It was a rule
of thumb for my father’s generation that the spooks came from
Fordham, as my father had, and the gumshoes from Holy Cross. Thus
did the national security state in its formative stages staff the
middle-level apparat of its two major corps, the CIA and the FBI.
The upper tiers of The Company, as the CIA fondly refers to itself,
were blue-blooded Ivy League, and you could perhaps not have better
proof of Adam Smith’s invisible hand at work than that patriciate
national interests would be carried out by second-generation Irish
and Italian underlings molded in the peculiarly Jesuitical pedigree
of defense of empire.
My father was representative of that first
contingent of CIA officers, Depression-reared and working-class.
Their way up and out of the neighborhoods was stymied by the war,
and at its close they had jumped headlong at the first tenders of
peacetime regimentation. My father’s reaction was typical. At 33,
a veteran of Army Intelligence and with a war bride and two
children, the CIA’s was the logical entreaty and meant the first
real opportunity he had to make a respectable living.
I make no excuses for him beyond the exigencies of
necessity, and 20 years to the week after his passing entertain no
illusions about the nature of his handiwork. He was a tough, firm,
and cranky Cold Warrior, an ideologue unmistakably shaped by
Coughlinite catholicity and parochial clannishness. What
extenuations I could cite for him are of a different order, however
insufficient: More than a passing interest in literature, a longing
and a reverence for the sea his merchant seaman father had
bequeathed him, a public courtliness and affability which was
totally genuine, a pampering gentleness toward my mother —
offsets, albeit minimal and dilettantish, against the life role he
had assumed and which held him in sway. My father did what he had to
do without the long view perspective affords. And that allowance, I’d
be remiss not to argue, has the heft of moral hindsight: Unlike
myself, he lacked a smorgasbord of affluence cushioning his
adolescent years, still more the luxury of revisionist history as a
political Baedeker or the contemporary tools for decoding the biases
of media and propaganda.
Not that those amenities would have necessarily
made any difference. I was half expecting to see my father’s name
a few years ago on a declassified CIA documents list of the agency
operatives responsible for the 1954 coup in Guatemala. While it’s
true that the scared junior officer off-loading guns at a rebel
airfield was a different man from the one two decades later whose
disgust at our toppling of Allende helped occasion his early
retirement, to his credit my father needed no prompts to admit that
there was no inner statute of limitations for such complicity.
But by then compensation owed had long put him in
arrears, and my own outrage added punctuation. We quarreled over
Vietnam, predictably, with all the ugliness of the most profound
estrangement, apparatchik facing off against poet-dreamer, one
steadfast to the notions of nest and hearth, the other loosened to
the streets and the road and undreamt of possibilities, with a
willingness to risk much to realize them.
A sense of decorum born of proud poverty always
propelled my father, and gradually it amplified whatever basic
instincts for proportion he possessed. The truest thing that can be
said of him is that he was a man and of a generation trapped by
history, and he well knew it. I still find a bit remarkable his
assumption that I should share his confidences, as if my listening
would better solidify the distinctions he laboriously mulled over.
In the daily service to the wrong ends, his was a serial dramaturgy.
“Despicable soldiers of fortune,” was my father’s assessment
of the Chiang Kai-Shek generals for whom he toted water as
third-in-command of CIA’s secret base on Saipan in the Marianas
Islands in the mid-1950s. The training of Kuomintang guerrillas for
sabotage missions against the mainland, he was forced to conclude,
would not regain the China that had ostensibly been “lost” by
John Stewart Service and the old China Hands at the State
Department. By degrees, my father would come to hew to an old-school
professionalism which prescribed that intelligence and policy never
mix. Blame for the Bay of Pigs, he conceded, lay with the operations
wing of the CIA foolishly usurping policy prerogatives and expecting
that a new president would fully back a plan he hadn’t initiated.
The consequence was the worst of possible lapses, and by “bringing
embarrassment” to the agency one’s personal repute was similarly
tarnished.
The Thomistic scholasticism the Jebbies had
provided apparently rooted him: Down and dirty espionage was
necessary, even admirable; but fomenting foreign and domestic
destabilization except under extreme circumstances failed his
ends/means test. My father didn’t live to see Iran-Contra and the
cumulative evidence on the CIA’s long involvement in drug running,
and missed witnessing the agency’s paymastering of surrogate
terrorism in Central America. I suspect he would have regarded these
manifestations as an outgrowth of the predilections of the new breed
of officers he railed against late in his career, sycophantic bag
men like Robert Owen, and semper-fi “assets” like Ollie North,
eager to emulate OSS nostalgics like William Casey and the aloof
ruthlessness of the perennial Yalie directorate. And yet it’s a
given that my father could never abandon his beloved employer. On
his deathbed, his frail voice barely audible, he speculated about
how the agency should best approach the aftermath of Anwar Sadat’s
assassination. In the end, as in life, it was all he had.
Along the way there was always my father’s
strained consternation about what would finally become of me. My
impulse to challenge the state in the 1960s he could at least
ascribe to Quixotic youthfulness. But I had also abandoned the safe
sinecure of academia, and later the trivialities of mainstream
journalism and its corresponding stench of careerist fear. I had
informed my father, to his considerable bewilderment, that I
intended to follow Camus’ counsel to “create dangerously.”
Evidently some of the gods are apportioned to look
out for renegades like myself, and what laurels of public
certification I’ve been accorded would probably please my father,
though he would likely rather acknowledge my entrepreneurial
abilities than my political analyses.
I daresay in the end I knew the man better than he
knew himself. The times in which he lived had made him a quick
study. And yet I remain uncertain if he sensed that his example of
stealth and cunning, the very covertness of his existence, had found
a corollary in me. It’s a rich irony, but certainly it was plain
that I needed neither his blessing nor his applause — neither his
nor anyone else’s, for that matter.
Such self-containment clearly discomfited him,
perhaps because it was a reminder of his own essential isolation, as
well as the options he, by contrast, hadn’t exercised, for either
want of nerve or the constraints of a sense of responsibility to his
era. Once, at the end of a visit, I told him I loved him and he
turned quickly back toward the house, sobbing. I realized, in
retrospect, that the fact that I absolutely bore no uneasiness in
telling him must have been all too apparent, and what I thought was
merely embarrassment on his part went far deeper.
For all our disaffected and impassioned
differences, he may have seen more reminders of himself in me than
he liked. Clearly in that mirror with its vying dance of shadow and
light was a reflection each had yet to detect, one where history and
ideology were without visage, and what showed was only the timeless
calm of blood and gristle, marrow and bone, father and son.
