FDR’s praetorians scrambled to repair the damage. “The usual ‘high administration sources’ are passing out word that Mr. Roosevelt does not favor the plan, after all, and that he never really was ready to adopt its basic philosophy,” wrote New York Times columnist Arthur Krock. Roosevelt ordered the Foreign Economic Administration, a State Department group, to study economic controls for postwar Germany, and the Morgenthau Plan was swept out to sea, never to return.44
• • •
When Roosevelt returned from Quebec, he had Henry Stimson join him for lunch at the White House. With a smile, he said, “Henry Morgenthau has pulled a boner.” Morgenthau had come to Quebec looking to have Germany dismantled, but Roosevelt said he would never agree to turn Germany into an agrarian state.
Stimson was used to presidential dissembling. It was not the first time FDR had lied about what he and Churchill had agreed to, and in the past, Stimson refrained from correcting the president. But this time Roosevelt seemed to believe what he was saying; his manner was so emphatic, the old statesman worried Roosevelt might make the claim in public and get badly burned.
For the president’s own good, he pulled out and read aloud a copy of the memorandum initialed “F.D.R.” and “W.S.C.” The aide-mémoire declared that the president and prime minister were “looking forward to converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character.”
Roosevelt sputtered when he heard this. “He was frankly staggered by this and said he had no idea how he could have initialed this; that he had evidently done it without much thought,” Stimson wrote.45
When speaking in lies or half-truths, a younger Franklin Roosevelt had been skillful at covering his tracks. But back then he had been an energetic, healthy man. In the fall of 1944, FDR’s mind was still remarkable, but at times it seemed the ancient mariner was losing some of his legendary ability to tack between shoal and shore.46
• • •
For all his bitterness over the Morgenthau Plan, Stimson took no pleasure in the backlash directed at the treasury secretary. He liked Morgenthau, and he attributed the Treasury Department’s meddling to “youngsters around Morgenthau who are seeking to make Treasury the center of everything.” After listening to Dewey lash out at Morgenthau in a radio address, Stimson told his diary, “I am sorry for Morgenthau, for never has an indiscretion been so quickly or vigorously punished as his incursion into German and Army politics at Quebec.”47
But Morgenthau was not the only one Dewey intended to punish, as Marshall was about to learn.
FORTY-SEVEN
OLD WOUNDS
NO MATTER WHAT HE TOLD HIMSELF, GEORGE MARSHALL WAS A POLITICIAN. A different sort of politician, perhaps—one whose party, the Army, he subordinated to the needs of his country—but he was still a politician. He hosted dinners for congressmen, he monitored the Post and the Times, and he counted noses on Capitol Hill when military bills came up on a chamber floor.
But the professional soldier in him drew the line at partisan politics. He never voted, never registered to vote. He endorsed no candidate, and he never, under any circumstances, inserted himself into a presidential campaign.
Until 1944.
• • •
In the outpouring of fury following Pearl Harbor, Americans had, for the most part, drawn together as one. Republicans and conservative Democrats, isolationists and many pacifists fell in behind FDR. Nearly everyone loyally supported the president’s approach to the war.
But 1941 was a long time ago. The Nazis hadn’t bombed Times Square, California was still American, and it looked like Hitler might be finished by Christmas.
Besides that, 1944 was an election year. By the canons of politics, hallowed by solemn tradition and the sacred mud first slung by the Founding Fathers, every fourth year was open season on any man with his hat in the ring.
That year Republicans had few issues to trumpet and few advantages to press. Their candidate, Governor Dewey, was a short, humorless former prosecutor who vaguely resembled the mustachioed villain Spaldoni from Dick Tracy. Too stiff to connect with middle-class voters, he lacked Roosevelt’s easygoing charm and mastery of the radio. Dewey and his campaign strategists would find it impossible to beat FDR on personal charisma, so they banked on moderate voters buying the right issues.1
Finding the right issues had always been the hard part. The big one, the war, seemed to be going well. Rome was liberated, Paris was liberated, the Germans were retreating to the Siegfried Line, and MacArthur announced, “I have returned!” when he landed on Leyte. The GOP could argue until it was blue in the face that the war was not going as well as it might, but Dewey, who had never worn a military uniform, knew he had no chance of matching military credentials with the nation’s wartime commander-in-chief.2
“How can you challenge a will-o’-the-wisp?” Dewey groaned to Robert McCormick one day.
