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Review
Our Man in New York by Henry Hemming, review: where’s an American ally when you need one?
In 1940, Britain was in dire need of munitions, food, raw materials and aid of every kind, and although Churchill was crying his eyes out (“We shall lose unless you come in – and with all you have”), America was obdurate. Indeed, after the Dunkirk evacuation and the Nazi occupation of France, the Americans didn't think the British worth saving.
Joseph Kennedy, the ambassador, and father of the future president, told Roosevelt somewhat blithely that “the RAF would be obliterated by the Luftwaffe” and that British surrender was “inevitable”. Germany “already controls the Continent”, Kennedy pointed out, and as in London “there is famine and a total upset of normal life”, his diplomatic advice was: keep away from these Limey losers.
If only a scant 8 per cent of the American population was keen on wading in to help, it is because they didn’t like us very much. The British were seen, in the words of Henry Hemming, as “indecisive, snooty and stiff, the qualities least attractive to Americans, then and now” – which is why Hollywood always cast our actors as butlers. Lord Halifax, our man in Washington, fitted the slighting description all too well. He went foxhunting in Pennsylvania, recoiled from the sight of a hot dog (“What’s inside it?”), and observed of baseball: “It is more vigorous than the cricket I played at Eton.”
In 1937, in another statistic unearthed by Hemming, a Gallup poll showed that 70 per cent of the American people believed with hindsight that their nation’s involvement in the First World War had been a big mistake, and that in any case this new conflict was a conspiracy cooked up by Wall Street bankers and profiteering arms dealers. An outfit calling itself the America First Committee, which soon had 800,000 members, believed in protectionist tariffs and an isolationist foreign policy.
One of their spokesmen was the aviator Charles Lindbergh, who demanded rhetorically in many a broadcast: “Shall we submerge our future in the endless wars of the Old World? Or shall we build our defences and leave European war to European countries?”
All well and good, except that when Lindy was being pro-America, he was also being pro-Germany. He visited the Fatherland on five separate occasions and expressed his admiration for the “organised vitality” of the Reich under Hitler, and “the spiritual and, particularly, the moral superiority and purity of this man”. Millions of Americans, who didn’t want their country entering into “entangling alliances”, thought such sentiments “authentic and level-headed”.
Nazi propaganda was also directly at work. Members of congress, military officers and businessmen were bombarded with pamphlets extolling the virtues of Germany. Hitler made it clear that “his country posed no threat to America”, and many Republicans, who “had no desire to fight Germany”, quite accepted this avowal. The Hays Code, the film censorship board, insisted that there be no “negative portrayal” of Germans in Hollywood scripts.
Which rather left Britain on its own, like the asthmatic boy with scabby legs in the playground, whom no one wants to associate with. Enter, therefore, according to Hemming, William Stephenson, a Canadian of Icelandic stock, a Great War air ace, who was appointed MI6 Head of Station in New York. Arriving by ship in June 1940, his brief was to run a “secret British influence campaign”, to win hearts and minds, and persuade the reluctant Americans to join the cast of the Second World War, preferably on our side.
Stephenson’s headquarters were in the Rockefeller Center, behind a door marked The British Passport Control Office. This was later changed to British Security Co-ordination, as nobody actually wanted any visas or passports. Here were located up to 1,000 “agents, intermediaries, analysts, clerical staff, pressure-group leaders, journalists, pollsters” and no doubt barrel-organists and ostlers, which must have made the elevator very crowded every morning. This “flurry of people all working for MI6” were in on the job to place articles in the press, make radio appeals, manipulate opinion polls, carry out wiretaps and infiltrate protest groups, to convince Americans it was going to be in their interest to give us a helping hand against Hitler.
Roosevelt, in fairness, was doing his best, despite opposition, to assist Churchill. In September 1940, he sent ships and planes to Britain, in return for 99-year leases on naval and airbases in the Caribbean, Bermuda and Newfoundland. Roosevelt’s rather Jesuitical reasoning was that by giving such succour to Britain, America would improve its chances of staying out of the war. Churchill hoped that, when American destroyers escorted British merchant ships across the Atlantic, a German submarine would accidentally torpedo an American vessel – a “provocative” act precipitating war. Hitler saw through the ploy.
Yet despite the “covert, sophisticated, eye-wateringly expensive” shenanigans of Stephenson and his staff, I can’t see that it amounted to much. Their projects sound like plots from The Goon Show: the forging of maps and documents to “prove” that the Nazis were going to invade Latin America, having first occupied Bolivia; the announcement by astrologers that Hitler’s demise was imminent; the spreading of the rumour that Germany was much weakened by a typhus epidemic; the dissemination of another rumour that the Nazis were in fact a front for the Sicilian Mafia and that Italian troops were “so terrified of fighting the British” they were all making appointments to see psychiatrists.
If any of this “fake news” helped to get Americans into uniform, clearly other factors played a bigger part. The America First campaigned fizzled out, for example, and the public turned against it, when Lindy began making anti-Semitic remarks. He said that if war came, the Jews “would only have themselves to blame” when they ended up in concentration camps. This was widely condemned as a rant worthy of “the cow pasture assemblies of the Ku Klux Klan”.
Then, of course, there was Pearl Harbor, after which even Lindy said: “I can see nothing to do under these circumstances except to fight.” He took to the skies in a war plane. Germany had its own “entangling alliance” with Japan, and Hitler declared war on America on December 11 1941. The gloves were off at last.
Lindy found time between sorties in the Pacific to become a busy adulterer, fathering seven children by three different women. Stephenson was knighted and in retirement sat in a bungalow in Bermuda, surrounded by photographs of royalty. We are told by Hemming that he was “hailed by Ian Fleming as one of the inspirations for James Bond”.
Our Man in New York is published by Quercus at £20. To order your copy for £16.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop