 First edition | |
| Author | Upton Sinclair |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Series | Lanny Budd |
| Genre | Historical |
| Publisher | Viking Press |
Publication date | 1944 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 655 pp |
| Preceded by | Wide Is the Gate |
| Followed by | Dragon Harvest |
Presidential Agent is the fifth novel in Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd series. First published in 1944, the story covers the period from 1937 to 1938.
Visiting New York in 1937 to see paintings for sale, Lanny runs into his old mentor from the Paris Peace Conference, Professor Alston, who is working in the Roosevelt administration. Upon hearing that Lanny's wealthy European customers include top Nazis Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring, and Josef Goebbels, and that Lanny's father Robbie has started a military aircraft Company in Connecticut, but is finding only Nazi customers, Alston suggests a meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR is impressed with Lanny’s grasp of the situation in Europe. Lanny agrees to gather information in Europe as a confidential agent.
In Germany, Lanny’s old school friend Kurt is rising as a German agent. In England, schoolmate Rick is a leftist writer of political analysis. Lanny's American heiress ex-wife Irma is looking to marry into the English aristocracy. The English upper crust, including Lanny's ex-lover Rosemary (back from the Argentine, her husband's scandal having blown over), and the wealthy DeBruyne family of Lanny's deceased French ex-lover Marie, all fear a "Red" Spain and see Hitler as preferable to Stalin.
In Paris, Lanny finds his secret wife Trudi has vanished, as have others working in the anti-Nazi underground. He seeks help from his “Red” uncle Jesse. His Spanish friend Raoul may be able to reach Trudi’s old underground contact Monck, who is fighting against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Lanny believes Trudi may be imprisoned in the walled, guarded Chateau Belcour outside Paris. Lanny manages get himself, Monck and a locksmith into the chateau dungeons, where they find Trudi has already been taken to Germany.
Trying further to rescue Trudi, Lanny steps up his mingling in Nazi society as an art dealer and by posing as a convert to Nazism. Hitler purchases Detaze paintings and asks Lanny to spy on wealthy Austrians in Vienna. Lanny learns Hitler is preparing to force the Anschluss; he notifies FDR. By a device involving an occult séance, Lanny maneuvers Nazi Rudolf Hess to reveal that Trudi died at Dachau Concentration Camp.
Lanny again reports to FDR on Nazi terrorism and aims of domination. In New York City, Lanny witnesses a fascist rally of the Christian Front (United States). Back home on the Riviera, Lanny discovers that his sister Marceline's husband, the Italian fascist officer Vittorio, has stolen Marcel Detaze paintings from the home of Lanny's mother Beauty; Lanny allows Vittorio to avoid arrest by leaving France permanently. Shortly thereafter, a pregnant waitress threatens to sue Vittorio for child support; upon learning of the affair, Marceline divorces Vittorio. Marceline becomes a professional dancer.
Back in Germany, Lanny sees Czechoslovakia partially dismembered "in the name of peace" at the 1938 Munich Conference. The Krystallnacht pogrom erupts all over Germany. Discouraged by the failure of England and France to arm themselves against Hitler and the political difficulties preventing FDR from acting, Lanny considers resigning as a Presidential Agent, but he stays on. Lanny sees the future holds a fateful struggle of Roosevelt against Hitler.
In 2001 the book was re-issued by Simon Publications in two volumes. [1] Digital editions are available.
Otto Johann Anton Skorzeny was a Austrian-born German SS-Obersturmbannführer in the Waffen-SS during World War II. During the war, he was involved in a number of operations, including the removal from power of Hungarian Regent Miklós Horthy and the Gran Sasso raid which rescued Benito Mussolini from captivity. Skorzeny led Operation Greif in which German soldiers infiltrated Allied lines by using their opponents' uniforms, equipment, language and customs. As a result, he was later, in 1947, charged at the Dachau Military Tribunal with breaching the 1907 Hague Convention, but was acquitted after a former British SOE agent F. F. E. Yeo-Thomas testified that he and his operatives had been prepared to open fire while wearing German uniforms behind enemy lines.
Ernst Franz Sedgwick Hanfstaengl was a German-American businessman and close friend of Adolf Hitler. He eventually fell out of favour with Hitler and defected from Nazi Germany to the United States. He later worked for Franklin D. Roosevelt and was once engaged to the author Djuna Barnes.
The Business Plot was a political conspiracy in 1933 in the United States to overthrow the government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and install a dictator. Retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler asserted that wealthy businessmen were plotting to create a fascist veterans' organization with Butler as its leader and use it in a coup d'état to overthrow Roosevelt. In 1934, Butler testified under oath before the United States House of Representatives Special Committee on Un-American Activities on these revelations. Although no one was prosecuted, the Congressional committee final report said, "there is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient."
