Kasper: Well, good morning. Let's pick up with some bombs and—

Kirkpatrick: Well one of the early activities, when the Germans became active in the air over Britain, was going down to Dover. The first trip that I see I had notes of was going down with Virginia Cowles, an American who lived and worked in London and wrote for British papers, and (Jimmy) Vincent Sheehan and David Bruce, who was there for the American Red Cross, and who later became—

Kasper: An ambassador, didn't he?

Kirkpatrick: He later became an ambassador. We drove down to Dover and, according to my notes, I don't recall it, but we spent several days there. It became quite a thing to do. Various correspondents would go down to Dover for the day and sit on the cliff and watch the German planes come in and the RAF fighters go up and the air battles went on. We sat on Shakespeare Cliff and watched this.

One notable time was when the Chicago Tribune correspondent was down there. He was a strange man who, in Chicago, had had an interest in a boomerang factory. So he was accustomed to walking across Shakespeare Cliff throwing a boomerang, you see. It was fine until the danger of an invasion became such that the British mined the cliff. There was a walk along the edge of it and we were all down by the walk, maybe four or five of us, and we looked up and there was Guy Murchie coming across this mine field with a boomerang. We were terrified. We were afraid if we called out to him, it would cause him to jump or fall on a mine, and we stood there paralyzed while he made his way safely through and came down the edge and said, "Oh, hi, folks. What's the matter?" [Laughter.]

And another time, later than that, he was staying at this little hotel—it was sort of our headquarters—and he was sitting on the edge of his bed putting his shoes on when a German artillery shell sliced the hotel in half, leaving him sitting on the bed and a great gap in front of him—totally undamaged. Again, I think he sat there with his mouth open and said, "Oh, what happened?" It was interesting. [Laughter.]

Another time in those early days, I remember driving down to—

Kasper: This was in 1940, was it?

Kirkpatrick: It was 1940, yes. The early days of when the Germans were really coming over testing the strength of the RAF. They hadn't really started saturation night bombing, but they had begun bombing, but much more military objectives. I drove down with David Bruce and Ben Robertson, a marvelous man from Clemson, South Carolina, who worked for the newspaper P.M. Ben was killed in the crash of the Pan Am plane at Lisbon the following year—a wonderful man. When the three of us drove down to Plymouth, we were greeted by Lady Astor and Lord Astor in the square. They were dedicating a memorial to something—what, I've forgotten. But at any rate, Plymouth had been severely bombed because Dartmouth, the big naval base, was right there at Plymouth. So we went around and inspected all of that. That night there was an air raid and there were bombs that fell fairly close, including one that blew a car up onto the top of the Astors' house. We were all, by that time, downstairs in the basement and the house was shaking—either from the car landing or from the bombs.

Nancy Astor was very amusing. She was a very sharp-witted and sharp-tongued person, but she could also be very humorous and extremely kind except to her political opponents. She used a rapier-like wit on them. Churchill is alleged to have said to her one day, "If I were married to you, I would put poison in your coffee." And she said, "And if I were married to you, I'd drink it." [Laughter.] That kind of exchange went on. But she was quite a character. She and Ben had

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wonderful conversations because they were both southerners and they were comparing this war with the Civil War, which of course neither of them had lived through.

Kasper: How did you get to know the Astors?

Kirkpatrick: I can't remember, but I knew them and was invited down to their place, Cliveden, fairly early on. Well, she sought out Americans who were living in London and she was very hospitable. And at one time, after the air raids became so intense on London, Ben Robertson came into my office one day and said, "I've had it. How do you feel?" And I said, "So have I. I didn't get much sleep last night." And he said, "Well, let's get out of here. Let's go down to Cliveden." So we telephoned—and the Astors, at that point, I think, were in Plymouth—but Lady Astor said, "Oh, you go on down and tell Arthur to take care of you." So we drove down that afternoon, late afternoon, to Cliveden which was just on the Thames, about a little over an hour from London. We had a nice, peaceful night by ourselves in this huge house.

Another time, Ben Robertson and four or five of us went to see Gone With the Wind in London and an air raid started in the middle of it. We weren't sure whether the sound was on the screen or outside. [Laughter.] We came out into London with fires burning—having left fires burning in Richmond on the film. It was quite a combination of the real and film life.

And the other thing that I had thought of was that fairly early on, and I can't tell you what the dates were, I was assigned more or less to be our "Irish correspondent," as well as our "French correspondent."

Kasper: For the Chicago Daily News?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. I mean, that was in addition to normal, daily coverage.

Kasper: Why was that?

Kirkpatrick: Well, in the first place, I spoke French and I knew a number of the Free French so that I made regular calls on them from time to time, you know, several days to check on anything new developing. Then, in 1940, the SS Roosevelt was sent over to evacuate Americans, and I went over taking two children with me—Bill Stoneman's daughter and Ralph Barnes' daughter—to go back on the ship. It sailed from Donegal. So I took advantage of being there to write some pieces about Ireland at the time. I had seen David Gray, our Minister, who gave me lots of stories of things that were going on, including the fact—"the fact," he said—that the German submarines were surfacing in bays on the west coast of Ireland. There were lots of wild, uninhabited places and they were surfacing there to recharge their batteries; and that the Germans had a wireless station which they used to get news to Germany—picking up information and intelligence on what happened in Britain. And, of course, Ireland was ablaze with lights—southern Ireland was ablaze with lights—whereas the north was blacked out, as the whole of the British Isles were. And the Germans were using triangulation from the south of France to Ireland, to fix on bombing targets in Britain.

Kasper: Why were the lights on in the south of Ireland?

Kirkpatrick: Well, because they weren't at war.

Kasper: Oh. But they weren't going to cooperate.

Kirkpatrick: They wouldn't cooperate at all. [Eamon] De Valera was very, very stubborn.

Kasper: Who?

Kirkpatrick: De Valera. He was the President of Ireland, or rather the Prime Minister. I got into great trouble with having written those stories when I got back to London because the Irish censorship probably wouldn't have let them through. De Valera denounced me and said it was absolutely untrue—the Germans were not doing the things that I had alleged they did. His protest, through the Irish Minister in Washington, appeared next to a piece of mine on the front page of the Daily News with a note from the editor saying that they had received this protest

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from the Irish and that they nevertheless accepted my account over the Irish account, which did not endear me to Mr. De Valera. But David Gray, the Minister, phoned me and said, "You know, if you get thrown from a horse, climb right back on. Come on over." I said, "Well, I think I'm persona non grata." He said, "Never mind. Come over and stay with us." That's when I first came to know them and staying with them became a habit. So I would go at regular intervals. I would go either north across Stranraer to Belfast, and stay there for a couple of days and do pieces about what was going on in (Ulster) northern Ireland. Then take the train down to Dublin and stay there. Incidentally, I bought up all of the French underwear that existed in Dublin—things that you couldn't get in Britain. And wool socks for my friends—things like that. I remember that particular trip in which I bought some wonderful Irish tweeds. The maid at the Legation packed for me and she interlaced these things in my own clothes so that the Irish, who didn't really want the stuff to go out of the country, wouldn't find it, and the British wouldn't charge me duty for taking it in.

Then on another trip back, I got back to Holyhead to take the train to London and I had a sleeper. This was some time later, I think probably in April of '41, I'd been in Northern Ireland and in Erie, and I was held up at the customs at Holyhead by what must have been intelligence people—all of the British customs people are—and very, very sharp. He opened the bags and on top were some publications printed in Ulster about Ulster in the war and he started going through them. So I said, "Well, you know, they're put out by the Ulster Government." He continued going through them and he wanted to see my handbag. He opened it and there was a notebook in there. He took the notebook out and he went through it page by page. I remember his stopping at one page which said something about six hundred men, troop carrying planes, Norway. And he said, "What's this about?" And I said, perfectly honestly, "I haven't the faintest idea. You make notes, you know, when you're a journalist and you may write a story about it and you may not. I don't remember what that was about." Well, he went through it and I can see the train steaming up and thought I was going to miss it. I had my credentials as an accredited correspondent from the Ministry of Information, and that didn't seem to impress him. He kept questioning me as to whether I really was a bona fide correspondent. I finally got impatient and nervous about the train and said, "Well, call the ministry. Call Jack Brebner," who was the executive director there. Then I said, "No, no. Don't bother him. I will give you the home telephone number of Duff Cooper who is the Minister. Call him." Well, he shut my bags and I got on the train. I thought, "This is very odd."

I was still mad about being held up. When I got back to London the next morning and went into the office, I exploded to Bill Stoneman, my boss. He said, "Come in the office,"—into his office—and we went in and shut the door. He said, "I was called up yesterday by Kennedy, our Ambassador, and was told, off the record, that the British had just arrested Tyler Kent, the code clerk at the embassy for passing information. He and a Russian woman in London were passing information to the Germans via Ireland." "So," he said, "they were obviously very suspicious of any American going back and forth to Ireland." But I continued to go regularly and I became quite good friends with the man in the Foreign Office.

Then a dreadful thing developed later on. The British High Commissioner (the British had a High Commissioner in Erie; they didn't have an ambassador or minister), Sir John Maffey, and David Gray were great friends and they conferred all the time. David was openly pro-British. They got together and decided on some scheme—I've forgotten what it was—that could force the Irish into the war, or at least to give Britain some rights—possibly at the ports or something like that. And so when I was there—they didn't want to trust this plan to the telephones which were always tapped. So they asked me when I got back to London to see Lord Cranborne, who was the Cabinet Minister for Colonies and the Dominion, and to lay this before him; and to tell Winant, U.S. Ambassador, which I did. I reported back to David Gray that I had done so and included a piece that I had written about Ireland which was to be sent to—I've forgotten the man's name—in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And by mistake a copy of my letter went with it to this man. Well, the fat was in the fire. The next thing I knew there was a call from David Gray. He'd gone up to Belfast to telephone because he didn't trust the phones from Dublin. He said, "I shall resign. This puts you in a terrible position." I said, "Look, I'm expendable. You're not. Forget it." "Well," he said, "it was stupid on my part."

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At any rate, I never heard anything more about it and neither did he. But it had, I'm sure, confirmed in the minds of the Dubliners that I was at least an intelligence officer or a spy. And I was treated that way. When the first contingent of American troops arrived in Northern Ireland after the naval base there had been activated at Londonderry, a large contingent of the press went over. And a small group—three or four including an American from the south, Bill King, who was I think UP, and one other and I—went south to Dublin. They hadn't ever been there and so I was sort of their tour director. When we got there, I got hold of Erskine Childers, whose father had been hanged by the British. And Erskine Childers, himself, later was the President of Ireland in the 1960s. A marvelous man and a writer. I called Erskine and said I had these two Americans with me and I thought that he'd like to meet them. So we all had dinner together and I suddenly found Bill King and Erskine talking—they spoke the same language because Bill came from the south and its memory of the Civil War, and Erskine and his intimate knowledge of Ireland's civil war against the British—it was fascinating to hear them.

Kasper: I would imagine.

Kirkpatrick: Then I got back to the hotel (I think it was on that trip) and as I went in the man at the desk said that Mr. O'Sullivan, the manager of the hotel, would like me to come into his parlor for a drink. I said, "Well, thank him, but I'm tired and I want to go to bed." He became very agitated and he said, "Oh, he's very insistent," and so on, and called and O'Sullivan came out. "Please would I come in." So I went in and there were three of the biggest thugs you've ever seen in your life—IRA men—who accused me of being the forerunner of an American invasion of Erie.

Kasper: Oh, you're kidding!

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Because I was back and forth so much. And I must say, I didn't find it very pleasant. I really was rather scared. They were very menacing looking. I said, "Well, you're quite mistaken. We wouldn't do that. In the first place, we have all the Irish we need in the United States, and we're not interested in acquiring any more." And I dashed out of the door.

Kasper: Did they leave you alone after that?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I never heard anymore.

Kasper: No more? [Laughter.]

Kirkpatrick: No. I think Mr. O'Sullivan was a little nervous himself— But it was an amusing place because I'd get in there and I'd go to the Gresham Hotel and I'd pick up the phone to call the Legation, to call the Grays, and the operator would say, "Ah, Miss Kirkpatrick, the Grays are out of town now. They'll be back tomorrow." You know, Dublin was a small town—it was like a village. Everybody knew what everybody else was doing. It was very amusing.

Kasper: Do you remember some of the pieces that you wrote—the stories that you wrote—from Ireland and what they were about?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I remember writing one when the Prince of Wales and Repulse were sunk off Malaya on December 10, 1941. There was a piece in the Irish Times whose headline was "Irishman Lost in Boating Accident." Now a lot of the Irish were in the British Army and the British Navy, but officially the Irish wouldn't admit this, you see. So here is this story about Mr. O'Ryan, or whoever he was, being lost in a boating accident off Singapore. I remember hearing two women—you know, that's the kind of story that was wonderful to write—two women on the bus, and one of them saying, "Lord, help us. Them planes. There's danger, you know, they may come after us. Who knows?" And the other one said, "Don't worry, Mary, the British'll take care of it." In other words, they damn them on one side, and then on the other count on being protected by them. The Irish were totally dependent on the British for imports of food that they didn't grow themselves. Things that came over from the States in convoy. So it was interesting.

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Kasper: So did you also write stories about life in Ireland at the time of the war?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes. Well, yes.

Kasper: I mean, whether it foodstuffs or import—?

Kirkpatrick: Well, yes. I'd go down and stay with the Adaires, at Adaire, and have breakfast in bed with eggs and bacon and butter and all the things that one didn't have in London. Yes.

Kasper: Life was better in Ireland.

Kirkpatrick: Oh, heavens, yes. You'd go over there to eat.

Kasper: You could explain that to the IRA when they saw you—

Kirkpatrick: Right.

Kasper: The only reason I keep coming back is because it's more comfortable here and I can eat a good meal.

Kirkpatrick: That's right. That's right.

Kasper: And sleep at night. [Laughter.]

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Well, that was that. Then, the French, it was just simply reporting on various new people who would join them. People came over from France, from Brittany and Normandy, in rowboats to join De Gaulle and there were always stories about that. Early on, when I didn't fully appreciate how necessary censorship was, at the fall of France, when the French were coming over in large numbers, I sent a cable to the office avoiding censorship and said, "Mary Ann Gobbs has safely arrived with many of her possessions." Well, of course, they knew in Chicago exactly what that was. But Gobbs was not a British term, you see, so they didn't realize I was talking about the French Navy. But I only did that, and I think one other, very early on to avoid censorship.

