A Cave of Hands - Hardcover

by Paul Hilburn (Author)

This personal memoir relates the author's experiences growing up in his small farming and ranching community in west central Texas, his college years at Texas A&M as a member of its corps of cadets, falling in love and marriage, his service in the US Air Force, and then an unlikely career in the Ivy League-dominated, "pale, male and Yale" US Foreign Service. The author looks back on his parents' growing up during the depression as well as his grandparents' life. Throughout the author comments on international developments as they related to his Air Force assignment in Japan, his Foreign Service assignments in Ecuador, Vienna, Peru, Geneva, Brussels and Luxembourg as well as his domestic assignments in the State Department's Latin American and Intelligence and Research bureaus. The Allende election in Chile, the fall of Saigon, State-CIA relations, aerial reconnaissance programs, nuclear nonproliferation, support for the Polish trade Union Solidarity, German reunification and the collapse of the Soviet Union are subjects of his reminiscences.

In earlier chapters the author traces his family history and its westward migration to Texas from its American beginnings in colonial Virginia and South Carolina through Alabama and Georgia. The author explores the economic, social and historical conditions that formed the context of their stories, including motivations that may have led many of them to support the Confederacy, even though for the most part they were part of the southern yeomanry and not large scale slave owners; post-Civil War Reconstruction; southern agriculture. The author recalls loving memories of and pays tribute to his paternal grandparents and his maternal grandmother who, respectively, persevered on hardscrabble farms and courageously coped with the vicissitudes of single motherhood during the Depression.