The Rise & Fall of the American Phoenix / Song of Saigon

Joe Stalin had recently died, probably poisoned by his own doctor. He had been one of the most terrible leaders in all history. For many years he had enslaved and murdered his people. He had left them in a situation which would make them miserable for many more years, and could possibly destroy them. He had created the Cold War. Joe McCarthy was a senator making a living with Stalin’s creation. He had gained power by indiscriminately accusing people of being communists and was destroying careers and lives in Washington, D.C. where I lived.

But Joe didn’t care. He was addicted to accusations and booze. Both Joes would go down in history as jerks, dad said.

His words woke me from my childhood. My life would not be spent in a neighborhood of prosperous nations as I had believed while living in Belgium and in the Philippines. Instead, we would be involved in a long and miserable war because of some boneheads and their stupid followers.

At that moment, it seemed that my duties and aspirations became one. I would seek to free people from bad leaders through knowledge and relationships, and I would work for a community of wise and prosperous nations.

From years of dinner-table lectures by my father, I concluded that this would be the right thing to do. Trying to become president didn’t seem to be the answer, for Eisenhower appeared to be afraid of McCarthy. Dad said they didn’t talk to each other, even though they went to the same Republican parties. Perhaps it would be better if I tried it as an artist; that way I wouldn’t have to be polite to so many bores. I sat by the pool and cried with the deep and fleeting sorrow of an eight-year-old.

Feeling better, I went inside for dinner. *** Dad had been born into a New York City aristocrat’s family which had derived some its fortune during the robber baron days with commercial compressed gas cylinders and, more recently, on Wall Street. His parents had bitterly divorced when he was a child, and he had grown up mostly under his mother’s wing. He attended all the “right” schools and served honorably in the cavalry and air force during World War II. His mother, Katherine, inclined toward utopianism and had influenced my father to enter the State Department. There, she felt, he could render a greater service to making than just “grubbing for filthy money on Wall Street.” Though she and my mother were titanic rivals for my father’s attention, they both entered into supporting his career with gusto, and all three set their hearts upon making the world a better place.

With postings in Belgium during the great Marshall Plan, and in the Philippines during the Huk’s Rebellion, Dad was well on track to an ambassadorship when he arrived in Vietnam. Now my older brother and I were finally on our way to join him and my mother there. ** * It was early June, 1958. Cumulonimbus clouds stretched to the unseen horizon for an eternity, a blinding white sea of angry cotton inside a cerulean blue and white bubble. The endless drum of the plane’s four huge super-charged radial engines had long ago sapped any sensation from my tired body, and the blur of the propellers outside my window drained all thoughts from my mind.

Suddenly, the pilot announced our descent. Ramsay and I exchanged knowing glances; our dangerous assignment would soon be over! Four days previously we had left the expensive, sophisticated, and very strict “old world” schools Fay and St. Marks in Southborough, Massachusetts with worried and extremely serious instructions to fly half way around the world to Southeast Asia without attracting absolutely anyone’s attention.

Fay had been my first lonely year in a boarding school. I had been virtually lost there, though I had enjoyed making model airplanes and playing in the school band. And I had noticed that music in my country was made more for profit than for Art’s sake. I had heard great music and concerts in Europe during its rebuilding, concerts for audiences that arrived broken and hopeless, and left crying, reborn, and profoundly inspired to rebuild their countries and never, never create another world war such as those by which they had almost destroyed themselves in the previous two. Fay, on the other hand, shamelessly used us cute musicians to play vigorous and charming happy-music from the adolescence times of old alumni as the key to persuading them to give cultural support and lots of money to the school. We musicians liked the genuine appreciations and special considerations this brought us from our masters, and we became good at this rude game.