Joseph E. Persico (21 page)

Wearing a light gray seersucker suit and a black mourning band, the President was wheeled into the East Room to a clutch of microphones next to a poster proclaiming,
KEEP
'
EM FLYING
. An estimated sixty million Americans were listening as he began. “The United States destroyer
Greer,
proceeding in full daylight toward Iceland, . . . was flying the American flag,” Roosevelt intoned somberly. “Her identity as an American ship was unmistakable. She was then and there attacked by a submarine. . . . I tell you the blunt fact that the German submarine fired first upon this American destroyer without warning, and with deliberate design to sink her.” Technically, yes, the submarine had fired first at the
Greer,
but only after having been depth-charged by the British plane. “It is clear,” the President continued, “Hitler has begun his campaign to control the seas by ruthless force. From now on,” he warned, “if German or Italian vessels of war enter the waters the protection of which is necessary for the American defense, they do so at their own peril.” He meant that American warships would shoot on sight. FDR would later say that he was perfectly willing to tell untruths to win a war. At this point, he was willing to bend the truth about the attack on the
Greer
to prepare the country to accept war. He justified his stance with a simple homily, “. . . [W]hen you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck before you crush him. . . .” He had proof, FDR said, that Hitler was not only a threat at sea, but a danger to the American landmass. Bill Stephenson's British Security Coordination had provided him with a letter from the Bolivian military attaché in Berlin reporting a plot to create a Nazi government in that South American country. Stephenson's information enabled FDR to state in his broadcast that this attempt “to subvert the government of Bolivia” proved Hitler's designs on Latin America.

Churchill, upon hearing the President speak, instantly understood the Nazi dilemma. “Hitler will have to choose between losing the Battle of the Atlantic,” he said, “or coming into frequent collision with United States ships.” The Germans also now recognized that, at least on the Atlantic, they faced two enemies. The German navy chief, Admiral Erich Raeder, advised Hitler, “There is no longer any difference between British and American ships.”

Six weeks later, on October 27, a rainy evening in Washington, Secret Service agents carried the President from his limousine into the shelter of the Mayflower Hotel. The first time that his secretary, Grace Tully, had seen the President of the United States hoisted like a sack of flour out of the car and into a wheelchair, she had turned away and cried. But since the President never showed the slightest embarrassment at this handling, she and the rest of the staff became accustomed to it. FDR was already late for one of the premier events of the Washington social season, the annual Navy Day dinner. The performer in him knew that his late arrival would only heighten his audience's anticipation. Waiting in the flag-draped ballroom under a canopy of blazing chandeliers were the capital's powers—cabinet members, congressional leaders, Supreme Court justices, the nation's military chiefs, and their spouses, everybody who was anybody.

On the dais, the President, smiling and exuberant, looked splendid in black tie, especially after being seen so often in the gray suits he favored. As the Marine Corps band finished “Hail to the Chief,” a new star in the federal constellation, William J. Donovan, rose to introduce the President. Roosevelt maintained a magisterial silence until the audience became hushed, and then began his remarks. A little over a month after the
Greer
incident, on October 16, a brand-new $5 million destroyer, the USS
Kearney,
had been torpedoed while patrolling off Iceland with the loss of eleven American lives. The President seized on the incident this evening to denounce Germany. “We have wished to avoid shooting,” he said. “But the shooting has started. And history has recorded who fired the first shot. In the long run, however, all that will matter is who fired the last shot.” He then traced a threat that ran from land to sea. “Hitler has often protested that his plans for conquest do not extend across the Atlantic Ocean.” He paused for effect before unleashing his shocker. “I have in my possession a secret map, made in Germany by Hitler's government—by planners of the New World Order. . . . It is a map of South America and a part of Central America as Hitler proposes to reorganize it. . . . The geographical experts of Berlin have ruthlessly obliterated all the existing boundaries; they have divided South America into five vassal states. . . . And they have also so arranged it that the territory of these new puppet states includes the Republic of Panama, and our great lifeline—the Panama Canal. This map, my friends, makes clear the Nazi design not only against South America but against the United States as well.”

