The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

By summer’s end, 1938, Hitler was ready to move. Final plans were drawn up for deploying thirty-six divisions against the Czechs. To a frenzied, baying crowd of Nazis at Nürnberg he demanded “justice” for the Sudetens. Events crowded on one another during the rest of September. To Hitler’s surprise and delight, Chamberlain suddenly flew to Germany. While the wind howled and rain lashed the windowpanes, the prime minister conferred with the ex-corporal in his mountain house in Berchtesgaden. Hitler shouted that he would settle affairs with the Czechs even if it meant war.

  Frightened by Hitler’s reckless attitude, Chamberlain returned to London to see if the cabinet would support the peaceful separation of the Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia. Hitler continued preparations for attack. A week later Chamberlain returned to Germany, happily bearing agreements from his country, France, and Czechoslovakia—the last obtained by putting Prague under severe pressure—for peaceful transfer of Sudeten districts. Amazed that the Czechs would submit, incensed at losing his chance of smashing them, Hitler balked. He now insisted on immediate occupation by his army. A desperate Chamberlain returned home; Hitler ordered assault regiments to their action stations; Londoners dug bomb shelters while mobilization orders went out to the fleet. As a last chance for peace Chamberlain turned to Mussolini, and the Duce, not yet ready for war, appealed to Hitler. Through the combined efforts of Mussolini and the moderates around Hitler, he was induced to join with Mussolini, Chamberlain, and Daladier in a conference where he would be granted by agreement what he wanted to take by force. Meeting in Munich on September 29, the four men arranged the partition of Czechoslovakia, and soon German troops were crossing into the Sudetenland, unopposed.

  What was Roosevelt doing all this time? As the European crisis sharpened in early September he was campaigning in Maryland against Tydings and then spending some anxious days in Minnesota while Mayo Clinic surgeons operated on James’s ulcers. During the critical days of September he abruptly broke off further speaking plans and hurried back to Washington. He grasped the basic elements of the situation: Hitler’s determination to seize Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain’s insistence on peace, the probable seizure of the Sudetenland, the likelihood of war within the next few years even if it was postponed by concessions. Could the United States play any part in the immediate crisis?

  Once again, but this time in the teeth of impending disaster abroad, Roosevelt tried to throw his influence in the scale without making commitments. Again and again he and Hull called for international co-operation against lawlessness but drew the line at foreign entanglements. The President did not respond to the plea of President Eduard Beneš of Czechoslovakia that he urge Britain and France not to desert the Czechs. He would not allow Chamberlain to broadcast a direct message to the American people. He turned aside suggestions that he arbitrate. Instead he decided on an open appeal for peace to all the nations—to potential aggressor, bystander, and victim alike. But the appeal itself mentioned our spurning of “political entanglements”; it evoked polite answers from the democracies and a long diatribe from the Fuehrer filled with lies about the oppression of the Sudetens. The President then appealed to Hitler himself to agree to a conference over the crisis in some neutral spot, but with no involvement by the United States; this letter Hitler ignored, for matters were already turning his way.

  September 1938 in America had been the month of a great hurricane. Breathless newscasters, working around the clock, had brought reports of winds, tidal waves, and floods in the Northeast, of the wreckage left in their wake, punctuated by the latest bulletin on the man-made storms abroad. At month’s end the calm blue skies seemed to heighten the outburst of relief over Munich’s outcome. “I have had a pretty strenuous two weeks,” Roosevelt wrote a friend, but a cruise taken in midsummer “made it possible for me to come through except for a stupid and continuing runny nose. A few days ago I wanted to kill Hitler and amputate the nose. Today, I have really friendly feelings for the latter and no longer wish to assassinate the Fuehrer.”

  But the enormous sense of relief was deeply shaded by worry. Munich was probably not too great a price to pay if it insured permanent peace, Ickes said. “But will it? I doubt it very much, Hitler being the maniac that he is.” Hull issued a cool statement about the pact, but Welles a day or so later publicly stated that a superb opportunity had now come to establish a new world order based on justice and law. The nation’s press was divided, the more isolationist press hailing the result, other newspapers fretting over its meaning for the future. The President seemed divided too. “Good man,” he had cabled Chamberlain enigmatically after Hitler agreed to the Munich meeting, but he had deep misgivings as to Chamberlain’s appeasement policy and its implications. He told Ickes darkly that he suspected Britain and France might offer Trinidad and Martinique to Hitler to keep him satisfied—and if they did he would send the fleet to take both islands.

