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caution at most if 1 weren’t at odds with the governor. I was obviously next. But I
was not about to gamble that the threat to Jim was a bluff. I told him that if I were in
his shoes, | would go back to England. He did. That left me. But I was in my shoes.
The blunders had been mine, and I would face the music.
My two weeks of house arrest went peacefully. The plain cement-block house had
been built for my father at our port camp of Mina Saud when he lived in the Neutral
Zone in 1953. The Emir’s identical house was a few steps away. My father’s favorite
maple sugar was still in the fridge. I read the few Shakespeare plays | hadn’t read in
college, and read or reread the complete poems and plays of John Keats.
The house arrest was probably as much dressing-down as | deserved. Paul, or
anyone else, would have handled the perks and privileges more adroitly. But our
host country, Saudi Arabia, may have picked up on something too. Getty Oil was not
one of the concession companies in the Middle East named in the baksheesh
(bribery) scandals that made the front pages over the few years remaining before
most concessions were negotiated away and host countries ran things themselves.
Back to my father in Scotland, where he was visiting his old friends the Maxwells
near Inverness, and then to the two-room suite at the Ritz in London about like the
one in Paris. He drove the six hundred miles between, in a vintage Cadillac, taking
two days and stopping to visit historic sites and museums. He needed no guidebook.
] sat in on meetings and events everywhere with him in London as in Paris. |
assumed that the Saudis had cleared the house arrest with him, and I would have
agreed as he did. He too was in different shoes. He was right. He had solved a real
problem with minimum damage. Lesson learned, and no hard feelings either way.
It was clear to both of us that I was not cut out to be a line officer, meaning one who
runs things from day to day. My mind goes off on tangents instead of tracking
arguments in real time. It works for me, but not as an administrator. We decided to
try me as a consultant.
Chapter 1: Recollections 1/06/16 3
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