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Lanny Budd #5
PRESIDENTIAL AGENT (Lanny Budd #5)
New York Times bestseller
On the eve of World War II, Lanny Budd reenters the deadly snake pit of Nazi Germany as Roosevelt’s spy—in the pulse-pounding, Pulitzer Prize–winning series.
On the eve of World War II, Lanny Budd reenters the deadly snake pit of Nazi Germany as Roosevelt’s spy—in the pulse-pounding, Pulitzer Prize–winning series.
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1944
258 people are currently reading
584 people want to read
About the author
Upton Sinclair
721 books1,187 followersUpton Beall Sinclair, Jr. was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle (1906). To gather information for the novel, Sinclair spent seven weeks undercover working in the meat packing plants of Chicago. These direct experiences exposed the horrific conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. The Jungle has remained continuously in print since its initial publication. In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the “free press” in the United States. Four years after the initial publication of The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists was created. Time magazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and silence." In 1943, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Sinclair also ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Socialist, and was the Democratic Party nominee for Governor of California in 1934, though his highly progressive campaign was defeated.
Sinclair also ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Socialist, and was the Democratic Party nominee for Governor of California in 1934, though his highly progressive campaign was defeated.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 38 reviews
October 21, 2023
Currently reading.
As the series continues, I am liking it less and less. It moves from being characcter to plot oriented. It reads more as a series of adventurous, cinematic episodes intended to scare and excite rather than inform. The humor becomes slapstick!
I am still in the first part--hopefully it will improve.
ABOOK I DECIDE NOT TO FINIAH i GIVE ONE STAR!
RGW PLOR HAS DETERIORATED INTO UNBELIEVABLEM AND REPETITIVE EPISODESN IF ADVENTURENDESIGNED INUCEN XINEMATICNEXCITEMENT,
I GAVE UP ON THIS TWO DAYS AGO, THOUGHT IF I WAS MAKING THE RIHT DECISION AND NDECIDED II HAD. I WILL NOT CONTINUE THE SERIES. i FIND IT NOW A TOTAL WASTE OF TIME AND NOT ENJOYABLE!!!!!!
******************
*The Jungle 3 stars
the Lanny Budd Series:
1. World's End 4 stars
2.Between Two Worlds 4 stars
3.Dragon's Teeth 4 stars
4.Wide Is the Gate 3 stars
5,Presidential Agent not fpr me
7.A World to Win not for me
8.Presidential Mission not for me
9.One Clear Call not for me
10.O Shepherd, Speak! not for me
11.The Return of Lanny Budd not for me
As the series continues, I am liking it less and less. It moves from being characcter to plot oriented. It reads more as a series of adventurous, cinematic episodes intended to scare and excite rather than inform. The humor becomes slapstick!
I am still in the first part--hopefully it will improve.
ABOOK I DECIDE NOT TO FINIAH i GIVE ONE STAR!
RGW PLOR HAS DETERIORATED INTO UNBELIEVABLEM AND REPETITIVE EPISODESN IF ADVENTURENDESIGNED INUCEN XINEMATICNEXCITEMENT,
I GAVE UP ON THIS TWO DAYS AGO, THOUGHT IF I WAS MAKING THE RIHT DECISION AND NDECIDED II HAD. I WILL NOT CONTINUE THE SERIES. i FIND IT NOW A TOTAL WASTE OF TIME AND NOT ENJOYABLE!!!!!!
******************
*The Jungle 3 stars
the Lanny Budd Series:
1. World's End 4 stars
2.Between Two Worlds 4 stars
3.Dragon's Teeth 4 stars
4.Wide Is the Gate 3 stars
5,Presidential Agent not fpr me
7.A World to Win not for me
8.Presidential Mission not for me
9.One Clear Call not for me
10.O Shepherd, Speak! not for me
11.The Return of Lanny Budd not for me
July 26, 2025
This fifth book in the series was published in 1944 and created in the Audible version in the 2020s. It is mostly about Lanny operating undercover in Nazi Germany hobnobbing with the upper echelon of the Nazi party. He is secretly reporting back to FDR.
April 3, 2024
“A tragic time indeed for clearsighted men and lovers of justice; the greedy ones were rubbing their hands and the butchers were sharpening their knives all over the world. Every gain that had been made in the World War had been thrown away, and every principle for which Woodrow Wilson had fought had been mocked.”
Most of this book concerns the complicity of the British, French, and American moneyed classes—the industrial, financial, and political powers—in the rise of the Fascist dictators, Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler all over Europe. British and American appeasement policies allowed the rise of Fascism and even actively armed and bankrolled the destruction of a popular elected democracy in Spain. Country after country falls under this Fascist incursion, successfully murdering all opposition and claiming to have defeated communism or atheism or international Jewry. Meanwhile, America, Britain, and France are paralyzed by fear of war and the bogeyman of Soviet communism (basically, a fear of labor movements demanding better wages and working conditions.)
“His discourse embraced the complete Nazi program for the undermining of the French republic: warm protestations of friendship; unlimited promises of peace; the sowing of distrust of all politicians and of the entire democratic procedure; and, above all else, fear of the Red specter?”
“….Isn’t it fear of Bolshevism that is enabling Germany to undermine and destroy the governments of every country in Europe?”
It is an important story, and our resourceful and well-connected Lanny is now an independent (unpaid) covert operative, reporting exclusively to President Franklin Roosevelt, from Lanny’s vast network of friends, family, business acquaintances of his father, and his own work as an art expert and welcome guest at the estates of the elite and powerful in Europe and America, including Hitler and his inner circle. Lanny continues to expand his contacts and appeal, using his own disposition to make himself likable and adaptable to any situation and with all people.
This book is a harder and less satisfying read because it is a master study of the looming threat of a global world war, with powerful personal portraits of Hitler’s madness, mien, and methods, as seen by Lanny, who must carefully conceal his own despair and horror at all he sees. Helplessly, he can only report all he sees directly to FDR, whose hands are also tied by the slow moving machine of democracy and the compromises that must be made in order to continue his efforts to turn American public opinion from isolationist self-interest to recognition of the worldwide threat to democracy that Fascism represented.
“It means that greed and jealousy continue to rule the world, and people spend their substance building fences to keep the rest of the world out.”
I have enjoyed these books like no other fiction I have read in a long time. The protagonist’s personality holds the greatest appeal for me. He is the ultimate inside outsider, and a character I have been very glad to get to know. This is the fifth of eleven very long books in the series, so my worry for Mr. Lanny Budd and his very few close friends and confidants increases with each book. The range of his interests—philosophy, art, music, literature, spiritualism and psychic phenomena, people of all backgrounds and classes, history, political philosophy, a bit of religion, and his ability to learn, adapt, and insinuate himself into almost any group of people or circumstances makes his a complete delight. His open heart and fundamental kindness are pained by his covert activity, while his rather unique ability to speak truthfully while lying by his intentions makes him a very likable spy. His upbringing cultivated the ability to look at every situation from multiple points of view and to put conversation and connections with others before his own interests. In short, Lanny Budd is the sort of person most readers would enthusiastically embrace, with qualities that are proving indispensable in his new role as Presidential Agent. We hope he continues to be protected by his likable and harmless demeanor.
“The Germans have a poem to the effect that when you hear singing you may lie down in peace, for evil men have no songs. The Nazis were using this as one more camouflage, but for Lanny tonight it held good.”
January 30, 2018
I finished this book in tears, as Lanny walked about the Lincoln Memorial after a late night report to/meeting with FDR, reading the words of the Gettysburg Address and committing himself to whatever he might be asked to do in the conflict that is inexorably approaching. He had returned from undercover work in Germany to give his observations on Hitler’s annexation of Austria, rape of Czechoslovakia, abuses within Germany itself, reactions to Chamberlain’s appeasement. I’m just lost in this series, unable to tear myself away for very long. The next one, Dragon’s Harvest, I will be reading in a remarkably sturdy 1945 hard copy that I bought through amazon for about the same price as the electronic version. Just wanted to read the real thing.
September 2, 2017
A Fly on the wall
Mr. Sinclair gives us the ultimate insider's perspective on the rise of Adi Schicklgruber and his fellow madmen. Sinclair takes his peerless journalistic skills and renders an account that is as startling in detail as it is monumental in its effect to the careful reader. He reveals the one great truth: Governments are slow to learn the sad lessons of war, and are quick to forget them. Thank you, Upton. The multitude of unknown ghosts of Trudi are surely resting in peace because of your indefatigable efforts.
Mr. Sinclair gives us the ultimate insider's perspective on the rise of Adi Schicklgruber and his fellow madmen. Sinclair takes his peerless journalistic skills and renders an account that is as startling in detail as it is monumental in its effect to the careful reader. He reveals the one great truth: Governments are slow to learn the sad lessons of war, and are quick to forget them. Thank you, Upton. The multitude of unknown ghosts of Trudi are surely resting in peace because of your indefatigable efforts.
June 10, 2019
The title gives away the next theme of this fifth volume in the World's End series, and the story jumps right to it, rather than attempting to pick up exactly where the last volume left it, as usual. The connections are made as and when by Upton Sinclair, in this series anyway. And here, Lanny Budd meets his old mentor and boss Professor Alston in the hotel in N.Y. where he has a room, presumably because Shore Acres is no longer an option, not at the moment when Irma's new marriage is fresh, anyway; and as the two talk, professor Alston who has been close to President Rosevelt - FDR - suggests he speak with the President directly, makes a call, and an appointment.
..............................................................................
Lanny takes in the ambience, of the locale and the residence and the person. He was impressed positively.
"“You would be amused to hear of the efforts they made to trap me, after I was elected and before I was inaugurated. The country was in the midst of a panic, and if only I would consent to meet with Mr. Hoover and give him some idea of what I wanted done! The scheme was, of course, that I should be assuming responsibility, taking the panic over as my panic instead of my predecessor’s. I let him have it all, up to the very last moment.”
"“It took nerve, and I admired yours.”
"“You can’t imagine the pressure; it never let up, and hasn’t let up yet. They persuaded me into a World Economic Conference in London right after the inauguration, if you remember, the idea being to preserve the gold standard and fix all currencies at the then-existing levels. France and Britain had devalued their currencies and wanted to keep the dollar at the old level, so they could take over the trade of the world. When I realized what it was all about I dumped the chess-board, and I don’t expect ever to be forgiven for it. You doubtless know the sort of stories they tell about me.”
"“I have had them straight from the horse’s mouth.”
"“I am supposed to be drunk all the time, and in spite of my physical deficiencies I maintain a large harem.”
"“Have you heard the one about the psychiatrist who died and went to heaven and was invited to psychoanalyze God?”
"“No. Has that something to do with me?”
"“St. Peter explained that God was suffering from delusions of grandeur—He thought He was Franklin D. Roosevelt.”
"The President threw back his head and laughed heartily; he put his soul into his enjoyment of a joke, and it was a good thing to hear. Lanny remembered that Abraham Lincoln had sought the same kind of relief from too many burdens.
"“Just now,” said the Chief Executive, “I am in the midst of the hottest fight yet, brought on by my efforts to reform the Supreme Court. Those nine old gentlemen in their solemn black robes have blocked one after another of our New Deal measures, and the whole future of our program depends upon my efforts to break that stranglehold. I have called for an increase in the number of the justices, and this is called ‘packing the court,’ and is considered the opening wedge for Bolshevism. There is nothing the enemies of this plan will not do or say.” The President told some things they had done, and after one tale of senatorial skullduggery he asked: “What do you think of that?”
Lanny said: “I think it shows you are almost as indiscreet as the previous Roosevelt.” This brought another burst of laughter, and after it they were friends."
Lanny told him about Spain, about the war being really invasion, and about the Spanish rulers et al being unlikely to not bring back dark ages to Spain if brought back due to failure of democracies of West in helping the republic. FDR explained his difficulty in leading the country where the party was a troika and rest virulently against, and the troika harnessed to factions pulling in completely different directions.
"“Mr. Roosevelt,” remarked the visitor, “what you say is almost identical with what Léon Blum has told me. He carried an election on a program of domestic reforms, and is very proud of having pushed them all through. But he had to pay the price which the reactionaries exacted—no aid for Spain. I have warned him in vain—what good will it do him to nationalize the armament industry of France while Hitler is permitted to arm and prepare to overwhelm him? What will be the position of France with a Fascist Spain at her back door and German submarines using harbors on the Atlantic and the Mediterranean?”"
"“The American people will believe that when they see it; and meantime there’s no use in you or me trying to tell it to them. I can say to Congress: ‘These are dangerous times, and we must have ships and planes to defend ourselves,’ and I can get away with that; but if I should say one word about defending the interests of any other nation or group, I would raise up a storm that would bowl me over. Believe me, I know my master’s voice, and when I hear it, I have no choice but to obey. If you want to save Spain, persuade your French friends to stick out their necks; or better yet, persuade Mr. Chamberlain and his Cabinet, the real authors and sustainers of the Non-Intervention policy. If the British cannot see that it is their fight, surely nobody can ask me to take it on my shoulders.”"
Lanny was about to take his leave, but FDR said professor Alston had suggested he make use of Lanny's abilities, and Lanny protested that he'd love to but couldn't.
"“There might be things you could do for me in Europe, and they wouldn’t have to be ‘regular.’”"
Lanny informed the President succinctly about his real work and private life, and thus the necessity of shielding his real persona and any possibility of a connection with the President whom he'd love to work with, since German agents were bound to be everywhere and he was a known figure due to his previous marriage. In this, incidentally, the recapitulation of previous parts is complete, since he's already spoken about his prior background and peace conference days.
FDR told him they would meet confidentially and exclusively without anyone else except his man knowing, and immediately arranged it.
..............................................................................
Lanny proceeded to drive upstate and meet his clients, finishing with Murchison in Pittsburgh who flew him in a three seater to Adirondacks.
"Set down at the Washington airport on Monday morning, Lanny got busy on the telephone and gave the password. “Gus” told him to call again at noon, and when he did so the order was to be at a certain street corner at a quarter to ten that evening. It happened to be raining, and Lanny with overshoes and umbrella stood watching the speeding traffic, standing back far enough from the curb so as not to be too badly spattered. A car drew up, and the President’s bodyguard looked out and nodded."
Lanny met FDR privately and confidentially, and talked to him about France, Germany, and more.
"“Robbie thinks the fat general is making a grave mistake by building short-range fighter planes when he should have bombers to bring England to her knees. But Hermann only laughs and winks. What he means, of course, is to put troops ashore in England and fly those planes from English fields.”
"“How can he do it while the English control the seas?”
"“He expects to do it by parachutes, and by submarines and dive-bombers sinking the British fleet. He figures that it won’t take long to ferry troops across twenty miles of water, and they will be specialists, with weapons the like of which has never been seen in the world before.”"
FDR kept him on. "“Tell me about Hitler,” said the President; so Lanny described that strange portent, half-genius, half-madman, who had managed to infect with his mental sickness a whole generation of German youth.
"“Years ago I made a remark in a woman friend’s hearing: ‘There will be nothing to do but kill them.’ The remark horrified her so that I promised never to make it again. But it is literally true; they are a set of blind fanatics, marching, singing, screaming about their desire to conquer other peoples; it is their God-given destiny, and they have no room for any other idea in their heads. They have a song: ‘Today Germany belongs to us, tomorrow the whole world.’ The German word for belongs is gehört, while the word hört means hears; so in Germany they sing ‘belongs to us’ and abroad they sing ‘hears us,’ which sounds less alarming. That is typical of the Nazi technique. Hitler has written in his book that you can get any lie believed if you repeat it often enough; and especially if it’s a big lie—because people will say that nobody would dare to tell one as big as that. It is no exaggeration to say that he has made Germany into a headquarters of the Lie; he has told so many and so often that nobody in his country has any means of distinguishing truth from falsehood.”"
"“People here make a grave mistake,” Lanny said. “They think of Nazism as a reactionary movement, an effort of the capitalist class to put down labor and the Communists; but Nazism was a revolutionary movement—that is the only way any movement can get power nowadays. Hitler promised the redistribution of landed estates without compensation, the abolition of what he called ‘interest slavery,’ the whole program of populist revolt.”
"“We had such a man in this country—Huey Long.”
"“I’m sorry I didn’t meet him.”
"“Believe me, I did! He was all set to be my successor. He once had me waked up at one in the morning to give me hell over the telephone from Baton Rouge for some appointment he didn’t like. I refused to cancel it and he was my mortal enemy forever after.”
"“There will be others like him,” replied Lanny, “unless we solve the problem of poverty in the midst of plenty. The German middle classes, the little men like Hitler, were being wiped out, and he offered a millennium, also a scapegoat, the Jews. When he got the votes, he took them to the big industrialists and sold them for more campaign funds.”
"That aspect of the movement had few secrets for Lanny, because his father, a steel man himself in those days, had heard the German steel men talking about the sums they were turning over to their new political boss. “Thyssen alone put up five million marks.”"
Lanny explained the realities behind, as he'd come to grasp.
"“It is really Hitler who is directing it?”
"“It is the technical men of German industry, and the officers of the general staff of the Wehrmacht. They are probably the most highly trained military men in the world, and of course it is herrlich for them, because for the first time all German industry, both capital and labor, does exactly what they, the members of the Herrenklub, direct. Emil Meissner, Kurt’s brother, is a member of that club. He was doubtful of Schicklgruber, the demagogue, but now he worships Hitler, the inspired master of the German destiny. I have seen Emil rise from lieutenant to general in less than twenty-five years, and today he is probably the happiest man I know; he has everything exactly the way he wants it. The Communists, the Socialists, the democrats and pacifists are all dead or in concentration camps; every good German is hard at work, living frugally and investing his savings in government bonds; and all the money the wizard Schacht can create is going into the building of that bicycle I was telling you about a while ago, the machine on which the German Army is going to ride to world mastery.”
"“It is a terrible picture you paint, Lanny.”
"“I assure you, Governor, I am no painter. I am only a transporter of paintings. When I come on one that seems to me worth while, I bring it to this country and show it to my friends. The most important one for you to look at is the picture of this German war machine being tried out in Spain. Hitler is sending his tankmen, his artillerymen, and above all his airmen there in relays; nobody stays more than three or four months, just long enough to learn the new techniques of swift and deadly mechanized war; then he goes back to Germany, and tells it to his superior officers, and on the training fields in the Fatherland he teaches it to hundreds of others. The Italians are doing the same, but they’re not so good; they don’t really like war and nobody can make them. But the Nazis like nothing else, and the result is going to be that they will have a large army of trained and eager professionals, while all the other peoples, except perhaps the Japanese, will be bungling amateurs. The Nazis are training some of their stormtroopers right here in America; I have seen them in New York, and they may be doing it even in Washington. You tell me you can’t prevent what is happening in Spain, Governor, but surely you ought to be able to do something in America.”
"Said the President: “I think I can assure you we’re not entirely overlooking that part of our duty.”"
...............................................................................
Lanny visited his father's home and the Budd Erling plant, and heard him; he visited Hansi and Bess and met their little boy Freddi, and Hansi's parents. Johannes talked to him freely, and his family's politics no longer bothered him. Lanny had enough to report already, and did.
"Lanny drove them all in to the concert, which was held in a hall on the East side, its purpose being to collect funds for the aiding of Jews who had escaped into the countries bordering on Hitlerland. The place was packed to the doors with Jewish men and women, some of them old but most of them young, a few bearded but most smooth-shaven, a few well-to-do, but most poor. Jews of all sorts and sizes, but mostly undersized; Jews with dark curly hair and some with red; Jews with Jewish noses, but many who might have been taken for Russians or Poles or Hungarians or Italians or Spaniards. They had been mixed up with all the European tribes for a thousand years, but alas, it hadn’t done them any good."
Here the author goes into a diatribe that's church propaganda from pulpits for most of two millennia, for a convenient handshake with Rome around seventeen centuries ago, to escape persecution by turning on the relatives of the one god church was attempting to enforce by every possible means including lying, cheating, fraud and mass murders called inquisition. This propaganda coupled with terror has succeeded so well, most under its spell never stop to think how obvious a fraud it is, but it's nothing less. Fact is, Rome occupied Israel and Judea, and people were executed via crucifixion every day for very little, and blaming the occupied colonial subjects or vilifying them while exculpating the invading colonial regime is the most convenient game, no different from blaming females for being victims of physical attacks including murders. In both cases it's merely convenience of targeting the weaker, blaming the vanquished and generally a prejudice in favour of the bully.
Funny the author doesn't see it, whether about Jews regarding the crucifixion blame or about India, particularly Hindus, regarding anything; in the previous volume he repeatedly refers to Hindus as strange while describing Buddhist monks of Ceylon as dark Aryans, but Buddha was a Hindu and a Prince from India and never separated as such from either the land or it's culture any more than most - who weren't converted by invaders - ever did, and Buddhismis counted as separate from mainstream India only for convenience of the conversionist invaders who adopted the Macaulay doctrine of using every possible lie to decimate India so 1857 war of independence does not recur. And Aryan is a term borrowed by West and deformed to the extent of twisting it to mean something never originally meant, from Indian word in Sanskrit, Aarya, which has to do with enlightenment of inner self and civilised conduct, with no regard to any physical colours.
But of course West has only a contempt for any people subjugated as much as for women for the same reason, and respect for non colonial occupied people such as China is generally greater, hence the lack of recognition by this author that Hindu is where the very word Aarya and therefore Aryan stems from, and neither Ceylon nor Buddhism nor dark physical skin are relevant more than India and Hinduism as the mother culture.
....................................................................
Lanny visited his daughter who was now at Wickthorpe lodge while Wickthorpe castle interior was being redone to suit Irma, and he was given a cottage on the estate. His purpose was dual, the daughter and the Wickthorpe set. They talked freely before him.
"Intelligence Service, most secret of all organizations, was turning in one report after another showing that the German Air Force had outstripped the British; also, that the German Navy was disregarding its pledged word to limit construction to one-third of the British. Prime Minister Chamberlain, who believed in business and called it peace, was solving the problem by sticking the reports away and forgetting them. But Anthony Eden, Foreign Minister, was on the warpath against this course, and Sir Robert Vansittart, the highest permanent official of the Foreign Office, was backing him up.
"Gerald Albany, the embodiment of propriety, would probably not have mentioned this delicate subject in the presence of an American; but Lanny let it be known that he had heard about it. So then they talked. Ceddy declared that the trouble was due to the inability of some statesmen to face frankly the fact that Hitler had made Germany into a great power, and that she was again entitled to cast her full vote in the councils of Europe. Irma supported him, speaking with that new assurance which had come with her title. It was her idea that her new country should make a gentleman’s agreement with Hitler covering all the problems of Europe, and should use this as a lever to force France into breaking off the Russian alliance. Thus, and only thus, could there again be security for property and religion. Lanny, listening to her emphatic phrases, thought: “She is still quarreling with me in her heart!”"
Here the author is obliquely establishing a little Cliveden Set.
"Russia now had an alliance with France, but didn’t know whether to trust it or not, and the British didn’t know whether the French meant it, and whether they should be encouraged to mean it or to sabotage it. French policy, unlike the British, did change with the government, and that was a bad thing for the French, and for their friends and backers. Many persons in Britain took the position that the question of Russia was not merely a political issue, but a moral one; they refused to “shake hands with murder.” Gerald Albany, a clergyman’s son, was among these; but Ceddy spoke cautiously, saying that in statecraft it was not always possible to be guided by one’s moral and religious ideas. “We should have had a bad time at the outbreak of the last war if we hadn’t had the aid of Russia; and surely the hands of the Tsar had bloodstains enough.”"
Funny how convenient it is for the author and his aristocratic British characters, both, to forget that British massacred far more in India than the reds in Russia did their own aristocracy; whether that's racism or merely a question of being recognised by Europe as aristocracy is a matter of making excuses, since there is Wickthorpe admitting that the Czar's regime did kill people, and those were poor. Hence too the lack of a vigorous denunciation of nazis by West until discovery of the concentration camps post WWII, for Jews were just as Asian as India, and so West understands racism against them.
..............................................................................
Lanny takes in the ambience, of the locale and the residence and the person. He was impressed positively.
"“You would be amused to hear of the efforts they made to trap me, after I was elected and before I was inaugurated. The country was in the midst of a panic, and if only I would consent to meet with Mr. Hoover and give him some idea of what I wanted done! The scheme was, of course, that I should be assuming responsibility, taking the panic over as my panic instead of my predecessor’s. I let him have it all, up to the very last moment.”
"“It took nerve, and I admired yours.”
"“You can’t imagine the pressure; it never let up, and hasn’t let up yet. They persuaded me into a World Economic Conference in London right after the inauguration, if you remember, the idea being to preserve the gold standard and fix all currencies at the then-existing levels. France and Britain had devalued their currencies and wanted to keep the dollar at the old level, so they could take over the trade of the world. When I realized what it was all about I dumped the chess-board, and I don’t expect ever to be forgiven for it. You doubtless know the sort of stories they tell about me.”
"“I have had them straight from the horse’s mouth.”
"“I am supposed to be drunk all the time, and in spite of my physical deficiencies I maintain a large harem.”
"“Have you heard the one about the psychiatrist who died and went to heaven and was invited to psychoanalyze God?”
"“No. Has that something to do with me?”
"“St. Peter explained that God was suffering from delusions of grandeur—He thought He was Franklin D. Roosevelt.”
"The President threw back his head and laughed heartily; he put his soul into his enjoyment of a joke, and it was a good thing to hear. Lanny remembered that Abraham Lincoln had sought the same kind of relief from too many burdens.
"“Just now,” said the Chief Executive, “I am in the midst of the hottest fight yet, brought on by my efforts to reform the Supreme Court. Those nine old gentlemen in their solemn black robes have blocked one after another of our New Deal measures, and the whole future of our program depends upon my efforts to break that stranglehold. I have called for an increase in the number of the justices, and this is called ‘packing the court,’ and is considered the opening wedge for Bolshevism. There is nothing the enemies of this plan will not do or say.” The President told some things they had done, and after one tale of senatorial skullduggery he asked: “What do you think of that?”
Lanny said: “I think it shows you are almost as indiscreet as the previous Roosevelt.” This brought another burst of laughter, and after it they were friends."
