The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  For Dewey, too, it was a strange campaign. Like his predecessors Willkie and Landon and especially Hoover, he found it impossible to come to grips with his adversary. He had plenty of hard evidence for his charges of mismanagement and red tape and expediency—but words meant little in the face of MacArthur’s and Eisenhower’s triumphs abroad. He was infuriated by Roosevelt’s bringing up the question of enforcing the peace—a question he had understood to be barred from the campaign in the interest of bipartisan unity. He had occasional strokes of luck, such as Selective Service Director Hershey’s remark that the government could keep people in the Army about as cheaply as it could create an agency for them when they came out. But Roosevelt was quick to have Stimson shush up Hershey and to make clear his own plans for rapid demobilization.

  Dewey’s actual position on policy was directly in the presidential Republican tradition—moderate liberalism, moderate internationalism—but the President attacked not the Dewey Republicans but the Taft, Martin, and Fish Republicans. In one speech Roosevelt even turned topsy-turvy one of the oldest and proudest GOP war cries—its stand for stable currency—when he asserted that the “Democratic Party in this war has been the party of sound money,” and the Republican party of unsound. To Dewey, as to Hoover, Roosevelt seemed a political chameleon.

  FOR YOU ARE THE MAN FOR US

  With the polls predicting a close election but with Roosevelt in the lead, Dewey acted more and more like a prosecutor trying to put the President in the dock. And he gravitated more and more toward Communism as the issue. In the final days of the campaign he charged in Boston that to perpetuate himself in office for sixteen years his opponent had put his party on the auction block, for sale to the highest bidder. The highest bidders were the PAC and the Communist party. Roosevelt had pardoned Earl Browder, he said, in time to organize the fourth-term election. “Now the Communists are seizing control of the New Deal, through which they aim to control the Government of the United States.” By now Democratic leaders were telling Rosenman and Sherwood that the President must answer the charges—the voters feared Communism more than Nazism or fascism.

  Roosevelt had long disliked Dewey; now his attitude had become one of “unvarnished contempt.” Bringing his campaign to a climax in Boston three days before the election, he met Dewey’s charges with ridicule.

  “Speaking here in Boston, a Republican candidate said—and pardon me if I quote him correctly—that happens to be an old habit of mine—he said that, quote, ‘the Communists are seizing control of the New Deal, through which they aim to control the Government of the United States.’ Unquote.

  “However, on that very same day, that very same candidate had spoken in Worcester, and he said that with Republican victory in November, quote, ‘we can end one-man government, and we can forever remove the threat of monarchy in the United States.’

  “Now, really—which is it—Communism or monarchy?

  “I do not think that we could have both in this country, even if we wanted either, which we do not.

  “No, we want neither Communism nor monarchy. We want to live under our Constitution which has served pretty well for a hundred and fifty-five years. And, if this were a banquet hall instead of a ball park, I would propose a toast that we will continue to live under this Constitution for another hundred and fifty-five years.

  “Everybody knows that I was reluctant to run for the Presidency again this year. But since this campaign developed, I tell you frankly that I have become most anxious to win—and I say that for the reason that never before in my lifetime has a campaign been filled with such misrepresentation, distortion, and falsehood. Never since 1928 have there been so many attempts to stimulate in America racial or religious intolerance.

  “When any politician or any political candidate stands up and says, solemnly, that there is danger that the Government of the United States—your Government—could be sold out to the Communists—then I say that that candidate reveals—and I’ll be polite—a shocking lack of trust in America….”

  Al Smith had died early in October, and to the Irish of Boston the President cited the lesson of Al Smith:

  “When I talked here in Boston in 1928, I talked about racial and religious intolerance, which was then—as unfortunately it still is, to some extent—‘a menace to the liberties of America.’

  “And all the bigots in those days were gunning for Al Smith….

  “Today,” he told the roaring, partisan crowd, “in this war, our fine boys are fighting magnificently all over the world and among those boys are the Murphys and the Kellys, the Smiths and the Joneses, the Cohens, the Carusos, the Kowalskis, the Schultzes, the Olsens, the Swobodas, and—right in with all the rest of them—the Cabots and the Lowells.”

