The Golden Age (30 page)

Caroline thought of Hopkins’ almost casual admission that the United States was not ready to fight a war in the Pacific. Why, she wondered, had the President’s shrewd stalling for time been so suddenly abandoned?

“Yesterday, the main Japanese fleet began to move east, in our direction. My naval friend is concerned about the lack of intelligence Washington has made available to the Pacific Fleet. Everything is filtered through the White House and the War Department. Before my friend left the Navy, he set up his own naval intelligence center in the Pacific and out of Washington’s reach. He’s been tracking Yamamoto. He’s also tracking the Navy Department. They have done nothing
except for an order from Admiral Stark—just this morning—to the naval commander at Pearl Harbor, telling him to send his two newest aircraft carriers, along with twenty-one other new ships, west toward Midway and Wake …”

“Where, presumably, they will meet Admiral Yamamoto on his eastern cruise.”

“Yes. It is … diabolic.”

“Or, maybe, very … complicated. There is something uncanny about Mr. Roosevelt, other than diabolism, of course. He leads so many lives. Last night he dined alone upstairs with Princess Martha. Eleanor had conveniently gone off to New York earlier to stay with lady friends and so … 
What
do you want, Burden?”

Burden sat heavily on the leather sofa. “To talk. To talk to you. To talk to someone who knows far more than I do about Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Hopkins.”

“I know character, perhaps, but I don’t know their war plans, if they have any. I get the sense that they are just drifting, waiting for something terrible to happen.”

“My naval friend thinks that we should bomb the Japanese fleet. Now.”

“So does Mr. Stimson. ‘It’s not too difficult,’ he told Hopkins, ‘maneuvering them into firing the first shot without them doing us a lot of damage in the process.’ ”

Burden nodded. “The first sensible thing I’ve ever heard attributed to Stimson. All right, what do I want? I’ll see to it that the
Tribune
gets the full story of what the President did and did not do. I’m holding subcommittee hearings in mid-December. All I want from you is fair coverage, something we’re not apt to get in the rest of the mainline press.”

“Oh, you can count on me, up to a certain point.”

“France?”

“France. But I think you’ve delayed too long. If there’s a war by Monday, there will be censorship on Tuesday. Also, I can’t see your other senators indicting—or whatever it is they do—the Commander in Chief in a time of peril.”

Burden shrugged. “We shall see what form the peril takes.” He smiled; shifted a gear. “I think about you—often.”

“I return the compliment.”

“If I’d been free to marry …”

“I was never designed for marriage, other than the one of peculiar inconvenience that I was obliged to make, thanks to our …” She laughed at the phrase: “… love child.”

As Caroline led him to the door, she tried to recall exactly what it was that she had once felt for him. Lust, she finally decided, giving herself moderately high marks for inner truthfulness. They embraced at the door. She felt in full control of herself not only now in the present but in the turbulent past tense as well.

“I gather that our offspring is in London,” said Burden.

“Oh?” Caroline had no idea where Emma was.

“Yes. She’s working on a film with your old friend Farrell. I assume you got him to hire her. Keep it all in the family, as they say.” And with this unexpected haymaker, James Burden Day was gone, leaving the ever-cool, superbly well-balanced Caroline trembling with unanticipated rage.

Hopkins returned to the White House on December 3. The next day, at his invitation, Caroline went straight to his sitting room in the Lincoln suite. He was seated in an armchair, reading what looked to be War Department memoranda. “There you are!” He waved at her. “I had intended to leap boyishly to my feet but …”

“Don’t.” She kissed the top of his head. “Did they find out why you were having trouble walking?”

“Of course not. But whatever they did, I don’t totter as much as before. Your paper is beginning to sound suspicious of us.”

“That’s only because we are. Because I am.” Caroline sat opposite him, deliberately facing away from the portrait of a brooding Lincoln, the bad-luck, in her eyes, president. “I don’t understand Hull’s infamous ten points. You say you stall for time and then you order the Japanese out of China, out of everywhere, and expect them to obey you.”

