The issue was discussed on the highest levels in Washington and London (though not in Moscow; Roosevelt and Churchill rightly suspected that Stalin would not share the discoveries of Soviet laboratories). In the autumn of 1943 a special intelligence unit, to be landed in Normandy on D-Day, was formed under the code name Alsos, the Greek word for Groves. Its members, though dressed as soldiers, would wear on their battle dress a recognition badge bearing the alpha sign in white and a jagged line of red forked lightning. Their mission was to collect data about the extent of the Reich’s atomic research. Such documents would be translated and appraised on the spot by the team’s senior scientist, Dr. Samuel A. Goudsmit of Holland, a distinguished experimental physicist whose hobby was the study of new developments in criminal investigation.
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On Thursday, January 7, 1943, the President of the United States delivered his tenth annual State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress—“The Axis powers knew that they must win the war in 1942 or eventually lose everything,” he said; “I do not need to tell you that our enemies did not win the war in 1942”—and late Saturday evening, when the capital was quiet, a small cavalcade of limousines glided away from the south portico of the White House, turned right on Fifteenth Street, and parked at a little-known train siding near the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. The President’s train was waiting. Following him into the “Ferdinand Magellan,” his private car, were Harry Hopkins, Dr. Ross T. McIntire, and a glittering staff of generals and flag officers. In Miami a Pan American Clipper waited to fly the presidential party across the Atlantic, to Casablanca and Winston Churchill.
This was to be a year of Allied summit meetings. After Casablanca—where he sized up Eisenhower and announced his controversial demand for “unconditional surrender” from the enemy coalition—the commander in chief would confer in Quebec (Churchill again), Washington (Churchill and joint military staffs), Cairo (Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek), Hawaii (Nimitz and MacArthur), Teheran (Churchill and Stalin), and then back to Cairo (Churchill once more). During that year the torch of leadership passed from the British Prime Minister to the American President, and both men knew it. The shift had nothing to do with personalities. America was putting more men and materiel into the conflict, and American generals, notably Eisenhower, would be commanding combined forces in the great battles ahead.
Roosevelt’s performance as commander in chief was not without critics; nothing in his life was. Stalin believed FDR’s insistence on unconditional surrender would merely prolong the war by uniting the German people, and most historians agree with him. In the Pacific the President may have given MacArthur too strong a hand in what was essentially a war for sea power and was to be won by Admiral Nimitz. But no one doubted that Roosevelt, from 1943 on, was the commander of Allied armies and navies. As early as November 1942 William D. Hassett, a special assistant to Roosevelt, observed in his diary, “The President becomes more and more the central figure in the global war, the source of initiative and authority in action, and, of course, of responsibility.” Louis Johnson cabled from New Delhi, “The magic name over here is Roosevelt,” and most professional soldiers admired his leadership. Eisenhower wrote, “With some of Mr. Roosevelt’s political acts I could never possibly agree. But I knew him solely in his capacity as leader in a nation at war—and in that capacity he seemed to me to fulfill all that could possibly be expected of him.” Stimson said that “the Army never had a finer commander in chief,” and Major George Fielding Eliot wrote that FDR’s grasp of total and global strategy made him “one of the greatest war presidents.” American casualties were proportionately lighter than those of any other World War II power, yet on Navy Day 1944 the President could say that during the past year Americans in uniform had participated in twenty-seven landings on enemy beachheads and “every one of those twenty-seven D-days has been a triumphant success.”
