Lambert “Nick” Heyniger Dies

Lambert (Nick) Heyniger, 93, who served as a diplomat with the U.S. Foreign Service in Africa, Jordan and the Netherlands, passed away peacefully in his sleep on January 26, 2024, at the Kendal community in Hanover, N.H. The cause of death was complications of anemia and acute chronic blood loss after a brief illness.

Nick was born in Dobbs Ferry, NY, on Sept. 20, 1930. In addition to his overseas posts, he lived in Washington D.C.; Montreal, Quebec; Port Kent, NY; Woodstock, Vermont and Hanover.

Nick was only named Lambert at birth, with no middle name, but his nanny, Flo, called him “Nicky” as a baby and that name stuck. Nick and his older sisters, Anne and Eyre, were raised on the campus of the Darrow School in New Lebanon, NY, where their father, Charles Lambert “Lamb” Heyniger, was the school’s founder and headmaster.

Darrow

C.L. Heyniger had started the Darrow School in 1938 after a career as an executive at General Motors. Using funds from a loan he secured from then-GM executives Alfred P. Sloan and Charles Kettering, Nick’s father acquired a small school built on the grounds of the Mount Lebanon Shaker Village. “My father got the school into farming, especially during summer school, and we and the boys and faculty worked on the farm regularly, weeding, picking corn and harvesting other crops,” Nick wrote in an essay remembering Darrow.

“My father did not want the school to be like Lawrenceville or Hotchkiss,” which he believed spoiled their students. “So rather than give us demerits for being late to class or smoking in a dorm, we were given ‘hours.’ These we had to work off doing physical labor on Saturdays or Sundays.” In fact, “hands to work” was the Shaker motto that C.L. Heyniger applied to everyone at school, regularly turning out the students and teachers to spend a Saturday landscaping the campus or repairing facilities.

‘The Experiment’ in Europe

Nick attended Darrow briefly until his father decided to shift him to the Lawrenceville School in Lawrenceville, N.J., in 1946, where he rowed on the crew team. During his high school and college years, Nick spent two summers participating in the Experiment in International Living: first in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1948, where he traveled around Switzerland by train and bicycle with other expatriate students, and then in the summer of 1951 in the French countryside near Ste. Etienne.

During his summer in France, Nick joined a mountain climbing group, bicycling from Avignon to La Salle les Alpes – Villenueve, where his group attended a mountain climbing school and later climbed the 13,400-foot peak Barre des Écrins. As part of an oral history of U.S. diplomacy later on, Nick told the archivist Charles Stuart Kennedy, “Those two summer experiences were very significant for me, particularly being told by people in France that the First and Second World Wars had really exhausted France’s capacity in world affairs, and it was now the responsibility of us in the New World to get more involved.”

Princeton

Following in a tradition for men on both sides of his family, Nick attended Princeton University, graduating in 1953, where his classmates included the author John McPhee. At Princeton he joined the Cap and Gown eating club and served as president of the Princeton Nassoons, a close-harmony singing group. He was enrolled in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and his senior thesis was on “Fascism in France” between 1933 and 1939.

At Darrow, Lawrenceville and Princeton, Nick came up in the shadow of his towering 6’7” father, a teetotaling World War I-era Princetonian who played varsity football with the great Hobey Baker and who, as president of Princeton’s Triangle Club musical theater troupe, famously kicked F. Scott Fitzgerald out of Triangle for drinking in 1917. Later in his life, during Reunion weekends, C.L. Heyniger would wear a white suit, stand on the football field after the game and lead the home crowd in singing “Old Nassau.” His appearance at the game became so familiar that people would use him as a landmark, saying, “I’ll meet you at Lamb Heyniger.”

Nick’s mother, Marion Eyre Savage Heyniger, grew up in Philadelphia’s Chestnut Hill neighborhood as one of eight Savage brothers and sisters. They trace their lineage back to the Jamestown, Virginia colony and young Thomas Savage, who in 1608 at age 13 was traded to the Algonquin Indians in exchange for a son of Chief Powhatan, father of Pocahontas.

Army Service in Austria

After graduating from college, Nick served for two years in the Army. He was posted to Austria with the Counterintelligence Corps (CIC), where he was able to spend his furlough time skiing and mountain hiking. After being honorably discharged from the Army in 1955, Nick enrolled as a graduate student in Princeton’s Wilson School, but withdrew to join the U.S. Foreign Service in 1956 before completing his master’s degree. Living in Washington D.C. while going through training at the State Department, Nick met Anne Sedgwick Coe when both were performing in D.C.’s Hexagon show. The oldest of three daughters of a Washington family, Anne was a graduate of the Madeira School and Bryn Mawr College, and they were married in 1958.

