Roosevelt and Prewar Commitments to Churchill: The Tyler Kent Affair* WARREN F. KIMBALL and BRUCE BARTLETT A cold, blustery wind swept across pier 3 in Hoboken, New Jersey, on 4 December 1945 as the British freighter, Silver Oak, maneuvered into a berth. Her thirteen-day trek across the Atlantic had been through heavy seas, and seasickness had plagued her forty-seven passengers. Shortly before noon the last passenger debarked. Met at the gangwayby two private detectives, plus a captain and lieutenant from Hoboken’s “finest,” he was quickly escorted to the Customs Ofice on the pier. He briefly greeted the mother he had not seen since March 1940 and then, after receiving customs clearance, turned to talk with the group of over forty newspaper reporters clustered around him. Five years in a British prison had not robbed him of his good looks, his poise, or his political convictions. The newspaper headlines that followed summarizedthe results of the dock-side interview: TYLER KENT ARRIVES, GETS CHANCE TO TELL ALL- CHARGES KENNEDY LIED, KENT RETURNS DE- AND THEN DOESN’T; KENT, HOME FROM CELL, FENDS ACTION.’ T h i s combination of reticence, accusations, and hints of secret knowledge epitomized what was, for the next three decades, known as the Tyler Kent story. In fact, there are two Tyler Kent stories: the one that combines the few bits and pieces of factual evidence available before 1972 *Preparation of this article was assisted by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, and the Research Council of Rutgers University. The authors wish to thank Richard J. Whalen, who shared with them his knowledge and his extensive files of correspondence on Tyler Kent and Harry Elmer Barnes. They also thank Charles C. Alexander, Ohio University; Christopher Thome, University of Sussex; Garry Clifford, University of Connecticut;David Reynolds, Cambridge University; and Lloyd C. Gardner and Herbert Meritt, Rutgers University, for their helpful criticisms. ’New York Times, 5 December 1945; New York Sun, 4 December 1945; New York Herald-Tribune, 5 December 1945; New York D a i l y News, 5 December 1945; New York World-Telegram, 4 December 1945; New York Journal-American, 4 December 1945. 29 1 292 DIPLOMATIC HISTORY with innuendo, rumor, and unverified charges, and the one that is found in the documentary records made available in 1972. To begin with the first, Tyler Gatewood Kent, a twenty-nine-year- old code clerk at the U.S. embassy in London, was arrested on 20 May 1940, though no public mention of it appeared until 2 June when the New York Times reported an American embassy statement, announcing the arrest but refusing further comment on the grounds of national security. For the next three months occasional but equally uninformative news items cropped up: an announcement of Kent’s arraignment by a British court; a mention of secret hearings; the start of his in-camera trial; then, on 8 November 1940, the sentencing of Kent to seven years’ imprisonment for five offenses, including violations of the British Oficial Secrets Act. British newspapers, carefully censored at that time, reported that Kent had stolen four classified documents and implied that some of those documents had been passed to Anna Wolkoff, who had been convicted of similar charges. Wolkoff, daughter of a White Russian admiral emigre, had reportedly attempted to transmit a coded letter to William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw), the British Fascist who had fled to Germany and made propaganda broadcasts for the Nazi government. Public reports did not give the slightest indication of the contents, senders, or recipients of the documents stolen by Kent.* Hearsay soon began to merge with fact. Two questions posed in the House of Commons claimed that the Kent documents included copies of correspondence between President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill. The M P s accused Churchill of having violated British censorship, since the messages had been sent via the American embassy when Churchill was still only First Lord of the A d m i r a l t ~ . ~ The British home secretary declined comment, but Arthur Sears Henning, writing in the Washington Times-Herald on 12 November 194 1, claimed, according to one version, that the Kent collection of pre-June 1940 Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence outlined the Lend-Lease concept as a way of circumventing neutrality legislation and discussed the possibility of more vigorous support for Britain by the United state^.^ In spite of persistent efforts by Tyler Kent’s mother to publicize her son’s story, the Kent case disappeared from public view until a debate in ?New York Times, 2 June, 2. 6, 20, 25. 