Late that same evening, Marsh got a call from Drew Pearson, who reported that Ickes had given him a detailed account of his meeting with the vice president over the telephone and had said Wallace appeared “sad” and that there wasn’t any “fight” left in him. When Marsh got off the phone with the “Merry-Go-Round” columnist, he was mad, and he stayed mad for the rest of the month.
The mood at the R Street house that Christmas was bleak. They were all in for a rough winter. Dahl, who usually filled the role of Marsh’s “favorite court jester,” as Ingersoll described him, was in no condition to lift their spirits. He was in quite a lot of pain and was resigned to the fact that there would probably be no avoiding another operation on his back. Once again his old war injuries were spoiling his fun and threatening to put him out of action. After seeing him limp across the room one afternoon, Marsh observed that the classic horror actor Lon Chaney, who starred as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, “never dragged his crippled body along more beautifully that you did when extracting sympathy.” An expert on all things, Marsh was of the opinion that the doctors at the wartime hospital in Alexandria may not have done the best job of patching him up. There was something very much amiss in his thin body. After New Year’s, Marsh packed Dahl off to the Scott and White Clinic in Temple, Texas, to see its leading specialist, Dr. Arthur Scott, who was his friend and personal physician. Scott determined that an operation on his spine was necessary. It was not happy news for Dahl, who dreaded the thought of more surgery. He came through it well, however, and spent the next several weeks recuperating at the Texas clinic. Marsh saw that he had a splendid room all to himself and footed the bills.
Marsh, as usual, wrote constantly, sending him bulletins from the front lines of the long, lonely fight over Wallace’s nomination as secretary of commerce. Jesse Jones had told a newspaper reporter that Roosevelt would have to dynamite him out, and he was as good as his word, galvanizing Senate conservatives to block Wallace’s appointment. Jones and his mob of like-minded senators, many of whom had worked to dump Wallace from the national ticket, banded together again to defeat their old adversary and argued that the vice president lacked the business acumen to handle the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and other important lending agencies. The New York Sun summed up the collective outrage: “The fourth term was scarcely twenty-four hours old before it thus became known that into the hands of the most radical, impractical, and idealistic dreamer in his entourage, Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt has placed a large measure of responsibility for the ultimate liquidation of billions of dollars’ worth of industrial property now under the control of the Federal government.”
Determined not to lose this battle, Marsh helped Wallace mount a defense. He worked the phones, urging old friends like Lyndon Johnson and Claude Pepper to join the fray. Ironically, they were somewhat helped by the fact that some southern Democrats were beginning to worry that the extreme opposition to Wallace might create a backlash and actually work in his favor with the Democratic Party rank and file for the presidential nomination of 1948. If that was the case, it might be better to take the pressure off him now, before they created a martyr. On January 22, just before Wallace was set to testify before the Senate committee to contest allegations that he lacked the necessary competence to administer the agency, Dahl sent a telegram to his apartment at the Wardman Park wishing him good luck. He had followed the proceedings carefully, and despite his superiors’ objections to Wallace, he did not want to see that crowd of jackals on the Hill drive a good man out of government. Finally, on March 1, the Senate confirmed Wallace’s appointment. But it had been a near thing, and before giving the commerce job to the former vice president, the Senate stripped it of all the lending powers that his predecessor had exercised. Several weeks passed before Wallace responded to Dahl’s wire. Apologizing for the delay due to an overwhelming amount of work, he wrote, “Nevertheless, even at this late date, I want you to know I am personally grateful to you for your support, especially in the days before my confirmation,” adding, “I hope I always merit your kind opinion of me.”
To keep his bedridden friend amused, Marsh sent a stream of comic letters, each one wilder and more nonsensical than the last, most of which centered on their activities as spies in the employ of an outfit called “Screwball, Unincorporated International.” Dahl, who had spent far too long in the wilds of Texas with far too little in the way of diversion, happily took up their imprudent correspondence, again impersonating Halifax and inventing his own plots and subplots. He wrote of “placing” an agent in the R Street house to keep him informed of all Marsh’s movements and to monitor the comings and goings of his friends, assorted statesmen, amateur politicos, and highbrow writers who were all members of a gang of notorious spies. Marsh’s longtime black butler, Mr. Clinton, was in fact a tracker of enemy agents and had them all under investigation: “This man reports to me each day, and you will know how important his information is to me.”
After two and a half weeks flat on his back, Dahl was able to leave the hospital and moved into Dr. Scott’s house for the remainder of his stay. As soon as he was able to sit up again, he began working on new short stories and “wrote like a madman.” In the last few months, he had managed to sell several more short stories to magazines and was hoping to have enough for a book. Curtice Hitchcock had sent him a letter stating that his firm, Reynal & Hitchcock, would be interested in publishing the collection.
In early February, Dahl was called back to Washington on “urgent business” that he could not divulge, but as soon as it was taken care of, he retreated to Marsh’s house in Virginia to continue his recuperation. With both Marsh and Alice away, there was no one at Longlea besides Marsh’s two young children, who had been left in the care of the household servants, so he was more or less on his own, living “in solitary opulence.” With its breathtaking view of the Blue Ridge Mountains, it was an ideal setting in which to rest and regain his strength. His recovery was taking rather longer than he expected, and he still could not bend down to tie his shoes. But he had his writing to occupy him and still had a great deal to do, including reworking “A Piece of Cake” and several earlier stories to include in his short story collection. He dashed off a note to his mother filling her in on his progress and suggested she phone Stephenson, “my boss,” who was in London, to get “all the news.”
By early March, Dahl had taken a turn for the worse and was feeling sufficiently unwell to worry Dr. Scott. On his advice, Dahl caught an RAF plane back to Texas and returned to the clinic for further examination. Scott immediately diagnosed the problem and scheduled Dahl for a small secondary operation to remove a substance from his spine that had been injected back in January to enable them to take X-rays. Dahl spent a week in traction and then moved back into Dr. Scott’s house. He was soon up and about and feeling much better and wrote his mother that he was confident that the last procedure “did the trick” and he was finally cured.
During his absence, Marsh kept Dahl abreast of matters of diplomatic and domestic consequence and on March 7 sent him a letter alerting him that the personal press spokesman for Representative Clare Luce had “privately communicated” that she would be making a speech upon her return from her travels from the Middle East and that she hoped that the wing commander would be present. Addressing Dahl as “My Dear Lord,” Marsh continued:
Naturally the people concerned with air routes and oil are educating her. It has been suggested that she confine her remarks to love in order to be accurate in her standard role as a Narcissus actor.
Attached are a few of the highlights of her speech on love from the Orient to the Occident, from the front to the back, from the head to the foot, on the axis of thought. The attached speech is not in her exact language, but is provocative and suggestive of what might be said by this lady Congresswoman to all these men in Congress who will hear her.
Dahl had been back in Washington less than a week when he learned of the president’s death from a massive cere
bral hemorrhage on the afternoon of April 12. It was just as his superiors had feared—Roosevelt had died in office, and his vice president would be imposed on a grieving nation. Only it would be Truman, not Wallace. All the old American warhorses were dropping in their tracks. Pa Watson, a member of FDR’s inner circle, had passed away during the return trip from the Yalta conference. Hull had heart problems and had retired. Hopkins was in and out of the hospital. Soon there would be a complete changing of the guard, and Churchill might have trouble finding a friendly face among the country’s new leadership. It was unlikely that Truman, whom Marsh categorized as a man of “small brain and great ambition” and wholly ignorant of foreign affairs, would be as kindly disposed toward Great Britain as his predecessor. Roosevelt would be missed by the English at least as much as by his own people, maybe more.
