But Forrestal was an old Roosevelt neighbor whose father had been active in Democratic politics in the Poughkeepsie area. Moreover, Chairman Vinson wanted Forrestal to have the job, and Vinson’s wish was as good as law. Without asking King’s advice, Roosevelt appointed Forrestal as the new naval secretary.20
A disappointed Ernie King gave Forrestal what he considered to be an education about his new department. He told an associate, “After due reflection, I went yesterday afternoon to the new incumbent and laid the situation on the line, as I saw it.” He added, “It was an unpalatable job for me but I am bound to say that it was, all things considered, received amiably enough.”21
While Forrestal at first deferred to his senior admiral, King knew the hard-driving New Yorker would be a pain in his stern. Forrestal had a bad habit of overintellectualizing problems when direct solutions were called for, and he clearly disliked King. “Although he seemed to needle me in many ways, I tried to tell him the exact truth as I saw it,” King told his biographer years later. “He would make dirty cracks at me.”22
•
It was an unwritten rule that no high-ranking official could shield his son from danger once he joined the military. The repercussions to the boy’s career, and to family relations, would be long-felt and severe.
FDR’s sons served in combat positions. James, a Marine Raider, won a Silver Star for gallantry in action on Makin, and he weathered the storm of bloody Tarawa. Elliott rose through the ranks of the Army Air Forces reconnaissance group in the Mediterranean and Southwest Pacific. John served aboard the carrier Hornet as a Navy supply officer, and Frank Jr. earned his Purple Heart rescuing a fellow sailor when his destroyer came under enemy fire.
Other war leaders also had loved ones in harm’s way. Marshall’s stepson Lieutenant Allen Brown was a tanker in Italy with the First Armored Division, and another stepson in the Mediterranean worked an AA gun. Eisenhower refused Mamie’s plea to keep their son John out of danger once he graduated from West Point. King’s son, studying at Annapolis, would become a naval officer upon graduation, and the sons of five other generals came under fire in the Marshall Islands.
With time, the lottery of loss would catch up to the high command. The world, as Hemingway wrote, “kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially.” George Patton’s son-in-law, a colonel in the First Armored Division, had been captured at Kasserine Pass and languished in a prison camp somewhere in Eastern Europe. Harry Hopkins’s son Stephen, a marine who turned down a college deferment, was killed at Kwajalein. General Leslie McNair and his son would die on opposite sides of the globe within two weeks of each other—Marshall flew down to break the news to Mrs. McNair personally—and Ambassador Joseph Kennedy would lose his eldest son when his experimental bomber exploded. “The sorrows of the war are coming in on us on every side, and more and more of our friends are being stricken by its blows,” lamented Stimson.23
On May 29, as the Allies closed in around Rome, George Marshall came home to find his wife, Katherine, ebullient over letters from her two sons. Gaily chattering, she showed them to her husband. He was fond of both stepsons, and Allen, the youngest, had been like a natural son to him. He smiled at Allen’s reference to a horseshoe he once nailed to a barn door at their Leesburg home. “The horseshoe has held my luck,” Allen wrote. “I shall take it down this Christmas and keep it for the rest of my life.”24
That same day, a little south of Rome’s Alban Hills, Allen stood up in the turret of his tank, field glasses pressed to his eyes. In the distance, a German sniper caught sight of the glass and dialed up his scope. The trigger moved, the rifle cracked, and Lieutenant Allen Brown tumbled into his tank. He was buried in a roadside grave.25
The next day Marshall’s driver, WAC Sergeant Marjorie Payne, drove Marshall to the Pentagon and took her usual place in the antechamber near the general’s office. Moments later, the door opened and General Marshall stepped out. His secretary, Cora Thomas, took one look at him and knew something was very wrong. “You had better run along,” she told Payne. “Something is up.”26
Katherine Marshall had been up since before her husband had left, and didn’t expect to see him until around lunchtime. She was startled to see the front door open in the middle of the morning as her husband stepped inside.
