Ambassador to Croatia: Who Is Kenneth Merten?

AllGov

3/31/2012

The Balkan nation of Croatia, known to most Americans as the homeland of NBA stars like Toni Kukoč 
and Dražen Petrović, will soon have a new ambassador from the U.S. President Barack Obama nominated 
career diplomat and current ambassador to Haiti Kenneth H. Merten to be Washington’s next man in Zagreb 
on February 10, 2012. 

Born in St. Louis in April or May 1961, to mother Edryne A. Merten and father Helmut L. Merten, at age 
twelve Kenneth Merten and family moved to Hudson, Ohio, about 20 miles southeast of Cleveland. He attended 
Hudson Junior High School and graduated from Walsh Jesuit, a Catholic prep school in Cuyahoga Falls, 
in 1979. “He really wanted to go into foreign service,” recalled classmate Rob McCarty, who later became 
a magistrate in Summit County, Ohio. “Not a lot of people know what they want to do at 16 or 17 or 18, 
but he knew.” Merten himself credited that interest to his Austrian-born father, a chemist with a number 
of patents to his name, “We always had foreigners, family members, parading through the house.” 

Merten earned a B.A in Diplomacy and Foreign Affairs at Miami University of Ohio in 1983, and a Masters 
in Public Administration at American University in 1986. He has also studied at the Université d’Aix-Marseille 
in France and at Karl Franzens Universität in Austria. 

Merten joined the Foreign Service in 1987. His work for the State Department has been divided between 
assignments in Washington, DC, and those overseas. His previous foreign postings include serving as the 
economic counselor at the embassy in Paris, France, followed by his first tour in Haiti as vice consul 
from 1988 to 1990, providing assistance to Americans in distress and interviewing Haitians seeking green 
cards and tourist visas. He was the economic officer at the U.S. Mission to the European Union in Brussels, 
Belgium, and then did the same job at the embassy in Bonn, Germany. Merten turned down a position in 
London, U.K., to return to Haiti in 1998 to serve as economic counselor at the embassy in Port-au-Prince 
until 2000. 

His Washington assignments have included two tours in the State Department Operations Center, service 
in the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs and on the Cuba Desk, as well as a year as special assistant 
to the Special Advisors on Haiti. 

Merten was serving as deputy executive secretary to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (and earlier 
to Secretary Condoleezza Rice) when President Barack Obama nominated him in June 2009 to be ambassador 
to Haiti, where he began serving on August 24, 2009. Present during the devastating earthquake of January 
12, 2010, Merten was relaxing before an evening reception and ran out to the back yard, screaming for 
his wife and daughters to get out. “I had this vision of this 80-year-old house, with its foot-thick 
cement walls collapsing on them,” he recalled. Unhurt, his family soon left the country, and Merten began 
supervising U.S. relief efforts. 

Kenneth Merten is married to Susan Greenman Merten and has two daughters, Caryl and Elisabeth. He speaks 
French, Haitian Creole and German.