Presidential Mission

by Upton Sinclair

  Lanny replied: “Oh, yes, I was at the Paris Peace Conference. I remember how you came over to try to persuade them to go in and lick the Bolsheviks before it was too late.” A broad grin spread over the old gentleman’s face. There was a lot that he might have said if he had known this American better; but possibly he, too, might be tainted with Red ideas.

  He went on to talk about that dinner in the White House where he had renewed his acquaintance with Lanny. He remembered “that fellow Adamic”—pronouncing his name with the accent on the second syllable, perhaps because that gave a hint of what he would like to do to him. He wanted to know if there was any chance of the President’s taking up that “fool idea” of sending “democratic Americans” over to run the Middle European lands from which they had originally come. “They would turn out to be a bunch of Socialists,” declared the staunch old Tory, “and the Communists would be running them.” Lanny quoted what the author had said to him, that some day he was going to publish an account of that dinner. The P.M. growled: “I ate the dinner, but I don’t have to read the book!”

  29

  Home Is the Sailor

  I

  Lanny received notice that a seat was available for him on the plane to Lisbon. He flew the familiar route, and was warm again, after being very cold in the half-heated Castle. He looked down on the bright blue waters around the Azores, and again on the island-dotted harbor of Hamilton, the town in which automobiles were being admitted for the first time. Bermuda was being Americanized.

  Lanny was going back to his wife and baby, and his thoughts were on them. The baby would be more than four months old; Lanny thought how Laurel had wanted him because he would be Lanny’s son. This aspect of parenthood had never come into his mind before—the love for a child being due to love for the other parent. He loved his little daughter, not because she was Irma’s child, but because she was his own. But Laurel had said that she wanted Lanny’s child, and she had her wish. This thought of her made her seem closer to him. It made his young son something they shared, the symbol of their love for each other.

  He hoped the young Lanny would be like Laurel, who was kind, unselfish, and clear-minded. Yet he admitted that he had a somewhat egotistical desire that this son might closely resemble his father. He wanted to see himself as a child again in this child. Now he told himself that he must not hold this idea; he must hold the other—that his boy’s mother would live again for him in his son. He would have more of Laurel that way! He found himself smiling with amusement at this line of thought; a strange idea, that wanting his son to be a reincarnation of the woman he loved should be a sort of renunciation! Never mind, he said to himself, you will live in your work; you have helped the Chief in this hour of world travail.

  Lanny’s thoughts moved on. How fortunate he was to have found a woman who would leave him free to do his real work! She must have suffered cruelly during that time when he was “missing”—just as he had suffered when Trudi had disappeared. Did a man have the right to cause a woman so much grief? Laurel had said that he did. She loved his cause and his zeal for humanity. Because she had the same zeal, she would always understand him and never be resentful. So they could be happy; and now his mind became occupied with the problem of how to make her happy, to give her some sort of holiday, as repayment for her sufferings. He had a clear sense of having earned a holiday himself, and he meant that they should have it together.

  II

  Set down at the Washington airport, the P.A. called Baker, but the President’s man wasn’t in; Lanny left word that “Traveler” would call in one hour. Then he was free to try New York, and after some wartime delay he heard Laurel’s voice. Her excitement was painful; she couldn’t keep from crying, and that brought tears to his eyes. “Lanny, I wouldn’t give you up! I never did give up hope!” He told her: “It was terrible, but I was in a position where I couldn’t possibly get word to you. I will tell you about it.”

  “Are you all right?” she wanted to know, and he assured her that he was entirely well. He asked about the most wonderful baby in the world, and learned that it, too, was thriving. He couldn’t say yet when he would be able to leave Washington; he had to make a report to two different persons. “I’ll let you know as soon as I can,” he said. “How is the book coming on?”

  “The book? I finished it, but then I forgot that it existed. How could I think about a book when they told me my husband was dead?”

  “Darling,” he went on, “we’re not supposed to talk more than three minutes. Phone Robbie for me and tell him I’m here, and we’ll come to see him soon. I’ll probably take a plane to New York tomorrow afternoon. I’ll let you know.”

  Lanny tried to reach Baker again, and this time got him. The President’s man said that he would get word to the Boss—no names over the telephone—and Traveler was to call again in two hours. Traveler said he would have to spend the night, and Baker told him what hotel to go to and promised to have a room reserved. That was the way with the V.I.P.’s and their families—sometimes even their dogs!

  Lanny had time for a bath, and for dinner, and to read the evening papers and discover that the Russians were being slowly brought to a halt in the Ukraine, and that the British and Americans were holding on desperately in Tunisia, bombed incessantly in their muddy foxholes. The Germans had moved an army across from Sicily, and Rommel was holding fast to what was known as the Mareth line, near the seafront at the border of Tripoli. More than four months had passed since Lanny had seen the Americans come ashore, full of hope and determination; they had been learning the bitter lesson that war is not all victories, but tedious waiting, and seemingly endless toil, repairing roads and bridges, laying new airfields, and bringing up supplies, mostly in the night, to dodge the bombs. All the dirty work that men had done at home, but much more of it, and under conditions of exposure and discomfort such as they had never dreamed.

