America's Great Game (5 page)

The young Kim Roosevelt no doubt encountered other images of the Orient besides Kipling stories and Lawrence of Arabia. American consumer society of the 1920s was replete with Orientalia, ranging from King Tut to Valentino’s Sheik. But Kim was not just any American. While most boys of his generation grew up “with a fantasy of striking out Babe Ruth,” so one of his sons observed later, “his childish fantasies had to do with shooting tigers, . . . or exploring the Euphrates.” Not only had Kim heard of Tut, but his aunt, Mary Elizabeth Willard, married the nephew of George Herbert, Fifth Earl of Carnarvon, the English aristocrat who financed the excavation of the Egyptian boy king’s tomb and died shortly after, reputedly from the “Curse of Tutankhamun.” “I’ve read of the East for years unnumbered,” Kim himself explained in a poem published in the May 1931 issue of
The American Boy–Youth’s Companion
, “I’ve learned about it in poems and verses, . . . I’ve talked about it with men who’ve been there.” Long before he went to the Middle East in person as a US intelligence officer, Kim Roosevelt had a vivid notion of what the place was like based on stories of British imperial adventure.
¹¹

IF YOUNG KIM ROOSEVELT WAS
not already sufficiently exposed to the culture of the British empire by his family background, then Groton School for Boys assuredly finished the job. Founded in 1884, Groton was the creation of Episcopalian clergyman Endicott Peabody, who was still headmaster when Kim entered the First Form in 1928, at the age of twelve. The scion of an eminent New England family, Peabody had been educated in Britain at an elite public school, Cheltenham College, and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he thoroughly absorbed the Victorian values of the day: self-discipline, sportsmanship, and Christian “manliness.” After returning to the United States and entering a seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Peabody traveled west to the Arizona territory, where he spent the first six months of 1882 as rector of Tombstone’s Episcopal Church. At a time when many members of the East Coast aristocracy were worrying about the possible “enervation”
of their class by the luxuriousness of modern life, a western ordeal like this was a rite of passage for patrician young men. Theodore Roosevelt himself worked for two years in the 1880s as a cowboy in the Dakota Badlands. It seems that Peabody, with his tall, muscular frame and fierce sense of moral rectitude, acquitted himself very well among Tombstone’s frontier roughs. His reputation for virile Victorianism preceded him when he returned east, and it was not long before many of the “best” families in New England and New York were sending their sons to be toughened up at the boarding school he established in the Massachusetts countryside, among them all four of TR’s sons.

Modeled after the English public schools, Groton had another purpose, enshrined in its motto,
Cui servire est regnare
, or “For whom to serve is to rule.” While some Victorian Americans worried about the softness of their sons, others were beginning to imagine a new role for their country in the world, that of a more vigorous and thrusting successor to the British Empire. For imperialists such as the US senator Henry Cabot Lodge and, of course, President Theodore Roosevelt himself, boarding schools like Groton were training grounds for young Americans destined to govern both at home and, increasingly, abroad. Indeed, after US victory in the 1898 war with Spain, Lodge explicitly encouraged Peabody to create “a class of men precisely like those employed by England in India” to administer America’s new island possessions in the Caribbean and Pacific, and the others farther afield that were bound to follow. TR personally saw to it that Groton performed this function, turning up at Sunday chapel to exhort the boys to “use aright the gifts given to them” and “render service to the State,” even if doing so meant sacrificing other ambitions. The message clearly sunk in, as an astounding number of Grotties ended up serving in high public office. The first thousand graduates included nine ambassadors, three senators, two governors, two secretaries of state, and one president (the Oyster Bay Roosevelts’ Hyde Park cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt). Kim Roosevelt’s generation would produce an astonishingly large number of senior officers in the CIA.
¹²

Admission to this elite came at a price: the austere regimen of daily life at the school. Boys slept in bare, six-by-nine-foot dormitory cubicles and were awakened every day by a bell rung at five minutes before seven. Next came a cold shower, breakfast, and then chapel (twice on Sunday). Class, which went from nine to one o’clock, consisted principally
of Sacred Studies (taught by Peabody), Classics, and European languages and history, with an emphasis on the rise of Anglo-Saxon civilization. The boys’ academic performance was constantly monitored, with the headmaster himself sending parents unsparing monthly reports.

