Dick Mitchell was Dad’s best friend—I heard Dad say that once. I don’t know whether the best friendship was mutual. The Dick Mitchell of my memory is a bon vivant, a joker, not really the type to have a best friend, though no doubt he was more complicated than the affable operator he’d seemed to be. The main thing I know about him is that he killed himself; I don’t remember how I learned it. After he died, our parents told us that he’d been sick. But we found out, somehow everybody at school seemed to know that Rob Golden’s stepfather had committed suicide, a fact that kept circulating because none of us could absorb it. There were two girls at our school who’d tried to kill themselves but survived, and there was Ernest Hemingway, but before Dick Mitchell died I couldn’t have conceived that a man like that, a friend of my parents, might take his own life.
The funeral took place at a narrow, slate-gray church in a transitional part of downtown, a sparse few blocks lodged in between more residential and more commercial neighborhoods. Outside the church, on a blackboard shaped like a pope’s hat, white lettering spelled out Richard James Mitchell, 1938–1988, and I remember the strangeness of seeing the current year written that way, as the year of someone’s death. Courtney was away at college by then. Maggie and I wore Jessica McClintock dresses, lace bibs falling over floral prints, as if we were much younger than we actually were. We wore stockings and black Mary Janes.
I saw my father press his shaky lips together, look down at his shoes. I had the impression that he was supposed to give a eulogy, but he never did. We sang hymns, and I could barely hear his voice, though my mother’s was strong, maybe a little too strong. Rob Golden was there too, of course, home from whatever school he’d gone to—Bennington, I think, or was it Wesleyan? He’d dyed his hair platinum blond and had an earring in one ear, and was sitting in the front row, his hair all the whiter by contrast with his black-suited shoulders. I didn’t speak to him, too shy and also embarrassed by what I was wearing. Mom had bought us those little-girl outfits, and after the service we became little girls. We ran giddily, giggling, around a park across the street from where the reception was, sweating and scuffing up our shoes. We waited there while our parents drank wine and talked to people. We came home with bloody ankles because of those stiff shoes and had to throw out our stockings.
* * *
An obituary from the Branberry, Connecticut, Weekly Record, dated September 27, 1988, for Richard J. Mitchell, fifty:
Richard J. Mitchell, a former deputy assistant secretary of state, died suddenly at his home in Bethesda, Maryland, on Sunday. Mr. Mitchell had been an aide to the assistant secretary for international security affairs at the Department of Defense, an executive assistant for policy planning at the Department of State, and a deputy assistant secretary of state. He also served as a trustee of the St. Albans School and as an officer of the Metropolitan Club.
Mr. Mitchell was born in Branberry. He graduated from Milton Academy in 1956 and from Harvard University in 1960, where he was Phi Beta Kappa. He entered the doctoral program in political science at Cornell University and received an M.A. degree before discontinuing his studies. He then went to Washington, where he was an aide to Senator Leverett Saltonstall and later worked for the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
Mr. Mitchell is survived by his second wife, the former Martha Golden, his stepson, Robert Golden, his mother, Mrs. Wilbur D. Mitchell, and two sisters, Lillian McCrory and Marjorie Reiss. A service will be held at the Christ Church of Washington on Friday, September 30, at 11:00 a.m.
I found this online. The Record from that era had been scanned whole, and so I read from an image of that week’s actual page B7, set in one of those round 1980s typefaces, with halftone-dot shading around the names of the deceased. On the same page were three other death announcements and two advertisements for local businesses. A world-class bank with a hometown feel. I read and reread Mitchell’s obituary, as if by starting again I might find the story changed, though he died every time, suddenly, at his home in Bethesda, Maryland.
My father had always looked up to him, that was my impression—albeit an impression based in my protean childhood ideas of who looked up to whom, and maybe an adult would’ve noticed that Dad had other feelings about his friend as well. I remember Dick’s once tossing a dollar into the lit charcoal of our grill, making a joke about inflation. My dad never would’ve done that. And yet, as dutiful as he was, Dad still cared about what Washington cared about, whether you call it power or whether you call it a compulsion to get as close as possible to the action, and here was Dick, who found the action as if without effort.
* * *
I thought of him as the pied piper who led my father to Washington. Dick Mitchell with his long neck, his confidential smile. At Cornell, they’d both been members of the College Republicans. Mitchell rarely went to the meetings but always seemed to know everything that happened at them, my father once told me. He was one of those guys who soaked up all the members’ personal information, the dynamics of the group itself, the political nitty-gritty. There was a rumor, Dad said, that he’d managed to fix a campus election, though Dad hadn’t believed it—vote stealing seemed beneath Dick. Then again, I discovered later that there were other things that would’ve seemed beneath Dick Mitchell but which, in fact, he did.
They were both in the thrall of Gerald Sayles, the nuclear strategist: for his famous course on technology and war, in which the assigned reading included his own writings as well as Wohlstetter’s and Markov’s, a hundred or more students would crowd the lecture hall, among them Dick Mitchell, in the back row and without a notebook, and Tim Atherton, who would show up early to claim a spot in the front row.
