The White House mail reflected the bitterness. “In conclusion candidate Roosevelt,” wrote a Californian, “you are a politician I would not trust; for you use men to promote your desire for power and more power and when their usefulness is at an end, they are cast aside, as you double-crossed Al Smith at the 1932 Chicago Convention in your deal with Hearst (whom you now revile), McAdoo and Garner. Both you and your wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, have done more during your incumbency to promote and stir up class, racial hatreds….May God pardon you.” From a New Jerseyite: “The people of the U.S. of America do not like any longer boss rule, nor dictated by a machine….” Of the several hundred persons who wrote in against a fourth term some had specific complaints, some general, but many simply hated Roosevelt.
Many still loved him, or needed him. “Please President Roosevelt don’t let us down now in this world of sorrow and trouble. If we ever needed you is now. I believe within my heart God put you here in this world to be our Guiding Star….” Some letters came from organized groups; 6,100 steelworkers signed a petition, “We know that you are weary—yet we cannot afford to permit you to step down….” Few letters dealt with issues, programs, specific goals; here again a gap yawned between great cloudy war aims and peoples’ specific needs.
An undercurrent of worry about Roosevelt’s health ran through many letters from both friend and foe. From San Diego: “I don’t believe in working a good horse to death—so don’t try to carry the whole world on your shoulders.” From a woman in Brooklyn: “…You did many fine and wonderful things for this country, no doubt….Resign, retire to your New York State home rest—and in time enjoy the fruits of your endeavours.” One or two advised him to step down and head the peace delegation.
Messages came from Berlin, too. Election year had hardly started when Douglas Chandler, a former Hearst newspaperman who broadcast regularly from Germany under the name Paul Revere, called on his fellow Americans to repudiate the traitor, the charlatan, the weakling in the White House. America, he said, was on the brink of a reign of terror—and, even worse, inflation. “Get that man out of the house that was once white!” Adolf Hitler had cast his ballot early.
AS A GOOD SOLDIER
It might seem that, in theory at least, the most ticklish role in wartime politics would be the opposition’s. To conduct a campaign at home against an administration conducting a campaign against the enemy overseas, to agitate and divide the country, to attack the Commander in Chief—politicians might be expected to recoil from such unpopular ventures. But not the pragmatic office seekers of America. By the inexorable calendar of American politics it was election year and hence it was time to smite the party in power, war or no war. By early 1944 the GOP was seething with hope and stratagems, and several men were seeking the Republican nomination.
The most active of these was Wendell Willkie. The 1940 nominee had refused to fade away after his defeat. His global travels, his writings, his calls for strong postwar world organization, his eloquent defense of Negroes and other minority groups, his double-barreled attacks on congressional Republicans and on the Roosevelt administration kept him in the public eye. But by 1944 he was a man without a party. He was still anathema to the congressional Republicans; he had never built a strong grass-roots organization within presidential Republican ranks, and what organized support he had mustered had partly melted away during the war.
Willkie was still a commanding figure, with his big burly frame, shaggy hair, muscular phrases, and blunt assaults on his enemies. But a note of desperate frustration was creeping into his speeches. He lambasted the reactionaries, bigots, and stand-patters in his own party even more bitterly than the racists and reactionaries in the Democratic. Introduced by an industrialist as “America’s leading ingrate” to those who had helped him in 1940, he burst out, “I don’t know whether you are going to support me or not and I don’t give a damn. You’re a bunch of political liabilities anyway.” He was forever telling Republicans that they could take him or leave him—and many left him. He said all the right things about the Democratic regime—one-man rule, confused administration, self-perpetuation in power—but his criticisms of presidential Democrats seemed to lack the bite and crunch of his attacks on congressional Republicans.
