The Very Best Men
Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA
By Evan Thomas
Simon & Schuster, 427 pages, $27.50
Four men return from World War II, are bored with the routine of civilian life and enlist in the CIA’s clandestine service. All are the sons of wealth and privilege, three from the playing fields of Groton, Harvard and Yale, and the fourth from Princeton. Each has an honorable sense of public duty, a need for adventure and a talent for risk as demonstrated in World War II. For those not of that generation, it is essential to know that those who fought in that war had no doubt about its goal: the annihilation of an enemy who threatened free societies everywhere and whose menace gave their struggle an uncompromising moral clarity from which there would be no retreat. Unconditional surrender was the price demanded and unlimited resources would be mobilized to achieve it.
The Cold War was different. Stalin’s totalitarianism had brought a new Dark Ages to the captive nations of Europe and threatened the civilized world beyond, or so it was thought, but the battle lines had changed. In joining the cause, the four brought with them the same idealism, courage and daring of that earlier war. But it was a different world now, different in the limits of military power, as the nuclear bomb warned and the Korean stalemate proved, different in the nature of political action and different in the methods of engagement. No longer was unconditional surrender the price to be demanded. The Cold War would be different in means as well as ends, in what was permissible and what was obtainable under cautious administrations still nervously groping their way, loud in rhetoric but hesitant in execution. The result was a far-flung clandestine war of limited measures, murky goals, uncertain enemies, dubious principles, limited if not trivial successes and, just as often, limited and agonizing failure.
In following the careers of Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell, Desmond FitzGerald and Tracy Barnes during the Cold War years, Evan Thomas has told the story of four such individuals in “The Very Best Men.” His purpose is a group biography of the era, tracing the social background and lives of four Ivy Leaguers he credits with helping imbue the singular character of the CIA.
“Patriotic, decent, well-meaning and brave,” he tells us, “they were also uniquely unsuited to the grubby, necessarily devious world of intelligence.” He finds a parallel between the privileged, secluded social world in which the four came of age and the world the CIA would re-create: “secretive, insular, elitist, and secure in the rectitude of its purpose.” These parallel qualities serve him as an organizing premise in helping explain the agency’s ethos, character, methods and failures. The notion is seductive, especially some 40 years later, but like all attempts to interpret the past by a simple paradigm, it is also inadequate and no more fully explains the CIA than gargoyles explain a medieval cathedral. Yet the notion doesn’t get in the way of a fascinating story.
Frank Wisner was a Wall Street lawyer who’d served in the OSS in Romania and whose political conscience had been reawakened in 1945 as he watched trainloads of Romanians, including his friends, hauled off to the USSR. Later he would become head of the CIA’s clandestine operations. Richard Bissell, “the brightest man in Washington,” some thought, was a logistical genius who had brought order to U.S. maritime shipping during the war, helped organize the Marshall Plan and was responsible for developing the U-2 in the incredible time of 18 months. He, too, would later head the CIA’s clandestine services, plan the Bay of Pigs operation, be unfairly blamed by President Kennedy for its failure and let go. Desmond FitzGerald, a veteran who fought in Burma and China, became head of the Far East division, ran covert wars in Southeast Asia, became enmeshed in the 1963 plot to kill Castro, largely because of Robert Kennedy’s vengeful obsessional needs, and later led the clandestine service. Tracy Barnes was an OSS veteran who parachuted into France in 1944, won the Silver Star and held a number of senior CIA posts in the ’50s and ’60s.
None had much experience in running covert operations, none was interested in the routine of intelligence collection and analysis. If their personalities were different, what characterized them was a compulsive activism–daring, sometimes reckless, often amateurish or simply wrong-headed. In a baffling transitional world that few fully understood–certainly not those quiescent policy skeptics and doubters waiting to be captured by events–there was little to guide them.
Privileged innocents of shared values they might have been, elites as well, but the four were far too different in their individual talent, character and intellect to be summed up by a common background. The latter no more accounts for their shortcomings than Ivy League dilettantism explains the failure of the Bay of Pigs. There were other, more crucial players involved; they were merely four among thousands on a crowded, much larger executive stage, even at their own agency. None of the men, not even Wisner, played a decisive or originating role in reorganizing the agency’s basic structures and mission.
Thomas also gives himself too little credit. Had he succumbed to the journalist’s temptation to treat each as a stock social type–men out of their depth and thus easily scorned–the four might have personified everything gone wrong with the agency and Washington during those years. But he didn’t. Helped by the reminiscences of families, friends and colleagues, he has questioned, listened, learned and given each his due. What emerges is a compassionate portrait of four uniquely interesting individuals who maintained their integrity and dignity to the end, even in dismissal, madness and defeat. There is honor in that.
None except Bissell lived to see the fall of Vietnam or the end of the Cold War. Eventually each would come to doubt himself in certain ways. By the ’60s all showed signs of physical and mental exhaustion. Wisner was retired in 1962 and died by his own hand in 1965. Ill and overworked, FitzGerald died of a massive coronary in July 1967 while still at the CIA. Dismissed in 1966, Tracy Barnes died similarly in 1972. Bissell died in his sleep in 1994.
Thomas suggests all four were the victims of hubris, the wanton arrogance of an excessive pride that ultimately leads to tragedy and ruin. The evidence isn’t compelling. He has gotten the lesson right but the focus wrong. To borrow and modify his own words in describing the four, what description better characterizes a privileged, insular, naive America–coming of age in World War II to assume far-flung global responsibilities–than “patriotic, decent, well-meaning and brave, but uniquely unsuited to the grubby, necessarily devious task of international power politics”?
And what better characterizes Washington’s Cold War policymakers than “a small, elite group, secure in the rectitude of purpose, privately manipulating the world with American funds and power”?
This may be the larger national tragedy Evan Thomas is stalking in the lives of the four, but it doesn’t really matter. On its own terms, this is a thoughtful, provocative and absorbing book, as scrupulously fair as it is responsible, bringing new details and shedding new light on forgotten events and personalities of years past.
If not the tragic tale Thomas seemed to be seeking, and which the nation found in Vietnam, it is certainly a terribly sad one.
