Kasper: Well, as I mentioned, let's start with early on. I know that you were born in Rochester, New York, but much more than that, I don't know. You could fill me in.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. I was born in Rochester, New York, in 1909. I grew up there and lived there until the end of my sophomore year in college when my parents moved east to Glens Falls, New York. My father had a job there. I went to a private school, Columbia Preparatory School—where all my mother's and father's friends' children went—until the end of the freshman year in high school. My father, who never took any hand in disciplining me or my brother [Kirk], who is seven years younger, announced that unless I stopped being kept in after school and pulled up my grades, that I would go to public school the next year. I paid no attention, because I knew Mother wouldn't let that happen. But to my surprise, she did, and I went to East High School for one year, which was the greatest thing that ever happened.

I had a marvelous English teacher with whom I was in love. He was probably all of 22 or 23. He was a great teacher, and he turned out later to become a very well-known educator in this country. He was the dean of New York University—Paul McGhee—and he had edited an anthology of poetry and doubtless wrote other books. He used to write long notes on my papers when I turned them in. He called me into his office one day and said, "Where are you going to college?" And I said, "Well, I'm not. Mother says I'm going either to Paris or to Florence to school." And he said, "No, you're not. You're going to college." So, that was that.

And the next year I went to boarding school, the Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, New York. I discovered after I'd started there that Mother had entered me in the general course, not the college preparatory course. So I went to the dean and said, "I think there's a mistake. I belong in the college preparatory course." So that was that.

Kasper: Now, why is that your parents didn't have college as part of their sights for you?

Kirkpatrick: I don't know. Mother, was very, very bright. Her mother was the graduate of the first class at Pennsylvania College for Women, which was very unusual at that time. My father had one year at Yale and then had dropped out. He was more social than he was academic, but he also wasn't stupid. I don't know. I think Mother perhaps thought I could follow her example. She had been a very, very glamorous young woman who had a lovely time in Kentucky as a girl. She was very beautiful and this was the way that one went at that time. Unfortunately, I wasn't beautiful as she was, and I just knew that I could not follow that lifestyle. I "came out," so to speak, in Rochester at a tea, but I was awkward and gawky and most of the boys came up to my chin in dancing school. So that didn't appeal to me.

Kasper: Well, did they have other expectations for your brother?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, I suppose so. As a matter of fact, there was no battle about it. None at all. Mother was perfectly happy when I—

Kasper: When you changed her mind.

Kirkpatrick: —when I announced that I was going to college. And along with fourteen—I think there were fifteen of us who graduated in the college course at Dobbs—fourteen of us went to Smith, and Louise McCracken went to Vassar. Her father was president of Vassar. The rest of us, sheep-like, followed the school leaders, and went there also.

Kasper: And when you were coming up, as they say, with your brother at home, were there interests like literature, reading, writing, that were encouraged at home?

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Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes. We both read a lot and we were taken on trips. We did New England, and the battlefields, and Gettysburg, and so on. My brother, I remember being impressed by how much he knew about history, although he is seven years younger than I. Well, it turns out, he had a fabulous memory—always had. Later, during World War II, he was on General Bradley's staff after being in OSS. He used to do the morning briefings—enemy order of battle—and he would stand up and say, "Colonel Schmitt has gone to Berlin this weekend, and the division so and so—" And Bradley went in early one morning and made notes to check on him because he couldn't believe he could stand up there without notes and do this whole routine—from the Baltic down to Italy. So we had a good education. And my father, I remember taking us out [he was born in Macedon, New York. We had Rome, Macedon, Ithaca, Cicero—all of the classic names] to show us where Joseph Smith had had the word from on high to found the Mormon religion. So, no, it was a lively family. I was sent to the Eastman School of Music to music classes, which, unfortunately, didn't take. I had piano until Mother said, "If I have to nag you to practice, you stop." So, I stopped. I'm sorry, I wish I had continued.

Kasper: Well, it was still very progressive of her. I mean so many children were forced to.

Kirkpatrick: I complained once that my best friend's father and mother always checked on her homework—whether she'd done it and so on—and my parents didn't. And they said, "Well, if you can't be bothered, why should we nag you?"

Kasper: Again, very progressive.

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: Did your mother work outside the home?

Kirkpatrick: No.

Kasper: No, she didn't.

Kirkpatrick: There was a story—now I don't know whether it's true—that at the time of the battle for women's suffrage, my father headed the women's drive and my mother headed the anti-suffrage drive.

Kasper: Is that right?

Kirkpatrick: I don't think it's true, but Mother liked to say that. [Laughter.]

Kasper: Did they disagree on those kinds of issues?

Kirkpatrick: No. Not really. No. It was always sort of a joke.

Kasper: But, generally speaking, it was a happy kind of family.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Yes. We lived perilously near the poverty line in a sense because my father was no businessman and he was never successful.

Kasper: But he was in business nonetheless?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes. But it never sort of panned out. He'd go into real estate and it would be the wrong place or the wrong time or something. And both parents came from fairly well-to-do families who kept bailing them out. I mean, my grandmother paid my boarding school and college tuitions. When she died the middle of my freshman year, I had to drop out. I couldn't stand just being home so I went to the University of Rochester for that semester. I went back to Smith with a scholarship sophomore year, having taken, for the third time, my college board in Latin. I had flunked it—at the end of my senior year at Dobbs, I had flunked it at the beginning of freshman year and I had entered with a condition which, of course, you can't do these days. I was not getting a passing grade in Latin at Smith. But I managed to get an "A" in Latin at the University of Rochester and so that helped.

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Kasper: And you eventually passed the exam?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I not only passed the college board, but Smith required a reading knowledge of two foreign languages to graduate. I took it in Latin and French at the beginning of my sophomore year and passed both, because I'd had French in school from fifth grade on, and, at one point, had had a French governess.

Kasper: That helped.

Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes.

Kasper: When and what did you major in at Smith? How did you decide what you would major in?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I was going to major in psychology until, at the University of Rochester, we got into abnormal psych, and I decided I had all of the problems of abnormal psychology. And it was so gloomy. At Smith I became intrigued with history—History 101 course—and so I switched to that. My roommate and I looked at the possibility of going to Paris for junior year. We were accepted, but we debated and finally decided we'd stay at Smith and do what they call special honors—I in history, and she in government.

[Tape interruption.]

Kasper: How did you settle on history as your major?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I was fascinated by it and I became involved fairly early on in things like the international relations club and debating. And the faculty—we had Sidney Fay, who was a noted World War I historian; and a man by the name of Robert Binkley (who died much too young) in modern European history. He went to Wisconsin from Smith. There were just terribly good people. And they, I think, put a little pressure on me.

Kasper: To become a history major.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Yes.

Kasper: But it was History 101 that began to excite you, was that true?

Kirkpatrick: Well, it fascinated me, yes.

Kasper: What in particular fascinated you?

Kirkpatrick: I think—I don't know.

Kasper: Even ancient history. It wasn't necessarily contemporary?

Kirkpatrick: No. No. No—not ancient and not medieval. I took medieval history and hated it. But Renaissance I loved. And from 1815 on, I thought was fascinating. We were all swept up in the period of modern history—that was the late twenties—in "merchants of death," armaments, the responsibility for the war (WW I), you know— Everybody was against war and we were looking at the people whom we thought were responsible—the "merchants of death," the armaments manufacturers.

Kasper: What do you mean by merchants of death?

Kirkpatrick: I think there was a book called Merchants of Death, which was about the armaments industry and the extent to which the sales of arms and their promotion tended to push nations toward fighting.

Kasper: The fact that there was money involved in producing these kinds of activities were an economic item.

Kirkpatrick: Sure. Of course. Well, after all, Nobel's money was made in armaments.

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Kasper: Yes, that's right, in explosives.

Kirkpatrick: And his conscience, I think, is what led him to—

Kasper: What drove him to set up the Nobel prizes.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. The same thing is true, I think, today when you look at the size of the industry—air, tanks, everything else. It's been interesting that they haven't been fighting for a bigger defense budget—as I'm sure they favor.

Kasper: They always are. There's always a battle around that.

Kirkpatrick: But what's going to happen to the industry in this country when they begin to cut down on the purchase of arms?

Kasper: Sure, because so much of our economic livelihood comes from selling those.

Kirkpatrick: Right. That's right.

Kasper: And even, for instance, the state of Israel. It breaks my heart. I mean, this was a homeland for the Jews and a great shining light in the Mideast and so forth, and now something like—I can't remember the figures—but I remember I was appalled—something like 65 or 70 percent of their income is from armaments that they sell.

Kirkpatrick: That they sell?

Kasper: That they produce and sell to other countries.

Kirkpatrick: And we also provide arms, etc.—we sell them. Yes, I know.

Kasper: But they sell, I mean, not that any armaments are good, but I suppose it's even worse in some ways that you sell armaments to countries that are more war-like.

Kirkpatrick: Exactly.

Kasper: And the Israelis are willing to sell armaments, willy-nilly. Being a Jew, it just bothers me all the more.

Kirkpatrick: Of course, of course.

Kasper: You know, because I like to think that—not that I'm a Zionist—but that, you know, the homeland for the Jewish people would be a place that would be more peaceable. And it always bothers me.

Kirkpatrick: Right. I know many of my Jewish friends are very turned off by that and by their behavior toward the Palestinians.

Kasper: Absolutely. That's really a serious issue. But so you were more intrigued with contemporary history.

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: And in particular, you—

Kirkpatrick: Modern European.

Kasper: Modern European history—and within that context, the issues of war and peace seemed to catch your eye.

Kirkpatrick: Right. Well, it was a very dominant theme in the late twenties and early thirties. Also, the quality of the teaching of men like Fay and Binkley—they were top-notch people.

Kasper: Did they teach modern European history and discuss World War I and so forth?

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Kirkpatrick: Yes. Well, Sidney Fay's two volumes on the causes of World War I were, and still are, textbook books. I don't think Binkley wrote. He may have, but I don't remember anything that he wrote, but he was just a marvelous teacher. There was a thing called special honors in which you had no classes, just small units, maybe three or four students, who met with the professor at his or her house for two or three hours a week. And we did research and papers. No classes for junior and senior year. And then senior year, you did a long paper. Mine has the marvelous, really pretentious title of, "Objectivity in American Historiography with Particular Reference to George Bancroft and Henry Adams."

Kasper: All right!

Kirkpatrick: Isn't that wonderful? Merle Curti, who has also been at Wisconsin, is a noted American historian, still alive at the age of 92 or 93. He has a book—among others—on war and peace. I went back to Smith—oh, maybe I had been four or five years out—and went to one of his classes and was sitting in the back of the room. He came in late. At the end of the lecture he said, "Would Miss Kirkpatrick speak to me after class?" And I went up, and he said, "I came across something the other day that I thought would interest you on the subject of objectivity. This was the kind of a mind you had there."

Kasper: He remembered well what you had written?

Kirkpatrick: Well, apparently.

Kasper: Well, it must have been reasonably impressive.

Kirkpatrick: I don't think so. I haven't read it since.

Kasper: [Laughter.] Do you still have a copy of it? Have you saved it?

Kirkpatrick: No. There presumably is one in the library now on microfiche, I suppose, because they couldn't keep them otherwise.

Kasper: Now, in the paper did you make reference to World War I? Was there a particular subject matter?

Kirkpatrick: No, this had to do with George Bancroft and Henry Adams, American historian.

Kasper: Oh, of course. I'm sorry. That was the latter part of the title. Who was George Bancroft?

Kirkpatrick: He was a noted [19th century American] historian and he wrote textbooks for schools—really rather simplistic textbooks.

Kasper: Were you criticizing objectivity or you were—?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I was looking to see how objective they were?

Kasper: Did you conclude that they were?

Kirkpatrick: I don't remember the conclusions.

Kasper: Tell me about your life as a student at Smith. Was it congenial?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, it was wonderful. I loved it—every minute of it. I'd had boarding school. I'd been there two years and held no positions and was not even in any club or anything like that. But at Smith suddenly everything opened up.

Kasper: You blossomed.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Slow bloomer. I was president of the international relations club; I headed debating; I was class officer on student council; editor of the yearbook—you know, all that nonsense.

Kasper: Oh my. All that stuff. You were very busy.

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Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: You apparently did quite well because you graduated Phi Beta Kappa, is that correct?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Why, I don't know, because the record doesn't support it. It really doesn't.

Kasper: You mean your grades were not as—

Kirkpatrick: No. See, once you were accepted for special honors, it was assumed you were an "A/B" student. So that was that. But looking at freshman and sophomore year—huh uh—no. But though I did take—let's see four courses were required, I took six both years, which may have counted favorably. I don't know. I had several faculty members who were good friends and I always feel that they were playing favorites.

Kasper: Well, but on the other hand, it doesn't— As you say, you have to have the record that supports Phi Beta Kappa. It isn't good enough to—

Kirkpatrick: Well, I've got the transcript and it really isn't that great.

Kasper: Well, maybe they took into account lots of things. Maybe the record then was balanced with all of your activities.

Kirkpatrick: Maybe. Maybe. Well, I did have a double major. I had finished a philosophy major by the end of sophomore year. And I did have all "A's" and "B's" in that which may have helped.

Kasper: It sounds like it probably did.

Kirkpatrick: I was surprised. I hadn't consciously "majored" in philosophy the first two years. And I was in the philosophy club. I never understood really what was going on, but I liked it and still do.

Kasper: When you worked with the international relations group, and in the debating group, and so forth, did you find yourself drawn to historical issues or was the whole spectrum of interest open to you?

Kirkpatrick: Well, no, we were all very involved in things like disarmament and what was going on at the League of Nations. We debated other college debating teams. I recall going to Princeton to debate, and the Scottish team came to Smith. Then the summer of junior year— Excuse me, but we have some very nice birds that come and want to know why I'm not feeding them.

Kasper: Oh yes. What are they? They're not chickadees are they?

Kirkpatrick: No, no. They are—oh, lord, I'll tell you in a minute. It's the New Hampshire state bird. This is senility when you try to find the name of something like that—purple finch.

Kasper: So disarmament and League of Nations' issues were prominent.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. It was very big. They were very big then. Then in the summer of junior year, I was invited to go to Geneva. A woman, a Smith graduate, had a program called the Students' International Union. Every summer she took a Smith, a Wellesley, a Vassar, a Yale, and a Harvard student, etc., to Geneva and then had Europeans: French, German, Turkish, and Spanish, etc. Altogether I think there were probably about twenty of us who spent the summer living together and taking part in a seminar. The first year the leader was Salvador de Madariaga, who was Spanish. He was the Spanish representative at the League, a brilliant man, and he conducted these seminars. It was very interesting because we'd go to the League for sessions. There was also the Zimmern School in the summer in Geneva run by Professor Alfred Zimmern of Oxford, again in international relations. Both were for college age or graduate students. It was a marvelous place, and of course, we had a lot of fun beside the seminar.

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Then when I graduated, I'd had three job offers. I was offered a job teaching at Roberts College in Istanbul; Macy's training school had a course; and the third was to go back to Geneva with a fellowship to study and also be part-time secretary at the Students' International Union. I think the other options closed so that I took the Geneva one, which I guess I was going to take anyway.

Kasper: It sounds like the best of the three.

Kirkpatrick: Also I went back to Geneva for the summer and helped run the seminar that summer. Then I spent the winter partly at the University and partly at the Institute des Hautes Études Internationales (Rappard Institute). And while it was serious, I didn't get into a degree program.

Kasper: What did your parents think of all of this? I mean, not only did you become all these—

Kirkpatrick: They were divorced by that time. My father was remarried living in California, and Mother was in the east, in Cohasset and at Deerfield. She couldn't get my brother into the boarding school that year, so she took a house in Deerfield. He got into boarding school the following year. So, in spring vacation of senior year, when we were working on our papers, four or five of us stayed in Deerfield with Mother and commuted to the library at Smith to do our long papers.

