Srodes, James 1940–

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Srodes, James 1940–

PERSONAL: Born 1940, in Newcastle, PA; son of James L. and Louise Srodes; married Cecile Zaugg, 1969.

ADDRESSES: Home—Washington, DC. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Author, broadcaster, and financial journalist. Served as bureau chief for both Forbes and Financial World; British Broadcasting Corp., World Service, presenter of a weekly radio commentary.

MEMBER: Washington Independent Writers, National Press Club.

AWARDS, HONORS: Book Award, best intelligence book of the year, Association of Former Intelligence Officers, 2000, for Allen Dulles: Master of Spies.

WRITINGS:

(With Ivan Fallon) Dream Maker: The Rise and Fall of John Z. DeLorean, Putnam (New York, NY), 1983, published as DeLorean: The Rise and Fall of a Dream-Maker, Hamish Hamilton (London, England), 1983.

(With Ivan Fallon) Takeovers, Hamish Hamilton (London, England), 1987.

(With Arthur Jones) Campaign 1996: Who's Who in the Race for the White House, Harper Paperbacks (New York, NY), 1996.

Allen Dulles: Master of Spies, Regnery (Washington, DC), 1999.

Franklin: The Essential Founding Father, Regnery (Washington, DC), 2002.

SIDELIGHTS: James Srodes is the author (with Daily Telegraph financial editor Ivan Fallon) of Dream Maker: The Rise and Fall of John Z. DeLorean. DeLorean worked for the Pontiac and Chevrolet divisions of General Motors until 1973. The authors note that his departure followed a series of alleged misdeeds on his part, including leaks of confidential corporate information. Soon after, DeLorean announced his plans to build a car that would last up to twenty-five years, have low fuel consumption, and run safely at any speed. He put little of his own money into his "ethical" car, the DMC-12, but instead raised between 11-million and 12-million dollars from outside sources. In a bidding war between Puerto Rico, the Republic of Ireland, and England, the British came in with the high bid for a factory to be located in Dunmurry, Northern Ireland. They offered DeLorean 155-million dollars in loans, grants, and guarantees, and he raised an additional 15.5-million dollars from private sources with the help of the investment house Oppenheimer and Company.

DeLorean established a Manhattan headquarters with huge overheads. The penthouse office, which had no part in the actual design or manufacture, cost nearly 300,000 dollars per month. On his payroll were high-priced executives and lawyers and servants, and he paid himself considerable consulting fees. The Northern Ireland Development Agency had no control over the manufacture of the DMC-12. The price of the car, at 25,000 dollars, was too high for the market. The Lotus sports car company was being paid for engineering work, as was a Swiss firm called GPD. "Yet for all the expenditures on engineering, DeLorean's automobile was not a new design at all," wrote John McDermott in a Nation review. "'A bastardized Lotus,' one DeLorean executive called it," reported McDermott, "perhaps even a composite of off-the-shelf components hidden under a gleaming stainless exterior." In spite of the evidence, the people and institutions close to DeLorean failed to acknowledge the truth. McDermott said that "the shining idea of DeLorean the entrepreneur blinded them to the reality of DeLorean the careless executive: the 'brilliant' engineer who peddled his engineering work out to others, the 'socially responsible' businessman who played fast and loose with his agreements and squandered venture capital on frivolous window dressing." The company was eventually put into receivership by the British government. Srodes and Fallon write that a proposed loan might have saved the company, but it was still unsigned when DeLorean was arrested for dealing cocaine. Ultimately, it was British taxpayers who bore the cost of DeLorean's risky venture.

Fortune reviewer Ann M. Morrison wrote that "for all the book's fine reporting and vivid detail, the authors never really nail down their subject. They describe a man who is socially awkward, shamelessly vain, partial to coarse jokes, often scaring off potential investors with his ludicrous ideas. Dream Maker never makes it clear how this same man could have deluded two British governments and some of the largest American financial institutions, including Merrill Lynch, Oppenhe-imer, Citibank, Bank of America, and Arthur Andersen. It remains unclear to the end what made DeLorean such a master of delusion."

Srodes and Fallon teamed up again to write Takeovers, a book dealing with hostile takeovers and the players involved. David Galloway wrote in Management Today that the "crisply written" book "quotes studies showing that: 'predatory takeovers on the whole do not work—that they are, on average, not good for both the companies and the shareholders on both sides of the bid.'" Galloway said Srodes and Fallon "had access to all the big players. Fortunately, they also have the journalistic gifts of portraying character, together with a strong narrative drive which keeps the interest engaged even in contests where the outcome is already known."

Eleanor Dulles, sister of Allen Dulles (1893–1969), asked Srodes to write her brother's biography. Srodes had access to previously inaccessible family papers in writing Allen Dulles: Master of Spies. Dulles was the grandson of a Civil War Union general and diplomat, and an uncle was Woodrow Wilson's secretary of state. His brother, John Foster Dulles, was secretary of state under President Dwight D. Eisenhower as Dulles himself was creating the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1953. Dulles had the background for the job. He served as a diplomat in Switzerland and attended the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. He was involved in a plot to kill Hitler and received over 1,000 cables from an informant at the German Foreign Ministry. He later was instrumental in sending the U-2 spy plane into action.

