Shadow Warrior (5 page)

The New Jersey school was home to the children of some of the nation's wealthiest families. The town of Princeton, population seven thousand, consisted almost entirely of students, faculty, and school employees. The Gothic architecture, set off by a wooded campus, was breathtaking. Princeton was a whites-only institution, and co-eds were still four decades in the future.
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If Bill Colby was taken with Princeton, it was certainly because of its intellectual rather than its social offerings. Woodrow Wilson—who had been president of the university from 1902 to 1910—had brought the institution into the twentieth century, adding modern subjects in the social sciences to the curriculum and attracting some of the world's best thinkers to the college. He tried, but failed, to abolish Princeton's exclusive “eating clubs,” which served as surrogate fraternities. Bill Colby possessed neither the money nor the social standing to be admitted. He was, financially at least, a middle-class boy at an upper-class institution. Not only did he eat at the cafeteria at Madison Hall, he also waited tables there. His social life revolved mainly around the Catholic Church and ROTC. Princeton was then still very much a Presbyterian institution, and twice-a-week chapel attendance was required; Bill was allowed to substitute by serving as an
altar boy at the Catholic Church. He thrived in ROTC, rising to be cadet captain by his senior year. Throughout his life, Bill Colby would be drawn to people from working-class backgrounds with Ivy League degrees.
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On the Princeton campus were some of academia's leading lights, including Albert Einstein. Princeton was a traditional liberal arts institution; students were required to pass 118 hours in courses ranging from history and philosophy to foreign language, chemistry, and psychology. Like most other undergraduates, Bill's first two years were spent in survey classes. He remembered being especially caught up with anthropology. Woodrow Wilson, much enamored of Oxford and Cambridge, had introduced preceptorships at Princeton. Small groups of students, under the guidance of an individual faculty member, would pursue directed readings in a particular subject. Topping off the undergraduate experience was a comprehensive examination and a senior thesis. Colby opted to major in politics and history, ensuring that he took most of his classes during his junior and senior years in the School of Public and International Affairs. Among his favorite instructors were Edwin S. Corwin and Alpheus T. Mason, who taught constitutional law and political theory, respectively.
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The mid-1930s was an exciting time to be studying American politics. The administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt was attempting to pull the country out of the Great Depression through bold new experiments in political economy and social justice, including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Works Progress Administration, the Social Security Acts, and the Agricultural Adjustment Acts. Louis Brandeis, Mason's icon, was one of the Supreme Court's minority of liberals who believed that the federal government had a right and a duty to act to regulate big business and to advance the causes of social and economic justice. In addition to teaching and writing, Corwin acted as an adviser to the Public Works Administration. Colby remembered becoming a total convert to Roosevelt's New Dealism at Princeton. His tutors certainly played a role in this conversion, but both the Colbys and the Egans had long evidenced liberal views on race, the appropriate role of government in society, and the need for social and economic justice. At the School of Public and International Affairs, Colby conducted independent research on problems such as black education, the Cuban sugar trade, and civil liberties violations in Jersey City, which was then ruled by Boss Frank Hague, one of the most corrupt machine politicians in the country.

Bill Colby's stint at Princeton also coincided with the rise of European and Japanese fascism and with a deeply divisive debate in the United States as to the nation's proper role in the looming international crisis. The peace structure established by the Treaty of Versailles was one of the shortest-lived in modern history. It took but twenty-one brief years for the world to move from one cataclysm to another, even greater one. During the 1930s, three European states emerged to challenge the status quo that Woodrow Wilson and his associates had established in the aftermath of World War I: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the Soviet Union, the world's first great experiment in Marxism-Leninism. Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933 promising to regain all the territory and power the Reich had lost in the Great War. In 1935, the führer renounced the disarmament clauses of the Versailles Treaty, and in the following year he ordered the Wehrmacht to occupy and fortify the Rhineland. Germany had given notice. Benito Mussolini and his fascist followers had seized power in Italy in 1922, ending the kaleidoscopic succession of governments that had ruled Italy since its unification. Il Duce established a one-party corporate state and declared the Mediterranean to be “mare nostrum,” our sea. In 1935, Italy overran Ethiopia, strategically situated on the Horn of Africa, although Mussolini's air force and armored infantry had a difficult time with Haile Selassie's mounted spearmen. The Soviet Union, ruled iron-handedly by Joseph Stalin, had not yet made its foreign policy goals explicit, but it was no secret that Moscow intended at the first opportunity to regain the territory it had lost in Eastern Europe at the close of the Great War.