Lanny told him about Spain, about the war being really invasion, and about the Spanish rulers et al being unlikely to not bring back dark ages to Spain if brought back due to failure of democracies of West in helping the republic. FDR explained his difficulty in leading the country where the party was a troika and rest virulently against, and the troika harnessed to factions pulling in completely different directions.
"“Mr. Roosevelt,” remarked the visitor, “what you say is almost identical with what Léon Blum has told me. He carried an election on a program of domestic reforms, and is very proud of having pushed them all through. But he had to pay the price which the reactionaries exacted—no aid for Spain. I have warned him in vain—what good will it do him to nationalize the armament industry of France while Hitler is permitted to arm and prepare to overwhelm him? What will be the position of France with a Fascist Spain at her back door and German submarines using harbors on the Atlantic and the Mediterranean?”"
"“The American people will believe that when they see it; and meantime there’s no use in you or me trying to tell it to them. I can say to Congress: ‘These are dangerous times, and we must have ships and planes to defend ourselves,’ and I can get away with that; but if I should say one word about defending the interests of any other nation or group, I would raise up a storm that would bowl me over. Believe me, I know my master’s voice, and when I hear it, I have no choice but to obey. If you want to save Spain, persuade your French friends to stick out their necks; or better yet, persuade Mr. Chamberlain and his Cabinet, the real authors and sustainers of the Non-Intervention policy. If the British cannot see that it is their fight, surely nobody can ask me to take it on my shoulders.”"
Lanny was about to take his leave, but FDR said professor Alston had suggested he make use of Lanny's abilities, and Lanny protested that he'd love to but couldn't.
"“There might be things you could do for me in Europe, and they wouldn’t have to be ‘regular.’”"
Lanny informed the President succinctly about his real work and private life, and thus the necessity of shielding his real persona and any possibility of a connection with the President whom he'd love to work with, since German agents were bound to be everywhere and he was a known figure due to his previous marriage. In this, incidentally, the recapitulation of previous parts is complete, since he's already spoken about his prior background and peace conference days.
FDR told him they would meet confidentially and exclusively without anyone else except his man knowing, and immediately arranged it.
..............................................................................
Lanny proceeded to drive upstate and meet his clients, finishing with Murchison in Pittsburgh who flew him in a three seater to Adirondacks.
"Set down at the Washington airport on Monday morning, Lanny got busy on the telephone and gave the password. “Gus” told him to call again at noon, and when he did so the order was to be at a certain street corner at a quarter to ten that evening. It happened to be raining, and Lanny with overshoes and umbrella stood watching the speeding traffic, standing back far enough from the curb so as not to be too badly spattered. A car drew up, and the President’s bodyguard looked out and nodded."
Lanny met FDR privately and confidentially, and talked to him about France, Germany, and more.
"“Robbie thinks the fat general is making a grave mistake by building short-range fighter planes when he should have bombers to bring England to her knees. But Hermann only laughs and winks. What he means, of course, is to put troops ashore in England and fly those planes from English fields.”
"“How can he do it while the English control the seas?”
"“He expects to do it by parachutes, and by submarines and dive-bombers sinking the British fleet. He figures that it won’t take long to ferry troops across twenty miles of water, and they will be specialists, with weapons the like of which has never been seen in the world before.”"
FDR kept him on. "“Tell me about Hitler,” said the President; so Lanny described that strange portent, half-genius, half-madman, who had managed to infect with his mental sickness a whole generation of German youth.
"“Years ago I made a remark in a woman friend’s hearing: ‘There will be nothing to do but kill them.’ The remark horrified her so that I promised never to make it again. But it is literally true; they are a set of blind fanatics, marching, singing, screaming about their desire to conquer other peoples; it is their God-given destiny, and they have no room for any other idea in their heads. They have a song: ‘Today Germany belongs to us, tomorrow the whole world.’ The German word for belongs is gehört, while the word hört means hears; so in Germany they sing ‘belongs to us’ and abroad they sing ‘hears us,’ which sounds less alarming. That is typical of the Nazi technique. Hitler has written in his book that you can get any lie believed if you repeat it often enough; and especially if it’s a big lie—because people will say that nobody would dare to tell one as big as that. It is no exaggeration to say that he has made Germany into a headquarters of the Lie; he has told so many and so often that nobody in his country has any means of distinguishing truth from falsehood.”"
"“People here make a grave mistake,” Lanny said. “They think of Nazism as a reactionary movement, an effort of the capitalist class to put down labor and the Communists; but Nazism was a revolutionary movement—that is the only way any movement can get power nowadays. Hitler promised the redistribution of landed estates without compensation, the abolition of what he called ‘interest slavery,’ the whole program of populist revolt.”
"“We had such a man in this country—Huey Long.”
"“I’m sorry I didn’t meet him.”
"“Believe me, I did! He was all set to be my successor. He once had me waked up at one in the morning to give me hell over the telephone from Baton Rouge for some appointment he didn’t like. I refused to cancel it and he was my mortal enemy forever after.”
"“There will be others like him,” replied Lanny, “unless we solve the problem of poverty in the midst of plenty. The German middle classes, the little men like Hitler, were being wiped out, and he offered a millennium, also a scapegoat, the Jews. When he got the votes, he took them to the big industrialists and sold them for more campaign funds.”
"That aspect of the movement had few secrets for Lanny, because his father, a steel man himself in those days, had heard the German steel men talking about the sums they were turning over to their new political boss. “Thyssen alone put up five million marks.”"
Lanny explained the realities behind, as he'd come to grasp.
"“It is really Hitler who is directing it?”
"“It is the technical men of German industry, and the officers of the general staff of the Wehrmacht. They are probably the most highly trained military men in the world, and of course it is herrlich for them, because for the first time all German industry, both capital and labor, does exactly what they, the members of the Herrenklub, direct. Emil Meissner, Kurt’s brother, is a member of that club. He was doubtful of Schicklgruber, the demagogue, but now he worships Hitler, the inspired master of the German destiny. I have seen Emil rise from lieutenant to general in less than twenty-five years, and today he is probably the happiest man I know; he has everything exactly the way he wants it. The Communists, the Socialists, the democrats and pacifists are all dead or in concentration camps; every good German is hard at work, living frugally and investing his savings in government bonds; and all the money the wizard Schacht can create is going into the building of that bicycle I was telling you about a while ago, the machine on which the German Army is going to ride to world mastery.”
"“It is a terrible picture you paint, Lanny.”
"“I assure you, Governor, I am no painter. I am only a transporter of paintings. When I come on one that seems to me worth while, I bring it to this country and show it to my friends. The most important one for you to look at is the picture of this German war machine being tried out in Spain. Hitler is sending his tankmen, his artillerymen, and above all his airmen there in relays; nobody stays more than three or four months, just long enough to learn the new techniques of swift and deadly mechanized war; then he goes back to Germany, and tells it to his superior officers, and on the training fields in the Fatherland he teaches it to hundreds of others. The Italians are doing the same, but they’re not so good; they don’t really like war and nobody can make them. But the Nazis like nothing else, and the result is going to be that they will have a large army of trained and eager professionals, while all the other peoples, except perhaps the Japanese, will be bungling amateurs. The Nazis are training some of their stormtroopers right here in America; I have seen them in New York, and they may be doing it even in Washington. You tell me you can’t prevent what is happening in Spain, Governor, but surely you ought to be able to do something in America.”
"Said the President: “I think I can assure you we’re not entirely overlooking that part of our duty.”"
...............................................................................
Lanny visited his father's home and the Budd Erling plant, and heard him; he visited Hansi and Bess and met their little boy Freddi, and Hansi's parents. Johannes talked to him freely, and his family's politics no longer bothered him. Lanny had enough to report already, and did.
"Lanny drove them all in to the concert, which was held in a hall on the East side, its purpose being to collect funds for the aiding of Jews who had escaped into the countries bordering on Hitlerland. The place was packed to the doors with Jewish men and women, some of them old but most of them young, a few bearded but most smooth-shaven, a few well-to-do, but most poor. Jews of all sorts and sizes, but mostly undersized; Jews with dark curly hair and some with red; Jews with Jewish noses, but many who might have been taken for Russians or Poles or Hungarians or Italians or Spaniards. They had been mixed up with all the European tribes for a thousand years, but alas, it hadn’t done them any good."
Here the author goes into a diatribe that's church propaganda from pulpits for most of two millennia, for a convenient handshake with Rome around seventeen centuries ago, to escape persecution by turning on the relatives of the one god church was attempting to enforce by every possible means including lying, cheating, fraud and mass murders called inquisition. This propaganda coupled with terror has succeeded so well, most under its spell never stop to think how obvious a fraud it is, but it's nothing less. Fact is, Rome occupied Israel and Judea, and people were executed via crucifixion every day for very little, and blaming the occupied colonial subjects or vilifying them while exculpating the invading colonial regime is the most convenient game, no different from blaming females for being victims of physical attacks including murders. In both cases it's merely convenience of targeting the weaker, blaming the vanquished and generally a prejudice in favour of the bully.
Funny the author doesn't see it, whether about Jews regarding the crucifixion blame or about India, particularly Hindus, regarding anything; in the previous volume he repeatedly refers to Hindus as strange while describing Buddhist monks of Ceylon as dark Aryans, but Buddha was a Hindu and a Prince from India and never separated as such from either the land or it's culture any more than most - who weren't converted by invaders - ever did, and Buddhismis counted as separate from mainstream India only for convenience of the conversionist invaders who adopted the Macaulay doctrine of using every possible lie to decimate India so 1857 war of independence does not recur. And Aryan is a term borrowed by West and deformed to the extent of twisting it to mean something never originally meant, from Indian word in Sanskrit, Aarya, which has to do with enlightenment of inner self and civilised conduct, with no regard to any physical colours.
But of course West has only a contempt for any people subjugated as much as for women for the same reason, and respect for non colonial occupied people such as China is generally greater, hence the lack of recognition by this author that Hindu is where the very word Aarya and therefore Aryan stems from, and neither Ceylon nor Buddhism nor dark physical skin are relevant more than India and Hinduism as the mother culture.
....................................................................
Lanny visited his daughter who was now at Wickthorpe lodge while Wickthorpe castle interior was being redone to suit Irma, and he was given a cottage on the estate. His purpose was dual, the daughter and the Wickthorpe set. They talked freely before him.
"Intelligence Service, most secret of all organizations, was turning in one report after another showing that the German Air Force had outstripped the British; also, that the German Navy was disregarding its pledged word to limit construction to one-third of the British. Prime Minister Chamberlain, who believed in business and called it peace, was solving the problem by sticking the reports away and forgetting them. But Anthony Eden, Foreign Minister, was on the warpath against this course, and Sir Robert Vansittart, the highest permanent official of the Foreign Office, was backing him up.
"Gerald Albany, the embodiment of propriety, would probably not have mentioned this delicate subject in the presence of an American; but Lanny let it be known that he had heard about it. So then they talked. Ceddy declared that the trouble was due to the inability of some statesmen to face frankly the fact that Hitler had made Germany into a great power, and that she was again entitled to cast her full vote in the councils of Europe. Irma supported him, speaking with that new assurance which had come with her title. It was her idea that her new country should make a gentleman’s agreement with Hitler covering all the problems of Europe, and should use this as a lever to force France into breaking off the Russian alliance. Thus, and only thus, could there again be security for property and religion. Lanny, listening to her emphatic phrases, thought: “She is still quarreling with me in her heart!”"
Here the author is obliquely establishing a little Cliveden Set.
"Russia now had an alliance with France, but didn’t know whether to trust it or not, and the British didn’t know whether the French meant it, and whether they should be encouraged to mean it or to sabotage it. French policy, unlike the British, did change with the government, and that was a bad thing for the French, and for their friends and backers. Many persons in Britain took the position that the question of Russia was not merely a political issue, but a moral one; they refused to “shake hands with murder.” Gerald Albany, a clergyman’s son, was among these; but Ceddy spoke cautiously, saying that in statecraft it was not always possible to be guided by one’s moral and religious ideas. “We should have had a bad time at the outbreak of the last war if we hadn’t had the aid of Russia; and surely the hands of the Tsar had bloodstains enough.”"
Funny how convenient it is for the author and his aristocratic British characters, both, to forget that British massacred far more in India than the reds in Russia did their own aristocracy; whether that's racism or merely a question of being recognised by Europe as aristocracy is a matter of making excuses, since there is Wickthorpe admitting that the Czar's regime did kill people, and those were poor. Hence too the lack of a vigorous denunciation of nazis by West until discovery of the concentration camps post WWII, for Jews were just as Asian as India, and so West understands racism against them.
September 7, 2019
So many people awarded this book five stars. I can see why that was the case, but all I felt was impatience for it to be done. Maybe it was just the wrong book at the wrong time.
August 24, 2019
The title gives away the next theme of this fifth volume in the World's End series, and the story jumps right to it, rather than attempting to pick up exactly where the last volume left it, as usual. The connections are made as and when by Upton Sinclair, in this series anyway. And here, Lanny Budd meets his old mentor and boss Professor Alston in the hotel in N.Y. where he has a room, presumably because Shore Acres is no longer an option, not at the moment when Irma's new marriage is fresh, anyway; and as the two talk, professor Alston who has been close to President Rosevelt - FDR - suggests he speak with the President directly, makes a call, and an appointment.
