Joseph E. Persico (9 page)

How Roosevelt handled the potential threat is now known because of the discovery in recent years of a secret device he had concealed in his office. Inside a drawer of FDR's desk was a panel with buttons reading Record, Pause, Rewind, Idle, and Playback. They controlled a recording system in place since August 1940. The year before, FDR had been badly burned when he was misquoted after a private meeting in the Oval Office with a group of senators. Word had leaked out that the President had said America's defense perimeter began at the Rhine. The implication was that the United States would go to war if German troops crossed their own river. A White House stenographer, Henry Kannee, subsequently came up with a solution to avoid repetitions of such distortions—a secret record of what exactly was said inside the Oval Office. Kannee took the technical challenge to the RCA Corporation. Several months later, J. Ripley Kiel, an RCA inventor, found himself in the Oval Office while the President was away vacationing in New England. Under the scrutiny of Secret Service agents, Kiel drilled holes through the President's desk drawer and through the floor to a basement storage area. He concealed a small microphone in a lamp on the desk, then ran a wire from the lamp through the drilled holes to a machine in the basement. There a rudimentary tape recorder captured the spoken word onto a motion picture film's sound track.

On August 22, with the President back from his vacation, the hidden recording system was tested during a press conference in the Oval Office. As soon as the conference ended and the last reporter had filed out, the President asked a new staffer, Lowell Mellet, a former newspaperman himself, to close the door. FDR knew that his opponent Willkie, still married, was rumored to be involved with another woman, Irita Van Doren, a prominent literary critic in New York. Roosevelt began to speak in a conspiratorial tone, either forgetting or not caring that the recorder was running. “Ah, Lowell,” he began, “now, I agree with you that there is, so far as the old man goes [presumably himself], we can't use it publicly. . . . You can't have any of our principal speakers refer to it, but people down the line can do it properly. (Raps desk for emphasis.) I mean the Congress speakers and state speakers, and so forth. They can use your material to determine the fact that Willkie left his old . . . (inaudible whisper). All right. So long as it's none of us people at the top. Now, all right, if people try to play dirty politics on me, I'm willing to try it on other people. Now, you'd be amazed at how this story about the gal is spreading around the country.” The President mentioned a parallel, New York's former mayor Jimmy Walker, who, Roosevelt said, had an “extremely attractive little tart” but hired his estranged wife, for $10,000, to appear at his side during a corruption trial. “Now, Mrs. Willkie may not have been hired,” the machine recorded FDR saying, “but in effect she's been hired to return to Wendell and smile and make his campaign with him.”

As it turned out, the Republicans never issued the release about Wallace and the potentially damaging letters. Willkie may have been too principled to stoop to base tactics, or as has been suggested, a deal was struck—no mention of the Wallace correspondence by the Republicans in exchange for no mention of Willkie's extramarital affair by the Democrats.

On another occasion, FDR's secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, went to J. Edgar Hoover asking that he run a check on Willkie's ethnic roots. FDR recognized that in Willkie he was up against no Depression-haunted Herbert Hoover, no insular Alf Landon. Wendell Willkie was a six-foot, 220-pound bear of a man, a fresh, appealing star in the Republican firmament, a candidate possessing solid business credentials as president of the huge Commonwealth and Southern utilities corporation, yet a man of liberal bent, indeed a former Democrat. FDR looked across the ring to the other corner and saw his match. Willkie was, Ickes recalled FDR as saying, “the most formidable candidate for himself that the Republicans could have named.” At the time, a rumor was circulating that Willkie had changed his name from Wulkje. Ickes, acting for the President, asked the FBI to check out this story. If it proved true and it became known to the public, it could cost Willkie the Polish-American vote. This time, Hoover's trusted number three, Ed Tamm, advised his boss that carrying out the administration's political mischief would be “a serious mistake.” Hoover agreed, drew the line, and said no to Ickes.

The President, who publicly said he “had no wish to be a candidate” for a third term, was, however, moving energetically behind the scenes. On the same day that Ickes sought out Hoover, FDR had dispatched another close aide on a related mission. Adolf Berle typified the tough, brainy breed drawn to the New Deal. He had been the youngest graduate ever of Harvard Law School, then served as an intelligence officer in World War I. He later went into private practice, taught at Columbia, and became a member of Roosevelt's legendary Brain Trust. By 1938, the stocky, square-faced, stern-visaged Berle at age forty-three was appointed assistant secretary of state. So comfortable was he with the President that Berle addressed memos to FDR as “Dear Caesar.” The practice temporarily ended when Roosevelt directed an aide to “Get hold of Berle and tell him to be darn careful in what he writes me because the staff see his letters and they are highly indiscreet.” But soon, Berle resumed using the imperial salutation, which seemed not to displease the President all that much.

