All the Houses (15 page)

Mr. Mitchell was born in Branberry. He graduated from Milton Academy in 1956 and from Harvard University in 1960, where he was Phi Beta Kappa. He entered the doctoral program in political science at Cornell University and received an M.A. degree before discontinuing his studies. He then went to Washington, where he was an aide to Senator Leverett Saltonstall and later worked for the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

Mr. Mitchell is survived by his second wife, the former Martha Golden, his stepson, Robert Golden, his mother, Mrs. Wilbur D. Mitchell, and two sisters, Lillian McCrory and Marjorie Reiss. A service will be held at the Christ Church of Washington on Friday, September 30, at 11:00 a.m.

I found this online. The
Record
from that era had been scanned whole, and so I read from an image of that week's actual page B7, set in one of those round 1980s typefaces, with halftone-dot shading around the names of the deceased. On the same page were three other death announcements and two advertisements for local businesses.
A world-class bank with a hometown feel.
I read and reread Mitchell's obituary, as if by starting again I might find the story changed, though he died every time, suddenly, at his home in Bethesda, Maryland.

My father had always looked up to him, that was my impression—albeit an impression based in my protean childhood ideas of who looked up to whom, and maybe an adult would've noticed that Dad had other feelings about his friend as well. I remember Dick's once tossing a dollar into the lit charcoal of our grill, making a joke about inflation. My dad never would've done that. And yet, as dutiful as he was, Dad still cared about what Washington cared about, whether you call it power or whether you call it a compulsion to get as close as possible to the action, and here was Dick, who found the action as if without effort.

*   *   *

I thought of him as the pied piper who led my father to Washington. Dick Mitchell with his long neck, his confidential smile. At Cornell, they'd both been members of the College Republicans. Mitchell rarely went to the meetings but always seemed to know everything that happened at them, my father once told me. He was one of those guys who soaked up all the members' personal information, the dynamics of the group itself, the political nitty-gritty. There was a rumor, Dad said, that he'd managed to fix a campus election, though Dad hadn't believed it—vote stealing seemed beneath Dick. Then again, I discovered later that there were other things that would've seemed beneath Dick Mitchell but which, in fact, he did.

They were both in the thrall of Gerald Sayles, the nuclear strategist: for his famous course on technology and war, in which the assigned reading included his own writings as well as Wohlstetter's and Markov's, a hundred or more students would crowd the lecture hall, among them Dick Mitchell, in the back row and without a notebook, and Tim Atherton, who would show up early to claim a spot in the front row.

I could see it, my dad and Dick at Cornell.

*   *   *

 … Sinewy old Sayles is a campus celebrity, technocracy's champion and prophet. His winged eyebrows and the deep crease between them contribute to his aura of genius. Trained as a physicist, he favors quantitative analysis, he likes to assign a probability
P
and write formulas on the blackboard in noisy, jabbing strokes, yet he emphasizes that these equations have “unknown terms,” because so much information is not available to the public.
The body of secrets
is one name for that material, as in, “Any public assessment of military policy is of limited significance, given the body of secrets within the U.S. and Soviet governments.” At other times he speaks of “the expanding frontier of secrecy,” his tone approving. Some knowledge is and should be the special province of the elite, he implies, and part of his mystique is the implication that he has some larger access to the body of secrets—that he belongs to that elite, or at least knows it intimately. Mitchell can often be seen in Sayles's office, cross-legged in the chair opposite the great man's desk. He has the smoothness of wealth as well as the premature lines that appeared on his face during an extended stay at McLean, the psychiatric hospital, during which time he submitted to shock treatments that left him pretty well stripped of any memories of his years at Milton Academy. Mitchell takes note of a bright undergraduate named Tim Atherton, who asks questions he hasn't thought to ask, and what begins as discussions in the corridor after class would grow into walks across the quad and then beers at night …

*   *   *

That was what I started with, the two of them way back when. Even in death, Mitchell still had this magnetism about him, so that I could picture his life in a way that I found it difficult to picture my dad's—and then, once I had him, I could put the two of them together. It's true that these images, conjured out of bits and pieces, led me away from the small set of facts I had about my father's past. Although I considered my project to be biographical, I was inventing much of it as I went along. I decided—not at the outset, but as I scrawled and scratched out—that the best way to improve upon the kind of I-was-there! bullshit served up in
A Call to Honor
would be to create a more honest story, even if it was an honest invention. My aim was to flesh out the book that Dad had stalled on, to finish what he'd started. That I didn't know the full story, that he was reluctant to tell it to me, that we remembered those days so differently—these were not trivial obstacles, but I started to think I could write my way around them.

