9. THE IMPOSITION

ST. PAUL the Apostle Church is on the West Side of Manhattan, across Sixtieth Street from Lincoln Center. It was designed by one of the first Paulist fathers, a hundred years before my ordination, at a time when Midtown was the edge of wilderness. Father Deshon had been an Army engineer, and indeed, to me, the church resembled nothing so much as an armory. Its stunted twin spires seemed like the crenelated towers of a fortress. St. Paul's vast interior was mystically dark, except for a few pillar-mounted lights that shone on the ceiling vault, a midnight-blue canopy on which was painted the night sky showing the stars and planets exactly as aligned on the night of the conversion of Saint Paul. That never made sense to me, because Paul's experience—knocked from a horse in bright daylight on the road to Damascus—had made him blind.

We saw nothing. My classmates and I, halfway through the ordination ceremony, were lying flat on the cold stone floor, prostrate. Our faces were buried in our arms. We were blind, knocked down, but converted? Meanwhile, the boys' choir in front of us, alternating with the congregation behind us, sang the transfiguring Litany of Saints. Its strains ricocheted between the high-pitched precociousness of the boys and the ragged happiness of the amateur throng.

Lord, have mercy.

Christ, have mercy.

Lord, have mercy.

Holy Mary, Mother of God.

Mom. I thought first of her, what a dream come true this was. The reward to the people of her father's village in Ireland for never having taken the soup; her guarantee of a special place in heaven; proof that she had done the right thing in marrying Joe.

Pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel.

Pray for us.

On the refrains rolled, like heaven's chariot rolling over us. The litany is an arcane Who's Who—Athanasius, Sebastian, Agatha, the arrow-pierced eunuchs, the virgins whose breasts were crushed with the paving stones of the Roman Forum.

All ye holy men and women, saints of God.

Pray for us.

Lord, be merciful.

A prayer for mercy was one I had no trouble making mine. Only moments earlier, I had knelt before Terence Cardinal Cooke with my folded hands inside his, like a blade inside a scabbard. He'd looked me in the eye and asked, "Do you solemnly promise to respect and obey me and my successors?"

All around were witnesses, not only my Paulist brothers and my family and the families of my dozen classmates, but Air Force chaplains, five of them, or ten, or fifteen—I kept seeing more. They were present because I was the son of a general, the first son of an active-duty Air Force officer subject to the military ordinariate to be ordained. They came to show a pious solidarity—and to be seen doing so by Cardinal Cooke. They wore their blue uniforms, standing behind me like sponsors. Slim priestly stoles draped their necks, stoles of the kind meant to be worn on a battlefield, evoking Mass on the hood of a jeep. The stoles across their epaulets blanked out the silver bars, leaves, eagles, and stars of their rank.

"Do you solemnly promise to respect and obey your ordinary?"

Ordinarily.

"It depends, Eminence," I wanted to say. This man and others like him had just sheepishly endorsed the war. And only months before, he and others like him—ordinary indeed—had bowed to the pope's demoralizing edict on birth control, Humanae Vitae, published in July 1968. I knew that if, in that season, B-52S had been dropping condoms on the hills and valleys of Vietnam, Cardinal Cooke and Washington's Cardinal O'Boyle and all the other "ordinaries" would by now have solemnly condemned the war as intrinsically immoral, forbidding Catholic participation. But instead, they called it justified because the B-52S were only dropping napalm.

The cardinal had put my hands in his when, at that moment, despite myself, what I'd wished for was to put my hands inside Dad's. The image I had of myself was of that little boy in boots, chaps, and a cowboy vest, standing hand in hand with his Air Force father, equally awkward in his general's uniform. Cowboy? Didn't my lying here on the cold stone floor equal elevation to the status of the Lone Ranger himself?

"Monsignor, take this one aside," I imagined His Eminence saying in response to my mute paralysis. But mute paralysis, only rarely broken by the poems I'd tried to write, was my true condition. I had begun this process of handing myself over to God, if not the Church, years ago, wanting only to be like Dad. And then what happened?

