FDR had asked Knox to join him in the past. Each time Knox declined, explaining that unless war became imminent, he could not in good conscience join a Democratic administration.
Hitler’s panzer lunge over the Meuse River changed everything. On June 19, as Congress was passing a massive bill funding a two-ocean navy, Roosevelt rang up Knox and offered him his choice of the War or Navy Department. Henry Stimson, he said, would get whichever department Knox didn’t choose.
Knowing Stimson had been head of the War Department under Taft, Knox told Roosevelt he didn’t know enough about the Army, so FDR gave him the job of navy secretary.8
It didn’t matter to Roosevelt that Knox knew even less about the Navy than he did the Army, for Roosevelt intended to act as his own naval secretary. As commander-in-chief, Roosevelt would set naval policy himself; he wanted a functionary, not a policy maker. A superb coastal yachtsman, FDR often reminisced about his years as Woodrow Wilson’s assistant secretary of the navy. He intended to direct naval affairs regardless of who his nominal secretary might be.9
• • •
That same day, White House telephone operator Louise Hachmeister tracked down Henry Stimson at his apartment in New York’s Pierre Hotel. Moments later, FDR’s voice came on the line. He wanted to know if Stimson would accept the job of secretary of war.
Stimson agreed, on condition that he would not be required to participate in partisan politics. Roosevelt couldn’t have been happier to make this concession, and he sent the names of Knox and Stimson to the Senate for approval just as Republicans began gathering in Philadelphia for their 1940 national convention.10
The twin appointments stung GOP delegates and party faithful. The New York Times reported that Stimson and Knox were “virtually read out of the Republican party,” and angry Republican senators prepared for a gritty confirmation battle. Time commented, “If there was an opportunity to debate calmly the merits of Republicans Stimson and Knox in a Democratic Cabinet, the opportunity disappeared in the feverish political atmosphere of Convention Week. Senatorial debate grew bitter [and] reached a new low in wild charges and venomous insinuations, punctuated with cries of warmongering from isolationists, and virtual accusations of treason.”11
But isolationist cries were weakening in the heartland. Churchill’s defiant speeches from London, FDR’s “stab in the back” address, and the Nazi onslaught in Europe had swung a narrow margin of public support to Britain’s side. In July, Elmo Roper’s opinion pollsters found that more than two-thirds of the public favored some kind of aid to Britain. Mainstream newspaper editors came out sympathetically for aid to the democracies, and a whimsical cartoonist signing his name “Dr. Seuss” began lampooning Republican isolationists by drawing their party symbol as an amusing half-elephant/half-ostrich creature, burying its head in the sand. He called his animal a “GOPstrich.”12
Aftershocks from this seismic shift among voters rattled Capitol Hill offices. Despite partisan rancor and the opposition of men like Democratic Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, another isolationist firebrand, Stimson’s appointment passed on July 9 by a vote of fifty-six to twenty-eight. Knox was confirmed the next day by an even greater margin.
Roosevelt’s cabinet now included two new war chiefs carrying their second Roosevelt banner—Franklin’s, not Teddy’s.13
• • •
The new secretary of war found an indispensable ally in the Army’s chief of staff. Stimson had first met Marshall in France during the Great War, where the two men rode horseback together and shared a mess. Even then, Marshall stood out in Stimson’s estimation as a sharp mind and first-rate soldier, and when President Coolidge sent Stimson to the Philippines as governor-general, Stimson unsuccessfully tried to persuade Marshall to join him as his military aide.14
At the end of June, Stimson invited Marshall to visit him at Highhold, and on the twenty-seventh Marshall flew to Long Island’s Mitchell Field and took the twenty-minute drive to Highhold. There he had dinner with Henry and Mabel Stimson, and the two men talked genially until midnight.
