MY FATHER'S SECRET WAR
The story of a remote silent man who kept his breathtaking past and his real character a carefully guarded secret - until the day his daughter found out who he really was. A World War Two Spy Memoir.
About the Book
Questions for Dan Rather - program on My Father’s Secret War at Museum of Jewish Heritage – March 14, 2007
Bob and I in Vermont by a shack.
When I was a child, I thought I was the luckiest girl in the neighborhood. Daddy and I were inseparable. We chased butterflies with big green nets he made himself, we rode bikes with no hands, he taught me how to shoot pineapple juice cans off the back steps with a little pistol. I remember being hoisted up in his arms and the soft feel of his cashmere suits. I had a game, he would look away and I would steal the white hankie out of his pocket. Each night he brought me glasses of water and I would lie awake at night waiting for his long shadow in the doorway, he bought me a big telescope and we would peer cheek to cheek at all the constellations in the sky, waiting for our favorite, the mighty Orion, to appear.
He was a perfect gentleman, from a morally upright family in a small town in Illinois he was a prodigy in his chemical enginering classes at the Univesity of Illinois and was snapped up by a leading company as soon as he graduated. He was the wunderkind of general alloys, a small specialized steel company and his future looked very bright
but when I came of age, he grew silent and withdrawn. He treated me like he treated all adults. He wouldn’t talk to me about personal things, and especially not feelings.
He remained this way throughout my adulthood, I never could get through to him. Then my mother got cancer and he was a loyal husband, nursing her through her long illness, but after she died, the company he was supposed to inherit from the owner went belly up. I think this broke what was left of him after the war.
He was a fiercely independent man but paradoxically when I was still in my twenties he had given up. He wouldn’t get another job – it was hard because he was past 60 – and he began to count on me to support him. This actually wasn’t a problem at first because I was living in London and worked for United Press International. The boys in the bureau would buy me dinner and I lived in a cheap apartment so I had money to spare. But when I returned to New York to work at the New York Times, mailing him half of my paycheck really hurt. My friends were dancing their way through their youth, but they did it without me, because I was dirt poor – I hated rain because the water would seep through the holes in my boots.
I came to regard my father as a lost cause. I loved him, or at least I loved the memory of him in my childhood, but he was a complete mystery to me and I thought he probably always would be. When we were together we couldn’t find anything to say to each other and I resented that our roles were reversed. I wanted to be able to turn to my parent in a crisis but that was hard when all the crises were his.
Amy and I, age 4 in our farm in Hudson Valley.
He was in his eighties and sharp as ever but he couldn’t seem to take care of himself I was always bailing him out. One day I got an eviction notice – he was about to be kicked out of his apartment which the landlord said was an eyesore and a fire hazard.
So I took my little daughter amy – he adored her – and drove to his home in Milfor Massachusetts at about 80 miles an hour. I knew I had to rescue him from himself as I had so many times. The apartment was a mess. Amy found weevils in all the cereal and the only place you could put your feet was in a narrow pathway bounded by teetering piles of storage cartons. They contained the remnants of three generations of ancestors which we had packed up when we sold our childhood home many years before. He hadn’t opened one of them.
So I started in on the cartons – boring stuff, torn t-shirts, yellowed silk doilies, mostly old correspondence and files that I was rapidly chucking into a garbage back. And then, there, beneath the files, I saw a box sealed with duct tape. Dad was busy playing with Amy’s pet rats which she had brought with her, and so I surreptiously peeled away the duct tape and opened the box.
Inside were some tiny cracked negatives of ships and military installations, andunder that was an old silk map whose street names were smeared. Then there was a bunch of foreign coins, an old receipt fromn a café in Gutenborg Sweden, an innocent looking button that when opened, revealed a secret compass inside. And then, beneath it all, I pulled out what appeared to be a Nazi cap. It sloped down from the front and had a black brim and above that, a skull and crossbones topped by a swastika. I sat there staring at it dumbfounded.
