We Saw Spain Die

by Preston Paul

  All that was left was to work for the Republican cause in exile. Already, Fischer had sent material on the Italian bombing raids on Barcelona to Jay Allen to help in the fight to change the US position. He had even suggested the line to take: ‘While America eats Thanksgiving dinner, Barcelona is in deep mourning.’ Fischer and Jay Allen, along with Herbert Southworth, had gone on lobbying for American support for the Republic even though defeat was inevitable.99 In late August 1938, Otto Katz had written to Isabel Brown, a leading light in the British Aid Spain Movement, passing on a request from Louis for a reprint of many thousand copies of a comment in the Evening Standard on Juan March and anti-Semitism in Franco’s Spain: ‘If you agree, will you please have it made and send about 5,000 copies to Jay Allen, New York.’100 In a similar spirit, in January 1939, Fischer had written from New York to Katz: ‘Please send to me, with copies to Jay, everything, literally everything, showing pro-Loyalist sentiment on the part of European Catholics, pro-church acts and statements in Loyalist Spain, and racist, Anti-Semitic, Anti-Masonic, Anti-Protestant views in Franco territory.’101 After the war was over, Fischer accompanied Negrín on the Normandie to New York, where they arrived in May 1939. He helped Negrín write speeches in English and to gain access to senior American officials, including Secretary of State Cordell Hull.

  Three months later, he was back in Europe and was in Paris when Hubert Knickerbocker rang to tell him about the Nazi–Soviet pact. He was devastated, and could ‘see only unrelieved blackness’.102 Even as his horror at Soviet policy intensified, his commitment to the defeated Spanish Republic never wavered. Fischer would continue to work for Negrín and the Republic for quite some time after the Republic’s defeat. Nevertheless, his main anti-fascist hopes now focused on London. In the autumn of 1939, he interviewed a wide spectrum of the British political class, including both Winston Churchill and the influential diplomat Sir Robert Vansittart. He visited the Foreign Office in London on 10 October 1939 to request that he be given confidential information to help in the production of an article. He was received by a relatively senior official, Ivo Kirkpatrick, who minuted:

  I received Mr Louis Fischer, an American journalist, today at the request of Mr Peake, who described him as a thoroughly reliable and discreet man. He writes for the American ‘Nation’ and other periodicals, and is in touch with the ‘New Statesman’ here. He worked for many years in Moscow and became infected with Bolshevik ideas; but he described himself now as disillusioned and disappointed. What he wants us to do is supply him, either in writing or verbally, with material for an article on the course of negotiations with Russia. He is prepared to submit his article for our approval and to guarantee that he will not reveal that he obtained the information from British official sources.

  Kirkpatrick responded that the British Government would come in for fierce criticism if it became known that information, withheld from Parliament, had been supplied to a foreign journalist. Fischer

  retorted that his discretion was known to the authorities here and that he would not be traced to us. Moreover, he pointed out that whilst we might be well advised not to publish our side of the case for fear of treading on Soviet susceptibilities, it would, on the other hand, be good propaganda to put it out through a neutral source – particularly an organ like ‘Nation’, which was distinctly leftist in character and could not be accused of Conservative propaganda.

  Kirkpatrick inclined to give Fischer a verbal account in return for ‘the right to make any alterations we think necessary in the article which he submits for our approval’. When the issue was put to more senior figures, they decided that Fischer should be given short shrift. Orme Sargeant wrote:

  I dislike this idea. We don’t want at this moment to remind the public of our abortive negotiations with the Soviets, and still less do we want to ‘ventilate’ our grievances as to the behaviour of the Russians and their treatment of us. But unless we do bring out grievances, any account of negotiations needs present us as cutting a rather sorry figure – I should be in favour of not giving Mr Fischer any encouragement.

