Biography
Steinhardt was born October 6, 1892 in New York City. He served as a Sergeant in the Quartermaster Corps in the U.S. Army in World War I. He married the former Dulcie Yates Hofmann. They had one daughter, Dulcie Ann.
Steinhardt was appointed U.S. Minister to Sweden in 1933 by Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was appointed ambassador to Peru in 1937, the Soviet Union in 1939, and Turkey in 1942.
While ambassador to Turkey, Steinhardt, particularly because he was Jewish, was involved in the rescue of Hungarian Jews from Bergen Belsen. He also played a significant role in helping many eminent intellectuals fleeing Europe to find refuge in Turkey.
In 1945, President Truman appointed Steinhardt ambassador to Czechoslovakia, and to Canada in 1948. While serving as the Ambassador to Canada, he was killed in a plane crash on March 28, 1950 near Ramsayville, Ontario, while en route to Washington, D. C. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Steinhardt was survived by his wife Dulcie Hofmann Steinhardt Beau (m. 1917, d. 1974) and daughter Dulcie Ann Sherlock.
Read more about this topic: Laurence Steinhardt
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“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)