CHAPTER THIRTEEN
germany invaded Poland on the first of September, 1939, Panzer divisions racing east toward Krakow and Warsaw, dive-bombing Stuka fighter planes strafing civilians. Knick, still in Paris, hastily dismantled his household. The cook, in tears, left for Flanders. A chauffeur was dispatched to fetch his two daughters and their nursemaid from the Côte d’Azur, where they’d been holidaying. Pack only your clothes, he instructed Agnes, but when she insisted on bringing her skis, he didn’t waste any time arguing about it.
There was no doubt in Knick’s mind that Britain and France would respond with their own declaration of war. The coming conflict would be brutal and drawn-out; it might last as long as six years. He had to get his family out of Europe. Not just because of the war but on account of the story—a real corker—that he would break on front pages around the world in a couple of weeks’ time.
Planning ahead, Knick had booked passage to the United States for the whole family on the Nieuw Amsterdam. Agnes and the girls would embark from the ship’s port of origin, in Rotterdam. In the meantime, he would travel to London, to gather the final details he needed for his story and meet the ship at the Southampton dock. It was mayhem at the Gare du Nord, thousands of distraught people trying to leave Paris.
For years, Knick had been stockpiling evidence from bankers, some of them Jews, about the assets that top Nazis were hiding abroad. In London, the information he’d gathered was supplemented by a dossier from British authorities, part of a fledgling effort at “black” propaganda aimed at demoralizing the enemy. As Knick told the story, the leading Nazis had secretly deposited more than $34 million in the banks of foreign, neutral countries such as Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Argentina. Under Nazi law, it was a crime punishable by death for any German citizen to possess undeclared foreign currency or assets abroad, but nonetheless Goebbels, Göring, Hess, von Ribbentrop, Streicher, Ley, and Himmler had salted away their money. If the war went badly, Hitler’s inner circle had their escape plans at the ready.
Knick documented the Bethlehem Steel and Pennsylvania Railways bonds that Hermann Göring, commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, had purchased through a German shipping firm and the life insurance policies he’d taken out in foreign currencies. He tracked the cash that Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo, had stashed in Smyrna, Finland, and South America. Knick kept copies of the evidence in his traveling satchel. On the twentieth of September, 1939, his allegations made headlines across the world.
“A lying swine,” Goebbels railed to his diary. On a Sunday morning, a few days after Knick’s story ran worldwide, the propaganda minister summoned the foreign press to an urgent news conference.
Crowding into the room, the correspondents speculated about what Goebbels was so hell-bent on saying. Was he going to announce a peace settlement? Neither the French nor the British seemed all that keen on defending Poland, so perhaps the world war would be finished before it really started. Instead, Goebbels stormed in, his wan face boiling with anger, and spent the entire press conference ranting about Knickerbocker.
The story was a complete invention, a despicable lie, raged Goebbels—“snorting like a bull,” in Bill Shirer’s description. He invited the assembled international correspondents to disprove the allegations, telling them that he’d already issued a challenge to Knickerbocker over the shortwave radio: “Publish the documents. Name the banks.” If Knickerbocker produced his sources within twenty-four hours, Goebbels would see to it that he was paid 10 percent of the money he alleged had been deposited abroad.
Goebbels thought he had a sure bet: his spies had told him that Knick was already on the Nieuw Amsterdam in the middle of the Atlantic and would hear nothing of the challenge until long after the deadline had passed. What the spies didn’t know was that Knick waited on board the ship until the very last minute, after the bells had clanged and the steward had shouted a couple of times for the well-wishers to disembark. Then he donned a slouchy hat to cover his cockscomb of ginger-red hair, bade goodbye to Agnes and John, and slipped down the gangway, proceeding to London to answer Goebbels’s challenge.
“I am a neutral American journalist and I do not choose to engage in polemics with Dr. Goebbels,” Knick announced. But the day after Goebbels’s press conference, he served up what the propaganda minister had demanded and more. In an exclusive for Paris-soir, and then in newspapers across neutral and Allied countries, Knick detailed his proofs, publishing the names and addresses of the agents who had made the deposits, including the $1.85 million waiting for Goebbels in the safe of a German importing firm in Buenos Aires. He hadn’t intended to reveal the particulars, wrote Knick, but “Goebbels is wrong if he thought I would not take up the challenge. I have now done so.”
But were Knick’s allegations true? His rival Hearst correspondent, Karl von Wiegand, doubted the story. In 1933, von Wiegand had charged Knick with spreading “insidious lies” about the Hitler regime and this seemed to him more of the same. Knick had “pulled off a good yarn to call attention to himself,” noted von Wiegand to his editor, claiming the Dutch authorities didn’t “take it seriously.” Von Wiegand, accused of pro-Nazi sympathies, may not be the most reliable judge, but he wasn’t the only skeptic. The Times of London thought the story too neat to be believable. The specificity of the charges—the “far too precise details”—aroused suspicion, The Times noted in its initial article, though subsequent ones conveyed Knick’s reporting without comment.
When Goebbels denounced Knick’s articles as British propaganda, he was, at least in part, correct. Knick and the two Chicago Daily News correspondents who broke a similar story—Edgar Mowrer and Bill Stoneman—had obtained a dossier on the Nazi leaders’ assets abroad from the British Ministry of Information and the Foreign Office. Knick’s charges about the top Nazis have never been confirmed, nor have they been disproven. But this much is certain. Thanks to decades of painstaking scholarly work, the massive scale of the Nazis’ plundering and looting operation is well established. These spoils, concealed under numbered accounts all over the world, are still under investigation. Many will never be traced.
Having vigorously denied Knick’s other accusations for years, Goebbels now found himself in the position of the boy who cried wolf with the rest of the foreign press. All over Europe, in the United States and other neutral countries, Knick’s stories ran as fact and the fireworks with Goebbels only redounded to Knick’s credit.
“Bet Knick will like the publicity immensely,” Bill Shirer chuckled. He certainly wouldn’t see a penny of the 10 percent Goebbels had promised. In sorties that month over northern Germany, Britain’s Royal Air Force dropped more than three million copies of the leaflet outlining Knick’s charges.
