FDR was not thinking of bringing the United States into a war, or at least not into a land war, for he did not propose to strengthen America’s skeleton army. Bullitt had infected him with enthusiasm for the notion that airplanes would keep war away from America’s shores. It was George Marshall, not the President, who argued that the country should take steps to enable it to wage war if necessary.
So by the winter of 1939 FDR had come to believe that Hitler would make further demands on Germany’s neighbors and had to be stopped; that France and Britain could stop him, short of war, if they had enough warplanes; that only the United States could supply them with the quantity of aircraft they needed; and—perhaps most important—that it was in America’s interest to supply the European democracies with whatever they needed to take their stand and bring Nazi Germany’s expansion to a halt.
* Some would have seen the SEC chairmanship as reward enough, but Kennedy did not.
† All of these were figures mentioned at one time or another by the President in the next year or two.
44
THE BELL TOLLS
IN ORDER FOR THE UNITED STATES to have been able to back them up, France and Britain would have had to take a stand. But in the winter of 1938–39, that was something they felt no need to do. Proud of his pact with Hitler, Neville Chamberlain sent out Christmas cards picturing the airplane in which he had flown to Munich. On March 9 he told an off-the-record press conference that relations with Germany and Italy were improving, that trade discussions with the German government were about to begin, and that he expected a disarmament conference to convene, perhaps before the end of the year.
Guided by the prime minister, a close political ally delivered a speech the following day—March 10—suggesting that a golden age of peace and prosperity was dawning for Britain and Europe. It may have been on March 10, too, that the political cartoonist of Punch finished his drawing for the next issue: it showed John Bull awakening from a nightmare labeled “WAR SCARE” (which is shown flying out the window) with the relieved words, “Thank goodness that’s over!” The cartoon was entitled “The Ides of March” and appeared in print March 15, 1939.
As it happened, March 15 was the day that the German army, breaking the Munich Pact, invaded and occupied what remained of Czechoslovakia. Hitler slept in Prague that night, in the fortified castle on the crest of the hill that dominates the city. Once the residence of the ancient kings of Bohemia, it had served until that very night as the palace of the president of what had been the republic of Czechoslovakia.
As a pretext for the invasion, the German government had engineered the secession of Slovakia under pro-Nazi leaders. In turn the secession of Slovakia provided England with an excuse for standing aside. The prime minister admitted to the House of Commons on March 15 that Great Britain, as a party to the Munich Pact, and indeed its prime mover, had “a moral obligation” to come to Czechoslovakia’s defense. But, he argued, the secession of Slovakia meant that Czechoslovakia was no longer a nation. Thus, Britain’s guarantee of her security “has now ceased to exist” and “His Majesty’s Government cannot accordingly hold themselves any longer bound by this obligation.”
IN THE WINTER OF 1939 Chamberlain proposed to send as his new ambassador to the United States Lord Lothian, who as Philip Kerr had headed Prime Minister Lloyd George’s secretariat in the First World War. Kerr, who had sympathized with the stated foreign policy goals of Hitler’s government all along, was one of the original supporters of the appeasement policy. He now was in the process of changing his mind. In conversations with President Roosevelt that winter, he seemingly took the position that Britain was unable to hold the line anymore against such dynamic expansionist powers as Hitler’s Germany, and that Britain’s burden of upholding the balance of power in Europe and Asia from now on would have to be taken over by the United States. Roosevelt would have none of it.
“I wish the British would stop this ‘we who are about to die, salute thee’ attitude,” wrote the President afterward. “I got mad clear through and told him”—Lothian—“that just so long as he or Britishers like him took that attitude of complete despair, the British would not be worth saving anyway. What the British need today is a good stiff grog, inducing not only the desire to save civilization but the continued belief that they can do it.”
