Presidential Agent Page 5

  “You are certain that Hitler means war?”

  “Many of my friends cannot believe it, and I put it to them this way: A man who is poor starves himself and spends all his time and labor to build a bicycle. What are you to assume about his purposes? Do you assume that he is intending to sail on the sea? Or to play music? Or to give his friends a banquet? No, because you cannot sail on a bicycle, nor play tunes on it, nor eat it. A bicycle is good for only one thing, to ride a bicycle; every part of it is made for that, and no part of it is good for anything else whatever.”

  Lanny told of conversations with his client and host, the head of the Luftwaffe. Hermann Göring was a man of many pleasures but of only one business, which was preparing to make war from the air. Lanny described the huge new office building of the Air Force in Berlin, with three thousand rooms; he told about the airports with hangars hidden underground—Robbie Budd had visited one at Kladow, and had been staggered by the completeness of it. Said the son: “Robbie thinks the fat general is making a grave mistake by building short-range fighter planes when he should have bombers to bring England to her knees. But Hermann only laughs and winks. What he means, of course, is to put troops ashore in England and fly those planes from English fields.”

  “How can he do it while the English control the seas?”

  “He expects to do it by parachutes, and by submarines and dive-bombers sinking the British fleet. He figures that it won’t take long to ferry troops across twenty miles of water, and they will be specialists, with weapons the like of which has never been seen in the world before.”

  “The reports I get differ widely, Lanny. I’d like very much to know the real numbers of the German Air Force; I mean actual first-line planes of the different types.”

  “I think my father comes pretty near to knowing those figures. But you must bear this in mind, Governor—what counts at this stage is not so much the number of planes as the machine tools, the jigs and dies, the stocks of aluminum and rubber and so on. Hitler isn’t ready for war yet, and won’t be for two or three years. Meantime he tries one bluff after another, but is ready to back down before any strong move of Britain or France.”

  “The British tell me they daren’t move, because they’re not prepared.”

  “That is the statement of public men who have lost the habit of action. Military expenditure in Germany now is two and a half times that of Britain. What good does it do to delay when you’re falling behind at that rate?”

  V

  Twice Lanny offered to leave, but the President wouldn’t let him. “I’ll sleep late,” he said; then, grinning like a schoolboy playing hooky: “I have a cold and won’t be able to keep appointments.” He lighted one cigarette after another in the long thin holder—certainly not a therapeutic procedure—and went on asking questions about the old continent which was managing its affairs so badly and might again be calling upon America for help. F.D. had discovered here another self, a self that had lived abroad and knew all the people who were in the headlines there. It was as if the morning newspaper had come suddenly to life, and the persons in it stepped out and started talking.

  “Tell me about Hitler,” said the President; so Lanny described that strange portent, half-genius, half-madman, who had managed to infect with his mental sickness a whole generation of German youth.

  “Years ago I made a remark in a woman friend’s hearing: ‘There will be nothing to do but kill them.’ The remark horrified her so that I promised never to make it again. But it is literally true; they are a set of blind fanatics, marching, singing, screaming about their desire to conquer other peoples; it is their God-given destiny, and they have no room for any other idea in their heads. They have a song: ‘Today Germany belongs to us, tomorrow the whole world.’ The German word for belongs is gehört, while the word hört means hears; so in Germany they sing ‘belongs to us’ and abroad they sing ‘hears us,’ which sounds less alarming. That is typical of the Nazi technique. Hitler has written in his book that you can get any lie believed if you repeat it often enough; and especially if it’s a big lie—because people will say that nobody would dare to tell one as big as that. It is no exaggeration to say that he has made Germany into a headquarters of the Lie; he has told so many and so often that nobody in his country has any means of distinguishing truth from falsehood.”

