Whether Oursler ever dispatched the President’s suggested message or any other reply to the Bahamas is unknown. He did publish an article in Liberty magazine, quoting the duke as saying, “You cannot kill eighty million Germans and since they want Hitler, how can you force them into a revolution they don’t want?” But Oursler never mentioned a word of Windsor’s peace overture, fearing that knowledge of their former king’s German sympathies would sow serious upheaval in Britain, as Captain Drury had warned. His sixteen-page account of his meeting with the duke and FDR was tucked away and not published until fifty years later by his son, Fulton Oursler Jr.
The Oursler episode reveals several strands in the President’s makeup: his spongelike absorption of information, his highly personal reactions to the players in the drama, his disinterest in supporting anything short of the defeat of Hitler, even while America was neutral, and the clear distinction he drew between the symbolic role of those who wore the ermine and their actual character. Though his contempt for “Little Windsor” as a royal twerp was obvious, he rarely passed up an opportunity to consort with him. Nearly a year later, on October 21, 1941, with all his other appointments canceled because of the death the day before of Eleanor’s brother Hall Roosevelt, the President nevertheless entertained the Duke and Duchess of Windsor at lunch in the White House. He then took them on a tour of the second-floor living quarters. The duke’s sympathies had not altered. At about the time of this visit, he wrote his friend Silva back in Lisbon, “Britain has virtually lost the war already and the U.S.A. would be better advised to promote peace not war.” The duke was to be a guest of the President at the White House or Hyde Park on eight more occasions before FDR’s death. On none of these visits, however agreeable the company, did Roosevelt allow any serious conversation to intrude.
Chapter VI
“There Is No U.S. Secret Intelligence Service”
FRANK KNOX’S championing of Bill Donovan continued. In December 1940, while FDR was hosting the Duke of Windsor and listening to Fulton Oursler’s startling account of the duke’s peace meddling, Knox was asking the President to approve a second Donovan mission abroad. The idea’s origins are clouded by counterclaims. Donovan would later maintain that the President “asked me if I would go and make a strategic appreciation from an economic, political, and military standpoint of the Mediterranean area.” This stretches the President’s approval of the trip to initiation of it. The seed was more likely sown by Bill Stephenson of British intelligence. The trail leading to the second journey appears to have run from Stephenson urging Donovan, to Donovan persuading Knox, to Knox convincing FDR. Supporting this explanation is the fact that Donovan’s way was paid for by the British secret service. Early in December, Ruth Donovan again said good-bye to her peripatetic husband as he and Stephenson boarded a plane for London. He would be gone, Bill told her, over Christmas and New Year’s and likely for months.
Donovan at the time was fifty-seven and Stephenson forty-four. As fellow heroes of the first war, they scarcely felt the age difference, and the two men had grown close. Donovan was tall, approaching the portly, and Stephenson short and slight. Their associates thus began to refer to “Big Bill” and “Little Bill.” They stopped en route at Bermuda, where Stephenson brought Big Bill into the secret operation that Vincent Astor had shared in, the opening of pouches of presumably inviolable diplomatic mail from dozens of countries. In pursuit of his assignment to draw the United States into the war, Stephenson showed Donovan an intercepted message supposedly revealing that Nazi fifth columnists were preparing to seize the southern half of the Western Hemisphere.
Thanks to Stephenson’s preparing the way, Donovan arrived in England with his stock soaring. On December 17, the permanent undersecretary of state, Sir Alexander Cadogan, wrote to the Foreign Office: “[Colonel Stewart Menzies] tells me that Mr. Stephenson, who travelled over with Colonel Donovan, has impressed upon him that the latter really exercises a vast degree of influence in the administration. He has Colonel Knox in his pocket and, as Mr. Stephenson puts it, has more influence with the President than Colonel House had with Mr. [Woodrow] Wilson.” The latter claim no doubt would have amazed FDR.
