The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  Faced by such a situation, some men might spend hours in mental anguish and turmoil as they strove desperately to make a decision. Not so Roosevelt. His decision was to reserve decision. Playing for time had everything to commend it. By keeping alive the possibility of running he could maintain control of the “presidential politicians” throughout the country—his personal friends in the party, high officials holding patronage jobs, programmatic New Dealers—who would jump on someone else’s bandwagon only when they were sure the President was through. He could, without trying, win scores of convention delegates, including those who wanted a neutral figure to support until they saw the way the wind blew. He could husband whatever remaining influence he had with Congress. He could protect his position of strength from which to deal with foreign nations and carry weight on the international scene. Since the Republicans would meet before the Democrats, he could wait and see who would be the challenger.

  None of this was remarkable; traditionally presidents considering another term had seen the uses of delay. The remarkable thing was Roosevelt’s shrewdness and dexterity in keeping alive his two lines of action—of running and of refusing to run.

  It was charged at the time that the President was ensuring his renomination by killing off the chances of all his prospective rivals. Quite the contrary was true. In a series of shrewd yet bold moves Roosevelt helped build up a host of presidential possibilities. His tactic was quite in keeping with his usual political and administrative leadership—to strengthen his own position by the method of divide and conquer. Now he carried the tactic to a new level: not only did he encourage the rest of the candidates to contend with one another, he enlarged the field so that there would be a host of rivals wrestling for delegate votes.

  With tenacity and vigilance Roosevelt pursued this maneuver. In the spring of 1938 he privately encouraged Hopkins to try for the presidency in 1940, advised him on campaign strategy, and said that he would appoint him Secretary of Commerce in order to strengthen his position. The President did everything possible to help the Hopkins build-up until the latter’s almost fatal illness in 1939. Then, during that year, he appointed former Governor Paul V. McNutt of Indiana chief of the newly established Federal Security Agency, and he encouraged McNutt’s aspirations to such an extent that the handsome, white-haired Indianan seemed to conclude that there had been a “laying on of hands.” On several occasions during 1939 and early 1940 Roosevelt indicated to Hull—without absolutely committing himself—that he hoped the Secretary of State would be his successor. He told Barkley early in 1940 that “some of the folks here at the White House” were for him as the next Democratic nominee. (Barkley did not bite.) He told Governor Lehman of New York that Lehman deserved the vote of his state delegation at the convention, and the President asked Boss Flynn of the Bronx to make these arrangements. At various times he encouraged the hopes of Jackson, Wallace, and other members of the inner circle.

  The President did not miss a trick. He never closed the door completely on the possibility of his own availability. Yet he told visitors time and time again that he neither desired nor intended to run. White House intimates came out with “inside dope stories” that the President would not be a candidate. Letters importuning him to be a candidate went unanswered. He pressed for Chicago as the Democratic convention site because Boss Kelly could be relied on to pack the galleries with Roosevelt supporters. In states where presidential candidates were supposed to make known their intentions before the primaries he privately arranged that he would not be asked about his candidacy. Still keeping his own intentions secret, he sent emissaries to California and other states to make peace among the factions and line them up on one pro-Roosevelt ticket. The result of these and other maneuvers was that Roosevelt kept open a line of retreat—refusal of the nomination—at the same time that he maintained a strong position in case he decided to run.

  Roosevelt’s basic problem, if he chose to run, was not how to get the nomination—his ability to get a decisive convention majority was never in doubt—but how to be nominated in so striking a manner that it would amount to an emphatic and irresistible call to duty. This party call would be the prelude to a call from the whole country at election time. Only a party summons in July, in short, would make possible a popular summons in November.

  Standing formidably in the way of such a call was the very thing that made the call necessary—the anti-third-term tradition. Roosevelt did not doubt the potency of that tradition. No matter that the framers of the Constitution had been so hopelessly divided on re-eligibility that they had failed to establish a limit in the Constitution. No matter that the tradition had been bolstered as much by the accident of personality and circumstance as by deep popular conviction. The unwritten law was there, and Roosevelt was not one to defy it. How to get around it? All the polls showed a vast majority opposed to a third term as an abstract matter, and a clear majority opposed to a third term for Roosevelt. Yet many people, when further questioned, believed that certain circumstances—especially a crisis—would justify the President’s running again.

