It is impossible to fully appreciate Roosevelt’s deft handling of the crisis without exploring his character—the often intangible aspects of his personality that allowed him to remain optimistic in the midst of tragedy and calm in the wake of defeat. The last time Eleanor witnessed a similar expression on her husband’s face was in August 1921, as he lay paralyzed from the waist down while a doctor informed him for the first time that he suffered from polio. That private crisis inspired the same iron will, dogged determination, and unquestioned optimism that the nation would witness in the face of its greatest military defeat.
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“Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars”
FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT likely started his day on December 7, 1941, in typical fashion. At 8:15 a.m. his valet, Arthur Prettyman, would have come into the bedroom, announced the time, and then helped FDR to the bathroom. Roosevelt would then have returned to his bed, where, propped up by pillows, he would take his breakfast on a tray sent up by the White House kitchen. Most mornings, Roosevelt ate a boiled egg along with two pieces of bacon and toast. While FDR ate, Prettyman would set up a table next to the president’s bed with a small coffee percolator. “One of the President’s real joys,” reported Missy LeHand, “is to make his own coffee.”1
While eating his breakfast, Roosevelt could look out his bedroom windows, which offered an unobstructed view of the Washington Monument to the south. From this spot, the president would read each morning the latest dispatches from abroad and scan a handful of papers: the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Washington Post, and Washington Herald.2
Roosevelt’s limited mobility required him to gather within arm’s reach many of the objects that he needed throughout the day. This left his living and work space in a state of perpetual clutter. Atop the white painted table next to the bed were aspirin, nose drops, a glass of water, pencils, reminder notes, an old prayer book, a pack of cigarettes, an ashtray, and a couple of telephones. No one was allowed to tidy this table. On a shelf above the table rested a six-by-three-inch alligator-covered case that contained a clock and a barometer. On the floor below sat a small basket where Eleanor would often leave him notes, memorandums, and articles she wanted him to read. “I have a photographic impression of that room,” recalled Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins. “A little too large to be cozy, it was not large enough to be impressive.”3
At some point during the morning FDR’s valet helped him get dressed. He slipped on a pair of flannel slacks and an old gray pullover sweater that had once belonged to his son James. Prettyman then wheeled him into the adjacent Oval Study. With the exception of a visit to the White House physician’s office, the president would conduct all of the nation’s business from this small room on December 7.
While the Oval Office represented the seat of power, Roosevelt preferred the comfort of his private study on the second floor. Speechwriter Robert Sherwood described the Oval Study as “the focal point of the nation and, in a sense, of the whole world” during FDR’s presidency. Lined with mahogany bookcases, the room was stuffed with ship models, maritime pictures, books, and stacks of paper. White woodwork-framed walls were painted in a color that a White House architect described as “a sort of schoolhouse tan.” On them hung portraits of his mother, Sara, who had died three months earlier, and his wife. An oval dark-green chenille rug covered most of the floor, while an odd assortment of tables, floor lamps, and chromium ashtray stands contributed to the clutter. The leather sofas and chairs had once been used by Theodore Roosevelt on the presidential yacht the Mayflower. A pipe organ occupied one corner of the room. FDR had received it as a gift, and although he never learned to play it, he also refused to get rid of it.4
The study was FDR’s favorite room in the White House. It was where he found solace in the massive stamp collection he had inherited from his mother, which contained a million stamps preserved in 150 matching albums. It was also where he unwound in the evening, inviting his many houseguests to join him for cocktails. A tradition dating back to when FDR was governor of New York, the cocktail hour was the time at the end of the day when he gathered with a few close aides, and the numerous houseguests, to reflect on the day, share stories, and exchange jokes. No official business was permitted. The president insisted on mixing the drinks himself, experimenting with new concoctions of gin and rum, vermouth and fruit juice. He had a special cocktail for each day and always ordered the appropriate ingredients ahead of time. “He mixed the ingredients,” reflected Sherwood, “with the deliberation of an alchemist but with what appeared to be a certain lack of precision since he carried on a steady conversation while doing it.”5
In addition to the informality of the room, Roosevelt no doubt appreciated its convenience. The Oval Study was ideally set up for a man who could not walk. His bedroom and bathroom were just off to one side. It was an easy room for him to navigate, and he could do so without assistance. Roosevelt needed help in the morning getting out of his bed and into the wheelchair, but he was capable of transferring himself from his wheelchair to his more comfortable working chair.