Given his inflated rapport with the President, Donovan had no trouble securing another appointment with Winston Churchill. Almost immediately upon his arrival, the Prime Minister invited Donovan to lunch at 10 Downing Street. On the night before, and on the day of their luncheon, the Prime Minister ordered RAF strikes on the German industrial center of Mannheim. The message was not lost on Donovan. Britain could dish it out as well as take it. During their talk, however, Churchill stated that Britain could not survive bloodletting on the scale of the first war, which had cost the empire over a million dead. He took Donovan to a map and pointed out what he described as Germany’s soft underbelly, the Mediterranean and the Balkans, where he preferred to fight. Donovan, who during World War I had witnessed the slaughter Churchill described, was sympathetic if not necessarily in agreement. Before leaving, he explained that MI6 had asked him to make a tour of the Middle East. Splendid idea, Churchill agreed. No sooner had Donovan left Downing Street than the Prime Minister instructed his field commanders and overseas intelligence stations to open all doors to their American visitor. Donovan was to be “taken fully into our confidence,” he ordered, as he had “great influence with the President.”
On New Year’s Eve 1940, Donovan, wearing a long sheepskin trench coat he had bought at Cordings in Piccadilly, boarded a four-engine Sunderland reconnaissance flying boat at Plymouth Sound. As he settled in, a crewman presented him with a hamper of delicacies that defied wartime rationing—fresh lobster, cold pheasant, Stilton cheese, turtle soup, three bottles of Moselle, all courtesy of Lord Louis Mountbatten, to mark Donovan’s fifty-eighth birthday. He was off to a glowing start. He had won Churchill’s confidence. Admiral Godfrey, the director of British naval intelligence, advised Admiral Andrew Cunningham, commander in chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, concerning his imminent guest, “It was Donovan who was responsible for getting us the destroyers, the bombsight and other urgent requirements… . There is no doubt that we can achieve infinitely more through Donovan than any other individual… .”
His Mediterranean odyssey took Donovan to Spain, Malta, Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Libya, and, on his way home, to the land of his forebears, Ireland. He had listened with his steady, blue-eyed gaze to generals, admirals, princes, sheikhs, spies, kings, and politicians during seventy-eight days of near-constant motion, exhausting much younger escorts. He was back in America on March 18, 1941. Frank Knox immediately called the White House and spoke to the President’s aide Pa Watson. He wanted to make sure that FDR saw Donovan before Roosevelt left the next day for a cruise on the presidential yacht, Potomac. By now, FDR had also received a cable from Churchill that read, “I must thank you for the magnificent work done by Donovan in his prolonged tour of Balkans and Middle East. He has carried with him throughout an animating, heart-warming flame.” Despite this endorsement, FDR told Watson to schedule only fifteen minutes for Donovan to report on his two-and-a-half-month journey.
At nine-thirty the next morning, Donovan, accompanied by Knox, arrived at the White House. They joined FDR and his alter ego, Harry Hopkins, a man so pale and fleshless, yet so lively in spirit, that he resembled an animated corpse. Hopkins, the onetime social worker and New Deal troubleshooter, lived in the White House, occupying a large bedroom with a huge four-poster bed, the room in which Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation. His presence suggested that the President had given the meeting a certain weight. Yet, while Donovan was bursting to tell what he had learned in the Mediterranean war zone, the President launched into what an aide described as “wildly irrelevant” talk. The fifteen-minute session grew into a full hour. Still, Donovan managed to report little as the meeting petered out in FDR’s ramblings. Though it appeared that Roosevelt was only talking and not listening, another level of that multi-tiered mind
had been hatching an idea.
On April 4, two weeks after seeing Knox and Donovan, the President summoned his cabinet. He was still unhappy with the muddled state of U.S. intelligence. “Disputes were settled in Great Britain,” he noted, “by a gentleman known as ‘Mr. X,’ whose identity was kept a complete secret.” He was contemplating “a similar solution for our country in case we got into war.” FDR had confused the code names. Rather than Mr. X, he was actually referring to “C,” Stewart Menzies, head of Britain’s MI6. The cabinet members could only guess at who the President had in mind for his “C”—Vincent Astor, J. Edgar Hoover, Adolf Berle, possibly another recent candidate, New York City’s Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, or Bill Donovan? Of John Franklin Carter, they knew nothing.
