My Father, The Spy

JFK praised him. David Halberstam scorned him. The CIA consumed him. Even now, old Cold Warriors shake their heads and say, God, that man was a believer. To know his story is to know something profound about this country. It is the story of the American century.

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. A few minutes later, he gets up to go to the bathroom. I've seen him hobbling around the house for years now, and I'm used to frail--he's been juggling congestive heart failure, osteoporosis, cirrhosis, and about a half dozen other major illnesses for almost a decade. But now, the nurse takes one arm, and I take the other, and he leans over so far he's actually hanging by his arms, chest nearly parallel to the floor. He goes three steps and pauses, rests against the bureau, then takes five more steps and rests again. Glancing sideways, I see gray in his cheeks, a whitish gray like dirty marble. 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