Donovan’s standing also received a backhanded boost from an unexpected source. Later that month, the COI director brought to the White House a cable from the American embassy in Berlin that seemed certain to interest FDR. The embassy had forwarded press accounts from the Nazi Party newspapers, the Angriff and the Völkischer Beobachter, reporting Donovan’s appointment. The latter paper’s headline read, THE JEW-ROOSEVELT NAMES WAR MAKER DONOVAN AS SUPER-AGITATOR. The purpose of Donovan’s COI, both papers reported, was “making the American people ripe for war.” These stories, the embassy noted, marked an advance in Nazi vituperation: “… [S]ince the appearances of articles in several German newspapers some months ago on the alleged Jewish ancestry of the President, this is the first time he has been referred to as a Jew in German newspaper headlines.” A subsequent story in the Nazi press reported, “Roosevelt has named the Colonel Coordinator of Information. Hiding behind this title he is brewing a Jewish-Democratic crisis which is directed at all of Europe. Colonel Donovan’s office … has grown into the largest espionage and sabotage bureau that has so far been seen in any Anglo-Saxon country.” This Nazi ranting delighted both Donovan and the President who had appointed him.
Not everyone saw the COI as a welcome answer to the gap in America’s intelligence defenses. Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, a New Deal friend but isolationist foe of FDR’s, complained one month after the creation of the agency, “Mr. Donovan is now head of the Gestapo in the United States. That is the proper place for him, because he knows how such things should be done… .” Wheeler then ticked off a list of senators whose offices had supposedly been raided by Donovan when he was with the Justice Department in the twenties. “So he is a fitting man to head the Gestapo of the United States,” the senator concluded.
Donovan, however, would have to contend with rivals with far sharper fangs than the gaseous Wheeler. The COI director and J. Edgar Hoover had crossed paths nearly twenty years before when both were on a different footing. Donovan was then assistant attorney general and Hoover, as acting director of the then Bureau of Investigation, was his subordinate. To Donovan, in those days, Hoover seemed a plodding bureaucrat mired in administrative trivia. To Hoover, Donovan was a dilettante who stuck his nose where he had no business and failed to act when he should. Hoover was angered to find his orders inexplicably countermanded or his disciplinary actions reversed. When he took his complaints to Donovan, the assistant AG was always too busy to see him. Later, as Donovan began to understand Hoover’s power, he suspected that the FBI director had played a part in President Hoover’s failure to appoint him as attorney general. Indeed, J. Edgar Hoover liked to boast: “I stopped him from becoming AG in 1929… .”
By the time FDR had appointed Donovan to run the COI, Hoover had a substantial head start in the intelligence field. A full year before, in one of his instant, inexplicable decisions, Roosevelt had ordered that “Edgar” was to have “foreign intelligence work in the Western Hemisphere,” and MID and ONI “should cover the rest of the world.” Given the President’s nod, Hoover had moved swiftly. Well before Donovan signed up his first college professor, the FBI already had 150 secret agents, the Special Intelligence Service, working to combat Nazi influence in Latin America. For Hoover, his initial bureaucratic victory was just the first step in an intelligence strategy that suggested, today Latin America, tomorrow the world. Running this worldwide network, Adolf Berle reported to the President, was Hoover’s ultimate goal for the FBI.
In his naked ambition, the man had his critics. Secretary of War Stimson wrote in his diary of the FBI chief: “[H]e goes to the White House … and poisons the mind of the President.” General Marshall found Hoover puerile and petulant, “more of a spoiled child than a responsible officer.” Still, he had provided useful, if questionable, services to FDR during the 1940 election and continued to do so. Hoover was not only personally helpful to FDR, but was apparently doing a splendid job of spy catching. The FBI still controlled the Abwehr’s shortwave station on Long Island and continued to feed bogus intelligence back to Germany over this circuit. The penetration was so complete that even funds sent for the salaries and expenses of the compromised agents were intercepted by the FBI. And then, on July 30, 1941, Hoover practically shut down German espionage in the United States overnight. The FBI arrested thirty-three Nazi agents. William Sebold, the German-born double agent working against the Abwehr and for the bureau, helped finger the suspects, including one seemingly innocuous figure. It was Sebold who tricked the simple Hermann Lang into admitting that he had stolen the plans for the Norden bombsight. These triumphs, which Hoover described over lunches with FDR, could not fail to impress.