Kasper: When you say you didn't quite understand the role of censorship in the—

Kirkpatrick: Well, I didn't appreciate really how essential it was for the—

Kasper: For the war effort.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Well, for security. Yes, they wouldn't have passed a story talking about the arrival of French naval vessels at that time.

Kasper: Yes, it's been said that the censorship during World War II was something that pretty much everybody, correspondents, all agreed to.

Kirkpatrick: Well, we didn't have any alternative.

Kasper: Well, no. But on the other hand—

Kirkpatrick: But, no. We understood it.

Kasper: They appreciated—as you said, the term you used—appreciated the reasons for it, as opposed to something like the war in Vietnam where a lot of correspondents felt that information that was valuable and needed to be received by the American public was being distorted or kept from them.

Kirkpatrick: I didn't realize that they had outgoing censorship, did they?

Kasper: Well, that's what I've been told. I don't know. Not being a correspondent myself, I don't know. But a number of people have referred to the distinction there between censorship in World War II and censorship in the Vietnam War and how journalists in World War II came to appreciate it and acknowledge its impact and its import, whereas those in—

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Kirkpatrick: I wouldn't say we appreciated it but, we understood it.

Kasper: But that those in Vietnam—

Kirkpatrick: We got very annoyed about it—at times, you know.

Kasper: Yes. Well, but on the other hand, you knew why it was there. Whereas, the difference was that correspondents in Vietnam were downright angry. They felt that information was being kept from the American public that they needed to have.

Kirkpatrick: Which, I think, indeed was the case because I know, my husband and I went to Saigon in 1964. My nephew was in the Army then. We considered ourselves well informed. We kept very abreast of the news, and in fact, we had given a double lecture in New Hampshire on Vietnam just before coming over then. When we got to Saigon, Terry met us and took us into the Caravel Hotel. He said, "After dark, go up to the roof and watch the fighting." We said, "Huh?" And he said, "The city is ringed with Viet Cong and don't go out. It's dangerous." We had no idea of the situation in Vietnam at that time. As I say, we considered ourselves very well informed.

Kasper: So you went there thinking what you knew enabled you to go there safely enough, not realizing how bad things were.

Kirkpatrick: Well, we didn't think about that. He was there and we were on our way to Phnom Penh and Angkor Wat in Cambodia. And it was perfectly simple to go from Japan to Saigon—nobody stopped us. So we went then.

Kasper: But what you're saying is, you didn't realize the degree of danger until you got there.

Kirkpatrick: No, we didn't realize the degree of participation of the United States at that stage because it wasn't until the following year that Johnson announced that he was going to send troops. Up to this time, supposedly we had advisors, that was all. And my nephew, I said, as a relatively new recruit—he volunteered, was an enlisted man—I didn't think he was a terribly competent advisor. He was there in intelligence and appeared in civilian clothes. He's six foot five and I said, "Who thinks you're a Vietnamese? You know. Blonde, blue-eyed, six foot five, you don't look like a Vietnamese.

Kasper: Hardly.

Kirkpatrick: However, on the night we were there we were going to dinner at a restaurant that was in a boat on the Mekong River. And Terry said, "I don't think we'd better go. It's Ho Chi Minh's birthday and I think we may have some fireworks." We went to another restaurant, and indeed, during dinner, somebody came in and tapped him on the shoulder and he had to leave because things were happening. Anyway, that's not part of this story.

Kasper: No, it's not really beside the point, but let me ask you a question that's somewhat related to the notion of censorship. It's a somewhat different angle. During this time period as a war correspondent, did you have a sense of what your personal ethics of journalism were, you know, what you should be reporting and why you should be reporting what you were reporting to the American public?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I suppose I had, yes. I had a sense of what one was writing, what the story was, so to speak, because I remember when Leland Stowe went off to Finland and I was left alone at the office. I said, "How will I know whether I'm writing the story"—what everybody else is writing, you see. And he said, "Don't worry, you'll know." So it might have been a story of the budget; it might have been about a debate in the House of Commons; or it might have been air raids or the latest state of rationing: of what was rationed. We all had clothing coupons as well as food coupons and there were always stories of that sort.

I remember Larry Rue, who was a Chicago Tribune reporter there, whose office was near ours, and going in there one day. I said, "What are you up to?" And he said, "Well, I got a cable from Chicago asking me to comment on reports that the British were selling Lend-Lease foods that were sent over." I said, "Well, how are

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you going to check that?" And he looked at me and said, "Check it? I just write it." I said, "Oh, that's the Chicago Tribune style. Colonel [Robert R.] McCormick. We don't do that, Larry." And he said, "Oh, well. You'll learn." [Laughter.]

Kasper: Well, did you stick to your ethics then? Did you always check your sources and check your information?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, sure. Of course.

Kasper: You did.

Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes. Oh, I would have been dressed down by Bill Stoneman if I hadn't. Oh, yes.

Kasper: And presumably that's why it was so important for you to keep so many contacts and all the networking you did afloat, is that accurate?

Kirkpatrick: Well, that's a normal way to operate.

Kasper: Did you sometimes kill a story of your own when you felt that it might damage the war effort before it even hit the censors?

Kirkpatrick: No, I don't recall any. It was not an issue really that arose in that sense. We were all very courted by the British because they were all, of course, extremely anxious for the United States to come into the war and we were entertained royally. They put on a show at the theatre for us and all kinds of things. We were all perfectly conscious that we were being—

Kasper: Courted.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. And most of us were convinced that the United States eventually would get into the war. It had to get into the war because it seemed unlikely that the British could survive without help after France fell. When the Germans attacked Russia, then the prospect looked a little better, but even so it was touch and go: the German forces were very considerably larger than anything the British had. So I think that lots of us wrote the kinds of stories that would accentuate the fact that things were very tough.

Kasper: In other words, you wanted the American people to know—

Kirkpatrick: Sure.

Kasper: —that they may have to start considering entering the war—

Kirkpatrick: That's right.

Kasper: —because things were not going well.

Kirkpatrick: That's right.

Kasper: Did you feel some sort of—I guess this sounds a little high falootin'—but did you feel some sort of moral obligation as a journalist to principles of war and peace and democracy and so forth?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I think I had my own code of ethics which would include all of those, but I don't think I sat down in the morning and rehearsed them when I started to write a story.

Kasper: Well, what were they?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I never—I never wrote anything that I had heard on a social occasion at someone's house, in spite of what Mr. Churchill said. That, to me, was unethical. Or if it was something that I thought was important, then I would try to get at it from another source. And I also never wrote anything that was told us off the record—and there were occasions when that happened—and I always made every attempt to see that whatever I wrote was accurate as best one could.

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Kasper: Did you feel that you and the other correspondents were filling some kind of need—the American people needed to know what was going on—so that democracy, not only at home, but abroad could be supported? I mean, did you feel that you were contributing to that effort?

Kirkpatrick: I don't think we thought of it in those terms.

Kasper: What terms do you think you were thinking of it in?

Kirkpatrick: Well, we were reporting. Period.

Kasper: But you felt strongly and very passionately about your reporting, didn't you?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. That's right.

Kasper: What do you think the foundation of that passion was?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I liked the British. I thought they were admirable. I couldn't stand the Nazis or the Fascists. I thought they were a menace and that if they conquered the whole of Europe that we would be the next.

Kasper: So you really were—you saw yourself in the fight for democracy.

Kirkpatrick: Sure. Sure. Without spelling it out in those terms. But, oh, from back at the time Hitler came to power it was clear to me that this was going to be a fight to the end.

Kasper: But you were also really frustrated, weren't you? I mean, as much as you were fond of the British, you were very frustrated, and you explain this in Under the British Umbrella, by their unique ability to hide behind the umbrella or to put their heads in the sand and avoid seeing the—

Kirkpatrick: Well, of course, that was particularly true with Chamberlain's government. Yes. Less so later.

Kasper: Well, but do still subscribe to what you were saying in the book, in Under the British Umbrella, that there seems to be this kind of thread that runs among the British people as a kind of cultural artifact that they generally hide from bad news or tend to fool themselves into believing that things are okay.

Kirkpatrick: Oh, and "we'll muddle through."

Kasper: That we'll muddle through.

Kirkpatrick: Muddle through, that's right. Yes.

Kasper: Weren't you frustrated by that?

Kirkpatrick: Well, yes, at times, except I've discovered we tend to do the same thing. But I can remember Dorothy, our secretary, a little Cockney girl who came in from the East End every day, sometimes not having slept a wink, you know, because the East End got a terrible pasting. And Churchill would have given one of his nine o'clock Sunday night talks, and she'd come and she'd say, "Well, the old boy, he certainly gives it to 'em and makes you feel good, you know." He restored their faith in things by "blood, tears, toil and sweat" talks. The worse he painted it, the better they felt.

Kasper: Yes. You know, there is a statue of Winston Churchill in front of the British Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington.

Kirkpatrick: Oh, is there?

Kasper: It's a lovely—very large and lovely statue. And until just a few years ago, every morning a woman came and placed a fresh flower at the base of that statue.

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Kirkpatrick: Really!?

Kasper: Yes. She must have—I know she was elderly. She must have died, because the flowers stopped about four or five years ago.

Kirkpatrick: Really?

Kasper: But up until that time, and I've lived there almost twenty years now, there was a fresh flower or a bouquet of flowers every single morning at the foot of the statue.

Kirkpatrick: Well, there isn't any question but that people in this country adored Churchill, just as people in Britain adored Roosevelt. And even at times when Roosevelt was—well, he was bitterly hated by large segments of people in this country, the British thought he was wonderful; and there were times, of course, when Churchill was voted out of office and people in this country were indignant about it. But both were regarded, I think rightly, as two great men without whom the war really wouldn't have been won. I can find people who argue that, here. But I know several people who blame Roosevelt for Pearl Harbor.

Kasper: Well, the hatred of Roosevelt runs so deep.

Kirkpatrick: Runs deeps. Yes. Yes.

Kasper: It's really—it still very shocking to me. I guess the only reason I can understand it is because I know that the love for Roosevelt also runs incredibly deep. My own mother, for instance, just adored the man. I was born in '42 and she always tells the story of having me in her lap in a nap when she heard the news over the radio that he died. And she remembers just crying tears.

Kirkpatrick: He didn't die in '42.

Kasper: No, no, no. But I was born in '42. And later, when I was still just a baby, napping in her arms, hearing the news on the radio that he had died, and the tears running down and soaking the baby. She was afraid she was going to soak the baby.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Well, I was in Schweinfurt, Germany, the day that he died. We heard rumors and we said, "Oh, this is the Nazis spreading this thing." Then the GIs came in and they were all in tears. They'd heard it from the Stars and Stripes Network. And they really, all of them, were terribly sad. My husband told the story about his mother's family in Boston on election night—I don't know whether it was '36 or '40—sitting there and one of them said, "Isn't it nice to be cozy in here with all those dreadful things happening outside"—meaning Roosevelt's re-election. [Laughter.]

Kasper: In the same vein of ethics and morality and so forth—and don't get angry with me—but do you think you ever violated your ethics to get a story that you felt was so important that you needed to sort of pinch a little bit on the side of your personal ethics?

Kirkpatrick: No, I don't recall any. No.

Kasper: Do you think you ever risked your life or your health to get a story? Because clearly you were writing in very difficult times.

Kirkpatrick: Well, I suppose in—in fact, one was risking one's life by living in London during the air raids or going into war zones in France. Sure. But, so you could be run over by a taxi in New York. The same—

Kasper: Well, of course, the risks were a bit greater during the Blitz. [Laughter.]

Kirkpatrick: Well, I'm not sure.

Kasper: Well, that's true, given taxis in New York these days. You may well be right. [Laughter.]

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Kirkpatrick: Or flying in a plane in the United States today. You take your life in your hands every time you step into a plane.

Kasper: That's true.

Kirkpatrick: No, I don't think—sure, I mean there were times, of course you were scared. I can remember driving over to the Murrows for dinner one night. The car headlights were only crosses of light allowed to show. There was cardboard or whatever that was put in so that you couldn't see anything—it didn't really show anything—it just showed other cars that you were around. And I was driving down Oxford Street in the middle of an air raid. It was a really noisy one and a motorcycle came out of a side street and I hit him—not badly, but enough so that he pulled the thing over to the curb. We couldn't find a policeman anywhere around. And we fiddled around trying to do something about it and I took him to someplace nearby. So when I got up to the Murrow's house—you had to disarm your car; you had to take the rotor arm out of the motor, the theory being the Germans might land, or they'd drop parachutists and so on, and you had to disable your car—and I got out, and I thought, "I don't want to do this. I want to get in the house." But I got the rotor arm out and then I dashed for the door and I dashed upstairs. I opened the door and I said, "Give me a brandy." It was just too much, you know.

Kasper: Do you think there was a certain amount of youthful naïveté that also allowed you to manage during these years?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I don't know that one was naïve. You had the feeling, I mean, if you got it, you got it. If you didn't, fine. I'll tell you another very amusing story about air raids. There was a shelter down in the East End under the railway arches—these big stone arches—and they had enclosed them and families had sort of made little homes for themselves with blankets hung up and they'd go down there every night. Ed Murrow and I took Alexander Woollcott when he was in London down to this shelter because it was a very special place. They'd set up a whole form of government and everything. Mr. Goldburg, I think, was the head honcho there. And that night we went down and Goldburg said, "Oh, you missed it." We'd been down there several times. He said, "Oh, you missed it the other night. A bomb hit the gas main out here and it came bubbling up through the cobblestones in the street." Then he said, "So I had to get everybody out of their houses and down here and get them in"—they had to go through these burning cobblestones. And we said, "Well, how did you do it?" And he said, "I give 'em the order to march and they come like anythin'."

Kasper: Oh, my lord. [Laughter.]

Kirkpatrick: Woollcott thought that was marvelous. It was quite a place.

Kasper: Yes.

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

Kasper: I just read a piece you showed me entitled "London Still Stood This Morning," that appeared in the Chicago Daily News September 9, 1939, and while you claim it is full of hyperbole, it's probably well intentioned and certainly reflective of what went on because you had just undergone a night of air raids in London.

Kirkpatrick: The first one.

Kasper: It was the first night as well?

Kirkpatrick: The first one. Yes.

