by FDR
In France, the military situation turned hopeless. The French had lost thirty of their best divisions, the Belgians and Dutch were out of the war, and the BEF had been evacuated. On June 5 the Germans turned south. Panzers crashed through the French line on the Somme, the defense collapsed in confusion, and the Germans crossed the Seine virtually unopposed four days later. Paris was declared an open city, the government fled first to Tours and then to Bordeaux, and General Maxime Weygand, the French commander in chief, urged Reynaud to ask for an armistice. “I am obliged to say that a cessation of hostilities is compulsory.”54
On Monday, June 10, Roosevelt headed for Charlottesville, Virginia. FDR, Jr., was graduating from law school, and the president had been invited to give the commencement address. As Roosevelt boarded the train, he received word that Italy had declared war on France, launching thirty-two divisions against the lightly held Alpine passes and the Côte d’Azur. Whatever doubts FDR held about his future course vanished with Mussolini’s attack. That night, disregarding State Department objections, he went full out. In a voice dripping with scorn, the president told the university’s graduands, “On this tenth day of June, 1940, the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor.”
To believe that the United States could exist as “a lone island in a world dominated by the philosophy of force,” said Roosevelt, was “an obvious delusion.” America’s duty was clear: “We will extend to the opponents of force the material resources of this nation; and at the same time, we will harness and speed up the use of those resources in order that we ourselves may have equipment and training equal to the task. Signs and signals call for speed—full speed ahead.”55
Roosevelt’s “stab-in-the-back” speech marked the decisive turning point in American policy. Though polls indicated that only 30 percent of the nation believed an Allied victory possible, FDR unequivocally placed himself shoulder to shoulder with Britain and France.56 Listening to the president on the radio, Churchill could scarcely contain his enthusiasm. “We all listened to you last night and were fortified by the grand scope of your declaration. Your statement that the material aid of the United States will be given to the Allies in their struggle is a strong encouragement in a dark but not unhopeful hour. Everything must be done to keep France in the fight. The hope with which you inspired them may give them the strength to persevere.… I send you my heartfelt thanks and those of my colleagues for all you are doing and seeking to do for what we may now indeed call a common cause.”57
Despite Churchill’s hopes, the weight of the Nazi offensive proved too much for the embattled Third Republic. On June 14 the Germans entered Paris. On the sixteenth Reynaud resigned and was succeeded by Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain, the aged hero of World War I’s Battle of Verdun. Two hours later Pétain sued for peace. On Saturday, June 22, in the Forest of Compiègne, in the very same railway car in which the 1918 armistice had been signed, Hitler personally presided over France’s surrender.
When Roosevelt returned from Charlottesville, he reorganized his cabinet for action. Charles Edison was eased out as secretary of the Navy, and Harry Woodring was dumped from the War Department. FDR prevailed upon the New Jersey Democratic organization to nominate Edison for governor (he won the post in November); Woodring, who continued to drag his feet on rearming the British, was cut adrift.58
On June 19, 1940, less than a week before the Republican nominating convention in Philadelphia, Roosevelt announced that Colonel Frank Knox, the publisher of the Chicago Daily News, the old Rough Rider who had been Alf Landon’s running mate in 1936, would succeed Edison at the Navy Department. Joining Knox at the War Department would be Colonel Henry L. Stimson of New York, the principal foreign policy spokesman for the eastern establishment, Hoover’s former secretary of state, and Taft’s secretary of war.
