The Foreign Service Journal, April 2011

66 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / A P R I L 2 0 1 1 One or two other states formed such commissions, and in 1948 there was a lively grassroots exchange going on between them and various World Affairs Councils that were also spring- ing up. In spite of an enthusiastic ini- tial response in Kansas, however, the state commission idea did not gather momentum, and the organization folded a year or so after Mr. Parker left it in January 1949 to enter the Foreign Service. During a 31-year Foreign Service career, Mr. Parker served in the entire gamut of consular and diplomatic jobs, from bottom to top, in assignments to Sydney, Jerusalem, Beirut, Amman, Cairo, Rabat and Algiers. He also served on various country desks in the Department of State for a total of eight years and spent one year as a mid-career fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and Interna- tional Affairs at Princeton (1964- 1965). Mr. Parker spent two years in Ara- bic language and area studies and was the first non-native speaker to attain a grade of 4/4 (meaning fluency in both the spoken and written language) in the test administered by the Depart- ment of State’s Foreign Service Insti- tute in 1961. In 1975 Mr. Parker was appointed ambassador to Algeria by President Gerald Ford. He then served as am- bassador to Lebanon (1977-1978) and to Morocco (1978-1979) during the Carter administration. His last gov- ernment post was as faculty adviser at the Air University at Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala. In 1980 Ambassador Parker retired from the Foreign Service to accept the position of Diplomat-in-Residence at the University of Virginia in Char- lottesville, where he spent two years teaching courses in the modern diplo- matic history of the Middle East. At the same time he became editor of the Middle East Journal , a peer-review journal dealing with the modern Mid- dle East. In 1982 he returned to Washington and continued at the Mid- dle East Journal until 1987. In 1983 Amb. Parker served as consultant to the U.S. Businessmen’s Commission on Reconstruction in Lebanon (headed by Lewis Preston of Morgan Bank). He took on added re- sponsibility in 1986 for three years as founding president of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, an alumni organization devoted to im- proving the Foreign Service Institute and promoting the study of diplomatic history. From 1989 to 1990 Amb. Parker was a fellow at the Smithsonian’s Woodrow Wilson International Cen- ter for Scholars, where he began work on a study of miscalculation in foreign affairs. The fruit of this year was his book The Politics of Miscalculation in the Middle East (Indiana University Press, 1993). Choice , the librarians’ journal, picked it as an outstanding ac- ademic title of the year, saying: “This is the best book to deal with the diplo- matic history of these three wars. It is written in clear, lucid and undiplo- matic language. This is a great achievement.” In the fall of 1990, Amb. Parker was the John Adams Fulbright Fellow in London, speaking at 16 British uni- versities, including Oxford and Cam- bridge, as well as on the BBC and in other public fora on the situation in the Middle East on the eve of the Gulf War. For the 1992-1993 academic year, he was the Stephen Scarff Dis- tinguished Visiting Professor at Law- rence University in Appleton, Wisc., teaching courses on the Middle East. And in the spring of 1994, he helped teach a graduate course on conflict resolution at The Johns Hopkins Uni- versity School of Advanced Interna- tional Studies. In both 1992 and 1998, Amb. Parker organized and directed ground- breaking conferences on the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israel wars, grouping re- tired officials from all sides to discuss their versions of what led to those crises and how their governments re- acted to them. The results were pub- lished by the University Press of Florida in two volumes: The Six-Day War, a Retrospective (1996) and The October War, a Retrospective (2001). Meanwhile, Amb. Parker was or- ganizing and raising money for a mon- ument to Joel Barlow, his predecessor at Algiers 180 years before. That me- morial was dedicated in 1998 in the graveyard at Zarnowiec, the Polish vil- lage where Barlow died in 1812 on his way back to Paris from an aborted meeting with Napoleon at Vilna. Amb. Parker also served briefly as in- terim president of the Middle East In- stitute and, again, as editor of the Middle East Journal in the mid-1990s. Beginning in 1998, he concentrated on a study of U.S. relations with the states of North Africa during the pe- riod 1785 to 1830, producing a book ti- tled Uncle Sam in Barbary: A Diplo- matic History (University Press of Florida, 2004). The work recounts America’s first international hostage crisis, when North African pirates cap- tured two American ships off the coast of Portugal in 1785. In 2004, the American Academy of Diplomacy awarded him the C. Douglas Dillon Prize for the year’s best work on Amer- ican diplomatic practice. Amb. Parker was a prolific writer I N M E M O R Y