During the campaign, Crane collected his position papers into a book, Inescapable Rendezvous: New Directions for American Foreign Policy, with a foreword by Congressman Gerald Ford, who succeeded Nixon as President.
[2] On January 20, 1969, Crane moved into the White House as Deputy Director (for Planning) of the National Security Council, but soon moved to the U.S. Department of State as special assistant to Deputy Secretary Elliot Richardson, responsible for liaison with the National Security Council and then as Director of the Office of Resources policy responsible for monitoring the policies and budgets of the U.S. government's intelligence agencies.
In 1975, he founded his own consulting firm by the same name to staff the U.S. Treasury Department's U.S.-Saudi Joint Commission for Economic Cooperation, where he produced his book, Planning the Future of Saudi Arabia.
In 1976, at the request of the U.S. State Department, he served for a year as the Principal Economic and Budget Advisor to the Finance Minister in the Emirate of Bahrain to prepare a five-year plan based on this book.
[3] In September 1981, President Ronald Reagan appointed Crane to be U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates to pursue two-track diplomacy by developing relations with the various Islamist movements in the Middle East and North Africa.
In 1994, Crane founded his Center for Civilizational Renewal in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he produced his book, Shaping the Future: Challenge and Response.
On January 1, 2014, Crane was appointed Professor Emeritus for 18 months to complete his four-volume textbook, Islam and Muslims: Essence and Practice, as a model and part of a proposal for a Holistic Education Center to produce edited textbooks on Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Indigenous Religions by spiritual scholars in these world religions.