Kasper: That was incredible. I mean it just—you know, your descriptions are all quite overwhelming.

Kirkpatrick: Well, it sounded worse than it really was. This was the family you asked about. Our feelings that many of us had about the necessity for the United States, or the inevitability of the United States, coming into the war and writing

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to my family, and I said, "Bill and I" (that was Bill Stoneman, the bureau chief) "went last night to the right person to persuade them that the time had arrived for a frank appeal to the United States to come in at once. The outcome, if it comes off, will be known to you long before this reaches you." Well, obviously, it didn't. I think we must have gone to Winant, the Ambassador. And I said, "Don't believe people when they tell you the United States can't do anything or give help in time. The Germans are trying hard to convince Americans of that and it should be combatted. You know that I feel strongly, not only because of my ties here, but as I told every audience, because it matters vitally to the United States. I gather from reports coming back that that is beginning to dawn on people." So, the answer is, "Yes," most of us felt quite strongly that it was important. That was in May, 1940, after Dunkirk.

Kasper: That was the letter from May of 1940, is that what you're saying?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. I think it was then.

Kasper: After Dunkirk.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. No, it couldn't have been after Dunkirk in May. Dunkirk was in June.

Kasper: So it was before—probably.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. I think it had to be before. Well, I'm now confused as to what happened when, but—

Kasper: Well, let's pick up the chronology where we left off. Let me ask you, did you remain in London during the Blitz during the entire time?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes.

Kasper: You did.

Kirkpatrick: Well, except I told you, Ben Robertson and I decided we needed a night in the country and we went down to Cliveden. But other than that—

Kasper: And presumably you kept filing pieces not unlike the one that I just read—the one about "London Still Stood This Morning."

Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes.

Kasper: But you also apparently filed stories about military strategy, is that correct? And government plans for managing the war? As well as pieces on what actually had happened and what the front lines in London, if you will, looked like. Is that correct?

Kirkpatrick: I would have said, without going back and looking at clipbooks, which we don't have here, that strategy pieces were when I was in Algiers, North Africa, when we had daily briefings on what was happening. I remember writing a piece when we went into Sicily and writing a piece on how it would appear to be the way in which we should proceed. The British went in in the southeast and they should be moving north in that direction; and the Americans over here in the southwest should be moving up towards Palermo and so on. That got killed by the censor because it's exactly what we subsequently did. The funny part of some of those kinds of analyses being written from headquarters was that there were protests in Chicago to the Daily News that a woman really shouldn't be writing war strategy or war tactics stories. How would she know anything about it? Well, I say, what does any man know about it unless he's gone to West Point? I mean, you know, it's utter nonsense that it's a male or female mind that would cope with this. And the office of the Chicago Daily News paid no attention.

Kasper: So they ignored that.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Well, apparently they got enough of that to—I think there was some editorial in which they said that they considered me as competent a

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military commentator as anybody else on the staff. They went to town, I'm afraid, on that and when I got back there—

Kasper: Went to town in what sense?

Kirkpatrick: Well, the trucks that delivered papers had a big poster with a picture of me and "Read our Helen from—" Oh, all that—

Kasper: "Read our Helen?" Is that what it said on it?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Yes. Oh, yes.

Kasper: So in other words they turned it their advantage.

Kirkpatrick: Oh, sure.

Kasper: The criticism of you.

Kirkpatrick: Well, this may not have been at the same time, but I hadn't realized the extent to which they'd done this until I was in Chicago on home leave. And I got onto a bus and several people spoke to me and they said, "Oh, you're Helen."

Kasper: They recognized you.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. And I said, "How did you know that?" "Oh, we've seen your pictures on the buses." It was quite a shock. I thought that was going too far.

Kasper: Well, in the same vein, let me ask you, did you think that you brought a different perspective—

Kirkpatrick: No.

Kasper: —to what you wrote because you were a woman?

Kirkpatrick: No. No.

Kasper: So you were no less competent, but you didn't see that you were any more competent.

Kirkpatrick: I didn't see there was any difference. I mean, various of us would argue the merits—I mean, Wes Gallagher of AP and I would argue as to whether Montgomery should move his troops here or there, and you know, it was one of the fun things to discuss.

Kasper: So you were essentially one of the guys.

Kirkpatrick: Sure.

Kasper: And you weren't treated any differently—or were you?

Kirkpatrick: No. No.

Kasper: Were there any journalists who were very unaccepting of you because you were a woman?

Kirkpatrick: Maybe. I don't know.

Kasper: But you don't remember that there were any.

Kirkpatrick: I don't know. I don't know.

Kasper: Well, and as you said, you really enjoyed staying up late at night over a couple of drinks and discussing all of this stuff.

Kirkpatrick: Sure.

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Kasper: Were there any other women journalists, do you remember, who would be party to any of that?

Kirkpatrick: There were none in Algiers at the time that I was there. Margaret Bourke White arrived, but she was off doing pictures in various places. I remember she and I were going up to Eisenhower's headquarters at Carthage in a jeep driven by one of the Air Force officers from Air Force Press Camp, and she had just come to the theater there. She had been at home on a lecture tour and we began discussing lecture tours and the kinds of clothes one had to wear for lecturing. And the two men in front were terribly amused—"we always wondered what women war correspondents talked about"—you see. And then she'd been down in southern Algeria at a big Air Force base and she said how nice all the men were—terribly nice. I said, "Well I think they are too. I've never had any trouble." And she said, "No, I've never been raped either." Well, at that the jeep almost went up a telegraph pole. [Laughter.]

Kasper: Let me ask you another question in the same vein since we're on this subject. Was there ever a time that you felt you did not have the same access to stories as men correspondents because you were a woman?

Kirkpatrick: Well, yes, in a sense. For example, when they went in by glider to cross the Rhine, I had my name down to go. And my brother, of all interfering characters, somehow got wind of it and saw that my name was taken off. Now, you could say that was brotherly-sisterly or male-female, but I must say later I was awfully glad because they all got shot down. But, if they'd survived, it would have been a good story. [Laughter.] Did you ever see the movie, "A Bridge Too Far?"

Kasper: Yes.

Kirkpatrick: It was good. It was a good film and a good book. Connie Ryan was a good writer.

Kasper: Were there any other instances like that where you missed a story because you were a woman?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I suppose if I hadn't been, I might have been assigned to cover the landings in Normandy, but the men were all there. Well, they'd been accredited to the Army before I was. They didn't take any women on the invasion.

Kasper: Right. Although Martha Gellhorn managed to slip herself onto a ship—a hospital ship—that was stationed right out—

Kirkpatrick: Oh, hospital ships—

Kasper: That was different.

Kirkpatrick: Women went over on hospital ships.

Kasper: They did?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. I went over on one. I went over, as a matter of fact, on a hospital plane fairly early on, but that was just there and back. I wasn't staying.

Kasper: Some people have reported that some of the women who were hired as journalists in Europe were hired because they were already in Europe, and that others who had applied to go abroad to report on the war were turned down. Is that true?

Kirkpatrick: I have no idea. But certainly a whole raft of women came over in '44 before the invasion—a tremendous number.

Kasper: But prior to that? How many women correspondents were there before '44 do you think?

Kirkpatrick: There were very few. Time magazine had a number, but in their London office, not necessarily accredited to the Army. People would come over—Dixie Tigh came over for INS, I think. They'd come over for brief periods.

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They came over with Mrs. Roosevelt, for example, but didn't stay. There were I think originally—I saw the picture the other day taken when we were first accredited to the U.S. Army and there was—Kathleen Harriman; Mary Welsh; Tanya Daniels (Daniels-Long) she was Herald Tribune and Times married to Ray Daniels of the Times; Lee Miller, a Vogue photographer—all women. Lee was in the thick of everything from then until the very end of the war.

Kasper: Wasn't she married to Man Ray later on? That Lee Miller? No, it's not the same Lee Miller?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. She was a girlfriend of Man Ray's much earlier.

Kasper: Oh, right. Okay.

Kirkpatrick: Much earlier. No, she married a Britisher later. She was fantastic.

Kasper: She was gorgeous to look at too, wasn't she?

Kirkpatrick: She had been, yes.

Kasper: Striking. I mean, not beautiful—

Kirkpatrick: She led a fairly—

Kasper: Dissolute.

Kirkpatrick: Well, I wouldn't say that—

Kasper: I did. [Laughter.]

Kirkpatrick: —but she led quite a life.

Kasper: Here's a curious question. Were you women journalists paid the same as the men journalists you knew?

Kirkpatrick: I have no idea. I don't think we ever compared notes. I know I wasn't paid the same as Bill Stoneman, but Bill had been a foreign correspondent since he'd left college. He spoke Norwegian, Swedish, Russian, Italian, German and French. He should have had a higher salary, which I'm sure he did. No, I don't think we ever compared notes. And he was bureau chief.

Kasper: And you traveled around in uniform. Weren't you and Mary Welsh some of the first two women in uniform when you went about your business?

Kirkpatrick: I think we were the first to get our uniforms. I think we were all more or less accredited about the same time, but Mary and I went to the best tailors in Savile Row and had ours tailored. It was before the WACs had been activated so there were no women's uniforms at that time.

Kasper: There was no Women's Army Corps to imitate the uniform of.

Kirkpatrick: No, that's right. So we simply took officers' jackets and had both khaki and what do you call it? Pink skirts. I have mine, still, I can wear it.

Kasper: Is that right?

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: Is it here?

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: Can I see it?

Kirkpatrick: Sure.

Kasper: Oh, I'd love to see it.

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Kirkpatrick: It's good looking. I've lost the battle jacket for some reason. I don't know where that went. And the beret. Neither of us thought that the overseas cap was particularly becoming so we opted for a beret. I've got some pictures of it. Shut this thing off.

Kasper: Okay, I'll turn this off.

[Tape interruption.]

Kasper: [You] just showed me a couple of pictures of yourself in uniform and a picture of yourself with Mary Welsh of Time Life. And, also a picture of your brother, Kirk, who is also in uniform. Now, how did he serve in the war?

Kirkpatrick: He came over with OSS. He was a captain over there, I would have said probably in—when was Pearl Harbor? December, '41. He came over around, I would have said, January or February of '42—possibly later, I'm not sure. He was in OSS and went into Normandy—I think he was parachuted in. Then he was with the First Army, Bradley, and later, by the time they got into northern France, he was transferred, I think, to Bradley's staff. I'm never sure, you know, they're all mixed up. But he became an intelligence officer on Bradley's staff.

Kasper: On Omar Bradley's staff.

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: I was just going to say, the uniform is just marvelous. I mean, you have the original jacket and the original dress skirt—the pink skirt as you called it, right?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Right.

Kasper: And on it are four medals on the left hand side of the front of the jacket. There's the Medal of Freedom, the Médaille de la Reconaissance, the French Legion of Honor, and the European Theater.

Kirkpatrick: I think that's the European Theater—I'm sure it is.

Kasper: The last one, the red one.

Kirkpatrick: Yes, I think it's the only—

Kasper: And on the sleeve is the Rainbow Division emblem which is—the Rainbow Division was the 42nd Division of the U.S. Army, is that correct?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Right.

Kasper: And you also have their scarf—

Kirkpatrick: Right.

Kasper: —which you showed me and which you also wore with the jacket.

Kirkpatrick: Not officially, of course.

Kasper: Yes. I understand. And you actually had the status of a captain, isn't that correct?

Kirkpatrick: We had the assimilated rank of captain. Somebody said we'd been promoted to major before the end of the war—it didn't make any difference, you know. It was always only done in case we were captured so we would be treated as officers by the other side.

Kasper: Yes. And on the left-hand sleeve, I believe it was—

Kirkpatrick: Hash marks.

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Kasper: Were the hash marks or—

Kirkpatrick: Hash marks.

Kasper: Hash marks? How do you spell that?

Kirkpatrick: I don't know—hash—H-A-S-H, I guess. [Laughter.]

Kasper: Hash marks, which represented the three and a half years of service. There was one hash mark for each six months, is that right?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. That's right.

Kasper: And the only thing that's missing from this marvelous uniform which, as you said, you had made at Savile Row, were the khaki skirt and the beret. Is that right?

Kirkpatrick: Right. Yes. I did have the slacks, too.

Kasper: Oh, you did?

Kirkpatrick: Which I didn't wear a great deal.

Kasper: And it's in marvelous condition, I mean, it really is.

Kirkpatrick: Well, it's good material—better than anything that's been made since.

Kasper: Probably. I would agree with that. Yes. Well, let's pick up where we left off then.

Kirkpatrick: Well, let's move on.

Kasper: Yes.

Kirkpatrick: So we did the French and the Irish. When De Gaulle went to North Africa—I think we covered that yesterday to an extent—I went down there, primarily to cover the political side. The French General [Henri] Giraud had been appointed as the official French leader in North Africa. And Darlan, Admiral Darlan, had been assassinated, so that it was an ongoing political story, really, and that had been my primary function in going down there. The State Department had not been in favor of my going because they thought I was pro De Gaulle. Well, I was assigned to report on the Free French and that was De Gaulle. So, obviously, the stories I wrote had to do with that.

But I also, from the intelligence reports that I saw, was primarily convinced that De Gaulle had considerable backing in France. Whereas, Giraud, who was a gallant soldier, didn't have any sort of political following. He had been appointed because he'd escaped from German prison and we had spirited him into North Africa at the time that General Mark Clark went in there, initially, before the landings. Then we had made him our man. And there was this constant battle between De Gaulle and Giraud as to which one was to be the primary general representing France. And De Gaulle in the end succeeded principally I think because Giraud was not politically astute and the British had put their money on De Gaulle and they had to back him, although Churchill got awfully fed up with him at times.

De Gaulle was not an easy man to handle. He felt that he had to stand up for France and he couldn't be seen as being a creature of either the Americans or the British. And, of course, Roosevelt conceived a great dislike for him. De Gaulle was not a warm, loveable creature. He was one of the most difficult people to talk with. I sat next to him at luncheons or dinners and saw him quite often in his office, both in London and in Algiers, and later, in Paris, and he is a man of no small talk at all. You either had something to say and said it, or you didn't get any reaction from him.

Kasper: Now you were accredited to the Free French forces as well as to the U.S. and the British?

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Kirkpatrick: Yes. And the British.