  Lanny described the Führer in the early days of his movement, coming onto the platform of a crowded beer cellar in Munich, the living image of Charlie Chaplin with his tiny dark mustache and ill-fitting pants. In those days he always wore a rusty brown raincoat; he was the proletarian leader, the rabble-rouser, the friend of the common man. “People here make a grave mistake,” Lanny said. “They think of Nazism as a reactionary movement, an effort of the capitalist class to put down labor and the Communists; but Nazism was a revolutionary movement—that is the only way any movement can get power nowadays. Hitler promised the redistribution of landed estates without compensation, the abolition of what he called ‘interest slavery,’ the whole program of populist revolt.”

  “We had such a man in this country—Huey Long.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t meet him.”

  “Believe me, I did! He was all set to be my successor. He once had me waked up at one in the morning to give me hell over the telephone from Baton Rouge for some appointment he didn’t like. I refused to cancel it and he was my mortal enemy forever after.”

  “There will be others like him,” replied Lanny, “unless we solve the problem of poverty in the midst of plenty. The German middle classes, the little men like Hitler, were being wiped out, and he offered a millennium, also a scapegoat, the Jews. When he got the votes, he took them to the big industrialists and sold them for more campaign funds.”

  That aspect of the movement had few secrets for Lanny, because his father, a steel man himself in those days, had heard the German steel men talking about the sums they were turning over to their new political boss. “Thyssen alone put up five million marks.”

  “And now he’s very unhappy, I am told,” remarked the President.

  “Don’t let that fool you. Hitler is a wild horse and has taken the bit in his teeth—but he’s galloping in the direction the big industrialists want him to go. They are finding it a wild ride, but they expect to arrive at their destination, which is the integration of the industry of the Continent and its control from Berlin.”

  “Control by the Hitler gang?”

  “But under the rules of the big business game. A big industrialist wants to turn out unlimited quantities of goods, and have an unlimited market for them at what he calls ‘fair’ prices, that is, prices which allow him a profit. He wants to take these profits and reinvest them in his plants and turn out more goods, and so on, over and over—he calls it the ‘turnover,’ and as long as he can make it he’s happy. That is the situation in Germany for every man who can produce war goods; also for every worker who has any sort of skill. Naturally, they all think it is herrlich, and that the Führer who has brought this about is some sort of magician, or an emissary from on high.”

  “It is really Hitler who is directing it?”

  “It is the technical men of German industry, and the officers of the general staff of the Wehrmacht. They are probably the most highly trained military men in the world, and of course it is herrlich for them, because for the first time all German industry, both capital and labor, does exactly what they, the members of the Herrenklub, direct. Emil Meissner, Kurt’s brother, is a member of that club. He was doubtful of Schicklgruber, the demagogue, but now he worships Hitler, the inspired master of the German destiny. I have seen Emil rise from lieutenant to general in less than twenty-five years, and today he is probably the happiest man I know; he has everything exactly the way he wants it. The Communists, the Socialists, the democrats and pacifists are all dead or in concentration camps; every good German is hard at work, living frugally and investing his savings in government bonds; and all the money the wizard Schacht can create
is going into the building of that bicycle I was telling you about a while ago, the machine on which the German Army is going to ride to world mastery.”

  “It is a terrible picture you paint, Lanny.”

  “I assure you, Governor, I am no painter. I am only a transporter of paintings. When I come on one that seems to me worth while, I bring it to this country and show it to my friends. The most important one for you to look at is the picture of this German war machine being tried out in Spain. Hitler is sending his tankmen, his artillerymen, and above all his airmen there in relays; nobody stays more than three or four months, just long enough to learn the new techniques of swift and deadly mechanized war; then he goes back to Germany, and tells it to his superior officers, and on the training fields in the Fatherland he teaches it to hundreds of others. The Italians are doing the same, but they’re not so good; they don’t really like war and nobody can make them. But the Nazis like nothing else, and the result is going to be that they will have a large army of trained and eager professionals, while all the other peoples, except perhaps the Japanese, will be bungling amateurs. The Nazis are training some of their stormtroopers right here in America; I have seen them in New York, and they may be doing it even in Washington. You tell me you can’t prevent what is happening in Spain, Governor, but surely you ought to be able to do something in America.”

