The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  It was a moment of enormous relief for Roosevelt. Earlier in the evening he had been upset by early election returns from New York; but far more important, he had been worried for weeks about the ominous forces that seemed to be lining up with the opposition. There were altogether too many people, he felt, who thought in terms of appeasement of Hitler—honest views, most of them, he granted, but views rising out of materialism and selfishness. Vague reports had come in of obscure fifth-column activities. Speaking to Joseph Lash that election night, Roosevelt was blunt: “We seem to have averted a Putsch, Joe.”

  But now, standing before the crowd, Roosevelt could forget the stress of the campaign. He joked with his neighbors and reminisced about this “surprise” celebration—actually an old election-night tradition at Hyde Park.

  “A few old greybeards like me,” he said, “go back to 1912 and 1910. But I think that, except for a very few people in Hyde Park, I go back even further than that. I claim to remember—but the family say that I do not—and that was the first election of Grover Cleveland in 1884.

  “I was one and a half years old at that time, and I remember the torchlight parade that came down here that night….

  “And this youngster here, Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., was just saying to me that he wondered whether Franklin, 3rd, who is up there in that room, will also remember tonight. He also is one and a half years old….

  “We are facing difficult days in this country, but I think you will find me in the future just the same Franklin Roosevelt you have known a great many years.

  “My heart has always been here. It always will be.”

  HYDE PARK

  “The same Franklin Roosevelt you have known …” A few in the crowd must have remembered Franklin as a small boy snowshoeing across the fields, shooting birds for his collection, skating and ice-boating on the Hudson. Then Hyde Park had not seen much of him for a time. Fall after fall he had left for school—for four years at Groton and for another four at Harvard.

  He had returned to settle down with his widowed mother, but not for long; soon he made a suitable marriage with his distant cousin Eleanor Roosevelt, a niece of President Theodore Roosevelt. Again he had left Hyde Park—this time for Manhattan, where he studied and practiced law. Hyde Park had seen a good deal of him in the fall of 1910 when he campaigned strenuously to capture a seat in the New York Senate. But then he was off again—to Albany, where he spent two years as an anti-Tammany Democrat; to Washington, where he served Woodrow Wilson as Assistant Secretary of the Navy; to the political crossroads of the nation, as he campaigned in 1920 for the vice presidency.

  Then suddenly he was home again, his body seemingly shrunken, his long legs inert, his political career in ruins. For seven years he had searched for a cure for the effects of infantile paralysis, resting at Hyde Park, crawling around lonely beaches in Florida, swimming in the buoyant waters of Warm Springs, in Georgia. He never found the cure. But he had found himself, steadied his political course, struck out for the highest stakes in the nation’s politics. In 1928 his neighbors had helped send him to Albany, where he governed New York for four years. In March 1933 he had left Hyde Park for Washington, amid a numbing depression, to preside exuberantly for eight years over a nation in upheaval and regeneration.

  September 18, 1940, Rollin Kirby, reprinted by permission of the New York Post

  And then 1940. He had broken tradition to win a third-term nomination, taken on a formidable adversary in Wendell Willkie, and plunged into the maelstrom of shifting political alliances and seething political reactions to events abroad. He had faced isolationists in both parties, a labor turncoat in John L. Lewis, a bleak parting with his old campaign manager, James A. Farley. Hitler dominated events in America. The presidential politician who above all had sought to keep his choices wide and his timing under control had had, at the height of the campaign, to send destroyers to England and to draft American boys.

  October 14, 1940, Rollin Kirby, reprinted by permission of the New York Post

  The pursuit of victory had exacted a heavy price. In the last desperate days, Roosevelt had made some fearsome concessions to the isolationists. After Willkie hurled the flat prediction that a third term would mean dictatorship and war, Roosevelt had assured the “mothers of America” categorically that “your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” Yet his whole posture toward Hitler for months had been founded on the assumption that fascism was a menace to democracy everywhere, that the Nazis would not be content with the conquest of Europe but, with their junior partners, Italy and Japan, would ultimately carve up the world. Still, there was this flat pledge to the mothers of America.

