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

The President’s political sachems pleaded with him to hold up conscripting men at least until after the election. Sam Rosenman observed, “[A]ny old-time politician would have said [it] could never take place.” But Roosevelt insisted that the country’s preparedness took precedence over politics. On October 29 a dubious secretary of war, Henry Stimson, stood blindfolded before a huge fishbowl full of cobalt-colored capsules, each containing a number assigned to young men of draft age. Stimson’s blindfold had been cut from the cloth of a chair used at the signing of the Declaration of Independence. He reached his hand into the bowl, pulled out a capsule, and handed it to the President. “The first number,” Roosevelt announced soberly into the network microphones, “is one-fifty-eight.” The six thousand registrants across the country holding that number were to report for military duty.
    The President pledged, in a fervent speech at the Boston Garden in the last days of the campaign, “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” Chatting privately with his speechwriter Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt observed afterward, “If we’re attacked, it’s no longer a foreign war.” How close the President believed the country was to being drawn into the conflict is revealed in a transcript of a conversation with his staff captured by the concealed Oval Office recorder. It took place in the late afternoon of October 8, a time of day when the President liked to relax and ruminate. He spoke of a telegram that Roy Howard, of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, had received from a Japanese named Mitsunaga, chief of the Japanese press association. “Now this Mitsunaga fella wires to Roy,” the President began, “and says, ‘there will be no war with the United States’—I’m quoting from memory—‘on one condition, and one condition only’ (slams the desk), and that is that the United States will recognize the new era in not the Far East, but the East, meaning the whole of the East. Furthermore . . . and the only evidence of this recognition the United States can give is to demilitarize all its naval and air and army bases in Wake, Midway and Pearl Harbor! God! That’s the first time that any damn Jap has told us to get out of Hawaii!” The President paused theatrically, then made a comment that rang with premonition: “. . . [T]he only thing that worries me is that the Germans and the Japs have gone along, and the Italians, for, oh, gosh, five, six years without their foot slipping. Without their misjudging foreign opinion. They’ve played a damn smart game. [But] the time may be coming when the Germans and Japs will do some fool thing. That would put us in! That’s the only real danger of our getting in, is that their foot will slip.”
    On November 5, FDR won his precedent-shattering third term. Soon after, the clumsy and intrusive Oval Office eavesdropping device was shut down. The fourteen press conferences, together with several private conversations recorded, were not discovered until found accidentally by a historian, Robert J. C. Butow, while researching at the FDR Library in Hyde Park in 1978. After hearing them, the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. observed, “With all their technical imperfections, the tapes add a fascinating dimension to our sense of the Roosevelt presidency. They offer the historian the excitement of immediacy: FDR in casual, unbuttoned exchange with his staff. One is struck by how little the private voice differs from the public voice we know so well from the speeches. The tone is a rich and resonant tenor. The enunciation is clear, the timing is impeccable. The voice’s range is remarkable, from high to low in register and from insinuatingly soft to emphatically loud in decibel level.”
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