Personal Life
Wriston was born in Middletown, Connecticut to Ruth Bigelow Wriston, a chemistry teacher, and Henry Wriston, a history professor at Wesleyan University who was later president of Lawrence College and Brown University.
Wriston attended grade school and high school in Appleton, Wisconsin. Reared as a traditional Methodist, he was not allowed to listen to the radio or go to the movie theater on Sundays. Wriston was an Eagle Scout and recipient of the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award.
He attended Wesleyan University, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1941. While there, he was a member of the Eclectic Society and received the "Parker Prize" (awarded to the Wesleyan sophomore or junior who excels in public speaking). He received a Master's Degree from Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1942.
After graduate school, Wriston became a junior Foreign Service officer at the State Department, where he helped negotiate the exchange of Japanese interned in the United States for Americans held prisoner in Japan. Drafted into the U.S. Army in 1942, he served in the U.S. Army for four years, being with the Signal Corps on Cebu in the Philippines during his service.
In 1942, Walter Wriston married Barbara Brengle, with whom he had one daughter. Two years after her death in 1966, he married lawyer and businesswoman Kathryn Dineen.
Wriston died on January 19, 2005 in Manhattan, New York City, New York, at the age of 85. His papers, including the text of hundreds of speeches and articles spanning his lengthy career, are at Tufts University's Archives. Many have been digitized and are available in the Tufts Digital Library.
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