“As you can see with the broad red line on the map, the goal of the German army is to cut off the oil to the Soviets. And we have been extremely successful in doing this, while at the same time protecting our own fields at Ploesti in Romania. This new line was put in place in the second week of September, and now it is achieving what it was designed to do.”
“In addition to the German army’s new line, the British RAF has been largely neutralized.”
Stimson, who had a week earlier briefed the President on the details of this denuding of the British air arm, simply asked, “What do you mean?”
“Well, we do not have all the details, but the Luftwaffe has destroyed many of the Britishers’ air fields and fuel supplies. And now there are no longer any bombing raids on the Reich. This has meant that our aircraft have been freed to fly sorties into Russia to destroy the Russian tanks with our new 45 millimeter cannons. These new cannons reportedly open a Russian tank as if it was a tin can.”
“As a consequence, the Soviets have realized their position is now untenable. So our two sides are speaking about an accommodation in Geneva.”
“What kind of accommodation?” Stimson asked.
“We two are just diplomats, but it is the understanding of my ambassador as well as myself that the Soviets will grant German control of the Ukraine, and that Germany will hold the Baku fields and will supply the Russians with 100,000 tons of oil per month at no cost. In return, Germany will grant the Soviets autonomy in the Baltics. Finland will become a free, sovereign nation.”
“You’re in that strong a position?” Stimson asked candidly.
Schneider nodded, “Gentlemen, please do remember that all of the ill-conceived notions about how to attack Soviet Russia—‘you have merely to kick in the front door’ and all that gibberish—have been washed away with the sudden death of our Chancellor last September.”
The reference to the dead Chancellor alerted both the President and Stimson that there was as much discord in the German ranks as there was in their own.
Roosevelt asked, “So how does this affect your two allies in the agreement?”
Schneider replied, “Well, sir, regarding the Tripartite Agreement, we have been in very close consultations with our Japanese allies and have completely ignored the Italians.”
Schneider answered Roosevelt’s frown, “They are Italian.”
For a second there was silence then Roosevelt erupted in laughter; Stimson joined him.
While the ambassador was a little lost with the proceedings, seeing the two Americans roaring with laughter removed his concerns.
Schneider winked at the old man.
“And to be completely honest and forthright, gentlemen, the Japanese put in a surprising request, which in all propriety I am not sure I should disclose.”
This stopped the laughter.
“Our Japanese allies explicitly requested that the Reich not declare war on the United States, in spite of the Reich being legally bound to do so. It struck us as odd and unusual at the time, but perhaps it is the workings of the Japanese mind.”
Ever the diplomat, Stimson said, “Is that a fact?”
Schneider—his turn to play the fool—just nodded.
“Well, Mr. President and Secretary Stimson, you are both very busy men. I think it is time the Ambassador and I stopped wasting your time. We bid you good day.”
With this the two Germans stood, clicked their heels, and left.
“Hmm,” was the President’s sole comment.
Twenty minutes later, at precisely ten minutes past noon, Admiral King entered the Oval Office. Ten minutes later, Miss Tully buzzed the intercom to tell the President that Ambassador Nomura had arrived.
Quietly the Japanese ambassador entered the room, bowed, as was his custom, and waited for the President of the United States to offer him a seat.
The previous evening, Roosevelt had sent Stimson to the Hill to speak to two of the three most vociferous critics of Roosevelt’s apparent inactivity. Only last month, the Senator from California made mention on the floor of the Senate of a “Second Munich.”
Oddly, Stimson found both Senators oddly quiet and curiously accommodating. As Stimson joked to Roosevelt on the telephone, “We should have the water checked up there on the Hill.”
Under mysterious circumstances, the third Senator—the one from Oregon—had died in an automobile accident a week earlier when one night he tragically drove his car off a bridge into Bull Run Creek outside of Washington.
The Senator from California always returned home to California by Pullman rather than airplane. It was not so much that he disliked flying, but rather that he had an addiction to the young Pullman porters. And—sadly—while relaxing after a tenuous month of law making and speechifying just two weeks earlier during a special session, he had the terrible misfortune to be walked in on by a Presbyterian minister and the minister’s two maiden aunts. All three were returning from an ecumenical conference in Chicago. The look of horror and disgust on their faces was seared into the Senator’s memory. And the minister looked as though he was straight out of Central Casting—white hair, tall, honest and open face, forthright, and with a slight stoop.
Actually, he was straight out of Central Casting, as where the two “aunts,” and the young porter had been paid ten $100 bills—“more money than I will ever have,” was his comment to another porter, as the young man boasted of his plans to return to Mississippi. The three actors tsk’ed and quickly disappeared. The Senator’s mood was gray as he knew he would have to resign, so a visit from Stimson was actually a welcome diversion. The Senator was remembering the look on the minister’s face all the while as he spoke to Stimson.
Only three years later, sitting in a hot and stinking movie house dive in south San Diego, did the now-disgraced former Senator start to see the truth. Sitting in the back row, while being serviced by a 50-cent-an-hour male escort and sipping lukewarm Thunderbird, he saw the self-same “minister” on the silver screen, paradoxically playing a man of the cloth who had failed the temptation of the flesh.
The burning of the other two Senators was far more straight-forward. And both happened in the same house on K Street. The house was well known and highly regarded, both for the freshness of the young ladies and the absolute discretion of the proprietress.
The proprietress herself was from the South—Richmond, as it turns out, the former capital of the Stars and Bars. She took very pretty girls from Richmond and “introduced” them to Washington. She would tell the parents all about her Lee Finishing School Of Deportment For Young Southern Ladies, and how a few young ladies were sometimes selected to attend diplomatic parties in Washington where they could be introduced to young European princes and other nobles of royal lines.
Why, only two weeks ago the young crown prince of Sweden announced his intention to marry one of her girls. Gasps always resulted in the six years she has told this story. Occasionally, the parents would sense the possibility of a deflowering, and in these cases the proprietress would simply thank her hosts for the tea and, “Thank you for seeing me, I will see myself out.”
The young girls themselves were all eager to escape the dull back water that Richmond had become after the surrender in Wilmer McLean’s parlor. Alone with the young ladies, the proprietress was more frank—the work was entertaining and relaxing the overworked public servants who labored so long and hard in the public good in the alphabet soup that was the New Deal. And with the huge legislative agenda of the Roosevelt administration there were new agencies to create almost every month. The proprietress explained to the girls—always with very limited success—how the Roosevelt administration had added over 10,000 pages of new laws for his New Deal, and how the complete Federal legal structure before the current president had consisted of less than 8,000 pages.