Since it was still wartime, the jacket failed to mention that he, like many journalists, was also a member of the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA), an organization my mother referred to as “Oh, So Secret.” My brother says that Bobby was in Shanghai when the Japanese invaded China in 1937, and I remember stories of his propaganda activities, such as putting Allied messages in prayer books in churches all over Europe, including Germany, and also tales of “Wild Bill” Donovan. During the war years, my father was involved in getting European Jews, including his assistant, Paul Vajda, out of prisons (and out of the country to safety, if possible). After my mother died, I found letters from people he had helped among her papers.
In 1946, we moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where my father worked for Radio Station WLW. His daily 30-minute radio news program, “World News Analysis,” aired at 11:00 P.M. (Not surprisingly, we children only heard it a few times, once when my mother was his guest.) On Sundays he and three other commentators, Jack Beall, Arthur Reilly, and Maj. General James E. Edmonds, all friends since their European days, shared a WLW news discussion panel called “The World Front.”
In Ohio my parents divorced, and my mother, brother and I moved to Washington, D.C. Over the next nine years, my father owned an upstate New York weekly newspaper that folded and a herd of cattle that contracted hoof-and-mouth disease, and worked for the
He wrote two more books:
I think those are the adjectives I would have used as a teenaged daughter about my imagined father. I feel it was a deep loss not to have known him better, and longer.
I, for one, would have loved to know what he would have thought or written about the fall of the Berlin Wall; or the death of Alexander Litvinenko, the ex-KGB spy, now MI6 agent, poisoned by radioactive polonium; or about Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader-turned-fugitive, wanted for international war crimes, who, until he was finally arrested, lived right in Belgrade for a decade disguised as an eccentric monk-like practitioner of alternative medicine.
My father died of a heart attack in 1955, just short of his fiftieth birthday. His was a short life of accomplishment at an early age, a hard-hitting, heavy-drinking, heavy-smoking, stress-filled existence. It was a life of constant deadlines of all sorts. In many ways he lived the life of his fictional protagonists, and like theirs, his wasn’t always a happy one.
During the war years, though, Bobby was just where he wanted to be—where the story was, in a period of great historical upheaval in the world.
Daphne Wolcott Parker Hawkes
Princeton, NJ
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Jake Danser has it all: a beautiful wife, a house in the California hills, and a high-profile job as a forensic psychologist. But he’s also got a mistress. And when she’s found strangled to death with his necktie, the police show up at his door. Now it’s up to Jake to prove he didn’t do it. But how can he, when all the evidence says he did?
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