by Jay Winik
There were still others, an increasing number, who supported Roosevelt’s campaign pledges: help Britain, provide material aid, but stay out of the war.
The isolationist groups were the most vocal, particularly the America First Committee. It had a hefty membership of sixty thousand and was growing like “a house afire.” Yet bit by bit, indignation over the Nazis’ conquests deepened, and the ranks of isolationists in Congress thinned.
And after the evening of November 5, 1940, when Franklin Roosevelt was reelected president, America moved one step closer to war. As he had done in 1932 and 1936, a glowing Roosevelt, his necktie loosened and coat off, perched himself in the dining room of his boyhood home in Hyde Park and tabulated the voting returns. Elsewhere in the residence, family and friends nibbled on toast and forkfuls of scrambled eggs, while in the smoking room Teletype machines whirred, spitting out the figures. At midnight, while Luftwaffe bombers were attacking London, there was a loud whoop from the crowd waiting at Hyde Park, a band blared out songs of triumph, and ebullient Democrats paraded by torchlight across the lawn. Meanwhile, Roosevelt grandly puffed on a cigarette, waving his arms and grinning broadly. “We are facing difficult days in this country,” he told the well-wishers. “But I think you will find me in the future just the same Franklin Roosevelt you’ve known a great many years.” Through a combination of his own ambition and vanity and the urgency of the world war, Roosevelt had achieved something that had eluded all other presidents, including his cousin Theodore—a third term as president. On Election Day, the largest number of Americans ever went to the polls—50 million. Actually, Roosevelt won re-election by the smallest margin since Woodrow Wilson in 1916, but he still had enough of a mandate to come to the aid of a beleaguered Europe, if he so chose.
The question was: would he take it?
BACK IN WASHINGTON ROOSEVELT, as his train crawled into the capital, briefly basked in the adulation of his supporters. With his customary panache, the president doffed his old familiar campaign fedora to greet the roaring crowd. On the route from Union Station to the White House, children climbed on trees and boxes to get a better view as the presidential limousine rolled by. And hundreds of thousands of cheering spectators crowded Pennsylvania Avenue, waving little flags and chanting over and over again, “We want Roosevelt! We want Roosevelt!” until the president’s car disappeared into the grounds of the executive mansion. Yet despite his reelection, the president seemed strangely inattentive, even a bit irritable. The strain of his third presidential campaign had taken a toll on him, and increasingly, the situation in Europe was doing the same. “The more I sleep,” the president muttered one day, “the more I want to sleep.”
However, sleep was a luxury he didn’t have.
During the Battle of Britain, while the Germans were ruthlessly bombing their cities, the British were also losing merchant ships in frightful numbers. In just ten days in mid-July 1940, the Germans sank or damaged eleven British destroyers. Before November 3, the British would lose over 400,000 tons of shipping as a result of sinkings. Churchill was despondent. Three times in June he had urgently requested destroyers from the Americans, calling the situation a “matter of life and death.” King George VI himself contacted Roosevelt to beg for aid “before it is too late.” Yet Roosevelt fretted about political reaction from Congress. On July 21, 1940, Churchill again sent Roosevelt an impassioned request for fifty or sixty U.S. destroyers, to be provided “at once.”
“Mr. President,” he wrote, “with great respect I must tell you that in the long history of the world this is a thing to do now.”
Roosevelt wanted to help, and so did some prominent Americans who called themselves the Century Group. They waged a national campaign to provide political running room for Roosevelt to take action. But Congress remained firmly resistant—Senator Claude Pepper, Roosevelt’s ally, stonily informed the president that a bill allowing destroyers to be transferred to Britain “had no chance of passing.” Eventually Attorney General Robert Jackson came up with the idea that Congress could be bypassed altogether. The president, Jackson argued, could provide the destroyers—in truth, they were old destroyers badly in need of refurbishing, and only half a dozen of them would be brought into action by the end of 1940—on his own authority by “trading them” for access to British bases in the Caribbean for ninety-nine years. Roosevelt agreed, and sent a wire about the breakthrough to Churchill, who also immediately agreed. Only then did the president inform Congress. Almost innocuously, he announced the deal from the sitting room of his private car on the presidential train, forty-five minutes from a dilapidated ordnance plant he had been inspecting in West Virginia. With a mischievous smile, his eyes rolling, he made the stunning announcement to a few reporters, declaring this to be “the most important action in the reinforcement of our national defense since the Louisiana purchase.”