...................
Lanny takes in the ambience, of the locale and the residence and the person. He was impressed positively.
"“You would be amused to hear of the efforts they made to trap me, after I was elected and before I was inaugurated. The country was in the midst of a panic, and if only I would consent to meet with Mr. Hoover and give him some idea of what I wanted done! The scheme was, of course, that I should be assuming responsibility, taking the panic over as my panic instead of my predecessor’s. I let him have it all, up to the very last moment.”
"“It took nerve, and I admired yours.”
"“You can’t imagine the pressure; it never let up, and hasn’t let up yet. They persuaded me into a World Economic Conference in London right after the inauguration, if you remember, the idea being to preserve the gold standard and fix all currencies at the then-existing levels. France and Britain had devalued their currencies and wanted to keep the dollar at the old level, so they could take over the trade of the world. When I realized what it was all about I dumped the chess-board, and I don’t expect ever to be forgiven for it. You doubtless know the sort of stories they tell about me.”
"“I have had them straight from the horse’s mouth.”
"“I am supposed to be drunk all the time, and in spite of my physical deficiencies I maintain a large harem.”
"“Have you heard the one about the psychiatrist who died and went to heaven and was invited to psychoanalyze God?”
"“No. Has that something to do with me?”
"“St. Peter explained that God was suffering from delusions of grandeur—He thought He was Franklin D. Roosevelt.”
"The President threw back his head and laughed heartily; he put his soul into his enjoyment of a joke, and it was a good thing to hear. Lanny remembered that Abraham Lincoln had sought the same kind of relief from too many burdens.
"“Just now,” said the Chief Executive, “I am in the midst of the hottest fight yet, brought on by my efforts to reform the Supreme Court. Those nine old gentlemen in their solemn black robes have blocked one after another of our New Deal measures, and the whole future of our program depends upon my efforts to break that stranglehold. I have called for an increase in the number of the justices, and this is called ‘packing the court,’ and is considered the opening wedge for Bolshevism. There is nothing the enemies of this plan will not do or say.” The President told some things they had done, and after one tale of senatorial skullduggery he asked: “What do you think of that?”
Lanny said: “I think it shows you are almost as indiscreet as the previous Roosevelt.” This brought another burst of laughter, and after it they were friends."
Lanny told him about Spain, about the war being really invasion, and about the Spanish rulers et al being unlikely to not bring back dark ages to Spain if brought back due to failure of democracies of West in helping the republic. FDR explained his difficulty in leading the country where the party was a troika and rest virulently against, and the troika harnessed to factions pulling in completely different directions.
"“Mr. Roosevelt,” remarked the visitor, “what you say is almost identical with what Léon Blum has told me. He carried an election on a program of domestic reforms, and is very proud of having pushed them all through. But he had to pay the price which the reactionaries exacted—no aid for Spain. I have warned him in vain—what good will it do him to nationalize the armament industry of France while Hitler is permitted to arm and prepare to overwhelm him? What will be the position of France with a Fascist Spain at her back door and German submarines using harbors on the Atlantic and the Mediterranean?”"
"“The American people will believe that when they see it; and meantime there’s no use in you or me trying to tell it to them. I can say to Congress: ‘These are dangerous times, and we must have ships and planes to defend ourselves,’ and I can get away with that; but if I should say one word about defending the interests of any other nation or group, I would raise up a storm that would bowl me over. Believe me, I know my master’s voice, and when I hear it, I have no choice but to obey. If you want to save Spain, persuade your French friends to stick out their necks; or better yet, persuade Mr. Chamberlain and his Cabinet, the real authors and sustainers of the Non-Intervention policy. If the British cannot see that it is their fight, surely nobody can ask me to take it on my shoulders.”"
Lanny was about to take his leave, but FDR said professor Alston had suggested he make use of Lanny's abilities, and Lanny protested that he'd love to but couldn't.
"“There might be things you could do for me in Europe, and they wouldn’t have to be ‘regular.’”"
Lanny informed the President succinctly about his real work and private life, and thus the necessity of shielding his real persona and any possibility of a connection with the President whom he'd love to work with, since German agents were bound to be everywhere and he was a known figure due to his previous marriage. In this, incidentally, the recapitulation of previous parts is complete, since he's already spoken about his prior background and peace conference days.
FDR told him they would meet confidentially and exclusively without anyone else except his man knowing, and immediately arranged it.
...................
Lanny proceeded to drive upstate and meet his clients, finishing with Murchison in Pittsburgh who flew him in a three seater to Adirondacks.
"Set down at the Washington airport on Monday morning, Lanny got busy on the telephone and gave the password. “Gus” told him to call again at noon, and when he did so the order was to be at a certain street corner at a quarter to ten that evening. It happened to be raining, and Lanny with overshoes and umbrella stood watching the speeding traffic, standing back far enough from the curb so as not to be too badly spattered. A car drew up, and the President’s bodyguard looked out and nodded."
Lanny met FDR privately and confidentially, and talked to him about France, Germany, and more.
"“Robbie thinks the fat general is making a grave mistake by building short-range fighter planes when he should have bombers to bring England to her knees. But Hermann only laughs and winks. What he means, of course, is to put troops ashore in England and fly those planes from English fields.”
"“How can he do it while the English control the seas?”
"“He expects to do it by parachutes, and by submarines and dive-bombers sinking the British fleet. He figures that it won’t take long to ferry troops across twenty miles of water, and they will be specialists, with weapons the like of which has never been seen in the world before.”"
FDR kept him on. "“Tell me about Hitler,” said the President; so Lanny described that strange portent, half-genius, half-madman, who had managed to infect with his mental sickness a whole generation of German youth.
"“Years ago I made a remark in a woman friend’s hearing: ‘There will be nothing to do but kill them.’ The remark horrified her so that I promised never to make it again. But it is literally true; they are a set of blind fanatics, marching, singing, screaming about their desire to conquer other peoples; it is their God-given destiny, and they have no room for any other idea in their heads. They have a song: ‘Today Germany belongs to us, tomorrow the whole world.’ The German word for belongs is gehört, while the word hört means hears; so in Germany they sing ‘belongs to us’ and abroad they sing ‘hears us,’ which sounds less alarming. That is typical of the Nazi technique. Hitler has written in his book that you can get any lie believed if you repeat it often enough; and especially if it’s a big lie—because people will say that nobody would dare to tell one as big as that. It is no exaggeration to say that he has made Germany into a headquarters of the Lie; he has told so many and so often that nobody in his country has any means of distinguishing truth from falsehood.”"
"“People here make a grave mistake,” Lanny said. “They think of Nazism as a reactionary movement, an effort of the capitalist class to put down labor and the Communists; but Nazism was a revolutionary movement—that is the only way any movement can get power nowadays. Hitler promised the redistribution of landed estates without compensation, the abolition of what he called ‘interest slavery,’ the whole program of populist revolt.”
"“We had such a man in this country—Huey Long.”
"“I’m sorry I didn’t meet him.”
"“Believe me, I did! He was all set to be my successor. He once had me waked up at one in the morning to give me hell over the telephone from Baton Rouge for some appointment he didn’t like. I refused to cancel it and he was my mortal enemy forever after.”
"“There will be others like him,” replied Lanny, “unless we solve the problem of poverty in the midst of plenty. The German middle classes, the little men like Hitler, were being wiped out, and he offered a millennium, also a scapegoat, the Jews. When he got the votes, he took them to the big industrialists and sold them for more campaign funds.”
"That aspect of the movement had few secrets for Lanny, because his father, a steel man himself in those days, had heard the German steel men talking about the sums they were turning over to their new political boss. “Thyssen alone put up five million marks.”"
Lanny explained the realities behind, as he'd come to grasp.
"“It is really Hitler who is directing it?”
"“It is the technical men of German industry, and the officers of the general staff of the Wehrmacht. They are probably the most highly trained military men in the world, and of course it is herrlich for them, because for the first time all German industry, both capital and labor, does exactly what they, the members of the Herrenklub, direct. Emil Meissner, Kurt’s brother, is a member of that club. He was doubtful of Schicklgruber, the demagogue, but now he worships Hitler, the inspired master of the German destiny. I have seen Emil rise from lieutenant to general in less than twenty-five years, and today he is probably the happiest man I know; he has everything exactly the way he wants it. The Communists, the Socialists, the democrats and pacifists are all dead or in concentration camps; every good German is hard at work, living frugally and investing his savings in government bonds; and all the money the wizard Schacht can create is going into the building of that bicycle I was telling you about a while ago, the machine on which the German Army is going to ride to world mastery.”
"“It is a terrible picture you paint, Lanny.”
"“I assure you, Governor, I am no painter. I am only a transporter of paintings. When I come on one that seems to me worth while, I bring it to this country and show it to my friends. The most important one for you to look at is the picture of this German war machine being tried out in Spain. Hitler is sending his tankmen, his artillerymen, and above all his airmen there in relays; nobody stays more than three or four months, just long enough to learn the new techniques of swift and deadly mechanized war; then he goes back to Germany, and tells it to his superior officers, and on the training fields in the Fatherland he teaches it to hundreds of others. The Italians are doing the same, but they’re not so good; they don’t really like war and nobody can make them. But the Nazis like nothing else, and the result is going to be that they will have a large army of trained and eager professionals, while all the other peoples, except perhaps the Japanese, will be bungling amateurs. The Nazis are training some of their stormtroopers right here in America; I have seen them in New York, and they may be doing it even in Washington. You tell me you can’t prevent what is happening in Spain, Governor, but surely you ought to be able to do something in America.”
"Said the President: “I think I can assure you we’re not entirely overlooking that part of our duty.”"
...................
Lanny visited his father's home and the Budd Erling plant, and heard him; he visited Hansi and Bess and met their little boy Freddi, and Hansi's parents. Johannes talked to him freely, and his family's politics no longer bothered him. Lanny had enough to report already, and did.
"Lanny drove them all in to the concert, which was held in a hall on the East side, its purpose being to collect funds for the aiding of Jews who had escaped into the countries bordering on Hitlerland. The place was packed to the doors with Jewish men and women, some of them old but most of them young, a few bearded but most smooth-shaven, a few well-to-do, but most poor. Jews of all sorts and sizes, but mostly undersized; Jews with dark curly hair and some with red; Jews with Jewish noses, but many who might have been taken for Russians or Poles or Hungarians or Italians or Spaniards. They had been mixed up with all the European tribes for a thousand years, but alas, it hadn’t done them any good."
Here the author goes into a diatribe that's church propaganda from pulpits for most of two millennia, for a convenient handshake with Rome around seventeen centuries ago, to escape persecution by turning on the relatives of the one god church was attempting to enforce by every possible means including lying, cheating, fraud and mass murders called inquisition. This propaganda coupled with terror has succeeded so well, most under its spell never stop to think how obvious a fraud it is, but it's nothing less. Fact is, Rome occupied Israel and Judea, and people were executed via crucifixion every day for very little, and blaming the occupied colonial subjects or vilifying them while exculpating the invading colonial regime is the most convenient game, no different from blaming females for being victims of physical attacks including murders. In both cases it's merely convenience of targeting the weaker, blaming the vanquished and generally a prejudice in favour of the bully.
Funny the author doesn't see it, whether about Jews regarding the crucifixion blame or about India, particularly Hindus, regarding anything.
...................
Lanny takes in the ambience, of the locale and the residence and the person. He was impressed positively.
"“You would be amused to hear of the efforts they made to trap me, after I was elected and before I was inaugurated. The country was in the midst of a panic, and if only I would consent to meet with Mr. Hoover and give him some idea of what I wanted done! The scheme was, of course, that I should be assuming responsibility, taking the panic over as my panic instead of my predecessor’s. I let him have it all, up to the very last moment.”
"“It took nerve, and I admired yours.”
"“You can’t imagine the pressure; it never let up, and hasn’t let up yet. They persuaded me into a World Economic Conference in London right after the inauguration, if you remember, the idea being to preserve the gold standard and fix all currencies at the then-existing levels. France and Britain had devalued their currencies and wanted to keep the dollar at the old level, so they could take over the trade of the world. When I realized what it was all about I dumped the chess-board, and I don’t expect ever to be forgiven for it. You doubtless know the sort of stories they tell about me.”
"“I have had them straight from the horse’s mouth.”
"“I am supposed to be drunk all the time, and in spite of my physical deficiencies I maintain a large harem.”
"“Have you heard the one about the psychiatrist who died and went to heaven and was invited to psychoanalyze God?”
"“No. Has that something to do with me?”
"“St. Peter explained that God was suffering from delusions of grandeur—He thought He was Franklin D. Roosevelt.”
"The President threw back his head and laughed heartily; he put his soul into his enjoyment of a joke, and it was a good thing to hear. Lanny remembered that Abraham Lincoln had sought the same kind of relief from too many burdens.
"“Just now,” said the Chief Executive, “I am in the midst of the hottest fight yet, brought on by my efforts to reform the Supreme Court. Those nine old gentlemen in their solemn black robes have blocked one after another of our New Deal measures, and the whole future of our program depends upon my efforts to break that stranglehold. I have called for an increase in the number of the justices, and this is called ‘packing the court,’ and is considered the opening wedge for Bolshevism. There is nothing the enemies of this plan will not do or say.” The President told some things they had done, and after one tale of senatorial skullduggery he asked: “What do you think of that?”
