It was Welles, then, sharing Bullitt’s view that the United States needed an envoy in Berlin more acceptable to the Nazi regime, who took steps to accomplish that end. But it was the Soviet Union, not Germany, that FDR himself seemed intent on accommodating. It seems not to have been Welles, or even Hull, but the President who took the much-resented step of dissolving the Russian Division in the Department of State, apparently because of its anti-Soviet views; and in 1936, to fill Bullitt’s place at the Moscow embassy, he appointed Joseph Davies, a politician who found no fault with the USSR.
Another FDR decision—this time, one that Bullitt approved—was to send Joseph P. Kennedy as U.S. ambassador to Britain. The Boston Irish speculator and wheeler-dealer (or swindler, some said), who had served as first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, had been the President’s liaison with Hearst, Coughlin, and other demagogues of the Right, and had the confidence of isolationist leaders—Republican as well as Democrat. Nursing a grudge that came from not having been rewarded adequately by FDR until now,* Kennedy soon began to see himself as a 1940 presidential candidate; he lavished financial favors on New York Times Washington bureau chief Arthur Krock and other newsmen to promote his interests.
Kennedy admired the way the Paris embassy was run, and arranged for his two oldest sons, Joe junior and Jack, to do brief stints there. As always, Bullitt had discovered talent, bringing forward promising young diplomats Robert Murphy and Douglas MacArthur II (the general’s nephew), and taking along with him from his Moscow embassy future CIA director Roscoe Hillenkoetter. But it was Carmel Offie whose services Kennedy most coveted; he offered to put him on his personal payroll.
Kennedy (from London) would consult Offie (in Paris) by telephone several times a day, and when his son Jack, the future president, did his monthlong stint at the Paris embassy in the spring of 1939, staying at Bullitt’s otherwise deserted official residence on the avenue d’Iéna, it was Offie who entertained him and showed him around. Offie later recalled that Jack, who was then twenty-one years old, “did not learn much French but … had a good time” because Offie got him “invited to various parties in the diplomatic corps” where he “could meet young ladies.…” In a thank-you note young Kennedy sent Bullitt from Poland, as he continued his travels, he wrote: “That month ranks as just about the best I’ve ever put in.” To a friend back home he wrote that “Bullitt has turned out to be a hell of a good guy. Live like a king … as Offie and I are the only ones there + about 30 lackies.”
IN MARCH 1938 German troops invaded and occupied Austria, which Germany then annexed. Ambassador Kennedy believed these events did not “affect our country or my job.” He deplored “the semi-hysterical attitude which the professional diplomats here adopt.…” He foresaw no further danger.
Later that month Konrad Henlein, the leader of the Nazi-subsidized German-speaking party in Czechoslovakia, was instructed by Hitler to ask concessions from the Czech government that could not be granted: “We must always demand so much we can never be satisfied,” said Henlein in summarizing his instructions. On May 7 the British and French ministers in Prague urged the Czech government “to go to the utmost limit” in meeting Henlein’s requirements.
The crisis in Europe was approaching its yearlong climax. Unlike Kennedy, Bullitt was aware of the imminence of crisis; but like the European politicians and officials with whom he dined, he believed that—at some price, however high—the German government could be appeased. His concern was that the Czech government would not pitch its offer high enough.
In his château at Chantilly, surrounded by woods and serenaded by nightingales, Bullitt wrote to Roosevelt on June 13 that he felt “like a participant in the last days of Pompeii.” That, he told the President, was the mood of all Paris; “I know no informed Frenchman who does not feel that he is living in the last days of his civilization.…”
Bullitt reported to FDR the gist of his conversations with the French chief of staff and with the general who in wartime would be France’s frontline commander. What they had to say was disheartening. In effect, the French generals envisaged a replay of their strategy in the First World War. On the outbreak of the war, they planned to attack German fortifications and expected French manpower losses to be so horrendous in doing so that it would mean “the death of a race.” But at that price they could deadlock the Germans until a British naval blockade starved the Germans into submission.
