Penn Kemble

Kemble was appointed to various government boards and institutions throughout the 1990s, eventually becoming the acting director of the U.S. Information Agency under President Bill Clinton.

[3] After moving to New York, Kemble stood out as a neatly dressed, muscular Protestant youth, in an urban political setting that was predominantly Catholic and Jewish.

[1] A leader in the East River chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, Kemble helped to organize a non-violent blockade of the Triborough Bridge during rush hour, to raise consciousness among suburbanites of the lives of Harlem residents.

His caucus included Paul Feldman, editor of the party paper New America and Tom Kahn, chief of the League for Industrial Democracy.

[2] Kemble was executive director of CDM from 1972 to 1976, at which time he left to become a special assistant and speechwriter for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Concerned about the direct and indirect role of the Communist Party USA and of sympathizers of Marxist-Leninist politics in the US Peace Movement and in the National Council of Churches, Kemble helped found the Institute on Religion and Democracy.

[7] PRODEMCA channelled funds from the National Endowment for Democracy to opposition groups in Nicaragua and lobbied for military aid to the contras by taking out full-page newspaper ads and contacting members of Congress.

[8] Kemble lobbied Congress to support the Christian Democratic President of El Salvador José Napoleón Duarte, during the Salvadoran Civil War; he also argued that Congress should fund the Nicaraguan Contras, who were then engaged in an armed campaign against the Sandinistas, to pressure the Sandinistas to negotiate a peace treaty with more guarantees for the civic opposition.

[2] However, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell appointed Kemble to be the Chairman of the International Eminent Persons Group on Slavery, Abduction and Forced Servitude in Sudan.