D.B.A.
The Evolution of David Brooks Arnold
From child piano prodigy to Foreign Service Officer, Vietnam whistleblower, refugee repatriator, husband, father, gay lover, adoptive partner, and AIDS activist, DBA traces, in vignette style, the life arc of an extraordinary man through some of the most transformative times in modern American history.
— To the marriage of true minds —
Turning Points
David Brooks Arnold sat down for pie.
Surveying the table-top tableau that Ato, their quirky Vietnamese house girl, had set before him and Diane, his wife, it occurred to David that Ato always placed their pie slices pointing ‘away’ from them, rather than ‘at’ them, which, to him, seemed the more natural configuration.
A rookie Foreign Service officer assigned to the “Kennedy Build-up” in South Vietnam and ever keen to the telling detail, David finally asked Ato whether this arrangement reflected a Vietnamese custom, a personal predilection, or merely unconscious habit.
Ato explained the general Asian belief that evil spirits can lurk in corners — any corner — so she always made sure to set the pie points facing ‘upward’ and thus ‘away’ from their would-be targets.
Filtering the scene through this new light, David pondered aloud whether Ato’s protective instincts had inadvertently placed husband and wife in opposing lines of paranormal pie fire.
Aghast at the insight, Ato lurched over the table, flicked each slice awry, and begged the couple’s forgiveness.
It was spring 1962.
Testimonial
He looked every bit the anglophile: The crisp, three-piece suit with fancy-patterned vest and dangling watch chain, tailored to an angular, six-foot-four frame; the near-bald pate, groomed to microscopic silver; the forceful eyes set squarely over sunken cheeks; the fulsome mustache resting cat-like on a droll lip. He was Big Ben incarnate.
He’d arrived to take part in a panel discussion marking World AIDS Day 2002, the theme of which was to help reduce the stigma surrounding HIV and AIDS by fostering more open dialogue about them. The global AIDS pandemic was at its peak, having reached the official status of “national and global security threat” for its potential to decimate societies and, in its wake, leave failed states exposed to exploitation by terrorist organizations of the kind that had struck American soil so profoundly the year before.
He represented the International AIDS Trust, whose president, Sandra Thurman, had been President Bill Clinton’s AIDS “czar.” Now that Clinton was out of office, Thurman sought to refashion her former high station into an equally prominent, non-profit role. Unimpressed by the occasion, she’d passed this chore on to her own ‘Special Assistant to the President’ to handle in her stead.
I went over to introduce myself as he filed his long grey coat.
“David Brooks Arnold,” he perked with a chumminess that mismatched his physical bearing and therefore was equally striking. Shaking his ample, seasoned hand, I wondered why he was the assistant.
He nestled his imposing frame into his chair at the mahogany conference table, fielding glances from all around. Though silent for most of the two-hour talk, he drew rapt attention when he finally spoke by way of summation.
I’ve known myself to be HIV-positive since the first reliable test appeared in 1985. My then-partner, Jim, also diagnosed positive at the same time, died in 1990. I am among the two percent of those diagnosed positive in whom the disease has not progressed, to the continuing perplexity of the medical profession.
But as one who has survived, I have resolved to enable others to survive — those not yet affected, so that they may know very clearly, from someone who did not know at the time, what can be done to prevent infection; and those already affected, so they may know that their lives are not necessarily over and that I’d like some company in conveying my message.
Simpatico
I got to know him thereafter over the occasional lunch and at various social gatherings. I never left without a new impression to layer onto the last, another fascinating snippet from his vast life: from child piano prodigy to Harvard PhD to Vietnam whistleblower to refugee repatriator to part-time husband, absent father, gay lover, adoptive partner, and freelance elder statesman.
His couture also would reveal bolder tastes than he’d initially displayed in professional company. One lunch date featured a three-piece, pale yellow suit (French Vanilla, he later corrected) sprigged with a rainbow tie and wrapped in a jaw-dropping, floor-length calico coat trimmed with boa scarf and fedora hat.
His past service to the United Nations — where he, future Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and eventual legendary diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello, had been close in age, rank, work, and, for a while, friendship — suggested an opening for professional collaboration among the UN, the International AIDS Trust, and my organization, the American Bar Association.
Inevitably I asked him, and did so repeatedly — as had many others, apparently — when he planned to write about his life. He said he never would. “It’s just not in me.”
“Well,” I finally ventured, intrigued by the journey and determined to make it happen, “what if someone did it for you?”
Spectre
He was born David Spectre in Needham, Massachusetts. By age five he’d demonstrated a talent for the piano — a conclusion his mother, Vivian, had reached from frequent visits to her parents’ home in Fitchburg, where David would park at the piano and tinker. She took him to Ethel Hutchinson, a piano teacher in Needham, who concurred. David was fond of Ethel and craved his weekly one-hour lessons with her. She was kind, loving, gentle.
He liked his burly, half-bald father, Harry, who on Sundays would take him and his two younger siblings, Karen and Paul, out to mid-day dinner. Those were the years when Harry was in the junk business with his father, Nathan, at “N. Spectre & Son Salvage.”
David was closer to Karen than to Paul, and she needed it. Vivian had made it clear that David, the first-born, was her favorite, while Harry looked forward to having Paul join him in the junk business, since David clearly wasn’t going to. That left Karen with only David to fill the void, which he did instinctually.
Vivian was hard on her boys but downright mean and vindictive to Karen, doing all she could to ensure she felt dirty to be a girl. One of her favored punishments had Karen crouch under their home’s dark crawl space for an hour at a time, like the family’s own junk.
Once, when all three kids had fled their mother’s rage, Grandmother Brooks said of her daughter, “I love you children, but your mother should not have had any.”
Uncle Venie’s Road
David was in fourth grade when Harry bought a summer house on Uncle Venie’s Road in South Harwich, Cape Cod. Vivian saw it as a way to spend even less time with Harry, who worked in Boston during the week and returned to the Cape on weekends.
From the first year in that house, Vivian took an extended view of summer. All three children would start school in Harwich in September, transfer to Needham in November and head back to Harwich in April. Since Harry wasn’t around for Vivian to scream at, the South Harwich months were nicer than the Needham ones.
The Holmes and Tobey families were the Harwich luminaries. Mr. Holmes owned the only home fuel business in town; Mr. Tobey, a store in Harwich Center that specialized in delicacies. An attractive lad, David couldn’t decide which of the daughters, Judy Holmes or Patsy Tobey, he liked more, so at school recess he’d often hold hands with both — Judy on the left, Patsy on the right — and make both feel special.
Chickering
A piano bench was his primary playground growing up. Early on he practiced on the family Chickering — a great old Boston-based brand popular throughout New England — one hour before school and two or three after. During the summer months on the Cape, where he had many more friends than in Needham, it was four hours in the morning, with afternoons off to play something else.
Yet he didn’t resent the regimen; it was the life he knew, and it let him be with Ethel, who nurtured him emotionally as well as musically, urging him to “make your fingers sing!” Chopin and the other Romantic composers — especially Schubert and Brahms — would become his lifelong favorites.
He played in annual piano competitions starting at age seven, earning certificates of ‘Superior’ in most of them. At 14 he performed a solo concert at the Provincetown Museum of Art; in high school, at Roxbury Latin, he played the hymns at the daily prayer service called “Hall” and, in summer, the hymns at the Sabbath services at the Hyannis synagogue — not from any spiritual investment in the services, but because he was willing and wanted. Indeed, his excellence became well known in both the Needham and Cape Cod communities, where his future as a great concert pianist was presumed.
Ethel was crushed when Vivian abruptly, without explanation, sent David, in his teens, to a new and more prestigious male instructor. Aside from occasional glimpses in the neighborhood, they’d never see each other again.
Exelauno
Roxbury Latin School is the first private school founded in the United States and one of the elites that feed Harvard. David’s education there included six years of Latin and three of classical Greek, the latter affording students March 4th off for “Exelauno Day,” in recognition of Xenophon’s Anabasis, the first classical Greek text RLS students read after mastering Greek grammar. Each chapter opens with, “And the Greeks marched forth into battle.”
He was neither popular nor derided among his peers at RLS. He was different, in his mind and theirs, and as Vivian relentlessly reminded him. He was destined for musical greatness, and that peculiar future steered his actions and interests almost automatically — so much so that he vaguely disliked being young and the sense of delay it stirred in reaching his anticipated place. But happiness in getting there — emotional reward and satisfaction — was never part of the vision. Arrival was the end.
Inkling
Required to choose one elective activity in his final year at RLS, David opted for the debate team, which promised few demands other than to think and talk. Now quite tall, intellectually imposing, and cloaked in ‘future greatness,’ he found himself appointed team captain. Though surprised by the honor, he embraced it. As the team’s winning season drew to a close, he marched them forth into battle against arch-rival Andover on the topic, “Conformity v. Non-conformity.” Team RLS was assigned with defending the former — a task painful for any youth in the sedate, conformist Eisenhower years, when pompadours, leather jackets, Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando, James Dean, and a rumbling Civil Rights Movement offered alternative visions of American life.
Luckily, RLS got to close the tight debate, with its captain the final speaker. David’s inspiration arrived just as he approached the podium:
“The presentations given by our opponent’s second and third speakers conformed perfectly to their first and second, respectively. They have all but made our point for us. Why go on?”
To a gasp from Andover and thunderous applause from the audience, he returned to his seat. With the lavish praise came his first inkling that he might be good at something else.
Eleanor
Another debate moment earlier that year would become a touchstone in his mind and slowly deepen this feeling of broader potential. Eleanor Roosevelt, the former First Lady and grand humanitarian, was visiting RLS and had asked to sit in on the competition. Greeting the contestants afterward, she shook David’s hand and smiled widely into his eyes.
“Your performance was most impressive,” she beamed, having heard more about David from the head of school as the competition unfolded. “I hope you will share your gifts with those who need them.”
He’d come to expect such praise and expectation following his concert performances. And the former First Lady’s notion of “need” — that David would have something to offer humanity beyond high art — was a predictable entreaty from a beloved paragon of service who’d helped the country through the Great Depression and the Second World War and toward global leadership — including the founding of the United Nations and the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in which she’d played a pivotal role.
Part of him assumed she’d said something similar to everyone that day. But a deeper part felt it was just for him.
Fontainebleau
Despite his middling grades, he was offered admission to Oberlin, Yale, Michigan, and Harvard’s class of 1958 on the strength of his piano prowess and, in Harvard’s case, his matriculation from RLS. At Vivian’s insistence he also auditioned (successfully) in New York for a summer program for promising young musicians at the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau, France, led by Nadia Boulanger, legendary mentor to such greats as Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, and Leonard Bernstein, among others.
He decided to spend the summer at Fontainebleau and, in the fall, attend Harvard — his fourth choice, but the one that offered some prospect of financial aid. A thousand-dollar savings bond Grandfather Nathan had bought him at birth covered his Fontainebleau tuition.
When a friend worried aloud to Vivian whether letting a young man with David’s manifold attributes venture alone overseas might be courting trouble, Vivian chortled.
“David’s so naïve he wouldn’t know sin if it stared him in the face!”
Bloom
He sailed from Hoboken in late June 1954. Most aboard were young, on their own, and off to see the world. As they set sail, David felt free, finally, from Vivian, at least physically. He also felt a new shot of joy at hearing Greensleeves sung that first lively, moonlit night by a lass heading to Vassar. He’d never heard a folk song before nor enjoyed music simply for its own sake.
They docked in Rotterdam in early July. Those going to Fontainebleau were bused to a Paris-bound train arriving at the Gare du Nord. Upon exiting the station, David’s heart leapt again at a resplendent Paris suddenly before him. His life as a man would begin here.
They stayed overnight at the Hotel Lenox, visiting a nearby club called L’Echelle, in the Latin Quarter, where Leda and Maria, a latina folk duet, were on stage. David’s heart swelled again. One of the pair’s ballads, La Fête des Fleurs (The Festival of Flowers), became the most popular song in France that summer, airing on every radio station and hummed in the streets.
Cherry
In Fontainebleau, each student boarded with a local host family for the summer. David’s were grocers who lived above their main-square shop facing the Chateau de Fontainebleau itself. His room looked onto the store’s fruit section and its profusion of exotic cherries. The shop radio, on all day, filled the air with La Fête des Fleurs at least twice an hour.
The first day at the Conservatory, each student essentially re-auditioned for Nadia Boulanger, who sat iconically in the heart of the hall. David performed a favorite selection from Schubert, Opus 69, flawlessly — he’d achieved a machine-like proficiency that rendered him virtually impervious to nerves.
Boulanger cracked a thin smile at David’s confidence and assigned him to Jean Casadesus for piano instruction; Boulanger herself would instruct him in harmony and composition.
Casadesus was in his mid-twenties. David liked and respected his guidance, given in private lessons side-by-side on the piano bench (Ethel had always sat off to the side). Yet there was no emotional connection. The instruction was objective, distant.
His lessons with Boulanger came in classes of about fifteen students. Once a week, each student was asked to perform before the others in the recital hall: Boulanger was always present but never commented on what she’d heard; instead, unbeknownst to them, she used the recitals to decide which students would be invited to stay beyond the summer.
Shape
During the few structured breaks in his weekly regimen, David ventured into the intriguing world around him. The Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) was based in Fontainebleau; during one excursion into town, David fell in with three off-duty members of the British military police. They were all about his age and, though generally dismissive of Americans, took David on as their Yankee mascot. He spent every spare evening with them, swigging beers and swapping stories and, in the process, discovering an instinct for relating to very different people.
He also grew close to John Marshall, who was studying sculpture in the Fine Arts wing of the Conservatory and had a motorcycle on which they’d explore neighboring villages when their regimented lives allowed. John, too, was about David’s age and size, though David thought him far more impressive and, from the back of the bike, comforting.
Mademoiselle
In early August, based on his contributions to classes, reports from Casadesus, and his performance recitals, David was invited to become one of Boulanger’s private pupils. Vivian had counted on this development and already browbeaten Harry into financial submission. Harvard readily deferred his admission to fall 1955.
His new quarters at the Netherlands House at Cité Universitaire in Paris looked out across a flower garden to the Indochina House. He admired the latter’s graceful architecture and puzzled at the curved spikes gracing every roof corner.
He practiced piano six hours daily now, with three formal lessons per week, including one-hour sessions alone with “Mademoiselle,” as Boulanger was called, at her rue Ballou apartment, which was thick with photos, scores, and memorabilia. She maintained a formal and correct bearing with her students, typically wearing a bland skirt and blouse, with a jacket or sweater if she felt a chill. Each student would place her required fee in a white, sealed envelope and rest it atop her piano, though she never acknowledged its presence.
All of Mademoiselle’s students learned immediately that Igor Stravinsky, the revolutionary composer with whom she’d worked early in his career, was her standard: The one who’d brought something serious to all his actions. Who’d treated his art as sacred. Who’d used his talent to the utmost.
Her own gift was an analytical sonar that detected the subtlest emotional currents in her students and their music. (“She hears everything,” Stravinsky had said.) Her mother had nurtured this talent by being “dispassionate in her judgments,” and Mademoiselle approached her students this way, discerning first whether they truly loved their music or merely wanted or were trained to. Whatever one does seriously, she believed, “is a demonstration of God,” and true devotion begins with true love.
Accordingly, her private sessions with students often lasted much longer than the scheduled hour. In David’s case, she was curious about who his friends were; what they talked about; what he did with his spare time. She disliked the sideburns he’d grown — they weren’t stylish. She was concerned he wasn’t eating enough. She also asked about his surname: Though darkly poetical, “Spectre” didn’t fit a future concert pianist.
She was getting to know him.
Denouement
After a grueling fall semester at Fontainebleau, David spent Christmas break in Wales with Taffy, one of his SHAPE pals, simply sharing time and conversation with Taffy and his family. Later, at a boarding house in North London, his Australian roommate suggested he see The Boy Friend, a stage musical starring a dazzling new talent named Julie Andrews, who would soon become world-famous in the epic Sound of Music and Mary Poppins movies. Even from the cheap seats, the music was captivating.
He returned to Paris visibly refreshed and unfocused. In short order Mademoiselle began questioning him surgically about his dedication to a career as a concert pianist. Were he serious, she said, he would put Harvard out of his mind entirely and she’d see about getting him enrolled at the Paris Conservatory.
Rattled, David knew her questions were, in fact, conclusions. But she let them linger over a few more lessons, not forcing him to answer until, finally, she broke.
“My dear Monsieur Spectre,” she declared at the end of a particularly perfunctory session, confronting the reality he’d sought to ignore. “You have the talent but neither the need nor the will to become a concert pianist.”
Truly great artists, she insisted, had to perform, had to compose, had to paint, sculpt, or dance, or life would be dead. He didn’t.
“I’m sure there are many other things you could do well, perhaps greatly,” she offered, “but you will be better served by going to Harvard and discovering them. You do not belong here.”
Parquet
Though foreseen, the rebuke was no less shocking. Mademoiselle agreed to let him continue his lessons while he weighed her advice. But before long, her housemaid would seal his fate.
Entering her salon for what would be their last conversation, David remarked how brilliant her parquet floors shone in the afternoon sun.
“Yes,” she replied crisply. “I have a cleaning lady who does what she does so well that, when she dies, she will surely be admitted into the same corner of heaven as Stravinsky.”
He got the message.
“Will you write my mother to explain,” he implored, resigned to the truth. She agreed, and said she’d also recommend he be allowed to stay in Paris another month. There was much he had yet to see.
“What they say about Paris in spring is true,” she smiled.
He took in as much of the city, where his long-awaited life had finally been born and suddenly died, as time and spirit allowed. He also took Mademoiselle’s seriousness to heart and would not play a piano again for fifty years.
