By 1961 I was a freshman at Georgetown. I had desperately hoped that my ROTC unit would be tapped to march in Kennedy's parade, but we were not chosen. It was deflating to be on the curbside again, but disappointment gave way to rampant joy when JFK drove by, no hat at all. More, almost, than anything else, his bareheadedness made him ours. It was so cold that button vendors had built fires in oil drums up the side streets from Pennsylvania Avenue. I recall that someone near me in the crowd was carrying a transistor radio, which seemed more a marvel even than Kennedy's speech.
I was present for Lyndon Johnson's parade, but my memory is blurred because a melancholy impulse had taken me back to the spot on Pennsylvania Avenue, near the National Gallery, where I'd stood for the funeral procession the year before. When I try now to picture a triumphant LBJ going by, I see instead the riderless black horse. Same bands, different music.
No longer living in Washington in 1973, I realized I had an unbroken string of inaugurations going, yet when I traveled there that year, it was to join what organizers dubbed "the counter-inauguration." The protest was an enraged reaction to the just past Christmas bombing of Hanoi, which, with a hundred thousand bombs dropped in eleven days, was the highest concentration of firepower in the war. When Richard Nixon's car approached—that year my spot was at Fourteenth Street, near the District Building—the crowd jeered the man who'd kept the war going despite his four-year-old promise to end it. My own readiness to join in was a measure of the distance I had come from my youthful worship of these men. I shook my fist and cursed the president of the United States.
All my life, inaugurations had been like a sacrament of the streets to me, rituals of rebirth, the one true American gala, a quadrennial instance of Jefferson's "peaceful revolution." At inaugurations, even including the glaring exception of 1973, because it was an exception, I had learned the basic lesson of this nation: how to put aside what divides us— e pluribus —in favor of a felt experience of what unites us— unum. At inaugurations, we could all wear buttons that said, "I Like Everybody."
I grew up, in other words, with a vivid and continuous sense of connection to what theorists called "the state," but which we thought of only as our country. From an early age, I understood that "we the people" gathered on the sidewalks of the avenue to cheer the president as a way of cheering ourselves. And our entire lives in Washington, with its child-pleasing monuments, museums, military displays, and becolumned white buildings, reinforced us in our attitude toward the political sphere—toward, we would learn to say later, the "secular"—as a realm of nothing less than (we didn't know yet to use this word either) the "sacred."
The Roman Catholic Church had set itself against the modern ideas of pluralism and democracy, and it was deeply suspicious of Protestant America. But Catholic Americans knew in their bones that democracy was good, and their influence, especially through figures like the Jesuit John Courtney Murray, was beginning to be felt in Rome. The American experience, filtered through theology, would end the era of Tridentine Catholicism. My mother and father would be constitutionally incapable of thinking of themselves as ecclesiastical liberals, but they unselfconsciously anticipated the coming breakthrough that would be so powerfully symbolized to American Catholics by the twin, nearly simultaneous arrivals of John Kennedy and Pope John XXIII. With a wartime jump-start, my parents embraced the life of Washington—of their nation—with a verve that I still remember as the electric pulse that brought me into my first awareness of myself not only as a citizen, but as a believer.
Our father would give us the motto Pro Deo et Patria, yet he was less the one who initiated Joe and me into the holy mysteries of Washington than our mother. Later our brothers were initiated too. They were born as Joe and I had been, in two- to three-year intervals, according to norms set by Casti Connubii, the Pius XI encyclical that "once and for all" defined "artificial" birth control as intrinsically evil. That doctrine was promulgated in 1930. It fixed my parents and their generation of Catholics—the meaning of Pro Deo —in the rigid sexual roulette to which so many of us, their children, owe our very existence.
Throughout our infancies and childhoods, our father was making his way from the outer circles into the starred chambers of real government power, first at Justice, then at Defense. But because we knew to associate him with the high and, even to us, evident purpose of the era's great crusade—he was catching Communist spies—his absence itself had the weight of presence. "Absence makes the heart grow fonder," he used to say to us, climbing into the car where we were waiting, half asleep. We often picked him up at night, and I still remember the odd thrill it was to have our mother at the wheel, him in the passenger seat, and her announcing that on the way home we would have a tour. As if she were his guide to Washington too, she would set off, hunched over the wheel of the Studebaker Champion. She loved the city's avenues and edifices, and displayed them as if they were hers to give us.
