We know now, however, that a considerable fraction of those civilians were killed by the North Vietnamese and Vietcong. We know now that the Tet offensive really was, as Lyndon Johnson said, “a complete failure” militarily for the Communist side.
And we know now that the prisoner we watched being executed on TV had previously killed one of his executioner’s men and the man’s wife and children. We also know now that the general, the cold-blooded killer who so shocked my conscience that evening, had been considered a humanitarian figure in South Vietnam.
We also now know, by the way, the truer stories behind some of those ghetto riots in the summer of 1967. The taxi driver in Newark was roughed up by the police, but he didn’t die. The kid shot by the Tampa police had robbed a store. The kid in Houston was shot not by the police but by another kid. I am not saying that racism in America in 1967 wasn’t savage and deep-seated, only that some of the spontaneous violent uprisings against it were ignited by plausible fictions.
And as disinclined as I am to feed my son-in-law’s hysteria concerning my granddaughter, in 1968 my friends and I did comprise a little cult. Which is why I’ve been allergic ever since to groups of people with single-minded visionary passion and without any doubt that they possess the one truth—why, ever since, I’ve seen cults everywhere I look, not just literal cults, like Scientology, but the astoundingly successful ones around Warren Buffett and Oprah Winfrey, Linus Torvalds and Steve Jobs, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama.
Ours was a cult based on our narcissistic love of our beautiful young American selves and hatred of the horrible American pod people callously killing millions. As with the Muslim cult of hate embodied for a while by Osama bin Laden, and as with the worst and nuttiest of the new American haters, ours was a nihilism that fancied itself utopian. On the spectrum of self-righteous madness, we were somewhere between the lunatic Islamists and the lunatic American right-wingers.
I call Greta. She asks if I’m relieved to be finished with the school year. Commencement was two days ago. I’m touched that she keeps track of my academic calendar.
“It feels excellent. I can lock myself in my bunker and finish the book by Labor Day. Which is why I’m calling.”
I tell her I need a primer from her on the neuroscience of hate, which is, along with love, the focus of her work.
“You really want my help?” she asks.
The surprise in her voice makes me feel like crying.
Over the winter I asked her about the neuroscience of free will, but I didn’t tell her it was research. She’d told me the evidence mainly indicates that free will is an illusion, an instant revisionist trick our minds do to fool us into thinking we decide what to do and then do it—whereas it’s more like the reverse of that, our unconscious lizard brain initiating every action on its own, and only then our conscious brain rubber-stamping those actions as “choices.” Or occasionally vetoing them. I find that somewhat comforting, as I contemplate what I did back in 1968, but also disturbing as a user’s manual for human consciousness.
“Yes, sweetie, I do want your help.”
She tells me about the “neural correlates of hate” that she and her fellow researchers have started pinpointing, no longer solely by taking fMRI pictures of blood flow but by injecting photosensitive proteins and then shining blue light on the exposed brain to see how it responds. And, in her newly funded project with neuroscientists in Shanghai, by implanting electrodes directly into the brains of people who are consumed with hate.
“How can you do that?” I ask.
“Technically, you mean?”
“No … ethically.”
“They’re volunteers.”
I don’t raise the question of what “volunteering” might mean in China. “Cutting to the chase, the bottom line is? Give me ‘Neuroscience for Dummies.’”
“I hate it when you do that.” We both laugh. “Correlating isn’t the same as causing, of course, but hate seems to burn mainly in the right side of the front of your brain. One’s brain. That’s where hateful feelings are either denatured or amplified.”
“Each of us is wired to either hate more or hate less?”
“Basically, probably, yeah. Certain families and certain cultures intentionally build up the—so to speak—hate muscles in the brains of children. Hurting them, insulting them, steeling them, maybe indoctrinating them with false beliefs.”
“Your grandmother indoctrinated me with plenty of false beliefs about the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—”
“No, no, I mean false beliefs about the people you’re supposed to hate.”
“Ah.”