Which is not to say I was pulling it all out of my ass. I continued to consult outside sources. I'd lugged my dad's dusty old course reading up from the basement, textbooks and technical papers that he and Mitchell would've been assigned. Studying with the likes of Gerald Sayles and others had steeped them in a set of methods, an approach to geopolitical conundrums, the arms race in particular. The threats against us became terms in equations. Computers were programmed to evaluate the likelihood of nuclear war.

“The Delicate Balance of Terror” was the name of one of Albert Wohlstetter's widely circulated papers, from 1958. I found it online and printed it out in nine-point font, and of all things I climbed into bed with it. “I should like to examine the stability of the thermonuclear balance,” he begins—and then he goes on to suggest that it's hardly stable at all. The postwar world, that happy land of big cars and big refrigerators, rests on a fulcrum made of uranium. I read the whole paper, every tiny word. The sentences washed over me and away, but the tone, the assumptions stuck, the crazy (to me) clash between the grand pessimism of overall outlook and the optimism about methods. The ongoing threat of global apocalypse could be countered with quasimathematical analysis. Numbers of missiles, payloads: what faith in their own calculating! It was a doomsday algebra they invented, to combat our math-savvy antagonists behind the Iron Curtain.

To one side of my bed was a window, an old ivory-colored shade covering the upper half while in the lower half I could see my reflection in the glass, my knees drawn up and the paper resting against them. When I saw that, I felt as if I were acting, putting on a show of studiousness for an audience of one, i.e., myself. And yet, haphazard as this whole course of research was, I did learn from it. Some remnant of that midcentury military-industrial mind had stayed with us, hadn't it? A machine inside a ghost. This was how some people who were still in power had been taught to understand the world, long ago, in different times. This was the rug that had been yanked out from under them. Secrecy, quantitative analysis, the best plans made by the best men.

I was drawn to the jargon my father would have learned then and also later, after he went to Washington, terms that cropped up in selected circles in the seventies and eighties, like
procurement
and
operationalize
and
off-the-shelf covert capability
. All those words that meant nothing but pointed to something, the confidence disguised as procuring and operating, the belief in our ability to analyze and control. To manipulate other nations like numbers.

And in his stiff old textbooks, I found Dad's underlining, the odd phrase penciled in the margin. Alongside the densely printed text of a book called
East-West Relations in the Atomic Weapons Era
, for instance, he'd written short notes, indicators of what was discussed on that page, like
nuclear aggression—consequences
and
reflexive choices
. Or was it
reflective choices
? These notes also got to me, though here it wasn't the words but the handwriting, recognizably my dad's, if neater and firmer. That script belonged to a twenty-year-old student with his mechanical pencil, the eager debater in his bilateral world of pro and con, west and east, good and evil, all or nothing.

 

 

With the help of the Internet I found a place of my own, and I told Dad I'd signed a lease on an apartment, a semifurnished studio I could rent month to month. It was in one of the few remaining areas of D.C. that had not yet been thoroughly gentrified—that process was still in the early stages. When I explained where the apartment was, he scowled. No, he said, you shouldn't live over there by yourself. And then he said I needed to be mindful of “the security situation.” Explaining that it was now home to a few artists' studios and a coffee shop had no effect. He insisted he would help me pay for a place in a better neighborhood, I said I didn't want him to do that, and in this way we circumscribed the subject of my departure without ever addressing it.

I wanted to live where I chose to live. During my childhood it was an area we'd driven through and never stopped in, which lent it a mystery that, for me, had always had as its wellspring the House of Wigs, a store on a corner that displayed tiers of faceless plastic heads wearing every sort of hair and, in some cases, fanciful hats. When I moved I was pleased to discover that the House of Wigs was still in business, though now the store, much dustier than in my memory, seemed to cater to cancer and head-surgery patients. I took up residence a few blocks from there, on Vane Street Northeast. Faded town houses that had been divided into apartments lined most of the block, but mine was a corner building of brown brick, with bars over the first-floor windows.

