Richard H. Curtiss Biography

Washington Report Executive Editor Richard H. Curtiss enlisted in the U.S. Army in World War II, and served as a military correspondent in Berlin, Germany after the war. After earning a B.A. in journalism from the University of Southern California and work on newspapers and for United Press in California, he served as a career foreign service officer with the Department of State and the U.S. Information Agency in Djakarta, Bonn, Stuttgart, Ankara, Beirut (three times), Baghdad, Damascus and Rhodes, Greece, where he headed the Arabic Service of the Voice of America, and in various positions in Washington DC.

During his U.S. government career he received the U.S. Information Agency's Superior Honor Award for his service as Embassy Counselor for Public Affairs in Lebanon during the civil war there, and the Edward R. Murrow award for excellence in Public Diplomacy, U.S.I.A.'s highest professional recognition.

Following his retirement from the U.S. Foreign Service in 1980, Mr. Curtiss was a co-founder of the American Arab Affairs Council (now the Middle East Policy Council) in 1981 and the Council for the National Interest in 1984, remaining on the initial board of directors of each of those organizations for one year. Since he co-founded the American Educational Trust in 1982, its magazine, the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, has received an award from the National Association of Arab-Americans in 1993.

For his work as its executive editor, Mr. Curtiss received awards from the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) in 1992, from the Council for the National Interest (CNI) and Partners for Peace in 1993, from the United Muslims of America and the Islamic Association for Palestine in North America in 1994 and from the Jerusalem Fund for Education and Community Development and the Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine in 1995.

Mr. Curtiss has published three books on U.S.-Middle East relations. The first, A Changing Image: American Perceptions of the Arab-Israeli Dispute, was in 1982 and commended for its objectivity by all three then-living ex-Presidents of the United States, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter. An updated second edition was published in 1986.

His second book is Stealth PACs: Lobbying Congress for Control of U.S. Middle East Policy. The first three editions were published in 1990, 1991 and 1992. A fourth, updated edition was published in 1997.

The third, co-edited with with Washington Report Managing Editor Janet MacMahon, is Seeing the Light: Personal Encounters With the Middle East and Islam, an anthology of personal accounts in which individuals describe how they woke up to the facts on Israel-Palestine.