The Foreign Service Journal, September 2003

and Nicole Theresa of Arlington, Va. His first wife, Virginia Foley, preceded him in death. Memorial contributions may be made to the American Cancer Society, 22107 Elmira Blvd., Port Charlotte, FL 33952, and/or the Movement Disorders Society of Southwest Florida, 126 E. Olympia Ave., Suite 200, Punta Gorda, FL 33950. Condolences to the family may be sent to Mrs. Sandra Johnston, 1301 Osprey Drive, Punta Gorda, FL 33950. John Keppel , 86, a career diplo- mat and international public servant who in retirement challenged the gov- ernment’s account of a national securi- ty crisis, died in Bloomington, Ind., on June 23. The cause of death was a heart attack. Born Aug. 21, 1917, in Quogue, N.Y., Mr. Keppel was the son of David Keppel and Dorothy Vickery of New York City. His grandfather Frederick Keppel (1844-1912) was the first deal- er in fine etchings and engravings in North America, and David Keppel (1877-1956) developed the firm. Educated at Saint Bernard’s School in New York, Milton Academy, and Harvard University (B.A. cum laude, fine arts, 1940), John Keppel expected to carry on the family art business. But his experience in World War II, where he was a division commander’s aide in the Normandy campaign, pro- pelled him into foreign affairs. In 1947, Mr. Keppel entered the Foreign Service. He was a noted ana- lyst of political developments in the Soviet Union. He served twice in Moscow (1948-50 and 1953-55). On the second occasion, under Ambassador Charles Bohlen, he helped draft analyses of political change in the post-Stalinist U.S.S.R. — despite the pressure of Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, R-Wis., to insist on a monolithic and unchanging Russian enemy. He was also a political officer in Seoul during the Korean War. At the 1954 Geneva Conference, he was an adviser and translator for General Walter Bedell Smith. As first secretary of the political sec- tion in Rome (1955-57), Mr. Keppel analyzed the Italian Communist Party. In 1958 he returned to Washington, where he was deputy director of the Office of Research and Analysis of the Sino-Soviet Bloc in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. He was a member of the escort party for Nikita Khrushchev’s 1959 U.S. visit and an adviser at the 1960 Kennedy- Khrushchev Paris summit. After a year at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs (1961-62), Mr. Keppel went to Rio de Janeiro as political counselor. In that position, he was involved in an internal debate in the U.S. government over how to regard the leftist administration of Brazilian President Joao Goulart. When conservatives in the Brazilian military launched a coup in 1964, Mr. Keppel was instrumental in persuad- ing President Lyndon Johnson to give Marshal Humberto Castello Branco early recognition. The Brazilian experience left him questioning the Cold War framework with which he had approached the cri- sis. After two years at the Foreign Service Institute (1965-67), where he was chairman of political studies, he spent a year at Johns Hopkins University as a special student in pop- ulation studies. Mr. Keppel then returned for a year to the Population Office of the State Department. In 1969, Mr. Keppel took early retirement from the government and moved to New York, where he helped Philippine statesman Rafael M. Salas found the United Nations Fund for Population Activities, now the United Nations Population Fund. He was chief of operations staff (1969-72), assistant executive director (1972-74), and an advocate of U.S. support for the organization and its holistic approach to popula- tion. In October 1974, he retired from the United Nations and moved to Essex, Conn., where he lived until 2001. Mr. Keppel’s most independent and controversial initiative began in 1983, when he challenged the U.S. government’s account of the Korean Airlines Flight 007 disaster. Re- membering that in 1960 he had been part of the government working group that put out the cover story that the downed U-2 spy plane was just a weather plane, he was skeptical that the Korean airliner had flown far off course, straying over Soviet mili- tary facilities on the Kamchatka Peninsula and Sakhalin Island, acci- dentally. As project director of the Fund for Constitutional Government’s investigation of the incident, Mr. Keppel demanded a congressional investigation of contradictions in the official account. He assisted French aviation expert Michel Brun, whose book Incident at Sakhalin argues that U.S. military aircraft crossed Sakhalin on the same occasion and were shot down there by the Soviets. (Brun and Keppel believe the passenger-filled civilian airliner perished later than generally report- ed, over international airspace, of unexplained causes.) Ever courteous, Mr. Keppel 76 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 3 I N M E M O R Y