Interview with Barry Bingham Sr., July 6, 1982

BOBO: This is Mary Bobo at the University of Louisville Oral History Center. I'm continuing with the second interview with Barry Bingham, Sr. Today is July 6, 1982. We're going to pick up where we left off last week. We had worked our way up to about 1941. At that point, it's my understanding Mr. Bingham did go into service, and we're going to talk about these years and some of the things that happened to him and some of the writing coverage that he may have done during this period of time. Mr. Bingham.   

BOBO: Well, you're taking me back a long time, but [to] an era that was pretty important in my life, I think, going back to 1941. I had felt for quite a while that America was going to get into World War II, and I had felt also that America ought to get into World War II, as I began to learn more and more about what had been happening in Europe. We began to get these disclosures about what 1:00the Germans were doing, what the Nazis were doing, and the stories of the concentration camps and things of that kind were beginning to leak out; and it seemed to me that it was essential that the United States should line up on the side of the Allies against this terrible tyranny that Hitler had organized in Germany, appealing to all the worst elements of human nature there. So in view of that feeling that I had, I believed that I myself ought to go ahead and volunteer for military service of some form. I was not awfully young to be doing that kind of thing even then, but it seemed to me that I'd better go ahead and get in as early as I could and see what I could do to help. I did volunteer for naval service, and I was enrolled in the Navy in April 1941. My commission dated from then. In May 1941 I was ordered to Great Lakes - a naval training station 2:00there up near Chicago. So I went on up there, not knowing, of course, how long I might be away, but I felt that this was something I should do and should prepare myself for as best I could, so off I went to Great Lakes.

Before I left, as you can well understand, I had talked this thing over pretty thoroughly with my principal associates in the papers, primarily with Mark Ethridge and Lisle Baker, explaining to them that I felt it necessary for me to go ahead and take this step, and that this meant I was going to have to throw a lot more responsibility on them during my absence, the absence being for a completely undetermined length of time. I didn't realize then, I must say, that I'd be gone nearly four and a half years, but I knew it was not going to be a short thing.

So off I went to Great Lakes and found myself up there at this naval training station. I was given a commission as a lieutenant junior grade, and I started in 3:00working at this station there doing public relations duty, because that's what they immediately assigned me to, knowing that I'd been in newspaper work for many years. And I stayed there for about three months, and then I was transferred to the public relations office of the U.S. Navy in Washington, and moved on down there. By that time it looked as though I might be there for a while so I moved my wife and family there; and we got a house out in Georgetown and settled ourselves in for what appeared to be maybe a pretty good stay in the Capital.   

We were then not wearing uniform when we were off duty, because the United States was still not in the war, and when we went out in the City of Washington I never wore a naval uniform because we were told not to do that. They didn't want it to appear that Washington was becoming an armed camp with a lot of 4:00people in uniform there, when we still were not in the war. Of course, that all ended in December with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Of course, everybody remembers where he was, I guess, on Pearl Harbor Day. My wife's sister had gotten married in Richmond the day before, and we were down there for that event and were going to drive back to Washington that day. And we were having a family lunch party at the Commonwealth Club in Richmond, and the head waiter, who was a very, very courtly gentleman, came into the room and said, "Ladies and Gentlemen, I must inform you that the Japanese have attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor." Well, of course, this was almost unbelievable, but we then realized that it was true. We immediately got to listening to radios and found repeated reports coming in, each one, it seemed, worse than the last one about the damage that had been inflicted, and horrible confusion at Pearl Harbor, and nobody knowing exactly how this had happened or what it might be followed by. 5:00Nobody knew whether this was going to lead quickly to a Japanese invasion. In any case, that was, of course, the breaking point. I got back to Washington just as quickly as I could and reported into the Navy Department that evening. This was a Sunday. And from then on I was regularly in uniform and a part of the operation there.

Not long after that, in early 1942 - January 1942, it was decided that I should go over to England on a mission concerned with civilian defense. They wanted to get as much information as possible about the British system of civilian defense, which had already been very well organized and was operating with considerable efficiency. And American authorities thought we needed a lot of information about exactly how they had done that job. Now civilian defense there, of course, was under great pressure because London had already been under enemy attack. They were digging people out of the ruins of buildings; they were 6:00rescuing people under the most dreadful circumstances. Many hundreds of thousands of people were spending the night in underground shelters and that sort of thing.   

I went over there to take a look at it and to send back some reports, and I stayed there from January until about the end of March or early April, I guess - early April - and sent back a number of reports on what I was able to observe. I was made an honorary member of a shelter team at one point, and I used to go down to that same shelter quite often and sit around and talk to these people. Some of them, of course, had wonderful personal stories to tell. But at the same time I was trying to learn all I could about the techniques they were following, and I observed some amazing actions on the part of these people. There's just recently been a series on television called 'UXB' 'Danger UXB.' I don't know whether you've seen it, by any chance, about that era in London when unexploded bombs landed, and they knew where they were, but they had to cordon off that 7:00whole part of London so as to keep people from going in there until the demolition experts could come in and defuse them. I saw some of those activities myself, and they were thrilling in a way because you knew the danger these people were running in doing it, in any case.

