Vice President Wallace too shared many of these views, as did Roosevelt himself. But the pro-Communist, Russian-speaking Wallace was much more frank and open about airing anti-imperial opinions than was his more secretive and unpredictable boss. Thus he became an object of profound suspicion for the British—particularly given the frequent scares about the president’s own health. Halifax described the prospect that the eccentric Iowan agronomist might overnight become the occupant of the Oval Office as “horrid,”15 while Stephenson was well aware that a lot of BSC’s freedom of maneuver came from its close relationship with Roosevelt. For him too, a radical in the White House would be a disaster. Both men were consequently delighted to discover that they had a tailor-made mole to hand in the person of their rambunctious new assistant air attaché. Not only did Roald Dahl play tennis and talk politics with the vice president—often until late into the night—he was even distantly related to him through his Norwegian Wallace ancestry. Thus, even if Stephenson had played no part in his initial appointment to Washington, Dahl’s unexpected friendship with the vice president made it well nigh impossible for him to avoid being drawn into the secretive Canadian’s undercover games.
One of Wallace’s closest associates was another buccaneer: Charles Marsh, a self-made newspaper magnate, who had been born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1887. Beginning as a rookie reporter in Muskogee, Oklahoma, in 1909, Marsh built up a press empire that stretched from Fargo in North Dakota to Massachusetts in the East and Florida in the South. At its zenith, there was hardly a state of the union in which his companies, General Newspapers and Newspapers Inc., did not have an interest, but the focus of his business empire was Texas. A passionate Democrat, whose own desire for the public stage had been thwarted by his brash personality and erratic personal life, Marsh had become content with the role of éminence grise and kingmaker. Yet he was far from self-effacing. He was tall, broad-shouldered and oafishly opinionated: a “smooth talker,” as one former business partner described him,16 who “walked like a bear,”17 and whose restless blue eyes and strong bald dome of a head reminded Lady Bird Johnson of a Roman emperor.18 He was loud, irreverent, egotistical and coarse: an “idealist,”19 in Dahl’s eyes, who played a mean hand of poker, struck a good business deal, entertained lavishly and possessed a well-developed sense of the absurd. He also had a keen eye for talent, a kind heart, and the resources to support his hunches. Marsh was one of the first to back Lyndon Johnson’s political career, and even though Johnson would go on to cuckold his mentor, a mutual friend would later write that Charles continued to love Lyndon “like a son.”20 Marsh was similarly drawn to the irreverent young British air attaché and, almost in no time at all, Roald Dahl became another of his surrogate sons.
Initially, Marsh’s interest was professional. His strong pro-interventionist views gave him good reason to cultivate Dahl and, as Roald himself later recalled, it was politics that first brought them together:
Charles Marsh was a Texan newspaper proprietor. He bought and sold newspapers as though they were cigarette cards. He was a fervent FDR Democrat and although the party valued his ideas and advice, they all kept their distance because somehow or other he frightened them. All, that is, except Henry Wallace, who used to visit Marsh’s house in Washington almost every evening when Wallace was Vice-President. Marsh was not all that sympathetic to Wallace’s left-wing ideas, but he used him as a channel into the White House.21
Marsh longed to enter the president’s inner circle, but Roosevelt regarded him as too much of a wild card and kept him distant. Indeed, Dahl once bluntly told his friend that “the Great White Indian Chief”—as he nicknamed Roosevelt—thought of him merely as “a man who owns a few newspapers.”22 Consequently, Marsh was forced to rely on others—Dahl among them—to let him know how Roosevelt’s mind was working.