  It had been in Boston in 1940 that the President had made his famous pledge to the mothers of America that their sons would not be sent into any foreign war. He would retract nothing now.

  “I am sure that any real American—any real, red-blooded American—would have chosen, as this Government did, to fight when our own soil was made the object of a sneak attack. As for myself, under the same circumstances, I would choose to do the same thing—again and again and again….”

  On the day before the election, the President talked in the frosty open air to his “neighbors” on both sides of the Hudson. Election eve he gave a radio broadcast to the nation, ending with a prayer composed by Bishop Angus Dun, of Washington. Election Day he voted, along with forty million other Americans; like some of them he had trouble with the voting machine, and a mild oath floated out from behind the curtain.

  In the evening the old ritual was followed in the mansion above the Hudson: the dining-room table was cleared, tally sheets and pencils laid out, the big radio and the news tickers turned on. Leahy sat with the President; Eleanor welcomed guests and staff—the Morgenthaus, the Watsons, Sherwood, Rosenman, Early, Hassett, Grace Tully—who clustered in the library. From the start, the President was calm and confident—well poised, unexcited, courteous, and considerate as always, Hassett noted. Once again, after a few ambiguous returns, the big Eastern and urban states began to fall solidly in line for the President. Shortly after eleven the torchlight parade arrived with fife and drum. The President talked quietly from the portico about election nights in the old days, when people would come in farm wagons for a Democratic celebration.

  Dewey did not concede until after 3:00 A.M. Only then did the President go upstairs to bed. In the corridor he turned to Hassett and said: “I still think he is a son of a bitch.”

  The ballots were still being counted across the nation. Some Negroes had, “on this little note,” passed their votes to Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt because they were not allowed into their polls. One vote had been received in the White House in the form of a letter from a black woman in Pittsburgh:

  “I have all way believed

  That when God put you in the White House

  He shore did no that you were the right

  Man for the poor people.

  I have never got anything

  When the other party was in.

  Only when you became Prest. did I get

  What was do for the poor person.

  Dear Mr. Roosevelt

  No matter what the other partie say

  I am all way for you…

  So I am praying to the Good Lord above That he will take good care of you

  And put you back in the White House

  For as long as you live

  For you are the man for us.”

  EIGHTEEN The Ordeal of Strategy

  THERE WAS A GREAT flutter in Union Station as the President’s train pulled in three days after the election. Truman, Stimson, Wallace, and other notables climbed aboard to welcome the conquering hero back to the capital. The Police Band sounded “Hail to the Chief” with ruffles and flourishes. It was like New York all over again. Despite the driving rain the President ordered the top put down; Truman and Wallace squeezed in with him, whi
le young Johnnie Boettiger sat grandly in front. Outside, in Union Plaza, 30,000 people waited in the downpour. The car stopped and a panel of microphones was slid across the President’s lap. He would always remember this welcome home, he told the crowd.

  “And when I say a welcome home, I hope that some of the scribes in the papers won’t intimate that I expect to make Washington my permanent residence for the rest of my life!”

  Behind police motorcycles a long sleek line of limousines paraded up Pennsylvania Avenue. A half-dozen bands played. Over 300,000 people, including federal employees given time off and children let out of school, craned their heads and applauded as the presidential car went by. Soon after reaching the White House the President was greeting the staff, receiving congratulations from officials, and holding a press conference. He had no news, he said, except that he had underestimated his electoral votes. A reporter asked: “Mr. President, may I be the first to ask if you will run in 1948?” The President laughed with the others at the hoary old question.