"But the agency was on less firm footing elsewhere in the world," wrote Jeff Stein in the Washington Post Book World. "The Korean War caught the CIA by surprise. Despite early successes in overthrowing socialist regimes in Iran and Guatemala in 1954, it failed miserably in Indonesia, Tibet, Vietnam, and, of course, Cuba…. The Bay of Pigs was Waterloo for Dulles." President Kennedy relieved Dulles of his post shortly after.

Times Literary Supplement reviewer Adam Hochschild noted parts of the Dulles history not covered in Allen Dulles, including his successful attempt to have a New York Times reporter pulled from Guatemala as the CIA planned the coup that resulted in the overthrow of the country's elected president and the installation of a right-wing army officer in his place. Hochschild said that the book devotes less than two pages to the Guatemalan operation that grew out of opposition to President Jacobo Arbenz's nationalization of United Fruit Company plantations. "Srodes does not remind us that the New York law firm which Dulles worked for in between (and sometimes during) spells of his long career in intelligence represented United Fruit." Hochschild noted that Srodes doesn't mention that United Fruit lobbied for a coup, that they shipped weapons and ammunition in boxes marked "agricultural machinery" to Guatemala, that Arbenz was elected democratically, and that more than 100,000 Guatemalans died during the military dictatorships that followed the one installed by the CIA. "To Srodes," said Hochschild, "Guatemala was one of the 'triumphs' of the agency's 'golden years." Hochschild wrote that "the CIA's use of unsuspecting American and Canadian mental patients as guinea pigs for studying the effects of LSD, something which permanently wrecked a number of lives, is barely mentioned…. Lacking any critical distance, Srodes's approach is something of a caricature of the Cold Warrior attitudes that Allen Dulles exemplified. For Srodes, the evils of the Soviet regime mean that almost anything the United States did was justified."

"Competent content-wise," said Gilbert Taylor in Booklist, "this work's utilitarian style might deflect casual readers but not committed devotees of espionage history." A Publishers Weekly reviewer called Allen Dulles "less notable for its insight into policy than into character…. Srodes presents Dulles as a capable, moral, loyal, persistent man, who left the world a better place." Library Journal reviewer Edward Geodeken wrote that Srodes "covers the material well, helping us understand his mercurial and exuberant subject."

In Franklin: The Essential Founding Father, Srodes looks at Benjamin Franklin, not so much as an active ingredient in the rising of the movement for American independence, but as a catalyst—one of the men who made things happen, according to a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Franklin was not the highly visible orator, the statesman, or the military genius. He was the diplomat, the mediator, some even say the international spy, whose greatest contribution to the emerging nation was his ability "to plot strategy in private and to write documents for public purposes," again according to the Publishers Weekly contributor. Library Journal reviewer Thomas J. Baldino suggested that the Srodes biography portrays the man larger than life—that Franklin's role was in fact less dramatic than Srodes would have his readers believe—but also granted the work its place in the huge body of Frankliniana. Margaret Flanagan's assessment in Booklist was more favorable. She called Franklin "a page-turning biography" of a "shrewd, ambitious Renaissance man."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Atlantic, November, 1983, Roy Blount Jr., review of Dream Maker: The Rise and Fall of John Z. De-Lorean, p. 142.

Barron's, October 31, 1983, Richard Rescigno, review of Dream Maker, p. 34.

Booklist, June 1, 1999, Gilbert Taylor, review of Allen Dulles: Master of Spies, p. 1780; April 1, 2002, Margaret Flanagan, review of Franklin: The Essential Founding Father, p. 1302.

Business Week, September 26, 1983, William J. Hampton, review of Dream Maker, p. 16.

Chatelaine, January, 1984, Judith Timson, review of Dream Maker, p. 6.

Commentary, January, 1984, Don Sharp, review of Dream Maker, p. 76.

Director, September, 1983, review of Dream Maker, p. 66.

Economist, July 30, 1983, review of Dream Maker, p. 81.

Fortune, September 19, 1983, Ann M. Morrison, review of Dream Maker, p. 193.

Interview, November, 1983, Tom Teicholz, "Ivan Fallon and James Srodes," p. 64.

Library Journal, May 1, 1999, Edward Geodeken, review of Allen Dulles, p. 90; April 15, 2002, Thomas J. Baldino, review of Franklin, p. 100.

Maclean's, May 18, 1981, William Lowther, "Takeover Fever in the Boardrooms," p. 30.

Management Today, October, 1987, David Galloway, "Predatory Takeovers and the Players," pp. 43-44.

Nation, November 12, 1983, John McDermott, "The Entrepreneur's New Clothes," pp. 469-471.

New Leader, October 31, 1983, Jamie Kitman, review of Dream Maker, p. 17.

New Statesman, July 29, 1983, John Rentul, review of Dream Maker, p. 28.

New York Times Book Review, September 25, 1983, Brock Yates, review of Dream Maker, p. 12.

Publishers Weekly, July 22, 1983, review of Dream Maker, p. 1208; May 10, 1999, review of Allen Dulles, p. 49; March 11, 2002, review of Franklin, p. 63.

Road and Track, December, 1983, Allan Girdler, review of Dream Maker, p. 32.

Times Literary Supplement, September 17, 1999, Adam Hochschild, "The Golden Years of United Fruit," p. 28.

Washington Post Book World, June 20, 1999, Jeff Stein, "Prince of Shadows," p. 2.