In the crushing months before, with the assassinations of Dr. Bang and Bobby, with the pope's reform-killing encyclical, with the debacle at the Democratic National Convention—the Chicago riots took place within blocks of my birthplace—I had tried one last time to hurl myself from the ecclesiastical express, to get out of becoming a priest. That summer I'd been a pastoral counseling intern at a clinic for alcoholics in Atlanta. For three months I lived and worked in a becolumned mansion, once the home of the Coca-Cola Candlers, a family of notorious liquor drinkers. Now their stately house was the refuge of a ragtag collection of drunks and therapists. The solarium had become an arts-and-crafts center. The ballroom was the cafeteria. In the former master bedroom were bunks for twelve. My bed was in the corner of a small room. I loved the work, my first independent taste of the pastoral ministry. But I was challenged, to say the least, by my collegial closeness with female nurses and social workers, as well as partnership with Baptist and Methodist ministers. As a Catholic, I was a mystery to the mostly redneck patients, who, with edgy good humor, called me "bull nun." I handled it all with apparent equanimity, but I ached with loneliness and uncertainty. Visions of myself as a defeated whiskey priest woke me in the night, and I would lie there in the dark trying to remember how any of this had happened. One minute I am a laughing boy with a girlfriend in a gala room, waiting for Elvis, the next I am an avowed eunuch in a narrow bed alone.

I hitched a ride one weekend up to Sewanee, Tennessee, site of the University of the South, where Allen Tate now lived in retirement. I hadn't seen him in two years, but I had continued to send my poems to him, and he had faithfully sent them back, properly defaced. His support had seemed an ongoing miracle to me. Slowly I accumulated a collection of finished poems, some of which would appear, with his imprimatur, in Forbidden Disappointments. In Atlanta, thinking of my approaching ordination, I panicked, fearing among other things that Tate's interest in me depended on my status as a priest in training. But, I argued with myself, even as I drove into Sewanee, hadn't Mr. Tate been the one to warn me with his demurral about my "two vocations"? Priest and Poet—not you, kid. How about Priest and Poet and Prophet. Maybe Daniel Berrigan could do it, but I couldn't.

My spiritual director had recently told me that, in the final evaluation of my candidacy for ordination, one priest faculty member had observed disapprovingly that I had a "soft middle." Like the earth? I wanted to ask. Like bread? But it was true. I was soft where all the heroes, from Cardinal Cooke to Daniel Berrigan to my father, wanted me to be hard. On this at least those three would agree. Priest and Poet, I can't be both? By now I am concluding I can't be either. When I quit, they will think it's the war, and I may even say as much. They'll think it's birth control, or that I want a woman. All of which will be true, but only partly so. I drive into Sewanee knowing that the unidentified faculty critic has seen right through me. Addressing a reflection in the windshield, I rehearse what I will say when I resign: "Three reasons: poverty, chastity, and obedience." But the truth will be something else, and "soft middle" is as good a term for it as any I know.

Soft middle—the place, above all, in which the silence becomes words, giving me poetry. Wasn't I coming to Sewanee now to tell Mr. Tate that he'd been right? That summer marked the end of my hope of becoming a Catholic priest of the kind my father wanted. If there was another kind—Thomas Campion the resister, not Thomas a Kempis the pious fool—what would that be to Dad? Therefore, what would it be to me? The choice seemed clear. As I arrived in the small Tennessee hill town in which Allen Tate had first made his reputation, I realized that in coming here I had already made the choice. I was coming to declare myself to Allen Tate, to announce my determination to make a life as a writer. He would bless me, calling me out of the priesthood, and out of prophecy too. Yes, Allen Tate would be my new father in the Word, but lowercase.

I found his house, a surprisingly modern split-level with redwood siding set off by large panels of glass. It was in a tony section of the remote academic town, a hip faculty enclave. In Minneapolis, I'd been entirely focused on Tate's meaning for me, but now I knew that the summer of 1966 had been a momentous one in his life too. Only months before, he'd divorced the poet Isabella Gardner, and in July, while patiently tutoring me, he had married a young woman who had been a student of his. Her name was Helen Heinz, and she was a nurse. Tate's first wife had been the writer Caroline Gordon; that his third was a young nurse made their marriage a choice tidbit on the literary gossip circuit. That she had been chief nurse in a large Catholic hospital in Minneapolis made it gossip among Catholics.

