Booknotes

Mr. JOSEPH PERSICO (Author, Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR and World
War II Espionage"): Brian, I was a kid growing up during the
Roosevelt era. He's always been a hero of mine. I wondered how I
would be able someday to write a book about Franklin Roosevelt. I
couldn't imagine there was anything that hadn't been said. I pulled
up on the Internet the catalog of the Library of Congress and I went
through it line by line and there were something like 600 books on
Franklin D. Roosevelt. And I thought, `It's a--it's all said. But
I've written a great deal about intelligence and maybe I could combine
the two,' and there was nothing in this list of 600 books in the
catalog about FDR and intelligence. My--my reaction was, `Joe, you
are either brilliant and you've thought of something that nobody else
could think of or you're a fool and you're wasting your time because
there's no story.'

LAMB: So in the end, what--when did you start to see a--a story that
had never been told?

Mr. PERSICO: Well, I started going down, Brian, to Hyde Park, to the
Roosevelt Archives. And it--I started virtually from ground zero.
But as I started plowing through the papers of George Marshall, the
papers of Bill Donovan and FDR's papers, I realized there were a lot
of unst--untold stories and I was very encouraged to proceed.

LAMB: Let's pick one of those names, Bill Donovan. Who was he?

Mr. PERSICO: Bill Donovan was an authentic hero of World War I, a
Congressional Medal of Honor winner, subsequently a vastly successful
Wall Street lawyer. Now he becomes, in effect, the first head of a
central intelligence agency in the United States. Franklin Roosevelt
appoints him in the summer of 1941 as--what eventually becomes the
Office of Strategic Services. Kind of a strange choice because
Donovan was a staunch Republican, had run for governor of New York on
an anti-Roosevelt, anti-New Deal platform. But he was also a man of
irrepressible spirit, boundless optimism, full of ideas and, in a
sense, he--he reflected the qualities of Franklin Roosevelt. So he
was named the head of our first spy service.

LAMB: As you know, they called him Wild Bill Donovan. Tell us a wild
story.

Mr. PERSICO: Well, one--one of the--one of the conclusions I reached
about Donovan was that he was a magnificent magnet for attracting
talent. His OSS attracted college presidents, semanticists,
philosophers, writers, journalists, photographers, actors, cameramen.
Arthur Goldberg had been an OSS veteran, subsequently goes on the
Supreme Court. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was with the OSS.
The French chef Julia Child was with the OSS. But what kind of
str--struck me about Donovan is the crack-brained ideas that he could
advance, one of which was that his agents would somehow intrude into
Hitler's diet substances that would cause the fuhrer's breasts to
swell, his voice to rise and his mustache to fall out. Another idea
that he came forward with was to drop leaflets over Japanese troops
which show pictures of Japanese women involved in compromising
positions with Caucasians, which presumably would--would demoralize
them and seeing that their women were not being faithful. The thing
that was surprising to me is that these crazy ideas did not turn FDR
off at all. He didn't reject them out of hand because he loved
the--the surreptitious, the furtive, the clandestine and the covert.

LAMB: You say in your book at, I think, the height of the OSS, he had
something like 1,600 people working for him?

Mr. PERSICO: More like 16,000.

LAMB: Sixteen thousand people!

Mr. PERSICO: Yes.

LAMB: Boy, I missed that.

Mr. PERSICO: And that's starting from ground zero. You know, we had
no intelligence service to speak of, even the year before Pearl
Harbor.

LAMB: So kind of relate that to today. The president of the United
States has somebody who's a friend of his who creates what kind of
a--and what would--what would happen if this kind of thing was
developed today?

Mr. PERSICO: Well...

LAMB: Can you relate it to what's going on in the world right now?

Mr. PERSICO: Yeah. I--I th--I think that the--the real parallel
here is the shocking unexpectedness of Pearl Harbor and September
11th. How could this happen? At the--after the fact, the strand of
intelligence that leads from A to B to C to Pearl Harbor may stand out
glaringly, and after the fact the strand of intelligence that runs
from X to Y to Z to the World Trade Center and the Pentagon may seem
to stand out glaringly. But before the fact, this intelligence
doesn't come in single strands. It comes in great bundles. You know,
we were breaking the Japanese code, there were hundreds of messages
available to the president. We now have the NSA, which I understand
does something like $3 billion of worldwi--wide eavesdropping. So
what we have that's comparable is a f--a flood tide of intelligence
which seems to overwhelm the circuitry. What we seem to be lacking
is--then and now is careful analy--an--analysis to say, `Well, we've
got this tide of intelligence. What direction is it falling in? What
do these jigsaw pieces tell us if we can put them together?' That was
a failing prior to Pearl Harbor and obviously a failing now.

LAMB: Vincent Astor. What did he do for FDR?

Mr. PERSICO: Well, I mentioned a moment ago that the United States
didn't go into the intelligence business in a serious way until 1941.
We were probably the only world power that didn't have a professional
intelligence service. Roosevelt relied very heavily prior to, let's
say, 1940 on a circle of socialite friends as his sources. There were
a group of them who styled themselves The Club, and they had taken a
shabby apartment on New York's Upper East Side. They had an unlisted
phone number. They had a secret mail drop. It--it--it sounded like
the spy games of boys being carried out by grown men. The ch--the
chief figure in this outfit called The Club was Vincent Astor, one of
the wealthiest men in the country.

