Diplomatic Retirement

By Robert G. Morris

Even in retirement former foreign service officer John Pauley is called to consult on South American .nuclear affairs affecting Colonia, his former country of assignment. He is also writing a book on his other specialty, international science cooperation, and has just finished Volume One, covering the years since 1945. He breaks away to take a canoe trip with his two sons and old foreign service friend Henry Nielsen. Despite Henrys awkwardness, the trip is a success.
John returns from the North Woods to find his wife Barbara has suffered a mild stroke. A more serious attack follows. Barbara is hospitalized while John seeks a retirement home with hospital and therapeutic services. The least undesirable choice: Grandview, characterized by an imperious director, overworked staff and cowed residents, where the daily enrichment activities include Bingo, crossword puzzles, balloon badminton and old movies.
After a time John and his family find the long drive to Grandview wearing, so John decides to take an apartment there where he can live too. With all the talk about health he decides he is not completely well. He finds the atmosphere at Grandview oppressive. Residents main occupations are eating and talking about other residents. Many spend much of the day when not in the dining room seated in the lobby watching intently the comings and goings of the mailman, visitors, repairmen and the occasional departure of a fellow-resident with the 911 squad.
John is bewildered by the lack of interest in the world. With Barbara ill, he has no one to talk to. He resumes his correspondence with Henry, who volunteers to help him with Volume Two of his book, on cooperation before 1945, but Johns heart is no longer in the work. Henry promises to visit early in the new year.
Life at Grandview looks up for John when resident Septimus Simmons returns from a trip. Septimus has been the spark plug of life at the retirement home, promoting dinner music in the dining room, leading excursions to the nearby Indian casino, jamming worthy issues through the moribund residents council, criticizing the ineffectual administration, arranging excursions to plays and concerts, setting up a residents newsletter and running the residence library.
Septimuss field is philosophy and his first love is Lucretius, whose work he introduces to John. He and John spend much time together, finding they share many opinions of Grandview and life in general. John learns Septimus is working on some unknown project.
Johns visits to Grandview to see Barbara and Septimus take time from his writing so he decides to move to Grandview, fearful now that he, too, is ill. When her doctor is prepared to release Barbara to go home, John decides to stay on at the residence with his questionable new illness. Septimus disapproves.
John doesnt go home even for Christmas. Septimus leads the festivities at Grandview. Johns family surprise him with presents and food on Christmas night. Septimus presents him a copy of Lucretiuss On the Nature of Things, which he discusses with John as it pertains to retirement, the end of life and preparations for death. Septimus considers Johns philosophical thinking fuzzy; John finds Septimuss thoughts too abstract, too ethereal.
Septimus completely takes over Henrys visit and arranges an indoor picnic where he prepares the barbecue. John tells Henry he is unable to write Volume Two. Johns family attend. Septimus tells them they must help get John away from Grandview. Henry makes his own contribution to the discussion of retirement and death, quoting a recent speech on the subject.
At the end of the picnic Septimus bids John farewell, surprising him and the others. But John says, Im not leaving.
Johns Volume One receives a prize and his publisher presses him to finish Volume Two. John shrugs off Sept

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 27, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477129463

Robert G. Morris

About the Author Robert G. Morris is from Des Moines and has a PhD in physics from Iowa State University. After teaching and doing research, he joined the US Foreign Service in 1974 and worked on nuclear nonproliferation, science cooperation, and environmental issues in Washington, Paris, Bonn, Buenos Aires, and Madrid. He has three sons; Beverly, his wife of fifty-nine years, died in 2014. The author dedicates this book to her memory.

Book preview

Chapter 1

John Pauley’s Retirement Projects

Two things John Pauley wanted to do during his diplomatic retirement: write a book and take a vacation with his two sons. But work interfered with his plans. He had found time to write a book despite frequent consulting for the State Department. The book was now finished; the vacation trip would be next.

The book was about the role of science and technology in foreign affairs. The manuscript went off to the publisher just before John’s latest trip to South America, this time as a consultant on nuclear development. It was in such an area that John’s expertise lay. He had been an academic physicist before he joined the State Department.

Volume One covered the period after 1945; the future Volume Two would cover the time up to that year.

Newly back from his latest consultancy, John’s attention was forcefully directed by his two sons to the long-promised trip, now referred to by the boys their adventure trip. Charley, the younger boy, had lived with John and Barbara part of the time when they were posted overseas. His older brother Bill spent these years in college in the United States. Although Bill had been completely satisfied with his life as a student with little direct parental supervision, he sometimes envied his younger brother when Charley sent him letters, postcards and pictures of his life and trips overseas. These included sailing from Grand Cayman to Cuba with his father and two other crew members. Later, Bill’s envy extended to Charley’s exploration of native ruins in Colonia. But he was glad that it had been Charley and not he who had been imprisoned for allegedly seeking to expose the buried remains of Colonials murdered by the military during the days it governed the country.