III.) What did you think all this was? What it meant?
I remember the my hands growing cold, sweaty. My immediate fear was that the big mystery about my father was not a good one. I thought that maybe he had been a closet Nazi during WWII.
Over the next year, I asked him over and over about the Gestapo cap but even then, in his eighties, my father was a very smart, very stubborn man. He would always make excuses. “I’ll tell you some other time”, he would say, but I knew some other time would never come.
IV.) Was he a Nazi?
Josh, age 4 with his "Granpop"
No. I dismissed that possibility as absurd fairly quickly. You see, all his life he had inculcated me with a love of Israel. When I became an adolescent hippy, and argued self righteously for the rights of the Palestinians , he would just get this very sad look on his face and say cryptically, “Cindy, you don’t know what youre talking bout. You just don’t know what the the Jews have been through.”
But what finding these artifacts did was launch me on a search for the truth about Dad. Once I started I couldn’t stop.
First thing I did was to tell his former business partner and best friend about what I’d found and amazingly, he wasn’t surprised. He told me a story that seemed to thicken the plot. My father had always been a perfect gentleman, never raised his fists at anyone, but one day he suddenly flew through the air and decked a man sitting behind him in a restaurant. He was 75 years old and the man was half his age, but he had him pinned to the ground and had his thumb pressed into the man’s carotid artery. He was using silent killing techniques so ingrained in him that they had to have come back to him fifty years later in a burst of adrenaline. His friend got him home and Dad broke down and said that the man had been making anti-Semitic remarks and it had brought back the horrors he had experienced when he went into Ohdruf, the first concentration camp liberated by the Americans. He had gone there as a spy for the supreme commander of the Allied Forces, Gen Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Eisenhower had refused to visit Ohrdruf, which was located in Germany, on the grounds he was too busy . The fact was that like a lot of American military brass, he just didnt’t believe what he was hearing so he wanted reliable objective eyewitnesses to write a report just for him. After he got my Dad’s report, he decided to come and visit the camp. It was an entire week later and the American troops had left the camp just as they had found it, stacks of bodies and all.. When Eisenhower saw what was inside, he turned ashen white and General Patton, who was with him, went round the corner and vomited.
Lucinda and father 18 months before he died.
I could get nowhere with him, he kept insisting he could not talk about it. It was my husband, Bob Morgenthau who did. Bob persuaded him that there were growing numbers of people who were denying that the Holocaust ever happened and that the Museum of Jewish Heritage was taking testimony from survivors and witnesses of camps before it was too late.. They particularly needed non-Jewish people who had no vested interest in telling exactly what they had seen.
It took Bob months working on him, convincing him that everything about the horrors of the Holocaust had been made public and he wouldn’t be betraying anything.
Of course, my Dad must have known this, but I think the real reason he didn’t want to talk is that all his life he had repressed his feelings about witnessing the camps. Those feelings burst through his unconscious when he attacked the man in the bar and I think he was afraid he would break down again in front of the camera.
Of course, I was hoping that he would do just that. My father never showed any sign of emotion, He was impenetrable. The house could be in flames and he would do what had to be done, but without so much as a flinch. In fact, just before he left me and went into the recording room at the Museum, I told him that it was okay if he cried on camera because it would be more effective when this testimony was used some day against the claims of the Holocaust deniers. He looked at me hard and said, “That’s exactly what I’m afraid of. If I start, I’ll never stop”.
VI.) You know, why don’t we just look at some of that testimony that he gave to the Museum
VII.) What was the effect on him of seeing the concentration camp, I mean in terms of how it impacted his life?
He never got over it.
VIII.) What do you mean by that, exactly?
