Instead, Schlesinger attempted to push PW Weekly in a more political direction, writing another position paper entitled “The need for intellectual guidance in psychological warfare research.” Here Schlesinger argued that R&A needed “a greater degree of intellectual unity.” The material that came into his office from the various regional desks was often contradictory. “Scandinavia [desk] disapproves of Danish sabotage, while Central Europe is delighted by it and urges it on,” he cited as an example. But no one took “steps towards reconciliation.” Yet surely, he urged, only by enforcing “agreement upon itself can R&A hope to bring much influence to bear on people outside.” Sherman Kent, often called the “father of intelligence analysis,” took the paper sufficiently seriously to put structures in place within his own Europe-Africa Division to ensure a more consolidated approach.24
For the most part, however, Schlesinger was on the outside. R&A was nicknamed “the campus” after the nine hundred or so intellectuals and academics who filled its corridors. Specialists like the historians Felix Gilbert and Hajo Holborn would convene weekly evening seminars to debate issues and drink into the early hours. It was an environment in which Schlesinger in other circumstances might have felt at home. But for all his scholarly credentials, within this campus environment he was “staff,” not “faculty.” While the analysts composed their hundred-page reports, Schlesinger’s job was “boiling down and editing” those documents for short articles in PW Weekly. The R&A official history would later praise the “peppy style and all-consuming appetite” of his editorship, but at the time it did not bring him much prestige with his colleagues. When they engaged with him at all, it was mostly to complain that he had butchered their precious work.25
No doubt Schlesinger was personally unhappy during his stint at PW Weekly. “It is like going into retirement,” he grouched, adding that “I have a mounting suspicion that the whole thing is a gigantic boondoggle.” “Very rarely in this process is anything outside OSS affected by anything happening inside it,” he lamented. History would judge that was not the case, but to Schlesinger, stuck with editing the in-house magazine, it felt like a job, he grandly informed his parents, that “will be in no sense a developing experience.”26
Schlesinger in a position paper that summer had staked out his belief that R&A analysis could not be an “altogether neutral” process. “Fact, judgment and value,” he argued, “are inextricably entangled.” What he had not anticipated was that the judgments and values of some in R&A might be, to introduce a later controversial term, un-American. That realization not only dragged him into an office row every bit as nasty as the one at OWI; it shaped his worldview in ways that would have profound consequences for his actions during the “red scare” of the postwar years.27
Maurice Halperin, born in 1906, was a generation older than Schlesinger, but the two men shared a Boston childhood, a Harvard education, and a European Jewish background that formed a minimal part of their identities. When the war broke out, Halperin was teaching Latin American studies at the University of Oklahoma at a time the discipline was in its infancy. In the summer of 1941, William Langer recruited him to OSS, where he soon became head of the Latin American desk. Unfortunately for Langer, Halperin was also almost certainly a Soviet spy. Towards the end of the war, American and British military code breakers would crack high-grade Soviet communications from Washington, which they codenamed “Venona.” By 1953, that information, combined with information from the one-time Soviet spy Elizabeth Bentley, led to an FBI investigation and a subpoena to Halperin to appear before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS). He fled, eventually finding his way to Moscow (where he constantly complained about the food) and then to Cuba, until finally he took up residence at Simon Fraser University near Vancouver, British Columbia. Halperin died in 1995, still denying that he was a spy. The weight of recent scholarship and archival releases shows that denial to have been a lie. Even his friend Don Kirschner, who wrote a scholarly book on the case, concluded that Halperin was guilty as charged.28
While he was procuring OSS secret files and passing them to the Soviets, Halperin’s tactic, like that of the British spy Guy Burgess, was to hide in plain sight. “He used to have copies of the Daily Worker [published by the CPUSA and not known for its Latin American coverage] on his desk,” Schlesinger later recounted for the OSS Oral History Project. “He took a straight party line.”29
Things blew up between the two men over the unlikely question of Bolivia. Just before Christmas 1943, members of the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR) overthrew Bolivian president Enrique Peñaranda. Given that Peñaranda had supported the US war effort, his overthrow caused concern in Washington. At a press conference immediately afterwards, US Secretary of State Cordell Hull pointed out that leaders of the revolution had visited Argentina ten weeks earlier to confer with Nazi sympathizers. “Included in the relevant considerations,” Hull said when asked whether the United States would recognize the new regime, “is the question of whether outside influence unfriendly to the allied cause played any part.”30
