10

“I have frequently stated that I did not intend to set down either autobiographical notes of any kind or any version of events as I have witnessed and affected them. It has been my firm and long-held conviction that events, for better or for worse, speak for themselves, work as it were toward their own ends. After reviewing published accounts of certain of these events, however, I find my own role in them to have been misrepresented. Therefore, on this August Sunday morning, with a tropical storm due from the southeast and hard rain already falling outside these offices I am about to vacate at the Department of State in the City of Washington, District of Columbia, I have determined to set forth as concisely as possible, and in as much detail as is consistent with national security, certain actions I took in 1984 in the matter of what later became known as the lethal, as opposed to the humanitarian, resupply.”

So begins the four-hundred-and-seventy-six-page transcript of the taped statement that Treat Morrison committed to the Bancroft Library at Berkeley with instructions that it be sealed to scholars until five years after his death.

Those five years have now passed.

As have, and this would have been his calculation, any lingering spasms of interest in the matter of what later became known as the lethal, as opposed to the humanitarian, resupply.

Or so it would seem.

Since, seven years after Treat Morrison’s death and two years after the unsealing of the transcript, I remain the single person to have asked to see it.

So Treat Morrison’s Who’s Who entry began.

And continued.

All the special postings enumerated, all the private-sector sojourns specified.

All there.

Right down to Office: Dept. of State, 2201 C St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20520.

Without giving the slightest sense of what Treat Morrison actually did.

Which was fix things.

What was remarkable about those four hundred and seventy-six pages that Treat Morrison committed to the Bancroft Library was, as in his Who’s Who entry, less what was said than what was not said. What was said was predictable enough, globalism versus regionalism, full Boland, failed nations, correct interventions, multilateral approach, Directive 25, Resolution 427, criteria not followed, nothing Treat Morrison could not have said at the Council on Foreign Relations, nothing he had not said, up there in the paneled room with the portrait of David Rockefeller and the old guys nodding off and the young guys asking pinched textbook questions and the willowy young women who worked on the staff standing in the back of the room like geishas, shuttle up and hop a flight back down with one of the corporate guys, maybe learn something for a change, you’d be surprised, they’ve got their own projections, their own risk analysts, no bureaucracy, no commitments to stale ideologies, none of those pinched textbook questions, they can afford to keep out there ahead of the power curve, corporate guys are light-years ahead of us.

Sometimes.

Four hundred and seventy-six pages on correct interventions and no clue that a correct intervention was for Treat Morrison an intervention in which when you run out of options you can still get your people to the airport.

Four hundred and seventy-six pages with only a veiled suggestion of Treat Morrison’s rather spectacular indifference to the conventional interests and concerns of his profession, only an oblique flash of his particular maladaption, which was to be a manipulator of abstracts whose exclusive interest was in the specific. You get just the slightest hint of that maladaption in tropical storm due from the southeast and hard rain already falling, just the barest lapse before the sonorous recovery of outside these offices I am about to vacate at the Department of State in the City of Washington, District of Columbia.

No hint at all of his long half-mad gaze.

Wide spindrift gaze toward paradise, Elena McMahon said the first time she was alone with him.

He said nothing.

A poem, she said.

Still he said nothing.

Something galleons of Carib fire, she said, something something the seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.

He studied her without speaking. Diane read poetry, he said then.

There had been a silence.

Diane was his wife.

Diane was dead.

Diane Morrison, 52, wife of, after a short illness, survived by, in lieu of flowers.

I wasn’t thinking about the Carib fire part, Elena had said finally.

Yes you were, Treat Morrison had said.