At the White House political dinner described previously, attended in early July by FDR, Hopkins, Byrnes, Kelly, Flynn, and Walker, the President raised the question of the vice-presidential nomination. He said that Garner did not want to run for Vice President again (which presumably expressed less than Roosevelt’s whole thought, for Garner was running for the presidential nomination).
FDR then said that his first choice for a replacement candidate was Byrnes. Shrewdly, Byrnes himself raised the obvious objection: he came from the Deep South. But Byrnes did not know that Flynn was a houseguest at the White House, that he had already discussed the vice presidency with FDR, and that Roosevelt had brought up the name of Byrnes knowing what Flynn was about to say in vetoing the nomination. Byrnes, said Flynn, was a Catholic who had turned Protestant, and as such would lose the ticket many votes.
Byrnes was not the only politician cast for a part in what they did not realize was a prescripted drama, designed to satisfy their egos but not their ambitions, that Roosevelt and his few intimates had rehearsed. All over Chicago there were men whom FDR had named as his first choice for President, Vice President, or the cabinet, but whom he was somehow prevented from pushing forward.
The logic of the Wallace choice never was clear to the convention, and only a personal appearance and plea by Eleanor Roosevelt persuaded the convention to accept it. It was as though FDR, in his moodiness, was taking pleasure in forcing the party to admit that it had to do whatever he said. He seemed to be choosing Wallace not because the agriculture secretary had a following, but because he did not: as Vice President he would pose no political threat.
The instincts of the disgruntled delegates were right; they were not nominating a ticket that if elected would provide a Democratic administration from 1941 to 1945. Nor would the new administration really prove to be a coalition of Democrats and Republicans, though many in later years would claim that it was. The incoming administration would be a coalition of Theodore Roosevelt’s followers and Franklin Roosevelt’s followers: it would be a TR-FDR coalition.
Harold Ickes, who would continue to be interior secretary, was a Bull Moose Republican from the 1912 campaign. Of the new appointees, a significant number—half of the six men who ran the new War Department—were veterans of the TR-inspired Plattsburg Movement in 1916. The secretaries of the armed forces were TR Republicans; indeed, the new navy secretary, Colonel Frank Knox, had been one of TR’s Rough Riders, and a lifelong friend. The new Vice President was from TR’s faction of the Republican party, the Progressives, as was William Donovan, who was about to head the forerunner of the CIA.
What loomed ahead, therefore, if FDR won the 1940 general elections, was that the Rough Riders would ride again.
THREE CONFLICTS BEGAN in the summer of 1940 that took place at about the same time and affected one another: (1) the presidential contest in the United States, (2) the efforts of private American citizens to pry loose from their government some reconditioned American destroyers the British desperately needed, and (3) across the Atlantic, the loneliest and most decisive struggle of the war: the Battle of Britain.
On July 2 Hitler ordered plans to be drawn up for the invasion of the British Isles. His army delivered the plans July 17. The German army’s conception was that the air force would play the role of artillery, pounding the enemy with explosives before the attack, then softening up the defenders and opening up gaping holes in their lines. Then German troops would cross the English Channel as if it were a river and pour through the holes in British lines. Hitler scheduled the invasion for September 15; the Luftwaffe commenced the buildup toward its assigned task with a concentrated air campaign conducted from July 10 to August 12 against shipping in the Channel.
The air barrage against the British Isles themselves began August 13. Germany’s object was to destroy England’s airfields and airplane factories in order to win command of the skies. It was a close-run thing, with the outnumbered British for a time losing twice as many pilots as they were able to train for replacements.
The fate of the world was at stake, but it would be decided by only a couple of thousand men put up by the two sides. The rest of humanity could only watch as helpless bystanders as the pilots of RAF Fighter Command’s 600 single-seat Hurricanes and Spitfires were pitted against the nearly 1,200 bombers and more than 800 fighters of Goering’s Luftwaffe. It was pilot and ground crew against pilot and ground crew. By mid-September the Germans had lost. Hitler postponed the invasion of England to October, then until spring, then indefinitely.
But meanwhile the Germans began the “blitz”: the nighttime bombing of London by armadas of as many as a thousand planes. It was aimed at civilians—at ordinary people and their houses, and at their places of business and entertainment—and it was much more unnerving than daytime bombing because it took place in the dark. This was an aspect of the war that was made vivid for millions on the other side of the Atlantic by the radio broadcasts of intrepid American reporters.
For it was the moment when radio replaced the press as the principal supplier of news to the masses, a step on the road that, a half-century later, led to the Gulf war being watched as it happened on television. Best remembered of the pioneer radio correspondents who brought something of the reality of London under aerial siege into American homes in 1940–41 is Edward R. Murrow of the CBS network, whose somber and understatedly dramatic opening words, “This … is London,” are known even to millions too young to have heard him at the time. Murrow went to wherever the action was, and allowed his audience to listen to it. In the background Americans heard air raid sirens, shouts and screams, the shrieks and whines of incoming bombs, the roar of explosions. According to one account of his innovative techniques, “He sometimes broadcast air raids from roof tops, with as many as a dozen microphones scattered to pick up the sound.” The crackling noise of static on the overseas line conveyed a sense of the fragility of America’s tie to the last fighting outpost of the Western world: it said more effectively than words could have done that this was a line that at any minute could be cut.
