The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  Congress was as cool to national-service legislation in early 1944 as it always had been to proposals that united labor and business in opposition. A gulf yawned between the legislators, sensitive to economic pressures, and Stimson, who saw a moral purpose in the bill transcending even the practical needs of war. A national-service law, he told the Congressmen, was a question of responsibility. “It is aimed to extend the principles of democracy and justice more evenly throughout our population….” Congress did not see it that way; the bill died in committee. Roosevelt had finally come around to Stimson’s point of view. National service transcended politics, he told Congress. “Great power must be used for great purposes.” But he had come to this view late, he had not marshaled his administration behind his position, and he failed to convince the men on the Hill.

  The President still met, the first thing on Monday mornings, with the congressional Big Four—Vice President Wallace, Speaker Rayburn, Senate Majority Leader Barkley, House Majority Leader McCormack. Years later Barkley would remember these sessions-Roosevelt sitting in his plain mahogany bed amid a pile of papers, wrapped in an aging gray bathrobe that he refused to give up, puffing on a cigarette through his long uptilted ivory holder, Wallace in turn voluble and quiet, Rayburn laconically sagacious, Barkley himself often speaking for the whole leadership on the Hill.

  Late in February 1944 these usually amiable talks took a sharper turn. Even since the previous October, when Morgenthau had presented the President’s stiff revenue proposals to the House Ways and Means Commute, the administration bill had been running-more often crawling—a legislative gantlet. The fiscal committees patiently heard scores of special-interest representatives. Most of the nation’s press opposed the administration’s tax program; the people, as reflected in a Gallup Poll, were as divided as usual. The Ways and Means Committee not only scrapped the Treasury’s program, but also barred Treasury officials from attending its executive sessions. Eventually the committee’s new bill, which would produce barely two billion dollars, was passed by a lopsided vote in the House. The Senate let the bill go over until the next session. In January the President warned that a realistic revenue law would tax all unreasonable profits, both individual and corporate, and that the tax bill then pending did not begin to meet that test. Undismayed, the Senate passed a bill that would raise only a fraction of the 10.5 billion requested by the President and that bristled with what the administration viewed as inequities and favors to special interests.

  Congress, it seemed to Roosevelt, was playing with fiscal dynamite. Treasury men estimated that in the fiscal year 1944 income payments to individuals would amount to 152 billion, and that the amount of goods and services available could absorb only about eighty-nine billion of that figure. While the 1943 tax rate would reduce the difference by twenty-one billion, an inflationary gap amounting to forty-two billion would be left to threaten the nation’s stabilization program. War-bond savings and other savings were not expected to reduce this figure enough to forestall the piling up of a dangerous amount of excess income. Taxes were needed for both revenue and stabilization.

  The President bespoke his indignation over the tax bill in a bedside conference with the Big Four. All but Wallace urged him to sign it anyway; Roosevelt said he would think it over. A week later he had made up his mind. The administration position had hardened by then. Byrnes originally had favored acceptance of the bill on the ground that if “you asked your mother for a dollar and she gives you a dime” you should go back later for the ninety cents. But Vinson’s and Paul’s arguments swung Byrnes against the bill; and Morgenthau had glumly concluded that the President should let the bill become law without his signature.

  When Barkley and his colleagues arrived for the next Monday conference, the President had his tentative veto message written out. He read it to his silent visitors; then Barkley once again sparred with him on the issues. The President was willing to give way on one or two questions, but he was adamant on what he saw as concessions to special interests. Timber was the main case in point. Barkley argued that it should be taxed as capital gains, since it took fifty years to grow a tree for lumber. He grew trees himself, Roosevelt said. Timber should be treated as a crop and therefore as income when sold.

  “Well, Mr. President,” Barkley went on, “it’s perfectly obvious that you are going to veto this bill and there’s no use for me to argue with you any longer about it.” Barkley was so depressed that he rode back to the Capitol with Wallace in the latter’s limousine without exchanging a word with him. His dismay turned to indignation next day when he saw the text of Roosevelt’s veto message. New and searing phrases had been added.

