Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July/August 1998, Pages 42-44

In Memoriam

George R. Thompson, 1925-1998

By Richard H. Curtiss

I first met George Thompson in Beirut in 1962, but in my mind he will always be associated with the U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia, when it was still in Jeddah, and the American Language Institute he created in Riyadh. However, everything about my friend George was memorable. The clichés “one of a kind” and “after God made George, he broke the mold” spring to mind.

A blur of crackling energy who spoke English faster than anyone I’ve ever known, he spoke Arabic the same way: Simple declarative sentences—lots and lots of them. And when he wrote his columns for USA Today, “America’s national newspaper,” he took pride in the precision and speed with which he completed them.

Because I stayed immersed in Middle East affairs long after I retired from the foreign service, while when he retired from the foreign service he branched out to the whole world, sometimes George would call me in Washington from Florida with a detailed question or two. The conversation always began the same way: “Sid Hurlburt [the editorial page editor at USA Today] has asked me if I can give him 660 words defending the proposition that...” He would outline the argument and conclude along these lines: “I’ve got 45 minutes. What do you think?”

It meant that USA Today had typeset its principal editorial for the day, and was commissioning one or maybe two “op-ed” pieces, taking contrary points of view. George was the house liberal. Undoubtedly there were other liberals and conservatives in the stable, but I doubt that any others knew much about the Middle East and I’m sure none could write faster.

We would discuss the topic briefly—very briefly—and George would thank me and hang up. Twenty or thirty minutes later the telephone would ring again, and again the opening was utterly predictable. “Hi! Got a minute? Let me read you this. It’s 558 words. See what you think.”

He would read at his incredibly rapid clip and I knew better than to interrupt. If I heard an error of fact or believed there was a more accurately nuanced way of saying something, I’d make a note.

When he stopped I’d say, “It’s fine, George, except that in your third paragraph you might say it this way,” and I’d read my note.

“Gotcha,” he’d say. “Thanks.”

The next day millions of readers would be exposed to a lucidly written and wonderfully incisive exposition of Middle East facts that, unfortunately, were all too rarely found in the American media. It was possible to present them, however, because, as a viewpoint opposite to that expressed in the editorial (thus “op-ed”), advertisers or readers who were partial to the Israeli or some other more “politically correct” point of view could hardly object to the presentation of two or three different slants on the same question.

Often an article in USA Today would result in invitations to discuss it by telephone as the principal guest on radio talk shows. Whenever George did one of these shows on a Middle East topic, he would refer listeners to the Washington Report for further information. I’m sure many who read this article first subscribed to this magazine because of him.

Only a small percentage of George’s columns were on the Middle East, of course. A man who read widely and rapidly, and totally immersed himself in a great variety of subjects, he could produce a column on almost anything, and for most of them I doubt that he needed a specialist fact checker like me.

In Beirut, where he had studied Arabic in the Foreign Service Institute’s school there, and then headed the U.S. Information Agency’s program to encourage local publishers to bring out Arabic-language versions of American literature and textbooks, he had a lot of other interests on the side.

He started an international scuba diving group that spent summer weekends mapping the sunken quays and breakwaters of the ancient harbors of Sidon and other Phoenician cities. He also was a mainstay of a local English-language little theater group. I still recall whole lines from his delightful portrayal of the lead role in “Visit to a Small Planet.” He was made up as a shorter, cheerier version of “Star Trek’s” Spock, and I heard a child behind me whisper, “Mommy, are those really his ears?”

And, of course, there was the sailboat. Once, when George and some friends didn’t turn up on Cyprus as expected, the RAF was called out to search for them. Afterward, George was indignant. “We told people where we were going to make port, but we didn’t say when,” he protested.

In fact, when George had a post on the sea, there always were sailboats. When USIA transferred him from the position of public affairs officer in Jordan to edit its monthly Arabic magazine, Al Majal, in Tunis, he didn’t need a plane ticket. He sailed down the Gulf of Aqaba, up the Red Sea, surviving a terrible storm there, through the Suez Canal and then along the coasts of Egypt and Libya to his new assignment.

Earlier, after a stint in Washington as USIA’s science adviser, when he was assigned to a post in the Caribbean, he sailed his own boat there, with friends flying out from Washington for temporary stints as crew members as he progressed from island to island.

At other posts, there were other enthusiasms. George and his steady and unflappable wife, Dolly, served twice in Jordan, and liked it so much that they named their second son after the country. It was there that George also spent a lot of time talking by ham radio to people all over the world—and from time to time with King Hussein, who also was a ham radio operator.

And there were airplanes. George flew his own, both in the Middle East and in the Caribbean, wherever the local authorities permitted it. In short, for a man in love with technology as well as ideas, there was never a dull moment in any part of the world.

But the technology was by no means just a hobby. Wherever he was it became an integral part of his job—to the awe or consternation of his foreign service colleagues in a profession that, then as now, attracted both adventurers and stuffed shirts.