Her youth was reflected, I sensed, in this bright, appealing house. So was the fact—he'd told me this in his letter—that they had recently had twin sons. When I'd read that, I'd pictured the young poets in Dinky Town taverns back at U of M, elbowing each other about the old man's virility. Tate was sixty-eight. For a change, as I approached the front door I was not carrying a sheaf of poems, but I did have a pair of small wrapped boxes, crib toys for the twins. I rang the doorbell, aware of myself as the latest in a long line of would-be poets who had come to him like this, seeking a literary laying on of hands. Even Robert Lowell and John Berryman had done so, and years later my friend Robie Macauley would tell me that so had he. In an instant, had the image occurred to me, I knew that I would have put my hands inside Tate's, promising to respect and obey him. But now I realize that the reason I felt inclined to do so was that he'd have never let me.

The door opened and a shockingly small, frail old man in a short-sleeved white shirt stood there, red-eyed and slack-jawed. His huge forehead—it was Tate's most distinctive feature—was crimson, as if he'd just been running. I hardly recognized him. He stared blankly back at me. He seemed the opposite of virile. To my horror, I realized he had no idea who I was. In his letter, he'd appointed this hour for my visit, but clearly he'd forgotten.

"Paul?" he said.

"It's Jim Carroll, Professor."

He leaned toward me. I was wearing a blazer and a dark cotton turtleneck, despite the summer heat. I had abandoned the necktied Hans Kung as my clerical sartorial ideal in favor of Daniel Berrigan. I would hardly ever wear a Roman collar, but at that moment, to help Tate recognize me, I wished I had. I saw that his eyes were wet, as if he'd been crying, or as if he were drunk. I assumed drunk.

"Oh," he said suddenly, "James!"

When, in Minneapolis, I had asked him to sign his book to "Jim," he'd written 'James," and I've used the name as a writer ever since.

"Forgive me," he said now, opening the door wide and stepping aside for me. "Forgive me," he said again, bowing slightly, the Southern cavalier. Tate ushered me into the spare, modern living room with its high flagstone fireplace, its Scandinavian furniture, its slate floor. I sat on the couch and, to my surprise, Mr. Tate sat next to me, close. I looked around for his bourbon glass and did not see it. I heard the faint sounds of someone else stirring in a distant part of the house.

"Oh, James," he said then, leaning toward me. "I could have used you yesterday."

"Why?"

A startled expression crossed his face. "You don't know?" The sharp edge of inquiry in his eyes told me he was not drunk at all. But his eyes...

I forced a big smile. "You mean about your twins? Yes, sir. You wrote me about it." I held my boxes out.

He shrank back. "Oh. Oh." Then he simply shook his head. Tears fell from his eyes. Finally he said, "My baby died. One of my babies died. Michael..."

He explained that one of the boys, Michael Paul, in the care of a nanny, had vomited while sleeping and choked to death. His wife, he said, was devastated. So was he. He looked off toward the part of the house from which I'd heard noises.

"I could have used you yesterday," Tate said again. "I needed a priest like you."

"What?" I asked, fearing that I'd misled him, since I wasn't a priest yet.

"The Catholic priest here in the local parish—he would not let us have a Catholic funeral. Helen—" Tate began to sob. I touched his arm. "Because of me," he said. "The priest refused to bury Michael because, he said, my marriage was notorious."

"Your marriage?"

"My divorces. I am a bad Catholic."

"Oh, Christ!" The words rushed from my mouth ahead of a bitter bolt of disgust.

"We buried Michael in the Protestant church."

I heard in Tate's voice not bitterness or anger but despair. Religious despair. I knew that Tate had become a Roman Catholic, with his wife Caroline Gordon, in 1950. While other poets had embraced the Church as an act of faddish aesthetic self-expression, Tate had grappled for decades with the figure of Jesus—his 1928 poem "The Cross" is a religious masterpiece. His conversion to Roman Catholicism was the result of a lifelong spiritual quest and was a deeply transforming event. Jacques Maritain would cite him as an influence. But to the Sewanee curate, Allen Tate would have been the wrong kind of Catholic from the start. Not long after his baptism, writing in the New York Times, Tate had denounced Cardinal Spellman's censorship of the 1951 film The Miracle.

