AS BARTON GREW, THE older boys welcomed him into their lives with open enthusiasm. They taught him how to fish, catch lizards, race across the millpond, and both impress and spy on girls. They also vigorously defended the undersized Barton against countless would-be bullies. One eleven-year-old neighbor in particular taunted him mercilessly, calling Barton a runt and—slamming him in his Achilles’ heel—repeatedly jeering “Mama’s boy!”
Bill famously picked the young fellow up by his hair one afternoon, ignoring his screams for mercy. The alternately crying and whimpering miscreant begged to be let go. Even Barton was beginning to feel sorry for him. When Bill finally released the boy on condition he keep away from Barton and Lilac Hedges or else, he ran as fast as his eleven-year-old legs would carry him, not once looking back.
When Barton was finally big enough, Benny and Bill introduced him to touch football. They gave him tips and took him to high school games. The school football team had long been the star of the surrounding boroughs. Every boy between eight and eighteen dreamed of someday being its quarterback.
But Barton never developed an appetite for the primal aggressions of gridiron warfare. It was baseball that became his favorite activity with Benny and Bill. The three brothers spent hours each night after dinner on the broad south lawn of Lilac Hedges, playing their improvised game with one pitcher, one hitter, and one outfielder. They made bases out of anything they could get their hands on, including the dried hide of an unfortunate squirrel. Barton was neither fast nor much of a hitter, but he loved the game just the same. Unusually tall for their adolescent ages, Benny and Bill towered over him. Their height endowed them with that much more star quality to Barton, ever undersized for his age.
They taught him what they knew without a trace of older-brother bravado. They only smiled when he took up the bat with his left hand, and frequently slowed the action in the outfield to let Barton score. Barton grew accustomed to this preferential treatment over the years, which later made it difficult for him to survive, not to mention realize his full potential, outside a system not specifically calibrated to optimize his chances.
Nonetheless, their mother was as pleased by the brothers’ bond as they were themselves. On summer nights, she and Arthur sat on the wide, covered porch watching them play until circling bats began their nosedives toward the airborne ball and the long shadows of twilight reached the fields beyond. Helen would call to Barton to come in for a bath and bed while the two older brothers routinely stayed behind, gathering up the tools of their play. Then they walked together in the gathering darkness toward the house.
Benny and Bill would do as she expected, and that was good enough for them, it seemed. Their twin imperatives were to cultivate their shared role as Barton’s elders, ensuring at least sparing maternal affection, and to prepare for a life in which they would almost certainly be expected to take care of themselves.
4
BILL
AT THE OFFICE OF Naval Intelligence (ONI) in Washington, DC, Bill Mott had worked forty-one straight days since Pearl Harbor was bombed and war declared. By mid-January 1942, the Navy Department was running on a twenty-four-hour schedule and still struggling to keep pace. With two brothers in the Pacific—Barton listed as missing in action and Benny facing mortal danger by the hour—Bill needed no reminder that superior intelligence was the Navy Department’s top priority. But shortages of naval officers schooled in codes and ciphers were acute, even as blame for the mishandling of pre–Pearl Harbor intelligence was cast and recast in the daily newspapers.
Bill retrieved the Washington Times-Herald from his icy Chevy Chase walk each morning to read of the Roberts Commission, a formal government panel assembled to “report the facts” leading to the disaster. To the navy, its mission seemed more a search for scapegoats rather than facts and answers. Like many divisions within ONI, the one in Bill’s charge—Secret Dispatches, Letters, and Documents Branch—had been besieged with inquiries and subpoenas, even as it sought to run a world war around the clock.
Washington’s naval leaders felt the hot glare of a global spotlight and an enraged citizenry. The American public viewed the Pacific War as the navy’s war and the unspeakable losses at Pearl Harbor theirs to explain. These woes were compounded by daily reports pouring into the Navy Department of American tankers being sunk much closer to home—by German U-boats off the Atlantic beaches of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and other East Coast states. Germany, Japan’s ally, had declared war on the United States four days after Pearl Harbor.