I mean he came back from the war a changed man. The reason I know this is true is that when I was sorting out all the cartons piled in his apartment, I also found cache of letters that he had written my mother early on in the war when he was stationed in the Pacific. I couldn’t believe the tenor of the man who wrote these richly descriptive tomes full of brio and passionate endearments. This was a very human individual far from the stoic I grew up with. He complained about how his feet hurt running up and down the hard packed hills, he adopted a giant lizard, named him Oscar and carried him around on his shoulder. So I searched out people who had known him before the war, navy buddies and friends of my parents, as well as who knew him afterwards and they confirmed that he went from being a carefree fun-loving humorist who loved life to a dour man who did not take much joy in it.
Photo of my father and Amy, who he called his "little princess." He had just given her the feather boa. It was taken in his kitchen.
IX.) Was there more than just the witnessing of the camps behind his change? For instance, did you find out what the Nazi cap and the silk map and things were all about?
Yes, he finally admitted that he had been a spy, a secret agent detached to naval intelligence and the OSS – that was Wild Bill Donovon’s swashbuckling intelligence organization that preceeded the CIA and helped win the war in Europe.
The Nazi cap turned out to have been part of a disguise he wore when he was attached to the French Resistance and broke into an SS office to steal the names of people who were on a death list. He admitted to blowing up ammunition dumps, he armed the Maquis and taught them how to use their guns, and to my dismay, he apparantly carried out several assassinations.
It took several years to get the details out of him. I have to admit I used every reporters trick in the book to get him to talk about his many spy operations
X.) – What possible reason did he have for not talking? After all the war has been over for half a century and everything has been declassified, made public.
He took an oath of silence, imposed by the American military. He wrote one handwritten report for all his missions, submitted it to his handler, and that report was never to be duplicated. In those days, people took their commitments seriously. It was a different age. Besides, the oaths were often accompanied by threats. Even the women who worked the assembly line in a factory making a machine to break the Japanese code were told that if they ever talked about what they had done, for the rest of their lives, they would be shot and killed. This is documented.
Others feared retaliation by the relatives of people they had killed in cold blood.
Still more were responsible for the deaths of scores of innocent people. In the small towns in the German-occupied countries, for instance, the sabotage of trains carrying troops or the assassination of a German soldier would bring horrifying reprisals – for every German killed, the SS chief would have 10 innocent women and children grabbed and typically have them shot before he had his breakfast. That’s a lot of innocent blood on a young American solder’s hands.
You know, Dan, people think everything about the war has been made public, but that is not true at all. I went through the national archives and other historical repositories and crucial documents had been pulled, in fact the researchers admitted that most controversial operations had NOT been declassified, no matter what the intelligence organizations claimed.
Researchers told me that my quest to find recorded details about my father’s spy activities was fruitless and they proved right. I finally had to resort to gathering circumstantial evidence that actually pretty strongly backed up his claims about his spy activities.
XI.) Why was he chosen as a spy?. What qualifications did he have?
He was a chemical engineer of considerable talent, he was a crack marksman, he spoke fluent German, and he had nerves of steel and a completely deadpan demeanor. He had so many talents, lepidopterist, astronomer, tournament bridge player, expert fisherman, pool shark. He could have posed as anyone and never given himself away. My husband said that if he had been the navy brass, he would have plucked my father out of the crowd in a minute.
XII.) – If he had to put on so many different personalities, what was his real personality behind the facades. Was he able to retain a defined one?
No. He did retain his unflinching character – he was noble, chilvalrous, brave, tender with his children and grandchildren, very empathetic with people in trouble. But as for his personality, he didn’t really have one. He was like a blank wall.
There was perhaps only one person with which he could be real. As I turned over the hidden pages of his life, I discovered that not only had he been a spy during the war, but he maintained a double life in peacetime. In essence he had a second family. From the time he came back from the war until he died, the real love of his life was a woman poet named Pat who had two boys whom he helped raise like a father. When I first found out about his mistress I was distraught but in time I came to realize that she accepted him as he was, not as he used to be before the war. She turned out to be the real love of his life. And he told her much more than he had told anyone about what he did as a secret agent.