His only hope in 1944, in contrast to his last-minute blitz four years before, was to demonstrate his popularity in a string of primaries. He won a small victory in New Hampshire and then plunged into Wisconsin. He calculated that if he could carry this Midwestern state, with its big German-American population and isolationist tradition, he would have met the crucial test. Day after day before big crowds he lashed his foes—the Chicago Tribune, New Deal regimentation, trimmers and poll-takers in his own party—in an exhausting campaign through the cities and towns of Wisconsin. It was like punching air—no other candidate was there to face him. But his lieutenants hoped to win a clear-cut majority of delegates, perhaps even all of them.
The results were clear-cut enough. He won not a single delegate. His leading delegate candidate ran a poor fourth to the top Dewey, MacArthur, and Harold Stassen men. Appalled and played out, Willkie told a crowd that he was quitting the race. He had hoped, he told his startled listeners, that the Middle West, the matrix of so many moral causes, would help produce new leadership. “Perhaps the conscience of America is dulled. Perhaps the people are not willing to bear the sacrifices, and I feel a sense of sickening because I know how much my party could do to make it worthy of its tradition….”
Roosevelt read the results with mixed feelings. Not only did he admire his old adversary in certain ways, but also he had reason to feel uneasy about the two candidates left in the running.
The more notable of these was Douglas MacArthur, Roosevelt’s old acquaintance, onetime Chief of Staff, and present subordinate. The President no longer considered MacArthur, along with Huey Long, one of the two most dangerous men in the country, as he had ten years before, but he could not ignore the General. MacArthur was still the darling of the congressional Republicans and the Hearst-McCormick-Patterson press, with their Pacific First strategy, neoisolationist tendencies, and anti-New Deal feelings. While publicly aloof, the General privately was making known his willingness to be drafted. After Vandenberg had shown some interest in MacArthur, the General wrote him an effusive letter intimating that there was much he would like to tell Vandenberg “which circumstances prevent” and asking for the Senator’s “wise mentorship.” Encouraged and spurred by the General’s missionaries to Washington, a small group of conservative Republicans—Vandenberg, publisher Frank Gannett, General Robert E. Wood, of Chicago, former head of America First, among others—quietly fostered MacArthur sentiment. The General made clear that he would accept the nomination only if drafted; otherwise he stayed out of the struggle and communicated through intermediaries.
April 10, 1944, C. K. Berryman, courtesy of the Washington (D.C.) Star
The politicos in the White House watched the boomlet closely. It was clear that MacArthur, if nominated, would campaign for Pacific First; it was possible that he would charge Roosevelt with inadequately preparing the nation for war, with deserting the Philippines and starving the Southwest Pacific theater. The General had repeatedly put himself on record with the Pentagon and the White House about his grievances; his documented appeals would make good campaign material in the fall. But also on record in the White House, in the secret files of the President’s naval aide, was the transcript of a discussion between MacArthur and Navy chiefs the day before Pearl Harbor. During this discussion the General had said that he was sure he could defend the archipelago as a whole and that his greatest security was the “inability of our enemy to launch his air attack on our islands.” That, too, would make good campaign material in the fall.
For the MacArthur backers everything depended on retaining control of their boom for the General, keeping his name out of the presidential primaries, and timing developments so that he would be summoned to higher duty by the Republican convent
ion. But too many Republicans, desperate to find a candidate who could match Roosevelt’s glamour and appeal, crowded onto the small bandwagon. One of these was a Nebraska Congressman who rashly published an exchange of letters with MacArthur in which the Congressman had intemperately attacked the New Deal, and the General had expressed complete agreement with his views and had gone on to refer darkly to the “sinister drama of our present chaos and confusion.” The publicity and the ensuing furore pricked the MacArthur bubble; he announced that he did not “covet” the nomination and would not accept it because no high officer at the front should be considered for President.
