His Father's Secrets

Richardson hardly knew, as a kid, if his dad had such bizarre episodes. His dad rarely talked about his work -- except in generalities, in abstractions. He learned from his father's former colleagues that he was an understated man, persistent and persuasive in his spycraft. If someone were to play his father on-screen, the son says, it would have to have been Sean Connery. His father, he says, was a low-key but charming man, the smooth dancer at diplomatic functions.

And yet he battled sadness, always had. At 14, he witnessed his father, an oilman, die. He went to high school and college in California, just behind Richard Nixon. Then his younger brother died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. His mother died of cancer in his arms.

Rather than "heroic," the son uses the word "tragic" to describe his dad. Joining the army as a battlefield translator during World War II, his father had a military career that morphed into espionage. Letters he later wrote to the family read as clinically as his cables to CIA HQ.

"At the moment, I would be inclined to feel that we should be able to avoid further crisis with respect to the Buddhist issue," he wrote from Vietnam to the wife and kids while they vacationed in the States. A dispatch from Planet Dad.

The son longed for more of the dad he didn't see. The dad he did see was the man who pressed him incessantly to be correct and responsible and patriotic and serious.

"He never taught me how to shave or 'this is how you dress.' Nothing normal," Richardson says. "He told me to read books on anti-communism."

The father would leave books on his 15-year-old son's bed "and I hated him," the son writes.

One day in Seoul, the long-haired son gets into a fight with U.S. military police. The father forces him to apologize in person to the commander of U.S. forces in South Korea.

Then, the shock and disappointment deepen. The father receives a note from military intelligence that his 16-year-old son "is a known user" of LSD. The parents and son go to a psychiatrist. It is decided the best course is for the young Richardson to go away to school. He's off to Hawaii. But things only get worse.

Acid is everywhere, and the son is dropping tab after tab and also trying to sell it. He is arrested, he writes, as he walks through a marketplace "muttering 'Acid.' " He acknowledges how warped it all was: "It would probably have been smarter not to actually be on acid at the time," he writes.

It is much too much for his father to bear. The honor of the CIA is being smeared by this scandal, he believes.

On hearing the news that young John is in a juvenile lockup in Hawaii for trying to sell drugs, the father calls in his secretary and starts to dictate a cable to HQ -- a cable of resignation. The secretary refuses. They argue. He finally gives up the idea.