Claude Gordon Ross, 88; U.S. Diplomat Served in Africa, State Dept.

Claude Gordon Ross, 88, who was a deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs from 1972 to 1974 after serving three presidents as an ambassador, died Jan. 18 of pneumonia complicated by acute lymphoma at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C., his family said.

In 1963, President Kennedy named Ross the ambassador to the Central African Republic. President Johnson appointed him to serve in Haiti, and President Nixon sent him to Tanzania.

Born in 1917 in Chicago, Ross moved to Southern California as an infant, graduated from Huntington Park High School and earned a bachelor’s degree in foreign service from USC in 1939.

After joining the State Department in 1940, Ross worked in several cities around the world before attending the National War College from 1956 to 1957. He served as the department’s deputy director of the office of West African affairs in the early 1960s.

He spoke five languages, including Greek, which his wife’s father required him to learn before allowing Ross to marry Antigone, a second-generation Greek American. They were married for 64 years, until her death in 2004.