Commander in Chief

by Nigel Hamilton

  Burgeoning pride at the success of the Torch invasion and MacArthur’s advances in the Pacific—where, in the battle of the Bismarck Sea, American B-25s carrying five-second five-hundred-pound bombs, carried out “the most devastating air attack on ships in the entire war,” in the words of naval historian S. E. Morison8 (sinking seven of the eight Japanese transports seeking to reinforce Lae following the evacuation of Guadalcanal)—left the noninterventionist voices of Charles Lindbergh, Joseph P. Kennedy, and Senators William Borah, Robert LaFollette, Hiram Johnson, Arthur Vandenberg, and Burton K. Wheeler looking like defeatists. The Casablanca summit—trumpeted in newspaper reports and pictures, as well as in movie-house newsreels shown across the country—lent a moral grandeur to the turnaround in the fortunes of war: photographs of brave, cigar-wielding Winston Churchill sitting beside the President, declaring himself to be his “active lieutenant,” French generals shaking hands, the President inspecting and eating with U.S. forces in the field . . . Even Lord Halifax, the British ambassador, was full of congratulations when writing to the Prime Minister, extolling the results of the Casablanca Conference and noting in his diary how, in America, Republicans and Democrats were beginning to talk of the future in a new and wholly different way.

  Lord Halifax was learning, himself, to see the world in a different way. Since his appointment to the embassy and America’s entry into the war, he had had to meet with people of every stripe and to learn the complexities and nuances of the American political system, with its checks and balances—and vituperative press. As a result Halifax had become a more astute observer of trends in the United States than in his home country, where his aristocratic airs and way of life (hunting, shooting) had inured him, as a notorious appeaser, to the fact that the younger, post–World War I generation would, in fact, fight Hitler—but not for a colonialist, class-riven British Empire they no longer believed in. The President’s latest postwar vision, which Roosevelt had shared with him in private talks at the White House, struck Ambassador Halifax not only as positive, but one that even former isolationist Americans seemed more and more willing to embrace. Even the former U.S. president, Herbert Hoover, who lunched with Lord Halifax on January 8, 1943, after the President’s address to Congress, had expressed a more “friendly” view of America’s association with Britain than before, the ambassador had found. “We discussed a great many post war things,” Halifax recorded in his diary—relieved to hear the former president was “absolutely convinced of the necessity of our working together” as nations. “On the whole I was cheered by my talk with him and by his estimate of what American public opinion will accept in the way of international cooperation.” Hitherto, public opinion had opposed any American treaty or involvement with other countries that could be “represented as infringement of [American] national sovereignty. This was the rock on which [President] Wilson broke—the idea that some League or conference should dictate United States action.” But now—at least in Hoover’s opinion—public opinion was changing, as were former president Hoover’s own attitudes. “These difficulties would not in his view arise if you had some international organisation that would content itself with expressing moral opinions and leave it to the joint policemen, whom he sees as the United States, ourselves, and, if she will play, Russia, to take action on their own,” Halifax noted. The United Nations—or “whatever the international body was” that would be set up at the war’s end—would “make a report and recommendation to the policemen,” which the policemen could either carry out or not.9

  This exploratory notion of a United Nations Security Council was a momentous reversal—and when in Washington Lord Halifax addressed assembled British consuls from main U.S. cities, several days later, the ambassador advised them to push the notion of the “British Commonwealth,” rather than “Empire,” as having “a biggish part to play” in the coming times—yet to exercise “self-restraint, when Americans threw their weight around.”