28 August, 24, 25, 29 October and 8 November 1940. Times (London), 8 November 1940; Daily Telegraph (London), 8 No- vember 1940: Manchester Guardian, 8 November 1940. ’Charles A . Beard, President Roosevelt and the Corning of the War, 1941 (New Haven, 1948). p. 272. ‘Washington Times-Herald, 12 November 1941. Kent’s mother later claimed that the article was suppressed after the first edition, but the last (five-star) edition for the day still carried Henning‘s story. “Minutes,” Friends Meeting House, Washington, DC, 20 July 1944. summarizes a talk given by Mrs. Kent. See also Official File 5613, Papers of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, NY (hereafter cited as Roosevelt Papers). THE TYLER KENT AFFAIR 293 the British House of Commons on 16 June 1944. During that debate a member of Parliament claimed that the Kent documents related to Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence concerning America’s entry into the war, and newspapers in the United States quickly seized the story. Speculation in both British and American papers reached new heights when Anna Kent claimed that Churchill’s first message to Roosevelt stated: “I am half American and the natural person to work with you. We evidently see eye to eye. If I could become Prime Minister of Britain we could control the world.” She added that, according to a message from her son, Churchill and Roosevelt had exchanged details on a plan for world d~mination.~ The news media would have played up such sensational accusations under any circumstances, for they effectively accused Roosevelt and Churchill of having plotted the collapse of the Neville Chamberlain government so that Churchill could become prime minister, of having schemed to bring America into the war while FDR was publicly denying any such eventuality, and of having secretly mapped out plans for Anglo- American domination of the world. But 1944 was an election year, and the Republicans, with a constituency already predisposed to believe anything bad about the British and Franklin Roosevelt, sensed an issue of substance. Rumors of treason by government officials already had begun to leak out of the war and navy board investigations of the Pearl Harbor attack and, in August, Rear Adm. Husband E. Kimmel, the navy commander at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked, finally broke his long silence with a letter to Senator Harry Truman that broadly hinted at a hidden scandal.6 The Kent case added fuel to the fire. As the London Sunday Express put it: for months a whispering campaign had developed around the Kent affair. This was picked up by a small group of anti-British and anti- Roosevelt newspapers and Congressmen. The Hearst press, for example, played up mysterious reports ‘that the British attorney for Kent fears for the safety of the young American if he is returned to the United States.’ A radio commentator was quoted as saying Kent had disclosed State Department informationto Russia’s secret police. The New York Journal-American said Kent ‘was convicted by the British ’Daily Mail (London), 21 June 1944; John G. Winant (U.S. ambassador in Great Britain) to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, 21 June 1944 (State Dept. #4928), Decimal Files (DF) 123/Kent, Department of State, National Archives (hereafter cited as DSNA); Robert Waithman, “American Diary,” News Chronicle (London), 20 June 1940. The quo- tation is from Gerald L. K. Smith, “The Story of Tyler Kent,” The Cross and the Flag ( 1 944): 664, and is attributed to Ian Ross MacFarlane, an investigator hired by M r s Kent. Smith noted that he was paraphrasing the “general sense rather than the exact quote.” See also John H. Snow, The Case of TyZer Kent (New York, 1946), p. 6; and Anna Kent to Senator Gerald P. Nye [with enclosures], 1 1 December 1942, Box 14, Papers of Gerald P. Nye, Herbert Hoover Library, West Branch, IA. 6H. E. Kimmel to Senator Harry Truman, U.S., Congress, Senate, Congressional Record, 78th Cong., 2d sess., 1944,90, pt. 10A3653. 294 DIPLOMATIC HISTORY of divulging code messages between Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt.” The death of a journalist who had been investigating the Kent case quickly became “mysterious,” and broad hints of murder began to emerge.8Although thirty years later the existence of Churchill-Roosevelt exchanges can be found reasonable and hardly surprising, that was not so in 1944. Mrs. Kent’s flat assertion that Roosevelt and Churchill had exchanged private, coded messages using American ciphers was a bomb- shell, particularly since statements in Parliament seemed to verify its accuracy. It all appeared conspiratorial: private messages in code to someone other than the British prime minister, Churchill’s rapid rise to power and his subsequent close personal relationship with Roosevelt, Kent’s speedy and incommunicado imprisonment after waiving his diplo- matic immunity, and vague hints of broken codes and secrets passed on to the Bolshe~iks.