My father had more to say. “Smith and his gang are cooking up all sorts of crazy schemes to get the director’s attention. I wish I could wash my hands of them.”
“That mafia. I bet Terry’s right in there with them. He’s such a brownnoser he’s sure to get the next plum post.”
My father just stared out the window.
My father was trying to harden himself so as not to care, and my mother was trying to stay calm, but she was revving up instead. “That awful place,” she said, her eyes flashing. “We’ve got to get out of here. Charlie, put in for a hardship post.”
I didn’t know what all this meant, but for the first time, moving sounded good to me. I could newly embrace my mother’s motto, “You can do anything for a year.” To get away from the States seemed like a delicious adventure. Besides, we were living in an occupied country. If America was ever good it was now in the hands of a tyrant: President Nixon.
On October 14 there was an announcement at school about a big antiwar demonstration to take place the following day. It was going to be the biggest ever—and all the students were in a flurry. At home, I rushed into the kitchen to ask Mom if I could go.
“They gave out these.” I showed my mother my armband, a strip of black cotton on which had been stamped in white the number of American soldiers killed in the war—something over thirty-five thousand. “We’re excused from school if our parents say we can attend.”
“I’m not sure, Sara. I’m not sure it’s safe,” she said. There had been reports that the Weather Underground and SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, were threatening violent actions and the riot police were gearing up, but I was determined. I believed the moratorium would be as peaceful as the organizers had guaranteed the police it would be. At Sidwell, we believed in Gandhian civil disobedience.
“But Mom, everyone’s going!” I was not going to let Mom stop me from participating. This meant everything to me. But I could tell by my mother’s face that she was in her worried, determined mode, and when she was like this she was an iron gate.
“Mom!” I was beginning to boil and she saw it. “I’ll talk to your father when he gets home,” she said.
But at night I heard my mother in their bedroom saying to my father, “She could be raped, or, my God, Charlie, they could get caught in a riot and she could be killed!” Her voice was rising to a shriek now. I put the pillow over my head so I wouldn’t hear her urgent wolf voice, to close out the contagion of her worry.
But my father won. He came into my room and said, “Your mother and I have discussed it. You can go to the demo as long as you stay with kids from school, avoid anyone holding an SDS sign, and steer away from any particularly vociferous groups like the Weathermen. Keep a watch out, and if anything starts to get out of hand, you get yourself out of there. Agreed?” I nodded and he said, smiling, “Okay, you can go,” and gave me a hug.
I lay on my bed, thinking about how my father had fought for me to go to the “demo,” a version of the word no American used. Ever since Holland, it had seemed like the word “demo” had magic sparkles around it for my father. Later, as an adult, I’d comprehend that that word had packed into its four letters all that my father loved about Holland, all that he had to smother in himself, and all that he believed about America. Without saying so, and without my knowing it—and probably without his awareness either—my father was setting me up to be his voice. By way of his daughter, by sending me off to the march, he was able to express the sprouting doubts, seeded in Japan and Taiwan, about his country’s manner in the world.
As an officer in the CIA, it was dangerous to feel. To feel was weakness and turned you to prey for the powers that were. My father was not permitted emotion but I was, and he encouraged me to feel and speak out. My mother, on the other hand, needed me not to. I dumped my outrage on her head.
After my father retired, my parents demonstrated for every liberal cause. They were the fluffy white-haired couple in olive green jackets holding signs saying “Another Pro-Choice American,” or “Equal Rights for All Women,” or “Universal
Health Care for All.”
The next morning, my father patted me on the back and my mother sent me out the door with a desperately tight squeeze, as though she’d never see me again.
As Sara and I and a clutch of other Sidwell kids traveled to the Mall, the bus was crammed with rumpled protestors wearing dove necklaces and carrying signs. Nearly everyone was holding or carrying a peace symbol; it was like we were all waving the passports of a brand new country. The morning news said a quarter of a million people had descended on the city; the turnout was massive.
