Richard Helms - Life Up To World War II

Life Up To World War II

Helms was born in St. Davids, Pennsylvania, in 1913, to Marion (McGarrah) and Herman Helms, an executive for Alcoa. He grew up in South Orange, New Jersey and began high school there at Carteret Academy. Foreign language instruction was considered very important, and his family, father, mother, elder sister, and two younger brothers, all moved to Lausanne on Lac Léman. His next year of high school was spent nearby at the prestigious Swiss Institut Le Rosey where he advanced toward fluency in French. After a brief return to America, the family settled in Freiburg im Breisgau in southern Germany, where at the Realgymnasium he became conversant in German.

During his years at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, he served as editor of The Williams Record which encouraged his interest in journalism. Following graduation, in 1935 he got a job at the United Press (UP) office in London, working in the News of the World building. The economic depression in London, however, caused Helms to look for work at the UP office in Berlin. There he translated and rewrote stories from the German language press. He also met well-known journalists, e.g., William L. Shirer and H. R. Knickerbocker, as well as Bennett Cerf, a publisher at Random House. Substituting for an ill UP colleague, Helms attended the annual NSDAP Parteitag in September 1936. There Helms heard Adolf Hitler speak to a massed party formation, and later with a small group of news reporters met and briefly questioned him in the Nuremberg Castle. Earlier he had covered the Berlin Olympic Games, conversing afterward to gold medalist Jesse Owens. In mid-1937 Helms left the Berlin UP office and returned home to America.

Helms had determined on a career in print media, and wanted eventually to become a publisher and run a metropolitan daily newspaper. Accordingly he sought hands-on business experience in this line. He had heard it that "in the flinty eyes of owners, reporters were easy to find and a dime a dozen". He got a job on the retail advertising staff of the Indianapolis Times where he soon rose to be its national advertising manager.

In 1939, Helms had married a "divorcée with two children" so that his home became a "whole family". With his wife Julia he entered a new life in local society. Three years later his son Dennis was born. Yet by then America had already entered World War II.