# William A. M. Burden

William Armistead Moale Burden Jr. (April 8, 1906 – October 10, 1984) was an American banker, art collector, and philanthropist who served as U.S. Ambassador to Belgium under President Eisenhower.

## Early life

Burden was born on April 8, 1906, in Manhattan to William Armistead Moale Burden Sr. (1877–1909), and Florence Vanderbilt (née Twombly) (1881–1969). His younger brother, Shirley Carter Burden (1908–1989), was a prominent photographer. Their paternal grandparents were I. Townsend Burden (1838–1913) and Evelyn Byrd Moale (1847–1916), the daughter of William Armistead Moale (1800–1880) of Baltimore, Maryland, who was a descendant of the Carter and Byrd families of Virginia. Burden's grandfather was an owner of Burden Iron Works, which was founded by his great-grandfather, Henry Burden (1791–1871).
His maternal grandparents were Florence Adele Vanderbilt Twombly, a granddaughter of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Hamilton McKown Twombly.
Burden attended and graduated from Harvard College in 1927. He also attended special aviation courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

## Career

In 1927, after his graduation from Harvard, he was hired as an aviation research analyst at Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. From 1932 to 1938, he worked for Scudder, Stevens and Clark. In 1935, while at Scudder, he was elected a director of the United Air Lines Transport Corporation. In 1940, he was named to the board of trustees of Central Hanover Bank & Trust Co.
During World War II, he was Special Assistant for Research and Development to the Secretary of the Air Force. In 1947, after the War, he joined Smith, Barney & Co. as an aviation consultant.
In 1949, he founded William A. M. Burden & Co., an investment company intended to pool and manage his family's money. The firm is considered a pioneer in the "family office" space and continues to this day, managing half a billion dollars as of 1998. Unlike other Vanderbilt descendants, Burden "saw the fortune dissipating into smaller and smaller chunks and was determined to protect his own progeny."
In 1959, he was nominated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower as U.S. Ambassador to Belgium. He served in this role from 1959 until 1961.
Burden served on the board of trustees of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City from 1943 until his death. He was elected President of the Board in 1953, succeeding Nelson Rockefeller, who resigned to accept appointment as Under Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Burden resigned as president in 1959, to become Ambassador, and was succeeded by Blanchette Ferry Rockefeller, the wife of John D. Rockefeller III. He resumed the presidency again afterwards from 1961 until 1965. He donated works to be auctioned off for the Museum, including Paul Cézanne's Apples, in 1960. He also served as a trustee of Columbia University, a member of the board of the Smithsonian Institution, director of the Council on Foreign Relations, chairman of the Institute for Defense Analysis.

### Residence

In the 1940s, Burden and his wife commissioned Wallace K. Harrison, an architect who was involved in the design of Rockefeller Center, the Museum of Modern Art, and the United Nations Building in New York, as well as Isamu Noguchi, the artist, to design a summer home for them in Maine. The original 4,500 square-foot house, known as "Sea Change," was completed in 1947 and in the early 1980s, an indoor swimming pool was added bringing the home up to 6,500-square-feet.

## Personal life

On February 16, 1931, he was married to Margaret Livingston Partridge (1909–1996), at Saint Thomas Church in Manhattan. She was a daughter of sculptor William Ordway Partridge (1861–1930) and a niece of Bishop Sidney Catlin Partridge. On her mother's side, she was a granddaughter of William H. Wetmore and great-great-great-granddaughter of Chancellor Robert L. Livingston. Together, they were the parents of four sons:
* William Armistead Moale Burden III (1931–1962), a reporter for The Washington Post who was married to Leslie Lepington Hamilton (1932–1998), granddaughter of Bishop Franklin Hamilton, in 1951.
* Robert Livingston Burden (1934–1974), who was the head of the science department at Thomas Jefferson School in St. Louis.
* Hamilton Twombly Burden (1937–2015), who was an author.
* Ordway Partridge Burden (b. 1944), who married Jean Elizabeth (née Poor) Lynch, a granddaughter of Walter E. Poor, founder of the Sylvania Electric Company, in 1991.
Burden died on October 10, 1984.

### Legacy

In 1971, together with his mother and brother, he donated Burden Auditorium to Harvard Business School in honor of his father, William A. M. Burden Sr., who graduated from Harvard in 1900, and his son, William A. M. Burden III, who graduated from Harvard in 1953 and Harvard Business School in 1955, both of whom died young. The hall was designed by Lincoln Center architect Philip Johnson.
His estate in Mount Kisco, New York was later purchased and subdivided in the 2000s.
His granddaughter, Wendy Burden, wrote a memoir entitled Dead End Gene Pool about her family, including her grandfather William, who in the waning years of his life “had a bathroom and dressing room lined with two inches of foam to avoid bruising himself. Once, while visiting Paris, he had a private secretary in New York order seven new Mercedes-Benzes — one to be delivered within a few hours."
After his death, in 1985 his widow donated "eleven masterworks" from his estate to the Museum of Modern Art. Paintings included:
| Image | Artist | Title | Year |
| Link | Jean Arp | Ptolemy | 1953 |
| Link | Constantin Brâncuși | Young Bird | 1928 |
| Link | Constantin Brâncuși | Bird in Space | 1941 |
| Link | Robert Delaunay | The Three Windows, the Tower and the Wheel | 1912 |
| Link | Arshile Gorky | Diary of a Seducer | 1945 |
| Link | Piet Mondrian | Trafalgar Square | 1939-43 |
| | Claude Monet | Corona (Water Lilies) | c. 1920 |
| Link | Pablo Picasso | Two Acrobats with a Dog | 1905 |
| Link | Pablo Picasso | Still Life with Red Bull's Head | 1938 |
| | Pablo Picasso | Mirror and Cherries | 1947 |
| Link | Georges-Pierre Seurat | The Channel at Gravelines, Evening | 1890 |

## Published works

* The Struggle for Airways in Latin America (1943), Council on Foreign Relations.
* Peggy and I: A Life Too Busy For a Dull Moment (1982) 345 pp.