We boarded the U.S.S. America in New York on a sunny day in June 1951, with all our worldly possessions. I was two months shy of thirty, and young Ben not quite three years old. I was excited and apprehensive at starting such a new chapter in such a fabulous part of the world, at such an interesting time in history. I was just developing a sense of who I was and what I was doing with my life, and now I was taking a right-angle turn. I had no great confidence in my skills as a diplomat, to put it gently, nor was I optimistic about how much the diplomats would appreciate me.
Jean was reluctant to leave a life that had become comfortable, even if it was not without its trials. Mostly me. The problems of finding an apartment, finding a school for Ben, finding a bonne à tout faire, finding new friends, all in a foreign language, and all on a shoestring, seemed formidable to her, as they damned well were.
Benny didn’t care. On the boat to France, all he remembered was that I yanked him into the ship’s swimming pool. It was years before he forgave me for trying to give him a crash introduction to swimming.
In the dining room on the first or second day out, we met Irwin and Marian Shaw and their young son, Adam. That chance encounter alone made the trip for me. Irwin had written The Young Lions, the first of the really good World War II novels, and had just published a second novel, The Troubled Air, about how the Redbaiters fragged the networks. The Shaws became the anchors for many expatriate Americans living in Europe in the fifties. Wherever they were—in Paris on the rue de Boccador (in the same building as Teddy and Nancy White, and Art and Ann Buchwald), in St. Jean de Luz near Biarritz in the Basque country, or in Klosters, in Switzerland—the sign said, “Welcome.” The sports were incredibly competitive, the food was good, the wine flowed, the conversation was full of joy and laughter. Irwin was one of the few tennis players I ever knew who regularly shed blood during a match. I always felt he was trying to kill me, as he persuaded me to ski with him down the mountains above Klosters, and he wouldn’t play you any game—like golf or squash—where he thought he would lose. I was always sort of in love with the beautiful Marian—warm, funny, and smart.
It took us forever to find an apartment, a forever spent with a small boy in a small hotel room with a smaller bath, until we landed a modern—for Paris—flat at 171 rue de l’Université, one block in from the river on the Left Bank, near the Eiffel Tower. Soon after we moved in, Benny broke out in hundreds of red spots, and that produced for the first time the great Paris doctor, Jean Dax, who looked him over, had two Martinis, and was willing to bet us he had chicken pox. In fact he had mosquito bites, since there were no screens on the windows, but Jean Dax became—and remains—a warm and wonderful friend, as wise about people as medicine (despite the mosquito bites).
At the embassy, as assistant press attaché, my first job every morning was to prepare the daily roundup of the French press—a dozen dailies and weeklies—for the embassy officers and for the State Department in Washington. Elias McQuaid had turned boulevardier with a vengeance with his Savile Row suits and his love of Paris. He was taking long lunch hours, for tennis or for food, and that left me to talk to the journalists about whatever was on their minds. The Americans were no problem. The good ones didn’t bother with press attachés; they knew the ambassador and his top aides a lot better than I did. The bad ones had no good questions, meaning no questions that were hard to answer. The Brits were tougher, always showing off their shorthand skills and threatening to take down every bloody word you said. The French were tough for me at first, for I didn’t know them and their political shadings, and I didn’t speak French well enough to be sure I gave them the delicate nuances that had been given me by the policy wonks.
My secretary was the spectacular Marie-Thérèse Barreau, daughter of a French Army general from Versailles, smart, quick, sassy and fun. She delighted in teaching me about France, which I hadn’t visited in fifteen years, and plunged me into conversation with people who spoke no English, smiling as I groped my way out of trouble. I could have brained her, but in a couple of months I began to master the slang and argot of journalism and politics.
Elias McQuaid left some months later, eventually to become the American Consul General in Edinburgh. I took over as the Attaché de Presse, auprès de l’Ambassade Américaine, and immediately started to get into trouble. The ambassador at that time was James Clement Dunn, one of a handful of career ambassadors in the Foreign Service. He had been Chief of Protocol, and Ambassador to Italy. I had met him some years before, when I was an usher at his daughter Cynthia’s wedding to my friend Alexander “Budsie” Cochrane from Boston.
