Bill Colby’s father, Elbridge, was the quintessential Yankee, descended from eight generations of Massachusetts Puritans-cum-Congregationalists. A number of Colbys had been seafarers, ships’ captains, and mates who were gone for years at a time as they traversed the world’s oceans. Bill’s grandfather, Charles Edward Colby, was the clan’s first intellectual of note. Born in Massachusetts but educated in New York City’s public schools, Charles had distinguished himself as an inventor and math whiz by age fourteen. He matriculated at Columbia College and subsequently rose to become professor of organic chemistry. He married Emily Lynn Carrington in 1882. Elbridge was born nine years later. Charles suffered from poor health throughout his adult life and died prematurely of Bright’s disease.1 Elbridge was nine years old.
The New York that Elbridge Colby grew up in was one of the most vibrant communities in the world. It was a city of extreme wealth, high culture, an emerging middle class, and a degraded underclass composed of dirty, diseased, illiterate immigrants who toiled from dawn to dusk for a pittance. While the rich reveled in the “high life,” congregating at the Waldorf-Astoria and the opulent apartments of Fifth Avenue, and the doctors, lawyers, managers, and ministers sought refuge on Long Island or in the boroughs bordering Manhattan, the poor resided in crowded, filthy tenements in Five Points or the Lower East side—“Hell’s Kitchen.” The city produced America’s first Progressive-era president, Theodore Roosevelt. Buoyed by his exploits with the Rough Riders in the Spanish American War (or at least reports of those exploits), by his embrace of the new reform movement known as Progressivism, and by his advocacy of overseas empire, Roosevelt had shot up through the ranks of the Republican Party. Even while he was president, TR continued to be an avid outdoorsman, hunting, hiking, and horseback riding whenever he could. He was the first conservationist to occupy the White House. From what he would call his “bully pulpit,” TR advocated “preparedness” to his fellow Americans—which meant, for men, the willingness to forbear ease and risk their lives for their country; for women, the willingness to bear children and sacrifice for family; and for the nation, a strong military and active, independent foreign policy, coupled with laws to restrain big business and provide a degree of protection to the laboring masses. Though not of his socioeconomic class, the Colbys were enthusiastic supporters of the Rough Rider.
After his father’s death, Elbridge’s mother took a position in the registrar’s office of New York’s Hunter College. As his family clung desperately to the lower rungs of the middle class, Elbridge worked his way first through high school and then Columbia College. He received a bachelor’s degree in English literature, graduating magna cum laude in 1912—the same year he became a Phi Beta Kappa—and earned a master’s degree in 1913. Elbridge converted to Catholicism while in college. At Columbia, he was deeply influenced by the distinguished European historian Carlton J. H. Hayes. In 1904, Hayes, drawn by the teachings and example of John Henry Cardinal Newman, had himself converted. Elbridge’s family did not approve of his conversion. Protestants to the core, his two older sisters would not speak to him for more than twenty years.2
In addition to Roosevelt, Hayes, and Newman, Elbridge was drawn to two other prominent figures of the post-Victorian era—the Englishmen Rudyard Kipling and Robert Baden-Powell. Kipling, one of the most popular writers of his time, was the ultimate apologist for British imperialism. Born in India, he and his parents considered themselves “Anglo-Indians.” In his Jungle Book tales, Kim, and the epic poem “Gunga Din,” Kipling reveled in the melding of native cultures and British civilization. His only son died in World War I. Robert Baden-Powell, first Baron Baden-Powell, was famed as the founder of modern scouting. “Lord B-P,” as he became known in the press, served in the British Army from 1876 to 1910. During the early 1880s in the Natal Province of South Africa, where his regiment had been posted, Baden-Powell honed his military scouting skills amid the Zulu. In 1896, during the Second Matabele War, the Englishman met and befriended the American scout Frederick Burnham, who introduced Baden-Powell to “woodcraft,” that is, the scout craft of the American Old West. Learned primarily from Native Americans, this method of scouting included among other things tracking, stealth, and survival techniques. On his return from Africa in 1903, Lord B-P found that his military training manual, Aids to Scouting, had become a best seller. Scouting for Boys was published in 1908 and sold 150 million copies during the years that followed.3 TR, Baden-Powell, and Kipling were role models for the fatherless boy.
