Carol Laise; Former Ambassador to Nepal

Carol Laise, a pioneering woman diplomat who was U.S. ambassador to Nepal, has died at her summer home in Dummerston, Vt. She was 73.

Ms. Laise, widow of Ellsworth Bunker, the former U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, died Thursday of cancer.

Ambassador to Nepal from 1966 to 1973, Ms. Laise was the first woman career officer to be named a U.S. ambassador. She said frequently that being a woman posed no serious handicap in her government career of nearly four decades.

“I believe a woman can bring certain qualities to any job, as does a man, and it’s not a competitive thing,” she told The Times in 1970.

“While men may also possess it, women seem to have a special degree of compassion and an ability to promote harmony and healing,” she said. “I feel these same qualities, best reflected in the framework of a family unit, can be utilized beyond the home in other realms of human relations.”

Ms. Laise, born in Winchester, Va., on Nov. 14, 1917, studied at American University and George Washington University and at the Foreign Service Institute. She worked for 10 years in the U.S. Agriculture Department and on the Civil Service Commission before beginning her career in the State Department in 1948. After helping to work out details for establishing the United Nations, she served with the U.S. delegation.

There, she said, she “was exposed to every part of the world” and decided that she would best fit in the Indian subcontinent.

She served in India twice, the second time as first secretary when Bunker was ambassador to India. She also served as country director in Washington for India, Nepal and the Maldives.

Ms. Laise was named to her ambassadorship by President Lyndon B. Johnson in his attempt to increase the number of women in foreign diplomacy.

Her 1967 marriage to Bunker, a widower 24 years her senior, was the first marriage of two U.S. ambassadors and established a policy condoning such liaisons in the State Department. Johnson not only sent warm congratulations, but promised Bunker a jet for commuting the 1,800 miles between capitals, Saigon and Katmandu.

Bunker died at 90 in 1984.

After her term in Nepal, Ms. Laise went on to serve as assistant secretary of state for public affairs and director general of the foreign service in Washington.

She is survived by a brother and three stepchildren.