So much was hers to give. I know that she cherished me when I was little, and wanted to give me not just that city but the world. She is the first source of my pride and self-regard, the virtue of my worldliness. I knew from an early age what a rare woman she was, and I remember feeling the power of that knowledge when she would drive us through Washington at night: the stately flag-bedecked mansions of Embassy Row, the brooding Lincoln, Jefferson in solitary splendor at the Tidal Basin, the White House, the Willard, the ghostly white "tempos" along the Mall, the fairy-tale turrets of the Smithsonian, and the floodlit needle of the Washington Monument. The tours were especially vibrant if visitors from Chicago were along, and then our father would chime in with a rare recounting of tales of wartime Bureau work: the surveillance of diplomats at Dupont Circle, a stakeout at the old Carroll Arms Hotel on Capitol Hill, a rendezvous near the Soviet embassy on Sixteenth Street, and someone's suicide off a bridge into Rock Creek Park.
I cannot drive through the Doric canyons of Washington even now without seeing the flash of my parents' youth, my mother's enthusiasm for a world she would never have dared expect to claim as her own, my father's quiet assumption of an authority that would eventually be ripped away from him. The established classes of old Washington—Cave Dwellers, the Foxhall Road set, the high society of Ivy League men and women who set their clocks by Cissy Patterson's Times-Herald —would ruthlessly have kept in their place one-toilet Irish interlopers like my parents, but a social revolution had occurred during the war. The population of the city had doubled with the arrival of men and their women who'd come to save the nation, which they then did. The newcomers loved Truman, of course, because he seemed like one of them.
As for my brother Joe and me, the FBI was everywhere in our first remembered world, and we loved it more for that. My first experience of professional entertainment, one could say even of story itself, was listening on the radio in the late forties to The FBI in Peace and War, and I can still hum its theme. Joe and I, and then Brian too, huddled together by the old Philco, riveted because those tales of gangbusters, spy catchers, and G-men gave us glimpses of Dad, who couldn't be there to put us to bed. That radio program, and another called This Is Your FBI, filled that primordial need to draw close to him at night before daring to close our eyes—Joe in the bottom bunk, me in the top, Brian on the cot. Those episodes portrayed FBI agents as men of such competence and integrity, of such selflessness, that one could think of them as modern-day Knights Templars. In my mind, the image of the agent would blur into that of the priest, for some obvious and some quite obscure reasons. In recalling the power of that first ideal in which virtue was not the opposite of masculinity but the essence of it, I recognize that the man I still long to be is the one I first thought my father was.
Joe and I had a wealth of uncles and aunts. Between them our parents had a dozen or more siblings—we never knew for sure how many. The totality of their break with Chicago is evident in the sad fact that even now I have no remote notion of how many first or second cousins I have. But in those early years in Washington
, our Back of the Yards relatives arrived at our garden apartment in Arlington in a regular parade. Someone from Chicago was always sleeping on the couch, under the replica painting of Lady Davenport that Joe and I thought was of Mom. The visitors came as if to verify the regular, and to them incredible, reports of Joe and Mary's ascension. And every visitor, whether Morrissey or Carroll, or member of the old gang at the phone company or Loyola, got the nighttime tour on the way to pick up Dad.
Two buildings loomed in importance. Careening down from Capitol Hill, crowded into the Studebaker, we would fall silent at a certain point on Pennsylvania Avenue, passing the wedding-cake Archives Building where my mother would slow down. At Tenth Street she would point to the innocuous desk-sized marble block that was Franklin Roosevelt's self-appointed and only monument—hidden in death as he was in life—and then, craning at the windshield, she would point at a set of grand corner windows three stories above. "J. Edgar's office," she would say with a familiarity that always impressed the South Siders, and had me convinced for years that Hoover was more her personal friend than Dad's mentor.
After the Touhy case, Hoover had brought Dad into his inner circle and begun to depend on him as a Bureau troubleshooter. My father went from kidnapping and bank robbery investigations to the more urgent wartime tasks of counterespionage. The Germans and Japanese proved to have been ineffectual penetra-tors of Washington security, but, as the nation would learn soon enough, they weren't the only ones trying. Joe Carroll came into his own as the war ended and a renewed Red scare began, a true reversal of the short-lived American assumption of invincibility.
