The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (5 page)

A few days after the Black Tom incident, Roosevelt burst into the office of his boss, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, and said, “We’ve got to get into this war.” The following year, President Woodrow Wilson, then a frail, elderly man and newly reelected, declared war. In a speech in Washington, DC, Wilson warned listeners that the Kaiser had sent German agents to America “to
spread sedition among us” and to “undermine the government with false professions of loyalty to its principles.” By the fall, Germans and German Americans were barred from strategic areas, including harbors, canals, railroad depots, and wharves.

Roosevelt feared he was personally a target of German spies. He told his friends in Naval Intelligence that the Secret Service had found a safe in the German general consul’s office in New York with a document headed “To Be Eliminated.” Roosevelt’s name was on the list. For about ten days after the discovery, Roosevelt, shaken by the threat, carried a revolver in a leather shoulder holster.

On February 15, 1933, a few weeks before Roosevelt was inaugurated as president, his life was threatened by Giuseppe Zangara, an Italian immigrant and out-of-work bricklayer. Roosevelt arrived that day in Miami after a cruise from Jacksonville on Vincent Astor’s yacht. Zangara met the boat at the dock and then followed Roosevelt’s entourage to Miami’s Bayfront Park. From the backseat of a convertible, Roosevelt delivered a short speech. After he finished, people gathered around the car to shake the president-elect’s hand. Zangara, only five feet tall, stood on a chair to get a closer view of Roosevelt and opened fire with a .32-caliber pistol, purchased at a pawnshop for $8. The shots missed Roosevelt but hit several bystanders. Anton Cermak, the mayor of Chicago, was wounded in the chest.

When Secret Service agents swarmed Roosevelt, the president-elect motioned for them to place Cermak in the back of the car and ordered the driver to rush to the nearest hospital. He talked to Cermak all the way to the hospital. “I’m glad it was me instead of you,” Cermak told Roosevelt in the car. Three weeks later, on March 6, Cermak was dead.

But it wasn’t just Roosevelt—the entire country was gripped in a social paroxysm surrounding German, Italian, and Japanese immigrants. In March 1933, the following headline appeared in the
New York Times
: “Nazi Units in United States List 1,000 Aliens; Admit Their Aim Is to Spread Propaganda.” Other headlines followed:
“Nazis’ Hand Seen in Activities Here” and “Hitler’s Men Said to Be Ready to Send Report of Sabotage to Reich Authorities.” By 1934 the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), led by US representatives John McCormack and Samuel Dickstein, was investigating Nazi propaganda and secret agents in the United States.

Novelists also reflected the general dread of dangers at home. In his bestseller
It Can’t Happen Here
, Sinclair Lewis told the story of a native-born, Hitler-type character named Berzelius Windrip, whose nickname was Buzz. In the story, Buzz deploys his own private army, the Minute Men, to storm the White House. Ernest Hemingway’s play,
The Fifth Column
, published in 1938, was about the threat to liberty in Spain, but it powerfully reinforced fears of Fifth Column influence in the United States.

At the White House, Roosevelt and a small cadre of advisers, including Secretary of State Cordell Hull, a tall, white-haired Tennessean, well respected by both liberals and conservatives on Capitol Hill, became convinced that Nazis and Fascists would attack the United States from within, using immigrants as Fifth Column forces. On May 8, 1934, Roosevelt issued a secret directive to authorize J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI to investigate Nazis and Nazi sympathizers in the United States. The spy hunt began.

On that day, Roosevelt called Hoover to the White House. In a memorandum that is the only written record of the meeting, Hoover wrote that Roosevelt asked him to work in collaboration with the Secret Service and the INS to conduct “a very careful and searching” investigation of Nazi and Fascist organizations. In particular, Roosevelt asked Hoover to find “any possible connection with official representatives of the German government in the United States.”

Roosevelt had in mind a limited investigation and impressed on Hoover that the operation must be secret. Under Hoover’s direction, Roosevelt’s modest directive soon ballooned into a vast and illegal national campaign of targeting hundreds of thousands of politically defenseless immigrants, including the fathers of Ingrid and Sumi, who if left to their own devices would have continued to
live quiet, harmless lives as their children joined the mainstream of American life.

