Stimson performed a bigger service for the President that evening. He heard from Elmer Davis that Willkie was about to address the New York Herald Tribune Forum and to denounce American leaders for promising freedom to the French people and then putting their enslaver in control of them. “Shall we be quiet when we see our government’s long appeasement of Vichy find its logical conclusion in our collaboration with Darlan, Hitler’s tool?” Reaching his fellow Republican by telephone less than an hour before he was to speak, Stimson implored him to delete the critical passage or otherwise jeopardize the lives of 60,000 soldiers. Willkie lost his temper, denounced Stimson for trying to control his freedom—but after exhausting his reservoir of profanity he agreed to tone down his speech. As delivered, it merely pummeled that battered old punching bag, the State Department. The President listened to Willkie’s broadcast and later telephoned Stimson to congratulate him.
By the iron laws of mutual hostility, the more the Americans embraced Darlan in Algiers, the more they alienated de Gaulle in London. The Free French leader, at first exhilarated by the landings in Africa, turned cold toward the invaders as they parleyed with the men of Vichy. He felt that the Darlan deal was politically shortsighted, tactically ineffective, and an American ploy for postwar supremacy. “What remains of the honor of France,” he proclaimed, “will stay intact in my hands.” He called on Admiral Stark and tendered a one-sentence note: “The United States can pay traitors but not with the honor of France.” Stark refused to accept it. Churchill was caught between his desire to sustain the soldiers in the field, his policy of recognizing de Gaulle and working with him, and the revulsion against Darlan among the people and even within his own government. Somehow he managed to back Eisenhower while making clear that the Darlan deal was essentially an American undertaking.
At first Roosevelt seemed unmoved by the furore. He received from Eisenhower a strong cable explaining that if Darlan was repudiated, French armed forces would resist passively and perhaps actively—and the possibility of getting the French Navy out of Toulon intact and of winning French military assistance in France would be gone. Impressed by this cable, Roosevelt read it to Hopkins with such superb emphasis that it seemed to Sherwood, sitting by, as if he were making a plea for his European commander before the bar of history. But as the tumult over Darlan mounted, Roosevelt was compelled to issue a public justification. “I have accepted General Eisenhower’s political arrangements made for the time being in Northern and Western Africa.” He understood and approved the widespread feeling that in view of the history of the last two years no permanent arrangement should be made with Darlan. “We are opposed to Frenchmen who support Hitler and the Axis. No one in our Army has any authority to discuss the future Government of France and the French Empire.
“The future French Government will be established, not by any individual in Metropolitan France or overseas, but by the French people themselves after they have been set free by the victory of the United Nations.
“The present temporary arrangement in North and West Africa is only a temporary expedient, justified solely by the stress of battle.” It was designed to save lives and to speed the attack on Tunis. He had asked for the abrogation of all laws inspired by Nazi governments or ideologists.
At the same time Roosevelt assured Eisenhower that he appreciated his difficulties, did not question his actions in any way, and that the General could be sure of Roosevelt’s complete support-but that Eisenhower should keep in mind:
“1. That we do not trust Darlan.
“2. That it is impossible to keep a collaborator of Hitler and…a fascist in civil power any longer than is absolutely necessary.” He asked that Darlan’s movements be watched and his communications supervised.
Brave words—and yet they masked Roosevelt’s sharp disappointment over the political problems in Africa. The operation had been a stirring success militarily, with American casualties amounting to less than 1,500, and a bracing fillip for the people back home, but celebration of this was dimmed by the criticism. When Morgenthau, still depressed after his visit with Stimson, came to the White House to say that North Africa was “something that afflicts my soul,” Roosevelt gave him the usual argument of military expediency and went on to quote an “old Bulgarian proverb of the Orthodox Church: ‘My children, you are permitted in time of great danger to walk with the Devil until you have crossed the bridge.’ ” Roosevelt liked the proverb so much he repeated it both to Churchill and to the press, adding to the reporters, “Mind you, this is okayed by the church.”
The trouble was that Roosevelt had as little desire to walk with the devil as had the people he led. Rosenman could not remember a time when he was more deeply affected by a political attack, or resented his critics more, especially since so many of them were usually his supporters. At times he refused to discuss the matter at all; other times he read aloud with bitterness some columnist’s criticism. It did not help that Stalin later approved the Darlan deal on the ground that military diplomacy must be able to use not only the Darlans but “Even the Devil himself and his grandma.” That was doing the Bulgarian one better, but Roosevelt preferred to clothe his policies in idealism, because fundamentally he was an idealist.
