Joseph E. Persico (8 page)

Churchill's son, Randolph, remarked of the American ambassador's defeatism: “We had reached the point of bugging potential traitors and enemies. Joe Kennedy, the American ambassador, came under electronic surveillance.” Ironically, during that May 20 encounter between Tyler Kent and Kennedy, an American ambassador who himself did not believe in the war, who ridiculed Britain's chances of survival, and who practiced his own brand of anti-Semitism berated a lowly code clerk who shared both his politics and his prejudices. Kennedy treated the matter as he always did when his principles collided with his survival. He pulled the rug on Kent. Two days after his talk with the ambassador, Kent was fired by the State Department, Kennedy denied him diplomatic immunity, and the code clerk remained in the custody of the British. In this matter, at least, the President showed no disagreement with his ambassador's conduct. Kent's loss of immunity was instantly approved in Washington. Kennedy declared that if the United States had been at war during Kent's betrayal, he would have recommended that he be sent home and shot by a firing squad.

FDR had just returned from a dip in the White House pool when he received a transatlantic phone call from an uncharacteristically contrite Kennedy. Because of Tyler Kent's treachery, the Gray code, through which the President and Churchill communicated, had been compromised, the ambassador informed FDR. An American assistant secretary of state, Breckinridge Long, reckoned the cost of Kent's disloyalty in his diary: “Appalling . . . it means that not only are our codes cracked a dozen different ways, but that our every diplomatic maneuver was exposed to Germany and Russia. It is a terrible blow—almost a major catastrophe.”

Tyler Kent was tried in secret in the Old Bailey on October 23, 1940, charged with violating Britain's Official Secrets Act and the Larceny Act for stealing the documents. Kent's defense attorney, a London barrister, Maurice Healy, argued that this court had no jurisdiction over an American whose arrest and trial were “entirely contrary to the general principles of international law and the comity of nations.” After four days of testimony, however, it took the jury of twelve Englishmen only twenty-five minutes to find Kent guilty of endangering their country. He was sentenced to seven years and, with equal secrecy, packed off to the windswept Isle of Wight, to a camp for political prisoners. In a separate trial, Anna Wolkoff received ten years.

The Churchill government found in the Kent-Wolkoff scandal just the provocation it wanted. Within forty-eight hours of Kent's arrest a massive roundup of British fascists took place, including the Jew-baiting Captain Ramsay. The Low Countries had fallen to Germany within days, and on June 20, France surrendered after only a shocking six weeks' struggle. Obviously, British leaders believed, Poland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and France could not have fallen under Hitler's heel simply because they were weak. Fifth columnists had to be the answer. The British were convinced that Norway had been flooded with German “tourists” before the invasion. German parachutists who dropped into the Netherlands were rumored to have been guided by enemy agents signaling them from the ground. The contagion of suspicion crossed the Atlantic, and FDR eagerly embraced the conspiracy rationale. Even before the fall of France, he had shared his preoccupation with the American people. On May 26, 1940, FDR was wheeled into the White House's first-floor diplomatic cloakroom to deliver a fireside chat. He stubbed out his cigarette, squared the pages of his text, faced the three microphones of the major networks, and told the country, “Today's threat to our national security is not a matter of military weapons alone. We know of new methods of attack. The Trojan Horse. The fifth column that betrays a nation unprepared for treachery. Spies, saboteurs, and traitors are the actors in this new tragedy.”

FDR's fear of subversion had been deeply planted during his World War I experience with the Navy Department, especially a shock like the Black Tom explosion. More searing, on a June evening in 1919, Franklin and Eleanor had experienced terrorism firsthand. They were parking their car on R Street in Washington when a deafening explosion tore off the front of the residence of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who lived across the street from their home. Palmer had made himself the scourge of radicals and Communists and was zealously hunting them down to combat the “Red Scare.” An assassin, out to kill Palmer, had instead blown up himself. Pieces of the corpse landed on the Roosevelts' front steps. Concern over saboteurs and terrorists persisted after FDR became president. He told reporters at a press conference that Americans had to “protect this country against . . . some of the things that happened over here in 1914 and 1915 and 1916 and the beginning of 1917, before we got into the war.”

