So it was an indignant Ambassador who reported to the President. Just what happened when he went to the White House twice during March is not wholly clear. He said later that he wanted a showdown with the Commander in Chief but “when the President reached up that fine, firm, strong hand of his to shake hands with me” and Hurley found in his hand a “loose bag of bones” and saw the wasted face, he lost some of his nerve. Apparently the President was in better shape than he looked, for he scoffed at Hurley’s worries and stated vigorously that he had not surrendered the territorial integrity or political independence of China. “You are seeing ghosts again.” He was loath to let Hurley have the Yalta documents on the Far East, but Hurley insisted on seeing them, and in a later meeting the Ambassador felt—or so he testified later—that the President seemed less confident about the agreements and had decided that Hurley should see Churchill and Stalin to discuss them. The President stuck to the basic policy of giving military aid only to Chiang, but he urged Hurley to continue to conciliate the Communists and he approved representation for Yenan on the Chinese delegation to the San Francisco Conference. Hurley left the White House satisfied that he had been thoroughly sustained in his fight with the young China hands.
Thus passed a last opportunity for Roosevelt to abandon his China strategy. Yet despite all the illusions that dominated American thinking about China it was not ignorance or stupidity or illness that was the prime source of Roosevelt’s continuing gamble on Chiang. It was a combination of Utopian hopes for the possibility of Chinese unity, stability, progress, and democracy, Western-style, and of hard-nosed military planning to minimize American casualties in the conquest of Japan.
Hurley had hardly left Washington for his trip to London and Moscow when Americans were once again reminded of the need for Soviet help in the final struggle. On April 1 Marine and army divisions swarmed ashore on Okinawa, the largest island in the Ryukyus and a threshold to the East China Sea. It was the most daring move in the Pacific campaign, for Okinawa lay only four hundred miles east of the China coast and barely 350 southwest of Kyushu itself. The invaders had an April Fool’s surprise when they met little resistance the first day. But during the following week, as the infantry pushed south through choppy terrain, they encountered the most formidable defenses in their Pacific experience. Losses mounted appallingly as hardened Marines and soldiers ground their way through endless mazes of mutually supporting strong points.
Several hundred Japanese aircraft from the home islands also attacked the invaders. Most were shot down, but enough kamikazes slipped through to cause heavy losses, especially among destroyers and picket ships. Twenty-two of the first twenty-four suicide crashes were effective. Clearly Japanese fanaticism was intensifying as the Americans drove closer to Kyushu and Honshu. More sharply than ever the Commander in Chief and the men in the Pentagon confronted the question: If a few Japanese divisions and a handful of suicide planes could exact such a price in defending an outlying island, what would happen when the Americans attacked the heartland?
By early April it seemed likely that the atomic bomb would be finished in time to use against Japan if not against Germany. Would this make the difference? Scientists were becoming more and more worried about the prospects of dropping the bomb on civilians, the lack of international control of information, the still-pervasive secrecy. Bush and others were pressing Stimson to support a general pooling among nations of all scientific research to prevent secret plans for weapons, but Stimson wanted to give the Russians information about the weapon only on the basis of a “real” quid pro quo. He seemed to draw back a bit after a long talk with his aide, Harvey Bundy, during which the two went “right down to the bottom facts of human nature, morals and government,” Stimson noted in his diary, but the Secretary was still divided between continuing secrecy and international sharing and control. So was Roosevelt, who wanted to put off a decision until the first bomb was tested. Einstein wrote a letter to the President introducing Leo Szilard, who raised the portentous atomic questions of the future. This time Roosevelt did not respond.
Early in April Bohr returned to the United States and prepared for the President a new memorandum against atomic secrecy and distrust. He asked Halifax and Frankfurter how the statement could be brought to the President’s attention. The Ambassador and the Justice decided to discuss the matter in the privacy of Washington’s Rock Creek Park. They planned to meet on April 12.
