Washington Press Club Foundation

Helen Kirkpatrick Milbank: Interview #3

April 5, 1990 in Williamsburg, VA

Anne Kasper, Interviewer

Helen Kirkpatrick Milbank - April 5, 1990 Tape 1 of 2

April 5th, 1990
Listen to audio

Helen Kirkpatrick Milbank - April 5, 1990 Tape 2 of 2

April 5th, 1990
Listen to audio
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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Kasper: So, you have a French Legion of Honor Award that was given in 1945; the French Médaille de la Reconaissance given in '46; and then, of course, the U.S. Medal of Freedom, also given in '46. And I'd like you talk a little bit about that because those are very substantial awards.

Kirkpatrick: Well, I don't know. The Legion of Honor was presented to me by Madame Bidault, the wife of the Foreign Minister, in a very simple ceremony at the Quai d'Orsay, the French Foreign Ministry, and there was a luncheon that followed it.

Kasper: Why were you chosen to get this?

Kirkpatrick: I don't know why. I don't know why. I suppose because I had been reporting on the Free French and De Gaulle was the President, at that point, of France. I was known as a strong advocate of France during the war and was in France then, had been there as a correspondent; they gave a number of them to correspondents. It was sort of handed out, you know. An awful lot of French have them.

Kasper: Yes, but not that many Americans have them.

Kirkpatrick: Oh, a fair number, I think. And the Médaille de la Reconaissance—I don't really know. I suspect probably that my friend, Louis de Cabrol, initiated it, inasmuch as I had gone and plucked him out of a British hospital and gotten him down to an American hospital and an American surgeon had saved his knees so that he was able to walk and ride horseback thereafter. I don't know. I never knew and, as a matter of fact, I don't recall it being presented. Maybe it was.

The Medal of Freedom was given to me at the Pentagon by General Collins, who was then the Chief of Staff of the Army, with General Bradley, I think he was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, standing by. My name had apparently been on a list of correspondents who received it, and I'd been away at the time that they all got it, so that's—

Kasper: And what were the reasons that you were awarded the U.S. Medal of Freedom?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I'd have to look up the citation to know.

Kasper: Well, what's your best guess?

Kirkpatrick: I really don't know.

Kasper: Well, it was for your war correspondence presumably.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Presumably, yes.

Kasper: Yes, and was there anything heroic in there, was that the reason?

Kirkpatrick: No. No.

Kasper: It was just because you had covered the war.

Kirkpatrick: I guess. I can't think of any—I can't think how the citation read. Again, that's at Northhampton. Everything we really want is there. I can look it up.

Kasper: That reminds me. I'm going to shut this off for a second.

[Tape interruption.]

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Kasper: Okay. So there was also, you mentioned yesterday, the Neiman Fellowship that you turned down that you say, much to your regret. There was also the Rockefeller Service Award. Would you talk a little bit about that—1953, I believe?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Well, that was something that one applied for and I think probably the application was in '52. There was a committee that was headed by Phillip Graham, who was then the publisher of the Washington Post, and on it was the head of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, and they passed on the merits of the projects. The project that I proposed was to study the relationship between public opinion and foreign policy—what role did public opinion play in the formulation of foreign policy? It was probably a good thing that I didn't get it because I don't know how one would go about it. But I proposed to do it partly at Harvard and also in Paris.

Kasper: It was an interesting topic. I'm sure you could have had some guidance from some—

Kirkpatrick: Oh, I think—I had—I did have—

Kasper: —you know, academics, as to how to do it.

Kirkpatrick: I did have various people, some at Harvard and some at Princeton, who had suggestions about it. And the only aftermath was that of a comment by Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., who was I think then probably emeritus professor of history at Harvard, who said to his son, Arthur, whom I knew, "She has a bad habit of turning down good awards."

Kasper: Oh, dear. Meaning the Neiman that you had turned down?

Kirkpatrick: The Neiman, and then the Rockefeller.

Kasper: And why did you turn down the Rockefeller?

Kirkpatrick: Well, because I knew I was going to leave the State Department and the Rockefeller award was given to people in government to give them a year to do something special and then they presumably were going back to their jobs. I knew pretty well that I wasn't going back—this was sometime after I had applied. That was at the height of the [Joseph] McCarthy* investigations, and the State Department, of course, was very much in the middle of it. Mr. Dulles, the new Secretary of State under Eisenhower, had closed the files to all of us so that we were not able to get at the records of any people whom McCarthy was attacking. And he was attacking Ferdinand Auberjenois, who was the head of the French desk on the Voice of America. I would give policy guidance to people on the Voice, as well as to USIA. And one of my memos—guidance—someone had seen on McCarthy's desk to Auberjenois said, "Do not attack the communists in broadcasts to French. Stick to reporting of the United States because attacking the French communists is counter-productive. The French resent our interfering in their internal affairs."

Kasper: This was a memo you wrote to Auberjenois.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Yes.

Kasper: And you saw it on whose desk?

Kirkpatrick: I didn't see it. Somebody saw it on McCarthy's desk at the Capitol.

Kasper: Yes. The presumption being that you were probably going to be investigated, too.

Kirkpatrick: Well he was going after Auberjenois, which seemed to me grossly unfair, inasmuch as he was following my instructions. And then the man who was the head of USIA in Bonn, who was really doing a marvelous job, an anti-communist, in the things that were being put out and the activities there, was being attacked by McCarthy as a communist. And I was not able to go into the files, and I had several senators asking for documentation to counteract the McCarthy charges. We were not permitted by Dulles to go into the files to do anything. He was placating McCarthy

______________________ * Joseph Raymond McCarthy (1908-1957), Republican senator from Wisconsin who led a communist "witch hunt" from 1950 to 1954 accusing the State Department and the US Army Signal Corps of employing communists. In televised hearings from April 4 to June 17, 1954, McCarthy's claims were unsubstantiated and he was finally recognized as a reckless fraud. In December 1954 the Senate condemned McCarthy for misconduct.

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at every turn. And he had brought into the department a man, whose name at the moment I mercifully have forgotten, and whose job was to clean out all of the commie sympathizers and the homosexuals in the department.

Kasper: And this man was assigned specifically to the State Department for that task.

Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes. He was in the department.

Kasper: Well there was apparently one in every department at least.

Kirkpatrick: Probably, yes. And Frances Knight, who had succeeded Mrs. Shipley as the head of the passport division—

Kasper: Oh, the woman you mentioned the other day.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Frances Knight was very, very active in that field also and she worked with Senator Bridges of New Hampshire, I'm sorry to say, who was hand-in-glove with McCarthy in this sweep of the so-called communists. And Dulles was doing everything he could to placate him, as indeed Eisenhower was also at that time. You remember he went into McCarthy's state and McCarthy attacked General Marshall and Eisenhower never defended him—which people found very hard to forgive because Marshall had been responsible for Eisenhower's promotion and appointments. So that period was a very hideous period and everyone in the Department was very, very concerned and, as I may have mentioned, there was a feeling that our telephones were being tapped. My immediate boss had sent word to me to come down and speak to him, not to say anything to him on the telephone because he thought—I don't know whether he thought his phone or mine was tapped—or all of them.

Kasper: But he suggested that you speak directly to him—

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: —in his office and not use the telephone—even within the State Department.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. That's right. It was a—it was a fearsome time. And then I resigned. I sent my resignation in, I think, in about April with a leaving date of June. This was a misguided idea that I should stay until my successor was appointed and be able to help him take over the job.