Dad helped me move in, and while he was there he checked out the apartment, the suspect locks, the windows that according to him should have been constructed differently. He was very much dissatisfied. He left me with a list of demands he thought I should make to the landlady, demands I did not make, and from time to time after that he would leave long messages in the middle of the day about exploding water heaters and other hazards. Naively, I saw this as a good thing, his preoccupation with the apartment, because it focused all his worries about my life on what was, to me, the least worrisome component, and so I was content to hear him out.

On the phone he was a different father. He would call to check on me, and although we'd chatted plenty when I lived in other cities, these calls from across town had a new quality to them. I could practically hear our nearness, the way you hear static or breath. He might've been gabbing about any old thing, the Redskins' running game or airline fares, and still there was this underlying sense of
I'm right here, I'm right here.

Loosely defined as the whole book project was, I began working in earnest, staying up late to crawl through the underbrush of an imaginary bureaucracy, as memories of the eighties brewed, and I brooded, at odds with myself. For no reason at all I pictured the small white stickers that had appeared on bus stops and trash cans when I was in high school, which had on them an ugly caricature of the U.S. attorney general and below that the slogan: “Meese Is a Pig.” These came later, after Iran-Contra, in response to a lesser scandal, but still. Rained-on, halfway scraped-off, melting Meeses were with me as I wrote.

The afterimage of those stickers suited my twilight leanings, the sense I had that the scandal marked the end of something. At least, that was a sense I wanted to have. I wanted the scandal to possess historical weight, to mark the End of an Era, even if I couldn't name the era. I wanted to tie it to the decline of the so-called Washington Consensus, to see the NSC mandarins' secret activities as the reduction to absurdity of an older way of doing things, back when policies had been fashioned by a small chummy group who dined at the homes of Georgetown hostesses. I wanted to understand Iran-Contra as a parody-triumph of all that, militarism as the new paternalism, the inner circle outdone by a junta. But even if there was a case to be made (and I would be out of my depth trying to make it), what did it matter? As best I could tell, one sort of ruling caste had just been replaced by another, more corporate one. And much as I wanted meaning on a grander scale, my terminal feeling had not arisen sheerly or even primarily from my spotty understanding of history. It came from sources and experiences closer to home.

The downside to my microapartment, for me, was not its location or its window glass but the fact that I slept poorly there those first nights. I don't know what the cause was—not street noise, not the bed—but after I moved in, sleep was coy, a tease, and I would spend half the night chasing it around those three hundred square feet, only to sink deep into dreaming just before dawn, then wake up again as soon as the sun infiltrated the room. I rose in fits and starts; I dressed petulantly. To actually wake myself up, I relied on a morning walk and a double espresso: before that beverage I was a muddled brain weakly bleating out instructions to a distant and uncooperative body.

I will go ahead and admit that I was reassured by the sight of other white people in the neighborhood. I wasn't sure who lived around there now, and I'd had a fear that I would feel extremely conspicuous every time I went out. Instead I only felt somewhat conspicuous. At a nearby playground, I saw a white girl shooting baskets at a hoop without a net, in a taut ponytail and a headband and shiny red shorts that fell almost to her knees. And there was a man, I'd guess in his midforties, who lived in the town house next to my building and who on some mornings would come out the door just as I was coming out my door. I would follow in the same direction until he turned left toward the Metro station and I kept on walking straight ahead, toward the nearest coffee shop, a coffee shop that aspired to the status of cultural center, with shelves of left-wing reading material and movies for rent, and was populated by hipsters, kids in their early twenties wearing mismatched clothes from Value Village. It seemed these people were biding their time until they could move to some even more blighted neighborhood in Brooklyn or Queens. Hence Voltaic (this was the name of the place) had the feel of a train station or a dock, one where the awaiting passengers read Chomsky and discussed recent sexual endeavors and community organizing. On two or three hours of sleep I was never in the mood for any of that, and so I would down my espresso and be on my way.