Correspondence
Correspondence I'VE BEEN GOOD TO HER DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN's 1993 statement to the Boston Globe in which she alleges that I under-cited her work is not only regrettable, but erroneous. As...
...Is it possible that Hanssen was simply very adept at living different sides of his life selectively, presenting himself in different ways according to his audience...
...At best, her criticism was disingenuous...
...Self-absorption and denial are, alas, too powerful...
...Torres also chides the FBI and others for not recognizing in Hanssen signs betraying a troubled personality...
...In the Marin County area, parents place a very high value on raising "open-minded" children...
...JOE MCGINNISS Williamstown, MA FAMILY VALUES HARRY STEIN's "How the Father Figures" (Jan...
...It has always seemed to me that her later comments about the book constituted one of the duties she was expected to perform as a member of the Kennedy extended family...
...one paragraph is extremely unfair, however, in a way that ought to be addressed...
...To criticize the priest's penance on Hanssen's say-so is to take a double agent's word at face value, and to assume that a highly trained priest with a deeply moral spirituality shrugged off a sin of almost Judas-like severity...
...Death" because of his dour demeanor...
...MarkMallah San Francisco, CA JUSTIN TORRES's piece on Robert Hanssen was a thoughtful review of a number of books on the subject, and he raises some interesting questions: above all, "how could someone lead a double life of the sort that Hanssen did...
...The Last Brother is not—nor have I ever suggested that it was—a biography of Edward Kennedy...
...He uses the same rhetoric the Left uses to decry tax cuts...
...Double agents from Cuban intelligence routed the CIA in the 1980s by passing polygraphs...
...In the same way, Pope John Paul II (for whom they have great affection) is an acute critic of some aspects of modern thought, though he has drawn a great deal from it...
...We realized that our children needed an anchor, a bedrock belief system, and concrete guidance more than they needed to be "open-minded...
...Perhaps if the parents had had more input rather than allowing him to drift without an anchor, they would not be facing such heartache and their son would not be facing life in prison or worse...
...Is it possible that Hanssen acted differently at work and at spiritual formation activities...
...Trying to identify an actual spy from within a population who "failed" their polygraphs, if he "failed," renders such a screening exercise impracticable...
...The quotations begin on page 133, where I attribute the first to "family biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin," and continue with attributions like "as Kearns Goodwin has described," and "Kearns Goodwin has written...
...Only the priest and Hanssen know what the penance given in that confessional was...
...crops...
...therefore Hanssen was never given a polygraph test...
...I believe Marilyn Walker and John Lindh love their son, but they did not give him the next most important lesson in his upbringing...
...As documented by Bo Crader, Goodwin said at the time that "[McGinniss] just uses it flat out, without saying that it came from my work" ("A Historian and Her Sources," Jan...
...Although I dislike the bill for other reasons, I think Barnes's rationale for opposing it, as outlined in his editorial, is flawed...
...There would be plenty of time for flexibility later, but growing up they needed standards, rules, and guidance...
...Nearly two years later, the FBI gave me a grudging exoneration...
...solely as a result of the polygraph, the FBI falsely accused me of espionage...
...CHRISTOPHER WOLFE Marquette University Milwaukee, WI FARMER BARNES I GENERALLY ENJOY Fred Barnes's commentary in The Weekly Standard...
...The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys was an invaluable source, as I stated in an author's note (published in the original edition of the book, not added later): "Moreover, in almost every instance, the quotations and other facts that form the basis of my interpretations have been drawn from published sources that I believe to be reliable...
...She met with me personally to offer suggestions and advice...
...My career undermined, I resigned immediately...
...In addition, many of the facts she relates reside in the public domain...
...I would add—because although Goodwin now says, "I didn't mean it as harshly as it sounded," she has not acknowledged that her complaint about my work was essentially baseless—that I quote from her repeatedly in my text, in each case placing quotation marks around the words used, and crediting her as the source...
...Since they were going to absorb someone's values, we preferred they absorb ours...
...Naturally, this involved treatment of his parents, his siblings, his childhood, adolescence, and manhood before John F. Kennedy became president...
...There's no reason to impute a fault to members of opus Dei that Torres acknowledges goes directly contrary to its spirit...
...Her work was by no means my only source, as I used the archives of the Boston Globe and other material, none of it dependent on Goodwin's work, gathered by two research assistants I employed...
...However, I find surprising his arguments against the new farm bill ("Farmer Daschle," Jan...
...This is of course easier in hindsight, although the FBI's failure to act on his brother-in-law's information was egregious...