1958: Jordan

Weeks after their wedding, Nick was dispatched to his first Foreign Service post as a consular  officer at the U.S. embassy in Amman, Jordan. That geopolitical neighborhood was roiled by a rebellion by Muslim factions against the Maronite Christian government in Lebanon, which led to 15,000 U.S. troops landing in Lebanon in July 1958 to support the government. At around the same time, the Hashemite monarchy of King Faisal II in Iraq was overthrown and Faisal was executed in a military coup led by Arab nationalist officers while a number of monarchist troops were in Jordan supporting Faisal’s cousin, King Hussein bin Talal. The result was that the U.S. embassy in Amman was considered too dangerous for Anne to join Nick, so she spent several months on her own in Paris, a difficult beginning for their marriage.

Nick’s work at the embassy included servicing the high demand for U.S. visas by Palestinian refugees who had fled their homes in Israel in 1948. Nick’s notes on his diplomatic career say that because his consular district “included much of Palestine, I made frequent visits to Jerusalem, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Hebron, Nablus and the Arabian Desert.” The family’s first child, their daughter Kristen, was born in Amman under difficult circumstances in April 1960 – several weeks premature, blue in color and preceded by a stillborn twin. The baby survived because a Palestinian nurse spent days feeding her milk with an eyedropper several times an hour.

1960-65: The Hague & Congo

From 1960 to 1962, Nick and the family were posted to The Hague, Netherlands, where he was a junior political officer. He described the post as “lots of white-tie dinners, little substantive work.” Back in Washington in 1962, Nick volunteered for language training in Swahili, and the couple’s second child, William, was born in D.C. in December 1962. In 1963 Nick took on the first of three African posts, moving the family to the U.S. consulate in Elisabethville, Congo, now called Lubumbashi. This was toward the end of the postcolonial “Congo Crisis” in which Soviet-backed Simba rebels tried to secede from the country to form their own nation. Nick described Elisabethville as “a far-flung outpost, with few amenities, but very interesting work,” noting that he “almost drowned in Lake Mweru.” The family’s third child, Nicholas, was born there in February 1965.

Back in the States, Nick spent from 1965 to 1969 in two positions, first as a desk officer for the State Department’s African Bureau, which he called “one of the best jobs in the Foreign Service,” and later as an exchange officer on the Army General Staff at the Pentagon, in the middle of the Vietnam War. Nick wrote that taking the position was “a very bad idea… it did my career no good, as I was a dove among overcommitted hawks.”

1969: Tanzania 

When he was sent to his fourth overseas post in 1969, as a political officer in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Nick was able to use his Swahili training. The family lived in a large house in Dar’s Oyster Bay neighborhood, a few blocks from a beach, and went on safari in Tanzanian game parks like Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater. Nick described the Dar es Salaam post as “a nice house on the Indian Ocean, swimming all year ‘round… We all loved Dar, despite the difficult political situation and its remoteness.” The State Department was interested in Tanzania because of socialist President Julius K. Nyerere’s position as a Third World leader.

The U.S. embassy in Dar in those years featured a handful of diplomats who would go on to become well known. Nick’s first deputy chief mission (DCM) – second in command to the ambassador – was Thomas Pickering, who became President Reagan’s ambassador to El Salvador during that country’s civil war with FMLN guerrillas, and later served as U.N. Ambassador under President George H.W. Bush. Nick’s third DCM was Jack Matlock Jr., who went on to be Reagan’s Soviet expert on the National Security Council and later ambassador to Moscow toward the end of the Cold War.

Nick owned a 20-foot sailboat called “Foxtrot” and played squash and tennis at Dar’s Gymkhana Club. Toward the end of the family’s residence in Dar, in 1972, Nick climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with a group led by Maj. Gen. Mrisho Sarakikya, commander of the Tanzanian armed forces, with whom Nick played squash regularly at the military base in Dar.

1972: Divorce

Upon returning to the States in 1972, Nick and Anne’s marriage ended in divorce after a separation. In the mid-‘70s, the children would see Nick on Sunday nights at his apartment in Northwest D.C. and later, his home in Arlington, Va., where he would cook them dinners (after learning how to cook). At the State Department, Nick was offered coveted deputy chief of mission (DCM) jobs in Burundi and other embassies, but declined them because he didn’t want to be displaced from his children. Instead, he took positions in African sections of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research and in State’s Office of Personnel.

1976: Algeria 

In 1976 Nick married Line Robillard, a fellow foreign service officer, a tall dual-national from Montreal, Quebec and native French speaker. In his final foreign posting they served together at the U.S. consulate in Oran, Algeria, the city where Albert Camus’ “The Plague” is set. Nick later wrote that as consul, he spent considerable time assisting American energy companies like Bechtel that were building gas-liquefaction plants in Algeria, and made one official trip “deep into the Sahara Desert.”

