Transcript
Introduction
In 2010, I was a historian for the best museum you've never seen, the CIA Museum. We were preparing to install a new exhibit on the Office of Strategic Services, OSS, America's first Central Intelligence Agency. I was tasked with finding out everything I could about this experimental organization, which included researching the company roster. Hastily pulled together to fight the Axis. OSS was an odd creature. At once a collection of men and women from the upper crust of society on America's East Coast and a magnet for astonishingly talented and creative people from all walks of life, from Wall Street lawyers to Hollywood filmmakers, even the future chef, Julia Child. In OSS, they could almost literally design their own adventures.
My head swimming in research, I made an off-hand connection one day that would lead to uncharted waters. I remember reading in the past that Ernest Hemingway and Col. David Bruce of the OSS had liberated the bar of the Ritz in Paris from the Germans in August 1944. Now I wondered if there was more to the story. Hemingway would not have been out of place in the OSS. He loves secrets and the edge they gave him. He craved action but was not cut out for conventional soldering. He moved easily between social and economic classes and across borders. I thought to myself that he had a lot in common with many of the other men in the spy business, whom I met or read about. So had he been an OSS spy of some sort? What was the full story about Hemingway and intelligence in World War II?
The writer had tried his hand at various forms of spying and fighting on two continents. The way stations were varied, often exotic. The battlefields of Spain, the backstreet of Havana, a junk on the North River in China. He seemed to gravitate to men and women who operated on their own in the shadows. And then I learned something that surprised me. He had signed on with another intelligence service, one that did not fit the conventional narrative of his life. That service turned out to be the Soviet NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB. A lifelong Hemingway admirer, I felt I've taken an elbow deep in the gut. How could this be?
The characters he created embodied so many American values we still cherish. Truth, bravery, independence, grace under pressure, standing up for the underdog. His voice was uniquely American and revolutionary. He had changed the course of American literature in the 1920s. Why would he sign on and why would he do it secretly? His greatest work after all came from sharing, not hiding his life experiences. And so I sat on a quest day after quiet day in reading rooms all over the country. I paged through his correspondence. He was almost as great a letter writer as a novel writer. I wanted to uncover the back story. Research has always been seductive for me. It felt right for one visit to the archives to lead seamlessly to the next.
One more obscure book about the Spanish Civil War or World War II or the Cold War was never enough. And so over the next three years, I filled in the outlines of the new Hemingway portrait from my unusual sources. Ultimately, I concluded that Hemingway's dalliance with the NKVD and the political attitudes that explain it made an important difference in his life and art. It influenced many of the decisions he made during his last 15 years, where he lived, what he wrote and how he acted. The chapters of the Cold War, the Red Scare, the Cuban Revolution, and two months before his death, the Bay of Pigs made things worse for him. He did not understand politics and intrigued as well as he thought he did. And for long stretches of time, he overestimated his ability to control himself and others, even to change history. In the end, he began to understand his limits and came to the tragic conclusion that the only way to reassert control was to kill himself. That is the story I tell on this book.
That is an excerpt from the introduction, that's a fantastic book that I hold in my hand and the one I'm going to talk about today, which is Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures, 1935-1961 and was written by Nicholas Reynolds. Okay. So before I jump into what I learned from the book, some highlights for you. I want to tell you how this book came about. This has been several months in the making. I knew I was -- I wanted to read a biography of Ernest Hemingway, and a lot of it has to do with this quote that Steve Jobs said when he was giving a commencement address. I think he was at Stanford back in 2003.