by FDR
In Cairo, Roosevelt delegated Hopkins to determine what Marshall preferred. “I shall accept any decision the President would make,” said Marshall.114 The chief of staff realized that FDR was wavering. The following day, Sunday, December 5, the president sent for Marshall shortly before lunch. “I was determined,” Marshall said later, “that I should not embarrass the President one way or the other—that he must be able to deal in this matter with a perfectly free hand in whatever he felt was the best interests of the country.”115
As Marshall recalled, Roosevelt beat around the bush for a while “and then asked what I wanted to do. Evidently it was left up to me.” Again Marshall replied that it was the president’s decision to make. His own feelings did not matter. “I would cheerfully go whatever way he wanted me to go and I didn’t express any desire one way or the other.”
“Then it will be Eisenhower,” said Roosevelt. “I don’t think I could sleep at night if you were out of Washington.”116 The president dictated to Marshall a message for Stalin:
The immediate appointment of General Eisenhower to command of OVERLORD operation has been decided upon.
—Roosevelt117*
The selection of Eisenhower as supreme commander in Europe was the last major military decision Roosevelt was required to make. FDR did not second-guess or micromanage the military. More than any president before or since, he was uniquely able to select outstanding military leaders and give them sufficient discretion to do their jobs. Leahy, Marshall, King, and Arnold made a cohesive team at the highest level, and they handled their individual service responsibilities superbly. In the Pacific, Roosevelt turned to MacArthur over War Department objections, and he named Nimitz to command the fleet despite the lukewarm enthusiasm of more senior admirals. Eisenhower ranked 252nd on the Army list when Marshall chose him to head the North African invasion, and he was still well down when FDR tapped him as supreme commander.
Roosevelt’s stance toward the military differed substantially from his approach to domestic matters. Unlike the professional accomplishment he sought from the admirals and generals, his civilian appointments reflected the demands of politics. Hull, Ickes, Wallace, and Frances Perkins spoke for particular constituencies whose support the president needed. They symbolized his political coalition, but they were not free to set policy in their individual bailiwicks. Roosevelt did not hesitate to dip down to resolve departmental issues, often structured competing lines of authority, and had no hesitation in second-guessing decisions his subordinates had made. Cabinet officers were kept on a short leash; the military were free to roam the reservation.
Like FDR’s other military choices, Eisenhower rose to the occasion. The planning for D-Day, inter-Allied cooperation, and the logistical backup left little to be desired. At the crucial moment, with a brief break in the weather, Eisenhower made the decision to land on June 6, 1944, entirely on his own authority. Washington and London were informed but not consulted. The bravery, conditioning, and discipline of the troops who hit the beaches carried the day against determined German resistance. Three million men organized into thirty-nine divisions—twenty American, fourteen British, three Canadian, one Polish, and one French—constituted the invasion force. They were supported by 12,000 aircraft and the largest naval armada ever assembled. At the last moment Churchill decided he wanted to participate. Eisenhower could not dissuade him. George VI finally intervened. If his prime minister was going to take part in the landing, so would he. Except for the air raids on London, said the King, he had not been under fire since the Battle of Jutland, and he eagerly welcomed the prospect of renewing the experiences of his youth.118 At that point Churchill saw the problem: Britain could not risk losing the King or a prime minister. He yielded to Eisenhower’s wishes.
* When Field Marshal von Rundstedt launched his counterattack in the Ardennes in December 1944, his ten panzer divisions possessed a total of 1,241 tanks. By contrast, Eisenhower’s order of battle included 7,079 medium tanks alone. As the commander of a German 88 mm gun unit remarked, “The Americans kept sending tanks down the road. We kept knocking them out. Every time they sent a tank we knocked it out. Finally we ran out of ammunition and they didn’t run out of tanks.” John Ellis, Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War 335, 421 (New York: Viking, 1990).
