In A Bright Shining Lie, Neil Sheehan explains the American debacle in Vietnam through the life and death of John Paul Vann, a flawed hero of the war. Sheehan begins with Vann’s grand funeral at Arlington National Cemetery. A horse-drawn caisson carried the coffin of the gallant and brilliant soldier who, in Sheehan’s words, had tried to “redeem the unredeemable” war. There was a marching band, an honor guard, and a parade of important mourners, a Who’s Who of the Vietnam era. It included senators and spies, antiwar crusaders and prowar columnists, senior generals blamed for losing Vietnam, and Vann’s ex-wife along with her five fatherless children. “It was a funeral to which they all came,” Sheehan wrote. “Those who had assembled to see John Vann to his grave reflected the divisions and the wounds that the war had inflicted on American society.”
Few came to the funeral of Major Donald Nichols. He was buried in Brooksville three days after he died, with only his son’s widow, two young grandchildren, and a handful of others in attendance. Most of his relatives did not know he was gone until months later. His death occasioned no coverage in the national press. Obituaries were brief in central Florida newspapers: a couple of sentences about his service in Korea. Nothing about sex crimes. Nothing about his “magnificent” and “impossible” achievements as a spymaster. The tragic arc of his life, from South Florida ragamuffin to King of Spies to serial pedophile, was unknown. As far as anybody understood at the time of his death, Nichols was just another worn-out and troubled veteran who had faded away.
Yet in its invisibility, his passing was as symbolically rich as the pomp and ceremony that marked the state funeral of John Paul Vann.
In life and in death, Vann had shone a spotlight on the conduct of his war. He wanted Americans to understand the folly of their military leaders. While his war was a singular tragedy for the United States, it was a tragedy performed in public. Vietnam sparked riots, but it also taught lessons that changed the conduct of the American military. The war’s impact was even more profound in the hearts of millions of Americans who never again would trust so blindly in their government.
As for Nichols, his unnoticed death was of a piece with his undigested war. Most Americans never debated, let alone understood, the causes and conduct of the conflict in Korea, even though it killed GIs at a far faster clip than the Vietnam War did. Did it make sense for the United States to draw an arbitrary line across Korea, igniting war without end on the peninsula? Should the United States have passively acquiesced as Syngman Rhee’s men murdered tens of thousands of South Koreans who might or might not have been Communists? Was it not just counterproductive but immoral for the U.S. Air Force to flatten every population center in North Korea with bombs and napalm?
Because questions about Korea went unasked, blunders in military strategy and errors in statecraft were not examined. Soon they were repeated. After the air force bombed and burned North Korea, it did the same thing in Vietnam and Cambodia, with the same unsatisfactory and morally reprehensible results. After the United States empowered and unleashed Rhee in South Korea, it repeated the strategy in many parts of the world, installing and supporting “anti-Communist” leaders in Africa, South America, and the Middle East.
Ignorance about the Korean War has also led to the cartoonish, ahistorical understanding many Americans still have of contemporary North Korea. They know that a family of clownish-looking dictators named Kim has created a hermit state armed with nuclear weapons. They know that it is wildly belligerent toward the United States. But most do not know that the fears of North Korea’s isolated citizens are firmly rooted in history: they are afraid that Americans might once again raze their country. Thanks to the bombs and napalm dropped by the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War, the Kim family is able to stoke anti-American hatred and perpetuate its rule, all while telling a terrifying, fact-based story that most Americans have never heard.
The quiet passing of Donald Nichols occasioned no examination of his behavior in Korea or the blinkered acceptance of it by his commanders. Nichols’s battlefield achievements—assembling a team of code breakers that helped save the U.S. Eighth Army in the Pusan Perimeter, identifying weaknesses in Soviet-made tanks and fighter jets, and finding thousands of bombing targets behind enemy lines—altered the course of a major war of the twentieth century and saved an untold number of American and South Korean lives. For this, he deserved his medals. But his closeness to Syngman Rhee made him, at the very least, a passive accomplice to atrocities that occurred before and during the war. He attended mass executions of South Korean civilians, trained the murderous Korean National Police, and regularly sat in on torture sessions. While there is no documentary evidence or eyewitness testimony showing that Nichols personally took part in mass killings or torture, he acknowledged that his career benefited from the intelligence that torture extracted. If he had interfered “in the methods our Allies used during interrogation,” Nichols said, “a good source of information would have dried up.” In much the same way, Nichols was compromised by his closeness to Rhee. It gave him exclusive information, high-level contacts, and an inside-the-palace cachet that thrilled his commanders, who rewarded him with promotions, power, and autonomy. But the price of his proximity to the president was blindness. He did not see—or did not care to see—Rhee’s criminal excesses or his incompetence. Nichols convinced himself that Rhee was “a great Democrat” and a “deeply trusted leader of the South Koreans.”
In the confused early days of the Korean War, when the air force was utterly dependent on Nichols for expertise, he was allowed, even encouraged, to operate outside the normal military chain of command. When he got into a bloody shoot-out with agents who feared that Nichols would send them to die in North Korea, his behavior did not raise eyebrows: the gunfight in his own quarters with his own men never entered his military service record. When he pushed suspected double agents out of boats or aircraft, commanding officers in the air force did not know or did not care.
