*
As 1941 drew to a close, FDR’s newest intelligence creations, headed by Astor, Carter, and Donovan, vied for the President’s favor. Bill Donovan, with the largest, most visible apparatus, rushed ahead with indiscriminate energy, for Wild Bill was a man to whom motion equaled progress. He began to bombard FDR with memoranda churned out by his ever-growing staff. A November 12 report from the coordinator of information quoted a supposedly confidential remark by Churchill to the effect that after the war both “German and Russian militarism must be destroyed.” With Britain’s best hope of survival at this point resting on Russia’s recent entry into the war, it must have surprised FDR to be told that Churchill would make so rash a comment. Five days later, Donovan delivered to the President intelligence purportedly from within the Third Reich that the Germans were filled with “despair” and “misery,” that morale was sinking fast, and that a single major setback would leave the Nazi regime hanging “dangerously in the balance.” Such errant nonsense at a time when Hitler had yet to taste defeat somehow drew no rebuke from FDR, and Donovan’s stock seemed unaffected. The COI chief’s access to the White House continued, totaling nine meetings with the President in 1941.
FDR’s least recognized agent, John Franklin Carter, who was now operating with $54,000 from the President’s emergency funds, also continued to enjoy easy access to the Oval Office, thanks to his cover as a columnist friendly to the administration. Some assignments that FDR gave Carter were straightforward espionage, in one instance, having an agent investigate a suspected fifth column operation on the French island of Martinique in the West Indies. Others skirted the defensible. Charles Lindbergh continued to infuriate FDR, especially after the aviator became the crown jewel in the isolationist America First movement. In late April 1941, days after Lindbergh gave his first speech as a member of the organization, the President called Carter into his office and began speaking in his elliptical fashion, leaving the journalist mystified as to where he was headed. FDR finally got around to the Civil War and the Copperheads, northerners who sympathized with the South. The President wanted Carter to look into present-day Copperheads. Carter now understood what was expected of him. Within days, he delivered a fifty-page report for placement in the President’s nighttime reading file. Thus armed, FDR was able to fire back when a reporter at a press conference asked him why Colonel Lindbergh had not been called to active duty. That was simple. Lindbergh, the President explained, was the equivalent of the arch–Civil War Copperhead Clement L. Vallandigham. The thrust drew blood. Lindbergh wrote FDR three days later resigning his commission as a colonel in the Army Air Corps Reserve. In Roosevelt’s mind, his assignment to Carter had not been prompted by personal animus. Lindbergh, in FDR’s eyes, was an enemy of his country, as dangerous as any fifth columnist, and had to be exposed.
Perhaps the oddest—or given FDR’s multi-layered thought processes, a typical—assignment was the one he had given Carter to take a discreet look into the effectiveness of his dear friend Vincent Astor’s operation in New York. On completing the assignment, Carter could barely wait to phone his conclusion to FDR. He told the President that Astor was confused “about the whole problem of investigation in the New York district.” This verdict was merely a preliminary jab presaging a full-scale attack on a rival whom Carter believed was clearly out of his depth.
*
To the President, what was happening in Europe was vital to America, what was happening in the Pacific a distraction. Seen from the Japanese perspective, however, the United States had become an obstacle to Japan’s grand strategy for creating the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a union, with their country at its heart, freed of Western colonialists. The United States was aiding the empire’s enemy through its extension of lend-lease to China, embargoing vitally needed fuel—in short, attempting to block Japan’s imperial destiny. China had become the major sticking point between the United States and Japan. After nine years of unofficial and four years of full-scale war, the Japanese dared not lose face by a withdrawal from China, yet could not defeat it as long as Chiang Kai-shek continued to be propped up by American military aid. The emperor’s government had been willing to placate the Americans by trimming back its ambitions in Southeast Asia. But Roosevelt demanded an impossible price, Japan’s complete withdrawal from China.
Through Magic decrypts, FDR knew of the Japanese frustration. One broken cable dated November 4, 1941, and marked “urgent” from Tokyo’s foreign minister, Matsuoka, to the ambassador in Washington, Nomura, warned: “Conditions both within and without our Empire are so tense that no longer is procrastination possible, yet, in our sincerity to maintain pacific relationships between the Empire of Japan and the United States of America, we have decided, as a result of these deliberations, to gamble once more on the continuance of the parleys, but this is our last effort… . We gambled the fate of our land on the throw of this die.”