Fear of a Nazi end run through South America and into the United States had long preoccupied the President. He had directed Adolf Berle to instruct all American embassies in Latin America to spy on German companies, German immigrant clubs, and just plain suspicious Germans south of the border. Berle had quickly been inundated with the effluvia of amateur informants. From Cuba came a list of schoolteachers, students, and an unemployed sixty-two-year-old mulatto, all described as “persons believed to hold pro-German sympathies.” A thick dossier compiled in Mexico would surely have astonished the popular café society pianist José Iturbi. Iturbi was, according to this file, “a principal agent for Germany in Latin America.”

The British had long been feeding FDR's fears. An MI6 report forwarded to the President nearly a year and a half before warned him that German troops were headed for Dakar, Senegal, just 1,900 miles across the South Atlantic from Natal, Brazil. These troops, the British claimed, were the vanguard of a far larger force that would cross this narrow neck of the ocean and set up bases in Brazil within striking distance of the Panama Canal. The British report had six thousand German troops already there prepared to join pro-Nazi Brazilians to overthrow the pro-American regime of President Getulio Vargas. FDR ordered the Navy to come up with a plan to thwart the takeover. The Navy devised “Pot of Gold,” an operation to transport over a hundred thousand American troops to Brazil. However, the plan had a flaw. The American military, at that point, had neither the ships nor the men to carry it out.

The American press was instantly suspicious of the map FDR described in his Navy Day speech. At a press conference the next day, a reporter asked Roosevelt if he might see the map. Oh, he could not do that, the President explained in horror. It “has on it certain manuscript notations, which if they were reproduced would in all probability disclose where the map came from.” And disclosure, he went on, would “dry up the source of future information.” Another reporter pressed ahead: “What would you say to the charge of the suspicion that the map . . . had been foisted on you in some way? That it was also a forgery or a fake of some sort?” FDR smiled complacently. He had acquired the map from “a source which is undoubtedly reliable,” he said. “There is no question about that!”

FDR's isolationist nemesis, Senator Burton K. Wheeler, learned that the unidentified source of the map was Little Bill Stephenson, who gave it to Big Bill Donovan, who passed it on to the President. Wheeler's suspicions had immediately been aroused. “Where did it originate?” he asked on the Senate floor. “It originated in the office of Colonel Donovan. . . . Perhaps I should say it originated in New York, in the minds of gentlemen closely associated with the British government. . . .” The map's provenance was indeed cloudy. The British had an explanation as to how they had acquired it, another tale of derring-do. Their secret agents had snatched it from a German courier, Gottfried Sandstede, who thereafter “met with an accident” arranged by the Gestapo for his carelessness. Sandstede, however, was not murdered by the Gestapo in 1941; he died on the Russian front in 1944. The map of South America that FDR had refused to share with the press did not outline a Nazi partition. Rather, it was entitled, in German, “Air Traffic Grid of the United States of South America's Main Lines,” and showed straight line routes connecting major cities and contained longhand notes, also in German, referring to the production, storage, and shipment of airplane fuel to these sites.

Not only was the map spurious, but the Nazi plot to take over Bolivia that FDR had warned of in his earlier fireside chat was an outright British fabrication. The letter from the Bolivian attaché alleging the plot had been forged by the BSC and swallowed whole at the White House. Even before FDR had used this information in his speeches, Adolf Berle had warned Secretary of State Cordell Hull that British intelligence agents were “manufacturing documents detailing Nazi conspiracies in South America.” He cautioned, “I think we have to be a little on our guard against false scares.”

The intriguing question is why all this suspect intelligence—reports of Nazi troops in South America, a forged letter predicting a Nazi takeover in Bolivia, a suspicious map, a manipulated version of the
Greer
incident—found its way into the speeches of the President of the United States. The answer clearly lies in FDR's underlying objective. He wanted U-boats attacked. He wanted America in the fight. And if someone handed him documents that strengthened his case, he was not about to scrutinize them to death. The truth was that since June 1941 the British had learned from Ultra decrypts that German U-boat commanders had received frequent instructions to avoid clashes with American vessels. Further, Hitler had not the slightest intention of invading the Western Hemisphere. But these facts stood in the way of what FDR wanted—to stand by Britain in the defeat of Nazism. His proselytizing appeared to be working. On November 8, after a close House tally and a thirteen-vote margin in the Senate, Congress amended the Neutrality Act to allow the President to arm U.S. merchant ships. That same month a Gallup poll revealed that if the Nazis attacked South America, two thirds of Americans were willing to go to war.

