That was the recurring thought in Tom Bradenâ??s mind. It haunted him late into the nights and galvanized him in the mornings.
He was living in frightening times. It was the early years of the Cold War, and there was a real fear the West would lose. Soviet spies had stolen our atomic secrets. President Harry Truman announced the U.S. expected a Soviet attackâ??at any time. North Korean communists invaded South Korea. A headline in The New York Times revealed a Soviet plan to â??rule all of Germanyâ? and start â??a civil war.â?
More than most people, Braden was consumed by these events. He had a job that demanded he do something about them.
Braden would become a liberal newspaperman and launch the CNN political talk show Crossfire, which he co-hosted with Patrick Buchanan for almost a decade.
He was best known as the inspiration for the sweater-vest-clad father on TVâ??s Eight Is Enough. The series was adapted from Bradenâ??s best-selling 1975 memoir about life as the father of eight children, and at one time it had more viewers than Monday Night Football and Charlieâ??s Angels.
But before he became any of these things, Tom Braden was a spy.
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