The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  If there were any miracles in World War II, the shipbuilding spurt of 1942 would qualify. The President had set astronomical goals in January; he boosted these again the next month, and then again a few months later. Admiral Land and his Maritime Commission were aghast at these figures, which seemed to have been plucked out of nowhere. The commission had to compete for supplies against the Navy and Army, and the shipyards were plagued by machine-tool shortages, strikes, and poor planning of their own. Land demanded steel and more steel; he also urged the President to freeze labor-management relations in the industry so that the workers would not be distracted by union issues. During the first nine months of 1942, shipbuilding fell behind schedule and seemed unable either to meet Roosevelt’s final goal or to offset Allied losses. But it was evident even during the output troughs that the curve of production would rise so high that by the end of 1942 the Commander in Chief’s initial objective of eight million tons would be met. It was.

  The near-miracle would become an American legend. It was achieved as much by flouting the rules as by observing them. Henry J. Kaiser, in particular, grabbed all the tools and materials he could lay his hands on, hired untrained workers recklessly on the theory that he could teach them, and was denounced for pirating labor and priority supplies. But he depended on American experience in standardization, prefabrication, and mass production, plus the happy protection of cost-plus. He had instinctively grasped Roosevelt’s rule, Eliot Janeway noted, that energy was more efficient than efficiency. By spring of 1942 Kaiser’s and other shipyards that had begun to build only the year before were breaking records by completing ships in sixty to seventy days rather than the anticipated 105. Deliveries rose from twenty-six in March to sixty-seven in June. Most of the credit for the feat went to the builders and doers. But the dreamer in the White House who had set the “impossible” goals in 1942 was also the signer of the Merchant Marine Act of 1936 and the launcher of a long-range shipbuilding program; he had stepped up the shipbuilding effort after the fall of France; he had put men like Land and Vickery in charge; and—perhaps hardest of all despite his love for small graceful ships he had approved the design of a simple cargo vessel called the “Liberty ship” but known to Roosevelt and other sailors as the “Ugly Duckling.”

  Five months after Pearl Harbor war production had been lagging so badly that Roosevelt warned Nelson and others that his great goals for 1942 were not being met. War supply improved markedly during the spring, however, and by midsummer the toughest problem facing the administration was not so much production as planning the allocation of war supply to different services at home and to beseeching Allies abroad, in the face of ever-shifting strategic needs, as the fortunes of war rose and fell in distant battle theaters. This planning, of incredible magnitude and complexity, was putting heavy pressure on Roosevelt’s war agencies and on his and Churchill’s allied boards by late spring of 1942.

  Part of the trouble lay in the sudden transition from cold to all-out war. Before Pearl Harbor the President had been cautious in his public projection of spending and in his requests to Congress, and Congress had been irresolute and at times niggardly. On December 7 everything instantly changed: Roosevelt set seemingly fantastic production goals, and Congress simply opened the floodgates, appropriating almost a hundred billion dollars in the first six months and adding another sixty billion in the next four.

  Such was the case with fighting manpower, too. The Congress that had almost voted out the draft endorsed sudden huge expansions after Pearl Harbor. In January 1942 the President authorized an increase in army strength to 3.6 million by the end of the year. Four months later he boosted this goal to well over five million, but he would not approve Marshall’s proposal to go to almost nine million by the end of 1943. To Marshall’s chagrin, the President preferred to plan six months to a year ahead—and he made no secret of that preference. Roosevelt was sensitive to charges that more equipment was being bought than could be used or could be sent overseas—for example, a newspaper report that enough uniforms were on hand or on order for fifty million men.

  Struggling to hold the colossal sums in some kind of balance was Donald Nelson and his WPB. In early spring he had to inform the President that the forty billion dollars’ worth of production considered feasible for 1942 right after Pearl Harbor had become inflated to sixty-two billion, and the sixty billion for 1943 had swollen to 110 billion—and that the increases were physically not possible. Nelson was in an unhappy position of being the “production czar” without a czar’s powers. The President had placed on him, he insisted to the War Department and other rivals, the duty of exercising direction over the entire war procurement and production program. But in fact he had to compete with General Brehon Somervell’s huge new Services of Supply, with the Navy, with the international raw materials and allocations boards, and with a cluster of shipping and other czars. And Nelson himself was too much the conciliator and the negotiator to give driving leadership to the whole mobilization and allocation effort. The result was a procurement free-for-all. Merchant ships took steel from the Navy, the Navy took aluminum from aircraft, rubber took valves from escort vessels and from petroleum, the pipelines took steel from ships, new tools, and the railroads. “All semblance of balance in the production program disappeared,” a Budget Bureau study revealed, “because of the different rates of contracting and of production that resulted from the scramble to place orders.”

  Roosevelt was still being urged to set up an integrated super-agency under a real superczar, as Baruch had proposed long before the war, and he was still resisting. In the spring of 1942 strategic plans were still open; whether or not Russia could survive the gathering German offensive was still a burning question. The President still did not want to plan ahead more than six months or a year; he wanted, as always, to protect other options in case of a collapse in Russia or North Africa or the Pacific. He could not forget that the very strength of a production and allocation superczar might tie his hands in granting aid to other nations, especially Russia.