LAMB: Which one is he in this photo at top?

Mr. PERSICO: Vincent Astor is the one to the right of the bar on the
ship where's is standing.

LAMB: Or to the left of FDR?

Mr. PERSICO: And he's--and he--let's see. It looks to me like he's
to--yes. Yes.

LAMB: And--and who was he?

Mr. PERSICO: Vincent Astor was the--the heir of a massive fortune in
the United States. He was--he was a socialite, but he was also a man
interested in--in causes, owned probably the biggest chunks of real
estate in Manhattan. He and his other members of The Club, while they
seemed like dilettante amateurs, had this value for FDR: They were
very highly placed. For example, Astor was a director of Western
Union, and consequently he was privity to the kinds of cables which
were going from foreign embassies in the United States back to their
homelands, and though it was illegal, he had these cables intercepted
and he passed this intelligence along to FDR. Another member of The
Club was Winthrop Aldrich, who, at the time, was head of the Chase
Manhattan Bank. Aldrich knew about international financial dealings.
He could report to FDR all the money that was going into and coming
out of the Russian spy front in the United States, the Amtorg Trading
company. But this--this was a pretty unsophisticated level of
intelligence for a country the size of the United States at that
point.

LAMB: Well, in 1939 and '40, what kind of an intelligence-gathering
operation did FDR have? Did he have an official one?

Mr. PERSICO: No, he--that doesn't--he doesn't begin a formal,
official central intelligence agency until the summer of 1941. What
he has before that are the military services, the Office of Naval
Intelligence, he has the military intelligence division of the Army,
and he has the FBI. And he ha--he tri--he's very unhappy with the
lack of coordination--and doesn't that ring a bell today? For
example, at one point, to try to get these people moving in the same
direction, he--he calls a meeting of--of Hoover as the head of the FBI
and the head of military intelligence and naval intelligence. Hoover
doesn't dane to come.

LAMB: Just says, `I'm not coming'?

Mr. PERSICO: Well, he had to be ordered by FDR finally to come. We
had the Army and Navy with the lunatic handling of--of the messages
that we were decoding, particularly Japanese diplomatic traffic. They
had this rivalry in which the Army would decode messages on even days,
the--and the Navy would do it on odd days. They had a s--a s--a
system where they would share who got to deliver the plum traffic to
the president. The Army would do it in certain months and subsequent
month would be in the Navy. And it was--it was madness. And finally
Roosevelt himself just cut out that nonsense.

LAMB: Back to Vincent Astor. Was he the one that went on the trip to
try to find some intelligence over in Japan?

Mr. PERSICO: Yeah. Again, this indicates the rather amateurish
intelligence that Roosevelt conducted prior to forming a formal agency
in--in the OSS. Astor had a magnificent ocean-going yacht called the
Nourmahal. It had a crew of over 40 members. FDR asks Vincent Astor
to cruise the Pacific, seemingly on a pleasure junket, and hit places
in the Marshall Islands, which were then managed by Japan as--as a
mandate, and to report on our preparations there. And this was great
fun for Vincent Astor and a great adventure. He subsequently thought
this would lead to his becoming FDR's chief of intelligence, but he's
up against tougher rivals in Donovan and some others.

LAMB: John Franklin Carter. You've got a photo of him in your book.
Who does--who is he?

Mr. PERSICO: John Franklin Carter--interesting man--was a columnist
in Washington. At one point he wangles an appointment with the
president in the Oval Office and he, in effect, says to FDR, `You
know, I have extraordinary contacts in journalism, among international
government figures, among businessmen worldwide. I could easily set
up for you a ring and I would report strictly to you.' Roosevelt
lapped that up. It was just the kind of thing that appealed to
FDR--off the books, circumventing his own bureaucracy, something
private, clandestine. A spy thriller kind of thing appealed to him.
So he took money out of his own White House budget to set up the John
Franklin Carter ring. Has this money transferred into the State
Department, where presumably it's there to buy reports about
foreign--foreign governments. And then Carter operates throughout the
war, directly reporting to FDR and the Oval Office.

LAMB: How many people did he have working for him?

Mr. PERSICO: Very small group, only about 12. But the interesting
thing is that we have an OSS that doesn't necessarily know about the
John Franklin Carter ring. We have John Franklin Carter who doesn't
necessarily know about the Astor ring.

LAMB: And you say that FDR didn't write very much down.

Mr. PERSICO: FDR, by his character and temperament, was ideally
suited for--for secret warfare. He loved to trade in secrets. He was
a master manipulator of people. He misled his own associates when it
suited him. He seemed to enjoy subterfuge for its own sake. And he
said it best himself. He said, `I'm a juggler. I never let my left
hand know what my right hand is doing.' And to answer your point, he
left virtually no fingerprints. One of the most frustrating things
that h--historians on the--on the trail of Franklin Roosevelt complain
about is the lack of written commitment to decisions that he made or
explanations as to what he did.

LAMB: What did you learn about him ba--as a person?

Mr. PERSICO: Well, I always had a--had a sense that--that Roosevelt
was a man with a certain amount of guile. My research in writing
"Roosevelt's Secret War" convinced me even further of that. As I--as
I said a moment ago, he was ideally suited for this kind of thing.
He--he was--I think some of the best descriptions of him, which I
accept as--as essential to his character, one of which was made by one
of his New Deal associates, who said, `The man always conceals the
purposes of his mind.' An--another one of his close associates said,
`I'--this was Robert Sherwood, who wrote speeches for Roosevelt--he
said, `I could never penetrate that heavily forested interior.' Henry
Wallace said, `The only certainty in the Roosevelt administration was
what was going on inside FDR's head.' M--my initial expectation that
he would be a--a man who held the cards close to the vest was
confirmed. Somebody said to me, `Well, did this make you think less
of him?' It made him more interesting to me, a more textured
character.

