Joseph E. Persico Read online

  His mood was explained by intercepted and decoded Japanese messages reaching his desk in recent weeks which suggested a Japan bent on war. Back in his room the President took a pad and began drafting in his bold hand an appeal to Emperor Hirohito to join him in a statesman-to-statesman effort to stave off disaster. But within a half hour of dispatching this olive branch to the emperor, FDR’s hopes were dampened. A young naval aide, Lieutenant Lester R. Schulz, just two days on the job, brought to the President the latest decrypted message from Tokyo, instructions to the Japanese ambassador in Washington spelling out what the President regarded as intolerable demands. It was near midnight before Prettyman lifted a drained FDR into bed.

  The next morning, the world looked brighter as the President breakfasted on his customary orange juice, coffee, toast, soft-boiled eggs, and bacon. The sun rose in a clear sky bathing the East Wing of the White House in pale gold light. The weather, for December, was glorious, cool, heading toward a high of forty-three degrees. Golfers were getting ready to tee off at Washington’s Burning Tree course, among them CBS’s broadcast star, thirty-three-year-old Edward R. Murrow, just back from London. The President had invited Murrow for supper that evening to learn firsthand how the British were bearing up under the Blitz and Hitler’s string of unbroken conquests. “Wild Bill” Donovan, just six months into his job as Roosevelt’s spy chief, veiled by the opaque title Coordinator of Information, had gotten away from the capital for a late-season football game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants at the Polo Grounds.

  As Prettyman removed the debris of the President’s breakfast, FDR called for his doctor. His chronic sinusitis was acting up, but otherwise he appeared to have shed the cares of the night before.

  Admiral Ross McIntire left his dispensary on the first floor and strode through the unaccustomed Sunday-morning stillness of the White House, his heels echoing hollowly up the stairway. Outside, the capital’s streets were deserted and traffic sparse. Washington was a sleepy, middle-class city populated by middle-class government workers who abandoned downtown on the weekend. The silence was broken only by the peal of the bells of St. John’s Church across Pennsylvania Avenue on Lafayette Square, summoning worshippers to morning services. As McIntire entered FDR’s study, the President reflexively rolled back his large, handsome head, and the doctor administered nose drops. FDR blinked, sat up, and launched into one of his anecdote-strewn monologues. Roosevelt and McIntire had first met aboard a cruiser when FDR was assistant secretary of the Navy and the doctor a young medical officer. Roosevelt remembered the affable MD thereafter and brought McIntire into the White House, where he began his heady ascent to his present rank. The President and his doctor swapped stories for almost two hours before FDR prepared himself for his only official appointment that Sunday, a visit by the Chinese ambassador, Hu Shih. Then he could do what he really wanted, which was to work on his stamp collection, his passion since he was eight years old.

  At 12:30 P.M., the ambassador was ushered into the White House. In tune with the leisurely day he had in mind, the President chose to see Hu Shih in his upstairs study rather than in the more formal Oval Office below, though both rooms reflected FDR’s casual disarray. Stacks of books, piles of yellowed papers tied with string carpeted the floor, and FDR’s ship models sailed along the tops of bookcases. Portraits of the President’s mother and wife studied each other across opposite walls. Hu Shih found himself assigned a role familiar to Roosevelt’s visitors, serving as a sounding board for whatever popped into the President’s mind. This day FDR wanted the ambassador to listen to what he had cabled to Hirohito the night before. He read with relish from his literary handiwork. “I got him there; that was a fine, telling phrase,” he exclaimed. “That will be fine for the record,” he added, punctuating the point with a stab of his cigarette in its ivory holder. Hu Shih left the President’s study a half hour later, having heard much and said little.

  As his guest departed, FDR turned eagerly to the manila envelope sent over the day before from the State Department. His hobby had prospered mightily after he became president. Mail came into the department from all over the world, and every Saturday a messenger delivered a batch of the most interesting stamps to him. He asked his valet to bring him the tools of his avocation—his album, magnifying glass, scissors, packet of stickers, and the collector’s bible, Scott’s Stamp Catalogue.