All right, I was there until early April of 1942, and then I came back to Washington, back in the Navy Department, and stayed there until August of that year, when for the second time my superiors decided that I should be sent over to England, this time on a regular naval mission, to be attached to the Naval Headquarters in Grosvenor Square. So I left my wife and family. My wife moved back to Louisville. We had to give up the house that we had gotten in Washington, and she came back here with the children, and again we had no idea how long our separation might be then. So I went on back to England and arrived 8:00there on the most beautiful moonlight night I've ever seen in my life - absolutely clear, and a friend of mine took me around in an open car all around the city of London that night to show me the devastation that had occurred in the months previously. I remember seeing St. Paul's Cathedral with nothing but ruins all around it, everything brilliantly illuminated by this moonlight. And in those days a brilliant moonlight night was considered a matter of danger rather than beauty because they called it a "bomber's moon." They could see their targets so clearly. That night there were no further attacks, but I had a chance to see what had been happening to London in even the months since I had been there. So I was then put into the Naval Headquarters in Grosvenor Square where so many Americans were, and I stayed there until January of 1945. In other 9:00words, for about two and a half years.   

During the latter part of that time I had one diversion. I was temporarily put off into another section called "Logistical Plans." This was a group that was doing a lot of the planning for the Normandy Invasion, and I was sent down to the West Country in England to some bases where they were doing specific amphibious training, getting ready for the naval invasion. This was fascinating duty, I must say, and I found myself in some of the most delightful small towns in the West of England that you could imagine. Oddly enough, I was first sent to a place called Appledore in West Devon. Appledore was a perfectly charming little village, but right next to it was the town of Barnstaple from whence one of my early ancestors had sailed to come to America. And my father had been down there during his days in London to unveil a memorial, so I felt myself 10:00somewhat at home because I knew that my ancestors had been in that very part of the world, and I found it a most appealing place, I must say. Well, there I was stationed for quite a while, and I moved from one of these seaport towns to another, going around the coast where we were doing this amphibious training. And we had a Russian party down there at one time. I never shall forget it. Some Russians were sent down there to observe our landing preparations. Part of this, I think, was an idea of convincing them that we really were getting ready for opening a second front in Europe. The Russians were very dubious about that. I had these Russians on my hands, and they spoke very, very little English, but I found that they did speak a little English - one of them, at least, that I was standing next to. While we were standing there looking out over the beach, suddenly a dud shell fell right between us - missed us - didn't hurt either one 11:00of us, but this man who previously had not spoken a word of English, turned to me with a great big smile in which some flashing metal teeth showed and said, "A very unexpected present." It was so odd to hear - all of a sudden it was like hearing a child speak who never had said a word. It was a pretty unpleasant present, too, I must say. So I spent some months down there, going from one of these communities to another, and trying to help out on these amphibious planning exercises that were going on there. And then I got sent back to London, and then we were really getting into the final stages of preparing for the Normandy landings. So I was back in London during the early stages of 1944, when the whole of England was really an armed camp. The whole country was so much 12:00involved with preparations for this great joint operation that was to take place, and yet the whole thing was done under such secrecy. There were not even any signposts on roads in England. Everything was kept absolutely quiet. There were thousands of troops massing on the south coast ready for the invasion attempt, but nobody was allowed to talk about that. I had a strange angle on it because my job, of course, really most of the time had been to help with coverage, and at that time coverage of what was happening became virtually impossible. The many, many dozens - even hundreds - of American newspapermen over there were pretty much waiting impatiently for the big moment to come. And we had an amusing episode in that case. It was decided there should be a diversionary movement of the correspondents down to the south coast, giving the impression to Germans, who undoubtedly were monitoring what was happening, 13:00giving the impression that the invasion was about to take place at that moment. So I had to summon all the naval correspondents - there were about a hundred of them - to my office and tell them that they must prepare to go the next morning down to the West Country, under sealed orders. Nobody was to say where they were going and all that. This word was rather purposely leaked in the bar of the Savoy Hotel, which was a place where many American correspondents used to hang out, and we knew perfectly well that somehow or other the word would get back that this was taking place. So we got all these fellows together, and I felt somewhat embarrassed about fooling them, but I had to do that. And they had their gear with them, and they had their typewriters, and they had said goodbye to their girlfriends and others; and off they went to the West Country to get ready for the big operation. When they got down there, they were told that this was a diversion, that this was not going to take place at that moment.   

We called this "Operation Mock Turtle" at the time. But the men themselves, after their first disappointment that they weren't getting into the big story of their lives, found it delightful because they were all put up at a perfectly charming house in the West Country that belonged to the author of Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier - a lovely place. I had to stay in London, unfortunately, and couldn't be with them because I was trying to keep this thing in order. But they stayed down there for two or three days, and then they came straggling back to London and thought, "Oh gee, this isn't going to happen now. The whole thing is probably a fake." Two weeks later the word really came through that the operation was going to take place, and we'd better get all these people down there and get them ready for coverage. And this time when l summoned them, they were pretty dubious about whether I was really telling them the truth, and said, "Oh, well, I hope we're going to a nice house again, and I hope there'll be plenty of booze there, and that kind of thing." But this time it was for keeps. So I got them down to their points of departure, mostly in Portsmouth and in 15:00that area of England, and then I hastened back to London myself to be there when the curtain really rose.