LAMB: You say in the book that you're--Colin Powell helped you with
information on this book. Did I misinterpret that or was that from
your old friendship?

Mr. PERSICO: Well, in this sense, as--as you know, I w--I was Colin
Powell's collaborator on his autobiography, "My American Journey."
Colin Powell, needless to say, had very, very useful connections
throughout the federal bureaucracy, and when I would have queries, I
could go to some of his staff who--who--who would get answers for me,
for which I'm very grateful.

LAMB: How long did you work on his book?

Mr. PERSICO: He and I were together for about 20 months. Most of
the time I spent down in a little study in his office examining the
soles of his sneakers. He's a, you know, very casual guy. And he
put--propped his feet up on the desk and--and we would just start
talking with a tape recorder on, and essentially, what we arrived at
was an extended oral history. Colin Powell has an extraordinarily
retentive mind. He's a great storyteller. Every once in a while when
we were sated with working on the book, he would regale me with his
renditions of Jamaican songs which had kind of a naughty double
entendre lyric. It was a s--stimulating experience.

LAMB: What do you know about him that we don't that gives you a
certain view of him during this crisis as secretary of State?

Mr. PERSICO: Well, I'm not sure who--who--who would not be aware of
this now, but my--my sense is that we're--we're fortunate in that
in--in Colin Powell we have an unusual preparation for the work he's
carrying on now. This man, from the military standpoint, was the--the
nation's chief military figure as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff. Frequently overlooked is the fact that he had already been a
national security adviser. He was Reagan's man at the NSC. And then
he has developed a worldwide reputation for integrity,
in--intelligence, candor, so that in building coalitions, this is
enormously important. So I think we have an extraordinary combination
in Colin Powell, and I would say, in short, the man I see is resolute,
but at the same time reasonable. That's--that's a comfort.

LAMB: But just on a personal level, if somebody came to you and said
that, `Joe, I'm gonna go meet Colin Powell. I've got to do business
with him,' what would you tip him off to do?

Mr. PERSICO: Well, I--I--I will tell you, Brian, what I--what I told
my wife when I first met Colin Powell. I went down to the Pentagon
the very day before he retired from 35 years in the military. He's a
joint--chairman of the Joint Chiefs. And we were just kind of sizing
each other up for the collaboration. And I went home and my wife
said, `Well, what is he like?' And I said, `Colin Powell is the most
comfortable man in his skin whom I have ever met.' And what I would
tell somebody is pretty much expect a direct, casual figure with no
guile, no side to him.

LAMB: So how did you get to all this? Where were--where'd you first
get interested in being a writer?

Mr. PERSICO: Well, I wanted to be a writer ever since I was a kid.
Finally, I--I backed into writing, I guess. I was, for many years,
chief speechwriter for Governor and later Vice President Nelson
Rockefeller. Did that for a long time, as I say, and started out--the
first five years I loved it. The next three years I tolerated it.
The final three years I hated it. It had nothing do with--with--with
my boss. It was that I wanted to write my own books. And finally,
rather late in life I would say, in my 40s, I started writing my own
histories and biographies.

LAMB: I counted in the front part of the book that this would be your
ninth book. Did we miss any?

Mr. PERSICO: Not that I'm going to admit to. Yes, these...

LAMB: You--you wrote in '94 about Nuremberg, in '91 about William
Casey...

Mr. PERSICO: Right.

LAMB: ...in '98 about Edward R. Murrow...

Mr. PERSICO: Yeah.

LAMB: ...in '90--in '79, "Piercing the Reich: The Penetration of
Nazi Germany by American Secret Agents During World War II." How much
of that book led to what you're doing here?

Mr. PERSICO: Well, it--it led to a sense of confidence that I could
write reasonably well about intelligence. And I--I did that book.
An--another book that dealt with intelligence was Casey, William J.
Casey, who subsequently becomes the director of central intelligence
and who I first had met in--in talking to him about Bill Donovan's
OSS. Casey, you know, as the Brits would say, had a pretty good war.
Casey was--was posted in--in England during the latter part of World
War II, and he was responsible for one of the great triumphs during
that period, which was something the British said couldn't be done,
and that is we got a number of teams inside Nazi Germany, into--into
something like 60 German cities. So this would have been a coup for
the OSS and a coup for the Roosevelt administration of the war.

LAMB: What is MAGIC?

(Graphic on screen)

For More Information Random House 299 Park Avenue New York, NY 10171

Mr. PERSICO: The US code crackers were working very hard prior to
1940 in breaking the Japanese diplomatic code. They called it code
Purple. They finally broke that code, and there--there b--it was
broken s--by a team led by a man named Frank Rowlett. Rowlett
and--and his people were now able, in effect, to place the president
of the United States on the distribution list of the Japanese Foreign
Office because we're breaking these messages, they're available in a
very sh--in a very short time. They may--it may be a message from the
foreign offices in Tokyo to the American--or to--excuse me--to the
Japanese ambassadors in Washington. We're breaking that code and
these messages go up to Pre--to President Roosevelt very quickly. And
that's what the MAGIC operation was. Very important because our
breaking of the Japanese codes were responsible for our 1942 victory
in the Pacific at Midway, which is a turning point of that war.
And...

