11
THIS SEEPAGE OF IMPRESSIONS ABOUT MY father’s life over that desultory spring of assassination, riot, and protest, as I neared draft age, only heightened my sense of anxiety that everything I knew and loved was under threat. I found myself drawn to things past, to old certainties, to the fading values that had come out of the abolitionist movement and the Civil War, upon which my people had founded Winsted.
I can remember walking into the library and instinctively looking up for assurance at the Sargent portrait of General Alden, and feeling only a terrible sadness at his once-sterling reputation. If such a thing was so fragile, so fleeting, what hope was there left for any of us? Even with all the histories of Antietam, his memoirs and letters, his sacrifice and that of his men in the Fifteenth Regiment Massachusetts Volunteers, their legacy seemed under threat. Even the likes of Jerry Gadsden could be dismissive of that once-honored generation of abolitionists. “Truth be told, your people, your general beat the pants off those southern slaveholders, and then retreated to their safe homes up north and let those crackers butcher and degrade black folks for another hundred years. Like amnesia, man, a hundred years of forgetting, like people just forgot what that Civil War was all about.”
All too true.
What had happened to our faith in the struggle for human dignity and freedom, and Lincoln’s “better angels of our nature”? In 1968, American exceptionalism was in bad odor.
I found myself looking into the troubled eyes of the general’s portrait, as I’d looked into the hard eyes of that Green Beret captain, and wondering what I missed, what I lacked as a human being . . . bred out of me. Even Max, more and more preoccupied with his short story writing, neglected me as a lost cause.
John Alden, an engineer by training, had learned his trade the hard way, at Bull Run, and Ball’s Bluff and during the Peninsula Campaign when he became a favorite of George McClellan, a professional soldier and organizational genius. Alden’s efficiency and bravery prompted his speedy rise to general. By Antietam, Alden had been through enough galling retreats; his Massachusetts men had marched from Washington though the lush landscapes of western Maryland, singing abolitionist hymns, anticipating a fight on home ground after the malarial marshes and fetid water of the Peninsula Campaign. He pushed himself and his men to break the Confederate line at all costs. It was a horrendous gamble but a victory there and then might bring a quick end to the war. Brigade after brigade was fed into the slaughter pen and massacred. Finally, the rebel line broke and began falling back. That was when General Alden was shot off his horse. A bullet shattered his right ankle. He tried to get back on his mount, but he was bleeding profusely and began to faint. His aides carried him back to a dressing station. By the afternoon, he was in excruciating pain and woozy from loss of blood and unable to vigorously participate in the planning to follow up the limited successes of the morning with further attacks. “I failed to put steel in George McClellan’s spine: a man I admired but a man afraid of losing and so unable to win.” By all accounts, a quick response that afternoon and in the days following would have pinned the Confederate army against the Potomac and ended the war in a matter of weeks, saving the nation another two and a half agonizing years.
That deadly wager on high body counts for a decisive victory weighed on Alden all his life, as regrets tend to do. “The thing was graspable; Johnny Reb was reeling, and we had Lee with his backside in the Potomac.” So much staked for so little gain. It marked him—marked him as a gambler in human souls. He’d gambled with his men’s lives and lost the wager. That’s how he saw it, even though Antietam was a victory that saved the Union and prompted the Emancipation Proclamation, when Lincoln finally realized the North had to take off the gloves and get freemen into the fight. A week after the battle, as Alden was still recovering in an army hospital in Silver Spring, Maryland, McClellan dismissed him for his complaints to the papers about his commander’s indecisiveness and incompetence. Alden had been an early admirer of McClellan, but he knew a missed opportunity when he saw one, and he never forgave McClellan. “McClellan cared only about the Union, but union without the destruction of slavery was union with the devil and his filthy spawn.”
It was the dismissal that set him on the path to his fortune.
“He lit out for the West,” as my grandmother put it, where he surveyed for the railroad and designed their bridges, and made “handfuls” of money, and finally came home, not to Boston and Cambridge, where he and Samuel Williams had gone to Harvard and become fervent abolitionists, but to New York, where he invested in real estate and made another, even larger fortune. President Grant was a personal friend and urged him to run for governor of New York. The great preacher and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, who introduced him to the work of the artist George Inness, also urged him to run, to get back in the fray before it was too late, “get some teeth into the reconstruction of the South before all our gains are lost.” Alden refused the call. (The manila envelope with the newspaper cuttings from the 1877 Natchez Weekly Democrat and the Pinkerton reports spelled out his final heart wrenching failures in the abolitionist cause.) And he did so again when the Republicans asked him to run for the Senate. He wanted nothing more to do with public life. “The South and the southerner be damned, the bondsmen and their dastardly supporters in the Democratic Party can go to hell.” Alden retreated into making money, engaging in philanthropy that set the mold for Carnegie and Rockefeller, collecting classical statuary and George Inness paintings, and building Elysium and the Winsted School with his cousin Samuel Williams.
Having now encountered Bobby Williams in the flesh, I couldn’t help but wonder why a fighting general, a superb businessman, and an organizational genius felt the need to team up with the likes of Samuel Williams—Essays and Prayers just didn’t cut it—to found and run a school for boys.
A fascinating tale that even a Kim Philby might have failed to unearth.
