Traveling Sprinkler by Nicholson Baker Page A

their submarine burned.” No, definitely not, because Chuck worked on submarines and it would make Nan unhappy if I wrote a song about Chuck’s precious submarine.
    Oh, but the guitar sounded good. I couldn’t get over how good a D minor chord sounded on the guitar. Little old D minor. I once played a Mahler symphony with a D minor bassoon solo, big deal—Mahler’s interminable Sixth Symphony. But this guitar D minor was different. By shifting two fingers you can go from a D minor to some other chord with a suspended something-or-other. D minor, then strange chord, then D minor again. So beautiful. “It’s early morning and the rollers are rolling,” I sang. “The rollers are rolling in the early morning.”
    Everything’s different when you write a song. The rhymes sound different and they happen naturally, and the chords don’t sound like the same chords played on a piano. Your fingers make choices for you. The guitar is your friend, helping you find chords you’d never have found on your own, and then those chords help you find tunes you’d never have thought to sing. It’s such a simple and glorious collaboration.
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    I S IT POSSIBLE to write a song about the beginnings of the CIA? About the fetish of secrecy? I know a little secret about the CIA. I bet you don’t know this. I’m going to tell it to you right now. The true founder of the CIA was a poet, Archibald MacLeish. Well, that’s not quite right. MacLeish was one of the true founders, one of the early recruiters and legitimizers.
    When Franklin Roosevelt wanted to set up a bureau of secret intelligence—this was in the summer of 1941—he assigned the job of creating an intelligence agency to two highly placed people. One was William Donovan, a Republican lawyer who’d gone to Pearl Harbor to “inspect the fleet” before it was attacked and gone to London to cook up trouble and help set Europe ablaze. The other was FDR’s poet speechwriter, the man who’d won a Pulitzer Prize for saying, with great self-importance, that a poem must not mean but be: Archibald MacLeish. MacLeish had already helped Wild Bill Donovan with some of his interventionist speeches—they stayed up late in Donovan’s place in New York fashioning what Donovan would say on the radio about how convoys of American destroyers should be protecting British ships—and he was setting up a new propaganda agency called the Office of Facts and Figures, and he was, incidentally, Librarian of Congress. When Roosevelt wanted an Office of Censorship to keep the lid on bad news, he put MacLeish on the board of directors. MacLeish wanted to be in control of all government information. He was fascinated by air power—the physical air power of bombing, and also the ideological air power of propagandistic radio. He wanted us in the war, but he wanted us to fight smart, at high altitude, with careful targeting and big new weapons made in democratic factories—to fight, above all, with the really big weapon, managed truth. Elizabeth Bishop wrote dismissively of MacLeish’s “mellifluous and meaningless” speeches. The
Chicago Tribune
called him the Bald Bard of Balderdash.
    In August 1941, Donovan and MacLeish met on a cool porch and sketched an organizational chart for a secret agency, and afterward MacLeish sent out telegrams to academicians of war planning, including William Langer at Harvard and James Phinney Baxter at Williams: “Colonel Donovan as coordinator of information is setting up a central intelligence service with which the Library of Congress is cooperating,” MacLeish said in the telegrams. The war planners met, and one of MacLeish’s librarians produced a long document titled “Proposal for a CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE SERVICE for the Federal Government Together with the Relationship of THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS