Killing Patton The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General

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FENWAY PARK

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

NOVEMBER 4, 1944

9:00 P.M.

The man with five months to live surveys the joyous crowd, as he revels in the ongoing applause.

Unbeknownst to him, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is waiting to deliver the last campaign speech of his long and storied political career. Red, white, and blue bunting covers the stadium. The surface of the old ballpark is dark. Roosevelt stands tall atop the speaker’s platform in center field, stretched up to his full six-foot-two height, awash in the cheers of forty thousand Bostonians and bathed in brightness by giant spotlights shining down from atop the roof.

FDR has been president of the United States for nearly twelve long years—and is just days away from being elected to a record fourth term. He wears a gray fedora and thick gray overcoat on this brutally cold autumn night. His legs are withered and weak from the polio that has long ravaged his body. Even with steel braces encircling his hips, thighs, and knees, FDR must grip the lectern to balance himself.

“This is not my first visit to Boston,” Roosevelt reminds the crowd, gently trying to calm their boisterousness. The president’s subtle request for quiet is spoken into the microphone in that genteel upper-crust voice that these working-class men and women recognize from the radio.

But the good people of Boston refuse to sit down and let him speak. Most have never glimpsed the president in person until this moment. Indeed, many have only heard his voice and seen his picture in the Boston Globe.



President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

“Free admission,” reads the ticket that got them all into the ballpark on this cold Saturday night. “Bring your friends.”

And they did.

The voices of those cheering are made up of men too old to fight, veterans home on leave, rosy-cheeked young children, and “Gold Star” mothers—those mournful women who have lost a son in combat.

The night is being broadcast nationwide on the radio. Festivities began with the twenty-eight-year-old Italian American matinee idol Frank Sinatra singing the national anthem. Sinatra’s given name is Francis, but he claims that he was inspired to name his newborn son, Frank Jr., after the president. “What a guy,” Sinatra marvels after his performance, referring to Roosevelt. “And boy does he pack ’em in.”

Despite the adoration of the public, Roosevelt is not a man of the people. He was born into wealth and privilege and has never known hard labor. As a young man, FDR collected stamps and shot birds, which he then stuffed himself and put on display. These are his hobbies to this very day. The president still spends his free time tending to the more than one million stamps in his possession, and his ornithological collection is on display at the family home in Hyde Park. Somewhat ironically, he speaks fluent German, thanks to his early years of schooling in Germany, near the warm springs at Bad Nauheim, where his father temporarily moved the family so that the elder Roosevelt might recuperate from a heart problem. The cure did not take, and FDR’s father died when Franklin was just eighteen, leaving the future president a sizable inheritance that would ensure him a life of luxury. His wealth made him stuffy and elitist, even as his foppish behavior led his cousin Alice Roosevelt, daughter of Franklin’s macho distant cousin Teddy, to sneer that FDR was a “Good little mother’s boy.” She took to insulting FDR’s manhood even further by giving him the nickname Miss Nancy.1

At age twenty, Franklin married Eleanor Roosevelt, his fifth cousin and the niece of Teddy Roosevelt. While he was at first madly in love with Eleanor, he found his affection soon waned. FDR is a man who craves constant approval, and he chafed at Eleanor’s constant criticism. The range of her scorn included their bedroom activities. Although their fruitful marriage has produced six children, Eleanor once stated that sex with FDR was an “ordeal to be endured.” Their relationship is now a platonic political arrangement—as it has been since Eleanor caught Franklin having an affair with her social secretary almost thirty years ago.

The American people know none of this. Despite FDR’s upper-crust mannerisms, his public policies have done much to benefit the working class, and the folks love him. In Roosevelt, they see the man who led the nation out of a crippling economic depression. They see a president who brought the nation together in the devastating wake of the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. They see a president who has gone to great lengths to assist the German Jews who are now being persecuted in their homeland, even going so far as to recall the American ambassador to Germany, thus enduring the rage of American anti-Semites. And they see the commander in chief who has guided the country so skillfully through three long years of war. The good people of Boston have turned out in force this evening to show their gratitude.



Eleanor Roosevelt at work

“I shall not review all my previous visits. I should have to go on talking for several days to do that,” Roosevelt says into the microphone, the veteran politician making a joke in the hope that a ripple of laughter will get the people to sit down so that he might speak.

It doesn’t help. The cheering continues.

Outside Fenway Park, the crowd is even larger. The sidewalks are packed all the way out to Kenmore Square, about a quarter mile away. Some in the throng are able to brag that they were also on hand when the president’s cousin, former U.S. president Teddy Roosevelt, spoke at Fenway back in 1914, just as the First World War was breaking out in Europe.

