by Lynne Olson
Not long afterward, he acquired a top-secret memo from Churchill stating that of the 176 destroyers with which Britain entered the war, only 68 were still fit for service in home waters—a point that underscored the gravity of Britain’s danger. Lothian leaked the memo to several members of the Century Group, as well as to other prominent interventionists. He asked that in their use of the material, they not provide the exact number of available ships, to lessen the chances of Britain’s foes discovering the source of the leak and also to reduce the strategic advantage that such information would give the Germans.
At about the same time, John Foster, the British embassy’s legal adviser, leaked to Joseph Alsop the cables sent by Churchill to Roosevelt appealing for aid, as well as the president’s discouraging responses. As the British intended, Alsop passed the information on to the rest of the Century Group, and, in his words, “the public agitation for transfer of the destroyers began.” Stories, columns, and broadcasts pushing the importance of the destroyers for the survival of Britain—and thus America—began popping up in the American media, particularly in those outlets employing members of the Century Group. Alarmed at the sudden explosion of pro-British sentiment, the German chargé d’affaires in Washington complained to Berlin that American “public opinion is being systematically whipped into a state of panic.”
Century Group members also decided to put direct pressure on key political and military figures in Washington, many of whom were their friends and acquaintances. In late July and early August, they fanned out across the capital, calling on the president, members of his cabinet, senators and congressmen, the top military brass, and other major players in the fight.
Joe Alsop paid a visit to Admiral Harold Stark, the chief of naval operations, who in the spring had testified before a congressional committee that America’s old destroyers were too valuable to stay in dry-dock and should be refitted to help defend America’s coastlines. Shortly after Stark’s testimony, Congress approved a measure outlawing any transfer of surplus vessels unless the Navy chief expressly stated they were not needed for the defense of the United States.
Stark found himself in a difficult situation. Unlike many in his service, he was sympathetic to the plight of Britain, having spent time there as a young officer during World War I. He had also studied the cables from Captain Alan Kirk, the Anglophile U.S. naval attaché in London, who reported that “the situation in [British] home waters is growing desperate” and that, according to the Admiralty, “successful survival this year depends on the U.S. decision to release destroyers and aircraft.” Yet Stark was on record as telling Congress his own navy needed the old destroyers. How could he now reverse himself and say they should be handed over to the British?
Aware of the admiral’s dilemma, Alsop told him that the Century Group wanted to promote the destroyer transfer but would do so only with assurances of Navy approval. When Stark said he was unable to provide such a pledge, Alsop asked whether he would sanction the deal if problems over the congressional ban could be resolved. Yes, said Stark; in that case, he would be free to declare the transfer in the national interest.
Although Alsop had told Stark he was talking to him not as a journalist but as a member of the Century Group, he alluded to his interview with the admiral in a column he wrote several weeks later, declaring that U.S. destroyers were vital for holding the English Channel against Germany. “The highest naval officers join the President and virtually every other man in the government to whom the facts are known, in firmly believing that the needed destroyers ought to be made promptly available,” Alsop claimed.
While obviously referring to Stark, the columnist was also misinterpreting his views—a fact that an angry Stark made clear when contacted by other journalists about his remarks. “A recheck” with the Navy chief “brought confirmation that his opposition still stands,” the New York Times columnist Arthur Krock wrote.
Apart from the issue of misinterpretation, Alsop’s actions raised other serious questions of journalistic integrity. He had concealed from his readers the fact that he was a member of a pressure group working for the destroyer transfer and had led Stark to believe the opposite—that he was acting as a political partisan and not as a journalist. “As an opinionated citizen, perhaps Joe could take satisfaction in what he had done; as newsman, he had brought discredit on himself,” observed Robert Merry, Alsop’s biographer.
While Alsop tried to tamp down the uproar caused by his column, Herbert Agar and two other Century Group members went to the White House to lobby FDR, who had won his party’s presidential nomination just two weeks before. Like Stark, Roosevelt said his hands were tied by the congressional action on surplus ships. In his view, large-scale aid to Britain, notably the transfer of destroyers, would be possible only if Congress, with a minimum of opposition, passed special legislation approving such actions. And that, he indicated, was not going to happen—at least not in the immediate future.
