The Man
Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William
Colby is an extraordinary documentary
about the long-time CIA operative who led the agency amid the
post-Watergate scandals that almost destroyed it. It remarkably
resembles The Good Shepherd, the 2006 fictional film about
a dedicated Cold War spy across the years, right down to their
eerily similar white brick colonial houses in leafy D.C. area
neighborhoods. But the real life Colby and his wife are far more
interesting than the characters played by Matt Damon and Angelina
Jolie. Working for the CIA’s predecessor, the OSS, during WWII,
Colby parachuted into Nazi-occupied France and Norway to help the
Resistance. After briefly working at the law firm of former OSS
chief “Wild Bill” Donovan, Colby joined the CIA and helped Italy’s
Christian Democrats against the Soviet-backed Communists during the
1950s. He presided over U.S. covert assistance to South Vietnam in
the 1960s, personally befriending doomed President Ngo Dinh Diem,
and later organizing the “Phoenix Program” that neutralized Viet
Cong killers. Colby took the helm at CIA as President Richard Nixon
was collapsing and revelations about CIA’s own scandals were fast
emerging. He struggled for candor with endless Congressional
hearings without betraying CIA assets and operations. Senator Frank
Church’s melodramatically waving a pistol before cameras to
illustrate CIA assassination schemes iconically illustrated the
nation’s masochistic desire to castrate the CIA even as Soviet
power was surging.
Appropriately for an old spook, Colby died somewhat
mysteriously in 1996, his body recovered after he’d gone missing
for several days, having apparently fallen from a canoe at his
Maryland vacation home. His son produced this film to explore who
his enigmatic father really was, without fully finding a
satisfactory answer. Colby, a devout Catholic sometimes known as
the “warrior-priest,” was zealously devoted to his vocation of
defending America, first from Nazism, and then from Communism. Like
many of his “greatest generation,” he was driven by duty and was
not emotionally expressive, often exasperating his more
introspective Baby Boomer children.
Most delightfully in the film, Colby’s wife of 40 years, a
very perceptive and spry octogenarian, is interviewed at length.
She shared his Catholicism and devotion to the CIA. The whole Colby
family met with President Diem shortly before his assassination
during a coup countenanced by the Kennedy Administration. Mrs.
Colby struggled with the moral compromises and largely shared her
husband’s confidence that the greater good required America’s
victory in the Cold War. Other interviewees include old CIA
colleagues, former allied intelligence chiefs, and such familiars
as Bob Woodward, Brent Scowcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, and Bud
MacFarlane.
Colby bore up mightily during the congressional
investigations of 1975 but never had the Ford Administration’s full
confidence. After the 1976 Langley ceremony installing his
successor George Bush, Colby drove off alone in his somewhat
battered looking car. He practiced law and consulted, abruptly
divorcing his wife in 1984, then marrying a younger woman. Colby
portrays his father as friendless and tragic.
Perhaps. Twenty years ago, easily finding his number in
the phone book, I invited Colby to speak about his newly published
Vietnam memoir to my Methodist church outside Washington. “I’m not
even sure I’ll be alive then,” he laughingly said of the date
several months away. He enthusiastically appeared at the church
breakfast, sharing his strategic analysis of the post-Cold War
world. The most charming man I’ve ever met, he left us all feeling
like his new best friends, though of course none of us would see
him again. Colby concluded by describing his recent visit to
Moscow, recently freed from communism, and where he was now ignored
as merely a tourist. After walking around the sites of Red Square,
he smilingly realized he had conducted his own “personal victory
tour.”
Colby lived long enough to witness the fall of the two
great tyrannies against which he had dedicated his life. He seemed
more vindicated than tragic. His son describes him at life’s end as
no longer interested in living longer. If so, it’s because his full
life was completed.
J. Edgar is another film about a
zealous public servant whose life was about as long as Colby’s but,
who unlike his CIA colleague, never retired and never allowed
marriage or family to distract him from his exclusive love for the
FBI. The sexual orientation of the lifelong bachelor who was often
seen with his FBI deputy director Clyde Tolson is the topic of
endless prurient fascination. How director Clint Eastwood would
handle Hoover’s personal life provoked much
speculation.
The answer is that mostly Hoover was what he appeared to
be, a tireless bureaucrat who created a public image and carefully
lived within its parameters. More unfairly treated is Tolson,
prissily portrayed by Armie Hammer, who earns a stern rebuff when
he plants an unwanted kiss on Hoover. In Eastwood’s telling, Hoover
was warped into a lonely, repressed figure by his controlling
mother. An affair with actress Dorothy Lamour is briefly alluded
to. Otherwise, Hoover grimly bulldozes through most of the 20th
century as America’s most powerful lawman, relying on Tolson and
his ardently dedicated secretary of 54 years, Helen Gandy,
portrayed by Naomi Watts. As the unshakeable ruling Trinity of the
FBI, they were unassailable. Upon Hoover’s death, Gandy dutifully
shredded documents, while Tolson inherited Hoover’s house, allowing
their chief to take many of his secrets to the grave.
Leonardo DiCaprio is surprisingly effective as Hoover,
perhaps the best dramatized portrayal ever. Even his make-up works
as Hoover becomes jowlier and heavier across six decades. Scenes
from the teens, 1920s, 1930s, 1960s, and 1970s are evocatively
captured. Hoover’s watching various presidential inaugural
precessions on Pennsylvania Avenue from his Justice Department
balcony capture his power and timelessness across eight
presidencies.
There are historical errors of course. Hoover is shown
preparing to blackmail a newly elected FDR with an FBI dossier on
First Lady Eleanor’s supposed hotel tryst with a young leftist
companion. This actual encounter was years later, and the report,
which turned out to be false, was shared with FDR after Hoover
already had formed a strong alliance with the President, who
apparently never discouraged his FBI director from surveilling his
wife or her leftist friends. Hoover is also shown dictating a nasty
anonymous letter to Martin Luther King about his sexual
infidelities. That letter was actually composed by an FBI
subordinate whom Hoover later fired. As former Hoover associate
Cartha “Deke” DeLoach recalled in his own memoir, Hoover would have
been “horrified” by the letter, which was “not his style.” Eastwood
reportedly consulted DeLoach for the film but seems to have ignored
his counsel here.
That Hoover was supremely dedicated to the FBI’s
independence is captured by the film’s portrayal of his dismissive
comments about Joe McCarthy and his fears of a Nixon presidency.
After Hoover’s death, a foul-mouthed Nixon is portrayed ordering
seizure of the legendary files. Too late! Helen Gandy was already
completing one of her last acts of devotion to her
chief.
Hoover and Colby, both uncomplaining and unself-reflective
public servants during the 20th century’s greatest conflicts, are
difficult for contemporary times to understand. But whatever their
faults, America weathered a tumultuous century partly because of
such men.
