The Day We Lost the H-Bomb: Cold War, Hot Nukes, and the Worst Nuclear Weapons Disaster in History

After Yale, Angie floundered. He spent his twenties traveling the world, working briefly at a sports magazine, and toying with business. He divorced his first wife and married his second. Eventually, World War II gave him some direction. He enlisted in the Army before Pearl Harbor, then attended Officer Candidate School, becoming a second lieutenant in January 1942. It was a proud moment for the flighty young man with no college degree: for the first time in his life, he had actually accomplished something. He served much of his tour in the Washington war room of Secretary of War Henry Stimson. There, as the lowest-ranking officer, Angie read incoming cables and updated battle maps with colored pushpins. Sometimes he stood at the maps with a pointer as generals discussed battle plans. He remained in the Army for five years, retiring with the rank of major.

After the war Angie drifted again until fate pushed him back toward foreign affairs. In 1948, he was conducting an auction at a golf tournament. In the audience that day was an investment banker named Stanton Griffis. Griffis was impressed by the young man's poise and, speaking with him afterward, discovered Angie's interest in diplomacy. Griffis had served as ambassador to Poland and was expecting another appointment if Harry Truman got elected. Griffis knew that any embassy posting would involve a heavy load of socializing, and, as a widower in his sixties, he wasn't up to the task. Angie and his young wife, however, would be perfect. Angie lit up at the proposition, but with no college degree, he wasn't qualified to take the Foreign Service exam. Griffis pulled some strings, Angie took the exam, and in 1949, Angier Biddle Duke began his diplomatic career as special assistant to Stanton Griffis, the new ambassador to Argentina. When Griffis was appointed to Spain in 1951, after the United States had resumed diplomatic relations with the country, he took Angie with him. The following year, President Truman named Angier Biddle Duke ambassador to El Salvador. Only thirty-six years old, he was the youngest U.S. ambassador in history.

Ambassador Duke poured his abundant energy into the new job. He desperately wanted to make his mark on foreign policy and worked hard to understand key issues and participate in important decisions. But, to his continued dismay, most of his colleagues considered him more adept at parties than policy. The American press called Angie a “tobacco-rich playboy,” and one colleague described him as an “amiable lightweight.” Yet he was much loved in the countries he served. One Salvadoran reporter wrote, “He has dedicated more sewers, slaughterhouses, and clinics than half a dozen politicians.” When Eisenhower, a Republican, won the 1952 election, Angie hoped to remain at his post in El Salvador, but the political winds blew him out of his beloved government job. He plugged away on international refugee issues for the next eight years, then worked on the John F. Kennedy campaign. When Kennedy won the 1960 election, Duke expected another posting, hopefully as ambassador to Spain. Instead, the new president called him in late December and asked him to serve as his director of protocol.

Angie balked at the offer. He wanted to shape foreign policy, not arrange table settings like some glorified Emily Post. But Kennedy, with Secretary of State Dean Rusk, convinced him that the job was critical to the administration's foreign policy goals, and Angie finally accepted. Soon he and his third wife — a Spanish aristocrat he had met while stationed in Spain — were up to their ears in diplomatic minutiae. Duke ensured that the rooms of one foreign dignitary were stocked with his favorite brand of soda crackers; that another had an informative visit to the Tennessee Valley Authority. He sent birthday greetings from the president and answered queries on the correct way to display the American flag. He introduced new ambassadors to Kennedy and arranged the seatings and menus for state dinners. He attended about a dozen cocktail parties a week, a half-dozen dinners, and two or three luncheons. With his elegance and boundless energy, Duke excelled at the job. In 1964, The New Yorker ran a long, flattering profile of Duke. At one point, it caught him in a moment of despondency. “I'm lost,” he told the magazine. “I'm lost and of no importance.” Then, after a moment, he brightened. “But there are compensations,” he said. “It's satisfying to be as close as I've been to the sources of world power.”

After President Kennedy was killed, President Johnson kept Angie on as director of protocol. But Duke craved something more substantive. In early 1965, Johnson gave Angie his dream job: ambassador to Spain. Duke's third wife, the Spanish aristocrat, had died in a plane crash in 1961, and he had remarried for a fourth and final time the following year. So in 1965, he, his wife, Robin, and their children from previous marriages packed up and moved to Madrid.