Secretary Colin L. Powell
Washington, DC
February 4, 2004

Warren Zimmermann ranks among our finest Career Ambassadors. He served in France, Austria, Spain, Switzerland, Venezuela, the Soviet Union and as our last Ambassador to Yugoslavia. Ambassador Zimmermann's passing is a great loss to American diplomacy and to our State Department family.

An eloquent defender of human rights and refugees, Ambassador Zimmermann led the United States Delegation to the East-West Review Conference of Helsinki signatory states in Vienna, Austria in the late 1980s, and was the State Department's Director of the Bureau for Refugee Programs in the early 1990s. After retiring from the Foreign Service, he continued to make distinguished contributions to American foreign policy through teaching at Columbia and Johns Hopkins University and through writing. He authored a number of acclaimed books on American foreign policy, among them Origins of a Catastrophe: Yugoslavia and Its Destroyers, which won the American Academy of Diplomacy Book Award, and his most recent work First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made their Country a World Power, for which he was given the Academy's Douglas Dillon Award last December.

On behalf of Ambassador Zimmermann's colleagues at the Department of State, and especially the many young men and women here he so generously mentored over the years, I wish to extend my deepest condolences to his wife Teeny and the entire Zimmermann family.