Morgenthau urged Roosevelt to cut out the State Department from Jewish rescue efforts. FDR agreed, though he wanted State to have some voice in the problem. He signed an executive order establishing a War Refugee Board, which would act under the direction of Morgenthau, Hull, and Stimson. In classic Roosevelt style, the board was a mix of men whose opposing philosophies would keep the group from doing anything too precipitous without his personal approval.16
Hitler’s occupation of Hungary in March 1944, and his demand that the Hungarian government deport or liquidate the country’s 700,000 Jews, underscored the urgency of the crisis. The War Refugee Board funneled bribe funds to diplomats like Raoul Wallenberg, who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews, and from the Oval Office FDR denounced “the wholesale systematic murder of the Jews in Europe [that] goes on unabated every hour.” Vowing to punish both Nazi and Japanese executioners, Roosevelt called upon the Allies “temporarily to open their frontiers to all victims of oppression.”17
But until those executioners were caught, until those frontiers could be pried open, Roosevelt’s words remained unfulfilled platitudes. Military options, such as bombing death camps in the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, were given low priority by the Allied command. The War Department’s Jack McCloy turned down several requests for bomb strikes against death camps on grounds that strategic air missions were better directed toward defeating Hitler—to stop the slaughter everywhere—than at a single camp or rail line. As long as refineries were brewing gasoline and factories were assembling Messerschmitts, neither the War Department nor the Army Air Forces had any interest in diverting bomb groups to concentration camps.18
FDR wished to alleviate some of the suffering he knew was being felt across Eastern Europe, but he would not alter military plans, not even to give the doomed a brief respite. Nor, does it appear, was he ever directly asked to do so.* Unless his captains told him that destroying death camps would hasten the war’s end, he would not edit Hap Arnold’s target lists. He might meddle in military strategy, but he would not elevate humanitarian operations over wartime necessity.19
•
As Roosevelt wrestled with the G.I. Bill, a United Nations organization, and the plight of Europe’s Jews, another watershed was slowly breaking in arid New Mexico.
Since early 1942, when the Army took over the “S-1” project, the Manhattan Engineering District and its sinuous web of affiliates had grown to 42,000 civilian workers, 84,500 construction contractors, and 1,800 military personnel working on half a million acres of land. The $85 million covertly funneled to the project in early 1942 turned into a $400 million estimate by the following December. By the time General Somervell secretly pulled $300 million from engineering funds in May 1943, he was told an additional $400 million would be needed just to get the project through 1944. By early 1944, the Manhattan Project had become the second most expensive weapon program in the Arsenal of Democracy, exceeded only by the snafu-plagued B-29 bomber.20
Though the number of people who knew small or isolated details of the project had grown to the size of a two-corps army, Manhattan remained one of the war’s best-kept secrets. Within the administration, only a tiny, carefully guarded circle of senior officials, scientists, and administrators were privy to the full story. Few others in the American high command knew the big picture; Marshall did not even tell Admiral King about it until late 1943.21
As head of the project’s “Policy Committee,” Henry Stimson struggled to keep nuggets of technical information from spilling out, and first and foremost, that meant keeping Congress in the dark. To legislators whose investigators stumbled upon mysterious offices and fence-shrouded factories, Stimson would simply say the matter was too secret to discuss, he was acting at the direction of the president, and they should not ask any more questions.22
But democracy is a noisy, unruly affair, and by 1944 the project’s cost had grown so prodigious that money could no longer be quietly pulled from harbor construction and land mine appropriations. Over an uninspired White House lunch on February 15 (Mrs. Nesbitt, despite Roosevelt’s best efforts, was still on the job), Stimson and Roosevelt agreed that Congress would have to earmark specific funds for the project, though it could not know why it was shelling out all those greenbacks. Roosevelt suggested that Stimson and Marshall take Speaker Sam Rayburn and ranking members of the House into their confidence. The Senate, he cautioned, would be a tougher nut to crack, so he advised waiting until momentum had built in the lower house before walking the request to the other side of the Rotunda.23
Three days later, Stimson, Marshall, and Dr. Vannevar Bush, head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, entered the plush office of Speaker Rayburn, who had invited House Majority Leader John McCormack and Minority Leader Joseph Martin Jr., the ranking Republican, to join them. In Rayburn’s office, Stimson informed the three congressional leaders that the Army had been working on a uranium-powered explosive using funds appropriated for general military research.
Marshall and Dr. Bush explained the military and scientific fundamentals of the new weapon. Emphasizing that the project was so important, and so secret, that Congress would have to accept certain aspects of it on faith, Marshall told the congressmen the atomic weapon required massive congressional appropriations without the usual public disclosure.
