1945 U.S.-Saudi Meeting to Be Marked Top
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Author: Ken Thomas, Associated Press
Released 15 February 2005
MIAMI (AP) - When President Franklin D. Roosevelt met with the king of Saudi
Arabia for the first time in February 1945, Thomas Hilliard and his crewmates on
an American warship had to build a giant tent for a monarch who wouldn't sleep
in an "iron cabin."
For Albert Levesque, the young secretary to the captain of the USS Quincy,
the meeting offered a ringside seat to the small talk of diplomacy, and he
remembers King Abdulaziz Al-Saud telling Roosevelt he would "never have to worry
about oil."
Sixty years after the two leaders met aboard the Quincy on Egypt's Great
Bitter Lake, part of the Suez Canal, their descendants, surviving crew members
and others promoting U.S.-Saudi relations will gather Monday to remember the
summit that cemented the alliance between the two nations.
The luncheon will honor Hilliard, Levesque and other crew members and feature
appearances by Prince Abdulaziz bin Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud, a grandson
of the king, and H. Delano Roosevelt, Roosevelt's grandson.
The meeting occurred as Roosevelt, just months before his death, was
returning from Yalta, where he had met with Winston Churchill and Josef
Stalin.
Roosevelt secretly sent the USS Murphy to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to bring the
king and his delegation to the meeting aboard the Quincy.
"We had no idea what the meeting was about - just rumors," said Hilliard, 82,
of St. Petersburg.
The king declined the commodore's stateroom on the Murphy, not wanting to
sleep in the "iron cabin," so the crew worked overnight to sew together rolls of
canvas for a tent. They even set aside a corral on the ship's stern for the
sheep the king wanted to bring aboard to feed his entourage.
Levesque, 79, of Pawtucket, R.I., was struck by the affinity Roosevelt and
Abdulaziz Al-Saud shared during their meeting, the king's first trip outside his
country.
"When they were together, you would swear they knew each other for 100
years," Levesque said.
And when the king told Roosevelt he wouldn't have to worry about oil,
Levesque recalls, the president called them the "best words I've heard in a long
time."
Monday's meeting, sponsored by the newly formed Friends of Saudi
Arabia, comes during a period when U.S.-Saudi relations have been strained
since the 2001 terrorist attacks in which 15 of the 19 hijackers were
Saudis.
Michael Saba, the group's executive director, said the luncheon was arranged
to foster relationships between Americans and Saudis while recognizing the
formation of their nations' alliance.
"It probably was the single most important meeting in terms of opening up
that relationship," Saba said.