Of course, Wilsonian loyalists were in Roosevelt’s entourage; and they might blackball Bullitt for his disloyalty to the President in 1919. In this regard House himself was traveling on a passport that—known only to himself—had long since been canceled. As Wilson’s sometime closest friend and political partner, he still spoke as though he were the dead man’s envoy among the living. He did not reveal that his authority had been revoked by Wilson five years before the paralyzed President died. House kept secret the news of their bitter break; indeed, an authoritative four-volume work on House’s role by his collaborator Charles Seymour improved upon the past by claiming that the intimacy between Wilson and House had never been broken: it had merely lapsed because of Wilson’s illness. House therefore seemed to be in a position, if anybody among the living was, to forgive Bullitt in Wilson’s name.
In December 1931 House asked Bullitt’s permission to show one of his political letters from Europe to Roosevelt. It evidently was what Bullitt had been angling for. Bullitt replied: “I should be glad to have you show Roosevelt my letter and I hope you will, as you suggest, let him know that I might not be altogether useless.” Bullitt had known Roosevelt only slightly during the Wilson administration, and counted on House to bring him into the inner circle of the New Yorker who was the leading contender to win the 1932 Democratic nomination.
BULLITT’S OLD FRIEND Walter Lippmann had carved out a unique niche for himself with his phenomenally successful syndicated newspaper column, which appeared in the Herald Tribune and more than a hundred other papers throughout the country. In the serious press, which aimed at objectively presenting the facts, Lippmann instead provided opinion and analysis that made sense of the news by putting it in a personal perspective. He did not even try to look at events from a detached point of view; he deliberately looked at them from his own. He had become in some ways the equivalent of a Hindu pandit; and that is what (in its anglicized form) he was called—a pundit.
It had become clear by 1930, as a Republican administration led America into an abyss, that the 1932 Democratic presidential nomination would be well worth having. Lippmann was insistent that the nominee must not be the popular governor of New York, Franklin Roosevelt, whom he had known in Wilson’s Washington and whose most remarked-upon gift—of which Lippmann took a dim view—was to seem all things to all men.
To a friend, Lippmann wrote in 1930, “I very much hope that you are right in thinking that he has destroyed his chances of a presidential nomination. He never was big enough for that.” In 1931 he wrote, “I never felt so confident as I do now that the weakness of the man will become revealed to the general public well in advance of the conventions.” Roosevelt, according to him, “just doesn’t happen to have a very good mind.… [H]e never really comes to grips with a problem which has any large dimensions.… He has never thought much, or understood much, about the great subjects which must concern the next President.…” He was no more than a “kind of amiable boy scout.”
In 1932 he wrote, “What a weaseling mind he has; how much he would like to have everybody vote for him!” In his column he charged that Roosevelt was “without a firm grasp of public affairs and without any strong convictions …” and was “a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.”
Other keen observers of the political scene were in agreement, and Lippmann himself refused to retract; referring back to these remarks years later, he said: “That I will maintain to my dying day was true of the Franklin Roosevelt of 1932.” Indeed, one of the great mysteries of American history is how the charming, superficial mama’s boy with an undergraduate sense of humor, easily bored, and with no interest in hearing explanations became a national and a world leader. Those who knew him as President continued to find him an intellectual lightweight with an astonishingly short attention span.
The widespread theory is that FDR’s bout with crippling infantile paralysis, which began in 1921 and lasted for the rest of his life, matured him. If so, it was poetically right that his closest companion in youthful debauches and follies, the philandering and hard-drinking Livingston Davis, should have committed suicide during the presidential primary season of 1932: it echoed the despair and death of Falstaff when young Prince Hal put aside the wild companions of his youth to assume greatness as Henry V.