At his funeral in the Winsted chapel, General Alden was remembered as the best of his generation, and a man shadowed by loss. He was haunted by the failure of Reconstruction, by the lynching of blacks in the Jim Crow South that occurred with sickening frequency in the decades before his death in late 1918, which his friend Theodore Roosevelt had been helpless to stop, and by the graves of a near company of his men in the Winsted cemetery, where he, too, was buried: a commander still. He died in the terrible outbreak of Spanish influenza in the fall of 1918. A month before, he’d received word of his doctor son’s atomization when a five-hundred-pound German shell made a direct hit on his surgical field station in the Argonne.
And so I found myself latching onto the last echoes of that great man’s hopes for his nation, as my father had in his letters to his mother from France and Germany in the waning months of the war, as their country went to war with itself once again. I found myself craving the voices of those who remembered him as he once was, as the dead in Hades craved Odysseus’s blood libations, and news of their sons, their glorious sons.
Doc Steele was an institution. He’d been head of the history department for forty-odd years and took personal pride in fine-tuning some of the best and brightest minds of my father’s generation. Educated in Germany and at Oxford, Doc believed in the tutorial method for developing critical thinking in his young charges. For Doc, the classics and sacred studies, even math and science, were mere window dressing for a man’s liberal education. He taught us the nuts and bolts of statecraft and the legacy that informed political purpose. A pragmatist to the core, he equipped his boys to deal with the hard world as it really was. Through his steady eyes we might see our way past the complexity and deceit of human affairs to the vital truth . . . the vital center.
Doc wanted to believe in the worst way that we were the vital center. “A balanced and pragmatic mind, boys—that’s the ticket.”
Old Doc was about to have a grand chance to put some of his handiwork on display. It was the school’s eighty-eighth birthday and many of the top guns in Washington would be on hand to celebrate, including the president’s national security adviser who had decided, on very short notice, to give a speech about our involvement in Vietnam. The president’s adviser was one of Doc’s boys.
In morning class, with his protégé’s address scheduled for that evening, Doc fairly jitterbugged before his lectern. His patrician voice boomed, with its hints of British inflection from his days as a Rhodes scholar. Still tall and slender at almost seventy, he retained the dashing good looks of the scholar athlete, a sterling mechanism crowned with a shock of snow-white hair tamed back with a discreet dose of Vitalis, while his wide-apart, sea green eyes glittered with agitation as he preached the still-pressing drama of history’s close calls. He paced before us with the gravitas of the worldly sage who has touched all the bases and then some.
Doc launched into his classic lecture on the meaning of history. He’d been delivering this now-famous lecture, with pithy updates, to the advanced sections—including my father’s class—as long as anyone could remember, which he illustrated at crucial points with close-arm drills from the time of Frederick the Great. Doc was a great fan of the Prussian king who—after two world wars fighting the Germans, one would have thought his subject slightly tarnished—represented, in his well-traveled mind, an obscure, if vivid, baseline in the scheme of human affairs.
History, he never ceased reminding us, was not about blind economic forces, but about man qua man—the unique figures who have shaped the world by force of character. “No man or nation can escape the burden of history,” he repeated, for our individual lives are connected in an unbroken line of cause and effect stretching backward and forward in time.
“That is the heritage that binds us.” He charged across the room as if to viciously thrust an eighteen-inch bayonet into the stomach of a Saxon grenadier. “No generation”—he pressed a foot on the skewered foe and pulled out his blade with a guttural grunt—“can escape this responsibility.”
He spoke to us of the great men who had changed the course of history. “If it had not been for Luther and the Protestant triumph in Germany and England—thank God for Thomas and Oliver Cromwell, who set the seal of English liberty on the land—we might all be speaking Spanish and going to confession on Sunday.” He eyed us with a woeful stare that spoke of the benighted plague of the Inquisition.
History was the tug of the old and new, the revolt of the sons against the fathers—witness the irony of Frederick the Great, who as a youth reviled his cold Prussian father, only to end up much like his old man, even surpassing his pedantic father in the meticulous requirements to patiently build little Prussia into a European power.
Doc stood to attention, shouldering his invisible but weighty musket, moving it from shoulder to shoulder with quick, precise movements, then bending to one knee to demonstrate the firing position, and counting off the seconds it took a first-rate rifleman to reload and fire again. His body took the impact of the recoil and he staggered up, wiping sweat from his domed brow. “The Prussian marksman could get off six shots in a minute, twice the speed of the best infantry in Europe of the day. A withering fire, an oblique and mobile formation—a formidable killing force.”
How Doc loved to go on about poor Frederick, portraying the fate of the fallen idealist who spent his declining years plagued by the memories of the death and destruction that had filled his reign. But what a soldier, what a determined general . . . that poor little Prussia should survive! (Survive to fire a five-hundred-pound shell at a surgical station, killing my grandfather and dozens of the wounded and nurses!) Somehow these thoughts on things Teutonic inevitably led to his most dire warnings against Hegelian idealism and economic materialism. Somehow, that dirty little bearded Jew, Karl Marx, a man with no practical experience of the world, a library-sated intellectual, had inserted himself into the historical process, preaching his blather of class struggle and historical necessity.
