In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  Several weeks later Marshall testified before a Senate subcommittee that “I am more of a pacifist than you think. I went through one war and I do not want to see another.” Missouri senator Harry S Truman responded: “General, I think that all of us who were in it feel that way.”

  On May 10 German forces, overshadowed by a sky dark with their military aircraft, swept into and through the Low Countries of Holland and Belgium. France’s vulnerable northern flank—from Montmédy, below the Ardennes forest, where the fortified Maginot Line ended, all the way across to the English Channel—lay exposed.

  As news of the German victories was received at the War Department in Washington, Marshall told Treasury Secretary Morgenthau that it was terrifying how much it would cost to buy the military equipment the United States needed. “I don’t scare easily,” Morgenthau replied. The immediate requirement, said Marshall, was for twice the yearly appropriation the President had asked in January, adding that the very thought of the dollar figure “makes me dizzy.” Morgenthau said: “It makes me dizzy if we don’t get it.”

  On May 13 Morgenthau brought along Marshall to see the President. FDR now said that the United States would build not 10,000 or 25,000, but 50,000 airplanes a year. He turned down the request Morgenthau had made on the army’s behalf and refused to hear Marshall, claiming, “I know exactly what he will say.” Enraged, Marshall lectured the President point by point on the deficiencies in the primitive American defense program. Subdued and impressed, the President told Marshall to come back the next day to talk things over.

  THE WAR BROUGHT LEADERSHIP CHANGES throughout the Western world. In France in March, Daladier was replaced as premier by Paul Reynaud, who for years had preached resistance to Nazi Germany. In England in May, Chamberlain was succeeded by Winston Churchill. In his correspondence with FDR, “Naval Person,” having left the Admiralty to become prime minister, now styled himself “Former Naval Person.”

  In the United States a surge of feeling for the Allies upset earlier calculations as to the political terms on which the presidential campaign would be fought: it had looked like a contest between a Republican isolationist and a Democratic internationalist, but did not turn out that way.

  In 1938 James Farley, the canny political professional who served as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, echoed the opinion of Washington insiders in predicting that the Republicans “will undoubtedly nominate Senator Vandenberg for the presidency in 1940.” But after the 1938 elections Vandenberg had to divide the isolationist vote with others. A May 1939 Gallup Poll showed New York district attorney Thomas E. Dewey ahead; next came newly elected Senator Taft and Vandenberg in what was close to a tie. Still, in 1940 the columnist Drew Pearson quoted Joseph Kennedy as naming Vandenberg his “favorite Republican candidate” for the presidency; Kennedy said that he would “back Arthur against half the Democratic candidates.”

  But Republican voters were looking for new faces, and Arthur Vandenberg resembled too closely a caricature of an old-fashioned senator. Journalist Dorothy Thompson remarked that “Senator Vandenberg simply does not speak the language of anybody under the age of 40 in this country.”

  Dewey, an attractive thirty-eight-year-old prosecutor from New York who had earned a national reputation for his crusade against organized crime, held a large lead in the polls from the start. He doomed Vandenberg’s candidacy by beating him in the Wisconsin and Nebraska primaries of April 1940. Dewey’s campaign was well financed and organized, and he held on to a commanding lead over Taft. But in the shadow of the European war, Dewey, with no experience of political office or foreign affairs, suddenly looked much too young to be President; and his isolationist views increasingly alienated the internationalist-minded eastern seaboard bankers, lawyers, and businessmen whose candidate he had been.

  The emergence of Wendell Willkie as the Republican candidate was one of the most astonishing stories in modern American political history. Willkie, forty-eight, a world war veteran, was an attorney from Indiana who had made a success as a Wall Street utility holding company executive. He had been a Democrat, was not a politician, and was imbued with a pure Wilsonian vision: his first quarrel with FDR’s politics was with Roosevelt’s abandonment of support for the League of Nations.

