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3 Chapter 1 paris september 3, 1935, would serve as well as any date to mark the beginning of the prewar period, the start of the buildup for World War II. The postwar era ended in the middle twenties, when the last patch was put on the physical wreckage of World War I. An interlude of precious calm, highlighted by the Truce of Locarno, followed. But the fabric of peace was too delicate to withstand the world depression which began in America in 1929, and from 1931 the European situation deteriorated. Nineteen thirty-three put Adolf Hitler in power, and in 1934 there were rumblings of what was to come. Treaties were repudiated and defiance was barked, but as yet there was no overt act to break the peace. September 3 was not a day of great news, but it was the day I arrived in Paris to join the staff of the Associated Press there. I stepped out of the Gare St. Lazare onto streets bathed in feeble sunshine but still glistening from a shower. This is the time when postcard photographers must be busy in Paris, for the postcard makers like to show buildings in the sunlight with their reflections on wet pavements. Paris was not new to me. I had lived there in 1927 as a student and again in 1931 as a member of the staff of the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune. I had not found much time for study during my first visit, at least for study out of books. Nineteen twenty-seven was the best year France enjoyed between the two wars. Paris was bubbling over with exciting things, living was cheap, and I was twenty-one. But even in that happy 1. This is a reference to seven treaties negotiated and signed in Locarno, Switzerland, in October 1925, in which Great Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, and Germany agreed to a number of provisions intended to ensure peace in Europe. As a consequence of Locarno, Germany was admitted to the League of Nations. In 1936, however, Hitler declared the truce a dead letter and invaded the Rhineland. 4 ED KENNEDY’S WAR year some older Frenchmen told me it was too bad I had not known Paris before the war—ah, in those days, Paris was really quelque chose. My “student days” in Paris ended when my money ran out, a little ahead of time. I returned home and spent three years on the staffs of newspapers, on the Newark Star-Eagle, the New York Sun, and the Washington Star. Those were days of police blotters and murder trials, and I enjoyed them. A little startled to find myself a few hundred dollars to the good in 1931, I left abruptly for a second fling in France. There were two havens for American newspapermen in Paris—the Herald and the Tribune, and the Tribune was the lesser haven. Their pay scales were low, the Tribune’s lower than the Herald’s, and their turnover was rapid; in the twenties almost anyone who could read English (and a few who couldn’t) could land a job at one of them. But by 1931 the depression had hit France and especially the tourist business, and these papers were published mainly for American tourists. I made frequent and unsuccessful visits to both, and to all the American news bureaus. Before long, my money was gone and I was experiencing something new—hunger. It was not, of course, the long-term hunger that I was to see among others later but merely the sensation of walking about on an empty stomach and frequenting places where an invitation to dinner from a fellow American might be received. I did not confide my condition to anyone, but I was deeply impressed by the changed outlook on life which hunger brings. I had established uneasy credit for my room in a shabby hotel on the Île St. Louis, and I somehow ran into a meal almost every day. Finally, an American girl, sensing my situation, advanced me a loan, which lasted me until a job opened at the Tribune. The Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune had been established during the war as a service to American soldiers. It remained in the field as a weak competitor of the Herald, founded well before the turn of the century by James Gordon Bennett, Jr., as the European edition of his New York Herald. The Tribune’s circulation...

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