The Conquering Tide

by Ian W. Toll

  Though his party commanded towering majorities in both the House and the Senate, its prospects in the 1942 midterm elections were dismal. The Democrats’ once-unassailable New Deal coalition—the urban-union-liberal-ethnic-Catholic vote in the North and upper Midwest combined with the dependably solid South—had been fractured and diluted by the war’s disruptions. Millions of servicemen and war workers had been uprooted from their homes and hereditary polling precincts. Voter turnout was expected to hit record lows, and the remaining electorate skewed toward older, rural, and affluent voters who leaned toward the Republicans.

  By the early summer of that year, the post—Pearl Harbor mood of bipartisan unity had taken an ugly turn, and the customary thrust and parry of political combat had returned with undiminished vehemence. All recited the shopworn mottoes of patriotic unity, but criticism of the administration grew freer and more vigorous, both in the anti-Roosevelt press and on the floors of Congress, and Republicans angrily spurned any suggestion that politics be suspended for the war’s duration. What were the Allies fighting for, if not the right of democratic opposition? In April 1942, the Republican National Committee had pledged to work for a “complete victory” over the Axis powers, but added “solemn protestations” that the GOP would “preserve the constitutional form of government . . . and the two-party system.” When the president proposed that the party organizations be reconstituted as civil defense associations, Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio barked to reporters, “I’ll be goddamned if I’ll bow to Roosevelt and stand on the street corner as an air raid warden with a tin hat, flashlight and a bucket of sand.”5

  The newspaper tycoons whose broadsheets had fought the New Deal and carried the torch of prewar isolationism—most prominently Robert McCormick, Cissy Patterson, and William Randolph Hearst—now purported to support the war, but they assailed the president for waging it ineptly. Roosevelt’s enemies in Congress, among them the leading isolationists of 1940 and 1941, now agitated for a concentration of resources against Japan rather than Germany, and complained bitterly about American combat losses. More out of habit than real conviction, perhaps, they seemed determined to undermine the administration by any means at hand. Many observant pundits doubted that their hearts were really in the war. Marquis Childs, a Washington correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was unsparing: “No matter what they said for the record on December 8, the blindest and the stubbornest would continue to believe that Pearl Harbor was no more than [what] America deserved for not having remained pure and isolated as such wise men had counseled.”6

  The critics were of two minds. Even when lashing out at the administration, they declared that all Americans must eschew bickering and unite to win the war. Democrats indignantly accused the president’s wartime critics of doing the bidding of Axis propaganda. Oratory in Congress grew venomous. On June 25, Senator Harry Schwartz of Wyoming took the floor to deliver a long philippic aimed at the “whisperers who inculcate class, racial, and religious hatreds. They unwittingly are using Hitler’s most effective weapons of propaganda. . . . Following in the wake of this Nazi machine are camp followers, blinded by private ambitions and secret hatreds, intent on gathering unto themselves personal advantage. They do not consciously seek the loss of this war or the defeat of democracy, but by their course they imperil both.”7

  Conservatives of both parties wrung their hands over the war’s inevitable expansion of federal and presidential powers. Washington’s business was government, and business was booming as it had never boomed even at the zenith of the New Deal. There seemed every reason to fear that the war would yoke the country to an elephantine bureaucracy. The president’s congressional foes acquiesced in providing the colossal sums needed to mobilize and equip the armed forces, but Republicans and conservative southern Democrats moved to eliminate or defund several landmark New Deal programs, including the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration, and the National Youth Administration. Roosevelt did not even bother trying to save them. The war itself would provide more than enough employment to offset the loss, and his core legislative achievements (notably Social Security, collective bargaining, and bank regulatory laws) would survive.