In the summer of 1941, the President was approached by the distraught wife of Kermit Roosevelt, his distant cousin and Eleanor’s first cousin, the member of The Club who had accompanied Vincent Astor aboard the Nourmahal on the 1938 spying expedition to the South Pacific. The heavy-drinking Kermit, already plagued with a venereal disease, had strayed again. He had run off with a masseuse named Herta Peters, their whereabouts unknown. Kermit’s wife pleaded with the President to find him and end the scandal. FDR asked Vincent Astor, now coordinating intelligence in the New York City area, to get help from the FBI.
Astor made an immediate blunder. He went to the FBI, but at the wrong level. Since he was operating out of New York, Astor contacted Thomas Donegan of the bureau’s office in that city and conveyed the President’s desire for assistance in finding Kermit. Astor then called Director Hoover, annoyed by the bureau’s slow pace in handling the case. On learning that Astor had talked to his New York subordinate first, Hoover became furious. The wellborn amateur was about to get a lesson from the humbly born Hoover in how these games were played. The director explained icily, “[A] thing like that ought not be given directly to our New York office. As a matter of fact if you’d called me … in the first instance, I would have arranged to put a special on right away … so that nobody in our New York office would necessarily know about it… . I know how a story like this if it got out by any chance would just be terribly embarrassing to the big boss. It’s a kind of case that we usually handle in a little different way, that is, where there is a personal angle involved I generally will send some personal representative directly from Washington so he can go ahead and handle it without anybody locally knowing what it is all about you see… .” Astor’s mistake was that he had failed to bring a scandal in the President’s family directly to Hoover. The director’s expertise at such matters would not only increase Roosevelt’s indebtedness to him, but Hoover’s awareness of this presidential dirty linen would make FDR wary of ever attacking him. That was how Hoover’s dossiers worked from the President on down. Hoover also used the conversation with Astor to jab an emerging rival as America’s spymaster. He accused Astor of supporting Bill Donovan and said, “Now I don’t know anything about the Colonel Donovan situation and I, of course, care less. But the point about it is if they want Colonel Donovan to come in or if they want you to come in or they want Smith or Brown … hell, I’ll wire my resignation tonight if that’s the way the President feels about it… . The job doesn’t mean enough to me.” Astor backed down, and responded meekly, “Anything that I said which may have been improper, I was mad that night myself, all I can do, I apologize to you in blank… .” In the end, Hoover got a personal plea for help with Kermit’s disappearance from the White House, but not directly from the President.
By now, FDR’s adoring and adored secretary, Missy LeHand, was no longer on the scene. The month before, June 4, 1941, she had been felled by a stroke in front of the President at a White House party, an affliction that ultimately killed her. In the meantime, her premier position in the President’s office was assumed by Grace Tully, perhaps lacking Missy’s innate femininity, but a first-rate executive secretary. Tully has been vividly sketched by Sam Rosenman: “She was Irish, very devout Catholic. She had an Irish temper, and one of her virtues, as well as one of her faults, was her dir
ectness with people… . She was militant in her devotion to Roosevelt; she had a very good humor and was good company, inclined to drink a little too much on occasion and show it, nothing really disreputable, but if she had two or three drinks, she’d get very loquacious.” FDR referred to Tully as “The Duchess.” It was Tully whom the President told to call Hoover and ask him to handle the search for Kermit personally. By having her call Hoover, FDR managed to keep himself one layer removed from direct intervention in a mess. It was a tactic that Hoover, a fellow adept, could not fail to admire.