But Shakespeare’s Henry V had grown to be a different man from the carousing young wastrel he once had been, while there had been no such revolution in Roosevelt’s character. The shallow young assistant secretary of the navy, who nonetheless had been the only American official with the genius to see in August 1914 what the European war would mean, remained an intellectually shallow man when as President he saved democracy, first in America and then in the world. “A second-class intellect. But a first-class temperament!” The description of FDR in 1933 attributed to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes suggests the elusive but undeniable quality of the President’s greatness.
Lippmann was right to think that Roosevelt had the mindlessness of a fraternity man, but it transpired that he was wrong to think the less of him for it. The genius in action of the frivolous Hudson Valley squire who would rather be amused than informed was a mystery to contemporaries and remains a mystery to historians. But so great a difference did he make that it is almost impossible to imagine what would have happened to the United States if his candidacy had gone down the drain after the first few ballots at the Democratic National Convention of 1932.
IN 1932 WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST, an opinion maker of rather a different sort than Lippmann, decided to back a Democratic candidate for the presidency, rather than to run for the nomination himself as he had in the past. Though Roosevelt, whose internationalism alienated Hearst, held an early lead, he had no lock on the nomination; and a number of other names were being brought forward (even, in the end, that of Walter Lippmann). Hearst’s inclination was to support Congressman John Nance Garner of Texas, the Democratic Speaker of the House, with whom he had become friendly when they were both serving their first terms in Congress starting in 1903. But he took the precaution of first making sure that Garner stood with him on the issues that mattered most. A Hearst envoy, sent to question Garner, was able to reassure the publisher on that point: Garner was totally opposed to American involvement in the affairs and wars of Europe.
Garner had not been regarded as a major contender, but he became one in early January 1932 when Hearst took to the airwaves and proclaimed that “we should personally see to it that a man is elected to the Presidency this year whose guiding motto is ‘America first.’ ” John Nance Garner, he told a surprised America, was that man.
Edward House immediately contacted Hearst, seeking his support for Roosevelt and assuring him that the New York governor was no internationalist. Hearst was skeptical. Roosevelt, he wrote House on January 21, “made his numerous declarations publicly when he said that he was an internationalist. He should make his declaration publicly that he has changed his mind and … that he is now in favor of not joining the League [of Nations].… I must say frankly that if Mr. Roosevelt is not willing to make public declaration of his change of heart, and wants only to make his statement to me privately, I would not believe him.…”
On February 2, typically trying to have it both ways in a speech delivered in Albany to the New York Grange, Roosevelt said that he had no apology to make for having supported American entry into the League of Nations in 1920, and that if circumstances had not changed, “I would still favor America’s entry into the League. But the League of Nations today is not the League of Nations conceived by Woodrow Wilson. It might have been had the United States joined …,” but we had not, and the League now dealt with “strictly European political national difficulties. In these the United States should have no part.… The League has not developed … along the course contemplated by its founder.…” The members of the League, instead of being guided by its ideals, had embarked on rearmament programs so that “A
merican participation in the League would not serve the highest purpose of the prevention of war … in accordance with fundamental American ideals.… [T]herefore I do not favor American participation.”
This somewhat tortured explanation of Roosevelt’s position was not enough for Hearst, who threw money and resources behind his candidate with such effectiveness that in June 1932 Garner came into the Democratic National Convention in Chicago with the California and Texas delegations behind him.
Two-thirds of the delegates—770 votes—were needed to win. On the first roll call of the Chicago convention, Roosevelt received a shade more than 666 votes; Alfred E. Smith, who last time around, in 1928, had won the nomination but lost the election, had nearly 202; and Garner, a bit more than 90. There was little change on the second and third ballots, and Roosevelt’s campaign manager worried that if the fourth ballot proved inconclusive, too, the convention would move to a compromise candidate such as former War Secretary Newton D. Baker, a political heir of Woodrow Wilson’s.
From his hilltop castle of San Simeon in California, Hearst kept in constant telephone contact with his men on the floor of the convention. Garner had little chance of winning further support. Smith was better positioned, but he was Hearst’s bitter enemy, to be stopped at all cost. Joseph Kennedy phoned Hearst to warn that if Roosevelt fell short on the next ballot, the candidate would be Baker, the most internationalist of all.