  America, henceforth, would be top dog, Halifax made clear. From that meeting the ambassador had then gone to the State Department “to discuss the draft of a scheme for what the Americans call the rehabilitation of the world.”10

  Rehabilitation it certainly would be. The Russian ambassador, Maxim Litvinov, was present at the State Department meeting, too. “We got along fairly well and all did our best to be accommodating to one another. Some difference of opinion as to whether the inner management committee of the thing should be composed of the four Powers,” as a security council, “or, as we [British] had suggested, seven”—which would “permit Canada as a great supplier to be on [it], probably a South American, and one of the smaller European allies. Litvinoff made a strong argument about this thing being used as a pattern for the future, and consequently the importance of keeping the four big powers undiluted. I thought there was a good deal in his argument,” Halifax noted, approving the Russian’s view.11

  Ten days later, on January 18, 1943, barely a week after the President’s State of the Union address, Halifax was noting that Dr. Alan Valentine, president of the University of Rochester—a Democrat who had campaigned for the Republican Wendell Willkie in the 1940 presidential election, organizing “Democrats for Willkie” in opposition to a third term for FDR—“did not think there was much danger of isolation.” In fact, Valentine now found Willkie “too emotional and immature.”12 A new “American State [Department] book about American policy in the last ten years” had shown “how paralyzed their Executive was,” after World War I, “owing to the prevalence of isolationist thought.”13 Even Willkie himself, when Halifax dined with him on January 27, emphasized the change of Republican mind—now claiming “that historically the Republican party had not been isolationist and had only accidentally been thrown into isolationism after the last war by Wilson’s attempt to monopolise the international ticket. He was apprehensive lest something of the kind should happen again, and spoke very earnestly about the necessity of nothing being said in British quarters” of Republicans backing away from an internationalist stance, lest this actually revive isolationist sentiment. “He spoke with great certainty, as did Claire Luce”—a Republican congresswoman from Connecticut and wife of the publisher of Life magazine—“about the Republican party in 1944 being victorious.”14

  By the time the President returned from North Africa, therefore, it had been to find his utopian hen had laid its eggs—indeed, the next day Halifax noted a long talk with Henry Luce “about the prospects of the Republican Party being isolationist after the war.” Luce dismissed the very idea, just as Willkie had—in fact claimed, like Willkie, that isolationism had been an aberration—the United States having “only accidentally got into that line in 1920,” according to Luce. Halifax was then stunned as Luce proceeded to advance Roosevelt’s internationalist agenda. “On the post-war business Luce said that he wanted to make a careful examination of just what an international police force might mean,” but was not averse to it. “He said that there had been a curious revolution in American feeling in the last few years”—in fact, in the last few weeks. “A short time ago, if you had listened to any argument between the isolationists and internationalists, the isolationists would at once have clinched the argument by saying: ‘You want to police the world, do you?’ which was generally held to be conclusive against it. Now, he said, American public opinion was completely convinced that an international police force was desirable.”15

  When Halifax went to see the President in person at the White House on February 15, he was told that columnist Walter Lippmann, no less, was talking of “the United States being established in some European base after the war,” so that “any infraction of European peace” should at once be addressed: the forerunner of NATO.16

  20

  Health Issues

  THOUGH IT WAS too early to crow, the President thus seemed decidedly proud, Halifax found. His step-by-step military strategy for prosecuting the war had been set in stone at the Casablanca Conference—with the target, in w
riting, of almost a million U.S. troops and their weapons to be conveyed to Britain by December 31, 1943, ready to launch a full-scale invasion across the English Channel in April or May 1944. As Averell Harriman noted, based on his conference notes, a “new joint command (COSSAC, acronym for Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander) was created to begin immediate planning for this climactic operation known later as Overlord.”1

  The postwar world, too, with luck, might well turn out the way the President envisioned, with the growing support of the American public, the Republican Party, and America’s British partners—though the latter would have a difficult row to hoe if they chose to reestablish their colonial empire as Churchill wished.

  It was in this context that FDR’s health raised some concern, however. Although in the immediate aftermath of his trip to Africa Roosevelt had seemed energized and rejuvenated, in the weeks following the Casablanca Conference it was evident that the journey had taken a physical toll on the President. At least to those in close contact with him. His cousin Daisy, especially.