As she walked toward him, the expression on his face told her something terrible had happened.
Marshall quietly closed the door behind him.27
FORTY-TWO
“DR. WIN-THE-WAR”
WHEN HE RETURNED FROM TEHRAN, ROOSEVELT KNEW THE NEXT TWELVE months would be a year of American fatigue. Fatigue over losses, fatigue with his long administration, fatigue even with the qualified blessings of a wartime economy in full swing. Republicans would attack him for overstaying his welcome at 1600 Pennsylvania, and liberals would attack him for rolling back the New Deal in the rush to mobilize for war.
Speaking to reporters, FDR explained the role of the New Deal in the world war:
How did the New Deal come into existence? It was because there was an awfully sick patient called the United States of America, and it was suffering from a grave internal disorder—awfully sick—all kinds of things had happened to this patient, all internal things. And they sent for the doctor. And it was a long, long process—took several years before those ills, in that particular illness of ten years ago, were remedied. But after a while they were remedied. . . .
Two years ago, on the seventh of December, he was in a pretty bad smashup—broke his hip, broke his leg in two or three places, broke a wrist and an arm, and some ribs; and they didn’t think he would live, for a while.
And then he began to “come to”; and he has been in charge of a partner of the old doctor. Old Dr. New Deal didn’t know “nothing” about legs and arms. He knew a great deal about internal medicine, but nothing about surgery. So he got his partner, who was an orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Win-the-War, to take care of this fellow who had been in this bad accident.
And the result is that the patient is back on his feet. He has given up his crutches. He isn’t wholly well yet, and he won’t be until he wins the war.
When FDR finished, a reporter asked a follow-up question: “Does all that add up to a fourth term declaration?”
A round of polite laughter went up from the newsmen and Roosevelt. As any politician would, FDR dismissed the question, saying, “Oh now, we are not talking about things like that now.”1
• • •
Dr. Win-the-War spent most of his time peering into the dim future. From his Oval Office desk, a president could pull many levers of power, but most of those levers wouldn’t change events for months, sometimes years. He could replace the man in charge of ship production, or approve a new bomber program, but those ships and bombers would not appear in equipment tables for many months—and it would be many more before they could be taken into battle by trained men. Like a billiard player who calculates his second and third shots when leveling his cue, FDR’s sight had to remain fixed on front lines that were one to three years distant.2
The war’s effect on the nation would last much longer. The butcher’s bill would not be tabulated for many years, but everyone knew the final tally would be a big one. By February 1944, neatly tabulated columns in War Department files totaled 112,030 killed, wounded, or missing, while the Navy Department’s books put its losses at 38,448. While small compared to other belligerents, these losses had no precedent in U.S. history save the carnage of the Civil War. And the heavy ground fighting to conquer “Fortress Europe” had not even begun.
For FDR, killed, wounded, and missing were only part of the picture. Men and women returning to civilian life physically unscathed—the vast majority of the eleven million who would don a uniform—would stow their duffel bags in attics and begin looking for work, an education, and a way to put their lives back together.3
Returning veterans ha
ve plagued democracies since the days of ancient Greece. When the crisis that binds the nation has passed, democracies tend to move on quickly. Hoplites and musketeers who defended their lands were sometimes honored, but rarely given material assistance. Poet Rudyard Kipling lamented Victorian disdain for the Empire’s lower-class redcoats:
For it’s Tommy this, and Tommy that, an’ “chuck him out, the brute!”
But it’s “Saviour of ’is country” when the guns begin to shoot.
America’s attitudes toward its veterans—“bums,” if they were poor—had not been, on the whole, much different. Revolutionary War claims had vexed Congress, Civil War pension laws were passed decades after the war ended, and the plight of the Depression-era Bonus Army marchers had helped bring down Herbert Hoover.
