Alexander Comstock Kirk
Encyclopedia
Alexander Comstock Kirk (November 26, 1888 – March 23, 1979) was a United States diplomat.
Alexander Comstock Kirk was born in Chicago
, Illinois
, on November 26, 1888, the son of James Alexander Kirk (1840–1907) and Clara Comstock (1851–1936). His family lived in Hartland, Wisconsin
. Their wealth derived from America's largest soap manufacturing concern, which was founded by Kirk's grandfather in Utica, New York
, in 1839, relocated to Chicago in 1860, and capitalized as James S. Kirk & Co. in 1900. James Alexander Kirk was a director of the company. Its 2 national brands were "American Family" for laundry and "Juvenile" for the bath.
Kirk was "fat" and "unhappy" in childhood and enjoyed drawing. At age 9, he attended the Art Institute of Chicago
until his family decided he was too young to be drawing nude models. He was then sent to work incognito in a soap factory until his identity was discovered. He was then tutored at home for half the year by Hughell Fosbroke, future head of the General Theological Seminary
of New York, spending the other half traveling in Europe with his mother and sister.
Kirk attended the University of Chicago
for one year and then Yale University
, where he excelled in physics and graduated in 1909. He appeared with the Yale University Dramatic Association in 1908-09. Kirk's father died of a heart attack in 1907.
He next spent 2 years at the School of Political Sciences
in Paris. In order to fulfill his mother's promise to his late father, he earned his law degree from Harvard Law School
in 1914. He was admitted to the Illinois bar. He joined the board of the family business at a salary of $10,000 a year.
Kirk had two sisters, Gertrude 24 years his senior and Margaret his near contemporary. His sister Margaret married Albert Billings Ruddock in New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine in March 1912. The couple left for Berlin following the ceremony. Ruddock was Third Secretary of the American Embassy in Berlin in 1913, when Mrs. Kirk visited the couple there. In 1954 Ruddock became Chairman of the Board of Trustees of California Institute of Technology
, where an undergraduate residence hall was named for him in 1960.
on March 6, 1915.
In 1916, he left his post as Secretary of the Embassy in Berlin for a position in Constantinople.
Kirk served as private secretary to the Secretary of State during World War I
and accompanied him in that position to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference
. He then lived in "a commodious old house in Georgetown with his mother to act as hostess on the occasion of his entertainments," until posted to Peking
as Secretary of the Embassy.
He managed the State Department budget for a time in the 1920s, and later said he thought it "an obligation" to spend the entire amount in order to support the argument for additional appropriations.
Kirk was Counselor of the U.S. Embassy in Rome in 1932. His mother was presented to Queen Elena of Italy
on March 9, 1932. She lived in Rome during his service there, and Kirk entertained important guests at her home, the Villa Spada on the Janiculum
. Even in 1930, long before rising to ambassadorial rank, he entertained lavishly. He hosted an opera party for Mrs. William Randolph Hearst
on her 1930 tour of Europe.
Kirk was assigned to Moscow as Embassy Counselor and consul general effective March 18, 1938, where he was the senior official in the 9-month interim between the service of Ambassadors Davies
and Steinhardt
.
He served as Embassy Counselor in Berlin beginning in May 1939, and became the senior officer when the American ambassador, who Hugh R. Wilson
, resigned to protest Germany's invasion of Poland that September. Though his status was too low to allow access to important officials in the German government, he communicated with them by staging conversations close to a device the Germans used to eavesdrop on his conversations. Time called him "adroit" in his "uncomfortable post." He developed contacts with Germans who opposed the Nazi regime and became convinced, in spite of Germany's early victories, that the war would end badly for Germany. Discussing with noted dissident Helmuth James von Moltke
the need for Germany to suffer complete defeat with no one to blame but its Nazi leaders, he said: "Do you want to know my solution? It's a flood without an ark." During the war, in 1943, Moltke twice tried without success to contact Kirk, whom he trusted as an intermediary between the German opposition and the Allies.
