Archive - October 31, 2018

In September, 1958, Bill Josephson went to England to write a doctoral dissertation in history at St. Antony’s College, one of the two graduate colleges at Oxford University. He set himself what he still describes as “a fascinating thesis problem: what were the other Americans, other than President Wilson and Colonel House, doing at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919? “The American delegation included numbers of people who were to become first magnitude figures—Lippmann, Grew, Bullitt, Frankfurter, Dulles, Baruch”—but exactly what they were doing from day to day has by and large remained a mystery.” Fascinating or not, the thesis was never completed because the young lawyer met Diana Hayward Bailey, a London girl whom he proceeded to court and marry. On the other side of the world, one Earl Reynolds had just stated an anti-bomb demonstration by sailing his yacht, Phoenix, into the Pacific testing area. Just before leaving . . .