Roosevelt’s utter concentration on the task at hand—winning military victory—raised difficult problems, just as his absorption with winning elections at whatever cost had created difficulties during the peace years. It was all very well for Hopkins, reflecting his chief’s attitude, to apply to every policy the simple test “Will it help to win the war?” but such a test was likely to ignore broader strategic aspects of winning the war—and the relation between winning the war and defending democracy. Two examples illuminate the dilemma:
Early in 1942 Roosevelt authorized the military to uproot thousands of Japanese-Americans on the West Coast and relocate them in concentration camps in the interior. To the military this seemed a wise precaution, but in the long run it was a compromise with the ideas the nation was supposed to be fighting. Again, in September 1942, exasperated by the failure of Congress to pass a bill to stabilize the cost of living, including the prices of farm commodities, Roosevelt in effect ordered Congress to act in three weeks and warned that if the legislators failed to act he would. Congress sullenly complied. Here was an astonishing usurpation of power in a nation fighting for democratic ideas and processes.
Roosevelt would have made the same defense of his drastic actions as had another war president eighty years before. “Was it possible,” Lincoln asked, “to lose the nation and yet preserve the Constitution? A limb may be amputated to save a life, but a life is never wisely given to save a limb.” Yet a democratic people always faces the ultimate question, Which is life and which is limb?
ROOSEVELT AS PEACE LEADER
During 1943 the tide turned. In May, Allied forces drove the enemy out of Tunisia. Two months later they invaded Sicily; two months after that, Italy; and on September 3, 1943, Italy surrendered. Elsewhere the massive counterattack slowly gained momentum. American troops mopped up the Japanese in Guadalcanal and Buna, launched amphibious assaults in the Solomons, New Georgia, New Guinea, Tarawa. The American and British navies were winning the Battle of the Atlantic. Most decisive of all, the Russians drove the Germans back from Stalingrad early in the year after an epic siege.
By the end of 1943 victory for the Allies was no longer seriously in doubt. The question now was less whether they would win than whether they could win in such a way as to make a lasting peace more likely.
This year was also a year of the great international conferences, where questions of war strategy and postwar peace policy were taken up. Roosevelt and Churchill met at Casablanca, Washington, and Quebec; Roosevelt, Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek met at Cairo; Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met at Teheran. At this last conference the thorny problem of the second front was finally settled, and soon afterward General Dwight D. Eisenhower was made its supreme commander.
Teheran brought together three towering personalities and a “concentration of physical power and political authority unique in the whole history of mankind.” Roosevelt beforehand was keenly confident of his capacity to establish a workable and mutually beneficial personal relationship with Stalin. So he did—as long as negotiations involved immediate problems of beating the Nazis. But on the longrun strategic questions involving the pattern of power in Europe after the war the President’s preoccupation with military victory put him at a disadvantage to both Churchill and Stalin. Yet Roosevelt probably believed that the crowning need both for winning the war and securing the peace was the visible fact of Allied co-operation.
“I may say that I ‘got along fine’ with Marshal Stalin,” he told the people in his Christmas Eve 1943 fireside chat, “… and I believe that we are going to get along very well with him and the Russian people—very well indeed.” And he told Miss Perkins gleefully how he had broken the ice with Stalin by deliberately baiting Churchill about his Britishness, his cigars, and his habits.
If Roosevelt had to deal with Stalin in the posture of alliance, he had to deal with Hitler in the posture of war. It was a battle not only of armies and navies but of ideas and symbols as well. The Fuehrer, a master of propaganda, interpreted the war to his people as a struggle of the masses against the plutocratic nations of the world. The President, now the Allies’ chief propagandist with a constituency of three-quarters of the world, affirmed Freedom as the supreme symbol of the cause for which the Allies fought. As Hitler sought to divest this symbol of any meaning except liberty to exploit the masses, Roosevelt sought to strengthen the idea of Freedom as a positive idea—as freedom to gain peace and security after the war. Roosevelt, in short, was compelled as a means of winning victory itself to fashion means of attaining postwar goals; one result was that during 1943 a series of “united nations” conferences began to plan postwar social and economic arrangements.
During all this time the home front was never free of storm and controversy. A “little cabinet” of Byrnes, Rosenman, Hopkins, and the President’s personal chief of staff, Admiral William D. Leahy, struggled to clear bottlenecks and settle interagency feuds, but the war management reflected the familiar administrative habits of the commander in chief. Some “second-level” decisions he refused to delegate, and he continued to play officials and agencies off against one another. As in the past, the results were not altogether happy. Feeling between Hull and Welles became so sharp that the latter resigned as under secretary of state, and Wallace and Jones warred against each other so openly over international economic policy that the President removed both of them from their posts in this field. Still, the crucial goal at home—mobilization without severe inflation—was achieved.
It was in the party and legislative arena that the domestic political hostilities were sharpest. Right after Pearl Harbor Roosevelt had, quite characteristically, demanded an end to “partisan domestic politics” for the duration. He had even suggested that the two national party organizations be converted to civilian defense. But partisan politics would not die so easily. Under the inexorable calendar of American elections the regular off-year congressional contests were fought in 1942. Roosevelt carefully avoided Wilson’s mistake of asking for a Democratic Congress; still, his party almost lost control of Congress. The Democratic margin in the House fell from 91 to 14, and 8 seats were lost in the Senate.