  Said the President: “I think I can assure you we’re not entirely overlooking that part of our duty.”

  VI

  It was after two in the morning when the great man released his visitor. The last thing he said was: “Make your reports as short as you can. One man sent me a long one, and when he asked if I had read it, I told him I hadn’t been able to lift it!”

  He pressed a button, and told his colored valet to summon Gus Gennerich. The man came promptly, and escorted Lanny out of the building by the same door they had entered. The rain had stopped, the moon had come out, and Lanny said: “It will be a pleasant day.” The reply was: “Looks like it.” Evidently this ex-policeman didn’t consider it his duty to make conversation with “P.A.’s.” He drove Lanny to his hotel.

  Much later that same morning the art expert turned secret agent set out on the crowded highway to Baltimore, He reached New York before sundown, having approached the city by the Pulaski Skyway, and crossed the George Washington Bridge. He was heading for Newcastle, Connecticut, for he had already engaged steamer passage and desired as much time as possible with his father.

  He had phoned that he was coming, and there was always a warm welcome for him. He had allowed his “Pink” ideas to sink into the background and be forgotten; he had kept his second marriage secret, and to his stepmother and half-brothers and their families he was the art expert and man of the world, lover of music and friend of famous and important people. He didn’t mention that Franklin D. Roosevelt had been added to the list. He talked, instead, about his art adventures, and especially about the Murchisons, whom Robbie knew. To fly to the Adirondacks for a week-end was a decidedly swanky thing, and Lanny’s half-nephew, Robert Budd III, piped up: “Why don’t you build us some passenger planes, Grandfather?”

  Grandfather was sixty-three, an age at which most men think of retiring; but Robbie Budd was just getting ready to conquer the world, by way of the air above it. As a preliminary, he had more than once conquered himself. In his youth he had been “wild,” or so his stern Puritan father had judged him. Lanny was the product of that wildness, and as a result was still looked upon askance by the older generation of Budds; they were a long-lived and long-memoried tribe. Again, a decade or so ago, Robbie had been “playing the market” heavily, and drinking much more than was good for him as a result of the strain, also of the bitterness in his heart against his father and his oldest brother.

  But now all that was over; Robbie’s father was no more, and Robbie was on his own, nourishing colossal hopes. He had broken with Budd Gunmakers, which had been taken over by a Wall Street crowd and was making mostly hardware and “specialties.” Robbie’s heart was set on the dream that some day the new firm, his creation, would have a bigger turnover and pay higher dividends than the family firm which had been wrested from them.

  Robbie Budd lived and breathed and ate and talked airplanes: catwalks and bulkhead segments, stabilizers and de-icers, sub-assemblies and spot-checking—a whole new vocabulary which the members of his household had to learn. Robbie’s conscientious wife, who had suffered at the spectacle of his weaknesses and had even had to take Lanny into her confidence, now shared his high ambitions, and did everything to encourage and help him: inviting the plant engineers to dinner, and even studying the highly technical reports which determined the obsoleteness of the B-EP10 and the expected supremacy of the B-EP11.

  Robbie Budd was a football and polo player who had taken to golf, and had added fifty pounds and a load of dignity. His gray hair became his florid complexion; his manner was hearty, and he enjoyed talking, provided it was with some person who liked to listen to what Robbie liked to talk about. If left to himself, he might have grown slouchy, but his wife kept him in order by the simple device of causing his used garments to disappear and new and spotless ones to be in their place. She kept his home the same way, causing cigar stubs and ashes and used whisky glasses to disappear. The house was large and elegant, but slightly suggestive of a Puritan meeting-house, with plain papered walls and furniture of the sort which Esther’s forefathers had made. On the walls of the drawing-room hung several paintings by Arnold Böcklin which Lanny had found in Germany, knowing that they would please his stepmother because they embodied or were supposed to embody philosophical ideas.