“Hull’s given up. Hull …”

“It’s not Hull. It’s the President. Why?”

Hopkins placed the War Department documents facedown on a table beside him. “Hull should have waited one more day, because we had just come up with a brand-new series of delays. But this may all be for the best. We’ll soon have the Japanese response to Hull.”

“This morning General Tojo said that the United States will be driven from East Asia by a great wind.”

Hopkins pulled himself out of his usual slouch. “A great wind?”

Caroline repeated Tokyo’s cryptic message to the fleet that morning. “East wind rain.”

Hopkins shook his head. “False alarm, I think. Most of their fleet is still in home waters.”

“Except for six or seven aircraft carriers.”

“Who tells you these things?”

“In the Washington whispering gallery all things are told.”

“All things false as well as true. Senator Burden Day, I’ll bet.”

Caroline made a little speech on the sacredness of the relationship between a journalist and his sources; neither of them listened to her.

“Tell your spy in the Navy Department that much of the Japanese fleet is now heading south, toward Saigon. That’s the area where they will take us on, and the British and the Dutch.”

“Not the mid-Pacific? Not Wake Island?”

“Unlikely. They’re close to home in the South Pacific. They’re too close to us at Wake or Midway, too close to San Diego. We should have their answer to Hull by the weekend.”

“How is the President?”

“He is well, thank you.”

Caroline laughed. “I expected no more, in the way of information.”

“You are asked to lunch on Sunday. Judge for yourself.”

“Is Eleanor back?”

“Oh yes. And the Crown Princess of Norway has gone into purdah at her Bethesda, Maryland, castle.”

“Young love will find a way,” said Caroline and left Hopkins to his papers.

James Burden Day rang Caroline in her office at the Tribune. “For your private information, Admiral Stark cabled, on November twenty-eighth, all the Pacific Coast naval commanders, from Alaska down to Panama and over to Hawaii. Here’s his message: ‘If hostilities cannot repeat cannot be avoided the United States desires that Japan commit the first overt act.’ My friend tells me that otherwise no information is getting through from the War Department to the Pacific.” With that, Burden hung up.

Caroline went into Blaise’s office. The ticker tape was clattering beside his desk: United Press—after November 26—was currently the news provider of choice. “All the Japanese embassies around the world are destroying their codes.”

Caroline told Blaise what Burden had told her. “On the other hand, I think Harry really believes the danger to us is in the Philippines.”

Blaise shuffled papers on his desk. “A garbled report’s come in from Singapore. They are expecting a Jap attack at any moment. There is also a reference to some sort of secret mutual defense deal between the U.S. and England …”

“You mean between Roosevelt and Churchill?”

“Which isn’t exactly the same thing, is it? I can’t find the damned thing.”

He rang for his secretary, an excited young man who said, “It’s started coming through.”

“That’s very interesting. But what I want from you is that copy of …”

“
What
is coming through?” Caroline spoke now as the true founder-publisher of the modern
Tribune
.

“The answer to Mr. Hull’s ten points. The Japanese Embassy is busy decoding it. There are fourteen parts. Thirteen are coming through now. The fourteenth, for some reason, won’t come until tomorrow, just after noon.”

Blaise dismissed his secretary. “So now we’ll know.”

“If we don’t already,” said Caroline. “I suspect that the war is already under way.” She picked up the latest poll from Dr. Gallup. “I
hope for Franklin’s sake—well, for the war’s sake—that the blow when it falls is decisive, because,” she held up the latest poll, “over eighty percent of the unconsulted people of this model democratic republic are still against any foreign war.”

“Unless,” Blaise was uncharacteristically sardonic, “we suffer a surprise attack from a foreign power.”

