Skip to Content
 

William Royall Tyler (1910–2003)

William Royall Tyler (1910–2003)

William Royall Tyler was born in Paris on October 17, 1910, the son of Elisina Tyler and Royall Tyler. He attended Harrow School in London and graduated from Balliol College at the University of Oxford with a bachelor of arts degree in 1933. He then worked for five years in international banking in the United States and England. He married Bettine Fisher-Rowe in London on July 31, 1934; they had two children, Royall Tyler (b. 1936) and Matilda Eve Tyler (b. 1939). He studied at Harvard University in the Fogg Art Museum’s museum studies program, receiving an MFA in 1941. During the Second World War, he served as a manager for a short-wave radio station (1940–1942), as an editor in the Office of War Information in Algeria (1942–1943), as the chief of press of the wireless bureau in the western Mediterranean (1943–1944), and as the deputy director and later the director of the Office of War Information in France (1944–1945). He was transferred to the Department of State, where he served as the chief of outpost (1945), the chief of the branch, Area Division I, P-7 (1946), the assistant director in charge of areas of the Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs (1946), the assistant director of the Office of Information and Educational Exchange (1947), a foreign service reserve officer (class two) and a public affairs officer in Paris (1948), a secretary in the Diplomatic Service (1948), and a public affairs counselor for France (1948–1954). Tyler was a fellow at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, D.C., in 1956–1960. He also was the director of the Office of Western European Affairs (1957), a member of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations (1957), and a counselor of the U.S. embassy at Bonn (1958–1961). He became deputy assistant (1961) and then assistant secretary of state (1962–1965) for European affairs and the U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands (1965–1969). Tyler was a member of the Administrative Committee (1963–1965) and later the director (1969–1977) of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. He was a member of the Metropolitan Club and the Cosmos Club. He died on November 16, 2003, in Bristol, Vermont.


Vincent Laloy, "William Royall Tyler: L’Américain-Bourguignon," Le Bien Public, November 20, 2003.

William R. Tyler, interview with Charles Stuart Kennedy, November 17, 1987, Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, Washington D.C.