Henry A. Byroade

Brigadier General Henry Alfred Byroade, United States Army (July 24, 1913 – December 31, 1993) of Indiana was a career diplomat who served as Ambassador to Egypt in 1955 and 1956 and later to five other countries, including United States Ambassador to Burma from September 1963 to June 1968, and served as Assistant Secretary of State for Middle East, South Asia and Africa from 1952 to 1955.

A 1937 graduate of West Point, he began as a career Army officer, rising to the temporary rank of Brigadier General in 1946, when he was 32. From 1949 to 1952, the Army lent him to the State Department, and he became chief of its Office of German Affairs. In 1952, he resigned his Army commission and became an Assistant Secretary of State, while still in his 30s. In that post, he received criticism from Israel and the Arab nations for a 1954 declaration in which he told the Israelis, "You should drop the attitude of a conqueror and the conviction that force is the only policy that your neighbors will understand," and told the Arabs, "You should accept this state of Israel as an accomplished fact." He had been Ambassador to Egypt for a more than a year when it was announced that he was being transferred. He was considered a friend of Arab causes but unable, during his Egyptian assignment, to prevent an arms deal between Czechoslovakia and Egypt, or to influence the Egyptian government, run by Gamal Abdel Nasser, in its expanding campaigns against the West. Criticism of his effectiveness in Cairo in the Eisenhower Administration led to his reassignment to South Africa. Emanuel Neumann, chairman of the executive of the Zionist Organization of America urged that he be removed from Cairo, claiming he had been "long an apologist" for the Egyptian government.

He was Ambassador to South Africa from 1956 to 1959; Afghanistan from 1959 to 1962; the Philippines from 1969 to 1973, and Pakistan beginning in 1973. He retired from the Foreign Service in 1977.

References

• Obituary

External links

• http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/po/com/10404.htm
• Papers of Henry A. Byroade, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum
• Oral History Interview with Henry Byroade from the Truman Library