On Capitol Hill, Representative Joe Courtney is better known by some as “Two-Sub Joe,” a nickname he earned for his efforts to promote submarine production in Connecticut’s 2nd Congressional District, which the Democrat has represented since 2007. Courtney’s interest in public service started with his parents, Bob and Dorothy, who met while working for the FBI during World War II. Here he recalls their love story, their work, and what it all means to him.
“My dad joined up as a ‘G-man,’ as they called FBI agents back then, in 1935. I remember him talking about the training process. He went down to Quantico, and he described how they put you in a pit and threw tear gas in there so you could get a taste of what that was like. Not sure what the point of that was, but he was assigned to the FBI office in New York.
“After Pearl Harbor, as the war approached, his primary job was tracking Nazi sympathizers and spies. It was old-fashioned sleuthing: following folks who would try to shake him—getting on trains, going nowhere, getting off, and then getting back on.
“My mother was a secretary at the same FBI office. In those days, they did shorthand transcription—she was in the room when the agency was interrogating Nazi spies and sympathizers. In 1942, a group of German saboteurs had planned to blow up defense installations in Long Island. She was part of the team of stenographers working on the interrogation.
“So it was sort of a unique love story: an office romance at the FBI. I was the youngest of five boys—around the dinner table, they always had us talking about what was going on in the news.
“My dad was a Republican. Part of it was because of his experience in the FBI toward the end of the war, when he was tracking Soviet sympathizers and spies. That affected his political views, in terms of thinking Eisenhower and the Republicans were much more pro–law and order and tougher on the Soviets.
“I think if my dad was alive today, he’d be bewildered by the administration’s posture toward Russia and the FBI. The demand for identities and information about [agents’] work on January 6 cases—they don’t control where they get assigned—would be horrifying to him, that people who were doing their jobs well are having their work treated as somehow disloyal to the FBI’s mission.
“My parents were very proud of their service to the country. Whether it’s the [deferred-resignation offer] or some of the other threatening messages coming from the new director [Kash Patel], it’s going to result in mass departures, because that’s not what people feel like they signed up for.
“I think about both of my parents a lot, in terms of what’s happening in real time right now.”
This article appears in the April 2025 issue of Washingtonian.
