The life of Frank Giles, the British newspaper editor who died last week in London at the age of 100, was a striking combination of good and bad fortune.
The son of an Army officer who died when Giles was 10, his mother was obliged to take in lodgers to pay her son’s school tuition. He won a scholarship to Oxford and was finishing his studies when World War II broke out. Giles, who suffered from poor health, seemed likely to be sidelined, until a family friend, a general who had been appointed governor of Bermuda, invited him to become his military assistant. Giles’s good looks, smooth manner, and effortless competence served him well and brought him into contact with celebrities and VIPs passing forth between Britain and America.
He remembered afterward that Joseph Kennedy, the appeasement-minded U.S. ambassador in London, confided to Giles that “carnage” in Britain and France would compel “the warring nations [to] find a joint meeting ground and become united by a common demand for peace.” Seeing the Duke of Windsor showering after a game of golf, Giles noted that he seemed to have no hair on his body, “even in places where one would most expect it to be.” Toward the end of the war, he was transferred to the Foreign Office, where he served as assistant to two successive chiefs: Anthony Eden, the Tory grandee, and Ernest Bevin, the Labour foreign secretary. Giles resembled Eden in manner and appearance, but Bevin’s contempt for left-wing intellectuals appealed to him almost as much as his humor. Standing side by side at two urinals, Bevin turned to his polished assistant and remarked, “This is it, Giles, the socialist dream: the means of production in the hands of the people.”
Giles’s official career, however, came to a halt in 1946, when he failed the Foreign Service entrance exam and found work as an editor on the foreign desk of the Times. He had never contemplated a career as a journalist but was tailored for success on postwar Fleet Street: Slightly to the left in politics, Giles was temperamentally conservative, unfailingly inquisitive, a skilled reporter in Paris and Rome, and, not least, happily married to the daughter of an earl and owner of a villa on Corfu.
In 1961, at the prompting of his friend and James Bond creator Ian Fleming, Giles joined the Sunday Times as foreign editor. He had hoped to become editor of the paper in 1967, but the post went to Harold Evans. In 1980, when Rupert Murdoch became proprietor of the Times newspapers, he moved Evans over to the Times as editor and appointed Giles to succeed Evans. In some respects, it was a natural choice: Giles was an enterprising editor and the Sunday Times was eminently suited to his talents. It would be difficult, however, to think of two more dissimilar figures, and in 1983, conflict between the mild-mannered Giles and the buccaneering Murdoch coincided with one of the great disasters of modern journalism: the Hitler Diaries hoax.
In fairness to both, the offer of West Germany’s Stern newspaper to share its acquisition of 60 volumes of Hitler’s journal, purportedly discovered in an East German hayloft, was accompanied by a measure of dissembling and deception. But the lure of the scoop was irresistible to Murdoch, and Giles’s initial reservations were relieved when the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper inspected selections in a Swiss bank vault and judged them genuine. The subsequent fate of the “diaries” is well known: Trevor-Roper changed his mind and informed the editor of the Times but not Giles, the editor of the Sunday Times, where the diaries were initially published, and then swiftly retracted, with apologies.
Giles was subsequently dismissed by Murdoch, who, in 2012, declared the episode “a major mistake and one I shall have to live with for the rest of my life.” It was Giles, however, whose New York Times obituary was headlined “Editor Snared in ‘Hitler Diaries’ Hoax,” and whose life apart from that debacle was reduced to a handful of perfunctory paragraphs.
Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
