Upstairs at the Roosevelts'

by Roosevelt, Curtis;

  An invasion of the United Kingdom was thought to be next on Hitler’s list of conquests. With the British army having left all their equipment on the beaches of Dunkirk, Britain seemed an easy prize of war. To listen to Prime Minister Churchill’s stirring speeches mobilizing his country’s people was exciting for me. At the same time, my mother was reporting that my grandfather was deeply frustrated over being blocked from sending aid to Britain due to the Neutrality Acts passed by Congress.

  His hands were tied. He saw Britain as America’s first line of defense. It wasn’t just the isolationists in Congress stopping him; it was obvious from the polls that the American public was in agreement. With an ocean on either side of us, we felt a false security.

  Although a young boy during this prewar period, I was better informed than most of the adults that crossed my path. Recognizing my keen interest, my mother was good at passing on what she learned in her conversations with my grandfather. I began collecting more books about the navies engaged in the conflict. My grandfather had already given me three books that I pored over, including the 1940 edition of Jane’s Fighting Ships.

  By 1943 my stepfather was assigned overseas. He had thought—wrongly, as it turned out—that FDR would make him one of his military aides. Though FDR’s four sons, my uncles, were in the armed forces, none were made presidential aides during the war, and neither was my stepfather. Instead, he was sidelined with an assignment to “military government.”

  Because of travel restrictions, my sister and I stayed on the West Coast until the summer of 1943. We then crossed the country to the White House to join our mother and little brother there. It was indeed a homecoming for me. I hadn’t lived there since 1937.

  Compared to my experience of living in the White House when I was a child, I found it a completely different place as a teenager in 1943. At the center of the changed atmosphere was my grandfather. He was now completely involved with his role as commander in chief of the armed forces. This was his priority and it occupied him totally. For example, I could not help but notice how my grandmother had a difficult time engaging him in domestic issues, in spite of her introducing them at the dinner table—the very same subjects that in previous years would have been at the center of FDR’s attention.

  He now spent longer hours in his office and often retreated after supper to his study on the White House second floor for further work, or perhaps for private meetings. His regular morning briefing with his personal staff was maintained, enabling him to keep abreast of a wide range of issues.

  As Missy, FDR’s longtime secretary, was soon unable to continue her duties due to a debilitating stroke, my mother stepped in to do some of the confidential chores that otherwise would have been handled by Missy. Not an official staff member, my mother worked—unpaid—in her spacious bed–sitting room, just down the hall from FDR’s bedroom. Her desk was a card table with a pair of telephones on it. Whenever I was home from my boarding school I spent many hours sitting there, absorbed by the goings-on.

  Regularly I read the newspapers and magazines delivered to her and, even more enlightening, I listened avidly to the dinner table conversations. Guests might be cabinet members, Supreme Court justices, or government officials. The key to the inclusion of some and the exclusion of others was their ability to be amusing and entertaining. Meals were FDR’s time for relaxation.

  My grandmother often encroached upon this leisure time of his by including her own guests at the dinner table. Once, when her close friends Sgt. Joe Lash and his wife, Trude, were there at supper, she announced, “Franklin, Joe has observations about his time in the Pacific War theater [he had just returned to the States], which I think you would find interesting.” FDR immediately turned to Joe who, obviously uncomfortable, began to tell his story. We all listened attentively.

  In those years I learned to keep my mouth shut about what I was hearing. I shared nothing with my schoolmates. For example, I knew well in advance about the date for D-Day, the Allied invasion of Normandy. How could I not enjoy being on the “inside,” especially with military leaders arriving regularly to see their commander in chief?

  To my great pleasure I was once asked by my grandfather to join him and Admiral Leahy, his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at lunch. We ate from the edge of FDR’s desk. Leahy had looked a bit startled as I came into the Oval Office to join them, but my grandfather reassured him by saying I was a great navy buff, and with a naval career in mind. I pulled my chair up to the desk and listened as the two men went on with their review of events, Leahy was rather stiff and colorless but straightforward, while FDR was serious and probing. I was not only “seen but not heard,” I was probably not even seen. I focused on my chicken sandwich and a bit of salad. Dessert was ice cream—in my honor—my grandfather explained, as normally he skipped having it. At the end of the meal, my grandfather presented me a small ship model from among the many items on his desktop. It was the Brazilian battleship Minas Gerais, which I still have on my own desk some seventy years later.

  Just before I returned to boarding school I again had an exclusive lunch with my grandfather, this time on the lawn beside the West Wing. His guest was his running mate in the 1944 presidential election, the senator from Missouri, Harry S. Truman. Again it was just the three of us. Over the usual chicken sandwiches, my grandfather reviewed the war’s progress and particularly his problems with Winston Churchill over planning for the postwar era. Right after dessert my grandfather dismissed me saying he had a confidential matter to discuss with Senator Truman. My guess is that he informed his potential vice president about the Manhattan Project, in which the United States was developing the atomic bomb.