*

In June 1940, practically on the eve of the Republican convention, FDR pulled off a master stroke that could well abet his designs on a third term. His secretary of war, Henry Woodring, stuck in FDR's craw like a fish bone. He had appointed Woodring, a former Kansas governor, in 1936 more to placate economically depressed midwest farmers than for military views congruent with his own. Woodring was an isolationist who had sought to block FDR's effort to ship munitions to Britain. The President dreaded firing anybody and welcomed an excuse that would justify ejecting an unwanted subordinate. Woodring's attempted obstruction of the arms shipments handed FDR the perfect opportunity to unload the secretary. But he went further. With the potential for war mounting, he seized the moment to make his cabinet bipartisan and thus less politically assailable.

Frank Knox was a self-made multimillionaire who had risen from grocery clerk to cub reporter, eventually to publisher of the
Chicago Daily News.
He was a veteran of that legendary band the Rough Riders, who had charged San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt. Knox, a visceral foe of the New Deal, had actually hoped to oppose Roosevelt in 1936 as the Republican presidential candidate. Instead, he had had to settle for the vice presidential nomination, going down to defeat with the head of the ticket, Alf Landon. What Knox did have in common with Roosevelt was a rejection of isolationism as illusory and an acceptance of interventionism as a necessity.

On an afternoon in December 1939, FDR invited Knox to the White House for a free-ranging view of the world situation. Knox was still with the President as six o'clock approached, and FDR suggested that he stay for dinner. Afterward, they could watch the movie
Drums Along the Mohawk.
Knox declined, though he found himself increasingly seduced by the Roosevelt magnetism. Before he left, FDR tested on him a plan of breathtaking boldness. He wanted the defeated 1936 Republican ticket, Landon and Knox, to come into his cabinet, filling the two military secretaryships, war and Navy. Indicative of Roosevelt's sinuous style, the very day before, he had instructed his press secretary, Stephen Early, to tell reporters, “I don't think it is likely the President will put a Republican as a member of his cabinet.” Landon subsequently made known that he was not interested in the War Department post, fearing Roosevelt intended merely to exploit him. FDR then turned to a quintessential establishment American.

Henry Stimson was a product of Phillips Academy at Andover, where, in his day tuition was sixty dollars a year and students cut their own firewood. He went on to Yale, joined Skull and Bones, and later graduated from Harvard Law School. His roots in the country were deep. He could recall stories his great-grandmother had told him of her conversations with George Washington. Stimson had previously served as President William Howard Taft's secretary of war, Calvin Coolidge's governor general of the Philippines, and Herbert Hoover's secretary of state, in all serving every president since William McKinley in one key post or another. At seventy-three, lean, tall, with his steel gray hair and erect posture, Stimson was the soul of rectitude and enjoyed as well a reputation as an able administrator. To the grumbling of disappointed Democratic office seekers and the cries of betrayal from fellow Republicans, Stimson and Knox were enlisted in FDR's coalition cabinet just before the Republican convention, the former as secretary of war, the latter as secretary of the Navy.

Chapter III

Strange Bedfellows

FDR'S CONCERN over a secret and silent invasion of the United States by fifth columnists and saboteurs allied him with one of the canniest players on the Washington scene. In June 1939 the President had given the leading espionage role to J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI in an attempt to impose order on the jerry rig that passed for intelligence operations in the United States. J. Edgar, self-elevated from plain old John Hoover, had started his career as a file clerk in the Department of Justice. There, through his appetite for work and talent for accumulating dossiers on people, he caught the eye of Attorney General Mitchell Palmer and moved up quickly. Hoover made his first major strike in 1920, as Palmer's chief lieutenant during the Red Scare, rounding up nearly ten thousand suspected radicals and subversives. By 1924, at age twenty-nine, Hoover had become director of the department's Bureau of Investigation, which by 1935 metamorphosed into the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Ed Tamm, number three man at the bureau behind Hoover's constant companion, Clyde Tolson, had first suggested the name. Hoover was not immediately taken by the initials FBI until Tamm pointed out a bonus. They could also stand for Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity. During the thirties Hoover gained national fame for the astutely publicized battles his “G-men” waged against gangsters. In 1939, when the war broke out, the director, with his instinct for the main chance, shifted the bureau's principal mission from fighting crime to hunting subversives, spies, and saboteurs.

