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Farewell to Ambassador Hume Horan
By C.F. Jones and Henry E. Mattox
We recently lost another outstanding Foreign Service professional and Arabist, Hume Horan, who was felled by cancer at a relatively young age. He died at Falls Church, Virginia, on July 22, not long after the Department of State decorated him for his work, coming out of retirement, with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. There in Iraq he had begun his career as a diplomat forty-four years earlier.
A native Washingtonian, Horan was the son of an Iranian diplomat who later became his country's foreign minister; his mother was from a prominent Washington family. His parents divorced when Horan was an infant and he was reared as the son of an American newsman named Horan. After service in the U. S. army, the young Hume finished undergraduate studies at Harvard and went on to earn a master's degree at that university. After passing the Foreign Service examination, Arabic training followed at the Foreign Service Institute at Beirut, Lebanon, and assignment to the U. S. embassy at Baghdad. Later he went on to augment his command of Arabic in Cyrenaica at a time and place that required a deep knowledge of the language. Later he served in increasingly responsible embassy positions in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan (as ambassador), and Saudi Arabia again, this time as ambassador.
In 1988, early in his second tour at Riyadh, as so often happens in government service, exigencies and circumstances overrode competence: According to a recent account in the Washington Post dated July 25, the Department of State instructed him, as U. S. ambassador, to protest officially the Saudi purchase of ballistic missiles from China. The consequence, as he had anticipated, was a request by the officially irate Saudis for his recall.
That effectively ended his career as an ambassador in the Middle East. Off he went as ambassador in the Ivory Coast, followed by Washington assignments until his retirement in 1998. A year ago, in 2003, he opted to return to temporary duty in Iraq.
We at this journal are proud to have published two brief accounts of segments of his career that Ambassador Horan made available to us, one on his service in Jordan and the other, an article paying his respects to the late Ambassador L. Dean Brown. We regret that he never had the opportunity to complete for American Diplomacy a promised personal report of his recent service in Iraq.
His colleagues, friends, and admirers at American Diplomacy take this opportunity to express their condolences and respect to his wife, Lori, and his family. They can take some consolation, we believe, in his distinguished career, marked intellect, and lasting dedication.
July 31, 2004