Leonard, Graham - Oral History Interview
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2011-02-01
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Before coming to SAIS, Dr. Leonard was a self-proclaimed east Tennessee hillbilly from Kingsport, Tennessee going to the University of Tennessee. During that time, he says the most important person was Ghandi and he wanted to live in one of Ghandi’s ashrams. So during his junior year he applied and got accepted to one of the ashrams, but Ghandi was killed during January of his senior year. He was less interested in going to India then because he couldn’t meet Ghandi. He heard that there was an Aramco scholarship, Arabian American Oil Company scholarship, to SAIS…which he applied for and got. He came up to SAIS Easter weekend to interview with Colonel Bill Eddy, who was the first minister to Saudi Arabia and was on the board of SAIS. At that time, he says, SAIS and the Middle East industry were very closely integrated. SAIS was located at its old address on Florida Avenue and the Middle East Institute was on 16th Street. A graduate of the class of ’48, Bill Marsh (sp?), was executive secretary of the Middle East Institute. Dr. Leonard was at the Middle East Institute at SAIS and started the study of Arabic at SAIS with George Mecdesey (sp?), who was a Lebanese kid brought up in Detroit.
Mecdesey’s family sent him back to Lebanon when he was 13 or 14 to be a Jesuit priest. Mecdesey was studying and was about 20 when World War II began. He signed up at the embassy and was drafted. Though he knew Arabic and French, the army sent him to the South Pacific. Mecdes]sy was so impressed by the young counsels at the embassy that he decided that that was what he wanted to do. While he was in the army, he met a good Meronite girl from Detroit and they got married. They started having children and eventually had around 11. He came to Georgetown to do the Foreign Service masters and taught at SAIS to help support his family. Mecdesey later went to Princeton where he had a fight with Hiti (sp?). Mecdesey corrected Hiti in class and Mecdesey was right so Hiti hit the ceiling. According to Dr. Leonard, Hiti by that time was a God, not just an icon. So Mecdesey went to Paris to study with Messingion (sp?) [at 3:23] and got his doctorate. When Dr. Leonard went to Harvard to finish his PhD, he studied with George Mecdessey who is the foremost expert on the Abbasid.
Dr. Leonard has spent almost 40 years in the Middle East as an educator and now he has a project with the Ministry of Education trying to revive Abbasid discussion-based education in Arabic. Most of his idea’s came from Mecdessey’s books.
Dr. Leonard says there were two people from Kingsport, Tennessee at SAIS in the class of ’49. The other was Genevieve Collins, the daughter of a local character and lawyer in Kingsport, IT Collins. She’d gone to Duke but she had been so cuddled by her father that Dr. Leonard had to sit next to her at SAIS and cut her meat for her! One of their professors was Dr. Paul Linebarger who was raised in China because his father was an extraterritorial judge there. Dr. Linebarger and Genevieve fell in love and got married. About a year or so later, Genevieve visited them in Beirut on her way to meet Paul in Nepal alone. Dr. Leonard says that that marriage absolutely transformed Genevieve and they remain close friends. Dr. Leonard saw her every Christmas and Easter when he was home in Tennessee. He says Dr. Linebarger, who was a stuffy professor that wrote lurid, sexy novels on the side under a pseudonym, which Genevieve continued after his death, also changed. Dr. Leonard describes Linebarger as a great scholar who would dictate to one secretary scholarly work and to another these sexy novels. In Dr. Leonard’s opinion, Linebarger started looking 20 years younger after he married Genevieve and it was an almost unbelievable love story.
Dr. Leonard says there was a marvelous German chef at SAIS. The students used to go to school at the old building on 1906 Florida Avenue which used to be a Holten Arms, right across from where Reagan was nearly assassinated. What brought them together was the dining room and the library, which they were in all the time. Dr. Leonard’s roommate was Manfred Halpern, who later earned his PhD from SAIS and was one of the first students to do so. Mr. Halpern has been the Middle East Sociologist at Princeton. They’ve remained friends and Dr. Leonard was in his wedding. Halpern was married in the home of Supreme Court Justice Rutledge. Rutledge’s daughter was maid of honor and Dr. Leonard was best man. The Rutledges invited Dr. Leonard to the Truman inauguration when the Point Four was announced in January 1949.
One of Dr. Leonard’s good friends went to the CIA that year. He says that almost everyone at SAIS was interviewed for the CIA but Dr. Leonard was not. He supposes he talks so much that the CIA thought he wasn’t a good candidate. Several friends of his did work for CIA, one of whom was Joe Culbertson, whose father was a farmer involved in politics in Missouri and the man that got Harry Truman into politics. Joe spent much of his career training secret intelligence people all around the world for CIA, married a Vassar graduate named Mary and had three children—two boys and a girl. Dr. Leonard lived in Beirut at the time when all airplanes had to stop to refuel in Beirut, so he saw the Culbertsons quite often. The Culbertsons worked with a family from his home in east Tennessee, a Swiss-German man married to an English woman. The husband did the same type of work that Mr. Culbertson did. (6:56 to 8:14)
Lois Catarin (sp?) was one of Dr. Leonard’s dorm mates while at SAIS. Three of them lived on the second floor of the building.
Dr. Leonard relates the story of how SAIS got started. As he recalls, the Dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts fought with the president of Tufts and wanted to be totally independent. He managed to get Harvard on the diploma because he got permission for his students to use the Harvard library even though they didn’t have any classes there. Dr. Leonard describes the dean as a “wheeler-dealer” who had a very close friend, a mistress, who was from a wealthy Boston family. She provided most of the money for the library at Fletcher. The dean conceived the idea of leaving Fletcher and starting SAIS in DC right after the war. He would use adjuncts from the government and it was attractive because everyone wanted to be in Washington after the war. He managed to get 19 schools to sponsor the new school (SAIS). But he became difficult in terms of running the school and was replaced. It was then decided that the format with 19 colleges would not work and since Johns Hopkins was the nearest, Johns Hopkins took it over in the ‘50s. For the first 5 or so years, SAIS was sponsored by all 19 colleges. The original dean brought the library and the librarian to SAIS and was often seen in compromising positions in the stacks according to rumors.
The original dean also had a secretary who was a real “crackerjack” who loved to dance according to Dr. Leonard. Four couples, including Dr. Leonard, used to meet at her house once a month and cook one of the times throughout the year. Every Thursday, there was an adult, singles place that is now an embassy somewhere on 17th or 18th street that held dances. Dr. Leonard used to take the secretary, Rosemary Woods, dancing. The chairman of the board at SAIS at that time was Christian Herter, a congressman from Massachusetts and he liked young congressman Nixon. That fall in 1948, Nixon won the Senate seat in California by vilifying Helen Gahagan Douglas, the wife of an actor, by calling her a Communist. When Nixon took office, he needed an assistant so Christian Herter got Rosemary Woods to work for him.
Rosemary Woods and Dr. Leonard still dance on Thursday nights. She lived at that time on 2000 Connecticut Avenue across from what is now the Hilton, in a very nice apartment. She had two or three sisters who were nuns and was from Zanesville, Ohio, a steel town, from a very Irish family with red hair. Later on, she was at the White House with Nixon. Dr. Leonard was in Paris with UNESCO at that time and his daughter was in school at Paris. All of the children had to write to the heads of state as an exercise. So they got a letter in the White House (there are hundreds of volunteers who read the correspondences and interesting ones are sent up). The letter was from a little girl in Paris who said she was half American, half Arab and half English and studying in Paris. Rosemary said, “Is the last name Leonard?”. That’s another connection Dr. Leonard had with Rosemary.
When Rosemary was with Nixon when Nixon was Vice President, Dr. Leonard was able to help arrange for a group of Arab Palestinian students to meet Nixon. Nixon’s mother was a Quaker and Dr. Leonard told Nixon that Nixon’s mother used to raise money for Quaker schools in Ramallah. He said to Nixon that Nixon knows all about the Palestine question and asked why he always votes on the side of the Zionists. Nixon’s response was that the Arabs don’t vote in America. Dr. Leonard responded questioning the morality of that position at which point Nixon turned his face on Dr. Leonard and didn’t shake Dr. Leonard’s hand when he left.
Dr. Leonard had a wonderful time at SAIS and his French teacher was a young woman, Ann Sayey (sp?) who is now Ann Sele dela (sp). Her family was one of the most prominent families in Paris socially. Her mother’s family, the Devendels (sp) are the Carnegies of France. They own a home that is a whole city block, but they could not get a penny out of France in those days. Ann had gone to Columbia and did a Masters in English Literature. She was a classmate and roommate of Ann Kirkpatrick, who served as the US ambassador to the UN.
There was a French ambassador, Monsieur Boneig, whose wife was a Jewish woman from Alexandria, Egypt. During the war, she had a hat shop in Manhattan that made a lot of money. In those days, ambassadors had to do a lot of entertaining on their own money. During Easter-time, Madame Boneig had as her guest Marlene Dietrich (sp). They had a dinner part in which they invited Ann because Madame Boneig was very interested in being in society in Paris. Dr. Leonard sat next to Marlene Dietrich at the dinner table and during the dinner she told a story about going into Paris the day it was liberated. She got her driver to take her to where she had a seamstress who used to make her underwear. They were shot at two or three times as the Germans were still in Paris. When they arrived, they learned the seamstress had gotten in a shipment of skin-colored Vietnamese silk just before the war began and spent the war making embroidered underwear for Marlene Dietrich. At the dinner table, Marlene Dietrich opened her dress to show them the beautifully embroidered bra that was made for her.
Years later, when Dr. Leonard was at Oxford doing his post-doc work, Dietrich came and did a show. Dr. Leonard met her again, but she did not remember him. He told her the dinner party story and again she opened her dress and exclaimed that she was still wearing that underwear—she had a lifetime’s worth! He met her a few times since and the next time he saw her, she did remember him.
One of the most interesting people on faculty in Dr. Leonard’s opinion was Brigadier General James Hayworth Dunn who had worked during the war in British intelligence in Egypt. Dr. Leonard describes him as a cross between Winston Churchill and King Farouk of Egypt, but with the worst qualities of both—a heavy drinker and fat man with lots of energy who slept only two or three hours a day and was into everything. He had become a Muslim in order become an advisor to Hassan al Benna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Dr. Leonard never knew if he should believe him or not because the stories were out of this world. After he converted, Brigadier General James Hayworth Dunn married one of the most famous Egyptian actresses in the Muslim world and then he married a very rich Egyptian cotton heiress. When SAIS hired him, they said they’d pay his transport from England to America. He came on the Normandy in a suite with two servants and his own car, but only stayed at SAIS one year. Hassan al Benna was killed Thanksgiving weekend of 1948 in Egypt probably by the British intelligence. Within a month or so, al Bennah’s son-in-law and heir came to see Heritha (sp? 19:42) and Dr. Leonard met him. The son-in-law was a drinker, gambler and womanizer and destroyed the puritan reputation of the Muslim Brotherhood. Hassan al Benna had founded the Muslim Brotherhood on the same basis as the YMCA—self-help, keep yourself clean, clean your mind, clean your body, clean your soul. It’s the only organization in the history of Egypt that started in the villages and went up to the capital.
Another professor of Dr. Leonard’s was the Middle East expert at the Agriculture Department who had attended the American University in Beirut. That October was the year Truman was running for president on his own and no one in the country thought he could be elected. Bob Hall, later the first full-time Alumni Secretary of SAIS and another person boarded in a house on Florida Avenue. The woman that owned it was the daughter of an American admiral. She was an astrologist and did the charts for Truman and Dewey. She predicted early in October that Truman was going to win, which at the time they thought was very funny. Dr. Leonard had a friend who was assistant Navy attaché to Truman in the White House who used take Margaret as an escort. This friend went with Margaret to the astrologist and told reporters about the prediction but after Truman won, the astrologist got quite a reputation in town.