Lanny said: “I think it shows you are almost as indiscreet as the previous Roosevelt.” This brought another burst of laughter, and after it they were friends."
Lanny told him about Spain, about the war being really invasion, and about the Spanish rulers et al being unlikely to not bring back dark ages to Spain if brought back due to failure of democracies of West in helping the republic. FDR explained his difficulty in leading the country where the party was a troika and rest virulently against, and the troika harnessed to factions pulling in completely different directions.
"“Mr. Roosevelt,” remarked the visitor, “what you say is almost identical with what Léon Blum has told me. He carried an election on a program of domestic reforms, and is very proud of having pushed them all through. But he had to pay the price which the reactionaries exacted—no aid for Spain. I have warned him in vain—what good will it do him to nationalize the armament industry of France while Hitler is permitted to arm and prepare to overwhelm him? What will be the position of France with a Fascist Spain at her back door and German submarines using harbors on the Atlantic and the Mediterranean?”"
"“The American people will believe that when they see it; and meantime there’s no use in you or me trying to tell it to them. I can say to Congress: ‘These are dangerous times, and we must have ships and planes to defend ourselves,’ and I can get away with that; but if I should say one word about defending the interests of any other nation or group, I would raise up a storm that would bowl me over. Believe me, I know my master’s voice, and when I hear it, I have no choice but to obey. If you want to save Spain, persuade your French friends to stick out their necks; or better yet, persuade Mr. Chamberlain and his Cabinet, the real authors and sustainers of the Non-Intervention policy. If the British cannot see that it is their fight, surely nobody can ask me to take it on my shoulders.”"
Lanny was about to take his leave, but FDR said professor Alston had suggested he make use of Lanny's abilities, and Lanny protested that he'd love to but couldn't.
"“There might be things you could do for me in Europe, and they wouldn’t have to be ‘regular.’”"
Lanny informed the President succinctly about his real work and private life, and thus the necessity of shielding his real persona and any possibility of a connection with the President whom he'd love to work with, since German agents were bound to be everywhere and he was a known figure due to his previous marriage. In this, incidentally, the recapitulation of previous parts is complete, since he's already spoken about his prior background and peace conference days.
FDR told him they would meet confidentially and exclusively without anyone else except his man knowing, and immediately arranged it.
...................
Lanny proceeded to drive upstate and meet his clients, finishing with Murchison in Pittsburgh who flew him in a three seater to Adirondacks.
"Set down at the Washington airport on Monday morning, Lanny got busy on the telephone and gave the password. “Gus” told him to call again at noon, and when he did so the order was to be at a certain street corner at a quarter to ten that evening. It happened to be raining, and Lanny with overshoes and umbrella stood watching the speeding traffic, standing back far enough from the curb so as not to be too badly spattered. A car drew up, and the President’s bodyguard looked out and nodded."
Lanny met FDR privately and confidentially, and talked to him about France, Germany, and more.
"“Robbie thinks the fat general is making a grave mistake by building short-range fighter planes when he should have bombers to bring England to her knees. But Hermann only laughs and winks. What he means, of course, is to put troops ashore in England and fly those planes from English fields.”
"“How can he do it while the English control the seas?”
"“He expects to do it by parachutes, and by submarines and dive-bombers sinking the British fleet. He figures that it won’t take long to ferry troops across twenty miles of water, and they will be specialists, with weapons the like of which has never been seen in the world before.”"
FDR kept him on. "“Tell me about Hitler,” said the President; so Lanny described that strange portent, half-genius, half-madman, who had managed to infect with his mental sickness a whole generation of German youth.
"“Years ago I made a remark in a woman friend’s hearing: ‘There will be nothing to do but kill them.’ The remark horrified her so that I promised never to make it again. But it is literally true; they are a set of blind fanatics, marching, singing, screaming about their desire to conquer other peoples; it is their God-given destiny, and they have no room for any other idea in their heads. They have a song: ‘Today Germany belongs to us, tomorrow the whole world.’ The German word for belongs is gehört, while the word hört means hears; so in Germany they sing ‘belongs to us’ and abroad they sing ‘hears us,’ which sounds less alarming. That is typical of the Nazi technique. Hitler has written in his book that you can get any lie believed if you repeat it often enough; and especially if it’s a big lie—because people will say that nobody would dare to tell one as big as that. It is no exaggeration to say that he has made Germany into a headquarters of the Lie; he has told so many and so often that nobody in his country has any means of distinguishing truth from falsehood.”"
"“People here make a grave mistake,” Lanny said. “They think of Nazism as a reactionary movement, an effort of the capitalist class to put down labor and the Communists; but Nazism was a revolutionary movement—that is the only way any movement can get power nowadays. Hitler promised the redistribution of landed estates without compensation, the abolition of what he called ‘interest slavery,’ the whole program of populist revolt.”
"“We had such a man in this country—Huey Long.”
"“I’m sorry I didn’t meet him.”
"“Believe me, I did! He was all set to be my successor. He once had me waked up at one in the morning to give me hell over the telephone from Baton Rouge for some appointment he didn’t like. I refused to cancel it and he was my mortal enemy forever after.”
"“There will be others like him,” replied Lanny, “unless we solve the problem of poverty in the midst of plenty. The German middle classes, the little men like Hitler, were being wiped out, and he offered a millennium, also a scapegoat, the Jews. When he got the votes, he took them to the big industrialists and sold them for more campaign funds.”
"That aspect of the movement had few secrets for Lanny, because his father, a steel man himself in those days, had heard the German steel men talking about the sums they were turning over to their new political boss. “Thyssen alone put up five million marks.”"
Lanny explained the realities behind, as he'd come to grasp.
"“It is really Hitler who is directing it?”
"“It is the technical men of German industry, and the officers of the general staff of the Wehrmacht. They are probably the most highly trained military men in the world, and of course it is herrlich for them, because for the first time all German industry, both capital and labor, does exactly what they, the members of the Herrenklub, direct. Emil Meissner, Kurt’s brother, is a member of that club. He was doubtful of Schicklgruber, the demagogue, but now he worships Hitler, the inspired master of the German destiny. I have seen Emil rise from lieutenant to general in less than twenty-five years, and today he is probably the happiest man I know; he has everything exactly the way he wants it. The Communists, the Socialists, the democrats and pacifists are all dead or in concentration camps; every good German is hard at work, living frugally and investing his savings in government bonds; and all the money the wizard Schacht can create is going into the building of that bicycle I was telling you about a while ago, the machine on which the German Army is going to ride to world mastery.”
"“It is a terrible picture you paint, Lanny.”
"“I assure you, Governor, I am no painter. I am only a transporter of paintings. When I come on one that seems to me worth while, I bring it to this country and show it to my friends. The most important one for you to look at is the picture of this German war machine being tried out in Spain. Hitler is sending his tankmen, his artillerymen, and above all his airmen there in relays; nobody stays more than three or four months, just long enough to learn the new techniques of swift and deadly mechanized war; then he goes back to Germany, and tells it to his superior officers, and on the training fields in the Fatherland he teaches it to hundreds of others. The Italians are doing the same, but they’re not so good; they don’t really like war and nobody can make them. But the Nazis like nothing else, and the result is going to be that they will have a large army of trained and eager professionals, while all the other peoples, except perhaps the Japanese, will be bungling amateurs. The Nazis are training some of their stormtroopers right here in America; I have seen them in New York, and they may be doing it even in Washington. You tell me you can’t prevent what is happening in Spain, Governor, but surely you ought to be able to do something in America.”
"Said the President: “I think I can assure you we’re not entirely overlooking that part of our duty.”"
...................
Lanny visited his father's home and the Budd Erling plant, and heard him; he visited Hansi and Bess and met their little boy Freddi, and Hansi's parents. Johannes talked to him freely, and his family's politics no longer bothered him. Lanny had enough to report already, and did.
"Lanny drove them all in to the concert, which was held in a hall on the East side, its purpose being to collect funds for the aiding of Jews who had escaped into the countries bordering on Hitlerland. The place was packed to the doors with Jewish men and women, some of them old but most of them young, a few bearded but most smooth-shaven, a few well-to-do, but most poor. Jews of all sorts and sizes, but mostly undersized; Jews with dark curly hair and some with red; Jews with Jewish noses, but many who might have been taken for Russians or Poles or Hungarians or Italians or Spaniards. They had been mixed up with all the European tribes for a thousand years, but alas, it hadn’t done them any good."
Here the author goes into a diatribe that's church propaganda from pulpits for most of two millennia, for a convenient handshake with Rome around seventeen centuries ago, to escape persecution by turning on the relatives of the one god church was attempting to enforce by every possible means including lying, cheating, fraud and mass murders called inquisition. This propaganda coupled with terror has succeeded so well, most under its spell never stop to think how obvious a fraud it is, but it's nothing less. Fact is, Rome occupied Israel and Judea, and people were executed via crucifixion every day for very little, and blaming the occupied colonial subjects or vilifying them while exculpating the invading colonial regime is the most convenient game, no different from blaming females for being victims of physical attacks including murders. In both cases it's merely convenience of targeting the weaker, blaming the vanquished and generally a prejudice in favour of the bully.
Funny the author doesn't see it, whether about Jews regarding the crucifixion blame or about India, particularly Hindus, regarding anything.
August 24, 2019
The title gives away the next theme of this fifth volume in the World's End series, and the story jumps right to it, rather than attempting to pick up exactly where the last volume left it, as usual. The connections are made as and when by Upton Sinclair, in this series anyway. And here, Lanny Budd meets his old mentor and boss Professor Alston in the hotel in N.Y. where he has a room, presumably because Shore Acres is no longer an option, not at the moment when Irma's new marriage is fresh, anyway; and as the two talk, professor Alston who has been close to President Rosevelt - FDR - suggests he speak with the President directly, makes a call, and an appointment.
...................
Lanny takes in the ambience, of the locale and the residence and the person. He was impressed positively.
"“You would be amused to hear of the efforts they made to trap me, after I was elected and before I was inaugurated. The country was in the midst of a panic, and if only I would consent to meet with Mr. Hoover and give him some idea of what I wanted done! The scheme was, of course, that I should be assuming responsibility, taking the panic over as my panic instead of my predecessor’s. I let him have it all, up to the very last moment.”
"“It took nerve, and I admired yours.”
"“You can’t imagine the pressure; it never let up, and hasn’t let up yet. They persuaded me into a World Economic Conference in London right after the inauguration, if you remember, the idea being to preserve the gold standard and fix all currencies at the then-existing levels. France and Britain had devalued their currencies and wanted to keep the dollar at the old level, so they could take over the trade of the world. When I realized what it was all about I dumped the chess-board, and I don’t expect ever to be forgiven for it. You doubtless know the sort of stories they tell about me.”
"“I have had them straight from the horse’s mouth.”
"“I am supposed to be drunk all the time, and in spite of my physical deficiencies I maintain a large harem.”
"“Have you heard the one about the psychiatrist who died and went to heaven and was invited to psychoanalyze God?”
"“No. Has that something to do with me?”
"“St. Peter explained that God was suffering from delusions of grandeur—He thought He was Franklin D. Roosevelt.”
"The President threw back his head and laughed heartily; he put his soul into his enjoyment of a joke, and it was a good thing to hear. Lanny remembered that Abraham Lincoln had sought the same kind of relief from too many burdens.
"“Just now,” said the Chief Executive, “I am in the midst of the hottest fight yet, brought on by my efforts to reform the Supreme Court. Those nine old gentlemen in their solemn black robes have blocked one after another of our New Deal measures, and the whole future of our program depends upon my efforts to break that stranglehold. I have called for an increase in the number of the justices, and this is called ‘packing the court,’ and is considered the opening wedge for Bolshevism. There is nothing the enemies of this plan will not do or say.” The President told some things they had done, and after one tale of senatorial skullduggery he asked: “What do you think of that?”
Lanny said: “I think it shows you are almost as indiscreet as the previous Roosevelt.” This brought another burst of laughter, and after it they were friends."
Lanny told him about Spain, about the war being really invasion, and about the Spanish rulers et al being unlikely to not bring back dark ages to Spain if brought back due to failure of democracies of West in helping the republic. FDR explained his difficulty in leading the country where the party was a troika and rest virulently against, and the troika harnessed to factions pulling in completely different directions.
"“Mr. Roosevelt,” remarked the visitor, “what you say is almost identical with what Léon Blum has told me. He carried an election on a program of domestic reforms, and is very proud of having pushed them all through. But he had to pay the price which the reactionaries exacted—no aid for Spain. I have warned him in vain—what good will it do him to nationalize the armament industry of France while Hitler is permitted to arm and prepare to overwhelm him? What will be the position of France with a Fascist Spain at her back door and German submarines using harbors on the Atlantic and the Mediterranean?”"
