I am holding no brief for any race in the Near East. I believe that if the Turk, the Greek, the Armenian, the Syrian, etc., were shaken up in a bag you would not know which one would come out first, but probably the Turk is the best one of the lot.
—Mark Bristol
Prior to assuming his post at Constantinople, Admiral Mark L. Bristol’s background on the Near East (what we generally call the Middle East) seems to have consisted mainly of three things: a quick meeting with naval authorities in Paris, a hurried reading of Ambassador Morgenthau’s book while en route to the city,1 and a conversation he had at some point with a former American missionary. The missionary had been convinced that none of the Near Eastern races knew the difference between right and wrong, a conclusion Bristol was to trumpet with conviction again and again. In other words, Admiral Bristol had been assigned his post not because he knew anything about the Near East, but simply because he was a well-regarded naval officer of the proper high rank.2
Just over fifty when he received his orders, Bristol had already spent over thirty years in the Navy, twenty-one of them at sea. Besides taking one of the last Navy cruises under sail round Cape Horn, he had served on every class of battleship, done tours on all principal American naval stations, and performed substantial gunnery and torpedo work. He was aboard Texas at the Battle of Santiago, and served as executive officer of Connecticut during the cruise of the Great White Fleet.3 Though the cruiser he thereafter commanded in 1911 went aground near the South China coast, he survived this possible career ender, apparently on the intervention of high-placed friends.4 Just before American’s entry into World War I, Bristol had served energetically as director of naval aeronautics, this in naval aviation’s earliest days. He consistently played down the theoretical capabilities of aircraft carriers in favor of his beloved battleships,5 but he wasn’t alone at that mistake. During World War I, Bristol commanded a cruiser and finally, for several months, a battleship.
The admiral had a reputation for industry and forcefulness. When American civilians met him in Constantinople, they were impressed with the tremendous determination seen in the set of his jaw and the immensely broad shoulders of this short, barrel-chested man. Some American diplomats liked him for his “square, bluff, straight-forward” manner, but one of them also noted that he did not seem to know when to stop talking.6 A young officer reporting to the Turkish station in 1922 was impressed by the admiral’s general affability, despite the “aggressive scowl” that he noticed the admiral could instantly assume. Consul George Horton of Smyrna pointed to “the sheer magnetism of his genial and engaging character,” which typically created a school of admirers and disciples.7 Not surprisingly for a naval flag officer, the admiral was quite at home with the social dimensions of a diplomat’s life.
Bristol hoisted his flag on the embassy station ship USS Scorpion in late January of 1919. However, finding this yacht’s quarters inconvenient either for work or entertainment, he soon moved into the U.S. embassy in Pera, a building complete with “marble galleries and naked ceiling nymphs.” Soon he would place a radio station in the embassy that would afford him regular and confidential communications both with his ships throughout the region and with Washington. From the embassy he fought hard with superiors to secure a battleship. After all, the British, French and Italians all had battleships in the straits—why shouldn’t the United States? Among other things, one of these great vessels would also provide a good place to show movies, and thereby help distract his sailors from the notorious local vice districts.8
He never got a battleship, although for a couple of years a cruiser was routinely assigned to him. More than a flagship, though, Bristol desperately needed destroyers. After all, he had charge of all American naval activities in the Aegean, the Black Sea, and the eastern Mediterranean—a very large area of operations—and all he had initially (besides the Scorpion) were two converted yachts and some subchasers. Within a couple of months, Bristol got a few of these fast and quite versatile small combatants, and the number of destroyers assigned him increased somewhat as time went on. Moreover, over the first year and a half or so of his duty in Constantinople, no fewer than forty-five American naval vessels called briefly at the city, two of them battleships.9
Bristol saw to naval logistics, worked to get an effective staff, visited the panoply of Allied, Turkish, and Levantine officials in this great city, and regularly kept the State Department informed about conditions throughout the region. He disposed his ships so as best to aid all the Americans who, after the war, were now scattering throughout the Middle East and the Caucasus (particularly relief workers and missionaries), and soon he was also providing a destroyer to an American admiral acting as an observer with the beleaguered White Russian Army in southern Russia. Since it was sometimes difficult to communicate to the rest of Europe directly from Constantinople, Bristol regularly stationed a destroyer at a port in Romania or Bulgaria as a radio relay ship. In Constantinople itself, Bristol succeeded in getting American organizations such as the Near East Relief and the Red Cross to cooperate, and thereby to conserve efforts.10
He also helped such organizations in other ways. For instance, commercial wire services were expensive and open to foreign scrutiny, so the admiral opened Navy circuits to many American groups. At one period the Navy was said to have handled two thousand messages a day.11 This service could be a bit problematic to the sender, to be sure. Anna V. S. Mitchell, who worked with Russian relief, discovered that although the admiral would let the Red Cross send cables on Navy circuits, he proved “anxious to get in his own special point of view.” On some occasions, the Red Cross chose to bear the commercial expense rather than the admiral’s agenda.12
Meanwhile, friction developed between Bristol and the leading American diplomatic holdovers from before the war, that is, Commissioner Lewis Heck and Consul General G. Bie Ravndal. Their respective lines of authority were ill defined, and Bristol wanted complete control. Moreover, Bristol regarded his unimpressive initial title “Senior Naval Officer Present” as a hindrance in dealing with the Allied “High Commissioners” at Constantinople. Eventually, by force of personality, he imposed his will on Commissioner Heck, several years his junior and very ill at the time, and also persuaded prominent Americans in the city to write letters to the State Department on his behalf. Friends in Washington also intervened. After six months, Bristol was appointed America’s “High Commissioner” to Turkey.
Although a State Department official then refused to make Bristol “the big chief of our Consuls” in the area, nevertheless the admiral could now settle into his assignment (before this, he had talked of resigning), for he had become both the senior American naval officer in waters east of Greece and the senior American diplomatic official in this same region and was provided with two separate organizations (naval and diplomatic) to assist him.13 To be sure, his new title and his commensurate responsibilities did not ensure either equivalency with the Allies or cooperation. At Paris the United States was a full partner with the Allies; here Bristol was left out. Americans neither provided members of the city’s police force (as the Allies did), nor had any part in giving the sultan his orders. Of course Americans had also played no part in the disarming of Turkey, something done by the occupying British army (all this, again, because America had never declared war on Turkey).
Nor, later, did the United States have any role in the sudden imprisonment of a hundred Nationalist leaders and the Allied occupation of the Turkish ministries, post office, and telephone and telegraph offices, actions that would take place simultaneously on March 16, 1920.14 By arresting Nationalist Turkish agents and formally imposing martial law, the Allies hoped to thwart growing Nationalist power. Concurrently, thousands of British, French, and Italians troops moved into Constantinople itself and the nearby straits, each of these powers overseeing a special zone of the city. In contrast, American military forces in the area never exceeded the small number of Navy men manning the American naval ships actually in port—no more than about half of which were available for landing forces, at best a few hundred in all.
