The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  The most pressing question was Turkey’s entrance into the war. The President dispatched John Boettiger to escort President Ismet Inönü to Cairo for final discussions. Over the next three days Roosevelt and Churchill mobilized their combined persuasiveness—along with clear hints about postwar arrangements—to talk Inönü and his colleagues into the war. The Turks were polite, co-operative, concerned, and stubborn. They wanted a commitment of military aid that the straitened Anglo-Americans could not make. So anguished was Inönü as he faced his dilemma that Roosevelt had to admit that if he were a Turk he would need more assurances than were being offered; naturally, he conceded to Inönü, the Turks did not want to be caught with their pants down. Inönü would not make the pledge. Roosevelt seemed unperturbed by the outcome; Churchill gamely swallowed one more setback to his military ambitions in the eastern Mediterranean.

  On a far more important matter, however, the Prime Minister won a crucial victory. In Cairo he immediately set himself to induce Roosevelt to renege on his promise to Chiang of a big operation in the Andamans. Churchill had powerful arguments on his side. Stalin’s promise to fight Japan after Germany posed the likelihood of a better continental land route into Japan. Operations in the central and Southwest Pacific were opening up other avenues to the enemy homeland. The decision for OVERLORD and ANVIL (the attack through southern France) in May escalated European needs, especially for landing ships. Mountbatten was asking for a much bigger landing force for Southeast Asia than had been expected.

  Churchill could see that things were different in this second Cairo meeting. Chiang was no longer present; the crucial decision had been made in Moscow for the second front. Stilwell was in Cairo to speak for Chiang, but “Vinegar Joe” felt at sea amid the big-power politics going on by the Nile.

  At first Roosevelt was dead set against withdrawing the promise to Chiang. They had a moral obligation to do something for China, he told Churchill and the Combined Chiefs. Too, he was dubious about putting all the eggs into one basket. Suppose Stalin was unable or unwilling to make good his word; Washington might find that it had forfeited Chinese support without obtaining commensurate help from the Russians. His Joint Chiefs of Staff backed the President; they feared especially that a cancellation of the Andamans thrust would give Chiang an excuse to renege on his promises of land operations and would lead in turn to Chinese withdrawal from the war. Admiral King, feeling especially strongly on the matter, managed to scrounge up enough landing ships for Europe to leave a goodly supply for the Andamans.

  But Churchill and his chiefs were determined, and after a day or two of resistance Roosevelt backed down, with the glum acquiescence of most of his chiefs. The President’s reasons were partly military: under the Europe First doctrine OVERLORD and ANVIL had to be as secure as possible. Partly they were personal: at Teheran he had sided with Stalin over Churchill on OVERLORD and ANVIL; now he must favor Churchill over Chiang. And there were deepening fears on the part of almost all at Cairo about China’s staying power, with or without the Andaman operation.

  “I’ve been as stubborn as a mule for four days but we can’t get anywhere,” Roosevelt told Stilwell, “and it won’t do for a conference to end that way. The British just won’t do the operation and I can’t get them to agree to it.” When Stilwell asked for political guidance on China, the President told anecdotes and mentioned postwar plans. To Chiang, Roosevelt sent a terse wire canceling the Andamans and proposing lesser alternatives. The Generalissimo’s answer was as gloomy as feared. The results of the first Cairo Conference had electrified the Chinese people, he cabled. Now this decision at Cairo would dishearten the nation to the point that it might not hold out much longer. The Japanese would deduce that under the Europe First policy the United Nations were now abandoning China to the mercies of Japan’s mechanized air and land forces. Yet Chiang seemed to acquiesce in the decision and seemed, indeed, more concerned about his economic than his military problems. He asked simply in his reply for more planes—and for a billion dollars in gold.

  One other matter remained to be resolved at Cairo: the command of OVERLORD. This was Roosevelt’s decision alone. It had long been expected that Marshall would command the climactic invasion he had so long argued for, and that Eisenhower would return to Washington and take over his post. But Roosevelt could not quite bring himself to make the appointment, even though most of his advisers favored it and Marshall clearly, though diffidently, wanted it. “I feel I could not sleep at night with you out of the country,” Roosevelt told his Chief of Staff. It was one of the hardest decisions Roosevelt ever made, Sherwood felt.

  Churchill insisted toward the end of the second Cairo Conference that he and Roosevelt motor out and see the Sphinx. For once silent, the two men stared at the brooding features as the evening shadows fell. It was symbolic that Roosevelt thus ended in the company of Churchill alone this year of conferences, just as they had started it together. The two men had had their differences, but in the end they had stood together, even on OVERLORD. Churchill had spent week after week in America, day after day with the President. He had addressed Congress again, attended Cabinet meetings, presided alone—with the permission of the President, who had been in Hyde Park at the time—over a meeting of American and British military and diplomatic chiefs in the White House. He had made no secret—even to Stalin—of his satisfaction at being “half American.” He was more papal than the Pope; driving with Roosevelt and his party through Frederick, Maryland, one day he had noticed a sign advertising Barbara Fritchie candy, and while Roosevelt and Hopkins listened in astonishment, he recited a score or so of lines from Whittier’s famous poem—“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head….”

