Donald Kendall was born in Clallam County, Washington, where his family owned a dairy farm, in 1921.

As a Navy Catalina PBY seaplane pilot he assisted in the Landings at Manila Bay, Mindoro, and Leyte Gulf.

[6] In 1970, Kendall requested and participated in a high-level meeting of Chilean businessman and publisher Agustín Edwards Eastman of the Edwards family with high Nixon administration officials, after which President Nixon met with then-National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and CIA Director Richard Helms and, in the words of a 1976 New York Times article, said "that Chile was to be saved from Salvador Allende and he didn't care much how.

According to The Guardian:...the October 1970 plot against Chile's President-elect Salvador Allende ... was the direct result of a plea for action a month earlier by Donald Kendall, chairman of PepsiCo, in two telephone calls to the company's former lawyer, President Richard Nixon.

Kendall arranged for the owner of the company's Chilean bottling operation to meet National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger on September 15.

In 1973, when Crawford officially turned 65 (she was actually two years older born in 1906), she was forcibly retired from her position on the company's board of directors.