Donovan, though his earlier dream to train troops had aborted, still insisted that his only wish was to command “the toughest division in the whole outfit.” But when Frank Knox suggested after the cabinet meeting that Donovan write out his ideas about how American intelligence should be organized, the man leaped to the task. By April 26, Donovan had delivered to Knox a four-page memorandum laying out how a spy service should operate, the first enunciation of an American central intelligence agency. He made no claim to originality. His model was based on the way “the British government gathers its intelligence,” he admitted. Donovan urged an organization above partisan politics to be headed by “some one appointed by the President directly responsible to him and to no one else,” and secretly funded. He was sufficiently sensitive to prevailing turf wars to add that the proposed agency should not “take over the home duties now performed by the F.B.I., nor the intelligence organizations of the Army and the Navy.” Yet, he wanted to confine them and urged that his envisioned agency have “sole charge of intelligence work abroad.” A pleased Knox forwarded Donovan’s plan to FDR.
During the cabinet meeting at which the President had favored centralizing intelligence under a “Mr. X,” Henry Stimson had taken notes that he later showed to General Marshall. Marshall, in turn, asked General Sherman Miles, his assistant chief of staff for intelligence, his opinion of the President’s idea. Miles’s riposte was swift. He had already learned from a London source that while in England, Donovan had inquired of British intelligence officials how they dealt with the constitutional and legal quandaries raised by clandestine operations, how secret enterprises were financed, in short, how a nation spied. Miles advised Marshall, “In great confidence O.N.I. tells me … there is a movement afoot, fostered by Col. Donovan, to establish a super agency controlling all intelligence. This would mean that such an agency, no doubt under Col. Donovan, would collect, collate and possibly evaluate all military intelligence that we now gather from foreign countries. From the point of view of the War Department, such a move would appear to be very disadvantageous, if not calamitous.” Miles had no immediate cause for concern. In the Roosevelt fashion, it would take a ferment of circumstances, time, place, and his own mood before the President would act.
In the meantime, the British mounted an intense campaign to enlist the United States in an intelligence partnership. Along with Little Bill Stephenson, Donovan had made another friend as a result of his efforts to get the overage American destroyers for the Royal Navy, the director of British naval intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey. In late May the admiral, accompanied by Commander Ian Fleming, the future creator of James Bond, left England on a secret mission to draw America into Britain’s intelligence web. They arrived in civilian dress aboard the commercial aircraft Dixie Clipper, hoping to make an anonymous entrance. They were appalled to be greeted by a horde of reporters, cameramen, and popping flashbulbs. They were much relieved to find that all the attention was meant for Elsa Schiaparelli, the fashion designer. Admiral Godfrey then proceeded to an elegant address on New York’s Sutton Place, where he was to be the guest at the home of the man he intended to use as his instrument in forging a British-U.S. espionage alliance, Bill Donovan.
Later, when the admiral and Fleming moved from New York to Washington, they were appalled to discover the low state of American intelligence. After dealing with the fragmented bureaucracies, Godfrey reported to London, “Even the more senior U.S. Navy, Military and State Department officials … prefer their intelligence to be highly coloured. For instance, the Navy Department’s estimate of the size of the German U-boat fleet is higher than our own by approximately one third, while the War Department’s estimates of the first line strength and first line reserves of the German Air Force are higher than ours by 250%. This predilection for sensationalism hinders the reasoned evaluation of intelligence reports.” As for cooperation between ONI, MID, and the FBI, it was, he noted, practically nonexistent. “These three departments showed the utmost goodwill towards me and Ian Fleming but very little towards each other.” Jealous and competitive, the Americans operated on the premise that knowledge is power, but that knowledge shared is power diluted. Godfrey’s final verdict: “There is no U.S. Secret Intelligence Service. Americans are inclined to refer to their ‘S.I.S.,’ but by this they mean the small and uncoordinated force of ‘Special Agents’ who travel abroad on behalf of one or another of the Governmental Departments. These ‘Agents’ are, for the most part, amateurs without special qualifications and without training in Observation. They have no special means of communication or other facilities and they seldom have clearer brief than ‘to go and have a look.’” Godfrey agreed with those Americans he met who said that a better source of intelligence was The New York Times, which was faster, better informed, more accurate, more objective, and cost, at the time, pennies a copy. Godfrey decided that he must ring an alarm directly in the Oval Office. But gaining entry proved a problem.
