American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  The invaders had outfoxed the defenders as well as outgunned them. The Allies’ remarkable decoder, Ultra, provided Eisenhower with virtually the enemy’s whole order of battle. The German radar that survived shelling was foiled by devices simulating a different landing. The Führer was so certain that the first landings were a feint that he delayed the dispatch of two Panzer divisions. General Rommel, commanding the defenders, was not even at the front; he had left the day before the invasion to visit Hitler at Berchtesgaden. But it was sheer Allied power that made the overwhelming difference: a million and a half Americans, another million British and Canadians, tens of thousands of Norwegians, Danes, Frenchmen, Belgians, Czechs, Poles, and others; 900 warships, including twenty-six battleships and heavy cruisers, 163 air bases directly supporting the offensive—and 124,000 hospital beds ready for the wounded.

  Not that everything on D-Day went according to plan. Off Utah beach landing craft were swamped in the heavy seas, while other craft were swept by a strong current past their assigned beaches. Strong enemy defenses, surviving heavy bombardment, poured a withering fire on the invaders. For hours masses of men and equipment jammed the beaches. Radios and other equipment failed to function. But the Allies’ superior power allowed for this sort of thing; some spearheads would be blunted, but others would break through. By nightfall on D-Day, although none of the Allied landings had reached the designated target lines, almost continuous thickets of ships were disgorging war power along miles and miles of coast. That evening an enormously relieved President led his fellow Americans in prayer for “our sons, pride of our Nation,” and for the people at home who must wait out their long travail and the inevitable sorrow.

  During the next few weeks, while the Allies deepened their bridgehead, bested the Germans in stiff fighting, and joined with troops moving up from almost unopposed landings in southern France, American commanders in the Pacific continued to give Eisenhower and his lieutenants some lessons in the tactics of combined sea, air, and land power. To be sure, the imperatives of war differed there. Strategy in Europe called for mass, focus, unity of purpose, singleness of command—under Eisenhower. Strategy in the Pacific was prone to dispersion, opportunism, competing arms and commands—under an admiral and two generals. In the great arc stretching ten thousand miles from the Aleutians south and west and then north into Southeast Asia, Nimitz continued to command the northern and central Pacific, MacArthur the southwestern Pacific, and Joseph W. Stilwell the China-Burma-India theater.

  At times hostility within the Allied camp almost rivaled the feeling against the enemy. Stilwell was furious at Chiang, whom he privately called “Peanut,” for his unwillingness to come to grips with the enemy and the widespread corruption in his government and army. MacArthur was still incensed by the Navy’s plans for a straight thrust through the central Pacific. Such a direct attack, he instructed the joint Chiefs, would degenerate into a spate of separate seaborne attacks against powerful island defenses that could fend off carrier-based planes, and—he did not add— would leave him underemployed. Attacks from his theater, on the other hand, would be launched from bases closest to the targets and could choose the most lightly defended enemy positions for destruction.

  Evidently MacArthur did not realize that not only he but Nimitz too was perfecting the fine art of island-hopping. In November 1943 Nimitz’s naval, air, and ground forces began their long campaign west across the Pacific by capturing Tarawa and Makin in the Gilbert Islands. Three months later they seized Kwajalein and Eniwetok in the Marshalls. Four months after that they assaulted Saipan and then Guam in the Marianas. Challenged on their own territory, a big Japanese naval force—nine carriers, eighteen battleships and cruisers, 430 carrier-based aircraft—struck from the west with orders to annihilate the invaders. But it was the Americans who did the annihilating, in what became known as the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.” In two days the Japanese lost three flattops, including their flagship, and 400 aircraft, and a month later the Tojo government fell.

  MacArthur was not to be outdone, by either the Japanese or the American Navy. During early 1944 his sea, air, and land forces occupied the Admiralty Islands and landed in Dutch New Guinea. In October, MacArthur redeemed his promise—“I shall return”—when his forces invaded Leyte in the central Philippines. Again the Japanese fleet sortied out to battle, this time losing four carriers and eleven battleships and cruisers. By the end of 1944 Japanese sea power had been virtually destroyed, as the Allies closed in on their home islands from east and south.

