Manhattan, August, 1940 Chapter Two: British Spies, Wendell Willkie, and Tallulah Bankhead

At the HQ of the British spies in America, Harry Hopkins got a party invitation. He called Tallulah Bankhead hoping she would be his date. Then he listened to Wendell Willkie's first campaign speech.

This Episode: Harry Hopkins had secured the third term nomination of Roosevelt, over the boss’s expressed disinterest in it, with a clever political trick that the pundit aristocracy scorned as cheesy. Harry didn’t care and neither did the boss but they both thought he needed a little cleansing and there was work to be done in New York. Manhattan was where the work of Harry Hopkins first caught the eye of Franklin Roosevelt. In 1928, the newly elected Governor of New York was faced with a Great Depression and found Harry to help him fix it for his people. Twelve years later Roosevelt thought Harry was the most able executive he had ever known, and the most versatile. They weren’t ideologues in any sense, just two tinkerers in the public interest. Harry looked forward to going back to the big city. And there was Tallulah Bankhead who had invited him to look her up the next time he was there.

This Chapter: Harry found the British spies in two floors of one of the buildings at Rockefeller Center. They welcomed him as an ally and he saw that everything they were and did was draped in anonymity. Little Bill Stephenson, who led them, was one of Churchill’s heroes for his wartime history, and he and Harry hit it off. Little Bill said he was throwing a party on Saturday at his home for his spies to meet Harry, so Harry got a date with the notorious and scandalous Queen of Broadway, Tallulah Bankhead.

Wendell Willkie finally came out of hibernation with a speech he delivered before 200,000 in central Indiana and millions on the radio. Harry got with Ed Flynn, the Bronx politician whom he had designated to lead the boss’s campaign. They met at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan that Flynn had seized as the campaign headquarters because “it’s got our name on the door.” The third term reëlection campaign began in earnest.

Contents: Here are the three chapters of “Manhattan, August, 1940,” from “Seeking the Hinge” with their dates of publication and their reading times.

• Chapter One: Harry Hopkins Making Waves. Friday, April 25. Reading time: seventeen minutes

• Chapter Two: British Spies, Wendell Willkie, and Tallulah Bankhead. Saturday, April 26. Reading time: seventeen minutes.

• Chapter Three: “What a Swell Party This Is!” Sunday, April 27. Reading time: sixteen minutes

Chapter Two: British Spies, Wendell Willkie, and Tallulah Bankhead

Reading time: seventeen minutes

Harry went to the offices of the British Security Coördination. He was told by J. Edgar Hoover’s secretary that they occupied the 63^rd and 64^th floors of the International Building at Rockefeller Center. There was no mention of British Security Coördination on the lobby directory, but British Passport Control was shown at 6401 and British Library of Information at 6501. The Library would be Aubrey Morgan’s office where he did actual public relations work days as a cover for his nights. Off the elevator at 64, Harry walked a long central hallway with at least a dozen doors that were unmarked and locked. Halfway down, one door carried a small plaque that read “6401. British Passport Control.”

It opened to his hand and he entered a room of no more than fifteen by twenty feet where sat two women at desks talking on phones. They were facing him with a door between them and a portrait of George VI on the wall behind one of them and one of his Queen behind the other. Both women smiled at him and raised a finger indicating he was next. They were dressed for work but drably, one in a gray dress and the other in a somber green. They wore no jewelry. They were attractive but not using it persuasively, perhaps fortyish, but far short of matronly. Fit, rather; not brusque, but appeared capable of it. To Harry’s right and his left sat large men in uniforms with their backs to plain walls. The uniforms lacked badges or any sort of indication of their offices. They were simply brown, Sam Brown belted and identical. They were on chairs with no desks. The men stared at him until one of the women deposited her phone on a cradle and greeted him with genuine warmth. She asked of his business and he said he was there to see Mr. Stephenson. She asked for his identification, took it from him, and copied its elements on a pad, visibly comparing it, point by point, with companion information before picking up the phone.

She said, “Eloise, would you tell Mr. Stephenson that Mr. Harry Hopkins is here to see him and that his credentials are in order?” She hung up and told Harry it would be a few minutes as Mr. Stephenson was “rather far from the front.” Would he wait? He nodded that he would. The woman went back to work on something on her desk. There was no place to sit so he stood there for several minutes. He pointed to the two portraits and said, “I’ve met them. My daughter also.” The woman said, “How fortunate for both of you. I have not, but yet hope to.” The door opened and a small man in a dark suit emerged and said, “Mr. Hopkins, what a pleasure. I’m Bill Stephenson.” As Stephenson extended his hand in greeting, Harry was sure he could feel the two large men exhale and relax. At least he did.