Knox, whose appointment had been in the works for some time, cleared it with Landon before accepting.* To make the public aware of the gravity of the international situation, he insisted that a Republican join him at the War Department. The war cabinet, so to speak, must be bipartisan. Roosevelt initially thought of his old Columbia Law School classmate William Donovan for the post but at the suggestion of Justice Felix Frankfurter turned to Stimson.59 Knox also requested that the appointments be deferred until after the Republican convention. Roosevelt declined. It was important to stress the bipartisan nature of the defense effort, he told Knox. Even more important, if the GOP nominated an isolationist candidate, Knox and Stimson would be deemed guilty of bad sportsmanship in joining FDR’s team afterward.60 Stimson, whom Roosevelt surprised with a telephone call to his apartment at New York’s Pierre Hotel on the morning of the nineteenth offering the appointment, had his own conditions. Fully aware of the internecine struggle between Woodring and Undersecretary Louis Johnson, he wanted a free hand to name his own assistants. FDR agreed, and Stimson brought to Washington a remarkable team that remained throughout the war: Judge Robert P. Patterson of the U.S. Court of Appeals as undersecretary, John J. McCloy as assistant secretary, and Robert A. Lovett as assistant secretary for air. Knox brought New York investment banker James V. Forrestal to Washington as undersecretary. With the exception of Forrestal, none of these appointees supported the New Deal and none had ever voted for FDR. Patterson had been appointed to the federal bench by Herbert Hoover in 1931; McCloy was the managing partner of Cravath, Swaine, and Moore;† Forrestal was president of Dillon, Reed; and Lovett was a senior partner at Brown Brothers, Harriman. Nevertheless, they proved devoted administrators who rendered superb service to the president and the nation.61
Roosevelt not only undercut the isolationist opposition on the eve of the Republican convention, he added two of the most powerful GOP foreign policy voices to the cabinet. On June 18, prior to their appointments, both men had delivered speeches on national defense. In Detroit, Knox had called for compulsory military training, a million-man Army, the most powerful air force in the world, and unstinting aid to Great Britain. Stimson, speaking at the Yale commencement in New Haven, had asked for repeal of the Neutrality Act in its entirety, reinstitution of the draft, and the use of the U.S. Navy to convoy supplies to Britain.* By advocating a peacetime draft, Knox and Stimson prepared the way for the president to follow.62
The appointment of Knox and Stimson cast a pall over the Republican convention. Roosevelt had not only upstaged the event but exposed the deep fissure in the GOP over foreign policy. Not since Bull Moosers and Old Guard fought it out in 1912 had the party been so divided. The isolationist wing, stung to the quick by Knox and Stimson’s defection, proceeded to read them out of the party—a mean-spirited response that did the Republicans no good with an electorate increasingly concerned about national defense. Keynote speaker Harold Stassen, striking a more responsive chord, noted that the appointment of two distinguished Republicans merely reflected the lack of talent among the Democrats. His only regret, said Stassen, was that the Grand Old Party was not replacing the rest of Roosevelt’s “New Deal incompetents.”63
Four candidates vied for the nomination. Thomas E. Dewey, New York City’s thirty-seven-year-old racketbusting district attorney, was the front runner. A forceful public speaker, Dewey started like a house afire, claiming 67 percent of the Republican vote in a May 9 Gallup poll. But with Hitler’s invasion of the Low Countries and France’s defeat, Dewey’s lead diminished. His youth and inexperience worked against him, and his too-clever-by-half ambiguity concerning Nazi aggression satisfied no one.† The more voters saw of Dewey, the less they liked him: “Cold as a February iceberg,” in the words of one of his most ardent supporters.64
Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan was a distant second. A Senate fixture since his arrival in 1928, the courteous and fair-minded Vandenberg mistook approval by his colleagues for electoral support. He disdained primaries—“Why should I kill myself to carry Vermont?”—and soon found himself trailing badly.65 Running neck and neck with Vandenberg was freshman Ohio senator Robert A.
Taft, son of the former president and chief justice. In the Senate little more than a year, Taft’s sense of entitlement left few doubts that he was ready to take on the presidency. Vandenberg and Taft appealed to the same constituency: the isolationist hard core of the GOP who had never forgiven FDR for defeating Hoover in 1932. Vandenberg’s campaign was low-key and understated; Taft’s strident and self-righteous. “There is a good deal more danger of the infiltration of totalitarian ideas from the New Deal circles in Washington than there ever will be from activities of the Communists or the Nazis.”66
The convention dark horse was Wendell L. Willkie, the folksy, forty-eight-year-old Hoosier lawyer who had risen to become president and chief executive officer of Commonwealth and Southern, the nation’s largest utility holding company. An outsider to politics, Willkie’s huggy-bear good looks made him what David Halberstam called “the rarest thing in those days, a Republican with sex appeal.” John Gunther called him “one of the most loveable, most gallant, most zealous, and most forward-looking Americans of this—or any—time.”67 The fact is, Willkie was a lifelong Democrat, from a family of lifelong Democrats, who turned Republican in early 1940.68 He had gained prominence as a progressive, independently minded businessman who could hold his own in public forums with the nation’s leading intellectuals. He wrote for The Atlantic Monthly, The Saturday Evening Post, Fortune, Reader’s Digest, and The New Republic—where he defended the free speech rights of Nazis and Communists.69 He charmed the nation’s radio audience with an April 1940 guest appearance on the phenomenally popular Information Please program hosted by The New Yorker’s Clifton Fadiman* and routed the New Deal’s Robert H. Jackson in a widely listened to policy debate on Town Meeting of the Air.
