An American Requiem

by James Carroll

  The war inside the Pentagon was acrimonious too. Nixon's people hated Johnson's, and they especially hated those associated with McNamara. Under Kennedy, McNamara had launched an effort to unify the services as a way to end their turf fighting. His attempt to reassert the civilian control that had been lost in World War II marked the beginning of his conflict with the Chiefs. But my father's role in that struggle predated McNamara, going back to Symington in 1947. As a way to win the loyalty of the Chiefs, Laird retreated from the goal of restoring civilian primacy. "Laird Gives Back Key Budget Role to the Military," read a headline in the New York Times. No more would the office of the secretary of defense design force structures or impose weapons programs. Coordination of the services' planning and procurement would be deemphasized. With the McNamara impulse toward unification undercut, my father's efforts at the Defense Intelligence Agency were doomed. Under Nixon, the various competing intelligence operations would sprout again, like mushrooms after a spring rain. That my father's dream of a cohesive military intelligence system turned into yet another bureaucratic nightmare is succinctly revealed by the fact that in fiscal year 1995, as I write, the DIA budget is $600 million, while the combined intelligence budget of the separate services—what DIA was established to take over—stands at $12 billion.

  Thus conflict between Laird and my father must have been inevitable. In any event, it came. I assume there were serious differences between them about the air war, but their public break resulted from something else. In the late summer and early fall of 1969, while I was learning the ropes as a peacenik priest, Melvin Laird was trying to get the U.S. Senate to appropriate funds for an antiballistic missile, the Sentinel. His case for the ABM depended on his unprecedented assertion that the Soviet Union had recently begun developing a "first-strike capability," the ability, that is, to so completely wipe out our nuclear arsenal that we would be unable to retaliate. If true, this represented a major shift in the balance of terror that depended on Mutual Assured Destruction, MAD. Nothing in Robert McNamara's or Clark Clifford's assessments had warned of this shift in Soviet intentions.

  My father was called to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Senator William Fulbright, whom I'm sure my father detested. He stated that he was reluctant to testify before that committee, even in executive session, because its highly politicized atmosphere would make it impossible to keep secret what he said. That was true, which is why I read about his testimony in the newspapers. Otherwise, I would never have had this context for concluding why his life of public service came to such an abrupt and ignominious end.

  The hated dove Fulbright was the committee chair, but in a strange twist, another leading opponent of the ABM was Senator Symington, my father's former mentor. They still held each other in high esteems and who knows how that influenced what happened? The climax of the debate came when Fulbright produced a report entitled "Intelligence and the ABM," which purportedly cited CIA analysis that undercut Laird's claim. Then Symington produced what he called a secret Pentagon report that drew the same conclusion. It was one thing for Laird to be contradicted by CIA chief Richard Helms—but by his own man in the Pentagon? Later I asked my father about this, and he told me that he and Helms were in complete agreement, seeing no change in Soviet strategic planning. When the senators put the direct question to my father—whether, as the director of DIA, he had been the source of Laird's information about the new Soviet intentions—he replied (I see him doing so) coldly that he was not. He was then asked if he had intelligence data that supported the testimony offered by the secretary of defense. My father answered no. When pressed, he stated that he saw no evidence anywhere that what Laird had said was true.

  This was in late July. Within days—my mother once told me it was the next day—my father was notified that he was being transferred and demoted. He was nearly sixty years old. My mother told me how stunned he was by this clear consequence of his divergence from a line that the defense secretary and the Joint Chiefs had drawn. He was instantly shunned, a betrayer after all. Until then he had been healthy, but exactly at that point—a classic psychosomatic reaction—he was immobilized by a savage attack of sciatica. Within a week he was in the generals' wing of the Andrews Air Force Base hospital undergoing surgery on his lower back. It was not successful. For most of a year, he would be crippled. Like his son Joe had been. He retired from the Air Force, having never returned to his Pentagon office.

  Secretary Laird, meanwhile, unable to produce credible backup for his claim about the USSR, shifted the argument. He began to define the ABM as protection against China. Though he won that summer's vote, he ultimately had no better luck with that rationale. The ABM, which would have amounted to a U.S. move away from Mutual Assured Destruction, never got off the ground. I do not know if he meant to, but my straight-arrow father, bound by a need to say only what he saw, had in fact ended his career by striking a blow against the nuclear madness. I believe his unsung act contributed in some small way to the momentum that led in 1972 to the ABM Treaty with the Soviet Union, the beginning of the end of the arms race.

  When, as a young man trained since childhood to be a priest, Dad said no to the cardinal archbishop of Chicago, everything in his Irish-Catholic culture then said no to him. When he and my mother left Chicago, they were surely under the curse of his defiance, and they would fail. But for many years, spoiled priest or not, they had seemed, as it were, to beat the devil. For a time they bore the suffering—my mother openly, my father mutely—of their eldest son's polio. But that sadness lifted too, as Joe junior, despite his endless surgeries or because of them, grew into a sensitive, accomplished student whose graduation with a Ph.D. in psychology prompted one of the few unclouded family celebrations of the late 1960s.

