The CIA and Me

When my daughter Lauren was born we lived in Philadelphia and nine of our best friends were secretly working for the CIA.  

It was different then, in the early 60s: things were hopeful, the Vietnam war was a whisper, the government was not the enemy.  Working for the government wasn’t so…. suspect, wrong.  Government then was still ‘us,’ not yet ‘them,’ at least if you were a middle class white person.  John Kennedy and even Lyndon Johnson were generally seen as positive figures, and we were all working, we thought, for the same things.  Economic and social justice, civil rights, peace, progress.  But I certainly did not know that nine of my friends were secret agents, and that the office I shared with them was a CIA front, and that money I raised to support a national organization of campus newspapers was from the CIA too.  I thought my friends, while we had dinner, and they played with our baby daughter, and we traveled and argued and planned and shared, I thought we were all doing the same things.  I thought I knew them.

Yale Press has just published my friend Karen Paget's book, Patriotic Betrayal, about that time, and those people.   A history of the entanglement with CIA, why and how the lies were born and grew.  I have just a small piece, what happened to me. Because for three years or so, before I knew what was going on and after, it was a very large part of my life.

Works for Me

It is my current opinion that in all matters of faith, including religion, politics and medicine, the limit of avowal should be "it works for me."  Beyond that comes pressure, coercion, violence and war, serious over-reactions for systems that after all include large impacts of the psychological.  In other words, maybe most, possibly all of the evidence for deeply held beliefs is the effect of placebo.

My daughter Lauren was about six months old in March 1965 and we lived in Philadelphia.  There were a lot of awful things happening then  — kind of a storm of shit that battered us those years: including civil rights, Vietnam.  That winter, on March 25, Viola Liuzzo, a 40-year-old housewife and voter registration worker from Detroit, was shot to death by the Ku Klux Klan on an Alabama highway.  She was registering black voters in Selma with Martin Luther King and she driving a car with a black passenger.  That was her offense.

It’s not that any of us knew her personally.  But we knew who she was: part of the volunteer cadre of civil rights workers in Mississippi and Alabama who challenged racism, America’s great Original Sin.  You probably know that just fifty years ago — my adult lifetime —  our country was still segregated racially.  It was thoughtlessly, simply, legally, the way things were, and not just in the South.

Anyway, a couple of weeks before the Liuzzo murder Selma police conscripted and deputized all the young white men and town and led them to attack civil rights marchers at the Pettus bridge. the whole world watched and it was a huge outrage. 

The New York paper (specifically our friend Carol Pogash) today reports that the people who run the Golden Gate Bridge will finally for heaven’s sake, install a suicide barrier.  The average last year of about one successful and two foiled jumpers per week is apparently, at last, too many.  So good.  And about darn time.

And here’s a story about a jumper not so widely known.  

Charles Rudnick introduced me to the late Nate Cohn, a wonderful old-school criminal defense lawyer in San Francisco. He was of the Mel Belli - Jake Erlich school of colorful courtroom artists, just the guy you want if you’ve done something stupid and want not to go to the gas chamber for it.  

He, Nate, told us that for a time he represented Show People of America which was the guild of movie stunt people, one of whom (I've got the name here someplace) needed to raise money to pay off an amiable divorce. Naturally, being a stunt person, he thought of making some money with a grand, attention-getting trick and convinced himself he could jump off the Golden Gate Bridge and live, have the stunt filmed, and make money selling the movie.  Nate represented the widow in the murder case that followed. 

Here is her picture, with Nate the balding guy on her left. 

Nate told us the DA charged the divorcing wife because she was to be the beneficiary of the stunt, had it worked; the money to be made selling the movie of the jump was for her. The reason the trick didn’t work, in spite of careful preparation and practice, is that a Highway Patrol Officer grabbed at the performer as he jumped and threw him into an uncontrolled spin. So, you know, he was killed.... not that he wouldn't have been anyway.  Nate got the widow off, during the inquest as I recall, by demonstrating that the 'murder' was really an accident.

PS.  the film of the fatal stunt may still exist, a possibility that sometimes entertains me late at night.

And PPS.  there's a whole book of Nate's stories -- although maybe not this one, I think.  It's called Murder He Liked and was written by Rory McGahan.  Lovely book.

