by Lynne Olson
Once the Great War was over, the belief had taken hold that America had been tricked into it by British propaganda and by U.S. bankers and arms merchants who had acted on the European allies’ behalf. According to a 1937 Gallup poll, 70 percent of the American people thought it had been a mistake for the country to enter the war.
The misty idealism of the pre–World War I period had given way to a hard-eyed, determined isolationism, which precluded accepting any of the inherent responsibilities that came with America’s position as the world’s leading economic power. Giving voice to the national mood, Ernest Hemingway wrote in 1935: “Of the hell broth that is brewing in Europe we have no need to drink.… We were fools to be sucked in once in a European war, and we shall never be sucked in again.”
In towns close to military bases, it was not uncommon to see signs on storefronts reading: dogs and soldiers—keep out. The atmosphere in the nation’s capital was so antimilitary that most officers, including Lindbergh, did not wear their uniforms in public. When the services’ top brass testified before congressional committees, they also appeared in mufti, so as not to antagonize Capitol Hill’s powerful isolationist bloc.
Long starved of support by both the White House and Congress, the U.S. Army in 1939 ranked seventeenth in the world, sandwiched between those of Portugal and Bulgaria. While the Navy was by far the strongest of the services (despite the fact that nearly half its vessels dated back to World War I), the Army was, as Life noted, “the smallest, worst-equipped armed force of any major power.” With fewer than 175,000 men, it was in such bad shape that, in the words of one military historian, it would not have been able to “repel raids across the Rio Grande by Mexican bandits.” Weapons were so scarce that only one-third of U.S. troops had ever trained with them; those weapons that did exist were almost all of World War I vintage.
Conditioned to ask for only the smallest increases in their budgets, the country’s military leaders were accustomed to seeing even those paltry requests slashed. With most Americans opposed to the very idea of rearming, there was little likelihood of getting enough money to replace deteriorating weapons and equipment, much less to create a modern, mechanized force to match the power of Germany or other potential enemies.
While every president in the post–World War I era had kept the military on a short leash, Roosevelt was the object of particular distrust and dislike in the upper reaches of the armed forces. “Although Roosevelt had his defenders among officers, opinions generally ranged from aversion to disdain and loathing for him, especially on the part of the older generation,” the historian Milton Goldin has noted. Largely conservative in political outlook, many American officers faulted FDR for starving national defense for the previous six years while spending billions of dollars on what they considered wasteful domestic programs, which, as they saw it, pampered the unemployed and poor.
A substantial number of military men were also highly critical of FDR’s increasingly antagonistic attitude toward Germany. While decrying Nazi brutality and repression, they, like Lindbergh, admired Germany’s military and economic achievements and its evident restoration of national pride. Many, too, had great respect for the professionalism and skill of the German army and saw nothing wrong with the Wehrmacht’s massive growth in the 1920s and 1930s—an expansion expressly forbidden by the Versailles Treaty. In 1934, General Douglas MacArthur, then Army chief of staff, told General Friedrich von Boetticher, the German military attaché in Washington, that he believed the treaty was a “gross injustice” and that Germany had every right to enlarge its army.
Like many of their countrymen, a large percentage of the American military felt that Germany had been unfairly treated after the war and that England and France shared much of the blame. Indeed, a sizable number of senior officers were far more antagonistic toward their former allies than toward their former enemy. Many felt that America had been tricked by Britain and France into entering the Great War, which, in their view, had neither served nor advanced U.S. interests. They strongly believed in the idea of a Fortress America and shared Lindbergh’s adamant opposition to the idea of getting involved in another European conflict.
Anyone who thought that the American military in the late 1930s and early 1940s was “an incubator of militarism prolifically hatching designs for war … would have been surprised by the strong element of isolationism and the absence of militancy in their deliberations,” the historian Forrest Pogue observed in his biography of General George Marshall. As General Malin Craig, Marshall’s predecessor as Army chief of staff, saw it, another war “would mean the end of civilization.”
The antiwar views of senior American military figures were faithfully transmitted back to Berlin by von Boetticher, who had established close contacts and friendships with a number of officers in the Army’s high command. A cultured man, whose mother had been born in America and raised in Britain, the short, stout von Boetticher had first begun cultivating U.S. officers in the 1920s, as part of his job as a key intelligence officer for the German army. Assigned to Washington as military attaché in 1933, he rented an imposing Victorian mansion in the increasingly fashionable neighborhood of Georgetown, where he entertained lavishly. In June 1938, for example, he hosted a garden party in honor of Hap Arnold’s son, who was bound for the Naval Academy in Annapolis.
Von Boetticher had built something of a reputation as a military historian, and his expertise in the American Civil War gained him entrée to both civilian and military social circles. Indeed, the U.S. Army War College invited him on several occasions to lecture to its students about the battles of Bull Run and Chantilly. Among von Boetticher’s friends was the Virginia newspaper editor and historian Douglas Southall Freeman, author of a Pulitzer Prize–winning four-volume biography of Robert E. Lee. Another was Colonel George Patton, then commandant at Fort Myer in northern Virginia, who, like the German attaché, was a Civil War buff. Patton frequently accompanied von Boetticher on expeditions to Civil War battlefields near Washington, where the two men would tramp the ground for hours and debate the battles that had raged there.