  Roosevelt’s task—in the event he finally decided to run—clearly was to bring about a unanimous party draft that would neutralize the anti-third-term sentiment. Unhappily for the President, he could not openly lift a finger to bring about such a draft. To do so would be to sharpen the very fears that lay behind the no-third-term feeling, the fears that had dogged Roosevelt all through his second term—the fears of a dictatorial leader grasping for more and more power. If the President were to run again, everything depended on a spontaneous draft. Indeed, after seven years in the White House Roosevelt felt that he was entitled to such a tribute from his party.

  By early 1940 there seemed little chance that Roosevelt would be given such a tribute. Three men stood in the way—Hull, Garner, and Farley.

  It was a curious trio. Hull, cautious, correct, courtly, slow to act but tenacious when committed, proud of his log-cabin birth, aware at the age of sixty-eight that he had only a few years left of his long political life, stood for the old South that looked with fear on the “radicalism” of the New Deal. Garner, seventy-one years old but still tough as hickory, his tricolor face—white eyebrows, blue eyes, red complexion—hardly changing with the passing years, spoke for the new South of prairie skyscrapers, huge terminals, oil wells, the South that looked darkly on the New Deal as anti-individualistic, anticapitalistic. Farley was only fifty-one; the big tireless party chief had more friends than ever across the country, but his closest ties were with urban politicians who, little interested in policies or programs, tested every passing wind for its impact on votes, deals, tickets. Ideologically the two Southern Protestants and the Irish Catholic had little in common except varying degrees of disenchantment with the New Deal.

  Politically, though, it was an ominous combination for the President. Garner, while hopeful for the presidency, was intent mainly on denying Roosevelt a third term. Hull would accept the presidential nomination if he did not have to fight for it. Farley had his eye on the White House but he could wait; running for Vice-President on a ticket headed by either Hull or Garner would give him a priceless opportunity four years later. During 1939 and early 1940 Farley kept in close touch with both men: each buttered the others up and stirred the others’ resentments at Roosevelt’s slights; they all united in their opposition not to the President himself, whom they professed still to love, but to the third term in principle and to the unscrupulous men who, they told one another, were leading the President astray.

  Roosevelt knew that Farley was meeting with Hull and Garner. He devised a different tactic in dealing with each of his potential rivals.

  Garner’s candidacy the President simply dismissed. “He’s just impossible,” he told Farley. The once cordial relations between the two men had long turned sour. They had little contact except at cabinet meetings, where Garner, red and glowering, occasionally took issue with the President in a truculent manner. Roosevelt hinted that he
would desert the Democratic cause before he would vote for the Texan for President. By early 1940 even official relations between the two men had almost ceased; Roosevelt was hoping that the Vice-President would not show up for cabinet meetings. The President was gleeful about Garner’s tribulations as a presidential candidate—about Lewis’s public attack on him as a “labor-baiting, poker-playing, whisky-drinking, evil old man,” about Garner’s sudden change of heart over an antilynching measure in the light of the Negro vote.

  Farley was a different matter. Roosevelt did not want to lose the man who had so ably administered two election campaigns. But the President faced a special disadvantage. The Constitution made it politically impossible for two men from the same state to run on the same ticket. Nor would Farley be satisfied with a promise of the vice-presidency in any event. All his presidential hopes turned on Roosevelt’s not being a candidate. The President sought to disarm his Postmaster General by insisting that he would not run again; but Farley’s political instincts warned him to stay on the alert. Roosevelt asked Cardinal Mundelein to talk with Farley, but the cardinal failed to budge him. Farley stayed in the race.

