by FDR
* FDR met many young officers during his eight years as assistant secretary and did not forget them when he became commander in chief. Lieutenant Commander William D. Leahy was skipper of the Navy’s Dolphin, the official yacht of the secretary and assistant secretary. Leahy became chief of naval operations in 1937, was later FDR’s ambassador to Vichy France, and served as the president’s personal chief of staff throughout World War II. Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, commander in chief of the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, had been Roosevelt’s naval aide in 1915. Lieutenant Emory S. Land, who later chaired the nation’s Maritime Commission, served in that post as well. Lieutenants Harold Stark and Chester Nimitz, both CNOs (Nimitz after Roosevelt’s death), were well known to FDR during World War I. The naval historian Robert Greenhalgh Albion wrote that as president, FDR always kept a copy of the Navy Register close at hand and knew most senior officers personally. “Some were remembered favorably, a few unfavorably, and some were not remembered at all.” Makers of Naval Policy: 1775–1941 385 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1980).
* As a young diplomat Cecil Spring-Rice served as best man at TR’s wedding to Edith Carow in 1886 and always had a warm spot in his heart for the president. “You must always remember that Roosevelt is about six,” he gently reminded a friend when TR was in the White House. Jusserand, for his part, had once skinny-dipped with TR in the Potomac near Chain Bridge wearing only his gloves. “We might meet ladies,” he informed the president when asked about his attire. Lodge and TR had maintained a mutual admiration society since the Republican National Convention in 1884, co-authored three books, and shared a view of America’s muscular role in the world. Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, 249–250, 357 (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979); Theodore Rex 512–513 (New York: Random House, 2002).
* FDR received his pay from the Navy Department every two weeks. Initially, he took it in cash and put the money in his pocket. “I don’t know where it went, it just went. I couldn’t keep an account with myself. After about six months of this, certain complaints came back from home about paying the grocery bill. And so I began taking my salary by check and putting it in the bank and taking perhaps five dollars cash for the week and putting it in my pocket—trying to anyway.” Elliott Roosevelt and James Brough, An Untold Story: The Roosevelts of Hyde Park 66 (New York: G. P Putnam’s Sons, 1973).
* FDR’s son James reports a rare instance in which Roosevelt overruled Howe. It was 1932 in Chicago, en route to accepting the Democratic nomination. “I squeezed into the car which carried Father to the hotel. Louis Howe rode in the back seat next to Father, and immediately there began one of the most incongruous performances I have ever witnessed. Louis had strong objections to parts of Father’s proposed acceptance speech and he began arguing with him even as the car was rolling in from the airport. Pa listened with one ear—all the while smiling and waving at the wildly cheering crowds. Finally, Pa exploded: ‘Damnit, Louie, I’m the nominee.’ ” James Roosevelt and Sidney Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R. 225–226 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959).
* Occasionally a request was beyond the pale, especially if it ran against Daniels’s puritanical instincts. In 1915 Congressman Lathrop Brown, FDR’s Harvard roommate, wrote to request that a young friend named Donald Clapham be allowed to enlist in the Navy. Clapham had gone astray with a young woman, had been convicted of stealing $38, and had received a suspended sentence. Howe replied to Brown on FDR’s behalf:
Now, about your young friend … who appears to be one of nature’s noblemen and to have nothing against him except that he has broken most of the Ten Commandments. I am willing to admit that if we bar from the Navy every gent who has become mixed up with a beautiful female we would have to put most of our ships out of commission and I am afraid we might lose an admiral or two, but in this case the young man was unfortunately caught with the goods. You have run against one of the secretary’s strongest antipathies. And while I know Mr. Roosevelt will speak to Mr. Daniels about the case again, I honestly do not think he has a chance on earth. Do you want one of those “we are doing everything on earth to get this done because of the affection for the Congressman” letters or not? Will send you a masterpiece that will convince your friends that Mr. Roosevelt is sitting on Mr. Daniels’ doorstep every night waiting for a chance to make one more plea when he comes home to supper, if that will ease the strain any.
