Jean Edward Smith

by FDR

  It was about this time in the spring of 1941 that Missy’s health began to fail. She was forty-three. For twenty years she had been at FDR’s side—his secretary, companion, and confidante—but the strain of long hours with little respite had taken its toll. “The president would work night after night, and she was always there working with him,” her friend Barbara Curtis remembered. “He could take it, but I think her strength just didn’t hold out.”59

  After dinner with the president, Hopkins, Grace Tully, and Pa Watson on June 4, Missy collapsed and fell to the floor unconscious. White House physicians initially diagnosed it as a slight heart attack brought on by overwork. In fact, it was a small stroke, a precursor of a massive stroke two weeks later that paralyzed her right side and rendered her unable to speak coherently. Missy was transferred from the White House to Doctors Hospital in Georgetown, where Franklin and Eleanor visited her frequently. As Doris Kearns Goodwin reports, the visits were unbearable for FDR. “All his life, he had steeled himself to ignore illness and unpleasantness of any kind.” For Eleanor the visits were easier to handle. More accustomed to vulnerability and loss, she kept up a steady flow of flowers, fruit, presents, and letters.60

  Grace Tully assumed Missy’s secretarial duties, but she was not a companion for FDR. That void was never filled. And in his own way, quietly and with no outward emotion, Roosevelt grieved for Missy. While she was in the hospital he ordered round-the-clock nursing care, paid every expense, and wrote each of her doctors personal notes expressing his gratitude. Aware that Missy might never recover, FDR worried what would happen if he should die and there was no one to pay for her care. Five months after her stroke he changed his will, directing that half of the income from his estate (which was eventually probated at more than $3 million) be left to Eleanor and the remaining half “for the account of my friend Marguerite LeHand” to cover all expenses for “medical care and treatment during her lifetime.” Upon Missy’s death, the income would go to Eleanor, with the principal eventually divided equally among his five children.61 “I owed her that much,” Franklin told his son James. “She served me so well for so long and asked for so little in return.”62*

  On June 22, 1941, the war took a decisive turn. Without warning Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, an invasion of his recent ally, the Soviet Union. At 0330 hours German forces poured across the Russian frontier from the Baltic to the Black Sea. One hundred and eighty divisions, 3.8 million men, supported by thousands of planes, tanks, and artillery pieces surged forward in three parallel thrusts. In the north, Field Marshal Ritter von Leeb pressed toward Leningrad; in the center, Marshal von Bock drove on Smolensk and Moscow; in the south, von Rundstedt barreled through the Ukraine toward Kiev. Russian resistance crumbled. In four days German panzers were 200 miles deep in Soviet territory. Two Russian armies had been destroyed and three badly mauled, and 600,000 prisoners were in German captivity. In the air, the Russians lost 1,800 aircraft on the first day of fighting, 800 on the second, 557 on the third, and 351 on the fourth.63

  Churchill responded with immediate support for the Soviet Union. “No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years,” he told a British radio audience the evening of June 22. “I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding.… Any man or state who fights on against Nazidom will have our aid. It follows, therefore, that we shall give whatever help we can to Russia and the Russian people.”64*

  Roosevelt followed Churchill’s lead, gingerly at first, then with increasing vigor. On June 23, at the president’s direction, the State Department issued a cautiously drafted statement affirming Hitler as the nation’s number one enemy and proclaiming America’s sympathy for any who opposed him “from whatever source.” The Soviet Union was not mentioned.65 Roosevelt may have been testing the waters, or the State Department may have resisted going further. In any event, at his press conference the following day the president came flat out: “Of course we are going to give all the aid that we possibly can to Russia.” Roosevelt said he had no idea what the Russians needed and had not yet received any request from Moscow.

  Q: Will any priorities on airplanes be assigned to Russia?

  FDR: I don’t know.

  Q: Does any aid we could give come under Lend-Lease?

