Drop by Drop by Gabriel Valjan

 

Friend and fellow author Richie Narvaez alerted me to a call for short stories in Vautrin Magazine in June. Little did Richie know that his email would lead me to a summer’s reading binge on several books about JFK. Editor Todd Robins asked for stories around Lee Harvey Oswald. The obvious subject was Oswald’s role in JFK’s assassination. On the magazine’s web site Todd directed authors to several books by David Talbot. It was Talbot’s The Devil’s Chessboard that inspired my story “The Other Quiet American” which will appear in Vautrin’s Fall edition.

 

The Devil’s Chessboard is less about the JFK assassination, and more about the career of Director of the CIA Allen Dulles, the undisputed architect to several coup d’états around the world. Where Dulles walked, bodies dropped. The jewel in the crown of his storied and violent career was installing Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in Iran in 1953; his nadir, the Bay of Pigs, which prompted President Kennedy to fire him. JFK was opposed to an invasion of Cuba because the plan made no sense to him, but he was bullied and strong-armed by the military leaders

around him and Dulles. To say that Dulles was a sociopath is an understatement. Several times he wanted to deploy nuclear weapons, much to the horror of several presidents. Kennedy, who had experienced combat, despised war and saw it as a failure of diplomacy. After he fired Dulles, Dulles continued to run operations for the CIA from his private residence on the CIA’s Camp Perry aka ‘The Farm’ in Virginia. While I was reading the book, I could feel the Cheshire Cat’s grin on Dulles’s face when he formed (and served on) the Warren Commission to investigate JFK’s assassination. Talbot’s ‘biography’ is a portrait of genuine evil and a man so crafty that he deserves to be called a modern Machiavelli. The book unsettled me.

 

JFK’s assassination has spurred a metric ton of speculation. Talbot walks the reader step-by-step to that fateful day in Dallas and he names names. All I can say is that the orchestration required to kill a sitting president was both satanic and polyphonic. If the US government could function with such organization and precision for the greater good, the US would indeed be the greatest society and country on the planet. As for the CIA, one month after the assassination, Truman, who created the agency, wrote this ominous op-ed that enraged Dulles.

 

After I finished Talbot’s book, I reread James Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable, which provides a lucid argument for why Kennedy had to die. The short answer is that he wanted to end the Cold War, Vietnam, and deescalate nuclear arms. He also wanted to shutter the CIA. Kennedy never trusted military leadership after the Bay of Pigs and he refused to be alone in a room with generals. He would instead rely heavily on advice from his brother Robert. JFK initiated back-channel communications with Khrushchev. Taped conversations and letters exist. Douglass points to this speech as the day the president signed his own death sentence.

 

I concluded my binge with two books: Graham Greene’s The Quiet American and C. Richard Allen’s RFK: His Words for Our Times. The Greene novel is my favorite of his work because it showcases the dangers of American naivete. The novel’s title inspired my own story in Vautrin. It is no small irony that while Greene was writing the novel in Hanoi, JFK and RFK were in Vietnam. A letter exists between the brothers that shows both men agreed that a war in Vietnam was neither winnable nor sustainable.

 

I was never a fan of RFK until I read Allen’s compilation of letters, arranged chronologically. My initial assessment of RFK was that he was arrogant and guilty of dichotomous thinking. He saw everything in terms of black or white. He was incapable of seeing gray and was rather apoplectic about ambiguity, which is how I wrote him in my third Company Files novel, The Devil’s Music. The letters showcase a remarkable and stunning transformation, a journey into wisdom. Where his brother was aloof and ultimately unknowable, RFK was sensitive and compassionate. His brother’s death radicalized him. He wore his heart on his sleeve. He was troubled by a country divided, the chasm between those with extreme wealth and those who had nothing; he was especially offended by the poverty he saw firsthand in rural America. You can’t help but be moved to tears when he says the shanties of Mississippi were worse than anything he’d seen in Africa.

 

Dulles made me recoil in horror, at the magnitude of Evil incarnate. In November of 1963, the country lost whatever innocence it had, and by June 1968, buried it. I end this with these words RFK used when he spoke the night Martin Luther King, Jr. died:

 

“And even in our sleep,
 pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart,
 until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”