After Eisenhower was elected president in 1952, the new Secretary of State was the austere and joyless John Foster Dulles. He came to Paris for some conference, and I persuaded Dunn to persuade Dulles to give a background briefing over cocktails to the American correspondents. All the regulars came. Harold Callender of the New York Times, Walter Kerr of the Herald Tribune, Frank White of Time, Arnaud deBorchgrave of Newsweek, Bob Kleiman of U.S. News, Preston Grover of the Associated Press, Joseph Kingsbury Smith of the International News Service, and Ed Korry of United Press. Midway through the briefing, I could see Dunn was mad at something, and he took me aside to ask, “Who is that little shit who keeps calling me Jimmy? I’ve never seen him before in my life.” I told him he was referring to David Schoenbrun of CBS, probably the savviest of all the American foreign correspondents, but a man whose ego made him hard to love. Ever the professional, Dunn said no more.
Sometime later, I got into real trouble, or rather Dunn got me into real trouble. The occasion was a note verbale about Indochina, delivered by Dunn to French Prime Minister Antoine Pinay, the little leather merchant from the Loire Valley, who died in 1994 at the age of one hundred two. Indochina in the fifties was a preview of Vietnam in the sixties. First the enemy was France, for trying to hold on to its colonial empire. And then the enemy was the United States for trying to prevent a Communist takeover. The effects were devastating to both countries. According to diplomatic protocol—Dunn’s particular field of expertise—a note verbale is a message delivered orally, precisely so that the receiving government will get the message, but leave no written record, in order to avoid embarrassing anyone. The note verbale said something about how the French should not count on receiving U.S. aid for Indochina at the current level—around a billion dollars a year—unless France kept better track of where the money was going.
So far so good. The Elysée announced a visit from the American ambassador, and that was pretty much that. Until I got a call from Ed Korry, the United Press Bureau chief. Did Ambassador Dunn leave a copy of the note verbale at the Elysée Palace? I said he did not; it was a note verbale. No copy. Korry asked me to check. I did. Dunn repeated his story to me, and I repeated my story to Korry. Pretty soon, the UP ticker was tinkling. “The American Embassy today insisted that Ambassador Dunn delivered a note verbale,” blah-blah-blah. I didn’t like that “insisted.” Then Korry called again and told me that Pinay’s chef de cabinet, Félix Gaillard (later to become prime minister himself), had a copy of the message, in fact had read Korry the entire message, since the French didn’t like to be threatened.
After I had checked again, the ambassador admitted he had left a copy of his note verbale. “Happens all the time among friends,” he said. I had to call Korry to admit that I had misspoken and could not appropriately tell him that I had been lied to first. I already knew that newspapermen don’t like being lied to, but Korry really let me have it. (He was mad at me to start with, because I had failed to introduce him to two visiting CIA biggies, whom Korry wanted to see about joining the agency.) The UP story read something like, “After insisting that he had not lied, Benjamin C. Bradlee, the American Press Attaché, late yesterday admitted that he had lied to the United Press,” blah-blah-blah.
Almost as soon as I landed in Paris, the espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg started showing up on page one of European newspapers. The Rosenbergs had been tried and convicted of espionage, in the landmark trial of the Cold War in 1951. They were convicted of giving the Russians information vital to the manufacture of atomic weapons. The trial, the verdict, and especially the death sentence had absorbed—then enflamed—France. As the architect of European recovery, the “Fire in the Ashes” in Teddy White’s great phrase, America was easy to resent. The American presence was overwhelming; American cash was everywhere, and the Rosenbergs became the symbolic rallying point for everyone who had a bone to pick with our government. Not just the Communists, who lived on anti-Americanism, but the intellectuals, the Socialists, and everyone who worried about McCarthyism—and the death penalty.
Protests were staged all over France, and many of them turned into anti-American riots. One man was killed in a “Libérez-les-Rosenbergs” rally in the Place de la Concorde, a stone’s throw from the embassy. We were severely handicapped in trying to counteract this wave of anti-American feeling. We had begged USIS for factual information about the case, and about the trial, so that we could at least respond intelligently to our critics. Before I knew what was happening I became, in effect, the Rosenberg attaché, charged with receiving delegations that came to the embassy to protest the verdict and the death sentence. This was an extremely difficult task. Contemporaneous newspaper accounts provided us with nothing like the detailed knowledge of the case that we needed to counter the emotional protesters. The last straw for me came when the blind mayor of Ivry, a worker suburb of Paris and a stronghold of the PCF (Parti Communist Français), showed up with his buddies, shouting questions, and we still had no material from Washington to answer them.
