In the Garden of Beasts

the storm of clashing passions whirling through Berlin that spring, the gravest danger to Diels arose from the fact that he continued to resist choosing a side and as a result was distrusted in varying degrees by allcamps. He grew sufficiently paranoid that he believed someone was trying to poison him.
    Martha had no objection to spending more time with Diels. She liked being associated with him and having the insider’s view he afforded her. “I was young and reckless enough to want to be as closely in on every situation as I possibly could,” she wrote. But again, she possessed what Diels did not, the assurance that as the daughter of the American ambassador she was safe from harm.
    A friend warned her, however, that in this case she was “playing with fire.”
    Over the weeks that followed, Diels stayed close to Martha and behaved, she wrote, “like a frightened rabbit,” though she also sensed that a part of Diels—the old confident Lucifer—reveled in the game of extricating himself from his predicament.
    “In some ways the danger he thought he was in was a challenge to his slyness and shrewdness,” she recalled. “Could he outwit them or not, could he escape them or not?”

CHAPTER 35
Confronting the Club
    D odd’s ship arrived at quarantine in New York harbor on Friday, March 23. He had hoped that his arrival would escape notice by the press, but once again his plans were frustrated. Reporters routinely met the great ocean liners of the day on the presumption, generally valid, that someone of importance would be aboard. Just in case, Dodd had prepared a brief, five-sentence statement, and he soon found himself reading it to two reporters who had spotted him. He explained that he had come back to America “on a short leave … in order to get some much-needed rest from the tense European atmosphere.” He added, “Contrary to the predictions of many students of international problems, I feel fairly certain that we shall not have war in the near future.”
    He was heartened to find that the German vice consul in New York had come to meet the ship bearing a letter from Hitler for delivery to Roosevelt. Dodd was especially pleased that his friend Colonel House had sent his “handsome limousine” to pick him up and bring him to the colonel’s Manhattan home at East Sixty-eighth Street and Park Avenue to wait for his train to Washington, D.C.—a lucky thing, Dodd wrote in his diary, because taxi drivers were on strike “and if I had gone to a hotel the newspaper folk would have pestered me until my train for Washington departed.” Dodd and the colonel had a candid talk. “House gave me valuable information about unfriendly officials in the State Department with whom I would have to deal.”
    Best of all, soon after his arrival Dodd received the latest chapter ofhis
Old South
, freshly typed by Martha’s friend Mildred Fish Harnack and sent via diplomatic pouch.
    IN WASHINGTON, DODD CHECKED into the Cosmos Club, which at the time stood on Lafayette Square, just north of the White House. On his first morning in Washington, he walked to the State Department for the first of many meetings and lunches.
    At eleven o’clock he met with Secretary Hull and Undersecretary Phillips. All three spent a good deal of time puzzling out how to respond to Hitler’s letter. Hitler praised Roosevelt’s efforts to restore America’s economy and stated that “duty, readiness for sacrifice, and discipline” were virtues that should be dominant in any culture. “These moral demands which the President places before every individual citizen of the United States, are also the quintessence of the German State philosophy which finds its expression in the slogan, ‘The Public Weal Transcends the Interests of the Individual.’ ”
    Phillips called it a “strange message.” To Dodd, as well as to Hull and Phillips, it was obvious that Hitler hoped to draw a parallel between himself and Roosevelt and that the obligatory U.S. reply would have to be drafted very carefully. That task fell to Phillips and Western European affairs chief Moffat, the goal being, Moffat wrote, “to prevent our falling into the Hitler trap.” The resulting letter thanked Hitler for his kind words but noted that his message applied not to Roosevelt personally but rather to the American people as a whole, “who have freely and gladly made heroic efforts in the interest of recovery.”
    In his diary Phillips wrote, “We sought to