excellent layered and oral history that they did. in melvin, it was who john kennedy bought i had. . if you did it wrong. so laird's positions and how he did it and how he related to the president's and that's why certain things happen the wi they did dear during, his xhi testimony the ar war, but the way the nixon administration went about doing that had a lot to do with the character of

melvin laird who, by the way, played a very important role in water date and not only nixon and convincing him to yield the tapes in 1973 and '74, but also with gerald ford. >> i've got time for one por. >> my name's mark kellar and i'm at cal-state fullerton. we've been asking similar questions and i'll try again a different way. could we have one of the how and what with would it took hook? >> that issa way to approach it. diddis innon, kissinger and laird other ands believe the war could be won. z we have to be won. they did not believe it could be won militarily and this san important point to remember when

blame is thrown at others for losing the war. they did not believe that by 1968 and '69. they or eventually it was at the end of the interval. >> i would say the worry was not punable of. please join me in thanking this excellent panel for sharing theiren sights with us. and thankal of you for yr cag ren chem bell, meredith scott. here's i new website for american history of it where you can watch the videos of upcoming projects and aa tweet social media from face book, at twoer

and four and online at c-span.org/history. before he won a pulitzer prize for his write, world war i veteran and author ernest hemingway served as a spay for the iz, mill he speaks about the larger than previously acknowledged impact of hemming weigh's espionage to the war and his connection to the soviet union. this is about 1:20. >> well, good morning. welcome back. it was a lovely day. i think it's been a great series.

[ applause ] >> thank you. and you're a great crowd, by the way. you're here and on time. we don't always have that. so this morning will be the last of our series, if you would be kind to our speaker, if you could turn off your cell phones. it can help with the am mrifcation, and what we have at the museum. you can put yourself on the e-mail list, get an e-mail blast and we put out a communique every three months on the programs that were coming and that would include things like the smithsonian service. that's you not to -- we have

this celebrity spy and celebrity spice are always controversial because the way oui used this term and as you know from the galleries as either people who worked in intelligence and later became celebrities like julia child or someone who was, in fact, a celebrity and used that to conduct espionage like the ballplayer mo burn. hemingway is a different finish, if i can say that. at this point i don't have a good handle on hemingway's intelligence activity, and i think our speaker does, and i think he has a surprising insight into, and some of the earlier activities and i leave that to nick to bring that to your attention. nick is our speaker. nick reynold, it was an intelligence on mill hare historian with a pair shape of

ox ft. oxford at the sent history and it works on ass which they'd done an exhibit on and he's still funkictioning there. he's been in charge of history for the marine corps and has several books to his credit and one on marine operations in the second gulf war and also he has done a book on german resistance to hitler in world war ii which was an interesting speck rum. we're delighted to have you here. we' please join me to welcome him. >> thank you, party. and thank you all for coming out to hear my story. what i'm going talk about as

peter told you is the hemingway family and intelligence in world war ii. my thesis is that the hemingway family was involved in intelligence to a greater extent than has previously been acknowledged. this was something that they liked to do and they, in this case is ernest himself and his brother lester and his son john or bumby, and they thought they were very good at it. i'm going to tell you that the results are a little bit of a mixed bag. i'm also going tell you that there were surprising players whose role hasn't been acknowledged and i would say it's a dramatic story, but there are not dramatic results. all right. by way of background, i think a lot of you probably already know

this, but i would like to cover it quickly and that's the oss, america's wartime intelligence agency that existed from 1942 to 1945. it was run by a gentleman named wild bill donovan. a republican lawyer and world war i hero from new york. while bill was not all of the republican lawyers in new york, he had a pretty big tent and welcomed a lot of people into that tent from various persuasions. he started off with people like himself, a lot of rich and prominent people and then he brought in the best and the brightest. he brought in academics and he brought in adventurers and brought in artists so it was quite a crowd at the end of the day and oss, and the official

name was the special services, and the office of strategic oh, so, social or so, so, socialist. ernest could have been under oh, so social or oh, so socialist. so the first character when i was researching the subject for the cia museum i looked at the -- i looked for special stories and interesting stories of people associated with oss, and i came across the fact that hemingway's son jack was a member of oss and he's a fully paid up member of oss and not a celebrity spy and not much special treatment and he put on the uniform and submitted to the discipline. jack, some of you will know if

you're a hemingway aficionado. he's in a movable feast. he is mr. bumby and hemingway's firstborn, and that's what you see here. you see him in paris for hemingway in 1925 and grows up in france, learns french pretty well arne the french country side. by the time of world war ii, he's taller than his brothers and he's draft age. he's in and out of college in the beginning of the war and eventually joins the army and no special treatment, he becomes an m.p. officer and it's probable not something that he would have picked and he certainly would not have picked the m.p. b battalion in which he wound up which was a battalion of black m.p.s. i don't think this was racist, but this was not a coveted