IF THE COUNTRIES of Europe and Asia, one after another, were to let themselves fall into the grip of Germany and her allies without putting up a fight in their own defense, should the United States therefore, as Roosevelt’s remarks implied, abandon them to their fate? Grappling with the question in the winter of 1939, Walter Lippmann’s restless mind was led to new conclusions. He was always in the immediate intellectual advance guard of his peers, and his twists and turns of opinion were a reliable leading indicator of imminent shifts in the views of his generation in the course of its lifelong foreign policy education.
In 1914–15 Lippmann had believed that America had to stay out of the European war; in 1916–17 he had known that America had to enter it. After the war was over, he had concluded that America should never had gone into it. In 1916–18 he had crusaded for the League of Nations; in 1919 he had urged his fellow Americans to reject it. He had advised Franklin Roosevelt and written in support of him as President, but had voted against him both in 1932 and 1936. Now he turned his protean mind to foreign policy assumptions that he had shared with most other Americans in the 1930s—until the winter of 1939.
It was now Lippmann’s view that staying out of foreign conflicts was not the safe and prudent policy he and others had thought it to be. Writing to Thomas Lamont of the Morgan bank, a friend and colleague from Wilson administration days, he warned that “the policy of neutrality and isolation involves the risk which nobody had foreseen until recently, that the victim of the aggression will not only be overcome, but in being overcome will be the ally of the aggressor …” so that “a power that had been on our side of the scale will be transferred to the other side.”
Thus, in taking back Germany’s industrial heartland, the Saar and the Rhineland, and later (in 1938–39) taking Czechoslovakia, with its Skoda armaments works that were among Europe’s most important manufacturers of war matériel, Hitler added strength to strength; he had made the Germany of 1936, which could have been defeated by practically anybody in Europe, into the Germany of 1939, which could be defeated by practically nobody in Europe.
And what of Japan? asked Lippmann. By not only vanquishing China, but enlisting China’s resources and her hundreds of millions of people into Japanese service, could it now dominate Asia?
And what if France and Britain were overcome by Germany and converted into Germany’s vassals in a war against the United States? At the back of Lippmann’s mind was the dreaded question of what would happen if Britain’s Royal Navy, which ruled the world’s oceans and for so long had shielded America from overseas threats, were turned over to German conquerors for use against the United States?
Suddenly it seemed the height of folly to have waited while Germany and Japan seized, devoured, and digested their neighbors one by one. When Germany attacked Czechoslovakia, had she not really attacked the security of Great Britain? If Germany now attacked Britain, would she not be threatening the national security of the United States?
THE WINTER OF 1939 was one of the coldest Europe and the United States had known. The state of international affairs, too, was bleak. Roosevelt, who now believed that he had been wrong, told his cabinet that he had acted in good faith in imposing an embargo on shipments of supplies to the Spanish republic. The fall of Barcelona in January 1939 doomed the Loyalist forces to defeat in the three-year war that had taken almost a million lives. Interior Secretary Ickes bitterly confided to his diary his regrets that the American embargo had helped keep the republic from winning the “fight for her life and the lives of some of the rest of us, as events will very likely prove.”
For the conspicuous part played by the armed forces of Hitler’s G
ermany and Mussolini’s Italy in bringing about the victory of Francisco Franco’s Nationalist coalition suggested that Franco’s regime would be manipulated by Rome and Berlin. Indeed, on March 27, 1939, the day before Franco’s troops entered the starving capital city of Madrid and four days before the formal termination of the civil war, Spain adhered to the Anti-Comintern Pact uniting Germany, Italy, and Japan in a common policy. This seemed to confirm that the American, British, and French embargo on aid to the Loyalists had placed a potential enemy in the coming European war on France’s vulnerable Pyrenean frontier. Too late, Roosevelt began to suspect that the Loyalist cause in Spain might have been America’s cause, too. For that was what the broad spectrum of writers and intellectuals on the American Left were saying: people who voted for Roosevelt but whose views were articulated more often by his wife than by him.