Despite the fact that Marsh was almost thirty years older than Dahl, their rapport was easy and instantaneous. As Marsh’s daughter Antoinette Haskell remembers, Roald very quickly became “family.”23 She sensed that at first her father had felt sorry for the young airman, who seemed to have so few British friends, but sympathy soon grew into a profound appreciation for those qualities that set Dahl apart from his embassy colleagues: his imagination, his reflectiveness, his creativity and his madcap sense of humor. Antoinette also felt that Roald was looking for a strong male role model and that her father fit the bill perfectly. It was a remarkable friendship. Roald quickly became her father’s “favorite court jester”24 and soon the two of them were “as close as father and son,” while Antoinette herself quickly came to view the lanky Norwegian ex-pilot almost as a brother.25 Forty years later, Dahl would touchingly describe Marsh as his “best friend in the world.”26
With Marsh, Dahl could joke and indulge his imaginative flights of fancy. He did not need to mince his words and be diplomatic. They were “braggarts together,” as Antoinette described it, “iconoclasts” and “fantasists,” who played practical jokes that were “elaborate” but also “sometimes cruel.”27 Under the names of Roald Gordon and Mr. C. Bell Ball, for example, they wrote a series of long-winded letters to a preposterous Californian mystic called Dr. Edmund J. Dingle, who dubbed himself “Preceptor Emeritus of the Institute of Mental Physics.” Apparently treating his philosophy with the utmost seriousness, the two men pushed to the limits of absurdity Dr. Dingle’s professed belief that his patented breathing techniques, learned in the high mountains of Tibet, could prolong human life by up to forty years. But Lord Halifax was the most frequent target of their jests. For two years Roald sent fictitious letters to Marsh’s home which he addressed to his friend’s nonexistent brother, Stanley. Each was written on embassy notepaper, apparently signed by the ambassador and elaborately sealed with the official red wax. In these, the straitlaced Viscount Halifax, whom Churchill had dubbed “The Holy Fox,” voiced his concerns about Marsh’s subversive political opinions and confided that he had engaged various agents to gather intelligence on him, including the master of disguise Hermann Horstwessel, the inscrutable Hiruto Hirototo Hiroto, Martin “The Blimp” Levy, and a “negro servant of immense intelligence and knowledge who is known as Mr. Clinton, but whose real name is Ambrose Chickenlooper.” Special Agent Chickenlooper was charged with investigation of Marsh’s relationship with the radical Vice President Schweinhogger. “You will understand how important I consider his information to be,” Dahl wrote, parodying Halifax’s snobbery, “when I tell you that in spite of the colour of his skin and in spite of the fact that he is neither of the peerage nor descended from a royal house, I still receive him in the privacy of my study.”28
The tone of this correspondence was enthusiastically disrespectful throughout and filled with scurrilous and lewd gossip about almost everyone in their social circle—whether friend or foe. In some letters, Halifax enthusiastically catalogued his imaginary sexual conquests, and in others Marsh mocked his own secretary and future wife Claudia Haines, describing her as a “martinet” and a cruel, decisive woman.29 Claudia, of course, was in on the joke too. She typed all Charles’s letters. It was innocent, absurd banter: two men letting off steam to each other. But for Roald there was an element of danger in these games. Had he been discovered, he would probably have lost his job. That sense of risk seems to have been part of what made the friendship with Marsh so powerful. “They were lethal together,” Antoinette explained. “They were dangerous.”30 One day, Roald took his mentor to visit the British Embassy. “First he tried to shake hands with the messenger at the door, who refused, because he thought he was crazy. Then he poked his head into all the rooms along the corridor and generally had a lot of fun,” Roald told a friend. “I wouldn’t like to have him around in the Embassy for more than half an hour on end,” he concluded. “There would be a riot.”31 With his colorful sense of the absurd and his taste for debunking pomposity, Marsh was surely a model (if one were needed) for the “geriatric child” Dahl himself would later become.
Marsh also left his mark
on Dahl as a philanthropist. In 1947, he would sell many of his newspaper titles and found the Public Welfare Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving how people live that remains one of the most active organizations of its kind in America. Marsh espoused the virtue of being an anonymous giver and often boasted that he intended to die broke, having given all of his money away. But while his charitable giving could be comprehensive and global, it often had a very human face. At the Salzburg Festival of 1937, he had befriended a young Austrian pianist and composer called Erich Leinsdorf. The following year Leinsdorf was conducting at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, when Marsh discovered his application to renew his visa had been refused. It seemed Leinsdorf, a Jew, would have to return to a country that had just enthusiastically embraced Nazism. Marsh helped him out, prevailing upon his friend the Texas congressman Lyndon Johnson to pull strings on Leinsdorf’s behalf and enable his visa to be extended. Leinsdorf would go on to become a naturalized American and one of the most significant conductors of his day. It was a typical act of kindness in a man who believed strongly in spreading his money around and using it for the good of others.
