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long after I started on the job, as I stepped between two football players, one black and one white, to create a physical barrier, I realized that they were easily as big as I was, and half crazy with anger. I’m almost six foot two, but they were bigger and stronger than I was. I don’t remember what I said, but I was able to use words to calm them down and keep them apart until some of their anger had subsided. I knew intuitively that once the fists started flying, it was all over.
    For some Americans during this period, the stark contrast between the inspiring goals of the civil rights movement and the reality of everyday life caused them to revolt to varying degrees against America’s institutions, including the FBI. But I was raised more traditionally, and I never really embraced the counterculture movement. I continued to dream of being an agent; for me, the FBI still represented justice, something American society seemed to need more than ever.
    And so when I graduated in the spring of 1972, there was only one job I really wanted. I didn’t want to run a business or be a banker. I wanted to be an FBI agent. Problem was, you needed to be twenty-three and have three years of other work experience. I had enjoyed teaching inspite of the time I spent breaking up fights, and thought this would be a great way to gain the required work experience, but full-time positions were scarce, and so I became a substitute. I also met with a recruiter at the local FBI office in Jacksonville. He suggested an idea I hadn’t considered before, which was to start as a clerical employee at FBI headquarters, something I could do right away. So I filled out an application, sent it in, and was eventually accepted. A few months later I found myself loading up the 1954 Ford I had purchased from my grandfather and driving up to Washington, D.C.
    The FBI I joined in 1972 was in a kind of time warp. Even though J. Edgar Hoover had died a few months before I came on board, his presence was still felt, largely in the straitlaced conservatism of the Bureau. No matter how much the world had changed since the Beatles and Bob Dylan had shaken up American culture, agents at the FBI still wore white shirts only; some still even wore fedoras. Not long after I joined, one agent was given a special commendation for nabbing a Top 10 Most Wanted fugitive. But he was also reprimanded when a photograph during the collar showed him wearing a sports jacket rather than a dark suit.
    This conservative atmosphere didn’t dull my wish to be an agent; the only trouble was that I wasn’t one yet. I immediately discovered that, far from being thought of as agents in training, clerks were members of a different caste altogether, one whose purpose was to do the entirely unglamorous work of supporting the field agents. I found myself engaged in mundane tasks such as delivering mail and filing paperwork. There was a seemingly endless pile of documents. To say that I was demoralized would not do the experience justice. I hung in, though, and after a few months, I got to know an agent named Jim Sherman, who became a kind of mentor for me. He knew how much I wanted to become an agent, and while he couldn’t make that happen any sooner, he did arrange for me to get an interesting assignment assisting him on the Foreign Counterintelligence Squad, collating data on the movement of foreign spies in Washington. It sounds more exciting than it was—but it was certainly a huge improvement over pushing the mail cart.
    During my time working for Jim I had another stroke of good fortune. One night, about three months after I’d started working for the FBI, I went out with other people from the office and found myselfseated across from an attractive young woman in our group. Her name was Carol Drolsbaugh, and I plucked up the courage to introduce myself. She had joined the FBI as a stenographer just a few months earlier, right out of high school. I was immediately attracted to her