When Dr. Leonard graduated from SAIS, Aramco did not choose him from the pool of people to work for them. He’s ultimately glad he didn’t get that position because he wouldn’t want to buy goodies for the Saudi royal family and provide other favors, which Aramco did. He ending up getting a job with Union Carbide to go to India but before he was sent out, he worked in his area in the southeast and decided that was not for him. While Dr. Leonard was at SAIS there was no auditorium in the building. They had lectures in the dining room but used the Quaker Meeting on Florida Avenue for big lectures and Dr. Leonard started going there. The secretary to the leader of the Quaker Meeting had been a teacher in Ramallah. He learned that the Quakers started girls’ schools in Ramallah in 1866 and boys’ schools later on which became the best schools in Palestine. They also started one around the same time in Lebanon. In 1888, the British took the ones in Lebanon and the Americans took the ones in Palestine. Dr. Leonard found out that they had a fellowship for someone to teach science for a year and applied in 1950 but did not get it. But they did offer him $800 plus board and room for the year to teach English, which Dr. Leonard accepted. Friends of his were traveling through Europe that summer and Dr. Leonard decided to go with them as far as Venice.
He decided he would go from Paris to Jerusalem overland. He thinks he was probably the first person to do this after World War II because when he was in Paris he could not get a visa to Yugoslavia, but when he got to Rome, he could. The Yugoslavs showed him how to follow chalk lines to get through mine fields to the Greek border. He made it overland all the way to Ramallah where he would be teaching. He taught that year in Ramallah and then came back. The Korean War began when he was in Paris that summer. Because Dr. Leonard had not served for two years in World War II, he was drafted...He was planning on teaching another year in Ramallah, then travel to Kashmir to teach a year in India and then travel to Japan to again teach at a Quaker School there. He loved to travel and this was the way he could afford to see the world deeply and not flip through, like a tourist. But he had to go back because of his draft case in 1951. In Easter time in 1951 in Ramallah, he had gone to Amman and bought a small motorcycle and drove it to Petra, which he then drove to Haifa and had shipped back to America when he had to return home to fight the draft case. After three years, he finally won conscientious objector status. He spent a short time in jail because of mistakes in his case but was studying Arabic and Islam at the Kennedy School Hartford Seminary. He then applied to go back and teach in Ramallah but was instead put in charge of Quaker work in Ramallah. By that time, he spoke the colloquial language quite well and in ’57 he met and married a Palestinian woman living in Beirut and brought her back to the States. They then went to Harvard so Dr. Leonard could work on his PhD.
Because Dr. Leonard was a teacher, he never made money. He did work for UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees as the Assistant to the Director of Education. After he finished his doctorate, he worked as an advisor for UNRWA from ’82 to ’86 and spent one year with the UNDP in Jerusalem. After that, he stayed on in Ramallah and started a program to teach teachers how to teach discussion-based education partly funded by a Fulbright and partly from other sources. When he finally spent all of his money, he quit and came home in 1996. He has a program now with the Ministry of Education in Jordan and has helped institute one hour of open-ended discussion in all the schools in Jordan from the 6th to the 10th grade which is a project he’s still working on.
Dr. Leonard’s daughter convinced him to come back to the States in 1996 because she and her husband were moving to England with his grandson and she wanted him to look after her house in Cleveland Park. Dr. Leonard then decided to study Shakespearean acting with the Washington Shakespeare Theater but he’s not good at remembering the exact words. He did that for a few years. He was staying with a friend in New York in 2004 when the US got into the Iraq War. Dr. Leonard was angry and decided to run for Congress. His district in east Tennessee has voted Republican since the Civil War. He won the democratic nomination, receiving more votes than all other democrats on the ticket combined. He also got a higher percentage of votes than any democrat had gotten in 100 years—30%. When he went to run, the National Guard in east Tennessee just received orders to go to Iraq. As a conscientious objector in a state that is known for volunteering for wars, Dr. Leonard was in deep trouble with the veterans. He called the Executive Officer of the National Guard and offered his services to provide background information to those going to Iraq. He gave three two-hour lectures to each of 8 units in east Tennessee. In spring 2005, Dr. Leonard went to Iraq for three weeks with a Christian peace maker team without guard or armor. He was then embedded as a journalist with the Tennessee National Guard in Iraq. At that time, his unit was the only one that had recruited, trained and left Iraqis in their place because they knew how to deal with Iraqis and because the average age was 42 and not 22 like the soldiers. Dr. Leonard believes that going into Iraq was one of the biggest mistakes that America ever made, but even when we went in, we weren’t very smart. He says we only had 12 people in the army who knew Arabic, we’ve used 6,500 Kurds as interpreters, and of the 45 interpreters in his unit 35/40 didn’t have better than third grade English. He was surprised that more people weren’t killed. He says that the British had ruled Iraq from the air, with bribes to the Sunni sheiks and with intelligence and he wonders why America didn’t do that too. He says that the reason we stopped fighting so much during the surge, when we added extra troops, wasn’t because of the 35,000 troops but because we finally starting bribing the sheiks. He says we would have saved thousands of lives if we had been smart enough to use “subsidies” or bribes since the beginning. He says that anybody with a SAIS intelligence could have told you that.
Now, Dr. Leonard continues to travel to Jordan to promote discussion-based education. He suffered for a year from pain in his leg and hip, but a Lebanese shi’ah surgeon operated on him at Johns Hopkins on January 21 and he feels absolutely no pain. He’s going back around the world now like he’s always done.
Dr. Leonard would advise current students at SAIS that learning a language and becoming an expert on a country is not enough—they need to have a specialty. There are many, many people in these countries that know the language and culture, so it’s not enough. He’d also advise not to just learn the language but to learn the culture as well. Afief Tenous (sp?) taught him the culture of the Middle East when he was at SAIS. He took them to a Middle East restaurant near Foggy Bottom, taught them the different foods and how they were made. He was a Cornell PhD. Dr. Leonard’s Hartford degree was a joint degree with Syracuse in Literacy Journalism because he was interested in doing literacy work with the Arabs at that time. At Syracuse, he met people who had known Afief at Cornell. In Beirut, he met Afief’s sister who was married to an Iraqi who wrote the first book on Arab education. American University Beirut (AUB) was started by idealist New Englanders who gave their lives to teach the very best liberal arts education to empower people to think. Dr. Leonard says this education transformed the Middle East. All outstanding leaders up until the ‘70s and ‘80s were AUB graduates.
