The preeminent such vessel was the destroyer, three hundred or so feet in length, equipped with machine guns, three-inch artillery pieces, and depth charges. Roosevelt approved the assignment of the bulk of the American destroyer force to transatlantic convoy duty. By September 1917, sinkings had declined sharply. By then the navy had also stopped work on new dreadnoughts and devoted American shipyard capacity to destroyers and other more immediately needed ships.
Naval engineers also developed a new class of antisubmarine vessel: the wooden submarine chaser, a small boat fitted with light artillery pieces and depth charges that could be turned out quickly in large numbers. There were two models: a 110-foot ship capable of roaming dozens of miles into the ocean in search of enemy craft and a 55-foot ship designed for shore patrol only. The first, towed across the Atlantic in large numbers and often operating in tandem with destroyers, was highly effective. The second, too small to function in any but the calmest waters, was of little use even in guarding American beaches. Roosevelt pursued both projects with tenacity and enthusiasm.27
His most audacious project was the North Sea mine barrage, a difficult and complex plan to stretch mine-laced nets to a depth of two hundred feet some 230 miles across the North Sea from Scotland to Norway, penning in the German submarine force. The plan displayed yet another enduring, if typically American, Roosevelt characteristic: the lack of a sense of limits. The British thought it was too expensive and problematic. Roosevelt bulldogged it through the Allied military bureaucracy. Utilizing 80 million feet of wire rope and 100,000 antenna-detonated mines at a cost of perhaps $80 million, the barrage was substantially completed just weeks before the end of the war. It destroyed only three to six German submarines, but had the war gone on, it might well have achieved its objective. Roosevelt’s critics depicted it as a stupendous waste of money; he would continue to see it as a constructive example of imaginative leadership prevailing over small minds.28
By mid-1918, those on the inside knew that the tide was beginning to turn. Naval convoying limited the effectiveness of German U-boats. The Allied navies ruled the waves. A huge, fresh American army was streaming into France. Roosevelt had done his part to make all this happen.
Like all politicians, he underscored his accomplishments and did not hesitate to exaggerate them. If he was not the secretary of the navy, he often behaved as if he were. He went directly to the White House for support when he needed it, most notably for the North Sea mine barrage. Too prone to believe that much of the navy bureaucracy was lazy and incompetent, he enlisted the popular American novelist Winston Churchill (no relation to the British Winston), a friend of Wilson and a graduate of the US Naval Academy, to do an investigative report for the president on the department’s shortcomings.29
As ham-fisted and ambitious as he sometimes was, he had been the person pushing for readiness before the war. When war came, he was a first-rate administrator. A wide impression inside and outside Washington held that his accomplishments far outweighed his missteps. In 1917, when he broached the possibility of resigning to join the army or navy, General Leonard Wood declared, “It would be a public calamity to have him leave at this time.” Who was the man pushing things along? asked the Wall Street Journal not long afterward. “That’s easy: Franklin D. Roosevelt.”30
In 1925, when someone suggested that the war effort had been the work of a united people, Roosevelt responded that Wilson and his cabinet had led public opinion, created emergency war agencies, and recruited the right men to staff them. “The American organization for war was created from the top down, NOT from the bottom up. This is most important.” It was, he declared, the major lesson of war leadership.31
Roosevelt’s one regret was his lack of military service. The emotion had a very personal dimension. Uncle Ted had offered to raise a volunteer division—a large-scale counterpart of his Spanish-American War Rough Riders—and personally lead it in France. President Wilson, with the near unanimous backing of the military establishment, had rejected the request. TR’s four sons, however—Theodore Jr., Kermit, Archibald, and Quentin—all made their way to France as uniformed officers. So did Eleanor’s younger brother, Hall. Theodore made no secret of his belief that Franklin should join them.32
By mid-1918, the assistant secretary was being talked up, with the apparent acquiescence of Tammany, as a possible Democratic candidate for governor of New York. Relinquishing that honor to Al Smith, Roosevelt had a different plan. After he made repeated requests, Secretary Daniels gave in to his proposal for a long inspection trip to Europe, where he would examine naval and marine forces, look into bases and contracts, and see the front lines for himself. After returning home and filing a report, he expected to resign and accept a command in the US Navy or Marine Corps. The political advantages were obvious, but he also felt a moral obligation. Writing to Eleanor from France that August, he said, “The more I think of it, the more I feel that being only 36 my place is not at a Washington desk, even a Navy desk. I know you will understand.”33
The manner in which he crossed the Atlantic exemplified his attitude. He left the United States on July 9, 1918, on a new destroyer, USS Dyer, accompanying a convoy of supply ships. For a week and a half he was tossed around on rough waters, a submarine attack always a possibility. He found the experience exhilarating. “I have loved every minute of it,” he wrote eleven days later as the craft approached Portsmouth.34
Considering that he was a subcabinet official, his reception in Europe was remarkable. This had something to do with his name, but it also was extremely unusual for important American officials to visit Britain. In London, he set up headquarters at the Ritz and proceeded to meet, formally and informally, with practically the entire British establishment, dealing especially with First Lord of the Admiralty Sir Eric Geddes. He quickly discovered that he had a preference for one-on-one talks. On July 29, he had a forty-five-minute personal audience with King George V and was delighted by one of the monarch’s remarks: “You know I have a number of relations in Germany, but I can tell you frankly that in all my life I have never seen a German gentleman.”35
