Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941

by Ian Kershaw

  The administration had reckoned before May 1940 on one of three scenarios: that the democracies would win the war without active American aid; that the war would turn into a protracted stalemate, in which the United States might eventually be in a position to broker a negotiated peace; or that the dictatorships would seriously threaten to defeat the democracies, though over the course of a long war. What had not been anticipated was a fourth scenario: an astonishingly rapid and sweeping German victory in the west, before any meaningful aid could be supplied by the United States.77 Yet this is precisely what happened. The gloomy prospects of British survival meant that the whole issue of material assistance to Britain now became acute. Aid to Britain was crucial if she was not to go under, yet if Britain were forced to surrender, such aid would be merely a gift to Hitler. As the magnitude of the defeat of France sank in across the Atlantic, the whole critical and contentious issue of aid for Britain was about to enter a new, decisive phase.

  III

  As he began to confront the momentous issues raised by the fall of France, Franklin D. Roosevelt, now 58 years old, was well into his eighth–and by long-standing convention final–year as President of the United States. Both wealth and high political office had moulded his background. Hailing from a patrician family, he was raised at Hyde Park, a large mansion in the state of New York; his fifth cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, had been President from 1901 to 1909. He had even married a Roosevelt–Eleanor, a distant cousin and niece of Theodore. She was to be the mother of his six children (of whom one died in infancy). Unlike Theodore, Franklin had made his way in politics as a Democrat. He had been appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson and ran as the Democratic vice-presidential candidate in the unsuccessful campaign of 1920. Personal tragedy struck the following year, when he contracted polio and was left paralysed in his legs. As elected Governor of New York from 1928, Roosevelt had proved a shrewd and capable politician. He had already made a mark in combating the worst of the Depression in New York when he gained the Democratic presidential nomination in 1932.

  His personal charm, seemingly relaxed style, good humour and affable manner helped him persuade his friends and assuage his opponents on many occasions, as he wove his way through the political thickets. Some of his political enemies accused him of deviousness and duplicity. His supporters, on the other hand, admired his cleverness and skilful manoeuvring. He remained, for all his years in power, something of an enigma. ‘His bewildering complexity’, it has been said, ‘had become his most visible trait. He could be bold or cautious, informal or dignified, cruel or kind, intolerant or long-suffering, urbane or almost rustic, impetuous or temporizing, Machiavellian or moralistic.’78 Whichever way he was viewed, it could scarcely be doubted that by the time he faced the daunting questions of war and peace in the critical months of 1940–41, Roosevelt was the supreme master of the political scene in the United States.

  The White House in Roosevelt’s time has been described as ‘a home inside a mansion inside an executive office’.79 It was a power-centre, certainly, but an unostentatious one, even in its representative rooms. Roosevelt began the day by reading the newspapers over breakfast in bed, his blue cape with red F.D.R. monogram draped over his pyjamas. His personal aides would then come in to discuss the day’s schedule with him. Thereafter he worked as a rule behind his big desk, littered with papers, in the Oval Study, full of books, prints and family photos, each day from 10 o’clock in the morning, looking out through the tall windows into the garden outside. He would usually have a number of visitors to see in the late morning and afternoon, where access to the inner sanctum was controlled by his amiable military aide, Major General Edwin W. Watson, known to all as ‘Pa’, a big, good-natured Virginian with a distinctive taste in aftershave that was the butt of many a repetitive presidential joke. Then he would dictate letters and memos to his secretaries, the longtime loyal devotee Marguerite ‘Missy’ LeHand and her assistant, Grace Tully. Congressional representatives would have their audiences with the President on Mondays or Tuesdays. Roosevelt met the press on Tuesday afternoons and Friday mornings. And on Friday afternoon he presided over the Cabinet meeting. In the evenings there was often formal entertainment in the state dining room. Otherwise, Roosevelt liked to spend the evening sorting out his stamp collection (when he was not distracted by phone calls and other business). But this seemingly ordered routine could be, and often was, interrupted by any kind of crisis that had blown up. Roosevelt’s way of operating often gave the somewhat misleading impression of a lack of any systematic application. In fact, it spoke of a high personal level of involvement based upon accessibility. The ‘air of small-town friendliness’ that characterized the White House superficially belied the fact that Roosevelt kept the reins of power very tightly in his own hands.80