  During the rise and fall of the fortunes of war Roosevelt could not ignore the requirements of political leadership both at home and abroad. He had two primary tasks: to persuade Americans of the need for and importance of coalition with Russia, and to counter Hitler’s global ideological appeal.

  The first task proved surprisingly easy, largely because American press and public opinion had swung strongly on their own initiative to the cause of the beleaguered Soviets. Popular support for treating Russia “as a full partner” rose sharply after Pearl Harbor. Time, which had featured “Man of the Year” Stalin as a bad guy in January 1940, presented him as a good guy on its front cover three years later. The Chicago Tribune was now calling communists not Satanic but merely “cockeyed.” Stalin was “killing the men who would kill Americans,” opined the New York Herald Tribune. Wendell Willkie and other eminent personalities led the demand for a second front. Quentin Reynolds defended Stalin’s purges as having eliminated Russia’s fifth column.

  It seemed to take an old communist to resist the new appeal. “ ‘Don’t say a word against Stalin or he won’t accept our tanks!’ ” Max Eastman wrote in Reader’s Digest, “seems to be the attitude of some of those who are now giving away the national treasure so avidly.”

  Roosevelt was more concerned with that master propagandist, Hitler. As a longtime promoter of the idea of freedom the President could hardly ignore the fact that the Führer was increasingly exploiting that very same symbol in his appeals to friend and foe. Having once narrowly defined freedom as essentially Lebensraum for good Germans, now Hitler was shifting its meaning to freedom for the masses to enjoy national and personal security and the good things of life. Freedom in America and Britain he derided as license for the plutocrats within democracies to exploit the people. A Nazi school for propagandists taught that Americans preached liberty and equality but had surrendered to lobbyists and the kept press. Roosevelt in turn repeatedly assailed Hitler’s freedom as license for the Nazis to dominate and enslave the human race.

  But what about freedom in America? The President tried to make the term relevant to real human problems and social conditions. “The essence of our struggle today is that man shall be free,” he had said a month after Pearl Harbor. “There can be no real freedom for the common man without enlightened social policies.” His Four Freedoms included freedom from want. He spelled out for Congress an economic bill of rights in January 1941; three years later he presented this “second Bill of Rights” in sharper detail: the right to good jobs and to adequate food and clothing and recreation; the right of every family to a decent home and adequate medical care; the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age and sickness and accident and unemployment; the right to a good education.

  “For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.”

  These words, in January 1944, could have applied as well to FDR’s electoral security, for they presented in essence his domestic program. Once again he would have to run for reelection. But this time, unlike 1940, he was not about to play political games; in July he simply notified the Democratic party that he was available. His handling of vice-presidential ambitions in 1944, however, was much like his crafty management of presidential rivals four years earlier. Vice President Henry Wallace was willing to go on, but he was unpopular with party professionals and conservatives. FDR gave Wallace a personal letter of support but on various other occasions th
rew enticements in the paths of James F. Byrnes, Hull, Barkley, Rayburn, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, and several others. In the end he let the party leaders make the choice—Senator Harry Truman of Missouri, a stalwart New Dealer who had also demonstrated his independence, especially in his leadership of the war investigation committee.

  It was the Republicans who seemed at first to face a donnybrook among a host of strong potential candidacies—until they began to fall like tenpins. Willkie was drubbed so badly in the Wisconsin primary, winning not a single delegate, that he immediately dropped out. MacArthur, who had privately expressed interest, issued a Sherman-like statement when one of his more ardent conservative boosters ineptly released a letter from the general hinting darkly of “the sinister drama of our present chaos and confusion” and of a New Deal “monarchy.” Taft deferred to his fellow Ohioan, Governor John Bricker. “And then there was one”—Tom Dewey of New York, a young veteran in Republican politics who now drove straight down the open road to the GOP nomination. Eternally plagued by his image—the only man who could strut sitting down, the groom on the wedding cake, the Boy Orator of the Platitude—Dewey had shown his drive and professional skill in winning the New York governorship, a political prize monopolized for two decades by the Democrats.

