Sailor in the White House

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Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

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SAILOR IN THE WHITE HOUSE

My 11 Years of Service to Three Presidents

William M. Rigdon

with James Derieux

Sailor in the White House was originally published in 1962 as White House Sailor by Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York.

• • •

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 5

I. I’m Admitted to the Secret Room 6

II. I Learn about FDR and Fala 13

III. Roosevelt’s Mysterious Trip 20

IV. Two Invasions of Quebec 26

V. Off to Cairo and Teheran 33

VI. Face to Face with Stalin 46

VII. FDR Rests in the South Carolina Low Country 57

VIII. Roosevelt Meets with MacArthur and Nimitz 64

IX. Yalta—The Controversy Lingers On 79

X. Arabian Knights 92

XI. Disillusion 101

XII. Truman Takes Over 105

XIII. The Bomb 117

XIV. With FDR and Truman at Shangri-La 122

XV. Truman Becomes a Shellback 129

XVI. Surprise of the Century 139

XVII. Truman at Key West 146

XVIII. With My Third President 153

Appendix 156

Illustrations 180

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 189

I. I’m Admitted to the Secret Room

OCTOBER 1942. The weathered, neglected looking, but still useful old destroyer tender Black Hawk was riding at anchor in the lonely Aleutians—a strange place for this venerable man-of-war. Months previously, as a long-time mainstay of the United States Asiatic Fleet, she had been honorably known in many busy Far Eastern ports. Five days before the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor we loaded all available torpedoes and other supplies the fighting ships of our Destroyer Squadron Twenty-nine were certain to need, pulled out of Manila Bay, and headed south at our full nine knots.

Thirteen destroyers depended on us for supplies and repairs. Five of these, the Stewart, Pillsbury, Edsall, Peary, and Pope, were soon lost to enemy action. The Black Hawk lost one man, a poor fellow who was so terrified when he saw a submarine surfacing that he jumped overboard. He was thrown a life-ring, and a destroyer picked him up. He was transferred to a hospital at the first port, and we never saw him again. The submarine had been one of our own.

Our strategic retreat had taken us by way of Balikpapan, Borneo; Soerabaja and Tjilatjap, Java; Darwin, and Exmouth Gulf, and finally Fremantle, Australia. The last of our small arsenal of ammunition was passed to fighting ships before we reached Fremantle. We had cheered our skipper, Commander George L. Harriss, when he assured us that we’d become a fighting ship too if the Japs ever came within range of our four five-inch guns.

Three times we had departed a stopover port only hours before Japanese bombers struck. There had been a torpedo attack intended for us that failed. In the race to stay ahead of the advancing enemy the Black Hawk broke her speed record, including the builder’s trial, but the engine-room crew thought we might do better. They called the bridge to find out.

Hell no, shouted Skipper Harriss through the intercom. Slow down! We’re shaking apart!

At Sydney our rudder hanger had to be made fast. The engine-room speed boys had shaken it loose.

After several weeks at Fremantle repairing battle-damaged American ships, the Black Hawk left for Pearl Harbor. As we approached Pearl we exchanged signals to identify ourselves, but their signal station refused to believe our ship was still afloat. Luckily, a signalman who had served in the Asiatic Fleet knew us by sight and we were allowed to come in.

We hoped that we were on our way to a continental port for refitting, since the Black Hawk had been in the Orient twenty-two years and looked it, but there was no time for refitting. We were ordered to the Aleutian area—with our bad boilers, old engines, rusted decks—loaded with stores and ammunition for destroyers.

The air was filled with the crackling sounds of radio transmissions as I went to my post that cold, wet October morning in the Aleutians. As ship’s clerk, with rank of warrant officer, one of my duties was to encode and decode messages. Coding and decoding was done by machines that looked somewhat like teletype machines. Once a machine was set for the code in use, the mumbo jumbo of letters, as received by radio, was typed out on the keyboard and as though by magic the message in plain language on tape spilled out of a slot.

A stack of messages awaited me as I sat down to work. I began typing the scramble of letters of the top message. Glancing at the slot to see what it was about, my heart almost exploded out of my ribs. I managed to keep pecking away until this message appeared:

"Ship’s Clerk William M. Rigdon hereby detached Black Hawk proceed by first available air transportation port continental US arrival proceed Washington DC report October thirtyone Naval Aide to President duty his office. SecNav has determined this employment on shore duty required by public interest."

I jumped up and ran to see Commander Harriss. He read the message, looked steadily at me, and asked:

Well, Rigdon, who do you know in Washington?