Kasper: Was your mother pleased with your progress—your intellectual progress?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes. Oh, yes, I think so. I didn't know anything about it, but the faculty member, in a house I had lived in, was head of Special Honors, a professor of government, Alice Holden; I think she telephoned Mother to say that the Phi Beta Kappa announcements were going to be in Chapel the next morning, so Mother turned up.

Kasper: Oh, did she.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. I came back from the Hasty Pudding Show at Harvard that same morning—just in time to get to Chapel. My roommate and I had both been there with our beaux.

Kasper: Were you pleased to see your mother there?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. I didn't see her until after Chapel. I was surprised. I didn't know how she'd gotten there.

Kasper: That's nice.

Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes. She was pleased.

Kasper: How about your father? Once they were divorced and he was remarried, did you stay close to him as well?

Kirkpatrick: No. No. Both my brother and I were very, uh—very disapproving of him—and of the split—which in some ways I shouldn't have been because I think I had a part in it. They used to argue tremendously over money. And I remember sitting in the living room one day and this argument going on and said, "Why don't you stop this and separate?" I've always felt slightly guilty about it, but I don't think I was the cause.

Kasper: Probably not. But childhood guilt is long lasting.

Kirkpatrick: Well, I was a freshman in college at that time.

Kasper: Well, but still. I think children inevitably feel very responsible for things that happen in their parents' marriages—it can't be helped.

Kirkpatrick: Well, they remarried later.

Kasper: Both of them?

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Kirkpatrick: Well, my father's second wife died and he and Mother remarried.

Kasper: Oh—your parents remarried later.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Yes.

Kasper: Oh, heavens. How much later after their initial divorce?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, I think—goodness, I can't remember how long. Well, it was my sophomore year in college that they were divorced, which would have been 1930, and it was after I was married the first time, which was in 1934. About 1934—about five years.

Kasper: That they—

Kirkpatrick: Remarried.

Kasper: After five years they remarried. Did they stay together then, until they both died?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

Kasper: Good heavens.

Kirkpatrick: They always—they really adored each other, but money was always a factor.

Kasper: That's terrible. It's a shame. Did they make their peace once they remarried? Were they reasonably happy?

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: This was also during the Depression.

Kirkpatrick: That's right.

Kasper: So this must have been very trying, not only on their marriage, but on you as well. Did the Smith scholarship cover everything—all your costs?

Kirkpatrick: I don't know. It was fairly big. And then, I tutored also. I got through my final oral exam in history by tutoring a freshman who was having trouble with History 101. So I reviewed it, which was great for me, and it worked out well, and it paid well.

Kasper: So you began at a fairly young age to have to look after yourself, is that true?

Kirkpatrick: More or less. More or less. Yes.

Kasper: I mean, weren't many of your friends and roommates at Smith being cared for by their parents, literally, and you were not?

Kirkpatrick: Maybe others had problems as a result of the Depression.

Kasper: I mean, your parents had separated, money was a problem, your grandmother had died, there was a younger brother, who, I'm sure, you had some concerns about being the elder of the two siblings—it may not have been apparent to you early on how independent-minded you had to be, but you were.

Kirkpatrick: I guess so. I was counselor at a camp the summer of my freshman year, which also helped because I tutored two youngsters in beginning Latin which bolstered my Latin. The Latin teacher at Dobbs had gone down to look at the exams because she couldn't understand why I had failed. She said, "Well, you were the first one through and you were careless. You never went back and checked." Which is partly true, but also I don't think I had a very firm grasp of the basics.

Page 8

Kasper: Well, maybe it wasn't to your liking either.

Kirkpatrick: No.

Kasper: It's kind of interesting—

Kirkpatrick: I'm glad. I've made every child that I've had anything to do with take Latin.

Kasper: Oh, have you?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes. Because I think it's very important.

Kasper: My mother felt just the opposite.

Kirkpatrick: She did?

Kasper: She had so many years of Latin, she said she was not going to subject her children to it. And to give you some idea of how sometimes those tests for, you know, how children are going to do on certain aptitudes? I remember my mother loves to tell this story. She was called into the guidance counselor's office in my high school, who reported to her that Anne just did not seem to have a particular facility for languages and that she was going to suggest Anne not take Latin to which my mother, of course, said, "Fine, I don't want her to take Latin." And she said, "Well, I'm going to suggest that Anne take Spanish, it's probably the easiest of the languages that we offer." And my mother said, well, she preferred Anne to take French. So Anne would take French. My mother always likes to tell this story because when I went off to college, I took a language placement exam—actually at the end of high school for college—and scored the highest in the country—in French. And Mother said she always loved to tell this story because, as she said, it said something about the kinds of placement exams that kids have all been required to take, you know. And, you know, my fluency in French was fine.

Kirkpatrick: You must have had awfully good teachers.

Kasper: Actually I did. I had some very good teachers. Their accents were not good, but they were—

Kirkpatrick: They were Americans?

Kasper: They were Americans, but they had a nice grasp of grammar. And then, I guess, I think I just had some natural facility. I see that now. My daughter speaks French just beautifully. And when she, just this year, took her placement exam at the University of Wisconsin, she placed in junior year French, you know. One of the courses she's taking is French conversation, and she told me early in January when she went back, that her professor told her that she had a lovely accent. And I said, "Oh, good!"

Kirkpatrick: Right. Right. Well it's funny, but are you musical?

Kasper: No, not particularly.

Kirkpatrick: Because, I think, often it goes hand-in-hand.

Kasper: Yes. Yes. No, not particularly at all.

Kirkpatrick: Well, I had very good grounding in French. I remember Madame Brewer at Columbia School, who was French, married to an American, I guess, and she was a tartar. She really was. But we did learn our grammar: "favor, help, please, trust, believe, persuade, command, obey—take the subjunctive," you know. I mean, the grammar was dinned in us.

Kasper: What was the first part? Do that again.

Kirkpatrick: "Favor, help, please, trust, believe, persuade, command, obey—take the subjunctive."

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Kasper: Oh, of course.

Kirkpatrick: So when I went to Geneva, the French came easily—I'd had it in college for two years. But, I acquired a Swiss accent which is deplorable. It's as bad as a Belgian accent.

Kasper: Yes. I was just going to say that. You can imagine my Belgian accent when I'd go to Paris, and I would say "enh." The "enh" at the end was so roundly criticized that I was never left alone on that.

Kirkpatrick: When I got into Paris in 1944, with French friends, on an evening out their idea of fun was to make me sing a French song: a) I can't carry a tune, and the accent was just appalling—the Swiss accent. Until finally they said, "Well, it's not fun anymore," 'cause my Paris accent had taken over.

Kasper: Thank God.

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

[Tape interruption.]

Kasper: We left off with—

Kirkpatrick: Geneva.

Kasper: Well, actually, graduating from Smith and going on—we were talking about Geneva during your junior year, correct?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. And then I went back after graduation.

Kasper: And then went back after you had graduated.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. And went to the University and to the Institute (Rappard Institute), where I had fascinating people: Myrdal on economics, and Count Sforza—former Italian foreign minister—before Mussolini.

Kasper: Gunnar Myrdal?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Gunnar Myrdal; and another man, whose name escapes me for the moment, who had been at the Peace Conference in Paris following World War I; and Bernadot Schmidt, who wrote the other definitive book on World War I, the opposite view from Sidney Fay. Fay's premise was that the Germans were not responsible for the war; and Schmidt, having I think suffered during World War I because of his name, took the view that the Germans were indeed responsible. So we'd go through der Grosse Politik, you know, and comment on the marginal notes by Bismarck and the Kaiser. And Schmidt would glare at me and say, "I suppose you don't agree." He assumed that because I'd been a student of Fay's—but it was a very interesting and exciting business. I wish I'd had the backbone to have gone on and gotten an advanced degree.

Kasper: Why do you think you did not?

Kirkpatrick: Well, because I think I might have taught. I've enjoyed such teaching as I've done, which has not been much.

Kasper: Now, this whole time that you were there, with Schmidt and Myrdal, and other interesting professors, was this a year's worth of study?

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: It was a year's worth. And why do you think you didn't matriculate and take an advanced degree?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I spent an awful lot of time in the nightclubs. [Laughter.] There are very good nightclubs in Geneva and I love to dance. I had some beaux who were good dancers. I got engaged to a young man—I was reading a letter the other

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day about it and I can't understand why I did—and I thank god it didn't go on. I broke it off.

Kasper: Oh, so you never married him.

Kirkpatrick: No. No.

Kasper: Was this a Swiss or a—?

Kirkpatrick: No, no. He was an American. He was a twin and his twin brother and father were at that time, in 1931, in China, in Manchuria, when the Japanese went in. We were passionately involved against the Japanese at the League, you see. And Bill, with letters from his father and brother (his brother later committed suicide)— Bill was a very earnest, tweedy, pipe-smoking, gung-ho kind of a guy—a Harvard graduate, you know. We were very congenial, but I had, at the same time, another beau, a Swiss, who was very sophisticated, a very good dancer, and lots of fun, and I really—I really liked him better. [Laughter.]

Kasper: Did you ever become engaged to the Swiss?

Kirkpatrick: No, no. No, but later, many years later, he and his French wife came over with me and spent some weeks with us. I took them down to Florida where the family were at that time. I've seen him from time to time. He ended up in the International Red Cross. Oh, in the meantime, he'd had a coffee plantation, I think, in Rhodesia. But during World War II, I ran across him in the International Red Cross. A very attractive man. I kept saying to him, you know, how marvelous a people the Swiss are, and it's a wonderful country and everything—the trains ran on time and the food was so good. In fact, I think it's almost as good as French food. And he'd say, "Yes—

Kasper: Keep going. That's my annoying [timer].

Kirkpatrick: "—name one great painter, one great writer, one great musician, who is Swiss." Well, you couldn't quite do that. He said, "Any Swiss worthy of his salt leaves Switzerland."

Kasper: The amenities were not enough. Life was comfortable, but it wasn't interesting.

Kirkpatrick: Not intellectually interesting, he thought.

Kasper: Yes. Was he particularly attractive—

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: —to you because of his intellectual kinds of—?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, I don't know. I don't think we did much about the intellect at that point. [Laughter.]

Kasper: Okay.

Kirkpatrick: You know. He loved American jazz.

Kasper: Uh huh. So does my husband.

Kirkpatrick: He collected all the records.

Kasper: Yes. My husband is quite an aficionado of American jazz.

Kirkpatrick: His parents were dead and he lived with his—he didn't live in the same house, but on the property of his brother who was a pastor—a Calvinist—and Jean had no use for the Calvinists.

Kasper: Oh, my. Now, at the end of this year in Geneva, you'd obviously had a very exciting time, both intellectually and even romantically, shall we say, or socially.

Page 11

Kirkpatrick: Mmmm. Yes.

Kasper: Why did you leave?

Kirkpatrick: Well, because I was crazy about an American who taught at Columbia. And so, Mother and my brother had come over that summer, I think expecting to stay on for a year, but, no, we had to come back.

Kasper: They had to go back because you were going back, is that a true assumption?

Kirkpatrick: That's right. That's right. Well, my brother would have come back anyway to school, but we all came back. At that point, Mother and Dad were still divorced, so Mother and I had an apartment in New York and we both went and worked at Macy's. I went into the college training squad.

Kasper: And this is what year?

Kirkpatrick: This was 1932, in the fall. I had gone back determined to get a newspaper job. All the people in Geneva whom I saw a lot of were newspaper men—Americans, British, French and German and so on—and they all did everything. I used to send pieces back to papers in New York State. Well, I skipped something. In high school, there was journalism class. My father suggested that I take it because he knew Ernie Clark, the man who taught it, who had been the editor of the paper in Watertown or Oswego. So I did take it and I don't remember very much about it. But I sent pieces back to him and he'd place them in the papers—for nothing.

Kasper: What kind of pieces did you send him?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, on politics in Geneva and international affairs.

Kasper: Were they short pieces or more complicated?

Kirkpatrick: I don't remember them. No, I don't know.

Kasper: But they were published in this upper New York State paper?

Kirkpatrick: Well, in various New York State papers—any place that Ernie could get them placed—without payment. So, when I went back to New York in the fall, I saw Stanley Walker, the managing editor of the Herald Tribune. He'd had a letter from John Whitaker, his principal correspondent, and he said, "Well, I can give you a job. Fourteen dollars a week. I don't need women on the staff. I have one woman—Ishbel Ross. But if you have any ideas that you're going to go abroad, forget it. I'd never send a woman abroad."

Kasper: This is Stanley Walker telling you this?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. So I went to the college training squad at Macy's.

Kasper: Now what is the college training squad?

Kirkpatrick: Well, they took a certain number of college graduates and put them through a very rigorous training course that lasted—hmmm, when I say six months, I would guess it's that. We had training in merchandise, management and personnel. You went into whatever the job was—for example, I was head of stock in the china department, and later lamps. Management—I was—what do you call it—the one with the flower in the buttonhole? Section manager for a period. Then I was given a bunch of superannuated employees whom they had marking things, you know. They didn't want to fire them, but they weren't very good at anything else. So I managed them for a while. Then I was in the accounting department, which I hated, and I was given a job that had something to do with standard of living and wages. I had several big columns of figures, you see, which I had to copy down and work from. And after I'd been on that maybe three weeks, I thought, "Uh huh, my Latin teacher—careless—go back and check." And it was true, I had copied here and then moved over a column. So I had to start and do it all over again. I didn't dare admit it, so I'd go in early and stay through lunch and late so that I got it finished on time. And to my horror, they asked to have me back again.

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Kasper: [Laughter.] Because you did such a good job—correcting your own mistakes.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. That's right. And after each one of these assignments you'd go back and the executive placement person would go over the assignment. She was Mrs. Shepherd, who was a tough cookie. And you'd go back and she'd go over how well you'd done.

In the china department, where I was head of stock, there was to be a sale the next day. One of the rules was: you set up a sale table the night before—no nonsense about it. Well, there was a party out in Mt. Kisco that I wanted to go to, so I left early and didn't set up the sale table. I got in early the next morning and was setting it up when the buyer came along. He said, "Miss Kirkpatrick, you didn't set it up last night?" And I said, "No, sir. I had had an urgent engagement and I knew I'd get in early." And he said, "Supposing you'd been knocked down by a taxi, what would we have done?" [Laughter.] So, I thought, "Well, that's going to be a black mark for me."

Well, when we came to the end of the review and Mrs. Shepherd was going over it and so on and so forth. "Well," she said, "Mr. Wells said 'never makes the same mistake twice.'" That kind of thing. Then I wound up—you make a choice at the end of the training period as to whether you wanted to go into management, personnel or merchandizing—and I really hated the whole thing. I knew it was good training, but I hated it. I'd wake up in the morning and say, "You've got to get up." "Why?" "To go to Macy's." "Why?" "To earn enough money to pay the rent." "Why?" "So you can go back to work at Macy's?"

A British psychiatrist, for some reason, was over here studying at Macy's, and I saw a lot of him. He was very attractive. And he said, "You know, this isn't your line." And I said, "Well, I know, but so what?" Well, when I came back at the end of the training period and Mrs. Shepherd was going over things, she said, "Well, now, you have your choice. You can go anywhere you like. You've done very well." Then she leaned back and she picked up a cigarette and lit it. This was sort of an indication that the interview as such was over, you see. We'd become fairly good friends and she said, "Tell me what's happening in France?" The government had fallen for the umpteenth time, you see. And I thought, "Uh huh, she's trying to catch me on this." And I said, "Well, you know, Shep, I haven't really had time for that kind of thing." And she laughed and lit the cigarette and said, "Well, you know what I'm saying to you is that that's your field of interest—not here." But she said, "It won't matter. If you want the job, you can have it."

