Despite his retiring manner, perhaps because of it, the bachelor physicist enjoyed a full after-hours social life at Los Alamos. The shy Fuchs aroused the maternal instincts of Manhattan Project wives, who saw to it that he was invited to their picnics, dinner parties, and dances, where he proved surprisingly light on his feet. The job, nevertheless, remained Fuchs’s obsession. As his immediate superior, Hans Bethe, put it, “He worked days and nights. He was a bachelor and had nothing better to do, and he contributed very greatly to the success of the Los Alamos project.” As Fuchs later described his dual existence, in “one compartment I allowed myself to make friendships, to have personal relationships … I knew that the other compartment would step in if I approached the danger point.” He had an expression for his mind-set, “controlled schizophrenia.” Even before coming to Los Alamos, Fuchs had already begun slipping atomic secrets to his Soviet contact in New York, Harry Gold, code-named Raymond. Now he was positioned deep within the atomic sanctum, able not merely to provide to his Soviet superiors the marginalia of nuclear physics, but the very heart of the bomb’s construction.
Fuchs was not alone at Los Alamos in his hidden loyalties. Theodore Alvin Hall, son of an immigrant New York furrier, was a physics prodigy who skipped whole grades in secondary school. He was initially accepted by Columbia University but turned away when it was discovered he was only fourteen. He next attended Queens College and in 1942, at age sixteen, entered Harvard as a junior. There he demonstrated a genius for quantum mechanics. When Manhattan Project recruiters discreetly inquired at Harvard about promising physicists, Ted Hall, now an eighteen-year-old senior, was suggested.
From early youth the precocious Hall had been drawn to radical politics, joining the left-wing American Student Union when he was thirteen. At Los Alamos, the boy physicist, with the slender, handsome looks, soon adopted the moral conviction of several of his colleagues that knowledge of the bomb should be shared with the Soviet Union. As he later described his state of mind, “I was worried about the dangers of an American monopoly of atomic weapons if there should be a post-war depression.” In October 1944, while visiting his family in Forest Hills, he went to the Amtorg purchasing office at 238 West Twenty-eighth Street and boldly offered to give atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Two months later, now assigned a Russian controller, he made his first delivery, pages of handwritten notes jotted down in the privacy of his room at Los Alamos. Some scholars would later rate the notes that Hall handed to the Soviets as superior even to Fuchs’s disclosures in that the young physicist was the first to reveal to Russia the implosion method for detonating the bomb. Hall was nineteen when he provided the Soviet Union with possibly its most priceless atomic secret thus far.
*
Nineteen forty-four was a presidential election year, and espionage intruded into the campaign. Once Roosevelt had cleared the third-term barrier, and with the country in the midst of war, a fourth-term bid seemed unremarkable. FDR initially remained coy about his intentions. One person, however, privy to his thoughts was Daisy Suckley. Over the past twelve years, he had exhausted the nation’s appetite for liberal politics, he told her. As she recorded in her diary after she and Roosevelt had finished a lone lunch, “… [H]e remembers Woodrow Wilson telling him that the public is willing to be ‘Liberal’ about a third of the time, gets tired of new things and reverts to conservatism the other two-thirds of the time.” On May 22, 1944, FDR made another admission to his spinster confidant, something he had first raised at Bernard Baruch’s South Carolina estate. He knew he was sicker than his doctors had let on. But on this subsequent occasion, discussing a fourth term, he told Daisy, “What will decide me will be the way I feel in a couple of months. If I know I am not going to be able to carry on for another four years, it wouldn’t be fair to the American people to run for another term.” Should that be his decision, he claimed, “I have a candidate—but don’t breathe it to a soul.” FDR paused conspiratorially, then said, “Henry J. Kaiser.”