Rayburn understood the delicacy and importance of the Manhattan Project. He liked to say, “Any jackass can kick down a barn. It takes a carpenter to build one.” Rayburn would not let any jackass kick down Stimson’s barn, and he promised to get the money from Appropriations and see to it that nobody talked.24
Sam Rayburn ran the House the way Admiral King once ran Lady Lex, and no one breathed a word. The Senate was another matter, however. When staffers began hearing rumors of mysterious military outposts in Oak Ridge in Tennessee and Hanford in Washington State, several upper-chamber members demanded to know what was going on.25
The most prominent of them was Senator Harry Truman of Missouri, the same gadfly who had backed off his investigation of undisclosed war plants the year before. He had a mandate to clamp down on War Department overspending, and this time he asked the War Department to allow his staffers to investigate rumors of financial waste at a Washington State defense plant.26
For a second time, Stimson asked Truman to call off his investigation. Now Truman objected. He had two uniformed staffers, both brigadier generals, on his staff. Surely, he told Stimson, the Army could trust its own one-star generals with military information. At the very least, they should be allowed to look into the cost of housing and roads leading to the plant.
Stimson held his ground, and the Missouri senator shot back a burst of plain Midwestern speaking. Stimson grumbled to his diary that night, “He threatened me with dire consequences. Truman is a nuisance and pretty untrustworthy man. He talks smoothly but acts meanly.” 27
Eventually Harry Truman backed down. While the project’s cost was enough to unnerve everyone who knew about it, Truman had second thoughts, given Stimson’s strenuous objections, and he declined to push the matter further.
With a sigh of relief, Stimson went back to shepherding the Manhattan Project, grateful that he would never have to worry about Harry Truman sticking his nose into the atomic bomb project again.
•
In December 1943, George Marshall had returned from Cairo, Tehran, and the Pacific to an overflowing assembly line of paperwork. But before he could plunge into decisions requiring his signature, FDR dropped another domestic bombshell on him and Stimson. The four largest railway brotherhoods, unions representing 1.4 million railway workers, were about to go on strike.28
Roosevelt’s heart was usually with organized labor. Back in ’37, when strikers waged sit-ins at steel and auto plants, he refused to send federal troops to reopen the factory gates. His solution back then was to call Bill Knudsen of General Motors, ask him to sit down with the strikers, and let common
sense and the Wagner Act solve the problem.29
But that was in time of peace, when the consequences of a strike were limited to bad press, short-term unrest, and a disruption in the supply of consumer goods. In wartime, a railroad strike could cripple America’s ability to defend itself. The nation had more than 233,000 miles of track crisscrossing the continent, and reinforcements, ammunition, fuel, food, and weapons ran along those steel arteries. A strike could leave planes stranded for lack of engines, cities cut off from the farms that fed them, and troop-marshaling points with no troops to marshal.
FDR told Stimson to be ready to take over the railroads if no agreement were reached by December 30. He added, to Stimson’s satisfaction, that he would ask Congress to enact a general service law requiring undrafted men to serve in war industries.30
Like Roosevelt, Henry Stimson saw the home front as a continuation of the battlefront. Total war wasn’t total if men lucky enough not to be drafted were free to become insurance salesmen or musicians—a reality other nations at war had accepted long ago. When Mussolini invaded backward Ethiopia in 1935, Emperor Haile Selassie issued one simple order to his villagers: “Everyone will now be mobilized, and all boys old enough to carry a spear will be sent to Addis Ababa. Married men will take their wives to carry food and cook. Women with small babies need not go. The blind, those who cannot walk or for any reason cannot carry a spear, are exempt. Anyone found at home after receipt of this order will be hanged.”31
While he might not go as far as the Lion of Judah, Stimson felt that every able-bodied American citizen had an obligation to support the war effort, either on the front lines or behind them. A “National Service Act” would require personal service in the form of industrial labor—similar to a military draft—and for business owners, a formal requisition of factories and shipyards for the war’s duration. The threatened railway strike provided Stimson with a platform for a loud, deep blow on this bugle.32
On December 27, FDR signed an executive order seizing the railroads and placing them under the secretary of war. Between the threats of a national service bill and railroad nationalization, the brotherhoods backed down for the moment. On December 29, the holdout unions canceled their strike.33
The unions had entered into a truce, but a truce isn’t the same as a peace treaty. On the last day of 1943, Stimson heard fresh rumors that the brotherhoods were planning another strike. When he told Marshall what the unions were up to, the general exploded.
The war would go on another six months if the unions struck, Marshall raged, his words getting hotter and louder by the syllable. Any hope that Germany would collapse by spring would be “gone with the wind” if Nazi propaganda painted U.S. strikes as evidence of a near-collapse. Cheeks growing red, Marshall said he would not let civilian labor leaders condemn men to death and disfigurement just so their workers could make an extra twenty-five cents an hour.
