About the Civil War Robert Penn Warren once wrote, “Every victory has a price tag; every gain entails a loss, not merely in the price of effort and blood to achieve victory but in the rejection, or destruction, of values which are incommensurable with it.”
But the tragic consciousness Warren here expresses is alien to the American worldview. Civil War notwithstanding: of the ancient classical wisdom that the past binds, that power has limits; that fate mocks good intentions; and that progress carries upheaval in its wake, the nation does not know. American idealism precludes a sense of tragedy. Found a nation. Conquer a continent. Win a War. Spread Democracy. Americans believe they can accomplish anything they wish without cost or contradiction.
Only our idealism thrives on amnesia and self-deception-- a willful blindness to the ambiguities of our success, of the sins committed and of the wages paid in the process. Yes, the Founding Fathers pioneered in the hostile wilderness a new model Republic. But first they stole the land for it and annihilated its inhabitants-- sowing a savage, lawless frontier and a fixation with violence and guns. Then too, while their Constitution guaranteed individual liberty, it also licensed human bondage—a tragic compromise that wed the states but eighty years later, nearly sundered the Union.
Related ironies bedevil American ideals abroad. Last century, to protect (and promote) the American example, the U.S. fought two European wars. Yet triumph in the First World War led to the Second, and victory in the Second inaugurated a Third-- a Cold War with the Soviets wherein at home, we stifled the civil liberties, and abroad, subverted the electoral processes, we first went overseas to uphold. Worse, to defeat our communist foe, we collaborated with a militant Islam that has metastasized into a terrorist threat more insidious, obdurate, and lethal than the totalitarianism it displaced. Today, Iraq caps the tragedy. The war waged to propagate American democracy has re-created instead the violence of our revolution, the anarchy of our frontier, and the carnage of our civil war. America’s original sins have incurred their own punishment.
II.
For as screenwriter Eric Roth has conceived it, the story of the CIA’s birth and early adolescence evokes Greek theatre: a stage where noble purposes beget ignoble consequences; where duty conflicts with virtue and where love of country and family collide; where heirs pay, generation after generation, for ancestor’s sins; and where secrets sabotage what they aim most to protect. So by The Good Shepherd’s end, its hero, Edward Wilson, has played out an allegorical drama that illuminates the CIA’s original sin, and by extension, America’s.
Of course, some of the most accomplished novels written in the English language over the past fifty years have mined the spy’s terrain to similar effect. Novels like Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost and John Le Carre’s A Perfect Spy achieve their depth and gravity by tunneling beyond genre fiction into the core of the national psyche. As John Le Carre has said, “a nation’s intelligence agency functions as its political subconscious.” But the CIA also represents a synecdoche for America because the founders of each descend from the same hoary WASP lineage running from Plymouth and Jamestown to Washington and Langley. They belong to the select group of elite, blueblood families who can trace their ancestry to the men who colonized the land, subdued the Indians, imported the slaves, launched the Revolution, waged the Civil War, industrialized the economy, modernized our federal institutions and built the national security state. They form America’s aristocracy: the Protestant Ivy League Establishment that, through most of our history, has governed the country and shaped its worldview.
Indeed, Edward Wilson, (Matt Damon), The Good Shepherd’s protagonist, personifies this Elect-- inherited guilt and all. His father, Thomas Wilson, a Cabinet appointee, committed suicide amid rumors of treason. A betrayal which Edward tries to escape by spying for his country, but which only will serve instead to ensure his son revisits the crime. Apropos, the Bay of Pigs, the fiasco that marked the CIA’s fall from grace, frames the Wilson’s saga. The film opens days before the invasion as Edward and his overconfident staff boast of swimming in Havana and dancing in Castro’s bedroom. Comeuppance, naturally, beckons instead. The Cubans, anticipating the attack, neutralize the air cover, rout the exile militia, and humiliate the U.S. Someone on the inside, it appears, has betrayed the operation’s landing site. “There’s a stranger in our house,” declares Edward’s assistant. Little does Wilson suspect he will discover in the metaphor a literal resonance.