  Yet here he was before me—my father in the prime of life, a man of power and prestige, the proud father of five good sons, the faithful husband of a still handsome, witty woman—here he was sobbing like a baby. What could those others have made of this? What did he see behind those hands of his? A career that begins in defiance must end in defiance? To himself, I see it clear at last, my father was already a failure. And the awful truth is that to me then, too, he was a failure. The war was wrong. He knew it. Despite his image as a truth teller—the thing Symington and McNamara had prized him for—it seemed to me he knew less about the truth than I did. This was months before I had a hint of his other war, the one in the Pentagon. The only war I knew of was Vietnam, which was a brutal crime against GIs and Vietnamese both. A terrible piece of me thought of him as a war criminal for his part in it. Yes, I felt the old emotion as I pressed my hands onto his head, but I felt something else as well. For the first time in my life I was ashamed of him. His weeping made me think that my almighty father—Roger Touhy's "voice of doom"—was a weakling and a coward.

  Within a year he would be an almost entirely broken man who would, over the next twenty years, never recover. He would sink from chronic depression into stroke-related dementia or Alzheimer's disease, into complete senility. Oh James, young James, could I but shake you now! Wake up, you smug bastard! If I could only press into your head what I saw years later when I took him to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Mall. He was half demented by then, with snow-white hair and a stooping, lumbering physique. I watched as, with increasing frustration, he tried to find on that black wall the names of men he'd known. He ran his fingers over the etched granite, lost, shaking his head. He became frantic in his searching, but refused my offers to help. As he explained later, he thought the names were arranged alphabetically, instead of in the order in which they'd died. His beleaguered mind was stuck in that mistake.

  Something in the intensity of his feeling made me see my mistake. I had thought he'd kept his silence about the war not because he believed in it, especially the phase that began with Laird, Kissinger, and Nixon, but because, as McNamara would put it in his memoir, he had felt slavishly obligated by a code of loyalty to his superiors. Not
a good enough reason, and as the ABM debate demonstrated, not true of him anyway. But now, watching him finger the names of grunts and pilots and Seabees and leathernecks, I saw the far more compelling obligation that bound him, an officer's obligation, a general's. How could he ever have said about these dead men that their sacrifice had been offered for a stupid mistake? Once he had helped dispatch thousands of young men to their deaths, certainly he'd have seen any subsequent denouncing of the war as breaking faith with them—his other sons.

  And then I thought, with horror, that my father, running his fingers over that granite, was looking for another name, his own. I wanted to cry out, Only the dead are recorded here, Dad! But suddenly I saw him as one of those who'd died in Vietnam. Certainly, he had died to me. But now I saw that he had died to himself too. His name might as well have been carved there by Maya Lin.

  "...descend upon you and remain with you forever." Finally I withdrew my hands from his head. My father made it to his feet and staggered back to his pew. He continued to hide his face. I went on blessing people, my brothers, relatives, and the blue-suited chaplains. Many wet eyes. Much pride. Much admiration for me. I took almost nothing in. My ordination to the priesthood meant so much to all these others. What did it mean to me?

  Only now do I understand. During the preceding seven years—Hans Küng, the Vatican Council, Martin Luther King, protest at the Pentagon, the assassinations, Humanae Vitae, the return of Richard Nixon—I had stopped believing in my father's God and all that went with it: a God more American than Christian, more Roman than Catholic, a God of orthodoxy, conformity, sexlessness, and patriarchy. Even as I swore to be a priest forever, I was afraid that I was losing my faith.

  Yet even at that moment of my infinite distance from the pieties that were expected of me, I was finding my faith. I was discovering the God of Jesus Christ, the blasphemer, the heretic, the criminal, the disgrace. In Jesus Christ, passion, doubt, uncertainty, anguish, despair even—all the emotions breaking in me while I was prostrate on that cold stone floor—were signs not of moral failure but of human life. As I looked forward to a priesthood of which I knew already that neither the cardinal nor my parents would approve, my spine was stiffened by the knowledge that Jesus, in keeping bad company, had been disapproved like that. The Gospels recorded a way of life that, from what I could see, had little to do with the life these others expected me to lead. I was very much afraid, but I did not feel alone. I had as friends and comrades Patrick Hughes and a few others, heading out with me from exactly such a place. And I had a vivid sense of the presence at my elbow of Jesus Christ. By some miracle of a transformed faith, despite all the reasons not to, I trusted Him. I wanted to speak of Him to others. The truth is, I still do.

  Erasmus defined happiness as the wish to be what you are. By that definition, on the complicated day of my ordination to the priesthood, I was happy.

  10. A PRIEST FOREVER

  THE WAR would be at the center of my life as a priest, even if I was always on the margin of the movement to end it. After ordination—it was 1969—I was assigned to the campus ministry at Boston University. At first, after all those years in the seminary, I was intimidated and mystified by the freedom and rampant joy—by Jansenist standards, true hedonism—of the students I encountered. BU was one of the capitals of the student antiwar movement. For a moment in history, they were the teachers. In fact, BU students gave form to instincts and impulses I already had myself. Being with them freed me.

