Presidential Mission

by Upton Sinclair

  Lanny made his way back to the Gothic building and spent another three hours of the hardest kind of mental work. The lesson over, he said his thanks to the solemn young physicist: “You have taken a lot of trouble with me,” he remarked. A shadow seemed to cross the teacher’s dark eyes. “Mr. Budd,” he replied, “I have a very special interest in what you are doing. The Nazi gangsters are every man’s enemy. They are doubly mine. I am a Jew.”

  They both knew that they were playing with the fantastic notion of an atomic bomb, and the issue at stake was whether a missile of such destructive power should land on Berlin before it landed on New York or Washington.

  The Professor wished to say good-by, so Lanny was taken into his office, or perhaps it was the seminar room, Lanny couldn’t be sure. It had a large table in the center and several leather-seated chairs. As any room would do to think in, so any pencil would do to jot down a formula, and any piece of paper to receive it. Lanny knew that Einstein was now searching in the recesses of his unfathomable mind for the formula of what he called his Unified Field Theory, which would reconcile his Special Theory of Relativity with his extension of Max Planck’s Quantum Theory, thus bringing all natural phenomena under one universal law. Recently he had thought that he had it, but it hadn’t worked out, so he had told Lanny sadly.

  Now he bade farewell to this agreeable guest. “Glück auf, Herr Budd! I know that what you are doing is dangerous, and I wish I had as much courage.”

  “Didn’t it take courage to upset the entire scientific world?” inquired the P.A. mildly.

  “Oh, that!” replied the Professor. “That is not so much. I have a mathematical mind and it will not rest. It goes its own way into the far reaches of this mysterious universe and I cannot hold it back. It finds harmony where chaos once seemed to reign.” The great physicist said that, and then a shadow darkened his face. “It is a dreadful thing that we are doing now, trying to unlock the secrets of atomic power for purposes of war. The future will hold us responsible for the use we make of that knowledge if we get it! Viel Glück, Herr Budd, und leben Sie recht wohl!”

  III

  Lanny followed the highway as far as he could and then struck off to the west-through the rolling farm country of Maryland. Fields and orchards and woodlots and farmhouses were rolling by, but he withheld the attention he ordinarily gave to such a panorama; his mind was absorbed with the subject of atomic fission and the means of producing it, and, more important yet, of controlling the process. It was something new and terrible in the world, and he never tired of speculating about the changes it might bring in human affairs.

  Gradually the land rose, and there came into sight the beautiful Blue Ridge mountains. Here, so Alston had told the P.A., an area in one of the National Parks had been set aside for the use of a Chief Executive who could not walk and had been deprived of his recreations of fishing and swimming. Oddly enough it was the Navy which had taken charge of this forest preserve; the crew of the presidential yacht Potomac and its auxiliary tender and fishing boat had set to work, with the help of local mountain labor, and put in a paved road and a group of buildings for use as a rest camp. Now they guarded and ran it, and the President motored each week end from the capital, bringing officials and others with whom he desired to have conferences. Churchill had been here twice, and various generals and admirals, to consult with him; but not a line about it had appeared in any newspaper.

  Lanny did not enter the little town of Thurmont, but telephoned from outside. He was told to be in front of the post office at eight o’clock that evening and he would be picked up in the usual way. Meantime he parked his car in a grove of chestnut trees alongside a little stream and sat and studied his atomic notes. Later he found a roadside inn and had a bit of supper, and then studied some more until it was time to drive into the town. Precisely on the minute he stepped into Baker’s car and was driven up the new road, which climbed a couple of thousand feet to the camp. It was ten or twenty degrees cooler here than in the sweltering city of Washington; a gentle night breeze murmured through the trees, and fireflies showed their mysterious tiny lights. Lanny, who was worried about his great leader’s health under the terrifying strain of war, thought this hideout the pleasantest discovery he had made in some time.

  He felt free to ask questions on the three- or four-mile drive. Baker told him there was a massive lodge built of local timber, a number of smaller cabins, a swimming pool, and fine trout streams running through the area. One of these emptied into an abandoned quarry near the lodge, and this made a unique fishing place, well stocked with rainbow trout from the government’s hatcheries. A feature of the main building was that one wall was on heavy hinges so that it could be let down like a drawbridge, making a ramp on which the President could be wheeled out in case of fire. Also, in the rear, there was a smaller lodge for the adoring Fala.

  Lanny had seen mountain camps all the way from the Adirondacks to Bavaria, and many of them had cost more than the twenty-five thousand dollars this one represented. Also he was used to having flashlights turned upon his face, to make sure that he was the person expected. Baker had the right to bring anybody in, and no questions were asked. In the entrance hall, while they waited to be announced, Lanny surveyed a map of “Shangri-La,” as this place was called. He noted that here, as everywhere, Americans had to have their fun. This building, the President’s home, was labeled “The Bear’s Den”; the laundry was “The Soap Dish”; the building set aside for the Filipino stewards was “Little Luzon.” There was a row of cabins marked “Baker Street Urchins” on the map, and Lanny asked whether these were named after his escort. The reply was: “The Secret Service men get their names from Sherlock Holmes, not from me.”

