John Moors Cabot

John Moors Cabot (December 11, 1901 – February 24, 1981) was an American diplomat and U.S. Ambassador to five nations during the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations. He also served as Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs. He warned repeatedly of the dangers of Soviet communism toward American interests in Latin America.

Early life Cabot was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father was Godfrey Lowell Cabot (1861–1962), and a philanthropist. His mother was Maria Moors Cabot. Two of his siblings were Thomas Dudley Cabot (b. 1897), businessman and philanthropist and Eleanor Cabot of the Eleanor Cabot Bradley Estate.

Cabot graduated from Buckingham Browne & Nichols in 1919. He would go on to graduate magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1923, and from Oxford University with a degree in Modern History.

During much of World War II, Cabot worked in the State Department as assistant chief of the division of American Republics and then as chief of the division of Caribbean and Central American affairs. during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administration. He was also commissioned to Pakistan during a recess of the Senate, but did not serve under this appointment. From 1953 to 1954, he also served as Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs.

As ambassador to Brazil from 1959 to 1961 his public relations campaigns on behalf of American business angered nationalist politicians and journalists. President Jânio Quadros of Brazil publicly rebuked Cabot for questioning Brazil's foreign policy and tolerance of the Cuban revolution. President John Kennedy recalled Cabot early in 1961.

In December 1954, Cabot, in his role as U.S. ambassador to Sweden, attended the Nobel banquet and read the acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded that year to Ernest Hemingway who was not present due to ill health.

Following his retirement from the U.S. Department of State, he taught at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and Tufts Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

Personal life In 1932, he married Vassar College graduate Elizabeth Lewis (d. 1992). Together, they were the parents of four children: John G.L. Cabot (b. 1934) Lewis P. Cabot (1937-2019), owner of the Portland, Maine-based Southworth Machine Company and prominent collector of modern art Marjorie Cabot, who married Antonio Enríquez Savignac (1931–2007) in 1957. Elizabeth T. Cabot, who married Bogislav von Wentzel.

Cabot died at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C., on February 24, 1981.

Published works The Racial Conflict in Transylvania: A Discussion of the Conflicting Claims of Rumania and Hungary to Transylvania, the Banat, and the Eastern Section of the Hungarian Plain, 1926 Toward Our Common American Destiny: Speeches and Interviews on Latin American Problems, 1954 First line of defense: forty years' experiences of a career diplomat (Georgetown University, School of Foreign Service, 1979).