  He had asked, the President said, for legislation to raise 10.5 billion dollars over present revenues. Persons prominent in public life—everyone knew he was referring mainly to Willkie—had said that his request was too low. The bill from Congress purported to provide 2.1 billion in new revenues but it canceled out automatic increases in the Social Security tax yielding over a billion and granted relief from existing taxes that would cost the Treasury at least 150 million dollars.

  “In this respect it is not a tax bill but a tax relief bill providing relief not for the needy but for the greedy.” He listed “indefensible” special privileges to timber and other interests.

  “It has been suggested by some that I should give my approval to this bill on the ground that having asked the Congress for a loaf of bread to take care of this war for the sake of this and succeeding generations, I should be content with a small piece of crust. I might have done so if I had not noted that the small piece of crust contained so many extraneous and inedible materials.” He went on to condemn Congress for not simplifying tax laws and returns; the people, he added, were not “in a mood to study higher mathematics.”

  For years Barkley had been ridiculed in the press—especially in Time—as a bumbling and spineless flunky of the White House. Now as he read Roosevelt’s biting words he felt personally affronted. He had been a liberal long before the New Deal, he reflected bitterly; he had learned his progressivism at the feet of Woodrow Wilson after coming to Washington from Paducah in 1913. He had gone down the line for Franklin Roosevelt’s program, he had carried the administration’s flag up on the Hill, often with little help from the White House, and now here was this sarcastic message. Barkley had to protect his political situation, too. In Kentucky a Republican trend seemed under way. In the Senate, like other elected leaders before and since, he was caught between members loyal to the President and the anti-Roosevelt Senators clustered in the citadels of power, including the Finance Committee, of which Barkley was a high-ranking member. He checked with his Senate cronies and found them equally aroused. He wanted to denounce the message immediately from the floor, but Chairman George of the Finance Committee was recognized first. Barkley decided to sleep on the matter. Next morning, as he left his apartment he told his wife, an invalid, that he would denounce the President’s veto and resign as Majority Leader. “Go to it, I’m with you,” she said.

  Barkley spoke before packed galleries; he did not disappoint his audience. To keep his Democratic credentials, he began with a crack at Willkie—that “up-to-date Halley’s comet darting across the firmament hither and yon to illuminate the heavens with an array of fantastic figures which neither I nor anybody can comprehend.” While he talked, his old foe McKellar, who once had refused to speak to him for weeks even though their seats adjoined, ran copy from page boys who were bringing dictated pages from Barkley’s office. Barkley went on to rebut Roosevelt’s “deliberate and unjustified misstatements” point by point. Roosevelt’s effort to compare his “little pine bushes with a sturdy oak, gum, poplar, or spruce…is like comparing a cricket to a stallion.” The President’s comment about tax relief for the greedy is a “calculated and deliberate assault upon the legislative integrity of every Member of Congress. Other members of Congress may do as they please; but, as for me, I do not propose to take this unjustifiable a
ssault lying down.” He concluded: “If the Congress of the United States has any self-respect left it will override the veto of the President and enact this tax bill into law, his objections to the contrary notwithstanding.” Prolonged applause on the Senate floor, members rising, the reporter noted. Spectators joined in; newsmen dashed from their gallery to their typewriters and telephones.

  At this moment Roosevelt was at Hyde Park. He had been quickly informed by Wallace and Byrnes of Barkley’s impending speech and resignation—and he appeared to be unconcerned. He told Byrnes to forget it and “just don’t give a damn…”; he remarked mildly to Hassett that Alben must be suffering from shell shock. Barkley was tired and Mrs. Barkley ill, he said later; it was just a nine-day wonder. When Byrnes pressed him for a conciliatory letter, the President agreed to send one if his War Mobilizer would draft it. Together the President and the former Senator produced a small masterpiece of balm and finesse.

  “I sincerely hope,” Roosevelt wrote to Barkley, “that you will not persist in your announced intention to resign as Majority Leader of the Senate. If you do, however, I hope that your colleagues will not accept your resignation; but if they do I hope that they will immediately and unanimously re-elect you.”