Finding himself uninvited to the Allies’ deliberations and frequently complaining he was uninformed about Allied actions,15 Bristol retaliated both by symbol and by action. For example, he ordered his ships’ crews not to render the traditional honors to the yachts of the Allied high commissioners (manning the rails and saluting),16 and he refused to be bound by Allied decisions. In such ways Bristol offended the British, who sometimes responded in kind. On one July 4th, the British admiral Sir John de Robeck was said to have sailed his whole fleet down into the Sea of Marmara rather than be forced to honor America’s independence by dressing ship.17
More important, the British early on developed a very dim view of Bristol’s personality. During the period in which he served in Constantinople, British diplomat Neville Henderson found the “pugnacious” Bristol “the greatest thorn” in the British high commission’s side.18 The British high commissioner, Sir Horace Rumbold, once wrote the British foreign minister that Bristol possessed “limited intelligence and outlook.” From London, Lord Curzon agreed. “We have had abundant proof for nearly 2 years that he is suspicious, anti-British, stupid, and at times malignant. You must be careful with him, for he reports everything in an unfavourable spirit.” The British also thought Bristol flattered the Turks,19 but if so, he was just returning the favor. In a travel book about his journey through Europe in 1919, American journalist Alexander Powell remembered the amusement of the European colony in Constantinople as they observed the Turks “rushing” the rear admiral as fraternity members would rush a desirable freshman. On his own part, Powell expressed wonderment at the “dogmatic opinions” spoken by certain Americans “on subjects of which most of them were in abysmal ignorance prior to the Armistice,” that is, only a few months before. For Bristol, this description was a perfect fit.20
However, although certainly dogmatic and also chronically suspicious of British actions,21 Bristol was not unintelligent. He simply had a different agenda than the British and an opposing one, or rather, two related agendas.
First, he was determined to fight Allied monopolization of commercial opportunities. Vice Admiral William Sims had directed Bristol to safeguard American interests,22 and Bristol thought the most important American interests were commercial rather than humanitarian, educational, or religious, even though support of the missionaries had traditionally played a controlling part in American foreign policy toward Turkey. By favoring business, of course, Bristol was also supporting what was known as the “Open Door” policy, an agenda intended to give American firms a fair opportunity to compete for overseas markets. “Helping trade was the admiral’s pride,” Bristol’s aide, Robbie Dunn, later wrote,23 and it was simply true. The pages of Bristol’s war diaries, long daily summaries of each of his afternoon conversations, bristle with records of the admiral’s conversations with businessmen of all kinds, particularly Standard Oil people, but also bank representatives, shipping agents, tobacco company men, and various salesmen bent on opening new markets. In 1921 America had a steamship line, two trading companies, and two banks doing business in Turkey, and another fifteen to twenty firms had representatives there, most of them unknown before the war. Much of this was a result of Admiral Bristol’s efforts.24
Bristol also regularly wrote to business acquaintances back in the States, and he frequently wrote the State Department on commercial topics,25 always with the same themes: the United States needed overseas markets; Allied barriers to American trade in Turkey and elsewhere should be torn down; American firms must employ Americans only; American banks, shipping firms, and merchants of all sorts should come to Constantinople. Bristol spoke to local businessmen at the American Chamber of Commerce for the Levant and at the embassy itself. He was always available to offer salesmen tips, or to provide general pep talks on trade, that is, on his support of American business interests “first, last, and always.” In fact, Bristol promoted “the gospel of American trade” at every opportunity.26
Beyond this, Bristol offered businessmen very specific help in pushing the level of trade reached in 1920 to over ten times the level that had obtained in 1913 (from $3.5 million to $42 million). He successfully fought the sultan’s new taxes on importation of whiskey to Constantinople, important for U.S. interests because, despite Prohibition, America provided over 90 percent of the city’s liquor imports after the war. Bristol also staved off new consumption taxes on sugar, coffee, petroleum, and tea, most of which also came from the States. And he cooperated with businessmen like retired admiral Colby M. Chester and his son, who for years had been negotiating massively with the sultan (and later would bargain with the Nationalists) for valuable oil concessions to the east.27
Individually, Bristol helped American drummers in several ways, some of them unique. Not only did he allow commercial messages on his Navy cables, but he also allowed businessmen access to local information on “crops, minerals, manufacturing, port facilities, trade opportunities, [and] weather data” that he had his officers gather.28 And he also encouraged salesmen and managers to hop his destroyers virtually to anywhere his ships steamed, by no means the normal naval practice. True, he would offer passage to other Americans, too, particularly relief workers. Some missionaries, a few professors, and a number of journalists also took rides on what became known informally either as “Bristol’s Ferry Boats,” “The Black Sea Express,” or “The Black Sea Express and Mail.”29 Although it was against regulations, American women even rode the destroyers at times. Naval and embassy wives took short pleasure trips (once on Scorpion, they steamed even so far as Yalta), while female missionaries and relief workers sometimes were given rides from Constantinople to and from Samsun, Batoum, and other hard-to-reach Black Sea ports.30
Still, American businessmen were welcome almost anywhere the “tincans” went, and at almost any time. A glance at various documents finds several Standard Oil officials riding McFarland from Constantinople to Constanza, Romania; a salesman catching an overnight ride from Beirut to Mersina, a trip that otherwise would have taken him a week; two American tobacco men riding from their business in Samsun to Constantinople and back; and an occasional transport of gold bullion from Constantinople to Smyrna, this to pay for tobacco exported to the United States.31 If the ship were going to the same port anyway, a businessman could simply pile his suitcase on a junior officer’s bunk and his samples on the ship’s fantail, and no one would be inconvenienced (except the junior officer). However, on one occasion at least, the captain of Overton was told to “take orders from Mr. St. Phelle” of the Baldwin Locomotive Works, a situation in which the ship’s support of commercial trade had obviously become a primary, not an incidental duty.32
St. Phelle, in turn, wrote home that he could only visit certain regions because he knew Bristol would evacuate him, if need be.33 Bristol was well aware that business could not thrive in unstable environments, which knowledge was of importance in the development of Bristol’s second agenda, a program that offended the British and many of his own countrymen. From almost the beginning of his assignment, the admiral went out of his way to befriend the Turks, both government officials and private individuals in Constantinople, and increasingly the Turkish Nationalists on the mainland of Asia Minor and their confederates within the city. Bristol seems to have concluded early on that a Nationalist takeover would offer the country its best chance to develop the stability it needed to prosper, and to provide a stable market for American goods. If Armenian and Greek businessmen suffered in the process (they often provided tough commercial competition for the Americans), that would not be all that bad a thing.34
In all of this, Bristol’s motives were not purely commercial. He was idealistic in his way. There is no doubt that the admiral came to “believe” in Turkish nationalism, as did many Americans at one time or another, including not a few missionaries who had suffered under the sultan’s despotic rule and from the greed, tyranny, and incompetence of local Turkish officials. In a letter to a friend written as early as December 14, 1919, Bristol commented that the Nationalist movement “is the best thing that has taken place since I have been out here.”35
Contributing to the admiral’s education along these lines were the people he was talking to. Regularly calling on the admiral, for example, was the president of Constantinople Women’s College, Mary Mills Patrick. Decidedly pro-Turk herself (as everybody noticed), Patrick also introduced the admiral to Halide Edib, the first Turkish woman to receive a BA from that American college and already highly influential by 1919 as a Turkish writer and speaker.36 Halide became Bristol’s frequent confidant, both in person while she remained in the city, and later by letters and more discreet communication when she fled Constantinople (lest she be interned at Malta by the British along with many other Turks having Nationalist leanings) to join the Nationalist government in Angora (the name of Ankara before 1930). An increasingly liberated Turkish woman of intelligence with strong American connections, Halide was one of the admiral’s most trusted inside sources and strongest influences.
