Emery Reves

Emery Reves (Révész Imre; 6 September 1904 – 5 September 1981) was a writer, publisher and successful press and literary agent most notably for Winston Churchill and other prominent European statesmen who were predominantly antifascist and held democratic ideals.

He advocated that world federalism might bring peace to a post-war world.

Reves was born in Bácsföldvár, Austria-Hungary (now part of Serbia), to Simon and Gisele Gross Reves, who were Jewish middle-class property owners.

As exact dates of his birth and death vary, those provided by his widow for his tombstone are used.

In the 1920s, he became a freelance journalist, focusing on the League of Nations.

Statesmen including French Prime Minister Aristide Briand and Lord Robert Cecil, architect of the League of Nations, supported his desire to create an international news agency that would counter purely-nationalistic viewpoints.

A brilliant student in Budapest, he moved to Berlin in 1922.

A strong proponent of democratic government and a stronger opponent of autocratic rule, Rathaneau was assassinated by anti-Semitic right-wing extremists in 1922, likely for expanding trade with the Soviet Union.

In Zürich, Reves wrote his first articles and conducted his first interviews with politicians.

He would later lose his mother and other family members in the Holocaust.

He received a doctorate in Economics from the University of Zurich in 1926 and wrote on the economic theories of Walther Rathenau, a German politician and successful industrialist of Jewish ancestry who served as foreign minister.

He made significant personal contributions to Churchill's highly-successful six volume Memoirs of the Second World War, and the exceptional international network that he had developed since the 1930s was the key to the book's outstanding success.

Towards that end, he founded the Cooperation Press Service and Publishing Company in Paris around 1933.

It was known for its internationalism, broad circulation and strong anti-Nazi stance.

It was considered the first viable wire press service in Europe.

Reeves had to abandon his Press Service in Berlin after it was raided by Nazi stormtroopers on the first of April, 1933.

Fleeing Berlin at the age of 29, he reopened the office in Paris.

In 1937, he befriended Winston Churchill, became his literary agent and used his own Cooperation Press Service to place Churchill's articles on current world events in major newspapers across Europe.

Reves's relationship with Churchill would in many ways become the most important one of his career.

With Reves efforts, newspapers that published Churchill's articles in the years 1938 and 1939, included those in Brussels, Copenhagen, Riga, Stockholm, Helsinki, Oslo, Warsaw, Cracow, Kaunas (in both the Lithuanian- and Yiddish-language newspapers) and Tallinn (Estonia).

Outside Europe, Reves published the same articles in cities as distant as Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Perth, Sydney, Colombo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Nairobi, Cairo and Jerusalem.

Churchill's writing had cast a limited global presence, but by 1939, Reves had helped place Churchill's work on the front pages of thirty newspapers, with 750 different outlets annually, representing approximately 15 to 20 million readers in 25 languages.

On February 24, he was naturalised as a British subject, after first having applied around December of 1939.

After the war, he purchased the rights to publish Churchill's war memoirs, Memoirs of the Second World War, outside the United Kingdom and Churchill's extensive four-volume History of the English-Speaking Peoples.

Though considered a risk by many at the time, both sold widely.

In June 1940, he was forced to flee France after the fall of Paris, by one account on a submarine put at his disposal by Winston Churchill, relocating to London.

Reves's Cooperation Press Service organized global publication of the views of over 120 European statesmen, including the French statesmen Paul Reynaud, Prime Minister in 1940, Léon Blum, a three-term Prime Minister from 1936, as well as British statesmen Foreign Minister Anthony Eden, a Prime Minister in 1956, and Labour Party Leader Clement Attlee, a Prime Minister from 1945.

Others included the Italian anti-fascist statesman Count Carlo Sforza, the English mathematician Bertrand Russell, and Albert Einstein, a graduate of the University of Zurich like Reeves.

All were opponents of appeasement with Mussolini's Italy or Hitler's Germany, at least in the years closely leading to the second World War, though Attlee had supported pacifism for a period.

Referring to Reves in 1940, Churchill wrote to the British Minister of Information, "I can speak from personal experience of his altogether exceptional abilities and connections," and characterized him as "a most brilliant writer" who "holds our views very strongly".

After Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940, Reves was sent to New York City in February of 1941 to help build up the British propaganda organization in both North and South America.

Reves described his mission as convincing the West that Nazi aggression seen in Europe would continue in the Americas and that the principles of non-intervention were "principles of a lost world, which lead every nation to the abyss".

Significantly increasing Churchill's wealth, and retaining a roughly 10-15% commission, in the late 1940s, Reves negotiated an impressive $1.4 million in the United States, and 555,000 pounds for Churchill in the United Kingdom for the rights to Memoirs of the Second World War, with the resulting royalties becoming equally impressive.

Published in 1940 in the United States, the widely-quoted book, allegedly based on Hitler's confidences to Rauschning, was a damning portrayal of Hitler as a madman bent on world conquest and destruction.

Several more contemporary Hitler historians, particularly Ian Kershaw, think that several of the alleged confidences of Hitler to Rauschning were lifted from different sources and that the book should be disregarded in respect to its historical accuracy, but Kershaw might have agreed with several of its primary conclusions.

At Churchill's request, he was sent to New York in February 1941 and relocated his agency's headquarters there while retaining the use of press outlets in European cities, South America, and throughout the world.

Reves was truly a devoted follower and friend to Churchill, as in addition to the long periods of time the two men spent together between 1956 and 1960 at Reves' Villa la Pausa on the French Riviera, Reves visited Churchill at his home at Chartwell, at Morpeth Mansions before the war, and at Hyde Park Gate after it.

Other noteworthy and lucrative post-war work included brokering the memoirs of Dwight D. Eisenhower, British Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery and other wartime leaders to newspapers and magazines.

Reves commissioned Conversations with Hitler by Hitler's aide Hermann Rauschning.

The official Churchill historian, Sir Martin Gilbert, in 1997 published an extensive record of correspondence between Reeves and Churchill from 1937 to 1964, in his book Winston Churchill and Emery Reeves.