A very small contingent landed on the beach at Beirut, Lebanon, in November of 1946: Dr. Charles A. Ferguson, a State Department scientific linguist, and two young State Department diplomats, William Sands and Donald Bergus. All were army veterans and just beginning their State Department careers. The task was to establish the first US program to train diplomats in Arabic and to create a corps of Middle East languageand- area specialists.

Despite a brief retreat back to Washington to reorganize, in its first decade the school established a program that could rapidly train Americans to speak Arabic. But the results were limited: from 1946–52 training was a brief, six-month introduction to the Middle East and Arabic, sometimes conducted in Beirut and at other times in Washington, DC. Only later in the Cold War was it permanently settled in Beirut and expanded into an intensive multiyear course.

This era was filled with fits and starts, landfalls and retreats, ambitious goals and setbacks. In the first decade the State Department was deeply committed to the effort but soon its limitations were apparent. There was a long struggle to get Congressional funding to improve it. Six months of Arabic training was not enough time to develop useful skills. Moreover, the companion area studies course lacked resources.

The Cold War competition with the Soviets was increasingly a factor garnering support from Congress and the Eisenhower administration. At best in this era the program periodically turned out a handful of graduates who were in great demand but not yet fully fluent. In the end, Cold War fears that the Soviets were training specialists in Arabic to a much higher standard set off fears of what I would term the Cold War “linguist gap”.

The State Department also aimed to deal with the people of the Middle East and the developing world directly in the so-called shirt-sleeved diplomacy and to erase the stereotypes of monolingualism from the popular press. American diplomats would no longer be the striped-pants “cookie pushers” at receptions but instead professionals who knew the area in which they served, talked to “the man on the street” and understood the nuances of regional politics.

The Senate investigated language skill levels in the State Department, and William Lederer and Eugene Burdick's novel The Ugly American focused popular attention on the problem.