He was special, Albert Votaw's daughter remembers all these decades later.
Cathy Votaw is 70 now, more than a dozen years older than her father lived to be. She describes a man with a larger-than-life personality and a love of fun - as if you couldn't tell that from the photos, which show an outrageous handlebar mustache and a penchant for bowties sewn by his wife.
Each year on April 18, the anniversary of the 1983 bombing at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut that took the lives of her father and 62 others, a persistent sense of loss awakens in Cathy. Some years, she writes an email to her family, telling them about Albert, a public-housing expert for the U.S. Agency for International Development.
He was, she writes, dedicated to public service - and to USAID. And she is so sorry, she tells Albert Votaw's grandchildren and great-grandchildren, that his death at the hands of an anti-American attacker driving a truck packed with explosives means they never got to meet him.
Yet Albert Votaw's influence echoes down across the generations. Four decades later, as the agency that worked to promote American security through international development and humanitarian work disappears at the hands of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, two things are abundantly clear: