The Irregulars (31 page)

All this, of course, Marsh relayed to Dahl in gory detail. His anger grew in the retelling. Marsh blamed the defeat on an underhanded plot by party professionals who put compromise above “character, enterprise, conviction and public virtue.” He wrote a cascade of postconvention memorandums in the following days and weeks, all of them suffused with bitterness toward the president. “When a ‘dark horse’ like Truman comes through, the simplest explanation is to say that he had a good jockey,” Marsh wrote on July 28. “In this case the bosses and Roosevelt did not want Wallace. The second ‘secret’ letter of Roosevelt was the whip at the finish that nosed out Wallace.” As angry as he was, Marsh rejected the idea that the president had deliberately set out to double-cross the vice president and instead saw it as a sign of “political feebleness rather than political leadership”—a sign that FDR was finally losing his grip. Roosevelt was no “Richelieu,” he concluded in yet another memo analyzing the president’s mind-set. “It is extremely difficult, even distressing, for us to see Roosevelt as an aging and vacillating man:

It shows Roosevelt as a liberal under such heavy pressure that he himself went into temporary collapse. It is reasonable to believe that he sincerely sacrificed Wallace; that his soul was in a torment of uncertainty; and that he was in great pain emotionally. Roosevelt perhaps saw the world and peace and himself as a necessary agent. He traded his country’s insurance policy in order to insure a continuation of himself.

 

Marsh told Dahl he would work for the president’s election because he was afraid of what the Dewey alternative might mean, but then he was finished. He was disgusted with the party pros. The friends of liberalism might well continue to serve and fight under Roosevelt, but they would go forward with a “heavy, uncertain step.” After November 7, he would rethink his role. “When Wallace got defeated it broke Dad’s heart,” said Antoinette.

It was a dirty convention and made for a lot of hard feelings all around. Roosevelt tried to be conciliatory and asked Wallace to remain part of his administration, telling him he could have his pick of jobs with the exception of secretary of state. That job was reserved for his dear friend Cordell Hull, his secretary of state for the past ten years, who was in his last stint of public service. Roosevelt hastened to assure Wallace that he wanted him to take an active role in postwar planning and to sit on “some international conferences.” Wallace felt that as one of the strongest leaders in the Democratic Party, he should by rights have the State Department, the most important cabinet post. Out of deference to the president’s wishes, however, he settled for secretary of commerce, the seat currently occupied by his bitter adversary Jesse Jones. The president had already indicated that after the election one of the first people he wanted to boot from his administration was the arrogant “Jesus H. Jones.” The ambitious commerce secretary had been a thorn in Roosevelt’s side as well, and it suited him to allow Wallace to replace him, thereby exacting a measure of revenge on both their behalfs.

Everything about the 1944 presidential campaign aggravated Marsh, and he quarreled with old friends and allies. He had a falling out with his old friend Mrs. Ogden Reid, upon learning that she had recently gone to England to sell Churchill, Eden, and Brendan Bracken, minister of information, on Dewey as the man to best further the cause of Britain in the United States. Marsh was disgusted and agreed with Wallace that she had become an obnoxious woman and had lost the charm that once covered her claws. Dahl, as he did for all Marsh’s foes, gave her the unflattering nickname “Horse-whip Helen” and made a point of deriding her in his subsequent letters.

Dahl knew that Marsh’s real beef with Helen Reid was that he blamed her for preventing him from seeing Lord Beaverbrook during his recent visit to Washington. Beaverbrook, accompanied by a battalion of advisers, had come to advance the talks on aviation and for three weeks had been the toast of Georgetown society. His presence, coinciding with a visit by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, created a flurry of excitement, and as Marsh wrote Dahl, Mrs. Reid, “the great female agent of the British Empire in America,” could hardly contain herself:

The great social humiliation of my short life occurred when the great adventuress Mrs. Reid, who beavered her way into control of the Herald Tribune—“beavered” did I say—broke an engagement for me to dine with her, said to her secretary that she was out of town, and by postponing my dinner to the following Monday bootlegged the Duke and Duchess into her home.

