Looking for the US ambassador in Lebanon at Columbia Archives

The word archives always look boring and out of date in my head. Where I come from, the word — pronounced almost the same in Arabic — refers to old, unimportant forgotten data that no one cares about. But while taking a class on researching and writing history, archives seemed suddenly interesting, mysterious and promising.

My first attempt at using them underlined the “mysterious” part.

I was looking for any information dating back to the fifties and sixties in Syria, where I grew up. I looked up the names of the American ambassadors in the Damascus in those decades from the State Department website.

Usually State Department officials leave their private papers and correspondence to the Library of Congress or to public libraries in the states from which they originally came. Most of those papers and documents are declassified two or three decades after the ambassador’s tour of duty. Some are still classified even after five decades. A case in the point is the seven boxes of papers from Richard W. Murphy, who was the U.S. ambassador in Damascus from 1974 until 1978, when Syria restored its relations with the United States. Six boxes are open to the in Library of Congress archives, while one box is still secret.

I was planning to go to Washington, DC to check the archives at the Library of Congress or to make a day trip to the Princeton University library, which holds the private papers of James Keeley, who was the first U.S. ambassador to be expelled from Syria, after the Syrian government found that the United States was helping to stage a coup in 1957. But such short travels were not possible this week because I had to submit the first full draft of my thesis on Monday and it’s the longest story I have ever written.

So I decided to keep my first archive trip close to home — the oral history archives on the sixth floor of Columbia University’s Butler Library. I found in the online catalogue that there is an interview with Armin H. Meyer, US ambassador in Lebanon from 1965 until 1970, done by Columbia University.

I registered online to go in person the next day, Friday. The next morning, at 9:30, I was at the glass door of the rare documents and oral history archive. The archive assistant told me that I had to put all my belongings in a wooden closet next to the glass gate. I left my stuff in closet 17 and went back to request the interview transcript. I had to wait for the documents in the reading room to be brought by another young archivist.

It was amazing just to sit there. I saw a student taking very old, yellow papers out of a gray, slim box. Most of the papers were handwritten. I was so excited to see the papers I’d requested that I forgot for some minutes that I was waiting for an oral history interview, and that it wouldn’t look like this. While waiting, I saw the archivist arranging six pieces of dark gray foam to make a book stand for an old woman to use while flipping through a very old notebook.

Researchers can take photos of the documents to read them later. The archive is only open on Mondays and Fridays, so taking photos of the content seemed a pragmatic solution.

After half an hour, an archivist came and told me that the interview was not on the shelf, contrary to what the archive website said. He would have to put in a request to deliver it from an off-site repository if it could be located.

In the meantime, he offered to bring me other documents on Iranian-American relations in the fifties. This was the topic of the Meyer interview, he said. So it probably does not have not what I was looking for — material on Lebanon, Syria, and the Six Day War with Israel in 1967. I was still interested in having a look at it, but not in documents about Iranian-American ties 60 years ago — certainly not in poring over them 48 hours before my thesis deadline.

The archivist told me that he would send me an email once they find the interview I’d requested. I left, a bit disappointed but hoping to find more in other archives.

I later received an email that the interview would be brought on site on Monday and that it would be available for two weeks for me to look in it.

Then I will find it out if it solves any mysteries for me.