THEN CAME THE WAR. And at once Mike knew his prayers had gone unanswered: his luck had run out. There was Before Pearl Harbor and After, and in the aftermath his job would never be the same.
Like the rest of the nation, Mike would always remember where he was when he learned about the Japanese surprise attack. Only he had the distinction of hearing the news before it reached even the president. Weekends in the White House were a slow time; a skeleton staff roamed through the corridors, and they went about in a relaxed walk, not the usual officious scurrying. On Sunday, December 7, 1941, Mike, on duty, found himself filling the empty afternoon sitting in the cubbyhole office of the mansion’s chief usher talking fishing; a young naval aide, resplendent in his gold-braided uniform, sat slouched in an adjacent chair with his eyes closed as though trying to sleep while his boss, the naval secretary, ate lunch in the next room with the president. The phone rang, and Wilson Searles, the usher, interrupted his long-winded tale about some pesky trout that’d gotten away to answer it. He listened, and then offhandedly passed the receiver to the aide, explaining, “It’s the Navy Department calling you.”
The young man pulled himself from his chair and put the phone to his ear. At once all his previous lassitude vanished, and, immediately alert, he was bellowing into the receiver, “My God, you don’t mean Pearl Harbor’s been bombed?” Searles’s story stopped in midsentence. Mike’s head snapped back, as if a roundhouse sucker punch had landed, which it had. The reeling naval aide couldn’t even manage to hang up the phone; it took him two tries before he succeeded in putting the receiver into the telephone cradle.
Then the initial shock passed, and they were on the move. The aide ran off to alert his boss and the president. At the same time Mike, careering down the carpeted mansion hallway like the right end he was a lifetime earlier, went straight to the White House switchboard. “Start calling in all the Secret Service men who are off duty,” he instructed the operator. “All the White House police, too.” Picking up a phone, he called Ed Kelly, Washington’s chief of police, telling him to send sixteen uniformed men over to the White House right away, and “don’t tell them why.” Next he started reaching out to his superiors. Mike couldn’t locate Colonel Ed Starling, the chief of the detail; Starling and his wife apparently were spending a sunny Sunday afternoon driving through the Virginia countryside. He did find Frank Wilson, the chief of the US Secret Service, who took the news with an icy calm, and then began tearing into Mike as if the war were somehow his fault. Finally, Mike spoke to Henry Morgenthau Jr., the imperious treasury secretary and the Secret Service’s ultimate boss, and, the way Mike remembered it, for once Morgenthau’s usual treacly reserve was overwhelmed. He let out a scream “as though stabbed.” Recovering, he ordered that the guard be doubled immediately. But before Mike could act on that, Morgenthau was back on the phone, demanding that the guard be quadrupled and machine guns issued all around.
It was at that moment, the phone pressed against his ear, that Mike saw the president being pushed in his wheelchair to the Oval Office. “His chin stuck out about two feet in front of his knees and he was the maddest Dutchman I—or anybody—ever saw,” he’d recall, the fierce countenance of the normally affable president locked in his memory. The Boss, he realized, was now a wartime commander in chief.
As the arriving agents and police officers were being deployed, Morgenthau showed up. He wanted to hear all the protective measures the detail had taken. Mike ran through them, but it didn’t seem the treasury secretary was paying much attention. Instead, his eyes kept darting to the White House’s windows. Mike was perplexed until he realized Morgenthau was searching the sky for enemy aircraft. For the first time Mike fully comprehended that now anything was possible.
The next day, Mike was summoned to Frank Wilson’s office. He didn’t know what to expect. He feared the head of the service was going to reprimand him for not having done enough to protect the Boss in the first chaotic hours of this new war. He was blindsided, then, when Wilson announced that Morgenthau had just signed an order promoting Mike to supervising agent of the president’s Secret Service detail.
At thirty-one, Mike found himself in charge of the safety of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the leader of a nation at war. The weight of his new responsibilities landed on his broad shoulders with a sudden, nearly crushing force. “It was something to give a man,” he’d admit without embarrassment, “cold shivers in the daytime and nightmares in bed. It did both.”
The Boss was no longer just “a high priority target” for the mentally unsound. At any moment the president could be, Mike imagined with a fresh shudder of dread, in the sights of “a regiment of Axis assassins.” Mike understood it would be his job “to outwit them.” And he knew they wouldn’t come armed with rubber knives.
SHOULD THE WHITE HOUSE BE painted black?
But would that be sufficient? Perhaps engineers also needed to alter the course of the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers. Even if the mansion were camouflaged, an enemy pilot could still follow these waterways; the building was, any map made clear, a measured mile from their confluence. It would be an easy bit of navigation.
Maybe, then, the only secure alternative was to relocate the president’s residence, find a home and office for him farther inland, away from the dangerous geography of the East Coast.
Such was the heightened anxiety in the uncertain days after America went to war that these precautions against aerial bombing attacks, as well as other similarly impulsive suggestions, were discussed with an earnestness that, only in retrospect, seems fantastic. Yet at the time the challenges were unprecedented. FDR was the first president who had to be protected against enemy nations that had aircraft that could fly across oceans to drop payloads of bombs or platoons of paratroopers from the sky above Washington. There were remote-controlled devices that, in the hands of spies or fifth columnists, could be detonated from a distance to blow up bridges, railroads, even buildings. And, if all the jittery rumors buzzing through the city were to be believed, the Nazis had high-powered rockets that could be shot off from faraway locations and strike with lethal accuracy. Mike’s overactive imagination was grinding out one horror after another, and yet he knew however preposterous they might seem, he could not afford to be contemptuous of any of them: too much was at stake. Guided as much by his fears as any firm military expertise, he threw himself into the multifaceted task of making sure the White House was put on a wartime footing.