  FDR: I don’t know.… We will not cross that bridge until we come to it.66

  For Roosevelt there was no question that the Soviets should receive what they needed. He was no more fond of communism than Churchill was. But much of his political life was premised on the doctrine that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and he saw no reason not to measure Stalin by that standard. The Soviet Union was scarcely engaged in fomenting world revolution and had not been since the mid-1920s. Even if it were, the universalist appeal of communism was far less reprehensible than the genocidal racism of Nazism. And although Russia had attacked Finland and absorbed the Baltic states, it displayed none of the aggressive imperialism of Germany and Italy.67 But the American administration was divided. Career foreign service officers remained hostile to the Soviet Union; the military advised the White House that the Germans would sweep across Russia in one month, three at the most; and Stimson and Knox worried that supplies sent to the Soviets might fall into Hitler’s hands. Together with Ickes, they urged that the breathing space provided by Hitler’s invasion be utilized to win the war in the Atlantic.

  There was also a political minefield to navigate. “The victory of Communism would be far more dangerous to the United States than a victory of Fascism,” said Senator Robert Taft. “It’s a case of dog eat dog,” allowed Missouri’s Bennett Champ Clark. “I don’t think we should help either one.” The isolationist press, led by the Chicago Tribune and the New York Journal-American, was predictably opposed to aid to Russia. More serious was the potential opposition of the Catholic Church. Many Catholics felt bound by the 1937 Encyclical of Pius XI, Divini redemptoris, which stated categorically, “Communism is intrinsically wrong and no one who would save Christian civilization may give it assistance in any undertaking whatsoever.”68*

  To short-circuit the hostility of the foreign service, Roosevelt sent Hopkins to meet Stalin and observe the situation firsthand. As in 1933, relations with Russia would be handled in the Oval Office. The diplomats would be relegated to the sidelines as interpreters and note takers. Hopkins was impressed by the Soviet resolve. When he returned to Washington, Roosevelt brushed aside the War Department’s military estimate; rejected the advice of Knox, Stimson, and Ickes to concentrate on the Battle of the Atlantic; and invited the Soviet ambassador in Washington, Constantine Ourmansky, to present a list of items the United States might supply to the Red Army. Within a week the Soviets submitted a detailed request totaling $1.8 billion.

  As Russian resistance stiffened, Roosevelt pressed the military to step up deliveries. He fumed at the cabinet for its foot-dragging: “I am sick and tired of hearing [the Russians] are going to get this and they are going to get that.” He wanted a hundred or more fighters delivered to the Soviet Union immediately. “Get the planes right off with a bang,” he told Stimson, even if they had to be taken from the U.S. Army.69 Public opinion rallied to the president’s side. A July Gallup Poll indicated that 72 percent of Americans favored a Russian victory. Only 4 percent were opposed.70 In the fall FDR instructed General Marshall to give precedence to delivery of supplies to Russia. Shortly thereafter he formally declared the defense of the Soviet Union “vital to the defense of the United States,” making Russia eligible for aid under the Lend-Lease Act.71

  Three weeks after Hitler’s invasion of Russia, Roosevelt dispatched 4,400 marines to relieve the British garrison in Iceland. The move had been planned for several months, but the White House kept its fingers crossed. Admiral Stark wrote Hopkins that what the Navy was being asked to do was “practically an act of war” and wanted the president’s explicit approval. “O.K., FDR,” Roosevelt
scribbled on the bottom of Stark’s request.72 Marines were deployed initially because it was unclear whether Iceland was in the Western Hemisphere, and the Selective Service Act prohibited the use of draftees if it were not. After the marines were in place the State Department redefined the hemisphere to include Iceland, and FDR pressed the American patrol zone one degree of longitude eastward.

  It was at FDR’s instigation that he and Churchill met off Newfoundland in early August. “I’ve just got to see Churchill myself in order to explain things to him,” the president told Morgenthau.73 The arrangements were entrusted to Hopkins. Confidentiality was essential. Churchill would have to cross the U-boat-infested Atlantic coming and going, and Roosevelt for his part wanted to avoid provoking his isolationist critics until after the conference took place. Initially FDR envisaged a private one-on-one meeting, but Churchill pressed to have the senior military staffs included, and Roosevelt agreed.