On a Saturday morning I went to my immediate boss, the embassy’s public affairs officer, Bill Tyler, for help. Since we couldn’t get any help from Washington, why didn’t we send our own man—me, obviously—to New York to read the transcript of the entire Rosenberg Trial (and appeals), return to Paris as quickly as possible, and write a detailed, factual account of the evidence as it was presented, witness by witness, and as it was rebutted, cross-examination by cross-examination? Tyler thought that was a great idea. When could I—should I leave? Right away. Fine, but it was Saturday. The banks were closed and no one had cash for the air fare. “That’s all right,” said Tyler. “We’ll ask Bobby for some francs.”
Bobby was Robert Thayer, son of the founder of St. Mark’s School, a longtime friend of my mother and father, and the CIA station chief in Paris. He reached nonchalantly into the bottom drawer of his desk and fished out enough francs to fly me to the moon, much less to the Federal Courthouse in the Southern District of New York, and I left that afternoon. This incident caused me some embarrassment years later, when a woman named Deborah Davis argued in a book about Katharine Graham that I had worked for the CIA as an agent. Her “evidence,” obtained through a Freedom of Information request, was an internal CIA document noting that Bobby Thayer had advanced the cash for my air fare. *
It had been arranged that the D.A. for New York’s Southern District, Myles J. Lane, would make a small office available to me, plus a transcript of the entire court record of United States v. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. I read it from A to Z, taking notes on the testimony of all the witnesses, almost around the clock. I left late at night for a shower and bed at my sister’s apartment, and began again early Monday. Three days later I was back in Paris dictating a 7,500-word analysis of the Rosenberg case, which was translated into French and distributed to the French press in two days.
Not a whole lot changed, to tell the truth, even though at last we had some facts. In fact, the French president, Vincent Auriol, sent a top-secret letter over to the embassy to be sent to President Eisenhower, urging him to pardon the Rosenbergs, or at least to commute the death sentence. This was illegal under the French Constitution, which prohibits a French president from interfering in the internal affairs of another state. I felt I had been picked on enough already, without the help of President Auriol, so I called up my friend Blair Clark, who was now in Paris stringing for CBS as a kind of super-assistant to David Schoenbrun. Clark told Schoenbrun, who immediately ordered himself up on the CBS radio wire, and broadcast his “exclusive” about the French president’s message to the American president. I was learning how to “manage” the news.
The Rosenbergs’ executions left me depressed. I was convinced of their guilt after reading all that fine print, but I had trouble fitting the punishment to that crime, or any crime. I felt the State Department had treated it as an abstract incident with some diplomatic repercussions, rather than the vitally complicated drama it was.
This was the early 1950s. Eisenhower, elected president in November 1952, was staying aloof from McCarthy’s Red hunts. In Paris, we had no U.S. television, no Washington Post stories, no real firsthand information until Charles “Chip” Bohlen came through Paris (and commandeered my office) on his way to become ambassador in Moscow. Bohlen was the star of the State Department’s new generation of Soviet experts, and McCarthy had grilled him relentlessly while Secretary of State John Foster Dulles let him twist uncomfortably in the wind.
And then came Cohn and Schine—Roy Cohn and David Schine, Senator McCarthy’s favorite investigators/hatchetmen—on their ludicrous, destructive crusade through Western Europe on behalf of McCarthy’s witch-hunt, banning books from USIS libraries, berating Foreign Service officers, whose socks they couldn’t hold, for insufficient zeal, threatening to investigate the British Broadcasting Corporation, and generally fragging a mess of intelligent people.
As soon as their itinerary was announced showing a weekend stop in Paris, correspondents started begging me to set up a press conference, led by the Brits, who were particularly outraged by the “little wankers thinking they were going to investigate the BBC.” Some of the meanest bastards in all of journalism were drooling at the prospect of getting their hands on what an American official in Germany called “junketeering gumshoes.” I could hardly wait to facilitate matters, but I had to think. If everything proceeded the way I felt sure it would, Cohn and Schine would be ridiculed, and they would seek revenge on everyone who had anything to do with it. I needed to involve Ambassador Dunn—who was to the manner born and all that, but a tough little monkey, at the end of his career and in no mood to be abused by types like Cohn and Schine. He gave a green light, but asked me to clear it with Graham Martin. Martin, smiling in silence, gave his nod.