Still, he was also a practical man, and the final irony of the expedient North African policy was that the expediency failed in major respects. The French did resist initially, causing and sustaining casualties. It was hoped that Darlan could bring over the French fleet in Toulon, but when the Germans closed in on the naval base late in November the French scuttled their fine battleships, cruisers, and destroyers. It was hoped that the French would actively help in the Tunisian campaign, but they proved unwilling or unable to lend decisive assistance. Above all, it was hoped that an early cease-fire would enable the Allies to make a quick thrust into Tunisia, but the Germans got there first, the weather turned foul, and soon the Americans and British were stalled on the Tunisian front. If the Darlan policy had been effective as a way of achieving major short-run military goals, it was far less rewarding, and even probably a handicap, in achieving long-run or even middle-run strategic objectives. Darlan’s assassination in Algiers the day before Christmas 1942 relieved Roosevelt of the person but not the problem.
So Roosevelt and his soldiers were left with a gnawing worry about the price that might be paid, impossible to estimate, in disappointment and chagrin among anti-Nazi French inside and outside their country, and among free peoples everywhere who wondered just how far one could walk with the devil, how often, and at what price.
ROOSEVELT: A TURNING POINT?
“The President becomes more and more the central figure in the global war, the source of initiative and authority in action, and, of course, of responsibility.” So wrote Hassett in his diary toward the end of November 1942. Hassett, who was as close to his chief as a valet and only a shade less iconoclastic, went on: “A little impatient at delay in offensive against Tunis and Bizerte. ‘Why are they so slow?’ he queried. But still calm and composed, always at his best, as the first year of the war draws to a close. Still unruffled in temper, buoyant of spirit, and, as always, ready with a wisecrack or a laugh, and can sleep anywhere whenever opportunity affords—priceless assets for one bearing his burdens, which he never mentions. No desire to be a martyr, living or dead.”
Buoyancy—this was the quality that struck Roosevelt’s staff and friends during the anxious months of planning, waiting, and managing during late 1942. Despite Hassett, he was often ruffled—by reporters, by critics, by delays—but he was quick to recover. As always he found strength in friends, anecdotes, banter, the daily routine of visits, dictating letters, signing documents with the broad-pointed pen he had given Hassett.
And always the darting interest, the instant response, the nimble recovery, the endless curiosity, the quick, almost automatic self-protectiveness. He instructed his naval aide to tell the Navy band that the “Star-Spangled Banner” should be played with fewer frills. He asked his wife
to cut down the food bill in the light of the new income-tax law, especially in the large portions served at meals brought up to the study. “I know of no instance where anybody has taken a second help—except occasionally when I do—and it would be much better if I did not take a second help anyway.” He wrote to Admiral King, who had informed him primly that he would shortly be sixty-four and hence retirable, “So what old top? I may even send you a birthday present!” (And he did—a framed photograph of himself.) He dunned neighbor Morgenthau for his annual dues ($750) to the Dutchess County Democratic party. He sent his half-niece a transcription of his grandmother’s Hyde Park diaries, confessing that neither he nor his niece would have found Hyde Park life sixty years back very exciting. He thanked Fred Allen for sending him a coffee bean, which had ended his anguished coffeeless breakfasts and “made the sun come out”; otherwise he would have resigned as Commander in Chief and taken appointment as a sergeant major in Brazil, where he could have coffee six times a day. He told Ickes, who had invited himself to lunch and threatened to bring his own food, that he would fall into the clutches of the Secret Service and that the President would rather go out to “dine with my old farmer’s wife named Jane.” He wrote to Herbert Bayard Swope—signing the memo with Grace Tully’s initials—that the President would never speak to him again.
“He is affronted and insulted by your suggestion that his French is ‘as good’ as that of Winston. Furthermore, the President’s accent is not only infinitely superior but his French profanity is so explosive that you had better not be within a half mile of him when it goes off.” If Swope was such a linguist, he could go to Albania, where the third front was to be established. “Incidentally, a little bird tells us that the pulchritude of the Albanian mountain females is an added attraction. When do you want to shove off?”
He was pleased when Eleanor Roosevelt planned to visit England and he listed people she must see—mainly top royalty. “People whom you should see if they call on you”—more royalty, and a few commoners, including Eduard Beneš, of Czechoslovakia. He wrote letters for her to King George VI and to Queen Wilhelmina. To his wife’s query as to whether she should take anything to King George and Queen Mary and to Churchill he replied, “No.”
On Thanksgiving Day he invited the leaders of his war government—Cabinet members, Army and Navy chiefs, war agency heads, along with the Supreme Court—to worship with him at a special service in the East Room. There he read his Thanksgiving Proclamation. “…Yes, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil,” the President intoned in a soft, hushed voice. To David Lilienthal, sitting near him, he looked like one of the senior wardens of his little church at Hyde Park, drawing up his eyebrows as he read the words, singing almost soundlessly the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Afterward he greeted people cheerily, sometimes boisterously, taking their hands in his huge grip, saying a word to their wives like a minister at the church door after the service.
