Well, maybe this is just a story about Howard Hart, an ex-CIA
guy. Or maybe it’s about something bigger. Maybe it’s about
communication, about humanity, about compassion, about respect —
about speaking the right language in the right situation.
So many stories tumble into my mind. I think of the Jew who
comes to the Rabbi to ask him to arrange for a divorce.
“Wednesday!” the Rabbi shouts. “Giving a divorce on Wednesday?!”
The congregant slips off in puzzlement, embarrassed for his lack of
scholarship. Of course, Wednesday is no different from any other
day, but the Rabbi buys some time for the man to go back home and
think better of his rash move. Here a man imagines that he is
missing some key word in the language of scholarship and he is
silenced by his ignorance.
I think of Rabbi Eizel Charif, chief rabbi of Slonim, Poland, in
the early 1800s, who was confronted with a crisis. Restrictive laws
against Jews made most businesses and much property ownership
illegal for them, so there was a lot of hanky-panky that went on in
order to survive. A local blackmailer had been soaking the
community for a hundred gold coins a month. When he asked for a
raise, the Rabbi called him in and yelled, “You either take a
hundred or I’ll import a competitor from out of town who will take
seventy-five and put you out of business!” In that case, the
language of business was an absurdity and both men knew it, but it
was a way of drawing a line.
But mostly I think back to the time that I was assigned The
Plague by Albert Camus in a college Literature class, and I
ran into a friend who had been assigned the same book in medical
school for its detailed description of the symptomatology of
bubonic plague. I had a flash of insight in that moment that I have
carried through my adult life: it’s possible for two people to read
the same book, but for him it’s medicine and for me it’s
literature.
Let’s not forget Howard Hart. He was a CIA field agent, a hero
who toiled in shadows of drear and dread. All his former commanders
and colleagues, even the ones who didn’t like him, concede that he
always sought out the toughest and most meaningful posting, which
usually was also the riskiest. A real spy, out “in the cold,” yet
with his sleeves rolled up to take on the big challenges.
He began that career in 1968 and distinguished himself from the
first. No surprise, then, that he was made acting station chief of
the pared-down five-man CIA team in Teheran during the treacherous
days of 1979. The Shah was being shooed and Khomeini was comin’ in.
The streets bristled with danger. Being American was like wearing a
bull’s-eye. This was a time that told the men from the boys and the
great men from the ordinary men. In such a moment, Fate no longer
(as the poet Gray said) “circumscrib’d their growing virtues.”
In the midst of the madness, March of 1979, six weeks after
Khomeini’s return, Hart made a daring run to bring travel papers to
a former CIA “asset.” On his way back to the Embassy (just months
before it was taken hostage), two soldiers caught him in a
roadblock. They threw him face down on the ground and began kicking
him with their boots. Finally, they turned him over to deliver the
coup d’ grace, at which time he pulled a Browning pistol from his
belt and shot them both dead.
He never reported that beating because he did not want to be
pulled out of the field. At the time, he worked through the pain
with gritty determination and resumed his intrepid field work. But
a quarter-century later, in February 2003, he began to experience
pains and symptoms that could not be ignored. When surgery was
performed, the doctors found that all his internal organs were out
of place. Ribs pried far apart, intestines jammed against his lung;
doctors were amazed how long he had lived productively despite
these traumas.
Now, three surgeries later, he struggles daily to cope with the damage that
long-ago beating has left in his 64-year-old body. Yet his claim
for Workmen’s Compensation from the government has been denied
twice. Technically, they make valid points. He cannot corroborate
by other evidence that indeed he was injured on the job;
furthermore, he made no contemporaneous report. He has one final
hearing in a month, his last chance to get this decision
reversed.
When Mark Twain feuded with fellow author Bret Harte, he once
fumed: “He has no heart, except his name.” For years Howard Hart
had no way of showing the public his heart, except in his name. Now
it is time for us to acknowledge that name. Let us stop talking to
him in legalese and answer him with the language of the heart.
