‘World’s Youngest Ambassador’ Remembered Forty Years After Her Death

‘World’s Youngest Ambassador’ Remembered Forty Years After Her Death

In 1982, a precocious 10-year-old from Maine wrote a letter to Yuri Andropov, then General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (and thus its supreme leader), and called on him to make peace rather than war with the U.S. Her name was Samantha Smith, and she quickly became known as "the world's youngest ambassador." She died tragically on Aug. 25, 1985, at the age of 13. Forty years later, her trip to Moscow still raises questions…