Kasper: So it was clear to everybody—not only to yourself, but even to your employers—that Macy's was not your future.

Kirkpatrick: That's right.

Kasper: And that your interests were elsewhere, shall we say?

Kirkpatrick: That's right. That's right. And this British psychiatrist said, "You know, you really should get out of this."

Kasper: Meanwhile, there was this beau, however, at Columbia. Is that where he was?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes. But then—

Kasper: That's part of the reason why you were there.

Kirkpatrick: That's right. Well—

Kasper: I mean, aside from the fact that the New York Herald Tribune said that they didn't want you because they didn't need any women, it was also this man that had attracted you back to New York.

Kirkpatrick: That's right. I saw a lot of him. I was crazy about him. And at Christmas time, he and a friend of his (they had been at Cambridge together) picked me up and we drove to Canada to ski with a group of friends.

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[End Tape 1, Side A; Begin Tape 1, Side B]

Kasper: —from Columbia.

Kirkpatrick: No.

Kasper: And what year was this that you married?

Kirkpatrick: In 1934.

Kasper: And who was this fellow you married?

Kirkpatrick: Victor Polacheck, whose father was the managing—

Kasper: Why do I know that name?

Kirkpatrick: —managing editor of the Hearst papers. Vic was (and he still is) very attractive, very personable, very charming, very persuasive, and absolutely wrong as far as I was concerned. Really.

Kasper: All wrong for you, you mean?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. About a week before the wedding I was fully aware of it and it was just too late to get out of it. I tried to. But the wedding had been planned, etc. My father wanted no part of it. Vic and I—

Kasper: Was that because he sensed that Victor was wrong for you?

Kirkpatrick: Vic and I had gone down to Florida to see my parents and they both said he was charming, but it wasn't a good combination. Vic didn't have a particular job. His time was very valuable—worth money to him—only he didn't have to bring in any money. This was one of the real problems. I adored his father. I couldn't stand his mother. Neither could he. So we were married in February. My father didn't come. Mother came, of course, and my brother. I remember as we started down the aisle—we were married in the Church of the Ascension on 10th Street and Fifth Avenue—my brother said, "Now, if you want to run, this is time to do it." It was too late, I couldn't do it. Anyway, we had fun for a time. We lived in Chicago for about six months or so where he had some business that had to do with advertising signs that you put in the stores. But always next week he was going to make a million.

Kasper: And he never did.

Kirkpatrick: Never did. And always—some of the things were a little bit close to the edge of being straight. They weren't ever crooked, but they were just a little bit off. Then we moved to New York, and we had Edna St. Vincent Millay's house on Cherry Lane in the Village, which was wonderful—nine feet wide, three stories high. It was great. And I went back to work.

Kasper: At Macy's.

Kirkpatrick: No. I don't think I did. No. Next door to us lived Osgood Field and Alice. Alice Field was supporting the Daily Worker and had been in Russia a number of times. Freddy Field, his brother, was charged by the Institute of Pacific Relations with being a card-carrying member of the Party. And the Fields, I remember, asked us to go one night to a Communist Party rally and Vic and I went. I think we stayed twenty minutes and decided it was for the birds and left. But Osgood was a member of, and interested in, the American-Russian Institute in New York. They were going to bring over an exhibit of Soviet education which was to be put on at the Natural History Museum. Oz asked if I would take the job of setting the exhibit up—the publicity and all that stuff—so I took that job. We needed the money and it was an interesting job. I became aware, I think, perhaps later rather than immediately, that some of the people involved in this were definitely involved in the Communist Party. But I had nothing to do with them or with it. I worked with the Soviet Consul General in New York, a charming man named Tolokonsky. And Bill Bullitt, Allen Wardwell and Henry Goddard Leach, prominent New York

Page 14

lawyers, were behind this exhibit. And the Institute, in itself, was supposedly non-Communist and not involved in the Party. Actually, I think the Executive Secretary definitely was a Party member. She was Russian and married to an American. But this was afterwards that I realized this. So I took that job and put the exhibit on and then decided that really things were not right, so I was going to get out.

Kasper: Things were not right in working with the Institute and—

Kirkpatrick: No. As far as Vic and I were concerned.

Kasper: In your marriage.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. It just, to me, had no future. It was brought to a head by the fact that I was pregnant and I just knew that it wasn't going to last, and therefore, it was wrong. So I had an abortion—or, we called it—a D&C, which my doctor very kindly organized at Doctor's Hospital. That really brought me up to the point of saying, "Well, this doesn't make sense to go on." So I got a job taking a bunch of girls to Europe—the hard way—thirty girls in their late teens. At that point we had moved in with Vic's family, which was impossible.

Kasper: Especially given his mother.

Kirkpatrick: Well, she was all right. I just—she was sort of a fussy, fussy, pretentious woman. I loved Father Victor. I used to spend time with him every day. He would come back from the office and go into his study and he and I would sit and he'd smoke these big cigars and we'd have long talks. He was a wonderful man who took a dim view of his older son, too.

Kasper: Had his son gone to college? Did he have a profession of some kind?

Kirkpatrick: He went to Princeton. And he went to Cambridge. But he never finished anything. He was going to write the great American novel.

Kasper: Was that part of your frustration in the marriage—that he never completed anything?

Kirkpatrick: That's right. And, you know, he'd get one idea of making money, and it was always going to make a million, but nothing really ever happened. He was fun and charming and attractive. And, also, another thing that I held against him: he and the family were Jewish, but he didn't think of himself as Jewish. He rejected it. And this, I didn't hold with. You are what you are and you don't reject it. And he did. I just didn't respect him for that. So I left with the girls for Europe. When I got to Vienna, I sent him a cable saying, "Not returning."

Kasper: Is that right?

Kirkpatrick: Chicken. And I got a furious cable back. At that point, I was ill. I had acute cystitis. By the time I got to Rome, I was fairly ill, and I shoved the girls on the ship. We had the dean of Sweetbriar as my assistant. Anyway, she got the girls home and I went back to Geneva with no money.

Kasper: Oh, my god.

Kirkpatrick: And I couldn't ask the family for money 'cause I couldn't admit that they'd been right and I'd been wrong. I certainly couldn't ask Vic for any. So I got to Geneva and my college roommate had married a Dutchman and lived in Holland and I borrowed some money from her. I lived in the Salvation Army hostel in Geneva, which was very attractive. I had a very nice, clean room with running water, a balcony looking over the lake, for two francs fifty a day. And I looked for jobs. And I heard that Raymond Buell, who headed the Foreign Policy Association, was coming over to set up a Geneva office. So I quickly did a great deal of research on the issue before the League at that time, which was the Chaco dispute between Uruguay and Paraguay.

Kasper: The Chaco dispute?

Page 15

Kirkpatrick: The Chaco River. And there was a section of it that each country claimed.

Kasper: Between Uruguay and Paraguay?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. So I wrote quite a long paper on it. And conniving friends arranged that we'd have picnic with the Buells shortly after they arrived and they also brought up the subject of the Chaco dispute.

Kasper: The Chaco River dispute. [Laughter.]

Kirkpatrick: I seemed very knowledgeable about it. And Mr. Buell was quite impressed and offered me the job of running the Geneva office. So I did. I wrote and edited a magazine—Geneva. Our office was in the League of Nations Building—at the time in an old hotel on the lake front. So, it was marvelous. I saw all my press friends as the "salle de presse" was just above our office.

Kasper: This is 1935, isn't that right?

Kirkpatrick: This was 1935.

Kasper: I was going to say, your old newspaper friends, as well as your other friends, were still there presumably?

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: And you had a lovely job.

Kirkpatrick: And naturally they'd get me to cover for them if they had to go out of town. So I built up quite a clientele. I covered for the Manchester Guardian, which paid by the line, so I wrote at great length for them—and the Daily Telegraph in London, the Daily Express, the Herald. And then the Paris Herald. The head of the European office of the Herald Tribune, John Elliott, offered me a job as string correspondent paying $100 a month. So, I took that, and that was the beginning.

Kasper: When you were a string correspondent, explain what that meant.

Kirkpatrick: A string correspondent is paid a stipend to answer queries and to write when asked by the head office. The Paris office would telephone me after they received the French and English newspapers at night—they usually called between one and two in the morning—to query a story. Then I would check it out and call them back. Or, they would assign a particular thing. I remember Henry Grady came on some trade mission. Well, they had me cover that daily. So it was on demand. Or, I could call up and say, "I think this is a good story on so and so," and they'd say, "Yes" or "No."

Kasper: Do it. And then you would do it and send it off to them.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Telephone it in.

Kasper: But at the same time you were still working at the Foreign Policy Association, or no?

Kirkpatrick: No. I gave it up.

Kasper: So you were earning enough money covering all these various papers and being a string correspondent.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Barely.

Kasper: Barely. And you liked what you were doing.

Kirkpatrick: I lived largely on brussels sprouts and cottage cheese, it seems to me. [Laughter.] But it was healthy.

Kasper: Were you still at the hostel?

Page 16

Kirkpatrick: No, no. I'd moved in with two American friends, girls, who had a flat and I think—I'm ashamed to say, I don't think they charged me any rent. One of them worked at the ILO—the International Labor Office—and what did Harriet do? She had a job, but I have no idea what she did. Anyway, they were agreeable. One of them was a Smith graduate which is how I originally got involved in that. So that was very helpful.

[Tape interruption.]

Kasper: Tell me a little bit about some of the pieces that you wrote at this time. When you wrote for the Guardian or the Express or the Telegraph, do you remember some of the kinds of issues you were covering or articles you were sending them?

Kirkpatrick: Well they principally had to do with the League—things that were before the League Council: Abyssinia—the Ethiopian War—the Spanish Civil War. I remember when The Negus, the Emperor of Ethiopia, came to Geneva—it was a big story. Dear little man.

Kasper: What was his name, "The Negus"?

Kirkpatrick: Haile Selassie, the Negus, the Emperor of Ethiopia. And the Japanese-Chinese war was still going on, of course, because the Japanese were pushing farther and farther into China and the affair was perpetually before the League. I think the most dramatic one I remember, however, arose because of the sanctions the League imposed against Italy with the greatest reluctance on the part of the British, notably, and the French. And, of course, the Italians were utterly opposed to it.

Kasper: What was the issue?

Kirkpatrick: The Italian invasion of Ethiopia and their really brutal behavior to the natives. The most dramatic moment came when Lord Halifax spoke to the League Assembly, I think it was, to say that Britain intended to lift the sanctions. It was the most sanctimonious, mealy-mouthed alibi as to why, you see. And I remember that the London Times correspondent, a very proper young Scotsman by the name of Ian MacDonald, was sitting in front of me. There was this dead silence in the Council chamber—and as Halifax finished, Ian murmured audibly: "Jesus, bloody Christ," and it echoed throughout the room. This was the reaction of many people.

Kasper: Why were the British and the French opposed to sanctions against Italy?

Kirkpatrick: Well, you know, it gets in the way of trade and good relations. The British would privately say, "Well, you know, we're concerned about Mussolini and Hitler, and we don't want to do anything to push them together." The usual.

Kasper: Even though the evidence about the slaughter and the brutality in Ethiopia was pretty overwhelming.

Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes. And it was the Italians' war. I mean, they had invaded Ethiopia from Eritrea, which was Italian at that time. Shortly after, the Spanish Civil War became a great issue. It was well known that the Germans and the Italians were using it as a testing ground for weapons. There again came the question of applying sanctions, but nobody was willing to do it. The Spaniards, both sides, were up arguing—I don't remember Franco's people because the legal Spanish government was a member of the League, you see. And del Vayo was the Spanish representative. He was the foreign minister of the legal government and he made moving pleas in French. If there is anything more painful than hearing a Spaniard speak French, I don't know what it is. The accent is appalling.

Kasper: The two just don't mix.

Kirkpatrick: No, they don't mix. No.

Kasper: No. One is a whole difference use of the tongue and the mouth than the other.

Page 17

Kirkpatrick: That's right. I can make myself understood by using a kind of Spanish with a combination of French and Latin, but the Spanish don't do well by French. But it was a passionate—people felt strongly. And at times, I remember, during the Sino-Japanese war, we all boycotted the Japanese. They'd have a big party and nobody would go. Geneva was a very—a very biased place. People took sides firmly. And there were all kinds of operators around. One of the most amusing—

Kasper: All kinds of operators around?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes.

Kasper: What do you mean by operators?

Kirkpatrick: Well, people whose jobs were a little obscure as to what they were. They were oil merchants or they were spies for one side or another. It was a very exciting place to be. One of the more amusing episodes occurred at the Council—this was when the Nazis had grabbed Danzig, now known as Gdansk.

Kasper: Gdansk.

Kirkpatrick: And there was the Gauleiter, named Greiser—Herr Greiser—who came to the Council. I don't recall what he thought his mission was. At any rate, the Council sat at a big round table in the Council chamber. The press was in a box up above and at the end facing the Council—facing the president of the Council, who, at that particular time, was [Anthony] Eden. And Greiser appeared before them to make a statement. He made his statement, which was very Nazi, and then he was thanked, I guess, and he went around to the end of the table to where Eden sat and with a Nazi salute said, "Heil Hitler." And, of course, we in the press all tittered—laughed. So as he came past us, he turned and thumbed his nose at the press. The president of the Press Association was a perfectly marvelous man, Robert Dell—white moustache, white hair, flashing eyes, who spoke impeccable French in the most appalling Manchester accent you've ever heard. He stood up, shaking with anger, and addressed Eden, one Briton to another, "Monsieur, le Président, il nous a insulté. Il a fait comme ça à nous."* To which Eden replied, "I didn't see it." [Laughter.] There were all kinds of wonderful things like that that went on.

Kasper: So you were both drawn to—this is interesting to me because you were both drawn to the drama of internationally what was going on in the world—the big issues of war and peace and so forth—but at the same time, you were a witness to the human comedy. It seems to me that both those things really drew your attention. Is that true?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Well, for example, going back to 1931-32, the fact that [Henry L.] Stimson, who was then Secretary of State of the United States, had proposed the Stimson Doctrine, calling for non-recognition of a country which had used force against another country. This had to do with the Japanese invasion of China. The British turned it down: "Well, you know, this is not a very wise thing to do," and so on. This could have brought us, the United States, much more, perhaps almost into the League, which we had turned down in 1920. That kind of thing. We had a first-class man whose title was consul general in Geneva, but he had a whole staff of bright young foreign service officers who were all there—as he was—to observe the League: its economic council and the ILO and all functions of the League. Very bright. All of them turned out later to be excellent ambassadors. Tommy Thompson was Ambassador to Moscow. They were very good. And that's what they were there for—getting an education and training and reporting to the State Department.

Kasper: It was a real training ground.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. There was a regular consul who did consular work and whose caliber could be judged by the fact that he called me in one day and he said, "You know, you and Helen—" (I shared an apartment with a California girl, Helen Meyer. She and I were there that first winter together and we'd taken an apartment. Her father was German and her mother was American, and she had lots of young Germans—these handsome blonde boys at the university—they all turned out to be Nazis later—that she ran around with.) Gilson Blake said, "You know, Marge and I were talking about it the other day and we think it's a pity that you and Helen see more

______________________
* "Mister President, he insulted us. He did like this to us."

Page 18

Europeans than Americans. She sees all these Germans. You ought to stick with Americans." And I said, "You mean to live in Geneva and see only Americans? I could stay at home and do that."

Kasper: View.

Kirkpatrick: But it was a fascinating place because many famous people came to the League, to the various bodies of it.

Kasper: Were there other women like you who were reporting on some of these issues? When you were up in that press box in the Council chambers, were there any other women with you?