Kasper: What made you decide to resign?

Kirkpatrick: Well, it just was reaching the point of utter frustration with Dulles. I had to go out and make speeches and to go out and promote the Dulles line of brinkmanship was abhorrent to me. And I don't think that you should speak against your boss. If you feel that strongly you should get out. That was the principle reason that I left. And interestingly enough, the following year when I was at Smith College as assistant to the president, the students asked me to talk about McCarthy. They didn't know what it was all about. It had begun to die down then. Do you remember Joseph Walsh, wasn't it, the Boston lawyer?

Kasper: Oh, yes. Yes.

Kirkpatrick: Who finally—

Kasper: Finally did McCarthy in.

Kirkpatrick: He and Ed Murrow, together, really did him in. And the students didn't really know what it was all about so they asked me to talk on the subject and so I did. I took a tape recorder in. They wanted to know why did I want a tape recorder? Was it so they could read it? I said, "No. It's because McCarthy is still a loose cannon and I want to be able to—"

Kasper: Protect yourself.

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Kirkpatrick: "—to protect myself from what I said." And I didn't mince words about him. But they didn't—no, they were very naïve, politically, and they didn't understand the reasons for it. So I left the State Department in June, having stayed two months—when you resign, you should get out—immediately.

I went to Northhampton the first of July as assistant to the president—a job I'd been offered out of the blue—and really had no idea what it entailed, but I was to be a sort of buffer between the president and faculty, and president and trustees. Oh, I had under me the news office, the development office, and any odd jobs that came up—I think one of the first ones that was tossed at me was to find a cook for one of the dormitories for the fall. [Laughter.] The administration was not as filled with specialists as it has become lately. There had been an assistant to the president appointed the year before, but she'd had a nervous breakdown within a short time and had departed so that I was in a sense the first one and the job had never been very well defined. I went thinking that I wouldn't have to have anything to do with students who, at that age—I didn't know that age group—and they scared me to death. But I had a faculty suite in a dormitory and I of course got to know them and had a lot of fun with them.

Kasper: I'm sure you did.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Including the freshman who came in dejected because she'd just been elected president of the freshmen class and I asked why was she dejected? Well, she'd been president of her class at boarding school and president of the student government—she'd had all that. And I said, "Well, I think maybe you'd better get used to being on that track because you're never going to get off it." She's the president of Bryn Mawr today. It was very clear she was a born leader. But it was interesting. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Kasper: Who was the president of Smith at the time?

Kirkpatrick: Benjamin Fletcher Wright who had come there from Harvard. He had devised the general curriculum at Harvard. He was a red-headed, very able, very bright man, but who had small tolerance for fools, and also if people didn't stand up to him, he tended to bully them. And the faculty, who was used to being hand-patted, didn't quite understand that. So they'd come into my office after seeing him and I'd say, "Go back and talk to him—yell at him, disagree with him, stand up to him—he'll respect you for that." Oh, well they didn't like doing that—most of them. No, it was a fun—it was a fun job.

Kasper: How did your name come to him as a possibility?

Kirkpatrick: From the chairman of the board of trustees who decided that he needed somebody. She knew me and she asked a friend of mine in New York what I was doing and the friend said she thought I was just leaving the State Department. So they called up and asked me. Mrs. Dwight Morrow was then the chairman, succeeded by Mrs. Keith Kane, and I knew both of them and they talked to me about it. I enjoyed it very much. And I gave a monthly talk on foreign affairs at the college assembly. It's been interesting since—those who were students at the time, those who remembered that I gave these talks and others hadn't a clue. Either they didn't show up at assembly or else they slept through it.

Kasper: And those were the days when women in women's colleges were required to attend assembly too, no doubt.

Kirkpatrick: Well, not anymore. Not the way it was when I was in college, when we had to go, I think, four times a week.

Kasper: Yes. Well, when I was in college in the 60's, we were supposed to go to chapel, or the equivalent of assembly. We were supposed to go to chapel once a week for lectures and so forth as a group and, of course, nobody made you go, but it was kind of frowned on if you didn't.

Kirkpatrick: Well, it was too at that time and as a matter of fact, since it no longer exists—

Kasper: As an institution, right.

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Kirkpatrick: —even a suggestion, it's a pity because it's the one time when the entire college is together—faculty and students—and you lose a sense of community as a result.

Kasper: Yes, the only other time is commencement and—you know, but that's different.

Kirkpatrick: Well, the opening of college when they have to go to the convocation. They have to go there because they get their course cards signed. That's the only way to make sure that they go.

It was there that I met Robbins Milbank, whom I married subsequently.

Kasper: At Smith?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. He was at that time a member of the Board of Counselors, which was sort of the junior board of trustees, and they all had a particular assignment. Some were advisors to the art department, some to health services, etc. He was asked to counsel me on development and various things. I think at that time the editor of the Alumni Quarterly was away or ill and so I was doing that with one hand. He as an advertising executive, creative vice president for McCann-Erickson and the West Coast director, was very knowledgeable in that field and also very knowledgeable in the field of fund raising, which he had had experience in for Princeton and for the Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco. And subsequently he and I—I was always raising money for boarding school and for Smith, and he for Princeton and the Cathedral, and we'd walk down the street in San Francisco and people would cross over to avoid us!

Kasper: To the other side.

Kirkpatrick: —when they'd see us coming. Yes. But he taught me a lot about fund raising and how, you know, you go in and say, "I want at least a thousand from you, Mrs. Kasper, for this." People are never insulted by being asked for more than they can give. But if you go in and say, "I'd like twenty-five dollars," you could be insulted.

Kasper: They can always tell you they can't give you the thousand but they could hardly tell you they can't give you the twenty-five.

Kirkpatrick: That's right. That's right. Yes. So I saw him a couple of times that fall. Then we had our own McCarthy flair up there. Suddenly the sister of William Buckley sent a letter to about five thousand alumnae, just picked at random, saying that there were five members of the Smith faculty who were either communists or members of communist-front organizations and that they should not give any more money to Smith until they got rid of those members of the faculty. Well, Alois Buckley Heath lived in West Hartford, and someone in Hartford got the letter and brought it straight up to us so that we had it almost the next day. And the president was all for getting up in assembly and repudiating this, and I said, "Let's check with what we have, first." There were some very distinguished members of the faculty, including one whose history textbooks were in all public high schools in the country, and, of course, it would ruin him.

Kasper: So she named names in this letter?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, she named five members of the faculty—she named them.

Kasper: Oh, lord.

Kirkpatrick: I also had a classmate who was at the New York Times and I said to her, "Watch it. Don't get any of this into the paper or there will be libel suits." And nothing appeared in print. But I went straight down to Washington and Bill Rogers was the Attorney General. I'd known him when I was there before and I took this list down to him and said, "Can you check it out?" He did and he said, "You have no problems. You have one man who is in the art department who has signed petitions, but the organizations since have been on the attorney general's list, but it's nothing. And I wouldn't be at all disturbed." Then I went to Boston where

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Chris Herter was the Governor, and I'd known him when he was in Congress, and he sent the state's anti-communist committee from the State Senate up and held hearings for these people and cleared them all. So then it was possible for the President to stand up and tell the students and the faculty about these baseless charges—not naming any names, I believe. Well, they knew what was happening because reporters, particularly from the Hartford Courant, would come up. I threw one of them off the campus. The students were not supposed to talk to the press directly. They were supposed to do it through the news office or my office. And, of course, there was a Buckley girl in college, and she was taking the Hartford Courant man around, so I had her in for a little private talk. And it was quite a business.