On August 24, 1936, Roosevelt again called Hoover to the White House for a private meeting. He told Hoover he wanted a “broad picture” of subversives in the United States. The following day, Roosevelt and Hoover met with Hull, the normally sanguine secretary of state. On this day, Hull was in a frenzy over the political activities of foreigners at home. “Go ahead,” said Hull, “investigate the hell out of those cocksuckers.”

By the end of the year, Hoover had built his own bureaucratic empire. Moreover, Roosevelt’s directive allowed Hoover unlimited public resources to spy on the FBI director’s list of his personal enemies, including—of all people—Eleanor Roosevelt. It’s a measure of the general delirium of the times that the first lady was not immune from FBI surveillance.

Hoover’s covert investigation of Eleanor initially targeted her ties to the American Youth Congress, an organization including members of the YMCA, the American League for Peace and Democracy, and the Popular Front—in other words, liberals like Eleanor. Eleanor believed that money spent on arms and military buildup would be better spent on education and medical care. She knew that some of the young people in the AYC were self-proclaimed Communists, but she thought the numbers were few. After a speech by Eleanor to the AYC, noted in her FBI file, Hoover scrawled in his own hand, “Shut her up.”

With his new power, Hoover instructed his agents to illegally monitor Eleanor’s movements and tapped her telephone without a warrant. In time, case file 62-62735 grew to more than four thousand pages—one of the largest in the FBI’s history. Neither Eleanor nor Franklin knew that Hoover had Eleanor in his sights. However,
Eleanor made no secret of her dislike of Hoover. When she learned that FBI agents had investigated two members of her staff—Edith Helm, her social secretary, and Malvina Thompson, a personal aide—she complained to the attorney general and to her husband.

Franklin asked Hoover to explain the matter to Eleanor. Hoover
then wrote a confidential letter to Eleanor claiming it was a mistake, that the FBI agents did not realize Helm was her social secretary. “Had the FBI known, the inquiry would not have been initiated,” Hoover lied.

Two days later, Eleanor fired back: “This type of investigation seems to me to smack too much of Gestapo methods.”

For her candor, Eleanor made an enemy of Hoover for life. No one challenged Hoover the way Eleanor did. In Washington, his position was impregnable. He continued to monitor Eleanor until the day she died.

As had World War I, the run-up to World War II brought more disagreements to the marriage of Eleanor and Franklin. Eleanor continued to focus on conditions at home while Franklin monitored events in Europe. He realized that America would eventually have to get into the war, but isolationism gripped the nation. Even after Hitler invaded Poland, polls showed that 90 percent of Americans favored neutrality, although 80 percent wanted the Allies to win the war. The country wasn’t ready for war. At best, the Army could muster five fully equipped divisions, and the munitions industry in the United States was practically nonexistent.

On September 1, 1939, the day German tanks, infantry, and cavalry invaded Poland with 1.5 million troops, Roosevelt created a highly secretive division within the Department of State called the Special Division. He ordered this division to identify American civilians: businessmen, physicians, and government officials who were currently in Japan and Germany and who would be in danger when the United States joined the war. The State Department estimated that, as of January 1, 1939, 80,428 US nationals resided in Europe, 12,111 in the Near East, and 17,138 in the Far East. More than 100,000 US civilians were in harm’s way.

A few months later, Roosevelt authorized the Special War Problems Division to find Japanese and Germans in America and in Latin America who could be used as hostages in exchange for the more valuable of the Americans. Once the United States joined
the war, Roosevelt knew that American soldiers, many of them wounded, would be captured and held as prisoners of war, and that he would need a ready source of exchange. Slowly and secretly, the vast machinery of internment and prisoner exchange sputtered to a start. The Special Division’s exchange program was informally known as “quiet passage.”

In 1940, Hoover installed the first group of FBI agents in Latin America. Based on the FBI reports, Roosevelt was convinced that Germans and Japanese in Latin America were a direct threat to hemispheric security. His primary fear was of the Germans. Beginning on April 9, 1940, Hitler’s forces overran Denmark, Norway, Belgium, and France, leaving Britain alone to fight against Germany’s domination of Europe. America’s involvement in the war was now a matter of time. Again and again, Roosevelt warned his advisers to keep their eyes on Hitler: “Germany first!” became his battle cry. Isolationists had vanished—now a majority of Americans favored war. As
Time
magazine reported on June 3, 1940, one way that citizens demonstrated patriotism was to become informants for Hoover. “Hundreds of gossips wrote to the FBI volunteering to spy on their neighbors,” noted the magazine.