  IV

  A door was opened before Lanny, and he entered the President’s room. Roosevelt was resting on a couch by an open window, wearing tan-colored linen trousers and a soft white shirt; he gave a welcoming hail, as always. Seated beside him was a man in his fifties whose features were familiar to all readers of newspapers. He was tall and thin, with deep-set, keen brown eyes, a sallow skin, hollow cheeks, and a prominent lower jaw. He was loosely put together, slouchy in his way of sitting, and informal in manner. He was a harnessmaker’s son from Iowa who had gone through college in the American fashion, by working his way. He had devoted most of his life to social service, first for the Red Cross, then for the Tuberculosis and Health Association in New York, then as chairman of the New York State Temporary Emergency Relief Administration. When the newly elected President had been faced with the worst financial collapse in the world’s history, he had given this man the enormous job of finding work for fifteen million unemployed. He was trusted by the President above all other men, and hated by the President’s enemies to the same extent. In this war crisis he was working himself literally to death—he had had a perforated ulcer and now had a rare intestinal disease, and he looked rather ghastly as he lifted himself out of his chair to greet the new arrival.

  “Lanny Budd, this is Harry Hopkins,” said the President. And Lanny said: “I have never had the pleasure before, but I had plenty of time to look at you, something over a year ago, when we crossed on the same Clipper.”

  “I remember your face well,” said “Harry the Hop,” as his genial Boss called him.

  “I didn’t suppose you were seeing anything on board, Mr. Hopkins, except the papers in your portfolio. I took the liberty of guessing that they contained the lend-lease figures.”

  “You were correct, of course.”

  “Later on,” added the ex-playboy with a grin, “I was told that you had landed with only one shirt and no hat, and that you had had to go to work without having time to shave.”

  “I see that you move in the best circles,” was the dry reply.

  “My father used to complain that you were spending more money than any one man in the world ever did before. That was in the old W.P.A. days. Now, doubtless, you are spending ten or twenty times as much, but my father doesn’t
seem to mind it at all.”

  “He is getting so much of it himself,” put in the President, and all three of them enjoyed a laugh.

  V

  They got down to business quickly, there being little time for joking these days. “I want you to know Harry,” said “the Boss,” as Harry called him. “He will be in London while you are there, and I should like you to report to him anything interesting that you may come upon. The same goes for Alston, of course.”

  “Fine!” said Lanny.

  “Churchill has told me about your idea of having a talk with Hess. That is interesting, and all right with me; but I don’t want you to go into Germany. There are others we can send, and I can’t spare you.”

  “All right, Governor. My wife will call that good news.”

  “There will be danger enough where you are going. I want you in Vichy France and North Africa. It may seem like treading in your old footsteps, but events are moving fast, and we need every item of information about the attitude of the big people there. Some of them are bound to be worried, and more so as the summer passes. Some will be ready to desert a sinking ship, and we want to know who they are and how we can use them. It’s going to be a dirty business, and you may have your faith in human nature greatly tried. But keep your nerve, and never forget the one purpose we have in mind, which is to save the lives of American boys and win this war at the lowest price in blood.”

  “Yes, Governor,” replied the P.A. meekly. He took it as an answer to the objections he had been raising, as to the wisdom of dealing with the rats deserting the Vichy ship.

  “Remember our clear intention—the French people will decide the future of France, and we have no wish to do it for them. Our job is to put down the Nazis, and after that to see a free and fair election in every country we have entered.”

  “I get you, Governor.” It was the nearest to an order the son of Budd-Erling had ever received, and it pleased him because it relieved him of responsibility. He added: “Professor Alston wants me to go to Switzerland and meet my old-time labor and Socialist friend there.”

  “That’s all right; Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, wherever you think there is information to be had, but not into any German-held territory. It is possible you might get some of your Nazi friends to meet you in Switzerland. What is the name of that musician?”

  “Kurt Meissner. He would come if I asked him, but I’d have to have something important to tell him, and something he could believe. It would be a dangerous game, because I’d be attracting attention to myself again, and they might comb the world to find out about me. It would be pretty hard for me then to continue as an art expert.”

  “Does anybody really accept that since we’ve entered the war?” It was Harry Hopkins, his questions always direct and to the point.

  “I can never be entirely certain,” replied Lanny. “I suppose it varies with different persons. The French are polite, and they pretend to believe it. Nobody has accused me to my face, except some of my friends of the underground, where I got into a jam. I suppose the collaborateurs whisper about me behind my back and speculate. I spend money freely, and that helps.”

  The thin-faced chief of lend-lease nodded his head slightly. “That helps!” he echoed. “I know!”

  Lanny took the opportunity to bring in a subject that lay close to his heart. “The last time I saw Kurt Meissner I told him about a plot of some of our high-up business tycoons and Army people to kidnap the President and make him obey their orders. That made a tremendous hit with Kurt, and later on with Hitler when I saw him. I think I could still use that story, but I’d have to report progress, and I might need to have some hint leak out here. But the Governor doesn’t seem to want that to happen.”