Kirk served briefly as Embassy Counselor in Rome before becoming Minister to Egypt in February 1941, when Time
magazine described him as "smooth, spare." He served there for 3 years. He advised the State Department in 1941 that a Jewish state "is incapable of realization in the future unless imposed by force on an unwilling native population." Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles
did not share his assessment and did not forward Kirk's views to the White House. As Kirk look to the end of the war, he anticipated a post-colonial world in which nations operated freely in a free enterprise environment, unlike Secretary of State Cordell Hull
who expected the persistence of traditional spheres of influence, notably that of Great Britain in Egypt. While posted to Cairo, Kirk kept one house in the city for lunch, another near the pyramids for dinner and sleeping, and a houseboat on the Nile. He hosted FDR
, Churchill
, and Chiang Kai-shek
at the second house for the November 1943 Cairo Conference
. He has been described as "an archeological dilettante" who liked to lecture his guests as they gazed at the pyramids. Claire Booth Luce claimed to have flummoxed him by pre-empting his performance by asking: "Mr. Ambassador, what are those strange-looking objects?"
Along with several military men Kirk devised the successful plan to attack Rommel's communications instead of his ground forces. He later received the United States of America Typhus Commission Medal for his support of the Commission's work during his time in Egypt.
While resident in Cairo, Kirk was also accredited to the government-in-exile of Greece until November 13, 1941, and to Saudi Arabia until July 18, 1943.
Kirk was appointed U.S. representative on the Allied Advisory Council for Italy, with the rank of ambassador, on April 4, 1944. He was appointed Ambassador to Italy on November 30, 1944, and became the first ambassador of any country to present his credentials to the new Italian regime in January 1945. Upon his appointment, Time gave him the title "suave Career Man." He resigned in 1946. When the American Office of War Information produced an Italian-language publication, Kirk insisted it be labeled propaganda to maintain a clear distinction between what Italians were accomplishing for themselves or not.
In August 1945, he received petitions from Russian prisoners of war, taken by the Germans and liberated by Allied forces. They wrote to him in his role as Political Advisor to Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force
(SHAEF) and claimed the status of "political refugees" and asked "in the name of humanity" not to be repatriated to the Soviet Union. Kirk wrote to Secretary of State Byrnes
seeking guidance, a diplomatic way of expressing his reservations about the repatriation policy. He was instructed to make certain none of the prisoners was actually from Poland
or the Baltic States
and to proceed with the repatriations.
Kirk was long famous for entertaining and continued even when forced to operate in Rome "under a wartime minimum." Six or 8 guests joined him for lunch or dinner, often many more. One Friday lunch he hosted about 20 enlisted men. Though some involved in recruiting the guests worried that a Negro corporal might not be well received, Kirk gave him the place of honor on his right.
Life
described him near the end of his career: "To call Kirk an ornament of the State Department is almost a libelous understatement....Kirk's true value resides in the fact that he is an American who, far from being an innocent abroad, knows Europe infinitely better than most Europeans. This makes him almost unique in the current roster of U.S. foreign representatives in the diplomatic, charitable, or didactic spheres. Kirk's career should be studied in detail, like The Education of Henry Adams." Forbes called him "foppish, intelligent, and very rich."
Kirk predicted in 1945 that future diplomats should be technical experts "chosen for the ability not only to diagnose economic, industrial and political trends, but also to adjust their dislocations before they can start wars." He lamented the willingness of governments to spend on wars far more than on the diplomacy that might prevent them.
A few years after Kirk's retirement, as Senator Joseph McCarthy
launched a campaign against suspected homosexuals in government
, one investigator's 1948 report charged that State Department employees Carmel Offie
and Charles W. Thayer
"were very close personal friends of former Ambassador Alexander Kirk who is not now in the service but who had a very bad reputation of being a homosexual and certainly protected a lot of homosexual people."