Roosevelt used a wheelchair only for transportation, and he designed it specifically for that task. A simple device crafted from the frame of a regular kitchen chair, it was mounted on a sturdy base with two large wheels in the front and two smaller ones in the back. The large wheels were nineteen inches in diameter, which made it easier for him to slide from the wheelchair to a stationary chair. They also allowed him to turn in a very small circumference. There was a small platform for him to rest his feet and a retractable wood and glass ashtray attached beneath the seat. Since it did not have arms, the chair was narrow enough to fit through most doorways.6
FDR’s dynamic leadership over the next twenty-four hours obscures the fact that every aspect of his life was made more difficult by his polio. He required assistance to perform the simplest of tasks that most people take for granted—getting dressed, climbing in and out of bed, moving around his home. But he needed little help in making momentous decisions that would impact the lives of millions of Americans.
On the morning of December 7, Roosevelt was tired, sick, and in desperate need of a vacation. He had twice delayed his traditional Thanksgiving trip to Warm Springs, Georgia, where he wanted to enjoy the warmer weather and therapeutic baths. He finally managed to slip out of town by train on November 28, hoping for a ten-day respite. Shortly after he arrived at the “little White House,” however, his secretary of state, Cordell Hull, had called, asking him to return to Washington. A large Japanese armada was on the move in the Pacific, and no one was sure where it would strike. Roosevelt returned to Washington on December 1. Not only had he failed during his short trip to procure much-needed rest, but his chronic sinus infection had flared up, leaving him congested while his head throbbed in pain.
Reading the headlines on the morning of December 7 may have only aggravated his discomfort. Clearly, Japan was going to strike somewhere in the Pacific. The Washington Post reported that Tokyo’s patience was coming to an end, while the New York Times predicted that an attack on Thailand was “imminent.” There seemed little reason for Americans to worry. The Times reassured readers that the United States Navy, in the midst of a three-year expansion, was first-rate. It quoted Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox who, in his annual report released on December 6, announced the U.S. Navy “has at this time no superior in the world.”7
It was ironic that Roosevelt’s attention was focused on the Pacific this morning because for the previous two years he had used all of his juggling skills to nudge the nation closer to war in Europe. Since coming to office in 1933, Adolf Hitler had been consolidating power at home by asserting it abroad. Tapping into a deep well of resentment that Germans felt toward the West for imposing a punitive peace following World War I, he had repudiated the Versailles Treaty of 1919, withdrawn from the League of Nations in 1933, and unilaterally announced in 1935 that Germany would rearm. His Nazi Party had sus
pended constitutional rights and initiated systematic persecution of Jews living in Germany. One of Hitler’s lieutenants, Alfred Rosenberg, announced that he wanted to see the head of a Jew impaled upon every telephone pole along a railroad line between Berlin and the North Sea.8
The events in Europe were clearly troubling to Roosevelt. An internationalist at heart, he recognized that the modern technology of warfare meant that America could no longer count on the vast geographic separation provided by two oceans to isolate the nation from events elsewhere in the world. His internationalist roots traced back to his earliest years. As a child, Roosevelt had traveled extensively throughout Europe, making his first trip at the age of three. He had also read the influential works of Alfred T. Mahan, who extolled the importance of sea power. During the Spanish-American War in 1898, FDR conspired with a few friends to run away to Boston and enlist in the navy. A bad case of scarlet fever foiled his plans, however. While a student at the prestigious Groton School and later at Harvard, he debated international issues and gloated in his cousin Theodore’s exploits.