On May 20, 1940, the President's aide Major General Edwin M. “Pa” Watson poked his head into the Oval Office to tell FDR that Treasury secretary Morgenthau had just phoned with a problem normally outside Treasury's province. Hoover had gone to Morgenthau complaining that he was being thwarted in his counterespionage work by Attorney General Robert H. Jackson, his nominal boss and a staunch civil libertarian. Congress had outlawed wiretapping in the Communications Act of 1934, and in 1939 the Supreme Court upheld the ban. Citing this decision, Jackson had issued an order barring the FBI from wiretapping. Publicly at least, Hoover paid the order lip service. “I do not wish,” he said, “to be the head of an organization of potential blackmailers.” But the FBI chief was a far shrewder and tougher player than Robert Jackson. To enlist support, Hoover had taken his problem first to Morgenthau, the President's Hudson River neighbor and confidant, rather than directly to FDR. Morgenthau noted in his diary on May 20: “I spoke to J. Edgar Hoover and asked him whether he was able to listen in on spies by tapping the wires and he said no; that the order given him by Bob Jackson stopping him had not been revoked. I said I would go to work at once. He said he needed it desperately.”

Prior to Jackson's tenure, Hoover's agents had been wiretapping for years, and with Roosevelt's blessing. FDR had given Hoover an off-the-cuff order to track “Communist and fascist activities.” Thereafter Hoover located a loophole in the 1934 act to legitimatize the President's wishes. The Justice Department had ruled that wiretapping per se was not outlawed, but only the
disclosure
of wiretapped information. The FBI, in the name of national security, then began tapping the phones and bugging the rooms of diplomats, journalists, labor leaders, and political activists. Jackson's ruling had been designed precisely to plug that hole. It was this ban, Hoover complained, that handcuffed him in his battle against foreign agents. He told Morgenthau that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had asked his help in surveilling four Nazi spies “working in Buffalo across the Canadian borders,” but Jackson's order had stymied any investigation. Consequently, the frustrated Hoover had gone to ask Morgenthau to intervene at the White House. Pa Watson told the Treasury secretary that it was his understanding that wiretapping was illegal, but he promised to take Hoover's complaint to the President. FDR's answer was instantaneous: “Tell Bob Jackson to send for J. Edgar Hoover and order him to do it and a written memorandum will follow.” The memorandum went out the next day. Roosevelt's reasoning revealed a supple legal mind. “I have agreed with the broad purpose of the Supreme Court decision relating to wiretapping in investigations,” FDR declared, “wiretapping should not be carried out for the excellent reason that it is almost always bound to lead to abuse of civil rights. However, I am convinced that the Supreme Court never intended any dictum in the particular case which it decided to apply to grave matters involving the defense of the nation. It is, of course, well known that certain other nations have been engaged in the organization of so-called ‘fifth columns' in other countries and in preparation for sabotage, as well as in actual sabotage. . . . You are, therefore authorized and directed in such cases as you may approve, after the investigation of the need in each case, to authorize the necessary investigating agents that they are at liberty to secure information by listening devices direct to the conversation or other communications of persons suspected of subversive activities against the government of the United States, including suspected spies.” In short, never mind Congress, the Supreme Court, or the attorney general's qualms. The nation was in peril.

FDR was not yet done. He asked Attorney General Jackson later that May if there existed “any law or executive order under which it would be possible for us to open and inspect outgoing . . . or incoming mail to and from certain foreign nations” to uncover “Fifth Column activities—sabotage, antigovernment propaganda, military secrets, etc.” Jackson responded with the answer the President did not want to hear. Opening mail was illegal. Nevertheless, Hoover, who by now well understood his president, began training FBI agents in mail-opening techniques.

