Landrum R. Bolling

By Allan Kellum

Few Americans have personally known such a variety of Middle East leaders as has Landrum R. Bolling. His past and present contacts have ranged from the foreign ministers of virtually all countries in the area to Anwar Sadat, Golda Meir, Menachem Begin, King Hussein, President Assad and Yasser Arafat.

Over the years, Dr. Bolling has received more than 25 honorary doctorates, but disclaims Middle East academic credentials. "I'm not a Middle East scholar, and I don't speak or read either Hebrew or Arabic," he explains. What he does possess, however, is a genuine and intense interest in global war and peace. While not claiming any specific successes in the Mideast peace process over the years, Dr. Bolling does offer these words of advice to would-be peacemakers: "Cultivate the habits of patient, open listening... I think that whatever success I've had in gaining access and being able to talk comes from the judgement people made that I could listen."

The Lures of Academia and Journalism

As a Quaker, Dr. Bolling struggled with whether or not to participate in World War II. Ultimately, his conscience led him to leave his teaching post at Beloit College (Wisconsin) to become a war correspondent in the Mediterranean region, including Italy and the Balkans. From that point on, he has experienced the twin, sometimes opposing, pulls of academia and journalism.

After the war he returned briefly to Beloit College, but then headed back to Europe as a foreign correspondent from 1946-48. His motivation was to immerse himself in what he felt was the educational opportunity of a lifetime: "Probably nothing I would ever have an opportunity to do would be more instructive about the great, powerful economic, social, and political forces that were sweeping over the world at that time than to just dig in as a foreign correspondent."

Some of his war and post-war experience in Europe and the Mediterranean introduced him to the peoples and problems of the Middle East. As Dr. Bolling says: "I became aware in roughly the same period of the problems of the Jewish survivors of the Nazi terror in Europe... and of the Arab nationalist cause in the various colonial areas." He tells of visiting concentration camps after the war, and of the many articles he wrote about the treatment of Jews in Europe. Ile also tells of the irony of reporting on the brutal suppression of Algerian nationalists by French colonial rulers in North Africa during the very week that France celebrated the fall of Nazi Germany.

In 1948, his Quaker ties and the obligations of his growing family pulled him back to academia at Earlham College in Indiana. He continued periodically, however, to cover U.N. political affairs for the Overseas News Agency, and got to know a number of Arab and Israeli diplomats during and after the creation of Israel in 1948.

In the early 1950's, he brought major representatives of Israel and several Arab countries to Earlham for a special three-day seminar. Those early efforts to involve educational institutions in Middle East studies have continued with his more recent positions on the visiting committees for Near East studies at both Harvard and Princeton. Also, he served as Research Professor of Diplomacy at Georgetown University during the academic years 1981-83.

He left Earlham College in 1973 to become vice president, and later president, of the Lilly Endowment, one of the world's largest private grant-making foundations. Five years later he became president of the Council on Foundations. Surprisingly, though, in none of Landrum Bolling's full-time jobs has the Middle East been his sole, or even central, focus.

Book Draws Praise and Wrath

In 1968, he accepted a special assignment from the American Friends Service Committee to examine what Quakers might do to promote peace in the Middle East. The result, after many visits to the region and about 17 drafts of an evolving manuscript, was the book Search for Peace in the Middle East, which Dr. Bolling edited. It was praised by many dispassionate observers but bitterly attacked by partisans from both sides.

Undaunted by this experience, Dr. Bolling now heads the Ecumenical Institute for Advanced Theological Studies and its newly-formed affiliate, the Inter-Faith Academy of Peace. Although Washington remains Dr. Bolling's home base, the institutions themselves are located on the main road linking Jerusalem and Bethlehem on land provided by the Vatican. Prior to Dr. Bolling's tenure, the Ecumenical Institute confined itself primarily to Christian theologians, but its mandate now has been expanded to include Jews, Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists. Its purpose, he explains, is to study "how to break out of this pattern of war and violence."

Dr. Bolling views with alarm the danger posed by religious fanaticism. In the Middle East, fanaticism on either side could ignite a conflict leading to a superpower confrontation. Such a Soviet-American confrontation originating in the Middle East is, in Dr. Bolling's opinion, "the most dangerous issue to world peace."

Allan Kellum is editor of the Mideast Observer. A sample copy of his publication may be obtained by writing Mideast Observer, P.O. Box 2397, Washington, D.C. 20013.