Agonizing over the possibilities, he admitted to Harold Ickes, “If I should guess wrong, the results might be serious.” Beetle Smith put it more bluntly to a friend: “Everyone who was a party to the deal might hope to be found hanging from a lamp post.”3
Eleanor Roosevelt once quipped, “The president never thinks. He decides.” After three weeks of dithering, he decided. The guns would go to Britain. If industry stepped up production, and if he could keep America out of war a little longer, he could make good his losses in weapons. So he hoped.4
There were three hitches. First, naval warships posed special problems, because they constituted a floating steel wall against invasion. Isolationists vehemently opposed the sale of warships, and with Republicans and pacifist Democrats taking aim at him, the summer of 1940 was not the time to force the destroyer question. The warships would have to wait.5
Second, neutrality laws forbade the government from selling weapons to belligerents. Private contractors could sell them for cash, but arms merchants did not have warehouses full of 75-millimeter fieldpieces, tanks, or machine guns. Roosevelt couldn’t muster the votes in Congress to repeal the neutrality statutes, so he asked his lieutenants to figure a way around them.6
Morgenthau, Marshall, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles and Acting Attorney General Francis Biddle sent staffers scurrying through old laws to find a loophole. Biddle’s lawyers, being lawyers, soon came up with a clever answer: If the weapons were declared “surplus” by the Army Chief of Staff, they could be sold to private corporations, which could in turn resell them to qualified buyers on a “cash-and-carry” basis. Morgenthau would ensure that the only qualified buyer would be Great Britain, and the U.S. Navy would ensure that no unfriendly country could show up to take delivery.
Biddle’s theory was a beautiful piece of legalistic clockwork. It gave Roosevelt the power to lend Britain a hand, and it seemed legal—or at least legal enough. All that remained was to have General Marshall declare Churchill’s aid “surplus,” and have Secretary Woodring approve the shipment.
Unwilling to entrust this job to Woodring, an isolationist at heart, Roosevelt handed the whip to Morgenthau and told him to crack it without mercy. “Give it an extra push every morning and every night until it is on the ships,” he commanded. Morgenthau obediently pressured Marshall to get the weapons into British hands.7
The Army was desperately short of everything, but Marshall did his best to fulfill the president’s wish. After sending ordnance clerks to scour armories and warehouses, he tracked down large stocks of World War I rifles, old Lewis machine guns, French 75s, and other semi-obsolete equipment he probably could call “surplus” with a straight face. By giving the British the benefit of every doubt—and counting in the Army’s inventory some weapons that were still on assembly lines—Marshall’s staff calculated that the Army could part with half a million Enfield rifles, 35,000 machine guns, 500 fieldpieces, a stock of .30-caliber ammunition, and other odds and ends without endangering national security.
Marshall signed off, but with serious misgivings. To describe five hundred artillery pieces as “surplus” in 1940 was to stretch the definition like a worn-out inner tube. “It was the only time that I recall that I did something that there was a certain amount of duplicity in it,” he later admitted.
Other men felt the same way. Assistant Secretary of War Louis Johnson told Roosevelt he wanted a promise that if he, as assistant secretary, were convicted of a felony in shipping the weapons to Britain, Roosevelt would pardon him. Roosevelt threw back his head and let out a hearty laugh. Johnson was not laughing with him.8
Once Marshall came across, the Army moved quickly. Top-priority cables went to arsenals around the country, and weapons were packed in gooey cosmolene and shipped to the Army’s arsenal in Edison, New Jersey, for loading onto freighters bound for Liverpool. As the Germans closed in on Paris, Marshall’s “surplus” sat in warehouses along Edison’s Woodbridge Avenue, ready for loading onto His Anxious Majesty’s ships. The last requirement to send them over the ship rails was authorization from the secretary of war.9
And there lay the final catch.