Throughout Edward’s frantic two week investigation to identify the traitor from a blurry photograph and edited recording he receives, the film backtracks. Beginning at Yale in 1939 and culminating in Cuba in 1961, the narrative unravels the intertwined histories of Black Prince Edward and his Underground Estate. The Ivy League anoints him, among the rest of the Elect, for leadership. Skull and Bones, meanwhile, taps him, molding his character and launching his vocation. This select, clandestine society functions as the CIA’s antechamber-- its anonymous membership, esoteric rites, fraternal oaths, and shrouded insularity invest the Agency with its ethos and code in addition to initiating prospective agents in imposture, secrecy, and skullduggery. What’s more, Skull & Bones introduces Edward to his future wife and professional mentor-- Clover Russell (Angelina Jolie), daughter of Bonesman Senator Russell; and General William “Wild Bill” Sullivan (Robert DeNiro), Chief of CIA forbear, the OSS. Clover, Edward marries after getting pregnant; while Sullivan recruits him for the OSS. And, together, fatherhood and fatherland will seal his tragic destiny.
That Roth and DeNiro proceed to compress thirty years of CIA history into a 150 minute film and to imbue each discrete episode with suspense and narrative tension is of course a feat all its own. Among the CIA exploits portrayed (pruning, embroidering, and reconfiguring of course where artistic considerations warrant) are (i) the Agency’s harboring and enlistment of Nazi fugitives; (ii) the coup that deposed Arbenz in Guatemala (which the CIA Director’s position on United Fruits’ Board of Directors may have spurred); (iii) the Wall St-CIA axis; (iv) KGB agents, Golitsin’s and Nosenko’s defections, one or both of which the Soviets may have staged; (v) the KGB’s penetration of MI-6[1]; (vi) the Agency’s experimentation with LSD as a truth serum (vii) its collaboration with the mafia in Cuba, and finally, of course, (viii) the Bay of Pigs.
III.
However, The Good Shepherd’s real éclat remains the wholly invented Wilson family epic embedded within the CIA biography; and through which, it unfolds. For the Wilson saga informs the narrative’s tragic vision and accords it its symbolic resonance. The House of Wilson’s curse is born when the family patriarch, Thomas Wilson betrays his country, and in committing suicide, abandons his son and stigmatizes his name. It continues when his son, Edward Sr., endeavors to overcome it—serving his country, on the one hand; and marrying to legitimate his son, on the other. And, finally, the curse recurs when Edward Jr. reprises his grandfather’s transgression.
In the end, the CIA through which Edward seeks to rise above his father’s treason enables and abets his son’s. Edward Sr. has himself spawned “the stranger in his house”. Espionage’s ominous secrecy and consuming hours have estranged him from his family. The wife he never loved turns lonely and friendless, escaping in drink. While his son becomes a timid, fearful, neglected little boy, plagued by nightmares, prone to wetting himself, and terrified by the sinister aura that surrounds his family. And the scared boy is father to the ingenuous, vulnerable, lovelorn young man desperate for his elder’s attention and susceptible to duplicitous surrogates. He follows his father into the CIA; where, in short order, a Soviet agent seduces him into disclosing the Bay of Pigs landing site.[2] Worse, Edward Jr. plans to marry her and to install the “stranger” permanently. The revelation confronts his father with the ultimate tragic choice: protect his son and betray his country; or save his country and expose his son. A sentence the Black Prince cannot outwit. In fact, by trying to do so, he unwittingly condemns to death his unborn grandchild and perpetuates the tragic cycle.
IV.
The Wilson family’s doom, of course, reinforces the film’s tragic conception of the CIA. As The Good Shepherd’s Cassandra, General Sullivan prophesies, “Despite how much we need it… I’m concerned too much power will end up in the hands of too few.” How clairvoyant he proves! The film depicts a CIA born of a Cold War America neither sought nor declared; the unwanted child of international responsibilities the nation neither anticipated nor was equipped for. Far then from the sinister caricatures that populate the work of a Robert Ludlum or an Oliver Stone, Roth and DeNiro’s CIA men appear earnest, flawed, patriotic men, guilty often of smug hubris and myopic chauvinism, yes, but all the more real and pathetic as a consequence.
