Ethnicity:
Moffat's paternal grandfather, James Clement Moffat, was born at Glencree in the south of Scotland and came to America as a young man in 1833.
Douglas Maxwell Moffat was born on November 16, 1881, in Stanhope, New Jersey, United States. He was the son of Edward Stewart and Anna McCartney Moffat. Douglas was less than a year old when his family moved to Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Douglas attended the School of the Lackawanna in Scranton, Pennsylvania until 1897 and then went to Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, for two years. He entered Yale College in 1899, graduating in 1903 with the degree of a Bachelor of Arts. He then spent a year in the English department of the Yale Graduate School, receiving the degree of a Master of Arts in 1904. Douglas entered Harvard Law School in 1904, became an editor of the Harvard Law Review in his third year and was graduated, cum laude, in 1907.
Douglas Moffat was associated with Welles&Torrey, the Scranton law firm of his cousin, C.H. Welles, from 1907 to 1909, being admitted to the bar of Lackawanna County. In the summer of 1909 he was sent to New York on work for the Delaware&Hudson Railroad. He stayed on and entered the Cravath office on December 20, 1909. His Cravath partnership was interrupted in World War I and twice in World War II.
During WWII, Moffat had also served as deputy alien property custodian in Manila, the Philippines, and was Washington’s principal representative at the Middle East Supply Centre at Cairo, Egypt, in 1943. Immediately prior to his appointment as ambassador, Moffat practiced law in New York and was well-known for his service as a member of the city’s Transit Authority from 1953 to 1956. Moffat was also the first and only United States ambassador to Australia to die on the job - from health complications in August 1956, only five months after presenting his credentials in Canberra.
Moffat was a vestryman of St. James' Protestant Episcopal Church of New York City and has for a number of years served as a lay delegate to the Diocesan Convention of New York for St. James' Church.
Moffat was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Delta Kappa Epsilon, and of the American Institute of Graphic Arts.
Douglas married Gertrude Mali, daughter of Pierre Mali, on June 13, 1921. They have a son and a daughter.