The FBI found Kermit Roosevelt and kept him under surveillance for a month, especially since his inamorata was believed to be German and a potential spy. Vincent Astor learned from the episode both that J. Edgar Hoover was no man to have as an enemy and that the director bitterly resented Bill Donovan. What he could not know was that his role, indeed the whole treatment of this embarrassing incident involving the President’s family, was placed in Hoover’s personal files. Astor’s conversations with the director had been recorded by a listening device on Hoover’s phone. Bill Donovan might have once dismissed Hoover as a mere clerk, but a critic once described the FBI chief as America’s “most dangerous file clerk.” Hoover’s final judgment on Donovan’s COI was equally harsh: He described its creation as “Roosevelt’s folly.”
It was in the realm of political intelligence that Hoover continued to be most useful to the President. In September 1941, at FDR’s direction, Adolf Berle contacted Ed Tamm, Hoover’s number three aide, to ask the bureau to provide inside information on any congressional opponents of the administration’s foreign policy. Within a day, the director himself got back to Berle. “There was no indication,” Hoover said, “of any revolt on matters relating to the foreign policy. The President can have anything and everything he wants, at least through the present term of Congress… . Opposition to appropriation bills will probably depend upon how specifically these bills provide for British aid, since there seems to be a growing anti-British sentiment.” The director gave no hint of how his organization managed to penetrate the confidential councils of Congress. Hoover was further able to tip off the President to an upcoming congressional investigation “into the entire motion picture industry in order to show that the Administration had been using the movies as a vehicle to propagate information about the War.”
In October, Bill Donovan lost another turf battle, along with yielding intelligence operations in Latin America to Hoover. Nelson Rockefeller, the thirty-three-year-old grandson of the richest American, John D. Rockefeller, and himself an aficionado of Latin America, persuaded FDR to create still another agency, the Office for Coordination of Commercial and Cultural Relations Between the American Republics. The energetic and ambitious Rockefeller became head of the new agency, which was subsequently more trimly renamed the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. Donovan had managed to add to his COI charter psychological warfare to be conducted via radio. He and Rockefeller were thus running overlapping broadcasting operations to win the hearts of Latinos. To trump Donovan, Rockefeller used a tactic that he picked up from Henry Wallace while playing tennis with the Vice President. Wallace had advised “what you ought to do is … give him [FDR] something that’s ready to be signed.” Rockefeller, a quick study, presented just such a pre-emptive letter to the President on October 15. FDR read it, made a few minor changes, and sent it that day to Bill Donovan. The letter began: “It appears that some question has been raised as to the fields of responsibility of your work and that of Nelson Rockefeller’s organization… . Propaganda by radio or any other media directed at Latin America should be handled exclusively by the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs… .” Donovan had now been kicked out of the Western Hemisphere on the ground by Hoover and in the air by Rockefeller.
He was in for one more stumble. Donovan wanted to recruit Henry Field, a leading anthropologist and Middle East expert. He invited Field to his Georgetown home and began his soft-spoken, persuasive sales pitch. Much to his astonishment and annoyance, he failed to make a sale. He already had a job in the government, Field explained. As he later described Donovan’s reaction to this rare rejection, “Wild Bill’s face got red, his eyes blazed and he drew a letter from his pocket signed ‘Franklin D. Roosevelt,’ authorizing him to recruit anyone, anywhere, for his mission.” Field then pulled out his own letter, demonstrating that he was already working for an intelligence operation run directly by the President. Donovan, as Field recalled, “was very amazed… .” Thus the director of the COI learned of the existence of John Franklin Carter’s ring and that his agency was not the only espionage fiefdom spawned in the Oval Office.
Chapter IX
“Our Objective Is to Get America into the War”
ALL THAT the White House staff, including the Secret Service detail, was told on August 3, 1941, was that FDR was boarding the presidential yacht, Potomac, for a ten-day fishing trip off Cape Cod. Before leaving, the President had written his mother, Sara, “The heat in Washington has been fairly steady and I long to sleep under a blanket for the first time since May.” Washington mythology had it that the British, who knew something about torrid outposts, paid a tropical supplement to their diplomats posted to the American capital and that the ambassador performed his duties in khaki shorts and a pith helmet.
