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.
Right until the convention, Roosevelt had continued to remain coy about his intentions regarding a third term, keeping even his closest intimates guessing. He stayed at the White House during the sweltering humidity of a Washington heat wave and listened, no doubt with a certain bemusement, as Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky read the message he had sent to the delegates in Chicago. He had, FDR said, “no wish to be a candidate again,” and “all the delegates to this convention are free to vote for any candidate.” Of course, they nominated Roosevelt, including the supposedly bought-off Pennsylvania delegation, which went solidly for him.
The second prong of the Beat Roosevelt strategy was masterminded by General von Boetticher’s colleague in the German embassy in Washington, the chargé d’affaires, Dr. Hans Thomsen, a tall, handsome, blond-haired, exquisitely mannered German of Norwegian ancestry. The clever Thomsen and his glamorous wife, Bebe, managed to soften the appearance of serving a vile regime by playing the good Germans. After Nazi storm troopers smashed 815 Jewish shop windows, burned 76 synagogues, and murdered 36 Jews in 1938, a moment burned into history as Kristallnacht, Bebe would burst into tears at diplomatic receptions, almost on cue, to bewail the awful things the Nazis were doing.
The ambitious Thomsen nevertheless continued to serve his Führer with shrewdness and style. He intended to operate with a good deal less money than Göring had proposed to beat FDR, but with more finesse. In April 1940, even before the party conventions, he received $50,000 from Berlin to covertly underwrite American isolationism as a prelude to driving Roosevelt out of the White House. Thomsen engaged George Sylvester Viereck, an American public relations counselor, to devise the strategy. With Viereck’s scheme in hand, Thomsen described for the foreign office his opening tactic: “to invite fifty isolationist Republican Congressmen on a three-day visit to the Party convention, so that they may work on the delegates of the Republican Party in favor of an isolationist foreign policy.” The cost he estimated at a modest $3,000.
The day before the Republican convention was slated to adopt its platform, a full-page ad addressed to the delegates and to “American mothers, wage-earners, farmers, and veterans” appeared in The New York Times. “Stop the war machine!” it read. “Stop the interventionists and war mongers. Stop the Democratic Party which we believe is the war party… .” Ostensibly, the ad had been placed and paid for by the National Committee to Keep America Out of Foreign Wars. Thomsen had kicked in another $3,000 toward its cost.
Not only did these interventions have no effect on FDR’s fortunes, but the outcome of the Republican convention was hardly good news in Berlin. On June 28, Thomsen cabled the foreign office, “Willkie’s nomination is unfortunate for us. He is not an isolationist … he belongs to those Republicans who see America’s best defense in supporting England by all means ‘short of war.’” The resourceful Thomsen, however, was not yet out of tricks. He went to North Dakota’s Senator Gerald P. Nye, who had delivered a speech that Thomsen rated a masterpiece of isolationist reasoning. In a July 18 cable to Berlin, Thomsen boasted that “after lengthy negotiations,” Nye had been persuaded to distribute his speech “to 200,000 especially selected persons. This undertaking,” he added, “is not altogether easy, and is particularly delicate since Senator Nye, as a political opponent of the President, is under the careful observation of the secret state police here.” Ultimately, Thomsen boasted that more than a million copies of isolationist speeches and articles, printed in The Congressional Record, were mailed at public expense, using the franking privileges of twenty-four sympathetic members of Congress. These tracts, Thomsen claimed, though presumably authored by congressmen, had actually been written by Viereck as part of the anti-Roosevelt strategy.
While FDR was chronically criticized for being opportunistic and devious, other facets of his intricate character surged to the fore in the 1940 campaign, his statesmanship and boldness. On September 16 the draft, vigorously promoted by FDR and lukewarmly passed by Congress, became law. The timing could not have been worse. The President’s political sachems pleaded with him to hold up conscripting men at least until after the election. Sam Rosenman observed, “[A]ny old-time politician would have said [it] could never take place.” But Roosevelt insisted that the country’s preparedness took precedence over politics. On October 29 a dubious secretary of war, Henry Stimson, stood blindfolded before a huge fishbowl full of cobalt-colored capsules, each containing a number assigned to young men of draft age. Stimson’s blindfold had been cut from the cloth of a chair used at the signing of the Declaration of Independence. He reached his hand into the bowl, pulled out a capsule, and handed it to the President. “The first number,” Roosevelt announced soberly into the network microphones, “is one-fifty-eight.” The six thousand registrants across the country holding that number were to report for military duty.