Changeling
He sailed from Le Havre to New York City on the S.S. America. Standing at the railing, gazing wearily at a glittering ocean liner fading eastward in the night, with only the piano having filled any vision of the future, he wondered whether that ship held more hope than his.
Arriving home, he braced for a rage that never came. Mademoiselle’s letter, and the extra weeks to digest it, had dissolved Vivian’s anger. She, too, knew he’d be great at something else. And, if the great Mademoiselle had said it, it must be true.
Struck by the calm, David floated Mademoiselle’s ‘Spectre’ observation. Intrigued, Vivian said she’d asked Harry to change his name back to an anglicized version of ‘Aranofsky’ before they were married, but he’d refused — he was already in business under his father’s name.
Missing the gravitas he’d always worn as “David Spectre, Future Concert Pianist,” having left that cloak in Paris, he proposed the change. To his surprise, Vivian readily agreed, as did Harry, knowing that David would never join him in the junk business. Although there were distant Aranofsky relatives who had settled in California with the name ‘Arnow,’ David chose the more mellifluous ‘Arnold’ and would add ‘Brooks’ (unofficially) for heft.
In due course the Middlesex County Court accepted the change, and David Brooks Arnold turned toward an unwritten future.
St. Grottlesex
Harvard freshmen were housed in dorms located in Harvard Yard. They took their meals at the Freshman Union, which had an extension with glass walls and six round tables.
Upon registering as a member of the class of 1959, David chose to have lunch in the extension because it was airy. He quickly discovered that the self-appointed elite of the freshman class had chosen it, too. They were part of the “St. Grottlesex” crowd, an amalgamation of the elite New England prep schools that fed Harvard, including St. Paul’s, Groton, Middlesex and (silently) Andover, Exeter, and Milton Academy. Roxbury Latin, deemed a poor man’s school, also qualified because it was private. But it was both last and least among the others.
David recognized some of the self-distinguished diners from past debate encounters, so he sat down at one of the tables. A few minutes later, a freshman of another ilk offered to join them.
“And where, dear man, do you come from?” sniffed one.
“Grants Pass, Oregon! Grants Pass High School,” replied the lad with a spark, which was snuffed to a wisp when it was suggested he might be more comfortable dining elsewhere.
Lodge
David was assigned to a room on the top floor of Thayer Hall which, he soon discovered, was one of the better freshman dorms. Next door were the Cabot twins, Ned and Fred, whose family name was so revered in New England, it had its own jingle:
I come from Boston
The land of baked beans and cod
Where the Cabots speak only to the Lodges
And the Lodges speak only to God.
David also discovered Ned Weld, who lived farther down the hall. His family, too, was Massachusetts-prominent, as reflected by the freshman dorm with his name on it — Weld Hall. But there was nothing stuffy about Ned, and their bonding was quick. They took all their meals and many of the same classes together and soon became inseparable. Ned’s clear approval of David enabled his fellow elites to forgive the latter’s lower origins and appoint him editor of the freshman yearbook.
Gustav
While in Paris David had, for no particular reason, become interested in Russia, so he told his freshman adviser that he wanted to major in Slavic languages and literature, which would require taking Russian his first semester. Considered a difficult language for those not born to it, Russian was one of the most challenging courses a freshman could take. His adviser, based on David’s less than sterling academic performance at RLS, nixed that choice, steering him instead to beginning German.
Though disappointed, David did well in the class. By mid-semester, Gustav Konitsky, his personable German professor, saw something in him.
“You’re better than you think you are,” he told David, a startling assessment that changed him instantaneously. He’d been accustomed to high praise for his musical talent, so much so that it had become (and now, in fact, was) meaningless. Hearing, in this new elite setting, that he visibly harbored other special potential was unexpected and reassuring.
By the end of the first semester, Konitsky’s endorsement had given the once diffident student a new mooring for his untethered perfectionism. He earned A’s in all his classes.
Pusey
Another new Weld Hall friend that first semester was John Fox, a graduate of respected Belmont Country Day School. Still fired by Konitsky’s revelation, and in no way missing Vivian, David had decided to stay at school and study over Christmas break. John returned home, but Belmont is the next town west of Cambridge, so he and David saw each other often, including at a dinner at the home of Nathan Pusey, Harvard’s president, to which John had been invited and brought David along.
Quizzing David about his newfound academic interests, Pusey told him about a relatively new discipline, Linguistics, which had been offered only at the graduate level but would be opened to undergraduates next year. At Pusey’s suggestion, David enrolled in a related undergraduate course, The Psychology of Communication, which would give him a sense of the field.
The professor of that course, George Miller, was a big man with a then-rare goatee. David hung on his every word and decided on-the-spot to major in Linguistics, and to earn the degree in three years, to make up for his year in Paris.
This also was the semester to choose an upperclassman’s dorm for next year. Each house had a distinct reputation: Eliot was for the preppy elite; Winthrop, for the jocks; Dunster, for theatre types; Kirkland, the chamber music fanatics; Lowell, the intellectuals; Leaverett, the social lepers; and Adams, for artsy types who frequented coffeehouses and knew (already) who Joan Baez was.
David joined Ned in Adams.
Grind
His second year at Harvard was a blur. Now committed to accelerated graduation, carrying six courses instead of four, he also was a tutor twenty hours per week and had accrued enough scholarship money to cover tuition, fees, and room-and-board. He translated German foreign-study applications for a young, haughty professor named Kissinger; joined the Adams House intramural heavyweight crew; volunteered to mentor disadvantaged teenagers in nearby Somerville; and occasionally dated Allison Keith, Radcliffe class of ’59.
His Linguistics major required fluency in two modern languages in the same linguistic grouping. He chose Romance languages, since he was already fluent in French; and Italian, in honor of his grandmother and because Italian is the language in which performance instructions for all forms of classical music are given, so it was already familiar.
In The Psychology of Language and Communication, his infatuation with both the subject matter and George Miller continued. But his friendship with Ned, who’d ignored his studies and concentrated on playing tennis, fizzled. David’s dedication to studying, by contrast, had rendered him a “grind.” Having fun, even dating Allison, were chores. He was busy yet remained unfulfilled, plodding toward graduation instead of finally living. Having seized virtually every opportunity Harvard had presented, he’d replaced the rote discipline of his piano years with an indiscriminate mass of activity that finally had become more exhausting than enriching.
Strokes
Regular swims in the Adams pool — often done nude since Adams was all-male — were a therapeutic diversion. On one such occasion David was vaguely aware of a solitary presence in the stands surrounding the pool; he became vividly aware of it in the showers afterward, when the nameless spectator reappeared to slowly lather David’s back. The erection this aroused prompted an invitation back to the stranger’s apartment. Awkward at first, the impromptu romp grew pleasurable but, by David’s lights, was inconsequential.
Recounting the experience in a reverie to John Fox later that night, he was taken aback at John’s explosive reaction and his demand never to repeat it. It was David’s first personal encounter with ‘sin’ — or at least with others’ perception of it.
Peer
In summer school, he took two courses necessary to accelerated graduation. Also attending was Bill McKinney, a Baylor University undergraduate from Rome, Georgia. They became fast friends, spending all their spare time together, including a weekend on Martha’s Vineyard, renting bikes and sleeping on the beach.
Pondering the moonlit surf one night, Bill asked David what he thought his life would become.
“I don’t know yet,” he finally confessed, peering at the same glittering sea that had seemed answerless after Paris. “But I know it will be special.”
Quake
Aside from occasional services with a friend’s family and others to which he’d been invited to play piano, organized religion had played virtually no part in David’s life. But one Sunday when he was fifteen, a Boston-area friend took him to a Cambridge Quaker Meeting for Worship. Seated in the sustained, collective silence that characterizes Quaker worship, peace and solitude enveloped him. He felt at home.
Although he returned infrequently to Meeting while at Roxbury Latin, at Harvard he attended regularly, just a short walk down Brattle Street. He and Drew Pearson, a diminutive nephew of the famous New York Times reporter, grew close there and, on walks back to campus after Meeting, had long talks about the Quaker experience. The film Friendly Persuasion, depicting how a Quaker family in Indiana handled the violence of the Civil War, impressed him deeply.
Yet when a kind, elderly Friend asked one Sunday after Meeting, “When did thee become a Member,” David stammered at the realization that he had never formally done so. A two-person membership committee was soon dispatched to Adams to probe Davd’s spiritual beliefs and life plans. It reported to a subsequent Meeting for Business that David was indeed a Quaker, which is how he became one.
Flame
For the summer of 1958, he decided to accept a fellowship offered by the Linguistic Society of America to attend its Summer Institute at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The university housing office found him a co-op, of which he was elected president despite (rather than because of) his Harvard credentials — his first discovery that Harvard conceivably could count against him.
Nancy Willard and her family were members of the Ann Arbor Monthly Meeting, which made her a birthright Quaker. David met her at a social gathering after a Meeting for Worship. She was stunning: A budding poet with flame-red hair who’d recite her verse (for which she would become famous) as David gazed at her soulfully. They dated and quickly became steady.
Captivated, infatuated, spellbound, David found himself broaching marriage — a notion she not only rejected outright but laughed at.
Bared, David fled town and, with his new pal Doug Bowden, spent the rest of August hitchhiking through the South, licking his wounds and looking ahead to the Fulbright Fellowship he’d secured for the fall and spring semesters.
Liberté
He returned to Cape Cod the second week in September to say good-bye to his family before sailing to Europe on the SS Liberté for his Fulbright Fellowship in Italy.
At the dock, a young woman boarding with her college roommate spotted him with his Uncle Jim and Aunt Fran, who’d come to see him off.
“I want that one,” she whispered, leaning into her companion as David filled her sights.
She watched him at a distance over the next couple of days to see when and where he strolled. At an optimal moment, she slipped herself comfortably in a pre-set deck chair.
“Hi, I’m Diane,” she announced breezily as David stepped through the doorway, halting his stride.
He grew intrigued as they chatted: Here was a lass from Salt Lake City, of all places (albeit a Stanford undergrad), wooing him, a Harvard man. Such daring, he thought, having absorbed a spot of that St. Grottlesex elitism he’d disdained.
Indeed, his ego, still chilled by Nancy’s rejection, warmed to Diane’s genuine interest. That she was a dead ringer for Doris Day — cute, blond, vivacious, seemingly wholesome — stoked it more. Their conversations over the following days were easy and many, one flowing into another, without form or pretense, their walks spanning the ship many times over.
On their last day at sea, David told Diane he’d have two weeks free before his assignment to Perugia, Italy, for his month-long Fulbright orientation. He invited her to join him for the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels, then to Paris for a tour of his old haunts there.
She leapt at the chance and convinced Marilyn, her traveling companion, to venture on her own for two weeks and reconnect in Spain after David had left for Perugia.
Lost
They had separate hotel rooms in Brussels and shared no more than chaste kisses at first. Diane divulged her Mormonism and its concomitant moral restraints (but not her secret desire to be free of them). Behind his veneer of Harvard sophistication David feigned diffidence, yet by Paris they would decide to share a room at his old favorite, the Hotel Lenox.
Their first night there, Diane was shocked to discover David a virgin — and he, that she wasn’t. Gratitude at her tender tutorials soon replaced his shock; relief at his quick learning helped restore her cracked image of him. Over the next several days, he thought the sex kept improving (not thinking to ask her opinion). More profound was his relief at having ‘become a man,’ doing what men were supposed to do; she greatly enjoyed his company and was enchanted by the Paris he showed her.
When they parted at the end of September, he promised to write.
Vespa
On the way to Perugia David met Perry Smith, an art major headed to Venice who planned to buy a motorcycle and a hooded black cloak and sweep dramatically through the narrow streets and alleys along the way. He got the cloak but settled for a Vespa scooter, which they rode breezily from town to town.
In Assisi they came upon the church where St. Francis is buried. David asked Perry to stop for a beat so he could see the tomb. While Perry waited outside, arms folded, a handsome young priest, happy to have an interested visitor about his age, welcomed David in and cheerfully took him to the tomb, after which he offered David a tour of the church itself.
Pointing out the iconic structure’s finer architectural points, the priest led David up a hidden, twisting staircase. About halfway around the bend, he turned, smiled, grabbed David’s crotch, and put David’s hand on his. Startled at first, David quickly welcomed the spontaneous chance to get off and go. They took turns frantically stroking each other, dappled the ancient stone, and summarily parted.
When a spritely David finally leapt from the church doorway, a peeved Perry asked what had taken so damn long. Wryly mounting the Vespa (and remembering John Fox’s reaction), David didn’t answer.
Palazzo
The Fulbright orientation was perfunctory, but everything else in Perugia that October was dazzling. Artur Rubinstein, the concert pianist (and Stravinsky contemporary), performed on a Sunday afternoon in the main palazzo, from which David floated into the central square, buoyed by his sudden realization that he was young, living in Italy, and in love with Diane. He invited her to meet him in Rome at the end of his Fulbright orientation in early November. “I have a surprise planned,” he promised.
She arrived at the Rome airport on the day Pope John XXIII was to be installed. As they waited for the bus to take them into the city, David proposed. Having hoped but not dared believe this was the “surprise” he’d promised, she giddily accepted.
Ecstatic, they joined the throngs in St. Paul’s Square to celebrate.
St. Clair
The highly competitive and prestigious Fulbright Program, established in 1946 by Sen. William Fulbright of Arkansas, sends American fellows abroad (and brings non-Americans to the U.S.) to share their talents with, and to learn from, other cultures.
David was assigned by Fulbright to the University of Padua, where the Linguistics department was Italy’s best. He had visited Padua before going to Perugia for orientation and had been enchanted by the medieval quaintness of the village. But he realized it was no place to bring a new bride with nothing to do while he worked. So, he went to the Fulbright office in Rome, explained the situation, and asked to be transferred to a more suitable city. Anticipating Rome or Florence, he instead got Turin, home of FIAT and Olivetti.
They eloped there on Christmas Eve, and David carried Diane over the threshold of their little flat. Settling into their new routine, Diane admitted to being no housewife and (undeniably) a bad cook. She once fell asleep while dusting.
Meanwhile, Becky St. Clair — blonde, courtly, Southern, motherly, in her forties — was assigned as David’s Fulbright ‘guardian’ of sorts. She quickly grew attached to the couple, and they to her: David was drawn to women who sheltered him. Becky threw the couple a rousing wedding reception and encouraged her idealistic but unfocused charge to take the Foreign Service exam.
But the recurrent pull of academe would intervene — momentarily, at least.
Haas
During David’s last year at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, Sue Ervin had been conducting research in bilingualism, a subfield of Psycholinguistics. Through an introduction by George Miller, David had served as her research assistant while attending summer school in 1957. By the time David had left Harvard for his Fulbright year in Italy, Sue had secured an assistant professorship in the Department of Speech at the University of California at Berkeley, where she was planning to introduce Psycholinguistics into the curriculum. She wanted David, when he returned from Italy, to be her first PhD student candidate.
He readily agreed.
Sue was startled to find David married when he returned in September, though she tried to disguise it. Diane detected her disappointment; David laughed it off when she mentioned it, but he, too, eventually discerned a coolness Sue hadn’t displayed at Harvard. Nevertheless, she tried to secure a study plan agreement for David with Mary Haas, Chair of the Linguistics Department.
Linguistics had sprung from Anthropology in the 1920s and 30s and Berkeley was its birthing ground. Haas’ father had been a Berkeley anthropologist, and his daughter remained one in spirit. Indeed, she was quite direct in her requirements of Linguistics PhD candidates in her department: whatever their dissertation topic, they had to write a grammar of one of the fast-dying Native American languages. She had a large sum of money from the state to do just that, as California led the nation in the number of Indian tribes that were becoming extinct. To produce such a grammar, one had to locate a speaker of that language, called a ‘native informant,’ and deduce the grammatical structure of the language.
True to her roots, “over my dead body” was Haas’ reaction to Sue’s innovation.
Now foiled on dual fronts (romantic and curricular), Sue advised David to take an MA in Linguistics from Berkeley and go back to Harvard for his PhD, where Psycholinguistics was in full flower. Haas quickly concurred, wanting to be rid of David and any possibility of introducing Psycholinguistics into the Berkeley curriculum.
David agreed and chose Cambodian for his Berkeley MA thesis, for no reason other than a Cambodian graduate student at Berkeley, Son Sann, was available to be his native informant. Meanwhile, the Harvard Linguistics Department assented to David’s returning and taking just one additional course (he’d already taken all the other graduate level courses while an undergraduate), writing a Psycholinguistics dissertation in a topic of his choice, and receiving his PhD.
Arch
Although living in Berkeley was idyllic — including a sumptuous view of the bay from the top-floor apartment they rented at 1400 Arch Street — Diane couldn’t shake her Stanford roots. Berkeley was Stanford’s rival in football, and Stanford had a chant about Berkeley — “Those dirty Golden Bears.” She wasn’t comfortable there.
David, meanwhile, having witnessed Haas’ pique and other petty politics, began to have second thoughts about an academic career. Both he and Diane, so taken with Becky St. Clair in Turin, began to revisit her suggestion about a Foreign Service career, spurred further by John F. Kennedy’s recent election to the presidency and the call to national service and sacrifice that had characterized his campaign. For David’s generation, having come-of-age in the sleepy Eisenhower years, Kennedy’s challenging vision of a “New Frontier” for the country and the world was palpable.
David registered for the Foreign Service exam that December and discovered that, even if successful, which seemed unlikely given the test’s steep tilt toward political science specialists, the earliest available slots for new officers would open in September 1961 — plenty of time to think through his options if he got a passing score.
To his shock, he did pass, crediting his habit of reading the New York Times while in the U.S. and the International Herald Tribune while overseas, cover-to-cover and between-the-lines. By the time he got his exam result, the back-to-Harvard scenario had materialized, and he could foresee finishing his PhD requirements just before his Foreign Service training got under way.