Here portrayed are the men whose real-life, modern counterparts installed the Shah of Iran and in so doing, ultimately galvanized Khomeini’s Islamic revolution; who, to combat communism in Afghanistan, nurtured the Arab militants that burgeoned into al-Qaeda; who inflated the likes of Saddam Hussein until they grew so tyrannical and ruthless U.S. troops had to invade their domains to remove them. What The Good Shepherd suggests, however, is that the CIA’s former clients often have come back—or blownback, in their parlance— as nemeses haunting the nation and imperiling its interests not because ignorant fools or diabolical knaves run America’s intelligence services. Rather, the Agency’s follies inhere in the original sin General Sullivan foresaw-- the inexorable corruptions and distortions that afflict those working underground, opaque to public scrutiny and removed from legal constraint, at a secretive Machiavellian craft alien to their nation’s democratic heritage and without an imperial history or realpolitik tradition, like the British possess, to guide or insulate them. Power corrupts. Secret power corrupts insidiously.
V.
But beyond a family epic, or CIA creation story, or a parable about espionage’s human costs, The Good Shepherd tells an allegory about America. If Edward’s hubris personifies the CIA’s; then the CIA’s, in turn, figures America’s. The House of Wilson’s fate reflects the House of Langley’s; the House of Langley’s fate, the House of Washington’s. They dramatize history’s tragic dialectic-- the punishment its actors solicit, behind their back, as they try to outrun their sins. The Wilsons replay an epic cycle that begins in suicide and ends in infanticide. The CIA frame compassing it begins and ends with the abortive Bay of Pigs. And, together, the cul-de-sac they describe evokes the tragedy of American history. The curse of a country that with sincere, honorable, and idealistic motives aspires to reshape the world in its image only to conjure instead the murderous, oppressive, insurrectionist past its self-image fails to integrate.
To explain, we, too, return to where we began with Robert Penn Warren, the Civil War, and the blight on the House of Washington. “From the land itself…from history, from an error or sin committed long ago and compounded a thousand times over, the doom comes,” Warren elaborates in an essay on Faulkner,
“The men who seized the land from the Indians… their project… was doomed from
the first. It was [also] ‘accurst’ by chattel slavery… [I]t was an evil,
and all its human and humane mitigations and all its historical necessity could
not quiet the bad conscience it engendered. The Civil War began the
fulfillment of the doom.”
“Their project,” of course, was the American Experiment: that grand, noble undertaking the Founder embarked upon of establishing in the virgin wilderness a new kind of nation whose shining democratic example would redeem mankind. Only life on civilization’s frontier, too often, was nasty, brutish, and short; and survival occasioned evils that sullied the mission’s exalted moral purpose. Land theft, genocide, insurrection, and slavery, in truth, undergird the “City on a Hill” as much as do its lofty ideals. Free land endowed democracy’s “equal opportunity”; slavery united diverse white immigrants and underwrote their wealth. Original sins no more reprehensible, perhaps, than the religious wars, ethnic cleansing and sovereign force which sired Europe’s nation-states, just more tragic-- tragic because America’s trespasses violated the democratic principles and moral promise it alone defined as its raison d’etre. If America, accordingly, is “the only idealist nation”, as Woodrow Wilson once boasted, then it is also the only nation to embody its contradiction: liberty beside bondage, equality beside race privilege, the sanctification of life amid a peoples’ extermination. The Constitution struck the Faustian bargain and in the Civil War, arrived the reckoning.
Only the humble self-awareness a tragic climax typically augurs didn’t follow. The nation didn’t gain the mature ambivalence, modest skepticism, and tempered realism some of its most perceptive and eminent tragedians expected. In Hawthorne, published 15 years after hostilities concluded, Henry James, for instance, wrote,
“[T]he Civil War marks an era in the history of the American mind. It
introduced into the national consciousness a certain sense of proportion and
relation, of the world being a more complicated place than it had hitherto
seemed, the future more treacherous, success more difficult… the good American
[] will be a more critical person than his grandfather. He has eaten of
the tree of knowledge… He will remember that the ways of the Lord are
inscrutable. ”
Never would the Master prove more wrong.
To the tragic sensibility, the Civil War, to be sure, suggested that if America herself, the first and perhaps only nation to define liberty and equality as the basis of its identity; that if she, the world’s only “idealist nation” even after a century of internecine struggle with ancient prejudices, vested power, and hidebound atavism, had yet fully to vindicate her democratic mission, then it was probably hypocritical to demand other countries to emulate her example, folly to expect they could, and downright self-destructive to impose it upon them. Only America spurned the lesson.
