My dear Secretary,
I was very glad indeed to receive your two letters of the 17th¹ and 24th May², keeping me generally informed of the whole situation. I quite realize how your time is taken up, but I should be most grateful if you could continue this practice. The newspapers are dead things by the time we receive them, so dead indeed, that it is difficult to do more than scan them quickly for important headlines. They also seem, from this angle of observation at any rate, to over emphasize non essentials in foreign news. Perhaps it is because the lapse of time and subsequent developments make one wiser, and the impression may be quite wrong. The 'Osservatore' which naturally has to be one's gospel here, is so splendidly calm and well written, in spite of its Italian slant, that it unfits one for the sensational and commercialized atmosphere of English language newspapers whether published in Ireland, England or America.

I must say I was horrified to read John Heffernan's³ letter on Spike Marlin.⁴ If Heffernan is telling the truth Marlin must be deliberately representing himself as a follower of the Gray policy, but since I know that David got rid of Marlin simply because Marlin told the truth about the supposed German plots, it really doesn't matter what pose he adopts in his occasional exalted moods as a super-American patriot. He often told me he hated our policy of neutrality, but nevertheless, he was the first person on the American side who broke through David's paper wall, and made most valuable contacts for us with the American S.[ecret] S.[ervice] especially with Colonel Bruce⁵ and Wilson⁶ (ex diplomat. You remember his between-the-war books?) Moreover, Marlin, in his queer way, has a sense of humour, and I am not sure that he wasn't pulling Heffernan's leg when he told him that he disliked the Taoiseach for not having allowed Ireland to be 'wiped out' in the interests of humanity. He knows how un-American that sort of stuff is, as he can't but have read Roosevelt's frequent statements, before he went into the war, to the effect that war would only be waged by the United States in the exclusive interests of the people of America. Moreover, since he admits the truth that the Taoiseach defeated the combined wiles of Roosevelt, Churchill and Willkie,⁷ his petulant remark about his personal feelings towards the Taoiseach, whether true or not, doesn't matter. Personally, I believe that he and Heffernan were just drawing each other out.