Suckley was astonished. No one, she thought, could be more unlike the President. True, the sixty-two-year-old Kaiser was an eighteen-hour-a-day dynamo, a bottleneck breaker, who was on his way to turning out over a thousand Liberty ships, some in just days, a man so hyperactive that he wore two watches, one set to East Coast time and the other to West Coast time. He was known as the New Deal’s favorite tycoon. But Kaiser’s knowledge and experience of politics were nil and his personality less than magnetic. Suckley could not tell if the President was sincere or merely fishing for encouragement to run again by comparing himself to so unlikely a successor. Nor could she know how sincere this byzantine personality was when FDR told her, “[I]f the election were held tomorrow, he would be beaten by almost any Republican.” That July, however, Roosevelt did accept a fourth-term nomination as naturally as breathing. He chose Senator Harry S Truman as his running mate, shedding Henry Wallace, whose ultra-liberal politics and eccentricities had become anathema to Democrat bosses. FDR’s Republican opponent was to be New York’s governor and former racket-busting prosecutor, Thomas E. Dewey.
The choice of Truman would eventually plug a flagrant security leak. In January 1944, Fritz Kolbe was shocked by a document that came across his Berlin foreign office desk. Vice President Wallace had continued to confide the most delicate secrets to his trusted brother-in-law, Charles Bruggmann, and the Swiss diplomat had continued to cable these conversations to his superiors in the Swiss foreign ministry. What Kolbe came across was Wallace’s account of what had happened in the innermost councils of a Moscow conference of foreign ministers in October 1943. This information had found its way to Berlin through Habakuk, the German plant in the Swiss foreign office. Kolbe delivered the incriminating document to Allen Dulles on his next trip to Bern. Upon receiving it, Dulles alerted Donovan, who in turn took the report to the President’s military chief of staff, Admiral Leahy. The admiral, stunned by the enormity of Wallace’s indiscretion, immediately showed the message to the President. Leahy was equally amazed by FDR’s reaction. “The OSS report did not seem to surprise Roosevelt,” Leahy noted. “I do not recall that he commented on it at all except to say that it was quite interesting.” Two possible answers explain the President’s bland reaction. Either FDR’s powers of concentration were flagging or he knew, come July, that Wallace would not be on the ticket with him.
Arlington Hall’s work was not limited to decrypting Japanese ciphers. In April 1944 a broken message sent by the Swiss ambassador in Tokyo to Bern painted a gloomy portrait of Japan’s capital in the third year of war with America. The decrypt, sent to FDR, read: “Stores are closing one by one and Tokyo presents a pitiful spectacle. The Japanese are more and more dependent on the black market, and the distress of the people is great… . Thousands of families are leaving the capital, driven out by hunger.” The President could only hope that the picture of Tokyo was more accurate than the one the Japanese were receiving about the American home front. A German who had been interned in the United States returned home in early March 1944 aboard an exchange ship and gave this description to Ambassador Oshima: “Living conditions of the people in general in the United States are growing steadily worse. Prices are soaring and quality declining. Distribution of articles, particularly necessary for daily use, is poor. Foods, particularly meats, vegetables, sugar and fresh fish, are scarce. It is the same with goods of secondary necessity. Such things as shoes are almost unobtainable.”
The collision of presidential politics and espionage occurred less than two months before the 1944 election. James V. Forrestal, the Navy secretary, who had succeeded Frank Knox after the latter’s death that year, first sounded the alarm. “My Dear Mr. President,” Forrestal wrote in his neat longhand on September 14, “Information has come to me that Dewey’s first speech will deal with Pearl Harbor.” An unidentified anti-Roosevelt Army officer, it turned out, had informed Dewey that FDR had access to broken Japanese codes long before December 7, 1941. Therefore, the President had to have known of t
he impending attack and had done nothing to prevent it. Consequently, the Dewey camp reasoned, FDR was guilty of criminal negligence at best and treason at worst. General Marshall, aware of the leak, and given his visceral loathing of politics, dreaded entering into this political sinkhole, but saw no choice. Without saying anything to Roosevelt, he proceeded with his own counterattack.
