ABSTRACT
This chapter examines President Harry S Truman's policy toward the Near East during the last years of his administration. It suggests that the Truman administration attempted to reinvigorate the economic approach to peacemaking in the early 1950s. The Locke mission emerges as a link between the initial launching of the Economic Survey Mission (ESM) in 1949 and the later attempts by Eric Johnston under the Eisenhower administration to resurrect the same kind of approach. The dispatching of the Locke mission represents a concerted, if failed, attempt to promote a more regional United States approach to the Near East, a break from past United States emphases on bilateralism. Hollis Peter was concerned by Edwin Locke Jr'.s propensity to project his ideas about United States development policy in the region in an official manner in meetings with Lebanese officials. The United States' assistance under the Point Four program was judged to be slow and insufficient by Arab governments.
