The Irregulars (8 page)

Marsh’s friend Ralph Ingersoll introduced him to the playwright Lillian Hellman, an old flame who was even further to the left than he was. Hellman’s current beau, the detective-story writer Dashiell Hammett, had helped launch Ingersoll’s
PM
, bringing in all his New York literary pals, including such names as Heywood Broun, Dorothy Parker, Donald Ogden Stewart, and George Seldes, and earning the publication a reputation for being a Communist mouthpiece in the early days of its inception.
PM
was hardly a Stalinist front but a rather schizophrenic cross between a high-minded journal of opinion and a tabloid. It was the journalistic dream child of Ingersoll, a veteran editor of
Time
, the creator of
Life
, and the publisher Henry Luce’s longtime lieutenant. When Ingersoll left the Time organization to start
PM
in 1938, one of his largest backers was Marshall Field, the department store heir, who was at the same time financing another newspaper start-up, the
Chicago Sun
. According to Marsh, who took an early interest in
PM
, the paper was losing more than a half million dollars a year and probably always would, but this was a matter of no great concern to man like Field.

Ingersoll, who made no claim of being objective—and often said there was no such thing as “objective journalism”—was one of the first editors to campaign all-out for aid to Great Britain. He frequently ranted in print about America’s embarrassing “kibitzing” while London burned and was so rabid in his attacks on isolationists like Charles Lindbergh and William Randolph Hearst that it had led to rumors that he was being subsidized by that “man across the sea,” i.e., Churchill. He was almost as big and loud and opinionated as Marsh himself, and over his usual liquid lunch of two martinis and black coffee, followed by a chain of mentholated cigarettes, he had fought and won the war a hundred times over. So much so that when the forty-one-year old editor was drafted into the army in July 1942, it became a cause célèbre, with Field petitioning the appeals board that he was “indispensable” in the war on the home front. In a misguided attempt to help, Marsh, without consulting Ingersoll, used his considerable influence to get him a deferment. The draft board’s reversal became front page news and, embarrassed by stories denouncing him as a draft-dodger, Ingersoll enlisted in the army. He wound up earning a commission and serving on General Omar Bradley’s staff and wrote a best seller about his experience. He credited Marsh with altering the course of his life and virtually revered him.

Through Marsh, Dahl also met Mrs. Ogden Reid, wife of the
Herald Tribune
publisher and very much the power behind the throne. Marsh had great admiration for Helen Reid, and the two newspaper owners were close friends and had formed their own little secret society and met from time to time to exchange information. She was very pro-British and had taken to Dahl immediately, and he often stayed with her when he was in New York. Her father-in-law, Whitelaw Reid, had been ambassador to Britain from 1905 to 1911, and in the years before her marriage she had worked as a social secretary to his wife and so had close ties to England. According to Marsh, the formidable Mrs. Whitelaw Reid had realized that her son and heir was a bit of a drunk and had engineered the marriage to her very capable assistant. Through Marsh and Mrs. Reid, Dahl got to know the
Herald Tribune’s
lead columnist, Walter Lippmann, a passionate internationalist who was said to have considerable sway with policy makers. The married Lippmann had caused a local scandal by falling in love with Helen Byrne Armstrong, the wife of his best friend and fellow editor, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, who oversaw the quarterly publication
Foreign Affairs
. His divorce, followed by her divorce and their subsequent marriage, was still much whispered about among their colleagues and friends.

Dahl dined regularly with the tall, mustachioed Drew Pearson, whose infamous, gossipy “Daily Washington Merry-Go-Round” was read by everyone in town and was carried in some five hundred papers nationwide. In 1931 he and Robert Allen, then the Washington bureau chief of the
Christian Science Monitor
, had anonymously published a collection of scandalous news items about a handful of public figures in a book called
Washington Merry-Go-Round
, and although controversial it was so popular they published a sequel the following year. Pearson and Allen were unmasked and promptly fired, but by 1940 they had launched their famous syndicated column and were riding high. After Allen joined the army, Pearson soldiered on alone, making Washington politics and politicians his main beat. He was an odd duck, a tight-lipped Quaker with a quirky sense of humor, and had a house on Dumbarton Avenue that boasted a garden pool stocked with goldfish named after FDR aides, such as Harry Hopkins and Harold Ickes. He continued this tradition on his Maryland farm, where his cows were christened Cordell Hull, Henry Morgenthau, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Naturally every now and then one of the cows had to be slaughtered and would be duly devoured by Pearson and his dinner guests. He was an old-fashioned, hard-hitting muckraker, with a thick skin and cold disregard for those he angered or hurt with his disclosures, be they friend or foe. Dahl thought it far better to be his friend, and the two became regular drinking buddies and whiled away many evenings at the men’s bar at the Mayflower.

