However, soon after the book was submitted to the CIA for review, Lockheed dismissed him, and he became convinced that the order came down from Washington.
Around this time, Dee was sitting in her fifth-grade history class when the teacher began talking about the U-2 Incident, telling the class that Francis Gary Powers should have killed himself to avoid capture by the Soviets. His little girl was stunned. Her father? Her father was a bad man because he hadn’t killed himself?
“I was crying when I got home that afternoon, and Mom wanted to know why,” she said.
Mom promptly drove to the school and got in the face of the teacher and the principal.
“It was a very traumatic moment for me,” Dee said.
After leaving Lockheed, Dad landed a job flying a Cessna 170 traffic airplane for Los Angeles radio station KGIL. When I became old enough, I sometimes flew with him during the summer, soaking up the experience as Dad patrolled high above the freeways.
In the beginning, the onetime U-2 pilot conceded a certain amount of “stage fright,”50 but in a short amount of time, he became a radio veteran, typically reporting four times each hour while flying at an altitude of 1,000 to 3,000 feet.
Even though it was not quite the same as the thrill of flying off into the stratosphere, Dad enjoyed the job because it allowed him to make a living in the sky. Trying to explain the special feeling that had captivated him for nearly his entire life, all the way back to that day at the fair in West Virginia, he told a reporter, “The higher you get, the greater the sense of detachment. It’s indescribable, but it’s the detachment.”51
Many of my most powerful memories occurred at my father’s side.
Over the course of writing the book about his life, my father became good friends with Curt Gentry. Not long after their book was published, Curt arrived in Los Angeles. He was already at work on his next nonfiction work, the blockbuster Helter Skelter, about the Tate-LaBianca murders, which rocked America in the summer of 1969. One day in 1970, I rode along as Dad picked up Curt at the downtown courthouse where Charles Manson and his gang were being prosecuted. While being transported away from the courthouse, the three young female followers of Manson who would soon be convicted of the gruesome crimes saw me, an innocent child amid the circus atmosphere.
“Look, Daddy,” I said. “They’re waving at me and blowing me kisses.”
“Well, wave back,” he said.
So I did.
I was about five, unable to fully appreciate my momentary brush with history.
The closeness between father and son was forever evident, as I grew big enough to follow in my dad’s footsteps. We played golf, rode bikes, bowled, and played in the snow during family trips to the California mountains. On a vacation in Hawaii, Dad taught me to body surf. He also got me excited about solving puzzles and other logic problems and collecting coins.
One time, when I was about eight or nine, I got up way before dawn and we headed off for a deep-sea fishing adventure off the Pacific Coast. I became very sick and spent much of the day throwing up at the side of the boat. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that smell. But at least I caught a fish.
Several family trips to “the Pound,” as we called it, formed powerful memories of a world very different than our suburban California life, including one holiday in the summer of 1976.
I will always remember helping my father paint the big heating-oil container out behind the house and running a string tied to a bunch of tin cans between two trees in the backyard.
Getting to shoot his .22 rifle was a great thrill. What a rush to pull the trigger and hear the distant ping of the bullet penetrating tin!
The man everyone back there still called Francis regaled me with stories of his childhood hunting, fishing, and spelunking in the surrounding countryside. One particular tale made a big impression. When they were young boys, he and Jack Goff were climbing through a nearby cave. At one point, while crawling through a very tight passage in the pitch dark, Francis got stuck. Jack was ahead of him and could not turn around. Francis was on his own.
After several tense moments, when he thought he might not make it out, he finally realized that his belt had gotten twisted up on a rock, and he started moving back and forth, side to side… until he finally worked his way free. Imagine the feeling of relief. The two friends then continued their exploration, only to realize they had gotten confused and lost their way out. After more than an hour of going around in circles, Francis finally noticed a candy-bar wrapper that had fallen out of his pocket on the way in. This little piece of litter showed them the way home.
“When you get in a tough spot like that, son,” Dad told me, “always remain calm. If you can keep from panicking, you can work the problem and solve it.”
It was impossible for me to know at that point, before my world shattered, but such moments would loom large in my life. I would cherish every thread of a recollection, remembering my father through the stories he told me; the advice he offered; the little rituals we shared.
In 1976, NBC aired the two-hour TV movie Francis Gary Powers: The True Story of the U-2 Spy Incident. Starring Lee Majors, it was based largely on Dad’s book, which gave him yet another opportunity to tell his side of the story.
I was cast in the small part of a young Russian boy being warned not to touch a poisonous coin.
I thought it was cool to be in a movie with the Six Million Dollar Man, but I didn’t know until many years later that the scene had never happened in real life. It was pure Hollywood.
In a small, seemingly innocuous way, I was drawn into the mythology surrounding my father’s real-life drama, which set me on the circuitous road to someday understanding how fact and fiction could be melded in ways that undermined true history. Sometimes a stubborn fact is no match for a juicy lie.
In a city filled with movie stars and other celebrities, Francis Gary Powers was a rather-unique figure in Los Angeles in the 1970s, especially as he settled into his high-profile job as a traffic helicopter pilot for Channel 4.
Dad and Mom were included in many things and given various opportunities because of the fame forever attached to his name. Still, wherever he went, he was shadowed by those pervasive doubts. Everyone who encountered him wondered what really happened over there. This was his particular burden, and he was never able to escape it. Even his friends invariably felt compelled to ask.
After their sons’ sixth-grade graduation, Dad and Robert Conrad headed for the bar at the Van Nuys Airport, sidling into a booth while the boys played in the parking lot. Eventually the conversation turned to a familiar topic.
“Did they want you to kill yourself?” Conrad asked.
Dad shook his head. “No. They never told me to do that.” Then he smiled and pointed toward his son in the distance. “If I’d done that, I wouldn’t have Gary, wouldn’t have this life.”
Recalling the scene, Conrad said, “He was used to the question, and he knew I didn’t buy any of that stuff about him being a traitor.”
All those years after the wide-eyed young man earned his Air Force wings, Dad remained a flag-waving patriot. But he was struggling with a certain amount of creeping cynicism and resentment concerning the CIA.
In 1975, the whole country started getting an education about the agency, thanks to the efforts of Senator Frank Church, who chaired a select committee charged with investigating alleged abuses of power by the CIA. Like the U-2 Incident, the very public hearings drew unwanted attention to a part of the government unaccustomed to the spotlight.
The Church Committee exposed many of the agency’s darkest secrets, including various assassinations and coups. Dad watched the proceedings with great interest and took the opportunity to compose letters to Church and his colleagues, trying to plead his case. Complaining of the agency’s impact on his dismissal from Lockheed, he said, “I am a living example of that misuse of power.”52 He added, “In retrospect, my two years in a Russian prison was easy when compared to my treatment by the CIA.”