Another personal influence working on Bristol was his intelligence officer, Lt. Robert (Robbie) Dunn. Dunn was an interesting character, an “inferior precursor of Richard Halliburton,” as Bristol’s biographer Peter Buzanski put it.37 Having once worked as a newspaper correspondent under famous journalist and editor Lincoln Steffens, Dunn very much preferred firsthand reporting, or journalism “in the heat,” as it were. He had reported on mountain climbing expeditions from Alaska to Martinique, had ridden with General Pershing in Mexico, had explored the Kamchatka River in Siberia, and during the early days of World War I, with John Reed (later to become infamous as the only American to be buried in Red Square in Moscow; Reed’s career was popularized by Warren Beatty’s 1981 movie Reds), Dunn had jumped in the German trenches to report on the beginnings of the Great War.
Something of a drifter, Dunn “lit out for the territory” more than once. He had grown up in Newport among various naval personalities and had accompanied the world tour of the Great White Fleet as a correspondent, supposedly at Teddy Roosevelt’s specific invitation. Hence when America was about to enter the war in Europe in early 1917 and Dunn heard of some destroyers heading for Ireland, he attempted to enlist. Though he was just shy of forty, the Navy let him in. Dunn claimed he had great fun in standing lookout in the North Atlantic (!), and, as a yeoman, in changing “commences” to “begins” every time the first word occurred in several months’ worth of engineering logs. His boss, a friend of Dunn’s, caught him doing it. “‘Commences’ is a vulgar latinism, sir,” Dunn primly replied. “Well, you put it back on every damned page,” said the officer, characteristically valuing naval tradition above beauty.38
Then somebody recognized that Dunn was “officer material”—well, he was hardly that, but he did have some useful writing ability. Admiral Sims was said to have admired a story Dunn wrote, and the former reporter suddenly found himself commissioned and transferred to archival work. Stultified, he requested a transfer, and although he did not get that, before long he was working for Sims in naval intelligence. At the Armistice, Lieutenant Dunn took the advice of a friend to ask to accompany Adm. Mark Bristol to Turkey.39
In Constantinople Dunn was Bristol’s first lieutenant by name, but really was his intelligence officer. Dunn delighted in learning the spy trade while snooping around in the dives of Constantinople, a city with enough tricks, secrets, and vice to satisfy the most ravenous appetite. But Bristol also sent this one-time mountaineer out and about, allowing him to use his own judgment as to what he did and, often, where he went. Hence, in the summer of 1919, upon the admiral’s direction, the adventurous Dunn traveled from the Caucasus through Armenia to the north coast of Turkey and back to Constantinople, almost entirely without escort. Dunn found the countryside aflame with Turkish anger at the recent occupation of Smyrna. He also heard of the revolutionary Nationalist Congress of Erzurum, soon to assemble. Although he did not then meet Mustapha Kemal (or any leading nationalists), early on Dunn formed a most favorable opinion of the Nationalist leader and his cohorts.40
Back home, Dunn waited while the admiral read his report. Bristol’s response is recorded in Dunn’s memoir World Alive, most of the Turkish parts of which were probably written only a year or two after the events. “Do you think, Dunn, that this Turkish national movement is an honest thing?” Dunn reports the admiral asking: “How sincere?” When Dunn replied, “Damn yes, I do,” the admiral looked out the window. “I’ve been wondering quite a while. . . . You know, I think this man Kemal is right.”41
In Dunn’s description, it is certainly possible to see some sincerity on Bristol’s part. The American naval professional finds himself offended at constant abuse of the local (Turkish) officials by arrogant Europeans. He notes also the incursion of a Hellenic Greek army onto the mainland, and, remembering his own country’s revolutionary origins and its democratic principles, responds warmly to native patriotism.
Sincerity, however, is not necessarily wisdom. Local British officials typically regarded reactions of the kind described here as terribly naive, as being conditioned by a lack of knowledge of the nature of the prewar and wartime Turkish Committee on Union and Progress (colloquially known as the “Young Turks”), for example, and of the general political history of Turkey’s last ten or fifteen years. British High Commissioner de Robeck, for instance, thought the Americans in particular were “‘green’, easy for the Nationalists to spoon-feed, and ready to rise to such catchwords as independence and self-determination.”42 He was no doubt referring primarily to Bristol and his naval aides, and perhaps diplomatic staff members like Allen Dulles, too.
Surely most Turks were genuinely upset with the prospect of Greeks ruling over Turks, which seemed to be the implication of Smyrna. The prospect of vengeful rule by the previously abject and gravely injured Armenians also bedeviled them. Unquestionably, Nationalist leaders were determined to prevent any such reversal of roles. Such an intention, however, would say nothing about the character of the people, or the character of the Nationalist movement itself, which was still very much in the making, anyway. In America at about this same time, many Southern whites would have gotten enormously upset if they thought blacks were getting the upper hand, but the Ku Klux Klan hardly rates a positive assessment. That the Turk of the day was a “Near Eastern Ku Klux Klan,” by the way, was a contemporaneous assessment of the Harvard professor Albert Bushnell Hart.43
To his credit, Bristol did recognize the importance of Kemal’s movement long before the Allies did.44 However, such an early taking of the cudgels for the Nationalists with so little to go on would not only have been premature, but would have been very dangerous. Whatever the basic character of Mustapha Kemal himself, for instance, he was in those early days, and actually for a considerable time, at least the companion and perhaps partly the creature of many cutthroats. As just one example, Kemal’s bodyguard beginning in late 1920 and apparently extending as far as early 1923 would be provided by Osman Agha, or “Lame Osman,” a notorious leader of irregulars who, according to Kemal’s recent Turkish biographer, was “a sadistic ethnic cleanser of Armenians and Greeks,” a description that documents in the Bristol papers amply confirm. It would take three years before some of Kemal’s associates would murder Osman on Kemal’s behalf (though perhaps without his knowledge), and thus rid the Nationalist leader of an increasingly inconvenient association.45
In any case, Bristol’s approval of the Nationalist movement was sometimes manifested in very dramatic fashion. We’ve noted above how Bristol shared his musings with Dunn; he then had the deeply pro-Turkish lieutenant draft many of his memos to the State Department. Sometime later, the admiral spoke memorably of Mustapha Kemal to the whole naval staff. Naval officer Webb Trammell was one of Bristol’s destroyer captains, but also at one point he became his aide at the embassy. Trammell told the following story to his son: “One day Bristol came downstairs. . . . He announced to the staff that he had had a dream. In the dream the Turks had won the war of independence, and would become an independent country (and more), and ‘Gentlemen, it will be our work to see that this comes true.’”46 Whenever this dream occurred (if it wasn’t simply a strategic fiction on the admiral’s part), it probably grew out of the admiral’s nightly ruminations about the Turkish situation.
We need not depend only on anecdote, of course. The fact that Bristol was pro-Turk in matters having to do with the Christian minorities in Turkey (these were ethnic Armenians and Greeks, for the most part), though sometimes contested by scholars desiring to present the admiral as an objective witness of events,47 can be further illustrated both by testimony and the admiral’s own conversations.