In Khartoum, George noted that although IQs were high among the students who frequented the USIA library, the nation’s chronic trade deficit was even higher. He concluded that there never was going to be enough money to send most of Sudan’s best and brightest for studies abroad. So he set out to create a cultural center that would bring the best of Western educational technology to them. At that point it was one of my jobs in Washington to find the money to pay for the language labs, video playbacks, and satellite dishes.

The case was helped by a photo in our house organ, the USIA World. It showed George suspended in a sling attached to the roof of the cultural center, welding electrical connections along an exterior wall a couple of stories off the ground. George had been a newspaperman in Pennsylvania before joining the foreign service in the 1950s. He knew the value of publicity and he knew that since very few of the ex-journalists and ex-college professors who made up the part of the State Department that broke off in 1954 to become the USIA were able to do such technical things themselves, they were easily impressed by those who could.

I also listened to the American technicians who went out to help set up the Khartoum center fret that, although George was creating the most spectacular American Cultural Center in the world, there wouldn’t be enough local maintenance expertise to keep it going. However, in the several times I subsequently visited Khartoum, years after the Thompsons had left, the center, with its comfortable furniture, its tasteful decor, and its soft, recessed lighting, was so full of students that their activities had to be limited to research on U.S.-related subjects. There was no room for the hundreds who would happily have spent all their time there between classes, doing their homework and enjoying the inviting facilities.

It was during George Thompson’s assignment to Saudi Arabia, however, that I was most impressed. It was just after the 1967 war and Egypt, Iraq, Sudan, Yemen and Syria had broken diplomatic relations with the U.S. over its partiality toward Israel. Both the State Department and our USIA had gone into a sort of blue funk. Instead of re-examining the policies that had brought relations to such a state, we simply turned our attention elsewhere.

I’d lost my post in Damascus, and had gone back to Washington to become USIA’s administrative coordinator for the Near East and South Asia. George’s Saudi post was in the commercial hub, Jeddah, where all of the foreign missions were. But he rightly complained that a good many of the promising young people he should be helping prepare for U.S. study were in the political capital, Riyadh, which was still a tiny town that hadn’t yet outgrown its ancient dun-colored walls.

Very much on his own, he struck a deal with the Arabian American oil company (ARAMCO), which in those days was largely U.S.-owned, and with the Saudi government, each to fund a third of the equipment needed for a modern, state-of-the art English-teaching institute in Riyadh. The deal was that the U.S.’s one-third contribution would be the teachers and curriculum expertise needed to make the American Language Institute a world-class teaching model.

The Saudis had allowed no other foreign diplomatic or cultural mission in their capital up to that time and other Western countries couldn’t believe what the Americans (read George Thompson) were pulling off. The problem, of course, was that right then no one in Washington cared, since everyone was in a huff that the Arabs didn’t like us anymore.

We got George the financial and technical support he needed, but almost surreptitiously. Meanwhile, with his usual all-out enthusiasm he shuttled faithfully back and forth between his home in Jeddah and his creation in Riyadh until it was up and running—with non-diplomat directors since foreign diplomats still weren’t allowed there.

The center became the forerunner for a U.S. “liaison office” which grew and grew until it became the large and comfortable U.S. Embassy that exists in Riyadh today in the heart of the “diplomatic enclave” where embassies from all of the world’s major powers cluster among diplomatic residential quarters nearby.

For his extraordinary accomplishments in Riyadh, Khartoum and Amman (where he built another beautiful cultural center), George received USIA’s Leonard Marks award for creativity, recognition given to only one officer annually in an agency that then consisted of more than 10,000 employees.

And then George Thompson, who had entered the U.S. Army Air Corps at age 16 during World War II and had been shot down over Germany, retired from U.S. government service in Tunis. From there he and Dolly sailed off in their 41-foot ketch for two years of living in Mediterranean ports. Then their son Jordan flew out from the U.S. to help his Dad sail the boat across the Atlantic to Melbourne, Florida. There George and Dolly eventually moved ashore and set up a comfortable and charming permanent residence after 30 years of nomadic living.

In Florida, George taught writing courses at Brevard Community College for several years. During this period, in the words of a journalistic colleague, he “set up a cottage industry of sorts in journalism.” It started with a weekly left-right opinion column (he, of course, was the super-liberal) in Florida Today, parent newspaper of USA Today.

He and his very conservative protagonist, Dan Warrensford, then were invited to take their debates to radio, and eventually to set up a weekly cable television show where they also invited experts on the subjects under discussion to participate, and took call-ins. George produced that show, and sometimes did his own specials on subjects that deserved in-depth treatment.

After some highly acclaimed shows on education, he got so personally involved that he took six months off from all of his political writing to campaign for a seat on the Brevard County school board. He was philosophical about his defeat. “I guess it’s going to be a long time before this county’s ready for me,” said the man whose World War II experiences had turned him into a conscientious objector, and who could always make the most eloquent case for gun control and for racial, religious and international tolerance and harmony.

The first time George was stricken with cancer, he beat it. His doctor called it a miracle and introduced him to another survivor. “It was like meeting myself,” George told me later. “The guy was just too busy to die.”