Louis Howe to Lathrop Brown, September 21, 1915, FDRL.
* The “Roosevelt corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, announced by TR in his annual message to Congress on December 6, 1904, provided that “Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States … to the exercise of an international police power.” It was a unilateral blank check that allowed the United States to intervene in Latin America and became the bedrock of America’s hemispheric policy from 1904 until 1930, when it was repudiated by Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson on behalf of the Hoover administration. The Monroe Doctrine, said Stimson, was “a declaration of the United States versus Europe, not the United States versus Latin America.”
SEVEN
WAR
These dear, good people like W.J.B. [William Jennings Bryan] and J.D. [Josephus Daniels] have as much conception of what a general European war means as [four-year-old] Elliott has of higher mathematics.
—FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, AUGUST 2, 1914
AFTER A YEAR as assistant secretary, FDR grew restive in Washington. While he relished the ceremonial trappings of his office and reveled in the proximity to national power, he was still a pale second to Secretary Daniels and relegated to department housekeeping rather than the grand strategy and high politics to which he aspired. Much of the day-to-day work in the Navy Department he found tedious. He could recommend, but final authority rested with Daniels. Senator Elihu Root had recognized the trait: Roosevelts were accustomed to ride in front. A southern wit like Addie Daniels, Josephus’s wife, would simply have said that Franklin was getting too big for his breeches.
Through Louis Howe, FDR kept tabs on New York politics. The state Democratic party was in more than the usual disarray, and Franklin maneuvered to exploit the confusion. If further advancement in Washington was temporarily blocked—as it clearly was—he would rekindle his career by seeking statewide office in New York. Roosevelt’s perspective was clouded by Potomac myopia, the affliction of self-importance that often causes senior Washington officials to overestimate their significance in their home states, and in FDR’s case he assumed that the governorship of the Empire State was within easy grasp.
“Plain Bill” Sulzer, who had been Tammany’s handpicked choice for governor, had run afoul of the organization and was removed from office in October 1913. He was replaced by the reliable Martin H. Glynn, a Democratic stalwart from Albany. But the heavy hand of Tammany had tainted the impeachment process and made Glynn vulnerable. He was also Catholic, the first of that faith to occupy the governor’s chair, and whether a Catholic could win a statewide election in 1914 was far from clear. In addition, New York had recently enacted the direct-primary law for which FDR had worked so diligently in the legislature. As Franklin saw it, that would limit Tammany’s ability to dictate the party’s nominee and open the way for a candidate with strong grassroots support—support that the name Roosevelt virtually ensured. Finally, FDR envisioned himself as the anointed candidate of the Wilson administration, departing Washington with the president’s blessing to smite the Murphy machine on behalf of political reform.
Wilson’s support was crucial to FDR’s campaign. Yet throughout late 1913 and early 1914 the president refused to commit himself. He may have savored the thought of a reform victory in New York, but he needed the votes of the state’s Tammany-dominated congressional delegation to put the New Freed
om legislative program across. Howe launched a series of trial balloons for FDR in the New York press and did his utmost to hint at Wilson’s support, but it was wishful thinking.1 In March 1914, Roosevelt tried to force Wilson’s hand. Ralph Pulitzer of The New York World had asked FDR to write an article for his paper on the political situation in the Empire State. Franklin asked Wilson for guidance. Could he have five minutes of the president’s time to discuss the matter?2 Wilson declined. Instead, he sent FDR a brief note advising him to say nothing. Events in New York were still unfolding, said the president, and “the plot is not yet clear.”3 That was scarcely the vote of confidence Roosevelt needed to challenge a Tammany incumbent in the primary.
