Arabists

The Romance of an American Elite

Robert D. Kaplan

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 1995
• eBook ISBN: 9781439108703
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

A tight-knit group closely linked by intermarriage as well as class and old school ties, the "Arabists" were men and women who spent much of their lives living and working in the Arab world as diplomats, military attaches, intelligence agents, scholar-adventurers, and teachers. As such, the Arabists exerted considerable influence both as career diplomats and as bureaucrats within the State Department from the early nineteenth century to the present. But over time, as this work shows, the group increasingly lost touch with a rapidly changing American society, growing both more insular and headstrong and showing a marked tendency to assert the Arab point of view. Drawing on interviews, memoirs, and other official and private sources, Kaplan reconstructs the 100-year history of the Arabist elite, demonstrating their profound influence on American attitudes toward the Middle East, and tracing their decline as an influx of ethnic and regional specialists has transformed the State Department and challenged the power of the old elite.

Part II
Reality

Chapter 5
Mr. Foreign Service

In September 1947 Loy Henderson, the director of the State Department’s Office of Near Eastern, African and South Asian Affairs, wrote to the secretary of defense, George Marshall, that the “partitioning of Palestine and the setting up of a Jewish State [is opposed] by practically every member of the Foreign Service and of the Department who has been engaged … with the Near and Middle East.”* In the Washington political establishment the State Department was not alone in its opposition to Israel. All of President Harry Truman’s foreign policy advisers—including many of the so-called wise men: Marshall, Robert Lovett, George Kennan, Charles Bohlen, James Forrestal, and Dean Acheson—were against recognizing the new Jewish state, which they viewed as an oil-poor impediment to good relations with the oil-rich and strategically located Arabs at a time when the United States was embarking on a worldwide struggle with the Soviet Union. But none held so tenaciously to this view as Henderson and his diplomatic colleagues at the State Department’s Near Eastern Affairs bureau, known as NEA. When it became clear that Truman was not to be swayed from his support for Israel, Lovett, Marshall, and the other wise men withdrew their opposition and got behind the President to a degree that Henderson and the State Department would not. Hearing the news that Truman had recognized Israel, a State Department official assigned to the United Nations in New York, lamented, “It can’t be.” Another department official, Philip Ireland, who had taught at the AUB, equated Zionism with “Nazi Lebensraum.”* Several months later, in the spring of 1948, when the new State of Israel was fighting for its life against five Arab armies, Henderson and his colleagues labored strenuously to prevent arms reaching Israel.

“The area experts to a man were scandalized by what happened in 1948. We had made a tremendous effort to lay the ground for good relations with the Arabs, and all of a sudden, when we were in a good position, all of our hopes were dashed,” recalls Parker Hart, an Arabist who later became assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs.† Carleton Coon, Jr., another diplomat, says “the old-time Arabists knew that had the partition vote gone otherwise, the Arab world would have been ripe for American political penetration and intercultural fertilization. But now the days of a beloved American presence were over. In some of their minds, Israel spoiled it all.”

Truman had this to say in his memoirs:

“The Department of State’s specialists on the Near East were almost without exception unfriendly to the idea of a Jewish state…. Some thought the Arabs, on account of their number and because of the fact that they controlled such immense oil resources, should be appeased…. Some among them were also inclined to be anti-Semitic.”

State Department officials from that era who are still alive take umbrage at that statement. Not only do they deny its validity, but they claim Truman knew full well that Henderson and his men were not anti-Semitic. Truman, these old Arab hands claim, was playing domestic politics, pandering to the fears of American Jews, that is, at the expense of the career Foreign Service.

Nevertheless, not even these officials would deny that they, like the Protestant missionaries and the other American expatriates in the Middle East, were simply not willing, or able, to imagine the Nazi Holocaust to the same degree that Truman and many Americans were. As Bill Stoltzfus admits, “The Jews were a distant, unreal world to us, but the Palestinians were individuals we knew.” Contrast this statement with one about Truman, recalled by his adviser, Clark Clifford: “He [Truman] deplored the existence of Jewish ghettos and the cruel and persistent persecution. He never ceased to be horrified at the murder of some six million Jews by the Nazis. He was fully aware of the miserable status of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who had been displaced by the Second World War.”

Of course, emotional responses to the Holocaust in Europe need not have affected one’s attitude toward the situation in the Middle East. In abstract moral terms one could well argue that they should not have: why should Arabs be punished for European crimes when traditional Christian anti-Semitism never existed in the Arab world? But such emotional empathy not only affected political attitudes in 1947 and 1948 but, as it would turn out, allowed an insight into what was then unfolding in the Middle East, a development that State Department officials appeared not to grasp. The sheer magnitude of the Holocaust had unleashed a historical process—of which the mass movement of Jewish refugees from Europe to Palestine was only a part—that made the birth of Israel simply inevitable. For most this was plain to see, but not for the Arabists.