He breakfasted early and flew back to Washington, reassured that he and the new secretary would forge a good working relationship. Marshall enjoyed his brief stay. “They are both delightful people and their farm is charming,” he told his wife, Katherine.15
The two men were well matched. Neither harbored ambitions to move into the White House. Stimson trusted Marshall to handle the Army’s affairs with Congress, the president, the press, and the British, while Marshall deferred to Stimson on administrative matters. Whenever FDR cut Stimson out of the chain of communication, Marshall briefed him on what the president was doing. Their adjacent offices in the Munitions Building were connected by a door, and that door was, at least figuratively, always open.16
On workdays Stimson, like Marshall, was an “early to bed, early to rise” man. He would awaken at five or six in the morning, dictate his diary entries for the previous day, then leave for work by eight. He threw himself into the department’s workload with the fierce intensity he gave his law firm clients, and like Marshall, he disliked tackling complex problems after four or five in the afternoon. He relied on a talented team of lieutenants that included Jack McCloy, another former Wall Street lawyer, and Robert Patterson, who wore the belt of a German soldier he had killed in the First World War.*
Stimson’s nights were quiet. He avoided the Washington dinner party circuit and dined at home with Mabel and a few guests, mostly old upper-crust friends like the Pattons or the Frankfurters. He might play a round of lawn tennis with friends or colleagues, but usually he and Mabel spent their evenings reading together or listening to the radio. On weekends they escaped Washington’s humidity by flying to Highhold, and among the faux rustic charms of his estate, he could unwind, visit old friends, play tennis and ride horses.17
•
For three centuries, the British Empire had stretched across the world’s oceans. Unlike the great land empires of Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon, Britannia’s rule depended on mastery of a line of choke points strung like pearls on a necklace. In 1940, the most important of these pearls were the West Indies, Gibraltar, Cairo, India, Singapore, and Hong Kong. As long as each of these redoubts held, the United Kingdom could shift its resources to defend any threatened portion of her empire.
Yet even with these colonies, Britain could not fight a world war without the resources of North America. The empire depended on Canada and the United States for raw materials to feed its factories, and for fruits and grains to feed its workers. The Atlantic shipping lanes carried that food and material; should Hitler slice those arteries, the blood spilling onto the Atlantic floor would ensure England’s death.
The Royal Navy’s best weapon against the U-boat menace was the humble destroyer, the tough rat terriers built to corner and sink submarines. But when Stimson and Knox took the oath of office, half of Britain’s prewar destroyer fleet had been sunk or damaged. By mid-June, the Royal Navy had only sixty-eight destroyers fit for combat.18
Finding little opposition in the mid-Atlantic, Hitler’s gray wolves unleashed hell. U-boats and bombers based in occupied France, Norway, and the Low Countries sank 155 merchant ships between April and June 1940, faster than Britain could replace its losses.19
The United Kingdom could not survive at this pace. In his May letter to Roosevelt, Churchill had requested fifty destroyers. He urged his request again in June and July with growing urgency. He assured Roosevelt the Royal Navy could make do even with the old four-stack destroyers of World War I vintage. But he needed those warships, and he needed them now.
On naval matters, Roosevelt and Churchill spoke the same language. FDR had been assistant navy secretary at the time Churchill had been First Lord of the Admiralty, the equivalent of the U.S. naval secretary. Roosevelt wanted to throw a lifeline to his drowning ally, but because the sale of fighting ships would pose insurmountable poli
tical problems, he felt he had to decline. Warships guarded America’s shores and produced a feeling of safety that howitzers and fighter planes did not. Senator Walsh, an isolationist, was chairman of the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs, and FDR could not afford to antagonize the isolationist wing at such a delicate time.
Yet time was a luxury that Britain could no longer afford. On July 31, an anxious Churchill pleaded anew for the destroyers, concluding, “Mr. President, with great respect I must tell you that in the long history of the world, this is a thing to do now.”20
Roosevelt shut himself in the balmy White House, shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, and struggled to find a way to send Churchill those destroyers.* He told his cabinet, “The survival of the British Isles under German attack might very possibly depend on their getting these destroyers.”21
But neither he nor his cabinet could figure out how to do it.
The answer, and obstacle, was Admiral Harold L. Stark, chief of naval operations and Marshall’s opposite number in the Navy. Affable and scholarly, with round glasses anchored below a shock of thick white hair, Stark was the Navy’s top strategic thinker and a man with the credentials to persuade Congress to go along.
