His Father's Secrets

"Worst Episode of my CIA Service," the father wrote, followed by, "Why didn't I protest more?" He was talking about the Diem coup, his son writes. He could get no explanation from his father, then in failing health. The notes left more mysteries.

And other discoveries left more hurt.

An old friend of his dad's let him read letters written ages ago when the two elder men were in college. The letters contained his father's expressions of wonderment and thoughtfulness and feeling -- all the things the son always wanted from his dad but could never, ever reach.

Others knew his father in ways he could only imagine. They knew a completely different man.

"I was jealous, more than anything else," he says. "I loved that he was like that" -- like the man in the early letters. "I loved that guy. And yet that was not a guy I ever met."

Only late in his father's life did the two begin to communicate easily. The father, retired and living in Guadalajara, Mexico, seemed pleased that the son had become a writer and was making something of a success of it.

His letters seemed less and less formal; less like classified cables. The father and son were able to even talk about the divide. At one point, the son sent a chunk of an early version of his book. His father responded:

"About my being remote and vague. Part of this may have been the result of your strong rebelliousness from an early age," he writes, adding later, "We did go trout fishing once together in the Virginia Blue Ridge mountains, and remember the trip we made together from McLean to trout fishing in Maine?"

As the years wore on and his father's health wore down, the son shuttled frequently from his home in Westchester County in New York, where he lives with his wife and two daughters, to Mexico. There still was so much to know.

One day, he's sitting on his father's patio, chatting amid the bougainvillea and lemon trees. They're chatting about Vietnam, sort of. And the son decides to ask his father the big question.

"I asked him how he felt about the blood on his hands," Richardson recalls in the interview.

In the book, he writes: "I'm thinking in a general sense about Diem and the war. But he looks hurt and puzzled and doesn't answer. Later, mom gets angry at me. 'He never killed anyone or ordered anyone to be killed. You know that.' "

But he didn't know that. Not even at the very end in 1998, when his dad is dying and gasping for breath and the son is sitting on the edge of the bed. So much he would never know.