American Warlords

by Jonathan W. Jordan

  Around midnight, a visibly relieved Franklin Roosevelt rolled out to Springwood’s porch to acknowledge a small crowd of local Democrats, reporters, and well-wishers. One supporter carried a homemade placard reading, “SAFE ON THIRD.”34

  He was. By morning, the results were history: FDR had won 54.7 percent of the popular vote, to 44.8 percent for Willkie.35

  For a change, Roosevelt even carried his home district.

  SEVEN

  THE PARABLE OF THE GARDEN HOSE

  MARSHALL, STIMSON, AND THEIR RETAINERS SAT IN THE TREASURY BUILDing’s cavernous conference room, listening patiently as Henry Morgenthau lectured before a large blackboard. With his bald pate, flat voice, and round pince-nez glasses, Morgenthau resembled the Norman Rockwell image of a local accountant auditing a small town’s bookkeeping journals.1

  Which was appropriate, except the ledgers did not belong to a small town. They belonged to the British Empire.

  Behind Morgenthau, written in long chalk columns, was a list of the United Kingdom’s liquid assets: dollars, bullion, foreign securities, mineral stockpiles—everything but the crown jewels and Nelson’s Column. The chalk lines showed that the ripened fruits of two and a half centuries of conquest now totaled less than five billion dollars. It was an embarrassing position for a cash-only arms deal, since five billion dollars was about what Britain needed in military and food aid, more or less immediately.2

  The prospect of a British bankruptcy was deeply unsettling to the man who lived in the house next door to Treasury, the juggler who had dreamed up one hyphenated scheme after the next—“cash-and-carry,” “destroyers-for-bases,” “even-Steven”—to keep Britain afloat. Across the Channel, Hitler had snatched up half a dozen big arms factories and many smaller ones, widening the production gap between the Axis and Britain. By December 1940, His Britannic Majesty was losing the war one tank, one bomber, one bullet at a time.3

  For once, even Roosevelt was stumped. Lending money and extending credit were clearly things only Congress could authorize, and nobody believed Congress would loan Britain a penny. The Great Powers had been more than a little delinquent in paying their debts after the last big war, and few congressmen had much appetite to tell constituents their tax dollars were being shipped off to Britain.4

  • • •

  Roosevelt needed some quiet, uninterrupted time to think about the problem, and in early December he scheduled a post-election vacation cruise. As always, the Secret Service kept the president’s itinerary under wraps. To inquisitive journalists Roosevelt blithely announced that he would be shopping for Christmas cards on Christmas Island and hunting Easter eggs on Easter Island.

  But his real destination was the Caribbean, where he could inspect his newly acquired bases from the fantail of the cruiser USS Tuscaloosa. And do a little thinking.5

  The commander-in-chief was piped aboard ship on December 3, accompanied by his affable gatekeeper and military aide, Brigadier General Edwin “Pa” Watson; his personal physician, Rear Admiral Ross McIntire; Harry Hopkins; and the new First Dog, a small black Scottie named Fala.

  Standing out under the boom of twenty-one-gun salutes, Tuscaloosa and her crew bore their passengers to Guantánamo Bay, Puerto Rico, and former British outposts in Jamaica, St. Lucia, and Antigua, which had been acquired in the destroyers-for-bases deal. As the graceful ship plowed south, FDR and his entourage spent the better part of each day fishing, chatting, playing small-stakes poker, and watching the placid islands drift by.

  The fish didn’t bite, even for the President of the United States—and despite emphatic advice on bait radioed to Tuscaloosa by author Ernest Hemingway. The biggest catch that week, a twenty-pound grouper, was hooked by Harry Hopkins, whose wasted body proved unequal to the reluctant fish. After a short struggle, Hopkins handed his rod to Dr. McIntire to reel in the catch. The ship’s crew eventually landed the grouper, sparking a heated debate among McIntire, Hopkins, and General Watson over who held the honor of landing the cruise’s biggest fish.6

