In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson Read Free Book Online

impression of the new ambassador: “He is extremely sure of his opinion, expresses himself forcibly and didactically and tends to dramatize the points he makes. The only fly in the ointment is that he is going to try and run the Embassy with a family of four persons on his salary, and how he is going to do it in Berlin, where prices are high, is something beyond me.”
    What neither Carr nor Moffat expressed in these entries was the surprise and displeasure they and many of their peers had felt at Dodd’s appointment. Theirs was an elite realm to which only men of a certain pedigree could expect ready admission. Many had gone to the same prep schools, mainly St. Paul’s and Groton, and from there to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.Undersecretary Phillips grew up in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood in a giant Victorian pile of a house. He was independently wealthy from the age of twenty-one and later in life became a regent of Harvard College. Most of his peers in the State Department also had money and while abroad spent heavily from their own funds with no expectation of reimbursement. One such official, Hugh Wilson, in praise of his fellow diplomats wrote, “They have all felt that they belonged to a pretty good club. That feeling has fostered a healthy esprit de corps.”
    By the club’s standards, Dodd was about as poor a fit as could be imagined.
    HE RETURNED TO CHICAGO to pack and attend various good-bye functions, after which he and his wife and Martha and Bill all set out by train for Virginia and a last stay at the Round Hill farm. His eighty-six-year-old father, John, lived relatively near, in North Carolina, but Dodd, despite his wish that his own children remain close at hand, did not at first plan to visit him, given that Roosevelt wanted his new ambassador in Berlin as soon as possible. Dodd had written to his father to tell him of his appointment and that he would not have a chance to visit before his departure. He enclosed a little money and wrote, “I am sorry to be so far away all my life.” His father immediately replied how proud he was that Dodd had received “this great honor from D.C.,” but added that tincture of vinegar that only parents seem to know how to apply—that little something that causes guilt to flare and plans to change. The elder Dodd wrote, “If I never see you any more while I live it will be alright I shall be proud of you to the last hours I live.”
    Dodd changed his plans. On July 1, a Saturday, he and his wife boarded a sleeper car bound for North Carolina. During their visit with Dodd’s father, they made time for a tour of local landmarks. Dodd and his wife touched old ground, as if saying good-bye for the last time. They visited the family cemetery, where Dodd stood before the grave of his mother, who had died in 1909. As he walked the grass he came upon the plots of ancestors caught up in the Civil War, including two who surrendered with General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox. It was a visit filled with reminders of “family misfortune” and the precariousness of life. “A rather sorrowful day,” he wrote.
    He and his wife returned to Virginia and the farm, then proceeded by train to New York. Martha and Bill drove the family’s Chevrolet, intending to drop it off at the wharf for transit to Berlin.
    DODD WOULD HAVE PREFERRED to spend the next couple of days with his family, but the department had insisted that once he gotto New York he attend a number of meetings with bank executives on the issue of Germany’s debt—a subject in which Dodd had little interest—and with Jewish leaders.Dodd feared that both the American and German press could twist these meetings to taint the appearance of objectivity that he hoped to present in Berlin. He complied, however, and the result was a day of encounters that evoked the serial visits of ghosts in Dickens’s
A Christmas Carol
.A letter from a prominent Jewish relief activist told Dodd that he would be visited on the night