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

presidential nomination, going down to defeat with the head of the ticket, Alf Landon. What Knox did have in common with Roosevelt was a rejection of isolationism as illusory and an acceptance of interventionism as a necessity.
    On an afternoon in December 1939, FDR invited Knox to the White House for a free-ranging view of the world situation. Knox was still with the President as six o’clock approached, and FDR suggested that he stay for dinner. Afterward, they could watch the movie
Drums Along the Mohawk.
Knox declined, though he found himself increasingly seduced by the Roosevelt magnetism. Before he left, FDR tested on him a plan of breathtaking boldness. He wanted the defeated 1936 Republican ticket, Landon and Knox, to come into his cabinet, filling the two military secretaryships, war and Navy. Indicative of Roosevelt’s sinuous style, the very day before, he had instructed his press secretary, Stephen Early, to tell reporters, “I don’t think it is likely the President will put a Republican as a member of his cabinet.” Landon subsequently made known that he was not interested in the War Department post, fearing Roosevelt intended merely to exploit him. FDR then turned to a quintessential establishment American.
    Henry Stimson was a product of Phillips Academy at Andover, where, in his day tuition was sixty dollars a year and students cut their own firewood. He went on to Yale, joined Skull and Bones, and later graduated from Harvard Law School. His roots in the country were deep. He could recall stories his great-grandmother had told him of her conversations with George Washington. Stimson had previously served as President William Howard Taft’s secretary of war, Calvin Coolidge’s governor general of the Philippines, and Herbert Hoover’s secretary of state, in all serving every president since William McKinley in one key post or another. At seventy-three, lean, tall, with his steel gray hair and erect posture, Stimson was the soul of rectitude and enjoyed as well a reputation as an able administrator. To the grumbling of disappointed Democratic office seekers and the cries of betrayal from fellow Republicans, Stimson and Knox were enlisted in FDR’s coalition cabinet just before the Republican convention, the former as secretary of war, the latter as secretary of the Navy.

Chapter III
    Strange Bedfellows
    FDR’S CONCERN over a secret and silent invasion of the United States by fifth columnists and saboteurs allied him with one of the canniest players on the Washington scene. In June 1939 the President had given the leading espionage role to J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI in an attempt to impose order on the jerry rig that passed for intelligence operations in the United States. J. Edgar, self-elevated from plain old John Hoover, had started his career as a file clerk in the Department of Justice. There, through his appetite for work and talent for accumulating dossiers on people, he caught the eye of Attorney General Mitchell Palmer and moved up quickly. Hoover made his first major strike in 1920, as Palmer’s chief lieutenant during the Red Scare, rounding up nearly ten thousand suspected radicals and subversives. By 1924, at age twenty-nine, Hoover had become director of the department’s Bureau of Investigation, which by 1935 metamorphosed into the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Ed Tamm, number three man at the bureau behind Hoover’s constant companion, Clyde Tolson, had first suggested the name. Hoover was not immediately taken by the initials FBI until Tamm pointed out a bonus. They could also stand for Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity. During the thirties Hoover gained national fame for the astutely publicized battles his “G-men” waged against gangsters. In 1939, when the war broke out, the director, with his instinct for the main chance, shifted the bureau’s principal mission from fighting crime to hunting subversives, spies, and