The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  Yet actually it was but a brief moment of joyous pomp and pageantry in a sullen world girding for war. Indeed, war had already come—a strange war of military threat and intrigue, of calculated lies and slander, of alarums and provocations, of news blackouts and barter deals, of high-pressure diplomacy and currency raids, of propaganda barrages, mass meetings, posters, parades, radio blasts. Caught in a fog of confusion and indecision, Chamberlain and Daladier groped for a way out. They wanted to join hands with Stalin against Hitler, but they dared not pay the price Stalin demanded; nor would Poland, overly confident in her own arms. Hitler, however, marched straight to his goal. Poland was next on his list. He was willing to grant Stalin power in eastern Europe; he already planned to withdraw the grant at a later time. He fobbed off on an anxious Mussolini assurances that Britain and France would not help Poland, or if they did, would act too little and too late. By August 24, 1939, the Russians and Germans had signed their pact, Stalin had drunk a toast to Hitler, and the Fuehrer’s “tremendous political overturn,” as he called it, was completed. All was ready.

  August 1939 in Washington was sultry and oppressive. The President received full reports of the Nazi successes, but he could not move a single pawn on the diplomatic chessboard. When he got the catastrophic news of the Russo-German pact and of Hitler’s imminent attack on Poland, he sent a last despairing plea to Hitler. Poland had accepted Roosevelt’s offer to conciliate, he told the Fuehrer. “All the world prays that Germany, too, will accept.”

  Hitler’s answer came seven days later.

  At ten minutes to three on the morning of September 1, 1939, the telephone rang next to the President’s bed. He was awake in an instant.

  “Who is it?”

  “This is Bill Bullitt, Mr. President.”

  “Yes, Bill.”

  “Tony Biddle has just got through from Warsaw, Mr. President. Several German divisions are deep in Polish territory, and fighting is heavy. Tony said there were reports of bombers over the city. Then he was cut off. …”

  “Well, Bill, it’s come at last. God help us all.”

  After a few more words, Bullitt hung up and the President began calling Hull, Welles, and others. Soon officials were speeding to their offices through dark empty streets. For a while Welles, Hull, and Berle listened to Hitler’s announcement to the Reichstag that the attack on Poland had begun and that “bombs will be met with bombs.” There was little else they could do. Said Berle: “We are ending our death watch over Europe.”

  In the White House Roosevelt fell asleep until 6:30, when Bullitt phoned again to say that he had talked with Daladier: France would go to Poland’s aid. The President, with his usual iron nerve, got a few more minutes’ sleep before Ambassador Kennedy phoned from London to report that Britain would fight. Roosevelt did not try to nap again; soon Welles and his secretaries were at his bedside for instructions.

  As the President set into motion long-laid plans for the emergency, his mind kept going back twenty years to the last war, when a telephone at his bedside brought news of the latest events at sea. Now the crisis hours seemed not strange to him, but more like picking up an interrupted routine. European statesmen, too, were reliving the crisis days of 1914. An anguished Chamberlain delivered an ultimatum to Hitler to withdraw his troops. In Berlin on Sunday morning, September 3, an interpreter pushed his way through a crowd of Nazi leaders in the anteroom at the Chancellery, entered Hitler’s study, and slowly translated the ultimatum. When he finished, Hitler sat silent and unmoving for long seconds. Then he turned to Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, who had said that Britain would not fight. “What now?” demanded Hitler savagely. In the anteroom outside Goering gave an answer: “If we lose this war, then God help us.”

  That evening the President spoke to what he called “the whole of America.” Until early that morning, he began, he had hoped against hope that some miracle might prevent war and end the invasion of Poland.

  “You must master at the outset a simple but unalterable fact in modern foreign relations between nations. When peace has been broken anywhere, the peace of all countries everywhere is in danger.

  “It is easy for you and for me to shrug our shoulders and to say that conflicts taking place thousands of miles from the continental United States, and, indeed, thousands of miles from the whole American Hemisphere, do not seriously affect the Americas—and that all the United States has to do is to ignore them and go about its own business. Passionately though we may desire detachment, we are forced to realize that every word that comes through the air, every ship that sails the sea, every battle that is fought, does affect the American future.…

  “This nation will remain a neutral nation, but I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well. Even a neutral has a right to take account of facts. Even a neutral cannot be asked to close his mind or his conscience.

  “I have said not once, but many times, that I have seen war and that I hate war. I say that again and again.…

  “As long as it remains within my power to prevent, there will be no black-out of peace in the United States.”

  During the next days, as German troops and tanks plunged ever deeper into Poland, as German submarines ranged along the world’s shipping lanes, the President wrestled with the problem of neutrality. He had hoped, shortly before the war, that he could order customs collectors to seize German ships as soon as war started, but the Attorney General ruled that such an act would be construed as an act of war. The President did have the satisfaction of holding up the departure of the Bremen from New York on various pretexts, and the huge German liner barely got home. As long as possible he delayed issuing the proclamation required under the Neutrality Act so that Britain and France could have a little extra time to get munitions. But these were trifles. The crucial job was to repeal the embargo itself, and this job the President made his main objective for the fall of 1939.