“There is beginning to be a general conviction throughout Europe that the United States will be drawn into war,” Bullitt continued. “This conviction is helpful insofar as it may tend to diminish the readiness of Germany to go to war; but we shall find ourselves violently unpopular in both France and England when it becomes clear that we intend to maintain our neutrality.”
Bullitt’s proposed policy was on the one hand to persuade the French of the truth—which was that the United States would remain neutral—while on the other hand bluffing Germany by hinting at what was not true: that America might intervene on behalf of France and Britain. As to what the United States in fact should do, Bullitt wrote that “I remain as convinced as ever that we should not permit ourselves to be drawn in. I believe that if war starts, the destruction on the Continent of Europe will be so great that, unless we are able to remain strong and relatively untouched, there will be no nation on earth left to pick up the pieces. If we should stay out, we could at least help to keep alive whatever human beings may remain alive in Europe.”
As always, Bullitt found time and place for gaiety even as he relayed his somber report. He told the President that Harold Ickes, a widower who had remarried the month before, had visited Paris with his bride on their honeymoon; Bullitt had taken the couple to dinner two nights before. He had also entertained them at his country estate, and then had put them up in a small hotel in Paris where reporters would not find them. “Mrs. Ickes is charming,” Bullitt remarked. “How Ickes accomplished that is beyond me.”
Then there was the wife of Joseph E. Davies, briefly ambassador to Russia and now the newly appointed ambassador to Belgium. Instead of remaining at her husband’s post in Brussels, “she has taken a large house in Paris, ostensibly for one of her daughters, and is having it done over for her own occupancy.” An informant had told Bullitt that “she had said to him that she knew she would be bored by Brussels, so she had decided to spend all her time in Paris!” Bullitt’s comment was: “War will, at least, save me from that.”
FDR, NOTING THAT BULLITT was predicting that war might be closest hand, gave little hint of his own thinking—or even of whether he was thinking very much about it at all. “Dear Bill,” FDR wrote in reply. “May God in His infinite wisdom prove that you are wrong. I know you share this hope with me.”
It was the summer of 1938, and the question was about to be put to the test. In July Walter Lippmann, who despite the move from New York to Washington kept to his regular schedule of travel abroad and discussion with foreign leaders, visited Czechoslovakia, the focal point at the time of Germany’s unwanted attentions; afterward he discussed matters with Bullitt. Lippmann had come away from a long meeting with Czech president Edvard Benes with the impression that Czechoslovakia would resist a German invasion and that Britain and France would come to her aid. If that became clear in advance, Lippmann reasoned, Hitler might not attack.
But Bullitt, like the leaders of Britain and France, was still thinking in terms not of scaring off Germany, but of buying her off. Like them, he believed that Germany would not attack if Czechoslovakia made concessions that were sufficiently enormous.
Bowing to pressure from his country’s British and French allies, Beneš on September 5 asked the leaders of the German-speaking party to write down on paper all of their demands, and promised in advance to accept whatever they asked. But acting on Hitler’s instructions, Henlein and his colleagues refused to accept even this blank check, and broke off negotiations.
British prime minister Neville Chamberlain flew to German
y to offer one concession after another, but Hitler kept raising his demands as negotiations continued throughout the month of September. But in the course of a shouting, screaming, hysterical speech to a mass audience in Berlin September 26, Hitler, who had made (and broken) similar promises before, denied that he wanted to rule Czechs and pledged that Sudeten Czechoslovakia was the last territorial claim that he would make in Europe.
The British and French governments were determined to take Hitler at his word. At 1 a.m. September 30, Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain, and French premier Édouard Daladier, meeting in Munich, signed the pact that permitted Germany to occupy and annex Sudeten Czechoslovakia, together with the entire formidable Czech fortification system. Hitler was disappointed by the capitulation of Chamberlain and Daladier; he had hoped to provoke a war. But his fearful generals—certain that the Allies, protected by the Czech fortifications, would have won the war—were amazed and ecstatic.