  It was a time of sweet victory. Not only had he beaten Dewey by 432 electoral votes to 99, but he had won the big Northeastern states, half the Midwest, including Illinois and Michigan, and all the West except Wyoming and Colorado. Only the Plains states had gone solidly for Dewey. The President’s strength in Congress had been boosted. Formidable isolationists or conservatives had fallen: Gerald Nye, James J. Davis, of Pennsylvania, Guy Gillette; and leading Senate stalwarts, including Bob Wagner, Claude Pepper, Elbert Thomas, of Utah, Scott Lucas, of Illinois, Lister Hill, of Alabama, and Alben Barkley, had kept their seats. There were some attractive new faces both in the Senate—Brien McMahon, of Connecticut, Fulbright, of Arkansas, Wayne Morse, of Oregon—and in the House—Helen Gahagan Douglas, California New Dealer; Emily Taft Douglas, of Chicago, wife of a University of Chicago economics teacher named Paul Douglas, then serving in the Marines; Adam Clayton Powell, of New York, who claimed to be the first Negro Congressman from the East. Once again Roosevelt had won out against the great majority of the nation’s newspapers; not only the Hearst-Patterson-McCormick-Gannett press, but also Henry Luce’s Life and a number of internationalist journals had supported Dewey. And once again he had beaten John L. Lewis in the mine leader’s own precincts in Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

  © Low, world copyright reserved, reprinted by permission of the Trustees of Sir David Low’s Estate and Lady Madeline Low

  Above all, he had won the referendum of 1944 for American participation in a stronger United Nations. The “great betrayal” of 1920 would not be repeated. He had strengthened his own hand for future negotiations. Congratulations flowed in from abroad—from Churchill, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung.

  Physically, the campaign had taken its toll. At times Roosevelt had completely disregarded his rest regimen; he had had to be strenuously active for long periods of time. He seemed more tired than ever after the election; his appetite was poor, his color only fair. But Bruenn found that his blood pressure was actually lower when he was out on the hustings, and when he examined the President two weeks after the election he found that his lungs were clear, the heart sounds were clear and of good quality, there were no diastolic murmurs. Roosevelt’s blood pressure was 210/112.

  Politically, the victory concealed some weaknesses. The Republicans had been defeated, but not the two congressional parties; the “unholy” coalition of conservative Democrats and Republicans would still largely control Congress, at least on domestic affairs. Roosevelt’s popular-vote margin of 3.6 million votes out of 48 million cast was the narrowest since Wilson’s hairline victory over Hughes in 1916. In retrospect it would seem remarkable that a forty-two-year-old governor with experience in neither war nor diplomacy could come so close to toppling a world leader at the height of a global war. Most important, events in eastern Europe were threatening to erode the very premises on which Roosevelt had won the election and made solemn commitments to the American people.

  EUROPE: THE DEEPENING FISSURES

  Europe was trembling with hope and fear, change and convulsion. As the Germans were driven out of France and Greece and the vast areas overrun by the Red Army, tormenting political problems flared up in their wake. Roosevelt had hoped to postpone politics until after the war was won, but political problems would not wait—especially those of eastern Europe.

  For months now, Poland had linked war and politics, ancient quarrels and future hopes, Chicago ward bosses and Kremlin strategists. On the prompting of Roosevelt and others, Stalin saw Mikolajczyk in Moscow early in August, only to urge the “émigré group” to come to terms with the Committee of National Liberation, the Lublin Poles. The two Polish groups met and failed to agree. By this time Roosevelt was facing heightened election pressure from Polish-American groups at home. In Washington and on his campaign trip to Chicago he promised representatives of the Polish-American Congress that the principles of the Atlantic Charter in general and the integrity of Poland in particular would be protected.

  The torment of Warsaw foreshadowed future calamity. When Soviet troops neared the Polish capital at the end of August, underground forces mainly loyal to the London Poles struck at the Germans from houses, factories, and sewers. In moments the city was engulfed in a bitter street-to-street battle. In the next few days, as the fighting became more and more desperate, the Warsaw Poles begged for help from Churchill, who persuaded Roosevelt to send with him a joint message to the Marshal.

  “We are thinking of world opinion if the anti-Nazis in Warsaw are in effect abandoned. We believe that all three of us should do the utmost to save as many of the patriots there as possible. We hope that you will drop immediate supplies and munitions to the patriot Poles of Warsaw, or will you agree to help our planes in doing it very quickly? We hope you will approve. The time element is of extreme importance.”

