After the liberation of Paris in late August, Dahlberg and his squadron commander, Major Jack Bradley, commandeered a Jeep and headed there. Denis Baudoin, Dahlberg’s host and benefactor after he had been shot down, had invited Dahlberg to a dinner. Baudoin had assembled a who’s-who list of Paris dignitaries so that he could show off his rescued pilot.
Baudoin told the assembled luminaries of the brave young aviator’s arrival, via parachute, at his estate. He had introduced himself to the American as a member of the Resistance and said they needed arms. Did he have his revolver? No, Dahlberg replied. Did he have a rapier? No. Or even a knife? No.
The young American was totally unarmed, Baudoin continued, “but in his shirt pocket he had not one, not two, but three condoms. This brave young American came to France not to make war but to make love.”
Also, about this time,
Baudoin brought Dahlberg to the famous Paris restaurant Ledoyen for a meal.
“There was a couple sitting at a table right next to us, and Denis wanted me to
meet them,” Dahlberg recalls. “The guy was an American writer named Ernest, as
in Hemingway, and he had a date. His date was a German woman—well, an American
movie actress with a German background. Her name was Marlene Dietrich. Denis
knew these people well, and I didn’t know them at all. I was just a country kid.
I’d never heard of Ernest Hemingway.”
One Step Forward: The Life of Ken Dahlberg is available at bookstores and at kendahlberg.com.
“Who the Hell is Ken
Dahlberg?”
An excerpt from Minnesota’s Twentieth
Century, by D.J. Tice
(1999, University of Minnesota
Press. Reprinted with permission.)
Watergate, 1972
“You have to have a little luck in life,” Ken Dahlberg likes to say. But in August 1972, Dahlberg wasn’t feeling lucky.
The Twin Cities businessman was in Miami, attending the Republican National Convention. The scent of scandal was in the air. A Florida investigator tracked down Dahlberg on the convention floor and took him in for questioning.