  Lanny was speaking to Hopkins, as if answering his question. He took it for granted that F.D.R.’s best friend must know all about this affair, and Lanny wanted to know what the friend’s attitude was. This was not difficult, for Hopkins was an outspoken person who said what he thought on any subject—unless it was a subject about which he didn’t want to talk, and then nobody could get a word out of him. Now he said: “So far those bastards haven’t done anything but talk, and it’s one of the requirements of democracy that every bastard shall be free to shoot off his mouth.”

  “Even in wartime, Mr. Hopkins?”

  “Even in wartime, Mr. Budd. The Nazis can liquidate people for talking, and so can the Communists; but if we do it, we have lost the war before we fight it.”

  “And more than that, Lanny,” put in F.D.R., “you must admit that it wouldn’t help morale either at home or abroad to let people know that such a junta exists in this country.”

  “You are the boss,” replied Lanny. “I am just pointing out that this is the one way I can get any Nazi to warm up and talk to me as a friend. They would greatly like to get the Jewish-Democratic Herr Rosenfeld out of their path.”

  “You don’t tell me!” responded Herr Rosenfeld with one of his infectious grins. “Do this, Lanny. Tell them anything that will help to loosen them up, and when you come back report to me about it, and I may figure out some way to give you a bit of support.” Then, suddenly serious, he pointed to papers on a table beside him. “Here is a stack of orders that I must sign tonight; so you two fellows go into the next room and get acquainted.”

  VI

  Lanny had read much about this chief boondoggler and leaf raker who now made his home in the White House; a greatly abused man, but he didn’t seem to mind it—he had chosen his enemies carefully. He didn’t believe in the system of monopoly capitalism any more than Lanny did, and he didn’t care if his system of relief by public spending brought the profiteers nearer to their doom. He had been quoted as saying about the program of the New Deal: “We shall spend and spend, and tax and tax, and elect and elect.” He had carried out this program to such good effect that his great friend and hero had become the first man ever to be elected President for a third term, and by all the political signs he might have a fourth term if he wanted it.

  Now the harnessmaker’s son had set out to put the Nazi-Fascists out of business by the same method of unlimited spending. Oddly enough, he had most of the big businessmen behind him in this, but that didn’t either worry him or please him especially; he had only two-thirds of a stomach left, and no time or strength for a superfluous emotion. He had reports to study, orders to give, quarrels to abate. He had to fly to England with the President’s instructions and guide the controversies of high-ranking British and American staff officers, bringing them to an agreement as near as possible to what the President desired. He needed all the help he could get, and when he had sunk into a chair in the next room, sliding down into it until he was sitting pretty nearly on the back of his neck, he opened up. “The Boss said to me: ‘Lanny Budd is one of us.’ And that is enough. I want to talk to you frankly. May I call you Lanny?”

  “Indeed yes.”

  “Call me Harry; it comes easier. There’s going to be what the English call a good show in London this month. We have to settle definitely upon the plan of campaign. The Boss wants very much to invade across the Channel this summer, but Churchill won’t hear of it; he insists that we haven’t the air power for anything but a defensive attitude, and he won’t have anything to do with an invasion. But meantime the Russians are clamoring and, strictly between us, threatening to quit if we don’t come to their help with a second front. So we have to do something. Churchill wants us to go up through the Balkans. I assume you understand what he has in his mind.”

  “Of course. He wants us to be in possession of that territory when the war ends, and to keep the Russians away from the Dardanelles.”

  “And of course our military men are not going to tie us up in any balance-of-power game between Britain and Russia. We want to beat the Nazis in the quickest way we can, and the cheapest with regard to the lives of our boys. So I think the decision will be for some action in North Africa this fall. That would cut Rommel off and be a minor disaster for the G
ermans. It would settle the control of the Mediterranean and save us the tonnage we waste carrying stuff around Africa. Also, it would enable us to take Sicily and Southern Italy.”

  “And have airfields from which to bomb the munitions plants of Austria and southern Germany,” ventured the amateur strategist.

  “I see that you have the picture in mind. I’m not saying that will be the final decision, but that’s the way matters appear to be shaping up. If you are in London when the decision is taken, I’ll tell you about it. You won’t be free to tell anybody else, but it will guide you in your work.”

  “That suits me fine,” replied the P.A. “I have a little daughter in England whom I’d like to see.”

  “I know about her. I met Irma Barnes once or twice in night clubs before you married her. I did a little playing round with the smart crowd in those days. I wanted to understand their minds. It helps me now.”

  “The same for me,” replied Lanny with a smile. “But I liked some of them a bit too well.”

  They talked for a few minutes about people they knew; but the burdens of the time pressed upon them, and presently they were talking about the bleak outlook before the country. The Germans had taken Sevastopol, and their plunge into the Ukraine had reached the Don River. The British were making a stand at a place in the deserts of Egypt called El Alamein, but it was uncertain if their line would hold. Hopkins said: “If the enemy gets to Suez, it may set us back for a long time. But don’t ever doubt it, Lanny, we are going to get the troops and the weapons and win this war!”