The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  The President’s main trouble, though, lay in none of these, but in a big, shaggy man who, during the late July lull, was busy pumping hands and visiting rodeos in Colorado. A glittering new figure had emerged on the political scene.

  THE HOARSE AND STRIDENT VOICE

  Legends were sprouting profusely around Wendell Willkie by midsummer 1940, but the facts were striking enough. Born in 1892, the fourth of six children, he was descended from Germans who had left their homeland after the revolutionary disturbances earlier in that century. He grew up in Indiana amid an intellectually and politically fertile family; his father was a teacher, lawyer, and Bryanite Democrat, his mother a lawyer and a gifted public speaker. After stints at teaching, law, and the army, young Willkie spent ten years in Akron as a lawyer-businessman, then moved to New York City in 1929, where he made a meteoric rise in the utilities field. In January 1933, a few weeks before Roosevelt’s first inauguration, he became head of the huge Commonwealth and Southern Corporation.

  During the next seven years Willkie became the most articulate and effective business critic of the New Deal. Scorning Liberty League tactics, he shouted his denunciations from hundreds of platforms across the country and in scores of magazine articles. He sold himself as the chief victim of the New Deal, as an honest, enterprising businessman overwhelmed by big government. He had, indeed, been beaten time and again by the New Deal—beaten in his attempts to hold off the TVA, beaten in his fight against the “death-sentence” clause of the public utility holding company bill, beaten in his campaign efforts for Landon, beaten finally in the courts. It seemed a monumental piece of poetic justice that now he could take on, in direct and open combat, the author of all his misfortunes.

  He was the perfect foil for Roosevelt. Like the President, Willkie was a big, attractive man, who liked to talk and to laugh; but the two antagonists were cut from sharply different cloth. Willkie’s touseled hair, broad face and jaw, bulky frame, baggy, unpressed clothes gave him a countrified look that appealed to middle-class America. “A man wholly natural in manner, a man with no pose, no ‘swellness,’ no condescension, no clever plausibleness … as American as the courthouse yard in the square of an Indiana county seat … a good, sturdy, plain, able Hoosier,” Booth Tarkington said in a description that set off the Indianan from the slick figure in the White House.

  Inside this rustic form was an urbane New York cosmopolitan. Widely read and traveled, Willkie was literate enough to write book reviews for reputable journals, facile and knowledgeable enough to steal the show on “Information Please,” the phenomenally popular radio program of the day, and versatile enough to win over a wide range of audiences in his vigorous, “man-to-man” talks. He was, a newspaperman noticed, “a master of timing releases, issuing denials before edition time, adding punch to a prepared speech, or making one on the spur of the moment letter-perfect enough to have been memorized, treating publishers, editors, and reporters with the skill needed to suggest to each that they were the sole beneficiaries of his gratitude and his confidence.” Moreover, in seven years of crisscrossing the country in his one-man battle against the New Deal, Willkie had won the friendship of the very publishers—notably Roy Howard and Henry Luce—who had become increasingly alienated from the White House.

  From the start Roosevelt saw the Republican candidate as a serious threat. Here was no solemn engineer, like Hoover, no raw novice in national politics, like Landon. Roosevelt had first met Willkie in December 1934. Their talk was friendly, but not their feelings; afterward Roosevelt told how he had outdebated his visitor and reduced him to stammered admissions, while Willkie wired his wife, an anti-New Dealer, CHARM EXAGGERATED STOP I DIDN’T TELL HIM WHAT YOU THINK OF HIM. The President felt that Willkie’s utility background would hurt his opponent’s chances, but the Republican selection for Vice-President of Senator McNary, a long-time supporter of public power and farm aid, was bound to take some of the sting out of any attempt to tie Willkie with the “interests.”

