David Talbot - The Devil’s Chessboard - Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government

Allen Dulles first laid eyes on Martha Clover Todd in the summer of 1920 at a party of fashionable young people at a lakeside resort near the Dulles family home in upstate New York. Before the week was out, he had proposed to her. She later spoke of her blitzkrieg courtship and marriage to Dulles with a sense of wonder. She couldn’t quite explain why she had agreed to marry the headstrong young man. “ I married Allen,” she told a curious nephew years later, “because he was attractive, and doing interesting things.” This commonplace observation was the best she could offer. Clover had other suitors at the time, including a perfectly acceptable young doctor who was particularly eager to win her. That courtship became entangled in her indecision. But Allen Dulles gave her no room to ruminate or reconsider. He had made the decision for both of them—she was the girl for him.

At twenty-six, Clover was a year younger than Dulles, and she radiated an ethereal beauty that set her apart from the other debutantes in her social set. She had sensuous lips and wide-set, almond-shaped green eyes that seemed to hint of deep sadness. She spoke in a breathy voice that made men lean closer to her. In photographs of Clover at the time, she always seemed to be looking away from the camera, as if her thoughts were somewhere else and too melancholy to be shared. She had an air of fragile mystery that undoubtedly appealed to Dulles.

But she also possessed some of the feisty “flapper” spirit of her generation of liberated women. She looked sexy and self-possessed in the masculine fashions of the day, posing for one photo in a trim suit, businesslike tie, and a wide-brimmed hat jammed down over her tightly coiffed curls.

Once, on holiday from her Connecticut boarding school, Clover was invited by an eccentric New York society queen to an evening in honor of “ some poor convicts” recently paroled from Sing Sing prison. The evening was grinding on with excruciating stiffness until Clover broke the ice by challenging the ex-cons to a game of poker. In later years, she made prison reform a passionate personal commitment. Clover’s affinity for convicts was fueled by the fact that she often felt like a prisoner of her own life. During World War I, she volunteered as a canteen girl in a Paris officers’ club. She sometimes wandered the streets of the war-tattered city dressed as a beggar, just to feel what it was like to be someone else, someone who had to plead for bread.

Clover’s own childhood was rich in material comfort. Her mother came from a wealthy Baltimore manufacturing family whose foundry had produced the metal plates for the USS Monitor , the famed ironclad Civil War vessel. Her father, Henry Todd, was a distinguished professor of romance languages at Columbia University. She and her sister and two brothers grew up in a tastefully furnished house near Central Park filled with books and music. Their father would take his children on long strolls through the city, discoursing at length on its history and architecture. Her mother would make “ fairy circles” from tiny white stones in the park, where, she insisted, the sprites would gather for dances on moonlit nights. Clover grew up with her mother’s fey spirit and would constantly be disappointed by the modern world’s banality. Instead of the fairy world conjured by her mother, she was forced to dwell in a world “too pedestrian, too filled with anxiety, with duty, with the necessity to be always right.”

Clover’s father, a strict Presbyterian with an Old Testament sense of right and wrong, made her feel that she never measured up. When she was eight and her sister, Lisa, was ten, he tried to teach them both Latin but gave up in frustrated rage. “ We simply weren’t ready for Latin yet, or at least I wasn’t,” she recalled. “We exasperated Father terribly. He was a scholar—very tense and high-strung—and he cared. As he was a professor, it was hard to have subnormal children.”

Her mother, who was prone to debilitating migraines and would often take to bed for long “rest cures,” was too involved with her own travails to provide her children with maternal love. There were nursemaids for the children and housekeepers, and when Clover’s mother was confined to bed under her pillowy white bedspread, an efficient domestic manager named Miss MacMillan would arrive and put the house in order. But Clover’s mother would go into rapid decline as soon as Miss MacMillan departed, overwhelmed by the obligations of family life.

Clover’s emotional touchstone in her family was her younger brother, Paul, a beautiful and sensitive boy the nursemaids enjoyed dressing like a girl. While still quite young, he began demonstrating precocious artistic skill, drawing “the most astonishing [pictures], queer animals always, each one different from the last and exhibiting the most extraordinary amount of skill and imagination.” But their father thought Paul’s nursemaids had turned him into a “sissy.” He seemed too fragile for the rough-and-tumble of college life when he went away to Princeton in 1918, and at the end of his freshman year, he dropped out.

On the eve of Allen and Clover’s wedding—which was held in October 1920 on the wooded estate of Todd family friends outside Baltimore—Paul sent word that he did not feel hearty enough to attend the festivities. “He said he didn’t feel well enough and we thought it rather queer,” Clover later noted in her diary, “but we were always all of us not being well and having all sorts of inhibitions and neurotic feelings.”

Clover later tormented herself for not being more attuned to her brother’s emotional condition as she prepared for her wedding. But she herself was in a state of great anxiety. “ To me it was a terrible strainbeing engaged, trying all the time to act the way you suppose a normal person would act, instead of simply jumping out the window the way you naturally would. So I wasn’t thinking very much about my brother.” That December, when the newly wed couple arrived in Constantinople, Allen’s next diplomatic port of call, Clover heard that Paul had suffered a nervous breakdown and been confined to a fashionable sanitarium in Greenwich, Connecticut. In November 1921, after being discharged, the twenty-one-year-old was found dead in bushes alongside a road not far from the sanitarium. He had shot himself between the eyes with a revolver.

Paul’s death plagued Clover for many years. “In a certain sense I suppose I did kill [Paul], at least I let him die, yes, certainly I let him die without lifting a finger,” she wrote nearly three decades later in a therapeutic journal she was keeping.

Clover quickly learned that the man she married was simply not suited to help someone with as much inner turmoil as she suffered. She was tortured by feelings of worthlessness, which Allen did little to allay. Throughout most of their early married life, Clover underwent Freudian analysis with various psychoanalysts in New York, and at one point she committed herself to a sanitarium for six weeks. “I started Freudian analysis,” she wrote in a journal many years later, “because I was suffering so much that it was not possible to live unless I did.”

Clover and Allen’s oldest daughter, Martha (“Toddie”), also grappled with psychic demons throughout her life—bouts of manic depression that became so severe that she submitted to multiple rounds of electroshock therapy. In some ways, Toddie was the most like her father—energetically outgoing and self-confident. But his daughter’s troubles failed to engage Dulles. Nor did he display much interest in his children’s accomplishments, including those of his son and namesake, Allen Jr., even when the boy began to shine at Exeter, where the headmaster said he was the brightest student in the school.