Now, all I needed was Cohn and Schine, and they gave me the brush-off. They understood that the banning of Kay Boyle’s books from the USIS library in Germany, and the ridiculing of her husband who was on that library staff, had not been well received in Europe. They were also trying to ban Thunder Out of China, Theodore White and Anna Lee Jacoby’s book about the fall of China, and they knew White might be at any press conference in Paris. They absolutely refused on Friday, finally said no on Saturday, and only agreed at the very last minute to hold a press conference on Sunday afternoon.
We had prepared for just such an emergency by telling reporters to stay in town that Sunday, instead of lunching in some romantic moulin outside of Paris. We had collected fifty or sixty telephone numbers—homes, hotels, restaurants, and all that—and an hour after we had a green light for the press conference, we had fifty reporters sitting, nice as can be, in my office. Loaded for bear, with Art Buchwald of the International Herald Tribune in the front row, flanked by a pair of testy Brits.
Buchwald had just acquired a high-tech tape recorder, whose microphone was hidden in a regular-sized wristwatch, attached by a wire which ran up his left sleeve, around his back to the recorder itself, which was stashed in his right coat pocket. “You don’t have to take notes,” he told his colleagues. “I got it all, right here.” I had less confidence than he had in his gadget, and my secretaries Margot McCloud and Marie-Thérèse Barreau were trying to take it all down in shorthand.
I was a basket case when the press conference finally started, after an inane introduction by me.
The first question came from the diminutive Reuter correspondent next to Buchwald, in a clipped British accent. “Mr. Cohn, Mr. Schine, are you happy in your work?” And things went precipitously downhill from there.
“How old are you, Schine?” barked Sy Freidin, who was then working for Collier’s magazine, a dear pal (later revealed to have done the odd job for the CIA, unbeknownst to all of us).
“I wonder, sir, if you could tell us about your credentials in all this work?” This from another Brit, teeth clenched with anticipation. We all watched in amazement as Schine stood up, removed his wallet from his rear pocket, and produced a laminated ID card from McCarthy’s committee. This exchange produced the great front page headline the next day in England’s Daily Mail: “Look, Ma/We Got Credentials.”
Throughout, Buchwald had his left hand up, pretending to want to ask a question, but really getting his wristwatchmicrophone in position to pick up the Q and A. I would ignore him as I picked selected questioners, but from time to time Cohn or Schine would point at him, and he would have to come up with a question.
Most of the reporters were enjoying themselves too much to ask questions, content to sit back and watch the boy Commiehunters squirm. Halfway through the ordeal, the Reuter correspondent asked, “How could you be happy in your work?” and he closed the press conference with “Are you sure you’re happy in your work?”
Cohn and Schine finally stormed out, glaring at all of us, and at each other. Most of us adjourned to the Crillon Bar across the rue Boissy d’Anglas, and waited while Buchwald disentangled himself from his high-tech equipment. Finally, he was ready. Silence fell, and Art turned on the machine.
Absolutely nothing, at first, then a low-pitched whine. For twenty minutes. And that was that.
Cohn and Schine decided to leave Paris as fast as they could, and start the final leg of their Midnight Ride in Britain. The British correspondents begged to know the flight number of their plane to London, but Cohn literally sneered at me when I asked him over the telephone later, and shut Schine up before he could tell me. The embassy had not made the travel arrangements, so I couldn’t find out from our travel office. Finally I called Clem Brown, the resident meeter and greeter for Pan American Airways, and told him I absolutely had to have Cohn and Schine’s flight number. Brown prided himself on his skills as a can-do type, and in fifteen minutes he had it, and we passed it along to the British press. More than one hundred British reporters met them at Heathrow, and their visit crashed around their ears. They took the next flight home.
We all felt we had made a contribution to the decline and fall of Cohn and Schine, which would finally occur in 1954, when Eisenhower finally got mad after the Army-McCarthy hearings, and perhaps through them, even to the gradual lancing of the whole abscess of McCarthyism. * Like most Americans abroad in and out of the diplomatic service, I had felt left out of one of the crucial battles of our time. I didn’t like to miss any fight, especially that one, and so I got a special kick out of helping them make fools of themselves.