And there came that great, breathless moment when the Normandy Invasion, for which we had waited so long, was beginning to take place. Beautiful, clear morning in London. As I waked up that morning very early, I could just hear drone and drone and drone of planes overhead. An incredible number of planes were passing over. And it must have been pretty obvious to everybody in the street that something big was happening. But there had been so many exercises and things of that kind that it was hard to tell that this was the real thing. But I did know it was the real thing, and I realized that this was going to be one of the great events of modern history that was taking place right there, and under my eyes, as it were. I stayed in London when the Normandy Invasion took place because I had to then be sure that the copy that was sent back and the 16:00photographs sent back by all these correspondents would get handled quickly, get through censorship, get sent out, and get back to its destination, back in this country. This was a fascinating and somewhat complicated process, and for three or four days I've never been quite so busy in my life. I was trying so hard to keep everything going and keep it moving, and it was not an easy thing to do. But thank goodness, it did all go through quite well. We had with us many famous correspondents - the most famous, I suppose, of all was Ernest Hemingway, who had come in there just not very long before the invasion, and who had run into a static water tank one night and had his whole head bound up. He had an enormous bandage, and he looked like some sort of bandit. But there he was, ready to go over to France and ready to go on his big story, as was everybody else. I had had to assign these various people to whatever naval vessel they were going to 17:00be crossing over the English Channel in, and one of my great friends has accused me, in a sense, of putting him on an ammunition ship. It really wasn't true. I didn't put him on an ammunition ship because that would have been the worst target - the worst place, I must say, for anybody to be, but this gentleman has always joked with me about it since then. We tried to put them wherever they could best be fitted in, and only a few could go on any one vessel. And of course, they all wanted to be in at the very beginning of it, they wanted to see the big thing and have the big excitement. And they had plenty of excitement before they got through, I must say. For a few days nobody knew for sure, of course, whether the landing attempt was going to be just an attempt and would be thrown back into the sea, or whether they would really get ashore and be able to stay ashore. And then gradually we began getting reports that the troops were moving further inland, they were moving up toward the Cotentin peninsula, and that was one of the objectives. The area around the landing beaches became secured after dreadful fighting and a great many casualties, and it began to 18:00appear that the landing was going to work. Part of it - and I must just mention one thing about this: part of the success of the landing was undoubtedly due to the element of surprise. The Germans knew that we were going to try to put a force ashore somewhere, but they did not know where or when, and this was a marvelous asset to the invading forces. The Germans believed that we would have to land - make our major landing, certainly - at one of the main existing ports, so they thought we would have to confine ourselves to two or three of the major ports on the English Channel there, and they did all their preparations involved with those big ports, trying to put plenty of troops nearby and all of their equipment and everything of that kind. The beauty of it was that, partly by the inspiration of Mr. Winston Churchill, a plan was worked out to put an artificial 19:00harbor off the coast of Normandy. They took across the channel some great big ships and sank them offshore in shallow water, and then built an artificial harbor off of this beach, the Normandy beachhead, and they were able to bring in troops and supplies through that artificial harbor. Now the Germans never suspected this, although some of the elements of this, when they were brought across the channel, were as tall as eight-story buildings. But for some reason, German reconnaissance, if it saw these things, didn't have any idea what they were, couldn't understand that this was going to be a major landing port for the American forces and the British forces. And so the element of surprise prevailed for several days, really, long enough to throw them off their balance at the beginning of the operation. They then hastily brought more troops in, of course, to the points where we had landed, but by then there was the possibility that we 20:00could stay ashore and keep these troops supplied, and move on in to the inland, and that is the way it happened.

About ten days after this, I finally found my chance to get over to Normandy, which I had been wanting very much to do, but I felt by then I could turn over the things that I had been doing in London to some very able assistants in my office there. So I was sent over to Cherbourg, which was a port that by that time the Allies were very eager to obtain. It would give us a much better place for landing supplies and so forth. But Cherbourg was strongly held, and the country behind it strongly held by German troops. I was put aboard a cruiser, the "Tuscaloosa," and the Tuscaloosa went in for a tremendous attack on the batteries at Cherbourg, and these big guns were booming for a couple of hours, 21:00and a fascinating experience for me because I had never been that much involved with actual military operations in all of my work over there. But in any case, the shelling took place, the German defenses were very much weakened. At the same time American army troops began to move up the peninsula from the south, and in a short time the port of Cherbourg fell to the Allied forces. And very, very shortly after that, I was put ashore on a landing craft and was able to move into Cherbourg myself along with three or four other officers. And there we spent the most amazing week. We lived in an almost ruined house that had been deserted, of course, by its occupants. There was no roof on it, but fortunately, the weather was not too bad. And there were walls, and we had a little stove in 22:00there on which we could do some cooking. We had nothing to cook except C rations, but we managed to cook up C rations. We had no water because the water supply had been completely cut off and was still not back in shape during those early days. So I must say, we had to use cognac to brush our teeth. There was no other liquid that was available, and cognac was a great product, of course, of Normandy, so we were able to get this delicious cognac. I never, however, wanted to brush my teeth with it again. I was there for about a week while we were setting up facilities for American correspondents to get their dispatches out of Cherbourg and that region, and then the war began to move again further south and into the main part of France, and I eventually went back to London.

