One result was a close rapport between the President and his military chieftains. He often volunteered the observation that he had never overruled his staff. “We haven’t had any basic differences,” he said, referring to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “and even haven’t had any minor disagreements.” This was true only in the narrow sense that the Joint Chiefs may never have come up with a firm and final plan that was flatly vetoed by the Commander in Chief; in fact, he had overridden the advice of military advisers in deciding on the invasion of Africa and in other decisions, and many a showdown was averted because the military men knew the President’s views and never allowed disagreements to come to a head. The significant fact is that the President saw such a congruence and even boasted about it. In the occasional real disputes between the President and the Chiefs, he tried to win his way by quiet pressure and maneuver; he would not permit a showdown.
Even when the President felt strongly about an issue for political reasons, he was reluctant to overrule the military. Such an issue was the noncommissioning of Fiorello La Guardia. Son of an army bandmaster, reared on western army posts, proud of his World War I service as an aviator, the Mayor had been eager to join Eisenhower’s civil-affairs staff. The “Little Flower” saw a great role for himself in Italy, but in any event he wanted to be in uniform, especially that of a brigadier general.
Roosevelt cabled to Eisenhower asking him to put La Guardia on his staff. Eisenhower agreed but complained to the War Department. Stimson and Marshall intervened at the White House just in time to try to persuade the President not to make La Guardia a brigadier general, but to commission him a colonel and send him to Charlottesville for civil-affairs training. “Eternal vigilance is the price of efficiency in this curious Administration,” Stimson grumbled. When McCloy told the Mayor of the decision, La Guardia came to Washington to see Stimson. The Secretary reported to Roosevelt on the interview that had followed.
“1. I told him that there were two lines, of which he could follow either but not both. He could be a soldier or he could be a propagandist. He couldn’t do both. The Army does not handle propaganda.
“2. As a friend I strongly advised him to remain in his present pulpit of the mayoralty and to use his influence with Italians from there; that his words would carry much further than if he was a civilian soldier, let alone a make-believe General….”
Roosevelt replied in the stiffest letter he had ever sent a senior Cabinet member.
“Frankly, I think you have this LaGuardia business all wrong.
“I do not agree with your paragraph #1 wherein you told him that he could be a soldier or he could be a propagandist and that he could not be both.
“In view of my knowledge of literally hundreds of officers that you have commissioned out of public life who are neither soldiers or propagandists, I do not see how you could offer him one of the two alternatives….
“I do not like your second paragraph wherein you suggested that he ought not to be a make-believe General. In the strict sense of the word, you have a great many make-believe Generals….
“I do not think that LaGuardia wants ‘adventure.’ I think that is imputing a motive to him which is not strictly fair to him. Like most people wth red blood, he does hope he can get war service….”
Stimson answered with a long placating letter, but did not retreat an inch. A month later Roosevelt spoke up for La Guardia in a brief conversation with Stimson, though only mildly, and a few months later was still talking to the Secretary about a possible reconsideration. But La Guardia never got his commission.
Even when the President might have had a gust of public feeling behind him he refrained from interfering in military matters. He refused to intervene when an army general, in a much-publicized action, punished soldiers who had “yoo-hooed” at him while he was playing golf. When reporters pressed him to comment on the hubbub over Patton’s slapping two soldiers in Sicily, the President reminded them of the story about Lincoln, who had said when informed that his successful commander drank, “It must be a good brand of liquor.” Nor did he intervene later when Patton avowed that Britain and the United States would run the world of the future. For a highly political man Roosevelt had shown remarkable restraint in influencing the selection of generals. Even Stimson had granted that his record “was unique in American war history for its scrupulous abstention from personal and political pressure.” At the same time, as Commander in Chief, he did not hesitate to propose specific ideas and changes to the military. He personally authorized the Navy to take extra risks in Atlantic convoying because of the need for emergency tonnage in Africa. He queried King as to whether carrier catapults had been brought into action in Pacific fighting, and Knox and Leahy as to the relative merits of several destroyers as against one heavy cruiser in protecting carriers. He suggested that carriers cope with suicide air attacks by improvising masts and wire on flight decks to be raised and lowered quickly, like barrage balloons. He gave special instructions to both the Army and the Navy about the need to rotate personnel. Yet in making these interventions—especially to the Navy—the Commander in Chief seemed to be acting as a leader of the team rather than as a civilian outsider.
Nor, in contrast to some of his predecessors, did he overturn many sentences following courts-martial. The exceptions are notable. He was vastly amused, in reviewing the dismissal from the Marine Corps of a young second lieutenant, to discover that the young man had simply allowed a sergeant to shoot a “limping” calf for a steak meal, outside the naval reservation at Guantanamo. The President put him on probation for a year—“This man must be taught not to shoot calves”—and seemed surprised that Marine Corps headquarters was distressed. He also put on probation a Navy nurse who had gone absent without leave at Norfolk in order to join her sailor husband for a delayed honeymoon. Hassett pleaded leniency for her. It was arbitrary to refuse her request to join her husband for a honeymoon, he argued. “It was arbitrary for her to go A.W.O.L.,” the President countered.