Kasper: It certainly must have been.

Kirkpatrick: And the contributions to the alumnae fund almost doubled that year.

Kasper: Oh, is that right.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. As a result. People were fed up with McCarthy. What he was doing, what Governor Herter said, you know, he's really trying awfully hard to get into Massachusetts into various of these institutions that have government funds. Well almost every college has government funds in some way or another, either for research or scholarships or something. And they were successful in keeping him out.

Kasper: More than a lot of places were.

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: Yes.

Kirkpatrick: So that was—oh, apropos of that, I was on my way to Atlantic City to speak to the Association of Principles of Private Schools. I was in Penn Station to take the Atlantic City train and I was paged for a telephone call and it was Robbins Milbank calling from the Philippines, he was on his way to Asia. At that point, he had become a trustee and he knew about this, of course, and he wanted to know how it was going. I was pretty impressed by this, you know. I didn't know him very well and I thought that was really being very dutiful as a trustee to take that interest. Then when he came back, he invited me to go to dinner and the theatre in New York, which I did. I hadn't seen him a great many times. And he came up in June for a trustee's meeting and we were both invited to another trustee's place in Vermont for the weekend, and on the way up, he proposed and I accepted.

Kasper: Just like that.

Kirkpatrick: Like that. And were married at the end of June.

Kasper: This was in '54?

Kirkpatrick: In 1954, and he came to Northhampton—I, again, thought that I shouldn't just resign. So I would stay a year to work somebody else into the job. So he came up and we had a marvelous house above Paradise Pond for that year. He had retired from advertising when his first wife had had a heart attack. So he was at loose ends at that point. We had a fine year and the chairman of the English department persuaded him to take a section of freshman English the second semester, which he did. I've never before seen a manic-depressive at close range, but one day he'd be so excited at the prospect, and the next day he'd be sunk.

Kasper: Scared was he of—

Kirkpatrick: Thinking he didn't know how to do it. He came back after he'd met his class for the first day and I said, "How did it go?" And he said, "I told them everything I knew in the first ten minutes." [Laughter.] But I think he had a good time and I think he did a good job. I used to accuse him of giving them higher grades than they deserved. But he was tough on some of them. There was one girl I remember from California, and he gave her—I don't know, a D on a paper, and she went to see him and said, "Mr. Milbank, you don't understand, I'm used to getting B's." And he said, "Well, you had better turn in some work that gets B's then." But it was an interesting year.

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Kasper: Why did you decide only to stay another year? You liked your job.

Kirkpatrick: Well, he didn't want to stay in Northhampton. He had a house in Burlingame and one down at Pebble Beach and this was not his idea of where he was going to spend the rest of his life. And I had a place in New Hampshire—he had a place in New Hampshire—a hundred miles apart. So you know whose was sold. Mine was. We used to go to New Hampshire in the summer and then the rest of the year we were in California.

Kasper: So you packed up your bags and left Smith and moved to California.

Kirkpatrick: Yes, in '55.

Kasper: Did you look for work at that point?

Kirkpatrick: No. Well, I got into all of the kinds of things I'd never had time to do before. Well, you've got a list of some of them, I guess. The World Affairs Council in San Francisco, which is a very active and large and going concern. I was invited to be on the women's board at the San Francisco Museum of Art. I was put on the governor's crime commission.

[Tape interruption.]

Kasper: California, and you were talking about the organizations—

Kirkpatrick: There was a marvelous woman in San Francisco, Mrs. Henry Potter Russell, who was almost Mrs. San Francisco, and she had been Helen Crocker of the Crocker Bank family. And for some reason, I became sort of a protegé of hers. She'd been on the California State Crime Commission and her term was expiring and she had the Governor appoint me to it. I was on that for I think three or four years. Very interesting. We spent a great deal of time studying hard core juvenile delinquency, and the gangs, in particular. Eric Hoffer was a member of it, and the head of the criminology department at the University of California, and a couple of prominent lawyers. In our report, we put heavy emphasis on the effect of television on these kids and the amount of publicity they'd get because when they'd be picked up, they'd find a clipping in their pockets about a gang war or something. The television industry fought very hard to soften that report.

Kasper: Yes. There's a whole literature on that. I mean, we see that in sociology and criminology. And no matter how well it's substantiated by study after study after study—

Kirkpatrick: Nothing's done.

Kasper: —it's still denied that that's really a—

Kirkpatrick: Oh, there's no question.

Kasper: —an important variable in crime. I've always believed that it was, and I'm always astonished that it doesn't change.

Kirkpatrick: There was absolutely no question about it. We'd had—all the evidence pointed to it. And then when I finished on that one, the Governor, Pat Brown, put me on the California Coordinating Commission on Higher Education. They had just completed the Master Plan for Higher Education in which there it was specified what were the entrance qualification for the university, state colleges, junior colleges. We also were very instrumental in getting the State Board of Public Instruction to change the qualifications for teachers so that teachers were required to have a degree of substance and not just a major in education. I don't know whether that's still in effect, but I hope so because I think it was a very important one.

Let's see, I was on the board of World Affairs Council. Then I was on the Regional—Western Commission for the Marshall Plan Fellowships—which Britain had set up—particularly for fellowships at any British University. And really, the qualifications were like the Rhodes. We went through all the applications and

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then had hearings when we whittled the applicants down to a reasonable number. Then I was on the President's Commission on Trade from 1956 to about 1960, I think, under President Eisenhower. William Roth was the chairman of that and he put me on it. I also was on the board of a boarding and day school, Katherine Branson School, in Ross, California, and on the board of Mills College. So I had quite a bit to do.

Kasper: You must have been quite busy.

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: At that point, and this was really a big shift in your life—

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: I mean, you had always been on your own and—

Kirkpatrick: Working.

Kasper: —working hard on your own—

Kirkpatrick: Nine to five.

Kasper: —nine to five, salaried and so forth. Let me ask you a couple of questions. The first question is, did you miss that?

Kirkpatrick: Well, sometimes. The discipline of it. To be able to go to an office and get away from whether the laundry has come back and what about the groceries and so on. But basically, no, I was delighted to get into all these other things that I'd never been able to do—I'd never had time to do.

Kasper: So the transition to married life was a transition, but one that you welcomed—

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Yes.

Kasper: —or was it a mixed set of circumstances for you? You welcomed it.

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: And you were enjoying and—

Kirkpatrick: I remember one doctor who thought that my problems were because I resented not being in a job, and it turned out that I just was hypothyroid.

Kasper: He was looking for psychosocial reasons.

Kirkpatrick: He was looking for the psychological reason, yes.

Kasper: Let me ask you another question. You had had a very exciting career as a journalist. Did you miss it?

Kirkpatrick: Not really. Not really. I had gotten—you know, you can burn out, and I'd gotten really burned out on some things of a repetitious nature such as the European Peace Conference in which you knew who would argue what and who would argue against it, and it was very hard to bring freshness to a story like that. Oh, sure, there were times when I thought, well it would be fun to be in it. The only time I really felt strongly that I wished I were back in it has been with all these changes in Europe at this time.

Kasper: Now?

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: So, now you would happily go back and cover Europe again.

