The American Story

by David M. Rubenstein

  JW: It’s a fascinating question and an important question in terms of understanding this whole drama. What took place was the Battle of Britain, which was largely fought in the skies. It wreaked a great deal of damage on Britain. But the British people are made of stern stuff, and they fought back.

  Of course, they were led by Winston Churchill, who gave that famous speech that “we’ll fight them on the beaches, we’ll fight them in the air.” They were willing to do anything and everything, and it became clear with time that this set of invasion plans, Operation Sea Lion, would not succeed.

  It was then that Hitler conceived of this idea—what he thought was his boldest and most brilliant idea, and it proved to be his most prophetic mistake—which was that he would invade the Soviet Union. As he told the generals, “All we have to do is kick the door down and the whole edifice will collapse.” It did not.

  DR: Had he not invaded the Soviet Union, with whom Germany had a nonaggression pact, and had he actually tried to invade England, do you think he could have succeeded, given all the military might he had?

  JW: It’s not easy to make that cross-channel invasion. We would do it with the D-Day invasion of Normandy in 1944, but we were a much larger country with a much larger population base. I’m not so sure he could have subjugated Britain.

  DR: Let’s talk about the American response. When the Sudetenland was taken over, when Poland was invaded, when France was invaded, when the Netherlands was invaded, when Belgium was invaded, the Americans said, “We’re not doing anything.” Churchill spent so much time trying to get us to help. Why were we so reluctant to go into the war?

  JW: We were still exhausted and worn out from the memories of World War I. The images and the visions of the dead and dying were still very fresh in America.

  And there was the America First movement, a movement with Charles Lindbergh as its spokesman. He was trim. He was handsome. He was articulate. And he said, “We must stay out of Europe’s wars.” He made the case for it over and over again. And America didn’t have much of an appetite for intervening.

  Roosevelt, interestingly enough, as charismatic as he was, with his fireside chats and with his speeches, you would think he could have gotten the American people to follow him to the edge of the universe. But he was careful never to get too far out ahead of public opinion, and public opinion was not at the point where we were ready to invade or join the fight against the Nazis.

  DR: When Pearl Harbor is bombed on December 7, 1941, we declare war against Japan. Would we ever have gone to war in Europe had we not been bombed by the Japanese?

  JW: I think we would have gone to war, but much too late in the game. The longer it took, the stronger Hitler got, and as we waited, he took, and as we waited, he took.

  DR: Why did Hitler declare war against the United States? The Japanese had bombed us. We didn’t have a fight with him.

  JW: As I said, he made two profound mistakes. One was trying to subjugate and take over the Soviet Union, and the other was declaring war on the United States. After Pearl Harbor, he said, “The Japanese haven’t been defeated in a thousand years,” and he was convinced that the Japanese would win again. That was when he made the mistake of declaring war against the United States.

  DR: When the United States came into the war, why didn’t the Allies just get all their militaries together and invade France or the Continent from England and do what later became the D-Day invasion? The bombing of Pearl Harbor occurred in 1941. D-Day didn’t occur until June 6, 1944. What were we doing for those three years?

  JW: The problem was that we had the seventeenth most powerful military in the world. Wrap your heads around that for a second—not first, not second, not third, but the seventeenth. We were drilling our soldiers with broomsticks. That’s how ill-prepared we were.

  And while our generals, including Dwight D. Eisenhower and George Marshall, wanted one great, grand tank battle over the European plains against the Germans, Churchill, who had fresh memories of the disaster with the invasion at Gallipoli [World War I’s Gallipoli Campaign of 1915–16 was a major defeat for the Allies], said to Roosevelt, “You’re simply not ready.”

  Roosevelt thought about that and he thought about that, and it was then that he devised, along with Churchill, the North African Campaign. [The Anglo-American invasion of North Africa began with Operation Torch in November 1942; the subsequent military campaigns led to the defeat in 1943 of the German forces in North Africa under Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.] That got the American soldiers into the fight, it got America engaged, and it did something very important—it boosted the morale of the American people.

  DR: Eventually, after we had a victory in Northern Africa and in Italy, the invasion of France occurred on June 6, 1944. Was it clear from the beginning that the invasion was a success? How dangerous was it? Could we have actually lost on D-Day?

  JW: D-Day was a massive effort, but there really was no plan B. In the beginning, the battles went very well on Sword and Juno and the two other beaches in Normandy.

  But on Omaha Beach, it was terrible, the pounding the Americans were taking. American soldiers were being cut down, mowed down like wheat. They were bleeding into the water. They had lost many of their senior military men. And it really looked like they could be losing at Omaha.

  DR: Suppose the Germans had actually anticipated a Normandy landing. Would we have had a chance of winning then? Because they didn’t anticipate it, is that right?

  JW: No, they didn’t anticipate it. They anticipated that the invasion would take place at a place called Pas-de-Calais. [The Allies’ Operation Fortitude involved making the Germans believe this in order to distract them from Normandy.] But I think it was inevitable, given this vast armada of men and machines and battleships, that we would have won eventually.

