by FDR
Praise for
FDR
“Miraculous … a careful, intelligent synopsis of the existing Roosevelt scholarship … and a meticulous re-interpretation of the man and his record … At last we have the biography that is right for the man.”
—The Washington Post
“Magisterial … The author’s eloquent synthesis of FDR’s complex and compelling life is remarkably executed and a joy to read.… This erudite but graceful volume illuminates FDR’s life for scholars, history buffs and casual readers alike.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“[A] remarkable, sympathetic biography … [Smith] does a fine job.”
—The New Yorker
“Compelling … richly researched … one of those monumental works that … does not lose sight of the individual at its heart.”
—The Denver Post
“An outstanding biography of ‘the most gifted American statesman of the twentieth century’ … an exemplary and highly readable work that ably explains why FDR merits continued honor.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A marvelous book.”
—The Dallas Morning News
“Especially deft … Smith vibrantly captures the complete drama of an American original.”
—Newark Star-Ledger
“An intricate network of personal detail … deeply moving.”
—The New York Sun
“Smith’s towering new biography brings the great man to vivid life once more, offering us a valuable chance to ponder again the crucial mystery of leadership.”
—JON MEACHAM, author of Franklin and Winston and American Gospel
“[Smith] is an accomplished biographer, and he lays out in the most charming prose the dynamics of a gifted politician.”
—The Washington Times
“This page-turner is the best single-volume biography available of America’s thirty-second president. Essential.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
ALSO BY JEAN EDWARD SMITH
Grant
John Marshall: Definer of a Nation
George Bush’s War
Lucius D. Clay: An American Life
The Conduct of American Foreign Policy Debated
(ED., WITH HERBERT M. LEVINE)
The Constitution and American Foreign Policy
Civil Liberties and Civil Rights Debated
(ED., WITH HERBERT M. LEVINE)
The Papers of General Lucius D. Clay (ED.)
Germany Beyond the Wall
Der Weg ins Dilemma
The Defense of Berlin
Copyright © 2007 by Jean Edward Smith
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint
of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, an imprint of
The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2007.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., for
permission to reprint brief excerpts from Working with Roosevelt by Samuel I. Rosenman,
copyright © 1952 by Harper & Brothers. Copyright renewed © 1980 by
Dorothy R. Rosenman, Robert Rosenman, and James R. Rowen. Used by permission.
Unless otherwise noted, the photographs in this work are courtesy of the Franklin D.
Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, Hyde Park, New York.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Smith, Jean Edward.
FDR / Jean Edward Smith.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-624-5
1. Roosevelt, Franklin D. (Franklin Delano), 1882–1945. 2. Presidents—United States—Biography. I. Title.
E807.S58 2007 973.917092—dc22 2006043087
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www.atrandom.com
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To the memory of my parents,
Eddyth and Jean—proud Mississippians
devoted to Franklin Roosevelt
HE LIFTED HIMSELF FROM HIS WHEELCHAIR
TO LIFT THIS NATION FROM ITS KNEES.
Preface
THREE PRESIDENTS DOMINATE American history: George Washington, who founded the country; Abraham Lincoln, who preserved it; and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who rescued it from economic collapse and then led it to victory in the greatest war of all time. Elected for an unprecedented four terms, Roosevelt proved the most gifted American statesman of the twentieth century. When he took office in 1933, one third of the nation was unemployed. Agriculture lay destitute. Factories were idle, businesses were closing their doors, and the banking system teetered on the brink of collapse. Violence lay just beneath the surface. The Hoover administration had deployed tanks and tear gas to drive a bedraggled remnant of World War I veterans (the Bonus Marchers) from Washington but otherwise appeared incapable of responding to the crisis.
Roosevelt seized the opportunity. He galvanized the nation with an inaugural address (“the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”) that ranks with Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, declared a banking holiday to restore confidence in the nation’s banks, and initiated a flurry of legislative proposals to put the country back on its feet. Under FDR’s energetic leadership the government became an active participant in the economic life of the nation. More important, he restored the country’s confidence. Roosevelt revolutionized the art of political campaigning, revitalized the Democratic party, and created a new national majority that included those previously cast aside. His fireside chats brought the presidency into every living room in America. And what may be more remarkable, he did this while paralyzed from the waist down. For the last twenty-three years of his life, Franklin Roosevelt could not stand unassisted.
The literature on the Roosevelt era is immense. Virtually every major participant has written his or her memoirs, scholars have filled library shelves with analytic studies, and the nation’s most prolific writers have addressed the New Deal, the Second World War, and the outsize personalities who dominated American life in the 1930s and ’40s. Biographies of Franklin Roosevelt are only slightly less numerous than those of Washington or Lincoln, and there is little that has not been said, somewhere, about the president. These works are easily accessible to the student of history, yet are seldom consulted by the general public. In recent years, biographies of lesser figures—Truman, MacArthur, Eisenhower, the numerous Kennedys—have shaped popular perceptions of the period. Rummaging through the life of Eleanor Roosevelt has become a cottage industry. As a result, Roosevelt himself has become a mythic figure, looming indistinctly out of the mist of the past.
