In the Garden of Beasts

possible.”
    By the summer of 1937, Dodd was reporting near continuous headaches and bouts of digestive trouble that in one case caused him to go without food for thirty hours.
    Something more serious than the stress of work may have lain at the root of his health troubles, though certainly stress was a contributing factor. George Messersmith, who eventually moved from Vienna to Washington to become an assistant secretary of state, wrote in an unpublished memoir that he believed Dodd had undergone an organic intellectual decline. Dodd’s letters rambled and his handwriting degraded to the point where others in the department passed them to Messersmith for “deciphering.” Dodd’s use of longhand increased as his distrust of his stenographers grew. “It was quite obvious that something had happened to Dodd,” Messersmith wrote. “He was suffering from some form of mental deterioration.”
    The cause of all this, Messersmith believed, was Dodd’s inability to adjust to the behavior of Hitler’s regime. The violence, the obsessive march toward war, the ruthless treatment of Jews—all of it had made Dodd “tremendously depressed,” Messersmith wrote. Dodd could not grasp how these things could be occurring in the Germany he had known and loved as a young scholar in Leipzig.
    Messersmith wrote: “I think he was so thoroughly appalled by everything that was happening in Germany and the dangers which it had for the world that he was no longer capable of reasoned thought and judgment.”
    AFTER A WEEK on his farm, Dodd felt much better. He went to Washington and on Wednesday, August 11, met with Roosevelt. During their hourlong conversation, Roosevelt said he’d like him to stay in Berlin a few months longer. He urged Dodd to do as many lectures as he could while in America and “speak the truth about things,” a command that affirmed for Dodd that he still had the president’s confidence.
    But while Dodd was in America the Pretty Good Club engineered a singular affront. One of the embassy’s newest men, Prentiss Gilbert, standing in as acting ambassador—the chargé d’affaires—was advised by the State Department to attend the upcoming Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg. Gilbert did so. He rode in a special train for diplomats whose arrival in Nuremberg was greeted by seventeen military aircraft flying in swastika formation.
    Dodd sensed the hand of Undersecretary Sumner Welles. “I have long believed Welles was opposed to me and everything I recommended,” Dodd wrote in his diary. One of Dodd’s few allies in the State Department, R. Walton Moore, an assistant secretary of state, shared Dodd’s distaste for Welles and confirmed his fears: “I have not the slightest doubt that you are correct in locating the influence that has been determining very largely the action of the Department since last May.”
    Dodd was angry. Staying clear of these congresses was one of the few ways he believed he could signal his, and America’s, true feelings about the Hitler regime. He sent a pointed and—he thought—confidential protest to Secretary Hull. To Dodd’s great dismay, even this letter was leaked to the press. On the morning of September 4, 1937, he saw an article on the subject in the
New York Herald Tribune
, which excerpted an entire paragraph from the letter, along with a subsequent telegram.
    Dodd’s letter incensed Hitler’s government. The new German ambassador to America, Hans-Heinrich Dieckhoff, told Secretary of State Hull that while he was not making a formal request for Dodd’s removal, he “desired to make it plain that the German Government did not feel that he was
persona grata.
”
    ON OCTOBER 19, 1937, Dodd had a second meeting with Roosevelt, this at the president’s home inHyde Park—“a marvelous place,” Dodd wrote. His son Bill accompanied him. “The President revealed his anxiety about foreign affairs,” Dodd wrote in his diary. They discussed the Chinese-Japanese conflict, then in full flare, and the prospects of a major peace conference soon to take place in Brussels aimed at bringing it to an end. “One thing troubled him,” Dodd wrote: “Could the United States, England, France and Russia actually co-operate?”
    The conversation shifted to Berlin. Dodd asked Roosevelt to keep him in place at least until March 1, 1938, “partly because I did not wish to have the German extremists think their complaints … had operated too effectively.” He was under the