Tom Braden

American CIA official and journalist (1917 2009)
the mayor of Lowell, Massachusetts

After graduating from Dartmouth College in 1940, Braden enlisted in the British Army while the U. S. was still neutral in World War II, and he saw combat in Africa in the King's Royal Rifle Corps. When the United States entered the war, he was recruited by the U. S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and he was parachuted behind enemy lines into Nazi occupied France. At the end of the war, with the encouragement of OSS Director William "Wild Bill" Donovan, who thought of Braden as a protégé, he and his OSS paratrooper compatriot Stewart Alsop wrote a journalistic book about the OSS, two years before it was replaced by Harry Truman with the CIA. After the war, Braden taught English for a time at Dartmouth, where he met Robert Frost, and he later moved to Washington, D. C., and became part of a group of well connected former OSS men, some of whom were journalists such as the Alsop brothers, known as the Georgetown Set. Braden began staunchly advocating for a permanent civilian American intelligence agency. In 1950, at the start of the Korean War, Allen Dulles invited Braden to become his personal assistant at the Central Intelligence Agency. He accepted, and was assigned the codename "Homer D. Hoskins". The CIA helped him financially to run his network with $1.6 million in 1954 (equivalent to approximately $ in dollars). After Ramparts, the flagship publication of the New Left, broke the story of the CIA's funding of anticommunist citizen groups like the National Student Association in a 1967 article, Braden defended the agency's covert work in the student and labor movements with an article, "I'm Glad the CIA is 'Immoral,'" in The Saturday Evening Post.

Braden left the CIA in November 1954 and became owner of the Oceanside, California, newspaper The Blade Tribune, which he bought with a loan from his friend Nelson Rockefeller. Active in California Democratic politics, he served as president of the California State Board of Education during the 1960s, and had a running battle with conservative Republican state superintendent of public instruction Max Rafferty. Braden himself ran for office only once, mounting an unsuccessful primary challenge in 1966 (with the campaign theme "Guts") to incumbent Democratic lieutenant governor Glenn Anderson. After the assassination in Los Angeles of his friend Robert F. Kennedy during the 1968 presidential campaign, Braden returned to Washington and became a popular newspaper columnist in partnership with Kennedy's press secretary, Frank Mankiewicz. He also became a prominent political commentator on radio and television. Although the Nixon White House initially included him on a list of friendly journalists, his work eventually landed him on the master list of Nixon political opponents. In 1975, Braden published the autobiographical book Eight is Enough, which inspired an ABC television series of the same name with Dick Van Patten in the role of Tom Bradford, the name of Braden's character in the series. The book focused on his life as the father of eight children and also touched on his political connections as a columnist and ex CIA operative and as husband to a sometime State Department employee and companion of the Kennedy family, Joan Ridley Braden. After replacing Mankiewicz as the "voice from the left" on the syndicated radio show Confrontation, Tom Braden co hosted the Buchanan–Braden Program, a three hour radio show with former Nixon aide Pat Buchanan from 1978 to 1984. He and Buchanan also hosted the CNN program Crossfire at the show's inception in 1982, with Braden interviewing guests and debating Buchanan and Robert Novak. Braden left Crossfire in 1989.