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  • A Need to Know: The Clandestine History of a CIA Family
  • Katherine Miller
A Need to Know: The Clandestine History of a CIA Family. By Harold Lloyd Goodall Jr. . Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2006; pp. 399. $24.95.

In 1976, Lloyd Goodall died at the age of 53. He died in Maryland (or was it Virginia?). He died of flu complications (or was it Legionnaires' disease?). He died after an undistinguished career as a mid-level government bureaucrat (or was he a spy?). Almost 30 years later, his son, Harold Lloyd (Bud) Goodall Jr., decided to confront these and other mysteries of his family's history, in part to answer the questions posed by his own son, in part to honor the lives of his parents, and in part to consider an often hidden aspect of twentieth-century American history—the ways in which the families of Cold War "operatives" were influenced by the culture of fear that was endemic to that time and the machinations of deception seen as critical to national security. Goodall began his investigation with the "narrative inheritance" bequeathed to him by his father: a Bible, a diary, and a copy of The Great Gatsby. Using these documents as his codebooks, Goodall traces his family's history and its intersection with historical events such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Suez Crisis and with historical, national, and international intelligence figures such as William Colby, Kim Philby, Clare Boothe Luce, and James Angleton.

In A Need to Know, Goodall provides a largely chronological account that begins with his father's childhood and his brief but honored service in the Army Air Corps during World War II, then follows Goodall family life from early days in West Virginia through a few heady years as part of the foreign service in Rome and London to times of "exile" in Wyoming and Philadelphia. As Goodall traces both family and national history through these years, he relies on memory, family documents, interviews as available, and government documents, often procured with great difficulty. And, of course, these government documents are of somewhat questionable value when investigating Goodall's father's role as a CIA operative during the Cold War. Was Goodall's father a "spy" or did he merely "work for the government"? To what extent is the "dummy" file to be believed? In his past work, Goodall has labeled himself as an "organizational ethnographer" and "cultural detective" who uses clues from observation and interviews to build compelling narratives about organizational and community life. However, in A Need to Know, the available data provide new interpretive challenges. Goodall acknowledges the somewhat tenuous nature of his account, noting that "the world I re-enter is largely, and necessarily, a historically derivative and narratively imagined one. It is made up of persons, places, conversations, and things that I have constructed out of the raw materials of what I know, what I've read about, the patterns I recognize, and what I believe to be true. It is a version of the truth, not the whole [End Page 529] truth, or maybe even the main truth. . . . But it is a spy story, after all, shadowy and clandestine" (115).

Goodall's narrative is, indeed, a compelling one. At one level, A Need to Know is a story of a family struggling through problems that many families confront: unrealized professional ambitions, life in unfamiliar communities, strained relationships between husband, wife, and child, illness and substance abuse. Goodall is particularly powerful when he considers the issues confronting his mother, a woman from a poor background, trained as a nurse, who finds herself in the rarefied environment of foreign service officials in London and Rome in the late 1950s. "My mother came, if not exactly to hate herself, then surely to distrust the dignity of her own identity. She came to hate where she had come from and what she hadn't done. She learned to distrust who she really was beneath her skin" (189). These issues of identity confronted many women of this era, and Goodall's mother's struggles can still be viewed as a lesson for contemporary families as they cope...

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