Bad Catholic—the phrase meant as little to me as "good Catholic." What had I spent six years learning except that Jesus Himself had been labeled bad. Who had killed Him? Not the Jews, I had learned by then, but the curates. The monsignors.

In his urbane and knowing lectures, Professor Tate had seemed beyond the cruel pettiness of the Church. But he wasn't beyond it at all, and that was a revelation to me. The Church gives us our faith. Later I would read that all of Tate's poems were about the suffering that results from disbelief. It was Tate who'd made me love "Pied Beauty," by that other convert Gerard Manley Hopkins, but now I saw that the Holy Ghost hovering over us with "Ah Bright Wings" had razor talons, which were sunk deep into this man's soul. Later I would learn how deeply they penetrated mine.

I pressed his hand and said inane things about God's love for Michael, about the real meaning of our communion, about the importance of Jesus' own experience of such a rejection. Even as I spoke, I could not imagine that what I was saying could relieve his obvious pain, but when I fell silent, he asked me to say more, and I did. In the end I told him that I would pray for his dead baby.

And with the most direct gaze ever to pierce me, he said, "Thank you."

"I think I should go."

He nodded. Then we stood and he went with me to the door, where he put his hand on my shoulder. "Your visit helped, James. More than I can say."

Embarrassed, I turned his remarkable statement aside with a laugh. "If you can't say it, Professor, no one can."

He smiled thinly. We shook hands. And I departed. I would never see him again, although I would continue to send him poems and he would continue to be kind about them. As I left, the irony hit me. From one point of view, it seemed I'd gotten the opposite of what I'd come for. But it didn't feel that way. Allen Tate, who'd given me permission to be a writer, had just given me permission to be a priest. Yes, I would pray for his infant Michael, at my first Mass.

 

And so, six months later, there I was on the floor of the sanctuary of St. Paul the Apostle Church, with all these images floating like motes through my willfully distracted mind. I thought at one point of the war protesters who threw themselves down to the ground like this, miming the roles of napalmed Vietnamese. Several of my classmates and I had discussed the possibility of refusing to exchange the kiss of peace with Cardinal Cooke as a protest against his support of the war. The idea was that, immediately after he had made us "priests forever according to the order of Melchizedek," one of us would go to the microphone and explain our act of conscience. I remember how, in our grave discussion, we all fell silent, staring at each other. Actively contemplating such an act of defiance was enough to make it impossible even for my peacenik friends. As for me, why not just ignite myself with candle wax?

So no, I was not miming the part of a napalmed villager, although one day, at the main gate of Pease Air Force Base in New Hampshire, I would do just that—conical hat and all. But neither was I dead to the secular world, as the sacramental theology intended with this symbolic prostration, nor was I about to be resurrected into the spiritual realm. The great irony of my time in training for the priesthood was that, forcing my participation in the revolutionary events of the day, it had made me more alive to "the world" than I'd ever have been as a gung-ho fighter jock. Holiness had ceased to be an ambition of mine, which may have been the problem. To me, Jesus was not holy. Why should I be?

By the time the Litany of Saints was ending, I may not have been dead, but the feeling was, my life had flashed before my eyes. And in truth, for all my worry and obsessive self-doubt, it was a life I felt grateful for. Even more, I felt grateful that it was far from over. Finally I relaxed into the last of the music, accepting where I was, what I was doing, and who was with me.

From all evil...

Lord, save your people.

From every death...

Lord, save your people.

By your death...

Lord, save your people.

Bless these chosen men and make them holy.

Lord have mercy, yes. When they called my name, I stood and said in a firm voice, "Adsum," which a soldier would say means "Present," but which at that moment in my life meant, "Here I am, Lord. Send me." That too was Isaiah's statement, and what was he—trouble coming, for sure—but a prophet?

Uncoerced and with a clear mind, I accepted the chasuble of charity upon my shoulders. Touching the chalice and golden paten with the sacred host upon it, I received the power to change bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus. When the cardinal anointed my hands with the oil of kings, and then wrapped them in fine linen bands, I had the only gift my mother ever wanted, for as tradition required, I would give that oil-stained linen to her. She would treasure it, unlaundered, and when she died, her own hands would be wrapped in it so that at the gate of heaven angels would recognize her at once as the mother of a priest.

