In her late 20s, Helen Eugenie Moore Anderson visited Nazi Germany, where she witnessed what she later recalled as a “totalitarian state in action.”
The visit spurred her fascination with foreign affairs and American diplomacy, and a dozen years later President Truman chose Anderson as the nation’s first female ambassador.
Anderson impressed her host nation, Denmark, where she learned Danish and traveled the country. She negotiated a deal to allow American planes to land at Danish air bases in Greenland. When she signed a commerce deal, she became the first American woman to ink a formal treaty with another nation.
A decade later, Anderson deployed again as one of the nation’s top diplomats, this time to Bulgaria — making her the first woman to represent the United States in a nation behind the Iron Curtain. When communist state agents tried to block Americans from distributing pamphlets at a fair in Sofia, Anderson brushed past them to hand the pamphlets out herself.
When she returned home, she became one of Lyndon Johnson’s representatives to the United Nations, where she was the first woman to sit on the United Nations Security Council.
Even before her international service, Anderson played a role in fashioning one of the unique elements of local Democratic politics: She worked with Hubert Humphrey to coalesce liberal factions in Minnesota, forming the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party — a one-of-a-kind name that still exists today.
Anderson died in 1997, aged 87.
— Reid Wilson
photo: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum/Abbie Rowe