As expected, one of the books Cohn and Schine had bullied USIS into banning abroad was Teddy White’s Thunder Out of China. We all told Teddy to wear it as a badge of honor, until Teddy pointed out to us that the Book-of-the-Month Club was just at that time considering his new book Fire in the Ashes for a main selection, and was unlikely to have the balls to pick a book by a banned author. Teddy was starving as European correspondent for The Reporter magazine, and needed the money, although he never used that as an argument.
I had drafted a cable on White’s behalf for the signature of President Eisenhower’s new ambassador, Douglas Dillon. We got White’s press card accreditation numbers from SHAPE, US AREUR, ECA, etc., and pointed out that in order to get them, Teddy had passed the stringent security checks instituted by Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and the U.S. and Allied Air Chief in Europe, Lauris Norstad, plus Averell Harriman, who was then the national security administrator in Paris. Dillon, in the bravest ambassadorial gesture I know anything about, changed my classification from “Top Secret” to “Eyes Only SecState,” and appreciably strengthened the recommendation that the book be unbanned ASAP.
And it was. Fire in the Ashes was selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club, and Teddy and Nancy could afford caviar at the goodbye parties, before he returned to a brilliant, pioneering new career as a political historian.
But that was braver and bolder than diplomacy usually got, in my experience. I was never really trusted by the diplomats, because of my belief that, all things considered, a press attaché ought to answer questions truthfully. This revolutionary theory got me in trouble when I realized that the Soviets were always calling in American reporters in Moscow whenever they delivered a note to the State Department, and filling their ears with a manipulated version of its contents. It was American policy at that time not to comment on these notes, and so for days the world knew only what the Communists had decided to tell it about their latest diplomatic maneuvering.
This policy of no comment seemed almost unpatriotic. I was reading these Soviet notes because the American Ambassador to the USSR, Chip Bohlen, made the AmEmbassy, Paris, an information addressee on the notes themselves, and on his own expert analyses. His cables invariably pointed out the crap in the Soviet notes, and put them into a perspective that contradicted the public Soviet version. I started mentioning this to reporters who asked. And reporters started asking me more often, as they started getting good answers. And so all of a sudden, dope stories about Soviet notes began appearing on the wires and in newspapers, datelined Paris.
The State Department complained. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the embassy was leaking, and it didn’t take all that long for suspicion to center on me. I didn’t volunteer anything, but when Ambassador Dillon asked me: “It’s you, isn’t it?” I admitted it, and gave my reasons. Dillon smiled, and even nodded, but said that perhaps we better knock it off, for a while. To say that initiative was discouraged in the embassy doesn’t do justice to the cover-your-ass mentality that pervaded the joint. Diplomacy had taken me to Paris, but it was perfectly obvious it was going to take me no further—by mutual consent.
I loved Paris—and France—with a passion. Life was cheap, and even cheaper with black market francs. Life was different, exciting. Wining and dining were magnificent, and a fine lunch with a glass of wine in any of the hundreds of good small restaurants was affordable on my salary of about $8,500, costing little more than a dollar. I couldn’t get over the French women, pretty or plain, in cafés, on the streets, looking you up and down with confidence and interest. My own inhibitions, bred into me over the generations, seemed so complicating, so dreary.
Every weekend Jean and Benny and I left Paris on a different road, for a picnic in a parc, for a tour of Chartres, for the Loire Valley (and wines). We spent a summer vacation in Normandy with the McQuaids. We went to London, Geneva, Germany on weekends. I was sure I could still speak German, after saying my prayers in German for so long. I finally realized I couldn’t when it took me an hour to rent a bicycle in some Rhine village from a guy who spoke perfect English.
We went skiing in the French and Austrian Alps. I couldn’t believe those thrilling mountains of the purest snow, with lifts at last instead of rope tows. I was totally blown away by being able to stand on top of a mountain pointing my ski pole at a village thousands of feet below, and then skiing there. On one of these trips we made friends with a couple from Holland, and I became smitten with “M,” the beautiful wife. I followed her up and down the mountains for days—and almost incidentally we ended up in bed one afternoon while others were skiing. New recklessness for me, and new thoughtlessness. I wondered why I didn’t feel more guilty.