He and Diane packed up and headed back East.
Lift
Diane had planned to complete her BA at Boston University but, after investigating the course possibilities, decided to take a job instead. She became secretary to Morton Halperin, who’d recently joined the Center for International Affairs and, as a prominent liberal intellectual at the Brookings Institution in the 1970s, would find himself on President Nixon’s infamous political “enemies list.” He was a year younger than David and had already received his PhD from Yale. Although horrified by that fact, David liked him. Diane supplemented her income at the Center by serving as the reader for a blind graduate student.
David had one course left to complete — Statistics. Sucking up to the instructor was the only way he survived it, garnering a ‘B’ he didn’t deserve, but which enabled him to move on to his dissertation.
The chairman of the Linguistics Department that year read David’s undergraduate honors thesis on “Parallels between Linguistic and Biological Evolution” and was so intrigued that he later published it virtually verbatim as his own, citing David in a footnote as having provided its inspiration. The theft was particularly ironic given that David’s undergraduate thesis adviser had blocked his receiving an AB summa cum laude because he hadn’t found the thesis sufficiently original in either concept or execution.
David decided to do his PhD dissertation on language change. Sue Ervin, meanwhile, had told John Carroll, her former colleague at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, about David. Carroll was one of the pioneers in what eventually became Sociolinguistics, and language change was one of his interests. He agreed to be David’s dissertation adviser.
David chose to investigate language change in Central Village, an isolated, rural hamlet in southeastern Massachusetts. He’d found it through a Danforth Fellow who, while completing his own graduate work at Harvard, was serving as the minister in the sole village church. He helped David choose ten families whose speech changes over three generations he would study.
Meanwhile, he also served as a teaching assistant in the Harvard Psychology Department. There were two lectures by professors each week; then the class was divided into sections that met as a third session supervised by one of the teaching assistants. David had two sections, and it was on the basis of his performance that he was offered a post-doctoral fellowship at the Center for Cognitive Studies then being established.
His disillusionment with academe persisted, however — indeed had intensified after his thesis was stolen — so he declined the offer. Earlier in the fall semester, he’d been visited by a CIA representative who’d urged him, given his Linguistics subfield, to take the CIA equivalent of the Foreign Service Exam. He did so in November and discovered in December that, unlike his Foreign Service result, his CIA score ranked among the highest that year.
In January 1961, he had his Foreign Service oral exam and was asked by the CIA to come down to Washington the first week in March for a series of oral exams and meetings at CIA headquarters. He performed well at both but was unimpressed by his prospects at CIA: it seemed a disheveled operation and unlikely to satisfy his growing taste for adventure — an impression borne out a few weeks later in the so-called Bay of Pigs fiasco, in which Cuba’s new communist dictator, Fidel Castro, crushed a quixotic band of Cuban exiles whom the CIA had trained, armed, and sent back to “invade” the island and, in so doing, inspire a popular revolt against Castro, which never materialized. It would be JFK’s biggest presidential blunder.
David also completed his Central Village field research that month and, upon his return from Washington, set about analyzing and writing up the results, which he completed by the end of August. Selected for the first class of new Foreign Service Officers convened in September, he left his dissertation back in Cambridge for Diane to type up and turn in. She did so, then joined him for his six months of training at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute — where wives got trained, too.
He returned to Cambridge in November to defend his dissertation. The faculty committee assigned to grill him had no real clue about the subject but were awed that David was about to join the still-dazzling Kennedy Administration. Congratulating him on a job well done, the committee approved his PhD, which he officially received in absentia at the spring 1962 commencement.
Shuffle
Setting up In Washington, the Arnolds found a six-month rental at 2028 P Street, near DuPont Circle. The area was rundown then — whenever asked, they said they lived “just across the bridge from Georgetown.” They often took languid evening walks across that bridge, gawking at the tony houses on the other side and wondering when they’d be able to have one.
The Foreign Service Institute was in nearby Arlington, Virginia. One memorable training session, which included Diane, instructed them how to give a classy reception yet gracefully get guests to leave on cue: Go to the reception room doorway and make subtle shuffling noises on the floor. As the notion of ‘guests leaving’ registers subconsciously, the herd will instinctually mill toward the exit.
When training finally finished, David was given a choice of assignments — the State Department or the U.S. Information Agency. Indifferent to either on the merits, he chose the USIA because of his experience with, and affection for, USIA’s Becky St. Clair in Turin.
He initially was assigned to Mali. But the person assigned to South Vietnam threw a fit about it and, refusing the assignment, said she’d take Paris or resign. (She got Paris but didn’t last long.)
So, David was handed Vietnam instead.
Heat
Once reassigned to South Vietnam, David met with Averell Harriman, Assistant Secretary of State for Asia, for a perfunctory pep talk in which Harriman exhorted David to be part of the Kennedy vanguard in what was becoming a crucial confrontation in Southeast Asia to prevent countries in the region from “falling like dominoes” into Communism, as China simplistically was believed to have done several years earlier.
Kennedy had sent Gen. Maxwell Taylor to South Vietnam in November 1961 to assess the precarious situation with that country’s government and return with recommendations on what to do with the mess the U.S. had assumed from the humbled, departed French. Maxwell’s recommendations would come to be called the “Kennedy Build-up.”
David had been largely oblivious to this imperative, however. He’d accepted the reassignment to Saigon because it sounded like a good chance to pursue his interest in Cambodia next door, which had been piqued by his work with Sonn San on the Central Village research.
The Arnolds left for Saigon in February 1962. Diane flew ahead to Salt Lake City to say goodbye to her family, and David caught up with her there. Then it was on to San Francisco and beyond. David’s personnel officer in DC had told them cryptically to “take your time getting to Saigon,” so they stopped in Hong Kong to buy whatever they could manage to haul the rest of the way. David bought a stereo system and several hand-made suits from Jimmy Chen, said by USIA staff in DC to be the best tailor in Hong Kong. Diane got a pearl necklace.
They finally landed at Tan Son Nhut airport in mid-February to begin their two-year assignment. It was dry season. Stepping into a wall of heat upon alighting from the plane, David didn’t notice the U.S. military aircraft spread about the tarmac.
Jot
New Foreign Service Officers at USIA were called JOTs (Junior Officer Trainees), which was David’s status in Saigon — a trainee, bearing no real responsibilities for two years other than being an apprentice.
The head of USIA in South Vietnam was called the PAO (Public Affairs Officer). Although in theory he reported to the ambassador, Frederick Nolting, this PAO, John Mecklin, had a back channel to the White House through JFK’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger. Both he and Mecklin had been journalists by trade and so understood each other’s language. During the 1960 campaign, Mecklin had written a Life magazine cover story about JFK and his PT boat heroism during WWII, and it was considered a contribution to his victory over Nixon. Kennedy chose Mecklin for the PAO post in Saigon, instructing him to bypass normal channels and send reports on the situation there directly to Salinger — a move apparently prompted by Kennedy’s distrust of the CIA and the military brass after the Bay of Pigs fiasco the year before.
Exchange
David’s first day on the job started with a staff meeting in a large vault with a thick door that, at the flick of a switch, could be opened only by combination lock from the inside so that, were the office attacked, the entire staff could secure themselves inside until rescued. This portentous contingency notwithstanding, the first agenda item was banal: the monthly staff order from the Hong Kong Navy Exchange. Although they had a large exchange in Saigon, orders for more exotic merchandise had to be placed with the one in Hong Kong.
David Shepherd, the Deputy PAO, and Doug Pike, the Information Officer, soon became David’s closest friends on the staff. As Mecklin’s deputy, Shepherd essentially was chief of staff, responsible for ensuring things ran smoothly at USIA Saigon and its three branch offices: Can Tho, down in the Mekong Delta; Dalat, up in the mountains bordering Laos; and Hue, just south of the border between North and South Vietnam.
David didn’t know it, but Shepherd had soon started convincing Mecklin that there was no need for an apprenticeship — David was good enough to start working as a full-fledged officer. During David’s third month as a JOT, Shepherd suggested the three of them go down to Can Tho to see how the Vietnamese staff were doing.
When they arrived, Mecklin got to the point. “What would you think of being Branch Public Affairs Officer at Can Tho as soon as you and your wife can pack yourselves up?”
“Yes,” David replied with alacrity.
Can Do
Can Tho was the largest town in the eight-province Mekong Delta stretching south of Saigon to the South China sea, and where the USIA Cultural Center and Library was located, beyond which lay an open field at the edge of town serving as an airfield where small planes could land in dry season. In rainy season, the mud was foot-deep.
David had a staff of ten, headed by a Vietnamese named Lu who’d been there since the Center’s recent creation. The Center also had a one-man outpost staffed by a Vietnamese in Camau, at the edge of the South China Sea near the border with Cambodia. David’s monthly schedule included two weeks in Can Tho and two traveling within his eight-province territory, depending on the willingness of the Special Forces team to bring him along wherever their missions took them. They warmed up to each other as readily as David and the SHAPE soldiers had in Paris.
The Kennedy build-up had never included a precise count of the so-called ‘advisers’ that comprised it. The Geneva Accords that had divided Vietnam into North and South in 1954 restricted the number of foreign military troops that could be stationed in either state. Kennedy got around this limitation by calling the Special Forces ‘advisers’ who would merely train South Vietnamese forces and engage in combat themselves only if attacked. So far as David could ascertain, the advisers respected that limitation. Their convoys, undertaken in daylight as the Viet Cong operated only at night, were never attacked, so David never had to use the rifle the Special Forces insisted he carry. As a Quaker, he’d refused to be trained how to use it.
Kennedy also did not observe Geneva’s limitations on the amount and type of foreign-provided armaments. Prohibited jet fighters, for example, were unloaded at the Saigon docks in the middle of the night, and whenever a reporter inquired about “those jets flying overhead,” the standard Special Forces response was, “What jets?”
Hamlet
The centerpiece of the Americans’ anti-communist ‘pacification’ plan for the Mekong Delta — the ‘rice bowl’ of South Vietnam where the fighting had started — was the so-called ‘strategic hamlet’ program, patterned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara after the successful British plan to defeat the communist insurgency in Malaya (now Malaysia) after World War II. There the communists were ethnic Chinese, so the British built what they called fortified villages for the Malays to live and farm in, killing anyone found carrying a weapon outside those villages.
The scheme had worked in Malay, which was not South Vietnam. The Viet Cong of communist North Vietnam were ethnically the same as the ‘good guys’ in the South and looked and dressed alike. Unlike the Chinese in Malaya, telling friend from foe in Vietnam was nearly impossible.
Regardless, the South Vietnamese government, with both civilian and military U.S. advisers, proceeded with the plan. David’s mission was to inspect the hamlets periodically and report their progress to his superiors in Saigon. The only other U.S. government civilian he spotted in the Delta was a CIA agent posing as a USAID road safety adviser. David had no idea to whom that agent was reporting and avoided him entirely. His own reports, headily classified “Top Secret,” were to be sent to both USIA Saigon and the U.S. embassy via John Mecklin.
To his dismay, David soon discovered that the South Vietnamese had built one ‘show’ hamlet in each province, with little to actually show for it. The other hamlets reported by provincial officials as “completed” existed only on paper, with U.S. construction funds presumably embezzled.
His dismay increased when Mecklin refused to believe these reports, citing the assurances of his South Vietnamese counterparts that a given province contained a certain number of strategic hamlets and therefore was pacified.
“Go look again,” he ordered nonsensically.
Given Mecklin’s willful disbelief, David began to wonder whether his continuing negative (but accurate) reports ever made it to the embassy, let alone to Washington, where McNamara and his so-called ‘whiz kids’ were crowing about the program’s success — based, apparently, on reports the South Vietnamese were feeding them through Mecklin and others.
Foxtrot
Despite these frustrations, which he assumed would be temporary once he could convince Mecklin to join him on a mission to the Delta, David was enjoying himself immensely. He was fond of his staff, proud of the services they were providing, and making many friends among both the Americans and South Vietnamese. These included the Special Forces, who also knew exactly what was going on with the hamlets, and a missionary couple who neither knew nor cared, busy as they were trying to convert the poor yellow heathens to the ways of the Good Book. Diane grew close to the wife, who was the only other American woman in the Delta.
Besides providing security when David traveled, the Special Forces also joined the South Vietnamese in providing security in Can Tho. Not long after the Arnolds had set up living quarters above the Center, a map showing how to access their bedroom was found in a Viet Cong outpost that the South Vietnamese forces had raided. David laughed it off; Mecklin, Diane, and the Special Forces didn’t. From then on, he had round-the-clock security under the code name “Foxtrot.”
Yet he remained unfazed. Indeed, he was growing near-euphoric about this new life he’d created. A popular Bank of America ad of the day depicted a putative employee in some dynamic foreign locale with a circle drawn around his feet and declaring, “Our man on the spot can help you out.” David felt like that man, bearing a great deal of unexpected responsibility and satisfied he was meeting it.
Twist
The Arnolds had taken breaks from their Can Tho responsibilities several times since arriving in May 1962. Diane had accompanied David to Saigon for his bi-monthly meetings with Mecklin in July, September, and November, when they’d stay with Doug and Myrna Pike. Like the popular primetime cartoon families back home on television — the Flintstones and Rubbles — the wives shopped while the husbands worked.
For David’s birthday in October, he and Diane went up to the mountains of Dalat, then down to the coast, where they stayed at a bungalow hotel at the beach in Nhatrang, next door to Danang.
In Singapore, they were struck by the normality of the place — people walking the streets without looking over their shoulders. In Kuala Lumpur, they stayed in a beachside bungalow, where the Chinese owner had a German Shepherd named “Locket” in honor of the manned mission to the moon that JFK had pledged to fulfill “before this decade is out” — another means by which to sell wavering, newly-independent states on the superior virtues of capitalism over communism.
The Arnolds danced away New Year’s Eve at the Eastern & Orient Hotel in Penang where David, still prudish, was appalled when Diane danced the Twist. She also discovered Thai silk in Bangkok and bought yards of it to have dresses made.
After about ten days, they’d unwound to the point of nearly forgetting Saigon. Returning from vacation and the perspective it gave him, David couldn’t help pondering the contrasts between South Vietnam and its neighbors.
Protest
Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, during which all Vietnamese, even the Viet Cong, shut down and returned to their homes to procreate (most Vietnamese babies are born nine months hence), began soon after the Arnolds returned from vacation. Their Vietnamese friends, concerned that the couple were “still” childless and would have no one to look after them in their old age, urged them to rectify the situation during the time Tet afforded.
A week or so later, Ambassador Nolting came down to Can Tho with one of his aides. David reported earnestly and thoroughly what he knew about the purported strategic hamlets.
Nolting seemed unfazed. “What’s a Harvard PhD doing down here?” He’d obviously read David’s dossier.
In late February David went up to Saigon for his regular bi-monthly briefing with Mecklin, at which he’d hoped to set the record straight about the hamlets. But Mecklin cut this one short, saying dismissively that he was going back to Washington for consultations. At their April briefing, though, the mounting tension between David’s accounts and Mecklin’s purported expectations finally snapped.
“Goddamn it, David, you must be fabricating these reports,” Mecklin sneered. “Have you actually gone out to look for yourself? This makes no sense.”
David’s face flushed.
“I resent that, John. I’ve been giving you the same report since day one, from personal observations, in the field, and it doesn’t seem to matter. I have to wonder whether Washington is getting the message.”
“You’re a Quaker,” Mecklin shot back, “and we all know that Quakers are cowards!” David’s eyes widened. “You would have never taken such dangerous missions with a military escort if I hadn’t ordered it — I know what you Quakers think about the military.”
“I quit,” David replied flatly. “Get another stooge.”
He couldn’t brook the charge of cowardice, nor Mecklin’s sheer obtuseness, which clearly had backing somewhere up the chain. And his ignorance about David’s bond with the Special Forces only highlighted Mecklin’s detachment from his own team, never mind the South Vietnamese.
David slapped his copy of the report into Mecklin’s hand and headed for the door. Mecklin, taken aback, called feebly toward him.
“No one back in Washington is ever going to believe you, David.”
“We’ll see about that, John,” he called back without turning, the screen door clacking shut behind him.
Fillmore
The Arnolds left Saigon the first week of May 1963, just a few days before the world was shocked by a Buddhist monk’s self-immolation there, in protest of the South Vietnamese government’s abuses.
They stopped in Cambodia to see Angkor Wat. David took the elephant tour alone due to Diane’s morning sickness, sown during Tet. She was disappointed for David at the abrupt, bitter end to his Foreign Service career but felt sure another adventure would follow, along with a family.
When they finally landed in California, David was relieved to escape what now seemed a foolhardy decision — his ever having accepted the Saigon assignment. It didn’t occur to him that his government’s self-delusion (or willful ignorance) about the hamlets would ultimately make much difference, or that he now held the de facto title of ‘first American agent to resign in protest over Vietnam.’ He just wanted to put this misstep behind him and get on, yet again, with creating a new life.
Fellows
They arrived in Princeton, New Jersey, a week later. In a Christmas card to the Arnolds, Hans Rosenhaupt, executive director of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, had said there’d be a place for David at the Foundation whenever he decided he’d had enough of South Vietnam. Upon receiving David’s telex explaining the Mecklin imbroglio, Hans immediately offered him a position as his assistant.
They’d first met when Hans had visited Harvard during the 1960–61 academic year and asked to meet with all the Woodrow Wilson Fellows and their wives. David wasn’t especially impressed with Hans aside from his leering at Diane. But with a baby on the way, he felt he couldn’t refuse the job offer.
On his first day there, David discovered he wasn’t to be Rosenhaupt’s assistant after all but would direct the dissertation fellowship program. The fellowships were awarded to graduate students who had completed all other PhD requirements but needed funds to write their dissertations. David was to screen the applications and prepare written recommendations for a panel of academic experts who met twice a year to decide them. Between meetings, he would travel to various universities nationwide to interview deans and check on the fellows’ progress.
