The Press: Pertinax Goes Home

Last week France’s No. 1 journalist-in-exile packed his belongings in Washington, including his cocker spaniel Busy Bee, gift of his good friend Walter Lippmann, and got ready to sail home. He hoped to celebrate his 63rd birthday on the Atlantic. It had been five years and four months since “Pertinax” sailed out of Bordeaux on a British destroyer, away from a France which had not heeded his Cassandra-like warnings.

During his years in the U.S., Pertinax (real name: André Géraud) had lost none of his reputation for perspicacity. In New York and in Washington, whither he moved in 1943, he was often a better source on European politics than reporters in Europe. He was the first to predict the Teheran conference between Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill. In November 1943 he suggested a United Nations Council, with headquarters in the U.S. He tactfully called it “the Big Four,” leaving out his still-prostrate France. Long before most others did, he foresaw Marshal Tito’s triumph over Mihailovich.

At his apartment in Washington’s Georgetown, Pertinax worked from 8 a.m. until noon in a bathrobe, read “the three newspapers”—the New York Times and Herald Tribune, the Washington Post—spent his afternoons tapping his pipelines. The best of these were longtime friends in the British Embassy. He gathered his news in personal interviews, not at cocktail parties. Pertinax stuck to his lifelong rule against purely speculative stories, which he feels U.S. columnists overdo. His motto: get to the root of the facts and the conclusion should become self-evident.

In France Pertinax will write thrice weekly for Pierre Lazareff’s France-Soir—never again, he says, will he write daily, as he did for 21 of his 32 years on the Echo de Paris. But for a sexagenarian, grey, thick-set Pertinax will be busy: he will also edit the weekly L’Europe Nouvelle, as he did after he split with Echo in 1938 over its appeasement policies. He intends to update his best-selling U.S. book, Gravediggers of France (Pétain, Gamelin, Reynaud, Daladier). Then at last it can be published, perhaps, in the country where the graves were dug.