From 1912 to 1914, Elbridge was a Proudfit Fellow in Letters at Columbia. In 1914 he was accepted into the Ph.D. program in English at the University of Minnesota. While employed as an instructor there, he met and fell in love with Mary Margaret Egan, the daughter of one of nearby St. Paul’s most prominent Catholic families. They were an unlikely couple. Elbridge, though still a young man, was evidencing that austerity, rigid self-discipline, and severity that would characterize the rest of his life. “Converts are painful people,” Elbridge’s granddaughter would later observe. Margaret was pretty, outgoing, liberal, and liberated. Her father, William H. Egan, born in St. Paul in 1859, was the son of Irish immigrants. Like Elbridge’s Puritan ancestors, he had grown up on the frontier; the upper Midwest was the scene of the last sustained fighting between Indians and whites. As a young man, however, William Egan had learned Sioux—even producing a Sioux-English dictionary—and he had made a fortune trading with the natives rather than killing them. The family archives boasts a photo of little Margaret sitting in the lap of the famous Sitting Bull, who was clad in native garb and top hat. The Egans lived in a small mansion on Summit Avenue just down the street from railroad executive Jay Gould. By the 1890s, William had accumulated enough capital to take the family on an around-the-world tour. John, Margaret’s elder brother, attended Harvard.4
Margaret was an English major at the University of Minnesota when she met Elbridge. It was still rare for women to go to college, and she was one of the few female students on campus. Margaret and Elbridge had very different personalities—Margaret was affectionate and carefree, and Elbridge stern and intense—but they shared common values. First, there was their Catholicism, which at that time began to emphasize the Social Gospel that later developed into the Catholic Worker Movement led by Dorothy Day. Elbridge had inherited the educated New Englander’s enlightened attitudes toward race, and the Egans were Democrats in a region where Progressivism was at its strongest. The Colby’s exhibited enlightened racial attitudes early on. Elbridge’s great-uncle, Lieutenant Colonel Ebenezer T. Colby of the 4th Massachusetts, writing to his brother in April 1863, had said, “Several hundreds of the able bodied men have joined the Negro Regiment forming here. Their condition arouses my sympathies. I am becoming more and more interested in this oppressed race every day. I hope the Government will adopt a liberal policy respecting them.” Both Margaret and Elbridge also had a strong sense of service and a determination to make a difference.5
In 1915, Elbridge interrupted his studies—and his courtship—to volunteer for service with the Serbian Executive Committee of Mercy, a creation of the American Red Cross. Following the outbreak of World War I, the committee had devoted itself to aiding the wounded and displaced of the various Allied countries, especially Belgium and Serbia. Elbridge spent several months in the Balkans driving ambulances, delivering supplies, and helping to set up refugee camps. He was a Progressive abroad—a miniature Herbert Hoover—sharing American largesse and striving to make a better world. For his efforts he was awarded the Serbian Red Cross’s Gold Medal and, after the Versailles Peace Conference, the Order of Mercy by Yugoslavia, Serbia’s successor state.6
In 1916, Elbridge returned to his teaching post in Minnesota; he married Margaret the following year.7 When America entered World War I in 1917, Elbridge enlisted, hoping to be sent to France, where he could establish a combat record. Instead, to his deep chagrin, he was posted to Panama to serve in the detachment guarding the canal. The one bright spot was that Margaret was able to accompany him. At war’s end in 1919, he resigned from the army, and, with a pregnant Margaret in tow, returned to Minnesota to resume his studies and teaching duties.
William Egan Colby was born in St. Paul on January 4, 1920. A year later, Elbridge earned his doctorate and then abruptly decided to reenlist in the military. In his memoirs, Bill recalled that his father “became anxious about his ability, as a struggling writer and underpaid teacher, to support his family of my mother and myself.” Indeed, so strapped was the young couple that they found it necessary to live with the Egans after returning from Panama. “I went into the Army to keep the family decent,” Elbridge would later tell one of his grandsons.8
It was clear that eventually Margaret would become a modest heiress, but her Yankee husband had no intention of living off his wife. There was more than machismo involved; from an early age, Elbridge had had to assume familial duties; he was raised to be responsible, to take responsibility for those dependent on him, and then, of course, to breed responsibility. The army recognized Elbridge’s previous service and advanced degree and granted him a commission. Thus, at the age of twenty-nine, Second Lieutenant Elbridge Colby embarked on a military career that would span four decades; ultimately, however, he would be noted more for his intellectual and pedagogical attainments than for his battlefield achievements.
The interwar army was small and dominated by southern whites—and as such its culture was a bit alien to Yankees like Elbridge and Margaret. The Colbys bounced around from post to post, landing, in 1925, at Fort Benning, Georgia, where Elbridge became involved in a racial incident that would change the course of his career. That year the army, rather unwisely, had assigned the all-black 24th Infantry Division to Benning, which was situated in the heart of the ex-Confederacy. The 24th had been established in 1869 and at that time had included African American veterans of the Union Army as well as freed slaves. The regiment was one of the “Buffalo Soldier” outfits that had served in the Indian Wars on the western frontier, in the Spanish American War, and in General John J. Pershing’s punitive expedition against Pancho Villa in 1916. In 1917, 150 members of the unit had become involved in a vicious race riot in Houston.
While Elbridge was at Benning, a black soldier from the 24th was shot dead in nearby Americus, Georgia, when he refused to give up the sidewalk to a white. Subsequently, an all-white jury acquitted the shooter. Elbridge, then serving as Benning’s publicity officer, wrote an outraged letter of protest for the post’s newspaper, calling upon all soldiers, black and white, to declare support for their wronged comrade. His eloquent appeal was reprinted in The Nation magazine, creating a national uproar. With the Georgia congressional delegation calling for Elbridge’s head, the black press and the biracial NAACP came to the young officer’s aid, but the army also felt that it had to act. As punishment, Elbridge was to be assigned for a period to the 24th.9 Although the idealistic young officer hardly viewed his assignment as punishment, the Benning incident would mar his career, and many in his family, including Bill, would later believe that it had kept Elbridge from attaining the rank of general.
In 1929, Elbridge, now a captain, was assigned to the 15th Infantry Regiment in Tientsin (Tianjin), China. Bill, who was nine years old when his father received the assignment, would spend the next three years in the Orient; it would be one of the formative influences of his life.
