The Chameleon (10 page)

William Henry Harrison IV, called Harrison by his wife, Ophelia, and his close friend Franklin Delano Roosevelt, expertly dismounted his horse. He was exuberantly greeted by his prized Airedale terriers, Tippecanoe and Tyler, wagtail references to his direct descent from a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a Virginia governor, and two United States presidents, one of whose campaign motto inspired the call names of his purebred dogs. Harrison affectionately rubbed their short-haired necks with both hands and gamely accepted their wet tongues on his cheek. His son, carrying the heavy mantle of his highly respected father's name with the Roman numeral V affixed to it (he thanked God hardly anybody called him “Cinq” anymore), dismounted with a little less expertise and joined him at the stone mounting post in front of the stables connected to the main house by a worn russet brick path just two hundred yards long.

“Harry.” The elder Harrison beckoned. “Let's have a word before we lunch with Mother.” Both Ophelia's handsome husband and gawky twenty-two-year-old son called her by the same maternal title even in their most personal moments.

Traditions and obligations had long since replaced mere middle-class emotions at Charlotte Hall, the pastoral piece of real estate where they resided. The estate was more than cobbled gray stones and manicured green hedges where stoic-faced servants served highballs at dusk and weathered stone lions guarded whispered family secrets and lush sprawling lawns. It was a cherished way of life even with all its codified rules of behavior and pecking orders. For the Harrisons, Charlotte Hall was a refuge, a place of order and beauty in which they could shield themselves from the noisy confusions of everyday life. Decorated with inherited furniture and hung with sepia-tinted photographs and oil portraits of Harrison's eminent ancestors, the house stood like an emblem to the best of the past, secure in the notion that it would always be so. The Harrisons were confident that eventually their heirs would sit in their favorite chairs and walk the same walkways, just as their ancestors once had, replacing them physically but keeping their spirits, ideals, and family values alive.

As they approached the great house, Harrison placed his hand on his son's shoulder in a rare show of affection, a gesture that indicated to young Harry that this would be a serious father-son discussion. Evidently his father had already read his letter. As close-knit as their family was, important communications were still laid down formally in writing.

Father and son continued to walk at an unhurried pace like a man and his longer shadow toward the large gray stone Tudor manor, a solemn house, their hands stuffed into the pockets of their jodhpurs, matching one another stride for stride.

“You articulated your position quite nicely in your correspondence, Harry.” Harrison usually had this kind of conversation with overzealous ambassadors or warmongering Pentagon generals. “I admire you for your enthusiastic spirit and sense of decency, but I am asking you to wait on this decision for a couple of sound reasons.”

“Sir, too much is going on in Europe for me to watch from the sidelines. I don't think I'm cut out for law. I'm a good pilot and ready to fight for the Brits. Now. I want to fly.” He squared his shoulders in an earnest display of manly persuasiveness. Harry had already submitted his application to join the British fliers in the RAF and was waiting for his certain acceptance at any moment. It wasn't every, Princetonian who had his finesse at the throttle, what his flying instructor called his “aptitude for altitude.” So far flying was the only thing in his life that Harry felt he was really any good at, something that no Harrison ancestor had ever attempted before him. He searched his father's face anxiously for any indication of the “yes” he needed to proceed.

Harry had graduated from his father's alma mater this past June and was expected to enter Yale Law School as his father had before him, in just a matter of weeks. Enlisting in the RAF would be the only way to avert this certain fate.

“You'd make a fine flier.” Harrison's face was an unreadable blank as he preceded his son through a free-standing stone arch.

“I'm not bad now, you know.” He could hear his flight instructor jokingly telling him he was like a goose on the water and a swan in the air. Harry's face momentarily relaxed into a grin that covered the entire width of his face. The same grin—only more confident—was mirrored back at him.

“You'd make a fine lawyer, too.” Harrison raised a woolly eyebrow. “That's a decision only you can make and I will certainly respect. But as a senior adviser to the president, I simply cannot have my son fly for a foreign country in a war in which we are not officially involved. It would be an embarrassment to the president and undermine our position.”

Sensing his son's disappointment, Harrison breathed deeply and stopped walking.