The riddle for a biographer is to explain how this Hudson River aristocrat, a son of privilege who never depended on a paycheck, became the champion of the common man. The answer most frequently suggested is that the misfortune of polio changed Roosevelt. By conquering adversity he gained insight into the nature of suffering and found new sources of strength within himself. That is undoubtedly true. But it does not go far enough. FDR’s effort to recover from polio took him to Warm Springs, Georgia. Year after year at Warm Springs he was exposed to the brutal reality of rural poverty. All around him he saw hardworking people who were “ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” Roosevelt’s patrician instincts rebelled, and he began to formulate the economic ideas that came to fruition in the New Deal. As governor of New York when the Great Depression hit, FDR was the only state chief executive to organize extensive relief efforts. “Modern society, acting through its government
,” he said, “owes the definite obligation to prevent the starvation or the dire want of any of its fellow men and women who try to maintain themselves but cannot.”
Roosevelt was too talented to be confined by the circumstances of his birth. His devotion to his career and his conviction that he was a man of destiny far outweighed any tribal loyalty. A social conservative by instinct and upbringing, he did more to alter the relationship between ordinary citizens and their government than any other American. And he shaped our notion of the modern presidency. In that sense Roosevelt was a natural. He was not especially gifted in any field except politics. But in politics he had no equal.
Roosevelt knew the Democratic party better than anyone. It was said he could draw a line on a map from the East Coast to the West Coast and name every county the line intersected. In most counties he knew the Democratic leader and one or two officeholders as well. And he kept close watch on party patronage. His appointments were calculated not only to reward, but co-opt. As his first secretary of war, he appointed Utah isolationist George Dern. For secretary of state he chose conservative Tennessee senator Cordell Hull—a sheet anchor to protect the administration from carping redneck legislators. His vice president, hard-drinking John Nance Garner of Texas, former Speaker of the House, solidified southern support. To dole out federal money at the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, FDR chose conservative Texas banker Jesse Jones. When the Securities and Exchange Commission came into being, he appointed Joseph Kennedy to head it. “It takes a thief to catch a thief,” The Washington Post chortled.
FDR’s administrative style was a legendary mixture of straightforward delegation, flowchart responsibility, Machiavellian cunning, and crafty deception. James MacGregor Burns called him a lion and a fox. Frances Perkins, FDR’s long-serving secretary of labor, said Roosevelt was “the most complicated human being I have ever known.” He kept major decisions in his own hands, played his cards close to his chest, and enjoyed the consternation of opponents when his maneuvers were revealed. “I’m a juggler,” Roosevelt told Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. “I never let my right hand know what my left hand is doing.” Occasionally he overreached. His wrongheaded 1937 Court-packing scheme boomeranged badly, as did his ill-considered intervention in Democratic senatorial primaries in 1938. He made mistakes. Some were catastrophic, such as his 1937 decision to slash federal expenditures, precipitating the “Roosevelt recession” of 1938–39.
Roosevelt expected cabinet officers to run their own shows, but did not hesitate to enter the arena when an issue interested him. He handled the nation’s diplomacy largely through Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, a fellow Grotonian, and often ignored Secretary Hull. The Navy he ran through the chief of naval operations, Admiral William D. Leahy, who had skippered FDR’s yacht when Roosevelt was assistant secretary of the Navy. When he decided to replace Douglas MacArthur as Army chief of staff in 1934, he sent the general on an inspection tour of Hawaii and then announced his successor while MacArthur was en route.
Roosevelt relished being president. His buoyant energy and unshakable optimism transmitted itself to everyone he met. After the lusterless Warren G. Harding, the dour Coolidge, and stuffy Herbert Hoover, FDR seemed like a breath of fresh air in the White House. His self-assurance was exactly what the country needed. With the possible exception of Ronald Reagan (who voted for FDR four times), no president has been more serene in the conviction that whatever happened, everything would turn out all right. “Take a method and try it,” he once said. “If it fails, admit it and try another. But above all, try something.” Social Security, unemployment compensation, stock market regulation, the federal guarantee of bank deposits, wages and hours legislation, labor’s right to bargain collectively, agricultural price supports, rural electrification—all of which we take for granted—did not exist before FDR.
As commander in chief, Roosevelt was better prepared than any president before him, save Washington and Grant. For eight years under Woodrow Wilson he had been the number two man in the Navy Department. He understood how the services operated and did not hesitate to assert presidential authority. When war clouds gathered in 1939, he passed over the Army’s senior leadership and named George C. Marshall chief of staff. As the situation grew tense in 1940, he reached out to the Republican party and named the redoubtable Henry L. Stimson secretary of war and Frank Knox of the Chicago Daily News, who had been Alf Landon’s running mate in 1936, secretary of the Navy. When war came, he turned to hard-bitten Admiral Ernest J. King to fight the fleet and recalled Admiral William Leahy to be his own chief of staff. To manage military procurement, it seemed natural to select Army engineers who had worked closely with Harry Hopkins and the WPA: Brehon Somervell and Lucius Clay.
