Dr. Tsiang had an apartment in that area, and the woman living in the apartment under him had been married to a Chinese man and had left him because he was sexually inadequate. Her apartment caught on fire, and in the aftermath, the place was such a…
Kenneth talks about how his temporary job became permanent. Several other men from the OCI, including a man named Gordon Bowles, who was a graduate of Earlham College, moved over with Kenneth to the BEW. Kenneth picked out bombing targets, locating…
Kenneth went to work researching the questions that President Roosevelt and Col. Donovan wanted answered, and when he had his report ready, he accompanied Donovan to the President's office. Donovan had told Kenneth how he had come to seek Kenneth's…
Kenneth talks about his experience leaving the OSS for the BEW, when the OSS tried to keep him from going. The experience served him well years later when he left the State Department for the White House staff in the 1950's. There was an…
Kenneth's book, The Chinese in Thailand, was bought up by the Japanese, and people and organizations could not find copies for themselves. Years later, at a meeting in Washington, Kenneth met a Japanese Intelligence Officer who had come to meet him.…
Kenneth was staying in a room, at $22 a month. When he moved over to the BEW and his salary jumped to $5600, he wrote to Margaret that he felt his future lay in government. The money was much better than he could earn in the academic world.
At the first meeting of the Far Eastern section of the OCI, Kenneth's new chief bawled him out for contacting people all over the city that he thought might be of help to him. Kenneth never worried about protocol, so he never paid attention to the…
Kenneth would be expected back at Earlham Collge in January for the spring semester, but then Pearl Harbor happened, and all bets were off. During that period, there was quite an interest in Kenneth among various government agencies, which tried to…
Donovan brought a man named James Phinney Baxter down from Harvard to run the OCI, and he brought a number of men down from Harvard and Yale, and "the eastern seaboard boys began to take over." Both Yale and Harvard had Far Eastern departments.…
Peggy was sixteen at the time Kip was born, and she'd come home and help with the baby. She was going to Wilson High School. So was Bill. Carol was ten and attending school at Alice Deal Junior High. One night, Kenneth collapsed when he and Carol…
Kenneth went to a party and played the piano. Life magazine, Kenneth thinks it was, had an article on how to play the piano in four or five lessons. He sat down with that, figured it out, and did it. All he had to know was the melody, and it showed…
For recreation Kenneth would go out to Glen Echo, up the Potomac River outside Washington, where there was an amusement park, and swim in the public swimming pool. It was very crowded.
In conjunction with the OWI broadcasts, there developed a need to send messages to San Francisco regarding the broadcasts, and the OWI people wanted some sort of simple code that could be typed out for this purpose. Kenneth thought up the idea of…
In March, 1942, Kenneth wrote a handbook for soldiers in Thailand. We knew we would eventually be going in, and so there was a lot of talk about how to set up a military government. Somebody had to cook up a manual on this, as there were none.
When Kip was born, Kenneth said, "This boy and I are going to get acquainted." It was impossible to find anyone to come into the home and help. He took annual leave for two weeks, brought Margaret and Kip home from the hospital, and took care of both…
In the spring of 1942, Kenneth delivered the Taft lectures, three lectures, at the University of Cincinnati. In conjunction with that, he worked on reading in Chinese with a view to writing a book on Chinese philosophy.
Kenneth comments on how much the family's life had changed over the past few years. He had expected to spend his life as a Presbyterian minister, but then he couldn't get a church, so he became a professor at Earlham, and expected that he would spend…
The Board of Economic Warfare was formed just for the war, and its purpose was to figure out how to cripple the economy of the enemy in the war. It was involved in bombing factories, bridges, acts of sabotage, whatever would cripple the enemy's…
Kenneth now tells of the Chungking project. This was a possible venture in India and China to tap possible sources of information in Thailand and Indochina, and it was to be based in Chungking. Kenneth was seriously considering going out and setting…
Margaret wrote Kenneth that Candy, the bulldog Kenneth had acquired as a pet in Richmond, had bitten a child. Kenneth wrote back that he felt Candy should be disposed of. Margaret kept that dog, and two years later, when Kip was a baby, on March 27,…
The Dolly Madison saga, which happened in February, 1942. Dolly Madison was Kenneth's secretary, and she was madly in love with a reporter for The Washington Post, and a good one, named George. The man wasn't interested in marrying her, so she…
The Free Thai movement developed simultaneously among Thai students in Britain and the United States. It was under the direction of the Thai Legation in Washington and probably under the principal military attachés in Britain. Kenneth explains how…
Kenneth's work with the BEW began with a study of Southeast Asian countries to select bombing targets that would be significant in hurting the enemy's abilities to control the area. This began with important bridges, machine shops, roundhouses,…