In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  Bullitt stayed in Paris for only about two weeks after the Germans entered. Having helped to arrange an orderly transfer of authority to German military officials, there then was little left for him to do. He cabled Washington repeatedly to call attention to the plight of the refugees who clogged the paths and highways of Europe in hopeless attempted flight from the Nazis; he also reported that from Paris alone a million more had taken the road south, where nothing awaited but starvation. But Washington and the Red Cross did nothing, and Bullitt pleaded in vain with Hull: “There are now six million persons in southwestern France who will die unless American aid for them is organized immediately.”

  Bullitt did not realize that he had disappointed FDR. By failing to follow the French government southwest to Bordeaux, he had forfeited the last chance to exert America’s full influence on the cabinet to keep France in the war. Just as Joe Kennedy had not followed FDR’s orders to stiffen the Chamberlain government’s resolve to fight, so had Bullitt—in Washington’s view and in that of General de Gaulle—not gone the last mile to keep the Reynaud government in the war.

  Moreover, FDR, whose first priority was the security of the Western Hemisphere, saw French West Africa in enemy hands as a dagger pointed at South America. His policy was to win the friendship of General Maxime Weygand, the French commander in chief in Africa, so as to keep French Africa from being used against the Americas. Robert Murphy, of Bullitt’s embassy staff, worked at winning over Weygand; but it was a task that Roosevelt felt Ambassador Bullitt should be doing himself.

  In mid-July Bullitt left Lisbon for the United States. He expected to be named secretary of war or secretary of the navy, the two positions that FDR had offered him. But by the time he reported to the President, the political situation had changed.

  IN PART it may have had something to do with the President’s health. A few months earlier—in February—Bullitt (on leave from Paris), Roosevelt, and Missy LeHand had an intimate dinner together in the White House in the course of which FDR reportedly collapsed. It was, of course, hushed up. But a physical attack—if that is what it was—often leaves an emotional legacy of mood changes, and Roosevelt became moody about Democratic politics.

  His candidate for the presidency, Harry Hopkins, had been eliminated from the race by ill health, and Roosevelt really had no second choice. He had grown to dislike his party, with its backward-looking southern Bourbons, its corrupt big-city bosses, and its big-business interests—a coalition that had named the Democratic party’s 1924 and 1928 nominees and that would name its 1940 nominee if he stood aside and let it happen.

  As feudal barons had defied their kings during Europe’s Middle Ages, so the powerful lords of the Senate—of both parties—defied the White House. Roosevelt’s attempt to defeat Democratic senators who opposed him had failed in 1938, but in 1940 he made another ill-judged try: he seemed to back a candidate against Missouri’s Senator Truman, who was seeking a second term. Truman had provided FDR with at least one important victory on a crucial vote in the Senate. Moreover, he was a champion of small business against the corporate giants that Roosevelt opposed. But he also (though personally honest) had been the candidate of a corrupt Kansas City political machine; perhaps for that reason, Roosevelt preferred Truman’s opponent. Truman was popular with fellow senators, and Jimmy Byrnes had Bernard Baruch contribute $4,000 toward his election—which proved to be half of his entire campaign fund. It was a close race, but Truman won and Roosevelt cannot have been pleased.

  But what mostly must have contributed to putting FDR into a strangely dark mood was that the props had been kicked out from under his strategy for staying out of the world crisis. His assumption that the Allies would fight on to victory was jolted by the fall of France. Abandoned by her ally, England continued to defy Germany, but one did not need to be as defeatist as Ambassador Kennedy to fear that she could not hold out for long. On June 27 Marshall and other army and naval planners advised Roosevelt to send no further military supplies to Britain since her survival was uncertain and whatever was sent her might fall into German hands once England was overrun. In July 1940 FDR sent a special envoy, William J. Donovan, to Britain to report whether she could and would endure. Later he sent a team of military officers. He knew Kennedy’s views, but wanted a second opinion—and then a third.