At moments in his autobiography, Nichols raised questions about the morality of his behavior, even if he was not honest or rigorous in examining it. He knew, for example, that he needed tighter supervision, complaining that he “received absolutely no training.” He was unequipped, he said, to manage what he called his “legal license to murder.”
“Who should have this kind of authority?” he wrote. “Perhaps, if I had the benefits of higher education, an education which included something of philosophy and an understanding of life and man and their interrelationships with morals, honor, and duty, it would be easier for me to assay our wartime conduct. . . . I was a small cog in a big machine, the one that had to do a lot of dirty work for higher headquarters.”
Why was a poorly educated, minimally trained American agent allowed to befriend—and serve the interests of—a foreign head of state? Who allowed him to work for years with South Korean enforcers who sent severed heads to Seoul to demonstrate their loyalty? Who allowed Nichols to push people out of planes? To send hundreds of South Korean agents to their deaths in the North? There are no answers for these questions, in part because no one outside the Far East Air Forces knew enough about Nichols to ask them—until more than a quarter century after he was dead.
Nor is there an easy explanation for Nichols’s decades-long pattern of secretly abusing young men and boys. The hospital-based psychiatric care Nichols received in the air force failed him—and the boys he later victimized in Florida. According to his clinical record, air force psychiatrists—between lockdowns, heavy doses of Thorazine, and multiple rounds of electroshock—never made much effort to explore his family history. They diagnosed and treated a “schizophrenic” who did not exist. They failed to notice or help the sexual predator who did.
Nichols put a lot of time, thought, and subterfuge into his final resting place.
He and his son Donnie are buried on opposite sides of a large, lichens-stained granite cross with NICHOLS engraved on it. The monument is easy to find in Brooksville Cemetery, a tidy, town-owned graveyard shaded by live oak trees draped in Spanish moss. On the spring morning I spent beside the grave, a tendril of moss, swaying in a warm breeze, caressed the top of the family headstone.
Nichols acquired the plot, which has enough space for six coffins, in 1976. He was then fifty-three years old, and eight years had passed since his acquittal in Fort Lauderdale for abusing boys; their anguished depositions were safely sealed away in Broward County court archives. He had established himself as a respectable parent in Brooksville, where he served as chairman of the Hernando County school board’s comprehensive plan steering committee. By then, his marital status had also changed, at least on official records. Instead of being single, he was a widower. The change appears on Veterans Administration paperwork he filled out in the latter years of his life. He seems to have decided to become a widower while he was writing the autobiography that chronicled his wartime marriage to Kim In Hwa.
In Brooksville, as Nichols worked on his autobiography in the late 1970s, he arranged to have the marriage set in stone. Purchasing the monument for his future gravesite, he instructed that KIM HWA be engraved just to the right of DONALD. (Her death date was also added; his was left blank to be filled in later.) Between their names, the engraver added the word MAMA, an apparent reference to one of Nichols’s favorite dogs. Soon after the monument was placed in Brooksville Cemetery, Nichols photographed it, and the photo appears on the final page of his autobiography, enshrining his seemingly normal heterosexual marriage and the sentimental ideal that he would one day rest beside his beloved wife. An undated photograph of a young Korean woman whom Nichols identified as Kim Hwa also appears in the book, as does a photo of his dog Mama.
Nichols provided Brooksville Cemetery with a metal box, eighteen inches wide, forty-eight inches long, that he said contained the cremated remains of his late wife. This vault was set in concrete next to the space reserved for him. But the cemetery has no information about when her remains might have been transferred from South Korea to Florida or, indeed, if her ashes are in the vault. “I have no clue what’s in it,” said Mike Hughes, manager of the cemetery. “It is kind of odd.” It seems unlikely the transfer ever occurred. In 1953, when Kim Hwa supposedly died in childbirth, cremation was viewed in South Korea as an affront to Confucian values. It was extremely rare, especially for a supposedly married woman.
A second stone marker on the Nichols plot also signals the spymaster’s sleight of hand. Engraved on it are the names of his mother, Myra, and father, Walter—even though the two never reconciled and neither is actually buried there. When Walter died in Broward County in 1940, his relatives paid to have his body transported to New Jersey for burial in a family plot. Myra remarried at least once, becoming Myra Wolf. She died with that name in 1978 in a nursing home in Hollywood, Florida, and was cremated in nearby Delray Beach. “I don’t know what is under the headstone, to be honest with you,” the cemetery manager said.
By uniting his parents on a stone near his grave and by engraving the name of his potentially nonexistent “wife” on his own headstone, Donald Nichols concocted a happy and conventional ending to a life that was tormented and strange. It satisfied his father’s frustrated longing for a loving wife. It reconnected him to a mother he always hated but never stopped needing. It created an enduring tableau of Nichols as a devoted husband and family man.
In his autobiography, Nichols asked: “How does one de-train the mind of a trained agent?” In his case, it seems it could not be done.
He played one last spy trick in the graveyard. On the granite cross that stands over his grave, he hid the part of his life that was most important to him and to the country he served. The monument bears no reference to the U.S. Air Force. It does not mention his rank. It forgets the Korean War.