When Tom applied for a White House press credential, he wondered if the flunkies there would tell him to fold it till it was all corners and then stuff it. But, after one of them made a phone call to a higher-up, everything went snicker-snack.
“Thanks,” he said, wondering how his vorpal blade managed to slice through red tape.
“It ain’t your pretty face, buddy,” the press secretary’s subordinate replied. “If we turned you down, how much crap would you crank out about how we were stifling free expression? So we won’t stifle it. You want to ask the President questions, go ahead. Five gets you ten he spits in your eye.”
Roosevelt had been a gentleman right down to his paralyzed toes. From what Tom heard, Harry Truman was anything but. If he thought you were a son of a bitch, he’d call you one. Well, it made for good copy. “I’ll take my chances,” Tom said.
“You sure will.” The other man sounded as if he looked forward to it.
If Truman cussed him out…Tom had been cussed out by experts. You couldn’t quote a President cussing-there were unwritten rules about such things, as there were about reporting on, say, a Senator’s lady friends-but you could probably get the idea across one way or another.
Tom’s chance came on a blustery day in the middle of January. He presented his pass at the front gate of the White House, wondering if the guards would turn him away at the last minute. But they didn’t. One of them said, “Lucky stiff-you get to go inside. Goddamn cold out here.”
They wouldn’t have had anything to complain about in the White House press room. Tom figured he’d come out as a ham: thoroughly cooked, and just as thoroughly smoked. His own Old Gold added only a little to the tobacco haze. Truman’s press secretary came in and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.” Charlie Ross was a longtime Missouri newspaper man. He was an even longer-time friend of Truman’s; they’d gone to high school together. Rawboned, with a lock of gray hair that flopped down onto his forehead, he stood several inches taller than the President.
But Truman ran the show. He bustled in and started sassing several correspondents he knew well. They returned fire. Truman wasn’t Stalin-giving him a hard time wouldn’t cost you your head. He looked out over the crowd of reporters. When his eyes met Tom’s, he said, “Haven’t seen you here before. You new?”
“Yes, sir. Tom Schmidt, from the Chicago Tribune.”
“Oh. You’re him.” Truman looked as if somebody’d just farted. “Charlie wanted to give you the bum’s rush, but I said no. You don’t have to go sneaking around any more, Mr. Schmidt. If you’ve got something to say, say it to my face. Believe me, I can take the heat.”
“Thanks, Mr. President,” Tom said. “I wouldn’t’ve had to sneak if your people in Germany weren’t hiding how badly things are going there.”
“They’re still fighting in Germany, Mr. Schmidt, in case you hadn’t noticed,” Truman said tartly. “We don’t want to spread information that can help the fanatics.” He might be tart, but he was also smart: he didn’t use the word war. The war, after all, was over.
Sure it is, Tom thought. “Well, yes, sir,” he replied. “But since the Nazis were the ones who kidnapped that poor GI and then filmed him, don’t you think they already knew what was going on?”
Truman glowered at him over the tops of his metal-rimmed glasses. Tom felt as if he were getting grilled by his principal after some high-school scrape. No doubt the President wanted him to feel just that way. “During the War Between the States, Abe Lincoln asked why he had to order a young deserter shot but let the clever so-and-so who conned him into deserting go free,” Truman said. “All these years later, it’s still a damn good question. Or don’t you think morale matters?” He skated around war again.
“Of course I do, Mr. President,” Tom said. “But I think truth matters, too. Or what are we fighting for? Hitler was the one who went in for the big lie.”
Truman’s nostrils flared as he snorted angrily. “I suppose you think we should have pointed a big arrow with neon lights at the Normandy beaches and run up a billboard that said ‘We’re going to invade here.’ Some things need to be kept secret, that’s all. Go ahead-tell me I’m wrong.”
“Not me.” Tom shook his head. “But you can hide anything you want behind that kind of smoke screen. Like I said, we weren’t keeping this from the Nazis. We were keeping it from our own people. I don’t think that’s right.”