Though a far cry from implementing U.S. foreign policy in the field, there was some fun to the job, especially in learning how to manipulate the panel. One application involved a man named Phillips who’d supported himself and his large family as a milkman while working on a doctorate in philosophy at UCLA. He was several years above the program’s standard cut-off age of 30, but David found his story endearing. So, he scheduled consideration of Phillips’ application for right after lunch, when the panel would feel warm and sated; through humor and a heartening narrative, he got them to agree.
He became a family man himself when Ellen was born October 20. David was smitten and euphoric and knew she’d be the first of many. Looking now to set real roots, he and Diane also discovered the New Brunswick Quaker Meeting. (They’d attended the Princeton Meeting several times but found it too smug.) New Brunswick was a new, small, struggling Meeting serving the Rutgers community. David became active in the Meeting and noted the Quakers’ growing interest in Vietnam.
Back at work, he maintained his travel schedule apace. During one trip that spring, he met Tom Smith, Vice President for Academic Affairs at Ohio University. They bonded immediately and, soon thereafter, David got a call from Tom asking him to venture to Athens to meet OU’s new president and discuss a position there. Given his disdain for Rosenhaupt, he leapt at the chance. Maybe academe was where he belonged after all.
He took the job without consulting Diane, who’d grown to love their cute little house in nearby Kingston, her secretarial job at Princeton University, and the friends who’d begun to fill a creeping void.
Athens
At OU, Tom made it clear that David was his protégé, and that he expected great things from him. Vernon Alden, the new president of Ohio University, was determined to turn it into the Harvard of the Midwest and had assembled his own collection of McNamara-esque ‘whiz kids.’ Tom gleefully offered David as his contribution to the pack. He and his wife, Lillian, also became the Arnolds’ personal friends, sharing many a festive evening together.
Home in Athens was, at first, a short-term rental by the train tracks, with the Washington-to-Chicago express rattling by every night. But they soon found a vacant, one-acre wooded lot on the edge of a hill overlooking the university. They put a Techbuilt house on it, with a mortgage from Athens National Bank, the president of which was a fellow Harvard graduate who readily cleared the financing.
While the house was being built, David, Tom, and colleagues inspected three USAID–supported, OU teacher-education projects in South Vietnam and Nigeria. Unimpressed, David proposed they go bigger and create a Center for International Studies, which he would lead while reporting directly to Tom, who beamed approval at the idea. With Vernon’s consent, Tom scratched out a small budget from his discretionary funds to get David started; after that, it was up to him to raise real money.
That proved easy. Wayne Hays, then-Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Appropriations Subcommittee for Foreign Operations, was OU’s congressman. Vernon introduced David to Hays, who bellowed brightly, “Tell me what you want, and I’ll make sure you get it!” David decided to start programs in African and Southeast Asian studies, beginning with Africa since OU already had two contracts and a faculty in Nigeria. Hays told him about the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) funds available for undergraduate African studies and said he’d promote David’s application. Meanwhile, he got David a consulting contract with the State Department to study — of all things — the training of U.S. Foreign Service officers.
Vault
To prepare himself for the NDEA application and learn more about the emerging field of African studies, David went to England to see what had already been done there: The University of Birmingham had the premier programs in the field.
En route from the airport to The Bristol Hotel, he noticed posters advertising the Royal Ballet’s performance in town that night and recalled reading of Rudolf Nureyev’s recent defection to join the troupe.
Checking in at The Bristol, David heard a commotion in the lobby and turned to find Nureyev himself hovering behind him. Unfazed, David headed toward the elevator; as he neared it, the dancer performed a flawless grande jeté across the lobby, alighting in front of David just as he reached for the lift. Observing the ‘take me now’ gaze in Nureyev’s piercing eyes, David and the bellhop slipped around him, turned, and watched the doors close on an incredulous visage.
Fall
That spring OU was officially designated one of two NDEA-funded undergraduate programs in African studies. As a result, the Arnolds found themselves invited to countless dinner parties at the university president’s house and hosting foreign dignitaries in their now-completed home. They seemed well on their way to the college presidency they’d come to covet.
With the African Studies program funded and faculty recruited, David now needed a director — someone with sufficient standing to make the academic community notice what was happening at Ohio University. Bernard Riley, an OU assistant professor of Geography whom David had befriended, told him of a South African named David Brokensha, an assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley and editor of the journal, African Studies. Tom gave David permission to go to Berkeley to scout him out, and Brokensha agreed to come to OU for interviews.
During the visit, both David and Tom noticed the first signs of jealous grumbling among old-guard OU professors in the Anthropology department, where the African Studies program was based. Brokensha had dazzled Vernon, Tom, and David and, consequently, spooked his would-be colleagues. David chose to ignore their concerns and kept pressing Tom to make an offer. Tom, who knew his faculty well, resisted. David finally went directly to Vernon, who authorized him to discuss terms. When David returned from Berkeley and told him of the trip, Tom exploded, marched in to see Vernon, and demanded David’s termination.
Feigning ignorance, Vernon agreed.
Their friendship ruptured, Tom nevertheless recognized that Vernon had double-crossed David, and suggested he stay on until the end of the academic year while looking for work elsewhere.
Dorothy
A bright spot in this new dark moment was his brother Paul’s wedding. David and Jill, Paul’s fiancée, had hit it off right away. She had the tenderness that David responded to instinctually and seemed to understand him, despite his and Paul’s lifelong distance. David was delighted when she became his sister-in-law.
At the reception, Grandmother Brooks remarked at the lusciousness of the wedding cake. Vivian, a notoriously awful cook but a serviceable baker, said it reminded her of a cake she once made.
Her mother scoffed. “Dorothy was always the better cook,” she corrected gratuitously, referring to Vivian’s beautiful and talented sister, who had died tragically in childhood. So beloved was Dorothy, and so seemingly banal was Vivian made to feel by comparison, that she’d grown up certain that everyone wished she had died instead.
Antioch
In March, Antioch College, down the road from OU, in Yellow Springs, invited David to debate one of McNamara’s whiz kids, Daniel Ellsberg, at a Vietnam “teach-in” — an open-ended, audience-driven, action-oriented forum on a major political or social topic. At dinner afterward, Ellsberg conceded that David may be right about Vietnam; he hadn’t been there to see for himself. Years later Ellsberg, finally convinced, would reveal for all to see the so-called Pentagon Papers, containing all the lies the government had told the American people about the war in Vietnam.
Others had found David persuasive as well. Within days after the teach-in, Antioch’s Dean of Faculty, Morris Keeton, offered him a one-year position as associate professor of political science to fill in for one who’d be on sabbatical. Despite his successful Foreign Service exam years before, David pled incompetence, noting he’d never had a course, let alone a degree, in political science.
“That’s exactly why our students want you,” Keeton countered. “They don’t like what they’ve been getting from our political scientists.”
Tom urged David to take it: since he’d never been a faculty member, he didn’t understand faculty politics; and if he intended to pursue a career in academic administration, he’d better learn it.
David followed that advice and accepted the offer, to start in the fall, again without consulting Diane. In the interim, Elliot Menold, a student assistant David had hired upon his arrival in Athens and had quickly grown to trust implicitly, house-sat while he and Diane spent the summer in DC on a Woodrow Wilson assignment at EWA.
Plunge
Within days of their arrival in Yellow Springs, David became desperately ill, his red blood cells plunging, his white cells, soaring. He was so weak he could barely stir out of bed. A local doctor thought it was leukemia. Whatever it was lasted two weeks, then vanished. During the second week, he started feeling strong enough to eat. He dragged himself to trays of food Diane frostily would leave outside the bedroom door and was back to normal by the time classes started.
It turned out to be a great year. He enjoyed teaching, and his students enjoyed him, visiting him at home whenever he’d let them, which was often. To both his and Diane’s delight, Elliot had enrolled in an MA program in Russian studies at Indiana University, just across the Ohio state line, and spent virtually every weekend with them, often as their default babysitter.
Continuing in the fall the EWA consultancy he’d started in the summer, David taught classes Monday through Wednesday, flew to New York City Thursday mornings, and returned to Yellow Springs every Friday evening. Door-to-door, the routine took him slightly under two hours’ traveling: a thirty-minute drive to the Dayton airport; a sixty-minute flight to JFK; a ten-minute connecting helicopter ride to the top of the Pan Am building; then a ten-minute walk to the EWA offices at 522 Fifth Avenue. He used the roundtrip flights to compose exam questions.
Peace
In February he diverted for a week to Hawaii, where the university there wanted him to direct its newly awarded Peace Corps Training Center for all volunteers going to Asia.
On the long flight down, he discovered that United Airlines had just instituted the first in-flight music system. He got drunk on Mai Tais and “California Dreamin’,” “Paint It Black,” and “Summer in the City,” all of which he replayed ad nauseam on the “Rock” channel. Like the folk music he’d discovered on his first sail to Paris, these radical tunes were a revelation. On the trip back, with a layover in San Francisco, he met up with Bill McKinney, now doing his residency in Psychiatry at Stanford, who took him to The Fillmore for a mind-blowing night.
He ultimately turned down the Hawaii offer, again without asking Diane. His New England-bred sense of struggle had won out — he could see himself forgetting all about changing the world while living in paradise.
Yet that week had been transformational. He returned to Yellow Springs laden with psychedelic posters, which he plastered on his office walls. His adoring students found him less stuffy and started bringing him grass-baked oatmeal cookies to advance the cause.
As the school year closed, Antioch offered to create a new position of co-director of International Studies to keep him on. But he declined: having so enjoyed the two-days-a-week at EWA, he accepted instead a full-time job there, starting at the conclusion of his Antioch stint.
YMCA
The Arnolds arrived in New York City in June 1967. One of the EWA staffers had a friend who’d just completed a brownstone renovation in yet-to-be-discovered Chelsea. The Arnolds took the top floor, which featured a living room with a huge skylight, a working wood fireplace, a kitchen, two bedrooms (one with a fireplace of its own), and a bathroom with a small skylight, for $400-a-month.
Despite the great digs, Diane, pregnant again, was miserable. The summer was hot; the closest park for Ellen was three New-York-City blocks away; and David’s job was higher-pressure than he’d anticipated. When he’d come home, wanting to vent, she’d balk.
“It was your decision to take this job, not mine,” she’d remind him.
He’d also gotten chubby during their last months in Athens — a classic case of unhappy overeating. By the time they’d left for Yellow Springs, he’d reached 235 pounds. So, once settled in New York, he determined to resume his daily swim regimen, going each noon to the West 63rd Street YMCA.
10/14
On several occasions that October, he noticed a man smiling at him every time he left the pool. Soon he noticed the same figure smiling as he entered, so he finally swam over and introduced himself.
“Pleasure to meet you, David. I’m Frank.”
They left the pool and entered the showers, then dressed. Frank suggested a walk in Central Park one block over, where they continued chatting. He was Deputy Director of the Lincoln Center Fund; he hailed from Worcester, Massachusetts; and he, like David, had plenty of office acquaintances in New York but few personal friends.
They swam together every workday thereafter, walking and lunching together, prattling about who they were and wanted to be. It made Diane happier, too — David now had someone to talk to and would come home in a better mood, needing less from her.
Frank began suggesting they meet after work for a drink, maybe have dinner — he lived alone and would welcome the company. David demurred, citing a pregnant wife at home. Frank said he’d like to meet Diane and get to know her, so David finally invited him to tag along home with him one evening.
Aware of David’s interest in French films, he suggested they all see Jules et Jim together. Diane, delighted to make Frank’s acquaintance and glad that David had a friend whose company he enjoyed so much, shooed them on without her.
They met up again at the theater. It was the first evening in David’s marriage (except when traveling) that he was out without Diane. As they left the theatre, Frank mentioned that his apartment was only a few blocks away, with a great city view.
“How about coming up for a drink?”
“All right,” David obliged, not quite ready to call it a night.
As soon as David entered the apartment and turned from the door, Frank grabbed him and kissed him deeply.
The conversion was instantaneous. In seconds, David had melted, dissolved, his pieces re-formed. The last vestiges of the person others had planned disappeared.
He’d finally arrived.
Payback
Ellen at the time was reading a children’s book by Richard Scary, the main characters of which were an extended family of mice. David was spending so much time with Frank now that Ellen referred to one of the characters as Frankmouse, the daddy mouse’s friend.
To David, he and Frank had become intoxicated lovers. The sex wasn’t especially powerful, and Frank wasn’t much to look at, nor the least bit endowed. But emotionally it was a different feeling than he’d ever had. He lost himself totally in Frank no matter what they were doing — having sex or just sitting in the dark, looking out at the New York City skyline and listening to romantic music. They once drove out to the countryside in David’s MG convertible, stopping for dinner at a roadside restaurant on a crisp fall night, wading through leaves on the way back to the car. Another night, they drove to Brooklyn Heights and walked along the promenade overlooking Brooklyn Bridge and lower Manhattan. They were together almost every night, though David always returned to Diane by midnight, never staying overnight with Frank.
Then it ended. Frank took David to lunch the day before Thanksgiving and told him that his boyfriend, who’d left the day he and David had met, was about to return from an overseas trip. He was an executive at Bantum Books and had always taken Frank with him on his foreign travel. He didn’t this time, so David was his payback.
Revelation
Clawing his way home after work, David told Diane that he and Frank had argued and would no longer be friends.
She tried to console him. But after a few weeks, he still was affected by the split. She asked what was going on.
“I can’t tell you,” he would say.
She kept at it. He kept resisting.
Then, as they were driving back from a visit with Paul and Jill, leaving Ellen with them for the night, Diane finally cracked his silence.
Her heart stopped. “Why did you have to tell me that.”
Confidant
After a few days, when she was able to pry thoughts loose and begin to grapple with David’s revelation, she asked him who she could talk to about it — another man, perhaps, who might be able to make sense of it.
Elliot, they agreed, was the one — perhaps the only person who knew them intimately as a couple and had their best interests at heart.
She asked David to take Ellen to a friend’s birthday party so she could invite Elliot over, hoping he could shed light on David’s shocking behavior.
After the party, David returned to find Elliot gone and Diane nearly hysterical.
“Go see Elliot,” she sobbed. “He’ll explain.”
He did.
“I’ve been in love with you since my first interview with you,” Elliot began, still reeling from joyful disbelief. “Even though you were straight, and I thought it was hopeless, I felt compelled to be with you, so I tried to share whatever part of your life I could.”
Exposing his erection, he confessed to being shocked at Diane’s news and devastated that he wasn’t the reason for it. When David, stunned by this revelation, instinctively hugged him in consolation, Elliot ejaculated all over him.
Back at home, Diane, craving any comfort, asked David what had taken him so long to return.
“That’s disgusting,” she muttered.
Her emotions had fled.
Fancy
Two weeks later, on the night Jonathan would be born, David took Elliot to a Carnegie Hall concert that Diane now felt both too expectant and too empty to enjoy. The Graduate had been released the prior fall, introducing Simon & Garfunkel to a wide audience, and all of popular entertainment in New York attended. David and Elliot watched from the balcony.
On the way out, David finally broke the tension, telling Elliot that he appreciated his devotion over the years and, after the Frank affair, understood his love, but he couldn’t reciprocate. He and Diane had talked things through: She had apologized for how she’d been treating him — she’d driven him into Frank’s arms and, now that hers were open again, there was no need for a Frank — a mistake, a whim, a passing fancy.
That night was the last that either Arnold would see of Elliot. Within a few weeks, he quit his job and moved back to Indiana.
Foundation
David went back to work. The Ford Foundation, which funded EWA, held its April 1968 board meeting in Nassau. Both John Gardner and Robert McNamara, having recently left the Johnson administration, had joined the board. A month earlier, President Johnson had announced he would not seek reelection, a decision compelled by his dire unpopularity over the insoluble quagmire that U.S. policy in Vietnam had become, with tens of thousands of American soldiers now killed in the war, and angry protesters at home filling the streets and chanting, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?!”
On a break from the meeting, David found himself walking the beach alone with McNamara. It was understood at the meeting, however, that any mention of Vietnam was verboten. The psychic wounds were still searing, and the former defense secretary felt them most keenly through his wife’s agonizing ulcers — later diagnosed as terminal stomach cancer — which, he was sure, had been caused by the burden of “McNamara’s War,” as the press had dubbed the Vietnam conflict.
“Margaret’s got my ulcers,” he muttered when David politely inquired about her.
Later that summer, David was sent on a mission to Afghanistan, Nepal, and India with Ford Foundation funds to scout out possible EWA projects. Carol Laise, the wife of Ellsworth Bunker, then-U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam and also a member of the EWA board, was herself the U.S. Ambassador to Nepal. Bunker had told her about David’s mission, and they enjoyed a delightful dinner at her residence in Kathmandu. She taught him about the path, a painting encompassing the entirety of Hindu mythology. She had one hanging above the sideboard in her dining room and told him where to buy one in New Delhi.
David also was invited, through an old USIA friend, to a private dinner party at the residence of U.S. Ambassador Chester Bowles, where his emotional reformation continued, tinged now with the fresh memory of a broken McNamara in Nassau, echoes of the fights with Mecklin, and the ache of his own breaking home. Amidst the diplomatic finery and the eager youngsters surrounding the old oracle, David told Bowles he was full of shit about Vietnam and should stop it for the sake of the sacrificial youth still getting drafted and shipped there to die for a lie.
Ticket
So impressed were David’s EWA superiors by his talents that, in March 1969, they suggested he take a couple of years off for a research project of his choice, wherever he wanted, to bolster the academic career they and he thought he still wanted. They would support it financially and ensure its results got published.
