After a brief illness, peacefully, surrounded by his family.
Ken is survived by his wife of 35 years, Priscilla Montgomery Jensen; children Rebecca
Mattson; Joseph Gallerano (Carah); Dominic Gallerano; Piers, Berit, and Mads-Henning
Jensen; grandchildren Col, Quinn, and Lily McDermott; Victor and André Gallerano;
Damian and William Gallerano; James and Riley Vandell; his cousin Patricia Wallace
and family of New York; the extended Montgomery and Moss families; and his cousins
from the Syphax family of Virginia.
Ken was the son of Louis B. and Dorothy V. Jensen of Kenosha, Wisc. He held a PhD in
Russian and Soviet history from the University of Colorado and taught for several years
at colleges in the west and at Kenyon College in Ohio. He served as director of grants
at the Institute for Educational Affairs in New York and as grants and research director,
as well as a senior scholar, at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington. He
was executive director of the American Committees on Foreign Relations, a
membership organization with groups throughout the country, for some fifteen years. In
“retirement” he collated and distributed more than 7,000 issues of an emailed
NewsGroup that provided links and information about ongoing foreign policy issues and
current events to a mailing list of hundreds.
Among the high points of his professional life he included several conferences regarding
the potential ramifications of the breakup of the Soviet Union; meetings in Washington
and Russia included participants from throughout Europe and the former USSR. He was
particularly pleased to have convened what may have been the first conference on
Francis Fukuyama’s seminal paper on the end of history, in May 1989. At ACFR he sent
speakers to address committees across the country, as well as convening annual
meetings in Washington and a number of study trips abroad.
Ken was a fan of traditional folk music, a singer and guitarist who reminisced about
sharing a gig with Judy Collins long ago in Boulder; a fan of the Danish tenor Aksel
Schiotz, whom he also befriended in Colorado; and a font of good stories like those two.
In the last fifteen years he was deeply pleased to have been sought out by some
cousins he didn’t know he had: members of the Syphax family, descended from persons
who were enslaved at Mt. Vernon and Arlington House. He had long known of an
interesting New England lineage, which included Abner Kneeland, the last American
jailed for blasphemy; several Minutemen, and New Englanders like Samuel F.B. Morse
and Julia Ward Howe. He was fascinated by the complexity and irony of such a
combination, and treasured the affection and inclusiveness of his Syphax cousins.

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