An American Requiem by James Carroll Novelist James Carroll recalls the war in Vietnam and the war with his father

...Anyone who is brought to believe, as Carroll apparently was, that the White House can give us justice and that the Vatican can give us God is sure to be as disappointed as any millenarian left upon the hilltop once his judgment day has passed...

...Little wonder, then, to learn that espionage was the family trade in which Carroll grew up, and that much of his later crisis over the authority of church and state was rooted in his own history as the son of a G-man...

...An organization man in an age of organizations, he became adept at working his way through them, charting the course that took him from the FBI to the Air Force to the Pentagon just as the cold war was turning Washington into a boom town on a scale unimagined since the Klondike gold rush...

...It would also be hard to find a better symbol of the fate of Pope John's aggiornamento than Saint Jerome's Chapel at Boston University, which Carroll undertook to "renovate" in 1969...

...James Uebbing Anyone too young or too old to enjoy pious recollections of the nineteen-sixties might be allowed to cast a cold eye upon the reverent memoirs now being put forward by those, like James Carroll, who created or were sustained by the confusions of that decade...

...An FBI agent who came through the ranks to head up the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1961, Joseph Carroll was a perfect exemplar of the virtues by which American men once measured themselves: tenacious, loyal, self-effacing, and quiet...

...There was a rotation of banners, a riot of bright cushions, all made by the kids...

...He had begun as a Chicago seminarian and persevered all the way to the eve of his ordination, when he left abruptly to marry...

...Romantic gestures as stirring and grand as this inevitably become family legends, but it would seem that the young James Carroll was struck more by his father's first ambition than his last, because in 1962 he dropped out of Georgetown to enter the Paulist novitiate in New Jersey and he was eventually ordained a priest of the order in 1969...

...Old myths die hard and almost always outlive their audience...

...That short span of years was, of course, the undoing of an entire generation of American Catholics who had sworn themselves to the religious life, and Carroll himself became one of the casualties, resigning his ministry in 1975...

...Liberation is usually conceived of as liberation from the past, but the past will always persist and organized attempts to overthrow it fail at a very high price...

...To run a vocation aground after only six years was not enough to turn heads in those days—or now—and what sets Carroll's history apart is not its direction so much as its shape...

...For history can go badly wrong, as the quick failure of Carroll's own youthful idealism demonstrates, as the nightmares of Vietnam and Cambodia ought to have made clear...

...Carroll's priesthood did not long outlive it...

...But Joe Carroll had not been predestined for the role that he eventually learned to enact...

...In that first year the pews went, and so did the altar, and so did the smoky glass....We put down a bright red carpet on which we could sit in a big circle until it was time to stand around the simple oak table a student had built...

...For Carroll, as for most of the active participants in the conflicts of that age, this consciousness is inextricably woven into his own sense of identity as it developed and mutated during those years...

...unpleasant events that arise from delusion or self-deception are tragic...

...Unpleasant events are sad...

...The power of Carroll's story is not simply nostalgic...

...For in his case the pacifist, ecumenist, and modernist enthusiasms that he picked up with increasing velocity in those years all had a sharply personal edge and ended up revolving around his father, who—as an Air Force general in some measure responsible for plotting the conduct of the war in Vietnam— became a literal object of Carroll's protests...

...I took one look around Saint Jerome's and thought, Here is where we start...

...They are certainly great stories...

...The best and most interesting memoirs generally find some other focus than the author himself, and in this case it is Carroll's father who steals the show...

...Yet this is precisely what happened...

...James Uebbing is the editor of Love Had a Compass: Journals & Poetry (Grove Press), a collection of Robert Lax's work...

...Pope John's second Pentecost and Kennedy's New Frontier were strong metaphors that energized a large part of an entire generation...

...As groovy as all this sounds, it was remarkably short-lived, since Saint Jerome's burned to the ground in a mysterious fire a few years later...

...For the myth of liberation around which that epoch revolved is still very much alive and, despite the cataclysms of 1989, still determines our historical consciousness to a very large degree...

...But when were such promises ever made...

...Throughout his career as a novelist, and most notably in The Prince of Peace, Carroll has shown a keen sensitivity to the metaphors contained within historical events...

...It would be hard to find a clearer— indeed, a more novelistic—image of the civil strife that raged through this country over the war than that of Carroll the young seminarian standing in the midst of an antiwar demonstration at the Pentagon, terrified that his father would see and recognize him from his office...

...For Carroll the process is quite the reverse: his characters are very much at the mercy of their world rather than in control of it, and they seem to suffer as much from a consciousness, however dim, that they are pawns in some monstrous relentless game as from their more particular and immediate misfortunes...

...True, his descriptions of the rallies and the manifestos and the new ideologies themselves—Hans Kung is described at some point as "our Elvis"—make depressing reading today...

...It could well be argued that, as far as mythologies are concerned, we have made only small progress since then...

...Still, it is possible to catch a glimpse of the brave new world that Carroll and his friends imagined lying just over the crest of the hill, and it would be hard not to be stirred by such a vision of the new age—which is as old as time itself and never completely illusory...

...It is no surprise that, like all metaphors, they became at once meaningless and cruel when read as literal prophecies...

...This is not history in the grand manner, a la Gore Vidal, wherein the public conflicts that create and change societies are traced in their origins to the petty spites of a few overbearing men...

...The real difficulty with Carroll's account of these events—the estrangement from his father as well as the failure of his priesthood—is that he seems to misjudge their nature, which is essentially tragic...

...That is why he makes such a good specimen of this type...

...If as a seminarian Carroll truly came to believe that the doctrines of Christ demand "Trust in this life, this process, this history, wherever it takes you," then the subsequent history of his vocation must be looked at in a very different light than he would shine upon it himself...

...They are not merely sad...

...These failures, such as the failures Carroll describes for us, can be a great reminder for us all...

...There is a suggestion of Graham Greene in this approach—although Carroll lacks Greene's subtlety and possesses a far less arresting imagination— which is well-suited to spy novels, thrillers, and other narratives that operate through the gradual revelation of some hidden controlling power...