The President had known she’d continue to worry on his account, and wanted to reassure her—not only the first president to fly abroad while in office, but the first since Lincoln to visit a battlefield in war. Taking a celestial fix of sun and moon, the captain turned the forty-four-ton behemoth, like a flying carpet, southeastward. “Then out over the Caribbean—high up—I felt the altitude at 8 or 9,000 feet—and so did Harry and Ad. Leahy—The cumulus white clouds were amazingly beautiful but every once in a while we could not go over them & had to go through one—
“At last—5 p.m.—we saw the N.E. Coast of Venezuela & then the islands of the Dragon’s Mouth with Trinidad on the left—The skipper made a beautiful soft landing & Ad. Oldendorf came out & took us ashore to the U.S. Naval Base—one of ‘my’ eight which we got for the 50 destroyers in 1940. It is not yet finished but operating smoothly.”11
The U.S. naval base at Trinidad had come with a hotel, situated at Macqueripe on the north coast, “& thither we went for the night,” the President related. However, there had then occurred a serious hiccup, unrelated to the dinner he was served. “Ad. Leahy felt quite ill—he had flu ten days ago—Ross McI[ntire] is worried as he is 68 & his temp. is over 100—we will decide in the a.m.”12
In the morning, on January 12, the doctor found Admiral Leahy still feverish. “Up at 4 a.m. This is not civilized,” the President joked in his letter to Daisy. However, “Leahy seemed no better & we had to leave him behind—He hated to stay but was a good soldier & will go to the Naval Hospital & get good care—I hope he won’t get pneumonia—I shall miss him as he is such an old friend & a wise counselor.”13
If the President was concerned, though, he did not show it, for he never mentioned Leahy again in his letters to Daisy, despite the fact that Leahy was to have chaired daily meetings not only of the U.S. chiefs of staff but the British chiefs of staff, in their role as the Combined Chiefs of Staff, in Casablanca. The President was on top form: confident he could manage the summit quite successfully on his own, even without Leahy’s wisdom.
Thus the Dixie Clipper flew on a further thousand miles to Brazil, filled its tanks with fuel at Belém, and set off for its great “hop” across the Atlantic, carrying its august passenger and small, slightly diminished entourage—followed closely by the backup Clipper, lest the Dixie Clipper experience engine trouble and have need to ditch.
Reflecting their earlier days as transoceanic first-class passenger planes, each Clipper boasted a lounge, a fourteen-seat dining room, changing rooms, and beds normally for thirty-six passengers—with a honeymoon suite at the rear. They required considerable piloting skills, however—takeoffs and landings in choppy, windswept water always an especial concern. The Dixie Clipper’s sister plane, Yankee Clipper, for example, would snag its wing several weeks later in Lisbon Harbor, with the loss of twenty-four lives.
Meantime, landing smoothly at the old British trading post of Bathurst (later renamed Banjul) on the Gambia River on January 13, after a twenty-eight-hour flight, the Dixie Clipper moored offshore. Arrangements had been made for the President to transfer to the light cruiser USS Memphis, ordered up from Natal by FDR’s chief of naval operations, Admiral King—there to provide the President with a secure overnight stay where he would not be exposed to tsetse fly. As it was still light, however, he took the opportunity to tour the waterfront—the President seated in a whaleboat as the local British naval commander acted as his guide during a forty-minute cruise amid dozens of tenders and oil tankers. Loading and unloading beneath the evening sun, their crews seemed oblivious to the fact that the upright figure seated in the midst of the whaleboat party, in his civilian clothes and hat, together with Hopkins, McIntire, and McCrea, was the President of the United States.
Finally, hoisted aboard the USS Memphis, the President was given the flagship admiral’s stateroom, “where I’ve had a good supper & am about to go to bed,” he described, delighted to be in African waters.14
Given Roosevelt’s childhood dream of going to naval college instead of Harvard (a hope dashed by his mother),15 his long love of naval history, and his nearly eight years as assistant secretary of the Navy, being piped aboard an American warship as commander in chief for the first time in World War II was inspiring for the President. Yet the sentiment paled beside thoughts of what was to come. The next morning would see him embark for a further “1,200 mile hop in an Army plane,” this time overland, as he wrote to Daisy—bound for “that well known spot ‘Somewhere in North Africa.’ I don’t know just where,” he added, in self-censoring mode. “But don’t worry—All is well & I’m getting a wonderful rest.” He felt positively refreshed. “It’s funny about geography—Washington seems the other side of the world but not Another Place—That is way off,” he wrote of Hyde Park, “& also very close to—”16
There Roosevelt left the sentence, however—unwilling to give hostage to fortune, lest prying eyes open, or see, his letter to the distant cousin whose romantic adoration he’d encouraged, especially after his mother’s death two years earlier. “Lots of love—Bless you,” he ended.17
To his wife, Eleanor, he meanwhile wrote in a similarly informative, if less tender, vein—telling her he’d be seeing their son Elliott when he arrived, and signing off: “Ever so much love and don’t do too much—and I’ll see you soon. Devotedly, F.”18
He was almost there: not only the journey of a lifetime, but bringing the agenda of a lifetime. At Casablanca the President wished not only to map the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II, but commence discussions of the world to follow.