  Churchill boarded the battleship HMS Prince of Wales at Scapa Flow on August 4 and sailed with the tide. During his absence, Labour party leader Clement Attlee, who was deputy prime minister in the war cabinet, stood in for Churchill in the House of Commons. Attlee was under firm instructions to answer no questions concerning the prime minister’s whereabouts. On the second day out the sea was so rough the Prince of Wales’ destroyer escort could not maintain the pace. Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, the first sea lord, who was traveling with Churchill, gave the order for the destroyers to drop away. The big battleship plunged on at high speed alone, zigzagging to avoid possible U-boats and maintaining radio silence to avoid detection.74 It seems mind-boggling in retrospect that Great Britain’s prime minister, the chief of the imperial general staff, the first sea lord, and the air vice chief of staff—that nation’s highest political and military leadership—should be traveling together on a single warship in the North Atlantic, fully aware of the U-boat menace they faced.* Two days later, when Prince of Wales crossed the twenty-fifth meridian, a squadron of Canadian destroyers took up screening positions and escorted the mighty vessel to the American fleet lying at anchor in the deep waters of Placentia Bay, off Argentia Harbor—one of the locations acquired by the United States in the Destroyers for Bases deal.

  For his own route to Argentia, Roosevelt organized an elaborate charade. On Sunday evening, August 3, he boarded the presidential yacht Potomac at New London, Connecticut, for what was announced as a ten-day fishing vacation off the New England coast. The following day he hosted members of the Danish and Norwegian royal families on board, and that evening, under cover of darkness, rendezvoused with vessels of the Atlantic Fleet off Martha’s Vineyard. The Potomac returned to Massachusetts waters still flying the presidential pennant and for the next week cruised leisurely around Cape Cod, giving every evidence that FDR was still present.†

  Roosevelt, however, had boarded the heavy cruiser Augusta, flagship of the Atlantic Fleet, and set sail for Newfoundland. Waiting for the president on ship were General Marshall, Admiral Stark, and General Hap Arnold, each of whom had taken his own circuitous route to the rendezvous. Accompanying the Augusta was her sister ship, the 9,000-ton Tuscaloosa, and five destroyers. The little flotilla sped along at a steady twenty-one knots and arrived off Argentia the morning of August 7. There they were joined by the venerable Arkansas, the 1912 dowager empress of the battleship fleet, and a dozen more destroyers from the Atlantic patrol.75 Prince of Wales, with her Canadian escort, steamed slowly into the magnificent harbor precisely at 9 A.M. on August 9. As the huge battleship made its way through the line of American ships, crews in dress whites stood mustered at the rails—a dazzling panorama on a bright, sunny day.

  At eleven o’clock Churchill, dressed in the Navy-like uniform of Warden of the Cinque Ports, crossed the bay to the Augusta. On deck, just below the bridge, Roosevelt waited. He stood erect, holding his son Elliott’s arm. “The Boss insisted on standing,” said presidential bodyguard Mike Reilly. “He hated and mistrusted those braces, but it was a historic occasion and he meant to play his part as much as his limbs would permit. Even the slight pitch of the Augusta meant pain and possibly a humiliating fall.”76

  “At last we have gotten together,” said Roosevelt.

  “We have,” Churchill replied as they shook hands.77

  BY THE TIME lunch was finished, they were “Franklin” and “Winston.”78* “I like him,” FDR wrote his cousin Daisy Suckley, “and lunching alone broke the ice both ways. He is a tremendously vital person and in many ways is an English Mayor La Guardia.”79 Churchill said, “I formed a very strong affection, which grew with our years of comradeship. We talked of nothing but business, and reached a great measure of agreement on many points, both large and small.”80 For Hopkins, who played interlocutor at lunch, the friendship was preordained. “They were two men in the same line of business—politico-military leadership on a global scale—and theirs was a very limited field and the few who achieve it seldom have opportunities for getting together with fellow craftsmen in the same trade to compare notes and talk shop. They established an easy intimacy, a joking informality and a moratorium on pomposity and cant—and also a degree of frankness which, if not quite complete, was remarkably close to it.”81

