Philip W. Bonsal
| Philip Bonsal | |
|---|---|
| United States Ambassador to Morocco | |
|
In office 1961–1962 |
|
| President | John F. Kennedy |
| Preceded by | Charles Woodruff Yost |
| Succeeded by | John H. Ferguson |
| United States Ambassador to Cuba | |
|
In office 1959–1960 |
|
| President | Dwight D. Eisenhower |
| Preceded by | Earl T. Smith |
| Succeeded by |
Jeffrey DeLaurentis, Acting (Diplomatic relations restored, 2015) |
| United States Ambassador to Bolivia | |
|
In office 1957–1959 |
|
| President | Dwight D. Eisenhower |
| Preceded by | Gerald A. Drew |
| Succeeded by | Carl W. Strom |
| United States Ambassador to Colombia | |
|
In office 1955–1957 |
|
| President | Dwight D. Eisenhower |
| Preceded by | Rudolf E. Schoenfeld |
| Succeeded by | John M. Cabot |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
May 22, 1903 New York City, New York |
| Died | June 28, 1995 (aged 92) Washington, D.C. |
Philip Wilson Bonsal (May 22, 1903 – June 28, 1995) was a career diplomat with the U.S. Department of State. A specialist in Latin American affairs, he served as United States Ambassador to Cuba from February 1959 until October 1960, the first months of the Castro regime.
Philip Bonsal was born in New York City in 1903. His father was Stephen Bonsal (1865–1951), a well-known journalist who served several years in the U.S. diplomatic corps, wrote several books, and won a Pulitzer Prize. The Bonsals descended from English Quakers who participated in founding the colony of Pennsylvania in 1682. His mother was Henrietta Morris, a descendant of Gouverneur Morris, a leader in the American Revolution. He had three brothers.
Philip Bonsal's early education took place in the Philippines and Switzerland. He graduated from Yale in 1924.
He married Margaret Lockett of Knoxville, Tennessee, circa 1929.
After living in Cuba for several months as a student trainee with the Cuban Telephone Company, Bonsal worked in Spain and Chile for its parent company, International Telephone & Telegraph, rising to become chief of its Latin American Division. He then entered government service as a specialist in telephone services with the Federal Communications Commission, where he remained from 1935 to 1937.
He was fluent in Spanish.
Bonsal joined the State Department in 1937. He was Vice Consul and Third Secretary in the U.S. embassy in Havana in 1938 and 1939, followed by a year in Washington as Cuban desk officer at the State Department.
While on the staff of the U.S. embassy in Bolivia in 1944, he tried without success to persuade the U.S. State Department to ignore the rhetoric of Bolivia's radical opposition parties, which he excused as reflexive opposition to the recently ousted U.S.-friendly regime of Enrique Peñaranda. He told Secretary of State Cordell Hull that the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) embodied the "legitimate and respectable ... aspirations of certain sectors of the Bolivian people". Instead the U.S. forced President Gualberto Villarroel to remove members of the MNR from his cabinet.
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