“Marx was a fake, a charlatan; even his research was a fraud.” “Never!” he admonished, circling the room like a master sergeant inspecting the latest timorous offering to the war gods, “use the word inevitable in a paper you write for this course, or I guarantee you an automatic F. Got it?” He inspected the attentive faces, a few trying to blink back stubborn morning hangovers. “Man must be free to create his own destiny.” Doc pointed out a few in the pantheon, the framed photos of Lincoln, Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, Churchill, Eisenhower, and George C. Marshall that hung above his desk. “Be forever vigilant of those who manipulate with half-baked ideas, who use ideas to gain their odious ends and crush freedom from the earth, who prey on the natural resentments and jealousies of the downtrodden. We are a practical race, gentlemen; we are doers and pragmatists first, thinkers second. Believe only in what you can touch, what you can ascertain with your own eyes, what can be proved to the judge and jury of a well-tempered mind. Experience the world, boys. Touch its face. But keep your wits about you. Remember, sometimes it is necessary to make your own facts and prove what is true by its accomplishment.”
He turned like a weary general from the appalling wastage of the battlefield and retreated to the front of his classroom, where he began methodically to raise the maps of Europe—1500 the Reformation, 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, 1815 Treaty of Vienna, 1914 on the eve of the Great War—century after century, snapping them upward into neat rolls until the blackboard appeared with the word FREEDOM scrawled in blue chalk. He patted his forehead with a handkerchief and waved at the board.
“That is what America must stand for in the eyes of the world. It is what we have always fought for, from Bunker Hill and Gettysburg to the Battle of the Bulge and Inchon. It is the cross we bear.” I wondered if that cross included the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley or the recent repulse of the Vietcong during the Tet Offensive. He nodded gravely as he prepared to dismiss us with a reminder about the president’s adviser’s lecture in the hall that evening. “Remember, boys, some men take instinctively to their calling, while others will never hear the call. But we are all called to serve in our own way.”
How simple, how commonsense seemed Doc’s vision of history. Surely, here was a fine echo of General Alden’s creed. No complex dialectic of economic forces, just the interplay of great men and experienced judgment, the champions of progress and justice against those of dark reaction, our fate decided by the passionate will of a chosen few, the great-souled statesmen who, by force of will, might yet redeem the world. Churchill was Doc’s great hero. “And don’t forget, boys, his mother was an American beauty, as fierce in intellect as she was stunning to behold.” Doc had married an Englishwoman after the war, a fourth cousin of Winston Churchill, so he had some skin in the Winnie game.
Perhaps he never heard the snickers or saw the yawns in the back of the classroom, or didn’t care. He believed that in times of crisis there would be enough good men—just enough—to step forward, to hold his shining standard high.
As we left his class, he called me over to his desk and motioned me to sit. He picked up a handwritten note on his desk and reviewed it one more time. Then he bounced his shaggy eyebrows at me and smiled, still breathing hard from his exertions. He indicated the note with a White House letterhead on his desk. “Mac wants to meet with you after his address to the school privately, at the headmaster’s house.” A look of fondness and surprise mixed in his green eyes, catching the sunlight from the window. I nodded my compliance, still a little churned up in the backwash of his oratory.
“He knew your father, of course,” he continued. “They were friends and colleagues.”
I had an inkling from my mother’s little story about the shoe with the broken heel and the shattered windowpane on a street in Georgetown, which, at the very least, hinted at a more problematic friendship. Of course I said nothing, just nodded and prepared to go. Then he said my name as if he needed to add something, maybe give me a little briefing about the man, a little historical perspective. Something seemed to be bothering him. A moment of doubt perhaps? I waited. The sunlight shone in his white hair, again bringing out the turbid green of his fervent eyes. After having delivered his stirring lecture forty times, sending boys from forty sixth forms off into the world, he was on the cusp of his proudest moment . . . or so one would have thought. His boys were coming back to pat him on the back, to see if old “Steeljaws” was still on the march, to thank him for all he’d done for them. He shook his head. And it hit me: My father was one of the few who wouldn’t be coming back. Many had died in World War II as young men, but only one, a marine colonel, had died in Korea, and so far no one from the school was serving in Vietnam, unless you counted Elliot Goddard and some of his more intrepid CIA colleagues.
Doc’s smile expressed gentle feeling, a deep affection, and he reached with a half shrug across his desk and patted my hand. And then he just shook his head again and said I could go.
I got up.
“No, wait.” He waved me back to the seat. “The way things are going around here . . . I’d just like to tell you how much I miss your father.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“He was a terrific student, of course, but I never knew him as a coach or even a dorm master. He was rowing in the spring, when I was on the tennis court. But you know what really impressed me: He spoke perfect German, I guess from that summer he spent in Germany studying at Leipzig. I knew nothing about his scholarship, but I was touched by his profound respect for German culture—a dicey thing, even then, with the memory of the First World War still fresh, with Hitler coming to power. There’s no one left today who even remembers how German scholarship was once esteemed.” He paused while passing his heavily calloused hand through his white hair, needing to ease out the significant facts from his encyclopedic brain. “But you see, what I remember . . . how much your father loved music, especially Bach and the piano work of Mozart and Beethoven. His friend the Williams boy, extraordinary talent on the piano, was always playing on the Steinway grand in the hall, or the organ in the chapel. I liked to stop and listen, and I’d often find John there. It seemed odd to me, with all his athletic prowess, that music held such a place in his life. And you know, as a teacher, when your boys come back, as they always do, one can’t help comparing the student to the professional man, the life that has evolved from an early aptitude and passion. Time and again, I can spot the match; I think, Yes, I could see the man in that boy. The president’s adviser, for example; I knew that Mac was headed to the top job after only a week in class. And I did see something of your father when he returned from the war, when he was on the board of trustees in the late forties and early fifties—not that I was an intimate; and I could never quite place that boy seated with his head bowed pensively listening to a Bach sonata or a Mozart rondo. He was a war hero, by all reports, a man on the way to the top reaches of government, where, God only knows, his talents were sorely needed. One detected the weight of the world on his shoulders.”
