The Wentworth “Spies”

John Callan “Cal” O’Laughlin was at Wentworth as the correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. Having served as an Associated Press correspondent in St. Petersburg, O’Laughlin knew the Imperial court and its intrigues first-hand. When he accompanied Sergius Witte and the Russian entourage by boat from Europe enroute to Portsmouth, he carried a medal presented to him by Czar Nicholas – a decoration the local newspapermen said was O’Laughlin’s “prized possession.” 

 

O’Laughlin’s Chicago Tribune dispatches on the conference convey the “inside access” he had to members of the Russian diplomatic corps. Behind the scenes, O’Laughlin was reporting to TR. Each night, starting with a lengthy letter dated August 13th, he would record his observations of how the diplomats seemed, their manner as they walked around the public spaces of the hotel, the insights their staff would share about how things were going in the negotiating rooms. Sometimes O’Laughlin’s telegrams would be the basis for Roosevelt’s instructions to his ambassadors in Russia and Japan. O’Laughlin’s urgent message on the night when the Portsmouth Herald reported “Crisis Reached” foreshadowed the back-channel telegram TR sent to the Emperor and Czar urging reconciliation.

 

When the impasse over territory and indemnity was resolved on August 29th (Japan would keep the southern half of Sakhalin Island; Russia would pay “not a copeck”), O’Laughlin wrote a final letter to Roosevelt on Hotel Wentworth stationary: “From both Russian and Japanese I have heard tonight your praises sung. There is no question in their minds that had it not been for you, the negotiations would have failed.” Apparently Roosevelt wanted to thank his agent in person, as O'Laughlin added a postscript, “It will be a great pleasure to call at Oyster Bay on my way South. I am looking forward to it.” Cal would later accompany TR through Africa and Europe in 1910, stopping off in Oslo when Roosevelt could finally deliver his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize awarded in 1906 for his success in orchestrating the Treaty of Portsmouth.

 

In 1905, Kanichi Asakawa was a Dartmouth College professor who had written extensively about the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, based on his study of the balance of power in East Asia and the implications of the war among the saber-rattlers in Tokyo. The reporter on site in Portsmouth for Asahi Shimbun of Osaka suggested in print that Asakawa was an agent of the Japanese government. How else could this simple Japanese pay for the “high class 5 dollar per night hotel”? Actually, Dartmouth President William Tucker footed the bill, to allow his prize student, a lecturer on the Dartmouth faculty, into the arena. Tucker probably knew that Asakawa was the man whose realpolitik informed the two Yale advisors, Stokes and Woolsey, whose opinion Japanese counsel Tokutaro Sakai sought as the Japanese were preparing their conference demands. Asakawa held a Ph.d from Yale and had published detailed articles on the impact of the war in the Yale Review in May and August of the year before. He was also author of the book, Russo-Japanese Conflict: Its Causes and Issues (1904) which scholars now view as the text the “Yale Symposium” of Stokes and Woolsey used for their multi-point rationale.

 

The New Hampshire Historical Society’s Dorothy Vaughan Collection of calling cards collected at Wentworth in the summer of 1905 includes a small white card with a hand-written “K. Asakawa, Hanover N.H.” along with the card from correspondent Fukutomi who had sneered at his ability to pay.

 

Forty years later, it was perhaps their Portsmouth perspectives that led both O’Laughlin and Asakawa to vocal opposition to what they viewed as military excesses in World War II. Asakawa lobbied President Franklin Roosevelt in 1941, helping him draft a letter to the Imperial Government of Japan urging them to stand down in the Pacific. The letter was not received until after the Zeros had left for Pearl Harbor. O’Laughlin, by then a former Secretary of State and long-time publisher of the Army and Navy Journal, defied convention by opposing the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan. The legacy of being on the scene at Wentworth took many lingering forms.

Next: The daily Wentworth routine