Eleanor Roosevelt had made a career of being FDR’s conscience, but in the Spanish affair he had not listened to her or it. A passionate partisan of the Loyalists, she was bitter that he had ignored her views and, typically, blamed herself. To a guest for dinner at the White House, she remarked: “We were morally right, but too weak. We should have pushed him harder”—nodding toward her silent, ignored, but unprotesting husband at the head of the table.
Only a few years back, Americans had believed that nothing that happened on the other side of the oceans was of concern to them. Now the writers and artists who often were the first in their midst to sense and express a shift in the intellectual winds were saying just the opposite: that nothing that happens to human beings anywhere can be of indifference to Americans. The view was perhaps most notably phrased in a book published the following year: Ernest Hemingway’s novel of the Spanish civil war, For Whom the Bell Tolls. The title was from the lines in which John Donne, the seventeenth-century English poet and churchman, reflected on the tolling of bells to signal the death of he knew not whom, writing that “any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
IT WAS AS THOUGH a fog had started to lift. Gradually the leaders of the European democracies could see—indistinctly at first through the haze, and only later in clear outline—the hostile armies that were approaching for the attack.
Within a couple of days after the British prime minister had washed his hands of the guarantee to Czechoslovakia, he learned that even ardent Conservatives were appalled. The feeling in Parliament, according to that keen observer Harold Nicolson, “is that Chamberlain will either have to go or completely reverse his policy.” Scheduled to speak in public on March 17, Chamberlain discarded his text and prepared another, defending his foreign policy record but finally posing the question of whether Germany and her allies might not be planning to conquer the world.
In the couple of weeks that followed, Chamberlain’s ministers, stampeded by a false rumor that Germany was about to attack Romania, attempted to construct a military alliance that would deter Germany by threatening her with a two-front war. Both Poland and the Soviet Union were approached by the British to join the alliance, but as the former refused to ally with the latter, a choice had to be made; Britain chose Poland. Then another false report—this one, that an attack on Poland was imminent—moved Chamberlain to make a rash pledge. Hoping to gain time to put together the alliance that would deter Hitler, the British prime minister told a crowded and cheering House of Commons on March 31 that if, while his negotiations were taking place, Polish independence were threatened and the Poles resisted, Britain and France would come to their aid.
So the line was drawn; and Chamberlain had gambled his career, his government’s existence, his country’s future, and the peace of the world on his stubborn belief that Hitler would never dare to cross that line.
UNTIL 1939 HITLER’S VICTIMS had submitted unresistingly. Bill Bullitt predicted (on March 23, 1939) that now that would change; he wrote to FDR that “some day someone will have enough guts to pull a trigger and the affair will begin.” He added that in France, “everyone believes that war is inevitable and that it will come quickly.” War before May 15 was, he reported (on April 4), “possible” but not “certain.”
As usual his reports to the President were filled with the anecdotes and gossip that Roosevelt so enjoyed. The French premier had asked for advice on how to increase the national birthrate; Bullitt told FDR, “I do not know quite what to suggest unless it is to have Joe Kennedy transferred to Paris!” And on that subject: “Joe Kennedy phones several times a week to say that he is about to resign. I don’t believe for one minute that he will.”
Bullitt’s views mirrored those of the French politicians with whom he was on intimate terms. “The trouble with Bullitt,” FDR complained, “is in the morning he will send me a telegram, ‘Everything is lovely,’ and then he will go out to have lunch with some French official, and I get a telegram that everything is going to hell.”
Passionately committed to the French cause, Bullitt foresaw the need to build an American army that could be sent to Europe and suggested to Roosevelt on March 23, 1939, that “it might be worthwhile to bring back Douglas MacArthur … to direct our activities in France.” Described by a Polish diplomat as “President Roosevelt’s right-hand man in … foreign affairs,” he acted as go-between in building the French alliance with Poland. Time magazine (March 6, 1939) called him “President Roosevelt’s most trusted adviser on foreign affairs.”