What really mattered, however, was what took place during the afternoon, on the school’s playing fields. Peabody was skeptical about the value of learning for learning’s sake: “I’m not sure I like boys who think too much,” he once pronounced. He believed sports, especially football, which he coached personally, were a truer test of a pupil’s character. Indeed, at Groton, as in the English public schools, games served as a metaphor for life in general, so that Peabody, known as “the Rector,” disapproved when star quarterback (and future CIA officer) Tracy Barnes showed a rebellious streak, writing his father, “We must work together to impress on Tracy the necessity of ‘playing the game’ fairly.” Sports were also strongly associated with the business of empire building. “The time given to athletic contests . . . and the injuries incurred on the playing field are part of the price the English-speaking world has paid for being world-conquerors,” Henry Cabot Lodge stated, lumping together Britons and Americans as one nation. It was no coincidence that the Anglo-Russian imperial rivalry in Central Asia was known as the Great Game.
¹³

Kim Roosevelt arrived at Groton only a few years behind Barnes and, unsurprisingly perhaps, seems at first not to have coped well. “It is very dull up here,” he wrote his mother, Belle, in October 1928. “I wish I was in Oyster Bay fishing for flounders with Willard” (a reference to his younger brother, who would follow him to Groton two years later). The unfavorable assessment was mutual. In December, after Kim had been ranked 27 out of 28 in his form, Endicott Peabody sent his parents a withering report. “He has ability,” noted the Rector. However, “we find him careless and difficult to correct.” Things were no better come the winter term. Kim “was not manifesting a spirit of obedience,” wrote William E. Mott, secretary of the school’s Disciplinary Committee, to Belle. Young Kermit had acquired fifteen disciplinary points or “blackmarks,” only five short of the twenty that would require his being sent home. Kim’s own letters home had by now acquired a plaintive tone. “When are you coming up here?” he asked his mother. “I was in the infirmary with a slight cold for a day. . . . The snow up here is one foot deep.”
¹⁴

By May, however, things had begun to look up for Kim. “I think the spring term is much the nicest, and have been having a great time,” he wrote Belle. His grades had improved as well, although he lagged behind in Latin (the Latin master’s fault, he assured his parents, not his own). In much the same way that Kipling’s fictional character Kim, sent to an English school in Lucknow against his will, eventually thrives in his new environment, so the initially unruly Kim Roosevelt settled down at Groton, learning to play by the rules of the game. It helped that he was naturally interested in sports, his letters home abounding with enthusiastic references to various contests with rival schools, including the annual football game against the dreaded St. Mark’s. His own athletic exploits were confined mainly to sprinting and tennis (a game he played throughout his life, with ferocious competitiveness) as opposed to team games. He also began to manifest some genuine academic ability, especially in English and history, regularly contributing poems to the
Grotonian
. These now appear rather tame, conventional efforts, but interesting nonetheless, if only because of what we know about his later career. One, untitled, reads: “The wanderlust has got me
I must follow in the footsteps of Ulysses
Who was the greatest of all vagabonds.”
¹⁵

Kim graduated from Groton in 1934, having earned excellent marks in the Harvard entrance exams. “Mother wanted to call the Rector up right away and tell him what she felt with regard to his gloomy forebodings,” a proud Kermit Roosevelt wrote his son. Later, Kim would distance himself from the Groton clique at the CIA: “I was not part of that gang,” he recalled. Certainly, the adult Kim was not one for the old school tie—he was in fact something of a loner—but it is hard to believe that Endicott Peabody did not leave his stamp on the boy. The two men stayed in touch long after Kim’s graduation, corresponding regularly, in intimate, almost familial terms, until Peabody’s death in 1944. It is surely telling that, when the time came for him to pick a school to which to send his own sons, Kim chose Groton.
¹⁶

FOR GRADUATES OF CHURCH SCHOOLS
like Groton, student life at an Ivy League school during the 1930s offered an undreamed-of degree of personal freedom, and as a Harvard freshman Kim Roosevelt was determined not to miss out on the fun. His grandmother, TR’s widow, Edith, loaned him a car, and he used it to drive parties of friends, such as
his Groton classmate Benjamin Welles (son of FDR’s undersecretary of state, Sumner Welles), out into the New England countryside. There was Radcliffe College and its suitable young ladies, with whom Kim, who had inherited some of his father’s good looks, was clearly popular, writing his mother that he hoped “some day life may become less complicated. . . . Two girls don’t help at all.” And there was the promise of more larks to come: the song-and-dance antics of “the Pudding” (the Hasty Pudding Theatricals society) and serious drinking at the Porcellian or “Pork,” the most desirable of “final” clubs for Harvard men. (TR and Kermit Roosevelt had, of course, belonged to both the Pudding and the Pork, and Kim’s correspondence with his parents suggests some anxiety about whether he would gain admission to the latter, a good indication of its exclusiveness.) Kim’s freshman year was rounded off with a July 1935 hunting expedition in the rainforest of Brazil’s Matto Grosso, where, despite a crash landing that wrecked one of his plane’s propellers, an incident he reported to his parents with studiedly cool bravado, he succeeded in bagging a good deal of game, including a red wolf. So successful was this trip that he and his father discussed the possibility of undertaking another Roosevelt father-and-son voyage up the River of Doubt the following summer.
¹⁷