The Germans’ race to sink more US ships aiding Britain than the latter could buy, build, or borrow had continued unabated since. More than thirty were lost in January 1942 alone, eight on a single night within sight of New York Harbor. Burned bodies and thousands of ship remnants were washing up on coastal beaches all along the Eastern Seaboard. It appeared that the US Navy couldn’t even protect American shipping within swimming distance of its own shores.
Washington’s ordered society and stolid military establishment had been slapped awake on December 7, 1941. By mid-January, a world had turned. The nation’s capital, long accustomed to its southern-leaning traditions and unhurried pace, was now in a chaotic struggle to ramp up and run a war that suddenly spanned the globe. Hastily minted reserve officers descended from Pullman cars at Union Station only to form long queues and crowd the city’s rickety trolleys and small pool of taxis.
They headed for all manner of temporary lodging in boardinghouses, barracks, hotels, and apartment buildings, most of which were already overbooked with long waiting lists. Nearly seventy thousand Washington initiates—from fresh inductees, to eager purveyors of war goods, to stenographers and government workers of all ranks—swelled the city’s population to overcapacity in no time. In less than six weeks, the district government had issued more than 1,500 new building permits and still couldn’t keep pace with the soaring demand—the housing bottleneck just one small piece of the shocking transition to a previously unimaginable second world war.
Upgrading the security at Washington’s military departments and the White House was another major undertaking. Machine guns were mounted on the bridge leading to the Lincoln Memorial, and guards with tin hats were posted outside the State and War Departments. The White House had installed bulletproof glass in the three south windows of the Oval Office, and a bomb barrier was poured along the west wall. General Electric was commissioned to design special outdoor lighting to dimly illuminate the grounds without casting light on the house itself. An air raid shelter was built under the newly constructed East Wing.
The lights at Naval Intelligence burned nightly as the bitter struggle for control of the world’s oceans intensified. All eyes were on the men who could read the codes and divine new threats before a widely dispersed enemy could strike again. Recruiting and detailing of naval intelligence officers had reached a frenzy by January 1942. Desperate to crack the Japanese naval codes and keep abreast of the Germans’ changing ones, senior officers routinely pulled rank to detail personnel from one office to another according to which intelligence functions were deemed most critical.
Around this same time, President Roosevelt decided to set up an intelligence center of his own in the West Wing of the White House. He had come up with the idea after Winston Churchill’s White House visit in late December. To command Britain’s war with Germany, the prime minister maintained an underground headquarters in London full of maps; when traveling, he carried with him a matching set on which staff continuously updated enemy movements. During his December 1941 visit to the White House, he had set up the vivid portable display in the room across the hall from his quarters, the Queens’ bedroom, on the second floor.
“Franklin, you must have a map room of your own,” Churchill effused, and even temporarily loaned him the aide traveling with him at the time, one Sublieutenant Cox, to get the project under way. Roosevelt needed no convincing; he immediately ordered his naval aide to “Fix up a room for me like Church
ill’s.” A ladies’ coatroom on the ground floor, located between the Diplomatic Reception Room and the president’s physician’s office, was thus hastily converted into the new chart room.
Cox was also charged with training Lieutenant Robert Montgomery, an American naval reserve officer and well-known actor who was also familiar with Churchill’s London map room, having recently worked for the US naval attaché in England. Montgomery built on Cox’s preliminary work setting up the new White House Map Room, but within weeks, he requested a reassignment to join the hunt for German U-boats in the Atlantic. A replacement was needed in short order, preferably someone who would not also be tempted to depart for the war front.
The search for Lieutenant Montgomery’s successor was intense, and speculation was thick in the staff-strapped Navy Department on who might ascend to the position. There was no application process for Roosevelt’s military aides; the president’s men did their own scouting. Their scrutiny of potential naval aides was particularly focused. As a onetime assistant secretary of the navy, Roosevelt had a strong preference for his naval representatives over other military aides.
