Presidential Mission

by Upton Sinclair

  IV

  The car came into Washington on schedule. Lanny had had another nap in the afternoon, and felt fine, he said. He telephoned Baker, the President’s man, and learned the name of his hotel. There was time for a bath and a shave, then to dress and have dinner—room service was prohibited in wartime, so Agnes had to stay with the baby and then dine by herself. Lanny said no word to his wife about where he was going or what he expected; he was under pledge and kept it strictly. But he couldn’t keep his wife from observing that these rush calls to Washington invariably preceded flights to Britain or North Africa and absences of several months.

  Lanny sat and read the papers, with his watch on the table beside him. At ten minutes to nine he got up, put on his linen coat and his Panama hat, gave his beloved wife a more than dutiful kiss, and said, “Don’t wait up for me. I may be late.” He strolled out into the blacked-out city and, walking slowly and carefully, arrived at a certain corner promptly on the second of nine. A familiar car drew up at the curb, a voice said, “Hello,” and he stepped in.

  He wasn’t supposed to talk to Baker either; but in the course of several years they had acquired a certain number of topics in common. Lanny said, “How is the Boss?” The answer was, “The doctors say he’s OK, but you don’t have to be a doctor to see that he’s tired.” Lanny said, “God help him!” And that wasn’t just a conventional phrase. The burdens which this great man carried in his soul, the problems he carried in his mind, were a cause of brooding sorrow to his secret agent.

  1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was the address. It was a sort of little park, an oasis in downtown and crowded Washington. A high fence surrounded it, and Lanny was glad to see Navy men in little white caps patrolling. The Navy was in charge at the entrance drive, and the car stopped and Baker said, “A visitor on the President’s orders.” That was enough, and they went up the drive to what was called the “social door,” used only on formal occasions. Two secret service men stood in the shadow of the high columns, and now they came out and flashed torches; when they saw it was Baker, they stepped back. The pair went in, climbed a side stairway, and went down a corridor to the door of the President’s bedroom, where Prettyman, the Negro, sat on duty.

  All this was routine to Lanny Budd; he had been here a dozen times in the same way. But his heart would never fail to beat faster, for he considered Franklin Roosevelt the greatest man in the world, and everything of a public nature that Lanny hoped for depended upon his decisions and commands. Lanny hadn’t enlisted in any of the war organizations, he wore no uniform and bore no title, but he had given his word, and keeping it was his supreme duty. The forty-three-year-old presidential agent had an earthly father, whom he loved, but there were limitations to his admiration for that father. In the past six years F.D.R. had come to be a sort of superfather. Lanny had never tried to formulate it, but if he had been asked to do so he would have called him a Father of the Future, a Father of Victory over Fascism.

  V

  Baker tapped on the door, and a cheery voice called, “Come in.” The crippled man lay on the ancient mahogany bed in which a long line of presidents had slept. Lanny had never seen him in any other position in this room: propped up by pillows, wearing a striped pongee pajama coat, his spectacles on, some papers in his lap and a stack of them on the table beside him. Always there was a hard day’s work behind him, a schedule of callers demanding decisions that would affect the fate of the world. In this room he could be quiet and comfortable; here he received a few of his trusted friends, and many times stole hours from his sleep for the pleasure of companionship which meant so much to him.

  It was a hot night, and an electric fan was playing on the bed, making it necessary to keep a book on top of the papers. The great man called a cheery greeting; when Lanny had come from China he had been “Marco Polo,” and now, browned by the sun of Florida, he was “Ponce de Leon.” He grinned and exchanged a warm handclasp, then sat in the chair beside the bed and studied the aspect of his Boss. A big man physically; a big head, and powerful arms and shoulders which he had developed of necessity, by untiring discipline. His hair had become entirely gray, and there was only a little of it left above the temples. The face was deeply lined, and Lanny’s heart ached to see it; but he must not give any sign, he must meet the cheery smile and the jest. Business as usual!

  “Well, Governor, what’s up this time?” The P.A. knew that the hurried summons meant something special, and he thought it an act of kindness to take as little from the great man’s sleep as possible.

  Roosevelt came directly to the point. “I had a man whom I especially trusted, and I sent him on an important mission to Italy. Yesterday morning I got word that his heart had given out, and they are shipping him home in a box.”

  “Hard luck!” replied the other gravely. He hoped his own heart could be trusted.

  “How well do you know Italy, Lanny?”

  “I wouldn’t claim to be a specialist, but I’ve lived most of my life within an hour’s drive of the border, and I’ve visited a few times and motored over the whole country. On the Riviera people come and go, you know, and prior to the war the fashionable world didn’t pay much attention to national boundaries. I must have met hundreds of Italians off and on.”

  “You speak the language?”

  “Enough to get along. I wouldn’t be able to pose as a native.”

  “That isn’t what I have in mind. I want somebody to meet a few of the top people.”

  “They all speak French and many speak English.”

  “Can you think of any who might be sympathetic to our side?”

  “I might, but I’d have to give thought to it. The aristocracy submitted to Mussolini only because they had to, and they surely don’t like what they’re getting now.”