  And now he was back, at the height of his power and prestige. Who was this Franklin Roosevelt? The master campaigner who had evaded the Republican attack and then outflanked and beaten his enemies in the last two weeks of the campaign? The son of Hyde Park who had never really left home, who had measured men and events by old-fashioned standards of noblesse oblige, aristocratic responsibility, inconspicuous consumption? The graduate of Groton who was still inspired by Rector Endicott Peabody’s admonitions about honesty, public morality, fair play? The state legislator who had embraced an almost radical farm-laborism at the height of Bull Moose reform? The Democratic-coalition politician who had learned to barter and compromise with Tammany chiefs, union leaders, city bosses, Western agrarians, Republican moderates, and isolationist Senators? The Wilson internationalist who had fought for the League of Nations but then abandoned it? The humanitarian who could spend billions for relief and recovery but almost obsessively preach the need for a balanced budget? The foe of totalitarianism who had stood by, vocal but inactive, during the agony of Munich? Could he be all these things?

  No one—certainly not his Hyde Park neighbors—could have answered such questions this election night of 1940. They might have seen some significance, however, in the people gathered around Roosevelt on that mild November evening.

  There was his mother, still active and bustling in her eighty-seventh year. A belle of the 1870s, later a young wife to a much older man, she had been the dominating influence on Franklin’s early character. She had struggled to keep her son in his Hyde Park frame. Politics, she felt, was for vulgar men. But she was proud of her son’s success, and a little defensive. This very election night she was confiding to a reporter that she could not understand why businessmen hated her son so. “They say he has been stirring up class hatred, but there is nothing in his heart to justify that. We were not brought up to consider whether people were rich or poor.”

  There was Eleanor Roosevelt, radiant and vivacious tonight in a red chiffon dress, so busy entertaining forty or so guests that she hardly paused to hear the election returns. A tortured childhood had seemed to make her sensitive to misfortune and, though this ugly duckling had made a fine marriage, her private troubles had not ceased. She had had to endure Sara’s benevolent dictatorship at Hyde Park, years of supervising five young children—and then the discovery that her gay, handsome husband was in love with another woman. This was Lucy Mercer, whom Eleanor had brought into the family as a part-time social secretary. Almost ten years younger than Roosevelt, she was a Catholic, and poor but of a noted Maryland family. She had won Roosevelt’s heart with her pretty face, artless, beguiling way, and her touching love for him. The affair had ended, Eleanor must have realized, mainly because Franklin feared his mother’s reaction and the political cost. But had the affair really ended? Certainly it had seemed so during Roosevelt’s invalidism, but one evening during her husband’s convalescence Eleanor had talked about it to her daughter, Anna, and had broken down and cried.

  Now, facing her third term in the White House, she was no longer the controversial First Lady of the mid-thirties. Most people had come to accept—many had come to admire—her endless travels and her championship of youth, Negroes, sharecroppers, the poor in general. Out of her private sufferings had emerged an indomitable public lady, compassionate, g
racious, even gay, but also imposing, a bit didactic, tenacious, sometimes hard as steel. But the private woman was still sensitive and vulnerable. She and her husband had the kind of affection and mutual consideration that temper a long marriage; but she was an ever-present conscience. “When you take a position on an issue,” Roosevelt once protested, “your backbone has no bend!” In many respects she was but a member of the President’s staff. Perhaps in a sense she willed it this way; Joan Erikson concluded that Eleanor Roosevelt had first become a decisive woman when, remembering how as a girl she had been unable to prevent the father she adored from being institutionalized, she resolved to help her polio-stricken husband to stay active in public life.

  There was Henry Morgenthau, Jr., a Dutchess County neighbor for many years. The Secretary of the Treasury was virtually a member of the Roosevelt family, with an especially close relation to Roosevelt’s sons. Fussy, thin-skinned, morose, he was sometimes a bother to the Roosevelts, but the President prized him for his absolute loyalty, his solid convictions, and, perhaps most of all, his fellow feeling for Dutchess County, its trees and land and crops.