assignment. he made the best of this and he made off with mostly africa so you're enforcing out speeding and that sort of thing and bum owe by, there has to go more to war than enforcing these kinds of regulations. so he gets invited to a party, a highly social, vent in north africa at the home of a brit named dove cooper and then he meets randolph churchel, that's winston's son. he is a hanful. he was a handful for winston and fought with him for a lot of occasions and he successfully worked his way into british special ops. he just kind of showed up and

goes off on a long-range desert group and he goes into occupied yugoslavia. so bumby hears this story and he thinks this is a very interesting way to spend your time with the war. i wonder if we have anything like this, if you're an m.p., second lieu lute and looking to enjoy the intelligence organization, and one day in algeria he goes to a camp and he makes his rounds looking to enforce various regulations and this camp is nondescript. it's a fabulous mess hall and the food is head and above any other u.s. army food. >> what's going on here? why is this so good? this unit has a french chef. they do not have -- he says how do i join?

>> he says do know the french country size side and it turned, this is the spring summer of 1966. the, on the ss is dropping people into europe and bumby is given a pretty stark choice. you can either go on the next mission which is a really exciting mission called region etoile and it would drop in the south of france and we don't have to send you to jump school and a pare chutist before you go. do you want to jump for the first time in your life into combat and the other choice is well, you can wait, take the training and something will show up later on. lisa's no, no, i'll go now. so he gets on this mission and he has one concern, a very

hemingw hemingway, he won't go without his fly rod, reel and tackle box. there he is loaded up for the war and he's the go the fly rod in one hand ask they a british dispatch officer that doesn't want to let him on the airplane with a fly rod and bumby says this is communications equipment, this is an antenna cleverly disguised as a fly rod. he i and he talks about the fly rod, he's got the fly rod in the string so he lowers it on the ground and it won't him him and possibly break. so jumper and fly rod are unscathed and able to continue the mission. the mission is basically a

quintessential oss mission and designed to find what fortifications are in the area and so forth and it's also to work with the french underground to get them reading on the same sheet of music as theal plied forces and not doing things that the allies and the uniformed allies are uncomfortable with. so bumby does a pretty good job with this. he fits in well and makes a comfortable and another remming -- and a jrma know patrol comes by. he's wearing sort of a nondiscrypt insignia uniform, the american flag in one shoulder. lucky for him the germans walking by see the other

shoulder and that i say something in german, probably not complimentary and laugh and walk on. bumby's luck does run ought in he's in a fire fight, severely wound him. they don't realize he's a hemingway. he runs into the boyfriend of the former manny from the period he was going up with sxem separated, 19 lib and ges evaluated, at least at that time he he is making decisions about onward a sewnments and bumby says i want to go to asia. the war is still going there. let me have a crack at the

japanese and oss says okay. we'll get you ready for that. the evaluation officer writes that john hemingway has been through a lot. he's acquitted himself well and he's quite mature for his age. he has good social skills. so he's under 25. he's not that old. he's a good operations sxrof then they add, not very reflective. so this was, if you think about the elements of this evaluation, it's really kind of -- by hemingway's family values, it's really a pretty good evaluation and ernest himself might have been happy to have it. some of you will remember that ernest was wounded? world war i and he was reflective and it bothered him enormously for years. anyway, he was very proud about what she'd done and graged about

his service in oss. to flush out bumby's ridiculous i went to one of my favorite places which is the national archives. when i was a grad student i could hang out here and now you have to go to college park. all of them are available for a researcher to look at which is a remarkable thing if you stop and think about what other intelligence service in a country that has recently been conquered can you go in and see virtually all the files? anyway, so, i'm looking actually for bumby and ernest, but i stumble across lester and that's ernest's brother and he's closer in age to bumby and he's a chip off the old block. he's a survivalist and lives in the woods by himself. he's a hunter and fisherman.

he loves boating and sales the caribbean in this boat with one other guy. a really a kind of homemade outward bound trip. and then around 1939 the -- britain's in the war and the u.s. is not yet in the war and he's down in the hemingway family, ernest is living in key west with his second wife and there will be a quiz on this and which one affected the u.s. intelligence the most. so he's living with his second wife pauline in key west and he's an obituary of sloppy joes and there he meets a british adventurer and he jenkinson is a fellow writer and he's looking for someone to go with him to

find nazis in the, and they have put a bad idea by the way and supports it. they get a sloop called the blue stream and here we see ernest on the blue stream. ernest is in the middle. lester's on the right. that's martha gelhorn, to be wife number three. not yet wife number three. to be wife number three with them on the boat. so they go off, the boat's outfitted. here's another shot of the same. when i first looked at the shot, it was much smaller and i thought only lester had an adult beverage. but in the blowup here you see that ernest and martha have adult beverages as well. so they cruise around the caribbean. they are looking for places where nazi submarines might