  “And what they see coming! I can tell you that we are going into Sicily. I don’t know the exact day, but it should be next month. Our military men expect it will take us three months to clean out the island. I’m hoping it may be quicker.”

  “You sound as if you were asking my opinion, Governor.” Lanny smiled as he said it. “I have no idea how many divisions the Germans have there, but it’s a safe bet the Italians won’t put up a desperate struggle.”

  “That’s what we are hoping; and of course our agents are working there to persuade them that we’ll be good customers.”

  “The bombs are helping too, I’m sure.”

  “What we want is to convince the Italians on the mainland that they’ve been backing the wrong horse. We’ve got the big airfields in Tunisia in working order, and we’re turning on the heat. We have grave questions to consider—for example, shall we bomb Rome? We’ll take pains to avoid hitting the Vatican and the churches; but the immense marshaling yards of the railroads are there, serving the whole peninsula to the south. Putting the railroads out of order is our most important single job.”

  “That ought to be easy,” Lanny ventured, “because they have so many tunnels.”

  “Tunnels have proved to be difficult targets for airmen; but saboteurs can get them, and we have people working on that. What I want is to have somone make contacts with the governing class and explain what unconditional surrender will mean to them. We don’t want to humiliate them, we don’t come as conquerors, but as liberators of the Italian people.”

  “In other words, Governor, we want somebody to do another Darlan.” It was a touchy subject, and the younger man forced himself to a grin.

  “I know you didn’t enjoy what you had to do in North Africa, Lanny, but you ought to see that it worked. We got the government, we got the army, and we have the French fighting with us instead of against us.”

  “You win, Governor. But it won’t be so easy in Italy, for there the government people have the Germans on their necks. They’ll be scared as the devil; and they’re not the most dependable people in the world.”

  “I know the difficulties, and I’m not giving an order. I hesitated before putting it up to you. It’s a dangero
us mission.”

  “It’ll be a useful one, so I’ll take a shot at it. But I have to tell you about a misadventure I had with the Fascists at the start of their career. I was in Rome with a lady friend, Marie de Bruyne, nearly twenty years ago. A newspaperman brought me the news about the murder of Matteotti, and I tried to telephone it to the outside world. The result was I got called up before Italo Balbo, head of the Fascist militia, and they put me out of the country, not too politely. Whenever I have gone in since then I have expected that somebody would look me up in the files; but it never happened, so I decided those old files must have got buried. If anybody dug them out, I could explain it as a youthful aberration. I could point out that Benito called himself a Socialist when he was twenty-two years old.”

  “I hate like the devil to send you back into enemy territory, Lanny.”

  “Don’t worry for a moment, Governor; I have what amounts to a command from Hitler to return. I’m supposed to be interviewing American crypto-Nazis right now, working on a plan to have you assassinated.”

  “Have you been making much headway?” This overburdened man always managed to spare some time for a smile.

  “I was planning a motor-trip to interview some of them, just so that I could make up a plausible story for the Führer. But I suppose this new assignment takes precedence.”

  “Italy happens to be our line of march,” said F.D.R.

  His P.A. recited, “We’ll hang Il Duce on a sour-apple tree, as we go marching on!”

  VI

  The arrangement was that Lanny was to report to “Wild Bill” Donovan in the morning, and the Italian section of OSS would give him a thorough briefing. How he was to get into Il Duce’s realm, where he was to go and whom he was to meet, all that would be talked out, and then Lanny would report to the Boss for final instructions. His reports would have to come through OSS channels, for, alas, the United States had no ambassador and no consuls anywhere in Italy. F.D.R. said that he would arrange for the reports to come first to him, and the son of Budd-Erling Airplanes would still be classified as a “P.A.”—presidential agent.

  Lanny went back to the hotel and told his wife that he would be going abroad very shortly—something that she knew already in her heart. He would not say where he was going, and she would not ask. War changed marriage, as it changed everything else in the world. People discovered that they had a country, and that its survival was more important than their own. The husband said, “It won’t be dangerous, what I’m doing”; and maybe that was true and maybe it was what is politely called a fib.

  At nine in the morning he presented himself at a rather dingy building in the slum section of Washington. Except for the fact that there was an armed soldier posted at every door you would never have guessed that it was the headquarters of one of the most important war agencies. In the Office of Strategic Services were combined all the Intelligence departments of the Armed Forces. The genial, rosy Irish-American who headed it had just been promoted to the rank of general. Someone had told him that Lanny Budd was coming, and he had two of his top “Italian” men present—one of them a young New Orleans lawyer of Italian descent, and the other a middle-aged importer of ceramics who had been going to Italy and back most of his life. The General sent them away to an office to stay shut up until they had solved the problems of getting Lanny into enemy land, whom he was to meet there, and what he was to bring out.

  They spent the entire day discussing a score of different plans, none of which satisfied the fastidious art expert. Lanny asked for time to think matters over, and then he telephoned Baker to request another appointment with the Boss. Close to midnight, when that tired man had been reading and signing documents for a couple of hours—some of them directing the spending of hundreds of millions of dollars—Lanny Budd was escorted to the second-story bedroom. One glimpse of the care-lined face, and he came at once to the point.

