The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

The notables of Japan flanked Hirohito; his brothers and other nobility, old statesmen and warriors who still had access to the throne, and his Cabinet stood rigid and solemn in their frock coats. Here was the Foreign Minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, brilliant, mercurial, talkative, unpredictable, a graduate of the University of Oregon, where he had suffered the real and imagined humiliations of a hotel busboy to put himself through college; the Minister of War, Hideki Tojo—“Fighting Tojo,” to his young schoolmates—now a brusque, sharp-minded army general who had built his reputation in governing the Emperor’s troops in Manchuria; Navy Minister Zengo Yoshida, the tireless agent of his service; the Premier, Prince Fumimaro Konoye, a handsome aristocrat, towering over his colleagues only in height, adroit, versatile, but also irresolute and hypochondriacal, lacking both the means and the will to bridle his military colleagues.

  The Emperor arose; Prince Konoye shouted the banzais; 50,000 people bobbed in rippling waves, and throughout Japan millions of villagers, assembled before their elders, bowed to their Emperor. In front of the palace all eyes fastened on Hirohito, man, god, high priest, symbol, and emperor. He looked every inch not an emperor, but he played the part destined for him: a patient ceremonialist, dutiful family man, titular autocrat with influence over the drift of affairs through a look or a gesture but without decisive control over major decisions.

  Next day, at an equally stately ceremony, Roosevelt’s old friend and fellow Grotonian Ambassador Joseph C. Grew spoke for the diplomatic corps. He faced the Emperor, bowed, got out spectacles and manuscript, read, bowed, replaced his manuscript and spectacles, bowed again, turned backward, and paced solemnly to his place. It was a bland address, calling for peace and mutual cooperation and new contributions by Japan to culture, but the Ambassador was pleased that Hirohito seemed to nod vigorous approval of his main points. Was this a sign to the military? Grew could not tell.

  Now in his eighth year in Tokyo, he had reported to Washington a series of dismal events: assassinations of key government leaders by army fanatics; the tightening grip on Manchuria; Tokyo’s joining with Berlin in the Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936; the move into China, with the capture of Shanghai and the rape of Nanking; the ever-heightening pressure on Chiang Kai-shek’s government; the fierce, furtive clashes of Japanese and Russian troops in Asia. The military clearly had been given its head, but there were times of hesitation, when the moderates seemed to have their chance, especially after the shocking news—at least to genuinely anti-Communist military chiefs—of the Russo-German Pact of 1939. Patient, correct, polished, outwardly imperturbable but inwardly mystified and anguished, Grew had counseled moderation, in the hope that the military’s fortune would run out.

  Adolf Hitler’s blitz through the Low Countries, the fall of France, the threatened invasion of Britain had echoed thunderously in the councils of Tokyo. Dutch, French, even British possessions seemed ready to be plucked. Impatient to seize the opportunity, military leaders in July 1940 had forced a moderate government to quit and had established a new government under Konoye. A hard line was then set. In order to settle the “China incident,” Nationalist China’s supply lines were to be severed, which would mean a flanking move through Indochina. Such a move would in turn antagonize Washington and London and would require offsetting support in the West. Hitler and Mussolini, eager to divert American efforts into the Pacific, would readily accept a stronger Axis coalition.

  Late in August, Tokyo extracted from Vichy an accord that recognized Japan’s immediate military interest in Indochina. In this pinch the French had turned to Roosevelt for help, but the administration, deep in a political contest, offered nothing but moralisms. Washington’s attitude was hardening, however—as was that of its man in Tokyo. In a cable that was to become famous as the “Green Light” message, Grew stated that “Japan today is one of the predatory powers; she has submerged all moral and ethical sense and has become unashamedly and frankly opportunist, seeking at every turn to profit by the weakness of others. Her policy of southward expansion definitely threatens American interests in the Pacific.” Japan must be deterred no longer by words, but by American power.

  Grew’s views strengthened the hands of those advisers who were urging Roosevelt to use his only immediate weapon. Late in September the administration decided on a complete embargo on all types of iron and steel scrap—but not on oil—to Japan and announced a new loan to China.