The 15th Regiment had initially served in China as part of the relief expedition that had ended the siege of foreigners in Peking during the Boxer Uprising (1899–1900). Although the regiment was withdrawn after the Great Powers crushed the rebellion, it was ordered back to China following the collapse of the Manchu Dynasty in 1912. Headquartered in Tientsin, it took its position astride the Peking-Mukden railway in January 1912; it labored to protect American interests during the tumultuous years of the 1920s, particularly when the Chinese Nationalists ousted the ruling dynasty and then split into communist and noncommunist factions. A prolonged civil war between the two groups ended with Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists driving Mao Tse-tung and the communists into the far northwestern reaches of the country.10 Despite this unrest, China was an attractive post for many Americans: alcohol was legal and plentiful, and the Great Depression lay half a world away. Elbridge was particularly excited about the assignment. China had occupied a special place in the hearts and minds of American Progressives. Bankers and businessmen dreamed of a “great China market,” while missionaries and engineers like Herbert Hoover labored to bring a better life to the inhabitants of the land that Pearl S. Buck would so movingly profile in her novel The Good Earth. Progressives had launched the “Open Door Policy,” which sought to preserve both Chinese markets and sovereignty, and many had embraced Chiang as the avatar of modernity. Tientsin promised to satisfy Elbridge’s yearning for adventure and provide an outlet for his missionary impulses.
Elbridge, Margaret, and Bill began their journey to Tientsin on the East Coast in the fall, boarding a US Army Transport (USAT) in Brooklyn. The voyage proceeded down the eastern seaboard, where it encountered one of the gales that regularly visit the mid-Atlantic states with winter’s approach. Farther south, the travelers encountered warmer weather and the stunning blue waters of the Caribbean. After a brief stop to allow passengers to see the Canal Zone and the sights of Panama City, which were new to Bill, the ship continued on to San Francisco. There Elbridge and his family boarded the “doughboy special,” the USAT Thomas, a veteran of many transpacific runs. Following weeks at sea, the ship anchored at Chinwangtao, a major Chinese port on the Gulf of Chihli that served much of northern China, including Peking and Tientsin. Disembarking, the new arrivals boarded railcars for a six-hour trip along the Peking-Mukden railway to Tientsin, 167 miles to the southwest. At last, the replacements for the 15th arrived at Tientsin’s East Station, there to find the regiment’s service company waiting with teams of horses and baggage wagons. The new arrivals were soon marching along Victoria and Meadows Roads bound for the American compound situated in the old German concession.11
Tientsin, a city of four thousand foreigners and a million Chinese, was situated on a vast alluvial plain extending beyond Peking to the Gulf of Chihli on the Yellow Sea. It lay at the head of the Hai Ho, the “Sea River,” a short waterway formed by the confluence of the Grand Canal entering Tientsin from the west and the Pei Ho River flowing from the northwest. The Sea River meandered 40 miles to the southeast, where its mouth was guarded by the Taku forts. The Sea River was an important commercial waterway navigated by small steamers, seagoing junks, and gunboats of the international concessionary powers, those nations that during the past century had forced various Chinese rulers to grant them territory and economic monopolies.12
As far as the eye could see, the surrounding countryside was absolutely flat, dotted with small villages, brick kilns, and the mounds of countless graves. The climate in northern China was harsh. Summers were stifling and winters bitterly cold. Situated on the banks of the Sea River, Tientsin was sometimes flooded, especially in typhoon season. In the spring, northeastern China choked under a veil of dust blowing in from the Gobi Desert located 65 miles to the northwest. Because it was the gateway to Peking, the imperial seat, Tientsin was known as the Ford of Heaven.
The United States had obtained a concession in Tientsin in 1860 when it had become a treaty port. The Americans had formally ended their residency in 1896, and although US troops had joined in putting down the Boxer Rebellion in 1901, there was no official presence until the United States took over the German concession in the aftermath of World War I. By 1924, Tientsin was garrisoned by British, French, Italian, Japanese, and American troops.
Foreigners were struck by the squalor and despair of the native sections of the city. The population—as initially perceived by the soldiers, at least—consisted of masses of dirty, crippled, stinking, terrible-looking beings. The half-clothed “coolies” sweated in the summertime and shivered in the winter. There were the ever-present rickshaw drivers, while other members of the lumpen proletariat, “like beasts of burden,” loaded and unloaded coal and other cargo from ships and barges. The natives’ day-to-day existence seemed perpetually precarious. During times of famine, peasant families could be found around the rail station trying to sell their children.
