Geof Mclaughlin
James Lewis McLaughin born August 2, 1937, in New York City to Brig. Gen. Frank McLaughlin and Charlotte (Casey) McLaughlin passed away January 10, 2025 in Leesburg, Virginia at the age of 87.
Jim, also known as Babu (Swahili for grandfather), Uncle Jim, Mr. McLaughlin or Colonel McLaughlin led a rich life led by his Catholic faith and surrounded by the extended family who meant the world to him. He adored his grandchildren and cherished seeing his great grandchildren as much as possible.
In his own upbringing, his Army father moved them so often that he considered his paternal grandparents’ home in the Bronx and Camp Smith on the Hudson as his childhood homes. Those grandparents influenced his faith, which remained a constant throughout his life. The Catholic couple’s movement, Teams of Our Lady which he and Mary Jane joined in Siver Spring, MD in the mid-1970s remained incredibly important to him his whole life – he met his wife at a social in the basement of Holy Trinity Church in Georgetown. During his “retirement years” in Charleston, SC, he helped with all aspects of their small beach community church, Our Lady of Good Council.
Education was also important to him. He prioritized Catholic school for his children over other expenses (holidays sometimes meant his repairing someone’s beach house). He left West Point to his Army General father’s dismay after his plebe year (complaining that the learning was not serious enough) and then attained a BA in history from Boston College (1961) and MA in Comparative Government with a specialization on Africa at Georgetown University (1964). In between these, he studied at the Centre of Higher Administrative Studies on Modern Africa and Asia at the University of Paris as the first American student to be admitted, and in 1985 completed studies at the National Defense University in DC.
His numerous vocations (which helped inform his reputation as “a big fish story for every circumstance” man) included (in no order) bartending, lifeguarding (which led to a lifetime if dermatology procedures), bookkeeping/accounting, sailing and selling sailboats (and regretfully not holding on to the option to market the newfangled Zodiacs at the time), being posted to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania (where his sons Geof & David were born) with the Africa American Institute (AAI) working on education programs for the liberation movements based there and in Zambia who were expected to become the leaders of newly independent African nations, selling real estate (or buying, making his kids help renovate and then flipping, or buying and renting to students when his daughter Jennifer was in Baltimore, or renting with the unrealized intention to develop and sell, a 1802 plantation home on the South River in Annapolis where so many friends and family were hosted for swimming and sailing), helping to institutionalize the profession of home inspectors while founding both Annapolis Home Inspection and Charleston’s Antebellum Home Inspection (studying colonial bricks and building techniques), serving in the Army Reserves through his promotion to Colonel and Deputy Commander of the Army’s International Threats Analysis Center (ITAC), serving as Assistant to the Under Secretary of Defense, working with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) on the Defense Attaché program in North Africa (where he clandestinely had to flee on one trip, and from where he uncharacteristically called in a favor from an attaché when his backpacking daughter Julie fell ill).
He was perhaps most of all committed to authoring history. Working with American University in the 1970s, he authored the history and politics sections of numerous books under the Country Study/Area Handbooks series produced by American University. For the longest time, he was the Army’s only African expert, and put this knowledge to use years later as the Deputy Commander of the International Threats Analysis Center to ensure his son’s 10th Mountain Division had a Soldiers Guide for its 1993 Somalia deployment. Once he retired in Charleston, he began many years of researching and writing (enlisting his wife’s extensive support and that of friends and family members who might conduct research or interviews for him) to produce “A Diocesan Priest for our Times: The Life and Legacy of Fr. Patrick Quinlan” published in 2024.
He lives on in his writing, in his countless stories and the memories he created, in his 4 children and their spouses, 12 grandchildren and 6 great grandchildren, in his nieces and nephews and their children, and most of all within the love of his life, his wife of more than six decades, Mary Jane.