It so happened that I did know somebody in Washington, but I had not been in touch with him for a long time. Captain John L. McCrea was then Naval Aide to President Roosevelt, and I had served under him in the battleship Pennsylvania two years before, when he was executive officer. I had been the ship’s writer—a senior enlisted assistant—with the firmly established habit of using my ears much more than my mouth.

This was the beginning for me of eleven years at the White House and surely no other unobtrusive smalltown guy ever had such good luck. My hometown was Statesboro, Georgia, and I had been in the Navy nearly twenty years, twelve of them as a chief petty officer. I had become competent, then expert in stenography, serving often as official reporter of court-martial proceedings, a task I disliked but which was an important part of my preparation for the years ahead.

With two of the three Presidents under whom I served, I was to make at least forty trips away from Washington working as their secretary, mess officer, mailman, baggageman, banker, storekeeper, photographer, custodian of secret files, and keeper of official logs.

I went with Roosevelt to Cairo, Teheran, Great Bitter Lake, Yalta, both Quebec conferences, Honolulu, and the Aleutians. I was with him, too, on his inspection and political trips within the United States, on his mysterious fishing vacation to Georgian Bay in Canada, at Bernard Baruch’s place in South Carolina where the President went to recuperate after Teheran. And there were many weekends at Hyde Park and trips to Shangri-La, the President’s mountain hideaway in the Maryland mountains.

On these and other occasions I saw close-up such famous figures as Prime Minister Churchill, Generalissimo Stalin, King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, Prime Minister Jan Christian Smuts of South Africa, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur, and many others. Also, on these trips away from Washington I served Harry Hopkins as secretary, when my duties with the President allowed.

When President Truman took over I served him exactly as I had served President Roosevelt, going in his party to the Berlin Conference, where he met with Generalissimo Stalin, Prime Minister Churchill, and his successor Prime Minister Clement Attlee. I was with him en route home when he received King George VI in the cruiser Augusta, and in mid-Atlantic when he announced the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, which was the one big secret I was not aware of.

After the war I was one of President Truman’s merry party on a state visit to Brazil, and I took down his often disjointed rear-platform talks in the famous whistle-stop campaign of 1948. Always, I was with his party at Shangri-La. At Key West I was in his words the man who makes the clock tick day and night and who received his thanks for doing all the work.

At my first meeting with President Roosevelt, Captain McCrea presented me as William McKinley Rigdon, my new assistant. The President’s eyes twinkled as he asked me how a man with that name happened to be there among so many Democrats. I spoke up and said that I was from Georgia, and that I had a brother whose name was Lincoln.

Your father must have been a most courageous man, said the President.

Franklin D. Roosevelt had served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy from 1913 until 1920, under Secretary Josephus Daniels (whom he always called The Chief). He knew scores of naval officers personally, and he knew naval history. He often spoke of himself as an old Navy man and frequently began a story with When I was in the Navy... Being a Navy man at heart, he assigned numerous duties to his Naval Aide, whose assistant I became.

Primarily, the President’s Naval Aide is his liaison with the Department of the Navy in all matters relating to naval personnel and affairs. But under FDR he was much more. He supervised the Map Room and was the President’s intelligence officer. He was commodore of the Presidential yacht squadron and in charge of the President’s camp, Shangri-La. He coordinated arrangements for Presidential trips when foreign travel was involved. He was in charge of the White House bomb shelter, and he selected and supervised that group of young bachelor officers from all services who were brought in from time to time to assist at White House social functions. They called themselves the Potted Palms.

Captain McCrea had done a good job of selling me to the President, who soon accepted me without reservation as a member of his staff. Unsure at first, I soon gained confidence as to my duties, best described as multifarious. There was little or no pattern to my job, which demanded all my time and thought. I had to learn where to go to get the official word on personnel, operations, traditions, customs, regulations, protocol, and food preferences and idiosyncrasies of the President and members of his traveling parties.

I was early put in charge of the wonderful Filipino stewards from the Presidential yacht who always accompanied the President away from Washington to prepare and serve his meals, and also the big luncheons and dinners he often gave. They were loyal. They were tireless. Often they were sleepless—and always they worked silently.

Only once in eleven years did I hear a complaint from them. The request was one that millions of servicemen would have supported heartily: Please, Mr. Rigdon, no more spam, please! They could do anything. A few hours after landing, with no stove in the kitchen, and no cooking utensils either, they served a grand state dinner at Teheran. On board the cruiser Quincy at Great Bitter Lake, with no prior knowledge of what Arabs like, they prepared such a good luncheon that King Ibn Saud asked the President to give him the cook.

