Gorham, Richard V.

CONVOCATION, OCTOBER, 1988
RICHARD VESSOT GORHAM
to be Doctor of Laws

There's a place in New Brunswick called Gorham's Bluff. A loyalist community on the Kingston Peninsula, it's like a lot of other places where generations of farmers have confronted the encroaching forests and the fierce winters and the hard scrabble soil, and have persisted. On a lazy hot summer's day, when the surrounding hills rise green out of the shimmering silver of the St. John and Belleisle, you would wonder why anyone would ever want to leave. But every day without fail, as if to remind one that there is a vast unexplored world out there beyond the seas, the great tides of the Atlantic back up through the gorge at Saint John and flood all of the lower tributaries of the river above, and the freshening smell of salt air beckons. The Gorhams of Gorham's Bluff have always been torn between leaving and staying.

Back in the last century, one of them named Joseph went off to sea in the great wooden ships for which the province was famous. But after 20 years of wandering by land and sea to the United States, Europe, and Australia, he came back to Gorham's Bluff to plant strawberries and apple trees and to coax the reluctant soil with commercial fertilizers and the techniques of scientific agriculture. The world had taught him something, but it couldn't keep him away from the place he called home.

And so it was with Joseph's son Raymond. Raymond followed his father's interest in scientific agriculture and after studying at McDonald College, became an entomologist with the federal government. But he always had time to go back to the farm, taking with him on one occasion a couple of used telephone sets he had bought in Montreal. He hooked them up between two farms and out of this experiment emerged the Kingston Peninsula Telephone Company, which maintained its independence until 1961.

Loyalist farmers and modernists, both: these were the Gorhams of Gorham's Bluff. This was the family into which was born Richard Vessot Gorham. Dick, as he prefers to be called, was born in Fredericton, son of Raymond the entomologist and grandson of Joseph the sailor. His schooling was in Fredericton, bleak years when Depression and the Gathering Storm in Europe filled the news. But for a boy like Dick, life was fun, especially the summers down on the farm. Yet as much as he loved it there, it was hard to ignore the problems of a world at war, hard not to heed the lure of the salty breezes and tidal waters.

Dick Gorham went to UNB with the veterans, and when he graduated in 1950, he headed off to Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, to take a Master's degree. He found his place in the world quickly. In 1952, he joined the Department of External Affairs at a time when idealistic young men like him were perfectly suited to serve an idealistic country trying to make a difference in a war-torn world. Within two years, he went to Japan and began surely and steadily to rise in the diplomatic service from Third Secretary to Second Secretary and, in a posting to New Delhi in 1963, First Secretary. A recognized expert in Asian affairs, he was a logical choice to become Canadian Commissioner to the International Commission for Supervision and Control in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in 1968, at the peak of the grisly war in Vietnam. Cambodia in 1968-70 was not a place for the weak of heart.

As is the practice at External Affairs, foreign positings are alternated with desk jobs in Ottawa. Dick Gorham has had his share of these, serving on the Japan desk of the Department's Far Eastern Division, the Economic. Division dealing with nuclear questions, as official press spokesman, and more recently as Director General and later Assistant Undersecretary in charge of Latin America and Caribbean Affairs.

Moreover, his foreign postings have become demanding and prestigious, a measure of the high esteem in which he is held by the Department. He returned to Japan as Minister in 1974, became Canada's Ambassador to the People's Republic of China in 1984, and is now Roving Ambassador to Latin America and Canada's Permanent Observer to the Organization of American States. Along the way, he has acquired a working proficiency in French, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, German, and Swedish, and he has turned his talents to assisting prime ministers and secretaries of state in state visits and ministerial meetings.

Dick Gorham has seen more of the world than his grandfather did, and that was a lot. But like his grandfather before him, his lodestar is forever drawing him back to Gorham's Bluff, if only for a summer break. His cousins run the farm there now. They raise turkeys, and it didn't take Dick long to learn the tricks of the trade. One day while in China, he was visited by Chinese agriculturalists who told him that they were beginning to raise turkeys. To their amazement, they discovered that Canada's ambassador was perfectly conversant on the subject and was even willing to demonstrate how to load turkeys onto a truck. As they say, you can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy.

"It's home," says Dick Gorham if you ask him about the Bluff. And so it is that at the peak of his career, Richard Vessot Gorham, Canada's Roving Ambassor to Latin America, looks for his chances to return. And in the heat of the summer sun, he feeds poultry and tries his hand at carpentry and cuts hay. And after a few days back on the farm, he wonders why anyone would ever want to leave.

From: Honoris Causa - UA Case 70, Box 2