That was the context for Halperin’s report for PW Weekly on the takeover. “Maybe two months before Peñaranda was overthrown he was in Washington at a big reception,” Halperin recalled. “This was official red carpet treatment. And there’s no question about it: he was 100% pro-U.S. So this man was overthrown, and you had to look at it very carefully to see what you were getting in return: . . . a combination of populist reformers, anti-imperialists and out-and-out Nazis and anti-Semites. The anti-imperialism was anti-American . . . and accordingly we submitted in our weekly report an analysis of the situation that the new government was hostile to the United States.”31
Schlesinger saw matters quite differently. Noticing that Halperin’s line was almost identical to that of the Communist Daily Worker, which condemned the coup as pro-Nazi, he spoke to Laurence Duggan in the Latin American Division of the State Department and Ernesto Galarza at the Pan-American Union (later the Organization of American States). Then he reversed Halperin’s line and wrote up the coup as resistance to “the domination of the country by the tin interests, the inefficiency and corruption of the Peñaranda Government, the food shortages and the uncontrolled inflation.” An incongruous alliance of mine owners and local Communists spread rumors that the coup was Nazi-inspired. The United States “must await more conclusive evidence of pro-Nazi leanings than tales from sources close to the mine owners or from Communist organizations.”32
There was little question that Halperin’s reports consistently breached the guidelines the State Department laid down for R&A that it should never “suggest, recommend or in any way determine the strategy or the tactical decisions of the war.” The rules had been put in place specifically to neutralize what was seen as the infiltration of R&A staff by Communists and the hard Left. Officials in OSS generally turned a blind eye, as did their counterparts in other spheres of government. Sometimes, as when questions were raised about whether Robert Oppenheimer and scientists at the Manhattan Project were spying for the Soviets, the bigger picture prevailed. At other times, domestic political considerations became a factor. Roosevelt knew that American Communists, who supported his war aim of “unconditional surrender” as well as some elements of the New Deal, would vote for the Democratic Party in 1944. The president routinely disavowed Communist support, but as his Republican opponent Thomas A. Dewey pointed out, it was a “soft disclaimer.” Either way, the battle lines for postwar debates about fellow travelers and Communism were already being drawn.33
The fact that Halperin was working for the Soviets confirms that fears about infiltration were not misplaced. But Schlesinger’s judgment on the question was flawed too. He undermined his own case by using information, complete with Spanish mistranslations, that Halperin showed was plagiarized from political tracts by Italian socialist refugees. Then there was the later discovery that Schlesinger’s own source, Laurence Duggan, was also a Soviet agent who abused his acces
s to Sumner Welles, undersecretary of state and FDR’s most trusted advisor on Latin American affairs. In short, the whole affair was a tangle of confusion and betrayal, exacerbated by a clash of academic egos.34
Halperin reacted furiously to the next edition of PW Weekly. Storming into the office of William Langer, now head of R&A, Halperin demanded to know who this “pasty face boy” was. “Maybe you don’t need a Latin America Division,” he sneered, “if you have one man who can handle this, maybe you don’t need us.” Langer reassured him that was not the case. To prove it, he called Schlesinger in for a dressing-down, telling him to “use the reports from the Latin America desk or nothing.”35
Accounts differ on what happened next. Both protagonists agree that Schlesinger presented himself in Halperin’s office in an agitated state. Halperin remembered Schlesinger being “literally in a rage, like a young child in a tantrum . . . yelling at the top of his voice.” When Arthur kept yelling, the dyspeptic Halperin rose from his chair, advanced on the smaller man, “and, as I recall it, I grabbed him by the collar of his coat, turned him around, and shoved him out.” Schlesinger remembered the verbal exchange but not the ejection. “I am sure I would have recalled physical assault,” he said when Halperin’s biographer questioned him on the matter. Either way, Schlesinger certainly came off worse from the incident and his reputation at R&A suffered. For his annual OSS efficiency rating report, he received just “adequate” for “cooperativeness.” This came so soon after his acrimonious exit from OWI that Schlesinger was cementing a reputation as a difficult colleague. He was, in Halperin’s derisive phrase, too much of “a knee-pants genius.”36