, mining heiress and owner of the Hope Diamond
.
While posted to Berlin, he lived in an "enormous mansion" in the "swank" Grunewald
neighborhood. One German who visited described it as "one vast hall after another, and he quiet alone in the midst of it. Very funny; a little like the theatre." His staff of servants spoke only Italian. He held "a large buffet luncheon every Sunday noon, as a means of revenging himself for such hospitality as his position required him to accept."
While Ambassador in Rome, Kirk lived in the Barberini palace
, which he redecorated. He filled a large enclosure the size of a tennis court with "Renaissance tables and settees covered in ivory silk," according to Life
magazine, to create what he termed "a sort of cozy sitting room." When Life profiled him in 1945, it reported that he had always established fine residences wherever he was posted: "The Ambassador is fond of houses, and especially big ones. Equipped with ample private funds and the courage of his complexes, Kirk sees no reason why he should not capitalize the chance his profession gives him to indulge this fondness, all the more since such indulgence usually works out to the benefit of the State Department in one way or another." His nickname around this time was "Buffy."
In 1945 he attributed "his excellent health to the fact that he has never worn himself down by any form of exercise more violent than scratching, which he only does when suffering from insomnia at 6 a.m."
He planned to retire to Arizona and bought a piece of land in the White Mountains
at the end of World War II. He joked that he would live there not in a house but in a cave. Another diplomat reported that he retired to the mountains of Colorado and "amused himself operating a ranch and raising cattle" for a few years being relocating to Texas.
His sister Gertrude Kirk Metzeroff died in St. Petersburg, Florida in 1948 at the age of 84. According to her obituary, her brother Alexander was then living in Washington, D.C., and Santa Barbara, California, while her sister Margaret was living in Santa Barbara.
Kirk died in Tucson, Arizona
, on March 23, 1979. He is buried with his mother in Rome's Protestant Cemetery
(Cimitero Acattolico).
In his 1967 memoirs, George F. Kennan
sketched an affectionate portrait of Kirk, as he knew him in Berlin before America entered World War II: "a confirmed bachelor, profoundly saddened by the recent death of an adored mother who, while she was alive, had preempted much of both his companionship and his emotional life, Kirk drowned the inner emptiness in the performance of his arduous official duties," sleeping in an office alcove while working 16 to 18 hours daily. He continued:
Kirk claimed he escaped from diplomatic functions by whatever ruse the situation required. At one embassy in Rome he found it necessary to leave by a door he could only reach by going under a grand piano. "In a case of this sort, Kirk recommends slow motion, which, he says, often prevents witnesses from even noticing a maneuver which, if executed fast, might horrify them."
He insisted his favorite color was gray. He never had fresh flowers, rather he collected artificial ones in his favorite color. His wardrobe and household were maintained by a servant named Mario, who joined the Kirk household in Mexico early in Kirk's career and continued through his stint as Ambassador in Rome.
Early years
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
, Illinois
Illinois
Illinois is the fifth-most populous state of the United States of America, and is often noted for being a microcosm of the entire country. With Chicago in the northeast, small industrial cities and great agricultural productivity in central and northern Illinois, and natural resources like coal,...
, on November 26, 1888, the son of James Alexander Kirk (1840–1907) and Clara Comstock (1851–1936). His family lived in Hartland, Wisconsin
Hartland, Wisconsin
Hartland is a village in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, along the Bark River, and is a suburb of Milwaukee. The population was estimated at 8,689 in 2006.-Geography:Hartland is located at...
. Their wealth derived from America's largest soap manufacturing concern, which was founded by Kirk's grandfather in Utica, New York
Utica, New York
Utica is a city in and the county seat of Oneida County, New York, United States. The population was 62,235 at the 2010 census, an increase of 2.6% from the 2000 census....