That evening, he and the Italian ambassador were guests at a formal dinner held at Gray’s Inn in honor of the war ministers. He found Lord Curzon and sundry other speakers impressive but made no mention in his diary of the minister of munitions, Winston Churchill. Churchill quickly forgot the event and Roosevelt’s presence at it. Twenty-one years later, in conversation with Joseph P. Kennedy, Roosevelt would recall Churchill as having “acted like a stinker” toward him.36
The next day he lunched at the American embassy with Britain’s wily, charismatic prime minister, David Lloyd George, as the guest of honor. Roosevelt found him fascinating: “Thick set; not very tall; rather a large head; and rather long hair; but what impressed me more than anything else was his tremendous vitality.”37
On July 31, Roosevelt and his party dashed across the English Channel on a British destroyer. After inspecting American bases and construction in the Dunkirk-Calais area, they made for Paris, based themselves at the Crillon, and undertook a round of meetings with civilian and military officials. The highlight was an audience with the nation’s tough old premier, Georges Clemenceau. Roosevelt described him as a force of nature: seventy-seven years old, yet tireless, seemingly in constant motion, and dedicated to total victory against a hated enemy. “I knew at once that I was in the presence of the greatest civilian in France.”38
He also took time for brief visits with his Aunt Dora (Sara’s sister) and TR’s sons Archie and Ted Roosevelt, both recuperating from serious war wounds. By then he had received the bitter news that their brother Quentin had been shot down and buried in France. Their example doubtless reinforced his sense that he, too, should be in uniform and redoubled his determination to see the front lines.39
On August 4, he started for the front. The American naval attaché who had planned the trip, doubtless under orders to bring Roo
sevelt back unscathed, presented him with an itinerary that “called for late rising, easy trips and plenty of bombed houses thirty miles or so behind the front.” Roosevelt scrapped the plan and ordered his party farther north toward Chateau-Thierry and Belleau Wood, the battlefield where just weeks earlier American marines had pushed back the last big German offensive against Paris. He described the scene vividly:
We had to thread our way past water-filled shell holes and thence up the steep slope over outcropping rocks, overturned boulders, downed trees, hastily improvised shelter pits, rusty bayonets, broken guns, emergency ration tins, hand grenades, discarded overcoats, rain-stained love letters, crawling lines of ants and many little mounds, some wholly unmarked, some with a rifle stuck bayonet down in the earth, some with a helmet, and some, too, with a whittled cross with a tag of wood or wrapping paper hung over it and in a pencil scrawl an American name.
They reached the headquarters of army general Hunter Liggett, whose marine forces were part of a painful Allied offensive, then moved forward through marching troops and supply convoys, past the sight and stench of dead horses dragged to the side of the road and dead Germans laid out in a field for burial. Finally they got to Mareuil, a village that had been under German control the previous night, and were just three or four miles away from the actual fighting. With night falling, they returned to Chateau-Thierry for a late dinner and billeted themselves in a deserted house.40
Rising before six the next morning, they were soon on the road again, traveling east to Nancy, just south of a German bulge against which the Allies were massing for an attack. Here they linked up with marine general John A. Lejeune, inspected troops, and again stayed up until 1 a.m. with their host. On August 6, they got another early start, moving back around the German lines to Bar-le-Duc, then up the Voie Sacrée to Verdun, for a conference with the French commandant there and a tour of the killing fields that had claimed at least a half million lives. Spotted by a German observation balloon, they motored to safety ahead of a quickly incoming artillery barrage. On August 8, they were back in Paris.41
Although he never got all the way to the front, Roosevelt had come closer than a senior civilian official probably should have and exposed himself to some danger. At the very least, he had gathered a firsthand understanding of the conditions under which American and Allied soldiers labored. Most of all, he had satisfied his need for self-respect. He could, if need be, look Cousins Ted, Ted Jr., and Archie in the eye and tell them he had experienced war. A later generation might call the trip quixotic; in his world, it was gallant.
On August 9, Roosevelt left for Rome, where his main goal was to persuade the Italians to deploy their battleship fleet against the Austro-Hungarian navy. Instead he obtained a symbolic Allied staff committee, chaired by British admiral Sir John Jellicoe. The Italians would never commit the fleet to battle. (They would follow the same policy in World War II.) Roosevelt’s assumption of authority on this matter irritated Daniels, Secretary of State Lansing, and President Wilson. Still, none of them could quarrel with his purpose, and the offense was relatively minor. He seems to have received no reprimand.42
Back in Paris on August 13, Roosevelt launched into another grueling tour of American installations around the country. At Sainte-Nazaire a few days later, he inspected another of his unorthodox pet projects, the Naval Railway Guns—fourteen-inch battleship guns mounted on a large, enclosed platform car—conceived as a response to German long-range artillery. Each weighed ninety tons and had to be accompanied by a dozen or so railcars carrying men, ammunition, and supplies. The guns fired a 1,400-pound shell eighteen to twenty-three miles. They were powerful and effective, but production and transportation difficulties resulted in only five seeing action in France. The commander of the operation was Rear Admiral Charles Plunkett, a salty old officer who already had rebuffed army objections to the navy markings that would be displayed prominently on the vehicles.