LAMB: Frank Rowlett is what kind of a guy back then and where did he
operate from?

Mr. PERSICO: Frank Rowlett was operating out of a former girls'
school in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington called Arlington
Hall. He operated with a very small group of people. I can't imagine
they made a great deal of money. They worked for the Army as
cryptographers, but they were very dedicated. And their--their
breakthrough was really a significant advance for us.

One of the things that they--they--they enabled us to do--by breaking
the Japanese codes, we also were able to find out German intent. How
did that come about? Because the Japanese had an ambassador posted to
Berlin. His name was Oshima. Oshima was a rabid pro-Nazi.
Consequently, he won the confidence of Adolf Hitler. Hitler would
bring in Oshima and say, `Mr. Ambassador, I'm going to send you to
inspect the Atlantic Wall. I want you to see what I'm erecting to
repel an Allied invasion of the continent,' or he would say to Oshima,
`I'm going to tell you how many divisions I have deployed in Norway,
Denmark, in Belgium,' most importantly in--in France. And then he
would say to Oshima, upon these--these rather critical revelations,
`and I don't want you to breathe a word of--of this to anybody.'

Well, Oshima did what a good diplomat does. He would report back to
Tokyo, virtually verbatim, his conversations with Hitler through that
diplomatic code that we're breaking, and these messages then are
available to the president, to his secretary of War, to the military
chiefs. One of the most significant revelations was when--when Hitler
tells Oshima, `I'll tell you where the Allies are going to strike.
They're going to strike at the Pas-de-Calais,' the narrowest part of
the British Channel--the English Channel. And he reports this back to
Tokyo. We intercept it. We now know that Hitler expects the invasion
there. Why is that significant? Because that was our deception plan.
That's exactly what we wanted him to think, and we know it's working.

LAMB: You say that--that some 400 messages that FDR could have read
from Oshima?

Mr. PERSICO: There--there was something like 400 Oshima intercepts
per year. General Marshall...

LAMB: Per year?

Mr. PERSICO: Yes. General Marshall said that he was our best source
of information on German intentions. He was our--our--our best agent,
an unwitting agent albeit. And for the president, it was not simply
peeking at the other fella's hand. It was like holding the other
fella's hand.

LAMB: So the president's in the Oval Office, and every day they could
bring in these Oshima messages. And did the Japanese ever find out
that the president knew all this stuff?

Mr. PERSICO: It's really extraordinary. In 1942, after the Battle
of Midway, the Chicago Tribune front-paged a story which practically
blew the secret. The--the--the Tribune headline read, in effect, Navy
Knew Japanese War Plan. Well, how else would we have known it? The
story's virtually saying we're--we're breaking the Japanese code.
Astonishingly, while any cabdriver in Chicago could have drawn that
conclusion, the Japanese considered their code unbreakable. They used
the same compromised code to the end of the war.

LAMB: You mentioned the Chicago Tribune. And again, I want to try to
relate to the atmosphere we're living in right now. First of all,
when you read this book, the first thing that comes to mind is that
FDR knew a lot more than the American people ever knew. And I wonder
if you think that our president today knows a lot more than we'll ever
know about what's going on in the world.

Mr. PERSICO: Well, I--I would think the president does, I would
think the intelligence-gathering agencies do, be--because, you know,
it's al--it's almost like a criminal investigation or a manhunt that
we're on now. And--and--and by revealing everything you know, you
also tip off your adversaries as to what you know. You dry up
sources, you compromise people. I think it has to be that way.

LAMB: You point out that 20 cases of espionage happened here in the
United States from outside coming in, and that at one point there were
16 of the 20 they had in--in jail somewhere. But the--what I'm
getting at is how much--I'm looking at a story of Willie Copaw--Is
that the way you pronounce it?

Mr. PERSICO: Yes. Yeah.

LAMB: How much of the--you know, the enemy coming inside this country
did we have back in World War II?

Mr. PERSICO: Surprisingly little. The FBI had rounded up almost all
agents operating with the United States. However, Hitler was very
unhappy with the job being done by his intelligence service, the
Abwehr, and pressured Admiral Kanaris, his intelligence chief, do
something more dramatic. The result was an operation called Pastorius
in which eight Germans who had lived in the United States, two of whom
had been US citizens, and--men who had gone back to Germany, were
recruited to form this team. They were put ashore in the United
States via submarine in the summer of 1942 to carry out espionage.
One of them decided to rat on his other comrades, thinking this would
make him a hero. This--and--and--and so they were all quickly rounded
up. This story is--is fairly well-known.

What is far less known was Roosevelt's attitude towards these
saboteurs. He immediately directs his attorney general, Francis
Biddle, to organize the trial outside of the civilian courts through a
military tribunal. And he said to Biddle, in effect, `These are
agents of the enemy. They've come ashore in wartime th--in civilian
clothes. I don't think there can be any doubt as to what their fate
must be.' So he keeps the--this case out of the civilian courts
because the rules of evidence are strict, the opportunities for appeal
seem to be endless. A military court which he creates and he names
all the members, and then he directs his attorney general, Biddle, to
prosecute the case, so that within eight weeks of these saboteurs
setting foot in the United States, they have b--all been condemned to
death. Two of them subsequently are commuted. But what I found
interesting was that this Hudson River patrician, this amiable, genial
Franklin Roosevelt, was underneath hard as nails. He expressed his
only regret in this case that these men hadn't suffered the more
ignominious fate of being hanged rather than being electrocuted.