Kirkpatrick: Now, I would—I think, "Boy, if I could only get to Prague or Warsaw, you know; and the Soviet Union." Also, we did a lot of traveling.

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Kasper: You and Robbins.

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: Yes. One of the theories that has been propounded by other women journalists about women of your era during the Second World War was the notion that it was so exciting to be a correspondent and to be a foreign correspondent and a woman during World War II that a number of women may have dropped out of journalism because there was nothing that could bring them the same excitement that they had during those years of say 1938 to 1945 or 1946. How do you feel about that idea?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I suppose it's entirely possible. I just found every subsequent job I had was exciting. I had this self-made idea that what I'm doing is terribly exciting—whatever it is. I endow it with qualities that it probably doesn't have. You know, this was the best job in the State Department as far as I was concerned.

Kasper: And if it wasn't for Senator McCarthy, it would have been even better.

Kirkpatrick: Well, no, there was some pressure to get me to become a regular member of the Foreign Service, and I thought, at my age to start as a Consul General and to go to Managua is not my dream. I just recalled that I learned afterwards that Mr. Acheson had thought seriously about naming me as Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs. Ed Barrett, who had the job, who had been with Newsweek before, was resigning, and he and Acheson discussed making me Assistant Secretary of State. It would have been the first woman Assistant Secretary of State. They concluded, I think quite rightly, that the time was not ripe from the point of view of the Hill because assistant secretaries had to go up to the Hill to defend budgets and so on before Congress, and Congress is stubbornly male.

Kasper: So in 1953 they felt that Congress would have not been receptive to you as a woman.

Kirkpatrick: Right. Right. And I think they were right. The very idea scared the daylights out of me.

Kasper: So you were not anxious to be a pioneer in that capacity?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I didn't know anything about it until afterwards. Later Acheson told me.

Kasper: Well, you'd been a pioneer in other fields, maybe you would have done fine in that one too?

Kirkpatrick: Well, but you were always—this was one of the things that came up when one was tempted to fight McCarthy. Are you going to damage the Department by doing it? And the same thing would have been true trying out a woman to go up to defend the State Department. And Public Affairs, in particular, was always a target for Congress, you know. They didn't like the policy or they didn't like what USIA was doing, or, why do you have these books in the USIA libraries, and all these kinds of questions. And I'm not, by nature, very patient. It would have been awfully hard to have kept my temper at some of the stupidities that would have been asked and perpetrated and it would be necessary in that type of job.

Anyway, so, no, I enjoyed being at leisure, so to speak, and I got involved in all kinds of things, except bridge playing, which one was supposed to play every Tuesday at the Burlingame Club. I did not get into that. I wasn't a very good bridge player anyway.

As I say, we did a lot of traveling. Robbins was an original charter trustee of the Asia Foundation in San Francisco, which is still going strong and which has representatives in various Asian countries, and they send books to universities and support projects of that kind. So one of our trips was in 1964 to Japan, and then we were going on to Bangkok, to Thailand, and to Burma, but by the time we got there, the border was closed. The Burmese would close and open it, you know, at regular intervals. We were in Japan for nearly a month and were entertained and met

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a tremendous cross-section of Japanese people through the Asia Foundation—and through the San Francisco Museum.

Then we flew to Saigon where my oldest nephew was a soldier in the Army. That was when I think I may have mentioned to you how totally surprised we were at what we found there because we both knew and followed very closely everything that went on in the field and particularly in Asian things. We had no idea of the extent of the American involvement at that time. And I think the American people had no idea. We thought we had a few people there as consultants and advisors to the Vietnamese and we were up to our ears in the actual military operations. My nephew was in intelligence. Well, in the first place, Saigon after dark was ringed by Viet Cong. You couldn't go out after dark—the fighting was that close. And nobody in the States had any idea of that. Then we went on, as a matter of fact, to Cambodia and up to Angkor Wat and it was one of the last times that it was possible to go there because the fighting subsequently, you know, moved into Cambodia.

Kasper: Let me just ask you, when you went home, did you write up any of this as a story or an article for anybody or any publication?

Kirkpatrick: No. No. I don't think so. I don't remember that.

Kasper: Letters to the editor or anything?

Kirkpatrick: No. No. Then we came on around the world through Turkey, Turkey to Denmark, Scandinavia, Britain, and then home. Our furniture went overland from San Francisco to New Hampshire. We decided we had already taken an apartment in San Francisco, and we had been there the previous year I think only about six weeks, and we thought that was a little expensive. And every book we wanted was always in the other place. So we said we'd consolidate. So we moved to New Hampshire to Robbins' farm there—

Kasper: In '64?

Kirkpatrick: In '64. And also partly to get out—there's a bluebird on a limb just off at ten minutes to eleven from where I'm sitting. Do you see it? It's facing us now. Red breasted. Don't move because you'll scare him.

Kasper: Yes, I know. Oh, yes, I see him.

Kirkpatrick: You see him? They're in this bird house over here by the Nelsons.

Kasper: There he goes.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. [Timer sounding.]

Kasper: Just ignore that.

Kirkpatrick: Good morning. Yes.

Kasper: So you moved to—was it Keene, is that where you were living in New Hampshire?

Kirkpatrick: No it was a little village called—we were in the country, deep in the country. We were three miles from—in the winter, three miles from any other living human being. But it was fourteen miles northeast of Keene in the Manadnock region.

Kasper: And you kept an apartment in San Francisco, is that what you did?

Kirkpatrick: No. No. We gave it up.

Kasper: You gave up everything in California?

Kirkpatrick: Well, no, we had a place down at Pebble Beach. But we liked skiing and this was of course ideal. Vermont and New Hampshire ski places were, most of them, within an hour's drive—an hour and a half—

Page 101

Kasper: When you married Robbins, you inherited a whole second family didn't you?

Kirkpatrick: Well, yes, except they were grown, the two of them—a daughter and son. Daphne, the oldest, was married and living in Anchorage. David was in the Army in Korea at the time and I didn't meet him until later. But we went up the first summer, right after we were married, to Anchorage and met Daphne, who then had two small children, six months and two years old. Yes—the easy way to have children. Would you like a cup of coffee while you're reloading?

Kasper: Oh, sure. I'd love one.

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

Kasper: Yes, you had just moved in '64 to New Hampshire.

Kirkpatrick: Via Japan and Vietnam.

Kasper: Oh, yes. Yes.

Kirkpatrick: We had gone to Japan and Vietnam.

Kasper: And we had gone to Angkor Wat and Turkey and through Scandinavia and home again.

Kirkpatrick: Are you sure?

Kasper: Yes.

Kirkpatrick: We talked about that, but I only talked—

Kasper: You talked about Saigon at some length and I thought that was very interesting. Yes.

Kirkpatrick: Okay. Well, one of the reasons for leaving San Francisco was that both of us were so involved in so many things that we wanted to get out of it, you know. Of course, when we got to New Hampshire—

Kasper: There was nothing.

Kirkpatrick: Nothing to do. Now, I started the Conservation Commission in Nelson. Robbins was elected a Selectman, then he ran for the legislature.

Kasper: For the state legislature?

Kirkpatrick: The state legislature.

Kasper: Was he elected?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes. I became the president of the New Hampshire Association of Conservation Commissions—that was a little later after they'd gotten going. We were early on in Nelson with the Conservation Commission—"eco freaks" they all said.

