We were saddened to learn of the death of Faith Whittlesey, who slipped away Monday after a long battle with cancer. We covered her in the 1980s, when we were a young editor on the Wall Street Journal Europe and Whittlesey was serving as President Reagan’s envoy to Switzerland. We came to think of her as an ambassador of American idealism and an antidote to the cynicism to which so many had succumbed in the thick of the Cold War.

Whittlesey brought to her public service an uncommon zeal for the Reagan doctrine that Soviet communism could be rolled back and defeated. She grasped the role of religion in the struggle for liberty. She welcomed religious Americans to the White House, as Reagan, in the climactic decade of the Cold War, allied with Pope John Paul II, fundamentalist Christians, and Jews racing to rescue their co-religionists from Soviet communism.

During Whittlesey’s years in Berne, she was accused of helping private contributors to her representational fund. The State Department administers such funds for envoys not wealthy enough to pay personally for their diplomatic entertaining. The investigation interpreted “disputed facts in the light least favorable” to Whittlesey. Yet Whittlesey was still formally cleared, which the Wall Street Journal marked with an editorial headlined “True Grit.”

After her second tour as envoy in Berne, Whittlesey became chairman of the Swiss American Foundation. Though she had worked her whole life, even while raising her three children, Whittlesey found herself unwelcome in the women’s movement. Whittlesey believed this owed to her opposition to abortion and commitment to the cause of life. We came to admire her greatly for the way she stayed with the pro-life struggle.

We sometimes wondered whether Whittlesey’s ardor for life was driven in part by the tragedies she bore. Her husband had committed suicide in 1974 and, a generation later, one of their children, in the grip of depression, took his life. Her sadnesses must have been unimaginable. We encountered her only occasionally after her years in Europe — the last time as we were exiting an elevator. She was brimming with excitement at the prospect of the new administration. It could have used a spirit like hers.