Married: Frances Young Allen in Louisville, Ky., on 26 Dec. 1930.

The author corresponded at length with the General in the ´70´s on genealogical matters. Letter after handwritten letter with page after page came detailling one ancestor or the other. Each page in fine well formed handwriting with little margin, each row perfectly straight and hardly a correction, all lined up, perhaps like the rows of cadets he liked to watch marching.

When he chose to return to West Point in 1949 instead of becoming an attaché to Venezuela, his family was disappointed that he had not taken the step into a glamorous diplomatic career. But alas, I believe he expected what the CIA was going to be up to in the years that came and felt that it was more imperative to groom the character of the cadets who were yet to become the leaders of the nation by subjecting them to the rigors of exact logical and mathematical thinking. Certainly having so many men highly placed in the administration with a strong background in spherical calculus was a boon when the space age came on.

Gen. Charles Parsons Nicholas and Frances Young Allen had a daughter:

Ni3-5-4-1 Frances Young Nicholas, born 15 Sept. 1933 in Louisville.

My father was a staunch Republican and during and after Watergate he wouldn't discuss Nixon with me anymore but just maintained a stony silence. Also, he defended the Vietnam War to the end, at least partly out of loyalty to William Westmoreland who was his friend and former math student.
 
    I knew "Westy" when he was superintendant at West Point. He was a charming man and taught me how to waterski. His daughter Margaret and my daughter Francie hated each other when they were six years old. His son, "Ripper", attended the Berklee School of Music in Boston and probably became a rock musician. He had another daughter - I think her name was Stephanie - and someone I knew in Maine said they thought she was living in retreat somewhere because she didn't want anyone mentioning the Vietnam War to her.

   I was in Guatemala recently. That country is a fine example of our CIA's rape of Latin America where we set up a succession of military dictatorships with death squads roaming the country - allegedly in the interest of containment, but more motivated by greed than anything else.
     I think the discord within the CIG had much to do with interdepartmental rivalry in a hastily assembled peacetime organization that had no idea what it wanted. My father, representing the military viewpoint, had little patience with "civilian" mentality and having to deal with types from the State Department probably drove him up the walls. Despite his many fine qualities (he could be witty and charming and was a brilliant mathematician) there was a steely side to his personality that invariably emerged whenever anyone disagreed with him. I have books in my home library in Maine that quote some of the dialogue that took place within the CIG but unfortunately have no access to them here.  

     One of the more notorious Nazi war criminals that Operation Paperclip brought to this country was Otto Ambros. He was a Director of I.G. Farben and oversaw construction and slave labor at Auschwitz. An interesting outgrowth of Operation Paperclip was MK-ULTRA, which choreographed experiments in mind control at the Federal Narcotic Addiction Hospital in Lexington, KY.

I've often wondered if my father had any connection with Operation Paperclip and may never be able to find out. His involvement was more as the War Department liaison for the Alsos Mission which went about the business of rounding up nuclear physicists towards the end of the war. Before that the OSS had embarked on a more cloak-and-daggerish project when they hired a Major League baseball player named Moe Berg to try to track down Werner Heisenberg and kill him. Fortunately for this country, Berg never succeeded. That episode reflects more than anything the panic in the U.S. thinking that Germany was ahead of us in the nuclear arms race when actually the opposite was true.

My father liked to bake and one of my treasured memories was joining forces with him when I was nine and making a lemon meringue pie. He would try just about anything as long as he could invent a way of avoiding too much chopping or too much cleanup. One of his best inventions we called "Pop's Paella", which utilized dried onions and other dried veggies instead of the real thing. You could make it in a single pan. It wasn't paella, but it was quite good.
My father also died of stroke. I hate to think that it runs in the family.

.