I then was in London most of the time until early September when Paris was secured, and I was able to go over to Paris and spent a little time setting up a 23:00naval headquarters for correspondents there. And I lived in a hotel in Paris and had a most interesting time. I was one of the early naval officers to appear on the streets of Paris. There were plenty of GIs by that time, plenty of army people, but a naval uniform was still something of a curiosity, so I still had a few people throwing their arms around me and offering to buy me a drink at a bar, and that kind of thing. It was just a lovely experience, I must say. The French were so happy to be liberated and so grateful to us. Anybody they saw with an Allied uniform on they just wanted to express their joy to. I got a little of that, although not, of course, what they had when they first came in there. So I stayed in Paris for a while at that point, and then went back to London to reorganize my office staff there. By that time the war was going quite well, and it looked like everything was going to be all right. Then there came that setback at Christmastime that year when the Battle of the Ardennes took 24:00place, and for a while it looked as though maybe it wasn't going to work after all. But that was won with great difficulty and considerable loss of life, and by January 1945, I thought the time had come for me to move out of the European theater and see if I couldn't make my way over to the Asian theater where, of course, a great deal more fighting was going to take place, nobody knew how much. So I did manage to get myself transferred because I didn't think there was going to be nearly enough work for a naval public relations man to perform in the European theater, and I managed to arrange a transfer.   

I got back home for leave for about two weeks, and then I was sent out to the Pacific. My wife got out to San Francisco with me, and we had to say goodbye yet 25:00again, when I was taking off for what was an utterly indeterminate length of time in the Pacific. I think nobody thought the war in the Pacific would last less than another two or three years. We didn't know about the atom bomb, we didn't know what forces were going to be brought to bear to bring the war in the Pacific to an end, but anyway, I flew out of San Francisco not knowing how long I was going to be gone out there. Was briefly stationed at Pearl Harbor, and then sent out to Advance Naval Headquarters in Guam. And there I was on the staff of Admiral Nimitz and, again, working with a lot of war correspondents -interesting job. The war was moving along in the Pacific, and there was a period of island-hopping when American forces were trying to retake various islands and bypass other islands. It was the time of the Iwo Jima landing, and I 26:00got up to Iwo Jima briefly, not at the time of the landing, but quite soon after that, and saw what a dreadful, eerie, ghostly place that was with that black sand on the beach, and that Mt. Suribachi dominating the landing beach as we've so often seen in pictures. I was there for a little while. It was while I was at Iwo Jima that the word came through that the war was over in Europe. This was a time I would loved to have been in London, after my two and a half years there. I would liked to have celebrated the end of the war in Europe in London. I knew what all my friends there would be doing, and the best I could do to celebrate was to get one can of beer. That was all I could get hold of, and I did drink that one can of beer, sitting up there in Iwo Jima thinking about how wonderful it would be to be back in London on that particular night when people went wild, as you can imagine.   

BOBO: I remember reading an article either you wrote afterwards or at the time about feeling so alone, and they weren't - not having been in Europe, they were not excited--   

BINGHAM: Nobody was interested. They were not interested in our plight a'tall. 27:00They just thought that was a distant thing - that it had nothing to do with them, that the war in Asia was the only thing, as it had seemed to them.

Then I went on back to Guam and had my final great break of luck during the war. The time came to prepare for the surrender ceremony, and I was put on a transport ship, along with a large number of correspondents, and we went up under escort - but under complete radio silence - up toward the Sea of Japan, getting ready for what was going to happen in Tokyo Bay. We all hoped everything was going to work out all right, but nobody knew for sure, again, that the Japanese were really going to surrender at the time when we hoped they would, whether the Emperor would be able to prevail on his people to give up. We were very well aware of the fact that there were literally hundreds of kamikaze pilots still in Japan, men who had sworn to die protecting their country, if it 28:00meant diving their planes into the deck of a battleship and that kind of thing, which they frequently did, or an aircraft carrier. We knew that the airports in Japan were still not secured, even as we moved into Tokyo Bay, and I thought it was quite possible that these pilots might just decide to attack the fleet in Tokyo Bay and make one last, great suicide attempt, and doing so, sink a great part of our fleet. But we managed to get ourselves in there, and this amazing flotilla of ships appeared in Tokyo Bay, and there we were, and we knew that the Japanese surrender party was coming aboard the Missouri. I was on the Missouri myself at this moment, and I knew that this was a historic moment in our whole modern history. The Japanese did come up a rope ladder and up onto the deck, and Admiral Nimitz and General MacArthur were there to receive the surrender 29:00ceremony. I had placed myself where I could watch the thing, because I had all my war correspondents where they could see it very clearly, and I just thought, "Well, I'll get myself where I can have a good look too." And I did look right down on the deck of the Missouri where the actual papers were signed; and, of course, it was an unforgettable sight. Just as the thing was coming to a climax, there was a great wave of planes coming over, and I think everyone of us thought, well, maybe this is the Japanese Air Force come back to get its final revenge, but as we looked up into the bright sunlight that broke out at that moment, we could see the American insignia on the planes. And we knew that it was the American Air Force coming to help instead of the enemy coming to destroy us. And it was the most exciting event, I guess, of my whole life.   

[End of tape 3, side 1]   

[Beginning of tape 3, side 2]   

BOBO: This is Mary Bobo. We're continuing talking. We have just recreated the 30:00Japanese surrender on the battleship, the Missouri. We're going to move on as Mr. Bingham tells how he, of course, was discharged from the service and came back to begin again his career with the papers. Would you continue, Mr. Bingham.   

