Free Joseph E. Persico by Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR, World War II Espionage

camp for political prisoners. In a separate trial, Anna Wolkoff received ten years.
    The Churchill government found in the Kent-Wolkoff scandal just the provocation it wanted. Within forty-eight hours of Kent’s arrest a massive roundup of British fascists took place, including the Jew-baiting Captain Ramsay. The Low Countries had fallen to Germany within days, and on June 20, France surrendered after only a shocking six weeks’ struggle. Obviously, British leaders believed, Poland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and France could not have fallen under Hitler’s heel simply because they were weak. Fifth columnists had to be the answer. The British were convinced that Norway had been flooded with German “tourists” before the invasion. German parachutists who dropped into the Netherlands were rumored to have been guided by enemy agents signaling them from the ground. The contagion of suspicion crossed the Atlantic, and FDR eagerly embraced the conspiracy rationale. Even before the fall of France, he had shared his preoccupation with the American people. On May 26, 1940, FDR was wheeled into the White House’s first-floor diplomatic cloakroom to deliver a fireside chat. He stubbed out his cigarette, squared the pages of his text, faced the three microphones of the major networks, and told the country, “Today’s threat to our national security is not a matter of military weapons alone. We know of new methods of attack. The Trojan Horse. The fifth column that betrays a nation unprepared for treachery. Spies, saboteurs, and traitors are the actors in this new tragedy.”
    FDR’s fear of subversion had been deeply planted during his World War I experience with the Navy Department, especially a shock like the Black Tom explosion. More searing, on a June evening in 1919, Franklin and Eleanor had experienced terrorism firsthand. They were parking their car on R Street in Washington when a deafening explosion tore off the front of the residence of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who lived across the street from their home. Palmer had made himself the scourge of radicals and Communists and was zealously hunting them down to combat the “Red Scare.” An assassin, out to kill Palmer, had instead blown up himself. Pieces of the corpse landed on the Roosevelts’ front steps. Concern over saboteurs and terrorists persisted after FDR became president. He told reporters at a press conference that Americans had to “protect this country against . . . some of the things that happened over here in 1914 and 1915 and 1916 and the beginning of 1917, before we got into the war.”
    *
    In June 1940, practically on the eve of the Republican convention, FDR pulled off a master stroke that could well abet his designs on a third term. His secretary of war, Henry Woodring, stuck in FDR’s craw like a fish bone. He had appointed Woodring, a former Kansas governor, in 1936 more to placate economically depressed midwest farmers than for military views congruent with his own. Woodring was an isolationist who had sought to block FDR’s effort to ship munitions to Britain. The President dreaded firing anybody and welcomed an excuse that would justify ejecting an unwanted subordinate. Woodring’s attempted obstruction of the arms shipments handed FDR the perfect opportunity to unload the secretary. But he went further. With the potential for war mounting, he seized the moment to make his cabinet bipartisan and thus less politically assailable.
    Frank Knox was a self-made multimillionaire who had risen from grocery clerk to cub reporter, eventually to publisher of the
Chicago Daily News.
He was a veteran of that legendary band the Rough Riders, who had charged San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt. Knox, a visceral foe of the New Deal, had actually hoped to oppose Roosevelt in 1936 as the Republican presidential candidate. Instead, he had had to settle for the vice