Tales from the attic: Things my father never told me

 Sam Smith - After war broke out, my father, who had worked for the New Deal from almost the beginning and was then over 40, went to work for the Foreign Economic Administration in Dakar, buying things West Africa needed and buying from West Africa things the military needed such as fats and oils. Richard Saltonstall in a chapter on my father in Pilgrimages, wrote that he "conducted extremely high-level and sensitive business missions for the government, including the purchase of the fuel oil that got Patton's tanks rolling again across Germany." In a letter of recommendation in 1945, the Army's Adjutant General, James Ulio, said my father  had purchased $20 million in commodities for the U.S. Army, the equivalent about about $240 million in 2010. Among them: 90,000 Swiss watches.

Lawrence Smith also carried a noncombatant certificate which said that if captured he was to be treated as a field grade officer (major to colonel).

Nearly a quarter century after my father's death, I was tinkering with an old family desk that I knew had several hidden compartments. A piece of wood suddenly moved and I found myself staring at a small cache of typewritten letters between my parents in the last year of the war.

On March 2, 1945 my father wrote my mother from Bern. He described catching an 8:29 am train to Zurich: "There I talked three hours to the head, or one of the heads, of the Swiss National Bank, named Mr. Hirs and then took the train back here."

Then:

Tuesday I go to Paris probably - if so with the Currie Mission on their train. I come back in a day or two. No gestapo follows me, except possible the Swiss, for they have a wonderful one.

And at the end:

Tell mother that there are plenty of Swiss spies but not German and no female spies. I haven't time for them either.

Then on March 14:

Paris is cold and damp. We left in two 2 1/2 ton six wheel trucks and a jeep with six soldiers, all with guns to protect the load on the way back. . . German tanks and trucks burned up, and turned over off the road, wooden repairs to iron and steel bridges, German prisoners marching off to work, a warning by an MP that two German parachutists had dropped, a railroad locomotive off the bridge and beside the road. . . factories and oil plants destroyed. . .

Author's father on the way from Paris to Bern in March 1945. At his right is his driver carrying a pistol. He wrote home: “We had six tommy guns and plenty of ammunition.”

The photo of my father and the soldiers continued to puzzle me, especially since it was accompanied by another showing a Swiss moving van backed up to one of the Army trucks. Then in 2009, I was having some art appraised and in the course of a conversation with the appraiser's assistant, who also happened to be a member of an OSS history group. I recounted the story of my father's strange journey and other WWII materials I had found. She said, "It sounds like he might have been part of Operation Safehaven."

She took my materials to an OSS history group meeting and came back with a note from one of its oldest members: "It appears that Mr. Smith was indeed a member of the Safehaven mission."

My father had never used the phrase, there had never been a hint of any connection with OSS, but the more I investigated, the more it seemed that I had discovered something deliberately hidden all these years.

Operation Safehaven was a secret World War II project aimed at recovering stolen and hoarded Nazi gold, art and other valuables.  In the course of my research I came across an OSS summary stating that Safehaven's purpose was "above all, to deny Germany the capacity to start another war." A CIA report calls this purpose its "overriding goal."

The Safehaven operation was started by the Foreign Economic Administration, for which my father was working. But, while inventing the project, the FEA soon found itself over its head and called on the OSS for help. In classic government tradition the two agencies apparently alternately cooperated and competed. The State and Treasury departments' involvement helped to make it even more complicated.

The Currie Mission, with which my father was also involved in some manner, was headed by Laughlin Currie, head of the Foreign Economic Administration. According to one account, "In early 1945, Currie headed a tripartite (U.S., British, and French) mission to Bern to persuade the Swiss to freeze Nazi bank balances and stop further shipments of German supplies through Switzerland to the Italian front."

That was the trip my father had taken. The Currie Mission, according to the National Holocaust Museum, reached an agreement with Switzerland to stop cloaking enemy assets, gold purchases from Germany, assist in the restoration of looted property, and conduct a census of German assets in Switzerland. It adds that Switzerland "reneged on commitments."

Two weeks earlier, my father had "talked three hours to the head, or one of the heads, of the Swiss National Bank, named Mr. Hirs." Mr. Hirs, it turns out, was only the deputy head, of whom David Sanger of the NY Times would write decades later:

When the war ended, the Swiss offered a series of backtracking explanations of their behavior [with Nazi loot] . . When bank records or intelligence reports surfaced, it turned to legalistic defenses, arguing that under the rules of occupation the Nazis had clear title to anything they looted from central banks.

Lengthy negotiations were held in Washington over this prickly subject. A particularly duplicitous deputy head of the Swiss National Bank, Alfred Hirs, blurted out to the Americans, ''Do you want to take 500 million Swiss francs of gold'' -- worth roughly $1.25 billion today -- ''and ruin my bank?'' It was a telling moment, because until his outburst the Swiss had not acknowledged holding anywhere near that much looted gold.

The record of my father's role in all this remains blurred. He was a serious art collector and art was one of the things the Nazi had looted. He had also held a high position in the Justice Department so he was used to keeping his mouth shut.

In fact, according to one news account, Operation Safehaven didn't even become publicly known until the mid-nineties, two decades after my father's death.

In 1997, Stuart Eizenstat compiled a report for the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence. In it, citing two countries in which my father operated, he wrote;

The overriding goal of Safehaven was to make it impossible for Germany to start another war. Its immediate goals were to force those neutrals trading with Nazi Germany into compliance with the regulations imposed by the Allied economic blockade and to identify the points of clandestine German economic penetration. . .

It is quite clear that Safehaven planners had a good idea of what they wanted to achieve, but it also is apparent that they did not have the slightest idea of how to do it. Although it was evident from the outset that Safehaven would be primarily an intelligence-gathering problem, it does not appear to have occurred to anyone to consult the intelligence services, which were excluded from the planning and implementation of Safehaven until the end of November 1944. Bureaucratic rivalries predominated. Indeed, Safehaven was nearly destroyed by internecine quarrels among the FEA, State, and Treasury, each of which wanted to control the program and to exclude the other two from any participation. 

The decision was finally taken to invite the formal participation of the OSS. Once the OSS was brought into the Safehaven fold, all the advantages of a centralized intelligence organization were brought to bear. . .

In Nazi Europe, neutral Switzerland carried out business as usual, providing the international banking channels that facilitated the transfer of gold, currencies, and commodities between nations. Always heavily dependent on Swiss cooperation to pay for imports, the Reich became even more so as the ultimate defeat of the National Socialist regime became obvious and neutrals grew more wary of cooperating with the Axis belligerents. . .

In this critical situation, the Swiss banks acted as clearinghouses whereby German gold--much of which was looted from occupied countries--could be converted to a more suitable medium of exchange. An intercepted Swiss diplomatic cable shows how, allegedly without inquiring as to its origin, the Swiss National Bank helped the German Reichsbank convert some $15 million in (probably) looted Dutch gold into liquid assets. . .

Fortuitously, the restoration of access to Switzerland through France in November 1944 made it possible for the first X-2 operative in Switzerland to enter the country by the end of the year. By January 1945, X-2 was up and running in Switzerland, and by April it was able to provide OSS Washington with an extensive summary of Nazi gold and currency transfers arranged via Switzerland through most of the war. . .

Despite its liberal democratic traditions, Sweden was Nazi Germany's largest trading partner during the war and almost the sole source of high-grade iron ore and precision ball bearings for the German war machine. . .

Another CIA report states:

Within the OSS, Safehaven fell largely under the aegis of the Secret Intelligence Branch, responsible for the gathering of intelligence from clandestine sources inside neutral and German-occupied Europe. But the unique character of Safehaven, which was both an attempt to prevent the postwar German economic penetration of foreign economies and an intelligence-gathering operation, meant that the OSS counterintelligence branch, X-2, also had an important role to play.

In view of the Monuments Men movie, my curiosity about my father’s role in all of this has been reignited.

The story, which was kept secret  a long time, remains extremely complicated and involved a number of agencies including Foreign Economic Administration, the OSS, the Treasury Department, the Army, and the Roberts Commission.

The Roberts Commission was chaired by Owen Roberts, who helped to found the law firm where my father had been employed before joining the New Deal. At one point, my father says he worked for Roberts, but looking at Robert’s bio, this could have only have been for a few months, if he was referring to his work as a lawyer. As a Robert’s biography notes:

In 1930 Roberts returned to his private practice but only for a few months, as President Herbert Hoover soon appointed him to the Supreme Court of the United States

The other period to which my father might have been referring was when he was with the FEA, working with the Roberts Commission. One account describes this commission thusly:

The Roberts Commission was established in 1943 to consolidate earlier efforts on a national basis with the US Army to help protect Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives in war zones. The commission ran until 1946, when its activities were consolidated into the State Department.

Elsewhere:

The name “Monuments Men” was shortened from the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section of the Roberts Commission, a group approved by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1943 and headed by Supreme Court Justice Owen J. Roberts.

