The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  The biggest feud within the administration was yet to come. All through the spring of 1943 a dispute was brewing that would erupt into the most spectacular rupture among Roosevelt’s crisis agencies. The antagonists were Jesse Jones, Secretary of Commerce and boss of the RFC, and Vice President Henry Wallace, head of the Board of Economic Warfare. Even for Roosevelt’s administration the two were gloriously antipodal: Jones, a onetime RFC member under Hoover, taciturn, shrewd, practical, cautious; Wallace, hero of the Lib Labs, dreamy, Utopian, even mystical, yet with his own bent for management and power. Jones’s distaste for Wallace was less ideological than professional; he could not abide the BEW’s speculative practices, its overbuying, its dubious projects. War or no war, the business of the RFC was business. His corporation, Jones announced flatly, “does not pay $2 for something it can buy for $1.” Liberals roared over the story—possibly true—that when a fire consumed a New Jersey warehouse filled with tons of precious rubber, Jones remarked, “What’s the trouble? It was insured, wasn’t it?”

  Roosevelt’s penchant for overlapping assignments had joined the two men in unholy wedlock. The BEW was empowered to obtain strategic materials from foreign sources through preclusive buying and other methods, but it was not given its own funds, and the RFC remained banker for BEW’s foreign activities. BEW ordered RFC to finance the planting in Haiti of Cryptostegia—a rubber project dear to Roosevelt’s heart. Jones refused. BEW then asked RFC to finance an experimental rubber project in Africa. Again RFC resisted. For months Jones and Wallace waged an intensive but quiet fight at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue over the key question of which agency could veto what.

  The struggle surfaced during the heat of June 1943. Inflamed by Jones’s latest effort to crop his powers, Wallace denounced the Texan for “hamstringing” the war effort. Jones called Wallace’s charges hysterical, dastardly, malicious, and false. The President asked Byrnes to “get Henry and Jesse together and harmonize their differences.” The two men came to an armistice meeting in Byrnes’s office but refused to smoke a peace pipe; Jones would not even speak to the Vice President, and Byrnes feared that he would physically assault him. Within hours the two men were publicly hurling charges back and forth.

  Prompted by Byrnes, the President now acted with dispatch. He fired both gladiators from their war jobs by abolishing the BEW, setting up an Office of Economic Warfare under Leo T. Crowley, and switching the Export-Import Bank, the rubber and petroleum agencies, and other dukedoms out of Jones’s empire and into the new OEW. To the heads of all federal agencies he dispatched a stern warning that while he recognized the nervous strain they were working under in wartime, if they disagreed among themselves publicly instead of submitting their dispute to Byrnes or himself, “I ask that when you release the statement for publication, you send to me a letter of resignation.”

  Roosevelt’s sternness impressed the country, but his aides were probably more skeptical. They must have doubted that their chief would change his old administrative habits for long. He had issued a similar warning the year before. One assistant, indeed, knew that whatever Wallace’s and Jones’s transgressions, much of the blame for Washington’s civil war lay with the President. Foreign economic policy was a case in point. In February 1943 Budget Director Smith had cautioned his chief that the North African operation had provided a warning signal of “impending breakdowns in our international operations.” Item by item Smith described duplication, confusion, disorganization—the division of authority and responsibility among a host of agencies, the muddle over dealing with foreign requirements, the fragmented foreign-aid and subsidy operations in Latin America, the split control of imports and development projects, the tendency of competing agencies to make isolated spot adjustments rather than to follow a comprehensive plan. Smith proposed a basic reorganization and consolidation of agencies.

  As usual the President waited for a crisis before acting. As usual he acted by reshuffling people and creating a new agency. Smith contended that whatever the advantage of keen competition of several new agencies during the formative period, a strongly unified foreign administration was now imperative. But whatever Roosevelt’s impatience with public brawling, he essentially did not mind—he even welcomed—competition.

  “A little rivalry is stimulating, you know,” he once said to Frances Perkins. “It keeps everybody going to prove he is a better fellow than the next man. It keeps them honest too.”

