Me and the NSA

I’m amused by the way everybody is freaked out about the NSA watching when we send an email and who we’re writing. I grew up in Washington, D.C., during the 1950s, the child of a political journalist.

My father, Stewart Alsop, with LBJ

We always assumed we were being watched, our phones tapped, our conversations recorded, our mail opened. My father  often reported from Communist countries where, in his hotel room, he found taping devices behind the pictures, cameras in the mirrors, microphones in the flower arrangements.  My uncle Joe was entrapped by the KGB on a visit to Moscow in 1957 and surprised in bed with a man. Photos were taken and disseminated in Washington years later.  In 1965, Uncle Joe accused LBJ of tapping his phone. In a fascinating conversation between LBJ and his attorney general,  Nick Katzenbach, the two men discuss Uncle Joe and his sexual exploits. ( See a transcript in  REACHING FOR GLORY by Michael Beschloss.) LBJ announces that he doesn’t believe in wiretapping, but even as he says it,  you can imagine him leaning closer to the microphone he’d implanted in his own desk to make sure the reception was clear. He was taping himself for history. Speaking of taping, my father bet my brother that he couldn’t bug a dinner party without being discovered.  My oldest brother, Joe, won the bet and went on to more nefarious capers. A friend of ours, whose father worked for the CIA, dropped a microphone down his family’s living room chimney. We ran a private telephone line through the Washington storm sewers so nobody could listen in to our conversations. Stealing other peoples’ secrets? That’s what you did.

Fiction writers steal secrets in order to reveal them. I’d open lots of mail or listen to phone calls if it helped me develop a character. I certainly eavesdrop shamelessly.   It’s a habit I developed when I was one of the children listening at the top of the stairs. It gave me memories revisited in DON’T KNOCK UNLESS YOU’RE BLEEDING, Growing up in Cold War Washington and  in an essay I wrote, entitled MY LIFE BEFORE TELEVISION, just published in an anthology BREAKFAST ON MARS and 37 Other Delectable Essays.

And I know there will be more where those came from.