By contrast, the foreign business sections of the city featured wide, paved streets flanked with stores whose windows displayed as varied an assortment of articles as any thriving Western city. One American, finding himself on Victoria Road in the British sector, observed that he might as well be on Bond Street in London or Fifth Avenue in New York. “The glamour of the place is beyond my power of exposition,” he wrote in a letter home. “[It is] the most cosmopolitan place I . . . have ever seen. In one block one may see an English, a French, an Italian soldier, a dozen Jap soldiers, a Jew drummer, an American expatriate [sic], a Russian . . . and a Capuchin monk.”13
Money went a long way in Tientsin. American soldiers were paid in gold, and the exchange rate was excellent. A bachelor officer could rent a room above the officer’s club, but officers with families—such as Elbridge—had to find quarters outside the US compound, though still within the International Concession. The Colbys occupied an abode that would have been considered a mansion back in the States. Like other American families, they employed a domestic staff, including a “number one boy,” a cook, two maids, a gardener, and an amah (nanny) to look after Bill. Almost all manual labor in the concession was performed by Chinese. Even when in the field, the 15th Regiment had coolies to set up camp and do the cooking and washing. Low rent and cheap labor, unfortunately, rode on the backs of squalor and disease. Foreigners had to take extraordinary measures to protect their health. Virulent diseases such as smallpox and cholera were constant threats. Drinking tap water “was an open invitation to the agonies of amoebic dysentery,” according to the 15th’s official historian.14
Despite his youth, Bill had the run of the city, first in the company of his nanny and later on his own. Victoria Park in the British concession was surrounded by iron railings. No Chinese were allowed into the park—except for amahs in charge of foreign children, hobbling along on their bound feet. Looming over the park was a dark gray building, half castle and half cathedral—Gordon Hall, named after General Charles George “Chinese” Gordon, who had surveyed and fixed the boundaries of the British Concession after the conclusion of the Second Opium War in 1860.15
The market was located on Taku Road, a dirt thoroughfare that bisected the British sector and extended into the native districts at both ends. Hundreds of Chinese mingled there. Stallkeepers hawked their wares, and the air reeked of fresh earth, cabbage stalks, aniseed, garlic, and soya. A huge granary housed the rice that came up the Grand Canal from southern China, forming one side of the marketplace. Against this building’s wall, acrobats, storytellers, magicians, and conjurors performed. Next to the conjurors sat a row of men making six-inch-high figures out of different colors of clay mixed with water. The figures were called ni ren, which meant “mud men.” You could ask for anything you wished—opera singer, dancer, mandarin, or warrior. The sculptors were especially good at soldiers.16
Periodically, a junk loaded with supplies—frequently arms—was hijacked on the Sea River or the Grand Canal, supposedly by pirates. The British editor of the Peking and Tientsin Times, however, correctly identified the brigands as members of the infamous White Lotus Society, the influential antiforeign movement whose agitation had spawned the Boxer Rebellion. One day, the sound of gunfire coming from the river brought Bill’s mother, Margaret, up short. Bill was nowhere to be seen. She and Elbridge began scouring the city. They eventually found their son with some other European boys at the riverfront, where the local protection force was fighting off “pirates”—in reality White Lotuses attempting to hijack a junk full of arms.17
Like the other children of American and English families, Bill attended the Gordon Road School. The Empire Cinema was a favorite haunt of concession boys; on Saturday afternoons the performance always began with the same ritual. Herr Schneider, who looked just like Charlie Chaplin, would walk down the five steps into the orchestra pit, take his violin out of its case, and rest it on a small pad on his shoulder. The theater’s pianist would sound the key note while Herr Schneider tuned his strings. After bowing to the cellist and second violinist, who together made up the rest of the orchestra, the maestro would turn to glance up at the cinema manager, who stood beside the film projector at the back of the gallery. It was his signal for the picture to begin, and the youngsters settled down in their seats to watch yet another installment of a serial like Tarzan of the Apes. Herr Schneider provided passionate background music for all of the shows until the advent of talkies.18
The officers and men of the regiment were encouraged to mingle with the Chinese and learn local customs. Chinese-language training was mandatory for officers, and Elbridge hired a language instructor for Margaret and Bill. The latter’s CIA personnel file would later list his Chinese language skill as “fair.” One family photo features father and son dressed in native Chinese garb. In the sweltering summers, the Colbys vacationed at the seaside resorts of Qinhuangdao and Weihai. In the fall there was horseback riding on the plains surrounding Tientsin. Bill would later observe that “my boyhood experiences of China . . . had prepared me for the exoticism of Asia.”19 In truth, foreign travel was a rarity for pre–World War II Americans. Bill’s experiences in China would do more than prepare him for the mysteries of the Orient; it would create a lifelong craving for immersion in other cultures. Though he was just a preteen during his Tientsin experiences, young Bill was sensitized to the political, economic, and military forces that were shaping international politics.
Nationalist aspirations, conflicting ideologies, and imperial designs swirled all about the Colbys. During their posting, Elbridge, Margaret, and Bill visited Japan, traveling by steamer up through the inland sea to Hiroshima and then boarding a train to Yokohama. There they saw the giant steel mills that would fuel the burgeoning Japanese military-industrial complex. Japanese encroachment on Manchuria had begun just when the Colbys arrived in China. During the family’s three years in Tientsin, the Japanese garrison in the city grew from six hundred to six thousand. “As a kid,” Bill’s son John recounted, “he saw the new Japanese soldier firsthand—tough, dedicated, fanatical even.”20 America would eventually have to deal with this threat, Elbridge told his son. The Republic must play its proper role in world affairs, he insisted, protecting its legitimate strategic and economic interests. Woodrow Wilson had been right: totalitarian aggression was a threat to all people, and the United States had a duty to facilitate the spread of democracy and to support the principle of national self-determination. The fate of the nation and the fate of the world were inextricably intertwined.
In 1932, Elbridge’s tour of duty came to an end. Shortly after the family’s return from China, he was assigned to the Reserve Officer’s Training Corps (ROTC) at the University of Vermont as an instructor in military science. Burlington, the state capital and site of the university, was a charming, rustic town of some forty thousand. The community and its college were situated on the wooded eastern shore of Lake Champlain. Small and remote at the close of the Revolutionary War, Burlington had quickly attained a degree of prosperity as its economy shifted from fur trading to textile manufacturing and lumber milling. Burlington’s most famous citizen had been Ethan Allen, whose Green Mountain Boys played a key role in the capture of Fort Ticonderoga during the war for American independence.21
Bill was as happy in Burlington as he would be anywhere in his youth, or at least as happy as an army child could be. He would later recall that the family’s constant travels provided him with a unique education, but also with a sense of rootlessness. Still, his years in Burlington were ones of stability and contentment. Like most of his peers, Bill was an avid outdoorsman. In the winters he captained the high-school ski team; in the summers, he spent much of his time on or around Lake Champlain.