LAMB: I mention Willy Copaw. You--you write on page 387, `He had
never fit in. He was a bony 6' 2" 26-year-old from a good Greenwich,
Connecti--a good Connecticut family but a social outcast and a loner.'
What happened there with Copaw?

Mr. PERSICO: He got caught.

LAMB: What did he do, though? What was that story?

Mr. PERSICO: Well, C--Copaw, as you've just read, didn't seem to fit
anywhere. He had German ancestry, and consequently, he was enamored
of--of what was happening in Germany and very much impressed by
Hitler's early victories and manages to get himth--self thrown out of
the US Navy for being overtly pro-Nazi; manages, through merchant
vessels, to get himself to Europe, and he volunteers with another
figure to carry on probably the last attempt the Nazis made to--to
land saboteurs ashore on the United States. He meets one of his
former schoolmates, who persuades him that this is madness. Copaw
turns himself in, serves a--a--a modest sentence after the war. We
knew we had victory in hand now, and there wasn't quite this s--spirit
of vengeance that FDR had expressed earlier.

LAMB: But you put--I mean, one of the things that's interesting is
that he was dropped into Frenchman's Bay up there in--I assume, in
Maine.

Mr. PERSICO: Yeah. Yeah.

LAMB: That's the way he got back into the country.

Mr. PERSICO: Right. He--he did--he did make it back to the United
States wi--with a bundle of money. He had a good time with the
Fuehrer's dollar supply but was useless as an agent. And I think
the--the lack of appropriateness of this man and the previous team I
talked about is an indication of how weak German intelligence was as
targeted against the United States.

LAMB: Who's this fellow right here?

Mr. PERSICO: That man is Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstaengel. That was his
nickname, Putzi. He had been a close personal associate of Hitler's.
He handled the foreign press for Hitler. He was a pretty good
pianist, and he was dubbed Hitler's piano player. Hanfstaengel was
eventually driven out of Hitler's circle by more ruthless Nazi rivals,
became fighting for his life, went to England, the war breaks out, and
Hanfstaengel is interned in a POW camp. He is subsequently sprung by
one of FDR's personal agents, John Franklin Carter, who I mentioned
earlier, and they bring him to the United States and they install him
in a safe house in Washington suburbs.

Now Roosevelt is very interested in Hanfstaengel because, first of
all, he is half-American and he comes from a pedigreed New England
family, and like FDR, he went to Harvard. Hanfstaengel's job is to
provide the president with inside information on the cast of
characters in the Third Reich and anything else he can provide of
value. Much of what he provides is--is more titillating than
elevating. He sent re--reports to Roosevelt about how Hitler had
ex--sent out agents to recover pornographic paintings that the--the
Fuehrer had done as a penniless artist in Vienna. He--he was able to
report to the president on how the Hitler-Eva Braun romance had begun.
He further was able to tell the president about Hitler's sexual
ambiguity.

He also was able to deliver some intelligence or estimations that were
of s--of substance. For example, he was the first to insist that
Hitler, no matter how bad things got, would not surrender, that he
would commit suicide first, which is, indeed, what happened. The
president looked forward to these reports from Hanfstaengel. He
called them `my Hitler bedtime stories.'

LAMB: What en--what hap--ended up happening to Putzi?

Mr. PERSICO: Well, Putzi s--seemed to lose favor when he got done
telling his bedtime stories or when he had revealed whatever he knew,
which--about the Third Reich and he's now a number of years divorced
from that, and because he's kind of a pain in the neck who expects the
United States to provide him with a piano, take care of all of his
dental work. He's finally shipped back to the POW camp in Britain,
and that is the end of his spy career.

LAMB: Also, you have sprinkled in your book some stories that, if it
were to happen today, they would keep some cable networks going for
about three months. And what I'm getting at is things like the
Eleanor Roosevelt-Joseph Lashe story, the personal side of that.
Where do those--did--did the--how did the president--did the president
know about those kinds of stories?

Mr. PERSICO: Well, there's an--there's an interesting dichotomy
in--in Hoover's relationship with FDR and with Eleanor Roosevelt. He
got along surprisingly well. You have this genial, patrician,
charming figure on one side and the dour Hoover on the other, but they
cooperated very closely. However, Eleanor Roosevelt had made the
mistake once of referring to J. Edgar Hoover as stupid because he was
pressing a background clearance of a White House staffer who had been
around for years. Hoover was not the kind of figure who would forget
a slight, and consequently, when the Army came up with a preposterous
report that Eleanor Roosevelt had been involved in a sexual tryst with
her young protege, Joe Lashe, Hoover kept this information in his own
private files to the day of his death.

LAMB: What was the story, though? Did--was it ever proved that they
had a relationship?

Mr. PERSICO: No. The Army intelligence people that provided this
information to Hoover had made a--a small error in their
eavesdropping. They had found Eleanor Roosevelt in a--in a hotel with
Lashe visiting. But what they produced as proof of a tryst was young
Lashe's involvement with hi--with his girlfriend. He was having an
affair with a married woman at the time, who he subsequently married
himself. But the--the Army mili--military intelligence people
are--are taping this, they're peeping through--through holes in the
wall, and somehow it gets mixed up that it's not Lashe and his
girlfriend Trudy, but it's Lashe and Eleanor Roosevelt.