  THE FALL OF FRANCE in 1940 either marked or made a revolution in world affairs. Global politics were turned upside down. All bets were off; all reckonings had to be figured again from scratch.

  Since sometime in the seventeenth century, events had been dominated by the ambitions and actions, rivalries and alliances, wars and diplomatic combinations of France and Great Britain: the one supreme† on land; the other, at sea. Whether as friends or enemies, whether fighting alongside or against each other, they had set the course of history and politics. The United States was born out of the tension between the two great European powers; and the historical era of their predominance was the only international environment the country ever had known.

  When Pétain surrendered to Hitler, this long-standing structure of world politics disintegrated. New powers linked to one another—Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, imperial Japan, and communist Russia—stood poised to achieve mastery in the world unless somebody stopped them.

  FDR had not intended to be a foreign policy President, let alone a war president, when he took office in 1933. He had not intended to involve his country in the conflicts of the outside world; his generation had explored that route in the First World War and had learned, to their cost, where it led.

  The collapse of France changed Roosevelt’s calculations. It was the decisive foreign policy event in his presidency, for before it occurred, he had seen no need to bring the United States into the war. After it happened, however, he saw no way to keep America out of it. The magnitude of the German triumph was such that it was inconceivable Britain could come back to win on her own. The best that could be hoped for was that she could stay in the fight until the president elected in November could somehow induce an unwilling American public to join in it, too.

  FDR still believed (as did Churchill) that the war could be won solely by airpower—that is to say, by bombers. He did not believe that it would be necessary to send U.S. armies overseas. In campaigning for the presidency, he was not being entirely untruthful in saying he would not send American boys to die on foreign battlefields, for he did not intend to do so. But he did mean to fight Nazi Germany, and was convinced that to bring the country around to his views, he would need to make new appointments.

  Taking a dim view of his party, his Congress, most of his cabinet colleagues, and all of the candidates who proposed to take his place, FDR, who already had decided to carry on himself, decided to do so with a new team.

  * And remained so. For the next two decades, delegates for whom the 1940 choice would have been between Dewey and Willkie beat those for whom it would have been between Taft and Vandenberg.

  † Though France had lost the 1870–71 war to Prussian-led Germany, she reversed its results by winning the 1914–18 war against Germany.

  47

  FDR’S NEW TEAM AND NEW TERM

  ON MAY 10, the day Germany invaded the Low Countries, Harry Hopkins dined with the President and his wife. He felt too ill to return home, and at the urging of the Roosevelts, spent the night at the White House. He stayed on. He left the White House only three and a half years later, and never recovered.

  His health shattered, Hopkins no longer harbored personal ambitions. He devoted his remaining years and energies to FDR. He spent all his waking hours with the President or acting for him; he served as Roosevelt’s other self, looking, listening, speaking, and (at terrible cost to his frail body) traveling for the even less mobile FDR.

  Hopkins knew nothing of foreign policy or military affairs, but had a practical and inquiring mind and was briefed by Roosevelt. From the middle of 1940 on, in pursuing world war and world peace, the Roosevelt story became the story of R
oosevelt and Hopkins.

  EVER SINCE THE MUNICH PACT at the end of 1938, Roosevelt had been thinking of forming a coalition government to face the war threat. As a member of the last Democratic administration, he had seen for himself what disasters Woodrow Wilson had brought about by trying to direct and inspire a war effort—which, in order to succeed, necessarily had to be a national effort—while presiding over a one-party government that inevitably was perceived as partisan.

  In December 1939 the post of secretary of the navy fell open, and FDR made his first move in the direction of coalition by offering it to Frank Knox, owner of the Chicago Daily News and Republican candidate for vice president in the last elections. Knox said that if the time ever came when he could accept such an offer, he would want a Republican named as secretary of war, too—preferably William J. Donovan, war hero, Wall Street lawyer, progressive New York Republican, and law school classmate of Roosevelt’s.* But Knox told the President that the time was not yet ripe for him to join the cabinet.