Consulted finally, Diane, who now disliked New York more than ever, was all for escaping to a new beginning. Europe came to mind immediately, since they’d both enjoyed living there before. “The Growing Role of Academics in Policy-making,” became his topic, with England and Germany the countries to be studied.
David set off to Europe to choose his base city. His first stop, London, was an obvious possibility, with British academics already emulating their American counterparts in this regard. The Hague and Geneva became two other possibilities when the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace had agreed to contribute $20,000 to his project. The Endowment supported several programs relating to the International Court in The Hague, and its nearby university in Leiden could arrange a connection for him. It also had an office in Geneva he could use.
Chelsea II
Having read in the New York Times about the Swinging London of the late 1960s and learning that King’s Road, Chelsea, was its social center, David made a beeline for it on his first night in London. The Drug Store was the place to be at cocktail time.
Upon arriving he saw Peter — blond, blue-eyed, in his late twenties — cornered at the bar by a much older man. As David approached, Peter had caught his eye and given him a pleading look. Quick to the rescue, David went up and started chatting with Peter as though they were old friends. Before long, the screened-out pest paid his tab and left.
Peter hugged David in relief and spent that night, and every night thereafter, in his hotel bed. They were mutually enchanted, equally delirious. David explained to Peter why he was in London and that, because of him, he’d choose to stay there. He also told him about Diane and the children. Peter said they’d work it out — he was bisexual. They could even double date!
Netherlands
Having summarily selected London, David proceeded perfunctorily with his scheduled visits to The Hague and Geneva.
Even on a weekday, The Hague is quiet, peaceful, and utterly dull. On a Sunday afternoon, as when David arrived, it’s virtually lifeless. He went looking for a restaurant and couldn’t find one open, then spotted a corner establishment which, although its windows were completely curtained off, had a side door through which only men, it appeared, were coming and going. In keeping with his fact-finding mission, he dutifully went over to investigate.
Frank had told him about gay bars but had never taken him to one, perhaps wary of poachers or witnesses. But from Frank’s description, David knew this was one. He immediately became self-conscious, not knowing quite how to behave. Playing it cool at the bar, he noticed an older man at the other end signaling interest. Knowing from the straight world that if you accepted a drink, you were on the way to something interesting, David turned to a handsome young man next to him.
“What should I do?”
“Well, to start with,” the man counseled sardonically, “if you don’t want to go to bed with him, don’t accept his offer.”
Before long, though, the counselor himself, a University of Utrecht student visiting his aunt, made an offer of his own, which David, smitten, readily accepted. Since the lad had no classes the next day, he proposed taking David to Amsterdam that night and showing him “what to do.” Hitting three gay bars that night — men dancing with men! — David felt again the sense of place he’d found at Frank’s first kiss.
When he got back to New York he told Diane what had happened, though not mentioning Peter. Clearly hurt, she nevertheless said she was delighted he’d chosen London, that she’d always wanted to live there, and that what he’d told her wasn’t really him but some strange phase they’d be able to work their way through.
“Let’s leave New York and move to Europe as soon as we can.”
QE2
They left on the maiden eastbound voyage of the Queen Elizabeth II in mid-June. EWA had reserved one of the first-class salons for a going-away party, which was packed with EWA staff, Chelsea pals, and other New York City friends. As the Arnolds boarded, they noticed a gaggle of photographers at the first-class gangplank flashing their cameras at people who, from a distance, looked vaguely familiar. But they were too excited themselves to pay much attention.
The second day out, Diane sent David up to the nursery to collect Jonathan, who’d been deposited there for the morning while she and Ellen got their hair done. He discovered Jonathan in a playpen, eagerly attempting to gouge out the eyes of another eighteen-month-old boy. David reached down to extricate him as the other boy’s mother did the same. Lifting their wiggling offspring, the actress Lynn Redgrave said to David, “I do believe our sons have become friends.”
Other notables aboard included director John Schlesinger, who’d flown his closest friends to New York for the premiere of his latest film, Midnight Cowboy — about a dim young Texan who ventures to New York City to become a male hustler — which would be the first “X-rated” film to receive Academy Awards (for Best Director and Best Picture) — and was now sailing them back home on the QE2. The friends included Lucas Heller, who’d written the scripts for Whatever Happened To Baby Jane and The Dirty Dozen, among others; and his wife, Caroline, who, along with Redgrave, became Diane’s ship-friends; John Clark, who clearly felt warm for Diane and asked the Arnolds, in front of his mortified wife (Redgrave), whether they were swingers; the director Clive Donner, then best known for What’s New Pussycat?, who became David’s friend; and John Schlesinger’s then-lover, David, whom he treated publicly as badly as John Clark did Lynn.
The celebrity cast were amused by the Arnolds and relieved to be shipbound with people who didn’t want anything from them. When David brought his EWA prospectus to read at the pool one morning, Clive said, “A-ha! So you do have a script you want me to read” — he seemed disappointed to discover otherwise. David recognized Clive was attracted to him but found Donner’s personality far more interesting than his body. Besides, having turned down John Clark’s bid for Diane, he was in no position to swing for Clive. Indeed, a wise old lesbian who’d lived down the block in New York and in whom David had confided, had cautioned him, “Don’t shit in your own bed. When you have to cat around, be sure it’s nowhere near wherever Diane is.”
Cherbourg
It was through Caroline Heller that the Arnolds would find their house in London. Her father had just retired as president of the Architectural Association of Great Britain and was about to move with his wife to their country home in the lake district of England. His Hampstead townhouse, an architectural gem, would be available to rent. Caroline got it for them, which never would have happened through the open market as her father wanted it rented to a friend or someone he knew. Caroline convinced him that the Arnolds qualified.
The ship docked first in Cherbourg before going on to Southampton. The Arnolds debarked there because David, having read in the New York Times about the glories of Brittany, had arranged a beach house in Le Croisic for the summer. They rented a car for the season, stayed overnight at a country inn on the way, and arrived to find their sweet summer house the following day. It would be the last time they were happy together.
Diane’s eighteen-year-old nephew, Scott, flew over to spend the summer with them and help Diane look after the children while David arranged his academic affiliations. On the way to pick Scott up at Orly Airport, David drove by Fontainebleau and stopped at the small concert hall where Mademoiselle used to hold her master classes. Sure enough, there she was, sitting up on stage, next to the piano bench, instructing a student. Other students were sitting in the front rows, rapt as he’d once been. He sat in the very back for at least an hour, hoping to go up and greet her during a break. But she was engrossed in her work and gave no sign of letting up. He finally left and drove on to Orly. She never knew he was there or how grateful he’d become for her honesty.
With the family settled in Brittany, David went to England and The Netherlands to get things going. In truth he went to London to cavort with Peter and do whatever else Amsterdam offered. He didn’t feel the least bit guilty about it, recalling Diane’s reaction to the Frank revelation and figuring she didn’t need to know about these dalliances.
But before heading home in September, Scott was perceptive enough to tell David, in front of Diane, that he didn’t like the way he was treating his family.
Two Keats Grove
They arrived at their new home at Two Keats Grove in London a few days later, having taken the ferry across the Channel. The boxes had barely hit the floor before David scampered to one of London’s best-known gay pubs, the King William IV.
Bartenders there were about as hunky as Brits can get. David found the clientele a bit queeny, but he met and dated Mark, a butchy New Zealand carpenter. Diane didn’t seem to suspect anything during these first few months.
Professionally, he had a visiting appointment at the London School of Economics but spent more time at the University of Sussex. He found Robert Rhodes James, the Institute’s director and a renowned historian, fascinating. Diane was charmed by James’s wife and daughters when she and David visited their country house near Brighton for dinner.
Alan Pifer introduced David to Dame Nancy Parkinson. Alan had met her as head of the Fulbright Commission in London during the late 1940s, when she was already a cosmic pooh-bah at the British Council. Alan had warned David that she would make up her mind about him instantly: If she liked him, he’d know it; and likewise, if not. She was sharp, perceptive, and cared deeply for whom she cared. She could open all sorts of doors for him.
David took Diane with him to their first visit to Parkinson’s magnificent Edwardian home facing Regents Park. As Alan knew she would, Dame Nancy fell all over David. She immediately started introducing him to people he needed to know in London and even found him an assistant.
She ignored Diane.
Wolf
In Amsterdam, meanwhile, he’d met a big, beautiful, strapping German, blond-haired, blue-eyed, about the same age, who made him forget about Peter. They met in a gay bar in Amsterdam during one of David’s seminar visits to the University of Leiden.
The sex was intense. It wasn’t love, but they fit so well together that David started spending more and more time with Wolf at his apartment in Amsterdam — so much time that Diane finally began to accept that he was leading a double life.
She confronted him in early December. He confessed. She gave him an ultimatum, thinking that would shock him into choosing her. She was stunned when he chose Wolf.
Attempting to make the best of it, at least for appearances’ sake, they gave a mammoth New Year’s Eve party at Two Keats Grove to ‘celebrate’ their (unexplained) separation, inviting all of their London friends (except Robert Rhodes James and Dame Nancy). On New Year’s Day 1970, David flew to Amsterdam and moved in with Wolf.
Diane believed he’d be back before long and waited at Two Keats Grove for that to happen.
Cold
The subterfuge now obsolete, life with Wolf in Amsterdam quickly turned mundane: perfunctory sex, grocery shopping on weekends. It was, David realized, a relationship of convenience. Of escape.
He began spending more time back in the UK, visiting universities in England, Scotland, and Wales, doing the interviews for his EWA research project. He and his assistant, Christopher Rhoad, traveled together, always by train, and stayed overnight in separate hotel rooms. David eventually told Chris what was going on with Diane; he wasn’t fazed.
On a trip to the University of Edinburgh, David met a Scot in a gay pub and went home with him, not realizing how far out of Edinburgh he lived, and didn’t return to the hotel until late the next morning. Chris was beside himself, ready to call the police to report a missing person. He made David promise never to spend another night with someone while they were traveling together.
David didn’t go anywhere near Diane and the children either, though he always let her know where he was in case of emergency.
She finally contacted him Easter weekend while he and Wolf were in Dortmund visiting Wolf’s mother: She’d decided to return to the States with the children.
He flew back to London immediately.
Commune
Upon his return to London, he discovered Diane had taken a lover — an American student named Tim, at least fifteen years her junior, doing his year abroad at Dartmouth. She’d met him through one of David’s Danforth friends, whose wife had made the introduction, recognizing Diane’s loneliness. Tim had moved into Two Keats Grove and Jonathan had taken to calling him “new daddy.” Diane was planning to return with Tim to the States, where they would live in a commune in Vermont until the following academic year, when Tim would decide whether to return to Dartmouth.
David was appalled — not that Diane now had a new man, since he’d driven her to it — but at the total impracticality of what she was planning. They were flying back on Icelandic Air, the cheapest way to fly then, to New York City, where they would rent a car and drive up to the commune.
“Neither of you even has a credit card to rent the car,” David scolded.
“Tim will figure it out,” Diane scoffed. It took her only two days to pack what she wanted, leaving behind every memento of David and their life together.
Crack
Meanwhile, a letter from EWA had arrived. David’s superiors there had been replaced and Jim Perkins, who’d been rescued by the Ford Foundation from his presidency of Cornell during the student anti-Vietnam-War riots there, had decided to cancel David’s project. He would be paid a further month’s salary and have his relocation costs covered, then be on his own.
The next day, David escorted Diane, Tim, and the kids to Victoria Station, where they took the train to Gatwick Airport for the overnight flight to New York. When he got back to Two Keats Grove, he called Dame Nancy, who’d known nothing of his personal life and had no inkling why Diane was leaving.
“Good, she didn’t deserve you,” she declared, and apologized for having a dinner appointment she couldn’t cancel that night. She instructed him to come to her house the next day so she could help him in any way possible.
“For now,” she instructed, “get yourself to a pub far enough away from home that no one there knows you but not so far away that you can’t get home on your own and get sloshed. Ring me tomorrow once you’ve recovered from your hangover.”
The next morning, his head pounding, he got a call from Aunt Betty in New York. Diane had had a nervous breakdown in New York. Tim had abandoned them at JFK — just walked away and disappeared, never to be seen again. She had left the children in a restroom but couldn’t recall which one. Traveler’s Aid had found her wandering around the terminal in a daze. She’d had wits enough to give them Betty’s phone number; Betty and her husband had gone out to the airport, brought them all back to their apartment, and told David to take the first flight back to the States.
He called Dame Nancy. Between the two of them, they decided David should call his parents on Cape Cod and ask them to come down to New York and take Diane and the children back with them. David would then call Diane’s father, Oliver, in Salt Lake City, tell him what had happened, and ask him to join him as soon as possible on the Cape so they could decide what to do next. Once that was sorted out, David should return to London and Dame Nancy would take over.
He arrived in Boston the next day. Oliver met him at the airport, and Harry took them home to West Falmouth.
Drive
David, Diane, Oliver, and the kids stayed with Harry and Vivian in West Falmouth for several days, deciding how to proceed. A local psychiatrist said Diane needed to be institutionalized immediately.
For his part, David still felt no guilt, no remorse, wanting only to extricate himself from the situation as soon as possible. He spent a day alone reviewing scenes of his past — driving down to South Harwich to see his childhood house, now owned by someone else; his grandparents’ house, where he’d discovered piano, now vacant; the elementary schools he’d attended. He then drove to Chatham, where he took in an ill-chosen matinee performance of, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? As with his nostalgic stop at Fontainebleau, it all seemed a poignant goodbye to a stranger.
By the time he got back to Garrison Road, Oliver had decided to fly back to Salt Lake City the next day with Diane and the kids. He’d already made arrangements to put Diane in a Mormon hospital that specialized in mental illness — the one his wife had been in and out of over the years.
David saw them off at the Boston airport and took an overnight flight back to London.
Rufus
He called Dame Nancy as soon as he reached Two Keats Grove the next morning. She was still in bed, reading the paper. After he explained to her what had transpired back home, she said he needed live-in companionship — total, adoring love with no questions asked. She’d spotted an ad for black Labrador pups, gave him the kennel information, and told him to call Chris and have him go choose one.
“Rufus” arrived that afternoon.
David plunged back into his project, which the Carnegie Endowment still supported, using his office at the London School of Economics for the first time. On the way out one day, he encountered Diana Vickers, a graduate student who’d recently returned from the British equivalent of the Peace Corps in Africa. She looked and talked like a young Katherine Hepburn, just as leggy and elegant. Dazzled, David asked her out for coffee, and she accepted. He called Dame Nancy to tell her.
“Wait a minute, dear, while I look up something.” After some rustling in the background, she returned to the phone and read him an extract from the British social register, Burke’s Peerage. It turned out Diana was a Vickers of the Vickers, Ltd., family, originally a giant shipbuilding, engineering, and arms conglomerate and now, through various mergers, the British Aircraft Corporation. They were the richest non-royals in the UK.
“How,” Nancy purred, “have you managed this?”
Here, clearly, was the kind of woman both Dame Nancy and, for that matter, Vivian, who had never taken to Diane, had envisioned for David. Although there was no sex involved, David’s urges told him he might be bisexual.
Diana invited him out for a weekend at her family’s country estate in Epson — where she’d also invited another suitor, James Douglas-Home, son of then-prime minister William Douglas-Home.
Seeing he was outgunned, David jettisoned the bisexuality notion and re-entered the London gay scene with abandon. Although he continued to go to the King William in Hampstead (since it was walking distance from home), he’d also discovered the Queen’s Arms, near Buckingham Palace, a totally straight pub except on Sundays at lunchtime, when it became the gay place to go and the standard pick-up line was, “Would you care to go home with me for some coffee?”
One interlocutor asked David more directly, “I’m terribly sorry, I’m all out of coffee, but would you like to come just for the sex?”
DAAD
Dame Nancy knew nothing of all this. She was, of course, disappointed that the Diana Vickers liaison had fizzled, and she mentioned other eligible young ladies she could arrange to have over for tea. But David changed the subject whenever she brought it up.
Meanwhile, Diane was hospitalized less than two months. She asked David to visit her and the children, which he did.
She asked to reconcile. He said it wouldn’t work.
When he returned to London, his funds dwindling, he gave Rufus away and sublet Two Keat’s Grove for the summer. He moved in with a young man who lived just south of Victoria Station, not a very fashionable neighborhood then, but there was no rent involved and the sex, for an Englishman, was good. David completed his UK research and prepared to move to West Germany to work on the second year of the project.
Dame Nancy had arranged a grant for him from the DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, or German Academic Exchange Service), the West German equivalent of the British Council, to supplement the continuing Carnegie Endowment support. DAAD arranged office space for him at the West German version of the Council on Foreign Relations, located in Bonn. DAAD also secured a room for him with a family in Bad Godesberg, a suburb of Bonn, where he moved in early September.
He hadn’t felt so empty since saying goodbye to Mademoiselle.
Achtung
A gay American he’d met in London at one of the Queens Arms Sunday luncheons told David, upon learning of his West Germany plans, of an American friend of his, a banker named Kurt, who lived in Frankfurt, whom he might enjoy meeting. Once settled in Bad Godesberg, David called him.
Since Kurt worked for an American bank, he had Veterans Day off and suggested David take the train down to Frankfurt for the day and dinner with him, and he’d make sure he got a train back afterward.
They enjoyed each other’s company so much that David missed the last train back to Bonn. With more of the night ahead, Kurt suggested they go to his favorite gay bar in Frankfurt, the Come Back, frequented by Americans hot for Germans and vice versa. David could stay overnight on Kurt’s sofa bed.
They’d barely stepped inside the Come Back before David felt a strong presence standing behind him. He turned, and there was “Bernd,” clearly drawn to him. David’s reaction was immediate. Following hours of riveted conversation and intensifying attraction, David got Kurt’s permission to bring Bernd back to the sofa bed.
