The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  Wallace’s big weapon was a letter Roosevelt had written about him to the convention chairman: “I like him and I respect him and he is my personal friend. For these reasons I personally would vote for his renomination if I were a delegate to the convention.” But the letter ended by leaving the matter up to the convention. To some it looked like the kiss of death; others wondered if it might put the Vice President over the top. It might have if Hannegan and his cohorts had not finally broken Truman loose from his pledge to Byrnes. Roosevelt, by now in San Diego, had to do this job, too; after Hannegan had got Truman together with Walker, Flynn, and Chicago boss Edward J. Kelly in a room at the famous Blackstone Hotel and put a call through to the President, Roosevelt demanded: “Have you got that fellow lined up yet?”

  The answer was no. Truman still could not believe that the President was supporting him over Byrnes and Wallace.

  “Well, tell the Senator,” the President said, “that if he wants to break up the Democratic party by staying out, he can; but he knows as well as I what that might mean at this dangerous time in the world….” Convinced at last, Truman asked Byrnes to release him. Wallace led the pack strongly on the first ballot, with Truman, Bankhead, and Barkley following, but the city bosses and the Southern Bourbons converged on the next ballot to put Truman over. Earlier Roosevelt had been routinely renominated; Harry Byrd received eighty-nine votes, virtually all from Southerners, and Farley one. The President had asked for and got a short, mildly New Deal, internationalist platform. He gave his acceptance speech from San Diego over the radio to the delegates sitting in the Chicago Stadium.

  “I have already indicated to you why I accept the nomination that you have offered me—in spite of my desire to retire to the quiet of private life….

  “I shall not campaign, in the usual sense, for the office. In these days of tragic sorrow, I do not consider it fitting. And besides, in these days of global warfare, I shall not be able to find the time. I shall, however, feel free to report to the people the facts about matters of concern to them and especially to correct any misrepresentations….

  “What is the job before us in 1944? First, to win the war—to win the war fast, to win it overpoweringly. Second, to form worldwide international organizations, and to arrange to use the armed forces of the sovereign Nations of the world to make another war impossible within the foreseeable future. And third, to build an economy for our returning veterans and for all Americans—which will provide employment and provide decent standards of living.”

  The President rarely closed an address by quoting a famous speech, but the peroration of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural seemed apt for the occasion:

  “With firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the Nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all Nations.”

  A NEW PARTY?

  After allowing a decent interval for Democratic convention oratory Dewey resumed his campaign against the tired administration and one-man government. The best way to counter this line of attack, Roosevelt knew, was through action rather than words. His long trip to California, Hawaii, and Alaska was to be testament to a Commander in Chief radiating energy and confidence. But Dewey had a point. So much did depend on that one man. And as the domestic battlelines were forming there were ominous signs that the pressure was too heavy, the body too fragile.

  In his railway car in San Diego just before he was to leave to watch the landing exercise, the President was chatting with his son James. Suddenly his face turned white and agonized. “Jimmy, I don’t know if I can make it—I have horrible pains.” For minutes his father’s eyes were closed, his face drawn, his torso convulsed by waves of pain. He refused to let Jimmy cancel his appearance. Then he recovered and was able to leave for the exercise. However serious this episode may have been, it was not reported to Bruenn.

  Rumors were spreading. A story circulated even in the White House that the President had had a secret operation at Hobcaw in May. In Hawaii, Roosevelt received word from Hopkins in Washington that an FBI agent in Honolulu had reported to J. Edgar Hoover that the Pacific trip had been canceled because of the President’s ill-health. He hoped the report was untrue, Hopkins wired, but if true that some other reason would be given. “The underground is working overtime here in regard to your health.” Leahy replied that the President had worked fourteen hours straight the day before and was never in better health, and that the FBI agent should be disciplined for making a false report.

