Elizabeth Rudel Smith

Signature of Elizabeth Rudel Smith

Elizabeth "Libby" Rudel Smith (born April 27, 1911 in Montreal , Canada , † January 25, 1997 in Kentfield , California ) was an American government official. She belonged to the Democratic Party .

Private life

Elizabeth Rudel Smith, daughter of a Canadian-American industrialist, said Rudel Machinery Company had been about three years before the outbreak of World War I in Montreal ( Quebec born). Nothing is known about her youth. At some point the family settled in the United States. She attended Smith College there and then graduated from the University of Michigan in 1937 . She moved to California in 1942 during World War II . There she married her third husband, Frederick H. Smith IV, a businessman from San Francisco , from whom she later divorced. In 1962 she married the savings and loan manager Albert W. Gatov, who died in 1978. Mrs. Gatov returned to her Marin home from Washington, DC in 1962 and remained active in politics for the next 20 years. She was a close friend of the Kennedy family and many other stars in the Democratic Party.

Political career

Smith campaigned for Harry S. Truman in the run-up to the 1948 presidential election . After her work at the Coro Foundation in San Francisco, which trained young men and women for careers in politics and government, she chaired the Democratic Party in Marin County . In 1956 she was elected to the Democratic National Committee of California along with Paul Ziffren, a Los Angeles attorney . Both served there as contact persons for the Democratic Party at the federal level. She held the post until her appointment to the Kennedy administration. President John F. Kennedy named her Treasurer of the United States . She held the post from January 30, 1961 to April 13, 1962. She then served a brief period in Sacramento as Deputy Labor Commissioner for Governor Pat Brown .

literature

• Elizabeth Rudel Smith's obituary , The New York Times, February 9, 1997