Pot Shards: Fragments of a Life Lived in CIA, the White House, and the Two Koreas. Donald P. Gregg
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years before.
During the rushing process, we had to go to the Garfield Club, which was composed of the men who had failed to make a fraternity. The student head of the Garfield Club was an outstanding man, a real campus leader, who had chosen not to enter a fraternity. I sought him out and told him that I had not joined a fraternity in high school and felt that the entire rushing system was bizarre, in its timing, method, and objective. I told him I intended to work for change and asked his advice as to whether I should work from outside the system, as he had, or join a fraternity and try to change it from within. He strongly advised me to take the latter course, which I did, joining Phi Delta Theta.
I majored in philosophy at Williams and am still very much influenced by the thinking of Professor John William Miller, the head of the philosophy department, who taught at Williams from 1924 to 1960. I try to live by Miller’s simple but profound definition of morality, “Never treat another human being as an object.”
Miller was also interested in people taking action and being defined by, and held responsible for, the actions they took. “Man does not have a nature, he has a history,” Miller often said. He urged his students to act upon what they believed in and to “cut behind appearance toward reality,” which I tried to do all through my years as an intelligence officer. Williams was, and remains today, a great teaching college. And Professor Miller exemplified that tradition.
My athletic career was odd, to say the least. I was six feet two-and-a-half inches tall and weighed about 180 pounds. I tried out for football and soccer, but my inexperience doomed me to failure. I was a good badminton player and started an unofficial team that lost its only match to Columbia. I made the freshman baseball team and while sitting on the bench during a game entered the interfraternity track meet that was going on right next to the baseball field. My event was the javelin throw, which, to everyone’s surprise, I won.
I was also on the informal polo team. I could ride and had a car with a ski rack to which we could attach our mallets. But I was left-handed, and there are no left-handed polo players. We would ride until October, when a local man took his polo ponies south for the winter. Then in February or March we would hear from places like Yale or Cornell asking us to come and play them. The results were one-sided, to say the least. The best I can say is that I never fell off my horse. That is the roster of my meager athletic achievements at Williams.
In 1951, the first college committee was formed to evaluate the need to change the fraternity system. The committee was named for its chairman, Professor Sterling, and I served on it, having been elected president of my fraternity. The year after I graduated, it pledged a Jewish student and was immediately kicked out of its national organization, which allowed only “Aryan” membership. Today, fraternities are long gone, women comprise half the student body, and Williams now has a far richer campus life than it did when I was there.
One of the other outstanding professors at Williams was Fred Schuman, a political scientist of some notoriety. He had been born in Europe and viewed the burgeoning tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States with great concern. In his freshman Political Science 101 course, Schuman pronounced solemnly: “I was born before World War I, survived World War II, and expect to be killed in World War III.”
Schuman’s words seemed ominously prophetic in 1948 with the imposition of the Berlin Blockade and the 1949 ascent to power of the Communist Chinese, and later with the opening of the Korean War in June 1950. President Truman’s firing of General MacArthur in the spring of 1951 split the campus down the middle, and those of us about to graduate knew we were to become working parts of a tense and uncertain world.
In the middle of my senior year, the National Security Agency approached me to see if I would like to return to Washington to work at Fort Meade. The bespectacled NSA recruiter was a bookish man in his forties, who quickly saw that cryptanalysis was of no interest to me. After a few minutes of friendly conversation, he suggested I might think about joining CIA.
I had very little understanding of what that agency did and asked what its main purpose was. He replied unforgettably, and probably with some cynicism: “Oh, they jump out of airplanes and are going to save the world!”
That one sentence led to my serving with CIA for 31 years. I doubt that many men were recruited more easily than I.
But let me say something more about the influence of my father, which was at least as strong. Dad hated war. Having served in a hospital unit of the Colorado National Guard along the Mexican border in 1916 (chasing Pancho Villa), and having gone over to France in 1918 as an infantry private, Dad had had direct experience of war and wanted nothing more to do with it.
In 1939, the first trans-Atlantic air mail service was inaugurated by Pan American Airways. Dad got a first-day cover for that flight and wrote me a letter dated May 17, 1939, that had flown back and forth across the Atlantic. In it he wrote: “Your generation will have to devise the ways whereby nations plan together in friendly, increasingly unselfish ways, how all the nations of the world may be dealt with as members of a world community. . . . Maybe that will become your goal. Lovingly, your father hopes it may.”
It is fair to say, that I have been deeply influenced by that thought and saw my work as an intelligence officer as a way of preventing greater conflicts among nations.
I was often asked, early in my career, how it was that I, the son of a YMCA officer, had joined CIA? My answer to that was that I did not see intelligence work as “a dirty business.” The most effective relations between CIA case officers and foreign agents were based not on coercion but on trust—and produced intelligence that could keep us out of miscalculations that might well otherwise lead to war.
By the end of my final college semester, I had filled out the endless CIA forms, had been interviewed secretly, and had passed the polygraph. I was ordered to report to Washington a day or two after I took my last examination at Williams and was granted leave to return to campus for the graduation ceremony in June 1951.
I graduated cum laude, with no romantic interests whatsoever. My heart had been badly bruised at the end of my junior year, and I was then truly “fancy free.”
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