“Heydrich’s so-and-so’s didn’t snatch Private Cunningham because they figured we’d yield to those demands they made him mouth,” Truman snapped. “They released that movie because they wanted to confuse decent Americans and to scare them. Schrechlichkeit, they call it. Frightfulness. We tried to suppress it to keep that from happening-at my order, in case you’re wondering. But you played straight into their murderous hands. Thank you one hell of a lot, Mr. Schmidt. I hope you’re proud.”
Tom had thought the President would say his commanders in Germany had made the decision and he backed them because they were the experts and they were on the spot. Something like that, anyhow. But Harry Truman didn’t seem to work that way. He’d done what he’d done, and he was ready to argue about it. Right or wrong, he had the courage of his convictions.
“And now I’ve wasted enough time on you,” he continued. “Too much time, to tell you the truth. Let’s get back to business. Who else has got a question for me?” Hands shot into the air. Truman pointed at a heavyset bald man. “Drew?”
“How long can we keep troops in Germany if the American people decide they don’t want to any more?” Drew Pearson asked.
If the look the President sent him didn’t scream Et tu, Brute? Tom had never seen one that did. “Since I don’t believe the American people are going to decide any such thing, that isn’t worth answering,” Truman said.
“Diana McGraw will tell you you’re wrong, sir,” Pearson responded.
“I respect Diana McGraw. I sympathize with her, too, and with all the good people who’ve lost loved ones because of Heydrich’s fanatics. Hitler called Heydrich the man with the iron heart, and for once Adolf wasn’t lying.” Truman deigned to shoot Tom another glare. Then he went on, “I talked with her when she came to picket the White House last month. I’m convinced she’s sincere. I’m also convinced she’s wrong. If we run away from Germany without finishing the job we set out to do there, we’ll be worse off in the long run than if we stay. And not in the very long run, either.”
“More and more people seem to agree with what she’s saying,” Drew Pearson observed.
“Well, so what? That doesn’t make them right.” Yes, Truman could be as stubborn as a Missouri mule. “And just because there are more of them than there were, that doesn’t mean there are very many of them. Most Americans can see farther than the end of their nose-and a good thing, too.” He nodded to another correspondent. “What’s on your mind, Walter?”
Walter Lippmann asked him a question about farm legislation. Truman answered it with every sign of relief. Most of the time, foreign-policy issues weren’t what swayed elections. In the aftermath of the biggest war in the history of the world-no, not in the aftermath, dammit, because it wasn’t over yet, no matter who’d signed which surrender documents-the usual rules might not apply. But they would if Truman had anything to do with it.
Tom Schmidt remembered the line from The Wizard of Oz. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” the Wizard had said desperately. That was only a movie, but the President was trying to pull the same stunt for real. Could he make Germany disappear from voters’ minds? To Tom, that would be a bigger trick than any the Wizard managed.
He wasn’t the only one with such thoughts on his mind. When Truman pointed to another reporter, the man said, “Seems like the Republicans want to use Germany as a club to hit you over the head with in the upcoming elections. What will you do if you have to deal with a Republican Congress next year?”
“Ha! That’ll be the day!” Truman was a dump
y little guy, but he had an actor’s control of his expressions and attitudes. His whole body radiated contempt.
“Work with me, Mr. President,” the newspaperman urged. “Suppose they do win the election. Then they’ll be holding the purse strings. What can you do if they decide not to appropriate any money for the occupation?”
FDR would have set his granite chin and looked indomitable. Harry Truman didn’t have that kind of chin. He didn’t look indomitable, either-he looked pissed off. “They wouldn’t dare,” he snapped. Before the reporter could even try to follow up, Truman shook his head. “I know what you’re gonna say, Bernard. Suppose they do, right? Okay, I’m supposing. And this is what I suppose. No matter what kind of stupid stunts the Republicans try and pull with the budget, this country still only has one commander-in-chief, and you’re looking at him. The United States of American isn’t a box turtle, no matter what some people think. It can’t pull its head and its legs inside its shell and pretend the rest of the world isn’t out there. That got us in trouble before the war. It’d be a lot worse now.”
Yet another reporter said, “If you were to try to do something after Congress said you couldn’t…That’s how Andrew Johnson got impeached.”