  Nor could Willkie himself easily be labeled a reactionary. He had come out publicly for many of the chief New Deal reforms. A bitter and active foe of the Klan during the 1920’s, he had a deserved reputation as a friend of civil liberties. And he was an internationalist who had said, a month before the Republican convention, that “a man who thinks that the results in Europe will be of no consequence to him is a blind, foolish and silly man.” Willkie was as flexible in his views as most other politicians panting for a presidential nomination. But this made him a hard man for the Democrats to label. Indeed, the Indianan himself was a Democratic bolter: he had been a delegate to the 1924 Democratic convention, he had voted for Roosevelt in 1932, and he was calling himself a Democrat as late as 1938.

  All in all, Willkie and McNary were formidable opponents—the strongest ticket the Republicans could have named, Roosevelt felt. The nature of the two conventions also strengthened Willkie’s hand. The Republican convention had appeared as open and unbossed as the Democratic had seemed tawdry and rigged. In fact, however, Willkie’s build-up had been spurred by a great deal of money and an avalanche of propaganda; yet his sixth-ballot triumph in the convention over the Dewey and Taft “steam rollers” left him looking like a Galahad.

  In mid-August Willkie made his acceptance speech in his home town in Indiana. A colossal shirt-sleeved crowd—a quarter-million strong, some said—stood in a grove in the stifling heat and heard Willkie lambaste the third-term candidate. “Only the strong can be free,” he shouted in his slurred, twangy way, “and only the productive can be strong.” In this speech and in the ones that followed, as his voice turned husky and then hoarse and finally became a scratchy croak, Willkie’s initial strategy became clear. He would accept the major foreign and domestic policies of the New Deal. He would attack Roosevelt on three main counts: seeking dictatorial power, preventing the return of real prosperity, and failing to rearm the country fast enough in the face of foreign threat.

  He was eager, Willkie proclaimed again and again, to meet “the Champ.”

  The Champ would not enter the ring for a while. Even before his renomination Roosevelt had decided on his campaign tactics in the event he should run again. Spurning ordinary election campaigning, he would stay close to Washington and emphasize his role as commander in chief. He would ignore the opposition. Occasionally he would travel through the eastern states on inspection trips. It would be the tactics of 1936, except that now he would be inspecting defense plants and naval depots rather than PWA projects and drought areas.

  “Events move so fast in other parts of the world that it has become my duty to remain either in the White House itself or at some nearby point where I can reach Washington and even Europe and Asia by direct telephone—where, if need be, I can be back at my desk in the space of a very few hours,” he had said in his acceptance speech. “… I shall not have the time or the inclination to engage in purely political debate.”

  As usual, the old campaigner had left himself an opening.

  “But I shall never be loath to call the attention of the nation to deliberate or unwitting falsifications of fact, which are sometimes made by political candidates.” The effect of this, of course, was that the President could enter the campaign at any moment he chose.

  Roosevelt made the most of his role as commander in chief. His defense inspection trips were arranged so that he would pass through as many towns as possible. Presidential aides tried to keep state and local politicians off the President’s train, but the press was given ample opportunity to picture the commander in chief watching army maneuvers and gazing fondly at aircraft carriers under construction. During a defense trip through northern New York the President met with Prime Minister Mackenzie King, and it was agreed to set up a Permanent Joint Board on Defense to consider the security of the north half of the Western Hemisphere.

  Vainly the White House correspondents tried during August to get Roosevelt to answer Willkie’s barbed shafts. “I don’t know nothin’ about politics
,” he said coyly.

  The President’s defense role was not merely a campaign tactic. By midsummer 1940 the nation was feverishly rearming, and quick decisions had to be made in the White House. Roosevelt’s availability was all the more necessary because he had refused to delegate central control of defense production. When he had set up the Defense Advisory Commission at the end of May 1940, one of the members, William S. Knudsen, asked, “Who is our boss?” Roosevelt answered, laughing, “Well, I guess I am!” Administratively, it was a makeshift arrangement, but politically it enabled Roosevelt to keep his fingers on this delicate and vital phase of policy.