Shortly after the family’s arrival in Vermont, Elbridge moved into a cottage he had inherited from his father at Thompson’s Point on the lake. Hunting, fishing, canoeing, and camping lay just beyond the Colby’s back door. When he was thirteen, Bill and a friend, Bill Cook, embarked on a ten-day canoe trip on the lake, camping on shore at night.22 During the summer before his junior year, he and another chum embarked on a two-week biking tour around New England, visiting forts and historical landmarks by day and sleeping in fields and meadows by night. Physically, Bill Colby was unimpressive: full grown, he stood no more than five feet nine inches, and, until late in life, he never weighed more than about 150 pounds. In high school, his frame was almost waifish, accentuated by a large head on a thin neck. His fine-boned face promised a certain handsomeness in maturity, and young Colby was neat, even natty, with dark, meticulously combed hair and wire-rimmed glasses. There was an excellent mind, well-disciplined and inquisitive without being pedantic. He made excellent grades, rarely recording a C at a time when A’s and B’s were given to only the best students.
Bill remained an only child, which was somewhat unusual in a Catholic family. There were rumors of miscarriages. The young man spent a great deal of time with his parents. His mother—warm, gracious, mannerly without pretension—adored Bill. Her love was unconditional but not permissive. Like many strong women of her era, Margaret identified with her son and envisioned great things for him. Elbridge did not trust to love; like John and Abigail Adams, he believed in discipline and detailed guidance for his progeny. Elbridge spent his days away from his teaching duties at the university writing and exercising. John Colby later remembered his grandfather as “ramrod straight, a principled guy” who could not make small talk and who was devoid of humor. Elbridge proved a diligent and diverse, if not accomplished, scholar. Among his many published works were The Echo Device in Literature, Early American Comedy, Problems in Trench Warfare, Theodore Winthrop, and The First Army in Europe.23
Elbridge was an avid genealogist, compiling more than enough documentation to win membership in the Sons of the American Revolution. He frequently took Bill to nearby Fort Ticonderoga, which the Colbys’ ancestors had helped capture from the British, and to Fort William Henry, which Colonel Jonathan Bagley, another ancestor, had helped to build. “Bill loved to go to Fort Ticonderoga . . . loved the Green Mountain Boys and the idea of these irregulars taking on this massive fort,” son John recalled. “He grew up with that spirit and those stories from his father, yet he was not a martial kind of guy.” As the family remembered it, Margaret and her sister Frances, who moved in permanently following her husband’s death, were not much into substantive matters. While Elbridge might want to discuss the Greek origins of geometry, they preferred to talk about the latest fashions or the movies. That left young Bill as Elbridge’s principal interlocutor. The father liked to argue, but he was tolerant of dissent. The son did not have the option of non-participation; so Bill learned how to take a point and defend it, to think clearly, and to express himself concisely. He also acquired a certain imperviousness to pressure. “My dad’s father was very directed, I would not say harsh, but stern and focused,” another of Elbridge’s grandsons, Carl, recalled. “His mother gave Bill all the love he ever needed and he just took off from there.”24
As an adult, Bill Colby would spend much of his time either as a participant in or an advocate for unconventional warfare. It was an appreciation bequeathed him by his father. Elbridge was fascinated with Robert Rogers and Rogers’ Rangers. Rogers’ Rangers were, of course, a historical reality, an independent company of colonial irregulars attached to the British army during the Seven Years’ War. The unit was organized and trained by Major Robert Rogers as a rapidly deployable light infantry force tasked with reconnaissance and special operations conducted against distant targets. So effective was the unit that it became the chief scouting company of British forces in North America. In front of the Colby house at Thompson’s Point lay a trail taken by Rogers and his men as they ventured north during the French and Indian War. Their mission was a reprisal for Indian raids against British settlements. After killing every man, woman, and child in an Indian village, they returned safely to Fort William Henry.
