Acheson took his turn. “Stalin is a murdering monster. He’s slaughtered millions of his own people and enslaved millions more. His word is as trustworthy as that of a gangster, an Al Capone.”
“Stalin is an ally,” added FDR as if that said it all. “But what then are the Soviets doing?” he asked, suddenly reasonable.
The others looked at each other. The army’s code-breaking efforts were providing them with some diplomatic information, but they knew very little about the Russian military.
“We have no OSS agents in the Soviet Union,” Donovan admitted.
“Our embassy in Moscow might as well be on the moon,” Acheson said. “Our personnel are followed everywhere and only allowed to go to certain areas, and see what the Soviets wish us to see, and talk to people with whom they wish us to speak, all of whom are spies. Russia is as much a closed society as is Japan.”
“Even so, there’s nothing on the Russian side to indicate perfidy, is there?” FDR said smugly.
“Nothing concrete,” Acheson admitted. “But the embassy is still picking up rumors of vast troop movements headed towards the Urals and Siberia.”
Roosevelt laughed hugely and slapped his large hand on the table. “And that, gentlemen, makes no fucking sense whatsoever. They do not have an enemy in Siberia, and what would they do with an army in that frosted land in the winter?”
It was Stimson’s turn. “German military intelligence also indicates that the Reds are pulling out.”
“Rumors, counterrumors, and rumors of rumors,” FDR said, practically sneering. “Gentlemen, please, do not bother me with bogey men and monsters under the bed.”
He lit another cigarette and took a long, slow, drag. It seemed to calm him down. “Gentlemen, I respect your opinions and I even permit the possibility that you might be right, however much I doubt it. In fact, I doubt it so strongly that I want no further discussions of the possibility of Russian treachery to take place with me. Continue to gather data, of course, but do not bother me without concrete facts, which I am confident you will not find.”
He coughed and laid the cigarette and its long holder in the ashtray. “There is, of course another reason for keeping the lid on these wild rumors. In just under two weeks we will have the election and I will either be President for a fourth term or tossed out on my can and Tom Dewey will be voted in for his first term. Now, this Dewey person is an excellent governor of New York and might make a fine President under other circumstances, but not right now. We need continuity in the White House. A ship does not change captains in mid-course.”
He looked around and they all nodded. FDR’s decision to run for a third term in 1940 had provoked enormous controversy. No President had held the office for more than two terms, following an implied guideline established by George Washington. His decision to run for a fourth term, whatever the circumstances and the rationale, had upset a large part of the nation who were beginning to think that Roosevelt was establishing a dictatorship of his own. Many voters were thinking continuity be damned-it was time for a change. Similar winds were blowing in England where it was felt that Churchill’s skills as a war leader were no longer needed, and that he should be replaced by someone who knew how to rebuild the shattered British Empire.
Republican Tom Dewey was a formidable opponent, which truly concerned Roosevelt. If it should get out that the alliance between the U.S. and the Soviet Union forged only a few years earlier was falling apart, it would strongly imply that FDR was no longer in control of the international situation. While photographs still did not show him in a wheelchair, no one who saw his picture in the newspapers or in newsreels could deny that he was a frail and sickly man. An openly discussed question was whether he would even be still living four years from now. Thus, failure with Russia would indicate a need for a new hand at the helm. The others nodded. They would keep the possibility of a problem with Stalin quiet for a couple of weeks.
Unsaid was the fact that Henry Wallace would no longer be Vice President after the elections. Politically, he leaned too far left for the comfort of the men in the room. If FDR won, the new Vice President would be the senator from Missouri, Harry Truman. Nobody knew much about him except that he’d served honorably in World War I and wasn’t a communist.
Roosevelt smiled his famous smile. “Wonderful. Now, let’s do something constructive about this. Mr. Acheson, you will have our Moscow people find out all they can without, of course, endangering themselves or their sources. Mr. Byrnes, you will meet with Mr. Gromyko again and push him to let us know a precise date when the Russian offensive will start up, while I will send a letter to ‘Uncle Joe’ essentially asking the same thing.”
He leaned forward, more confident now. “And you, Mr. Donovan, will try to infiltrate the Soviet Union, or at least focus more on what they are doing.”
“That would take years,” Donovan said ruefully. “Realistically, Mr. President, we should be working with sympathetic Germans to find out what they are observing regarding Russian moves, and develop sources who might know of secret German-Russian agreements. What I can and will do regarding the Soviets is send teams into Poland to observe.”
Roosevelt thought for a moment. “Very well,” he said thoughtfully and then beamed. “Martinis?”
CHAPTER 14
The trouble with landing a plane in a grassy field was that you were never quite sure what you were landing on. Morgan had dropped his plane quite gently into tall grass and been taxiing comfortably when the left wheel hit a rock, dipping the nose of the Piper Cub into the ground and breaking the blades of the propeller. Save for mortal wounds to their pride, he and Snyder were unhurt. The plane, however, would be hors de combat until someone scrounged up a new propeller and the mechanics determined whether or not the structure had been damaged.
As a result, Morgan was now an unofficial aide to Whiteside. Now piloting a Jeep, he kept his ears on radio traffic while his eyes took in the countryside. The American army was moving even more slowly than before as the Germans grudgingly gave up the remnants of French territory that remained in their possession. If they were fighting like devils for occupied France, he wondered how they would fight when the army crossed the border into the Rhineland, that large portion of Germany that lay to the west of the Rhine. It had been occupied by Allied armies in 1918, when Germany had been forced to give up the Rhineland as part of the Treaty of Versailles. The Nazis had taken it back in 1936.
Worse, the closer they got to Germany, the more armor and artillery the Germans seemed to possess. It made a kind of sense since German supply lines were shortening, but there were rumors of German troop pullbacks from the Russian fronts and that made no sense to Morgan or anyone else in the 74th. Of course, what the hell did they know about grand strategy in the first place?
With the presidential election only days away, there was a lot of talk about whether Roosevelt would be reelected for the fourth time. He’d been President for twelve years and many younger soldiers really couldn’t recall anybody else in the White House, while older ones recalled Hoover and the other idiots who preceded him and, in their opinion, caused not only the Great Depression but this fucking war.
For his part, Jack recalled the anxiety his parents felt during the Depression and remembered the sight of people waiting in long lines for free bread. At first people they knew seemed embarrassed to be seen getting handouts, but they soon got over it. Handouts beat the hell out of starving.
Jack’s family had come through the Depression poorer and possibly wiser, but not economically destroyed like so many others had. Some meals had been sparse and he’d gone a long time wearing worn out and patched clothes, but they’d never been bankrupt and never had to stand in lines for handouts.