He smiled gently and raised a long finger. He seemed almost relieved, and then he shook his head. “Yes, the boy, and the man . . .” His eyebrows expanded upward. “Well, I just wanted you to know that I miss him and I often think about him when I hear Mozart.”
Doc, too, couldn’t help but be rattled by recent events: city streets in flame, protests on campuses and in Washington, and the relentless criticism in the Times of his boys and their pedigree. Perhaps he was having second thoughts about what he’d wrought, the way he’d portrayed the historical imperative to his boys who now ran the country. For the most part, things had gone pretty well up to the Vietnam War. Doc’s crowd had played an exalted role in the Second World War and had saved the heartland of Europe. But then they’d failed in the rollback of Communist expansion in Eastern Europe. And then China had gone down to the Reds. Korea had been an expensive and cruel blunder: A Winsted boy, before Doc’s time, had failed to draw the line at the Yalu. Senator Joseph McCarthy had given anticommunism a bad name. Then there’d been the hiccup of the Bay of Pigs, in which three of Doc’s boys had featured, a botch to end all botches, due to an inexperienced, womanizing president who lost his nerve and failed to commit the military decisively and in a timely fashion. Elliot Goddard had escaped that fiasco by the skin of his teeth. Payback had come with the Cuban Missile Crisis—near Armageddon, and then another humiliation. The president’s adviser had a lot to answer for, and now, because of the Cuban fuckup, he was up to his chin in the Vietnam morass, where they’d been compelled to draw the line. And truth be told, Vietnam wasn’t even in the neighborhood of those maps of ye olde Europe on Doc’s wall—that heartland of Western civilization we were sworn to protect. And well, a land war in Asia . . . Eisenhower had thought a land war in the jungles of Asia was madness. Was it possible that Doc’s boys had gotten in a little too deep and maybe hadn’t covered all sides of the question? Maybe the Oxford tutorial system didn’t work as well in the White House. Maybe the better part of valor was to cut our losses and let Vietnam go Communist. Draw the line in Thailand or India, both of which had viable governments—did they not? Besides, you’ve got the whole wide Pacific in which to drown those red dominoes.
In the histories that would one day be written about Doc’s influence on his best and brightest students, he would grudgingly express these second thoughts. If such reservations disturbed his mind during our conversation after class, he’d changed his tune by dinner, and most assuredly when he introduced the president’s adviser in the hall before the speech, which would be quoted in full by The New York Times the following morning, and harshly critiqued by Pravda that evening.
Or possibly our conversation—and it really wasn’t much of a conversation—might have been prompted by Doc’s many contacts with the powers that be. Had he heard darker hints about the disastrous calamity of my father’s “defection”? Did he know any more about Kim Philby’s machinations and his CIA boy’s fawning, and that outstanding joker in the deck: Anthony?
Perhaps he just felt sorry for me.
At dinner I sat with Max at Charlie Springfield’s table. Up at the head table the president’s adviser sat with Byron Folley and Doc and other esteemed members of the board of trustees and their wives, including Elliot Goddard, Bobby and Suzanne Williams, and a number of top-ranking CIA officers. Many were Doc’s boys. Precedents were being broken, the press was being allowed to cover the president’s adviser’s speech. This had been Byron Folley’s idea; he was basking in the reflected glow of the publicity. But the trustees, to a man, were annoyed at the headmaster’s lack of discretion. They grumbled behind his back, barely able to say a civil word to “that hick of a pipsqueak.” Gentlemen, especially those in public life, were expected to keep low profiles and avoid drawing attention to themselves or their backgrounds. Their schools, like their clubs, were sacrosanct, offering a degree of respite from the public eye, where they drew strength among their own kind.
Nevertheless, dinner was a magnificent affair. The school was on its best behavior for its birthday celebration: white shirts and blue blazers to the skies. I kept looking up at the head table, behind which Sargent’s towering portrait of the first headmaster, Samuel Williams, claimed pride of place (Sargent, a pal and confidant of Samuel’s daughter, Isabella, had painted the general and the rector in consecutive sittings). Bobby Williams glowered uncomfortably in his wheelchair next to the president’s adviser, although he must have taken some comfort that the imposing portrait of his grandfather had his back. Suzanne smoldered in icy elegance, attracting every male gaze; a quick glance and I might have taken her for Laura, who had not been included in the occasion, the wheelchair chores falling to her mother.