  The Catholic Student Center, also known as Newman House, became controversial. I permitted a group to open a health food restaurant in our basement, and when they asked me to suggest a name, I offered "Hedgeschool," for the Irish resistance. To my surprise, Hedgeschool became a left-wing organizing center. The sheep of my flock were not the timid Catholics, the puritans and patriots, I'd been sent there to serve. They were radicals, Jews, feminists, gays, SDS kids, draft dodgers, resisters, misfits, and wackos. Not sheep at all.

  I became a draft counselor, helping kids avoid induction. With colleagues who were already in the Berrigan network, I became part of the underground—the self-styled East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives—helping to get conscripts and deserters to Canada before FBI agents could find them. My brother Brian, operating out of the Philadelphia field office meanwhile, was on the fugitive squad, tracking draft dodgers.

  The greatest fugitive of all, beginning in April 1970, when he disappeared rather than turn himself in to serve time for the Catonsville action, was Father Daniel Berrigan, S.J. He played cat and mouse with the FBI, traveling incognito up and down the East Coast with the help of hundreds. J. Edgar Hoover was enraged as Berrigan, popping up at rallies and giving interviews, made fools of the Bureau. That I was moved by the Jesuit's courageous witness to deepen my involvement in antiwar activity was hardly unique. Thousands of us were recruited. "We are summoned to act in unison with our friends," he wrote, and I heard the words as addressed to me, "to join in conspiracy, in jeopardy, in illegal nonviolent actions, to hotten up the scene wherever we are."

  We tried to hotten up the scene at BU. Several professors, including some Jewish professors who were less likely to draw FBI notice, were part of the underground network hiding Berrigan, and he often seemed close at hand. We held celebrations and rallies, always evoking his name and always hoping he would show up. We helped stage sit-ins to block military recruitment. On Good Friday we picketed the Brighton residence of Cardinal Humberto Medeiros, asking him to denounce the war. "Another Crucifixion in Indochina," read the sign I carried. As his priests and nuns, we asked to see His Eminence. When he admitted us, he said sadly how tormented he was about the war. But his torment, compared to that of the Vietnamese, seemed beside the point. I was not rebelling against authority. I was in search of it.

  Daniel Berrigan became my authority. In relation to him I'd found a voice, and I used it against the war as forthrightly as I could, while he was underground and then when he was in prison. One day I received a phone call from a producer at The Dick Cavett Show. "Frankly," she said, "it's Father Berrigan we're interested in interviewing, but he's not available." She laughed, and I didn't. "We're told you could speak for him."

  "Me? I don't even know Dan Berrigan."

  "Look," the producer said impatiently, "Mr. Cavett is trying to get your guy's point of view on the air. They've approved you. Don't say no."

  With a sinking feeling I thought, Christ, they know about Dad. They want me because of Dad, the sensation it will cause. But then, exactly because I'd thought of him, I realized I had to do it. In the early afternoon of the day of my appearance on the Cavett show, the street outside the Catholic Student Center was blocked with demonstrators trying to keep a Marine recruiter from entering the nearby BU placement office. Invited, even goaded by the university president, John Silber, Boston police swooped onto campus and savagely attacked the students: "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh my ass!" Cops invaded Newman House, threatening my secretary and shoving me aside to get at the fleeing kids. By midafternoon I was hoarse from screaming at police, taking badge numbers, stalking the sergeants and captains. "If you're with them, Father, fuck you!"

  I was still trembling with anger and frustration by the time I arrived for the early evening taping at the ABC studios in New York. The producer greeted me and showed me to the green room, where Cavett's other guests were waiting. They were the comics Jack Klugman and Henny ("Take my wife—please") Youngman, the singer John Sebastian, and, looking very sexy, the actress Elizabeth Ashley, soon to appear on Broadway as Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. When I entered the small soundproof room, no one looked at me. The other guests continued their hushed chatting with their handlers and agents. There was nothing to note in my appearance. I was wearing, as usual, black chinos, a black turtleneck, and a dark J. Press tweed sportcoat that I'd bought at an Episcopal church rummage sale.

  I began to wonder where Dick Cavett was, and, sure enough, just before showtime the producer put her head in the room to say Dic
k was ill. My heart sank when she asked Jack Klugman if he would sit in as host. The goofy Klugman? What about Cavett's impulse to put in a word for Berrigan? What about the solemn agenda that had brought me here? Klugman hurried out.

  More than an hour later, after all the other guests had done their self-promoting shticks, the producer came for me. I had just poured yet another cup of coffee. I carried it along, as if I were an old hand at this. When I stepped out into the backstage area, the unmuffled sound of the show's band jolted me, and just as the announcer was speaking my name—"Father James Carroll, an antiwar priest"—I spilled the coffee all over the crotch of my pants. Numbness gave way to a feeling of nausea, and even as I heard the dutiful applause of the studio audience, I frantically wiped at my pants. Only at the last second did I determine that the coffee stain was invisible. Thank God for black.

  John Sebastian and Henny Youngman greeted me warmly, as if we hadn't ignored one another in the green room. Then Elizabeth Ashley kissed me full on the lips, a wet kiss that drew hoots from the audience. Take that, Father. I was to be their straight man. Very straight.