~ Although by 1944 the fact that Churchill-Roosevelt corresponded in 1939 might not have troubled Americans, assuming it was all innocent and did not contain any American commitments to go to war, the secret existence of such a body of pre-Pearl Harbor messages raised questions of presidential credibility that could have proven disastrous in an election year. Admitting that its hand had been forced by “recent inquiries and newspaper reports,” the State Department finally issued a press release about the Tyler Kent case on 2 September 1944. For the first time since Kent’s arrest factual details became available, although the department constructed the press release with caution, emphasizing considerations of national security. The statement implied that Kent was an anti-Semite and, as such, sympathetic to Nazi propaganda. After briefly discussing Anna Wolkoff s background and association with various pro-German groups, the release pointed out that Kent’s rooms were searched when British authorities became convinced that Kent had passed classified documents to Wolkoff. In a strongly worded paragraph, the department noted that Ambassador Kennedy, with the approval of the State Department, had waived Kent’s diplomatic immunity prior to the search. The release defended this waiver as legal and as necessary in order to preserve the confidentialityof diplomatic communications. The major bombshell was the announcement that over 1,500 individual embassy papers were found in Kent’s room, along with extra and unauthorized keys to the code room at the American embassy. No mention was made of what the documents contained or who sent and ’Sunday Express (London), 3 September 1944. See also Times (London), 4 Sep- tember 1944. Washington Times-Herald, 18 July 1944. 9Shortly after the debate in the House of Commons, Mrs. Kent issued a public statement about the case: “My Appeal for Fairness: A Petition for Justice on Behalf of a Loyal American Against Whom Injustice Continues,” DF 123/Kent, DSNA. THE TYLER KENT AFFAIR 295 received them, though the department stated that their contents would have been useful to Germany. In the same paragraph the press release resorted to innuendo, noting that Kent, while in London, had asked for a transfer to Berlin. The delay in holding Kent’s arraignment and trial was explained by the need to conduct a full investigation of the leaking of classified docu- ments before holding a criminal proceeding. The in-camera trial became necessary, claimed the statement, because of certain counterintelligence efforts that would otherwise have been compromised. Identifying British survival with American security, the State Department claimed that because of Britain’s fight for its very “existence,” it was impossible to ask Britain to waive its jurisdiction and send Kent to the United States for trial, particularly since the other principals were British citizens and guilty only of breaking British law. The release ended with a scarcely veiled threat: “The question whether the United States will prefer additional charges against Kent will be decided after his release from imprisonment in Great Britain. . . .,’lo Joseph P. Kennedy, American ambassador to Britain in 1940, soon added his voice to the controversy during a newspaper interview. Kennedy’s story did not contradict the State Department press release but did add a touch of sensationalism. He admitted that Churchill had sent a steady stream of reports on Britain’s military preparedness through the American embassy. Kennedy claimed these were sent in an “unbreakable” code, and that Kent’s actions had forced the U.S. government to close its secret communications systemjust at the time of the fall of France in 1940. This “blackout,” said Kennedy, lasted for two to six weeks during one of the war’s most critical periods. Claiming Kent’s motives had been sheer anti- Semitism (“he played up and down the scale of an intense anti-Semitic feeling, showed no remorse whatever except in respect to his parents”), Kennedy denied that Kent had been “railroaded.” Rather, the ambassador argued, “if we had been at war I wouldn’t have favored turning Kent over to Scotland Yard. . . . I would have recommended that he be brought back to the United States and been shot.”ll Although the State Department press release effectively discredited Kent, anti-Roosevelt columnists quickly trumpeted the entire story, adding a few rumors and inventions of their own. Frank C. Hanighen, later a founder of the conservative weekly, Human Events, claimed that during his conversations with Labourite members of Parliament in 1942 they had mentioned a Scotland Yard search for “an extra copy” of the Kent documents. Hanighen related some “exciting, if not credible” rumors that his English friends had passed on concerning the extra copy. According to their tale, Anna Wolkoff had given her copies of the collection to a “Red lopressrelease #405, US., Department of State, 2 September 1944. “Washington Daily News, 5 September 1944 with byline by Henry J. Taylor; and Joseph P. Kennedy t o Eugene Meyer, 28 September 1944, Box 30, Papers of Eugene Meyer, Library of Congress. DIPLOMATIC HISTORY spy” posing as an anti-Bolshevik. Once Joseph Stalin had the documents, he could threaten Roosevelt and Churchill with exposure unless they acceded to his demands.’