  The camera that had projected Roosevelt’s radiant face throughout the world could also be cruel. One widely used picture of Roosevelt making his acceptance speech showed a gaunt, shadowed face and a slack, open mouth; Rosenman lamented that Early was not there to prevent that kind of picture from going out, as Early had done in the past.

  Perhaps the President missed the feeling of human contact in making his acceptance speech from San Diego; perhaps his mind went back to his dramatic flight to the Chicago convention in 1932 to pledge “a new deal for the American people”; or to the Philadelphia acceptance speech in 1936, when he proclaimed that “this generation of Americans has a rendevous with destiny.” Certainly he wanted a live audience for his first appearance back on the mainland after his Pacific trip. He asked Mike Reilly to make arrangements for a speech in the Seattle baseball stadium. Reilly, anxious about security, appealed to Rosenman and Hopkins, who cabled that the President should not be in the position of having crossed the country in one direction in secrecy and then making a speech to a civilian audience on the way back. Why not speak from the deck of his destroyer with its guns as background? The President liked the idea.

  To thousands of Bremerton workers jamming the docks—and to a nationwide radio audience—the President gave a chatty travelogue about his Pacific journey. To his aides the talk seemed a near-disaster. The President spoke in the open, against the wind; on the curved deck his braces, which he had been wearing less and less during the war years, were ill-fitting and uncomfortable; his delivery was tepid and halting. Rosenman’s heart sank as he sat by the radio and heard the rambling speech.

  What Rosenman did not know—and probably Roosevelt himself never knew—is that during the first part of this speech the President was suffering the first and only attack of angina pectoris he had ever had, or would have. Standing just behind him, even Bruenn could not tell what was happening. For about fifteen minutes the oppression gripped Roosevelt’s chest and radiated to both shoulders; then the severe pain slowly subsided. Roosevelt told Bruenn right after the talk that he had had some pain; within an hour a white blood count was taken and an electrocardiogram tracing made. No unusual abnormalities were found.

  Once again tongues started wagging. Rosenman knew all about the chatter at Washington and New York cocktail parties, about the questions people were asking: Has the master lost his touch? Is he a setup for Dewey’s punches? Some of Roosevelt’s intimates worried less about this than about Roosevelt’s boredom with political detail. He had seemed curiously disengaged concerning the vice-presidential canvassing at the White House. At San Diego he told Jimmy that he didn’t give a damn whether the convention chose Douglas or Byrnes or Truman; the important thing was to get on with the war. The Bremerton speech—his first contact with the American people since his acceptance address over three weeks before—he prepared hastily on the destroyer without the help of speech writers. Still, he was not detached about the rumors of his bad health. When Reilly confessed to him that he had allowed reporters to glimpse the President at Hobcaw to counter their taunting claims that he was actually hospitalized in Boston or Chicago, Roosevelt’s lips tightened and his eyes glittered. “Mike, those newspapermen are a bunch of God-damned ghouls.”

  The President’s most effective electioneering technique, at least early in the campaign, had always been th
at of maintaining his presidential posture, above the battle. While activists like Ickes chafed and fretted, while the Republican candidate sought to come to grips with his foe, Roosevelt continued just being President, offering as small a partisan flank as possible for the opposition to bombard.

  Being President meant that he could propose and sign popular legislation. In early summer he approved the GI Bill of Rights, which revolutionized the whole approach to the returning soldier. The emphasis was less on a bonus or reward and more on education and individual achievement. Education or training at any level from primary grades to postgraduate would be allowed an ex-serviceman for one year plus the time served in the armed services, up to a total of four years. The bill also provided for a federal guarantee of half of the amount of loans made to veterans to buy or build homes, farms, and business properties; authorized substantial unemployment allowances for jobless veterans; set up machinery to help returning veterans find jobs; and authorized the building of more hospitals. The GI Bill was the capstone of a structure of veterans’ benefits fashioned during the war: dependency allowances; mustering-out pay; broad medical care; death and disability pensions; war-risk life insurance; re-employment rights for returning ex-servicemen, and more.

