An American Requiem

An American Requiem is James Carroll's memoir of his father, of his church, and of the war that broke both relationships, and it compresses the whole American 1960s into one household. The father, Joseph Carroll, was an FBI man who became an Air Force lieutenant general and the founding director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, one of the senior intelligence officers of the Vietnam war; the son, raised in the certainties of Irish Catholic Washington, entered the seminary partly to please him and was ordained a Paulist priest in 1969, at the height of the war his father was helping run. The memoir's subject is the collision that followed. As chaplain at Boston University the young Father Carroll moved into the antiwar movement, drawn by the Berrigans and the Catholic resistance, preaching against the bombing his father's intelligence made possible, and the two men, each certain, each formed by conscience, stopped being able to speak; Carroll left the priesthood in 1974 to write, and the silence between father and son never fully healed before the general's death. Carroll tells it all without caricature, honoring his father's integrity while refusing the war, and mourning a church whose authority died for him in the same years, so the requiem of the title is triple, for a man, a faith, and a national innocence. The book won the 1996 National Book Award for Nonfiction, and it stands among the finest American memoirs of fathers and sons, and the best account anywhere of what Vietnam did inside the families of the men who ran it.