Joseph V. Montville

Joseph V. Montville, ABD, was born on August 18, 1937, in Southbridge, Massachusetts as the elder of two sons. From the age of three, he grew up in Paterson, New Jersey, where he was educated in Roman Catholic parochial and then public schools. His father was a skilled machinist of Lithuanian descent and his French-Canadian mother was an unusually gifted pianist who coached opera singers in metropolitan New York and directed choirs in churches and a synagogue in northern New Jersey. An aunt, who worked as a secretary in the Foreign Service, whet his appetite for foreign travel by sending family-wide letters from Paris, Beirut, Caracas, and Tehran. Joseph was educated at Lehigh, Harvard, Columbia, and as a Fulbright scholar at the American University of Cairo. For 23 years, starting in 1965, he served as a diplomat in Iraq (Baghdad, Basra), Lebanon (Beirut), Libya (Baida, Benghazi, Tripoli), and Morocco (Rabat). He also served in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs and in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. In the latter organization, he served as chief of the Near East Division and Director of the Office of Global Issues.