Laise, Caroline Clendening, 1917-1991

Carol Laise, a pioneering woman diplomat who was U.S. ambassador to Nepal, has died at her summer home in Dummerston, Vt. She was 73.

Ms. Laise, widow of Ellsworth Bunker, the former U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, died Thursday of cancer.

Ambassador to Nepal from 1966 to 1973, Ms. Laise was the first woman career officer to be named a U.S. ambassador. She said frequently that being a woman posed no serious handicap in her government career of nearly four decades.

“I believe a woman can bring certain qualities to any job, as does a man, and it’s not a competitive thing,” she told The Times in 1970.

“While men may also possess it, women seem to have a special degree of compassion and an ability to promote harmony and healing,” she said. “I feel these same qualities, best reflected in the framework of a family unit, can be utilized beyond the home in other realms of human relations.”

Ms. Laise, born in Winchester, Va., on Nov. 14, 1917, studied at American University and George Washington University and at the Foreign Service Institute. She worked for 10 years in the U.S. Agriculture Department and on the Civil Service Commission before beginning her career in the State Department in 1948. After helping to work out details for establishing the United Nations, she served with the U.S. delegation.

There, she said, she “was exposed to every part of the world” and decided that she would best fit in the Indian subcontinent.

Ms. Laise was named to her ambassadorship by President Lyndon B. Johnson in his attempt to increase the number of women in foreign diplomacy.

Her 1967 marriage to Bunker, a widower 24 years her senior, was the first marriage of two U.S. ambassadors and established a policy condoning such liaisons in the State Department. Johnson not only sent warm congratulations, but promised Bunker a jet for commuting the 1,800 miles between capitals, Saigon and Katmandu.

Bunker died at 90 in 1984.

After her term in Nepal, Ms. Laise went on to serve as assistant secretary of state for public affairs and director general of the foreign service in Washington.

She is survived by a brother and three stepchildren.

Born in Winchester, Virginia, to Elizabeth Frances (née Stevens) and James Frederic Laise.[2] She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from American University in 1938, majoring in public administration,[2] and then a Master of Arts in political science from George Washington University in 1940.[3][4]

Laise worked as a coder for the Civil Service Commission in 1940, her first government position. She had a position in the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration for a short time before joining the State Department in 1948. She was an adviser from 1956 to 1961, and in 1962 became deputy director of the Bureau of South Asian Affairs.

In 1965, Laise traveled to India and Pakistan as an adviser to Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey. After a year in New Delhi, President Lyndon B. Johnson named her ambassador to Nepal in 1966, a position she held until 1973.[3]

On January 3, 1967 she married 72-year-old Ambassador at Large Ellsworth Bunker in Kathmandu.[5] Later that year he was named ambassador to South Vietnam and for nearly the first six years of their marriage they only saw each other monthly, via a special government flight offered by President Johnson as enticement for Bunker to accept the post.[6]

In October 1973, she became Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, and in 1974 became director general of the Foreign Service, until her retirement in 1977.[7]

She died at home in Dummerston, Vermont, of cancer in 1991 at the age of 73.[3]

Carol Laise, an American Ambassador who was the wife of an American Ambassador and the first woman to be an Assistant Secretary of State, died yesterday at her home in Dummerston, Vt. She was 73 years old.

Miss Laise died of cancer, a spokesman for the family said.

She was named Ambassador to Nepal by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966 and remained in the post until 1973. In January 1974 she married Ambassador at Large Ellsworth Bunker, a 79-year-old widower, in Katmandu, Nepal. She kept her maiden name professionally.

It was the first marriage between two American Ambassadors. Miss Laise was a close friend of Mr. Bunker's first wife, Harriet Allen Bunker, who died in 1964, and it was Miss Laise's first marriage.

For nearly six years after their marriage the couple saw each other only once a month when Ambassador Laise would take a plane provided by President Johnson and fly to Saigon, where Ambassador Bunker was trying to stabilize the situation in South Vietnam. Named Director General

In October 1973 she returned to Washington and was sworn in as Assistant Secretary of State in charge of the Bureau of Public Affairs, the first woman to hold so high a post in the department. Before her appointment as Ambassador to Nepal she had been director of the Office of South Asian Affairs,

In 1974 Miss Laise became director general of the Foreign Service, the highest nonpolitical job in the Foreign Service, a post she held until she retired in 1977.

Caroline Clendening Laise began her Government career in 1940 as an occupational coder for the Civil Service Commission. In 1946 she went to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, and in 1948 joined the State Department.

From 1956 to 1961 she was an adviser to American delegates to various United Nations agencies and in 1962 was made deputy director of the Office of South Asian Affairs with responsibilty for diplomatic relations with Afghanistan, Ceylon, Nepal, India and Pakistan.

In comparing the economic problems of Nepal with those of India, she said in a 1966 interview with Ann Terry Pincus of The New York Post, "You could explain that Nepal is like Appalachia, and India has the problems of Harlem." An Adviser in New Delhi

When Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey went to India and Pakistan in 1965, Miss Laise went along as his adviser. In the 1962-63 Chinese invasion of India, Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith sent for Miss Laise for advice and she spent about a year in New Delhi.

She was a winner in 1965 of the annual Federal Women's Award for outstanding contributions by women in government service, and in 1973 she received the Career Service Award of the National Civil Service League.

Miss Laise, a native of Winchester, Va., was a graduate of American University and received an M.A. in political science from George Washington University.

Her husband, Ambassador Bunker, died in 1984.

She is survived by a brother, Frederick Laise of Santa Fe, N.M.; two stepsons, Samuel Bunker of Dummerston, Vt., and John Bunker of Wheatland, Wy.; and a stepdaughter, Ellen Bunker of Tucson, Ariz.