Thanks to his close connections with high-ranking U.S. officers, von Boetticher had been given free rein to travel around the United States, visiting military research installations, regular army commands, and plants producing aircraft, weapons, and other military equipment. After a nationwide tour of warplane manufacturers in the summer of 1939, he reported to Berlin that “there was not the slightest indication of [the U.S.] preparing for war.”
General Friedrich von Boetticher, German military attaché in Washington (on right), and Colonel T. Nakamura, Japanese military attaché (on left), observe U.S. Army war maneuvers in upstate New York in August 1939, a month before the beginning of World War II. U.S. Brigadier General Walter C. Short is in the center.
Franklin Roosevelt, for his part, considered such inertia an enormous mistake. He desperately wanted to convince his fellow Americans that the United States must come to the aid of Britain and France if war erupted in Europe, as he was sure it would. But up to that point, he had done almost nothing to persuade them of the need for action. How could he make them listen to him now?
ROOSEVELT WAS THEN NEARING the end of his second term. When he first took office in 1933, his optimism, eloquence, and aggressive activism had helped restore hope and confidence to a demoralized country. In his first inaugural address he had promised “action now”—a pledge that he fulfilled beyond anyone’s expectations. Because of Roosevelt and the dizzying array of domestic programs launched by his administration, the lives of Americans had been transformed, and the federal government had assumed vast new power and authority.
But he had shown no such resolution in his approach to foreign policy. Throughout his political career, FDR had tacked back and forth between isolationism and internationalism. He had started out as a supporter of international cooperation and collective security; in the aftermath of World War I, he had backed Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations. B
ut he was, above all, a consummate politician. Keenly aware that most Americans were against the League, he adjusted his public views accordingly. When he sought the presidency in 1932, he assured voters that he opposed U.S. participation in the organization.
During his entire first term and much of his second, Roosevelt subordinated foreign policy to his efforts to stimulate domestic economic reform and recovery from the Depression. Not until 1939 did his administration begin to consider active involvement in the darkening situation in Europe. In the midst of the 1936 presidential campaign, Roosevelt had declared: “We shun political commitments which might entangle us in foreign wars.… We seek to isolate ourselves completely from war.”
Equally determined to keep the United States out of future conflicts, Congress passed a series of so-called Neutrality Acts in the mid-1930s that, among other things, banned U.S. arms sales to countries at war and made it illegal for U.S. citizens to join a warring power’s military service or travel on a belligerent ship. While Roosevelt supported the idea of an arms embargo, he believed that only aggressor nations should be prohibited from buying munitions and that he, as president, should have the authority to decide which belligerents fell into that category. But Congress refused to give him such authority, and facing the prospect of an isolationist filibuster, he signed the bill.
And so, as Hitler and Mussolini prepared for war in Europe, Roosevelt and his administration were stripped of the power to provide any future material support to countries on the list of the dictators’ future victims. The Axis leaders, meanwhile, were reassured that the United States, in what the historian Richard Ketchum called “its almost pathological desire to stay uninvolved in Europe’s quarrels,” would sit quietly by while they snatched up any country they wanted.
In 1938, after Hitler annexed Austria and then did the same to Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, the Roosevelt administration deplored such aggression (in private, the president called it “armed banditry”) and urged peaceful settlement of the crises. But it made no commitments and offered no meaningful assistance to achieve such settlements. “It is always best and safest,” Neville Chamberlain acidly remarked, “to count on nothing from the Americans but words.”
After the Munich agreement, Roosevelt had little doubt that appeasement would fail, that war would soon follow, and that the United States could not escape unscathed, no matter what the isolationists claimed. But he shrank from passing this thought on to the American public. When Harold Ickes urged him to do so, he replied that the people would not believe him.
In his tenure as president, Roosevelt, who had been so effective in educating Americans about domestic issues, had never done the same for foreign affairs. As his biographer, James MacGregor Burns, put it, “He hoped they would be educated by events.” As it turned out, they were, but not in the way he wanted. With the president making little or no attempt to persuade Americans that it was in the country’s best interests to help stop the dictators, the increasingly dire events in Europe only confirmed their determination to stay as far away from that hornet’s nest as possible.
As a result, when FDR tried to redirect U.S. foreign policy in early 1939 toward a greater involvement in the European crisis, he was acutely aware that public opinion did not support him. Convinced by this time that the arms embargo had been a mistake of epic proportions, he wanted Congress, at the very least, to revise it so that nations at war—i.e., Britain and France—would be permitted to purchase arms from the United States, as long as they were paid for in dollars and transported on the buyers’ own ships. But he declined to press for such an amendment. Instead, he was persuaded by Senator Key Pittman, the ineffective, alcoholic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to abdicate presidential leadership and stay silent on the matter while the committee debated a number of recently introduced neutrality measures. The president and Secretary of State Cordell Hull were “anxious to do what they can to help,” an official of the British embassy in Washington reported to the Foreign Office, “but are obsessed by the risk of going too far ahead of public opinion and thus losing control of Congress.”