  Dewey’s main problem, it soon developed, was a paucity of issues. He could deplore Roosevelt’s handling of the war, but the summer of 1944 was a season of triumphs in Europe and the Pacific. He could condemn the Roosevelt Administration’s economic policies, but the war economy was prospering. He could denounce Roosevelt’s postwar plans, but only at the risk of antagonizing large sections of the nation’s leadership who were calling for bipartisan support for a bipartisan foreign policy. It was most infuriating of all that his adversary piously adhered to his role of Commander-in-Chief and refused to campaign—or when he campaigned, did so in the form of war inspection trips. Like half a dozen challengers before him, Dewey was finding FDR an elusive and tantalizing foe.

  While Dewey sought some opening, others went for the jugular. A whispering campaign about Roosevelt’s health had him dying of everything from cancer to syphilis—if he was not dead already. Rumors were floated that he had left his terrier Fala behind in the Aleutians and had sent a destroyer to retrieve it. A story was told that when Truman’s name had come up for the vice presidency FDR had said, “Clear it with Sidney.” Now Roosevelt was “clearing everything” with Hillman, and labor’s Political Action Committee was scheming to bring out a huge working-class vote. Billboards read: “SIDNEY HILLMAN AND BROWDER’S COMMUNISTS HAVE REGISTERED. HAVE YOU?”

  Now Roosevelt saw his opening and struck. At a Teamsters union dinner in Washington late in September he spoke mournfully, with a mock-serious expression, about the opposition:

  “These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks—on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family doesn’t resent attacks, but”—a pause, and then quickly—“Fala does resent them.” The room burst into cheers and laughter.

  Infuriated by Roosevelt’s ridicule, and with his own campaign still faltering, Dewey told an Oklahoma audience that he would have to depart from the high road in order to “keep the record straight.” The issue of communism that he had earlier left to others he now took up with a prosecutor’s fury. FDR, he said, was indeed “indispensable”—indispensable “to Sidney Hillman and the Political Action Committee, he’s indispensable to Earl Browder, the ex-convict and pardoned leader of the Communist Party.” The whole Democratic party, he charged, had been taken over by Browder and Hillman. Allowed to look at the draft of one of her husband’s speeches, Mrs. Dewey said sharply, “Bricker could have written it.” In this speech Dewey charged that Roosevelt had pardoned Browder in time to organize support for his campaign.

  This challenge Roosevelt could not dismiss with jokes. It came at a time when American opinion toward Russia appeared to be cooling. It was one thing for Americans to have sympathized with a beleaguered Soviet Union and to have asked, “If Russia falls, who next?” It was quite different to be asking when the Red Army was marching west, “If Russia wins, what next?” Once again the old-time foes of Soviet communism were becoming more vocal—the Hearst papers, the conservative leadership of the AFL, Roman Catholic bishops. Thoughtful commentators including Walter Lippmann and Reinhold Niebuhr were apprehensive—though Lippmann was so repelled by Dewey’s late-campaign tactics as to decide to vote, glumly, for FDR.

  The President dealt with the health rumors, which immensely annoyed him, by taking long campaign trips in an open car, sometimes in a pouring rain. He answered charges of the Administration’s military incompetence by pointing to the glorious victories of Eisenhower, MacArthur, and Nimitz. He dealt with the charge of communist influence largely by evading it. “I can’t talk about my opponent the way I would like to sometimes,” he said at the end of the campaign, “because I try to think that I am a Christian.” Later that day, in Boston, he rebutted the charge.