In addition to learning the language, students need to learn the culture. And when you go there, Dr. Leonard suggests not associating with the rich diplomats but getting to know people in the youth, labor and women’s movements. This is the problem in Egypt and Libya according to Dr. Leonard. Nobody knows what the youth are thinking even though they are a majority of the population and nobody predicted what would happen in Egypt. Dr. Leonard believes it’s wonderful provided they can follow through but so far we have not seen much leadership. One of the big differences that Dr. Leonard thinks people at SAIS should know is that for 300 years we’ve been part of the Western emphasis on individualism, individual identity but the rest of the world, especially the Middle East, values group identity more than individual identity. That’s how people can become suicide bombers because it’s about your family’s honor and prestige.
Dr. Leonard says that the most interesting thing happening in Egypt now is that it wasn’t the Muslim Brotherhood or any right-wing fanatical group that initiated the events in Tahrir Square.
Dr. Leonard says what was happening in Egypt was fascinating but also frightening because it was composed of sound bites. Egypt has 3 times the population they can afford and 1/5 the jobs they need and that cannot be solved by one leader. Dr. Leonard has a hard time keeping out of politics and keeping out of analyzing because of his years at SAIS. He says Washington is an amazing place for students and he says the Friday evening get-togethers in the summertime are a very important part of SAIS. Students will run into SAIS people wherever they go. Even Dr. Leonard, who was just in the fifth class, was running into people all the time who had been to SAIS or who had studied Arabic with him at Harvard and Oxford. He also says that language is a tool but also the way in. And you have to be the type of person who is willing to try to understand other people. In fall of 2009, Dr. Leonard was in the Middle East and he stayed in 10 different homes with 7 different religious groups and in every one of those homes he was “Uncle Gra’ham”. Being accepted enough to be criticized is one of his greatest accomplishments. He learned by being part of the community. The Quakers had been in Ramallah for nearly 100 years but he was first one to break convention of being addressed by his full name and was just called by his first name. Dr. Leonard also suggests that if students are going to work anywhere that was formally part of the Ottoman Empire, they need to understand the Millet System. He explains that the Turks took over from the Ottomans a system that allowed each religious community to have its own laws and court for marriage, inheritance and divorce and any other crime committed within the community. In the former Ottoman Empire, these communities have remained separated. When asked the main difference between Sunnis and Shi’ites, Dr. Leonard says theologically there is very little difference but the communities have 500 years of history hating each other and killing each other. It’s important, says Dr. Leonard, to understand history. He also says that in the Arab world, Arabic has no past, present or future—just completed action or uncompleted action. He explains that all the past is rumpled up together—people are still worried about the Crusades. So when Bush made a remark about the US crusade in Iraq, the Middle East was ignited with hatred for him. Dr. Leonard focused a few days on history in his training with trainers in Jordan. He teaches them how to do a timeline because they have no timeline in their head and don’t know if Mohammad or Napoleon came first. He says it’s crucial to understand the different way people look at things.
Dr. Leonard married a Palestinian who was a superb cook. Dr. Leonard also found that his Southern mentality translated well in the Middle East in that he was taught to understand people based on their relationships to other people (knowing who married whom and who was related to whom). Dr. Leonard now knows the people and the clans in Ramallah. Dr. Leonard knows Hannah Ashwari, the Palestinian spokesperson. She had a cousin who came from America to get married. At the reception the night before the wedding, the cousin said this woman kept calling her auntie and asked Hannah what the relationship was. Hannah did not know but said to ask Gra’ham (Dr. Leonard) and he did in fact figure out the relationship which is evidence of how well he knows some of the families in Ramallah.
Dr. Leonard kept up with Ann SeeleDelaselatr (sp). She became undersecretary of the OECD. Dr. Leonard says she’s a very brilliant economist. She had the idea of the Club of the Sahel in which she coordinated across all sectors. She is now retired and lives in Paris. She has three happily married daughters and lots of grandchildren. She lives in a chateau now and has given over her big home. Paula Pepke (sp), Nitze’s niece who was named for him, was one of Dr. Leonard’s classmates in 1949. Her father founded the Aspen Institute in Colorado and was a University of Chicago graduate like Nitze. Nitze is Paula’s father’s brother-in-law. There were only six girls in his class. He ran into Marianne Smith in Belgrade when getting a visa in Yugoslavia. Many SAIS alumni work for the CIA, he says. The CIA began in the fall ’48 or spring of ’49, so there were many SAIS graduates in the agency. Dr. Leonard also recalls a fellow from the Philippines who was very interested in Genevieve Collins but she was not interested in him. One of their classmates graduated from Harvard from a well-to-do Boston family and he was the socialist in residence. The classmate then went on to start a newspaper in Dartmouth, married a Swiss socialite, got divorced, married one of the daughters of Sir Harry Oakes in the Bahamas and became a rich banker in the Bahamas. One of Dr. Leonard’s most interesting classmates, Rosenhower, teaches at George Washington and had written a book about Eleanor Roosevelt before he came to SAIS. He also describes a classmate, Barrel, who is now a bureaucrat but in Dr. Leonard’s opinion, had a very bureaucratic mind. Dr. Leonard remembers his filing system and being awed by it. Dr. Leonard also remembers a brilliant classmate from California who eventually burned out. Dr. Leonard suspects that Brigadier General James Hayworth Dunn really did work for British intelligence but got kicked out and that’s why he went into academia. Hayworth Dunn’s son spoke about four languages and Hayworth Dunn told them it’s very easy for a child to learn many languages provided each person who speaks to the child only speaks that language. Dr. Leonard did his PhD on applied linguistics at Harvard and this one of the things he emphasized. He raised his children to speak only in Arabic and it wasn’t until after his divorce when he moved to England, that his children learned English. He was intent that they learn proper English and not American hillbilly English. When Dr. Leonard ran for Congress in east Tennessee, he was afraid people would consider him a “carpetbagger”, but his family was pioneers and he’s related to a lot of people there and they accepted the fact that he spoke standard American English. They also did not consider him snobbish.