Wedemeyer, as well as Hurley, visited the White House in March—characteristically Roosevelt had his two China lieutenants in separately—and he was even more disturbed than the Ambassador by Roosevelt’s drawn face and drooping jaw. But on one point at least the President was clear and emphatic. He was going to do everything possible to grant the people of Indochina their independence from France. He instructed Wedemeyer not to hand over any supplies to the French forces operating in the area.
Independence for Indochina had become a near-obsession of the President’s during the past year or two. He told Stalin at Yalta that he had in mind a temporary trusteeship for Indochina, but that the British wished to give it back to France, since they feared the implications of a trusteeship for their own rule in Burma. De Gaulle, he said, had asked for ships to carry Free French forces to Indochina. Was he going to get them? Stalin asked. The President answered archly that he had been unable to find any ships for de Gaulle.
Indochina seemed to engross the President on the way home from Yalta. For two whole years, he told reporters, he had been terribly worried about that country. He recounted his Cairo talk with Chiang, who had said that the Chinese did not want Indochina but that the French should not have it. Roosevelt had proposed the temporary trusteeship idea, he told reporters. “Stalin liked it. China liked the idea. The British don’t like it. It might bust up their empire….” Wilhelmina, he went on, was planning to give Java and Sumatra independence soon, New Guinea and Borneo only after a century or two. The skulls of the New Guineans, the Queen had explained, were the least developed in the world.
Churchill, a reporter remarked, seemed opposed to a policy of self-determination. He had said that the Atlantic Charter was not a rule, just a guide. He seemed to be undercutting it. The President agreed.
“The Atlantic Charter is a beautiful idea,” he said. Did he remember the speech, a reporter asked, that Churchill had given about not being made prime minister to see the Empire fall apart?
“Dear old Winston will never learn on that point. He has made his specialty on that point. This is, of course, off the record.”
The most significant sentence in these remarks was, perhaps, the last one. Roosevelt would not make a public issue of colonialism. It would only make the British mad, he said. “Better to keep quiet just now.” He could not forget an incident at Yalta. Stettinius had begun to discuss trusteeships under the new world charter when Churchill broke in, exclaiming that he did not agree with a single word. His phrases spilling out in spurts of anger, he shouted that as long as he was prime minister the British Empire would not be put into the dock. He would never yield a scrap of his country’s heritage. Roosevelt had intervened only to ask that Stettinius be allowed to finish his statement; the Secretary was not talking about the British Empire. Churchill had subsided ungraciously, muttering, “Never, never, never.”
Roosevelt would tease Churchill to his face about his colonies; he would joke or complain about Churchill’s imperialism with Stalin and others; but he would not directly confront the Prime Minister. He was serious about the trusteeship idea, telling Hurley at their March meetings that United Nations trusteeships would be set up at the forthcoming San Francisco Conference. But such a policy required the concurrence of Britain and France and perhaps other colonial nations, and Roosevelt gave little indication that he was ready to challenge the other Atlantic powers. Indeed, since his talks with de Gaulle in July 1944 he seemed also to be veering toward more recognition of the French interest in Indochina, especially if de Gaulle lived up to his promises ab
out giving Indochina representation within a postwar French federal system. Even more important in the whole situation was Roosevelt’s Atlantic First strategy, which in early 1945, as China weakened and the Soviets seemed to grow more chauvinistic, seemed likely to be as important after the war as it had been during it. Caught between these forces, Roosevelt left Indochina in a political void. He merely provoked Churchill and de Gaulle without accomplishing anything specific.