“Congress has no business telling me how to run the country’s foreign policy,” Truman retorted. “And this is all moonshine, anyhow. I’m just indulging Bernie there. Everything in Germany will be fine. The Republicans won’t win in November. And even if they do, they aren’t asinine enough to play games with the public purse.”
“You hope,” the reporter said.
“No, I hope they do try it. They’d give me all the platform I need to bang on ’em like a drum in 1948,” Truman replied. “But they’re just not that stupid…. Well, a few of them are, but not many.”
“What if they run Eisenhower against you?” Walter Lippmann asked.
“Nobody knows whether Ike’s a Republican or a Democrat. I’m not sure he knows himself,” the President answered. He got a laugh; even Tom chuckled. Truman went on, “But I am sure of one thing: Eisenhower likes the idea of pulling out of Germany even less than I do. And they said it couldn’t be done! For the isolationists to line up behind him would be as foolish as for the antiwar Democrats to line up behind General McClellan against Lincoln in 1864.”
“But the Democrats did do that,” Lippmann pointed out. Tom thought he remembered the same thing, but hadn’t taken American history in a hell of a long time.
“Damn straight they did-and they got their heads handed to them that November,” Truman said. “If the Republicans want to try what didn’t work for my party in 1948, good luck to ’em.”
He didn’t lack for confidence. Tom had known that before. Seeing it face to face was more than a little daunting, though. He had to remind himself that being confident and having good reasons for confidence were two different critters. Would Harry Truman remind himself of the same thing? Off this morning’s performance, Tom didn’t think so.
“God Damn the Russians to Hell and gone!” Reinhard Heydrich ground out.
Hans Klein made sympathetic noises. “No one ever hit them a lick like the one we gave them New Year’s Eve,” he said. “Not even Stalin purged their officers the way we did.”
“Wunderbar,” Heydrich said sourly. “Just killing them didn’t matter. Killing them and accomplishing something does.”
“The new men in those slots won’t be as sharp as the ones we got rid of,” Klein said. “That’s bound to help us later on.”
“Wunderbar.” Heydrich sounded even more morose this time. He didn’t know what the hell to do about the Russians. In the western occupation zones, the resistance was going as well as he’d hoped, maybe better. Lots of Americans and Englishmen and even some Frenchmen were yelling that holding Germany down was more expensive than it was worth.
They hadn’t taken a blow even close to the one poisoned liquor gave the Red Army. But the Russians didn’t miss a beat. They hanged Germans and shot them and deported them and hunted Heydrich’s underground more ferociously than ever. Nothing seemed to faze them. The Reichsprotektor couldn’t understand it.
Well, Hitler hadn’t understood it, either. He’d said one good kick would bring the whole rotten structure of the Soviet Union crashing down. And he’d proceeded to deliver the good kick with 3,000,000 men, 3,000 panzers, and 2,000 planes. And the USSR staggered and lurched and reeled…and then, like one of those toys weighted at the bottom, bobbed upright again in spite of everything. And it started kicking back, and didn’t stop kicking till the Reich lay prostrate under its boot.
The same thing was happening now. Knock out that many top French or British or American officers-hell, knock out that many top German officers-and the army you’d just sucker-punched would do its best imitation of a chicken right after it met the hatchet.
(Which reminded Heydrich: what would happen to the resistance if he went down? Jochen Peiper, his number two, was a pup-he’d just turned thirty. He was a damned capable pup, though. He ought to be able to carry on. Heydrich had to hope so.)
As for the Red Army, the Germans had seen too often, to their dismay and discomfiture, that it had an almost unlimited supply of human spare parts. Take out a bunch of people and Stalin would simply bolt on replacements and carry on as before. Maybe the military engine ran rough for a while. But it kept running. Since it hadn’t had much luck rooting out Heydrich’s fighters, it avenged itself on the German people as a whole.
When Heydrich growled about that, Johannes Klein said, “It’s bad for even more reasons than you’re talking about, sir.”
“Oh? What am I missing?” Heydrich was always ready to acquire fresh fuel for his righteous indignation.
