Status Updates From Presidential Agent (The Lan...

“Das macht nichts aus. We will fly you back here, or send your car to Berlin, or to Berchtesgaden, wherever you prefer. This is a serious matter—the fate of Germany, and indeed of all Europe, may be hanging in the balance.” (Lenny‘s relationship with and influence on Hitler maybe the most exaggerated aspect of this series!)

Lanny agreed, but said that he had noted a great many native groups springing up, having the Nazi program, but not acknowledging it as Nazi, and in many cases not even knowing it. They called themselves “Christian” or “Protestant,” “Yankee Freemen” or “American Patriots”—it didn’t really make any difference, so long as they saw the Red peril and the Jew menace, and fought the New Deal.

Aviation was something new in the world, and at every stage of its development it had broken the rules and defied authority. When Lanny had been a tiny toddler on the beach at Juan, two bicycle manufacturers in Ohio had built themselves a frail contraption out of spruce-wood and canvas, and on the sand dunes of the North Carolina coast had learned to keep it in the air for several minutes.

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.

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.”

You will not be surprised to find that the first extended conversation that Lanny has in this fifth book of the series is with President Roosevelt! He is 35 years old. He is divorced from his Aris wife and now secretly married to A German activist who lives underground in Paris, working on her anti-Nazi efforts.

“It’s all one world—that is one of the things I learned as a geographer, and that the American people have to learn with blood and tears, I very much fear.” It was the summer of 1937.