Elbridge had Bill, and, subsequently, his grandsons, read Kenneth Roberts’s Northwest Passage, published in 1936. In the book, the young protagonist, Langdon Towne, is a Harvard graduate, an aspiring artist, an avid outdoorsman, a naturalist, a patriot—and a soldier-disciple of Robert Rogers. The villains in Towne’s community are local officials who are guilty of arbitrary exercise of power, misuse of authority, and abuse of the law. The rangers in the novel assume almost mythical proportions: “Mostly they get along without sleeping, and a good part of the time they get along without eating,” a Rogers’ disciple told young Towne. “Sometimes they lay [sic] in one spot for twelve hours without moving, while the mosquitoes and the black flies chewin’ ’em to pieces. Other times they run seventy-eighty miles in a day and kill a few Indians when they get where they’re going. If they can go afoot, they do so; but if they can’t go afoot, they go in canoes, or on rafts, or on skates or on snowshoes. . . . They’re up prowling around when everybody else is a-bed.” Rogers himself was, of course, a backwoods superhero—woodsman, diplomat, gentleman, a killer of men and unkillable himself.25
Bill Colby emerged from childhood to adolescence in the shadow of his father and his father’s obsession with Rogers’ Rangers and irregular warfare. But it may have been Langdon Towne as much as Robert Rogers who intrigued the Colbys. Kenneth Roberts introduced his book with the following passage: “The Northwest Passage, in the imagination of all free people, is a short cut to fame, fortune and romance—a hidden route to Golconda and the mystic East. On every side of us are men who hunt perpetually for their personal Northwest Passage, too often sacrificing health, strength and life itself to the search; and who shall say they are not happier in their vain but hopeful quest than wiser, duller folk who sit at home, venturing nothing and, with sour laughs, deriding the seekers for that fabled thoroughfare—that panacea for all the afflictions of a humdrum world.” Langdon was such a man, a man Elbridge and Bill were determined to emulate.26
The beneficiary of some excellent schooling at home and abroad, Bill skipped a grade, graduating from Burlington High School in 1936 at the age of sixteen. He had planned to apply to West Point, following his father into the military, but he was a year too young. In the interim he was admitted to Princeton. By Christmas vacation, Bill had turned seventeen, old enough to apply to the Academy. Then, as now, candidates were nominated by their congressmen and senators, but only after passing West Point’s entrance examination, which included a physical. The extremely nearsighted Bill failed the eye test. His disappointment quickly abated. “I was delighted,” he later recalled, “for that one year at Princeton had disabused me of the idea of a military career.”
The New Jersey school was home to the children of some of the nation’s wealthiest families. The town of Princeton, population seven thousand, consisted almost entirely of students, faculty, and school employees. The Gothic architecture, set off by a wooded campus, was breathtaking. Princeton was a whites-only institution, and co-eds were still four decades in the future.27
If Bill Colby was taken with Princeton, it was certainly because of its intellectual rather than its social offerings. Woodrow Wilson—who had been president of the university from 1902 to 1910—had brought the institution into the twentieth century, adding modern subjects in the social sciences to the curriculum and attracting some of the world’s best thinkers to the college. He tried, but failed, to abolish Princeton’s exclusive “eating clubs,” which served as surrogate fraternities. Bill Colby possessed neither the money nor the social standing to be admitted. He was, financially at least, a middle-class boy at an upper-class institution. Not only did he eat at the cafeteria at Madison Hall, he also waited tables there. His social life revolved mainly around the Catholic Church and ROTC. Princeton was then still very much a Presbyterian institution, and twice-a-week chapel attendance was required; Bill was allowed to substitute by serving as an altar boy at the Catholic Church. He thrived in ROTC, rising to be cadet captain by his senior year. Throughout his life, Bill Colby would be drawn to people from working-class backgrounds with Ivy League degrees.28
On the Princeton campus were some of academia’s leading lights, including Albert Einstein. Princeton was a traditional liberal arts institution; students were required to pass 118 hours in courses ranging from history and philosophy to foreign language, chemistry, and psychology. Like most other undergraduates, Bill’s first two years were spent in survey classes. He remembered being especially caught up with anthropology. Woodrow Wilson, much enamored of Oxford and Cambridge, had introduced preceptorships at Princeton. Small groups of students, under the guidance of an individual faculty member, would pursue directed readings in a particular subject. Topping off the undergraduate experience was a comprehensive examination and a senior thesis. Colby opted to major in politics and history, ensuring that he took most of his classes during his junior and senior years in the School of Public and International Affairs. Among his favorite instructors were Edwin S. Corwin and Alpheus T. Mason, who taught constitutional law and political theory, respectively.29
The mid-1930s was an exciting time to be studying American politics. The administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt was attempting to pull the country out of the Great Depression through bold new experiments in political economy and social justice, including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Works Progress Administration, the Social Security Acts, and the Agricultural Adjustment Acts. Louis Brandeis, Mason’s icon, was one of the Supreme Court’s minority of liberals who believed that the federal government had a right and a duty to act to regulate big business and to advance the causes of social and economic justice. In addition to teaching and writing, Corwin acted as an adviser to the Public Works Administration. Colby remembered becoming a total convert to Roosevelt’s New Dealism at Princeton. His tutors certainly played a role in this conversion, but both the Colbys and the Egans had long evidenced liberal views on race, the appropriate role of government in society, and the need for social and economic justice. At the School of Public and International Affairs, Colby conducted independent research on problems such as black education, the Cuban sugar trade, and civil liberties violations in Jersey City, which was then ruled by Boss Frank Hague, one of the most corrupt machine politicians in the country.
Bill Colby’s stint at Princeton also coincided with the rise of European and Japanese fascism and with a deeply divisive debate in the United States as to the nation’s proper role in the looming international crisis. The peace structure established by the Treaty of Versailles was one of the shortest-lived in modern history. It took but twenty-one brief years for the world to move from one cataclysm to another, even greater one. During the 1930s, three European states emerged to challenge the status quo that Woodrow Wilson and his associates had established in the aftermath of World War I: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the Soviet Union, the world’s first great experiment in Marxism-Leninism. Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933 promising to regain all the territory and power the Reich had lost in the Great War. In 1935, the führer renounced the disarmament clauses of the Versailles Treaty, and in the following year he ordered the Wehrmacht to occupy and fortify the Rhineland. Germany had given notice. Benito Mussolini and his fascist followers had seized power in Italy in 1922, ending the kaleidoscopic succession of governments that had ruled Italy since its unification. Il Duce established a one-party corporate state and declared the Mediterranean to be “mare nostrum,” our sea. In 1935, Italy overran Ethiopia, strategically situated on the Horn of Africa, although Mussolini’s air force and armored infantry had a difficult time with Haile Selassie’s mounted spearmen. The Soviet Union, ruled iron-handedly by Joseph Stalin, had not yet made its foreign policy goals explicit, but it was no secret that Moscow intended at the first opportunity to regain the territory it had lost in Eastern Europe at the close of the Great War.