The inexorable political calendar brought also the presidential election of 1944. With the anti-third-term tradition broken, Roosevelt could eschew his devious preconvention tactics of 1940. So a week before the Democratic convention convened in mid-July 1944 Roosevelt wrote the national chairman a simple, direct letter stating that he would serve again if “the Commander in Chief of us all”— the people of the United States—should order him to do so in November.
THE ONE DOLLAR QUESTION, March 14, 1944, H. M. Talburt and Don Patterson, © by the Washington Daily News
July 14, 1944, C. K. Berryraan, Washington Star
“All that is within me cries out to go back to my home on the Hudson River,” Roosevelt wrote, but “we of this generation chance to live in a day and hour when our Nation has been attacked, and when its future existence and the future existence of our chosen method of government are at stake.”
When it came to the vice-presidency, though, it was the same old Roosevelt. He made half-promises to more than one aspirant, refused to tell Vice-President Wallace frankly that he could not back his nomination if it divided the convention, and yet wrote Wallace a letter stating that he was his “personal” choice. Harry Truman was surprised to find that he was the President’s official choice; he would run, the Missouri Senator told Roosevelt’s men, “but why the hell didn’t he tell me in the first place?”
On one matter the political wheel came full circle. In June 1944 Roosevelt talked with Rosenman about the subject he had toyed with again and again in his four decades of political activity: party realignment. “We ought to have two real parties—one liberal and the other conservative,” he told Rosenman. The Democratic party must get rid of its reactionary elements in the South and attract to it the Republican liberals. He asked Rosenman to take the question up with Willkie, who had just be
en shouldered out of the Republican running by the G.O.P. regulars. At a secret meeting with Rosenman in New York early in July, Willkie expressed enthusiastic support for the idea of party realignment, and he agreed to work plans out jointly with the President. But on one thing Willkie was insistent. He could not meet with Roosevelt until after the election. At a time when he was still trying to keep some leverage in the Republican party he feared that co-operation with the President would be misinterpreted as a “sellout” on his part to the Democrats.
Roosevelt, however, wanted to pursue the matter before election, and it was here that his reputation for cunning and indirectness tripped him up. The more the President pressed for an early meeting the more Willkie was convinced that he was engaged in an election tactic rather than in a long-term strategic effort. A series of leaks to the press about the indirect communication between Roosevelt and Willkie served only to heighten the latter’s suspicion. In any case, it was too late; for Willkie, who had always spent his energies recklessly, died of a coronary thrombosis in October. Thus was lost perhaps the supreme opportunity in a generation for party realignment.
Oct., 1944, Tom Little, Nashville Tennessean
The President now faced his fourth campaign for office—this time against the vigorous, youthful Dewey, who in 1942 had won the governorship of New York over the divided Democrats in that state. Roosevelt’s tactics followed the classic pattern: long inspection trips, patient “nonpartisanship” while Dewey lambasted the “tired old men,” and then a series of swift thrusts in the last few weeks of the campaign. The first of these thrusts was the most devastating—the Teamsters Union speech that answered Republican libels against “my little dog, Fala.” From then on, a Democrat commented, the race was between “Roosevelt’s dog and Dewey’s goat.”
Roosevelt’s victory over Dewey by a margin of 333 electoral and about 3,600,000 popular votes was one more testament of his masterly campaigning. It was also a tribute to his supreme direction of military operations. In June, Allied armies had surged into Normandy; in midsummer American troops drove the Japanese out of Saipan and Guam; in October they landed in the Philippines. As the war fast reached its climax, issues of peace became ever more urgent.
The great tasks of peace lay ahead—but now, as the year of victory neared, Roosevelt was desperately tired. The ceaseless toil and tension of the war years were leaving their mark. Like the great actor he was, he could shake himself out of his weariness and take his old role before the people. Fighting off campaign rumors about his condition, he had handled the exacting “Fala” speech—which so easily could have flopped—with exquisite skill; he had driven gaily for hours through New York streets in a cold, driving rain. But at other times he seemed quite different. His face went slack; he slumped in his chair; his hands trembled more than ever.
Yet so swiftly did he shift from dullness to buoyancy that even while his friends were whispering to one another about their concern there would be fresh reports that the President was showing his old form.
Roosevelt was desolately lonely, too, lonely in the midst of the White House crowd. Just as he had always stayed partly in the world symbolized by Hyde Park, so he had kept around him people who had represented that world. But they were slipping away. Sara Roosevelt died in 1941, and the President remarked to Eleanor that perhaps she had departed this world at the right time, for she might not like the postwar world. Endicott Peabody died late in 1944, and Roosevelt wrote his widow that the “whole tone of things is going to be a bit different from now on, for I have leaned on the Rector in all these many years far more than most people know.…” McIntyre died in 1943, Missy Le Hand the following year. Eleanor Roosevelt was often away on long war tours; all four Roosevelt sons were in uniform.