At the kiss of peace, Cardinal Cooke greeted me with such genuine warmth—his own son! a son of the military!—that it appalled me that I had ever thought of insulting him. When he said, "I hear you are going to be an Air Force chaplain," I was too surprised to respond. Before I could deny it, he was hugging me again. And then, having donned his golden miter and his jeweled crazier—the shepherd's stick they use on their sheep—he was gone. There was nothing for me to do now but turn and go down the stairs to the altar rail, for the moment toward which my whole life had been building.

The ritual is that, immediately following the ceremony, the newly ordained priest imposes his first priestly blessing upon his mother and father. An imposition of hands. An imposition.

Thirty-five years before, Joe and Mary had risked everything to be together. In the last hour, he had refused his own ordination, defying his own cardinal, his mother, the Church, and, by all lights, God. Then Mary had stared that act of sacrilege in the eye and found a way to second it. They had married, leaving the parochial world behind. They were free, they thought, of the fishmonger's curse. But then their first-born son, like some biblical Egyptian, was touched by plague. It was impossible, despite an otherwise magical ascent, ever again to feel out from the shadow of the spoiled priest. Until now.

"May the blessing of almighty God..." My kneeling mother's head was bent before me. She was wearing the black mantilla, what she'd worn each of her two times in the presence of a pope. Her hands on the altar rail clutched the rosary.

"...the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit..." I am quartering the air above her. In a million years, she would not look up at me, and I do not want her to. This is not about her Jimmy, I tell myself. This is about God. Jimmy does not exist here. It is not Jimmy who brings his hands together, palms downward, and lowers them to her bent head. It is a priest. "...descend upon you, and remain with you forever."

There, Mom. For you.

When I reach to touch her chin, she startles me by grasping my hands and pulling them to her mouth. My mother kisses my hands, as if she is an Irish peasant, as if I am the pope.

Before I can say, "I love you," she is turning away, then gone.

I take one step along the rail. In those vestments I feel like a float in a parade. My father in his dark civilian suit is kneeling there with his head bent, his face in his hands. What I notice is his hair, and I am shocked to see how white it has become. He is fifty-eight years old, but I have never thought of him as anything but young and powerful.

If I could have looked into the near future, I would have seen the two of us sitting alone on the terrace of the Officers' Club at Ramey Air Force Base in Puerto Rico, the SAC base where, years before, he'd confessed his dread of the Bomb. We are there again the week after my ordination, a priest's honeymoon, a vacation with the folks. Mom is back at the bungalow. Dad and I are having breakfast before heading out for golf. The sun is warm already, glinting off the green-flecked Caribbean. Things have been awkward between us since my first sermon at Boiling, my use of the forbidden word "napalm." We cannot talk about the war. I know that. Yet I am determined to break through the wall of silence the war has built between us. So, suddenly, because it is the only question I have ever really had, I ask him, "Dad, why didn't you get ordained?"

He puts his fork down, thinks for a minute, and seems to decide it is time to answer truthfully. His eyes meet mine. "Because I wasn't worthy."

"Worthy?" I am mystified, and to my horror, I feel a jolt of anger. Worthy? What the hell does worthy have to do with it? Who the fuck is worthy? I am here at a SAC base with you, with B-52S swarming like gnats, pretending they are not in my fucking nose, pretending not to be a hypocrite and liar. "Worthy?" I say again. I hear the pitch of my voice rise. "I was just ordained, Dad. You think I'm worthy?"

My father stares at me, thinking. At last he answers. "Yes, I do."

How I wish I could note this moment as the magnificent affirmation he may well have intended it to be. But I see it as something else. I am worthy because I have immolated my will. He is unworthy—here is the very definition of his life—because he would not.

 

"May the blessing of almighty God..."

I raise my eyes toward heaven, but what I see are the stars as they were the night Saint Paul was knocked from his horse.

"...the Father..."

I bring the blade of my hand up in front of my own face. Behind my kneeling father are my brothers, a line of relatives from Chicago, and the blue-uniformed chaplains waiting to kneel to me. Not me—a priest.

"...the Son..."