—
europe is like a sealed train with 350 million people aboard, hurtling to some godforsaken destination, John had said in his broadcast from London in August 1939. “The window shades are drawn. The doors are locked. No one can see outside. Or even inside. No one can talk to the driver. No one knows who the driver is.”
When Britain declared war on the third of September, John had been in Parliament, watching as the MPs remained on their benches despite the second air raid siren of the morning. At night, London was now pitch-black, not a child or a dog to be seen in the city. He was staying at the Dorchester Hotel, supposedly the safest building in London on account of its reinforced concrete structure. He spent his nights in the dugout with a gas mask on or, after the all-clear signal, visiting the Turkish baths in the basement. He got drunk nearly every night, just to take his mind off the war. When I broadcast, I am talking to you—for you, he told Frances.
She was in Lake Placid, visiting Johnny at camp. There was too much static on the radio in the Adirondacks for her to hear much of what John said, she informed him. Anyway, she couldn’t stand the warmongering that he and Knick and the rest of their friends were doing. If he was as gung ho on the war as he sounded, then he ought to fight in it. Did he realize that the British Empire was more than sixty times as big as the German Empire, even including Austria and Czechoslovakia? She couldn’t bear it. She was going out camping in the woods for a few days.
Soon after, a telegram arrived from Frances’s brother. Your wife is dangerously ill, he wired John. While Frances was camping in the Adirondacks, her appendix had burst and she’d developed a bad case of peritonitis. The doctors had rushed her into surgery, and her condition was stable. Frances insisted that John wasn’t to return home on her account. He booked the first passage home he could, on the Nieuw Amsterdam.
—
john thought agnes looked none too pleased when he boarded the Nieuw Amsterdam with Knick. Maybe she’d been looking forward to a shipboard dalliance or two, he surmised. Knick was always so jealous. He didn’t permit her to dance with other men, even to lunch with them alone. Nevertheless, at one point or another, most of the correspondents had tried their luck with her. They’d all heard Knick’s stories about “that crazy little Agnes”—demure and aloof in public, but who could come any time she wished, or, more to the point, any time he wished, even dozens of times a night. Bill Shirer attempted to get in bed with her one night in Vienna. In Paris, when Knick was in Czechoslovakia during the Munich crisis, the broadcaster Raymond Swing made a pass she derisively characterized as “feeble.”
John saw a lot of her on the ship. Knick had arranged for Agnes and the children to stay with his family in Texas. But when she returned to New York for a visit at Thanksgiving, she wrote John to say she was coming. They dined out and then had drinks at the fashionable “21” Club.
Didn’t you know this would happen when I wrote you? she asked him later that night. They’d gone to her place.
When I want something, I want it, Agnes told John at the start of their affair. Strange as it may seem, I love my husband, she added.
—
while frances was convalescing in the Lake Placid hospital, she had nightmares of being a soldier on a battlefield. The war had just started, and she was a Polish soldier or an English one or a German. It was night and there were wounded men all around her. She came to from the surgery and was disoriented. Why were the doctors treating her—“a useless woman,” she called herself—when there were young men dying?
Before she got sick, she’d written Nehru a picture postcard from the Adirondacks: “We could have lunch here—lettuce sandwiches—fresh grilled trout. I hope you can make a boy-scout fire because I can’t!” The British censor read the postcard, and then stamped it “censored” before forwarding it on. The world in which she’d written—peace, albeit an uneasy one, the plans for him to come to New York—had vanished before the card arrived. On the say-so of a single man, the British viceroy, the entire Indian subcontinent had been brought into the war. The viceroy hadn’t consulted the Indian National Congress or, for that matter, any Indian leader.
With the outbreak of war, Nehru was under the strictest surveillance. The nationalists wouldn’t dare to sabotage the war effort. Or would they? So ran the conversations between nervous British officials. On the one hand, neither Gandhi nor Nehru had any sympathy for fascism, and the Congress had declared itself “entirely on the side of democracy and freedom.” On the other, the Congress was withholding its support for the war until the British explained both where imperialism fit into their war aims and what plans they’d made for Indian independence.
Nehru heard the news of Frances’s illness from a visiting American reporter. Was it right of her not to tell him that she’d been so ill? he reproached her. Of course he could make a fire. He wasn’t that much of a refined city-dweller. He sent her a photograph of himself at home in his study: in profile, beset by worries, a picture of his daughter, Indira, on top of the bookcase. He wrote her, elliptically, one eye on the censor, about the rivers of India, the Ganges and the Indus.
He knew Frances well enough to anticipate how she’d react to this trivia—Write me about something important, for God’s sake. Not rivers. “There is our friend the censor, remember, and probably he will think that rivers are a safe subject for American consumption,” Nehru reminded her. Besides, what counted as a worthwhile subject? he asked. “Something that one craves for and cannot reach?” Under the still surface of the waters lay “strange currents and unplumbed depths.”
Unmentioned were the divisions in the Congress. Or the debates about mass civil disobedience in wartime, which Gandhi adamantly opposed. Or the bitter arguments about whether to demand independence immediately or settle for a commitment for freedom after the war was done. The British were intransigent, refusing to concede any right to self-determination; Nehru and the other Congress leaders were growing more impatient by the day.
In October 1940, Nehru was among the first to be rounded up in the mass arrests of nationalists whom the British government accused of undermining morale and military recruitment. Twenty-three thousand would be convicted that next year. The shock came at Nehru’s sentencing. Previously, he’d been termed a political prisoner. This time, he was given four years’ hard labor like a common criminal. As the Blitz began, Frances fumed to John: “I hope London is razed till there’s not a stinking stone of it left—till it’s bald—like Jawahar’s poor old bald head.”
Please send me letters, Nehru wrote her from the jail at Dehradun. “They manage to bring me a bit of yourself and that is a very welcome gift.” She mailed him letters and postcards and books, including a volume of photographs of Kailash and Manasorovar and Thomas Mann’s novella about the Indian goddess Sita. That one prompted him to a reverie about the mysteries of Woman. He’d always been a little afraid of the opposite sex and had been accused (with some justice, he acknowledged) of being blind—deliberately so. “When will this world settle down again, my dear? When one can write to one’s friends and meet them and do more or less what one wants to?”
