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.”
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