Confronting these expansionist powers were the victors of the world war: Britain and France, allied with a smaller group of states created or reshaped by the Treaty of Versailles. The Western democracies faced two alternatives: they could confront Germany and Italy at the outset, nipping fascist aggression in the bud, or they could seek to appease Hitler and Mussolini. Enmeshed in the problems of the Great Depression and politically fractured, Paris, London, and their allies chose the latter path. One of the reasons later put forward in defense of this ill-conceived approach was the unwillingness of the United States to join with the European democracies in standing up to the dictators at that time.

In truth, isolationism was the order of the day in the United States. Americans were far too concerned with the vast economic, financial, and
social crisis that followed in the wake of the Wall Street crash of 1929 to pay much attention to what was going on overseas. Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt were loath to embark on a risky foreign policy that could jeopardize domestic recovery. Moreover, Americans were deeply disillusioned with the results of World War I. Most had come to believe that the nation's sacrifices had been for naught, and that the United States had been tricked into participating by the wily British or by unscrupulous war profiteers. By the mid-1930s, pacifism was rampant on the nation's college campuses. At Princeton and other institutions of higher learning, a student organization—the Veterans of Future Wars—led annual class boycotts and staged protest meetings at which young men signed pledges never to participate in any foreign war. Reflecting the popular mood, Congress between 1935 and 1937 passed a series of Neutrality Acts prohibiting US citizens from loaning money to nations at war, selling arms to belligerents, and traveling to war zones.

Isolationists again carried the day when a civil war erupted in Spain in 1936. General Francisco Franco, whose Falangist Party resembled Mussolini's fascists, waged a bloody struggle to overthrow the Republican government, which included both communists and socialists. Germany and Italy supported the Falangists, supplying Franco with massive amounts of munitions, while the Loyalists (as government supporters were called) received less substantial support from the Soviet Union. The United States joined the British and French in refusing to offer assistance to either side. Americans were deeply divided over the Spanish Civil War. Many Roman Catholics, including the proto-fascist “radio priest” Father Charles E. Coughlin, strongly supported Franco, while those on the left, from liberals to members of the tiny Communist Party, supported the Republic. Over a thousand young Americans enlisted in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade that fought for the Loyalists.