LAMB: How public has the Sumner Welles story been, the one in the
train?

Mr. PERSICO: It's--it's fairly well-known. And you--what you're
referring to is the fact that Sumner Welles, who was the
undersecretary of State in the Roosevelt administration and who was an
important figure, he was Roosevelt's man. The secretary of state was
Cordell Hull, and Roosevelt pretty much circumvented him and--and
worked through Sumner Welles, who was an old family friend. Welles
had made some sexual advances on trains, part of his--his business
trips, to black porters on these trains, who reported him. This was
concealed for a long time. It was two or three years before it
finally erupted. Roosevelt is under tremendous pressure from people
who fear that having a man with homosexual tendencies in such a
sensitive position at State--we have to remember we're not talking
about the current world; we're talking about the attitudes of the--of
the 1940s. He's looked upon as a--as a--a security threat, and
Roosevelt very unhappily eventually dismisses Sumner Welles.

What I thought was interesting was after he has to--has to force
Welles out of the State Department, he considers sending Welles on a
mission to Moscow for him, and he's talked out of that. But one can
only imagine, with the capabilities of the NKVD to--to blackmail and
to lead people into compromising positions, what might have come of
that assignment.

LAMB: And how does William Bullitt fit into all this?

Mr. PERSICO: William Bullitt was a--a rival of--of Sumner Welles.
Bullitt had been FDR's ambassador to France. Obviously he has to come
back when France falls, and he is one who is pressuring the president
to do something about Sumner Welles, to get rid of him. Roosevelt
i--is--is loyal to people, and he's very fond of Sumner Welles, and he
is very dependent on Sumner Welles. And after he hears of the tarring
of Sumner Welles by Bill Bullitt, he, in effect, says to Bill Bullitt,
`What Sumner Welles is doing is wrong, but what you are doing to
denigrate another man will send you down there,' and he makes this
hellward gesture.

LAMB: There are so many stories, as you know, in this book. You
be--in the back you have a legend of where you got a lot of it. You
mentioned the library. How much time did you spend at the Hyde Park
Library?

Mr. PERSICO: Well, I was practically living there for many months.
Hyde Park was a--a commute for me almost. It was about an hour and a
half from my home in Albany, New York. That was my greatest source.
I also had marvelous results in my research at the National Archives,
the Library of Congress. The stories I was telling about the messages
that were intercepted by Ambassador Oshima I managed to track down at
the National Archives. I don't think they'd been looked at very much
or at all since that time. That was very rewarding for a researcher.

LAMB: Well, o--one of the things you have listed is PS--and you have
the little designation so you can tell where something's coming
from--`PSF, president's secretaries file, Roosevelt Library.' Have a
lot of people mined that file?

Mr. PERSICO: Certain areas, things have been mined rather heavily.
But there--there are always fresh revelations that--that--that
astonish me. For example, there was some suspicion that an economist
by the name of Lachlan Curry, who was an--a utility infielder for
President Roosevelt, took on--undertook many trusted missions--there
was some suspicion about his--his loyalty, and I'm plowing through the
archives at Hyde Park, and I find that Lachlan Curry was the White
House man tracking the development of the secret explosive RDX.
Somehow Soviet Union finds out about the development of RDX. On
another occa--on another occasion, he is assigned to track the
development of a new bomber, the B-29. Somehow the Soviet Union finds
out about the B-29. These were things that I discovered that I--I
don't imagine anybody paid any attention to before. So there are
still, among these millions of pages, some fresh research nuggets.

LAMB: Whatever happened to Lachlan Curry?

Mr. PERSICO: Well, Lachlan Curry denied, after the war, that--that
he had ever been a--a spy or that he's ever been a member of the
Communist Party. Lachlan Curry was one of a number of--of--of people
who were useful to the Soviet Union, who took the position at that
period that Russia is our ally, why should we hold anything back from
the Soviet Union? So a g--a guy like Curry may not have been a spy in
the White House in the most narrow, technical sense, but he certainly
was a--a--a--a priceless source of in--of intelligence.

LAMB: It's not often that I would cite a PR insert in a book, but
this was the most complete PR advance work I've ever seen. I guess
it's from Random House.

Mr. PERSICO: That's right, my publisher.

LAMB: And the reason I cite it is 'cause it--in spite of reading the
book, it makes it so easy. I'm gonna go down the list of things that
they point out here, because time goes by very quickly, but just give
people just a little nugget of what--what you're talking about here.
It says here, `Among the revelations discussed in "Roosevelt's Secret
War," the failure of US intelligence to anticipate the surprise Pearl
Harbor attack.'

Mr. PERSICO: Well...

LAMB: Why--why did they fail?

Mr. PERSICO: Because, a--as I have explained to people at the time
or--I sh--excuse me, after the fact, that thread of intelligence
running from A to B to C to Pearl Harbor seems glaringly obvious, or
from X to Y to Z...

LAMB: But did they have the in--the intelligence information?