I lower my hand toward my bent-over dad. My eyes follow and are caught by something, a motion in his shoulders.

"...and the Holy Ghost descend upon you..."

I put my hands on my father's head, pressing that gray hair, the first time I have ever touched him there. I am so grateful to have this way to press into him at last all my thwarted love. But as I do, it is as if an electric current flows through me, because instantly his body convulses. The movement in his shoulders explodes into quaking, and I fear at once, though I cannot imagine what it is, that some awful breach of nature has occurred.

And so it has. I have never seen a hint of such a thing in him. My father is racked with sobbing. Crude guttural sounds come from inside the hands that remain closed upon his face. He is loudly weeping now, and—as if he is my own Allen Tate—I press my love onto his head. Oh, what gratitude for the raw physical sensation it is to touch this man to whom I can no longer speak. I want to fill the abyss inside him, and I do not care if what I fill it with is myself.

Myself. At the time I thought his weeping was all about me, my fulfilled priesthood balancing the scale of his failed. At the time I thought he was weeping because he was finally released from the curse. I was the ransom paid to God. Now I see what a narrow self-reference all that was. My father had far more to weep about than me, the Church, and even God. Fifteen thousand dead GIs, for one thing. Was he making contact through me with feelings for all those lost sons? The extremity of the sobs that broke and broke and broke again, long after I had said, "...remain with you forever," should have told me. I knew so little.

Less than a month before, Richard Nixon had become president. Melvin Laird had become secretary of defense. Among Laird's first messages was one sent to the Joint Chiefs of Staff: the era of breakdown between civilian and military leadership would now end. The Nixon administration was intent upon winning the war. Henry Kissinger announced that we would "prevail." He wanted, in particular, to reinvigorate the JCS, and indeed its recommendations for escalation, long thwarted by McNamara and his successor, Clark Clifford, were already being implemented. By mid-March, less than a month after my ordination, Nixon ordered a major expansion of the air war and began a series of secret and illegal raids by B-52S against North Vietnamese Army sites in Cambodia. This expansion would lead to the ground "incursion" into Cambodia in the spring of 1970, which in turn prompted the shootings at Kent State, sealing the alienation of an entire generation. Nixon's escalation would be partial, giving the Chiefs their air war in exchange for gradual troop withdrawals beginning in mid-1969. But Nixon's escalation would work no better than Johnson's had.

I have no idea if my father objected within Pentagon councils to Nixon's expanded air war, although I doubt that renewed reliance on bombing could have been justified by his DIA estimates. Controlling the flow of military intelligence, my father would have been acutely aware of the other unpublicized development of that season: the psychological and moral unraveling of the U.S. fighting force. The full horrors of the massacre at My Lai, which took place in 1968, were just being uncovered by the high command, although the story would not become public until November of 1969. More and more GIs were committing "refusals to fight." Hundreds of officers were being assaulted—"fragged"—by their own troops. Up to a third of the Army was using drugs. What the Vietnamese could not do to the American military, it was doing to itself.

The war inside the Pentagon was acrimonious too. Nixon's people hated Johnson's, and they especially hated those associated with McNamara. Under Kennedy, McNamara had launched an effort to unify the services as a way to end their turf fighting. His attempt to reassert the civilian control that had been lost in World War II marked the beginning of his conflict with the Chiefs. But my father's role in that struggle predated McNamara, going back to Symington in 1947. As a way to win the loyalty of the Chiefs, Laird retreated from the goal of restoring civilian primacy. "Laird Gives Back Key Budget Role to the Military," read a headline in the New York Times. No more would the office of the secretary of defense design force structures or impose weapons programs. Coordination of the services' planning and procurement would be deemphasized. With the McNamara impulse toward unification undercut, my father's efforts at the Defense Intelligence Agency were doomed. Under Nixon, the various competing intelligence operations would sprout again, like mushrooms after a spring rain. That my father's dream of a cohesive military intelligence system turned into yet another bureaucratic nightmare is succinctly revealed by the fact that in fiscal year 1995, as I write, the DIA budget is $600 million, while the combined intelligence budget of the separate services—what DIA was established to take over—stands at $12 billion.

