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

slunk away in embarrassment, and that was the last time I ever saw him. I tried my best to forget the entire painful incident.
    Yet when the notion of applying to the CIA first entered my mind almost a decade later, the first person I thought about was Lyman Kirkpatrick. Perhaps he had stayed somewhere in my subconscious all along. If so, I wasn’t the only Brown student of that era whom Kirkpatrick affected. Many years later, in the mid-’90s, I stepped into an elevator at CIA headquarters and saw a guy standing there who looked vaguely familiar. I was a relatively well-known figure inside the Agency by that time, and the guy introduced himself. Turned out he had been a year or two ahead of me at Brown, and right after graduation he began a long career as an undercover CIA operative, serving mostly overseas. Intrigued, I asked him what caused him to join up at such an early age. “Two words,” he replied. “Lyman Kirkpatrick.”

    At the beginning of 1969, the year I was to graduate, I had to start—grudgingly—thinking about what to do after Brown. I settled on law school, but first, like every other twenty-one-year-old guy at that time—the height of the Vietnam War—I faced the possibility of being drafted into the military.
    Like most everyone else at Brown, I was opposed to our government’s involvement in Vietnam, but I was never a part of any of the protest groups or demonstrations. My fraternity brothers and I were far morefocused, if that is the word for it, in putting together parties at the house and organizing road trips to all the women’s colleges scattered all over New England. All I knew for sure was that I didn’t want to go into the military, at least while the war was ongoing.
    A few months before graduation, I dutifully reported for my physical at the South Boston naval station. To my utter amazement, I flunked the physical. The summer before, I had suffered a kidney stone attack (doubtless due to the sun and the copious amounts of beer I had consumed in college), the first of what would be a series of attacks stretching over several years. My family’s urologist put me on a strict low-calcium regime, which I blithely ignored when my parents were not around, and wrote a letter outlining my medical condition—not so much to get me a deferment (which he said it would not) but to give the doctors a complete picture of my physical health. Letter in hand, I arrived at the naval station and passed all the physical tests with flying colors. However, when one of the military physicians finally scanned the letter, which was only a couple of paragraphs long, he said, with a trace of annoyance, “Why didn’t you show us this when you first got here? You can’t serve in the military when you have to be on a diet like this.” I was then summarily dismissed, having gone from 1A to 4F status in a matter of thirty seconds.
    I take no pride in saying this, but that was probably the happiest day of my life up to that time.
    Of course, it wasn’t right that I felt so happy about escaping service. The entire selective-service process in the Vietnam era was so capricious and unjust. Almost all of my friends from college—and later from law school—managed to avoid military service, and the handful that did serve were never sent to Vietnam. At the same time, tens of thousands of young guys from less privileged backgrounds had no choice but to go, fight, and die there.
    Free of the draft, I decided to visit Washington, D.C., for the first time in my life that spring, to check out the law schools of Georgetown and George Washington University. GW became my first choice. I was accepted there, and in the fall of 1969 I was off to the capital.
    The summer between leaving Brown and entering GW, I had an epiphany of sorts. After my narrow escape from the draft, it dawned on me that I needed to stop casually coasting through life and start taking my future seriously. I wanted to become a grown-up. I began to apply