Mr. PERSICO: They--they had--they had the intelligence. They had
the information, but it came in a flood tide. In--in--in the
Roosevelt era, you know, Roosevelt didn't get in--intelligence
decrypts that had been examined by analysts and--and placed together
like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. He got raw intelligence. You know,
it's very hard to sense, what's the direction of this? What's it
warning us about? What is our antagonist likely to do next? Also we
had--we had nobody on the ground. We had no spies inside Ja--Japan,
just as apparently we--we haven't done very much to penetrate the
inner sanctum of--of our current adversaries.

LAMB: Another item: `FDR wanted to bomb Tokyo before Pearl Harbor.'

Mr. PERSICO: Yeah. That's amazing. Roosevelt was outraged by the
behavior of the Japanese in the war against China--machine-gunning
civilians in the street, bombing defenseless cities. He considered a
plan--This was a y--a year in advance of Pearl Harbor--whereby the
United States would give B-17 bombers to the Chinese and train Chinese
pilots to fly them against Tokyo. He was told that it would take too
long to train these pilots. So the backup position was we would give
the bombers to China; we would have American pilots resign from the
Air Force and volunteer to fly them. So we would have American pilots
flying American planes a year before Pearl Harbor against Tokyo. He
was advised by cooler heads that this would be an outright provocation
and could only lead to war.

LAMB: `The British fed FDR phony intelligence to draw the United
States into the war.'

Mr. PERSICO: Well, Winston Churchill was very eager to have the
United States join the war against Hitler, and consequently, British
agents were to provide intelligence that would help ro--this happen.
They told Roosevelt about the fact that the Germans had taken a map
and cut Latin America into six future Nazi vassal states, that--that a
Bolivian pro-US government was going to be toppled by the Nazis, that
we had 6,000 Brazilian troops--excuse me, 6,000 German troops in
Brazil. Roosevelt used some of this information in his speeches and
in his Fireside Chats. It was all fabricated by the--by the British
to help encourage the United States to enter the war.

LAMB: `FDR's yielding to Churchill led to the theft of the A-bomb.'

Mr. PERSICO: Yeah. A curious tale. In the beginning, the United
States and Britain were full partners in developing an atomic weapon,
but as time went on and the United States launched the Manhattan
Project, was putting millions of dollars into this, creating the
facility at Los Alamos, we became the dominant partner and started
cutting the British out of what was happening for security reasons.
Churchill comes to the United States at one point, sees Roosevelt at
Hyde Park. He's furious. He accuses Roosevelt of reneging. So a
compromise is reached: The British will not be getting s--information
on the A-bomb imported into Britain, but we will allow a small team of
British physicists, mathematicians and other scientists to work at Los
Alamos. One of them turns out to be Klaus Fuchs. So as we know,
Klaus Fuchs steals major secrets of the bomb, gives this information
to his Soviet controllers. He is it--at Los Alamos because of a deal
cut between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.

LAMB: What happens to Klaus Fuchs?

Mr. PERSICO: Fuchs is finally unmasked several years after the war
in--in 1950. He was sentenced, I think, a 14-year prison term.
Eventually, upon his release, he--he continued his work in East
Germany.

LAMB: How did he get into this in the first place?

Mr. PERSICO: Well, he--Klaus Fuchs had been a young, avid Communist
in his native Germany. Things got very tough for--for Communists in
Germany as the Nazis came to power, so he fled to Great Britain and
eventually became a British citizen.

LAMB: Back to the PR sheet here, which--by the way, did you write
this?

Mr. PERSICO: I made some suggestions.

LAMB: Because, you know, sometimes authors don't, and then they're
always surprised by what's in here. `A leaked FDR plan led Hitler to
declare war on the United States.'

Mr. PERSICO: Yeah, this is frequently overlooked, Brian, th--that
the United States did not cl--declare war on Germany; we declared war
only on Japan on December 8th, 1941. Why did Hitler do something
seemingly so rash? There was a leak of an important document called
Rainbow Five, a contingency plan that Roosevelt had called for: What
would we need, should we go to war against Germany by 1943? How many
divisions, how many ships, how many aircraft, how much fuel, etc.?
The Chicago Tribune gets a hold of this secret plan and front-pages
it, does not play it as a contingency plan. The Tribune plays it as a
war plan, and the--the headline says FDR, Five Million Troops Against
Germany by '43. And when Hitler declares war on the United States
four days after Pearl Harbor, he--he virtually quotes this. He says,
`Fra--President Roosevelt intends to make war against us by 1943,' so
in declaring war against the United States, he doesn't view it as
being rash. He views it as anticipating the inevitable and getting
the draw on the US.

LAMB: `The relationship between FDR and Josef Stalin.'

Mr. PERSICO: Well, the--the president recognized that Stalin was
taking 80 percent of the casualties during World War II and inflicting
80 percent of the casualties on the Germans. So he was very, very
eager to cultivate and placate Joe Stalin, would bend over backwards.
I'll g--I'll give one example. There is the long-standing controversy
about the Katyn forest. Who murdered 9,000 Poles in the Katyn forest?
The Germans claimed the Soviet Union did it. The Soviet Union claimed
that it happened when the Germans occupied this territory. This story
was rather controversial for a half a century. Interestingly enough,
Roosevelt and Churchill knew from day one that these murders of the
Poles had been done by Soviet Union on Joe Stalin's orders. They
didn't say anything, again, because they did not want to alienate
Stalin, who could conceivably make a separate peace with Germany; then
we would have been left with the bulk of the fighting and the bulk of
the casualties.