He was also eager to please his commander-in-chief. But as he sat in his spacious office at Main Navy, the Navy’s Washington command post, he shook his head. The entire fleet had only 230 destroyers from Manila to the Virgin Islands. How could the Navy Department sell a fifth of its destroyer fleet without crippling America’s thinly spread defense?
Stark’s objection was no abstract policy problem; to him, it was personal. Under a statute authored by Senator Walsh, Stark was required to certify in writing that any ships sold to a foreign government were “not essential to the defense of the United States.” Five months earlier, when Stark asked Congress to put the old four-stacks back into commission, he had testified that those destroyers were essential to the nation’s defense.
Stark felt he had been placed in a terrible position of having to break his word to Congress, or embarrass the president by refusing to go along. Like a martyr resigned to the stake, Stark suggested he should be relieved of command, rather than be forced to recant his congressional testimony.22
Roosevelt brought the question to his cabinet on August 2, and there Frank Knox unwrapped an idea that had been batted around some months earlier: Instead of selling the destroyers for cash, why not swap them for British naval bases in the Caribbean and Canada?
Cabinet members supported the concept, but most assumed congressional approval would be necessary. That meant pulling along members of the Republican minority in an election year—an impossible task. Through Stimson, Roosevelt quietly reached out to pro-British Republicans for support, but even Stimson could make no headway.23
Roosevelt decided the stakes were too high to allow the fate of Britain to rest in the hands of Congress and a conscience-stricken admiral. He asked Dean Acheson, a Washington lawyer and former treasury undersecretary, to look through the laws and opine whether he needed congressional approval for a ships-for-bases trade. Acheson prepared a memorandum concluding that the commander-in-chief could authorize the transfer if the new bases would, on balance, increase the nation’s security. If the bases were more valuable than the destroyers, Admiral Stark could honestly certify that the ships were unnecessary to national defense.24
Two days later, Roosevelt convened a luncheon at the White House with Stimson, Knox, Morgenthau, and Undersecretary Welles. He told his lieutenants—two conservative Republicans and two liberal Democrats—that he would accept Acheson’s advice and make the deal with Churchill. He would inform Congress after the bargain was struck. He would catch hell from both sides of the aisle, probably, but it had to be done.25
Roosevelt’s patchwork of legalisms would hardly have convinced a neutral jurist. But FDR saw the issue in simpler terms: As commander-in-chief of the armed forces—and head of state—he could send warships wherever they would do the country the most good. In 1907, the elder Roosevelt had done the same thing when he sent the Great White Fleet around the world, and FDR felt he had a better case for action than Cousin Theodore had.26
To Roosevelt, legal technicalities were fine so long as they didn’t conflict with either the common defense or the general welfare—the really important things that follow the Constitution’s opener, “We the People.” His attorney general, Robert Jackson, later remarked, “The President had a tendency to think in terms of right and wrong, instead of terms of legal and illegal. Because he thought that his motives were always good for the things that he wanted to do, he found difficulty in thinking that there could be legal limitations on them.”27
Admiral Stark knew that serving Roosevelt sometimes required bending those legal limitations. Some years earlier, when FDR had ordered him to build a set of bases in South America under dubious authority, Stark remarked that he would do it, but “I’ll be breaking all the laws.”
“That’s all right, Betty,” Roosevelt joked, using Stark’s Naval Academy nickname. “We’ll go to jail together.”28
Roosevelt offered Churchill fifty destroyers in return for ninety-nine-year leases on seven British possessions off the Canadian coast and in the Caribbean Sea. It was a stiff price to pay, but a desperate Churchill accepted. The details would be worked out between FDR and Prime Minister Mackenzie King of Canada.29
Roosevelt took Stimson with him to meet with the Canadian PM in upstate New York, near where the First U.S. Army was holding maneuvers. Because the secretary of the navy was not invited and the secretary of state was on vacation, Roosevelt negotiated the deal through his secretary of war. “It is a funny situation,” Stimson told his diary two days later. “For the last few days I have been acting more as Secretary of State than Secretary of War.” 30
FDR didn’t care about procedural formalities. He announced the deal in a press conference two weeks later. The destroyers-for-bases agreement, he claimed, was “probably the most important thing that has come for American defense since the Louisiana Purchase.” When asked if the Senate had to ratify his decision, a beaming president said the deal “is all over. It is done.”31
With a wave of Roosevelt’s cigarette holder, Churchill had his destroyers. But the decision, Stimson knew, courted risk. Where, he wondered, would that leave America?
