Julia V. Taft

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Julia Ann Vadala Taft (July 27, 1942 – March 15, 2008) was a U.S. official who helped with international humanitarian aid. She was born on Governors Island, New York. Her father was Colonel Anthony Vadala, a surgeon in the Army, and her mother was Shirley Harris Vadala. She studied at the University of Colorado Boulder, earning a BA in international politics in 1964 and an MA in 1969. After a White House Fellowship, she worked as an aide to Health and Human Services Secretary Elliot Richardson.

In 1975, President Gerald Ford named her Director of the Interagency Task Force on Indochina Refugees, created by the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act. She helped resettle about 130,000 evacuees from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam after the fall of Saigon. She then spent decades developing refugee programs for the State Department, the Health and Human Services Department, USAID, and the United Nations.

From 1986 to 1989, she led the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance at USAID, coordinating aid with the State Department, the Pentagon, and non-governmental groups like CARE and Save the Children. She helped respond to the 1984–1985 Ethiopian famine, the 1988 Bangladesh floods, and other crises in places such as the Dominican Republic, India, Burundi, Cameroon, and Ethiopia, and she went to Armenia after the Spitak earthquake to coordinate U.S. aid.

From 1994 to 1997, Taft led InterAction, a group of NGOs focused on international aid. In 1997, President Bill Clinton appointed her as Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration, a role she held until 2001. From 2001 to 2004, she led the United Nations Development Programme’s Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery, overseeing aid to people displaced by the War in Afghanistan.

Her personal life included two marriages. First, to Fred Malone (divorced). In 1974 she married William Howard Taft IV, great-grandson of President William Howard Taft, and they had three children. Julia Taft died of colon cancer in Washington, D.C., on March 15, 2008, at the age of 65.