by Jon Meacham
THE NUREMBERG LAWS Breitman and Lichtman, FDR and the Jews, 1.
ROOSEVELT COMBINED THE AUSTRIAN Ibid., 101–2.
ONE THAT LED TO Ibid., 102–10.
ROOSEVELT SLOWED HIS EFFORTS Ibid., 123–24.
BELIEVED THAT ROOSEVELT BEGAN THINKING Ibid., 124.
“THE MORE ROOSEVELT RISKED” Ibid.
THE GERMAN AUTHORITIES “11 Allies Condemn Nazi War on Jews,” NYT, December 18, 1942.
ESTABLISHED THE WAR REFUGEE BOARD Breitman, Official Secrets, 200–204.
EVERY SINGLE LIFE COUNTS Gerhard L. Weinberg, “The Allies and the Holocaust” in Holocaust and History, 490. The key question: Could more have been done? Certainly on rescue and refugee policy, yes. It would have been difficult, but Franklin Roosevelt was equal to the task of rescuing democracy—so why couldn’t he control his own bureaucracy?
Part of the answer to that is that the full, consuming urgency of the Holocaust was not as clear then as it is now. This is a different thing from not knowing. They knew, it’s just that during the war itself the Final Solution—as difficult as this is to grasp—was an element of the evil the Allies were fighting, not the whole compound. It was only in the 1960s that the Holocaust came to play the central role in our memory of World War II that it plays now.
Part of this is because of the Cold War; almost immediately after V-E Day the Germans became our quasi-allies against the Soviets. And part of it was the rise, in the 1960s, of a historical sensibility that focused more on the experiences of the common person than on the actions of Great Men. And another part of it was the increasing awareness that the world needed to be reminded why a Jewish homeland was so important. For my conclusions I am indebted, in part, to Breitman and Lichtman, FDR and the Jews, 315–29, and Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston, 1999), as well as the books cited above.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT BROUGHT Eleanor Roosevelt Oral History, Session 12, 2, Robert D. Graff Papers Collection, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum. I drew on my Franklin and Winston, 281–84, for this section, as well as my “FDR’s D-Day Prayer,” Time, June 5, 2014.
“ON D-DAY” Eleanor Roosevelt Oral History, Session 12, 2, Graff Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.
“THE MOST DIFFICULT AND COMPLICATED” See my “FDR’s D-Day Prayer,” Time, June 5, 2014.
ROOSEVELT “WAS TENSE” Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember (New York, 1949), 252.
“I WONDER HOW” Ibid.
RUSSELL LINAKA Ibid.
(HE MADE IT) For correspondence about Linaka’s future assignments, see PPF: 7548: Linaka, Russell W., December 11, 1944, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum.
WHO LOVED THE KING JAMES See my “FDR’s D-Day Prayer,” Time, June 5, 2014.
HIS DAUGHTER, ANNA Geoffrey C. Ward, ed., Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship Between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley (Boston, 1995), 309–10.
THE WHITE HOUSE RELEASED “Let Our Hearts Be Stout: A Prayer by the President of the United States,” NYT, June 7, 1944.
TO THE AFTERNOON NEWSPAPERS Stephen E. Ambrose, D-Day: June 6, 1944 (New York, 1994), 491.
ONE HUNDRED MILLION AMERICANS “War-Matured Nation Hears D-Day News with Restraint,” Newsweek, June 19, 1944, 38.
ONE OF THE LARGEST MASS PRAYERS This is my estimation. See my “FDR’s D-Day Prayer,” Time, June 5, 2014.
ALMIGHTY GOD Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Prayer on D-Day,” June 6, 1944, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=16515.
“BEAUTIFULLY READ BY” Ward, Closest Companion, 310.
“I COULDN’T BELIEVE IT” Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 880.
TO RESEMBLE THE PROW OF A SHIP Author observation. See also William B. Rhoads, “Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Architecture of Warm Springs,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 67, no. 1 (Spring 1983), 70–87.
“TODAY, SCIENCE HAS BROUGHT” Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Undelivered Address Prepared for Jefferson Day.” For details about the drafting of the speech—including the point that FDR wrote the last line himself—see Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt, 551.
SIX · Have You No Sense of Decency?
THE FACT THAT Harry S. Truman: “Remarks at the National Health Assembly Dinner,” May 1, 1948, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=13170.
HE WAS IMPATIENT Roy Cohn, McCarthy (New York, 1968), 275.
AT EIGHT O’CLOCK Harry S. Truman, “Rear Platform and Other Informal Remarks in Michigan,” October 30, 1952, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=14325.
HARDLY A FRIEND Ibid.
