Late in August 1939, just before Germany invaded Poland, the Chicago Daily News broke an ironclad policy to make the American reporter Helen Paull Kirkpatrick its first and only woman correspondent abroad. She was nearly 30 and had been living in London since 1937 after two years in Geneva, circulating with patrician ease among the native and expat upper classes. With two English colleagues, she had cofounded The Whitehall Letter, a successful weekly digest of world affairs with a strong antifascist bent, and on her own wrote two books: one about Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the prewar Munich Agreement, the other about the British after the war began. She also started an American edition of the newsletter run by her younger brother, Lyman Bickford Kirkpatrick Jr., whose eventual experiences in the American intelligence apparatus would figure heavily in her own working life.
Helen Kirkpatrick’s start date in the Daily News London bureau could not have been better timed. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor had just returned to England after a period of semi-exile in France. By way of Helen’s frequent weekends with Waldorf and Nancy Astor at Cliveden and with Ronald and Nancy Tree at Ditchley Park, she happened to know something most others did not: that the Windsors were staying at South Hartfield House, the grand home of Edward Dudley Metcalfe, the duke’s former equerry, whom she also happened to know. Bill Stoneman, the Daily News London bureau chief, thought her foolish to trek the 40 miles south to Sussex in what was sure to be a failed attempt to interview the Duke of Windsor—the man who had been the nation’s king until abdicating the throne in 1936. But off she went. She arrived at twilight, buoyed with anticipation until it emerged that the duke had already declared that he would not give interviews during his stay. And yet, struck by the dismay on the face of this visitor, the duke devised a gallant way to both keep his word and salvage Helen’s hopes for a triumphant debut in the Daily News—and the many other papers that subscribed to its well-regarded foreign news service. “He seemed to have decided that even though I was not to be allowed to interview him, he would interview me,” she wrote. Her story appeared on page two, September 18, 1939, under the headline, “Duchess of Windsor to Run Hospital, Duke May Join Army.”
This flashy little royal scoop became the first of scores of exclusives during Helen’s seven years with the paper, most of them far more substantive in news value. For her first anniversary on staff, the editors featured her in a five-column promotional house ad titled “War and a Woman,” which called her articles “clear as crystal, accurate as a radio beam, prompt as the crashing impact of the happenings they record”; her dispatches arrived in Chicago by cablegram at “machine-gun tempo”—three, four, sometimes five times a day. Her beat was all of England and Ireland and General Charles de Gaulle and his London-based Free French Movement. Later, there would be lengthy forays to Algeria, Italy, France, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe—wherever war news flowed.
Least known to the public among her journalistic virtues, the ad disclosed, was how often her stories had to be “splashed across eight-columns, front page headlines, without a hint of credit to the razor-edged intelligence that rifled them home.” For example, eight days before the German blitzkrieg of May 10, 1940, Helen was alone among correspondents to report that King Leopold III of Belgium had privately informed the U.S. government that the Germans were sure to invade his country next. Clearly to avoid linking the news to Helen or revealing how or where she had obtained the information, the story ran buried in a column of items under someone else’s byline, attributed only to “private sources in Chicago.” The point was, the impeccable confidential sources cultivated by “Our Helen,” as Daily News headlines would sometimes dub her in the years to come, were either newsmakers themselves or those just as likely to know of what they spoke. “Not even now,” the ad went on, “—not until war and war’s tongue-stilling offspring, strict censorship, have lifted—can the complete story of Helen Kirkpatrick’s incredible war coverage be told.”
The siblings’ connectedness casts a hazy light on how the realms of intelligence-gathering and major media reportage have sometimes intersected in times of war and tyranny.
It is fair to say that as a class, American women correspondents during World War II were not held in particularly high regard, so Helen Kirkpatrick’s outsize ability to garner not only respect but also major governmental and military awards does conjure up questions. Of the more than 1,600 U.S.-accredited World War II correspondents, only 19 received the coveted U.S. Medal of Freedom—and of those 19, Helen was the only woman. This despite similar barrier-breaking reportage by Margaret Bourke-White, Ann Stringer, Lee Carson, Lee Miller, Iris Carpenter, Marguerite Higgins, and others, none of whose names even appear in archived military lists of suggested nominees. How did she manage to have so much swift, direct access to so many top-line political, diplomatic, military, and intelligence sources? Was it just her keen reporting, or did the close social relationships she developed with important men set her apart?
Lyman Kirkpatrick’s time in Europe during the war either ran parallel to hers or was intertwined. And yet in her lengthiest latter-day interviews, references to her brother are few and casual. In his books, Lyman’s mentions of his sister were similarly spare. Both of their names appear in the wartime memoirs of friends and colleagues, but never in the same account. Only a careful rereading of the Washington Press Club Foundation’s oral history of Helen revealed an offhand mention of a brother in the CIA. Did Lyman’s rapid rise through the U.S. intelligence ranks figure in her successes, and if so, how? Had Helen broken with journalism’s established codes of conduct and crossed the line into espionage? In a more general way, the siblings’ connectedness during the war years casts a hazy light on how the realms of intelligence-gathering and major media reportage, meant to be strictly separate, have sometimes intersected in times of war and tyranny.
In interviews, Helen’s answers to questions about how she achieved such high recognition were veiled, self-deprecating. Sometimes she’d deflect. Did she do anything heroic? No, she’d reply, adding that she could not remember why she was honored by the French and with a U.S. Medal of Freedom or if she ever even knew the reasons. Check her papers at Smith College, she would suggest. They offer little. The questions lingered. For even her nearest living relations, they linger still.
The Kirkpatricks of Rochester, New York, were a prominent family, albeit no
longer monied by the time Helen and Lyman’s parents married. (They later divorced, then married each other again.) On their father’s side, the siblings were mindful and proud of a Scottish lineage that pre-dated Robert the Bruce; I Mak Siccar (“I’ll make sure”) was the family motto. Their maternal heritage came via the Paulls of Wheeling, West Virginia; they often spent holidays at the family home in Hawthorne Court in Woodsdale, on Wheeling’s outskirts. Their ancestors included Virginia unionists like Colonel James Paull, a soldier in the Revolutionary War, and Colonel Joshua Fry, who, alongside the father of Thomas Jefferson, created the original map of Virginia. A long list of judges, lawyers, military men, and other public servants followed.
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