  Always there were the frantic demands of Allied nations for supplies, and no one in authority in Washington was more sensitive to those demands than Roosevelt. The pressure from abroad itself was institutionalized; uneasily coexisting with United States agencies by this time were a host of international organizations for allocation. At the ARCADIA Conference Roosevelt and Churchill had set up the Combined Munitions Assignments Board (MAB) in Washington and London, operating under the Combined Chiefs of Staff; other combined boards were established for raw materials, production, shipping, and food during the first half of 1942. Despite some misgivings in Washington that the British would have an undue influence over the MAB pool of arms while making much the smaller contribution, the board worked reasonably well as a means of Anglo-American consultation and adjustment. But it was by no means a global agency. Its members were required only to “confer” with Russia, China, and other United Nations; when Chungking put out feelers for membership it was denied on the ground that only nations with disposable surpluses should be admitted.

  Lend-Lease, now one of the veteran programs after a year of expansion and hard experience, had become a potent instrument of American foreign policy. It could set broad policy for programs in support of the civilian economy of beneficiary nations, but after Pearl Harbor it gave up to the War Department most of its control of military Lend-Lease. Military and civilian goods that could easily be segregated in theory could not be in practice—for example, when it came to shipping military equipment and nonmilitary supplies in one cargo vessel. For months after Pearl Harbor, military Lend-Lease was snarled by interagency conflict, administrative confusion, and innumerable crises.

  The obvious questions were always there: who of the many claimants should get what, how much, and when? Those who lost out in the strenuous competition were sorely tempted to appeal to the White House—to Hopkins and even to Roosevelt. The elaborate and constantly expanding machinery set up to free the Presid
ent from lesser problems could also jam and eject crises back into the White House, often at the most unpropitious moments. The Commander in Chief was not averse to shouldering this burden; he often seemed to welcome it. “Come to Poppa,” he would tell the aggrieved. But there was always the possibility that the machinery would subvert or erode presidential purpose, especially when the machinery itself served narrower needs. Aid to Russia was a case in point.

  Morgenthau came in to see the President in mid-March with some disturbing figures. Washington had agreed to deliver to the Soviets by April 1, 1942, 42,000 tons of steel wire, of which only 7,500 tons would have been shipped under existing schedules. The Secretary went down the gloomy list: 3,000 tools promised, 820 shipped; stainless steel—120 tons versus twenty-two; cold-rolled steel strips—48,000 tons versus 19,000; steel alloy tubes—1,200 tons versus none at all….

  “I do not want to be in the same position as the English,” Roosevelt said as he contemplated these figures. “The English promised the Russians two divisions. They failed. They promised them help in the Caucasus. They failed. Every promise the English have made to the Russians, they have fallen down on….The only reason we stand so well with the Russians is that up to date we have kept our promises….

  “I would go out and take the stuff off the shelves of the stores, and pay them any price necessary, and put it in a truck and rush it to the boat….Nothing would be worse than to have the Russians collapse.… I would rather lose New Zealand, Australia or anything else than have the Russians collapse.”

  The President told Morgenthau to see to it personally that the “stuff” moved to Russia. He initialed a chit for his Secretary: “This is critical because (a) we must keep our word (b) because Russian resistance counts most today.” Morgenthau told his staff that the President wanted him to get all concerned together, that the boss felt “they had made a perfect monkey of him” on Russian aid and he would not stand for it.

  For weeks the President prodded his agencies, which had many excuses for delays and inaction, including failures at the Soviet end. By midsummer—a year after the original decision to aid Russia—deliveries were beginning to catch up with pledges. Through it all Roosevelt remained basically optimistic, even while the Russians were once again reeling back from German blows.

  “The amusing thing about the President,” Morgenthau noted in his diary in September after listening to the President discuss the holocaust in Russia, “is that he can state these facts coolly and calmly whether we win or lose the war, and to me it is most encouraging that he really seems to face these issues, and that he is not kidding himself one minute about the war. That, to me, seems to be the correct attitude for a commander-in-chief to take.”

  THE ALCHEMISTS OF SCIENCE

  The Commander in Chief during these ominous summer weeks was worried by a prospect even more appalling than the overrunning of Russia—the possibility that the Nazis might have unlocked the secrets of the atomic bomb and might be building it.

  It was now three years since Albert Einstein had written to the President to tell him that recent work by Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard led him to expect that the element uranium might be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future, that it might be possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium to generate quantities of new radiumlike elements, and that it was “conceivable—though less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed”—bombs so powerful, Einstein added, that they could blow up a whole port and its environs. Einstein’s letter was the culmination of passionate efforts by refugee scientists and others to press on the government their understanding of atomic energy, following Niels Bohr’s announcement that Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman in Berlin had achieved the fission of uranium atoms and the release of stupendous amounts of energy.