  By now Tokyo was fishing in deep waters. For several weeks Matsuoka had been negotiating with the Germans over a tripartite pact. The burning question was the extent to which Berlin would recognize Japan’s sphere of interest. A hopeful list of acquisitions under Japan’s New Order had been drawn up: Indochina, Thailand, British Malaya, British Borneo, the Dutch East Indies, Burma, Australia, New Zealand, India, “etc.,” with Japan, Manchuria, and China as the New Order’s heartland. To Tokyo’s surprise and delight Hitler’s envoy had gone along with this list, except possibly for India, which might be reserved for Russia. The Germans made clear, however, that Japan must help them keep America out of the European war.

  Supporting the treaty, Matsuoka stated flatly to the Privy Council: “Germany and Japan have a common aim in concluding this pact. Germany wants to prevent America’s entry into the war, and Japan a Japanese-American conflict.” But the elder statemen pondered Article 3 of the pact: “Germany, Italy and Japan agree…to assist one another with all political, economic and military means if one of the three Contracting Powers is attacked by a Power at present not involved in the European War or in the Chinese-Japanese conflict.” Could war be prevented better by appeasing Roosevelt or through a show of coalition power? But it was too late for second thoughts; in September the Japanese signed the Tripartite Pact.

  Publicly the United States had responded calmly to the news of the pact but an intense struggle over policy continued. The pact had bolstered the position of the hawks, who wanted a tougher line against Japan. The administration was divided, some members fearing that stronger measures—especially an embargo on oil—would precipitate a war that the country was not yet ready to fight. The President considered a number of alternatives, including a shift of naval strength westward, even to Singapore, or a naval patrol, but he decided to play for time.

  “Now we’ve stopped scrap iron,” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote him a week after Election Day, “what about oil?”

  “The real answer which you cannot use,” he replied “is that if we forbid oil shipments to Japan, Japan will increase her purchases of Mexican oil and furthermore, may be driven by actual necessity to a descent on the Dutch East Indies.” And that, he added, might encourage the spread of war in the Far East.

  Tokyo, for its part, was quiet. Matsuoka insisted that the pact was not directed against the United States; he even invited Washington to join the pact and to help the Axis make the world into one big family. It was this kind of bravado that led Cordell Hull to say that Matsuoka was as crooked as a basket of fishhooks.

  In mid-December Grew sent “Dear Frank” a personal year-end assessment of the Pacific situation. After eight years of effort, he told the President, he found that diplomacy had been defeated “by trends and forces utterly beyond its control, and that our work has been swept away as if by a typhoon….” He put the main problem directly to the President: “Sooner or later, unless we are prepared…to withdraw bag and baggage from the entire sphere of ‘Greater East Asia including the South Seas’ (which God forbid), we are bound eventually to come to a head-on clash with Japan.

  “A progressively firm policy on our part will entail inevitable risks—especially risks of sudden uncalculated strokes, such as the sinking of the Panay, which might inflame the American people—but in my opinion these risks are less in degree than the far-greater future dangers which we would face if we were to follow a policy of laissez faire….

  “It is important constantly to bear in mind the fact that if we take measures ‘short of war’ with no real intention to carry those measures to their fina
l conclusion if necessary, such lack of intention will be all too obvious to the Japanese, who will proceed undeterred and even with greater incentive, on their way. Only if they become certain that we mean to fight if called upon to do so will our preliminary measures stand some chance of proving effective and of removing the necessity for war—the old story of Sir Edward Grey in 1914….

  “You are playing a masterly hand in our foreign affairs,” he concluded, “and I am profoundly thankful that the country is not to be deprived of your clear vision, determination, and splendid courage in piloting the old ship of state.” These remarks were pleasing and barbed; the pilot in the White House, who had stayed on the bridge in part by promising to keep the American people out of war, now had to face Realpolitik.