Kirkpatrick: There was a Dutch girl, Luce Haakman, I think. She was a regular correspondent there. There was one other, I can't think who it was, who came. Then, of course, when the Council was in session and big issues—when people came, Geneviève Tabouis, a famous French reporter, a character, was there—she and Pertinax—Andre Géraud—who was a very impressive writer—they were both very well informed.

Kasper: What paper did they work for? Did they work for the same paper?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, no. I think Pertinax wrote for Le Figaro and I've forgotten what Tabouis' paper was.

Kasper: Le Monde?

Kirkpatrick: I worked for a French paper called L'Ordre. No, Le Monde didn't exist then. The same format and perhaps staff became Le Temps in 1944.

Kasper: And what paper did you work for?

Kirkpatrick: L'Ordre. Which, as far as I could make out—I never did make it out very clearly—it was slightly left-wing.

Kasper: So, in other words, when you were writing articles for some of the other papers, you were also writing for this particular French paper.

Kirkpatrick: Well, that was later. I picked up L'Ordre when I was in London and did regular telephone reports every night with current stories, or specials if requested.

Kasper: When you were in Geneva and you were beginning this career in journalism, was your French an advantage to you?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes, sure. Because also when I needed money I worked for a law firm there translating. Jean, my Swiss beau, was in that law firm—or one of his and my pals, Tudi Martin-Achard's father was head of that firm, and I used to do translations for them, which, I must say, took me into another realm of French because legalisms are—

Kasper: A whole other vocabulary.

Kirkpatrick: That's right.

Kasper: But in working in journalism and making contacts and networking, was your French an advantage?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes. Sure.

Kasper: In what ways?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I could talk to the French delegation more easily. Their English was never great. People like Briand. They all went to the Bavaria, which was a café almost on the lake side, every night. It was a famous place. There were two Hungarian cartoonists, political cartoonists, and the walls of the Bavaria were, and probably still are, covered with their cartoons. Derso and Kalen, wonderful

Page 19

characters. We all would go down there at night and have a beer to check who was there. It was great.

Kasper: You had a good time.

Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes.

Kasper: And you kept yourself afloat financially so that you could enjoy yourself—barely.

Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes. Yes.

Kasper: And it meant, too, didn't it that during this roiling time, if you will, between the wars, you were covering the antecedents to World War II. Although clearly you didn't know it at the time?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I have the text here of a talk I gave here at The Landing, which took half an hour to give. It starts with Geneva and winds up at the United Nations in New York.

Kasper: Many years later.

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: Who were some of the American correspondents, women or men, that you worked with? How many were there and who were you working with? Do you remember some names?

Kirkpatrick: Regular ones there were John Whitaker of the Herald Tribune; Stuart Brown of United Press; Wally Carroll, I think was also with United Press and later the New York Times (they may have been at different times); Clarence Streit of the New York Times. (He lived there. He later started Atlantic Union, or Union Now, and he left the New York Times to put full time into this organization. His wife was French and he could see war coming and his goal was to bring about a union between Britain and the United States.) Who else? Others would come, you know, for special League sessions, Council sessions. Bill Hillman of the INS—

Kasper: Any women?

Kirkpatrick: I don't remember any. Sigrid Schultz of the Chicago Tribune was a Berlin correspondent at that time, but I never saw her at the League. She had plenty to do in Berlin.

Kasper: And she was an American.

Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes. And Dorothy Thompson, of course.

Kasper: And where was Dorothy at that time?

Kirkpatrick: Well, she was expelled from Germany by Hitler, I've forgotten at what date. Fairly early on, I think. I didn't meet her until later on. We crossed on the same ship in 1940. I'd been home on a lecture tour. She was quite a person.

Kasper: What do you remember about her?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I was impressed with her—in the first place, I was—it sounds ridiculous, but I was shy, really shy, and I used to die a thousand deaths before I'd go and see somebody. It just took—

Kasper: Is that right? How did you manage all this if you were so shy?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I just would say, you have to do it. Go ahead and do it. But it—you know, I hated it—hated to go in and bother somebody about something. Crossing on this ship, there were a whole group of Jewish boys who were going to Bologna to medical school. And a lot of the crew on the Manhattan were Germans, and they were Nazis, and there was, you know, a certain sort of tension in the air. These Americans were all awfully nice kids, but they were obstreperous and they made

Page 20

an awful racket. And one night—we had relatively small sort of a lounge and they were making an awful racket. Dorothy and several of us were sitting and talking. Suddenly Dorothy got up and walked over to them and said, "Look, there are Nazis on this ship, and you're Jewish—shape up." And they did. And I thought, boy, that takes guts.

Kasper: Yes. It does.

Kirkpatrick: And if she can do it, maybe I could, you know?

Kasper: So that you felt in some ways she was a bit of a mentor to you?

Kirkpatrick: Oh yes, definitely, except, and this is not a nice thing to say, but when we got to Italy— I had been staying on way out with the British minister and his wife, Noel Charles, who was very sharp politically. And the ambassador was Sir Eric Drummond, who was out of the country at that point. But they had divided responsibilities: Drummond saw Mussolini and Noel Charles saw [Count Galeazzo] Ciano. So on my way home in whenever it was from the lecture tour, I sat up until about two in the morning drinking champagne with Noel while his wife went to bed and he filling me in because he really knew what was going on. So when we got back to Italy in April, 1940, I went to stay with the Charles' again and they had a cocktail party for me and I had asked them to ask Dorothy Thompson. Well, Ciano came, all the brass were there, none of whom she had known. So I sort of helped, you know—

Kasper: You introduced her to all these—

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: You introduced the famous Dorothy Thompson to people you already knew.

Kirkpatrick: No, I also first met Ciano there. I got a certain secret sort of satisfaction out of it. And sitting up the night before I left to go back to London with Noel again I got the story. I got to Paris and wrote that the Italians would be in the war as soon as France fell or the June wheat came in. The story appeared on the front page of the Daily News and in the next column was a speech by Colonel Knox (who owned the paper) and who was Secretary of the Navy, saying that there was absolutely no chance that Italy would ever get into the war. It would remain neutral. Well, I shook in my boots!

Kasper: This was in the same edition of the paper?

Kirkpatrick: Same paper—on the front page—yes!

Kasper: Of the Chicago Daily News.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Side by side. And I thought, "Whoo, here I go." I got a cable from him saying, "Congratulations on your story. I hope you're wrong. But congratulations."

Kasper: Well that was kindly of him.

Kirkpatrick: Oh, he was marvelous. They ran a wonderful paper.

Kasper: Well, indeed, it was a marvelous paper. We'll talk about that. Let's see. That was—

Kirkpatrick: We jumped ahead to 1939-40. Well, back to Geneva in '35 or '36. I went in June or July of 1936 with a friend who was living in Europe for a time with her son. We drove down to Spain. We got as far as Barcelona when Franco attacked and the Spanish Civil War began.

Kasper: Was attacking in Barcelona?

Kirkpatrick: No, the attack began in Morocco and spread to Spain. There were reports of fighting somewhere between Barcelona and Madrid, and we were headed for Madrid. Well, of course, we had to turn around and get out fast.

Page 21

Kasper: So you left Spain entirely?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. We got back to Geneva just as the war became widespread. And that, of course, came before the League.

Kasper: Did you know Martha Gellhorn then?

Kirkpatrick: No, I didn't know her until later.

Kasper: Because she was covering the Spanish Civil War.

Kirkpatrick: I know she was, but she came in there later. I didn't see anybody at that time. No, we met later in London. We had each of us been in the same places, knew the same people, but at different times. When she came to London in '44, I guess, she called up and said, "Hey, it's time we met."

Kasper: Crossed so many paths.

Kirkpatrick: That's right. We knew all the same people.

Kasper: So you went back to Geneva.

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: And you picked up your work for the British and French papers?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Oh, this was just a holiday. I was there until I went to London.

Kasper: When you were back in Geneva, did you then cover the Spanish Civil War as part of the articles you were writing?

Kirkpatrick: Well, what came before the League, yes. But that was not immediate.

Kasper: In other words, you didn't necessarily report on your short visit into Spain.

Kirkpatrick: No.

Kasper: No. In other words, you didn't write a piece saying, "I had traveled into Spain and this is what happened. Franco was attacking and—"

Kirkpatrick: No. Because we didn't really know and had seen nothing.

Kasper: You just knew to get out.

Kirkpatrick: All we knew was that the road from Barcelona to Madrid had been mined and they had carpet tacks and so on. It was primitive. No, it wasn't that. I didn't know enough about what was going on at that point. We couldn't find out anything.

Kasper: And there wasn't anybody in Spain reporting to you?

Kirkpatrick: No. Later, for the Chicago Daily News—yes, Richard Mowrer was there. There were plenty of people there at a later stage.

Kasper: Later, yes. But at that time, nobody much. So you went back to Geneva, and how much longer then did you stay there before you went to London?

Kirkpatrick: I was there—let's see, my divorce came through in 1936. And Vic came over to try to persuade me—he had to agree to it because the Swiss are quite civilized—you can get a divorce on the grounds of incompatibility.

Kasper: But both parties have to be present.

Kirkpatrick: Both parties have to agree to it and I had to persuade him. He was convinced there was somebody else. I said, "No, there really wasn't."

Page 22

So he finally agreed—if I'd come and spend a weekend with him in Paris. I said, "Well, you know, we'll see. Let's play it by ear." And that was that. He went off to write the great American novel.

Kasper: Did he ever?

Kirkpatrick: No. Well, I don't know. I have something he wrote in here.

Kasper: What became of him?

Kirkpatrick: He is living in Florida. I got a large bouquet of flowers on my birthday. And he called up and said, "I have a house. I've just had my third divorce. And I've got a nice house on a lake and a sailboat, come on down."

Kasper: This is a recent birthday?

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: Last October?

Kirkpatrick: No, a year ago.

Kasper: A year ago October.

Kirkpatrick: And we chatted and he said, "Did you hear me?" I said, "Yes." "Will you come down?" And I said, "Well, we'll see." And that was that.

Kasper: Let's see, forty-four years later—no, more than forty-five years—fifty-five years later—and it was still another, "We'll see."

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: I guess he hasn't forgotten.

Kirkpatrick: No. One of his sons was at Brown University where my brother was university professor after he left CIA, and Vic saw my brother and asked about me—where I was living. Kirk was very vague about it, happily, and said, "Well, you know, you really don't want to see her, she's turned into a nasty old woman." [Laughter.]

Kasper: That's what your brother said to him? [Laughter.]

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: In protection.

Kirkpatrick: Vic wrote and said, "I don't know. I don't understand this. You were very nice when you were married to me." [Laughter.]

Kasper: Well, it apparently didn't prevent him from reaching you on your birthday, however.

Kirkpatrick: No, I know. And my brother gave him my address which I was very cross about.

Kasper: He hasn't bothered you since then.

Kirkpatrick: No. No.

Kasper: Well, that's all right, then.

Kirkpatrick: No. I think three marriages were enough. I'll tell you about meeting him in France, though, during the war. That was a riot.

Kasper: Meeting Vic later, yet, after this divorce was finalized?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes, years later.

Page 23

Kasper: You want to save that?

Kirkpatrick: Well, not necessarily.

Kasper: I mean, to put it in chronologic order?

Kirkpatrick: Well, it was during the war. I went up to Vittel to 7th Army Headquarters. I was having dinner in the officer's mess and I suddenly got a slap on the back that nearly threw me into my soup, and there was Vic in uniform. He was a captain. He wanted to know what I was doing there, and I said, "Well, I just stopped to get clearance to go into Strasbourg tomorrow." (This was in December of '44.) He said, "Well, I have to go to Strasbourg tomorrow. I'll give you a lift." And I said, "All right."

Kasper: Reluctantly.

Kirkpatrick: So we went to Strasbourg and we separated and he went off to whatever he had to do and I went to whatever I was doing. Then we met later and he said, "I'd like to take you out and show you where we can look across to the German lines." So we went along a canal toward the Rhine and there was an observation post and we went up in it. Of course, the Germans saw us and started lobbing shots across. We got back to the jeep and the sergeant who was driving was very unhappy because there was an enormous shortage of tires—of all parts, of everything at that stage—and he wasn't happy being there. These howitzer shells were landing sort of bracketing this canal. And I wasn't enthusiastic either, so, I said, "Let's get out of here." So we started out and then we got to the outskirts of Strasbourg and the driver wasn't sure which way to go and I didn't know and Vic didn't know. I said, "Now, come on. Let's find a way." He said, "Now, don't get excited sweetheart." And I said, "I'm not your sweetheart. I'm not excited. Let's get out of here." The Strasbourgeois were putting white sheets out their windows because they thought the Germans were coming back in—which they didn't, but it was just before the Battle of the Bulge. So that was the last time that I actually saw him. We parted company and then I went back to Paris and he went back to Vittel.

Kasper: Under very exciting circumstances.

Kirkpatrick: Oh, and he'd shown me pictures of his wife and children at that stage. Everything apparently was fine. This was, I guess, his second wife—after me—then he was divorced from her and he married her best friend. It wasn't a success.

Kasper: I see. And so now he's finally living alone.

Kirkpatrick: I guess so. I haven't checked on him yet. He changed his name.

Kasper: He changed his name?

Kirkpatrick: From Polacheck to Polk.

Kasper: And did he finally make enough money so that he did not have to live hand to mouth?

Kirkpatrick: Well, he sounds it. The letter I had from him said he was the head of a mutual fund and he was on the bank board and he was this and he was that. And he sent me a picture—looking very slim and elegant. He's a nice man. Just temperamentally not—

Kasper: Not to your liking.

Kirkpatrick: No. No.

Kasper: Very simple really.

Kirkpatrick: Right.

[End Tape 1, Side B; Begin Tape 2, Side A]

Page 24

Kirkpatrick: I think that my great interest in politics, always, might have had something to do with the fact that my father took me down, when I was fairly young, to City Hall in Rochester and introduced me to the mayor and explained to me the way in which city government functioned, including the fact that there was a boss—like Boss Tweed in New York, but whose name I don't recall—and that he was really the man who called the shots. At any rate, it certainly was part of my continuing interest in political governance.

So, are we back to where we left me in 1935 or '36 in Geneva?

Kasper: Yes. We were just finishing the whole portion of your life in Geneva before you went on to London. I don't know if there is anything you want to add to that before we move along to London?

Kirkpatrick: I don't think so. I went to London, in 1937 actually, largely because a British diplomatic correspondent, Victor Gordon Lennox of the Daily Telegraph, suggested that I come, and that he and I, and Graham Hutton of the Economist, would put together a newsletter. So, when I went to London, that's what happened.

Kasper: The Whitehall News?

Kirkpatrick: The Whitehall Letter. Yes, and it was totally and entirely on foreign affairs and dealt with the situation in Europe. At that time, in late 1936-37, it was clear to the three of us that we were headed—or Britain was headed—for war with Germany.

Kasper: Why was it so clear to you and so unclear to the British government and other people?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I think it was clear to many, but there were those who didn't want to believe it to be inevitable. Many thought that they could avoid it—as did Mr. Chamberlain, who perhaps was very naïve. He was naïve in many ways—though not in street politics. His election in Birmingham and to Parliament, subsequently to the leadership of the Conservative Party attested to that. But he was naïve in sensing what the situation was with Hitler and Mussolini. For example, he wrote to Lady Austin Chamberlain, who was in Rome at that time, on the stationery of Number 10 Downing Street, and mailed it through the open mail. When Eden learned of this, I don't know how, he was appalled and said to him, "Prime Minister, your letters will be opened and read by the Italian government." And Chamberlain said, "What a nasty mind you have. Gentlemen don't do that." This would suggest that he really didn't know what the score was.