And then there was one….Thomas E. Dewey had not had to lift a hand while his rivals ran into pitfalls and booby traps. Grandson of a founder of the Republican party in 1854, son of a Republican editor and postmaster in a small Michigan town, he had not only lived a Horatio Alger boyhood, but also at thirteen had nine other boys as his agents peddling the Saturday Evening Post and Ladies’ Home Journal. After graduating from the University of Michigan and from Columbia Law School, he joined a New York law firm in the mid-1920s, practiced obscurely there for six years, then as a mob prosecutor and racket buster won almost instant fame by putting the likes of Legs Diamond and Lucky Luciano behind bars. Dewey was always in a hurry. Elected District Attorney for New York County on the La Guardia ticket in 1937, the next year he took on the redoubtable Herbert Lehman in a race for governor. He lost so narrowly that he was emboldened to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 1940. He led strongly on the early ballots at the Philadelphia convention, only to fall before the Willkie boom. Two years later, with Lehman out of the way, he captured the governorship in a smooth operation.
At forty-two Dewey was a seasoned young professional, with his share of wins and losses. Already he had acquired a reputation for being stiff, humorless, overbearing. With his waxworks mustache and features, his medium height, and his deep baritone he lent himself to cruel remarks: he was the bridegroom on the wedding cake, the only man who could strut sitting down, a man you really had to know to dislike, the Boy Orator of the Platitude. But his adversaries had learned not to underestimate him. He was the clear-cut choice of the Republican rank and file as well as the presidential-party leadership during the early months of 1944. He was running an expert noncampaign. He exuded energy, efficiency, purpose.
The New York Governor had done such a professional job in rounding up delegates, in fact, that he won easily on the first ballot in Chicago. It was a dull convention, enlivened only by Dewey’s choice of John W. Bricker, the popular, wavy-haired Governor of Ohio, as his running mate. Bricker was no savant—his mind had been compared to stellar space, a huge void filled with a few wandering clichés—but all agreed that the two men made a strong ticket. And when Dewey, in his acceptance speech, lambasted the Democrats for having grown old and tired and stubborn and quarrelsome in office, he made clear the grounds on which he would carry the attack to the Roosevelt administration.
May 18,1944, C. K. Berryman, courtesy of the Washington (D.C.) Star
There was little suspense about the Democratic nominee. The President told friends that he wanted to return to Hyde Park “just as soon as the Lord will let me,” but by early 1944 there was no doubt in the White House, and little outside, that he would run again, certainly if the war was not yet won. After sparring with reporters for some months, Roosevelt in July handed them copies of a letter to Robert E. Hannegan, now Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, stating that he did not want to continue in the White House after twelve years but that if the convention nominated him and if the people—“the Commander in Chief of us all”—ordered him, as a “good soldier” he would serve.
The big question was his running mate. It was clear that whether the President completed another term or not, the next Vice President would be in a commanding position in 1948. Who was Roosevelt’s choice? The President never—not even in 1940—pursued a more Byzantine course than in his handling of this question.
Relations within the top echelons of the Democratic party in early 1944 were reminiscent of the old description of the Massachusetts Democracy as the systematic organization of hatred. Congressional Democrats were threatening to bolt the party, or at least withhold Southern electoral-college votes from the President. Texas and Virginia Democrats were in open revolt. CIO unions and liberal journals, along with a number of people close to Roosevelt, including Eleanor Roosevelt, backed Wallace; most of them opposed Byrnes. A covey of Democratic politicians—Hannegan; Edwin Pauley, Treasurer of the Democratic National Committee; Postmaster General Frank Walker; George E. Allen, Secretary of the National Committee; Boss Ed Flynn of the Bronx—opposed Wallace; so did Pa Watson and Steve Early. Friends of Pauley boasted that the California oil man journeyed from city to city urging local leaders to send reports to the White House about Wallace’s unpopularity, and that Pauley had made a deal with Watson that Pa would clear the way into the oval office for anti-Wallace Democrats.