During his last few years in the State Department in Washington, Nick and Line lived in D.C.’s Cleveland Park neighborhood while Nick served as press spokesman for State’s Counterterrorism Bureau under Ambassador Anthony Quainton in 1979. He took questions from reporters during the crisis that exploded when a group of armed Iranian college students took over the U.S. embassy in Iran, holding 52 American citizens hostage for 400-plus days. On the night the Tehran embassy was overrun, Nick recalled later, “I vividly remember being in the operations center at about 3:30 a.m., drafting press guidance for Secretary [of State Cyrus] Vance to use with the BBC and other news organizations that had deadlines.”

1980: Montreal 

Nick chose to retire from the Foreign Service after 25 years in 1980, moving to an apartment in Montreal with Line and getting a job at a foundation set up the J.W. McConnell family, listening to grant proposals and researching philanthropic ways for the foundation to spend its fortune. After 10 years he retired from that job in 1990, at the relatively early age of 60, fortified by two pensions. Line and Nick spent their weekends at a house he bought in Port Kent, NY, on the shore of Lake Champlain near Keeseville, which afforded easy access to swimming and sailing on the lake when his children visited in the summer, along with hiking and cross-country skiing in the nearby Adirondack High Peaks around Lake Placid.

During his Montreal years, Nick spent many evenings earning a master’s degree in American history at Concordia University, and wrote a thesis titled “No Salties on Lake Champlain: Why an Improved Waterway Linking Montreal and New York via the St. Lawrence, Richelieu and Hudson Rivers Was Defeated in the 1960s.” His paper won the McMasters Award in 1993, given annually by the Clinton County (NY) Historical Association for the best research about the North Country. According to the Plattsburgh Press-Republican, the paper “explains why Lake Champlain did not become a pathway for ocean-going ships, despite its many promoters.”

Woodstock and Hanover 

Nick’s marriage to Line ultimately also ended in divorce in the 1990s, and Nick left Montreal to take up full-time residence at the Port Kent house. After deciding his life on the lake was a bit too remote, Nick returned to the D.C. suburbs and was a single man about town for a few years until he met Jane McDill Smith, a Foreign Service widow in D.C.’s Palisades neighborhood who was preparing to retire to her family home in Woodstock, Vermont. The two hit it off well enough that Nick followed Jane up north when she left, buying a house in Woodstock not far from Jane’s. They practiced Katharine Hepburn’s maxim that instead of marriage, men and women should perhaps “live next door and just visit now and then.”

In Woodstock, Nick joined a barbershop chorus and served on the Darrow School’s Board of Trustees for several years. His relationship with Jane continued after Nick moved to the Quaker Kendal community in Hanover, N.H., in 2010 at age 80, where he was still only 25 minutes’ drive from Woodstock. At Kendal, Nick joined another singing group and portrayed an evil scientist in a musical theater piece written and performed by residents. He hosted his children and three grandchildren, took them to Dartmouth baseball games (if they were playing Princeton) and swimming at Storrs Pond in the summer. Nick suffered long bouts of pneumonia in his later years, but was determined to remain in his “independent living” apartment at Kendal to the end, and he did.

‘Close Harmony’ Singing 

Nick was deeply sentimental about his college years and Princeton generally, and one of his great loves was the “close harmony” a cappella singing he learned with the Nassoons. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, and again after his return to Washington in the ‘90s, Nick sang with a D.C.-area close-harmony group called The Augmented Eight, most of them alumni of Ivy League groups like the Nassoons, the Yale Whiffenpoofs or the Harvard Krokodiloes. In between overseas posts, Nick and his kids would make trips down to Virginia’s Shenandoah park for the “Mountain Weekend” event, with other singers’ families. The men of The Augmented Eight became some of his closest friends.

Nick’s interests also included reading The New Yorker and other magazines and newspapers for hours at a time, along with historical novels and books on military history. He read widely about international affairs and U.S. diplomacy, and during his Woodstock years he taught adult education courses in the history of diplomacy. For several summers he enjoyed bringing his children and grandchildren to the Rockywold-Deephaven Camps in New Hampshire, diving into Squam Lake each morning for a swim before breakfast, and tennis after lunch.

Nick is survived by a daughter, Kristen Anne Heyniger of Fairfax, Va.; two sons, William Lambert Heyniger of Washington D.C. and Nicholas Savage Heyniger of Strongsville, Ohio; and three grandchildren, Nicole Anne Heyniger of Madison, Wisconsin; John Lambert Heyniger of Columbus, Ohio; and Hobey Coe Heyniger of Washington D.C. He was predeceased by two older sisters, Anne Heyniger Willard and Marion Eyre Heyniger Davisson, and his parents, Charles Lambert Heyniger and Marion Savage Heyniger.

The family held a memorial service for Nick at 11 a.m. on Saturday, June 1, at the Darrow School, 110 Darrow Road, New Lebanon, NY 12125.  In lieu of flowers, the family suggests donations can be made to the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (ADST), where Nick sometimes interviewed colleagues for oral histories, at adst.org.