However, the State Department variety of this species was different from the Protestant missionary variety. Beginning in the 1950s, these two species would merge into a single brand of Arabist, which would in turn subdivide into a variety of newer strains. It is necessary, therefore, to understand the diplomats who manned the State Department’s Office of Near Eastern Affairs in the first years after World War II. That means starting with one man: Loy Henderson.

Loy Henderson was more than a diplomatic archetype: he might be considered the most important and distinguished career diplomat in United States history. That he is little known outside the State Department is testimony to the insider role he played and to the onrush of news events in this century and the speed with which their details are being forgotten. For nearly half a century this man was a behind-the-scenes player in nearly every international drama that involved the United States. The Middle East, as it happens, was only one chapter in Henderson’s epic career.

Loy Wesley Henderson came from a small Arkansas town, one of two identical twin boys born in 1892 to a poor Methodist preacher. He went to a small college in a small town in Kansas and afterward transferred to Northwestern University outside Chicago. Due to an arm injury he was rejected for service in World War I, but as a Red Cross volunteer he saw firsthand the social chaos that engulfed Germany and Russia at the end of the war. It was in Latvia in 1920, when he himself was close to death with typhus, that he received a cable informing him that his brother, Roy Henderson, had died from a kidney ailment. Because of Roy’s death, Loy’s preacher father wrote him, “You must be double as good a man as you had ever planned to be.” Henceforth, Loy Henderson’s life would be driven forward by the ghost of his dead identical twin. “The eventual result was a near-obsession with duty” that “tended to narrow his field of vision, and … discouraged the reflection that allows a person to learn from criticism,” observes the scholar H. W. Brands in Inside The Cold War: Loy Henderson and the Rise of the American Empire 1918-1961.

Henderson became like a Jesuit priest whose religious order was the Foreign Service, the cadre of diplomats who spend their professional lives representing America at embassies abroad and at the State Department in Washington. But Henderson, unlike other diplomats, was not intellectually curious. He read little aside from the diplomatic cable traffic. According to those who knew him, he lacked a sense of humor and was unable “to share popular emotions.” Henderson’s attitude toward New York City is telling: the city “was more foreign to me than London, Paris, or Berlin had been. The people in the restaurants and on the subway … and those who jostled me in the streets or pushed in front of me in the shops, seemed to have little in common with me.” One of Henderson’s early jobs in the State Department was to investigate Soviet links to leftist labor organizations in the United States. Given the significant role played by Jews and other ethnics in such organizations in the 1920s, it is possible that this work only deepened Henderson’s animosity toward New York City and to the ethnic and political universe it represented.

In some ways Henderson bore an uncanny resemblance to the man who, more than any other, came to epitomize the political power and upper-crust waspdom of the East Coast Establishment: John J. McCloy, Jr. McCloy, a Wall Street titan who helped run the War Department during World War II and was later high commissioner for Germany, president of the World Bank, and chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank and the Council on Foreign Relations, was also a consummate insider and narrow, unreflective deal maker, who grew up, like Henderson, in a financially strapped and undistinguished Protestant family. This condition only increased his determination to be more of an American aristocrat—with the typical American aristocrat’s devotion to duty—than his colleagues who had been born wealthy. In a photo, taken on the steps of the U.S. legation in Baghdad in 1943, Henderson certainly appears to the manner born: ramrod-straight in a black dinner jacket, hands clasped behind his back, a trimmed moustache, and aloof eyes that reveal not a trace of self-doubt. With his bald head, he even looks like McCloy.

McCloy, the focus of adulation toward the end of his life, has in recent years come under revision as one of the key figures responsible for imprisoning Japanese Americans during World War II and for preventing the U.S. military from bombing the railway tracks leading to Auschwitz. Indeed, McCloy’s easy forgiveness of German war criminals immediately after the war, coupled with his vehement opposition to the creation of Israel and to Israeli security long before the Likud came to power, suggests a pattern of possible prejudice. Henderson’s life, beginning with his dislike of New York and its leftist ethnic culture, indicates a similar pattern.

But while McCloy’s career was full of mistaken judgments, Henderson’s judgments—the Middle East aside—were incredibly prescient. And even in regard to the Middle East, Henderson’s opinions, though in some cases incorrect, are not impossible to defend.

“Loy Henderson was a big picture man. He saw the world from a global viewpoint. Henderson came to the Middle East relatively late in his career. He placed the Middle East strictly in terms of its impact on the U.S.-Soviet conflict,” explains Hermann Eilts, an ambassador to Saudi Arabia and to Egypt, who worked with Henderson as a young Foreign Service officer.