FIVE
THE NEW DEAL WAR
FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT LOVED TREES. HE TOOK PRIDE IN SELECTING THE varieties his workers planted around Hyde Park. He talked trees with his neighbors, and in his travels up and down the eastern United States he studied the maples, pines, sassafras, poplars, magnolias, and oaks that filled the landscape from Campobello to Warm Springs.
He understood, better than any other American, how the growing war effort mimicked those arboreal sentinels. The roots of the nation’s might lay buried in its farms, mines, factories, and homes. The thick trunk—Congress, the White House, the War and Navy Departments, and the hundred-odd civilian agencies that ran the mobilization effort—channeled resources drawn from those roots. From that unruly trunk flowed arms, ammunition, food, supplies, and men into the ground, air, and sea forces, logistical departments, civil affairs, and diplomatic and intelligence services.
Roosevelt, his budget director once observed, “was the only one who really understood the meaning of total war.” He appreciated, better than most of his military advisers, how a fighter plane sent to China affected Japan’s threat to Russia, Russia’s war with Germany, and Germany’s campaign against Britain. As Roosevelt told a group of reporters, “There is just one front, which includes at home as well as abroad. It is all part of the picture of trying to win the war.”1
He liked to say, “If war does come, we will make it a New Deal war.” Roosevelt had already organized masses of men to fight unemployment and inflation. If the Great Depression could be overcome by American determination and competent leadership, that same energy, he belie
ved, could vanquish the tyrants of Europe.2
• • •
Yet America’s power still lay dormant. In 1940, its arms production was a quarter of Germany’s. Steel plants were producing a third of their capacity. Shipyards took years to produce warships, and raw materials like tin, bauxite, and rubber were in dangerously short supply. American industry held immense potential, but it would be years before speeches, laws, and government money could turn that potential into weapons fired by trained soldiers.3
FDR knew the New Deal was a four-letter word to most men running the war industries. In his 1936 campaign, he denounced business magnates as “economic royalists,” a term that raised vague images of guillotines and Madame Defarge. The National Labor Relations Act alone—to say nothing of the minimum wage law, securities regulations, or taxes funding the National Recovery Act—guaranteed that the name “Roosevelt” would be cursed in the dark-paneled clubs where barons gathered to blow off steam and plot their defense against New Deal revolutionaries.4
Yet capitalism, like democracy, spreads power among many players, and some of those players agreed with Roosevelt’s foreign policy. To bring these economic royalists into his fold, FDR established a seven-member board, christened the National Defense Advisory Commission (NDAC), to which he appointed William Knudsen of General Motors, Edward Stettinius of U.S. Steel, and Ralph Budd, chairman of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railway.5
It was an inspired decision. Knudsen, Stettinius, and Budd, natural leaders of the anti-Roosevelt clique, had spent eight years as outcasts in a New Deal–dominated Washington. Finding themselves welcomed back as patriots, they began bringing over fellow titans of industry.
As with most of Roosevelt’s decisions, a move in one direction was balanced by a move in the opposite. He ensured the left controlled the NDAC by giving progressives four of the board’s seven votes. He appointed union leader Sidney Hillman, the Trotsky of organized labor, to give workers a voice on the committee. Leon Henderson, a New Deal zealot, was appointed to handle prices. University of North Carolina Dean Harriett Elliott would advocate for consumers, and Federal Reserve Board member Chester Davis would provide input on farm production. Most importantly, the board reported to the president, ensuring that if any serious threat to New Deal progressivism arose, the New Deal would win.
American Warlords Page 6