She’d made copies of his letters and tucked the originals inside a folder. Every once in a while, she took out those letters he’d touched and felt again the warmth of his hand. She also imagined a future for the two of them. She started one letter to Nehru while she was getting ready for a New Year’s Eve party to usher in 1941. She was supposed to be meeting John there. In her imagination, though, she was in bed with Jawahar, laughing. She wrote that letter, and others like it, but never sent them.
The experience in Asia, she told Nehru, had done her tremendous good. She—who’d hardly considered herself Jewish—had become an ardent Zionist, a supporter of the armed struggle of Jabotinsky’s paramilitary organization, the Irgun, for a Jewish state in Palestine. She was hosting meetings and appearing on platforms on behalf of her “Irgun lads.” Her change of heart was Hitler’s doing, of course, but it owed something, too, to her analysis of the British Empire. The British orated about liberty and freedom but the policies they pursued abroad were the rankest form of domination. “They eat other people’s cake and have it too. They have democracy for themselves, and empire for other people.”
Empire, tout court, was the problem—the American Empire as well—but the British Empire was a particularly malign and powerful instance of it. She’d started a new book entitled Empire, she told Nehru, an attempt to tell a “psychiatric imperial case history.” He was too much of an old Harrovian, she supposed, to agree entirely with her assessment of the British. Still, the line that her erstwhile friends and colleagues were drawing between the liberal democracies of Britain, France, and the United States on the one hand, and Germany and Russia, on the other—We or They, as one influential title had it—was too simplistic. If you looked at what the British were doing in India or in Palestine, didn’t the distinction become much cloudier? Weren’t the crimes the British had committed in empire the precedent for what the fascists were doing now?
She was writing and speaking, not just for the Zionists but for the Indians, too. She’d given an address at the New York festivities to mark Gandhi’s birthday in 1940, a toast that the journalist Gobind Behari Lal—the first Indian to win the Pulitzer Prize—lauded as revelatory. “You psychoanalyzed world politics,” Lal exulted. John’s editor Cass Canfield wanted to see her manuscript. She was busy day and night, she told Nehru, and had added sculpting to her activities. Nonetheless, many were the days, she confided in him, when she wished she could take a hypodermic needle of veronal and wake up when the war was over and she could start to live again.
—
though dorothy had always had a soft spot for Frances, she viewed her Anglophobia as flat-out insane and worse, a menace to civilization. Anti-British crusaders like Frances—or the New Republic’s Quincy Howe or the Gunthers’ old friend Jerry Frank—were playing right into Nazi hands, Dorothy declared. Hitler wanted nothing more than to distract attention from his own crimes by ranting on about the British Empire. She spent a maddening evening arguing with Frank, an ardent New Dealer and the new head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose book, Save America First (1938), blamed the British elite for the mess in Europe.
Indictments of the perfidious English had long played well in American political life, especially in working-class German and Irish strongholds like Chicago. But in the 1920s and 1930s, opinions against the British gained traction among both urban liberals and American Establishment types. Many were still disgruntled about the last war: the British, they said, had snookered America into the conflict with their atrocity propaganda about the “barbaric Huns.” Some also disliked appeasement. But increasingly, as for Frances, the heart of the matter was the British Empire, more particularly the nationalist struggle in India.
It wasn’t that Dorothy was uncritically pro-British or enamored of British imperialism. India, she said, had been “Great Britain’s ruin.” But what she cared most about was the survival of Western Christian civilization, and in that effort, Britain—and American public opinion about Britain—was key. The publicity battle was shifting into a higher gear, she saw: opinion would need to be mass manufactured the same way that tanks or bombers were. And thus far, the Nazis with their formidable propaganda machine had the upper hand.
When Germany invaded Poland, Dorothy was on the radio day and night. She recognized that broadcasting was an even more potent means of reaching an audience than the printed page: it was both immediate and emotional. Her voice was clipped and feminine with the slight hint of a British accent that among Americans counted as a mark of good breeding. Decorous as she sounded, what she had to say was anything but polite. Contrary to his promises, Hitler had no intention of sparing noncombatants; Polish women and children had already died in his bombing raids. He was a liar and had always been one. She barely paused for breath once she got going. For one St. Louis station, it was all too much. Nervous about alienating their isolationist or pro-German listeners, they stopped Dorothy’s broadcast in midstream. She was expressing her “personal opinion” in violation of FCC rules, the station claimed. “Dorothy Is Cut Off Air,” read one front-page headline.
Dorothy worried about the pacifism she saw ascendant in America, a stance that anti-British sentiments bolstered. The forces that favored isolationism had always been strong in the United States. Why, asked the isolationists, should we mix into European troubles? What had that gotten us in the last war, aside from fifty thousand of our boys killed and a slew of unpaid loans? Shortly after the start of the war, the aviator Charles Lindbergh—a bona fide national hero after his solo flight across the Atlantic—took to the radio to endorse American neutrality, insinuating that Jews stood behind critical reports of Nazi Germany. A few days later, Thompson lit into Lindbergh in her column. She offered a chronology of his dalliances with the Nazi Party, including his meetings with Göring and the distinguished service medal he’d been awarded by the Germans.
“Colonel Lindbergh’s inclination toward Fascism is well known to his friends,” she noted, depicting him in addition as a man lacking in human understanding, contemptuous of the weak, a mean practical joker. She’d met him, though she didn’t say so, first in 1930, when he’d poured Listerine into a rare Burgundy decanting on his host’s sideboard. She “peels the hide off Mr. Lindbergh,” crowed Harry Truman to his wife after Dorothy’s first column on the subject. She would publish thirteen more such columns before she was finished with Lindbergh. That incident with the Burgundy, she told Jimmy, was the key to the man’s character.
Dorothy left for Europe in March 1940, when nearly every day brought rumors of secret peace negotiations to end a war that had barely begun. The Soviet Union had invaded Finland on November 30, 1939, but more than five months after the Nazi conquest of Poland, Britain, France, and Germany had yet to engage in a significant military campaign on land, on sea, or in the air. This was a “phony war,” people called it, nervously looking at the sky, tuning in to the radio, rifling through the newspapers.
