In the summer of 1946 Donald Bergus, William Sands and their instructor Dr. Charles Ferguson landed in Lebanon. Their destination was the American embassy in Beirut, where Ferguson established a new State Department program to train diplomats in the Arabic language and Middle East area studies.

Their goal was to create a small group of area specialists who could communicate with the people of the region in one of the hardest of the “hard languages” (Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic). It takes approximately four years for an English language speaker to achieve skill in the fundamentals of Arabic, but Ferguson had been allotted only six months.

Lebanon was then the region's financial and commercial center and almost lived up to its billing as the Switzerland of the Middle East. The Lebanese had a well-deserved reputation as the area's most sophisticated businessmen, building their fortunes on the capitalistic ideals learned from decades of close contact with American missionaries, educators and diplomats. But beneath the surface lay the germs of conflict and war, dormant for the moment, as the first group of American diplomats began their exploration of the Middle East.

Within a decade the Eisenhower administration would make a major investment in the program and regard these area specialists or Middle East hands as the American frontline in the Cold War.

Between 1946 and 1975 the Middle East Area Program (MEAP) expanded into a highly selective, rigorous training program, which produced a small corps of professional diplomats known as Arabists or, as I would term them, Middle East hands. This book examines 53 of them, men and women, who staffed American embassies from Morocco to Afghanistan over the decades from the Eisenhower era through the Ford administration (see Brief Biographies in the Appendix), as America's Middle East foreign policy crystallized into three general objectives: to keep the Soviets out, secure access to oil at a stable price and maintain the special relationship with the state of Israel.

These diplomats were very different from those who had worked in the old Bureau of Near East Affairs (NEA) in the 1930s and 1940s: the modern Middle East hands were far more middle class, far less Ivy League and had for the most part no connection to the old missionary community or the East Coast elite.