He was in his late twenties, working on a Diplom Kaufman, the German equivalent of an MBA, supporting himself by working as a guide for the Visitors Service, which invited eminent foreigners to West Germany to see what good guys the Germans had become since World War II. The following weekend, and every weekend thereafter through Christmas, David came down to Frankfurt and stayed with Bernd at his one-room studio.
On New Year’s Day 1971, he moved in with him.
David traveled around West Germany the remainder of that academic year doing his project interviews, made all the more forgettable by the growing sense of comfort, care, and love he felt for, and from, Bernd. In the spring he bought a Volkswagen Beetle and, that summer, drove with Bernd to Amsterdam to show him off to Dutch friends he’d made during his Wolf diversion. They also drove to England to spend time at David’s University of Sussex Institute for the Study of International Organisation, and to meet Dame Nancy. She clearly liked Bernd but didn’t appear to recognize the relationship.
Carnegie suggested David use their European office in Geneva in August and September to finish writing up his two-year study, as both the DAAD and Carnegie grants expired at the end of that month. He drove back to Frankfurt several times to share days and nights with Bernd, using his Carnegie European Office time to figure out what to do next with his life. Bernd had another year to complete his studies, so they decided David would return to an academic position in the U.S. and Bernd would join him wherever that was.
Pivot
Chuck Young, Chancellor of UCLA and a member of the EWA board, invited David to Los Angles to explore becoming Director of International Studies. Intrigued, David bought a ticket to Los Angeles for the last Saturday of September.
The night before the flight, though, he got a call from Michel Moussalli, the Assistant Director of Administration at the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and a friend of Jean Siotis, the co-head of Carnegie’s Geneva office, asking him to come to his office the next morning. He was looking for an American with administrative experience now.
The sudden and unforeseen prospect of working at Eleanor Roosevelt’s United Nations was exhilarating. He never took that flight to Los Angeles.
Fiorella
The U.S. government had just given UNHCR funds toward the repatriation of millions of people who’d fled to India during Pakistan’s civil war, which had led to the birth of an independent Bangladesh. The unwritten rule was that a national of whichever country paid the most for a UNHCR operation was to be in charge of it. David was hired accordingly.
Within days of his arrival, however, the Indian government opted to run the operation itself, now leaving UNHCR headquarters with an extra American on its hands. Fiorella Cappelli, an Italian who’d started out in the UNHCR Rome office, snapped David up. Her administrative officer, Sergio Vieira de Mello, was getting itchy for a field assignment and she needed a replacement for him. David was the available warm body.
Quickly discovering that David liked to write (and that she liked what he wrote), Fiorella assigned him to write the “sorry letters” for the High Commissioner, Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, who received a constant stream of personal pleas, even from heads of small states, to hire their relatives. David was assigned to draft the responses and had such a way with saying “no” that it made even the recipient feel good — yet another iteration of David’s empathic powers. This facility worked to his personal advantage as well: he also had a knack, which Bernd dubbed his “pure puppy dog” routine, for endearing himself to a person who may be obstructing his desires but who, once endeared, would warmly watch David trot off to do whatever he’d originally planned.
So impressed was the High Commissioner with David’s work that he came by personally to meet this fellow who was dexterously keeping him off so many a pointy hook. It was in this job that he also met Kofi Annan (who’d held the job before Sergio) when Kofi, visiting Geneva from UN headquarters in New York, came over to meet whomever had his old job now. They became fast friends.
Meanwhile Jacqueline Damer, a voluptuous blonde from the French Foreign Ministry, had joined UNHCR the same day as David. They met during orientation, and the mutual attraction — intellectual, emotional, physical — was immediate. They started dating platonically, David surmising now that he must be bisexual and telling neither Bernd nor Jacqueline about the other.
She was assigned as a Programme Officer in the Central and West Africa Section, responsible for tracking and supporting operations in then-Zaïre and elsewhere. When David received a field assignment to Isiro, in Zaire’s northeast corner, she was delighted — she would be his back-up at HQ.
He got the Isiro assignment, too, as the first available warm body. The Swiss incumbent had returned to Switzerland for Christmas complaining of headaches — owing, it turned out, to an operable brain tumor. The director of administration roamed the UNHCR corridors looking for a replacement, but it was Christmastime, and the offices were empty — with the exception of David, who hadn’t accrued enough leave to be absent.
Sensing adventure, he accepted the assignment without hesitation.
Isiro
There was a two-week interval before he departed Geneva: He had to have a thorough physical, including shots for the tropics; get briefed by the Africa experts and read through the files on the Isiro operation; and visit Bernd in Frankfurt and sell his car, which he wouldn’t need down there.
Jacqueline briefed him on program matters and shared the relevant files. One item, which she dismissed out of hand, suggested the Zande tribe, to which the bulk of the refugees belonged, were cannibals. She then outlined more serious concerns he would encounter, mainly diplomatic ones between authorities and refugees.
His car sold quicker than he’d expected, so he took the train up to Frankfurt for a passionate goodbye with Bernd. They agreed he would come down to Isiro during his semester break the following summer.
Bearings
David took the train to Paris and Le Bourget airport, where Jacqueline met him for the trek to Zaire. Deplaning in Kinshasa after the overnight flight, he met a wall of wet, sticky air that reminded him of stepping into Saigon nearly ten years before.
The next day, his prickly new boss, Otto, quickly made it clear that he was an old Africa hand, that David wasn’t, and that, although he understood the urgency of the situation, he wished they’d sent someone else.
David then flew up to Isiro on Air Zaïre, with a stop in Kisangani, where he was met by Henri Robert and his key staff, Simon Bassenda, who was to be David’s administrative officer, and Gabriel, his driver. The climate, high in the savannah and away from the tropical rainforest, was blissful. In Isiro, his new staff escorted him to his house, where he was introduced to Frederick, his houseman and cook. Henri and his wife had him over for dinner.
Within days, Robert took David out to the largest of the three refugee settlements, containing some 25,000 people, near a village called Amadi. The other two settlements held 15,000 and 10,000, respectively. The drive took six hours on a series of rutted dirt roads and a river-crossing on a log ferry held together with rope and puffed along by a tiny outboard engine.
All three settlements were located some 200 kilometers from the Sudanese border to prevent cross-border skirmishes between the refugees (former rebels) and the Sudanese Arabs. David noticed in the local villages that the women had taken to wearing bras donated, presumably, by women in Europe and the U.S. who’d recently discarded theirs in response to the women’s liberation movement then gaining traction.
Tadeo
Robert had chosen the first settlement because it had a collection of hot-heads impatient to return to their home villages in southern Sudan and demanding to know, now that there was a truce, when that would be. Their leader was Tadeo Bidai. He and Robert disliked each other, and Robert, knowing David had never dealt with Africans before, worried he would mishandle the meeting, to be held under a massive mango tree.
It went beautifully. At the end of the session Tadeo came up to David, shook his hand, asked him to come to his hut, meet his wife and children, and see his garden.
Robert was incredulous at David’s report. “But I thought you said you’d never worked in Africa before? How did you make this happen?”
“I just treated him like a person and listened.”
After two months of similar results in the other two settlements, Robert concluded that matters were well enough in hand that he and his wife could take some home-leave back to France.
David and his Dutch assistant, Adrian, went out to the Isiro airstrip to see them off.
“Well, now that the cat’s away, we mice can play,” David grinned as the plane fizzled out of sight.
“You can’t fool me, David,” Adrian laughed. “You’re the cat!”
Gite
His schedule entailed two weeks per month in the Isiro office and two visiting the refugees. Joining him were Frederick and Joshua, a German shepherd pup that Paul Meier, a liaison in the Kinshasa office, had found for him at a kennel south of the city.
Each settlement had a gite — a thatch-roofed guest cottage — reserved for him. Frederick cooked for him in Isiro and out in the settlements. Joshua, who came along to the office and to the settlements, protected him. David swiftly made his closest friend among the IORD staff, John Hunt, an Englishman who worked at the Amadi settlement and often joined David for dinner when he was there and stayed with him when he came down to Isiro for R&R. A Belgian lady in the third settlement had a mongoose on each shoulder protecting her from snakes as she worked among the refugees.
David was grateful not to stay very long in the house he’d inherited from Bosshard. The owner now wanted it back, and Robert found a better one further down the road, with a working fireplace in the living room (it got cool during rainy season) and a majestic garden with mango, papaya, and banana trees. Manny, David’s night watchman, would bang the banana bunches with a long stick to shake out poisonous snakes that had coiled up therein. Whenever one dropped, Joshua would pounce on its head and kill it.
Missionary
David spent his days in the settlements listening to and attempting to resolve the refugees’ problems. He quickly grew attached to them, and they to him.
In the evenings, sitting on the veranda of his gite, watching the sun melt, with Frederick cooking dinner and Joshua snoozing at his feet, he marveled at being paid to do something so fulfilling. A smiling Mrs. Roosevelt’s would waft across his mind.
His schedule in Isiro started with a six-a.m. nude dip at a Belgian-built swim and tennis club just down the road, virtually unused now that the Belgians had fled. He got to the office by seven; the workday ended at two, when everyone went home for a nap to ignore the mid-day heat. His connection with Kinshasa was a two-way, short-wave radio that Simon Bassenda operated for him. He shared Bosshard’s trick of keeping it turned off when he didn’t like the orders he was receiving, shrugging to superiors later that the radio must have been on the fritz. Eventually Otto came up for a visit to see personally how David was doing. Apparently satisfied, never returned.
David also had become good friends with the local police chief, a Zaïrian who made sure David had good relations with all the police and other security officials in the entire province. There was a secondary school outside of Isiro run by Mennonite missionaries, and he had access to those living out in the bush who would visit with him during his trips to the settlements.
Waylay
As it turned out, Isiro was on the trans-Africa, London-to-Nairobi Land Rover route established by the Royal Automobile Club of Great Britain and a stopping point for provisions. Word-of-mouth along the way told of this wacky UN man in Isiro named David with plenty of bedrooms for overnighters and access to the local (and legal) equivalent of marijuana for roughly a dollar-per-pound.
David thus had lots of visitors and, therefore, lots of sex. Among many a bedmate were Jacqueline (for the first time) when she came down from Geneva for an inspection visit. She and Bernd, who also came down for a romp according to plan, still knew nothing of each other. And a hitch-hiking Dutchman named Rick drifted through and spent a couple of weeks in David’s bed as well.
Back at headquarters in Geneva, they worried he was lonely. He wasn’t.
On one of his periodic trips to Geneva to consult on repatriation logistics (and to get some R&R with Bernd in Frankfurt), David was to take an Air Zaïre flight from Isiro to Kigali and connect on a Sabena flight from Kigali to Brussels. But just before they were to re-board an intervening flight in Bunia, Zaire, the plane had mechanical trouble and was taken out of service. They would have to remain in Bunia until the next Air Zaïre flight, exactly one week later.
Instead, David and three others on the flight, strangers until then, decided to hire a Land Rover and a driver to take them on a two-day trip to the closest international airport, at Entebbe.
Bernd picked him up at the Frankfurt airport. They soon went down to Geneva for the briefings to prepare for the repatriation operation. David learned that Sergio Vieira de Mello, his predecessor at UN headquarters, would be his counterpart on the Sudan side of the border. David would be stationed in Juba, the capital of the southern and “black” sector of Sudan, which was about to be given semi-autonomy from the Arab north in a limited federal system. UNDP would do the actual resettling of David’s refugees back in their home villages. Sergio, as the senior UNHCR representative, would be responsible for ensuring it all ran smoothly.
Reintegration
David’s job was to ensure that the Zaïrian authorities allowed the Zande to cross the border into Sudan without having their already-meager possessions confiscated; that the same would happen in Sudan; and, along with Sergio up in Juba, that UNDP teams were there in the home villages to assist with reintegration. The IORD team was responsible for the actual transporting, done in truck convoys.
David thus spent much of the final nine months of his mission being driven by Gaby up to Juba and back — a two-day trip. They would stay overnight just inside the Sudan-Zaïre border at the Garamba National Park, created by the Belgians during the colonial period and, though now virtually devoid of visitors, still full of animals. David stayed in one of the cottages right on the river, near hippos bellowing through the night. While driving through a forest one day, they came across an elephant asleep in the narrow road. Rather than wake and anger it, they sat next to it and had lunch. After about an hour, the groggy behemoth finally arose and ambled off, and they resumed their trek.
The repatriation operation was completed successfully in September 1973. David closed up shop in Isiro, donating its contents and those of the three now-empty settlements to the Zaïrian authorities.
Frederick begged David to take him back to Switzerland with him. David explained why that wouldn’t be practical, sure that Frederick would never be able to adapt to a radically different existence.
Frederick cried when David left. African men don’t cry.
La Rippe
He took a non-stop Lufthansa flight from Kinshasa to Frankfurt, upgrading to first class to celebrate not only the successful Isiro operation, but his return to Bernd. The UN’s standard ‘hardship’ per diem, paid in Swiss francs and deposited in Geneva, had enabled him to order an MGB/GT sports car, which he picked up in London and took to Frankfurt.
He almost didn’t make it. Two days before he was to leave Isiro, Jacqueline sent him a message that HQ had decided he would proceed directly to Kigali as the UNHCR Representative in Rwanda. But a day later, she sent him another message that Otto would be transferred there instead.
That was a relief — he was anxious to get back to Bernd. He suspected Jacqueline had had a hand in the retraction: she knew David yearned to return to Europe (to be with her, she thought). She’d also never been fond of Otto and believed he was trying to take credit for David’s successful repatriation operation, in which he’d barely been involved.
David was assigned instead as a Programme Officer in HQ’s Central and West Africa Regional Section, working for a boisterous, boring Ethiopian woman named Antoine. The Chief of the Asia and Pacific Section let David use his house, with a grand view of Lake Geneva, while he and his wife were back in The Netherlands on home-leave. Bernd joined him there and they went searching for their own place.
They found it in a renovated farmhouse in the village of La Rippe, 22 kilometers from Geneva in the Canton of Vaud, then featuring more cows than people. The retired farmer kept one half of the house for himself and his wife; David and Bernd rented what had once been a hayloft, converted to three bedrooms, a dining room, a kitchen, a living room, and a balcony with its own magnificent view of Lake Geneva and Mont Blanc beyond.
Then they started job-hunting for Bernd.
Despite the all-consuming thrills of Isiro, David’s love and passion for Bernd were undiminished — in fact, were more intense than ever. For him, ‘being with’ Bernd, even when physically apart, was glorious. Throughout his Isiro assignment, he would rush to the post office every day, hoping for a letter. When they were together, he reveled in Bernd’s company. He’d felt much for other lovers and received much from them, most poignantly from Diane, but Bernd, he knew, was his true love. He was a good man and David looked forward to their life together.
Yet he sensed that Bernd felt less secure in their relationship than he had before Isiro. As the weeks passed, their respective careers seemed the cause: David knew Bernd appreciated his efforts to get him a job in Geneva, but he also seemed to resent the contrast: David’s career, burgeoning, while he struggled for low-level internships.
Fast Track
David hadn’t served more than a few months as a Programme Officer before being promoted to Deputy Chief of the Counseling, Education, and Resettlement Section. The chief, a Greek woman named Hari, was about as fun as Antoine had been. But she delegated the Education component to him, and being a deputy chief would put him on a fast track for further advancement.
While there, he also spotted an opportunity for Bernd. The West German government subsidized a one-year, paid UNESCO internship for promising young West Germans. UNESCO assigned that person to UNHCR as an education expert. Bernd wrestled the appointment through the West German bureaucracy and, by September 1974, had become the said “expert.”
Meanwhile, only their fellow closeted colleagues knew they were lovers. Everyone else thought they were mere flatmates in that fabulous farmhouse. The La Rippe villagers referred to them, both tall and mustachioed, as the “American brothers,” as Bernd also spoke French with an American accent.
Indeed, many of the key middle- and upper-level posts in the United Nations and its manifold satellites were filled by gay men — the “Gay Mafia,” as they were quietly known, established by the late, gay Dag Hammersjkold, the second great UN Secretary General, who died in a plane crash in 1961, to the deep sorrow and lament of all who’d known him personally and professionally. David — brilliant, cosmopolitan, uber-competent, gay — was the quintessence of Hammersjkold’s legacy.
Turnabout
Working under Hari essentially meant staying out of her way. In April 1975, while she was on home-leave in Greece, South Vietnam was taken over by the North and the first flood of South Vietnamese refugees arrived in the U.S. In Hari’s absence, the Director of Assistance yanked David out of Counseling, Education, and Resettlement and made him chief of a new section dealing solely with the refugees, reporting directly to him.
When she found out, Hari cut her leave short and came back to Geneva screaming bloody murder. David was packed off to the States as Chief Repatriation Officer and back under Hari’s heel.
Yet that mission — the only U.N. mission ever deployed on U.S. territory — proved transformative: David was in the U.S. for nine months while the press followed him around, taken with the irony of the first American government agent to have resigned over the conduct of the war in South Vietnam now assigned to pick up its human pieces.
His first encounter with an angry group of refugees, who’d decided they wanted to return to the reunified Vietnam immediately, was covered on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, considered by much of the American public as their most trusted source of information. Assisted in his efforts by the American Red Cross, David shuttled among Fort Chaffee, Arkansas; Eglin Air Force Base; Fort Indiantown Gap; and Camp Pendleton, registering a growing number of refugees who wished to return and were nearly riotous at the bureaucratic delay and seeming indifference to their plight. Once registered, they were based at Camp Pendleton until they could be flown out to Guam, where they were to await Hanoi’s permission to return. Toward the end of his mission David spent most of his time at Camp Pendleton to keep the peace but would return to UN HQ in New York every week to report.