  Daisy Suckley had been relieved to see the President looking so well on his return—yet she remained disappointed by the meager medical attention her hero appeared to be receiving as president of the United States. After ten years in the Oval Office, Mr. Roosevelt still relied on a simple U.S. Navy doctor as his personal White House physician: Dr. Ross McIntire, who’d been on his staff since 1933 and could be relied upon “to keep a close mouth” about the President’s medical condition.

  McIntire was an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist by early training as an intern. He’d had an undistinguished record thereafter, becoming a simple naval dispensary physician, onboard and onshore. Nevertheless, he’d been recommended to the new president by former president Woodrow Wilson’s floundering doctor, Cary Grayson—one incompetent recommending another, it would be claimed.2 Beyond daily treatment of Roosevelt’s notorious sinus problems, McIntire appeared to do little for his patient other than keep at bay those doctors who might offer the President more expert medical attention, in view of his fragile health: practitioners who might equally, however, blab inadvertently to reporters employed by Colonel McCormick, owner of the Chicago Times-Herald, or Cissy Patterson, owner of the Washington Times-Herald—both of them sworn enemies of the Democratic president and determined to oppose his reelection if he stood for a fourth term.

  Despite McIntire’s mediocre medical talents, the President, then, had been content to continue with a single doctor—in fact, in 1938 Roosevelt had appointed McIntire surgeon general of the U.S. Navy, in addition to his White House duties, and soon had him promoted to the rank of rear admiral—with responsibility for what became a vast naval medical system, involving 175,000 doctors, nurses, and professional medical staff. Such enlarged duties, however, were plainly incompatible with continuing daily care of the paralyzed chief executive.

  Such was Roosevelt’s authority, however, that by 1943 no one dared question McIntire’s solitary supervision of the President, in spite of worrying signs of deterioration in FDR’s health, even in the run-up to his historic flight to Africa.

  Staying with the President on December 4, 1942, for example, the Canadian prime minister, Mackenzie King, had been alarmed by the President’s physical condition. When he’d first gone in to see him, King reflected, “the President was smoking a cigarette in bed while reading the papers. I felt that even at that hour of the morning, he seemed a little tired and breath still a bit short.”3

  Given the President’s vast responsibilities and the fact that his mental acuity seemed in no way impaired, King had given no further thought to the matter. The trip to North Africa, meanwhile, had seemingly done wonders for his state of mind and body, the President’s staff felt on the President’s return, as did visitors to the White House. “The President was in fine form,” the secretary of war recorded in his diary on February 3—“one of the best and most friendly talks I have ever had. He was full of his trip, naturally, and interspersed our whole talk with stories and anecdotes.” Though he found them amusing, Stimson was nevertheless discouraged “to see how he clung to the ideal of doing all this sort of work himself.”4

  The war secretary was seventy-four and in excellent health; the President, sixty-two. Stimson noticed nothing amiss in Roosevelt’s form other than his messy approach to administration, which Stimson deplored. “He was very friendly but, as I expected, takes a different and thoroughly Rooseveltian view of what historic good administrative procedure has required in such a case as we have in North Africa,” the secretary noted. “He wants to do it all himself. He says he did settle all the matters that were troubling Eisenhower when he was over there”—and even claimed Robert Murphy was in North Africa not “as a diplomat to report to Hull but as a special appointee of his own to handle special matters on which he reported to Roosevelt direct. This was a truly Rooseveltian position. I told him frankly over the telephone that it was bad administration and asked him what a Cabinet was for and what Departments were for,” he recorded, “but I have small hopes of reforming him. The fault is Rooseveltian and deeply ingrained. Theodore Roosevelt had it to a certain extent but never anywhere nearly as much as this one.”5

  Stimson’s criticism of the President was well founded, though his recommendation, namely that the United States should simply administer French North Africa in the same way as the War Department had ruled Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, belied the secretary of war’s ongoing turf battle with Cordell Hull rather than the tricky realities of the situation. With regard to the President’s health, however, neither Stimson nor the majority of the President’s visitors seemed alert to any problems.