  Someday there would be a price to pay for the exuberant friendship of the two men. Churchill turned a myopic eye to the teeming masses in Asia; among intimates he could even worry about the Russians breeding like flies and overwhelming the white population of Britain and the United States. His attitude toward China was deeply affected by racial feeling. But in this moment Anglo-American co-operation was at a peak.

  Roosevelt left Cairo for home on December 7. He stopped in Tunis, where he greeted Eisenhower with a cheery “Well, Ike, you’d better start packing.” He touched down in Malta, where he presented a scroll to the islanders for their heroism. He reviewed troops in Sicily. Then the long return trip on the Iowa and a greeting at the south entrance to the White House by the assembled Cabinet. Rosenman had never seen the President look so satisfied and pleased. He also looked tired, but robust and confident. To Stimson, the President said: “I have…brought Overlord back to you safe and sound on the ways for accomplishment.”

  It was Christmastime. The President wanted to be in his own home; for the first time since he became President he celebrated Christmas at Hyde Park. On Christmas Eve he broadcast a report to the people from his own fireside. Mainly it was a long, general, and optimistic survey of the fighting fronts and of his conferences abroad. He announced his selection of Eisenhower to lead an attack from “other points of the compass” along with the stern Russian offensive in the east and the relentless Allied pressure in the south. As for Stalin: “…I may say that I ‘got along fine’ with Marshal Stalin. He is a man who combines a tremendous relentless determination with a stalwart good humor. I believe he is truly representative of the heart and soul of Russia; and I believe that we are going to get along very well with him and the Russian people—very well indeed.”

  The next day he presided over a family reunion in the old mansion. Seven of his fourteen grandchildren were there, with their mothers. The President watched as gifts were unwrapped, carved the family turkey, and, as always, read Dickens’s Christmas Carol, skillfully condensing it to hold the attention of the young.

  The President was not, however, in a wholly festive mood. Shortly before Christmas he wrote Frankfurter: “…I realized on the trip what a dreadful lack of civilization is shown in the countries I visited—but on returning I am not wholly certai
n of the degree of civilization in terra Americana.”

  PART 4

  Battle

  FOURTEEN The Lords of the Hill

  THE PRESIDENT HAD RETURNED home from Teheran to an embittered capital. All the old simmering issues seemed to be coming to a boil. Joseph Guffey, the aged New Deal war horse, rose in the Senate to castigate the “unholy alliance” of Old Guard Republicans under Joe Pew and of Southern Democrats under Harry Byrd. In reply, his foes threatened to organize a new Southern party that would hold a balance of power between the two major parties. In the House, John Rankin, of Mississippi, pointedly read off the Jewish names of New Yorkers supporting a soldiers’-vote bill. Secretary of Interior Ickes charged over a nationwide radio hookup that the “four lords of the press”—Hearst, McCormick, and the two Pattersons—hated Roosevelt and Stalin so bitterly that they would rather see Hitler win the war than be defeated by “a leadership shared in by the great Russian and the great American.”

  “There is terrific tension on the Hill,” Budget Director Smith noted. “People who have been friends for years are doing the most erratic things.” A leading politician said privately: “I haven’t an ounce of confidence in anything that Roosevelt does. I wouldn’t believe anything he said.”

  Seldom had race feeling been so conspicuous in the capital. Indignation greeted the news that 16,000 “disloyal” Japanese had rioted at the Tule Lake concentration camp. The Senate killed a federal aid-to-education bill when Republicans adroitly hitched on an antidiscrimination provision. Railroad employers and unions alike defied an FEPC order barring discrimination against Negro firemen. Not since Reconstruction, the Nation observed, had sectional feeling run so high in the halls of Congress.

  “The President has come back to his own Second Front,” Max Lerner wrote. “We shall need to build another bridge of fire, not to link in with our Allies but to unite us with ourselves, and to span the fissure within our own national will.”

  The center of the storm seemed as calm as ever. He had got the impression on returning that there was a terrible mess in Washington, the President observed mildly to the Cabinet. Nor did he betray any worry. “There he sat,” reported the New Republic’s TRB, “at his first press conference after his five weeks on tour-Churchill sick; inflation controls going all to pot; the Democratic party at sixes and sevens; a rail strike threatened; selfish goals sought by labor and farmers and business; ignoble motives imputed to every public act of every public man; the world a global mess—and there he sat, bland and affable, in his special chair, puffing imperturbably on an uptilted cigarette and welcoming old friends.”

