Richard David Vine (December 10, 1925 – May 14, 2008) was a career diplomat, US Ambassador to Switzerland from 1979 to 1981, and later Director General of the Atlantic Institute for International Affairs.

Education and diplomatic career

He was born in 1925 New York City. After serving in the US Army from 1943 to 1946, Vine graduated from Georgetown University in 1949 and later earned an M.A. at Yale University.

In the 1950s, as a Foreign Service officer, he was posted to Bonn, Tel Aviv and Paris.

In the early 1960s, he served as officer in charge of European integration affairs at the State Department in Washington D.C. before taking up a second posting in Bonn in 1963.

Vine went on from there to Brussels, where he was USEC counselor for political affairs from 1965 to 1969, and then to Bern, Switzerland, as Deputy Chief of Mission from 1969 to 1972.

US Ambassador to Switzerland

Back in Washington, between 1972 and 1979, Vine's State Department functions included Director of Western European Affairs, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Canadian Affairs.

He served as Jimmy Carter’s Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to Switzerland from 1979 to the end of the Carter administration in 1981.

Director General of the Atlantic Institute

Ambassador Vine had started a new position as Director of the State Department’s Bureau of Refugee Programs in 1982 when he was asked by the Paris-based Atlantic Institute for International Affairs to become its Director General.

In 1984, soon after he had resigned from the Foreign Service and taken up the function, the French left-wing guerilla group Action Directe bombed the Institute’s empty premises which were almost completely demolished by the blast.

Although Institute activities resumed at a new location, Vine was later informed by French police that he personally was on the group’s hit list. Georges Besse, head of the Renault car manufacturing company, was gunned down on a Paris street by two members of the group in 1986.

Vine resigned his post, and returned to the United States, spending the last 20 years of his life in active retirement in Millington, and then Chestertown, Maryland.

He remained on the Atlantic Institute’s Board of Governors, and was also a member of the Council on Foreign Affairs. He died in 2008 in Chestertown, Maryland.

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