Officially, naval aides served as the formal liaison between the White House and anything relating to the US Navy, but under FDR, the position entailed much more. They were the president’s intelligence officers, chargés d’affaires for heads of state visiting the White House, unofficial executors of special requests from Mrs. Roosevelt, and now, overseers of the Map Room. Intellect, personality, and discretion were essential qualities, as well as one’s ability to work long and unpredictable hours.
Captain John McCrea, Roosevelt’s senior naval aide, told the president, “I have my eye on a chap named Mott—an Academy graduate and naval reserve lieutenant. I want to bring him over here to take over from Montgomery as executive of this operation . . . I like the cut of Mott’s jib. He’s intelligent, quick witted, and a take-charge doer . . . Since I spend so much of my time at the Navy Department, I need my Map Room deputy to be a ‘take-charge guy.’ ” McCrea further stipulated that the Map Room was to be a primarily “naval operation,” although all theaters of war would be covered. And he wanted its executive to remain in the position for the war’s duration. Mott’s nearsightedness, he surmised, would permanently disqualify him for sea duty.
BILL’S 1929 NAVAL ACADEMY appointment came three years after Benny’s. Unlike Benny, however, who was happy enough to do well, Bill had stood at the top of his high school class and undertook every academic task with near-fanatical intensity. Beneath his senior yearbook picture was the quote “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” Under it, his English teacher, Mrs. Carpenter, had written, “To Bill, the best English student I have ever had.”
The prolonged economic depression following the stock market crash his plebe year had a near-catastrophic effect on Arthur’s business. As he struggled to recover, Bill’s Annapolis appointment was not only a goal attained, but also an economic necessity. The fact that Uncle Sam covered the cost of a midshipman’s education was a luxury-turned-saving-grace.
Budgetary cutbacks forced on the navy by the Depression, however, had an even worse effect on Bill’s graduating class than it had on Benny’s three years earlier. Only half of the 1933 graduates received officer commissions; the rest were honorably discharged and offered a place in the naval reserves. Any shortcoming among classmates competing for commissions was grounds for the dreaded cut. In the spring of 1933, as Bill’s June graduation approached, he was met with an obstacle that prevented him from taking the same coveted course as Benny.
Each midshipman had to undergo a rigorous physical examination prior to receiving any postgraduation orders, and among the most dreaded of the compulsory tests was the vision exam. Perfect eyesight was an absolute prerequisite for a naval officer, particularly for sea duty. Failure to observe the slightest threat—a light, a periscope through the mist, a critical guiding star—could jeopardize the ship, not to mention the lives of thousands. The eye test was therefore especially exacting.
Replacing the familiar reading charts that hung in eye doctors’ offices everywhere (because they could be memorized) was the Snellen tester, which was manipulated by the examiner to make letters of various sizes slide into view horizontally and pop up vertically in constantly changing order. The eyes were dilated beforehand, then refracted with a homatropine solution that was applied every ten minutes, several times in a row. A retinoscope then threw light on the pupil at a distance of one meter to determine if the eye was myopic or near- or far-sighted, and if so, by how much. These refractions were conducted on each midshipman by four naval eye specialists.
“Son,” the Academy physician said to Bill after his exam, “you’re a fine midshipman. But you can’t go active with those eyes, eyeglasses or not.”
Bill was stunned. When he entered the Academy, his vision had been 20/15 in both eyes. The shock that his less than perfect vision was enough to bar him from the navy career he’d been planning as far back as he could remember rocked him to the core. He was crushed, not accustomed to the sort of setback he couldn’t overcome with tenacity and hard work. After receiving sunglasses to protect his dilated eyes from sunlight, he pulled his cap down low over his watering eyes and began formulating the unimaginable: an alternate life course.