LAMB: Page 273. This seemed to be one of those sentences that people
who don't like FDR probably use when they're talking about him. "I
th"--and this is a quote: "I think if I give Stalin everything I
possibly can and ask for nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige,
he won't try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of
democracy and peace." Where does that come from?

Mr. PERSICO: It comes out of Franklin Roosevelt's character, which
is a reliance on a--an almost overwhelming charm. Roosevelt could
charm almost anybody, and he thought that he could charm Joe Stalin by
being utterly--utterly respectful and admiring and not questioning
anything that Stalin did, underrating the hard pragmatism of a Joe
Stalin.

LAMB: Did that hurt us in the negotiations?

Mr. PERSICO: Well, it hur--it hurt us to the extent--for example,
the story I just told about the Katyn forest, that we--we are not
letting the American people know the--that the monstrousness of Stalin
is not all that different from that of--of Adolf Hitler. But in--in
the end, I--I--I don't accept the charge that--that Roosevelt gave the
store away at Yalta, which is a common conclusion of--of many who
discuss this era. He was too forgiving and too accommodating to
Stalin. I do--but I--I don't think he--he gave anything away that
created our--our post-war confrontation with the Soviets.

LAMB: Did you learn anything about his relationship with Winston
Churchill that you hadn't known in the past?

Mr. PERSICO: It was a relationship that s--that started poorly.
Franklin Roosevelt had a tre--tremendous ego. As a young assistant
secretary of the Navy, he had visited Britain, and he'd come away with
a very poor opinion of Winston Churchill. He said that Winston
Churchill had not shown any--any respect for him. He called Winston
Churchill `a stinker.' Subsequently, wh--when Pearl Harbor is
attacked, Churchill calls him and says, `We're all in the same boat
now.' They pretty much behaved that way, although we have two men,
both with--with giant egos, and--and they--and they do collide
occasionally because Britain's ob--ob--objectives are not the United
States' objectives, and this is clearest in--in--in Churchill's
determination to win this war, at least in part, to be able to restore
the British Empire, much of which had been taken away by the Japanese.
And Chur--and Roosevelt wants to go in the opposite direction. He
wants this war to serve the human end of allowing countries to develop
their--their--their own independence, their own freedom. So there is
a real collision.

LAMB: You--you say that President Kennedy's father, Joseph Kennedy,
called him at one point, quote--he was angry, called him a "crippled
SOB." Do you remember where that quote came from, and why did he call
him that?

Mr. PERSICO: Joe Kennedy had a son, Joe Kennedy Jr., the elder
brother of the future president. Roosevelt was very insistent that a
certain secret operation take place in which an aircraft would be
loaded with high explosives. The pilot and the co-pilot would head it
towards the target, V-1s and V-2s, the German secret weapon launching
sites. The pilots would bail out and a guide plane
would--would--would, in effect, lead this flying bomb towards the
target through radio remote control. Churchill opposed this.
Churchill was afraid that the Nazis would retaliate against London,
and Roosevelt took the position, `We know they're developing these
secret weapons. They're gonna strike London anyway.'

So this plan, Aphrodite, went forward, and on the first mission, Joe
Kennedy and his pilot take off with this explosives-laden aircraft.
It--it explodes mysteriously. Both men are killed. Joe Kennedy, Sr.,
who at one point had been Roosevelt's ambassador to Great Britain,
runs into Harry Truman at an event. Truman is then Roosevelt's vice
presidential candidate in the 1944 election. And Joe Kennedy says to
Harry Truman, `Harry, what are you doing working for that crippled SOB
who killed my son Joe?'

LAMB: There's a woman that is always around FDR in your book, someone
named Margaret Suckley, Daisy Suckley. Who was she and where did you
get the information about her?

Mr. PERSICO: Daisy Suckley was a distant cousin of Roosevelt.

LAMB: She's in the middle in this picture.

Mr. PERSICO: Let me take a little closer look. Yes. And Daisy
Suckley was a person who Roosevelt would confide in, things that he
would not tell to anybody else. He felt perfectly comfortable.
Because she adored him, he knew he had her absolute trust. So he
to--he told her things that, for example, would have very much
surprised other members of the--of the Roosevelt team, one of which
was the state of FDR's health. From the last year at least of FDR's
life, he w--he was a dying man. He had been examined at the Bethesda
Naval Center by cardiologists that realized he had astronomic blood
pressure, that he was suffering from hardened--hardening of the
arteries. Amazingly, Roosevelt never asked a question. He never
asked: What was the result of these examinations? What had they
found? A cardiologist is assigned to him in the White House who
checks him out daily. He joshes with the cardiologist, gossips with
him, never asks about his condition.

So one would have the sense that he doesn't know what's happening or
doesn't want to know. But he, on one occasion, in one of these
private sessions with his confidante and distant cousin, Daisy
Suckley, he says, in effect, `I--I am very sick, much sicker than I
have been told, and if I am sick enough, I will not run for another
term. I must be convinced that I can complete another term.' He's
talking about a fourth term. And as we know, he--he--he's right on
one count. He runs again. He's wrong on another count, he dies only
four months into his fourth term.

LAMB: Unfortunately--no, fortunately, I have about a hundred more
questions for you, but unfortunately, it's--time is up. Our guest has
been Joseph Persico. His book is called "Roosevelt's Secret War."
Thank you very much for joining us.

Mr. PERSICO: Thank you for having me, Brian.

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