Thetford
He saw German divisions under the banner of fascism roll across Europe, and then their retreat.
He observed the Soviet Union operating as a world power committed to socialism, and the sometimes frightening reaction in his American homeland.
And he reported from Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Middle East and central Asia as supporters of Zionism established a Jewish state in Israel, and neighboring Arab nations and other Muslims resisted.
Unlike contemporaries who sought to shape or direct events and forces that comprise history, Fowle set out to understand, describe and explain them.
Fowle had a “respect for order and formality,” according to his youngest and only surviving brother Rik, 87, who lives in West Lebanon. “He was not rigid but (thought) there ought to be a reasonable sequence to events, causes and consequences.”
With that thirst for understanding, Fowle advanced through the world of journalism. He began as a foreign correspondent for Time magazine. He was one of a cohort of young American radio reporters who worked for the legendary Edward R. Murrow at the Columbia Broadcasting System. He was a staff writer for the New York Times.
And even after some shadows of frustration slightly dimmed the luster of his career, his desire to know and understand persisted. In 2009, in a letter to family and friends about Turkey’s harsh treatment of Armenians and centuries-long assimilation of Jews, Fowle wrote: “As you can see, my curiosity survives like the Cheshire cat’s grin.”
Missionaries From Thetford
Fowle was born to missionary parents in Turkey in 1915, just after the start of World War I. As soon as he was old enough to travel, his mother took him and his older brother by train across Europe and by ship over the Atlantic and back to the Upper Valley.
“We always thought of home as Thetford, Vermont,” where the family spent summers, Fowle said in a 2005 interview with a retired judge who was compiling an oral history for Williams College. “That is where we registered and Father and Mother voted when they were home on leave.”
Fowle’s father, Luther, led a Congregationalist mission that had been established in 1852 by his grandfather, the Rev. Wilson Farnsworth, who had attended Thetford Academy and graduated from Middlebury College.
Luther Fowle met his future wife, Helen Curtis, when they were both counselors at the Aloha camps, which had been founded by an aunt, Harriet Farnsworth Gulick. Farnsworth Fowle himself was at Lanakila Camp as a camper in 1927 and 1928, and a junior counselor in 1931 and 1932.
Fowle’s youngest brother described his older sibling as sociable yet studious. “Farny was good at making friends,” Rik Fowle said. His older brother was also a “bookworm,” he added. “When other kids were out doing other things, he would be reading.”
After World War I, the family was reunited in Turkey, where Farnsworth Fowle attended school until he returned to the United States to attend Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. After graduating in 1933, he got a scholarship to attend Williams, where his father had graduated in 1908.
Although Williams is an elite school, the Fowles did not view themselves as members of that elite. “We were never wealthy,” said Rik Fowle, who graduated in 1950.
Farnsworth Fowle, who viewed himself as part of an “over-privileged underclass of teachers and preachers,” earned money at Williams by selling subscriptions to the New York Times and making morning deliveries to the dormitories and fraternities.
Fowle did not follow classmates seeking fortune on Wall Street. “I knew I wanted to be a reporter and a foreign correspondent,” he said in the 2005 interview.
So Fowle wrote for the campus newspaper where, he said in the 2005 interview, “my interest was doing whatever would get me chosen as editor.” He claimed that job in his senior year, succeeding, after a one-year interval, an editor named Dick Helms, whom Fowle saw as “a man of remarkable intellectual gifts and splendid social bearing (with) a princely quality about him.”
Helms had his own complex career arc, including a seven-year tenure as director of the Central Intelligence Agency that ended in 1973 and a 1977 no contest plea to two misdemeanor counts of failing to testify fully to Congress about the agency’s role in overthrowing Chilean President Salvador Allende.
Fowle’s major was history but he was modest about his academic achievements. “I don’t have the real scholarly drive to dig deep into matters,” he said in the 2005 interview. “I’m a rather more superficial person.”
But not so superficial as to prevent him from graduating magna cum laude, becoming Phi Beta Kappa and winning a Rhodes scholarship, which he used to study philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford University from 1937 until 1939.
Reporting Days
Meanwhile, Fowle began pursuing job prospects. In March 1937, Fowle sent letters to Time, Newsweek and the New York Times expressing his interest in employment two years hence, after he finished his studies at Oxford.