Kasper: Oh my. Who said? You mean the conservatives in the state?

Kirkpatrick: Well, people around said, "Eco freaks—what is all this nonsense about conservation?" This was 1964 or '65, you know. People were not ecologically, environmentally minded, at any rate. Then I was on the local board of the League of Women Voters, and then on the state board; on the New Hampshire Committee for Better Water—I always thought that was a wonderful name; later the New Hampshire Coalition for the Environment; and I worked at hospital as a member of the auxiliary. And at the same time, when we went out to California in winters, I worked at the Community Hospital in Monterey—a marvelous hospital with a perfectly wonderful auxiliary. It had something like four hundred active members which means that you worked four hours without question at least once a month—and many do it more often. And you appear in uniform and it has to be pristine and no jewelry and no perfume.

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Kasper: Serious stuff.

Kirkpatrick: Very, very impressive stuff, and totally accepted by the staff and the doctors and the nurses.

Kasper: And probably an important part of the institution for survival.

Kirkpatrick: Very, very—yes. Oh, then I transferred from the Western to the Northeastern Commission on the Marshall Fellowship and served on that and the last year was chairman of it—1964 to 1968, I guess. And then in 1965, I became a member of the Visiting Committee to the History Department at Harvard.

Kasper: What is that?

Kirkpatrick: Well, the Board of Overseers [Harvard's name for trustees] chair committees that visit the various departments—you go in once a year. We would meet, not necessarily in this order, with the senior staff, with the junior staff, which meant the instructors, assistant and associate professors, and the graduate students who were teaching assistants, and then we would meet with what Harvard calls the concentrators, meaning the students who were majoring in it. Then we would write a report on it. And the history department was notorious, not famous, notorious for its lack of any organization—it was a bunch of prima donnas and if one wanted to go off on a sabbatical, he went on a sabbatical, whether it left a hole for the—

Kasper: Whether it was his turn or not?

Kirkpatrick: That's right. They were a brilliant lot, but they were real prima donnas. There was a whole period in which there was no Americanist. There was another—a named group of historians who had a house and it had been left by someone—or money donated for this—first-class historians. They were not recognized by the History Department as counting for a student who took courses with them. It was very interesting. I learned a great deal in those five years what went on at Harvard.

Kasper: How did you get the appointment in the first place?

Kirkpatrick: Well, Teddy White—Theodore White, the journalist and author—was the chairman. He was on the Board of Overseers. Harvard is run by a three-man troika at the top that's called The Corporation. Then under them is the Board of Overseers which is like most boards of trustees, except they don't have as much power as boards do. And the overseers chair these various committees for the departments. And it was very interesting. I was not as respectful of Harvard afterwards as I had been before. The History Department committee on graduate study turned down a girl who had graduated summa cum, Phi Beta Kappa from Bryn Mawr and had taken a first at Oxford in history. She was turned down on her application for graduate work because the chairman of the three-man committee considering applicants said the recommendation from Bryn Mawr didn't sound very enthusiastic. When I saw the man with whom she wanted to study and told him this, he was horrified. He said, "He never recommends people at all. They have to be wonderful to be recommended." But the person with whom she wanted to study was never consulted. This sort of thing. This shouldn't be bruited about, for I'm sure they've reformed. And, oh, I forgot, I should go back.

When I was in California, I got well and truly involved in politics. I was a member—the only member, they used to say, (it's not true)—of the Democratic party who was a member of the Burlingame Club or of the Cypress Point Club. There was one other Democrat in each club! And I was the chairman of the county Democratic party which was not a very big party. That's not an area where there are many Democrats.

Kasper: Was your husband a Democrat too?

Kirkpatrick: No, he was a Republican.

Kasper: How did you work that out between you?

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Kirkpatrick: Well, initially when we decided to get married, I said, "Oh, I can't marry you because I promised Adlai Stevenson that I would work in his next campaign." I couldn't in '52 because I was in the State Department. And Robbins said, "Well, the name has been in far worse places than that."

Kasper: You mean the name Milbank? [Laughter.]

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Then when Stevenson was running in the primary against Kefauver, Nixon was the only man running in the Republican primary and Robbins knew—we both knew Adlai personally, and he liked him very much, so he re-registered as a Democrat for the primary. And he never changed his registration until some years later when he was going to run for the legislature in New Hampshire. And I said, "You can't possibly stand the Manchester and Nashua Democrats. They're to the right of Eastland and that southern bunch, they're impossible people." So he re-registered as a Republican. But we usually ended up voting for the same people.

But there's a wonderful story about that. There was a man in Nelson who was the postman and he was the general factotum and he took care of the cemetery and he worked for various people. And a neighbor of ours, a Smith gal, was working in her garden and had the radio on. And when Win came by, she said, "Oh, Win, I just heard on the radio that Robbins Milbank is running for the legislature." "Well," he said, "that explains everything." And she said, "What does it explain?" "Well," he said, "I was to Selectmen's the other night and Robbins comes in and wants to re-register. And I goes home and says to my wife, 'Robbins and Helen have had a spat and he's gettin' back at her.'" [Laughter.]

Kasper: Oh, the uses of politics.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. And I was a delegate to the 1956 convention in Chicago, a member of the California delegation, which was interesting. The only way I really knew what was going on was that I'd telephone Robbins every night in California and he'd tell me because he'd seen it on television. Much easier than having to follow the proceedings from the floor.

Kasper: To be there.

Kirkpatrick: And then I worked in the Stevenson headquarters in Washington for a couple of months, which put a great strain on the marriage. Robbins didn't care for that. He didn't mind that I was working for Stevenson, but I was in Washington instead of in California.

Kasper: I see. He wanted you with him, presumably.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Yes.

Kasper: What kind of work did you do on the Stevenson campaign?

Kirkpatrick: I was the head of the speakers' bureau.

Kasper: So you organized—finding people who would travel around the country and—

Kirkpatrick: Calling Mrs. Roosevelt and saying will you go to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and to line up various other people. The less well-known they were, the more difficult they were to work with.

Kasper: You mean, the more prominent they were, the more conceding they were.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. More cooperative. Well, that's always been true. The busier the people, the more they'll take on. So, and in New Hampshire, I got mildly involved in state politics, but not a great deal. I went to a couple of conventions. One year, I was elected to both Republican and Democratic conventions.

Kasper: Both?

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

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Kasper: How did you manage that?

Kirkpatrick: Which is hysterical. I didn't have anything to do with it. I didn't have anything to do with it at all. I came across the notice the other day from the Republicans that I'd been—

Kasper: Elected to go to the—

Kirkpatrick: —as a delegate to their state convention. I didn't go to—

Kasper: Maybe was it listed under two names—Helen Kirkpatrick and Mrs. Robbins Milbank?

Kirkpatrick: No. No. They didn't cross-check, you know.

Kasper: Oh, my.

Kirkpatrick: Politics are a strange thing in New Hampshire—where we had Mr. Sununu, you remember.

Kasper: Yes. I know.

Kirkpatrick: And we didn't any of us think he'd last six months in Washington. He's tamed himself. He was very, very abrasive in New Hampshire. Very. Very authoritarian as governor.

Kasper: Indeed.

Kirkpatrick: To the right of Julius Caesar—but brilliant.

Kasper: Oh, I imagine, he's quite bright, yes.

Kirkpatrick: A technician.

Kasper: Yes, that's right, a technician.

