February 14 th 1945, USS Quincy (CA-71), On The Great Bitter Lake, Egypt – A Baltimore class heavy cruiser of the United States Navy is anchored in a salt water lake that forms part of the Suez Canal. We are some seven months away from the cessation of hostilities in a war that has claimed approximately 70 million lives worldwide. Two sexagenarian Heads of State are seated side by side on the carpeted deck, flanked by translators and Battleship grey. The 32nd President of the United States of America, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, has just returned from his Yalta meet with Churchill and Stalin. He smokes a Gaulois from a cigarette holder. Abdulaziz Bin Abd Rahman Bin Faisal Al-Saud, the first King of Saudi Arabia, sits with a walking cane in his lap. This is the first formal diplomatic rendezvous between the global power and the nascent nation.
The Quincy Agreement that will result from this tëte-á- tëte, will form a pact between them that survives to this day, in which military assistance goes one way, and secure access to plentiful oil supplies goes the other. At a time when the stars of both nations were waxing, this would push the industrial powerhouse to become a superpower and the desert state to become the world leader in oil production. Barely a month later, FDR would be dead with war still raging. And this meeting on a lake amidst the Sahara may have been one of the most significant contributions to the United States he would leave behind….
P.S. Here's another Quincy you might remember
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