Kasper: Yes. And so that—

Kirkpatrick: When I went into Normandy, I was officially supposedly accredited to General Koenig, who was leading what forces the French had in there. But I spent initially most of my time at Montgomery's headquarters because that's where the action at that time was in Normandy. But I kept track of the French. Then I joined General Leclerc's Second French Armored Division at Ecouché —accent aigu. I never know which is aigu and which is grave.

Kasper: I know, I always—grave. I always—has got to be this way because aigu is used more frequently and it's this way. I think I'm right.

[Tape interruption.]

Kasper: —De Gaulle's French?

Kirkpatrick: His French was absolutely superb—magnificent. Le Général De Gaulle qui vous parle. La gloire de la France— Wonderful—absolutely.*

Kasper: Well, and he also had this deep voice—

Kirkpatrick: Very deep voice.

Kasper: That came straight from the diaphragm.

Kirkpatrick: And he spoke beautiful French, and it was distinct enough so that anybody could understand it who understood any French at all.

Kasper: And his diction was—

Kirkpatrick: Beautiful. Marvelous.

Kasper: —as wonderful as Roosevelt's diction in English, which my mother always said was used as an example of fine spoken English. We had two great men, each of whom were to some degree a fine representative of his own language.

Kirkpatrick: Of course, Churchill's was a little bit mixed up.

Kasper: And his French was appalling. [Laughter.]

Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes, it was terrible, just terrible.

Kasper: Right. Right. So you were snooping around in North Africa here while being assigned—

Kirkpatrick: Well, I was seeing the Free French a lot. I had known personally very well René Pleven who had been in Washington at the beginning of the war as French (I think) purchasing agent, or something to do with France before France fell. Then he came to England and joined De Gaulle and he had various roles in that. When he came down to North Africa, the same. He later became Prime Minister and Minister of Justice and various other offices. As I say, I had known him extremely well in London. We went down, four or five of us who were always welcome at the Biddles' place in the country on weekends.** They had two houses there and in one they put up the men—Ed Beatty, Bill Stoneman, Drew Middleton and Ned Russell. I always stayed in the main house. And René Pleven was down there on many weekends. And the Dutch Prime Minister had a house not far—this was at Sunnydale.

I got to know Pleven very well and saw him in North Africa and came to know a great many of the French military around De Gaulle. In Algiers, the battles went on. General Marshall came over—this was in 1943—I was not there when Roosevelt and Churchill met in Marrakech. I went down when De Gaulle went in March of '43. Geoff Parsons and I went at the same time. Marshall came over later. Eisenhower had gotten very much fed up with my bugging him on why De Gaulle was ______________________
* "General De Gaulle who is speaking to you. The Glory of France."
**Anthony Biddle was U.S. Ambassador to the refugee governments of Europe in London.

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being given the cold shoulder and Giraud was always the number one man. After one press conference in which Eisenhower reiterated that it was necessary that we have the support of the French military and General Giraud was the head of the French military, therefore, we recognize General Giraud, I would say, "Is this your decision General Eisenhower?" knowing very well it wasn't, of course. But he would say, "That is my decision." Then, afterwards, he called Harry Butcher [his naval aide, formerly with CBS] and said, "Tell Helen, for crying out loud, she knows perfectly well it came from Washington." So when Marshall was there this came up again and he reiterated, but by that time they had decided that they might counter their bets and they also recognized De Gaulle as the head of the Force Française Combattante. And really, De Gaulle took over because Giraud just didn't have any of the political savvy that De Gaulle had.

Kasper: So your instincts and your knowledge were correct—that clearly De Gaulle was the leader of the Free French.

Kirkpatrick: Well, I was betting on something. As a matter of fact, I had a bet with Bob Murphy, who was our top political man in Algiers, and Colonel Julius Holmes, who was in charge of military government, but who was particularly interested in France, and they both bet that when we got to France that De Gaulle didn't stand a chance. So in 1944, when we got into Paris, we had a drink at the Crillon and they conceded that De Gaulle was clearly in. It was a hunch, but the intelligence that we had indicated that the Conseil de la Résistance all backed De Gaulle. He had no opponent. Nobody was in favor of Laval, and Pétain by that time was discredited. But I followed all the French politics and intelligence as best as one could from London because we kept getting fresh intelligence all the time—people coming over from France. And the British were dropping French and their own people into France. We'd get a pretty good picture of what was going on there, and, of course, from North Africa even better because the French could get over there more easily. They'd go out through Spain and cross into Morocco and come to Algiers.

Kasper: How long did you stay in North Africa?

Kirkpatrick: I was there until early December of '43? The invasion of North Africa was in September of '42, and I was in this country on a lecture then.

[Tape interruption.]

Kasper: —that it was September '42 that you were in North Africa for the invasion.

Kirkpatrick: I was not. No, I was here in this country on a lecture tour.

Kasper: You were on a lecture tour.

Kirkpatrick: But the invasion was in '42. So it was March of '43 when I went to Algiers. It was early December when I got back to London. I had been in Italy and had been in Corsica. In Italy, I was up in the British sector with the British Tenth Armored Division. Then I was with an American surgical unit on the Volterno—surgeons and nurses—and it was a forward unit that dealt with casualties that were too bad to go back. Well, they had triage, and those that could be sent back were, but then they operated there and I spent three or four days with them. And there were fairly heavy casualties in that period.

They operated in a tent. It was a tent camp, and the Germans were just over the hill on the other side. The nurses' latrine consisted of blankets on poles, open at the top. It was sort of chilling to sit there with a German observation plane flying fairly low overhead. And they had a lot of wounded. I helped in the operating room itself because they were terribly short-handed. They worked around the clock practically, you know, and I did what errands I could do. I found I could tolerate anything as long as I didn't see the face of the man. When they were operating on the head, that, I couldn't—I didn't care for that because the casualty became a person.

Kasper: With a personality and—

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Kirkpatrick: Yes, but amputations and things like that didn't bother me. We were in the sector where the Japanese, the Nisei division was, and they had fairly heavy casualties. And they fought absolutely magnificently. Everybody had a great respect for them. Then I was with the British Tenth Armored Division several times. It seemed to me we crossed the Volterno constantly.

Kasper: Where is the Volterno?

Kirkpatrick: It's a river that curves and curves and curves between Naples and Cassino, north of Naples. And it was raining most of the time and muddy. And I got back to Casserta where army headquarters were and found a message that I was to return immediately to Algiers; that Colonel Knox was there on a visit and I would be met. Here was I in muddy clothes and boots and I had nothing but a clean shirt and clean underwear with me. I got back and was met, but I was allowed to go and change into a clean uniform to go up to the Admiral's quarters in a very fine villa with Filipino stewards in white jackets running around with cocktails. And this contrast with the mud of the Volterno—it was something! And Knox wanted to see me and he thought I ought to get back to London. That the plans for the invasion of Europe were being made. I don't know whether he wanted me out of Italy or what, but at any rate, I was to return to London.

Kasper: Yes, that was going to be my next question. You never surmised that?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I sort of said, "Do you want me out of Italy?" And he said, "No, but I think there are things that you ought to be doing in London." He dodged the question. So, I don't know. No, there were perfectly good stories coming out of there. The hospital unit I think was one of the best, apart from day to day fighting progress, covered by headquarters' reporting. Well, we had ninety newspapers in the Chicago Daily News syndicate so it didn't matter where men came from, we pretty well covered the U.S.

Kasper: You mean the foreign service of the Chicago Daily News served ninety other newspapers.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Yes. So I went back to London early in December and promptly went to bed with pneumonia.

Kasper: This was in '43 again.

Kirkpatrick: Yes, December '43. And then we began—we did begin the planning for the invasion. We had a correspondents' committee that met with the British, the Canadians and the Americans on coverage.

Kasper: You were the only woman on that committee, weren't you?

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: How did you get the appointment?

Kirkpatrick: Newspapers. I covered for the newspapers; Ed Murrow for radio; I think Joe Evans for magazines; Bob Bunnell for wire services.

Kasper: And you, Helen Kirkpatrick, for newspapers.

Kirkpatrick: For newspapers, yes.

Kasper: How often did you all meet and what did you do?

Kirkpatrick: I don't know, we met probably about once a week with censors and military. We covered how many people in a pool to go in on the first wave of the invasion; how to get copy back to the press headquarters; where copy would be sent—either back to England or directly to the U.S.—before French facilities were opened up. All those practical kinds of questions.

Kasper: Were you in a position to assign newspaper correspondents as well?

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Kirkpatrick: No. No. I don't know how the pool was selected— I think most of the newspapers got their correspondents over in the first wave because there were enough boats going in, you know. But where it was necessary to pool, the papers would pull the names out of a hat.

Kasper: I see, so they did it on their own.

Kirkpatrick: Sure.

Kasper: And you were not in charge of designating who would be part of the pool or who would get first dibs or anything like that?

Kirkpatrick: No. No thank you very much. No, indeed.

Kasper: Yes that would—you wouldn't make great friends.

Kirkpatrick: You'd hear from the New Yorker, Joe Liebling, for example, would be furious because he wouldn't be in it.

Kasper: Right. Exactly. Just as I said, it wouldn't make you any great friends.

Kirkpatrick: No, no. No, no. One avoided that. So then we had armies in Italy. We had the headquarters being covered in North Africa. And we were in London and planning for D-Day. They did such a marvelous job of camouflaging where and when the invasion of Europe would be, and I'm sure you've read it. But I know that Bill Stoneman, who knew that he was going in, had all things packed to go to Norway. He had skis and everything else. This was because he was so convinced that—I couldn't believe that it would be in the slightest use to go to Norway, but he was convinced that was where he was going. But that was when he was actually going to North Africa. [Laughter.]

Everybody knew it was going to be across the Channel—but when and where? And they did a great deal and were very successful in deceiving the Germans. Duff Cooper wrote a book about it—about the officer's body floated off Lisbon with papers on him suggesting where they were going to land—which was phony, of course.

Kasper: Seriously?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes, sure. It was a man who'd been killed. They didn't kill him purposely for that, but they floated his body with papers.

Kasper: Hoping that the Germans would pick it up—

Kirkpatrick: Which they did.

Kasper: Which they did.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Indicating that they were going, I think, to land somewhere between southern Belgium and the Dieppe area, you see, instead of Normandy. But yes, they did all kinds of deception.

Kasper: Clever things.

Kirkpatrick: Yes..

Kasper: Who was in charge of all these clever ideas?

Kirkpatrick: I don't know. Probably SOE—Secret Operations Executive or Tring—where lots of mysterious things went on. I think British and American intelligence. Planning for "Overlord" operated out of a building in St. James Square—the planning for the invasion. People would gradually be syphoned off from the Mediterranean to come back and work on military plans. We began seeing them and we'd see General Bradley—who I don't think was in the Mediterranean. I don't recall his division. Terry Allen was First Division in the Mediterranean. Anyway, Bradley was to me a new name and he was definitely in on the planning, and of course,

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he became Commander of the First American Army. And Patton of the Third Army. I don't think we had a Second Army.

So that went on. We, none of us, knew—we knew roughly when it might be, you know, that it would be late spring, depending on the tides and the weather and so on, and—just before—well, a month or so before it came, we got the bad news that Carroll Binder's son [Carroll was Foreign Editor of the Chicago Daily News] had been lost on a raid over Peenemünde.* He was in the Air Force.

Kasper: Over where?

Kirkpatrick: Peenemünde, an island off the north German coast, where work was going on on the atomic bomb.

Kasper: Peenemünde.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. It was a big research station there which was constantly being bombed. And young Carroll never came back from that raid. Bob Post, of the New York Times, I remember having dinner with him the night before he was going up to a bomber squadron to go in on a bombing raid. Bob was always gloomy and he was very gloomy about it, you know, and I said, "Nonsense, look at all those who've gone off on raids and come back." And he said, "I'm not coming—" and he didn't. He was killed in that raid. We lost—I have somewhere a long list of correspondents who were killed covering, of course, Southeast Asia and Pacific as well as Europe.

Kasper: Right.

Kirkpatrick: Now as to Overlord, the invasion of Europe. We all waited for the day and we never knew when it was to be. All of the troops who were involved in the invasion were in the south of England. It was a closed area. You couldn't go into it unless you had special permission. And if you lived there, you stayed there. You didn't go out.

Kasper: How much notice did you have of the invasion? Just the night before? I mean, they couldn't have given you much. Presumably they would be afraid to.

Kirkpatrick: Well, the correspondents who were going with the troops were down in the south. They were sent down there well ahead of time. So the rest of us had no idea—we didn't know until it happened—the morning of June 6. Well, we heard planes, you know, just hoards of planes—the sky was black with them. I don't know, it was probably about five in the morning or so when—

Kasper: You were in London?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Oh, yes, I got word because I was a bureau chief at that point. Nobody but I holding down the fort.

Kasper: Because that was when Bill Stoneman left.

Kirkpatrick: Bill Stoneman went with the First Army sometime before. Bernie McQuade, who'd recently come over, he was with the Third Army. I don't know whether it was Ed Morgan with the British or Bill with the British. Anyway, we had three of them on the invasion—with the invasion forces. So I was holding the fort.

Kasper: How long were you acting bureau chief then in the London office?

Kirkpatrick: Until I was relieved in early July. And I guess it was—

Kasper: Several months, then.

Kirkpatrick: No, a month or five weeks. I think Ed Morgan came—and I can't remember who—I could look it up, but I don't remember who it was, but I think Ed Morgan came back. And then I went on into Normandy. It had to be—yes, it was early in July—fairly early in July because I remember we had just taken Cherbourg when I went up there for Bastille Day, the 14th. And then on the 15th, to a

______________________
* Peenemünde was the German rocket experimental station.

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restaurant in Honfleur called Les Trois Sans [or Cents] Hommes—and you could spell it anyway you like. It was [either] "The Three Without Men" or "The Three Hundred Men."

Kasper: Well, which should you choose for your transcript?

Kirkpatrick: I think the official title was—

Kasper: The Three Hundred Men? Les Trois Cents Hommes?

Kirkpatrick: I think so, I'm not sure, but there were three women who ran it.

Kasper: Because the pronunciation would be different.

Kirkpatrick: The Normans were a little bit sloppy in their pronunciation. You know, Norman was quite a different dialect. How do you get to Honfleur? Tout "dree." [meaning "tout droit."]

Kasper: Tout "dree?"

Kirkpatrick: Tout "dree."

Kasper: Oh, how awful.

Kirkpatrick: "Straight ahead."