Two years later, however, George was stricken, at age 72, with leukemia and it was swift and deadly. However, he remained undaunted. Wrote Francis X. Donnelly, another Florida Today columnist: “In the hospital, just a few weeks before he died, George Thompson did what he did so well. When a physical therapist came to his room to discuss exercises, when a dietitian came to talk about what he would be eating, George asked them questions, clarified their information and generously explained their answers to a guest...He spoke quickly and succinctly. He wrote the same way. No gray areas, no middle ground. But his takes on issues were thoughtfully arrived at and delivered. Even those who vehemently disagreed with his conclusions admired his intelligence and style.”

One of those, his long-time journalistic sparring partner Dan Warrensford, wrote in the same newspaper: “Honesty was a key; it must’ve been one of the links in George’s DNA...And trustworthiness; and loyalty; and courtesy...When he made a commitment you could take it to the bank...One could easily disagree with his views—as I often did—but his character and integrity were not subject to question.”

Looking through earlier issues of this magazine, I am astounded at how many articles, usually in the “Two Views” format, George wrote for us. He wouldn’t take money when he realized how financially strapped we were.” Just send me any books I should read,” he would say.

When I suggested a topic, his submissions arrived so quickly and so beautifully edited, that I was hardly aware of how much he contributed over the years to our efforts to make the Middle East accessible to all Americans.

George Thompson is survived by his wife of 53 years, Dolly, son Jordan, two grandchildren by Jordan and his Persian-born wife, Mojgan, who live in Florida, and another two grandchildren and a great granddaughter by the Thompson’s first-born son, Glenn, who died in 1989 in Michigan.

It may be a long time before I accept the fact that my friend and colleague of 36 years, who became even better known in “retirement” than he was during his uniquely creative foreign service career, is no longer out there writing a think piece, debating before a radio microphone, or lining up guests in front of a television camera. I keep expecting, when I answer the phone, to hear a staccato voice say, “Hi! Got a minute?”

(The following is an article written by the late George R. Thompson and first published the Washington Report’s December 1986 issue. It is included in the book Seeing the Light: Personal Encounters with the Middle East and Islam, published by the American Educational Trust in 1997 and available through the AET Book Club.)

Learning That I Didn’t Know It All

By George R. Thompson

Newspaper editors think they know it all. At least I did—until I met my first Palestinian. I met him in 1954. His name was Farouk. I’ve forgotten his last name. That’s really not as important as were his words and the tale he told: “You are an editor [I was at the time] of an historic [150-year-old] American daily newspaper. What do you know of the Palestinians? I mean, really know?”

That question was followed by a long pause. The answer, of course, was not one helluva lot.

Like many Americans in media, I thought I was reasonably well-educated, informed and aware—unlike many Americans who were inclined to ignore the fact that the U.S. was indeed surrounded by other countries. There was, also indeed, a whole world out there about which we (and, damn-it-all, I) knew nothing.

And he was asking about the Palestinians?

There I stood, bathed in abysmal ignorance, mind racing, searching for a suitable reply, until I took refuge behind the newsman’s shield:

“Tell me more.”

He did: “You wonder why Palestinians are concerned about the Israelis. You wonder why I and countless other Arabs are concerned that the Israelis have shed the cloak of captive for captor. Let me ask you some questions: Who flies over, drops bombs on, attacks, takes, and occupies whose land? Where are the refugees from? Who are among the largest groups of refugees in the world? Why isn’t something being done to correct the situation?”

Another long pause, and he continued: “The answers are: Israel, Palestine, the Palestinians, and ‘because some of my best friends are Jews.’”

The next day was spent in the library, where I learned a few things. He was right, and so many of us in the media — to say nothing of my compatriot Americans — were wrong, and continue to be so.

Since then, 43 years have passed. They have been years filled with “up-close-and-personal” experiences with Palestinians and Israelis in which I indeed have learned more.

Let me share but one of a kaleidoscope filled with memories of how much I finally did learn:

It took place on the roof of the venerable American Colony Hotel on a hilltop in East Jerusalem long before the 1967 war. A Palestinian waiter paused to look out over the no-man’s-land cutting a swath of desolation between Jordan and Israel. The tears on his cheeks glistened in the moonlight.

“Is there anything wrong? Can I help you?”

“No thank you. I come up here every night at dusk when the lights go on over there. Do you see those lights there? There, on the side of the mountain? Count down three from the top. That’s my house. I can see it. When the wind is right I imagine I can smell my mother’s cooking from the kitchen.

“I can see it. I can smell it. But I can’t touch it.

“The Israelis came one day with a note. ‘Watch the mukhtar’s (mayor’s) house at six tonight,’ it said. ‘If you don’t leave by six tomorrow night, your house is next.’

“At six that night, the mukhtar’s house disappeared in a cloud of smoke and a big explosion. We left the next day.”

I’ve been learning and “seeing the light” ever since. For most of us, it’s been under a bushel for far too long.