Hearst saw that for one ballot more his control of the Garner bloc enabled him to swing the nomination to Roosevelt; afterward his 90 votes might not be able to swing the nomination to anyone, so nobody would have to make a deal with him to obtain his support.
He phoned the Roosevelt people in Chicago to demand assurances that if their man won, there would be no internationalism, no involvement in Europe or its affairs; and “almost tearfully,” according to an eyewitness account, FDR’s managers agreed. The publisher then called his own people in Washington and Chicago. Hearst’s man in Washington relayed the tycoon’s message to Garner, who consented; the deal was struck.
The Garner delegations of Texas and California then announced their switch to Roosevelt. The convention nominated Franklin Delano Roosevelt for President, with 945 votes out of 1,154, and John Nance Garner for Vice President on a unanimous voice vote.
It was the custom for nominees to be notified of their selection several weeks later, and to accept then. But Roosevelt immediately flew from Albany to Chicago to deliver his acceptance speech to the convention. He said he was breaking with “absurd conventions.” It was a foretaste of things to come: Roosevelt was not going to play by the rules—or at any rate, not by the old ones.
* His brother Orville had sold them out of the market at the top, before the collapse.
† It was published in 1967.
38
THE EMERGENCE OF FDR
ROOSEVELT WAS NOT AN INTELLECTUAL. It was unlikely to have occurred to him that the role he was about to play on the stage of history had been foreshadowed in a literary classic, let alone one 3,000 years old. Yet it sheds some light on his performance to think of him in terms of Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s epic poem of life and death in the long-ago Bronze Age.
When the Odyssey begins, its hero has spent many years fighting overseas in the Greek expedition against Troy. His side has won. The war is over now. He longs to return to house and family, and the Odyssey is the story of his adventures in trying to go home. He became, for all time, the model of the voyager in life.
He wants to go back to things as they were, but everywhere about him he finds people and things changing, often for the worse. Gods become humans; humans become animals. Mastering change is the art of survival in the world through which the voyager wanders.
Change was the central feature of the voyager’s world—as it was of the world of Roosevelt’s generation. Indeed, Roosevelt’s contemporaries had lived through greater and faster change than any other generation in history. When they were young, they rode in carriages drawn by horses, as Trojans had done in the Bronze Age; now they flew in airplanes. They were born into a world of lamps and campfires, not unlike those of Greeks and Trojans, but now they lit up the night with electricity. The voices of their parents—back in the days when they had been young—could have been heard no farther than the distance of a shout, but now a person on one side of the Atlantic Ocean could carry on a normal conversation with someone on the other side.
After all the tremendous dislocations and changes caused by the Great War, in which for the first time a couple of million of young Americans were sent to a foreign continent, Americans wanted to go home to normalcy and the world they had left behind. They were not allowed to do so. Everything had changed.
The social shifts ignited by the war exploded in the 1920s. The role of women changed, and with it the norms of accepted behavior; relations between the sexes changed, along with the code of sexual behavior. Senators and soldiers and journalists who were attempting to grapple with bewildering political and economic dislocations were doing so, it should always be remembered, against the background of personal lives that had become at least equally problematical. Nobody had drawn the guidelines yet; it was all too new. As will be seen, faced with the question of how to deal with a wife who had become an alcoholic, or even whether to consult a psychologist about her, William Bullitt and James Forrestal, men who might well belong to the same club, took quite different approaches.
The worldwide rise of dictatorships after the war, the discrediting of the remaining democracies, and the collapse of the world’s economies and financial institutions, coming on top of all the other confusing changes, seemed to leave nothing to hang on to. The Americans whose support Roosevelt solicited in 1932 were disoriented. They did not know what to believe. But FDR did.