  “It gives emphatic notice to the men and women in the armed forces,” Roosevelt said in signing the bill, “that the American people do not intend to let them down.” It was not the kind of action or statement that presented an inviting target to the Republicans.

  Being President meant laying exciting plans for the postwar future. Roosevelt proposed perhaps the most dramatic of these at summer’s end when he called for a Missouri River development plan that would be based on the TVA concept that a big river basin contains one river and one set of interrelated problems and opportunities. In spurning a piecemeal legislative program for the basin, the President defied the innumerable groups that clustered around the existing power, recreation, irrigation, transportation, agricultural, and commercial interests in the basin. He called, too, for a study of the Arkansas and Columbia River basins, also with the TVA model in view.

  Being President meant upholding the law. In the heat of August the Philadelphia transit system, serving almost a million war workers, came to a halt when motormen quit work because eight black employees had been upgraded to motormen. Strike leaders protested that motormen sat on the same wooden benches between runs and “the colored people have bedbugs.” As thousands trudged to work in ninety-seven-degree heat and tension rose in the black enclaves, the President intervened from far out in the Pacific. Under his proclamation the Army took control of the transit system, ordered strikers to return, vainly waited two days for compliance—then moved 8,000 armed soldiers into the city, arrested the strike leaders, warned younger strikers that their draft deferments would be canceled, put two soldier guards behind each complying motorman, got the trolleys rolling again—and protected the Negroes’ rights to their jobs.

  During these summer months Roosevelt was conducting a curious venture in grand political strategy at home—curious because he ordinarily shunned broad political planning, curious, too, because years later it was still unclear whether he was seriously engaged in fundamental political reform or simply attempting an election ploy.

  Certainly the political state of affairs cried out for a major confrontation. By 1944 Roosevelt and Willkie were both badgered and frustrated by the conservative wings of their parties; the presidential Democrats and the presidential Republicans were each under sharp challenge by the opposing congressional party. Roosevelt had been defeated on major legislation, such as taxes, and several of the Southern Democracies were openly defying him. Willkie was so impotent after Wisconsin that he was not even seated as a delegate in the Republican convention, much less invited to speak to the conclave or to testify before the platform committee. He felt more bitter than Roosevelt about his own congressional-party foes. He condemned the postwar international-security plank of the Republican party platform—actually a restatement of the Mackinac formula—as a betrayal of the youth of America. It was only natural under the four-party pattern of American politics during this period that Willkie seemed to have more friends at the Democratic convention than at the Republican and that there was even some scattered interest in making him Roosevelt’s running mate.

  One day toward the end of June the President called Rosenman into his office. He said that former Governor Gifford Pinchot, of Pennsylvania—long a leader of presidential Republicans—had had a meeting with Willkie recently and then had come in to see the President. Willkie and Pinchot had talked about the possibility of a new setup in American politics. Roosevelt went on, as Rosenman recalled later, “It was Willkie’s idea. Willkie has just been beaten by the conservatives in his own party who lined up in back of Dewey. Now there is no doubt that the reactionaries in our own party are out for my scalp, too—as you can see by what’s going on in the South.

  “Well, I think the time has come for the Democratic party to get rid of its reactionary elements in the South, and to attract to it the liberals in the Republican party. Willkie is the leader of those liberals. He talked to Pinchot about a coalition of the liberals in both parties, leaving the conservatives in each party to join together as they see fit. I agree with him one hundred per cent and the time is now—right after the election.

  “We ought to have two real parties—one liberal and the other conservative. As it is now, each party is split by dissenters.

  “Of course, I’m talking about long-range politics—something that we can’t accomplish this year. But we can do it in 1948, and we can start building it up right after the election this fall. From the liberals of both parties Willkie and I together can form a new, really liberal party in America.”

