Hours before Joseph E. Persico was to give a background interview at the Council on Foreign Relations, he agreed to meet with PW at the Tuscany Hotel in the Turtle Bay neighborhood of New York City. As PW's correspondent searched for Persico's room, visions of sinister Nazi spies, straight out of the film noir classic The House on 92nd Street, lurked behind every crevice of the dimly lit, deserted hotel floor. All thoughts of cutthroat spies evaporated, however, as Persico, affable, mustachioed and impressively tall, warmly greeted his guest.
Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage (Random House), Persico's latest, is largely the story of Franklin Roosevelt's obsession with spies and intelligence and how that led to the establishment of the Office of Strategic Services under William "Wild Bill" Donovan. And the book, to a great extent, is a paean to FDR. "I had grown up during the Roosevelt era," says Persico. "I was always a great Roosevelt fan and I always wondered, what could I write about him that hadn't been done? It seemed to me there was nothing new to say about Franklin Roosevelt. I had also written widely in the intelligence field, and at one point I just sat down at my computer and I pulled up the catalogue of the Library of Congress, and I said, let's see if anything has related Franklin Roosevelt to intelligence operations during the war, and I can combine two interests. I found nothing connecting him to espionage during the war. So I made one of two conclusions, either I was brilliant and thought of something that no one else thought of, or I was a damn fool chasing a wild goose."
Persico draws a detailed personal portrait of FDR: a man who smoked 40 Camels a day in a cigarette-holder, a lover of gossip and mystery novels who could mix a mean martini and who ended December 7, 1941, which he called a day of infamy, with a sandwich and a beer. "This is something I like to do," says Persico about these homely little facts. "These are telling details—they make somebody come to life. Most of my research, the meat of my research, was done at the Roosevelt archive at Hyde Park. History just oozes out of his home and the library. I never became blasé about being there and working there."
The other star of the book is Donovan, the legendary leader of the Fighting Irish 69th Infantry Regiment of World War I. And although FDR and Donovan both loved the spy game—everything from surveillance to turning spies into counterspies and dirty tricks that would delight Nixon—they were different in many ways. "Politically, they were not alike," says Persico. "Donovan was a staunch Republican. He had run for governor of New York pretty much as an anti—New Dealer, anti-Roosevelt candidate. But Bill Donovan had been an authentic hero of World War I, Medal of Honor winner, fabulously successful Wall Street lawyer, a guy who was full of irrepressible optimism, energy, boldness, and this mirrors FDR. Roosevelt is drawn often to this type of swashbuckling figure because I think it's a vicarious expression for a wheelchair-ridden individual who used to lead a very dashing life."
Roosevelt, always the master manipulator, seduced Donovan into the government by reminding him that he was denied the attorney generalship by President Herbert Hoover in 1929 because he was a Roman Catholic. "What that story tells me," says Persico, "is the fabulously retentive mind that Roosevelt had. He was very sensitive to people's feelings, their prejudices, their strong and weak points. And he knew this had to be very pleasing to Donovan, to have this past injustice rectified. Franklin Roosevelt was genial, affable, charming, but tough as nails."
Persico vehemently defends FDR from the slew of recent historians who claim that he knew in advance that an attack was imminent at Pearl Harbor. "The case for the revisionists in my eye falls apart under the lens of logic," says Persico with passion. "Why do people write this kind of history? Because the truth is often dull, inconsistent, illogical, messy, and conspiracy theories are tightly wound, they're spine-tingling and they're wonderful to read about."
The similarities between December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001, are not lost on Persico. "The most obvious parallel is the utter unexpectedness of each attack," says Persico. "Why were we so pitifully unprepared? In the case of Pearl Harbor, no one was really analyzing this bundle of intelligence. We were breaking the Japanese diplomatic code. Roosevelt and his chief cabinet people were fed just raw data. No one was taking these jigsaw pieces and putting them together. And further, we had no one on the ground. We had nobody inside Japan. We had no spies. And essentially, the same criticisms are leveled today in our unpreparedness for September 11."
Although Persico is a staunch admirer of the Democratic Roosevelt, he worked for 11 years as a speechwriter for a Republican who ran for president several times, but always fell short: Nelson Rockefeller, the former governor of New York. "I was with him for two of his last gubernatorial terms," he recalls, "then went down to Washington when he was vice-president under Jerry Ford." His biography of Rockefeller, The Imperial Rockefeller (1982), is a fascinating insider's look at the man who would be president.
Persico also worked with another high-powered Republican, Colin Powell, as collaborator on Powell's autobiography, My American Journey. As he does Roosevelt and Rockefeller, Persico clearly admires the secretary of state and the difficult job he is trying to do. "I will yield to nobody in my admiration for Colin Powell as a public figure and as a human being. I have the highest regard for him. He has this worldwide reputation for integrity, which is important in building these coalitions that we're trying to create now."
