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We Are Dealing with an Insane Man
Eleanor Roosevelt had also continued to argue on behalf of admitting Jewish refugees to the United States for as long as the Nazis were willing to grant them exit visas. Restrictive immigration laws frustrated her. So did the actions of obstructionists within the State Department—some genuinely concerned that German or Soviet spies would slip into the country along with genuine refugees, some blatantly anti-Semitic—who erected what Albert Einstein called “a wall of bureaucratic measures” meant to keep refugees out.
“I do not know what we can do to save the Jews of Europe and to find them homes,” Eleanor wrote in 1943, “but I do know that we will be the sufferers if we let great wrongs occur without extending ourselves to correct them.”
From FDR’s point of view, he and the Allies were already extending themselves. No other world leader reacted more decisively to Nazi crimes against Jews than Franklin Roosevelt did. In 1938, he had called for an international conference to deal with the refugee problem, only to find that no Western nation was willing to admit significant numbers of Jewish refugees. Later that year, he found himself the sole leader of a democratic nation willing to call home his ambassador and denounce Nazi brutality following Kristallnacht and was made the target afterward of bigots at home and in Berlin for doing the bidding of international Jewry.
In 1942, when rumors began to filter out of occupied Europe that the Nazis had moved from mistreatment of the Jews to mass murder, they were met at first with disbelief; the State Department thought they were of a “fantastic nature,” reminiscent of the false propaganda employed by both sides in the First World War. But when Rabbi Stephen S. Wise and the heads of four major Jewish organizations presented Roosevelt with irrefutable proof, the president agreed to warn the Nazis that they would be held to “strict accountability.” Just nine days later, he persuaded Churchill and Stalin to join him in promising to prosecute as “war criminals” those responsible for what they called this “bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination.”
But he also asked the rabbis while they were still in the Oval Office for suggestions as to what more he could do to save European Jewry. They had no answer. Hitler remained the master of Europe. The Jews were his prisoners—and his intended victims. “We are dealing with an insane man,” FDR told his visitors. “Hitler and the men around him represent … a national psychopathic case. We cannot act toward them by normal means.” In the end, he believed there was nothing he could do other than work night and day to obliterate that madman and his monstrous regime.
Then, in 1944, persuaded by his friend and secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau Jr., he created the War Refugee Board, which authorized funds to help Jews flee from the edges of the crumbling Nazi empire. As many as 200,000 men, women, and children may have been saved—a minute fraction compared to those who were murdered, but more than any other Allied agency managed to rescue.
Breckinridge Long, the assistant secretary of state in charge of immigration. In 1940, he wrote a memorandum urging consular officials to block efforts to assist endangered Jews hoping to find sanctuary in America: “We can delay and effectively stop … the number of immigrants into the United States,” he wrote, “by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way … and to resort to various administrative devices which would postpone … the granting of the visas.”
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A Ukrainian Jew, about to be shot by an SS executioner, kneels at the edge of a mass grave near the town of Vinnitsa, September 22, 1941. This snapshot, made by another SS man, was pasted in his personal album and labeled “The Last Jew of Vinnitsa.” Twenty-eight thousand other Jewish men, women, and children had already been slaughtered in and around the town. Within a few months, secret plans would be under way for what Hermann Göring was the first to call the “final solution of the Jewish question”—the systematic, mechanized extermination of the Jews of Europe.
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Unconditional Surrender
On Saturday, November 8, 1942, FDR, Daisy Suckley, Harry Hopkins, and a handful of others were spending the weekend at “Shangri-La,” hidden in the Catoctin National Forest, seventy-five miles from Washington.
“For weeks,” Daisy noted in her journal, “the P[resident] has had something exciting up his sleeve. Only a handful knew about it.… He spoke of an egg about to be hatched.… After dinner, as we were getting settled in chairs, [the president] … said at nine that something will break on the radio … and at nine we got the news of the landing of our troops on North Africa.… It was thrilling and for the President it was a tremendous climax.”
The simultaneous landings in Morocco, Algiers, and Tunisia went smoothly and came as a complete surprise to the enemy. Casualties were low. “Thank God!” Roosevelt said. “Thank God!”
It took just four days to force the Vichy French to agree to an armistice, but their German and Italian allies proved far more formidable foes and the raw U.S. troops soon found the fighting that followed much tougher than they’d expected. Elliott Roosevelt, who had pulled strings to get into combat despite his bad eyesight, was among those fighting there, piloting unarmed reconnaissance planes again and again over enemy territory. It would take seven bloody months to drive the enemy from North Africa.
In January of 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill made their way to the war zone, to Casablanca in Morocco, where FDR declared the Allies united in their goal—nothing less than “unconditional surrender.”