  Harry Hopkins, FDR’s gaunt constant confidant, padded down the hall from the bedroom he occupied next to the Lincoln study. Another large list of guests had been invited for lunch this Sunday, though, as Eleanor later recalled, “I was disappointed but not surprised when Franklin sent word a short time before lunch that he did not see how he could join us… . The fact that he carried so many secrets in his head made it necessary for him to watch everything he said, which in itself was exhausting.” Instead, the President had chosen to have lunch alone with Hopkins. They ate off trays, Roosevelt’s set on a removable rack affixed to his wheelchair. FDR stabbed desultorily at his food. The White House chef, Henrietta Nesbitt, was notorious for dull menus. Eleanor had met her through Hyde Park politics and, for some unfathomed reason, had decided the woman would make a good housekeeper. FDR’s son Jimmy found Mrs. Nesbitt “the worst cook I ever encountered.”

  While the President munched on an apple and flipped through his album, Hopkins stretched out on a couch. Their conversation was light, bantering, with serious concerns set aside this day. At 1:47 P.M., the phone rang. FDR picked it up. The White House operator apologized for intruding, but she had Navy secretary Frank Knox on the line, and he insisted on speaking to the President.

  “Put him on,” FDR said. “Hello, Frank.” His voice took on its habitual gaiety.

  Knox’s voice was choked. “Mr. President,” he said, “it looks as if the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor!”

  “No!” Roosevelt gasped.

  Knox said that he had no further details, but would keep the President advised. Hopkins, learning what had happened, was incredulous. There must be some mistake, he said. Japan would not attack Honolulu. FDR quickly regained his composure. His wife had long ago observed, “His reaction to any great event was always to be calm. If it was something that was bad, he just became almost like an iceberg, and there was never the slightest emotion that was allowed to show.” To Hopkins’s doubts that the Japanese would make such an attack, the President responded that this was just the kind of thing they would do, talk peace while plotting war.

  The United States had fallen victim to the most stunning failure of intelligence in the country’s history, likely in the entire history of warfare. What happened that tranquil Sunday had been preceded by and would be followed by fluctuating triumphs and failures in something relatively new to Franklin Roosevelt, the sub rosa battlegrounds of espionage. The story began in 1938.

  Chapter I

  Gentleman Amateurs

  THE DATE was May 12, 1938. With three bells announcing his arrival, trailed by trotting Secret Service agents lugging wire baskets of official papers, FDR propelled his wheelchair from the first-floor elevator into the Oval Office where he summoned Missy LeHand. As she came in, the President greeted his secretary with a blinding smile and an expression that said, what does the world have in store for Franklin Roosevelt today?

  It was nearly 11 A.M. as the softly attractive LeHand sat down and propped her steno pad on her knee. By now, eighteen years at his side, through his glowing early promise, the catastrophe of polio, the slow resuscitation of his spirits and ambitions, she could read FDR’s every mood and need instantly. The President took from a can on his cluttered desk one of the forty-odd Camel cigarettes he would smoke that day and inserted it into a nicotine-stained holder. He chose from a wire basket a letter delivered personally to the White House the day before by Uncle Ted’s son Kermit Roosevelt. It was from Vincent Astor. Before he began dictating, FDR reread the nineteen handwritten pages in the familiar script. The letterhead read simply Nourmahal, the n
ame of Astor’s yacht. The very word suffused FDR with warm memories. He had first sailed the Nourmahal in 1932 while still president-elect. The luxurious oceangoing vessel, manned by a crew of forty-two, recalled America’s Cup races off Newport watched from her deck, fishing trips off Long Island Sound, cruises in the Caribbean, card games, drinking, and, for some of Astor’s pals, occasional amorous adventures on board.

