In Those Days: A Diplomat Remembers

In Those Days is the candid, often funny, autobiography of a twentieth-century American diplomat who spent most of his life in high-level diplomacy in Asia and Africa. The story takes James Spain from an Irish Catholic childhood in gangster-era Chicago through military service as Douglas MacArthur’s photographer in occupied Japan and university life at Chicago and a Ph.D. from Columbia. His Foreign Service career brought postings in Islamabad, Istanbul, and Ankara and four ambassadorships - in Tanzania, Turkey, the United Nations (as deputy permanent representative), and Sri Lanka. In Those Days is rich in stories drawn from the author’s experiences with such major world figures as Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, President Suleyman Demirel of Turkey, Ayub Mohammad Khan of Pakistan, Sir David Owen and Lord Peter Carrington of the UK, and U.S. presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter. Spain’s memoir offers readers a firsthand account of U.S. diplomacy and of a family that tied its experiences to the events of contemporary history. He writes of personal triumphs and family tragedies and speculates on the meaning of it all, including the joys and tribulations of retirement in Sri Lanka.