Marsh also possessed a sense of the fuzzy dividing line between fantasy and reality that in some respects went beyond Dahl’s. Never was this more clearly demonstrated than in the late 1930s, when he embarked on an affair with Alice Glass, a twenty-year-old girl from a small town in Texas, and decided to divorce his first wife, Leona. According to his friend Ralph Ingersoll, he first of all stymied his furious wife’s plans to prosecute him under the Mann Act by walking into her lawyer’s office and announcing that he would not deny his offenses. However, he added, he would also publicly tell the court that the reason he was leaving his wife was because he could not “get a hard on” when in bed with her.32 During the proceedings, Alice got pregnant. Determined that she should keep the child, Charles devised an ingenious plan to ensure the baby was regarded as legitimate. A few weeks later, as soon as she was of age, Alice was dispatched to England “on holiday,” where she wrote to her parents that she had fallen in love with an English soldier by the name of Major Manners and married him at once, because his regiment was soon to be posted to India. Manners even gallantly journeyed all the way from the Himalayas to South Texas to present himself in person to his bride’s family and friends.
A few weeks later, her parents received another letter. It contained both good news and bad. The good news was that their daughter was pregnant. The bad news was that her husband was dead. He had, she claimed, been killed by bandits in a border skirmish. Eighteen months later, ostensibly as a widow, and with a small child in tow, she returned to America, where she was swept off her feet by the newly divorced Marsh, who promptly married her and adopted Alice’s child, Diana, as his own. The whole episode was in fact an elaborate charade: a fabrication scripted and directed by Marsh in order to make sure that his own child would appear legitimate to the rest of the world. “Major Manners” was a male model. Marsh had spotted him in a clothing advertisement and subsequently hired him to play the role he required.33
By the time Dahl met him in 1943, Marsh had been married to Alice for two years and that marriage too was failing. Now in his late fifties, Marsh had begun to sell some of his newspaper titles so that he could spend more time dabbling in philosophy, politics and philanthropy. He held court both in Washington and at Longlea, his rambling brick mock Tudor mansion near Culpeper, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in West Virginia, some 60 miles from Washington. Perched on a small hill high above the Hazel River, Longlea had a luxurious freshwater swimming pool, a superb wine cellar and was staffed with a gourmet cook. Dahl described it to his mother as “the most lovely house I’ve ever seen.”34 Creekmore Fath, a young Texas lawyer and another White House insider who became a protégé of Marsh’s, remembered it as “one of the best restaurants in town,” a place where everybody came to gossip.35 However, Marsh’s daughter Diana recalled that it was not “a Noël Coward sort of a place.” The guests were “mostly Texas friends and cronies, not the smart set.”36 Roald loved it there, “doing tricks and playing crazy practical jokes,”37 although he was equally happy in Marsh’s Washington home at the foot of Embassy Row, which Antoinette Haskell recalled as absolutely “jumping with newspapermen and politicians … all very glamorous and hush-hush.”38 Stretched out on the sofa there in his RAF uniform, Roald would trade stories with his host and with Henry Wallace, burning the midnight oil and bringing what Ralph Ingersoll described as a “cocky British grace”39 to their conversation. “You could sit at Charles’s house and hear more of what was going on than you’d hear practically any other place in town,” reminisced Fath. “I’m afraid we weren’t brought up properly as to how to keep secrets.”40 Dahl himself was more realistic about the nature of what was discussed. “Marsh loved it because he got a bit of gossip and he felt closer to FDR,” he recollected. “Of course he never got close to FDR. He got very close to Wallace.”41
It was after one of these conversations with Wallace that Marsh handed Dahl a sheaf of papers to read. Entitled Our Job in the Pacific, it was a discussion document on postwar American foreign policy, which Wallace had drafted and which he had left behind for Marsh’s comments. To Marsh it all seemed pretty innocuous, but as Dahl scanned the pages of this plan to “emancipate” large parts of the British Empire and thereby ensure an American monopoly of civil aviation, he realized he was looking at information that not only made his own hair “stand on end”42 but would doubtless do the same to Bill Stephenson’s.