THE COVER STORY “Building a Business for War or Peace,” Business Week, October 18, 1952.
“IT USED TO BE TRUE” Ibid.
“THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY” Truman, “Rear Platform and Other Informal Remarks in Michigan.”
“THE ARTICLE POINTS OUT” Ibid.
“ ‘HIGH LEVELS OF’ ” Ibid.
“NOW THERE YOU” Ibid.
HE GAVE HIS CHAPTER James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York, 1996), 61.
“THE GREATEST PROSPERITY” Ibid.
AVERAGE WEEKLY EARNINGS Manchester, Glory and the Dream, 397.
SAVED ABOUT $136 BILLION Ibid.
BY 1949 PER-CAPITA INCOME Patterson, Grand Expectations, 61.
BIRTH AND EMPLOYMENT RATES Ibid., 61–81.
“OF THE THREE” Lawrence R. Samuel, The American Middle Class: A Cultural History (New York, 2014), epigraph.
“HERE INDIVIDUALS OF” J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur, “What Is an American,” in Letters from an American Farmer (New York, 1904), 55.
“THE MOST VALUABLE” Samuel, American Middle Class, epigraph.
“THE BEST AMERICANISM” Theodore Roosevelt, “Sixth Annual Message,” December 3, 1906, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29547.
WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT SAID THAT William Howard Taft, “Address Accepting the Republican Presidential Nomination,” July 28, 1908, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=76222.
“THE FACT THAT” Truman, “Remarks at the National Health Assembly Dinner.”
“THE CLASS STRUGGLE” Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Telephone Broadcast to the AFL-CIO Merger Meeting in New York City,” December 5, 1955, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=10394.
AS LONG AGO AS Sitaraman, Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution, 3–12; 59–104. See also Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston, 1966), for an examination of the role of the Revolution and, chiefly, of the Civil War in the story of American capitalism.
DEFINITIONS OF “MIDDLE-CLASS” Samuel, American Middle Class, 4–8. “The difficulty in defining the middle class reflects Americans’ discomfort with the idea of class in general,” Samuel wrote. “Even the U.S. Department of Commerce—an organization intimately familiar with facts and statistics—concluded that being middle class ‘is as much a state of mind and aspirations as it is a set of income levels’ after conducting a study in 2008. The Department found that owning a car, having a retirement nest egg, and being able to take a family vacation were other common criteria among Americans.” Ibid., 4.
THE SCHOLAR GANESH SITARAMAN Sitaraman, Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution, 13. The Economist wrote this in its February 14, 2009, issue.
WHAT HENRY CLAY HAD CALLED Cullen, American Dream, 69.
THE PACIFIC RAILROAD AND HOMESTEAD This section draws on my essay “Keeping the Dream Alive,” Time, June 12, 2012. See also Harold Hyman, American Singularity: The 1787 Northwest Ordinance, the 1862 Homestea
d and Morrill Acts, and the 1944 G.I. Bill (Athens, Ga., 2008).
THE MORRILL ACT CREATED Hyman, American Singularity, 35–61.
“THE GREAT ARSENAL” Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Fireside Chat,” December 29, 1940, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15917.
THE GI BILL OF RIGHTS See, for instance, Suzanne Mettler, Soldiers to Citizens: The G.I. Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation (New York, 2007), and Hyman, American Singularity, 62–76.
(AFTER A 1965 LAW) Sitaraman, Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution, 208–9.
THE INTERSTATE HIGHWAY SYSTEM Patterson, Grand Expectations, 274.
“NOW IT IS TRUE” Dwight D. Eisenhower to Edgar Newton Eisenhower, November 8, 1954, TeachingAmericanHistory.org, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/letter-to-edgar-newton-eisenhower/.
“THERE WAS AN ATMOSPHERE” J. Ronald Oakley, God’s Country: America in the Fifties (New York, 1986), 49.
IN THE CLOSING WEEKS Robert Welch, The Politician (Belmont, Mass., 1964), vii–viii.
CONSERVATIVE CANDY MANUFACTURER Michael Seiler, “Robert Welch, Founder of Birch Society, Dies at 85,” Los Angeles Times, January 8, 1985.
(TWO OF HIS MOST POPULAR) Ibid.
EISENHOWER WAS TO BLAME Welch, Politician, vii–viii.
HIS FRIENDS EXPRESSED SURPRISE Ibid., viii.
AN “AGENT” OF Seiler, “Robert Welch,” Los Angeles Times, January 8, 1985.
WITH A RISING WORRY Welch, Politician, 5.
