The Irregulars (23 page)

Marsh argued that the initiative for the negotiations had been transferred to New York banking interests, and he claimed there was a close tie-up between General Breton B. Somervell, who commanded the Service of Supply, and Bernard Baruch. Taking a page straight out of the old Gould-Vanderbilt railroad tactics, Marsh believed Baruch was in bed with Wall Street moneymen and entrepreneurs like Juan Terry Trippe, the ambitious forty-four-year-old president and founder of Pan American Airways, who were greedily eyeing the future of civil aviation and wanted all the business for themselves. The press—particularly the Luce publications
Time, Life
, and
Fortune
—wrote admiringly of Trippe, who was invariably referred to as “America’s arch strategist of foreign airways,” and even savvy members of the administration fell sway to the legend of romantic pioneering that attached itself to the great Pan Am enterprise, so that some liked to think of it as America’s “chosen instrument.” Marsh distrusted Trippe, who was known as a ruthless competitor even by the standards of the relatively youthful, rough-and-tumble airline industry. He had almost single-handedly led his airline’s rapid expansion into five continents and was suspected by some critics of carrying on a “high and devious diplomacy,” preaching the patriotic function of building air bases in South America for the hemisphere’s defense, while privately calculating their future benefit to his corporation’s bottom line. “There will always be wars,” Trippe maintained. “We must not just give things away for nothing. We must know our interests in the future as well as the British do.”

According to Marsh, Trippe and his team of iron-willed monopolists wanted to get rid of British competition and “let their hearts bleed” about imperialism and oppressed subjects whenever they could. Pan Am already had the inside track over the other numerous American aviation interests and was working to make sure that when the bell rang they had a commanding position in the skies and would be the ones enjoying air sovereignty. Dahl, who favored free competition and worldwide freedom of transit, felt Marsh’s appraisal of the situation was probably accurate and believed the scope of international aviation was far too great to be trusted to any single group or pool of interests.

An increasingly sensitive political issue before Congress was whether American foreign aviation would be in the hands of a monopoly company or divided among different commercial airline companies. Pan Am was, or already thought of itself as, the American air industry and had been very successful in making its case for monopoly ownership and control. Trippe and company wanted to seize the tremendous post-war assets of the government, namely the engine works and patents. They wanted a minimum of government regulation on the industry and a maximum of government protection through subsidies, policy, and pressure. There was plenty of support for the so-called New York plan among private financiers in London, who opposed the government control imposed after the blitz. As one of Marsh’s London sources reported: “Entrenched position for the American private control plan post war is growing very rapidly. Berle’s stature in the State Department is growing very rapidly. Over here we do not see how post war Air can be handled except by the official Governments of Russia, Great Britain, and the United States. But with Russia left out and American Government policy being dictated by private interests we do not know where we are at.”

Marsh did not fault Beaverbrook for the way things were unfolding, but he felt it was possible that as “a financial operator” he was naturally inclined toward private enterprise, and that these considerations may have distracted him from the “global outlook” with which the negotiations had opened. As usual Marsh was full of good ideas and leads that Dahl and his colleagues could follow up on in order to find out why the talks were bogging down. To show their gratitude for his help, at the end of one lunch Dahl and a fellow BSC agent “let it slip” that the president was unhappy with Admiral William Leahy, his chief of staff, and was planning to get rid of him. Marsh seemed inordinately pleased with this scoop, and Dahl was certain he would go home and straightaway telephone Wallace.

