In the Garden of Beasts

March 15, 1933, during a sojourn at his Virginia farm, he went to Washington to meet with Roosevelt’s new secretary of state, Cordell Hull, whom he had met on a number of previous occasions.Hull was tall and silver haired, with a cleft chin and strong jaw. Outwardly, he seemed the physical embodiment of all that a secretary of state should be, but those who knew him better understood that when angered he had a most unstatesmanlike penchant for releasing torrents of profanity and that he suffered a speech impediment that turned his
r
’s to
w
’s in the manner of the cartoon character Elmer Fudd—a trait that Roosevelt now and then made fun of privately, as when he once spoke of Hull’s “twade tweaties.” Hull, as usual, had four or five red pencils in his shirt pocket, his favored tools of state. He raised the possibility of Dodd receiving an appointment to Holland or Belgium, exactly what Dodd had hoped for. But now, suddenly forced to imagine the day-to-day reality of what such a life would entail, Dodd balked. “After considerable study of the situation,” he wrote in his little pocket diary, “I told Hull I could not take such a position.”
    But his name remained in circulation.
    And now, on that Thursday in June, his telephone began to ring. As he held the receiver to his ear, he heard a voice he recognized immediately.

CHAPTER 2
That Vacancy in Berlin
    N o one wanted the job. What had seemed one of the least challenging tasks facing Franklin D. Roosevelt as newly elected president had, by June 1933, become one of the most intransigent. As ambassadorial posts went, Berlin should have been a plum—not London or Paris, surely, but still one of the great capitals of Europe, and at the center of a country going through revolutionary change under the leadership of its newly appointed chancellor, Adolf Hitler. Depending on one’s point of view, Germany was experiencing a great revival or a savage darkening. Upon Hitler’s ascent, the country had undergone a brutal spasm of state-condoned violence. Hitler’s brown-shirted paramilitary army, the Sturmabteilung, or SA—the Storm Troopers—had gone wild, arresting, beating, and in some cases murdering communists, socialists, and Jews. Storm Troopers established impromptu prisons and torture stations in basements, sheds, and other structures. Berlin alone had fifty of these so-called bunkers. Tens of thousands of people were arrested and placed in “protective custody”—
Schutzhaft
—a risible euphemism. An estimated five hundred to seven hundred prisoners died in custody; others endured “mock drownings and hangings,” according to a police affidavit. One prison near Tempelhof Airport became especially notorious: Columbia House, not to be confused with a sleekly modern new building at the heart of Berlin called Columbus House. The upheaval prompted one Jewish leader, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise of New York, to tell a friend, “the frontiers of civilization have been crossed.”
    Roosevelt made his first attempt to fill the Berlin post on March 9,1933, less than a week after taking office and just as the violence in Germany reached a peak of ferocity. He offered it to James M. Cox, who in 1920 had been a candidate for president with Roosevelt as his running mate.
    In a letter laced with flattery, Roosevelt wrote, “It is not only because of my affection for you but also because I think you are singularly fitted to this key place, that I want much to send your name to the Senate as American Ambassador to Germany. I hope much that you will accept after talking it over with your delightful wife, who, by the way, would be perfect as the wife of the Ambassador. Do send me a telegram saying yes.”
    Cox said no: the demands of his various business interests, including several newspapers, compelled him to decline. He made no mention of the violence wracking Germany.
    Roosevelt set the matter aside to confront the nation’s worsening economic crisis, the Great Depression, which by that spring had put a third of the nation’s nonagricultural labor force out of work and had cut the gross national product in half; he did not return to the problem until at least a month later, when he offered the job to Newton Baker, who had been secretary of war under Woodrow Wilson and was now a partner in a Cleveland law firm. Baker also declined. So did a third man, Owen D. Young, a prominent businessman. Next Roosevelt tried Edward J. Flynn, a key figure in the