, in 1839, relocated to Chicago in 1860, and capitalized as James S. Kirk & Co. in 1900. James Alexander Kirk was a director of the company. Its 2 national brands were "American Family" for laundry and "Juvenile" for the bath.
Kirk was "fat" and "unhappy" in childhood and enjoyed drawing. At age 9, he attended the Art Institute of Chicago
Art Institute of Chicago
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago is one of America's largest accredited independent schools of art and design, located in the Loop in Chicago, Illinois. It is associated with the museum of the same name, and "The Art Institute of Chicago" or "Chicago Art Institute" often refers to either...
until his family decided he was too young to be drawing nude models. He was then sent to work incognito in a soap factory until his identity was discovered. He was then tutored at home for half the year by Hughell Fosbroke, future head of the General Theological Seminary
General Theological Seminary
The General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church is a seminary of the Episcopal Church in the United States and is located in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan in New York....
of New York, spending the other half traveling in Europe with his mother and sister.
Kirk attended the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
for one year and then Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
, where he excelled in physics and graduated in 1909. He appeared with the Yale University Dramatic Association in 1908-09. Kirk's father died of a heart attack in 1907.
He next spent 2 years at the School of Political Sciences
École Libre des Sciences Politiques
École Libre des Sciences Politiques , often referred to as the École des Sciences Politiques or simply Sciences Po was created in Paris in February 1872 by a group of European intellectuals, politicians and businessmen, which included Hippolyte Taine, Ernest Renan, Albert Sorel, Pierre Paul...
in Paris. In order to fulfill his mother's promise to his late father, he earned his law degree from Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. The school is routinely ranked by the U.S...
in 1914. He was admitted to the Illinois bar. He joined the board of the family business at a salary of $10,000 a year.
Kirk had two sisters, Gertrude 24 years his senior and Margaret his near contemporary. His sister Margaret married Albert Billings Ruddock in New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine in March 1912. The couple left for Berlin following the ceremony. Ruddock was Third Secretary of the American Embassy in Berlin in 1913, when Mrs. Kirk visited the couple there. In 1954 Ruddock became Chairman of the Board of Trustees of California Institute of Technology
California Institute of Technology
The California Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Pasadena, California, United States. Caltech has six academic divisions with strong emphases on science and engineering...
, where an undergraduate residence hall was named for him in 1960.
Diplomatic career
Kirk joined the American Diplomatic ServiceUnited States Foreign Service
The United States Foreign Service is a component of the United States federal government under the aegis of the United States Department of State. It consists of approximately 11,500 professionals carrying out the foreign policy of the United States and aiding U.S...
on March 6, 1915.
In 1916, he left his post as Secretary of the Embassy in Berlin for a position in Constantinople.
Kirk served as private secretary to the Secretary of State during World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
and accompanied him in that position to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference
Paris Peace Conference, 1919
The Paris Peace Conference was the meeting of the Allied victors following the end of World War I to set the peace terms for the defeated Central Powers following the armistices of 1918. It took place in Paris in 1919 and involved diplomats from more than 32 countries and nationalities...
. He then lived in "a commodious old house in Georgetown with his mother to act as hostess on the occasion of his entertainments," until posted to Peking
Beijing
Beijing , also known as Peking , is the capital of the People's Republic of China and one of the most populous cities in the world, with a population of 19,612,368 as of 2010. The city is the country's political, cultural, and educational center, and home to the headquarters for most of China's...
as Secretary of the Embassy.
He managed the State Department budget for a time in the 1920s, and later said he thought it "an obligation" to spend the entire amount in order to support the argument for additional appropriations.
Kirk was Counselor of the U.S. Embassy in Rome in 1932. His mother was presented to Queen Elena of Italy
Elena of Montenegro
Elena of Montenegro was the daughter of King Nikola I Petrović-Njegoš of Montenegro and his wife, Milena Vukotić...
on March 9, 1932. She lived in Rome during his service there, and Kirk entertained important guests at her home, the Villa Spada on the Janiculum
Janiculum
The Janiculum is a hill in western Rome, Italy. Although the second-tallest hill in the contemporary city of Rome, the Janiculum does not figure among the proverbial Seven Hills of Rome, being west of the Tiber and outside the boundaries of the ancient city.-Sights:The Janiculum is one of the...