"“The American people will believe that when they see it; and meantime there’s no use in you or me trying to tell it to them. I can say to Congress: ‘These are dangerous times, and we must have ships and planes to defend ourselves,’ and I can get away with that; but if I should say one word about defending the interests of any other nation or group, I would raise up a storm that would bowl me over. Believe me, I know my master’s voice, and when I hear it, I have no choice but to obey. If you want to save Spain, persuade your French friends to stick out their necks; or better yet, persuade Mr. Chamberlain and his Cabinet, the real authors and sustainers of the Non-Intervention policy. If the British cannot see that it is their fight, surely nobody can ask me to take it on my shoulders.”"
Lanny was about to take his leave, but FDR said professor Alston had suggested he make use of Lanny's abilities, and Lanny protested that he'd love to but couldn't.
"“There might be things you could do for me in Europe, and they wouldn’t have to be ‘regular.’”"
Lanny informed the President succinctly about his real work and private life, and thus the necessity of shielding his real persona and any possibility of a connection with the President whom he'd love to work with, since German agents were bound to be everywhere and he was a known figure due to his previous marriage. In this, incidentally, the recapitulation of previous parts is complete, since he's already spoken about his prior background and peace conference days.
FDR told him they would meet confidentially and exclusively without anyone else except his man knowing, and immediately arranged it.
...................
Lanny proceeded to drive upstate and meet his clients, finishing with Murchison in Pittsburgh who flew him in a three seater to Adirondacks.
"Set down at the Washington airport on Monday morning, Lanny got busy on the telephone and gave the password. “Gus” told him to call again at noon, and when he did so the order was to be at a certain street corner at a quarter to ten that evening. It happened to be raining, and Lanny with overshoes and umbrella stood watching the speeding traffic, standing back far enough from the curb so as not to be too badly spattered. A car drew up, and the President’s bodyguard looked out and nodded."
Lanny met FDR privately and confidentially, and talked to him about France, Germany, and more.
"“Robbie thinks the fat general is making a grave mistake by building short-range fighter planes when he should have bombers to bring England to her knees. But Hermann only laughs and winks. What he means, of course, is to put troops ashore in England and fly those planes from English fields.”
"“How can he do it while the English control the seas?”
"“He expects to do it by parachutes, and by submarines and dive-bombers sinking the British fleet. He figures that it won’t take long to ferry troops across twenty miles of water, and they will be specialists, with weapons the like of which has never been seen in the world before.”"
FDR kept him on. "“Tell me about Hitler,” said the President; so Lanny described that strange portent, half-genius, half-madman, who had managed to infect with his mental sickness a whole generation of German youth.
"“Years ago I made a remark in a woman friend’s hearing: ‘There will be nothing to do but kill them.’ The remark horrified her so that I promised never to make it again. But it is literally true; they are a set of blind fanatics, marching, singing, screaming about their desire to conquer other peoples; it is their God-given destiny, and they have no room for any other idea in their heads. They have a song: ‘Today Germany belongs to us, tomorrow the whole world.’ The German word for belongs is gehört, while the word hört means hears; so in Germany they sing ‘belongs to us’ and abroad they sing ‘hears us,’ which sounds less alarming. That is typical of the Nazi technique. Hitler has written in his book that you can get any lie believed if you repeat it often enough; and especially if it’s a big lie—because people will say that nobody would dare to tell one as big as that. It is no exaggeration to say that he has made Germany into a headquarters of the Lie; he has told so many and so often that nobody in his country has any means of distinguishing truth from falsehood.”"
"“People here make a grave mistake,” Lanny said. “They think of Nazism as a reactionary movement, an effort of the capitalist class to put down labor and the Communists; but Nazism was a revolutionary movement—that is the only way any movement can get power nowadays. Hitler promised the redistribution of landed estates without compensation, the abolition of what he called ‘interest slavery,’ the whole program of populist revolt.”
"“We had such a man in this country—Huey Long.”
"“I’m sorry I didn’t meet him.”
"“Believe me, I did! He was all set to be my successor. He once had me waked up at one in the morning to give me hell over the telephone from Baton Rouge for some appointment he didn’t like. I refused to cancel it and he was my mortal enemy forever after.”
"“There will be others like him,” replied Lanny, “unless we solve the problem of poverty in the midst of plenty. The German middle classes, the little men like Hitler, were being wiped out, and he offered a millennium, also a scapegoat, the Jews. When he got the votes, he took them to the big industrialists and sold them for more campaign funds.”
"That aspect of the movement had few secrets for Lanny, because his father, a steel man himself in those days, had heard the German steel men talking about the sums they were turning over to their new political boss. “Thyssen alone put up five million marks.”"
Lanny explained the realities behind, as he'd come to grasp.
"“It is really Hitler who is directing it?”
"“It is the technical men of German industry, and the officers of the general staff of the Wehrmacht. They are probably the most highly trained military men in the world, and of course it is herrlich for them, because for the first time all German industry, both capital and labor, does exactly what they, the members of the Herrenklub, direct. Emil Meissner, Kurt’s brother, is a member of that club. He was doubtful of Schicklgruber, the demagogue, but now he worships Hitler, the inspired master of the German destiny. I have seen Emil rise from lieutenant to general in less than twenty-five years, and today he is probably the happiest man I know; he has everything exactly the way he wants it. The Communists, the Socialists, the democrats and pacifists are all dead or in concentration camps; every good German is hard at work, living frugally and investing his savings in government bonds; and all the money the wizard Schacht can create is going into the building of that bicycle I was telling you about a while ago, the machine on which the German Army is going to ride to world mastery.”
"“It is a terrible picture you paint, Lanny.”
"“I assure you, Governor, I am no painter. I am only a transporter of paintings. When I come on one that seems to me worth while, I bring it to this country and show it to my friends. The most important one for you to look at is the picture of this German war machine being tried out in Spain. Hitler is sending his tankmen, his artillerymen, and above all his airmen there in relays; nobody stays more than three or four months, just long enough to learn the new techniques of swift and deadly mechanized war; then he goes back to Germany, and tells it to his superior officers, and on the training fields in the Fatherland he teaches it to hundreds of others. The Italians are doing the same, but they’re not so good; they don’t really like war and nobody can make them. But the Nazis like nothing else, and the result is going to be that they will have a large army of trained and eager professionals, while all the other peoples, except perhaps the Japanese, will be bungling amateurs. The Nazis are training some of their stormtroopers right here in America; I have seen them in New York, and they may be doing it even in Washington. You tell me you can’t prevent what is happening in Spain, Governor, but surely you ought to be able to do something in America.”
"Said the President: “I think I can assure you we’re not entirely overlooking that part of our duty.”"
...................
Lanny visited his father's home and the Budd Erling plant, and heard him; he visited Hansi and Bess and met their little boy Freddi, and Hansi's parents. Johannes talked to him freely, and his family's politics no longer bothered him. Lanny had enough to report already, and did.
"Lanny drove them all in to the concert, which was held in a hall on the East side, its purpose being to collect funds for the aiding of Jews who had escaped into the countries bordering on Hitlerland. The place was packed to the doors with Jewish men and women, some of them old but most of them young, a few bearded but most smooth-shaven, a few well-to-do, but most poor. Jews of all sorts and sizes, but mostly undersized; Jews with dark curly hair and some with red; Jews with Jewish noses, but many who might have been taken for Russians or Poles or Hungarians or Italians or Spaniards. They had been mixed up with all the European tribes for a thousand years, but alas, it hadn’t done them any good."
Here the author goes into a diatribe that's church propaganda from pulpits for most of two millennia, for a convenient handshake with Rome around seventeen centuries ago, to escape persecution by turning on the relatives of the one god church was attempting to enforce by every possible means including lying, cheating, fraud and mass murders called inquisition. This propaganda coupled with terror has succeeded so well, most under its spell never stop to think how obvious a fraud it is, but it's nothing less. Fact is, Rome occupied Israel and Judea, and people were executed via crucifixion every day for very little, and blaming the occupied colonial subjects or vilifying them while exculpating the invading colonial regime is the most convenient game, no different from blaming females for being victims of physical attacks including murders. In both cases it's merely convenience of targeting the weaker, blaming the vanquished and generally a prejudice in favour of the bully.
Funny the author doesn't see it, whether about Jews regarding the crucifixion blame or about India, particularly Hindus, regarding anything.
...................
Lanny takes in the ambience, of the locale and the residence and the person. He was impressed positively.
"“You would be amused to hear of the efforts they made to trap me, after I was elected and before I was inaugurated. The country was in the midst of a panic, and if only I would consent to meet with Mr. Hoover and give him some idea of what I wanted done! The scheme was, of course, that I should be assuming responsibility, taking the panic over as my panic instead of my predecessor’s. I let him have it all, up to the very last moment.”
"“It took nerve, and I admired yours.”
"“You can’t imagine the pressure; it never let up, and hasn’t let up yet. They persuaded me into a World Economic Conference in London right after the inauguration, if you remember, the idea being to preserve the gold standard and fix all currencies at the then-existing levels. France and Britain had devalued their currencies and wanted to keep the dollar at the old level, so they could take over the trade of the world. When I realized what it was all about I dumped the chess-board, and I don’t expect ever to be forgiven for it. You doubtless know the sort of stories they tell about me.”
"“I have had them straight from the horse’s mouth.”
"“I am supposed to be drunk all the time, and in spite of my physical deficiencies I maintain a large harem.”
"“Have you heard the one about the psychiatrist who died and went to heaven and was invited to psychoanalyze God?”
"“No. Has that something to do with me?”
"“St. Peter explained that God was suffering from delusions of grandeur—He thought He was Franklin D. Roosevelt.”
"The President threw back his head and laughed heartily; he put his soul into his enjoyment of a joke, and it was a good thing to hear. Lanny remembered that Abraham Lincoln had sought the same kind of relief from too many burdens.
"“Just now,” said the Chief Executive, “I am in the midst of the hottest fight yet, brought on by my efforts to reform the Supreme Court. Those nine old gentlemen in their solemn black robes have blocked one after another of our New Deal measures, and the whole future of our program depends upon my efforts to break that stranglehold. I have called for an increase in the number of the justices, and this is called ‘packing the court,’ and is considered the opening wedge for Bolshevism. There is nothing the enemies of this plan will not do or say.” The President told some things they had done, and after one tale of senatorial skullduggery he asked: “What do you think of that?”
Lanny said: “I think it shows you are almost as indiscreet as the previous Roosevelt.” This brought another burst of laughter, and after it they were friends."
Lanny told him about Spain, about the war being really invasion, and about the Spanish rulers et al being unlikely to not bring back dark ages to Spain if brought back due to failure of democracies of West in helping the republic. FDR explained his difficulty in leading the country where the party was a troika and rest virulently against, and the troika harnessed to factions pulling in completely different directions.
"“Mr. Roosevelt,” remarked the visitor, “what you say is almost identical with what Léon Blum has told me. He carried an election on a program of domestic reforms, and is very proud of having pushed them all through. But he had to pay the price which the reactionaries exacted—no aid for Spain. I have warned him in vain—what good will it do him to nationalize the armament industry of France while Hitler is permitted to arm and prepare to overwhelm him? What will be the position of France with a Fascist Spain at her back door and German submarines using harbors on the Atlantic and the Mediterranean?”"
"“The American people will believe that when they see it; and meantime there’s no use in you or me trying to tell it to them. I can say to Congress: ‘These are dangerous times, and we must have ships and planes to defend ourselves,’ and I can get away with that; but if I should say one word about defending the interests of any other nation or group, I would raise up a storm that would bowl me over. Believe me, I know my master’s voice, and when I hear it, I have no choice but to obey. If you want to save Spain, persuade your French friends to stick out their necks; or better yet, persuade Mr. Chamberlain and his Cabinet, the real authors and sustainers of the Non-Intervention policy. If the British cannot see that it is their fight, surely nobody can ask me to take it on my shoulders.”"
Lanny was about to take his leave, but FDR said professor Alston had suggested he make use of Lanny's abilities, and Lanny protested that he'd love to but couldn't.
"“There might be things you could do for me in Europe, and they wouldn’t have to be ‘regular.’”"
Lanny informed the President succinctly about his real work and private life, and thus the necessity of shielding his real persona and any possibility of a connection with the President whom he'd love to work with, since German agents were bound to be everywhere and he was a known figure due to his previous marriage. In this, incidentally, the recapitulation of previous parts is complete, since he's already spoken about his prior background and peace conference days.
FDR told him they would meet confidentially and exclusively without anyone else except his man knowing, and immediately arranged it.
...................
Lanny proceeded to drive upstate and meet his clients, finishing with Murchison in Pittsburgh who flew him in a three seater to Adirondacks.
"Set down at the Washington airport on Monday morning, Lanny got busy on the telephone and gave the password. “Gus” told him to call again at noon, and when he did so the order was to be at a certain street corner at a quarter to ten that evening. It happened to be raining, and Lanny with overshoes and umbrella stood watching the speeding traffic, standing back far enough from the curb so as not to be too badly spattered. A car drew up, and the President’s bodyguard looked out and nodded."
Lanny met FDR privately and confidentially, and talked to him about France, Germany, and more.
"“Robbie thinks the fat general is making a grave mistake by building short-range fighter planes when he should have bombers to bring England to her knees. But Hermann only laughs and winks. What he means, of course, is to put troops ashore in England and fly those planes from English fields.”
"“How can he do it while the English control the seas?”
"“He expects to do it by parachutes, and by submarines and dive-bombers sinking the British fleet. He figures that it won’t take long to ferry troops across twenty miles of water, and they will be specialists, with weapons the like of which has never been seen in the world before.”"
