Personal History (26 page)

One of the great influences on all of those who worked in Lend-Lease was Ben Cohen, a good friend of ours, then a minister without portfolio who in early 1942 was part of a self-constituted group of men who were making sure arms production was on target. Ben never would acknowledge that a thing was illegal, he would simply rationalize it in one way or another.

In trying to understand where the country was starting from, it’s helpful to consider a meeting this defense-watchdog group held in early June. Someone brought along the current
Time
magazine, which contained a footnote revealing the Russian losses of planes and other machines of war. The men figured out that these losses were greater than this country even had
on order
. While the military blamed everyone but itself for not having realized how big the war would be, this group of lawyers was able to demonstrate to the powers in charge, including the president, how bad the situation really was and how little the United States was doing to prepare for war.

The competition for the few supplies we were producing was fierce—from our own army, navy, and air force, as well as from the British, the Free French, and the Russians. Roosevelt had spoken the year before about “clouds of planes,” and of becoming the “Arsenal of Democracy.” One day Phil and Joe Rauh were looking at the top-secret statistics, for
which they had clearance, of the Office of Production Management. When they read that only one four-engine bomber had been delivered to the army during August, they saw their chance to push for the importance of doing more and wrote a memorandum to be sent to the president.

Three hours later, a hot memo came back from Hopkins saying, “You shouldn’t bother the President with things like this and besides it isn’t true.” The very young men—Phil was twenty-six at the time and Joe just three years older—felt that the world was coming to an end. They’d misled the president—they’d have to leave Washington! They rushed down to see Bob Nathan, director of research in the Office of Production Management and the originator of the book of statistics from which the memo had been drawn. Nathan got out his yellow backup sheets, while Joe and Phil sat there preparing to die. Nathan kept looking at his papers and making marks with a pencil. Finally, he said, “I made a mistake.” Just as Phil and Joe were about to collapse, Nathan said, “There wasn’t one four-engine bomber delivered in August. There were
no
four-engine bombers delivered in August. The one I counted was delivered after August 31.”

One Sunday we went out to have lunch at the log cabin owned by the Edward Burlings in the nearby Virginia woods. That day one of those present was the undersecretary of war, Robert Patterson, and the arguments on preparedness were being waged at the top of everyone’s lungs. Of course, I worried that Patterson was unused to this mode of discourse and would think that everyone arguing was insane, and when we got home I told Phil that their manners in front of this august figure had been appalling. When Phil came home the next day, he said, “I guess we didn’t offend Patterson too much. He called me today and asked me to go to work for him.” Phil didn’t, but so much for my nervous nanny-bred worries.

Soon afterwards, on another Sunday, in early December 1941, my parents had some guests to lunch at their own Virginia cabin. I was there, but Phil and Joe Rauh were at their office working on the report to Congress that Lend-Lease had to make every three months. In the middle of lunch someone from the
Post
called to say the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.

Phil and Joe had gone out to a late lunch, and on the way back, Larry Fly, head of the Federal Communications Commission and of the War Communications Board, spotted them and stopped his car, shouting to them that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. Joe said, “Thank God.” Phil said, “Shut up.” “I was so depressed we weren’t preparing for war,” Joe told me many years later, “that my reaction was ‘Thank God’ and Phil, whose reactions were always the quickest, realized that there could be an anti-Semitic kickback and the last thing any Jew should say is ‘It’s good.’ ” They both went immediately to try to enlist but were rejected for a variety of reasons, all later dropped.

Pearl Harbor was followed quickly by Roosevelt’s solemn declaration of war. With the realization of what Pearl Harbor meant, Congress was flooded with requests from the different services, all competing with each other and uncoordinated. Bob Nathan was called on to ensure that there wouldn’t be airplanes without wings or tanks without armor. In order to be more effective in moving the country to a wartime footing, some of this group of young men, including Phil, who were already working through Lend-Lease and other agencies, started meeting regularly at Bob Nathan’s apartment. These men, calling themselves the “Goon Squad,” were all trying to do the same thing in different agencies, waging a magnificent battle against bureaucracy and red tape, at times amazingly successful at getting things done. There was such dispersion of authority in the government until the War Production Board was created that this informal group of mostly quite young men with absolutely no formal authority was actually able to step into the vacuum and compensate partially for that lack of a center.

This chaos was finally resolved when Jimmy Byrnes went to the White House in overall charge. He had a small staff, of which Ben Cohen and Prich were a part. If the Goon Squad recognized some problem, Ben and Prich would tell Byrnes, who could get it fixed. Until that time, one art the Goon Squad developed for making known its concerns was that of leaking information—partly to Al Friendly, who had come to the
Post
from the
Washington Daily News
early in 1939 and who was reporting on the defense buildup, and partly to Drew Pearson, who was writing his very popular and widely distributed national column with Bob Allen.

Prich was thought by the group to be leaking too much and too often to Drew Pearson, who was a personal friend, so one evening he was told that he should stop, that his leaking was doing more harm than good. Two weeks later, the group decided that something
ought
to be leaked to Pearson and asked Prich to leak it. “Are you sure?” asked Prich. “Yes,” said the group. “Well, all right, then,” Prich said, “I’ve already done it.”

Phil seemed to wear one hat in the Lend-Lease Administration and another in the Office of Emergency Management. Although nominally he was based in these agencies, practically he was all over the place. Wherever he worked, he acquired a reputation as an expediter. He was gone from his office so much that his friends said his secretary spent her time knitting sweaters. For several months in the spring of 1942, he was detached from the legal division of Lend-Lease at the request of Bert Evatt, who was foreign minister of Australia and had been chief justice there, and who asked him to work for Australia as liaison to Lend-Lease. So he worked full-time with the Australians, particularly after the Japanese invaded the Australian territory of New Guinea.