If the career of a naval officer was not to be his, Bill concluded, he would not join the Reserves, at least not right away. He loathed the idea of civilian life, but with few other choices in view, he moved directly from Annapolis to Washington, DC, and began searching for a job. His first stop was the northwest gate of the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue.
In hand was an article Bill had obtained from the stacks at the Washington Times-Herald summarizing the commencement speech that President Roosevelt had just delivered at his Annapolis graduation. Bill politely asked the gate guard if he could speak with the president. When the surprised guard queried further, Bill explained patiently that the chief executive had offered to help any of the noncommissioned Academy graduates—and pointed to a passage in the accompanying news article: “Now, I can’t promise you anything,” Roosevelt said, “but if any of you boys who are not commissioned need help, well, you know you have a friend in Washington.”
Bill waited for some time as the message was carried inside the White House and debated. Finally, a man came out and introduced himself as Steve Early, FDR’s press secretary. Trying to conceal his irritation, Early smiled and, with a southern drawl, said, “Well, it’s nice that you came by, but I’m sure you know the president’s comment was, well, you know, rhetorical.”
Bill said, “Well, I took him at his word, and I need a job.”
Early sighed, exasperated. “Okay, I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Give me your telephone number, and I’ll look into it.”
The next morning at about seven thirty, Bill received a call at his boardinghouse. He was to report to the Washington Navy Yard as an ordnance inspector, charged with examining lead castings eight hours a day. The work was stunningly boring, but he endured it long enough to gain acceptance to George Washington Law School (which he attended at night) and get a job as a patent examiner for the US Patent Office.
Bill worked at the Patent Office by day to pay for law school and living expenses. In the evenings were classes and many a solitary dinner at Ford’s or Child’s, local counter-and-stool eateries where he could study his law books and, for forty cents, fill up on specials such as pot roast, mashed potatoes, string beans, and coffee. Despite late-night classes, studying, and the tedium of patent work, Bill excelled academically and moved up in professional rank. By the time he was admitted to the DC bar, he was a senior patent examiner in the General Counsel’s Office and confident that a lucrative career in patent law lay ahead.
Despite the promise of fame and fortune the US Patent Office offered to eager young inventors, it was a classic federal bureaucracy, slow and leaden. Bill battled daily stacks of applica
tions and rote procedures but greatly enjoyed the dogged energy of the entrepreneurs who streamed in and out of his office. As the son of a dentist, he had more than a passing knowledge of that profession and unwittingly became the resident expert on patent applications for fluoride removal from drinking water. Fluoride was thought to be the cause of brown spots on children’s teeth. Dental scientists discovered subsequently that fluoride actually protected tooth enamel from decay and might even have tooth-hardening properties. Two years later, Bill oversaw the patent process for adding it to municipal water and toothpaste.
This wasn’t the military career that Bill once dreamed of, but it was a secure and respectable profession during grim economic times. Meanwhile, his affinity for the navy never extinguished, he sought every opportunity to stay involved with his Annapolis classmates and colleagues. He was an officer in the US Naval Academy Alumni Association, a position that gave him considerable control over local distribution of army-navy football game tickets, a source of stature regardless of rank. He visited Annapolis often for alumni meetings, and befriended Academy football coach Rip Miller. Bill always brought Rip fresh intelligence on promising high school football players with the academic potential to enter the Academy.
In 1938, he organized the first of what would become an annual army-navy-game rally at Washington’s Ambassador Hotel, smartly securing the attendance of the secretary of the navy, the secretary of commerce, the postmaster general, the chairman of the Maritime Commission, the chief of naval operations, the Marine Corps commandant, and the coaching staffs from West Point and Annapolis. Bill also arranged for starlet Linda Darnell, one of Hollywood’s loveliest, to lead off the event with the help of an NBC radio commentator. Cocktails were generously served. A popular and patriotic event, the rally was broadcast throughout the country.
The Jersey Brothers Page 6
