[ applause ] siddhartha mukherjee is a physician the author of the emperor of all mall disand the winner of the 2011 pulitzer prize. to find out more and other policer prize winters go to pulitzer.org. up next on book tv recounts jennet during world war ii. the cook book author and television personality began her service in 1942 as file clerk and was later stationed in india and china. the author recalls the travels as well as the interrogation of paul child on charges of sympathies. this is about 40 minutes.

[ applause ] >> thank you. for venturing on out this rainy spring evening. i think i'm going start off my quoting grouch. >> how do they happen to go behind enemy lines? she didn't but we'll get to that later. the only thing is despite what you may have read this morning in usa today bone appetite was not a secret code. the most common question i get is what on earth brought me to this topic and write about julia child and more to the point how did i know that the popular

french chef of television fame had worked for the first intelligence agency? the truth is i read it in the new york post. i happened to see a headline "secret e recipes of spy" and it reported that julia had been an officer it set up by president roosevelt in the earliest days of the war. it is before today's runner cia. anyway i was in washington at the time and been the fall of 2008. and i was on my book tour for the e regulars which happened to be about a group of british spies. and at that time -- the national archives released a huge cash of previously classified documents. this was a huge haul of papers classified records and it detailed the 24,000 people that had worked for the oss during world war ii. these identified for the poirs

poirs -- identified during the time when it was threatened by nazis and some of these people were notable and the most unlikely possible secret agents. you had among them supreme court justice author goldberg, white sox catcher moe burg. but perhaps the most unusual and notable was the chef julia child. >> now the news that jewel ya had worked for the oss made headlines across the country. everywhere i went people would stop me and ask was she really a spy and where did she go? i didn't note answer to any of their questions soy began doing some research and one thing or another led to the beginning of this book. now, like so many wartime secrets julia child's oss career was really not a secret at all. the basic facts of her

intelligence career could be looked up as easily as the ingredients to quiche. she opened up about her past an talked a bit about her escapades and mentioned a few paragraphs about it in her memoir, my life in france. it was mentioned in movies. and it was in all the obituaries when she died in 2004. but as soon as this huge treasure-trove was released there was a great excitement about the new material that might be on earth and it caused a bit of a stir. afterall the cia held on to these documents for many decades and was very reluctant to release them. it took the former director of the cia to release the records. and they began slowly relesion them in 198 is. these personnel records were the very last batch of papers to be

released. and jewel ya child's 130-page oss personnel file, the classified document gave the details of her dynamic career in the intelligence agency and made for some fascinating reading. >> the first thing that became clear was that contrary to all of those newspaper headlines jewel ya was never actually a spy but she hopes to become one when he unioned the embassy in 1942. she moved to washington and was determined to try and serve her country. she was single -- 30 and unemployed with several failed attempts at a career behind her and looking at a chance to remake her life a chance to do something special. she was the daughter of a well-to-do rancher and graduated from smith and spent most of her time as a social butter fly.

attending parties and having a good time. she was keeping house for her widowed father and living a very sheltered life and a pretty plain person with no skills. she didn't speak any languages and never been out of country other than a day trip to. >> but by 30 they had miserably failed to materialize. still she was tall. she was very athletic and sure she would be a natural for the army or navy reserves. when she was rejecting the firm letters came too tall they stated. [ laughter ] she was bitterly disappointed. she used family connections and got a job at the war department. it was a low level secretary job. it was a typist and loathed it and determined to work like a demon until she got transferred to have the offices of a colonel

william a mysterious new intelligence agency. well one reviewer recently know the the business was like bread and butter to the young julia. she found it exciting and glamorous and loved her brilliant colleagues. she soon found herself assigned to an experimental research project. she was working with a zoologist his name was harold jefferson and nonetheless a descendant of jefferson. they conducted all kinds of bazaar experiments in dedesigning their rescue kits. she was to go every morning for the fresh catch to the markets. she loved her work and felt she had found her niche.

