From 1946 to 1948
My aunt and uncle reinvented themselves in the Middle East. Marianne, the ex-school marm, became Anne, the sophisticated expatriate, after her arrival in Dhahran. Hank, the salesman from Oregon, became a corporate diplomat in Beirut. I would like to think my favorite uncle was already estranged, if not divorced, from his first wife before he met my father’s sister. Although they spent the rest of their long lives together, I never heard either of them (or anyone else) speak about their relationship before they returned from Arabia to be married in White County, where my family had lived longer than Illinois had been a state.
Hank spent his first 10 years in Arabia, six of them married to Anne, before they were transferred to Lebanon for another 15 years. Three events in the Middle East between 1946 and 1948 shaped their lives – as well as the rest of the millennium.
The end of the British Mandate in Palestine triggered civil war between Arabs and Zionists who claimed it as their own. A majority of the United Nations Assembly called for the partition of Palestine in November 1947 without providing the means to implement Resolution 181. The withdrawal of British military forces in May 1948 was immediately followed by the violent birth of the state of Israel. The conventional wisdom shared by most of the US government and American oilmen in the Middle East was that the Zionists would be wiped out by the armies of the Arab countries that bordered Palestine. But the issue was framed very differently by many in America and Europe, where millions of survivors of the Holocaust and displaced persons were still living in encampments guarded by the Allies.
Two other descendants of the Standard Oil Trust joined Socal on Aramco’s board in March 1947. Standard Oil of New Jersey bought 30% of the Arabian concession, equaling Socal and Texaco, with Standard Oil of New York settling for 10%. The joint venture of four large competitors in the US oil industry would have violated the Sherman Act if it were onshore. Instead, the Arabian concession became one of the most powerful expressions of American exceptionalism in the postwar era. Adjusted for inflation, the half-billion in cash, credit, and deferred dividends that Jersey Standard and Socony invested in Aramco equate to more than seven trillion dollars. The investment by the predecessors of Exxon and Mobil (which later merged) achieved several practical goals. One of the most immediate was a $100,000,000 line of credit that offset the capital expenditures of Socal and Texaco in Arabia. The new concession partners were also well-established in European markets, helping Aramco deliver millions of tons of crude oil to the continent without investing downstream.
The board of Aramco voted to build the Trans-Arabian Pipeline from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. The same week in early 1947 that Standard Jersey and Socony joined Socal and Texaco, President Truman addressed Congress, announcing that the US would protect the struggling democracies in Greece and Turkey from Soviet aggression. The news couldn’t have been better for the American oilmen who expected to spend a million dollars per mile on their pipeline. The Arab countries in the eastern Mediterranean were far more volatile culturally and politically than Saudi Arabia, a predominantly Sunni theocracy. In 1945, when Socal and Texaco registered their new pipeline subsidiary in Delaware, it was a notional holding, an unfunded investment on a massive scale, mirroring the capital structure of their money-losing concession in Arabia. But within a few years, Tapline became a strategic asset of the next five US presidents, as well as the four American oil majors who owned Aramco.
https://wwf3.substack.com/p/the-trans-arabian-pipeline?r=2kqfhs