While Admiral Godfrey was trying to see Roosevelt, FDR was looking for an opportunity to alert the nation that he intended to bring the United States a giant step closer to alliance with Britain. He had been moving in that direction from the day the war began, largely through his secret correspondence with Churchill. Eight months after hostilities started, he had used a commencement address at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville to make clear where he stood. Before a jammed Memorial Gymnasium, wearing an academic gown and a mortarboard at a jaunty angle, he condemned Hitler’s ally, Benito Mussolini, for declaring war on a collapsing France. “On this tenth day of June, 1940,” he intoned, “the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor.” Churchill, listening to the radio in the Admiralty, was struck by the President’s political courage. “I wondered about the Italian vote in the approaching presidential election,” he later wrote; “but I knew that Roosevelt was a most experienced American party politician… .” More gratifying to Churchill was what Roosevelt said next: “We will extend to the opponents of force the material resources of this nation.” Time magazine reported afterward: “With this speech, the U.S. had taken sides. Ended was the myth of U.S. neutrality.” But these had been only fine words from a nation whose own defenses were still puny, and by a president who did not know exactly how far he dared get ahead of public opinion. At the time he addressed the Virginia graduates, the U.S. Army ranked eighteenth in the world. It was not only weaker than the major powers—Germany, France, Britain, Russia, Italy, Japan, and China—but outstripped by Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, even tiny Switzerland. Germany had 6.8 million men under arms, the United States 504,000. The country lacked an arms industry. Its productive capacity was invested in the output of cars, washing machines, and refrigerators, in all of which it was the world leader.
However relatively weak the nation, FDR was determined to share whatever he could to shore up Britain. To him, England’s plight was not something discovered solely in Churchill’s cables or the cold assessments of his military analysts, but a highly personal matter. He had an English friend who dated back to his youthful trips abroad, Arthur Murray, a business executive and former member of Parliament. The two regarded themselves as distantly related. During the Blitz, Murray’s wife
wrote, “Dear Mr. President (Cousin Franklin) … I am going this afternoon to sort out … bundles of warm clothes for the children and women who have been evacuated… . This is the first few names on my list; John Hodson (aged 10) one parent killed in air raid, other missing; George Elton (aged 12) mother killed, father in army abroad; Elsie Burrey (age 7) both parents killed; Harry Young, mother missing, father killed at Dunkirk. And the list goes on.”
His visceral conviction that Britain’s fight was America’s fight had led FDR to take the daring step in September of giving the British the fifty old destroyers before Congress had a chance to say no. But it was not enough. As 1940 drew to a close, Churchill had sent FDR a letter arriving on December 9 that spelled out Britain’s peril. After a depressing inventory of British losses from the Blitz—the plants destroyed, the arms lost, the ships sunk by U-boats—he laid bare his country’s plight: Britain was going broke. “The moment approaches where we shall no longer be able to pay cash for shipping and other supplies.” Roosevelt wanted both to save Britain from collapse and buy time for the United States to rearm. But, as a neutral, how did he surmount the tangle of obstacles, the reluctance of commercial interests to loan money to a sinking ship, the congressional resistance to outright gifts? The answer came about in Rooseveltian fashion, in another gestation discernible nowhere but in the President’s mind. As Harry Hopkins put it, “I began to get the idea that he was refueling, the way he so often does when he seems to be resting and carefree… . Then, one evening, he suddenly came out with it—the whole program. He didn’t seem to have any clear idea how it could be done legally. But there wasn’t a doubt in his mind that he’d find a way to do it.” FDR would simply circumvent the obstacles in his path through a device of ingenious simplicity. The United States would send Britain weapons and supplies without charge. Then, after the war, the British could pay for them or return them. The program, passed by Congress and signed by the President on March 11, 1941, was called lend-lease.
Joseph E. Persico Page 12