Kirkpatrick: An MIT professor.

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

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Catholic with nine children. That's an area I feel strongly about—that both Reagan and Bush refuse to permit federal funds to go to any country which practices contraception.

Kasper: Never mind abortion.

Kirkpatrick: Not to mention abortion. Yes. I think it's disgraceful. In last Sunday's New York Times book review, there is a review of the book by—you'd know the name, I recognized it—it was the Ehrlichs.

Kasper: Oh, yes. The Ehrlichs. Paul and Ann Ehrlich.

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: About the population explosion.

Kirkpatrick: The population explosion. Yes. Which anyone in his right mind knows is devastating. The population explosion, yes—"Too many, too rich, too wasteful." My police nephew, when he talks about crime, he says that a lot of it is due to overcrowding, overpopulation. People can't really stand being cooped up so close together.

Kasper: Aside from which they can't afford to take care of each other either.

Kirkpatrick: That's right.

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Kasper: I mean there's not enough food, and not only housing, but food and comfort and clothing and all the rest of the necessities of life to go around. Never mind some of the amenities.

Kirkpatrick: That's right.

Kasper: Like education and culture and hope.

Kirkpatrick: That's right. Well, I think we're finished everything else, except I've always been involved, for at least the last forty years or so, at Smith. I was vice president of the alumnae association and on fundraising campaigns and all that sort of thing. In other words, generally pro bono publico.

Kasper: Are you working at some of those same issues down here? Are you involved at all?

Kirkpatrick: I'm on the board of the Friends of the Library and I work up at the Health Care Center, but other than that, I've been so apt to be away that I haven't gotten involved in anything else. I went around to the hospital because I've worked in hospitals for years, and started out at the age of 14. Mother was on the board of the Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester and I went in as a volunteer. Someone said to her one day, "Did you know where Helen is working in the hospital?" And Mother said, "No, I don't think I do." I was working in the VD clinic. And Mother said, "Well, she's learning a little early, but—" [Laughter.]

But it was my grandmother who had started in Wheeling, West Virginia, at the Ohio Valley General Hospital, a thing called The Twig, which is like an auxiliary. And Mother started it in Rochester working for, sewing for the hospital. And it is just sort of inherited. And also I really had wanted to be a doctor, so—

Kasper: That's right. I was just going to say, you mentioned that much earlier. Where do you think that impulse had come from originally?

Kirkpatrick: I have no idea. Well, I suppose that if you were brought up to regard volunteer work in a hospital, that the next step would be to become a professional. It always interested me—it still does. I'm an unlicensed diagnostician—very good, too. [Laughter.]

Kasper: Let me ask you a couple of sort of recap your career questions. During the time that you were an active journalist, what were the best parts and what were the worst parts about being a war correspondent?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I suppose the best part—being in the middle of things knowing what's going on. Being with troops, with fire brigades and where the action is. Oh, I forgot the trip to Iceland that never was. I became the president of an association of all those who were going somewhere and never got there. [Laughter.] I was supposed to go to Iceland and I started out on an Icelandic freighter from Edinburgh and somewhere in the North Sea (and I don't recommend it in March on a small ship), it's the only time I've ever been seasick in my life. We had twelve young men from Norway who had been brought off in a raid by the British from the Lofoten Islands. Only one of them had ever been to Oslo. They were very attractive young fishermen. And one by one they'd stand up at dinner, bow, and ask to be excused and dart from the room. And I followed not too long after and prayed for a submarine to hit us, you know, it was so rough.

We were in a convoy that was attacked and lost a lot of ships. The Icelandic sailors didn't care for it. So we swung around and came back into Loch Ewe which was the convoy assembling point in Scotland. And while we were sitting there waiting for another convoy to form, I got a message through the Admiralty to come back to London as the Germans had gone into Greece and somebody had to go to Greece and I was needed back in London—mercifully—because I would have sat in Reykjavik, you know, for a year with nothing much to do or report. We were setting up a Navy base there. It was a point, you know, for Atlantic convoys. It was before we were in the war.

Kasper: So you were actually going to Iceland to stick around and report for a while?

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Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: What year was this?

Kirkpatrick: In 1941. We were not in the war, so it had to be '41. Then another time I was on my way down to the country for a weekend in England when I was stopped by an Automobile Club officer—they're like the AAA [American Automobile Association]—to say there was a message that a plane was leaving such and such an airport at noon for Moscow and I was supposed to be going. I had been told I should go, and I had applied to go. So I called my housekeeper, who hastily threw everything she thought I would need for a whole winter in Russia, and brought it out to the airport. As I was about to board the plane, the message came from the Embassy in London that Ambassador Steinhart in Moscow had said he didn't want any more people coming, and he certainly didn't want a woman because the Russians were not going to survive. He said, "Three weeks at the most, they'd give up." So I never got to Moscow and I was very glad afterwards because correspondents there with the Embassy personnel were all evacuated to Kuybysher and there was no story there, you could never get near the front, or really do anything. It would have been a dead end.

Kasper: So really your career during the war had a great deal of good fortune attached to it, didn't it?

Kirkpatrick: It was just plain good luck for not getting someplace where I—

Kasper: And getting to a lot of good places.

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: I mean, you covered a lot of interesting material.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Yes.

Kasper: So, in some ways, the good fortune is also a part of the good part, is that what you're saying?

Kirkpatrick: Right. Right.

Kasper: What were some of the worst parts about being a journalist, then?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, I suppose frustrations at times of not being able to get out a story through censorship of something. I don't recall anything that I minded terribly. But that would be a certain frustration. I couldn't complain about eating because unfortunately there were a number of black market restaurants in London and we ate very well there. Then when the Americans moved in there was a mess you could go to if you wanted to—you didn't want to very often—but you could. And we didn't do badly. Care packages from home were—

Kasper: Welcome.

Kirkpatrick: —were welcome. But you'd go down to the country and I used to go and stay with Constance Spry, who was a very well known flower, decorator, expert horticulturalist. But she also was a great cook and she wrote, at that time, a cookbook called Come Into the Garden Cook. And I wrote an introduction to it, which was the most pretentious, really, sophomoric sort of business about how one hadn't really cared much for English food—soups with lots of flour in them and vegetables that were overcooked—but that Constance was not of that ilk—indeed she wasn't. So I really fared well. And well, getting on to planes or taking trains was sometimes an irksome business.

Kasper: Were there any hard parts like convincing your editors or your bureau chief that there were places you should go or stories you should cover and they didn't want you to?

Kirkpatrick: No.

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Kasper: No, that was never a problem?

Kirkpatrick: Bill and I were rather a free-wheeling pair. Bill was a very, very firm bureau chief. He knew what should be done and what shouldn't be done. He would lecture me at times—one doesn't this and one yells at censors—remember that, you know?

Kasper: Yes. Was Bill Stoneman bureau chief the whole time that you were there?

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: So that was a nice connection—the two of you.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. And we remained very good friends until he died. I saw him just before he died two years ago.

Kasper: Did he remain a journalist all his life?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Until he retired. I finally after eighteen years persuaded Robbins to go abroad without having reservations and a planned itinerary everywhere. We went over and we were staying with the Parsons in Spain. Then we flew up to Toulouse, and picked up a car, and we went over to the Tarn, and did the area around the Tarn, to the Dordogne where we met Bill and Ingrid Stoneman. And we went over to Beynac-Zazenave—a marvelous hotel, the Hotel Bonnet—right overlooking the river. The English had been on that side and the French on this side during the Thirty Years War. Beautiful country and wonderful food. My diary of that trip consists practically of menus and wines. So we were with them for about three or four days and did the—

Kasper: What year was this?