Stephenson took Harry on the tour. There were offices along the window walls and they were enclosed, no glass fronts. The interior was desks crowded tight and they were all manned, womanned mostly, everyone working, no one dawdling. Everyone wore drab outfits, just like the two women at the front. Stephenson described a series of duties that were being performed. Each had a name that meant nothing to Harry — Mail Assessment, Regional Supervision, Broadcast Management, Identity Coördination. At a corner, he showed Harry in to an office that was notable only for its pretension to unimportance. Metal furniture, metal chairs, a table for conferencing, a desk that was suitable for a high school principal. The windows were covered with venetian blinds, no drapes. The blinds were closed. Stephenson sat at his desk and Harry sat on a metal chair.

Stephenson said, “I’m impressed with your visit. What do you want to know?”

“I don’t know. I want you to know that we’re with you in all you do, whatever it is. I speak for President Roosevelt in that.”

“Yes. I’m told that you do. I’m told that your words are his words.”

“Not all my words, but those. I suppose it would be helpful for me to meet various members of your team, to chat with them about their duties. Perhaps over time come to a full understanding of the operation. I am curious about the spartan appearance of everyone and everything. Are you attempting to be invisible?” He thought he might be speaking British.

“Yes. That is precisely what we’re doing. We’re spies in a country that has welcomed us. Our objectives are your objectives, and invisibility is our costume. Our people are instructed to be as anonymous as possible when they come and go on their daily personal chores. They work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. They sleep and eat, of course, and they have our permission, but not our encouragement, to fall in love. To the world outside the office, they represent themselves as whatever may suit the circumstances of their activities. Social workers, nurses, bookkeepers in the garment district, university students, machinists. Unthreatening jobs that explain their meaningless appearances and their odd hours. If we encounter each other outside the office we make no recognition of it. As we enter the elevator to come to these offices, we ignore each other. The women wear simple dresses and no jewelry. The men all wear dark suits, white shirts, and dark ties. We blend in.”

“Sounds equally boring and thrilling.”

“Our work is just that. We break your laws in our work. Our own, also. We intercept mail in Bermuda, Trinidad, Newfoundland as it arrives by PanAm Clippers. We are able to open anything and reseal it so you’d never know it was opened. Read everything. Copy that which matters. No more than one item in a thousand has any value, but that one is why we do it.

“Our work is various and unstructured. As an example, recently we unearthed a man named Gerhard Westrick, the commercial attaché at the German embassy, who set himself up here in the city, a house in Westchester actually, where he was meeting with American businessmen to tell them of the opportunities waiting for them in a Europe dominated by the Nazis when Britain falls. He made progress with oil companies to stifle our blockade of the Baltic and open up Italian markets. We planted stories about him with newspapers and radio stations, small locals at first, knowing it would bubble up to the Times and the Herald-Tribune. And it did. Neighborhood protests erupted outside his house. Your State Department is about to pull his credentials and order his recall to Germany.

“On the day last May when the prime minister summoned me to this job, he said, ‘The United States of America is the mightiest force in the world, and can remain so. When the nation is united to a righteous cause, it will prevail over all evil interests. Over all evil interests.’ He felt that the American threat to that unity was not isolationism, but anti-Semitism, and now after my time here, I share that view.

“We are daily infiltrating the German-American Bund. We worked with Tom Dewey, giving him what he needed to begin a prosecution of this Fritz Kuhn fellow who runs it. Kuhn will end up in jail.

“America First had Henry Ford, the prominent anti-Semite, on its board with Robert Wood, the head of Sears Roebuck. Sears is owned by the Rosenwald family, Jews. Lessing Rosenwald gave Wood his job. We stirred that pot with planted stories and watched Ford squirm. He resigned from the board, and we made certain he couldn’t hide the reasons for it. The goal there wasn’t to tarnish Henry Ford, or to get him to a synagogue, but to get him to back off his unwillingness to convert his facilities to the production of armaments. That’s happening.

“Little things like that. Our fingerprints are unseen. We use what we call cut-outs, one hand to another to another, to cloak our involvement.”

Harry said, “The president instructed Hoover to support you, as you know. We know that he has, know he provided you with the best short-wave equipment, but the boss knows Edgar can be prickly. How is that working?”

Stephenson said, “It’s delicate and difficult. This is his patch and not ours, which is another reason for the importance of our invisibility.”

His voice had not altered an octave in all the time he spoke. He might have been an accountant doing a routine audit. Harry thought, They might win yet.