FDR kept him on. "“Tell me about Hitler,” said the President; so Lanny described that strange portent, half-genius, half-madman, who had managed to infect with his mental sickness a whole generation of German youth.
"“Years ago I made a remark in a woman friend’s hearing: ‘There will be nothing to do but kill them.’ The remark horrified her so that I promised never to make it again. But it is literally true; they are a set of blind fanatics, marching, singing, screaming about their desire to conquer other peoples; it is their God-given destiny, and they have no room for any other idea in their heads. They have a song: ‘Today Germany belongs to us, tomorrow the whole world.’ The German word for belongs is gehört, while the word hört means hears; so in Germany they sing ‘belongs to us’ and abroad they sing ‘hears us,’ which sounds less alarming. That is typical of the Nazi technique. Hitler has written in his book that you can get any lie believed if you repeat it often enough; and especially if it’s a big lie—because people will say that nobody would dare to tell one as big as that. It is no exaggeration to say that he has made Germany into a headquarters of the Lie; he has told so many and so often that nobody in his country has any means of distinguishing truth from falsehood.”"
"“People here make a grave mistake,” Lanny said. “They think of Nazism as a reactionary movement, an effort of the capitalist class to put down labor and the Communists; but Nazism was a revolutionary movement—that is the only way any movement can get power nowadays. Hitler promised the redistribution of landed estates without compensation, the abolition of what he called ‘interest slavery,’ the whole program of populist revolt.”
"“We had such a man in this country—Huey Long.”
"“I’m sorry I didn’t meet him.”
"“Believe me, I did! He was all set to be my successor. He once had me waked up at one in the morning to give me hell over the telephone from Baton Rouge for some appointment he didn’t like. I refused to cancel it and he was my mortal enemy forever after.”
"“There will be others like him,” replied Lanny, “unless we solve the problem of poverty in the midst of plenty. The German middle classes, the little men like Hitler, were being wiped out, and he offered a millennium, also a scapegoat, the Jews. When he got the votes, he took them to the big industrialists and sold them for more campaign funds.”
"That aspect of the movement had few secrets for Lanny, because his father, a steel man himself in those days, had heard the German steel men talking about the sums they were turning over to their new political boss. “Thyssen alone put up five million marks.”"
Lanny explained the realities behind, as he'd come to grasp.
"“It is really Hitler who is directing it?”
"“It is the technical men of German industry, and the officers of the general staff of the Wehrmacht. They are probably the most highly trained military men in the world, and of course it is herrlich for them, because for the first time all German industry, both capital and labor, does exactly what they, the members of the Herrenklub, direct. Emil Meissner, Kurt’s brother, is a member of that club. He was doubtful of Schicklgruber, the demagogue, but now he worships Hitler, the inspired master of the German destiny. I have seen Emil rise from lieutenant to general in less than twenty-five years, and today he is probably the happiest man I know; he has everything exactly the way he wants it. The Communists, the Socialists, the democrats and pacifists are all dead or in concentration camps; every good German is hard at work, living frugally and investing his savings in government bonds; and all the money the wizard Schacht can create is going into the building of that bicycle I was telling you about a while ago, the machine on which the German Army is going to ride to world mastery.”
"“It is a terrible picture you paint, Lanny.”
"“I assure you, Governor, I am no painter. I am only a transporter of paintings. When I come on one that seems to me worth while, I bring it to this country and show it to my friends. The most important one for you to look at is the picture of this German war machine being tried out in Spain. Hitler is sending his tankmen, his artillerymen, and above all his airmen there in relays; nobody stays more than three or four months, just long enough to learn the new techniques of swift and deadly mechanized war; then he goes back to Germany, and tells it to his superior officers, and on the training fields in the Fatherland he teaches it to hundreds of others. The Italians are doing the same, but they’re not so good; they don’t really like war and nobody can make them. But the Nazis like nothing else, and the result is going to be that they will have a large army of trained and eager professionals, while all the other peoples, except perhaps the Japanese, will be bungling amateurs. The Nazis are training some of their stormtroopers right here in America; I have seen them in New York, and they may be doing it even in Washington. You tell me you can’t prevent what is happening in Spain, Governor, but surely you ought to be able to do something in America.”
"Said the President: “I think I can assure you we’re not entirely overlooking that part of our duty.”"
...................
Lanny visited his father's home and the Budd Erling plant, and heard him; he visited Hansi and Bess and met their little boy Freddi, and Hansi's parents. Johannes talked to him freely, and his family's politics no longer bothered him. Lanny had enough to report already, and did.
"Lanny drove them all in to the concert, which was held in a hall on the East side, its purpose being to collect funds for the aiding of Jews who had escaped into the countries bordering on Hitlerland. The place was packed to the doors with Jewish men and women, some of them old but most of them young, a few bearded but most smooth-shaven, a few well-to-do, but most poor. Jews of all sorts and sizes, but mostly undersized; Jews with dark curly hair and some with red; Jews with Jewish noses, but many who might have been taken for Russians or Poles or Hungarians or Italians or Spaniards. They had been mixed up with all the European tribes for a thousand years, but alas, it hadn’t done them any good."
Here the author goes into a diatribe that's church propaganda from pulpits for most of two millennia, for a convenient handshake with Rome around seventeen centuries ago, to escape persecution by turning on the relatives of the one god church was attempting to enforce by every possible means including lying, cheating, fraud and mass murders called inquisition. This propaganda coupled with terror has succeeded so well, most under its spell never stop to think how obvious a fraud it is, but it's nothing less. Fact is, Rome occupied Israel and Judea, and people were executed via crucifixion every day for very little, and blaming the occupied colonial subjects or vilifying them while exculpating the invading colonial regime is the most convenient game, no different from blaming females for being victims of physical attacks including murders. In both cases it's merely convenience of targeting the weaker, blaming the vanquished and generally a prejudice in favour of the bully.
Funny the author doesn't see it, whether about Jews regarding the crucifixion blame or about India, particularly Hindus, regarding anything.
July 24, 2011
Presidential Agent, written in 1944 is the fifth in the magnificent and epic eleven book Lanny Budd Series written by Upton Sinclair and covering the period of 1937 and 1938. Upon publication, Viking Press issued a statement that the books were related but could be enjoyed independently. I disagree. As I have previously noted, I read the third book, the Pulitzer Prize winning Dragon’s Teeth first and it lived up to the awards and recognition it received but I was convinced that one had to start at the beginning to fully appreciate the series. And so I did. I read all eleven books in about six weeks and have reread World’s End, Wide Is The Gate and Presidential Agent again.
Presidential Agent begins with a chance encounter Lanny has in New York with his boss at the Versailles Treaty. When Lanny is nineteen years old he is hired to assist a college Professor, Charlie Alston with the geographical aspects of the remaking of Europe after the dissolution of the Ottoman and Austrian Empires following the end of World War One. Professor Alston, one of President Roosevelt’s closest advisors and a “fix-it” man introduces Lnnny to President Roosevelt and Lanny has many confidential meetings with FDR and becomes Presidential Agent 103. The meetings are brought to life in such a way you feel yourself in the room with them as they discuss the coming storm in Europe. Lanny sounds the alarms to the coming of Fascism and Nazism and the fall of the democratically elected government of Spain and the rape of Abyssinia by Mussolini. All of the terror brought by Franco, Mussolini and Hitler is financed by rich and powerful industrialists and financiers. Their reasoning behind supporting these onetime skid row bums is to ward off the Red Menace or Bolshevism. These European plutocrats are more fearful of the Reds than surrendering their freedoms to Fascism and Nazism.
Lanny’s secret wife Trudi has been kidnapped by the Gestapo and the insuring efforts by Lanny to rescue her are riveting and as daring as the rescue of Alfy from Franco’s dungeon in Spain and the attempt to rescue Fredi from the Gestapo in Dragon’s Teeth.
There is a conspiracy Lanny is privy to involving the “200” families of France to over throw the French government, known as the Cagoular’s or hooded men. The Plutocrats of France are determined to make nice with Hitler in the hope of retaining their wealth and avoiding another war. They believe order of the German variety is the only solution to the corruption of the various French political factions or even worse, the Bolsheviks. This is a very exciting and significant part of this story.
There is also much intrigue in England and France between the wealthy, the diplomats and the politicians. No one can guess what Hitler will settle for and where his greed for more territory will end. The powerful in England want to believe that Hitler will be content with regaining the territories that were predominantly German people prior to the Versailles Treaty. Hitler has demanded Austria, Czechoslovakia as well as Poland.
The Munich agreement is reached in which England and France accede Czechoslovakia to Hitler in hopes of reaching an accord that will avoid war and bring “Peace in Our Lifetime”. This appeasement to Hitler and his Fascist government is now well known to students of world history. and foretells the coming conflagration to Europe, indeed the entire world. This is the beginning World War Two.
Finally there is the assassination of a German Embassy official in Paris by a deranged Jewish youth that ignites the Nazi’s pogrom against the Jews and the pillaging of Jewish businesses. Jews are rounded up and by the hundreds of thousands many commit suicide, are murdered or sent to the Dachau concentration camp.
Please visit our website at: www.uptonsinclairinstitute.com. You may also contact the publisher, Frederick Ellis at frederick659@yahoo.com, or me at jsc12109@hotmail.com. On our site you may read reviews of all 11 books in the series and learn much much more about Upton's works. You can also purchase dirrectly from the publisher and save upt o 30% off the retail price with free shipping. Quality is guaranteed.
Stephen Courts
July 23, 2011
Columbus, Ohio
Presidential Agent begins with a chance encounter Lanny has in New York with his boss at the Versailles Treaty. When Lanny is nineteen years old he is hired to assist a college Professor, Charlie Alston with the geographical aspects of the remaking of Europe after the dissolution of the Ottoman and Austrian Empires following the end of World War One. Professor Alston, one of President Roosevelt’s closest advisors and a “fix-it” man introduces Lnnny to President Roosevelt and Lanny has many confidential meetings with FDR and becomes Presidential Agent 103. The meetings are brought to life in such a way you feel yourself in the room with them as they discuss the coming storm in Europe. Lanny sounds the alarms to the coming of Fascism and Nazism and the fall of the democratically elected government of Spain and the rape of Abyssinia by Mussolini. All of the terror brought by Franco, Mussolini and Hitler is financed by rich and powerful industrialists and financiers. Their reasoning behind supporting these onetime skid row bums is to ward off the Red Menace or Bolshevism. These European plutocrats are more fearful of the Reds than surrendering their freedoms to Fascism and Nazism.
Lanny’s secret wife Trudi has been kidnapped by the Gestapo and the insuring efforts by Lanny to rescue her are riveting and as daring as the rescue of Alfy from Franco’s dungeon in Spain and the attempt to rescue Fredi from the Gestapo in Dragon’s Teeth.
There is a conspiracy Lanny is privy to involving the “200” families of France to over throw the French government, known as the Cagoular’s or hooded men. The Plutocrats of France are determined to make nice with Hitler in the hope of retaining their wealth and avoiding another war. They believe order of the German variety is the only solution to the corruption of the various French political factions or even worse, the Bolsheviks. This is a very exciting and significant part of this story.
There is also much intrigue in England and France between the wealthy, the diplomats and the politicians. No one can guess what Hitler will settle for and where his greed for more territory will end. The powerful in England want to believe that Hitler will be content with regaining the territories that were predominantly German people prior to the Versailles Treaty. Hitler has demanded Austria, Czechoslovakia as well as Poland.
The Munich agreement is reached in which England and France accede Czechoslovakia to Hitler in hopes of reaching an accord that will avoid war and bring “Peace in Our Lifetime”. This appeasement to Hitler and his Fascist government is now well known to students of world history. and foretells the coming conflagration to Europe, indeed the entire world. This is the beginning World War Two.
Finally there is the assassination of a German Embassy official in Paris by a deranged Jewish youth that ignites the Nazi’s pogrom against the Jews and the pillaging of Jewish businesses. Jews are rounded up and by the hundreds of thousands many commit suicide, are murdered or sent to the Dachau concentration camp.
Please visit our website at: www.uptonsinclairinstitute.com. You may also contact the publisher, Frederick Ellis at frederick659@yahoo.com, or me at jsc12109@hotmail.com. On our site you may read reviews of all 11 books in the series and learn much much more about Upton's works. You can also purchase dirrectly from the publisher and save upt o 30% off the retail price with free shipping. Quality is guaranteed.
Stephen Courts
July 23, 2011
Columbus, Ohio
June 29, 2020
Compared to the earlier books in the series, the Presidential Agent (Book 5) isn’t one of my favorites. It is a good book, but it’s somewhat depressing because it occurs in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of WW2. It was during this time period the Nazis rose to power and began to systematically silence their opposition and those it considered inferior. The Nazis rule of terror and its death machine begins in earnest as the world turns a blind eye; and it does not even spare a love one of Lanny Budd.
