...Storing my souvenirs at the Amawi, I took a bus to our consulate. Its distance from the heart of the Syrian capital impressed me as being symbolic of the distance I felt our officials maintained from the soul of Syria. They were trying hard to do a thorough job of understanding the Arab and fostering good will,m but they were limited by many handicaps: (a) they were Anglo-Saxons from far-off America; (b) they were essentially transients in the land; (c) they counted a great deal on local Syrians for data and interpretation -- and every Syrian had his own axe to grind. Objective reporting is unknown among the highly emotional and partisan Arabs. The Americans I met were extremely friendly and hospitable. But I could not help feeling that officially we were far removed from the realities of Arab life and Arab psychology -- a feeling that I found equally applicable to our legations all over the Middle East.

Our American officials' general anti-Zionist, pro-Arab attitude that I met in the Arab world impressed me as not a conviction arrived at intellectually, but a matter of policy dictated by State Department dogma, resulting among other things from the fact that we had invested enormously in Middle East properties and depended on the good will of the Arab world for forty per cent of our oil. I felt that if substantial deposits were discovered in the Negev our State Department attitude would be modified overnight.