  The chips were down. Polite but agonized appeals were coming in from the democratic nations at war: American material aid would be indispensable to victory. The President acted swiftly. Convening a special session, he asked Congress to repeal the embargo provisions. He denounced the Neutrality Act of 1935 as a departure from the nation’s historic neutrality policy. “I regret that the Congress passed that Act. I regret equally that I signed that Act.” He warned against any group assuming the exclusive label of the peace bloc. “We all belong to it.”

  Despite these blunt words, Roosevelt acted with great caution. In his plea for repeal he stressed peace through noninvolvement rather than what was his main goal: helping the democracies against the aggressors. He exerted every influence possible on Congress, but covertly. Cabinet members and friendly congressmen were asked to marshal votes. Patronage grievances were smoothed over. Pittman and his fellow silverites were bought off by the promise of a higher price for domestic silver. Landon and Knox were reached through newspapermen close to them and to the White House. Governors and mayors were asked to help. Prominent businessmen were lined up. Most of the job of marshaling public opinion was handled by private groups, especially by William Allen White’s “Non-partisan Committee for Peace Through Revision of the Neutrality Law.” The White House quietly co-operated with these groups but made no effort itself to lead a public campaign for repeal.

  “I am almost literally walking on eggs,” the President said to Lord Tweedsmuir, Governor General of Canada, in asking him to postpone a visit until the neutrality fight was over. “… I am at the moment saying nothing, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.” He canceled a speech he was to give to women Democrats; he held up other business to give repeal the right of way. Reports on the Senate line-up were flashed to him daily, sometimes hourly.

  On Capitol Hill, senators again roared and thundered. Isolationists rehearsed their familiar lines: ignore the “war hounds of Europe,” keep out of the wily game of power politics. Tellingly they pointed to the fateful parallel to intervention in 1917: war breaks out; the President help
s one side; secret commitments are made; excuses arise for taking sides. Taking their cue from the President, the advocates of repeal based their appeals on keeping America out of war, and stressed that the new bill would require belligerents to pay cash and to carry goods away in their own ships.

  The lawmakers debated amid heavy pressures. A North Dakota congressman wrote the President that “you can absolutely count on my vote to lift the embargo.” Eleven days later he sent a plaintive note. He had not changed his own opinions but the petitions, letters, resolutions, and telegrams from home were so strong that he probably would vote to keep the embargo. “This job of being a Representative doesn’t appeal to me as strongly as it did when I first came here,” he added.

  Finally, at the end of October—a month after the Germans had overrun Poland—the Senate repealed the arms embargo by a vote of 63 to 30 in legislation studded with compromises and ambiguities. The House followed suit a few days later. Despite all the talk of nonpartisanship the vote was along party lines.

  Even more important than neutrality legislation—at least for the long run—was a conversation the President held during October with a student of science named Alexander Sachs. Two months before, Albert Einstein had written Roosevelt about the possibility of developing a new bomb of unbelievable power, and now Sachs had come in to report on recent developments in the field of nuclear fission including, ominously enough, progress in Nazi Germany. At first Roosevelt seemed preoccupied and inattentive—it must have all seemed remote and theoretical—but in characteristic fashion once he caught on to the implications of the problem, he acted. Wheels started to turn immediately and the basis for the future Manhattan Project was laid during the next six months; because Roosevelt continued to be willing to gamble hundreds of millions of dollars against the unknown, the project went forward to the awful climax of Hiroshima.

  But in the fall of 1939 all this lay far in the future. “Here in Washington the White House is very quiet,” the President wrote Kennedy. “There is a general feeling of sitting quiet and waiting to see what the morrow will bring forth.”

  ROOSEVELT AS A POLITICAL LEADER

  Back in February 1939, a friend of the President’s had sent on to him a letter from a man who had long supported the administration. Written in despair and indignation, the letter spoke for the millions of Americans who could not understand Roosevelt’s cautious tactics:

  “Why don’t you tell our idol FDR to quit beating around the bush, get on the radio and be honest with his people? Of course our first line of defense is the Maginot line. Of course we cannot afford to let France and England get licked. Of course we should prepare to help them—first with munitions and then if that is not enough with everything we’ve got.

  “Why stall around? Why let these pussyfooting Senators kid the American public into the belief that we could stay out of another war? Why not talk brutal realism to the American people before it is too late? You and I know goddam well that if Der Fuehrer and Il Duce are convinced that we will go in—as the Gallup poll shows that the people think we will—there just won’t be any war.…

  “No bushwa about making the world safe for democracy or strict neutrality. The truth is so much more convincing: to save our own hides we must eventually halt the have-not nations in their drive to loot the have nations by force or threat of force.…”

  All the passion in the letter left the President unmoved. “Thank him very much,” he told Early. “Say delighted to get it and it came just before I left for the cruise.…” That was the end of it. Other persons—even heads of nations—had asked him to take the leadership against the aggressors. He had not done so.