Thus conflict between Laird and my father must have been inevitable. In any event, it came. I assume there were serious differences between them about the air war, but their public break resulted from something else. In the late summer and early fall of 1969, while I was learning the ropes as a peacenik priest, Melvin Laird was trying to get the U.S. Senate to appropriate funds for an antiballistic missile, the Sentinel. His case for the ABM depended on his unprecedented assertion that the Soviet Union had recently begun developing a "first-strike capability," the ability, that is, to so completely wipe out our nuclear arsenal that we would be unable to retaliate. If true, this represented a major shift in the balance of terror that depended on Mutual Assured Destruction, MAD. Nothing in Robert McNamara's or Clark Clifford's assessments had warned of this shift in Soviet intentions.

My father was called to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Senator William Fulbright, whom I'm sure my father detested. He stated that he was reluctant to testify before that committee, even in executive session, because its highly politicized atmosphere would make it impossible to keep secret what he said. That was true, which is why I read about his testimony in the newspapers. Otherwise, I would never have had this context for concluding why his life of public service came to such an abrupt and ignominious end.

The hated dove Fulbright was the committee chair, but in a strange twist, another leading opponent of the ABM was Senator Symington, my father's former mentor. They still held each other in high esteems and who knows how that influenced what happened? The climax of the debate came when Fulbright produced a report entitled "Intelligence and the ABM," which purportedly cited CIA analysis that undercut Laird's claim. Then Symington produced what he called a secret Pentagon report that drew the same conclusion. It was one thing for Laird to be contradicted by CIA chief Richard Helms—but by his own man in the Pentagon? Later I asked my father about this, and he told me that he and Helms were in complete agreement, seeing no change in Soviet strategic planning. When the senators put the direct question to my father—whether, as the director of DIA, he had been the source of Laird's information about the new Soviet intentions—he replied (I see him doing so) coldly that he was not. He was then asked if he had intelligence data that supported the testimony offered by the secretary of defense. My father answered no. When pressed, he stated that he saw no evidence anywhere that what Laird had said was true.

This was in late July. Within days—my mother once told me it was the next day—my father was notified that he was being transferred and demoted. He was nearly sixty years old. My mother told me how stunned he was by this clear consequence of his divergence from a line that the defense secretary and the Joint Chiefs had drawn. He was instantly shunned, a betrayer after all. Until then he had been healthy, but exactly at that point—a classic psychosomatic reaction—he was immobilized by a savage attack of sciatica. Within a week he was in the generals' wing of the Andrews Air Force Base hospital undergoing surgery on his lower back. It was not successful. For most of a year, he would be crippled. Like his son Joe had been. He retired from the Air Force, having never returned to his Pentagon office.

Secretary Laird, meanwhile, unable to produce credible backup for his claim about the USSR, shifted the argument. He began to define the ABM as protection against China. Though he won that summer's vote, he ultimately had no better luck with that rationale. The ABM, which would have amounted to a U.S. move away from Mutual Assured Destruction, never got off the ground. I do not know if he meant to, but my straight-arrow father, bound by a need to say only what he saw, had in fact ended his career by striking a blow against the nuclear madness. I believe his unsung act contributed in some small way to the momentum that led in 1972 to the ABM Treaty with the Soviet Union, the beginning of the end of the arms race.

When, as a young man trained since childhood to be a priest, Dad said no to the cardinal archbishop of Chicago, everything in his Irish-Catholic culture then said no to him. When he and my mother left Chicago, they were surely under the curse of his defiance, and they would fail. But for many years, spoiled priest or not, they had seemed, as it were, to beat the devil. For a time they bore the suffering—my mother openly, my father mutely—of their eldest son's polio. But that sadness lifted too, as Joe junior, despite his endless surgeries or because of them, grew into a sensitive, accomplished student whose graduation with a Ph.D. in psychology prompted one of the few unclouded family celebrations of the late 1960s.