  As for Hull, Roosevelt continued to indicate that he hoped the old Tennessean would be his successor. This on the face of it seemed a dangerous maneuver, for Hull was also the person behind whom Farley and Garner would unite. But the President knew his man. Hull thought it incompatible with his position as Secretary of State to campaign for the nomination. Knowing that Roosevelt’s support was all he needed, he chose to wait. Unlike Farley or Garner, he captured virtually no delegates; in the end he became utterly dependent on the President. If, on the other hand, Roosevelt ultimately decided not to run, Hull would be a suitable compromise candidate.

  How much of this complex maneuvering was deliberately planned by the President, how much was sheer accident in the midst of utter confusion, no one could tell. But it was certain that by hiding his plans Roosevelt was adding to the confusion, and that he was expecting to benefit from it. The Sphinx waited.

  THE HURRICANE OF EVENTS

  A few weeks after the outbreak of war, when Roosevelt’s standing in the polls jumped upward as it always did during international crisis, Ickes remarked to him that he was more popular than he had been for years. Roosevelt replied: “But just wait and see the nose dive that I will take about next March.” As usual, his uncanny sense of timing proved right. All things considered, March 1940 was a low point even for Roosevelt’s second term.

  The international situation was obscure where it was not dark. Smashing through the Mannerheim Line, Soviet troops in March were forcing Finland to accept a dictated peace. Appalled by what he called the “dreadful rape of Finland,” the President must have felt keenly the hopeless inadequacy of United States aid to the little nation—inadequacy stemming from Hull’s caution and from Roosevelt’s fear of American isolationists. Once again he had at his disposal only moral protests and pronunciamentos, and once again these went unheeded. Throughout the winter both Russia and Germany were consolidating their strength in their respective spheres of interest—but just how far was not clear.

  The “phony war” maintained its leisurely pace, as both sides took advantage of the winter to build up their armies. The repeal of the embargo, enabling France and Britain to buy war materials in the United States, was proving a Pyrrhic victory. For one thing, the Allies were planning on a long war of attrition and they were slow to place orders. For another, the cash-and-carry compromise, by taking American ships off the seas, helped the German blockade of Britain almost as much as if all American ships had been torpedoed. The President tried to get around the law by allowing Americans to transfer their ships to Panamanian registry, but he had to beat a hasty retreat when Hull opposed the maneuver and William Allen White wrote that he would not have worked so hard for repeal if he had known that such a subterfuge would be resorted to.

  The administration also had to use subterfuges to maintain America’s neutral position. In tightening its blockade of Germany, Britain searched American ships, censored American mail, violated American “neutrality” zones. While publicly defending its neutral rights down to the last jot and tittle, the administration at first winked at British violations wherever it seemed safe to do so. But as episodes multiplied, irritation increased in America. The President had to tell his friend Winston Churchill, who had become First Lord of the Admiralty at war’s outbreak, “I would not be frank unless I told you that there has been much public criticism here.” But incidents continued, to the delight of anti-British congressmen and orators.

  March brought also the end of any peace hopes that Roosevelt still harbored. Returning from a mission to Europe, Welles reported that he had found Rome bitter at Hitler’s deals with Russia but still banking on a German victory, Berlin intent only on a total triumph, Paris full of corroding discouragement, and London charged with determination, even overconfidence. There was no sense in any further peace initiatives from America.

  Balked on the diplomatic front, the President had no other way to turn. The nation was stuck on dead center, somewhere between neutrality and effective aid to the Allies. The mood of the country in March 1940, Ambassador Bullitt said, was like that of England before Munich.

  On the domestic scene, too, Roosevelt’s leadership was at low ebb. To be sure, every day brought new declarations from local Democratic leaders that Roosevelt was the party’s only hope, that he must run for a third term. The President’s tactic of broadening the field in order to prevent any candidate from getting too far ahead, seemed to be working; McNutt, for example, was bleeding so heavily from bites and scratches inflicted in the Washington jungle that he was no longer a front runner for the nomination. And in the early presidential primaries Roosevelt was running far ahead of any rival. But in a more fundamental sense the President’s position was precarious.