On January 20, 1945, Roosevelt took the oath of office for the fourth time; to save money and energy the inaugural was held in front of the White House rather than at the Capitol. He spoke for only a few minutes. “In the days and the years that are to come, we shall work for a just and honorable peace, a durable peace, as today we work and fight for total victory in war.…” As the President spoke, Allied troops in Europe stood on the threshold of victory. Hitler’s armies, except for a precarious hold in Hungary and northern Italy, had been forced back onto German soil. In the Pacific, American forces were preparing heavy assaults on islands barely a thousand miles from Tokyo.
“We can gain no lasting peace if we approach it with suspicion and mistrust—or with fear,” the President said in his inaugural; and in this spirit he met with Churchill and Stalin two weeks later at Yalta. Roosevelt faced resolutely this supreme test of Big Three co-operation. He was tired; he was frail; Churchill noticed that his face had “a transparency, an air of purification, and often there was a far-away look in his eyes.” But even at Yalta, he could be as gay, charming, and buoyant as ever. His mind moved as quickly and as acutely as ever over the great range of problems that the conference considered.
Out of the hard bargaining at Yalta issued a series of compromises. No nation had its own way. Stalin made concessions on German reparations, on voting arrangements in the projected world organization, on the question of a French zone of occupation in Germany, and on several other matters. Moreover, the date of Russia’s entrance into the war against Japan was fixed. Yet Stalin also gained some large demands. While the conference did not “give” him Poland, which was already occupied by Red troops, the terms of the agreement may have facilitated ensuing Soviet control of that country. And in the Far East Stalin was granted the Kurile Islands, the southern part of Sakhalin, and extensive spheres of influence in North China.
Had Roosevelt, the man who boasted of his prowess as a “hoss-trader,” finally been outbargained? Many would later cry that he had. Yet a verdict must take account of the different operating methods of the two men. Roosevelt, as always, was acting pragmatically, opportunistically, tactically. As usual, he was almost wholly concerned about the immediate job ahead—winning the war. Japan had yet to be overcome, and the military advised that the invasion and conquest of the homeland would be long and fanatically resisted. The first test of the atomic bomb was long in the future. His generals and admirals insisted—and the President agreed—that a Russian attack on Japan was essential.
Stalin, on the other hand, was thinking already of political arrangements in the postwar world. This granite-hard son of serfs, schooled in blood and violence, had always thought and acted several moves ahead of his adversaries—this was one reason he had defeated them. He had, moreover, few illusions about the postwar world; his revolutionary and Marxist background had taught him that, however friendly the Roosevelts and Churchills might be now, the inexorable laws of history would produce new tensions among nations, and Russia would have to be strong. Churchill, too, was aware of the political implications of victory; he, too, whatever his romantic Edwardian temperament, could see the storms ahead—had he not written bluntly that “the story of the human race is War”? But Churchill, unlike Stalin, did not have the continental land power to give strength to his strategy.
Roosevelt, a match for these men in the military direction of a war, was handicapped, when it came to the considerations of peace, by the belief that better days must lie ahead. Poignantly, in his inaugural address just before Yalta, he had quoted his old schoolmaster Peabody as saying that in life there would always be peaks and valleys, but that the “great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward; that a line drawn through the middle of the peaks and the valleys of the centuries always has an upward trend.” But Marx and Lenin seemed to have taught Stalin better than Peabody taught Roosevelt.
Such, at least, was the verdict of some of those who looked back from the years of bitterness and disillusion that followed the war. The verdict of still later years might be different. For beyond the military and political considerations of Yalta was the supreme accomplishment that Roosevelt wished to present to the world—the fact of Three Power co-operat
ion. It was quite characteristic of him that in the existence of this accomplishment as interpreted by him to a world hungering for leadership, he should see the best chance of a lasting peace. Again and again, in his report to Congress on the Yalta Conference, his words came back to the supreme fact of the unity of the three great powers. Later generations, looking back from more tranquil years, might see this as the crowning achievement of Yalta—one that dwarfed even the most far-reaching maneuvers of the Machiavellians.
Even so, Roosevelt made one colossal—though understandable-miscalculation. His plans assumed that he, as President of the United States for another four years, would be around to keep the fact of one world alive, to symbolize it for peoples everywhere, to mediate between Stalin and Churchill. But time was fast running out.
Roosevelt’s voice was strangely thick and blurred as he told Congress about Yalta. He stumbled and halted; he ad-libbed irrelevancies. At times his face and words flamed with the old eloquence, then it seemed to ebb away. Thus it was constantly in the final weeks. His body seemed to sag heavily in his chair or in the arms of his porters; his hands trembled so that the act of fixing his pince-nez or lighting his cigarette took all his powers of concentration; his gray-blue eyes clouded, his face went slack, his head hunched over. Then, suddenly, miraculously, the old gayness and vitality would return. At his last press conference in Washington the repartee raced from Canadian relations to the new peace organization to New York City politics to Yalta to night baseball; the President was as quick, humorous, and deft as ever.
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