Your Sunday Read: 'My Father, The Spy' by John H. Richardson

To know his story is to know something profound about this country.

My Father, The Spy Mom calls. Dad is in the hospital, on oxygen. It's his heart. I fly down. They live in Mexico in a big adobe house with cool tile floors and high ceilings. Servants move quietly through the rooms. Mom greets me at the door, telling me through tears that she found him last night flopped across the bed with his legs hanging off the edge. He couldn't lift his feet onto the bed, so he just lay there like flotsam for an hour before he started calling for help. When she finally woke up, he apologized for bothering her. Then I laugh, and she smiles through her tears, because it's just so Dad. He's always so polite, so maddeningly self-denying. Sometimes my mom cries out: "Don't ask me what I want! Just tell me what you want!" I go into his room, and his face is puffy and red, and he looks so very weak. With his dentures out and his head back, he looks like a cartoon of an old codger, lips sucked back over his gums and grizzled chin jutting out. One yellowed tooth stands out in the black hole of his mouth. He's like an apple that's been sitting on a shelf for months, all dried out and sucked down into itself. But when he sees me standing there, his face brightens. He's so grateful to see me, so relieved—and he immediately starts worrying that I've abandoned my important professional responsibilities to come. My father was a spy, a high-ranking member of the CIA, one of those idealistic men who came out of World War II determined to save the world from tyranny. Like so many of his colleagues, he ended up bitter at a world that mocked and frustrated and finally vilified him. His bitterness was the mystery of my childhood, turning me stubborn and defiant. Like most sons of unhappy fathers, I had a hole inside me cut to the shape of his sadness, a hole I tried to fill in all the usual ways and never did, because happiness would be too much of a betrayal. My miseries were a tribute to his own—a fucked-up gesture of fucked-up solidarity. So I was always leaving home and coming back and leaving again and coming back again, and often on these visits I would interview him, trying to bridge the gulf between us in the only way I knew. But whenever I pulled out my tape recorder, he would remind me that he had taken an oath of silence. That was always the first thing he said: "You know, son, I took an oath of silence." Read the Full Story Your Buratta Is F***ing Boring "I hate burrata," writes Esquire's Jeff Gordinier. "I never order it. When I see it on restaurant menus, which is all the damn time, I radiate waves of contempt. Burrata used to signify delight; now, in my mind, its appearance at the top of a menu is like a billboard announcing, 'The chef at this place has never had an original idea in his life, and he only figured out what to cook after relying on a series of corporate focus groups to tell him what's popular.'" 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And HBO is standing by its new show—which absolutely does have a lot of drugs and sex, including a scene which reportedly shows 30 penises—despite outrage from a parents' group and reports of controversy during production. Read the Full Story   Follow Us     Unsubscribe  Privacy Notice   esquire.com ©2019 Hearst Communications Inc. All Rights Reserved. Hearst Email Privacy, 300 W 57th St., Fl. 19 (sta 1-1), New York, NY 10019