by Lynne Olson
When the administration began a hesitant mobilization for war in the spring of 1940, Roosevelt summoned several business and industrial leaders to Washington to help guide the effort. Harriman was not among them. He was deeply upset by his exclusion, not only because of his desire for power but because he firmly believed that the United States should be more assertive in the fight against Hitler and Mussolini. Like other major Wall Street figures who had invested in the rehabilitation of the Continent after World War I, Harriman was an internationalist who felt that America had a responsibility to the rest of the world and, particularly, to Europe. “Anyone who says we are not affected [by the war in Europe] and its results is not facing reality,” he said in early 1940. “America has a destiny at this particular moment in the world’s history.” As some of his friends saw it, Harriman’s commitment to intervention was also a way to atone for his evasion of military service in World War I, which continued to be a major embarrassment.
Whatever the reason, he remained outspoken about the need for America’s government and business community to give Britain and France whatever supplies and arms they needed. Wherever he traveled on Union Pacific business, he wrote to a friend, he found that the people he met were not only far more willing to provide aid to Britain and its ally, France, than Roosevelt and his men believed but were desperate for leadership from the White House. “There is a sense of frustration,” Harriman added. “People want to know what we are going to do as a nation and what they can do as individuals to help.” He clearly counted himself among the frustrated.
In June 1940, Harriman finally was summoned to Washington to advise the government on how best to coordinate the transport of raw materials for the mobilization effort. But he considered it an inconsequential job and, from the day he arrived in the capital, he was determined to find a way to play a more active and substantive part in America’s lurch toward war. To help him reach that goal, he turned to a master of Washington intrigue who was said to combine the wiliest qualities of Machiavelli, Svengali, and Rasputin: his friend Harry Hopkins.
WITH HIS UNRIVALED influence and access to the president, the fifty-one-year-old Hopkins was widely regarded as the second most powerful man in Washington. Next to Roosevelt, he was also the most reviled.
The sallow-faced presidential adviser, with his penetrating eyes and sharp features, had been a New Deal lightning rod for nearly a decade, virtually from the day he first came to Washington to direct the administration’s massive emergency relief and jobs programs. Hopkins’s job had been to spend money, and, as one historian put it, he “spent more of it than any man ever had in the history of the world”—more than $9 billion. On his watch, millions of unemployed persons received emergency aid and then were put back to work, their government-funded jobs ranging from building roads and preventing floods to writing books and painting murals.
A zealot when it came to helping the poor, Hopkins, a former social worker, saw his mission as providing the greatest number of jobs in the shortest amount of time. As long as that goal was achieved, he didn’t particularly care how it was done. According to Harold Smith, director of Roosevelt’s Bureau of the Budget, Hopkins “was bound by no preconceived notions, no legal inhibitions, and … absolutely no respect for tradition.” He was accused by his many critics of being slapdash and reckless in administering the programs under his charge, resulting in widespread inefficiency, corruption, and waste of government funds. “Harry never had the faintest conception of the value of money,” said the head of a New York charitable organization for which Hopkins had worked in the 1920s.
While conservative opponents of the New Deal were the most vocal in their condemnation of Hopkins and his methods, he also had his share of enemies among the president’s supporters. Many administration officials—among them Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, who was regularly outmaneuvered by Hopkins in their frequent bureaucratic duels—resented his intimacy with the president and considered him a malign influence and a political liability for Roosevelt. Hopkins’s key role in the attempted 1938 purge of conservative Democrats in Congress and his ruthless tactics, as FDR’s chief political operative, in assuring the nominations of Roosevelt and Henry Wallace during the 1940 presidential convention, contributed greatly to that hostility.*
A man of razor-sharp wit, with “a tongue like a skinning knife and a temper like a Tartar,” Hopkins responded to his critics by thumbing his nose at them, which only enraged them more. Calling reporters into his shabby, paper-strewn office to answer the latest charges against him, he would slouch in his chair, feet propped up on the desk, and inhale deeply from a cigarette. Then, recalled Marquis Childs of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “he would snarl back at his prosecutors…. He was rarely tactful or tactical. Only half trying, you could get out of him a fine, angry contempt for all [his enemies].”
Hopkins could hurl his insults, secure in the knowledge of the president’s appreciation of his tough-mindedness, skill, and all-consuming loyalty to the man he called the Boss. The ultimate White House insider, he had been living since 1939 in the room that once served as Lincoln’s study, just down the hall from FDR’s bedroom. His was a privileged position, as he well knew, and he was quite sure no one could dislodge him from it.
At one point, he even harbored political ambitions of his own, considering a possible run at the presidency in 1940 if Roosevelt retired after the traditional two terms. The president, of course, did not step down, but even if he had, Hopkins never could have pursued his dream. In 1937, shortly after the death of his second wife, he underwent surgery for stomach cancer. The operation, which removed most of his stomach, was successful, but for the rest of his relatively short life, he suffered from severe nutritional deficiencies and was often so ill he could not function. Nonetheless, in between his bouts of sickness, Hopkins insisted on returning to work. During the next eight pain-filled years, he would provide his most valuable service for the president, with Averell Harriman acting as one of his chief associates.
