Flowers From Berlin

1939
ONE

August 3, 1939. Washington, D.C. Ninety-one degrees of city-wide steam bath for the fifth day in a row. A relentless sun and a humidity unfit for any living, breathing creature. Six more weeks of summer in the American capital and not an evening breeze or a thunderstorm in sight.

The windows were open at the White House and fans whirled in more than a hundred rooms. Fifteen minutes remained before a luncheon meeting between Secretary of State Cordell Hull and the President. Franklin Roosevelt sat in his wheelchair in the Oval Office and studied the disturbing four-page report that he had received that morning. These days the President's mood matched the weather, hot and oppressive. Neither seemed likely for sudden change.

Europe was going to hell. The Nazis had taken Austria and had been given Czechoslovakia. Salazar was entrenched in Lisbon, and Franco had taken Madrid in March. Hitler lunched with Mussolini on a fourth-century A.D. veranda in Rome, and Joseph Stalin, freshly invigorated by the liquidation of his enemies at home, folded his arms on a Kremlin balcony and glared westward. The Red Army, under Stalin's direct command, was bigger, tougher, and better equipped thin ever. But then again, Hitler had more panzer divisions than anyone could count already in place in Bohemia and Moravia. At his desk, Roosevelt lit a cigarette. As soon as current work could be concluded, the USS Tuscaloosa, docked at the Washington Naval Yard, was ready to take FDR and his family to Campobello until September. The President longed for the foggy, misty New Brunswick coastline that he had loved since his boyhood. His sinuses bothered him; so did his arthritis.

Meanwhile, the Republicans imprisoned on Capital Hill sniped daily at Roosevelt. A second Democratic term in Washington had failed to cure a 12 percent unemployment rate. And the 1938 elections had put the taste of FDR's blood in the mouths of the opposition: the Republicans had gained eighty-one seats in the House of Representatives, eight seats in the Senate, and control of thirteen additional statehouses. Suddenly, new presidential prospects were everywhere. Ohio's Senator Taft had won re-election big, as had governors Stassen of Minnesota, and Saltonstall of Massachusetts. New York's racket-busting district attorney, Thomas Dewey, was drawing the largest crowds of any Republican since the President's cousin, Theodore Roosevelt. And the influential eastern press was lining up behind the longest shot of all, Wendell L. Willkie, the president of a utilities company and a former Democrat. All these were added to Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg, a paunchy cigar-puffing white-suited gray-haired arch isolationist whom everyone expected to be the candidate and who led Roosevelt in every important poll. Quaintly, Roosevelt referred to Vandenberg, an old-fashioned tub thumping orator, as "the windbag," and the rest of his potential opponents were the "the Neanderthals." But Roosevelt's private dismissal of his opposition was defensive. Since the midterm elections, he had become increasingly isolated within the White House. And the enemies were everywhere.

Even members of his own party were disgruntled. When would the President announce his own plans? Was he, or was he not, running for a third term? Even Eleanor, who had publicly professed her distaste for another four years in Washington, did not know. "Eight years is enough for any one man," she had said on June 6 in Chicago. On this and most other important matters, the President was keeping his own counsel.

There was no credible successor to carry forward the New Deal. The candidacy of Harry Hopkins was stillborn. John Nance Garner of Texas, the Vice- President and the darling of the increasingly powerful reactionaries within Roosevelt's own party, was already campaigning. So were the six Republicans, equally rock-headed in Roosevelt's opinion.

"Andrew Jackson," Roosevelt was now telling Democratic leaders, "should have picked someone more in sympathy with his policies than Martin Van Buren if he had wanted his policies continued." The history lesson was meant as a warning. But the party leaders were responding with their own warnings: Roosevelt was the only candidate who could hold together the political coalitions in the North and the West in 1940. Roosevelt, they told him, was the only candidate who could prevent the nation from being turned over to the club-swinging isolationists.