. Even in 1930, long before rising to ambassadorial rank, he entertained lavishly. He hosted an opera party for Mrs. William Randolph Hearst
Millicent Hearst
Millicent Hearst, née Millicent Veronica Willson , was the wife of media tycoon William Randolph Hearst. Willson was a vaudeville performer in New York City whom Hearst admired, and they married in 1903...
on her 1930 tour of Europe.
Kirk was assigned to Moscow as Embassy Counselor and consul general effective March 18, 1938, where he was the senior official in the 9-month interim between the service of Ambassadors Davies
Joseph E. Davies
Joseph Edward Davies was appointed by President Wilson to be Commissioner of Corporations in 1912, and First Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission in 1915. He was the second Ambassador to represent the United States in the Soviet Union and U.S. Ambassador to Belgium and Luxembourg...
and Steinhardt
Laurence Steinhardt
Laurence Adolph Steinhardt was a United States diplomat. He served as the U.S. Minister to Sweden and U.S. Ambassador to Peru, the USSR, Turkey, Czechoslovakia, and Canada....
.
He served as Embassy Counselor in Berlin beginning in May 1939, and became the senior officer when the American ambassador, who Hugh R. Wilson
Hugh R. Wilson
Hugh Robert Wilson was a member of the United States Foreign Service, who headed the U.S. mission to Switzerland for ten years beginning in 1927. He became Assistant Secretary of State in 1937 and served for several months in 1938 as U.S...
, resigned to protest Germany's invasion of Poland that September. Though his status was too low to allow access to important officials in the German government, he communicated with them by staging conversations close to a device the Germans used to eavesdrop on his conversations. Time called him "adroit" in his "uncomfortable post." He developed contacts with Germans who opposed the Nazi regime and became convinced, in spite of Germany's early victories, that the war would end badly for Germany. Discussing with noted dissident Helmuth James von Moltke
Helmuth James Graf von Moltke
Helmuth James Graf von Moltke was a German jurist who, as a draftee in the German Abwehr, acted to subvert German human-rights abuses of people in territories occupied by Germany during World War II and subsequently became a founding member of the Kreisau Circle resistance group, whose members...
the need for Germany to suffer complete defeat with no one to blame but its Nazi leaders, he said: "Do you want to know my solution? It's a flood without an ark." During the war, in 1943, Moltke twice tried without success to contact Kirk, whom he trusted as an intermediary between the German opposition and the Allies.
Kirk served briefly as Embassy Counselor in Rome before becoming Minister to Egypt in February 1941, when Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
magazine described him as "smooth, spare." He served there for 3 years. He advised the State Department in 1941 that a Jewish state "is incapable of realization in the future unless imposed by force on an unwilling native population." Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles
Sumner Welles
Benjamin Sumner Welles was an American government official and diplomat in the Foreign Service. He was a major foreign policy adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and served as Under Secretary of State from 1937 to 1943, during FDR's presidency.-Early life:Benjamin Sumner Welles was born in...
did not share his assessment and did not forward Kirk's views to the White House. As Kirk look to the end of the war, he anticipated a post-colonial world in which nations operated freely in a free enterprise environment, unlike Secretary of State Cordell Hull
Cordell Hull
Cordell Hull was an American politician from the U.S. state of Tennessee. He is best known as the longest-serving Secretary of State, holding the position for 11 years in the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during much of World War II...
who expected the persistence of traditional spheres of influence, notably that of Great Britain in Egypt. While posted to Cairo, Kirk kept one house in the city for lunch, another near the pyramids for dinner and sleeping, and a houseboat on the Nile. He hosted FDR
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin Delano Roosevelt , also known by his initials, FDR, was the 32nd President of the United States and a central figure in world events during the mid-20th century, leading the United States during a time of worldwide economic crisis and world war...
