Barry Bingham

Barry Bingham, the son of Robert Bingham, was born in 1906. His father owned the Louisville Courier-Journal and was a good friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He also served as ambassador to England during Roosevelt's first term in office.

Barry Bingham inherited the newspaper on his father's death in 1937. It has been argued by Jennet Conant, the author of The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington (2008) that Ernest Cuneo, who worked for British Security Coordination, was "empowered to feed select British intelligence items about Nazi sympathizers and subversives" to friendly journalists who "were stealth operatives in their campaign against Britain's enemies in America". Cuneo also worked closely with editors and publishers who were supporters of American intervention into the Second World War. This included Bingham, Arthur Hays Sulzberger (New York Times), Helen Rogers Reid (New York Herald Tribune), Henry Luce (Time Magazine and Life Magazine), Dorothy Schiff (New York Post) and Ralph Ingersoll (Picture Magazine).

In 1940 Bingham employed both Ulric Bell and Herbert Agar at the Louisville Courier-Journal and continued to pay both of their salaries while they helped run Fight for Freedom, an organization funded by the BSC. According to Thomas E. Mahl, the author of Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44 (1998): "Barry Bingham was deeply involved with intelligence and attacks on the isolationists. From the spring of 1941 he was ostensibly in the navy, but attached to Fiorello La Guardia's Office of Civilian Defense.... From the over one hundred surviving pieces of correspondence in Barry Bingham's file in the Fight for Freedom Papers it is evident that after Bell went back to Fight for Freedom, Bingham organized these anti-isolationist speakers for Fight for Freedom." One document asks Bell to help organize the office "in regard to the whole subject of offensive publicity to offset the propaganda of the Wheeler's Nye's, Lindbergh's, etc."

Barry Bingham died in 1988.

Primary Sources

(1) Thomas E. Mahl, Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44 (1998)

Barry Bingham was deeply involved with intelligence and attacks on the isolationists. From the spring of 1941 he was ostensibly in the navy, but attached to Fiorello La Guardia's Office of Civilian Defense.... From the over one hundred surviving pieces of correspondence in Barry Bingham's file in the Fight for Freedom Papers it is evident that after Bell went back to Fight for Freedom, Bingham organized these anti-isolationist speakers for Fight for Freedom.