Among my numerous duties the least interesting was to see that malfunctioning White House watches and clocks, including the President’s, were sent off to the Naval Observatory for repair. The most interesting of all was the assignment that took me daily to that most secret of all secret places, the President’s Map Room. Only a few persons even knew of its existence.

I am proud that I was one of seven—not counting the officers assigned—who were free to enter the Map Room at any time. The other six were the President, Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy (Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief), the Naval Aide, the Military Aide, Vice Admiral Ross T. Mclntire (the President’s physician), and Harry Hopkins. These high officers could sometimes bring other persons with them; and at any time on instructions from the President or Admiral Leahy or Harry Hopkins, the Naval Aide would give the door guard written orders to admit certain persons, with similar notice to the watch officers.

Lieutenant Robert Montgomery was serving in our Naval Intelligence at the time of Pearl Harbor. In London he had had occasion to visit Prime Minister Churchill’s Map Room, where he saw the story of the war updated daily on wall graphics—or hourly if events warranted. When Lieutenant Montgomery told President Roosevelt about the Prime Minister’s room, the President said he wanted one of his own right away. It became the Naval Aide’s duty to establish it, and it was done—in what formerly had been a ladies’ room in the White House. Here behind closed doors, the President could follow each day every move in the global war involving the lives of millions and the fate of the Allied cause.

Lieutenant Montgomery, a good showman, designed special pins for the maps to indicate where the President, Churchill, and Stalin were, whether in their capitals or away. The head of the FDR pin was shaped like a long cigarette holder, Churchill’s represented a big cigar, Stalin’s was a briar pipe. Dispatches between the President and the Prime Minister relating to Stalin often used the letters U J (Uncle Joe) to denote him.

The Map Room also had other pins to show the location of each of our major ships—battleships, aircraft carriers, and cruisers. Space did not allow the use of separate pins to indicate individual destroyers, submarines, and other small ships, and they were indicated in clusters. But there was one exception. The destroyer in which Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., was serving had a large-headed, distinctively colored pin so that the President could see it at a glance. FDR’s first look was always for that pin.

The Map Room was ready a few weeks after Pearl Harbor. It grew with the spread of fighting and in response to the President’s wishes. Its purpose was to maintain a twenty-four-hour service by which the President could communicate quickly and securely with the heads of state of Allied nations, to maintain a secret file of such communications, and to have available to the President at all times up-to-the-hour information about the war everywhere, on land, at sea, and in the air. Military and diplomatic messages, letters, and reports sent to the White House for the President’s information by State, Army, or Navy departments were delivered to the Map Room. Temporary map rooms were set up on board ships, at war conference locations, and at other points where the President paused in the course of wartime travels. The White House Map Room was staffed by twelve officers—six Army, six Navy. There was no separate Air Force then.

Security was so tight that even a cabinet officer could not enter unless accompanied by the President or some other person authorized to have access to the room, or on proper written instructions. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox was furious when the guards at the door turned him back, and he went fuming to the President, who kidded him about his lack of control over Navy personnel. But the President did not order the Secretary admitted. FDR often kidded his subordinates—and his equals too. He roiled Prime Minister Churchill a number of times with his banter, and once I knew him to agree, or pretend to agree, with Stalin on a matter the Prime Minister opposed vigorously.

No unauthorized person could enter the Map Room, but one day Mrs. Roosevelt showed up and walked right past the astonished guard, who dared not stop her. The President had told her about the large-headed brightly colored pin that marked Franklin’s ship, and she wanted to see for herself.

On another occasion, late one afternoon, Mrs. Roosevelt appeared unannounced and caught Captain McCrea with his pants off. Confident that the Map Room was a place where there would be no surprise visitors, he was changing into a fresh uniform preparatory to accompanying the President somewhere, when he saw her coming through the door. Captain McCrea was a punctiliously polite gentleman, and normally would have walked forward to greet the First Lady with a bow, but this time he jumped behind a desk, sat down with as much of himself under it as possible, picked up the phone and pretended to be on a call so important that he was forced to ask Mrs. Roosevelt to excuse him until it could be completed. The telephone monologue lasted until she had departed.

But the greatest commotion Mrs. Roosevelt ever created inside the Map Room was the day she came, again unannounced, accompanied by Madame Chiang Kai-shek, who, in the opinion of the officer in charge, had no need to know any of the secrets of this most secret room. It was commonly believed among the intelligence staffs that the Japanese had infiltrated Chiang’s staff and whatever the Chiangs knew the Japanese also knew. So, the Map Room went through a swift change of charts and pins as the two ladies advanced. Panels with graphs were slipped behind blank panels. Pins showing locations of ships were yanked out. Stalin’s briar-pipe pin was relocated. Dispositions of American ground forces in the South Pacific were scrambled. Madame Chiang saw confused maps and a confused Map Room staff, and if she believed all she saw, she must have concluded that we were running a confused war.