Meanwhile, at Princeton, Bill Colby had decided to spend the summer prior to his senior year—that is, 1939—in France, honing his language skills and soaking up French culture. Elbridge arranged for him to live with a family in the Loire Valley. For three months, Bill bicycled through the chateau-studded countryside, stopping in various villages to sample country cuisine and converse in French. In the midst of this idyll, he and a friend ventured to the Pyrenees. There the two young men encountered a steady stream of bloody, dispossessed refugees from the Spanish Civil War raging
just over the border. Just the previous semester, Bill had written an essay on propaganda in Spain, both of the right and the left, as an independent study project for the Politics Department. In it, he had anticipated a larger European conflict and lamented the excesses of both the Fascists and the Republicans. After acknowledging the right of revolution to secure popular rule, he condemned Franco for leading a “minority revolt in behalf of a reactionary and Fascist State, which the people have voted against.” The Soviet Union, a totalitarian state, might be aiding the Republicans, the young undergraduate wrote, “but it frightens me not at all to learn that hitherto poverty stricken peasants are taking over acres of land which formerly went to the support of one man, or that the government and even industry are now under the control of the people.”
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World War II erupted while Bill was in Europe. In the spring of 1939, Hitler broke his Munich pledge and overran the remainder of Czechoslovakia, annexing a state that had no cultural or historical relationship to Germany. In August, Germany invaded Poland, and Britain and France declared war. Hard on the heels of these events, Bill Colby sailed for home. The British liner on which he crossed the Atlantic was guarded by a detachment of soldiers whose duty it was to ward off attack by German submarines or surface raiders. By the time he landed on American soil, Colby had become, by his own accounts, an ardent internationalist. Indeed, he later confided to his son John that had he been old enough, he would have joined the Lincoln Brigade: “He was very proud and awed by the people who had volunteered in that struggle,” John recalled.
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Back at Princeton, Colby chose as the subject of his senior thesis France's reaction to fascist aggression in Europe. He saw it as a case study for exploring the issue of why democracies seemed so weak in their dealings with totalitarian states. A contemporary of Colby's named John F. Kennedy was examining the same topic from the British perspective while completing his studies at Harvard. Colby was extremely critical of appeasement, coming down particularly hard on the Popular Front government in France. If the democracies had cast their lot with the Austrians and Czechs in 1938, he maintained, Hitler and Mussolini could have been stopped before they had gotten started. The young scholar abjured any sympathy for communism, however. Communism and fascism were both expansionist, imperialist, racist ideologies, and the Nazi-Soviet Pact proved that Russia could
not be trusted. “I am willing to concede,” he wrote in his memoir,
Honorable Men
, “my Catholicism may well have kept me from the emotional antifascism that pushed many of my time into the ranks of the Communists. . . . I was perfectly convinced—which of course many supporters of the Republican cause were not—that it was possible to be antifascist without becoming pro-Communist.” Many years later he would cite George Orwell's
Homage to Catalonia
as a penetrating, authentic look at the Communist International in action.
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Bill Colby graduated from Princeton in the spring of 1940. Ceremonies included singing the “Cannon Song” while the new alums broke ceremonial clay pipes over the Revolutionary War cannon anchored behind Nassau Hall.
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Within a month of his departure from Princeton, the Wehrmacht had overrun France. Three hundred and fifty thousand members of the British Expeditionary Force barely escaped with their side arms from the French port of Dunkirk. With the fall of France, the conflict between isolationists, led by the America First Committee, and interventionists, spearheaded by the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, reached a crescendo. Bill was certain, as were most liberal interventionists, that war with the Axis powers (including Imperial Japan, which had conquered Manchuria and invaded northern China) was inevitable. Although he had served as cadet captain of his ROTC unit at Princeton, Colby had not been commissioned with his classmates. He was still several months shy of his twenty-first birthday (the age of conscription did not change from twenty-one to eighteen until after the attack on Pearl Harbor).

Bill applied to Columbia Law School and was accepted. Elbridge had been assigned to army headquarters in Washington, DC, and Bill decided to spend the summer there with his parents. To pass the time and earn a little money, he landed a job pumping gas in the District of Columbia. “Gas station attendants weren't unionized,” he later remembered, “and I enthusiastically joined in the effort to organize them in the best tradition of New Deal liberalism.”
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The beginning of the fall term at Columbia brought the younger Colby's union activities to a halt. Bill moved into the law dormitory and immediately struck up a friendship with Stan Temko, who would go on to become a partner in Covington and Burlington, Secretary of State Dean Acheson's
law firm. The two men would become lifelong friends. Diligent and disciplined, as always, Bill was soon named to the
Law Review
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All was not cloistered study, however. Stan Temko later recalled a trip to Vermont that included skiing with Barnard girls. Bill subsequently met another Barnard student, Barbara Heinzen, when Temko arranged a blind date for him. “It was all very informal,” Barbara later recalled, “because we were going to the Gold Rail, a local campus hangout.” She was not particularly taken with the young man physically—he was of medium height, wore glasses, and seemed very conventional (“not the person to stand out in a crowd,” as she put it)—but she found him to be an excellent conversationalist. The two hit it off and began dating. “We had splendid times together, racing around New York, dancing, partying, endlessly arguing politics with our friends,” Bill later wrote. Those discussions generally revolved around the war in Europe and the Roosevelt administration's move from neutrality in 1939 to undeclared naval war with Germany by the winter of 1941. Bill recalled vividly that on one of their outings in early 1941, he and Barbara witnessed a communist-led demonstration on the Columbia campus. Participants paraded around with mock coffins to protest Roosevelt's decision to aid Britain. This was, of course, prior to the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
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