Abstract
On Valentine’s Day, 1945, having flown directly from his final meeting with Churchill and Stalin at Yalta, President Roosevelt met with the Saudi king Abdul Aziz al Saud aboard the USS Quincy on Egypt’s Great Bitter Lake. Ibn Saud and his kingdom fascinated Roosevelt and he had prepared thoroughly for the meeting. “[The king] has never been outside Arabia,” a briefing paper explained. His passions included “women, prayer and perfume,” and the president learned that the king might offer him an Arab wife, as he had to many foreigners.1 In deference to the king’s religious beliefs no one, not even the president, should smoke or drink in his presence. FDR came to know that the king would bring a retinue of at least fifty people, including his personal astrologer and fortuneteller, his official food-taster, ten bodyguards armed with sabers and daggers, and nine servants described in the American briefing papers as “slaves.” The American minister to Saudi Arabia, Col. William Eddy, urged Saudi officials to leave behind the king’s personal harem.2
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Notes
William A. Eddy, FDR Meets Ibn Saud (New York: American Friends of the Middle East, 1954), 14–16.
Martin Woollacott, After Suez: Adrift in the American Century (Washington: I.B. Tauris, 2006).
Adeed Dawisha, Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Cohen and Kolinsky, Demise of the British Empire in the Middle East.
Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004);
Juan Cole, Engaging the Muslim World (London: Palgrave, 1999).
Lloyd C. Gardner, Three Kings: The Rise of An American Empire in the Middle East after World War II (New York: New Press, 2009).
A common theme explored in H. W. Brands, Into the Labyrinth: The United States and the Middle East (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994);
Lawrence Freedman, A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East (New York: Public Affairs, 2008);
Peter L. Hahn, Crisis and Crossfire: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945 (Washington: Potomac Books, 2005);
Rashid Khalidi, Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009);
Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 127.
Kylie Baxter and Shahram Akbarzadeh, US Foreign Policy in the Middle East: The Roots of Anti-Americanism (London: Routledge, 2008);
Lloyd C. Gardner, The Long Road to Baghdad (New York: New Press, 2008).
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© 2012 Christopher D. O’Sullivan
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O’Sullivan, C.D. (2012). Conclusion. In: FDR and the End of Empire. The World of the Roosevelts. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137025258_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137025258_9
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