It's no wonder, as Risen points out, that many folks would later call him "Senator Cathedral" behind his back, seeing in him a sacrosanctimoniusness that later Kissinger "realists" would recoil at and seek to undermine for the sake of blessed "national security." Often really meaning, as Church would unveil, ka-ching-a-ling-a-ding-dong-ding illicitly obtained, such as with the CIA thugs who enforced for ITT, in Chile, and took out Salvadore "Whatshisname" Allende's socialist government and replaced it with Pinochet's fascism.
Part One has more than a couple of notable narrative flying buttresses and rose windows. One I liked was his growing amorous relationship with Bethine Clark, the daughter of Idaho's former Democratic governor, Chase Clark. Risen writes of their lifelong relationship,
To a remarkable degree for teenagers, Frank and Bethine were attracted to each other on an intellectual level; they shared a thirst for knowledge and an interest in history, current events, and politics that shaped their friendship long before they began to date.
Bethine, a political agency in her own right, propels Frank's career, and helps get him over the rough patches of Senatorial resistance to his Mr. Deeds "act," as well as his lifelong battle with cancer, to which he finally succumbed in January 1984. Bethine was his confidante and political strategist. During their courting years, while he was stationed overseas as a military intelligence analyst at the close of WW2, he expressed in a letter his worries about the reaction of the drop of the Bomb among his fellow GIs. Risen writes:
"I am fearful that the United States is about to launch itself into a program of unprecedented imperialism," Church wrote Bethine after the Japanese surrendered".
"With few exceptions indeed, people I meet over here speak elatedly of the atomic bomb," he wrote in another letter to her.
The other bit that was an amusing revelation was that Church was an Army intelligence officer, stationed at Camp Ritchie, not far from Camp David. And:
While Church was there being trained as an analyst, Camp Ritchie was also the secret training center for a unique group of immigrants and Jewish refugees whom the Army had selected for intelligence work against the Nazis. Now famous as "the Ritchie Boys," they used their native fluency in the language and culture of Germany to interrogate prisoners and defectors, as well as to conduct other spy missions.
That's right Church trained with the real deal Inglorious Basterds of Tarantino fame. Areeverdeechy! Nazi schweinhunden! What chance did the CIA have against such later Senate committee righteousness?
Risen paints a nice picture in Part One. It's a mid-America I didn't really know. I only passed through the place back in the 70s when Greyhound had a $99-for-30-days promotion on, and I may have eaten at a roadside diner in Twin Falls, pie ala mode and coffee (was that Tom Waits over there, with that 'closing time' look on his puss; and rin another both Jack Nicholon was tellingthe wiatress to hold the sandwich between her knees; geez, I laughed). I couldn't picture Idahoans in their domestic tranquilities, but when I did it was dark, and I couldn't wait to cross the line into Big Sky country, Montana, home of Mama Missoula. It was years before I thought about Idaho again. In Maryland, I took a girl I liked to a movie in Silver Spring; it was My Own Private Idaho, which apparently was some kind of symbolic gay coming-out film. Later, my ultra feminist culture instructor at UMass, who'd jump the fence in a heartbeat to get to you, would claim that the Bard himself was a homosexual. Eyes challenging me. I may have let out a small scream at this provocation. No, I stayed on the bus, thumbing through my Erich Fromm, Anatomy of, I think, or was it Escape from.
Part Two of The Last Honest Man is devoted to the year 1975, the year of Church Committee Hearings, and is by now fairly familiar terrain to any lefty who grew up through the 60s and 70s. Many of us have longed to understand how JFK could be murdered, followed by his alleged murderer, Oswald, and for there to be so little satisfactory answers for the death decades later. Overnight, many Americans suspected an "inside" job, with the CIA the leading suspect in their minds. We became a nation of real honest-to-goodness conspiracy theorists. Even the first phone call Bobby Kennedy made after hearing of his brother's demise in Dallas was to call the CIA and ask if they had done it, according to Robert Kennedy, Jr., now running for president himself. Probably, Malcolm X was closest to the Truth when asked what he thought of the JFK assassination: "Looks like the chickens came home to roost." Even Dylan took some sh*t when he got up to accept the comfortably left Emergency Civil Liberties Committee's annual Tom Paine award in 1963 and offered up that he could kinda relate to where Lee Harvey Oswald was coming from. (Hisses! From the Left!)
Risen succinctly frames the Church credo:
Church saw the committee's task as to act as a kind of constitutional convention, debating the proper balance between national security and civil liberties.
What Church discovered and revealed was that the CIA, his bailiwick (Walter Mondale had been given his own sub-committee to look into the FBI), had become, as the famous 1961 Schlesinger Memo to JFK, following the failed Bay of Pigs, had implied, a virtual parallel government and operated by its own rules, disdainful of elected officials and refusing to be held accountable for its covert deeds. Kennedy had wanted to 'scatter the Agency to the winds,' feeling that they made diplomacy far more difficult than it had to be by going unauthorized on missions and operations that had shown over the years failure.
But Church was especially upset by the pursuit of presidents who used the CIA to assassinate foreign leaders under the rubric of 'national security'. Risen writes:
CIA assassination plots that revealed a long pattern of criminality in American national security policy that had never been fully disclosed or curbed. The CIA plots targeted Patrice Lumumba in Congo; Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam; Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic; and General Rene Schneider in Chile, and combined, took place over four consecutive presidential administrations Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. The horrific stories disclosed by the committee's investigations of the four cases confirmed Frank Church's belief that the United States was not always a force for good in the world, and that the rise of an unaccountable and permanent national-security state was perverting American foreign policy.
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