the place she belonged. it was a pretty strange group of people. there were a lot of colorful personalities and had a lean yacht answerth atmosphere of a small liberal arts college. she heard that donovan's idea that the female employee was a cross between a smith graduate, a power's model and a katy gibbs girl. she had all the right qualifications. they made her peer above her reproach. the rumor at the time was that donovan only hired people from the ivy league and that you were less sus september to believe bribes. critics scoffed that it stood for oh so social and oh, so secret. the fact was that the oss did not begin recruiting until all of the services had had their

pick. donovan was forced to scramble to find real talent. building a huge democracy but he knew the specific kill sthas he was working for and had to have someone to make the brains and the street smarts to know when to throw out the rule book and an underdropped sense of fear. of course, these same qualifications could be used to describe any dubious characters. donovan's lack standards meant that all sorts of dangerous people were employed as spies. she began hiring lawyers from his wall street firm as well as prominent attorneys that he knew and he recruited a wide variety of math -- math tigses.

and invent torse. with time being of the essence he simplified by keeping it all within the family if they had a girlfriend or a sister who happened to go to college and had a decent typing speed she would be brought in and promised faster advancement. if she was studying abroad she would get intensive training. she became friends with people who were training to be spies and she was green with envy. one was a woman named jane foster. she was from a wealthy conservative west coast family. she was on adventurous california girl but there the similarity ended. she was widely traveled and had

briefly been married to a dutch diplomat and stationed in java. she was everything that you'll ya felt she was not wildly sophisticated. witty and outrageous bold and darg enough to be good material. joule yap was stuck doing files jane was taking a crash course and learning everything from cryptography to morale operations how to create prop propaganda to demoralize the enemy and create decent. betty had grown up in honolulu and been a young reporter and one of the very first after the pearl harbor attack. she was rekriewsd because of her working knowledge and her wartime experience. she and jane would disappear for

weeks at a time at orientation courses where they learned thousand master a gun and a cult 45. she was desperate to go to france but after 17 years of high school and college french she discovered she couldn't speak a word. so when the word went out that donovan was looking for warm bodies. anybodies to help set up and run a new intelligence bases in india, she immediately volunteered. she didn't care where she went as long as she got to go and there was a man shortage and the newly formed oss was willfully understaffed. i think it's important to remember that when you think about about the oss young about the gorilla operations they get all the glory. young of agents power shoot little behind enemy lines but the fact of the matter is up to

45 a 00 were women, the vast majority spent their time writing reports. collecting and analyzing information. and planning missions. so the fact that many of the oss is very unorthodox activities means that women could be just as equally effective. while they did remain in washington -- helping to support the oss's far-flung missions many went overseas and some went into active operations. but the small percentage that did go overseas like jane -- like julia and betty they carried out their assignments with the same mixture of audacity and ingenuity that was inspired to him and worked for him. julia got her wish and she joined a cob tension that were sent to india but on the month

long boat trip her travel orders were changed and ended up being rerouted because the dashing new supreme commander of combined operations had decided this would be nicer and cooler place for his wartime headquarters. now candy which was a mountain top resort had once been a tea planters oasis was not a post. it was a good thousands miles from the fighting and picture postcard pretty. it has a lake why you can go rowing with your boyfriend. it was put up in a hotel called the queen's hotel. it was run down and overrun with rats and mosquitoes and looked for grand. their office headquarters detachment 404 was housed on an old to tea plantation a little bit out of town and made up of

bamboo huts called bashes but the palm trees and some running between the bungalows made the whole place seem like an eye -- island retreat. she was in charge of the oss registry known as the camp's nerver in and it contained all of their most top-secret documents. the military plans and operations. classified cables from the joint chief of staff in washington. as well as locations of all of the oss missions around the world and the real identities and various code names of the oss agents in the field. it was an important job. it carried grave responsibilities and it came with the highest security clearance. she joked that she developed a twitch from handling such highly sensitive material. so while she was never an operational agent going behind

enemy lines she did become a very able and intelligence officers. which oss staffers referred to as the operational payroll. now chill you would often say later looking back that the war made me. it was her personal and political coming of age. infuser with a new confidence and curiosity about life and it

was where she met her mentor and her soulmate, paul child. and embarked on a life altering romance. julia met paul who designed for rims for the allied generals on the porch of a tea planter's bungalow in ceylon and she was immediately smitten. he was 41, decade older and a head shorter. he was world-weary, but strong and somewhat difficult. his colleagues regarded him as a loner, moody and said set in his ways. not an easy man julia confided to her diary. and artists, paul had started out by skipping college and running off to work as a sailor. yet studied painting and sculpture in paris since oak impeccable french. french. he was a self-taught photographer, black belt at judo,, housebuilder and jack of all trades. he considered himself a connoisseur of the finer things in life, art, food, fashion, poetry, women.