* Although the Yalta conference was still four months away, the so-called “Yalta Betrayal” image already had begun to develop. By the time Kent returned to the United States in 1945, the onset of Cold War tensions lent new significance to his story. Russian domination of Eastern Europe and heightened rumors of a “sellout” by Roosevelt at Yalta made the story of an extra set of the Kent documents more believable. In the never-ending search for simple answers to complicated historical questions, blackmail fit the bill.I3 Even more newsworthy was the implicit relationship between the Kent affair and the ongoing investigation of the Pearl Harbor attack by a special joint congressional committee. During his news conference on the pier in Hoboken in 1945, Kent portentiously told reporters that he would make himself available to the Pearl Harbor Investigation Committee. The committee discussed calling Kent to testify, but Percy Greaves, chief of the minority staff, and the two Republican congressmen on the committee each interviewed Kent and concluded that his testimony would not add anything substantial to the record. Moreover, Kent himself wrote the committee chairman, Senator Alben Barkley, stating that “I can think of nothing within my own knowledge that would throw light on events directly connected with our country’s disaster at Pearl Harbor.” Acting on that advice the committee decided not to subpoena Kent.I4 Anti-Roosevelt revisionists’ interest in the Kent affair stemmed from their desire to gain access to what they believed was documentary evidence of Anglo-American collusion against Hitler and Japan even before May 1940, a time when the United States was legally neutral. Convinced that Roosevelt had “lied us into war,” revisionists like Harry Elmer Barnes and ”Frank C. Hanighen. “The Curious Case of Tyler Kent,” The Progressive (Madi- son, WI), 9 October 1944. ”For a full treatment of the Yalta image in America see Athan Theoharis, The Yalta Mvths (Columbia, 1970). As Theoharis points out, only the Republican extremists con- demned the Yalta conference as early as 1945: nevertheless, their complaints made the press curious about Kent’s story. The notion of the existence of at least two extra sets of the Kent documents has persisted. In a letter to Richard Whalen, 6 March 1963, Harry Elmer Barnes claimed that Joseph Pew, a businessman with contacts in Russia, had obtained a set of the Kent documents in the fall of 1945 and had given them to President Truman. Pew claimed he got them from the Russians, but Barnes then talked to Kent who swore he had no idea how that could have happened. They speculated that Anna Wolkoff had been a double agent for the Soviet Union. Barnes claimed that Ambassador Kennedy also had a copy since the documents were on microfilm. “Although the most tenacious partisan Republican on the committee, Senator Owen Brewster of Maine. moved to have counsel examine the Kent file in the State Department records. the motion failed. That the committee planned to finish its work that day probably inhenced the vote. U.S.. Congress, Senate, Joint Committee on the Investigation ofthe Pearl Harbor Attack, Hearings on Pearl Harbor Attack, 79th Cong., 2d sess., 23 May 1946, pt. 11:5523-30. THE TYLER KENT AFFAIR 297 Charles A. Beard were intrigued by the tantalizing indications that a full exposure of the Tyler Kent case would validate their convictions. The evidence available in the late 1940s and 1950s, when such critiques peaked, was beguiling but hardly complete. Hearsay long since had replaced fact, and the Kent story had taken on a bizarre flavor. One story had Kent decoding almost 2,000 Churchill-Roosevelt exchanges, a frequency of correspondencethat would have occupied the two leaders full time. And the rumor that a set of the Kent documents had fallen into Soviet hands continued to crop up.15 Early in the sixties, Richard Whalen published an article on the Kent case as well as a biography of Joseph Kennedy that included a discussion of the affair. Whalen sorted out some of the fact from rumor, summarized the case, added a little new information based upon the trial transcript, and posed some hard but unanswered questions: Why was Kent not tried in the United States? Was his arrest legal? Did the U.S. government ask British authorities to keep Kent in England and quiet for the duration of the war? Did other foreign powers gain access to the Roosevelt-Churchill messages? Was Kent a spy? Whalen was bitingly critical of Kent’s “staggering indiscretions,” but he seemed convinced that the ex-code clerk had been denied a fair trial and a chance to clear his reputation only because Churchill and Roosevelt had somethingthey wished to hide, even long after the end of the war.16 In spite of over twenty years’ worth of broad hints about the sensational disclosures he could make, the answers Kent gave Whalen were largely reiterations of the vague guesses that had characterized the Kent affair since