At thirty, I was still an innocent in the boy-girl department, not all that far beyond the teenager who had thought about getting laid a lot, but didn’t get laid a lot. I certainly had extremely limited experience with women looking at me and thinking about getting laid. And when I finally did meet one or two, their success was virtually assured.
Jean and I were now more friends than lovers. We had missed growing together in our early twenties, when growth together is so essential to any relationship. Things were not improved in Paris, where I was so involved and Jean was somewhere between uncomfortable and unhappy. A few months before home leave in 1953, we opted for a trial separation.
She and Benny moved back to Washington, and I joined them a few months later. I spent most of my home leave talking to Dr. Julius Schreiber, with Jean and alone, and attending some McCarthy hearings on the Hill. When it was time for me to return to Paris six weeks later, the feeling of adventure that still overwhelmed me still underwhelmed Jean. While I was cooling on the Foreign Service fast, I was nowhere near ready to go home for good. And so we went back to France together, too scared to call it quits, without options for another way of life, and with a future that lacked definition.
I had kept my eyes and ears open for jobs back in journalism where I belonged, including the Post, which still had no international staff, but without success. The Paris Trib interested me, but they paid nothing, and they weren’t interested in me. Bill Attwood, who had been the Look magazine bureau chief in Paris, was returning to a big position with Cowles, and I got short-listed for his job. But Ed Korry got it.
Back in Paris, Jean and I soldiered on. There was a modest amount of scut work to be done in the embassy. We had to attend certain cocktail parties, but to work, not play. We had to pick up guests at the end of a receiving line every so often, and guide them to the booze, and chat them up for a bit. One’s chances of finding someone interesting were poor, unless you count as interesting the odd French countess, who turned out to have been born Irish in Chicago, and had come to Paris with Mummy between the wars to land herself a title. The really interesting people had better things to do than go to embassy functions.
Jean and I had moved from the rue de l’Université to the fourth floor of 42 Quai des Orfèvres, on the He de la Cité, with fourteen windows overlooking the Seine and the Left Bank, and across a square from the Palais de Justice. We gave a great New Year’s Eve party there, with everyone in costume as Apaches. Ladies in black satin skirts, slit to the waist. Gents in horizontalstriped matelot shirts. We had gone up to Montmartre the night before, Claude deKemoularia and I, to find the right music, and we did—a great accordion player, a drummer, and a sexy female trumpeter. Kemou was the special assistant and the brains behind Paul Reynaud, the wartime prime minister of France, a longtime Radical Socialist politician. He had arranged for the colorfully dressed guards from the Palais de Justice nearby to “raid” our New Year’s Eve party, until they took mercy on us and confessed it to be a hoax.
On the job, work involved dealing with the French press first, then visiting American reporters, before adjourning at midday. Lunches, for me, often started at the Crillon Bar across the street from the embassy, where the great Sam White was more or less permanently installed at one corner. (When they eventually remodeled the bar, they cut off Sam’s corner and gave it to him.) He was a colorful, handsome, hard-drinking Australian, the Paris correspondent for the Evening Standard (London), and a special favorite of Lord Beaverbrook, its famous owner. Sam was not good at politics. The rise and fall of the many governments of the Fourth Republic voted in and out at the Assemblée nationale, only a few hundred yards across the Place de la Concorde and the Seine from the Crillon Bar, essentially bored him. But a whiff of scandal would bring Sam to his feet, asking Louis, the bartender, to place calls to starlets, philandering statesmen, or the objects of the Beaver’s latest interest. I can still see Sam turning, ever so slightly shaky on his feet just after noon, and saying, “Louis, donnez-moi la Queen Mary at sea,” and the call went through.
And then there was Bernard Valery, the joyous and resourceful correspondent of the New York Daily News, who taught me everything he knew about Paris—or tried to—and France, and Sweden, and Russia, and Japan. He spoke seven languages, and had written books in Swedish, French, and English. I can still hear Bernard, working on the visit to Paris of a president of Mexico, accompanied by a Mexican actress, not his wife, turning to the concierge of the Crillon and saying, ever so gently, “La question qu’on me pose est la suivante: quelle est la disposition des lits?”