Kirkpatrick: In 1972. I have the notes on our menus there.

Kasper: What you ate and what you drank—who with— [Laughter.]

Kirkpatrick: That's right. Yes. And then we went down to Bordeaux. I'd never been—in all the years I was in France, I'd never been down to the Bordeaux region. We went down there and we had introductions from Douglas Dillon to his Maître de Chai at the château (famous for Hant Brien wine). Then he telephoned other—the Rothschild cellars and three or four different vineyards that we were interested in going to, and so we went. The most interesting, I think, in a way, was Philippe de Rothschild's—Mouton Cadet—

Kasper: Mouton Cadet Rothschild.

Kirkpatrick: Rothschild, yes. And the Maître de Chai there taking us around the wine cellar, he showed us where, when the war started, they had bricked up one whole section of the cellar and Philippe de Rothschild's best wines—

Kasper: Were behind that.

Kirkpatrick: Were behind that.

Kasper: So that the Germans would never find it.

Kirkpatrick: The Germans didn't get it. And Goering had put a star on it and no German except Goering's people were permitted there. And Goering was going take that as his residence and all the wine. He didn't get around to it fortunately.

Kasper: Oh, god.

Kirkpatrick: But then we worked our way up the Atlantic Coast. I remember stopping one day someplace to eat oysters out in some little fishing place and there were fishermen in there. So I began asking them what happened during the war. And you know, you get wonderful stories.

Kasper: Oh, yes.

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Kirkpatrick: And then we went—we had been before—Robbins and I had been before on the north coast of Brittany, and I had been on the south coast, so I insisted that we go on the south coast. We stopped at a little inn that the Parsons had known about that was owned by a Frenchman with an American wife. It was on the River Aven, right near Pont Aven—a charming place—and we stayed there about ten days. We would make sorties out. We'd go to see the calvares in the various towns in Brittany and to good places to eat. The Inn at Kerdrue on the Aven had a young chef, and in the morning he'd ask us what we'd like for dinner that night, and then he'd go to market and get it. And we drank a great deal of Muscadet. The Bretons don't grow grapes so there's no wine, it's cider. So we would drink this Loire wine, Muscadet. The chef had a two or three year old child, and I remember her skipping up and down the hall saying, "Monsieur Muscadet. Monsieur Muscadet." [Laughter.]

Kasper: It was everywhere.

Kirkpatrick: And we'd go down to the bar late in the afternoon and the fishermen would come in and we'd get wonderful stories from them.

Kasper: Did Robbins speak French too?

Kirkpatrick: He knew French. His mother had taught him French. He spoke it with a Boston accent, but he would never speak it in front of me.

Kasper: He knew it wasn't as good as yours, is that right?

Kirkpatrick: Well, he was shy, you know. Also, he'd spent hours and hours on Italian, you know, the tapes, before the first time we went to Italy. Did he speak Italian? No. I never had time to do it at that time, so I was the one who tried to sort of ad lib Italian with a mixture of French and Latin. And after a trip in the Aegean, we came up the Yugoslav coast. We'd had a waiter at the hotel in Gilroy, California, where we used stop for dinner on our way down to Pebble Beach. And Yuba was a Yugoslav. So when we were going there, he wrote to his brother in Dubrovnik to be sure to see us. So brother and wife came on board, which prevented me from seeing much of Dubrovnik, I'm sorry to say. And we sat there with some of the officers of the ship having hysterics because they spoke no English. She spoke a little Italian, just about as much as I did. And these two men just sat there dumb. She and I handled the conversation. It was a riot. [Laughter.]

Kasper: Oh, dear. Tell me, let's see if I can put this in a not too terribly convoluted way. It's often been said that men have pretty straight career trajectories, you know, they're educated in a certain fashion to take on a certain line of work and then they go into it and it becomes pretty much a life career. It's often been said that women by contrast have careers that are very contingent. They may not be particularly educated for a career, but they get into one and they may well enjoy it, and it may last for a while, but they may move about and so forth and so on. And it's often interrupted by such things as marriage and children and a variety of other circumstances including, you know, aging parents and illness and so forth. When you look back on your career, how do you see yours? Was it more the contingent or was it more determined on your part to have one and did it take the shape you wanted?

Kirkpatrick: I think it was determined. I think from the time that I went to Geneva after college and began sending pieces back to Ernie Clark from New York to publish anywhere he could publish them, that that was the general direction—I think it also had been guided slightly by a man who had been the head of the Foreign Policy Association in New York, James MacDonald, and we became very good friends. He said to me one day he wanted to talk to me seriously about what I was going to do. This was, you know, already in the summer of 1931. And he said, "You have a great many talents, and I'm afraid you're just going to waste them if you don't pick some one thing and concentrate on it." And I said, "Well, I don't know what the talents are." But I recalled from time to time when I was tempted to go off in other directions, I would remember what he said and it would bring me back to saying "Stay on this path."

Kasper: Yes. But you also effectively retired from journalism at about age 44?

Page 109

Kirkpatrick: Age 45. Yes.

Kasper: Age 45? Do you have any regrets about that because, after all—

Kirkpatrick: No. I don't think that in this particular case that my marriage would have been compatible with my having a job as a journalist.

Kasper: Why is that?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I just don't think it would have been compatible. There wouldn't have been—I couldn't have lived in San Francisco and Burlingame and worked for a newspaper—even if there were one that I thought was any good. There weren't very good newspapers. The San Francisco Chronicle which had been good had really deteriorated. The Theriot family seemed only interested in making money from it. And, you know, in any kind of a newspaper job, you'd have gone off somewhere on stories and that—no, that wasn't my idea of marriage.

Kasper: Yes. So in this case you—

Kirkpatrick: So I really felt that I had three careers. I had journalism. I had education and government. And I had marriage. And I was just lucky to acquire ready-made children. I do remember writing to Mary Ellen Chase, who had complained that some of her best students had really never gone on to write who had writing ability. I got an honorary master's from Smith in 1948 and she'd written the citation. And she clearly thought that I could write. And she said it bothered her because some of these really good students didn't develop their writing. And I remember writing her and saying, "I have just interrupted this letter to go: the laundry came back—to go and count it and put it away. This is the kind of reason why your good students have never become writers because there is no uninterrupted moment in the day of a housewife. There's always something. You have to go and see whether lunch is ready or see whether the ordering has been done." And I think that it's very hard—it takes a very determined woman with great powers of concentration to set aside the time to do nothing but that. I mean, the nine to five office was—I often regretted it because it was glorious. You got out of the house and you got to the office and there it was.

Kasper: What do you think are the circumstances then for women today who are journalists and who are trying to have marriages and families at the same time that they're writing?

Kirkpatrick: Well, I think the young women are remarkable in how they cope. I think it's remarkable. They've found a way to do it. I don't know whether it is underlying in any way the enormous divorce rate in the country or not. I mean, I don't believe in küche, kierke and kinder.*

Kasper: Barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.

Kirkpatrick: That's right. But there is something in between.

Kasper: And you think women today are managing to eke out a compromise on that.