“By the way? One thing that really interests me? A couple of the neural correlates for hate are also significant neural correlates for love. Makes sense, right? The happy or angry tunnel vision that won’t switch off.”
Like in Karen Hollaender, ages seventeen and eighteen. “Right.”
“As with most brain states, there’s a useful mode and a pathological mode—schizophrenia bad, creativity good. A guy I know in San Diego is doing interesting work on athletes, how the best ones develop tunnel vision, psychologically as well as literally, in terms of visual perception. Swimmers, especially.”
“Swimmers, huh?” Such as a boy who swam the 400-yard freestyle at the 1966 Illinois state championship in under four minutes? “That’s interesting.”
As we chat about Waverly, Jungo gets on an extension, tells me he’s trying to “really Six Sigma her college admissions process,” and reads aloud from his Excel spreadsheet of “places we’re planning on applying to,” so that I can give him the names of all the professors and deans and trustees I know at each institution. I’m so relieved that Stanford is not on the list. Alex is on Stanford’s board.
“Thanks, Mom,” Jungo says, “I’ll shoot you a follow-up email with action steps,” and when he hangs up, I ask Greta if she’s talked to Alex Macallister again.
“Uh-uh, why?”
No reason in particular except that he’s the only person alive for whom I feel actual hatred. “Oh, I had a conversation with him after you and I talked in New York, and … I just thought he might have been in touch with you again.”
I rarely feel anger, let alone hate. I sometimes feel frustrated and disgusted and despairing, but it almost never blossoms into true hate, not even for the ideologues on TV and radio and their overexcited cult followings of ignorami. I never hated Jack. Not only did I not hate my acquaintance who slept with Jack at the start of the last decade of our marriage, but it was my lack of anger when I discovered her betrayal that made me realize I didn’t want to be married to Jack much longer. I did hate the psychiatrist who told my son Seth at fourteen that his Asperger’s is “in all likelihood due in some measure” to my “mothering style.” I hated a man who called me a “self-satisfied corporate pawn” and “chilly crypto-conservative” in his review of my first book, and until he went to prison for securities fraud, I hated the asshole at my law firm who said with a smile at a partners’ meeting in 1989 that “as a smarter-than-average gal,” I was “living proof affirmative action can sometimes work.”.Mostly, I hate feeling or seeing hate.
In 1967 and 1968, however, I truly and viscerally hated every American official responsible for the war in Vietnam, in particular Lyndon Johnson. I had merely a simmering repugnance for people like those I would become, the self-satisfied corporate pawns and crypto-conservatives who refused to admit how wrong and untenable the system is, grown-ups who let a nice paycheck and a dry martini and a good book in a comfortable chair prevent them from challenging the racist, warmongering, imperialist status quo.
At age sixty-four—and tomorrow, sixty-five—I still disapprove of imperialism when it humiliates and immiserates and brutalizes people. But visiting which cities makes me happiest? Charleston, Cuzco, Cartagena, Cape Town, and Hanoi, the glorious antique urban residue of European colonialism. I am a postcolonial colonialist, just as I am an irreligious lover of religious art—Michelangelo, M
ozart, cathedrals, “Amazing Grace.” I still disapprove of unnecessary wars, but does even the leftiest lefty today refuse to use GPS because it’s an app invented and operated by the Pentagon?
After the waiter takes our order and we clink our glasses of red wine, Stewart says, “I’m afraid, my dear, you’ve proved a theory of mine about you.”
My throat tightens. Tonight is supposed to be pure fun. Until now, neither of us has mentioned 1968. I fake-smile. “I thought you and your gizmo decided I was telling the truth.”
“Whoa! The lady protests too much. I’m talking about you and menus—your dinner.”
“What? I like mozzarella, I like spicy pasta, I like crab. And since you love garlic, I figured you’d forgive the pesto breath.”
“You always order the items on the menu that have the most words. Every time.”
I smile authentically and shake my head. I ordered two dishes—bufala mozzarella with pesto, salsa romesco, tapenade, and caperberry relish to start; for my main course, squid-ink chitarra freddi with Dungeness crab, sea urchin, and jalapeño. “You know me better than I know myself.”