* Mandatory contract renegotiation and the recapture of excess profits faced repeated court challenges, but in the end the Supreme Court upheld the Army’s authority. Said Justice Harold Burton for the Court, “The constitutionality of the conscription of manpower for military service is beyond question. The constitutional power of Congress to support the armed forces with equipment and supplies is no less clear and sweeping. The mandatory renegotiation of contracts is valid, a fortiori.” Lichter v. United States, 334 U.S. 742 (1948).
* Churchill repeated the performance in 1959 as he was riding with President Eisenhower to his farm in Gettysburg. Ike recited the famous “Shoot if you must” lines as they drove through Frederick, and Churchill again quoted the entire poem from memory. New York Herald Tribune, May 11, 1959.
* Eight divisions (four British, three American, and one Canadian), a total of 175,000 men, hit the beaches the first day. Within two days 478,000 troops were ashore. At Normandy, by contrast, and despite earlier projections, the Allies landed only five divisions plus three British armored brigades, a total of 150,000 men, on D-Day. B. H. Liddell Hart, History of the Second World War 440 (London: Cassell, 1970); Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett, A War to Be Won 420 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).
* Under German tutelage Mussolini proclaimed the “Italian Socialist Republic” with its headquarters at Salò on the banks of Lake Garda in northern Italy. Badoglio and King Victor Emmanuel fled safely to the Adriatic resort city of Brindisi, where they were protected by British forces. The Italian Navy, including four battleships, sailed to Malta, where it ceremoniously surrendered to the British.
* Einstein’s letter, dated August 2, 1939, was drafted initially by the Hungarian émigré physicist Leo Szilard and delivered personally to FDR by New Deal businessman Alexander Sachs, then with Lehman Brothers and an old friend of the president. Sachs recounted to Roosevelt Napoleon’s error when he rejected Robert Fulton and Robert R. Livingston’s offer to build a fleet of steamships and suggested that Einstein’s letter represented a similar technological breakthrough. According to Sachs, Roosevelt’s interest was piqued and he ordered an authentic bottle of Napoleon brandy to be brought out—a Roosevelt family heirloom. FDR poured two glasses, gave one to Sachs, and sat back to listen as Sachs summarized Einstein’s presentation. Roosevelt comprehended its import instantly. “Alex, what you are after is to see that the Nazis don’t blow us up.” “Precisely,” Sachs replied. Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb 313–314 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985). For the text of Einstein’s 1939 letter, see Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times 556–557 (New York: World Publishing, 1971).
* “If I had known that the Germans would not succeed in constructing the atom bomb, I would have never lifted a finger,” said Einstein years later. Quoted in Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust War 263 (New York: Basic Books, 1977).
* When Republicans regained control of Congress in 1947, Brewster became chairman of the Special Senate Committee Investigating the National Defense Program—the old “Truman Committee.” Brewster’s first target was Howard Hughes, whose Hughes Aircraft Company had been awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to develop an enormous transport plane made of plywood (the “spruce goose”). Critics charged that Brewster—“the kept senator of Pan American Airways”—was pursuing Hughes because TWA, which Hughes owned, was challenging Pan Am’s dominance of transatlantic travel. After five days of hilarious hearings in the Senate Caucus Room, Hughes demolished Brewster and made the committee look foolish. When Hughes successfully flew the plane during a test in November 1947, the committee abruptly closed the investigation. (One of the highlights of my l
ife as a teenager growing up in Washington, D.C., was to attend the hearings and witness Hughes’s aplomb before the committee.) The Hughes flying boat remains the largest plane ever built, with a wingspan of 320 feet (compared to the Boeing 747’s 195 feet) and a weight of 400,000 pounds (versus 378,000.) Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, Empire: The Life, Legend and Madness of Howard Hughes 145–160 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979).
* It is unfortunate that no one from the State Department attended FDR’s meeting with the military chiefs on the Iowa or was privy to his views on zonal boundaries. The Teheran conference placed the matter in the hands of a newly created European Advisory Commission based in London. The United States was represented by Ambassador John G. Winant and his deputy, George Kennan, but neither was familiar with Roosevelt’s wishes and the commission quickly adopted a proposal framed by the British cabinet that established the demarcation between east and west more or less on the Elbe River, with Berlin located 110 miles inside the Russian zone.