Yet here he was before me—my father in the prime of life, a man of power and prestige, the proud father of five good sons, the faithful husband of a still handsome, witty woman—here he was sobbing like a baby. What could those others have made of this? What did he see behind those hands of his? A career that begins in defiance must end in defiance? To himself, I see it clear at last, my father was already a failure. And the awful truth is that to me then, too, he was a failure. The war was wrong. He knew it. Despite his image as a truth teller—the thing Symington and McNamara had prized him for—it seemed to me he knew less about the truth than I did. This was months before I had a hint of his other war, the one in the Pentagon. The only war I knew of was Vietnam, which was a brutal crime against GIs and Vietnamese both. A terrible piece of me thought of him as a war criminal for his part in it. Yes, I felt the old emotion as I pressed my hands onto his head, but I felt something else as well. For the first time in my life I was ashamed of him. His weeping made me think that my almighty father—Roger Touhy's "voice of doom"—was a weakling and a coward.

Within a year he would be an almost entirely broken man who would, over the next twenty years, never recover. He would sink from chronic depression into stroke-related dementia or Alzheimer's disease, into complete senility. Oh James, young James, could I but shake you now! Wake up, you smug bastard! If I could only press into your head what I saw years later when I took him to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Mall. He was half demented by then, with snow-white hair and a stooping, lumbering physique. I watched as, with increasing frustration, he tried to find on that black wall the names of men he'd known. He ran his fingers over the etched granite, lost, shaking his head. He became frantic in his searching, but refused my offers to help. As he explained later, he thought the names were arranged alphabetically, instead of in the order in which they'd died. His beleaguered mind was stuck in that mistake.

Something in the intensity of his feeling made me see my mistake. I had thought he'd kept his silence about the war not because he believed in it, especially the phase that began with Laird, Kissinger, and Nixon, but because, as McNamara would put it in his memoir, he had felt slavishly obligated by a code of loyalty to his superiors. Not a good enough reason, and as the ABM debate demonstrated, not true of him anyway. But now, watching him finger the names of grunts and pilots and Seabees and leathernecks, I saw the far more compelling obligation that bound him, an officer's obligation, a general's. How could he ever have said about these dead men that their sacrifice had been offered for a stupid mistake? Once he had helped dispatch thousands of young men to their deaths, certainly he'd have seen any subsequent denouncing of the war as breaking faith with them—his other sons.

And then I thought, with horror, that my father, running his fingers over that granite, was looking for another name, his own. I wanted to cry out, Only the dead are recorded here, Dad! But suddenly I saw him as one of those who'd died in Vietnam. Certainly, he had died to me. But now I saw that he had died to himself too. His name might as well have been carved there by Maya Lin.

 

"...descend upon you and remain with you forever." Finally I withdrew my hands from his head. My father made it to his feet and staggered back to his pew. He continued to hide his face. I went on blessing people, my brothers, relatives, and the blue-suited chaplains. Many wet eyes. Much pride. Much admiration for me. I took almost nothing in. My ordination to the priesthood meant so much to all these others. What did it mean to me?

Only now do I understand. During the preceding seven years—Hans Küng, the Vatican Council, Martin Luther King, protest at the Pentagon, the assassinations, Humanae Vitae, the return of Richard Nixon—I had stopped believing in my father's God and all that went with it: a God more American than Christian, more Roman than Catholic, a God of orthodoxy, conformity, sexlessness, and patriarchy. Even as I swore to be a priest forever, I was afraid that I was losing my faith.

Yet even at that moment of my infinite distance from the pieties that were expected of me, I was finding my faith. I was discovering the God of Jesus Christ, the blasphemer, the heretic, the criminal, the disgrace. In Jesus Christ, passion, doubt, uncertainty, anguish, despair even—all the emotions breaking in me while I was prostrate on that cold stone floor—were signs not of moral failure but of human life. As I looked forward to a priesthood of which I knew already that neither the cardinal nor my parents would approve, my spine was stiffened by the knowledge that Jesus, in keeping bad company, had been disapproved like that. The Gospels recorded a way of life that, from what I could see, had little to do with the life these others expected me to lead. I was very much afraid, but I did not feel alone. I had as friends and comrades Patrick Hughes and a few others, heading out with me from exactly such a place. And I had a vivid sense of the presence at my elbow of Jesus Christ. By some miracle of a transformed faith, despite all the reasons not to, I trusted Him. I wanted to speak of Him to others. The truth is, I still do.

Erasmus defined happiness as the wish to be what you are. By that definition, on the complicated day of my ordination to the priesthood, I was happy.