Wallace had left the typescript with Marsh. Marsh in his political naivety handed it to me that evening for comments. I saw immediately its importance from the British point of view and excused myself saying that I was going downstairs to read it. I quickly phoned the only contact I knew in BSC and told him to meet me on the road outside Marsh’s house fast. I handed the pamphlet through the car window and told him he must be back with it in fifteen minutes. The man buzzed off to the BSC Washington offices and duly returned the pamphlet to me on the dot. I returned it to Marsh without comment.43
Dahl, as Wallace himself noted, was “very much excited”44 by what he had read. He had already been keeping “pretty careful tabs” on Wallace’s “communistic leanings,” reporting them back to BSC as and when he saw fit.45 But the pamphlet had little to do with Wallace’s socialism. It merely revealed a truth that was obvious to American analysts, but which the British found much harder to swallow: namely, that it was in the U.S. national interest to encourage “an orderly process of transition” among the Asian countries from “colonial subject” states to ones that were free and independent.46 Dahl, however, saw it in more melodramatic terms. For him it was evidence of treachery: of one ally plotting, as it were, to do down the other after the war was over. And he was not alone in this perception. His timely action in copying the report brought him not only into direct written communication with William Stephenson for the first time, but also to the attention of Churchill himself, who received a copy of the report and was apparently stirred “to cataclysms of wrath” by what he read.47¶
When Our Job in the Pacific was eventually published in 1944, there was an official complaint from Lord Halifax to Secretary of State Cordell Hull about Wallace’s “regrettable” statements. Hull, who had little time for Wallace and his utopian pronouncements, reportedly dismissed the pamphlet as “bunk” or “junk.”48 Dahl, however, told Marsh indignantly that the situation was “very serious” and that he thought it likely Churchill would “ask the President to get a new Vice President.” Marsh, not surprisingly, thought his friend was overreacting. “Don’t be a child. Grow up,” he told Roald. “Don’t you know that the most certain way to be sure Wallace will continue to be vice-president is for the word to get around that Churchill is against him?”49 Wallace’s position was nevertheless becoming increasingly precarious. Despite his power base among blue-collar workers and the unions, his political influence was in decline. A yea
r earlier, in July 1943, Roald had told his mother about another “rumpus” between Wallace and the president: “Wallace has temporarily lost his prestige, but I think he is on the way up the ladder—not down it, as so many people seem to think.”50 He was wrong. In both disputes between Wallace and other senior figures in the administration—with Cordell Hull in 1942 and Secretary of Commerce Jesse Jones in 1943—Roosevelt sided against his vice president. Isaiah Berlin read the runes correctly when, in September 1943, he described Wallace as a “distinct political embarrassment to the President.”51
Wallace himself remained unswervingly loyal to Roosevelt, but he had become an easy target for William Stephenson, who—largely thanks to Dahl’s intervention—was now confirmed in his view that the vice president was a “menace,”52 and redoubled his efforts to persuade Roosevelt to drop him from his reelection ticket. His efforts were rewarded when, in the spring of 1944, Roosevelt sent Wallace on a fifty-one-day tour of Russia and China and, in his absence, dumped him from the ticket. In making this decision, the president was probably much more influenced by Wallace’s enemies within the Democratic Party than he was by the wiles of Bill Stephenson. The leaking of Our Job in the Pacific probably made little or no difference to his decision. Yet, as Wallace’s diaries record, Dahl remained close to him throughout these plots, playing tennis with him when his health allowed it, and discussing politics, music and art. It must have been difficult for Dahl, who had admitted neither to Marsh nor Wallace that he had connections with BSC. Though he disagreed with him on many issues, he still admired Wallace’s idealism, yet he knew his own actions were helping covertly to undermine him. In a clash of loyalties between his friends and his country, he had sided with the latter. As a reward, Dahl was “seconded into the periphery of BSC,”53 and shortly afterwards promoted to squadron leader.
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