Schlesinger had not wanted to join OSS in the first place; now he was being censured by his boss, shouting in other people’s offices and being physically intimidated by colleagues. It was time to depart. On December 29, his boss and current intelligence chief, another Harvard historian, S. Everett Gleason, told Langer that “AS Jr. wants to go to London.” The OSS station there was looking for someone to pep up their R&A weekly summaries. Schlesinger seemed qualified for the task.37
Three days later, to help facilitate the move, Schlesinger formally executed an application for a commission in the navy (which would then transfer him back to OSS). In a case of déjà vu, his naval interview turned out to be an uncomfortable affair. A Division of Navy Records summary reflected continuing suspicion that Schlesinger’s father was “a member of numerous organizations and movements,” some of which were “alleged Communist front groups.” The summary also indicated that “the applicant’s associates and references had been connected with various radical and front movements.” As Schlesinger wrote to his wife years afterwards when his file was opened, “It does not look as if the Navy confused me with my father [as had happened earlier]; rather that the investigators felt that the son was carrying on the dirty work of the father.”
In 1948, the FBI, which investigated Schlesinger when he assisted Averell Harriman under the Marshall Plan, found that “all persons interviewed in connection with this investigation described Schlesinger as a violently anti-communist liberal; no one alleged that he was or ever had been a communist or communist sympathizer.” The FBI would find that Arthur Sr. had “unwittingly associated with communist front groups in 1930s.” In 1944, however, these suspicions kept Schlesinger out of the navy. His “defective vision” provided sufficient excuse to turn him down. On February 19, 1944, the navy advised Schlesinger that after “a complete examination of your qualifications in relation to the overall demands of the service, the Bureau regrets that it is impractical to approve your application. In addition to the foregoing, you do not meet the approved standards of physical qualifications for the appointment as an officer in the US Naval Reserve.”38
The rejection was yet another blow in a tumultuous twelve months. Fortunately Harvard once again came to the rescue. On February 22, three days after the brush-off from the navy, Crane Brinton, R&A chief in London and another colleague of Arthur Schlesinger Sr., wrote to William Langer saying that he wanted Arthur Jr. anyway. “In order to remedy some of the recognized weaknesses of the present coverage,” he recommended “that Arthur Schlesinger be assigned to London at the earliest possible date and that he be entrusted here with the composition of the weekly summary or summaries.”39
Langer agreed, but matters were complicated when the story of the navy rejecting Schlesinger became public. Drew Pearson, the author of a syndicated muckraking political column, broadcast a story on March 12 on his weekly NBC radio show Drew Pearson Comments that the navy had turned Schlesinger down for overtly political reasons. Arthur later noted that Pearson had “picked up the story somewhere,” which formulation hides one Phillips Exeter Academy alum telling his story to another. Now the story was sufficiently embarrassing for the navy that Admiral Louis Denfeld asked to see Schlesinger’s file. But the memorandum that came back could not have been clearer: “that the report of investigation had been unsatisfactory and that the applicant was not physically qualified.” The admiral was in no mood to relent. The navy issued a terse press release saying they had rejected Schlesinger because he was physically unfit for duty. “I have a complete sense of being tried and condemned without a chance to defend myself,” Arthur complained to his father.40
Despite the setback, Schlesinger continued to agitate for a move to London even while Langer continued to demur. His friends in London continued to call for his presence. “Mr. Schlesinger,” wrote Harold Deutsch, the chief of political research and another Harvard-educated historian, would fill “one of the most important posts in the R&A Branch, being that of Chief Editor and, in many cases, direct the composition of projects, which will be directly concerned with the servicing of psychological warfare operations during the anticipated invasion.”41
Schlesinger, in fact, would miss D-Day on June 6, but in the end Langer relented. On June 27, 1944, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. departed for England aboard the RMS Queen Elizabeth to join the Research and Analysis team in London. The previous day, having bid an emotional farewell to the twenty-month-old twins in Washington, he spent a night in New York with Marian. At the Onyx Club on West 52nd Street they heard Billie Holiday, her voice “filled with heartbreak,” Schlesinger recalled, “as she sang the song that lingered in my ears for the rest of the war: “I’ll be seeing you, In all the old familiar places.”