HOPKINS’S FRIENDSHIP with Harriman was an outgrowth of his longtime fondness for high living and associating with the rich and famous. From the time he arrived in New York as a young social worker, Hopkins, a native of Grinnell, Iowa, combined a devotion to the poor with a penchant for nightclubs, speakeasies, and racetracks. When he became a key figure in the New Deal two decades later, he cultivated—and was cultivated by—the relatively progressive members of New York’s business elite, as well as by its literary and artistic crowd. His weekends were often spent at Harriman’s forty-bedroom estate in the Hudson Valley or at the Long Island mansion of the famed newspaper editor Herbert Bayard Swope, where he would play croquet and poker with the likes of Bernard Baruch, William Paley, George S. Kaufman, and John Hay Whitney.
While hardly handsome, Hopkins was witty and charming when he wanted to be—attributes that he used to advantage in his relentless pursuit of beautiful women. “He was pleased and rather proud whenever the hostile press denounced him as a ‘playboy,’ ” the playwright Robert Sherwood wrote. “That made him feel glamorous.”
Hopkins and Harriman had been friends since 1933, but their relationship became considerably closer in late 1938, when Roosevelt decided to make Hopkins his secretary of commerce. Knowing that Hopkins was hardly a favorite with many U.S. business leaders, not to mention members of the Senate Commerce Committee, who would have to approve his nomination, Roosevelt asked Harriman to help him in the fight. The Union Pacific chairman persuaded the Business Advisory Council, which he headed at that point, to endorse Hopkins’s appointment and then solicited letters of recommendation from other prominent businessmen. The campaign was successful, and after Hopkins was confirmed, Harriman accompanied him to Des Moines, where, in his first major speech as secretary, he played down his record as a social reformer and promised to promote business recovery “with all the vigor and power at [my] command.” Harriman, a sour Harold Ickes would later write, “was always willing to scratch Harry Hopkins’
back, just as Hopkins was willing to scratch his.”
Hopkins’s tenure at the Commerce Department was cut short by his recurring illness. After being hospitalized for several months, he returned to Roosevelt’s service in November 1940, this time as the president’s chief wartime operative and the man in charge of overseeing the country’s industrial mobilization and rearmament. Working from a card table in his White House bedroom, Hopkins, who had no official title or job, was relentless in prodding, chastising, and encouraging the captains of business and industry to achieve production goals most believed were impossible.
In January 1941, with the Lend-Lease bill working its way through Congress, FDR gave his top aide a new assignment: to travel to London to determine Britain’s defense needs and, even more important, to judge for himself whether the country could hold out against Germany. As he prepared for his mission, Hopkins made clear he planned to resist the famed persuasive talents of Winston Churchill, whose ego, he thought, was considerably greater than his ability. “I suppose Churchill is convinced that he’s the greatest man in the world!” he exclaimed to a friend. “Harry,” the friend replied, “if you’re going to London with that chip on your shoulder, like a damned little small-town chauvinist, you may as well cancel your passage right now.”
In London, Churchill responded with a puzzled “Who?” when told that a certain Harry Hopkins was coming to see him on behalf of the president. His advisers soon set him straight, telling him how close Hopkins was to Roosevelt and how important it was to impress him. Hopkins had been informed, they said, that Churchill was anti-Roosevelt. It was vital that the prime minister convince him that this wasn’t so and that he held FDR in the highest possible regard.
Churchill did that—and more. He ordered a special train to transport Hopkins to London from the airfield where he landed and then entertained him at Downing Street and Chequers, the prime minister’s official country residence in Buckinghamshire. His ministers were told to provide the American with any information he requested. Escorting Hopkins around his battered country, the prime minister introduced him to everyone they met as “the personal representative of the President of the United States.”
In the five weeks Hopkins spent in Britain, he and the British leader became close friends. While the relationship between Churchill and Roosevelt has received considerably more attention from historians, the friendship between Hopkins and Churchill was, in fact, much warmer and more personal. Despite their exceedingly different backgrounds, Churchill recognized a kindred spirit in FDR’s envoy. Brash and combative himself, he appreciated Hopkins’s irreverence, humor-laced cynicism, and straightforward way of speaking. He was also greatly moved by the American’s dedication and determination, not to mention his willingness to subject himself to the damp chill of an English winter when he was so obviously ill, keeping himself alive with the personal pharmacy of pills that he carried with him everywhere. In his memoirs, Churchill referred to Hopkins as “that extraordinary man … a crumbling lighthouse from which there shone the beams that led great fleets to harbour.”
For his part, Hopkins became an unabashed admirer of the prime minister well before his visit was over. Churchill was neither anti-Roosevelt nor anti-America, he wrote FDR. He added: “Churchill is the gov’t in every sense of the word…. I cannot emphasize too strongly that he is the one and only person over here with whom you need to have a full meeting of minds.”
