Four years later, Endicott heard about a 2000 article in the American Foreign Service Association’s Foreign Service Journal by Lilian Winkler Stuart Smith. The wife of a Foreign Service officer, Smith had written about how Endicott’s father had issued the necessary visas so her family could escape. Smith’s father had been placed on the Nazis’“wanted” list because of critical articles his newspaper syndicate had published.
Coincidentally, Smith lived in Bethesda, so Endicott invited her to her house in November 2001. “When I met her,” Endicott says, “she told me that she had actually run into my father at a Groton School parents’ weekend in Massachusetts in 1965, where they each had a son. By sheer coincidence, she was seated next to him. They introduced themselves, and she asked if he was the Bingham who’d lived in Marseille. He said yes, and she told him she remembered him saving her family. Her father had gone to get visas in Lyon for her family, but he was told he would have to leave his two children behind.” He had then gone to Marseille.
“In France at that particular time, there was only one American diplomat who was willing to risk his career to help people escape,” Saul says as he sits on the sofa in the Endicotts’ living room during a September visit. “The grapevine would have passed the word: ‘Go and see Harry.’ ”
Smith told Endicott she had known all her life that it was Bingham who had saved her family.
In sharing with her family all she was learning, Endicott found out that her niece, Tiffany Bingham Cunningham, had interviewed Endicott’s father for a grade school project years earlier. Her niece sent Endicott the tape. For the first time, Endicott heard her father’s voice tell how his boss had ordered him not to give visas to “these Jewish people.” The Nazis were going to win the war, the man said, and it was better not to offend them. “When he helped many of the people with their visas, he was acting against orders,” Endicott says. And in acting against orders, he paid with his career: His bosses demoted him and sent him to Buenos Aires.
During this time, Endicott’s oldest brother, Robert Kim, started a campaign to have a stamp issued in his father’s honor. He put up a corresponding Web site and began receiving letters from survivors eager to tell how Bingham had saved their lives and those of their families.
In 2002, then Secretary of State Colin Powell recognized her father with a posthumous Constructive Dissent award—an honor given to those in the State Department who speak out regardless of consequences. Three other State Department employees received the award that day, and Endicott watched the ceremony with several of her siblings. “I now understood that Father had lost his career because of his actions saving others,” Endicott says. Largely due to the efforts of Robert Kim, the State Department chose Hiram Bingham to be one of six Distinguished American Diplomats to appear on his own commemorative stamp in 2006.
In the years since learning about her father’s role in the war, Endicott has offered her own tribute to him and other rescuers. A solo voice teacher at National Cathedral and St. Albans schools in Washington, D.C., she wrote a song titled They Were True. Saul asked Endicott to perform her song at the grand opening in 2008 of the “Visas for Life: The Righteous and Honorable Diplomats” exhibition in New York. She sang in the grand entry hall of the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. “There were hundreds of survivors and relatives of diplomats in attendance,” she says. As she sang, Endicott thought of the documents her father had provided and the lives he’d saved, and in that moment she felt his presence.
Endicott has always wondered why her father didn’t share the full story of his courageous activities. “I now believe it isn’t the people he saved that kept him from talking about it,” she says. “I believe it’s the people he couldn’t save.”
Saul says that none of the rescuer diplomats he knows of spoke about their wartime activities with their children. “There’s an old Chinese proverb that says if you do something good and don’t talk about it, it must be really, really good. Harry Bingham did something really, really good and didn’t talk about it,” Saul says as he leans back on the sofa and smiles. “He saved thousands, and now there are five generations of people living because of this one man’s actions. How many did he save? Those he gave visas to, as well as all their future generations.”
Louisa Jaggar writes for The Washington Post as well as other publications. She is also the co-author of the book Saving Stuff (Simon & Schuster, 2005).