I wondered if the president’s adviser was concerned about his golden-haired son, a phenomenal athlete and wide receiver, only recently back from rehab. I could count on two hands all the touchdown passes he’d dropped the previous fall. Now he’d grown his hair past his shoulders and couldn’t concentrate enough to sign his name. Max and I wondered if the Secret Service agents at the doorways carried guns under their coats. We couldn’t take our eyes off the famous man. His commitment and brilliance seemed to shine in his round, compact face, only the merest strands of hair disguising the impressive size of his cranium. His movements were quick and decisive, his intelligent eyes darting with impatience. He had a reputation for not suffering fools gladly. Which made it tough on Byron Folley, who tried to act the part but nodded woodenly like a windup marionette at every word uttered by the brilliant alumnus, who was the adviser to another boy from Texas, who’d also made it big in the world of the bold easterners but had now fled the heat of the kitchen and bowed out of the upcoming fall election. For the president’s adviser, this, too, would be his last hurrah in government before history shoved him from the world stage, where the critics sharpened their knives. Doc sat up straight as a halfdriven nail, beaming and proud; he knew as well as anyone that the affairs of state had been committed to able hands, to one endowed with the wisdom of the ages. He had seen to that.
Only the Reverend Springfield seemed soured by the whole affair. He slumped forward at the head of our table and brooded darkly, hardly touching his food—unusual for a man normally jocular and garrulous.
Charlie Springfield had been a class behind the president’s adviser and had known him as man and boy. He remembered the boy as brilliant and utterly self-confident—too brilliant, in his opinion; for having mastered all the facts of history so as to marshal them in the blink of an eye, he suffered no doubt; only now it was lives and not just the debating society’s trophy at stake. People were dying; young soldiers were dying in great numbers at obscure jungle coordinates because of advice he was offering to a besieged and lame-duck president. Charlie Springfield did have doubts. He abhorred senseless slaughter and was no stranger to war, having landed on Omaha Beach, where many in his platoon had been killed (while the president’s adviser had monitored the landings through binoculars from a navy cruiser three miles offshore).
“Your dad,” Charlie Springfield said to me suddenly, “would never have been taken in by the blather justifying this war.”
I was startled by this remark so abruptly flung out for all to hear. Had he picked up such a view when my father visited him in the hospital, or had their paths crossed again after the war, when my father had been on the board of trustees?
“What part of the blather wouldn’t he have been taken in by?” I asked. Max was shaking his head at me: Don’t go there, Hawkman. Charlie Springfield was not just a little drunk; he was smashed. I could smell it on his breath.
“It’s not a fucking game; it’s not fucking imperial satraps out of
Kipling striding the world stage . . . oh, Christ.”
Charlie smacked the table with his fist. His acne-scarred cheeks had turned beet red; he could have been choking to death. He glared at the head table, a curl of dark hair falling above his eyebrows. Our table fell silent. Max made another signal in my direction to keep my big mouth shut. Charlie swept the lock off his brow and a moment later shoved his chair back and strode out of the dining room.
Just as well he left before the birthday cake was presented at the head table, before the school stood to sing the traditional “Blue Bottles.” Nor did he bother to attend the president’s adviser’s speech; he’d heard it all before. Charlie Springfield had gone home to finish work on his sermon for next morning’s Sunday chapel.
That night, the hall was packed. The newspapermen were there with their notebooks and cameras. The lectern was a tangle of microphones.
The television klieg lights transformed the dowdy hall into an incandescent moment of Cold War history. Byron Folley made a brief introduction, then cannily turned the podium over to Doc, who made a proper introduction, telling his famous story about the president’s adviser’s class, which was the most brilliant class he’d ever taught. He said that when he’d arrived as a young master after a year of teaching at Dartmouth, he had expected to be disappointed with the quality of students. Was he shocked! By God, if they weren’t already superior to the college boys.
Then there was another famous story, about how when it came time for the president’s adviser to take his advanced placement exam in history, he hadn’t liked the choice of exam questions and so had taken the liberty of rewriting one of the questions and answering it in his own terms. The examiners had to decide whether to flunk him or give him the highest grade possible. Doc smiled, knowing he didn’t have to reveal the outcome. The crowd tittered. Even those who were against the war couldn’t help but feel a sense of pride. After all, he was one of our own. Come what may, we really were a magnificent bunch.
When the president’s adviser took the lectern, there was loud clapping and then expectant silence. All the television lights came on, cameramen bent to their eyepieces, and soundmen adjusted their levels. Our boy nodded gravely for ten or fifteen seconds—almost an eternity under that incandescent glare—and looked at us and then spoke in a medium forthright voice. He had been busy and had not had time to prepare his remarks, but he would try to address the issues that might be uppermost in our minds. The newsmen pricked up their ears, because it meant he would be speaking off-the-cuff, and off-the-cuff always meant news. Doc smiled because he knew that extemporaneous speaking was what his boy did best.
And he was right. The president’s adviser waxed eloquent, barely pausing, as if he were in a trance, and we could almost hear the fine machinery of his mind whir like those great IBM computers behind closed doors at the Department of Defense. He told us how Americans hated war, how we had been dragged into both the world wars, and Korea too! He hated war because he had seen what had happened at Pleiku; he had seen the wounded. He told us this with a grim face. There were tears in his eyes when he continued. He had talked to many of the badly wounded, talked to our boys who had lost legs and arms and who lay suffering in the field hospitals. He was devastated by their sacrifice and stirred by their heroism. They had done their duty and paid the supreme price. It was not a war we wanted. But the North Vietnamese and their backers in the Soviet Union and China had chosen to test us; they had forced our hand. The United States was thus compelled to retaliate against escalating aggression. No country could be allowed to think that it could get away with uncontested aggression, for it only led to more aggression, until we were in a mess like we were against Hitler and Hirohito. He told us in a hushed voice that the president had resisted the decision to bomb the North as long as he could, but he had been compelled to make the hard choice.