Never mind the rumors, Dorothy proclaimed in her column. There could be no peace until Hitler was defeated: this was a war “to make universal certain human rights, without which no individual is human.” She set out for the neutral countries first, visiting Greece, Turkey, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Switzerland. She was in Rome for an audience with the pope in April 1940, when Nazi forces seized Denmark in a lightning attack and advanced into Norway. The following month, as German columns steamrolled through Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg, Dorothy traveled from Paris to broadcast from the Maginot Line.
She saw the forts one hundred feet underground and took the elevator eleven stories high to watch the guns in action, counting off the artillery shots directed at the advancing Nazi forces: this one for the Czechs and that one for the Poles and the Dutch and the Norwegians, she said. But she could tell that the much-vaunted French defenses didn’t stand a chance. She rushed to Genoa to sail for home and was back in New York by the time that France fell to Nazi armies after just six weeks of fighting. She’d known the French defenses would collapse as soon as she saw the grass in the Tuileries Garden. The lawns hadn’t been mowed: it was as if the French had already given up. Shortly after German troops marched into Paris, the French police handed Herschel Grynszpan, the young assassin whose legal defense Dorothy had championed, over to the Gestapo. Extradited to Berlin that summer, he was imprisoned in preparation for the show trial that Goebbels was planning. That was the last that Grynszpan’s family heard of him.
After her return from Europe, Dorothy’s public defense of Britain became more avid. As the Royal Air Force battled the Luftwaffe to stave off a German invasion, Dorothy appeared at Aid-to-Britain meetings in front of crowds of ten thousand people; she rhapsodized about a union of the English-speaking world. “The master of the dyke against world chaos is you, Churchill, you gallant, portly little warrior.” Churchill repaid the compliment. “She has shown what one valiant woman can do with the power of a pen” was the message the British prime minister sent to be read aloud at a May 1941 dinner in her honor. There were more than three thousand people in attendance at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel that evening in New York. “Freedom and humanity,” wrote Churchill, “are her grateful debtors.”
In Dorothy’s vision of Anglo-American unity, however, Britain would be reduced to a North American naval and air base where in the summer “we will go to eat Devonshire cream.” The defining fight against fascism, she thought, would ultimately fall to America. Although she’d originally championed the dark-horse Republican candidate Wendell Willkie, in the fall of 1940, as the Blitz raged, she changed her mind. Now was no time to switch political leadership.
She’d criticized FDR, especially his New Deal, but she came out in support of his bid for a third term a month before the November 1940 election. The staunchly Republican Herald Tribune at first refused to print her column endorsing FDR, and then relented when she reminded its owners of the clause in her contract that permitted her to write as she saw fit. The column appeared in the paper alongside a sampling of the slew of angry readers’ letters that her “betrayal” had prompted.
It was a painful break, one of a series she had to endure. Although Willkie didn’t hold a grudge, the publishers of the Herald Tribune did. Her contract wasn’t renewed, and her “On the Record” column moved to the New York Post, in those years a liberal paper with a working-class and Jewish readership. “On the Record” was still syndicated widely but the Post was a less influential paper than the Herald Tribune and an uneasy fit for Dorothy’s opinions on subjects other than Hitler.
Then there was Red. He turned up at Twin Farms every once in a while, but they hadn’t lived together since 1937. Still, Dorothy was reluctant to give him a divorce. “You are now the most prominent advocate in the whole country not only of Freedom but of generosity,” he pleaded with her. “Are you going to deny your entire faith by holding an unwilling ex-associate?” If Dorothy advocated for war, he was going to rent out Madison Square Garden and rally Americans against it, he declared; he proceeded to join the America First Committee. Unless she consented to a divorce, Red had warned her, he would refuse to see their son. In November 1941, she finally acquiesced.
Stories began to circulate about the influence Dorothy was wielding in the Oval Office. “Dorothy, you lost your job, but I kept mine—ha, ha!” was the way that FDR greeted her after the election. From now on, though, he’d be on the receiving end of torrents of her exhortations, friendly suggestions, even draft speeches, conveyed in memoranda, letters, notes, cables, and telephone calls.
That was a great speech, Red purportedly said to Dorothy after one of FDR’s Fireside chats. “I know, I wrote it,” Dorothy proclaimed.
—
jimmy was behaving erratically again. Ever since the Sheeans returned to New York from Europe in February 1939, he had been yelling in his sleep and weeping and drinking all the time. That was the same sort of behavior that had presaged his breakdown in Ireland, and Dinah was very worried about him. He was supposed to speak at the memorial gathering the Lincoln Battalion was holding for their dead, but that, she was certain, would put him straight into the loony bin. There were too many days that she had to make apologies for him when he couldn’t manage to keep appointments. “Jimmy is awfully sorry,” she’d say, “but really, you must forgive him. He just couldn’t get himself organized this morning.”
Then there were the disturbing things he said to her. He was abnormal, he kept insisting; there were obscene parts to him. Anyone who passed him on the street could figure it out. Even if she couldn’t see it herself, it was a humiliation for her. It may have suited Jimmy to cast Dinah as the innocent party in the marriage, but she was far more sensitive and worldly than he acknowledged. He needed a doctor, probably of the Freudian type, Dinah figured, but in his present state, there wasn’t the slightest chance that he’d agree.
Dinah had hoped that the move to Dorothy’s spare house at Twin Farms that summer of 1939 might do him some good. He’d be gone from New York, where he always became so self-conscious. And the Vermont house was perfect: charmingly sloping ceilings and old, uneven floorboards, plus the modern conveniences, steaming hot water for the baths, and a fully outfitted kitchen. From the nearby farms, they’d have a limitless supply of fresh cream and eggs and butter. The countryside was practically Austrian in its mountainous beauty, and while they awaited the arrival of the baby, they could lounge in rocking chairs on the shaded porch.
Dinah hadn’t reckoned, though, on the rigors of life in Dorothy’s proximity. Dorothy was like her aunt Maxine: lordly, imperious, needing company around her all the time. She barely paid attention when Dinah opened her mouth. Dorothy and Red’s son, Michael, was just as bad as everyone said: calling people “God-Damn Swine,” and pranking the guests by slipping castor oil into their cocktails. Jimmy was up until all hours at Dorothy’s, arguing and pounding his fist on the table. Under the circumstances, Dinah felt certain, the news of the Nazi-Soviet Pact would send him over the edge.
