In 1956, the year I was born, a rookie reporter at the Goldsboro News-Argus went to see his boss about a story. The News-Argus, circulation eight thousand, was the paper of record in its patch of eastern North Carolina; Goldsboro, the seat of Wayne County, was a small town surrounded by tobacco and cotton, a place where nothing much of moment happened, other than the struggle for civil rights and that time a B-52 broke up in midair and dropped two fully armed thermonuclear weapons a few miles away. The reporter, Gene Roberts, was only twenty-four years old, but he had the weighty responsibility of writing the paper’s best-read feature, “Rambling Through Rural Wayne,” which on any given day might bear witness to an emotional family reunion or depict a sweet potato that closely resembled General Charles de Gaulle. “The world could be exploding, but the ‘Rambling Through Rural Wayne’ had to come out,” Roberts remembered fifty years later.
Roberts also wrote deeper stories about people’s lives, stories people would remember, and on the day that he sat down with his boss, Henry Belk, he was bearing a copy of his latest dispatch. Belk had edited the paper since 1929. He was six-foot-seven, walked with a cane, and wore a battered gray fedora. He tilted back in his big oak armchair, the springs creaking, the warm wind blowing in the window off the town square, while Roberts read the story out loud. The reporters of the News-Argus had to read to their ancient editor because he had gone blind. And if a story had ragged holes in the reporting or dull thuds in the writing, the old boy would pound his desk and declaim: Ah cain’t see it. Make me see it!
Twenty-five years later, Gene Roberts was my editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer. His peculiar genius inspired a generation of reporters. He made us look at all the trees to let our readers see the forest. In 1987, he sent me to see how the CIA’s multibillion-dollar weapons pipeline to the Islamic rebels fighting the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan was working. This wasn’t a story you could report from a desk in Washington. You had to see it for yourself. The assignment changed my life in a way I didn’t foresee. Before I took off, I called up the CIA’s public information officer and asked for a country briefing on Afghanistan. He scoffed and hung up. I returned to Washington three months later, and I hadn’t been back at my desk for more than a day when my phone rang. “Tim! How are you? How was your trip? How’d you like to come in for that briefing now?”
Off I went to the CIA’s headquarters. I walked into the magnificent atrium and looked up at the words from the Gospel of John carved in gold bas-relief: And ye shall know the truth and the truth will make you free. I knew then that I wanted to cover the CIA the way other reporters covered the cops and the courts.
Joe Lelyveld hired me at the New York Times to do that job. Gene and Joe had both covered the civil rights movement for the Times in the deep south in the 1960s. Joe’s father was a rabbi who marched, and was bloodied, in that struggle; Gene’s father was a minister who published a small paper in North Carolina. Without being preachy about it, both of them had an instinctive sense that journalism was a vocation. Gene went to Vietnam and then ran the national desk at the Times during the first Nixon administration. Joe became one of the great foreign correspondents of his generation. He covered the fight against apartheid in South Africa, and his book Move Your Shadow remains the greatest chronicle of that epic battle.
By 1994, Joe was the executive editor and Gene the managing editor at the Times. I was their national security reporter, parachuting into places like Afghanistan and Sudan every so often, and never was an ink-stained wretch happier to wake up at home in the morning with the paper at the doorstep, wondering what the day might bring.
I owe a debt of gratitude for almost every word I have ever written to these two men, along with a tip of the old fedora to the memory of Henry Belk.
An equal measure of thanks goes to Kathy Robbins, who became my literary agent in 1994. Ever since, she has urged me on, gently coaxing inchoate ideas toward oblivion and forcefully driving good ones forward, reading every draft, and making sure that my work could be published not only in America but around the world. I didn’t know how to write a book before I met Kathy, though I’d written one. Five books later, I feel like I am getting the hang of it, and she is a great part of the reason why. Thanks to everyone at the Robbins Office: David Halpern, Janet Oshiro, and Alexandra Sugarman. At CAA stands Matthew Snyder, always at the ready. Rick Pappas knows the law.
Four of those books have been written in part at Yaddo, the colony for artists and writers in Saratoga Springs, New York, where this one got its start. Yaddo is a spring that faileth not, and its presiding genius is the incomparable Elaina Richardson, without whom my life as a writer would be irreparably abridged.
The Folly and the Glory owes its life to everyone who has had a hand in it along the way at the publishing house of Holt. The wisdom of chairman Steve Rubin and executive editor Serena Jones brought it forth from conception to birth. My gratitude goes to all at Holt, and in particular Amy Einhorn, Pat Eisemann, Maggie Richards, Madeline Jones, Chris Sergio, and Caitlin O’Shaughnessy. The manuscript had another reader, someone whom I would trust with my life: my brother Richard.
Something else immeasurably marvelous happened to me in 1994. I had the infinite good fortune to marry Kate Doyle. Among her many virtues is her avocation: as a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, she has worked for nearly thirty years with human rights groups, truth commissions, prosecutors, and judges to obtain files from secret government archives that shed light on state-sanctioned crimes against humanity in Latin America. Kate has kept me honest, picked me up when I have stumbled, given me strength and hope and joy. The greatest joys are our daughters, Emma Doyle and Ruby Doyle, who have shown me unconditional love even when I didn’t deserve it. Emma helped research this book, challenged my assumptions, and helped me think things through. Ruby keeps me off my high horse and on the good foot. This book is dedicated first and last to these three strong women, the light of my life.