 

It was only by the merest accident the following day, when Marsh called upon one of Mrs. Reid’s favored guests, that he happened upon the truth. She had quietly gone behind his back and informed British intelligence that he was “too loud” for the duke and arranged for his place to be given to one Major George Fielding Eliot, a military historian and major player in the British front organization Fight for Freedom. All this, Marsh explained in his long-winded fashion, added to his “great regret at not having seen the Beaver.”

With Wallace out of the running, the tension in Dahl’s daily life was greatly relieved. At the end of the summer, Dahl decided to throw a party at his Georgetown residence. As gloomy as Marsh might be about the future of America, there was only good news from Europe. Just days earlier they had heard that the Nazis had finally been chased out of Paris, and the Allied armies had them on the run. There were rumors of attacks on Hitler’s life and revolt inside Germany. Dahl had heard that the flying bombs had stopped landing on London, and his family was finally safe. The end of the war was in sight. He had even managed to sell his last unsold story, “Missing Believed Killed,” to a magazine called
Tomorrow
. He was in a mood to celebrate.

The buffet dinner hosted by “Wing Commander Dahl” was written up in Hope Ridings Miller’s gossip column and sung the praises of the British pilot-turned-author who “made all of us Gremlin-conscious.” The guest list included Charles Marsh; the Brazilian ambassador, Carlos Martins; Walter Lippmann and his wife, Helen Byrne (Armstrong) Lippmann; and Archibald MacLeish, a poet and former colleague of Ingersoll’s at
Time
who was the librarian of Congress and had been assistant director of the Office of War Information supervising American propaganda. There were a fair number of high-ranking British officials, including Mr. and Mrs. Paul Gore-Booth, the air commodores Black-ford and Lydford and their wives, and Captain Abel-Smith of the Royal Navy. Among the many young colleagues Dahl invited was Donald Maclean, a good-looking thirty-one-year-old Scotsman who was first secretary at the embassy and chief of the cipher room.
*

Dahl had also been seeing rather a lot of Millicent Rogers, which was an occupation in itself. He had spent the Easter holidays at her estate in Virginia, and they had gone on a number of weekend getaways. She had been kind enough to invite him to stay with her while his Georgetown house was being redecorated, so he spent the latter part of the summer living in splendor. He was terribly impressed with her art collection, which he studied closely in his spare time. Dahl took no small amount of pride in the fact that he had managed to acquire a Matisse, picked up comparatively cheaply during his last trip to the war-ravaged Continent, and two paintings by Matthew Smith, an English disciple of Matisse’s and a friend since 1941. Both of Smith’s sons had been in the RAF and had been killed in the war, and he had taken a liking to Dahl, who was then just back from North Africa. One of the Smith paintings was a striking portrait of Dahl in uniform, his tan face framed by a vivid orange drapery, staring off into the middle distance. It was the centerpiece of his own modest collection, which he planned to display in his newly refurbished living room.

Marsh was greatly amused by Dahl’s relationship with the Standard Oil heiress, and professed an interest in examining “the beautiful home of the lady of the curvature of the spine,” as he dubbed his eminent Virginia neighbor, “even if I am not a great art collector, and am a mere homebody.” Rogers had recently graced the pages of
Vogue
, and Marsh teased Dahl for dating “the great international society highlight of the month of August 1944.” Given his own romantic difficulties at the moment, he was actually quite jealous of Dahl’s many female admirers and the fuss they all made over him. In honor of Dahl’s birthday that September—he turned twenty-eight on the thirteenth—Rogers threw him a fancy party and invited the usual cast of ambassadors, diplomats, undersecretaries of state, and assorted socialites and sycophants. Everyone sipped champagne and made polite chatter, and Dahl later complained that he found the whole thing a crashing bore.