The President, in response to pleas from Churchill, sent to Britain such guns and ammunition as America could spare. But Roosevelt, who remembered the British empire as it was in his youth—the greatest and wealthiest of the world’s powers—seemed unable to grasp by how narrow a financial margin Churchill’s England clung to survival. He saw no reason why the British should not pay cash for supplies.
On the other hand he feared that Britain, though able to fight on, might give in to Germany through moral weakness, as she had done throughout the 1930s. If so, whatever ships or planes America delivered to England might be delivered by England to Germany. This was one reason for his continued refusal to help England in the way most urgently needed: the loan of overage American destroyers recently reconditioned. One of the other and more important reasons was that Congress almost certainly would refuse to let him do it.
Churchill first raised this subject with him in May 1940, but Roosevelt said that “to his regret … the United States of America could not spare any.” In June, with Italy entering the war and France disintegrating, Churchill told Roosevelt that “nothing is so important as for us to have the thirty or forty old destroyers you have already had reconditioned.” At about the same time he made the same point to Bullitt in Paris. But from Washington the British ambassador reported to the prime minister “that the President is not convinced that our need for destroyers is serious.”
Churchill’s greatest immediate fear in regard to the war at sea was that the French battle fleet would be turned over to Germany by the Vichy government. He met the threat head-on by sending a British squadron to Algeria, where about a tenth of the French war fleet berthed, with an ultimatum to either sail to British ports or be attacked. The French resisted, so on July 3 the British blew one after another of their ally’s warships out of the water.
Roosevelt approved of the decision, and may even have begun to believe that Britai
n had regained her fighting spirit. But if so, it had no effect on his continuing disinclination to lend Churchill the destroyers Great Britain so badly needed.
On July 31 Churchill cabled FDR that German control of the French coastline allowed the enemy to launch attacks at British shipping from many points along that coast. To counter such attacks while also defending against a cross-Channel invasion, holding the Straits of Gibraltar against attacks from the Mediterranean, and patrolling the northern seas against attacks from Scandinavia had stretched the Royal Navy to its limits. Churchill claimed that for lack of “50 of your oldest destroyers,” all could be lost. “The whole fate of the war may be decided by this minor and easily remediable factor.” He pleaded: “Mr. President, with great respect I must tell you that in the long history of the world, this is a thing to do now.”
Private American citizens, meeting in New York City, were moved to action on the destroyer issue, as others had been in pushing through military conscription and in placing Stimson and Patterson in the War Department. The earlier group, assembled by Grenville Clark, had met at the Harvard Club; this one convened a block away, at the Century Association. The roughly twenty-seven members of the Century group included university presidents, clergymen, newspaper columnists, businessmen, retired admirals, and a Hollywood producer, among others. Henry Luce, founding owner and publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune, and Democratic lawyer Dean Acheson, closest friend of Roosevelt’s advisers Frankfurter and MacLeish, were among the members able to reach into one presidential camp or the other.
The journalist Joseph Alsop, who had looked into the matter, told the others that Churchill desperately needed the destroyers and that America could spare them. Eighty-year-old General Pershing made a radio address, drafted by Walter Lippmann and Herbert Agar, saying that the immediate transfer of the destroyers might save America from another war. White House adviser-attorney Benjamin Cohen and Dean Acheson found a legal way for the President to transfer the destroyers without having to ask the approval of Congress (where a filibuster would have killed it); he could do it by executive decree.
Century group members worked to persuade Roosevelt and Willkie to let the destroyer transfer proceed without becoming a campaign issue. The cabinet urged the President to do it.
Churchill seems to have been the first to suggest that it might help if Britain leased some bases to the United States in return. Henry Luce seized on the point that America ought to be compensated. The British ambassador, Lord Lothian, mentioned the quid pro quo idea to Walter Lippmann, who later remembered it as an idea that he and Lothian had originated.
FDR then went forward with it, bargaining hard and obtaining from Britain the use of Caribbean bases far more valuable than the aging destroyers. Not merely in appearance, but in reality, he had given nothing away. He showed himself to the voters as a shrewd trader who had gotten the better of the British.
Of course, the isolationist press nonetheless attacked. Alsop had anticipated the onslaught by soliciting support from the other leading newspaper opinion writers, their views to be published the moment the news was announced that the President was transferring the destroyers by executive order. “I got firm commitments from all the major columnists save one,” he later wrote. “Although Walter Lippmann supported the movement to the hilt early on …, in the end he became alarmed about the extreme use of executive prerogative and chose, as Walter sometimes did, to write on both sides of the issue.”
AS THE POLITICAL CAMPAIGN MOVED toward its climax, both candidates were driven to appeal to the great majority of voters who feared that American troops were about to be sent to Europe’s battlefields. Conscious that the slogan “He kept us out of war!” had won the 1916 elections for Woodrow Wilson, but that Wilson then had turned around and led the country into the conflict, Willkie charged that FDR, too, might pledge peace but if reelected would lead America into war.