  One voice in Britain showed no mixed feelings. Said Winston Churchill, “We have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat.”

  In the fall of 1938, as Hitler’s truculence seemed only to increase, the President took advantage of the lull in world affairs to reassess his foreign policies. Again and again he called Hull and Welles in for consultation, often while he was still in bed. Sitting in a sea of newspapers and messages, his little cape of blue flannel slipping off his shoulders as he waved his long cigarette holder and brandished the latest cable, Roosevelt slowly crystallized his views. He no longer had any doubt that appeasement was a costly gamble that would probably fail. Nor could America escape its implications. When he heard that the peanut vendor outside the White House had said, “Over there, there are guns. Here there ain’t no guns. Here there’s squirrels on the lawn,” Roosevelt remarked that he was right, “but he fails to mention the unfortunate fact that the fuss and pushing and guns on the other side are coming closer to our country all the time.”

  Still, the President would not tell the country about the gravity of the situation. When Ickes urged him to do so, he said the people simply would not believe him. Probably Roosevelt feared they would not trust him; it was now the end of 1938, the year of the purge and of the surge of Republican isolationist power in the congressional elections.

  Unwilling to strike boldly on the central front, the President acted where he felt he safely could. He dispatched a bipartisan delegation to the Inter-American Congress of Lima, where Hull helped bring about, despite Argentine opposition, a declaration of joint action against threats to the hemisphere. Knowing of the Nazis’ vaunted strength in the air, the President laid plans for a sharply increased air force. When a German émigré Jew shot a German attaché in Paris and touched off a savage pogrom in Germany against the Jews, the President publicly expressed his shock and horror, ordered his ambassador home from Berlin to report, and redoubled his efforts to help refugees from Germany. Keeping an eye cocked toward the Far East, he granted a credit of twenty-five million dollars to Chiang Kai-shek on assurances that Chinese resistance to Japan would continue.

  The new year 1939 came, and with it a crucial session of Congress. Over the holidays, while his grandchildren romped through the house and guests watched the after-supper movies, the President dictated and redictated to Grace Tully from scribbled notes. On January 4, 1939, he delivered some bold and urgent words to Congress:

  “A war which threatened to envelop the world in flames has been averted; but it has become increasingly clear that world peace is not assured.

  “All about us rage undeclared wars—military and economic. All about us are threats of new aggression—military and economic.…

  “There comes a time in the affairs of men when they must prepare to defend, not their homes alone but the tenets of faith and humanity on which their churches, their governments and their very civilization are founded. The defense of religion, of democracy and of good faith among nations is all the same fight. To save one we must now make up our minds to save all.…” God-fearing democracies could not forever let pass, witho
ut effective protest, acts of aggression. “There are many methods short of war, but stronger and more effective than mere words, of bringing home to aggressor governments the aggregate sentiments of our own people.”

  What were these methods? Here Roosevelt pulled in his horns. Rather than call for specific changes in neutrality policy, he said, rather vaguely, “We have learned that when we deliberately try to legislate neutrality, our neutrality laws may operate unevenly and unfairly—may actually give aid to an aggressor and deny it to the victim.” Quickly dropping the subject, he went on to the needs of defense.

  Yet a tactic of caution and secrecy has risks of its own. During 1938 Roosevelt had smoothed the way for French and English purchase of munitions as part of a program of increasing United States arms production. Looking on this as a touchy matter, he insisted on secrecy. Unhappily, late in January 1939 one of the newest American bombers crashed in California, and in the wreckage was found the body of a French official who had been inspecting American equipment. Promptly the whole story of foreign purchase of arms came out—and in the worst possible way for the President. Isolationists stormed; the Senate Military Affairs Committee investigated. To quiet the commotion Roosevelt invited the senators in for a long talk. He insisted on secrecy, but afterward someone reported the President as saying that America’s frontier ‘lay on the Rhine.” Again the isolationists seethed with indignation. So did the President. Denouncing the report as a deliberate lie, he said that “some boob” must have said it.