JFK

Today another story out there about who killed President Kennedy.  Fifty years ago.  Like maybe who or what did it is still alive and ready to confess.  Or that finally confirming this or that version changes anything.  It's my sense that all these whodunit pieces in print and TV are created by people who weren’t alive when JFK was shot to death in Dallas.  That they have no idea what mattered and what the story was.  

They don’t know what they’re talking about.

Virtually every person conscious that day, November 22, 1963, every one of us remembers where he or she was when they heard.  Exactly.  I was in an English class at college.  The class ended abruptly.  Silent except for the sound of people crying.

There are not many moments where most of the people on this planet share an experience.  Pearl Harbor for my parents’ generation was like that, I gather.  Surely 9-11 and the planes flying into the Towers.   It is the electric minute, all of us with our fingers in the same plug, horrible and thrilling. If you are young now, and you imagine telling your offspring one day about 9-11, do you think you will talk about the conspiracy or the terrorists or some guy reading a children’s book to a kindergarden class?  I’m guessing not, rather that you’ll tell your children where you were and what you felt when you heard.  I’m predicting that what will stick over the next years is that instant of awful connection, of the burst of impossible information, that bite of the god-like fruit of pure knowledge, of suddenly, involuntarily knowing something you do not know how to know.  

A Thanksgiving Tale

I got an assignment back then to do a Thanksgiving piece for NPR and soldiered off by phone and car to make a little radio story about turkeys.  They raise turkeys in the Central Valley down the hill from our Mariposa house and I figured the audio from a turkey ranch — twenty thousand anxious birds in one place — would carry me a long way. 

Don’t remember much of the finished piece which I recorded on a Sony cassette 110A machine and edited on a Sony reel-to-reel on the living room table.  But I remember this one part.

The manager of the Armour turkey ranch just outside of Planada lived across the highway 140 from his birds, thousands and thousands of anxious birds bred for fast growth and weight gain, and with no skills except to eat.  We stood in his yard looking at them all, in pens just a few yards from the road.  And I asked him didn’t anybody ever steal one of his turkeys and what did he do about turkey rustling.   

Oh, he said, it pretty much takes care of itself.  I’ll see a car stop and a guy’ll run over to the pen and grab a bird and throw it in his car.  Then, maybe quarter mile down the road, I’ll see the car pull over, the door open, and the bird come flying out.  

Still makes me smile, imagining inside that station wagon, a freaked out 25-30 pound bird screeching, flapping and shitting, kids crying, wife screaming.  

Happy Thanksgiving.

why I no longer work for NBC News ever

Back then, early oughts, I was field producing live shots for the Today Show.  Not much money, but kinda fun way to spend an early morning.  Usually pretty good stories, and the glamor.  That too.  So one night in April the crew booker called from Burbank – this would be maybe 8 pm Pacific – said there was a Rasputin dog (my language, not her's) in Clear Lake and that Matt (Lauer, we're all on first names here) Matt wanted to interview the dog.  

Okay.  The story was that the dog, a 10 month old female mixed breed named Dosha, had slipped out of her yard collarless and been hit by a car.  And the responding police officer, seeing the animal as badly injured and in distress, had shot the dog.  In the head.  Put her down.  

Dosha's body, in an orange body bag, was put in the animal morgue cooler or something.  Whatever, a bit later, couple of hours I think, the shelter staff found Dosha standing up in the refrig, still in the body bag, and quite alive.  (The officer's a very bad shot, Dosha's vet whispered to me later.)  I have met this animal and can say that all things considered she was in pretty good shape and in a better mood than I would have been.  

So Matt wanted to do this story and I went to Clear Lake, arriving a bit after midnight Pacific.  We were to go live at 7:40 Eastern with dog and vet.

At the vet's office where the dog was and where we, the Today Show, had booked an interview with the vet, there were two satellite trucks.  One for me, along with two cameras, and one for ABC GMA.  Competition isn't unusual and I said hey to the GMA guys whom I knew and didn't think much of it.  However, a bit on when I told the Today Show producer in New York – a person sitting in a warm office with plenty of coffee and snacks – when I told her that there was an ABC crew in Clear Lake too, well, she went batshit.  She told me I represented NBC News! and was to tell the ABC crew that we, Today, had an exclusive.  I told her that I guess I'd do that but that it wouldn't work and that they'd think I was stupid.  But, you know, I went in where they were setting up and told the GMA producer that Today had an exclusive.  It went about as I said -- they thought I was a jerk and they continued to set up.