The President pledged, in a fervent speech at the Boston Garden in the last days of the campaign, “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” Chatting privately with his speechwriter Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt observed afterward, “If we’re attacked, it’s no longer a foreign war.” How close the President believed the country was to being drawn into the conflict is revealed in a transcript of a conversation with his staff captured by the concealed Oval Office recorder. It took place in the late afternoon of October 8, a time of day when the President liked to relax and ruminate. He spoke of a telegram that Roy Howard, of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, had received from a Japanese named Mitsunaga, chief of the Japanese press association. “Now this Mitsunaga fella wires to Roy,” the President began, “and says, ‘there will be no war with the United States’—I’m quoting from memory—‘on one condition, and one condition only’ (slams the desk), and that is that the United States will recognize the new era in not the Far East, but the East, meaning the whole of the East. Furthermore … and the only evidence of this recognition the United States can give is to demilitarize all its naval and air and army bases in Wake, Midway and Pearl Harbor! God! That’s the first time that any damn Jap has told us t
o get out of Hawaii!” The President paused theatrically, then made a comment that rang with premonition: “… [T]he only thing that worries me is that the Germans and the Japs have gone along, and the Italians, for, oh, gosh, five, six years without their foot slipping. Without their misjudging foreign opinion. They’ve played a damn smart game. [But] the time may be coming when the Germans and Japs will do some fool thing. That would put us in! That’s the only real danger of our getting in, is that their foot will slip.”
On November 5, FDR won his precedent-shattering third term. Soon after, the clumsy and intrusive Oval Office eavesdropping device was shut down. The fourteen press conferences, together with several private conversations recorded, were not discovered until found accidentally by a historian, Robert J. C. Butow, while researching at the FDR Library in Hyde Park in 1978. After hearing them, the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. observed, “With all their technical imperfections, the tapes add a fascinating dimension to our sense of the Roosevelt presidency. They offer the historian the excitement of immediacy: FDR in casual, unbuttoned exchange with his staff. One is struck by how little the private voice differs from the public voice we know so well from the speeches. The tone is a rich and resonant tenor. The enunciation is clear, the timing is impeccable. The voice’s range is remarkable, from high to low in register and from insinuatingly soft to emphatically loud in decibel level.”
After Roosevelt’s reelection, Hans Thomsen, ever the realist, cabled Berlin, “The supreme law of his actions—and we shall have to adapt ourselves to that during the coming four years—is his irreconcilable hostility to the totalitarian powers.”
Chapter IV
Spymaster in the Oval Office
VINCENT ASTOR wanted to be Franklin Roosevelt’s chief intelligence operative, and through his associates in The Club, his tentacles extending into business, broadcasting, journalism, and international society, he appeared to be succeeding. So comfortable was he in his association with FDR that he used White House stationery when communicating with the President. He enjoyed Roosevelt’s trust to an extent that he occasionally went ahead with his schemes and told FDR later. On April 18, 1940, he informed the President that “British intelligence in this area [New York City] is in charge of Sir James Paget, assisted by a Mr. Walter Bell, who conduct the so-called British Passport Control Office, although passports occupy but little if any of their time… . It occurred to me that Paget and Bell might from time to time obtain leads useful to us. I therefore arranged a meeting with Paget, at which I asked for unofficial British cooperation, but made it clear that we, for obvious reasons, could not return the compliment in the sense of turning over to them any of our confidential information. This somewhat one-sided arrangement was gladly accepted.” Of course, the arrangement was accepted, since it wove another strand in the net designed to pull the United States into the war on Britain’s side. FDR did not resist this outcome and consequently did not object to his old sailing mate’s espionage freelancing.
Two days later, Astor was back to the President with what he regarded as an intelligence opportunity presented on a silver platter. The Japanese ambassador to the United States had recently called a member of The Club, Winthrop Aldrich, chairman of the Chase National Bank, and assured him that “his government was preparing to liquidate the Chinese war as rapidly as adequate policing arrangements could be made.” At that point, the ambassador claimed, the Japanese could start paying more attention to their domestic economy. They wanted the Chase bank to send a commission to Japan to advise them. Here was a chance to penetrate Japanese intentions far more deeply than having the Nourmahal poke around remote Pacific atolls. Astor told the President, “It seems to me that such a commission might be of great value to us in obtaining valuable information, provided that certain individual members were wisely chosen and adequately educated in advance as to what to look for.” At this point, FDR was preoccupied with what he could do to keep a beleaguered Britain afloat. What he did not want was to do anything that might provoke the already wary Japanese into darker suspicions of U.S. intentions. He turned Astor down.