“No one”—and he made a fist and stared at it gravely—“could be allowed to doubt our resolve. If not us, then who?”
He went on in a searching voice. If we backed down, where would we have to back down next? What would become of the others: Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and then Indonesia . . . and the people, the bloodbath that would be sure to follow? We had given the South our word and we would never desert an ally. What would our faithful European allies think if they saw our resolve falter? “Gentleman,” he told us, “it’s a rough and dirty world out there. It comes down to one thing: toughness and nerve . . . to stand up for what you believe in. It is America’s responsibility as a free people.”
He reminded us of the stirring words of our slain president, the man who had brought him to the White House: to pay any price for freedom. At the end, he gazed at us and spoke in an intimate and quiet voice. “Gentlemen, the one lesson our generation has learned the hard way was the lesson of Munich: Appeasement never solves anything, but only begets more aggression and leads to greater and greater danger. Freedom requires toughness and the nerve to stand fast and hold the line. This is the lesson of my generation: the wisdom of our fathers’ fathers—it has been our triumph—its neglect our failure.”
They gave him a standing ovation. In the end, we stuck by our own.
As instructed, after the illustrious man and the other dignitaries had left the hall, I made my way over to the headmaster’s house. It was a warm spring evening, hinting at early summer and freedom from care, and the grass on the Circle had been recently mown and the aroma of the cut grass and the ancient apple trees seemed to rise in delicious updrafts like an ambrosial harvest. I stopped and stared at the smoky leafed-out forms of the apple trees, feeling myself drawn to them as if they were old friends. I was put in mind of something my grandmother had told me in the hospital during her last illness. I went to see her almost every day at Lenox Hill Hospital after school and she’d talk about early times when she was a girl. She thought it important that I should hear it from her, and not from a memoir or letters or a diary, “although,” she said, “I’ve stored up and organized a bushel or two for you to peruse when you’re older. The voice carries,” she told me, “farther than you dare imagine.” I remember her telling me about the apple trees. About how my great-grandfather had been scouting out places for the new school he wanted to build and how he’d come upon the near-abandoned Revolutionary-era farm and the unpruned orchard. How he’d been taken by the “demeanor of these winter-battered trees in the early summer of ’78,” like old men bent and browbeaten and huddled toward one another as they related tales of famous battles and comrades lost. He’d circled and circled the old trees until he knew in his bones that this was the place where he wanted to build his school, preserving the ancient trees as a reminder, a centerpiece of what once had been and was no more . . . of some enduring truth that must be kept before young men’s eyes.
And as I was remembering my grandmother’s story, I heard a noise from the branches of one of the trees. There on a sturdy bough about seven feet off the ground was a silhouette of a sitting man. I knew it was a man, as opposed to a boy, by his size and baggy pants and the suit jacket hung over the branch at his side. I realized he’d been watching me for some time, as if he’d been waiting, as if he knew my story.
“Hey,” the specter called out. “What’d you think of Mr. Hotshot?” “What’s that?” I asked, taking a few steps closer, peering upward.
A hand reached down, like the hand of God out of a cloud in one of Giotto’s early frescoes.
“Get your butt up here.”
I was dumbstruck . . . Elliot Goddard, a trustee, CIA station chief in Saigon, sitting on a branch in the dark, swinging his legs like a smart-alecky kid. I took his hand and he pulled me—his strength was impressive—and in seconds I was beside him. All around us indistinct figures passed, retreated, and dispersed to lighted doorways.
“Don’t you love it,” said Elliot. “I used to hole up in this tree for hours. Watch the moon come up over Mount Monadnock. Lovely to be all alone right at the center of things . . . and nobody the wiser.”
I was quite taken by this unaccustomed view, at once familiar and not, and by this man who seemed to appear and disappear in my life like the Cheshire cat.
“So, how’d he do?” he asked. “Oh, it was a great speech.” “Mac can be damn convincing.”
I could barely make out his face, just his blond hair like tarnished silver, his royal nose a convexity of assurance to go with his powerful jaw.
“He told us about Munich and the dangers of appeasement.”
“Yup, good ole Munich . . . should’ve run Chamberlain out of town on a rail.”
I detected a world-weariness.
“Did Doc tell his little story about Mac?” “Oh yeah, about his history AP.”
He laughed, and this furthered my sense that these inner-circle anecdotes had begun spreading virally, imagistic stations of the cross upon which the cognoscenti built their arguments and justified their brilliance to one another.
“I’ll bet the Monroe Doctrine doesn’t get much air play in Steeljaws’s class. Does anybody even teach American history around here?”
Elliot was reprising his bête noire. “The seniors have it as an elective.”
“Lord God—an elective, the Monroe Doctrine is an elective.Tomorrow at the trustees meeting, this is going to be top of the agenda.” He reached and shook a branch. “So, what’s the White House’s latest reading on the Vietnam entrails?”
It took me a few seconds to process this—wouldn’t he, of all people, know? “Oh . . . he was explaining why we have to take a stand and what was at stake.”
Elliot laughed.
“Stand fast—hold the line.” Elliot gave a jaunty salute. “Mac was making the same speech to your dad twenty years ago, back in ’48, when we were trying to coax your dad out of the ivied halls of Princeton.”
“Why did he—did you have to do that?”
This was followed by silence. Elliot knew that his indiscretions tended to be his undoing.