Confronting these expansionist powers were the victors of the world war: Britain and France, allied with a smaller group of states created or reshaped by the Treaty of Versailles. The Western democracies faced two alternatives: they could confront Germany and Italy at the outset, nipping fascist aggression in the bud, or they could seek to appease Hitler and Mussolini. Enmeshed in the problems of the Great Depression and politically fractured, Paris, London, and their allies chose the latter path. One of the reasons later put forward in defense of this ill-conceived approach was the unwillingness of the United States to join with the European democracies in standing up to the dictators at that time.
In truth, isolationism was the order of the day in the United States. Americans were far too concerned with the vast economic, financial, and social crisis that followed in the wake of the Wall Street crash of 1929 to pay much attention to what was going on overseas. Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt were loath to embark on a risky foreign policy that could jeopardize domestic recovery. Moreover, Americans were deeply disillusioned with the results of World War I. Most had come to believe that the nation’s sacrifices had been for naught, and that the United States had been tricked into participating by the wily British or by unscrupulous war profiteers. By the mid-1930s, pacifism was rampant on the nation’s college campuses. At Princeton and other institutions of higher learning, a student organization—the Veterans of Future Wars—led annual class boycotts and staged protest meetings at which young men signed pledges never to participate in any foreign war. Reflecting the popular mood, Congress between 1935 and 1937 passed a series of Neutrality Acts prohibiting US citizens from loaning money to nations at war, selling arms to belligerents, and traveling to war zones.
Isolationists again carried the day when a civil war erupted in Spain in 1936. General Francisco Franco, whose Falangist Party resembled Mussolini’s fascists, waged a bloody struggle to overthrow the Republican government, which included both communists and socialists. Germany and Italy supported the Falangists, supplying Franco with massive amounts of munitions, while the Loyalists (as government supporters were called) received less substantial support from the Soviet Union. The United States joined the British and French in refusing to offer assistance to either side. Americans were deeply divided over the Spanish Civil War. Many Roman Catholics, including the proto-fascist “radio priest” Father Charles E. Coughlin, strongly supported Franco, while those on the left, from liberals to members of the tiny Communist Party, supported the Republic. Over a thousand young Americans enlisted in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade that fought for the Loyalists.
Meanwhile, at Princeton, Bill Colby had decided to spend the summer prior to his senior year—that is, 1939—in France, honing his language skills and soaking up French culture. Elbridge arranged for him to live with a family in the Loire Valley. For three months, Bill bicycled through the chateau-studded countryside, stopping in various villages to sample country cuisine and converse in French. In the midst of this idyll, he and a friend ventured to the Pyrenees. There the two young men encountered a steady stream of bloody, dispossessed refugees from the Spanish Civil War raging just over the border. Just the previous semester, Bill had written an essay on propaganda in Spain, both of the right and the left, as an independent study project for the Politics Department. In it, he had anticipated a larger European conflict and lamented the excesses of both the Fascists and the Republicans. After acknowledging the right of revolution to secure popular rule, he condemned Franco for leading a “minority revolt in behalf of a reactionary and Fascist State, which the people have voted against.” The Soviet Union, a totalitarian state, might be aiding the Republicans, the young undergraduate wrote, “but it frightens me not at all to learn that hitherto poverty stricken peasants are taking over acres of land which formerly went to the support of one man, or that the government and even industry are now under the control of the people.”30
World War II erupted while Bill was in Europe. In the spring of 1939, Hitler broke his Munich pledge and overran the remainder of Czechoslovakia, annexing a state that had no cultural or historical relationship to Germany. In August, Germany invaded Poland, and Britain and France declared war. Hard on the heels of these events, Bill Colby sailed for home. The British liner on which he crossed the Atlantic was guarded by a detachment of soldiers whose duty it was to ward off attack by German submarines or surface raiders. By the time he landed on American soil, Colby had become, by his own accounts, an ardent internationalist. Indeed, he later confided to his son John that had he been old enough, he would have joined the Lincoln Brigade: “He was very proud and awed by the people who had volunteered in that struggle,” John recalled.31
Back at Princeton, Colby chose as the subject of his senior thesis France’s reaction to fascist aggression in Europe. He saw it as a case study for exploring the issue of why democracies seemed so weak in their dealings with totalitarian states. A contemporary of Colby’s named John F. Kennedy was examining the same topic from the British perspective while completing his studies at Harvard. Colby was extremely critical of appeasement, coming down particularly hard on the Popular Front government in France. If the democracies had cast their lot with the Austrians and Czechs in 1938, he maintained, Hitler and Mussolini could have been stopped before they had gotten started. The young scholar abjured any sympathy for communism, however. Communism and fascism were both expansionist, imperialist, racist ideologies, and the Nazi-Soviet Pact proved that Russia could not be trusted. “I am willing to concede,” he wrote in his memoir, Honorable Men, “my Catholicism may well have kept me from the emotional antifascism that pushed many of my time into the ranks of the Communists. . . . I was perfectly convinced—which of course many supporters of the Republican cause were not—that it was possible to be antifascist without becoming pro-Communist.” Many years later he would cite George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia as a penetrating, authentic look at the Communist International in action.32
Bill Colby graduated from Princeton in the spring of 1940. Ceremonies included singing the “Cannon Song” while the new alums broke ceremonial clay pipes over the Revolutionary War cannon anchored behind Nassau Hall.33 Within a month of his departure from Princeton, the Wehrmacht had overrun France. Three hundred and fifty thousand members of the British Expeditionary Force barely escaped with their side arms from the French port of Dunkirk. With the fall of France, the conflict between isolationists, led by the America First Committee, and interventionists, spearheaded by the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, reached a crescendo. Bill was certain, as were most liberal interventionists, that war with the Axis powers (including Imperial Japan, which had conquered Manchuria and invaded northern China) was inevitable. Although he had served as cadet captain of his ROTC unit at Princeton, Colby had not been commissioned with his classmates. He was still several months shy of his twenty-first birthday (the age of conscription did not change from twenty-one to eighteen until after the attack on Pearl Harbor).