  So Roosevelt appointed the acting navy secretary, Charles Edison, to the post. When Edison turned out to be inadequate, Roosevelt, who hated to fire anyone, arranged for him to be nominated governor of New Jersey to be rid of him. So the job was open, and FDR offered it to Bullitt, who accepted and expected to be sworn in after returning from France in the summer of 1940.

  That left the War Department with its paralyzing feud between isolationist Secretary Harry Woodring and internationalist Assistant Secretary Louis Johnson, to whom FDR had promised the succession once Woodring somehow could be removed. Roosevelt also had offered the War Department job to Bullitt.

  The situation, already complex, became more complicated still as a result of initiatives by private citizens. Moved by the war news from Europe, individual Americans who held no political office but had become impatient with the President’s caution in responding to the overseas threat prepared to take matters in hand.

  Wall Street lawyer Grenville Clark had been a class ahead of FDR at Harvard. They had started in law practice together in the first decade of the century: both had been employed as law clerks by the same Manhattan firm, and at the same time. Clark had achieved fame early by running the TR-inspired preparedness movement—the Plattsburg Movement—during the early years of the Great War, before the United States entered it. Now he took the lead in lobbying for military conscription: the draft.

  To accomplish their program, Clark and the friends with whom he met at the Harvard Club decided to have their own proconscription candidate named secretary of war. Their candidate, perhaps the only person with the stature and leadership qualities to get such a program through Congress, was elder statesman Henry Stimson, former Republican secretary of war and secretary of state. Stimson was of an age (seventy-two) when he might require considerable assistance in administering his department, so Clark and his friends hit on the idea of pushing a two-man “ticket”: Stimson for secretary and Judge Robert Patterson for assistant secretary: both ex-Plattsburg trainees who had served on the western front. Clark enlisted the help of Stimson’s former protégé, Felix Frankfurter, now a Supreme Court justice but still one of FDR’s political advisers. Frankfurter, who always had been devoted to Stimson, took the matter in hand. The President was persuaded, and on June 19 finally induced Woodring to resign.

  But before contacting Stimson about War, FDR phoned Knox to renew his invitation for Navy. Knox had worked for Vandenberg’s Michigan newspaper and had been associated with the Hearst press, but FDR liked him immensely and now offered him his choice of Navy or War. Knox picked Navy. So FDR did give War to Stimson and, eventually, Patterson.† The appointment of these outstanding national figures from the Republican party strengthened FDR with both the voters and the Congress.

  Stimson and Knox recruited outstanding staffs. As his undersecretary, Knox chose Wall Street investment banker James Forrestal of the investment banking house Dillon Read, an ex-Plattsburg trainee who had failed to get an overseas assignment in 1918 and was eager to serve.

  Forrestal was contacted on the issue of aircraft production by his close friend, Wall Street banker Robert Lovett of Brown Brothers Harriman, a navy flier in the Great War. Lovett said the government was submitting its orders to what in effect was a handcraft industry, and should instead have airplanes made by the automobile companies, who alone knew how to mass produce. Lovett went to work on the matter at War, eventually becoming a special assistant secretary. Another of Stimson’s recruits was former Plattsburg man and Wall Street lawyer John McCloy, who had become an expert on the subject of First World War German intelligence in the course of a complex lawsuit. Then there was Harvey Bundy, a lawyer who had worked for Stimson at State in the waning days of the Hoover administration, and who in Wilson days had been, alongside Walter Lippmann and Felix Frankfurter, a lodger at the “House of Truth.”‡ Another recruit was George Harrison, former president of the New York Federal Reserve.