“Cushy—Princeton—cushy as it gets. Then he’d had a rough war in Greece. Me, I had a couple of weeks of excitement in Brittany dropped behind enemy lines, and the rest was a cakewalk. And that guy in there tonight, he got no closer to Omaha Beach than a little sea spray. But your dad saw the worst of it. He volunteered for an intelligence unit with Patton to go in right behind the point of the spear. He spent a lot of time in those flattened German cities interrogating some of the worst of those sons of bitches. Not to mention, to put it delicately, the not so discret modus of the Soviet security forces in Berlin and Prague and other beauty spots.”
How did it follow: my father’s reluctance to abandon the cushy confines of Princeton?
“So, he volunteered?”
“Listen, he had a ticket home after he was wounded in Greece. But he wanted to be back in the field . . . a score or two to settle.”
“A score?”
“The Germans had killed a lot of his people in Greece.”
“Mr. Oakes told me about when he and my father arrived at the liberation of Buchenwald.”
“Oakey told you that? . . . Well, that was damn straight of him.” Here a note of chagrin that I had a nugget of information that had gotten past him. “Want to tell me, or I suppose I can get it from him?”
“I think he told me in confidence.”
“How is the old man? I just got here; haven’t had a chance to stop by and see him.”
“He doesn’t look so good, not after his operation and the chemotherapy; sometimes he can barely make it around the Circle.”
“I’m sad to hear that. I’d hoped NIH might lick it for him. He was the fittest man I ever knew. When he was football coach, he’d arm-wrestle the entire team in succession and beat every last one of us. Tougher than any drill sergeant I ever encountered in basic training. He thought your dad walked on water. Well he should; John got him three league championships in a row and an invite to Henley.”
Somehow the shared intimacy of the moment, the smells of earth and apple blossoms, the glittering stars allowed an unburdening of frustration on my part. Or maybe it was because I’d stood my ground on the story of the lynched German guard, exclusively mine as things went downhill for Paul Oakes.
“Mr. Goddard, is it really true that he died in an automobile accident on the Autobahn?”
Again silence, and I could just make out Elliot’s perplexed face turned to the upper branches and the starlit sky beyond. I knew I’d put him in a tight spot: I was appealing to his honesty at the altar to his gods.
He put a hand on my shoulder. “I know it’s not much to go on, but it’s the best we’ve got for you right now. If it makes you feel any better, there’s not a day in Saigon when I don’t wish he were there to bounce things off of, although there are plenty of days when I’m just as glad he doesn’t have to face the shit.”
His warmth was utterly disarming. “How bad a mess is it?”
I saw him lower his eyes to my face and grimace, as if hearing in the cadence of my voice an echo of another time and place. He took a couple of deep breaths.
“No, it’s an incredible opportunity. The Vietcong took a terrible beating at Tet. They lost tens of thousands and their terrorist infrastructure has been fatally compromised, if not obliterated. But you’d never know it from CBS or The New York Times. Now we have a real chance to win back the provinces in the South. The trouble is, you can’t just hold the line ; you have to play to win. And guys like Mac don’t know how to play to win. It’s not enough to have the right instincts; you have to find a way to win and minimize your costs.” He grabbed my arm and squeezed. “You never heard me say that—never, right?”
In this moment of candor, I thought I detected something of an echo of General Alden’s failed gamble and frustration.
“Sure, okay.”
“There’s a lot we can do, a lot we’re doing. We’re organizing the South Vietnamese local defense forces. We’re training their army; they need better officers and generals. We can buy them time, but unless we cut off the Ho Chi Min Trail it is going to be a war of attrition, and this country doesn’t have the patience.”
“Does that mean more bombing? Do we invade the North? What do we do?”
I saw a grin come over his face . . . again, the echo.
“Whoa there, I didn’t get you up here to discuss Vietnam. I’m just a foot soldier and this is all way above my pay grade. My ulterior motive involves the Yale football coach—good friend of mine—who would like to sign you up for the team.”
“Yale? Well, I haven’t really thought about it.”
“Don’t be coy, Mr. Alden. Surely you’ve been getting recruiting letters?”
I had, over fifty by latest count.
“A few.”
“Yale would be a good home for you. I can see to that. Jerry Gadsden will be there; you’ll have your favorite running back. You’re good enough to win a starting job as quarterback. You know, they come from as far away as Iowa now—where our star quarterback’s from, the guy who led Yale to the Ivy League title last fall. But he graduates next year—that’s where you come in.”
“I can certainly think about it.”
“Don’t let Princeton turn your head. I’m sure you feel some loyalty there.”
“They told me I could have my father’s number.”
“Shit,” and he laughed. “And I thought I knew how to recruit. I’d hate to see you play against Jerry Gadsden.”
“I don’t think he’d mind. In fact, I think he might prefer it.” “I thought you were good pals.”
“Not after this year.”
“You mean the King assassination?”
“And the riots and everything. The black guys have their own table in the dining hall now. I feel like I have a scarlet letter on my chest, a red R for racist.”
“Fuck that bullshit, not after all the years we fought these issues on the board to get more blacks into Winsted. And your grandmother— she was a human dynamo on the subject.” He sighed. “So what’s new—so the world goes to hell and sticks its big finger in your eye. Well, we’re just going to have to make this work; we’re just going to have to work it harder. If we can’t get race relations right in this country, we’ve got no case to sell to the world. And I’m out in every godforsaken malarial-ridden province and backwater hamlet in Vietnam making the case, goddamn it, and this goddamn school is part of the case. It’s who we are.”