  And there was Harry Hopkins, by 1940 the President’s chief aide. On the surface Hopkins was still the keen, casual, tough-talking New Dealer who had infuriated the conventional with his outspoken distaste for conservatives, his frequenting of race tracks, his jabbing attacks at friend and foe alike. But underneath, Hopkins had changed since the heady days of the New Deal. Scourged by illness, steadied by relentless demands, he had lost some of his “gee whiz” attitude toward rubbing shoulders with celebrities. He had given up the Secretaryship of Commerce in August 1940 to work and live in the White House as Roosevelt’s eyes, ears, and legs. Instantly empathetic to the President’s needs and moods, broadly educated by his chief in the ways and wiles of bureaucratic politics, he was essentially a means of presidential management and manipulation.

  Others were at Hyde Park that night: Missy LeHand and Grace Tully, both gay, devoted, long-time presidential secretaries who laughed at their boss’s endlessly repeated stories and gave him the relaxed after-dinner companionship that was so hard for Eleanor Roosevelt to provide; Samuel Rosenman, an old friend from gubernatorial days, now the President’s chief speech writer; Stephen Early, a florid, sometimes suave, sometimes bristling Virginian, in charge of the President’s press relations; Marvin McIntyre, a former newspaperman and a friend of Roosevelt’s since Navy Department days; General Edwin Watson, known as “Pa” in the White House, another Southerner, genial, bluff, adept at letting the right people see his chief and mollifying the disappointed; Robert Sherwood, a playwright and eloquent liberal, who had been drafted to help with the 1940 campaign speeches and who had stayed on.

  And Roosevelt himself? People were still trying to take the measure of the man. By the end of his second term his bewildering complexity had become his most visible trait. He could be bold or cautious, informal or dignified, cruel or kind, intolerant or long-suffering, urbane or almost rustic, impetuous or temporizing, Machiavellian or moralistic. Most political leaders embody contrasting traits; the baffling question about Roosevelt was what kind of internal standard, if any, determined which of his qualities would appear in what situations.

  And always there was his mercurial capacity to move from one mood to another, to deal with portentous public events with little private evasions, to lose himself as a political leader, at least for a moment, in some strange or funny role. For instance, shortly before Christmas 1940—at a time when Roosevelt was working on one of the momentous speeches of his presidency—a letter arrived for Fala from Henrik Van Loon’s dog Noddle. Back went a letter to Noddle from Fala. “The cookies were grand and I am glad you like me and I am glad, too, that you have never been on a train because the long rides on swaying cars over rolling wheels—just like five thousand mile cruises to see a lot of islands—ain’t no fun for us folks….P.S. I prefer to walk in the yard where trees grow and there is some place to scratch.”

  Was there a discernible core of ideas and values behind the glittering façades? What kind of crucible would prove the iron in the man?

  LONDON

  At the moment Roosevelt was greeting his Hyde Park neighbors, Luftwaffe bombers were dumping their loads onto London and turning back toward the Continent. It was almost dawn; all-clear sirens wailed, and groggy Londoners stumbled out of their shelters after the fiftieth consecutive night of Nazi bombing. Great craters pocked the heart of the ancient capital; buildings stood like skeletons; much of the dock area was rubble. Tiny paper Union Jacks fluttered on top of Londoners’ homes.

  Winston Churchill exulted over Roosevelt’s re-election. He had not dared to speak his mind before, “but now,” he wrote to the President on this day, “I feel you will not mind my saying that I prayed for your success and that I am truly thankful for it.” That did not mean, he added guardedly, “that I seek or wish for anything more than the full, fair, and free play of your mind upon the world issues now at stake….We are entering upon a sombre phase of what must evidently be a protracted and broadening war….Things are afoot which will be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe….” Unaccountably Roosevelt never acknowledged this message; perhaps his silence was eloquent.