No, when America came of age and entered the international arena, the curse of its origins persisted. Far from the “critical” actor James intellect anticipated, the tragic innocent his imagination captured would characterize the nation’s foreign policy. Like Isabel Archer, America would venture abroad eager to realize her ideals only to founder amid ulterior motives and ruthless cynicism, ancient prejudices and fallen civilizations. From Woodrow Wilson’s to Edward Wilson’s to Joseph C. Wilson IV’s chapter and beyond, the nation would try to re-author its exemplary idyll on the international stage only to re-enact instead the dark, subterranean counter-narrative.
VI.
Like the consummate tragic actor, then, America’s offenses, as George Kennan observed, result not “from any desire on our part to bring injury to others or to establish power over them, but from our attempts to strike noble postures and to impress ourselves.” They result, that is, from the romanticism and grandiosity, from the autism and denial, with which the Eastern Establishment see their nation’s heritage and which they, in turn, project upon the world.
To Woodrow Wilson, America was an idealist nation. Idealization, as such, formed his view of the world. He declared war “to make the world safe for democracy,” with the goal of re-creating it in America’s image. His League of Nations envisioned a United States of the World where sovereign law would bind states; self-determining nations would arise out of imperial colonies; and elections would dethrone kings. Only the American model cannot be transplanted to feudal lands or tribal soil (not without centuries of cultivation anyway.) From Central Europe to the Middle East, the League carved volatile, antagonistic nation-states out of benevolent dynasties and stable empires. And where popular rule empowered demagogues who rallied the masses through bellicose nationalism and with promises to bring order, honor, and élan, and ultimately, brought dictatorship. The Weimar Republic actually elected Adolph Hitler.
But if Woodrow Wilson typified the American flaw of idealism, then Edward Wilson illustrates its narcissistic cousin. As Edward reveals in his conversation with mob boss, Joseph Palmi (Joe Pesci),
“Let me ask you something,” Palmi asks him, “We Italians, we got our families
and we got the Church. The Irish, they have their homeland. The
Jews, their tradition. Even the Negroes, they got their music. What
about you people, [you WASPs, that is], what do you have?”
Edward’s replies: “The United States of America…The rest of you
are just visiting.”
Just visiting? Negroes, just visiting? Evidently, Edward conceives of America as some old-line Anglo-Saxon country club upon whose verdant green the descendants of European immigrants and African slaves intrude. Perhaps the Board invited--or conscripted, as the case may be-- a few of its guests, but they need remember who owns the place. Of course, the filio-pietism this reflects—the blatant denial of his ancestors’ racial sins, to say nothing of the violence to our egalitarian creed —find mirror in the ethnocentric worldview. Edward’s CIA didn’t need a traitor to foil the Bay of Pigs. Chauvinism doomed it from the start (just as his fellow Wilson’s utopianism condemned the League of Nations and hastened World War II.) Why else would the CIA dispatch an ill-equipped, ragtag, exile platoon to Cuba and count on natives hostile to Yankee hegemony to rise up and overthrow Castro and to join their ranks? Why else, if not because they imagine them America’s colonial militia liberating their people from a despised tyranny and Cuba’s immiserated peasantry as beholden as Edward and his coterie to the myth of the Stars and Stripes?
The Iraq imbroglio, it’s true, departs slightly from the script. After all, in the modern rendition the CIA’s Wilson (Joseph C. Wilson IV) plays the clear-eyed, prescient foil.[3] While the President bent on discrediting him portrays tragedy’s blind protagonist. Still, if history has re-cast President Bush II in the Wilsonian role, it also has underscored his tragedy’s recurring motif. Indeed, set against the backdrop of Mr. Wilson’s War and the Bay of Pigs, the White House seems to have rehearsed a disaster preordained. The War to Make the Middle East Safe for Democracy bears all the earmarks of Woodrow’s utopian conceits. As the administration’s presumption that Iraqis would greet U.S. troops as liberators recalls the CIA’s egocentric delusions about the Bay of Pigs. Then again, few of Bush’s II predecessors have so consciously modeled their rhetoric and mission on Woodrow’s Presidency. Nor can they, despite colonial ancestors, boast Edward and Joseph’s CIA pedigree. (President Bush I was Director of the CIA from 1976-7. While both Presidents Bush attended Yale and belonged to Skull and Bones.)