BINGHAM: I had a little period back in Guam before I was able to get back to this country. The great question was at that time transport to get back to the U.S.A., and many of us had had a long period of service. They rated it according to points - the number of months that you had been in the service, and I had a lot of points, but that didn't necessarily mean I was going to be able to get a plane or a ship back to the United States. And I wondered just how long I was going to be sitting on that island out there, after all of the excitement of the war was over. It was such an anticlimax after that episode in Tokyo Bay. But in a little while I had another very lucky break. There were some American naval 31:00officers who had been prisoners of the Japanese for a very long period of time, since the very beginning of the war, some of them. And those men had been released from prison and were to be flown back to the United States. And it was thought wise to have an escorting officer go along with them and talk to them about their experiences and get some of that down on paper while it was still so fresh in their minds, and find out all we could about the conditions under which they had been living in the prison camps. So I got the job. And this was marvelous, because it meant I could go back, doing a most interesting piece of interviewing with these officers, and at the same time take back myself so I could get home pretty soon. And we landed first in Honolulu - flying. We made a landing in Honolulu, and there I was able to tell all these men that they were going to be able to make a free telephone call back to their families and tell 32:00them that they were on their way back, and that they would be back at a certain time. And they all rushed to the telephones. There was one man who didn't go to the telephone, and I worried about him, and I said, "You know, this call is free. Don't think that it's going to cost you anything. You must go and telephone your family." And he said, "I can't do it." And I said, "Why can't you?" And he said, "You know, I just have to tell you, I was married just before I went in the service and went overseas, and I've never heard from my wife since I became a prisoner of war. It's been four years. I don't know whether she's still alive or whether she knows I'm still alive. She may have remarried or she may have died. I don't know what's happened to her." And I said, "Well, can't you call up and find out?" And he said, "No, I just can't make myself do that. I will have to wait till we get to San Francisco and see if she's there to meet me. The Navy Department will have notified her that I'm coming at a certain time." So when we landed in San Francisco, there was such a scene of rejoicing. 33:00All these men being met by their wives and children and friends and everybody else, and everybody just with tears of joy in their eyes, and my wife was there to meet me, thank goodness, and of course, we were all so happy! But I kept looking around, and this poor man didn't have anybody to meet him. And I've never known, of course - I've lost touch with him. I never have known whether or not his wife just didn't get there and was still at home, or whether he had a sort of "Enoch Arden" situation and maybe she had remarried or something else had happened to her. Anyway, this was just one little sad moment in the most joyous day of getting back to this country and coming back with men who had been in horrible conditions over there for years. And you can imagine their pleasure at getting back to America under those circumstances.

I was briefly back at Great Lakes where my service was terminated, and came back to Louisville. My wife and I took a little vacation up in New England, together, 34:00without anybody else - even leaving the children with relatives at home, and then I came on back to Louisville and resumed my newspaper work. And I was so glad that that was what I was going back to. I had had an interesting experience once when I was in Guam. I was talking to some of the young officers there about going back to their jobs when the war was over, and I found that some of them were not at all eager to get back to what they had been doing before the war. Some of the lawyers said, "You know, law is a perfectly good profession, but I don't think it's giving me what I really wanted in life." The only ones who seemed really eager to get back were people who were in the theater and people who were journalists. And I think one reason for that is that nobody forces people to go into those two professions. In fact, many families frown down on it, so that the people who do go into journalism or theater are people who really want that more than anything else, and the war was simply an interruption to them. They wanted to get back to it, and I certainly felt that way about 35:00getting back to journalism. I came back to Louisville, and Mark Ethridge had been holding the fort here so wonderfully while I was away, and during my long absence he had taken the title of publisher, which I wanted him to do. I thought it was necessary for that to be done. At the time of my return, I saw no reason for me to resume the title of publisher, which I had had before the war, and give another title to Mark. So he kept on as publisher of the paper, and I became editor-in-chief. My principal interest had always been in the news and editorial end of the newspapers, anyway, so that's the way it was for a while. And I'm glad to say that we were able to keep a wonderful relationship going here, and I came back to a staff of people that I loved to work with. And, of course, it was a joy to be back on my home turf and back in my own office. But by 1949, another opportunity arose that I really thought I should take advantage 36:00of. The Marshall Plan by that time had gotten started. It had been announced, as you may remember, at a Harvard commencement exercise. I wasn't there, but I had read about that and was fascinated with the purpose and efficient organization of the Marshall Plan, and I wanted very much to be a part of it. I thought this, next to the war itself, was the most dramatic and interesting thing that the United States would be involved in during my lifetime. And, indeed, it did prove to be so. So I went up to Washington, and I was interviewed by various people, particularly by Paul Hoffman, who, along with Averill Harriman, was the Co-chairman of the Marshall Plan operation, and they said they would like for me to take an overseas assignment. I said I would be glad to do so for one year only. I didn't think I should be away from the papers more than a year, but I thought I would give a year to it. To my surprise, it turned out they wanted me to go as Marshall Plan Minister to France. I didn't know it was going to be 37:00France. I thought it would be some much smaller, less important country, but France is a country, of course, I have always been interested in, and had visited as a tourist, but not otherwise. So I found myself going over by ship in June 1949, and taking over for a year as the head of this Marshall Plan office in France. Now there was one thing that caused a little confusion. There was a main Marshall Plan office for the whole operation in Paris presided over by Averill Harriman. Paul Hoffman was back in Washington presiding over the whole operation on this end. I was in an office which dealt only with France. Now when you say, "only with France," even so, it was a pretty large operation. The year I was there we expended one billion dollars in American credits for the restoration of France, after the terrible war damage that that country had 38:00suffered. And it was all done with the close collaboration of the French authorities, particularly a wonderful man named Jean Monnet, who had himself devised something called a Monnet Plan or the Plan Monnet, for the restitution of France after the war, even before there was any possibility that American funds would be available. He was trying to find a way to bring back France to a situation of prosperity in the European world. And when the American Marshall Plan was adopted, we were able to take over almost the whole aspect of Mr. Monnet's plan for the work we were to do in France. That didn't mean, of course, that we simply turned it over to the French. We were working in close collaboration with the French in every possible way. The railroads in France had been largely destroyed by attacks during the war; the ports and harbors were an absolute shambles, so it was almost impossible to bring anything into France at 39:00that time. The French needed desperately to import a lot of goods in order to get their economy moving again. The Marshall Plan was able to do many constructive things. Ports and harbors, I think perhaps the most dramatic, we did restore with Marshall Plan funds. The railroad system of France we restored with Marshall Plan funds. We also were able to build some additional dams on some of the rivers of France, and we were able to increase the electrical capacity of France by 50%, which was· a tremendous contribution to the economic recovery of that country. We weren't able to do very much about housing, and this was a problem because many French people wanted the first priority to go to restoring housing. They were in desperate need of good housing, but it was determined - and I think wisely so - that if the money went into housing, that is not productive. That is simply something that helps the people to live better, but what we needed to do was to get the factories started 40:00again, get the ports and harbors open again, get the railroads operating, get the country back on its feet industrially and economically, and then improvements of housing could come along in its natural train. So that's the way it was organized, and I did have one very interesting year there in that office. The French I had known previously, as I say, more as a tourist, and I had always enjoyed my times in France. I found a very different aspect of the French from what I had expected: terribly hard working, terribly serious, terribly eager to put their country back on its feet. Not at all the kind of image of the "fond of dancing and light wines French" that we always have heard about traditionally. I was working with some of the most serious-minded and some of the best organized brains that I've ever encountered during my time in France. So I stayed there for one year from June 1949 to June 1950. My wife and children came over, and we 41:00had that one year in France, which was a wonderful experience for them. Unfortunately, I was so busy most of the time that I didn't get very much time to spend with them, but it was something that I think they will remember all their lives. The children went to school, two in Switzerland and the rest in France, and had a most interesting time there. By June 1950, my time had run out, my year that I had agreed to spend, and I thought it was the time for me to turn back and come on back to my home job here in Louisville. So with some reluctance, I did leave the job in France. It was passed on to a very able successor, Harry Labouisse, and I came back to my own job here and took up the reins once more in close collaboration with my close associates here. And I was back in newspaper work, and that's where I stayed from then on until the time of my retirement.   