  Caution was not paying off. Then, in March 1939, affairs in Europe rushed to another climax.

  THE STORM BREAKS

  Skillfully wielding his three-pronged lance of diplomacy, threat, and subversion, Hitler on the Ides of March seized the rump state of Czechoslovakia and put Slovakia under German “protection.” Hungary snatched at the bone tossed by the Fuehrer and gobbled up Ruthenia. Dictators and militarists seemed to be winning victories wherever they turned. Japan laid claim to the Spratly Islands, covering a huge area southwest of Manila. German troops occupied Memel. Smashing Loyalist resistance, Franco took Madrid at the end of the month. Ten days later Mussolini seized Albania. Earlier in March Stalin did something less dramatic but even more ominous than acts of aggression: he warned the West against “egging the Germans on” to march upon Russia.

  Grimly Roosevelt read the cables. “Never in my life,” he wrote a friend, “have I seen things moving in the world with more cross currents or with greater velocity.” Matters changed so fast every day that he was admittedly unable to pull them into focus. Neither were others. State Department officials were divided in their views as to whether Hitler would next move west or east. Chamberlain on hearing of Hitler’s move at first refused to be deflected from his course; but two weeks later he turned completely about and announced Britain’s guarantee of the independence of Poland—the state that six months before had helped destroy Czechoslovakia.

  The President’s first step after Prague’s fall was little more than the old diplomacy of protest and pinprick. He approved a statement by Welles against “acts of wanton lawlessness” and he considered imposing countervailing duties on imports from Germany. Roosevelt then indirectly sounded out Mussolini, warning him of Hitler’s ambitions, on the possibility of the Duce’s taking the initiative for peace—but this venture was knocked into a cocked hat by the Duce’s cynical adventure in Albania a few days later. During the lull that followed the President spent hours talking about the fast-changing situation. Of certain things he was sure. The fate of Prague proved that Hitler’s aim was not simply reuniting Germans. Appeasement was a failure. With Chamberlain’s spine now stiffened, the chances of war had increased. And if Britain and France fell, Hitler could take over Latin-American countries by his strategy of military and economic coercion.

  But what to do? Of all the somber events, Franco’s triumph shook Roosevelt the hardest, for his own policies had helped shape the outcome. It was clear to him that the embargo had been a grave mistake. He asked Pittman to redouble his efforts to get the Neutrality Act revised or repealed. While the bill dragged through the slow Senate machinery, the President decided on another, typically Rooseveltian act.

  In a sudden move on a Friday night in mid-April the President addressed identical appeals to Hitler and Mussolini. He asked them to take their problems to the council table and in effect to “park their guns outside.” The heart of his plea had a novel twist—a direct and unvarnished question whether they would promise not to attack thirty-one nations, which Roosevelt named one by one. He closed by pinning responsibility for the fate of humanity on the heads of great governments. Explaining the message to correspondents the next day the President stressed again and again—for the benefit of “some of our friends on the Hill”—that the message was no departure from his policy of no entanglements, no commitments. He was offering to serve, he said, not as a mediator but as an intermediary, as a post office or telegraph office.

  In the lull between crises that was the spring of 1939 Roosevelt’s appeal came like a burst of sunlight in an April storm. Democratic governments and peoples rejoiced; Moscow, too, expressed approval. But the Axis leaders reacted with scorn and contempt. Visiting Mussolini at the time, Goering dismissed the message as suggesting an incipient brain malady; the Duce thought it might be more a case of creeping paralysis.

  But it was Hitler who delivered the main rebuttal. Appearing before the Reichstag, after a long defense of his policies he went over the President’s plea sentence by sentence and rang every tone on the American isolationists’ register. To counter Roosevelt’s appeal for the thirty-one nations, he said amid jeering applause that he had asked each of the states listed whether it felt threatened by Germany and each had answered no. He made much of his and Germany’s role as underdog.