When Franklin dispatched intermediaries to canvass Cousin Theodore’s support, the result was equally disappointing. TR said he admired his young Hyde Park relative but was too busy mending fences with liberal Republicans to offer a Progressive endorsement.4 The final blow to FDR’s gubernatorial aspirations was administered by Congressman John J. Fitzgerald of Brooklyn, the powerful chairman of the Appropriations Committee and the Tammany spokesman in the House. Unless Wilson disavowed self-appointed critics of Tammany within the administration, said Fitzgerald, he and twenty other New York Democrats would find it difficult to support the New Freedom legislative agenda.5 That finished FDR. Wilson issued a public statement saying he had the highest regard for Mr. Fitzgerald and certainly did not endorse the characterization of Tammany congressmen as “representatives of crooks, grafters, and buccaneers”—campaign rhetoric that had become a staple for FDR.6*
Roosevelt recognized the impossibility of his quest and put an upbeat spin on the outcome. “Thank God,” he wrote Eleanor, “the governorship is out of the question.”7 To the Times he denied that he had ever been a candidate: “When I said I was not a candidate and would not accept the nomination, I did not say it in diplomatic language, but in seafaring language, which means it.”8
The reason for FDR’s jauntiness soon became apparent: an even more desirable statewide office was available. In May 1913 the Seventeenth Amendment, providing for the direct election of senators, was added to the Constitution. Senator Elihu Root’s term was expiring, and Root, who had opposed the amendment in Senate debate, announced that he would not seek reelection.9 That provided an opportunity FDR had not anticipated. The venerable Root was one of the most distinguished members of the Senate—secretary of war under McKinley, secretary of state under TR, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1912. Had Root run, he would have been unbeatable. Now the race was wide open. Even better, there was no Democratic incumbent to contest the nomination. Franklin could barely contain his excitement as he broke the news to Eleanor that he planned to seek both the Democratic and Progressive nominations for the U.S. Senate. “I really would like to be in the Senate just so as to get a summer with my family once every three or four years.”10
FDR’s 1914 flirtation with elective office was interrupted by events in Sarajevo, far off in the Balkans. On the morning of June 28, Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the Hapsburg throne, and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, were shot and killed by a nineteen-year-old Bosnian terrorist while riding in an open car in downtown Sarajevo. The assassin, Gavrilo Princip, one of seven young Bosnian co-conspirators, believed that by killing the archduke he would liberate Bosnia from Hapsburg captivity.11 The Serbian government was implicated in the assassination, and the Austrians demanded satisfaction. Germany backed Austria and gave Vienna a blank check to proceed as it wished. Diplomatic demands escalated, armies mobilized, governments miscalculated, and events took on a life of their own. The Concert of Europe, elaborately crafted by Viscount Castlereagh and Count Metternich one hundred years earlier and embellished by Otto von Bismarck and Benjamin Disraeli in the 1870s, came crashing down like a house of cards. The year before his death, Bismarck had predicted that “some damn foolish thing in the Balkans” would ignite a general war in Europe. Princip provided the spark that set things off.12*
On July 23, more than three weeks after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the Austrian government, believing itself ready for war and confident of German support, presented Serbia with an ultimatum couched in language carefully crafted to make it all but impossible for Belgrade to accept.13 The Serbian reply, deliberately evasive, was rejected by Vienna on July 25, and both nations mobilized. Austria declared war on Serbia on July 28; Russia mobilized to support Serbia on July 30; France mobilized to support Russia the following day; and Germany called up its reserves immediately afterward.14† Last-minute diplomatic efforts failed, and on August 1 Germany declared war on Russia. Locked in by military planning predicated on a two-front war, Germany declared war on France on August 3 and crossed into Belgium to outflank the French Army, which was drawn up facing the Franco-German border. The violation of Belgian neutrality brought Great Britain in on France’s side, and Europe was at war.