it had taken place. Kent’s opinion was that his immunity had been waived after his arrest, hence his arrest was illegal. He was “firmly convinced” that the deportation order dated 23 May 1940 demon- strated that the British had no intention of prosecuting him and that from May until August, when Kent was finally indicted, there were constant discussions between London and Washington concerning how to deal with him. Kent argued that his actions could not have compromised the ISThe “lied us into war” statement was first made by Clare Boothe Luce. See Harry Elmer Barnes, “Revisionism: A Key to Peace,” RampartJournal2 (Spring 1966): 30. For a brief summary of the use of the Kent affair by anti-Roosevelt revisionists, see James Leutze, “The Secret of the Churchill-Roosevelt Correspondence: September 1939-May 1940,” Journal o f Contemporary History 10 (1975): 465-91. For additional examples of the development of the Tyler Kent myth, see Beard, Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, pp. 265-73,296; Barnes, “The Court Historians Versus Revisionism,” 2d rev. ed. (privately printed, n.d.), pp. 9-10; Barnes, ed., Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (Caldwell, ID, 1953), pp. 16,74; Barnes, “Revisionism and the Promotion of Peace,”Liberation (Summer 1958): 14; Barnes, “The End of the Old America,” Modern Age 2 (Spring 1958): 141-42; Charles C. Tansill, Back Door to War (Chicago, 1952), pp. 587-88; Westbrook Pegler, “The Strange Case of Tyler Kent,” New York Journal-American, 19 October 1960; and Snow, The Caseof TylerKent. ‘%chard Whalen, “The Strange Case of Tyler Kent,” Diplomat (November 1965): 1 7 c and Whalen, The Founding Father: The Story of Joseph P. Kennedy (New York, 1964),pp. 303-14. 298 DIPLOMATIC HISTORY American codes since the four documents used in the trial were in the GRAY code, which even the State Department treated as noncodidential. Kent wrote that he did not believe Churchill’s claim that Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had known of the Churchill-Roosevelt exchanges, since those messages had discussed how to arrange for Churchill to become prime minister. Kent emphatically denied that he had made anti-Semitic statements during his postarrest interview with Ambas- sador Kennedy but was unable to provide Whalen with any logical explanation of why Kennedy, supposedly an ardent anti-interventionist, would act so harshly against someone of like persuasion. Only when Kent explained his reasons for taking the documents did his letters become believable: I took copies of documents because I considered that their contents was concrete proof of non-neutral activity on the part of Roosevelt and co. Today [ 19641 this matter of neutrality and its violation is treated as a purely technical matter having only a small bearing on the facts of history. In order to see the situation in proper perspective, it is essential to project onesself [sic] back 24 years into the political ambience of that time.” Kent argued that it was impossible to understand his motivation without actually knowing what was in the roughly 1,500 documents he had collected. Though Kent never explained just how he planned to use that evidence of Roosevelt’s illegal actions, he pointed out that he had given a sympathetic member of Parliament information about the Churchill- Roosevelt exchanges because they related to “impropriety” from a strictly British point of view. Kent scaled down previous estimates of five hundred Churchill-Roosevelt messages to between thirty and fifty, but saved his strongest language for a defense of his patriotism. He emphasized that he had not been accused of spying nor charged by the United States with anything, much less treason. He pointed out that the British prosecutor in the case, the Earl Jowitt, had agreed that Kent had no prior knowledge of Anna Wolkoff s activities as a foreign agent. Taken as a whole, Kent’s information added very little to what people already knew about the case. Kent apparently had no documents, and his recollections about the ones he had seen were impressionistic and vague. The sensational disclosures for which the Roosevelt critics had waited during those twenty-five years never materialized. Although Kent always had claimed that the Yardley Act prevented him from telling the full story of his case, he answered Whalen’s questions without ever claiming that the law restricted his freedom of speech.’