  It was a somber time for Churchill. Resolute in war, defiant in defeat, he was impatient and fretful in these days of delay and uncertainty, when eddies and crosscurrents were cleaving the great tides of war. Britain had stood alone; the Royal Air Force had ground down the Luftwaffe; Hitler had postponed and then called off the cross-channel invasion; defenses in Britain and in Africa had been bolstered. But now sinkings in the Atlantic were increasing at a sickening rate; Germany was putting pressure on Vichy France and Franco Spain; the Free French had just fumbled a plan to seize Dakar. At home, production was lagging and the politicians were bickering.

  The old landmarks were vanishing. Bombs pitted famous London monuments; old clubs simply disappeared between teatime and supper. Often, Churchill was compelled to quit 10 Downing Street for a headquarters thirty-five feet below ground. There, in a monastic bedroom, he carried on his work, dictating clear, witty, marvelously precise instructions; attaching red labels reading ACTION THIS DAY to his orders and queries; and presiding over meetings in a cavernous yellow chamber protected by steel girders. He was restless underground. When he heard heavy bombing he climbed painfully to a rooftop, where, in his Air Force overcoat and cap, thick siren suit, with gas mask and steel helmet, he puffed stolidly on a long cigar and watched London burning. His daily schedule was quite different from Roosevelt’s. He started work in midmorning in a bed strewn with cables and reports, met with his aides later in the morning, presided exuberantly over a staff luncheon, took a long nap in the afternoon whenever the spirit moved him, conferred further or toured a blitzed section of the city, and then went through a strenuous evening of dictation, conferences, and idle talk until far past midnight—often to the dismay of his colleagues.

  By the end of 1940 these colleagues were acquiring the professionalism, steadfastness under pressure, and mild cynicism of old war hands. Churchill’s compact, nonpartisan War Cabinet comprised the Labour party’s leader, Clement Attlee, as Lord Privy Seal; Herbert Morrison, a long-time Cockney trade-union boss, as Home Secretary; Sir Kingsley Wood, as Chancellor of the Exchequer; Lord Halifax, as Foreign Secretary. Churchill was his own Minister of Defence. General Sir Hastings L. Ismay, a highly professional soldier who somehow coped with Churchill petulant as well as Churchill puckish, headed the Defence Secretariat; Sir John Dill presided over the Imperial General Staff; Lord Louis Mountbatten was Chief of Combined Operations. The death of Neville Chamberlain in early November 1940 and the return of Anthony Eden to the Foreign Office at year’s end (with Halifax shifted to the British Embassy in Washington) seemed to symbolize the final triumph of the Churchill men. The Prime Minister, at the height of his powers in his mid-sixties, drove them remorselessly, in turn infuriated, inspir
ed, confounded, and consoled them.

  By this time Churchill was on terms of slightly circumspect but close familiarity with Roosevelt, even though they had met only once, during World War I—a meeting Roosevelt professed to remember and Churchill did not. Their messages flowed back and forth freely. The Former Naval Person, as he still signed himself, could send as late as 2:00 A.M. a cable that would go directly to the American Embassy in London, which would flash it to the White House through special coding machines; often Roosevelt would have it before he went to bed. Sometimes the President’s reply was awaiting Churchill when he awoke in the morning.

  Churchill had looked on with admiration as Roosevelt defied the Nazis abroad and the isolationists at home. He had rejoiced when Roosevelt trounced his opposition at the polls. Now—presumably—the President would act.

  There were subdued differences between the two, however, even at this early stage. Each was his nation’s agent; each was a patriot. The interests of their nations, so closely intertwined during these months, could always branch off; they could even break apart, as had those of Vichy and London. Roosevelt had turned away Churchill’s plea for destroyers in May, when they were most needed; the deal in September, though warmly greeted in London, would bring only half a dozen of the old craft into action by the end of 1940. The destroyers themselves had been the lesser stakes in the game. Churchill’s main goal had been to entangle the two nation’s affairs and interests beyond possibility of separation and divorce. Roosevelt had wanted instead a straight quid pro quo that he could present to a wary Congress as a simple Yankee horse trade. The two leaders had compromised: Churchill had treated the exchange of destroyers and leased bases as a “parallel transaction” reflecting the mutual interests of the two countries; Roosevelt had presented it to Congress as the quid and quo of a deal.