The Middle East Remembered

By John S. Badeau. Washington, D.C.: The Middle East Institute, 1983. 271 pp. $25.00

Reviewed by John N. Gatch, Jr.

This book is a personal account of John Badeau's long association with the Middle East. His greatest claim on public attention came from his service as President Kennedy's and, briefly, President Johnson's ambassador to Egypt from 1961 to 1964—during which he was regarded by foreign service officers as one of the most effective of the noncareer envoys of the New Frontier. Ambassador Badeau's career before and after his embassy days was, however, varied and productive. He served as a missionary in Iraq from 1928 to 1935, as a professor and later president of the American University in Cairo from 1936 to 1953—with time out during World War 11 with the OWI in Washington—and as president of the Near East Foundation from 1953 to 1961. After his diplomatic stint he was director of the Middle East Institute of Columbia University from 1964 to 1971 and then a lecturer at Georgetown University.

The Badeau book is a felicitous example of oral history. He participated in several long discussions with Dr. Carl Brown at Princeton in 1978 and 1979. These were taped and later transcribed at Columbia. This book is the result—a remarkably free-flowing and interesting account of over 40 years of direct association with the Middle East. Each career segment had its own special flavor which Ambassador Badeau effectively evokes. Aside from all his other attributes, he is an able raconteur, which skill is reflected to a high degree in this work.

During that part of his career spent as a missionary and educator, John Badeau carried on and built upon the great tradition of Americans who contributed so much to the Arab world—not as proselytizers but as doctors and teachers whose witness was in their good works.

Changing Tradition

When he became president of the Near East Foundation, he found himself in a different but related world—that of developmental and technical assistance to nations emerging from years of stagnation. This portion of the book reflects John Badeau's pragmatic approach to government and private-sector efforts to change, often abruptly, traditional ways of dealing with problems in agriculture, industry and indeed the fabric of Middle East society itself.

Ambassador Badeau's approach to diplomacy was also pragmatic. President Kennedy wanted to make a fresh start in Egypt and recruited a man who was favorably identified with the country. Ambassador Badeau found no difficulty in working with the professional foreign service but nevertheless put his own unmistakable stamp on the embassy's operation. The most satisfying part of his account is his description of his personal relationship with Nasser. He sums up the whole experience modestly as "a very good interlude" for the U.S. and Egypt, but goes on to say "...I do not think we had discovered a basis for a long, continued, tranquil, mutually beneficial relationship. I think it was not really discoverable."

Winning Sympathy

The book touches only tangentially on the Arab-Israel question, but what I found most important in this book is an explanation of the phenomenon which continually seems to puzzle people who have had no personal experience of the Middle East. This is that Americans who know the Middle East, be they diplomats, journalists, oil men, missionaries, businessmen, military men, anthropologists, archaeologists, educators, doctors or even simply tourists, are almost without exception sympathetic to the Arab point of view. This near unanimity is variously explained by those ignorant of or hostile to the Arab position as being the result of pure self-interest (particularly in the petroleum sector), of an outdated, patronizing paternalism (among missionaries and educators) or of basic anti-Semitism on the part of the foreign service (the notorious Arabists in the State Department) and the military. These explanations fail to take into account the simple fact that most Americans like Arabs when they meet them, and in most cases the feeling is reciprocated. Hear John Badeau on the subject in connection with his first visit to the Middle East. "On that trip I had the first experience that begins to raise the kind of questions that are always raised when one goes into another culture. A young university student on the train spoke quite good English, and we talked—it was a three-hour ride from Alexandria to Cairo. We talked about what we were doing, and he said, 'But have you considered that my religion, Islam, is also a good religion? Because it comforts me when I am sick, it helps me when I am in difficulty. It is my experience of God.' Nobody had ever said that to me before. At this time, most of the apologia that dealt with the missionary movement presented an idealized Christianity against the crass reality of some other faith ... But here was a living human being, a very nice person indeed, who simply said, don't count us out. This meant something to me, and I thought about it for a long time."

I recommend this book highly. The author is clearly a man of many accomplishments but also a man without side. His decency and his regard for his fellow man shine through every page.

John N. Gatch, Jr., a former Foreign Service Officer with long experience in the Middle East, is a Washington consultant.