* ”Kent t o Whalen, 5 February 1964, Whalen files. lRThisis taken from a series of letters exchanged between Kent and Whalen during January-March 1964, Whalen tiles. See also The Earl Jowitt, Some Were Spies (London, 1954), pp. 4 M 3 . The member of Parliament to whom Kent passed information was Capt. A. H. M. Ramsay, organizer of the rabidly anti-Semitic Right Club. Following this episode, THE TYLER KENT AFFAIR 299 From Kent’s arrest in 1940 until the declassificationin 1972 of both British and American diplomatic records for the World War I1 years, the Tyler Kent story remained a staple of revisionist critiques of Roosevelt’s prewar foreign policy. Yet the only public evidence consisted of scattered newspaper reports, vague statements by British authorities, and a press release from the State Department followed by a press conference held by Joseph P. Kennedy-both in 1944. There was also a steady stream of accusations, all based on hearsay and most issued by Kent’s mother. The trial transcript, examined by Whalen in the mid-1960s, added detail but proved disappointingly incomplete. All those who studied the Kent case, including Tyler Kent himself, agreed that only an examination of the Kent documents could provide a satisfactory explanation of what really happened and why. They were right. The story revealed by the documents resembles the popular version only in the most superficial fashion. The British and American records, all opened in 1972, including the Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence, showed that the two men exchanged only fifteen telegrams and letters prior to Kent’s arrest. A State Department inventory of the 1,500 various documents found in Kent’s apartment on that morning in May 1940 indicated that Kent had copies of only eight of those Churchill-Roosevelt messages, in spite of Kent’s assertions in a recent letter in which he upped his own estimate of Roosevelt-Churchill cables sent before May 1940 to one hundred or one hundred twenty-five. Neither all fifteen Roosevelt-Churchill messages nor all the other documents found in Kent’s apartment contained anything to substantiate his charges. There was nothing about Churchill planning to replace Chamberlain as prime minister, nothing to suggest firm promises to aid England in any secret, illegal way, and nothing that even remotely resembled the Lend-Lease concept, which the Roosevelt administration did not put forth until some seven months after Kent’s arrest. There was no promise of American intervention by the U.S. ambassador in France, William Bullitt, and no word of any plan by Roosevelt to circumvent Congress and provide aid to Britain. In fact, the president told Churchill that any transfer of destroyers would have to be approved by Congress. Ramsay was “detained” during most of the war by the British government. It was his release in 1944 that stimulated renewed interest in the Kent affair. See Winant to Hull, 26 Septem- ber 1944, DF 841.00/9-2644, DSNA. The Yardley Act of 1932 (22 USC 135), scwalled because it was designed to prevent an American intelligence analyst, Herbert Yardley, from disclosing cryptographic secrets after he left government service, was repealed and repassed with minor changes in 1948 as title 18 USC 952. Kent’s preoccupation with his reputation prompted him to sue two Florida news- papers and Joseph P. Kennedy after a printed report that Kennedy had called him a traitor. Because he had never been convicted by any American court of a crime against the United States, Kent won his libel suit, although the promised opportunity to get “historical material on the record” never developed when he agreed to a settlement without a trial. The slander suit against Kennedy was dropped, supposedly because of the ex-ambassador’s poor health. Kent to Barnes, 3 March 1963; Kent to Whales, 2 March 1964, Whalen files. 300 DIPLOMATIC HISTORY Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, and Roosevelt did correspond about British naval policy regarding neutral shipping. Following the president’s letter of 11 September 1939, which initiated their personal correspondence, and before Churchill became prime minister, they ex- changed ten cables and one letter, all solely devoted to descriptions of British naval actions against the Germans in the South Atlantic, or to problems posed for American shipping by the British sea blockade of Germany. According to international law, the United States was legally neutral, though everyone, including the Germans, recognized that as a legal fiction. In any event, there was nothing illegal about Churchill’s attempts to avoid antagonizingAmerican opinion. Once Churchill became prime minister on 10 May 1940, his messages to Roosevelt broadened in content from naval matters to include the overall issue of American aid to Britain. But even by these messages Kent’s claims of conspiracy are not borne out. Before Kent’s arrest on 20 May, Churchill sent three messages as prime minister to the president, each asking for some form of American aid. Roosevelt’s only answer came in response to the first and most comprehensive of Churchill’s telegrams, and that answer carefully insisted that planes, destroyers, and any similar aid would require the approval of Congress. The president ignored the request for a proclamation of American nonbelligerency (a step away from neutrality). Kent might have pointed to the British message as evidence that Churchill wanted to drag the United States into the war, but that would have been no surprise even in May 1940. There was nothing in Roosevelt’s