Notes and Sources to The Death of Ernest Hemingway

Key to Abbreviations in Notes

(Full citations of sources follow the Notes)

Baker = Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway, a Life Story

Braden = Spruille Braden, Diplomats and Demagogues

Brennen = Carlene Fredericka Brennen, Hemingway’s Cats

Dear Papa = Hotchner, Dear Papa, Dear Hotch

Dearborn = Mary V. Dearborn, Ernest Hemingway, a Biography

EHSL = Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters (ed. by Carlos Baker)

Feldman = Andrew Feldman, Ernesto: The Untold Story of Hemingway in Revolutionary Cuba

Fuentes = Norberto Fuentes, Hemingway in Cuba

HIL = A. E. Hotchner, Hemingway in Love

Hotchner = A. E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway, a Personal Memoir

Hotchner 1999 = A. E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway, a Personal Memoir, 1999 edition & preface

Kert = Bernice Kert, The Hemingway Women

LH = Leicester Hemingway, My Brother Ernest Hemingway

Meyers = Jeffrey Meyers, Hemingway, a Biography

MFRE = Hemingway, Moveable Feast, the Restored Edition

Morley = Jefferson Morley, Our Man in Mexico

Mort = Terry Mort, The Hemingway Patrols

MWH = Mary Welsh Hemingway, How It Was

NR = Nicholas Reynolds, Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy  

Reynolds = Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: the Final Years

Smithsonian = Smithsonian Magazine, WWI: 100 years later

True Gen = Denis Brian, The True Gen

VH = Valerie Hemingway, Running with the Bulls

Notes to Key West and Spain

Immediate best seller: Reynolds, p.32; Meyers says it sold over 500,00 copies in the first six months (p.339).

Powerful hurricane: The hurricane “sand-blasted clothing off of people who got caught in its vicious winds,” the Sun-Sentinel wrote 80 years later. Victims were swept into the Gulf or the Atlantic, some bodies “blown all the way across Florida Bay.” It is still one of the most powerful hurricanes to ever strike the United States.

700 WWI veterans working on construction projects: The veterans had all been Bonus Marchers and had war injuries that disqualified them from the Civilian Conservation Corps, according to Kathleen Duxbury. She writes that there were no CCC camps in the Florida Keys in 1935. These veterans had been living in temporary camps while they worked on highway construction, a project created as an emergency relief measure funded by the federal government and administered by the state of Florida. (New Deal Stories, “1935 Labor Day Hurricane — CCC First Responders,” by Kathleen Duxbury, dated August 15, 2020.) The article details the response of CCC Company No. 1421 from Miami, sent to search and rescue. But there was no one to rescue and the mission “quickly turn[ed] to the gruesome task of recovery.”

“….nothing but dead men”: Sun-Sentinel, quoting EH’s Sept. 7, 1935 letter to Max Perkins. Hemingway’s letter reads, in part: “Nothing could give an idea of the destruction. Between 700 and 1000 dead. Many, today, still unburied. The foliage absolutely stripped as though by fire for forty miles and the land looking like the abandoned bed of a river. Not a building of any sort standing. Over thirty miles of railway washed and blown away. We were the first in to Camp Five of the veterans who were working on the Highway construction. Out of 187 only 8 survived. Saw more dead than I’d seen in one place since the lower Piave in June of 1918. The veterans in those camps were practically murdered. The Florida East Coast had a train ready for nearly twenty four hours to take them off the Keys. The people in charge are said to have wired Washington for orders. Washington wired the Miami Weather Bureau which is said to have replied there was no danger and it would be a useless expense. The train did not start until the storm started…We located sixty nine bodies where no one had been able to get in. Indian Key absolutely swept clean, not a blade of grass…and over the high center of it were scattered live conchs that came in with the sea, crawfish, and dead morays. The whole bottom of the sea blew over it…Harry Hopkins and Roosevelt who sent those poor bonus march guys down there to get rid of them got rid of them all right…They had all day Sunday and all day Monday to get those vets out and never did it.” (EHSL, p. 421-422)

The highway was being built so cars could drive between Key West and Lower Matecumbe Key. The railroad already connected those two Keys.

FDR Administration: NR, pp. 9-13

Until 1945: Vets nicknamed them “tombstone bonuses.” President Wilson gave bonuses to civilian government workers but not to the military, even though bonuses for military service in a war were a tradition dating back to the Revolution, meant to recompense for the loss of income. The WWI vets considered them fair compensation, not a bonus.

In May 1932…Bonus Army’s many supporters: For a complete account, see Smithsonian Magazine, Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen, “World War I: 100 Years Later – Marching on History,” February 2003. (For brevity I have not detailed the particulars of the settlements and the attacks on them.) 250 veterans set out May 11 from Oregon with $30 between them, were joined by others along the way, and arrived in Washington two weeks later, thousands strong. Sympathetic railroad men helped them progress. Towns donated food and money and cheered the marchers on. When railroad police prevented the group from boarding trains, governors provided trucks to drive them to the state border. John Dos Passos observed that it was a spontaneous protest movement that had spread over the entire country.

Racially integrated…James Crow: Smithsonian, supra; see also National Archives blog, Pieces of History, by Jessie Kratz: “This army, unlike the U.S. military, was integrated.” https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2020/07/15/the-1932-bonus-army-black-and-white-americans-unite-in-march-on-washington/

Local police chief…communist roots: Smithsonian, supra.

On July28…flattened by tanks: Smithsonian, supra. Two Bonus veterans were shot and later died. Two others were shot and seriously injured. Many others were injured less seriously.

MacArthur personally commanded the attack. When the veterans fled over the river President Hoover ordered the assault stopped, but MacArthur, who saw the vets as communist agitators, did not stop. One of MacArthur’s aides at the attack was Major Dwight Eisenhower, who was critical of MacArthur but endorsed his actions. Eventually over 1,000 vets were hospitalized. One woman miscarried. A seven-year-old boy was bayoneted through the leg when he tried to rescue his pet rabbit. The morning after the attack an infant’s body was found in the rubble. A 12 year old boy died after being teargassed. (Brittanica.com)  Even the right-wing press was appalled, with an editorial in the Washington Daily News calling it a “pitiful spectacle…to see the mightiest government in the world chasing unarmed men, women and children with Army tanks. If the Army must be called to make war on unarmed citizens, this is no longer America.” (National Park Service, “Bonus Expeditionary Forces March on Washington.”)

Congressman Wright Patman (D, Tex), who had authored the bill calling for immediate payment of the bonuses, said after the attack “It is a shame that the United States is the only country in the world that is allowing war veterans to die of starvation.” (NY Times, July 27, 1932)

In addition to the tents and huts, some 3,000 people were camping out in abandoned buildings slated for demolition. The National Archives blog cited two notes above includes a five minute film of the attack, showing the tanks, mounted cavalry, and destruction of the camp, among other scenes.

Newsreel accounts…Hoover lost: Smithsonian, supra. Kratz quotes a letter in 1932 to a Washington newspaper: “I voted for Herbert Hoover in 1928. God forgive me and keep me alive at least till the polls open next November.”

In 1934 MacArthur sued columnists Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen for $1.75 million, a huge sum in that year, for defamation in writing that his treatment of Bonus marchers was “unwarranted, unnecessary, insubordinate, harsh, and brutal.” Pearson countered with a threat to subpoena a Filipina woman who had been MacArthur’s mistress when she was a teenager. MacArthur settled the lawsuit out of court, paying Pearson $15,000. (NY Times, May 17, 1934)

One thousand…“only possible protection?”: Emphasis in original; Hemingway, “Who Killed the Vets?” New Masses, September 17, 1935. See also Meyers, 288-290; NR, 8-12.  Many of the vets’ families lived there with them and also died. “Who Killed the Vets?” is available online.

Hemingway was badly injured in WWI: Hemingway was too young to join the armed services without parental permission (which he could not get), so he volunteered to serve as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross. Days after arriving in Milan he was sent to the site of a munitions plant explosion, a horrifying experience that entailed recovery of bodies and body parts. He was then sent 150 miles away to the Piave Valley near the Dolomites where he volunteered to take over a rolling canteen operation, handing out food and personal supplies to the soldiers while in the trenches with them.

He was injured on July 18, 1918, a little over a month after his arrival in Italy. Over 230 grenade fragments lodged in his leg when a shell exploded three feet away. One soldier was killed. Hemingway was carrying a wounded soldier away when he was hit in the right knee and right foot by machine gun bullets. He then crawled a hundred yards to the dugout, pulling the wounded soldier with him. He was the first American wounded in Italy in WWI and was later given a high award for his bravery. He underwent two operations, including one for the right knee.

He returned to the campaign a few months later but was re-hospitalized with jaundice. Italy later awarded him a medal of valor and the Italian War Cross.

Quote from Hemingway, “Who Killed the Vets?” That paragraph was printed in Time Magazine, September 23, 1935. Time also reported that the State Attorney concluded that no one was responsible for the 458 deaths two weeks earlier.

Article reprinted: NR p.11-13. Both the New Masses and the Daily Worker were Communist periodicals.

In January 1936…bonuses: NY Times, “Bonus Bill Becomes Law; Repassed in Senate, 76-19; Payment Will Be Speeded,” Jan. 28, 1936, p.1.  Some historians cite the Bonus March and subsequent events as impetus for the GI Bill of Rights, enacted in June 1944.

Spanish Civil War: In 1931 a coalition government was elected in Spain that included Communists, socialists, and  anarchists; the king abdicated. The new government began making reforms such as redistributing land to peasants, providing some autonomy to Catalonia, and attacking the prerogatives of the Catholic Church. The new government and its supporters were known as Republicans and Loyalists. The army, the Catholic Church, and the wealthy opposed the new government; they were known as Nationalists and Falangists (Spanish for “fascists”). The army, led by General Francisco Franco, staged a coup in July 1936. 27 countries, including Germany, Italy, Britain and the USSR, signed a non-intervention agreement that included an embargo of arms to either side in Spain. (The U.S. went along unofficially.) Hitler immediately sent air and armored units to Franco but wanted to avoid a world war he wasn’t yet ready for, so encouraged Mussolini to send troops, and Mussolini did − over 70,000 Italian soldiers. Germany provided a U-boat operation and the Condor Legion, an air force unit that engaged in carpet bombing. 19,000 Germans, including 2,000 SS men, fought for the Falangists in Spain. (173 were killed and 125 died in accidents or from illness.) The U.S. and Britain instituted blockades that helped the Falangists. The Republic received help from the Soviet Union; and around the world, leftists formed International Brigades and went to Spain to become citizen-soldiers. Between 40,000 and 60,000 volunteers came from 53 countries. The group from the U.S. was the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. 20% of the volunteers in the International Brigades were killed and many more wounded. Franco’s policy was to kill all Republican supporters, including civilians; over 200,000 people were killed by his army. The most infamous atrocity was the German bombing of the Basque village Guernica; it was completely destroyed and many people were killed (the number is still in dispute; figures range from 300 to 1,700). Those killed were mostly women, children and the elderly, because the men were away fighting the war. The event was immortalized by Picasso in his famous painting, Guernica.

During 1937…armed combatant: Fuentes, p. 155; Meyers, chapter 15

Hemingway’s speech at American Writers Conference: Meyers, 314; Dearborn, 429; Hemingway’s FBI file. Fuentes says this was the first political speech that Hemingway ever made (Fuentes, 420).

White House visit: NR 34-35; Meyers, 314-315; Kert, 305. Martha’s mother and Eleanor Roosevelt had attended Bryn Mawr together and were friends. Martha and Mrs. Roosevelt became close; they wrote to each other and Martha had stayed at the White House often enough to know that the food served would be unpalatable, so she, Hemingway and Ivens had sandwiches at the airport. Ivens was a Communist and one newspaper headline after this event read “Communist Director Invades White House.” (Meyers, 315, no cite; see also Mort, 25.)  I have found no indication of whether, during this visit, Hemingway discussed either the deaths of the veterans in the hurricane or his article holding FDR responsible; or whether FDR himself brought up the scathing article Hemingway had written. However, I haven’t read Hemingway’s letters from this period. None of the books cited herein make any such mention.

Republican surrender…his death in 1975: Estimates of the total number of deaths vary greatly. What is undisputed is that hundreds of thousands of people fled Spain after Franco’s victory. 500,000 went to France and Marshal Petain declared these refugees political prisoners. They were sent to concentration camps in Nazi Germany.

Purchase of La Finca Vigia: La Finca Vigia (Lookout Farm) included a run-down house and 15 acres, and was situated on a hill with a view of the lights of Havana, 12 miles distant. See Meyers, 329. Reynolds and Fuentes say the money for La Finca came from the film royalties for For Whom the Bell Tolls. (Reynolds, 44; Fuentes, 25)

Detroit letter; FBI file opened and quoted: FBI file on Ernest Hemingway, Memorandum of 10/8/1942 to Director Hoover from R. G. Leddy

Another 1942 memo to Hoover: FBI File on Ernest Hemingway, Memorandum for the Director re: Ernest Hemingway, 12/17/1942, from D. M. Ladd. See also Meyers, 379.

Premature antifascists: In 1947 Hemingway eulogized a member of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion who’d died in the Spanish Civil War, and said he was proud to be in the company of other “premature anti-fascists.”

Subjected to years of FBI surveillance and harassment: The FBI paid much attention to Americans who had supported the Spanish loyalists, particularly concerned about efforts to raise money for ambulances during the Spanish Civil War. The FBI file on Hemingway contains several references to his support for the ambulance campaign, in a tone implying this is reprehensible. Mitgang, “Publishing F.B.I. File on Hemingway,” NY Times, 3/11/83; and Meyers, 379-80.

Pulitzer prize: Quote is from The New Yorker of June 7, 1941, The Talk of the Town Column. Meyers, 339; Edwin McDowell, “Publishing: Pulitzer Controversies,” NY Times, 5/11/84. See also Dorothy Dunbar Bromley, “Nicholas Murray Butler: Portrait of a Reactionary,” which says: “It is no secret that Mr. Butler is a great admirer of Il Duce” and that while Butler said he deplored the compulsory nature of fascism, he also said it made “genuine improvements in the public life and policy of the nation.” (American Mercury, March 1935, pp.286-298)

Ironically, For Whom the Bell Tolls was denounced in Communist periodicals. See, e.g., the review by Mike Gold in The Daily Worker. The FBI pounced on the condemnation of Hemingway in the Cuban communist newspaper, Hoy (FBI File on EH, Memo of 6/1/43 to Director from Confidential Informant S.I.S. #360 and memo of 6/26/43 to Director from the Office of the Legal Attache, #396, R. G. Leddy). 

Notes to The Crook Factory, Operation Friendless, and the F.B.I.

In May 1942…Crook Factory: Ambassador Braden’s memoir says that he approached Hemingway, and that his idea to ask Hemingway to organize an intelligence service was “one of my better brainwaves.” He laid out his plan at a confidential meeting with Hemingway and asked him to conduct the intelligence for a “few months until I get the FBI men down. These Spaniards have got to be watched.” (Braden, 283). Braden is also the source of the description of the Crook Factory recruits. See also Meyers, 367 et seq.; Reynolds, 60; Baker, 372.

Counter-intelligence of fascists in Cuba: A 2017 book by Nicholas Reynolds, Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy, alleges that Hemingway spied for the USSR. The author admits that the KGB files that have been released thus far don’t prove his allegation. He writes that Hemingway had been recruited by the NKVD (KGB forerunner), and that the agency gave him a code name, but as Mr. Reynolds notes, the Soviets asked numerous participants in the Spanish Civil War to watch for saboteurs and fascist agents in a situation that was rife with them. Mr. Reynolds concedes that all attempts by the Soviets after the Spanish Civil War to recruit Hemingway failed abysmally and that they shortly gave up, writing him off in October of 1950 (p.220).  This doesn’t keep Mr. Reynolds from telling a long story about another person who did spy for the Soviet Union. That person had no connection whatsoever to Hemingway but Mr. Reynolds is apparently attempting to indict Hemingway by innuendo (NR 147-49).