Weeks, then months, passed with Pittman scheduling no hearings and the committee taking no action. When the chairman finally bestirred himself to announce he would begin to consider the various pieces of legislation, Senate isolationists threatened a filibuster over any attempt to “repeal or emasculate” existing neutrality laws, and Pittman fell back into his usual somnolent state. In May 1939, two months after Hitler seized all of Czechoslovakia, the Nevada Democrat informed the administration of yet another postponement in the committee’s examination of revising the Neutrality Act, claiming “the situation in Europe does not seem to merit any urgent action.”
Though fully aware of the absurdity of that statement, the White House was unable to convince Pittman and his congressional colleagues otherwise.
CHAPTER 3
“WHERE IS MY WORLD?”
Not long after Charles Lindbergh came back to America, his wife and two small sons made their own return voyage. In a letter to Anne shortly before she left France, Lindbergh informed her that because of the swarm of journalists that followed him wherever he went, he would not be at the dock to greet her. He instructed her to lock the doors of her stateroom when the boat docked in New York and to cover the boys’ faces as much as possible to thwart the taking of news photos. She did as he asked, much to the chagrin of the reporters and photographers who crowded around the gangplank of the French ocean liner Champlain as she and the boys disembarked.
From the moment of her arrival, Anne Lindbergh felt like a stranger. She had spent much of her life in and around New York, but its ceaseless bustle, brightness, and jangle now disoriented her. Unlike Europe, she thought, New York contained “nothing solid or real or quiet.” She desperately missed her life in France, “the sense of tasting and touching and relishing life as it goes by.” Above all, she yearned for the peace and security that France—and, before that, England—had given her and her family. Anne, now thirty-two, was plagued by a deep sense of foreboding about the future. It was not a new sensation. Ever since the murder of Charlie, she had had the feeling that disaster lay just ahead, that “very near to the surface of this lovely glaze of a safe, peaceful, normal life lies the terrible, the unbearable.” She was living, she believed, in “a half-mad world where nothing is safe, nothing is sure, anything can happen.”
Anne Morrow, in her teens.
But another, more specific fear overlaid that general sense of impending doom—a premonition that the United States was about to tear itself apart over the issue of war in Europe. The country was embarking, in her view, on “a long period of struggle and hate and jealousy and false names.” She added: “I see no place for me in that … I who do not want to fight, who do not want to force myself—even intellectually, even spiritually, even emotionally—on another human being.”
Nonetheless, she soon would find herself in the middle of the “hate and jealousy” she had so accurately foreseen and dreaded so much.
THANKS TO THE GREAT wealth of her father, Anne Morrow Lindbergh had grown up in a gilded cocoon, as remote from the economic and social realities of early-twentieth-century America as anyone could possibly be. Years later, she would describe her two sisters and herself as “the sleeping princesses.” There was, she said, a “haze of insulation which permeated our early years, our indefinable sense of isolation from the real world.”
One of the most influential men on Wall Street in the 1920s, Dwight Morrow was a senior partner in the international banking firm of J. P. Morgan, which, by the turn of the century, had emerged as the most powerful—and controversial—financial empire in the world. Unlike most of his colleagues, Morrow was never fully satisfied with his life as a multimillionaire financier. A graduate of Amherst and a voracious reader, he considered himself an intellectual and harbored dreams of returning to academia as a history professor. But his desire for money and influence—an appetite sha
red by his forceful wife, Elizabeth—trumped any thoughts of taking refuge in a cloistered, impecunious university environment.
The Morrows and their children lived, at various times, in a spacious apartment just off Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and a grand Georgian mansion on seventy-five acres in Englewood, New Jersey. Each summer, they traveled to their house on an island in midcoast Maine; in the winter, they spent a couple of weeks in Nassau. Not infrequently, Morrow swept his family off to Europe, where he met with bankers and heads of state while his wife oversaw the children’s sightseeing.
Shy, sensitive, and bookish, Anne felt eclipsed by her more outgoing sisters. The eldest, Elisabeth, was bright, blond, and beautiful—“the belle of the ball,” as Constance, the youngest of the three, described her. “Men fell at her feet.” Constance, for her part, was exuberant, funny, warm, and arguably the smartest of the Morrows—she would later graduate summa cum laude from Smith College.
Anne was hardly undistinguished herself. At Miss Chapin’s, the private girls’ school she attended in New York, she was student council president, captain of the field hockey team, and a frequent contributor to the school’s literary magazine. Petite and pretty, with sad eyes and a radiant smile, she had more than her share of male admirers.
Yet no one would know any of that from reading her diary entries and letters of the period. Convinced she was a failure, “the complete loss in our family,” she constantly apologized for her self-perceived shortcomings and felt especially inferior to her energetic, demanding, dominating mother. A prominent clubwoman, Elizabeth Morrow was also a poet, a writer of children’s books, a trustee of Smith College, her alma mater, and, at one point, its acting president. “She carries action and life into whatever room she walks,” Anne wrote in her diary. “I carry shyness and silence and inaction. It spreads in pools around me wherever I go.”