The President had anticolonial ideals; what he lacked was a carefully conceived strategy to carry them out, given the global strategic considerations and the checkered and volatile politics of Southeast Asia. Great possibilities were open in the early months of 1945. Roosevelt’s anticolonialism, his sponsorship of the Atlantic Charter, his support of Philippine independence were well known to nationalistic and revolutionary leaders in Burma and India, in Indonesia and Indochina. So was America’s own revolutionary past. When Ho Chi Minh was drawing up a manifesto of independence he asked an American friend for the language of the great declaration of 1776. Roosevelt was not willing to launch a crusade against colonialism or to risk the kind of public confrontation with the Atlantic powers that would have captured for him the allegiance—or at least the rapt attention—of the colonial peoples of Asia.
Rather, he felt that his stated goals combined with his personal influence with Wilhelmina and King George and even Churchill and de Gaulle would be enough to resolve the issue when the fighting was over. So it was not necessary to frame comprehensive programs and detailed policies, especially since it was hard to calculate all the factors in advance, and the war had to be won first anyway. He would attend to it at the right time. It was not the lack of personal convictions but the easy assumption that he would be around to translate them into decision and action, along with the shadowy dominance of Atlantic First, that flawed Roosevelt’s anticolonial credo at the beginning of spring 1945.
“THE WORK, MY FRIENDS, IS PEACE”
If events abroad were reaching one of the great climacterics of history, domestic affairs by the spring of 1945 were following their own tepid cycle. In the wake of the President’s challenging pronouncements of January the committees of Congress assumed command of the legislative process with their ancient weapons of discussion, dilution, and delay. The manpower bill, after passing the House, slowly bled to death in the Senate as victories abroad blunted the spur of emergency. Wallace was finally confirmed as Secretary of Commerce, but only after a bitter struggle in the Senate—and only after the big federal lending agencies were separated from. Commerce so that the former Vice President could not “control” billions in loans. Congressional investigators of subversive activities conducted feckless little witch hunts. The Senate rejected Roosevelt’s nomination of Aubrey Williams, former National Youth Administrator, as head of Rural Electrification. John L. Lewis threatened another coal strike.
Not for years had the President’s legislative fortunes seemed at such a low ebb. The Republican and Democratic congressional parties were collaborating smoothly. Roosevelt, however, seemed hardly aware of the congressional situation; in any event he was not going to invite a quarrel with the legislators over domestic matters at a time when he needed Republican and conservative support for his foreign policies, especially for American leadership in the new international organization.
His administration ran on with the momentum of twelve years of liberal activism. He urged renewal and strengthening of the Trade Agreements Act. He asked for an inquiry into guaranteed annual-wage plans. He received ambassadors, awarded medals, discussed jobs with Democratic politicos.
He seemed to be dwelling in the past and the future, as well as the present. “I still say, thank God for those good old days and for old and tried friends like you,” he wrote to a Dutchess County friend who had remarked that it was a long step from the size of apple barrels—an issue in Roosevelt’s 1912 campaign—to meeting Churchill and Stalin and perhaps deciding the fate of the world. He was looking forward to his trip to San Francisco in April and to England later in the spring with his wife. And by late March he could relax about military prospects in Europe. When he told Frances Perkins of his projected trip to England and she protested that it was still too dangerous, he put his hand to the side of his mouth and whispered: “The war in Europe will be over by the end of May.”
Both Anna Boettiger and Grace Tully were quietly trying to conserve the President’s strength until he could get some rest at Warm Springs. Both were perplexed by his sudden changes in appearance. So were the reporters, who were watching him closely. At the White House correspondents’ dinner, Allen Drury noted how old and thin and scrawny-necked he looked when he was wheeled in, how he stared out at the crowded tables as though he did not see the people, how he failed to respond to the blare of trumpets and to the applause.
Then he suddenly came to life, Drury noted, and began to enjoy himself. The notables of Washington were there, including Leahy and Marshall, Byrnes and Ickes and Biddle and Morgenthau, Justices Douglas and Jackson, Senators Ball and Morse and Austin; and Vice President Truman, with a handkerchief carefully folded so that the four corners showed. Danny Kaye performed, and Jimmy Durante and Fanny Brice. Everyone watched the greatest performer of all—how he steadily drank wine and smoked his uplifted cigarette, how he leaned forward with his hand cupped behind his ear to hear a joke repeated as laughter welled up in the room, how his booming laughter rang out—but then a few moments later simply sat at the table with an intent, vague expression on his face, while his jaw dropped and his mouth fell open.