the romance all the prettiest oss officers in their detachment and after his initial advances were rebuffed became the very best of friends with jane foster, who he described in his diary as a wild messy girl always in trouble, always irresponsible. jane have become famous, well infamous overnight in salon for her inspired scheme to release propaganda material encased in silver. her plan was to have a submarine released a little floating rubbers off the coast of malaysia and indonesia and they would float ashore burying their friendly messages of allied support. donovan was skeptical but he gave her the green light. now during the year they were all in salon, jane and paul became inseparable and julia was left to pine for a man who took little notice of her. although it pains her she wrote in her diary that she knew he was not attracted to her and

liked it more worldly bohemian type. she was not running guessing that he could not reciprocate her feelings. paul wrote long letters to his twin brother, charles in which he raved about jane's madcap personality and hilarious wartime escapades. and he would note in passing that julia was a nice girl with good legs. he dismissed her as a grown-up little girl noting that he 31 chile was is inexperienced and overly emotional and a virgin i was busy trying to be brave about being an old maid. not one to give up and salt however julia soldiered on and in early 1945, she and paul were transferred to china while jane stayed behind in salon where she was training native agents and running a subversive radio broadcasts. ceasing her chance julia monopolize paul's attention. she went exploring with him to outbound areas venture into all kinds of back alley chinese guys. and she tried to try to prove

her mettle wright daring to eat exotic delicacies from baby frog legs to pigs knuckles and sweet and sour sauce. now these fees invariably resulted in days and days of dysentery commonly known to oss as the shanghai ships. sorry, can i say that on c-span? anyway by the end of the war, julie was head over heels in love and paul, well, paul was still on the fence. he feared that they were from very different backgrounds and he dreaded meeting her right-wing father. he worried that chile would revert to being a pasadena socialite at the end of the war and he suggested a return to their peacetime lives and see how they liked each other a civilian clothes. so they return to the states and i went their separate ways, paul back to washington and julia to california. she embarked on a mission to win him over. she subscribed to "the washington post" and "the new york times" much to her father's horror so she could read what paul read.

she even took up the novels of henry miller which he found rather x-rated but which paul adored. and she took her first cooking lesson so she could make him a homemade meal when he came to visit. well after six months of the long-distance courtship and increasingly steamy correspondence, paul succumbed to julius charms. he allowed his heart to overrule, his head to overrule his heart and they were married in september of 1946. in 1948, two years later the child's move to paris. paul went to work for you si su too information service which is a branch of the state department and julia continued her cooking lessons at the gordon bleu school. they reconnected with her old friend jane in paris who is a painter and they found her married to a very odd russian man but as paul wrote in his diary that day, jane was just as lazy, hazy, impractical and lovable as she had always been.

the happiness of their reunion was short-lived however as there were also embroiled in the red spy scare. in only a few years after the war, the euphoria of victory had been replaced by new fears about the spread of communism and the cold war. after the fall of china to the reds in 1949, when mao tse tung led the communist and set up the people's republic an increasing number of officials in truman's administration became convinced that communism posed a real threat to america's security. by the end of 1950, spy fever had gripped the country. alger hiss was convicted of perjury. klaus fuchs confessed and julia and ethel rosenberg were arrested on espionage charges. by 1953 after three years of unrelenting media coverage the rosenberg scott the chair. all of this seemed to confer to people's government that they were spies in every nook and corner of washington.