In the Pacific, American naval forces had already badly damaged the Japanese fleet at Midway. The Marines had captured most of Guadalcanal—though at a fearful cost—and had raided Makin Island, too, where the president’s eldest son, Major James Roosevelt, was awarded the Navy Cross for “extraordinary heroism.”
Within a few weeks, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union would finally be halted at Stalingrad.
Allied troops would soon invade Sicily—where Franklin Jr.’s destroyer would be badly damaged. He would win the Silver Star for carrying one of his wounded sailors to safety under fire.
Then the Allies would have to begin the long, bloody struggle to take Italy. But the cross-Channel invasion of France that the Russians were demanding—and that everyone including the enemy knew had to come—had been postponed yet again and was still more than a year away.
GIs about to land in North Africa as part of Operation Torch, fulfilling Roosevelt’s pledge that American troops would at last be fighting the Germans somewhere in 1942
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From a lofty tower in Marrakesh, Roosevelt delights in the sunset over the roofs and minarets of the city and the snow-covered slopes of the Atlas Mountains beyond them. Churchill, just visible in the shadow, thought this “the most lovely spot in the whole world” and encouraged the president to allow himself to be carried up sixty steps to see it for himself.
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The Bottom Has Dropped Out
Kermit and I are much alike,” Theodore Roosevelt once said of his second son. Kermit shared his father’s love of books and adventure. He helped build bridges and railroads in Brazil, accompanied his father to Africa and down the Rio Roosevelt, shot tigers in Nepal and bears in Alaska, and wrote vivid books about it all. But he lacked his father’s ambition, could not find a way to outpace the depression that he also inherited, and never quite got over his father’s death: “You well know,” he told his mother afterward, “how the bottom has dropped out for me.”
He married an heiress with whom he had four children, but he disliked the social whirl she loved. He launched a steamship line but was never much interested in business, and lost most of his wife’s fortune in the Depression.
He began to drink far too much and took up with a mistress, just as his uncle Elliott had. When the war began he rejoined his old British regiment as a major in the hope that having a real mission might steady him. He fought bravely against the Germans in Norway, and served in North Afri
ca until ill health forced him home. When he was picked up by the police too drunk to stand, his brother Archie had him committed to a sanitarium for a time.
In the summer of 1942, his wife appealed to FDR to find something for him to do. The president sent him to an air base in Alaska where he was to help establish a Territorial Guard of Aleuts and Eskimos to serve as guerrilla fighters in case of Japanese invasion—just the kind of assignment his father would have relished.
It was too late. On May 31, 1943, U.S. forces destroyed the enemy garrison on the island of Attu in the Aleutians. The Japanese threat to Alaska had been lifted. Four days later, Kermit put his service revolver under his chin and pulled the trigger. A telegram explained that he had killed himself “due to despondence resulting from exclusion from combat duties.”
It was thought best to tell his mother, Edith—eighty-one years old and still living at Sagamore Hill—that he had died of a heart attack.
Kermit Roosevelt and his mother, Edith, aboard an ocean liner shortly before the war. “I know he’s a naughty boy,” she often said, “but I love him.”
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Major Kermit Roosevelt in Alaska, still hoping for action against a Japanese invasion force that would never come
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The simple marker on Kermit’s grave at Fort Richardson
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An American Mother
In the summer of 1943, Eleanor Roosevelt undertook a five-week 25,000-mile trip to the South Pacific on behalf of the Red Cross. She had no illusions about how it would be received by her husband’s enemies at home. “This trip will be attacked as a political gesture,” she told a friend, “and I am so uncertain whether or not I am doing the right thing that I will start with a heavy heart.… I’ll go because other people think I should … and where I do see our soldiers I’ll try to make them feel that Franklin really wants to know about them.”
She did just that in Hawaii, Australia, and New Zealand and on seventeen other Pacific islands, including Bora Bora, Samoa, Fiji, New Caledonia, Christmas Island—and Guadalcanal, where she got to see her young friend Joe Lash, now a sergeant in the army.
Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey, commander in the South Pacific, had been against her coming. He had a war to fight, he said, and no time to waste welcoming a visiting “do-gooder.” But when the first lady turned up and went to work, Halsey quickly changed his mind.
Here is what Eleanor Roosevelt did in twelve hours: she inspected two Navy hospitals, took a boat to an officer’s rest home and had lunch there, returned and inspected an Army hospital, reviewed the 2nd Marine Raider Battalion, … made a speech at a service club, attended a reception, and was guest of honor at a dinner given by General Harmon.
When I say that she inspected those hospitals, I don’t mean that she shook hands with the chief medical officer, glanced into a sunroom and left. I mean that she went into every ward, stopped at every bed, and spoke to every patient: What was his name? How did he feel? Was there anything he needed? Could she take a message home for him? I marveled at her hardihood, both physical and mental.… And she saw patients who were grievously and gruesomely wounded. But I marveled most at their expressions as she leaned over them. It was a sight I will never forget.