  The US Constitution endows the President with wide powers, though it also imposes checks and balances on his executive authority. Most notably, the powers invested in the legislature and the judiciary were intended to limit presidential power and curb any abuse of it. The doctrine of the separation of powers foresaw the friction which was built into the relations between the President and the Congress.81

  The duopoly between President and Congress, the complex balance between the powers of each, inevitably produced a need for compromise, often arrived at through wearisome, time-consuming processes and intense lobbying. The absence of swift, perhaps impulsive, decision-making and apparent lack of governmental efficiency were generally regarded as the necessary price of freedom from overweening power. On the other hand, at times of international crisis–and the implications for the United States of the war in Europe and the increasing threat in the Far East certainly amounted to such–the need to negotiate crucial measures through an obstructionist Congress could prove not simply laborious, but weakening when urgent action was called for. Yet precisely at such times it was imperative that the President have national, not partisan backing. Roosevelt’s caution, his reluctance to embrace the bold moves that his advisers sometimes advocated, reflected his pronounced sensitivity to the need to carry the country with him. And he was all too aware that the nation was divided on the decisive issue of American involvement in the European war–in favour of giving Britain more material support, certainly, but opposed by four to one to entry into the conflict.82 Roosevelt often showed consummate political skill in his dealings with Congress. He became, however, increasingly prepared to bypass Congress through use of his prerogative powers, sometimes ingeniously justified, in order to take action which might otherwise have been stymied or held up by protracted debate.83

  Each President brings his own inimitable style to the exercise of power. Roosevelt was a man of bold ideas, though without a coherent ideology. He was prepared to experiment, then pull back if his initiatives proved unworkable.84 He exuded confidence, and his genial affability helped to convey his sense of pushing at the limits of the possible to those around him. He focused on ends, not means. The detail of how to get something done he could leave to others.85 He was impatient with formal bureaucracies, often seeing them as a challenge that he had to circumnavigate. And his interests varied widely across the political spectrum. In many policy areas he did not become personally involved. While he could pore over matters relating to the navy, a passionate interest since his First World War days, he might pay only superficial attention to issues that did not capture his imagination.86 His discursive approach to problems could prove an irritation to those in his entourage who favoured more direct, forensic analysis. Stimson’s impatience for action and Roosevelt’s caution and ad hoc improvisations led the Secretary of War to note with a tone of frustration that ‘it literally is government on the jump’ and that conversation with the President was ‘like chasing a vagrant beam of sunshine around a vacant room’.87 Stimson, like others, did, however, come to appreciate Roosevelt’s ingrained shrewdness in engineering, at times through patience, wariness and roundabout means, the passage of the measures he
wanted to take. And no one mistook Roosevelt’s caution for weakness. In the formulation of policy and in the taking of the key decisions, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind of Roosevelt’s outright primacy.

  The Cabinet, the President’s advisory council, played little role as a collective body in the making of decisions. Unlike the government in the British parliamentary system, where members of the Cabinet are elected to Parliament and share collective responsibility for policy, the United States system, drawing upon specific expertise of individuals drawn directly into government and with its clear divorce between the legislature and executive, encourages the President to deal bilaterally with individual departments of his administration. Roosevelt intensified this inbuilt tendency by competition and by often fluid and unclear lines of demarcation among his officials.88 The Cabinet served little function as an instrument for coordinating the defence programme and tackling critical issues of foreign policy. Decisions, when they could not be postponed, were reached between the President and individual members of the Cabinet or following discussion involving those most directly involved.89