  Still, war has its own imperatives. At some point at the height of the war the first Chief Executive—the improviser, the disorganizer, the unsettler—gave way to a second. Perhaps it was when he set up the Office of War Mobilization and an “assistant President.” Perhaps it was when he confessed, “I get so many conflicting recommendations my head is splitting.” The shift was gradual, occurring in his slowly increasing reliance on the White House staff. By the end of 1943 virtually a new system of presidential government had grown out of the makeshift arrangements of old. The foundation had been laid for a powerful Executive Office, a huge war structure, and a vastly expanded social-welfare organization, which were to characterize the presidency for decades to come. During World War II, indeed, the modern presidency was created—and by a man who temperamentally had a decided preference for the White House as it was in the days of Woodrow Wilson or Theodore Roosevelt.

  THE TECHNOLOGY OF VIOLENCE

  While the demands of war forced the creation of modern presidential government, violence itself was being revolutionized. Modern war had become essentially a warfare of machines, and the weapons rolling off American assembly lines startled even science-fiction writers: radar-guided rockets, amphibious tanks, bazookas, proximity-fused shells, napalm jellied-gasoline flame throwers. Old cavalryman George Patton concluded that “we will have to devise some new method of warfare.”

  Weapons technology, the imperatives of war, and the improvisations of Roosevelt fitted productively. The speed of weapons development resulted from just those Rooseveltian habits that produced confusion elsewhere: division of authority, overlapping responsibilities, no unified program, changing agencies, improvisation in crisis, and reliance on talented individuals, not orderly administration.

  Prewar weapons development had lagged. In the peacetime Army, Marshall told Stimson, the technical services were preeminent because “the fellow that controls the contracts and expenditures…is the only one Congress is interested in,” and Congress controlled the purse strings. For the Army, cost accounting was more important than weapons development. While Congress cut weapons-research appropriations, Hitler drove thousands of scientists from Europe to America and stirred American scientists to political action. During 1938-40 the National Academy of Sciences urged a government organization of science to provide the United States with better weapons and techniques. The problem and the forces gravitated toward Roosevelt, the center of power.

  After establishing the civilian National Defense Research Committee and appointing Vannevar Bush chairman, the President had requested co-operation from the War and Navy Departments. To the surprise of many, the services eventually complied. Swamped with heavy demands to train pilots, construct tank factories, adapt to jungle, desert, and mountain warfare, the services had little time left for inventing new weapons. The admission of civilians to full-fledged military status, especially for the invention of dramatic new weapons, was a bitter pill, but Stimson and Marshall insisted on co-operation.

  At first, the technical services and the scientists merely stayed out of each other’s way, for, as Bush found, “basically, research and procurement are incompatible.” As the gap between NDRC research and Ordnance procurement grew, however, a crisis threatened: the research tended to be isolated and useless. Prodded by Hopkins, Bush, and Conant, in June 1941 Roosevelt reshuffled agencies and personnel, over the objections of Army Ordnance, the WMC, outside scientists, the OPM, and Ickes, who had a different plan. Though the President created the Office of Scientific Research and Development to bridge
the gap between research and production, and shifted Bush from NDRC to the new OSRD, power remained fragmented, and no comprehensive plan emerged. But OSRD and the services learned to compromise their differences.

  While NDRC was in its infant stages, Roosevelt had ridden the momentum of public dismay after the fall of France to set up an American-British exchange of secret scientific information. Soon the British arrived in Washington with a black box full of scientific secrets. Five months later, the President reciprocated by sending Conant to London to reveal American developments. A blatant violation of neutrality, the Anglo-American scientific trade provided an early boost to American weapons progress and later helped co-ordinate existing Allied scientific effort. Roosevelt’s masterly timing, disrespect for ordained practices, and improvisation gave the speed necessary for American weapons superiority.