  Willkie had outgrown the hometown girl he had married as a young man, and for years had kept company with actresses, models, and showgirls. That phase ended in late 1937 when he met Irita Van Doren, book editor of the New York Herald Tribune. She became the only woman in his life, and she edited him as though he were one of the book reviews submitted to her: polishing him, giving him style, cutting out flaws, sharpening him.

  Willkie had won headlines through the years for his long battle (on behalf of the utility company he headed) against what he pictured as the antibusiness tendencies of the New Deal. Propelled into national prominence by an inspirational article he wrote for Fortune magazine and by an April 9, 1940, appearance on a radio quiz show, “Information Please,” in which he captivated a mass audience, Willkie’s cause caught fire. He worked something in the nature of religious conversions: people who met him suddenly believed.

  Taft was still tipped by the professionals to win on the third or fourth ballot. But on June 2, 1940, Taft attended a dinner party given by Ogden Reid, publisher of the New York Herald Tribune, a leading voice of Republicanism, where he was drawn into a shouting match with Dorothy Thompson and others on the subject of the European war. Thoughts that he might not be totally unacceptable as a nominee went out the window. Willkie, at the same dinner, worked his magic on the other guests.

  Walter Lippmann, who in the past had admired Taft, revised his opinion in light of the European war. He wrote that Taft “has all the limitations of Neville Chamberlain, the same complacency, the same incapacity to foresee, the same apathy in action.… [T]o nominate him now would be to invite for the nation a disaster … [and] for Mr. Taft a tragic ordeal.”

  Lippmann was no kinder to the front-runner, Dewey. As the Republicans were about to convene, he wrote: “For eighteen months the Republican party has been walking in its sleep. At no one of the critical junctures of this period has the party understood the situation or proposed measures to deal with it or offered the country positive leadership.… One can, I think, search the speeches of Mr. Taft and Mr. Dewey, and search them in vain, for any evidence of foresight as to what has happened, for a single proposal which was sought, in advance of the Administration, to strengthen the national defense. The speeches of Messrs. Taft and Dewey during these critical months make Mr. Neville Chamberlain seem like a far-sighted and strong statesman.”

  Lippmann’s friend Thomas Lamont, who had connections with businesses and banks all over the country, used his network on Willkie’s behalf. Twenty-eight-year-old Wall Street lawyer Oren Root sent out a sort of chain letter (each asked the recipient to send out fifteen more) asking pledges of support for Willkie, and starting with mailings to Yale and Princeton alumni, wound up three weeks later with 200,000 pledges. Willkie clubs sprung up all over the country.

  Willkie made a virtue of having no campaign organization. He had no floor manager at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia at the end of June. But with thousands of spectators in the galleries shouting “We want Willkie!” and with Vandenberg unable to hold even his home state of Michigan for himself or for Taft, the nomination went to Willkie on the sixth ballot—the only spontaneous, grassroots candidacy that anyone could remember ever having succeeded.

  The novelty of it distracted attention from something else that was remarkable: the profound shift in sentiment within the until-then isolationist Republican party. The party nominated an internationally minded figure from the Atlantic seaboard for the first time since 1916. The battle for the nomination had not been, as had been expected, between a middle westerner and an easterner, but between two easterners: New York lawyer Dewey, who led on the first three ballots, and New York lawyer Willkie, who took the nomination away from him b
y leading on the next three. The new majority in the Republican party was internationalist*; it had been willing to nominate Dewey only so long as foreign policy was not an issue, and when the European war came to the fore, it dumped Dewey and gave the nomination to Willkie instead.

  After winning the nomination, Willkie was contacted by Dewey’s foreign policy adviser John Foster Dulles, the New York lawyer who was one of the inner circle of four running the Dewey campaign. Dulles offered his services, and those of his brother Allen, in advising on foreign policy and in preparing a statement on American foreign policy.