Politically, Willkie supported virtually all of the accomplishments of the New Deal except the TVA.70 He had an established record of fighting the Klan in Indiana, and was a firm friend of civil liberties. In foreign policy he supported Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations, advocated American membership in the World Court, and backed unlimited aid to the Allies. “England and France constitute our first line of defense against Hitler,” he told the Akron, Ohio, post of the American Legion in May. “If anyone is going to stop Hitler, they are the ones to do it. It must therefore be in our advantage to help them every way we can, short of declaring war.”71
Willkie had become a Republican because he disliked and distrusted FDR. Personal ambition was part of it. He had lost Commonwealth and Southern’s struggle with TVA over electric rates and had failed to prevent passage of the Public Utilities Holding Act, which severely crimped its power. He believed that Roosevelt had steered the Democratic party away from its liberal ideals and converted it into the party of centralized bureaucracy and big government. Still dedicated to the social goals of the New Deal, including national health care, Willkie saw Roosevelt as a threat to individual liberty. The possibility of a third term was a manifestation of that threat.
Willkie was a political outsider in the sense of not being a career politician. But he was very much an establishment insider, a director of the Morgan Bank, and a member of every important club in New York. Harold Ickes accurately described him as “a simple barefoot lawyer from Wall Street.” Alice Roosevelt Longworth said that of course Willkie’s candidacy sprang from the grass roots—“the grass roots of a thousand country clubs.”72
Willkie was supported by thousands of We Want Willkie clubs that had sprouted up across America. He was the candidate of media moguls such as Helen and Ogden Reid of the New York Herald Tribune, Roy Howard of the Scripps-Howard chain, John and Gardner Cowles of The Des Moines Register, Minneapolis Star, and Look magazine, and Henry and Clare Boothe Luce of Time, Life, Fortune, and Vanity Fair. “A vote for Taft is a vote for the Republican party,” said Life on May 13, 1940. “A vote for Willkie is a vote for the best man to lead the country in a crisis.” Willkie charmed reporters who covered the campaign. At his press conference on the third day of the convention, hard-bitten journalists gave him a prolonged standing ovation—a scene that could have come straight from Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
To his Republican rivals Willkie’s campaign appeared hopelessly amateurish. Yet the advertising was handled by Bruce Barton and John Young, the heads of two of the most powerful advertising firms in America; the chairman of the convention committee on arrangements (with absolute control over tickets to the gallery) was one of Willkie’s earliest supporters; keynote speaker Stassen became Willkie’s floor manager; and presiding officer Joe Martin of Massachusetts, the House minority leader, favored Willkie. Martin was a solid anti–New Deal isolationist, but he recognized that Willkie was the only candidate who might topple FDR.73
The Republican platform sidestepped a confrontation between the party’s isolationist and internationalist wings. The foreign policy plank, said H. L. Mencken, was “so written that it will fit both the triumph of democracy and the collapse of democracy.”74 Connoisseurs of political hara-kiri thrilled when the GOP unveiled Herbert Hoover for a prime-time radio address to a national audience. Democratic strategists regarded Hoover’s quadrennial appearances at Republican conventions as electoral reinsurance for victory in November.
On Thursday morning, June 27, with balloting scheduled to begin that afternoon, the Herald Tribune leaked (two days early) the results of the most recent Gallup Poll, showing Willkie out in front with 44 percent to Dewey’s 29 percent and Taft’s 13 percent. The impact was immediate. When the roll of the states was called, Dewey, as expected, led with 360 votes, Taft polled 189, and Vandenberg 76, but Willkie had 105—substantially more than had been expected.* The second ballot followed immediately. Willkie gained 66, Taft 14, Vandenberg held firm, but Dewey’s support began to erode. On the third ballot Willkie moved into second place, ahead of Taft. On the fourth Dewey’s strength collapsed and it was now a two-way race between Willkie and Taft, with Willkie leading 306–254.