Ten days after signing the Munich Pact, Hitler gave orders to his forces to plan the takeover of the rest of Czechoslovakia.
WAVING IN THE AIR the piece of paper that was his agreement with Hitler, Chamberlain exulted to the cheering crowds that had come out in London to welcome him home: “I’ve got it!” In Paris on October 1, the day after the Munich Pact was signed, Bullitt went by the home of French foreign minister Georges Bonnet, just back from the signing in Germany, to offer his own congratulations. Bullitt, in the words of his biographers, “appeared … with an armful of roses, tears in his eyes, and a ‘fraternal and joyous salutation of America’ on his lips.”
But a couple of days later, on October 3, Bullitt lunched with his close friend Premier Daladier, who disagreed with Bonnet. Daladier told Bullitt that the Munich Pact was a disaster for France. Indeed, said the premier, he had expected that the crowd waiting to welcome his returning airplane had come to lynch him for having signed it. He would not have signed it, he said, if he had had three or four thousand warplanes to back him up. He said that Chamberlain had been duped; that Hitler, despite his promise not to do so, would make new territorial demands in six months; and that France would have to regain a national spirit within the year in order to oppose Germany. In material terms, he believed, what France needed was an effective air force.
Bullitt, who tended to take his views from France’s leaders, instantly changed his mind about the European situation. No longer did he believe that Germany was, or could be, appeased: he recognized that new demands would be made on the democracies. He now felt that America should strengthen herself and strengthen France. Fear of Russia was overtaken in his mind by fear of Germany. His new view of the situation was reinforced by Hitler, who publicly proclaimed the need for Germany to rearm further.
Bullitt cabled FDR to alert him to the urgent need for America’s rearmament. The President, who may have needed no prompting, proposed a politically astute response to the fears that had been raised by the foreign crisis—and one in line with his primary strategic concern for the security of the Western Hemisphere. He urged the Congress to authorize an additional $300 million for Western Hemisphere defense, a program appealing to isolationists and interventionists alike.
Briefed by French officials, including his old banker friend Jean Monnet, Bullitt caught the next ocean liner to the United States, the Normandie. On October 13 he was closeted with FDR at the White House until late into the night. FDR saw that the Munich Pact merely postponed the opening date of the coming war in Europe—and ensured that it would be fought on terms much more favorable to Germany. At a time when the air strength of the United States itself was centered on only nineteen modern bombers, Bullitt urged the President to build thousands of warplanes and somehow supply them to France. No notes were taken, but the meeting was decisive; by bedtime FDR, in a fit of enthusiasm, had decided to produce military aircraft in overwhelming numbers.
The next morning Roosevelt told reporters he would ask Congress to give the army an additional $500 million to be spent on warplanes. He told the War Department to plan a major expansion of the air force. America had the capacity to make only about 1,200 planes a year; but FDR decided the country would build 8,000, 10,000, 15,000, 20,000, or 24,000 a year.† He told the New York Herald Tribune that “neither we, nor any nation, will accept disarmament while neighbor nations arm to the teeth.”
Bullitt’s cable from France, followed by his meeting with FDR on October 13, had been crucial in turning around the American position on what to do about the threat of a new war in Europe. Until October 1938 the American reaction to the threat of war had been to preach and practice disarmament. Now FDR’s new policy was rearmament.
Yet Bullitt and Roosevelt had thought nothing through. It is easier to imagine them in their all-night session as college fraternity brothers than as policy planners. For in deciding to ask Congress for money that would be spent entirely on planes, it had escaped their notice that they would also need money for hangars to house the planes, and for airstrips on which the planes could land, and for pilots to fly the planes, and for ground crews to service them, and for fuel to power them.
Such needs as these were drawn to the President’s attention when he met with his military chiefs and some of his civilian advisers November 14 and again in late December. Roosevelt told them that the United States needed “a huge air force so that we do not need a huge army.” Echoing Bullitt, who echoed Daladier, he asserted that “had we had this summer 5,000 planes and the capacity immediately to produce 10,000 a year … Hitler would not have dared to take the stand he did.” Too late, the American President and the French premier had come around to the view that Germany would back down before a show of force—which might have been true two or three years earlier, but was not in the cards after Munich.