"Ratlines" were a system of escape routes for Nazis and other fascists fleeing Europe in the aftermath of World War II. These escape routes mainly led toward havens in Latin America, particularly Argentina though also in Paraguay, Colombia, Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Guatemala, Ecuador and Bolivia, as well as the United States, Spain and Switzerland.
Operation Pastorius was a failed German intelligence plan for sabotage inside the United States during World War II. The operation was staged in June 1942 and was to be directed against strategic American economic targets. The operation was named by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the German Abwehr, for Francis Daniel Pastorius, the leader of the first organized settlement of Germans in America.
World's End is the first novel of Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd series. First published in 1940, after World War II had begun in Europe the previous year, the story covers the period from 1913 to 1919, before and after World War I.
During World War II, the Spanish State under Francisco Franco espoused neutrality as its official wartime policy. This neutrality wavered at times and "strict neutrality" gave way to "non-belligerence" after the Fall of France in June 1940. Franco wrote to Adolf Hitler offering to join the war on 19 June 1940 in exchange for help building Spain's colonial empire. Later the same year Franco met with Hitler in Hendaye to discuss Spain's possible accession to the Axis Powers. The meeting went nowhere, but Franco did help the Axis — whose members Italy and Germany had supported him during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) — in various ways.
Dragon's Teeth is a 1942 novel by Upton Sinclair that won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1943. Set in the period 1929 to 1934, it covers the Nazi takeover of Germany during the 1930s.
In the decades since the Holocaust, some national governments, international bodies and world leaders have been criticized for their failure to take appropriate action to save the millions of European Jews, Roma, and other victims of the Holocaust. Critics say that such intervention, particularly by the Allied governments, might have saved substantial numbers of people and could have been accomplished without the diversion of significant resources from the war effort.
Before, during and after his presidential terms and continuing today, there has been much criticism of Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945). Critics have questioned not only his policies and positions, but also charged him with centralizing power in his own hands by controlling both the government and the Democratic Party. Many denounced his breaking the no-third-term tradition in 1940.
Franklin D. Roosevelt's relationship with Civil Rights was a complicated one. While he was popular among African Americans, Catholics and Jews, he has in retrospect received heavy criticism for his internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War.
John Flournoy Montgomery was an American businessman and diplomat. His sole diplomatic posting was as U.S. Minister to Hungary, between 1933 and 1941. This ambassadorial assignment placed Montgomery at the center of the seething intrigue and gathering storm that characterized 1930's Hungary and Central Europe; in particular he was witness to the rise of Adolf Hitler's influence in Budapest, and the complex struggle over the alliance between Hungary and Nazi Germany. His memoirs, entitled Hungary: The Unwilling Satellite, are considered a valuable document of that era.
René Aldebert Pineton de Chambrun was a French-American aristocrat, lawyer, businessman and author. He practised law at the Court of Appeals of Paris and the New York State Bar Association. He was the author of several books about World War II and his father-in-law, Vichy France Prime Minister Pierre Laval, to whom he served as legal counsel. He defended Coco Chanel in her lawsuit against Pierre Wertheimer over her marketing rights to Chanel No. 5. He was the chairman of Baccarat, the crystal manufacturer, from 1960 to 1992.
Mussolini and I is a 1985 made-for-television docudrama film directed by Alberto Negrin. It chronicles the strained relationship between Italy's fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and his son-in-law and foreign minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, based on Ciano's diaries. Made in English as an Italian-French-German-Swiss-Spanish-US co-production, with Bob Hoskins, Anthony Hopkins and Susan Sarandon in the leading roles, it first aired on Rai Uno on 15 April 1985 in a 130-minute version. On 8 September 1985, it premiered in the USA on HBO in an extended four-hour version.
A World to Win is the seventh novel in Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd series. First published in 1946, the story covers the period from 1940 to 1942.
The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League was founded in Los Angeles in 1936 by Otto Katz and others to organize members of the American film industry to oppose fascism and Nazism. Although it was a communist front organization, run by the American popular front, it attracted broad support in Hollywood from both members and nonmembers of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Like many such communist front groups, it ceased all anti-Nazi activities immediately upon the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939.
The diplomatic history of World War II includes the major foreign policies and interactions inside the opposing coalitions, the Allies of World War II and the Axis powers, between 1939 and 1945. The military history of the war is covered at World War II. The prewar diplomacy is covered in Causes of World War II and International relations (1919–1939). For the postwar see Cold War.
The following events occurred in September 1937:
The following events occurred in October 1937:
Egon Ludwig Sedgwick Hanfstaengl was a German-American art publisher who was also Adolf Hitler's godson and the son of Ernst Hanfstaengl.
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