  Only Daisy Suckley paid attention to what was happening—or not happening. After she met with the President, at Hyde Park, she confided her concern to her diary—noting disorienting symptoms of transcontinental air travel that would later be called jet lag. “All his party have been feeling miserable since they got back,” she recorded on February 7. “He just hasn’t let himself give in until he got here—Then he ‘let go’ & feels exhausted—the President finding it hard, he said, to rise in the mornings, and sleeping late.”6

  Was it merely desynchronosis—disruption of circadian sleep rhythms—though, Daisy wondered? After Pearl Harbor the President had stopped swimming daily in the White House pool. He was still smoking several packs of cigarettes a day, but his doctor seemed to pay little or no attention to the President’s elevated blood pressure, or to his cardiac condition—despite the fact that there had been worries on that account even before the 1940 election, when he’d been beset by heart problems he couldn’t keep from those around him.

  “His color was bad; his face was lined and he appeared to be worn out. His jaw was swollen as a result of a tooth infection . . . And I learned there was worry over strain on Roosevelt’s heart,” the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, James Farley, recalled later.7 Bill Bullitt was more specific; he would claim that he’d been present at a White House dinner in early 1940 when the President had suffered “a very slight heart attack” and had collapsed.8

  A heart attack? It was little wonder McIntire had been concerned at the height the airplane would have to fly on its journey to Casablanca and then home. On the positive side, however, the President had shown the world he was on the top of his form at Casablanca. Even the dark areas beneath his eyes had vanished, people noticed. “He looks well,” Daisy acknowledged in her diary—her anxiety being more over the risk of a flying accident than his health at this stage. The plane carrying Averell Harriman and Brigadier Vivian Dykes—senior British aide to Field Marshal Dill in Washington—back to England had in fact crashed on landing in Wales. Though Harriman survived, Dykes had perished. As Daisy implored the President: “I told him we all thought he should not take the risks of such a trip.”9

  “Well—not for some time anyway,” the President had responded at Hyde Park, where he reclaimed Fala, his Scottie—hugging the woolly black
dog to his breast. When Daisy left to go back to her job at the president’s library, which had been created in 1939 and for which she had been working since 1941, “Fala looked at me,” she wrote, “but trotted after the P.”10

  Daisy was not convinced, however—and became less so when the President then fell ill again and again in February. The President’s physician showed little concern. “Allied successes lessened the nervous strain,” was all Dr. McIntire would later comment in a memoir he wrote, “and the President not only picked up weight but lost some of his care lines.”11

  Was the President really all right, though? Or were underlying, potentially serious health issues not being sufficiently addressed?

  To Daisy, his confidante, the President had once remarked that “he caught everything in sight,” as he put it. There was nothing new in this, he’d added—“all his life had been that way.”12 His near-fatal bout with virulent flu in 1918; his contracting of poliomyelitis in 1921; his repeated sinusitis; his collapses from possible heart or vascular failure—these were but the more dramatic examples of his proneness to infection and other ailments, he accepted.

  Illness was not something Roosevelt dwelt upon or paid much attention to—an attitude Eleanor, his wife, did not discourage, since it absolved her of marital anxieties at a moment when she herself was undertaking such a demanding schedule as First Lady at the White House, spokesperson for the underprivileged, and mother to six children, not to speak of grandchildren.

  This left Cousin Daisy, though, to worry all the more on behalf of the President. “The P. looked very tired, but did his usual part of ‘Exhibit A,’ as he calls it”—entertaining, for example, a party he was hosting at the White House on Valentine’s Day, February 14, without Eleanor, who’d flown to Indiana. “At nine, he said he had to go to work & left the guests, calling to me to go with him. He got on the sofa in his study and said he was exhausted—He looked it. He said: ‘I’m either Exhibit A, or left completely alone.’”13