Roosevelt confided his desire for active military duty and expressed an interest in commanding one of the guns. The fifty-four-year-old Plunkett was probably taken aback by the idea of an inexperienced civilian taking over a sophisticated piece of heavy artillery, but he was politic enough simply to ask his young superior if he could swear in French. Roosevelt unleashed a string of Gallic invectives, some authentic, some contrived. The admiral thereupon said he would take the younger man on with the rank of lieutenant commander—the equivalent of a major in the army or marines. Roosevelt appears to have planned to hold him to the promise.43
He spent several more days in France, always, it seemed, in constant motion. A press conference he held for the editors of leading Paris newspapers was something of a sensation. He sat on the edge of a table, addressed the journalists in what he called “Roosevelt French,” and assured them that the war effort was “over the hump.” Wholly won over, they wrote glowing reports of the event.44
Returning to Britain on a destroyer, Roosevelt got his closest taste of war yet. Zeppelin bombers targeted the vessel twice but failed to score a hit. In Scotland, he inspected progress on the North Sea mine barrage and managed a free day or two with old family acquaintances. The late Scottish summer was cold and wet. Refusing to moderate his standard pace of long working days and nights with little sleep, he spent one free morning fishing in a pouring rain, fortifying himself with Scotch whiskey.
He needed less Rooseveltian activity and more rest. The deadly Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 and 1919 had engulfed much of the world and impacted areas hit by the war with special ferocity. Roosevelt probably contracted the virus in France, where he had begun to run an intermittent fever. The pace, the foul weather, and the lethal contagion all caught up with him. On September 12, back across the channel in Brest, he boarded the US liner Leviathan for New York. For three days he worked on his report, then collapsed and was confined to his bed for the rest of the trip. Influenza gripped the ship, felling many other passengers. There were numerous deaths; some of the deceased among the crew were buried at sea. Eleanor received word from the Navy Department that a doctor and an ambulance should meet Franklin at the dock. She and Sara were both there as he was carried out on a stretcher and transported to Sara’s Sixty-Fifth Street town house, suffering from influenza and pneumonia in both lungs.45
One high point of a long, dreary convalescence was a note from TR, dated September 23:
Dear Franklin,
We are deeply concerned about your sickness, and trust you will soon be well. We are very proud of you.
With love,
Aff. Yours
Theodore Roosevelt
Later Eleanor will tell you of our talk about your plans.46
Franklin spent two weeks in the city, then two weeks at Hyde Park. After a time, he was able, with considerable help from Eleanor, to return to work on his report; a valuable document with numerous substantive suggestions, it would receive fulsome praise from both Daniels and Wilson.47
The postscript at the end of TR’s note had referred to his insistence that his cousin should join the military. Franklin was by then more than eager to do so, but returning to Washington on October 18, he found himself a full-time acting secretary of the navy as Daniels stumped the country in the crucial midterm elections, supporting President Wilson’s request for a Democratic Congress as a vote of confidence. On October 31, Roosevelt was finally able to see Wilson and request release for military duty. It was too late, the president told him. Germany was asking for peace terms. The armistice came eleven days later.48
As Eleanor remembered it, “Washington, like every other city in the United States, went completely mad. . . . The feeling of relief and thankfulness was beyond description.” Franklin regretted never making it into uniform. From time to time in the future, he would become unnecessarily defensive about it—as when he complained about his name being omitted from a Groton monument to those who had served in the armed forces during the war. Still, he co
uld be—and was—justifiably proud of his civilian role.49
By the time of the armistice, the Roosevelt marriage had passed through a crisis. The story comes to us through sources that are secondhand at best and frequently speculative. Franklin left no account of it. Eleanor left nothing in writing but did discuss her version of events with her daughter and with some close friends, including her biographer to be, Joseph Lash. Within the extended family, the episode was a matter of closely held gossip. Aside from the occasional, easily discredited rumormonger, no one wrote openly about it during Eleanor’s lifetime.50
As Franklin lay in his sickbed after returning from Europe, Eleanor unpacked his luggage. She found a number of letters to him from Lucy Mercer. It is unlikely that anyone other than Eleanor and Sara read them before they were destroyed. They revealed a strong romantic relationship and constituted convincing evidence that Franklin had been, at the very least, emotionally unfaithful, probably sexually also. They left no doubt that, writing to Eleanor the previous summer, he had been blatantly deceptive in his casual references to Lucy as an escorted member of weekend outing groups.
Always the Puritan, Eleanor felt betrayed and retained an anguished bitterness over the affair for the rest of her life. She took the letters to Sara, who in many ways had stepped into the emotional space that Eleanor had reserved for her own long-dead mother. The two women met with Franklin. It is unlikely that anyone else was involved in the discussions that followed, and it seems certain that Sara was the dominant force.
Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century Page 11