...For example (as should be apparent to any attentive reader), in the section of the book that deals with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, I have relied heavily upon the factual account presented in The Death of a President, the book written by historian William Manchester . . . Likewise, for other sections, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys by Doris Kearns Goodwin . . . [was] especially helpful...
...That sounds an awful lot like "Two-thirds of all tax cuts go to the wealthiest 10 percent of all taxpayers...
...A massive investigation ensued—24-hour surveillance by car and airplane, lengthy interrogations of my family, a consent search of my home, and other intrusions into my life...
...Nevertheless, I do not wish to see national security hinge on the perceptiveness of those in contact with people accessing classified information...
...It then questions the prudence of the priest and calls his instructions to the penitent "laughably naive...
...Belief in the polygraph has been a costly delusion...
...The way he chose has rigid rules for every aspect of life...
...I respect and admire Doris Kearns Goodwin and her work...
...One problem: As the article mentions, a Catholic priest "cannot reveal the contents of the confessional...
...Though I am affiliated in no way with the organization, I admire it and am impressed with the sensitivity and respect with which Justin Torres treats it...
...Talk about naive...
...Torres reports that Robert Hanssen confessed espionage to an opus Dei priest and was given a light penance...
...My children, who are not much older than John Walker Lindh, both read The Autobiography of Malcolm X in high school, but neither of them left their Catholic high school to pursue an alternative education...
...Only Hanssen can say anything about it...
...Both of my children have traveled extensively on their own and with my husband and me and have learned other languages...
...28) is an excellent account of John Walker Lindh's upbringing in Marin County, California, and his father's part in his transformation into an Islamic extremist...
...ANNE GOMES Guatemala City, Guatemala I Spy IT WAS A PLEASURE TO READ a more balanced portrayal of the Catholic organization opus Dei than one usually gets ("The Spy Who Went to Mass," Jan...
...I fully agree with her about the need to "credit the source," and in The Last Brother, I credited her repeatedly...
...It is fundamentally dependent on trickery, easily defeated by coun-termeasures in which we should expect any spy to be practiced...
...One might with more justification investigate all those who "passed" the polygraph, since a spy is more likely to appear in that group...
...Larry Wu Tai Chin, a convicted spy formerly with the CIA, passed his polygraph...
...While I do not have the figures, I would bet that the wealthiest 10 percent of farmers produce somewhere around two-thirds of all u.s...
...Nor, unlike Doris, do I consider myself a historian...
...Citing the books, Torres points to an arrogant FBI culture that could not believe one of its own could go bad...
...She was extremely gracious and helpful to me during the period when I was doing research for The Last Brother...
...Aldrich Ames passed his CIA polygraphs with primitive countermeasures...
...Its members did not recognize Hanssen's "torment," he says, because they "do not fully fit in this world" and are too concerned with converting others to learn from them, e.g., from the FBI people who referred to Hanssen as "Dr...
...Torres and the authors he reviews equate conducting polygraphs with national security...
...Nonetheless, I don't believe anyone could read The Last Brother without being aware of my oft-acknowledged debt to her...
...We know he did that well—he fooled just about everybody...
...But should people in opus Dei go around asking people outside the Work, such as Hanssen's professional colleagues at the FBI, how other members act...
...It's unfortunate that, after a very accurate account of opus Dei early in the article, Torres ends by criticizing it...
...What the Russians understand that we don't is that the best way to catch a spy is to recruit one from the other side...
...Not only possible, but likely...
...Some of my conversations with Californians have led me to believe they think that is more important than anything else...
...of course not...
...TOM HOOPES Executive Editor National Catholic Register North Haven, CT JUSTIN TORRES is partially off the mark in his review of three recent books on the spy Robert Hanssen...
...John Walker Lindh was searching for stability, a belief system, and his parents left him adrift to find his own way...
...However, Stein did not mention one very important factor in raising children...
...To assume that there must be some connection between Hanssen's faults and his involvement with Opus Dei is neither warranted nor fair...
...Two-thirds of the subsidies go to 10 percent of America's farmers...
...Rather, my book is an interpretation of the arc of Edward Kennedy's public life in the 1960s...
...Tom Reeves Montevideo, MN...
...People in Opus Dei, like everyone else, recognize both good and bad in the world, and are happy to learn from others...
...A polygraph has never caught a spy...
...I was an FBI agent from 1987-96, working in foreign counterintelligence for much of that time (I never met Hanssen...
...Because my work was sensitive, I was given a routine polygraph, as were many of my colleagues...
...After an undergraduate education in the University of California system, my husband and I left California...
Vol. 7 • February 2002 • No. 22
