New(ish) Books

Vinson Cunningham and Hugh Wilford

VINSON CUNNINGHAM’s Great Expectations (2024)

This book is such a misfire on so many levels that it seems important to disentangle them somehow. My sense is that what’s gone wrong here encapsulates much of what’s gone wrong in literary culture in general.

For one thing, it’s not really a novel at all — it’s autofiction, thinly and incoherently disguised. Why is Cornel West named but Jeremiah Wright — whom we can all recognize — given a pseudonym? Hard to say. Since it doesn’t do what a novel does — doesn’t tell a story, doesn’t have an economy of form — Cunningham seems to panic and compensate by making it florid and ‘literary.’ The spring is rendered as “that pregnant time when the city’s deep, salty musk begins to rise and its colors start to fizz” and in which “there were huge, lividly fertile tree roots bursting sexually through the concrete and, overhead, the trees’ branches hosannaed.” Emails with an invitation to an event aren’t just replied to — “RSVPs darkened my inbox, arriving minutes apart, in clusters of six or seven, like a blanket of locusts from the sky.” With the literary box thus checked, Cunningham still has the problem of coherence — of trying to make us understand why we should care about anything in the narrative, and here there is an even less satisfactory solution. We get very stray perambulations of the narrator’s mind. We hear, at great length, about his identification with Paul Pierce, about the time David Blaine visited his church, about how he likes to sing, about how he sometimes hung out in the projects as a teenager. None of this, Cunningham seems to suspect, is particularly interesting — we’re never completely sure what’s in it for us in hearing about this well-liked but somewhat affected and somewhat feckless young man. The solution, then, is to throw as much glitz at us as possible: the-times-I-met-Obama stories that are the book’s selling point, but also the glamorous fundraisers, the idea being that we are getting a rare point of entry into the place where politics and money criss-cross. What really animates the writing, though — and I can certainly sympathize with this state of mind — is a panic, a feeling that this is the writer’s one opportunity to give the full version of themselves to an audience, and so they find themselves ladling in everything they can think of, every stray thought, every impression of Pierce’s play.

The question is if that’s ok. I’ve just recently finished railing against stories and the need to be coherent in fiction. In principle, I have nothing against autofiction, and what Cunningham is up to here does match the somewhat inchoate sensibilities of the era he depicts. ‘Great Expectations’ is a good title for the book and gets at the sense of promise of being in one’s early 20s at the time of the Obama campaign — the idea is that everything really might change, who knows in what direction and by what rules, but that some utopia really might be possible. And for all the RSVPs arriving in the narrator’s inbox like locusts, there also are passages of genuine eloquence. The field operation of the Obama campaign is organized with “a basically insane disregard for the limits of the human capacity for work.” A night in LA has a turn when “the party had entered a new and more urgent phase.”

But to write without a clear novelistic structure, you also need to have an idea and this is where Cunningham comes up short. He plays around with a cynical rendition of the Obama campaign — “the longer I worked on this campaign the more I became aware of how much was hidden from me” — but this isn’t really convincing: he likes the campaign and is buoyed along by its optimism. He takes a stab at an identification with the candidate, with his fictional stand-in even copying Obama’s posture — “Proximity to the Senator made me feel slightly shabby. Unconsciously, I straightened out too.” — but this doesn’t go very far either. Obama’s sotto voce asides to David at the start of some fundraising event are still Obama in character, Obama having a bit of wry backslapping with the staff before moving on to hearty backslapping with the donors. There just isn’t a sense of how the experience ultimately shaped the narrator — did it turn him off politics? did it convince him that he wanted to be a writer? — and so we are left with just these anecdotes from Cunningham’s youth and these glimpses of Obama from fairly early in his campaign.