Chants of “We want Willkie” from the packed gallery threatened to drown out the proceedings on the floor. The Republicans had not gone past the first ballot at any convention since 1920 (when Harding was nominated on the tenth ballot), and Convention Hall was pure pandemonium. Chairman Joe Martin gaveled down efforts by Dewey and Taft supporters to adjourn, and Willkie’s momentum accelerated. On the fifth ballot Alf Landon switched the Kansas delegation to Willkie, and on the sixth ballot it was all over. Willkie defeated Taft 655–318, Governor John Bricker of Ohio moved to make the vote unanimous, and at 1:30 A.M. Friday the convention adjourned.
The following day Willkie named Senate Republican leader Charles McNary of Oregon as his running mate. McNary was from the West, isolationist, pro–public power, and far more conservative on most issues than Willkie. But he was well liked in Washington by his colleagues on both sides of the aisle, and Roosevelt found him easy to work with. “I have the general opinion that the Republicans have nominated their strongest possible ticket,” said FDR at cabinet the next day.75*
For Roosevelt, Willkie’s nomination was a mixed blessing. His internationalism removed the question of aid to Britain from the election agenda, but of the four potential Republican candidates he would be the most difficult to defeat. Unlike Taft, Vandenberg, and Dewey, Willkie appealed to the middle-of-the-road voters FDR needed most. Of the four, only he had a chance of cracking the Roosevelt coalition.
* As a sop to the increasingly bellicose Tory rank and file, Chamberlain recalled Winston Churchill from the political wilderness to reassume his World War I responsibilities as first lord of the Admiralty. “Churchill in the Cabinet,” exclaimed Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring. “That means the war is really on.” Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich 165 (New York: Macmillan, 1970).
* The committee’s leadership included Henry R. Luce, the publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune; New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia; the investment bankers Thomas Lamont and Henry I. Harriman; Thomas Watson of IBM; the department store tycoon Marshall Field; the Protestant theologian Rein
hold Niebuhr; the film actors Helen Hayes and Melvyn Douglas; the cultural historian Lewis Mumford; and the rising Democratic politicians J. William Fulbright and Adlai E. Stevenson.
† At a dinner in his honor at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin on October 19, 1938, Lindbergh was presented with the Service Cross of the German Eagle with Star “by order of the Führer.” Kenneth S. Davis, The Hero: Charles A. Lindbergh and the American Dream 380–382 (New York: Doubleday, 1959).
* Lindbergh expanded on his views a few days later in an article in the November Reader’s Digest. “It is time to turn from our quarrels and to build our White ramparts again.… Our civilization depends on a united strength among ourselves; … on a Western Wall or race and arms which can hold back either a Genghis Khan or the infiltration of inferior blood.” Charles A. Lindbergh, “Aviation, Geography, and Race,” Reader’s Digest 64–67 (1939).
* Lewis’s remarks were made in testimony before the House Labor Committee in July 1939. “Yes, I made a personal attack on Mr. Garner,” said Lewis, “because Garner’s knife is searching for the quivering, pulsating heart of labor.” When the Texas congressional delegation prepared a rebuttal denying that Garner did any of the things Lewis charged, one member refused to sign: the second-term congressman from Texas’s tenth district, Lyndon Baines Johnson. The New York Times, July 28, 1939.
* Parliament’s great debate on war policy took place May 7–8, 1940. Leo Amery from the Tory backbench launched the missile that brought Chamberlain down, quoting Cromwell’s injunction to the Long Parliament, “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.” On the second day of the debate Lloyd George gave the last great speech of his career, in the course of which he defended Churchill who as first lord of the Admiralty had taken responsibility for Norway’s fall: “The right honorable gentleman must not allow himself to be converted into an air raid shelter to keep the splinters from hitting his colleagues.” When the House divided on the evening of May 8, forty-one dissident Conservatives voted with the Labour opposition and sixty more abstained. Chamberlain recognized the inevitable and submitted his resignation. Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography 576–588 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).
