The Last Goodnight by Howard Blum

Author:Howard Blum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-02-20T05:00:00+00:00

THE ROOM WAS A SMALL, very select club, a secret society of rich and powerful men who liked to play at being spies. Its name was a veiled reference to their covert meeting place, a dingy apartment at 34 East Sixty-Second Street in New York, with an unlisted phone number and an impressive collection of wines. The Room’s keyholders all shared similar pedigrees, a provenance of recognizable family names, New England boarding schools, and Ivy League colleges. But the group’s acknowledged driving force was Vincent Astor.

After the Titanic sank into the sea with his father, John Jacob Astor IV, onboard, Astor had dropped out of Harvard to manage the family’s multimillion-dollar real estate empire. Yet soon he was looking for more excitement, and instinct and opportunity conspired to push him toward the secret life. Here was a trade that offered not just the opportunity to protect the gilded establishment world he’d been born into but also a rustle of adventure. A well-connected amateur could ply it as effectively, or so he innocently thought, as the diligent professional.

With Astor setting the tone and often the agenda, the monthly Room sessions were informal intelligence briefings. One member would report, for example, on his trip to China. Another would give an insider’s report on the growing Japanese financial reserves at his bank. Astor would share what he’d discovered on his self-styled reconnaissance missions across the Pacific in his gleaming motor yacht, the Nourmahal. Notes of the discussions would be typed, and then Astor, with a gravity normally reserved for state secrets, would distribute the Room memos to his important friends in the federal government and in the Office of Naval Intelligence.

Playing intelligence agents proved to be enjoyable sport for these worldly men; they were as happily occupied as boys in a tree house frolicking with decoder rings and secret writing kits. But in 1933 their freelance ops abruptly took on a new significance—Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president.

Not only was FDR one of their privileged own, part of the Groton, Harvard, Knickerbocker gentry, but he was also Astor’s longtime friend. The new president soaked his paralyzed legs at the indoor pool on the Astor estate just down the dirt road from his farm at Hyde Park. When the pressures of his job grew overwhelming, he’d unwind with Astor and a tight circle of buddies, all members of the Room, on the palatial Nourmahal; “This is the only place I can get away from people, telephones and uniforms,” the president would write. And like the Room’s keyholders, Roosevelt too had a dilettante’s fascination for the intriguing game of espionage. He encouraged diplomats, generals, and journalists to bypass normal channels and pass their confidential reports directly to the intelligence analyst-in-chief. He did not hesitate to let his friends into this operational circle too.

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