There was tennis in all seasons and at all hours. With Irwin Shaw, Peter Viertel, the novelist and screenwriter, George Plimpton, who was just starting the Paris Review, my old New Hampshire pal Elias McQuaid, before he left, and struggling novelist Peter Matthiessen. Peter and I had become totally caught up in one of the great French cultural events, a crime passionnel, involving the dashing and politically promising young mayor of Orléans, Pierre Chevallier, a doctor, and his faithful but slightly drab wife, Yvonne, a nurse.
The mayor-doctor had just been named to his first cabinet post in the government of René Pleven, and in fact was getting dressed in his formal clothes with decorations for the inaugural festivities, when his wife broke in on him to plead with him on bended knee to give up his red-headed paramour, and come back to his loving family which had been so desolate in his prolonged absences. He stood unmoved, looking down upon her, with eyes that were close to contempt. On and on she pleaded, without even recognition from the man she loved. Finally, in despair, she retrieved a small revolver from a closet in her bedroom, and started shooting. Four times she pulled the trigger, until her young son, barely eleven, called out, “Maman!” from the next room. Yvonne took the child by the hand and led him downstairs into the custody of the concierge for safekeeping. Then she returned to the bloody scene, and shot her husband once more for good measure, ruining, one would think, all chance of pleading lack of premeditation.
The French press went crazy, throwing caution to the wind with police reporters, court reporters, sob sisters, psychiatrists, novelists, the works. The French felt they invented the crime passionnel. They were determined to leave nothing unsaid and they left nothing unsaid. The whole country was either outraged, or outraged that anyone would be outraged. The venue of the trial was shifted from Orléans to Reims, although hardly for fear that Madame could not get a fair trial in her hometown. No jury in France was going to convict her of anything. After only two days of hearing evidence, the jury retired to a room in the Reims Palais de Justice, which just happened to face on the public square. Thousands of French citizens had gathered under the jury-room windows and were shouting, “Bravo, Yvonne, bravo!” and “Libérez-la!” (Free her!) for the short time it took the jury to acquit her.
“C’est peut-être un peu excessif,” Le Parisien Libéré editorialized on the front page next morning about the shouting crowd, but the whole country generally approved of liberating Madame. Matthiessen and I felt this was perfect for The New Yorker’s “Annals of Crime,” and we started writing it one weekend in my embassy office, with hundreds of clippings spread all over the floor. Perhaps rewriting is a better word. We showed the first draft to Irwin Shaw, and he volunteered with only the smallest hesitation to forward it to New Yorker editor William Shawn, with a personal letter: Two young friends of mine have written this story ... or something like that. And that was that. Matthiessen went back to the States, and the whole project was dropped.
Years later, Peter wrote me that the story had been resuscitated through his agent, but there had been two problems. The New Yorker had a rule against double bylines, and the editors there wanted some more information. Matthiessen had to rewrite it umpteen times, and I had contributed only a modest amount of rereporting. It ran November I, 1958, as an Annals of Crime, under the title “Peut-être un Peu Excessif.” Peter got the byline and two thirds of the money, and he deserved both.
Despite the listlessness of our personal life, there was such an excitement to this life—so many new tastes and sights and emotions—that it was inconvenient to reflect on the fact that I was still not engaged with the great issues of our time which I wanted to spend my life exploring. I had quit the Post because I was bogged down in a swamp inhabited by gamblers, indecent exposers, psychopaths, train robbers, racists, rapists, and the victims of all the above. The recovery of Europe, the rise of communism, the war in China, the excesses of anti-communism, the beginnings of the civil rights movement were all happening outside my field of vision. The great world leaders were leading, unobserved by me.
If my living conditions were now more glamorous, my involvement in history was not substantially different. All this made me vaguely discontented whenever I stopped briefly enjoying the glory of Paris in the early fifties to think about it. And to further complicate matters, I had fallen clumsily into an absorbing affair. Before that the sum total of my extramarital sexual experiences had been a few one-night stands. A single night in Sydney, Australia, the accident with a Bendel’s saleswoman in New York, and an incident on the slopes of Ober Lech in Austria. Now with someone full of joy, humor, and adventure, I became overwhelmed by sex itself, and the sexual excitement that gave my relationship with her a vitality I had not known before.