Roosevelt worried that Joe Kennedy might turn against him and confirm Willkie’s charges. The archisolationist and proappeaser, who spent his nights in the English countryside because he was afraid of the German bombs that fell on London, was still at his ambassadorial post in Britain but only with many recriminations on both sides. The Foreign Office file on him contained such comments as: “He thinks and hopes that we shall be defeated.… We consider that he is undoubtedly a coward.… Mr. Kennedy is a very foul specimen of double crosser and defeatist. He thinks of nothing but his own pocket.”
At Byrnes’s suggestion, FDR offered to name Kennedy chairman of the Democratic National Committee, but the ambassador refused. Taking a leave of absence from his post in London, Kennedy prepared to debark for a holiday in the United States. Roosevelt had Byrnes cable Kennedy asking him to say nothing on his return to America until the President had a chance to talk to him.
The arriving Kennedys were spirited to the White House for a dinner with the President and the Byrneses, at which Missy LeHand was hostess. As Byrnes described the man and the occasion, “Kennedy is not a bashful man. He is a forceful talker, and in his vocabulary are many words not found in dictionaries. He used some of them in his denunciation of the State Department and of the treatment accorded him.”
To Byrnes’s surprise, FDR did not defend State, but said that he “understood entirely … how Kennedy felt; as a matter of fact, he thought that Kennedy’s views were charitable, and it was only because of the war that he, Roosevelt, had put up with similar treatment. He was determined that after the election there would be some real housecleaning, so that friends of his, like Joe, would never again be subjected to such outrageous treatment.”
Roosevelt then asked his friend to make a radio speech advocating his reelection, and the moment Kennedy agreed, LeHand jumped up and phoned to book the radio time.
Later, in a major final campaign talk in Boston October 30, FDR drove to the stadium with members of the Kennedy family and went out of his way to praise Kennedy: “that Boston boy, beloved by all of Boston and a lot of other places, my Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, Joe Kennedy.” In the course of FDR’s speech, in a phrase often quoted later, the President pledged: “And while I am talking to you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance. I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” (“That hypocritical son of a bitch!” said Willkie on hearing those sentences. “This is going to beat me!”)
Willkie was untroubled by the possibility that he might be defeated if his relationship with Irita Van Doren were revealed by the press. “Everybody knows about us—all the newspapers in New York,” he said, and nobody would give them away in public. Roosevelt, whose marital arrangements were similarly unconventional, felt that Willkie displayed poor political judgment in allowing the press to know.
However, FDR was glad that Willkie’s situation helped preclude the Republicans from publishing a cache of letters from Henry Wallace to the White Russian he addressed as “Dear Guru,” in which his strange philosophical beliefs, couched in the language of mysticism, could easily have been quoted to make Wallace sound at best ridiculous and at worst a lunatic.
On the night of election day, Tuesday, November 4, FDR and his family and friends were gathered at his home in Hyde Park to hear the returns.
Roosevelt won the presidential elections against Willkie 55 to 45 percent. Churchill wired his congratulations on November 6: “I look forward to being able to interchange my thoughts with you,” he wrote. Exciting times lay ahead, said Churchill: “Things are afoot which will be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe.…”
* Though a Republican, Donovan performed foreign fact-finding missions for FDR even before joining the government on a full-time basis.
† In the summer of 1941 Donovan was named to create and head a new intelligence agency that proved to be a forerunner of the CIA. So of those whom FDR was going to appoint secretary of war, only Bullitt and Louis Johnson (fir
ed as assistant secretary to make way for Patterson) were without jobs.
‡ See this page.
48
MAKING CHURCHILL A PARTNER
WITH THE ELECTIONS OVER, Roosevelt and Hopkins left Washington December 2, 1940, for a couple of weeks of cruising in the Caribbean. They fished and relaxed in the sunshine by day, and played poker or watched Hollywood films by night.
U.S. Navy seaplanes flew every so often from Washington to wherever the President’s party had anchored, bringing legislation to sign, messages, and mail. On December 9 Roosevelt received and read a 4,000-word letter telegram from Churchill that had been sent to the White House and forwarded to the Caribbean. It was an overall view of the war situation in the coming year. FDR, resting and relaxing aboard ship in the soothing tropics, was able to give it his full attention.
Churchill proposed that, as it had done when Roosevelt was assistant navy secretary in the Wilson administration, the United States should assert its doctrine of freedom of the seas: that American merchant vessels would be free to sail or trade, unmolested, anywhere in the world. In exercise of that right America should then send supplies to England in convoys guarded by the U.S. Navy, and thus break the effective blockade of the British Isles imposed by German U-boat warfare. Roosevelt did not respond to this request.
The prime minister then asked for a great increase in America’s supply of war matériel to Britain, but stated bluntly that his government was running out of cash to pay for supplies. He wrote that it “would not be in the moral or economic interests of either of our countries” to leave a postwar Britain “stripped to the bone.”
Ever since the fighting had begun in Europe, FDR had been told repeatedly that Britain would soon reach the point where she could no longer pay her way. He had refused to believe it. For whatever reason, he seemed to believe it now.
In the Time of the Americans Page 54
