Anna Beth Hanes

Anna Beth gave eighteen years to the United States Department of State, in Germany, in Barbados, in Tunisia, and finally in Washington.

That changes how the Four should be read. It is easy to assume, looking at four portraits from a family that sent children to war, that the daughter is on the sheet because she is family. She is on it because she served. Three overseas postings and a headquarters assignment is not a job. It is a Foreign Service career — a life of being sent somewhere, learning it, and being sent somewhere else, representing the United States in each of them.

The three countries are not a set anyone would choose for comfort. Cold War Germany, with the inner German border running through it. Barbados, and the eastern Caribbean that the embassy there covers. Tunisia, on the southern rim of the Mediterranean. Whatever she did at each, she did it a long way from Louisiana.

She spoke eight languages: English, High German, Low German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic. Read against the postings, that list stops being a curiosity and becomes a career. German and Low German for Germany. French and Arabic for Tunisia, which needs both. Spanish, Portuguese and Italian across the rest of it. This was not a woman who happened to be sent abroad. This was someone the Department could put almost anywhere and expect to be understood.

Her last assignment was Washington, as the direct secretary to an Under Secretary of State, handling classified communications. That is a position of trust and a demanding one. The traffic that crosses an Under Secretary’s desk is the working material of American foreign policy, and somebody has to receive it, control it, move it, and account for every piece of it. She did that.

She was inside the Department’s headquarters on September 11, 2001. The Foundation records that and stops there. What she saw, and what she did in the days that followed, are hers to tell and not this page’s to imagine.

There is a span in this family worth naming plainly, without drawing an equation between two very different events. Her eldest brother is held to have stood inside Auschwitz with orders to write down what was there. She finished her career inside the building that runs American foreign policy, in the city that was attacked in 2001. Between the two of them, one Louisiana family was in the machinery of the United States at the two moments in their separate centuries when it had to decide what it was going to do about mass atrocity. That span — not either event alone — is the subject of this Foundation.

Of the Four, she is the last. Her brothers are gone. Everything on this page came from her own account of her own life, and the documents that would confirm it are in her family’s hands and have not yet been read into the record. That is the most urgent work this Foundation has.