He certainly didn’t look like a military genius. In his flannel shirt, old hat, and carelessly knotted bow tie—his invariable costume when visiting troops—he looked more like a hearty grandfather casually dressed for a weekend of trout fishing. But then, the troops he commanded were casual, too. The United States was not a European country; it was a different kind of nation, and no one represented it better than the American in the White House. David Lilienthal might write that FDR had “the handsomest fighting face in the world,” and General Eisenhower might be dazzled by the President’s gift for terrain, for grasping and remembering all the features of a countryside; to GIs and bluejackets, however, his greatest gift was his warmth, his concern, his appearance on the world scene as a shirt-sleeved President in a shirt-sleeved America. “As no other man in his time,” Jonathan Daniels wrote, “he could speak to the American confidence always underlying American fears. And because he believed in the dignity of the American, he was never afraid to ask or expect America’s courage.” Nothing is more illustrative of the Roosevelt touch, of his sensitivity to the needs of people, than his visit to a military hospital in Hawaii. He had come to talk to generals and admirals, to plan the great offensives which would bring Japan to its knees. But before he left, he asked to be wheeled through the ward for combat victims whose arms and legs had been amputated. He smiled and waved; he said nothing; his presence said everything. Here was a man who had lost the use of both legs. He knew their bitterness; he had shared it. Yet he had overcome it to become President, and there was no reason for them to despair of their prewar dreams.
Roosevelt was tired now, and he looked it. The White House press corps was convinced he didn’t want to run for President again in 1944, and he himself wrote Robert Hannegan, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, “All that is within me cries out to go back to my home on the Hudson River.” But there were pressures to stay in office, too. Like any President, he was thinking of history’s judgment. He had plans for postwar America; he was as committed to the United Nations as Wilson had been to the League of Nations. And then there were the letters: “Please President Roosevelt don’t let us down now in this world of sorrow and trouble,” one man wrote. “If we ever needed you it’s now. I believe within my heart God put you here in this world to be our guiding star.” There were petitions, one signed by over six thousand steelworkers: “We know you are weary—yet we cannot afford to permit you to step down.” And from the Third Reich came the voice of Douglas Chandler, a former Hearst man who had turned traitor to broadcast from Berlin under the name Paul Revere: “Get that man out of the house that was once white!”
Roosevelt was politician enough to be swayed, if ever so slightly, by such voices. He eyed Wendell Willkie wistfully. Both men saw things alike, and each secretly admired the other. The President called Sam Rosenman to his office and asked him to serve as an emissary to Willkie. “We ought to have two parties—one liberal and the other conservative,” FDR said. “As it is now, each party is split by dissenters.” He thought the parties should be realigned after the election, and asked Rosenman to sound out Willkie. “You tell the President that I’m ready to devote almost full time to this,” Willkie told Rosenman. In 1940 they might have worked something out—though it is hard to see how—but this was four years later. Willkie had just been discredited in the Wisconsin Republican primary, running behind Dewey, MacArthur, and Stassen. He too was tired; he was angry at the Republican Old Guard, and disillusioned with the political process. He was also sick; on October 8 he died after three heart attacks.
The passing of the Republicans’ most impressive presidential candidate since Hughes in 1916 brought out a vindictive streak in the GOP anti-Willkie Old Guard. “One-worlder” became their pet sneer. Spokesmen for the extreme right, silenced since Pearl Harbor, reappeared in 1944—Lawrence Dennis; Mrs. Elizabeth Dilling; and Joseph E. McWilliams, who alluded to FDR as the “Jew King.” Congressman Fish’s secretary was convicted of perjury for testifying that certain congressmen hadn’t used their franking privileges to mail Nazi propaganda as late as November 1941. Newspap
ers like the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News, Eleanor (“Cissy”) Patterson’s Washington Times-Herald, and the Hearst chain refused to keep military secrets—one Tribune correspondent actually gave away American knowledge of the Purple Code, but the Japanese missed his story—and the President thought the Justice Department should crack down on them. The government did have a strong sedition case, but Attorney General Biddle didn’t think jailing conservative publishers in an election year would sit well with the electorate, so he sidetracked Roosevelt. Still, the issue was very much on the President’s mind. Isolationists remained entrenched in the press and on Capitol Hill, and after victory they might drum up enough support in the country to sabotage American foreign policy. That threat appears to have been decisive. A week before the Democratic National Convention met the President wrote Hannegan:
If the people command me to continue in this office and in this war I have as little right to withdraw as a soldier has to leave his post in the line.
