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obstacle,” as Judge Proskauer stated in a letter to Undersecretary Phillips.
    Phillips took offense at Proskauer’s depiction of consuls as obstacles. “The consul,” Phillips replied, gently chiding, “is only concerned with determining in a helpful and considerate manner whether applicants for visas have met the requirements of law.”
    One result, according to Proskauer and other Jewish leaders, wasthat Jews simply did not apply for immigration to the United States. Indeed, the number of Germans who applied for visas was a tiny fraction of the twenty-six thousand allowed under the annual quota set for the country. This disparity gave officials within the State Department a powerful statistical argument for opposing reform: how could there be a problem if so few Jews applied in the first place?It was an argument that Roosevelt, as early as April 1933, appeared to accept. He also knew that any effort to liberalize immigration rules might well prompt Congress to respond with drastic reductions of existing quotas.
    By the time of his lunch with Dodd, Roosevelt was acutely aware of the sensitivities at play.
    “The German authorities are treating the Jews shamefully and the Jews in this country are greatly excited,” Roosevelt told him. “But this is also not a governmental affair. We can do nothing except for American citizens who happen to be made victims. We must protect them, and whatever we can do to moderate the general persecution by unofficial and personal influence ought to be done.”
    THE CONVERSATION TURNED to practicalities.Dodd insisted he would live within his designated salary of $17,500, a lot of money during the Depression but a skimpy sum for an ambassador who would have to entertain European diplomats and Nazi officials. It was a point of principle for Dodd: he did not think an ambassador should live extravagantly while the rest of the nation suffered. For him, however, it also happened to be a moot point, since he lacked the independent wealth that so many other ambassadors possessed and thus could not have lived extravagantly even if he had wanted to.
    “You are quite right,” Roosevelt told him. “Aside from two or three general dinners and entertainments, you need not indulge in any expensive social affairs. Try to give fair attention to Americans in Berlin and occasional dinners to Germans who are interested in American relations. I think you can manage to live within your income and not sacrifice any essential parts of the service.”
    After some additional conversation about trade tariffs and arms reductions, the lunch came to an end.
    It was two o’clock. Dodd left the White House and walked to the State Department, where he planned to meet with various officials and to read dispatches filed from Berlin, namely the lengthy reports written by Consul General George S. Messersmith. The reports were disconcerting.
    Hitler had been chancellor for six months, having received the appointment through a political deal, but he did not yet possess absolute power. Germany’s eighty-five-year-old president, Field Marshal Paul von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg, still held the constitutional authority to appoint and remove chancellors and their cabinets and, equally important, commanded the loyalty of the regular army, the Reichswehr. By contrast to Hindenburg, Hitler and his deputies were surprisingly young—Hitler only forty-four, Hermann Göring forty, and Joseph Goebbels thirty-six.
    It was one thing to read newspaper stories about Hitler’s erratic behavior and his government’s brutality toward Jews, communists, and other opponents, for throughout America there was a widely held belief that such reports must be exaggerated, that surely no modern state could behave in such a manner.Here at the State Department, however, Dodd read dispatch after dispatch in which Messersmith described Germany’s rapid descent from democratic republic to brutal dictatorship. Messersmith spared no detail—his