  The President asked Rosenman to go to New York to see Willkie and sound him out on the idea. Rosenman warned his boss that Willkie might interpret the approach as a subterfuge to get him to come out for the President in the election. Roosevelt said that he should explain to Willkie in advance that the project had nothing to do with the coming election.

  The two met secretly at the St. Regis—so secretly that Willkie stepped into the bedroom when the waiter served lunch. Willkie was wholly responsive to the idea of a postelection try at party realignment. Both parties were hybrids of liberals and reactionaries, he said. After the war there should be a clear confrontation of liberals and internationalists in one party against conservatives and isolationists in the other. “You tell the President that I’m ready to devote almost full time to this,” he told Rosenman. The two men spent most of two hours going over leaders and groups—labor, racial, and religious groups, small farmers, students, small businessmen, intellectuals, liberal Republicans—who could form the core of a cohesive liberal party. Willkie insisted only that he not see the President until after Election Day.

  Roosevelt seemed elated by Rosenman’s report of the discussion. “Fine, fine,” he said; he would see Willkie at the proper time. But without waiting further, and without telling even Rosenman, he wrote to Willkie on July 13 that he would like to see him when he returned from his trip westward. Willkie did not answer the letter; he preferred to wait. He became even more cautious when word spread that the President had written to him; he suspected a deliberate leak by the White House in order to implicate him in Roosevelt’s campaign effort, though he himself had shown the letter to Henry Luce and at least one other friend.

  Vast confusion followed as Roosevelt, returning from his Pacific trip, first denied and then admitted that he had asked to see the 1940 nominee. Willkie, backing off, then tried to use former Governor James M. Cox, of Ohio, the Democratic nominee of 1920, to serve as intermediary, but this only confused matters more. The whole question still hung fire when Willkie was hospitalized for heart trouble early in September.

  What had happened? Here, Rosenman reflected, were the two most prestigious political leaders in America, two leaders of the world. They were aflame with a great cause�
�the consolidation of the liberal, internationalist forces in America—that they better than any other men could have conducted with hope of success. And they utterly failed even to begin.

  One clue lay in the transformation of Willkie in the last years of his life. The onetime utility tycoon and man of practical affairs had become a passionate ideologue. He had painted his Republican enemies black, calling them reactionary, isolationist, narrow, pathological. He had become aroused not only about isolationism but also about racism at home and abroad. He had read Myrdal and agreed with him that the war was crucial for the future of the Negro, that the race problem was in truth the crisis of American democracy, that the most tragic indignities were those inflicted on Negroes in the armed forces. But above all the author of One World was heartsick over what was happening, in the cloying partisan politics of an election year, to the dream of an effective world organization.

  And Roosevelt—what was Roosevelt? To Willkie he was the head of a party as unprincipled as the Republican. The New Deal administration he had often charged with tired and cynical expediency, sacrifice of moral principle, misuse of personal power. Toward Roosevelt he was ambivalent; he had criticized him sharply in his preconvention campaigning, partly to keep his Republican credentials; programatically he was much closer to the President than to the congressional Republican leadership. But Roosevelt’s opportunism put him off. He was so fed up with pragmatic politicians, he wrote to Gardner Cowles in mid-August, that nothing would induce him to serve under any of them. “I’ve been lied to for the last time.”

  Was Roosevelt in effect lying to him? Was the whole thing just an election stratagem? Willkie could not tell. On the one hand, the President had seemed willing to try party realignment only after the election. He would naturally want to win re-election as a step toward realizing a grand new party design afterward. And after all, the President had fought his foes in his own party—and in Willkie’s—openly enough; he had even tried to purge conservative Democrats in 1938. But there was a darker side. Roosevelt had put Stimson and Knox in his Cabinet in 1940 without making a sustained effort to win over presidential Republicans. He loved to divide and conquer the GOP at election time. He would be a hard man to work with in overcoming the almost insuperable problems of party realignment. He had put out feelers to Willkie to take other posts; perhaps all these acts were just election gimmicks.