IN MEMORIAM

The Council for a Community of Democracies mourns the loss of Albert. H. Hamilton, a founding member of our Board of Directors and one of the founders of the movement upon which the Council for a Community of Democracies was built. The following obituary notice was carried in the Washington Post on November 11, 2003.

Albert H. Hamilton

Albert H. Hamilton, 78, a marketing and public affairs officer for the Export-Import Bank of the United States, died November 4 of a heart attack en route to Sibley Memorial Hospital. He was a Washington DC resident.

Born in Atlanta, Mr. Hamilton earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in international trade and finance in 1947. Fluent in French and German, he worked as a foreign credit investigator for Chemical Bank and Trust for two years, then became an information officer in the Foreign Service with the State Department in Washington and Germany until 1953.

He was drafted into the Army in 1953 and was assigned to establish a refugee camp in Germany and help resettle refugees from Central and Eastern Europe.

Mr. Hamilton resumed his marketing career in 1955 when he worked for DuPont Corp. In 1957, he took a similar position with Radio Free Europe in Munich. By 1961, he became public affairs officer for Voice of America at the U.S. Information Agency. From 1964 to 1981, he did similar work for the Export-Import Bank. He was vice president of First Washington Associates, an export credit agency in Arlington County, from 1987 through 2000.

He volunteered at the Council for a Community of Democracies, a non-governmental transnational group that aids other nongovernmental organizations, as its director in 1993 and continued to work with them until his death.

Survivors include his wife of 48 years, Jennifer Hamilton of Washington; four children, Christopher, of Culpeper, Jonathan, of Boonsboro, Marcia, of Honolulu, and Matthew, of Washington; and four grandchildren.