The truth was that Jimmy really didn’t know what to think at first when the Soviets and the Nazis made a declaration of nonbelligerence and neutrality in late August 1939. It seemed to him like seven or eight different conflicts were happening at the same time. Among the sinners were some saints, but the reverse was also true. He’d signed an open letter calling for closer cooperation between the United States and Soviet Russia in the service of world peace. But news of the secret addendum to the Nazi-Soviet Pact—which divided up much of Eastern Europe into German and Soviet “spheres of influence”—made him change course completely.
In a two-part denunciation published in the New Republic, Jimmy repudiated the Soviet project root and branch. The Soviet Union, he charged, was a fascist state, and Stalin, a ruthless dictator, bent on militaristic expansion. Millions had been killed in the campaign for agricultural collectivization, which was not only brutal but unnecessary. “No reflective person outside the Soviet Union assumes that it is necessary to murder millions of people to produce an industrialization program.” And what had the workers gained twenty years after the Revolution? They couldn’t strike or choose the conditions of their work in any meaningful way. Their gains were of a “purely fascist nature, consisting in the psychological and social delusions of the mass meeting, chauvinism, competitive sacrifice and self-congratulation.”
It was a demolition job, all the more complete for coming from a sometime fellow traveler. There were plenty of disillusioned New York intellectuals, Trotskyites, members of the anti-Stalin Left, important in Partisan Review circles, who were saying (or had said) what Jimmy did. But of the Soviet Union’s Left-leaning critics in the 1930s, Jimmy was the rare household name. The editors of the New Republic felt compelled both to publish his articles and to make some answer to them. Unimpeachable as his credentials were, Sheean was a little unrealistic in his objections to Stalin’s foreign policy, the New Republic replied; he saw expansionist aims where there were none; moreover, he indicted the entire Soviet system on the basis of the Pact.
The question Jimmy asked himself was why it had taken him so long to face up to the facts. In his circle, the human costs of the Five-Year Plan and the Great Purge were well known, and, as he conceded readily, were “very repellant.” But it had been difficult, as he put it, to “surrender an obstinate hope”: in the short term, an alliance of fascism’s enemies in a Popular Front, in the distant future, Rayna’s world of equal shares and fair play. So long as Soviet Russia was arrayed against Hitler, he’d hoped that the socialist experiment might be redeemed.
At the Communists’ mass meeting in Madison Square Garden that fall, the assembled audience—tens of thousands of comrades—booed when Sheean’s name was mentioned. Ah well, he wrote Eddy Sackville-West: there are so many things that Communists are prohibited from talking about these days that they have to make the most of what they can revile. Him, for instance. Also the movie Gone with the Wind, which seemed a piddling subject on which to foment a political storm.
The truth was that everyone was angry with Jimmy. The Stalinists denounced him as a British propagandist and the Anglophiles as a romantic Bolshevik. American isolationists sent him hate mail, and so did Nazis. “I think the best thing I can do is shut up for a while,” he lamented to Eddy. The only bright spot was that Himmler had banned his writings. John and Dorothy and Bill Shirer were already banned in Germany, but in their respective decrees, they’d shared billing with a handful of other writers. Himmler’s diktat of January 1940 specified Sheean alone.
—
frances remained an adamant isolationist. The argument she’d started with John during the summer of 1939 about America’s role in the war dragged on all that year and the next. He acknowledged there was a kernel of truth in her vendetta against the British Empire, but thought she was going off the deep end. For her part, she threatened that if John and his friends didn’t stop agitating for war, she’d move to Germany and declare herself a Nazi. It was intolerable to him that she, as a Jew, would even talk that way.
He felt completely at sea. He didn’t agree with Frances or with H. L. Mencken, who’d written him to object to the “crusade against Adolf.” The sentiment expressed at a New Republic dinner—that many Americans of his generation had quit Europe precisely because they were tired of its petty nationalisms and had no desire for further entanglement—rang truer with him. The news of the Nazi-Soviet Pact fortified the general feeling of a pox on both their houses.
He wasn’t, then, in the least bit gung ho about the war—in fact, sometimes he was against it. What had the carnage of the previous world war achieved, after all? At the same time, he was fervently anti-fascist. To be anti-Nazi but not pro-intervention seemed a wishy-washy, if not downright disreputable, position among his close friends. On account of Hearst’s isolationism, Knick quit his job with the International News Service in February 1941: “Journalists have more reason than any other type of citizen to work for the destruction of Hitler and his gang,” Knick wrote in tendering his resignation.
From London, John’s friends pleaded for him to do his part in swaying American public opinion for intervention. The stance of neutrality, Margot Asquith proclaimed, wasn’t anything she could even remotely understand. She’d have put neutrals to death. Lee Miller was less vengeful but equally emphatic. She’d cast her lot with the English after leaving her Egyptian husband and moving to London to live with the artist Roland Penrose. She was heartily sick of hearing how terrible her friends at home felt about Great Britain’s plight. What was needed were “fewer aneurisms, goiters and asthmas and more co-operation.” She was, she added, waiting for John’s return to London.
Good God, you’re not an isolationist, are you? Dorothy asked John one day. He didn’t feel as if he could tell anyone what he thought. Night after night, he attended events where people thoroughly convinced of their positions—diametrically opposed positions—tried to convince other people that they were right. He’d given a luncheon for the Conservative MP Ronnie Tree, who’d come over on the Nieuw Amsterdam to whip up favorable propaganda for the British cause. He and Frances hosted an evening of cocktails for Jabotinsky, inviting friends they suspected might be sympathetic to the militant Zionist cause; Frances did most of the talking. They attended a party for the America First Committee. The foremost isolationist organization in the country, America First was not yet the right-wing, anti-Semitic outfit it would become, but already it was adamantly opposed to any aid to the Allies.