“Don't you see, son? It's impossible.” The frown lines were deep in his forehead. “With Russia in the war now, the opposing political pressures on us to get in or to stay out mount each day. Between the interventionists and the isolationists our administration is in an untenable situation. It's just out of the question.” Harrison watched his son's face collapse in dismay.

The elder Harrison lowered his pitch from his speech-making tone to the
entre-nous
voice he used with the president.

“And when we enter this war, nothing would make me prouder than to have you flying for
our
country.” His hazel eyes were steady beneath their gray, bushy brows. “And I can tell you, unofficially, that day is coming.”

What he could not tell his son was what had transpired at a cabinet meeting just a few weeks before, when Franklin had thundered at Secretary of War Henry Stimson for dragging his feet about getting promised help to the beleaguered Russians. It was one of the most complete dressing-downs Harrison had ever witnessed and totally uncharacteristic of the president.

Later that afternoon, President Roosevelt had summoned his trusted adviser to the Oval Office.

“Harrison, I want you to take charge of this matter,” Franklin had told his friend. “It's been six weeks since they were invaded and we've done practically nothing to get the Russians any of the equipment they've asked for. Please get that list from Stimson and with my full authority—use a heavy hand—act as a burr under the saddle. Get this thing done!”

Although America wasn't at war, it was nonetheless supplying the British with part of their navy fleet and now sending planes to the Russians. The administration was also trying to decide to what extent it should build up the nation's own military forces. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes was convinced that “if we strip ourselves to supply England and Russia we will save immeasurably in men and money because these two countries between them can defeat Hitler.”

Harrison disagreed.

However, he took his instructions from Franklin Roosevelt as seriously and with no less zeal than a sworn knight of King Arthur's Round Table. Devoted to his president, or the “governor,” as he sometimes referred to FDR out of habit, Harrison's subdued, thoughtful manner and quiet, patrician bearing belied his crusading passions and fervent belief that it was America's moral duty to stop the black Nazi boot that was stomping through Europe.

The pragmatic side of Harrison's investment-banking background even reasoned that America's going to war might be a boon to the economy. But the moral question hammered at him as much as it did Roosevelt. Did the American people want to fight this war, a war in which the finest of America's young sons might be sacrificed? Including Harrison's own boy. His only son.

These decisions had been weighing heavily on him in the last few months. Today was the first time he had been home in weeks, and he was shocked to find it was suddenly the end of the summer in Tuxedo Park. Harrison spent as much time in this country haven as he could. In Washington he worked with brilliant minds, which were often in disagreement with his views on the business of government. Here he was in the company of his social kindred spirits. While FDR had his Hyde Park, Harrison had Charlotte Hall. The stately manor, named after his wife's Yankee heiress grandmother, had been part of Ophelia's dowry along with her Standard Oil shares, while Harrison had brought the pedigree of his illustrious American ancestry to the table. Harrison, with his tempered financial skills and cool rational mind, had tripled their net worth, even managing to make money during the Depression when his peers, many considered brilliant and ruthless, had lost theirs.

His old college roommate, Cyrus Pettibone, president of Chicago's stock exchange and nearly bankrupt at one point in the crash, had cast his IOU lot in with Harrison. The two of them now quietly owned companies, pieces of or the whole, that they had picked up for a song, bulking up their assets from other people's Depression losses like trolling bottom fishers. Together they owned controlling interests in a burgeoning radio network, rubber companies, bicycle plants, and a mattress manufacturer. They were even silent partners in the razzle-dazzle Ice Capades starring the short-skirted Olympic skater Sonja Henie.

Honesty and integrity were Harrison's main virtues, and if some of his assets were more “blue-collar” than “blue chip,” he would never let his snobbery interfere with his financial successes. He knew wealth had its value and so he pursued it ferociously, but, like his politics, he never brought home the baser and muddier sides of either government or business. He protected his wife and son from the more unpleasant elements of acquiring vast wealth. At forty-six years old, William Henry Harrison IV's upper-class habits and values were still deeply ingrained in him.

On this September morning's ride through the idyllic trails of Tuxedo Park, he had detected the first notes of the fall of 1941 in the air. The sailboats and racy wood speedboats were out in force as if for the last flotilla before they were covered up and hauled into their boathouses dotting the shore of the lake. Yes, summer and the season of indecision were over.

