Author Archives: Advocate

Roosevelt’s Secret War–FDR, Stalin, and Churchill

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The interactions of the “Big Three” have inspired several books, but once again the book by Joseph E. Persico ties what I see as the complete story together nicely. FDR had a much stronger affinity for Stalin than to Churchill.  He confided to Joseph Kennedy, his ambassador to Great Britain, that he had never liked Churchill from the beginning.  Churchill was open in his desire to maintain the British Empire, and Roosevelt was strongly opposed to imperialism. I was startled to read a quote from him in the book that he told Admiral Godfrey, the U.S. is going “…to show the Brits, Portuguese, and Dutch how to take care of those West Indies Islands. Every n—-r will have his two acres and a sugar patch.” On the other hand Roosevelt was strangely able to overlook the atrocities committed under Stalin. He knew that large numbers of people Stalin decided he couldn’t trust were summarily executed and millions of Ukrainians were intentionally starved.  Both Roosevelt and Churchill knew that Stalin had ordered the execution of thousands of Polish officers, but covered it up. FDR was somehow persuaded that he could work with Stalin and trust him.

Roosevelt early and often acted according to Stalin’s wishes. He had established diplomatic relations with the Soviets, and apparently was willing to accept the large numbers of spies that action brought into the country and his administration. He released Earl Browder, the head of the U.S. Communist party who had been convicted of passport violations. He took that action to placate Stalin, and it restored a key link in Russia’s spy chain in America. One of the strangest actions he took involved 1500 pages of Soviet cryptographic material and a codebook that had been sold to the Office of Strategic Service by Finland. FDR ordered the information to be returned to the Soviets without copying it, and there is a dispute whether it was copied or not. There is no dispute the Soviets were absolutely baffled about why the Americans had returned the information.  Secretary of State Edward Stettinius was said to have explained that FDR ordered to action because he wanted to do nothing to arouse Stalin’s suspicions.  

 Continue reading →

Spill the Beans

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The Phrase Finder describes that this expression means to divulge a secret either inadvertently or maliciously. One theory is that the expression had its origin with a voting system used in ancient Greece using white and black beans, with a single black bean preventing passage. If the collector spilled the beans before the vote was complete and a black bean was seen, the vote wasn’t counted. However, the phrase wasn’t recorded until in the early 20th century. “Spill was used in the 14th century with to mean spilling blood and killing, and it was used to mean divulge in the 16th century. It was used in U.S. in the 20th century to mean “spoil the beans” or “upset the applecart.”  It was first used in 1911 to mean upsetting a stable situation by talking out of turn.

Roosevelt’s Secret War, FDR and World War II Espionage, Part II

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Part I of the review of this book by Joseph E. Persico was about how FDR prepared the country for war, and how he reacted to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. This posting will focus on Roosevelt’s use of intelligence and intelligence services, and some of the impacts on the events of World War II.  Vincent Astor had become a friend and confidant of FDR after his crippling attack of polio. Astor and a group of wealthy friends had formed an organization to secretly collect gossip and informal intelligence that they called “The Room.”  One member was Kermit Roosevelt, the man who would engineer the CIA overthrow of the legitimate government of Iran in the early 1950’s.  Astor had done some amateur sleuthing in the Pacific for Roosevelt after FDR had become President, but the German attack of Poland brought Astor and The Room closer to FDR.  The group of adventure-seeking dilettantes reconstituted themselves as “The Club,” and began to increase their activities through various international banks.  This group appealed to FDR’s natural attraction to “cloak and dagger” intrigue.  FDR is characterized in the latter pages of the book as wanting to be like a secret agent who was “…a burglar with morals.”  He preferred to work with human sources over signals intelligence, or “humint” over “signit” in the shorthand of the trade.

Much of the book is about the various U.S. intelligence gathering services that seemed to spend almost as much effort trying to discredit the other organizations as they did trying to steal secrets from other countries.  Much of the in-fighting involved Bill “Wild Bill” Donovan. FDR had written a note in June 1941 authorizing a military central intelligence service with Donovan as the “coordinator of information,” or COI.  The organization was renamed Office of Strategic Services, or OSS.  It was the latest of 136 “emergency agencies” that FDR created.  However, this one began almost immediately to create friction with the other military intelligence agencies and J.Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Joseph Kennedy, Ambassador to Britain also wasn’t a fan of Donovan.  Continue reading →

Fed Up

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The Phrase Finder says that the expression means is to be tired of, bored with, annoyed with or in general to have enough of something or someone. There is an old English proverb that “enough is as good as a feast.” “Fed up” probably comes from the unpleasant feeling that comes from eating more than is good for us. The expression dates back to the 19th century when overfed aristocrats were compared to farm animals that were force fed to make them plump for market. There was a cynical section of an English newspaper article in The Middlesex Courier published in 1832 that argued a Duke could not have hanged himself, because he could not have possibly stood on a chair and tied the knot.  The writer observed about such aristocrats, ” Every thing being done for them, they never learn to do anything; they are fed up…”  Sometimes the expression is used in the extended forms “fed up to the eyeballs,” or “fed up to the back teeth.”

Roosevelt’s Secret War, FDR and World War II Espionage, Part I

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I’ve read several books about FDR, and this book written by Joseph E. Persico is, in my opinion, the best one. My parents were avid supporters of FDR, and I have been skeptical about why they felt that way. This book made me reflect that there were positive aspects of the man and his leadership that I hadn’t considered previously.  There is so much information in the book that I intend to break the review into several parts.  This part will describe how FDR prepared the country for war, and how he reacted to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Isolationists, such as Charles Lindberg, had a majority of popular support to avoid another war with the memories of the dead and maimed from World War I fresh in minds of Americans.  Roosevelt agreed with Churchill’s priority of finding a way to get the U.S. into the war before the Germans overran Britain, but he had to deal with the political reality that the country was not convinced that was necessary and the practical reality of the state of preparedness.  In 1940 the U.S. army ranked eighteenth in the world behind Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland.

Roosevelt strived to find ways to support the British while telling the American people that his intention was to remain neutral.  The depth of Roosevelt’s deception is illustrated by the “Tyler Kent” affair.  Kent was a code clerk attached to the U.S. embassy in London who was frustrated that his intellect wasn’t being used in his mundane job of decoding messages.  He was an anti-Communist Isolationist, and was reading exchanges between FDR and Churchill that clearly proved FDR was lying about how he was working to keep America out of the war.  Unfortunately for Kent and fortunately for FDR, Kent told some people he intended to provide documents he was copying to the press.  The British intelligence agency MI5 raided his apartment in May 1940 and found 1,929 documents. The content of the documents would likely have cost Roosevelt reelection if they had been revealed to the American public.  Roosevelt and Ambassador Kennedy denied Kent the diplomatic immunity to which he was entitled, and he was tried, convicted, and jailed. Continue reading →

To Peter Out

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This idiom is used to describe becoming exhausted, giving out, or giving up. Charles Funk in “A Hog on Ice” writes that Lincoln used the expression as a young man, and that the term appears to have originated in America. Mr. Funk speculates that it refers to the Biblical description of the apostle Peter reacting to the seizing of Jesus by grabbing a sword and rushing off to his defense. Within a few hours his enthusiasm has diminished to the point that he denied he even knew Jesus three times. However, the Phrase Finder writes that the term comes from American miners who in the mid 19th century would use it to describe dwindling yield for their efforts. The French word “peter” means to break wind, explode, or fizzle. Saltpeter is a name used for potassium nitrate, a component of gunpowder and fuses. The author speculates that last connection is the most logical explanation for how the expression found its way into the language of miners.