Stephenson said, “Your interest, which has been anticipated, is of great interest to all of our members. Your reputation has preceded you. My wife and I have a pleasant home at Hampshire House and we would hope you would be our guest, the honored guest, for a simple event this Saturday evening. Cocktails, food, milling about, nothing fancy. You’ll meet the key people of the BSC and open friendships that will lead, over time, to the answers to all the questions your curious mind may have.”

He called Tallulah Bankhead. A woman answered, not her. He said, “Is Miss Bankhead there? This is Harry Hopkins.”

She came to the phone. She said, “It’s Mrs. Emery, Mr. Hopkins. I’m a married woman. How did you get this number?”

“Well, that’s a revolting development. Did you get married since we met?”

“No, but I did file for a divorce. How did you get this number?”

“Mrs. Emery, the White House switchboard can get the number of anyone who has a number in less time than it takes to spell their name. You should call them to say you’d appreciate their records being changed to show you as Mrs. Emery and not Miss Bankhead.”

“Why bother? I’ll be Miss Bankhead again before the sun goes down. How good to hear from you, Harry. Have you missed me?”

“I thought I had until you came on the phone.”

“Where are you?”

“At the Essex House.”

“In New York? That Essex House?”

“That’s the one.”

“What a dreadful place. I much prefer the elegant hotel rooms of well-fixed gentlemen. They smell so good.”

“I’m not well-fixed. But I do my best to smell good.”

“I meant the hotel rooms. Are you well rested? That’s what really matters.”

“I am.”

“I know why you’re calling, but I’m still enough of a southern belle to ask, ‘Why are you calling?’ ”

“I have a social engagement for this Saturday evening that I thought you might enjoy. I’m calling to request the pleasure of your company.”

“Tell me about it.”

“That’s it? It’s conditional on the event itself, having nothing to do with my own magnetism?”

“I like that you’re so full of shit.”

“Your father said you would.”

“Is this event in the city?”

“Well, yes. Yes it is. Where did you think it would be? Boston?”

“Boston would be closer. I’m on Martha’s Vineyard.”

“That does change things.”

“Tell me of the event.”

“It’s nothing special. Just a gathering of all the British spies working in America to stop Adolf Hitler. I’m the guest of honor.”

“British spies are infinitely superior to any others, don’t you think? You’d never expect it of them. They’re so otherwise boring. Would this be a date?”

“A date? I hadn’t thought about that. I haven’t had a date in … maybe thirty years. What does it entail?”

“The lady is to be gathered at her residence, or any other place of her choosing, in the gentleman’s car, which she prefers to be chauffered. He will be expected to wait patiently while she pretties herself just long enough to annoy him and make them late. Not so much as a farthing will be required of her as the evening proceeds. He runs the risk that she may meet someone she prefers far more than him as the evening goes on, in which case his services will no longer be required.”

“That sounds fair, except for the part where I have to come to an island to pick you up in my car. Is there ferry service?”

“Do you know where my home is in Manhattan? Of course you do. That slutty little switchboard operator can tell you. Would eight work for the spies?”

“It will have to.”

“Spies! Really? No shit, Harry? I’ll kill you if you’re lying.”

“Tallulah, the thing about spies is you can’t tell if they’re spies.”

*

Wendell Willkie introduced himself to the world that Saturday before 200,000 people in a park in Elwood, Indiana — go five miles north of Muncie on Delaware County Road 3 and then thirty miles dead west on U.S. 35 — where “this young man was born and raised,” he said, referring to himself. It was hot in Elwood that day, officially 101 degrees, though it was reported that a thermometer outside a drugstore registered 112.

Willkie’s campaign chairman, Massachusetts Congressman Joe Martin, asked to see a copy of the candidate’s speech when they met up that morning.

Willkie said, “Edith’s got it. Edith, give me the speech.”

Edith said, “I don’t have it. Don’t you have it?”

Willkie rolled his eyes, and Edith said, “Oh, God! It’s on Mom’s dining room table.”

Joe Martin said, “Here in town?”

“No. In Rushville.”

“In Rushville? Where the hell’s Rushville?”

“South of Muncie about sixty-five miles. On three.”

“Three what?”

“County road three.”

Martin gave a motorcycle cop fifty bucks and sent him for it. An hour before Willkie was to speak, the cop showed up with it and gave it to Martin who said he “damned near fainted, and not from the heat,” when he saw that it was ten single-spaced pages. “Are you going to read that?” he asked Willkie.

“Well, sure,” Willkie said. “I wrote it.”

“Don’t you have one of those typewriters that makes the letters about four times that size? So you don’t have to read the damn thing with your nose on the page?”

“No.”

“No? There’s going to be a couple hundred thousand people here and you’re supposed to look at them. Not your speech.”