  “Governor, those fellows know their kind of job and they’re doing it well; but they don’t know my kind, and they are stumped when I confront them with my facts. They want to send me into Italy with false papers and have me pose as John Jones or Tom Smith. But where can such an unknown get among one of the oldest and most aloof aristocracies in Europe? They overlook the fact that I have met members of that aristocracy through the years, and some of them are bound to find my face familiar. I have met literally hundreds of German officers and Nazi party leaders—remember, I have been a guest in Hitler’s home for a couple of weeks at a time. To the first one that recognizes me, I’m a spy, and I’m caught, and I have no possible defense.”

  “You are right, Lanny,” said the President. “I ought to have realized it.”

  “You have a million things to realize, Governor, and let me realize this one. I have promised the Führer to come back and report to him, and that’s my entree. It would be foolish not to make use of it. I’ll tell him that I have come on the trail of treason in Italy—I have got the secret out of the Italians in America, and I want to run the thing down in Rome.”

  “Can you get him to believe that?”

  “I can make it impossible for him not to believe it, because the OSS can give me facts about loyal Italians here. That won’t do them any harm because Hitler can’t get at them, and his Intelligence doubtless knows about them anyhow. Meantime I have an excuse to meet the Roman governing class and play my double game with them.”

  “You’ll have to give Hitler some results to justify such an effort, won’t you?”

  “I won’t tell him anything that will do him any good, or our friends in Italy any harm. If I tell him that some of his Italian supporters are double-crossing him, how is he going to be sure? In his heart he doesn’t trust any Italian that breathes, and I might find a way to ball up his affairs for quite a time.”

  “All right, Lanny. Have it your way. What do you want from us?”

  “Just to be set ashore from a PT-boat on some beach near Ostia. They’d better carry one of those little kayaks, because I’d like to be dry-shod—there’s a lot in first appearances. I present myself to a German patrol and ask to be taken to Marshal Kesselring—he was a guest at Berchtesgaden the last time I was there. He may remember me, for there were a lot of both Nazis and Junkers who didn’t approve of the Führer’s having an American in his home at that critical time. When I meet him I’ll ask him to call Berlin 116191, and he won’t fail to be impressed by my having the Führer’s private telephone number. I’ll give Hitler my spiel, with the General listening, and the Führer will order me turned loose to do his work.”

  “That may be all right with the Germans, but what about the Italian police?”

  “Kesselring will give me a pass that will be good throughout the country. The Nazis are running it more completely every day.”

  “But that will mean you are stamped as a German agent, and you will meet only the wrong sort of people.”

  “That will serve the purpose pretty nearly as well. It’s like the negative of a photograph—it shows the same details, only everything is in reverse. The pro-German Italians will know who the pro-Americans are and will talk about them. General Donovan will give me the address of our ‘post office’ in Rome, so that I can send messages to you, and if there should be an important reason for my meeting any of our friends in Italy I can make myself known to the ‘post office’ and ask them to check on me with Donovan.”

  “All that’s going to be pretty risky business, Lanny.”

  “I’ll promise to use every precaution. I’ll be guided by circumstances and not take any steps that won’t pay off. When I’ve done all I can, I’ll see what I run into at the Führer’s headquarters.”

  “You’ll run into a madman, Lanny. I can say that, because I know what we and the Russians are going to serve up to him in the next couple of months.”

  “Adi is never entirely mad; he’s like Hamlet, mad only north-northwest. He’ll rave at me because of what my countrymen are doing to turn the world over to the Bolsheviks, and then he’
ll stop and ask penetrating questions about what sort of fellow this Jewish-Red Rosenfeld is, and finally he’ll send me out by way of Sweden to find out how much money Colonel Generoso Pope is raising among the New York Italians to buy General Badoglio in Rome.”

  “I see you’ve got the picture, Lanny. Go ahead and do it your way. Tell Donovan to give you the dope on the American-Italians—the many good ones and the few bad ones. And use as much as you need of that money I gave you.”

  “I don’t need any of it, Governor. I sold the two paintings I brought out of Germany for three times what they cost me; and so long as you will let me go on breaking the law, I can get along nicely—I could even afford to pay you a commission.” You could say anything to this democratic aristocrat, provided you employed the right sort of chuckle. He would throw back his head and laugh in a hearty explosion, revealing his somewhat uneven teeth, and also his happy disposition. If only he didn’t have to work so hard, thought the son of Budd-Erling!

  VII

  One of the President’s last remarks was, “Jim Stotzlmann was here this evening.” Lanny said, “Oh, good! I was going to look him up in New York.” Jim was at the Mayflower, and when Lanny got back to his own hotel he telephoned. This playboy was a night owl and hadn’t come in yet, but Lanny tried an hour later, and there he was. Characteristically he offered to come over right away, but Lanny said, “We sleep in my family. Come and have breakfast with me.”