PART TWO
* * *
Total War
3
The United Nations
EVEN BEFORE THE war began for the United States, the President had been thinking of the postwar world.
Enlisting the help of his protégé, Assistant Secretary of State Sumner Welles, the President had begun drafting ideas immediately after drawing up the Atlantic Charter, in August 1941. What he wanted to create, he’d told Welles, was a postwar organization that the Americans, British, and Russians would embrace as military guardians, and that all sovereign democratic nations could subscribe to. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor several months later had made the need for a viable postwar system all the more urgent: a new world order that would make such wars of imperial conquest difficult if not impossible. He’d therefore charged Welles with modeling the project on the twenty-six countries whose representatives he’d assembled over Christmas 1941 in Washington—a group the President had decided, in a moment of inspiration, to announce to the world as “the United Nations.”1
Properly constituted, the United Nations authority would, the President determined, avoid the disaster of the League of Nations—which neither the United States nor the Soviet Union had joined when it was formed. Building on the “Declaration of the United Nations,” which had been signed in Washington on January 1, 1942, the United Nations would, this time, have teeth: the world’s “Four Policemen,” as the President called them.2
First, the Germans and Japanese would have to be defeated—but the military might of the three foremost antifascist fighting nations could then be turned into a global peacekeeping coalition: the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain. He had then added China, a nation that had been fighting the Japanese since 1937—thereby forcing the Japanese to keep an army of more than a million men on the Chinese mainland. Once the war was won, the President proposed, this same group of the world’s major military powers could be employed not only to disarm the Axis nations for all time, but to police the world thereafter on behalf of the United Nations authority, ensuring that no Hitler or Mussolini or Hirohito would ever again upset global security by force of arms or conquest.
With laudable dedication, Welles—running the U.S. State Department under the sickly secretary of state, Cordell Hull—had thereupon set about the business, leaving the President to focus, meantime, on the best military strategy to defeat the Axis powers.<
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Under the aegis of the State Department, Welles had quietly set up a host of secret committees and subcommittees, asking members to think ahead on the President’s behalf and produce for Mr. Roosevelt at the White House their specific recommendations and alternatives, on a regular basis.3 “What I expect you to do,” Roosevelt had instructed Welles, “is to have prepared for me the necessary number of baskets so that when the time comes all I have to do is to reach into a basket and fish out a number of solutions that I am sure are sound and from which I can make my own choice.”4
Welles had done as ordered—magnificently, in retrospect. As historians would later note, neither Britain nor the Soviet Union, the other two primary nations conducting the war against Hitler, did anything in 1942 to address the needs or opportunities of the postwar world on an international scale—a “disastrous blockage at the top” in the case of the British.5 By contrast, bringing together an extraordinary cross section of the nation’s foremost minds and political figures in once-weekly meetings in Washington, Welles had single-handedly, in the midst of a global war being fought from Archangel to Australia, gotten his various teams working on the political, military, economic, labor, and even social (health, drug trafficking, refugees, nutrition, etc.) blueprints the President wanted for his vision of the democratic postwar world.
An extraordinary bipartisan group of Democratic and Republican senators and congressmen from the Capitol—including the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the ranking minority member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, a former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the current chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and a senior current Republican member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—had joined with Welles’s handpicked, representative minds from the State Department, the Agriculture Department, and the Board of Economic Warfare, as well as members outside government, including individuals from the press, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the academy, to provide the President with the necessary guideposts and alternatives he wanted at hand.
Though at first Welles had assumed the issues would be handled by the President in a peace conference after the conclusion of the war, as had been the case in the aftermath of World War I, the President had soon changed his mind—reckoning that if the postwar system could be settled before the war’s end, it could avoid the unfortunate fate of the Versailles conference of 1919. Instead, the President had asked the committees to report their interim findings, via Welles, as swiftly as possible: concerned that America’s allies, too, should help him address the challenge before, rather than after, the end of hostilities. By October 1942, therefore, as American troops readied for the Torch invasion of Northwest Africa—a draft outline of the postwar UN organization had begun to take shape.