In the face of intensifying mutual mistrust, the President sought to strengthen security at home by dealing with his customary bugaboo, fifth column infiltration, particularly by Japanese living on the West Coast, whether American citizens or aliens. Carter employed in his ring a Chicago businessman, Curtis B. Munson, a levelheaded operator not easily stampeded into herd judgments. With FDR’s blessing, Carter had sent Munson to the West Coast to gauge the loyalty of Japanese residents. Munson reported, “There are still Japanese in the United States who will tie dynamite around their waist and make a human bomb of themselves.” But American-born Japanese were “universally estimated from 90 to 98 percent loyal to the United States… . They are very American and are of a proud, self-respecting race suffering from a little inferiority complex and a lack of contact with the white boys they went to school with. There is no Japanese ‘problem’ on the coast, there will be no armed uprising of Japanese.” FDR glanced at these findings and quickly dismissed them as “nothing much new.” What caught his eye, however, was a later Munson paragraph: “Your reporter … is horrified to note that dams, bridges, harbors, power stations etc. are wholly unguarded everywhere. The harbor of San Pedro could be razed by fire completely by four men with hand grenades… . Dams could be blown and half of lower California might actually die of thirst… .” An alarmed FDR moved quickly. Memories of smoldering Black Tom munitions storehouses in 1916 were still alive in his mind. On November 11 the President directed Carter, Donovan, the FBI, and the Army to protect these sites. In Roosevelt’s shotgun style of delegation, the four parties could sort out their respective roles themselves. He further told Carter, “[I]mmediate arrests may be required.”
Was the United States facing an attack, overt or covert by Japan? In mid-November, Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee issued its assessment. Yes, Japan and the United States were approaching a crisis. But above all, the British analysts concluded, the Japanese would never risk war with the United States. If negotiations between America and Japan broke down, the Japanese might well attack, but in Southeast Asia, and their first target would likely be Thailand.
*
That fall, the President received a document of such sensitivity that its exposure could provoke an international crisis. Its thudding title, “Army and Navy Estimate of United States Over-All Production Requirements,” masked its significance. Within the War Department, the plan had been shorthanded to “Rainbow Five.” The previous July, the President had asked General Marshall to prepare an estimate of what it would take, should America enter the war, to defeat Germany. By September 25, the top-secret seventeen-page Rainbow Five report, was on the President’s desk. The plan projected the full productive capacity of a great industrial nation—its manpower, machinery, and matériel—to achieve the objective. Rainbow Five predicted the need for 216 infantry divisions, 51 motorized divisions, and a vastly expanded Navy, all at a projected cost of $150 billion. Given the secrecy of the document, only thirty-five copies were made.
However aggressive the President himself felt, the debate between inte
rventionists and isolationists went on and extended into the War Department. Though involved in devising a contingency plan for war with Germany, some members of Marshall’s staff were unhappy at considering the Third Reich even as a theoretical enemy. Officers who thought, with the President, that the United States could wage a successful war against Germany, or that it should do so, were put down by their isolationist colleagues as “soreheads.”
On the evening of December 3, Senator Burton K. Wheeler received a surprise visit from an unidentified officer in the Army’s War Plans Division. The officer had with him a copy of the Rainbow Five plan. “Aren’t you afraid of delivering the most secret document in America to a senator?” Wheeler is supposed to have asked. His visitor was unfazed, replying that Congress had “a right to know what’s really going on in the executive branch when it concerns human lives.” The next day, Wheeler leaked the Rainbow Five plan to Chesley Manly, the Washington correspondent of FDR’s fiercest journalistic critic, the Chicago Tribune.
J. Edgar Hoover was tasked to investigate the leak. Suspicion fell instantly on an officer in the War Plans Division, Colonel Albert C. Wedemeyer, a soldier of partly German extraction and a warm friend of General Ludwig Beck, chief of the German General Staff. Hoover’s report to the attorney general, marked “strictly personal and confidential,” was emphatic but circumstantial. “Wedemeyer spent two years in Germany attending the German War College,” the FBI chief noted. “He is reported to be most pro-German in his feelings, his utterances and his sympathies. He personally travelled through Germany with Colonel Lindbergh… .” On September 21, “Wedemeyer took four days’ leave for the purpose of going to New York to attend a banquet or dinner with Colonel Lindbergh… . Colonel Wedemeyer engaged in rather heated discussions with fellow officers at the War Department concerning his lack of sympathy with the Administration’s international program… . He advocates a ‘hands off’ policy toward Japan… . He is otherwise very isolationist in his statements and sympathies.” However, neither the FBI nor the Army was able to connect Wedemeyer directly to the leak.
Rainbow Five was a major military secret, and its disclosure likely violated the Espionage Act of 1917. The attorney general, Francis Biddle, thought that the Chicago Tribune’s publisher, Colonel Robert McCormick, could be prosecuted under the act. Printing the story had, in fact, troubled the Tribune’s managing editor, J. Loy Maloney, who bucked the decision up to McCormick. If FDR had a premier hater, it was the tall, stern, sixty-one-year-old conservative publisher of the Tribune. Given his rigid tory views, one wit called McCormick “the greatest mind of the fourteenth century.” McCormick told Maloney that he wanted the story to run, and on page one. It appeared on December 4 under a headline that shouted, FDR’S WAR PLANS! GOAL IS TEN MILLION ARMED MEN, PROPOSED LAND DRIVE BY JULY, 1943. The body of the story read: “… President Roosevelt calls for American Expeditionary Forces aggregating five million men for a final land offensive against Germany and her satellites… . Germany and her European satellites cannot be defeated by the European powers now fighting against her… . If our European enemies are to be defeated, it will be necessary for the United States to enter the war… .” July 1, 1943, was the date set for America’s presumed entry.
