In the Garden of Beasts

sidestep the impression that the President was becoming a Fascist.”
    The next day, Monday, March 26, Dodd strolled to the White House for lunch with Roosevelt. They discussed a surge of hostility toward Germany that had arisen in New York in the wake of the mock trial earlier in the month. Dodd had heard one New Yorker express the fear that “there might easily be a little civil war” in New York City. “The president also spoke of this,” Dodd wrote, “and asked me, if I would do so, to get Chicago Jews to call off their Mock Trial set for mid-April.”
    Dodd agreed to try. He wrote to Jewish leaders, including Leo Wormser, to ask them “to quiet things if possible” and wrote as well to Colonel House to ask him to exert his influence in the same direction.
    As anxious as Dodd was to get to his farm, he did relish the prospect of a conference set for early that week at which he at last would have the opportunity to bring his criticism of the policies and practices of the Foreign Service directly to the boys of the Pretty Good Club.
    HE SPOKE BEFORE an audience that included Hull, Moffat, Phillips, Wilbur Carr, and Sumner Welles. Unlike in his Columbus Day speech in Berlin, Dodd was blunt and direct.
    The days of “Louis XIV and Victoria style” had passed, he told them. Nations were bankrupt, “including our own.” The time had come “to cease grand style performances.” He cited an American consular official who had shipped enough furniture to fill a twenty-room house—and yet had only two people in his family. He added that a mere assistant of his “had a chauffeur, a porter, a butler, a valet, two cooks and two maids.”
    Every official, he said, should be required to live within his salary, be it the $3,000 a year of a junior officer or the $17,500 that he himself received as a full-fledged ambassador, and everyone should be required to know the history and customs of his host country. The only men sent abroad should be those “who think of their country’s interests, not so much about a different suit of clothes each day or sitting up at gay but silly dinners and shows every night until 1 o’clock.”
    Dodd sensed that this last point struck home. He noted in his diary, “Sumner Welles winced a little: the owner of a mansion in Washington which outshines the White House in some respects and is about as large.” Welles’s mansion, called by some the “house with a hundred rooms,” stood on Massachusetts Avenue off Dupont Circle and was renowned for its opulence. Welles and his wife also owned a 255-acre country estate just outside the city, Oxon Hill Manor.
    After Dodd concluded his remarks, his audience praised him andapplauded. “I was not fooled, however, after two hours of pretended agreement.”
    Indeed, his lecture only deepened the ill feelings of the Pretty Good Club. By the time of his talk, some of its members, most notably Phillips and Moffat, privatelyhad begun to express real hostility.
    Dodd paid a visit to Moffat’s office. Later that day Moffat wrote a brief assessment of the ambassador in his diary: “He is … by no means a clear thinker. He will express great dissatisfaction with a situation and then reject every proposal to remedy it. He dislikes all his staff but yet does not wish any transferred. He is suspicious by turns of nearly everyone with whom he comes in contact and a little jealous.” Moffat called him “an unfortunate misfit.”
    Dodd seemed unaware that he might be conjuring forces that could endanger his career. Rather he delighted in pricking the clubby sensibilities of his opponents. With clear satisfaction he told his wife, “Their chief protector”—presumably he meant Phillips or Welles—“is not a little disturbed. If he attacks it certainly is not in the open.”

CHAPTER 36
Saving Diels
    T he fear Diels felt grew more pronounced, to the point where in March he again went to Martha for help, this time in hopes of using her to acquire assistance from the U.S. embassy itself. It was a moment freighted with irony: the chief of the Gestapo seeking aid from American officials. Somehow Diels had gotten wind of a plan by Himmler to arrest him, possibly that very day. He had no illusions. Himmler wanted him dead.
    Diels knew he had allies at the American embassy, namely Dodd and Consul General Messersmith, and believed they might be able to provide a measure of safety by expressing to Hitler’s regime their interest in his continued