  Though the press speculated that Roosevelt simply wanted a break from the Battle of Britain, his thoughts drew nearer to the embattled isle. Navy seaplanes regularly approached Tuscaloosa with bags of dispatches from London describing bombing raids setting fire to cities, flattening entire blocks, and turning buildings into brickbat tombs for women, children, and old men.7

  One of these dispatches, dated December 7, came from the “Former Naval Person,” as Churchill liked to call himself. The message bore a bleak prognosis emphasizing the war at sea, not Blitz in the sky: “We can endure the shattering of our dwellings and the slaughter of our civilian population by indiscriminant air attacks and we hope to parry these increasingly,” Churchill said. “The decision of 1941 lies upon the seas; unless we can establish our ability to feed this Island, import munitions of all kinds which we need . . . we may fall by the way, and the time needed by the United States to complete her defensive preparations may not be forthcoming.”8

  • • •

  As Roosevelt sat on Tuscaloosa’s fantail, turning Churchill’s words over in his mind, a dim thought took shape. The notion was only a nibble on his hook, but as he thought about it, he realized he had hooked a catch much fatter than Harry’s thrashing grouper.

  “I didn’t know for quite a while what he was thinking about, if anything,” said Hopkins afterward. “Then, one evening, he suddenly came out with it—the whole program. He didn’t seem to have any clear idea how it could be done legally. But there wasn’t a doubt in his mind that he’d find a way to do it.”9

  The “whole program” was simply to lend Britain everything it needed. Not with the idea of receiving immediate payment, but by getting everything back once the war was over—or being paid for items damaged or lost. Roosevelt would close America’s “Cash Only” store and open a rental company.

  Suffused with his new idea, FDR ordered the ship to set course for Washington. At his next press conference, he borrowed a metaphor from Harold Ickes to explain his solution in language the average American could understand.

  “Suppose my neighbor’s house catches on fire, and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away,” he told a group of journalists.

  If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, it may help put out his fire. Now what do I do? I don’t say to him before that operation, “Neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15; you have to pay me $15 for it.” What is the transaction that goes on? I don’t want $15—I want my garden hose back after the fire is over. All right. If it goes through the fire all right, intact, without any damage to it, he gives it back to me and thanks me very much for the use of it.

  Of course, Roosevelt allowed, the hose might be damaged. In that case, the neighbor would have to buy him a new hose. Either way, the owner of the hose would be out nothing, and the fire would be put out, protecting his own home from the spreading flames.10

  To the public, Roosevelt’s homely metaphor smacked of common sense. To his advisers, it was brilliant in its audacity. Frances Perkins called it a “flash of almost clairvoyant knowledge and understanding.” Speechwriter Bob Sherwood marveled at FDR’s thought process. How he came up with the idea, wrote Sherwood, “Nobody that I know of has been able to give any convincing idea. . . . He did not seem to talk much about the subject in hand, or to consult the advice of others, or to ‘read up’ on it. . . . One can only say that FDR, a creative artist in politics, had put in his time on this cruise evolving the pattern of a masterpiece.”11

  To drive home his parable, Roosevelt took to the airwaves in an end-of-year fireside chat. The fireside chat, an informal radio address directly to the people, was a powerful tool that he used sparingly, for he knew the public would grow tired of his monologues if they heard them too often. While he had become famous for his fireside chats, he had given only about two per year since taking office in 1933. His reluctance to fill the air
with speeches meant that when he did speak, his voice reached an audience of around fifty million listeners.

  “My friends,” his voice crackled from wireless speakers across the land, “this is not a fireside chat on war. It is a talk on national security; because the nub of the whole purpose of your president is to keep you now, and your children later, and your grandchildren much later, out of a last-ditch war for the preservation of American independence.”

  In measured tones he told families sitting around living rooms and kitchens that negotiated peace with Hitler’s Germany was a forlorn hope. “No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it,” he said. “There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness. There can be no reasoning with an incendiary bomb.” The Nazis were overrunning Europe, and the Japanese were subjugating Asia. Should they rule the Eurasian landmass, he warned, “all of us in the Americas would be living at the point of a gun.”