On April 14 Dahl debriefed Pearson on Truman’s first cabinet meeting, held just before he was sworn in—which the columnist had directly from a cabinet member—and filed the following intelligence report with the BSC:
He [Truman] said he wanted them all to continue serving. Stettinius said he would be glad to…. Stimson said he was a soldier and would serve so long as the war lasted…. Mrs Perkins started weeping…. Truman lunched with Senators on the Hill yesterday; they all endeavored to persuade him to make following changes in his staff…Byrnes Secretary of State…remove Madame Perkins as Secretary of Labor…decision already taken make Spruille Braden Ambassador to Argentine…. You should know that conversations are going on at present between Army, Navy, State Department and Department of Interior re Roosevelt’s proposal make conquered Jap islands in Pacific trusteeships. This…one of the first problems confronting Truman….
Later that day Dahl was stricken with acute appendicitis and underwent emergency surgery. Marsh wired his family in England that Roald was doing fine and that hopefully this would be “the last of his troubles.” On a more reassuring note, he explained that before this last hiccup, Dahl’s back was almost completely better and that he had been getting ready to play tennis, adding drolly, “I am so very happy to report that I believe your son is going to be a normal physical young man before the year is over.”
When Dahl finally limped out of the hospital, Marsh installed him in the R Street house, where Claudia Haines, his “perennially efficient secretary,” as she wryly referred to herself, nursed him back to health. Claudia doted on Dahl, and treated him like a second son. Moreover, her own nineteen-year-old son, Davis, and twenty-one-year-old daughter, known as young Claudia, had become extremely close to him over the past three years. Young Claudia, who had always worshipped the handsome pilot, waited on him hand and foot. In the past year, she had blossomed into an exceedingly attractive young woman, with shiny dark hair, a well-developed figure, and a sultry air that Charles always said gave her the exotic looks of “a Hawaiian princess.” Young Claudia was sweet and affectionate, and Dahl soon convinced himself that he was in love, and he surprised them both by proposing. Despite having an enormous crush on Dahl, she knew him to be a tireless bird dog and, as Antoinette recalled, “quite sensibly turned him down.”
THE GLAMOUR SET
We almost suffered emotional bends the day the war ended.
—ERNEST CUNEO
DAHL HAD BEEN working for the BSC for what seemed to him like “quite a long time” without ever meeting the big chief. By his own estimate, it had been over a year and a half since his first contact with Stephenson’s agents and the beginning of his work along counterespionage lines. Now that he had formally joined the outfit and was considered a staff member as opposed to just another freelance agent, it seems he was finally being honored with a summons to the New York headquarters. He already knew, of course, that the large suite of offices the spy chief had chosen for the nucleus of his American operation occupied the thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth floors of a New York skyscraper, but he was not prepared for the black marble grandeur of Rockefeller Center or the dizzying speed of the state-of-the-art elevators, which, he later recalled, moved “faster than I have ever dived in any aeroplane.” Over the years, the office had functioned under a variety of covers, from the United Kingdom Commercial Corporation and British Purchasing Commission to the British Library of Information. At the moment, the small plaque by the door indicated that he had arrived at the British Passport Control Office.
Dahl could not help feeling just a little bit nervous at penetrating the much-vaunted veil of secrecy that separated the secret world from regular society—the “insiders” from the “outsiders.” At the same time, he was unaccountably pleased that he had made it through an arduous trial period without raising any red flags and was about to be invited into an elite corps. As he was led through the bustling premises, he could not help noticing the many comely young women, a pool of fifty or more Canadian secretaries whom, rumor had it, the BSC chief personally recruited and swore to secrecy. When he was finally ushered into Stephenson’s large office and the man behind the desk rose to greet him, Dahl received “quite a shock.” The legendary director of the BSC was surprisingly diminutive—all the more so from Dahl’s perspective of six feet six inches. “The first impression of Stephenson was a small man of immense power, nothing indecisive about him at all,” he recalled. “I liked him instantly. There was bound to be at first trepidation and fear because you were right in the lion’s den.”