McCormick suggested calling for a debate. Dewey snorted, “Roosevelt won’t debate anything with anybody, and he will laugh at the proposal from his positions at Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, or the White Cliffs of Dover.”3
Dewey would have to find another issue.
The New Deal had become a dead horse to flog, especially since FDR had publicly retired old “Doctor New Deal” and referred the patient to the younger, better-looking “Doctor Win-the-War.” That left Dewey, Vandenberg, McCormick, and the rest harping about the perils of communism—another old nag, if not quite dead yet—and Roosevelt’s health.
But the charge with more latent electricity than anything else was Pearl Harbor.
Blame for the disaster had lain dormant as the nation rallied against Japan. General Walter Short and Admiral Husband Kimmel, the Army and Navy commanders at Pearl, had been sacked. Admiral Stark, Kimmel’s boss, was also forced out of Washington, which seemed an appropriate sacrifice at the time. But Republican strategists figured the baskets might have room for a few more heads—including one head puffing a cigarette—and they climbed into the attic and unpacked an issue they had been saving for just this sort of rainy day.
In June 1944, Congress passed a law directing the Army and Navy to investigate what went wrong at Pearl Harbor. Over the summer, the Navy heard testimony from thirty-nine witnesses, the Army one hundred fifty-one, including Stimson and Marshall. As America wondered what the investigations would turn up, stories began circulating that U.S. codebreakers had given FDR advance warning of the attack. Fed by Bertie McCormick’s gumshoes and his own well-placed sources, Dewey concluded that before Pearl Harbor, American cryptologists had unlocked the Japanese Navy’s codes.*4
Whether FDR had been reading Tojo’s mail was a question that began percolating into public discourse. On September 11, Representative Forest Harness, a Republican from Indiana, gave a speech on the House floor referring to a letter dated December 7, indicating that the Japanese would present an ultimatum at one p.m. that day, and that the Japanese embassy in Washington had been instructed to destroy its coding equipment.
It was a horrifying security breach, but it caused no damage. Congressional Record didn’t exactly have the readership of the Saturday Evening Post, so few average voters knew about the congressman’s claims. But three days later, Navy Secretary Forrestal handed Roosevelt more disturbing news. “Information has come to me that Dewey’s [next] speech will deal with Pearl Harbor,” Forrestal warned. An unidentified Army officer had told Dewey’s operatives that the White House knew before the attack that Pearl Harbor would be a target.5
Marshall was appalled to learn that Dewey was going to discuss American codebreaking in public. The man evidently did not realize that the Japanese had never changed their diplomatic codes. Baron Hiroshi Oshima, Hirohito’s ambassador to Germany, was still sending radio messages to Tokyo in those old codes, and Oshima’s transmissions were a gold mine of information about Hitler’s plans. Once word leaked out that the U.S. had broken Japan�
�s diplomatic codes, Oshima’s gold mine would shut down and Eisenhower’s job would become much harder.6
“The matter was growing more pointed as the campaign was growing more violent,” Marshall told an investigating congressional committee after the war. “Some action had to be taken in a hurry or we were going to lose our tremendous source of information in the Far East.” Marshall reluctantly concluded that he must walk through a door he had never permitted himself to open.7
On September 25, after fretting over what he could do to stop the looming disaster, he drafted a letter to Governor Dewey, which he forwarded to King for his thoughts. “This letter of course puts [Dewey] on the spot,” Marshall admitted. “I hate to do it, but see no other way of avoiding what might well be a catastrophe to us. Just what he can do in the matter without giving reasons I do not know, but at least he will understand what a deadly affair it really is.”
