Nolte and his wife lived in
Beirut, Lebanon, from 1951 until 1957 thanks to a grant from the
Institute of Current World Affairs. He also taught at
Dartmouth College in the late 1950s before serving as a Middle East specialist for the American Universities Field Staff. He wrote numerous articles on the Middle East in addition to this book.
U.S. President Lyndon Johnson named Nolte as the U.S.
ambassador to Egypt in 1967 because of his expertise in Middle Eastern affairs. He arrived in Cairo on May 21, 1967. However, the
Six-Day War broke out just two hours before Nolte was due to present his diplomatic
credentials to
Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser on June 5, 1967. Nolte instead spent his first week in
Cairo, Egypt, helping to arrange passage home for Americans stranded in Egypt by the war. Nasser had refused to meet with Nolte because the United States had allied with
Israel during the war. He was expelled from Egypt on June 10, 1967, just one day before the
ceasefire which halted the war.
The Washington Post later called Nolte's short three week term as ambassador "one of the shortest and most hectic diplomatic careers on record." Nolte reportedly expected to be offered another
ambassadorship somewhere in the Middle East, but
U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk refused to offer Nolte another position because he viewed Nolte as an
Arabist. Ironically, Nolte supported Nasser specifically and the Arab side of the conflict with Israel in general by producing diplomatic cables that argued the U.S. should ignore its pledge to Israel not to allow Egypt to cut off the Sinai Peninsula via the Straits of Tiran to Israeli vessels. According to Benjamin Foldy, when Egyptian officials suddenly agreed to meet with the U.S. and opened up an official embassy channel to get their demands to Washington, Nolte held talks with Egyptian government representatives on providing a "pro-Arab" response from Washington (providing recognition of the Egypt-Syrian
United Arab Republic, declaring Israel to be the aggressor in the conflict, and drafting a UN Security Council resolution to force Israel to withdraw from any territories they had won in the conflict) to the disastrous results for Cairo as Egyptian forces were routed by Israelis. However, his recommendations to the State Department were completely ignored, as the incompetent work of Arabist diplomats before the war had left the
Lyndon Johnson administration uninterested in listening to any of their suggestions. Nolte served as the chairman of the
American Geographical Society from 1988 to 1996. The American Geographical Society, founded in 1851, provides
geographic consulting to American foreign
policymakers. Nolte led the Society's 1978 negotiations with the
University of Wisconsin–Madison, when the AGS transferred ownership of its
maps and
artifacts to the school. He also served as a member of a number of other organizations concerned with international relations. Nolte served on the
board of directors and as a past president of the
Near East Foundation. He was also a member of the
National Geographic Society, the
Council on Foreign Relations, the
Arctic Institute of North America and the
Alicia Patterson Foundation. He also became an active board member of the National Aphasia Association after his wife, Jeanne McQuarrie Nolte, suffered a stroke and lost her ability to speak. Nolte and 16 other former American
diplomats wrote a letter to President
George W. Bush in May 2004 to urge the President's administration to change its
foreign policy in the Middle East. The letter criticized the
George W. Bush administration for placing U.S.
troops, diplomats and civilians "in an untenable and even dangerous position." ==Death==