Dorothea Seelye Franck

By Andrew I. Killgore

For most of her lifetime, Dorothea Seelye Franck, who died in Syracuse, NY on Oct. 27, 1988, at the age of 71, poured her phenomenal energy and rare personal warmth into the cause of better mutual understanding between Americans and the peoples of the Middle East. Even the endless turmoil of Lebanon, where she spent much of her childhood and some of her last years, never visibly dampened her spirit of optimism. She endlessly sought to help others see the Middle East as a whole, and how Palestine, Lebanon, and other parts of the complex mosaic of the area interacted with each other.

Dorothea Franck was deeply committed to everything she did. During World War II she served in Egypt in the Office of Strategic Services. Earlier, she had coordinated cultural exchange programs at the Department of State. When she left the government she opened the Washington, D.C. offices of the American Friends of the Middle East, founded by the distinguished journalist, Dorothy Thompson. The pioneering AFME, now reorganized and renamed AMIDEAST, did much to promote US understanding of the Middle East.

At various periods of her life, Mrs. Franck was a writer and editor, especially for the Christian Science Monitor, and author of books for children (The Cat Who Loved Bach and Mother Adz). She also enjoyed creating ceramic jewelry and other objects bearing ancient Middle Eastern motifs.

While it was not her profession, I look on Dorothea Seelye Franck as a teacher, the calling having the most influence on youth and ultimately on society as a whole. She created finger crochet, wrote a book about it, and taught other nationalities its secrets. She helped set up the Middle East Network in Syracuse, NY, and was a board member of the Dunbar Center and the International Wives of Syracuse University, where her husband was a professor of international business.

Mrs. Franck's drive to impart knowledge stemmed from a very long tradition. Julius Seelye, her great grandfather, was an early president of Amherst College. A great uncle's work at Smith College is memorialized by Seelye Hall on that prestigious institution's Northampton, MA, campus. Another ancestor, Frederick Williams, went to the Middle East in 1848 as a missionary and educator. Mrs. Franck's parents, Laurens and Kate Seelye, were both professors at the American University of Beirut, where she spent much of her childhood. Her husband, Dr. Peter Goswyn Franck, has been a professor at both Robert College in Istanbul and at the AUB.

Dorothea Seelye Franck was important in her own right, however, as a tireless activist for peace and understanding. So vital was she that friends can hardly believe she has gone. She also represented a fink in the historical bonds between the US and the Arabs, as a member of one of the distinguished families that built a great American cultural legacy in the Middle East, the most outstanding institution of which is the American University of Beirut.

These pioneer American teachers and healers, like those in her family, for more than a century and a half built the institutions that laid the groundwork for the modern educational and medical networks in such countries as Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt today. At the founding sessions of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945, more delegates were graduates from the AUB than from any other institution of higher learning in the world.

For many years, propagandists in the US sought to portray the American University of Beirut as "Terrorist U," as part of a long-term Israeli government campaign to weaken US ties to the Arab world. In fact, the university symbolized the outstretched hand of US friendship to the Arabs and other Middle Eastern peoples. Mrs. Franck wrote as early as 1941 that this legacy, as well as all American interests in the Middle East, would be endangered by the creation of a Zionist state in Palestine. How prescient she was became ever more apparent as the years passed.

She was not present in Beirut in 1967 when Americans for Justice in the Middle East was established, but after she returned with her husband in 1980 to AUB where he was a professor of economics, she became a leading activist in AJME projects. She edited the AJME News, a publication that gave close up coverage of Israeli brutality toward the Arabs, and its disastrous consequences for the US everywhere in the Middle East.

During the four years she spent in Beirut, from 1980 to 1984, she worked on a book-length manuscript entitled Back Home to Beirut. It is her own account of an active American's life in the midst of the alternating episodes of war and peace unfolding around her before, during, and after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

Dorothea and Peter Franck watched much of the Israeli siege of West Beirut from their seventh floor apartment on the AUB campus. They could see the tanks and artillery pounding the city from the surrounding mountains, the rocket-firing aircraft overhead, and Israeli gunboats circling and firing from the sea. They were in the city where the shells were failing and could record the political and human consequences for resident Americans and their Lebanese and Palestinian neighbors.

In a moving tribute to her predecessor, editor Elaine Larwood of the AJME News wrote of Dorothea Franck:

"Despite the precarious security situation in Lebanon, she and Peter traveled all over the country to visit friends and old haunts remembered from her youth. She was also the instigator of many gregarious and spur-of-the-moment parties in their AUB apartment. She invited people she met in her travels around the city, mixing them in a sometimes politically combustible group that, besides friends and neighbors, might well include American diplomats, militia officials, foreign journalists, camps. It was one of her greatest delights to bring interesting people together.

"When news of her death reached AJME it was received with disbelief. Dorothea's spirit and enthusiasm seemed inexhaustible. She made hundreds of friends in Lebanon where her openness, generosity, and intelligent sympathy were especially appreciated during the turmoil of that period.

"Dorothea was truly an 'American for justice. 'Lebanon and the Arab world will miss her."

Her myriad friends in many parts of the US and the world realize that an extraordinary spirit has passed. There was about her a paradoxical quality. She was a completely open person, totally lacking in guile. Yet she rarely revealed much of her inner self. This stemmed from a personal style derived from a family tradition that regarded as selfish any focus on personal concerns.

Dorothea Seelye Franck leaves her husband, Dr. Peter Goswyn Franck, of Syracuse, NY, and two daughters, Karen and Marianne of New York City. In addition, she is survived by two sisters, Mary Avereft Seelye of Washington, DC, and Muriel Heineman of Baltimore, MD, and a brother, former Ambassador Talcott Seelye of Bethesda, MD.

Andrew L. Killgore, a former US ambassador to Qatar, is publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.