Our Man in Vienna
A Memoir
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The wit and charm that marked Our Man in Belize enlivens Richard Timothy Conroy's new "diplomatic memoir," in a posting that couldn't have a more different location. But the wheels of lower-level diplomacy, it turns out, turn at the same rate whatever the setting. Plucked from the cost of Central America and put down in post-World-War II Vienna, land of Der Rosencavalier and whipped cream cakes, Conroy still was "not mentioned in dispatches" (or at least, not complimentary ones) but even a lowly vice-consul could do some good in people's lives.
Take, for example, his effort to help a woman flee Vienna after she reported that someone was sneaking into her room and slicing off a bit of her foot each night. Or the unfortunate Austrian whose visa application had been rejected three previous times, with no explanation. Conroy discovered that there was a picture of the man in a Red Army sergeant's uniform. Turned out the man had conned a gullible Red Army soldier to lend him the uniform for a snapshot, and an equally gullible group of Russian border guards that he was an undercover Red agent posing as (what he really was) an export-import businessman. Nobody before Conroy had bothered to ask for an explanation.
In between similar tales of deep diplomatic deed and misdeed, the author gives his readers an imitable take on the Vienna of those days. Want to buy a second-hand piano? Some inexpensive paintings? How about -- above all -- that famous Viennese food and beer? You could have found it there with Conroy as your guide; failing that, his account of those days is just as rewarding and not nearly as fattening.
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Unlike most diplomatic memoirs, which deal with weighty matters of politics and foreign relations, Conroy's (Our Man in Belize, etc.) reminiscences are a lark. As U.S. vice consul (and later consul) in Vienna between 1963 and 1966, he seems to have dealt mostly with visa-related matters, judging from these latest sprightly recollections. Apart from a brief meeting with Simon Wiesenthal, who was operating a clearinghouse for information about the fate of European Jewry, most of the book consists of amusing if repetitious stories about eccentric, colorful, odd or desperate visa applicants. They include a mad Yugoslav inventor, a belly dancer whose Egyptian work permit had expired, an opera singer who was being stalked by another singer, an American teenage girl living in a derelict abandoned palace and a Czech gold smuggler posing as a dentist. There are tales of hair-raising escapes from Iron Curtain countries, of lovers reunited. Two of Conroy's immigration cases ended badly, with each woman dying in suspicious circumstances: one was mob-affiliated Virginia Hill Hauser, expatriate Southerner and former lover of "Bugsy" Siegel; the other, Austrian-American Ilse Schmidt, fled Baghdad, she told Conroy, after killing her bigamist Iraqi husband in self-defense. A droll observer of the human predicament, Conroy exudes a healthy disrespect for hierarchy, bosses, authority and received wisdom. While this self-indulgent memoir, which closes with his transfer to Washington as science liaison for the Atomic Energy Commission, lacks the sparkle of his Belize book, his comic misadventures nevertheless add up to a witty Thurberesque catalogue of human foibles, pretense, quirks and folly. Photos and drawings.