On September 25, Dewey, then campaigning in Tulsa, Oklahoma, received a visitor, Colonel Carter Clarke, dressed for the day in a recently reactivated civilian suit. Ushered into the candidate’s hotel suite, Clarke handed Dewey an envelope stamped in red “Top Secret.” As the former prosecutor eyed the envelope warily, Clarke explained that he had come directly from General Marshall. Dewey, with the trademark black mustache and a cold-eyed gaze, a shorter man than the officer had expected, extracted a letter from the envelope. “Well,” Dewey said, after reading it with a lawyer’s scrutiny, “Top Secret—that’s really top, isn’t it?” Clarke could not tell if the candidate was genuinely impressed or being sarcastic.
Marshall’s letter began, “I am writing to you without the knowledge of any other person except Admiral King… . The conduct of General Eisenhower’s campaign and of all operations in the Pacific are closely related in conception and timing to the information we secretly obtain through … intercepted codes. They contribute greatly to the victory and tremendously to the saving in American lives… . Our main basis of information regarding Hitler’s intentions in Europe is obtained from Baron Oshima’s messages from Berlin reporting his interviews with Hitler and other officials… . These are still the codes involved in the Pearl Harbor events.” He went on to explain that Magic had provided the edge in the naval battles of the Coral Sea and Midway. The heavy shipping losses inflicted on the emperor’s fleet, he explained, “… largely result from the fact that we know the sailing dates and routes of their convoys and can notify our submarines to lie in wait at these points.” He warned of the disastrous impact of compromising the secret of the broken codes with an unadmiring reference to the OSS: “… Some of Donovan’s people, without telling us, instituted a secret search of the Japanese embassy offices in Portugal. As a result, the entire military attaché code all over the world was changed, and though this occurred over a year ago, we have not yet been able to break the new code… .” The last point, while persuasive, was not quite true; and given Marshall’s reputation for probity, it had probably been fed to him by Donovan’s enemies in Army intelligence. The Japanese had not changed their codes after the OSS black bag job inside the Lisbon embassy.
Dewey knew that he faced a cunning opponent in FDR and feared a trap. He found it hard to dismiss a suspicion that Marshall was doing the President’s dirty work in order to rob him of a powerful campaign issue. A Dewey aide pointed out to Clarke that tens of thousands of people knew that the United States had broken the Japanese codes. Hadn’t the Chicago Tribune carried that story after Midway? To which Dewey added, “Well, I’ll be damned if I believe the Japs are still using those two codes.” As unlikely as it seemed, Colonel Clarke insisted, they were. For all his toughness and his own cunning, Tom Dewey was, at bottom, a patriot. After another meeting with Colonel Clarke at the governor’s office in Albany, he accepted Marshall’s plea. He did not raise Magic as a campaign issue, and the Japanese continued to use their compromised codes.
General Marshall, despite Dewey’s suspicions, had been honest in claiming that the President knew nothing of his approach to the Republican candidate. Not until days before the election did Harry Hopkins go to FDR with the story, after Marshall had confided it to Roosevelt’s closest aide. “The President was surprised at the action Marshall had taken but expressed no criticism of that action,” Hopkins later recalled. “He merely stated that he felt confident that Governor Dewey would not, for political purposes, give secret and vital information to the enemy.” FDR also revealed a surer grasp of popular sentiment than Dewey. He told Hopkins, “My opponent must be pretty desperate if he is even thinking of using material like this which would be bound to react against him.”
If he had lost a campaign issue, Dewey had won an unwanted fan. The Nazi RSHA, which included the Gestapo and the SD intelligence operations, received a dispatch from “an entirely trustworthy informant in Spain,” claiming, “Dewey hereby showed an instinctive antipathy to the Jews… . Many Jewish elements were to be found among the gangsters he had fought [as a district attorney]. This attitude is, according to the informant’s view, traceable to Dewey’s Irish ancestry as well as to his defeat in the 1938 campaign against the Jewish-Democratic candidate [for governor, Herbert] Lehman… . And the informant mentioned the possibility of an understanding between Germany and the U.S.A. under Dewey’s presidency.” It was rubbish passing for intelligence and demonstrated the uselessness of information tailored to fit prejudices, in this case, the anti-Semitism of Adolf Hitler.