  VII

  Into this household came Lanny on his secret errand. He must get his father to talking, and carefully guide the conversation to the subjects which had been listed for him by That Man in the White House—who was Robbie’s pet peeve and the embodiment of all evil and destructive tendencies of the time. Lanny mustn’t make the mistake of showing too much interest in any one subject; he must let his father ramble along. No notes could be made, but Lanny would fix names and figures in his memory, go to his room and jot them down, and then come back for another load.

  It seemed a mean sort of job, spying on one’s father. But Lanny wasn’t going to report anything which could do Robbie any harm; he was only going to harm the cause which Robbie had taken for his own, the cause of bigger profits for businessmen all over the land; also the maintenance of that autocratic control of industry which Robbie considered essential to its progress, and which Lanny considered a menace to the higher sorts of progress, political, social, intellectual. There was no use arguing the point, no use trying to reconcile or explain two opposite points of view. Nobody could tell Robbie Budd that the workers had any capacity or any right to meddle with the control of industry; Robbie considered that the workers belonged exactly where they were and were getting exactly as much pay as they were worth. Robbie didn’t really consider them competent to have anything to say about politics either, but he was reconciled to that system, having found that he could make deals with the political bosses in his town and county and state. He hadn’t been able to control the Presidency or the Congress, in spite of expensive efforts in combination with other Republican big businessmen; they had tried their best and a few months ago had got a sound licking. Now every time Robbie thought about it he got so hopping-mad that it made his veins swell out dangerously.

  Lanny had to say to himself: “I am a traitor to my family’s ideas; I am a snake in the grass.” He had to say the same thing in the home of his ex-wife and her friends in England, and with most of the fashionable ladies and gentlemen who came to his mother’s home on the French Riviera. He had to take with them the pose of art lover and ivory-tower dweller to whom politics was a base trade, far beneath a gentleman’s notice. He had to listen to the expression of the most reactionary opinions, and if someone asked him a direct question: “What do you think about it, Mr. Budd?”—or Herr Budd, or Mo
nsieur Budd as the case might be—he had to be ready with some playful answer, something that would pass for a mot in the smart world: “Well, all sorts of people manage to make politics pay, and I suppose we shouldn’t be too much surprised if labor tries the same thing.”

  VIII

  What Lanny did with his father was to ask how things were going in the plant; his father told him they had just installed the “mating jigs” for the new model. Lanny expressed interest in this odd form of the reproductive process, with the result that Robbie offered to take him and show him the latest devices. Next morning he was escorted through that quite extensive plant which had sprung up in a few months on what had until recently been a mosquito-breeding marsh. He gazed down from a balcony into a great room which appeared to be a jungle of complex machines, each one beating and pounding out its own individual tune. Lanny knew, of course, that every machine had been placed exactly on a spot which engineers had measured to the hundredth part of an inch; he knew that the motions of those machines were determined in some cases to the hundred-thousandth part of an inch, and that the finest watch had never been built with such care as the pieces of steel and aluminum and magnesium and what not which were here being stamped or ground or polished amid such a variety of sounds that it all became one, an infinitude of racket which, so Lanny was assured, the ears of the workers soon ceased to record at all.

  Down a long line appeared, in process of growth, a row of swift and deadly fighter planes which would be able to hurl themselves through the air at the rate of a mile every fifteen seconds or less. There weren’t nearly as many on that assembly-line as Robbie had hoped to see, and the line wasn’t moving fast enough to please him; but he stubbornly clung to the belief that old Europe was soon going to war, and then everybody would be calling for Budd-Erling pursuits. Robbie had seen it magically happen in Paris at the end of July 1914, and Lanny had been there, helping as well as a precocious lad could do. Neither had forgotten any detail of it, and so now they could talk to each other in shorthand. Robbie said: “God knows I’m not asking for it, but it’s coming.” Lanny wondered: Was it humanly possible to stake one’s whole fortune on a gamble, and in one’s secret heart not be hoping to win?