cautious answer to suggest that he had the slightest inclination to accept the prime minister’s proposals. As did the anti-Roosevelt revisionists in many instances, Kent exaggerated his evidence so much that he lost his credibility. Churchill and Roosevelt did have something they wanted to hide. The two leaders had connived secretly to ensure that British restrictions on neutral shipping did not cause an AngleAmerican incident, and they had begun to work out procedures for the joint reporting of the location of German surface raiders and submarines, violating the spirit though not the letter of legal neutrality. Had that information become public, anti-interventionists would have set up the kind of hue and cry that Roosevelt desperately wanted to avoid. But there was nothing in the Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence that Stalin could have used as blackmail in 1945, nor is there a shred of evidence to back up the rumor that a set of the Kent documents had been passed to a Soviet agent.19 IYThenature and completeness of the Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence are dis- cussed in Warren F . Kimball, “Churchill and Roosevelt: The Personal Equation,” Prologue 6 (Fall 1974): 169-82. The State Department inventory of the Kent documents is in Johnson to Hull, 4 June 1940, DF 123/Kent/6-440, DSNA. See also two memoranda for the files, both dated 3 March 1970, that also discuss the contents of the so-called Kent tiles. Both memoranda are located in D F 123/Kent, DSNA. Kent’s latest upward revision of the number of Churchill-Rooseveltmessages sent prior to June 1940 is in a letter from Kent to the THE TYLER KENT AFFAIR 301 Even more fascinating than Kent’s story is the tale told in the series of cables exchanged between the American embassy in London and the State Department. Though it is always possible to dismiss official files as selective, in this case it would have taken a vast conspiracy stretching from London to Washington and lasting for over thirty-five years-an unlikely possibility.2o The Kent affair all began shortly after midnight on 18 May 1940with a telephone call from the Military Intelligence Branch of Scotland Yard to Herschel V. Johnson, counselor of the American embassy in London. Johnson was asked to meet with Capt. Maxwell Knight that afternoon at three o’clock to discuss “a delicate matter.” The matter was Tyler Kent. Knight explained that British surveillance of the Right Club, which he characterized as anti-Semitic and pro-German, had led them to Kent. He also told Johnson that Kent had been visited by a suspected Gestapo agent on 8 October 1939, though the investigators had decided at the time not to inform the American embassy. In February 1940, Kent’s contacts with various members of the Right Club, particularly Anna Wolkoff, caused Scotland. Yard to investigate him further. According to British agents, Wolkoff had frequently boasted that Kent was an important contact and that she could obtain confidential information through him. Knight informed Johnson that they would arrest Anna Wolkoff on 20 May and that if diplomatic immunity did not stand in the way, they planned to search Kent’s apartment at the same time. Johnson gave his tentative approval for the search and then reported to the ambassador. Kennedy agreed, and the next day Johnson told British authorities that Kent’s diplomatic immunity had been waived even though Kennedy was checking with the secretary of state for both confirmation and approval.21 authors, 3 June 1973. Twelve of the f&teen Churchill-Rooseveltexchanges sent by 20 May 1940 were published by the mid-1950s. See U.S., Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1939 5 (Washington, 1865-): 85-86, 121-22, and FRUS, 1940, 2:10, 11, 29-30, 49-51; Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm (Boston, 1948), pp. 44041; and Franklin D. Roosevelt, F.D.R. His Personal Letters, ed. Elliot Roosevelt (New York, 1950), 2:995. All are being published in Warren F. Kimball, ed., Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence, 193e1945, 3 vols. (Princeton, in press). For details on growing Anglo-American naval cooperation, see Leutze, Bar;gaining for Su- premacy (Chapel Hill, 1977). Additional details within a broader context may be found in David Reynolds, The Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance, 1937-1941: Competitive Co-operation (London, 1981). 20Historianshave frequently remarked on the propensity of governmental con- spirators, particularly when motivated by extreme self-righteousness,to maintain records of their actions, apparently in the belief that history will ultimately fmd them praiseworthy. The Nazi records of their persecution of the Jews and the Nixon administration’s tapes and memoranda are classic examples. Given Churchill’sand Roosevelt’s belief in the correctness of their course of action, a “conspiracy” to hide the real facts of something as picayune as the Tyler Kent case seems quite unlikely, especially since the Roosevelt-Churchill corres- pondence, which contains evidence of extensive Anglo-American cooperation before Pearl Harbor, was preserved. 