Astor’s arrangement with Sir James Paget produced the socialite spy’s first great triumph. Confidential correspondence of all governments sent between the Western Hemisphere and the rest of the world had to be routed, via diplomatic pouch, through two central points, Bermuda and Trinidad, both British Crown colonies. In his courtship of the Americans, Paget had let Astor rummage through these presumably inviolate mailbags. As Astor explained to the President on March 14, “In regard to the opening of diplomatic pouches in Bermuda and Trinidad, I have given my word never to tell anyone—with always you excepted. The fear of the British is that if the facts become known, the writers would exercise greater caution or send their letters via a different route.” Thanks to this snooping, FDR could now read the secrets of a Japanese attaché, a German chargé d’affaires, a Brazilian foreign minister, or a Soviet ambassador. Astor alerted FDR that the American, George Sylvester Viereck, who was working with Hans Thomsen to defeat Roosevelt’s renomination, had sent twenty-seven intelligence reports to the German embassy. The same batch of violated pouches revealed to Roosevelt that the Spanish foreign minister, Ramón Serrano Súñer, had sent a dispatch to Spain’s embassies worldwide urging closer cooperation with the Nazis. An intercepted memorandum from Hervé Alphand, then Vichy France’s financial attaché in Washington, must have given FDR both mingled pause and pride. Alphand reported to Vichy that the United States was woefully understrength in aircraft, tank, and artillery production. Still, he respected the latent power of America. “We will be making a great mistake if we think the sad example of our country is going to be followed by American democracy,” Alphand concluded.
The President threw Astor assignments both strategic and mundane. On May 7, FDR received a letter from a Betty Lawson Johnson. Every day, letters from ordinary citizens poured into the White House mail room, but Mrs. Johnson rang the right bell to get hers before the President. She claimed a connection to the British royal family, and FDR had a soft spot for royals. Her husband, Mrs. Johnson said, had it on reliable authority that the Germans had stolen the Norden bombsight and had smuggled it into Germany aboard the SS Bremen. Consequently, King George wanted her to advise the President of this loss. “Knowing your affection for the Royal family, and England’s great struggle,” her letter went on, “I have come to you, Mr. President, realizing you are the only great man in our America who realizes and sees the dangers to our America if the Allies are beaten… .” Mrs. Johnson sealed her bona fides by mentioning, “I had the honor of being at the White House, and meeting with your dear mother the night your son, Franklin, invited us to see Gone With the Wind.” The President told Missy LeHand to forward Mrs. Johnson’s letter to Vincent Astor in New York and have him look into her claim.
Within days, Astor was back with his answer. “The story about the theft of the bombsight, and its having been hidden aboard the BREMEN is the same old song and dance which has cropped up repeatedly in the past. It always comes in the same form, and seems to be regarded as of great importance by the same type of people; the sort that Cholly Knickerbocker calls Café Society. In my opinion, there is little to it… .” Astor was both right and wrong. The Norden bombsight’s plans had not been aboard the Bremen. But they had been stolen and had reached Germany aboard the Hamburg-Amerika Line’s Reliance three years before, thanks to Hermann Lang. This head start speeded production of the Luftwaffe’s own bombsight, which fit neatly into Hermann Goering’s plan for a major air offensive against Britain timed for that fall.
His successes so far merely whetted Astor’s appetite. To him, the capital of espionage in America should be New York City, as the major U.S. port and the heart of commerce, finance, and communication. Thus, early in June 1940, Astor asked to come to the White House. The courtly multimillionaire stopped by Missy LeHand’s desk, charming her, as was his custom, with gallant compliments and invitations to sail on his yacht. Once
ensconced privately with the President, Astor explained the tangle of intelligence in New York. J. Edgar Hoover’s people, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the Army’s Military Intelligence Division were tripping all over each other and the lines had to be disentangled. He could do it, Astor explained, but the Navy chief, Admiral Harold Stark, kept putting him off. Could the President instruct Stark to see him? Roosevelt, ever disposed to accommodate Astor, called in his naval aide, Captain D. J. Callaghan. He told Callaghan to make sure that Admiral Stark saw his friend. FDR then alerted Stark, prior to the appointment, saying, “I simply wanted you to know that I have requested him [Astor] to coordinate work in the New York area and, of course, want him given every assistance. Among other things, I would like to have great weight given his recommendation on the selection of candidates because of his wide knowledge of men and affairs. Please pass this on to Walter Anderson.” Admiral Anderson was director of naval intelligence and a politically attuned sailor. He urged the Navy’s office of personnel to arrange a commission for Astor, as a commander at the very least. The personnel staff balked. It took regular Navy officers years to make commander, they argued. Anderson was adamant. The President wanted it done, and that was that. As one participant in the process explained to a colleague, “Astor must have a job… . Vincent Astor, for your information, stands very close to the great white father, so proceed with caution.”
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