Thomas L. Farmer

Thomas "Tom" Laurence Farmer (born July 26, 1923 in Berlin ; † February 5, 2015 in Washington, DC ) was a German-American lawyer . He was founding president of the American Academy in Berlin .

Life

Thomas Laurence Farmer was born on July 26, 1923 in Berlin to an American father (Laurence Farmer, 1895–1976) and a German-Jewish mother (Else Farmer, 1897–1960). In 1933 the family left Germany and moved to the United States and settled in New York City . He completed his education at Great Neck High School in 1940 before he began studying at Harvard College , which graduated with an AB in 1943. At Harvard College he was a member of the Editorial Board of the Harvard Crimson , the student newspaper of Harvard University . Subsequently he did his military service in the United States Army until 1946 , where he was a member of the Military Intelligence Division of the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington, DC. He then attended Brasenose College at the University of Oxford , from which he obtained a bachelor's degree in law in 1948 . In 1950 he again obtained a Master of Laws degree from Harvard and then from 1951 worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with covert operations for three years . In 1958 he returned to Washington once more and from that time worked as an employee of the renowned law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett .

At the time, Thomas L. Farmer was campaigning for John F. Kennedy's campaign in the run-up to the 1960 presidential election in the United States . Farmer was appointed chairman of the Advisory Board of the National Capital Transportation Agency by Kennedy in 1961 and served there until 1964. A citizens' campaign called the Northwest Committee for Transportation Planning came into being, and with this was largely responsible for preventing the construction of Interstate Highways through Washington. In 1962 he represented the then student and today's economist Frederic Pryor , who was accused by the Stasi of wanting to remove personal belongings of refugees from the GDR , in court. Through efforts of James B. Donovan Pryor was released on February 10, 1962 in the course of the prisoner exchange of the Russian spy Rudolf Ivanovich Abel against the U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers at Checkpoint Charlie . In 1960 he founded the think tank Overseas Development Institute and was mainly its director and consul general in the early days.

From 1964 to 1968, he served in the United States State Department's development policy and served as the department's consul general . As such, he was involved in founding the Asian Development Bank . During Jimmy Carter's presidency from 1977 to 1981, he served as chairman of the Intelligence Oversight Board within the President's Intelligence Advisory Board , overseeing the intelligence community. From 1970 to 1994 he was also a partner in the Washington law firm Prather Seeger Doolittle & Farmer and was a member of the Bankers Association for Foreign Trade from 1970 to 2002 . After that, he was also a senior consul for international finance with the American Bankers Association for two years . He was also a member of the law firm Kominers, Fort, Schlefer, Farmer & Boyer for some time . In 1983 he was involved in the founding of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies (AICGS), based in Washington, where he was director and treasurer. He was also a trustee of this organization until his death.

In collaboration with Henry Kissinger and the then German President Richard von Weizsäcker , he helped found the American Academy in Berlin , a US research and cultural institution. As a founding member, he also acted as chairman until it was replaced by the then US ambassador to Germany, Richard Holbrooke , who also had the idea for the institution. A year earlier, Farmer became the first non-German member of the Treuhandanstalt and played a key role in the privatization of state coal mining in the former GDR. In 1997 the native of Berlin was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit. From 2005 to 2013, at a very old age, he was a member of the Consultants International Group (CIG) founded in Washington in 1981 .

On February 5, 2015 Farmer died at the age of 91 years at his home in the Washington neighborhood Cleveland Park from the effects of progressive supranuclear palsy , a neurodegenerative disease . He was survived by his second wife, Wanda Walton, with whom he had been married for twelve years, the three children Daniel, Sarah and Elspeth, and five grandchildren. Farmer's first marriage to Elizabeth Midgley (according to other sources: Elizabeth Becker), from which the three children also come, was divorced. Farmer was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington, DC.

Web links

• Obituary notice in: Der Tagesspiegel , February 22, 2015
• Remembering Founding Chairman Thomas L. Farmer (1923-2015) , obituary of the American Academy in Berlin
• Obituaries in: The Washington Post, February 18, 2014
• Thomas L. Farmer, DC lawyer and civic activist, this at 91 in: The Washington Post (English)
• Thomas L. Farmer in the database of Find a Grave (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Remembering Founding Chairman Thomas L. Farmer (1923-2015) ( Memento of the original from February 23, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Obituary of the American Academy in Berlin , accessed on February 23, 2015