In the Garden of Beasts Read Online Free PDF Page B

job. Two days later Roosevelt placed Dodd’s appointment before the Senate, which confirmed him that day, requiring neither Dodd’s presence nor the kind of interminable hearing that one day would become commonplace for key nominations. The appointment attracted little comment in the press. The New York Times placed a brief report on page twelve of its Sunday, June 11, newspaper.
    Secretary Hull, on his way to an important economic conference in London, never had a voice in the matter.Even had he been present when Dodd’s name first came up, he likely would have had little say, for one emerging characteristic of Roosevelt’s governing style was to make direct appointments within agencies without involving their superiors, a trait that annoyed Hull no end. He would claim later, however, that he had no objection to Dodd’s appointment, save for what he saw as Dodd’s tendency to “get out of bounds in his excess enthusiasm and impetuosity and run off on tangents every now and then like our friend William Jennings Bryan. Hence I had some reservations about sending a good friend, able and intelligent though he was, to a ticklish spot such as I knew Berlin was and would continue to be.”
    Later, Edward Flynn, one of the candidates who had turned down the job, would claim falsely that Roosevelt had phoned Dodd in error—that he had meant instead to offer the ambassadorship to a former Yale law professor named Walter F. Dodd. Rumor of such a mistake gave rise to a nickname, “Telephone Book Dodd.”

    NEXT DODD INVITED his two grown children, Martha and Bill, promising the experience of a lifetime. He also saw in this adventure an opportunity to have his family together one last time. His Old South was important to him, but family and home were his great love and need. One cold December night when Dodd was alone on his farm, Christmas near, his daughter and wife in Paris, where Martha was spending a year of study, Bill away as well, Dodd sat down to write a letter to his daughter. He was in a gloomy mood that night. That he now had two grown children seemed an impossibility; soon, he knew, they would be venturing off on their own and their future connection to him and his wife would grow inevitably more tenuous. He saw his own life as nearly expended, his Old South anything but complete.
    He wrote: “My dear child, if you will not take offense at the term? You are to me so precious, your happiness through this troubled life so near to my heart that I never cease to think of you as a buoyant, growing child; yet I know your years and admire your thought and maturity. I no longer have a child.” He mused upon “the roads ahead of us. Yours just beginning, mine so far advanced that I begin to count the shadows that fall about me, the friends that have departed, other friends none too secure of their tenure! It’s May and almost December.” Home, he wrote, “has been the joy of my life.” But now everyone was scattered to the far corners of the world. “I can not endure the thought of our lives all going in different directions—and so few years remaining.”
    With Roosevelt’s offer, an opportunity had arisen that could bring them all together again, if only for a while.

CHAPTER 3
The Choice
    G iven the nation’s economic crisis, Dodd’s invitation was not one to be accepted frivolously. Martha and Bill were lucky to have jobs—Martha’s as assistant literary editor of the Chicago Tribune , Bill’s as a teacher of history and a scholar in training—though thus far Bill had pursued his career in a lackluster manner that dismayed and worried his father. In a series of letters to his wife in April 1933, Dodd poured out his worries about Bill. “William is a fine teacher, but he dreads hard work of all kinds.” He was too distractible, Dodd wrote, especially if an automobile was anywhere near. “It would never do for us to have a car in Chicago if we wish to help him forward his studies,” Dodd wrote. “The