Lawrence Palmer Taylor

:"For other persons named Lawrence Taylor, see Lawrence Taylor (disambiguation)."Lawrence Palmer Taylor (born April 18, 1940 in Cleveland, Ohio) was sworn in as the second U.S. Ambassador to Estonia in July 1995 and took up his posting in Tallinn in August 1995. Prior to this appointment, he had served since 1992 as Director of the Foreign Service Institute/National Foreign Affairs Training Center at its new campus in Arlington, Virginia.

Ambassador Taylor joined the Foreign Service in 1969 and was posted as vice consul in Santo Domingo. He then served as staff assistant in the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs from 1971-1972, becoming consul in Zagreb, Yugoslavia in 1973. Moving to the embassy in Belgrade, he served there for three years as economic officer. In 1977 he was stationed in Jakarta, Indonesia as energy attaché, moving to the embassy in Ottawa as economic officer from 1980-1984. He then served as economic counsellor in London until 1989, returning for a second tour in Ottawa as economic minister from 1989-1992.

Ambassador Taylor graduated from Ohio University and received a master's degree from American University and another from Harvard in addition to spending a year at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C. His foreign languages are Spanish, Serbo-Croatian, and Slovenian. He was awarded the State Department's Distinguished Honor Award in 1995 and holds two Superior Honor Awards and three senior performance pay awards. He is married to Lynda Gorham Taylor and has two daughters and one son. The Taylors live in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where they avidly pursue a family interest in collecting antique maps and books and ephemera from the U.S. Civil War and the Boer War in South Africa.