Agar persisted. There must be something the Century Group could do, he said, to help the president in his effort to aid Britain. FDR thought for a moment, then nodded. It was a long shot, he made clear, but if the group’s members could set certain events in motion, he might be able to do what they wanted.
First, Agar and the others must persuade General John Pershing, leader of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I and the country’s most revered military figure, to give a national radio broadcast in favor of the destroyer deal. The president warned them, however, that if word leaked of their approach to Pershing “and you say the idea came from me, I shall call you a liar.”
Although the Century Group representatives were disappointed by what they viewed as Roosevelt’s lack of enthusiasm for the destroyer transfer, they set out to do what he asked. Agar was chosen as the emissary to the seventy-nine-year-old Pershing, then living in a suite at Walter Reed Hospital. The ailing general told Agar that he had wanted to speak out on the issue for months and had been waiting in vain for Roosevelt to call. Pershing shared Agar’s belief that America should be a participant in the war rather than “equip other people to fight our battles.” Nonetheless, he agreed to address the nation on the importance of the destroyer transfer, seeing it as “a necessary first step.” He asked Agar to collaborate with Walter Lippmann in preparing a draft of the speech. While not a member of the Century Group, Lippmann was a close friend of both Pershing’s and Lord Lothian’s and had been a leading journalistic proponent of the idea that U.S. security ultimately depended on the British fleet.
In his August 1 broadcast, Pershing delivered an extremely blunt message to his listeners. “I am telling you tonight before it is too late,” he said, “that the British Navy needs destroyers to convoy merchant ships, hunt submarines and repel invasion. We have an immense reserve of destroyers left over from the other war.… If there is anything we can do to save the British fleet, we shall be failing in our duty to America if we do not do it.”
Pershing had avoided political controversy all his career and certainly had no partisan ax to grind in advocating the destroyer deal. When he said the British should have the destroyers, much of the public accepted his dictum as gospel. The general’s broadcast, Agar later recalled, “was the turning point in our effort to create a public opinion favorable to the president’s taking action.”
Pershing’s appeal was immediately seconded by several high-ranking retired naval officers, including Admiral William Standley, a former chief of naval operations and a Century Group member. A number of cabinet members, after being approached by Century Group representatives, also lobbied for the transfer. Among them was Harold Ickes, who wrote in his diary that he “spent a lot of time arguing with the President that, by hook or by crook, we ought to accede to England’s request.… It seems to me so very foolish not to make it possible for England to put up the stiffest fight it can.”
But the growing popular demand for the deal was outweighed, in Roosevelt’s mind, by increasingly virulent opposit
ion by isolationists. The Chicago Tribune declared that sending the destroyers to Britain would be an act of war. A reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, another isolationist newspaper, threatened Walter Lippmann with an investigation of the columnist’s participation in what the reporter called “a plot to get America into the war.” A shaken Lippmann persuaded the paper’s publisher, Joseph Pulitzer, to squelch the proposed exposé.
The president was caught in the middle, pressured by public opinion to sanction the deal but aware that congressional isolationists would do their best to defeat any bill authorizing the transfer. Failing that, they could delay its passage for weeks. What he needed was a legally valid excuse to bypass Congress altogether.
Once again, the Century Group stepped in to help. On August 11, The New York Times published what was later called “one of the most important letters to the editor ever written.” Signed by four of the most distinguished lawyers in the country, it was written by Dean Acheson, a former assistant secretary of the Treasury under Roosevelt and a Century Group member. The letter argued that congressional approval was not needed to transfer the destroyers, that the president already had the authority under the Constitution and existing legislation to do so by executive order.