as the journalists richard roby aired once observed, senator joseph mccarthy was a political speculator who found his oil gusher in communism. he kicked off his anti-communist crusade in 1950 with a speech in wheeling west virginia west virginia in which you claim to have had in his hand a list of 205 known communists currently employed in the state department. julia and paul were en route to their new pasta in bonn germany when the book reading and -- works by everyone from daschle hammond to their close friend the journalist teddy white who uncovered china for "time" magazine were banned from the shells of the uss -- you si is library in europe. paul had to take the boots off himself and see they were destroyed. rumors about where mccarthy fear tactics might lead to spread like wildfire. julian paul watch in dismay as one after another of the career foreign service officers they have served within china, among

them some of their very closest friends, were accused of disloyalty and while still others quit in disgust. somehow, mel's between china was now being seen as part of a master criminal plot enabled by a bunch of secret communist within the state department known collectively as the china hem. at the same time, j. edgar hoover, the ambitious head of the fbi, was out to destroy general donovan's reputation to be viewed as a threat to his espionage empire. donovan to protect his former staff started burning the oss records of his former personnel knowing that many of them like jane and paul had been left of center. julia and paul's poignant letters in his period capture their atmosphere of fear and paranoia that permeated their small diplomatic circle. julia considered mccarthy to be a desperate power monger she wrote and believed his vengeful

campaign of innuendo and intimidation was destroying a country that she loved. i am terribly worried about mccarthyism she wrote her friend in 1954. what can i do as an individual? it is frightening. i'm ready to bare my, small size though that they may be, stick my neck out. i want for my back on anyone. will sacrifice cats, cook books, husband finally sell. inevitably, jane foster and paul childs became caught in the buzz saw of mccarthy's red spy hunt. on april 7, 1955, paul received an urgent telegram summoning him to washington. their old friend, the reckless and flamboyant jane foster, was being investigated by the fbi as a russian spy. when she was arrested in paris, the authorities had ransacked her apartment and found paul child's name in her address

book. paul and julia found themselves than in the middle of a terrifying nightmare, full scale investigations, lengthy interrogations and a drawn out dispiriting internal state department loyalty inquiry. friends, family, neighbors and former employers were questioned about paul's past. his communist proclivities, his loose bohemian lifestyle and his latent tendencies. if you want to have some verbal fun, he wrote julia in despair, try to prove to two fbi guys that you aren't a. how do you prove it? julia and paul decided they would not be intimidated and they chose to stand by their friends and their principles no matter what the cost. in the chaotic months to come they would have to endure the shame of being accused as well as the taint of suspicions that paul rightly predicted would always place a black mark on his

name and curtail his career advancement. ultimately, they would also have to come to a very painful decision about whether jane was really a soviet spy or the victim of an overzealous fbi and an unscrupulous double agent. without giving away the whole story, i would like to say that the point of this book was to examine the complex issues that this close-knit group had to face in that controversial historical era. and to explore the intriguing ways that personality becomes destiny and how these two very adventurous california earls who came to be wartime friends and intelligence colleagues came to meet such different faiths. one becoming a beloved american icon and the other ending up at lonely exile. thank you. [applause] do we have any questions?

no questions? great, well, yes? >> how long did it take you to write the book? >> it took probably about three years ago i had done the previous book about the oss, so i had a great deal of material which helped speed up the process and i was very red into the period and the characters, but the last book i did was really from the british side and so this one was more from the american side and it really is based on paul and julia's diaries and letters but there is such a wonderful correspondence between the two that i had a fast and very colorful archive to work with.

[inaudible] >> yes, all the families were very cooperative and in fact some of the families even of minor characters in the book who were oss colleagues of theirs who were on the boat and worked with them in salon and china, people gave me their letters and diaries, so the very vivid descriptions in the book you get a lot of dialogue and you have a lot of scenes that make you feel as though you are were there and the reason is they are drawn from so many diaries. i had so many characters. i limited the number of characters that i named that all of the incidents were true and happened and julia stood out for obvious reasons. her height and her very vivacious personality and jane because she was very outrageous and infamous during her time there. almost everybody had a story to tell an anecdote that they remembered. >> that was my question as well. >> they were from families.

after that, jane foster's family offered me personal letters and her diaries. there is a huge archive that paul and julia childs left to havard. other families also provided me with letters of diaries and then i did an enormous amount of research in the military libraries, and repositories where i found all the telegrams and intelligence reports that they filed, many of julia's memos, jane foster's reports, all of their superiors reports about -- so i could tell you break they were and what they were doing much of the time. they were a broad, and then they all said -- stays as close friends and kept exchanging letters throughout the 50s so even after the war i was able to keep up with them and they were very frank in these letters. they are very moving about their fear of losing their jobs and what is happening to their friends. so you can really get a feeling for the time.