Immediately, there was an uproar. The St. Louis Post Dispatch denounced Roosevelt as “America’s first dictator.” Not to be outdone, the Republicans’ presidential nominee of 1940, Wendell Willkie, called Roosevelt the most “arbitrary of any president in the history of the U.S.” On the floor of the House, Representative Frances Bolton wondered aloud if Roosevelt could do this without consulting Congress adding, “God alone knows what he will do” when America’s boys were drafted.
Nevertheless, the arrangement for the bases was at best a stopgap. Although Hitler had shelved his planned invasion of Britain—Operation Sea Lion—for the time being, the Nazis’ onslaught was continuing. By December, cables from Whitehall to the White House poured in through special coding machines, detailing the withering German attacks. Landmarks, factories, houses, corner pubs, and the House of Commons were damaged or obliterated. And there was an equally devastating problem: Britain was now running out of money. Germany could boost its war effort by plundering the industrial powers it had conquered—France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Czechoslovakia—and could draw slave labor from Poland. But if Britain suffered economic strangulation, it could be defeated within the year.
Roosevelt’s cabinet met hurriedly on December 3 and struggled with the question of how to help a beleaguered Britain. The cabinet members glumly concluded that within thirty days a financially strapped England would deplete its gold and dollar reserves, and be unable to pay for much-needed supplies. American army chiefs agreed that the United States’ defense production facilities could be boosted, but financing remained a question, as did transferring military assets to Britain. Henry Stimson, the secretary of war, argued that the time for temporizing was over, and that the whole matter should be presented to Congress. His colleagues agreed. What they couldn’t agree on was how Roosevelt would react. Would he be willing to take this to Capitol Hill? Or would that only give ammunition to the isolationist barons in the legislature?
In England, Churchill labored for weeks on another impassioned letter to the president, one that the prime minister described as among the “most important” of his life. He began with a dazzling overview of the strategic equation. On its own, he argued, Britain would be unable to match the German armies massed across Europe. Nevertheless, he observed that “the decision for 1941 lies upon the seas.” However, confirming what Roosevelt’s cabinet already knew, he said that the moment fast “approaches when we shall no longer be able to pay cash for shipping and supplies.” Churchill hastened to add that England could withstand “the shattering of our dwellings” and “the slaughter of our civilian population by indiscriminate air attacks.” But what it could not withstand was a “less sudden and less spectacular but equally deadly danger”—the inability to feed its people and import the munitions that it needed. He added a hopeful note: “You may be assured that we shall prove ourselves ready to suffer and sacrifice to the utmost for the Cause.” And he put the matter to the president squarely: “If, as I believe, you are convinced, Mr. President, that the defeat of the Nazi and fascist tyranny is a matter of high consequence to the people of the United States . . . yo
u will regard this letter not as an appeal for aid, but as a statement of the minimum action necessary to achieve our common purpose.”
The letter was sent across the Atlantic as Roosevelt was in the Caribbean on a ten-day cruise aboard the USS Tuscaloosa. He knew that further evasion in public and further manipulation in private would no longer suffice, and he was well aware that the enemy was watching him closely, taking his measure. He was also keenly aware that he had a momentous decision to make. Once and for all, he needed to show the world—Axis powers and friends alike—what he stood for. Churchill’s letter would crystallize his course of action.