BOBO: Well, that brings us to the article that you and I were talking about earlier. This, I believe, came out in January of 1950, and people were watching the paper while you were watching other things along with the paper. As I said to you, there are several things in here that I would like to pursue. You see if you, in talking with Mark Ethridge, or in knowing what was going on here, realized that all of this was going on in such full command, so to speak. What was brought out here by Mr. White is that - of course, we had talked about the Ethridge team when we met a week ago, and about the different editors who had come, or young men who had come with him, particularly a lot of Southerners, but liberal Southerners. This is talking about how important it was to the paper to be covering these very things that you have been talking about. The statement was made here that during the war the Courier-Journal and Times turned down 43:00millions of dollars in advertising revenue - $1,200,000 in one year - rather than corrupt its space allocated for adequate world, national, regional and local coverage. Who would be making a decision like this at that time, Mr. Bingham, to...   

BINGHAM: It was done by Mark Ethridge and me, in collaboration, as so many things were. I knew that this was what we should do, and Mark was in complete agreement. And he was the one, of course, who put these policies into effect, but they were policies, fundamentally, that he and I had agreed on previously.   

BOBO: Well, we're talking about a great deal of profit money that would have come back in to...   

BINGHAM: Yes, it would, and it would have helped to build up the papers. But we did feel at that time that it was absolutely essential for our readers to have a good, broad coverage of what was happening in the world. And the only way to guarantee that to them was to open up our news columns sufficiently. If you open up news columns to a great extent, you've got to take the space away from something else, and that means taking it away from advertising.   

BOBO: How often did you actually talk with Mark Ethridge during this period of time? Once a week? Did you have a set time?   

BINGHAM: We didn't have a set time. He called me when there was some important thing to discuss. And of course, we wrote to each other frequently. And then, in addition to that, my wife was writing me very regularly, and she was here at the paper several days a week working on the editorial page and, of course, observing everything that was going on. She was able to give me an intimate report on what people were saying, what was happening down here; and then Mark and I kept in touch at the policy level, and between the two, I was able to get the thing pretty straight, I think.   

BOBO: Are these letters still in existence? Have you kept some of these things?   