>> during the time of the inquisition in washington, where people sympathetic? were the american people sympathetic to julia child's? is there any wreck of how they responded? >> it was paul and actually because they didn't know what was happening julia was still in your. they were living in germany at the time and he got this telegram summoning him back in the telegram is very day. in fact they thought in the beginning perhaps he was going to be offered a promotion and then when he got there nobody would talk to him, nobody would meet his eyes are tell them what he was doing there. it finally became clear that he was in some sort of serious trouble and then he was pulled then for this very long fbi interrogation that he cabled julia and germany saying, it is koska asked. i don't know what is going to be, me.

that went on for almost a month and then they were able to unite again in paris and that was several more months until he managed to get himself cleared though in fact they continually investigated him for the next year. so it didn't become public in that sense that there weren't headlines about him. in fact the sad thing is hundreds and hundreds of people were under investigation. remember the hollywood 10 had already happen. charlie chaplin had been under investigation for months and had fled to europe. so you have very high-profile people that were under investigation every day and so paul childs did not take the news. julia was not famous yet. she hadn't published her coat hook. they weren't celebrities but their friends on the come that, everybody in the state department knew and it was humiliating and terrifying.

paul rightly predicted that his career would probably not recover from it. >> was paul brought before the committee himself for just by the committee investigators? >> he was subjected to a full loyalty inquiry that was the fbi investigated him. the united united states informn service investigated him, his past going back 10 years on all of that but he wasn't dragged before a senate subcommittee. in the end, even though they thought he was about as liberal as you could get without being a communist, and they thought he was probably a and accuse them of all kinds of other sort of nefarious acts, julia was from a very wealthy right wing family and her probably was one of the early supporters of nixon.

she pulled every string she couldn't washington and he was finally cleared. >> what role did paul play -- what role did paul play in her celebrity? >> that is an interesting question and i can't begin to question to answer. if you look at the arc of their relationship she was really a very insecure, as he put it, inexperienced girl when he met her. and she turned herself inside out to become someone that he would like and admire and perhaps one day love, and so he really and a we became her mentor. he educated her. he shaped her interests, and through that she took up cooking and fell in love with french cuisine. she emerged from all of that a completely different person, a much more confident, outspoken,

really charismatic individual. she really credited him so much without that when she became a celebrity virtually overnight with the publication of her cookbook, she worked on and while he supported her for about 10 years it took, the first coat book and it came out it was an overnight success. she literally stepped from being a nobody into the limelight and becoming a celebrity. it was interesting, she would always use the plural, we. we did this, we did that in referring to herself in paul because i think of the enormous debt of gratitude she felt she owed him. >> how did you get interested in the genre, the historical genre? >> that is a good question. you know i am from a war family. my grandfather james b. conant was the president of havard when

world war ii in the early days of world war ii, and he was appointed by president roosevelt to be one of the men that led the organization of the manhattan project and the development of the bomb. so i grew up in the far east and in cambridge surrounded by wartime scientists and politicians and the men that led the war effort. so i think i got hooked on war stories at an early age. i got hooked on war movies at an early age and it just stuck. >> what other books have you written? >> i wrote a book about, call tuxedo park and that was about a group of physicists who congregated in a secret laboratory in tuxedo park, new york and began experimenting with radar and ultimately they would lead the wartime project that developed all of the radar systems that helped win the war in europe. then i wrote a book about the

development of the bomb in los alamos called -- and then i wrote a book about redish buys and the development of the oss and that was called the irregulars. so you can sort of see it. the lady in pink, yeah. >> what happened to jane? >> i can't tell you that. you have to read the book. but i'm glad you are curious. you have to find out. [laughter] any other questions? yes, sir. >> after these investigations were over, did they have that her feelings with the u.s.? >> i think that is one of the things that is very nice about the book. book. you see different people's reactions. betty mcdonald went through this