On board the Tuscaloosa, the president worked only a couple of hours a day. Otherwise, he spent time with colonial officials, played poker, fished, sunned himself while reading detective stories, napped after lunch, and relaxed by watching movies; he saw Betty Grable in Tin Pan Alley and Gary Cooper in Northwest Mounted Police. To be sure, each day background papers and briefing documents were brought to him by navy seaplanes, but to those who watched him, it appeared that he simply set them aside. By all accounts the weary president was, in Harry Hopkins’s words, “refueling” himself.
But on receiving Churchill’s letter, Roosevelt had grave misgivings. He ceased being social: for two straight days, he shut himself off and sat alone in his deck chair, brooding “silently,” reading and rereading the letter, wondering how the United States could help Britain. He could send arms, planes, and guns to Britain as a gift, but that would never be accepted by the American people. He could lend money to Britain, but that idea wouldn’t be accepted either. He could ask for repeal of the Neutrality Act, but for him, that was still politically a nonstarter. At no point did he ask for his cabinet’s advice. Nor did he request any studies by his staff. Nor did he pick up the telephone and sound out his influential allies in the Senate—or for that matter, consult with his good friend, his eyes and ears, the tough-talking, wily Harry Hopkins. It seemed the only advice that he took on the Tuscaloosa came from Ernest Hemingway, who sent word to him about how to catch big fish using a pork rind. (When the president tried Hemingway’s method, he failed.)
Finally, one evening Roosevelt had an epiphany regarding the question of Britain’s troubled finances. For some time he had been mulling over how to lease cargo ships to Britain for the balance of the war. If the United States could do this for ships, why not for planes or guns or other weaponry? If Hitler was truly to be stopped, he reasoned, the United States should simply lend Britain whatever it required, and at some undefined point in the distant future, after the war had ceased, the English would return whatever they had borrowed, or repay not in dollars but in kind. Inspired by the “fire hose” analogy that he first used in 1916, Roosevelt believed he had found his solution—famously dubbed Lend-Lease. It was unclear whether the program was even legal, but as Hopkins noted, “there wasn’t a doubt in his mind that he’d find a way to do it.” It proved to be one of the boldest strokes in Roosevelt’s long, storied career, and the ensuing couple of weeks would constitute one of the most critical periods in his presidency. Henry Morgenthau, his secretary of the treasury, went so far as to call it Roosevelt’s “greatest effort of all his years in office.” Actually, the approach was pure fiction—it was unrealistic to suppose that after the war the British would return a fleet of weathered, rusty vessels or tens of thousands of battered tanks and dirt-smudged guns. In truth, the plan constituted an outright gift. But politically, the Lend-Lease was a brilliant concept, and militarily, even more so.
And it was vintage Roosevelt, another example of how he could boldly circumvent his entire bureaucracy, and Congress for that matter, when he set his mind to it.
WHEN HE RETURNED TO the White House on December 16, the president convened numerous meetings with his restless aides. Here was Roosevelt at his best—focused, thinking big, deft. After ironing out the details, he called reporters into his office for a press conference, claiming that there wasn’t any “particular news.” But of course there was. He dismissed any talk about sending arms, guns, and planes to Britain as a gift. No, he insisted, there was a far better way. Strictly from the American point of view, he said, the United States should ramp up its production facilities and only then “either lease or sell the materials, subject to mortgage” to the British.
In a deceptively playful tone he continued, “Now what I am trying to do is to eliminate the dollar sign. That is something brand-new in the thoughts of practically everybody in this room—get rid of the silly, foolish old dollar sign.” Reporters began shaking their heads. What on earth was the president talking about? Roosevelt told them. “Well, let me give you an illustration: suppose my neighbor’s home catches on fire, and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him to put out his fire. Now what do I do? I don’t say before that operation, ‘Neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15; you have to pay me $15 for it.’ . . . I don’t want $15—I want my garden hose back after the fire is over. All right. If it goes through the fire all right, intact, without any damage to it, he gives it back to me and thanks me very much for the use of it.”