Here’s what the National Archives has to say about the relationship between the Roberts Commission and the FEA:

The Commission also assisted the U.S. Foreign Economic Administration in writing and disseminating an extensive report on Nazi art looting and collecting in the spring and summer of 1945. The Roberts Commission cooperated with various agencies to prevent looted art from being used to fund a postwar Nazi state.

And

The Economic Security Division also cooperated with the American Commission and  with the Office of Strategic Services and the Foreign Economic Administration in the investigation of individual cases of suspicious art transactions in the western hemisphere.

My father was a key official in the FEA at that time in Switzerland – center of much investigatory concern.  But he also went to Sweden, another neutral country in which many dubious things were happening or suspected to have happened.

The commission’s own report states:

RELATION TO THE FOREIGN ECO­NOMIC ADMINISTRATION: Because of its concern with over enemy economic activities, the For­eign Economic Administration participated in the setting up of controls over the exportation of art objects from Europe.  The Enemy Branch, Blockade Division of the Foreign Economic Administration, prepared in May 1945 an extensive report on enemy art looting in Europe and art collecting by enemy nationals in tile western hemisphere…

Because much of the material was of necessity based on unevalu­ated evidence, it was necessary to revise the Foreign Economic Administration report in August 1945 in the .light of later evidence… Since this report contains citations of cases still under investiga­tion it is, of necessity, classified as "Secret" and is not available for distribution.

At least one of the ,Monuments Men also was working for the FEA. From his bio:

Merrill joined the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1942 as assistant to the Navy liaison officer to the Board of Economic Warfare. In 1945 he transferred to the Foreign Economic Administration, assigned to the headquarters of the United States European Theater in Frankfurt. That same year he was recruited to assist with preparation and shipment of 202 German-owned paintings to Washington for safekeeping…. The paintings arrived at the National Gallery on December 8, 1945. They remained there in storage until 1948, when they began an exhibition tour of thirteen American museums.

Add to this the fact that my father had been significantly involved in the arts before the war - e.g. with the American Federation of Arts - and after the war was deeply involved with UNESCO, which took as one of its concerns how to prevent what the Nazis did from happening again, and this strange story starts to make sense.

The Trump legal problem

 Sam Smith – One problem I have with the current Trump controversies is that we have lawyers in charge. Communities, churches, politics, and social values seem to have no say which is too bad because if you want someone to live a good life going to lawyers is not often the best solution.  Lawyers are there to stop people from doing bad things but to create good values and a better society they’re not the best place to go.

While there’s no easy solution to this, a good place to start is to recognize the limits of law on our behavior. In Trump’s case, he’s clearly violated decent human values but stands a chance to get away with this thanks to the limits of the law. 

Journalism: What good old days?

From our overstocked archives 

Sam Smith, 1998 - Some journalists would have us believe that there was a time -- before Drudge and the Internet -- when journalism was a honorable activity in which no one went looking for a restroom without first asking directions from at least two sources (unless, of course, one of the sources was a government official), in which every word was checked for fairness, and in which nothing made the print without being thoroughly verified. There may have been such a time but it wasn't, for example, on January 20, 1925, when the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial declaring that:

A newspaper is a private enterprise, owing nothing whatever to the public, which grants it no franchise. It is therefore affected with no public interest. It is emphatically the property of the owner who is selling a manufactured product at his own risk.

Nor was it a decade or so later when a Washington correspondent admitted:

Policy orders? I never get them; but I don't need them. The make-up of the paper is a policy order. . I can tell what they want by watching the play they give to my stories.

Nor when George Seldes testified before the National Labor Relations Board on behalf of the Newspaper Guild which was then trying to organize the New York Times. The managing editor of the Times came up to Seldes afterwards and said, "Well, George, I guess your name will never again be mentioned in the Times."

Nor when William Randolph Hearst, according to his biographer David Nasaw, "sent undercover reporters onto the nation's campuses to identify the 'pinko academics' who were aiding and abetting the 'communistic' New Deal. During the election campaign of 1936, he accused Roosevelt of being Stalin's chosen candidate."

There was, too be sure, a better side, including those who hewed to the standard described recently by William Safire in a talk at Harvard:

I hold that what used to be the crime of sedition -- the deliberate bringing of the government into disrepute, the divisive undermining of public confidence in our leaders, the outrageous assaulting of our most revered institutions -- is a glorious part of the American democratic heritage.