  An atomic bomb in the hands of Hitler—this was unthinkable. How could the American government be alerted? After Fermi failed to interest the Navy Department early in 1939, it was decided that the President must be approached, and that this could best be done under the auspices of the celebrated Einstein. But it was not a time when even this name could unlock doors quickly. August and September 1939 were months of crisis and war in Europe. The letter was entrusted to Alexander Sachs, a financier and occasional adviser to the President, but it was not until mid-October 1939 that Sachs could get in to see the President.

  “Alex, what are you up to?” Roosevelt had demanded genially when Sachs came in. Sachs had an extraordinary answer, not only in Einstein’s letter, but also in more recent atomic developments. Roosevelt’s interest flagged during the long explanation; he tried to end the whole business by remarking that though it was very interesting, government involvement at the moment seemed premature. Sachs wangled an invitation to breakfast, however, and spent part of the evening calculating how he could get through to the President. When in the morning Roosevelt asked him, “What bright idea have you got now?” Sachs told him about Napoleon’s rejection of Fulton when the inventor of the steamship tried to interest him in the idea.

  “This is an example of how England was saved by the shortsightedness of an adversary,” Sachs went on. The President was quiet a few moments, thinking.

  “Alex, what you are after is to see that the Nazis don’t blow us up.” He called in Watson. “Pa, this requires action.”

  Action came in fits and starts, and always under the dread apprehension that the Germans might be ahead. Bohr compared the atomic scientists to the “Alchemysts of former days, groping in the dark in their vain efforts to make gold.” An advisory committee on uranium was created, with representatives of the Ordnance Departments of both the Army and the Navy, and with Lyman J. Briggs, Director of the National Bureau of Standards, as chairman. The President did not want the initial research and evaluation to be monopolized by one of the services. The committee met with Szilard and Fermi and others but made little progress in the first year. Both the theoretical and operational problems seemed immensely complicated.

  Roosevelt did not press the matter. Late 1939 and early 1940 were taken up with the twilight war in Europe. On May 10, 1940 he addressed the Eighth Pan American Scientific Congress in Washington and stated that the “great achievements of science and even of art can be used in one way or another to destroy as well as to create.…If death is desired, science can do that. If a full, rich and useful life is sought, science can do that also….You and I, in the long run if it be necessary, will act together to protect and defend by every means at our command our science, our culture, our American freedom and our civilization….” In the audience was a young scientist named Edward Teller. He had not planned to attend, because he disliked politics and considered political speeches a waste of time. But the Netherlands had been invaded that day and the shaken physicist went. Sitting there he concluded that Roosevelt was saying that the duty of scientists was to see that the best weapons would be available for use if necessary, and Teller, who had had serious qualms about devoting himself to weapons, suddenly found his last doubts removed as to whether he should work on the atomic bomb.

  The next month the President established the National Defense Research Committee, composed of such luminaries as President James B. Conant, of Harvard, and Karl T. Compton, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and at last extensive research on atomic fission with government funds was begun. Progress was slow. British scientists were also at work and were becoming somewhat more optimistic than their American counterparts. Early in October 1941 Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, reported to Roosevelt and Wallace the British view that a bomb could be constructed from U-235 that had been produced by a diffusion plant. Prognostications, he made clear, were still not definite. The President endorsed full interchange with the British and ordered policy considerations to be restricted to a small group composed of himself, the Vice President, Stimson, Marshall, Bush, and Conant. By the eve of Pearl Ha
rbor the President’s orders were for full speed ahead. But, as usual, he was taking the experimental approach. If in six months the project was making definite progress, he would make available all the industrial and technological resources of the nation to bring about crash production of the atomic bomb.

  By mid-1942 scientists were trying several different methods for extracting the U-235 isotope and plutonium. Harold C. Urey, at Columbia University, was conducting gaseous-diffusion research, physicists at the University of Virginia and the Standard Oil Company were studying the centrifuge method, and Ernest O. Lawrence was directing electromagnetic separation at Berkeley. Scientists at the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago, under Fermi, were working on plutonium research and planning to build the world’s first nuclear reactor. At this time there was still little to choose among the centrifuge, diffusion, and electromagnetic methods of separating U-235 and the uranium-graphite-pile and uranium-heavy-water-pile methods of producing plutonium. Conant, it was said, had the gambling spirit of the New England pioneers; and so did Roosevelt, who without evident hesitation approved tens of millions of dollars for pilot plants.

  When Roosevelt and Churchill met at Hyde Park in June 1942 they apprised each other of their progress with “Tube Alloys,” the English code name for the atomic project. Churchill was relieved when the President indicated that the United States would assume the responsibility for development. The project was already outstripping the managerial and governmental resources of the scientists, and in this same month the President ordered the Army to undertake the atomic-bomb program. A new division was created within the Army Corps of Engineers to direct the construction of massive research plants and secret atomic cities. The Manhattan Engineering District was launched in August 1942.