I stayed in the hotel until Monday the twenty-fifth, ironically, the day we’d planned the General Walker job. I stayed even though I was anxious to get home to Peg and the boys and help them through the emotional crisis that they couldn’t have suspected was my invention. But I couldn’t hurry, because I didn’t want anyone associating my coming and going with events in Dallas, the overcaution of an overcautious mind. I returned, took a day off, then went back to work in an effort to impose workaday normality on the inchoate grief that was everywhere.
Since this is memoir and not autobiography, allow me to skip details of the healing of the family, the stunned disbelief in Clandestine, the sorrow of even Cord Meyer, the lugubrious mourning of Washington, D.C., that seemed to last through winter and into spring. You’re familiar with the iconic images of the period, no doubt, the lasting one for me being the prancing of the riderless horse, Black Jack, with its single boot mounted backward in the stirrup. If I suggest, horribly, that I felt grief for the man I had murdered, it’s still the truth. Never did I feel joy except that one moment when Jimmy showed up and I knew we had done it, and that was a professional’s pride in craft, not a hunter’s exhortation of bloodlust after the kill.
I should not have been surprised, moreover, at the way in which Kennedy, a mild failure of a president who had shown a little promise and the barest possibility of intellectual growth, immediately became a symbol of greatness and his time in office christened “Camelot” and held up to the popular imagination as a bright and shining moment of moral excellence, star glamour, vivid beauty, and so forth. Yet I was not sickened. It happens that way, and in my mid-thirties, I was barely mature enough to get it. Nothing makes the heart grow fonder than a nice bloody martyr’s death, real or imagined.
Dully, I soldiered on. I lost myself in the Agency and began working the terrible hours that I later became famous for. I wasn’t escaping guilt or voices in my head or the sad faces of my family upon my return or anything like that. I didn’t feel that I owed anything or that redemption was in order. It just seemed the way to go, and if I wasn’t already the section star, I shortly became one, and in time a legend. It’s amazing what a little hard work can do.
God love Peggy, who stayed true as an arrow’s flight through it all, the travel, the intensity of the effort, the distraction. She was the real soldier. She raised three fine boys through difficult American teenage years almost on her own, though when around, I did try to get to the football and lacrosse games. I owe a great debt of gratitude to my forebears, who had the perspicuity to invest wisely so that we were always comfortable, which helps immensely when the father figure is absent. Nobody ever wanted for anything, and I also hope and believe I taught by example that dedication to task is its own reward, even at some personal cost. I’m happy to say that each son surfed through the horrors of the sixties without a major wipeout – no drugs, no binges, no criminal misdemeanors, no bombs planted in police stations – and each has prospered off the work-ethic lesson that was their real inheritance from me. My deepest regret is that in my present circumstances, I’m not able to enjoy the pleasures of grandfatherhood.
It would be a time yet before we realized the obvious: that my attempt to game history was an utter and inglorious failure. You might say the patient died, but the operation wasn’t a success. Who on earth would have guessed that the pea-brained egomaniac Lyndon Johnson would have wanted, as I’d predicted, his domestic revolution at the same time, as I had not predicted, that he decided to win a major land war in Asia? No one could be so foolish, but he – egged on by the slippery, weaselly opportunings of the Kennedy hotshots he inherited (until they deserted him, as was easily foretold) – proved himself equal to the task. No vain murderous folly has ever been more obvious and more unstoppable. Many is the time I wished I knew where Lon was and that Jimmy was alive so the old unit could go into action on LIBERTY VALANCE II.
It was madness, and by ’66, at least, it was obvious that the American future in Vietnam was bleak and bloody, that countless boys would die or come home in that dreadful steel chair for nothing beyond the vainglory of a stubborn old man hellbent on proving he was right. The more the Kennedy slime deserted him, the more stubborn he became. The pusillanimous Robert McNamara was the worst, in my book, later stating that he stayed long after he had quit believing, thus sending men to their death for no other reason than his own reputation in a cause he cared nothing about. When it was over and he grew tired of not being invited to the good parties on the Vineyard, he mea culpa’ed his way back into the good graces of the liberals who’d abandoned old LBJ years earlier. It was truly scoundrel time in America, and with my peculiar burdens of guilt and responsibility, I found the going difficult.
My answer was to offer myself up to the war gods. It was to taunt irony, which those gods do seem to enjoy a good deal, and let them kill me in the war I had committed blasphemy to stop. I suppose I felt I owed it to my sons, and that better I go and die than one of them, though by the time the eldest was fodder for the draft, Nixon had ended it, the one thing I thank him for.
As for me: three tours, each of a year’s length, the first running agents and supervising operations, 1966-’67; the second, 1970-’71, overseeing psywar ops against the North from a bunker inside Tan Son Nhut; and, as I have stated, the third as head of the murder program, Operation Phoenix, 1972-’73. I tried hard to get myself killed, and the North Vietnamese tried hard to kill me, even putting a reward on my head and coming damned close enough times to turn my hair gray, but even they, clever little devils, were never able to bring it off. I am proud to say that within Langley, I was known as the coldest of the cold warriors and the hottest of the hot warriors. Though I was a murderer, I made it clear to any who cared, and that would probably be only myself, that I was not a coward.
Here I leave off personal narrative only to say that after Vietnam, I was able to return to Soviet affairs, my true calling, and again I prospered. I grew a reputation for ruthless rationality – applying the precepts of the New Criticism again – and developed keen judgment; a vast network of sources inside Russia; savvy, superb reflexes; and a taste for vodka in the Russian style, neat in a peasant’s glass. I could drink that stuff all night, until Peggy finally objected, at which point I quit cold and didn’t take another drop until after her death, when, you might say, I made up for lost time. I’m still making up.
In September 1964, after employing hundreds and working eighteen-hour days, the Warren Commission released its report. You might think I’d gobble it up, but I didn’t. I read the news coverage in the Times and the Post and realized that no matter how diligent the eight hundred investigators had been, they still hadn’t a clue what happened. I left it at that and continued my total immersion in Agency affairs.
I can’t say I was surprised, but at the same time, I was annoyed when the first of the anti-commission books came out in ’65, Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment. My annoyance had more to do with the temerity of Lane: how easy it is to sit back and carp and bitch at the efforts of people who work so hard under a mission mandate to find out the truth and allay national fears; how easy to make a fortune out of nitpicking. It seemed likely that the report contained errors, as anything run by the government on so large a scale and compiled at such breakneck speed is bound to. What was called for was a second edition with a few corrections, not the initiation of a culture that would swell grotesquely and display its leftist tendencies and true agenda, which was to protect the left from any involvement in spite of the fact that Alek was created solely in the hothouse culture of screwball Commie crackpotism, and to sow general distrust of a government bent on winning its war in Asia, damn the cost in treasure and lives.