  It was to the Nourmahal, tied up in Miami, that FDR had retreated in February 1933 after an incident that nearly ended his presidency before it began. He had been seated in the back of an open car after addressing a crowd when, as he later described the moment, “A man came forward with a telegram about five or six feet long and started telling me what it contained. Just then I heard what I thought was a firecracker: then several more.” Roosevelt saw a Secret Service agent wrestle the man to the ground. The assailant was Giuseppe Zangara, an unemployed bricklayer and political malcontent whose shots had miraculously missed Roosevelt, but struck Anton Cermak, the mayor of Chicago then visiting Miami, a woman, and a policeman. Roosevelt accompanied Cermak to the hospital, where the fifty-nine-year-old mayor’s wound proved fatal. The other victims survived. The president-elect then joined Astor and other friends aboard the Nourmahal, grateful for a respite from the horrors of the day.

  Subsequently, FDR had sailed the Nourmahal every year, enjoying himself tremendously, especially his fellow passengers’ sophomoric hijinks. He got a kick out of the mock bills Astor sent after each cruise—“Expenses incurred for alcoholic stimulants and repeated correctives, $37.50 per diem. (Note: the Chief Steward reports that consumption of the above stores was so vast as to overwhelm his accounting system.) With a further $1.90 for chipping Mother-of-Pearl surfaces of bell contacts through impatient punching of the above, to hasten the arrival of correctives. Seventeen cigars, Profundo Magnifico, $.90 each.” And always the appended note, “The President is exempt.”

  The letter from Honolulu now in Roosevelt’s hands did not, however, recount shipboard capers. Rather, it was Astor’s report of an espionage mission the President had entrusted to the yachtsman. This deep trust, granted by a president to a private citizen, had equally deep roots. The names Roosevelt and Astor had echoed down Hudson Valley history since colonial times. The Roosevelts of Hyde Park and the Astors up the road at Rhinebeck stood at the heart of the Dutchess County gentry, their lives a weave of family, professional, and commercial interests. Franklin’s much older half brother, James, was close to Vincent’s father, Colonel John Jacob Astor IV, heir to the vast fortune founded by a once penniless fur-trading German immigrant, the first John Jacob Astor. Vincent’s grandmother was the grande dame who defined New York society by the four hundred guests who could fit into her Fifth Avenue ballroom. When Vincent’s father went down with the Titanic in 1912, the son dropped out of Harvard to assume control of the family’s holdings, inheriting $75 million and tagged by gossip columnists as “the richest boy in the world.” James Roosevelt became executor of the Astor estate and continued as a trusted advisor to Vincent, who prized his counsel and always referred to FDR’s brother as “Uncle Rosey.”

  Franklin and Vincent had known each other as boys, but were not then close since FDR was eight years older. As Astor put it, much later “we grew to be the same age.” The two avid sailors met again during the First World War while Franklin was serving as President Woodrow Wilson’s assistant secretary of the Navy. They had met to consider how yacht owners and powerboat sailors might organize their vessels into a Volunteer Patrol Squadron, an idea that ultimately became the Naval Reserve. Later, FDR received an urgent appeal from his brother, James, to help locate Ensign Astor. The young scion had donated an earlier yacht, the Noma, to the Navy and was serving aboard her on anti-submarine patrols off the French coast. James Roosevelt, possessing Astor’s power of attorney, needed to determine if the young officer was still alive before signing documents affecting Astor business interests, principally huge chunks of Manhattan real estate.

  Providing such constituent services was among Assistant Secretary Roosevelt’s least demanding duties. What genuinely engaged him was what later drew him closest to Astor, the netherworld of espionage. The clandestine had captivated Franklin Roosevelt from his youth. The first recorded signs of his bent for the covert surfaced while he was a student at Harvard. He had devised a code, numerals substituting for vowels, and symbols, such as an asterisk, substituting for consonants, all run together giving no hint of where words started or ended. Though child’s play for a serious cryptanalyst, the code nevertheless served Franklin’s need for and pleasure in secrecy. He had developed a crush on a beautiful Bostonian named Alice Sohier, not yet sixteen. One coded entry in his diary, dated July 8, 1902, at the end of his sophomore year, raises curious speculation. “Alice confides in her doctor,” he wrote. The next day’s coded entry read, “Worried over Alice all night.” A half century later the subject of his concern would explain only, “In a day and age when well brought up young men were expected to keep their hands off the persons of young ladies from respectable families, Franklin had to be slapped—hard.”