Kasper: I know, but it sounds almost like Canadian French or something terrible like that.

Kirkpatrick: It is. I know. I know. Tout "dree." But I went there to the restaurant for lunch, and it happened to be my brother's birthday and he was there with a group of officers.

Kasper: You didn't know he was going to be there?

Kirkpatrick: No. No.

Kasper: Oh, good heavens.

Kirkpatrick: I flew over with the 45th Tactical Air Force—got a lift over there and spent the first night in their area at camp playing poker—and cleaned up too! [Laughter.]

Kasper: This is the first night after the invasion and you—

Kirkpatrick: No, after—when I went over, which was early July when I flew over in a plane from the 45th Tactical Air Force and spent the night there in—

Kasper: Honfleur.

Kirkpatrick: No, they were near St. Mère Eglise. And then I moved on down to Bayeux, where most of the British press were in a very charming little hotel—very simple, I may say. We never had any hot water. I spent most of my time going out with the British forces. Montgomery's headquarters were right there. We were there a long time, you know, we never broke out until the Third Army made the breakthrough. I was with three British correspondents in a command car—Alan Morehead, Australian, of the Herald; Alex Clifford of the Express; and Ronny Matthews of the Telegraph. We used to set out in the mornings to find out where things were happening. And if there were a good tank battle going on down near Caen, we'd go down there and watch it. You know, it was rather like choosing which theatre to go to today?

And this particular day we had word that there were things happening—that maybe Patton had been unleashed. He was in hiding up in the northern part of the peninsula. So we headed over in that direction and found that indeed he had been unleashed and he made a breakthrough at Granville. So we followed down there and we were hightailing down behind a division and we cut out of the line of the division. As we did, we suddenly saw a jeep coming towards us with three stars on it and a

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flag—a little flag—and it was General Patton who leapt out and came towards us, clearly very angry. He told us in colorful language never to—

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

Kirkpatrick: —could not get out of the line when in a convoy. And he explained, quite firmly, that we must stay in the line. So we did and we went on with the division. We got down as far as—I don't remember, there's sort of a blank period in there when I left my British friends and joined an American group outside of Rennes, which is the capital of Brittany. And Jean Marin, that was his nom de plume, who had been in London with De Gaulle. He used to broadcast from London and he was very well known in France. He was about a six foot three Breton—a very handsome man.

At any rate, I camped in a pasture with some of the American forces outside Rennes. That evening, Jean Marin and I went into Rennes. The Germans were still there and we wanted to see whether they were going to blow the bridges. Rennes is sort of the Venice of Brittany. And we came out. There was a German 88 holding up the advance. Until that was gotten rid of, we couldn't move on into the city. The next morning we went into Rennes and it was a marvelous scene. I walked in with Jean Marin and the crowd recognized him—I don't know how they recognized him, but they did—but he had a big Cross of Lorraine on his uniform. We went to the Mairie and went upstairs onto the balcony and he was acclaimed—the crowd mobbed below. And suddenly during all this excitement, there was the sound of a bugle, I guess. We looked over and on a dormer window there was a man astride it with a bugle who started to play the Marseillaise and everybody began singing. Well we just stood there with tears streaming down our faces.

Kasper: I can imagine. What a moment!

Kirkpatrick: It was quite a moment. Later in the day we saw a few women who had their heads shaved being paraded through the streets. They had been accused of having been too friendly with the Germans. Then somehow from there, and I don't remember how, I got out to Mont St. Michel, where I found Hemingway and Bill Walton and Bill White and Irwin Shaw. He's dead now. They were all out there sort of taking time off, you see. And we ate very well. Then we went up to the top of the Cathedral and watched the German counter-attack right across the Channel at Avranches.

Kasper: Where?

Kirkpatrick: At Avranches in Normandy. You see, Normandy—there's a curve coming down, and here we were in Mont St. Michel and the Germans were counter-attacking at Avranches trying to cut off the 3rd U.S. Army. Fortunately, of course, it wasn't successful, otherwise we'd have been cut off. But that was about the third day away from my clothes and everything in Bayeux. I finally got back the next day and felt so grubby when I got into Granville—I don't know how I got a ride back—but at any rate, decided that I had to get into the water and several of us went swimming. I went in what the Army thought the well-dressed WAC wore under her uniform. These were Kaiser silk panties—you know, more like long bloomers and a bra. Well, it was fun going in, but coming out, it was not quite the same. Here crowds sort of gathered up at the top of the esplanade and I had to crawl out on my hands and knees. [Laughter.]

At any rate, I got back to Bayeux. And then I moved on to the 1st U.S. Army at St. Lô. The whole front opened up and the Germans were on the run. The British and Americans began to close the gap between their armies at Argentan. So I joined the French Second Armored Division at Ecouché, which was right near there. And the French Army idea of how one eats in the field—no nonsense like a mess kitchen that the American and British armies had. The French, each little group, had its own popote and built a little fire. There were the Germans just over the next hill, you see, and here are the fires and the French merrily cooking.

We sat there for what seemed like a very long time, and it probably was only a couple of days, but we had the radio on and would hear the BBC. The Americans were getting nearer and nearer Paris and these Frenchmen were just going out of their

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minds wanting to get to Paris, as we all did. That's one reason I joined that division because I thought they'd certainly be moving into Paris.

Finally the order came at night that we would be moving the next morning and the division got underway, I suppose, the first parts of it around probably four in the morning. Everybody fell in line and we just went hell bent, straight across that French plain. It rained most of the day and I was in a captured German jeep that was open—it had no top on it—with an American naval officer who was liaison with the French. The water sloshed back and forth and we didn't stop until, oh, well after noon. And we stopped and everybody dashed for the bushes, including me, and I put my foot up—the German jeeps had no doors—you had to climb over. I put my foot up on the top and it slipped and I fell and broke my toe, as it later turned out. So we got into Rambouillet that night after dark, still raining, in a large pasture and, may I say, to tend to one's needs hopping on one foot in mud was quite a feat. Somebody lent me—some officer, I don't know who it was—had an army cot, you know, a folding one, that opened up and so I had put my bedding roll on that. I remember waking the next morning and looking up at two French officers looking down saying, "Is it permitted to fish?" Because the cot was full of water, you see. [Laughter.] At any rate, I went into Rambouillet—somebody took me into the hospital there—and the doctor looked at it and said, "Oh, yes. You've broken your toe. Well, we don't do anything about that." But he shot it with novocaine so I could get my shoe on.

Then we went into the hotel there at Rambouillet where everybody from everywhere who could possibly make it was there. Hemingway was there conferring with his "scouts" and various generals, and David Bruce was there and—everybody you can think of. And everyone was trying to devise a way to get into Paris. General Leclerc had said there were roadblocks. That his forces were going in and nobody who was unauthorized could go in. Well, finally, we found a back road and Johnny Reinhart, the naval officer, reconnoitered and found a little sort of a bistro that had rooms to rent. So he got us two rooms for the night and we went down there and spent the night and thus avoided the roadblocks and got into Paris the next day.

I will never forget coming up over the hill and there below is Paris—white and shining in the sun. And the American sergeant who was driving was just as excited as we were—it was wonderful. And we got in but we never got across the Seine. We were held up, taken out of the jeep, kissed, given wine and so on.

And the Hôtel des États-Unis was put at our disposal and we spent the night there. Then suddenly I began to say, "Listen, I'm supposed to be reporting. I better get going." So I crossed over—I went over the next day to Helena Rubinstein's apartment on the Île St. Louis.

There were several correspondents there and we set our typewriters up on a table and proceeded to pound out some copy and then went on to the Scribe Hotel which was the press headquarters, and got their copy in there. And it was all wild, you know, just wonderful. And for some reason also, I don't know how, I discovered Hemingway was at the Ritz and about eight of us had lunch there. There was to be a parade beginning up at the Étoile and I kept saying, "I want to go to the parade." And Hemingway said, "Daughter, you can see parades all the time, but you'll never again be lunching at the Ritz on the 25th of August." And I said, "Nevertheless—" And in due course, I persuaded the naval lieutenant—

Kasper: This is 1944, right?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. August 25, 1944. And so we tried to get up—we couldn't get up the Boulevard to the Étoile, the crowd was so dense. So we said well, let's go down to Notre Dame because that's where the parade was to end. Going from the Étoile down to Notre Dame. So we got down there and I don't know what happened to Johnny Reinhart, but Bob Reed from the BBC and I were the only press down there. I remember standing up on the grill fence, you know, hanging onto the edge of the fence looking, when De Gaulle, Koenig, Leclerc and the others arrived. Leclerc arrived in a tank. I don't know how De Gaulle—I guess they got there in command cars—arrived and started into Notre Dame. The press of the crowd was such that I got shoved into the church. It had been reserved for families of members of the Résistance who'd been killed. I got in, and De Gaulle and the Conseil Nationale de la Résistance

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was with him, Bidault and Parodie, and the generals—and the lights went out. And the organ was not playing. And suddenly there was some shooting and a man near me was hit. They were shooting from the clerestory balcony. A Dominican monk appeared at the altar. Well, I am not a Catholic, but I knew that monks are not cathedral priests and he led them in the Magnificat. Then they turned around and marched out. I'll never forget Palewsky on De Gaulle's staff who was so undone by it that he had to be helped by two other people.

Kasper: Who had been doing the shooting?

Kirkpatrick: We never were quite—I never was quite certain whether it was Germans or French milice [militia]—the Germans who stayed behind—because the day before, or the day we went into Paris, there was a great deal of shooting from rooftops and we went with the police of the seventh arrondissement up to the Luxembourg Gardens and captured some Germans and brought them back to the police station and then we'd drink champagne—"Vive la France, Vive les États-Unis"—and then we'd go back get some more Germans. [Laughter.] And Johnny Reinhart, who spoke German, would interrogate these poor terrified Germans. [Laughter.]

Kasper: Who got left behind in Paris.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. So that was the entry into Paris and it was very exciting.

Kasper: Oh, it must have been.

Kirkpatrick: And the next day I finally found our office which was 23 rue de la Paix, just off the Boulevard on the rue de la Paix, and on the top floor. That's when I discovered that the concierge had kept the Germans out of it by saying, "Oh, it's a storage room." No one had been in it since Edgar Mowrer had left it in June 1940 as he left Paris—as the Germans were coming in—and copy of his last piece was lying on his desk and when you picked it up the blotter was a different color underneath. The place was very dusty—absolutely untouched. So I opened the bureau then and stayed in Paris. I stayed in Paris as a base and was the bureau chief. There was one man, an Egyptian, who had worked for the paper for years who was number two—

Kasper: Where was Mowrer?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, he was in the States. And our secretary, an Englishwoman, turned up, who'd been there before the war, and so the bureau got functioning.

Kasper: Four years it had been left absolutely just the way it was when it was closed in 1940.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Right. And Madame Chose, the secretary, was an Englishwoman married to a Frenchman, turned up after the liberation.

Kasper: Amazing.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. And then I pursued the question of who this monk was and how he had come to be at the altar in Notre Dame. He turned out to be Père Bruckberger, a Dominican, who had been the chaplain of the F.F.I.—the Forces Françaises à l'Intérieur—a very interesting man, seemingly very unholy. I met him that same night in the Scribe bar with this very attractive French woman—Lil Lauboeuf. She subsequently married an Englishman who had been with the Second French Armored division at the same time I was—Cecil Michaelis. Her husband was in hiding. He had not been quite as anti-German as she was. She'd been very much involved in the Résistance and Roger, that was his name, was in hiding at a convent or a monastery somewhere, and subsequently joined the French Army that was activated, and was killed up on the Rhine. I moved in with her, she had an apartment with two floors. I can't speak either French or English at this point—[Laughter.]

Kasper: Two flats?

Kirkpatrick: Two floors. Two floors, and Roger's had been the upstairs and hers was the downstairs with a stair in between, and I had the upstairs flat. So I lived there for sometime.

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Kasper: Au deuxième étage.*

Kirkpatrick: Yes. I had stayed in Edgar Mowrer's apartment for a time, but it was so desperately cold and there was no fuel, so I moved in with her. I stayed in Paris and went up from time to time with the Army to various places, the Sarre, for instance.

Kasper: Up into the where?

Kirkpatrick: The Sarre—S-A-R-R-E or S-A-A-R—depending upon whether you're French or German. And went up with the 44th Division which was a Rochester, New York, National Guard outfit. And they were up there in Alsace fighting without any winter camouflage; the Alsatian women made sort of cloaks for them out of bedsheets because we had no winter camouflage. They had no proper winter boots. There were no cigarettes. I remember coming back to Paris just as General—I think his name was Hodges, who was in charge of supplies at the Pentagon, was there, and talking about what marvelous equipment all the army units had. And I was not very popular with him and I told him what they didn't have up there. But one went back and forth to get travel orders to go any particular place.

Kasper: And what were you looking for at this time? I mean, you were just following action?

Kirkpatrick: Well I was really, I was reporting primarily on French politics and De Gaulle forming a government and that kind of thing. But Paul Ghali, the number two man, he was very good at that and he had very good contacts. So when I'd go off to report on, you know, something with the Army and the story about this division, he was perfectly competent to take over. And various people that we had in the field would come in from time to time to Paris. But basically he and I covered Paris and parts of the fighting front where we didn't have anybody else. I went up to Strasbourg, just before the Battle of the Bulge. And then I'd go up to Bradley's headquarters, partly to see my brother and partly to see what was going on there, or with the Air Force someplace—just normal sort of spot coverage. And I went with the Air Force which had a forward press camp and press officers, and we went in—for instance, we went into Aachen—four or five of us with the Air Force advance unit—and into a number of German towns with the advance group—with either tanks—we were in the outskirts of Cologne while the fighting was going on for Cologne.

We were on the west bank of the Mainz River and there was a group of girls—Marguerite Higgins, Rita Vanderwert from Time Life, Lee Miller, Vogue, Margaret Bourke White and I—were all in this particular group and we took over a German house with no running water, you know, all the watermains were bombed or a mess. I remember that Rita and Lee Miller and Marguerite Higgins and I shared a bedroom that had four beds in it and a good part of the night was spent opening the window and Marguerite Higgins closing it. [Laughter.] You know, those silly things that you remember.

Later, I went into Frankfurt fairly early on. I was in Schweinfurt at the mayor's office. The mayor had just committed suicide. That was the day when we heard that Roosevelt had died—in April. We thought it was a German rumor and then the GIs confirmed they heard it on the radio.