  The Head of the Foreign Office, Sir Alexander Cadogan, brought the matter to a close when he wrote: ‘I don’t think we should touch this.’103

  The fact that Fischer was seen in Paris in September 1939, in contact with French Communists and distributing funds, led a local agent of the British Secret Intelligence Services to conclude that he was a Soviet agent. This allegation appeared more than once in SIS reports, although usually on the basis of circumstantial evidence, often to do with his distribution of money.104 It is impossible to say definitively, but it is likely that the moneys in question came, not from Moscow, but from the funds of the Spanish Government in exile, and were destined for the relief of International Brigaders. In fact, another report suggested that his main contacts had been the exiled Spanish premier Juan Negrín and the novelist André Malraux. This time, the British agent reported that the source for the idea that Fischer was a Soviet agent derived from the Trotskyist press.105 During the visit to London when he met Churchill, he was under constant surveillance. However, his watchers reported: ‘He receives a fair number of visitors when he is at the Howard Hotel, and it is understood that most of these are persons who are of a similar profession to himself. Nothing unusual in his behaviour or contacts has come under notice during the time he has been at this hotel.’106

  Louis was now committed to the campaign to bring the USA into the war. In July 1941, he left New York with a view to spending ten weeks in London.107 While in London, Fischer’s telephone was tapped by British security services. A report on a conversation with Frederick Kuh described Fischer as ‘Propaganda Manager for Dr Negrín’. In the conversation itself, Fischer reluctantly described a large luncheon party that he had attended with Brendan Bracken, Lord Cranborne and Lord Moyne. The conversation at the table had ranged over various issues, including Munich, whether the Russians could have fought to prevent the German invasion of Czechoslovakia and potential Allied help for the Soviet Union, but, to Kuh’s annoyance, Fischer refused to go into detail.108

  The 1941 publication of his memoirs in New York caused Fischer some problems with his Spanish connections. He received a letter from the one-time Spanish Republican Ambassador to London, Pablo de Azcárate, which criticized details of the book. Fischer replied at length:

  I have read your letter in all friendliness as I am sure it was conceived. I would like to see you to talk about this and other matters. I suggest Wednesday right after lunch or Thursday some time. Will you ’phone me? Meanwhile, I wish to make a few comments without prejudice to our conversation. The figures about the assets of the republican treasury were printed regularly in the bulletins of the Bank of Spain. The data about debts to Russia, etc, I included to answer arguments by Araquistain and many others that Moscow had controlled all loyalist transactions… I used the interview with Azaña because he had died and death releases one from discretion. Anyway, the interpretation of the Besteiro affair reflects credit on those in the Negrín cabinet. I was perhaps wrong in using the Giral information…the 13 points story, I assumed, was correct. I got most of it from Vayo… The Vita tale did not come from a Spanish source… You are quite right about the La Baule bet and I apologise. I will try to delete it from the British edition which, however, is soon to go to press.109

  More ferocious criticism emanated from Negrín’s enemies in the Prieto wing of the Spanish Socialist Party, who accused Fischer of having received huge sums of money from Negrín to boost his image. Again this is almost certainly a reference to the sums given by Negrín for the repatriation of International Brigaders.110

  In contrast, the book seems to have absolved Fischer from accusations of being a Soviet agent. A report from the United States received by the British Intelligence Services stated:

  Louis Fischer for many years has been considered the most prominent exponent of the Foreign Policy of the Soviet Government. He lived for many years in Russia as a correspondent o
f the New York ‘Nation’, and he married a Russian woman. His account of his disillusionment with the policy of Stalin is told at great length in his latest book ‘Men and Politics’, to which you refer. His political beliefs are expounded in the final chapters. He is not a party man and cannot accurately be described as a communist. He is a left intellectual. The book, which has been out three months, received most favourable reviews. Fischer has been violently attacked by the American Communists as a traitor and an agent of International Capitalism. During the past years he devoted much of his time to the Loyalist cause in Spain. Fischer has many enemies, of which Eugene Lyons is one. The latter, author of ‘Assignments in Utopia’ revoked Stalinism some years before Fischer, hence his dislike. Whilst it is possible that he will contact many left wing personalities during his time in England, in view of his attitude toward the war before Soviet intervention and since, there is little to suppose that his activities will be inimical to the interests of Great Britain.111

