What was it like at the time?

At midday on Thursday, 8 June 1933 — Erik Larson is very keen on his times — the newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt had a call put through to the history department at the University of Chicago.

At midday on Thursday, 8 June 1933 — Erik Larson is very keen on his times — the newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt had a call put through to the history department at the University of Chicago. Since taking office in early March Roosevelt had been trying to fill the post of ambassador to Berlin, and with none of the usual suspects prepared to take on the job and Congress on the point of adjourning for the summer recess, time was fast running out.

If nothing will quite explain why Roosevelt thought the ‘almost uniquely ill-qualified’ William E. Dodd was the answer to Berlin — smart money had it that he had simply phoned the wrong Dodd — it is a still greater mystery as to why Dodd should imagine Berlin was the answer for him. In the summer of 1933 Dodd was a genial and cautious family man in his mid-sixties, a university professor with two grown-up children and no more thoughts of a career outside academia than a vague idea that some nice, quiet embassy might be just the place to get to grips with his great unwritten masterpiece on the Rise and Fall of the Old South.

Even his bitterest enemies allowed Dodd his virtues — modesty, integrity, parsimony, a faith in reason and the Jeffersonian ideals — but what nobody reckoned on was that it was precisely Dodd’s virtues that would be the problem. In his early days in the job his own unswerving decency left him curiously blind to the real nature of the Nazi beast, but from the moment he recognised the brutality for what it was, the cautious academic disappeared and Washington found that it had got itself an ambassador who would not so much as shake hands with the crooks and murderers to whom he was officially accredited.