No matter that Secretary Stimson pointed out to the press that Rainbow Five was a contingency plan, not what the United States would do, but what the country might have to do. “What would you think of a general staff,” he lectured the reporters, “which did not investigate every conceivable type of emergency which might confront it?”
Though a contingent plan, Rainbow Five was the most provocative jab yet at Hitler. It dealt not only with estimates of guns, ships, and men that the United States might raise, but its dense appendices contained maps of Germany, potential targets, and made estimates of the strength of the prospective enemy. The explicitness of the plan would inevitably affect Hitler’s strategic thinking, and it had to alarm Americans who wanted to keep the United States out of war. Rainbow Five, blown in a major American newspaper and its Washington affiliate, the Times-Herald, might have been a bombshell of international magnitude if its occurrence was not so totally obliterated by what was to happen in America on a peaceful Sunday afternoon just three days later.
Chapter X
Catastrophe or Conspiracy
IT WAS just past 1:30 P.M. when FDR heard Frank Knox’s voice over the phone telling him, “Mr. President, it looks as if the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor.” Soon a Signal Corps enlisted man was patching a line into the President’s phone to take a call from Governor Joseph Poindexter in Honolulu. Listening hard through the static, the President exclaimed, “My God, there’s another wave of Japanese over Hawaii right this minute!” A Secret Service man on duty remembered, “His chin stuck out about two feet in front of his knees, and he was the maddest Dutchman anybody ever saw.”
A stream of generals, admirals, and aides filed in and out of the office throughout the afternoon. At 8:30 P.M., members of the cabinet, summoned by the President, began arriving as stewards lugged in extra chairs, forming them into a horseshoe around the President’s desk. At 9 P.M., FDR met with the leaders of Congress. Through the window facing south over the Ellipse the moon could be glimpsed riding in a haze over a capital that had started the day at peace. In front of the White House, a crowd milled about, the stunned, the curious, and the angry. A stenographer took notes as FDR began addressing the arc of grave faces. At the root of the Japanese attack, the President said, he detected machinations of the Axis partnership: “… [W]e received indications from various sources—Europe and Asia—that the German government was pressing Japan for action under the Tripartite Pact. In other words, an effort to divert the American mind, and the British mind from the European field, and divert American supplies from the European theater to the defense of the East Asia Theater.” FDR told his listeners, who leaned forward to catch his somber delivery, that his administration had reluctantly reached the conclusion that the ongoing negotiations with Japan were a sham, particularly the sticking point concerning the U.S. demand for Japan’s withdrawal from China. “… [T]hey were to agree to cease their acts of aggressions, and that they would try to bring the China war to a close,” he said. He returned to the theme of Axis conniving: “And so the thing went along until we believed that under the pressure from Berlin the Japanese were about to do something… .” The sneak attack had a historical parallel in the Russo-Japanese war, FDR noted. Pearl Harbor was “equalled only by the Japanese episode of 1904, when two squadrons, cruisers … without any warning—I think on a Sunday morning, by the way—Japanese cruisers sank all of them… .”
As the President spoke, military aides continued to set fresh bulletins before him. He looked up from one to announce, “It looks as if out of eight battleships, three have been sunk, and possibly a fourth. Two destroyers were blown up while they were in dry-dock. Two of the battleships are badly damaged. Several other smaller vessels have been sunk or destroyed… . I have no word on the Navy casualties, which will undoubtedly be very heavy, and the best information is that there have been more than one hundred Army casualties and three hundred men killed and injured.” His labor secretary, Frances Perkins, the only woman in the cabinet, recalled, “The President could hardly bring himself” to describe the slaughter and had physical difficulty in getting the words out. Another eyewitness, however, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, observed how FDR “demonstrated that ultimate capacity to dominate and control a supreme emergency which is perhaps the rarest and most valuable characteristic of any statesman.”
Senator Tom Connally of Texas, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sat close to the President, his face red with rage as he bellowed, “How did it happen that our warships were caught like lame ducks at Pearl Harbor?” Connally slammed his fist down hard on the President’s desk. “How did they catch us with our pants down?” “I don’t know, Tom,” FDR answered. “I just don’t know.” After the cabinet and congr
essional leaders left, Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau returned to his office and told his staff gathered there, “They will never be able to explain it.” Adolf Berle wrote in his diary: “… If there is anyone I would not like to be it is the Chief of Naval Intelligence.”
Aides, couriers, and secretaries continued to enter the President’s study all evening. At twenty-five minutes past midnight FDR received his last visitors. He had summoned the COI chief, Bill Donovan, and the CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, recently back from covering the war from London, who had been invited for Sunday supper. Earlier that day, Donovan had been at a football game at the Polo Grounds, watching the Brooklyn Dodgers pummel the New York Giants 21 to 7, when a voice announced over a loudspeaker, “Colonel William Donovan, come to the box office at once. There is an important phone message.” The message was from the President’s son Captain Jimmy Roosevelt, telling Wild Bill that the President needed him in Washington at once.
Joseph E. Persico Page 19