But the menace of warfare lurked not just on European land—we, too, were in the middle of very grave danger as the ship plied the cold gray swells of the northern Atlantic. The crew warned me, their expressions grim and unblinking, that we were passing through waters thick with the dreaded Nazi U-boats and torpedoes. Sensing the unsettled nerves of everybody aboard the ship, dreading the piercing sound of the alert bulletins that crossed the radios in the high-pitched music of beeps and dashes, I preferred to stay in my stateroom most of the time, taking my meals in private. I did force myself to walk the decks at least twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon before supper, if only to get some fresh air and show solidarity with my crew. But I trembled whenever I looked out over the water, thinking about the thicket of destruction that lurked beneath the deceptively calm surface. Please, I prayed, choosing to fix my eyes to the sky instead, please let me make it home to my girls.
As if to scream ever louder the fact that I was crossing a war front, British RAF bombers thundered over our heads at regular intervals, patrolling from the skies for Nazi movement below. A week into our crossing, we passed a tanker with a scorched English flag, the ship’s scarred carcass roiling in flames, having been fired on by some menace either below the surface or above it. I stared in horror, studying the ghost of a ship, its crew already gone—hopefully in lifeboats, but there was no way to know. As I passed near the captain’s quarters to return to my stateroom, I heard the radio clicking away, SOS alerts and warnings of German activity all around us.
When at last New York Harbor came into view, I nearly wept in relief. I felt weak, having had little appetite during the trip and even less sleep. I wanted nothing more than to open the front door of my home, pull my girls into my arms, and collapse with them into my big plush bed.
But my relief was only a partial one because of my worried longing for Joe. And because I knew—even as I stared gratefully at our gleaming Manhattan skyscrapers and the blithe, bright faces of the people who walked the busy streets, oblivious of the swastika that was crawling like a poisonous spider across an entire continent—that I had crossed the Atlantic in just a matter of days. Surely it would not take long for the war to make that same crossing.
Chapter 41
New York
1939
“What are they doing?” Joe railed, his voice crackling across a long-distance line from Belgium. “Has Molotov completely lost his head?”
Hitler, rather than stopping with the Sudetenland as promised, had kept marching right across Czechoslovakia, wiping the entire nation off the map. And Stalin, rather than being alarmed by this Nazi encroachment farther east, appeared suddenly to welcome German aggression, having even gone so far as to sign a pact of friendship with Berlin. The main Russian architect behind this Nazi-Soviet accord? None other than our onetime friend and dinner guest, Vyacheslav Molotov.
Joe sounded mad enough over the phone, but the truth was that both he and I were devastated. All that we had worked for in Moscow, all of our efforts to cultivate friendship and trust with the Russians had been torn asunder and replaced by their alliance with Hitler. I didn’t see how the picture in Europe could appear less hopeful.
But then, that fall, the Nazis barreled into Poland, catching us all, it felt, in our sleep. It was being called a blitzkrieg—a lightning war—and to read about it in the papers, you’d see Poland had in fact been devastated by a pounding storm. France and England scrambled, hastily declaring war after years of hoping for peace. Italy, Spain, and Russia joined the side of the Nazis. All of Europe was seething, and the war promised to be worse than anything anyone had ever seen.
* * *
—
With the declaration of war, everything changed for us. Belgium and Luxembourg would soon be casualties of Nazi aggression, gobbled up as satellite states to feed Hitler’s goose-stepping war machine. The Russians were lost to us as well, having chosen the Nazis’ side in exchange for the promise of land in Eastern Europe.
As disappointing as all of this was to my husband, who had made it his life’s purpose in recent years to prevent this exact scenario, there was one silver lining to the way things had fallen apart: Roosevelt knew that Joe could no longer best serve him over in Europe. Now that the Soviets were at war with the West, our president needed an adviser in the State Department who could counsel him on how to deal with the Russian menace, an expert who knew Moscow and its political machinery. My husband, FDR decided, was the perfect man for that job.
“He’s coming home!” I danced around the house waving the telegram, running into the staff kitchen and announcing the glorious news to anyone I found at home on that rainy afternoon in late autumn. Joe had wired to tell me he’d accepted Roosevelt’s job offer of Special Adviser to the Department of State, where he would counsel on Soviet policy and draw on the other European relationships he had spent years so skillfully cultivating.