  While in England in September 1941, Fischer interviewed Clement Attlee, now deputy prime minister. While waiting to be admitted to his presence, there took place a minor incident which revealed how irritable Fischer could be on occasions. A Mrs Phillimore, on Attlee’s staff, was introduced to him and said:

  ‘May I copy Miss Wilkinson’s way and ask what you do?’ ‘Oh’, he said, ‘I’m attached to the Nation of America.’ ‘Oh’, I said, ‘of course you’re Mr F.I.S.C.H.E.R., I’ve often read your articles. I wish I’d known.’ I said, ‘Have you come from Russia?’ ‘No, no, I haven’t been in Russia, I’ve been in England for five weeks.’ ‘Oh’, I said, ‘I wish I’d known. I’d so much like to have asked you to meet people.’ He looked me in the eye and said: ‘It would be no good. I don’t like the English upper classes. I wouldn’t have come.’ Well, I looked at him and I said: ‘You be blowed! Who do you think you’re talking to? I’ve belonged to the Labour Party for years.’ So he said: ‘Oh yes, I know your sort.’ So I said: ‘Oh no, you don’t know anything of the kind!’ Then Mr Attlee sent for him. It shook me very much. I felt, ‘Good gracious, I don’t look like that do I?’112

  On his return to the United States, he was appointed a contributing editor of The Nation, along with Norman Angell, Reinhold Niebuhr and Julio Álvarez del Vayo. This was a reflection of his commitment to persuading America to join the British in the struggle against Hitler.113 He clinched his separation from his Russian period with a review of Walter Duranty’s The Kremlin and the People. In the book, Duranty had portrayed the purged Bolsheviks as a kind of fifth column within the Soviet State. Fischer had dismantled this theory by pointing to the lack of any evidence to sustain it, arguing that, for Duranty, execution itself seemed to be taken as proof of guilt with the torture-induced confessions as a mere adornment. Duranty had written: ‘It is unthinkable that Stalin…and the court martial could have sentenced their friends to death unless the proof of their guilt were overwhelming.’ Fischer commented dryly: ‘How naïve of the cynic!’114

  After enabling his family to leave the Soviet Union, Louis did not live with them, preferring to stay in hotels when in the United States. Although his marriage did not survive, he never divorced and always remained on relatively cordial terms with Markoosha. They helped each other write their autobiographies. They maintained a voluminous correspondence from which her feelings about their marriage can be deduced. In the main, her letters were deeply loving. However, in September 1940, she wrote:

  When I saw you on Saturday, something has happened. The feeling I had for almost twenty years of inferiority and humiliation in your presence has definitely and finally revolted. I am thoroughly through and I never again am going to hear from you that what I say is unimportant or uninteresting or see the feeling of disgust on your face.

  Some weeks later, as she continued to work on her book and reread letters that she had written to him, she wrote:

  Do you realize how much I have loved you and how much warmth and tenderness I have given you? You have hurt me a whole lot, Lou, these last years, much more than I deserved from you. One thing would console me. To know that this ocean of feelings I spent on you was not wasted: that you knew about it, that it has helped you, that you never had the feeling during the years we spent together that your personal life was empty.

  Nothing in his short and factual letters to her suggested that he responded to what she had said.115

  Indeed, while Markoosha concentrated on building a career as a writer and lecturer, he felt free, as he had always done, to indulge his own penchant for relationships with other women. An indication of his magnetism in this regard is revealed by the aftermath of a visit that he received in December 1942 from Mollie Oliver, a journalist who came to interview him. She was utterly entranced by his enthusiasm and charisma and wrote him a star-struck letter:

  I am sending this along to enclose the clipping of my interview on Saturday with you in Boston, after which you were kind enough to rescue my prose… My own impressions will remain clear-cut in my mind for some time. One hour’s talking with you completely and seriously changed my life – the night before I was close to accepting marital obscurity, so to speak, to becoming an air corps instructor’s wife, doomed to bridge afternoons and quiet ways. But now, and I don’t think I’m too impulsive, I’m keen for this journalism game, realize it’s the life I want. Doesn’t that sound foolish? It’s a sweet strangeness that shapes our lives. And thanks to your deep-tone of dynamic ideas, I have hope. And I hope to land in Russia!