Everything about Stephenson was compact and efficient. He was a slim, brisk man in his late forties, with the springy step of a boxer, cropped graying hair, and a pair of penetrating eyes. Unlike most short men, Dahl noticed that Stephenson never raised his head in order to meet his gaze but instead kept his chin tucked in so that “only his eyes, which were very, very pale, looked up at you.” He was dressed in plain clothes, lit his next cigarette from the one still planted in the corner of his mouth, and talked in short, clipped sentences. He could speak with authority about science, economics, and politics and in the next breath expertly lay out the latest technology for secret coding and surveillance, seamlessly switching from one subject to the other with the ease of someone adjusting the wireless. What was most striking about him was his imperturbable calm, an aura of absolute control that allowed him to offer only the occasional comment while eliciting from others a flood of nervous chatter, a talent that prompted Robert Sherwood to dub him the “quiet Canadian,” a moniker that stuck with him throughout the war. “He never raised his voice, ever,” recalled Dahl. “He had this extraordinary quality. You knew that in that head of his, as he was listening to you and watching you, something was ticking about twice as fast as it was in your head, and every facet and angle was being weighed up, and then one question would come out which would just about cover the whole lot, and you would answer it.”
It was typical of his temperment that he insisted on taking part in Operation Overload. On D-day, Stephenson, who would not be denied a front-row seat, had flown as a rear gunner over the Normandy coast. The old World War One fighter pilot had not lost his appetite for battle. He was disappointed not to have cornered a German in his crosshairs but was immensely proud to have been part of the greatest invasion force in history. It was a longing for action that Dahl understood and frankly admired, but no longer felt himself.
It was ironic that by the time Dahl started seeing a lot of Stephenson and learning firsthand the details of his masterful clandestine role, his far-reaching counterespionage apparatus was already in the process of being dismantled. The BSC had done what it set out to do—push America toward intervention and secure the defeat of the Nazis—and now, with the war drawing to a close, it was no longer needed. Their covert operation had been of inestimable value, but as is usually the case in espionage on foreign soil, gratitude was in short supply. Most of what the BSC had done within the United States could not be publicly acknowledged, and Stephenson’s cavalier disregard for the law of the land had long outraged the head of the FBI and senior State Department officials, who could not wait to clip his wings. During h
is five years in Washington he had been far too vigorous and independent, and the new generation ascending to power, both in America and England, favored executives who could be counted on more for their restraint than for their initiative. Stephenson, whose strength lay in his intuitive grasp of politics, could feel the tide in Washington turning against him.
While he was by no means ready to relinquish his power and probably felt he still had a firm hold on the situation, he knew the awarding of laurels always signaled that a warrior was near the end of his run. He had received the knighthood in January, his name included in the New Year’s honors list. He was more proud of the comment, written in Churchill’s signature green ink, next to his name on the list of candidates being recommended to King George VI. It read: “This one is dear to my heart.” He was later awarded the Medal for Merit by President Truman, the first foreigner to receive the honor from the United States government.
If Stephenson had been content to retire then and fade into the sunset, it probably would have been better. But it never happened that way. A particular hazard facing secret service officials was paranoia—the toxic by-product of their profession. It went way beyond the normal fear of being eclipsed. They never trust their successors not to do them in, and Sir William was no exception. He suspected that his rivals within the service would inevitably seek to rewrite history, taking credit for his accomplishments and reapportioning the blame. With this in mind, he moved to secure his legacy and commissioned a history of the BSC’s wartime achievements. As in the past, he banked on this “official” record of his agency’s activities to protect him against future criticism. He assigned the task to one of his brightest subordinates, Gilbert Highet, the brains behind their political counterpropaganda activities in Latin America. A classics professor in his prewar life, he seemed ideally suited to cataloging the BSC’s triumphs. Highet had begun work on the project early in the spring of 1945, but in mid-June, after rejecting an early draft as less than satisfactory, Stephenson called for reinforcements.
The Irregulars Page 30