Harry Woodring, a former governor of Kansas, reflected America’s isolationist heartland. A fixture at the War Department since 1936, Woodring was acutely concerned with the health of America’s farms and factories. He wanted combines, not cannon, rolling off assembly lines, and he refused to authorize military aid to Britain unless the President of the United States ordered him to do it. Otherwise, he said, the weapons would stay in America, where they belonged.10
FDR again had to lean on his own functionaries. He ordered Woodring to sign the transfer orders, and under protest, Woodring grudgingly complied.
With the last Rube Goldberg link completed, British transports were loaded up and steamed for England, their holds bulging with weapons that would be pointed at Germans before long. America was wriggling out of neutrality’s cocoon.11
• • •
The arms deal was cloaked in the darkest secrecy—or the darkest secrecy possible, given the number of soldiers, clerks, teamsters, stevedores, diplomats, and railroad workers involved. But a transfer of this size could not be kept under wraps for long, and Roosevelt knew he must get in front of the story. He decided to announce the sale at a June 10 commencement speech at the University of Virginia, where his son Franklin Jr. was graduating from law school.
Shortly before he and Eleanor boarded a train for Charlottesville, Roosevelt learned that Italy had just declared war on France and Britain. Mussolini wanted to share in the spoils of war, and Italian claims to French territory would wilt like overcooked linguini if he waited until France surrendered.
Sitting in the White House editing a draft of his commencement speech, Roosevelt borrowed a phrase from Bill Bullitt, his ambassador to France, that painted a picture of fascist Italy plunging a knife into the back of its next-door neighbor. State Department Undersecretary Sumner Welles was horrified at the draft’s “stab in the back” language, and he argued vehemently that Roosevelt must delete the phrase from his speech. Reluctantly, FDR agreed.12
On the three-hour train ride from Washington, he mulled over the speech with Eleanor in his private railcar. He told her he wanted to speak candidly to the American people, without diplomatic niceties diluting unpleasant truths. His “stab in the back” phrase might rile State—and it would certainly infuriate the Nazis, who claimed they had been stabbed by Jews and Communists—but FDR felt the public should have the facts laid bare, at least in this instance. He asked what she thought.
Eleanor was her husband’s social conscience, the angel of his better self. With her receding jaw, short-chopped hair, and tapered, oval eyes, she was not pretty, and their marriage, based on respect and necessity, had long lost the embers of passion. It was little more than a political partnership with the added wrinkle of shared offspring.
Over drinks with his buddies, FDR would make cutting remarks about Eleanor and the “she-men” and “squaws” who lurched to her progressive banner. But he appreciated Eleanor’s vast mental energies, and he valued her as both a moral barometer and a political sounding board. However lifeless their marriage had become, Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt were indispensable to each other.
Eleanor thought over her husband’s question, though the answer to her was obvious. As the train clacked along the tracks, she replied, “If your conscience won’t be satisfied unless you put it in, I would put it in.”13
• • •
“On this, the tenth day of June 1940, the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor,” Roosevelt told the assembled throng of graduates, parents, and journalists.