  The growing crisis from spring 1940 required more flexible and dynamic government. In the wake of the German triumph in western Europe in May and June 1940, there was an urgent need to convert the nation to a defence footing. A belated, massive effort had to be undertaken to mobilize the economy for defence, and to rearm with all haste. And, since national security was bound up with the fate of Britain and France, the attempt had to be made to prevent the destruction of the western democracies.90 Roosevelt now started to function more as commander-in-chief than as president of a civil administration, centralizing the orchestration of defence in his own hands. He was careful to bypass Congress, without alienating it, using statutes dating from the First World War to create new defence agencies and avoid legislation, strengthening his own position in the process. He began ‘to improvise a new government within a government’.91

  In May 1940 he established the Office for Emergency Management, intended to coordinate the work of all government agencies dealing with defence. Shortly afterwards, towards the end of the month, he revived the Council of National Defense, a body of six Cabinet officers that had lain dormant since the First World War, and created alongside it a seven-man National Defense Advisory Commission, comprised of business leaders and experienced administrators.92 But these organizations looked impressive only on paper. The Office for Emergency Management was merely an umbrella framework enabling Roosevelt to set up and control agencies for production without resort to Congress.93 The Council of National Defense, in theory the hub of the defence effort and consisting of Cabinet officers with defence functions, was no more than ‘an administrative fiction’ and never met at all.94 And the Advisory Commission was left without a chairman as an ‘administrative anomaly’, a group of experts without leadership or power, each responsible to the President alone. Defining its responsibilities, it has been said, ‘represented a problem in metaphysics’. Confusion and jurisdictional friction between the Commission and the relevant government bureaucracies in the War, Navy and Treasury Departments was the inevitable consequence. Meanwhile, the President’s power was enhanced.95 Temperament matched his sense of constitutional responsibility. He was unwilling to delegate authority to any organization that could have undermined his own direct and personal control; he thought it would have been constitutionally irresponsible to have done so.96

  In June 1940 Roosevelt made two important personnel changes that affected the shaping of defence policy. He brought in Frank Knox as Secretary of the Navy and Henry L. Stimson as Secretary of War. They were shrewd political appointments in an election year. Both Knox and Stimson had been senior members of previous Republican administrations. Knox, indeed, had been the Republican candidate for Vice-President in 1936, while Stimson had long-standing prior experience under Republican presidents both as Secretary of War and, in the early 1930s, Secretary of State. But apart from widening the political representation of his administration and giving it a bipartisan image at a time of national crisis, Roosevelt also greatly strengthened his own hand in dealing with defence.97 The previous Secretary of the Navy, Charles Edison, had been ineffectual, while Harry H. Woodring, whom the President now removed from his office as Secretary of War, had been singularly ill suited to the position, his isolationist tendencies wholly out of tune with the urgency of the situation.98 In Knox and Stimson, Roosevelt now had in position two men who favoured a more forceful defence policy–indeed were considerably more hawkish than the President himself and ready to push him in a direction he often seemed reluctant to take.

  Knox, whose affable demeanour went hand in hand with firm political views, had become the publisher of the Chicago Daily News in 1931 and provided a voice for moderate, internationalist Republicanism in a region dominated by the shrill isolationism of the Chicago Tribune.99 Stimson, by now into his seventies, a lawyer by profession though with many years spent in public service, soon became the strong man of the administration. He was a man of firm principles based upon moral rectitude and commitment to the law. He looked the part: silver-grey hair parted in the middle, a brisk moustache, an air of dogged respectability. His subordinates called him Colonel Stimson, his rank in the First World War. The President called him Harry. Stimson detested Nazism to the core, and had scant tolerance for the weak politicians of Britain and France who had failed to stand up to Hitler. He was a good, no-nonsense administrator, given to speaking his mind, with a tendency towards impatience, even brusqueness–also towards the President himself–when frustrated by anything he perceived as a lack of direction or drive.100 Stimson now brought a much needed dynamism and, despite his advancing years, great vitality to the urgent rearmament programme.