But he lasted out the evening and gave a talk at the end. It was about Humanity, he said—“We all love Humanity, you love Humanity, I love Humanity….” And in the name of Humanity he would give them a headline story—“I am calling off the press conference for tomorrow morning.”
The applause rang out as he was shifted back to his wheel chair, Drury noted in his diary, “and just before he went out the door he acknowledged it with the old, familiar gesture, so that the last we saw of Franklin Roosevelt was the head going up with a toss, the smile breaking out, the hand uplifted and waving in the old, familiar way.”
The usual crowd clustered around the little Warm Springs station as Roosevelt’s train pulled in on Good Friday, March go, 1945. Something seemed different this time as Roosevelt’s big frame, slumped in the wheel chair, seemed to joggle uncontrollably as he was rolled along the platform. A murmur drifted through the crowd. But the President drove his own car to the Little White House atop the hill.
That evening Hassett suddenly blurted out to Bruenn that the President was slipping away. Hassett admitted that he had been maintaining a bluff to the family and even Roosevelt himself, but he felt there was no hope for him. His feeble signature—the bold stroke and heavy line of old were gone, or simply faded out. Bruenn cautiously granted that Roosevelt was in a precarious condition, but said it was not hopeless if he could be protected from emotional and mental strain. That was impossible, Hassett said. He and Bruenn were on the verge of emotional upset.
But after a few days in the warm Georgia sun Roosevelt’s gray pallor changed and some of his old vitality returned, though the level of his blood pressure had become extremely wide, ranging between 170/88 and 240/130. The news from Europe was exciting: American, British, and Canadian troops were encircling the Ruhr, spearing northwest toward Hannover and Bremen, driving ever deeper into the heart of Germany. Reports were also coming to Washington of the many thousands of civilian deaths in the fire bombings of Japanese and German cities; it is doubtful that Roosevelt understood the enormity of the civilian losses, which would compare with the effects of the later atomic bombings.
Stalin’s harsh messages were forwarded to Warm Springs. Roosevelt was disturbed but not depressed by his deteriorating relations with the Kremlin. Unlike Churchill, who at the time foresaw the darkness ahead, as he said later, and moved amid cheering crowds with an aching heart, Roosevelt was sure that things would be put aright
. He tried to calm the troubled waters. The Swiss incident was fading into the past, he cabled to Stalin; in any event there must not be mutual distrust. He urged on Churchill that the Soviet problem be minimized as much as possible; things would straighten out. He added:
“We must be firm however, and our course thus far is correct.”
The President seemed more concerned with Asia than with Europe during these early April days. He was pleased with the news of the sudden fall of the Japanese Cabinet in the wake of the invasion of Okinawa. President Sergio Osmeña was back from the Philippines to report on the terrible destruction in Manila. The President talked with reporters in remarkable detail about conditions in the Philippines, economic problems, needed American assistance. It was the President’s 998th press conference.
He was especially determined that there be no change in plans for immediate independence for the Philippines. It depended only on how quickly the Japanese were cleared from the islands. He would set an example for the British and the other colonial powers. He wrote to his old chief, Josephus Daniels, that he would like independence to go into effect in August and to be present himself, but he feared he might have to be in Europe for a conference about that time.
On the afternoon of April 11 the President dictated the draft of a speech for Jefferson Day.
“Americans are gathered together in communities all over the country to pay tribute to the living memory of Thomas Jefferson—one of the greatest of all democrats; and I want to make it clear that I am spelling that word ‘democrats’ with a small d…”
The President paid a traditional tribute to Jefferson as Secretary of State, President, and scientist. Then he continued:
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