Joseph E. Persico (12 page)

Months after the December White House meeting, Chennault was still pushing for China-based air raids against Japan, and the President was still interested in providing the bombers. But the sober-minded Marshall first asked if he might send General John Magruder to China to evaluate Chiang's forces and to weigh the potential political fallout of American-engineered bombing of Japan. Magruder came back warning that Chennault's proposition could lead the Japanese to attack the United States. Roosevelt was by now providing military aid to the Chinese; he was willing secretly to sponsor the firebombing of Tokyo from China; and on July 26, 1941, he clamped an embargo on the shipment of American oil to fuel-hungry Japan. Doubtless the President's antagonistic actions influenced a Japanese decision that was to explode over Pearl Harbor in less than five months.

Chapter V

The Defeatist and the Defiant

HOW WILLIAM J. Donovan entered the Roosevelt intelligence universe is a sinuous tale. Soon after Frank Knox had been lured into the Roosevelt administration in June 1940, and before Henry Stimson had been appointed secretary of war, Knox called the President from his
Daily News
office in Chicago. He had heard rumors, he said, that FDR was thinking of putting another Republican into the cabinet, namely William J. Donovan. More likely, Knox was floating an idea, rather than checking a rumor, since he and Donovan were thick. Donovan, at the time, was an immensely successful lawyer, a former acting attorney general, and an authentic World War I hero. He had been Knox's close political ally, hosting dinners at his duplex apartment on fashionable Beekman Place in Manhattan to raise money for the publisher's ill-fated 1936 presidential bid. When that effort failed, Donovan's shrewd behind-the-scenes politicking won Knox second place on the Republican ticket.

Knox told FDR, “[F]rankly, if your proposal contemplated Donovan for the War Department and myself for the Navy, I think the appointments could be put solely upon the basis of a nonpartisan nonpolitical measure of putting our national defense departments in such a state of preparedness as to protect the United States against any danger to our security. . . .” Roosevelt replied smoothly, “Bill Donovan is also an old friend of mine—we were in law school together—and frankly, I should like to have him in the Cabinet, not only for his own ability, but also to repair in a sense the very great injustice done him by President Hoover in the winter of 1929.” FDR had again demonstrated what one aide called a “fiendish memory.” In 1928, Donovan had been acting attorney general in the Coolidge administration. When Herbert Hoover became president in 1929, it was assumed that Hoover would appoint him attorney general. Hoover did not do so because, it was rumored, powerful Republicans did not want a Catholic in the cabinet. His rejection, at that point, had been the bitterest disappointment in Bill Donovan's life.

The Columbia Law School class of 1907 comprised only twenty-one members. Yet, for all FDR's avowal of friendship, Donovan always denied that he and Roosevelt had been close there. And despite his response to Knox, FDR evinced no further enthusiasm for Donovan as his secretary of war. “I fear that to put two Republicans in charge of the armed forces might be misunderstood in both parties,” he explained. The only close personal exchange between himself and Donovan occurred on April 9, 1940, when Roosevelt sent a telegram of condolence on the death in an automobile accident of Donovan's adored twenty-two-year-old daughter, Patricia. Donovan wrote back the next day: “That you took the time from many and pressing duties makes me doubly grateful. . . .”

Soon after his conversation with Knox the President did exactly what he said he would not do. He named another Republican to a defense portfolio in his cabinet, Stimson, not Bill Donovan, as secretary of war. Still, Knox was not finished with promoting his friend. On July 9, at the White House, he agreed with what the President had been saying all along—that the swift collapse of France, the Low Countries, and Norway could be explained only by fifth column subversives operating from within. The Navy secretary proposed having a correspondent from his Chicago
Daily News,
Edgar Mowrer, already in Britain, study methods for detecting fifth columnists that the United States might adopt. And he wanted someone else to join Mowrer, Bill Donovan.

To the President, the possibility of internal subversion appeared only too credible. Over a quarter-million residents in America were, like Hermann Lang, who had stolen the Norden bombsight, German-born. In 1939 the FBI received sixteen hundred reports of alleged sabotage. But on a single day in May 1940, with Hitler's forces overrunning Europe and with Churchill rounding up suspected subversives in droves, the FBI received over twenty-nine hundred reports of suspected sabotage. FDR not only seized on Knox's idea, but took it a step further. Why not also have Donovan form a judgment of Britain's capacity to stand up to Germany? Could the British stop the Germans in the air? Could they withstand an invasion? There was no point in pouring aid down a rathole, the President believed.