Despite his wisecracking and outward cynicism, Hopkins was somewhat awestruck by his experience in Britain—weekends at Chequers and Ronald Tree’s Ditchley, his own valet at Claridge’s, luncheon with the king and queen at Buckingham Palace. Here he was, a hick from Iowa, the son of a harness maker no less, now serving as the confidant of a British prime minister and the lunch partner of the queen of England. That same vague feeling of insecurity surfaced again, as he noted to columnist Marquis Childs, when he met Stalin later in the war. “It seemed to me a rather tragic and … poignant commentary on the man and … on America,” Childs recalled. “In a sense it was a commentary on this fantastic role of responsibility and leadership into which we were precipitated, and our unreadiness for it, because at that moment you should not have been thinking about how you were the son of a harness maker.”
Hopkins’s emotional involvement with Churchill and Britain grew stronger as his visit progressed—an involvement reflected in his impromptu remarks at a dinner in his honor in Scotland in mid-January 1941. “I suppose you wish to know what I am going to say to President Roosevelt on my return,” he said to the guests seated before him. Then, turning to Churchill, he quoted a verse from the Bible’s Book of Ruth: “Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.” Pausing, he added quietly: “Even to the end.” Churchill’s eyes welled with tears. Hopkins’s heartfelt remarks gave him and his countrymen a new surge of hope that America was on the brink of ending her neutrality—a hope that, unfortunately for them, did not accord with reality.
When he returned to the United States, Hopkins was “a completely changed man,” with a “fuller sense of urgency,” in the words of the columnists Joseph Alsop and Robert Kintner. Before leaving for home in mid-February, he cabled Roosevelt: “This island needs our help now, Mr. President, with everything we can give them … our decisive action now can mean the difference between defeat and victory in this country.”
When his flying boat touched down in New York harbor in February 1941, he was met on the dock by Gil Winant, whose appointment as ambassador had just been announced, and also by Averell Harriman. Shortly before Hopkins left for London, Harriman had begged to be allowed to go along. “Let me carry your bag, Harry,” he pleaded. “I’ve met Churchill several times and I know London intimately.” Hopkins turned him down but hinted that the president “might have something” for him later. Determined not to let the opportunity escape, Harriman made sure he was in the welcoming committee on Hopkins’s arrival.
The day after Hopkins returned to Washington, he convinced Roosevelt that he needed someone in London to coordinate Lend-Lease aid. That person, he said, was Averell Harriman. With some hesitation, the president agreed, and the following day, summoned Harriman to the White House.
WHEN THE SENATE finally (and grudgingly) passed the Lend-Lease bill on March 8, FDR told reporters: “Here in Washington, we are thinking in terms of speed, and speed now. And I hope that that watchword—’speed, and speed now’—will find its way into every home in the nation.”
But, as Harriman discovered while preparing for his new assignment, Roosevelt’s statement had little basis in truth. Although Washington was struggling hard to come to life in early 1941, it still had not discovered the virtue of speed. For journalists who had been assigned to this languid, slow-paced city after covering Britain’s desperate struggle to survive, it seemed complacent and insular—“so orderly and sanitary after the rubble and stench of bombed-out London.”
James Reston of the New York Times, who, like Eric Sevareid, had been transferred from London to Washington in the fall of 1940, called his new posting “a pleasant place, if you lived in the ‘right’ part of town and didn’t read or think.” For his part, Sevareid considered Washington a “leafy, dreaming park” and “clean, well-hedged suburb to the nation,” isolated from reality and unable to grasp the significance of the chaos spreading over the globe. David Brinkley, who came to wartime Washington as a young reporter for a North Carolina newspaper, later referred to it as “a town and a government entirely unprepared to take on the global responsibilities suddenly thrust upon it.”
Stumbling along, trying to energize itself into becoming a major world capital, Washington was engaged in frantic improvisation. “It is difficult to exaggerate the bewilderment and frenzied uncertainty that prevailed in Washington in those days,” noted Robert Sherwood, who had switched from playwriting to writing speeches for Roosevelt in late 1940. Having promised Lend-Lease aid to Britain and now
immersed in preparing America for possible war, Washington was grappling with several urgent priorities, including the control of prices, allocation of raw materials, and the refitting of existing factories and construction of new ones for defense work.
In the view of many, the job of defense production and mobilization should have been assigned to a single government agency, headed by an official with the power to coerce obedience from private business and industry. Henry Stimson, Henry Morgenthau, and Bernard Baruch were among those who urged Roosevelt to appoint such a mobilization czar. But the president was having none of it. Loath as always to yield authority and power, he insisted on retaining administrative control. In early January 1941, he set up the Office of Production Management, the first in a series of agencies whose ostensible job it was to manage a wartime economy. But OPM would be given no real power: it could not force industries to convert to war work or ensure that raw materials were used for defense needs rather than the production of civilian goods. And, with a reviving economy, private industry was hardly eager to deny consumers the new cars and other items they were demanding—or to give up the profits that resulted. As a result, OPM limped along, doing the best it could but unable to compel the urgent, all-out industrial effort the president had called for.