Kasper: And he just blithely thought the Italians were gentlemen?

Kirkpatrick: Well he wrote to her all that he was thinking about.

Kasper: He really did.

Kirkpatrick: Oh yes.

Kasper: All of his planning and strategizing and so on?

Kirkpatrick: Well, whatever, that had to do with Italy and so on. Of course it was on Mussolini's desk the next day. And it was one of the many causes of Eden's break with Chamberlain. But the actual break came over the question—at the time none of us knew—that [Franklin D.] Roosevelt had offered to intervene to try to mediate between Hitler and Mussolini on one hand, and the British on the other. This was at a time when Eden had been in the south of France recuperating from flu, and Chamberlain had never told him of this offer but had simply rejected it out of hand. When Eden came back from the south of France, he was met at Dover by Strang from the Foreign Office who told him of this offer. Eden was simply furious and went immediately straight to Checkers where the Prime Minister was and told him how appalled he was at it and handed his resignation in as Foreign Secretary. We thought that it had something to do with Ciano and Grande, the Italian ambassador in London. Ciano was Mussolini's son-in-law and the Minister for Foreign Affairs in Italy. Count Ciano had married Edie Mussolini.

Page 25

I've forgotten what, at the time, we thought was the real cause of Eden's resignation. It was only later that I learned the real cause during a weekend at Ditchley, which was Ronald Tree's place. Ronald Tree's mother, I think, was a Marshall Field daughter; and his wife, Nancy, had been married to a Marshall Field (her maiden name was Nancy Perkins). She was Nancy Astor's niece and she came from Virginia.

Kasper: And that's Marietta Tree—

Kirkpatrick: No! No! Marietta Tree was Ronald Tree's second wife. Oh, never mix them up. No.

Kasper: I thought maybe Marietta Tree was their daughter.

Kirkpatrick: No, no. Marietta Tree was Ronnie's second wife. Nancy Tree said later, "Poor Ronnie, he had such bad luck in wives." [Laughter.] But they had this marvelous house, Ditchley, down near Oxford and wonderful weekend parties. I used to go down quite a good deal. And there, when the Edens were down one weekend, Antony (as pronounced—though spelled Anthony) and Ronnie Tree and I sat up late (I had a habit of doing that with men who have something interesting to say), and Eden recounted this and it was still current enough for me to very interested. So later, in London, I got hold of Bob Dixon, Eden's parliamentary private secretary, and said I had learned this, and would it be all right to use it. I wouldn't dream of using it, having heard it, you know, privately. He came back and said, "Under no circumstances—" So it was only later when Eden himself made it public that it came out.

Kasper: Became news.

Kirkpatrick: But that leads me to a fascinating thing that I just recently discovered. In Mr. Churchill's memoirs, I am referred to in terms that are not exactly complimentary.

Kasper: Oh my.

Kirkpatrick: If you want to turn that off, I'll get it.

[Tape interruption.]

Kirkpatrick: Ditchley, incidentally, was the country place where Churchill went during the war on weekends when there was a full moon. This was because at Checkers, the prime minister's residence, there is a lake and it was too easily identified from the air. The security people wouldn't let Mr. Churchill go there during the war, so he went to Ditchley.

Kasper: Now which of the Churchill memoirs are you reading from?

Kirkpatrick: This is volume six of Martin Gilbert's, Winston Churchill: Finest Hour. This had to do with relations between Britain and Vichy [France]. I'm quoting now: "—the secret discussions between Britain and Vichy were suddenly made public on December 24 by the Chicago Daily News correspondent in London, Helen Kirkpatrick, who sent to Chicago details of Professor Rougier's earlier visit to London and added that a further 'confirmatory message' had been brought to London from Vichy by Pierre Dupuy, including a personal message from Marshall Pétain and Admiral Darlan. Reading this dispatch, Churchill minuted 'Miss Helen Kirkpatrick should be shipped out of the country at the earliest moment. It is very undesirable to have a person of this kind scouting about private houses for copy regardless of British interests.' Dupuy went back to Vichy—" et cetera.

At any rate, Duff Cooper, who was the Minister of Information, and whom I knew personally very well, persuaded Mr. Churchill that—oh, see—this is from Martin Gilbert's book also: "Reading this dispatch, he minuted—" I've repeated that. But, at any rate, Duff Cooper and Brendon Bracken, who was a great close personal friend as well as a minister, persuaded the Prime Minister that I was not an undesirable alien and that it would be a mistake to—

Kasper: To ship you out of the country.

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Kirkpatrick: To ship me out of the country. And that I didn't—I did not take advantage. Oh, yes, here in the footnote it says: "The Prime Minister's personal minute—After Brendon Bracken had assured Churchill that Helen Kirkpatrick was a stoutly loyal and pro-Allied American, Churchill agreed to let her remain in the country. Minuting on the file in which her accidental indiscretions were described, 'Oh, Lord,' Helen Kirkpatrick writes of Rougier and Dupuy, 'I never met either one. I know that I first learned of their presence in London from Eve Curie and I suspect that more details of their reports came from Desmond Morton, whom I saw regularly.'" Desmond Morton was an assistant to the Prime Minister and particularly assigned to the Free French. I don't remember knowing anything about Rougier, and I did learn from Eve Curie when we drove down to Ditchley for Christmas that December of 1940 that Dupuy had been in London. I thought he was French, but he was Canadian. He was the Canadian minister to Vichy.

Kasper: And what information were you accused—or what did Churchill think you'd given away?

Kirkpatrick: Well, Churchill, you see—it hadn't occurred to him to have the censors watch out for this because he didn't think anyone knew. This was very, very secret. But, of course, the Free French had their sources too and they knew all about it. Because Churchill, through Dupuy and Rougier, was trying to persuade Pétain and General [Maxime] Weygand that if they would take their government to North Africa, the British would lend them support against the Germans. And if they didn't, that the Vichy government would be regarded as a traitor and illegal in British eyes. Well, Churchill claimed that my revealing this had sabotaged that effort. I think the Vichy people had turned it down anyway.

Kasper: As it came to pass, the Vichy government did—

Kirkpatrick: And I didn't know as much as he credited me with knowing. [Laughter.] Oh, and one reason that I thought it was important was that the British, and Churchill included, were being very snide about the United States having an ambassador in Vichy. We had Admiral Leahy there as ambassador, and this suggested that we thought the Vichy government was a legitimate government, which the British didn't regard it to be. And they were always making snide remarks about the United States in that respect. I thought this would indicate that they were not above trafficking with Vichy themselves.

Kasper: Themselves. Exactly. Did you actually write a column or send out to the Chicago Daily News a piece on that at that point?

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: You did. And was it published in the paper?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes. That's why Churchill knew about it.

Kasper: Oh, that's how they knew.

Kirkpatrick: Sure.

Kasper: Oh, okay. So it wasn't until it was actually published in the Chicago paper that they realized that you had been privy to this information. Is that correct?

Kirkpatrick: The censors had not been alerted to stop it. Unless they were alerted, they didn't stop things.

Kasper: And you just came across this recently?

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: In the Martin Gilbert book?

Kirkpatrick: Well, actually, Martin wrote me when he was working on this book and said that he'd come across this. The reason I knew him was that he came over to the

Page 27

United States sometime in the late sixties, and he was working on a book on Munich. I'd written a book at the time on Munich and he'd been told that he should see me. So he called up and asked if he could come. So he came to see us in New Hampshire and he stayed a month.

Kasper: Wow.

Kirkpatrick: Well, we had a guest house and Martin was in it. So we got to know Martin quite well. So I've been in frequent touch with him. He just sent me this newest book. If you'd like a little light reading, I'd be glad to lend it to you. [Laughter.] Can you imagine?

Kasper: You can hardly lift it.

Kirkpatrick: Well, it's—and it hasn't been that well reviewed.

Kasper: Which one is this now. The World—

Kirkpatrick: The Second World War. That's all. I'm reading How War Came by Donald Cameron Watts which was reviewed as being a far better, more important book than this one. But Martin is a very prolific writer. I don't know how he turns out as many books as he does. This is only 764 pages without the index.

Kasper: And he is a British historian, is that correct?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Yes. He was a fellow there at Oxford. But he's now in London.

Kasper: And he's very generous with words, I can see that.

Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes.

Kasper: Now, when you were in London and one of the first things you mentioned was The Whitehall Letter that you were writing with Victor Gordon Lennox and Graham Hutton.

Kirkpatrick: Yes, who was on the Economist.

Kasper: How often did that Letter appear?

Kirkpatrick: Once a week.

Kasper: Once a week.

Kirkpatrick: Once a week.

Kasper: How many pages did it consist of?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, it varied. It ran from maybe four legal sized pages on both sides, four to five to six, depending on what the situation was.

Kasper: And it was just the three of you who wrote the material in it?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Gathered it and Victor and I did most of the writing. Graham would come in with the economic news.

Kasper: I understand it was quite influential—that Churchill himself may have read it.

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: And Anthony Eden read it.

Kirkpatrick: He subscribed to it. The Danish government sent it to all their embassies. A great many people in the opposition—not necessarily the Labour Party (I don't think any of the Labour Party people took it)—but many of the Tories who were opposed to Chamberlain took it and a number of people in this country. I haven't got the list. I don't think I ever had it. We cabled it, and

Page 28

my brother printed it here and distributed it. We charged quite a lot for it. There was only one other newsletter at that time and that was Commander King Hall who had a kind of political newsletter.

Kasper: Out of Britain too, out of London?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. But newsletters were very new and I'm not sure whether—

Kasper: You mean the whole concept of political newsletters.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Of newsletters.

Kasper: The I.F. Stone kind of thing.

Kirkpatrick: I don't know whether Kiplinger was going then or not.

Kasper: No. Or I.F. Stone or—

Kirkpatrick: Oh, no, he was much later.

Kasper: He was later, right. But it's that same family of political newsletter.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. And we kept it going until, oh, probably, late 1939 or mid-1940, when it became clear that it was no longer of any merit, partly because of censorship and also things had developed and our sources of what was happening on the Continent were less good than they'd been obviously before that. Field Marshall Mannerheim in Finland took it. Interesting, interesting group of people. And we clearly pointed out what was in Mein Kampf and what the Germans were doing in gradually—economically, first of all—moving into southeast Europe and the Balkans and becoming the dominant factor in the economies of those countries. And then, of course, moving into Austria with the Anschluss and later into Czechoslovakia. The weekends when Chamberlain was flying to Germany to meet Hitler, Victor Gordon Lennox went at the same time with the press, and I was left to try to put the thing together while this was going on. It was wild.

Kasper: Writing the stories, seeing it printed, seeing it distributed—all the effort.

Kirkpatrick: Well, it was not mimeographed, but it was sort of that kind of a process.

Kasper: Was this the same place where the three of you, well, I'm assuming the three of you, or at least where you worked on commentaries that have now been attributed to your prescient ability to predict the war? I mean, were these pieces where, for instance, you saw the Munich Pact not as something wonderful but rather as something terrible.

Kirkpatrick: Well, I wrote a book on the subject.

Kasper: That, I know, but that was a little bit later, wasn't it? That was 1938?

Kirkpatrick: Well, that was Munich in '38.

Kasper: That's true.

Kirkpatrick: I wrote it right after Munich.

Kasper: And you wrote it right after. Right.

Kirkpatrick: In about three weeks.

Kasper: You wrote the book in three weeks?

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: Now, you're talking about This Terrible Peace, is that correct?

Page 29

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: That was printed by Rich and Cowan in London, is that correct?

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: Tell us about that.

Kirkpatrick: Well, I felt very strongly about Munich. I mean, I was emotionally involved in the Munich decision. The Czechs had one of the best armies in Europe at the time. Traditionally, in military terms, whoever dominates the Bohemian Arch (this is talking before atom bombs and things like that) can militarily control the whole of that part of eastern Europe. When the Germans acquired the whole of Czechoslovakia, this made them militarily almost invincible.

Kasper: It's that whole sweep of territory that comes down—is that why it's called the arch?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. It's the Bohemian Arch.

Kasper: It comes down sort of west to east and then back west again.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. And, of course, the Czech Army. The British and the French had a pact with Czechoslovakia which obligated them to go to their defense. The British sold the Czechs out. There were a great many in Britain who felt that Britain had double-crossed the Czechs by selling them out. Runciman was sent to Prague to negotiate. Initially it was a small portion: Sudetenland. Then Hitler, of course, promised that if only he got the Sudetenland where there were Germans, that that would be the end of it. Of course, having got that, he swallowed the rest of the country. I mean, it was obvious that that would be Hitler's plan. I mean, anybody who followed closely the German press or had read Mein Kampf was fully aware of Hitler's goal.

There was a member of the German embassy in London, Eddie von Seltzam, who was married to an American. He was very definitely not a Nazi, and we used to get quite a good deal of information from him. Then, at the time of Munich, I had a very good friend who was the diplomatic correspondent of the Sunday Times, which was owned by Lord Kelmsley, whose brother owned the Daily Telegraph. Correspondent Richard was mobilized (they had partial mobilization at the time of Munich). I took over his job as the diplomatic correspondent temporarily while this mobilization lasted. It gave me a marvelous insight into how news was manipulated. I worked very hard on those weekends. I would see Roland de Margerie at the French Embassy and then I would see Jan Masaryk, the Czech Ambassador, and later I would talk to people in the Foreign Office, and anyone at Number 10 Downing Street who was available. Then I would put together the piece for Sunday's paper on where things stood. Everything happened on weekends—Hitler always operated on weekends. Then I discovered that after I had done so, the editor would take it around to Number 10 Downing Street, and edit it to suit the Prime Minister. The editing was done to be read in Berlin. French newspapers were known to be political, but I hadn't expected it to be the case in Britain. I'm sure the Times was similarly edited. The Daily Telegraph was the leading conservative newspaper and this was known to reflect pretty much the government's point of view—and it sure did.

Kasper: It sure did. And you know how.

Kirkpatrick: That's right.

Kasper: How did you have access to all these sources?

Kirkpatrick: Well, the normal contacts of a journalist. I knew those I have cited.

Kasper: But why didn't they turn you away?

Kirkpatrick: Why would they? It was in the interests of those whom they represented to get the facts out.

Page 30

Kasper: Well, because they might not want to share this kind of information with you. I mean, who were you anyway? You know that kind of thing.

Kirkpatrick: I was becoming known as a serious journalist. They knew me. I had very good contacts in London.

Kasper: How did you have such good contacts in London?

Kirkpatrick: Well, partly because the first two years I was there, I really didn't know many Americans and Victor had excellent contacts. And then, socially one saw them.

Kasper: Ditchley was a place where things really connected for you, presumably, I mean, all the people out there.

Kirkpatrick: Well, to a certain extent, but London also. Roland de Margerie was the minister in the French embassy—not the ambassador, the minister—and very, very knowledgeable.

Kasper: And did you speak French with him? Did that get you in the door too?

Kirkpatrick: No, I don't think I did. He spoke very good English. And Jan Masaryk was a marvelous character, and, of course, delighted to tell the Czech side of the story. And the Foreign Office, well, we had regular contacts at the Foreign Office with the press officer there or other people that one knew.

Kasper: Well, I'm intrigued because one of the things you said this morning was how you're really a very private and shy person, and yet, at the same time, you're a very social person. Clearly, you enjoy interesting people and good parties and getting around and traveling and so forth and seeing what was going on.

Kirkpatrick: Well, I meant shy in the sense of sort of waiting three or four minutes to get up enough nerve to call Mr. Snooks and say I want to talk to you about something or other. It always seemed to me an intrusion.

Kasper: Into people's lives.

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: But then again, you were intrigued enough by the goings on—

Kirkpatrick: Well, it was my job to do so.