  WASHINGTON

  Two days after the election Franklin Roosevelt’s train rolled slowly south along the Hudson River, was shunted through New York City, and then bore him through the long night to Washington. In the morning Eleanor Roosevelt, Vice President-elect Henry A. Wallace, and several thousand Washingtonians greeted him at Union Station. Two hundred thousand people lined Pennsylvania Avenue. The returning hero, back from the wars like some conqueror of old, jubilantly doffed his familiar campaign fedora as the limousine inched its way to the White House. Thousands followed the car, poured through the open White House gates, swarmed over the lawn, and chanted “WE WANT ROOSEVELT!” until the President and the First Lady appeared on the north portico.

  And now the daily routine, fashioned during eight years in office, began again in the famous old mansion. Around 8:30 A.M. the President, a cape thrown around his shoulders, breakfasted in bed while he skimmed rapidly through dispatches and newspapers—usually the New York Times and the Herald Tribune (especially flown from New York), the Washington papers, the Baltimore Sun, and the Chicago Tribune—his eyes lighting with radar speed on presidential and political items. Eleanor might come in at this point with an urgent plea, and then presidential aides—Hopkins, Watson, Early, McIntyre, the old White House hand William D. Hassett, presidential physician Ross T. McIntyre for a brief check-up. Around 10:00 A.M. the President’s valet, Arthur Prettyman, trundled him into the White House elevator in his small armless wheel chair, lowered him to the ground floor, and wheeled him through the colonnade to his office, now accompanied by Secret Service men with baskets of presidential papers. Fala might meet his master on the way and receive a presidential caress. After the President’s return to his study around 5:30 came a relaxed and garrulous cocktail hour, as the President painstakingly measured out the liquor and dominated the conversation at the same time. Usually he dined with immediate members of his family and staff, and in the evening variously worked on speeches, leafed through reports, reminisced with his secretaries, or toyed with his collections of stamps and naval prints.

  Friday was usually Cabinet day; on the Friday after the election the President met with his official family for the first time since he had left for the campaign battles. The Cabinet of November 1940 was ripe in years, experience—and disagreements. The members with the greatest political weight, measured either by formal authority or by easy access to the President and his influence, were (along with Morgenthau) Secretary of State Cordell Hull, courtly, conspicuously patient and long-suffering until the point when he could explode under pressure with a mule skinner’s temper and damn his enemies, foreign and domestic; Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, no intimate of the President, but a man of such moral stature in American politics and strong and plain opinions that he exerted a constant, if unseen, influence on his chief; Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the first woman Cabinet member in American history, utterly loyal to the President and to Eleanor Roosevelt, a sweet-talking conciliator of rival politicians and labor leaders, her official mien hardly concealing a sensitive feminine personality; and, oddly, Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes, the Eeyore of the Cabinet if Morgenthau was its Rabbit, a prowling defender of his bureaucratic turf, prickly and petty but insufferably right-minded on the big issues, a host to his chief for poker and a grumpy guest of the President for fishing.

  The Cabinet was a brier patch of rivalries and differences. Stimson and most of the others fretted over Hull’s procrastinations and precautions; Hull, for his part, suspected, sometimes rightly, that certain of his colleagues would be happy to take over some of his department’s responsibilities; Morgenthau, in moving ahead on aid to Britain, jousted with both the State and War Departments; Ickes had battled with virtually all his colleagues, and pursued his most passionate determination, next to thwarting Hitler, to filch the Forest Service from the Department of Agriculture.

  But the Cabinet was broadly united on the cardinal issue of 1940. Hull had warned Latin-American diplomats of a wild runaway race by “certain rulers” bent on conquest without limit. Stimson was gradually becoming convinced that war was not only inevitable but also necessary to clear the field for a decisive effort. Morgenthau feared and hated the Nazis and yearned to help Britain as fully as American resources allowed. Ickes for years had been publicly reviling Hitler and for months urging a full embargo against Japan. The others were strong interventionists.