  It wasn’t until much later, when I read in more detail about FDR’s role as commander in chief, that I came to understand just how purposefully my grandfather was focused on running the war. Even though he only intervened with his service chiefs when political implications were involved—or when they were at loggerheads—he nevertheless kept himself extremely well-informed. For example, late in 1943, dissatisfied with the summaries of the intelligence reports he regularly received, he demanded to begin seeing the complete data that came into the Army Signal Corps and from Navy Intelligence. In the evenings, after supper, I would observe him retreat to his study to review this daily pile of documents. He commented to my grandmother that “they”—Navy Intelligence and Army Signal Corps personnel—just didn’t see the geopolitical implications of the information they were providing. The usual briefing papers one reads about being given daily to the president were not sufficient for FDR.

  It was rare that my grandfather had appointments regarding the war outside of the Oval Office in the White House West Wing. It was there that he maintained his regular contact with Admiral Leahy, General Marshall, General Arnold, and Admiral King. Even before the Joint Chiefs were formed—before Pearl Harbor—it was in the Oval Office that he met with them.

  There is a basic misunderstanding about the role of the White House Map Room, which was established to give the president a visual picture of the movement of troops and ships. But that was not where FDR conducted his role as commander in chief. I found that George Elsey’s memoir, An Unexplained Life (originally published in 2005 and recently reissued) overstates the functions of the Map Room. Elsey had been a young naval intelligence officer during World War II. This view of it is reflected as well in the Roosevelt Library’s recent exhibits at Hyde Park. As far as I’m concerned, it is all off the mark.

  The reality is that the president would show off his Map Room to important guests like Winston Churchill, but it was never intended to duplicate the British prime minister’s underground den (within walking distance of 10 Downing Street) from which he directed British forces around the world. No one seems to remember that Churchill was also minister of defense as well as prime minister; having attended Sandhurst he considered himself a military person. Meanwhile Roosevelt absorbed a lot during his eight years tenure as assistant secretary of
the navy throughout World War I.

  Fairly regularly after visiting Dr. McIntire’s office to have his sinuses unblocked, FDR might briefly stop by the Map Room to have a look and chat with the officers on duty. (It was conveniently located right next to the doctor’s office.) It was more of a social visit; FDR enjoyed seeing things visually but he was already acquainted with what the Map Room displayed. Unlike Churchill, FDR left the day-to-day running of the war to General Marshall and Admiral King.

  An important function of the Map Room emerged when Roosevelt began his overseas rendezvous with Churchill, and later with Stalin—well known as the Big Three. There was a need for a single place for messages to be sent and received as the White House had previously relied on the Army’s Signal Corps and Naval Intelligence for communications when the president was traveling. With the president now regularly abroad, the Map Room took over this role as the center forwarding his messages.

  The White House corridors were a marvelous place to meet people, especially in wartime. Once, when walking down the second-floor hallway, I nodded hello to a U.S. Navy admiral, a full admiral. He was waiting outside FDR’s study. Then I recognized who it was: Admiral William “Bull” Halsey! So I stopped, pulled up a chair, and we chatted. Of course I informed him that my goal was to attend Annapolis, the U.S. Naval Academy. Perhaps he was surprised at the amount I knew about the ships in his Pacific fleet. We talked amicably until a voice from inside my grandfather’s study rang out, “Come in, Bill!”

  But it was the conversation at the cocktail hour and at the dinner table that gave me a real sense of how FDR personally exercised his responsibilities as commander in chief. It was there that I learned, for example, how FDR left it to the British military leaders to inform Mr. Churchill that his idea of invading Crete was inadvisable, hence FDR could avoid confronting Churchill directly. Maintaining a working relationship with the British leader was not always easy but the president worked at it, and succeeded, often letting some of Churchill’s outlandish ideas die of their own weight. FDR was always the politician.

  After World War II, there were historians who judged Franklin Roosevelt as showing moderate involvement in his role as commander in chief, perhaps in comparison to the ever active Churchill. Roosevelt was criticized for leaving the running of the war mainly to the military leaders. But in the last twenty years this view has radically changed. Two recent books illustrate this: No End Save Victory: How FDR Led the Nation into War by David Kaiser and The Mantle of Command: FDR at War, 1941–1942 by Nigel Hamilton. As one commentator on FDR, Alonzo L. Hamby, has written: he “displayed a grasp of grand strategy and tactical matters exceeding that of his military commanders.”

  An older work, but essential for understanding how FDR functioned, is by Eric Larrabee: Commander in Chief, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants and Their War. He writes: “The President generated around himself an atmosphere of calm; his office was well organized and ran smoothly. What a contrast to Winston Churchill’s where, as Harry Hopkins reported, the guns were continually blazing in his conversation.” Larrabee continues describing FDR’s leadership: “From this restraint and absence of bravado on the president’s part comes much of the misapprehension that he refrained from involving himself in the war’s direction. He marched to his own internal rhythms.”1 In my own words, my grandfather knew where he was coming from; he also knew where he was going.

