Joseph E. Persico by Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR, World War II Espionage Read Free Book Online Page A

fire smoking a 24-inch cigar, and drinking whiskey and soda. It was quite obvious that he had consumed a good many whiskies before I arrived.” Yet, Felix Frankfurter, appointed to the Supreme Court by Roosevelt, who also visited Churchill just before the war, came away glowing. Meeting the man, Frankfurter wrote, “was one of the most exhilarating experiences I had in England—it made me feel more secure about the future.” A Frankfurter opinion counted with FDR. And so, when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain took Churchill into his government as First Lord of the Admiralty, FDR made a risky overture for the head of a presumably neutral nation toward the naval chief of a belligerent country. Eight days after war was declared, FDR instituted a secret correspondence recalling their common naval experience. “It is because you and I occupied similar positions in the World War that I want you to know how glad I am that you are back again in the Admiralty,” Roosevelt began. He went on, “What I want you and the Prime Minister to know is that I shall at all times welcome it, if you will keep me in touch personally with anything you want me to know about. You can always send sealed letters through your pouch or my pouch.” He later explained to Joe Kennedy as his reason for initiating the contact, “. . . [T]here is a strong possibility that he [Churchill] will become the prime minister and I want to get my hand in now.” FDR’s expectation had been borne out on May 10, 1940, when Churchill moved into 10 Downing Street, replacing Chamberlain. The day before, Hitler had declared, “The decisive hour has come for the fight today decides the fate of the German nation for the next 1000 years.” He then unleashed the Luftwaffe, the Wehrmacht, all of Germany’s might against Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France, simultaneously and with stunning effect. Roosevelt was relaxing in his upstairs study in his favorite red leather Jefferson chair, when he learned that eight months of not-quite-war yet not-quite-peace—the “phony war”—had been shattered. His envoy to Belgium, John Cudahy, telephoned him to describe the German Blitzkrieg under way. Hitler had earlier seized Denmark and Norway. Within the next five days the Low Countries and Luxembourg were defeated and France was reeling.
    From Paris, Bill Bullitt sent a message to Washington stamped PERSONAL AND SECRET FOR THE PRESIDENT. Bullitt judged Britain’s situation hopeless, and he proposed a desperate strategy. “I should like to speak what follows into your most private ear at the White House and to have no record of it,” Bullitt’s cable began. France, he predicted, “will be crushed utterly.” More alarming, “The British may install a government of Oswald Mosley and the union of British fascists which would cooperate fully with Hitler. That would mean the British navy would be against us.” In case the war went that badly, he urged that “the British fleet would base itself in Canada in defense of that dominion which might become the refuge for the British crown.” FDR, however, was not yet ready to write off the British navy in its home waters or the king in Buckingham Palace. He ignored Bullitt’s proposal.
    One American vigorously disapproved of the collusive nature of the secret correspondence passing between FDR and Churchill, the code clerk Tyler Kent, who had access to these messages. The reserved twenty-nine-year-old lone wolf was a deeply discontented man. Kent believed that he was working well below his station. He possessed all the WASP credentials favoring a successful diplomatic career. Tyler Gatewood Kent descended from an old Virginia family that dated to the 1600s. His father, William Patton Kent, had been a career officer in the U.S. Consular Service. Tyler had been born during his father’s posting to Manchuria and thereafter traveled