By William B. Ketter
May 01, 2007 01:01 pm
—
H. Roger Tatarian, the last great editor of United Press International and the person who guided me through my formative years as a journalist, was known for his scholarly encouragement when asked for help on a dicey story.
“Go where the facts take you,” he’d counsel. “Then get at the truth no matter where you end up.”
Tatarian passed away 12 years ago, but his sage advice remains firmly planted in the journalistic conscience of those men and women who had the privilege of working with him.
Perhaps no one better personifies that legacy than Lucinda Franks, who won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 1971 under the tutelage of Tatarian.
She was honored - along with fellow UPI reporter Tom Powers - for tracking down the truth of a rich girl from a small town in Illinois who drifted from her roots to become a tattered terrorist, dying at the age of 28 when a makeshift bomb factory exploded in a townhouse in New York’s Greenwich Village.
Now, Franks has chased a much tougher-to-get-at tale, the clandestine military life of her father in World War II. She bares the uncomfortable facts, including her family’s darkest dysfunctions, in a lyrically written memoir titled, “My Father’s Secret War.”
Getting at the truth was hard work, with plenty of days of despair, and Franks admits she’s still not sure she knows the complete story.
But through persistence and guile she determined that her father wasn’t the shining hero she’d imagined him to be and that his frequent assignments as a spy involved the cold-blooded assassination of at least two suspected enemy agents, including a double-dealer for the Soviet Union.
Thomas Franks, a Navy officer and deadeye marksman, didn’t want his daughter, or anyone else, to know what happened on his covert missions during the war. He insisted he had taken an oath to never tell and he held to it through bouts of alcoholism and mental anguish.
He couldn’t, however, hold off the determination of his journalist daughter to solve a mystery that jolted her curiosity when, as a young woman, she found a German secret police cap and Nazi Iron Cross among her deceased mother’s belongings.
She instinctively wondered if her mother had an affair with a Nazi. But that thought was quickly dismissed when her father assured her they were his artifacts from the war and that he didn’t want to talk about it.
“I’d rather you did,” she responded.
From that point on, Lucinda Franks sets out on a quarter-century journey of discovery into her father’s military past. In the process, she gathers remarkable detail about how his role in the war altered his very character and eventually caused what she describes as plenty of collateral damage to those closest to him.
That collateral damage included a hapless marriage that he offset with a mistress, paranoia manifested by hiding loaded guns about the family home, losing his job as a chemist and senior executive at a metals company, ending up penniless and unkempt, and showing little interest in Lucinda and her younger sister as they advanced their careers.
Yet the daughter’s hunger to know exactly what her father did during the war and why brings the two of them closer than ever. She rescues him from his drinking and slovenly lifestyle. Underwrites his rent and other expenses. Reintroduces him to the joy of family when she marries an accomplished lawyer 30 years her senior and has two children with him.
The lawyer is Robert Morgenthau, the district attorney for New York County and also a World War II veteran. He gets on well with his peer-age father-in-law and encourages his wife to continue her difficult quest into her dad’s war secrets despite his tight lips. Morgenthau counsels her on who to contact for information and where to look for telltale records. She spares no effort in finding buried documents and interviewing her father’s military compatriots and confidants.
A first notion that he may come around occurs when the father agrees to contribute videotaped testimony to New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage about what he saw during a brief visit to a liberated Nazi death camp in Ohrdurf, Germany. He told of the horror of finding hundreds of dead bodies stacked in buildings and others bunched up on the camp’s streets. His reaction: “Oh my God! Oh God! How could something like this happen?” He also said he was ordered not to talk about what he saw.
So it isn’t until later, when her father’s health begins to slip badly, that the author learns of his assassin role and other hush-hush, behind the enemy lines activity. She understands why he would kill a Nazi informer but puzzles over the shooting of the Soviet double-agent since that country was on our side at the end of the war.
“Hell’s bells, Cindy,” the father asserts. “He was a traitor! He was going to let the Russians know where a store of German material – unassembled parts, blueprints, things like that – was hidden.” Things like the V-1 and V-2 warhead rockets.
It is more than the author wants to know, but it helps close the loop on her father’s secret war.
When her father dies by her side in a hospice house in October of 2002, she tells him over and over how much she loves him. Father and daughter are one.
There are no firm rules for writing a memoir about your father. As a journalist, Lucinda Franks knew that pursuit of the truth could lead to where she didn’t expect to end up. Still, her book works for her and for the reader because it is loaded with surprising developments – and hard details.
It tugs at your sleeve.
William B. Ketter is vice president for news of Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. of Birmingham, Ala.
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