In the 2015 Steven Spielberg movie Bridge of Spies, a surface-to-air missile shoots past a jet, startling the pilot, who realizes he’s in major trouble. His top-secret mission, in addition to his 70,000-foot altitude, was supposed to assure his solitude. He’d flown 27 successful missions in his U-2 spy plane, five of them over the Soviet Union, like this one, so he and his commanders on the ground never see the missiles coming, including the one that takes off a wing of his plane.
In a harrowing sequence the pilot struggles in the cockpit, reluctant to eject because of the tight fit—he’s likely to lose his legs—and finally, he desperately unleashes his harness and falls out of the tumbling plane. But wait: His air hose is still connected to the cockpit dash! For a long moment the pilot thrashes helplessly in midair, bouncing off the fuselage as it plummets, nose-up, to ever-nearing earth.
Finally, and to the relief of the audience, the hose snaps off, and Francis Gary Powers opens his parachute for a safe landing in enemy territory. His fate does not get much better.
The May 1, 1960, shoot-down by Soviet missiles and the subsequent capture of Powers is one of those vivid I-remember-where-I-was moments for Baby Boomers. The incident made headlines around the world for months and made visible the war of secrets and propaganda fought by the democratic West and the communist East, especially between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
Powers’ capture—and the eventual exchange for a Soviet prisoner—is a tangible milestone in the Cold War, a lengthy conflict fought by thousands of largely unnamed military and civilian soldiers, agents and bureaucrats.
If you want to see evidence of this clandestine conflict, make a trip to the Cold War Museum at Vint Hill in Fauquier County. (Read more about the Cold War Museum here.) It is a trove of artifacts, photographs and exhibits that honor those from all sides who fought a war of information that on more than one occasion, as evidenced at the museum, brought the world to the brink of nuclear catastrophe.
The six-year-old Cold War Museum is the result of the work of many, but there could only have been one name attached to it that made it a reality, one that could sell the idea with authenticity, and that belongs to Francis Gary Powers Jr.
On a Wednesday evening at American Legion Post 177 in Fairfax City, Francis Gary Powers Jr. is stacking books on a table by the ballroom door. He’s dressed in khakis and a black golf shirt embroidered with the Cold War Museum logo. He speaks rapidly and in complete thoughts, betraying his part-time job as a schoolteacher and his full-time job as a lecturer.
Powers, who is 51, is here to give a talk about his father’s exploits—his capture, the prisoner exchange that freed him and his politically pointed travails once he returned home—and the Cold War in general, a chapter of American history that shaped Powers’ life.
After his talk to the Greater Vienna Optimist Club members, who have come to the American Legion hall for dinner and the lecture, he’ll sell autographed copies of the books he’s brought and have conversations with anyone who wants to ask him something about his father, the Cold War and Bridge of Spies.
It was Powers’ interest in the Cold War that brought him to live in Fairfax City after college in July 1992, to be closer to family—his father grew up in southwest Virginia—and to be near an abundance of research material in Washington. At the same time he earned a Master of Public Administration at nearby George Mason University in 1995.
His mission then and now is to preserve the history of the Cold War. In doing so, he invariably learned more about his father, who died in a helicopter crash in Encino, California, in 1977 when Powers was 12 while covering a wildfire for a local television station. Powers was not born when his father was shot down, so when his father’s passing brought his name back to the world’s front pages, the son inherited the legend.
“The more I learned about the Cold War, the more questions I had,” he says. “Then I needed to know about the Cold War to learn more about my father.”
And in doing so, he learned about himself.
“I didn’t feel in high school I had my own identity,” he says. “I was always referred to as ‘the son of …’ It wasn’t me—Francis Gary Powers Jr.—it was ‘the son of …’ I had to get accustomed to the fact that people would view me based on my father.
“In high school, it was awkward. I didn’t want the attention or the acknowledgement. I didn’t want to have to answer questions. It complicated growing up.”
To respond to questions, he had to know the answers, and in college at California State University, Northridge, near Los Angeles, he began what’s become a lifelong study of the Cold War. Another turning point was joining the campus’ Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter in his first year. The sudden influx of companions, combined with a new sense of purpose, helped him find direction.
“I believe I learned more in the fraternity than I did in college,” he says. “It was real-world experience: leadership, how to organize events, how to work with diverse personalities, how to host events, how to generate press and promotions. It all complemented what I learned in college through books.”
Meanwhile he was cramming Cold War in formation, spending hours at the campus library looking for information about his father in old periodicals. “That expanded when I moved to Virginia in 1992, to be close to the National Archives and other resources in Washington, to do more research.”
And as it happened, the cycle continued: “The more I learned about my father, the more questions I had. Then I needed to know about the Cold War to learn more about my father.”
The skills he learned in college and practiced in doing research proved useful in his public relations and marketing career. After a stint as assistant registrar of the City of Fairfax, he served as president of the Vienna Chamber of Commerce in 2001, adding Tysons to the name and, he says, doubling its membership.
He left in 2005 but last January was asked to return and serve as acting president for the now-named Tysons Regional Chamber of Commerce. He was dismissed in April. According to a lawsuit he filed in August, the chamber board fired him after he blew the whistle on alleged misuse of funds. “The best case scenario is the truth comes out,” he says.
As his professional career was hitting its stride, the accumulated knowledge from his research about his father led him to start the Cold War Museum with John C. Welch in 1996 with the idea being “to honor Cold War veterans,” he says.
While Powers worked to raise awareness and the initial funding for the new museum, he developed a virtual version online, complemented with a traveling unit on the U-2 incident and a Spy Tour of Washington (with several “dead drop” spots in Northern Virginia).
He stepped aside in 2010 and remains chairman emeritus. The brick-and-mortar museum opened at Vint Hill in 2011.
Today he lives in Midlothian outside of Richmond and substitute teaches, writes and delivers Cold War/Francis Gary Powers lectures. He lives with his wife, Jennifer, and their 14-year-old son, who happens to be named Francis Gary Powers III.
After the struggles with identity in his early years, was naming his son after the grandfather a good idea?
“I thought about it long and hard,” he says. “I talked to a dear friend many years before I was even married and told him my mother wants me to name my son Francis Gary Powers III, and I’m not sure I want to do that or not.
“He said, ‘If you are naming him after your dad, you’re doing it for the wrong reason. If you’re naming him for yourself and your own accomplishments, you’re naming him for the right reason.’”
Trey, as they call him, was born in 2002.
“I had founded the Cold War Museum; I was president of the chamber of commerce in Vienna. I felt I had made my own life, my own career, so I felt comfort naming him after my father and myself.”
February marks the 55th anniversary of the prisoner exchange of Powers for Soviet spy Rudolph Abel (actually KGB colonel Vilyam Fisher). It’s all in the Bridge of Spies movie.
It’s not everyone who gets to see a convincing, special-effects-laden sequence directed by Steven Spielberg of their father doing something impossibly heroic, such as falling out of a crashing jet. How would it make you feel to see that?
“Actually, I was looking for accuracy,” Powers says in his typical straightforward manner. “I was looking at the overall picture. The air hose, by the way, was not 10 feet as in the movie; it was more like 3 or 4 feet. And he didn’t see the missiles.”
He can be forgiven if the drama of the movie didn’t affect him emotionally. Powers, who reached out to the producers when he learned a movie was in the works, was hired as a technical consultant on the production, so he had a vested interest in the accuracy. He also ended up in a cameo. He finally saw a finished cut at the red-carpet premiere in New York City, with his family joining him.
His bottom line: “I like the way Spielberg portrayed my dad.”