Edward Peter Djerejian (born March 6, 1939) is a former United States diplomat who served in eight administrations from John F. Kennedy to Bill Clinton (1962–94.) He served as the United States Ambassador to Syria (1988–91) and Israel (1993–94), Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan and Deputy Press Secretary of Foreign Affairs (1985–1986), and was Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs (1991–1993.) He was the founding director of Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy (1994-2022) He is a senior fellow at the Middle East Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is on the board of trustees of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Djerejian was elected chairman of Occidental Petroleum Corporation’s board of directors (2013–2015). Djerejian is the author of the book Danger and Opportunity: An American Ambassador's Journey Through the Middle East (Simon & Schuster, Threshold Editions, September 2008. ) Life and education Of Armenian descent, Djerejian was born in New York in 1939. He graduated from Georgetown University in 1960. Djerejian served in the US Army in Korea for the next two years, and then joined the Foreign Service. Besides English, he speaks Arabic, Armenian, French, and Russian. Career He served as special assistant to Under Secretary of State George Ball (1962–64), a political officer in Beirut, Lebanon (1965–69) and in Casablanca, Morocco (1969–72), executive assistant to Under Secretary of State Joseph J. Sisco (1972–1975), consul general in Bordeaux, France (1975–77), officer in the Bureau of European Affairs (1978–79), chief of the US Embassy's political section in Moscow (1979–81), deputy chief of the US Mission to Jordan (1981–84), Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan and Deputy Press Secretary of Foreign Affairs (1985–1986), Deputy Assistant Secretary of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs (1986–88), Ambassador to Syria (1989–1991), Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs (1991–93), United States Ambassador to Israel (1993–94), He was Director of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University (August 1994–2022). In 2021 the Baker Institute was ranked the #1 University-Affiliated Think Tank in the World by the University of Pennsylvania Global Think Tank Survey. Djerejian, as Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs in an official speech at Meridian House, coined the description of the purported democratic goals of Islamic radicals as "One man, one vote, one