In either case, though, Adam Goodheart, of Civilization magazine, wrote recently:

Journalism didn't truly become a respectable profession until after World War II, when political journalism came to be dominated by a few big newspapers, networks and news services. These outlets cultivated an impartiality that, in a market with few rivals, makes sense. They also cultivated the myth that the American press had always (with a few deplorable exceptions, of course) been a model of decorum. But it wasn't this sort of press that the framers of the Bill of Rights set out to protect. It was, rather, a press that called Washington an incompetent, Adams a tyrant and Jefferson a fornicator. And it was that rambunctious sort of press that, in contrast to the more genteel European periodicals of the day, came to be seen as proof of America's republican vitality.

In the late 1930s a survey asked Washington journalists for their reaction to the following statement:

It is almost impossible to be objective. You read your paper, notice its editorials, get praised for some stories and criticized for others. You 'sense policy' and are psychologically driven to slant the stories accordingly.

Sixty percent of the respondents agreed. Today's journalists are taught instead to perpetuate a lie: that through alleged professional mysteries you can achieve an objectivity that not even a Graham, Murdoch, or Turner can sway. Well, most of the time it doesn't work, if for no other reason than in the end someone else picks what gets covered and how the paper is laid out.

There were other differences 60 years ago. Nearly 40% of the Washington correspondents surveyed were born in towns of less than 2500 population, and only 16% came from towns of 100,000 or more. One third of Washington correspondents, the cream of the trade, lacked a college degree in 1937. Even when I entered journalism in the 1950s, over half of all reporters in the country still had less than a college degree.

In truth the days for which some yearn never existed. What did exist was much more competition in the news industry. If you didn't like the Washington Post, for example, you could read the Times Herald, the Daily News or the Star.

By the 1980s, most of what Americans saw, read, or heard was controlled by fewer than two dozen corporations. By the 1990s just five corporations controlled all or part of 26 cable channels. Some 75% of all dailies are now in the hands of chains and just four of these chains own 21% of all the country's daily papers.

Today's diuretic discourse over journalistic values largely reflects an attempt to justify the unjustifiable, namely the rapid decline of independent sources of information and the monopolization of the vaunted "market place of ideas.".

The basic rules of good journalism in any time are fairly simple: tell the story right, tell it well and, in the words of the late New Yorker editor, Harold Ross, "if you can't be funny, be interesting."

The idea that the journalist is engaged in a professional procedure like surgery or a lawsuit leads to little but tedium, distortion, and delusion. Far better to risk imperfection than to have quality so carefully controlled that only banality and official truths are permitted.

In the end journalism tends to be either an art or just one more technocratic mechanism for restraining, ritualizing, and ultimately destroying thought and reality.

If it is the latter, the media will take its polls and all it will hear is its own echo. If it is the former, the journalist listens for truth rather than to rules -- and reality, democracy, and decency are all better for it.

Eternal fundamentals of leadership

Sam Smith, 2011 - I have been trying to understand the eternal fundamentals of leadership according those who see government and non-profits as badly in need of corporate principles. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far.

 
Fire, don’t inspire

Test, don’t teach

Statistics are just another form of adjective. Use them at will

Treat everyone – including citizens, patients, students, teachers, and volunteers – as corporate employees.

With enough public relations, personal relations aren’t necessary.

Internal organization is far more important than external programs

Statistical margins of error don’t apply when numbers improve. Acceptable progress need only be a decimal point away.

Dismantle, don’t build

Civility reflects inability

Reserve all creativity for budgets and annual reports.

The liberal virtue standard: words rather than action

 Sam Smith – Although your editor graduated from Harvard magna cum probation, I do feel compelled to say a word on behalf of that college’s president who is currently under attack for committing the current greatest liberal sin: saying something the wrong way. As the son of a man who worked for the Roosevelt administration and helped to end 69 years of GOP rule in Philadelphia back in the 1940s, I have a sense of how liberalism has changed as its forces have become better educated. Central to this change has been a decline in effective politics and a rising emphasis on the proper verbal perspective.

One of the ways I became aware of this was living most of my life in DC, about four decades of which in a city that was majority black. It was here I I learned that if you wanted to bring cultures together you didn’t just say things, you found things to work together on in common. In the case of DC that included home rule, statehood, and the most successful anti-freeway fight anywhere. In the latter example, an early protest meeting I covered included two speakers: one from the overwhelmingly white Georgetown neighborhood and a black guy who headed something called Niggers Incorporated. I early sensed we were going to win.  And in my fifty year friendship with Marion Barry he called me everything from a “cynical cat” to a “son of a bitch” but we could still find common ground on which to act.