“THE AMERICAN PEOPLE” Ibid. “They were, at long last, realizing the crime of ‘containment’ and the folly of appeasement,” Welch wrote. “And without the American government to hold over the Kremlin the umbrella of its protection, against storms rising on every side, the Kremlin faced a very precarious future.” Ibid.
“THE SAD TRUTH IS” Ibid., 6.
GUILTY OF “A VERY SINISTER” Ibid., 6; 13.
HAD BEEN “SWEPT ALONG” Ibid.
“A CONSCIOUS, DELIBERATE” Ibid., 15.
ANOTHER “COMMUNIST AGENT” Ibid., 223.
“THERE IS NOTHING” Ibid., epigraph.
A MEETING IN INDIANAPOLIS Seiler, “Robert Welch,” Los Angeles Times, January 8, 1985.
“WITH HIS DEATH” Ibid.
“TODAY WE ARE ENGAGED” Joseph McCarthy, “ ‘Enemies from Within’ Speech Delivered in Wheeling, West Virginia (1950),” Digital History Project, University of Houston, https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/coretexts/_files/resources/texts/1950%20McCarthy%20Enemies.pdf. See also David M. Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (New York, 2005), 108–11. I am grateful to Professor Oshinsky for his guidance on my treatment of the era.
HAD FORMED A Oshinsky, Conspiracy So Immense, 92–93.
PASSED THE SMITH ACT Ibid., 93.
“THE MOOD OF” Ibid.
ABROAD, EVIDENCE OF Ibid., 103.
BY 1949 MOSCOW HAD Ibid., 106.
“WE CANNOT SIT IDLE” Ibid.
THE ARRESTS OF KLAUS FUCHS Ibid.
JULIUS AND ETHEL ROSENBERG Ibid., 103.
CHINA, MEANWHILE, FELL Ibid.
CELEBRATED CASE OF ALGER HISS Ibid., 98–100; Richard Nixon, Six Crises (New York, 1962), 1–71; Patterson, Grand Expectations, 194–95. See also Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (New York, 1997).
AN “INTIMATE” AND “HOMEY” Frank Desmond, “McCarthy Charges Reds Hold U.S. Jobs,” The Wheeling Intelligencer, February 10, 1950.
MARKET AND TWELFTH STREETS Cohn, McCarthy, 1.
“WHILE I CANNOT TAKE” McCarthy, “Enemies from Within.”
THE NUMBER OF Oshinsky, Conspiracy So Immense, 110.
“TALKING TO JOE” David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York, 1994), 51.
“JOE MCCARTHY BOUGHT” Cohn, McCarthy, 8.
AS COHN TELLS THE STORY Ibid., 8–9.
THE SOVIETS HAD Oshinsky, Conspiracy So Immense, 85–102.
A LOYALTY PROGRAM Ibid., 97–98.
“BUYING THE PACKAGE” Cohn, McCarthy, 10.
“THE FIRST WAS PATRIOTIC” Ibid.
MCCARTHY, COHN SAID, “SAW” Ibid., 10–11.
A TRIO OF Edwin R. Bayley, Joe McCarthy and the Press (Madison, Wis., 1981), 36.
“LISTEN, YOU BASTARDS” Ibid.
“MCCARTHY’S METHODS” Richard H. Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy (Berkeley, Calif., 1996), 18.
“THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE” Correspondence Between President Harry S. Truman and A. Barr Comstock, October 18, 1951, Truman Papers, President’s Personal File, PPF 5866: Comstock, A. Barr. President Truman drafted, but chose not to send, a reply to a McCarthy telegram after Wheeling. McCarthy’s charges, the president wrote, marked:
the first time in my experience, and I was ten years in the Senate, that I ever heard of a Senator trying to discredit his own Government before the world. You know that isn’t done by honest public officials. Your telegram is not only not true and an insolent approach to a situation that should have been worked out between man and man but it shows conclusively that you are not even fit to have a hand in the operation of the Government of the United States. I am very sure that the people of Wisconsin are extremely sorry that they are represented by a person who has as little sense of responsibility as you have.” Telegram from Senator Joseph McCarthy to President Harry S. Truman, National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/mccarthy-telegram.
ADDED A PARAGRAPH Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy, 10.
“PARLIAMENTARY INSTITUTIONS” Queen Elizabeth II, Coronation Speech, June 2, 1953, Archives of Women’s Political Communication, Iowa State University, https://awpc.cattcenter.iastate.edu/2017/03/09/coronation-speech-june-2-1953/.
THURSDAY, MARCH 30, 1950, AT A PRESS CONFERENCE Harry S. Truman, “The President’s News Conference at Key West,” March 30, 1950, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=13755.
