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.
