Helen Kirkpatrick Milbank: Interview #2

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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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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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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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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: 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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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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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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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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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: 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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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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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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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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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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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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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: 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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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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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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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—