Joseph E. Persico Read Online Free Page A

rarely required disciplining: “We took secret pride in the fact that Franklin instinctively never seemed to require that kind of handling.” Franklin’s childhood compulsion to please his parents had grown into an adult reflex to charm and ingratiate, to turn every encounter into a personal triumph, sacrificing candor to achieve likability. By the time FDR became president, dissimulation had become second nature, and subterfuge cloaked in geniality became his stock-in-trade. Harold Ickes, his interior secretary, as crusty and blunt as Roosevelt was smooth and impenetrable, once complained, “You keep your cards up close to your belly.”
    Franklin D. Roosevelt had first entered upon the national consciousness on March 17, 1913, at the age of thirty-one, with his appointment by President Woodrow Wilson as the youngest person ever to become assistant secretary of the Navy. Franklin particularly savored the moment since his distant cousin and Eleanor’s uncle Theodore Roosevelt had held the same position before going on to become, at forty-two, the country’s youngest president. FDR’s boss, the secretary of the Navy, was fifty-one-year-old Josephus Daniels, former editor and publisher of the Raleigh (North Carolina)
News & Observer.
This prohibitionist/pacifist/populist could not have been more unlike his urbane, elegant deputy. Daniels, with his string ties, somber suits, and small-town manners and morals, was a figure out of the departed nineteenth century. Roosevelt was a man of the emerging twentieth century. At times, with the nakedly ambitious Roosevelt under him, Daniels must have felt as if he were sitting on a volcano. On one occasion, FDR looked over a site for building barracks for eleven thousand sailors. The next day, he let the construction contract. Four months later, the work completed, he went to Daniels for permission to carry out the project. The secretary had been forewarned. When Daniels initially went to New York’s Senator Elihu Root to clear Roosevelt’s appointment, Root had asked him if he really understood the Roosevelts. “Whenever a Roosevelt rides, he wishes to ride in front,” Root warned, “they like to have their own way.” For all his homespun manner, Josephus Daniels was no fool. He knew that a northern aristocrat would complement his southern folksiness, and he possessed that rare quality in a leader—he was not afraid to hire a subordinate who might be smarter than he was.
    The component of the Navy Department that quickly captured the assistant secretary’s imagination was the Office of Naval Intelligence. ONI, at that point, was the closest equivalent to an American central intelligence agency. In its thirty-first year when FDR came to the department, ONI was a small, elite subempire, one that had planted naval attachés in all significant world capitals, poking into the secrets of foreign powers. ONI’s chief, Captain James Oliver Harrison, unhappily observed that Roosevelt and his political mentor and private secretary, an untidy, irreverent man named Louis Howe, were poaching on his turf, organizing their own secret intelligence cell. FDR’s amateurs, Harrison complained to the Chief of Naval Operations, were interfering with his professionals. Soon after America entered World War I in April 1917, Harrison was replaced by a more pliant ONI chief, Captain Roger Welles. Welles happily commissioned FDR’s socialite pals into naval intelligence, young men who shared the right schools, clubs, and connections, among them FDR’s onetime law partner, Alexander Brown Legare, who founded the Chevy Chase Hunt Club; Lawrence Waterbury, star polo player; and Steuart Davis, a Harvard classmate and commander of the Volunteer Patrol Squadron. ONI’s roster soon began to resemble the Social Register.
    Roosevelt’s intelligence priority had been set before the United States entered World War I. German saboteurs were