The Central Powers believed that victory would be quick. “You will be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees,” the kaiser told departing guards regiments in Potsdam the first week in August.15 The British took a different view. “The lamps are going out all over Europe,” lamented Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey. “We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”16 General Lord Kitchener, recalled from retirement by Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, said that the war “will take a very long time. No one living knows how long.”17
FDR was fulfilling a speaking engagement for the Navy in Reading, Pennsylvania, when Germany declared war. Summoned by telegram to Washington, he jotted a quick note to Eleanor from the train: “The latest news is that Germany has declared war against Russia. A complete smashup is inevitable, and there are a great many problems for us to consider. These are history-making days. It will be the greatest war in the world’s history. Mr. D. totally fails to grasp the situation and I am to see the President Monday a.m. to go over our own situation.”18 Whether Franklin was referring to the war in Europe or his political ambitions in New York is unclear, but Wilson had no time on Monday or any day that week: his wife, Ellen, was dying of cancer.19
With the possibility of war looming, FDR found it even more difficult to play second fiddle. His letters to Eleanor in early August brim with his own activity, in stark contrast to the lethargy he perceived around him. Inexperienced and impulsive, Roosevelt failed to appreciate Daniels’s more cautious approach. The following day he wrote that upon his arrival in Washington,
I went straight to the Department, where as I expected, I found everything asleep and apparently utterly oblivious to the fact that the most terrible drama in history was about to be enacted.
To my astonishment nobody seemed the least bit excited about the European crisis—Mr. Daniels feeling chiefly very sad that his faith in human nature and civilization and similar idealistic nonsense was receiving such a rude shock. So I started in alone to get things ready and prepare plans for what ought to be done by the Navy end of things.…
These dear, good people like W.J.B. and J.D. have as much conception of what a general European war means as Elliott has of higher mathematics. They really believe that because we are neutral we can go about our business as usual.…
All this sounds like borrowing trouble I know, but it is my duty to keep the Navy in a position where no chances, even the most remote, are taken. Today we are taking chances and I nearly boil over when I see the cheery “mañana” way of doing business.20
Franklin told Eleanor he saw no hope of averting the conflict. “The best that can be expected is either a sharp, complete and quick victory by one side, a most unlikely occurrence, or a speedy realization of impending bankruptcy by all, and a cessation by mutual consent, but this too I think unlikely.”21
Eleanor said she understood. “I am not surprised at what you say about J.D. or W.J.B. for one could expect little else. To understand the present gigantic conflict one must have at least a glimmering of understanding foreign nations.… Life must be ex
citing for you and I can see you managing everything while J.D. wrings his hands in horror. There must be so much detail to attend to and so many problems which must, of course, be yours and not J.D.’s.”22
As it turned out, Daniels was more in tune with administration policy than his brash assistant secretary. On August 4, 1914, President Wilson issued the first of ten neutrality proclamations that would be promulgated during the first three months of the war. These committed the United States to complete neutrality and made it a crime for anyone to be partial beyond the “free expression of opinion.”23 Two days later Wilson told Daniels to order all officers “to refrain from public comment of any kind upon the military or political situation on the other side of the water.” The Navy was instructed to “watch things along the coast,” protect the neutrality of American ports, and prevent the shipment of munitions to any of the belligerents.24 FDR was appointed to two quickly established cabinet-level committees, one to translate the principles of the neutrality proclamations into practical policy, the other to provide relief for Americans stranded in Europe by the war. He arranged for the battleships North Carolina and Tennessee to sail for the Continent loaded with gold bullion to subsidize the credit of Americans caught in the war zone and organized a coastal patrol to prevent belligerent warships from venturing too close to U.S. shores. “Most of those reports of foreign cruisers off the coast have really been my destroyers,” Franklin proudly wrote Eleanor on August 7.25
FDR was consumed by the war in Europe and the Navy’s responsibility. “I am running the real work, although Josephus is here,” he told Eleanor.26 But over his shoulder, Roosevelt watched what was happening in New York. The prospect of succeeding Elihu Root in the Senate was too enticing to let slip. Treasury secretary William Gibbs McAdoo, who considered himself the de facto leader of the reform wing of the Democratic party in New York, was urging FDR to run, and on August 13, following a lightning visit to Manhattan, Franklin announced his candidacy.27 “My senses have not yet left me,” he wired Louis Howe, who was vacationing with his family on the Massachusetts shore.28