The next day Knox asked Lord Lothian to smooth the path for Donovan in Britain. Nothing could have pleased Lothian more. He had earlier described to London the American mood as “a wave of pessimism passing over this country to the effect that Great Britain must inevitably be defeated, and that there is no use in the United States doing anything more to help it and thereby getting entangled in Europe. . . . There is some evidence that it is beginning to affect the President. . . .” Donovan's findings might reverse that pessimism.

Secretary of State Cordell Hull cabled the American ambassador in Britain, Joe Kennedy, “We would appreciate any arrangements and preparations which could facilitate Colonel Donovan's mission.” Kennedy greeted this news with the enthusiasm of someone handed a dead rat. He shot back a reply to Hull that Donovan's and Mowrer's prying would amount to “the height of nonsense. We are already making an investigation here on this [fifth columnists] subject and [Harvey] Klemmer of my office is handling it.” Rather than paving the way, he intended to tell the British that Edgar Mowrer was just a reporter and not “entitled to confidential files and discussions with government officials. If Colonel Knox does not stop sending Mowrers and Colonel Donovans over here,” he concluded, “this organization is not going to function effectively.” Unsure that this cable alone would scuttle the mission, Kennedy called Sumner Welles the same day on the transatlantic phone. He wanted Welles to take to the President the cable he had received from Hull along with his own vigorous protest. Welles dutifully did so, encountering Roosevelt just returning from a rubdown by the White House physician. FDR read the correspondence and then followed a vintage Rooseveltian course, handing a squabble to his subordinates. He wrote Knox, “Please take this up with Secretary Hull and try to straighten it out. Somebody's nose seems to be out of joint.” The displaced nose obviously belonged to Joe Kennedy and what had dislocated it was the prospect of someone arriving in London too much like the ambassador for comfort, another wealthy, forceful, energetic, self-made Irish American burning with ambition, William J. Donovan.

Kennedy's counterattack failed, and Donovan prepared to set off for England. If anything could warm his reception by the British, it was the ambassador's opposition to his trip. Kennedy was a man predicting Britain's defeat. Donovan was a man who might be persuaded the country could survive. Another ally assured a cordial welcome. As soon as William Stephenson had arrived in New York to take charge of British intelligence, he had phoned Donovan at his law office on Wall Street. Donovan said, “Stay where you are.” Within twenty minutes, he was in the Canadian's suite. The two men had met occasionally during the thirties in London while Donovan was traveling on business. They instantly renewed a kindred spirit. Stephenson was soon convinced that his friend was a figure of power and influence in Washington. When he learned that the President was sending Donovan to Britain, it appeared that he had bet on a winner. Stephenson alerted the British secret service to open every door for his friend.

On the morning of July 15, 1940, Donovan's wife, Ruth, received a terse phone call from her husband in New York alerting her that he would be gone indefinitely, embarked on a secret mission. Donovan then boarded a Pan American flying boat, the
Lisbon Clipper,
for the flight to England via Portugal. On reaching London, he checked into Claridge's, his favorite hotel. The uncertainty of Britain's survival and Ambassador Kennedy's pessimism were understandable at the time of Donovan's arrival. All of Britain's allies on the Continent had fallen. Germany controlled the Atlantic coast from Scandinavia to Spain. Mountains of British military equipment lay smoldering and abandoned on the beaches at Dunkirk. Germany had gathered the world's largest concentration of armor and airpower, poised for an invasion of Britain. Yet, Donovan found British grit still intact. That June, the Foreign Office undersecretary, Sir Alexander Cadogan, wrote in his diary, “We have simply got to die at our posts—a far better fate than capitulating to Hitler as these damned frogs had done.” A sign at a London newsstand read:
FRENCH SIGN PEACE TREATY: WE'RE IN THE FINALS!

The British embraced Donovan. He spent a whirlwind two and a half weeks moving atop the peaks of British power and society. The American-born Lady Astor arranged for him to meet King George and Queen Mary at Astor's home at 4 St. James Square. On July 23, Robert Vansittart, chief diplomatic advisor to the foreign secretary, told Churchill, “There is at the present moment over here a Colonel William Donovan (he is staying at Claridge's). . . . He is a Republican, but he is a friend of Roosevelt and has been sent over here on a mission by consent of the two political parties in the United States, his real object being to collect as much information as would be useful in the event of America coming into the war. . . . I think in any event you should see him for a short while. He is an important person, and will be still more important to us in the future.” Churchill saw Donovan at 5:30
P.M
. on July 25.