Before coming to SAIS, Dr. Leonard was a self-proclaimed east Tennessee hillbilly from Kingsport, Tennessee going to the University of Tennessee. During that time, he says the most important person was Ghandi and he wanted to live in one of Ghandi’s ashrams. So during his junior year he applied and got accepted to one of the ashrams, but Ghandi was killed during January of his senior year. He was less interested in going to India then because he couldn’t meet Ghandi. He heard that there was an Aramco scholarship, Arabian American Oil Company scholarship, to SAIS…which he applied for and got. He came up to SAIS Easter weekend to interview with Colonel Bill Eddy, who was the first minister to Saudi Arabia and was on the board of SAIS. At that time, he says, SAIS and the Middle East industry were very closely integrated. SAIS was located at its old address on Florida Avenue and the Middle East Institute was on 16th Street. A graduate of the class of ’48, Bill Marsh (sp?), was executive secretary of the Middle East Institute. Dr. Leonard was at the Middle East Institute at SAIS and started the study of Arabic at SAIS with George Mecdesey (sp?), who was a Lebanese kid brought up in Detroit.
Mecdesey’s family sent him back to Lebanon when he was 13 or 14 to be a Jesuit priest. Mecdesey was studying and was about 20 when World War II began. He signed up at the embassy and was drafted. Though he knew Arabic and French, the army sent him to the South Pacific. Mecdes]sy was so impressed by the young counsels at the embassy that he decided that that was what he wanted to do. While he was in the army, he met a good Meronite girl from Detroit and they got married. They started having children and eventually had around 11. He came to Georgetown to do the Foreign Service masters and taught at SAIS to help support his family. Mecdesey later went to Princeton where he had a fight with Hiti (sp?). Mecdesey corrected Hiti in class and Mecdesey was right so Hiti hit the ceiling. According to Dr. Leonard, Hiti by that time was a God, not just an icon. So Mecdesey went to Paris to study with Messingion (sp?) [at 3:23] and got his doctorate. When Dr. Leonard went to Harvard to finish his PhD, he studied with George Mecdessey who is the foremost expert on the Abbasid.
Dr. Leonard has spent almost 40 years in the Middle East as an educator and now he has a project with the Ministry of Education trying to revive Abbasid discussion-based education in Arabic. Most of his idea’s came from Mecdessey’s books.
Dr. Leonard says there were two people from Kingsport, Tennessee at SAIS in the class of ’49. The other was Genevieve Collins, the daughter of a local character and lawyer in Kingsport, IT Collins. She’d gone to Duke but she had been so cuddled by her father that Dr. Leonard had to sit next to her at SAIS and cut her meat for her! One of their professors was Dr. Paul Linebarger who was raised in China because his father was an extraterritorial judge there. Dr. Linebarger and Genevieve fell in love and got married. About a year or so later, Genevieve visited them in Beirut on her way to meet Paul in Nepal alone. Dr. Leonard says that that marriage absolutely transformed Genevieve and they remain close friends. Dr. Leonard saw her every Christmas and Easter when he was home in Tennessee. He says Dr. Linebarger, who was a stuffy professor that wrote lurid, sexy novels on the side under a pseudonym, which Genevieve continued after his death, also changed. Dr. Leonard describes Linebarger as a great scholar who would dictate to one secretary scholarly work and to another these sexy novels. In Dr. Leonard’s opinion, Linebarger started looking 20 years younger after he married Genevieve and it was an almost unbelievable love story.
Dr. Leonard says there was a marvelous German chef at SAIS. The students used to go to school at the old building on 1906 Florida Avenue which used to be a Holten Arms, right across from where Reagan was nearly assassinated. What brought them together was the dining room and the library, which they were in all the time. Dr. Leonard’s roommate was Manfred Halpern, who later earned his PhD from SAIS and was one of the first students to do so. Mr. Halpern has been the Middle East Sociologist at Princeton. They’ve remained friends and Dr. Leonard was in his wedding. Halpern was married in the home of Supreme Court Justice Rutledge. Rutledge’s daughter was maid of honor and Dr. Leonard was best man. The Rutledges invited Dr. Leonard to the Truman inauguration when the Point Four was announced in January 1949.
One of Dr. Leonard’s good friends went to the CIA that year. He says that almost everyone at SAIS was interviewed for the CIA but Dr. Leonard was not. He supposes he talks so much that the CIA thought he wasn’t a good candidate. Several friends of his did work for CIA, one of whom was Joe Culbertson, whose father was a farmer involved in politics in Missouri and the man that got Harry Truman into politics. Joe spent much of his career training secret intelligence people all around the world for CIA, married a Vassar graduate named Mary and had three children—two boys and a girl. Dr. Leonard lived in Beirut at the time when all airplanes had to stop to refuel in Beirut, so he saw the Culbertsons quite often. The Culbertsons worked with a family from his home in east Tennessee, a Swiss-German man married to an English woman. The husband did the same type of work that Mr. Culbertson did. (6:56 to 8:14)
Lois Catarin (sp?) was one of Dr. Leonard’s dorm mates while at SAIS. Three of them lived on the second floor of the building.
Dr. Leonard relates the story of how SAIS got started. As he recalls, the Dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts fought with the president of Tufts and wanted to be totally independent. He managed to get Harvard on the diploma because he got permission for his students to use the Harvard library even though they didn’t have any classes there. Dr. Leonard describes the dean as a “wheeler-dealer” who had a very close friend, a mistress, who was from a wealthy Boston family. She provided most of the money for the library at Fletcher. The dean conceived the idea of leaving Fletcher and starting SAIS in DC right after the war. He would use adjuncts from the government and it was attractive because everyone wanted to be in Washington after the war. He managed to get 19 schools to sponsor the new school (SAIS). But he became difficult in terms of running the school and was replaced. It was then decided that the format with 19 colleges would not work and since Johns Hopkins was the nearest, Johns Hopkins took it over in the ‘50s. For the first 5 or so years, SAIS was sponsored by all 19 colleges. The original dean brought the library and the librarian to SAIS and was often seen in compromising positions in the stacks according to rumors.
The original dean also had a secretary who was a real “crackerjack” who loved to dance according to Dr. Leonard. Four couples, including Dr. Leonard, used to meet at her house once a month and cook one of the times throughout the year. Every Thursday, there was an adult, singles place that is now an embassy somewhere on 17th or 18th street that held dances. Dr. Leonard used to take the secretary, Rosemary Woods, dancing. The chairman of the board at SAIS at that time was Christian Herter, a congressman from Massachusetts and he liked young congressman Nixon. That fall in 1948, Nixon won the Senate seat in California by vilifying Helen Gahagan Douglas, the wife of an actor, by calling her a Communist. When Nixon took office, he needed an assistant so Christian Herter got Rosemary Woods to work for him.