I could see it, my dad and Dick at Cornell.
* * *
… Sinewy old Sayles is a campus celebrity, technocracy’s champion and prophet. His winged eyebrows and the deep crease between them contribute to his aura of genius. Trained as a physicist, he favors quantitative analysis, he likes to assign a probability P and write formulas on the blackboard in noisy, jabbing strokes, yet he emphasizes that these equations have “unknown terms,” because so much information is not available to the public. The body of secrets is one name for that material, as in, “Any public assessment of military policy is of limited significance, given the body of secrets within the U.S. and Soviet governments.” At other times he speaks of “the expanding frontier of secrecy,” his tone approving. Some knowledge is and should be the special province of the elite, he implies, and part of his mystique is the implication that he has some larger access to the body of secrets—that he belongs to that elite, or at least knows it intimately. Mitchell can often be seen in Sayles’s office, cross-legged in the chair opposite the great man’s desk. He has the smoothness of wealth as well as the premature lines that appeared on his face during an extended stay at McLean, the psychiatric hospital, during which time he submitted to shock treatments that left him pretty well stripped of any memories of his years at Milton Academy. Mitchell takes note of a bright undergraduate named Tim Atherton, who asks questions he hasn’t thought to ask, and what begins as discussions in the corridor after class would grow into walks across the quad and then beers at night …
* * *
That was what I started with, the two of them way back when. Even in death, Mitchell still had this magnetism about him, so that I could picture his life in a way that I found it difficult to picture my dad’s—and then, once I had him, I could put the two of them together. It’s true that these images, conjured out of bits and pieces, led me away from the small set of facts I had about my father’s past. Although I considered my project to be biographical, I was inventing much of it as I went along. I decided—not at the outset, but as I scrawled and scratched out—that the best way to improve upon the kind of I-was-there! bullshit served up in A Call to Honor would be to create a more honest story, even if it was an honest invention. My aim was to flesh out the book that Dad had stalled on, to finish what he’d started. That I didn’t know the full story, that he was reluctant to tell it to me, that we remembered those days so differently—these were not trivial obstacles, but I started to think I could write my way around them.
Which is not to say I was pulling it all out of my ass. I continued to consult outside sources. I’d lugged my dad’s dusty old course reading up from the basement, textbooks and technical papers that he and Mitchell would’ve been assigned. Studying with the likes of Gerald Sayles and others had steeped them in a set of methods, an approach to geopolitical conundrums, the arms race in particular. The threats against us became terms in equations. Computers were programmed to evaluate the likelihood of nuclear war.
“The Delicate Balance of Terror” was the name of one of Albert Wohlstetter’s widely circulated papers, from 1958. I found it online and printed it out in nine-point font, and of all things I climbed into bed with it. “I should like to examine the stability of the thermonuclear balance,” he begins—and then he goes on to suggest that it’s hardly stable at all. The postwar world, that happy land of big cars and big refrigerators, rests on a fulcrum made of uranium. I read the whole paper, every tiny word. The sentences washed over me and away, but the tone, the assumptions stuck, the crazy (to me) clash between the grand pessimism of overall outlook and the optimism about methods. The ongoing threat of global apocalypse could be countered with quasimathematical analysis. Numbers of missiles, payloads: what faith in their own calculating! It was a doomsday algebra they invented, to combat our math-savvy antagonists behind the Iron Curtain.
To one side of my bed was a window, an old ivory-colored shade covering the upper half while in the lower half I could see my reflection in the glass, my knees drawn up and the paper resting against them. When I saw that, I felt as if I were acting, putting on a show of studiousness for an audience of one, i.e., myself. And yet, haphazard as this whole course of research was, I did learn from it. Some remnant of that midcentury military-industrial mind had stayed with us, hadn’t it? A machine inside a ghost. This was how some people who were still in power had been taught to understand the world, long ago, in different times. This was the rug that had been yanked out from under them. Secrecy, quantitative analysis, the best plans made by the best men.
I was drawn to the jargon my father would have learned then and also later, after he went to Washington, terms that cropped up in selected circles in the seventies and eighties, like procurement and operationalize and off-the-shelf covert capability. All those words that meant nothing but pointed to something, the confidence disguised as procuring and operating, the belief in our ability to analyze and control. To manipulate other nations like numbers.
And in his stiff old textbooks, I found Dad’s underlining, the odd phrase penciled in the margin. Alongside the densely printed text of a book called East-West Relations in the Atomic Weapons Era, for instance, he’d written short notes, indicators of what was discussed on that page, like nuclear aggression—consequences and reflexive choices. Or was it reflective choices? These notes also got to me, though here it wasn’t the words but the handwriting, recognizably my dad’s, if neater and firmer. That script belonged to a twenty-year-old student with his mechanical pencil, the eager debater in his bilateral world of pro and con, west and east, good and evil, all or nothing.