That fall, FDR found occasion to lecture Churchill about security. The New York Times had carried a story headlined INVENTION GIVES U-BOATS NEW LIFE, BRITON ASSERTS. A Royal Air Force senior officer was quoted saying that “the Germans were fitting an extendible air intake to their U-boats so that they could recharge batteries and ventilate the submarines without surfacing.” FDR cabled the text of the Times story to Churchill, adding, “… [O]ur own submarine campaign in the Pacific is playing such an important role that the Barbarian will seize desperately upon any information that will help him in anti-submarine measures. I do hope, therefore, that we may continue to keep anyone from talking too much. I have no doubt that indiscretions are committed in our press but the enclosed has recently appeared under a London dateline. I will do what I can to keep the lid on here and I know I may count on you for similar measures.”
*
The war eventually was going to be won. Normandy had settled the outcome on the western front; Stalingrad had settled it in the East. The questions remaining were how much longer the victory would require and how to deal with the enemy afterward. Germany’s postwar treatment had been the subject of heated debate at Tehran in the fall of 1943. Roosevelt and Stalin favored a peace as simple as it was harsh; they wanted Germany broken up. Churchill was opposed. Keeping secret the dissension among the Allies became critical, for how hard the Germans continued to fight depended in part on how they expected to be treated in defeat.
On August 19, 1944, Henry Morgenthau, who had long concerned himself with the fate of European Jewry at the hands of the Nazis, went to the White House to discuss with FDR his ideas for dealing with postwar Germany. The President’s thinking happily coincided with his own. “We have got to be tough with Germany,” FDR told his Treasury secretary, “and I mean the German people not just the Nazis. We either have to castrate the German people or you have got to treat them in such manner so they can’t just go on reproducing people who want to continue the way they have in the past.” Morgenthau liked the punitive ring of the President’s comments. “Nobody is considering the question along those lines,” he responded to FDR. “In England they want to build up Germany so she can pay reparations!” After leaving the White House, he wrote in his diary that the President “left no doubt whatsoever in my mind that he personally wants to be tough with the Germans.”
It was outside his domain, but Morgenthau sensed a vacuum in postwar policy waiting to be filled. He went to a necessary ally, Henry Stimson, to test some fresh approaches. “I … gave him my idea of the possibility of removing all industry from Germany and simply reducing them to an agricultural population of small land-owners,” he later wrote of this conversation. Morgenthau had then described a plan for reshaping the German character. He told Stimson, “… [I]f you let the young children of today be brought up by SS Troopers who are indoctrinated with Hitlerism, aren’t you simply going to raise another generation of Germans who will want to wage war? … Don’t you think the thing to do is to take a leaf from Hitler’s book and completely remove these children from their parents and make them wards of the state …?” Ex-Army
officers from the United States, Britain, and Russia could run schools, he suggested, “and have these children learn the true spirit of democracy.” Stimson expressed horror at Morgenthau’s draconian ideas. The Treasury secretary responded, “[T]hat is not nearly as bad as sending them to gas chambers.”
To Stimson, Morgenthau was not seeking a viable policy, but wanted Jewish vengeance. He immediately sent to the White House a “Handbook” prepared in his department describing a more moderate approach to a defeated Germany. Roosevelt’s response, the most stinging that Stimson ever received, left no doubt that FDR preferred Morgenthau’s divide, disarm, and denazify approach. “This so-called ‘Handbook,’” Roosevelt began, “is pretty bad… . [A]ll copies should be withdrawn… . It gives me the impression that Germany is to be restored just as much as the Netherlands or Belgium… . [E]very person in Germany should realize that this time Germany is a defeated nation… . [I]f they need food to keep body and soul together beyond what they have, they should be fed three times a day with soup from Army soup kitchens… . [T]hey will remember that experience all their lives… . There exists a school of thought both in London and here which would, in effect, do for Germany what this Government did for its own citizens in 1933 when they were flat on their backs.” FDR told Stimson, “I see no reason for starting a WPA, PWA or a CCC for Germany when we go in with our Army of Occupation.” The Third Reich was not to be replaced by the New Deal.
Joseph E. Persico Page 47