From the start the President had protected his role as Commander in Chief. In appointing Leahy he had made clear that the Admiral would be a leg man, a collector of military advice, a summarizer—“whatever’s necessary from the point of view of the Commander in Chief.” The reporters did not quite understand. Would Leahy be Chief of Staff to the United Nations strategic command?
“He will be Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief….”
“He will definitely be chief of staff?”
“To the Commander in Chief,” the President put in amid laughter.
“Yes, sir.”
“Of the Army and Navy, Mr. President?”
“No. To the Commander in Chief.” More laughter.
The President’s job description was so predictive of what Leahy would do for the rest of the war that years later the Admiral used it to describe his work at the White House. Perhaps it was not strange that Leahy’s assignment remained much the same over the years, for Roosevelt’s whole command structure was remarkably stable. He did not hire and fire commanders as Lincoln did. The men who started out with him—Stimson, Marshall, King, Arnold, Leahy—were with him at the end. Only Knox and Stark were missing, the first because of his death, the second a casualty of feeling after Pearl Harbor. Even substituting Marshall for Eisenhower was for the President too much of a disruption of a settled array of relationships.
How, then, did Roosevelt withdraw from this comfortable interplay when political and strategic considerations demanded? The paradox of civil-military relations, William Emerson has pointed out, is that “in the strategic sphere, in all that concerns the structure and deployment of military forces, political leadership must be responsive to technical military opinion and advice, but it must, at whatever cost, shape and direct the military instrument to support and serve its own purposes. ‘War,’ as Clausewitz pointed out, ‘has its own grammar but not its own logic.’ ” The framers of the Constitution had given the President, as Alexander Hamilton said, “the
supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces, as first general and admiral of the confederacy,” and events since 1787, including the revolution in war making, had enormously broadened the Commander in Chief’s military powers and political responsibilities. He could delegate some of these powers but not, ultimately, the responsibility.
Roosevelt tried to resolve the paradox—to the extent he recognized it—by splitting his military role from his political. As Commander in Chief he left major military planning decisions in the hands of his Joint Chiefs and military planners. His differences with his chiefs over military policy arose not because he was following political objectives and they were pursuing military ones, but because of differing views as to correct military policy. In the months before and after Pearl Harbor he was bent on bringing about that concert of Anglo-American power that would best contain Hitler, while his chiefs were more concerned with husbanding American war production for their poorly equipped forces. The Joint Chiefs themselves were none too united, with Marshall eager to build up ground power in Britain, King naval power in the Pacific, and Arnold air power everywhere. Even so, most of the military disagreements between the President and his chiefs occurred in the early and middle phases of the war. As the war progressed the military thinking of Commander in Chief and Joint Chiefs converged, partly because of their increasing rapport, but mainly because the military build-up and Soviet as well as American military needs now called for the strategy that the Chiefs had long pressed—a central blow at Germany through France.
Meantime Roosevelt pursued some of his political goals separately. He clung tenaciously—almost fanatically—to his unconditional-surrender doctrine in the face of misgivings even among the military. He not only rejected their queries but seemed to reject the very notion that the military had a right to raise them. This seemed a bit odd, since the military would have to apply the doctrine in the first stages of surrender, and since the President’s great precedent for the doctrine was a confrontation between two generals.
It was he, the Commander in Chief, who would do the coordinating of the political and the military. Such co-ordination called for an almost philosophical detachment in the White House, a capacity to look at things whole, to avoid the dangers of immediacy, opportunism, expediency, piecemeal planning. But to the extent that Roosevelt immersed himself in the role of the soldier and of the Commander in Chief, he was unable to take that balanced and comprehensive view of things that properly arrayed the military against the political, the short-run against the long, the psychological against the operational, the principled against the expedient. And he had no strategic staff in the White House to help him do this. Hopkins had served in this capacity to some degree, but he was too much of an operator like the President, and toward the end too ill and exhausted, to satisfy such a vital need.
Still, if Roosevelt and his fellow soldiers sought victory for its own sake too keenly, it was in part because the American people wanted a simple military victory. For most Americans, as Louis Morton has said, “war was an aberration, a nasty business to be got over with….Postwar politics only complicated the problem and delayed the end. Beat the bully and bring the boys home—that was the American approach to war.” And to make military victory the highest goal of the nation, as Morton further suggests, both constricts strategy and overburdens the armed forces.
Roosevelt’s role as Commander in Chief contrasted significantly with Churchill’s. The Prime Minister met frequently with his Joint Chiefs—often twice a day—and badgered them with chits that went into major details of planning and tactics. As his own Minister of Defence he felt free to communicate directly with theater commanders and to advise them on operations, though generally he left final decisions with the men in the field. Churchill was more disposed than Roosevelt to bring new men into top command positions. Valid or not, his military plans and political goals were closely related. Roosevelt seldom held formal meetings with his Joint Chiefs of Staff, though he was in close touch with them individually and through Leahy. He rarely pressed and never hectored them. The apparent result was considerable autonomy for the JCS, but only within a community of outlook long nurtured between the Commander in Chief and his fellow soldiers in the Pentagon and Navy Building.