Bush II, then, didn’t have to invent the specter of a nuclear Iraq as a pretext for war. No, to an ideologue in whom the messianic zeal of the one Wilson and the ethnocentric presumption of the other combine, whether or not evidence existed for Saddam’s weapons programs was decidedly beside the point. Once 9/11 occurred, the President imagined he could redraw, in the American pattern, the Middle Eastern landscape and assumed the Arab people would cooperate because they wanted nothing more to emulate our democracy. To quibble about “evidence” of WMD’s, in this view, not only missed the President’s higher purpose, it betrayed the fallacies of what one Bush aide called “the reality-based community.” America “creates its own reality,” he said. Its own reality. Indeed! As Bush agonist Norman Podhoretz writes,
“By September 11th … George W. Bush now knew that the God to whom, as a
born-again Christian, he had earlier committed himself had put him in the Oval
Office for a purpose. He had put him there to lead a war against the evil
of terrorism… and [to wage the struggle for freedom and democracy]. ”
Now, it’s probably safe to infer then that a President who dismisses “reality” doesn’t dwell on history’s burden nor reckon with the significance of slavery or Indian reservations to his nation’s identity or his designs abroad. Because consciousness of those sins would signify an understanding of the tortuous, protracted, and singular path America took toward democracy. What’s more, it would have cast doubt on the ease of reproducing our model in a Middle East, still less an Iraq, riven by sect, faction, ethnicity and clan; and warned the President, finally, of the anti-American theocrats and demagogues elections might empower by trying. To quote from Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s seminal essay “Dictatorships & Double Standards” published, ironically, in the very same Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary almost 30 years ago,
“[In Iran, Cuba, Angola, and Vietnam], the American effort to impose
liberalization and democratization on a government confronted with violent
internal opposition not only failed but actually assisted the coming to power of
new regimes in which ordinary people enjoy fewer freedoms and less security
[]--regimes, moreover hostile to American interests and policies… In the
relatively few places where they exist, democratic governments have come into
being slowly, after extended prior experience with more limited forms of
participation… Decades, if not centuries, are normally required for people to
acquire the necessary discipline and habits… American history gives no better
grounds for believing democracy comes easily, quickly, or for the asking.
A war of independence, an unsuccessful constitution, a civil war, a long process
of gradual enfranchisement marked our progress toward constitutional
government.”
What America’s recurring Wilsonian drama suggests, then, is that the world is not a stage where “evil empires” and “axes” forever bedevil God’s New World Zion, however much our Presidents’ foreign policy may evoke the vision and imagery of a black and-white melodrama. To the contrary, the laws that govern the international system more closely resemble those of The Good Shepherd’s universe. That is the international arena is the tragic theatre par excellence. It’s an arena bathed in shades of gray where the past sullies the future and constrains its possibilities; where calamity befalls even the noble and the powerful; where bias and miscalculation, subjective intelligence, and unintended consequence thwarts even the most provident statecraft; and finally, where regime change unleashes anarchy, insurgency, and new, more virulent despotisms more often than the freedom, pluralism, and democracy it promised.
Yet America cannot play the wise, canny, prescient agent of other peoples’ history until it assimilates the singular contingencies of its own. Until our worldview acknowledges the expropriated land, unremunerated slave labor, and centuries of British tutelage upon which our prosperity, democracy and pluralism depended — we will not escape the fatal ironies of a utopian and “unreality-based” foreign policy. In places like Iraq, we will re-create the historical bloody, lawless, internecine past we deny instead of the noble, virtuous, enlightened idea of America we cherish.
[1] The friendship Wilson and MI-6 agent Arch Cummings develop parallels that between the historical models upon which Roth based the two characters-- respectively, notorious British traitor, Kim Philby, and CIA Chief of Counter-Intelligence from ’48-’75, James Jesus Angelton (codename, “Mother”). And like Philby, Cummings turns out to be a Soviet mole.
[2] This, too, Roth invented to give the Wilson saga its tragic dimension. No historical evidence exists that a CIA mole betrayed the Bay of Pigs operation.
[3] Ambassador Wilson, remember, in a New York Times Op-ed refuted the Bush administration’s assertion that Saddam Hussein recently had tried to acquire nuclear-grade uranium in Niger. After which the Vice-President’s office retaliated by disclosing to one or more reporters that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA and had sent her husband to Africa as the Agency’s emissary.