From the gleaming Capitol to the Washington Monument and beyond, hand-painted VW campers lined the Mall, along with VW bugs, Karmann Ghias, jeeps, and beat-up Volvos. The air was pungent with the scents of wine, sweat, and marijuana. As far as I could see, the Mall was jammed thick with people flashing peace signs, hoisting hand-lettered peace symbols, “God loves America” signs, and “Fuck Nixon” signs, and everywhere there were people lighting joints, groups sharing loaves of French bread and cheese, and Hare Krishna devotees dancing, their spidery arms waving around.
Music was blasting from the loudspeakers on the multiple platforms: Richie Havens keening, “Marching to the Concors War, to Dunkirk, to Korea, Birmingham . . . hydrogen bomb, guided missiles . . . Freedom! Freeeeedom” and “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child . . . a long way from my home. . . . Sometimes I feel like I’m almost gone. . . . Clap your hands, clap your hands. . . .” Joan Baez singing her mournful, “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,” and the Youngbloods’ rousing “Come on people now . . . everybody get together, try to love one another right now. .. ”
And the Mall was chock-a-block with long-haired boys in bandanas, feather headdresses, and floppy Arlo Guthrie hats; boys with foot-tall Afros; boys in sheepskin vests or in loincloths; boys playing kazoos; and disturbing close-shorn boys in fatigue jackets with their names on the pockets. And long-haired girls: girls with feather earrings, girls hugging guitars, girls wearing silver rings on all their fingers or ten necklaces of love beads, girls in Mexican ponchos or army jackets or knee-high fringed moccasins.
It seemed as though I’d landed in Wonderland. . . . Everything I believed in was right here. I strained so hard to hear the speeches—by Benjamin Spock, Justice Arthur Goldberg, and others—blaring from the fuzzy microphones, my head throbbed. When Ambassador Averell Harriman repeated, “Nixon is going to have to pay attention,” everyone roared. Nixon was reported to have said, “Under no circumstances will I be affected [by the demonstrations].”
Here on the National Mall it was all brought together: both the gigantic power and the deep flaws of America. Here, among thousands of other young people, I soaked into my bones one of America’s basic lessons: the power of free protest.
As the sun went down, the peace marshals handed out candles and we all lined up. Sad and quiet, we followed Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s widow in a candlelight vigil to the Nation’s Capitol. The city grew dark and hushed, even though thousands of people were gathered for the procession.
As we walked in quiet, I felt dissolved into the flow of people: just one pulse in a massive plea for goodness. In Holland, caught in the headiness of ethnocentrism, I had experienced the negative pull of the group. Here I felt its positive force.
The march was the most exhilarating experience I’d ever had, and seemed like the most important thing I’d ever done. Aside from being in the woods, this was the closest to God I’d ever felt. I was filled with righteous conviction. At last, I felt secure. I was part of something undeniably good. I was a balloon sailing above dark, peaceful, thronging Washington looking down on all the good people who wanted to save the world.
When I told my father about it, breathless, late in the evening, he said, “Bully for you!” I could tell he sort of wished he were me.
The next day, the Washington Post reported that Nixon maintained that he had b
een “conducting business as usual” throughout the day of the moratorium. At dinner, I said, “Nixon is a capitalist pig.”
“Don’t be disrespectful,” my mother said, “you just control yourself, Young Lady.”
“What good does control do?” I said, outraged.
I didn’t know how dangerous emotions were in my parents’ world. I didn’t know the pressures on them, how my father’s job was—surreptitiously, clandestinely—destroying parts of them. How my mother had to control her emotions all the time. How my father was going underground with his, and the submerging would turn into an undertow.
I was seeing many things anew, however, even my brother.
I shambled down the powder-blue carpeted stairs in my nightie, feeling all clogged-up still with sleep, and turned the corner into the kitchen. I grabbed my granola and milk, barely seeing Mom and Andy who were in there too, and plopped down at the Formica table. As I began eating my regulation nuts and grains, I began to feel more awake. I felt the sun on my cheek and looked up. My mother was bent down getting sandwich cheese out of the fridge, and Andy was standing in the middle of the kitchen in a daze, like he sometimes did—probably dreaming about General Westmoreland, MacArthur, or someone.
