Bob and Dorothy Courtney on their wedding ceremony day. He was an agent and he or she was a secretary on the FBI. {Photograph} courtesy of Joe Courtney.
On Capitol Hill, Consultant Joe Courtney is best recognized by some as “Two-Sub Joe,” a nickname he earned for his efforts to advertise submarine manufacturing in Connecticut’s 2nd Congressional District, which the Democrat has represented since 2007. Courtney’s curiosity in public service began together with his mother and father, Bob and Dorothy, who met whereas working for the FBI throughout World Conflict II. Right here he remembers their love story, their work, and what all of it means to him.
“My dad joined up as a ‘G-man,’ as they known as FBI brokers again then, in 1935. I bear in mind him speaking in regards to the coaching course of. He went all the way down to Quantico, and he described how they put you in a pit and threw tear gasoline in there so you could possibly get a style of what that was like. Undecided what the purpose of that was, however he was assigned to the FBI workplace in New York.
“After Pearl Harbor, because the warfare approached, his main job was monitoring Nazi sympathizers and spies. It was old style sleuthing: following of us who would attempt to shake him—getting on trains, going nowhere, getting off, after which getting again on.
“My mom was a secretary on the identical FBI workplace. In these days, they did shorthand transcription—she was within the room when the company was interrogating Nazi spies and sympathizers. In 1942, a gaggle of German saboteurs had deliberate to explode protection installations in Lengthy Island. She was a part of the group of stenographers engaged on the interrogation.
“So it was type of a novel love story: an workplace romance on the FBI. I used to be the youngest of 5 boys—across the dinner desk, they at all times had us speaking about what was happening within the information.
“My dad was a Republican. A part of it was due to his expertise within the FBI towards the top of the warfare, when he was monitoring Soviet sympathizers and spies. That affected his political opinions, by way of pondering Eisenhower and the Republicans had been rather more professional–legislation and order and harder on the Soviets.
“I believe if my dad was alive at the moment, he’d be bewildered by the administration’s posture towards Russia and the FBI. The demand for identities and details about [agents’] work on January 6 instances—they don’t management the place they get assigned—could be horrifying to him, that individuals who had been doing their jobs properly are having their work handled as someway disloyal to the FBI’s mission.
“My mother and father had been very happy with their service to the nation. Whether or not it’s the [deferred-resignation offer] or among the different threatening messages coming from the brand new director [Kash Patel], it’s going to end in mass departures, as a result of that’s not what folks really feel like they signed up for.
“I take into consideration each of my mother and father quite a bit, by way of what’s occurring in actual time proper now.”
This text seems within the April 2025 concern of Washingtonian.
