Someone Like Our Dads

The Cox report -- that classified House subcommittee document cited as the source of months of coverage on the Chinese espionage allegations -- finally made its public debut Tuesday -- but with nothing about the man it had been used to malign for months, fired Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee.

The report never names him, though the 700-page document begins with an “important note” that says, in part, that “U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies within the Clinton administration have determined that other significant findings and judgments contained in the Select Committee’s classified Report cannot be publicly disclosed without affecting national security or ongoing criminal investigations.”

In short -- we’re going to keep it secret, even as we continue to try to dig up what we can on the guy.

So it’s impossible to come to a definitive conclusion on whether we believe the government’s suspicions, given that we still have no information on what the government thinks it knows about Lee. What we did get over the past month, though, are a few more details about Lee’s life and the first wire photos of the man, snapped when he ventured out of his sun-dappled home in the New Mexico city this spring. The hazy image shows a balding, pudgy late-50s Lee squinting behind sunglasses. He’s wearing a wide-brimmed hat, a benign expression of someone who never wanted to be in the spotlight, who never wanted to do much but get a good job in a solid field and give his kids a better chance at life in America.

Does he look, maybe, like your dad or millions of other dads? Those who stepped on our shores decades ago only to find they could not live or even eat where they wanted to, but yet maintained the immigrant’s eternal hope in America’s promise of equality?

A lot of us remember the day that our dads and moms came home in the 1970s and 1980s having just achieved the American dream of citizenship; Lee was among them. Being able to call oneself an American meant something -- not least of which was the presupposition among parents and children alike that their loyalties had clearly been set, and that they were to this country. That those allegiances would be questioned seemed preposterous, especially so to those who knew of the Chinese Exclusion Act or the Japanese American internment only through their history classes in American classrooms.

Lee’s case and that of Chin-Ming Hu in 1982 seem to argue otherwise. Seventeen years ago, Hu lost his job and much of his life due to an FBI investigation. He lost his job, his status, his name and reputation, his friends and more to allegations that he has secretly been feeding China secret information.

The investigation into Hu ended up going nowhere; that of Lee continues. He has already suffered Hu’s fate -- even though he still hasn’t been charged, and even though, according to several news reports, law enforcement are scratching their heads to find something to charge him with.

And that leaves all of us whose dads could well be Wen Ho Lee or Chin-Ming Hu with a discomfiting thought, one that we thought had gone the way of the Edsel, or the black-and-white TV, or WIN buttons, or yellow ties.

And that thought is: What do we have to do to prove that we are American? And why are we still asked to prove it?