Dahl also got to know Pearson’s main competitor, Walter Winchell, whose column was syndicated in an astonishing one thousand newspapers, which together with his hugely popular Sunday radio show made him a force to be reckoned with. By the advent of the war, Winchell was a powerhouse widely feared because of his penchant for exposing the private lives of important public men—from mistresses and pregnancies to divorces—which gave him plenty of bargaining chips to trade for information about what was going on inside their businesses or agencies. He had morphed from a Broadway critic to a political commentator who thought nothing of weighing in on domestic and international affairs, from warning Americans that “isolation ends where it always ends—with the enemy on our doorstep,” to inaugurating a regular feature called “The Winchell Column vs. the Fifth Column.” A typical Winchell column would contain several dozen separate references to individuals and events, ranging from minor celebrity sightings, along the lines of spotting Marlene Dietrich at the Stork Club, his nightly hangout, to an impassioned denunciation of Nazi sympathizers or some other disreputable homegrown fascists.

While there were a number of prominent American journalists who were sympathetic to the British plight, Lippmann, Pearson, and Winchell went beyond publishing Ministry of Information handouts to actively aiding the cause whenever they could, and they were in close contact with British intelligence. Like Ingersoll, they, too, were often accused of being on the British payroll, though they had plenty of company in their surrogate form of combat. There was a long list of ink-stained crusaders who had been fighting against Hitler and Mussolini since as far back as 1933—among them Dorothy Thompson and Edmund Taylor—and who had proved helpful to the BSC in its covert campaign against isolationism and defeatism.

Dahl also met Ernest Cuneo, the affable, Falstaffian attorney and sidekick to Winchell, who was known to be a member of Roosevelt’s “palace guard” and a behind-the-scenes operator bar none. A thirty-three-year-old lawyer of Italian descent, Cuneo had served as an aide to congressman and New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia and was every bit as colorful and engaging a character as his former boss. A college football star gone to fat, he was almost as wide as he was tall and was a much-beloved figure in media circles. When Roosevelt was elected to office in 1932, Cuneo had followed his Columbia Law mentor Adolf Berle to Washington and served as the administration’s troubleshooter, eventually becoming associate counsel of the Democratic National Committee. When war broke out, he added to his portfolio the duties of White House liaison officer with British Security Coordination, the OSS, the FBI, and the Departments of Justice and State.

What Dahl was only then beginning to understand was that Cuneo had such close ties to the BSC that he was considered a member of the club, had his own code name—
CRUSADER
—and was empowered to “feed” select British intelligence items about Nazi sympathizers and subversives to Pearson, Winchell, and other handpicked outlets. At the time, he was actually ghostwriting many of Winchell’s columns and radio broadcasts, which parroted the British propaganda line of the day. For the BSC, journalists like Ingersoll, Lippmann, Pearson, Reid, and Winchell, and the facilitator Cuneo, were stealth operatives in their campaign against Britain’s enemies in America. “The conduct of political warfare was entirely dependent on secrecy,” states the official history of the BSC’s intelligence operations. “For that reason the press and radio men with whom BSC agents maintained contact were comparable with subagents and the intermediaries with agents. They were thus regarded.”

Whatever complaints embassy officials might have had with him personally, Dahl felt he was more than doing his bit for crown and country, and he was banking on his minor celebrity to stave off the threatened dismissal. In the meantime, he had taken Marsh into his confidence and explained that he was doing a little hush-hush work with an eye to getting himself transferred to intelligence. Far from being surprised, Marsh had already guessed as much and offered his assistance. “Of course, my father knew he was a spy,” said Antoinette. “They talked about it and my father said, ‘Look here, we’re on the same team, we can help each other.’” They both wanted the same things—Britain’s survival and an Allied victory—and Marsh was Machiavellian enough to think he could help Dahl while helping himself. “He got a huge kick out of it,” added Antoinette. “He always said that he was a spy during the war, too.” While Marsh regarded it as something of a lark and often made light of their joint espionage activities, Antoinette recalled that Dahl took the work very seriously: “Roald was a real patriot. He did it for the war effort, and he dedicated himself to it.”