At the end of September, Dahl arranged a chaste lunch with Clare Luce, the great American expert in postwar air policy, and her husband, hoping to sound them out on a variety of topics. The congresswoman, while never admitting any fault, seemed to regret her “globaloney” speech and implied it had been “a mistake.” She had apparently attracted strong support from isolationist groups—particularly after a glib put-down of the New Deal suggestions for global planning as “Dazzle-Dust”—which she said had never been her intention and which she had quickly disowned. After the heated controversy that had followed, she had been forced to retreat somewhat from her original position and was obliged to say that she hoped the British and the United Nations might come to fair agreements. Mrs. Luce made a point of heaping praise on Wallace, though the
Time
publisher was noticeably more reserved. Henry Luce knew that with the presidential election only a year away, and with Roosevelt possibly seeking an unprecedented fourth term, the controversial vice president had a rough road ahead of him. (Luce no doubt also knew that his magazine intended to throw its support behind FDR’s old friend House Speaker Sam Rayburn.) When informed later by Marsh that Mrs. Luce had spoken very highly of him at lunch with the British air attaché, Wallace knew better than to believe the Republican mouthpiece had moderated her views. He told Marsh that Mrs. Luce was up to her old tricks and “had a purpose in talking to Dahl that way.”

Marsh agreed. To his way of thinking, Clare Boothe Luce was a brassy interloper who had never had an original thought. She had once been “Baruch’s girl,” and he quoted a well-known Washington vulgarian to the effect that “Clare does not pee without asking Barney.” Baruch, who liked to call himself an “adviser to presidents,” with all the condescension that implied, was Clare’s personal “brain trust,” and her view of the world was cribbed from the Baruch view. Moreover, according to Marsh, one of Clare’s biggest supporters during her first run for Congress was Sam Pryor, a vice president at Pan Am who worked for Trippe—both of them were Yale men, like her husband—which helped place her “globaloney” speech in its proper context. This was also why
Time
correspondents all flew Pan Am. Pryor was her Greenwich, Connecticut, neighbor and a wealthy patron of the Republican Party, and like many conservatives he disapproved of Wallace’s advocacy of “internationalism” and efforts to spread the New Deal around the world. There was little doubt that Pryor had coached the congresswoman (a little spy reported having seen him delivering packets of Pan Am propaganda to her hotel room), which accounted for her sudden erudition in matters of aviation and her surprisingly sharp attack on Wallace. As always, this exhaustive reading of the tea leaves was Marsh at his best and the reason Dahl continued to consult him at every turn.

Keeping a close watch on Wallace in an election year involved a lot of nanny work and kept Dahl hopping. The British regarded the vice president as a growing political problem and wanted reports on all his activities and poll results. Adding to their grave misgivings about his postwar views, and their impatience with his frequent attacks on British imperialism and especially on Churchill, was the fact that Wallace’s public image was increasingly becoming a handicap for FDR. Over the summer, Wallace had become embroiled in an ugly public brawl with Jesse Jones, the secretary of commerce, who ran the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), which shared authority over export and import licensing prerogatives with the State Department and several other wartime agencies. Wallace, as usual staking out the moral high ground, wanted the confusing division of powers to be clarified and demanded “clear-cut authority” for the Board of Economic Warfare (BEW), so it could carry out its war work effectively, provide loans to impoverished countries, and not be hampered by waste and inefficiency. Wallace was dedicated to bringing about economic and social development in Latin America, long exploited by American business, which might prepare the whole area for participation as equals in postwar regional and global organizations. He believed that the United States had to align itself with forces of democracy everywhere and had a responsibility to foster change, which in his view was the main purpose of the war.

Wallace’s insistence on having the upper hand set off a bitter internal turf battle within the administration, arousing the opposition of Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who did not appreciate the vice president’s intrusion into foreign policy, as well as Jesse Jones. Two of the most powerful conservatives in Washington, both disagreed with Wallace’s political and social objectives. Hull complained that the political changes Wallace had in mind for Latin America might lead to revolution and constituted too much interference. Exacerbating tensions, Wallace and Jones were old rivals and had vied for the vice-presidential nomination at the last convention. Jones stubbornly defended his domain, and he and his bankers dug in, intentionally dragging their feet on loans and paperwork so as to impede the BEW’s progress, making it impossible for the board to secure loans, acquire strategic materials, and acquire the necessary funding to aid underdeveloped nations in Latin America. Before long, allegations of bad faith and political smears of all kinds were being hurled back and forth between the heads of various federal agencies faster than the newspapers could print them. As the accusations escalated, the attacks became more personal, culminating in Wallace charging Jones with intentionally “hamstringing bureaucracy” and causing delays in a vital program, and Jones countercharging that Wallace had crossed the line by calling him “a traitor.”