There was a certain irony in Acheson’s authorship of an opinion that said FDR could skirt procedure seen by many legal experts as necessary. Six years before, he had quit as assistant Treasury secretary after a violent argument with the president over a similar question. When Roosevelt had wanted to take steps to devalue the dollar in 1933, Acheson told him the law forbade him to do so. Roosevelt told Acheson that his job was to find a way to circumvent such laws, adding, “Don’t you take my word for it that it will be all right?” Losing his temper, Acheson retorted that he was being asked to sign illegal documents. “That will do!” Roosevelt shouted. Not long afterward, Acheson resigned.
Many years later, Acheson noted that while he respected Roosevelt, he did not like him. He particularly disliked what he thought of as the patronizing informality with which the president treated his subordinates, himself included. “He condescended,” Acheson wrote of FDR. “It is not gratifying to receive the easy greeting which milord might give a promising stable boy and pull one’s forelock in return.” Such casual treatment was especially maddening to a man who had more than a touch of patrician arrogance himself. The son of an Episcopal bishop, Acheson was a product of Groton, Yale, and Harvard Law School, where he led his class and was a protégé of one of the school’s most eminent professors, Felix Frankfurter. The poet Archibald MacLeish, who was a Yale classmate of Acheson’s, later described him as “gay, graceful, gallant,” but also “socially snobby, with qualities of … arrogance and superciliousness.”
Acheson’s personal feelings about Roosevelt, however, were outweighed by his ardent interventionism. An early advocate of all-out U.S. support for Britain, he had declared in a 1939 speech: “To shrink from this decision, to be satisfied with anything short of it, is to risk … the death of everything which life in America holds for us.”
In late July 1940, Roosevelt aide Benjamin Cohen asked Acheson, a partner at the Washington law firm of Covington and Burling, to work with him on a memo providing legal justification for the president to bypass Congress and send the destroyers to Britain by executive order. After considerable research, Acheson and Cohen concluded that under international law and current U.S. statutes, only the transfer of vessels built specifically for currently warring countries was prohibited. Since the old destroyers in question had not been constructed for such a purpose, it was therefore lawful to hand them over to Britain. The two men further agreed that such action was in America’s national interest, as argued by General Pershing, who said that “the transfer … may be a vital factor in keeping war from our shores.” If that were so, then the chief of naval operations could legitimately approve the transfer as essential for U.S. defense, and there would be no need to go to Congress for new legislation.
After refining his and Cohen’s memo and putting it in the form of a letter, Acheson enlisted two prominent New York attorneys—Charles C. Burlingham and Thomas Thacher—to sign it, along with George Rublee, one of Acheson’s Covington and Burling partners. Although not members of the Century Group, all three belonged to the Century Association. So did Charles Merz, the New York Times editorial page editor and a Yale classmate of Acheson’s, who agreed to run the letter in full.
The lawyers’ opinion, which took up three and a half columns in the Times, attracted tremendous attention, most of it favorable. It was, wrote Herbert Agar, “a fresh thought that changed everything.” The president saw the opinion as the breakthrough he’d been seeking, and he quickly accepted and appropriated its contents. Admiral Stark did the same.
To make the deal even more palatable to the public, it was decided to link the destroyer transfer to American acquisition of military bases on British-held territory in the Caribbean and western Atlantic. Such a quid pro quo would mean an obvious increase in U.S. security, greatly strengthening the defenses of the Panama Canal and East Coast and helping to prevent Germany from establishing a bridgehead in Latin America. The idea had been floating around for years, even before Hitler’s blitzkrieg in Western Europe. The U.S. military was in favor of it, as were many leading U.S. newspapers, notably the Chicago Tribune, which long had called for leasing such bases in return for cancellation of Britain’s World War I debts to America.
The Century Group pressed the president to pursue such an exchange, as did several cabinet members. Agreeing, Roosevelt asked Lord Lothian in early August to take the matter up with his government. As it happened, Lothian had already done so. For months, he had been as assiduous in lobbying Churchill to allow the American acquisition of bases as he had been in pushing Roosevelt for the destroyers. The ambassador had repeatedly told the British government that such an offer would go far to encourage U.S. reciprocity in aid. Until August, Churchill and his cabinet rejected the idea, declaring they saw no reason for making such a handsome gesture when America had not yet provided any substantial aid for Britain. But with the country’s situation growing increasingly desperate, the prime minister finally instructed his ambassador to “go full steam ahead” with the destroyers-bases swap.
