Richard William Murphy was born on July 29, 1929 in Boston, MA and passed away peacefully on November 22, 2024, surrounded by his family. A leading figure in US Middle East relations, Ambassador Richard W. Murphy’s long and impressive foreign service career included ambassadorships to Mauritania (1971–74), Syria (1974–78), The Philippines (1978–81), and Saudi Arabia (1981–83). He served as Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs (1983–89), and throughout the 1960s held consul and political officer assignments in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe); Aleppo, Syria; Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; Amman, Jordan; and the US State Department Office of Arabian Affairs. Amb. Murphy was a three-time recipient of the President’s Distinguished Service Award and received the State Department’s Superior Honor Award. He is often credited with brokering the Taif Agreement in 1990, which led to the end of the 15-year Lebanon war. Starting in the 1990s he served as senior fellow for the Middle East Council for Foreign Relations, and as chairman of the Foreign Student Service Council, the Middle East Institute, and Chatham House Foundation.
Commencement 2015: Amb. Murphy, Munib Masri, Honorary Degree recipient Peter Sellars, Alexander Ercklentz
Board meeting, January 2019
Amb. Murphy served in the US army from 1953-55 and as a member of the Advisory Board of the Naval War College. Educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard University (BA ’51), Cambridge University, (post graduate Arabic studies 1953), Amb. Murphy also pursued Arabic language studies at the US Foreign Service Institute in Beirut (1959–60); it was at this time that he also took a course at AUB, where he soon met staff and “began to sense the emotional complexities of assignment to the Middle East.” He was awarded an honorary LL.D. from New England College in 1989. A founding member of the American University of Beirut’s International Advisory Council in 1992, Amb. Murphy was appointed to AUB’s board of trustees in 1997, and as a trustee emeritus in 2007. He remained active on the board until the end of his life. Murphy is survived by his wife of sixty-nine years Anne Herrick Cook, and by three children, Katherine Murphy McClintic, Elizabeth Murphy Evans, and Richard McGill Murphy, and a loving extended family.
Sincerely,
Abdo Kadifa
Chair of the Board
American University of Beirut Board of Trustees
Board meeting, January 2020
Campus visit, 1999