As for testimony, consider just a few of many possible citations from both American and Turkish sources. In diaries jotted down in mid-1919 while serving with the King-Crane Commission, Albert Lybyer noted that the admiral was “very sympathetic” with the Turks as opposed to the Greeks, and that, conversely, Bristol disliked both the Armenians and the British. In time for the 1922 publication of his book Speaking of the Turks, the Turkish author and propagandist Mufty-Zade Zia Bey pointed out that the American high commissioner and his assistants were “more liked” by the Turks “than any other foreigner in Turkey”; in contrast, Zia Bey thought, it would be better to rid Turkey of many of the American missionaries. Edgar Fisher, professor of history at Robert College, had “gained sidelights” of Bristol’s views before, but when in April of 1922 he heard for the first time Bristol’s “thoroughgoing exposition of the Turkish situation as he saw it,” Fisher was “astonished and amazed” at the extent and depth of Bristol’s pro-Turkish views. Although Joseph Grew liked Bristol when he met him at the Lausanne Conference in January of 1923, he noted that he found Bristol “very pro-Turk.”
Finally, the Turkish journalist Ahmed Emin Yalman ran the Turkish paper Vakit in Istanbul from 1917 to March of 1920, at which point he was imprisoned by the British for his Nationalist sympathies. He later reported he had turned down the car Bristol had offered him to aid his escape, lest it embarrass the admiral that Bristol appear so supportive of the Nationalists. In his memoir, this University of Columbia-educated journalist (reportedly the first Turkish citizen to receive a PhD in the United States) concluded that Bristol’s “activities from the beginning to the end of our struggle for independent national existence amounted, in effect, to almost an informal alliance between Turkey and the United States.”48
As for Bristol’s own statements, most revealing is his favorite analogy, his comparison of relations between the Christian minorities and the Turks to those of a small boy stirring up a hornet’s nest. Typical of such conversations is his discussion with an Armenian delegation from Cilicia that came to the American embassy in October of 1920 with complaints about a recent French agreement that would force many of the Armenians out of Turkey entirely. Bristol attempted to demonstrate to this group that the contemporaneous circumstances were primarily the Armenians’ and the Europeans’ fault:
I informed them that the present conditions in Turkey, which were more or less the same all over the country, were, in my opinion, like a hornets’ nest that had been stirred up by a small boy who could not defend himself against the hornets and was calling upon his father to come save him. At the same time this same boy had been warned by his father of the dangers of stirring up a hornets’ nest and, in addition to that, had seen people that had been stung before by the hornets and yet he persisted in stirring up the hornets’ nest. The hornets’ nest, in this case, is Turkey with the Moslems as hornets, and the small boy is composed of the Christian races and the Allies, together with the [Hellenic] Greeks. . . . Therefore, it seemed to me that this small boy should be treated in much the same way that the father treated his son and that is, the father spanked the son for disobeying his orders and also for showing such little common sense.
The admiral made this analogy again and again in his conversations and correspondence, although sometimes the Turks with their “brutal instincts and fanatical ideas” became a ferocious bull, or a pack of mad dogs. The point, of course, was that by claiming independence, or by bearing weapons, or by listening to the Allies’ encouragement, or indeed by asserting themselves in virtually any way at all, the Armenians and Greeks were responsible for the suffering that they themselves had endured (though usually in Bristol’s pronouncements the European Allies bore responsibility, too—as surely they did).49
No doubt, from one standpoint, Bristol had a case. If, as we will shortly see, the French were not to commit enough troops to Cilicia (south-central Turkey) in attempting to take over that region, and the Armenians there had no force of their own, any actions that either group was to take in defying the Turks in that area could well be regarded as imprudent—indeed, as suicidal. However, there being no good assurance (and about a million bad assurances) that bowing passively to the Turks in early 1920 would have saved the Armenians in the various cities of Cilicia, one could argue that at least this time the Armenians would have gone down fighting. (Americans like Consul Leslie Davis of Harput not only blamed the Armenians for their general baseness, but also for their general lack of “heroism” in 1915.)50 James Barton once commented that Bristol seemed to blame the Armenians for their not trusting the Turks. Bristol was absolutely right about that: they didn’t. However, they had no good reason for such trust. Eventually, when the French made an agreement with the Nationalists and completely withdrew into Syria, virtually all Armenians remaining in Cilicia, absolutely panic-stricken, left the country too—tens of thousands of them. (Those who didn’t leave were unsubtly encouraged to go.)51
However, not only was Bristol always blaming the Armenians for bringing upon themselves their massacres and deportations—as an American teacher at Constantinople Women’s College once put it52—but by his typical analogies, he was, of course, also excusing the Turks. Notice that the primary focus the admiral’s analogy is on the boy’s actions, and not on those of the hornets. The ferocious bulls or mad dogs or angry hornets all being amoral creatures, such analogies conveniently leave the Turks out of the moral equation. Obviously, it is one thing to blame somebody for dealing foolishly with hardened criminals—for arousing their fierce instincts without providing protection—and quite another to obscure the criminals’ much greater responsibility.
Yes, in his conversations and letters Bristol would customarily begin or end by saying, “I hold no brief for the Turk,” and he would also state that he was quite knowledgeable about the Turks’ brutal and fanatical instincts, for example, that the “Moslem Turks” would “rob, pillage, deport and murder Christians whenever the opportunity is favorable from their point of view.” Then he would often add that he pitied the poor Armenians (or Greeks), or indeed, that “there was no one that sympathized more with them more than I do.”53 Despite such assertions, sometimes very strongly put, the admiral’s passion obviously lies in his contentions about Armenian or Allied imprudence rather than in any pity for the victims or horror at the crime, or revulsion at the criminal either. In fact, Bristol continued regularly to treat with the Turks in Constantinople and, increasingly, the Turkish Nationalists in Angora, in very friendly fashion.
Bristol did not behave in this way, however, because he had never seen evidence that the Armenian deportations and massacres had actually occurred. Although Bristol on his arrival in Turkey had not made anything like the tour of mainland Turkey that Barton or Gates did, let alone the arduous junket that General Harbord and his party had taken, he had personally investigated conditions in one location. In March of 1919, two months after he arrived in Constantinople, Bristol rode the converted yacht Nahma to Samsun, the major port city on the north coast of Turkey, and filed a report about conditions there. In his report he states that there had been about seven to eight thousand Armenians in Samsun; now there were seven or eight hundred.
Moreover, in the region near Samsun that Bristol visited (he reported making two twenty-mile trips into the country on different days), the Greek and Armenian villages had been “practically wiped out and the villagers driven into the interior. The houses were burned and leveled to the ground.” Only 10 percent of these villagers had returned, the admiral wrote, and even those few had “no houses to go to, no oxen or farm implements and practically nothing with which to go to work in the fields.” Of all the cattle in the hands of the Turks, probably a great number had been stolen from the Greeks and Armenians. Moreover, reports indicated that Armenian women had been forced to marry Turks and were living in Turkish homes.
