Elizabeth Petersen Clark

Elizabeth “Betsy” Petersen Spiro Clark died after a brief illness on October 31 in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Betsy was born in New York City on May 30, 1937, to Howard and Elizabeth Petersen. She grew up in Washington, where her father was a senior War Department official, and then in Radnor, Pa. She graduated from the Agnes Irwin School and Radcliffe College. At Radcliffe she had several lead roles in productions of Gilbert & Sullivan operettas and was active in Phillips Brooks House.

She was first married to Herbert Spiro, a political scientist, in June 1958. Together they traveled widely, including an around-the-world honeymoon and several months in 1962 in what was then Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). With Herb she had two sons, Peter and Alexander, with whom she shared her joys and curiosities and of whom she was always very proud. She was a producer of a political affairs program on public radio in Amherst, MA. She worked at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in Washington on the project that launched National Public Radio. Meanwhile, she pursued a career as a serious amateur operatic singer, having studied at the London Opera Center. She accompanied her husband to Cameroon in the mid-1970s, where he served as U.S. ambassador. Upon her return to Washington, she was a consultant at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. She co-edited one of the first modern-era treatments of human rights and U.S. foreign policy.

Betsy entered the U.S. foreign service in 1980 as part of a program to increase the number of women diplomats. She had assignments in Reykjavik and Oslo (for which she learned Icelandic and Norwegian respectively), and in Johannesburg during the turbulent era that preceded the end of apartheid rule in South Africa. For her reporting on black political affairs there, she was the first foreign service officer to be awarded the National Intelligence Community’s National Human Intelligence Collectors Award. She also served as special assistant to Under Secretary for Political Affairs. She subsequently directed the newly established State Department Human Rights and Democracy Fund in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, for which she traveled to Burma, Indonesia, and Haiti. She retired from the foreign service in 2000.

In 1993, she was remarried to Warren Clark, a fellow foreign service officer and former ambassador to Gabon. In retirement she served as an election observer for the National Endowment for Democracy, with missions to Lebanon, Jordan, and Yemen. She was an editorial board member of the Foreign Service Journal, in which she published several articles. She was an active and devoted member of the Women’s National Democratic Committee, serving in among other capacities as vice president for political affairs. She had a great sense of adventure and was a committed Democrat.

In her retirement, Betsy split her time between Washington and summers on Mason’s Island, near Mystic, Ct., where she enjoyed hosting friends and family. She was predeceased by her first husband, Herbert, from whom she was divorced and who died in 2010, and by her second husband, Warren, who died in 2018. In addition to sons Peter and Alexander, she is survived stepchildren Sarah Clark Stuart, Warren Clark, and Hope Clark, and by eight grandchildren, Liana, Henry, Julian, and Lila Spiro, Marina and Amelia Stuart, and Emily and John Clark.