Most of Mr. Reynolds’s accounts are speculations − the phrases “must have” “may have” “probably” and “would have” generously populate his book. On page 79, for example, after writing that “we know Golos [NKVD recruiter] met Hemingway at some point in late 1940,” Mr. Reynolds then describes the meeting by imagining how it “must have” occurred, using qualifiers no less than 14 times in two paragraphs. 

Mr. Reynolds also states, with no apparent irony, that the KGB files are incomplete, but the FBI files on Hemingway are complete (NR, 83). 

(For further discussion of Nicholas Reynolds, see the citation “At least 15 pages classified” in Notes to Betrayal and Incarceration, below.)

Interestingly, Hemingway was also asked by a high level official at the US Department of the Treasury to report his observations on a 1941 trip to China, and he did; his report consisted almost entirely of his observations about Japan’s intentions and capabilities (NR, 71 and103, and see Meyers, 360-61).

Comment on the trip to China: Hemingway and Gellhorn left San Francisco on February 1, 1941. She was on assignment to Collier’s and Hemingway arranged to write for PM, “a highbrow journal of current affairs which did not have advertising” (Meyers, 357). En route, they stopped at Honolulu where Hemingway noted the vulnerability of Pearl Harbor. After spending time in Hong Kong they went into the interior of China where conditions were “agony to watch and horror to share.” Some of the trip required traveling by horseback. They dined with Chiang Kai-shek and had a secret meeting with Chou En-lai; Martha described Chou as “the only really good man we’d met in China.” Hemingway later told US officials that if/when Japan was driven out of China, the Communists would take over. In one of the articles he wrote for PM he predicted that Japan might go to war with the United States. (Meyers, 357-361

Martha told a friend that when she returned home, she wept with gratitude and relief at the sight of the Golden Gate Bridge, and that she couldn’t have made it if not for Hemingway (Kent, 362). She later wrote a book about the trip, Travels with Myself and Another, vividly describing the adventures with plenty of detail about the conditions, her reactions, and Hemingway adapting to both with equanimity.

Crook Factory recruits…Robert Joyce: Baker, 372; NR, 125-126. Ambassador Braden created the post specifically for this project.

Hemingway detractors…wrong on both accounts: See FBI files on EH, Memo by D. M. Ladd to Hoover, 4/27/43, recording that information from the Crook Factory was “without fail, valueless.” Meyers denigrates the Crook Factory at 375; Operation Friendless at 387. See also D.T. Max, “Ernest Hemingway’s War Wounds” (NY Times 7/18/99), which calls EH’s efforts a “parody”; and Haynes & Klehr, “Their Man in Havana?” in National Review, 5/26/09, which says EH indulged in fantasies. The latter also erroneously conflates the Crook Factory and Operation Friendless, as many writers and commentators do.

The need for observation of fascist collaborators is described in the fourth and fifth paragraphs of the section.

Dedicated Falangists per Ambassador Braden: Braden, 283; and see Fuentes, 196.

Cuba ties to Spain, newspaper: Baker, 372

Braden documented…sabotage: Braden 283; and see Reynolds, 60. Japan also had a large spy network based in Guaymas (on the east coast of Mexico). It’s estimated that by 1940 nearly 10,000 Japanese agents, mostly disguised as fishermen, operated in boats off the coasts of Central America and the west coast of the U.S. (Swan, Naval Historial Review, March 1975). Japan’s largest spy ring in WWII was in Mexico (Business Insider, 8/8/15). Mexico was a base for German intelligence, too:  “…[B]etween 1940 and 1942 the Abwehr agents worked in Mexico practically undisturbed…There may have been fewer submarines in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean if there had not been a ready flow of intelligence about targets worth striking.” (Paz Salinas, Strategy, Security and Spies, at 171).

Abwehr spies: The British discovered one of the German spies in Havana, Heinz Lüning, and intercepted his reports; he was executed late in 1942. (Ambassador Braden bemoaned the arrest; he and the FBI had been intending to keep Lüning under constant surveillance and to feed him false information in order to discover the identities of other agents. But the Cuban chief of police Benitez “saw a golden opportunity to take credit for a coup he had no part in.” (Braden, 287-88).) Lüning served as the model for a bumbling character in Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana.

In June 1942 in “Operation Pastorius” German U-boats landed four agents near Jacksonville, FL and four on Long Island. All were captured and arrested; six were executed that year.  One of the Germans had gone to the FBI and confessed to Assistant Director D. M. Ladd, who coincidentally a few months later wrote a memo to Hoover on Hemingway’s background, which he then expanded into a 14-page memorandum (long enough to warrant a table of contents.)  FBI File on EH, Memorandums by D. M. Ladd dated 12/17/42 and 4/27/43. Leddy reported to Ladd (Reynolds, 71) 

Carlos Baker re: spies and submarines: Baker, 372; he incorrectly says that the U-boats were operating in wolf packs. In the Atlantic they did, but not in the Gulf, where they operated alone; see Fuentes, 192 and Mort, 76-77.

German spies: Reynolds, 61 and 68. For descriptions of the many incidents in both Cuba and the United States of Germans and other fascists engaging in espionage and sabotage, and the pro-fascist sentiment of the wealthy in Cuba, see NR, 120-123 and Reynolds, 56-61.

July 1942 Leddy assigned: Braden 282-3. (“Before I left for Cuba J. Edgar Hoover said he would assign FBI men — so-called ‘legal attaches’ — to the Embassy there as he had in Colombia.”) And see Reynolds, 62.

Raymond G. Leddy’s curriculum vitae: The Jesuit-educated Leddy was assigned by the FBI to Cuba on July 14, 1942.

Leddy’s precise roles and locations during WWII are difficult to pinpoint. He was in Cuba as the legal attaché until at least August 1943. Raymond J. Batvinis says that Leddy was one of five FBI men sent by J. Edgar Hoover at the request of the State Department to help with delivery of diplomatic mail in war torn Europe; Leddy spoke Spanish and was assigned to Spain.  References describe Leddy as a Naval Reserve lieutenant and OSS officer in the war. One Navy officer said that Leddy “was an OSS officer who had been in Spain” prior to 1946. (Olden interview.)

He joined the CIA in 1948. In 1949 he was named Chief of the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination for the hemisphere of Central and South America. (Morley, 50).  Leddy was a protégé of Allen Dulles, who arranged for his brother to bring Leddy into the State Department in 1951. As Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, Leddy advocated strongly for the CIA and was in charge of Central America from 1952 through 1955. Along with E. Howard Hunt and David Atlee Phillips, Leddy planned “Operation Success,” the coup against Guatemalan president Arbenz, who was forced into exile. Leddy urged the assassination of Arbenz’s allies, and “the CIA took up Leddy’s idea of slaughtering the leftist leaders of Guatemala.” (Morley, 68) In May 1960 Leddy testified to the Senate Intelligence Subcommittee on the dangers posed by Fidel Castro. When the CIA began planning Operation Zapata (to overthrow the new Cuban government), Leddy led the State Department’s effort. (The invaders were, not coincidentally, trained in Guatemala.) The subsequent Bay of Pigs invasion failed both militarily and politically, and Allen Dulles was removed as head of the CIA. Leddy took a job teaching at the National War College in Pennsylvania that year (1961) and later joined the Department of Defense and was there from approximately 1970 to 1973. In one declassified document, a memo of a meeting chaired by Henry Kissinger on December 7, 1970, Leddy was a participant in the group attempting to figure out how to deal with Chile. President Allende was assassinated 9/11/73 in a coup engineered by the CIA. Leddy died in March 1976 (NY Times 3/9/76 obituary).  

“American gestapo” remark…cited in FBI file for years: Most of the memos in the FBI file include a reference to the remark. For one example, an agent wrote in August 1943, “Hemingway’s attitude toward the FBI is already known…[and] recently indicated in Hemingway’s remark that the FBI is ‘the American Gestapo.’ ” FBI file on Ernest Hemingway, Memorandum for the Director, August 28, 1943, re: Gustavo Duran, Possible Communist Party Infiltration into American Embassy Havana, Cuba; signed by C. H. Carson. See also Nicholas Reynolds, “Ernest Hemingway, Wartime Spy,” Studies in Intelligence Vol. 56, No.2 (Extracts June 2012), p. 3 and NR, 127 n. 46

First document in FBI file…1940 protest: FBI file on EH, Memo of 10/8/1942, R. G. Leddy to J. Edgar Hoover.

FBI watching Hemingway….Hoover remark: FBI file on EH, memorandum for Mr. Ladd and Mr. Tamm from J. Edgar Hoover, 12/19/42 (emphasis supplied). Reynolds notes that “several references to EH prior to 1942 suggest that the FBI followed his activities throughout the 1930s, particularly his pronouncements on avoiding the next war and his indictment of the government in New Masses for the death of veterans in the 1935 Matecumbe hurricane.” (Reynolds, p.379, n. 64) See also Herbert Mitgang, “Policing America’s Writers,” The New Yorker, Oct. 5, 1987:  “….there is evidence in the [FBI file] documents that the Bureau, the State Department, and other agencies had been tracking [Hemingway’s] activities when he was a correspondent and Loyalist supporter during the Spanish Civil War.”

It is worth adding that in To Have and Have Not (in my lonely opinion, one of Hemingway’s best books, certainly the most radical), first published in 1937, a character who works for the federal government remarks to a co-worker, regarding the FBI’s capture of gangsters, “Edgar Hoover exaggerates his publicity.” Hoover was notoriously thin-skinned and never forgot a disparagement, no matter how slight, perhaps not even one put into the mouth of a fictional character.

Leddy’s concerns and quote from memo: FBI file on EH, Memorandum for the Director from D. M. Ladd, 12/17/1942

Two days later…White House ties: NR 126-127, and FBI file on Hemingway, memos of 12/19/42. Hoover referred here to a conversation he’d had with Roosevelt in which the president said he’d received a message through a friend from Hemingway. A later FBI memo refers to the friendship of Martha Gellhorn and Eleanor Roosevelt. 

Hoover sanctioned…memo to Leddy: NR, 109 et seq; Hemingway’s FBI file, memo of J. Edgar Hoover, 12/17/42. The memo appears to be a reply to Leddy’s 10/8/42 memo, although it makes reference to “your memorandum dated December 8, 1942.” But there is no 12/8/42 memo in the file. Hoover wrote a week after Hemingway reported contact between a U-boat and a Spanish steamer, and tied EH’s alleged “unreliability” to that incident: “In this respect, it will be recalled that recently Hemingway gave information concerning the refueling of submarines in Caribbean waters which has proved unreliable.”  Is it possible that the FBI went so far as to falsely exonerate the Spanish steamer just to “prove” Hemingway unreliable?

Hemingway had also denounced FBI agents in Havana as “Franco’s Iron Cavalry” (Baker, 380) and “Franco’s Bastard Irish” because so many FBI agents were Irish Catholics and sympathetic to Franco. Meyers, 381 quoting diplomat Robert Joyce.

In late 1942 …Crook Factory: In  November 1942, EH turned daily operation of the Crook Factory over to Gustavo Duran, a close friend since the Spanish Civil War. But Duran quickly abandoned the work of the Crook Factory and began “spending more and more time at the Embassy [and] made it clear to Hemingway that he thought little or nothing of the efforts of the Crook Factory.” (Meyers 376, quoting Robert Joyce; Joyce adds that EH fired Duran.)  Hemingway soon broke with Duran. Hemingway biographers tend to cite that break as evidence of mean-spiritedness and vindictiveness, while ignoring that it was only thanks to much effort and persistence by Hemingway that Duran had been able to become a naturalized U.S. citizen. Duran eagerly accepted Hemingway’s offer to come to Cuba and direct the Crook Factory, but almost immediately abandoned the assignment, making it clear that all along he had intended it only as a stepping stone. No wonder Hemingway felt used and betrayed. Duran’s frequent appearance at the Embassy proved fruitful: when Braden was posted to the American Embassy in Argentina in 1945, he hired Duran to work there for him. (Braden, 312) 

EH warning about General Benitez: Meyers, 373; FBI File on Ernest Hemingway, Memo for Mr. Ladd from C. H. Carson, 6/13/43, page 5. The absence from Havana of both President Batista and Ambassador Braden would have been considered a perfect time to strike. Former U.S. Ambassador to Cuba Earl Smith testified to the U.S. Senate in 1960 that, until the Revolution, the American Ambassador was the second most important man in Cuba, “sometimes even more important than the Cuban president.” (Kellner, p.66) 

Batista was elected president in 1940 and served until 1944. In 1952 he led a military coup against President Prio and ruled Cuba as Prime Minister until January 1, 1959 when he was overthrown by the Revolution.

Plot foiled: Braden, 298-300, who was informed of the plot by the vice president elect and a senator elect; Braden told them to inform the plotters that the U.S. government would only recognize the elected president and wouldn’t allow ships to enter or leave; a few days later Braden arranged to have Benitez arrested and deported. See also Meyers, 374-5; FBI file on Hemingway, Memo to Mr. Ladd from C. H. Carson, 6/13/43, page 5; Thomas Schoonover, Hitler’s Man in Havana, at 49-50; Time Magazine August 7, 1944.

Italian fascist: FBI file on Ernest Hemingway, pages 5-6 of Memorandum for Mr. Ladd 6/13/43 from C. H. Carson. Detractors say that this incident shows Hemingway to be ineffective as a spy; however, that conclusion rests on believing the FBI’s version of events.

The Ruspoli family had been nobles since the 16th century. They employed Handel as their house composer. Their ties to fascism were extensive; one member was in Mussolini’s cabinet and several other family members were arrested after the war.

Hemingway’s allegation about Prince Ruspoli is not farfetched. Ambassador Braden wrote that “a number of enemy agents − German, Fascist, Japanese − were being regularly locked up and were as regularly bribing their way out of jail.” In fact, Braden wanted to move the “political” prisoners to a remote prison but the State Department denied the funding, so Braden enlisted the help of Martha Gellhorn, who was about to visit Eleanor Roosevelt. Martha convinced Eleanor of the need and she went immediately to FDR, who then ordered the funding. (Braden, 288-89)

EH report on Knoblaugh; Leddy outraged: An FBI memo states that “Hemingway’s ill-disguised hostility to the FBI became more evident in February 1943 when the Ambassador received charges that Special Agent Knoblaugh…was a participant of the Franco movement in Spain and had acted as a paid Franco propagandist.” FOIA file on EH, pg 9 of memo by C. H. Carson of 6/13/43, Re: Intelligence Activities of Ernest Hemingway in Cuba.

One source says Knoblaugh wasn’t transferred; another that he was. Reynolds, p.75; Baker 380-381, without using Knoblaugh’s name, says the agent “had indeed been in Spain as a newspaperman assigned to the Rebel [fascist] side.”

Knoblaugh’s false “joint statement” claim: Herbert Rutledge Southworth, Guernica, Guernica, at 109.

Knoblaugh’s view…Hull excuse: Large, Between Two Fires, 261. One author describes Knoblaugh as a “Nationalist sympathizer” (Sanchez, The Spanish Civil War as a Religious Tragedy, p.15). Southworth writes of Knoblaugh “defending the Nationalist position on Guernica.”

Knoblaugh quotes on Guernica bombing: Quoted by Southworth, p.109.  The Catholic Church, which adamantly supported the Falangists, reprinted Knoblaugh’s remarks on Guernica in the Catholic World in January 1938. A Catholic press published Knoblaugh’s book in October 1937. Father Thorning, who spoke at an annual meeting of American Catholics in December 1937 in New York, quoted Knoblaugh and praised him. Father Thorning’s speech began “the Nationalists under the magnificent leadership of General Franco have rescued Spain from the bloody tyranny of Leftist forces…” (Full text of Thorning’s speech, “Why the Press Failed on Spain!”, is available online.)