In the faraway and largely imaginary world of the Odyssey, the voyager deals with the often magical transformations in shape and identity around him by quick changes into disguises of his own. Asked by a stranger who he is, he always invents a new identity for himself and tells an improvised story of how he happened to have been cast up upon this particular shore. Before he recognizes the affectionate goddess who watches over him, he lies even to her—to her vast amusement. He saves the truth only for members of his family—and even to them, only after he has told them invented tales designed to prepare them to hear the truth.
Roosevelt, too, was a teller of stories. It was his mode of persuasion. He employed speech not to reveal, but to convince. In the bureaucratic jargon of a later time, he told the truth only on a need-to-know basis.
Like Odysseus, too, he succeeded because, in a world in which others had forgotten who they were and had lost faith in the directional signs that tell which is north and which south, he knew who he was, where he was, and where he wanted to go. He had an instinct for which changes were real and which merely apparent. Undizzied by the world’s revolutions, the astonishingly complex man who made himself appear so simple appeared to take his stand on firm ground as a Delano and a Roosevelt of the Hudson Valley.
AS ROOSEVELT WAS WINNING the Democratic nomination in Chicago with a promise of no more internationalism, William Bullitt, who allowed people to understand that he was Roosevelt’s foreign policy representative, was visiting Moscow, the scene of his 1919 negotiations with Lenin: a mission that had led both to the triumph and to the tragedy of his earlier career. He led at least one American journalist in the Soviet capital, Eugene Lyons of the United Press, to believe that he was scouting out the land for the Democratic nominee. Lyons later quoted Bullitt as having said that “Franklin Roosevelt will be the next President, and American recognition of the Soviet government will be one of the first acts of his administration.”
Before leaving Moscow, Bullitt insisted on placing a wreath on the grave of his friend John Reed. Times had changed; only with the greatest difficulty was the necessary permit obtained from the Soviet authorities. Bullitt still shared the romantic revolutionary outlook on Lenin’
s early communism expressed by the dead poet and journalist: a man he had so much admired, whose life he had wanted to live, and whose wife he had married. When Bullitt came away from the grave, “tears were rolling down his cheeks,” wrote Lyons, “and his features were drawn with sorrow.”
In July Bullitt returned to the United States to seek a role in the presidential campaign, but it proved unexpectedly difficult to be introduced to the candidate. Impatient with House, Bullitt turned to Louis Wehle, who had known Roosevelt since Harvard and who claimed to have been the first Democrat to promote Roosevelt for a spot on the 1920 national ticket.
Wehle wanted to be reassured about Bullitt’s politics; and as Roosevelt had retreated from internationalism to win Hearst’s support, so Bullitt now recanted his pro-Soviet views to gain a position with Roosevelt. Wehle later wrote that “we ironed out such difficulties as there were between us. Whatever Bullitt’s original thoughts may have been about the possibilities of the Soviet system when it and Bullitt were both young, he had clearly become thoroughly disillusioned by the development of the U.S.S.R. under Stalin. He now condemned it and every part of it; and he now understood the extent of the Soviets’ subversive activities in the United States during his long absences.” (It is interesting to note that communist sympathizers, whom Bullitt now deprecated, had been organized throughout the United States in what were known, in honor of the friend Bullitt so admired, as John Reed Clubs.)
Wehle was unable to find a place for Bullitt on the Albany campaign staff—which was what Bullitt wanted—but did obtain a letter from Roosevelt formally accepting Bullitt’s services as a foreign policy adviser. Bullitt then sent Roosevelt a letter of support, prudently attaching a donation (“Enclosed is my cheque for a thousand dollars. I wish I could send more, but I have no more to send”). The Democratic party was much in need of money, and the handful of rich men who supported it—among them, stock market manipulator Joseph Kennedy and Jesse Straus, the president of Macy’s department store—were so few in number that they could feel sure of personal recognition if the ticket were to win.
In the Time of the Americans Page 41