Lanny Budd lived through WW1 and he sees that another World War is inevitable; yet he is powerless to prevent it. As FDR’s secret agent, Lanny Budd has infiltrated the Nazis and the American and European power-brokers who are driving the world to the brink of another World War. Lanny passes the information to FDR, but FDR is powerless to do anything about it. Lanny Budd’s helplessness, frustration, depression, and anguish are clearly felt in the book. Adding to his emotional and psychological conundrum, Lanny Budd has to continual seek out and remain friendly with people that he abhors as evil and wicked. He is sleeping with the enemy and the stench of death wafts around him.
Presidential Agent (Book 5) goes more in-depth on the influence of religion (specifically the influence of the Catholic church), Hitler’s admiration of the prophet Mohammad, spiritualism, mysticism, psychism, occultism, astrology, seances, fortune telling, mythology, etc. Hitler and his henchman Hess were followers of mysticism and astrology so it’s a historical fact that had to be addressed. Mysticism was also the rage with high society during this time. With all the deaths that have occurred and will occur because of the Nazis and Spanish and Italian fascism, the ghosts of the many victims are hauntingly felt in the book.
Lanny Budd is an unusual “spy” in that he’s not an action spy. If the “Lanny Budd” character had been cast in a movie or TV series, the late actor Cary Grant would have been an ideal leading man since he, like Lanny Budd, is low-keyed; yet cosmopolitan, debonair, handsome, intelligent, wealthy, charming, confident, and has an appealing personality and physique (in other words, a chick magnet). I sometimes wonder if Upton Sinclair thought of Cary Grant when developing the character of Lanny Budd.
Lanny Budd lived through WW1 and he sees that another World War is inevitable; yet he is powerless to prevent it. As FDR’s secret agent, Lanny Budd has infiltrated the Nazis and the American and European power-brokers who are driving the world to the brink of another World War. Lanny passes the information to FDR, but FDR is powerless to do anything about it. Lanny Budd’s helplessness, frustration, depression, and anguish are clearly felt in the book. Adding to his emotional and psychological conundrum, Lanny Budd has to continual seek out and remain friendly with people that he abhors as evil and wicked. He is sleeping with the enemy and the stench of death wafts around him.
Presidential Agent (Book 5) goes more in-depth on the influence of religion (specifically the influence of the Catholic church), Hitler’s admiration of the prophet Mohammad, spiritualism, mysticism, psychism, occultism, astrology, seances, fortune telling, mythology, etc. Hitler and his henchman Hess were followers of mysticism and astrology so it’s a historical fact that had to be addressed. Mysticism was also the rage with high society during this time. With all the deaths that have occurred and will occur because of the Nazis and Spanish and Italian fascism, the ghosts of the many victims are hauntingly felt in the book.
Lanny Budd is an unusual “spy” in that he’s not an action spy. If the “Lanny Budd” character had been cast in a movie or TV series, the late actor Cary Grant would have been an ideal leading man since he, like Lanny Budd, is low-keyed; yet cosmopolitan, debonair, handsome, intelligent, wealthy, charming, confident, and has an appealing personality and physique (in other words, a chick magnet). I sometimes wonder if Upton Sinclair thought of Cary Grant when developing the character of Lanny Budd.
November 6, 2022
I am loathe to admit it, but I do think this book is getting the better of me. I used to think that the Pulitzer Prize was a serious affair, not given out lightly; I’m now beginning to question the sanity (or even, dare I say it, the integrity) of those who dish them out.
This book is a case in point. While the writing is no doubt felicitous and readable, and the point of the plot appears to be to give the reader the inside story on Europe during Hitler’s rise and how he pulled off the greatest con job in politics (which is a reasonably noble justification), the book itself just keeps on and on and on and on. And on.
It’s billed as a thriller but anything less thrilling I’ve yet to read. Sinclair spends pages and pages without the plot getting even an inch further. He digresses into maundering on about the politics and social structures of France and Germany and the sinister military-industrial complex that Hitler has harnessed and spends hours inside the imagination of the protagonist (who seems a likeable chap, though quite unbelievably sophisticated and suave and smooth). All with very little to show for it by way of plot furtherance and activity.
(Unfortunately, some of what he depicts seems to be repeating itself in the real world as I read this, namely, America’s increasing isolationism and its view of Europe’s and the rest of the world’s problems as either just that: their problems; or as a way to make more pots of money.)
And Sinclair’s verbosity seems to be catching, considering I’ve spent this many words on a review of a book I never did complete. There is only so much time in the world and I’m barely 46% through after 11 days of my usual reading pattern (which is for an hour or so each night). Update: Abandoned.
This book is a case in point. While the writing is no doubt felicitous and readable, and the point of the plot appears to be to give the reader the inside story on Europe during Hitler’s rise and how he pulled off the greatest con job in politics (which is a reasonably noble justification), the book itself just keeps on and on and on and on. And on.
It’s billed as a thriller but anything less thrilling I’ve yet to read. Sinclair spends pages and pages without the plot getting even an inch further. He digresses into maundering on about the politics and social structures of France and Germany and the sinister military-industrial complex that Hitler has harnessed and spends hours inside the imagination of the protagonist (who seems a likeable chap, though quite unbelievably sophisticated and suave and smooth). All with very little to show for it by way of plot furtherance and activity.
(Unfortunately, some of what he depicts seems to be repeating itself in the real world as I read this, namely, America’s increasing isolationism and its view of Europe’s and the rest of the world’s problems as either just that: their problems; or as a way to make more pots of money.)
And Sinclair’s verbosity seems to be catching, considering I’ve spent this many words on a review of a book I never did complete. There is only so much time in the world and I’m barely 46% through after 11 days of my usual reading pattern (which is for an hour or so each night). Update: Abandoned.
March 28, 2023
The fifth of the Lanny Budd series takes the reader to within a year of the beginning of World War II. In a year that saw an equine underdog dominate American newspapers, culminating in a triumphant match race with an opponent of visibly greater stature (none of this mentioned by Sinclair), the scene was being set for a deadlier duel between nations of similar status to the naked eye. It is likely we will see this more in focus in the next book but the reader might do well to keep this perspective in mind especially if he/she has made the Lanny-like decision, described in this final chapter, to see the crisis to its conclusion.
It has often been said that a great writer must be a great reader; once again we see Upton Sinclair as such a man. While it may go unrecognized by many, his prose is often enhanced by the beautiful poetry of others, adding to this reader's enjoyment.
As this book is filed as an historical novel, never fail to discern the lessons taught and to be learned, for the true to life events described in this series shaped the world lived in for much of the next century.
Four stars waxing
It has often been said that a great writer must be a great reader; once again we see Upton Sinclair as such a man. While it may go unrecognized by many, his prose is often enhanced by the beautiful poetry of others, adding to this reader's enjoyment.
As this book is filed as an historical novel, never fail to discern the lessons taught and to be learned, for the true to life events described in this series shaped the world lived in for much of the next century.
Four stars waxing
October 26, 2019
Upton Sinclair keeps up the great information that has been a big part of the book since the first part of the series.
More about the personality's of the English elite and the English realists, the French left , right, and middle, The continuing war in Spain , most important, the relationships of the Germans to each other and to the radical leaders,Hitler,Goering,Hess, Ribbentrop,Just a few comments on Mussolini and of Lanny's buying and selling of artworks.
Budd's relationship with all of these characters and FDR make for a fascinating learning experience of History.
More about the personality's of the English elite and the English realists, the French left , right, and middle, The continuing war in Spain , most important, the relationships of the Germans to each other and to the radical leaders,Hitler,Goering,Hess, Ribbentrop,Just a few comments on Mussolini and of Lanny's buying and selling of artworks.
Budd's relationship with all of these characters and FDR make for a fascinating learning experience of History.
July 2, 2024
Another enjoyable entry in the series. Of course it is very dated., but that is part of why it holds my interest. Written in 1943 well before the end of World War II was inevitable, it provides an insight into how the world of the late 1930s looked just five years later. Parts of it are incredibly verbose and there are quite a few pages discussing psychic phenomena that I could do without though it does provide an interesting literary device to introduce information. Overall a worthwhile read and I'm looking forward to the next one. Recommended.
August 25, 2024
Another tome of Lanny Budd's superhero adventures. This time after gleefully excusing Roosevelt's ban on sale of weapons to republican Spain, he gives an idea of the foreign agents law and writes his Chicago quarantine speech for him, and also suggests The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact to Hitler (!). Coincidences, spiritual and otherwise, lead Lanny Budd through the gauntlet of ordeals unscathed all in order so he could for the third volume in a row save someone out of the fascist or nazi dungeon or oubliette. Still, a rather smooth narrative and a comfort read.
August 27, 2025
1938. Lanny Budd se convierte en Agente presidencial de Roosevelt remitiendo la privilegiada información que obtiene en Europa con el propósito de beneficiar las democracias ante los propósitos de Hitler.
Adolece de problemas de ritmo y de exceso de repeticiones, algo que pasa factura en la segunda parte de la historia y que afecta a aspectos fundamentales de la ficción, restándole frescura a la historia.
Citas y más:
https://lahierbaroja.com/2025/08/19/agente-presidencial-upton-sinclair/
Adolece de problemas de ritmo y de exceso de repeticiones, algo que pasa factura en la segunda parte de la historia y que afecta a aspectos fundamentales de la ficción, restándole frescura a la historia.
Citas y más:
https://lahierbaroja.com/2025/08/19/agente-presidencial-upton-sinclair/
April 26, 2019
After the first half of this book, I would have given it two, or possibly three, stars. LONG-winded, convoluted, TOO much back story..... However, mid-story (to be noted: this is book 4 of a series) the story got much more interesting, with a very detailed, plausible section about Hitler and his cronies. Would I recommend it? Maybe? It's an ambitious read that easily could be scanned, without losing any of the story.
June 17, 2022
Agent of enlightenment.
The breath and scope of this amazing book is awe inspiring. Yes, the characters (at least some of them) are fictional. The events? Ensnaring. Captivating. Very truly real. It’s a privilege to have the opportunity to witness the birth of World War ll from such a unique and close-up perspective. We see both the humanity and inhumanity at play, leading to a culmination of a brutal war. It is one heck of a read. It is beautifully written.
The breath and scope of this amazing book is awe inspiring. Yes, the characters (at least some of them) are fictional. The events? Ensnaring. Captivating. Very truly real. It’s a privilege to have the opportunity to witness the birth of World War ll from such a unique and close-up perspective. We see both the humanity and inhumanity at play, leading to a culmination of a brutal war. It is one heck of a read. It is beautifully written.
December 8, 2018
Well worth looking beyond some of the flat characters—and it takes some effort to do this esp with the female ones. Great historical detail, superb pacing, and lucid descriptions, bring this period and key historical players to life and provide a social and political context that is too often overlooked. Sinclair has a superior gift in his use of facts and political and social detail and consequences to capture and sustain interest. It’s a long read but very worthwhile if you’re a 20th century history buff.
November 18, 2022
Book five in the Lanny Budd novels. This one takes us to the beginning of WWII through the Anschluss of Austria, Hitler invading Czechoslovakia, and Kristallnacht. I think the was my favorite of the books so far. The character of Lanny being at all the major events of the time still bothers me, but does bring the history to life.
June 6, 2023
Vermakelijk, maar ook traag. Het is vooral een diplomatiek verhaal aan het worden. Hoewel ik het een mooi historisch document vind, was er net te weinig intrige naar mijn smaak. Tegelijkertijd bouwt het verhaal duidelijk op naar de climax en dat levert wel vaker minder interessante kost op, die noodzakelijk is om de rest beter te maken.
March 12, 2018
WWII
I learned so many interesting facts that led up to WWII. It brought back memories of my visit to "The Eagles Nest" several years ago. Two years past I spent 23 days in Berlin which I consider an architectural marvel. It's my favorite large City in Europe.
I learned so many interesting facts that led up to WWII. It brought back memories of my visit to "The Eagles Nest" several years ago. Two years past I spent 23 days in Berlin which I consider an architectural marvel. It's my favorite large City in Europe.
January 8, 2021
Fascinating, especially in these last days of the Trump presidency. Trump and his followers are eerily similar to Hitler and his followers. Many, continuous lies told as truths to justify their actions. So much history.
August 8, 2021
Important to read in these times
Fascinating novel of the years immediately before WW2…times of peril as the Nazis gained ascendancy…Spain was crushed under fascism…so much to learn and compare to the times in which we are living…sobering and thoughtful…
Fascinating novel of the years immediately before WW2…times of peril as the Nazis gained ascendancy…Spain was crushed under fascism…so much to learn and compare to the times in which we are living…sobering and thoughtful…
November 9, 2022
War is begun
Once again, I am struck by the horrifying similarities between the world before WWII and now. When you have leaders who lack any respect for anyone other than themselves, normal people are slow to tealize how terrible they are.
Once again, I am struck by the horrifying similarities between the world before WWII and now. When you have leaders who lack any respect for anyone other than themselves, normal people are slow to tealize how terrible they are.
May 30, 2017
Fiction
January 29, 2020
Had a good time reading about Lanny Budds explots.
Book may be half century old but still interesting reading. Gives insight to what people endured while a mad man ruled Germany.
Book may be half century old but still interesting reading. Gives insight to what people endured while a mad man ruled Germany.
January 25, 2023
I like these books for the perspective on WW2 era history but get tired of the seances.
March 24, 2024
sort of just ok. getting kind of repeat-y.
but i'll keep going.
but i'll keep going.
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