For myself I do not want to run. By next spring, I shall have been President and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces for twelve years….
Reluctantly, but as a good soldier, I repeat that I will accept and serve in this office, if I am so ordered by the Commander in Chief of us all—the sovereign people of the United States.
On July 20, while the convention was nominating him in Chicago, Roosevelt was perched on a towering California cliff, watching hinge-browed Higgins boats land ten thousand marines in an amphibious rehearsal. As he saw it, he was doing his job while the politicians went through their routine. But the quadrennial meeting of the Democrats has never been routine. United on Roosevelt’s candidacy, united on the platform, they were in turmoil over the Vice Presidency. Either the President had overlooked the matter or couldn’t make up his mind; the evidence suggests indecision. He thought Henry Wallace had done a poor job, neglecting his duties and needlessly bruising the congressional leadership, but he refused to disown him. Wallace believed he would stay on the ticket, and with reason; Roosevelt had written of him, in a letter to the convention chairman, “I like him and I respect him and he is my personal friend. For these reasons I personally would vote for his renomination if I were a delegate to the convention.”
Yet William O. Douglas and Alben Barkley were just as sure that FDR preferred them, and Jimmy Byrnes thought he already had the President’s endorsement. Harry Truman was equally certain that Byrnes had the inside track, and had agreed to nominate him. But with Roosevelt indifferent, the National Committee had been looking for the man who would hurt the President least. They decided upon Truman. He was a loyal Democrat, had gone down the line for administration bills on the Hill, came from a midwestern border state, and had led his committee investigating the war effort—a difficult task—with tact and skill. The President didn’t know him, scarcely knew his name. When Hannegan raised it, FDR murmured, “Yes… yes… I put him in charge of that war investigating committee, didn’t I?” Roosevelt had not had anything to do with it, of course, but Hannegan’s reasoning made political sense. Roosevelt agreed; it would be Truman.
“My God!” the Missouri senator said when told. He was flabbergasted. Truman hadn’t even considered running. Convinced only when he heard FDR’s voice over the phone—characteristically he asked friends, “Why the hell didn’t he tell me in the first place?”—he went off to square things with Byrnes. Even so, the convention took two ballots to nominate him. Then Roosevelt accepted the nomination in a radio address from the Marine Corps San Diego base while Americans were asking one another who Truman was. “The second Missouri compromise,” the New York Times called him. “A triumph of the bosses,” wrote James A. Hagerty. His opposite number, Republican vice presidential candidate John Bricker, said “Truman—that’s his name, isn’t it?” He scratched his head and murmured, “I never can remember that name.” In its July 31 issue Time patronizingly referred to Roosevelt’s running mate as “the gray little junior Senator from Missouri.”
Thomas E. Dewey, who led the Republican ticket, was a man of wisdom and courage, and there is every reason to believe he would have made an able President. But the Democratic challenge was too great. Prosperity had returned, the people still identified the GOP with Hoover, the armed forces were chalking up victories every day, and FDR was by now the most experienced politician in U.S. history. “There is nothing I love so much as a good fight,” he had once told the Times, and time had increased his enjoyment of it. His idea of fighting was to shadowbox with Old Guard Republicans and ignore his opponent. These tactics had crushed Hoover, Landon, and Willkie; and in a celebrated speech he displayed a new and even deadlier weapon—derision. Singling out a congressional trio celebrated for obstructionist tactics—Joe Martin, Bruce Barton, and Hamilton Fish—he defended his achievements and said everyone approved except “Martin… Barton… and Fish.” By the third time he used the phrase his audience had caught its cadence and was chanting with him, “Martin… Barton… and Fish.” It was funny, and it was powerful political medicine. Even more effectively, he seized upon a GOP whispering campaign that he had left his Scottie behind on the Aleutian Islands and dispatched a destroyer to bring the dog back. In a voice edged with sarcasm he told the Teamsters Union—and the country, by radio—that “These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog Fala…. I think I have a right to resent, to object to libelous statements about my dog.”
