When the son of a hardscrabble Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania, insurance agent found himself one September morn in the same Princeton dorm room as Donald Rumsfeld, part of a freshman class of ’52 that included James Baker, you might say that stars were ominously aligned. This side of paradise was about to get nastier. None of these young go-getters would ever deviate from career paths lubricated by the easiest grease America had to offer its ambitious best-and-brightest: hardline anti-communism mixed with military-industrial fortune. If rising to the top is what you crave, that slickum is guaranteed to work like a charm. Your soul might get a little singed along the way (“Ou est Carlucci?”–where’s Carlucci?–the grateful new Congolese prime minister famously asked upon meeting a clueless JFK after the murder of Patrice Lumumba), but what the heck. So let us raise a glass of the devil’s brew to this scion of Scranton, Old Nassau, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the Carlyle Group. You did them proud, Frank, and left the world a . . . well, a viler damned place, it’s fair to say.
Patrice Lumumba, c. 1952