But Deputy Chief of Staff George Marshall persuaded FDR’s intimate adviser Harry Hopkins, and then the reluctant President himself, that designing armed forces to carry out only one strategy—in this case, deterrence through air power—was imprudent. There had to be balance in the buildup of the American armed forces, Marshall argued, for the United States had to be prepared to meet the entire range of possibilities that might arise in future, and therefore unforeseeable, circumstances.
IN A JANUARY 1939 White House meeting with the navy, war, and Treasury secretaries and other administration officials, Bullitt sat next to Roosevelt while the President emphasized his desire to support France in the ongoing European political crisis. Bullitt then stressed the urgency of supplying the French with the Douglas bomber, which incorporated the most advanced American aviation technology. War Secretary Harry Woodring, an isolationist from Kansas and an opponent in any event of rearmament, objected that giving the Douglas to France would be transferring government military secrets to a foreign country.
It would indeed be politically risky to do that, especially as the American public apparently assumed that the large air fleet FDR proposed to assemble was entirely for the use of the United States. In fact, the substantial number of planes the President was talking about were intended by him in large part for France and Britain. Afraid that the army or the navy, if entrusted with administration of his program, would try to keep the aircraft for themselves, he turned the matter over to the reliable Henry Morgenthau. In making his end run around the State Department to recognize Russia in 1933, FDR had put the matter in the hands of Morgenthau and Bullitt; now, to bypass the War and Navy departments, he turned to them again. For Treasury, though, that meant running the risk of taking the blame if what was afoot became known to the Congress or the public.
So when FDR directed Morgenthau to order the release of Douglas aircraft to France, close friend though he was, he replied: “Mr. President, I want this in writing.” When Treasury officials then sent letters containing the necessary orders to the White House for FDR’s signature, they were returned—unsigned. Bullitt then took a hand in the matter, and secured Roosevelt’s signatures: he pushed the reluctant President into taking the responsibility for his
directive.
But on January 23 one of the new bombers crashed in California while on a test flight, and it became known that a passenger who died was from the French Ministry of Aviation. The secret therefore was out, and on January 27 the President, through a smoke screen of evasions, admitted that he had it in mind to supply aircraft to France. He then explained and defended his policy in secret to members of the Senate Military Affairs Committee.
But when the press reported that in the secret session the President had argued that “America’s security frontier now lay on the river Rhine,” FDR denied that he had said it. He had not, but it was a fair description of the views he had expressed. As many have remarked, it was always Roosevelt’s practice to lead with somebody else’s chin. Now he found himself out front and in an exposed position, and retreated rapidly.
FDR arranged a public press interview to restate simply (he said) the fundamentals of U.S. foreign policy as his administration conceived them to be: “We are against any entangling alliances, obviously”; we are for free trade, peace, and national independence; and “we are in complete sympathy with any and every effort to reduce or limit armaments.” The public was reassured, but the President’s statements were thoroughly and deliberately misleading. He might “sympathize” with reducing armaments, but was urging Congress to let him build tens of thousands of warplanes. He was not being candid with the American people about his real purposes.
Though historians are unlikely ever to agree as to what were FDR’s intentions at any given time, what he had in mind in the autumn of 1938 and the winter of 1939 can be inferred from how he reacted to events. He was told by Bullitt of Daladier’s view that Hitler would make new demands within months. The massive aviation production program he suddenly espoused after his all-night talk with Bullitt showed that he had been converted to the Daladier and Bullitt view that with a few thousand military aircraft to back them up, France and Britain could force Hitler to back down. His decision to produce far more planes than the United States could then use shows that FDR proposed to produce those aircraft for the Allies. He intended to supply them to France and perhaps Britain, not to keep them—at least not all of them, and maybe not even most of them—for the United States.
In the Time of the Americans Page 48