  Roosevelt’s letter keyed a scenario that had already been planned. Barkley came out of a conference of Senate Democrats to tell reporters, amid exploding flashbulbs, with tears in his eyes, that he had resigned as Majority Leader. He retired to his office while his colleagues deliberated. Suddenly the conference-room door swung open; Tom Connally, resplendent in a long black coat, a boiled white shirt, gold studs, and flowing gray-white hair, burst out, crying, “Make way for liberty! Make way for liberty!” and pushed his way through reporters and cameramen to Barkley’s office. A little procession of Senators followed. A few moments later Barkley was triumphantly escorted back to the conference room, where amid cheers and applause he was unanimously re-elected Majority Leader.

  The Senate had had its hour. The nation’s press was delirious. At last the White House errand boy had turned on his master; at last Congress had revolted against the dictator. More satisfaction was to come. The House overrode Roosevelt’s tax veto, 299 to 95; the Senate did the same the next day, 72 to 14. Treasury experts said it was the first revenue act in history to become law over a veto.

  The storm, as Roosevelt predicted, blew over in a few days. Barkley, who had seemed self-conscious and uncomfortable as a hero to the Senate barons, wrote the President a cordial note. When he returned to the White House as Majority Leader his role was unchanged. Roosevelt continued to appear undisturbed by the episode. Hassett could detect no bitterness or recrimination—even when the President inspected his Hyde Park timber-cutting operation, which was sending virgin oak direct to shipyards, though possibly it was accidental that photographers were on hand to record the size of the huge trunks. Passage of the tax bill over his veto, Hassett calculated, would save him $3,000 in taxes on his lumbering operations.

  Still, things would not be quite the same again. Not only were eight billion dollars of taxes lost, but the orgy of anti-Roosevelt eruptions in Congress and the press left a heavy deposit of bitterness. Western as well as Southern Democratic Senators—Edwin C. Johnson, of Colorado, for one—were coming out publicly against a fourth term. Uneasiness persisted over Roosevelt. Why had he vetoed the bill, knowing he would gain nothing better? And why a veto in such harsh and mocking terms?

  The columnists trotted out explanations. It was because Willkie was goading the President, some said, or because Barkley had infuriated him by belittling his Christmas trees, or because some New Dealer—Morgenthau or Byrnes or Rosenman or Paul—was really in control of fiscal policy. But it became evident that Roosevelt had written most of the cutting phrases in the veto message—and this fact helps explain Roosevelt’s action. He had come home from a global mission to a squabbling capital. The barons on Capitol Hill in particular—George, McKellar, Rankin, and the rest—seemed to symbolize the parochialism, the selfishness, the greed, the pettiness that Roosevelt felt was undermining the war effort. He himself was less patient, less receptive to advice from congressional spokesman, a bit less sparing of feelings. So his vetoing of the tax and other major bills, and his allowing the soldiers’-vote bill to become law without his signature, dramatized the gap between White House and Congress; but it also would leave the record clear.

  And always—for all the politicians—loomed the portent of the fall, the ultimate test by ballot. What would Roosevelt do? At the White House correspondents’ dinner, the President threw back his head and roared as Bob Hope gabbed away: “I’ve always voted for Roosevelt as President. My father always voted for Roosevelt as President….”

  THE SUCTION PUMP

  It was widely assumed in Washington that Roosevelt would run for a fourth term only if the war was still on by summer 1944. Many Americans thought the war would be over and won by that time, but the President himself had always been loath to predict an early victory. “We have got a long, long road to go,” he told visitors early in March 1944. “We are going to win the war—it is going to take an awfully long time.”