Before the war, Mike’s persistent four-in-the-morning, staring-at-the-ceiling worry was fire. The White House, he judged with a professional’s unsentimental objectivity, was “the biggest firetrap in America, bar none.” Compounding his distress was the fact that the man he’d have to rescue from an inferno was unable to walk. FDR couldn’t make his own escape. Mike, therefore, had fire chutes installed in the president’s bedroom that (or so he tried to convince himself) would enable him to slide from a window to the White House lawn. And, a more realistic insurance against disaster, agents had also practiced, and practiced again, the procedure of grabbing the president from his bed and carrying him down a flaming staircase until they could do it blindfolded (which might as well have been the case if the flames and smoke were thick).
But that concern, Mike learned after his first wartime security conference with the building’s engineers, was nearly insignificant when measured against another cause for alarm. A bomb wouldn’t need to land directly on the White House; the tremors from even a near miss would cause the mansion, the engineers predicted with a dramatic certainty, to “crumble like a stack of cards.” The building, they explained, was constructed with mere oyster shell mortar and limestone blocks. It wouldn’t survive a bombing attack.
Spurred on by that unnerving appraisal, as well as by the horrifying mental image of Japanese planes unloading their bombs on the US Pacific fleet, Mike realized he needed to find a bomb shelter for the boss. At once. He swiftly located a suitable spot—only first he had to get the authorities to remove several tons of opium.
Across a narrow street from the White House stood the stately, stone-columned, neoclassical Treasury Department building. Years earlier in a more halcyon time, the department had built a huge vault constructed of heavy armor plates and reinforced with concrete beneath its marble halls. Its purpose, in part: to warehouse the nation’s reserves of opium. Under Mike’s direction (and after much more expert consultation with army, navy, and civilian engineers), the Federal Works Agency quickly began transforming this subterranean repository. Protective filters against chemical gases were installed. Escape hatches were carved out of the thick walls. And a zigzagging underground tunnel, with emergency exits scattered along the route, was hollowed out between the White House and the Treasury building. The president could be wheeled covertly from the mansion to the vault even in the midst of an aerial attack. (As for the tons of opium, Mike never knew where they wound up, yet he often wondered if the fumes still hung in the vault’s air. But then again, he mischievously suggested, any lingering medicinal effects might be welcome in case the day came when the nation’s capital was being blown sky-high.)
However, even as work began on this bomb shelter, Mike had no illusion that it was anything more than a stopgap measure. The president needed a safe place to hide without leaving the White House grounds. FDR grumbled that this was an unnecessary precaution, but then one morning as Mike, always persistent, made his case while the Boss was having his breakfast in bed, the president relented. Perhaps FDR realized that it would be easier to give in than to listen to Mike’s constant badgering. Or perhaps, while comfortably propped up in his bed, the inconvenience of having to be wheeled through a twisting underground tunnel whenever there was an alert became apparent. Whatever the reason, the president instructed, “Tell Horatio Winslow to see me today.” And before the day’s end, FDR and Winslow, the White House architect, had sketched out a preliminary schedule to begin construction on the long-discussed East Wing—only now this much-needed addition would contain not just offices, but also a huge basement bomb shelter fortified by sufficient walls of lead and concrete to hold up against even a direct hit. In a further display of wartime prudence, the president insisted there should be a vault within the shelter to house state documents that were vital to the continuity of the republic.
Dive-bombing enemy planes, however, were just one of Mike’s nightmares. He also worried about “Axis parachutists or an organized heavy fifth-column invasion” of the White House. And he had little confidence that even a beefed-up, machine gun–toting Secret Service detail could fend off a determined, well-organized attack. He shared this troubling scenario with the army, and the generals quickly got the point. After the initial discussion, though, the four-star chieftains’ possessiveness took over; they’d be damned if they were going to formulate their plans to protect the commander in chief with a civilian. So Mike sat back and watched as the military went to work to transform the White House into an impregnable wartime citadel.
Overnight, or so it seemed, a combat-ready infantry battalion from nearby Fort Myer was bivouacked on the once pristine lawn. Artillery and heavy machine gun fortifications were excavated. An antiaircraft battery was set up on the mansion’s roof, the long-barreled guns raised, Mike felt, as if already searching the sky for targets. And a crack unit of the Chemical Warfare Service took up residence in the building in case of a sudden gas or even biological weapons attack. When Mike asked if that was really necessary, he received a curt lecture: the Germans had cavalierly dispersed anthrax spores in the United States during the last war, and the Japanese are even more ruthless than the Huns. Of course it’s necessary. By the time the industrious generals were done, the only thing the White House lacked, Mike liked to joke, was a moat.
Yet as the war dragged on, as the burden of his responsibilities pressed down on him, Mike found himself thinking that maybe the idea of a moat was not so outlandish. Not at all.