"Would your husband consider a third term in order to further his concept of internationalism and the New Deal?" Eleanor was asked in Penn Station by a New York Journal-American reporter in July.

"You'll have to ask him that question," she had answered.

"But hasn't he told you?"

"I haven't even asked him," the First Lady replied, stepping briskly into a private railroad car bound for Washington.

That evening in the capital, the pressures and political harassment evidenced themselves for the first time upon the President himself.

"Mr. Roosevelt? Would you even want a third term?" Walter Lippmann asked during an impromptu press conference.

"I don't know, Walter,” FDR snapped back without a nuance of a smile. "But I'd certainly like a second one."

And so it went.

*

Whatever his political concerns, no one could doubt the President's equal concern with naval matters. And the report that he read on this sultry August morning before lunch was a classified document from the Department of the Navy.

All his life, Franklin Roosevelt had been fascinated by the sea and in love with ships. As Secretary of the Navy during the Great War of 1914-18, he had been so successful at securing materiel that President Wilson had once called him to the White House. There, the thirty-four-year-old Roosevelt had been gently reproached for his ardor.

"Mr. Secretary," Wilson had said in his genteel, measured tones, "it seems you have cornered the market on supplies. I'm sorry, but you will have to divide them up with the Army."

By the time Roosevelt had occupied that same office, he had collected no fewer than 9,879 books and pamphlets on naval matters. A few were housed in the library at Hyde Park. Several hundred were at Warm Springs, Georgia. But most were in the White House. When asked by an interviewer during the first term how many volumes he had actually read, Roosevelt replied, "All but one. But that one arrived last evening."

Roosevelt ran his hand across his brow and reread the U.S. Navy report before him. He was deeply and anguished. The HMS Wolfe, two days out of New York, had been ripped in half by an explosive device placed by a saboteur. The Wolfe had sunk in ninety minutes. Thirty-nine English merchant seamen had lost their lives, four of the five members of the French purchasing commission had gone down with the ship, and the entire cargo had been lost. All this on a voyage that had been shrouded in the strictest secrecy. A special detail of United States Marine guards had been posted at the Erie Boat Basin in Brooklyn where the HMS Wolfe had been docked. But someone had placed an explosive device aboard the ship.

Sabotage on the East Coast, the President concluded as his intercom buzzed, was totally out of hand. The President turned his wheelchair and answered the intercom.

"Mr. Hoover is here," his secretary, Missy LeHand, told him.

"Two minutes," the President answered.

Waiting a few minutes was what J. Edgar Hoover needed these days, Roosevelt mused. The President eased his wheelchair back behind his desk and neatly placed the Navy's report on his right-hand side. He readied himself for the meeting with the F.B.I. director, a meeting to which Hoover had been summoned one hour earlier.

Roosevelt disliked and distrusted Hoover. Hoover was a Republican, a Coolidge appointee dating back to 1924. But even worse, in the eyes of the current President, was Hoover's greedy amalgamation of power within the newly formed F.B.I.. Hoover, it was known, had begun a grand collection of fingerprints and files, accessible primarily to himself. And still worse, Hoover seemed intent on building a political power base out of the recent successes of his agency.

Over the last few years, the F.B.I. had, through a combination of hard work, luck, and occasional diligence, captured several of the most notorious-and inappropriately romanticized-outlaws of the era since the stock market crash. One by one, Ma Barker, Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Bonnie and Clyde Parker had fallen into the hands of federal authorities. Always, Hoover was there soon after the arrest to link a hand onto the prisoner's elbow and have his picture taken. Even when the F.B.I. hadn't even been in on the capture, Hoover was there to claim credit. When John Dillinger, for example, had been shot to death outside the Biograph movie theater, a grinning Hoover had been in Chicago the next day to have his picture taken with the cadaver.

