In the early 1950s, long before the Ba‘th Party’s revolution and Hafiz al-Asad’s presidency, Syria witnessed its first experiment with authoritarian culture and a personality cult of “The Leader.” Army Colonel Adib al-Shishakli, Syria’s effective dictator from December 1949 to February 1954, instituted a “corrective movement,” promulgated an authoritarian constitution, dramatically increased the size and reach of Syria’s defense and security services, formed a personalized political party, engineered his near-unanimous “election” as president via popular referendum, consolidated and expanded state print and broadcast media, and used these media to exacerbate Syrians’ collective sense of insecurity and to construct his own cult of personality. In this paper I analyze the cultural expressions of al-Shishakli’s rule in the context of economic, political, and cultural changes sweeping the Arab and wider developing worlds, and with an eye to Syria’s past and its future. Al-Shishakli’s ambitious top-down reforms constituted a developmentally informed attempt to reorder Syrian political, economic, and social life on the model of Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal, Iran’s Reza Shah, Yugoslavia’s Tito, and Argentina’s Juan Peron. More significantly, his use of mass media and political repression, and the broad cooperation of Syria’s political, economic, and cultural elites in these efforts, raises questions about the putative novelty of Hafiz al-Asad’s subsequent dictatorship. This paper draws upon a wealth of media sources and the accounts of participants and eyewitnesses to argue that the period of Adib al-Shishakli’s rule was far more significant for the subsequent history of Syria and the Arab world than scholars have heretofore noted. In both style and substance, Adib al-Shishakli’s dictatorship provided numerous models for the policies and practices of the Gamal Abdel Nasser, Hafiz al-Asad, and Saddam Hussein regimes. A study of al-Shishakli’s rule also demonstrates that the authoritarian current in Syrian politics has much broader and deeper roots than scholars have previously observed.