Aramco World: Business and Culture on the Arabian Oil Frontier

Abstract

On a warm and windy day late in January 1947, 3,000 visitors gathered at the U.S. Air Force base in Dhahran to await the arrival of King Abd al-Aziz ibn Sa ud. The American ambassador, J. Rives Childs, the patrician from Virginia who collected the works of Henry Miller, had come from Jidda to crown the king’s welcoming committee to Aramco’s settlement on the Persian Gulf coast.1 The visit was only the king’s second in the 14 years since the Americans originally splashed ashore. Once, on the eve of the war in 1939, Abd al-Aziz had traveled by motorcade from his palace in Riyadh to witness the loading of the first tanker of Saudi crude. As the Americans liked to say, since that time Dhahran had been transformed.