  Roosevelt was not as imperturbable as he appeared. He was entering the new year like a tightrope walker starting out over Niagara. Monumental questions were hanging in the balance—not only the war economy, his electoral standing with the voters, the cross-channel invasion, the invasion routes to Japan, but also his whole strategy of war and peace. He was following a precarious middle way. He was trying to establish close rapport with Russia and at the same time follow an Atlantic First strategy depending on the closest relations with the British. He was trying to help make China a great nation in war and peace while putting it far down the priority list of military aid and political influence. He was trying to establish a new and better League without alienating the isolationists. He was calling for freedom for all peoples but deferring to the British in India and the Moslems in the Near East. He was demanding unconditional surrender but dealing with Darlans and Badoglios.

  He had said that “magnificent idealism” was not enough; neither was manipulation or expediency. How he balanced and interlinked the demands of his faith and the necessities of the moment would be the great test of Franklin Roosevelt in 1944.

  A SECOND BILL OF RIGHTS

  After seeing soldiers stuck in lonely outposts in Iran and stretched out on hospital cots in Sicily, the President was indignant about the attitudes he found at home—complacent expectations of an early victory, isolationists spreading suspicion about the Allied nations, noisy minorities demanding special favors, profiteers, selfish political interests, and all the rest. He decided to declare war on these elements in his State of the Union message—indeed, to make a dramatic reassertion of American liberalism even at the height of war.

  But first he indulged in one of those baffling sidesteps that often had accompanied, and camouflaged, a major Rooseveltian action. To a reporter who had tarried a bit after a press conference the Chief Executive had complained that he wished the press would not use that term “New Deal,” for there was no need of a New Deal now. At the next press conference reporters pressed him for an explanation. The President assumed a casual air, as though it was all so obvious; some people, he said, just had to be told how to spell “cat.” He described how “Dr. New Deal” had treated the nation for a grave internal disorder with specific remedies. He quoted from a long list Rosenman had put together of New Deal programs. But after his recovery, he went on, the patient had a very bad accident—“on the seventh of December, he was in a pretty bad smashup.” So Dr. New Deal, who “didn’t know nothing” about legs and arms, called in his partner, “who was an orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Win-the-War.”

  “Does that all add up to a fourth-term declaration?” a brash reporter asked.

  “Oh, now, we are not talking about things like that now. You are getting picayune….”

  “I don’t mean to be picayune,” the reporter went on, “but I am not clear about this parable. The New Deal, I thought, was dynamic, and I don’t know whether you mean that you had to leave off to win the war and then take up again the social program, or whether you think the patient is cured?”

  The President answered with a confusing analogy of post-Civil War policy. Then he insisted again: the 1933 program was a program to meet the problems of 1933. In time there would have to be a new program to meet new needs. “When the time comes…When the times comes.”

  There’s an Odd Family Resemblance Among the Doctors

  December 30, 1943, C. K. Berryman, courtesy of the Washington (D.C.) Star

  The creator of the New Deal had killed it, the conservative press exulted.

  Two weeks later Roosevelt gave the most radical speech of his life. He chose his annual State of the Union message as the occasion. Early in January he had come down with the flu, but he labored over draft after draft while Rosenman and Sherwood sat by his bed. He had not recovered enough to deliver the message to Congress in person, but he insisted on giving it as a fireside chat in the evening for fear that the papers would not run the full text.

  The President lashed out at “people who burrow through our Nation like unseeing moles…pests who swarm through the lobbies of Congress and the cocktail bars of Washington…bickering, self-seeking partisanship, stoppages of work, inflation, business as usual…the whining demands of selfish pressure groups who seek to feather their nests while young Americans are dying.”

  Once again he asked Congress to adopt a strong stabilization program. He recommended:

  “1. A realistic tax law—which will tax all unreasonable profits, both individual and corporate, and reduce the ultimate cost of the war to our sons and daughters….

  “2. A continuation of the law for the renegotiation of war contracts—which will prevent exorbitant profits and assure fair prices to the Government….

  “3. A cost of food law—which will enable the Government (a) to place a reasonable floor under the prices the farmer may expect for his production; and (b) to place a ceiling on the prices a consumer will have to pay for the food he buys….

  “4. Early reenactment of the stabilization statute of October, 1942….We cannot have stabilization by wishful thinking. We must take positive action to maintain the integrity of the American dollar.

  “5. A national service law—which, for the duration of the war, will prevent strikes, and, with certain appropriate exceptions, will make available for war production or for any other essential services every able-
bodied adult in the Nation.”

  Then came the climax of the address:

  “It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.

  “This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.

  “As our Nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

  “We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. ‘Necessitous men are not free men.’ People who are hungry—people who are out of a job—are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”

  The President was now speaking with great deliberateness and emphasis. The italics were not in his text, but in his delivery.

  “In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station or race or creed.