The letter back from a Times administrator wasn’t very encouraging: “We are overstaffed rather than understaffed, having carried our entire staff throughout the depression.”
After he finished at Oxford, Fowle traveled through the Soviet Union and then returned to Turkey where, during the early months of World War II, he became a freelance correspondent for Time.
The young reporter didn’t always please his editors. In November, a Time editor wired Fowle: “Your cables too broad too conjectural contain too many obvious generalities lacking original colorful facts not reported” elsewhere.
Later that month, Time pulled the plug with another cable: “Regret informing you must terminate current arrangement as of January one — stop — We obtaining practically no news from you at large expense including much traveling netting us nothing.” The cable said he was still welcome to make freelance submissions.
But Fowle had other suitors. In April 1940, Murrow, whose reports on a distant war were riveting America, sent Fowle a note offering him $25 for each radio report that he filed from Istanbul or Ankara.
In his 2004 book, Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism, former National Public Radio anchor Bob Edwards wrote that Murrow “assembled a team of smart and brave reporters whose accounts of the war would rival those of any newspaper staff and establish respectability for radio news.”
In a 2005 letter, Fowle described the mercenary motives at play. Network head Bill Paley “created CBS single-handed with Murrow-style radio and TV news coverage as its crown jewel,” Fowle wrote. “Then when he felt that political controversy was risking the network’s commercial success, he de-emphasized news in favor of sports and entertainment.”
In Turkey, Fowle teamed up with Winston Burdett, another young and ambitious correspondent who impressed his new co-worker. “A lot of people have good second-class minds, like me,” Fowle told the authors of a 1996 book, The Murrow Boys: Pioneers on the Front Lines of Broadcast Journalism. “And then you run into people like Winston who have first-class minds, and you know the difference.”
Fowle traveled to Sofia, Bulgaria, where he saw “the Germans move into the country on their way to Greece and” Yugoslavia.
Unable to get a visa to carry out his next assignment in Berlin, he worked from Turkey until he was sent to El Alamein, Egypt, to report on the retreat of the German tank divisions led by Gen. Rommel. In 1943, he reported on the Allies’ Italian campaign as it progressed from Salerno to Cassino to Anzio and then Rome. There, he reported alongside Burdett and Eric Sevareid.
The paths of reporters and spies often crossed. While in Bulgaria, Fowle met “Wild Bill” Donovan, the founder of the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency. At one point, a Navy officer offered Fowle an intelligence job, but he didn’t take it, Fowle said in the 2005 interview.
Burdett — who Fowle described in the 2005 interview as “my very close friend … who made history in other respects later on” — took a different course. Burdett told a Senate committee in 1955 that he was a member of the Communist Party from 1937 to 1942 and “engaged in … espionage,” according to CQ Quarterly Almanac, a Congressional reference book.
Fowle was the CBS correspondent in Moscow in 1945 and 1946. He then returned to the U.S. for an eight-week speaking tour. One interviewer introduced Fowle as a “distinguished CBS foreign correspondent whose voice we heard all during the war from various spots where the hottest fighting or worst political mess was in progress.”
CBS next sent Fowle to Jerusalem in 1947, where he reported on the events leading up to the creation of the state of Israel, and on the burgeoning conflict between Zionists and Arabs.
The News Business
In a 1954 essay, Fowle noted that CBS’ famous news operation always had a wobbly economic foundation.
“None of us would maintain that the American people today are getting the best of all coverage from the free nations of Europe,” he wrote. “The chief handicap, as I see it, is economic: American newspapers, wire services and broadcasting networks have to make ends meet, and it costs more than most of them are willing to spend to maintain a well-rounded corps of American correspondents across the Atlantic.”
Fowle noted that wartime overseas coverage had been subsidized by American taxpayers through the “substantially free communications, transportation and board and lodging” provided to accredited correspondents.
Without those subsidies, American news organizations relied for foreign coverage on “a plentiful supply of able young Americans, many of them with some news experience and perhaps a foreign language or two, so eager to get started as foreign correspondents that they will agree to work for practically nothing.”
Fowle concluded with this prescient warning: “Perhaps the news consumer in this country is satisfied with the service he is getting. If he wants something better, he can have it — at a price.”