, Churchill
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, was a predominantly Conservative British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century and served as Prime Minister twice...
, and Chiang Kai-shek
Chiang Kai-shek
Chiang Kai-shek was a political and military leader of 20th century China. He is known as Jiǎng Jièshí or Jiǎng Zhōngzhèng in Mandarin....
at the second house for the November 1943 Cairo Conference
Cairo Conference
The Cairo Conference of November 22–26, 1943, held in Cairo, Egypt, addressed the Allied position against Japan during World War II and made decisions about postwar Asia...
. He has been described as "an archeological dilettante" who liked to lecture his guests as they gazed at the pyramids. Claire Booth Luce claimed to have flummoxed him by pre-empting his performance by asking: "Mr. Ambassador, what are those strange-looking objects?"
Along with several military men Kirk devised the successful plan to attack Rommel's communications instead of his ground forces. He later received the United States of America Typhus Commission Medal for his support of the Commission's work during his time in Egypt.
While resident in Cairo, Kirk was also accredited to the government-in-exile of Greece until November 13, 1941, and to Saudi Arabia until July 18, 1943.
Kirk was appointed U.S. representative on the Allied Advisory Council for Italy, with the rank of ambassador, on April 4, 1944. He was appointed Ambassador to Italy on November 30, 1944, and became the first ambassador of any country to present his credentials to the new Italian regime in January 1945. Upon his appointment, Time gave him the title "suave Career Man." He resigned in 1946. When the American Office of War Information produced an Italian-language publication, Kirk insisted it be labeled propaganda to maintain a clear distinction between what Italians were accomplishing for themselves or not.
In August 1945, he received petitions from Russian prisoners of war, taken by the Germans and liberated by Allied forces. They wrote to him in his role as Political Advisor to Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force
Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force
Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force , was the headquarters of the Commander of Allied forces in north west Europe, from late 1943 until the end of World War II. U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower was in command of SHAEF throughout its existence...
(SHAEF) and claimed the status of "political refugees" and asked "in the name of humanity" not to be repatriated to the Soviet Union. Kirk wrote to Secretary of State Byrnes
James F. Byrnes
James Francis Byrnes was an American statesman from the state of South Carolina. During his career, Byrnes served as a member of the House of Representatives , as a Senator , as Justice of the Supreme Court , as Secretary of State , and as the 104th Governor of South Carolina...
seeking guidance, a diplomatic way of expressing his reservations about the repatriation policy. He was instructed to make certain none of the prisoners was actually from Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
or the Baltic States
Baltic states
The term Baltic states refers to the Baltic territories which gained independence from the Russian Empire in the wake of World War I: primarily the contiguous trio of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania ; Finland also fell within the scope of the term after initially gaining independence in the 1920s.The...
and to proceed with the repatriations.
Kirk was long famous for entertaining and continued even when forced to operate in Rome "under a wartime minimum." Six or 8 guests joined him for lunch or dinner, often many more. One Friday lunch he hosted about 20 enlisted men. Though some involved in recruiting the guests worried that a Negro corporal might not be well received, Kirk gave him the place of honor on his right.
Life
Life (magazine)
Life generally refers to three American magazines:*A humor and general interest magazine published from 1883 to 1936. Time founder Henry Luce bought the magazine in 1936 solely so that he could acquire the rights to its name....
described him near the end of his career: "To call Kirk an ornament of the State Department is almost a libelous understatement....Kirk's true value resides in the fact that he is an American who, far from being an innocent abroad, knows Europe infinitely better than most Europeans. This makes him almost unique in the current roster of U.S. foreign representatives in the diplomatic, charitable, or didactic spheres. Kirk's career should be studied in detail, like The Education of Henry Adams." Forbes called him "foppish, intelligent, and very rich."