The furtive and dour Hoover and the gregarious and charming Roosevelt developed a surprising rapport, something approaching friendship. Whenever he arrived at the President's office, Hoover experienced the arms thrown up in welcome and the flattering use of his first name. As Sam Rosenman once described a Roosevelt greeting, “[H]e could make a casual visitor believe that nothing was so important to him that day as this particular visit, and that he had been waiting all day for this hour to arrive.” Ed Tamm recalled accompanying his boss to the White House as many as thirty times, and the director and FDR, Tamm said, “got along very, very well. There was always an obvious manifestation of friendship and admiration. Of course, Mr. Roosevelt had the ability to give that impression to everyone he dealt with, but he was
very, very
friendly to Mr. Hoover.” As Hoover himself put it, “I was very close to Franklin Delano Roosevelt personally and officially.”

Hoover was already the scourge of liberals that he would remain for the rest of his life. His wiretapping, bugging of rooms, surreptitious break-ins, “black bag jobs” in bureau parlance, outraged champions of civil liberties in Congress. None of the disapproval hurt him at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. On May 16, 1940, FDR was guest of honor at the annual black-tie White House Correspondents dinner. Spotting Hoover among the guests, Roosevelt called out from the dais, “Edgar, what are they trying to do to you on the Hill?” “I don't know, Mr. President,” Hoover answered. FDR made a thumbs-down gesture, and added with a voice loud enough for all to hear, “That's for them.” Of course, the two men were using each other. But, there was more to it than mutual exploitation. Francis Biddle, who by then had succeeded Robert Jackson as attorney general, and who had known Roosevelt at Groton as the most patrician of Grotonians, commented, almost in disbelief, “The two men liked and understood each other.”

Why should the President not have appreciated his federal police chief? Hoover appeared to be doing a splendid job, particularly at spy catching. German intelligence agents in the United States had been communicating with the Abwehr through a shortwave radio station on Long Island. Hoover's men uncovered the operation and, instead of shutting it down, took it over. Their informant had been William Sebold, a German-born naturalized American citizen. During a visit to Germany, Sebold had been contacted by Abwehr agents who threatened the lives of his family still living in Germany if he did not spy for them. He agreed, but immediately upon his return to the United States reported the contact to the FBI, which took him on as a double agent at fifty dollars per week. He was to pretend to be working loyally for the Fatherland by radioing intelligence via the Long Island station. Sebold's phony messages were exploited by the Departments of State, War, and Navy to feed false information to the Nazi regime. The flow of traffic coming from Germany tipped off the FBI to Abwehr intelligence targets and revealed new agents who had been recruited in America.

So complete was the President's confidence in Hoover that the relationship began to move into areas testing legitimacy. Earlier on the day that he had attended the White House Correspondents dinner, FDR had addressed a joint session of Congress hammering at his pet theme, “the treacherous use of the fifth column” and the necessity for America to strengthen its national defense. The speech was blatantly interventionist, and its isolationist critics were swift in counterattacking. Two days after addressing Congress, FDR brandished a sheaf of telegrams before his press secretary, Steve Early. The senders, he told Early, were opponents of a strong national defense. He wanted Early to give the telegrams to J. Edgar Hoover to “go over” the names and addresses. Whatever “go over” meant, Hoover had the senders checked against the FBI's dossiers and promptly reported his findings back to the President. Three days later, Roosevelt sent Early another batch with a note reading, “Here are some more telegrams to send to Edgar Hoover.” By the end of May, Hoover had checked out 131 of the President's critics, including two senators, Burton K. Wheeler and Gerald Nye, and America's aviator hero, Charles Lindbergh.

The President and Lindbergh, the Lone Eagle who flew the Atlantic solo in 1927, had met once, on April 20, 1939. Lindbergh, convinced of Germany's bright future and fast becoming the darling of the isolationists, was determined not to be taken in by Roosevelt's charm. At the end of fifteen minutes, he left the White House feeling that the President was “a little too suave, too pleasant, too easy.” Later Lindbergh told friends that the experience had been like talking to a man wearing a mask. From behind that mask, the President had studied America's boyish paragon of Yankee virtue with a measuring eye. He was aware of an incident five months before at which Lindbergh had accepted from the number two Nazi, Hermann Göring, the Service Cross of the Order of the German Eagle with Star. With Germany having sliced itself a piece of Czechoslovakia only two weeks before and with Nazi persecution of the Jews intensifying, acceptance of the medal had tainted Lindbergh in the judgment of many Americans including the President. Lindbergh's defense, that the medal had been sprung on him without warning, that the presentation had taken place at a dinner given by the American ambassador, and that to have refused it would have been an offense further straining U.S.-German relations, did not wash with Roosevelt.