“Over here,” one soldier said, “she was something … none of us had seen in over a year, an American mother.” The family of every wounded soldier and sailor she visited got a personal letter. But, just as her experience with the wounded of World War I had affected her, it took weeks for her to get over the impact of the horrors she had seen. To the end of her life, she would remember the smell of the burn wards.
When she got back, just as she had predicted, Republicans attacked her for junketeering at the public’s expense. “The outcry in Congress is so great,” she confided to a friend, “that FDR feels I should not use Government transportation or even go on any [long] trips for awhile.… Later, I’m sure he’ll say go ahead again, but just now it seems he wants a little peace.”
Eleanor Roosevelt in the Pacific:
Speaking to troops
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With Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, who began as her critic and became an admirer
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Visiting a wounded soldier
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Receiving three cheers aboard ship
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Examining the wreckage of a downed Japanese plane
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The first lady’s trip drew enough worldwide attention that a Nazi cartoonist was assigned to produce a series of vicious caricatures of her. The German caption beneath this one reads, “I was the first white woman that the Americans stationed on the Pacific Island had seen for ten months.”
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The Final Authority
At the end of November 1943, the president set out on a demanding eight-thousand-mile journey by sea and air, first to Cairo, where he conferred again with Churchill, and then on to Tehran, Persia (now Iran), to meet for the first time with Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin.
Stalin was surprised to see the extent of the president’s handicap. “Tell the president that I now understand what it has meant for him to make the effort to come on such a long journey,” he told his interpreter. “Tell him the next time I will go to him.”
The Soviet dictator was taciturn, guarded, and perpetually suspicious, but FDR was convinced the Roosevelt charm that had worked so well for him throughout his career would work with Stalin, as well.
The bargaining was often tense.
Stalin, whose Red Army was still bearing the brunt of the fighting, was determined to hold on to the eastern European countries his men were capturing as they pushed the Germans back toward Berlin. And he insisted upon the fastest possible opening of a second front in western Europe.
Churchill resisted, still hoping an assault on France could be delayed or somehow avoided altogether.
Roosevelt, an aide remembered, “sat in the middle, by common consent the moderator, arbitrator and final authority.”
In the end, the Big Three set the stage for victory. The Americans and British would invade occupied France in the spring of 1944. The Soviets would mount a simultaneous offensive from the east. The hope was that the Nazis would be crushed between them. Once the Germans had been defeated, the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan.
At the final dinner, each of the leaders toasted the other two. Then, Stalin asked to make another toast—to the special contribution made by Roosevelt and the United States. “The most important things in this war are the machines,” he said. “The United States is a country of machines. Without the use of those machines, through Lend-Lease, we would lose this war.”
But even with all those machines, victory in Europe—and in the Pacific—still seemed a long way off.
FDR and General Dwight D. Eisenhower review troops at Castelvetrano, Sicily, December 8, 1943. The preceding day, the president had named Eisenhower to command Overlord, the long-delayed Allied assault on western Europe. “Eisenhower is the best politician among the military men,” the president explained to his son James. “He is a natural leader who can convince other men to follow him, and this is what we need in his position more than any other quality.”
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Together at last, the Big Three—Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill—in Tehran
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Roosevelt returns from the Tehran conference, greeted by (left to right) Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley, House Majority Leader John McCormack of Massachusetts, Vice President Henry Wallace, and House Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas.
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There Must Be Something Definitely Wrong
Roosevelt returned from Tehran exhausted and suffering from what Admiral Ross McIntire, his physician and the surgeon general, diagnosed as the flu. Weeks went by. He did not get better. Grace Tully, his longtime secretary, who had taken over for Missy LeHand, noticed t
hat his hands now shook so badly that he had trouble lighting his cigarettes and he sometimes seemed to doze for a moment during dictation.
She and Daisy Suckley were worried. So was the president’s daughter, Anna. With her second husband overseas, she had recently moved back into the White House with her children, and—with her mother often away—was now acting as her father’s hostess.
All three women feared that Admiral McIntire was not up to the job of caring for the president. His expertise was sinuses.
Something else was wrong, and Anna insisted on answers. On March 27, 1944, her father agreed to be wheeled into Bethesda Naval Hospital for an off-the-record examination by the chief of cardiology, Lieutenant Commander Howard G. Bruenn.
The doctor was horrified by what he found: the president was suffering from congestive heart failure. His heart was “markedly enlarged”; he was short of breath; and he was suffering from severe hypertension, for which there was then no effective treatment. Four days later, three senior physicians confirmed the diagnosis.
To reduce and slow the heart and to ease the strain on it, FDR was prescribed digitalis and put on a diet. He was told to cut his smoking in half and urged not to work more than four hours a day.
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