Kasper: Well, you didn't have to do it—well, it was a job, yes, but obviously you had a lot of native curiosity too that overcame whatever shyness you might have had.

Kirkpatrick: Oh, of course.

Kasper: And so you were able to get in the door nonetheless.

Kirkpatrick: [William Maxwell Aitken] Beaverbrook I got to know fairly well, and he was a character, a real character, and a—a rather sleazy one in many ways.

Kasper: Why is that?

Kirkpatrick: Well, when things looked blackest for Britain during the war, Beaverbrook suddenly became, again, a Canadian. He was a Canadian by birth and he talked about "we" meaning Canada. Whereas, the rest of the time, he was British! He'd been Minister of Aircraft Production. I remember one of my less objective leads in a story was, "Max Beaverbrook having been named Minister of Aircraft Production, aircraft production is likely to go down." [Laughter.] That was because he and Ernest Bevin were at the sword's point. Bevin was Minister of Labor and Beaverbrook had to count on Bevin to provide the manpower.

No, the first couple of years that I was in London, before the war actually started, I knew a great many of these people, thanks, largely, to Victor and his

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contacts, and social life where I met them. I went to all the parties, especially the social events surrounding the coronation in 1937.

Kasper: Oh, is that right?

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: That must have been fun.

Kirkpatrick: It was great. Except for the climate. I was in evening clothes many nights and I had an apartment that had no heat except for a very small electric stove. It was so cold. This was before they had coped with the fog and these yellow fogs would roll in. It was bitter cold and dank, you know. And I'd have to dress to go out to dinner in evening clothes.

Kasper: In strapless whatevers.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. And wished that I had a fur-lined evening dress.

Kasper: Right. [Laughter.]

Kirkpatrick: So the contacts the first couple of years there stood me in very good stead when I worked for the Chicago Daily News which wasn't until—

Kasper: 1939?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Late August 1939. Bill Stoneman, the Bureau Chief there, called me up and said, "How would you like to come and work?" And I said, "Fine." Because I knew that if war came there would be a problem about staying in London.

Kasper: Why?

Kirkpatrick: Well, because the Americans were evacuated—anyone who didn't have an essential job.

Kasper: Would have to leave.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Well, they didn't have to, but the pressures were great to do so. Mrs. Shipley started cancelling passports. She was the head of passports.

Kasper: Who?

Kirkpatrick: Oh! Mrs. Shipley.

Kasper: Mrs. Shipley?

Kirkpatrick: In the State Department. She was really the demon in charge of passports. She made life miserable for lots of people. She was responsible for more divorces because she refused to let wives stay—cancelled their passports. I never went home for lecture tours without having an ironbound guarantee that my passport wouldn't be picked up.

Kasper: Who was Mrs. Shipley? Where did she get all that power?

Kirkpatrick: She was head of Immigration and Naturalization in the State Department—the bureau which issues passports.

Kasper: For the U.S. State Department. How did she have so much power? I mean, how did she get to that position?

Kirkpatrick: Well, she had it. She had it. I guess she had support on the Hill. Later, McCarthy, put in his candidate—Frances Knight.

Kasper: I see. Did she cancel passports on the basis of political decisionmaking, or did she follow some rules?

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Kirkpatrick: Well, as they can be cancelled today. For example, if you went to Cuba without permission—

Kasper: Authorization, right.

Kirkpatrick: —your passport could be picked up.

Kasper: It sounds like she went a little overboard, out of bounds, as it were.

Kirkpatrick: Well. No, I think it was perfectly legitimate, in a sense.

But, at any rate, Bill called and asked me so I went down, and I did mostly go'fer for a time, you know, just gathering information and bringing it back to Bill who did the writing. Then the Windsors came back. (Julia Edwards has got this all mixed up in her book.)

Kasper: Well, here's your chance to straighten it out.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. The Windsors came back to Britain from Paris.

Kasper: You're talking about the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor. And he was looking, you know, for a job, so to speak. So I said to Bill, "Would you like me to get an interview with the Windsors?" And he looked at me witheringly and said, "Well don't you suppose that if it were possible Bill Hillman, who knows them intimately, would have had it?" And I said, "Well, nevertheless, I know where they're staying." "Well," he said, "go ahead, but you won't get one." So I went down. They were staying in the country with the Metcalfs—and I went down and I saw them. And the Duke said, "You know, I'm terribly sorry, but I did say that I wouldn't give any interviews while I was here." I apparently looked rather crestfallen, and he said, "But I didn't say I wouldn't interview anybody. Why don't I interview you?" So, I went back and wrote about being interviewed by the Duke of Windsor.

Kasper: Was that your first story for the—

Kirkpatrick: That was the first story winging its way to Chicago.

Kasper: —for the Chicago Daily News?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. And I had already signed a contract for a lecture tour and had the second book coming out so that I was due to come back here at the end of '39 or the beginning of January of '40 to do a lecture tour. So I came back and one of the early lectures was in Chicago in the ballroom of the Palmer House for the Council on Foreign Affairs. This was my first contact with the paper. In the meantime, Carroll Binder had come over to London in '39 and I had met him. He was the foreign editor and he was a dear. So he sort of shepherded me around the office. And my first meeting was with Paul Scott Mowrer, the editor, whom I had met once in Geneva. He was a rather awesome figure and rather taciturn and he sat as his desk, and I remember, turning his pencil over and saying, "I like your stuff, but we don't have women on the foreign staff." And this went on all the way along until I went up to see Knox.

Kasper: Who was the publisher?

Kirkpatrick: The publisher was Colonel Frank Knox—later Secretary of the Navy. And Carroll Binder went with me and the Colonel repeated what had become sort of a litany: "I like your stuff but we don't have women on the foreign staff." And Carroll said, "Well, Colonel, you know, the UP is trying to get her." I think it was absolutely made up out of whole cloth. They never tried to get me. I think he just made it up. I don't know. But the Colonel said, "Well, we can't have that. Let's have lunch." And that was end of the discussion. It never came up again. They never had any more women. And that was that.

Kasper: And in the Julia Edwards book, she reports that you said something to Colonel Knox about how "I can't change my sex, but you can change your policy."

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Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: Do you remember saying that?

Kirkpatrick: I guess so.

Kasper: You do. And so, what you're saying is, that since he never brought it up again, he made an exception for you, is that the idea?

Kirkpatrick: Well, that's clearly what it was. There was no question about it. Then I had to go off and the next day speak to this enormous audience in the ballroom of the Palmer House. It was a luncheon and I remember thinking, "Well, I'll have just another swallow of coffee," and the coffee spilling in the saucer.

Kasper: Because your hand was shaking.

Kirkpatrick: Yes, shaking so, and—

Kasper: Well, you were only thirty years old.

Kirkpatrick: Well, that's not—

Kasper: I mean you were, you know, a babe.

Kirkpatrick: That's not that young. The NBC man, Clifford Utley, whose son, Garrick, is now in broadcasting, was handling the controls. He said he had to change the voice level three times because my voice was so quavery at the beginning. That was because all of the Chicago Daily News hierarchy was there, and it was a little terrifying.

Kasper: And this was the Foreign Policy Association that was sponsoring it?

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: And you were presumably talking about conditions in Europe.

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: Had Poland been invaded yet?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes.

Kasper: Yes. But you were talking about—

Kirkpatrick: Oh, the war had started, except that it was called the phony war because there really was nothing happening on land. The submarines were out; there were some sea skirmishes, but there were no real land fighting. I mean, the British and the French took no aggressive action against the Germans, and the Germans didn't do anything because Hitler really didn't want to fight Britain. He had great admiration for England, and he also was working secretly to try and get the Windsors—who were allegedly pro-German. And he had people in touch with them by that time; they were back in Lisbon on their way to Bermuda—was it Bermuda? Yes.

Kasper: Bermuda's British.

Kirkpatrick: And that was a whole chapter that we didn't really know anything about at the time, but it's been fully documented since.

Kasper: What's that?

Kirkpatrick: Well, that the Germans—

Kasper: That he was trying to connect with the Windsors.

Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes, and that they did connect in Lisbon.

Kasper: Were they in fact pro-Nazi? Has it ever been established clearly?

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Kirkpatrick: No, I don't think you could say that. I think Windsor was a weak character that perhaps like some British thought war was unnecessary—that one could accommodate, you know, Hitler. That war was—

Kasper: Avoidable.

Kirkpatrick: Avoidable. And there were those. But there was never, in my view, anything like the "Cliveden set," but there were people who thought that war was avoidable, including of course, Chamberlain, who right up to the last minute was certain that you could trust Hitler, he said, that nothing would happen. It was a very naïve attitude.

Kasper: In that talk at the Palmer House, did you come out quite bluntly about what you saw as the future for the war in Europe?

Kirkpatrick: Probably.

Kasper: You don't remember?

Kirkpatrick: I've got the text somewhere—in Northhampton, I guess. Yes, I think so.

Kasper: Did you startle anybody? Do you remember getting responses that people were quite upset or surprised by what you said?

Kirkpatrick: Well, and I talked of course about rationing and the extent to which women were in the services and in factories, although it was just beginning at that time. And I remember speaking somewhere else in Chicago, and riding down in the elevator with some women who'd been at the lecture and who didn't know I was in the elevator, saying, "Well, I don't care. I'm not prepared to do without this or that. It's nonsense, you know."

Kasper: Oh, dear.

Kirkpatrick: Also, of course, during the spring of 1940 Ditchley, in one sense, was sort of a center. I was there one weekend when there were a number of members of Parliament, dissidents who were anti-Chamberlain and who wanted Churchill to come in (who felt Chamberlain had made a mess at Munich and he was not the man who should lead Britain in war) and they were all discussing it. (I have a list of the names of them—I made a note of that.) And we were all sitting out, it was a beautiful spring day, and I was just sitting there listening to them argue about, you know, the timing and how one dealt with getting Chamberlain out and so on and so forth. And Nancy Tree, who had been off in the garden, came dancing through and said, "Listen, all you people, talk is so cheap, why don't you make up your minds. You know what you should do, now go and do it." And the following week, indeed, they did. They voted against Mr. Chamberlain and voted him out of office.

Kasper: Thanks to Nancy Tree. [Laughter.] Somewhat.

Kirkpatrick: Somewhat.

Kasper: Or at least it makes a good story. She pushed them—

Kirkpatrick: She pushed them—

Kasper: —over the brink perhaps.

Kirkpatrick: They knew they were going to have to. Duff Cooper was there. Jim Thomas. These were members of Parliament. And Duff Cooper, of course, had resigned as a result of Munich. And Lord Cranborne—Robert E. Cranborne—who had been a minister, he resigned. Dick Law, the son of Bonar Law (a former Prime Minister) who was an MP—I don't think he had any office at the time. I don't think Eden was there, but that group of people, all of whom I knew and I sat, of course, listening with fascination. And, as a result, and Churchill probably was right in this sense, I went back and I wrote that Mr. Chamberlain would fall. And I remember Drew Middleton, who was then New York Times—just—he'd been with AP—and Drew said,

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"Well, you're out on a limb." And I said, "Yep, it's a nice heavy limb. It's not going to fall. We'll make bets." So he made a bet. And mercifully, it was right. They did vote Chamberlain out—

Kirkpatrick: Yes. This came right after defeat in Norway.

Kasper: The blockade?

Kirkpatrick: No. The Germans had gone into Norway—

[Tape interruption.]

Kasper: You know one of the things that was passed around, if you will, during this time period of war correspondents when women as journalists were new to the scene, was the notion that men who were journalists were annoyed that women had entered the ranks of journalism as war correspondents. And some people have reported that the men who were journalists often tried to undermine women journalists' access to news and even, you know, undermine the copy that they wrote and sent back home for the newspapers to print, saying that they slept around, or they had affairs with prominent people, and their contacts were a result of their promiscuity, and so forth and so on. Do you remember any of that kind of thing?

Kirkpatrick: No, I don't. And certainly none of the men correspondents whom I knew behaved in that fashion at all. The only time that I saw distinct prejudice so far as women were concerned, and I must confess, I think they asked for it, was in Algiers. The head of the Press Corps there, General McClure, came up to London and said that he wished that I would come down there because the two women who had been there had given women reporters such a bad name because they had been demanding and they'd used their femininity to get—you didn't—there was no suggestion of affairs or anything like that, but they had, according to him, just behaved in a particularly unprofessional way. And I know that their colleagues involved there were pretty tough characters and certainly didn't want them there and I think made life as uncomfortable as they could for them. So I think there were marks on both sides—against the men and against the women. But I never heard any suggestions about sleeping around.

I never saw anybody, and there were a number of women in the press in Britain. Kathy Harriman worked for INS. Everybody did everything they could to help out, to show her the way around, although she was the daughter of Averell Harriman who was then working on Lend-Lease in London. Then there were some women in the British press. I just never ran into that, but then I didn't move around in what one might call the gossipy circles, if there were any.

Kasper: Yes. It's been reported to me that you were a—

Kirkpatrick: A loner. I understood that.

Kasper: A loner. Yes. Do you feel that that's an inaccurate observation?

Kirkpatrick: Well, if that meant moving in groups of women, yes, I was then. I didn't move with groups of women. I saw the picture on the front of the Julia Edwards' book, with that group of women. Well, I never moved with a group of women into—and I never felt any discrimination. Oh, I haven't seen it. I didn't realize it was in paperback.

Kasper: This is a paperback. It's right on the front cover. And there you are.

Kirkpatrick: There I'm not.

Kasper: You're not there.

Kirkpatrick: No, of course I'm not there.

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Kasper: You're not in that picture.

Kirkpatrick: No, certainly not.

Kasper: Oh, no. You're right. It's the one on the inside that you're in.

Kirkpatrick: But not in a group.

Kasper: Not in a group. You're right. And that's true of Martha Gellhorn, too, there's a single picture of her, as well.

Kirkpatrick: That's right. No, in the first place, Martha Gellhorn and I had both been—

Kasper: That's cute.

Kirkpatrick: —both had been newspaper people before the war began and we didn't need to be led around in a group.

[End Tape 2, Side B; Begin Tape 2, Side B]

Kasper: —the Julia Edwards' book, you mentioned there's—

Kirkpatrick: Ruth Cowan, whom I knew very slightly. Sonia Tomara, who had worked for the Herald Tribune and was a first-class reporter and had worked for some years. She was no novice. I did not know Rosette Hargrove. I didn't know—Betty Knox—you say?

Kasper: Yes. The London Evening Standard.

Kirkpatrick: No. I may have seen her you know at affairs, but I don't remember. Iris Carpenter I knew and liked very much. I thought she was a first-class writer. Erica Mann, I knew slightly. The thing is, you know, you'd know these people but you wouldn't see what they wrote because it appeared back here and we didn't necessarily see what came out. But Erica Mann was a very serious person.

Kasper: And as you were saying at lunch, too, that perhaps you weren't the only so-called "loner." You said, for instance, you and Martha Gellhorn would invariably run into each other when you were reporting on material, but it doesn't mean you worked together or shared information or shared sources or anything else.

Kirkpatrick: No.

Kasper: You were reporters doing a job, and if you happened to have carried the same story, or covered the same story—do you want me to keep this?

Kirkpatrick: Yes, you can stick it in your book.

Kasper: Okay. Now these are hyperbole or errata in the Julia Edwards' book.

Kirkpatrick: Maybe I ought to send it to Julia. I don't know her address.

Kasper: I think so. Because if she's doing a revision—I have her address right with me.

Kirkpatrick: All right. I'll send it to her.

Kasper: I'll put the address on the top here. Because if there are mistakes in there—

Kirkpatrick: There are.

