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

faced the British naval blockade. The resilient Davis hoped to resume the sale of oil by engineering a peace plan. Just before noon on September 15, FDR greeted a well-dressed, white-haired, ruddy-faced visitor oozing the manners of the Old South. Davis had expected to see Roosevelt alone, but found him with Adolf Berle. FDR had called Berle the day before, as soon as Lewis had hung up, and told him to be on hand so that “a careful record be had of the conversation” with Davis. Berle had already warned Roosevelt that he considered Davis a Nazi agent and the State Department had a dossier on the man dating back to 1928. Still, FDR listened to Davis’s proposal. Through his overseas contacts, the oilman explained, he had become close to Hermann Göring. In fact, just days before, the Führer’s deputy had cabled him to sound out the President about a peace proposal. “The Germans desire to make peace,” Davis told FDR, “provided certain of their conditions were met.” The President nodded in rhythm with his visitor’s words, a gesture commonly misinterpreted to mean agreement, when it signaled only that he was listening. The Hitler regime wanted to know, Davis explained, “whether the President might not either act as arbitrator or assist in securing some neutral nation who might so act?”
    It was not FDR’s style to turn off any source of information; and so he led Davis on, telling him that he already had “various intimations that he might intervene in the European difficulty,” but he would have to be invited officially by a government before acting. Davis saw an opportunity to meet that condition. He told the President that the Germans wanted to confer with him again within the next eleven days. Would the President want him to report back when he returned from Europe? “Naturally, any information that would shed light on the situation would interest me,” the President answered, and the meeting ended.
    Given his tainted credentials, Davis’s peace mission, not surprisingly, withered. The indefatigable finagler, however, simply altered course 180 degrees. He knew that the Nazis loathed Roosevelt. In his meeting with Göring, he assured him that, through his influence with the powerful John L. Lewis, any bid by Roosevelt for a third term could, with enough money, be defeated. Göring liked that. Roosevelt might throw an occasional bone to American neutralist public opinion, but his anti-Nazi sentiments were all too obvious and their depth confirmed by the secret FDR-Churchill correspondence known to the Germans through Tyler Kent’s leaks. Goering estimated that, should Roosevelt decide to run, it would cost up to $150 million to defeat him. The blustering Reichsmarschall told Davis that he was prepared to spend whatever it took. Göring next brought the scheme to Hitler and won the Führer’s enthusiastic consent. In a final meeting with Davis, Göring promised to send soon the first installment of cash to defeat a Roosevelt reelection bid. Germany clearly lacked the foreign exchange to provide anything like the sums that Göring mentioned. Yet, he did manage to scrape together enough for the first gambit. The sum of $160,000 was funneled through Davis to an unidentified Pennsylvania Democratic politician who was to use the money to bribe his state’s delegates to the July Democratic convention to oppose FDR.
    Right until the convention, Roosevelt had continued to remain coy about his intentions regarding a third term, keeping even his closest intimates guessing. He stayed at the White House during the sweltering humidity of a Washington heat wave and listened, no doubt with a certain bemusement, as Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky read the message he had sent to the delegates in Chicago. He had, FDR said, “no wish to be a candidate again,” and “all the delegates to this convention are free to vote for any