  Polls predicted such a close result that Roosevelt’s victory by 432 electoral votes to Dewey’s 99 came as a surprise. Even so, the race had been something of a close-run thing. Roosevelt’s popular-vote margin of 3.6 million was the smallest since 1916—and this at the very height of the nation’s military successes, at the peak of war prosperity, and after a poor Republican campaign. Perhaps the figures reflected a deep current—war-weariness, and a trend toward “privatization.” It had been a bitter, unedifying contest at a time when a world-transforming conflict was reaching its climax and posing momentous postwar questions. Said the President, going to bed after Dewey’s concession, “I still think he is a son of a bitch.”

  Three months after his reelection, and two weeks after his fourth-term inauguration at the south portico of the White House, Franklin Roosevelt in his plane Sacred Cow touched down on the icy runway of the Soviet airport of Saki in the Crimea. Joined by Prime Minister Churchill, the President rode slowly in his jeep before a guard of honor, while the Prime Minister plodded alongside. The Soviet soldiers stood frozen to attention, their commander holding his sword in front of him like a great icicle. Shortly Roosevelt was speeding in a limousine, with his daughter Anna at his side, to Yalta, ninety miles away. He scanned everything with lively interest—the endless lines of guards, some of them young women with tommy guns; the gutted buildings and burned-out tanks; and later the snow-covered mountains through which the caravan threaded its way to the coast of the Black Sea. Soon the President was installed in Livadia Palace, a fifty-room summer place of the czars overlooking gardens filled with cypress, cedar, and yew.

  Yalta. Neither Roosevelt nor Churchill could have expected that this would become the most famous—the most notorious—of wartime conferences, for the crucial decisions had been made at Casablanca and Quebec and Teheran and a host of other meetings, and Yalta essentially confirmed as well as updated and applied some of the earlier plans. Churchill would have been astonished at Yalta’s later reputation as a sellout to the Russians by naïve Anglo-Americans; he had never held illusions about the Soviets. Roosevelt would have been perplexed—or perhaps amused—by reports of the “sick man at Yalta”; he found the energy to get through an enormous amount of business and indeed to conduct a whole separate set of negotiations with Stalin, chiefly over the Far East.

  The three men met as victors. By February 1945 the conquest of Germany was clearly in sight. Red Army troops had invested Budapest, captured Warsaw, and overrun East Prussia, and were within forty miles of Berlin. On the western front the Allies had been delayed for weeks by a surprise German counterattack in the Ardennes forest leading to the bloody Battle of the Bulge, but Eisenhower’s forces had retaken the lost ground and were beginning an offensive that would carry them across the Rhine. In the Philippines, MacArthur’s troops were closing in on Manila; in the Pacific, Nimitz’s amphibious forces were laying plans for assa
ults on Okinawa and Iwo Jima, stepping-stones to the home islands. Assembled with the three leaders at Yalta were some of the men who had planned the political and military offensives: Marshall, Admiral William Leahy, Hopkins, and the ambassador to the Soviet Union, W. Averell Harriman; Molotov, his deputy Andrei Vishinsky, and the ambassador to the United Slates, Andrei Gromyko; Eden and a big retinue of seasoned Britons.

  The Yalta Conference dealt with a wide range of issues, including postwar arrangements for regions like the Baltic and the Balkans and for the division of Germany. But for Roosevelt three issues were preeminent—and in each case he held weak cards.

  The knottiest of these was Poland. The Big Three had long agreed that the war-racked nation would be picked up like a carpetbag and set down a few hundred kilometers to the west, satisfying Russia’s appetite for real estate, penalizing Germany’s, and taming Warsaw’s. But who would run postwar Poland? For some time Moscow had been dealing with the “Lublin Poles,” a coalition dominated by Polish communists, while London and Washington dealt with the “London Poles,” the Polish government-in-exile in the British capital. Roosevelt was under no illusions about Soviet plans for Poland. As the conference met, the Red Army was completing Poland’s liberation—or rather, its occupation. The question was how much representation for noncommunist Polish elements could be extracted from a Kremlin that viewed liberals and conservatives as bourgeois exploiters if not fascists, and was absolutely determined both to create a buffer state against future invasions from the west and to consolidate Soviet control of Eastern Europe.