April 6, 2004—Mideast expert and former ambassador Richard W. Murphy will give a talk Thursday, April 15, at 4:30 p.m. at Oberlin College under the auspices of the Richard R. Hallock Foundation and the department of politics. The free, public address will be held in the Hallock Auditorium of the Lewis Center for Environmental Studies, 122 Elm St.

Murphy has followed near eastern developments for over 40 years, spending 34 of them as a career foreign service officer. He is a frequent commentator for NPR, CNN and the BBC and contributor to The New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, The International Herald Tribune and the Christian Science Monitor.

He holds bachelor of arts degrees from Harvard and Cambridge universities. After service in the U.S. Army he joined the foreign service of the State Department and from 1955-68 served in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe); Beirut, Lebanon; Aleppo, Syria; Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; and Amman, Jordan. He spent 1968-71 in Washington, D.C., as country director for the Arabian Peninsula and director of personnel for the Near Eastern Bureau.

In 1971 President Richard Nixon nominated Murphy as ambassador to Mauritania, and in 1974 he became ambassador to Syria. He then served as ambassador to the Philippines and Saudi Arabia. From 1983-89 he served as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs and was particularly active in the Israeli-Arab peace process. In 1985 he was named career ambassador, a title held by only five serving officers at any given time.

Retiring from government service in 1989, Murphy joined the Council on Foreign Relations in New York as the Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for the Middle East and continues to visit that region several times a year. He has received the President's distinguished service award three times and the State Department's superior honor award twice. 

He is a trustee of the American University of Beirut, on the Board of the Near East Foundation, and former Chairman of the Middle East Institute in Washington. He holds honorary doctorates from New England College and Baltimore Hebrew University. 

Richard R. Hallock Foundation
Col. Richard R. Hallock, OC '41, was a much-decorated paratrooper in World War II, personal aide for Intelligence to Gen. Lucius D. Clay in Berlin after the War, and the youngest major to be a Battalion Commander in Korea. A Master Parachutist, he won 27 decorations including a Silver Star, five Bronze Stars, and the Legion of Merit. In his long subsequent career in the Pentagon he was renowned for pursuing the interests of America's soldiers, sometimes in the teeth of vigorous bureaucratic opposition.

Upon leaving active service, Col. Hallock became an advisor to Defense Secretary James Schlesinger and consulted on political-military affairs, particularly in the Middle East. He and his wife, Mim Hallock '41, a former U.S. Information Agency officer, retired to Kendal at Oberlin, where Col. Hallock, in consultation with faculty, developed the idea for a class and lecture series for Oberlin students that would bring practitioners of military and diplomatic affairs to campus to address the changing nature of national security in the new century.