But no! Suddenly the sun was playing in Andy’s bed-tousled hair and on his nose, and I saw something new. Plink! went a new coin in the bank. My brother was beautiful! He was no longer a little boy with mossy teeth prattling about guns and making elephant jokes. He was almost as tall as I was, and he was handsome as heck standing there, all disheveled, in his navy blue Potomac School jacket and tie.
He ran his hand through his shaggy hair—I suddenly saw that his bangs hung charmingly down into his eyes and that the color was deep hickory-brown—saying, “Mom, where’re the English muffins?” And I heard now a new, growly timbre in his voice, like the voice was coming from down deep in, what I saw now was, his broadening chest.
“I’ll get ‘em, Andy,” I said. I’d never offered to do anything for him before in my life, except to get Brownie points with Mom.
As of this day, when Andy said something I listened. And new realizations came to me. As he talked to my father, comparing Vietnam to Guatemala, I saw that he had thought about it much more thoroughly than I had. He could name all the weapons being used in Southeast Asia, and he knew the generals’ names and geographical positions. He talked about the Geneva Convention like he’d read it. This brother of mine, who I could suddenly see as a person, would be a key ally during the two blithe and tumultuous years that lay in wait across the globe.
On November 3, Nixon gave a big speech in which he outlined his plan for gradually withdrawing the troops and ending the war. “And so tonight, to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans,” he said, “I ask for your support.” His ratings went up again as he and Vice President Agnew claimed they represented traditional American values. Agnew attacked the news media as a “small unelected elite that do not—I repeat not—represent the view of America.”
But on November 15, there was another massive antiwar demo in Washington. It was even bigger and more exhilarating than the last. Five hundred thousand gathered on the Mall.
Then, the next day, the My Lai massacre, which had taken place the year before, was revealed. Nixon’s ratings plunged again as the country went into paroxysms of anguish. None of us at school could believe the photographs of the decimated village. We were those mothers and children. And the outrage of this administration—keeping it secret for a year just to protect the Republicans!
Nixon reduced American troop strength by sixty thousand by December, and, in a bow to China, suspended patrols of the Taiwan Strait.
On February 21, Kissinger began secret talks with the North Vietnamese in Paris, cutting out the State Department and the Department of Defense. I had no idea about my government’s fondness for secrecy. Nor had I any sense—despite all the clues—of the secret in my own house.
The hints had been piling up into a tower like my father’s Chinese flash cards. Now the tower was so high it was about to topple.
Things were going along normally and then something big happened. My father arrived home one evening and announced he had just gotten his new assignment: Vice Consul in Kuching, East Malaysia, on the island of Borneo. Instantly my whole body bubbled with sparkling Seven-Up. Asia! Borneo, no less! A wild jungle island where headhunters dwelt, where tribal people lived in riverside long-houses on stilts, where hornbills squatted high in the trees—a realm untouched by the American paw. Kuching was a hardship post, so my father would earn extra pay, and it would afford him another grace period during which he didn’t yet have to go to Vietnam.
Ironically, Vietnam, the post he was avoiding, was the place he would do the one thing of which he was proudest—the post where, in spite of the government and without government support, he would take a large, redemptive action. But we didn’t know this at the time.
My father’s friend, Terry, as my mother predicted, got his first-choice assignment: somewhere in Europe. Kuching was lower on my father’s list. But my father refused to be defeated. “It’s a pasture, but I think it’ll be fun. The kids will love it.” The strain of being with an agency he no longer fully respected and the repeated disappointments in his career progression were getting to him. Morale was guttering in Washington due to the faltering war. Like many, he simply wanted to get out of Dodge.
The only hitch about the new post was that there was no high school for us to attend in Kuching. After much family discussion, my parents chose Canadian Academy, a missionary school in Kobe, Japan. Out of pure reflex, the Foreign Service girl clicked into departure mode.