The deal was clearly far more advantageous for the United States than for Britain, and Churchill, who feared being criticized at home for making a bad bargain, wanted the transaction to be seen as an exchange of gifts. Roosevelt, however, was adamant that it be presented to the American public as “a Yankee horse trade,” a hardheaded business arrangement in which his country got the best of the deal. “There was an election coming,” Herbert Agar sardonically observed, “and Roosevelt did not dare appear as merely generous and farsighted.… Hence, in all the discussions, the lectures, the letters to the press, there were discussions of … the wonderful benefits America was to receive for making a tiny gesture toward saving the world.”†
To enlist public support for the deal, the Century Group joined William Allen White’s committee and its six hundred local chapters in mounting a massive publicity campaign across the country. Although the two organizations differed radically in their approach to interventionism, they presented a united front throughout the late summer and early fall of 1940. “The committee was organized nationwide, while we were not as yet,” Agar wrote. “The committee was respectable … whereas we were suspect because we always used the dread word ‘war.’ Thus the respectable and the outrageous joined hands on a program of broadcasting and newsletters and advertisements to tell the public that the destroyer deal would safeguard our shores.”
Major U.S. newspapers carried full-page ads sponsored by the White Committee and bearing the headline BETWEEN US AND HITLER STANDS THE BRITISH FLEET! The ads urged readers to “write or telegraph your President—your Senators—your Congressmen—that you want the United States to sell over-age destroyers and give other material aid to Britain.” Prominent backers of the destroyer d
eal, including Robert Sherwood and Elizabeth Morrow, spoke at rallies and signed public statements of support. Petitions were circulated, garnering millions of signatures.
Both pro-aid groups called on their journalist members and other media colleagues to write supportive editorials, columns, and radio commentaries. In one of his many columns on the subject, Joseph Alsop denounced Roosevelt for not acting faster on the destroyer transfer. When the president’s press secretary, Steve Early, called him to “congratulate me on a useful and sensible contribution,” Alsop was startled. But he soon realized that FDR didn’t really mind public pressure, as long as it was meant to prod him into taking an action he already wanted to take. In fact, as Early’s phone call revealed, the president actively encouraged such prodding.
Thanks in large part to the immense publicity effort, the American people’s reaction to the proposed deal was overwhelmingly positive; polls taken throughout August consistently revealed approval ratings of more than 60 percent. But there was one more piece of the puzzle that had to be put in place before Roosevelt felt confident enough to sign off on the transaction. He told White and members of the Century Group that he needed the promise of Wendell Willkie, the Republican presidential nominee, not to make the destroyer deal a campaign issue. Knowing how formidable a candidate Willkie was likely to be, FDR was reluctant to give him and his party any more fuel to use against the Democrats.
It was an astonishing thing to ask of an opponent—to turn his back on a controversial issue that almost certainly would help him politically. The concept was almost as implausible as the idea, first bandied about the year before, that Wendell Willkie might actually capture the Republican nomination.
* Lothian’s appeal for caution was not always heeded. In the summer of 1940, Sir George Paish, an elderly British economist, arrived in the United States for a lecture tour. During a conversation with Senator Burton Wheeler, Sir George declared: “I am responsible for getting the United States into the last war … and I am going to get this country into this war.” That indiscreet comment prompted Wheeler and other isolationist members of Congress to demand Paish’s immediate expulsion from the country and an investigation into British propaganda. When asked by The Washington Post for a reaction, a British embassy official tartly replied: “We wish someone would drop Sir George Paish over Germany as a pamphlet.” At Lord Lothian’s order, Paish was put on the next ship to Britain, and the furor died down.