To Roosevelt, who knew a thing or two about power bases and who vastly preferred to have his own picture taken among boy scouts or WPA camp workers, such behavior was more than a trifle irritating. He had it in mind, in fact, to replace Hoover in another year. But meanwhile Roosevelt and Hoover were stuck with each other.

There was a knock on the door to the Oval Office and Mrs. LeHand was the first to step through. She ushered Hoover into the President's working quarters, glanced disapprovingly at the F.B.I. director, then closed the door as she left.

"Come in, J. Edgar, come in," the President said, not looking up. Roosevelt sat at a desk that was neither very big nor very neat. Papers were in disarray in every direction and a half-empty can of Camels stood on the left-hand edge. Then Roosevelt glanced up, blinked, cocked his large head, and smiled. J. Edgar Hoover stared at what was-with the possible exception of Adolf Hitler's-the most famous face in the world.

To Hoover, Roosevelt looked like a caricature of himself. The President's face was tanned and mobile, his eyes never at rest. When he smiled, his mouth took the shape of a V, his long jaw tilted upward, and two long grave lines bracketed his mouth. His round glasses reflected like windowpanes in the sunlight.

"Do sit down, please," F.D.R. said. He motioned to a leather armchair.

Hoover mumbled a good morning and sat down. He consciously tried to keep his eyes off Roosevelt's withered legs, visible through the open front portion of the desk. Then Roosevelt adjusted his glasses slightly, as if to bring his visitor into proper focus.

The corners of Hoover's mouth were turned ferociously downward. His neck was crimson, his collar tight, his eyes afire. Shadows from the window behind Roosevelt darkened Hoover's face, but made him squint at the same time.

"It would seem to me, J. Edgar," the President began, "that there exists a certain gathering importance to this matter of German saboteurs and agents within the United States. Yet your Bureau appears unable to make the appropriate arrests."

Hoover bristled instantly and opened his mouth to speak. Then he stopped. From the President's intonation, Hoover knew there was more. And he knew better than to interrupt. Back in July, Roosevelt had attempted to revise the Neutrality Act so that the United States might aid the democracies of Western Europe against Nazi aggression. Roosevelt had been defeated in both the House and the Senate. The United States was to remain strictly neutral and send no war materiel to anyone.

Undaunted, and risking impeachment, Roosevelt attempted anyway to assist those whom he considered to be America's friends, particularly England and France. But equally undaunted, a nameless, faceless and perhaps self-styled agent of the Third Reich had taken matters into his own hands. Roosevelt recited from memory a litany of incidents.

An explosion in a Newark, New Jersey warehouse had slowed the delivery of five thousand M-1 rifles to anti-Fascist partisans in Greece; a dynamite bomb in a Ford parts plant in Delaware had destroyed production capacity for a specific line of tank gearboxes essential to the French Army; yet another bomb, planted near a furnace in the Frankford Arsenal in Germantown, Pennsylvania, had almost brought down that entire edifice, a disaster which might have set back munitions production in the eastern United States by nine months. On and on the list went, incident after incident. Hoover squirmed uncomfortably until the President concluded with the plight of HMS Wolfe.

"Tell me, Mr. Hoover," Roosevelt asked rhetorically, "how does a saboteur, particularly the one whom your Bureau is searching for, creep onto a religiously guarded vessel, plant a bomb, and sneak off again?"

Hoover was about to answer, but Roosevelt kept talking.

"There is a man at large somewhere in America," Roosevelt postulated, "who is both an expert at espionage and high-level explosives. He is costing us lives and he is robbing precious war materiel from the democracies of Europe. But he is an unnaturally clever man. Your F.B.I. cannot arrest him because you do not know whom to arrest. You cannot look for him because no one knows for whom to look. Indeed, the local police departments in the cities and towns of the Northeast cannot be used because we haven't the faintest idea which ones should even be contacted."

Hoover sat in silence. The President looked him up and. down. "Well, what do you think, J. Edgar?" Roosevelt asked at length. "Have you been struck dumb? You've barely said a word since you walked in here."

