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Sunday 8 November 2009

Farewell, my father: the sun sets on my horizon

Charles Glass pays tribute to the man who was his measure in all things, and whom he thought, like all sons, would be there forever

In my last year at university, when the draft board seemed poised to call me to the colours, I met Dad for breakfast in one of the coffee shops where he had ham and eggs in the company of other lawyers, horse trainers and touts, criminal clients, meat packers and businessmen. He was on his own with the Los Angeles Times when I walked in, concealing my fear of him and of his reaction to what I had to tell him. I can see the restaurant now, but cannot remember whether he was eating his eggs or drinking his mug of coffee when I came to the point. If the army called, I would not serve. If prosecuted and convicted, I would go to prison. He did not agree or disagree, and he was not angry. If the government took me to court, he said, he would be my lawyer. He had saved men from the gas chamber. He would keep me out of prison.

It was an era, denied retrospectively by many of my newly reactionary and prosperous contemporaries, when fathers and sons stopped understanding one another. I knew someone whose father reported him to the police for smoking marijuana. The boy spent a few months in jail. His father told me years later that he believed it was the right thing at the time, but he had regretted it ever after. There were other resolute fathers and rebellious sons. Many ruptures did not mend. My father and I were often hard on each other. Yet he stood by me, right and wrong. I wanted to make him proud.

When the time came, the draft board ignored me — although my number in the conscription lottery was 48 out of 365, too near the top. Richard Nixon, whose legal secretary my father had inherited when Nixon moved to Washington as a congressman in the late 1940s, was withdrawing the troops from Vietnam. America no longer needed me to prosecute its ruthless war against the peasants, so Dad and I missed our hour in court. A few months later, I left the country to study philosophy in Lebanon. I meant to come back with a masters degree, endure three years in law school and become the junior partner in ‘Glass & Son’. Instead, I fell into journalism, television, book-writing and what was probably an easier and more foolish life.

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