The boys were genuinely interested in John’s letters from this consultancy—especially about his run-ins with pirates trying to divert or hijack a shipment of nuclear technology headed for a Middle Eastern country. It was John’s latest in a series of post-retirement activities—a trip to the southern tip of South America, where he carried out for a Washington foundation a study of any current nuclear activity and future potential nuclear threat from countries there. At one time Colonia itself had been a worry to the world community, but after it signed the international Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, along with other holdouts Brazil and Argentina, the country presented no appreciable threat, John concluded, as long as the civilian government prevailed over any possible military resurgence.

The day before he had left to board the freighter in Norfolk for his eventual adventure in two oceans with the pirates, John had mailed the last of the text for his book. With it finally in the hands of the publisher, John believed he could take the vacation he had promised his sons—just as soon as he got back from South America this time.

John himself was a scientist—a physicist—or at least had been one, he always hastened to add. But this fact appealed to the publisher especially when John described what he would include in the book—a description and evaluation of science projects by US scientists under the auspices of the government in cooperation with other countries and their scientists. In most cases this cooperation had definite political goals as well as scientific. The driving idea was that international cooperation can forge and strengthen diplomatic relations between countries.

This idea had been a particularly successful one in a large program of such cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union promoted by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger at a time when there was very little cooperation or even contacts between them at all. This has turned out, John noted in his book, to be especially important where other relations—political or economic, for example—were strained or even nonexistent. One of John’s favorite examples was the cooperation carried out between American and dissident Soviet physicists professionally isolated by their government. The Soviet physicists were kept by their government from traveling to international meetings where their work could be discussed, assessed and accepted. The American physicists solved the problem by holding meetings with the Soviet physicists in their apartments in the Soviet Union. The joint activity gave the Soviet physicists fortitude to continue their work and helped the Americans to keep abreast of the Soviet work.

You will have a much harder time with Volume Two, Henry Nielsen had predicted. Henry had been John’s friend in the foreign service since their early days together in the Juan de Solís embassy in Colonia. Even economically speaking, there was very little government-sponsored international cooperation before 1945—before World War II. I doubt there was much scientific cooperation at all. John agreed that any cooperation that had taken place was mostly person-to-person, laboratory-to-laboratory, but pointed out early cooperation on weights and measures and in astronomy. He recognized that the second volume might take longer to write but it would end up considerably thinner.

When John returned from this latest trip to South America, his wife Barbara and Bill’s wife Linda met him at the small Midwestern airport in the college town where John and Barbara had retired. Bill taught history at the college. The Pauleys’ other son Charley was away at another college.

Family members exchanged the usual sincere greetings appropriate after an absence of one of them, especially to a place as far away as Colonia. But though heartfelt, the exchange was reserved and unemotional for the most part, except when Barbara took John’s head between her hands, kissed him and said, Dear John, I missed you.

John was touched but said only, I missed you, too. Then he hastily added, As always.

Bill insisted on taking John’s small carry-on bag. Is this all you took for an ocean voyage and a month in Colonia?

John smiled. I did have some laundry done a couple of times.

I can imagine everything you’re carrying is filthy. Barbara turned to Linda. You should have seen the state of his clothes when he came back from rescuing Charley from the military prison camp.

Linda nodded and smiled. She knew all about Charley’s capture and imprisonment under suspicion of literally digging up secrets—remains of people killed by the military government—when he was actually on an archeological quest with the daughter of another Juan de Solís embassy officer.

Where is Charley? John asked as they walked to the parking lot. By then John’s plane had resumed flight and the ramp was deserted and still.

He’ll be here by for suppertime, Barbara said, using the Midwestern word for the evening meal. Dinner still meant the midday meal even for city people who no longer took a noontime break from farm work.

Bill placed John’s bag in the trunk and moved into the driver’s seat. Linda sat next to him; John and Barbara sat somewhat squeezed in the back seat of the small car. John was six feet tall, like Charley, while Bill was built close to the ground. At least this gave John more room in the back seat with the driver’s seat adjusted for Bill’s smaller height.

Headed for town, not far from the miniature airport, John turned to Barbara. Have you gotten anything from my publisher? A letter? Packages? E-mails?

Nothing yet.

