Those Angry Days

by Lynne Olson

  To his chagrin, Friedrich von Boetticher had also become aware of a distinct shift in the American mood. More and more, he was plagued by the uneasy feeling that some of his closest U.S. military contacts were losing their sympathy for Germany. One notable example was General George Strong, the head of the Army’s War Plans Division, whom von Boetticher had known since the 1920s. Throughout the years of their friendship, Strong had been widely regarded as pro-German and hostile to Britain and France, so much so that a French officer once accused him of representing German interests.

  In September 1940, Strong was one of several American officers sent to London to confer with their British counterparts and to judge for themselves the prospects for Britain’s survival. When von Boetticher heard of Strong’s presence in the delegation, he sent a gleeful cable to Berlin, noting that the U.S. general “has stood close to me for fifteen years and will report independently.” Convinced that Strong would confirm the grievous British losses claimed by German reports, von Boetticher was appalled when his friend declared on his return that the Luftwaffe was nowhere close to vanquishing the RAF, that the damage done by air bombardment had been relatively small, and that British claims of German aircraft losses were “on the conservative side.”

  Groping for an explanation of Strong’s stunning change in attitude, von Boetticher could only surmise that he had been ordered to make the remark “as an organ of Roosevelt, his superior.” The idea that his own influence with the American military might soon be at an end was too awful for the German attaché to contemplate.

  CHAPTER 14

  “AN AMERICAN FIRST, AND A REPUBLICAN AFTERWARD”

  For America’s interventionists, the summer of 1940 was an exceedingly busy time. Not only did they play crucial roles in crafting the destroyers-bases deal and nominating Wendell Willkie, they also were instrumental in engineering America’s first peacetime draft. All three were daunting challenges, but none more so than what Robert Sherwood called the “supremely daring” and “seemingly hopeless” notion of requiring young Americans to take up arms for their country when it was not yet at war.

  Conscription had been imposed on U.S. citizens only twice before—during the Civil War and World War I. In both conflicts, there was tremendous opposition to the draft. The concept of a standing army was anathema to many if not most Americans, as it had in fact been to America’s Founding Fathers, who feared that such a force would engender an unwelcome spirit of military ardor. According to Thomas Jefferson, a standing army was nothing less than an “instrument … dangerous to the rights of the nation.” As many Americans saw it, the idea of a draft smacked of state coercion, reminiscent of the militarism of Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. Compulsory military service during peacetime was especially unthinkable.

  In 1940, isolationists claimed that conscription would be immediately followed by the dispatch of an American expeditionary force to fight in Europe. College students, who would be among the first drafted, were particularly vocal on the issue. In the early and mid-1930s, more than half a million American undergraduates signed a pledge refusing to serve in the armed forces in the event of another conflict. As war swept over Europe in 1939 and 1940, thousands of students across the country took part in antiwar demonstrations.

  Ranged against these anticonscription forces were the private citizens who had come up with the concept—a group of influential men who strongly believed that a well-trained army was just as important to bolstering America’s defenses as additional planes, ships, and weapons. General Hugh Drum, commander of the U.S. First Army, expressed their views when he said in late 1939: “Of what value are modern munitions without the manpower organized and trained to operate them?”

  Compulsory military service would have been a hard sell at any time, but in a presidential election year, it was political dynamite. When the idea was first proposed in late May 1940, Roosevelt and most members of Congress immediately shied away from it, as did General George Marshall and the rest of the Army brass. So, on their own, its proponents wrote a bill and launched a publicity campaign to educate Americans about why it was necessary. Introduced in Congress two days before France’s capitulation to Germany, the legislation, which would affect millions of Americans if passed, ignited a firestorm in Washington and the rest of the country.

  THE MAN MOST RESPONSIBLE for the draft campaign was Grenville Clark, a square-jawed, broad-shouldered Manhattan attorney who looked as if he’d just stepped out of an Arrow shirt ad. The heir to a sizable banking and railroad fortune, the fifty-seven-year-old Clark was a founder and senior partner of the powerhouse Wall Street law firm of Root, Clark, Buckner and Ballantine. He was called Grenny by his friends and acquaintances, among them Franklin Roosevelt, whom Clark had known since childhood.

  Like many members of the Century Group and others in the East Coast elite, Clark, a Centurion himself, had been raised to believe in the duty of private citizens to serve their country. He first put that belief into practice after the torpedoing of the British passenger liner Lusitania by a German submarine in May 1915, less than a year after the outbreak of World War I. More than a thousand people, including 128 Americans, lost their lives.

  Believing that America should take firm action against Germany, Clark and his law partner, Elihu Root Jr., were dismayed when President Woodrow Wilson did not declare war after the ship’s sinking. The two young lawyers, who were sure that war was inevitable and that America must prepare for it, decided to set up a course of military training for university-educated professionals like themselves. Thanks to their efforts, more than two thousand lawyers, bankers, businessmen, politicians, and journalists devoted several weeks of their summer that year to learning the rudiments of soldiering, which included drills, maneuvers, and the use of artillery and other weapons. Among those who signed up for the training camp, located just outside Plattsburg in upstate New York, were New York City’s mayor and police commissioner; the famed war correspondent Richard Harding Davis; and Frank Crowninshield, the future editor of Vanity Fair.