In a few months in the summer and fall of 1949, the postwar euphoria evaporated suddenly, as illustrated by the contrasting findings of two Alger Hiss juries. The first jurors, in July of 1949, were unable to reach a verdict in the perjury trial of the patrician State Department official. The second, in January of 1950, found him guilty in a matter of minutes, not because the evidence was any more conclusive, but because the atmosphere in which charges had been brought was entirely different. In the period between the two trials the meanings of America's past and future were both upended. In August the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb, which Truman announced to the world in September. In October Mao Tse-tung took control of Peking, prefiguring his imminent takeover of all China. In December, after being cornered by an energized FBI, the eminent Los Alamos physicist Klaus Fuchs admitted to being a Soviet spy, source of the information that had enabled the Reds to build the Bomb a full decade ahead of expectations. The intermediaries between Fuchs and Moscow, it would be revealed, included low-level Los Alamos functionaries, one of whom had a sister named Ethel Rosenberg, wife of Julius. Although the authentic villain, Fuchs, would serve only nine years in prison before returning, upon release, to a hero's welcome in East Germany, the Rosenbergs would be sentenced to die a week after the North Koreans invaded the South. For more than a generation, Americans would argue over these events and claim their fundamental identities in terms of them. Notwithstanding all the controversy, the one undeniable fact, obvious from the start, was that the most closely held secret in the history of the United States had been penetrated by agents of the Soviet Union, which was how Joseph Stalin, the moral twin of Adolf Hitler, obtained the Bomb. Why shouldn't Americans have been anxious?
And why shouldn't my mother's voice have been full with pride as she pointed up at J. Edgar Hoover's windows? But the FBI wing of the Justice Department Building would not remain the high point of our family tour. By a stroke of fate that must have seemed of a piece with other momentous changes, the Pentagon became the destination of all our tours, the place where Dad worked now, and from which he would emerge at the end of another Free World-saving day, cheerfully greeting us and whoever that night's visitor was.
The life-changing Touhy letter from Hoover was dated, as I said, four days before I was born: three days before that, on January 15, 1943, the new Department of War Building was completed. Not one building actually, it is five distinct pentagonal structures arranged concentrically around a five-acre open court. These "rings" are joined by ten spokelike corridors, and its five stories (seven, counting the two below ground) are connected by broad ramps. Why ramps? "Because," as my mother always said, heading across the Fourteenth Street Bridge to the pharaoh's temple on the west bank of the Potomac, below Arlington Cemetery, largest tombstone in the world, "the building was designed to be converted into a hospital after the war was over." Ramps, she insisted, were for the movable beds and vets in wheelchairs, proof that we were an unwarlike people. I believed it for years, but my mother's explanation was a sweet piece of Washington apocrypha: Pentagon planners assumed the building's ongoing function as headquarters and records center of a massive military. The ramps ensured the smooth movement of wheeled file cabinets in the world's largest bureaucracy. Beginning in 1947, my father was one of the multitude working there.
Approaching the river entrance along the tidy George Washington Parkway, my mother loved to enumerate the wonders of the place: the Pentagon covered thirty acres and had three times the floor space of the Empire State Building, more even—here was something to impress Chicagoans—than the Merchandise Mart. It was a mile in circumference, had eighteen dining rooms that served sixty thousand meals a day. But the wonder of wonders was that her Joe worked there. A mere eight years after finishing night school, quitting the stockyards, and marrying her—he who, in growing up, had never crossed paths with a soldier or sailor much less an officer, never served a day in uniform, never saw a moment's service overseas, and had hardly ever been in an airplane—he had become an instant brigadier general in the United States Air Force. At age thirty-seven, he was the youngest general in America.
My brother Joe and I, and our Uncle Tommy, say, would laugh and laugh as Mom described how on his first day in uniform Dad went to work wearing one brown sock and one black. We'd howl as she described him at the bathroom mirror, practicing his salute. We wouldn't dare laugh about such things in front of him, but there was no mockery in us. We took our cue from Mom, and her pride in his accomplishment was bottomless, like her delight.