  Congress was determined not to act as a mere “rubber stamp,” but members of both parties were aware that a fine line lay between constructive oversight and deadly obstruction. The Republican Party was sharply divided between its historically isolationist leadership and its rising internationalist bloc, headed by the party’s defeated 1940 presidential nominee, Wendell Willkie. Total war could be waged only by a concerted and centralized executive power, and Congress was inevitably relegated to the policy-making sidelines. It was expected to fund military budgets fully, promptly, and without offering more than token dissent. Members could point to ample evidence of bungling, waste, overspending, corruption, internecine feuding, and monopolistic practices—but no function of oversight could be permitted to slow the progress of mobilization.

  BY THE SWELTERING SUMMER OF 1942, the federal government employed about a quarter of a million civilians in the District of Columbia, but it still lacked the scale and manpower needed to wage a global war. The population of Washington would nearly double between the day Pearl Harbor was attacked and V-J Day. About 10,000 new workers were arriving in the city each month, drawn by high wages and a seemingly bottomless demand for clerks, secretaries, stenographers, statisticians, and mid-level managers. The state-of-the-art information technologies at the time were the electric typewriter, the carbon copy, and the steel file cabinet. Washington’s administrative command-and-control apparatus was the typewriter battalion, deployed in phalanxes of wooden desks under fluorescent lights in long sweeping halls, with memoranda, requisitions, and requests typed in octuplicate and copies dispersed to cross-indexed files across the city. The OPA alone churned out more paper between 1940 and 1945 than the entire federal government had generated since 1789.8

  More than half the new arrivals were young women responding to recruiting drives that promised a generous paycheck to any high school graduate who could type. They staffed the “tempos” (“temporary” prefabricated cement-asbestos office buildings, so named because they were to be torn down at war’s end) that crowded across almost every part of the Washington Mall. The dreary, gray edifices lined both sides of the Reflecting Pool, and were connected by pedestrian bridges spanning the pool; they walled in the Washington Monument; they abutted the entire length of Constitution Avenue to the foot of Capitol Hill. Dirt excavated from their foundations was simply bulldozed into tremendous mounds and left there. Before the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor, twenty-seven of the temporary monstrosities were thrown up. In one case, construction from groundbreaking to ribbon-cutting took just five weeks. Together these twenty-seven buildings provided 3.3 million square feet of office space.9 They were pitilessly hot in the summer and glacial in the winter. Floors, walls, and ceilings clattered unnervingly. Plumbing and electrical systems were prone to chronic malfunction. Outside these buildings, on any weekday morning, long lines stretched down the sidewalk and around the block, as employees waited to show their credentials to an armed guard, or visitors on official business pleaded for permission to enter. Each building was made to accommodate an average of 40,000 workers, the very limit allowed by health and safety. In many agencies, work was conducted around the clock in eight-hour shifts, with each shift taking over the desks as the previous departed. Janitors strained to service the human avalanche, and the buildings grew filthy and even unsanitary.

  The War Department sought a more permanent solution across the Potomac River, in the leviathan War Department Building. The huge pentagonal structure, not yet called the “Pentagon,” was the largest in the world; it covered forty-two acres and included more than five million square feet of floor space. In September 1942, it was not yet completed and seemed likely to overrun its original budget by about 100 percent, raising an outcry in Congress, but 17,000 workers were already at work in it
s completed sections.10

  In 1942, Washington remained a somnolent midsized city—culturally southern, devoid of private industry, and entirely unprepared to accommodate a population boom. As in other cities, landlords gouged tenants and made money hand over fist. Government recruiters warned married applicants that they could not relocate their families to the capital, as no housing was available. The young women of the typewriter battalions crammed together into small apartments, with as many as four beds per room. Makeshift trailer parks were set up in vacant lots. Tract housing developments overran the farmland of suburban Virginia and Maryland. Dilapidated houseboats, with laundry hanging from the rigging, moored beam to beam along the Potomac riverfront. Owners of private homes were enjoined by authorities to rent out their vacant rooms. “If the war lasts much longer,” observed Life magazine in January 1943, “Washington is going to bust right out of its pants.”11