“Joe, there’s going to be about twenty million listening on the radio and I don’t want them to miss a word.”

“Christ, Wendell, don’t you know it’s just as important how you say it as what you say? This looks like a term paper.”

It went downhill from there. The sound system delivered Willkie’s words loud and clear to the maybe twenty thousand people close enough to the front, where there were speakers, to hear it. The rest weren’t even sure when he started or when he finished. They just drank beer, kicked balls around, sought shade where they could find it, and had a miserable picnic before they finally walked five miles back to where they had parked their cars.

Harry listened to Willkie from a radio in a New York hotel with Ed Flynn, who had accepted the job as campaign manager and would use the hotel, in midtown at 45^th and Madison, as national headquarters. It was the Roosevelt, named for Teddy when it opened in 1924, but Flynn said, “Who knows that? It’s like it’s got our sign on the door.”

It wasn’t apparent from the radio transmission how badly things were going in Elwood. The broadcaster said it was very hot and the crowd was very large. There was a long ovation when Willkie made his appearance, but as he read his speech he seemed to step on his own applause lines. What was happening in Elwood was the much larger crowd in the rear, unable to hear, was responding in a delayed reaction to sight cues from the group up front that actually heard him, with the effect over the radio that the great gathering might have been somewhere else, like Omaha.

The speech itself was a manifesto, the beliefs of Wendell Willkie, and not bad for that. But it was dreary in its delivery, and politically confusing for a man who needed nothing more badly than a united Republican Party.

He called himself “a long-standing liberal who fought for the progressive reforms of Teddy Roosevelt, before another Roosevelt adopted and distorted liberalism.” He said he supported “collective bargaining, fair labor standards, Social Security, and federal regulation of financial markets for their production of a better distribution of the wealth and the earning power of the country.”

At that, Flynn said, “He should be on our ticket instead of Henry Wallace.”

“But,” Willkie added, “the New Deal is exhausted. Rather than stimulate growth and production, it has settled for safety, and we are now on a path of heavy taxation that leads to economic disintegration and dictatorship.”

He turned to foreign policy. In Philadelphia, the day after his nomination in June, he told a group of reporters that he was “not an interventionist in any way, shape, or form,” making that one of the few unqualified positions he had to that point uttered. In Elwood, he tacked right from that, then left again, though the complications of Hitler made “left” and “right” confusing in themselves.

He said, “I oppose the direct involvement of the United States in the European war, and do here now take the president to task for his inflammatory statements and manufactured panics, for deliberately inciting us to war.”

Flynn said, “Okay. Maybe not.”

Willkie waffled again. “I support military preparedness, assistance for the Allies, and compulsory universal military service. Let me be clear. A British defeat will be a calamity for America, one that any lover of democracy must view with consternation. Therefore, I recommend all aid to Britain, but only if it is sent short of war. I will bring all my energies to the work of global peace, but in the defense of our liberties, I should not hesitate to stand for war. No man can guarantee peace. Peace is not something that a nation can achieve by itself. It also depends on what some other country does.”

Harry said, “He’s a real moving target, this guy.”

Willkie turned to anti-Semitism. “We must view with the greatest contempt the Nazi oppression of Jews, a race that has done so much to improve the culture of countries Hitler has conquered before proceeding to visit medieval persecution upon their Jewish populations. We must hereby resolve to preserve our country as a land free of hate and bitterness, of racial class and distinctions. I pledge to you that kind of America.

“Our happy home of Elwood seems far removed from the shattered cities, the gutted buildings, and the stricken men, women, and children of Europe, but we know instinctively that we are not isolated from those suffering people. We are, rather, their hope.”

“Where is he going?” Harry said.

Willkie challenged Roosevelt to engage him in “a debate or two.” He closed with a call for national pain and agony, promising to match it with his own in a clumsy plagiarism of Churchill. “If elected, I will ask every American to serve his country selflessly. We cannot rebuild our American democracy without hardship, without sacrifice, and without suffering. For my part, I have nothing to offer you but blood and tears, toil and sweat.”

“Amateur hour,” Flynn said and switched off the radio.

Harry said, “He didn’t deliver it. He read it. Strike one. He wrote it himself, all by himself. Strike two. And he offered nothing to take away as a call to action. The news tomorrow will be that the Republican candidate is a long-standing liberal, and proud to say so. Strike three.”

He told Ed he had to run. He had a long evening coming up and needed a long nap to brace for it.

“What’s up?” Flynn said.

“I’ve got a date.”

“A date? With a woman?”

“Tallulah Bankhead.”

“You dog!”

“Well, it’s my birthday.”