  His death in April of 1945, only a few weeks before the end of the war in Europe, blocks our seeing how clearly he had been mindful of the postwar world that would soon emerge, the advent of the Cold War.

  There are good reasons for reviewing the approach of the American president and its contrast to that of British prime minister, who had to function in a fragile wartime coalition government. Churchill felt his War Office and Admiralty worked too slowly and were unimaginative. (Surely not as imaginative as he was!) Churchill considered himself an equal with his military chiefs. He had, after all, graduated from the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, the British equivalent of West Point, had served in the army, and had kept up with weaponry development since World War I. Then he had served as First Lord of the Admiralty. In the years prior to the British entering World War II, he was considered the Member of Parliament who knew the most about the armed forces.

  FDR had been assistant secretary of the navy during the eight years of President Wilson’s administration. He knew the navy well and once commented:

  The Treasury and the State Department put together are nothing as compared with the Navy. The admirals are really something to cope with—and I should know. To change anything in the Navy is like punching a feather bed. You punch it with your right and you punch it with your left until you are finally exhausted, and then you find the damn bed just as it was before you started punching.

  Unlike Churchill, however, FDR had not kept up with military affairs after World War I. From 1921 until he was elected governor of New York State in 1928, his preoccupation was trying to recover from polio. But my grandfather always had a worldview, one I knew well, having grown up with him and it. I believe that over the years his stamp collection had taught him more geopolitics than any college course. His backing of U.S. participation in the League of Nations in 1920, not a popular view among his fellow Americans, showed his political orientation. And he was a major force in the establishment of the United Nations.

  But more important was the difference in style and focus between the two Allied leaders. As minister of defense, a position he held in addition to being prime minister, Churchill intervened regularly with his military heads—read General Sir Alan Brooke’s memoirs to see how they felt about this— and was often at odds with them on strategy. Roosevelt could observe Churchill’s putting forward diverting strategies that might further British interests in a postwar world, but were not militarily sound. This he did because, along with his Foreign Office, Churchill was keen to reestablish the prewar British spheres of influence in the world.

  Unlike Great Britain, the United States had no central intelligence service until the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was formed during the latter part of the war, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) subsequently established. An effort had been made at the end of World War I to maintain our intelligence service but the new Republican secretary of state, Henry Stimson, rejected this idea. He reportedly said, “Gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail!” With such history behind him, my grandfather had to move cautiously to organize an American governmental intelligence organization.

  The lack of cooperation between the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy was a real burden for FDR. The British had established joint chiefs for their army, navy and air force in the early 1920s, but it was not until 1942 that the Americans did the equivalent. Up until then, the hostility among the services was a continual problem. Nevertheless, Roosevelt chose not to interfere with the daily running of the war, leaving that to his newly minted Joint Chiefs of Staff. Admiral Leahy was its chairman but he wisely let the leadership directives issue mainly from General Marshall. During the war the British and American respective Joint Chiefs of Staff worked together, although this wasn’t easy since the British had much more experience in functioning this way.

  Another major difference between FDR and Churchill was Roosevelt’s focus on the political problems in a war that was indeed global. FDR looked to the future, especially the postwar political and social consequences of World War II. For example, he saw the British Empire—and the French and Portuguese empires, too—as fading out in the postwar world, with Churchill holding instead quite firmly to his prewar colonial vision. For example, more than once during the war, Roosevelt strongly advised Churchill to promise India that it would be able to run its own affairs after the war, thereby gaining the support of the Indian people in the war effort. Churchill refused.

  When Churchill referred to himself as being “Roosevelt’s lieutenant” in 1943 he was, I think, not only referring to the fact that the United States
was now the major supplier of the Allies’ war materiel, but was also, I feel, recognizing the president’s visionary leadership. But that didn’t mean Churchill had changed his longstanding position of maintaining the British Empire. For him that was the raison d’être of the war.

  Larrabee further notes, that Roosevelt’s flexibility “should not be allowed to obscure that of constancy.” He continues, “The means might vary, the ends did not. For a man who made so much of keeping his options open, to take advantage of opportunities as they arose, and to sabotage any other decision-making machinery than his own, President Roosevelt was almost rigidly consistent in his overall geopolitical strategies for waging war.”2

  Referring to Churchill, Roosevelt, General Marshal, and Field Marshal Brooke, British historian Andrew Roberts writes in his recent book, Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941–1945: “Roosevelt was the ultimate arbiter between the competing strategies of Marshall, Churchill, and Brooke.” And Roberts concludes, “The man who most influenced the course of the war was the one who openly acknowledged that he knew the least about grand strategy: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”

  I have nothing to add to that!

  15

  Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill

  No, it’s not revisionist history. It is a choice. Was it or wasn’t it? Was it for real or not? Were Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill really attracted to each other as friends? Or was it simply a grand performance by two old political pros? It is, after all, important to choose between the two views, for it changes dramatically the background to how we see the unfolding of the events of World War II.