  That unmanageable creature, the American economy, was behaving with its usual unpredictability. Early in March the brilliant Treasury economist Lauchlin Currie, now one of the President’s administrative assistants, warned him that a sharp downturn was taking place and urged a program of stimulating housing and exports and speeding up farm benefit payments. But Roosevelt had been busy for many months doing the precise opposite of Currie’s proposals: budget slashing. As sensitive as ever to attacks on him by the budget balancers, as unaware as ever—like most economists—of the enormous possibilities of heavy deficit spending, Roosevelt was cutting wherever he could without hurting essential welfare and defense programs. He would undertake no new programs. The man who three years before had called for bold action to help the one-third ill-housed, ill-clothed, ill-nourished, was now turning aside pleas that he call for stepped-up health, housing, and education programs. The only extension of the New Deal proposed by Roosevelt during early 1940 was a paltry program for building hospitals in needy areas, a project soon forgotten. And all through the early months of 1940 unemployment remained at a level of seven to ten million.

  It was not that Roosevelt had turned against the New Deal. He was simply operating on his old political rule that he could exert leadership on only one front at a time, and he was husbanding all his strength for the crucial political problems involved in the situation abroad.

  To strengthen his position in the face of that situation, the President had been engaged for some time in a tactical political shift. He was trying to line up Republican support in Congress and in the country for a bipartisan foreign policy without alienating his own party and without jettisoning the essence of the New Deal. As a grandiloquent party gesture he had Senate Republican Leader McNary and two other Republicans invited to the Jackson Day dinner. When the suspicious Republicans failed to show up, the President twitted them gently, proclaimed that both Hamilton and Jefferson were his heroes, and boasted that he had been less of a party man than most of his predecessors. Roosevelt’s shift to bipartisanship restored his symbolic role as leader of the whole nation. But it won him few votes from
Republican congressmen, who suspected that his real motive was to get their support without letting them help shape policy. It was no time for party peace. The opposition had won some local elections and was sensing victory in November. Republican presidential candidates were crisscrossing the country busily thwacking the administration’s policies and failings.

  It was on the left, though, that the President’s position was weakest. Despite his peace efforts, the AFL and CIO were still badly split apart. Lewis was still sulking and rebellious, still upbraiding Roosevelt for his “sellout” of the CIO after its help in 1936. Some of the youth groups, too, were becoming increasingly hostile to the President; when in a speech from the White House south portico he warned American Youth Congress delegates against seeking Utopias overnight, loud boos floated up in the cold winter air. And there was new and far uglier antagonism on the extreme left.

  The American Communists, once friendly or at least indulgent toward the administration because of popular-front tactics dictated from Moscow, had done a flip-flop domestically as well as internationally after the Nazi-Soviet pact. Roosevelt was now at best a weak Kerensky-type pawn of the capitalists, or at worst a power-mad militarist bent on plunging his country into an imperialist war. The President did not mind the abuse, for he knew the value of Communist opposition. But he could not—and did not—ignore the Communist infiltration of sections of labor, youth groups, the press, WPA workers, and government. As usual, however, he attacked the problem indirectly rather than frontally. He put suspected government employees under supervision, and he and Eleanor Roosevelt helped the non-Communist leaders of the Workers’ Alliance form a new organization of WPA workers.

  The President’s hold on Congress seemed weaker than ever. With their usual factionalism exacerbated by presidential nomination dogfights in both parties, the two chambers were arenas for rough-and-tumble combat. A House investigation of the National Labor Relations Board revealed a hapless administrative mess in this key New Deal agency. Republicans and conservative Democrats were readying a bill that, Roosevelt felt, while professing to assure administrative fairness, was actually a “stupid” attempt to hamstring New Deal agencies. The Hatch Act, which Roosevelt had signed the year before despite his suspicion that it was aimed at his patronage power rather than “purity in politics,” was extended to cover state employees paid with federal funds. Even Hull’s popular trade agreements program barely mustered enough support to gain a three-year extension. The President became so incensed at Garner’s opposition to the three-year extension that he exploded one night and “Goddamned this and that” to relieve his feelings, as he told Ickes.