In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  Acting on behalf of the Chamberlain government, Kennedy sent a proposal to Washington that the American government should pressure the Poles into surrendering to Germany’s demands without a fight. FDR and Secretary of State Hull refused to do that. Acting on his own, Kennedy then persuaded the British government to try to force the Poles to let Chamberlain and his foreign secretary negotiate with Germany on their behalf, as they had done for the Czechs the year before at Munich. The Poles purposely delayed their reply.

  Meeting with the prime minister or the foreign secretary several times a day, Kennedy overflowed with ideas for new concessions that could be made to Germany. He was undeterred by a report from Berlin that Hitler said “it was useless for the British to bother about Poland since he and the Russians had agreed to cut it up.” Kennedy’s thought was that Hitler might be persuaded to forgo claims to Polish territory in return for one or two billion dollars.

  Kennedy, Bullitt, and Roosevelt talked with one another over the telephone all through the August crisis. Historians lack written evidence of what they said to one another. One can guess that Bullitt continued, as he always had, to retail as his own the views of the French premier and France’s military chiefs. At least these were views of some sophistication. Those of the brash businessman who served as ambassador in London showed little understanding of the foreign situation; they would serve as an argument against the American practice of filling ambassadorial posts with those whose only qualification for the job is the making of campaign contributions.

  Over a game of golf years later, Kennedy gave James Forrestal his version of the Polish crisis. His view was that Britain and France ought simply to have walked away from their guarantee to Poland. Left to themselves, according to Kennedy, that is what they would have done.* Kennedy—much overestimating American influence—said that it was FDR who pushed Britain and France into making a stand, and that it was Bullitt who persuaded FDR to do so. If it had not been for the Americans, France and Britain would have done nothing; Germany, after taking Poland, would have gone on to invade the Soviet Union; and the rest of the world would have been left in peace because (Kennedy indicated, misunderstanding Nazi intentions) Hitler would not have attacked the west European democracies. So that in Kennedy’s view, the one person most responsible for the outbreak of the Second World War was not Adolf Hitler but William Christian Bullitt.

  TO THE AVERAGE AMERICAN the crisis in Europe still seemed far away. More than 25 million visitors to the New York World’s Fair were captivated by the bright prospects of the world of the future. Millions of others, looking back nearly a century to the Civil War, awaited the opening, scheduled for the end of the year, of Gone With the Wind, touted as the greatest motion picture of all time. Shirley Temple beguiled the nation in The Little Princess.

  Even those abroad were unaware of how swiftly the August crisis was racing toward its climax. While American tourists, Franklin Roosevelt’s mother among them, continued their leisurely summer travels, German troops massed on the Polish frontier. Bullitt told FDR that “storm warnings are out in Europe,” and on August 24 he cabled: “I told your mother … I thought she should return to America today.… [S]he agreed and will leave … this afternoon.” A couple of days later young John F. Kennedy, in Germany on a pleasure jaunt, having bought a new German movie camera and projector, was asked by the Berlin embassy to leave for London with a secret message for his father: war would commence in one week.

  AT TEN MINUTES BEFORE THREE on the morning of Friday, September 1, 1939, the telephone beside Roosevelt’s bed in the White House rang. He switched on the lights, looked at the time, then reached over and answered the phone.

  “This is Bill Bullitt, Mr. President,” said the voice at the other end of the line. He was calling to report that German troops had invaded Poland and already had penetrated “deep” into the country.

  Roosevelt immediately called the undersecretary and secretary of state, the secretary of war, and the acting secretary of the navy with the news. Then he went back to sleep. At 6:30 a.m. the telephone awakened him. Again it was Bullitt from Paris. His news was that Daladier had told him that France and Britain were going to war.

  So the cease-fire of November 1918 had not brought an end to the war between Germany and her neighbors; after an armistice of twenty-one years, the battle to stop the Reich from achieving mastery in Europe—and after Europe, the world—had resumed.

  * Minutes of the August 23, 1939, meeting of the French cabinet and military chiefs show this to be untrue; the military leaders advised that there was no choice but to go to war over Poland.

  PART EIGHT

  WILL AMERICA GET INTO IT AGAIN?

  45

  REPLAY

  … history does in fact repeat.

  —Franklin Roosevelt

  ROOSEVELT, MEETING WITH HIS CABINET two days later, told its members about Bullitt phoning him from Europe September 1 with the fateful news.

  “An unknown and unknowable destiny yawned before mankind that morning,” he said. “Yet, I was almost startled by a strange feeling of familiarity—a feeling that I had been through it all before. But after all it was not strange. During the long years of the World War”—the 1914 war that America had entered in 1917—“the telephone at my bedside with a direct wire to the Navy Department”—for Roosevelt then had been assistant secretary of the navy—“had time and again brought me other tragic messages in the night.…”

  “I had in fact been through it all before,” he concluded. “It was not strange to me but more like picking up again an interrupted routine.” Looking into the future, he told the cabinet that what would be distinctive about the days that lay ahead was that they would be “crowded with the same problems, the same anxieties that filled to the brim those September days of 1914. For history does in fact repeat.”