The protracted public feud created, in the words of Robert Sherwood, “an alarming sense of disunity and incompetence in very high places” and infuriated the president. On July 15 Roosevelt had finally had enough: he sent Wallace and Jones identical letters essentially relieving them of their war jobs and informing them that the BEW had been abolished and its myriad responsibilities, along with several RFC agencies, were being consolidated in the newly created Office of Economic Warfare, to be headed by Leo T. Crowley, a Wisconsin Democrat. Jones immediately declared himself the victor, and the press speculated that Wallace’s firing marked the end of his political future. Wallace bore his punishment stoically, confining his public response to one sentence: “In wartime no one should question the overall wisdom of the Commander in Chief.”

Speculation about whether or not FDR would run again in 1944, and how much Wallace’s missteps had hurt his chances of remaining on the Democratic ticket, dominated the editorial pages and journals of opinion. By fall tempers had cooled considerably, and Roosevelt and Wallace were back on cordial terms, but his position was seen as tenuous at best. Wallace, with constant encouragement from Marsh, hoped that “the war in Washington” (as headline writers had dubbed the feud) could be put behind him and that he could begin to build support for his nomination.

Marsh was convinced FDR would seek a fourth term. FDR had also been slow to commit himself to running for a third time in 1940—it had never been done before—and there had been the same swirling rumors then that he was tired and unwell. Marsh told Wallace of a remark made by the president’s son Elliott: “Pop has tried for twenty-five years to become president and he is going to keep on being president as long as he can.” To a practical thinker like Marsh, the challenge was to make sure Wallace was still the one sitting next to the throne at the convention. Marsh knew Wallace was feeling uncertain and worried that most of FDR’s close advisers were against him. To bolster his confidence, Marsh recounted a conversation that his friend Ralph Ingersoll had had with Mrs. Roosevelt at the end of October, during which she described the vice president in very positive terms, saying, “Henry Wallace has come out in the last year. He is showing signs of definite leadership. That pleases me.”

Not surprisingly, in early November, British intelligence in Washington received word that the prime minister wanted a fresh check on the progress of the 1944 elections. Churchill wanted Roosevelt to run and win, but above all he did not want any surprises. As Dahl told Marsh, it was a safe bet that if the old man was asking, something was in the wind. In one of his many multipage memos to Wallace, Marsh reported that there was “some activity in the British Embassy extending to the New York office of British Intelligence seeking to determine Roosevelt’s intentions regarding a fourth term.” After checking with his own New York contacts, Marsh wrote Wallace:

The supposition is that Republican sources near Willkie may have sold British political Intelligence at New York the proposition that FDR might not stand fourth term if war is being concluded in Europe, and that Willkie deserves more attention. The Dewey statement favoring Anglo-American collaboration may have been loosely connected because it is obvious [sic] that uncertainty regarding FDR which would cause British judgment to cover and contact Dewey and Willkie with increasing care.

 

For his part, Dahl needed to keep his superiors informed about the various contenders and track their respective odds. It was a wide field: on the Democratic side, there was Roosevelt, followed by Wallace, the former governor of Indiana Paul McNutt, James Byrnes of South Carolina, and Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas. On the Republican side there was Willkie, Dewey, Governor John Bricker of Ohio, and Senator Robert Taft, also of Ohio. The polls showed Roosevelt was more popular than Dewey, and Dewey more popular than Willkie. Of even more pressing concern was if FDR was up to it, who would be his running mate? Possible candidates included Wallace, Byrnes, Douglas, Rayburn, and Senator Harry Truman of Missouri. Wallace still had Roosevelt’s tacit support, along with that of the party rank and file, but he was regarded as an extremist by so many senior congressional leaders that it was only a matter of time before they started pressuring FDR to dump him.