BINGHAM: My wife's correspondence with me and mine with her has all been preserved during the war years. Hundreds and hundreds of letters, and we have now given that correspondence to the Radcliffe Library, which my wife is very 45:00much interested in. But we also have copies. We had them photocopied before we gave the originals there, and we have that whole mass of material. The Radcliffe Library people seem to be interested in it, not because it has any particular value in itself, but they found it a little unusual that they had the whole period of the war covered from both ends, by a wife writing to a husband and a husband writing to a wife. And it may have some value to some researchers of the future. There's one caveat I always have to give about it. I was not telling her anything that was going on in my life that would be disturbing. I didn't want her to know anything that would make her uneasy - she was uneasy enough about my being over there during those years. She, at the same time, wasn't writing me about any hardships that were going on on the home front, and they were not hardships in the sense that people were suffering in really war-torn countries, but she had difficulties that she never really wanted me to realize when she was 46:00writing to me in those days--   

BOBO: So both of you glossed over a little bit --   

BINGHAM: Both of us glossed over, and I've often thought that somebody reading about that in years to come might think, "My goodness, these people didn't seem to do anything but talk about their friends, and parties they went to, and the lighter side of life." I used to tell her every time I had a chance to go to the theater in London, and naturally, I wasn't telling her about going off on assignments that might have had some danger involved in them, so it may be that the correspondence will seem to be frivolous, in a sense, but there it is, and we haven't tried to change or correct anything. We've just left it that way. And we have a feeling that our daughter, Sallie, may some day want to work up that material and see if there's anything that she would like to do with it. So we've left very careful instructions that she is to have access to it at all times.   

BOBO: Do you know about the Ethridge correspondence?   

BINGHAM: No, I'm afraid I have not got any of that left, I'm sorry to say. I'm afraid that his secretary probably eventually weeded that out of his files, and 47:00I'm afraid mine got weeded out. I wish I did have those letters too, but I'm afraid that's gone.   

BOBO: Well, going back to--. Again, staying with Ethridge, but continuing this same article, he's talking about what is going on with the paper during these war years. He's talking about the important rights, franchises that have been won for Negroes, as they were referred to in print at that point, the importance of the paper for the openness of unions in this city. He's talking about how the paper has worked so hard to see the graft and corruption, particularly on the city and state level, were at least known to readers; and he points out the important moves that you had tried to make and, of course, your wife - and we'll be talking with her - in backing good education. Were these the kinds of things that you would even be talking with Mr. Ethridge about? Are these things that your men - your team already was working on?   

BINGHAM: The team was already working on them because I had been very much interested in exactly these same issues during the time when I was here, so it was really a continuation of policies that we had already adopted. Now, of course, there were times when strategies might have to be changed, when priorities might have to be somewhat altered as events developed. In that sort of case, I always had utter confidence in Mark Ethridge to do what was going to be best for the papers and, I think, for the community as well. But he understood perfectly well what my basic views were on all these subjects, and fortunately, his views and mine agreed just about 100%.   

BOBO: He refers to it as the "Bingham-Ethridge-Bingham team," I think referring to your wife --   

BINGHAM: That's right.   

BOBO:  -- as being vice president and   

BINGHAM: And she was sitting in on the editorial conferences, you see, and enjoying the inside part of it very much.   

BOBO:  Again, I look forward to talking with her about some of these things. 49:00Let's just talk, before we get off of this, for a couple of minutes about a couple more of these Southerners that we didn't mention the other day. Jim Pope, I believe, came during this time.   

BINGHAM:  Yes, he did. He, again - you know, I was once accused of reversing Sherman's march to the sea, because so many Georgians came up here to work on our staff, and they were some wonderful people, I must say. Jim Pope was one of them, a very able man, and stayed here for a number of years. He then  he took early retirement and has gone on down to Florida. But he was, I think, a very able newspaperman, and somebody that Mark Ethridge had had considerable contact with before.   

BOBO: Having lived in the deep South, I find it interesting that you were able to find a very large group of Southerners at this point in history that were this liberal.   

BINGHAM: We could. But I think I should point out that the South has always produced far more than its quota of able newspapermen. The New York Times for 50:00years, the Washington Post, other famous papers, have been staffed to a large degree by able Southerners who've come up there to make their careers. I don't know what it is about the South that seems to have been conducive to the production of good journalists, but it has been true historically.   

BOBO: But historically the editorial policies in most southern papers have not been liberally oriented.   

BINGHAM: Maybe that's why some of the able men left there. I really think it is. I think that's certainly why some of the southerners who came to the Courier-Journal and Times came up here: because they wanted to be in a more liberal atmosphere, particularly on race relations.   

BOBO: Let's talk a little bit about the Nieman Fellows. Of course, this is tied in with Harvard, which, I'm sure, has a soft spot in your heart. At this writing there were seven, and I know there have been many, many others since then. And anytime I interview someone that has been a Nieman Fellow, this is one of the really exciting things of their life. Tell us about it - some of these people 51:00that served as Nieman Fellows and your interest in the whole program.   

BINGHAM: We've been unusually lucky, I think, in placing a large number of Nieman Fellows through the years. During the last two years, we've had two back to back. Both of them happened to be women, very able women members of our staff. In the early years the Nieman Fellows were fellows, in the sense that they were all men. They later on began to take women, and now they are taking a considerable portion of women. I think it' s one of the most successful programs that's ever existed in journalism. It was started at Harvard under the will of Lucius Wahl Nieman of Milwaukee, who left a considerable sum of money for the establishment of some form of training for newspapermen at Harvard. Now he didn't stipulate exactly how that was to be done. At first, it was thought perhaps it would be a conventional journalism school, but there were other 52:00journalism schools already in existence which were doing a good job, Columbia and Northwestern and others, so at Harvard the decision was made to use the money in rather a different way and, I think, a very useful way. It was the plan to bring in newspapermen and women who had had at least five years practical experience on a newspaper, to give them a year at Harvard to study whatever they thought they wanted to study, which would promote their newspaper careers and make them more able and more professional newspaper people. And from the very beginning I think this program took off rapidly. The people who were able to win the Nieman Fellowships plunged into that Harvard atmosphere. And it's not only, of course, a matter of some excellent courses in practically every discipline that exists, but it's a matter of being in a community where there are famous 53:00scholars and where there is every kind of intellectual stimulation that you could imagine. And year by year the Nieman Fellows became more and more immersed in this bath of culture, of experience, of training of the very kind that they most wanted.   