  Dulles was considered a fellow isolationist by Bob Taft, his friend since young manhood, but in fact he was closer to holding a pro-German position. His legal career in important part consisted in representing companies (Solvay, International Nickel, Consolidated Silesian Coal and Steel) that were partners of German companies in cartels. He blamed the outbreak of war on the refusal of Britain and France to let Germany make changes peacefully. While acting as Dewey’s foreign policy expert, he denied (March 1940) that the war “involved a great moral issue, with right wholly on one side of the Allies and wrong wholly on the side of Germany.”

  Willkie thanked Dulles for his offer of advice and said he would call him—but never did. He had taken the nomination away from people of Dulles’s political persuasion. The shift within the Republican party, and the nomination of a candidate at least as pro-Ally as was FDR, was a foreign policy gift to Roosevelt; between June and November 1940 the President would be much freer politically to help Britain, if he chose to do so, than he would have been had Taft or Vandenberg been his opponent.

  WHILE TAFT, Vandenberg, Dewey, and Willkie were battling for the nomination, the German armies that had swept through the Low Countries on May 10 were moving forward with terrifying speed. In the six weeks that followed, they changed the face of Europe.

  Generals on both sides had estimated it would take nine days for the Germans to cross Belgium and reach the Meuse, but the tank commander General Heinz Guderian did it in two. Crossing the river on May 13—south of where the French had anticipated an attack—he took them by surprise, unnerved them, and broke through their lines. Surprising them again by turning west, and ignoring orders from superiors including Hitler himself to pause, Guderian’s legions roared 135 miles across northern France to the Atlantic in a week, encircling the entire British, Belgian, and northern French armies, and separating them from their supply bases as well as from the main French armies to their south. The British Expeditionary Force was down to its last rations; in a few days the troops would begin to starve. Meanwhile, the Germans were poised to win the race to the English Channel ports and cut off the British from their island homeland by standing between them and the sea.

  On May 25 a British officer attached to the French high command reported to London “that the French were very downhearted and did not mèan to stay in the war.” The next day Premier Reynaud told Churchill “that the war could not be won on land” and that Marshal Philippe Pétain, the elderly general who had joined the government, might insist on suing for an armistice. Then Belgium surrendered.

  The British cabinet discussed whether Hitler might agree to make peace on terms that England could accept, with Churchill angrily telling Foreign Secretary Halifax that it would be a fatal mistake even to inquire. Churchill asked his military chiefs whether the British Isles could hold out alone. They said yes, even though his question was whether it could be done with only a navy and an air force, for he assumed that the army, trapped on the Continent, would be destroyed. It was an assumption shared by all. “London people cried openly in the buses, in the streets, for the English army which was lost,” a young writer later remembered.

  Churchill’s government decided to save what it could of the British Expeditionary Force, which had retreated to Dunkerque, a French town on the North Sea coast. After the port of Dunkerque was destroyed by German bombers, Allied troops lined up on a beach ten miles long to be ferried out to sea. With German forces holding back to regroup, a motley armada of about 500 civilian-manned British vessels—sailboats, river ferries, trawlers, and fishing smacks—crossed the narrow seas from England to join about 250 vessels of the Royal Navy in saving nearly all 200,000 British soldiers, and some 140,000 French and Belgian, from the wreckage of Europe.

  The tragedy of the evacuation was that 150,000 French troops were left behind. The long-term effect of the evacuation was to drive a wedge between France and Britain emotionally and politically, as each in years to come blamed the other for having abandoned the common cause. Its immediate effect was to separate the Allies physically so that the German high command could deal with them one at a time, and plan to finish with France by the end of spring and with Britain by the end of summer.

  Salvation now could come only from the New World. Harold Laski, the left-wing British author and teacher, wrote from England on June 10, 1940, to his old friend Felix Frankfurter in Washington, urging Americans to organize in time. “Make them learn the lesson a million of us are going to die for, because Chamberlain would not learn it,” he wrote; for “unless you learn the lesson, your fate will be no different from that which threatens us.… [I]f you do not get ready now, you will have your Dunkirk too; and were that to come, there would be no prospect for the sons of men.…” He ended on a distinct note of farewell: “My America has been a great America. I hope all of you who love it, will do all in your power to keep it a great America. Then, one day, the world’s great age may indeed begin anew.”

