Robert Neumann; Former Envoy, UCLA Professor

Robert G. Neumann, expert on international affairs, UCLA professor and U.S. ambassador who ended his diplomatic career after wrangling with then-Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig in 1981, has died. He was 83.

Neumann died Friday of cancer at his home in Bethesda, Md., according to his son, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Ronald E. Neumann, the former U.S. Ambassador to Algeria.

The highly respected Austrian-born scholar left UCLA in 1966 to serve as ambassador to Afghanistan, a post he held until he went to Rabat as ambassador to Morocco in 1973. He also held State Department posts in Washington and served briefly as ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

But on July 20, 1981, Neumann--who had been the Saudi ambassador for two months--reportedly criticized Haig at a meeting with Sen. Charles Percy (D-Ill.), then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Neumann believed that his boss was being too soft on Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin by refusing to say that the Reagan administration’s delay in shipping F-16 fighter planes to Israel was punishment for its recent raid on Beirut.

Haig got President Reagan’s permission to fire Neumann over what he viewed as insubordination, even though Neumann had handled the administration’s State Department transition team earlier that year.

Within days, Neumann announced his resignation for personal reasons and returned to Washington as senior staff associate--he later became vice chairman--of the Georgetown University Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Born in Vienna, Neumann studied diplomacy at the University of Vienna and in Rennes, France, then spent a summer at the Geneva School of International Studies in 1937 on the promise of a full scholarship for the following academic year. Instead, he was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp.

While in Geneva, Neumann had met Marlen Eldredge, whom he later married. The only woman to serve on the eight-member McCone Commission, which investigated the 1965 Watts riots, she died two years ago.

After his release from camp, Neumann made his way to the United States to join his American fiancee. He earned his master’s degree at Amherst College and then taught at Oshkosh State Teachers College in Wisconsin until he obtained permission to join the U.S. Army.

He served in France and Germany during the last three years of World War II.

Years later, Neumann wrote a moving statement of his principles for Who’s Who in America, explaining how he formed them as a concentration camp prisoner and “penniless immigrant” to America:

“1. When in doubt, choose the road of courage. The dynamics of action will carry others with you and confound your opponents.

“2. While action must be carefully considered, it is generally better to act than not to act. It is easier to correct the course of action than to move from inaction to action.

“3. Dream big and without restraint. There will always be time afterwards to reduce the scope of your action in the light of confining realities. But if you start dreaming small, you shackle your imagination from the outset.

“4. Have some reasonable and constant ideas as to what you will not put up with and examine your conscience from time to time to check the possible corrosion success might have wrought. It might keep you honest, or at least humble.”

After the war, Neumann got his doctorate at the University of Michigan and taught briefly at the University of Wisconsin before joining the UCLA political science faculty in 1947.

During his 19-year tenure in Westwood, he helped organize and was the first director of the UCLA Institute of International and Foreign Studies.

He also served on the Committee on Atlantic Studies of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. An expert on Europe and the Middle East, Neumann wrote articles for The Times’ Op-Ed page and for other publications and spoke widely on issues involving nations in those areas. He was chairman of the international relations section of Los Angeles’ Town Hall for six years.

Neumann wrote three books about foreign policy, “The Government of the German Federal Republic,” “European and Comparative Government” and “Toward a More Effective Executive-Legislative Relationship in the Conduct of America’s Foreign Policy.”

He won a number of honors from other nations, including the Knight Commander’s Cross and Star of Austria, the Knight’s Cross of the French Legion of Honor, the Commander’s Cross and Officer’s Cross of Germany, the Star of the Grand Officer of Morocco’s Order of the Throne, and the Order of the Star First Class of Afghanistan.

Neumann is also survived by a son, Gregory, of Los Angeles; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.