“They aren’t just killing Germans for the fun of killing Germans. Maybe they’re raping for the fun of it, but not killing,” the veteran noncom answered. Heydrich snorted. Oberscharfuhrer Klein went on, “They’re being horrible to try and detach the Volk from us. If people start thinking helping us-or even keeping quiet about us-means they’ll get strung up, they’ll blab. You bet they will. They’ll blab like you wouldn’t believe.”
Heydrich thought that over, but not for long. “Scheisse,” he said crisply. “Well, when you’re right, you’re right, dammit. Now what do we do about it?”
“Beats me, sir,” Klein said, which made the Reichsprotektor want to clout him in the ear. Oblivious to that, or at least affecting to be, Klein continued, “As long as we look strong, we’ve still got a decent chance. The Russian partisans weren’t that much trouble till they saw we wouldn’t take Moscow, and our Frenchies stayed in bed with us till the Anglo-Americans landed. Hell, some of ’em stayed longer than that.”
A mocking smile stretched Heydrich’s thin lips. Some of the French collaborators had indeed clung to the Reich till the bitter end. What called itself Radio Paris went on broadcasting from Sigmaringen in southwestern Germany long after the real Paris fell. And some of Berlin’s last defenders were troops from the SS Charlemagne division (so-called; it never really got above regimental strength): Frenchmen with a few German officers and noncoms.
But things were different here. Now Heydrich’s followers needed the goodwill-or at least the silence-of the people among whom they moved. They tried not to compromise the wider populace…but how could you fight back at all without endangering them, especially when you faced a ruthless foe like the Russians?
You couldn’t. And, as Hans Klein reminded him, that carried risks of its own. Thinking out loud, Heydrich said, “I don’t want to have to pull out of cities in the Russian zone and in the parts of the Reich the Poles and Czechs are stealing from us. Harder to strike at the enemy if we stick to fields and forests.”
“Yes, sir.” Klein nodded. “Chances are it wouldn’t do us any good anyway. Just ’cause we move out of Breslau, say, nothing to keep the Russians from reaching in and hanging a hundred people there, or a thousand, on account of we blew up a panzer somewhere else.”
“Him
meldonnerwetter,” Heydrich muttered. The Oberscharfuhrer was right again, however much Heydrich wished he weren’t. All the Germans in the land lost to the Soviet Union were hostages. The NKVD wouldn’t need long to figure that out, if it hadn’t already. And it would be as vicious as Stalin decided it needed to be…and if Stalin’s viciousness had a limit, the world hadn’t seen it yet.
Although Hitler was almost eight months dead, even thinking that someone else might be harder than he was made Heydrich want to look over his shoulder and make sure no Gestapo or Sicherheitsdienst man was standing there and writing him up for disloyalty.
Heydrich knew that was ridiculous. If anyone qualified as Fuhrer these days, he did. But, like the men he led, old habits died hard. And knowing in your head was different from knowing in your belly. As far as Heydrich’s belly was concerned, Hitler still ruled the Reich from Berlin.
I will rebuild it, mein Fuhrer. I promise I will, the Reichsprotektor thought. I’ll make it as much the way you would have as I can.
“Herr Reichsprotektor, I’ve got another question for you, if you don’t mind too much,” Klein said.
You would, flashed through Heydrich’s mind. But he forced himself to patience; as he’d seen, the noncom sometimes thought of things he’d missed himself. And so his voice held no snap-or he hoped it didn’t, anyhow-when he asked, “What is it?”
“Suppose the Amis do decide to pack up and go home. Then suppose they don’t like what we’re doing once we come out of the caves and mines and bunkers and start running things. Will they drop one of those goddamn atom bombs on us?”
“I don’t know if they will, but they can. I’m sure of that-how could we stop them?” Heydrich said. “That’s why we’ve got to get one for ourselves as soon as we can. Till we do, you’re right-we live on their sufferance. So do the Russians, but Russia’s a lot bigger than Germany.”
“We found that out the hard way,” Klein remarked.
The Man with the Iron Heart Page 20