whole process as well. it back she was married to their boss in salon and he helped donovan burns, the fbi,, burned papers of the oss personnel before the fbi to could come and get them. but she, as well as julia and paul never became bitter about the u.s.. they were very bitter about that period and they really hated mccarthy, but they stayed very optimistic in the ability of people to learn and change, and after all they all returned to the united states and lived very happily in the united states from 1960 on. so they weren't bitter about that but they did have very sad and complicated feelings about the 1950s even though that is when a so much good happened to julia and her career. she would always have very mixed feelings about that period of time.

>> how helpful was the government and giving you the information or unhelpful? >> well, you don't want to say unhelpful. that is kind of an active term. they make it hard for you. i had to order all the oss documents and for almost every character in the book the fbi files are gone now, jane foster's fbi file is more than 65,000 pages. it if you can imagine. as you get further in the book you will meet a number of other characters whose fbi files or longer. so, you get these papers is sort of packets of 200 at a time. every time you need to request them coming need to doublecheck and you need to wait and it takes three months.

it is just a very arduous process to go through what we call the foia request, the freedom of information act. takes the patience of a saint and you don't get everything. when you do get the fbi files, they are redacted. a lot is blacked out. whole sections are whited out. then you can go through a whole nother set of appeals to argue that they should give you those papers. so it is a never-ending process. i've a feeling i'm going to be receiving fbi files on paul and jane for years to come. i hope i don't find anything shocking. yes. >> since they were such letter writers, to julia or paul ever write a letter to mccarthy? >> no. not that i know of. it is always possible but i wouldn't think so because they pretty much hated him from the beginning and it only got worse. they wrote an awful lot of letters about him though.

there are just reams and reams of sort of angry -- against him in the letters and diaries and it is actually just fascinating to read how it darkens from the 1940s to the hollywood 10 when they watched all of that persecution of the artists and directors and actors in hollywood and then he moved. you see their fear and anxiety eat the stand it is really, it is really compelling. thank you all so much for coming to this. [applause] >> i would like to weigh in on this. you are talking about fundamental confusions.

if you think about what a warrior is, a warrior is a person who first of all, chooses a side, the warrior clearly knows that these are my people and those are my enemies and he will risk his life and limb to use violence to try and stop the people who are trying to do violence against his people. that is a warrior. a policeman will also risked life and limb but they cannot choose sides. they have to be on the side of the law. if a policeman chooses sides, it is called corruption. we have fundamentally confused the role of warriors with the role of police and we have put warriors who are trained to oppose another side into a

situation to act as policeman where there is no agreed-upon law. they have to be on the side of the law. if you go to the state pen in any state in this union the people who are inside will tell you if you say well is it bad to kill or against the law to steal? ian they all agree. there is an agreement on law. we have put people who are trained as warriors into a situation where there is no agreement. well, you know it is perfectly justifiable to cut a woman's ears off if she is humiliated her husband in some way. oh, which lie retailing with? the second thing is if you have policeman who are trained, they are generally more of a -- mature. infantrymen are young. would you take a 19-year-old then send them to a troubled neighborhood in medford stuyvesant with another mattock weapon? it is not likely he is going to do a very good job. you sent him to go up against the enemy and he clearly knows

who they are, he will do a magnificent job. that is with 19-year-olds do. if we don't get over this fundamental confusion we are going to be finding ourselves in situations time and time again where we are putting people who are trained one way into a role that has none of the requirements to make their role successful. clarity of purpose in battle is a real force multiplier. in the middle of matterhorn you have this devastating moment when a u.s. officer suddenly realizes and begins worrying over the fact that the north vietnamese army units army units that he is opposing are infused with a sense of purpose and mission and you offer this devastating observation. you write for the americans the clarity was a thing of the past. the marines seem to be killing people with no objective beyond the killing itself that left a hollow feeling that mulvaney tried to ignore by doing his job which was killing people. and the cycle of