Crook Factory work terminated: Braden wrote that the Crook Factory had been meant to operate only until the FBI could get men in place (Braden, 283). Mort wrote that the Crook Factory’s closing coincided with FDR’s order consolidating all espionage under the auspices of the FBI (Mort, 120).

Leddy proclaimed EH’s efforts worthless: Meyers, 375, quoting FBI File on Ernest Hemingway, 6/13/43 memo from Carson. Most of the released portion of Hemingway’s FBI file concerns this period. The file contains extensive reports on Hemingway’s partner in the Crook Factory, Gustavo Duran. Previously Duran had been employed by Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs (Meyers, 371). Duran was a friend of Andre Malraux and worked for Luis Buñuel at MOMA in 1941. He’s referred to by his own name in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Duran was “persecuted as a Communist” from about 1946 to the late 1950s, subpoenaed before various investigative tribunals, denied a passport (despite working as a diplomat for the U.S. State Department), and even accused by Franco of being a Soviet secret agent. Years later Duran “commented bitterly on the lack of freedom in America and [said he] suffered even more from McCarthy than he had from the [Spanish] Civil War.” Meyers, 384. One author avers that Duran testified to the Senate committee that Hemingway was a communist (Fuentes, 198). Spruille Braden testified against Duran in May 1954 (Meyers, 382-3). 

Contradiction: Mort, 117-118.

Decoration: Meyers, 388.

Braden commendation: Braden, 283. Quoted by Herbert Mitgang, “Publishing FBI File on Hemingway,” NY Times, 3/11/83; and NR, 126

FBI kept tabs: Meyers, 384, who also points out that Hoover personally answered Leddy’s reports. 

Late 1942…Operation Friendless: For the favored status of Friendless the cat, see Brennen 69-70; EH made him a character in Islands in the Stream, under the name “Goats.” For details about the patrols, see Mort’s excellent book The Hemingway Patrols; and Reynolds, Chapter 3 (pp. 50-72); Meyers, Chapter 18 (pp. 367-388); and NR, chapter 8 (pp. 131-149).

Nazi U-boats…1942 especially bad: After the U.S. entered the war, “Hitler and Adm. Karl Donitz dispatched dozens of German subs…to the Eastern seaboard of the United States. Their orders: to torpedo any and all vessels they saw, thus distracting the Americans and, hopefully, cutting off U.S. aid to Britain.” Mike Scott, “German U-boats in the Gulf of Mexico, and the family that survived them,” The Times-Picayune, July 13, 2016, updated Sept. 6, 2016. 

“Operation Drumbeat”: Reynolds, 56

February 1942…Aruba refinery: Reynolds, 56-57. Seven tankers were also destroyed in that attack. Reynolds writes that on May 1, all shipping was stopped along the north coast of Cuba pending establishment of convoys; this was expanded on May 18th by the U.S. Naval Commander in charge:  all movements stopped between Gulf and Caribbean ports and the U.S. Atlantic Cost and to the east coast of South America. Many ships were sunk during this period, however, so Reynolds may be referring to a cessation of shipping in certain areas only.

“In May 1942…alarming rate”: Uboat.net, The Caribbean Sea (retrieved May 30, 2018). Mort says that U-507, the first to arrive in the Gulf, sank nine merchant ships or freighters between its arrival, April 30, and May 16. U-506 arrived on May 10 and in the next ten days sank seven ships and damaged one. In summer of 1942, Mort writes, 78 merchant ships were sunk in the Gulf; between May and September, 153 ships were sunk in the Caribbean. (Mort, 77-78)

By mid-June…360 ships: Mort, 64-67. A total of 2,779 ships were sunk by German U-boats in the war. U-Boat duty was dangerous to Germans, too; one of four who served on U-Boats survived. (Business Insider, 8/8/15).

Marshall… “entire war effort”: Memo from General Marshall to Admiral Ernest King, 6/19/42, quoted in Mort, 70-71. Winston Churchill later wrote that “the only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril.” (From his book Their Finest Hour, pp 528-529, quoted by BBC “The Battle of the Atlantic: the U-boat peril”)

Atlantic defenses…U-boat focus: Mort 67. When the defenses along the Atlantic coast were strengthened, “Hitler’s Navy simply shifted its U-boat operation to the Gulf.” (Mike Scott, “German U-boats in the Gulf of Mexico, and the family that survived them,” The Times-Picayune, July 13, 2016, updated Sept. 6, 2016). The head of U-boat operations urged Hitler to send more submarines to the Gulf.

30 ships torpedoed: Reynolds, 58.

263 ships sunk off Cuba: Reynolds, p. 56-57; Gellhorn, p.65. German submarines surfaced near Cuban fishing boats, boarded them, and demanded fresh water and food (Baker, 373)

Threat downplayed at government request: Mort, 64; and Scott, “German U-boats in the Gulf,” Times-Picayune. “It’s also why relatively few people know much about the attacks today.” Mort speculates that Martha’s ridicule of and antipathy to EH’s patrols may have been in part because EH’s information was classified (so he didn’t share it with her) and because the extent of the U-boat threat was not revealed by the government. (Mort, 102-3, 196)

Coast Guard organized boat owners: Reynolds, 78

Navy called for volunteers, promised to equip: NY Times, 6/28/42; Reynolds, 58. The call was issued by Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox.

Known as “Hooligan Navy”: Mort, 164

U-boat surfacing…handbook: Mort, 75

Hemingway worked through American Embassy: NR 141-2; Mort, 124.

Embassy supplied Pilar: Baker, 373-4; Meyers 385; Mort, 213; and see NR, 142. Mort (at 165) casts doubt on EH having been given a bazooka as mentioned by Baker and Reynolds.

Hemingway’s plan: Reynolds, 65-66; NR 136; Baker, 373; Mort, 78-83. In The True Gen Winston Guest says that “submarines had been accosting a number of [Cuban fishing boats] and taking off fish, chicken, bread and sometimes fresh vegetables.” (141)

Pilar reported contact submarine and steamer: Mort, 184-190; Mary related this to the Atlantic Monthly in 1964 (Fuentes, 205).

FBI found negative results: Reynolds, 70; and see FBI File on EH.

Navy kept eye on steamer: Reynolds, 73.

Pilar’s assignment…not everyone shared FBI skepticism: Mort, 203, and see Reynolds, 73. The area assigned was NW of Bahia Honda.

Learned that submarine landed three men: Winston Guest, the first mate in Operation Friendless, quoted in Mort, 190-191; and see Brennen and Hemingway, Hemingway in Cuba, p.81:  “Two days later when the same submarine was discovered off New Orleans trying to land four men at the mouth of the Mississippi, Ernest felt he had been proven right.” Guest goes into great detail in The True Gen, both about the sighting and reaction. Hemingway’s report was “given a DF which, I believe, means ‘not credible’…two days later they called him again and said he was completely, one hundred percent right, that it had been a submarine, that several tankers had sighted it on this course, due NNW, toward New Orleans. Then the story came out eventually about it landing men there.” (p.142)

Braden quote: Braden, 284

Two tragic incidents: Reynolds, 75. See also uboat.net. On April 1, 1943, U-155 torpedoed the Lysefjord, the Norwegian freighter, 55 miles west of Havana and the ship’s boiler exploded. 4 crewmen died; 19 survived. The Gulfstate, an oil tanker, was hit by two torpedoes by U-155 while about 50 miles SE of Marathon Key. 43 crewmen died, 18 survived.  See also Mort, 189-205.

Sneers by Gellhorn and others: Kert, 375, quotes Martha as accusing EH of using the patrols as a pretext to get gasoline, which was rationed, for fishing trips and calling the “chasing” of U-boats “rot and rubbish.” And see The True Gen, 142. Martha’s comments and attitude are often cited by Hemingway biographers. See, e.g., D. T. Max in the NY Times who writes that Hemingway “chased U-boats with a fishing boat…in search of a whale he would never catch.” Meyers wrote “All of Hemingway’s Cuban friends believed the sub-hunting expeditions were little more than boyish escapades…; an excuse to get strictly rationed gasoline so he could fish and drink with comrades on the Pilar…” and quotes two of EH’s Cuban friends as saying “all he did was fish.” (Meyers, 387-88) The FBI also disparaged Hemingway’s efforts: “The bearded novelist’s alcohol-fueled reports of German submarines in Havana Bay had become the gag of the [FBI] office.” (Scott, 19) 

No source I’ve consulted has questioned whether Hemingway and his crew would have been partying and fishing every day in waters plagued by U-boats.

I have noticed that those who sneer at Hemingway’s patrols, including the FBI, ignore that they were commissioned by the Coast Guard and Navy, that hundreds of other civilian boats conducted patrols, and that the Navy coordinated the patrols, made assignments, and provided equipment. Of all the biographers consulted, only Mort and Reynolds make clear the collective effort and the role of the Navy, and show that Hemingway was part of that effort. (Mort, 123-4; Reynolds, Chapter 3.)  Reynolds remarks, “If Hemingway’s patrols were as foolish and childish as some critics have expressed, then the same must be said of the efforts of hundreds of other private yachtsmen.” (Reynolds, 380, n. 30)   Mort’s The Hemingway Patrols goes into great detail about the importance of the patrols and the courage of  undertaking them. As to the fishing both as part of the ruse and to supplement the crew’s diet, see Mort, 182.

Conditions on the Pilar: Mort, 211-215. Additionally, the humidity and proximity to salt air and water caused skin problems. One of the crew suffered from jungle rot in his feet so extensive that the crew feared amputation might be necessary. Hemingway’s face was so sunburned and windburned that he could not bear to be touched.

Posing as scientific vessel…Naval Attache letter: NR 142 (a copy of the letter is reproduced at p. 144). The letter was dated May 18, 1943 and said Ernest Hemingway was specimen fishing for the American Museum of Natural History and would also be conducting radio experiments.

Dangers of the mission: Mort, 99-100; and in The True Gen, Malcolm Cowley cites Ambassador Braden as telling him the mission was “extremely dangerous.” (p. 141

Pilar’s assignment: Reynolds, 76-78

Daily routine: Reynolds, 77

Permit expired…Havana: Reynolds 78-80

FBI time and energy…to discredit Hemingway: Leddy’s assistant Win Scott wrote in an unpublished memoir that Hemingway’s “alcohol-fueled reports of German submarines in Havana Bay had become the gag of the office.” Quote is from Morley, p.19. Morley makes reference neither to the U-boat dangers in the Gulf and the Caribbean nor to the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard recruitment of civilian boats to patrol. In fact, anyone reading that book with no knowledge of the U-boat war in the Caribbean would assume that no civilian boats patrolled except for the Pilar and that the idea of German submarines there was absurd.

Five memos…Tamm addendum: FBI File on EH, memo of 6/13/43, which consists of a ten page report by Leddy with Tamm’s addendum on page 10.  An FBI memo of 8/13/43 informs the agency that EH is said to be writing a book about his experiences working for Braden, and says he will probably portray the FBI as “dull, heavy-footed, unimaginative professional policemen types.”

Tamm was the assistant director of the FBI from 1940 until 1948, when he was appointed a judge of the U.S. District Court. In 1965 President Johnson elevated him to the federal appeals court for the District of Columbia. (Obituary in Washington Post, Sept 23, 1985)

Guest beaten, Hemingway response, Joyce summoned Leddy: NR, 109-110. The FBI file gives credence to Hemingway’s suspicions of FBI involvement or sanction: memos express concern that EH might upset Cuban police or uncover facts that would “embarrass” the FBI. See, for example, the memo of 12/17/42.

Winston Frederick Churchill Guest had been an international polo champion in the 1930s and, as an infant, was painted in his grandmother’s arms by Sargent. He was the second cousin of Winston Churchill. His first wife was a Woolworth’s heiress. His second marriage took place at La Finca; CZ Guest became a designer and fashion icon and was painted by Diego Rivera, Dali, and Warhol. Their daughter Cornelia celebrated her 18th birthday with Truman Capote, Nancy Reagan, Andy Warhol, Cheryl Tiegs, and others; she later became an animal rights advocate and designed a line of handbags that contain no leather.

By mid-1943…ended U-boat war: Early in the war, American planes used primitive radar that German submarines could detect in enough time to dive to safety. The Allies later developed microwave radar that enabled them to locate and attack before the submarines could detect and dive. This changed everything. (Mort, 174; see also Reynolds, 88 and 362; Meyers, 389.)

Operation Friendless over: Hemingway wrote of the patrols extensively in Islands in the Stream. He didn’t resist adding a dig at the FBI. A character noted that .357 handguns had become hard to get “because the draft-dodging FBI’s have to use them to hunt down draft dodgers.” (p. 336) This may have reflected a common viewpoint in America. FBI agent Win Scott heard people in Havana wondering whether he was a draft dodger, after which he requested a leave of absence so he could join the Marines. (Morley, 19-20)

While Hemingway was away on the patrols, Martha had his cats neutered − not only without his knowledge or permission, but in direct violation of his wishes (which she was aware of). He had been intending to breed some of them. One of the cats died from complications of the surgery (Brennen, 71).  Meyers, 353, says all the male cats were sterilized; Brennen, p.71, all the adult cats; Reynolds (79 and note 25 at 380) only some male cats. Meyers adds that four of Hemingway’s Cuban friends believed this was “a petty act of revenge and a symbolic castration of her husband…Hemingway was deeply hurt and angry. He often exclaimed: ‘She cut my cats!’ and never forgave Martha for mutilating them without his knowledge or consent.” 

Hemingway held on charges: Reynolds, 114-115; the account in The True Gen by David Bruce, head of OSS in France, attributes the charges to jealous reporters (158), among whom were William Randolph Hearst Jr. and Andy Rooney. The True Gen includes a transcript of the investigation by Colonel Parks (Appendix A). Rooney gives a long account and his own words confirm resentment of EH, laced with accusations of EH being “childish.” Rooney also complained that “[Hemingway] was armed and none of the rest of us were. That was a big issue.” (162-3)

Returned to La Finca…married Mary Welsh: Reynolds, 362-3.

Notes to The Cold War

Hemingway supported…overthrow Trujillo: NR, 227. The exact nature of Hemingway’s support is not fully known. He may have given money only, or may also have supplied arms, advice, and the use of La Finca. (Reynolds, 159-161.) The plot was alleged to have received support from officials in the Cuban government as well as from the governments of Venezuela and Guatemala, but once the plot was exposed, those governments hastily professed outrage, which was short-lived. Leicester Hemingway (EH’s brother) wrote after EH’s death that a trial was actually scheduled, that Hemingway and oldest son John invited the judge to dinner at La Finca, and that John (Bumby) told the Judge the guns had been his. “Later, the charges were dropped.” (LH, 242-43)

Money in the form of personal checks: Reynolds, 159; Fuentes, 252-255.

Search of La Finca: Reynolds, 160-161, who says EH returned to Cuba a few months later; Fuentes says EH returned a week after the raid on La Finca and jettisoned his arsenal from the Pilar into the bay. (Fuentes, 254) Mary describes the raid but not the ostensible reason (MWH 239-40) and the court case as “suspected gun-suppliers to the now-aborted invasion of Santo Domingo” (MWH 248-9).