“This is the business I have chosen.”
“Speaking of which, what brings you to the Mojave this time?”
“Not much, quick look-see at the new FEMA concentration camp and mind-control facility we’re building out there. Usual bullshit.”
“Ha ha. Do you not want to tell me?”
He lowers his voice but raises the pitch. “I was out at Edwards looking at this unbelievable new UAS.”
“Ah, a new UAS.”
“Yeah, the thing can cruise stratospherically for almost a week. It’s got imaging resolution of half an inch at twelve kilometers. I could make out each of your buttons from fucking forty thousand feet. And get your heat signature.”
“What’s a UAS?” I finally ask.
“Oh, right—unmanned aircraft system. Unmanned aerial vehicles.”
“A drone, a Predator.”
“You are such a civilian, and so 2011. A Predator stays up for a day, day and a half. It flies low, lower than a passenger plane, and it’s noisy as a garbage truck, so the bad guys hear you coming. This thing is quiet.”
“What a nice birthday party—learning about a new, improved way for my country to kill people.”
“Bad people.”
“I’m sure.”
“And a lot fucking fewer not-so-bad people. With this, we might be able to reduce the NCCCR, no bullshit, from ten down to like one or two.”
I give him a look.
“Noncombatant collateral casualty ratio. The friends and family we unavoidably whack when we take out a bona fide target with a Hellfire.” He smiles. “You know what else? No, I shouldn’t tell you this. You’re going to think I’m a totally cold, callous motherfucker.”
“That horse left the barn fifteen years ago. Go ahead.”
“This thing is hydrogen-powered, the engines on the new drone. Totally green.”
Nineteen-sixty-eight hasn’t come up by the time the waiter takes away our plates, commencing the interval of quiet pre-coffee glow.
Then Stewart says, “So: eighteen United States Code 1751.”
I sigh. He knows.
“A wet job,” he says. “The wet job.”
“Yup.”
“I mean, that shocked me. You fucking inhaled, baby. Capital crime.”
I nod. Whoever kills any individual who is the President of the United States, according to 18 U.S. Code 1751, the relevant statute, shall be punished by death. “Except,” I say, “it didn’t happen in the end. The capital crime.”
“Conspiracy to commit still gets you life, even if nobody dies.”
I nod again. “I know the U.S. Code.” If two or more persons conspire to kill … and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each shall be punished by imprisonment for any term of years or for life.
“You know what else?” he says. “The great irony? Well, a great irony among several great ironies. It was Johnson who muscled his new director of Central Intelligence in sixty-seven to collect intel on campus un-Americans like you. The smart people at Langley hated it. If not for Johnson, your boy Macallister the Third wouldn’t have become such a friend of the Agency.”
“And the CIA wouldn’t have known a thing about what we were doing. So the president’s illegal domestic spying saved him. And maybe me.”
“Something like that. The piece of the story I still don’t have nailed is the other asset in your group. Which I still think there must have been, and which has to be what saved you. It’s killing me. Like when you can’t get a final, big thirteen-letter phrase in a crossword puzzle. I can’t pry shit out of INSCOM.”
“That reminds me.”
“You forgot to tell me you were a Defense Intelligence Agency asset after all? Signed up by your uncle Ralph?” He isn’t obviously joking.
“No. I got a Freedom of Information letter back from them a week or so ago—’in the interest of national security, involvement by the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command in the activities which are the subject matter of your request can neither be confirmed nor denied.’ They Glomarized me.”
“There you fucking go.” He seems both happy and unhappy, intrigued and disappointed. “The puzzle’s done.”
After he pays the check in cash and then shows off by having a conversation in perfect Spanish with one of the parking valets, we get in his car and he opens a manila envelope with both hands and holds it in front of me. Inside is a fat number 10 envelope, which I take out. “Happy birthday,” he says.