His fascination with world affairs and his love of the sea made him an ideal choice to serve as assistant secretary of the navy during the Wilson administration. His new job instilled in him a strong belief that a great power such as the United States should play an important role in world affairs. He lobbied for a dramatic expansion of the navy, argued for military intervention in nearly every crisis, and pushed the administration to enter World War I. After the war, he strongly supported Wilson’s plan for a League of Nations, believing that collective security provided the best protection against future wars.
In 1920, Democrats chose Roosevelt as their vice presidential nominee. Although the country had turned against Wilson’s idealism, and the Senate had rejected American participation in the League of Nations, Roosevelt refused to bend to public opinion. In his acceptance address, he warned that the United States must accept the fact that “modern civilization has become so complex and the lives of civilized men so interwoven with the lives of other men in other countries as to make it impossible to be in this world and not of it.”9
Roosevelt watched with alarm as Hitler consolidated power in Europe and began threatening his neighbors. FDR harbored no illusions about Hitler, or his intentions. “The situation is alarming,” Roosevelt told diplomats shortly after Hitler assumed power. “Hitler is a madman and his counsellors, some of whom I personally know, are even madder than he is.” Roosevelt, fluent in German, had read the original version of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which contained virulent anti-Jewish comments that were purged from later editions. On the flyleaf of an American edition of the book, published in 1933, FDR wrote, “This translation is so expurgated as to give a wholly false view of what Hitler really is or says. The German original would make a different story.”10
But while events in Europe alarmed the president, the Great Depression had monopolized his attention throughout much of the 1930s. When he took office in March 1933, one in four Americans was without a job. Each month, thousands of farmers and business owners went bankrupt. By March 3, the day before Roosevelt took office, thirty-eight states had shut down all of their banks, and the remaining ten states were moving to close theirs. Normal business and commerce ground to a halt. A Roosevelt adviser, Rexford Guy Tugwell, wrote in his diary, “Never in modern times, I should think, has there been so widespread unemployment and such moving distress from cold and hunger.” By 1937, even after launching an aggressive program to combat unemployment and revive America’s industrial engine, Roosevelt was still lamenting that a third of the nation was “ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” Confronting such overwhelming economic problems, Roosevelt had little time to dwell on the growing crisis in Europe.
Hitler, in the meantime, spent the ’30s expanding his reach within Europe. In March 1936, the Nazi leader ordered German troops into the Rhineland, the strategic buffer that lay between France and Germany. And Hitler was not the only fascist leader threatening world stability during the 1930s. In 1935, Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini launched an invasion of the independent African state of Ethiopia. In 1936, both leaders directly intervened in Spain’s civil war, allowing General Francisco Franco to come to power.
Hitler accurately predicted that the distracted West would respond feebly to his aggression. In 1938, he pressed Europe to the brink of war. In March, he forced Austria into Anschluss (union) with Germany. Later that fall, the Nazi dictator threatened to invade Czechoslovakia when it refused to give him its Sudetenland, a mountainous region bordering Germany inhabited mostly by ethnic Germans. Hoping to avoid confrontation, the West sacrificed the Sudetenland on the altar of appeasement, agreeing to a gradual transfer to German control. Abandoned, the Czechs surrendered, demobilized their army, and allowed Germany to shear off the Sudetenland.
Six months later, German troops completed their rape of Czechoslovakia. Armed columns poured over the Czech border, smashing Western illusions that Hitler could be appeased. Within weeks, the British government reversed course, announcing that it was committed to the defense of Poland.
It became increasingly difficult for Roosevelt to ignore the growing crisis in Europe. He recognized that Hitler presented a long-term threat to America, and he believed the best way to restrain further aggression was for the United States to participate in collective security arrangements with the Western democracies. But in the United States, disillusion with World War I and concern about jobs at home intensified deeply entrenched isolationist sentiment. Popular writers, who claimed that selfish business interests had conspired to lead the United States into World War I, whipped popular disenchantment with World War I into a frenzy.