Roosevelt nudged the nation toward a war footing. He pressed passage of the Lend-Lease Act to provide aid for embattled Britain, reestablished the draft (its extension carried by only one vote in the House of Representatives), and, probably in violation of the Constitution (and certainly contrary to statute), traded fifty seaworthy destroyers to Great Britain for base rights in the Western Hemisphere. What he did not do is connive with the Japanese in the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Roosevelt did not pay as much attention as he should have to the deteriorating situation in the Pacific in 1941; he allowed hawkish subordinates too much leeway, and he muffed a possible summit meeting with the Japanese prime minister. The administration recognized that Japan might attack in December 1941, but it did not expect the assault to come at Pearl Harbor, which the military believed to be impregnable.
FDR can be criticized on a number of issues. He ignored racial segregation, he did not rush to admit the victims of fascism to America’s shores, and he could be cavalier about the protection of civil liberties in wartime. But there is absolutely no evidence that he was complicit in the events of December 7, 1941.
Roosevelt’s wartime leadership resembles that of Lincoln. As in 1933, he restored the nation’s confidence. Under FDR’s hands-on direction, the United States became “the arsenal of democracy.” Britain was saved from defeat, the Soviet Union was provided the materiel it required, and by 1943 American armed forces had assumed the offensive. Roosevelt’s wartime diplomacy paved the way for the defeat of the Axis powers and the establishment of a world order based on the rule of law. His relations with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin suggest statecraft at its finest. On the other hand, his treatment of Charles de Gaulle was petulant and continues to roil Franco-American relations. It would also be fair to say that FDR did not fully comprehend the difficulties that would arise in containing communism in postwar Europe, nor did he fathom the sea change at work in China. The United States was a third-rate military power when World War II began. When it ended, America was the most powerful nation in history.
Roosevelt’s personal life has been obscured by his accomplishments. The “children’s hour” every evening at which the president mixed martinis for his guests, the poker games with cabinet cronies, the weekly sojourns on the presidential yacht Potomac, and his personal relations with family and friends warrant extended treatment. Roosevelt enjoyed life to the full, and his unquenchable optimism never faded.
Not to be overlooked are the four women who played crucial roles in FDR’s life: his mother, Sara; Lucy Mercer, the woman he loved; Missy LeHand, the woman who loved him; and his wife, Eleanor. After Eleanor discovered FDR’s affair with Lucy in 1918, their relationship became more professional than personal—an armed truce, in the words of their son James. They remained together for a variety of reasons, and Eleanor became a national personality in her own right. But her impact on the president’s life was tangential. She and FDR moved in different circles, each with a separate entourage, and only at formal levels did their paths converge. I say this as an unabashed admirer of Mrs. Roosevelt. She has been deservedly canonized because of what she stood for, yet we overlook the fact that she was a political liability for the president in the 1930s and ’40s. FDR did no
t need reinforcement among liberal and minority voters, where Eleanor was most highly regarded; he needed the votes of the white South, the Middle West, and the Great Plains, where for many she was anathema. Eleanor Roosevelt is a truly great American, not least because she was her own person. But she did not flourish until after the president’s death.
The most important figure in Roosevelt’s life was his mother, Sara. As an only child, Franklin grew to maturity in the warmth and security of single-minded maternal devotion. Sara shaped him, supported him, and transmitted to him the unshakable confidence that characterized his presidential leadership. Seven of Sara’s ancestors landed with the Mayflower. Unlike the cautious Hudson River Roosevelts, the Delanos were swashbuckling sea captains, global traders, and risk takers. Her father, Warren Delano, made a fortune in China in the 1840s exporting tea, then a much larger one in the 1860s in the opium trade. Sara lived two years in China, was educated in France and Germany, and as a young woman was courted assiduously by New York’s most eligible bachelors, including the irrepressible Stanford White. As a friend remarked, “she had a gift for saying the right thing at the right time, and she could say it in several languages.” Sara gloried in her Delano heritage and molded FDR in that tradition. “My son Franklin is a Delano,” she often said. “He is not a Roosevelt at all.”
Sara held the purse strings. She supported Franklin generously, bestowed on him and Eleanor an elegant New York town house (which she staffed and furnished), remodeled and enlarged the Hyde Park residence to accommodate her son’s political ambitions, and, when Franklin thought of leaving Eleanor for Lucy in 1918, intervened decisively to keep the couple together. Sara’s wealth freed Franklin from earning a living and allowed him the luxury of pursuing a political career unencumbered by financial worry. “Nothing,” said Eleanor, “ever seemed to disturb the deep, underlying affection they had for each other.”*