On the strength of his slender World War I experience, Berle had been assigned by FDR, along with a grab bag of other duties, to succeed George Messersmith in the hapless job of coordinating intelligence among the FBI, Army, and Navy. Temperamentally, he hardly seemed an ideal choice. As a strong civil libertarian, Berle found the assignment odious, referring to “this infernal counterespionage which I inherited from Messersmith.” His juggling act, he noted in his diary, “is to prevent a ‘fifth column' . . . trying to commit crimes; at the same time to prevent this machinery from being used hysterically, in violation of civil liberties. . . .”

The President now had another uncongenial task for Berle. The journalist Marquis Childs, FDR said, had tipped him off that former president Herbert Hoover, whom Roosevelt had defeated in 1932, might have behaved inappropriately during the Republican convention in Philadelphia that nominated Wendell Willkie. The ex-president, supposedly, had sent cablegrams to the former French premier Pierre Laval asking him to substantiate a report that Roosevelt once made a firm commitment to send American troops to fight in France. With the 1940 election approaching, with the President walking a narrow path between intervention and neutrality, this issue could prove a political land mine. FDR instructed Berle to go to the FBI and find out what messages Herbert Hoover might have exchanged with Laval. He did not care, Roosevelt claimed, about the man's personal political opinions or actions. But when he intruded himself into matters bearing on the foreign policy of the United States, that became the President's business. This time the FBI willingly accommodated FDR. J. Edgar Hoover had his staff run down the rumor and reported back that no Herbert Hoover correspondence with Laval had turned up.

Clearly, in using the FBI to dig into the comportment of Willkie and former president Hoover, FDR had used an ambitious FBI director to commingle foreign intelligence with domestic spying. His behavior exposed the steel underneath the sheath of patrician geniality. He was a Hudson River gentleman willing to employ the tactics of a street fighter. As one observer put it, Roosevelt gave “a carefully measured appearance of friendly irresolution.” But the man had not risen from a wheelchair to the presidency through lack of grit. Once he decided to run for a third term, FDR would unhesitatingly stomp on any hand reaching for his power.

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What J. Edgar Hoover knew, but was not about to reveal to the President, was that the United States faced no serious threat of internal subversion. Adolf Hitler had specifically ordered Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, not to conduct sabotage against the United States. No cargoes in American ships bound for Britain and no British properties in the United States were to be attacked, even though Britain was Germany's enemy. Hitler wanted no Black Tom provocations. The objective of German diplomacy in 1940 was to keep America out of the war. Hoover knew this and at one point noted that Germany “today relies far more on propaganda than on espionage and uses the mails and cables little for the latter purpose.” Even the spying that Germany thought it was carrying out in America was largely under Hoover's control through double agents. But if the President's belief that America faced sabotage and internal subversion would cause him to depend increasingly on Hoover, the director was all too willing to indulge the presidential prejudices.

One sensitively placed German officer was actually supplying rather than stealing secrets in America. At 1439 Massachusetts Avenue in Washington stood a gloomy pile of brown-red brick, its outer perimeter bristling with parapets and cast-iron railings, the German embassy. On the second floor, behind heavy velvet draperies, was the office of General Friedrich von Boetticher, a short, thick-bodied figure sporting a monocle, his red hair standing up in a stiff brush cut, his bull neck creased at the nape, his whole presence suggesting a Prussian in a B movie. Boetticher had been in Washington for seven years, sent there in Hitler's defiance of the Treaty of Versailles barring the posting of German military attachés abroad. Beginning in August 1940, Boetticher supplied U.S. War Department intelligence officers with bundles of sensitive information—German aircraft strength, operational plans, maps, and damage assessment reports on the bombing of Britain during the Blitz. Boetticher provided this intelligence, not through secret drops, codes, or cutouts, but by striding through the front entrance of the War Department's Munitions Building on Constitution Avenue in full uniform—riding breeches and boots, his barrel chest bursting with medals and Nazi insignia. The familiar figure was allowed to pass by the guards, his briefcase unsearched.