  In a mimicry of Roosevelt’s methods, OSRD achieved military break-throughs in most unmilitary fashion. With no research laboratories of its own, OSRD farmed out research jobs to the universities and industrial laboratories, which in turn garnered scientists from all over the nation; one radiation center had sixty-nine different institutions represented on its staff. The odd mixture of Harvard University and Standard Oil produced the no less odd and no less powerful mixture of soap powder and gasoline called “napalm,” which was to ravage almost every major city in Japan. OSRD loosely co-ordinated the research, collaborated with the British, urged new weapons on the Army, and won 99 per cent of its fights with Selective Service over deferments of scientists. On balance the decentralization and loose co-ordination probably gave speed to weapons developments.

  As scientists puzzled out new weapons, the military puzzled over how to use them. The airplane was already making old strategies obsolete and forcing commanders to re-evaluate their weapons. By mid-1943, the Navy’s most valuable ships were aircraft carriers, the most destructive weapons were air-borne bombs, and the defeat of Germany seemed to rest most heavily on the long waves of American and British bombers. To defeat submarines, the airplane was aided by radar and statistically deduced search patterns; to destroy Germany’s most vaunted air weapon—the V-1 rocket bombs—scientists developed SCR-594 ground radar, the M-9 electrical director for antiaircraft guns, and the radio proximity fuse. Soon most of the German missiles would be destroyed in the air. But the record was uneven, as trial and error slowly built up knowledge of how to use the weapons. The thousand-bomber flights were awe-inspiring, as were the mathematically based analyses of photographs of bomb damage, but the actual effect on German military capacity remained to be seen.

  Weapons technology had endless built-in problems. Roosevelt and his advisers worried about using the proximity fuse for fear the Germans would copy it. Tank crews found the gyrostabilizers on tank guns too complex and delicate to manage, so disconnected them. All down the line, new weapons created problems of use that the military had to solve in action.

  In the spring of 1942, Stimson and Bush recognized the problems and urged Roosevelt to create a Joint Committee on New Weapons and Equipment to bring civilian scientists in at the strategic planning level. Roosevelt acquiesced to the co-ordination, but only at a lower level—under the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This co-ordination was at once not high enough for atomic-bomb planning and too high for most weapons. Civilians were not brought into contact even with staff planners. Co-ordination lagged.

  Radar systems were a big exception; they were the best coordinated and most useful in combat of all OSRD projects. Some of radar’s success traces to Stimson’s almost Victorian sense of family. Throughout the war, he was one of the leading exponents of new weapons and techniques, and especially of radar. He had become fascinated by radar through his cousin, Alfred Loomis, a lawyer and pioneer in microwaves. Soon after NDRC was organized, Loomis was appointed head of a radar section under the Detection and Controls Division. By the spring of 1942, Stimson even had a special personnel consultant for radar and was using his influence and authority to get radar soundly established as a smoothly operating weapon of war.

  The British invention of the resonant cavity magnetron, which produced enough power to make possible radar in the microwave region, was the most essential advance. Immediately following the first exchange of scientific secrets, the NDRC, with assistance from British specialists, established the large Radiation Laboratory at MIT for research, design, and construction of radar for short-run use. NDRC scientists subsequently developed 150 different microwave radar systems for ground, air, and sea as requested by the War and Navy Departments for tactical operations. The most powerful radar ever built, the Microwave Early Warning System, developed in 1942, was contained in five trucks and operated by a company of soldiers.

  The greatest need in the first year of war was for an effective radar in American planes searching for far-ranging U-boats. The Army installed search radar developed by the Radiation Laboratory in B-24 Liberators and in a group of B-18’s, which together helped drive the submarines away from the East Coast. To make possible night bombing of Germany and Japan, British and American scientists invented the Plan Position Indicator and the three-centimeter “Mickey,” with glowing radar maps. A Ground Controlled Approach system was contrived by NDRC to direct aircraft landings in bad visibility. The development of a diverse assortment of radar systems, all closely tied to military needs, was OSRD’s biggest contribution to Axis defeat. In other areas the scientists, divorced from military weapons, focused simply on dramatic innovations.