In other words, he intimated, America’s arsenal and war matériel were no good if they were simply lying in storage; they would be of far greater use on the battlefield in the hands of the fighting British. After the war America would then be repaid “leaving out the dollar mark and substituting for it a gentleman’s obligation in kind.” The president smiled. “I think you all get it.”
Not entirely. But as Roosevelt laid out his plan, it was quite clear that the reporters were the orchestra and he was their conductor. The reporters peppered him with questions. Did this mean America was inching toward getting into the war? Roosevelt shook his head. No. Did this mean, as Congress would later ask, that the U.S. Navy would have to help in convoying munitions? No again. How about a congressional nod—would he need to seek it? Yes, he would. So adroit was Roosevelt that the press failed to ask him the single most important question: what did “in-kind” repayment actually mean, and wasn’t this really an outright gift?
Reaction abroad was striking. Churchill called Lend-Lease “the most unsordid act in history,” and a Nazi spokesman ridiculed Roosevelt’s policy of “pinpricks, . . . insults, and moral aggression.”
Now, for Roosevelt, it was time to sell the Lend-Lease program to the nation, in one of the most significant fireside chats of his presidency. On Sunday, December 29, at 6:40 p.m. he visited the White House physician’s office, as he did before many major speeches, for treatment to clear his sinuses and keep his vocal cords moist. He may even have had a quarter-solution cocaine wash, which was legal at the time, flushed through his nose. Then Arthur Prettyman wheeled the president into the oval Diplomatic Reception Room, where technicians had finished setting up the tangle of wires and microphones for Roosevelt’s address to the nation. He was maneuvered behind a simple wooden desk bearing only microphones emblazoned NBC, CBS, and MBS. Clustered nearby was a small, transfixed group: his most important cabinet members, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau; his closest family members, Eleanor Roosevelt and his mother, Sara; and a key ally from the Senate, the shrewd, hard-bargaining majority leader, Alben Barkley.
The assembled listeners could see that Roosevelt’s tan was gone and there were circles of fatigue under his eyes, but he was relaxed and his voice as musical and robust as always. At nine o’clock, when he started to speak, people poured out of diners and movie theaters to hear him. They crowded around radios in their living rooms and turned up the volume. The rare few who owned television sets turned them on. For the speech, some 70 percent of Americans hung on every word.
“This is not a fireside chat on the war,” Roosevelt told the nation. Rather, “it is a talk on national security; because the nub of the whole purpose of your president is to keep you now, and your children later, and
your grandchildren much later, out of a last-ditch war for the preservation of American independence.” He paused for emphasis. “Never before since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock has our American civilization been in such danger as now. . . . The Nazi masters of Germany have made it clear that they intend not only to dominate all life and thought in their own country, but also to enslave the whole of Europe, and then to use the resources of Europe to dominate the rest of the world.”
The president was unsparing in his assessment of Nazi aggression and of those, at home and abroad, who sought to justify it. “The experience of the past two years has proven beyond doubt that no nation can appease the Nazis. No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it. There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness.” He derided those who insisted that the United States should throw its influence “into the scale of a dictated peace,” “a negotiated peace,” with a “gang of outlaws.” This would only, he said, “lead Americans to pay tribute to save your own skins.” America must not, he now preached, “acquiesce” in Europe’s defeat, “submit tamely” to an Axis victory, or “wait our turn” to be the target of an attack later on. This would only embolden Germany and the Axis powers in their unremitting drive to subjugate the world, the outcome of which would be “all of us and all the Americas . . . living at the point of a gun.”
Yet he remained sly. For those who believed this was a prelude to America’s directly entering the war, he resoundingly dismissed such ideas as “deliberate untruths.” Yes, he acknowledged, there was a profound “risk in any course we may take,” but Americans had no choice but to abandon the notion of “business as usual.” To drive this point home, he added, “We well know that we cannot escape danger, or the fear of danger, by crawling into bed and pulling the covers over our heads.