Eleanor Roosevelt had seen the American fighting man, thousands of them. She saw them in field hospitals and mess halls and rest camps at Guadalcanal and Christmas Island, San Diego and Australia. She had comforted them, heard their gripes, and won their admiration. And they won hers.
In her syndicated newspaper column “My Day,” Eleanor quoted from a letter she received from a young officer in Europe: “There is one great fear in the heart of every serviceman, and it is not that he will be killed or maimed but that when he is finally allowed to go home and piece together what he can of life, he will be made to feel he has been a sucker for the sacrifice he has made.” She asked her readers, “Will we see that they have a better job, a better chance when they come home, for health, education, working conditions, professional standards and above all, for a peaceful world in the future?”4
In his New Deal heyday, FDR had championed social security for the poor and work programs for the unemployed. He agreed with Eleanor that the nation had an obligation to care for citizens who answered the call to arms, regardless of whether they had lost limbs or earned medals. In a land where fewer than 5 percent of college-age Americans attended college, he understood that returning veterans would become either vibrant, productive contributors to American society or despondent, bitter men filling the ranks of the next Bonus Army.
In the fall of 1943, Roosevelt asked Congress to draft a bill providing vocational and educational benefits for returning veterans. He proposed government funding of college education for able veterans, and special rehabilitation benefits for veterans with service-connected disabilities.
“I believe this nation is morally obligated to provide this training and education,” he told Congress on October 27. “While the successful conclusion of this great war is by no means in sight, yet it may well be said that the time to prepare for peace is at the height of the war.” He returned to this theme in a Christmas Eve fireside chat: “We here in the United States had better be sure that when our soldiers and sailors do come home they will find an America in which they are given full opportunities for education, and rehabilitation, social security, and employment and business enterprise under the free American system.”5
Over reflexive opposition to another New Deal program, the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, as the bill was called, gained legislative support. In time, it was broadened to include discharge pay, unemployment insurance for veterans who could not find work, medical and rehabilitation benefits, and credits for time served toward social security. The bill that took shape over the summer of 1944 provided soldiers and sailors with sweeping benefits, including home and business loan guarantees of $2,000 per veteran, a year’s worth of relocation insurance, and $500 per year for college tuition. Dr. Win-the-War had launched the last, great New Deal program.6
The “G.I. Bill of Rights,” as veterans groups dubbed the law, changed the way America lived, worked, and thought. Within seven years of the war’s end, eight million Americans would claim educational benefits under the law. More than 2.3 million veterans attended colleges or universities on the G.I. Bill and accounted for nearly half of all college students. This newly educated class established a tradition of giving their children a college education. The percentage of Americans with college degrees rose from 4.6 percent in 1945 to 25 percent by the end of the original program, and the resulting income tax revenues repaid Congress many times over its $14.5 billion investment.
America’s real estate engine would also rev into high gear, as the G.I. Bill provided low-interest, government-backed housing loans to returning veterans. Those veterans bought 20 percent of all new homes built in the war’s wake, boosting the U.S. economy and making home ownership widely available to ordinary citizens. Better housing, education, and job prospects fueled a baby boom, which begat a generation that grew up believing a college education and home ownership lay within reach. As Time declared in retrospect, the G.I. Bill “effectively created the American middle class.”7
•
Reshaping the way nations resolved their differences was a much more complex matter. Through two convulsive wars, it had become painfully obvious to Roosevelt that ad hoc alliances and antiaggressor coalitions were too weak, and formed too late, to keep dictatorships like Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan from shattering the world order. Tyrannies tended to get the jump on democracies.