Later, when Phil went to the
Post
, eight of his friends wrote a highly laudatory letter about him to the
Post
’s editor, a tribute that best describes
some of what Phil was doing in the year between his clerkship for Frankfurter and the time he enlisted:

The V-loan legislation, which allowed for the loan of money to small businesses to help them convert to the war effort, was typical of Phil’s ability to cut red tape. He worked on it for many months, and finally it was completed but had to be signed by certain officials before it went to Congress. To reduce the bureaucratically mandated time it would take to procure all of the required signatures, Phil got in a taxi, carried the bill from one individual to another, had it signed, and took it to the Hill himself. Under this legislation, hundreds of millions of dollars were loaned.

B
Y LATE
1941, having had a miscarriage just a few months earlier in the initial stages of pregnancy, I was pregnant again, with the baby due in May. The miscarriage had been profoundly upsetting, as though my whole physical being had begun to move toward a goal that was suddenly wrenched away from me, leaving me bereft, so I was deliriously happy to be pregnant once more. Phil, who had been rejected initially by the army because of eyesight problems and because he was married, had decided to wait for our baby to be born before doing anything more about the military, despite his determination to join. In one exchange between us, I had deplored the fact that we had the bad luck to live in a world with Hitler, to which Phil responded, “I don’t know. Maybe it’s a privilege to have to fight the biggest son of a bitch in history.”

By May I was experiencing a lethargy even greater than usual. Pregnancy seemed to dull my mind and sap my energy—perhaps just from the sheer exhaustion of carrying that much extra weight around. My listless-ness was interspersed with bursts of activity on the cooking, entertaining, and shopping fronts. I wasn’t working any longer and, as I wrote to my friend Sidney Hyman:

I had bought the things we needed for the baby, including three rubber sheets with the crib, although Phil protested that no child of his would need them. And I had gained a lot of weight and was quite uncomfortable, particularly when it started to get hot in Washington.

We were beginning to think the baby was overdue, so I suggested to my doctor that he induce labor, which he did, but it was too soon and the baby wasn’t ready. When after three days it finally began to be born, the cord was around its neck, a situation that ordinarily could be dealt with. Apparently, that night, with wartime help shortages, the doctor was delivering several babies at once, and by the time he got to my problem it was too late. We lost the baby boy.

When I came to after the long ordeal, I looked at Phil and groggily asked, “Is the baby all right?” When he said no, I couldn’t believe it. I had never heard of anyone losing a baby and was so disbelieving that I was sure it couldn’t possibly be true. But it was all too real. I was devastated. I will never forget getting back to the house, where Phil had removed all of the baby’s things so that it wouldn’t be even more painful. I began to realize not only that there was no baby but that Phil would now be leaving to go into the army and I would be alone. It was a terrible anguish, compounded by a desperate feeling that we’d never have children and an even greater fear that something might happen to him—all the worst dreads combined. Phil was wonderful to me, and we both were helped by my father. My mother was so upset I don’t remember seeing her until several weeks afterwards.

So Phil did enlist in the army, and before he was to leave we had a reunion at Mount Kisco that included my brother, Bill, who was going into the Medical Corps, and his wife, Mary.

One night, while we were all at dinner, my mother, still very Republican, started picking on the “young New Dealers,” who, of course, were not only our friends but by then were all either gone to the military or working in defense. I was still emotionally vulnerable, and her barbs and gibes about these young men as draft-dodgers were like a match thrown onto a gasoline-soaked bonfire. She and I had an enormous and horrible set-to. I knew that she was still spending her time on her book about Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Mann. In addition, despite the war, Mount Kisco was continuing to operate on its normal luxurious scale—for example, I knew she had laid in a great deal of sugar, which was in short supply or already rationed. So I demanded to know what she herself was doing to help the war effort, writing this remote treatise in a house full of servants and
hoarded sugar. She retorted by asking what
I
was doing about it. Since I had just lost my baby and was about to lose my husband to the army, I exploded into tears. We were separated by Phil and Bill, who took me upstairs.

They then talked to her in forthright terms, acknowledging that I shouldn’t have attacked her so emotionally, but stating that in fact she really should do something more constructive than what she was doing. They suggested she turn her attention to reporting on America’s war-impacted areas and, to her great credit, she took their suggestion seriously, and began an earnest and constructive career as a traveling correspondent on the war and the home front.

T
HOSE FIRST FEW
years of marriage, before the war interrupted all our lives, Phil and I had a very happy time. I grew up considerably, mostly thanks to him. What he did for me was more than helpful, it was essential. He began to liberate me from my family and from the myths they had propagated, eventually leading me down very different paths from those I had known earlier. He counterbalanced my ingrown resistance to new and different ideas, to people with whom I didn’t agree politically, to not having to hew to anyone’s standards but my own. Phil also brought into my life more laughter, gaiety, irreverence for rules, and originality.

At the same time that he freed me in many ways from my family, Phil also grew quickly to appreciate both of my parents and got along with them better than most of their own children did. Despite his early apprehensions about my father’s wealth, politics, and possible impulse to control, Phil gradually grew very close to him, ending up by becoming one of the two or three closest friends of his lifetime. He loved staying up with my father, listening to him reminisce about his life, his experiences, and his successes. Perhaps we children had all got too jaded by my father’s growing habit of speaking in a monologue rather than inviting an exchange of any kind; we found ourselves almost involuntarily clicking off our minds. But Phil would respond, question, remember, and enjoy. Their blossoming relationship gave both of them great pleasure.