But many others saw the imminent dangers of Nazism, which, if unchecked, posed a hazard not just to Western civilization but to the world itself. They pointed out that the Atlantic Ocean could not protect America, as had been demonstrated in the War of 1812 when British troops burned Washington, D.C.—let alone in the new age of submarines and heavy bombers.
The division manifested itself in a political split between the isolationists, who wished to remain neutral, and the internationalists or interventionists, who wanted to intervene. In Congress, the split leaned toward the isolationists, as it did on the editorial pages of most newspapers. Interventionists seemed more prevalent on the East Coast and New England, while isolationists remained centered in the Midwest.
An organization called America First emerged from a group of smaller antiwar associations, whose leadership included many prominent Americans including Charles Lindbergh, still at the height of his fame for flying solo over the Atlantic Ocean. They argued that America should rearm but save its power for defense of the country rather than go to Europe to fight. From the time the war broke out in 1939 through the fall of France in 1940, America First gained strength. By the time of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, it was a million strong and blowing with the fury of a hurricane on America’s airwaves. Rallies drew tens of thousands and received front-page coverage. Roosevelt was so incensed by Lindbergh’s involvement that he publicly suggested that the great flier was an appeaser and a traitor, provoking Lindbergh to resign his colonel’s commission in the Army Air Corps.
Roosevelt had long since concluded that sooner or later America would have to go to war with Hitler, but was loath to say so publicly, especially as another presidential election loomed. Based on reports he received from the Army and Navy, Roosevelt was very much opposed to going to war sooner because he was told that the U.S. military was completely unprepared for a major war. Even as late as 1941 there were only six ready-for-combat divisions in the entire Army, while Hitler alone had more than a hundred.
In the distasteful Munich Agreement of September 1938 the old European Allies—principally Britain and France—had agreed to let Hitler move on Czechoslovakia. Roosevelt held a conference at the White House with his military leaders. William C. Bullitt, now the U.S. ambassador to France, paid a dramatic visit to the president with alarming stories of Germany’s overwhelming aviation might and the unpreparedness of the French. Roosevelt startled everyone in the room with a proposal to build ten thousand warplanes, an unheard-of number. It revealed a remarkable prescience that airpower would likely be the deciding factor in any future conflict.
Franklin Roosevelt was both an internationalist and an interventionist who had been carrying on a secret correspondence with Winston Churchill well before the war broke out. He then “lent” the British fifty older destroyers in exchange for ninety-nine-year leases on bases in the Caribbean and elsewhere, declaring that America was “the arsenal of democracy” (a phrase Harry Hopkins had picked up one day reading a newspaper).
Churchill desperately needed the destroyers to fight the growing U-boat menace around the British Isles. Knowing that the Republican Congress would “raise hell” over such a militarist venture, Roosevelt prepared the American people with a particularly Rooseveltian obfuscation: an offhand remark at a press conference that his administration was “holding conversations” with the British government about the acquisition of “land and air bases for the defense of the Western Hemisphere.” Churchill, for his part, told Parliament that the United States resembled the Mississippi River. “It just keeps rolling along,” he rejoiced. “Let it roll. Let it roll on—full flood, inexorable, irresistible, to broader lands and better days.”11
Still later, Roosevelt persuaded Congress to go along with a program termed Lend-Lease, which was in practice an American giveaway of war matériel, food, and oil to the Allies fighting Germany (and later Japan). By the time it was done, U.S. factories and refineries had produced half a trillion dollars for the war effort, including seven thousand tanks and more than eighteen thousand warplanes for the Soviet Union alone. Stalin publicly admitted that he would have lost the war without American help.
During this period there was one thing that Roosevelt could do, which he did do, that became one of the most important acts of his political career. He set science into motion in defense of the country. He created a science and technology agency devoted to military development and selected the noted MIT scientist Vannevar Bush to run it. Employing a near majority of American physicists, chemists, engineers, and other scientists, this agency leaped ahead in the implementation of such new developments as radar, sonar, radio, high-altitude flying, ballistics, and so on, soon outstripping the Germans and the Japanese in these critical areas.
In October 1939 the president received a letter from the distinguished physicist and mathematician Albert Einstein, who had escaped Nazi Germany and was teaching at Princeton. Einstein told Roosevelt he and other noted scientists believed that “splitting the atom” was theoretically possible—and, more ominously, that the Germans were well along in the process. “This new phenomenon,” Einstein informed the president, “would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable—though much less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed.”
Roosevelt, whose mind was doubtless on many things other than the theoretical exploration of the tiny atom, scrawled a note on Einstein’s letter: “We ought to do something about this.” He might just as easily have had his secretary dictate a thank-you note to the old math genius. Instead, the president’s note led to the Manhattan Project and the first atomic bomb.12
* * *
BY NOW PEOPLE BEGAN TO NOTICE the dark circles under the president’s eyes and craggy wrinkles along his nose to his chin. White House staff thought that he often looked weary. Yet for the most part, Roosevelt’s cheerful personality shined refreshingly in his distinctive laughter that carried melodically down the long corridors from his office. His day began with breakfast in bed at about 8 a.m., amid half a dozen newspapers and conferences with his press secretary and other functionaries. Then he read cables from overseas and conferred with the Department of State. Harry Hopkins might drop in, or his appointments secretary Edwin “Pa” Watson. Near 10 a.m. Arthur Prettyman, Roosevelt’s longtime valet with whom he’d grown close, would assist him into his small, armless wooden wheelchair and push him to the elevator to begin his workday in the Oval Office, which he’d had redesigned and rebuilt not long after his inauguration in 1933.
A look at his big desk in the sun-bright office with the sixteen-foot paned windows halfway round spoke volumes about the Rooseveltian character. It was cluttered with models of boats and cars, gifts of knives and pens, and every sort of doodad to delight the president’s eye during a visit by a boring guest.
During a typical day he might see a dozen or more visitors, with about twice that many letters to be written in between. There would be papers to sign and often conferences with domestic or overseas implications. Evenings were not free either. “Eleanor is having a lot of do-gooders for dinner, and you know what that means,” he would tell Grace Tully.13
The celebrated Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison observed that Roosevelt, during these fraught days, had a mind like a “political calculating machine.” Morison, who wrote the official history of the U.S. Navy in World War II, thought that the president’s brain contained “an intricate instrument in which the Gallup Poll, the strength of the armed services and the probability of England’s survival; the personalities of governors, senators and congressmen, Mussolini, Hitler, Churchill, Chiang Kai-shek and Tojo; the Irish, German, Italian and Jewish voters, the ‘Help the Allies’ people and the America Firsters” were combined with fine points on political maneuvering.14
* * *
WHILE ROOSEVELT SUPPLIED favorable belligerents, he cut off unfavorable ones, including the Japane
se. He had long since banned the sale to Japan of scrap metals (which the Japanese were turning into warships) as well as tin and aluminum and the like. One critical item without which the Japanese Imperial Navy could not function was American oil. All through 1941, Japanese ambassadors in Washington protested and pleaded with the U.S. Department of State. But when Roosevelt cut off Japan’s oil supply it produced the final crisis.
Desperate now for oil, the Japanese turned to the Dutch, who still governed the rich oil fields of Indonesia and Borneo. But the Dutch turned them away, prompting the Japanese government to take these places by force—even if it risked war with the United States. The U.S. Pacific Fleet, based at Pearl Harbor on Oahu, Hawaii, was the only thing standing in Japan’s way.
The emperor’s planners also decided that, while they were at it, they would seize the fertile rice fields of Southeast Asia—Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia—which were now in the hands of the French. From there they would embark on a “southward movement” to capture not only the oil-producing territories of the Netherlands but also the British prizes of Hong Kong, Singapore, and rubber-and-tin-rich Malaya and Burma. India could come later.
For years, the Japanese strategy for defeating the U.S. Navy was to create an “incident” that would somehow lure the American fleet across the Pacific. Cut off from its bases, the U.S. Navy could be harassed for thousands of miles by Japanese submarines and warplanes based on Japanese-mandated islands, until it would finally be destroyed by the Imperial Navy in Japanese home waters. Then a remarkable man with a novel and daring approach stepped into the picture.
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto was commander of the Japanese Combined Fleet. Dead set against any war with the United States, the fifty-seven-year-old had been a naval attaché in Washington and attended Harvard University. He had seen the automobile factories of Detroit and the oil fields of Texas and correctly perceived that “Japan lacks the natural power for a naval race with America.” He went on record to predict, “If I am told to fight regardless of consequence, I shall run wild for the first six months or a year—but I have utterly no confidence for the second or third years.”15
Yamamoto was a realist, and he knew he stood little chance of preventing the army militarists from marching to the riches below the equator. If that came to pass he did not wish to leave his flank open to the powerful American fleet in Hawaii. Against decades of Japanese strategic thinking, he proposed instead to lure the American fleet out to sea via an enormous aerial assault on Pearl Harbor.
In its first iteration, Yamamoto’s plan was conceived as a giant suicide attack, in which the valuable Japanese carriers would launch three hundred planes five hundred miles from Pearl Harbor and immediately head home—out of range of American response. These Japanese dive-bombers and torpedo planes would deploy their weapons on the U.S. ships and—their fate sealed because there would not be fuel enough to return to the carriers—the pilots would crash into the ocean in the ages-old Japanese tradition of seppuku, or honor suicide.16
Somehow, this solution didn’t sit right with the naval authorities, who realized the impact of losing three hundred trained pilots, who took almost as long to train as it took to build an aircraft carrier. Nor did it sit well with Yamamoto himself, who became willing to gamble (he had been an inveterate poker player during his time in the United States) that his carriers could catch the Americans napping.
* * *
IN THE SUMMER OF 1940, Hitler’s armies roared through Belgium and France. Roosevelt had convinced himself to run for an unprecedented third term. For several years, he had gone to great lengths preparing the nation for a vast conflict, eventually with the active support of Great Britain. Now a severe threat loomed from within—the isolationists—who could, if they gained power, reverse all of Roosevelt’s enormous programs to build up the military. Worse, they might withdraw support for the British, who were now fighting the Nazis alone.
Instead of actively running for the nomination, Roosevelt conceived a strategy in which he would instead be drafted into candidacy by a convention that understood his overwhelming influence over the foreign policy crisis. It worked, and Roosevelt would run for president with agriculture secretary Henry Wallace as his vice president. Democratic Party bosses were relieved, as they felt Roosevelt was the only Democratic candidate who could beat a Republican. But those closest to Roosevelt were less enthusiastic. His personal secretary Missy LeHand had become so concerned about the president’s health that she actually burst into tears when the results came in.
Unfortunately for the Republicans, their convention coincided with the fall of France to the Nazis. This possibly accounts for their selection of Wendell Willkie, an internationalist who four years earlier had been a Democrat, as the Republican presidential candidate in favor of the isolationist Robert Taft.
The election debates were exceedingly spirited, centered on whether the United States would go to war. Both Roosevelt and Willkie danced around the subject at first, although a week before the election Roosevelt famously told a national audience in a campaign speech broadcast from Boston that “while I am talking to you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance. I have said this before, and I shall say it again, and again, and again. Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”17
He went on to declare that the purpose of drafting and training millions of Americans was solely “to form a force so strong that, by its very existence, it will keep the threat of war far away from our shores.”18
Much has been made of these statements in retrospect. Some insisted that they were out-and-out lies told by the president, a charge that is probably not far from the truth.
Roosevelt was savvy enough to understand the consequences of letting England fall to Hitler, who could then conceivably gobble up the rest of Europe, Scandinavia, the Balkans, the Middle East, Africa, and most likely India. Once that was achieved, it would be practically impossible to defeat him, because there would be no overseas bases from which to operate.
Roosevelt could talk a good game of pledging that the U.S. military buildup was strictly for home defense. But he also realized all too well that Hitler was going to have to be beaten in Europe, and that Great Britain couldn’t do it alone. He knew that the American boys he spoke of, sooner or later, were going to have to carry the fight across the Atlantic, though he could not know or even guess at what shape the thing would finally take. Wars, especially one this size, are always subject to seismic changes.
Meantime, in anticipation of congressional opposition, Roosevelt pulled off one of the slickest political coups of modern times by snatching two of the staunchest Republicans for his new cabinet. They were the venerable Henry L. Stimson, former secretary of state under Herbert Hoover whom Roosevelt made secretary of war, and Frank Knox, former Republican vice presidential candidate and publisher of the Chicago Daily News, who became Roosevelt’s new secretary of the Navy. This gave at least the appearance of the administration becoming more bipartisan, a condition Roosevelt knew he would need in the coming months.
The Republicans were so infuriated at this presidential expropriation that in the summer of 1940 they expelled both men from the party at their convention. They might not have bothered, for all the good it did. Roosevelt won by a landslide in the November election.
His speech at his inauguration on January 20, 1941, was particularly acute. He spoke of the so-called death of democracy in the wake of the rise of the Axis powers and the Hitler-Stalin pact. “Democracy is not dying,” he told the throng from the steps of the U.S. Capitol, “and it is up to all of us to keep it alive.” Seated next to him were Eleanor and his eighty-six-year-old mother, Sara. Once again, watching from a discreet distance, escorted by two Secret Service agents, was Lucy Rutherfurd. Her seventy-eight-year-old husband was ill and wheelchair-bound; Lucy and the president had found the time to take secret rides together in the Virginia countryside near her home. She was almost fifty n
ow, and still quite striking. According to White House ushers, Roosevelt took his Scottish terrier Fala along with him on these intimate trips—possibly as a beard!19
* * *
IN SEPTEMBER, SARA Roosevelt died. She had been ailing, and when word came that the end might be near Franklin rushed to her bedside at Hyde Park and sat with her for a day, holding her hand until she was gone. The president was heartbroken, and the country mourned with him for this remarkable woman who had devoted her life to her son. In her daily newspaper column, Eleanor wrote that the expression “Grande Dame” was “truly applicable to her”—although later she told her daughter, Anna, that “I couldn’t feel any emotion or any real grief or sense of loss, and that seem[s] terrible after thirty-six years of close association.” Nevertheless, Eleanor dutifully made all of the funeral arrangements.20
Matters of state ground on, and the grieving Roosevelt now faced the task of winning congressional approval of his Lend-Lease program. The isolationist faction of the Republican Party fought him at every turn. They filibustered, made inflammatory statements to the newspapers, and stalled by tacking on a string of petty amendments. But in the end the act passed, much to Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s relief. In retrospect, this act might have won the war—for if Hitler had been able to beat the Russians in the summer and fall of 1941 there would in all likelihood have been no stopping him.
Next came another bombshell: the extension of the draft act. The legislation had been passed by a contentious Congress the previous year with a mind toward training young American men in the basics of military science—formations, drill, riflery, military protocol, and the like—so that if there was ever a need for their services they would have at least a head start. But with the evolving world situation, Roosevelt wanted to extend the one-year service provision to an unlimited time, as in a national emergency.
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