"The Bureau," Hoover replied quickly and defensively, "is working on this precise case day and-"

"What has been accomplished?"

Hoover groped. He mentioned a Portuguese network that could be closed down at any moment. And he spoke of a man named Fritz Duquaine who was believed to have entered the country from Vancouver some months earlier and who the F.B.I. had good cause to believe was operating in the Northeast.

"But you have no proof?"

"No, sir."

"And you have no suspects who are so enormously gifted with explosives?"

"No, Mr. President." Hoover verged on mentioning that no fewer than 43,000 immigrants had filtered into the United States from Germany since 1929. Sorting through them for a gifted bomber was not easy. But Roosevelt was speaking again.

"Tell me," said the President. "Do I misunderstand the situation or am I correct? What we need is a face. A name. Or a past. We must find out who this man is, where he came from, and what his background might be. All this is even more important than a current identity because this man would certainly be gifted also at changing identities."

"That's all correct, sir."

Roosevelt continued to lead the conversation. "So what we are talking about is a bit of detective work. Identifying this particular man and locating him is the first task, without which any other plans are meaningless. And, of course, this work must proceed without alerting the suspect. Otherwise he will disappear and move elsewhere. Or return to Germany, perhaps."

Mrs. LeHand buzzed the intercom again and notified the President that the secretaries of State and Interior were awaiting the President in the downstairs dining room. Roosevelt selected a fresh cigarette from the tin of Camels on his desk, placed it into a tortoiseshell holder, and slipped the holder between his teeth. Then he shifted uncomfortably in his chair, leaned back slightly, and lit his cigarette.

"Now, Mr. Director," Roosevelt concluded, "who is the best detective in your Federal Bureau of Investigation?"

Hoover considered it for a few seconds. "The best detective within the F.B.I.," answered J. Edgar Hoover, "would be Frank Lerrick. Special Agent Lerrick is director of personnel as well as my own chief assistant. He's currently employed at Bureau headquarters on Constitution Avenue."

Roosevelt pursed his lips and waited impatiently. He glanced downward to the papers on his desk. Hoover shifted his weight slightly in the armchair.

Then Roosevelt looked up again. "Tell me, J. Edgar," the President said, "weren't we successful several months ago in infiltrating a man into Germany? A man who returned some very good intelligence for us? He was a linguist and a financial man of some sort. Even had explosives training in the United States Army."

"Yes, Mr. President. That's entirely correct."

"I believe he's returned home, has he not?"

"Yes, sir."

Now the President cleared his throat.

"Yes, of course," said Hoover, as if to suddenly remember. "Naturally, the man is still employed by the Bureau. I believe his name is-"

"Cochrane," Roosevelt said. "I recall. William Thomas Cochrane. Where is he?"

"He's currently assigned to Baltimore."

"Baltimore?" The President arched an eyebrow. "Doing what?"

"He's in the Mid-Atlantic States Banking Fraud Division," Hoover said.

Roosevelt added nothing for many seconds. "Really?" he finally breathed.

"I can reassign him this afternoon," Hoover volunteered.

The President smiled widely and extinguished his cigarette, carefully removing the stub from the holder. "Very good, J. Edgar," Roosevelt concluded. "I was confident that you would know exactly who should head this investigation."

As if by magic, two Secret Service men appeared and moved to a position behind the President of the United States, preparing to wheel him to the luncheon for which he was already five minutes late. Hoover instinctively rose. The Secret Service agents, employees of the Treasury, ignored him completely.

"I think," Roosevelt said in parting, "that you and I should meet again, J. Edgar. In about a month. I'd like to know how this saboteur has been captured."

Hoover thought his ears were failing. "A month?" he asked.

"Good Gracious, Mr. Hoover!" Roosevelt suddenly roared, his chair halting, his face florid. "There's a war breaking out in Europe! You don't think we have all year, do you?"