  They met again in the spring of 1943 and she wrote as if infatuated:

  What can I say to you? The second meeting was really something to remember. The two times I have talked to you I have felt terrifically alive, for the first times in my life, as if you were crystallizing so much for me. I can’t understand the feeling, it’s new but clean and good. You have an escapable vitality, such a sizzling realness about you. Life is good as you said. Can’t help but know that you did the interviewing. I did all the talking and women are supposed to be mysterious but so help me, I felt like it…Write to me.

  As the correspondence progressed, it became more flirtatious and contained hints of their beginning an affair, although there is no surviving correspondence to suggest that they did.116

  Just as Fischer had a remarkable ability to get politicians to open up to him, he apparently had a similar capacity to achieve intimacy with women, making them feel heard and understood, and, in cases like that of Mollie Oliver, encouraged or enabled to develop as writers. It had been like that with Tatiana Lestchenko and Gerda Grepp and with numerous other women in the future. However, because of his obsessive need to safeguard his independence, he ended relationships as soon as the women told him they loved or needed him. Perhaps for that reason, he had inclined to affairs with married women because he felt that they were less likely to make demands upon him. One important friendship that developed into something more was with Diana Forbes-Robinson, the wife of Jimmy Sheean. Throughout the Spanish war and after, she wrote to Louis weekly and sometimes more often. The correspondence was interrupted in 1940. After immense difficulties in her marriage, it was renewed on a more passionate basis in 1951.117

  By the autumn of 1942, Fischer had found a new cause, that of the independence of India, and a new hero, Mahatma Gandhi. He went to India, interviewed the Mahatma, and began to write articles about the Indian situation. He wrote three books about Gandhi, one of which, a full biography, would be filmed under the direction of Sir Richard Attenborough. He tried to get President Roosevelt to back Indian independence. His articles provoked heated polemics in The Nation about the ethics of stirring up India while the British were still involved in the fight with Hitler. For him, the post-war peace was paramount, which led to disagreements with his friend Freda Kirchwey, who was more interested in first winning the war.118 After an association going back to 1923, in June 1945, Fischer broke publicly with The Nation, resigning his position as a ‘contributing editor’ and accusing the ed
itors of having a ‘line’ and having a ‘misleading’ coverage of current events, by which he meant that, in the wake of the Yalta meeting of Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill, the magazine was becoming too pro-Soviet.119 He began writing for small anti-Communist liberal magazines such as The Progressive, as a foreign correspondent and commentator on international politics, focusing on Europe and Asia, especially Communism in the Soviet Union and China, imperialism, and the problems of emerging nations. Despite this change, he always remained committed to the Spanish Republic.

  The Spanish experience would always follow Fischer. In 1952, it facilitated two long interviews with Marshal Tito in Belgrade.120 Then, in 1953, when working for the New York Times, Fischer was approached by Alexander Orlov, the senior NKVD agent he had met in Spain. Orlov had defected to Canada in 1938 and, after the death of Stalin, he was in New York trying to sell his memoirs to Life magazine for a small fortune. The editorial director of the magazine, John Shaw Billings, before parting with a substantial sum, wanted proof that Orlov really was the former NKVD general that he said he was. Having failed to make contact with Ernest Hemingway, who was in Cuba, the person Orlov chose to vouch for him was Louis Fischer. They had met in Madrid in September 1936, having been introduced by the Russian Ambassador Marcel Rosenberg. On 17 March 1953, Orlov telephoned Fischer, saying only that he was ‘a friend from Spain’ and requesting a meeting. Although Orlov had not identified himself, Fischer seemed to recognize him and invited him to his apartment. When he arrived, Fischer greeted him as ‘my old friend Orlov’ and quickly agreed to vouch for him to Life magazine. Orlov asked him to come to his lawyer’s office, where he confirmed the former agent’s real identity to Billings.121