Jennet Conant - A Covert Affair: Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS

ALSO BY JENNET CONANT

The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington

109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos

Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II

Simon & Schuster
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Copyright 2011 by Jennet Conant

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition April 2011

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Photo credits appear on page 397.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Conant, Jennet.

A covert affair: Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS / Jennet Conant1st Simon & Schuster hardcover ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Child, Julia. 2. Child, Paul, 19021994. 3. World War, 19391945Secret serviceUnited States. 4. United States. Office of Strategic ServicesBiography. 5. Intelligence officersUnited StatesBiography. 6. Child, JuliaHomes and hauntsEurope. 7. Child, Paul, 19021994Homes and hauntsEurope. 8. McCarthy, Joseph, 19081957. 9. Anti-communist movementsUnited StatesHistory20th century. 10. United StatesPolitics and government19451954. I. Title.

D810.S8 C3863 2011
940.54'85092273dc22 2011002875

ISBN 978-1-4391-6352-8
ISBN 978-1-4391-6850-9 (ebook)

To Betty

for all her stories

Thanks to the human heart by which we live ,

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears ,

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

William Wordsworth

A COVERT AFFAIR

It started with the arrival of a telegram. Ever since the war, the thin slip of a letter had become permanently fixed in peoples minds as a harbinger of death and disaster. Why Julia believed for one moment that it would be good news she could not recalljust that she had been so sure. The cable, which reached them in Bonn on Thursday, April 7, 1955, was addressed to her husband, Paul Child. The cursory message took the form of an urgent summons to Washington: FOR CONSULTATION.

Julia had been over the moon. She knew exactly why Paul was being called stateside. They were going to make him She had even told him as much, her voice brimming with confidence and pride. Incapable of containing her excitement, she had been ready to celebrate then and there. It was silly of her, but characteristic, too. She had gone on happily speculating about the telegram the rest of the evening. Paul had eventually gotten caught up in her mood, his reluctant, mock impatience giving way to anticipation. This, at last, was his promotion, long deserved and long overdue. Then again, when had the State Department ever done anything in a timely fashion?

and Wooden-head the Second, or WH1 and WH2 for short) Paul was finally going to get his due. Perhaps he would get to run his own show or, at the very least, be allowed to pick the members of his own team. There were few things more demoralizing, in Julias opinion, than working for people you dont admire.

It was just the morale boost they both needed. Six months earlier, Julia and Paul had been forced to leave their beloved France and, crueler still, an adorable apartment in the old port city of Marseille, because of an inane government decree that a diplomatic post in any given country could not exceed a period of four years. The three years they had spent in Paris directly after the war, followed by a fifteen-month stint on the southern coast, meant they had exceeded the limit. They had no choice but to pack up and go where they were told.

The transfer to Bonn could not have come at a worse time. Julia had been in the midst of testing recipes for a French cookbook she was contracted to write for the Boston publisher Houghton Mifflin with two fellow gourmands she had met in Paris. She knew that the new assignment for Paul not only would take her farther from her collaborators, but would remove her from the country in whose cuisine she should be immersing herself. As difficult as it had been for her to box up her kitchen in Marsailles, Julia understood that the move was infinitely harder on Paul. He had spent his formative years in France, and the language had become second nature to him, as had the internecine squabbling of the locals. The country had captured his heart long before it had taken hold of hers.

Leaving Paris for Marseilles had been a wrenching experience, but it was nothing compared to the jolt that Julia and Paul experienced upon learning they were being posted to Bonn. Paul was fluent in a number of languages, but German was not one of them. It was a poor use of his skills, and he was beside himself. While he had long since reconciled himself to the fact that few things in their government agency followed the dictates of logic, this yank of the chain was particularly galling. Julia could think of nothing to say to cheer him up. She had never set foot in Germany and was

Their first glimpse of their new home did nothing to lift their spirits. Still, there were plenty of opportunities for escape. Pauls Foreign Service salary enabled them to live well, especially as the dollar was strong against the mark. Whenever possible, they fled across the river to Bonn, a picturesque university town that had been occupied by American troops toward the end of the war and had somehow managed to survive relatively unscathed, its medieval battlements and grand boulevards still redolent of Old World charm. There they could sample the solid regional fare, the sauerbratens and sausages, inevitably served with groaning plates of potato pancakes. Afterward, too full to go far, they would stop to recover at one of the pavement cafs along the banks of the river.

Julia and Paul, like most in their seasoned diplomatic circle, had always been guilty of a certain disdain for GI culture, but what had once been mild distaste had over time developed into a visceral aversion. They wanted no part of the martial fervor that arose in the shadow of the Soviet threat in East Germany. Bonn, the makeshift capital, seemed by virtue of its very impermanence to bring out the worst in its American occupiers, who were so conflicted about their objectives in the divided region that they appeared to be almost paralyzed. Caught between the menacing Soviet Union and Western Europes fears of military vulnerability, Bonn was emblematic of the tenuous peace, and of the uncertain prospects for American forces and American dollars to achieve a united capitalist postwar Europe to deter the spread of Communism. and, in its confusion and excess of caution, was substituting dogma for policy and the official line for serious thought.