Joseph Kennedy, his colleague in London, shared the views of the British prime minister almost as much as Bullitt did those of the French. An enthusiastic supporter of Chamberlain and appeasement, Kennedy still believed in 1939 what Bullitt had believed until 1938: that the United States could and should stay out of the coming European war, and that the great danger to Europe was posed not by Nazi Germany, but by Soviet Russia. In February 1939 he cheerfully wrote FDR that “England is on its way” and “that Germany will not attack.” His hopeful belief was that Poland should agree to whatever demands Hitler made upon her, so as to allow an unimpeded Germany to invade Russia. But at times he despaired, believing that Britain might be headed for a war she was militarily unprepared to fight. He could not bring himself to follow instructions from Washington that he try to stiffen Chamberlain’s resolve.
At a dinner June 14 Walter Lippmann, on a visit to England, mentioned that Kennedy was telling friends that when war came, Britain would be defeated and would make her peace with Germany. Seated next to Lippmann at dinner was Winston Churchill, the Conservative rebel who had lived in the political wilderness, out of office, out of power, and out of favor, throughout the decade of the 1930s.
“No, the Ambassador should not have spoken so, Mr. Lippmann,” said Churchill. “He should not have said that dreadful word. Yet supposing (as I do not for one moment suppose) that Mr. Kennedy were correct in his tragic utterance, then I for one would willingly lay down my life in combat, rather than, in fear of defeat, surrender to the menaces of these most sinister men. It will then be for you, for the Americans, to preserve and to maintain the great heritage of the English-speaking peoples.…”
BEFORE, DURING, AND AFTER the Czech crisis of 1938, Roosevelt had launched appeals for peace. As German pressures mounted in the Polish crisis of 1939, Roosevelt had Undersecretary of State Welles and Assistant Secretary Adolph Berle draft an appeal, which the President sent to the German and Polish leaders in late August, suggesting that their differences be the subject of conciliation or arbitration, and reiterating the American view that political goals should not be achieved by armed force. Berle’s view was that these messages “have all that quality of naivete which is the prerogative alone of the United States. Nevertheless they have to be sent.” FDR was conscious of the debilitating confusion as to who was responsible for the outbreak of the First World War, and remarked: “This puts the bee on Germany, which nobody did in 1914.”
An editorial in the New York Herald Tribune said it well: “Mere pleas, mere appeals
to reason, count for nothing.… Yet such is the temper of the American people that they are glad the President made his appeals. They would have felt, had he not made them, that perhaps he had overlooked a chance to preserve peace.”
The President predicted to Berle that war would break out in Europe September 10. Aware that the Soviet Union was considering which side to join, Roosevelt sent secret messages urging the Russian leaders to throw in their lot with France and Britain. But he was not taken entirely by surprise by the news that Moscow instead had come to an understanding with Berlin: that Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia had negotiated a nonaggression treaty that was signed and announced the night of August 23–24. Its secret clauses divided all of eastern Europe into Nazi and Soviet spheres. Even without knowing those clauses, the world was shocked by the cynicism of Nazis and communists in negotiating a partnership even though each had claimed the ideology of the other was the incarnation of evil.
Chamberlain and Daladier had refused to face the unpleasant truth that the western European democracies needed an alliance with Russia—however despicable her government might be—to stand a chance of defeating Germany. So the Soviet Union had gone over to the other side; and Britain and France were left holding a commitment to defend Poland that they could no longer redeem.
Chamberlain and Daladier saw the tragic irony of their position: they would have to go to war on Poland’s behalf even though they now knew they could not save her. To Daladier, who seems to have understood that France had to fight Germany someday anyway, this was less embittering than it was to Chamberlain, who saw the coming conflict as pointless: as a war without a purpose. The British leader saw no way out—unless Poland should release the democracies from their commitment to defend her.
In the Time of the Americans Page 49