Braden and Duran testimonies: There is unclarity about both men’s testimony concerning Hemingway, which will probably require a detailed examination of transcripts to resolve. Unfortunately they have never been released. Fuentes wrote that Braden was called before HUAC and testified that Hemingway was a communist, then immediately flew to Cuba to apologize to Hemingway. (Fuentes, 198.) In his memoir Braden writes that he testified to the Civil Service Commission about Duran, but makes no reference to testifying against Hemingway nor any reference to flying to Cuba to apologize (Braden 314). Articles in newspapers of December 23, 1953 report that Braden testified before the Senate Internal Security Committee (aka the Jenner Committee) that Hemingway ran a wartime underground network. (see, e.g., St. Petersburg Times, 12/23/53, p.3)  In a letter of Nov. 10, 1954 Hemingway wrote that “Mr. Braden did some talking while we were in Africa that wasn’t good for man or beast.” (EHSL 840.) Whether either man named Hemingway to HUAC is also discussed, without resolution or evidence, in The True Gen (pp. 280, 281).

Speculation Hemingway not called because he wasn’t a Communist: NR, 203. “But, like the FBI, the HUAC investigators were never able to show that Hemingway himself was a communist, let alone a Soviet spy. That, and his fame, were probably what kept him from receiving a subpoena.” Meyers emphasizes the courage it took to defy McCarthy at the height of his power and influence (Meyers, 380).

More likely…courage: The newspapers would have had plenty of page one stories had HUAC called Hemingway. He’d told a friend that if called he would deny he was a member of the Party, and say slowly and carefully into the microphone that the committee members seemed to be c−−−ers, that he was in complete contempt of them, and that he’d known only four honest congressmen in the past thirty years. (NR, 203, citing two of Hemingway’s letters.)  

Hemingway quote on McCarthy: Ernest Hemingway, Look Magazine, May 4, 1954, at page 80.

“Autumn of 1948…American citizens”: “No, Mr. President — How the FBI bosses the White House,” The Guardian, Oct. 24, 2012.

Hemingway distrust of phones and mail: NR, 212, 216.

Hemingway meets Hotchner: Hotchner, 1; Reynolds, 174. Hotchner had “trained as a lawyer,” Meyers, 433.

Hemhotch: Hotchner, 37.

H&H Corporation…50% of the income: Reynolds, 340-1.

EH’s friends’ opinions of Hotchner: See Meyers, 434, with cites to interviews with six of Hemingway’s friends at 612 note 25. A Spanish journalist in 1968 called Hotchner a hypocrite, sickening toady, obsequious bore, and clever exploiter. Hotchner sued and won $125,000 in damages but the libel award was thrown out on appeal. 

Valerie…Hotchner surreptitiously taping: VH, 42 and 45. “Hotch was still with us, very much the clown, I thought, carrying his ‘devil box’ and recording people sometimes when they least suspected it.” She also describes Hotchner inciting a serious argument between Hemingway and Kenneth Tynan (the British theater critic), then keeping “a respectable distance from the trouble spot. Cordiality between the Tynans and us ceased after this incident.” Shortly after she met Hotchner, Valerie writes that he encouraged her and a friend to speak ill of Mary. They later realized he had taped them and considered the incident “sinister.” (Valerie Danby-Smith was Ernest’s friend and secretary in 1959 and 1960, and later married his son Gregory. )

Word for word conversations in Papa Hemingway: In his preface to the 1999 re-issue of Papa Hemingway, Hotchner writes that he “attempted to paraphrase vital passages” from some of Hemingway’s letters in order to accurately convey what EH was thinking and doing; but the paraphrasing “had an ersatz ring to it that seemed to vitiate the uniqueness and energy of what he said in his letters, which were conversational in tone, quite like when he was talking to me in person. I felt strongly that some parts of those letters were needed to portray the true essence of how he was during those last fourteen years of his life. I decided, therefore, to disguise certain excerpts from his letters, so that I could preserve his actual voice and emotions and meld them into the conversation we had when we were together.” (Hotchner 1999, p. xvi and xvii.   In the Preface to the 2005 Dear Papa, Dear Hotch, Hotchner writes that because Mary denied him permission to publish “portions” of EH’s letters, he was “compelled to disguise some of them in my memoir…feeling that they were vital to depicting Ernest’s life between the times I was with him.” (p. xvi) For another, different explanation by Hotchner of the “quotes,” see the next note.

Hotchner’s integrity: In a 2015 book about Hemingway, Hotchner writes that “for all the time I knew him, I made a habit of scribbling entries about what had been said and done on any given day” and that “later on, I augmented these notes with conversations recorded on my Midgetape…whose tapes allowed ninety minutes of recording time. Ernest and I sometimes corresponded by using them.” (HIL xiii) Hotchner also writes that “the tapes disintegrated soon after use,” but I have so far not been able to either confirm or disprove that claim. (See, e.g., the website Museum of Obsolete Media and www.pimall.com/nais/pivintage/midgetrecorder.html.) Hotchner adds that he wrote this 2015 memoir using, among other things, “material I gleaned back then from my Midgetapes before they disintegrated.” (HIL, xvii ).

Despite all that detail from Hotchner himself, he told an interviewer “I never had a tape recorder” (apropos of a remark by Leicester (EH’s brother) that “anybody who will hold a tape recorder on a man when he’s drunk is not a friend.”) (True Gen, 266.)

Alfred Rice became EH’s lawyer: Meyers, 433. When Hemingway’s long time lawyer died in 1948, Alfred Rice, a junior partner at the law firm, took over handling work for Hemingway (Reynolds, 174).

Early in relationship….'personal standards’: Reynolds, 185

Old Man and the Sea: Reynolds, 250, 365

Two African plane accidents: Reynolds, 366; Meyers, 505. According to Kert, after the second accident when the Hemingways finally reached a city (Entebbe), Mary went to bed and Ernest “kept moving although he was reeling from the concussion and bleeding internally.” (Kert, 475.) The Hemingways continued to their planned fishing vacation to the East Indian Ocean for the next two months. While there, Hemingway joined firefighters dealing with a bush fire, and because his equilibrium was still bad, he fell into the fire and was badly burned. (Kert, 476.) EH’s son Patrick saw him in March and was shocked at how badly he’d been damaged by the concussion.  Mary, noting that Ernest wasn’t a complainer, wrote that she didn’t realize how grievous his injuries were until they got to Venice in late March. (MWH, 444.) I find that difficult to believe since she also wrote that his skull was broken open and “in the morning we found that Ernest’s pillow was soaked with cerebral fluid.” (MWH, 442)

Skull broken open: MWH, 442; a friend in Entebbe “looked at the hole in Ernest’s head and after a cursory glance, said, ‘Nothing to it, old boy. Let’s pour some gin in it,’ and did so.”  

Hemingway aged visibly: Meyers, 507. He also lost 20 pounds in the first few weeks after the crash. (Baker, 523)

Nobel prize: When he won the Nobel, Hemingway wanted to give the medal to the people of Cuba. But rather than turn it over to the Batista government, he put it in custody of the Catholic Church sanctuary at the town of El Cobre, near La Finca. The medal is still there today. (CubaJournal.com, “Ten Facts About Hemingway in Cuba.”) See also MWH 474 quoting EH’s press statement; and Feldman, 258.

In 1954 EH received Cuba’s highest honor for civilians, the Order of Carlos Manuel Cespedes, and Mary writes that Batista’s government wanted to hold the ceremony at the Presidential Palace but Hemingway, “never wishing to support the dictatorship, had politely vetoed the idea.” (MWH 467)

A year later he nearly died: Reynolds, 366; Kert, 482; Meyers, 512.

Notes to Revolution in Cuba

Killing of Black Dog and Hemingway’s complaint: Leicester Hemingway and Hotchner both wrote detailed accounts of Black Dog being clubbed to death by a Batista soldier’s rifle. Leicester also wrote that Hemingway ignored everyone’s advice and “formally lodged a protest” which “was duly noted by the Batista government. Though no action was taken, Ernest maintained enormous public respect.” (LH, 253.)  Hotchner relates a 1960 conversation in Cuba in which EH said: “A Batista search party, looking for guns, came barreling in here in the middle of the night and poor Black Dog, old and half blind, tried to stand guard at the door of the finca, but a soldier clubbed him to death with the butt of his rifle.”  (Hotchner, 243)

Fuentes also writes that Black Dog was killed by a soldier’s rifle butt (47-48). Hemingway’s close friend in Havana, Dr. Herrera Sotolongo, told Fuentes that “the cruelest thing they did to Ernest was to kill Black Dog.” (Fuentes, 62)

Not all sources agree that Black Dog was killed. See discussion below on the killing of Machakos.

Hemingway…still mourned: Quote is from Brennen, 136. See also Hotchner, 243; and Fuentes, 62.

Batista’s claim: The NY Times article of December 3, 1956 reported the Batista regime’s claim to have “wiped out” the rebels and that Castro was among the 40 dead.

Matthews’ visit and appreciation: NR, 231. Hemingway and Matthews had known each other while reporting the Spanish Civil War. Both strongly supported the Republic. (Matthews’ support for the Cuban rebels was no secret. The National Review once published a cartoon of Fidel Castro captioned, “I got my job through the New York Times.”)

Machakos killed: Mary wrote that Machakos was shot to death (MWH 515). Both Mary and Ernest wrote that the police sergeant responsible was himself killed by guerrillas a few months later (MWH, 520; EHSL, 890, letter of January 7, 1959 to Gianfranco Ivancich).

Leicester didn’t write of Machakos’s death, and Mary wrote only that Black Dog had died. Fuentes notes that some sources say Machakos was killed; others say Black Dog.

Other sources provide conflicting accounts:

NY Times, 8/22/57: Machakosa (sic) was clubbed to death; the sergeant in charge of the patrol denied that the dog had been killed by any of the soldiers.

Meyers: Machakos was shot (516, but no citation to that fact).

Villarreal: vividly describes finding Machakos clubbed to death the morning after Hemingway ordered a patrol of soldiers to leave his property (Villarreal, 123-4). In his memoir Villarreal says that Mary and Ernest “tried to get the culprits punished” and “even asked for assistance from the American embassy” without any results (124), but in an interview with the New Jersey Monthly a few years before his memoir was published, he said that Hemingway “couldn’t complain to anybody, because they were Batista’s men, and with all that corruption there was nothing you could do.” (New Jersey Monthly, September 2005) His memoir doesn’t address how Black Dog died.

Brennen: Her first edition of Hemingway’s Cats apparently relied on Leicester Hemingway’s account of Black Dog’s death and Mary Hemingway’s account of Machakos’s shooting. Her Cuba Edition eliminates both and relies on Villarreal’s account of Machakos’s death by clubbing. She also writes that, according to Villarreal’s son, Black Dog had died of natural causes. (Hemingway’s Cats, Cuba Edition, 136)

What emerges from the confusion, however, is that two dogs were killed. Witnesses describe one dog shot by soldiers and another dog killed by a soldier’s rifle butt. The most vivid accounts were written closest to the events, by Leicester (Black Dog was clubbed to death) and Mary (Machakos was shot).

Note on Rene Villarreal: Villarreal began working at La Finca Vigia in 1939 as a boy, and was the majordomo from 1946 to 1960. His memoir Hemingway’s Cuban Son is a loving portrayal of Hemingway as a kind, considerate, extremely generous, observant, fair-minded person whose love of nature was such that he wouldn’t allow any plants or trees at La Finca to be pruned.

Villareal had made notes toward a memoir after Hemingway’s death, but the notes were lost before he left Cuba in 1972 and he didn’t try to recreate them until 1995 when he began “telling his stories over wine and cigars to his son, Raul.” (NJ Monthly, Sept 2005). Raul told The Hemingway Project in 2012 that he, Raul, had translated his father’s words for the memoir, but they were not verbatim. (Stories from Cuba: an Interview with Rene Villarreal, The Hemingway Project, Aug 22, 2018.) Rene died in 2014, Raul in 2019.

Hemingway letter: EHSL, 890; MWH, 520, says that the news of the sergeant’s death came on April 10, 1958.

Hemingway concerned about police raids: For good reason. There were more than three police invasions of La Finca. Fuentes relates a story from EH’s close friend in Cuba, Dr. Herrera Sotolongo, that Lt. Maldonado and the Rural Guards were suspicious of weekly movie screenings held at La Finca. One night “Maldonado tried to enter the farm…[and] Ernesto stopped him. He went down the pathway from the house to the gate, and faced Maldonado and a half-dozen of his Rural Guards. Hemingway told them they were on American property and that the only conspiracy going on there involved a bottle of whisky. He was bold and brave. The Rural Guards decided to withdraw.” (Fuentes, 62)

Guns thrown into sea: Fuentes, 201, 273. NR, 237-9; MWH, 518. There are different times in the various Hemingway biographies for when EH and Gregorio threw guns overboard, but all agree that it did occur.

Hemingway on guerrilla kidnappings: Letter from EH to Bunny and Bill Horne, 7/1/58 (EHSL, 884). Bill Horne had served in the Ambulance Corps with Hemingway in WWI and lived in Wyoming. I have found no evidence as to whether Hemingway actually made such a call to the Embassy. 

Alfred Rice falsehood and Hemingway response: Reynolds, 311-313. Layhmond Robinson, “Hemingway Brings Suit to Stop Reprint of Spanish War Stories,” NY Times 8/6/58; and “Hemingway Says He Will Drop Suit” with the subheadings “Asserts that Political Fear Did Not Spur Attempt to Bar Reprints of Stories,” “Stands by Old Views,” “Declares He Still Favors Loyalist Cause−Esquire to Use One of 3 Works.” NY Times, 8/7/58. The Times also quotes EH as saying that two of the stories “were not as good as I wanted them and I wanted to revise them before letting them to go book form….I only wanted to remove some of the clichés.” (8/7/58)  The stories were not republished in EH’s lifetime; they were included in The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War, published posthumously in 1969.

Cuban friend called…all well at La Finca: MWH, 527 Baker, 543.

News services…changed to ‘hopeful’: Reynolds, 317; MWH, 527. I have not located any New York Times article quoting Hemingway in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution. However, according to the keeper of the NY Times “morgue,” the NYT website and library microfilms only contain one edition of the newspaper. If an article was printed in one edition but later removed in favor of breaking news (or for any other reason), the article may not show up in a search of the internet archives or library microfilms. (From my attendance at a group tour of the NY Times morgue on March 17, 2019.)

Eugene Register-Guard article: “Hemingway Defends Cuban Trials,” Eugene Register-Guard, January 23, 1959, p.1.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer article: Emmett Watson, “Hemingway Talks on Cuba,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 9, 1959, page 1. (A condensed version of this article was published March 11 in the Milwaukee Sentinel, headlined “Hemingway Defends Cuban Trials.”) Two years later Watson also broke the story that Hemingway had not died from an accident but had committed suicide.

Originally a sportswriter, Watson was a columnist for Seattle newspapers for over fifty years, known for opposing urban renewal and other efforts to destroy old Seattle. He unabashedly supported the civil rights and anti-war movements. His anti-trust lawsuit against major league baseball was instrumental in Seattle ending up with a team. When the Newspaper Guild went on strike in 2000, he joined the picket line every day although he was in his 80s. Mr. Watson died in 2001.  

EH in Cuba March 29 to April 22: Brennan, 143-144 and 147; Reynolds, 320 and 367. NR, 242; MWH, 530. La Finca had not been seized and Mary wrote that it was in the same condition the Hemingways had left it in except that most of the equipment wasn’t working, either through disuse or from the humid weather. MWH, 549.

Philip Bonsal appointed Ambassador: Bonsal arrived in Havana in February 1959, “when relations…had already begun to deteriorate.” The Restaurant Workers Union in Cuba demanded the Cuban government declare Bonsal persona non grata. After Castro implicated him in conspiratorial activities against Cuba, he was recalled to Washington on January 22, 1960 for “consultation,” and returned on March 22. In June Bonsal offered U.S. Navy assistance to victims of the La Coubre blast of March 4. In July 1960 he protested an alleged attack on an American woman and her two sons and the arrest of NY Times correspondent Tad Szulc, who was released after a few hours. After his recall in October 1960, the day after the U.S. imposed an embargo on Cuba, Bonsal was assigned as the U.S. representative on the Council of the Organization of American States.

