William A. M. Burden

William Armistead Moale Burden Jr. (April 8, 1906 – October 10, 1984) was an American banker, art collector, and philanthropist who served as U.S. Ambassador to Belgium under President Eisenhower.

Early life Burden was born on April 8, 1906, in Manhattan to William Armistead Moale Burden Sr. (1877–1909), and Florence Vanderbilt (née Twombly) (1881–1969). His younger brother, Shirley Carter Burden (1908–1989), was a prominent photographer. Their paternal grandparents were I. Townsend Burden (1838–1913) and Evelyn Byrd Moale (1847–1916), the daughter of William Armistead Moale (1800–1880) of Baltimore, Maryland, who was a descendant of the Carter and Byrd families of Virginia. Burden's grandfather was an owner of Burden Iron Works, which was founded by his great-grandfather, Henry Burden (1791–1871).

His maternal grandparents were Florence Adele Vanderbilt Twombly, a granddaughter of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Hamilton McKown Twombly.

Burden attended and graduated from Harvard College in 1927. He also attended special aviation courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1940, he was named to the board of trustees of Central Hanover Bank & Trust Co.

During World War II, he was Special Assistant for Research and Development to the Secretary of the Air Force.

In 1949, he founded William A. M. Burden & Co., an investment company intended to pool and manage his family's money. The firm is considered a pioneer in the "family office" space and continues to this day, managing half a billion dollars as of 1998. Unlike other Vanderbilt descendants, Burden "saw the fortune dissipating into smaller and smaller chunks and was determined to protect his own progeny." He served in this role from 1959 until 1961. Burden resigned as president in 1959, to become Ambassador, and was succeeded by Blanchette Ferry Rockefeller, the wife of John D. Rockefeller III. He resumed the presidency again afterwards from 1961 until 1965. He donated works to be auctioned off for the Museum, including Paul Cézanne's Apples, in 1960. He also served as a trustee of Columbia University, a member of the board of the Smithsonian Institution, director of the Council on Foreign Relations, chairman of the Institute for Defense Analysis.

Residence In the 1940s, Burden and his wife commissioned Wallace K. Harrison, an architect who was involved in the design of Rockefeller Center, the Museum of Modern Art, and the United Nations Building in New York, as well as Isamu Noguchi, the artist, to design a summer home for them in Maine. he was married to Margaret Livingston Partridge (1909–1996), at Saint Thomas Church in Manhattan. On her mother's side, she was a granddaughter of William H. Wetmore and great-great-great-granddaughter of Chancellor Robert L. Livingston.

William Armistead Moale Burden III (1931–1962), a reporter for The Washington Post who was married to Leslie Lepington Hamilton (1932–1998), granddaughter of Bishop Franklin Hamilton, in 1951. Robert Livingston Burden (1934–1974), who was the head of the science department at Thomas Jefferson School in St. Louis. Hamilton Twombly Burden (1937–2015), who was an author. Ordway Partridge Burden (b. 1944), who married Jean Elizabeth (née Poor) Lynch, a granddaughter of Walter E. Poor, founder of the Sylvania Electric Company, in 1991.

Burden died on October 10, 1984.

Legacy In 1971, together with his mother and brother, he donated Burden Auditorium to Harvard Business School in honor of his father, William A. M. Burden Sr., who graduated from Harvard in 1900, and his son, William A. M. Burden III, who graduated from Harvard in 1953 and Harvard Business School in 1955, both of whom died young. The hall was designed by Lincoln Center architect Philip Johnson.

His granddaughter, Wendy Burden, wrote a memoir entitled Dead End Gene Pool about her family, including her grandfather William, who in the waning years of his life “had a bathroom and dressing room lined with two inches of foam to avoid bruising himself. Once, while visiting Paris, he had a private secretary in New York order seven new Mercedes-Benzes — one to be delivered within a few hours."

After his death, in 1985 his widow donated "eleven masterworks" from his estate to the Museum of Modern Art. Paintings included: Peggy and I: A Life Too Busy For a Dull Moment (1982) 345 pp.