  Public services buckled under the strain. Trolleys and buses could accommodate perhaps a third of the daily commute. At peak transit hours, the cavernous terminal at Union Station was immobilized by crowds. Garbage piled up on the sidewalks. The telephone system was so overloaded that the telephone company ran newspaper advertisements begging the public not to make calls except in case of emergency. Long lines stretched down the sidewalk from retail businesses of every category—restaurants, grocery stores, dry cleaners, movie theaters, newspaper stands. Hospitals were so overcrowded that pregnant women scheduled induced deliveries when the occasional vacancies occurred. Public schools were oversubscribed; churches offered standing-room-only on Sundays; servicemen bribed doormen to be let into packed nightclubs. Crime, prostitution, and sexually transmitted diseases were rife, but the police were overwhelmed and the prisons overflowed.

  THOUGH HE HAD NEVER WORN A UNIFORM, Roosevelt was entirely comfortable in the role of commander in chief, and not in the least bit overawed by stars or gold braid. When a larger consideration of politics or diplomacy intruded, the president never hesitated to overrule the Joint Chiefs. “I am a pigheaded Dutchman,” he might say, “and I have made up my mind about this. We are going ahead with it and you can’t change my mind.”12 Marshall and King quickly learned to limit opportunities for presidential mischief by presenting the White House with joint consensus recommendations. When they did so, the president almost always gave his categorical assent.

  That the president was a navy man at heart was obvious to all, including Marshall and Stimson, who regarded it as a manageable problem. But for the admirals, his affection was a mixed blessing. Roosevelt’s habit of “running” the navy dated back to 1913, when the newly elected president Woodrow Wilson had appointed the thirty-one-year-old former New York state senator to be assistant secretary of the navy. Serving under the unobtrusive Secretary Josephus Daniels, the young FDR had overseen the daily operations of the service and had personally directed its mobilization in the First World War. He had been briefly acquainted with most of the up-and-coming midlevel naval officers of that period—King, Nimitz, Halsey, Stark, Leahy, Towers, Spruance, Fletcher, Turner—when they had been lieutenants and lieutenant commanders.

  By long-ingrained habit, President Roosevelt demanded information about individual ships and officers—information that would ordinarily fall far beneath the attention of a commander in chief. When he threw out impromptu ideas for new ship designs or weapons systems, the Navy Department was obliged to study these proposals and explain (tactfully) why they were impractical. The president nonchalantly short-circuited the chain of command—ordering a particular ship to a particular theater, for example, or dispatching officers on fact-finding missions with instructions to report back to him directly.13 On the other side of the ledger, Roosevelt had a flair for placing the right admirals in the right jobs at the right moments. His record in this respect was not perfect, but in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor he made two vital personnel decisions that were superbly vindicated. He recalled King to Washington to run the navy, and sent Nimitz to Hawaii to command the Pacific Fleet.

  When voices in the press and Congress suggested that the president confer supreme command on a properly qualified military authority such as Douglas MacArthur, Roosevelt gave the idea the back of his hand. “My crime is that I have read the Constitution and stand by it,” he remarked to Ross T. McIntire, his personal physician. “What is clearer than that the framers meant the President to be the chief executive in peace, and in war the commander in chief?”14

  Blurring the lines between labor and leisure, the wheelchair-bound Roosevelt did much of the substantive work of his presidency in the Oval Study (in the White House residence) or even his bedroom. Military leaders naturally and very properly preferred to maintain a professional distance when dealing with the president. (To sit at the foot of the commander in chief’s bed while he ate breakfast from a tray, for example, was asking too much of Ernest King or George Marshall.) But when an issue required immediate presidential attention, decorum was a secondary consideration. Marshall and King were frequent visitors to the Oval Study, and each man grew accustomed to briefing the president while he peered absent-mindedly through a magnifying glass at his stamp collection. On summer weekends, the military chiefs often drove the sixty-odd miles to “Shangri-La” and sat with Roosevelt on a screened porch overlooking a pastoral vista of the Catoctin Valley. In receiving the president’s written communications, the chiefs had no choice but to acquiesce in his warm and familiar tone (“Dear Ernie”) and steadfastly reciprocated with the correct forms of address (“Memorandum for the President”).

