CMES on 11/23/63: A Conversation with Roger Owen

December 6, 2013

Roger Owen, AJ Meyer Professor of Middle Eastern Studies Emeritus, happened to be visiting the Center for Middle Eastern Studies on November 23, 1963, and learned of President Kennedy’s assassination from AJ Meyer. We spoke with Professor Owen on the fifty year anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination about his memories of that day and his visit, and how he ended up back at CMES thirty years later.

Why did you visit Harvard that day?

I was coming to Harvard on the 23rd of November, 1963 in order to talk to two important people at the old Center for Middle Eastern Studies—the director, Sir Hamilton Gibb, and his adjutant, AJ Meyer—in order to discuss my future. Hamilton Gibb was the founder of modern Middle East Studies at Harvard and in various other places, and AJ Meyer was his adjutant, who was extremely good at raising money. He was also the entertaining side of the Center—Gibb was a rather austere fellow, but AJ took everybody out to dinner and entertained them and was a general enthusiast for Middle East Studies.

I was a graduate student in Middle East Studies and I was looking for ideas about jobs or fellowships. I was a student at Oxford but I was spending a year at Columbia working with Charles Issawi between ’63 and ’64. So I came up from New York by bus on that particular day.

Where were you when Kennedy was shot?

The actual event happened while I was on the bus. It hadn’t happened when I left New York, but it had happened when I arrived here because it took about four hours on the bus. The Center for Middle Eastern Studies was located in Dunster Street, which still exists, on the far side of Massachusetts Avenue by Holyoke Center, and it goes down towards the river, towards Eliot House. I’m not certain where the bus dropped me, but for some reason I crossed the Yard to get to Dunster Street. And I was aware that something was going on: the bell was tolling in the chapel, and large numbers of people were congregated in the Yard, just looking very sad, but I didn’t know anybody at that stage, so I didn’t know what to do.

So how did you find out?

When I got to Dunster Street, I said to AJ Meyer, who was the first person I met, “What’s going on?” and he said “Don’t you know? The president’s been shot.” It was only two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when WWIII had been narrowly avoided by JFK, and the first thing we thought of was that Kruschev might think, “This is the moment to attack America, because nobody’s in charge.” It seemed reasonable to suppose that if the Russians did wish to cripple America, that was the moment.
So we had this moment of speculation and then I went to talk to Sir Hamilton Gibb. We didn’t talk about Kennedy at all—Sir Hamilton Gibb was a rather rarified professor—we talked about Arabic and how difficult it was.

And then you went back to New York?

Yes, then I disentangled myself from that, got back on the bus, and went back to New York  and then read the paper, and the pictures began to come out, Jackie and the motorcade. Nobody knew what to make of anything at that stage, people were just in total shock.

People had invested such hopes in him. As he says in one of his speeches he was the first president who had been born in the twentieth century. It was a new generation; there was hope. The previous president, Eisenhower, had been very old and seemed to represent the past, and Kennedy came in with all his young advisors and plans, and so it was as though hope had been cut off too I think. And he was also Catholic and so he represented a moment in American life when not the usual kinds of people were becoming president. So it seemed part of America’s expansiveness, the dream, that he should have become president.  

Had you met Hamilton Gibb before that day?

No, and it was the only time I met him. He said this kind of thing that elderly persons sometimes say, “I’ve been studying Arabic for forty years and I still don’t know it.” At the time I thought this was the most off-putting thing you could say to anybody—what on earth do you say? Basically he’s telling me, “It’s absolutely no point, young man, studying Arabic, because you will never learn it.” But I think now, that actually it did reflect that knowing Arabic for him, of course, was not knowing Arabic so that I could read a newspaper. It was actually understanding a very complicated language, so he was talking about something quite different.

Would you say that to someone now?

I always say it’s difficult, but I think the way Professor Granara teaches it here is wonderful. It is very difficult and you’re going to have to work hard and be here at 8:oo every day but if you persevere, the rewards are set out. It’s not knowing Arabic; it’s being able to use it and read it and speak it and go to the Middle East and be more or less understood.

You ended up teaching at Oxford for nearly thirty years after that. How did you end up back at Harvard?

It wasn’t until 1993 that I came here. Much happened in the Center and it had lost its way after Hamilton Gibb had his stroke in ’64 or ’65, and then finally Roy Mottahedeh was brought back from Princeton to start up the Center again with Bill Graham. They needed an economist and people who did social sciences, and meanwhile AJ Meyer had died, of cancer, in about ’84 or ’85. His friends had got together to raise money in his name, and it was a good opportunity to get somebody who could do social sciences and not just history.


—Interview by Johanna Bodnyk