Lieutenant General Joseph Francis Carroll (March 19, 1910 – January 20, 1991) was the founding director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the first commander of the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI or OSI).

Youth and education

General Carroll was born in Chicago, Illinois. He graduated from St. Mary of the Lake Seminary in Mundelein, Illinois, in 1933 with a Bachelor of Arts degree and earned a J.D. degree from Loyola University in 1940. He was a member of the Illinois State Bar Association from 1940 to his death.

Carroll left the Seminary of St. Mary on the eve of being ordained a deacon, a transitional stage leading to ordination to the priesthood, in order to have a relationship with Mary Morrissey, who was to become his wife. After working with Swift and Company, a meat-packing concern, in Chicago, where he rose to a position as assistant sales manager, and soon after completion of law school, he left to join the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Carroll was survived by his wife, Mary, and five sons, one of whom is former priest and writer James Carroll.

Time as an FBI special agent

General Carroll joined the FBI in October 1940, where he served as a special agent in field offices at Memphis and Knoxville, Tennessee, before assignment to the Chicago, Illinois field office. He was instrumental in catching noted gangster Roger "Tough" Touhy, which brought him to the personal attention of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. In May 1944, he was transferred to the Washington headquarters of the FBI, where he held progressive positions as supervisor in charge of bank robbery and kidnapping matters, chief of the Criminal Section, and first assistant to the assistant director of the FBI in charge of the General Investigations and Accounting Division.

Relations with sons

The Vietnam War introduced serious tensions into the general's family life. His son Dennis fled to India to escape service. Nevertheless, General Carroll donned his uniform to represent Dennis, after he returned from India, before the Selective Service board and succeeded in getting his son recognized as a conscientious objector. There were also serious disagreements with his son James, who was ordained to the Roman Catholic priesthood in 1969. Father and son first clashed over the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; the general suspected several of King's aides were Communists, whereas James admired King as a champion of the poor. James' anti-war activity was an embarrassment to his father. After leaving the priesthood, James became a journalist and author. Several of his novels, including Prince of Peace (1984) and Memorial Bridge (1991), bear traces of the general's fraught relations with his sons, albeit in fictionalized form. James Carroll's memoir, An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us, winner of the National Book Award in 1996, addressed his differences with his father directly.

Dates of rank

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