Kirk predicted in 1945 that future diplomats should be technical experts "chosen for the ability not only to diagnose economic, industrial and political trends, but also to adjust their dislocations before they can start wars." He lamented the willingness of governments to spend on wars far more than on the diplomacy that might prevent them.
A few years after Kirk's retirement, as Senator Joseph McCarthy
Joseph McCarthy
Joseph Raymond "Joe" McCarthy was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957...
launched a campaign against suspected homosexuals in government
Lavender scare
The Lavender Scare refers to the fear and persecution of homosexuals in the 1950s in the United States, which paralleled the anti-communist campaign known as McCarthyism....
, one investigator's 1948 report charged that State Department employees Carmel Offie
Carmel Offie
Carmel Offie worked for the U.S. State Department from the mid 1930s until he joined the Central Intelligence Agency CIA in 1947...
and Charles W. Thayer
Charles W. Thayer
Charles W. Thayer was an American diplomat and author. He was an expert on Soviet-American relations and headed the Voice of America.-Early years:...
"were very close personal friends of former Ambassador Alexander Kirk who is not now in the service but who had a very bad reputation of being a homosexual and certainly protected a lot of homosexual people."
Personal life
In the 1920s, when he was Counselor to the American Embassy in Rome, Kirk remodeled a significant building in Georgetown, the Robinson house, at the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and R Street and "filled it with furniture, rugs, hangings and objects of art brought from the Orient." In 1942 he sold this estate, including its "elaborate formal gardens, outsize ballroom, marble-floored billiard room, and swimming pool," to Evalyn Walsh McLeanEvalyn Walsh McLean
Evalyn Walsh McLean was an American mining heiress and socialite who was famous for being the last private owner of the Hope Diamond as well as another famous diamond, the Star of the East...
, mining heiress and owner of the Hope Diamond
Hope Diamond
The Hope Diamond, also known as "Le bleu de France" or "Le Bijou du Roi", is a large, , deep-blue diamond, now housed in the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in Washington, D.C. It is blue to the naked eye because of trace amounts of boron within its crystal structure, but exhibits red...
.
While posted to Berlin, he lived in an "enormous mansion" in the "swank" Grunewald
Grunewald
Grunewald is a locality within the Berliner borough of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf. Famous for the homonymous forest, until 2001 administrative reform it was part of the former district of Wilmersdorf.-Geography:The locality is situated in the western side of the city and is separated from...
neighborhood. One German who visited described it as "one vast hall after another, and he quiet alone in the midst of it. Very funny; a little like the theatre." His staff of servants spoke only Italian. He held "a large buffet luncheon every Sunday noon, as a means of revenging himself for such hospitality as his position required him to accept."
Palazzo Barberini
Palazzo Barberini is a palace in Rome, facing the piazza of the same name in Rione Trevi and is home to the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica.-History:...
, which he redecorated. He filled a large enclosure the size of a tennis court with "Renaissance tables and settees covered in ivory silk," according to Life
Life (magazine)
Life generally refers to three American magazines:*A humor and general interest magazine published from 1883 to 1936. Time founder Henry Luce bought the magazine in 1936 solely so that he could acquire the rights to its name....
magazine, to create what he termed "a sort of cozy sitting room." When Life profiled him in 1945, it reported that he had always established fine residences wherever he was posted: "The Ambassador is fond of houses, and especially big ones. Equipped with ample private funds and the courage of his complexes, Kirk sees no reason why he should not capitalize the chance his profession gives him to indulge this fondness, all the more since such indulgence usually works out to the benefit of the State Department in one way or another." His nickname around this time was "Buffy."
In 1945 he attributed "his excellent health to the fact that he has never worn himself down by any form of exercise more violent than scratching, which he only does when suffering from insomnia at 6 a.m."