Finally, Bristol stated that although some refugee women and children were returning to Samsun itself, “no great influx is expected because the people deported were taken too far inland” (italics added).54 This statement might seem to indicate Bristol thought the deportees were just living elsewhere, perhaps in a more hospitable region (as some Turkish propagandists claimed). However, Bristol certainly knew of the horrors the minorities had suffered. For example, from Samsun he wrote his wife a description of how, at one spot nearby, “Greek women and children were first put in the Turkish bath in mid winter [and] then driven into the country only half alive.” These people died “by the wayside of hunger and cold. This was the so-called ‘white death.’”55
Though Bristol’s visit to Samsun took place after the war and at the beginning and not at the end of the deportation trail (down in Aleppo, Syria, American consul Jesse B. Jackson could have shown Bristol in fearful detail what happened when people were “taken too far inland”), the horrific nature of the past events was clear enough to the admiral at the time. Yet the very end of the admiral’s letter to his wife, Helen, indicates Bristol might have had some reservations about what his subsequent stance should be: “These massacres were terrible beyond description and yet the Greeks and Armenians are most unattractive and in some ways have irritated the Turks.” A year later he made a similar comment: “The Armenians have for centuries suffered under Turkish rule and in recent years have been subjected to massacre, deportations, and many cruelties, but it is useless for any one to disguise to himself the personal characteristics of the Armenians.”56 Massacres terrible beyond description, and yet. . . . Massacre, deportations and cruelties, but. . . . Clearly the admiral is hedging. A kind of “realpolitik” has begun to take root. “The Armenians are unattractive, and some are provocative. Moreover, there are few of them, compared to so many million Turks. The Kemalists, increasingly powerful, are also ‘sincere’ . . . and the Turks all seem such good fellows. They trust us Americans, surely they will listen to us and stop any objectionable behavior. . . . Can’t we just let ‘bygones be bygones’?”
Some such pragmatic naiveté led the admiral to play down the significance of the prewar inhumanities, and of their extensions during the admiral’s early tenure to Marash, Aintab, and other cities in the region known as Cilicia.
Cilicia is an area of south-central Anatolian Turkey that once had been known as “Lesser Armenia,” and had traditionally maintained a large Armenian minority. On November 1, 1919, the British began to hand over Cilicia to the French, because the French had been promised it by secret treaties during the Great War. In this region, the wartime deportations had been severe; in Marash, for instance, of an original population of 30,000 inhabitants before World War I, some 24,000 had been deported.57 Nevertheless, persuaded by the Allied victory (and Allied and American encouragement), thousands of deportation survivors from Syria and elsewhere had recently returned to Marash and other Cilician cities, several of which were now in the process of being occupied by French armed forces. In Marash, the three thousand-plus troops of the occupying French army had among them hundreds of Armenian legionnaires (some of whom had been recruited at Musa Dagh, the site of a heroic stand of Armenians against Turks during World War I), that inclusion apparently being a thoughtless blunder on the part of the French that inflamed Turkish feelings and provoked several incidents.58
With the additional emotional inflammation already being provided by the Greek occupation of Smyrna, not only were feelings running high, but the fledgling Turkish Nationalists were also determined not to accept a French occupation of one part of Turkey any more than they were going to accept a Greek or Armenian occupation of another. Here in Cilicia, Mustapha Kemal would send a trusted colleague, the Nationalist officer, Kuluj Ali (a Kurd), to organize a revolt. Even before he arrived, some Turks in the Marash region had begun organizing against the French in November of 1919. The attack on Marash was to be spearheaded by thousands of chette forces (irregulars, or bandit groups, pronounced “che-tah”) as well as Turks from within Marash and local villages, rather than by “regular” Nationalist forces (such as they were at this point),59 most of which would have their hands full elsewhere.60 Nevertheless, with this Cilician attack, the Nationalist movement was to initiate a major revolution that, over three years, would first crush the army of the fledgling Armenian state far to the east and then eventually succeed in defeating the large invading Hellenic Greek army in the west of Anatolia—these things in addition to eventually bringing about the negotiated departure of the French from the south of that same subcontinent, here in Cilicia.
Not counting the outlying villages, the population of Armenian civilians in Marash (including a variety of Cilicians who had returned after the war from deportation to Syria and settled in this city) was roughly 24,000. A few of these civilians had been organized by the French army to help in a defense of the city. However, only a couple of hundred Armenians actually had been given guns, and the multitude of Armenian civilians in the city were unarmed and unprotected.61 Besides the Armenians and many thousand ethnic Turkish civilians, also in Marash were some twenty Americans—doctors, relief workers, or missionaries. These Americans went through the entire siege (some also endured the terrible evacuation that followed), and several of them would later write about it. Although, like all other Americans in Anatolia, the American men and women in Marash were under Bristol’s orders to be neutral, they were doing most of their medical and relief work under the French umbrella. French guns were set up at the American hospital, for instance, and hence once hostilities opened, the hospital and the Americans inside immediately drew the Turkish fire.62
The Nationalist forces began their surprise attack on January 21, 1920. Near midday, rifle fire broke out all over the city, with coordinated fire immediately directed at street intersections and at any French troops who happened to be out and about, after which large sections of the city were put to the torch by Turkish units attempting to get at the buildings occupied by the French. The French responded with a destructive bombardment of Turkish positions.63 An intense battle went on for twenty-one days, which destroyed much of the city.
Normally very careful not to take part in the battle themselves (except perhaps accidentally to expose themselves while rescuing wounded Armenians), the Americans witnessed or heard of terrible events from every side, including much slaughter of helpless Armenian civilians. Finally, on February 8, an approaching French army relief column made contact with French forces in the city. The Americans and Armenians began rejoicing, and the Turkish forces were about to withdraw when, unaccountably, the French leader decided to withdraw all the French forces, this just at the moment when a victory had apparently been achieved! Emotions quickly reversed themselves. The Turks were ecstatic, while the Armenians (and some of the Americans) were possessed with dread. Maybe three thousand desperate Armenians decided to accompany the French army on its evacuation (a few Americans accompanied them), but a terrible blizzard over that three-day trek would pave the way to the railroad head at Islahiye’ with a thousand skeletons.64
Meanwhile, the victorious Turkish chette continued to slaughter the Armenian civilians whose homes or other places of refuge they overwhelmed, as they had done throughout the conflict. (This was testified to by the Americans in the city.65) Upon his announcing the French departure to some Turkish officers, the American missionary James Lyman made a personal plea to Kuluj Ali—that the Turks “stop slaughtering the Christians.” The Turkish leader agreed and issued orders to this effect, which helped save the three thousand Armenians in the Franciscan Monastery at Marash, all of them civilians who, upon the French deserting them, were expecting death.66
In 1973 Stanley Kerr, a Near East Relief worker who had gone through the siege, published a very thoroughly researched account of the battle he had personally endured over forty years before, naming it The Lions of Marash and basing it on all the written accounts he could find, and on many interviews. Overall, Kerr estimated that some eight or nine thousand Armenians within the city itself had died, many of them having been slaughtered or burned in homes or in churches where they had sought protection.67 Hundreds of French troops and thousands of Turks had died in the battle as well. Moreover, stretching over a couple of months, many Armenians outside Marash also lost their lives. For instance, Kerr interviewed in 1968 a man who had been among nineteen villagers from the village of Don-Kale’ who happened to be visiting a market in Marash on January 6. On that day the rest of the four hundred Armenians in their village had been massacred.68 Overall, among the great ironies of the outcome as noted by Kerr was that many thousands of the Armenians who died at or around Marash had returned to the Cilician city as survivors of the Armenian deportation only a year or so earlier.