Early in his career, from 1927 through 1942, Henderson worked exclusively on Soviet and Eastern European affairs, including the eight years that he spent living in the Baltic States and Moscow. This experience marked Henderson for life. It permitted him to work alongside George F. Kennan and Charles Bohlen. Together the three of them earned the reputation as the State Department’s finest area specialists on the Soviet Union, chalking up a record of prediction and analysis that was never to be surpassed. While many Americans—a group, it must be said, that was to a large degree dominated by Jewish intellectuals—saw the new Communist state in Russia through rose-tinted glasses, Henderson, Kennan, and Bohlen witnessed firsthand the horrific deprivations and terror tactics inflicted by Stalin’s regime. Frustrated by Stalin’s popularity in liberal circles in America, Henderson, in one diplomatic cable, blamed “international Jewry” for being “an important supporter of” the Soviet Union.*

In Riga Henderson married a Latvian woman, who further encouraged his intense dislike of the Soviet Communists and their sympathizers abroad. As with Charles Crane, it could be said that Henderson’s problem with the Jews initiated in Russia. Because he was actually living in Moscow and witnessing the cruelties of Stalinism—he attended the show trials and had the awful experience of having his Russian “contacts” disappear into the gulag—Henderson became more distrustful of Stalin than of Hitler. Consequently, American leftists and Jews publicly attacked Henderson for “fascist” tendencies and anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, Henderson’s awareness of the true nature of the Soviet regime led him to predict as early as April 1942 that the American-Soviet alliance against Hitler would be a passing phenomenon, which would break apart the moment the war was over.

In early 1942 with Americans—particularly President Roosevelt—enthralled with their new Soviet wartime allies, Henderson’s thinking was not considered politically correct. Pressure on the State Department from Eleanor Roosevelt and others in the White House resulted in Henderson’s transfer to the Middle East, a less important part of the world, where it was thought Henderson would not get into trouble by attacking the conventional wisdom. “The Near East! Nothing ever happens there,” observed an American diplomat of the day. However, Henderson was fated to arrive in the Middle East at exactly the moment in American history when it became a major strategic concern.

The State Department, though to a much smaller extent than the Protestant missionaries, had a relationship with the Arab world going back to the early days of the Republic. The Alaouite sovereign of Morocco was the first foreign ruler to recognize the United States after the American Revolution. And it was in 1826, during the administration of President John Quincy Adams, that the first State Department Arabist, William B. Hodgson, received his language training.* But until World War II Washington’s diplomatic presence in Araby was exceedingly small. Its policy was to defer to British interests in the region and to support the educational work of the missionaries. The only exception to this rule came in the aftermath of the First World War, when Woodrow Wilson conceived the desire for an American political role in Syria and sent Crane there for that purpose. But Wilson’s idea vanished in the face of British and French pressure. Though American oil interests, helped by Crane, had opened relationships with Arab sheikhs prior to World War II, by the time of Pearl Harbor, the United States was still a net exporter of oil, and thus the oil issue was consigned to the future. But from 1939 on, just as Bill Stoltzfus, Arthur Close, and their friends and families were leaving Beirut, the situation began to change dramatically.

Raymond Hare, a young second secretary at the American Legation in Cairo from 1939 through 1942, was one of the handful of Americans who personally experienced this metamorphosis. Born in West Virginia, Hare had taught at Robert College in Istanbul (established by missionaries a few years before AUB). When Hare joined the Foreign Service in the 1920s, there was still no proper facility in Washington for language training; so he, like William Hodgson a hundred years earlier, was dispatched overseas to learn Arabic and Turkish at the Ecole Nationale de Langue Vivant in Paris.

“War was the life of Cairo,” recalls Hare in an unpublished memoir. “People were going along having parties and at the same time people were fighting in the desert.” The “fast-paced social life” included royalty escaping from Balkan kingdoms and literary luminaries such as Lawrence Durrell, Evelyn Waugh, and Freya Stark. But Washington was not particularly interested in the Middle East, evidenced by the fact that despite the fighting between the British and Germans, the legation lacked a military attaché, a task that fell to Hare, who, except for a source he mysteriously dubs “the Shadow,” mainly had to rely on the British embassy for information.

In March 1941, however, Roosevelt persuaded an isolationist Congress to pass the Lend-Lease Act, and the historic shift toward America’s recognition of the importance of the Middle East began. Washington immediately poured large quantities of arms into Egypt for use by the British army, necessitating a considerable logistics, diplomatic, and intelligence presence. Still, Hare was frustrated with Washington’s responses to his cables. While he consistently emphasized the importance of the Middle East and especially the Mediterranean to the war against Hitler, Washington—as Roosevelt explained to British prime minister Winston Churchill—replied that “naval control of the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic will in time win the war.” The pleas of Hare and his ambassador, Alexander Kirk, for American fighter planes to help the British in Egypt fell on deaf ears in Washington until the 1942 fall of Tobruk in Libya.