The tree branch was shaking with the power of his emotion. I felt like saying “tell that to Jerry Gadsden.” But Elliot was way ahead of me.
“When you’re over there, the war is like a bubble; Vietnam is a bubble—of good men sacrificing themselves for a common cause. What we do there, well, sometimes it’s hard to reconcile with the shit going on back here. You’d think it was the same shit, but it isn’t. Maybe that’s our problem. Maybe people back here need to see the mass graves in Hué, the executed villagers with their genitals stuffed into their mouths. You think I like it; you think any of us like it? When back in Saigon, after a few drinks I can’t even stand to read the newspapers or the cable traffic. I curl up with my Shakespeare and read my Thomas Looney and contemplate the slings and arrows of court politics in the sixteenth century.”
This cri de coeur almost brought tears to my eyes. It was the first spontaneous and genuinely shared emotion from an older man I’d yet experienced in my life. Paul Oakes’s story about the German camp guard had been close, but it felt more like a set piece designed for my moral edification.
“So, you never wrote me: What do you think of Mr. Looney?”
“It got my roommate all hot and bothered. He’d love to talk to you about it.”
“And you?”
“Hard to believe such a secret could have lasted four hundred years.” He snapped his fingers. “Like yesterday—the plays. Not a day goes
by that I don’t have to deal with an Iago, a Prince Hal, a Coriolanus. And the Anthonys—you don’t want to know.”
“Art holding up the mirror to life.”
“Art is life. The greatest art is about politics, and . . . at the highest level.”
“So the biography is important?”
“The veil lifts; the characters live and breathe—like the past itself. You, if anyone, should understand.”
“About my father?”
“Our prince, who would have been happy to remain a prof in Tiger
Town.”
“Do you think?”
Elliot sighed and our branch dipped and rose again.
“That Edward de Vere could be lost to history—the unfairness, the injustice. It rankles the soul.”
“And none of his admirers, his literary confederates—wouldn’t they have revealed the truth?”
“Ah, but Ben Jonson did just that in the preface to the First Folio, as de Vere did in the sonnets: ‘That every word doth almost tell my name, showing their birth, and where they did proceed.’”
In that instant, I realized it was Elliot Goddard who had fixed that epitaph in stone for my father in the chapel ambulatory.
By their works ye shall know them.
“And what about Kim Philby? What part does he play in my father’s story?”
Elliot didn’t miss a beat; Virgil had already filled him in. “He’s our Iago.”
“A traitor . . . a false friend.”
“Mephistopheles, the cancer burning our guts out.”
“Should I know more about him . . . and Anthony—not Mark?” Again, he put his hand around my shoulder, squeezing hard. “Ah, I see Virgil has taken you firmly under his wing.”
“Not exactly. These names kind of keep popping up.”
“Certain stock characters do that—like a law of nature. May I suggest you keep all this to yourself: certain names”—and I saw him jut his jaw toward the lit interior of the headmaster’s house—“still hang fire— trust me.” Elliot squeezed my shoulder again. “So, you’ve been keeping Virgil properly apprised of the follies of our favorite headmaster?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And others in his camp, a certain couple who summer in your neck of the woods. Discreetly, you understand, very . . . and if the conversation should move to your father or Cambridge days and Cambridge matters, well, Anthony’s last name would indeed be a useful tidbit to know, now that Philby has fled our grasp.”
I remembered I was supposed to be meeting with the president’s adviser. I hurriedly excused myself and hurdled back to earth. As I reached up to shake hands good-bye, he offered me this:
“Listen, young man, I don’t really care if it’s Princeton or Yale, just as long as I get to a chance to see you play all four years. Is that a deal?” “Sure,” I said, not thinking much about it. But there was actually quite a bit to think about; for instance, how the CIA station chief in Saigon could strip off his jungle fatigues, grab a quick shower, catch a flight from Tan Son Nhut for San Francisco, and then Boston—not Washington, where his wife and three daughters eagerly awaited his brief home leave—rent a car and drive to his old school for its eighty-eighth birthday celebration and trustees meeting, park and—not even bothering about the president’s adviser’s speech—walk over to an old stand of apple trees and climb up into the branches of his favorite and assume a perch he’d first known as a boy, and remain there for hours. Or at least he was still there when I finished with the president’s adviser.
And to keep me playing college football—out of harm’s way—for four years, which he thought, at the very least, he owed my father.
Perhaps he felt he owed it because he’d been station chief in Berlin in the fall of 1953 when my father arrived from Washington on Allen Dulles’s orders to see what might be done to support the worker uprising against the East German regime: when he’d disappeared through Checkpoint Charlie without a word, without a trace. Leaving Elliot almost as much in the dark as I was. A darkness in which debts seem to come due.
Only years later did Elliot fill me in on the details, and only then did I fully grasp why Elliot never showed at the speech or the reception for the president’s adviser: He was the man at JFK’s elbow who had advised against the use of airpower to save Elliot’s Cubanistas fighting for their lives at the Bay of Pigs, who had advised against simply sending in the marines and taking Fidel out once and for all. He was a man who had never learned how to play to win. Not unlike the brilliant George McClellan, whom General Alden had come to despise.