  In Knox and Stimson, Roosevelt now had in place two men whose positions were crucial to the military aspects of foreign policy, prepared to back, privately and publicly, both American preparedness and aid to Britain.101 Stimson, especially, became the most ardent advocate of intervention in the European war. Roosevelt’s keen interest in naval affairs led to his active involvement in the operational planning for the navy. He rarely saw Knox alone, and frequently dealt directly both with Admiral Harold ‘Betty’ Stark, chief of Naval Operations, invariably amenable to the President’s proposals, and with the dour Commander-in-Chief of the Atlantic Fleet, Admiral Ernest J. King. With the army, Roosevelt acted differently. He regularly saw Stimson alone, and not just on army matters. And, probably so as not to offend his Secretary of War’s proprieties in the way he liked to run his Department, he seldom saw the head of the army, the chief of staff, General George C. Marshall, except in Stimson’s presence.102 The exceptionally able and impressive, eminently austere Marshall, tall, with greying hair and intensely blue eyes, struck up an excellent working relationship with Stimson.103 Marshall had a reputation for speaking bluntly to his superiors. He had announced his presence in autumn 1938 by disagreeing outright with Roosevelt at an important meeting. Most thought at the time that his promising career was at an end. But Roosevelt made one of his most outstanding appointments several months later when he gave Marshall the position of chief of staff. Stiff formalities were, however, upheld. Marshall always called Roosevelt ‘Mr President’. He determined to remain aloof from Roosevelt’s charm and never to laugh at his jokes. And after his first rebuff, Roosevelt never again called Marshall ‘George’.104

  In May 1940, after Roosevelt had flatly rejected the army’s proposal for a $657 million appropriation, Marshall approached the President and expounded all the arguments in favour of the funding, ending: ‘If you don’t do something…and do it right away, I don’t know what is going to happen to this country.’ Roosevelt reversed his decision. Marshall later spoke of this as the action that broke the logjam.105 Marshall continued, however, along with army planners, to oppose armed intervention until effective military strength was built up. Not before early autumn 1941 did the chief of staff come to favour war. In the summ
er of the previous year, the army’s stance was plain. Entry into the war would result in attacks on the United States by Germany, Italy and possibly Japan. ‘Our unreadiness to meet such aggression on its own scale is so great that, so long as the choice is left to us, we should avoid the contest until we can be adequately prepared.’106

  This did not prevent Stimson and Knox from emerging as the most hawkish influences on Roosevelt, pressing upon him an unyielding stance towards both the Axis powers and Japan, while supporting every move to maximize rearmament. They found eager support from the long-standing Secretary to the Treasury and personal friend of the President, Henry Morgenthau, who believed, like Stimson, that Nazism could only be defeated if the United States were to muster its full material power at the earliest possible juncture. Morgenthau, burdened with the major task of organizing war production (which had traditionally fallen to the War Department), came to form a good working relationship with the Secretary of War, based upon mutual respect and close cooperation.107 Further backing for ‘hawks’ came from the abrasive and outspoken Secretary of the Interior, Harold L. Ickes, a former Republican who had been a member of the Cabinet since 1933 and shared Morgenthau’s sense of impending crisis requiring decisive action.108

  The State Department, on the other hand, formed something of a counterweight to the hawkish tendencies of those responsible for military and defence matters. It was not that Cordell Hull, Secretary of State since 1933, favoured a soft line towards the aggressors in Europe or in the Far East. A pillar of rectitude in foreign affairs, he detested fascism and took an equally strong line in his moral condemnation of the Japanese. But his ingrained caution made him uneasy about any action that could serve as an unnecessary provocation.109 The prospect of Japan taking advantage in the Pacific from any American involvement in Europe was indeed worrying, for the President, too. Roosevelt was content to let the wary and experienced Hull deal with the Far East with minimal interference and to keep a fragile peace in the Pacific by avoiding provocation to the Japanese while refraining from action that might condone their aggression in China. The Atlantic was another matter altogether, and here Roosevelt played a more direct and overt role. But even in the Far East, authority was divided. Hull did not preside over the spheres of military deterrence and trade restrictions.110 Moreover, Hull could find that important issues were delegated to his Under-Secretary, Sumner Welles, a friend and confidant of the President, and a rival he viewed with some animosity and bitter resentment.111