refuel and might have come up -- might have enlisted the inhabitants of the area to run these places and stockpile oil supplies, what not. they think they have found a lot and they write various reports. one of the reports goes to the office of naval intelligence. another one goes, gets disseminated in the highly secret publication known as "reader's digest." so at the end of the day here, you have got lester thinking that he's a -- he's got a lot to offer in field of intelligence. he goes unbeknownst to his brother, he shows up here in washington and he tries to join oss. he walks in the front door, he talks about his adventure in the caribbean. he says, you know, i'm your guy. i can do this stuff. oss kind of likes him. and they evaluate him more or

less independently of his brother and say, you know, let's just look at lester on the merits. and he gets -- the processing of the application is surprisingly like processing for the u.s. government now. and they fill out some of the same forms, same questions, security background, medical exam. psychological exam and so forth. and at the end, they're ready to make lester a job offer. then this big hand reaches up from cuba and the job offer goes poof. and as far as i can reconstruct, what happened was ernest thought that this was not a good idea, ernest made some phone calls. then he wrote a couple of letters to lester and he criticized -- he's really pretty harsh on lester. he says, you know, what you did in the caribbean was good, but it wasn't that good. your navigation skills are good, but you didn't engage the enemy.

besides -- and then at one point he also says it was 98% imagination and kid stuff what you and tony did. oni the office of naval intelligence agrees, and there's a scathing letter in his file from an admiral and oni stating we know mr. hemingway and we are not impressed by his skills. so poor lester is left in washington. as i say, ernest scotched it. ernest wanted him to stay and take care of his wife and kids. he's about 25, so one -- only one wife. and two kids. and he stays here in washington at least until 1944 working at the fcc. all right. so now we're actually going to get to ernest's story. and this is the story that pretty much takes all the air

out of the room. i think the story -- i think bumby's story and lester's great are both great. and they had a lot of adventure, more than many of us will experience in a lifetime. but ernest is going to go one better. no what's going to have the most excellent adventure of anybody in the family or social circle. and this is one that to a surprising extent is focused on intelligence operations in one way or another. and this is even though ernest doesn't take his own advice. he's married and has two wives and two kids -- three if you count bumby. but two small kids to worry about. it's interesting to note, that for about a six-year period he

puts his writing career on hold. he's off doing the intel tasks and following the war rather than sticking to his writing. so when we encounter ernest in the war, he is living in cuba. he kind of goes to a different place every time he switches wives. so pauline, poor pauline is in key west. gorgeous house. and then he moves to -- he takes up with martha and they move to cuba and martha pretty much averages for him to buy and live in this gorgeous place, which is 10 or 15 miles outside havana. what do they -- anyway, here's a shot of martha. martha is said to have been a stunningly attractive woman. i don't think the pictures capture that. i think it was her presence that made people say that.

anyway, ernest liked her a lot. their relationship goes back to the spanish civil war. so what do they do in cuba? okay, ernest even though he didn't do a lot of writing in cuba, he did a lot of reading. you see him at the finka with one of his books. and another major hemingway pastime is drinking. and here he -- here's a post-war shot in havana showing them entertaining visiting big wigs. that's the fourth wife by the way, that's mary welsh. okay. when you're sober enough, you go fishing. and ernest of course is always looking to catch the biggest fish and literally and figuratively make the biggest splash. fishing occurs on this gorgeous boat called the pilar.

the pilar was built in brooklyn, new york, in the 1930s. ernest at this point is already quite well off from his writings. and so he has a boat built for himself and here she is. she's quite something. ernest fancies himself the master mariner. here he is at the wheel. the gentleman on the right was the inspiration for the old man and the sea. ernest loves to go fishing with guns. not just rods. and there's all kinds of firearms. this is even before the war. all kinds of firearms on the pilar. here he is pretty much -- this is probably mid to late '30s. i think that's a thompson submarine gun, although i can't tell because he's aiming it straight at me. all right. so erinest -- ernest has a remarkable circle of friends and acquaintances in havana.

he has barmen and prostitutes, sailors, hunters, writers, artists, high-lie player, bull fighters. athletes of various other sorts. and then some government officials and senior diplomats. they're actually kind of in a -- they're in kind of a contingency category in ernest's life. ernest's default setting is not to like government officials of any kind. whether they're american or foreign government officials. his attitude is to shake hands and be civil but walk away. he will make exceptions when they prove himself to him. this happens at the american embassy in havana in 1942.

the ambassador there is a man named braden, yale graduate. he's a boxer. ernest wants to go boxing with him and the ambassador is smart enough to not go boxing with ernest. braden -- he's my frame, 5'10". yet, he's said to have been very nimble on his feet and a great tango dancer. he's got a young man working for him named robert joyce. another yale graduate. it's kind of unconventional guy for the foreign service. he believes in getting the mission done and doesn't worry that much about the form of the mission. so he goes around havana, he makes friends, stays out late nights. he gets the kind of scoop that a good political officer needs to come up with. but he doesn't always show up at work on time. so he might stroll in