But Teddy came in the summer, during the warmth of baseball season. This is different. Roosevelt has come at a time of freezing temperatures. On his way into Fenway just moments ago, sound wagons blaring patriotic songs preceded him. To counter rumors that he is in poor health, Roosevelt made sure the top was down in the Sunshine Special, as his bulletproof black Lincoln limousine is known. The president looked vigorous and strong, seemingly unbothered by the damp chill of the night air, as he drove into Fenway with famous actor and director Orson Welles sitting next to him in the backseat. “Nice lights,” Welles said in awe as the Lincoln turned left—appropriately, as the liberal president will joke with his Secret Service protection.

Welles was the warm-up act at Fenway, and did his job splendidly. With his deep, dramatic voice and Shakespearean delivery, Welles insisted that the nation must elect Roosevelt to a fourth term. The director, who has achieved lasting fame with the movie Citizen Kane, had Fenway at a fever pitch long before Roosevelt clambered as gracefully as possible to the lectern to speak.

Now comes a delicate moment for Franklin Roosevelt. He must maintain Welles’s momentum while hiding the fact that he is, in the language of the day, a cripple. In 1921, at the age of thirty-nine, he was afflicted with polio, a stunning blow to the privileged man. Since then, he has seen that great doses of funding have gone to cure the disease, but to no end. The president now spends his days in a wheelchair, a fact that can easily be concealed in pictures of him sitting behind his Oval Office desk or at the wheel of a car. But he is not completely paralyzed, and has never lost his roving eye. FDR maintains a bevy of mistresses—among them, his personal secretary; a sixth cousin; and even a former princess from Sweden. But there are no long walks in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s life. No hikes. No midnight rambles on the White House lawn.

The only time his paralysis becomes a serious issue is at moments like this, when tens of thousands of people are watching his every move. He must rise and stand so that not a soul outside his closest circle will ever know of his health problems.

Roosevelt has practiced and plotted and seen to the evening’s every last detail. His car was driven through the center field garage and straight up a ramp onto the speaker’s platform. When it came time to get out of the car and move to the lectern, he continued the ruse by holding a cane and leaning on the arm of an adviser. Since his legs will not move, Roosevelt must swing his hips from side to side in a much-practiced method of forward movement. He would never dare let this, or any, crowd know that he is paralyzed, for that would convey weakness.

In a time of world war, a man such as Roosevelt must be made of the same sturdy timber as Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin.

But there is a far greater truth behind Roosevelt hiding his affliction: America is not ready for a paralyzed president. A nation that is intolerant of racial differences is even more unable to come to terms with physical handicaps.

Truth be told, Roosevelt’s physical problems extend far beyond his polio. He suffers from hypertension. He has bronchitis. After a lifetime of smoking cigarettes, his lung function is compromised, and he often assumes a gray pallor. He cannot ride on a train traveling more than thirty-five miles per hour, because the atrophied muscles in his lower body are unable to absorb the vibration.

In a word, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is dying. The greatest cause is something he cannot even see: Roosevelt’s arteries are completely clogged and hardened, so much so that when he dies the embalmer will be unable to poke a needle into them.

Yet FDR now stands out in the cold, just like any veteran politician seeking reelection. This is something he must do. The race between him and Republican nominee Thomas Dewey is just too close. So he endures a cold Boston night, just as he endured a four-hour car ride through New York City in the rain two weeks ago. Nothing must stop him from reelection.

“Radio time costs a lot of money,” Roosevelt finally barks into the microphone.

There is a moment of stunned silence.

This voice is not that of a frail old man, or of one who is tentative about speaking his mind.

It is the sound of ultimate authority.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, despite the physical maladies that have made him a shell of his former self, is the most powerful man in the world. His decisions will determine the fate of peoples and nations, and even the shape of the global map, for decades to come. So as Roosevelt talks, the people of his nation listen.

The crowd finally sits down.

* * *

Franklin Roosevelt speaks for thirty-five minutes before being bundled into his Lincoln and driven back to his train, the Ferdinand Magellan, by his Secret Service detail. His speech has been a rousing success, touching on a wide array of themes, including race relations, the rise of trade unions, and America’s diversity: FDR points out the fact that the U.S. Army is comprised of “the Murphys and the Kellys, the Smiths and the Joneses, the Cohens, the Carusos, the Kowalskis, the Schultzes, the Olsens, the Swobodas, and—right in with all the rest of them—the Cabots and the Lowells.”

He’s saying that everyone, from all strata of American society, is doing his part.

The massive fighting force that has banded together to battle its way across Europe is not just a combination of the established wealthy and the Irish, Italian, Jewish, Polish, and Scandinavian immigrants, but of blacks as well. To the people of Boston, most of whom come from Irish and Italian stock, and who can remember the words “Irish Need Not Apply” when seeking jobs, those words are a heartfelt reminder that the nation is changing for the better.