Obama launching his presidential campaign, 2007

The reason I wanted to read Great Expectations is that I was very close to the experiences Cunningham describes: went to some of the same schools, was in some of the same places at the same time, and I have wrestled with how to depict this very heady period — to try to figure out what it all meant. And in a sense it meant less than it seemed at the time. Obama certainly wasn’t some sort of grifter or con artist. He was the real deal as a statesman, but the change that he somewhat over-optimistically promised couldn’t quite be delivered. Even with Obama in office, it was politics as usual — and, for those who were caught up in the hoopla of the campaign, there was inevitably some growing-up to do. The passages that ring the truest for me in Great Expectations are the depictions of the stink of supporter housing; the acquaintance with deadbeats, with people who are pretty much at suicide’s door and who join up with the campaign because it’s “kinda saving my life”; the discovery of the inevitability of drunk-driving in a place like Manchester, New Hampshire, and the sense of euphoria in not being pulled over. In other words, it was a moment when privileged people come into contact with the gnarly realities of underbelly America and, for the most part, beat a hasty exit once they had. Obama, I guess, was the revolution that wasn’t. There was a belief in an egalitarian, progressive vision which was nonetheless compatible with pragmatic politics. The coalition that was based on fractured very soon after that. The underbelly went for Trump. The revolution did take place, but it involved fairly small, radical progressive groups insisting on ideological purity and focusing on cultural hot-topics rather than coalition-building. And 2008, for people like Cunningham and myself, is a precious, hard-to-place memory, something we badly want to communicate but that seems to have little relevance to, even, how the rest of our lives played out.

HUGH WILFORD’s The CIA: An Imperial History (2024)

A workmanlike, surprisingly comprehensive history of the CIA — although somehow undernourishing.

Why do I keep reading these things? I guess I’m trying to work out the shape of American power and it seems important to me to bring the CIA, and intelligence, out of the domain of legend and conspiracy and to resituate it within the broader context of great power operations. As Bill Haydon says towards the end of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, “I still believe the secret services are the only real expression of a nation’s character.”

Hugh Wilford’s history — one of, I think, very few one-volume matter-of-fact accounts of the Agency — is an important chip in putting together that understanding. It functions in the usual way of these things — which is to have one organizing hypothesis and then to ruthlessly discount everybody else’s theories. In Wilford’s case, that’s that the CIA needs to be understood as an imperial organization, and a fairly direct hand-off from the British and French empires at the moment when the U.S. was taking over their global positions.

The Soviet Union features far less in this account than one might expect — if only because Wilford may well have felt that this history was covered elsewhere. Instead, the premise is that the situation with the Soviet Union was fairly locked into place by the time of the CIA’s creation and so the sphere of action became the Global South, with CIA officers often, as Wilford drily puts it, moving into the same houses that their colonial forebears had lived in and engaging in much the same imperial skullduggery.

The somewhat mysterious ebbs and flows of CIA fortune through the later 20th century are interpreted, then, as extensions of the American public’s appetite for engaging in imperialism. In the 1950s, the American public either didn’t know what was going on or chose to look the other way — in an evocative image, the CIA covert action chief Frank Wisner referred to the media as the “Mighty Wurlitzer” (as in the organs that accompanied silent movies) and believed that the media could be played exactly as a skilled organist might do. When the CIA toppled over, surprisingly easily, in the 1970s, it was really just the result of bad press — a string of negative stories either by enterprising journalists or CIA defectors which allowed an “anti-imperial mindset” to prevail for a time in Washington. A similar turn of the wheel is supposed to be happening now, with the black ops of the George W. Bush era giving way to a more jaundiced perspective towards American imperial reach.

In Wilford’s account, there are basically two threads. One is the derring-do of officers in tropical climes who, in many cases, were largely contriving their own policy. Wilford focuses in on a few of the legendary early CIA officers — especially Kermit Roosevelt and Edward Lansdale, who altered the entire geopolitical history of, respectively, Iran and the Philippines. Roosevelt ignored a cable to stand down, instead initiating (and funding) the street protests that led to Mossadegh’s overthrow. Lansdale became an advisor and best friend to Filipino president Ramon Magsaysay, succeeding in remaking the Filipino army and political administration more or less in his own image, launching a doctrine of counter-insurgency that, in the case of the Philippines, worked astonishingly well, starving the ongoing Huk rebellion of much of its popular support and gradually transitioning the Philippines to a pro-U.S. regime. To Wilford, US officers in places like Iran and the Philippines were inflected with a largely-British sense of colonial romance. They were trying to channel T. E. Lawrence and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim in particular, and they found themselves part of an “imperial brotherhood” of intelligence that seemed to have a more pro-Western, colonial sensibility than to be even recognizably a part of American foreign policy. Wilford documents, within that atmosphere, a critical turn — the Americans coming under the spell of more veteran British intelligence operatives and reneging on some of their own democratic values. Somewhat surprisingly, many of the American officers who had been deployed to the Third World in the 1940s were at first highly sympathetic to national movements, and it was the British, Wilford claims, who more or less convinced the Agency to shift to a more imperialistic attitude. Wilford’s thesis does help to explain why the CIA often seemed at such a remove from the rest of American society. Just as it was an astonishingly small number of colonial officers who administered the British Empire — a mere 1,200 officers in India — so the CIA old guard came to pride themselves on being a class apart, seeing the world in terms of intricate geopolitics and using their influence to alter national destinies (often, it seemed, as if on a whim) and with precious little input from the American democratic process.