During Kim’s sophomore year, however, when he was nineteen, things grew more serious. In December 1935, he told his mother he was, “to all intents and purposes,” engaged to a Radcliffe student, eighteen-year-old Mary Lowe “Polly” Gaddis of Milton, Massachusetts. Now resolved on graduating as quickly as possible, Kim focused on his schoolwork, abandoning plans for the River of Doubt expedition in order to take summer courses, and opting to join the Signet Society, a club devoted, at least partly, to intellectual and literary endeavors (T. S. Eliot, later Kim’s favorite poet, was a member). His professors took note, and by January 1937 they were encouraging him to consider an academic career. Kim graduated that summer,
cum laude
, not bad given that he had gone through in three rather than four years. Shortly afterward he married Polly and began teaching in the Harvard History Department, apparently with some success. “Kim has certainly achieved great things in a very short period,” noted Endicott Peabody approvingly in February 1938. “I do hope he will carry on the work for which he has shown so great an aptitude.”
¹⁸

Kim himself was not so sure about the academic life. Counteracting his natural scholarly talents and inclinations were a host of other
considerations. His future at Harvard was uncertain, and he soon had a young family to support: Kermit III arrived in 1938, followed two years later by Jonathan. It didn’t help that his father, Kermit Sr., experienced a series of business failures during the 1930s that forced him to eat into Belle’s family assets. Indeed, the Oyster Bay, Republican branch of the Roosevelt family was not doing well generally, suffering from a sense of collective decline that was only heightened by the spectacular rise of the Democrat FDR and the Hyde Park Roosevelts. Kermit, always the most sensitive of TR’s progeny, started to go off the rails, drinking heavily and beginning an affair with a German masseuse that led to long periods when he was incommunicado with his family. In his absence, Belle tried hard to conceal the cracks in their marriage, socializing hectically in Washington and ingratiating herself with FDR’s White House. Kim and his brother Willard, who had followed him from Groton to Harvard, were sufficiently grown up that these events did not cause them any obvious emotional damage; however, their younger siblings, Clochette and Dirck, never successfully launched themselves into adult life (the troubled Dirck would eventually commit suicide in 1953), and Kim found himself increasingly involved in their care and support.

Added to all these financial and family worries were Kim’s love of adventure, an appetite unlikely to be satisfied in the cloisters of academe, and the familial expectation that Roosevelt men sacrifice all in order to serve their country. After all, his uncles Ted and Archie had both been wounded in World War I, and the aviator Quentin shot down over France and killed. With war clouds massing in Europe, this last impulse was growing stronger than ever.

In the end, Kim found a rather elegant solution to his dilemma. His doctoral research at Harvard concerned the role of propaganda in the English civil war, a choice of subject perhaps made with one eye on its potential relevance to wartime government service. He carried on this project after moving to Pasadena in 1939 in order to teach history at the California Institute of Technology. Although he and his young family enjoyed the perks of life in Southern California, such as horseback riding in the San Gabriel Mountains, there was a sense of marking time about this period of Kim’s life. The previous year, his father, desperate to redeem himself in the eyes of his family, had departed on an espionage mission for the president, inspecting Japanese installations in the Pacific while cruising on Vincent Astor’s yacht (Kermit and Astor had been collecting intelligence on an amateur basis since the 1920s as members
of the Room, an informal club of society spies). Then, when war was declared in 1939, Kermit dashed off to join up with the British army again, this time leading an expeditionary force into Norway. Kim, meanwhile, wrote letters to his mother back east, asking that if she were “to run into anyone connected with Intelligence,” she “find out whether they want young men who are well read in, and very critical of, most modern writing on propaganda.” With Kermit increasingly out of the picture, the well-connected Belle seems to have taken on the role of her much-loved eldest son’s career advisor and booster in Washington.
¹⁹