Hi kids! We’re the CIA! Tom Smith

You can’t make this stuff up.

Speaking of which, I really enjoyed Robert de Niro’s movie The Good Shepherd.  As far as I could tell, it got the shabby gentility of Skull & Bones and the old WASP elite exactly right.  Norman Mailer did not, lost in his own fantasy land in Harlot’s Ghost.  WASPs do not have sex with waitresses at diners.  Novelists may do that; I don’t know.  But WASPs don’t.

And speaking of WASPs, you can’t beat this line from the movie, when Wilson, the stoic CIA agent central character goes to Miami to discuss the Cuba problem with a retired Mafia don:

Joseph Palmi:You know, we Italians have our families and the church, the Irish havethe homeland, the Jews their tradition, the n%$#@&s their music. Whatdo you guys have?
Edward Wilson:We have the United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.

AND ALSO  a USD law student notes that the character on whom Edward Wilson was based, James Jesus Angleton, was half Mexican, making the whole, we are the true Americans boast, a bit peculiar.  I don’t know whether Angleton is the basis of Wilson or not, but this is kinda interesting:  Angleton is from my home town of Boise, Idaho, and his mother, who was indeed Mexican, lived in the same apartment building where my mother now lives.  In fact, she (Mrs. Angleton) used to go to Mass at St. John’s Cathedral, where my brothers and sister and I went to school and frequently Mass.  James’s father reportedly met his mother when his father was in Mexico with General ‘Blackjack’ Pershing.  One Sunday, my mother and I gave Mrs. Angleton a ride home.  She was dressed in the full (pardon my ignorance here) Mexican lady regalia, long black dress, black lace on her head, very old world.  Angleton’s nephew was a year ahead of me at St. Joe’s (the school of St. John’s Cathedral being named St. Joseph’s for some inexplicable reason).  I believe James Angleton is buried not far from my father in Boise’s Morris Hill Cemetery, where I do not really want to be buried when the time comes.  Though I would be in pretty distinguished company.