I remember a weekend afternoon when we sat at the kitchen table, Dad and I, with a big black cassette recorder between us, its heads spinning. My seventh-grade English teacher had given the class an assignment to interview an adult about his or her life and write a report, and I’d picked him. I asked questions like: What was your favorite subject in school? What were some trips you went on when you were a kid? Who were your friends? He put his elbows on the table and answered carefully but not directly, circling around the question until he landed on something that mattered to him, a story he thought was worth telling. That was the first time I heard him talk about Gerald Sayles, his favorite professor in college. He also told me about the time he and a roommate drove all the way to Guatemala, which was incredible to me, not merely that they drove there but that it was possible to drive to Guatemala at all. It was this trip, he said, that had been his introduction to Central America. I called my paper “The Biography of My Dad.” Three pages, handwritten, double-spaced. It had seemed to me far more grown-up and significant than any school assignment I’d ever completed before. And I remember how the Dad I interviewed seemed distinct from the Dad I knew, my first perception (muddy, prepubescent, wordless) of the difference between people as we come to know them and people as the subjects of the stories they tell about themselves, which are not about the lives we see them living but about their most cherished departures from regular life.

As an adult I had tried, off and on, to write a screenplay about Dad and the scandal that waylaid him. It was the form I was most familiar with, and its demands—the tight structure, the periodic reversals—helped me to fill in the gaps. (Better to invent than to ask him directly. He never brought up the scandal, and neither did we.) In the draft I wrote, the government official “George Swansinger” blows the whistle on his boss, a well-intentioned but compromised national security advisor, with the help of a brassy female reporter. I never finished that script. The story I’d come up with wasn’t anything like what had happened in fact, and when I complained to other people that I was stuck, they invariably (if gently) questioned whether there was really a need, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, for an Iran-Contra movie of any kind. I had those same doubts myself, and eventually I set the project aside. I couldn’t get the tone right. It had toggled between satire and thriller, as though my only options were to ridicule Washington or to inject it with false drama.

My dad’s real name is Timothy George Atherton.

He had a small part in that whole mess, enough of a part that he was questioned by investigators and later summoned before the congressional joint committees, and for more than two years the threat of prosecution hung over him. But he was a peripheral figure, even in a scandal crowded with obscure people. Some of them were made famous by it—not him. After he testified, during the second month of hearings, the article in The Washington Post was cursory, with no accompanying photograph. The record of his testimony takes up only nineteen pages in the official proceedings, and there’s not much in those pages. He’s one more source for a committee already drowning in data, a committee impatient to move on. None of the honorable members (Cohen, Rudman, Hamilton et al.) imply that he himself was at fault; they hardly even bother to posture, for Dad wasn’t going to make the nightly news, although in his own life, this was the closest he ever came to Washington notoriety.

Page A16, lower left. “Singlaub, others, offer details on Contra funds.” He was one of the “others.” To this day I don’t know whether to think of him as a coconspirator or a complicit bystander or just someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.