GAETANA
M. ENDERS
Biography
Gaetana
Enders, Italian by birth, was born in
Tangier, Morocco where her father was the
Administrator for Judicial Affairs for the
International Zone. She and Tom Enders met in
1953 after she had secured her Italian
baccalaureate and he had graduated from Yale
University. They married in 1955 in Tangier,
and moved to Boston where Tom completed his
graduate work at Harvard. By 1959 when Tom
joined the Foreign Service, they already had
four children: Domitilla, twins named Alice
and Claire, and a son, Tom.
Throughout
their diplomatic life she has been deeply
involved in the visual arts. While in
Washington she served on the Ladies Board of
the Corcoran Museum and helped to organize
the docent program, an innovative method of
introducing public school children to art.
During the years that Tom was an Ambassador,
Gaetana was responsible for sponsoring
exhibitions of American art and opening the
Embassies in Canada, Belgium, and Spain to
school children and art students.
When
her husband served in Cambodia, Gaetana
founded a refugee organization that took care
of seventeen camps. For her work she was
honored by the Chief of Staff of the
Cambodian Army with the highest decoration of
the Khmer government.
After
the fall of Vietnam in 1974 she was named by
President Ford as the only woman member on
his Committee for Refugees which was
responsible for placing the first 375,000
refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. In
that capacity she traveled to refugee camps
in the United States and Thailand. Tom became
Ambassador to Canada in 1976 and Gaetana
continued to oversee refugee camps, working
closely with the House of Commons to bring
about a change in the immigration laws to
allow for greater numbers of refugees to
enter Canada.
After
the Enders left Canada they moved to
Brussels, where Tom was Ambassador to the
European Community; then Washington, where he
was Assistant Secretary of State for Latin
American; and then to Spain, where he was
United States Ambassador until
1987.
After
completing his work in Spain, Tom left the
Foreign Service to join Solomon Brothers in
New York as Managing Director. Upon leaving
Madrid, Gaetana accepted the position of
International Editor of HOLA! Magazine, and
later HELLO!, two major weekly publications
with a joint readership of 8-million. She
became President of the American Friends of
Canada, an organization that promotes
cultural exchanges between the United States
and Canada, and currently serves as Chairman
Emeritus. Gaetana is also a member of the
Americas Society, an organization that she
greatly respects as she is deeply involved in
all aspects of Canada and Latin
America.