Since the Nationalist campaign was regional, other cities in Cilicia witnessed similar events. The small and remote city of Hadjin, for instance, held out against a Turkish siege for several months despite having no French help at all, only to finally fall; ultimately, virtually all of the roughly seven thousand Armenians who had gathered there after the deportations and had dared to resist the attacking Turks were massacred.69
At a city called Aintab, though, things were different. For one thing, by April 1, when Kuluj Ali and others (including some of the Nationalists who had fought at Marash) began their assault on Aintab,70 the events of Marash were well known. For another, in Aintab were found a few Armenians with military experience, including two who had been officers in the English army, and one former lieutenant from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Under the leadership of these and others, the Armenians began to build defensive redoubts on the quiet and to supplement the few guns they had. In this city, the Armenian quarter lay between the Turks and the French, so that the way to attack the French was through the Armenians. But when the Turks attacked this minority quarter, hoping for surprise and planning to catch the Armenians scattered and unwary and “slaughter them wholesale,” quickly the Armenians withdrew to their homes, stone barricades descended into position, and gunfire raked key approaches. The attack was stymied; the Turks could not penetrate the Armenian quarter and so could not approach the French.
At the end of May, after seventy days of fighting and the Armenians having foiled repeated Turkish attacks upon them, a temporary armistice was arranged between the Turks and the French. The French agreed to leave the city and its Armenian inhabitants to Turkish control, while the Turks agreed not to bother the Armenians, and—what was almost unheard of—to leave the Armenians in possession of their arms. In late July the Turks started fighting again—but now they directed their attention solely to the French, while the Armenians carefully maintained a position of armed neutrality.71
Eventually, in February of 1921, the Turks at Aintab surrendered to an investing French force of some 15,000 troops. The heroism shown by the Turkish troops in this battle, part of a campaign that eventually resulted in the complete withdrawal of the French from Cilicia,72 was later recognized by the Nationalists by their renaming the city “Gazi-Aintab”—Aintab of the Father (the “father” being Mustapha Kemal). The prior and arguably even greater heroism of the Armenians against the Turks was, of course, almost entirely forgotten.
Jesse B. Jackson, the American consul at Aleppo, wrote Admiral Bristol and the State Department after the June armistice at Aintab was concluded to applaud the Armenian courage there. He argued that the Armenians had protected not only themselves but also the Americans who had been at Aintab. Admiral Bristol responded with an astonishing statement: “I was very glad to hear the reports of the fight the Armenians put up in Aintab and I think they undoubtedly prevented a massacre or a wholesale killing at that time, but this may only be laying up trouble for themselves in the future. . . . Sometimes discretion is the better part of valor.” The absurd notion that the Armenians perhaps shouldn’t have tried to defend themselves for it would “make trouble later,” despite the decades of past experience as to what happened when Armenians had had no arms, and in the face of the evident prevention of massacres even on the present occasion, manifests the deep contradictions of Bristol’s policy. In the same letter, the admiral admitted, “The Turks, undoubtedly, want to get rid of the Armenians and will probably exterminate them if they cannot find another means.” He resisted the obvious conclusion proposed at the time by Jackson and later vehemently argued by Dr. Marion Wilson (who had been the relief director at Marash), that the Armenians should be allowed to leave the country.73 Bristol would resist this conclusion again and again,74 and would be irate when the relief workers and missionaries ultimately (in late 1921) took some part of the situation in their own hands despite Bristol’s advice and spirited all their remaining orphans out of Cilicia.75
In his reaction to the events at Marash, too, the admiral’s correspondence shows a grand disconnect between his preconceptions and the actual events. Originally he argued that there probably had been no massacre at all: “when we get the true facts we will find that the killing of Turks by the French and of French and Armenians by the Turks has been about equal and it was really a fight and not a massacre.”76 The same day in which he wrote that in a letter, he cabled Washington, “It is believed refugees are made up of all classes and races. Armenians are not being massacred by the Turks.”77
That confused the State Department (which had received reports of massacres from other American sources “closer to the events”),78 and he had to backtrack. By the middle of March Bristol seems no longer fully able to argue in this case what he consistently said in general, that both sides killed each other equally and indiscriminately. So he fell back on an oft-asserted position, although with reluctance and qualifications. Yes, there had been a massacre of some ten thousand Armenians (but thousands of Turks had been killed, too) and yes, women and children had been killed (but Turkish women and children had been killed too); however, whatever had happened, the Turks had first been provoked: “the Turks, during the fighting, had their usual brutal instincts aroused and resorted to massacres of Armenians.” He ended this message by inveighing against “exaggerated reports of massacres” and with a plea that “The Turks are human beings however vile their character might be.”79 A year later, despite having by then received damning eyewitness reports from Americans Kerr, Wilson, and others, Bristol had overcome any scruples at all about staying close to the facts, and had reverted to his earlier position: “The so-called massacres of Marash and Hadjin were really indiscriminate killing of each other.”80
Finally, briefly consider Bristol’s response to Americans’ witness of events in yet one more Cilician city, in Urfa. In April of 1920, after eight weeks of resistance, nearly five hundred French soldiers and their officers had marched out of Urfa under Turkish safe conduct—only to be attacked and massacred in a narrow defile.81 In August American classicist Francis Kelsey (who was traveling through the Near East on a search for ancient manuscripts, sometimes being transported on Bristol’s destroyers) sent the admiral an extract from a letter he had been shown, a letter that had been written by Mary Caroline Holmes, who was in charge of American relief at Urfa.
The morning after the French had made their agreement with the Turks and departed the city, several Turkish officials, including the Mutesarrif (the local governor), had gathered at the orphanage with Holmes and spoken to her about their great vision for a Nationalist future. In the new Turkish republic, they predicted, all Christians and Muslims would be treated alike. As these men were leaving the orphanage, though, Holmes suddenly realized that the Kurdish leader was missing. She took alarm, which increased when she saw loot begin streaming into the city. Urgently she wrote to Lt. Charles Weeden, an American relief worker she called “Sonny,” who was elsewhere in Urfa at the time:
Sonny,
Please come right back at once. The French have been attacked, and the head of one of them is being displayed in the street. Some say that it is that of the Commander, others that it is our dear Marcerou. In coming, go to the Mutesarif, with this letter from me, in which I beg of him to disprove what we have heard, as well as to say a word for yourself. While they were here with all the fine talk, this awful thing was known to them. The panic of fear is spreading. Come at once.82
What was Bristol’s response to Urfa? Three refrains: There are two sides to every story (a frequent Bristol argument); “the Turks did just what one would expect them to do”; and, once more, the French had been the small boy playing with the hornet’s nest.83
Apparently Bristol had convinced himself that virtually everyone who spoke for the minorities now was exaggerating their past injuries, or that the afflictions they in fact had incurred, no matter however severe, were comparatively unimportant. Surely, the admiral would often argue, although the Turks may sometimes have been just as bad as described, the Christians were not as good as has been made out, and they would be equally bad if opportunity offered.
And of course there were genuine complexities to the Turkish situation. Few Armenians were saints, and there had been bloodshed on both sides. On Lt. Robbie Dunn’s first trip through Armenia and into Turkey, while he had heard rumors of Armenian killings of Turks (and vice versa), he only actually witnessed two Tartars assassinate an Armenian peasant.84 He made no attempt to identify the bones he saw everywhere. On a second trip to Armenia in the Caucasus, however, he had a different experience.