Rosemary Woods and Dr. Leonard still dance on Thursday nights. She lived at that time on 2000 Connecticut Avenue across from what is now the Hilton, in a very nice apartment. She had two or three sisters who were nuns and was from Zanesville, Ohio, a steel town, from a very Irish family with red hair. Later on, she was at the White House with Nixon. Dr. Leonard was in Paris with UNESCO at that time and his daughter was in school at Paris. All of the children had to write to the heads of state as an exercise. So they got a letter in the White House (there are hundreds of volunteers who read the correspondences and interesting ones are sent up). The letter was from a little girl in Paris who said she was half American, half Arab and half English and studying in Paris. Rosemary said, “Is the last name Leonard?”. That’s another connection Dr. Leonard had with Rosemary.
When Rosemary was with Nixon when Nixon was Vice President, Dr. Leonard was able to help arrange for a group of Arab Palestinian students to meet Nixon. Nixon’s mother was a Quaker and Dr. Leonard told Nixon that Nixon’s mother used to raise money for Quaker schools in Ramallah. He said to Nixon that Nixon knows all about the Palestine question and asked why he always votes on the side of the Zionists. Nixon’s response was that the Arabs don’t vote in America. Dr. Leonard responded questioning the morality of that position at which point Nixon turned his face on Dr. Leonard and didn’t shake Dr. Leonard’s hand when he left.
Dr. Leonard had a wonderful time at SAIS and his French teacher was a young woman, Ann Sayey (sp?) who is now Ann Sele dela (sp). Her family was one of the most prominent families in Paris socially. Her mother’s family, the Devendels (sp) are the Carnegies of France. They own a home that is a whole city block, but they could not get a penny out of France in those days. Ann had gone to Columbia and did a Masters in English Literature. She was a classmate and roommate of Ann Kirkpatrick, who served as the US ambassador to the UN.
There was a French ambassador, Monsieur Boneig, whose wife was a Jewish woman from Alexandria, Egypt. During the war, she had a hat shop in Manhattan that made a lot of money. In those days, ambassadors had to do a lot of entertaining on their own money. During Easter-time, Madame Boneig had as her guest Marlene Dietrich (sp). They had a dinner part in which they invited Ann because Madame Boneig was very interested in being in society in Paris. Dr. Leonard sat next to Marlene Dietrich at the dinner table and during the dinner she told a story about going into Paris the day it was liberated. She got her driver to take her to where she had a seamstress who used to make her underwear. They were shot at two or three times as the Germans were still in Paris. When they arrived, they learned the seamstress had gotten in a shipment of skin-colored Vietnamese silk just before the war began and spent the war making embroidered underwear for Marlene Dietrich. At the dinner table, Marlene Dietrich opened her dress to show them the beautifully embroidered bra that was made for her.
Years later, when Dr. Leonard was at Oxford doing his post-doc work, Dietrich came and did a show. Dr. Leonard met her again, but she did not remember him. He told her the dinner party story and again she opened her dress and exclaimed that she was still wearing that underwear—she had a lifetime’s worth! He met her a few times since and the next time he saw her, she did remember him.
One of the most interesting people on faculty in Dr. Leonard’s opinion was Brigadier General James Hayworth Dunn who had worked during the war in British intelligence in Egypt. Dr. Leonard describes him as a cross between Winston Churchill and King Farouk of Egypt, but with the worst qualities of both—a heavy drinker and fat man with lots of energy who slept only two or three hours a day and was into everything. He had become a Muslim in order become an advisor to Hassan al Benna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Dr. Leonard never knew if he should believe him or not because the stories were out of this world. After he converted, Brigadier General James Hayworth Dunn married one of the most famous Egyptian actresses in the Muslim world and then he married a very rich Egyptian cotton heiress. When SAIS hired him, they said they’d pay his transport from England to America. He came on the Normandy in a suite with two servants and his own car, but only stayed at SAIS one year. Hassan al Benna was killed Thanksgiving weekend of 1948 in Egypt probably by the British intelligence. Within a month or so, al Bennah’s son-in-law and heir came to see Heritha (sp? 19:42) and Dr. Leonard met him. The son-in-law was a drinker, gambler and womanizer and destroyed the puritan reputation of the Muslim Brotherhood. Hassan al Benna had founded the Muslim Brotherhood on the same basis as the YMCA—self-help, keep yourself clean, clean your mind, clean your body, clean your soul. It’s the only organization in the history of Egypt that started in the villages and went up to the capital.
Another professor of Dr. Leonard’s was the Middle East expert at the Agriculture Department who had attended the American University in Beirut. That October was the year Truman was running for president on his own and no one in the country thought he could be elected. Bob Hall, later the first full-time Alumni Secretary of SAIS and another person boarded in a house on Florida Avenue. The woman that owned it was the daughter of an American admiral. She was an astrologist and did the charts for Truman and Dewey. She predicted early in October that Truman was going to win, which at the time they thought was very funny. Dr. Leonard had a friend who was assistant Navy attaché to Truman in the White House who used take Margaret as an escort. This friend went with Margaret to the astrologist and told reporters about the prediction but after Truman won, the astrologist got quite a reputation in town.
When Dr. Leonard graduated from SAIS, Aramco did not choose him from the pool of people to work for them. He’s ultimately glad he didn’t get that position because he wouldn’t want to buy goodies for the Saudi royal family and provide other favors, which Aramco did. He ending up getting a job with Union Carbide to go to India but before he was sent out, he worked in his area in the southeast and decided that was not for him. While Dr. Leonard was at SAIS there was no auditorium in the building. They had lectures in the dining room but used the Quaker Meeting on Florida Avenue for big lectures and Dr. Leonard started going there. The secretary to the leader of the Quaker Meeting had been a teacher in Ramallah. He learned that the Quakers started girls’ schools in Ramallah in 1866 and boys’ schools later on which became the best schools in Palestine. They also started one around the same time in Lebanon. In 1888, the British took the ones in Lebanon and the Americans took the ones in Palestine. Dr. Leonard found out that they had a fellowship for someone to teach science for a year and applied in 1950 but did not get it. But they did offer him $800 plus board and room for the year to teach English, which Dr. Leonard accepted. Friends of his were traveling through Europe that summer and Dr. Leonard decided to go with them as far as Venice.