*

As 1941 drew to a close, FDR's newest intelligence creations, headed by Astor, Carter, and Donovan, vied for the President's favor. Bill Donovan, with the largest, most visible apparatus, rushed ahead with indiscriminate energy, for Wild Bill was a man to whom motion equaled progress. He began to bombard FDR with memoranda churned out by his ever-growing staff. A November 12 report from the coordinator of information quoted a supposedly confidential remark by Churchill to the effect that after the war both “German
and
Russian militarism must be destroyed.” With Britain's best hope of survival at this point resting on Russia's recent entry into the war, it must have surprised FDR to be told that Churchill would make so rash a comment. Five days later, Donovan delivered to the President intelligence purportedly from within the Third Reich that the Germans were filled with “despair” and “misery,” that morale was sinking fast, and that a single major setback would leave the Nazi regime hanging “dangerously in the balance.” Such errant nonsense at a time when Hitler had yet to taste defeat somehow drew no rebuke from FDR, and Donovan's stock seemed unaffected. The COI chief's access to the White House continued, totaling nine meetings with the President in 1941.

FDR's least recognized agent, John Franklin Carter, who was now operating with $54,000 from the President's emergency funds, also continued to enjoy easy access to the Oval Office, thanks to his cover as a columnist friendly to the administration. Some assignments that FDR gave Carter were straightforward espionage, in one instance, having an agent investigate a suspected fifth column operation on the French island of Martinique in the West Indies. Others skirted the defensible. Charles Lindbergh continued to infuriate FDR, especially after the aviator became the crown jewel in the isolationist America First movement. In late April 1941, days after Lindbergh gave his first speech as a member of the organization, the President called Carter into his office and began speaking in his elliptical fashion, leaving the journalist mystified as to where he was headed. FDR finally got around to the Civil War and the Copperheads, northerners who sympathized with the South. The President wanted Carter to look into present-day Copperheads. Carter now understood what was expected of him. Within days, he delivered a fifty-page report for placement in the President's nighttime reading file. Thus armed, FDR was able to fire back when a reporter at a press conference asked him why Colonel Lindbergh had not been called to active duty. That was simple. Lindbergh, the President explained, was the equivalent of the arch–Civil War Copperhead Clement L. Vallandigham. The thrust drew blood. Lindbergh wrote FDR three days later resigning his commission as a colonel in the Army Air Corps Reserve. In Roosevelt's mind, his assignment to Carter had not been prompted by personal animus. Lindbergh, in FDR's eyes, was an enemy of his country, as dangerous as any fifth columnist, and had to be exposed.

Perhaps the oddest—or given FDR's multi-layered thought processes, a typical—assignment was the one he had given Carter to take a discreet look into the effectiveness of his dear friend Vincent Astor's operation in New York. On completing the assignment, Carter could barely wait to phone his conclusion to FDR. He told the President that Astor was confused “about the whole problem of investigation in the New York district.” This verdict was merely a preliminary jab presaging a full-scale attack on a rival whom Carter believed was clearly out of his depth.

*

To the President, what was happening in Europe was vital to America, what was happening in the Pacific a distraction. Seen from the Japanese perspective, however, the United States had become an obstacle to Japan's grand strategy for creating the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a union, with their country at its heart, freed of Western colonialists. The United States was aiding the empire's enemy through its extension of lend-lease to China, embargoing vitally needed fuel—in short, attempting to block Japan's imperial destiny. China had become the major sticking point between the United States and Japan. After nine years of unofficial and four years of full-scale war, the Japanese dared not lose face by a withdrawal from China, yet could not defeat it as long as Chiang Kai-shek continued to be propped up by American military aid. The emperor's government had been willing to placate the Americans by trimming back its ambitions in Southeast Asia. But Roosevelt demanded an impossible price, Japan's complete withdrawal from China.