Norman Burns (1905-1994)

By Andrew I. Killgore

When Norman Burns was director of the State Department's Foreign Service Institute in the early 1950s, he twice recommended that Arabic be added to the Institute's courses of language instruction. Twice his proposals were rejected by the same acerbic bureaucrat.

Then out of the blue one day the nay-saying official telephoned to say ingratiatingly that on sober reflection he thought that teaching Arabic was an excellent idea. Happy that Arabic instruction was now officially sanctioned, Burns wondered idly at the change of heart.

Only later did he learn the reason. A member of his staff at the Institute who knew Allen Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, had overheard Burns mention the bureaucratic opposition to Arabic. The staff member, on his own, spoke to the CIA director, who spoke to his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who spoke to the recalcitrant bureaucrat, who then called Norman Burns.

Self-Effacing Brilliance

This story gives a hint of why Burns had such success at making lasting changes for the better in every situation in which he found himself. Although he was the last man in the world to use pressure tactics to get his own way, people around him recognized a brilliant thinker with sound ideas and wanted to help him. His wit, ebullient good nature and humorously self-effacing manner drew people to him throughout his 89 years of life.

An open Midwesterner from Ohio, he earned undergraduate and law degrees from Wittenberg University in that state. He later received a master's degree in economics from Yale University. It was typical of him that, although we knew each other nearly 40 years, he never mentioned to me that he was trained in law.

Norman Burns did so many different things in his life that many people may not have realized that, for a good part of it, he was a Foreign Service officer. He was indeed, but he was far removed from the stereotype of a polished but indifferent or uncaring "striped pants" diplomat.

He started his working career at the American University of Beirut, where he was an associate professor of economics from 1929 to 1932. Twenty-nine years later he returned, but this time as president of AUB, then the premier American cultural legacy in the Middle East.

Burns filled the "gap" in his academic career with 27 years as a career official of the U.S. government. He worked as an economist at the Tariff Commission, on the War Production Board during World War II, and subsequently at the GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs) conference. He was an economic adviser to the United Nations' Palestine Relief Organization in Beirut and an examiner selecting new Foreign Service officers.

He was a deputy director of the International Cooperation Administration (now Agency for International Development—AID) for the Near East, South Asia and Africa in Washington from 1956 to 1959. Then he went to Amman for two years as director of the AID mission in Jordan. In Washington and Amman he became what I would call the "father" of the East Ghor Canal project, which took waters from the Yarmouk River via a cement-lined canal down the east bank of the Jordan River to near the Dead Sea. The result was a large irrigated area well below sea level divided into small individually owned farms. These Jordan Valley fields produced amazing quantities of wintertime flowers, fruits and vegetables, all thriving in "nature's own hothouse" in the lowest place on earth.

At a time when the division between the Arab states and Israel of the waters of the Jordan River and its tributaries still was highly sensitive, the genesis and actual construction of the East Ghor Canal was a minor political as well as engineering miracle. During a period when, because of limitations imposed by a lobby-driven Congress, American policy in the Middle East could point to few positive results through the years—especially from the Arab point of view—the East Ghor Canal and the American University of Beirut both became monuments to the good that can be accomplished by American vision, resources and organization, if not hampered by political myopia, hidden agendas or timidity. With both the American University and the East Ghor Canal, the name of Norman Burns is indelibly associated.

Norman and his wife, Constance (Connie) Albrech Burns, were beloved in the Foreign Service and in the Middle East, where people of many nationalities sensed, quite correctly, that they personally embodied the cheerful and pragmatic idealism long associated with America's impact on the world.

Norman Burns died at their home on Christmas Day, 1994, leaving his wife, Connie, and a brother, Harold Burns of Versailles, Ohio, as his only survivors.

Those who knew this great man will remember fondly not only his accomplishments in the face of political obstacles overseas, but also the bubbly good nature he retained during his retirement years in Washington, even as his health was declining. In his final months, when asked how he was feeling, his humorous reply reflected his wry acceptance of his own condition and, by extension, the circumstances of the world in which he had made such a lasting personal impact:

"I'm doing very well," he would say, "for the shape I'm in."

Andrew I. Killgore is the publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.