There had been no vacations for anyone in the Roosevelt administration this summer. Harrison had had little opportunity to walk through the English-styled gardens patterned after the tall boxwood landscaping and colorful floral formations at Berkeley Plantation in Virginia, the birthplace of his first presidential ancestor, William Henry Harrison. He hadn't spent more than a few undisturbed hours on the lake at the helm of his sleek mahogany boat, the
Silver Fox.
Nor had he had the leisure to study in his book-lined library with its vast collection of volumes of ancient history and comfortably lived-in cracked and faded burgundy leather chairs. There he kept his prize piece of furniture, the desk used by his great-grandfather, the ninth president of the United States, William Henry Harrison, for the few weeks he had inhabited the White House. Old Tippecanoe, as his war hero forebear was called, had caught pneumonia in March 1841 while delivering his lengthy inauguration address—at almost two hours, the longest in history—on the chilly Capitol steps and, unfortunately, had died a month later, setting a record for the shortest presidency in history as well as providing comics with a century of Harrison jokes. Ophelia had even needlepointed pillows for all of Harrison's offices that carried the family's unofficial motto: “Wear an overcoat and keep your speech short!” The embarrassment was somewhat lessened by Harrison's Uncle Benjamin Harrison, who became the nation's twenty-third president and did not die until he was well out of his one term in office.

Harrison was the family's first Democrat, and a New Deal Democrat to boot. Great-Grandfather President Harrison had been a Whig and Uncle President Harrison a Republican. Harrison had been converted to “Democratism”—“his new religion,” Ophelia always explained to amused dinner guests—by FDR when he recruited the leading investment banker from his New York firm, Harrison, Stokes and Phipps, the year Roosevelt became governor. They had been bonded together in ideology ever since. Thirteen years FDR's junior, Harrison held the president and his philosophy as a testimony to what greatness even men of inherited financial status and privileges could attain. It was Harrison's belief that if the parents were firm-handed enough, a child needn't be born in a log cabin to have “get up and go.” He had hoped his son would show signs of the Harrison individuality, and the drive that would lead him to the accomplishments that Harrison frankly expected from him.

“Helloooo. There you two boys are!” exclaimed Ophelia, her husky voice greeting them from the awninged and ivy-draped back terrace. “My dear boys back at last. Come along,” she said, waving them up the grassy knoll to the weathered bluestone promenade that could be entered from their vast house by any one of twenty sets of tall mullioned glass-paned doors.

“Alas, the leaves are getting ready to turn—much too long since I've had the pleasure of my two men together.” Ophelia's eyes smiled although her lips appeared to be set in the cement lock so prevalent in her social class. “I'd love to keep you both here with me until the first frost, but we all have our obligations, don't we?” She roughly rubbed Tippecanoe's ears in a display of happiness, the heavy sapphire ring she wore prominently on her freckled hand knocking against the dog's collar.

Harry reached down and hugged Tyler, causing the dog to wag his tail. Many families might have hugged and kissed one another in greeting at a moment like this, but not at Charlotte Hall. The dogs and horses were the surrogate receivers of affection. But while they were by habit and class undemonstrative, the feelings the Harrisons held for one another were genuine and strong. Even though this was one of the only weekends of the summer the three of them were actually physically together at home, their family bonds were firm.

“E.R. and I had a fine time with our little projects while we were all out and about. We saved another boatload of Jews from Portugal and got some Negroes into the navy. I'll tell you all about it at lunch.” Ophelia was one of the spokes in Eleanor Roosevelt's circle of friends and helped turn the first lady's wagon every bit as much as Harrison kept FDR's ship on course. But while Ophelia would give up her left arm to save the lives of Jews fleeing the Germans and to push for advancement of the “colored” people's education, it never occurred to her to have one of the “peoples” she worried so much about to lunch. She was one of the first lady's most loyal friends, but nonetheless, unlike E.R., she never crossed the line between whom she helped and with whom she dined. Like many of their neighbors, her activism ended at five o'clock sharp with her iced gin martini, shaken, with a lemon twist. As philanthropic as the Tuxedo people were, most didn't bring their social consciences to the elegant dinner tables in their dignified homes.