Secret communications between the President and heads of Allied countries always passed through the Map Room. One day a long report from Churchill was delivered to FDR in its original text by a young Navy lieutenant. The President asked the lieutenant if he could paraphrase it for him. The young man said, No, whereupon the President made his own brief digest of the substance of the report. But that was not the end of the incident. When the Naval Aide heard about it he issued instructions to all his subordinates that a Presidential request was never to be turned down. Answer him ‘Yes,’ then go get whatever help you need to make good, said the Naval Aide. FDR got no more turndowns by junior naval officers.

Navy Lieutenant Bob Myers, another Map Room watch officer, had occasion to deliver a message to the President late one evening, long after he had retired. Bob, always a considerate gentleman, asked FDR for a general guideline as to whether the watch officers should disturb him by bringing him dispatches at all hours of the night. The President pondered for a moment and then told Myers, Well, if they aren’t important and you come up and wake me, you’re in trouble. And if they are important and you don’t come up and wake me, you’re in trouble. So you take it from there!

The Map Room watch officers learned that the angle of FDR’s cigarette holder apparently registered his satisfaction or disappointment in what he read or saw on the maps. In the early months of the war the news was nearly all bad, and as the President read the dispatches or looked at the graphics, his long cigarette holder would descend from its usual rakish angle and hang loosely in his mouth. The alert officers soon made it a rule to include in the President’s briefing, or in what he saw or read, some bit of encouraging news. If there was nothing encouraging, something amusing would serve to raise the angle of the cigarette holder. It was not always easy to have at hand news that was either encouraging or amusing, but special effort was made. On days when more than one bit of good news came in the watch officer would hold the surplus items back, to be given the President on gloomy days. Not big items, you understand, but enlivening bits that could wait and were as good on Tuesday as on Monday.

The President’s Secret Service bodyguard, Charlie Fredericks, who usually furnished the motive power for FDR’s wheelchair, was not allowed in the Map Room. It was the duty of the officer on watch to wheel the President around. One day the watch officer, Ensign Ed Carson, who was nervous in the presence of his Commander in Chief, bumped FDR into a desk. The Naval Aide immediately ordered wheelchair practice. The watch officers pushed each other around in a spare chair until each one got his license. Never again was FDR bumped into anything in the Map Room.

Harry Hopkins, when Lend-Lease administrator, came often to the Room to learn what was happening to convoys of merchant ships loaded with supplies for our Allies. He was especially interested during the months of the deadly Murmansk run when ship losses were heavy as we strove to supply Russia with equipment. His mind was like a card-index file of the big items in each cargo. The watch officer would tell him of a ship lost to enemy action. There go [he’d give a number] P-38s that we can’t afford to lose. Detailed reports coming in later usually showed his verbal report was accurate.

Late one night after many brandies, Mr. Hopkins and Prime Minister Churchill came to the Map Room together. After the briefing the conversation got around to the Prime Minister’s capacity for brandy. Hopkins picked up a pad and pencil and calculated that at the going rate of consumption as he had observed it, the Prime Minister had consumed—he gave a number—tank cars of brandy. Tank cars, not tankards. Churchill offered no argument to the contrary, but looked at Hopkins with an expression of disappointment and said, I thought I had done rather better than that.

Another night, about 2:30 a.m., Prime Minister Churchill came alone to the Map Room. The watch officer, thinking all was over for the night, had turned off the overhead lights and was sleeping on a cot. The Prime Minister, admitted by the guards at the door, turned on the lights and went about examining the maps. Suddenly, the watch officer woke up, recognized the visitor, and jumped to his feet to attend him. Taut watch you keep here, son, said the Prime Minister, as he went on with his study of the exhibits. Apparently he told no one of the dozing officer, for nothing happened. The officer himself told the story, later.

The Map Room played an unexpected part in one of FDR’s famous Fireside Chats, giving a homey touch that was even more realistic than the President himself wanted. The Oval room, from which he was broadcasting, adjoined the Map Room, and as he was talking intimately with My Friends, a young officer flushed the Map Room toilet. The sound went out clearly over the air. A Secret Service man came rushing, but it was too late. All he could do was shush the gurgling of the tank as it refilled.

The Map Room received all important news, including loss of ships, before it was released to the press. I recall only one instance in