At its conclusion, this mission was the most satisfying of his career — this, he was now certain, was what he was supposed to do with his life. He had defused a tinder box with refugees’ lives at stake and the humanitarian reputation of the United Nations on the line — not to mention the faith of its primary sponsor, the sore and war-weary United States — and had served all these interests with integrity and aplomb. He was a true diplomat, converting high principle to effective action.
Even that aloof Harvard professor for whom he’d once translated German applications — now the secretary of state — had effusive praise for this, David’s masterwork. In a cable to UNHCR headquarters, Henry Kissinger enthused:
1. Mr. David Arnold has completed his brief assignment in Guam and returns to Camp Pendleton after top-notch handling of sometimes tense situations involving negotiations with repatriates. I wish to extend my personal regards for his totally professional performance. He is a splendid representative of the UNHCR.
2. Frustrations of 1,566 repatriates being exacerbated with the passage of time and no positive progress toward returning them to South Vietnam led to violence, confrontation and resulting increase in tensions 31 August at Camp Asan, Guam. Mr. Arnold and his dedicated assistants were most helpful in a series of meetings with repatriates and their elected spokesmen. Through skillful negotiations with great patience, Mr. Arnold was able to restore beneficial communication between repatriates and U.S. Government officials, ease tensions, and by this means of defusing a potentially explosive situation, perhaps prevent the needless injury or loss of life of Vietnamese or Americans. His positive action was absolutely beneficial.
3. While not in the charter of an IAT F Senior Civil Coordinator to rate or comment on a UNHCR representative’s performance, this message is designed to inform UNHCR of unique and decisive efforts of his representative to act as the situation demanded and as opportunities of beneficial activity by this special agency presented themselves. In short, he did not wait to be asked. He spotted the obvious opportunity to ameliorate tensions, to act in humanitarian interest and to get on with it. I salute him. — KISSINGER
Gass
His career now soaring, David’s sex life kept pace. While in New York for his weekly reports he met Don Gass and had an intense, extended affair with him. Don was a self-made man and a spontaneous lover who freed David to fuck with abandon.
In Guam, where he’d been sent to oversee the refugees’ transfer to Hanoi, he had a fling with a Japanese ballet dancer he’d met on the beach. On his way back to the mainland, he stopped in Honolulu for some R&R and bedded an American artist he met at Waikiki.
By December 1975 his mission was complete. Once back in Geneva he resumed his duties at UNHQ, which, along with his time with Bernd, would not last much longer.
Stockholm
Knowing from their telephone conversations how miserable Bernd had been without him, and now with the burden of having to explain his affair with Don, David suggested they reconnect on neutral ground. One-night-stands with strangers could be readily dismissed, but an ongoing connection with the same person suggested a more threatening emotional infidelity.
David had heard how beautiful the Swedish countryside was at Christmastime, so he found a country inn about three hours by train north of Stockholm. They met at the Stockholm airport the week before Christmas and stayed in town that night.
Even before David could attempt to explain Don, Bernd told him of his own affair with a French doctor. He barely got a word in edgewise about Don; Bernd clearly wasn’t interested and seemed determined to make David feel that he was, in fact, dispensable.
Snowy as it was outside, the train ride to the inn was even colder. The chill persisted through their stay in Sweden and continued back in La Rippe.
Professionally things began to cool as well. Although David had wanted to continue working the Vietnamese refugee problem, Hari wouldn’t have him back in her section, which was responsible for refugee resettlement worldwide. He was offered the position of UNHCR Representative in Botswana, which was a gem of an assignment, but he turned it down; trying to rescue his relationship with Bernd, he knew being gone again would end it. Instead, he was made Deputy Chief of the Fundraising Section, writing thank you letters to major donors for the High Commissioner’s signature. Meanwhile Bernd, his internship coming to an end, was looking frantically for a UN job in Geneva. He hadn’t caught on at UNHCR or any of the other Geneva-based agencies.
In September Bernd finally announced that their separating awhile might be wise. He would go back to Frankfurt and look for a job there, while asking David to remain on the lookout for a position for him in Geneva.
“Do that and you won’t be back,” David declared.
“Is that a threat?”
“No,” David sighed. “That’s a prediction.”
Bernd left in October. David was devastated. He finally sensed what Diane must have felt, watching the life she’d built crumble beyond repair while he’d sought simply to move on.
When Bernd couldn’t find a job back home, David kept hoping he’d return. But by late November it was clear that wasn’t going to happen.
Pivot
Fortunately, his UN career began to warm again. With Bernd gone, he told UN Personnel he was now available for an overseas assignment. The Vietnamese boat people had started showing up in southern Thailand in their continuing exodus after the fall of South Vietnam. David was assigned to open the first UNHCR “boat people” reception center, in Songkhla, down at the southeastern tip of Thailand, just north of the Malaysia border. Since it appeared he would be there for an extended period and had accrued a great deal of leave during his previous assignments, Fiorella suggested he take a respite over the holidays and head to Thailand in early January.
Bode
Before traveling to Geneva on his way to Thailand, David stopped in New York, where he met Helmut Bode in a bar on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. It was lust at first sight — so overpowering that he inquired with Kofi Annan, now the Personnel Officer at UNHQ, whether there were a position Kofi could give him that would allow him to stay in New York.
Kofi had one: Namibia, still governed under a UN mandate, would surely be granted independence in a matter of years, and a strengthened team of UN personnel would be needed during the transition. He saw the possibility of David’s being the equivalent of the district officer just inside Namibia’s border with Angola, a dangerous area used by Angolan rebels attempting (successfully, it would turn out) to topple the government. In the interim, as there was no timetable for Namibian independence, Kofi would find David a position at UNHQ which, he said, would be good for David’s career by letting him and the UN Secretariat get to know each other.
The job he found, “Classification Officer” in Personnel, was responsible for two departments: Legal Affairs and Conference Services. It didn’t sound like much — writing job descriptions — but, used shrewdly, it was a powerful tool for professional advancement.
Break
When he returned to Geneva to pack up, he found Bernd back at their La Rippe apartment, hoping to reconcile. He’d found a temporary job as a tour guide in Nepal in early December, but that was over and there were no further prospects for him in West Germany; he would resume looking in Geneva.
“Fine,” David snapped, his pain having soured to contempt. “The apartment’s yours. I’m moving to New York.”
He did inquire secretly with UNHQ whether Bernd could be given his forfeited Songkhla position. “Not qualified,” was the response. But, several weeks after David had left for New York, Bernd was given a junior post in a new UNHCR office in Hanoi, closing the circle of their once all-consuming relationship.
Master
David moved in with Helmut in New York until he could find decent digs of his own. Meanwhile the sex with him, a well-endowed master of technique and timing in the best tradition of German precision, was the most adventurous and intensely pleasurable David had ever experienced. He learned to try and enjoy anything Helmut ventured — and, in the process, he became a master in his own right. His growing reputation preceded his regular business trips to San Francisco, where gay bartenders there would try to book him for the night as soon as David’s silhouette darkened the door. At the peak of his powers, he climaxed eight times in one night.
In New York, he finally found a top-floor duplex in a converted brownstone in Chelsea. Helmut moved in with him until, after nine power-packed months, David’s passion for Helmut was spent almost as suddenly as it had arisen. He was eager to try his new repertoire with other, more expressive lovers. Though mostly ‘over’ Bernd, he did miss loving him.
Gold
He lived alone briefly until Albin Gold, a Jewish opthamologist living in Paterson, New Jersey, emerged. Albin was married to a lesbian; their marriage was arranged by their respective families who knew of their sexual proclivities, but — nice Jewish families didn’t live that way. So, Albin and Rebecca set up their ‘straight’ household in Paterson, had three daughters and, to the unattuned, led a perfectly suburban life. Meanwhile, Rebecca had a lover installed in an apartment in Greenwich Village where, every other weekend, she would indulge.
But while Rebecca had a steady, Albin didn’t and was tired of prowling. David was the answer until October 26, 1980, when, upon turning forty-five, David met the new love he’d craved.
Music
David’s birthday was on a Sunday. When Albin returned to his family in Paterson that evening, David hot-footed it to The Eagle, a gay bar on the New York waterfront. Shortly after midnight he met Jim, who lived in San Francisco but was in New York to audition for both the Met and the New York City Operas. David took him home.
It wasn’t love at first sight. In fact, it was so dark in The Eagle that David hadn’t realized Jim was black — breaking his fair-haired-Teuton pattern — until they’d left the bar. He’d been attracted to African men while stationed in Isiro but strictly avoided pursuing them as a matter of protocol. Nonetheless, he’d enjoyed watching them from a distance, admiring their defined and fulsome physiques, the gleam of their skin, their native manliness.
Union
In the sultry light of David’s apartment, Jim’s kiss was full and strong, massaging David’s firmly, then gently, deepened by David’s rising pulse, his giving reply.
David slipped under Jim’s jaw and nibbled down his dark, salty neck, the manly scent just as he remembered it, firing every nerve. He unlocked Jim’s fitted shirt and swept it off in one deft motion, exposing his elegant torso, dusted with curls. His tongue greeted each one down the tender trail they made, suckling each rigid nipple along the way.
David followed their path, unlacing Jim’s belt, popping the brass button with a snap, and locking into Jim’s eyes as he dragged the zipper to the point of no return. Jim’s loaded manhood sprung out, writhing madly before David established his credentials and brought him to the edge.
Both pulled away, breathless. Jim raised David up and sank to his knees, forced his new lover’s slacks down with both fists and tasted him in long, wet strokes, pulling, sliding, twisting, teasing.
David shed his shirt and coaxed Jim back up. After a deep kiss he spun him around and beheld the light & shadow playing on Jim’s slick, undulating back. He kissed his neck and traced a long, slow line down his spine, his palms following from the front, absorbing the supple strength in every part of Jim’s body. As he reached the crest, he stopped short at the sight: It was nature’s best work, marble made flesh, impossibly round, cool to the touch, firm yet giving, poised with expectation.
David caressed it, gripped it, spanked it, tested its proud defiance.
Jim pitched forward and clutched the table with a gasp as David dove in, writhing and licking and kissing and breathing and feasting as Jim arched and heaved and pushed and loaded again for orgasm.
David again broke the chain, just in time.
The pleasure unbearable, Jim groaned, greedy for more. David stood, gently stroked his member against him, and pressed slowly, firmly, fully inside. Jim gasped and prayed and surrendered to David’s masterful rhythms, the apartment filling with the escalating sounds of two grown men giving it all they have.
Yet in the raw cacophony David sensed something deeply, spiritually moving. With his head on Jim’s shoulder, hearing him enjoy his presence, his care, his seriousness as a lover, Jim whispered the faintest “thank you.” David, overwhelmed, came hard inside him; Jim called out at the sudden torrent he received and the one he unleashed in response.
Spent, they staggered back to David’s bedroom, tangled arm-in-arm, and made love through the night.
Ache
In the days and weeks after that night, their personal connection matched the physical, combining power, magic, and ease that drove a growing love. Before Jim returned West in December, they spent as much time together as they could while Albin — “Nurse Gold,” Jim had dubbed him — wasn’t around.
By late November, Jim had convinced David to move out of Albin’s townhouse on West 30th Street and helped him find his own place on Bank Street in the Village. It signaled a commitment for both of them — David’s leaving Albin for the hope of being with Jim, who had encouraged the split as a reason to relocate. When December came, Jim’s departure was rending.
They wrote each other weekly, often daily. By April 1981, after countless aching letters lamenting their separation, they decided to spend a week together at Uncle Jim Brooks’ farm in Great Falls, Virginia, to explore how serious they really were. It was a perfunctory nod to reasonableness, for both knew that, at the end of it, Jim would wind up his affairs (business and personal) in San Francisco and move in with David that summer. In the meantime, David found a bigger place, in Brooklyn Heights, to accommodate the additional furniture and other belongings Jim planned to bring.
With the decision taken, the anticipation became all-consuming. In reply to one of David’s many pleading letters, Jim wrote:
My Beloved Bear . . . . Just three weeks more and I’ll be on my way to my loved one. I’m so anxious I can hardly sleep at night. I sat up until three in the morning listening to the Richard Strauss ‘Don Juan’ Tone Poem, one of my favorites, while looking at your pictures. Oh my gorgeous bear I love you so! I pray to God to be able to spend the rest of my life with you. — Your Teddy Bear
When August finally arrived David drove cross-country, towing a U-Haul trailer.
Meanwhile, in the months leading up to the big move, doctors in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York had encountered a spate of bizarre diseases among gay men that seemed to indicate irreparable damage to their immune systems. They first called it “Gay-Related Immune Disorder” or “GRID”; as the cases mounted and clarified their understanding, they would give it the more accurate moniker, “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome” — “AIDS.”
Scratch
Their life together was everything they’d hoped. Not since Bernd had David been deliriously in love. They cooked together, read together, went out, stayed in, made love, lived. For all their obvious differences, David saw a version of himself in Jim — the musician he might have been had he truly loved his music. Whether in studied rehearsal or spontaneous song, Jim’s glorious tenor filled the apartment. Mademoiselle would have loved him, too.
Indeed, in an earlier letter from San Francisco, Jim had closed with, “I’m happy knowing that I have your love. That means more to me than anything.” He’d whited-out the words, “except my music.” Naturally David scratched off the camouflage and, upon discovering the original message, promptly typed back:
. . . . Dear brownbear, you did something very beautiful in that letter that I don’t want you ever to do, or think, again. Your singing is, for me, more important than me, and I want it to be for you as well. God did your gesture of whiting that out get to me — I knew what you were saying by that, but I do not, do not, do not ever want you even to think that there is any comparison to be made between your gift and your love. The two must co-exist, and it is my responsibility to make sure that they do. Within all my power I will do what can be done to make sure that you will never have to choose between the two. (How’s that for dramatic?)
Parentis
After their first year together, they craved some form of legitimacy that would recognize the primary role that each had in the other’s life. They wanted it for its own sake, but also for other reasons.
The specter of AIDS was growing now, with daily reports of gay men dying and being castigated not only as deviant, which was nothing new, but as deviants who, through their contemptible, “unnatural” self-indulgence, had foisted a plague upon everyone else.
The consequences were not merely societal, but personal, even granular. Every common cold was a test: how long would it last? Would it lead to worse? By all outward appearances, they were in peak physical condition and passably straight, so no one would necessarily suspect them of ‘being gay’ and, therefore, of ‘having AIDS.’ But in fact, they fit the high-risk profile: gay men who’d had unprotected sex with multiple partners since the mid-1970s. AIDS loomed, and if it struck, each wanted to be able to take care of the other without legal impediment.
There was but one feasible end to this quest: parental rights. David would adopt Jim (whose biological father was deceased) and, as his adoptive father, have legal responsibility for him. He would assign to Jim the same responsibility as his adoptive son, should anything happen to him.
It seemed a radical idea, to say the least — two grown men, lovers, seeking a relationship that smacked of constructive incest. Yet it would give them what they wanted: to live as a legal pair, with all the public benefits appurtenant thereto.
A UN friend referred David to Nora Mitchell, a lawyer with a taste for radical argument. When David and Jim proposed their new legal relationship, she paused.
“I love it,” she finally declared, her eyes lighting at the prospect. She agreed to draw up and file the papers that week. All else being in order, a routine hearing would seal the deal, although the true nature of their relationship — lovers seeking to become legal father-and-son — would become obvious to the judge and would have to be handled deftly.
When the adoption hearing finally arrived, the judge had but one dispositive question: “If you two decide to break off your romantic relationship one day, what then?”
“I’ll still be responsible for him,” David affirmed.
“Petition granted.” With the smack of a gavel, James Thomas-Arnold was born.
Seams
As soon as he’d met her, Jim saw right away what was going on. Yet it would take another year and a half for the sordid affair to play itself out.
Camille Croisic, Director of the Translation Division in the Department of Conference Services, had been dumped on the UN by the French government, which was delighted to be rid of her. The French translators referred to her as the “seamstress” — a term of neither endearment nor jealousy but of simple, contemptuous fact. But none of this was apparent when David first met her. Indeed, she was charming — voluptuously so — as she purred ulterior motives into his gullible ear, which, after experiencing Jacqueline, had developed a sweet spot for French women.
She got him to reclassify the Chief of Terminology-Conference Services post two rungs higher than was held by its last occupant — a woman who, Camille confided, had tried to climb into bed with her one night. This transgression enabled her to replace the offender with someone better suited to the job — someone such as David, whom she deemed eminently and deliciously suited. Blind to the subterfuge, David obliged, reclassifying the post from a P-3 to a P-4 with P-5 potential, whereupon she offered him the job.
Had Kofi, by the time this plot had formed, not been posted back to Geneva to replace Fiorella, who’d been promoted to Chief of Personnel, he likely would have been able to pluck the trap from David’s path. But when David accepted the post yet refused Camille’s repeated, jiggling advances, she threatened to expose what appeared to be his self-serving job reclassification. When he counter-threatened a sexual harassment complaint, she beat him to the punch, accusing him of unwelcome advances.
The imbroglio culminated in 1983 in an “Agreed Termination,” whereby David was given a sizable severance package for voluntarily relinquishing what had been a permanent contract and agreeing not to reveal publicly anything of what had happened.
And so, his brilliant UN career ended as quickly and whimsically as it had begun.
Lateral
He wasn’t quite done, though. During his waning weeks at the UN Secretariat, David met Alan Keyes, President Reagan’s ambassador to the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and about to become Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizational Affairs. Twenty years hence, Keyes would gain national renown as an apocalyptic conservative candidate for president bent on U.S. withdrawal from sovereignty-sapping international organizations and agreements. But, for now, given the U.S. government’s impending withdrawal from the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), he needed someone to track ongoing U.S. interests in that organization. That conversation led ultimately to the Multilateral Policy Council, which, thanks largely to David, would help transform UNESCO from corrupt backwater to mission-driven wellspring.