  Americans of Roosevelt’s generation, who throughout the 1920s and 1930s had regretted so deeply what they believed to have been their tragic mistakes in war and peace during the Wilson administration, were about to be granted what mortals rarely are given: they were being allowed to do it over again. They were being given another chance.

  And because Americans usually walk away from the past and ignore history, what was unique in the years to come was the extent to which, unlike Americans of any other time, they kept looking over their shoulders. Time and again they looked back. They made decisions and took positions in the light of what they or their counterparts had said or done twenty or twenty-five years before.

  SEPTEMBER 1. IN HIS ROOM at the Manila Hotel, Lieutenant Colonel Dwight Eisenhower heard the news of war. Suddenly everything came together for him. He had never wanted to go out to the Philippines with MacArthur, and his tour of duty there had been an unhappy one. His former hero worship of the general had turned to strong dislike—or to something even more than that.*

  Eisenhower’s great regret was that he had not been able to get overseas in the Great War. The news coming over the radio suggested that he might have a second shot at it; his four-year tour of duty in the Philippines was coming to an end, and he had long before decided that in 1939 he would return to a post in the United States.

  Jumping into the elevator, he rode up to the penthouse of the Manila Hotel. “General,” he told MacArthur, “in my opinion the United States cannot remain out of this war for long. I want to go home as soon as possible. I want to participate.…” MacArthur attempted to dissuade him, but in the end let him go.

  So at the last possible moment as the vessels were leaving dock, Eisenhower jumped from MacArthur’s ship to Marshall’s. In a bit more than a year, Ike would be drafting Marshall’s letters and orders to MacArthur.

  ROOSEVELT ADDRESSED THE PEOPLE of the United States in a “fireside chat” over the radio on the evening of Sunday, September 3. His subject was American neutrality in the war that had just broken out in Europe. Conscious, as were his listeners, that twenty-five years before, Woodrow Wilson had appealed to Americans to
be neutral not just in deed, but also in thought, Roosevelt said: “I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought.… Even a neutral cannot be asked to close his mind or conscience.”

  Indeed, the moral difference between the Allies and their enemies was clear in 1939. It had not been in 1914, when supporting the British and French meant also supporting despotic tsarist Russia. Now, in the aftermath of the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact of August 1939, despotic Stalinist Russia was on the German side. So the war declared by Daladier and Chamberlain was an unambiguous conflict between democracies and dictators.

  Moreover, in 1914 the public was in genuine doubt as to who had caused the war. But there could be no doubt about who started the war of 1939. And in countless pleas, messages, speeches, and proposals of mediations throughout the 1930s, and at the risk of seeming naive, simple, and uncomprehending, Roosevelt had urged conciliation, negotiation, arbitration, and peace. In his fireside chat, FDR reminded Americans that their government had left no stone unturned in its efforts to prevent the war. The government now aimed at true neutrality.

  But Americans were also aware that although President Wilson had proclaimed neutrality at the beginning of the Great War, in the end he had sent an American Expeditionary Force overseas. Roosevelt made clear that he was not going to repeat that experiment: “Let no man or woman thoughtlessly or falsely talk of America sending its armies to European fields.”

  WHEN THE WAR NEWS hit the New York Stock Exchange, the industrial averages soared from 134 to 138, the percentage equivalent of going up more than 100 points today. The 1914 war had brought riches to the United States, and investors bet that the 1939 war would do the same.

  It certainly would do so if the President could induce the Congress to revise the Neutrality Acts so as to allow Americans to sell supplies to the Allies on a cash-and-carry basis: the Allies to pay cash, then carry away the goods in their own merchant vessels so that all risk of being torpedoed by German U-boats was theirs.

  The public was in favor of the President’s proposals. A Gallup Poll taken in October 1939 showed that 62 percent of the population favored extending all aid to the Allies short of war. Selling goods to them was not even extending aid; it was doing good business at a profit.

  There were persuasive isolationist as well as internationalist arguments for going along with the President’s proposals. The best way “to keep Americans 3,000 miles from the war and keep the war 3,000 miles from Americans,” according to Walter Lippmann, was to send war supplies to Britain and France to help them win on their own. For if they were to lose, he thought, America would be compelled to fight. Yet the country was in no position to do so: quarrels with Japan pinned down the American navy in the Pacific; and the United States “could not, would not, and should not send an army overseas.”

  Appealing to Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican foreign policy leader in the Senate and once a fellow journalist, Lippmann argued that America ran no risks by selling arms to the Allies for cash: that an embargo on financing the Allies and on shipping supplies to them provided the “one effective way of preventing our being drawn into the war.” He reminded anybody who needed reminding that in 1917 it had been the attacks on American merchant vessels carrying goods to the Allies that had brought the country into the war. The danger could be averted this time around by ensuring that war supplies were carried by Allied rather than American merchantmen.

