Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA by John Rizzo

a surrogate father to his two kid brothers. (He also had five older brothers.) My dad took on all sorts of part-time jobs to support the family, and at the same time attended classes at night at Bentley College in Boston, earning a business degree in 1932. Starting at the bottom, he then began what would be a very successful fifty-year career in the retail department-store business. Throughout his life, my dad was a quiet, somewhat shy, hardworking, thoroughly honest and decent man. Above all, he loved and cared for his family—his mother, his brothers, his wife, and his children.
    My mother, Frances, was the daughter of a pharmacist. She was the middle child of five, two of whom died of tuberculosis in their twenties. Despite these early tragedies, my mom lived her entire life with her inherited Irish sense of wit, indomitability, and fierce loyalty to her family. More outgoing and socially active than my dad (she joined a bowling league and exercise club in her fifties), she adored and supported him unstintingly for the more than half century they were married, up to the day my dad died in 1996. She passed away two years later.
    I can summarize my childhood and adolescence in five words: very happy and very uneventful. I was the youngest of three children, and the only boy. In a close-knit Italian-Irish American family, that meant I was pampered and indulged from the day I was born. My two older sisters, Maria and Nancy, accepted this with remarkable equanimity. In fact, they were unwaveringly protective of their kid brother as we were growing up (and continue to be to this day). When I was twelve, my dad got a big new job in Boston, so our family moved from Worcester to Wayland, a small town about twenty miles outside the Hub.
    I spent my junior high and high school years in the excellent Wayland public schools. I was a pretty good student and active in things like the yearbook and newspaper, but I had no career ideas, save for a vague notion about becoming a Boston sports reporter. My logic was airtight: I could not only go free to Red Sox, Patriots, Celtics, and Bruins games, but get paid to do so, to boot.
    Entering my senior year of high school in the fall of 1964, I was facingmy first major life decision, which was where to go to college. With the help of Mr. Lewis Oxford, my kindly if somewhat bemused high school guidance counselor, I considered the Ivy League schools. Although my grades had been fairly good, and I had done well on the SATs, I knew my credentials were not exactly eye-popping. So I immediately ruled out Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Dartmouth or Cornell? Too rural. Columbia or Penn? Too smack dab in the middle of big cities.
    That left Brown University, in sleepier Providence, Rhode Island. In the years to come, Brown would become among the most chic and selective of the Ivy schools, but in the mid-’60s it was widely viewed as a safe fallback school for an aspiring Ivy Leaguer. For me, it was my first and only realistic choice. And lo and behold, I got in, much to the evident relief and surprise of the patient Mr. Oxford.
    My parents were thrilled. Although my sisters had gone to Tufts, I was the first member of the extended Rizzo family to go to an Ivy League college.
    I arrived at Brown in September 1965 and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in political science in June 1969. They were the most formative years of my life, and I loved every minute I spent there. Little of it had to do with academics, however. What Brown really taught me was how to go from being a naïve, immature kid to being a grown man. I joined a fraternity, Beta Theta Pi, where I met a group of guys that would become lifelong friends, and which gave me a lifelong taste for fine clothes and good cigars. Being at Brown, and especially being at Beta, also gave me a badly needed set of social skills. I like to think that, on balance, it was a worthwhile return on investment for my proud parents, who happily paid every cent of my