By Patricia H. Kushlis
Choosing the right title for Conant’s latest book A Covert affair: Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS must have been a challenge and I’m not sure that a better title, or at least a more accurate one, could not have been found. This one's catchy and it's not a misnomer but here’s the problem: a substantial amount of the book is not about the Childs.
The book also has little to do with a covert affair if- that is - Conant is referring to the Childs’ own relationship. This was openly known and previously disclosed elsewhere. They met in Ceylon, dated in Chungking, China and married shortly after the war ended in the US but anyone who has read about or was aquainted with this remarkable couple already knew that - although pieces of information in Conant’s book based on recently declassified documents are new. And it is an easy read.
Nevertheless, this book is certainly not just about the relatively short time the Childs spent in the OSS during World War II. It spans a much longer period.
Rather, A Covert Affair is as much about the life of an intriguing, larger-than-life but little known woman whom the Childs had befriended– first in Ceylon when and where all three worked for the OSS and then later in Paris: Paul Childs as head of exhibits at the US Embassy, his wife Julia as chef-in-training, and this mysterious woman friend pursuing an artistic career – and who knows what else.
Jane Foster
The mystery woman’s name was Jane Foster. The only child of a wealthy San Francisco doctor and director of Cutter Laboratories, Foster was the ultimate rebel despite or perhaps because of her sheltered upbringing in the family’s apartment in San Francisco’s glitzy Fairmont Hotel and then as a student at Mills College, the West Coast equivalent of the Seven Sisters.
An aside: Conant describes Mills as a school “where the rich sent their daughters” but it was not only for the children of the wealthy. Both my aunt and mother graduated from there several years before Foster. Their middle class family worked hard to make ends meet – including paying Mills tuition for two - but they studied there nevertheless.
Paul Child's European adventure
After the OSS folded, Paul Child was offered a job with the State Department as an exhibits officer at the US Embassy in Paris. When State’s overseas information arm became the US Information Agency in 1953, Paul joined USIA.
That Paul Child was suddenly summoned back from Bonn in 1954 where he ran the high profile exhibits office at the US Embassy to be subjected to interrogation by two special agents, W.H. Sullivan and A. W. Sanders, then ensconced in U.S. Information Agency Headquarters to ferret out Communists in this allied State Department agency may well have been because of the Childs’ friendship with Jane.
But the Childs never knew for sure – although more recently declassified documents that Jennet Conant used indicate that Jane had been a Communist and likely a KGB agent although she apparently never provided the Soviets with information they couldn’t have found in the media or through other open sources.
McCarthy Era Goon Squads on the Lam
Neither Paul nor Julia Child were then or had ever been Communists although they were far from the stalwart right wing, rock-ribbed Republicans that McCarthy would like to have seen in America’s foreign policy establishment and representing the US abroad. In April 1953, well prior to Paul Child’s inquisition in Washington, two McCarthy goons, Roy Cohn and David Shine, had gone on a fishing expedition to the US Information Service operation in Paris as a part of a larger European junket that included America Houses throughout Germany. One goal was to identify books by Communists in the library collection, but Ann Davis, the feisty American librarian in Paris refused to let them in.
The word of these encounters travelled throughout the Agency and the Department. Cohn and Shine's activities did put a pall over USIA library acquisitions – for a time.
In the end, the Cohn and Schine book witch-hunt inspired caper identified exactly 39 copies of 25 books by 8 authors from the millions of books in USIS Libraries worldwide that met the “subversive” criteria test in a costly-fireworks-for-the-media display of right-wing petulance which should have been doused even before the first match was lit.
According to Wilson P. Dizard, Jr. in his 2004 book Inventing Public Diplomacy, most of the 25 targeted books were hold-overs from World War II days: out-of-date descriptions of cosy US-Soviet relations. These, of course, should have been ditched several years prior to Cohn and Shine's Parisian visit.
After Paul Child’s humiliating encounter with the two “gum shoe” boys during which time they accused him of being a homosexual - perhaps because the Childs had no children – or perhaps because McCarthy’s acolytes couldn’t make the Communist label stick so they thought they’d try something else, he was left alone. But promotions weren’t forthcoming and after a final assignment to Norway as Cultural Affairs Officer, he retired from the US government and went on to help launch Julia as America’s most famous French chef.
Clearly, his experience in organizing and staging military briefings for the US Command in Chungking during World War II and developing and implementing large and very popular American exhibitions throughout Europe under the Eisenhower administration’s mandate helped Child develop the expertise useful for promoting his wife’s career upon their return to the US. In short, Paul Childs took the skills he had honed at the US government’s expense and made excellent use of them in “retirement” by helping Julia launch her tremendously successful and multi-media friendly culinary career.
Jane's misfortunes
Jane Foster’s story was not so happy and it did not end up well. Between college and the OSS she had lived in New York. While there she had associated with well-heeled Communists and likely joined the Party. She had also lived in Indonesia as a Dutch planters’ wife where she had essentially gone native – learned Indonesian and associated with Indonesians – not with the European wives of the other planters – as had been expected of her. That marriage was short-lived. Her second and also troubled marriage to George Zlatovski, a Polish Communist, lasted much longer – but her association with the Communist Party resulted in her exile to Paris in the 1950s, the loss of her passport, her father’s continuing anxiety over her well-being and his steadfast financial and emotional support throughout many trying years.
Jane had joined the OSS because the US government was desperately short of Indonesian experts at a time, she needed a job and the US government badly needed her expertise – and” Wild” Bill Donovan, the founder and head of the OSS, didn’t care about his staff’s political affiliations. Besides, the US and the Soviet Union were then allied in their goal to defeat the Nazis and the Japanese. It was only after the end of World War II that the anti-Red Scare became the flavor of the decade and McCarthy’s methods in pursuit of his quarry ultimately caused far more trouble and ill-will than had he just left well enough alone.
McCarthy and the China hands
It also cost him his Senate seat but not until he had wrecked the careers of far too many innocent people and deprived the US government of its best experts on China simply because they had called the events in China’s civil war as they saw them. The problem was their reporting did not favor Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang. State’s China hands were, as events unfolded, right. But being right does not necessarily advance a Foreign Service career. This case was just another tragic example of right-wing ideological fervor run amok and trumping American national security interests as a result.
Ironically, it was years later when another McCarthy acolyte, the Red-baiting Richard Nixon, turned the tables as President, finally calling a spade-a-spade, made a surprise visit to China in 1972 and began normalization of US-Chinese relations. In retrospect, this was perhaps Nixon’s greatest accomplishment. Too bad he was never forced to apologize to those he had earlier thrown under the bus in pursuit of his own venal political ambitions.
In the end, Conant’s book brings to life – through three outsized personalities - a piece of nearly forgotten American history that too many would like to keep on the closet’s back shelf. Obviously, Reds were far from under almost any American bed or tucked away in corners of either the State Department or USIA. History suggests that Alger Hiss turned out to be the only outlier - but the damage to US national security from Soviet moles within either government organization was apparently confined to this single individual. Besides, his "revelations" didn’t amount to much.
The pressing issue Covert Affair raises, however, is why this fear-clothed, ultra-rightwing over-reaction succeeded for as long as it did destroying and humiliating so many innocent people in the process. For that alone, this book is worth the read.
Jennet, Conant, A Covert Affair: Julia and Paul Child in the OSS, New York: Simon a& Schuster, 2011, 394 pages.