He decided he would go from Paris to Jerusalem overland. He thinks he was probably the first person to do this after World War II because when he was in Paris he could not get a visa to Yugoslavia, but when he got to Rome, he could. The Yugoslavs showed him how to follow chalk lines to get through mine fields to the Greek border. He made it overland all the way to Ramallah where he would be teaching. He taught that year in Ramallah and then came back. The Korean War began when he was in Paris that summer. Because Dr. Leonard had not served for two years in World War II, he was drafted...He was planning on teaching another year in Ramallah, then travel to Kashmir to teach a year in India and then travel to Japan to again teach at a Quaker School there. He loved to travel and this was the way he could afford to see the world deeply and not flip through, like a tourist. But he had to go back because of his draft case in 1951. In Easter time in 1951 in Ramallah, he had gone to Amman and bought a small motorcycle and drove it to Petra, which he then drove to Haifa and had shipped back to America when he had to return home to fight the draft case. After three years, he finally won conscientious objector status. He spent a short time in jail because of mistakes in his case but was studying Arabic and Islam at the Kennedy School Hartford Seminary. He then applied to go back and teach in Ramallah but was instead put in charge of Quaker work in Ramallah. By that time, he spoke the colloquial language quite well and in ’57 he met and married a Palestinian woman living in Beirut and brought her back to the States. They then went to Harvard so Dr. Leonard could work on his PhD.
Because Dr. Leonard was a teacher, he never made money. He did work for UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees as the Assistant to the Director of Education. After he finished his doctorate, he worked as an advisor for UNRWA from ’82 to ’86 and spent one year with the UNDP in Jerusalem. After that, he stayed on in Ramallah and started a program to teach teachers how to teach discussion-based education partly funded by a Fulbright and partly from other sources. When he finally spent all of his money, he quit and came home in 1996. He has a program now with the Ministry of Education in Jordan and has helped institute one hour of open-ended discussion in all the schools in Jordan from the 6th to the 10th grade which is a project he’s still working on.
Dr. Leonard’s daughter convinced him to come back to the States in 1996 because she and her husband were moving to England with his grandson and she wanted him to look after her house in Cleveland Park. Dr. Leonard then decided to study Shakespearean acting with the Washington Shakespeare Theater but he’s not good at remembering the exact words. He did that for a few years. He was staying with a friend in New York in 2004 when the US got into the Iraq War. Dr. Leonard was angry and decided to run for Congress. His district in east Tennessee has voted Republican since the Civil War. He won the democratic nomination, receiving more votes than all other democrats on the ticket combined. He also got a higher percentage of votes than any democrat had gotten in 100 years—30%. When he went to run, the National Guard in east Tennessee just received orders to go to Iraq. As a conscientious objector in a state that is known for volunteering for wars, Dr. Leonard was in deep trouble with the veterans. He called the Executive Officer of the National Guard and offered his services to provide background information to those going to Iraq. He gave three two-hour lectures to each of 8 units in east Tennessee. In spring 2005, Dr. Leonard went to Iraq for three weeks with a Christian peace maker team without guard or armor. He was then embedded as a journalist with the Tennessee National Guard in Iraq. At that time, his unit was the only one that had recruited, trained and left Iraqis in their place because they knew how to deal with Iraqis and because the average age was 42 and not 22 like the soldiers. Dr. Leonard believes that going into Iraq was one of the biggest mistakes that America ever made, but even when we went in, we weren’t very smart. He says we only had 12 people in the army who knew Arabic, we’ve used 6,500 Kurds as interpreters, and of the 45 interpreters in his unit 35/40 didn’t have better than third grade English. He was surprised that more people weren’t killed. He says that the British had ruled Iraq from the air, with bribes to the Sunni sheiks and with intelligence and he wonders why America didn’t do that too. He says that the reason we stopped fighting so much during the surge, when we added extra troops, wasn’t because of the 35,000 troops but because we finally starting bribing the sheiks. He says we would have saved thousands of lives if we had been smart enough to use “subsidies” or bribes since the beginning. He says that anybody with a SAIS intelligence could have told you that.
Now, Dr. Leonard continues to travel to Jordan to promote discussion-based education. He suffered for a year from pain in his leg and hip, but a Lebanese shi’ah surgeon operated on him at Johns Hopkins on January 21 and he feels absolutely no pain. He’s going back around the world now like he’s always done.
Dr. Leonard would advise current students at SAIS that learning a language and becoming an expert on a country is not enough—they need to have a specialty. There are many, many people in these countries that know the language and culture, so it’s not enough. He’d also advise not to just learn the language but to learn the culture as well. Afief Tenous (sp?) taught him the culture of the Middle East when he was at SAIS. He took them to a Middle East restaurant near Foggy Bottom, taught them the different foods and how they were made. He was a Cornell PhD. Dr. Leonard’s Hartford degree was a joint degree with Syracuse in Literacy Journalism because he was interested in doing literacy work with the Arabs at that time. At Syracuse, he met people who had known Afief at Cornell. In Beirut, he met Afief’s sister who was married to an Iraqi who wrote the first book on Arab education. American University Beirut (AUB) was started by idealist New Englanders who gave their lives to teach the very best liberal arts education to empower people to think. Dr. Leonard says this education transformed the Middle East. All outstanding leaders up until the ‘70s and ‘80s were AUB graduates.
In addition to learning the language, students need to learn the culture. And when you go there, Dr. Leonard suggests not associating with the rich diplomats but getting to know people in the youth, labor and women’s movements. This is the problem in Egypt and Libya according to Dr. Leonard. Nobody knows what the youth are thinking even though they are a majority of the population and nobody predicted what would happen in Egypt. Dr. Leonard believes it’s wonderful provided they can follow through but so far we have not seen much leadership. One of the big differences that Dr. Leonard thinks people at SAIS should know is that for 300 years we’ve been part of the Western emphasis on individualism, individual identity but the rest of the world, especially the Middle East, values group identity more than individual identity. That’s how people can become suicide bombers because it’s about your family’s honor and prestige.
Dr. Leonard says that the most interesting thing happening in Egypt now is that it wasn’t the Muslim Brotherhood or any right-wing fanatical group that initiated the events in Tahrir Square.