Dunn accompanied an Armenian leader named General Dro and his irregulars during an attack on a Tartar village of some eight hundred residents in the south of “Russian” Armenia, deep in the province of Zangesour, near Persia. There he witnessed these Armenian troops literally massacre the village’s inhabitants. Before the attack, Dunn noted that Dro’s final appeal to his fighters was neither patriotism nor Christianity but instead “primordial greed.” The American was left on the hillside during the onslaught itself, but afterward he was led through the village to see the carnage inflicted on those who had not gotten away. Dunn was understandably sickened by the sights of bayoneted children, the slashed genitals of a slain old man, and Armenian villagers plundering happily. For Dunn this firsthand experience with butchery was a terribly revolting sight, for which General Dro’s excuse, “We must keep the Moslems in terror that our cruelty beats theirs,” was hardly sufficient. Dunn thought, or hoped, that some of the general’s comments and laughs really covered for a sense of guilt. “For somehow, despite my boast of irreligion, Christians massacring ‘infidels’ was more horrible than the reverse would have been.”85
Dunn had here had been caught in a terrible feud between Tartars and Armenians that General Harbord had mentioned in his articles, and about which the general had commented, “The Tartars of Azarbaijan . . . are hereditary enemies of the Armenians wherever found, whom they massacre, and who retaliate in kind when possible,” an assessment that seems to have been an understatement, if anything.86 As we have seen that the Armenians had also shed blood and were involved in “the outstanding feature of the political situation in Trans-Caucasia . . . the intensity of racial hatreds” was a qualifying circumstance for Harbord, one which tempered his conclusions about the 1915 Armenian deportations and massacres and subsequent Turkish abuses, but hardly reversed them.87 He knew that, in Anatolia (as opposed to the Caucasus), with the exception of the short period of wartime Russian advances, very few Armenians ever had significant power to harm the Turks. Over centuries since their original ascendancy, it had been the Ottoman policy to keep the minorities disarmed, and they still were, for the most part. Harbord’s personal observation upon his trip through Turkey proper was that “the Armenian, unarmed at the time of the deportations and massacres . . . is still unarmed in a land where every man but himself carries a rifle.”88
In contrast to Harbord’s balanced assessment, Dunn’s witness of the raid seems to have substantially jaundiced his viewpoint, perhaps being a major reason he puts quotation marks in his book around reported “massacres” and “rape” of the minorities, and otherwise regularly depreciates Armenian and Greek suffering. “After Zangesour,” he writes, “I was callous to the plight of the Christian refugees,”89 a remark that suggests, of course, that he really knew better. In a passage prefatory to his Zangesour narrative, Dunn spoke about Enver Pasha and certain other Young Turks as having gone into hiding, being under death sentence for murdering Armenians. In his book, which was published posthumously in 1956, Dunn has the harshest possible words for these men. He calls Enver and the others “forerunners of the Nazis convicted of genocide.” Unless one thinks Dunn would deny the holocaust, this statement would seem to manifest the writer’s recognition of the real nature of the 1915 events, on which an understanding of all later events (and all relations between the Turks and the minorities) must depend. Yet other statements of the author belie this assessment, and his presentation is conflicted.90
Anyhow, knowing that the admiral has heard tales like Dunn’s account of Zangesour, one sympathizes somewhat with Bristol’s frustration when visiting dignitaries would come through Constantinople, having taken a quick trip that seemed only to confirm their original impressions, their perspective having been formed by the slick and extensive public relations campaign on behalf of the Armenians back in the States. Bristol regularly complained about the disproportionate stories being broadcast at home concerning the Armenians, and his complaints were not without foundation here, either.
Although James Barton did not agree that Near East Relief publicity was of this kind, he acknowledged to Bristol that both Greek and Armenian “publicity bureaus” were active in America, and that the one operated by a brilliant but unscrupulous young Armenian named Cardashian was especially troublesome, “constantly reporting atrocities which never occurred, and giving [out] endless misinformation.”91 Thus, some Stateside reports gave a false picture just as the admiral insisted (and there were very few stories put out by anybody about atrocities done against Turks). Still, Bristol himself seldom commented on the ludicrous tendencies of Turkish propaganda circulated everywhere by billboards, by Turkish newspapers, and in the case of Marash, by the Turkish foreign minister and by Bristol’s Turkish confidant, Halide Edib.
About Marash after the French evacuated the city, for instance, the Turkish foreign minister told the Associated Press, “the Armenians there enjoy the protection of the very persons they attacked with such hatred,” thus confusing the victims with the aggressors in that episode.92 Halide’s account, sent to the admiral a few days earlier, was in the same vein: “not only [are the Americans] safe [but] the armed and fighting Armenians who have ruined the city, killed Turkish children, violated Turkish women are safe,” she reported.93 In fact, of course, not only had the Armenians there been mostly unarmed, but at Marash months before the battle, civilian Turks had been required by Nationalist leaders to swear to kill their Armenian neighbors.94 Yet instead of castigating such Turkish propaganda, in his Marash correspondence Bristol consistently weighed in against the credibility of “native sources,” that is, reports from Armenians or Greeks.95
In sum, besides being biased in favor of the Turks, Bristol was at once vain and naïve. He thought that he had been responsible for the end of the massacres in Marash, for he was coordinating with the Nationalists via Halide Edib about that.96 (Actually, if any American had helped stop the slaughter, it was the missionary James Lyman, who had successfully pleaded with the Turks on the spot.) And Bristol considered things throughout Turkey could also be ameliorated by similar moral suasion, if only the traditional hatreds (for which all races were equally guilty) could be suppressed, and Kemal could take power, democratic reforms could take root, education develop, favoritism toward Christians diminish, Turkish authorities mellow out, and, especially, if business could get started, American men would lead the way.97
Anyway, Bristol was certainly putting out his share of effort along these lines. Rising to be at his desk by nine, he dealt with his correspondence before noon.98 Besides official reports, messages, weekly summaries, advisories to consuls, and letters to naval superiors, he frequently wrote five, six, even ten-page single-spaced letters to a variety of people back in the states, industrialists, businessmen, and college presidents among them. Robbie Dunn expressed amazement at the load of correspondence his idol handled,99 but Bristol never complained; he was pressing his agenda at every opportunity.
Just before lunch, Bristol put out instructions to his naval staff. In the afternoon, he took an average of five callers and preached his word to them, too. Either later in the afternoon or the next morning he always found time to dictate his war diaries. These diaries indicate that for sightseers or traveling businessmen who stopped in on courtesy calls, besides offering solutions to local problems and offering pointers, the admiral provided a kind of personal publicity bureau on political and social issues. As for VIPs, Bristol would deal with them argumentatively, hearing their experiences and viewpoints and then arguing his agenda in response. (The admiral inevitably becomes the hero of these war diary narratives.) Bristol was not only partisan, of course; indeed, among other things, the admiral should be given credit for aiding dozens of humanitarian causes over the years.
Bristol sent his war diaries back to the State Department every other week, and he required his ship captains to write up their own daily war diaries and weekly intelligence reports about the ports they visited; a selection of these he also sent back to Washington. Through such detailed reports from ports throughout the Near East; by his conversations with American relief people and missionaries and other Americans scattered throughout Turkey, southern Russia, and the Caucasus who often visited with the admiral upon their return; through discussions with American businessmen and representatives of the YMCA and Red Cross; through conversations with ethnic leaders and foreign representatives in Constantinople itself; and through diplomatic and covert contacts, Bristol became one of the most knowledgeable officials in the entire region.