Josh, Amy, Bob and I. Josh was about 20 then and Amy 14.
XIII.) What effect did this whole experience of getting to know the man behind the mystery have on your relationship?
It radically altered it. The hours we sat and talked about the war, we grew close. We at last had something personal to talk about. After he finally decided to talk, he drank up my attention. Our interviews were the closest to a conversation we had had in years. We listened to his favorite ragtime player, Knuckles O’Toole and we laughed and I began to look up to him. I felt like a daughter again, in a way I felt like I was reentering my childhood. I began to fall in love with him all over again.
It was a matter of redemption, for both of us.
I came to realize he was not a failure, but a hero who sacrified himself as surely as if he had given his life to his country. It explained my childhood to me in a different way, his arid parenting hadn’t been about me at all. I began to understand why he had shut himself off from his loved ones, I regained faith in him. And then, in turn, I regained it in myself.
XIV.) Is there something universal about the story you tell?. After all, your story is very specific. Every family has secrets but not everyone turns up such dramatic ones.
I think the one thing I hear more than anything else from people who have read the book is is the words “I cant tell you how much your dad was like my dad.”
I think that in writing about my journey with my father, I realized something that hadnt quite been explored about the greatest generation.
But this so called good brave war had terrible costs and ramifications that rebounded on everyone close to those who fought it., My father was traumatized by WWII and it lasted a lifetime. It destroyed his marriage, it destroyed his family. The scars of the greatest generation were visited upon their children and they have carried that around their whole lives.
People who have read the book often tell me their own stories. About how they were never able to get through to their closed parents, how they wanted to know them better, how they felt that things were left unsaid, secrets untold. Many of them say they are going to try to break through the façade and find out more about their family’s past.
And then there’s the issue of how hard it is to become a parent to your own parent, that is a universal issue we are all facing. But there’s something poignant about this when it happens, when a parent becomes dependent on you, as my father did on me, you get to know them in a way you havent before, you see them as people, needy people yes, but people who are somehow ready to talk, ready to tell about their own fascinating histories.
by Dick Donahue, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 2/5/2007
PW: What accounts for the public’s current fascination with memoirs? LF:Ihad a couple of people tell me afterIhad written the book,Iam really jealous of you.Ilooked at them like they were slightly loony, because it had been 10 years of mostly torture, getting the story out of my father and then trying to get it down on paper. They were jealous, they said, because they had always hoped and fantasized, somewhere, that their parents would turn out to be more interesting than they really were.Ithink people want to climb into other people’s lives—see what they can identify with, what lessons they can take away.
PW: WildApples, your 1991 novel, received favorable reviews. Why didn't you continue writing novels? LF: After WildApplesIraised my two children, andIwrote a lot of shorter things, for the New York Times Magazine, the Book Review, the New Yorker and other places. Also,IthinkIhad been trying to write about my father for a long time since then—to solve the mystery that he was. Many of the attributes of the mother in WildApples came from my own mother;Ithink after thatIhad turned to my father and didn’t know it.Istarted a couple of novels in which all of his habits, his looks, his little tics, just shouted out at me whenIlooked at them again.Ijust didn’t know how to write about him, and thenIfound this accidental incident that put me on the path to a real story—a journalistic story that was obviously not going to be a fiction.
PW: How did you get your father to divulge his secret—the fact that he did undercover work during World War II? LF:Ihad to catch him off-guard, and there were two basic waysIdid it: through food and through knowing more than he did.Igot his military records and figured out where he was when. AndIread up in as many books asIcould find about certain events in the war. That wayIcould take the opportunity to slip in something that would get him talking—without him realizing that he was divulging secrets that he had kept all those years. At one pointImade him think thatIknew about an incident that happened in a French town in 1945, and if he clammed up I’d offer him some apple brown betty—one of his favorite foods—if he’d keep talking.
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