Boetticher knew exactly what he was doing. The Germans were aware that Churchill supplied Roosevelt with reports of British military operations. Boetticher's deliberate revelation of German secrets to the American military served two ends: to establish unmistakably the power of German arms and to contradict any of Churchill's reports unfavorable to Germany. In one pointed example, on September 15, 1940, the hottest day of the Blitz, the Luftwaffe sent 200 bombers protected by 300 fighters over England. The Royal Air Force claimed 180 kills. The Germans wanted the Roosevelt government to know that they had suffered only 60 aircraft lost. Hence, General von Boetticher's campaign of espionage in reverse.

The Germans did have one concealed objective in 1940, the defeat of Franklin Roosevelt. They had launched a two-pronged enterprise backed by secret funds. The operation had begun as early as September 14, 1939, when the President received a phone call from John L. Lewis, the powerful union leader, asking him to see a man named William Rhodes Davis. FDR's relations with Lewis had gone sour the year before, when Roosevelt bucked Thomas Kennedy, the candidate of the United Mine Workers for governor of Pennsylvania. Instead, FDR had supported Charles A. Jones, the State Democratic Committee's choice. In a close primary, the Lewis candidate won anyway. Still the President had offended a proud man. Thus when Lewis called a year later, Roosevelt chose not to alienate the labor leader any further and agreed to see the unknown Davis the next day.

William Rhodes Davis was an oil operator whose most spectacular deal to date had been to persuade the Mexican government to ship millions of dollars' worth of oil to the fuel-short German navy. However, this lucrative arrangement had ended when the war broke out and Mexican suppliers faced the British naval blockade. The resilient Davis hoped to resume the sale of oil by engineering a peace plan. Just before noon on September 15, FDR greeted a well-dressed, white-haired, ruddy-faced visitor oozing the manners of the Old South. Davis had expected to see Roosevelt alone, but found him with Adolf Berle. FDR had called Berle the day before, as soon as Lewis had hung up, and told him to be on hand so that “a careful record be had of the conversation” with Davis. Berle had already warned Roosevelt that he considered Davis a Nazi agent and the State Department had a dossier on the man dating back to 1928. Still, FDR listened to Davis's proposal. Through his overseas contacts, the oilman explained, he had become close to Hermann Göring. In fact, just days before, the Führer's deputy had cabled him to sound out the President about a peace proposal. “The Germans desire to make peace,” Davis told FDR, “provided certain of their conditions were met.” The President nodded in rhythm with his visitor's words, a gesture commonly misinterpreted to mean agreement, when it signaled only that he was listening. The Hitler regime wanted to know, Davis explained, “whether the President might not either act as arbitrator or assist in securing some neutral nation who might so act?”

It was not FDR's style to turn off any source of information; and so he led Davis on, telling him that he already had “various intimations that he might intervene in the European difficulty,” but he would have to be invited officially by a government before acting. Davis saw an opportunity to meet that condition. He told the President that the Germans wanted to confer with him again within the next eleven days. Would the President want him to report back when he returned from Europe? “Naturally, any information that would shed light on the situation would interest me,” the President answered, and the meeting ended.

Given his tainted credentials, Davis's peace mission, not surprisingly, withered. The indefatigable finagler, however, simply altered course 180 degrees. He knew that the Nazis loathed Roosevelt. In his meeting with Göring, he assured him that, through his influence with the powerful John L. Lewis, any bid by Roosevelt for a third term could, with enough money, be defeated. Göring liked that. Roosevelt might throw an occasional bone to American neutralist public opinion, but his anti-Nazi sentiments were all too obvious and their depth confirmed by the secret FDR-Churchill correspondence known to the Germans through Tyler Kent's leaks. Goering estimated that, should Roosevelt decide to run, it would cost up to $150 million to defeat him. The blustering Reichsmarschall told Davis that he was prepared to spend whatever it took. Göring next brought the scheme to Hitler and won the Führer's enthusiastic consent. In a final meeting with Davis, Göring promised to send soon the first installment of cash to defeat a Roosevelt reelection bid. Germany clearly lacked the foreign exchange to provide anything like the sums that Göring mentioned. Yet, he did manage to scrape together enough for the first gambit. The sum of $160,000 was funneled through Davis to an unidentified Pennsylvania Democratic politician who was to use the money to bribe his state's delegates to the July Democratic convention to oppose FDR.