Full Flaps
Not that those amenities would have necessarily made any difference. I was
half expecting to see my father's name on the newly-declassified CIA documents'
list of 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 20 years later so sickened by our toppling
of Allende that it occasioned his early retirement, my father needed no
prompts to admit that there was no inner statute of limitation 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 hearth and propriety, the
other loosened to the streets and the road and undreamt of possibilities,
even if it took prison to realize them.
It was that sense of decorum born of proud poverty which always propelled
my father, and gradually it had amplified whatever basic instincts for proportion
he possessed. The truest thing that could 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 by my listening the distinctions he laboriously mulled over would
better solidify. 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 Mariana 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, he would come to hew to the old-school
officers' code which prescribed that intelligence and policy never mix.
Blame for the Bay Of Pigs, he conceded, lay with the operations wing of
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 decorum was diminished.
He didn't live to see Iran-Contra and the recent evidence on the extent
of CIA's traditional involvement in drug running. I suspect he would regard
these manifestations as an outgrowth of the predilections of the new breed
of officers he railed against late in his career, the sycophantic bag men
like Robert Owen, toadies to military types like Ollie North and intemperate
old-boy romantics like William Casey. But I'm hardly persuaded that my father
would cease all defense of his beloved employer. On his deathbed, his frail
voice barely audible, he mused 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.
I'll be off momentarily for the East Coast and a visit with my mother, and,
as it happens, to pick up a national journalism award which has been vouchsafed
this modest sheet.
I remember with particular amusement 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 eternal bewilderment, that I intended to
follow Camus' counsel to "create dangerously."
Evidently some of the gods are apportioned to look out for mavericks like
myself, and my forthcoming honors 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, and certainly
it was plain that I was not one who had need of his blessing or his applause
-- his or anyone's 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, either for want of nerve or the constraints of his acute
sense of responsibility. 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 very dire 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.