Don Cullivan’s Letter to Perry

Don Cullivan’s Letter to Perry is a prison correspondence that turns a nearly forgotten Army acquaintance into a source of unexpected human connection for Perry Smith. Postmarked Reading, Massachusetts, and accompanied by a photograph, it recalls Perry as Cullivan remembers him in uniform, explains why Cullivan has chosen to write, and offers friendship at a point when Perry is isolated and hungry for contact. The letter’s effect is not that it persuades Perry to share Cullivan’s faith, but that it makes him feel remembered and addressed as a person rather than reduced to the crimes in the news.

Arrival and Recognition

One mid-February morning, the letter reached Perry in prison. Its sender’s name initially meant nothing to him, but the enclosed photograph supplied what the name could not: Perry recognized the young soldier’s crew-cut hair and earnest, round eyes. The letter thus depends on two different kinds of recognition. Cullivan identifies Perry through remembered episodes and a description of his appearance; Perry identifies Cullivan visually, from an image of their shared past. The photograph makes the old acquaintance concrete before the letter’s memories can fully restore him.

Cullivan explained that they had met in the fall of 1951, when Perry was assigned to the 761st Engineer Light Equipment Company at Fort Lewis, Washington. He admitted that they had never been close personal friends and that he had known Perry for only about eight months, more than eight years earlier. Yet he remembered Perry more distinctly than most of the men he had encountered in the Army. That balance—limited intimacy paired with unusually vivid recollection—gives the letter its particular force: it offers no claim of lifelong loyalty, only a fellow soldier’s testimony that Perry had left a lasting impression.

The Army Perry in Cullivan’s Memory

Cullivan reconstructs Perry through small incidents rather than a broad judgment. He recalls a company inspection at which Perry’s footlocker was in order except for its inside cover, which was plastered with pin-up pictures. The inspecting officer let the display pass; Cullivan remembered the relief and admiration of the other soldiers, who had expected Perry to be punished. He also pictures Perry at the pool table in the company day room and describes him as one of the outfit’s best truck drivers.

A winter field problem supplies the letter’s most particular image of Perry’s practical nerve. The trucks had no heaters, so Perry cut a hole in his truck’s floorboards to let engine heat into the cab. Cullivan, then a cautious and inexperienced soldier, worried that damaging Army property could bring severe punishment; Perry grinned and kept warm. In Cullivan’s account, the same act embodies two contrasting responses to rules and discomfort: one man freezes rather than risk breaking a rule, while the other finds a way around the cold and accepts the danger. Cullivan also remembers Perry buying a motorcycle and having trouble with it, but he marks the details as uncertain—perhaps a police chase, perhaps a crash. The uncertainty matters: this is a memory offered in good faith, not a complete or authoritative account of Perry’s past.

The portrait is not simply of a rebel. Cullivan remembers Perry as cheerful and cocky, competent at his work, and not much given to complaining, while also sensing that he was wild. He recalls the nickname Eskimo, which some of the soldiers used because Perry had lived in Alaska. These recollections preserve a version of Perry that is neither the condemned prisoner nor an intimate’s idealized friend: he is a distinctive, capable young soldier seen across the ordinary scenes of military life.

Why Cullivan Writes

The letter turns from memory to the reason for its arrival. Cullivan says that reading the news about Perry first stunned him; he put the paper aside, but the thought of Perry returned. He explains that his own religious life had changed after his seventeen-year-old brother died of leukemia. Remembering that he had not known what to say to his brother in the weeks before the death, he writes now to Perry. His appeal rests on shared vulnerability and religious conviction: God made and loves them both, and, as far as people can know divine purpose, what has happened to Perry could have happened to him.

Perry read the letter many times. Its religious allusions did not convince him; he said he had tried to believe but could not. Yet he was thrilled by the correspondence. It came from a sane, respectable man who had once known and liked him, and who now called himself a friend. That response distinguishes the letter’s emotional achievement from its theological aim. Perry does not adopt Cullivan’s explanation of suffering or express a new belief; instead, the letter reaches him through remembered companionship and the simple fact of being deliberately contacted.

From Letter to Visit

Perry began a reply in great haste, opening with an emphatic assurance that he remembered Cullivan. The start of the response reverses the letter’s initial imbalance: Cullivan has supplied the photograph and the memories, while Perry now answers by affirming recognition and taking up the exchange. The correspondence therefore records not just an offer of friendship but Perry’s immediate attempt to return it.

That written offer also becomes an action. When Perry’s lawyer asked Cullivan to serve as a character witness, Cullivan said he knew at once that he had to do so because he had already offered his friendship. Traveling from Boston cost a week of vacation and money his family needed for other things, but he described the visit as something he could not afford not to make. He was a successful engineer, a Harvard graduate, a husband, and the father of three children; observers at the trial struggled to understand why he would travel to support a man he had known only slightly. Cullivan’s explanation returns to the letter’s central commitment: his belief in the life everlasting and in the possibility that all souls can be saved.

During a weekend recess, Josephine Meier and her husband invited Cullivan to have Sunday dinner with Perry in his cell. Perry welcomed the chance to play host and devoted himself to planning the meal, more absorbed in its details than in a trial outcome he considered predictable. The invitation and its preparations extend the letter’s movement from distant contact to face-to-face company. Cullivan’s correspondence does not erase Perry’s isolation or resolve their differences over religion, but it gives Perry a remembered face, a reply to write, and a visitor who is willing to spend his vacation keeping the offered friendship.