The fumbled decision on zonal boundaries in Germany plagued the Western powers throughout the Cold War and can be attributed in no small measure to FDR’s exclusion of the State Department from administration planning following Welles’s resignation. The War Department’s failure to inform State of the president’s position is equally inexcusable. Of course, if Hull had not vindictively pursued Welles and forced his resignation, the problem would not have arisen. Had Winant and Kennan been familiar with Roosevelt’s design, it is certainly conceivable that different demarcation lines would have been drawn.
* Harvard professor Samuel Cross, who served as interpreter when Roosevelt met Molotov, did an excellent job, but he blotted his copybook by entertaining dinner parties in Cambridge with stories of what Molotov had said to the president and what the president had said in reply. When he heard of it, Roosevelt was furious and instructed Hopkins to find someone in government service who could keep his mouth shut. After an extensive search Hopkins chose Bohlen. Charles E. Bohlen, Witness to History 132–133 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973).
* Admiral Leahy, who was sitting next to FDR at the meeting, said the president leaned over and whispered, “That old Bolshevik is trying to force me to give him the name of our Supreme Commander. I just can’t tell him because I haven’t made up my mind.” Admiral William D. Leahy, I Was There 208 (New York: Whittlesey House, 1950).
* “Nobody thanked me for my services,” wrote Beria. “I was rewarded solely with a Swiss watch. According to my father, Stalin was satisfied with the results of the conference and considered he had won the game. I am sure my summaries must survive somewhere in the archives. Perhaps the recordings too have been preserved.” Sergo Beria, Beria, My Father 94 (London: Duckworth, 2001).
* The message was handwritten by Marshall and signed by Roosevelt. Afterward Marshall passed it along to Eisenhower with the message: “Dear Eisenhower: I thought you would like to have this memento. It was written very hurriedly by me … the President signing it immediately. G.C.M.” Reproduced in Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe 229 (New York: Doubleday, 1948).
TWENTY-SIX
LAST POST
I can’t talk about my opponent the way I would like to sometimes, because I try to think that I am a Christian.
—FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, NOVEMBER 4, 1944
ROOSEVELT APPEARED TO BE in excellent health at Teheran. Bohlen said he was “clearly the dominating figure at the conference, never showing any signs of fatigue and holding his magnificent leonine head high.”1 Lord Ismay thought he “looked the picture of health and was at his best … wise, conciliatory, and paternal.”2 Stimson, greeting the president on his return to Washington on December 17, 1943, noted that he looked very well. “He was at his best [and] greeted all of us with very great cheeriness and good humor and kindness.”3
Franklin and Eleanor spent Christmas at Hyde Park—the first time since 1932 that the family gathered at Springwood. Anna was there from Seattle, and the two younger boys, FDR, Jr., and John, had secured leave from their units. For Anna, whose husband was with the Army’s press contingent in North Africa, it was a special reunion. The president was lonely. Missy, his companion for twenty years, languished stroke-ridden at her sister’s home in Massachusetts; Louis Howe had been gone for a decade; Marvin McIntyre, FDR’s longtime appointments secretary, had died while the president was in Teheran; and Hopkins had moved out of the White House on December 21.* Anna filled the void. She gossiped with her father as Missy had done, shared breakfast with him in the morning, sat beside him in his study as he worked, and joined him for cocktails before dinner. “It was the beginning of a new intimacy in their relationship,” wrote Doris Kearns Goodwin.4
Anna had intended to return to her job at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer after Christmas, but Roosevelt asked her to stay on. Would she consider coming to work for him? he asked. “Father could relax more easily with Anna than with Mother,” Elliott observed. “He could enjoy his drink without feeling guilty.”5 Anna agreed to the change immediately. “With no preliminary talks or discussions,” she recalled, “I found myself trying to take over little chores that I felt would relieve Father of some of the pressure under which he was constantly working.”6 Anna was never given an official title or paid a salary, but she became as much a part of FDR’s daily routine as Missy had been. “It was immaterial to me whether my job was helping to plan the 1944 campaign, pouring tea for General de Gaulle, or filling Father’s empty cigarette case.”7 She rented out her house in Seattle, moved with her children into the Lincoln Suite, which Hopkins had vacated, and settled into the White House for the duration of the war.