Then, in the evening and on weekends, Bristol and his wife, Helen, set about an extensive social life, including banquets and concerts and tea dances and dinners and the like. No doubt, here too he was learning a great deal, though sometimes indirectly. When Captain Bill Leahy arrived in Constantinople in mid-1921 to take command of the cruiser St. Louis, he attended all the receptions, teas, dinners, and dances put on by diplomatic or military officials that he could. Why? He found them vital to his education. Gossip and misinformation about “the game of acquiring from Turkey” was broadcast at such informal sessions like it was nowhere else.100
The small diplomatic dinners put on by Clover and her diplomat husband, Allen Dulles, seem to have been comparatively more genteel. Clover’s guests were mainly American and British, along with an occasional French couple. For a table of twelve, she spent considerable effort orchestrating the seating to enhance the guests’ conversation. Still, Clover seemed to regard the hosting as more necessity than pleasure. She held dinners even in Allen’s temporary absence in Paris, but her letters home were much warmer in discussing her charity work.101 On his part, Allen complained in letters that “Constantinople is rather gay to suit us,” pointing out that, in the current season, a Jewish charity ball was followed by an Armenian one, and then by balls put on by each of the various navies, the occupying armies, and so on. “We dodge as many balls as we can but are lucky if we get off with less than two a week.”102
It was difficult to get away from society too much, though, for the American embassy itself was ever hosting events. Helen Bristol once wrote home that on successive days the embassy was putting on a tea dance for the Russians, a dinner party, a picnic for the YMCA secretaries, and a tea for a Turkish prince.103
The American embassy was, in fact, the “height of society,” although perhaps a somewhat snobbish society, “made up mostly of navy men who have no manners,” Helen Ogden once complained. This YWCA worker was embarrassed to have only one dress to wear for two coming dances at the embassy and one at the women’s college, all three in the same week.104 From another local point of view, American embassy parties might have been considered very lowbrow, for Bristol regularly invited Turks to the embassy and made them feel quite comfortable. According to one source, the American embassy was the “first place where Turkish women have ever danced with men.”105 The middle-aged bachelor Cdr. Harry Pence was delighted with that, for he found some of the Turkish girls very beautiful, and quite good dancers, too.106 The British were scandalized by such fraternization.107 Robbie Dunn contended that American embassy parties were quite gay precisely “because you saw there people the British barred on grounds of morals, the last thing the rest of Constantinople fussed about.”108 The British, of course, were favoring the Greeks and Armenians as well as the Turks in the sultan’s favor rather than the Nationalists.
The admiral’s staff members were invited to follow the admiral’s lead, and many made good friends among the Turkish elite in Constantinople. At the same time, of course, much of the staff’s time was spent escorting prominent American tourists (congressmen, oil barons, and so on) around the city. The staff officers acted as tour guides and sometimes were given special assignments. Lt. John Williams, for example, was tasked to keep liquor away from the artist Chandler Christie, a great lush.109 Nevertheless, staff members still had plenty of time to enjoy themselves. As a patriotic duty, the bachelors among the young officers sometimes attended parties every night of the week.110 However hard they partied, though, it was difficult to keep up with the pace of the admiral, who was as “indefatigable” at his social duties as he was at working his political and business agenda. As an admirer pointed out, “The Admiral can dance or play bridge all night, and be at the breakfast table at eight, go through the daily papers, have a French lesson, and be at his desk at nine. And his aides are expected to do the same.”111
Bristol’s naval aides were strongly influenced by their boss in every possible way. Naval officers typically take their lead from their superiors anyway (especially on foreign stations), and career wise it was often dangerous to speak another point of view even if you happened to form one. Hence Bristol’s chiefs of staff, first Lyman Cotten and then A. J. (Japy) Hepburn, and other aides like Robbie Dunn, Julian Wheeler, Thomas Kinkaid, and Tip Merrill (most of whom would have big naval roles to play later, between the wars and in World War II) almost always ended up siding with Bristol. An officer reporting to Turkey in 1922 noted that most officers in the command were pro-Turkish and that their opinions caused pain to several American missionaries and relief workers. At Smyrna during the 1922 fire, American consul George Horton was concerned to discover that American naval officers (even high-ranking ones) freely identified themselves as pro-Turkish, even though they were under Bristol’s own orders to remain neutral.112
Not many such naval officers were serious students of political science or history, of course, and their tours were usually too short for them to develop any depth of local knowledge. Most had been picked not for their diplomatic expertise but for their technical aptitude or administrative talent—or perhaps for their social ability. While serving aboard the destroyer McCormick, Lt. Dolly Fitzgerald was rudely informed one morning by an unhappy captain that Fitzgerald had just been temporarily transferred to the Scorpion. Fitzgerald then remembered that, a night or two before, Mrs. Bristol had particularly appreciated his ability to play a good hand of bridge. (Bridge was Helen Bristol’s great passion.)113
The several diplomatic secretaries who reported to work at the embassy—Allen Dulles, Ferdinand Lamot Belin, Howland Shaw, Pierrepont Moffat, and Frederick Dolbeare among them—also usually ended up adopting the admiral’s views. The admiral regarded Allen Dulles as a kind of Bristol staffer even when he departed Constantinople in 1922 to head up the Near East Division at the State Department, so closely did their views coincide.114 In contrast, some American officials did not regularly find themselves in agreement with the American high commissioner. Consuls George Horton in Smyrna and Jesse B. Jackson in Aleppo, Syria, frequently had sharp exchanges with Bristol by correspondence. These men were much more sympathetic with the Christian minorities than Bristol was, partly from their decades of experience in the Near East, and Jackson from his specific witness of the wartime deportations. Both their relatively independent status as consuls and their geographical separation from the mesmerizing old Ottoman capital also helped make them less readily persuadable.
Even in Constantinople, some Americans on Bristol’s staff or in the wider American community could disagree with him. William Peet was the Constantinople secretary of the missionary board and had long been in charge of the American missionaries scattered throughout Anatolian Turkey. Protection of these missionaries being an important part of Bristol’s mission, of necessity Peet and Bristol regularly conferred. Although Bristol’s war diaries seem to indicate a general rapport between the two men, in fact they often disagreed. Peet was no doubt very diplomatic in expressing his views, although the older man may also have been cowed somewhat by Bristol’s domineering personality. Privately Peet sometimes defied Bristol’s policies. In one case, he was so moved by the admiral’s lack of support of the minorities and the Americans in the field that, with others, he covertly attempted to have Bristol removed.115
Within the Navy and the embassy staff, however, the admiral’s power and will were critically formulative, especially buttressed as they were by suave Turkish officials. As Edward Hale Bierstadt was to point out in 1924, “the Turks with whom our naval officers naturally come in contact are, as a rule, men of considerable polish and charm. They believe thoroughly in their cause and are convincing in the presentation of their point of view. Good diplomats, they set out deliberately to please, and they succeed in doing so.”116 Most easily influenced were naval officers who lived right in the embassy and, except for sightseeing tours, almost never got out of Constantinople.
Oral histories narrated toward the end of one’s life are often less reliable than contemporaneous letters or diaries about a person’s actual experience. It nevertheless remains telling, I think, that, in his oral history, Adm. Julian Wheeler would make the following astonishing assessment about his three years’ experience (1921 to 1924) on the American embassy staff: “Throughout my entire period in Turkey I never saw any evidence whatsoever of the so-called terrible Turk. They were an educated, thoroughly charming, delightful, and friendly people.”117
Wheeler had obviously not heard about that French head on that Turkish pole at Urfa, or if he had read that account, he didn’t believe it or the countless similar reports in the embassy files. Wheeler’s statement, in fact, speaks volumes about the insularity that tended to infect anybody working in the early 1920s at the American embassy in Constantinople.