EH meets Cubans re: UN trip: Reynolds, 322-23. Mary writes nothing of this.

Castro quotes EH on American TV: Reynolds, 323. Hemingway may have brought either the Eugene Register-Guard or the Seattle Post-Intelligencer article to Cuba when he returned. A friend in Havana, speaking of Hemingway’s last days in Cuba, said Hemingway had spoken against the U.S. campaign against the Cuban Revolution, wrote an article for a local paper, and broadcast his opinions on a local radio station; and that when he returned to Cuba he brought the article. “It is in Fidel’s possession, for we sent it to him. In one of his first appearances on television, Fidel had the article with him and commented on it.” Fuentes, 271-3, quoting Dr. Herrera Sotolongo. Dr. HS also notes, as do I, that the news syndicates and major newspapers ignored these interviews. 

EH in Spain May - October 1959: Hemingway biographers and memoirists have all written rather extensively about that summer of 1959 in Spain. What strikes me as relevant is as follows. At the invitation of one Norman “Bill” Davis, Hemingway went to Spain from May to October 1959, absenting himself from both Cuba and the United States at a critical juncture − and only weeks after his very public support of the Cuban Revolution (a detail mentioned in none of the biographies). Hemingway and Davis had met in Sun Valley in 1941 and ran into each other in Mexico in 1942. But not until that summer of 1959 did their lives intertwine. Davis was extremely wealthy and owned a large estate in Spain, La Consula, where the Hemingways and other friends stayed. EH spent most of those months driving around Spain with Davis at the wheel, accompanied by Valerie and often by Hotchner. Mary had not met or even heard of Davis before 1959, and did not like him or the situation. (The chapter in her memoir is called “A Disturbing Summer.”) Hotchner was meeting Davis for the first time as well, as was Valerie, who had only just become involved with the Hemingways herself. Yet for some reason Mary, Valerie, and Hotchner all revealed extremely private concerns to Davis or to his wife. Valerie wrote to Davis that Mary ruled the roost and wanted to keep her and EH apart and that EH was no longer making crucial decisions (Reynolds 345). Hotchner wrote Davis in November 1960 that EH’s symptoms of mental instability had worsened (Reynolds 348). 

The evidence that EH also discussed private matters comes from letter or in conversations related by Bill or Annie Davis after EH’s death: that Mary was trying to drive him to suicide (Reynolds 335); that relations with Mary were difficult (Reynolds 336); that he suffered from impotence (Meyers 594 n. 21, relating  what Bill Davis told him in an interview decades later); and that a female friend was one of the true loves of his life (Reynolds, 335, 336).

In fact, EH apparently began to mistrust Bill Davis. When Davis drove Hemingway and Valerie into an accident, EH told Hotchner (AEH 255-57) and Valerie (VH 142-3) that Davis was trying to kill him by driving badly (which both took as a sign of Ernest’s mental instability) (see also Meyers 542). (Hemingway apparently got a concussion in that accident, increasing the risk of brain injury when he received electric shock therapy a year later.) It’s noteworthy that when Hemingway wasn’t around, Davis was vulgar and lewd to Valerie (VH, 47-48).

Press conference at Havana airport: Meyers 519; Reynolds, 335; MWH 551 (for exact date). See also NY Times 11/6/59, “Hemingway Back in Cuba,” pg. 9, which erroneously reports that he had spent nearly a year abroad. He was accompanied by Spanish bullfighter Antonio Ordonez. “Mr. Hemingway told newsmen he had every sympathy with Prime Minister Fidel Castro’s regime.” Topping’s report to the FBI is dated 11/6/1959 (FBI File of Ernest Hemingway).

Hemingway’s support for Cuban Revolution: Subsequent reports have de-emphasized Hemingway’s support of the Cuban Revolution, to the point of even claiming that the Cubans have created support where it didn’t exist. See, for example, Jacobo Timmerman in The New Yorker, August 13, 1990, “A Summer in the Revolution: 1987” who writes that “The Hemingway cult…was created more as a tourist attraction and propaganda device than anything else,” and that “the revolutionaries never viewed Hemingway sympathetically; he had taken little interest in Cuba…or in the fight against Batista or in the bearded guerrillas of the Sierra Maestra.” This article was then quoted extensively in The New Yorker in “Hemingway, Castro and Cuba” by Jon Michaud, May 24, 2012, which goes so far as to imply Hemingway left Cuba because of the Revolution. In fact, Hemingway returned to Cuba less than three months after the Revolution; and until late July 1960 when the FBI forbid his return (nineteen months after the Revolution), he spent at least seven months in Cuba. That was more time than he spent in Idaho (six months, including stops in New York and other places in the U.S.) or Spain (six months).

Neither article makes reference to the murder of Hemingway’s dogs, raids on La Finca by the Bautista police, hiding of guns for the rebels, Hemingway’s declarations in newspaper and radio interviews in early 1959 declaring support for the revolution, his meeting with Cuban officials to warn them of problems during their visit to the United States, the demand by the U.S. government that Hemingway denounce Cuba, Hemingway’s refusal to ever do so, or that the U.S. government told Hemingway he would not be allowed to return to Cuba. Timmerman does refer to Hemingway’s announcement at the Havana airport that he considered himself a Cuban, but downplays that event and even misquotes Hemingway.

Soviet foreign minister visit to La Finca: VH, 113-115; Mary, 556. Mikoyan was the only Soviet politician whose career started with Lenin and continued through Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev. He was the Minister of Foreign Trade when Stalin was Premier, and First Deputy Premier under Khrushchev. In 1962 he was the Soviet emissary to Cuba during the missile crisis. (Meyers, 519.)

Lights on at bank at night…'illusory threat’: MWH, 554. A similar incident occurred in late 1960, but Mary is very clear about her placement of this incident, so apparently there were two separate but similar incidents.

Hemingway wanted to write about Cuban Revolution: Fuentes, 276, quoting Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who later turned against the Cuban Revolution. In an interview published in the Cuban magazine Bohemia in September 1977, Mary said that Hemingway “was always on the side of the revolution.” Fuentes, 281-2 and 427. Mary also said that Batista had invited Hemingway to lunch several times, but Ernest always refused.

EH and Castro met May 1960: Castro later said “During the first year of the Revolution I was able to talk to him twice, quite briefly.” (Emphasis added.) (Fidel Castro: My Life, pg. 592) For a description of that day, see VH, 117-119. The oddity of Castro winning the fishing tournament when he was not a fisherman has struck many observers, including Leicester Hemingway, who wrote that “After the tournament, Ernest had a bad taste in his mouth. He knew he had been used.” (LH, 253)  Fiction writers have passed on the lore that the marlin was caught by someone else and/or had its weight aided by pieces of heavy metal. John Updike found it “immeasurably strange.” But Mary Hemingway, no Castro fan, wrote that she and Ernest “kept our big old U.S. Navy binoculars on Fidel’s boat and watched him hook and bring to the gaff two marlin. He was no deep-sea fisherman, as far as we know, but he followed precisely the big-game fishing rules…” (MWH, 557)  Che Guevara was at the fishing contest, too, but did not meet Hemingway (Fuentes, 127-128).

Guerrilla strategy…Sierra Maestra: VH, 119; in Castro, My Life, Fidel Castro elaborates on the effect of the novel, including the guerrillas realizing the importance of ethics. (Castro, 209). Castro talks about Hemingway the person at 592-593.

Photograph on Castro’s wall: Ignacio Ramonet, introduction to Castro, My Life, p.1

Leddy testimony: Morley 102-3, citing Hugh Thomas, The Cuban Revolution, 453

La Coubre explosion: NY Times 3/5/60. Korda’s iconic image of Che Guevara was taken when he attended the funeral of 27 dockworkers; Che, a doctor, had been attending a nearby conference when the explosion occurred and rushed to the scene to provide medical assistance. Herbert L. Matthews wrote a memorandum on the La Coubre disaster and noted that “as time passed, Fidel became more and more emphatic about American responsibility…of course one cannot rule out a CIA operation.” (Matthews, 180)

Refineries nationalized…refusal to refine: Cuba’s oil came from the USSR. See Jane Franklin, Cuba and the U.S. Empire: A Chronological History, p. 26.

Cuba had been exploited by U.S. interests to an astonishing level. As John F. Kennedy noted in a 1960 campaign speech, by the end of 1958, “United States companies owned about 40% of Cuban sugar lands, almost all the cattle ranches, 90% of the mines and mineral concessions, 80% of the utilities, [and] practically all the oil industry.” Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy at Democratic Dinner, Cincinnati, Ohio, October 6, 1960.

EH comment and effect of sugar quota: Hotchner, p.235. According to the NY Times obituary of Ambassador Bonsal, “without notifying him [Bonsal], the Eisenhower Administration suspended Cuba’s sugar import quota − three million tons − in July 1960 after Cuba sold sugar to the USSR. “Mr. Bonsal opposed this and other economic sanctions against Mr. Castro as likely to drive him further into the Soviet orbit.”  (NY Times, 7/1/95)

American friends visited: VH, 116

Famous people visited Havana: Tynan and Williams: NR, 242; Alsop: VH, 109. Tennessee Williams wrote in his Memoirs (1975) that Hemingway had written a letter of introduction to Castro on his behalf, and that Hemingway told him, “You know that this revolution in Cuba is a good revolution.” Tennessee Williams agreed that it was, “because I had been to Cuba when Batista was in power…He was a horrifying sadist.” Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir also visited Cuba and spent time with Castro and Che Guevara in spring of 1960. George Plimpton visited Hemingway in 1959 and Hemingway took him to the stadium to watch some of the trials of Batistans.

Notes to The Ultimatum

Bonsal’s message to EH: VH, 106-7. And see Brennen, p.153. Valerie reported the second visit from Bonsal on the night before he left for the U.S. (p.107) 

Piecing together the information, the second ultimatum must have been issued on January 21, 1960. Although Valerie describes the threats as occurring “in the spring,” just before Bonsal’s recall to Washington, in fact Bonsal was recalled to Washington twice and neither time was in the spring. The first time was on January 22, 1960. He returned to Havana on March 22. The second and final recall was on October 20, 1960; he arrived in Florida on October 29 (NY Times, 10/21/60 and 10/30/60). But Hemingway was no longer in Cuba by then; he left on July 25, 1960 and was never able to return. Therefore, ultimatum had to have been issued in late January, just before the first recall, not “in the spring.” Valerie also writes that Bonsal usually came to dinner on Thursdays, and that it was a Thursday when Bonsal told Hemingway he’d been recalled and was leaving the next day. January 21 was a Thursday and Bonsal left on Friday, January 22.

In an article in The Smithsonian Magazine in 2007, three years after her memoir was published, Valerie Hemingway wrote that “American officials thought it would be best if Hemingway demonstrated his patriotism by giving up his beloved tropical home. He resisted the suggestion, fiercely.”

Mary makes no references to the demands or to Bonsal’s visits at all.

EH shaken but stayed in Cuba: Fuentes, 428, quoting Matthews’ Fidel Castro.

EH left for Key West: MWH, 559. See also Reynolds, 368; NR, 251.

EH planned to return…continued to support Castro: Herbert L. Matthews wrote that his March 1960 memo on La Coubre concluded that Hemingway was still the “great hero of the Cuban people. He is staying at his home and working as a deliberate gesture to show his sympathy and support for the Cuban Revolution.”  (Matthews, Fidel Castro, note at p. 180.)

Hotel Theresa: Many articles have been written about this event and are available online.

Deterioration of relations between US and Cuba: NY Times, “US Recalls Ambassador in Cuba for Extended Stay,” 10/21/1960, p.1; “Castro’s Cuba Takes Long Step to Left,” 10/16/60; and see other NY Times articles for October 1960. 

EH believed he was being followed: Reynolds, 347

Mary lost patience…fugitive from justice: MWH, 566. That striking phrase implies a more shrewd political awareness than Mary usually reveals. Surely someone as politically clueless as she purports to be would merely have chided EH for an overactive imagination or even paranoia without comparing him to a “fugitive from justice.” That phrase implies wrongdoing on EH’s part. Mary didn’t say “You act as if you think the police are after you” but rather, something more akin to “you act as if the police know what you did.” More significantly, a number of Communist Party members were charged under fugitive from justice provisions after the Supreme Court upheld the Smith Act in 1951. Their cases were widely known in the country at the time Mary used that phrase. 

Left for Ketchum: Reynolds, 347; Hotchner, 264.

EH glanced…not to be silly: MWH, 567; Reynolds, 347

Notes to Betrayal and Incarceration

Phone call cut off: Common, I might add, even into the early 1970s when you could often hear the clicks on the line of a tapped phone.

Ketchum: Sun Valley was a resort area adjacent to Ketchum, developed by Union Pacific Railroad heir, diplomat and New York governor (1955-58) W. Averell Harriman. Sun Valley Resort first opened in 1936. The 1960 census shows 746 people living in Ketchum, 317 in Sun Valley. The train station for the area was in Shoshone, 55 miles from Ketchum.

Hotchner argued against: Hotchner, 266

EH suspects two men are auditors: Hotchner, 266-7. Although the two bank incidents seem very similar, both Mary and Hotchner tie them into other specific events that occurred a year apart. Note also that Mary describes herself present but not Hotchner; while Hotchner describes himself as present but not Mary. In other words, these do seem to be two distinct incidents.

Rice miscalculated taxes: VH, 132, noting that “Hemingway never completely trusted Rice after this fiasco.” See also Reynolds, 328 and 333 – when Hemingway was in Spain in 1959 he received a letter from Rice that began, “I have shockingly bad news for you.” Rice had not reported $45,000 on Hemingway’s 1957 tax return; the error ended up costing Hemingway $51,000.

EH wanted everything above-board: As was well known in America, when the FBI and other criminal justice agencies could not prove Al Capone guilty of any crime, he was prosecuted and imprisoned for tax evasion. In 1997, one reporter, testifying to the Senate Finance Committee on the political uses of the IRS, described FDR ordering enforcement powers against Huey Long, Paul Robeson, and others. Albert B. Crenshaw, “It’s Tough to Tinker with the Tax Audit Process,” Washington Post, September 28, 1997.  In the 1960s the IRS hounded the Black Panther Party and other radicals. See John A. Andrew III, Power to Destroy: the Political Uses of the IRS from Kennedy to Nixon.

Mary refused to show check stubs: Reynolds, 353-4.

Valerie’s visa…“large tizzy”: MWH, 559. Hemingway wrote to his friend Bill Davis on January 7, 1960, that Valerie would accompany him and Mary when they returned to Cuba:  “She [Valerie] needs a tourist visa for U.S. and return Havana to Miami or Key West or N.Y. to be given Tourist Card and Tourist Entry for and to Cuba.” (EHSL, 897-8, emphasis in original). His “disproportionately large tizzy” must have been caused in part by the fact that he’d asked Bill Davis seven months previously to arrange for Valerie’s visa renewal and not only had Davis not done it, but he hadn’t told Hemingway that he hadn’t done it. Mary omits those critical facts, however.

Another incident involving Valerie’s status: In October 1960 Valerie and Hemingway were in Spain. She was about to fly to Dublin but couldn’t find her passport. Hemingway “became inordinately upset” and said that “someone, probably at the behest of the FBI, was trying to target him and, by snagging my passport, would prove he was guilty of a myriad of illegal actions” such as employing an alien without proper papers. He delayed his own flight and “took to bed.” She writes that she should have realized that his reaction was an indication of mental illness. (VH 146-47.) This episode occurred a few months after the ultimatum and three months after the visa problem in Key West, but Valerie doesn’t connect Hemingway being “inordinately upset” with those incidents.