  Because of the predominance of East Coast bluebloods among the first Plattsburg trainees, the endeavor was portrayed in some newspaper stories as a millionaires’ summer lark. It was hardly that. The following year, as a result of the work of Clark and his fellow organizers, more than sixteen thousand university graduates throughout the country received the basics of military training in camps based on the Plattsburg model. When the United States finally declared war against Germany in April 1917, the camps were turned into officers’ training schools, which Plattsburgers flocked to join. After ninety days of accelerated training, most of the new officers became instructors for the draftees now flooding into the Army. Many Plattsburg graduates went on to fight in France.

  Years later, a French general would remark that America’s most impressive military achievement in World War I was its ability to find and train enough skilled officers to lead an army of two million men in an amazingly short period of time. As the historians J. Garry Clifford and Samuel R. Spencer Jr. have observed, much of the credit for that accomplishment belongs to the Plattsburg movement.

  After the war, the Plattsburg participants went back to their law firms, banks, newspapers, and other businesses, but many, particularly the early adherents, never lost their belief in the importance of military preparedness, as well as in the obligation of private citizens to get involved in their country’s affairs. In May 1940, several dozen of these now middle-aged, prosperous, prominent men celebrated Plattsburg’s twenty-fifth anniversary. In their view, the events of that month seemed like a reprise of the spring of 1915: a war raging in Europe, and a neutral America under increasing threat but too militarily weak to go to war or even to defend itself.

  With Grenville Clark again serving as their leader, the group decided to launch a new campaign, this one considerably more dramatic and far-reaching than the Plattsburg camps. With the presidential election less than six months away, their plan—to work for the i
mmediate enactment of compulsory military training—was breathtakingly audacious. But these movers and shakers, many at the top of their professions, had few qualms. They had not gotten where they were by agonizing over their beliefs and actions. They expected to be listened to—and heeded.

  That was particularly true of Clark, whose aggressiveness and tenacity reminded his acquaintances of a well-bred, self-confident bulldog. Although polite and gentlemanly at all times, he was relentless in pursuing his objectives, disregarding or working to override those who disagreed with him.

  In the middle of May, Clark sent a telegram to Roosevelt outlining what he and the other Plattsburgers had in mind and asking the president what he thought. The two men had been classmates at Harvard and, a few years later, had worked together as law clerks at an eminent Wall Street firm, where Roosevelt astonished Clark one lazy afternoon by outlining his intended career path—the New York State Assembly, assistant secretary of the Navy, governor of New York, and then the presidency.

  Rather than laughing at his friend’s audacity, Clark cheered him on as Roosevelt achieved each one of those posts. He supported FDR for president in 1932 and was one of the few denizens of Wall Street to back him again in 1936. Early in Roosevelt’s first term, Clark helped the White House with the drafting of economic legislation; in return, Roosevelt offered him the chairmanship of the new National Labor Relations Board. Clark turned the job down, as he did all such offers. He was determined never to hold an official government position, fearing it would compromise his independence.

  While generally admiring of Clark and his public service crusades, his friends in government felt he had no grasp of political reality. “Grenny Clark could not get elected to Congress in any district—North, South, East, or West,” Roosevelt once grumbled to an aide. That lack of political acumen was particularly exasperating to the president in May 1940. The last thing he needed was another threat to his reelection, which the draft certainly would be. He sent back a polite, noncommittal reply.

  Yet even if 1940 had not been an election year, Roosevelt probably would have shown little enthusiasm for Clark’s proposal. In building up the defenses of the nation, the president had focused on the expansion of naval and, in particular, air power, which one observer described as his “Aladdin’s lamp for instant and inexpensive national security.” Throughout FDR’s presidency, the Army had always been the neglected stepchild—and it remained so in the spring and summer of 1940. The president continued to resist the idea that the United States would have to send an army to Europe again, even if the country were forced at some point to go to war against Hitler.

  Having been spurned by Roosevelt, Clark and Julius Ochs Adler, a top New York Times executive and fellow Plattsburger, flew to Washington on May 31 to try to convince the Army’s chief to back their plan. Unlike the president, General George Marshall was keenly aware of the need to strengthen the Army. Indeed, he had been urging Roosevelt for months to correct its huge deficiencies, to little effect.

  Yet Marshall, who had been Army chief of staff for only ten months, was also well aware how politically explosive the draft issue was likely to be. An intensely ambitious man whom one aide would later call “a consummate Army politician,” he had quietly lobbied for the top Army job for more than a year, with the help of Harry Hopkins and other key presidential advisers. He knew Roosevelt had chosen him with great misgivings, in large part because of his lack of combat experience, and considered him “the best of a bad bargain.”

  Marshall’s relationship with the president remained tentative and distant, and he had no desire to take the initiative on a controversial proposal that the White House and Capitol Hill had not approved, no matter how necessary it might be. “I thought,” he said after the war, “that it was far more important in the long run that I be well established as a member of a team and try to do my convincing within that team than to take action publicly contrary to the desires of the President and certain members of Congress.” If and when civilian leaders proposed legislation, he said, “I could take the floor and do all the urging that was required.”