Roosevelt was pursuing his own line. While not discouraging Wallace, he subtly and openly encouraged others. His handling of vice-presidential ambitions in 1944 was much like his crafty, brilliant management of presidential rivalries four years before. At that time he had not only encouraged existing candidates to contend with one another but also had adroitly enlarged the field so that potential opposition would be fragmented and thus more manageable. So in 1944 he tempted Byrnes, who had earlier decided he would not try for the job; Hull, who flatly declined; and, by no indication he was out of favor, Vice President Wallace. Word leaked out at various times that the President looked with favor on Barkley, Rayburn, Truman, Winant, Justice Douglas, McNutt, Henry Kaiser, and several others. Wallace was leading in the polls; the President did not help his chances when in May he dispatched him on a mission to Asia, for Roosevelt sometimes sent abroad people he intended to let go.
May 16, 1944, C. K. Berryman, courtesy of the Washington (D.C.) Star
By early July, with the convention scheduled for Chicago at the end of the month, Roosevelt could not put the matter off much longer. The smoke-filled room of the 1944 Democratic convention took place two weeks early, in the President’s sweltering second-floor study, where he met on the evening of July 11 with Hannegan, Walker, Flynn, and others to canvass the field. One by one the names of front runners were lobbed up and smashed down. Byrnes, a Southerner and ex-Catholic, would alienate Negroes, Catholics, and liberals, according to the conventional wisdom of the canvassers. Barkley was too old. Wallace was so clearly anathema to the group that he was hardly discussed. Roosevelt trotted out Douglas’s name—he was young, dynamic, he said, and, besides, played a good game of poker—but the others were cool. The talk turned to Truman. Roosevelt liked him for his personal loyalty and legislative support even while running an effective war investigation committee. The others approved his strong partisan background and instincts. He was from the Midwest, from a politically doubtful border state. The President did seem worried about Truman’s age and sent someone out to check it, but he wandered away from the subject and it never came up again.
Everybody seemed to want Truman, Roosevelt said with an air of finality. The meeting broke up, but Hannegan, worried that the President might change his mind, got him to pencil a one-line note that Truman was the right man.
How to inform Wallace and Byrnes that Truman had the nod? As usual Roosevelt left this distasteful job to his subordinates. Rosenman and Ickes got hold of Wallace, who had just returned from China. The Vice President was calmly adamant. People were starving to death in Asia by the hundreds of thousands, he told the emissaries; he would talk politics only to the President. At the White House he showed Roosevelt his list of delegate support, his high standing in the polls. Roosevelt seemed to be surprised and impressed. He even discussed possible tactics. And he promised the Vice President a letter of personal endorsement. As he left, the President reached up and put his arm around him. “I hope it’s the same team again,
Henry.”
Byrnes was equally obdurate. When Hannegan and Walker came with the bad news, he insisted on phoning the President at Hyde Park, and he took down the President’s answer in shorthand. Was the President allowing people to speak for him?
Roosevelt: “I am not favoring anybody. I told them so. No, I am not favoring anyone.”
Why were Hannegan and Walker quoting him as favoring Truman or Douglas?
“Jimmy, that is all wrong. That is not what I told them. It is what they told me.” He had not expressed preference for anyone.
Again Byrnes pressed him on the matter.
Roosevelt: “We have to be damned careful about words. They asked if I would object to Truman and Douglas and I said no. That is different from using the word ‘prefer.’…” He ended by virtually urging Byrnes to run.
By the time the Democrats convened in Chicago they were in a delicious state of confusion. While vice-presidential fever was sweeping the leadership, the delegates milled about in more than the usual state of ignorance. Byrnes had lined up Truman’s support so solidly behind his own candidacy that the Missourian was not fulfilling his assigned role as number-one dark horse. Hannegan and his friends were trying to sidetrack Wallace without putting in Byrnes. Hillman was working hard for Wallace but keeping a line of retreat open to Truman. Ickes was working for either Douglas or Truman—some said just for Ickes. Before the convention started, the President had stopped his train in Chicago on his way to San Diego and complicated things further by reissuing his penciled chit to Hannegan to read as an endorsement of Truman and Douglas—either to show he was not trying to run the convention or just to keep things confused.
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