On September 18 Dahl paid a courtesy call on the vice president at his office and offered his heartfelt condolences. He was sorry the convention had ended so unhappily for Wallace, though it went without saying that his superiors had no cause for regret. With his lame-duck status, Wallace would now have limited access to secret information, and Dahl knew he would be less and less use to him in his undercover activities. Perhaps with that in mind, Dahl, speaking frankly for the first time, informed the vice president that he was now with the British secret service. With the European war winding down, security was somewhat relaxed, and those in the BSC could officially introduce themselves to colleagues and friends. Showing off a little, Dahl told him that for a time the British government had been “scared to death” that Roosevelt would offer Wallace the State Department and had raised strong objections. Dahl claimed that British authorities already knew that the president, if he won, would be putting Wallace in the cabinet but had been reassured that it would not be as secretary of state. Beyond that, he indicated that his superiors did not much care what happened to the vice president. Dahl made no mention of the controversial pamphlet, or his private concerns about the part the BSC, and Stephenson in particular, may have played in Wallace’s fall from power.

Since Dahl was putting his cards on the table, Wallace decided to venture a few questions about the clandestine intelligence organization of which the airman was now a member. Who exactly was he working for? Dahl answered cautiously that the head of the BSC was “a secret” and known to only a handful. “I asked if he knew his name,” Wallace recorded in his diary. “He said ‘yes.’ He says this secret and powerful gentleman can go right in to see the King or Prime Minister day or night, unannounced, any time he wants. I asked if he himself could blow in on this high-powered gentleman unannounced? Dahl was shocked at the thought.”

Wallace, who was not as wholly naïve as Dahl supposed, was somewhat bemused by the extent to which the novice spy seemed to be in awe of his employer, especially when Dahl began boasting about the BSC’s vast covert network, claiming the British had had “10,000 agents in Germany all through the war.” Wallace found some of his claims strained credulity. If he was shocked by any of Dahl’s revelations, however, he did not let on. It would be surprising, though, if he did not feel somewhat disappointed that the young man he had grown so close to, even sending him a little bag of his special plant fertilizer at Christmas, had not been entirely on the up-and-up. As Wallace’s diary discloses, there was a new note of skepticism in his assessment of his British colleague. “Dahl is an awfully nice boy of whom I am very fond,” Wallace observed. “Undoubtedly at times he pulls Charles Marsh’s leg by telling him things that are not true.”

In early October, Dahl consulted a specialist in New York about the recurring pain in his back. In the three years since his accident, he had become accustomed to a constant dull ache and even periodic bouts of real discomfort, but with the arrival of the cold weather it had become measurably worse. On the doctor’s recommendation, he went into the hospital for a series of X-rays and tests. After suffering a bad reaction to a lumbar puncture, he was laid up for nine days and left the hospital feeling “just the same as before.” He was no sooner back on his feet and buttoned into his blue winter uniform than he found himself caught up in the swirl of events and traveling almost constantly. Roosevelt had surprised the British by announcing plans for a large international air conference in Chicago, which threw the Foreign Office and Air Ministry into turmoil. When he heard the news, Beaverbrook had reportedly “laughed loud and long,” but mirthlessly, and informed Churchill that the peremptory strike was a clear indication that America “was determined to call the tune.” Preparations for such a meeting would normally take weeks of planning and effort, and Beaverbrook, who was tired of the minutiae of the civil aviation negotiations, declared it “not his cup of tea” and handed the job off to Lord Swinton.

Dahl, who was part of the British delegation, first went to Toronto for a meeting with Swinton and the Canadian delegation, before proceeding on to the International Civil Aviation Conference, which began in Chicago on November 1. At the luncheon on opening day, Lord Swinton argued bitterly with Berle, the chairman of the U.S. delegation, which also included Senator Owen Brewster, Pan Am’s “stooge.” Swinton a stiff old-empire type, was in favor of an equitable “parceling out” of the air traffic among nations, while Berle wanted a free-for-all. Berle took Swinton’s supercilious attitude to mean he was returning to their old position “that controls be applied dividing traffic between Britain and the United States on a fifty-fifty basis,” which at this point meant America would have to divert traffic to the British lines out of the goodness of its heart. Swinton said he thought that this sounded fair. Berle, whose animosity toward Swinton caused him to take a harder line, insisted that it was “as impossible now as when it was broached last spring,” and that America was not in the business of supporting British aviation. There would be no turning back the clock to the glory days of British mercantilism. “In other words,” Berle declared impatiently, “there is no excuse for a modern air British East India Company or Portugese Trading Monopoly or ‘Spanish Main’ conception.”