The League of Nations, Woodrow Wilson’s dream, had been a profound disappointment. Yet FDR, a Wilsonian at heart, felt a permanent world peace organization could impart a stabilizing force on an out-of-kilter world. In the Atlantic Charter, he included an oblique reference to a peacekeeping mechanism, and since that inspired week aboard Prince of Wales, he had never stopped thinking about how such an organization might be established by the thirty-four countries fighting against the Axis—belligerents he referred to as the “United Nations.”8
The Cairo and Tehran meetings brought home to FDR a mathematical reality: The United States, the Soviet Union, China, and the British Commonwealth accounted for nearly three-quarters of the world’s population. The arithmetic impelled one conclusion: “As long as these four nations with great military power stick together, there will be no possibility of an aggressor nation arising to start another world war.”9
A bestselling book written by Wendell Willkie, titled One World, blew fresh wind into FDR’s sails. Based on Willkie’s travels as Roosevelt’s roving emissary, One World predicted the global hegemony of the United States and the Soviet Union. He argued that, whether Americans admitted it or not, the United States would be the postwar era’s democratic leader. As Willkie’s book became a part of Washington conversation, Roosevelt decided the time was ripe to put the State Department to work on an international peacekeeping institution.10
During a meeting of foreign ministers from China, Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union in the fall of 1943, Secretary Hull extracted a pledge of cooperation in forming a global organization. In November, a beaming Roosevelt presided over an East Room ceremony where representatives of forty-four countries pledged to support a United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration charged with feeding, clothing, and housing the world’s poor.
It was a first step on a longer path. Eleanor Roosevelt, who was present at the ceremony, wrote, “I watched each man go up to represent his country and thought how interesting it was that, before the end of the war, we have the vision this time to realize that there is much work to do and preparation by the peoples of the United Nations is necessary.”11
In the summer of 1944, Roosevelt turned his rough sketch over to the diplomats, whose brushes and palette knives would add color, lines, and shading to the picture. In the fall, representatives of the great powers would meet at Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks mansion in Georgetown to plan an international organization, a security council with permanent and rotating members, and an initial roster of its general assembly. A United Nations peacekeeping institution, the holy grail of the Wilsonian idealist, was taking shape.
•
The United Nations held out the promise of a more secure future. But for the moment, it was nothing more than a promise, and one communi
ty in need of immediate help would continue to suffer until the Allies could find a way to end the war. In late 1942, Rabbi Stephen Wise, head of the American Jewish Congress and an old friend of Roosevelt, approached the president with a detailed dossier of Nazi atrocities committed against European Jews. His report described mass murders on a horrific scale—“the most overwhelming disaster of Jewish history,” said Wise.12
FDR invited Wise and four other Jewish leaders to the White House on December 8 and asked them to draft a statement for his signature denouncing the slaughter. He also persuaded Churchill and Stalin to approve the Declaration on Jewish Massacres, which condemned “in the strongest possible terms this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination,” and indicted Hitler’s “often-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe.”13
Roosevelt was pragmatic on moral questions in wartime. When Hitler threatened to execute Allied bomber pilots in 1943, for instance, he said nothing publicly but quietly told Marshall to be ready to retaliate. He chose to believe, in spite of the evidence, that the Katyn Forest massacre was a Nazi crime, and although he promised that America would not be the first nation to use poison gas on the battlefield, he warned that it would be the second.14
Roosevelt saw he could do little beyond offer sympathetic words of support to Europe’s Jews. When he asked Rabbi Wise’s delegation about concrete actions the government might take, the group had no practical suggestions. FDR concluded that reprisals against German war criminals would have to await the war’s end.
In January 1944, Morgenthau, who had been quietly working to fund rescue efforts for European Jews, handed Roosevelt a memorandum prepared by his staff. Morgenthau toned down the original title, “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews,” to the more prosaic “A Personal Report to the President.” The report concluded that Hull’s State Department had become a serious impediment to Treasury’s efforts to rescue Jews caught in the jaws of the Nazi killing machine. It quoted an October 1943 speech by Senator William Langer, a Republican from North Dakota: “We should remember the Jewish slaughterhouse of Europe and ask what is being done—and I emphasize the word ‘done’—to get some of these suffering human beings out of the slaughter while yet alive.”*15
American Warlords Page 43