2’Memorandum by Herschel Johnson, 28 May 1940, attached to Johnson to Hull, 30 May 1940 (State Dept. #5318), DF 123/Kent/5-3040, DSNA. 302 DIPLOMATIC HISTORY At 1 1 :20 on the morning of Monday, 20 May, Captain Knight, three other Scotland Yard detectives, and Franklin C. Gowen, the second secretary of the American embassy, amved at Tyler Kent’s flat on Gloucester Place near Hyde Park. Armed with a search warrant and Kennedy’s verbal waiver of diplomatic immunity, the police ignored Kent’s cry of “don’t come in” and crashed through the door. An immediate search of Kent’s rooms revealed a pajama-clad girlfriend and extensive files of documents that appeared to be official American diplomatic correspondence. The police released the woman after telling Gowen that she was not involved in the security probe, that she was under constant surveillance, and that her phone was tapped. The suitcases containing the documents were taken by taxi to the American embassy, with Kent and the police following. Kent was then locked in a room at the embassy to await a hearing.” Later that afternoon Kennedy and Knight interrogated Kent. Knight, who handled most of the questioning, repeatedly tried to get Kent to elaborate on his contacts with Anna Wolkoff and Captain Ramsay, but Kent maintained that they were merely friends. Knight, obviously angry and frustrated, told Kent that a cocky manner and pretense of naivete would do no good, but Kent steadfastly denied any knowledge of illegal activities by either himself or his friends. When the young code clerk drew a distinction between disloyalty and opposition to current British policy, Knight curtly interrupted and demanded that Kent stop being “a parlor politician.” When Ambassador Kennedy inquired whether Kent might be liable to the charge of spying should the U.S. government waive its rights, Knight replied in the affirmative, provided that the evidence warranted it, and then Knight suggested that further questioning was pointless.23 Although it is possible that the transcript of the interrogation was edited or that subsequent confrontations between Kent and the ambas- sador occurred, there is only the one record in the files. Kennedy’s later claim that Kent showed no remorse is clearly accurate, but the more emotional charge of Kent’s rabid anti-Semitic remarks is not borne out, though the young man’s anti-Jewish sentiments subsequently became all too e~ident.?~ Some of the suspicion about Kent’s real role in the affair stemmed from a series of telephone calls that came to the embassy for Kent and were answered by Franklin Gowen pretending to be the code clerk. One call came from Kent’s mistress, warning the embassy that Kent had been arrested by the British. However, the most significant call came from Mrs. **Memorandum by Franklin C. Gowen, 28 May 1940, attached to ibid. ”Transcript of the “First General Interrogation of Kent after his Arrest held in Ambassador Kennedy’s ofice, May 20,1940,” attached to ibid. ’*In a letter written many years later, Kent stated that “the Jewish hate campaign stands in the same relationship t o World War I1 as Uncle Tom’s Cabin does to the Civil War.” THE TYLER KENT AFFAIR 303 Enid Riddell, confirming Kent’s invitation to a dinner to be attended by the Italian military attache, Lt. Col. Don Francesco Maringliano, Duke Del Monte. British authorities suspectedAnna Wolkoff and the duke of passing uncensored and classified information to Italy, using the diplomatic pouch (war between Italy and Great Britain was still a few weeks away) but had no concrete evidence. The meeting between Kent and the other two proved nothing but added to the weight of other circumstantial evidence against him, particularly Anna Wolkoffs repeated boasts that Kent was her contact at the American embassy.25 Actually, the circumstantial evidence was far stronger than Scotland Yard realized. British cryptographers had regularly broken the German diplomatic codes and were aware of a serious leak that was giving the German ambassador in Italy, Hans Mackensen, access to Churchill- Roosevelt exchanges. Thanks to a tip from Luigi Barzini, Jr., an anti- Fascist Italian-Americanjournalist, British security agents knew the leak came from within the American embassy. Thirty years later an examina- tion of the cables that Mackensen sent from Rome to Berlin shows that his knowledge of such Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence ended with a cable from Roosevelt to the new prime minister on 16 May, only four days before Kent’s arrest. Given the known links between Kent and Anna Wolkoff and the close connection between Wolkoff and the Duke Del Monte, it is hard to avoid coming to the conclusion that, at the very least, Kent had been duped and used by Wolkoff. As Kent admitted during his trial, he had invited Wolkoff and Captain Ramsay to look at the documen