“Fixated” about FBI: Kert, 498; Meyers, 543. Sadly, even the Communist Party disparaged EH’s fears; Milton Wolff, leader of the Lincoln Battalion and a lifelong CP member, said “I heard he was writing to everybody that the FBI was following him around and had a tail on him and was tapping his phones and reading his mail and that they were out to get him, he knew too much, and so forth. We were all incredulous−what the hell could he know that the FBI would be tailing him? Apparently, he was suffering from some form of paranoia.” (True Gen, 250) Members of the CPUSA exhibited similar lofty blindness when radicals in the 1960s alleged FBI harassment and surveillance, which, like Hemingway’s allegations, later proved true. 

Wolff’s assertion that the FBI would only harass someone who “knew too much” is a hidebound perspective I remember hearing expressed by CP members in the 1970s. But the FBI’s campaign against Hemingway wasn’t motivated by a belief that he was privy to inside information, just as the FBI’s vicious attacks on the Black Panther Party weren’t carried out because the agency feared that Panthers might be secretly working in strategic weapons facilities or in high diplomatic circles.

Plot concocted: Hotchner 274-5.

Hotcher visited Dr. Cottell: Hotchner, 275; Denis, 266 (interview with Hotchner). Hotchner conceals Dr. Cottell’s identity by calling him “Dr. Renown.”  I’ve found no explanation for this. (Note that Meyers calls the doctor as “Cattell” while Mary calls him “Cottell.”)

Dr. Cottell’s role: Hotchner, 275-6 and see Kert, 499:  “The psychiatrist, Dr. James Cottell, arranged for Ernest to be hospitalized at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota…[to overcome Ernest’s anticipated objections to a mental institution] Dr. Cottell said that his physical complaints justified his being admitted to the Mayo Clinic. After he was examined the psychiatrists could enter his case.” 

In the 1980s the psychiatric community admitted that “sometimes, improbable reports are erroneously assumed to be symptoms of mental illness,” and that sometimes this is done willfully by the mental health professional. Brendan A. Maher named it “the Martha Mitchell Effect” (after the former Attorney General’s wife whose 1972 claims of being beaten and drugged and accusations of illegal activities by CREEP were dismissed as delusional but were later proven true).

EH reacted with alarm: Hotchner, 275-6.

 EH thought he was going to Mayo for physical problems: Meyers, 545;  and see Dearborn, 617: “Hotchner’s and Mary’s accounts differ as to what Ernest was told that convinced him to go to the Mayo Clinic; Mary implied that Ernest knew the high blood pressure story was a fabrication, but Hotchner’s account does not corroborate this.” In his memoir, Hotchner described (with extensive detail) how he and others had tricked Hemingway into the Mayo Clinic. In her memoir, Mary implied that Hemingway had knowingly and willingly entered the Mayo for psychiatric treatment. She wrote that EH wouldn’t go to the Menninger Clinic because people would “say I’m losing my marbles,” and describes Saviers making arrangements with the Mayo Clinic, including registering Hemingway under Saviers’s name and giving him a room in the medical patients’ section; she strongly implies EH was involved in the plan. (MWH, 568) But her claim that EH was actually a willing psychiatric patient is negated by descriptions of the prison-like conditions under which he was immediately emplaced (described in detail below).

In addition to high blood pressure, which had been kept under control since 1940 with medication, Hemingway had kidney disease and a rare type of diabetes.

Dr. Rome…electric shock treatments: MWH, 569; Reynolds, 350.

Shocked 11-15 times: Hotchner, 276; Reynolds, 350-51; Meyers, 547. Meyers says that “the Mayo records may or may not exist, and the Clinic maintains absolute silence….Experts consulted at Harvard, Yale, Boston University and University of Minnesota medical schools agree that it would be almost impossible to get the clinical information on Hemingway.” It’s unclear whether Mary or Hemingway himself signed the permission forms, says Meyers.  But in his VQR article, published 14 years after his book, Meyers states flatly, “Mary signed the permission forms for Hemingway’s shock treatments at the Mayo Clinic in 1960.” Dearborn, whose book I found to slant facts and sometimes eliminate them in order to paint EH as a sexist, states flatly without citation or supporting evidence that “Ernest agreed to undergo a course of shock treatment.” (Dearborn, 618, with no cites.)  

ECT despite EH’s past brain trauma: Reynolds, 350. Psychiatrist Andrew Farah’s Hemingway’s Brain (University of South Carolina Press, 2017) posits that Hemingway suffered from CTE, as do many retired boxers and NFL players, due to repeated concussions. (The most recent concussion had occurred in the 1959 car wreck in Spain.) I have not read the book, only reviews and articles discussing Farah’s theory, but it seems quite plausible. All the more reason why ECT would have caused extensive damage to Hemingway. But that argument is beyond the scope of the issues discussed here. The doctors and the FBI did not know Hemingway had CTE (if he did), but the doctors did know he’d had many concussions, which made him a poor candidate for ECT, and the FBI knew that either ECT would destroy Hemingway’s brain or that incarceration in a mental institution would destroy his credibility.

Restrictions on EH at the Mayo: Phone calls disallowed: Hotchner, 276; frisked: Hotchner, 277; locked doors and barred windows: Meyers, 546;  light: Reynolds, 356. Winston Guest phoned and was refused permission to speak with Hemingway. (True Gen, 249-50) 

EH believes room bugged, intern an FBI agent: Room bugged: Hotchner, 280; intern a fed and delusion: Hotchner, 280, and Hotchner, NY Times, July 1, 2011.

Dr. Rome was reporting to FBI: Meyer, 543 and 553; and see FBI file, Memo from the SAC Minneapolis 1/13/61 to Director for Personal Attention. The informant’s name is redacted but Meyers has on numerous occasions asserted unequivocally that it was Dr. Rome. All sources consulted on this issue have named Dr. Rome.

Blood pressure drug discontinued: Kert, 499; Meyers writes that EH’s blood pressure was under control at the time he entered the Mayo (Meyers, 545), and Baker writes that his blood pressure, which rose in times of anxiety, increased during the early weeks of treatment at the Mayo (Baker, 556). Nevertheless the Mayo doctors discontinued the medicine that had been keeping his blood pressure under control since the late 1940s.

Discharged January 22, 1961: Meyers 550, Reynolds, 352.

Lost 40 pounds; emaciated: Reynolds, 352. Hemingway’s normal weight had been 240-260. January 23, 1961, he weighed 171; Hotchner found him “shockingly thin” (Hotchner, 278).  When Hemingway was released from the Mayo in June after his second stint there, he weighed only 155 pounds − nearly 100 pounds less than his normal weight (Meyers, 553).

“…brilliant cure…patient”: Hotchner, 280.

Other Americans receiving electric shock: Plath vividly describes ECT in her novel The Bell Jar. For the others, see Wikipedia page on Notable People Who Have Undergone Electroconvulsive Therapy and cites therein. Frances Farmer’s biographer wrote that she had a lobotomy, but her father disputed that because he had told her doctors he forbid it. 

Paul Robeson shocked…never recovered: Paul Robeson Jr., The Undiscovered Paul Robeson (John Wiley & Sons) at page 326 describes his father’s ECT and notes that the pattern of treatment closely resembled the procedures used in the MKULTRA program.

Project MKULTRA was the CIA’s secret and illegal mind control research program. It operated from 1953 to 1973. Often using front organizations, the program conducted research at over 80 institutions, mainly universities, hospitals, and prisons. People were subjected to drugs, chemicals, hypnosis, sexual abuse, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, isolation, and other methods of torture. CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MKULTRA files destroyed in 1973, but four years later a cache of 8,000 pages of records (that had been incorrectly filed) was discovered. Willing participants in MKULTRA included Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber; mobster, murderer, and FBI informant James “Whitey” Bulger; and Ken Kesey. It should be noted that the “willing” participants likely didn’t realize what they were signing up for. Most of the test subjects were unwitting. For more detail see the report of the Church Committee:  Project MKULTRA, the CIA’s program of Research in Behavioral Modification, Joint Hearing before the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources, United States Senate, 95th Congress, First Session, August 3, 1977; the report is available online.

EH isolated: Hotchner, 279 (as to Gary Cooper and Saviers); VH, 151; MWH chapters 26 and 27. Valerie later wrote that when she went to the Kennedy Library in 1998 to conduct research in the Hemingway papers, she found a letter from Hemingway to her that she had never received; it was dated October 26, 1960 and asked her to get in touch as soon as she received the letter. He’d given it to a friend to be hand-delivered, but this person (unnamed) instead sold it to a collector. Valerie writes that “Four weeks after he wrote that letter, he made his first suicide attempt.” (Actually that attempt was six months after October 1960.) She doesn’t believe it would have made a difference had she received the letter and contacted him, but “the deception must have added to his final despair.” (VH 294) He had returned to the U.S. from Europe on Oct. 8; his concerns about the FBI increased from that time forward.

JFK tribute: MWH, 571-2; Meyers, 550

Sent money to La Finca staff: Reynolds, 353.

Kert writes that EH paid for Valerie’s drama school tuition, but that is not true (Kert, 498 with no cites). Valerie herself said that she never attended drama school nor had EH paid a tuition fee for her at any college (Meyers, 618 n. 8 to chapter 26). Hotchner writes that “EH invented this fiction [drama school] as a means of getting money to her under auspices that Mary could not disapprove of [citing MR].” (Dear Papa, 303) Reynolds cites two letters from Hemingway: in one EH wrote that he’d sent a check for $1500 to Hotchner for Valerie and would continue supporting her but didn’t want Mary to know how much money he was giving, so he would send further money through Saviers. The second letter was to Saviers; Hemingway worried he was putting him at risk (Hemingway was still worried about legal ramifications from Valerie’s visa problems) so he “wrote an alibi note for George stating that [Saviers] never knew what the letters contained.” (Reynolds, 348)  

EH quote about Paris memoir: MFRE, 255.

FBI told EH he couldn't return to Cuba: Brennen, p.153.  In another instance of distancing herself from Hemingway’s pro-Cuban Revolution position, Mary writes of being appalled at the Bay of Pigs invasion − not at the act, but at the choice of a landing site, the muddiness of which precluded success for the invaders. She also implies that Ernest shared this view. (MWH, 574)

“This was devastating…fifty-seven cats”: Brennen, p. 153; and see Reynolds, 318. La Finca Vigia had become a shelter for cats in the area. In 1947 the Hemingways built a four-story tower where Ernest could write and where an entire floor could be turned over to the cats. In 1943 eleven cats lived at La Finca and Hemingway wrote to ex-wife Hadley that “one cat just leads to another.” In 1954 there were 34 cats. Some were descendants of the original cats, others appeared on their own, and some were brought by friends and neighbors. Although all 34 were given names that reflected their personalities, only seven or eight were special and allowed to roam the main house freely. By 1960 the menagerie had increased to 57 cats. 

April 21…he was sedated: Kert, 501; Meyers, 551; Reynolds, 355.

Because most of the Hemingway biographers downplay his political views and how Cuba-US relations affected his life, they don’t see the important conflation of the Bay of Pigs (April 15, with newspaper coverage beginning April 17, to April 19) and Hemingway’s first suicide attempt (April 21).

Against his will…to Mayo Clinic: Reynolds, 355. Hemingway reportedly hinted at suicide with his Ketchum friend Tillie Arnold. “There’s no other way out for me,” he said. “I am not going back to Rochester where they will lock me up.” (Minneapolis St. Paul Magazine, 3/1/2019.)

Two suicide attempts en route to Mayo: Reynolds, 355; Kert, 501. Hotchner and others say that the second attempt was made during a refueling stop when Hemingway walked toward the propellers of another plane, but Don Anderson, who was on the plane, said that never happened; George Saviers was on the plane and agrees with Anderson: “Hotchner’s Papa was a bunch of crap.”  (True Gen, 251, interviews with Anderson and Saviers.)

Not seen by psychiatrist until Mayo; never attempted suicide until after ECT: Meyers, 545.

Ten more electric shock “treatments”: Meyers, 551; Reynolds, 356

No phone calls or visitors: HIL, 3

EH accused Mary; she takes it as evidence of illness: Hotchner, 294; Kert, 502

Conjugal visit: MWH, 576. Supposedly the visit was meant to relieve Hemingway’s concern after months of impotency, but probably had the opposite effect. Was that Dr. Rome’s true intent? Hemingway had recently told Hotchner that all the things a man cared about were now lost to him: “Staying healthy. Working good. Eating and drinking with his friends. Enjoying himself in bed. I haven’t any of them. Do you understand, goddamn it? None of them.” (Hotchner 299-300) Hotchner and Mary investigated the Connecticut facility after that conversation. Hotchner wrote that he wished Hemingway “could only be made to adjust to a life where these prowesses were not so all important…” pg. 300. That wording plus the timing implies Hotchner related Hemingway’s concerns to Dr. Rome, who then arranged a conjugal visit that was guaranteed to be a disaster.

EH discussed suicide with Dr. Rome: Reynolds, 356; Harper’s Magazine, letter of July 1961 from Dr. Howard Rome to Mary Hemingway. “A discussion of suicide was threaded through all of our talks from the very first day.”

EH thinks two men in city clothes might be FBI: Kert, 503; Reynolds, 358; MWH, 578. The waitress told Hemingway she thought the two men were salesmen from Twin Falls. Mary told Hemingway the men were showing no interest in them, so he should forget it and have more wine.

No inquest, gun destroyed: “Hemingway inquest is ruled out after authorities talk to family,” with a sub-heading “Coroner cites a lack of evidence of foul play in gun death − burial planned for later in the week,” New York Times, July 4, 1961, page 9 (no byline).

Idaho law provides that the coroner may order an autopsy if necessary to determine the cause of death. None of the sources I’ve consulted refer to an autopsy having been conducted.

Coroner’s decision; accident or suicide; cursory examination: NY Times, 7/4/61

Comment on the reporting of Hemingway’s death: The NY Times and other major newspapers reported EH’s death as self-inflicted, that his wife had said it was an accident while he cleaned a gun, but that suicide was possible. Then on July 7, 1961 Emmett Watson reported on page 1 of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that it was suicide. Watson wrote that “all details of his death have been denied to reporters who converged here [Ketchum] from many parts of the world. Not even the make of the gun was revealed” but that because of the location of Hemingway’s body in the foyer, along with other inquiries, “the author’s death definitely was a suicide.”

For some reason, Andrew Feldman, author of Ernesto (published in 2019), sneers at Watson, first describing him as “a small-time reporter” (p. 316), then “the minor reporter from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer who had tapped Papa’s views on Castro, now returned for another scoop” (p. 347). Feldman also wrote that Watson’s story on Hemingway’s views of the Cuban trials had been “picked up by the major papers and rebranded as ‘Trials in Cuba Defended by Hemingway,’” but provides no citations (Feldman, 319).

Far from being a “minor reporter,” Watson is described in Daniel James Brown’s Boys in the Boat as a “legendary Seattle scribe.”

George Brown’s presence: MWH, 578-79. Brown ran a boxing gym in New York City and trained EH as a boxer. Brown routinely visited EH in Cuba for a month at a time to spar and was known for his immense strength. (Meyers, 334) In the last few years of EH’s life, Brown acted as his chauffeur in Idaho and so was present during most of the so-called paranoid episodes. He also drove EH and Mary from the Mayo to Ketchum after EH was released the second time. (Reynolds, 358)

Destruction of the shotgun: Hemingway’s Guns, p. 233; Baker, 668, note “post mortem.” EH’s brother Leicester later said that one of EH’s sons “cut it up, took it on a road, and rolled over it several times with a small truck, completely destroying it.” (True Gen, 252) 

Mary locked guns but left keys out: MWH, 578; see also Kert, 503 and Meyers, 360.