Standing before a sea of black-gowned collegians, Roosevelt declared, “We will extend to the opponents of force the material resources of this nation. . . . All roads leading to the accomplishment of these objectives must be ke
pt clear of obstructions. We will not slow down or detour. Signs and signals call for full speed ahead.”14
It was a rousing speech, but isolationists were reading different signs and signals. FDR’s foreign policy, bellowed North Dakota Senator Gerald Nye, was “nothing but dangerous adventurism.” David Walsh, an isolationist Democrat from Massachusetts, thundered from the Senate floor, “I do not want our forces deprived of one gun, or one bomb or one ship which can aid that American boy whom you and I may someday have to draft.” Charles Lindbergh, the hero who flew the Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic, accused Roosevelt of whipping up a “defense hysteria.” He warned his countrymen that foreign invasion would become a threat only if “American people bring it on through their own quarreling and meddling with affairs abroad.”15
Lindbergh and many smaller voices of isolation spoke for a following that had never bought into the German threat. Most Americans wanted to stay out of a European war, and a hit song of 1939, “Let Them Keep It Over There,” summed up popular sentiment. With liberal pacifists, socialists, pseudo-fascists, and anti-Rooseveltians singing a Hallelujah Chorus of isolation, FDR would have to shift elements of his power base and forge a coalition outside the New Deal faithful.16
While much of his own party turned against him, a growing number of Republicans—hard-liners on foreign policy—were openly sympathetic. “When I read Lindbergh’s speech, I felt it could not have been better put if it had been written by Goebbels himself,” Herbert Hoover’s former secretary of state, Henry Stimson, wrote to Roosevelt. Republican dailies like the Boston Herald and San Francisco Monitor threw their voices behind aid to Britain. Republican businessman Wendell Willkie, a contender for the presidency in 1940, told his party’s keynote speaker that if the leadership “attempts to put the Republican Party on record as saying what is going on in Europe is none of our business, then we might as well fold up.”17
Sensing a new alignment of the planets, FDR began courting leaders on the other side of the aisle. “The President’s calling lists cut across party lines,” wrote a New York Times journalist who shadowed the president for a day. “Republicans who opposed his policies in 1936 are almost as numerous as well-wishing Democrats in the parade across the White House lobby.”18
•
As foreign conflict loomed large in Roosevelt’s calculations, he preferred not to think about what to do with his obstinate secretary of war, Harry Woodring. “Every time I try to fire him,” Roosevelt joked with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, “he says, ‘My wife is expecting a baby and I want it to be able to say that I was born when my daddy was the secretary of war.’”19
Roosevelt’s advisers felt Woodring had to go. But Roosevelt was, by nature, an optimist who believed every man was his friend until proven different. “His real weakness,” Eleanor once told an interviewer, was that Roosevelt “had great sympathy for people and great understanding, and he couldn’t bear to be disagreeable to someone he liked . . . and he just couldn’t bring himself to really do the unkind thing that had to be done unless he got angry.”20
But angry or not, there could be only one commander-in-chief. Roosevelt needed the War Department carrying out presidential policy, not creating policy of its own. He hated firing old friends, but events were forcing a change at the top.
He needed to find new friends.
FOUR
“FEWER AND BETTER ROOSEVELTS”
THE LAST REPUBLICAN WHOM FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT WHOLEHEARTEDLY supported was Cousin Theodore. Since then, he had fought the Grand Old Party in every election. With his victories over Herbert Hoover in 1932 and Alf Landon four years later, FDR had become the opposition’s Public Enemy Number One, its John Dillinger, Ming the Merciless, tormentor and nemesis.
Along the way, however, Roosevelt had found a few Republicans who did not see him with horns and a pitchfork, while there were more than a few Democrats who did. His big blunders since 1936—a misfired attempt to pack the Supreme Court, a purge of conservative Democrats—had cost him dearly. As New Deal Democrats and liberal pacifists opposed military support for Britain, FDR began reaching out to backbenchers whose credibility among their own kind was unimpeachable.
• • •
At age seventy-two, Henry Lewis Stimson was an old-line patrician devoted to the twin ideals of American exceptionalism and civic virtue. A graduate of Phillips Academy, Yale University, and Harvard Law School, Stimson had served in some public capacity under nearly every president since Teddy Roosevelt. He had been a U.S. attorney under the elder Roosevelt, secretary of war under President Taft, governor-general of the Philippines under Coolidge, and secretary of state under Hoover.
Of average build and height, Stimson wore his white, bowl-cut hair parted in the middle, the same way he had worn it as a young lawyer of the late 1800s. With a salt-and-pepper mustache bristling over his upper lip, he resembled a throwback to the robber baron days when his father had run a Wall Street investment bank for tycoons like Jay Gould and Cornelius Vanderbilt.