Kasper: —then she should correct them in the second edition. Are there any really serious ones?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I—to me—I mean, I don't know what she called Victor Gordon—something else, I don't know what it was. You know, I'm just trained to

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be accurate about names and things, and she had me interviewing the Windsors in Paris. Well, they were in England. And there were a few other things, probably not great, but I did this because this book came down here and it was in the library up there. You see, I've said, "I hope I made some small contribution as Jean Pierre contributes to the success of the Landing" (he's the maître d' in the dining room up there). [Laughter.] But that was all.

Kasper: And you say here in that observation at the bottom that she does describe you as a loner.

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: And the photo on the book's cover gives you a clue that the description came from one of that group. What do you mean by that?

Kirkpatrick: I don't—well, who else? I don't know who else would make that comment. None of the men would.

Kasper: That's true.

Kirkpatrick: I wasn't a loner with them.

Kasper: That's true. And you just went on to say, "I didn't move about in groups of women, some of whom I liked and respected," just as you said, Tomara, Carpenter, Mann. And I think the point is well taken, that—I mean, there was no association of women war correspondents. You were all new to the field and you were all there to do a job and you maybe ran into each other, but it didn't mean you necessarily associated with each other. Isn't that what you're saying?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. No, there was the Association of American Correspondents in London, and we were American correspondents—period. No distinction. These women who were working for the British press were not members of it, obviously. But, no, there was no separate organization. As a matter of fact, when I was in Washington for the New York Post, I did not join the Women's Press Club because they were 90 percent society reporters and that wasn't my field. And the National Press Club did not admit women at that time, which was totally discriminatory because that was—is—a professional club. No, we didn't have associations of women. The Association of American Correspondents in Paris didn't have any women in when we got in there in 1944, but they soon did. We changed that.

Kasper: When you say "we," who do you mean?

Kirkpatrick: Well, men as well as any of the women. And it had been based—as Bill Byrd who is an old line reporter for, and I've forgotten for what paper—he didn't want any women in because the American Association used to have a party every year in which they had girls from the Folies Bergères coming out of pies, you know, in the middle of the table. That sort of thing.

Kasper: With almost no clothes on.

Kirkpatrick: And we said, "Well, by all means, go ahead and have it, we don't care." But, no. No, I never felt discrimination from fellow journalists.

Kasper: To the flip side of the coin, did you feel that your gender was an advantage? That being a woman got you entrée?

Kirkpatrick: No. No. No. No, I didn't feel it was an advantage. There were some who've used it to be sort of feminine, coy and so on, that I don't think were necessarily very successful as writers, but maybe they were. I don't know.

Kasper: Well, as you said before, they certainly weren't being professional and you prided yourself on your professionalism.

Kirkpatrick: Well, an example of that, when McClure told me about the episodes in Algiers, he said he wished that I would come down. Geoff Parsons of the Herald Tribune and I went down at the same time that De Gaulle went, which was logical because I'd been covering the Free French. And when we landed at Maison Blanche Airport

Page 38

in Algiers, Geoff said, "I'll call up and get them to send for us." And I said, "You can do that. I'm going to take the bus in." And I took the bus in. He went too, but he was protesting. And I went to the billeting office and was put in a terrible room right on the edge of the Casbah. Then I showed up the next day at the Press Building and Joe Phillips, the colonel in charge of press, said, "Well, where have you been? Why didn't you call?" And so on. And I said, "Well, I've got this room." "Well, we've got a room for you in the Aletti (the hotel where the press were billeted)." But I wasn't asking for any special treatment and I was sort of almost under doing it.

Kasper: So as to ingratiate yourself in another way.

Kirkpatrick: Well, no, to sort of overcome the feeling that had been left by—

Kasper: By those feminine women who needed special treatment.

Kirkpatrick: Whose names we will not mention.

Kasper: So you feel very neutral about being a woman and a war correspondent in terms of not only what your abilities and your access and your continuing coverage of war and so forth—

Kirkpatrick: I had been a correspondent before the war. I continued to be a correspondent. The war got in the way. One took it as it came. But I didn't feel that I had to change. No.

Kasper: Well, but on the other hand, you do realize that you were what we call a pioneering woman journalist. You know, whether you were a war correspondent or not, you were—

Kirkpatrick: Well, there had been others. Look there had been—what's her name?

Kasper: Sigrid Schultz?

Kirkpatrick: Sigrid Schultz in Germany long before the war. Dorothy Thompson. There were plenty. There had been—in Julia Edwards' book she talks about them.

Kasper: Yes. It's not plenty. I mean there was a small number of women as compared to a large number of men who had been journalists.

Kirkpatrick: Well, but this is true in any profession. Women only latterly come into the newspaper business in any numbers.

Kasper: Yes. Indeed. But still, nonetheless, usually breaking into a profession is not easy. And there are trials and tribulations associated with it and usually a fair amount of discrimination associated with it.

Kirkpatrick: Well, I think, being on the right spot at the right time and with luck, that's how you get there.

Kasper: You don't think you brought any special abilities—or perhaps did you?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I think I had. Yes, I had a great sense of curiosity and I always asked questions and I wanted to get the news out.

Kasper: Do you think the fact that you had no formal education as a journalist was in any way a handicap?

Kirkpatrick: Not at all. To the contrary.

Kasper: To the contrary?

Kirkpatrick: We didn't—at that time, you know, it wasn't the thing to do, necessarily, to go to a journalism school. Now, I don't think you can be a copy boy unless you've got an M.A. in journalism. But who needed to know how to put together a paper at that time in order to write for it. I found that I needed to know later

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when I was working at the Keene Sentinel as an editor. I had to put together the editorial page, and I must say I didn't know how to do it very well.

Kasper: Well how did you learn to write copy when you first started as a journalist?

Kirkpatrick: Well, there are those who say I never did learn. [Laughter.] The lead was usually the third paragraph down or buried somewhere, you know. No, I'd just—you write the way it comes.

Kasper: And you learned as you went.

Kirkpatrick: I guess. I guess. Well, I'd had good writing training in college. I think that that's important. I think to have history and I should have had economics, which I didn't, I took later in the University of Geneva. But history and economics and good English—I'm a nut on the English language and there's again where Latin, I think, was an asset. Those to me are more important than the technical side of how you put a newspaper together which today is less and less important. I did teach. Lael Wertenbaker and I divided a course at Boston University in writing for print and for broadcast. She did the books and I did newspapers and broadcasting. They were mostly seniors and graduate students—four hours a week—four.

Kasper: Great. Wow.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. It was tough.

Kasper: It's heavy.

Kirkpatrick: But it was fun. Great fun. The difference between writing for print and writing for broadcast is very different.

Kasper: Oh, extraordinarily. Yes. Who would you say your mentors were then? And when you began? Was there anybody whose style or copy you admired that you were trying to either imitate or—

Kirkpatrick: Not consciously.

Kasper: Not consciously.

Kirkpatrick: No, no, no. Today, I have E.B. White at my elbow.

Kasper: Strunk and White?

Kirkpatrick: Yes, but E.B. White's letters. I find if I pick that up and read a number of pages and I sit down to write a letter, it's vastly improved.

Kasper: It flows.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. No, he's great. No, actually broadcasting—yes, Ed Murrow, because I used to do broadcasts in London.

Kasper: For?

Kirkpatrick: For the BBC and I also broadcast to France quite regularly. I can't think what I said to them, and it was probably in pretty bad French, but Ed Murrow said that I was probably the worst broadcaster he had ever heard, without exception. So when in 1949 I went on to the Voice of America, I called Ed up and said, "What about—?" He said, "Come over and we'll go to work." And so, for about two hours he taught me how to broadcast. I'd been doing it for some time, but clearly not the way I should have been.

Kasper: Let's turn this off for a second.

[Tape interruption.]

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Kasper: Okay, at this point you want to put in some things that have been on your mind, is that right?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. March, 1936. Hitler operated on weekends. Every move he made was on a weekend so that he would take the people by surprise. The chancellories were closed. People were away for the weekends. And for some reason that I do not recall, I got a clue that he was going to pull something off on this particular weekend in March. So I got up at a very early hour on Sunday morning.

Kasper: Do you remember what year this was?

Kirkpatrick: It was 1936. And drove up with a friend of mine and we left Basle, Switzerland, at nine Sunday morning and crossed into Germany. We'd bought a Tribune de Lausanne on the way which the German customs inspected thoroughly before they let us through. And from the frontier to Freiburg, we saw many SA cyclists and police, but there was no evidence of troops. But the road was being widened. We tried to cross over to the Rhine Bridge at Mulheim, but the road was barred and guarded. We went all the way up as far as Freiburg, which was in gala attire with Nazi flags on every building and the streets filled with soldiers, SA and SS men. There were soldiers all the way along. This was the remilitarization of the Rhineland which had been forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles. But it was very clear, to me at least, in seeing this that they were very tentative. They hadn't pulled them right out to the very border of the Rhine. They were back and in such a position that they could withdraw quickly if there were any opposition.

Then we came down and crossed the Kehl Bridge at Strasbourg and went up the French side along the Maginot Line where the French were lazying around. Nothing was happening. And we followed from north Breisach down to Basle and the impression was decidedly one of war: trenches, fortifications, thousands of soldiers. Many of the local men had been called the day before, and at two towns there were large numbers of anti-aircraft and long-range guns. Trucks of French soldiers were scattered all along the road and no one was allowed beyond the first barbed wire lines of which we took a picture from the car. The French and the British consulted each other and decided that, well, nothing had happened so they wouldn't do anything. They were obligated, really, to enforce it. And they didn't. And if they had, I think that there's no question that the Germans would have pulled back because they were not ready for a confrontation. But neither were the French or the British. That was in March of 1936.

In April of 1936, I went to Berlin and I stayed with the Riddlebergers. They'd been in Geneva. He'd been in the consulate, one of the political observers, and he was now in the embassy in Berlin. Millie Riddleberger was Dutch, had grown up in Java, and was a very free spirit. The Nazis would come around and knock on the door and ask for saving your aluminum cans or whatever it was, metal, and so on, and she'd tell them to go to hell. One wondered how long they were going to survive in that. The atmosphere was really—you had to have been there to know it—you could cut it with a knife.

There was a press ball given by the German Foreign Office Press Corps, or Press Office, and I went with Wally Duell and his wife. He was with the Chicago Daily News. Ralph Barnes of the Herald Tribune, another old friend. This was in 1936 and yet everyone there was fully conscious that this was building up towards war—there was no question about it. You had the feeling far more than one did later in Russia of being scared to death until you got out of Germany. At the border, coming down, you had to be cross-examined as to how much money you had in marks or in dollars or in Swiss francs. They were all very unpleasant about it. At the Dutch border, the German officials were perturbed that I had no currency papers. But they finally—didn't make any difficulty.

"A man, a Britisher who was on the train (there were lots of SS and Reichswehr officers on a platform in Cologne), and Dr. Simpson, who was with Imperial Chemicals, was very, very, pro-Nazi and cautious, until we got to the border. Then he turned around completely. But you didn't dare open your mouth in Germany. That was the feeling that we had. As soon as we had crossed the Dutch frontier, Dr. Simpson began talking and contradicted all his previously expressed views on the Nazis. He said, his personal mail was always opened, but the business stuff, never. He had to go to England every three months because it was impossible to write the

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reports required from Germany and mail them out. He cited a case in his Mannheim factory of an explosion the previous week in which fourteen workmen were killed—fortunately, for if any had lived, cold weather would have killed them off at once—the effects of the fumes on the lungs and mucous membranes. This was clearly chemical warfare. Of course, the Germans were preparing for war—this being a chemical factory. And I got back to Switzerland. I have no idea, really, why I went, but I went up. And then I went to Holland to see my former roommate who had married a Dutchman and stayed with her a while."

Kasper: Now, are these notes you're reading from, or are these articles that you wrote? Was this copy?

Kirkpatrick: These are my notes. No, these are notes. So-called diary. I never kept a diary, but every once in a while I'd write a long description of recent trips.

Kasper: Did any of the material that you're reading or any of the material from that trip become a column or something?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I had—this was in 1936, and I had no real outlet. I went back and reported it to people like Clarence Streit of the New York Times or anyone that I ran into who had a feeling for news. Just as at the League Assembly that year, which was held in a musical auditorium in Geneva, the main speech was over and people were moving around and most of the press had gone out from the press gallery and I was still there when a Czech stood up—this was in 1936—he stood up and said, "Czechoslovakia is going to be next on the list," and shot himself right there in the Assembly. And then one of my news friends dashed out to tell them what's going on. It was frustrating not having an outlet, but, you know, I only acquired that later.

Then I was going to come to 1940 when I came back to this country for a lecture tour. I stopped in Rome, as I told you, on my way staying with the Noel Charles (British Minister) and sat up until much too late getting all the news from him. When I got on the Italian liner, which I think was the Conta di Savoia, I'm not sure, at any rate, I took my typewriter and sat down on the deck chair and started writing. Almost immediately I had an Italian officer from the ship sitting down to chat with me and this kept happening. I had to give up. So I finally went down to my state room and wrote an account to go back to Victor for The Whitehall Letter, and I got this full report on what I'd learned from Noel Charles. I had gotten it all written and I wrote a covering letter to Charles Peak in the Foreign Office in London, and addressed it to him at the Foreign Office, and when we were stopped at Gibraltar by the British for inspection, I went to where the British officer was with the Captain of the ship and I knocked on the door and went in. I handed this to the British officer, who said, "Oh, yes. Thank you." And he put it in his pocket. If he'd been an American, he have said, "Well, what's this? What do you—?" you know. But not a question—and it went in his pocket and it was in London the next day.

Kasper: Amazing.

Kirkpatrick: And I found that was true when I got back to Washington from having been in Berlin and in Rome and so on. Was there anyone in the State Department interested? Nobody. Not a soul. The British Embassy was very interested.

Kasper: The British Embassy in Washington?

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: But the British officer that stuck it in his pocket, are you saying he was disinterested or he was—?

Kirkpatrick: No, no, no. He said, "Thank you very much," and he put it in his pocket. If it had been an American, he would have said, "What was this, you know?" Well, I'm making it up, but this is the impression that I had—lack of interest on the part of Americans. Well, it carried on much later when Beedle Smith came back from being ambassador to Moscow. Nobody in the State Department asked him a single question (after the war).

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Kasper: Well, we were in an isolationist posture.

Kirkpatrick: No, this is after the war.

Kasper: This is 1940, you're saying.

Kirkpatrick: That was. But I'm saying that this continues.

Kasper: It continues. I see.

Kirkpatrick: Lack of—not interested, "we have our own sources" is the official U.S. attitude.

Kasper: So why do you think they discounted you? Because you were a journalist?

Kirkpatrick: Who?

Kasper: These people who discounted the material that you had.

Kirkpatrick: Nobody discounted it. No, I'm saying that if it had been an American, the attitude of American officials at almost any time was of disinterest. Not just to me.

Kasper: Not just to you.

Kirkpatrick: No, Beedle Smith had been ambassador, and they never bothered to asked him questions. But the British always were interested. When I got back from the Berlin trip, I was in London and Robert Vansittart—who was the permanent head of the Foreign Office, a brilliant man, very anti-German, anti-Nazi, anti-Munich—called me up and wanted me to come and talk to him and tell him everything I saw in Berlin. And no American was interested.

Kasper: Was interested at all.

Kirkpatrick: No, "we have our people in Berlin." "We know," is the U.S. attitude.

Kasper: And who were their people in Berlin?

Kirkpatrick: At the embassy—

Kasper: The embassy?

Kirkpatrick: And they're probably all right, but, you know, the difference in attitude.

Kasper: To what do you attribute the difference in attitude?

Kirkpatrick: Well, it's a—I don't know—having been in the State Department, I don't know—It's just a—well—"we can take care of it." The British have a much greater interest in picking up intelligence. I used to think that every Britain was born with an MI5 number on his wrist, you know.