FBI file…EH’s worry about registering as George Saviers: The source of this information is the FBI memo of January 13, 1961 from the SAC (Special Agent in Charge) of Minneapolis to Director Hoover. The name of the informant is redacted (presumably, Dr. Rome) and identified as male; this person claimed that EH registered under the name of Saviers because the Mayo Clinic advised this, “to eliminate publicity and contacts by newsmen” but that EH was now worried about the false registration; the informant stated that the worry was “interfering with the treatment” and he wanted to tell EH that the FBI wasn’t concerned about the false registration. “[Redacted] was advised that there was no objection.”

The standard view on EH registering in the name of Dr. Saviers follows what’s stated in the FBI memo. What might strike a curious reader is why, if EH was registering in a false name to avoid publicity, he chose the true name of one of his closest friends. This makes no sense. Why not simply register under an invented name?

Meyers writes that there was no plan to register EH under the name George Saviers, but that “the ‘cattle-pen’ admission procedure had many tedious delays and Saviers filled in the complicated forms with his own name in order to expedite matters.” (Meyers, 546, citing an interview with Dr. Saviers.) This explanation makes no sense, either. Surely most patients entering the Mayo Clinic’s psychiatric ward had to fill out similar forms and managed to register in their own names, or the family member with them managed to fill the forms out in the patient’s name. And why would filling out the form with one name rather than another expedite matters?

So there are two different explanations for the false registration — to avoid publicity and to expedite. Both explanations are nonsensical. I cannot help but wonder whether Hemingway’s admission was being concealed for entirely different reasons, all nefarious.

J. Edgar Hoover note: FBI File on Ernest Hemingway, letter from Quentin Reynolds to J. Edgar Hoover, January 6, 1964 (with the salutation “Dear Edgar”); Hoover’s note is handwritten on the bottom of the letter.

At least 15 pages classified: Meyers says 15 pages were withheld. That figure, of course, comes from the FBI itself.

Nicholas Reynolds in Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy contends that the FBI had no interest in Hemingway after WWII and merely catalogued information that it received, unsolicited, from concerned citizens. He writes, “There is no evidence that the Bureau opened any other files on Hemingway. Trust me, I looked and asked, many times!” (p. 328, n. 49) But I don’t trust Nicholas Reynolds. His book jacket biography says he “served as a CIA officer” and was the “historian for the CIA museum,” which, in and of itself, might not justify my distrust. But Nicholas Reynolds also writes that “All we know about [Raymond] Leddy’s life and work is that he represented the Bureau [FBI] in Cuba…” (NR, 109; emphasis supplied.) This is a flat out lie. Reynolds, as the CIA historian, was well aware that Leddy not only joined the CIA but planned the coup against Guatemalan president Arbenz in 1954, and had for several years been the CIA’s Chief of OPC Operations for all of Central and South America. According to Bryce Wood’s The Dismantling of the Good Neighbor Policy, at p.166:

“Edward A. Jamison, a State Department officer concerned with OAS affairs at that time [of Guatemalan coup], [suggested] that the principal person in the department on whom Secretary Dulles relied for day-to-day liaison with the CIA was Raymond G. Leddy, chief of the Central American Division in the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs. And Corson states that ‘in the Arbenz operation’ John Foster Dulles ‘handed the ball to Raymond G. Leddy, the officer in charge of Central American-Panamanian Affairs,’ and that Leddy ‘had put together the CIA’s operational system in South America’.”

Raymond Leddy is not a household name to the average American, but he is just that to the intelligence community.  

(For more on Nicholas Reynolds, see the citation “Counter-intelligence of fascists in Cuba” in Notes to the Crook Factory, above.)

“…shrewdness and tenacity”: Kert, 504

Cubans asked Mary’s consent: Brennen, 159-163; VH, 170-195; and “Mrs. Hemingway Is Cautious on Publication of Manuscripts,” NY Times, July 29, 1961, reporting on Mary’s visit in late July; she says she’s been “burning all documents of a personal nature [including] a large number of letters the author had written over the last twenty years and never sent…” She was also going through manuscripts looking for notes written by Hemingway with instructions. She also reported that Premier Castro had suggested that the home be turned into a museum; she felt “honored” by that and said “Ernest was very fond of the Cuban people.”

Brennen relates the visit by Fidel Castro, his generosity toward Mary Hemingway and the fulfillment of his promises regarding the estate. See Hemingway’s Cats, chapter 32, “Fidel Castro and the Last of the Finca Cats.” Valerie Hemingway provides a wonderfully evocative account of what became a month-long expedition to La Finca with Mary to sort and catalog the Hemingways’ possessions. She describes the visit Fidel Castro made and his sincere respect for Hemingway; the patience of the Cubans; and the generous and quick assistance from Castro when Mary contacted his office for help with arrangements. Although some claimed the Cubans simply took possession of La Finca, a letter by Mary to Roberto Herrera dated August 25, 1961 confirms the donation to the Cuban people. Herrerra was the brother of EH’s doctor (and fellow Spanish Civil War veteran) and the letter was discovered when he died. It was auctioned in 2015. (See The Guardian, Feb. 15, 2015 and The True Gen at 229) 

The Cubans also allowed Mary to take paintings by Miro, Gris, Klee and Masson along with clothing and jewelry. Meyers, 566.  Mary wrote that a Cuban friend had given her jewels to take to a family member in Miami; they were worth half a million dollars. (MWH, 587)  She makes no apology and seems proud that she was able to smuggle the jewels out. A different perspective comes from the Cuban Fuentes, who writes that Mary “took advantage of the opportunity provided by [Castro] to withdraw close to half a million dollars in jewels…” (Fuentes, 279)

EH concerns about A Moveable Feast; Mary ignored them: Hemingway’s unsent letter declares that as currently written the memoir could engender libel suits; if published it would have to be called fiction, and Scribner’s would have to bear the burden of libel lawsuits. (Reynolds, 354.)  He had not forgotten that twenty years earlier, in 1941, he had checked his royalty statements and learned that Scribner’s was charging all costs of defending a spurious plagiarism suit to him. (Reynolds, 46)

A Moveable Feast…viciousness to friends: Meyers, 333-34; he writes that the portraits in the memoir are mostly “venomous and brutal.”

In 2009 Hemingway’s grandson Seán edited and published A Moveable Feast – the Restored Edition. “The book was never finished in Hemingway’s eyes,” he writes, and disputes that it was finished in spring of 1960, as Mary has stated; Hemingway continued working on it until at least April 1961. “A small amount of material that Hemingway had intended to include was deleted, and other material that he had written for the book but had decided not to include…was added. The introductory letter by Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast was actually fabricated by Mary Hemingway…” Seán Hemingway commented that the use of a version of an episode “which casts Fitzgerald in a less sympathetic light than Hemingway’s [altered] final version, seems completely unwarranted.” And, “The remorse that Hemingway expresses and the responsibility that he accepts for the breakup [of his marriage with Hadley], as well as ‘the unbelievable happiness’ that he had with Pauline, was cut out by the editors…The extensive edits Mary Hemingway made to this text seem to have served her own personal relationship with the writer as his fourth and final wife, rather than the interests of the book or of the author…” MFRE, pp. 2-9

“…regained…his full literary power”: Meyers, 533-537

If he was writing in 1960 as powerfully…big problem: A number of people had read the manuscript for what became A Moveable Feast, including Mary, who typed it and later put a copy in a safe deposit box; Hotchner, who made a copy in 1959 (Dear Papa, Dear Hotch, 260-61); a friend in Idaho, Betty Weir Bell, who’d made copies for Hemingway (MWH, 567); Valerie, who read several of the sketches while in Paris with EH in 1959 (VH 77); and the publisher Charles Scribner (and others at Scribner & Sons). Hemingway had delivered a copy to Scribner’s in November 1959 and the publisher was excited, and wanted to publish it in fall of 1960 or the following spring. Hemingway demurred, saying it needed a month’s work, which he postponed while working on an article on bullfighting for Life Magazine (later published as A Dangerous Summer). He began editing the Paris sketches in summer of 1960. After his first release from the Mayo Clinic in January 1961 he kept trying to write an introduction, but failed. There is no reason to suspect that Scribner’s, Mary, or other friends turned a copy of the manuscript over to the FBI, but it is not inconceivable that news of the compelling, exquisite prose of the memoir became known in unfriendly quarters. The significance of Hemingway working on the manuscript while he was at the Mayo Clinic cannot be overlooked. (See his letter to Scribner of 1/16/61, p.912 of EHSL). Given the tight control over Hemingway there, it’s probable that some personnel had access to the manuscript, perhaps including Dr. Rome, the Mayo staff member who reported on Hemingway to the FBI. (MR, 335-339; 343; 353-54.) As a matter of fact, Dr. Rome “offered the services of his longtime secretary, Marie McQuarrie. She typed for hours while Hemingway dictated a flurry of letters from his bed that frequently mentioned his eagerness to resume work on a memoir about Paris.” (Minneapolis St. Paul Magazine, 3/1/2019.)

Hotchner’s memoir: Hotchner’s memoir Papa Hemingway was subjected to a lawsuit by Mary to prevent its distribution on the grounds that accounts of Hemingway’s conversations violated her right to privacy and were protected by copyright. (Usually it’s said the reason for the lawsuit was that Hotchner’s book revealed Hemingway’s death was suicide, not accident.) Mary lost before the NY Supreme Court in February 1966; the decision was affirmed by the Court of Appeals (Estate of Hemingway v. Random House, 23 NY2d 341, December 12, 1968). Six months later, in a Look magazine interview with Oriana Fallaci, Mary admitted that Hemingway had committed suicide. I can’t help but wonder whether the true reason Mary didn’t want the memoir published was because of Hotchner’s detailed descriptions of how he, Mary and Saviers conspired against and tricked EH into the Mayo, which contradicts Mary’s sanitized version. 

Lucrative partnership: Reynolds, 340-341, who also writes of a deal with CBS in which four of Hemingway’s stories were adapted for television shows by Hotchner; H&H was paid $240,000 but after Hotchner’s expenses and his 50% share, 1% to attorney Rice, and taxes, “Hemingway took home less than $25,000 on the deal.” (Reynolds, 327 n. 19.) It’s not clear why expenses and taxes both apparently came from Hemingway’s share.

Hotchner has written a number of books about Hemingway since 1964, and it’s fair to say that his fame rests primarily on his friendship with Hemingway and his extensive writing and speaking about that friendship.

In a 1999 interview on the radio show Fresh Air with Terry Gross, Hotchner defends and disputes, with solid reasoning and insightful analysis, some of the deplorable myths about Hemingway:  that he was “macho,” that he promoted himself, that he was boastful, that he was an alcoholic, and that he didn’t write good female characters. He goes on to freely describe his role in tricking Hemingway into the Mayo Clinic.

But in the Fresh Air interview Hotchner states incorrectly that Hemingway had attempted suicide before entering the Mayo for the first time: “He’d attempted suicide at this point.” Hotchner goes on to describe the second trip to the Mayo in 1961 as if it were the first, and implies that Hemingway’s suicide attempts on that second trip (when Hemingway was being forcibly returned to the Mayo, where he’d already suffered so much) occurred before the first incarceration. That’s not only wrong but it doesn’t even make sense, since on the first trip Hemingway thought he was being taken to the Mayo for treatment of high blood pressure.

This untrue description occurs during a point in the Fresh Air interview where Hotchner is explaining to Ms. Gross why he believed Hemingway needed psychiatric treatment. My impression of Hotchner during the Gross interview (which I viewed as well as listened to) was that Hotchner was in complete possession of his mental faculties, including his memory. Given how often he’s written about the events, it seems to me highly unlikely that he mixed up the sequence of events by accident. 

Had Hemingway in fact attempted suicide before the first incarceration, then Hotchner could more persuasively argue that tricking his friend into the Mayo was justified.

Hotchner and Paul Newman: Mark Seal, “Inside the Family Battle for the Newman’s Own Brand Name,” Vanity Fair, July 23, 2015. Hotchner and Newman met in 1955 when Hotchner wrote the screenplay for and Newman acted in the Hemingway story The Battler. James Dean had been slated for the starring role but was killed in a car wreck. It was Newman’s first major role.

“The sons sued Rice…” Jeffrey Meyers, “The Hemingways: An American Tragedy,” Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 1999.

Mary had turned over management of the lucrative estate to Rice, who had become a very wealthy man solely through his representation of Hemingway. See Meyers, 568 and article in VQR, Spring 1999.  Mary describes his slipshod accounting method, and although she isn’t critical she notes that “The IRS eventually collected nearly all of Ernest’s cash savings unto itself.” (MWH, 591)

Meyers on Gellhorn: Meyers, VQR, Spring 1999.

Martha as using EH to advance her own career: The True Gen contains comments from friends or acquaintances of EH that imply Martha became involved with EH for mercenary reasons. (Pages 111, 143-45, 152.) Winston Guest goes so far as to say that Martha told him “she’d picked Ernest [as a husband] because of his ability as a writer and possible remuneration from books….She didn’t imply that she loved him at all. She implied to me that she married him as a practical matter; it might help improve her writing.” Martha is immediately quoted as responding, “What rubbish. My ‘career’ had started before I ever met Ernest Hemingway…I never used his name or my association with him, not when I was married to him or ever after…” (True Gen, 144) I might add that Ms. Gellhorn’s rather constant disparagements of and accusations against Hemingway are a form of using his name, and seem to have especially ingratiated her with academic feminists.

Irwin Shaw, whose comments throughout reveal a deep dislike of EH, professes disbelief of remarks by two friends showing EH’s support of Martha because they were “toadies” whereas Martha’s are believable because she was Shaw’s good friend. (True Gen, 145)

As noted earlier in this essay, Martha’s disparagement of Hemingway’s efforts in Operation Friendless has given fodder to detractors for decades.

Martha killed a child in Kenya: Meyers, Article in VQR, Spring 1999.

Best relationship…Laurance Rockefeller: Francine du Plessix Gray, “Woman of Letters,” review of Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn, NY Times 4/22/2013. The affair with Rockefeller was her “best and longest” relationship, writes Gray, quoting Gellhorn (and see note at page 311 of Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn). Her romance with a Rockefeller may seem contradictory, but Martha exhibited class snobbery throughout her life. For instance, during her stint with the WPA she sympathized with the workers but wrote that they were becoming “useless human material.” In 1986 she wrote “I really am a snob; I cannot bear that counter jumper woman [Margaret Thatcher].” In England, where Gellhorn then lived, “counter jumper” is a derogatory term for a sales clerk. Mrs. Thatcher’s policies troubled Gellhorn too, perhaps as much as her social climbing. (Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn, 461-2)

Dr. Rome “psychological autopsy” of Oswald: Warren Commission Exhibit No. 3134. September 8, 1964. Dr. Rome concluded that Oswald was dyslexic and offered opinions on how that must have affected his life.

Hotchner 2011 editorial admitting he’d been wrong: Hotchner, “Hemingway, Hounded by the Feds,” New York Times, July 1, 2011. And see HIL,162. But in the Postscript to that book, Hotchner writes that fifty years after Hemingway’s death, in response to a Freedom of Information request, the FBI released its file. The file, in fact, was released in 1983, twenty-two years after Hemingway’s death, not in 2011, as any cursory research will show. Certainly any Hemingway scholar is aware of that.

