Richard W. Murphy, a diplomat whose colorful career included serving as ambassador to three Arab countries and as an assistant secretary of state in the 1980s — when he was the top Mideast expert in the State Department and helped end a long civil war in Lebanon — died in Manhattan on Nov. 22. He was 95.
His son, Richard M. Murphy, confirmed his death, at a hospital.
Early in Mr. Murphy’s career, he observed the military forces of Israel, Egypt, France and Britain entangled in the 1956 Suez Crisis and concluded that a Mideast specialist would never lack for good postings or excitement. Soon after, he began to learn Arabic.
Mr. Murphy was among the last of a post-World War II generation of State Department officials known as Arabists — experts steeped in the language, cultures and eternally shifting politics of the Middle East.
As assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs from 1983 to 1989, Mr. Murphy relished hopping on a plane to conduct diplomacy in one of the foreign capitals he had come to know intimately. “Where’s Murphy?” was an inside joke at State Department press briefings referring to his frequent, often secretive travel.
Conversant in Arabic and French, Mr. Murphy mentored a number of future Mideast experts, including William J. Burns, the current director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
“With a wry sense of humor and infinite patience, he taught me and a whole generation of diplomats the best in tradecraft and integrity,” Mr. Burns said in an email.
“Then, as now, the Middle East was endlessly challenging for American policymakers,” he continued. “Dick helped end a bloody civil war in Lebanon. He worked tirelessly to find a pathway toward peace for Israelis and Palestinians, with keen appreciation for the human dimension of the conflict. And he built excellent relationships in the Gulf, as the threat from revolutionary Iran grew.”
Mr. Murphy was a political officer in Syria and Saudi Arabia before serving as ambassador to Mauritania (1971-74), Syria (1974-78), the Philippines (1978-81) and Saudi Arabia (1981-83).
In his 33 years with the foreign service, he met late at night in a Baghdad palace with the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, visited Oman when its capital was a walled city that had only recently stopped locking the gates at night, danced on New Year’s Eve in the Philippines with Imelda Marcos (“She was a performer, and she was tough,” he later said), and flew by helicopter to Beirut from Cyprus, skimming perilously close to the water to avoid detection by anyone interested in downing a U.S. aircraft.
In 1974, Mr. Murphy re-established diplomatic relations with Syria after Damascus had cut ties over American support of Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. He found Hafez al-Assad, the Syrian president, accessible and in possession of a photographic memory.
His impression of Saddam Hussein, to whom he delivered a letter from President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, was far less pleasant. He remembered the Iraqi as stiff and curt.
“America treats the Third World like an Iraqi peasant treats his new wife,” Mr. Murphy recalled Mr. Hussein telling him, in an oral history recorded by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training in 2017 and 2018. “The Iraqi peasant feeds his new wife three days of bread and honey, and then it’s off to the fields for life.”
As an assistant secretary of state, Mr. Murphy is credited with helping to broker the end of a 15-year civil war in Lebanon, through a treaty signed in Taif, Saudi Arabia, seven months after he retired. His tenure coincided with the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Beirut, after the 1983 bombing of Marine barracks there, and with the crisis over American hostages held by Islamist militants in Lebanon.
“The pace was intense during those six years,” Mr. Murphy recalled in the oral history. “Crises were endless.”
He also suggested in those interviews that he was a distant bystander to the illegal arms sales to Iran by senior Reagan administration officials, intended to help free hostages in Lebanon and to finance anti-Communist rebels in Nicaragua — the scandal known as Iran-contra, exposed in 1986.
An independent counsel investigation of the affair in the 1990s described Mr. Murphy as one of a handful of senior officials at the State Department with “significant contemporaneous knowledge” of the arms sales, but it did not identify him as a participant in the deals, which were run out of the White House.
In “The Arabists” (1993), a history of Arabic-speaking Americans’ romance with the Levant, the author, Robert D. Kaplan, portrayed State Department Arabists in the 1950s and ’60s as anti-Zionist and sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians. Mr. Murphy told the author that the term had become “a pejorative for he who intellectually sleeps with Arabs.”
Mr. Murphy, a member of a later generation, was identified in the book as a new breed of Arabist — a diplomat who, after his first visit to Israel in 1959, he told the author, concluded that “taking sides was really a stupid thing to do.”
In his oral history, Mr. Murphy said that by the 1980s, American policy was strongly pro-Israel and the term Arabist no longer suggested naïveté about the region. By then, he said, “you didn’t hear the accusation that to be an Arabist was to be an enemy of the Jew, to be blind to the suffering of the Jews and addicted to wearing gold cuff links shaped like miniature daggers of Arab design.”
Richard William Murphy was born on July 29, 1929, in Manchester, N.H., where his father, John D. Murphy, managed a shoe company. When he was 7, the family moved to Wellesley, Mass., where his mother, Jane (Diehl) Murphy, was drawn into her family’s lumber and fuel oil business, eventually becoming the company’s president.
During World War II, with his father in the military, Dick was sent to board at Phillips Exeter Academy, in Exeter, N.H. He went on to Harvard, graduating in 1951 with a B.A. in British history and literature. He received a fellowship to study at Emmanuel College at Cambridge, earning an M.A. in anthropology in 1953.
After serving in the Army from 1953 to 1955, he joined the diplomatic corps in 1955. The same year, he married Anne H. Cook, a Radcliffe graduate; the couple had met as undergraduates. Her curiosity about the world and her sense of adventure matched his own: In 1971, when Mr. Murphy was offered his first ambassadorship, in Mauritania, a backwater where sandstorms would regularly shut down cable communications with Washington, the two talked it over. Both said, “Why not?”
In addition to their son, Ms. Murphy survives him, along with their daughters, Katherine McClintic and Elizabeth Evans, and seven grandchildren.
After retiring from the foreign service in 1989, Mr. Murphy joined the Council on Foreign Relations in New York as a senior fellow for the Middle East. He worked there for 15 years and was a go-to commentator for the news media about the region.
“Whenever something unspeakable would happen in Lebanon or wherever,” his son said, “he’d go on TV. And he loved that. It was like being pulled back into action.”
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