Clive Chandler

April 29, 1936 - May 25, 2023

OBITUARY—CLIVE CHANDLER

Clive Chandler, 87, passed away on May 25, 2023, after a brief illness. Clive grew up on Hunts Point in Bellevue, Washington, the son of Marshall and Helen (Beer) Chandler. He attended Lakeside Academy in Seattle and Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, graduating from Andover in 1953. He went on to Princeton University, studying international politics and economics at the Woodrow Wilson School, and graduated cum laude four years later.

Clive entered the U.S. Foreign Service right after college as the youngest foreign service officer (21 years, two months) in the history of the American foreign service. He served in the Mediterranean area— Naples, Italy; Nice, France; and Algiers, Algeria—interspersed by assignments in Washington, D.C. and at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations.

As personal aide to the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations in 1959–1960, Clive witnessed the chaotic UN session where Nikita Khrushchev, Fidel Castro, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Harold Macmillan and other world leaders delivered their demands and Khrushchev famously banged his shoe. The Algiers stint was marked by the French-Algerian war in which the Arab population rebelled and the indigenous French people of Algeria, led by the Secret Army Organization, fought a terrorist resistance against both the Arab rebels and the French Government, leading to the independence of Algeria in 1962. In Washington, as a sidelight to his normal duties, Clive was a French-English, English-French interpreter for a variety of American personalities, including the U.S. President, Vice President, Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense, and was one of the interpreters on the day of the burial of President Kennedy.

In 1968, having earned a law degree through Georgetown University’s four-year night program, Clive left the Foreign Service, and moved to New York City as an associate at the Dewey Ballantine law firm. That year, he and Margaret Ann Eliel married in her hometown, Alexandria, Virginia. Four years later, they and their newly-born daughter, Margaret, moved to Beach Camp on the south coast of Trinidad in the West Indies. They lived there for six years while Clive worked as Administrative Manager and Legal Adviser to Trinidad-Tesoro Petroleum Company Limited, a 51-49 joint venture of Trinidad and Tobago and Tesoro Petroleum. Their son, Ted, was born in 1974. Clive considered the multicultural, multiracial atmosphere of Trinidad an excellent setting for his young family and they all have fond memories of those years.

In 1978, Clive was asked to become Vice President and General Counsel of Tesoro in San Antonio, Texas, but he declined in favor of a much smaller New York Stock Exchange petroleum company, Buttes Gas & Oil Co., based in Oakland, in order to be closer to his family on the West Coast. He helped Buttes reorganize financially, and then in 1986 he moved to the legal department of Bechtel Corporation in San Francisco.

Clive greatly enjoyed legal/petroleum work and had some notable successes: delivering groundbreaking interpretations of the U. S.-Trinidad and Tobago double-tax treaty, negotiating a favorable outcome of Buttes’s dispute with the National Iranian Oil Company over petroleum deposits in the Strait of Hormuz of the Persian Gulf, and drafting a new petroleum policy, law and regulations for Romania after the fall of the Soviet empire. He continued to work long after normal retirement age.

Clive and Ann and their two children moved to Piedmont in 1978 and became members of Piedmont Community Church. In Piedmont, Clive’s community efforts included working to help found the Piedmont Choirs (now Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choirs) and volunteering on the board of the Piedmont Swim Club (now Piedmont Community Pool). He is also remembered by many Piedmont parents and children as the host of a summer retreat at Pope Valley where many Piedmont children learned to swim, fish and drive an automobile at a sprawling vineyard property of several thousand acres. He was a caring and supportive husband and father. He was particularly pleased that his daughter and son graduated from Princeton University, his alma mater.

Clive is predeceased by his parents and by his sister Marcia Johnson. He is survived by his wife of 54 years, Ann; his daughter, Margaret Hiller, son-in-law Jeff Hiller, and granddaughters Megan and Genevieve Hiller of Piedmont; and his son, Ted Chandler, daughter-in-law Giselle Chandler, and granddaughters Layla and Roya Chandler of Santa Monica. He is also survived by his sister and brotherin-law Henrietta and Jim Ratcliff of Oakland, and five nieces and nephews and their families.

There will be a memorial service at Piedmont Community Church, 400 Highland Avenue, Piedmont, at 2:00 p.m. on Sunday, July 30. The family requests that in lieu of flowers, memorial donations be made to the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choirs, the Piedmont Community Church, or a charity of your choice.