Tobruk caused Washington to take action. The American Air Force was involved in the combat by November 1942, when British forces stopped the Afrika Korps’s advance at El Alamein in Egypt’s western desert. Concomitantly, American troops were landing on the coast of Morocco and dashing eastward across the desert to Tunisia, where in the spring of 1943 they would meet up with British forces marching westward from Egypt and, in a quick series of battles, eject the Germans from North Africa. Though the Americans suddenly found themselves in a position of dominance in the Middle East, Hare reflects that it was “not clear to us” then just how big a role we were very soon to play. It was during this interregnum between the acquisition of regional power and the actual use of it that Henderson was fated to enter the picture.

It is unlikely, given his inclinations and his previous experiences, that Henderson quit Moscow—an exciting World War II nerve center—for mosquito-ridden Baghdad without bearing at least some grudge toward President and Mrs. Roosevelt, the Democratic party liberals, and the American Jews, who at the time were Democrats almost to a man. Henderson was already fifty-one, and he and his wife were childless. His life by then was completely consumed by the Foreign Service, a fact demonstrated by periodic physical breakdowns resulting from overwork.

Baghdad was truly a backwater of a backwater: a supply base for the British, who were in neighboring Iran holding back the Germans and, after a fashion, the Soviets, too. But Iraq was an unstable supply base rather than a calm one. The late Gertrude Bell’s dream of making this Britishmanufactured country “a model Arab state” had gone awry. British domination and the growing dispute between the Jews and Arabs of Palestine had turned many Iraqi Arabs into Nazi sympathizers. In 1941, two years prior to Henderson’s arrival, there was an ill-fated pro-Nazi coup in Baghdad led by a group of Iraqi army officers, which involved a pogrom in the Jewish quarter, where an Arab mob murdered over 150 Jewish men, women, and children while British troops stood on the outskirts of Baghdad and did nothing. Freya Stark, a British diplomat and travel writer, who to a certain extent had inherited Miss Bell’s mantle as the grand lady of the Iraqi Arabs—Miss Stark saw a great future for democracy in Iraq—defended the British action as necessary to allow time for King Feisal’s soldiers “to win their own fight [against the coup plotters] unaided.”

Among the surviving Jews was a little boy, Elie Kedourie, whose nightmare memories were crucial to his prodigious outpouring of books and articles against the old British Arab hands. Kedourie saw the 1941 Baghdad pogrom, known locally as the Farhoud (Looting), as the direct result of decades of amateurish meddling in Iraq by the likes of Miss Bell and Miss Stark, who, having invented a country and a power base for an Arab Moslem population, should have assumed responsibility for the minorities henceforth threatened by those Arabs. In The Chatham House Version and Other Middle-Eastern Studies, Kedourie fumes:

The right of conquest they [the Jews] could cheerfully acknowledge, for all their history had taught them that there lay safety…. It was not by the help of this experience that they would understand the strange, exquisite perversions of the western conscience: the genial eccentricity of Mr. Philby, proposing to make a thug who took his fancy the president of an Iraqi republic; or the fond foolishness of Miss Bell, thinking to stand godmother to a new Abbassid empire; or the disoriented fanaticism of Colonel Lawrence [of Arabia] proclaiming that he would be dishonoured if the progeny of the sharif of Mecca was not forthwith provided with thrones. Yet it was with such people that their [the Jews’] fate rested.

Supporting Kedourie’s view was none other than the intelligence officer attached to the British forces in Baghdad, Somerset de Chair:

… the ways of the Foreign Office were beyond my comprehension…. Having fought our way, step by step, to the threshold of the city, we must now cool our heels outside. It would, apparently, be lowering to the dignity of our ally, the regent [Feisal], who had fled to Palestine at the coup d’etat, if he were seen to be supported on arrival by British bayonets.*

Henderson, after he had arrived in Baghdad and had time to digest all of this history, realized he had little sympathy for the Jews of Iraq. The Jews, he felt, bore some responsibility for the violence directed against them, not only because they were “secretly sympathetic to Zionism” rather than to Iraqi nationalism, but also because of “the public dishonesty, profiteering and greed of some of the Jewish merchants who … conduct themselves in a manner which gives the impression that they consider themselves socially and culturally superior to the Arabs.”

Henderson’s instantaneous animus toward the Jewish community in Iraq was more extreme than similar attitudes entertained by the British Arabists or by the missionaries. Perhaps it had different roots. In the case of the British Arabists, it wasn’t that they disliked Jews. Some, such as Lawrence, could at times be quite philo-Semitic. But they just liked Arabs more, motivated, as they were, by an aesthetic and scholarly attachment to Arab culture as well as by guilt for betraying Arab aspirations after World War I, particularly in letting the French carve up Syria. The British also had a special affinity for wealthy Arabs. ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Three generations Three wars Three marriages
• Dream
• Reality
• Debacle
• Redemption