Not everyone believes this to be true. Many believed that FDR’s strategy of government-funded jobs and the public works projects of the New Deal were socialistic, even though they may have rescued the nation from the Great Depression. Roosevelt’s Republican opponent in the presidential election of 1944, New York governor Thomas Dewey, has relentlessly attacked FDR for promoting a form of “communism.”

But Franklin Roosevelt is not a Communist any more than Thomas Dewey plays center field for the Yankees. FDR is a natural leader whose foremost objective is to push the nation in a positive direction, first as governor of New York in 1928, and then during the legendary “First 100 Days” as president in 1933, when he realized that drastic experiments in government were required to halt a four-year economic slide that was being called the Great Depression.

The American Dream had evaporated. One fourth of all American workers were out of a job. Banks were failing. Poverty was epidemic. The American people felt that they were on their own. The government to whom they paid taxes and the men they voted into office were either unwilling or unable to fix the problems. Millions of Americans were desperate, families were falling apart, and prosperity looked as if it might never return.

Working closely with Congress, Roosevelt crafted a series of fifteen bills that fixed the banking system and made possible a number of monumental public works projects designed to put Americans on the job. Thus began the long climb back to prosperity. Republicans and Democrats set aside their differences and worked closely to get Roosevelt’s ideas passed into law. They enacted the legislation so quickly that comedian Will Rogers joked on the radio that Congress didn’t vote on the bills, “they just wave at the bills as they go by.”

FDR’s social experiments have worked. The American Dream has been revived, and the nation is reaching new heights of prosperity because of the production necessary during World War II. But those new laws also drastically expanded the size and reach of the federal government. This has made some voters angry. More than 150 years since Americans fought for independence and deposed a king, the specter of a powerful authority controlling private lives is alienating many citizens, and Dewey feeds that discontent by comparing large government with the oppression of communism.

Tonight in Fenway, Roosevelt fires back. He speaks out against communism, distancing himself and his administration from what many in the world—even Adolf Hitler—perceive as the world’s greatest threat. “We want neither communism nor monarchy,” Roosevelt tells the crowd. “We want to live under our Constitution.”

But Roosevelt says nothing about which sort of government will rule postwar Europe. One thing is for certain: thanks in part to him, communism will play a very large role.

Winston Churchill isn’t the only one making deals with Joseph Stalin. Franklin Roosevelt has made any number of secret arrangements with the Soviet leader dividing the postwar world between America and the Communist Soviet Union. Giving eastern Poland to the Soviets is just a start.

The high-stakes nature of the global intrigue being played out in Washington, Moscow, London, and Berlin means that FDR can trust very few people. It’s quite clear, however, that he needs someone to represent him in this new, turbulent world. Even if FDR were not president of the United States, his physical handicaps do not allow him to parachute behind enemy lines. His world-famous jaunty profile does not allow him to go undercover. And the constraints of his office do not allow him to perform the unethical work of political assassination or other messy intrigues.

But war is war, and lethal things must be done. So Roosevelt has appointed one special individual to do the dirty work. The man’s name is William “Wild Bill” Donovan.

At age sixty-one, Donovan is just a year younger than the president. The two have known each other since they were classmates at Columbia Law School. But there the similarities end. Roosevelt is a liberal while Donovan is a staunch conservative Republican. Roosevelt is in failing health; Donovan is so robust and larger-than-life that he seems bulletproof. And while Roosevelt is happiest basking in the adulation of a large crowd, the swaggering Donovan prefers to work in the shadows. Even before the war began, Roosevelt brought in this quick-thinking former attorney and Medal of Honor2 winner to be his global eyes and ears—and Donovan has done a spectacular job.

As Roosevelt gives his speech in Fenway on this cold Saturday night, Wild Bill is busy sabotaging America’s relationship with Winston Churchill and Great Britain—in order that the United States and the Soviet Union can achieve a tighter bond.

Donovan’s location seems innocuous enough. He is at home in Washington, DC, safe and secure in his tony Georgetown mansion on Thirtieth Street. Donovan has a sizable fortune, and lives a lavish lifestyle that would make few suspect he is America’s top spy.

Yet Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS, as this covert group of top-secret operatives he commands is known) is in constant contact with him. While he might be relaxing at home, Donovan is well aware that troops of the Soviet Red Army are rolling into Yugoslavia on board American tanks, trucks, and jeeps. Donovan soon orders that ten tons of medical supplies be flown into the Balkans at U.S. expense, an extravagance that will assist the Communist takeover. The OSS is also sowing seeds of discord in Greece, the country that Winston Churchill covets more than any other.