Eleanor Roosevelt embraced Caroline in a spontaneous outburst of affection. “I’m so glad you could come! We need cheering up.” The lines about her eyes were deeper than ever, and though she smiled her great toothy Rooseveltian grin she kept frowning at the same time, an unnerving effect.

They were in the Red Room. The guest of honor at lunch was a British naval officer along with a number of Roosevelt cousins.

“You must be exhausted!” Caroline suddenly realized how fond she had become of Eleanor over the many years that they had known each other. “Since we can’t get your column, we print your schedule. It’s like the Court Circular. Her Majesty, accompanied by His Honor Mayor La Guardia of New York, inspected the nation’s civil defense.”

“Her Majesty also discovered that there is no civil defense of any kind on the West Coast.” Eleanor completed the Circular. “Her Majesty disguised her ill pleasure as best she could while His Honor screamed epithets at every official in the state, including the heads of the fire departments. They are, he says, crucial. And, oh, how Fiorello can scream!”

“You are unlikely partners to be in charge of Civilian Defense.”

“Perhaps too unlikely.” Eleanor moved away as Hopkins came limping in from the adjacent Blue Room. He came straight up to Caroline.

“The President’s not coming down to lunch, so I’m going up to lunch with him.”

“The news is that bad?”

Hopkins nodded. “They have broken off all relations.”

“Part fourteen?”

“Yes. It won’t arrive officially until one p.m.” He looked at his watch. “Now. But we got an advance look at it. Come upstairs.
After
lunch.”

The lunch was no different from any other. Eleanor made dutiful conversation; and betrayed no anxiety. Caroline knew that she ought not to go upstairs on such a day, but as the invitation had been made, she also knew that nothing short of the Marine Guard could stop her. In the east-west corridor several military aides were hurrying in and out of the oval study. No one paid the slightest attention to her. The White House staff recognized her while the aides knew that, at any given moment, all sorts of ladies were apt to be staying with the Roosevelts. She did her best to look like a cousin, preferably Laura Delano; fiercely, she concentrated on turning her hair blue, in sculptured waves. She also concentrated on invisibility as she passed the study where Hopkins was slowly pacing up and down, papers in one hand. The President was at his desk, bent over the telephone, an untouched lunch in front of him. On another telephone an admiral was giving orders. Without permission or acknowledgment, military aides came and went, depositing cables on the President’s desk.

Caroline slipped, unobserved, she thought, past the door en route to Hopkins’ sitting room. But he had seen her. He led her to the Lincoln study. “Stay here in my room. Read this.” He handed her what was the entire Japanese response, including the fourteenth part.

“Why did they delay sending it?”

Hopkins showed her into his study. “They delayed because, at one o’clock our time, just as we were enjoying their prose, they bombed our fleet at Pearl Harbor.”

“It’s not possible.”

“That was my reaction. But the Boss has taken it all like a glacier. I was with him last night. He read the fourteenth part first. He gave it to me and he said, ‘This means war.’ Oh, we had a busy night.”

“But where was naval intelligence in all this? The Japanese must have had an enormous fleet. Why no warning?”

Hopkins turned away. “We’ll know soon enough.”

“But you knew last night they would attack …”

“Attack, yes. But not Pearl Harbor. Somewhere. In the southwestern Pacific was my theory. But I did change my tune last night. I said, ‘We ought to hit them first,’ but the Boss said, ‘No, we can’t do that. We’re a democracy.’ This means that Congress would blame a first strike on him. ‘We’re a peaceful people,’ he said. ‘But we have a good record.’ ”

“What does that mean?”

Caroline knew that every word her friend was telling her was being said for the record, for history—for the defense?

“A good record of winning virtuous wars, I suppose. Anyway, we tried to get Admiral Stark but he was at the National Theatre, at a performance of, God help us,
The Student Prince
. The Boss knew it would cause a panic if he were paged so he talked to him later.”

A military aide appeared in the doorway. “Sir …”

“I’m coming.” Hopkins vanished into the busy corridor.