Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage - Rilegato

Persico, Joseph E.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0375502467 ISBN 13: 9780375502460

Casa editrice: Random House Inc, 2001

Riassunto

A major new study of FDR's role in the "secret war" undergirding World War II reveals Roosevelt to be an enthusiastic instigator of many covert operations against the Nazis, the Japanese, and the Soviet Union. 35,000 first printing.

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L'autore:

Joseph E. Persico’s books include Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial, which was made into a major television docudrama, and Piercing the Reich, on the penetration of Nazi Germany by American agents. He is also the coauthor of General Colin Powell’s autobiography, My American Journey.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

Chapter 1
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 name 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 ...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Random House Inc
• Data di pubblicazione: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0375502467
• ISBN 13: 9780375502460
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 564