Kirkpatrick: I think that a lot of them are doing an incredible job. One granddaughter, she and her husband decided that they would not have any children. They are both actors. And I think she said that she wasn't temperamentally suited to be a mother. But I've seen her with her nephew and I'm not sure that that is really the case. But, that's different from being sustainedly in charge of a two year old, you know.

Kasper: It certainly is.

Kirkpatrick: And she may be right. I think a number of young women have decided not to have families.

Kasper: When you look back on your life and your work, what segments of it do you consider the high points?

______________________ * "Kitchen, church and children."

Page 110

Kirkpatrick: What do you mean by high points?

Kasper: Well, the best times.

Kirkpatrick: Well, I suppose in the early days of the war in England when we were all being so courted by all the British and it was great fun and there was a wonderful group of people—Ed Beatty, Ed Murrow, Drew Middleton, Geoff Parsons, Joe Evans—we were all great friends and we enjoyed being together. And we'd sometimes meet for lunch and quote our favorite author—what we'd just written, you know? [Laughter.] That was great. And then, of course, I enjoyed Paris very much. I came to love Paris, I think, almost more than London in a way.

Kasper: Even though you spent less time there, in Paris.

Kirkpatrick: Well I was in Paris overall about four years and in London about seven. But London has changed so. It was a small town in the late 1930s and 40s. It was a village really during the war, particularly during the Blitz. I mean, everybody talked to everybody which was not very English. And I had enjoyed life in London before the war, but it was somehow cozier. It's an interesting place and to discover that—to go back now, if you were once a friend of an Englishman or Englishwoman, it's for life. And it surprised me when I first discovered that. You know, we're here today, gone tomorrow people. Delighted to see you and may see you again, and that's it. But if you're a friend of someone in England, it takes a while, in those days, to be on first-name terms. You didn't call anybody by their first name until you knew him or her quite a long time. Here, the garage mechanic calls you Anne or Helen, which infuriates me. I don't care for this. You know, you're calling up on the phone and just selling something—"Hello Helen." Oh! Steam rises! [Laughter.]

Kasper: Or as you said to me the other day, when they call up and they say to you, "Well, good morning, how are you today?" And what you feel like saying to them is—

Kirkpatrick: "What's it to you?!"

Kasper: "So, what's it to you?!" [Laughter.]

Kirkpatrick: I know, this bonhomie is a false ami.

Kasper: Bonhomie, is right, it's a false ami. Right.

Kirkpatrick: No, I think it's very hard. You know, people would ask what was the best story, what was the greatest story? I suppose in many respects the entry into Paris and the 25th of August with all the celebrations in the Cathedral of Notre Dame were undoubtedly the really—I don't know that if one looked over what one wrote that it would stand out as a great story, but it was the most exciting—well, it did come out in pretty big headlines. But whether the quality of the writing was better than any others, I don't know. But it was very exciting.

Kasper: Any regrets?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, sure. Being lazy. The French general who was the chief of staff of the army under Vichy, but actually he was also running the Résistance within the army, and I got to know him and he offered me complete access to all of his papers for a book. Well, you know, could I do my job and also do the book? And I ended up by not doing the book. I don't think literature missed anything great, but I did have a unique opportunity then. I have about ten chapters of a novel that I did write.

Kasper: Oh, is that right? About what?

Kirkpatrick: Well, it's obviously, with name changes, very autobiographical. And I showed it to Cass Canfield of Harpers and my literary agent, Carol Hill, when they came to Paris. And they had hysterics. They read it. They said, "Well, none of these people are real. There's only one person who's real." And I said, "Who's that?" And they named him. And I said, "I don't know who he is. He got in there

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by mistake." And then Cass said, "Stick to non-fiction." I've read several of the chapters and I think they're pretty good.

Kasper: Well, show them around again and see what happens.

Kirkpatrick: Well, I'd have to revamp it. But there are some descriptions in there that I felt were excellent and I think would stand up today: of what it was like in actual combat in Normandy. I can really sort of feel and taste and smell it again as a result. I thought that was a pretty good description—said she, modestly. But I can see that the characters who wandered in and out of the "book" were not awfully real. My brother wrote a book—a spy novel, supposedly, and was an expert on the Soviets. He sent the draft to Robbins and me and we read it and we roared with laughter because there wasn't a single person who talked in it. They all made speeches. Well, Hollywood has bought it! But of course, they'll rewrite it. I mean, they just use it as a script because the dialogue is terribly difficult.

Kasper: Well, but they'll find somebody to redo all of that.

Kirkpatrick: Well, they always do, you know. They rarely—

Kasper: They'll just use the story line.

Kirkpatrick: Yes, sure. So I don't know what's happened to it, if anything. But at any rate, he got paid, which pleased him—

Kasper: Is he retired now?

Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes. He retired from Brown University in—well, what is he? He's 73. He retired when he was 66. He had polio at the age of 36 and hasn't walked since.

Kasper: Really?

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: Then he's wheel-chair bound?

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: How strange—at 36?

Kirkpatrick: Yes. It was the last year before Salk—'52. And there was a terrible polio epidemic. And he'd been on a trip in Asia and he came back and it had been a terribly hot summer. I can remember it in Washington because I was in the Department then. It never went below 90 degrees for about three weeks, night or day; it was just awful. And he was re-roofing his house in Fairfax. And so the doctor thought this was heat exhaustion and finally sent him in to Doctor's Hospital in Washington—I don't know why—you know all the mismanagement—for a spinal tap which proved to be positive. Then they made him get up and walk out because they didn't want the ambulance—(they thought, you know, polio was contagious at that point), and sent him to whatever the hospital was that handled contagious diseases. I'm sure that that walking probably pushed him towards paralysis because he'd been in that hospital probably three or four days before he became paralyzed. And paralysis came as high as his chest and then stopped. He was briefly in an iron lung and then out of it and then he was moved to a VA hospital which was excellent. And then to Walter Reed. Beedle Smith, who was then the head of CIA, had him moved to Walter Reed which was a dreadful mistake. He had a private room off a paraplegic ward and those boys in there—there was one orderly and one nurse for this whole ward and for Kirk. And the GIs from the Korean War were falling out of bed. They were setting their beds on fire. You know, they had drinks smuggled in.

Well, Mother called me the day that Eisenhower was elected and said, "I don't know what's the matter with your brother. He's so depressed. See if you can find out. He was for Eisenhower, he ought to be elated." So I went to see him and he'd had a series of tests and the Colonel and a Captain had come and said, "This is the end of the road. You'll never be any better than you are." And he couldn't turn over in bed. He couldn't feed himself. He couldn't do anything. And I said,

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"Okay. Now can I get you out of here?" He had refused before. And he said, "Yes, anything." So I called Howard Rusk who was the head of the Rusk Rehabilitation Center at Bellevue Hospital.

Kasper: The Rusk Institute.

Kirkpatrick: In New York, and I'd known Howard during the war, and said, "Do you have anything to do with Walter Reed?" He said, "Well, I'm supposed to be a consultant, but I'm so disgusted with their lack of common sense about rehabilitation." And I said, "Could you come and see Kirk?" He flew down the next day, took Kirk back up to New York. A week later I went up and Kirk wheeled himself down the hall in a wheelchair. It did make a remarkable—oh, incredible difference. I've forgotten how long he was there, but he was back at work in six months. And within that year, he did a complete tour around Africa.

Kasper: In a wheelchair?

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Kasper: That's incredible. That's amazing.