  In their working habits Churchill and Roosevelt could not have been more different. Roosevelt always worked in a setting of tranquillity, where outside pressures rarely penetrated. Churchill, on the other hand, “always seemed to be at his command post on a precarious beachhead, the conversational guns continually blazing.” Roosevelt retired early; Churchill did not work up a full head of steam until about ten in the evening and often stayed up until three or four. He slept late and always took a nap after lunch. Roosevelt worked straight through from morning to evening and usually took lunch at his desk. Churchill had an unquenchable thirst for champagne, cognac, and Scotch whiskey and fortified himself at regular intervals through most of his working hours. FDR enjoyed a martini, two at the most, during the “children’s hour” at seven but otherwise abstained.82

  The emotional high point of the Argentia meeting was the Sunday religious service on the deck of the Prince of Wales. Roosevelt and Churchill sat side by side under a turret of fourteen-inch guns with their military chiefs standing behind them. American and British sailors mingled in the foreground, the flags of the two countries draped the altar, and British and American chaplains shared the prayers and readings. Churchill, who was not an observant Christian, relished the pageantry of the Church. (He sometimes said he was a “buttress” of the Church of England rather than a “pillar” because he supported it from outside.83) As host for the ceremony, the prime minister chose the hymns: “O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” and the Navy hymn “For Those in Peril on the Sea.” “Every word seemed to stir the heart,” Churchill wrote later, “and none who took part in it will forget the spectacle presented. It was a great hour to live.”84 Roosevelt, who had insisted on walking the length of the ship to his seat on the fantail, called the service the “keynote” of the conference. “If nothing else had happened while we were here,” he told his son Elliott, “that would have cemented us. ‘Onward Christian Soldiers.’ We are, and we will go on, with God’s help.”85*

  Several times during the conference Churchill pressed Roosevelt for a declaration of war. “I would rather have a declaration of war now and no supplies for six months than double the supplies and no declaration,” he was quoted as saying.86 Roosevelt replied that he was skating on thin ice with Congress and they would debate a declaration of war for three months. As Churchill later explained to the war cabinet, “The President said he would become more and more provocative. If the Germans did not like it, they could attack the American forces.”87 Roosevelt agreed to provide armed escorts for British convoys as far as Iceland; expedite the shipment of planes and tanks; and request another $5 billion for Lend-Lease. Together they sent a joint message to Stalin pledging further assistance, and, in the event of war in the Pacific, agreed to a �
�Hitler first” strategy.88

  The most enduring result of the conference was the Atlantic Charter: a stirring declaration of principles for world peace adopted by Churchill and Roosevelt on August 12. The Charter renounced territorial aggrandizement, supported self-determination, favored a loosening of trade restrictions, reaffirmed the desire to seek a world free from fear and want, and proclaimed the freedom of the seas. In cautious words it advocated a permanent system of international security, a reduction of armaments, and abandonment of the use of force.89 “The profound and far-reaching importance of this Joint Declaration was apparent,” wrote Churchill. “The fact alone of the United States, still technically neutral, joining with a belligerent Power in making such a declaration was astonishing.”90

  While Roosevelt and Churchill met off Newfoundland, Congress grappled with an extension of the draft. The Selective Service Act of 1940 required inductees to serve for twelve months. For many their service commitment was about to expire. If they returned home, the battle-worthiness of almost every Army unit would be severely weakened. It was a crisis not unlike that faced by Union commanders during the Civil War when their soldiers’ term of enlistment expired. Roosevelt put the problem to Congress on July 21. Rather than submit a specific request, he left it to Congress to find a solution. “Time counts. The responsibility rests solely with the Congress.”91

  Marshall and Stimson carried the fight. At their urging the military affairs committees of the House and Senate drafted legislation to extend the term of service by up to eighteen months at the discretion of the president. That would provide the Army with a sufficient manpower cushion to rotate men in and out without damaging combat efficiency. The measure carried the Senate easily, 45–30. But in the House opposition was fierce. With all members facing reelection in 1942 there was little enthusiasm for taking action that would be unpopular with a vast swath of the electorate. An August 6 Gallup Poll indicated that 45 percent of Americans opposed an extension. Between the Appalachians and the Rockies, 54 percent were opposed.92