  Vandenberg had been there himself; he had lived through the same years that Lippmann had. He had been, like Lippmann, a TR supporter who had gone over to Wilson—and in part because he had been convinced by Wilson then, he was not convinced by Roosevelt now. “The story of 1917–18 is already repeating itself,” he said. “Pressure and propaganda are at work to drive us into the new World War.” And he foresaw that “the same emotions which demand the repeal of the embargo will subsequently demand still more effective aid for Britain, France, and Poland.…”

  Vandenberg’s instincts told him that the United States should either be all the way in or all the way out; the policy of backing the Allies without joining them bothered him. For one thing, he felt they could not stop Germany on their own; if the Germans were to be defeated, the United States at some point would have to come in to do it. Nor was it right to let Britons, Frenchmen, and Poles do all the fighting, for if it really was America’s cause they were upholding, Americans should be fighting by their side. But in Vandenberg’s view, what was happening in Europe was not America’s business; the responsibility of the United States was limited to defending the Western Hemisphere.

  Vandenberg frequently took lunch with Robert Taft, who in his brief service in the Senate was already looked to as the intellectual leader of his party. The pedantic and uncompromising Taft, at the top of his class at Yale and Harvard Law, but colorless, passionless, and humorless, and the owl-faced, beetle-browed, and pompous Vandenberg, with his overblown rhetoric and the tendency to violent swings of opinion that made him seem like some vessel in rough seas rolling from starboard to port, were an odd couple of middle western politicians, but together they led the Republican minority in the Senate.

  Taft was pro-Ally but antiwar. His wife, Martha, was if anything even more against entering the war than he was. He favored aiding the Allies so that they could win the war without America being drawn into it. He voted for even more rapid production of aircraft than the administration asked.

  Taft was at one with Vandenberg in violently distrusting the President. The Republican leaders regarded Roosevelt as devious and opportunistic, and believed he exercised too much power. Imagining him as a war President, they must have been reminded of Wilson’s autocratic and one-party government in war and peace in 1917–20.

  Even before the outbreak of war, Taft had warned that “we have moved far toward totalitarian government already. The additional powers sought by the President in case of war … would create a Socialist dictatorship which it would be impossible to dissolve once the war is over.” His strongly held view was that “we should be prepared to defend our own shores but we should not undertake to defend the ideals of democracies in foreign countries.” Why try to straighten out the affairs of foreign countries? he asked. If America’s New Dealers could not manage the United States, how could they run the world any better?

  Several months after the outbreak of war, Taft said: “While I certainly do not consider myself an isolationist, I feel it would be a great mistake for us to participate in the European War. I do not believe that we could materially affect the outcome”—remembering the First World War, in which the United States was not ready to fight until too late in the day—“and I do not believe we have shown any ability to make a peace after the war is over”—for had he not been in Paris in 1919, and believed President Wilson to have made a shambles of the postwar settlement? “In the meantime,” he concluded, by going to war “we would certainly destroy democracy in this country.”

  ROOSEVELT, TOO, remembered Wilson’s mistakes, among them his unwillingness to work with Congress or with the other political party. A few days after Germany invaded Poland, the President placed a phone call to South Carolina to ask the help of James F. Byrnes, one of the many senators he had estranged in his efforts to purge “disloyal” Democrats—several of whom were Byrnes’s friends—in the 1938 elections. Now Roosevelt moved to make peace.

  The President “is preparing to compose his ancient quarrel with Congress,” wrote the journalists Joseph Alsop and Robert Kintner, by asking “the Democratic moderate [Byrnes] … to share in the Senate management of the embargo repeal.…” Byrnes was invited by Roosevelt to a conference in Washington, to be held before a special session of Congress convened. So were other congressional leaders of both parties, and the 1936 Republican presidential and vice-presidential candidates. At the conference Roosevelt was, in Byrnes’s words, “conciliatory and persuasive.”

  The Congress granted the President’s request. The neutrality laws were changed. The United States now ha
d a bipartisan strategy for dealing with the crisis in Europe. It was to ensure an Allied victory by selling Britain and France all the weapons they might need, and to do so at a profit and without running the risk that the United States might be drawn into the war.

  GEORGE MARSHALL, acting chief of staff of the American army during July and August, became chief September 1, 1939, the day Poland was invaded. While waiting for Quarters Number One at Fort Myer to be ready for occupancy, he had been staying with Colonel George Patton, whose family was away (and who exulted in a letter to his wife: “I have just consummated a pretty snappy move!… [H]e and I are batching it. I think that once I can get my natural charm working I won’t need any letters from John J. P[ershing] or any one else”).

  Though Marshall was Pershing’s principal protégé, and the old general had campaigned long and hard to ensure that his former aide rose to the top, in the end it had been Harry Hopkins who persuaded Roosevelt to appoint Marshall to the job. But by the time Marshall was sworn in, Hopkins, ill and going through bouts of hospitalization, was not at hand to provide political guidance and to help him develop a close relationship with the President.

  By an executive order issued July 5, FDR had positioned himself to take a more direct role in commanding the armed forces; on certain issues the service chiefs were now to report directly to him as commander in chief rather than to the secretary of war or the secretary of the navy. The new system made it all the more important for Marshall to develop an easy working relationship with the President; yet the general’s own stern nature made that difficult for him to do.