The composition of the small presidential party appeared to confirm the purpose of the boat trip. Pa Watson, Admiral Ross McIntire, FDR’s physician, and Captain John Beardall, his naval aide, were all avid fishermen. To McIntire, “There was nothing about the start of the trip to make us think it was other than the usual thing.” Just prior to their departure, FDR “told me that he was going to take a little trip up through the Cape Cod Canal,” Eleanor Roosevelt recalled. “Then he smiled and I knew he was not telling me all that he was going to do.”
On August 4 the President’s party did put into the New Bedford Yacht Club for some fishing and a picnic. There, Roosevelt welcomed aboard the attractive and amiable Princess Martha of Sweden. After her brief visit, he changed the flashy shirts he favored when fishing for a white shirt and tie. The final sartorial touch was the regulation Navy cape with velvet collar and braid frogs given to him by his cousin Colonel Henry Roosevelt, who was now serving, in the family tradition, as assistant secretary of the Navy. Getting a man confined to a wheelchair in and out of an overcoat was a clumsy business, and the cape had been an inspired alternative. As the vessel steamed out of New Bedford harbor, a flotilla of five destroyers and the heavy cruiser USS Augusta rose over the horizon. The Potomac came alongside the cruiser and the President was piped aboard. He was greeted on the quarterdeck by the leadership of the American armed forces: General George Marshall, Army Chief of Staff; Admiral Harold Stark, Chief of Naval Operations; Admiral Ernest King, commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet; and General Henry Arnold, commander of the Army Air Forces. The flotilla then swung north, headed toward rough seas off Newfoundland. The sea was FDR’s element, and he tended to gather around him seafaring men whom he had known when he served as assistant secretary of the Navy. He had first met Stark as a young lieutenant commanding a destroyer. Once, while aboard another destroyer, the Flusser, Roosevelt had offered to take the ship between the narrow strait separating Campobello Island and the Maine coast. He knew these waters well, he said. The Flusser’s skipper, Lieutenant William F. Halsey Jr., suspected there was a difference between handling a sailboat and piloting a warship. But he later wrote of the incident: “As Mr. Roosevelt made his first turn, I saw him look aft and check the swing of our stern. My worries were over; he knew his business.” Years earlier, when FDR visited the Pan Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, his personal aide had been Husband E. Kimmel, now commanding naval forces at Pearl Harbor.
Steaming toward the Augusta, aboard the Royal Navy’s new battleship, the Prince of Wales, rode Winston Churchill, eager to find out what Franklin Roosevelt was really like. What stuff was he made of? How deep was his abhorrence of Hitler?
How likely was he to join Britain in fighting Nazism? The month before, the President had delivered a strong message to Congress that had heartened Churchill. The sea lanes from the United States to Iceland, Roosevelt had declared, had to be kept open and protected against even a “threat of attack.” He had then left it to the Navy to figure out what constituted a threat. Admiral Stark was called to the White House, where he hoped for clarification. Just what did the commander in chief expect of the Navy? “To some of my very pointed questions,” Stark later wrote a friend, “which all of us would like to have answered, I get a smile or ‘Betty, please don’t ask me that.’” What Stark guessed, and what FDR was not eager to spell out, was that he wanted the U.S. Navy to patrol four fifths of the Atlantic Ocean for the British. Admiral Ernest King, the fleet commander, was careful not to underestimate the President’s intentions. King simply ordered the fleet to go after any German submarine or raider close by or at “reasonably longer distances… .” This long arm of the American naval patrol served Britain well, but Churchill, as he approached the American ships, wanted more.
On Saturday morning, August 9, the Augusta and Prince of Wales came alongside each other. On the deck of the American warship stood Franklin Roosevelt, supported on the arm of his son Elliott, who had been waiting aboard the cruiser. Elliott, the first Roosevelt son to enter the military, had by then been on active duty almost a year, and had made a small declaration of independence by joining the Army Air Forces rather than his father’s favored Navy, and without FDR’s knowledge. A cosmetic ruse had been employed on this trip to minimize the President’s handicap. His metal leg braces had been painted black to blend with dark shoes and socks.
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