Welles’s teams, the President found, had done a grand job—indeed, Welles suggested that the putative “United Nations authoritative body” could already start functioning during the war itself. It would comprise a General Assembly of United Nations, seating representatives of all eligible countries of the world. It would also have a small Executive Council, incorporating the four major powers to arm and lead the organization with strength and simplicity. By April 1942, in fact, after discussing the matter with Mr. Roosevelt, Welles (who had made himself chairman of the Subcommittee on Political Problems, an international organization) had suggested the way the Executive Council should be set up: the President’s Four Policemen—the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and China—being given permanent seats on an Executive Council together with a small number of further, rotating seats reserved for members elected by the full United Nations authority, in order to give the council more balance and connection with the main Assembly.6
As Welles’s committees had advanced their confidential proposals in Washington, British Foreign Office officials in London had become anxious lest Churchill’s lack of interest in postwar planning leave Great Britain out on a limb. “His Majesty’s Government have not yet defined their views on questions or made any response to Mr. Welles’s expression of opinion,” the head of the British Economic and Reconstruction Department had complained as late as September 3, 1942, only weeks before Torch.7
Little was done to rectify this failure, however, in view of the Prime Minister’s full-time preoccupation with Britain’s military operations, and his aversion to postwar planning—which would inevitably involve the continuing transformation of the British Empire into a Commonwealth of Nations rather than a colonial enterprise directed by Parliament in London.8 “I hope these speculative studies will be entrusted mainly to those on whose hands time hangs heavy,” Churchill had mocked his foreign minister’s attempt to produce a British version of Welles’s work, “and that we shall not overlook Mrs. Glass’s Cookery Book recipe for Jugged Hare—‘First catch your hare.’”9
In Moscow, too, there had been a complete lack of interest in planning for a democratic future—Stalin’s Soviet government simply refusing to comment on or respond to cables from its Russian ambassador in Washington, imploring the USSR to get involved in international postwar proposals.
For FDR, the failure of Joseph Stalin to participate in discussions about the postwar world was galling if perhaps inevitable, given the history of the Soviet Union since the Russian Revolution: its protracted civil war, Stalin’s Great Terror and purge trials, and its ever-darkening development as a communist police state based on intimidation, arrest, torture, imprisonment, deportation, and execution. Nevertheless, as president of the world’s biggest and most advanced economy, Roosevelt wanted to give the Russians—who were bearing in blood the brunt of Hitler’s war of conquest—at least the chance to be a party to his proposals. And if Stalin, the absolute dictator of the Soviet Union, would not sit down to discuss them, then the President would begin the discussions without him—in Casablanca.
Hitler had declared that democracy was a relic of the past. The President, working with Winston Churchill, would now show him he was wrong: that democracy was, in fact, on the move.
Casablanca, then, was to be much more than a military powwow. Weeks before he left the White House on his secret journey, the President had begun to rehearse his developing vision with other world leaders such as Jan Christiaan Smuts, the prime minister of South Africa, whom he’d known since the summer of 1918.
Then, too, the end of the world war had seemed at hand. Twenty-four years later, Roosevelt was “drawing up plans now for the victorious peace which will surely come” and hoped to discuss them with the former guerilla leader of the anti-British Boers, if Smuts could see his way to come to Washington. A more durable and effective outcome was necessary than the ill-fated Versailles Treaty. “As you know,” the President explained, “I dream dreams but am, at the same time, an intensely practical person, and I am convinced that disarmament of the aggressor nations is an essential first step, followed up for a good many years to come by a day and night inspection of that disarmament and a police power to stop at its source any attempted evasion of the rules.”10
This time, then, postwar peace would not be guaranteed by treaties that could be broken with impunity, but by irresistible force—on behalf of the community of nations. There were “many other things to be worked out,” Roosevelt had added in his letter to Smuts, such as decolonization, effected over time, but with no backsliding by the old European powers, as after World War I—whether by the British, the Dutch, the French, the Belgians, the Spanish, or the Portuguese. “Perhaps Winston has told you of my thought of certain trusteeships to be exercised by the United Nations where stability of government for one reason or another cannot at once be assured. I am inclined to think that the [colonial] mandate system”—instituted in the wake of the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations—“is no longer the right approach, for the nation which is given the mandate soon comes to believe that it carries sovereignty with it.”11
Colonialism, in other words, was to be gradually but responsibly phased
out in the aftermath of World War II, and a new postcolonial world ushered in.
As prime minister of a former British colony now enjoying self-government and Dominion status within the British Commonwealth, Smuts’s reaction was important as Roosevelt sought to picture a viable postwar world and the problems he might encounter in getting international agreement.
Smuts—whose Boer countrymen had, like the Americans, risen up against British colonial rule—understood the President’s strong feelings on that score, but was facing a new election and could not travel. The prime minister of Canada, Mackenzie King, could, however—and once more the President had asked if King could come spend a few days with him at the White House, after the Torch invasion, so that he could rehearse his notions of what would, effectively, be the endgame.
Arriving from Ottawa by train, King had thus made his way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on the morning of December 4, 1942, three weeks after Torch. Alert to the dangers of premature leaks, rumor, and outright hostility among Republican politicians and newspaper owners who still hated him for his New Deal program, the President was chary of committing thoughts to paper lest they be used against him. Thankfully, the Canadian prime minister dictated each night a careful record of his day—and it is to this diary we owe our most authentic account of the President’s military and political strategy for ending the war, and the peace he hoped to mold thereafter, before leaving for Africa.
Commander in Chief Page 3