By inserting himself into an election campaign, Marshall knew he was crossing a dangerous line. He confessed to King, “The whole thing is loaded with dynamite but I feel very much that something has to be done or the fat will be in the fire to our great loss in the Pacific, and possibly also in Europe.”8
•
In Tulsa, Oklahoma, on a warm Tuesday afternoon, a nondescript man in civilian clothes stepped off a plane. In his briefcase he carried a sealed envelope addressed to Governor Thomas Dewey, who was stumping through the Sooner State as the presidential campaign galloped into its last full month.9
The governor had delivered a rousing speech the day before in Oklahoma City, and he stormed into Tulsa on the crest of a wave. Ten thousand supporters met his train at the station and roared with approval as he promised to clean out the communists in Washington, the Kelly machine in Chicago, the Pendergast machine in Kansas City, Big Labor everywhere and the “political satellites who have fastened themselves on your pocketbooks and mine for twelve years.”10
Finishing his speech, he withdrew to his posh Pullman car. Once inside, the man with a briefcase handed him a letter from the Army’s chief of staff:
TOP SECRET
FOR MR. DEWEY’S EYES ONLY
My Dear Governor:
I am writing to you without the knowledge of any other person except Admiral King (who concurs) because we are approaching a grave dilemma in the political reactions of Congress regarding Pearl Harbor.
What I have to tell you is of such a highly secret nature that I feel compelled to ask you whether you accept it on the basis of your not communicating its contents to any other person and returning this letter or not reading any further and returning this letter to the bearer.11
Dewey stopped. He glanced at “the bearer,” Colonel Carter Clarke.
As an agile prosecutor, Dewey could smell a trap a mile away. If he read the letter, he might have to stand down from an attack that would win him thousands of votes—or lose votes for revealing the information and breaking faith with Time’s Man of the Year.
Marshall’s letter was a grenade with the pin pulled, and Dewey politely returned the pineapple to sender. He told The Bearer he would not read the letter any further and handed it back. He said he already had some of the information he suspected was in Marshall’s letter. Besides, the Japanese were not dumb enough to use the same naval codes that had been broken before Coral Sea and Midway.
Dewey added that he could not believe the letter was written without Roosevelt’s knowledge. “Marshall does not do things like that,” he told Clarke. “I am confident that Franklin Roosevelt is behind the whole thing.”
With a flash of indignation, he added that Roosevelt “knew what was happening before Pearl Harbor, and instead of being elected, he ought to be impeached.”12
• • •
Back in Albany, New York, two days later, Dewey was surprised to see The Bearer appear at the governor’s mansion with the same letter attached to a new cover letter. Marshall’s second cover letter told Dewey he would not ask him to keep secret any information he received from a source other than Marshall. He also assured Dewey that the only persons who knew of the letter’s existence were himself, Admiral King, seven senior Army intelligence officers in charge of signals security, and his secretary. “You have my word that neither the Secretary of War nor the President has any intimation whatever that such a letter has been addressed to you or that the preparation or sending of such a communication was being considered,” he emphasized. “I am persisting in the matter because the military hazards involved are so serious that I feel some action is necessary to protect the interests of our armed forces.”13
Dewey frowned. He told Colonel Clarke he could not agree to the request to remain silent, even under Marshall’s looser conditions, without making a trusted adviser aware of the circumstances of the letter. He said he would also need to keep a copy of the letter in his most secret files.
Clarke telephoned Marshall from Dewey’s office and explained the governor’s conditions. Marshall agreed, then asked to speak to Dewey directly. Dewey told Marshall he would keep the matter between himself and Elliott Bell, New York’s superintendent of banks and Dewey’s top campaign strategist. The letter would go into a safe. Marshall agreed, Clarke left, and the matter rested in Dewey’s hands.14
• • •
“I should have preferred to talk with you in person,” Marshall wrote, “but I could not devise a method that would not be subject to press and radio reactions as to why the Chief of Staff of the Army would be seeking an interview with you at this particular moment.”