  Every ounce of the Cabinet’s talent and militance was needed in the fall of 1940. It was clear that Britain faced a crisis of shipping, supply, and money. There were rumors of mighty strategic decisions being made in enemy capitals. Interventionists were demanding action; the President had a mandate for all aid to Britain short of war—why didn’t he deliver? But nothing seemed to happen. When Lord Lothian, the British Ambassador, returned from London late in November with a warning that his nation was nearing the end of its financial resources, Roosevelt told him that London must liquidate its investments in the New World before asking for money.

  While official Washington waited for marching orders, the President took a four-day cruise down the Potomac to catch up on his sleep. Then he upset press predictions by making no changes in his Cabinet, tried unsuccessfully to persuade the aged General John J. Pershing to serve as ambassador to Vichy France, asked Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish to find out if the Cherable Islands, which he had once told reporters he would visit, could be found in poetry or fiction (they could not), and called for an annual Art Week under White House sponsorship. The President made it clear that he would not ask for repeal or modification of the Neutrality Act, which forbade loans to belligerents, or of the Johnson Act, which forbade loans to countries that had defaulted on their World War I debts.

  At a press conference, the President fended off reporters who were looking for big postelection decisions on the war. It was all very good-natured. Asked by a reporter whether his economy ban on civilian highways included parking shoulders for defense highways, the President could not resist the opening.

  “Parking shoulders?”

  “Yes, widening out on the edge, supposedly to let the civilians park as the military go by.”

  “You don’t mean necking places?”

  The reporters roared, but they got precious little news. The administration seemed to be drifting. Then on December 3 the President boarded the cruiser Tuscaloosa for a ten-day cruise through the Caribbean. Besides his office staff he took only Harry Hopkins.

  While Roosevelt fished, watched movies, entertained British colonial officials—including the Duke and Duchess of Windsor—and looked over naval bases, Cabinet officers back in Washington struggled with the dire problem of aid to Britain. Production officials agreed that American industry could produce enough for both countries, and army chiefs were happy to supply British as well as American needs, for this would require an enormous expansion of defense production facilities, but what about the financing? The British in Washington contended that they could not possibly pay for such a huge program. Morgenthau asked Jesse Jones, head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, if he could legally use its funds to build defense plants. For the War Department, yes, said Jones, but not for the British. Stimson argued that the adminis
tration must no longer temporize, but present the whole issue to Congress, and the others agreed. But this seemed a counsel of despair; everyone could imagine the explosion on Capitol Hill if the issues were clearly drawn. And would the President risk a legislative defeat of this magnitude?

  A thousand miles south, Navy seaplanes were bringing the President daily reports on these anxious searchings. Then, as the Tuscaloosa sat off Antigua in the bright sun, a seaplane arrived with Churchill’s fateful postelection letter. No one remembered later that Roosevelt seemed especially moved by it. “I didn’t know for quite a while what he was thinking about, if anything,” Hopkins said later. “But then—I began to get the idea that he was refueling, the way he so often does when he seems to be resting and carefree. So I didn’t ask him any questions. Then, one evening, he suddenly came out with it—the whole program. He didn’t seem to have any clear idea how it could be done legally. But there wasn’t a doubt in his mind that he’d find a way to do it.”

  The “whole program” was Lend-Lease—the simple notion that the United States could send Britain munitions without charge and be repaid not in dollars, but in kind, after the war was over.

  This was no rabbit pulled out of a presidential hat. Churchill’s letter had acted merely as a catalyst. A British shipbuilding mission had recently arrived in Washington to contract for ships to be built in the United States. For weeks, perhaps months, the President had been thinking of building cargo ships and leasing them to Britain for the duration. Why not extend the scheme to guns and other munitions? This apparently simple extension, however, represented a vast expansion and shift in the formula. There was no way that Britain could return thousands of planes and tanks after the war; there was no way that Americans could use them if it did. Maritime Commission officials had opposed even the leasing of ships, on the ground that the United States would not need a large fleet after the war and would be stuck with a lot of useless vessels. If this was true of ships, it was doubly true of tanks and guns. But so adroitly and imaginatively did Roosevelt handle the matter that for a long time its critics made every objection except the crucial one.