Lucinda Franks
Miramax Books
Hardcover, March 2007
Three stars
In this fascinating and heart-rending memoir, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lucinda Franks recounts her quest to learn the secrets of her estranged father's role in World War II. After regarding her father for years as a difficult and destructive man, she reluctantly comes to his aid as he's being evicted from his apartment at age 80, and comes across clues that there's more to him than meets the eye.
But her father is doggedly loyal to ancient orders never to say a word about what he had done. So she begins utilizing her journalistic skills to research historical records and gradually coax more information out of him. It's a tantalizing read as she comes across more and more pieces of the puzzle. And it turns out that he was a brave secret agent who risked his life for his country, and paid a heavy personal price. Sadly, by the time she comes to appreciate him, he is failing and there is little time left for their relationship.
The best memoirs are those in which the writer is brutally honest about his or her own flaws, mistakes and misjudgments. The investment of time in reading one returns little reward when it's a self-serving exercise. My Father's Secret War is the good kind of memoir. Franks is brutally honest, and the result is that this book is not just a portrayal of one family's travails, but of the differences between the World War II generation and the one that immediately followed it. For the truth is, when Franks discovers the difficult decisions her father made, the unpleasant things he did, she astonishingly condemns him at the moment when he has finally let down his shields and trusted her enough to confide in her. In fact, she derides him and tells him his actions accomplished nothing, because the very things he tried to prevent -- the development of nuclear weapons by the Soviet Union, the Soviets' early victories in the space race, and the Cold War -- happened anyway. What she should do is comfort him, forgive him, and thank him -- but she does none of these things. This is not a shining moment in the history of daughters' treatment of their fathers.
What Franks is doing at this moment is taking what feels right in a much easier, cushier age, and applying it to a time in which our nation's future was under threat, not rhetorically, the way it is today, but truly, seriously, and immediately under threat. Looking back, it is hard to imagine that the good guys could ever have lost World War II. But in those dark days, the outcome was by no means certain, and today's comfortable moral judgments had no oxygen then in which to survive.
Franks, and others of her generation, had the luxury of questioning what their parents had done precisely because their parents' efforts were so successful in making them safe to do so. And that is why this book so effectively captures the chasm between the generation that reached its prime during World War II, and the generation that reached its prime during the Sixties. What he did, he did for her future -- not just in the war, but in his troubled personal and professional lives afterwards -- but it took her, by her own admission, a long time to understand and appreciate it.