Roosevelt met the press for the 929th time on December 28, 1943. He was asked about the New Deal: Was the term still appropriate to describe his administration? FDR thought not. “How did the New Deal come into existence?” he asked. “It was because there was an awfully sick patient called the United States of America, and it was suffering from grave internal disorder. And they sent for the doctor.”
“Old Doctor New Deal” prescribed a number of remedies, said Roosevelt. “He saved the banks of the United States and set up a sound banking system. One of the old doctor’s remedies was Federal Deposit Insurance to guarantee bank deposits. Another remedy was saving homes from foreclosure, through the H.O.L.C. [Home Owners’ Loan Corporation]; saving farms from foreclosure by the Farm Credit Administration; rescuing agriculture from disaster through the Triple A [Agricultural Adjustment Administration] and Soil Conservation; protecting stock investors through the S.E.C. [Securities and Exchange Commission].” The president ticked off a list of prescriptions Doctor New Deal had written: Social Security; unemployment insurance; aid to the handicapped and infirm; minimum-wage and maximum-hours legislation; abolition of child labor; rural electrification; flood control; the public works program; the TVA; the Civilian Conservation Corps; the WPA; and the National Youth Administration. “And I probably left out half of them,” he added.
“But two years ago after the patient had recovered, he had a very bad accident. Two years ago on the seventh of December he was in a pretty bad smashup—broke his hip, broke his leg in two or three places, broke a wrist and an arm, and some ribs, and they didn’t think he would live for a while. Old Doctor New Deal didn’t know ‘nothing’ about legs and arms. He knew a great deal about internal medicine but nothing about surgery. So he got his partner, who was an orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Win-the-War, to take care of the fellow who was in this bad accident. And the result is that the patient is back on his feet. He has given up his crutches. He isn’t wholly well yet, and he won’t be until he wins the war.”
Q: Does all that add up to a fourth term declaration? (Laughter.)
FDR: Oh now—we are not talking about things like that now.8
The deterioration of Roosevelt’s health became evident in the late winter and early spring of 1944. For years his blood pressure had been rising, and he had given up his daily dips in the White House pool sometime in 1940
.9 Grace Tully noticed that the president was slowing down: the dark circles under his eyes grew darker, his shoulders slumped, his hands shook more than ever as he lit his cigarette. The year before he had ordered a coffee cup twice as large so he could hold it to his lips without spilling it. These were normal signs of aging, Tully thought, intensified by the relentless pressure under which Roosevelt worked.10
But in February and March 1944 the signs grew worse. FDR seemed unusually tired even in the morning hours; he occasionally nodded off while reading his mail and several times fell asleep while dictating. “He would grin in slight embarrassment as he caught himself,” Tully recalled. Once he blanked out halfway through signing his name to a letter, leaving a long, illegible scrawl.11
Anna was stunned at her father’s failing health. She mentioned it to Eleanor, but her mother dismissed it. “I don’t think she saw it,” Anna told the writer Bernard Asbell. “She simply wasn’t interested in physiology.”12 In the last week of March Roosevelt’s temperature reached 104 degrees. He canceled all appointments and confined himself to his bedroom. Anna stayed beside him and grew increasingly worried. After consulting with Grace Tully, she confronted Admiral Ross T. McIntire, the president’s personal physician.13 (McIntire wore a second hat as the Navy’s surgeon general, and in retrospect the two jobs may have been more than he could handle.)14 What was happening to her father? Anna asked. McIntire, originally an ear, nose, and throat specialist, saw no reason to worry. The president was recovering from his usual winter bout with influenza, he said. A week or two in the sun, and he would be fine. “I didn’t think he really knew what he was talking about,” Anna said later.