“Darling, I love you so much,” he wrote to Marian from the ship. “Kiss the babies and remind them of their father occasionally.”42
CHAPTER FIVE
THE REAL EDUCATION OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER JR.
Almost exactly a month after D-Day, Schlesinger arrived in London, where at first he was happy to be back. “Life in London is thus quite pleasant,” he reported brightly to his wife Marian, “except for such minor annoyances as the absence of you.” But as the weeks wore on, it seemed gradually to dawn on him just how much he missed his American life and family.1
The previous year, Schlesinger had bragged to Bernard DeVoto about having a “lovely girl, whom you will meet when you come down” on the side in DC. Now, even when meeting Anne Whyte, his English paramour from his Peterhouse days, he admitted to “developing into a sedate married man, because I promptly showed her the picture” of Marian and the twins. Expressions of love in letters home moved from the generic to the increasingly heartfelt, as Schlesinger came to realize “how god damned lucky I have been to get some one whom I can love as much and trust as much and feel as utterly sympathique with as I do with you.”
This state of affairs prompted a certain bafflement. “I am fed up to the teeth with being separated,” he complained to Marian by September. “All this is very astonishing to me.” Theirs would never be an easy relationship, and there were still unhappy moments when “your semi-psychotic” behavior “reminded me of the old days” and he wondered about being married to such a “nasty and beautiful girl.” But throughout those summer months, Arthur’s sense of what he already had intensified, as “in my g
eneral weariness and depression the thought that I am married to you, and have K&S [the twins Katharine and Stephen], and will return to all of you before too long, is the most compelling and wonderful of all thoughts.” His English friends provided an insight into what Marian had to put up with. “In some ways he’s very immature,” Anne Whyte complained to Charles Wintour, “in spite of his enormous brain.”2
Life in wartime London, so different from the happy time he had spent there in 1938–1939, did not lift his spirits. Schlesinger arrived in London just two weeks after the first V-1 rockets had fallen. “The tense period comes when the motor stops,” he wrote home to his parents somewhat thoughtlessly. “You get five to fifty seconds of silence; then comes the explosion. It is not nice.” Only belatedly did he reassure them he would “take every precaution” and was getting “a full night’s sleep every night; so should you.” Danger, however, would heighten from September onwards when the V-1 rockets were supplemented with the much more powerful V-2 ballistic missile, about which he told them, “you never know it is coming until it goes off.” Schlesinger witnessed many attacks at first hand. In addition to his regular job, he was required to “stand fireguard” most days, and “occasionally” bombs or rockets would come near (“but you get used to it all”).
Schlesinger had the “harrowing” experience of watching as “a good friend of ours suddenly appeared in acute stage of nervous breakdown.” His own condition often seemed fragile too. Certainly he enjoyed the gallows humor that the situation prompted, often reporting good one-liners home. (“I am not worried about one of those bombs having my name on it,” a colleague laconically observed while they shared fire guard duty. “The one I’m worried about is labeled ‘To whom it may concern.’ ”) His brother Tom was posted to England that July, and although the two were never particularly close, Schlesinger enjoyed his visits to see him at his base in Winchester. New friendships helped as well, including the historian Walter Lord, with whom he shared rooms. Even better, he renewed old ones. Whenever Wintour was home on leave from France, the two would meet at the fashionable Savoy Grill and then drink late into the night. They particularly enjoyed the cognac that Charles had brought back from France “marked everywhere ‘reserved for the Wehrmacht’ ” and generally “had a good sodden time.” But such nights were the exception. Wintour worried about Arthur’s mental and emotional state; his wife Nonie already believed their friend to be “violently and actively” depressed. As Arthur explained to Marian, he was “tired as hell, oversmoked and generally on the downgrade.” At such times, the best he could do was look forward to a time when once again he might have “the joys of being surrounded by bourbon, steaks, babies and you.”3
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