Richard B. Parker

If it had not been for a twist or two of fate, Ambassador Richard Parker, a retired U.S. foreign service officer who is now Editor of The Middle East Journal, might instead be the current Editor of The Middle West Journal of Industrial Chemicals, after having retired from a successful career as a senior executive at duPont.

For the fact is that Ambassador Parker's early goal in life was to become a chemical engineer. It was while he was studying to be one at Kansas State University—known those days as Kansas State College of Agriculture and Applied Mechanics—that fate stepped in for the first time.

"I had to take German as a pre-requisite for chemical engineering," he says, "and it was clear that German came much easier to me than to anyone else in the class. I discovered a gift for languages that I hadn't realized I had." It got him thinking about whether engineering was the thing he ought to be doing.

The Seeds of War

Then fate nudged him once again—strongly, this time—when World War II interrupted his studies and he went overseas as an infantry officer. Captured by the Germans, he was repatriated at the end of the war via Odessa, the Turkish Straits, Port Said and Naples. That did it.

"I had got my first exposure to the great wide world," he says, "and I loved seeing it. I was determined to go back and see a lot more. The foreign service seemed like a good way to do it."

He opted to be an area specialist because he thought it would help him get ahead, and he chose the Arab world, in part, because he believed his facility for languages might give him an edge over many of his colleagues in tackling a particularly difficult language like Arabic. Whether or not his careful planning had anything to do with it, he did, indeed, get ahead—reaching the rank of ambassador and serving as one in three different posts: Algeria, Lebanon and Morocco.

Along the way, aside from developing his professional skills and becoming one of the best Arabic language speakers in the U.S. foreign service, Ambassador Parker took up the study of Islamic architecture as a hobby—and wrote two "practical guides" on the subject. He says he first got interested in this subject in Cairo during the mid-sixties, when "I kept passing monuments when driving between the office and the airport and wondered just what they were." From his efforts to find out, emerged the book A Practical Guide to Islamic Monuments in Cairo. This was followed a few years later by a similar book on Morocco. Little wonder that some of his peers in the service (even those who did not already know of his penchant for chemistry and math) began talking of him as a "Renaissance Man."

After his retirement he became "Diplomat-in-Residence" at the University of Virginia and in Jan., 1981, joined the Middle East Institute as its director of publications and editor of its quarterly.

At that time, The Middle East Journal was in its 35th year of publication, and it no longer resembled the publication it had been during its earliest years. Says Ambassador Parker: "In the forties and fifties, there was relatively little academic writing being done in this country on the Middle East, and the Journal was more of a general-interest magazine." Later, as the revolution in Middle East studies took hold, he adds, "the Journal evolved into a considerably more scholarly publication." But in his opinion it had grown a bit too scholarly for many of its readers.

It's Academic

"We took a survey and discovered that 65 percent of our readers are not academics," he says, "and concluded that we should be providing articles that are academically sound, on a subject of current interest, and written in a form that our non-academic readers can appreciate." Shortly after taking over, he put his ideas into practice: articles on contemporary topics have now replaced those papers on such subjects as irrigation in north-central Syria during the early 1830's; and the emphasis is on readability rather than pedantry. The Journal has also been given a new, brighter-looking format.

Even with plenty of razor-sharp scholarship available today, Ambassador Parker still does not have the budget to publish as many articles as he would like, and notes wryly that he would have fewer problems filling even the limited space he has available "if we could pay writers for their contributions." When wearing his other hat as publications director, he supervises the publication by the institute of pamphlets and books, and expects to have come out with three books by the end of this year: one on the Middle East arms balance (already out), a book of memoirs (John Badeau), and a "reader" on oil questions.

Ambassador Parker also has a couple of important projects under way outside the institute: he is an advisor to the Preston Commission, a group of U.S. businessmen who are working on ways to begin the reconstruction of Lebanon; and he is writing a book on North Africa for the Council on Foreign Relations. Farther down the road, he expects to write more Islamic architecture books on Tunisia, Algeria, Spain and Central Asia.