  On the contrary, the President’s behavior had been almost a caricature of cautiousness. So much had he ostensibly withdrawn from the embargo repeal fight early in 1939 that Pittman was told to deny that the administration had any hand in his bill. On other matters, too, Roosevelt was utterly evasive. In January 1939 Congress was considering proposals to improve the harbor at Guam. This exchange occurred at a press conference:

  REPORTER: “Can you say whether you do or do not favor the five million dollar appropriation for fortifying Guam?”

  ROOSEVELT: “IS there a five million dollar appropriation for fortifying Guam?”

  REPORTER: “That is my understanding of it.”

  ROOSEVELT: “ ‘Deepening the harbor.’ ”

  REPORTER: “Guess you have got me there.…” [Laughter]

  REPORTER: “Just so there won’t be any confusion, would you make clear your stand on Guam?”

  ROOSEVELT: “I don’t think there is any confusion.”

  REPORTER: “You are for it?”

  ROOSEVELT: “No, I am not.” After more talk the President said he was in accord with a proposal to start dredging the harbor of Guam.

  What was the matter? In the gravest international situation the nation had ever faced, where was the leadership of the man whose very name since 1933 had become the symbol of candor and courage?

  When a leader fails to live up to the symbolic role he has come to occupy, his admirers cling to the image they love by imputing mistakes to the leader’s advisers. Stories went the rounds in 1939 that Roosevelt’s trouble really lay in Hull’s timidity and in Kennedy’s belief in appeasement. The stories were not true. Hull, to be sure, did seem to move slowly, but he was working against the embargo law before Roosevelt took a definite stand, and he was calling existing legislation “a wretched little bob-tailed, sawed-off” substitute for the established rules on international law while the President was using far softer words. As for Kennedy, Roosevelt knew that he had sympathized with the appeasement policies of Chamberlain and the so-called “Cliveden set” and to an extent valued him for this. But he would not let his ambassador get out of hand. When Kennedy submitted a draft of a talk he was to give in London, the President and Hull went over it line by line to adjust it to administration policy.

  The President’s tactics were his own. Another explanation for his caution lay in the nature of the opposition in Congress and among the people. Certainly the opposition to an internationalist or collective security program was not to be dismissed lightly. In a 1937 poll nineteen out of twenty people answered a flat “No” to the query whether the United States should enter another world war. Most of the people trusted Congress rather than the President to keep America out of war. They were powerfully drawn by the symbols of Peace and Neutrality—and they tended to equate the two. To be sure, these attitudes somewhat lacked stability and durability. But they had a terrible intensity. The late 1930’s was the period when the famous aviatrix Laura Ingalls showered the White House with “peace” leaflets from her plane, when Father Coughlin and John L. Lewis were whipping up isolationist feeling, when to some fascism constituted the “wave of the future.” Two decades of bitterness over World War I and its aftermath had left a hard, smarting scar tissue.

  Any attempt by Roosevelt to override this feeling clearly would have been disastrous. His real mission as a political leader was to modify and guide this opinion in a direction closer to American interests as he saw them. To raise this question is again to confront the paradox of Roosevelt’s leadership.

  For under the impact of shattering events abroad, people’s attitudes were slowly shifting. Most Americans, of course, clung to their “Keep-Out-of-War” position. But between Munich and the outbreak of war a great majority of the people swung over to the position of all help to Britain and France short of war. By September 1939 about 37 per cent of the people favored positive help to Britain, France, and Poland; less than half of these wanted to dispatch military help then or at any later time, while most favored sending food and materials. This 37 per cent interventionist element confronted a hard-core isolationist bloc that opposed any aid at all to either side. In the middle was a group of about 30 per cent that would refuse to sell to either side except on a cash-and-carry basis.

  It was this vast middle group that offered the President his suprem
e opportunity. For this group was clinging to the symbol of nonentanglement while grasping the need of American help to nations under attack. This group, combined with the interventionists, would have given heavy backing to Roosevelt’s all-aid-short-of-war policies. Was it possible that these millions of middle-of-the-roaders thought that cash and carry in 1939 meant material help to neither side? No; a later poll showed that 90 per cent favored cash and carry even if in practice only Britain and France got the supplies. Without question these middle attitudes were shot through with confusions and uncertainties. But this made a real leader’s opportunity all the greater, for opinions that are superficial and volatile are the most subject to influence. A situation that was an opportunity for Napoleon, A. N. Whitehead has observed, would appear as an unmanageable disorder to most of us.

  Roosevelt felt that events and facts themselves would educate the public. So they did—but not quickly enough. Each time in the race between aggression and American opinion victory went to the former. The early months of 1939 were the supreme test. Roosevelt’s great hope was that he could demonstrate to Hitler that America would give material aid to nations the Nazis planned to attack. The President’s tactic was based on a sound proposition—the best way to keep America out of war would be to keep war out of the world. But he did not lead opinion toward a position of all aid short of war. He tagged along with opinion. Sometimes, indeed—most notably when he was frightened by the reaction to the “quarantine” speech and later by the furore over America’s frontier being “on the Rhine”—he lagged behind the drift of opinion favoring more commitment by the United States to joint efforts against aggression.