Congress reinforced the isolationist sentiment by passing restrictive neutrality legislation. In 1935, Congress imposed an automatic embargo on American arms and ammunition to all parties at war. The following year, Democrats and Republicans joined together to add a ban on loans to belligerents. Two years later, lawmakers banned American ships from war zones, prohibited Americans from traveling on belligerent ships, and extended the embargo to include not just armaments but also the oil, steel, and rubber needed for war machines. Foreign belligerents could buy such goods only if they paid for them in cash and carried them in their own ships.
For the next few years, Roosevelt struggled to find a way to work with the Western democracies to restrain Hitler without arousing isolationist sentiment. It was not an easy task. In October 1937, FDR had tested the depth of isolationist sentiment in a speech denouncing the “reign of terror and international lawlessness” that threatened the peace. “When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community.” But public reaction to the speech proved mixed, and Roosevelt quickly backed away from the internationalist implications of his “quarantine” message. “It’s a terrible thing,” he said, “to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead—and find no one there.”
Even if he wanted to influence events in Europe, FDR had little tangible support to offer. At the time of the Munich agreement, the U.S. Army consisted of 185,000 men and ranked eighteenth in the world. Not only was it no match for Hitler’s Germany, but it was smaller than the armed forces of Sweden and Switzerland.
The limits of FDR’s influence on events in Europe became obvious when the Germans and Russians concluded a nonaggression pact on August 23, 1939. The agreement provided for the partition of Poland and for Soviet absorption of the Baltic states, as well as territory in Finland and Bessarabia. With his eastern flank now secured, Hitler unleashed his fire and steel on the Polish people on September 1, 1939. In a potent display of military skill and power, the Germans conducted a Blitzkrieg (lightning war), as 1.5 million men streamed into Polish territory. “Close your hearts to pity,” Hitler told his generals. “Act brutally.” Two days later, honoring their commitments to Poland, Britain and France declared war on Ge
rmany. World War II in Europe had begun.
Ambassador to France William Bullitt called Roosevelt at 2:50 a.m. Washington time to tell him the news. “Well, Bill, it has come at last,” FDR said. “God help us all.” Roosevelt propped himself on his pillow, lit a cigarette, and telephoned his secretaries of state, war, and the navy. They rushed to their offices. “I think a good many of us had a somewhat sleepless night,” Roosevelt remarked to reporters the following morning.11
By late 1939, American sympathy was clearly with Great Britain and France, but most people continued to believe the Allies could defend Europe without U.S. assistance. The British, who claimed the largest navy in the world, would strangle the German economy. France’s 800,000-man standing army was considered the most powerful in Europe. Many military strategists believed the French Maginot Line, an extremely well-developed chain of fortifications along the French-German border, could resist any invasion. The calm that settled over Europe during the winter of 1939–1940 only added to the detachment. For six months after the fall of Poland, Hitler’s armies remained largely silent. Many Americans believed that Hitler’s thirst for conquest had been satisfied and a larger war averted. Isolationist senator William Borah snorted, “There’s something phony about this war.”
Roosevelt, however, was convinced that Hitler and his generals were determined to conquer the democracies in Europe before the United States could build its defenses. “My problem,” he wrote editor William Allen White in December 1939, “is to get the American people to think of conceivable consequences without scaring [them] into thinking that they are going to be dragged into this war.” In November 1939, Roosevelt achieved a partial victory when he convinced Congress to pass a revised Neutrality Act that lifted the arms embargo against belligerents. It retained a cash-and-carry provision and stipulated that shipments could move only in foreign vessels. The new law also forbade American merchant ships from entering a broad “danger zone” that included most of the major shipping lanes to Europe.12
Pearl Harbor Page 2