He planned to retire to Arizona and bought a piece of land in the White Mountains
White Mountains (Arizona)
The White Mountains of Arizona are a mountain range and mountainous region in the eastern part of the state, near the border with New Mexico; it is a continuation from the west of the Arizona transition zone–Mogollon Rim, with the Rim ending in western New Mexico...
at the end of World War II. He joked that he would live there not in a house but in a cave. Another diplomat reported that he retired to the mountains of Colorado and "amused himself operating a ranch and raising cattle" for a few years being relocating to Texas.
His sister Gertrude Kirk Metzeroff died in St. Petersburg, Florida in 1948 at the age of 84. According to her obituary, her brother Alexander was then living in Washington, D.C., and Santa Barbara, California, while her sister Margaret was living in Santa Barbara.
Kirk died in Tucson, Arizona
Tucson, Arizona
Tucson is a city in and the county seat of Pima County, Arizona, United States. The city is located 118 miles southeast of Phoenix and 60 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border. The 2010 United States Census puts the city's population at 520,116 with a metropolitan area population at 1,020,200...
, on March 23, 1979. He is buried with his mother in Rome's Protestant Cemetery
Protestant Cemetery, Rome
The Protestant Cemetery , now officially called the Cimitero acattolico and often referred to as the Cimitero degli Inglesi is a cemetery in Rome, located near Porta San Paolo alongside the Pyramid of Cestius, a small-scale Egyptian-style pyramid built in 30 BC as a tomb and later incorporated...
(Cimitero Acattolico).
In his 1967 memoirs, George F. Kennan
George F. Kennan
George Frost Kennan was an American adviser, diplomat, political scientist and historian, best known as "the father of containment" and as a key figure in the emergence of the Cold War...
sketched an affectionate portrait of Kirk, as he knew him in Berlin before America entered World War II: "a confirmed bachelor, profoundly saddened by the recent death of an adored mother who, while she was alive, had preempted much of both his companionship and his emotional life, Kirk drowned the inner emptiness in the performance of his arduous official duties," sleeping in an office alcove while working 16 to 18 hours daily. He continued:
He was a carryover from an older day when to be rich entitled you to be eccentric, and he made the most of the privilege....
Deliberately, I think, as a gesture of defiance and self-protection, and in the indulgence of a fine sense of the theatrical, Kirk worked at giving himself the aspect of exactly that sort of American career diplomat of which the American philistine has always been the most suspicious: elegant, overrefined, haughty, and remote. It was a manner of enlivening life by playing the buffoon....His understanding was intuitive rather than analytical. His conversation consisted largely of weary, allusive quips. His posing sometimes went so far as to raise doubts whether he was serious.
But behind this facade of urbane and even exaggerated sophistication there lay a great intuitive shrewdness and a devastating critical sense of humor, directed to himself as well as others. No one impressed him....He despised the Nazis and held them at arm's length with barbed irony....
The only thing worth living for, he once told me, was good form. He himself had little to live for; there were moments when he would have liked to leave this life; but suicide would be an abrupt act, and abruptness was the height of bad form....He disclaimed all further interest in the Foreign Service, since his mother's death. He had entered it, he solemnly maintained, only to spare her having her bags inspected at frontiers. But he could not just resign, especially in wartime; that would have been abrupt....
After service as Ambassador in Egypt and Italy, he sidled, quietly and unobserved, out of all of our lives.
Kirk claimed he escaped from diplomatic functions by whatever ruse the situation required. At one embassy in Rome he found it necessary to leave by a door he could only reach by going under a grand piano. "In a case of this sort, Kirk recommends slow motion, which, he says, often prevents witnesses from even noticing a maneuver which, if executed fast, might horrify them."
He insisted his favorite color was gray. He never had fresh flowers, rather he collected artificial ones in his favorite color. His wardrobe and household were maintained by a servant named Mario, who joined the Kirk household in Mexico early in Kirk's career and continued through his stint as Ambassador in Rome.