So then we came to the surrender—the Armistice. That was mishandled from our point of view because the brigadier in charge of the press in Paris, the American brigadier, just himself picked the people who could go up to Rheims to see the surrender. And it didn't conform to any plans that we had because we had the pool picked as to who would go. We were all furious, and several people, Charlie Wertenbaker of Time Life and I think Bill Walton—Geoff Parsons of the Herald Tribune. At any rate, we went up to see Eisenhower afterwards and complained about General Davis.

I went to Rheims for the surrender and managed to get into a back door and to look in. I wasn't allowed in with the other correspondents. That was the time in which Ed Kennedy from AP broke the agreement on announcing the surrender. It had been agreed on the plane going to Rheims, as the correspondents had been told that because it was important to get the word to all units of the allied armies, the news

______________________
* "On the second floor."

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of the surrender would be held for two days. Therefore, they understood they were on their honor not to break it until it was officially announced.

Kasper: Until all the units had been notified?

Kirkpatrick: That's right. So everyone observed it except Ed Kennedy, who went back to Paris and had an open line to London and sent the word prematurely. He was severely reprimanded by everybody and really—we ostracized him. He said he hadn't agreed. Well, he'd been with the whole group.

Kasper: Well, he gives a bad name to everybody else if he breaks the rules.

Kirkpatrick: That's right. He never really lived it down. He was commended by the AP, but they nevertheless had to pull him out.

The Armistice was celebrated in Paris in great style. I can't remember much about that. A few days later, Bill Walton and I got a jeep somehow from Wiesbaden, which was Eisenhower's headquarters, and drove on down through Germany to Czechoslovakia. We got as far as Pilsen, which was as far as we could go because the Russian zone was beyond and we weren't permitted to go into that. We gathered a lot of stories and we went to the Eagle's Nest, Berchtesgaden, and I liberated, as we said, a skillet—because we'd picked up a lot of A rations and we had some bacon but no way to cook it. So I put a skillet under my jacket.

Kasper: You took Hitler's skillet. [Laughter.]

Kirkpatrick: Yes. And it was early enough so that there was no real security around it. That was instituted fairly immediately after that.

Kasper: I should imagine.

Kirkpatrick: And then we went to Kitzbühel where we found the 42nd Division headquarters and were able to sit down there and write some of the stuff we'd been gathering. And that was—

Kasper: When you were out like this in so many places, I mean even before the Armistice, and you would write a story, how would you get it to where it could be transmitted to Chicago?

Kirkpatrick: Well, you had to find—I mean, if you were at or near the headquarters of an army, they had dispatch riders who went—

Kasper: To some wires or to somewhere—

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Well, went to the nearest headquarters. We always had to find where we could get a dispatch rider.

Kasper: I mean, the last stop there, Berchtesgaden or Kitzbühel, how did you get something from Kitzbühel to Chicago?

Kirkpatrick: Actually, my copy always went to New York, where the syndicate office was. Well, Kitzbühel was the headquarters of the 42nd Division so they had dispatch riders. They also had a telephone. I probably phoned it to Paris. I don't recall. A lot of it was not hot news and a lot of it were color stories, you know, the Czechoslovakian and German countryside and occupation troops.

Kasper: You mean what it looked like after Armistice?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. And Berchtesgaden. But anywhere the Army was, you could always find dispatch riders going to a headquarters where there were communications.

Kasper: And the dispatch rider would just carry your copy to where they could then communicate it either by wire or by phone to either a capital—well, presumably, to either Paris or London, and then from Paris or London to New York. Is that correct?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Yes, Paris.

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Kasper: And it would go from the capital, again by wire or phone, to New York?

Kirkpatrick: It went by Press Wireless.

Kasper: Press Wireless.

Kirkpatrick: Which was the chosen conduit for the time of the invasion. A lot of the press used Press Wireless.

Kasper: What was Press Wireless?

Kirkpatrick: Well, it was a commercial wireless company that operated from London and I think it was American, but it may have been both British and American. But we always filed by Press Wireless from London and they had the official approval and set up a wire head from France—from Normandy. I can remember being concerned about how we got copy, but somehow we always managed to, but I can't tell you exactly how it happened. It just did.

Kasper: Because you didn't always know.

Kirkpatrick: I wasn't always sure. But it managed to get through. The Army was very responsible in that sense—or the Air Force would pick it up. If there were Air Force units around, it would be going to Paris.

Kasper: And at what point would it hit the censors after it left your hands?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, it would go through the Army censorship probably in Paris. We brought our censors with us from London. There was no question about that—the military. But they were all pretty reasonable. And things became so wide open and so sort of chaotic toward the end that there wasn't any point in stopping stories because by the time they got there, something new had developed.

So then the next sort of phase was in Paris. The French began trying collaborators and there were two Americans who were held—Ruth Dubonnet, whose husband made the famous Dubonnet. She was an American and she was accused of entertaining the Germans. And the Marquise de Polignac was locked up in Drancy and I'd gone out to see them. That's another story. You could go out and see people who were locked up for collaborating. Both were Americans. I remember her son came to see me in the office and said that I must use all my influence to get her out of there—that it was absolute nonsense. That, after all, she'd known [Von] Ribbentrop well before the war and it was perfectly natural when he came to Paris for her to have him for dinner and so on. I think she got off and she wasn't locked up permanently. But there were a lot of stories of that kind in the aftermath of the occupation.

Later on we all became much more aware of the balance of it—that sometimes personal revenge entered in to accusations—and sometimes they were justified. We'd find people who had wonderful stories. An American who had been married to a Frenchman. He'd been killed in Syria. She had a little house down in Barbizon and she had hidden umpteen aviators, flyers, who were shot down and somehow would find their way. And I have her book. Actually, I was staying with her in California just recently. Then she married Geoff Parsons of the Herald Tribune. She had been a starlet in Hollywood in the early days and she'd married Jacques Tartière, a French actor, and he'd been killed in Syria. She had a very gallant record—I don't know how many people she'd hid. She'd had about five men in her little house in Barbizon as the Americans came near and of course the Germans got more nervous and the Americans got excited and she said they all lived on cigarettes and brandy for the last week. It was quite an existence. It's an interesting book. So then the trials opened: first of Pétain, which was fascinating and—

Kasper: You showed me the picture yesterday of you in the courtroom right, practically, next to Pétain.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Well, the benches on either side—it was a very small courtroom.

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Kasper: Where was it held?

Kirkpatrick: In the Palais de Justice.

Kasper: In Paris.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. And they picked a very small courtroom because they didn't want a lot of hoopla. Well, it was impossible not to have it. But the French press was on one side of the courtroom, and the foreign press on the other side, and it just happened I had the seat there at the end of the bench and Pétain was just beyond. He was very deaf and he sat trying to hear. I've never seen such cold, blue eyes in my life as he had. And he never testified himself. He had very good lawyers, but the counts against him were pretty strong. And the jury, of course, was stacked—one hundred percent stacked.

Kasper: Against him.

Kirkpatrick: Oh, sure. They were all Résistance people. And the rules of law in France are not as stringent as they are in this country, to say the least.

Kasper: Well, it's the Napoleonic Code and it's very different than what we have.

Kirkpatrick: That's right. That's right. You could go and talk to the jurors and the jurors would come out and talk about what they felt. And that was very interesting. They called a whole series of witnesses: Daladier and Reynaud, previous prime ministers. Reynaud and Daladier are particularly important because they'd been predecessors and it was Reynaud whose government had preceded Pétain at the time of the surrender. It was a very interesting procedure. And Laval testified, which didn't do Pétain any good at all. And Laval's trial came next and there was no one—I don't think any of the French, who, of course, were very divided; there were lots of Pétainistes—lots of people who defended Pétain as having done his best to defend France against German interests. But no one really had a good word to say for Laval, and there was no question that he was going to be executed, as he was. He was hanged right after the trial. Whereas Pétain was stripped of his military honors and exiled to the Île d'Yeu off the Atlantic Coast—a little island. His life had been an interesting one. He was the son of peasants, and as he rose in the army, he distanced himself from his parents. He never had anything to do with them after he'd become an officer.

Kasper: He had an elitist attitude, is that the case?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. He didn't wish to acknowledge that he was a peasant by birth.

Then shortly after that, I would say probably in 1946, the Nuremburg trials began in Nuremburg and I went up. I was there for the principals like Goering and [Von] Ribbentrop and Frank. I didn't stay there all the time or for all of them because it became tedious. But it was interesting looking at them because the courtroom was long—quite long and fairly wide and the defendants were in a box up on the left-hand side, and the judges were over in a box on the right-hand side—American, British, French, Russian, and the rows of lawyers below them. We were in the body, the orchestra pit, so to speak. And then they would bring a particular defendant into the seat as they would in a courtroom here when they were concentrating on that particular one. But it was interesting watching the faces of the others and their general behavior.

Kasper: Before they were called.

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: Why?

Kirkpatrick: Well, you know, they were being tried for their lives and they knew it so they wanted to see how each one fared.

Kasper: Did you report those kinds of nuances in the stories that you wrote at the time?

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Kirkpatrick: I hope so. I don't remember. I trust so. And we all stayed in the château that belonged to a family. They were manufacturers of pencils—Caran d'Ache pencils. And there was the dower house, the dowager of the family had lived in, and the women were all billeted there, and the men were in the main château and we ate in the main château. The Russian women were in the same house as we and there was one bathroom—one big bathroom for all of us. And Janet Flanner was the one who was on the floor next to that bathroom and would report that the Russians would go in one after the other until they were all there. And there were about twelve of them all in the bathroom [Laughter] which was a mess after they'd left it.

Kasper: These were Russian women who were what?

Kirkpatrick: I don't know whether they were—

Kasper: Were somehow attached to the—

Kirkpatrick: Court reporters or secretaries. I don't know what they were.

Kasper: Correspondents of some kind.

Kirkpatrick: We never knew.

Kasper: You never knew.

Kirkpatrick: But they didn't have any truck. They didn't—

Kasper: They didn't want to deal with you all.

Kirkpatrick: No, they didn't fraternize with us at all.

Kasper: I see.

Kirkpatrick: And we had various rooms and some of us were in the living room and, you know, scattered all around the house. I roomed briefly with Marguerite Higgins and then managed to move to another room. And Ann Stringer was there. And this very attractive Polish girl correspondent. I remember one night, I think at the table, Janet Flanner said, "Now, I want to go around the table and I want to ask each of you if you were forced to sleep with one of the defendants, which one would you pick?" And she'd go around, and she got to the Polish girl, and she said, "Now remember, this is not for purposes of assassination." [Laughter.] It was lively.

And then the Russian officer, who—I don't know what his rank was or what he was doing there, but anyway, he ate in the dining room, and we observed one morning he came to the table and the only common language he and the waiter had was English. Neither of them spoke the other's language. So the Russian turned to the waiter and said, "Two boiled eggs." The waiter said, "Is no boiled eggs." The Russian said, "Will be boiled eggs." There were boiled eggs. [Laughter.] Oh, it was wonderful. Walter Cronkite was there, I can remember, with the correspondents, because we used to dance in the evening occasionally, and Walter is a very good dancer.

I'd go up and down on the train from Paris, which was the easiest, and I'd go up and stay, you know, two or three days and then go back. And that got us through mostly into late spring or so of 1946 and then the Peace Conference which was with all of the eastern European countries: Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungary, Poland—but not Germany. We've never had a peace treaty with Germany, you know. This is one of the things people keep forgetting. That until the peace treaty is signed, with the Russians, the British, the French, and ourselves, Germany is still at war, so to speak, and we have a right to have troops there.

The Peace Conference started in Paris and I covered it. And the more I covered it, the more I thought, this is where I came in. I know exactly who is going to argue what. Who was going to answer what. And this is stale. I'm burned out on this one. And Beedle Smith was our Ambassador in Moscow. He'd been Eisenhower's chief of staff and he'd been sent to Moscow as Ambassador and to clean up the Consulate, apparently, which had an enormous backlog of visa requests. And he and his wife were in Paris, and Beedle said to me, "Why don't you come to Moscow?" And I said, "Well—" And he said, "You can fly back with us. Come and

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stay with us." And I said, "Well, I don't think I could get a visa." And he said, "Sure you can. The head of the KGB is in Paris right now and you go and apply and I bet you get one." And I got one immediately. So I flew back to Moscow with Beedle and Nori Smith and stayed at Spaso House [the Embassy residence] for about three weeks. And Beedle said, "I don't care what you do while you're here, but you'd oblige me if you'd spend an hour a day with George Kennan and John Davies, because those two know more about what makes Russia tick than anybody else." I had asked the paper if I could go and had said that I would not be reporting while I was there because anything I wrote the Russians would assume reflected what the Ambassador thought. And so the paper said, "Fine." So when I came out, I wrote a long, long memorandum which was eyes only for the editors and not for publication.

Kasper: And it was never published.

Kirkpatrick: No. No. No, I have a copy. It's in Northhampton, of course. And it was quite interesting. It reflected, of course, Beedle's views and Kennan and John Davies and various things I'd done in Moscow, like going to a trial, and generally going around.

Kasper: The notion was to let the editors know what you had learned.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. As background, of course.

Kasper: So that if there were other kinds of information the paper needed for stories somewhere down the line, that you might be a source without actually using you as a source.

Kirkpatrick: Right. Yes. Well, you know, they were very broad-minded and it was worth having somebody there. Then I came out by way of Leningrad and Finland and stopped in Finland for two or three days. I stayed with the Minister and his wife there. Then took the boat over to Stockholm and then flew back—we didn't fly, did we? No, I took the boat from Stockholm back to England—England to Paris. And then the next year—

Kasper: Now we're talking 1947, are we?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. In the meantime, the New York Post had been after all the Chicago Daily News foreign staff to join the Post. They were going to build up a big foreign staff. Paul Scott Mowrer [Editor of the Chicago Daily News], had been persuaded to join the Post because, in the meantime, Knox had died and Annie Knox had sold the paper to Jack Knight. [Knock at the door.] Come in—

Kasper: Saved by the bell.

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

Kirkpatrick: He owned the Akron Beacon Sentinel.

Kasper: Who bought the Chicago Daily News from Annie Knox?

Kirkpatrick: The Knight newspaper group which also owned the Miami Herald.

Kasper: Oh, you mean John Knight.