Thus begins a sideshow to the war itself: the undercover battle led by William Donovan and the OSS to ensure that Eastern Europe fall into the hands of Soviet Russia. Above all else, FDR does not want a confrontation with the Soviet Union. He thinks of Joseph Stalin as his friend, and a true ally. Better to let Stalin have a part of the world where the United States has few interests. And even when Winston Churchill complains that the Soviet expansion is hurting England, it is explained to him that Donovan is out of control—and unstoppable. “I have always been worried by his predilection for political intrigue,” Gen. Walter Bedell “Beetle” Smith, one of Dwight Eisenhower’s top staff members, writes to Churchill about Donovan, “and have kept a firm hand on him so he keeps away from me as much as possible.”

But Wild Bill Donovan reports only to the president of the United States.

* * *

Two weeks after that triumphant night in Fenway Park, Franklin Delano Roosevelt relaxes in the White House, safely reelected to a fourth term. No other American president has ever served this long.

Roosevelt sits at his Oval Office desk in his wheelchair, the one specially built to look as much as possible like a normal piece of office furniture. The day is not a busy one, not beginning until almost noon with a private meeting with British admiral James Somerville, a war hero who has just been assigned to Washington as head of Britain’s naval delegation. Later on there will be a brief reception with a group of female newspaper correspondents and a small formal dinner for fourteen guests in the cavernous East Room of the White House. The affair will be short, lasting from 7:30 to precisely 9:00 p.m. Roosevelt will rattle around the White House for three more hours after that, but the time will be unstructured, unplanned, and completely his own. November 18, 1944, will mark that rarest of all days for a wartime president: one without crisis.

But today will one day be seen to hold monumental significance, thanks to a memo Roosevelt now grasps in his hand. Typed and organized into a single sheet in the form of a letter, it arrived between appointments. The memo comes straight from the desk of Wild Bill Donovan, who has scrawled his signature at the bottom. Roosevelt personally requested this piece of paper on October 31. Its highly confidential contents will soon get leaked, through no fault of Roosevelt’s, and he will be forced to defend Donovan when the newspapers report that the OSS chief is trying to create an “American gestapo.”

When that moment comes, Roosevelt will have no choice but to distance himself from Donovan in the same manner as Beetle Smith. Noting to an aide that Donovan loves “power for its own sake,” Roosevelt will try to “find a way to harness that guy, because if we don’t he’ll be doing a lot of things other than what we want him to do.”

But Roosevelt has no intention of stopping Donovan, because Wild Bill is doing what FDR wants.

“Pursuant to your note of October 31, 1944,” Donovan writes, “I have given consideration to the formation of an intelligence service for the postwar period.

“Though in the mist of war, we are also in a period of transition,” he adds. “We have now in the government a trained and specialized personnel needed for the task.”

Neither Roosevelt nor Donovan has any further concern about the German army. The war will soon be won; that is a foregone conclusion. And just as Donovan once traveled the globe at Roosevelt’s behest in the days before Pearl Harbor, warning that the United States should expand its navy and army in anticipation of the day it would join the war, Roosevelt now asks him to see the future once again. Both men anticipate that another great conflict might follow once Germany is defeated. But rather than suffer another surprise attack, as at Pearl Harbor, Donovan is pressing Roosevelt to allow him to design a new postwar intelligence agency that will anticipate clear and present dangers. In the absence of openly belligerent enemies, this new agency’s role will be to spy on America’s friends as well as her adversaries.

Roosevelt endorses the new group. His typewritten reply is signed, simply, “FDR.”

And so the Central Intelligence Agency is born.

* * *

As history will show, both Roosevelt and Donovan are taking their eyes off the ball much too early. Adolf Hitler and the armies of Nazi Germany are far from conquered. As Wild Bill Donovan strategizes about postwar power consolidation, Wehrmacht soldiers, guns, and tanks are quietly grouping near the German border. They do so under strict radio silence, lest the Americans hear their chatter and anticipate the biggest surprise attack since Pearl Harbor.

The Germans face west, toward the American lines, and the thick wilderness in Belgium known as the Ardennes Forest. It is here that U.S. forces are weakest, because it is assumed that an attack through this primeval wood is impossible. To tilt the odds even further in the Germans’ favor, it has been ascertained that George Patton and his Third Army are more than one hundred miles southeast, still in dire need of gasoline, guns, and soldiers—and still unable to conquer Metz.

Hitler and his generals are sure that Operation Watch on the Rhine will be a successful counterattack that not even the great George Patton can thwart. The Nazis are poised to turn defeat into victory with this counterattack and the development of a new atomic weapon that Hitler believes is almost ready.

The Führer is still certain of ultimate victory.

Very certain.