Linda turned partway toward John. Dr. Pauley, we want to hear all about your adventures with the pirates. Linda did not yet feel able to call John by his first name, as he had asked her to do. They had met only infrequently since her marriage to Bill and she still stood somewhat in awe of this person who had had so many adventures, traveled over the world, exposed the non-existence of a nuclear bomb project in Colonia, made a case for Cuba’s fitness to rejoin the Organization of American States after a secret visit there, returned to serve as deputy assistant secretary of state for science and technology cooperation. Bill’s wife knew most of the details about Charley’s imprisonment by Colonial irregulars and that there had been the tragic death of a particular friend of Charley’s, a young embassy daughter, but she had not probed for details. And neither John nor Charley had been particularly forthcoming.

John himself had related to her and the whole family the details of the Alphabetical Murders. It was when his friend Henry Nielsen had become ambassador to Colonia—unlikely as that may have seemed to someone who knew only Henry’s surface gaucherie. Henry had called John for help. Someone was picking off—murdering in Spanish alphabetical order—ambassadors to a branch in Colonia of the Organization of American States. The United States came under E for Estados Unidos and the killer had got up to the C’s.

Linda knew of another incident that had merited John’s intervention when he was an adviser to a congressional delegation to Colonia as the government there was crushing terrorist rebels. Feeling ill-treated, the head of the government forces went over to the rebels leading inevitably to his death. Linda had listened fascinated as John pointed out the similarities between the general’s story and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus." She immediately reread the play.

Barbara had asked Bill and Linda to stay for lunch but they couldn’t accept the offer. John then asked Barbara, Are you sure I received nothing from the publisher? From Blake Brothers?

I put all your mail in that box in the den, but nothing from Blake Brothers. I’m sure I would have noticed. Perhaps it will come today.

I’ll go through everything after lunch. Mostly bills and ads, I suppose.

And lots of requests from charities. Barbara assured John she had paid all the bills. I also checked your e-mail every day. I didn’t print many of them but they’re all saved in the computer.

John said he would take a look at the e-mails before lunch. A moment later he rushed back from the den and said, There is one from Blake Brothers. It came in just this morning. I’m printing it now.

The e-mail had a multi-page attachment that consisted of the page proofs of John’s book. He rushed through lunch and spent a large part of the afternoon reading the proofs. John had taken great care in preparing the manuscript but he found half a dozen errors that had eluded him. Disappointingly, he also found a number of mistakes made by the publisher. Look at this, he said to Barbara when they sat down for mid-afternoon coffee. This paragraph was supposed to be inserted, and this one’s in the wrong place entirely.

Will they be easy to fix?

Yes, these and any others I find. But that’s the hard part—finding them.

On the whole, though, John was very pleased with the proofs. It gave him a thrill to see words that he had come up with and typed now arrayed as book pages on a monitor’s screen. By suppertime John had located and corrected several more errors on the rest of the proofs but he didn’t send them off, deciding to wait until morning. He was disappointed to note that just in the short time since he had prepared the text, changes had occurred in international science and technology cooperation—especially with poorer countries. He wondered if he should make an effort to include them. Or should he declare a cut-off date and mention them only in the Foreword.

Charley came home while John was working, but at first took care not to disturb him. His excitement at having his father home finally overcame his reluctance to break in on him. John was glad to see the boy and they shook hands and slapped shoulders. Charley immediately asked John more about the pirates he had encountered in South America and later in the Mediterranean. John had written home about the events and referred the family to news accounts by the Associated Press journalist who regularly covered major events in South America. Charley knew Manuela Alvarez from his time with his father in Colonia, when she wrote about persons who disappeared at the time of the military government. John had revealed that on his trip just completed he had accompanied Manuela when she tracked the pirates into the Mediterranean. He had brought newspaper clippings home with him. Charley had already Googled Manuela on his computer and found many references to the recent stories.

Barbara made a suggestion. Why don’t you wait until Linda and Bill arrive. They’re coming for supper and Linda has already asked your dad about the pirates.

The two men agreed and John then offered to show Charley his page proofs.

John had initially been disappointed that neither boy had an interest or even an inclination toward physics or any science. With time, he saw they both had formidable talents in other areas. I guess we can’t all be physicists, he had told Barbara.

Thank heaven, she thought at first, then guiltily. Untrained in science herself, John’s wife had actually developed a strong appreciation, even admiration, for the scientific method, as she watched John apply it in his profession and his life as a whole.

John and Barbara did not usually have drinks before dinner, but because of John’s homecoming and the whole family’s being together again, Barbara brought out two bottles