  OSRD’s organizational concentration on developing new weapons led, according to its Deputy Director, Irvin Stewart, to a tendency to place great faith in the weapon or instrument itself, while the importance of the man-instrument combination was relatively slow to be realized. Wars are fought with machines run by men, and while the development of machines spurted forward, the training of their users fell behind. Anyone can throw a Molotov cocktail, but the special skills needed to operate and interpret electronic equipment cannot be produced as quickly as the equipment itself. OSRD developed weapons, the Army trained soldiers, but no one concentrated on the man-weapon combination.

  With no central control under Roosevelt of both weapons development and soldier training, an unnoticed revolution took place. America had traditionally relied on hastily drafted civilians to fight its wars, but technical weapons now required professionally trained men. The specialization of weapons demanded combat teams of experts and careful co-ordination between them, a coordination not to be learned in two months of basic training. What OSRD’s new weapons required was a large, specialized, professional standing army in peacetime in order to fight a war; but a large standing army in peacetime was against American tradition and the Constitution. Fragmented organization meant no responsible agency to deal with such broad problems.

  Similar difficulties arose in production. The weapons were as complicated to manufacture as to use, and temporarily converted industries had trouble making them. Only a permanent defense industry could work intensively with the civilian scientists advising and improving on the latest weapon advances. Around the country—at Seattle, Washington, and at Oak Ridge, Tennessee—a military-industrial complex was slowly, almost invisibly, developing. Roosevelt’s improvisation speeded the weapons development immensely, yet fragmented authority hampered use, and the lack of a comprehensive, stable agency prevented considerations beyond military expediency from getting a hearing.

  ROOSEVELT AS CHIEF EXECUTIVE

  To glimpse the titanic military and economic power mobilized by the Roosevelt administration at war’s mid-point in 1943, to consider the heavy political forces beating on the White House from the nation and from abroad, to assess the endless problems, appeals, complaints, queries, demands that flowed into the President’s office, to recall that for many months after Pearl Harbor the President operated with the help of one talented but ailing deputy, a small, overworked staff, and a shifting array of aides collected from outside the White House—all this is to marvel at the
aplomb, the gaiety, the buoyancy, the grace with which Franklin Roosevelt presided over the White House during the years of war crisis. Whatever the muddles and delays, the disputes and outright failures, the President would not duck responsibility. Cartoonists might picture the ship of state lurching and yawing, but no one could doubt who controlled the tiller.

  Old Washington hands wondered how he did it. How could one man dominate, even if he did not always control, the dispersed, disorganized, ever-shifting and expanding bureaucracy? How did he remain Chief Executive in fact as well as in title?

  The President stayed in charge of his administration by the methods that had seemed to serve him so well in the earlier, prewar years—by drawing fully on his formal and informal powers as Chief Executive; by raising goals, creating momentum, inspiring a personal loyalty, getting the best out of people; by skillful timing, now waiting endlessly while his aides chafed, sometimes moving quickly before his staff was even informed, but usually choosing a time when his target—a foot-dragging agency or bovine official—was most vulnerable; by deliberately fostering among his aides a sense of competition and a clash of wills that led to disarray, heartbreak, and anger but also set off pulses of executive energy and sparks of creativity; by maintaining an extremely wide “span of control”—or at least of attention, encouragement, and intervention; by handing out one job to several men and several jobs to one man, thus strengthening his own position as a court of appeals, as a depository of information, and as a tool of co-ordination; by ignoring or bypassing collective decision-making agencies, such as the Cabinet, and dealing instead with varying combinations of persons from different agencies; by often delving into specific, even tiny matters that some official had assumed were far below or beyond the Chief Executive’s reach; by sometimes withholding information, sometimes supplying it, to keep aides and officials in line; by maintaining his own private storehouse of intelligence, drawn from countless letters, memos, gossip, and fed by contending subordinates; by retiring behind the protection of rules, customs, conventions when they served his needs and evading them when they did not—and always by persuading, flattering, juggling, improvising, reshuffling, harmonizing, conciliating, manipulating.