Read Jack 1939 for Free Online Page A

full of foreign mail the State department saved for him each week, so he could cull the stamps, when there was a knock on the door.
    It was Sam Schwartz, the head of his Secret Service detail.
    “Tell me something, Sam.”
    “Mr. President?”
    “Did I, at any time, to the best of your recollection, require J. Edgar Hoover to investigate Joseph P. Kennedy, the ambassador to the Court of St. James’s?”
    “
Investigate
him, sir?” Schwartz looked puzzled. “You mean his manipulation of the stock market years ago? Our boys over at Treasury have turned that inside and out. We couldn’t touch Kennedy. There weren’t enough laws on the books then to cover what he did.”
    “Poking around in his private life, Sam. Following him off-hours. Checking up on the people he chooses to . . .
entertain
. That sort of thing.”
    “No, sir,” Schwartz replied with distaste. “To my recollection, you have never asked the FBI to investigate Mr. Kennedy in that way. Perhaps Mr. Hoover . . . fell into it, when you asked for the background report on Mr. Kennedy’s son.”
    “Charitable of you, Sam. But they’re different people, surely? Edgar keeps files, you know. Secret ones. Full of scandalous information. He’s very diligent in compiling them. A bit of blackmail will always be useful.”
    “That’s not right, sir.”
    “Edgar doesn’t waste time on what’s right—he concentrates on what’s legal. And in my experience, that’s whatever the FBI
decides
is legal. Makes you wonder,” Roosevelt added, “whether he has a file on you. Or my children. Or me
.
”
    “I doubt that, sir!”
    “Why?” He eyed his bodyguard. “If he has the dirt on one of the wealthiest men in America, why not the President?”
    Schwartz’s stolid face was shocked. “
Because
you’re the president!”
    Roosevelt laughed mirthlessly. “I bet he tapped Kennedy’s phones in Palm Beach. God, those transcripts would make some reading! Sam, I think it would be as well if you and Casey and Foscarello swept my bedroom for whatever it is that taps phones. Hell, sweep the whole White House for the damn things.”
    “Bugs, sir?”
    “Bugs.”
The word delighted him; it suggested something telling about Hoover’s mind.
    He turned his wheelchair toward his desk and rolled slowly across the study floor. “Edgar thinks the Germans know we’ve discovered their secret cash network. And that they’re shutting it down as a result.”
    “Hitler doesn’t shut down, Mr. President.”
    “Agreed. You think Edgar’s too eager to declare victory, Sam?”
    “It’d serve his purpose.”
    “Which is?” Roosevelt demanded.
    “To make himself indispensable. First he threatens you with a plot, then he blows it sky-high and calls himself a hero. Remember General Butler?”
    “How could I forget?”
    Major General Smedley Darlington Butler was a man Roosevelt admired. Once the youngest major general in the Marine Corps and twice a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, he’d been forced to retire by Roosevelt’s predecessor, Herbert Hoover, for publicly denouncing Benito Mussolini as a “mad dog.” When the Italian ambassador complained, then-president Hoover threatened the general with court-martial. Butler stood by his words—and was forcibly retired.
    In 1934, Butler came to J. Edgar Hoover with a bizarre story: He’d been tapped by two prominent American Legion officials to lead an armed march of half a million veterans on Washington, protesting the New Deal. The men in question had just returned from Europe, where they’d been studying the formation of Germany’s Nazi Party, the Italian Fascisti, and the French Croix de Feu. They were struck, Butler said, by the critical role army veterans had played in the founding of these political movements—and felt there was a place for such an organization in the United States. It would save America from the Communist Menace. If Roosevelt opposed them, he’d be removed by force, along