He felt stuck, uncertain about what he should be doing with himself. He didn’t want to sign up as a war correspondent. He’d never liked spot news reporting and, in addition, had no desire to find himself in Knick’s proximity. John decided to stick with his formula and tackle Inside South America, but even so, he found himself whiling away hours, sunk in discontented ruminations. Most nights he was at “21” late into the night, drinking beer, not wanting to go home. Why was he going to go to Mexico when the real action was in Britain? Why was he so detached from the war effort?
“I have been trying to think things out,” he wrote Frances in February 1940. “Thoughts about you, me, democracy, liberalism, war, Willkie & much else.”
He blamed Frances for some of his indecision. “I don’t believe in the war. F— destroyed my faith.” Then there was his marriage: he wasn’t in love with Frances any longer. But she still loved him, he felt certain, her attachment to Nehru notwithstanding. So even when she talked about divorce, he didn’t think she meant it. The real question, to his mind, was Agnes, and here, too, he wasn’t sure what to think.
He met up with Agnes again in February 1940, a few months after their first night together in New York. They’d talked once on the phone, New York to Dallas, and made a plan to meet in Florida. You and I are going to have a lot of happiness, she wrote. Just don’t get all tragic, she said when John felt glum. Knick would be in Europe for a while still. They’d be able to see each other every other month or so. The next time he met her in Palm Beach, she told him she loved him. But you know, she said, I can’t ever marry you.
“The source of my dissatisfaction & unhappiness is the failure of my marriage,” John wrote in his diary after that trip. “This explains my lack of will & purpose, confusion about the war, lack of faith, lack of feeling & conviction, my confused misdirection & ineptness.”
In the mail came comfort of a sort—a letter from Dr. Stekel. John had been corresponding with Stekel since the doctor and his wife fled Vienna just after the Anschluss. Frau Stekel wanted them to go to Hollywood, like Thomas Mann; John signed affidavits on their behalf and sent $500 to help.
They made it to London. Stekel sent his wife to the countryside because the bombing so unnerved her. Alone in the flat, he was depressed and sick but trying his best to write. He was working on his autobiography. “Shall I call it ‘Inside my soul’?” he teased John. It would be a shocking book, scandalous even, because he wasn’t holding anything back about his own sex life.
The old doctor was in a reflective mood, thinking back over his career and the advice he’d given. He’d tried to keep the Gunthers in their marriage, Stekel acknowledged to John. Back then, it seemed to him that John loved Frances and there was Johnny to consider, too. Even in those days, though, he’d wondered how John would manage. “You have a right to enjoy life and not be bothered by the changing moods of a neurotic woman.”
It was the final note and a benediction of sorts. The day that France fell, on the twentieth of June 1940, Stekel committed suicide.
—
the news that agnes was pregnant came at the same time as John learned about Stekel’s suicide. It was John’s child—it had to be, she insisted. Agnes found a doctor in Dallas who agreed to help her. Consider what a disaster it would be if there were no abortions, she told John. “You must love me less, John.”
At the start of their affair, Agnes told John that Knick had always been faithful to her. John didn’t contradict her, though he—like any newspaperman of their acquaintance—could have reeled off a long list of Knick’s infidelities. That fall of 1940, after the abortion, Knick was in London covering the Battle of Britain. He stayed longer than he’d planned, and the night after he returned home, Agnes had a dream that he’d fallen in love with an English woman.
I had the strangest dream, she told him. But that was no dream, Knick confessed. In London, he’d been living with another woman. Of course he wouldn’t hear of a divorce. I won’t ever leave you, he said.
Agnes’s jealousy surprised John, though maybe it shouldn’t have. Her attitude about the affair with John—and the impossibility of a divorce from Knick—began to change. I am happier with you than I ever was with Knick, she told John. When he talked of marriage now, she didn’t discourage him. “I want it just, just just as much as you do.”
Still, she wouldn’t tell Knick. She’d tried, she said. She started to say something about being unfaithful, but Knick’s reaction was so extreme that she stopped mid-sentence. He’d kill you and me and then himself, she was certain.
It was John’s hope that he could pry Agnes away from Knick that led him—seven months into the affair—finally to tell Frances. She’d been away in Florida by herself for the previous two months working on her empire book, leaving John in charge of Johnny. John didn’t dine at home very often, but he tried to spend some time with Johnny every day, at least. They listened to the program Quiz Kids. The comic Jack Benny popped up one evening as a surprise contestant, vying with the eleven- and fourteen-year-olds over the definition of “aquipotic” and the velocity of a rock falling from a mountaintop. Johnny sounded so happy when he laughed.
John went to the airport to fetch Frances. She looked pretty as she came off the plane, tanned and cheerful.
I have a long story to tell you, he began. Before he could say anything more, though, she interrupted him. She knew they had to divorce, she said. She just wanted to know the truth. If it was his happiness at stake, she wouldn’t be hurt by whatever he had to say.
I’ve fallen in love with someone else, John announced. He didn’t tell her who, and she didn’t ask. He wanted to marry the girl but she’d already turned him down. Love is very important, Frances said to him. He shouldn’t hang back. He ought to go after it, with conviction. But would this girl be nice to Johnny?
She was taking it all surprisingly well, he thought. Didn’t you know I’d be on your side? she asked him.
But three days later, Frances was furious with him. And hurt. How could he be talking about marriage with another woman when he was still married to her? She shouted at him on the telephone and when he saw her, she refused to look at him. “Every idea you ever had was mine,” she told him. One day, she’d write a book entitled My Unlived Life. She flung the charge of cowardice: he hadn’t come home from London because she was sick. He was just afraid of the war.
John’s lawyers drew up the separation agreement. Frances took Johnny to California for the summer; they’d stay with her brother and his family and visit John’s uncle out in Carmel. She and John had agreed not to say anything to Johnny until they’d worked out the terms of the divorce.
By the way, I’m pregnant, she wrote him. It was a ruse, his doctor assured him; the woman looked young, but she was forty-five years old. Either she was lying or it was a hysterical pregnancy. John called her brother, who dodged the question, saying that he couldn’t talk about it, but seemingly confirmed what John’s doctor had suspected. “Be of good cheer,” Frances’s brother said as he signed off.