In September 1941, Roosevelt took to the airwaves to declare that “Hitler’s advance guards” are readying “footholds, bridgeheads, in the New World to be used as soon as he has gained control of the oceans” and warned that German agents “at this very moment” are carrying out “intrigue, plots, machinations, and sabotage.” To secure the Panama Canal from sabotage, Roosevelt reached an agreement with the government of Peru that allowed the forcible detention in American internment camps of eighteen hundred Japanese Peruvians—men, women, and children with no ties to the United States.

Roosevelt pressured other Latin American governments, so-called good neighbors, to comply. Only Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil refused Roosevelt’s demands to deport Germans.

On September 5, 1941, three months prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, Francis Biddle, a short, slim man whom both Eleanor and
Franklin knew well, was sworn in as the new attorney general. Like the Roosevelts, Biddle was born an American aristocrat into an old, rich East Coast family from Philadelphia. Francis was a half cousin four times removed from James Madison. Like Roosevelt, as a boy Biddle went to Groton, the elite Massachusetts prep school, and later graduated from both Harvard and Harvard law school. The motto of Groton—
cui servire est regnare
, “to serve is to rule”—was part of his and Roosevelt’s DNA.

On Sunday, December 7, 1941, Biddle was at a luncheon in Detroit to sell defense bonds organized by the Slav-American Defense Savings Committee. After lunch was served, as Biddle rose to speak, his assistant Ugo Carusi handed him a note: “Japanese today attacked Pearl Harbor, great U.S. Naval Base in the Hawaiian Islands, and are also bombing Manila from planes probably released from aircraft carriers. The President made the official announcement at 2:20 p.m. The raids are still in progress.”

Biddle rubbed his balding head and sighed. He steadied himself at the podium and faced the large audience of Slavic immigrants. “Even as I was speaking,” recalled Biddle in his memoir,
In Brief Authority
, “Japs were bombing our country.” He looked at his audience and explained that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. After a few gasps, everything fell to a hush. Biddle described the Nazi ruthlessness in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia, now matched by the Japanese surprise attack on American battleships. “From now on,” said Biddle to the crowd, “we will be at war with the dictatorships.” Then he excused himself and abruptly left to return to Washington.

That night at 8:30 p.m. Biddle and the other cabinet members gathered in Roosevelt’s study. The president sat silently at his desk. One by one, they filed in. Biddle later described the president’s face as “gray, even ashen, and graver than I had ever seen him.”

Finally the president spoke: “I’m glad you all got here.” Not since the outbreak of the Civil War, Roosevelt said, had any cabinet faced such a crisis. A proud Navy man, Roosevelt could not bear to describe the details of the attack on America’s unsuspecting fleet.
By 10:00 p.m. congressional leaders had joined the cabinet. More chairs were brought into the now-crowded study. The president told them that the Navy ships and airplanes had all been lined up, one after another. “On the ground, by God, on the ground,” Roosevelt moaned. The idea that the battleships were not at sea and the planes not in the air seemed incomprehensible.

Everyone was in shock. The room was completely silent.

Finally, Senator Tom Connally of Texas, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, sprang to his feet, his face red with rage, and banged the desk with his fist. “How did they catch us with our pants down, Mr. President? Where were our patrols?”

Roosevelt bowed his head. “I don’t know, Tom. I just don’t know.”

Roosevelt told the group that he would appear before a joint session of Congress the next day and declare a state of war between America and Japan. His statement would be short.

At noon the following day, Eleanor and Franklin left the east gate of the White House by car. They drove to the Capitol under heavy security. When Roosevelt took his place at the podium, he looked out into the audience and said, “Yesterday—December 7, 1941, a date that will live in infamy—the United States was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” He enumerated the assaults on the Hawaiian Islands, Guam, the Philippines, on Wake and Midway Islands. To a standing ovation, he asked Congress to declare war so that “this form of treachery shall never endanger us again.” It took only thirty-three minutes for the House and Senate, sitting separately, to declare war, with only one dissenting vote. Jeannette Rankin of Montana, a pacifist and the first woman elected to the House, sobbed, “No,” as she answered the roll call.