Names
are the first casualties in the battle
against time, though he remembers mine.
|
June
24, 2004 (Thursday)
Washington
DC I MAIL out seventy invitations to the St Louis
and Louisville meetings from the mail-drop at the
National Archives building in Maryland. New
archives ID card has to be issued, as my old one
has already expired. I look up entries in the IRR
series (Investigative Records Repository), and find
references to a diary of John McCloy,
1941-1945, a wartime US deputy secretary of
defence; these may well be very be important, and I
order the four volumes.  Then
archivist John Taylor, left, walks
in; he has heard I am in the building. He is more
bent than ever; his memory has sagged only a bit
since we last met a year ago. Names are the first
casualties in the battle against time, though he
remembers mine.
He is delighted to see me there -- our first
discussion on sources in the old Archives building
in Pennsylvania Avenue was in about 1967 -- and we
chat about many things; he says author Anthony
Cave Brown is still around, he was on the phone
to him last week but Brown "could not come in" -- I
say probably too bulky now to get into any car. I
last saw him was when we  invited
him to dinner with Carla Venchiarutti,
right, working for me here, in K Street in
1976. He downed so many beers that I worried
whether he could get his car back safely (and he
totalled it that same evening, I recall). I ask John about the
PRIME-POTUS files, access to
which I first requested some thirty or thirty-five
years ago when I began researching the Winston
Churchill biography in depth; they are now open, he
concedes, and within seconds he has produced the
binder with the catalogue information. John's brain is a human file-cabinet, complete
with index cards: he can produce any item, from
memory. I order the
PRIME-POTUS file at once,
two ring binders. I comment on his lively good
health, and he volunteers that he never drank a cup
of coffee in his life -- then he corrects himself,
he did once drink a cup in an airplane over the
Grand Canyon, and disliked the taste so much he
never tried again. "Probably Instant," I
volunteer. We chat about author Ladislas Farago and
archivist Dr Robert Wolfe (who retired, he
says, ten years ago) and other old acquaintances
and friends. He knows all about the Robert
Kempner files found by Walt Martin
in Philadelphia, and asks what the status is of the
Robert
Gutierrez trove; I say I went to see the
Gutierrez family in Albuquerque last December, and
am playing that fish very slowly. John broke a thumb in a fall two or three weeks
ago. I ask permission to take a picture of him, and
he is pleased, puts on his glasses for the second
one, and asks for a print. Smiling at his
liveliness, I guess his age at eighty-three, and he
says, Spot on, how did you guess? But it was just a
guess. He comes into work at six each morning, though
even so he is not the first man in, then has
breakfast in the canteen and works a full day. What
a man. He recalls bumping into me coming into the
building main entrance in Pennsylvania Avenue many
years ago with "a good looking blond on my arm" and
that I had told him then that I had already had "a
life of crime" in writing. The blonde is unlikely,
the quote rings true. He throws out many clues to me about new files
now available in this building: nine million pages
of CIA files are coming into their third-floor
library at the rate of a million a month, on
CD-Rom; you type in key words, and up come images
of the documents. The library, he sniffs, keeps
regular hours, closes at five pm. The MID files and
FBI files contain a lot of Churchill materials
between the wars. Today the research room closes at
nine, that's handy. The McCloy diary is brought in, the first box
has about 1,000 pages. It is oddly comprised, of
carbon copies, subject by subject, e.g. Caribbean,
Philippines, evidently typed by researchers for the
official histories, from a real diary, which is
… where? Three more boxes to go.
RG
165 The two PRIME-POTUS box files are a bit of a
disappointment after all these years of waiting:
"RG 165 Security Classified records relating
to the special communications circuit for
handling PRIME POTUS … messages exchanged
during and after the war by the President
(Roosevelt and Truman) and the Prime Minister
(Churchill and Attlee) and their high ranking
officials, 1943-47." Boxes 195 and 196,
NM-64, entry 81. The first contains a small
black ring-binder, "Log of messages (lists 43
pages of messages)", with columns, Date, No.,
Ck. [a serial number], In, Out, Clear
W.U. and Remarks, from Jan 27, 1942 to Nov 15,
1946. The remarks include frequently "unnumbered
to Hopkins," "Winant to President," "Harriman to
President," and the numbered PM series (e.g., PM
289). The
boxes also contain folders, including many of
the original messages, and working papers of
Adml William D Leahy, "Doc"
Matthews and others attached to them. The
slim file on the surrender of Japan omits
(1985), a message Attlee to Truman, Aug 11,
1945, SRL#2262 [not an
intercept], removed because of "security
classified information." And another, MSG#443,
Winant to Truman, "Aug 6, 1946" (sic), removed
ditto. Many of the contents of other folders
have been removed, evidently as they relate to
communications security. File
#9 is a file on rumours that the USSR was
planning a putsch in Trieste, imminent on Jun
15, 1946, with a simultaneous attack across the
Oder to NW Germany, via Bulgaria and Romania
into Greece and through Austria and S Germany to
France. There is a verbatim teletype or phone
conversation between James Byrnes and Ernie
Bevin ("Bevans, Bevins") on Aug 14, 1945 about
the Japanese surrender. There are several
telegrams about Churchill's Fulton invitation
(Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri), at
which he would deliver a speech on world
affairs, requesting "no honorarium." There is
(in file #9, July 1945, mostly re Zones in
Austria) a stray visiting card of Dr Lloyd James
Thompson, Colonel, Consultant in Psychiatry ETO,
Office Chief Surgeon, endorsed on the rear in
his handwriting, "Received, one envelope
addressed to Hon Harry Hopkins, White House,
Washington. L J Thompson." The enclosure was
almost certainly the letter Winant to Hopkins,
Dec 11, 1944. [photocopied] File
#9 also has War Dept Washington cable to ETOUSA
July 1, 1945, "From General Marshall for
Ambassador Winant's eyes only. The President
requested Prime [Churchill] to see
Devers personally and Prime later replied that
he had already done so and was much impressed. I
am taking measures to assist in his relationship
with British chiefs of staff. Your interest in
all of this is genuinely appreciated by me as
well as your consistent attitude to great
helpfulness toward our military efforts and
procedure." File
#11 has telegrams on the Labour election win,
July 1945; reparations from Germany; President
Harry S Truman's over-brief visit to Plymouth,
UK, on his return voyage to the USA. File
#12 has Winant to Truman, Unclassified, SRNR
210, London August 16, 1945: 'Mr Churchill has
just asked me to forward to you the following:
"Accept my profound congratulations on the
surrender of Japan in response to our ultimatum
and upon victorious peace." -- Also Macarthur
messages.
Back in Falls Church at eight p.m. Ned invites
to dinner again. Afterwards we watch a video about
a Greek wedding. Never seen such over-hyped tripe
in my life, though the actress was oddly beautiful,
the spitting image of one of the trustiest
assistants I had in London, Zerin -- we called her
affectionately Miss Long-Nose Twisted-Face; she
hailed from Cyprus. Both she and the actress have a
strange kind of marble beauty that is hard to
define. I am told, as the movie grinds to its
inevitable matrimonial climax, that the actress
also wrote the script; ah, a Lifetime
channel movie, which you have to be a woman to
understand, or relish, I suppose. -
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David Irving