  Much could be accomplished by working through Harry Hopkins, the president’s principal adviser and alter ego. More than any other member of Roosevelt’s official family, “Harry the Hop” (who lived in the White House, in a bedroom down the hall from the president’s) elicited rational presidential decisions when they were urgently needed. This was no small achievement, and all the chiefs came to respect Hopkins immensely. But Hopkins was spread thin, and he lacked military training or experience. In June 1942, Marshall proposed that a new man be inserted into the White House to act as a senior liaison to the Joint Chiefs. This “military chief of staff” ought to be a gray eminence of one of the services, a man who had worked with Roosevelt in the past and was acquainted with his eccentric ways.

  King’s first instinct was to resist the idea, probably because he did not want another officer interposed between himself and the president, and because he assumed Marshall would nominate a general. Marshall defused the second objection by proposing Admiral William D. Leahy, a retired chief of naval operations. Leahy had known Roosevelt since 1915, when he commanded the Dolphin, the secretary of the navy’s dispatch boat. He and his wife were close friends of the Roosevelts, and had often been guests at Hyde Park. After Leahy’s retirement from the navy in 1939, the president had appointed him governor of Puerto Rico. In 1941, Leahy had been sent to France to serve as Roosevelt’s ambassador to the Vichy regime of Marshal Pétain. On July 7, 1942, Roosevelt lunched with Leahy in the Oval Study and offered him the job. Leahy took it.

  Returning to active duty with four stars, Leahy was now the senior-most American officer of all the armed services (by date of first commission). In deference to that seniority, he was recognized as the ad hoc chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As a former chief of naval operations, he was sympathetic to the navy’s concerns in the Pacific, but his appointment in Vichy had fortified his commitment to the Europe-first principle. It was hoped that Leahy, the mild-mannered diplomat, would provide a moderating effect on King’s volcanic temper.

  Most mornings Leahy went straight up to the president’s living chambers, where he found Roosevelt reclining in his four-poster bed, a monogrammed navy cape worn over his pajamas, the blankets pulled up over his wasted legs, reading the newspapers and eating his breakfast from a tray—or perhaps he was in the bathroom, shaving with a straight razor. The admiral took a seat in the corner and began summarizing the latest incoming dispatch
es from field commanders and outgoing orders from the Joint Chiefs, or he summarized important studies published by the military planning staffs.

  Having heard descriptions of Churchill’s fine “map room,” located in the prime minister’s underground bunker in London, Roosevelt decided that the White House ought to have a similar command center. A large room on the ground floor was vacated for the purpose, and a navy lieutenant commander, John L. McCrea, was placed in charge.15 Large maps of Europe and the Pacific were mounted on opposite walls. Smaller maps of Southeast Asia, the Mediterranean, and North Africa were mounted between them. All were positioned low enough that the president could scrutinize them without rising from his wheelchair. Flags and multicolored pins marked the known locations of Allied and Axis naval, ground, and air forces. The current locations of the “big three” (Churchill, Stalin, and FDR himself) were indicated by special pins—a cigar for Churchill, a briar pipe for Stalin, and a cigarette holder for FDR. Updates were relayed hourly from the navy and war departments by secure dedicated telephone lines.

  The Map Room was staffed twenty-four hours a day, eventually by six navy and six army officers. An armed guard stood watch at all times, and only half-a-dozen members of the White House staff were cleared for access. (After learning that her son’s location was updated daily, Eleanor Roosevelt dropped in whenever she pleased; the guards did not have the courage to stop her.) Roosevelt appeared each afternoon after his daily sinus treatment with Dr. McIntire, whose office was next door. Leahy and Hopkins often accompanied the president. When he was in town, Churchill haunted the place at all hours. It became, for all purposes, the brain center of the Allied war effort. “McCrea,” Leahy said, “I think there is more information about the war concentrated in your Map Room than there is in any other one place in Washington.”16