  Doris Kearns Goodwin, chronicler of Roosevelt’s wartime years, has explored the roots of FDR’s character that may explain his attraction to the secret and covert. Franklin had been an intuitive child, Goodwin writes, who “learned to anticipate the desires of his parents even before he was told what to do.” She quotes Franklin’s mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, saying that her boy rarely required disciplining: “We took secret pride in the fact that Franklin instinctively never seemed to require that kind of handling.” Franklin’s childhood compulsion to please his parents had grown into an adult reflex to charm and ingratiate, to turn every encounter into a personal triumph, sacrificing candor to achieve likability. By the time FDR became president, dissimulation had become second nature, and subterfuge cloaked in geniality became his stock-in-trade. Harold Ickes, his interior secretary, as crusty and blunt as Roosevelt was smooth and impenetrable, once complained, “You keep your cards up close to your belly.”

  Franklin D. Roosevelt had first entered upon the national consciousness on March 17, 1913, at the age of thirty-one, with his appointment by President Woodrow Wilson as the youngest person ever to become assistant secretary of the Navy. Franklin particularly savored the moment since his distant cousin and Eleanor’s uncle Theodore Roosevelt had held the same position before going on to become, at forty-two, the country’s youngest president. FDR’s boss, the secretary of the Navy, was fifty-one-year-old Josephus Daniels, former editor and publisher of the Raleigh (North Carolina) News & Observer. This prohibitionist/pacifist/populist could not have been more unlike his urbane, elegant deputy. Daniels, with his string ties, somber suits, and small-town manners and morals, was a figure out of the departed nineteenth century. Roosevelt was a man of the emerging twentieth century. At times, with the nakedly ambitious Roosevelt under him, Daniels must have felt as if he were sitting on a volcano. On one occasion, FDR looked over a site for building barracks for eleven thousand sailors. The next day, he let the construction contract. Four months later, the work completed, he went to Daniels for permission to carry out the project. The secretary had been forewarned. When Daniels initially went to New York’s Senator Elihu Root to clear Roosevelt’s appointment, Root had asked him if he really understood the Roosevelts. “Whenever a Roosevelt rides, he wishes to ride in front,” Root warned, “they like to have their own way.” For all his homespun manner, Josephus Daniels was no fool. He knew that a northern aristocrat would complement his southern folksiness, and he possessed that rare quality in a leader—he was not afraid to hire a subordinate who might be smarter than he was.

  The component of the Navy Department that quickly captured the assistant secretary’s imagination was the Office of Naval Intelligence. ONI, at that point, was the closest equivalent to an American central intelligence agency. In its thirty-first year when FDR came to the department, ONI was a small, elite subempire, one that had
planted naval attachés in all significant world capitals, poking into the secrets of foreign powers. ONI’s chief, Captain James Oliver Harrison, unhappily observed that Roosevelt and his political mentor and private secretary, an untidy, irreverent man named Louis Howe, were poaching on his turf, organizing their own secret intelligence cell. FDR’s amateurs, Harrison complained to the Chief of Naval Operations, were interfering with his professionals. Soon after America entered World War I in April 1917, Harrison was replaced by a more pliant ONI chief, Captain Roger Welles. Welles happily commissioned FDR’s socialite pals into naval intelligence, young men who shared the right schools, clubs, and connections, among them FDR’s onetime law partner, Alexander Brown Legare, who founded the Chevy Chase Hunt Club; Lawrence Waterbury, star polo player; and Steuart Davis, a Harvard classmate and commander of the Volunteer Patrol Squadron. ONI’s roster soon began to resemble the Social Register.