Timesman
By the time of that essay, Fowle had left CBS, been with the New York Times for five years and married Phyllis Propp, a lawyer who was the first woman officer in the Army’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps.
In September 1957, the Times sent Fowle to Little Rock where federal troops were enforcing school desegregation. Five decades later, he expressed regrets about his reporting as the first nine black pupils entered Little Rock Central High School. “I feel ashamed that I never knew that the black man I saw being kicked in the head across 16th Street was a fellow reporter. In Little Rock, our working paths hadn’t crossed,” he wrote. “That was mostly my fault.”
Still, Fowle’s story dated Sept. 23 highlighted the violence in Little Rock. It described blows struck to three black newsmen and this overheard comment: “We ought to wipe up the streets with these Yankee reporters.”
Fowle’s youngest brother, Rik, recalled that “up through Little Rock (Farnsworth Fowle) did a lot of direct reporting” at the Times but he later found that he “wasn’t getting a chance to use his background.”
Not that he didn’t try. For example, while at the Times, Fowle drafted pieces for the newspaper’s opinion pages.
One piece commented on a visit by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy and her daughter to Italy’s Amalfi coast. Fowle remembered the “American Rangers and British Marine Commandos (who) had swarmed ashore in fine piratical style” nearby in 1943. The Kennedy visit, he wrote in an unbylined piece that ran in August 1962, made it “pleasant to recall that Kilroy, too, was there.”
Fowle was also active in the Newspaper Guild, where for a time he chaired the unit representing employees of the Times.
Chris Wren, a retired Times reporter and editor who lives in Thetford, never met Fowle but recalled that his “was one of the great bylines that we all knew.” His name and his work expressed, Wren observed, “the spirit of the Times.”
But in correspondence in the final decade of his life, Fowle looked back at the period that preceded his 1978 retirement from the Times as “my later years of internal exile.” In 1967, he wrote the publication’s manager of the Rockefeller Foundation that he “would still be interested in working full-time for the (nonprofit) if wanted.” Years later, Fowle wrote his family and friends about his assignments from the foundation and his “appreciation for those jobs during (my) professionally lean years.”
Still Curious
Fowle’s interest in contemporary affairs didn’t end with his tenure at the Times. In his letters, he frequently lamented the newspaper’s lack of interest and reporting attention for Turkey.
Fowle melded his interests in international and domestic issues. In an undated letter apparently written sometime in 2007, he recalled his late wife who, in addition to serving as a military lawyer, had been involved in planning a march on Washington in the early days of World War II to demand an end to discriminatory hiring by federal agencies and contractors. “I’m glad she wasn’t around when (military lawyers) were by-passed at Abu Ghraib,” he wrote of his wife, who died in 2000. “I think she might have joined another March on Washington.”
As the 2008 election approached, Fowle wrote to his family and friends that his preferred choice had “turned out to be Hillary. I like Obama all right, but I’ve always been suspicious of charisma in candidates.”
Farnsworth Fowle moved to the Upper Valley 11 years after his wife’s death. During a winter visit here, Rik Fowle recalled his older brother, who had no children, “sat down on the couch and put his head in his hands, and said, ‘I just can’t manage by myself anymore.’ ”
The transition that followed was challenging. Bobbi Trombley, the activities director at Valley Terrace, recalled that Fowle moved there reluctantly and “planning to be a hermit.”
But he soon began socializing, participating in music and exercise gatherings and children’s visits, Trombley said.
Fowle showed himself to be “a walking encyclopedia” with a still unquenched thirst for knowledge. “It was so important to him to keep learning up until his last day,” Trombley said.
“There wasn’t a bit of arrogance about him,” said Joan Cohen, a friend and neighbor at Valley Terrace. When she would thank him for his conversation, he would respond: “Please don’t thank me, Joan. I like to speak. I like to talk about my experiences.”
And they started here, he wrote later in life: “I wasn’t born in Thetford, but it’s the earliest hometown I can remember.”
It was also his intended final destination, as was shown in a letter he wrote after a visit to the grave of his beloved wife. During the visit, he was moved by the discovery that “before Memorial Day lilacs were duly laid at the stone in the Thetford Center cemetery where Phyllis has preceded me.”
Rick Jurgens can be reached at rjurgens@vnews.com or 603-727-3229.