Six years previously, in 2005, Hotchner had ignored the FBI file — which, by then, had been available for 22 years — by again describing Hemingway as a “victim of his delusions.” (Dear Papa, p. xvii)

In Hemingway In Love (pp. 167-8), Hotchner writes that “beginning in the 1940s J. Edgar Hoover had placed Ernest under surveillance because he was suspicious of Ernest’s activities in Cuba. Over the following years, agents filed reports on him and tapped his phones. The surveillance continued all through his confinement at St. Mary’s Hospital [part of the Mayo Clinic]. It is likely that the phone in the hall outside his room was tapped and that nurse Susan may well have been an FBI informant,” as EH suspected she was. Interestingly, Hotchner doesn’t mention here that EH’s doctor reported to the FBI. (And perhaps Hotchner didn’t notice that the memo in the FBI file refers to the informant as “he.”)

Also, while Hotchner’s phrase “Ernest’s activities in Cuba” refers to the WWII work with the Crook Factory and Operation Friendless, Hemingway himself (according to Hotchner) referred to having “lived among the Cuban Communists all those years.”  Since the Revolution had occurred on January 1, 1959, and EH was speaking in June 1961, “all those years” obviously harkened back to his support of the Cuban guerrillas in the mid-1950s. Hemingway’s friends downplayed his radicalism. Hemingway did not. (HIL, 3; 161-3; and 167-8)

Hemingway quote on why the FBI would hound him: HIL, 162. Hemingway’s perceptive description of “all of them in cahoots” with J. Edgar Hoover  anticipates similar campaigns carried out against Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Panther Party, among others.

Hemingway’s impact: Upon learning of Hemingway’s death, President John F. Kennedy said, “Few Americans had a greater impact on the emotions and attitude of the American people than Ernest Hemingway….He almost single-handedly transformed the literature and ways of thought of men and women in every country in the world.” (Minneapolis St Paul magazine, March 1, 2019; emphasis supplied.)

SOURCES

Books:

Andrew, John A. III, Power to Destroy: the Political Uses of the IRS from Kennedy to Nixon (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee Publisher, 2002.

Baker, Carlos, Ernest Hemingway, A Life Story (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969)

Braden, Spruille, Diplomats and Demagogues (New York: Arlington House, 1971)

Brennen, Carlene Fredericka, Hemingway’s Cats (Sarasota: Pineapple Press, 2006)

Brennen, Carlene Fredericka, Hemingway’s Cats, Revised Cuba Edition (Sarasota: Pineapple Press, 2017)

Brian, Denis, The True Gen: An Intimate Portrait of Hemingway by Those Who Knew Him (New York: Grove Press, 1988)

Castro, Fidel & Ignacio Ramonet, Fidel Castro, My Life (New York: Scribner, 2008)

Feldman, Andrew, Ernesto - The Untold Story of Hemingway in Revolutionary Cuba (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2019)

Fuentes, Norberto, Hemingway in Cuba (Seacaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart Inc., 1984)

Gellhorn, Martha, Travels with Myself and Another (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1978)

Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn, Edited by Caroline Moorehead (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2006)

Hemingway, Ernest, A Moveable Feast, the Restored Edition, forward by Patrick Hemingway, introduced and edited by Seán Hemingway (New York: Scribner, July 2010, trade paperback edition)

Hemingway, Ernest, Selected  Letters 1917-1961, edited by Carlos Baker (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981)

Hemingway, Ernest, and Hotchner, A. E., Dear Papa, Dear Hotch: the Correspondence of Ernest Hemingway and A. E. Hotchner (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2005)

Hemingway, Gregory H., M.D., Papa, a personal memoir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976)

Hemingway, Leicester, My Brother, Ernest Hemingway (Crest: February 1963 edition)

Hemingway, Mary Welsh, How It Was (New York: Knopf, 1976)

Hemingway, Valerie, Running with the Bulls: My Years with the Hemingways (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004)

Hotchner, A. E., Papa Hemingway, a personal memoir (New York: Random House, 1966) 

Hotchner, A. E., Papa Hemingway, a personal memoir  with Preface, The Hemingway Centennial Edition (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1999)

Hotchner, A. E., Hemingway in Love, the Untold Story, a Memoir (New York: Picador, St. Martin’s Press, 2015) 

Kert, Bernice, The Hemingway Women (New York: W.W.Norton, 1983)

Herbert L. Matthews, Fidel Castro (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969), at p. 180

Meyers, Jeffrey, Hemingway: a biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1985) 

Moorehead, Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn

Morley, Jefferson, Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA (University Press of Kansas, 2008)

Mort, Terry, The Hemingway Patrol Ernest Hemingway and his Hunt for U-boats (New York: Scribner, 2009)

Reynolds, Michael, Hemingway: The Final Years (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1999)

Reynolds, Nicholas, Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy (New York: Harper, Collins, 2017)

Villarreal, Rene and Villarreal, Raul, Hemingway’s Cuban Son: Reflections on the Writer by His Longtime Majordomo (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2009)

Articles by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway, “I disavow any responsibility…”, Look Magazine, May 4, 1954

Ernest Hemingway, “Who Murdered the Vets? A First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane,” New Masses, September 17, 1935

Other Newspapers and Magazines (listed alphabetically by periodical title)

American Mercury, Dorothy Dunbar Bromley, “Nicholas Murray Butler: Portrait of a Reactionary,” March, 1935.

Contributions in Black Studies, a Journal of African and Afro-American Studies, Joy James, “Review/Harlem Hospitality and Political History: Malcolm X and Fidel Castro at the Hotel Theresa,” (Volume 12, Article 12) Jan 1, 1994

Eugene Register-Guard,  “Hemingway Defends Cuban Trials,” January 23, 1959, p.1

Garden & Gun, “Hemingway’s Suicide Gun, a new book takes a closer look at the evolution of a legendary sportsman,” October 20, 2010.

The Guardian, “No, Mr. President – How the FBI bosses the White House,” Oct 24, 2012

Harper’s Magazine: 

Howard Rome, For Whom the Bell Tolls (letter from Dr. Rome to Mary Hemingway written in July 1961), from March 2017 issue.

Ken Silverstein, “Six Questions for Jefferson Morley on Our Man in Mexico,” 4/17/2008

The Hemingway Project, “Series from Cuba: An Interview with Rene Villarreal,” August 22, 2018.

Milwaukee Sentinel, “Hemingway Defends Cuban Trials,” Emmett Watson, March 11, 1959, p.8 (a condensed version of the article by Watson that was published in Seattle Post-Intelligencer on March 9, 1959)

Minneapolis St. Paul Magazine, “The Last Days of Hemingway at Mayo Clinic,” John Rosengren, March 1, 2019

National Review, John Earl Haynes & Harvey Klehr, “Their Man in Havana?” 5/26/09

New Jersey Monthly, “Life with Papa,” Dawn Shurmaitis, Sept. 2005 issue, published online Feb. 6, 2008 (retrieved August 2019)

New York Times (articles without by-lines):

“B.E.F. to Be Evicted from Capitol Area,” July 27, 1932, p.21

“Troops Drive Veterans from Capital; Fire camps there and at Anacostia; 1 killed, scores hurt in day of strife,” July 29, 1932. Many articles are in this issue of the Times.

“MacArthur Charges Libel” May 17, 1934 

“Bonus Bill Becomes Law; Repassed in Senate, 76-19; Payment Will Be Speeded,” Jan. 28, 1936, p.1.  

“Navy Seeks 1,000 Boats for U-boat Patrol; Relaxes Requirements, Offers Commissions,” June 28, 1942, p.21

“Janet L. Graham Fiancee; Lima, Peru, Girl Will Be Bride of R. G. Leddy, Navy Veteran,” September 17, 1948

“Cuba Wipes Out Invaders; Leader is Among 40 Dead,” December 3, 1956, p.1

“Opposition Hunt Pressed in Cuba,” December 4, 1956

“Hemingway Dog Slain; Cuba Patrol Denies Act,” August 22, 1957

“Hemingway Back in Cuba,” November 6, 1959, p. 9

“Castro’s Cuba Takes Long Step to Left,” October 16, 1960

Photo captioned “Envoy Returns from Cuba,” October 30, 1960, p.1

“Hemingway Inquest Is Ruled Out After Authorities Talk to Family; Coroner Cites a Lack of Evidence of Foul Play in Gun Death − Burial Planned for Later in the Week,” July 4, 1961, p. 9

“ ‘One of Us’ to Cubans,” July 4, 1961, pg. 9

“Mrs. Hemingway Is Cautious on Publication of Manuscripts,” July 29, 1961

“Raymond Liddy [sic] Diplomatic Aide,” obituary, March 9, 1976, p.34 

NY Times articles with bylines, in alphabetical order by author:

David Binder, “Philip W. Bonsal, 92, Last U.S. Envoy to Cuba,” July 1, 1995, p.9

Francine DuPlessix Gray, “Woman of Letters,” Sunday Book Review, review of Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn, August 26, 2006

A.E. Hotchner, “Hemingway, Hounded by the Feds,”  July 1, 2011

E. W. Kenworthy, “US Recalls Ambassador in Cuba for Extended Stay,” October 21, 1960, p.1

Edwin McDowell, “Publishing: Pulitzer Controversies,” May 11, 1984

Herbert L. Matthews, “Castro’s Kidnappings Show War Is Still On,” July 6, 1958, p.1

D.T. Max, “Ernest Hemingway’s War Wounds,” July 18, 1999

Herbert Mitgang, “Publishing FBI file on Hemingway,” March 11, 1983

R. Hart Phillips, “75 Die in Havana as Munitions Ship Explodes at Dock,” March 5, 1960, p. 1

R. Hart Phillips, “Castro Links U.S. to Ship ‘Sabotage’; Denial Is Swift,” March 6, 1960, p. 1

Layhmond Robinson, “Hemingway Brings Suit to Stop Reprint of Spanish War Stories,” August 6, 1958

Layhmond Robinson, “Hemingway Says He Will Drop Suit. Asserts that political fear did not spur attempt to bar reprints of stories,” August 7, 1959, p. 27

Kate Zernike, “Havana to Unlock Hemingway Papers,” September 21, 2002, pg. A17

The New Yorker: 

The Talk of the Town column, June 7, 1941

Herbert Mitgang, “Policing America’s Writers,” Oct. 5, 1987

Seattle Post Intelligencer: 

Emmett Watson, “Hemingway Talks on Cuba”, March 9, 1959, pg.1

Emmett Watson, “The Real Story of Death of Hemingway” and “Goodbye, Papa”, July 7, 1961

Smithsonian Magazine, Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen, “World War I: 100 Years Later – Marching on History,” February 2003

Smithsonian Magazine, Valerie Hemingway, “Hemingway’s Cuba, Cuba’s Hemingway,” August 2007

Studies in Intelligence, Nicholas Reynolds, “Ernest Hemingway, Wartime Spy,” Vol. 56, No.2 (Extracts June 2012)

Sun Sentinel, Ken Kaye, “Nation’s meanest hurricane devastated the Keys 80 years ago,” 8/28/2015 (retrieved on line on 5/1/2018). 

Time Magazine:

September 23, 1935, “Catastrophe: After the Storm,” National Affairs section. 

August 7, 1944, “Cuba: Plot Foiled.” 

The Times-Picayune, Mike Scott, “German U-boats in the Gulf of Mexico, and the family that survived them,” 7/13/2016, updated Sept. 6, 2016)

Vanity Fair, Mark Seal, “Inside the Family Battle for the Newman’s Own Brand Name,” July 23, 2015.

Virginia Quarterly Review, Jeffrey Meyers, “The Hemingways: An American Tragedy,” Spring 1999 [to discuss “the full story that was suppressed in my biography (of Hemingway).”]

Washington Post: 

Albert B. Crenshaw, “It’s Tough to Tinker with the Tax Audit Process,” September 28, 1997

J. Michael Welton, “Hemingway’s Finca Vigia restored in partnership of Cuban, U.S. Preservationists,” October 14, 2011

Washington Times, Martin Rubin, review of “The Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn,” September 30, 2006

Other

“FBI Records: The Vault, Ernest Hemingway,” at vault.fbi.gov/ernest-miller-hemingway. The opening page of this website says: “The bulk of the file concerns Hemingway’s intelligence work on behalf of the U.S.Embassy in Havana, Cuba between 1942 and 1944.”

Raymond J. Batvinis, Lecture at CercleK2, a Paris think tank, on July 24, 2015 and “The Strange Wartime Odyssey of Louis C. Beck,” in World War II Quarterly, 2008 (both retrieved online in January 2019).

Bohemia, Interview with Mary Walsh Hemingway, September 1977 (cited by Fuentes, 281-282 and 427)

“21 rare and weird facts about World War II,” Business Insider, August 8, 2015 (retrieved online February 28, 2019)

Kathleen Duxbury, “1935 Labor Day Hurricane — CCC First Responders,” on the website New Deal Stories.com, http://newdealstories.com/1935-hurricane-ccc-first-responders-part-1/

Carlton Jackson, “Castro at the Hotel Theresa,” from Hotels of the Rich and Famous, April 25, 2008

Estate of Hemingway v. Random House (12/12/68, Court of Appeals of New York) 23 NY2d 341

Senator John F. Kennedy, Remarks at Democratic Dinner, Cincinnati, Ohio, October 6, 1960

National Archives, Pieces of History, blog by Jessie Kratz, July 15, 2020. https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2020/07/15/the-1932-bonus-army-black-and-white-americans-unite-in-march-on-washington/

National Park Service, Anacostia Park page, “Bonus Expeditionary Forces March on Washington.”

Sam Olden, “A Much-Traveled Southerner on Collecting and Memory,” Interview by Teresa Nichols in The South Writ Large, Summer 2015

Senior Review Group Meeting #526, Monday December 7, 1970. Declassified E.O. 13526, Section 3.5,  10/17/2016

Lt. Commander W. M. Swan, “A Century of Japanese Intelligence, Part III,” Naval Historical Review, March 1975 (Naval Historical Society of Australia) (retrieved online Feb. 28, 2019)

Joseph F. Thorning, PhD., Litt.D., Professor of Sociology and Social History at Mount St. Mary’s College, brochure published by the International Catholic Truth Society (1938), “Why the Press Failed on Spain!”

Uboat.net, The Caribbean Sea (retrieved May 30, 2018)

Warren Commission, Exhibit No. 3134, Letter of Howard F. Rome, Mayor Clinic, dated September 8, 1964

Project MKULTRA, the CIA’s program of Research in Behavioral Modification, Joint Hearing before the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources, United States Senate, 95th Congress, First Session, August 3, 1977

Books not read except for extracts obtained online, which are cited for specific points only:

Silvio Calabi, Steve Helsley and Roger Sanger, Hemingway’s Guns: the Sporting Arms of Ernest Hemingway (Down East Books, 2010)

Andrew Farah,  Hemingway’s Brain (University of South Carolina Press, 2017)

Jane Franklin, Cuba and the U.S. Empire: A Chronological History (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016), p. 26 

David Clay Large,  Between Two Fires: Europe’s Path in the 1930s (W.W.Norton, 1991) 

Herbert L. Matthews, Fidel Castro (Simon & Schuster, 1969)

Paul Robeson Jr., The Undiscovered Paul Robeson: An Artist’s Journey  (John Wiley & Sons, 2001)

Maria Emilia Paz Salinas, Strategy, Security, and Spies: Mexico and the U.S as Allies in World War II (Penn State Press 1997)

José M. Sánchez,., The Spanish Civil War as a Religious Tragedy (Univ of Notre Dame Press, 1987)

Thomas D. Schoonover,  Hitler’s Man in Havana: Heinz Lüning and Nazi Espionage in Latin America (University Press of Kentucky, 2008)

Herbert Rudledge Southworth, Guernica!, Guernica! A Study of Journalism, Diplomacy, Propaganda, and History (University of California Press 1977)

Bryce Wood, The Dismantling of the Good Neighbor Policy (Austin, Univ of Texas Press, 1985) 

PHOTO CREDIT: Hemingway standing in front of Mt. Kilimanjaro circa 1953-54. (Ernest Hemingway Photographs Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.)