  The son of Budd-Erling, clean and elegant, sat reading this news in an overstaffed armchair in a well-heated hotel room. He thought, as usual, that he was far too comfortable; but was he to wish himself back in the Sahara oven or the Donnerstein icebox? No, he would take things as they came, the thunder and the sunshine. Promptly on the minute he called the President’s man, and was told to be on the corner near his hotel in fifteen minutes. He could guess that F.D.R. had put off some other engagement, or perhaps the viewing of a film, in order to hear how his P.A. 103 had managed to get from the Sahara Desert to Stockholm.

  III

  In the familiar large bedroom there was an open fire burning, and the “Governor” had on his large blue cape for protection against the “sniffles”—but he had a few, even so. His face so lighted up with pleasure that it was only after a while that Lanny noticed how tired he really looked; he reached over and gave his friend one of those hearty handclasps and then exclaimed: “So you had your way and went into Germany!”

  “How did you know that?” Lanny asked, and the answer was: “Winston told me last night.”

  “Believe me, Governor,” the P.A. hastened to explain, “I had no idea of disobeying orders; it was my only way. I had to parachute in the desert, and the caravan that picked me up took me into German-held Tunisia. I had to chew up your visiting card and swallow it.”

  The hard-worked executive opened his mouth and enjoyed a roar of laughter. “How did it taste?”

  “Sort of rough and sticky. I had to get it down fast because there was a German roadblock ahead of us, and I had to be ready to slide off my camel and say ‘Heil Hitler!’”

  “Tell me the story,” exclaimed the other. “Don’t leave out a single detail!”

  That was quite an assignment. It started in Algiers and led by a rocky and sun-scorched route to Tozeur, and from there to Tunis, Rome, Nürnberg, and an unnamed place in the western Ukraine; then Stubendorf, Berlin, Karinhall, Stettin and Stockholm—quite a journey. “I’ve thought it all over, Governor,” remarked the traveler, “and I’m embarrassed to realize that I didn’t
accomplish a single thing of importance, unless you count the fact that I came out alive.”

  “I count that, Lanny.”

  “I thought I had achieved a real coup in the name of Rjukan, where the Nazis are making their heavy water in Norway. I sent the name out by my friend Monck, whom I had put in touch with the O.S.S.; but I learned from Churchill that he had it for a long time.”

  “The competition is getting keen, Lanny; we have the field well covered, and you won’t find it so easy to bring in scoops from now on.”

  “Well, I’m not working to build up a score, and if others can do the jobs, that’s O.K. But I thought, while I was there I might as well pick up what I could.”

  “You don’t count having talked with Hitler and Göring?”

  “I learned that Hitler is wild with nerves and that he’s dosing himself with nostrums; but I might have guessed that and saved my carfare. I heard him tell me his peace terms, but it’s the same old story as a year and a half ago. He wants you and Churchill to quit and let him polish off the Soviets. He’s very generous with you; he offers you Japan and all that the Japs have taken, and the whole western hemisphere; you can help yourself to Mexico and Central and South America. I promised to tell his good friends in America about it, and I assured him that they would be deeply grateful.”

  “Tell me everything you can remember that he said, Lanny. It may possibly mean more to me than it does to you.”

  That was another considerable assignment; and after Lanny had finished with Hitler he had to tell about Göring and the drugs he was taking and the art collections he was looting—such an odd combination of esthete and pirate! Then there was Schacht and others of the lesser lights; and there was the German Volk, the food they were eating, the newspapers they were reading, the jokes they were hearing. There was the bombing of Berlin and what Lanny had seen of it, and the story of Professor Plötzen’s butler, and of the Swedish-American oil man who had helped him out of Naziland.

  It was the longest session Lanny had ever had with his Chief; and on top of that the Chief wanted to do some talking, too—to tell about what had happened since he and his secret agent had parted in the Villa La Saadia in Marrakech. F.D.R. was in a happy mood, not merely because of the continued landing of an army in North Africa without losses, and getting them so promptly to the front, but also because of what the American Navy and Air Force men were doing on the other side of the globe.

  “We have made sure of the outcome of that war,” he said. “First we sank or burned the greater part of a Japanese Fleet in the harbor of Kavieng, and a month later we destroyed a whole convoy trying to get to the same harbor. Those were air-versus-sea battles, and the significance lies, not so much in the number of vessels destroyed, as in the power we have established to do such damage at almost no cost. We did it first in the Coral Sea, and then at Midway, and now twice again. When we have built up our air forces, we can do it as often as necessary. The Japanese Air Force and Navy will be powerless against us.”

  Said the P.A.: “That surely sounds good to a man who was under their bombs at Hongkong.”

  IV

  At the first lull in the conversation Lanny put in the question: “Am I to make another try at Stalin?”

  The answer was: “I sent somebody else, and I’m satisfied that he doesn’t intend to meet us until we have come through with the second front that he demands. You know how it is, we are pretty much at his mercy, because if he should choose to slacken up in his efforts, he might set the whole German Army free to come at us, and we couldn’t match it. I doubt if we could ever win the war alone.”