He outlined his dilemma: “The most vital evidence in the Pearl Harbor matter consists of our intercepts of the Japanese diplomatic communications. . . . [W]e possess other codes, German as well as Japanese, but 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 to the Japanese Government. These are still the codes involved in the Pearl Harbor events.”
He explained that U.S. fleet movements before Coral Sea and Midway were guided by intercepts from encrypted Japanese sources. Submarine successes against Japanese convoys came, in part, from decoded signals. Conversely, when Bill Donovan’s OSS spies once broke into Japanese embassy offices in Portugal, the Japanese changed their military attaché codes, depriving America of valuable information. He concluded, “You will understand the utterly tragic consequences if the present political debates surrounding Pearl Harbor disclose to the enemy, German or Jap, any suspicion of the vital sources of information we now possess.”15
To Dewey, Pearl Harbor was a golden hammer to swing as the campaign reached its climax. The administration had been reading Japanese mail, and a credible charge that Roosevelt had fallen down on the job so tragically could blast a hole in Roosevelt’s strongest defense—his war record.16
Marshall had no idea what Dewey would do with the information. He held an obstinate faith that the nation’s civilian leaders—including opposition candidates like Willkie or Dewey—would put the country’s interests above their own partisan ambitions. But a presidential election year was a funny thing. It was the nation’s most bitter regularly scheduled conflict, and people do strange things in the heat of battle. Marshall would have to wait, perhaps until November, to know whether his appeal to Dewey’s better nature would succeed.17
•
While Marshall bandaged the scars of Pearl Harbor, Admiral King was doing the same at Main Navy. As required by law, naval investigators had spent the summer investigating the disaster at Pearl Harbor. The Navy’s report hit King’s paper-strewn desk in October 1944, the last month before the general election.
The reports laid blame on General Short and Admiral Kimmel, a finding King endorsed.* Yet the principal admirals involved—Betty Stark and Husband Kimmel—were friends of his, and King saw Stark’s exile to England as punishment for Pearl Harbor. He resented the way Marshall
had escaped a similar humiliation. The Army had been in charge of Pearl’s air defenses, and Marshall’s relationship to General Short was exactly the same as Stark’s had been to Admiral Kimmel. King figured Marshall probably kept his job through the secretary of war’s intervention.
“That’s why I didn’t like Stimson,” King muttered, stewing on the subject years later. “I have never been able to understand how or why FDR could fire Admiral Stark without doing the same to General Marshall. In my opinion one could not possibly be more suspect than the other.”18
Everyone in Washington, it seemed, wanted to know what was in the report on King’s desk. Dewey’s Republicans were certain it painted a damning picture of incompetence—though Dewey, to Marshall’s relief, did not utter a peep about the Japanese codes. FDR’s pitchmen, for their part, insisted that Roosevelt had nothing to fear because he and his men had done nothing wrong.19
To King, job number one was keeping American knowledge of Japanese codes out of the public eye. Four enemy carriers had been sunk because of those codes, Yamamoto had been sent to the hereafter through those codes, and there would be many American lives saved if the Japanese didn’t wise up to what was going on. King recommended that Forrestal keep the Navy report under lock and key, and Forrestal suppressed the report on grounds that publication “would cause exceptionally grave damage to the nation.”20
The outrage was predictable. Time remarked that the “damage to the nation” Forrestal spoke of would be “election damage,” and Admiral Kimmel’s lawyer complained that Forrestal was using “a specious pretext to keep the truth of Pearl Harbor hidden from December 7, 1941 to November 7, 1944.”21
But Marshall and King knew that even in a democracy, there are some truths that cannot be told. Until the war’s end, the secrets of Pearl Harbor would remain in Admiral King’s cluttered office.
•
At 10:05 p.m. on Friday, November 3, Mike Reilly’s Secret Service men wheeled Roosevelt aboard Ferdinand Magellan for his Election Day trip home to Hyde Park. Unlike his overseas voyages, which had been shrouded in cloak-and-dagger schemes worthy of a Dashiell Hammett novel, on this trip the presidential party included thirty reporters, a press secretary, and FDR’s two best speechwriters, Sam Rosenman and Bob Sherwood.22
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