Then, on May 19, 1940, two days before FDR was to deliver a speech on military preparedness to Congress, Lindbergh openly unfurled his own isolationist banner. In a nationwide Sunday night broadcast, he charged the Roosevelt administration with creating “a defense hysteria.” Nobody was threatening to invade the United States unless the “American people bring it on through their own quarreling and meddling with affairs abroad,” he warned. The only danger of war, Lindbergh claimed, came from “powerful elements in America who desire us to take part. They represent a small minority of the American people, but they control much of the machinery of influence and propaganda.” If a fifth column threatened the United States, Lindbergh said, it lay in Roosevelt's belligerence. After hearing the speech, FDR told Henry Morgenthau, “If I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this. I am absolutely convinced that Lindbergh is a Nazi.” He wrote Henry Stimson, who was about to join his cabinet, “When I read Lindbergh's speech, I felt that it could not have been better put if it had been written by Goebbels himself. What a pity that this youngster has completely abandoned his belief in our form of government and has accepted Nazi methods because apparently they are efficient.” Lindbergh's name entered the President's list of foes. J. Edgar Hoover was only too ready to maintain a watch on him for FDR, but not necessarily because of Lindbergh's politics. The FBI director already had a thick file on the flier hero, started after Lindbergh supposedly credited the Treasury Department, rather than the FBI, with solving the kidnapping and murder of his infant son.

FDR was sufficiently pleased with Hoover's zeal in monitoring Lindbergh and other administration critics that he sent the director an artfully vague note of gratitude. “Dear Edgar,” it began, “I have intended writing you for some time to thank you for the many interesting and valuable reports that you have made to me regarding the fast moving situations of the last few months.” Hoover's response bordered on the mawkish. “The personal note which you directed to me on June 14, 1940,” he wrote back, “is one of the most inspiring messages which I have ever been privileged to receive; and, indeed, I look upon it as rather a symbol of the principles for which our Nation stands. When the President of our country, bearing the weight of untold burdens, takes the time to express himself to one of his Bureau heads, there is implanted in the hearts of the recipients a renewed strength and vigor to carry on their tasks.” The letter contained an enclosure, the latest information on FDR's enemies.

The President's actions in employing his chief spy catcher against enemy agents and potential saboteurs were legitimate. His siccing Hoover on what he saw as opponents of military preparedness was, if less defensible, at least politically explainable. But the next use to which FDR put Hoover clearly breached an ethical wall. On June 25, 1940, Vincent Astor, conducting another off-the-books operation in New York, gave FDR some curious political intelligence. Wendell Willkie, liberal businessman and political neophyte, had been nominated as the Republican presidential candidate that month in Philadelphia. “Within the last few days,” Astor wrote, “Wendell Willkie has asked J. Edgar Hoover to run on his Vice Presidential ticket. Hoover's reply to this was that, in view of the many fine things that you had done for him and the FBI, he would consider anything of the sort an act of great disloyalty to you, and therefore would not entertain any such proposition.” Encouraged by Hoover's fealty, FDR had a little matter that he wanted the director to tend to, keeping an administration skeleton securely in the closet. Vice President Henry Wallace, possessed of an interest in mysticism and the occult, had corresponded with a White Russian spiritualist with whom he traded utopian plans for world peace. Wallace's handwritten letters to the Russian also supposedly contained disparaging observations about FDR. Wallace claimed that the correspondence was false. Nevertheless, the treasurer of the Republican National Committee had managed to obtain copies, and the RNC had a press release prepared to make public Wallace's indiscreet comments. Hoover was able to obtain the correspondence and the Republican release, which he showed to FDR, and which indeed brimmed with potential embarrassment for the President.