A CIA lawyer, a film critic walk into a bar …
I met John Rizzo in New York in 2013, at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law, where we had been invited to participate in a panel discussion about the movie “Zero Dark Thirty.”
I was there to appraise the film’s cinematic merits. Rizzo, who died of cardiac dysrhythmia at 73 this month, was there to talk about torture. “Zero Dark Thirty” was in the middle of an epic takedown campaign centered on accusations that it condoned the use of “enhanced interrogation” tactics during the “War on Terror.” As acting general counsel at the CIA, a role he occupied for six years, Rizzo had legitimized those techniques — which included waterboarding and sleep deprivation — both legally and morally.
My memories of the event are fuzzy, although I recall agreeing that “Zero Dark Thirty” didn’t celebrate torture as much as acknowledge that it had occurred, and put it in context. Rizzo reminded the audience that, in the months after Sept. 11, 2001, he and his colleagues were desperate to avoid future attacks and loss of American lives, a justification that some listeners found persuasive and others considered an emotionally manipulative cop-out.
It was after the panel, when our group gathered for dinner at a nearby downtown restaurant, that Rizzo and I really bonded — not over “Zero Dark Thirty,” but another movie: the cult noir classic “Sweet Smell of Success.”
In that 1957 film, Tony Curtis portrays Sidney Falco, a cheerfully amoral press agent navigating the cutthroat demimonde of New York’s tabloid press by currying the favor of megalomaniacal columnist J.J. Hunsecker, played with slithery sang-froid by Burt Lancaster (and said to be based on famed columnist Walter Winchell). Shot in velvety black and white amid a midtown Manhattan that’s sleazy and sophisticated, “Sweet Smell of Success” has earned a small but devoted following, mostly for Clifford Odets’s compulsively quotable dialogue. The film includes some of the greatest lines in cinematic history: “The cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river.” “You’re dead son — get yourself buried.” “I’d hate to take a bite out of you. You’re a cookie full of arsenic.”
The elegant, wryly soft-spoken Rizzo — who favored natty pinstripe suits, silk pocket squares and French cuffs — wasn’t exactly a cookie full of arsenic. But he did seek “legal cover” (his words) for some of the CIA’s most toxic policies and procedures. He correctly predicted that his obituary would lead with the role he played, not just in the post-9/11 interrogation program at the CIA’s overseas “black sites,” but the drone strikes that came later and killed thousands of civilians. During his 30-year career at the agency, he also provided a framework for operatives engaging in covert wars in Latin America — meaning that in 2013, as I exchanged “Sweet Smell” quips with the dapper gentleman across from me, I was breaking bread with someone I’d marched against as a student activist in the 1980s.
That contradiction wasn’t lost on me then, nor did it become any less disorienting over the years. Although Rizzo and I never met in person again, he would lob an email my way once in a while, usually when our favorite movie was playing on TCM. Our correspondence became more frequent during the Trump administration, when there seemed to be a “Sweet Smell” quote for just about every occasion. Among them: “My right hand hasn’t seen my left hand in 30 years.” “It’s a dirty job, but I pay clean money for it.” “He’s got the scruples of a guinea pig and the morals of a gangster.” “Here’s your head; what’s your hurry?”
I cherished our epistolary tete-a-tetes. For one thing, they were testaments to the ability of movies to transcend even the most passionate political differences: It’s hard to stay mad at someone who laughed as hard as you did at “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” or dehumanize someone who sobbed as sincerely at “The Shawshank Redemption.”
But it also exemplified the singular weirdness of Washington friendships that, at their most improbable, can demand a discomfiting blend of open-mindedness, compartmentalization, cognitive dissonance and, sometimes, outright denial.
Although the Trump era drew new lines in the sand when it came to cross-party socializing, there was a time when comity was a natural part of the city’s culture — when Rs and Ds would regularly socialize and (gasp!) maybe even date and marry each other. It was not just possible but common to disagree vehemently with a political opponent by day and still find them a great hang come cocktail hour.
Admittedly, these relationships have also been the grease that lubricates Washington’s most cynical and self-enriching wheels: hypocrisy, opportunism and transactional back-scratching. Which inspires yet another “Sweet Smell of Success” quote, when Hunsecker and Falco meet the crooked and abusive cop Harry Kello (Emile Meyer) during a nighttime stroll. “I like Harry,” Hunsecker says in a salty aside, “but I can’t deny he sweats a little.”
That line has become code in my household for the times when we’ve recognized someone’s problematic history, objectionable beliefs or bad behavior, but maintained the connection anyway, either in the name of professionalism or fellowship. It also perfectly sums up the verdant if mucky bog that is Washington’s social ecosystem, in which proximity and genuine affection make ideological silos not just impractical, but no fun at all.
Rizzo’s detractors — including those who consider him an enabler of war crimes — might interpret his taste for “Sweet Smell of Success” as reflecting the cynicism and hubris that have animated so much of U.S. foreign policy for the past 20 years, and that came to such a calamitous head recently. My sense was that it was at least as much an expression of gimlet-eyed humor and love of language. I might have looked askance at Rizzo’s rationales for what I still consider profound moral and tactical mistakes on the part of the CIA. But his lack of defensiveness forced me to consider his most disastrous decisions as a function of human fallibility rather than inherent evil. And I found him far more intellectually honest than ideologues who were so eager to make polemical hay out of “Zero Dark Thirty” that they never bothered to watch the entire movie.
The arc of every private moral sphere is in constant pendular motion. I’m glad mine intersected with John Rizzo’s. I valued our weird Washington friendship, born of mutual cinematic obsession. Did he sweat a little? I prefer to think he perspired. As do we all.