March 18, 2015

Finest Hour 160, Autumn 2013

Page 47

By Warren F. Kimball

Conspiracy of One: Tyler Kent’s Secret Plot against FDR, Churchill and the Allied War Effort, by Peter Rand. Lyons Press, hardbound, illus., 272 pp. $26.95, Kindle $12.90, member price $21.60.


More years ago than I care to remember, I suggested to a bright undergraduate at Rutgers College that his Honors thesis was worth pursuing further. That began my longstanding fascination with the tale of Tyler Kent and his unauthorized, possibly illegal, copying of correspondence between President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill, along with some 1500 other pieces of classified material. The student (Bruce Bartlett, onetime economic adviser to George H.W. Bush, now a commentator on economic policies) and I churned out a piece, based on research in U.S. and British archives, outlining the details of the Tyler Kent episode.

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For the most part, the “Kent Affair” became a throwaway line in diplomatic history textbooks. Even biographies of both Roosevelt and Churchill paid only cursory attention. Yet three books, now a fourth, followed. (None was written by us; none attracts much attention, nor alas did we.)*

Churchillians will find the story familiar. Kent, a low-level code clerk in the American Embassy in London, let his personal politics—the conviction that international Jewry was somehow in cahoots with the Bolsheviks—get the best of his oath of office, and purloined or copied a tranche of secret material, including six exchanges between Churchill (First Lord of the Admiralty for all but one of the messages) and President Roosevelt. Kent’s intent was to expose FDR as a liar who was trying to get the United States into the war. On 20 May 1940, the British arrested him when Ambassador Joseph Kennedy waived Kent’s diplomatic immunity. After a secret trial, Kent was incarcerated in British jails until November 1945.

Of course Joe Kennedy was worried. As Rand points out, the Ambassador was caught on the horns of a dilemma. Fearing Hitler’s strength, Kennedy wanted the U.S. to stay out of what he saw as just another European war, so he and Kent were nearly on the same page. But a spy in his embassy would make the ambassador seem incompetent, an image Kennedy preferred to avoid.

This latest book is a colorful retelling of the Kent affair. Three issues dominate: Was it legal and principled for the U.S. government to allow Kent to be arrested and then held incommunicado? Would disclosure of the Kent files have embarrassed FDR and Churchill to the point of changing American policies? And who were the two Russian women with whom Kent had affairs? (Was this just sex, or spying?)

The first question seems unimportant in these days of the national security state, where a 9/11-traumatized society (UK and USA) has placidly allowed government to arrest and confine on the basis of mere accusations of either terrorism or being a terrorist.  In mid-1940, with Hitler’s Germany on the march westward, Britain acted pretty much the same way. But not so the United States. Yet awareness of the Kent affair was very tightly controlled by Washington, so the constitutional issues never arose until long after the fact, by which time Kent’s rampant anti-Semitism destroyed his credibility.

As for the second, whatever FDR’s intentions in the fight against Hitler, he did not want to give the so-called isolationists any leverage. That said, American public opinion strongly supported aid to Britain, while Roosevelt’s popularity remained high. Disclosure of the Kent files would not have changed that support, and, at the same time, would have provided Hitler with a fuller understanding of American policy.

Rumors of Kent being a coerced Soviet agent cropped up from the outset. All things are possible, but in this case it seems unlikely. But, how else to explain that Stalin’s regime allowed one Tatiana, Kent’s lover while in Moscow, to leave the Soviet Union and join him? This was what the paranoid Bolsheviks did casually.

Rand’s book is an easy read, worth an evening in front of the fireplace. Churchillians might ask, where was WSC? The Prime Minister consciously and smartly opted out, leaving instructions to let MI5 to do its thing.


*Our article was “Roosevelt and Prewar Commitments to Churchill: The Tyler Kent Affair,” Diplomatic History 5:4 (Fall 1981), 291-311. To our delight Tyler Kent called us “egg-head academics” in a long rant in The Journal of Historical Review (labeled routinely as a Holocaust-denial publication): see http://xrl.us/bpu6pa (accessed 3 June 2013). Kent’s State Department personnel file (DS-Kent/123) was opened for my use in 1979-80, but closed thereafter. Rand found papers from that file in Kent’s personal papers, although some of the details apparently are missing.

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