“FOR POLITICAL BACKGROUND” Ibid.
“NOW, IF ANYBODY” Ibid.
“TO TRY TO SABOTAGE” Ibid.
SENATOR MARGARET CHASE SMITH Margaret Chase Smith, Declaration of Conscience, ed. William C. Lewis, Jr. (New York, 1972), 3–61.
“JOE BEGAN TO GET” Oshinsky, Conspiracy So Immense, 164.
AS SMITH RECALLED IT Ibid.
“I WOULD LIKE TO SPEAK” Smith, Declaration of Conscience, 12–18.
MCCARTHY DISMISSED THEM Margaret Chase Smith, “A Declaration of Conscience,” June 1, 1950, Classic Senate Speeches, U.S. Senate, https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/Speeches_Smith_Declaration.htm.
“JOE, YOU’RE A REAL” Halberstam, Fifties, 250.
“HE’S UNBEATABLE NOW” Oshinsky, Conspiracy So Immense, 161.
“FROM A DISTANCE” Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy, 10.
“WILL YOU PLEASE” Eleanor Roosevelt, On My Own (New York, 1958), 125–26.
HE WAS FRIENDLY Evan Thomas, Robert Kennedy: His Life (New York, 2000), 64–65.
POPULAR IN MASSACHUSETTS Michael Beschloss, Presidential Courage (New York, 2007), 248.
A HOSPITALIZED SENATOR JOHN F. KENNEDY Oshinsky, Conspiracy So Immense, 489–91. See also Eleanor Roosevelt, “On My Own,” Saturday Evening Post, March 8, 1958, https://www2.gwu.edu/~erpapers/mep/displaydoc.cfm?docid=jfk15.
CHOSE TO REMAIN SILENT Oshinsky, Conspiracy So Immense, 490. JFK did not openly support the censure, Oshinsky pointed out, until 1958, when he was seeking support for the Democratic presidential nomination. On another front, “some critics complained,” Michael Beschloss wrote, “that Profiles [in Courage, Kennedy’s 1956 book] was an attempt to deflect attention from Kennedy’s failure to endorse the Senate’s censure” of McCar
thy. Beschloss, Presidential Courage, 248–49.
“WELL, AT THE TIME” Thomas, Robert Kennedy, 64. The exchange between RFK and the writer Peter Maas took place “in the mid-1960s.” Ibid.
(BUT,…“I WAS WRONG”) Ibid.
SAVORING SUPERLATIVES Oshinsky, Conspiracy So Immense, 145.
“I HAVE JUST BEGUN” Ibid.
THE “GROWTH OF THE MASS MEDIA” Hofstadter, Paranoid Style in American Politics, 63.
“THINGS HAVE TO BE DONE” Oshinsky, Conspiracy So Immense, 188.
“INVENTED THE MORNING” Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy, 164.
HIS OFFICE PRODUCED Bayley, Joe McCarthy and the Press, 179–80.
THE NUMBER OF TV SETS “Series R 93-105. Radio and Television Stations, Sets Produced, and Households With Sets: 1921 to 1970,” Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, part 2. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census (1975), 796. See also Bayley, Joe McCarthy and the Press, 176.
“PEOPLE AREN’T GOING” Sidney Zion, The Autobiography of Roy Cohn (Secaucus, N.J., 1988), 148.
HE WOULD ADJOURN FOR LUNCH “Investigations: The First Day,” Time, May 3, 1954.
“MY OWN IMPRESSION” Bayley, Joe McCarthy and the Press, 186.
“MCCARTHY’S CHARGES” Ibid., 187.
PALMER HOYT, THE EDITOR AND PUBLISHER Ibid., 145–46. The Hoyt memo is found in the Joseph Pulitzer II Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
“APPLY ANY REASONABLE” Ibid., 146.
IF A MCCARTHY STATEMENT Ibid.
“IT SEEMS OBVIOUS” Ibid.
“BELIEVE ME” Ibid., 147.
MCCARTHY DID NOT Oshinsky, Conspiracy So Immense, 182–85.
“KEEP IN MIND” Ibid., 184.
THE WASHINGTON POST HAD ASSIGNED Halberstam, Fifties, 250.
“IT IS THIS NEWSPAPER’S HOPE” Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy, 14.
EISENHOWER HAD FLINCHED David A. Nichols, Ike and McCarthy: Dwight Eisenhower’s Secret Campaign Against Joe McCarthy (New York, 2017), 3. For an excellent treatment of Eisenhower, McCarthy, and the atmosphere of the time, see William I. Hitchcock, The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s (New York, 2018), 81–83; 119–47.