Bred
It was during his UNESCO stint, in 1985, that David and Jim finally got tested for HIV. Since that first CDC report in June 1981, AIDS had killed gay men nationwide, but particularly in New York and San Francisco, where David and Jim had lived much of their lives. It promised an agonizing death as it stripped the immune system of all ability to fight even the most minor “opportunistic infections,” with no hope of treatment or a cure. Neither had been in a hurry to get that forecast. But it was becoming untenable not to know.
Privately, Jim’s energy had ebbed in recent months, a lingering malaise he’d attributed to the accumulated stress of life in New York, endless auditions, and the AIDS panic generally, which was everywhere and unforgiving, striking down friends and acquaintances in the performing arts community in mounting numbers. But he’d always find his stride again and never mentioned it to David, who’d nonetheless sensed it but kept quiet, unwilling to contemplate the possible cause. David also was hit that year with his sister Karen’s death after a long battle with breast cancer. The loss of young loved ones was palpable and pervasive.
They got tested together and waited for the eventual phone call announcing that the results had arrived. Knowing their blood was now in the clinical hands of strangers seeking a simple ‘life or death” signal, the intervening days were eternal, stretched with unspoken what-ifs.
When the call finally came, they headed to their doctor’s office and braced for the news.
Jim was infected. David, inconclusive.
David groaned knowingly, desperately. Jim stared, frozen.
“We don’t know whether you’re positive or negative, David. I suggest we wait a few weeks and test again,” their doctor advised soberly.
Everything had changed. They lay in bed that night, silent, Jim resting on David’s chest, their tears merging. Were both infected, they might have five or so years left to watch each other waste and wither from two men in their primes to empty, ravaged shadows of themselves, whittled away by nature’s pettiest evils. If uninfected, David could only watch Jim die.
Unwilling to accept the latter fate, David took those few weeks before the next test to ensure that Jim transmitted the virus to him. At first horrified by the notion, Jim finally agreed when he realized that he would have made the same demand of David. And, in truth, it was inconceivable that David was not already infected, despite the inconclusive test result — no one could have been as promiscuous as he’d been, where he’d been, taken no precautions, and been that lucky.
It was the sweetest love they’d ever made. What had brought them together, and affirmed their life together, now expressed their ultimate commitment to each other.
When the next test came back positive, David was relieved. Brutal though it would be, he could share death with Jim as he had life.
Or so he thought.
Dodge
As his UNESCO assignment drew to a close, David’s childhood friend, Paul Dodge, introduced him to Bill Gaither, the embattled president of Drexel University in Philadelphia, who hired David to serve as a mediator between himself and a segment of the faculty doing everything possible to have him removed from office. Although unable to save Bill’s job, David was able, in an article appearing in the Philadelphia Inquirer on the day Gaither was voted out, to explain the academic politics at play, thus saving his reputation.
Through Alan Keyes, news of David’s UNESCO and Drexel deliverables reached Bill Bennett, Reagan’s Secretary of Education. William Kristol, Bennett’s Chief of Staff and a future architect of the so-called ‘neo-conservative’ movement, contacted David and asked him to stop by next time he was in DC. From that encounter he was summoned to duty in March 1988 to the Fund for Innovation in Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE) as “Expert in International Education.” Jim, still strong but ill more often, stayed behind to sell their New York house, which finally happened in July, and then joined David in their last home together, on Dumbarton Avenue in Washington.
Brace
Jim’s inexorable slide into full-blown AIDS was excruciating. The earlier ebbs in energy had indeed been the beginning, as his degrading immune system worked to overcome routine challenges with dwindling resources, struggle back to par, and pivot to the next assault. Oddly, David seemed to show no effects of his infection — perhaps he’d been infected later (maybe by Jim) or his immune system was more robust for now. Whenever he was ill, which was rarely, he always bounced back in the normal way and timeframe.
He therefore had strength to care for Jim. For the first couple of years, there was little to do. As before, Jim would weaken and rebound and, by all outward appearances, was well. But he would weaken a little more each time, and take longer to recover, and not quite return to where he’d been.
His true decline began in 1989, when an overwhelming fatigue settled in and left him bedridden for days at a time. David would help him up and down the stairs, bearing nearly all of Jim’s weight and, over time, noticing less of it as Jim ate less and retained less and became less. Every illness wrung a little more out of him, exacted more pain of him. When he lost the strength to sing — to hit notes and express lyrics with the power and grace that had been everything to him — David wept with all his heart.
By spring 1990 Jim was in the hospital. His elegance was but a memory; his captivating beauty, gone. Only the spirit that had given them meaning remained, struggling for dignity against unforgiving fate. David stayed by his side, watching and hearing and feeling the end take its course.
In a last lucid moment, in the late-night shadows of the hospital room, Jim awoke and saw David in silhouette, sitting in the side chair, resting his head on the bed. He caressed it slowly, feeling it with a final store of clarity and memory. He struggled to speak.
“David,” he whispered faintly.
“Yes, my love,” David responded, snapping awake, clasping Jim’s hand. For a moment he thought he’d dreamt it; Jim was silent again, gathering his breath.
“Thank you.”
David’s heart burst.
“Oh, my darling man!” he cried. “How I love you so.”
Sweetheart
After Jim’s death, David’s daughter, Ellen, now grown and married and a new mother, wrote a published reminiscence honoring the person Jim was and confronting the stigma he’d endured as both a gay man and a man with AIDS:
I first met Jim as a voice on a long-distance phone call. I was staying with my father in his small apartment in Greenwich Village. It was a freezing New Year’s holiday in New York City.
Besides my father and myself, the apartment was home for a cat of Egyptian descent named, appropriately, Potifar. We called him Potty Puss. But we were all cold that year. Things had not gone well for my father and he was particularly lonely. My parents had been divorced for about eight years by this time.
Jim, who was living out in San Francisco then, called Dad on New Year’s Eve. They chatted and Jim insisted on being introduced to me, which made my father very excited. I don’t remember what Jim said, but his voice was very friendly and interested; I liked him. I saw the change in my father’s face and attitude and was silently grateful to Jim already.
The next time I met Jim was in person. He came out with my father for my high school graduation in Utah. Jim was making plans to move out to New York to be closer to Dad. He was absolutely charming and we had a great time celebrating. We explored Park City and Jim played a game with me that he was to repeat many times. He would watch me go through a store and narrowly observe what I admired. Then, somehow, later he would buy one of those things and present it to me.
During my college years at BYU, I spent several Christmases with my father and Jim in their house in Brooklyn. They had gone in together to renovate an old brownstone. For their big Christmas party, they draped the house in pine boughs and Dad made cakes (one of which he called “Death by Chocolate”). Jim sang “O Holy Night” for us in the music room by the light of the Christmas tree.
I met many interesting people at the party — Kissinger’s ghost writer, Saul Bellow’s son, the lion from “The Wiz,” and a young Polish fellow who was opening up a toy business in the U.S. But it is Jim’s beautiful, professional tenor that sings in my ears when I remember those parties.
Each morning as I awoke on those vacations, I wandered down to the kitchen to find Jim pouring some coffee or toasting a bagel. Before he dressed for the day, he usually wore a pair of baggy white Moroccan trousers. He often wore the same trousers in the evening as we sat on stools in the kitchen, sipped tea, and talked before bed. He listened, sympathized, and laughed with me through all my blathering about school, boyfriends, and family. He called me “sweetheart” sometimes. He had a talent for making me feel like I was brilliant, or at least that I had sense to deal with things intelligently.
Jim came to my wedding reception in Utah a week after I graduated with my bachelor’s degree. He comfortably circulated during the reception and afterwards took some of my probably bored stiff female cousins out dancing. They had a terrific time (it comes up as a favorite “those were the days” topic at all family gatherings now). It was the first and last time they met.
The last time I saw Jim I knew he was ill but he didn’t look it — he was just Jim who hugged me, ordered out for pizza, and didn’t mind too much that my toddler son threw Cheerios around in the beautiful house in DC he now shared with Dad. He walked with us through Georgetown to the fancy mall and along the waterfront; introduced us to his favorite French pastry stores; helped me sew a rip in my favorite pair of pants. His last gift was something he saw my son had admired in one of the stores we visited.
Jim died of AIDS a couple of days before my fourth wedding anniversary. I hear he was in a lot of pain when he died. My father was with him.
What would my life have been like if I had labeled Jim and refused his friendship? Infinitely poorer. When I can think rationally about Jim, all I realize is that, when dealing with people, theories mean nothing. One must take each case at face value. Face-to-face with Jim and love, how could I do otherwise?
Goodbye, Jim.
Savior
Though not close for much of their lives, David leaned on his brother, Paul, and sister-in-law, Jill, after Jim’s death. Now an author living in Maine, Paul had a writer’s sense of irony and empathy that attracted David’s grief. Although disappointed in David for how he’d treated Diane, Paul had liked Jim deeply and grieved his passing, too, as did Jill, to whom David had always been drawn as one of those women inclined to shelter him. He spent the better part of nine months escaping to Maine in abject sadness.
He carried on automatically for the next few years, continuing his work at FIPSE until Bill Kristol left and the position fizzled. His generous settlement with the UN had given him the luxury of leisurely job hunting until he found something else interesting. He volunteered at the American Red Cross, where the staff of the International Services Division recognized his formidable abilities and, when Elizabeth Dole became director of the ARC, brought him on as a policy adviser. The work gave him something nearby to care about.
By 1994 the fog of grief had begun to dissolve at last. Jim was still constantly on his mind, but less sadly. David’s disappeared soul had slowly returned and begun to seek a future. He even re-entered the social scene a bit, first with friends visiting DC and, now more often, for the occasional beer by himself.
Awake
Out of the blue, Bernd, who’d kept distant tabs on David after hearing of Jim’s death, came to town that Memorial Day weekend hoping to rekindle David’s interest. Alerted, David decided to go alone to a local gay bar for the evening to avoid seeing him, which would have felt a betrayal to Jim and too jarring in its own right.
Being in the bar was both painful and comforting — the dim space, filled with sexual energy, took him right back to The Eagle in New York and the night he met Jim; yet it was the kind of environment in which he’d felt most alive for much of his life. He was quietly gratified that he could still attract attention as he walked in, strode to the bar, and ordered a drink. He chatted easily with several would-be suitors who finally drifted off when it was clear he wasn’t interested. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be.
After a couple of hours, as he thought about leaving, he felt an entirely new energy next to him. His name was Mike, he was black, much younger than David, and he beamed life and empathy.
“Are you OK?” he offered, taking David aback with both the directness and sensitivity of his opening line.
“I’m a little better now,” David replied sincerely, without a trace of flirtation. They chatted for several more hours that seemed like minutes, until Mike asked David to come to his apartment so he could simply hold him. They just seemed to fit emotionally, even spiritually, like old souls whose paths had re-crossed.
“Thank God you’ve come,” David whispered as they drifted off to sleep in each other’s arms.
Kiss
When dawn broke, David awoke sharply to the sound of sobbing from the living room and found Mike there, disconsolate.
“What on earth is wrong?”
“I’m so sorry,” Mike began, struggling for composure. “I should have told you before. I was afraid, and I couldn’t.”
“Tell me what?”
“I’m positive,” Mike confessed, dissolving. He’d recently lost his partner to AIDS and, like David, was trying to start over. He was in denial about his own HIV status and didn’t believe he would ever feel again what he was beginning to feel for David — and the inevitable loss it seemed to portend.
David knelt down, took Mike’s hand, and kissed it.
“Let me take care of you.”
Ash
David died in December 2009 after a fall at Spring Mountain House, the rustic home he shared with Mike in the picturesque mountains of Asheville, North Carolina. He was 74.
They’d moved there in 2006 after a dozen happy years together in Washington, DC, where David had joined the International AIDS Trust following his stint at the Red Cross. Upon his formal retirement, they’d decided to seek a change of scenery; discovered their magnificent mountain house; and completed the move within weeks.
It had a music room with a massive window that looked upon the endless Blue Ridge Mountains. David filled the room with an elegant new piano. As Mike had long urged, he’d finally begun to play again, determined to enjoy it despite being decades out of practice. When he died, the sheet music was open to Schubert’s Opus 69, with which he’d won over Mademoiselle 50 years before.
The advent of life-preserving AIDS drugs in 1996, just two years after they’d met, meant that he and Mike no longer had to fear reliving the decline and loss they’d endured with Jim and Maurice, or confront their own looming deaths from AIDS-related causes. Nonetheless, David adopted Mike as he had Jim so they could have legal responsibility for each other. Although he finally began a precautionary treatment regimen a few years before he died, David never progressed to AIDS.
In his last couple of years, he’d struck up a brief, intermittent correspondence with Bernd, more out of reflective curiosity than lingering emotional interest. Yet the exchanges evoked the passion and pain he’d experienced with Bernd thirty years before — no longer acute, but still vivid.
His parents, Vivian and Harry, had died several years before, no happier (nor unhappier) than they’d been for most of their marriage. Vivian had remained a rapier, though with far less impact on her hardened adult children than she’d had when they were young. She and Harry, however, were readily accepting of David’s homosexuality (indeed, Vivian had always assumed it) and his relationships with men, perhaps recognizing that their approval or rejection was utterly immaterial to him.
As the years passed, David had grown guilt-ridden about how he had devastated Diane, sure he had ruined her life; and about his absence as a father, though he’d always felt and shown (he’d hoped) great love for Ellen and Jonathan.
“You didn’t ruin my life,” Diane reassured him once. “You gave me my children.” She never remarried.
In August 2009, at Mike’s suggestion, David invited Diane and their grandson, Gregory (Ellen’s son, now a teenager), to visit them at Spring Mountain House. They had a delightful time together, after which Diane sent a thank you note:
Hi, David and Mike,
I’m so sorry that I didn’t think to call after our visit. I’ve been looking for a ‘nice’ thank you note because I know you appreciate beautiful images. We did arrive safely, even pleasantly, via the West Virginia turnpike. Gregory drove all the way home and we enjoyed our audio book about Magellan’s voyage (our trip was much more comfortable than his).
Thank you for sharing your beautiful home with us over the long weekend. We both appreciate all you’ve done to create such a nice retreat — garden, dog pen, terraces, and a truly inviting house. It was good to see Mike’s workspace and see that others appreciate him, too. And I liked seeing the Black Mountain bakery and meeting Jinny and Betsey — what good company they are. It was clever of you to arrange live music from the Quaker community hall during Saturday dinner!
This experience is sure to stay with Gregory, who doesn’t always comment, but takes everything in. So thanks, Mike, for the idea and David for the invitation, and to both of you for being such gracious hosts.
Take care of each other.
Love,
Diane
When he was finally ready, Mike gave David’s ashes to the lovely scenes outside.
Reflection
David wrote this story after all. Albeit inadvertently.
When I said I’d like to write his life story (since he never would), I told him that, to get started, I’d need him to provide brief “outlines” of key moments in his life. He readily agreed. After receiving a critical mass of them, I quietly began editing the outlines into a narrative. I wanted him to write the book; I would simply be a vehicle to that end.
About halfway through this process, he finally caught on.
“I know what you’re doing”,” he teased. I feigned ignorance. Having come this far, he graciously followed through with the rest of the outlines, which are the backbone of the narrative.
I also had begun to interview him by phone periodically, based on the outlines, before he suffered the fatal fall at Spring Mountain House. Mike was away on business and grew worried after not hearing from him. He called the police to check the house. They found David at the bottom of the stairs in a pool of blood.
The news was shocking, of course, though not entirely unanticipated, despite his continuing good health. Several weeks before, David made me promise to finish the book for Mike’s sake. I noted a new urgency in his voice, as though time were of the essence.
“I have no reason to think so,” he said, “but I am 74 now. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be here, and I want Mike to have something to comfort him when I’m gone.”
I called to check on Mike a few weeks after the funeral. We talked about the book’s progress, in which he’d always had a keen interest, when the light in my room began to flicker. It never had before, and after the call, I checked the bulb and fixture. Both were secure and in good working order, and it never happened again. I muttered aloud, with a smile, “Hi, David.”
At the outset of this project, David stated his determination that it be mine, not his, but we agreed on one thing — that it be “impressionistic” rather than a detailed re-telling. Thus the vignette style of the narrative. Much more could have been said, of course, and in more detail, and probably would have been had time permitted. But this is basically how David wanted it, and it’s the approach I would have taken anyway — to me, the most interesting part of David’s story is not the divergent multitude of unusual (sometimes historic) experiences he had per se; they are but a colorful backdrop to his personal evolution, which is the essential humanity of his story.
The former David Spectre — “future concert pianist” — sought to please others and fulfill their vision of him, which he did to near-perfection. David Brooks Arnold was born at the height of that life, when the person he met at the summit, Nadia Boulanger, discerned the truth in the way that made her great: By listening.
As fate would have it, that also was the great talent David would discover in himself: Listening. Not in the form of musical interpretation, which he could bluff brilliantly until confronted by true greatness in that regard; but in the notes of human empathy, listening to different people in wildly divergent, wholly unfamiliar circumstances, gaining their trust, sometimes their love, and helping them through hardship.
In so doing, he became himself.
…..
Acknowledgments
Some of the names in this book were changed to protect privacy.
My thanks go. . .
To David Brooks Arnold and Michael Booker Arnold for their friendship, faith, and support.
To friends and colleagues who read drafts and offered feedback: Garry Bevel, Tanya Terrell Coleman, Margaret Drew, Anna Dolinsky, Lonnie Freeman, Ann Hilton Fisher, Matt Hopkins, Luke Howland, Kat Incantalupo, Debra Leithauser, Jordan Thompson Long, Allison Nichol, Bud Parr, Rick Paszkiet, and Paula Shapiro.
To Angela Little, my hero.
And to Patti Lemere Pates, who’s given me everything that matters most.