  It was no time for business as usual. America’s allies needed aid that only the United States could produce, and his new program, popularly called “Lend-Lease,” would give them that aid. The nation, he declared, must become the “great arsenal of democracy.”12

  •

  Henry Stimson believed America could not remain a mere arsenal for long. In his finely appointed living room at Woodley, after a pleasant meal with Frank Knox, the two old colonels turned their thoughts to Europe. Sitting among Woodley’s antique furnishings and Winslow Homer paintings, both men believed Churchill could hold out against Hitler, but Great Britain could never defeat Germany on her own, even with material support from the United States. The time had come to think about what the country would do when Britain could no longer be saved by “help short of war.”13

  Their focus on Germany was sharpened by a recent memorandum from Admiral “Betty” Stark. In the late 1930s, American planners realized that the nation, alone or with allies, might be forced into war against coalitions of enemies. The Joint Army-Navy Board, America’s highest military coordinating body, had grouped likely war scenarios into a color-coded set of plans code-named RAINBOW. The first variant, RAINBOW 1, assumed an invasion of the Western Hemisphere with no U.S. allies, while the last, RAINBOW 5, assumed the United States would fight Germany and Japan with the help of Britain and France.14

  Noodling over the rainbows until two o’clock one morning, Stark felt it was time to rewrite the playbook. Beset by enemies on two sides of the globe, the United States could limit its defense to the Western Hemisphere (variant “A,” or, “AFIRM,” in the naval alphabet), split its forces between the Atlantic and the Pacific (variant “BAKER”), throw everything against Japan in the Pacific (“CAST”), or defeat Germany before turning against Japan (“DOG”).

  Stark thought that Germany would be the more formidable enemy. Because the Third Reich was economically self-sufficient and Japan was not, the defeat of Japan would have little impact on German fortunes. The defeat of Germany, by contrast, would inevitably lead to Japan’s defeat, since the British and American navies would be free to concentrate their full might against Japan, blockade its Home Islands, and starve it into submission. If Germany and Japan declared war on the United States, Stark recommended Plan DOG.

  Stark knew DOG would be an extraordinarily hungry puppy. Germany, Europe’s major land power, could be subdued only by transporting an immense army to France under thick clouds of aircraft, and escorted by a huge, expensive combat fleet. It would require amphibious landings, the most difficult of all military operations. And it would require the United States to swallow the loss of the Philippines, which would not be able to withstand the Japanese surge while American forces were sent to Europe.

  Nonetheless, the bookish admiral felt the “Germany first” strategy offered America her surest path to victory.

  Talking over Stark’s memo at Woodley that night, Knox and Stimson agreed. Knox forwarded the memo to President Roosevelt, who affirmed Stark’s hound as America’s strategy for the coming war. The decision made, the United States now had a blueprint for defeating Hitler, Hirohito, and Mussolini.15

  But none of these men were at war with the United States. Not yet.

  •

  America rang in 1941 with fireworks, champagne, and kisses. But when the final strains of “Auld Lang Syne” faded, and the street sweepers began brushing away the empty bottles and paper streamers, Roosevelt’s first order of business was the passage of H.R. 1776, a bill authorizing the president to transfer war materiel to “the government of any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States.”16

  The battle over British aid was anything but certain, and the old, familiar menagerie sallied forth with old, familiar attacks. Isolationists said the bill would give FDR license to carry on a proxy war in Europe. Republicans said it would drag America into a direct war with Germany. Lend-Lease, Senator Wheeler claimed, was a New Deal farm subsidy that would “plow under every fourth American boy.”17

  As committee hearings in Congress heightened the political drama leading up to the floor debate, opponents of Lend-Lease lined up their own star witness: Roosevelt’s recently resigned ambassador to the United Kingdom, Joseph Kennedy.

  Joe Kennedy was a Boston Irish Catholic who had made his fortune in stocks, real estate, and liquor. After an interview with the Boston Globe in which he predicted the fall of democracy in Britain, Cordell Hull’s State Department quietly asked him to resign.

