Philip Kaiser, a former ambassador to Austria, Hungary and Senegal who served as a diplomat or political appointee under every Democratic president from Harry Truman to Jimmy Carter, died Thursday. He was 93.
The cause was pneumonia, said his son Charles.
After Carter named him ambassador to Hungary in 1977, Mr. Kaiser helped win the administration’s approval for the return to Budapest of the Crown of St. Stephen, a symbol of Hungarian nationhood, which had been in American custody since World War II.
Along with Cyrus Vance, then the secretary of state, Mr. Kaiser argued that getting back the crown would help encourage Hungary to turn toward the West at the height of the Cold War.
As ambassador to Senegal from 1961 to 1964, he assisted in persuading the government in Dakar to deny landing rights to military aircraft of the Soviet Union during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. He had earlier accompanied the president of Senegal, Leopold Sedar Senghor, on a visit to President John F. Kennedy at the White House.
Mr. Kaiser wrote “Journeying Far and Wide: a Political and Diplomatic Memoir” in 1993.
Philip Mayer Kaiser was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on July 12, 1913, the ninth of 10 children. Mr. Kaiser received his undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1936 and was selected as a Rhodes scholar.
At Oxford, he studied politics, philosophy and economics at Balliol College, where one of his tutors was the philosopher and critic Sir Isaiah Berlin, who became a lifelong friend. Another friend at Oxford, Byron White, the future Supreme Court justice, helped recruit Mr. Kaiser for the Kennedy presidential campaign in 1960.
Mr. Kaiser was assistant secretary of labor under Truman and a special assistant to Gov. W. Averell Harriman of New York in Albany in the late 1950s.
After serving in Senegal, and then enduring a bout with tuberculosis in Washington, he was deputy chief of mission in the U.S. Embassy in London, starting in 1964.