Kirkpatrick: John Knight. He had been a censor in London during the war.

Kasper: Oh, is that right? I didn't know that.

Kirkpatrick: And I'd been quite rude to him at times.

Kasper: Oops. Little did you know he would come to own your paper.

Kirkpatrick: That's right. He didn't seem to hold it against me.

Kasper: So Annie Knox sold the paper to John Knight?

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Kirkpatrick: Yes. Adlai Stevenson tried to buy it but never was able to raise enough funds. The Colonel had wanted to leave it to the employees. He and his wife were not very congenial. They hadn't really been very close for a number of years. But she was a little hungry, she wanted to make some money, so she didn't offer it to the employees or assist Adlai Stevenson in any way. And John Knight came along and offered the most, so he acquired it. He put in Basil Walters as the managing editor whose idea was more white space and asterisks and shorter pieces. He began to really alter the format and make life very much less pleasant for us in the field. For instance, I had a cable saying, "Report the Peace Conference in Chicago terms." Well, I didn't know what Chicago terms meant. You know, if you were visiting a division, you'd find Chicago men and report their names and that sort of thing. But Peace Conference in Chicago terms? And besides, we had many other papers that weren't Chicago. That kind of thing became annoying.

So when this pressure from the New York Post came along, I very stupidly succumbed and went along with Paul Scott Mowrer. I shouldn't have done it. I also just at that time had been offered a Neiman Fellowship and I think I was the first woman they'd offered one to. Paul Scott Mowrer talked me out of it, saying, "What do you want to do?" I said, "Well, I don't really understand economics very well." "Oh," he said, "you covered the British budget and the French budget, you know enough about economics."

Kasper: So he convinced you not to take the Neiman.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. And I have always regretted that. And I regretted going to the Post.

Kasper: Why did you regret going to the Post?

Kirkpatrick: Well, it wasn't a great paper. It was a New York paper and that's about all you can say for it. It was a better paper at that time than it's been subsequently, which wouldn't be hard. And Thackery had presumably been a foreign correspondent, I think at some point, in Berlin years before, whereby hangs a tale—at least we thought so. At any rate, I came back to Washington and was in the bureau there; and earlier covered the UN for a time. Disliked every minute of it.

Kasper: Why?

Kirkpatrick: Well, you know, it was sort of a repeat of the League, but they had two correspondents out there. John Hohenberg, who subsequently went to the Columbia School of Journalism, he didn't need me, he didn't want me, and he was not at all cooperative in any way. I just felt I was unwanted, unneeded. And it was boring. Just boring. Then I was down in the Washington bureau which in a way was better, but again they had a man who was assigned to the State Department, a very nice man, Bill Player, and this would have been my normal beat. I would never go to State without checking with him first. And another man—there were four people, there was Jim Wexler, who subsequently became the editor of the Post for a period, was there. But after a time, I did do a lot of sort of diplomatic stories on various embassies.

After a time, I began to be uncomfortable with what seemed to me New York editing of stories, and with a slant to them. I checked with Jim Wexler, because he and I were the most politically-minded of the office, and he had the same feeling. Then one day, Robert Lovett, who was the Deputy Secretary of State, a marvelous man, said to me, "You know, we're all very unhappy that you're at the Post." I said, "Why?" And he said, "Well, we just think you'd be happier if you weren't there." And I began to think—this, together with the kind of editing that was going on—

Kasper: What kind of editing was going on that you didn't like?

Kirkpatrick: It seemed to me to be very definitely slanted.

Kasper: Slanted in what direction?

Kirkpatrick: Pro-Soviet, pro-communist.

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Kasper: I see. And you objected to that.

Kirkpatrick: Well, I objected to editing that changed the slant of a story. Jim and I talked about it and he said he had been noticing this and he was convinced that there was something going on. We watched it for quite awhile and then we decided that it was true. So we tossed as to who would go tell Dolly Thackery about it, and I lost, so I had to go. So I went and told her what we thought; she was quite surprised.

This came in 1948 during the presidential campaign and she was in favor of Truman, and Thackery, her husband, was in favor of Wallace. And they had split. When two people are politically minded, it's not very good to share the same bed. At any rate, when I got there and told her this, she couldn't quite believe it, but she was already a little disillusioned with Mr. Thackery. She hired Joe Lash and she gave him two years of copies of the papers and he went through them, and he said, there had never been any deviation at all; it followed completely the Communist line. Thackery was out. In the meantime, I'd resigned and my letter of resignation had gone into Editor and Publisher which Thackery called "dirty pool."

Kasper: Why?

Kirkpatrick: Well, you know, you don't send a letter to the editor at the same time as a copy to the Editor and Publisher unless you're gunning for him—which I was.

Kasper: Oh, well. [Laughter.]

Kirkpatrick: But he was capable, you know, of turning around and saying, "Well, we had to reduce—a reduction in force—you know, and so and so." But he was firing a number of people.

Kasper: So that he was still in charge even though she—

Kirkpatrick: Well, this was just the beginning, you see. When I told her this, I then said, "I'm resigning." She said, "Well, don't do that." And I said, "Yes, I am. I'm not happy there and I'm resigning, whatever the outcome is." So I became a free-lance. Boy, I was up earlier in the morning, working harder, it's a miserable life with no income.

Kasper: Well, where did you place your stories that you wrote when you free-lanced?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I did some chapters in a book on the press.

Kasper: Oh, the great reporting book that you showed me?

Kirkpatrick: No, not that one. One on—well, I did a chapter on Paul Hoffman who was just setting up the Marshall Plan at ECA.

Kasper: The Economic Cooperation—

Kirkpatrick: The Economic Cooperation Agency. Then I joined the Voice of America. And was interviewed and that's when I called Ed Murrow and said, "Now, you said I was a terrible broadcaster. I'm going on to the Voice of America." So he said, "Come over," and we worked for about two hours.

Kasper: He taught you how to broadcast.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. I'd been doing it for some time, but obviously not very well. I was in the Washington office of the Voice and I was our Washington observer and I did a piece everyday in English which was broadcast around the world, I guess. I'd interview people like Mike Mansfield, people from the Hill, and then report on—I'd go around to the State Department and see people and put together some sort of report.

Kasper: How long a piece did you broadcast?

Kirkpatrick: It was probably fifteen minutes.

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Kasper: Every day?

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: That's considerable. So you had to stay on your toes and keep busy.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. It was fun. I was enjoying it very much and I'd been there maybe two or three months when suddenly I was informed that I was going to Paris. Mr. Averell Harriman had come back from Paris. He was the head of ECA, the whole overall thing in Europe, and had asked George Allen, who was the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, to release me to go to Paris. He didn't ask me if I wanted to go—because I didn't want to go—I'd been there. I didn't want to go back. But I was informed that I was going back. And the funny thing, there was quite a business about clearance. ECA was even stickier than the Voice or the State Department on security clearance and the American-Russian Institute showed up in my file.

Kasper: Oh, of course. So they had to check that out before they could let you go.

Kirkpatrick: They had to check it out and Jim Cooley who was the lawyer, the security man, for ECA, got what I thought was a ridiculous technicality. That I had not been a member of the Institute, but merely hired for a particular project, which was true. Therefore, I wasn't involved in whether it was a commie front organization or not.

Kasper: Right. You weren't involved in making policy in any way.

Kirkpatrick: No. But this had not shown up in the State Department clearance before. I mean, it had been on my record, of course. So there was some delay, but then I went over to Paris in September.

Kasper: What was the year? 1948? 1949?

Kirkpatrick: It was 1949. Yes. I'd been at free-lancing since early '49. And I was the chief of the information division of the French Mission. I had never been an administrator. You know, in government, the more people you have working for you, the higher the rank you are. Well, of course, when I filled out the papers, in the newspaper business, the higher you are, the fewer people you have under you or over you. So that was very funny. At any rate, I was chief of the information division. I was the only woman chief in the Mission, or I guess, in any mission. And I hadn't a clue—I hadn't a clue. I had to build a staff—

Kasper: A clue as to what your duties were or how to manage it?

Kirkpatrick: Any of it. And I succeeded a man, John Brown, who was brilliant—a brilliant French scholar—I mean he was sought after by the Academie Française for the definition of a word and so on. He was a great scholar. But his filing cabinet was in his head so that I found it very difficult to pick up the pieces. He had a small, sort of skeleton staff with a great many projects, but he carried them all around in his pocket.

And the first—I mean the moment I got there, particularly, we had to go up to open the Metz Fair and we had a booth there or something, and we had to go to a luncheon. And I had to make a speech, my first speech in French, which was pretty terrible. No, that's not true. Sometime before the end of the war, I was asked to speak at the Sorbonne under the auspices of the Quai d'Orsay and was introduced by a very distinguished ambassador. I stood up there and spoke in French—so-called French—about the United States and relations with France and so on. And Geoff Parsons was in the audience and I said at the end, "Well, Geoff, it was pretty bad, wasn't it?" And he said, "It wasn't bad at all, except some of your genders were a little mixed up." [Laughter.]

But at any rate, to have to get up and make a speech, and in front of John Brown, it was trying. And I worked for Barry Bingham. He was the Mission Chief, the Minister, a wonderful man. I'd known him in London during the war. He'd been in the Navy there. The publisher of the Louisville Courier Journal. And after a while we had exhibits—traveling exhibits and labor exhibits. We ran a magazine,

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France-Amérique. We had a labor representative. And I had to build a staff, and I'd had some good people in Washington suggesting people, and I finally had a staff that was ninety percent French. I got as a deputy Harold Kaplan who had been an editor of Partisan Review—a very able, very bright man. He really took quite a load off my shoulders. I worked about fourteen hours a day—morning, noon and night.

[Tape interruption.]

Kirkpatrick: Our office was in the building next to the Embassy—just off the Place de la Concorde. Two blocks over on the rue de Rivoli was the Special Representative, Harriman's office in the Tallyrand. They had a large information section and they all had ideas. They were in France so they were interested in what went on in France and they were constantly interfering. They would come up with ideas as to how to make the French aware of what we were doing in the Plan Marshall.

Kasper: The what?

Kirkpatrick: The Marshall Plan.

Kasper: Oh, the Plan Marshall.

Kirkpatrick: I'm sorry my diction isn't better.

Kasper: No, that's all right. I just didn't catch it the first time around.

Kirkpatrick: I mean, it was just things like yo-yos on the handlebars of French workers bicycles. Find out what the yo-yos—

Kasper: What for?

Kirkpatrick: To say, "Merci, les Etats-Unis"—"Thank you, America." Or a balloon from the Eiffel Tower with a streamer saying—

Kasper: "Merci, les Etats-Unis."

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Yes. And Congressmen would come over—one particularly nasty one who was an appropriations member fixing me with a beady eye saying, "I haven't seen anything at all to suggest that the French are aware of the Marshall Plan." And I said, "Where have you been, Mr. Congressman?" "In the Crillon Hotel." And I said, "Well, there aren't many French living in the Crillon." You know, I mean, constant, steady business. And senators and congressmen coming over and they all wanted their expenses paid by the counterpart funds. You see, we gave the French dollars and they paid the equivalent francs to us, which paid our expenses. And we had it to use. And Bill Tyler in the embassy, and his British opposite number, and a French member of the Assemblé and I got together with projects. One of them was, which subsequently I thought was absolutely wrong, was revealed by Tom Braden to Stewart Alsop. We funded the non-communist federation of labor. The CGT was communist-dominated. And we funded magazines, France-Amérique and various things that the French thought would be useful to combat the Communist party which was very strong in France at that time. So that was that.

Kasper: You stayed there for three years though. That was quite some time.

Kirkpatrick: No, I was there eighteen months.

Kasper: That's all.

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: Why does it say in your bio that you were there from '49 to '52? The chief of information division—'49 to '52.

Kirkpatrick: Well, that's not three years—'49 to '50, '50 to '51—I don't think it was three years. Maybe it seemed like three years. [Laughter.]

Kasper: You remember it, however, as eighteen months, is what you're saying?

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Kirkpatrick: I sort of thought it was, but, no, I guess it was longer than that. At any rate, George Perkins, the Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, came over. There was a NATO Council meeting in Paris. I sat next to him at a dinner party, and he said, "Would you be interested in coming back to the State Department. I need a public affairs officer there." Bill Tyler, apparently, had suggested that he talk to me. And I said, "When? Tomorrow?" I couldn't wait. So I came back to Washington to the Department as Public Affairs Officer for European Affairs. A dreamy job—I loved it. I had the best time.

Kasper: Why did you like it so much?

Kirkpatrick: Well, partly—Well, I had charge of all of USIA in Europe, which meant that I had to go over at regular intervals and check on how they were doing in various places which was very pleasant. Then when the Secretary of State went to Europe, I went, too, as his press officer. And travel with Mr. Acheson and Mrs. Acheson was a great pleasure. And we had I think several very exciting trips. First, we were in England when George VI died. Remember the picture of the Queens in Westminster Hall with the lying-in state and the three queens in black?

Kasper: Yes.

Kirkpatrick: Well, we were taken into Westminster Hall at night when the crowds were not admitted. It was very impressive. And as we were standing there looking at the coffin on the catafalque, this door at the stairs up above, a very narrow stair that came down, the door opened and there was the young Queen Elizabeth coming down. Then, of course, next day Mr. Acheson had to walk on foot to the train that carried the body out to Windsor for burial. And it was all very exciting.

Then, I'm not sure what the time frame was, but another time we were there before a NATO meeting in Lisbon, and I, and one other person, sat in on the meetings in the foreign office—Schuman, Adenauer, Eden and Acheson—and it was just fascinating. They were deciding on some aspect of policy that was coming up at the NATO meeting. And Robert Schuman, the Frenchman, would make a point, and Adenauer, the German, who was equally fluent in French, would start replying in French and then remember to shift to German, and then Schuman would pick up in German. It was very interesting. Then we went to Lisbon to the NATO meeting.

Another time, the most interesting one, was when we went to Bonn. Mr. Acheson—I can't remember what the occasion was, but we flew to Bonn and he had meetings there with the German government. Then we went to Berlin, which was very interesting. And then we flew to Vienna, and no American Secretary of State had ever been in Vienna. We arrived at the airport which was in Soviet territory—Russian territory. Vienna was still divided, and we had Emperor Franz Josef's train from the airport into Vienna—a glass car with a rear platform, and little tables with Viennese coffee and cakes.