He had much to give thanks for. It looked as though the turning point of the war had at last been reached, he told the Herald Tribune Forum. Despite his annoyance about the flap over Darlan, the weeks after the invasion were a time of solace for the President. “I am happy today in the fact that for three months I have been taking it on the chin in regard to the Second Front and that that is now over,” he wrote his old Navy chief, Josephus Daniels. He had the pleasure of sitting back in his chair, puffing contentedly on a cigarette, telling reporters about the long process of planning TORCH, lecturing them mildly on how a second front could not just be bought in a department store, ready-made. He even scored with the columnists. It seemed as though the United Nations had a grand strategy after all, some of them decided, what with American forces drawing the Japanese into the Solomons, the Russians overextending the Germans in the Caucasus, and then the pincers closing on the enemy in Africa. Roosevelt was one of the greatest war presidents, with a grasp of total and global strategy, Major George Fielding Eliot wrote.
If the war seemed at a turning point toward the end of 1942, Roosevelt seemed—a year after Pearl Harbor, two years after his decision for Lend-Lease, halfway through his third term—to be facing a turning point, too. For two years he had been stressing war problems and playing down long-run economic and social issues. He had usually evaded questions about planning for the postwar period. Now, in the first flush of victory, he seemed to be thinking more about future social and economic problems, at home and abroad.
New Dealers had been worried that fall. The town seemed, more than ever, full of big businessmen who now seemed to be running things rather than denouncing things in the Chamber of Commerce Building across from the White House. The President gave an “honorable discharge” to the old Works Progress Administration—symbol of the “Second Hundred Days” of Roosevelt’s progressivism at the height of its fervor and turbulence in 1935—and dropped one or two other New Deal agencies. Democratic leaders, according to Washington reporters, were privately conceding that great blocs of labor, farm, and independent votes had gone Republican; the President had lost his political touch, having failed in his two key aims of saving Norris and defeating Dewey; Congress was already in revolt; old New Dealers like Morgenthau, Wallace, and Ickes were unpopular, worn out, fumbling. There were reports—true this time—that Henderson would be out by Christmas.
A sense of defeat hung over Washington, Lilienthal felt—not of military defeat, but of the purposes for which Americans had been told the war was being fought. He sensed a disorganization of spirit, a vacuum at the center that was being filled with reaction, weariness, cynicism. His fears deepened when he went in to see the President in mid-December about some proposals to have lame-duck Senator Norris visit the Tennessee Valley and the Arkansas and other possible river-valley developments, and report back to the President. He suggested that Norris might also report on the possible role of TVA’s abroad, where there was intense interest in Roosevelt’s experiment.
The President was leery. No, he said, we had better leave the foreign thing out; the other night an NAM speaker had said that the administration had in mind a TVA on the Danube. Lilienthal did not contest the point. He left the White House with a heavy heart. He had heard the stories that the President was interested only in a military victory. “Godamighty”—it was true. One speech before the National Association of Manufacturers—and the man pulled away from the fundamental proposition of America’s interest in the welfare of the rest of the world.
Lilienthal had left so that Roosevelt could lunch alone with Norris; then he returned. He seemed to find a changed man. Roosevelt had told Norris that he wanted him to report on the Tennessee Valley project and what it meant to the future of America and to other parts of the world. Lilienthal was elated. He confessed to the President that he had left his office discouraged. Roosevelt leaned back in his chair. He looked as Lilienthal remembered him in the past, when he had fought back against his enemies and usually won. He had, thought Lilienthal, the handsomest fighting face in the world.
“I am going to fight back. I’m not going to take this lying down.” Roosevelt had his jaw stuck out. Lilienthal was standing, worried, knowing that Leahy and Marshall were waiting to come in. “I’m really going to tell this next Congress.” His speech would lay out a program that would give them and the country something to chew on. “Those boys in Guadalcanal and in Africa—does this Congress propose to tell them they are going to come back to fear about jobs, fear about the things a man can’t prevent, like accident, sickness, and so on? Well, they will have a chance to go on record about it, to divide on that political issue.” And as the President got off point after point, he would grin or wink. Lilienthal shook hands to go, but the President was keyed up and went on talking. Lilienthal was aroused, too, and blurted out something he had been aching to say but never expected to have the chance to—that it was when the President took the offensive that the people were with him.
Christmastime came, with parties at Hyde
Park for soldiers guarding the Commander in Chief’s home; then the President and First Lady returned to Washington for Christmas itself. On New Year’s Eve they had their usual small party for close friends, and as usual toasted the United States of America. The company drank to the President; he in turn toasted his wife as the one who made it possible for him to carry on; at his suggestion glasses were raised to friends and family in far-off parts of the world. Then the President offered a new toast: “The United Nations.”
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