  DR: What about Hitler? Were they afraid to wake him up when it happened?

  JW: It’s amazing, if you think about it. The great Erwin Rommel, the famed Desert Fox and one of the best generals of the Nazis—he was off buying shoes for his wife. Meanwhile, Hitler was asleep—he was taking sleeping pills then—and everybody was afraid of waking the Führer. That was so important because they had the panzer tanks ready and waiting. It was the one weapon in the arsenal of the Germans that could have repelled the Americans. But the panzers waited and waited and waited. And Hitler slept.

  “Taxis to Hell-and-Back.” Under enemy fire, troops from the U.S. Army’s 1st Infantry Division wade ashore at Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944: D-Day.

  DR: June 6, 1944, we invade. Finally, we capture France. But the war didn’t end in Europe until April 1945. What was going on for almost a year? The Battle of the Bulge, what was that about?

  JW: The thing about Hitler was he was willing to expend his men at almost any cost. He was conducting and overseeing battles with imaginary armies. But his motto also became, for what he saw as his cowardly generals—not a good way of leading his men—he said to his generals, “You must stand and die.”

  He conceived of one last-ditch effort, which was the Battle of the Bulge, where he threw everything he could at the Americans. He was hoping that if he could get the Americans to pull out of the war, then he could make a separate peace with the Soviet Union.

  DR: Eventually Berlin was being bombed. Virtually every major city in Germany was being bombed by the Americans. Why did the Germans not just say, “Let’s get rid of Hitler”? Why did they put up with this decimation of their country?

  JW: Remember that the Germans were a great society. They had great culture. They had great arts. They had great government. They were really just a remarkable state. But something happened under Hitler where the country was in the grips of what I can only say was a form of national psychosis. They stuck with him until the bitter end, even knowing the terrible things he was doing to the Jews, even seeing the concentration camps, the knifing of their own people.

  DR: There was an effort to kill him with a bomb. How did he survive that attempt?
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  JW: There were actually eleven efforts to kill him. But I don’t want that to suggest that there was great mass resistance, because there wasn’t.

  Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, an aristocrat in the army, came to despise Hitler. He offered to bring a bomb in a suitcase into the Hitler bunker. It went off, and a lot of people were killed and injured.

  But like a cat with nine lives, somehow Hitler survived. And of course he thought this was destiny—that he was fated to win the war after all.

  DR: Let’s go to the third subject I wanted to cover, which is Roosevelt’s health. Everyone knows that he contracted polio at Campobello, the island in Passamaquoddy Bay where he spent his childhood summers and that he often visited as an adult. He didn’t really think he had a career in politics after that. He had run as vice president in 1920 on James Cox’s ticket, but he was out of politics. How, as a polio victim, did he get elected governor of New York in 1928 when, in those days, people who had disabilities weren’t treated the way they are today?

  JW: He got elected because he had the hubris and the drive to get elected. He believed he was fated for high office. He actually thought that he could become president just like Teddy Roosevelt, his distant cousin, did. And while he couldn’t use his legs, he could use other parts of his body. He could use his arms. There was the famous tilt of his head. He liked to do things that were physical. He liked to drive, to play cards.

  DR: How did he drive without the use of his legs?

  JW: He had a special car that was made for him. Driving was one of his favorite sports. But he thought he was fated and destined for greatness, and indeed he was.

  DR: Why did reporters agree to not photograph him in his wheelchair or being carried? Very frequently he was being carried from his car to someplace else. Why did reporters never photograph that?

  JW: It would be unthinkable to have something like this happen today. The press had a gentlemen’s agreement that was rigorously adhered to never to show photos of him in his wheelchair, and never to discuss it in articles. And so he was able to do whatever he wanted.

  DR: He ran for reelection in ’36 and won. He ran for reelection in ’40 and won—the first time somebody had served a third term. Then in ’44 he ran again. What was his health like in 1944?

  JW: This is what really struck me when I set out to write 1944—his health was disastrous. He had congestive heart failure. He was a dying man. He had chills that wouldn’t quit, a hacking cough that wouldn’t quit.

  People would walk into the Oval Office, and the Secret Service was stunned to see that sometimes he had fallen on the ground and was sprawled out. His mouth was hanging open. His eyes were cloudy. He could barely even sign his name on letters.

  It was so bad that when he came back from the Tehran Conference [in 1943, when he, Churchill, and Stalin convened to talk wartime strategy], his daughter said, “He has to have a full workup, otherwise there will be hell to pay.”

  When he went to Bethesda Naval Hospital for the checkup, he was told that if he didn’t have significant rest, he’d be dead within a year. Those words were prophetic.

  Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill at the Tehran Conference in late 1943.

  DR: In 1944, how did he manage to get the nomination of his party? Didn’t he have to go to the convention and make a speech?

  JW: He didn’t make a speech at the convention. This charade continued in which he wasn’t photographed.