Kasper: Very glamorous.

Kirkpatrick: And it was a beautiful June day and hot weather and half of Austria was out along the banks of the Danube sunning themselves together and here were these stalwart Soviet soldiers lining the railroad tracks. Then the government gave a banquet in the Congress of Vienna Room at the Schönbrun Palace, which had all been done over. The gold was all freshly decorated. Very gala, very festive. And Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, the Viennese opera singer who subsequently was at the Metropolitan Opera—well, senility has taken over on that one.

Then the children's ballet of the opera danced. And they joined them. And then the Foreign Minister of Austria entertained at lunch the next day out at the Summer Palace in the garden—beautiful. Then a swing around—a tour around Vienna. Mr. Acheson had a press conference in the morning, and I remember waiting for him because I knew some of the questions that were coming up were sort of tricky and he and Ambassador Donnelly had been out calling on officials, I guess, so I met them at the top of the stairs as they came back. And Acheson had a marvelous sense of humor and he turned to Donnelly and said, "She's probably going to try to run your embassy now." [Laughter.]

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Kasper: That's a compliment.

Kirkpatrick: And then he laughed. I said, "No, I was just going to tell you about some questions that—" But he loved to tease. And the day of the lunch out at the Summer Palace as we were all leaving—there was to be a tour around Vienna in cars, and Mr. Acheson turned and he said, "Helen, are coming on this tour?" And I said, "Well, I was just debating whether to go." And he said, "Ah, you picked a worthy opponent." [Laughter.] He was very quick.

And in the plane flying to Vienna we were sitting around talking and speaking of the miserable time he had—how he was attacked by McCarthy over his refusal to repudiate Alger Hiss who had been a friend of his. And somebody said to him, "Don't you feel bitter about that?" And he said, "Well, I sometimes feel like the American in colonial times who came rushing back to the stockade, and as he fell in there with an arrow in his back they said to him, 'Doesn't it hurt you?' And he said, 'Only when I laugh.'" He was quite a man. He was marvelous. You went into his office and you had to know the answer or you would be in for a very rough time. I would be called down with other people about some current problem. He was going over to the White House and he wanted to know the answer to this or that, what our views were. But he was a marvelous man to work for.

Kasper: And it was a glamorous job, wasn't it?

Kirkpatrick: Very. Very glamorous, I thought. But then I've always had the ability to make myself think that the job I had was the most glamourous one going.

Kasper: Well, but when you were at the Economic Cooperation Agency, that was not glamorous, was it? That was kind of boring as compared to what you had been doing.

Kirkpatrick: Well, it was a tedious, hard, tough job, but in a way it was also glamorous because I got around a great deal—opening fairs. Eight and ten course meals and seven wines, and we'd go back to Paris to dine on Vichy pastilles and consommé. It had its moments of glamour, yes. And René Pleven, at that point, was the Prime Minister and so he would invite me to go to the opera—or to some special event at the Trocadero. The Garde Mobile in full uniform would line the stairs and we would be in full evening dress. It was very dramatic, very splendid. Anyway, sure, it had its glamorous moments, but basically it was not a job that I fancied.

Kasper: You liked more action, too, wasn't that also part of it?

Kirkpatrick: Well, there was plenty of action, but it was just plain hard work. And it wasn't political in a sense, although we saw plenty of the visiting politicians over from Washington.

Kasper: Complaining though.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. So then that was—oh, I skipped a year—that's '49. I skipped '48 when I went to India. India, Pakistan, Afghanistan.

Kasper: And who were you working for at the time? Were you free-lancing?

Kirkpatrick: The Post.

Kasper: Oh, you were still with the Post.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. And they sent me over right after Ghandi's assassination. So I was there for the very last days of the British Raj. The Mountbattens were still Viceroy and Vicereine. And all the glamour that that entailed. I was invited to lunch there, and there were probably fourteen, sixteen people at lunch and there was a footman behind every chair. The guests assembled, and after the guests had assembled, the Mountbattens came in. They were the representatives of the King and Queen. Very, very royal. Then I went around with Edwina Mountbatten to various camps visiting refugees. It was an horrendous period. The slaughter of Muslims by Hindus and vice versa was just unbelievable.

Kasper: You mean because of the fighting between India and—

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Kirkpatrick: The Muslims and the Hindus. They slaughtered each other on sight at the time of the division of the Indian Continent into India and Pakistan. Did you ever see the Raj Quartet—The Jewel of the Crown—on television?

Kasper: No.

Kirkpatrick: Oh, you should have. Well, read it. It's five slim volumes and it's marvelous. But I remember in one camp there were people lying out on sunbaked ground in the full sun and obviously sick. I said, "What's the matter with them? I mean, why are they lying here?" "Oh," she said, "they all have cholera." I hadn't had a cholera shot. I got one fairly soon after that. It's the only country I've ever been in where I couldn't wait to get out.

The Maharajah of Bundi had been in London and his political secretary was a Scot who had been with the BBC and whom I knew quite well—Robin Duff. They came to the United States and I helped them out with dollars and so Robin had said, "When you come India, we'll provide the rupees." So I was to be met in Bombay when I arrived by someone from Bundi to take me there. Well, there was nobody at the airport, so I went to the Taj Mahal Hotel. I'd flown directly from New York there without stopping. I mean, the plane put down for refueling, but I never got out. It was fifty-four hours flying in a prop plane. Yes, it was "glorious."

Kasper: Whoa! That is not glamourous.

Kirkpatrick: No. No, no. There was nothing glamorous about it. But I went to the hotel and had a bath and went to bed and slept and got up and felt fine. Still no message from Bundi. So I looked up a number of people to whom I had been given letters. I did Bombay and then about three days later, I tried to get through to Bundi, and telephones were impossible. And I thought, "Well, I'll go down and check at the American Consulate and see what they have to say about things." I went down there, and there was this poor little man; he got up from the bench. He'd been sitting there waiting for me ever since he had missed me at the airport and he hadn't—I don't know, he hadn't checked at the Taj Mahal Hotel, I guess. He'd had reservations on the sleeper every night for me, and if there would be no one, he had to go change them. So, finally, I said, "Well, I can't go tonight." So finally, I think the next night, I got the train and had a compartment. I shared it with a Mrs. Ghandi and her child. And I think, looking back, that it was—

Kasper: Rajiv?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. It was Nehru's daughter.

Kasper: Really?

Kirkpatrick: If the ages were right, and the time was right, it was Mrs. Ghandi. Well-born Indian women didn't like to travel on trains without sharing a compartment with a westerner, preferably—well, because people were still being killed. And also, there were—there's a special word for them—bandits—who preyed on trains. I don't know why being in a compartment with another woman would help, but it apparently did. It was interesting going up because the railroad people were all Anglo-Indians—I mean conductors and officials, and I talked to a number of them. They'd taken over when the British pulled out. I got to Bundi in the Punjab. It's a village and the Maharajah lived—what?—five miles outside. I was put in his guest house in the village. It was very comfortable, a very splendid place, and then I would go up to his palace to dinner. You'd go up about nine o'clock at night. You'd sit down to dinner probably about ten or ten-thirty. Then when you got up from dinner, you'd go home to bed. You drive through fascinating woods with tigers and monkeys and all kinds of wildlife. I spent the days in the village talking to the village people. The elders would come and consult me. This was at a time when the princely states thought they had an option of joining India or staying independent. They didn't know they didn't have that option. And the elders would ask me about the merits of going in and so on. And I'd have to go and sit down with them and drink some of this brilliant green or brilliant red, sickly sort of drink, whatever it was. But it was interesting. I got around and saw life in the villages. And I had a car and a driver to go around.

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Kasper: Where was Bundi near to? I mean, what state is it in?

Kirkpatrick: It's in Rajasthan. The state is north and east of Bombay, south and west of Delhi, and borders on Pakistan. I was there about maybe two or three weeks. Then I went to Delhi and I stayed in the hotel—it's a name there I can't remember—in the new part of town. The correspondent from Time Life—a very nice man whose name, of course, now escapes me—Bob and his sister were there and they were very, very helpful. And as I say, I was invited by the Mountbattens to lunch and, you know, I saw all the political people. Then Edward Carter, who was the head of the Institute of Pacific Relations (I'd been engaged to his son in Geneva way back in the '30's), came to Delhi and I had lunch with him. He said, "Have you met Nehru?" And I said, "No." And he said, "Well, I'll see that you do." So I was invited to lunch with Mr. Carter to Nehru's house. It was an interesting lunch. And Nehru then said to me, "What do you know about Kashmir?" And I said, "Well, this is one of the reasons I'm here—the war in Kashmir—and I know nothing about it except that the case has been before the League of Nations. But to me Kashmir is the Vale of Kashmir and the cashmere material—the wool." "Well, you must go to Kashmir. I'll see that you get there." So he got a conducting officer, a charming Indian, Unni Nayar, and a plane, and I was flown up to Srinagar as some people call it.

Kasper: Srinagar?

Kirkpatrick: Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir, and stayed in a hotel there and the Indian army commanded by sikhs—well they were mostly sikhs with a sikh general. They were fighting just outside of Srinagar between there and the next town, Baramula. Beautiful country. Magnificent country. It was too early in the year to stay in a houseboat, which you do, on these wonderful houseboats on the lake that are fully equipped and with a kitchen boat behind. They are beautifully furnished, oriental rugs, et cetera. It was much too cold then. There was still a little snow in the passes. You go over a 10,000 foot pass to get into Srinagar. And I went up with the Indian Army and saw their position, but I saw mainly people there. Anyone who talked English. And then the Sheik Abdullah, who had been the political leader of the Kashmir Muslims—Kashmir had been ruled by a Hindu maharajah. The bulk of the population was Muslim. And the Pakistanis, quite rightly, claimed it should belong to Pakistan, and this was what the fighting was about. Colonel Nayar took me to the Punjabi Club. Two Britishers who were left in the Punjabi Club looked down their noses at a white woman with a Hindu officer—tch, tch, tch. You know, "one didn't do that sort of thing in our day," attitude.

Kasper: It was considered, what, risqué or dangerous or stupid or—?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I mean, socially the British didn't mix with the natives, you know.

Kasper: Oh, you just didn't mix. It was class issue rather than—

Kirkpatrick: This was the old British Raj. You ought to read that Jewel and the Crown. The Raj Quartet is terribly good and awfully genuine. So I went back down to Delhi. Unni Nayar was the conducting officer. Major Unni Nayar, a charming man, a Madrassi. He was later killed in Palestine with the U.N. forces. And Prime Minister Nehru had said to report to him what I found. Oh, yes, the Sheik Abdullah had been in jail because he was an opponent of the regime, but they'd let him out. I went to dinner with him one night and I was not totally unapprehensive. I was having dinner alone at his house with this great tall Muslim. And he washed his hands in a brass bowl before we sat down. And then we had curry that lifted the top of my head off and I almost reached for that bowl to drink— And then one of the British correspondents—there were a couple of British correspondents there, one of the British correspondents called to escort me back. He said he did it because he didn't totally trust the sheik either. There was not a movement on his part or anything but political conversation, so it was perfectly all right, but it was very nice of the correspondent.

Anyway, I went back to Delhi and Nehru had said to report to him so I did, and what was my conclusion from that. And I said, "Well, it seems to me that Kashmir belongs to the Pakistanis, that they are all Muslims there." And he was furious! He was livid! He had been born in Kashmir, he was a Kashmiri, and that didn't suit

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him at all. So I didn't make any marks with him. Then I went on from there to Lahore, Pakistan, and I felt much more at ease. To me, the Hindus were so subservient, bowing, hands together: "Jai Hind," and agreeing with anything you say. So I just didn't like them.

Kasper: Mem sahib and all that stuff?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. And the fact that the Pakistanis could be much more independent and stand up and talk to you, and look at you. The American Consul General in Lahore was an old friend of mine, Merritt Cootes, so I stayed with him and his wife and saw Lahore. Then I went up to Rawalpindi—and I had been told by Cartier-Bresson, the French photographer in Delhi, that if I wanted to go into Kashmir "here's the telephone number and call Joe and tell him I told you to call—sort of bootleg days and he'll get you there." So I called and he said fine, a jeep would pick me up the next day and take me up. And this jeep arrived with this so-called Kashmiri officer. He was a Pakistani, I'm sure. And we drove up this trail. We crossed the Jammu River—but crossed it after dark, mercifully, because if I'd seen what the road was like, I don't think I'd have ever gone. We went on up to the very top—very high. And I can't remember, I was billeted in some sort of hut but perfectly comfortable and saw: I thought they were all Pakistanis, but they were allegedly all Kashmiri fighting for Kashmir, you know. So I was with them for several days. And I remember lying out on this charpoy, a sort of a cot.

Kasper: Charpoy?

Kirkpatrick: Charpoy, reading George Meredith and suddenly the Indian Air Force came over and I was off that cot and out in the woods and under a rock faster than—I could have made the Olympic team. [Laughter.] I didn't care to be bombed by anybody else. I'd had all that.

Kasper: You'd faced those risks before.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. So then I saw some of the fighting and talked with people. Then I started down by daylight in this jeep. And there were many, many times when there were only three wheels on the road because these—

Kasper: Huge drops?

Kirkpatrick: Drops—down this mountainside. And after—I began talking to him. "Where did you get the jeep?" "Oh, it was discarded by the Americans and it's not worth doing anything with." And I said, "You know, I feel a lot like exercise. I think I'll walk some." [Laughter.] So I did more walking down than I did riding. I got down all right. And we stopped in this camp which was supposedly a Kashmiri camp, it was Pakistani. And there was a young officer who had had about six months of British Army training. He was all spit and polish. We just stayed there and spent the night there, and of course, what I wanted after two or three days up above was a bath. He led me to a tent in which there was a tin tub filled with rose water and there were towels and he stood there and bowed and said, "Any social service I am fit for." [Laughter.] I finally got him out of the tent and had a bath. Well, we had dinner. And this great treat for dessert. They had a big can of American Del Monte pineapple and it was bulging at the top. And I thought, huh uh, this is—

Kasper: I don't want to die of botulism here this far from home.

Kirkpatrick: Botulism, right. Absolutely, you know. So when it came to that, I said, "Listen, it's a great honor you're paying me, but since it comes from my country, I must ask you to do the honors." And they ate it and they were all alive the next day. I didn't. [Laughter.] And I slept in his house and he and all his people slept outside—

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