Three days later, Lady Diana Cooper invited Donovan to Sunday dinner to meet Churchill again. Donovan discreetly chose not to knock Joe Kennedy's nose further out of joint and instead accepted a dinner invitation from the ambassador. He reluctantly declined Lady Diana and sent her a dozen yellow roses. She later responded with a thank-you note, adding, “I am happy to tell you that Winston was in his most engaging and invigorating form and I am sure you would have enjoyed it enormously. . . . I hope you had a hideous evening with Joe and I hope that you will lunch or dine another day.”

Donovan's most prophetic English encounter, as far as America's entry into the realm of espionage, took place not with monarchs or prime ministers, but in a grimy, nondescript office building at 52 Broadway opposite the Saint James underground station late on a Sunday morning just prior to his departure for home. The only hint of the building's official character was the posting of two elderly guards in blue uniforms with brass buttons who listlessly admitted the American visitor. Inside, Donovan met a Scot whose unaffected manner belied his position at the pinnacle of British society. Donovan's host was fifty-year-old Colonel Stewart Menzies, wealthy heir to a Scottish distillery fortune and a soldier who had won the Distinguished Service Order during the Great War as a member of the prestigious Household Cavalry. Menzies's parents had been close friends of Edward VII. Menzies's mother, Lady Holford, served as lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary, and her son was rumored to be the illegitimate offspring of the king. Menzies used his elevated connections skillfully and shamelessly to become Britain's chief spymaster as head of MI6. He was a man of charm but not warmth. The wife of one of his subordinates described him as “hard as granite under a smooth exterior.” Inside intelligence circles, he was referred to simply as “C.” Menzies had been alerted to Donovan's arrival by his American operations chief, William Stephenson. What Menzies and Donovan discussed at 52 Broadway is nowhere recorded. Like Blinker Hall captivating FDR in 1918, “C” may have given Donovan heady glimpses into British spycraft. That he received more than a cursory
tour d'horizon
seems premature, given that Donovan, however sympathetic, was still a civilian, held no office, and represented a neutral nation.

On August 3, eighteen days after his arrival in England, Donovan boarded the
Clare,
a four-engine British flying boat, camouflaged with green and blue patches, for his return flight to America. The Royal Air Force delivered champagne, and Brendan Bracken, Churchill's protégé, provided books to relieve the tedium of the crossing. Donovan arrived in New York at 7
P.M
. Sunday, August 4. His wife, Ruth, met him at the airport, still no wiser as to why or where her husband had gone.

The attitude of the British toward Donovan's visit was rather like that of a couple much relieved at having made a good impression after inviting the boss over for dinner. Admiral John H. Godfrey, director of Britain's naval intelligence, whom Donovan had also seen, writes in his memoirs that the unspoken object of the American's mission “was to discover if we were worth supporting.” The answer was to become clear in Donovan's actions upon his arriving home.

On August 9, FDR left the White House for a vacation in New England. He invited Donovan along, as he told reporters, “so he can tell me what he found on the other side when he went over.” Donovan caught up with the presidential party at the Hyde Park railroad station, and accompanied FDR for a two-and-a-half-day swing through the New England countryside, their most intimate association thus far. Since his return, Donovan had run into increasing pessimism in the administration over Britain's fate. Joe Kennedy, he told friends, could take much credit for this defeatism. The President wanted to know, could England hold out against an invasion? Donovan described what British leaders had shown him—well-organized air defenses, airfields wisely dispersed and cunningly camouflaged, and planes safely sheltered. He painted a picture of the English coast bristling with barbed wire and machine guns, just the first line of a deep defensive deployment. The British still stood in mortal peril, Donovan told the President, but with America's backing, they could make it. They needed immediately a hundred Flying Fortresses and a million rifles for the Home Guard to stave off an invasion.

During the two days that Donovan had the President's ear, they pursued FDR's favored pastimes, long drives through glorious foliage and frequent stops for roadside picnics. Donovan continued to tell the President what he wanted to hear, reversing the gloom and doom prophecies of Kennedy. He had a recommendation as well: that the United States start collaborating with British intelligence by creating its own centralized espionage service.