We had no language with which to express this, of course, no way to know it even, but looking back on my mother's giddy satisfaction at his rocketlike success, I sense its meaning as an apparently final reversal of the shame they'd felt in Chicago, a vindication of the risk he'd taken in rejecting the priesthood, and she'd taken in marrying a man who'd once promised himself to God. Wasn't the miracle of his success in Washington a sign of heaven's favor? How could their embrace during that period not have been edged with a feeling of release? Compared to the brothers, sisters, and friends they'd left behind in their indifferent hometown, and certainly compared to what, in their heart of hearts, they'd expected, they were surely the luckiest two people in the world, free or not.
Here is how it happened. In 1947 the Air Force was established as an independent service. The first air secretary was Truman's Missouri protégé Stuart Symington. He approached J. Edgar Hoover for the loan of an FBI expert in investigations and counterintelligence to devise a structure for an Air Force security agency. Symington wanted an operation more like the efficiently organized FBI than the Byzantine OSS or the Army's fief-ridden CIC. Hoover was duly flattered, which always helped. He assigned to Symington a man he described quite simply—this is my mother speaking—as his very best. "Your dad," she'd say; or, to Chicago visitors from his side of the family, "Your Joe"; or, to her own, and here was the phrase into which she put her every curl of feeling, pride, and love, "My Joe."
Symington quickly replaced Hoover as a mentor. My father might have been loyal to the FBI director, but he was no masochist. The initial assumption was that he would remain a civilian and return to the Bureau after six months. But the organizational structure he recommended for the Air Force posed a problem. It violated military taboos, and the brass hated it. For one thing, the new agency would be accountable not to local superiors, or even
to theater commanders, but to a director in Washington. In order to avoid being intimidated by senior officers who could be subjects of investigations, its agents would dress as civilians, not disclose their ranks, and stand outside the chain of command. The authority of OSI agents could supersede that even of generals.
The generals did not like the idea, and said so. They said it would not work, and implied they would not carry out such a proposal. But the operation my father outlined was exactly what Symington wanted. He went to Hoover, Congress, and President Truman. In short order, extraordinary legislation was passed, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations was established, and the ex-seminarian and former stockyards worker was released from the FBI, commissioned to the rank of brigadier general, and appointed director, a job he would hold for a decade. Instead of six months, my father would be in the Air Force for a quarter of a century.
A few years ago, I encountered a retired colonel who had been an assistant to my father in the early days of OSI. The mystery to me had always been how my father won over the hostile Air Force brass. The hard-boiled Curtis LeMay, for example, became his strongest early booster. I asked the colonel if he knew how it happened. He told me this story. In the late 1940s the great Pentagon contest was over who would be given main custody of the nuclear arsenal—the Navy with its proposed fleet of aircraft carriers and submarines or the Air Force with its new generation of strategic bombers. Politicians on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees would decide, and they seemed to be favoring the flyboys, largely because of the popular appeal of the Air Force chief of staff, hero of the air war against Germany, General Hoyt Vandenberg.
At a crucial point, however, a congressman sympathetic to the Navy produced an anonymous letter that labeled Vandenberg an adulterer and a liar. Negative publicity undercut the Air Force case just as the vote was to be taken. Symington asked the newly appointed General Carroll to find out what he could about the letter. And what Carroll did that very night, operating on a gumshoe's hunch, was burglarize the Pentagon offices of the secretary of the Navy and the chief of naval operations. Acting alone, he took type samples from all the Navy typewriters and, still in the middle of the night, brought them over to the FBI laboratory on Pennsylvania Avenue. By morning Joe Carroll had established that the anonymous letter slandering Vandenberg was written on a typewriter in the office of an undersecretary of the Navy. Using FBI-prepared photographic blowups comparing the "fingerprints" of the typescript, he briefed first Symington and Vandenberg, then the congressional committee members. Apparently no one asked whether this warrantless intrusion of the Navy offices was a violation of the law. Hearing about it from that elderly colonel, I thought immediately of my father's denunciations—"The ends don't justify the means!"—of Catholic peaceniks who burglarized draft board offices during Vietnam.
An American Requiem Page 4