  “Mr. Roosevelt!” Hitler cried, “I fully understand that the vastness of your nation and the immense wealth of your country allow you to feel responsible for the history of the whole world. … I, sir, am placed in a much smaller and more modest sphere.…”

  While the harangue was essentially a string of debater’s points, Hitler spoke with such masterful irony and so cuttingly of America’s own international derelictions that he appealed to public opinion outside Germany as well as within. He rebutted his adversary’s arguments without answering his central question about future aggression. (Perhaps he was taking a leaf from the President’s own book, for Roosevelt had made a major campaign attack out of replying to Landon at Madison Square Garden in 1936 without really answering him.) The immediate feeling was that Hitler had had the better of Roosevelt, and the isolationists exulted. “He asked for it,” said Nye. The President, angered by the dictators’ bad manners, relapsed into silence.

  Now there seemed only one weapon left—to throw into the scales the very force that Hitler had referred to: America’s immense wealth. Once again Roosevelt turned to the fight to repeal or change the arms embargo provision of the Neutrality Act—the now odious provision that would force him to cut off arms to all nations, aggressor and victim alike, in the event of war.

  That fight was still going badly. Since January the President had followed a strict hands-off policy on the bill, exerting no public leadership and little private influence. Hull himself feared to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Hence much depended on the committee chairman, Pittman; but the Nevadan was not equal to the task. Concerned less with neutrality than with the price of silver for his constituents, he was no match for Borah, Johnson, La Follette, Vandenberg, and the other formidable isolationists on his committee.

  Balked in the Senate, the administration now turned to the House. The President himself at last entered the lists. He told House leaders privately that repeal of the embargo would probably prevent war in Europe; but if war came, repeal would make an Axis victory less likely. He thought that the Axis had a fifty-fifty chance of winning the war and he painted a dark picture of the implications for America.


  No use. The House passed a new bill but kept the essence of the embargo provision. Dismayed, Roosevelt considered ignoring the act, but he dared not go so far. With the war clouds again piling up in Europe, he called Senate leaders to the White House. Summing up for them his long fight for peace, he said: “I’ve fired my last shot. I think I ought to have another round in my belt.” He again mentioned the strong possibility of war, the need of throwing America’s material weight into the scales before it was too late. Hull was even more emphatic than the President.

  The senators were sitting comfortably around the President’s study in their shirt sleeves, drinks in hand. Finally Borah spoke up. All eyes turned to the lion-headed old isolationist.

  “There’s not going to be any war this year,” he said. “All this hysteria is manufactured and artificial.”

  “I wish the Senator would come down to my office and read the cables,” Hull said.

  Borah waved him quiet. “I have sources of information in Europe that I regard as more reliable than those of the State Department.”

  At this Hull almost burst into tears. Roosevelt lay back on his sofa, silent. Garner after a moment went the rounds asking if there were enough votes to bring repeal up on the Senate floor. Finally he turned to the President.

  “Well, Captain, we may as well face the facts. You haven’t got the votes; and that’s all there is to it.”

  That was all there was to it. Roosevelt kept his urbanity, but he insisted that the senators take responsibility. The meeting broke up. Congress adjourned early in August, the embargo requirement intact.

  In all these bitter weeks, while Congress was thwarting Roosevelt’s efforts abroad and pinching off the New Deal at home, there was one radiantly magnificent interlude. This was the visit of the British king and queen in June. Attending to every detail, Roosevelt set the stage for their reception with the care and gusto of a Broadway director. The royal pair played their parts brilliantly, the queen winning everyone’s heart with her gracious, bonnie ways, the king looking young, strong, and earnest. Scene after scene came off perfectly: the reception by half a million Washingtonians in sweltering Washington heat; the well-schooled king even remembering to remark “Cotton Ed Smith?” when he met South Carolina’s senior Senator; the state dinner in the White House climaxed with an eloquent presidential toast and with songs by Kate Smith and Marian Anderson; the inevitable wreath laying at Arlington cemetery; the drive through New York City’s crowds to the World’s Fair: the picnic at Hyde Park that featured hot dogs, baked beans, and strawberry shortcake; the long tête-á-tête between president and monarch ending at 1:30 in the morning when Roosevelt put his hand on the royal knee and said, “Young man, it’s time for you to go to bed!”; the final good-by at the Hyde Park station, with the crowds bursting spontaneously into “Auld Lang Syne” and the President calling after the moving train, “Good luck to you! All the luck in the world!”