Lansdale in 1956

The other thread is publicity. And, here, Wilford seems to really feel for the dilemma of CIA officers, who, given the restraints of professional secrecy, couldn’t speak for themselves and instead had to designate proxies and manipulate public opinion in order to advance preferred messages. Part of the mystery of the CIA is why so much effort went into efforts like literary magazines and student groups. Once these were exposed — Ramparts Magazine in 1967 revealing the US National Student Association to be a CIA front; magazines like Encounter and Paris Review proving also to be CIA-run — it generated immense confusion. On the one hand, the CIA seemed to be everywhere — ‘penetrating’ almost all imaginable aspects of civic life, both in the United States and abroad. And then, on the other, the CIA seemed to be more fuddy-duddy and tepid than its fearsome reputation would suggest. CIA cultural operations continued to drift towards Modernist poetry, for instance, and to somewhat arbitrarily support the “Non-Communist Left” — with those on the right, at the time of the Ramparts revelations, bitterly complaining about why in the world American pinkos were receiving CIA largesse. That circle gets squared a bit once you understand the personalities of the CIA officers most behind the domestic operations — James Angleton and Cord Meyer — who were a bit of a different era, who had their own tastes, and who placed significant resources in a handful of highly-targeted operations. Ultimately, then, the CIA was both pervasive and not-as-strong-as-it-seemed. CIA operatives, for instance, flooded southern Florida in the 1960s as part of organizing for a planned invasion of Cuba — “transforming the face” of the entire region, as one journalist put it. And the CIA worked very deeply with Vietnamese, Iranian, and Central American immigrant communities in the ‘70s and ‘80s — but with all of that work occurring in the context of ‘targeted operations.’ The widely-believed story that the crack cocaine epidemic was the result of a CIA plan seems, according to Wilford, to have had only a very mild basis in fact.

Taken all together, the CIA is, let’s say, less fun than it appears in the more conspiratorial accounts of, for instance, Jefferson Morley or David Talbot. Wilford brackets the more famous conspiracy theories — CIA involvement in Watergate, CIA use of mind-control techniques à la The Manchurian Candidate, CIA participation in the JFK assassination. He doesn’t try to refute them but he also doesn’t give them particular credence. His CIA is a bit smaller and lonelier. There were the famous coups — Iran and Guatemala — but not more than that in the ‘50s, at the apparent height of the CIA’s ascendancy. CIA domestic spying did extend to a vast letter-opening operation, to front groups, influence-peddling, etc, but it was piecemeal and reactive and not some wholesale effort to control American civic life. The CIA seems to have been completely outmaneuvered in Cuba and Vietnam — settings that would seem to have been ideally suited to its set of skills. And when the curtain was pulled away, and the CIA old guard exposed to harsh public light in the 1970s, they were less prepossessing than might have been expected. Angleton had very clearly gone mad. Meyer — the former golden boy — had become a tiresome, stereotypical Cold Warrior

Angleton in Congress, 1975

In the end, though, I suspect that the real history of the CIA can’t be contained in one volume like this, as Wilford somewhat over-ambitiously tries to do. There is very little sense of the real, animating psychology of the figures he documents — Angleton and Dulles come across as far paler figures than they do, for instance, in Morley and Talbot’s accounts. Wilford seems to be dependent on documented history and, in order to create a tidy narrative, keeps returning to his ‘imperialism’ master thesis. But the sense is that a lot more was going on. Much of the deep history of the CIA has to do with clashes of personality and with profound inner divisions — as in the crackup of figures like Wisner and Angleton. There were so many different operations, so many different wings, so many conflicting directives and initiatives — and many of them, it seems fair to suspect, never made it into a written record. It may be completely impossible to get a history of all this in a single volume and Wilford’s book, impressive as it is, isn’t the place to look for that. It probably is true that the CIA contains something essential about the American character, that understanding its operations is the key to comprehending the United States at the height of its imperial power, but it takes more work than one magisterial volume to get what that was really all about. Even after reading a book like Wilford’s, the CIA, as much as ever, seems to reside in the realm of myth.