Sam Ruff '38,
diplomat and author

Samuel Ruff's austere Arlington apartment bears the subtle emblems of a life spent traveling the globe. A tiger skin hangs on the wall beside the unembellished desk where he wrote his recent book, Beirut & Baghdad: By An Assignee at the Embassies, 1950-1956. Travel magazines lie on the table; his bookshelves are stuffed with swollen photo albums. Ruff pulls one down and flips through pictures of some of human civilization's earliest and most magnificent remnants. With weathered hands and sharp memory, he paints a colorful picture of his years as an envoy in pre-revolutionary Iraq, a picture that bears little resemblance to the one now ingrained in our national consciousness.

In the idyllic prewar years at Hampden-Sydney, Ruff thought more about foreign history than he did about foreign service. After graduation, like so many of his classmates, he was called to World War II. Serving initially with the 16th Service Squadron in North Africa, he joined the 79th Fighter Group in Naples in 1944. Col. John F. Martin '40 was the 79th commanding officer, and their service together is the only instance known to Ruff where two Hampden-Sydney men were in the same unit in World War II. By the end of the war Ruff had seen action in North Africa, Italy, Corsica, and France.

Returning home, he earned a master's at UVA and taught English literature at Mary Washington College before joining the Foreign Service in 1948. His first post was in Belgian Congo (now Zaire), but he was soon transferred to Munich. Two years later, in 1950, he took a post in Beirut, Lebanon. After World War II, global considerations came to dominate American policy, and the geopolitical implications of the Middle East became a principal concern. As a result, Ruff was witness to watershed diplomacy in the region. And Lebanon, a bastion of free world ideology and economic prosperity, was at the heart of the affair.

The market center of the entire region, Beirut was the ideal post for a young diplomat. His years there, 1950-52, were marked not only by his work with civil aviation, electric power, tourism, and petroleum, but also by days on the beach, nights on the town, stylish parties, and side excursions to antiquities. A Gatsby-like social climate pervades the Beirut chapter of Ruff's book, as do anecdotes of the personalities and sentiments at work within the US Ministry in Lebanon.

In 1952 Ruff's next assignment was a hardship post: Mesopotamia. After crossing 600 miles of weathered plains from Damascus to Iraq, Ruff found a world markedly less Western than the one he had left. Despite the contrast, he enjoyed a considerable measure of goodwill and reveled in the country's archeological and historical richness. Unfortunately, Ruff had to spend his final years there in conflict with an ambassador of limited political scope. He and his colleagues, however, did manage to direct several successful economic development initiatives, including the huge engineering project that ended the flooding of the Tigris, a source of seasonal destruction for thousands of years.

As Ruff chronicles the personalities and interactions that shaped diplomacy in the region, we see office politics grow taut along with the political pressure, and the narrative is soon filled with portent. By 1956, Ruff was becoming increasingly aware of the tremors of political dissent. After struggling under an ambassador who refused to address the problem and imposed punishment on those who questioned him, Ruff left his Baghdad post. Two years later mobs of Iraqi citizens dismembered King Nuri and dragged his body through the streets.

Ruff then took a two-year post in Glasgow. Upon concluding his foreign service in 1958, he traveled home, but in typical fashion did so by way of India, Thailand, and Cambodia. He spent the rest of his career in the Department of Agriculture as a specialist on Brazil.

In retirement, Ruff has extensively researched the role in World War II of his Hampden-Sydney classmates, to whom he dedicates the final chapter of his book. He also includes in the book a tribute to his father, Thomas B. Ruff, a Presbyterian minister who brought up his family in various small towns in Virginia and who instilled in his son the importance of experiencing other cultures. Overall, his accounts provide a view of 20th-century life, and, given the peculiar uncertainty surrounding Baghdad today, perhaps some valuable insights about the 21st.

In his eighties, Ruff continues to travel the world when he can. His most recent journeys have taken him to Scandinavia, Belgium, Amsterdam, and the western United States. When asked the greatest lesson he has learned from his time abroad, Ruff answers with an amazingly simple but evidently elusive principle, an ethic of reciprocity as venerable as Mesopotamia itself: "Treat other cultures just as you would want them to treat your own."

On May 2, Hampden-Sydney's Wilson Center for Leadership presented Ruff with a Patrick Henry Public Service Award.