  Diplomatic developments, too, required close attention. All over the world foreign offices were revising their estimates in the wake of France’s fall. Relations with the new French government were severely strained, and the United States was caught in the middle. The Japanese military, its eyes on the Dutch and French possessions left almost undefended after Hitler’s blitz, won control of the Japanese cabinet in mid-July. An even greater problem involved hemisphere defense, for it was feared that Hitler might now either force France and Holland to cede their Caribbean possessions, or he might seize them by attack or infiltration. Hull brought off a brilliant coup at the Havana Conference late in July by wangling conference approval of his program for opposing transfer of European possessions in the New World, but the situation still bristled with a host of diplomatic and military difficulties.

  Despite these formidable problems, Roosevelt never forgot that he had a campaign on his hands. He arranged for Ickes to answer Willkie’s speech of acceptance and watched happily the ensuing Donnybrook as Willkie became involved in answering the pugnacious Secretary’s charges that the Republican nominee had been a member of Tammany Hall and had once eulogized Samuel Insull, the notorious utilities czar. The President also tried to put the creaking Democratic party machinery into shape. Farley, still galled by his treatment at Chicago, remained unwilling to continue as national chairman despite all the persuasion Roosevelt could bring to bear, and Flynn took over the job. Since the Good Neighbor League had been allowed to die, a new organization had to be set up to attract Republicans and independents; Norris and La Guardia, with the help of Corcoran and other administration aides, took on this job. Roosevelt telephoned city bosses direct to make arrangements for his campaign appearances.

  It was a time of cabinet reshuffling too. To take the place of Wallace, who was already campaigning quietly, Roosevelt chose Claude R. Wickard, a “dirt farmer,” as Secretary of Agriculture. Hopkins, still ailing, resigned as Secretary of Commerce in order to work directly for the President; by appointing RFC chief Jesse Jones to succeed him Roosevelt rewarded the big Texan for his cooperation at Chicago and also restored to his official family the kind of political balance the President liked, especially at election time. Frank Walker’s appointment as Postmaster General maintained Catholic representation in the cabinet after Farley’s departure, and Stimson’s and Knox’s presence gave the official family a strong bipartisan cast. During the summer two distinguished writers joined Hopkins and Rosenman to work on campaign speeches: playwright Robert Sherwood and poet Archibald MacLeish, whom Roosevelt had made Librarian of Congress the previous year.

  This would be Roosevelt’s ninth campaign for office, his third for the presidency. But events would not allow this to be an ordinary campaign.

  LION VERSUS SEA LION

  “The Battle of France is over,” Churchill told a rapt House of Commons in mid-June. “I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire.… Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.

  “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will say, ‘This was their finest hour.’ ”

  Four weeks later Hitler informed his generals and admirals: “As England, in spite of the hopelessness of her military position, has so far shown herself unwilling to come to any compromise, I have decided to begin to prepare for, and if necessary to carry out, an invasion of England.” Preparations must be completed by mid-August for this operation, which was given the code name “Sea Lion.” The Fuehrer stressed that success depended on gaining air superiority and then controlling a sea lane across the English Channel for the invaders.

  As Hitler marshaled shipping, deployed three crack armies, and mustered his awesome Luftwaffe for the softening up, Churchill again turned to Roosevelt for help. Destroyers, he wrote the President, were vitally necessary to repel the seaborne invasion and to protect Britain’s supply routes. In the last ten days alone, the Nazis had sunk or damaged eleven British destroyers. He must have fifty or sixty of America’s old, reconditioned destroyers at once. The next three months would be vital—if Britain survived this phase it ultimately would triumph.

  “Mr. President,” Churchill warned, “with great respect I must tell you that in the long history of the world this is a thing to do now.”