Kasper: So he could be trailed or tracked?

Kirkpatrick: No, so he would report. [Laughter.] No I think—and my brother has been in intelligence most of his life in the CIA, and he's written several books on intelligence—and I think both of us have this strong feeling of the importance of intelligence, of knowing what's going on and finding out from people, asking them what they've seen, what they've heard. Then you evaluate it as to whether it's of real interest or not. But that—I was struck by the attitude of the British officer at Gibraltar, who didn't know who I was from Adam—but, "oh, yes, thank you," and he put it in his pocket. The Italian captain looking on.

Kasper: Or over your shoulder as you were typing.

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Kirkpatrick: And, of course, the Italians had been dying to know what I was up to. They were curious anyway.

Kasper: But not the Americans.

Kirkpatrick: No.

Kasper: Totally disinterested. That lecture tour that you came back on in 1940, you were then promoting your second book, isn't that correct?

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: Under the British Umbrella.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. The first one was published only in Britain.

Kasper: Right. And the second one, what was that about?

Kirkpatrick: Under the British Umbrella? I think it's a very childish account of the British, of what they're like.

Kasper: You mean what their personalities are like?

Kirkpatrick: Well, the whole way the country is run and so and so forth.

Kasper: And what kinds of things did you focus on?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I don't know. I'd have to look at it and tell you. I haven't read it lately. I gave it to someone here the other day who wanted—

[Tape interruption.]

Kirkpatrick: —legends.

Kasper: What's the subtitle again? Let me see. Under the British Umbrella: What the English Are and How They Go to War. Helen P. Kirkpatrick. And it was published by Scribners in 1939.

Kirkpatrick: And it got good reviews.

Kasper: And it got good reviews. That's nice. So the chapters here are: "In Transition"—What is that, in transition between the wars, is that what that is?

Kirkpatrick: No. Between peace and war—I suppose.

Kasper: Between peace and war. "Westminster Roundabout." "Whitehall Parade." "Britain's Press: Its Lords and Legends." "The Muddle Through Policy." What does that refer to, do you know?

Kirkpatrick: The British: "we always muddle through," you know, "we don't really have a policy, we muddle through." "We'll make out, we'll muddle through."

Kasper: "British Statesman: Sir John Simon." Who was Sir John Simon?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, he was a cabinet member in Baldwin's and Chamberlain's governments, and he was the one who was involved in the dealings with Mussolini and with the Spanish. A tricky man. Nobody really trusted him. It was said that he would go up to a member of Parliament and say, "My dear, John," when he was talking to James or something. He always got things a little bit wrong.

Kasper: "A New King, a New Prime Minister, and a New Ambassador"—that must have been the coronation in what was it, in 1937?

Kirkpatrick: In 1937, yes.

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Kasper: "Chamberlain Takes Charge." "British Renaissance." "Europe Moves Towards War." "Britain Goes to War." And then the last chapter is, "The World of Tomorrow." Now why do you say it was childish?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I don't know, it just struck me that way, looking at it now.

Kasper: You mean in later years when you look back on it?

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: Well, you were only thirty years old when you wrote it.

Kirkpatrick: Well, I should know better.

Kasper: You mean then to write a book at thirty? [Laughter.] When you say it was well received, where was it well received? What kind of reviews—?

Kirkpatrick: It was reviewed in the New York Times.

Kasper: Oh, that's nice.

Kirkpatrick: Book Review, by—what's his name? I don't know. No, it got good reviews. I've got a scrapbook that has all the reviews of This Terrible Peace and of Under the British Umbrella.

Kasper: Oh, I'd like to see that.

Kirkpatrick: Well, it's in Northhampton.

Kasper: Oh, of course. I came too late.

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: I have to go back up to the Sophia Smith Collection to have a look-see.

Kirkpatrick: Right. The clip books are all there, too. And other papers.

Kasper: What prompted you to write these two books?

Kirkpatrick: Well, the book on Munich, I just felt so strongly about it that I had to. And then I proceeded to collapse thereafter.

Kasper: Why?

Kirkpatrick: I don't know. I couldn't keep food down. I couldn't sleep. I called Victor up in the middle of the night one night and said—which I don't remember—he said the next day that I called up and said, "I'm in the Chancery and I can't find Hitler." Oh, yes. Ohhh.

Kasper: Oh, you were really into it.

Kirkpatrick: Yes, I was. And I had a Czech doctor who put me into what they called a nursing home, which we would call a private hospital, and his instructions were that I was to have no radio, no newspapers, no telephone calls, and the nurse was to stay in the room if I had any visitors, and if they started talking politics, get them out. Then he sent me home and said for a month I wasn't to look at a newspaper or listen to a radio.

Kasper: Well that's sort of a post-traumatic disorder of some kind.

Kirkpatrick: I was just—I would call it a nervous breakdown, except I didn't feel I had a breakdown. I just couldn't keep any food down, you know, and I felt very strongly about it.

Kasper: And you were frightened, presumably, as well.

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Kirkpatrick: No. I wasn't frightened, I was mad. And Chamberlain had This Terrible Peace banned from the W.H. Smith book stalls in the stations.

Kasper: He banned the book.

Kirkpatrick: Well, he didn't—we couldn't say that he signed an order, but he saw that W.H. Smith did not carry it.

Kasper: Isn't that something.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. And it got great—interesting reviews in London, a great many reviews. One of which said, "This is an American's resentment at British failure to pull American chestnuts out of the Czechoslovakian fire." How is that?

Kasper: Oh, lord. Heavy-handed prose, to say the least. [Laughter.] Oh, my.

Kirkpatrick: It's not a bad book, actually, considering that this was written at a time when there were no documents available and nothing to—

Kasper: To support your arguments.

Kirkpatrick: Right. That's right.

Kasper: And then what prompted you to write this book, Under the British Umbrella?

Kirkpatrick: I guess my agent, who had gotten me a contract with Scribners, and I had Maxwell Perkins as the editor.

Kasper: Oh, how lovely. Lucky you.

Kirkpatrick: Oh, it was heaven. I didn't really fully understand at the time how lucky I was. And my agent also called Colston Leigh and said, I have a new lecturer for you, and she was telling him, and he said, "I've never heard of her." And she said, "That all right, you will. Give her a contract." She was quite an operator, Carol Hill.

Kasper: So they sponsored your lecture tour, is that—?

Kirkpatrick: Colston Leigh. Well, he was the top man who handled lecturers. This was a period in which lectures were the thing to do, you know. All the women's clubs and the town halls, and Council on Foreign Relations, and so on, they always had lectures. And they paid well. I did seventy-two in six weeks, the first tour.

Kasper: Seventy-two lectures in six weeks? You must have been very tired.

Kirkpatrick: It was like, if this is Tuesday, I'm in Omaha. I never knew where I was going to be until I looked at the schedule.

Kasper: Oh, poor you. And after you left there, you went back to London, correct?

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: And that was when—in 1940?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. I went back on The Manhattan. Dorothy Thompson also was going to Italy. It was the only way you could go. You could go either through Lisbon or through Italy, because Italy wasn't in the war at the time.

Kasper: So you sailed back to Rome.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. And then went up to Paris where I met De Gaulle.

Kasper: How did you meet De Gaulle?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I went into see Roland de Margerie who had been in the French Embassy in London, and he was working then for Paul Reynaud, who was the Prime Minister. And Reynaud had brought De Gaulle back from commanding a tank division

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to be deputy minister of defense. The army had never listened to De Gaulle on the subject of the use of tanks. The Germans had, however. But it was too late at that point. The German offensive started on the 10th of May. This was in April. And De Gaulle had only been back there a short time.

Kasper: It was too late for him to do anything about France falling.

Kirkpatrick: Oh, sure. Oh, yes. He had a perfectly good war record, but the French were fighting the last war. You know, here they were on the Maginot Line and the Germans, of course, just swung around it—and over it.

Kasper: When you met with De Gaulle, what did you talk about? Do you remember?

Kirkpatrick: No. He's not a great conversationalist. You don't make small talk.

Kasper: Presumably you spoke in French with him, is that correct?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Yes. It must have been trying for him. [Laughter.]

Kasper: Did you write copy based on the interview?

Kirkpatrick: I don't remember.

Kasper: Whether you wrote a story or not.

Kirkpatrick: I don't remember. Probably, when I got back to London. I wouldn't have done it from Paris because that was Edgar Mowrer's bailiwick.

Kasper: He was there, at the London bureau.

Kirkpatrick: No. He was in the Paris bureau.

Kasper: I mean in the Paris bureau. Right.

Kirkpatrick: So I wouldn't have trod on his toes.

Kasper: Why is it that Roosevelt was not fond of De Gaulle? What was the conflict there?

Kirkpatrick: Well, in the first place, St. Pierre et Miquelon, those islands off Canada, De Gaulle had sent some of his people there, and Roosevelt didn't think he should have. We'd rather handle that ourselves, you know. Also, De Gaulle was a feisty character and he didn't take direction well. In fact, Churchill found him very difficult. He once said, "The heaviest burden I have to bear is the Cross of Lorraine."

Kasper: Oh, right. I remember that. Yes.

Kirkpatrick: And then he also said, in his inimitable French, to De Gaulle, when he was trying persuade him to do something, and De Gaulle was not having any of it, he said, "Si vous m'obstructerez, je vous liquidatorez."* [Laughter.]

Kasper: I'm sure had he said it English it would have been better. Same words. I mean— [Laughter.]

Kirkpatrick: I would think De Gaulle couldn't help but laugh.

Kasper: He'd probably couldn't have been more offended.

Kirkpatrick: But he couldn't have—he didn't have any sense of humor, I think.

Kasper: No. And I'm sure offended he was. "Je vous liquidatorez." [Laughter.] That's terrible.

Kirkpatrick: Churchill thought he was great in French.

Kasper: Oh, he didn't realize the humor behind that.

______________________
* Meaning "If you obstruct me, I will liquidate you," but in incorrect French.

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Kirkpatrick: Oh, no.

Kasper: Oh, lord. Well, then you worked your way back to London, is that correct?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. I got back to London. And I remember crossing the English Channel with destroyers around and planes overhead. And one of them blew up a mine just to the starboard of the ferry. And everybody on it, French and English, were just, you know, it's like a May Day. Calm and cool.

Kasper: You mean they were used to it already?

Kirkpatrick: Well, they don't—you don't make a fuss about things you can't do anything about.

Kasper: How did you feel about all that?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I thought it was interesting, but I wasn't quite as cool as they were about it.

Kasper: I mean during all these things that you've—you know, this coverage of the war that you began to really participate in, did you fear for your life?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, there were times, sure. Oh, sure, in the air raids, yes.

Kasper: During the Blitz in London.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. It seemed to me that every time I took a stocking off, there was a buzz bomb overhead and I'm sure it was looking down at me. Or my toothbrush would attract them.

Kasper: They were that frequent.

Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes. Yes.

Kasper: That's awful.

Kirkpatrick: They were a nuisance. They were a nuisance.

Kasper: So what were you covering then towards the end of 1940 when you were back in London?

Kirkpatrick: Well, mostly what was going on, both politically and in the raids. I went down river with the fire brigade during the bombing of the docks and the huge fires down there. That was scary and fascinating. These two young officers who were in charge of the river part of the fire brigade—one of them said as we got down there, he said, "You know, last night I almost struck my head as I was getting out and I rather wish that I had and could have passed out and then I wouldn't have had to go and cope with it." Because it was monstrous. It was so enormous. I remember getting home that night, and I lived out in the West End, just beyond Hyde Park Corner, and I could have read a newspaper by the light of the fire, and it was way down at the docks. It lit the whole of London. And, of course, they used that to guide planes in and drop more bombs. It was pretty bad.

Kasper: And you would report that then presumably in the paper the next day.

Kirkpatrick: To the extent that one was permitted by censorship to—you couldn't be specific about where or what.

Kasper: How much censorship was there?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, everything was censored. Everything went through censorship. They were, on the whole, fairly reasonable, although we used to have arguments with them. Bill Stoneman's philosophy was, "Yell at them." And I said, "Bill, the British don't react to being yelled at." He said, "God damn. Just yell at 'em." [Laughter.] And then, he would.

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Kasper: Did you yell at them?

Kirkpatrick: No, I didn't.

Kasper: No. What did you do?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I'd just argue with them.

Kasper: Did you ever succeed in changing the censors' minds?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, sure, once in a while. The one thing that made me angry—really angry—was with this stupid Major General whom I thereafter called major.

Kasper: But not general. [Laughter.]

Kirkpatrick: Right. I was wakened one night, after eleven, by a phone call from someone who introduced himself as Commodore so-and-so, saying that the First Lord of the Admiralty wanted to see me. Who is this at that hour of the night who wanted to see me? It seemed highly improbable. I thought of Ed Beatty and Drew Middleton and Bill Stoneman—that one of them said, "let's get the old girl out and see what she's up to." And I was to meet him in front of this club in St. James Square and he would take me over to the Admiralty. Well, I knew that clubs were not open at that hour of the night. It seemed very unlikely. So I said, "Yes, fine," and hung up and went back to sleep. About fifteen minutes later, the phone rang again, and it was the same voice. I finally thought, well, all right, I'll give him the satisfaction. So I got up and dressed and got the car out and went down, and there, indeed, was an old salt, with whiskers growing out of his cheeks—I apologized and said I thought that it had been some of my colleagues—

Kasper: Playing a joke.

Kirkpatrick: Playing a trick on me. And he took me into the Admiralty. It had great enormous concrete walls around it and so we had to go through that. It was the First Lord of the Admiralty who was going to give me advance news of the fact that they had sunk the French ship in the harbor at Oran.

Kasper: Where?

Kirkpatrick: In Oran, North Africa. The British had sunk this ship because it was going to be turned over to the Germans, and this was to give me a scoop, you see. Well, at eleven-thirty or twelve at night, it didn't do me the slightest bit of good for the Daily News. It had already gone to press that day. However, I thanked him. This was really, I think he was sort of buttering me up thinking that I might be able to persuade Colonel Knox that the British needed the destroyers. You know, this was before the destroyer deal.

Kasper: Was Colonel Knox already Secretary of the Navy by then?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Yes. Well, you know how much influence I would have had if I used it—none. So the next morning I did write the story. It got stuck by Major General so-and-so, in the Marines, who was the censor up at the Ministry of Information. I went in and said, "You can't do this." And I explained—he didn't believe it. By the time he got through and was convinced it was true, of course, everybody else had the story, too.

Kasper: It was really sometimes a real nuisance—the censorship.

Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes. And this man was so stupid. You know, where would I have gotten it if my account hadn't been true? But the censors were on the whole quite reasonable. But you couldn't specify as to where damage was because the Germans really wanted to know. I remember one weekend down at the country at the Hudsons. Rob Hudson was the Minister of Food and there was this Swede there, Wenner Gren, who was known to be in touch with the Germans. He went back and forth between Stockholm and Berlin, you see. Rob had said to those of us who were down there that weekend, "Be a little guarded with what you say." So everybody was very careful and we talked about nonsense. And going up in the train Monday morning, I was sitting next

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to Mr. Wenner Gren, and he began asking me about how serious the air raids had been, what damage. Well, I was a child idiot, you know, I just didn't know a thing.

Kasper: Or so you pretended.

Kirkpatrick: And I gave all kinds of nonsensical answers. Then he called me up and asked me for dinner and to play bridge. My bridge has not ever been very noted. I thought, well, you know, we'll see what's up. There were three Swedes, two others with him, playing bridge. [Laughter.] I've never been in a bridge game like it for no hand was ever played out. They were dealt around, the bidding, and then it was, well, you know, you've taken so many slams and that was that. Just hysterical. And, of course, my partner and I won.

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