That summer of 1941 brought the news of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, which once again put the Russians in the Allied camp. It was the sort of thing he and Frances, in the past, would have chewed over for months, but now she wasn’t talking to him. He knew she was back from California when he picked up the phone, repeatedly, only to hear silence on the other end of the line.
In the fall, they took Johnny together to Riverdale School, in the leafy part of the Bronx, where he’d be starting as a boarder. He didn’t want to go away to school, but as Frances said to John, what choice was there now? They’d be living in separate apartments, both of them traveling. Besides, the independence would do their son good. Johnny was eleven years old and still occasionally wetting the bed. Please see to it that he doesn’t spend too much of the day playing his fiddle, she’d repeated every summer to his camp counselors; she wanted him climbing mountains, swimming, and joining in sports with the other boys. At Riverdale, he’d come home every other weekend and for holidays. Fodor’s son was there, and so was Dorothy Thompson’s boy.
Frances had agreed to the separation, but divorce, she now said, was out of the question. A couple of weeks after they delivered Johnny to Riverdale, John moved his things out of the apartment on Central Park West. Frances had left for the day so she didn’t have to see him but returned before he was finished moving out. She wept and he was close to tears himself. When they drove out to Riverdale to visit Johnny on the weekend, she refused to sit in the front seat of the car with him.
Knick was back in the United States for a lecture tour on which Agnes would join him. The affair was excruciating enough when Knick was away but when he returned home, John’s position was intolerable. He tried to avoid seeing them but Knick wasn’t the sort of person you could easily dodge. Knick was insistent: come and meet us for a drink, stay for dinner. Stop by tonight, won’t you?
Knick wanted John to write the foreword for his new book, Is Tomorrow Hitler’s? What could John say, other than yes? He cast the spell of mythology over their group: “We were buzzards in every foreign office, and kings on every wagon-lit…. When we did meet, the vault of heaven shook.” The foreword was also an elegy to his friendship with Knick: the night in Berlin they listened to Putzi’s rendition of Wagner; the rowboat trip on the icy Danube; those bad oysters in Madrid. John praised Knick’s authority and his judgment. There were love affairs in life and then there were hate affairs: “The hate affair between Hitler and Knickerbocker is one of the most torrid in political history.”
Not long after her abortion, Agnes was pregnant again. (It was Knick’s this time.) The news was almost unbearable to John: his own baby disposed of, Knick’s in its place. What was she supposed to do? Agnes asked him. She did want a baby.
That decided it for John: he’d return to London.
—
jimmy and knick had both been in England for the Battle of Britain, as the RAF, diving, sparring, held back the Luftwaffe invaders during the summer of 1940. They’d watched the battles from the cliffs west of Dover, camping out on the highest of them, Shakespeare Cliff. On the cliff a crowd of newsmen gathered with binoculars to watch the Spitfires and Messerschmitts duel it out above. The battle for freedom, as Jimmy put it, had finally begun. The dogfights weren’t mass hurled against mass, but the “terrible beauty” of a clash between individuals, a boy in this plane up here, in a fight to the death against that one, there.
On the first night the Germans bombed London, Jimmy was broadcasting from a balcony of the Piccadilly Hotel, looking down on the streets below. Overhead the bombs screamed and, down by the river, the fires burned all night. He and Knick stayed on through the worst of the Blitz, taking in the stunned faces in the street, the British mania for understatement, and the dancing on the terrace of the Dorchester as the frame of the great hotel swayed and shook. In a bad air raid, those Luftwaffe bastards seemed to be almost in the room with you. Playing in the rubble, children bartered a Messerschmitt cannon shell for three large hunks of shrapnel. At a lunch at Lady Sibyl Colefax’s, the septuagenarian H. G. Wells refused to retreat to the bomb shelter. He wouldn’t go until he’d finished his lunch, he insisted. “Why should I be disturbed by some wretched little barbarian adolescents in a machine? This thing has no surprises for me. I foresaw it long ago. Sibyl, I want my cheese.”
Most nights Jimmy dined at the Dorchester with the glamorous, shrewd Lady Diana Cooper and her husband, Duff, the minister of information. He’d been taken up by the high Tory circles of the Churchill government. “Half poem and half bread,” Jimmy called Diana Cooper, noting her practical good sense. Jimmy, she reported to her son, was one of her “supports.” Jimmy’s newspaper friends ragged him: “The Duchess of Westminster wants you to come to cocktails tomorrow. Will you please ring up the King tonight? And don’t forget Lady Astor.”
The British were avidly wooing the other American correspondents, too. A man like the CBS broadcaster Ed Murrow had the attention of millions of Americans. His reports alone, it was hoped, might sway the doubters at home. Even junior American pressmen—and there were 150 or so correspondents officially registered in 1940—had access to government officials unimaginable in the old days. This included an occasional audience with the Queen, whose insistence upon remaining at Buckingham Palace amid the Blitz had turned her into an emblem of British sangfroid. She was offered up as bait for the American newsmen. (It was “rather an ordeal” for Her Majesty, Jimmy thought.)
For Dorothy, who arrived in England in July 1941, the moral imperative was clear without any suggestion from on high. The British were fighting America’s fight and it was long past time that the United States put its own shoulder to the wheel. She flew to England via neutral Lisbon, arriving in London after the bombing had already eased. “I’m so glad you’re here, but you’re a year too late, my dear,” said Jimmy, linking arms with her.
Dorothy’s editor at the Sunday Chronicle soon found himself conscripted into the job of social secretary. It was like managing a film star, he reflected with resigned bemusement. Operating out of three suites at the Savoy Hotel, staffed by a crew of secretaries supplied by the Sunday Chronicle’s publisher, she planned her campaign. She toured bomb sites; visited munitions works; had an afternoon tea alone with the Queen; saw the heads of all of the European governments-in-exile; addressed three hundred MPs in a private reception at the House of Commons; broadcast on the BBC; and attended a dance for the London Auxiliary Fire Service. “Oh, I must be with the firemen,” she insisted when the invitation came. Much to the aggravation of British reporters, who hardly had a hope of a half-hour audience with the prime minister, she spent an entire weekend with Churchill. He appeared, late to meals, decked out in the leaden blue, zippered overall getup he’d designed for dressing quickly during air raids. He tapped his fingers on the table, absentmindedly.