Bill applied to Columbia Law School and was accepted. Elbridge had been assigned to army headquarters in Washington, DC, and Bill decided to spend the summer there with his parents. To pass the time and earn a little money, he landed a job pumping gas in the District of Columbia. “Gas station attendants weren’t unionized,” he later remembered, “and I enthusiastically joined in the effort to organize them in the best tradition of New Deal liberalism.”34
The beginning of the fall term at Columbia brought the younger Colby’s union activities to a halt. Bill moved into the law dormitory and immediately struck up a friendship with Stan Temko, who would go on to become a partner in Covington and Burlington, Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s law firm. The two men would become lifelong friends. Diligent and disciplined, as always, Bill was soon named to the Law Review.
All was not cloistered study, however. Stan Temko later recalled a trip to Vermont that included skiing with Barnard girls. Bill subsequently met another Barnard student, Barbara Heinzen, when Temko arranged a blind date for him. “It was all very informal,” Barbara later recalled, “because we were going to the Gold Rail, a local campus hangout.” She was not particularly taken with the young man physically—he was of medium height, wore glasses, and seemed very conventional (“not the person to stand out in a crowd,” as she put it)—but she found him to be an excellent conversationalist. The two hit it off and began dating. “We had splendid times together, racing around New York, dancing, partying, endlessly arguing politics with our friends,” Bill later wrote. Those discussions generally revolved around the war in Europe and the Roosevelt administration’s move from neutrality in 1939 to undeclared naval war with Germany by the winter of 1941. Bill recalled vividly that on one of their outings in early 1941, he and Barbara witnessed a communist-led demonstration on the Columbia campus. Participants paraded around with mock coffins to protest Roosevelt’s decision to aid Britain. This was, of course, prior to the German invasion of the Soviet Union.35
In the summer of 1941, Colby applied for and received his commission in the US Army. In August, he left for basic training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. That same month, President Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill met off the coast of Newfoundland aboard the HMS Prince of Wales to sign the Atlantic Charter, which outlined the two democracies’ postwar aims and, more important, signified America’s growing solidarity with its beleaguered ally. By November, US Navy vessels were convoying British and American transports across the Atlantic. Japan’s sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7 propelled the United States into the war against the Axis.
Bill Colby recalled that Pearl Harbor brought him, as well as most of the country, a sense of relief as well as horror and anger. The debate was over; at last, a united America would throw its immense weight into the fight against the Axis powers. The pressing question for Second Lieutenant Colby was how and when he would be able to enter the fray. The “day that would live in infamy” found the young officer in the artillery training program at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. To his dismay, he proved so proficient at “canon cocking” that he was detailed to the training unit as an instructor rather than being sent to a combat zone. “After six months in that job,” he wrote in his memoirs, “I was afraid the war would be over before I got a chance to fight—a repetition of my father’s frustration in Panama during World War I.”36
Fate intervened, however, in the form of a notice on the post bulletin board calling for volunteers for a new type of warfare—parachuting. Colby wasn’t sure what that involved, beyond jumping out of an airplane, but he noted that officers hoping to keep their best men could not obstruct those who wanted to volunteer. Like West Point, the parachute program required a vigorous physical. The nearsighted Colby was not to be foiled again. While undressing and dressing in the doctor’s office, he memorized the 20/40 line—the minimum required—on the eye chart. Unfortunately, when he “read off” the numbers and letters, he reversed them. He couldn’t see the 20/50 line at all. The examining physician asked the young officer if he really wanted to be a parachutist. “You’re damn right I do,” Colby replied. “Well I guess your eyesight is good enough for you to see the ground,” the doctor replied, and passed him.37
It was off to Fort Benning, Georgia, where the army’s new parachute school was located. Candidates had to undergo weeks of training before they were allowed their first airplane jump. Among other things, they had to leap from four 250-foot-high towers and learn how to properly pack their own chutes. Some of Colby’s contemporaries remembered him as handling the whole parachuting experience with nonchalance. A combat assignment was again delayed, however, when he broke his ankle during one of the training jumps. The accident took him out of the training cycle until he could heal. After completing his training, Bill was assigned to an artillery unit within the 82nd Airborne. Unfortunately, he lacked seniority, and when the unit shipped out, Colby was left behind in the officer replacement pool. He was cooling his heels at Camp Mackall, North Carolina, when the OSS came calling.38