USAID, United Nations Official Archibald MacArthur

By Patricia Sullivan

Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 30, 2006

Archibald Gordon MacArthur, 79, a career Foreign Service officer with the U.S. Agency for International Development and a United Nations staff member, died of a cerebral hemorrhage July 7 at Inova Fairfax Hospital. He lived in Reston.

Mr. MacArthur, a man of regal bearing and a common touch, spent most of his career in Africa and at the State Department, retiring in 1991 after spending five years as a staff member at the U.S. mission to the United Nations.

He had decidedly mixed feelings about USAID's impact in Africa over the years. His daughter, Edith M. MacArthur, said he was "profoundly respectful of democracy and profoundly fearful of Americanism," becoming "livid" about "how quickly our good deeds have dissolved in the last eight years."

In a 1999 interview for a foreign affairs oral history, Mr. MacArthur said that American foreign aid to Africa had saved countless people from starvation and drought by improving agriculture and water supplies. The failures of local and national governments in former colonies prevented the kinds of successes that the postwar Marshall Plan in Europe had achieved, he noted.

"I think we were able to keep the lid on total chaos, and we kept the communists out," he said. "We did train people effectively, they became educated, they occupied important positions. We did physical structures. . . Whether that translates into national development is where I raise a question. So, you had these mini-successes all over. But have we done anything to really put countries on a secure, self-sustaining basis? I don't know. Maybe you can only know that over a very long term."

He joined USAID in 1962, and after serving first in the Congo, he became a desk officer for North African countries, program officer in Morocco, then deputy director of the Sahel Development program, a big drought relief effort in the late 1970s and 1980s. For four years, he was deputy director of the Regional Economic Development Services Office in Abidjan in the Ivory Coast, where his job was to provide support to Foreign Service missions throughout West Africa.

By 1986, when he was sent to the United Nations in New York, Mr. MacArthur was immersed in a political culture where breadth of experience was required. At first, he worked with another USAID person, but he later became the only USAID representative there.

"I never worked so hard in my life. It was endless, overwhelming, just too much," he told the oral history interviewer. "We are talking about, for instance, resolutions on support of the Palestinian people, on a decade for natural disaster reduction, on AIDS, on transfer of resources to developing countries, on economic support to Yemen, Sudan and others, on food and agriculture programs, on emergency assistance to crisis countries in Africa, on rehabilitation of Angola, on opposition to the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba and so forth."

The Cold War, raging when he arrived, had thawed and melted away by the time of his retirement.

He was a descendant of a large and well-known MacArthur family, which made a fortune in timber, railroad construction and engineering in the late 1800s and early 1900s. But he joked that his family had gone from "riches to rags." He was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, and inherited a strong sense of diplomacy from his father, who also had been a diplomat.

Mr. MacArthur graduated from Harvard University in 1949 and served with the Army in Germany and at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe in France during the Korean War. He received a master's degree from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in 1959.

He was an accomplished amateur photographer who did his own darkroom work, and he enjoyed nature and hiking.

In addition to his daughter, of Falls Church, survivors include his wife of 45 years, Annerose MacArthur of Reston; two sons, Gordon C. MacArthur of West Windsor, N.J., and Herbert S. MacArthur of McLean; and six grandchildren.

Return to Home Page

This site maintained by John Reagan and last updated January 06, 2008