Stalin on this score resembled Churchill more than Roosevelt. Major and sometimes minor battle plans were cleared with the Kremlin, though younger generals coming to the top of the heap on the basis of performance won more and more freedom of initiative. Marshal Georgi Zhukov found Stalin clearheaded, businesslike, and willing to be differed with. Stalin, according to Isaac Deutscher, was in effect his own commander in chief, minister of defense, quartermaster, minister of supply, foreign minister, and even his own chef de protocole. Neither Stalin nor Roosevelt imposed military dogmas or blueprints on his commanders; both acted as arbiters and adjusters. Stalin’s donning of a marshal’s uniform bespoke his solidarity with the Red Army, while Roosevelt symbolically donned uniform in becoming a soldier among soldiers.
Hitler prodded and harangued and bullied his generals. He followed operations minutely and intervened daily, sometimes hourly. If Roosevelt occasionally complained that his military planners were conservative and exaggerated the difficulties, Hitler castigated his to their faces as incompetents, cowards, nincompoops, and he sacked generals who retreated in violation of his orders. Hitler made himself Commander in Chief of the Army—“a little matter of operational command,” he told General Franz Haider, “something anyone can do”—as well as Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces.
Still, whatever small difficulties the President had with the military could not compare with Hitler’s. In July, as it became clear that the Allies were in France to stay, the disaffection among German officers erupted in a plot to kill the Führer. The bomb went off in the conference room at the Wolfsschanze headquarters; Hitler survived.
The President got news of the attempt just before leaving San Diego for his journey to Honolulu on the Baltimore. He had a flicker of hope that the German “revolt” might get worse, but reports arrived that Hitler had quickly established control of the situation. Three days before, Premier Tojo had resigned, with his entire Cabinet, on the announcement of the fall of Saipan. Roosevelt could not be dismissed by an Emperor or deposed by ministers or generals. But he was the only military commander who could be sacked by the voters. As his destroyer neared Puget Sound his mind was on the presidential election, which was already well under way.
SEVENTEEN The Grand Referendum
THERE IS SOMETHING BOTH strange and sublime about a great democracy conducting free elections in the midst of total war. Strange because at the very time a people is most unified over its goals and most determined to achieve them it divides into contending parties, mobilizes behind opposing doctrines, and pits gladiator against gladiator in the electoral arena. Sublime because in the act of holding an election a people reaffirms its faith in the democratic process despite all the compelling reasons to suspend it. Even Britain, a seedbed of democratic practice, postponed general elections during World War II, as in the first war.
Some doubted that the nation—or at least Roosevelt—could go through with a wartime presidential election. At a press conference early in February a reporter mentioned rumors in the anti-Roosevelt press that the election would be called off. Roosevelt pounced on him.
“How?”
“Well, I don’t know. That is what I want you to tell me.”
“Well, you see,” Roosevelt said, “you have come to the wrong place, because—gosh—all these people around town haven’t read the Constitution. Unfortunately, I have.”
An Englishman observing the American scene early in 1944 marveled at the differences in Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s situations. The Prime Minister had the backing of a united nation, S. K. Ratcliffe noted, while the President moved in an atmosphere of conflict—of political bitterness, industrial discord, racial tension, press opposition, Democratic party defections—and �
�of an enmity against him so intense and persistent that for a parallel in Britain we would have to go far back.”
The White House mail reflected the bitterness. “In conclusion candidate Roosevelt,” wrote a Californian, “you are a politician I would not trust; for you use men to promote your desire for power and more power and when their usefulness is at an end, they are cast aside, as you double-crossed Al Smith at the 1932 Chicago Convention in your deal with Hearst (whom you now revile), McAdoo and Garner. Both you and your wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, have done more during your incumbency to promote and stir up class, racial hatreds….May God pardon you.” From a New Jerseyite: “The people of the U.S. of America do not like any longer boss rule, nor dictated by a machine….” Of the several hundred persons who wrote in against a fourth term some had specific complaints, some general, but many simply hated Roosevelt.
Many still loved him, or needed him. “Please President Roosevelt don’t let us down now in this world of sorrow and trouble. If we ever needed you is now. I believe within my heart God put you here in this world to be our Guiding Star….” Some letters came from organized groups; 6,100 steelworkers signed a petition, “We know that you are weary—yet we cannot afford to permit you to step down….” Few letters dealt with issues, programs, specific goals; here again a gap yawned between great cloudy war aims and peoples’ specific needs.
An undercurrent of worry about Roosevelt’s health ran through many letters from both friend and foe. From San Diego: “I don’t believe in working a good horse to death—so don’t try to carry the whole world on your shoulders.” From a woman in Brooklyn: “…You did many fine and wonderful things for this country, no doubt….Resign, retire to your New York State home rest—and in time enjoy the fruits of your endeavours.” One or two advised him to step down and head the peace delegation.
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