Though he hated being dragged into domestic politics, Marshall decided to use his clout with Congress and the public to avert a railroad shutdown. He told former senator James Byrnes he was “sleepless with worry” over the looming strike, and openly wondered “whether it was his duty to go on the radio, give his opinion, and then resign.”34
Marshall’s standing with the public in some ways outsized Roosevelt’s. That very week, his face stared out from the cover of Time’s “Man of the Year” issue, whose editors emoted, “The American people do not, as a general rule, like or trust the military. But they like and trust George Marshall. This is nothing more paradoxical than the fact that General Marshall hates war. The secret is that American democracy is the stuff Marshall is made of.” FDR gave Marshall and King the lion’s share of credit for the previous year’s victories in his Christmas fireside chat, and Colonel Eddie Rickenbacker, America’s great air ace from the previous war, called Marshall the kind of soldier who would make a great president. To this last, the Memphis Commercial Appeal remarked, “That’s about all that’s needed to start one of those ‘Marshall for President’ movements.”*35
Marshall had no interest in partisan politics, but he would do his best to kill the railway strike in its cradle. He called in a group of trusted journalists for a “not for attribution” interview and told them that any suggestion that the United States was disunited would hinder Allied efforts to break off Germany’s satellites. “He banged his white-knuckled fist on the desk,” Time reported, “and although not a blasphemous man, he swore bitterly. For he was brimming over with indignation that Americans in their ignorance should do anything so tragic.”36
Though the interview was off the record, Marshall knew his identity would leak, exactly as he intended. The St. Petersburg Times identified the “highly responsible source” as the Army’s chief of staff, and labor spokesmen struck back at Marshall, angrily challenging him to prove his implied charge that the brotherhoods were aiding the enemy.37
While the American Federation of Labor heatedly denied giving aid and comfort to the enemy, the fact that the unions even had to answer the charge from America’s most trusted man was enough to break the strike. Even the Communist Party’s Daily Worker, labor’s staunchest ally, did some bobbing and weaving, recognizing that lives lost if capitalist production faltered would include citizens of the USSR, not just citizens of the United States.38
The agonizing episode of the railroad strike came to a muddled end two weeks later, when the brotherhoods agreed to accept an increase of six cents an hour. The trains kept chugging, goods moved from factories to ports, and Roosevelt’s warlords had weathered another storm.39
•
To FDR, Douglas MacArthur was an amusing political diversion, a sort of boa constrictor behind glass who looks intimidating but is quite harmless so long as you don’t get too complacent. MacArthur lacked the political stature of Governor Dewey or Ohio’s governor John Bricker, but he was the hero of Bataan and Corregidor. Headstrong, unquestionably brave, and obsessive about his publicity, MacArthur had butted heads with Roosevelt during the Depression years, when he was the Army’s chief of staff.
“He has the most pretentious style of anyone I know,” Roosevelt once said. “He talks in a voice that might come from the oracle’s cave. He never doubts and he never argues or suggests; he makes pronouncements. What he thinks is final.” He told Harold Ickes that MacArthur and Louisiana’s governor Huey P. Long were the two most dangerous men in America.40
Yet to many Republicans, MacArthur was also the most dangerous man to Roosevelt.
As the 1944 election campaign lurched into first gear in late 1943, pundit typewriters turned to MacArthur’s burgeoning support among Republican voters. A Gallup poll in September put MacArthur not far behind Dewey and Wendell Willkie, a respectable showing for an Army officer who had never held elected office and had lived overseas since 1935. In November, a War Department staffer wrote Marshall, “The Times-Herald in editorial yesterday demoted General MacArthur to Secretary of War, and proposes that if any other Republican candidate for President carried the promise that MacArthur would be appointed Secretary of War upon his election, Republicans would win.”41
But MacArthur already had a job. Unlike General George McClellan, Lincoln’s old Democratic nemesis, MacArthur was far from the nation’s capital. He could hardly fight Roosevelt at home when he was supposed to be fighting Tojo in the Pacific. MacArthur’s reputation in middle America hinged on his single-minded focus on victory over Japan. Any hint that he might abandon his command post for Washington—or plot against his commander-in-chief—would unravel his support like a cheap sweater.
To get around the problem of MacArthur running for president, the general’s backers tried to engineer a draft movement before the summer’s Republican convention in Chicago. Initial results were encouraging. A grassroots “Bricker-MacArthur” campaign gained steam in October; one convention delegate ran as a MacArthur man in New Hampshire, while in Wisconsin, the general’s adopte
d home state, MacArthur finished second to Dewey and ahead of Willkie. “MacArthur for President” clubs sprang up in seven states, and in Illinois he picked up half a million votes. The MacArthur bandwagon seemed ready to go the distance.42
But as the skies seemed bright, the air honeysuckle-sweet, the MacArthur bandwagon lurched into a ditch. The previous fall, Representative Albert Miller of Nebraska had written a private letter to MacArthur describing turmoil on the home front. “The New Deal, including President Roosevelt, is scared to death of the movement in the country for you,” Miller said. “Unless this New Deal can be stopped this time our American way of life is forever doomed. You owe it to civilization and the children yet unborn to accept the nomination. . . . You will be our next president.”
MacArthur, busy with his New Guinea campaign, sent a short, vaguely encouraging reply to Miller that concluded, “I do not anticipate in any way your flattering predictions, but I unreservedly agree with the complete wisdom and statesmanship of your comments.”43
In reply, Miller sent MacArthur another, more pointed letter. He spoke of “a tremendous revolution in this country” and wrote, “If this system of left-wingers and New Dealism is continued another four years, I am certain that this monarchy which is being established in America will destroy the rights of the common people.”
American Warlords Page 44
