03/20/09 Leonore Annenberg, who has died aged 91, was a former chief of protocol at the White House and the widow of Walter Annenberg

Presidents Jimmy Carter,Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford with then U.S. Chief of Protocol Leonore Annenberg aboard an Air Force jet carrying them to the funeral of Anwar al-Sadat in 1981

Leonore Annenberg, who has died aged 91, was a former chief of protocol at the White House and the widow of Walter Annenberg, President Nixon's ambassador to Britain, with whom she formed a philanthropic partnership that sponsored causes on both sides of the Atlantic.

Leonore Annenberg
Telegraph.co.uk

In her capacity as chairman and president of the Annenberg Foundation after her husband's death in 2002, Leonore Annenberg, known as Lee, gave away billions of dollars to cultural and medical institutions.....

....She was born Leonore Cohn in New York on February 20 1918, the elder daughter of Max Cohn, a textile merchant whose business was failing, and of Clara Henle, his wife, whose family had emigrated from Berlin. Lee was the niece of Harry Cohn, founder of Columbia Pictures, who brought her up from the aged of 11 onwards – her mother having died when Lee was seven, leaving her father unable to cope. Harry Cohn was one of the legendary Hollywood producers, and the subject of many stories, not all of them complimentary.....

....In 1946 she married Lewis Rosenstiel, a multi-millionaire three decades her elder who had founded the Schenley liquor distillery (the second largest in the United States after Seagram). She moved into his 1,500-acre estate at Greenwich, Connecticut, and gave birth to a second daughter. But the marriage ended in a bitter divorce, Lee citing extreme mental cruelty and leaving the marital home with only the clothes she was wearing.

In 1951 she married her third husband, Walter Annenberg, which proved a close and enduring alliance. He had inherited a failing publishing empire, out of which he made a great success and a great fortune. As publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer he became a close friend of Senator Richard Nixon.....

.....For the rest of their lives the Annenbergs were philanthropists supporting numerous worthy causes. In 1989 Walter founded the Annenberg Foundation, which created the Annenberg Challenge, a $500 million contribution to a five-year programme of educational reform.
The foundation has now given away some $4.2 billion, and after Walter's death at the age of 94 Lee succeeded him as chairman and president.......

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