Dewey was burning. The President’s sardonic tone had reached him, and from then on, as someone remarked, the campaign was between “Roosevelt’s dog and Dewey’s goat.” It seemed that each Roosevelt campaign became rougher than the last, as though presidential politics were powered by some invisible but malevolent engine. This one turned increasingly bitter. One GOP target was Sidney Hillman, whose CIO Political Action Committee (PAC) was organizing to bring out the working-class vote for FDR. The story went round that when Truman’s name was suggested for the Democratic ticket, Roosevelt had said, “Clear it with Sidney.” CLEAR IT WITH SIDNEY, read billboards across the country, SIDNEY HILLMAN AND EARL BROWDER’S COMMUNISTS HAVE REGISTERED, HAVE YOU? In the last weeks of the campaign Dewey returned again and again to the issue of Communism. Within a decade such charges would make politicians tremble, but in 1944, with Russia a welcome ally against Hitler, their value was doubtful.
Fortune favored the Republicans when Lewis B. Hershey, still director of the draft and now a major general, remarked in public that enlisted men could be kept in the Army as cheaply as discharging them and creating an agency to take care of them. General Hershey’s name will reappear in this volume; his gaucheries were to enliven the administrations of other Presidents. In this instance, however, Roosevelt stopped him cold. Stimson was ordered to gag him and clarify the government’s plans for rapid demobilization. But a general with foot-in-mouth disease wasn’t to put Dewey in the White House anyhow. Neither were attacks on Fala or Sidney Hillman. Dewey needed an issue. Roosevelt was murdering him.
Speaking from his car on Chicago’s Soldier Field, with a hundred thousand people in the amphitheater and another hundred thousand standing outside, the President said this was the strangest campaign in his career. The Republicans were calling the Democratic party incompetent and praising the legislation it had passed. They were saying that “Quarrelsome, tired old men” had built the greatest Army and Navy in the history of the world, that none of this would be changed, and “therefore it is time for a change. They also say in effect,” said FDR, “‘Those inefficient and worn-out crackpots have really begun to lay the foundations of a lasting world peace. If you elect us, we will not change any of that, either. But,’ they whisper, ‘we’ll do it in such a way that we won’t lose the support even of Gerald Nye or Gerald Smith—we won’t lose the support of any isolationist campaign contributor. Why, we will be able to satisfy even the Chicago Tribune!’”
***
His adver
saries had one sound issue: Roosevelt’s health. Had this been debated responsibly, with all medical evidence before the electorate, the outcome might have been different. But this was impossible. No one really knew the true state of the President’s health, including the President and his physicians, and there was no way to raise the question in public without inviting charges of bad taste. The rabidly anti-Roosevelt press damned the torpedoes and went full speed ahead anyway. “Let’s not be squeamish…” began a front-page editorial in the New York Sun that October. “It is convention, not the Constitution, which forbids open comment on the possibility that a President may be succeeded by his Vice President. Six Presidents have died in office.” The New York Daily News mentioned in each edition, as a matter of policy, that Franklin D. Roosevelt was sixty-two years old and Thomas E. Dewey forty-two. Time said: “Franklin Roosevelt at sixty-two is an old man.”
The White House reply came from Dr. McIntire, and he bears heavy responsibility for it. Like most presidential physicians, he bore a military rank—vice admiral—and was a qualified ophthalmologist (eye doctor) and otolaryngologist (ear, nose and throat doctor). He was a wizard at clearing Roosevelt’s sinuses. To the press Dr. McIntire announced that his patient was:
…eight or nine pounds under his best weight. Frankly, I wish he’d put on a few pounds. He hasn’t been in the pool since before going to Quebec. But he’s going to start in the pool again now. He is a powerful swimmer and that gives him a good workout. The buoyancy of the water enables him to walk and he gets exercise there that he can’t get any other way. Nothing wrong organically with him at all. He’s perfectly O.K. He does a terrific day’s work. But he stands up under it amazingly. The stories that he is in bad health are understandable enough around election time, but they are not true.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 48