Jennet Conant follows up her very informative and entertaining book The Irregulars with A Covert Affair, focused on Julia and Paul Child and their wartime friends at the OSS. It starts at the beginning of World War II with Julie Child and her friends recruitment into the OSS and continues through Red Scare of the 1950's.
The colonial powers in particular the Dutch and French were singled out for suppressing local independence movements in Indonesia and Vietnam. Jane Foster a mutual friend of Paul and Julia Child was stationed in Indonesia and reported on the Dutch abuses.
The messy situation in China towards the end of WWII also was a source of OSS frustration. The Nationalist Chinese were fighting a war on two fronts with both the Japanese and the Maoists. US pilots risked there lives to make supply drops to China only to have them sold back to the Japanese or diverted to the campaign against the Maoists.
Paul and Julia Child's slow friendship evolving into romance is a study in persistence. Julia works hard to improve her self in an attempt to get Paul to think of her as more than just a friend. While stationed in Paris after the war Julia becomes obsessed with French cooking. She takes classes and begins working with a pair of like minded friends on understanding the nuances of French cooking.
The Child's along with their friend Jane Foster experience the hell of McCarthyism as they find themselves interrogated, spied upon and hounded by FBI and State Department investigators.
I also found the brief discussions about Martha Dodd and her husband interesting as she was a central character in the book In the Garden of the Beasts by Erik Larson.
24 minute discussion about A Covert Affair
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