Dr. John H. Davis

In the Washington area Dr. John Herbert Davis is the "grand old man" of Middle East affairs. His life and works over the past 25 years are so intertwined with the region that some may think he never had other major interests. But before becoming Commissioner General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (U.N.R.W.A.) in 1959, John Davis had already had a highly distinguished career quite unrelated to the Middle East. Like so many others who have come to know the area first hand, however, he has remained absorbed in Middle East problems.

A straight-forward and brainy Middle Westerner born in the early years of this century, John Davis was educated at Iowa State University of Science and Technology (B.S. Degree) and the University of Minnesota (M.A. and PhD. Degrees). Except for a short stint in 1935 and 1936 as an economist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, he was a vocational agricultural teacher and superintendent of schools in the State of Iowa from 1928 to 1939. (Little did he know that this experience would later serve him well in the Middle East.) For the next 14 years he was, successively, Chief of the Wheat Section, Commodity Credit Corporation; Executive Vice President, National Council of Farmer Cooperatives; General Manager of the National Wool Marketing Corporation; Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, President of the Commodity Credit Corporation and President of the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation.

From 1954 to 1959 Dr. Davis was a Professor at Harvard University where he directed the Graduate School of Business Administration's program in Agriculture and Business. During this period he turned down an opportunity to head the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. He decided it would be unfair to the rest of the world for him to be the third American in a row to hold the position.

Another reason for staying at Harvard was that Dr. Davis was engaged in writing two books, A Concept of Agribusiness and Farmer in a Business Suit. He brought the term "agribusiness" into the English language. Farmer in a Business Suit was a bestseller with more than 30,000 copies sold.

Dr. Davis might have retired full of honors at this stage, but President Eisenhower asked him to become head of U.N.R.W.A., the United Nations Refugee Works Agencies. The position opened a world about which he had known almost nothing. Suddenly he was a kind of father figure to one million Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt, who looked to the U.N.R.W.A. for food rations, shelter, health care and schooling. Overall living conditions for the refugees, miserable almost beyond belief, were especially shocking to a man from affluent America.

A lesser man might have despaired, but John Davis set out to do everything he could to improve conditions. He expanded existing vocational training schools and created new ones where many thousands of young Palestinians learned carpentry, mechanics, electricity conditioning, iron work and other skills that made them self-supporting and often employers of others. Dr. Davis headed a staff of 13,000 Palestinians employed in U.N.R.W.A. camps, schools and hospitals around the Middle East. Solidly grounded in vocational training and school administration, the Commissioner General was most comfortable encouraging the efforts of the 7,500 teachers who staffed the U.N.R.W.A. school system.

Dr. Davis fought successfully at the United Nations Headquarters in New York for more money for refugee housing and better health care. Always strapped for cash but a fine administrator, he was able to improve, albeit to a still inadequate standard, health facilities and to replace tents with concrete block houses in some refugee camps. Although Palestinian refugees overwhelmingly blamed American favoritism toward Israel for their homeless plight, Dr. Davis gained their trust during his five years as U.N.R.W.A. chief. Drawing from his Middle East experience he authored a highly regarded book, The Evasive Peace, in which he argued convincingly that Arab-Israeli peace could never be found until the aspirations of the Palestinians for a country of their own were reasonably satisfied.

Dr. Davis was a founder and long time President of American Near East Refugee Aid, Inc. (ANERA), which helps with health, education, and community and economic development work in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He has also served as Vice Chairman of the Board of Trustees and Director of the New York office of the American University of Beirut, the pre-eminent American cultural legacy in the Middle East. He created and for years headed the Musa Alami of Jericho Foundation (U.S.A.) which provides moral and financial support to a Boys Town for Palestinian orphans at Jericho in the occupied West Bank.

Dr. and Mrs. Davis (the former Edna Frazier) now live in a beautiful apartment on Washington, D.C.'s Massachusetts Avenue "Embassy Row." Even in retirement, however, he remains President Emeritus of, and an active fund raiser for, the Musa Alami Foundation, a part of his Middle East absorption which remains particularly close to his heart.

—Andrew I. Killgore