Crocker was born on June 19, 1949 in Spokane, Washington. He attended University College Dublin and Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, where he received a B.A. in English Literature in 1971.
He served as the US ambassador to Lebanon in 1990, Kuwait in 1994, Syria in 1998, and earlier served as an ambassador for his country in Iran, Qatar, Iraq and Egypt.
Following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, Crocker became the Director of the Iraq-Kuwait Task Force.
After Farsi language training, he was assigned to the American Consulate in Khorramshahr, Iran in 1972. His subsequent assignment was to the newly-established embassy in Doha, Qatar in 1974 as an economic/commercial officer and in 1976 Crocker returned to Washington, DC for long-te Arabic training. He completed the 20-month program at the Foreign Service Institutes Arabic School in Tunis in June 1978 Crocker was then assigned as chief of the economic-commercial section at the U.S. Interests Section in Baghdad, Iraq. Crocker served in Beirut, Lebanon as chief of the political section from 1981 to 1984. He spent the academic year from 1984 to 1985 at Princeton University under State Department auspices pursuing course work in near Eastern studies. He served as deputy director of the Office of Israel and Arab-Israeli affairs from 1985 to 1987 and was political counselor at the American Embassy in Cairo from 1987 to 1990.
In January 2002, he was appointed interim envoy to the new government of Afghanistan.
(some of this information was taken from a White House press release written February 24, 1994)