  The President spoke at a time when the war in Italy—the only active Allied front in the West—was going badly. Inching up the long valleys north of Naples, Mark Clark’s Fifth Army and the British Eighth Army, with polyglot elements from other nations, had fought their way through the Germans’ winter line and had come up hard against the Gustav Line, anchored in jutting, snow-covered mountains. Here was a soldier’s purgatory—rough, brushy terrain cut by gullies and stream beds and flanked by rocky terraces, knife-edge cliffs, broken ridges, all of which favored the defenders. The sunny days of Calabria had given way to weeks of pelting rain and wet snow that turned fields into swamps and quagmires. The drenched, shivering soldiers crouched in foxholes or thigh-deep in swamplands were an ironic symbol. The kind of draining, positioned warfare that Churchill had abhorred in the plains of France was appearing again in the mountains of Italy. When Clark’s 36th Division tried to force the Rapido River, south of Cassino, footbridges were blown up by mines or gunfire even while being erected; rubber boats sank under small-arms fire, and the few men who got across were trapped in barbed wire, mines, and machine-gun and shell fire. The 36th took 1,600 casualties in three days—and was not across the Rapido.

  Churchill was dismayed but unmoved by the deepening stalemate in Italy. He would not change the Italian strategy, but would adjust other strategy to it. OVERLORD, he professed, still had highest priority, but must everything be subordinated to the “tyranny” of the cross-channel attack? As he saw the problem, the campaign in Italy was the vital counterpart to the main operation in France. He was still critical of the “American clear-cut, logical, large-scale” style of thought. “In life people have first to be taught ‘Concentrate on essentials’…but it is only the first step. The second stage in war is a general harmony of war efforts by making everything fit together….”

  Though still feverish from pneumonia, Churchill had thrown himself into a battle to resuscitate the campaign in Italy. The stagnation on that front was scandalous, he told his Chief of Staff. A ray of hope was that Eisenhower planned an end run—an amphibious flanking attack behind the Germans at Anzio, thirty-eight miles south of Rome, conjoined with a renewed attack on the Gustav Line. Churchill was elated by this plan for a “cat claw.” The rub was that fifty-six LST’s destined for Britain and ERLORD would have to be held in the Mediterranean for the operation. Churchill sent a long, pleading letter to Roosevelt. The Italian battle could not be allowed to stagnate and fester, he insisted. A vast half-finished job could not be given up. The cat claw should decide the Battle of Rome and perhaps even destroy much of Kesselring’s army. If this opportunity was lost, the Mediterranean campaign of 1944 would be ruined.

  Once again Roosevelt confronted a Churchillian squeeze play in the Mediterranean; once again his Chiefs of Staff and planners worried about the suction pump; once ag
ain the President gave in. He did remind the Prime Minister that under the Teheran pledges he could not agree without Stalin’s approval to any use of forces or equipment elsewhere that might delay or hazard the success of OVERLORD or ANVIL. “I thank God for this decision,” Churchill wired back, “which engages us once again in wholehearted unity upon a great enterprise.”

  The cat claw struck Anzio on January 22. At first things went well. Undetected by the Germans, American and British assault troops met little resistance and quickly moved several miles inland. Unloading proceeded briskly. At this moment Kesselring’s reserves were committed in the battle against the major Allied attack to the south, and for a few intoxicating hours a lunge through to Rome seemed possible. Then came Hitler’s order of the day that the Führer expected the “bitterest struggle for every yard” for the sake of political consequences—the defense of Rome. The Anzio “abscess” must be liquidated. Ordering his Gustav Line troops on the defensive, Kesselring skillfully deployed his crack regiments into the Anzio perimeter. German divisions started moving down the boot of Italy. Fearing encirclement if they dashed toward Rome, the invaders fortified their beachhead positions and dug in. The attackers thus became the defenders. In the south the Allies stalled again below the formidable heights of Cassino. Roosevelt told reporters the situation was very tense.

  Churchill was appalled at the failure to exploit Anzio. The wildcat hurled onto the shore, he complained later, had become a stranded whale. At least the whale was there to stay; heavy Nazi counterattacks came dangerously close to overrunning the beachhead, but the defenders hung on. It was clear that deadlock once again would grip the Italian front, that more men and supply would be needed, that the suction pump would speed up again. Once again tactics were colliding with strategy. It had been evident for some time that OVERLORD must be postponed until about the end of May. Now the British, who had never been very enthusiastic about ANVIL, were insisting that the planned invasion of southern France be scrapped or put off so that the full Mediterranean thrust would remain concentrated in Italy. German strength would be contained and bled below the Alps.