Joseph E. Persico by Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR, World War II Espionage Page B

separating East Prussia from the rest of Germany. The hounding of the Jews in Germany—the gradual stripping away of their citizenship, their property rights, their very right to earn a livelihood—was in full flood well before the war broke out. And Hitler had turned Germany into the most powerful military force in Europe. Roosevelt accepted what the isolationists did not, that Britain’s fight was the good fight and vital to all democracies. Even before the war, he had begun to nudge his nation away from purist neutrality. His Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jr., recorded in his diary what FDR told his staff in confidence on April 20, 1939: “He . . . says that he is going to have a patrol from Newfoundland down to South America and if some submarines are laying there and try to interrupt an American flag and our Navy sinks them, it’s just too bad. . . . If we fire and sink an Italian or German . . . we will say it the way the Japs do, ‘So sorry. Never happen again.’ Tomorrow we sink two.”
    The President repeated his intention in a private conversation with Britain’s King George VI during a visit to the United States in June 1939, an occasion now remembered more for the hot dogs served to the royal couple at Hyde Park than for strategies discussed. The king later wrote of his visit that FDR had promised full support if Britain went to war against Germany. Roosevelt also repeated his covert plan for a naval patrol in the Western Hemisphere, “about which he is terribly keen,” the king wrote. “If he saw a U-boat he would sink her at once and wait for the consequences.”
    Roosevelt’s subsequent redefining of the frontiers of the Western Hemisphere was mind boggling. In an age of airplanes and swift ships, he claimed, having the traditional three-mile limit define the hemisphere’s extent was obsolete. He summoned the State Department’s geographer to the White House to consider a more up-to-date sphere within which the Monroe Doctrine would prevail—that is, where no foreign intrusion would be tolerated. The geographer watched stunned as the President drew a north-south line on a map on his desk running from Iceland to the Azores. Henceforth, FDR said, these Portuguese islands should be considered part of the Western Hemisphere.
    Still, as he leaned toward Britain, the President was constantly looking over his shoulder. Every pro-British move needed to be cloaked by stealth and subterfuge. A perception that he was a war lover could prove politically lethal, especially as he wrestled over the decision as to whether to break the two-term tradition and run for a third term. He liked to say that he was weary of the killing burdens of his office and longed for the tranquility of Hyde Park. He told Senator George Norris, who had stopped by to see him, “People come in here day after day, most of them trying to get something from me, most of them things I can’t give them, and wouldn’t if I could. You sit in your chair in your office too, but if something goes wrong or you get irritated or tired, you can get up and walk around, or you can go into another room. But I can’t, I am tied down to this chair day after day, week after week, and month after month. And I can’t stand it any longer. I can’t go on with it.” But Eleanor Roosevelt read her husband better than he read himself. She told an interviewer, “When you are in the center of world affairs, there is something so fascinating about it that you can hardly see how you are going to live any other way. In his mind, I think, there was a great seesaw: on one end, the weariness which had already begun, and the desire to be at home and his own master; on the other end, the overwhelming interest which was the culmination of a lifetime of preparation and work, and the desire to see and to have a hand in the affairs of the world in that critical period.”
    Should he