As we drive, I barely look up, marvel at no L.A.-by-night panoramas, do nothing but skim a sheaf of xeroxed CIA documents originally typewritten and sent via special pouch and specially numbered blind memoranda, many of them circulated directly to the director of Central Intelligence. Stewart tells me I “lucked out.” Richard Helms, the CIA director back then, tape-recorded conversations in his office, and before leaving the job in 1973, he didn’t manage to destroy all seven years’ worth of transcripts. “Somebody made a few temporary stayback burn copies that didn’t turn out to be temporary.” Thus, what I’m holding is the unredacted lowdown on Alex Macallister, junior spook.
“Wow,” I say. “ ‘EYES ONLY safekeeping.’ ‘Destroy the one burn copy and the ribbon copy.’ ‘Destroy all notes and other source materials.’ It’s so … spy-novelish. OCI is what—Office of Central Intelligence?”
“Current Intelligence.”
As we turn from Highland onto the Hollywood Freeway, I make a plosive sound. “Why do they write like this?”
“Don’t get me started. It’s one of the worst parts of the job.”
“‘Beginning 1967 Americans with existing extremist credentials’—‘extremist credentials,’ that’s hilarious—‘have been assessed, recruited, tested, and dispatched for assignments. Agents who have an American ‘Movement’ background are useful as agents to obtain biographic and personality data, to discern possible susceptibilities, and to develop operationally exploitable relationships with recruitment targets of the above programs.’”
“That’s Updike,” he says, “compared to the shit I see.”
“What, are they paid by the syllable? I thought CIA were supposed to be the intellectual ones.”
I read on silently, except when I need Stewart’s help deciphering. “RYBAT?”
“Highly sensitive information.”
“Coo-bark?” I ask, mispronouncing KUBARK.
“It’s K-U-bark. Headquarters, Langley. K-U is the prefix for the Agency.”
“So K-U-DOVE is … “
“Clandestine Services.”
We turn off the Hollywood Freeway onto Mulholland. “What’s A-M mean?”
“Cuba.”
“And A-M-THUG?”
“Castro.”
“Huh. Some code. Whoa—my name. Spelled right! Why does it have an asterisk penciled in?”
“Unclear. Your ol
d man’s connections, your uncle Ralph, some stray clerk sometime making a stray mark for whatever reason. I don’t know. You’re completely ruining the view with the light on, by the way. Those pages are not going to disintegrate. You can read them all later.”
I ignore him and continue reading. “I know O-D means ‘other departments of the government,’” I say as we turn down Benedict Canyon, “but what’s O-D-FOAM?”
“Secret Service.”
At my house, I take off my shoes but spend another half hour on the bed reading the trove. After his initial recruitment by the CIA in the summer of 1967 to spy on his Yugoslavian Communist friend, Alex started reporting on us and members of Harvard SDS as part of Project RESISTANCE. He contributed to a secret report called “Restless Youth,” produced by the CIA’s Office of Current Intelligence on student radicals and commissioned personally by LBJ. Alex informed his CIA handler in April 1968 of a potential threat against the president in Washington, D.C., and CIA in turn informed the Secret Service—which was, according to a memo, already aware of the assassination plot against Johnson. Alex continued feeding information to the CIA about Cambridge radicals until 1971, when we graduated. He even had a CIA code name, WHEEL-14.
That must be why his movie company is called Wheel Life Pictures. I always assumed it was just a lame pun that some boyfriend of Alex’s made up.
After examining the mysterious chronic dampness in the corner of my bedroom, Stewart says I need to get the roof repaired. He’s taken off his pants and turned on the TV. He’s on the bed, watching the new live-action HBO show about cats and dogs and horses and rats who talk and curse and dream and have sex and occasionally kill one another.
“Is that supposed to be a comedy?” he asks as he flips to the news channels.
“I don’t know, but one last question. What is CHAOS?”
“From the ancient Greek, abyss, a state of extreme confusion, formlessness.”
“Seriously.”
“In the summer of sixty-eight the Agency put all the domestic anti-radical crap under one roof. That’s what they called it.”
True Believers Page 33