Dr. Leonard says what was happening in Egypt was fascinating but also frightening because it was composed of sound bites. Egypt has 3 times the population they can afford and 1/5 the jobs they need and that cannot be solved by one leader. Dr. Leonard has a hard time keeping out of politics and keeping out of analyzing because of his years at SAIS. He says Washington is an amazing place for students and he says the Friday evening get-togethers in the summertime are a very important part of SAIS. Students will run into SAIS people wherever they go. Even Dr. Leonard, who was just in the fifth class, was running into people all the time who had been to SAIS or who had studied Arabic with him at Harvard and Oxford. He also says that language is a tool but also the way in. And you have to be the type of person who is willing to try to understand other people. In fall of 2009, Dr. Leonard was in the Middle East and he stayed in 10 different homes with 7 different religious groups and in every one of those homes he was “Uncle Gra’ham”. Being accepted enough to be criticized is one of his greatest accomplishments. He learned by being part of the community. The Quakers had been in Ramallah for nearly 100 years but he was first one to break convention of being addressed by his full name and was just called by his first name. Dr. Leonard also suggests that if students are going to work anywhere that was formally part of the Ottoman Empire, they need to understand the Millet System. He explains that the Turks took over from the Ottomans a system that allowed each religious community to have its own laws and court for marriage, inheritance and divorce and any other crime committed within the community. In the former Ottoman Empire, these communities have remained separated. When asked the main difference between Sunnis and Shi’ites, Dr. Leonard says theologically there is very little difference but the communities have 500 years of history hating each other and killing each other. It’s important, says Dr. Leonard, to understand history. He also says that in the Arab world, Arabic has no past, present or future—just completed action or uncompleted action. He explains that all the past is rumpled up together—people are still worried about the Crusades. So when Bush made a remark about the US crusade in Iraq, the Middle East was ignited with hatred for him. Dr. Leonard focused a few days on history in his training with trainers in Jordan. He teaches them how to do a timeline because they have no timeline in their head and don’t know if Mohammad or Napoleon came first. He says it’s crucial to understand the different way people look at things.
Dr. Leonard married a Palestinian who was a superb cook. Dr. Leonard also found that his Southern mentality translated well in the Middle East in that he was taught to understand people based on their relationships to other people (knowing who married whom and who was related to whom). Dr. Leonard now knows the people and the clans in Ramallah. Dr. Leonard knows Hannah Ashwari, the Palestinian spokesperson. She had a cousin who came from America to get married. At the reception the night before the wedding, the cousin said this woman kept calling her auntie and asked Hannah what the relationship was. Hannah did not know but said to ask Gra’ham (Dr. Leonard) and he did in fact figure out the relationship which is evidence of how well he knows some of the families in Ramallah.
Dr. Leonard kept up with Ann SeeleDelaselatr (sp). She became undersecretary of the OECD. Dr. Leonard says she’s a very brilliant economist. She had the idea of the Club of the Sahel in which she coordinated across all sectors. She is now retired and lives in Paris. She has three happily married daughters and lots of grandchildren. She lives in a chateau now and has given over her big home. Paula Pepke (sp), Nitze’s niece who was named for him, was one of Dr. Leonard’s classmates in 1949. Her father founded the Aspen Institute in Colorado and was a University of Chicago graduate like Nitze. Nitze is Paula’s father’s brother-in-law. There were only six girls in his class. He ran into Marianne Smith in Belgrade when getting a visa in Yugoslavia. Many SAIS alumni work for the CIA, he says. The CIA began in the fall ’48 or spring of ’49, so there were many SAIS graduates in the agency. Dr. Leonard also recalls a fellow from the Philippines who was very interested in Genevieve Collins but she was not interested in him. One of their classmates graduated from Harvard from a well-to-do Boston family and he was the socialist in residence. The classmate then went on to start a newspaper in Dartmouth, married a Swiss socialite, got divorced, married one of the daughters of Sir Harry Oakes in the Bahamas and became a rich banker in the Bahamas. One of Dr. Leonard’s most interesting classmates, Rosenhower, teaches at George Washington and had written a book about Eleanor Roosevelt before he came to SAIS. He also describes a classmate, Barrel, who is now a bureaucrat but in Dr. Leonard’s opinion, had a very bureaucratic mind. Dr. Leonard remembers his filing system and being awed by it. Dr. Leonard also remembers a brilliant classmate from California who eventually burned out. Dr. Leonard suspects that Brigadier General James Hayworth Dunn really did work for British intelligence but got kicked out and that’s why he went into academia. Hayworth Dunn’s son spoke about four languages and Hayworth Dunn told them it’s very easy for a child to learn many languages provided each person who speaks to the child only speaks that language. Dr. Leonard did his PhD on applied linguistics at Harvard and this one of the things he emphasized. He raised his children to speak only in Arabic and it wasn’t until after his divorce when he moved to England, that his children learned English. He was intent that they learn proper English and not American hillbilly English. When Dr. Leonard ran for Congress in east Tennessee, he was afraid people would consider him a “carpetbagger”, but his family was pioneers and he’s related to a lot of people there and they accepted the fact that he spoke standard American English. They also did not consider him snobbish.
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Keywords
SAIS, University of Tennessee, Mahatma Ghandi, India, Saudi Aramco scholarship, Eddy, William, Colonel, Marsh, Bill, Middle East Institute, Harvard University, Mecdesey, George, Haiti, Lineberger, Paul, Rutledge, Wiley Blount, Point Four Program, Truman, Harry S., Nixon, Richard, Herter, Christian, Gahagan Douglas, Helen, Woods, Rosemary, Unesco, Iraq War, Tennessee National Guard, UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refuge, UNDP, Quaker Schools, Palestine, Ramallah, Lebanon, Beirut, Oxford University, Kirkpatrick, Ann, Dietrich, Marlene, Dunn, James Hayworth, Muslim Brotherhood, al Bennah, Hassan, American University Beirut, Tahrir Square, Ottoman Empire, Millet System, Ashwari, Hannah, OECD, Abassid, Collins, Genevieve, Halpern, Manfred, Culbertson, Joe, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Kennedy School Hartford Seminary, Washington Shakespeare Theater, Pepke, Paula, Aspen Institute