As the years went on, wives became more and more involved in the Nieman Program. At first I'm afraid some Nieman wives had a rather thin time of it, because sometimes they had to move up there with small children. They didn't have much opportunity to participate in the Nieman events such as the lectures that they went to and the gatherings. But within a few years the people who ran the Nieman Foundation decided that they had to do better than that, so they began making special efforts to bring the Nieman wives into as many of the activities as possible, to see that they got to meet the interesting people who came to talk to the Nieman Fellows, and that they were a part of it in a way they were not at first. So two things have improved on the Nieman Program in that way. Wives of 54:00Nieman Fellows are now much more participants, and many more women journalists are being taken in as Fellows. It's been a wonderful success, I think.   

BOBO: Can we hit one more subject before you have to leave today? I believe it was in 1945 that you decided to build the new Courier-Journal building. It took about three years for completion. Had you thought about this prior to going off to war, so to speak? Was this something that you knew had to be done?   

BINGHAM: We had been talking about it for years because our old building, though a handsome, fine old structure, was just too small. And we were expanding - we had gone into radio at that time, which also took up more space, and we just didn't have room enough in that structure. We tried over a long period of time to buy two adjoining buildings, thinking we could then expand there, but we were never able to buy up that adjoining property, so we were really locked into that situation down there. And we began to feel over a period of time that the only 55:00thing to do was to move. Now some people thought we ought to move way out into the suburbs or to some point where a railroad siding would be available, get out of the downtown area completely, and really divorce ourselves from the downtown activity where the Courier-Journal had always been. But Mark Ethridge and I and others whose advice we took, felt that we ought to stay in the heart of the community. And we found this site down here on Broadway - Sixth and Broadway - and over quite a long period of time planning went on about how this building was to be constructed. It was a building that was interestingly built. It was really built from the inside out. Nobody thought about the outside expression of this building in the early days. Every department head was told to think about how much space he was going to need, how that space should be laid out, how it should relate to other departments, so you would have a free flow of activities 56:00within the building. And there was a very careful plan mapped out over a long period of time for how all this inner structure was to be put together, almost like the inside of a watch. Then finally the time came when we realized we've got to put a wall around the outside of this thing. It's got to have an appearance; it's got to be like the case for the watch.   

And we looked around quite a bit at that time and looked at some other newspaper buildings. There was one - the Toronto Globe and Mail - that I thought had a very handsome appearance, and I went up there to have a look at it, and saw some photographs of it too. So we finally got the architect that was working on this, Lockwood-Greene, to give us an exterior appearance that was fairly similar to the one on the Toronto Globe and Mail. It was not an innovative building architecturally, but it was really never intended to be that. What we were trying to do was to have a completely useable, completely functional building 57:00here that was at least respectable looking on the outside.   

BOBO: Has it proved to be functional as you've moved into the next thirty years?   

BINGHAM: It has proved to be functional in every sense except, again, it proved to be too small. We thought we were building such a huge building here when we moved over here, but then later on, we had to move into another building for Standard Gravure and another building for WHAS. WHAS, of course, required much more space when we went into television as well as radio. But we now have these three buildings here in this same block, and over and over again I've wondered to myself, "Can you ever build a building that really is quite large enough and quite flexible enough to take care of the needs of the future that are so hard to foresee?"   

BOBO: I know that you have to go today; I'm not going to hold you up. We do have - like about five minutes left on this tape.   

BINGHAM: Five minutes will be fine.   

BOBO: Five minutes will be fine? OK. I found that during the Fifties that you 58:00wrote a great deal on the role of the newspaper. Oh, I guess I found six different articles on it. You're talking about the difference in newspapers from the old beat and scoop and extras and, of course, the education of the journalists themselves and this kind of thing. In these articles you keep challenging journalism to improve itself, to police itself. You talk about threats to freedom of the press. Take these last few minutes and talk to me about some of your thoughts, as you look back on some of them.   

BINGHAM: I've always had a strong conviction that journalists, although they are in the business of communication, have not communicated well with their readers. We have not really explained to our readers in a clear and concise way what it is we are trying to do. I think we've left many misunderstandings. We've been much too apt to resent criticism instead of looking at criticism calmly and 59:00trying to take advantage of it, and I think this is one of the reasons why newspapers have suffered from what is now called "a lack of credibility." We didn't talk about that phrase so much in the past, but there was always a question of whether our readers really believed in us, and, beyond that, whether they really understood what it was we were trying to do. There was never much understanding among many readers as to the difference between the news operation and the editorial page operation, for instance. Most people seemed to think that they were all one. We inside the newspapers thought they were entirely separate and should be that way. For that reason, every time I had a chance to make a speech, I used to try to speak about this and see what I could do to help to clarify the situation, and then I did write, as you say, fairly frequent articles on this subject. I used the Editorial Notebook on the editorial page for this purpose several [tape ends]