SCOOPS AND SCUTTLEBUTT OF A BRITISH CORRESPONDENT

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-00418R000100170006-8
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 10, 2012
• Sequence Number: 6
• Publication Date: January 26, 1989
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

ILI Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/10: CIA-RDP99-00418R000100170006-8
Books of 2%e Times
Scoops and Scuttlebutt ofa
British Correspondent
The Washington Post
The New York Times
CZZ
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
Special Relationships
A Foreign Correspondent's
Memoirs From
Roosevelt to Reagan
By Henry Brandon
Illustrated. 436 pages. Atheneum. $24.95.
What impresses the reader most
forcefully about Henry Brandon's
memoirs is the extraordinary way
they knit together the intimate and
the public. Mr. Brandon, who was
from 1949 until 1983 the chief Amer-
ican correspondent for The Sunday
Times of London, describes his book
somewhat blandly as "a personal
memoir set against the broad-brush
canvas of history." But this gives far
too little credit to the remarkable na-
ture of the juxtaposition.
Take a small vignette, one of many
dozens that make his pages sparkle.
He is describing the social life in
Washington during the earlier years
of his assignment. He remembers the
rival salons run by the eminent col-
umnists Walter Lippmann and Jo-
seph Alsop. Evenings at the Alsops
were more combative on the whole,
Mr. Brandon recalls, but Mr. Lipp-
mann didn't always intervene when a
tough question was posed to one of his
guests.
one evening in 1956, "just before
the Suez crisis. when Nasser was al-
ready causing a great deal of annoy-
ance," someone asked Alien es
then Director 07 Central intelligence,
whether he had thou t o si lithe y
"doing away with" Egyptian
leader. Mr. Dulles puffed on his pipe
01 while and then said that of
course he had considered the idea,
"but the trouble is that we have no fa-
natics on our side and to undertake
such an operation, you have to find a
man willing to take his life instantly if
caught."
Or, on a larger scale, take Mr.
Brandon's account of the Cuban mis-
sile crisis. For him it begins when, on
a working visit to Havana in October
1962, he happened to discover on his
own, through what he modestly dis-
misses as "an extraordinary fluke of
good luck," that Cuba possessed
medium-range missiles that were
being manned by Russians.
?
This potential scoop was denied
him by the actual onset of what he un-
derstandably calls "the most serious
crisis of the thermonuclear age be-
tween the United States and the
Soviet Union." So he has a good rea-
son for describing the crisis itself
from the broader perspective of an
objective bystander. It is only at its
conclusion that he gets personal
again: "When on Sunday (October
28) McGeorge Bundy's secretary
called me to say that our regular
early morning tennis game, which in-
cluded Bundy, Walt Rostow and John
McNaughton - like Paul Nitze, an
assistant secretaPy for international
affairs at the Pentagon - would be
resumed on Monday, I knew the crisis
was virtually over."
By such an irresistible narrative
technique, Mr. Brandon not only suc-
ceeds in giving us close-up glimpses
of the major players who stepped
onto the stage of history from the end
of World War 11 up to the present. But
he also describes the big events, and
pronounces balanced, succinct judg-
ment on them, whether they pertain
to the waxing and waning of the Cold
War, the passing of the torch of lead-
ership from Britain to the United
States, or the extent to which the post-
war era really has represented a Pax
Americana.
Here's how to write history! one
wants to exclaim. How simple it is to
make great events bewitching. But
then on second thought: it isn't at all
simple. For it is not given to many
major players on the stage of history
to be able to describe themselves
with such wit and perspective. And it
is not given to many reporters to have
known so intimately so many major
players.
So what was it about Henry Bran-
don? Why was it that when he wrote
to Edmund Wilson asking for an in-
terview, he received in response the
writer's famous printed postcard list-
ing all the literary services Mr. Wil-
son habitually refused to perform, but
he got it tucked inside an envelope ac-
companied by a note explaining that
despite an oath Mr. Wilson had sworn
never to grant an interview, he was
going to make an exception in this
case and would Mr. Brandon please
come and see him at his home in Tal-
cottville, N.Y.?
The Washington Times
The Wall Street Journal
The Christian Science Monitor
New York Daily News
USA Today
The Chicago Tribune
Date _ 2(o cl
SGt1
?
Was it the prestige of The Sunday
Times that opened Such doors to Mr.
Brandon? Was it his personal reputa-
tion? Or was it rampant anglophilia,
even though Mr. Brandon happens to
be Czechoslovakian by origin? One
suspects that it was a little of each,
but that something more important
was involved - something that is
quite evident in the pages of "Special
Relationships."
Though he complains about not,
finding the right questions for Ed-
mund Wilson, and though he quotes a
letter to James Thurber in which Mr.
Wilson in turn complained that Mr.
Brandon "kept asking me questions
about books - a kind of thing that
bores me, especially when I haven't
read the books ...," it is nevertheless
apparent that he usually did ask good
questions of his subjects, and that he
made good use of the answers they
gave. This seems to have engendered
trust. One can see it spreading among
the people he worked with, inducing
them in turn to confide in him and
even seek his advice, whether they
are editors, ambassadors, secre-
taries of state or even Presidents and
Prime Ministers. One can feel it
growing in oneself.
By his title, "Special Relation-
ships," Mr. Brandon means any num-
ber of obvious things - from Eng-
land's longstanding bond with Amer-
ica, so severely tested during the era
on which he reports, to the extraordi-
nary friendships he made in his
Washington years with such figures
as Dean Acheson, John F. Kennedy,
Anthony Eden, Henry Kissinger; the
list is endless.
But unintentionally his title also
refers to the links he forges between
his subject and his readers. In a rela-
tionship that in other memoirs is too
often marred by long-winded valedic-
tory egotism, he avoids all self-con-
gratulation. He charms us and coaxes
our confidence, and makes of us his
rapt admirers.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/10: CIA-RDP99-00418R000100170006-8