  “I can tell you this, Governor, from my talk with him; he’s going to be mighty sore if we don’t cross the Channel this spring or summer.”

  “I should like to do it, and Beetle Smith is sure that we could; but our British friends are set against it, and I dare not force the issue. What it comes down to is air power; you can’t move anywhere in this war until you can put an air cover over your troops and keep it there. We tried it in Tunisia, and you saw what happened.”

  “Are we going to get the air power there, Governor?”

  “That is a compartively small job, and we are doing it already. We are bombing the enemy bases, their harbors and airports, and their ships coming across. You know, the Germans in Tunisia are just as if they were on an island, and if we destroy their communications they can’t put up much of a fight. We’ve got them to the point where they are trying to send in supplies by air; and you can imagine, those heavy transports are fat ducks and geese for our flyers.”

  “That is certainly a change since I was there!”

  “It was just a question of making the airports bigger and getting in the planes and supplies. The British Eighth Army is beginning to move on Rommel now, and our boys will be threatening his communications behind the Mareth line. They tell me that Rommel is ill and has had to go to Germany for treatment.”

  “I read that in the Berlin papers. They all put up a bold front to me, but Göring gave me to understand that he considered it was a blunder to send any army over there—it’s a trap. That is the Führer’s great weakness: he cannot bear to give up any territory that his troops have taken; he’d rather lose the troops.”

  “Well, we are already building the prisoner pens for them. If you go back to North Africa you’ll be surprised to see how we are getting things straightened out.”

  “There was surely a lot to be done. By the way, you’ll be interested in something the Herr Doktor Schacht had to say about our financial doings there.”

  “What does he know about them?”

  “Lord! That old vulture misses nothing that happens in the money world; he gets his beak into every carcass. When we came into North Africa you could buy a hundred and fifty francs with a dollar, which was fine for our troops. But our occupation authorities pegged the franc at seventy-five; and then Jacques Lemaigre-Dubreuil persuaded Murphy to raise it to fifty to the dollar.”

  “You must know the reason for that, Lanny. We wanted to make it possible for the people there to buy our goods. Those poor natives never had but one shirt to their backs, and now that one is in tatters.”

  “Yes, Governor; it’s like the talk about the widows and orphans that the insurance tycoons put out. The people who got the benefit of the deal were the big bankers and the Comité des Forges gang. Lemaigre has been the good friend of those fellows from away back, and they got the tip-off and shifted their money from Paris to Algiers. Schacht thought it was the joke of the century; he estimated the amount at twenty billion francs, and we raised the value of it to sixty billion, which meant forty billion net profit—that is about four hundred million dollars at one stroke of the pen.”

  “That’s terrible, Lanny. But you see how those economic royalists have us sewed up. We can’t do anything for the people, at home or abroad, that the speculators don’t get there first. I can’t solve that problem for the American people, let alone for the French.”

  “Yes, Governor, but here is something more. Schacht didn’t tell me, but I happen to know that the Germans own fifty-one per cent of all those companies, so we have made the enemy a free gift of a couple of hundred million dollars, which he will transfer to Spain and Switzerland and Sweden and use against us.”

  “I must admit I didn’t realize that, Lanny. That was State’s boner.”

  “Yes, and you may be sure that State isn’t going to let you do anything about it if they can help it. If you don’t mind my butting in, you might let Treasury have a go at the problem. Henry Morgenthau is one who really hates the Nazis—even when they are very rich.” Lanny had been a little dubious about making that suggestion, but the way the President chuckled over it let him know that he hadn’t gone too far.

  V

  “What do you want to do next?” demanded the Boss. And the P.A. said: “My wife had a terrible fright, and I’d like to give her a little time to get used to the idea that I’m still alive. Unless there is something urg
ent, I’d like to take a little furlough and watch you pull the drawstrings on Rommel and Arnim. Then, if you say so, I’ll go back and see how Hitler takes it and what he plans to do next.”

  “You can get in again?”

  “He practically gave me orders to return. I’m to interview the leading appeasers in this country and find out when and how they plan to kidnap you and take control of the government.”

  “Golly!” said F.D.R. “You might find out about that for me, too!”

  “That’s not so easy,” replied the P.A., smiling. “The big fellows talk about it freely, but they don’t get down to places and dates. I think it more likely that there will be an attempt to kill Hitler, and I might get on the trail of that. I should have to play a double role, doing what the O.S.S. people call ‘turning.’”

  “All right, but don’t worry about it now. Enjoy yourself listening to the radio—the news will be good this spring.”

  “One thing more, Governor, before I go. At Karinhall I found myself in the midst of the fat boy’s art looters, and. I thought I ought to make myself secure with them. You know, buying paintings is my camouflage, and the only way I have to keep them from becoming suspicious of me.”

  “Certainly, that is all right.”

  “I had some money sequestered in a Berlin bank. I couldn’t pay it to anybody else but I could pay it to Goring’s gang; so I bought half a dozen French paintings from them and brought them to Sweden and left them in a bank vault there. Technically that was trading with the enemy, and I ought to report it somewhere and clear myself.”