  By this point, there was talk that something was amiss with him. He would sometimes go in front of the press and he would put on a dog-and-pony show. He would pat himself and they would say, “Mr. President, how are you feeling?” And he would say, “I’m feeling pretty good.” And then Fala, his little dog, would jump up in his lap, and he would say, “I’m a little tired today, a little sleepy, but otherwise all is good.”

  And they all fell for it. They loved him.

  DR: When he was inaugurated in 1945, was the ceremony held in the Capitol?

  JW: Rather than having a full-scale inauguration, they had a small little affair of five thousand people at the White House. Again, his health was really bad. There was a very touching moment where he went out there, it was freezing cold, and his son offered him a cape and he turned it down. He was a gutsy guy.

  DR: But subsequent to the inauguration, he did go to Yalta in 1945 for his second big conference with Churchill and Stalin. How did he manage to fly there? He didn’t like flying. Didn’t the planes he traveled on have to fly very low because he couldn’t breathe well above ten thousand feet?

  JW: They flew low because that’s what he liked, and because flying was hard for him because of his physical infirmity.

  At Yalta, he had this image of two things that drove him. One was that he wanted to see the war to a close, and he needed to make sure Stalin was in the fight to the bitter end. And he wanted to create something called the United Nations. That was his great dream. And so he was willing to do anything to make that happen.

  DR: When he gets to Yalta, was he able to really do a good job of representing the United States, given the mental state and physical state he was in?

  JW: His mental state, I think, was still fairly sharp—but he was clearly circumscribed by his limited physical abilities and by his ill health. Where this really came into play at Yalta was in the treatment of what to do about Poland. [At Yalta, the leaders left Poland under the control of the Soviet Union, helping set the stage for the Cold War.]

  DR: He died how long after Yalta?

  JW: A few months later he was dead—April 1945.

  DR: Let’s skip for a moment to the question of the Final Solution—the Nazis’ plan to exterminate the Jews. Early in the war, the idea wasn’t to kill all the Jews, it was to get them out of Germany. Why did Hitler and the others decide to kill them instead?

  JW: There’s no absolute certainty about why they decided to do that. What happened with the Final Solution is that over time, it evolved. It began with just getting rid of the Jews, putting them in Siberia and relocating them to points east.

  Eventually they started these mobile killing squads in the Soviet Union that would line up the Jews, thousands of them at a time, and would just—boom—point-blank shoot them, shoot them, shoot them, and they would fall into a pit. And then, if you can believe it, David, the Nazi doctors were saying, “This is causing problems for the mental health of the German soldiers operating in the Soviet Union.”

  That’s when they convened a conference in 1942 at Wannsee [a suburb of Berlin] where all the great heads of the departments of the German Third Reich assembled with sun streaming in through the windows in this beautiful villa, they devised this policy in which they would destroy every living Jew—every man, every woman, every child.

  I want to say one other thing about this. After devising this policy of the Final Solution, these extermination camps in Auschwitz and elsewhere, they retired to a beautiful library not unlike this, and they drank brandy and they toasted themselves for a job well done.

  DR: Why did they decide to use gassing as part of the Final Solution?

  JW: They realized that shooting was inefficient as well as causing these problems for the morale and the health of the German soldiers. They had done some experiments on mentally challenged people in which they used gas, and they realized they could use this.

  They refined it to an art form. And it was dastardly.

  People would arrive at Birkenau [the killing center that was part of the Auschwitz camp complex], and they would smell this smell like nothing they had ever smelled before. It was broiled flesh. Little did they know that, within an hour, they themselves would be nothing but ashes and dust.

  DR: When you arrived at Auschwitz—there were many places like Auschwitz—when you arrived, they took the younger people who could do some work and they would tell them to go one place, and older people, or people who didn’t seem like they could do any work, would be exterminated right away. They were ju
st told to go into the gas chambers? What would the Nazis tell them?

  JW: They told them that they would be showered. There was this fiction that they weren’t actually going to kill them.

  The Germans were terrified that the Jews would fight back. So, until the bitter end, until the moment that they walked into the gas chambers, they thought they were going for nothing but a shower. Somebody might say, “Oh, I want to be with my child afterward.” And the guards would say, “Okay. Together afterward.” Or somebody might say, “I want to be with my wife afterward.” They would say, “Together afterward.”

  DR: They would tell these people, “Take your clothes off, women and men together,” and they would put them in a gas chamber. Death occurred in two or three minutes?

  JW: No, no, no. It was a little more horrific than that.

  It took about fifteen minutes, seventeen minutes. In the beginning there would be a mass rush for the doors, because people were trying to get away from the gas. And then there would be shouting, and that shouting would become a death rattle, and eventually the death rattle would be a squeak.

  Then all two thousand people—let me give you a sense of what two thousand represents: that’s nearly as many men as died during Pickett’s Charge [the failed Confederate military assault that was the turning point of the Battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War]—everyone would be dead. And then the process would be repeated an hour later.

  DR: What did they do with the bodies?

  JW: The Germans were nothing if not meticulous. They would shave off the hair and use it for mattresses. They would take out the dental fillings—they would take out the gold. They would take all the victims’ possessions.