From her I discovered the glorious truth that to be wanted by a woman was as consuming and thrilling as to want a woman, and as rewarding physically and emotionally. All those cumbersome Puritan legacies about sex and joy—laid on me by my heritage—slipped from my shoulders, and the world has looked different to me ever since.
My involvement with another woman made a mockery of our marriage, but I stayed put, guilty and unhappy, but unwilling to stop seeing her. I think Jean and I both doubted our chances of success in the long run, and both understood that each of us would inevitably find someone else. Selfishly, I never seriously thought of remarriage. The difference in religion and nationality, plus the preoccupation with sex, made it easy for me, typically, to sweep the whole matter under the rug. Although we never talked about marriage directly, my very Catholic friend had talked to a Vatican representative who specialized in annulments. He and I talked once, when he explained the various conditions under which annulments were possible. Had my marriage been consummated? Well, yes. Had promises been made that were never meant to be kept? Not that I could identify. Had my wife gone insane? Maybe I had; certainly not she.
The questions reminded me how unfinished, how incomplete a man I was. I had done what I had done, but I was a father. I had accumulated more experience than wisdom. The episodes of my life had not been woven into anything I was particularly proud of.
I felt generally miserable, as guilty about Benny as about Jean. I often wonder now whether I felt miserable enough. For the first years of my son’s life, I had worked the late shift at the Post, which meant he slept while I worked and I slept while he was ready to bond. Benny, who was about five, spoke a lovely, accentless, singsong French, even spoke English with a French accent. I had already disrupted his life by moving him to Paris and forcing him into a new culture and new language, and now it seemed that I was on a course to do it again. Arnaud deBorchgrave put my private life on something of a back burner in the fall of 1953 by wondering out loud one day whether I might be interested in succeeding him as the European correspondent of Newsweek. There was nothing coy about my response: I would kill for it. Arnaud was a piece of work then as now, slight, perpetually tanned, jumping with nervous energy and ambition. The son of a Belgian count, he had enlisted in the British Navy three months shy of sixteen years old, landed a job as the United Press correspondent in Belgium after the war, and married an American secretary in the American Embassy in Brussels. He was attractive, mischievous, conspiratorial, and tended to exaggerate both the insidedness of his knowledge of important events and the importance of his own role in those events. A bullshitter, and a player among the insider group of foreign correspondents with a host of sources, not scared to peg even with the expertise of any one of his peers, and ready to work harder than almost all of them. But it takes one to know one, as the saying goes.
Arnaud would be leaving by the first of 1954 to become assistant foreign editor, and he said there was no obvious Newsweek candidate. He was prepared to recommend me to the foreign editor, who would make the decision. Newsweek in the early fifties was much less of a magazine than it has become, owned by Captain Vincent Astor, and managed for him by an American businessman, Malcolm Muir, who aspired to rub shoulders with the world’s rich and famous without offending any of them with his magazine. People spoke of Time, in those days, never Time and Newsweek. The foreign editor who had to approve of me was Harry Kern, whose interest in foreign affairs was pretty much limited to Japan, Germany, Middle Eastern oil, and an Egyptian belly dancer named Tahia. He didn’t really care much about France, except as a place to buy lingerie and drink vintage wines, as deBorchgrave had spent hours briefing me. I liked French wine fine, but I had just spent the best years of my life fighting the Japanese and the Germans, and knew next to nothing about oil, the Middle East, or belly dancing. Kern seemed to like me well enough when we finally met, but he positively loved me when he learned that Mrs. Vincent Astor, the famous Brooke, had been a childhood friend of my mother and her sister, Alma Morgan. When I was eventually offered the job, I never doubted for a minute that Brooke Astor was responsible, and I have thanked her often, for that, and for much more.
The embassy was something less than heartbroken when I told them I would be leaving, and secretly pleased that they didn’t have to pay to transport me and my family back to Washington, just as Newsweek was delighted to avoid paying for our passages to Paris. Newsweek was notoriously chintzy then. My new salary was $9,000 a year, and I couldn’t wait to get started. In fact I started on Christmas Eve again, taking a train to Montpellier to interview the author of a new biography of Lawrence of Arabia.
Why did I always start work on the eve of holidays when no one had to work, I wondered. Because there was no place else I wanted to be, and nothing I wanted to do more.