  Of the six men at the top of Stimson’s department—Stimson himself, Patterson, Bundy, Harrison, Lovett, and McCloy—two had clerked for Justice Holmes, three were Plattsburg veterans, four were from the Yale secret society Skull and Bones, five were Harvard Law, and all six were Republicans from the financial districts of New York and Boston. War and Navy had become a congenial Republican government within a government, staffed by a body of capable men who had gone to the same schools, belonged to the same clubs, and had done business with one another all their adult lives.

  CONSIDERING THE QUANTITY and quality of the people who left their businesses and banks and law firms in the summer of 1940 to temporarily work with or permanently join the Roosevelt administration, it seems all the more curious that the President gave no sign that his government would continue beyond the end of the year. FDR played with his stamp collection and spent much of his time planning what he and his friend Harry Hopkins would do in private life. The two of them would publish a small newspaper or found a college or run a fishing resort in the Florida Keys or open a hot-dog stand; such at least was the impression conveyed by the playwright Robert Sherwood, the biographer of the two men.

  Nobody knows exactly when FDR decided to defy precedent and run for a third term, nor even when he admitted to himself that he had made up his mind. In early July 1940 Roosevelt and Hopkins held an intimate political dinner to discuss the matter with Senator Byrnes and Democratic political chiefs Edward Flynn of New York, Mayor Edward Kelly of Chicago, and Frank Walker, future chairman of the Democratic National Committee. FDR told the others that he was under great pressure to run for reelection, that he himself was loath to break with the tradition that a president should not serve for more than two terms, but that there was no other candidate the party could choose who could succeed. What should he do? he asked; and his guests of course said that he should run again.

  What bothered Byrnes was that the President had held the identical conversation with him six months earlier, in January 1940, at which time they had agreed he would run again. Nor did one need to be as astute as Byrnes to guess that the President had held the same well-rehearsed conversation with many others throughout the year. Yet by pretending to be undecided about his plans, FDR kept rival candidacies from developing.

  But the bewildered and frustrated rank-and-file delegates chosen to attend the Democratic National Convention had no clue as to what was going to happen. They convened in Chicago in the middle of July with no clear lead from the President. In deference to FDR, no candidate from his wing of the party had stepped forward. The only candidates were conservative members of his administration who opposed his policies: Vice President Garner and the Democratic National Committee chairman, Postmaster General James Farley.

  Asked by party leaders what to do at the convention (“Suppose at some point we want to know your directions on strategy—whom do we ask?”), FDR replied: “In that event, if I were you, I’d consult Jimmy Byrnes.” And Byrnes did indeed play a major role in such matters as drafting the platform. But then Ha
rry Hopkins arrived in Chicago for the convention. From a bathroom phone, he had the only direct line to the White House, so he was the man to see and to talk to. He also seemed to have a sort of script; for what followed, under his direction, was in the nature of a drama plotted out in advance.

  A message from the President was read to the delegates in which, without saying he would refuse the nomination if the convention insisted on offering it, he said he did not wish to run or serve again. This stunned the delegates, who sat in silence, not knowing what they were supposed to do.

  Then loudspeakers blared: “We want Roosevelt! Everybody wants Roosevelt!” The booming voice was that of Chicago’s superintendent of sewers, broadcasting from his quarters underneath the stadium. At his cry, other operatives of Mayor Kelly’s Chicago political machine and their political allies led the delegates in demonstrating in the aisles for fifty-three minutes crying, “Roosevelt! Roosevelt!” The next day they voted to nominate FDR.

  Responding over the radio, the President said: “Lying awake, as I have, on many nights, I have asked myself whether I have the right, as Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, to call on men and women to serve their country … and, at the same time, decline to serve my country in my own personal capacity, if I am called upon to do so by the people of my country.” There could be but one answer: he had no such right. He was obliged to accept the nomination.

  To the dismay of the delegates, who believed that at least the choice of a Vice President would be left up to them, they then were instructed to vote for liberal Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, a former Republican, as the President’s running mate. This, too, was a decision that emerged from FDR’s well-practiced conversations with party leaders behind closed doors.