  What could Roosevelt do? He was fully aware of the dreadful urgency of the situation, but the political obstacles seemed insuperable. Senator Walsh’s law provided that the President could send destroyers to Britain only if the navy certified that they were useless for United States defense, and naval officials had recently testified as to their potential value so that Congress would not junk them as a drain on the taxpayer. Clearly special legislation would be necessary—and Walsh, Wheeler, Nye & Co. would be waiting with raised hatchets. The President had toyed with the idea of allowing the destroyers to be sold to Canada on condition they be used only in hemisphere defense, thus relieving Canadian destroyers for service off England, but this weak subterfuge he cast aside.

  It was not the President but a faction in the cabinet that broke the stalemate. Stimson, Knox, and Ickes were pressing for action. At a cabinet meeting August 2 Knox stated that Britain’s situation was more desperate than ever and he passed on an idea that had been circulating for some time in private circles. This was to grant the destroyers in exchange for military bases on British possessions in the Americas. The idea drew wide cabinet backing. On the question whether Willkie should be consulted the cabinet was divided, but Roosevelt decided to bring him into the picture. The President, still assuming that legislation was necessary for the deal, calculated that Willkie could help line up Republican support on the Hill.

  From the cabinet room Roosevelt telephoned William Allen White and asked him to talk with Willkie. White was optimistic—had not the Republican candidate called for full aid to Britain? But when White talked with Willkie in Colorado he found him personally in favor of legislation to send destroyers but unwilling to take a public stand. Willkie’s difficulty lay in the Republican isolationists who dominated his party in Congress. He did not dare arouse this powerful group, including House Republican Leader Joseph Martin, now the Republican national chairman.

  “I know there is not two bits difference between you on the issue pending,” White telegraphed the President on August 11. “But I can’t guarantee either of you to the other, which is funny, for I admire and respect you both.”

  By now Roosevelt was sorely pressed. For Willkie’s rebuff came just as the Battle of Britain broke over southeastern England. On August 8 two hundred Stukas and Messerschmitts roared down on British convoys. Four days later hundreds more attacked radar stations and airfields. Then the tempo rose fast. On the 13th, 1,400 Nazi aircraft swarmed over England; two days later 1,800, the next day 1,700. This was the Nazis’ “Eagle Atta
ck”—the knockout blow against the Royal Air Force that was designed both to herald and to make possible the invasion.

  A cruel dilemma faced the President—the man who hated above all to be forced into a political corner. As Americans heard radio commentators tell of Britain’s ordeal, saw pictures of London burning, of women and children huddling in subways, a wave of sympathy for Britain swept the country. White’s Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, now boasting of six hundred chapters, built up a huge agitation on the destroyer issue. Millions signed petitions; General Pershing, old and ill, pleaded for action before it was too late; newspapers clamored that the President do something.

  This same uproar, however, seemed to provoke the isolationists to new virulence. Sale of the destroyers to a nation at war, warned the Chicago Tribune, would be an act of war. By all the measures of opinion the isolationists were in a minority in the country, but, as usual, they were entrenched on Capitol Hill. When Ambassador Bullitt warned that if Britain fell, Hitler would turn on America, senators denounced his speech as an act “little short of treason” by a “multimillionaire, New Deal warmonger.” Roosevelt knew that at best a destroyer bill would drag for weeks through Congress, at worst it would fail, with the awful effect this would have on British morale and on the chances of further American aid.

  To make matters worse, Congress was already wrangling bitterly over another contentious matter, compulsory military service. Sponsored by Republican Representative James W. Wadsworth and Democratic Senator Burke of Nebraska, now a hardened anti-New Dealer, the bill was vigorously supported by Secretary Stimson, who was sorely in need of men for his newly forming army divisions. The President had taken no leadership on the bill until August 2 when, under pressure from Stimson and others, he informally came out for “a selective service training bill” in a press conference. His statement produced another explosion on the Hill. Delegations of “mothers” swarmed into congressmen’s offices, religious and labor leaders protested, Senator Wheeler cried that a draft act would be Hitler’s “greatest and cheapest victory,” even Norris said that it would end in dictatorship.