  A shocking reply came from Stalin:

  “Sooner or later the truth about the handful of power-seeking criminals who launched the Warsaw adventure will out. Those elements, playing on the credulity of the inhabitants of Warsaw, exposed practically unarmed people to German guns, armour and aircraft. The result is a situation in which every day is used, not by the Poles for freeing Warsaw, but by the Hitlerites, who are cruelly exterminating the civil population….” Stalin promised, however, that his troops would try to repulse German counterattacks and renew their offensive near Warsaw.

  Stalin’s mounting temper stemmed partly from frustration. His troops had in fact been forced back from Warsaw by savage German counterattacks. The Warsaw Poles had not co-ordinated their plans with him; he suspected they were trying to force his hand. He did not want American and British airmen poking around his rear bases, especially at the very time his forces were pulling back. But he was moved by colder calculations. By now he was fully sponsoring the Lublin Poles. He did not propose to help liberate Warsaw from the Nazis only to leave it in the hands of bourgeois Poles who were the pawns of London and Washington. Better to let the Warsaw elements destroy themselves by their foolhardy action.

  In a last try Churchill asked Roosevelt to agree to a joint message that implored Stalin to allow Allied aircraft to land behind the Russian front after dropping war supply to the beleaguered Poles; privately Churchill suggested to Roosevelt that if Stalin did not reply they ought to send the planes and “see what happens.” Roosevelt would not go along on this. Distressed though he was by Stalin’s attitude toward the Warsaw tragedy, he feared that pressure on Moscow would jeopardize more important long-range military co-operation with Russia, especially in the Far East. In mid-September Stalin finally relented and allowed bombers to drop some supplies. But it was too late; resistance was nearing an end.

  A quarter of a million Warsaw Poles were dead; most of the city was in ruins. Somehow Roosevelt managed to resist Churchill’s and Mikolajczyk’s importunities about Warsaw at the same time he was holding his own with Polish-Americans in the election campaign. He even asked Churchill to hush up any controversial announcement about P
oland until after Election Day. Two weeks after the election, when former envoy Arthur Bliss Lane urged him to demand of Moscow that the independence of Poland be maintained, and added that if the country was not strong when it had the biggest Army, Navy, and Air Force in the world it never would be, the President asked sharply, “Do you want me to go to war with Russia?”

  In despair Mikolajczyk appealed directly to Roosevelt. He was being pressed to accept the Curzon Line without any reservations, he cabled. The Poles would feel terribly deceived and wronged if after all their efforts and sacrifices they were faced with the loss of nearly one-half their territory. “I retain in vivid and grateful memory your assurances given me in the course of our conversations of June, last, in Washington, pertaining particularly to Lwow and the adjacent territories.” For the last six hundred years Lwow had been a Polish city no less than Cracow and Warsaw. Would the President not throw his decisive influence into the scales by appealing to Stalin?

  The President sent Mikolajczyk an evasive reply, adding that Harriman would discuss the question of Lwow with the Polish leader privately. A few days later, caught between the Allies’ caution and his associates’ militancy, but with his warm feeling for Roosevelt evidently undiminished, Mikolajczyk resigned. This left Roosevelt and Churchill with no leader of the London Poles who could serve as a bridge to Moscow and the Lublin Poles. Playing for time, Roosevelt in mid-December appealed to Stalin not to recognize the Lublin group before the three leaders met in January.

  The Marshal was unbending. The polish émigré government, he said, was a screen for criminal and terrorist elements who were murdering officers and men of the Red Army in Poland. Meantime the Polish National Committee—the Lublin group—was strengthening and expanding the Polish government and Army and carrying out agrarian reform in favor of the peasants. The Soviet Union, he went on, was a border state to Poland and was carrying the main brunt of the battle for its liberation. The Red Army had to have a peaceful and trustworthy Poland to its rear as it fought into Germany. If the Lublin Poles transformed themselves into a provisional government, the Soviet government would have no reason not to recognize them.