“How are you going to win the war?” she asked him.
“First we shall see that we do not lose it,” he replied. “We can do it only with the help of Americans. You know that, don’t you? We can’t do it alone.”
Dorothy was fresher in the evenings than she’d been in the mornings, invigorated by the work, by the resolve of the exiles she met and the bravery of the British. For all the physical destruction she’d witnessed, the war wasn’t devastating British civilization but remaking it, for the better, from the ground up. “I’ve crowded months into weeks, prolonging my own life but shortening yours!” she chortled to her Sunday Chronicle editor. He admitted as much: “I was an exhilarated wreck when she left.” He proceeded to write a 250-page book about her visit. A “feminine Churchill,” he called her.
Back in New York, Dorothy continued her efforts to revitalize American democracy. Previously she’d called for Congress to repeal the Neutrality Acts, passed in the 1930s to limit involvement overseas. Now she also lobbied for new laws in the United States to protect all races and religions. In late September 1941, she made her appeal to an overflow crowd of more than seven thousand at Carnegie Hall; loudspeakers carried her voice to throngs on the sidewalks outside. Rediscover your own power! she pressed her fellow citizens. “It is not too early—it can soon be too late.”
—
in the fall of 1941, it took John more than a week to get from New York to London. He flew on the Pan Am Clipper to Bermuda (where autograph hunters were waiting for him), then to the Azores for refueling, on to Lisbon, where, a few days later, he took another plane to Bristol. When he arrived at the Dorchester Hotel late that evening, there was a message waiting for him from Lee Miller. She’d been photographing the Blitz for British Vogue, producing oddly domesticated images of the destruction: a bombed-out building viewed through the dotted Swiss curtains of an apartment opposite. At one-thirty in the morning, Lee came up to his room and stayed that night, and others that followed, too. One good thing about the Blitz, Lee said, was that you never had to explain why you hadn’t come home.
John, like Dorothy, saw everyone: the Spanish Republican leader, Juan Negrín, and the head of the Free French, Charles de Gaulle; Lloyd George and the powerful minister of labour, Ernest Bevin. He spent an evening with Churchill, marveling at his lucid table talk after tossing down one sherry, two stiff whiskeys, two drams of port, three brandies, and a glass of Cointreau. He met his old friends, too, Nye Bevan, Harold Nicolson, and Rebecca West, among others. Except for Churchill, they all had the same question for him. What was the United States going to do? Were the Americans going to be in—or out? He felt embarrassed, and didn’t know how to respond. Didn’t his fellow countrymen have any sense of the moral necessity of joining the fight? demanded the broadcaster J. B. Priestley.
John was on the radio nearly every night now. But what was he supposed to say to the American public about the war? As Ed Murrow put it, it was a no-win proposition. If he and John told the truth—that the British were still outmatched—people would call them pessimists and they’d strengthen the hand of the isolationists. Why on earth should we join a losing cause? Americans would ask themselves. But even if the British were winning, John knew, broadcasting the fact might backfire. If the Brits are managing on their own, why should we enter the war? his fellow citizens would ask.
Murrow confessed to John that he was frightened. He’d managed to keep his sanity during the worst of the Blitz but every time he heard the Ack Ack guns now, he could hardly breathe.
You have to tell the truth in your broadcasts, John insisted.
After John had been in London for a month, he realized he didn’t want to go home. He was happier than he’d been in years, charged up, as Dorothy had been. The sense of collective purpose was infectious, he wrote. In the theaters, British audiences cheered the Red Army louder than they did their own, and, to his surprise, Stalin got more applause than Churchill. The conservative Times of London was running a tribute ad to the Russians, topped by the Soviet hammer and sickle. In British factories, workers were producing at top speed, they told John, for the defense of their Russian comrades. Frances really ought to come here and see this for herself, he thought.
In England, the force of social leveling went far beyond the sky-high tax rates on the rich. Of course, some of Britain’s elites had retreated to their country estates, but others—including the royal family and government ministers—had stayed in London. There were no more gloves to be seen in public, and few, if any, first-class compartments on trains. The black iron railings that once enclosed the city’s private squares, locked and reserved for the exclusive use of the few, had disappeared, melted down for war matériel. Most astonishing of all, servants now had a legitimate right to object to their employers’ guest lists, for the roast on the table was common household property, and company cut into everyone else’s share.
The night before John was finally set to leave for Lisbon, Japanese bombers attacked Pearl Harbor and the American colony of the Philippines. Lee telephoned him. “We’re at war with Japan!” she exclaimed. Japan counted among the Axis countries; in September 1940, its right-wing government had entered into a pact with Germany and Italy. After the U.S. Congress declared war on Japan, Hitler, in anticipation, made his own declaration of war on the United States, which the Americans reciprocated the next day. John felt instantly relieved. “Now that we are in,” he wrote in his diary, “I’m all for it.”
Lee Miller would become one of only a handful of women accredited as photojournalists with the U.S. Army, taking some of the first pictures of the liberated concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau and being photographed, herself, bathing in Hitler’s tub the day of his suicide. Her affair with John more or less ended when he left London, reverting to what it had been previously—a friendship. Brainy, ambitious women were drawn to John, especially the beautiful ones like Lee; he had a wide circle of women friends who confided in him, asked his opinion about dresses, and talked with him about their work. It was in part his charm, the way he cast a veil of romance over an encounter, an easy way with flattery, his calm. More important than that, and unlike most men of the day, he also took women seriously as intellects, paying attention—and that was pleasing as well—to their advice and direction.
When John arrived back in New York a few days before Christmas 1941, Johnny and Frances met him at the docks. Johnny was home for the holidays from Riverdale and Frances seemed more reconciled to John’s presence, though she avoided being alone with him. They had Christmas dinner together with old friends at the Adams Hotel, but all the antiwar talk got to John. He’d hoped he was over the business with Agnes, but as soon as he got home, he felt determined to see her, pregnant or not. Frances hadn’t changed her mind: she still wouldn’t hear of a divorce.
“Amusing to see that Frances is an isolationist,” Agnes had written him. “What marriages do to people.”