Now we find liberals arguing over whether four college presidents said the right things about Jews and Israel when testifying on Capitol Hill. One has already resigned.  Yet their topic wasn’t Zionism or anti-Semitism but the actual things that were happening in and around Gaza. If you want, for example, to see how complex the word Zionism is check Wikipedia for it and for “Anti-Zionism.” But if you want to to deal with the current crisis, you won’t find the answer in the right definition.

If you’re the president of a university you have to deal with a lot of language junkies but if you want to create change you have to come up with actual actions and projects that appeal even to those who don’t have the right words.  The current liberal crisis is due in no small part to being unable to speak to, and converse with, those  who don’t share elite language. As my high school math teacher used to say, “Speaka United States."

 

The hidden power of us

 Sam Smith – Last May I wrote about a discovery that deer in the field behind our house had made for me:

We live next to a Maine field that is periodically used by up to a dozen deer. Watching them and thinking about their lives has taught me something about my own: namely humans are the only animal species on earth that allows fellow creatures outside of their close environment to tell them what to do.  Name another species of over 300 million beings that permits a president and a congress to make major decisions for them. The absence of a good answer may help to explain why things aren’t working better these days.  Meanwhile, 30 million other deer in North America have no idea or authority about what the deer in our field are up to.

Of course, there are no deer that build houses, plant fields, provide schools, or deal with cancer. But at the same time there is no Fox News that lies to foxes. And as George Orwell noted, “Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.”

The problem is that we are taught, and come to accept and admire, the achievements of humans without adequate discussion and analysis of the price we pay for them. In other words, living into one’s 70s or 80s with cable TV is wonderful, but having Trump-like creatures abuse our time is far the other way.

There’s another price we pay for it, namely a decline in the very institutions that keep us human despite the failures of nations, corporations, media and artificial intelligence. These include families, neighborhoods, schools, churches, gatherings and communities. 

Thus, for example, in our discussions of how  to deal with Trump we rely in affecting the large institutions that largely control us as opposed to the less obvious powers we possess as humans living with other humans. If, however, you look at examples of positive change, they often come not from manipulating the huge but by alliances of the weak.  Consider the civil rights movement, women’s rights or ecological reform. In each case it was community action that got things going, not the reform of the grand.

Yet we increasingly rely on institutional America, despite the fact that these grand formations typically lack the values and standards that you find in these antiquated places called communities. Consider, for example, how we increasingly rely on legal institutions to establish our moral requirements, replacing churches, schools, families and neighborhoods.

There was once another important factor: community alliances built on goals, not ethnicity, religion or other things that still divide us. For example, in DC for over four decades there was a black majority in the city yet strong cross ethnic alliances were formed to take on  issues like freeways, urban planning, home rule and statehood.

But that was almost six decades ago and these days action is assumed to be grand – just like the government or corporations that fail us. We forget that a huge amount of change in the past has come from the bottom up.

When I moved to Maine full time fourteen years ago, I was interviewed by a local journalist, to whom I described a part of my motivation:

Since he’s been back, Smith said he’s seen things in Maine that have perhaps made him less cynical. A few years ago, when a Freeport lobsterman was injured in an accident, he said, “Within a few days, all the lobstermen had removed his traps. It was a combination of good for the lobsterman, good for the other lobstermen and good for the lobsters. A combination of competition and cooperation —it’s the way a good economy works.”  At another meeting about the restoration of a historic barn, Smith was heartened to hear a local contractor tell a Connecticut executive that, “When I build a house, I don’t just have to worry about whether the owner thinks I have done a good job. I have to worry about what people will say to my parents.”

Nothing since has changed my view. As I wrote a few months ago:

When I think about my own past, I can’t think of a single large corporation, institution or association that led me down the course I chose to follow. It was individuals, my Quaker high school, working on a farm, organizing in my ‘hood and my city, being friends with the wise and the kind, serving on a small Coast Guard cutter, joining local groups, playing in bands  and enjoying my family.

There is no haven for liars in my Maine town and about the only bullshit you’ll find is on farm fields and in barns. People are too close to reality and its effects to try to talk their way out of it. 

The institutional takeover of our society began in the 19^th century and now, with artificial intelligence and modern media, it threatens the human in all of us. So as you puzzle what to do in this era of Trumpism and the lies, lousy logic and narcissism paraded as social change but threaten our country, bear in mind that an important part of the answer may lie in communities like yours. Don’t just complain; organize things that will make your community work better, especially ones that attract a cross-cultural alliance.  And find matters that challenge at a local level the lies that someone like Trump is stewing.

Summer

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