  Thoroughly embittered against the Roosevelt clique in general, and the State Department in particular, Kennedy gave isolationists the impression that he would come out foursquare against the Lend-Lease bill. The anti-Roosevelt coalition saw Kennedy as the big stick to kill British aid, and FDR’s nemesis, New York Representative Hamilton Fish, scheduled the former ambassador as the opposition’s star witness.18

  When he caught wind of Kennedy’s invitation to testify, FDR invited Kennedy to the White House for a morning chat in the presidential bedroom. Sitting in his wheelchair, shaving before a bathroom mirror, he motioned for Kennedy to sit down on the toilet seat next to him. Then Roosevelt did what he did best.

  Smiling sympathetically, he fondly recalled the good work the two of them had accomplished together. He agreed that Kennedy had been ill-treated by Secretary Hull and others, and he promised Kennedy that once the Lend-Lease bill was passed, he would make sure the country took notice of the ambassador’s laudable public service.

  In seventy-five minutes, Roosevelt blunted Kennedy’s wrath. When Kennedy appeared before Congress, he testified blandly that he opposed the bill’s dilution of congressional authority, but he admitted that aid to Britain was America’s best means of avoiding war. Isolationists listened in dismay as their biggest gun blew up in their faces, and Roosevelt’s supporters could claim with a straight face that Kennedy essentially supported their bill.19

  Roosevelt had his own big guns—Marshall and Stark, Morgenthau, Stimson. But after neutralizing Kennedy, he decided to counter with a true blockbuster: the former Republican nominee for president, citizen Wendell Willkie.

  Stimson had once been Willkie’s lawyer, and he remained on good terms with the Republican moderate. He assured FDR that Willkie supported the principles behind Lend-Lease, and FDR persuaded Willkie to fly to London to meet with Churchill and other British ministers. On his return, Willkie testified before a packed congressional committee room that without aid to Britain, London would fall and fascist dictators would be free to turn their guns against the Americas.

  One red-faced isolationist on the congressional panel, Senator Bennett Clark of Missouri, reminded Willkie about his scathing attacks on FDR’s foreign policy during his 1940 campaign. Looking the senator in the eye, Willkie replied, “I struggled as hard as I could to beat Franklin Roosevelt and I tried to keep from pulling any of my punches. He was elected president. He is my president now.”

  The room erupted into applause.20

&n
bsp; • • •

  With Willkie’s cannonade, the opposition broke and the bill sailed through. On the afternoon of March 11, ten minutes after the bill arrived at the White House, Roosevelt placed his fountain pen on the official copy and signed it into law. Five minutes later Roosevelt directed Knox and Stark to send the Royal Navy naval guns and shells, three thousand gun charges, and two dozen PT boats. It was the tip of what would become a very large, very costly iceberg.

  Lend-Lease was a smashing victory for the White House. It was also a victory for the hard-pressed United Kingdom. A grateful Winston Churchill later called it “the most unselfish and unsordid financial act of any country in all history.”

  But this unsordid act would take many months before it would influence the tides of war. And it would scatter seeds of bitter fruit that would ripen as America was called to fight.21

  •

  George Marshall agreed with Admiral Stark that an Atlantic strategy—“Germany First”—made the most sense. He also believed America should avoid war with Japan at nearly any cost; if forced to fight in the Pacific, the country should restrict operations to the bare minimum needed to hold a defensible line.22

  But to Marshall, grand strategy counted for little until he had an army to carry it out, and his mind was fixed on one immense task: to train and equip 1.4 million new draftees. That mission required construction of forty-six huge training camps in the East, in the South, and on the West Coast, located on the first of 44 million acres the Army would buy or lease. Everything Marshall needed was a rush job, since Congress had not thought to appropriate money for the new camps before passing the Selective Service Act. Civilian construction crews rotated night and day building roads, barracks, offices, and hospitals. Workers in sweat-stained overalls and faded hats graded fields, assembled radio towers and laid sewer and power lines, literally paving the way for a mass migration of citizens-turned-soldiers.23