A disciple of the first President Roosevelt, Stimson, like T.R., believed in a vigorous life spent in service to his country, God, and the Republican Party, more or less in that order. He hunted big game, rode big horses, played a bully game of tennis, and worked with an intensity that belied his age. At fifty, he had shipped off as an infantryman to fight the Kaiser and mustered out of the war with the rank of colonel. During his years out of government service, he testified before Congress on foreign policy matters and corresponded with government officials he had known over his long career.1
When he was secretary of state in the late 1920s, Stimson paid $800,000 to acquire Woodley, a Federal-style mansion near Rock Creek Park formerly owned by Martin Van Buren, Grover Cleveland, and other notables. After Hoover’s defeat in 1932, Stimson and his wife, Mabel, moved back to their Huntington, Long Island, estate, Highhold, but kept Woodley to rent to well-bred friends such as Colonel George S. Patton Jr. and State Department Assistant Secretary Adolf Berle.2
Like Roosevelt, Stimson saw the new brand of imperialism as a clear and present danger. With an enemy like Hitler, he told Congress, it made no sense to wait until the foe has “killed off the last nation that stood between us and safety.” On the other side of the globe, when Japanese troops overran the Chinese province of Manchuria in 1932, he became one of China’s most ardent supporters in Washington. As outgoing secretary of state, he articulated the “Stimson Doctrine,” which refused to recognize any treaty forced upon a nation through military conquest. As a private citizen, he worked with industrial elites to boycott trade with Japan.3
Though he shared Roosevelt’s desire to halt the fascist tide, Stimson remained ambivalent toward the man. Stimson believed Roosevelt was prone to welsh on gentlemen’s agreements. He wholeheartedly agreed with fellow Republicans who found most of the president’s initiatives “half-baked and dangerous,” and upon his departure in 1933, President Hoover warned Stimson that Roosevelt would misrepresent things told to him in private.4
But Roosevelt had decided to give the War and Navy Departments a political transfusion, and he would use opposition blood. He considered a short list of Republicans, including Alf Landon and New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia.
Justice Felix Frankfurter, whom Stimson had hired out of law school decades earlier, suggested adding Stimson to the list. Roosevelt liked the idea, but worried that Stimson’s age and health might rule him out. Another friend of Stimson’s, ignoring medical ethics, went straight to Stimson’s personal doctor and asked whether his patient had any significant health problems. Sidestepping those same ethics, the doctor replied that he would answer the question only because the answer was “no.”5
Frankfurter relayed this private medical information to Roosevelt. FDR thought about it, but for the moment he did nothing. He had another man to consider.
• • •
William Franklin Knox had run the Chi
cago Daily News before tossing his fedora into the 1936 election as Republican vice-presidential nominee. He had risen through the American middle class, from gym teacher, grocery clerk, and street reporter to newspaper publisher and Republican Party leader. When America declared war on Spain in 1898, he flocked to Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders banner and took part in the famed charge near San Juan Hill. He again volunteered during the First World War and came home, like Stimson, wearing a colonel’s eagles.6
While Knox idolized the Oyster Bay Roosevelt, he had no love for the Hyde Park variant. After FDR defeated Hoover in 1932, Knox turned his sharp pen against the New Deal. During the 1936 campaign, he attacked Roosevelt’s domestic programs with a vengeance. As he told one Boston audience, “The country needs fewer and better Roosevelts.”
After he recovered from the crushing defeat of 1936, Knox’s interventionist beliefs drew him toward the “lesser Roosevelt’s” orbit. When Japanese aircraft sank the gunboat USS Panay in the Yangtze River in 1937, he telegrammed Roosevelt to assure him of “my unequivocal support in any further measures you may find it necessary to take to maintain American self-respect and respect for America abroad in a world that has apparently gone drunk and mad.” Three years later, he would have dropped the word “apparently.”7
Like Stimson, Knox’s Republican bona fides made him a perfect choice for a coalition cabinet. It didn’t hurt that Knox’s rival newspaper was Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune, flagship of the McCormick-Patterson newspaper syndicate, which had bitterly opposed FDR since 1932. If Knox were willing to throw in his fortunes with a Democrat, he would make a solid addition to FDR’s cabinet.
American Warlords Page 5