  On June 10, too, there appeared a syndicated newspaper article by Walter Lippmann, a close friend and colleague of Frankfurter’s from the days of the Great War, who realized suddenly that it was the failure to understand the earlier conflict that had blinded his contemporaries. He charged that the reason Americans had misunderstood the significance of what was happening in the 1939–40 European war was that they had not comprehended why the United States had entered the world war in 1917. They had been “duped by a falsification of history” and “miseducated by a swarm of innocent but ignorant historians.” Reminding himself of what he had written in 1917, he explained that Britain’s independence and Anglo-American control of the Atlantic Ocean were indispensable elements of America’s security. That was why the United States in 1917 could not have allowed German U-boats to cut off what Lippmann had termed “the Atlantic highway,” and it was why the United States in 1940 could not allow the British Isles to fall into German hands.

  Even as Lippmann’s article was being read across America, Britain was coming closer by the day to becoming isolated. France and her army were disintegrating. Soon after Dunkerque, Reynaud’s government declared Paris an open city and fled the capital for Tours and then Bordeaux, supposedly to make a stand, though the supposition proved unwarranted. Reynaud, as Churchill reported to Roosevelt, “has a young general de Gaulle who believes much can be done”; but most others no longer held any such belief.

  With a courage bordering on rashness, the British prime minister continued flying to France to attend meetings with French officials. On June 12 he wrote Roosevelt that he had told the French government “we thought Hitler could not win the war or the mastery of the world until he had disposed of us which has not been found easy in the past and which perhaps will not be found easy now. I made it clear to the French that we had good hopes of victory and anyhow had no doubts whatever of what our duty was.”

  But on June 16 Reynaud resigned as premier, and his successor, Marshal Pétain, was determined to surrender. It was a stupefying end to the battle for France: Roosevelt had thought Germany might well lose, and not even Hitler had imagined that Germany would win in a mere six weeks. German superiority in numbers had not been great enough to account for what had happened; indeed, it is not clear that the Germans had superiority in numbers. Most of the world—which had thought the French army the most powerful in the world, and had expected another inch-by-inch war that would last four years until it en
ded in an Allied victory—could neither comprehend the speed and nature of the disaster nor understand how it had occurred.

  The rout of the French army left Ambassador Bullitt with a personal mission: the protection of Paris. On June 8 he had ordered twelve submachine guns with ammunition to be installed in the American embassy; and the following day he announced that he would not leave Paris to go southward with the rest of the diplomatic corps and the government. He told Reynaud “that no American Ambassador in history had ever left Paris” and that he had no intention of being the first to do so. He decided to act, with the approval of the French government, as the “guardian of the civil authority” in arranging peaceful German entrance to the city and in attempting to save Paris from possible destruction.

  The State Department’s view was that Bullitt’s job was to accompany the French government, and Secretary Hull wanted to order him to do so. But years before, Bullitt in conversation with FDR had imagined a situation in which German armies might enter Paris; he had asked the President not to let the State Department order him to leave the city, saying that he would be forced to disobey such an order.

  The President kept his word. “You said you would see to it that I should not receive such an order and I am grateful to you for remembering,” Bullitt cabled Roosevelt June 12. “My deepest personal reason for staying in Paris is that whatever I have as character, good or bad, is based on the fact that since the age of four I have never run away from anything however painful or dangerous when I thought it was my duty to take a stand. If I should leave Paris now I would be no longer myself.”

  The German army marched into Paris early the morning of June 14. The news sent a stab of pain through the many Americans, including hundreds of thousands of veterans of Pershing’s army, to whom Paris meant their youth. In Washington, in a scene significant only in that it was occurring in so many other places, Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish (who in 1935 had written, “I should do everything in my power to prevent the United States going to war under any circumstances”) was found at his desk in tears. The next day he lunched with Interior Secretary Ickes and urged that America declare war.