  In his meeting with Clark and Adler, Marshall was courteous but blunt in vetoing their idea. The Army chief was fixated on the idea that the Germans were planning to take over one or more South American countries and then strike at the Panama Canal. He told his visitors that his primary focus was on the defense of the Americas, which required a steady, orderly buildup of troops. There were not enough instructors and weapons for the soldiers he had now, let alone for hundreds of thousands of draftees. A huge influx of untrained men would disrupt everything he was trying to accomplish.

  Shocked by what they viewed as Marshall’s misguided priorities and unwonted caution, Clark and Adler proceeded to tell the chief of staff how foolish he was to worry about South America when Britain and France were on the verge of collapse. The defeat of those two countries, the New Yorkers argued, would pose a far greater threat to America’s security than any pro-Nazi coup in Uruguay or Argentina. Furthermore, Clark said, Marshall had a moral responsibility to make clear to Roosevelt the need for more trained manpower, especially when the Army chief clearly knew how great the need was.

  A brusque, dignified, and distinctly formidable man, considered intimidating by even his closest associates, Marshall was not accustomed to being scolded, especially by a couple of overbearing civilians. “It was very hard to keep my temper,” he later recalled. “I was being dictated to, and I mean dictated to … by this important New York fellow and this other important New York fellow.… I tried to listen politely but I couldn’t do it.” His face flushed, Marshall curtly told Clark and Adler that he did not think it his duty to give FDR advice that the president had not requested and that therefore he had no intention of doing so. With that, he terminated the meeting.

  As upset with Marshall as Marshall was with him, Clark decided to try a different tack. Someone, preferably the secretary of war, must put pressure on the Army and president to back conscription. Since the current war secretary, Harry Woodring, was a diehard isolationist, he would have to be replaced by an equally committed interventionist. Within hours of his confrontation with Marshall, Clark, self-confident as ever, set out to transform that pipe dream into reality.

  IF A POLLSTER HAD asked Washington insiders to pick the worst member of Roosevelt’s cabinet, Harry Woodring would have won in a landslide. Joseph Alsop called him “a sleazy third-rater” and “a peanut-sized politician distinguished only by the meanness of his nature.” The Kiplinger Letter, an influential Washington-based financial newsletter, referred to him as “plainly incompetent.”

  A former governor of Kansas, Woodring was in fact never supposed to have been secretary of war. In 1933, he had been given the job of assistant war secretary in return for his support of Roosevelt in the previous year’s presidential election. When his boss, George Dern, died in 1936, Woodring became acting secretary. Preoccupied by that year’s election and then by the Court-packing controversy, FDR never got around to filling the cabinet position with someone more qualified, as he once planned. As a result, Woodring’s appointment became permanent.

  For years, members of the press and administration officials, including Woodring’s fellow cabinet members, had urged the president to get rid of him. Not only did Woodring oppose aid for Britain, he was also at war with his own assistant secretary, Louis Johnson, who wanted his superior’s job and openly intrigued to get it. The two men did not speak to each other, and unsurprisingly, chaos and confusion reigned in their department. Roosevelt declined to get involved and procrastinated about replacing Woodring, even though he had been promising to do so for months. The president found it difficult to fire anyone, and he had a habit of delaying that uncomfortable duty for as long as possible.

  But that was before Grenville Clark entered the fray. Just hours after his contentious meeting with Marshall, Clark had lunch with his old friend Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who served as an unofficial a
dviser to Roosevelt. An ardent interventionist and Anglophile, Frankfurter had long been urging FDR to dump Woodring.

  During their lunch, Clark and Frankfurter discussed possible replacements, and within a minute or two, they came up with the same name: Henry Stimson. The country’s most respected elder statesman and a pillar of the Republican Eastern establishment, the seventy-two-year-old Stimson had served as secretary of war under William Howard Taft and secretary of state under Herbert Hoover.

  Even the cheeky young columnist Joseph Alsop was in awe of Stimson, describing him as “an impossibly grand figure” and “in matters of substance, as great a public servant as this country has ever seen.” Alsop, who was used to dominating conversations, was uncharacteristically subdued whenever he encountered Stimson, who was known for his bluntness and integrity: “On the few impersonal occasions when we did meet, I could manage little more than a muted and respectful greeting.”

  A friend of both Clark and Frankfurter, Stimson had been a Plattsburger himself; four years after his stint as war secretary, he had participated in the 1916 summer camp. When the United States entered the war the following year, Stimson, then a forty-nine-year-old Wall Street lawyer, enlisted in the Army and was sent to France, where he commanded a field artillery battalion and attained the rank of colonel.

  A forceful advocate of collective security all his adult life, Stimson had worked hard, if unsuccessfully, as secretary of state to encourage the creation of an international coalition to challenge Japan’s seizure of Manchuria in 1931. Once out of office, he played the role of Cassandra, warning his countrymen about the perils of isolationism. In a series of hard-hitting speeches, broadcasts, and articles throughout the 1930s, he declared that the United States, “the world’s most powerful nation today,” must assume its responsibility to help maintain peace and justice in the world.