But there was yet another bit of news to come, a bit of unsought truth that, without my knowledge, had been, and always would be, sculpting my life. The sea surged to the high tide line; the deeps divulged; the truth surfaced. Onto the sand rolled a murky grey pearl.
We were slouching around at the same old kitchen table, forking up ordinary meat loaf with ketchup and potato chips on an ordinary late-winter evening when my father looked at my mother.
“Sure, go ahead,” she said.
Their exchange was strangely calm and offhand.
“I have something I want to tell you two before I go off to Kuching,” my father said. He had to fly to Malaysia to take up his new post in a week and my mother and we would join him when school was out, in June. I didn’t have a clue what to expect.
“I want you to know something about my work.” He took a deep breath. “I don’t really work for the State Department. I work for the Central Intelligence Agency.”
The moment that should have sent a cold wind whistling through me and halted the world somehow didn’t. I continued forking up meat loaf, and listening. I didn’t quite get it yet.
“Normally officers aren’t supposed to tell their children,” my father was going on, “but I think you’re both old enough and mature enough to handle it, and I don’t want to mislead you any longer.”
I still couldn’t fathom what was going on.
Then Andy said, “Oh I knew that. You’re a spy, aren’t you, Pop?” My pipsqueak, bookworm brother explained he’d figured it out from his reading. He knew the euphemisms. Agency, company: he’d caught all the clues.
“Are you in intelligence gathering or the covert side?”
“I’m a covert operations officer,” my father said.
Now, finally, I began to feel the smooth, dusky weight of my father’s announcement. My father was a CIA agent, my brain told me.
Still, though, this chilling and shocking news was somehow not chilling or shocking at all. The news was not a tsunami. It was not even a storm. It was not an iron ball that took me to the bottom of the sea. My reaction surprised me: I was calm. The CIA was one of the prime enemies of the peace movement. I knew that, if I was doctrinaire antiwar, I should be outraged at Pop, but I was intrigued instead of aghast. Somehow the news made sense of things, gave the correct name to something
that I’d just barely sensed. I searched and couldn’t find fury anywhere in me.
I looked over at my father’s face, the brown eyes now bright and eager with the pleasure of finally sharing this fundamental truth with his children. This was still my father, the same man he’d always been, the kindest person I knew, the man in the world I adored. My father never even went over the speed limit. It didn’t add up for him to be engaged in anything immoral. I couldn’t find even a strand of hate to tug on.
The secret didn’t weigh me down, as people might have expected. On the contrary, I felt light and special, like I finally had a membership card—to a group to which I’d long unknowingly belonged.
Yet I had a keen inkling that my father wanted me to scream at him. Part of me sensed that he was getting frayed and he would almost have liked me to pitch a fit and insist that he quit so that he would be able to go into the office and say, “My daughter is so upset I have to leave,” and hand in his resignation letter. Other kids were doing this—fathers were leaving the government due to their children’s outrage—but I couldn’t help him out. I could do nothing but love him as before. Andy and I were young. We were intrigued. We liked James Bond movies. We were caught up in the glamour, the Hollywood of it all. Still, this was my first intuition that my father felt trapped.
Perilous though it may be, we make exceptions for the people we love. To me, now at sixteen, my father’s choice to reveal his true work to his children, his willingness to break the Agency rule, showed his integrity rather than an unforgivable participation in the immoral actions of an immoral agency. How many nuances there are to this matter of honesty.
This matter was a marbled and many-layered cake. Even though they’d lived a large and stunning lie, neither of my parents were people who struck you as fake or deceitful—quite the opposite. My mother was baldly honest and my father the most transparent person I had ever known. He didn’t pretend to know when he didn’t; he considered every point. He looked at the government, he looked at the president, he looked at himself, and took on board even unpleasant and contradictory facts. He grappled with mixed and messy truths about the Communists, about Vietnam, about the CIA.
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