Marsh took Dahl under his wing and gave him the benefit of his years of experience in Washington politics. He had the veteran newspaperman’s instinct for the inside scoop, nose for bull, and appetite for Capitol Hill scuttlebutt. Marsh was on a first-name basis with everyone in town who mattered, and he knew about the skeletons in their closets and the scandals in their home states. If he did not have all the answers, he knew who did, and more often than not he offered to place the call. He was an invaluable source for Dahl, a walking, talking encyclopedia of Washington life, from the stiff state dinners and senatorial committees to the “unofficial” hotel room conferences. He knew Washington was composed of tycoons, lobbyists, lawyers, deal makers, and fixers of every stripe, as well as legions of amiable young “government girls” with good legs and better memories. An inveterate memo writer who made his long-suffering secretary take down dozens of pages of dictation each day, Marsh, according to Ingersoll, would call Dahl in and debrief him, then spell out a cable for him to transmit to his bosses, saying, “I want this message to get through to 10 Downing Street right quickly and straight. Mark it urgent on your report, eyes only to your people.” Then Claudia, his timid stenographer, who was always seated silently nearby and wore a perennial look of alarm on her face whenever asked to take something down, would start hammering away on her machine as he began waking up and down and dictating, still clad in silk pajamas and a brightly embroidered Chinese gown.

Occasionally, when Marsh had information he wanted to impart to Churchill that he thought was over the head of the relatively junior assistant air attaché, he would announce self-importantly that he was going to summon Isaiah Berlin, the British Embassy’s brilliant, all-knowing London liaison, who communicated directly with the Foreign Office, various Whitehall departments, and the Cabinet Office. For his part, Berlin was put off by the American press baron’s eccentric circumlocution—“staccato, disjointed sentences”—and overweening self-regard. Marsh “gave the impression of being powerful, not to say sinister,” Berlin recalled, but he was always left feeling that there was something not quite right about him, “a screw faintly loose somewhere—and I felt rather frightened of him, as if in the presence of someone slightly unbalanced.” Marsh in turn, disliked the pale, pudgy Berlin, whom he and Dahl dubbed “the White Slug.”

When Dahl required specific information, Marsh instructed him to submit written questions. Typically, Marsh would respond with another memo. They communicated in this manner, trading everything from brief handwritten notes and telegrams to voluminous typed letters throughout the war. The pedagogical aspect of their relationship is evident in a short note Marsh fired off to Dahl after he took advantage of their arrangement on a recent occasion. “You woke me at four this morning, and you bumped me out of bed at five,” he scolded Dahl, addressing the pilot as if he were a recalcitrant pupil. “You had an idea. You wanted to send information quickly and had been too timid to say so. Next time put the time element in mind. Time is the essence in every contract—and I think, contact.” When Marsh had a lecture to impart, he would say, “Dahl, let’s go for a walk,” and he would be off, striding down 17th Street with his long, awkward gait, his arms swinging to and fro, holding forth on everything from a politician’s potentialities to the most intimate aspects of a well-known public figure’s sex life.

To help boost his standing at the embassy, Marsh arranged for Dahl to meet with important people in government and to apprise them of the RAF’s accomplishments. He sent him over to see the vice president to show him photographs of the damage done by the two-ton bombs dropped by British Lancasters. The photographs, taken from 30,000 feet and blown up to a size of about six feet by four feet, were striking examples of British air power, which Dahl argued were still superior to that of the United States. Dahl used the photos as a graphic illustration of the fact that the British were now causing about two and a half times the damage to the Germans as the Germans ever did to them, largely due to the greater bomb load of their bombers. In addition, the British had found that incendiaries were fully as important as high-explosive bombs; he reported that they were dropping about one thousand pounds of incendiaries for every fifteen hundred pounds of high explosives.