The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  American foreign policy in particular has been shaped by two diplomacies, as Russell Bastert has argued—one diplomacy of short-run expediency and manipulation, of balance of power and sphere of interest, of compromise and adjustment, marginal choices, and limited objectives, and another diplomacy—almost an antidiplomacy—of world unity and collective security, democratic principle and moral uplift, peaceful change and nonaggression. Then, too, the institutional arrangements in Washington—the separation of decision making between the State Department and the Pentagon, and in their lines of access to the President, the absence from the White House of a staff that could integrate diplomacy and military policy, the institutional gaps in Congress among legislators specializing in military, foreign, and domestic policies, and indeed the whole tendency in Washington toward fragmented policy making—all reinforced the natural tendency of the President to compartmentalize.

  All great nations, all world leaders exhibit such dichotomies; everything depends on the actual combinations. Stalin, for all his ruthless opportunism, was so consistently intent on the long-run, or at least middle-run, goal of postwar Soviet security that in the darkest days after Hitler’s assault he would not barter or gamble on matters relating to that security. He was, like Roosevelt, a brilliant tactician, an actor and even a dissimulator; like Roosevelt he was a master of timing, of the art of “dosage”—measuring out pressure to what the traffic could bear—and of waiting and watching as well as striking out quickly; like Roosevelt he was superb in playing his adversaries off against one another. But Stalin far more than Roosevelt linked his wartime decisions to a strategy for long-run security, a strategy to which he adhered with steel-like tenacity. He had in abundance the defects of his virtue. Insecure, suspicious, parochial, he was so imbued with an essentially old-fashioned and brutal Realpolitik that he could never claim the impact on mass opinion and ideals of a Lenin, a Gandhi, or even a Roosevelt.

  As a grand strategist Churchill was a more subtle study. Not lacking in his own canons of honor and responsibility, he embodied a diplomatic and military tradition that had helped Britain, in protecting its tiny isles against the colossi on the Continent, to practice all the black arts of diplomacy deplored by Hull and the other Wilsonians. He was, in truth, the Whig aristocrat of the eighteenth century that Harold Laski called him during the war. He had the aristocrat’s saving compassion for the miserable, but he also had the Whig’s fatal incomprehension of the tumultuous forces gushing out of the revolutions in Russia and China and elsewhere. Compared with Roosevelt’s, his vision was long but narrow; he could see the relation between wartime strategy and postwar balances of power in Europe, but he could not imagine the surge of masses of people in Asia or Africa. Like Roosevelt he was an opportunist and improviser in his approach to grand strategy, but he lacked the comprehensive principles that gave at least a general direction and focus to Roosevelt’s day-to-day decisions. He himself, as he once wrote admiringly of Lloyd George, “surveyed the problems of each morning with an eye unobstructed by preconceived opinions, past utterances, or previous disappointments and defeats,” and in the wartime kaleidoscope of shifting values and prodigious events, his strategy drew from intuition and insight rather than long-run purpose and settled goals. Versatile, fertile, vigorous, he lacked the steadiness of direction, the comprehensiveness of outlook, the sense of proportion and relevance that mark the grand strategist. And his strategy was Western-oriented; Roosevelt at least glimpsed the explosive energy lying dormant in the billion people of Asia, especially when that energy was released and focused by the call of freedom that the antifascist leaders were trumpeting throughout the world.

  Such, at least, was a possible judgment toward the end of 1944, and if history is written by the survivors, Roosevelt would not have the opportunity of Churchill and even of Stalin to vindicate himself in later years. But Roosevelt, like Churchill, would have argued that all the long-run plans of mortal men are subject to the caprices of chance and conflict, that, in sum, events control strategy—and in the dying days of 1944 a sudden, cruel event was being readied on the quiet Western Front.

  CHRISTMAS 1944

  After his triumphal return to Washington, the President had worked steadily to catch up on postponed business. Hassett, still smarting from election attacks on the tired, quarrelsome old men, noted that while his boss had been laboring like a Trojan, young Dewey had been resting for a fortnight in a suite at a posh vacation resort. Late in November, though, Roosevelt journeyed through a leaden rain with a retinue of secretaries, aides, and doctors to take a long Thanksgiving rest at Warm Springs, his first extended visit there since Pearl Harbor.

  As usual, his work load followed him. Shortly after the election, Hull had announced his decision to retire, and all the President’s persuasiveness could not induce him to stay on until January 20 to round out “our Third Term,” as Roosevelt called it. The President chose Stettinius to succeed him. Though earnest and agreeable, the former Undersecretary could not ease the eternal tension between White House and State Department. When Stettinius submitted a mixed bag of nominations for assistant secretary—including Joseph Grew, James Dunn, Nelson Rockefeller, and Archibald MacLeish—the President signed the documents without enthusiasm, stating to Hassett that MacLeish was the only liberal in the lot. He wrote to the Librarian of Congress that he was thrilled that MacLeish was staying on in Washington, even if it meant jumping from one mausoleum to another.

  The other appointments raised the hackles of old New Dealers, and the reporters were waiting to pounce on the President when he returned to Washington late in December. The redoubtable May Craig asked:

  “Mr. President, this is a contentious question, but I would like a serious answer.”

  “You would find it awfully hard to get, May.”

  “There’s a good deal of question as to whether you are going right or left politically, and I would like your opinion on which way you are going.”

  “I am going down the whole line a little left of center. I think that was answered, that question, eleven and a half years ago, and it still holds.”

  “But you told us a little while ago,” another reporter said, “that you were going to have Dr. Win-the-War and not Dr. New Deal.”

  “That’s right.”

  “The question is whether you are going back to be Dr. New Deal after the war—”

  “No, no. No. Keep right along a little to the left of center, which includes winning the war. That’s not much of an answer, is it?”

  “No,” said May Craig amid laughter.

  “However, you have broken the ice, May.”

  “Mr. President,” someone asked, “if you are going down a little left of center, how does that match with the six appointments you sent up to the Hill on the State Department?”

  “Very well.”

  “Would you call them a little left of center?”

  “I call myself a little left of center. I have got a lot of people in the Administration—oh, I know some of them are extreme right and extreme left, and everything else—a lot of people in the Administration, and I cannot vouch for them all. They work out pretty well, on the whole. Just think, this crowd here in this room—my gracious, you will find every opinion between left and extreme right.”

  The President showed remarkable aplomb at this press conference considering the reports that had just been coming in from the European front. Three days before, the Germans had struck with power and ferocity in the Ardennes and broken through the light Allied defenses there. It was Hitler’s supreme gamble in the west. He had lost over three million officers and men by the end of autumn 1944; he had suffered over a million dead, wounded, and missing during the summer of 1944 alone; his cities were in ruins; he still felt the effects of the bomb attempt on his life. Finland had broken with Germany in September; Bulgarians and Rumanians were switching sides to Russia. But the Führer still carried a paper strength of ten million men and at least three hundred divisions and brigades,
over forty of them armored, and Himmler scoured the country for another twenty-five divisions. Hitler won the grudging support of his generals for a “grand slam” that would re-create the spectacular days of 1940.

  Anxiously Roosevelt and Leahy followed the attack on the wall charts in the map room, as the Germans encircled Bastogne and Saint-Vith and drove on west toward the great supply dumps. Not only was the counteroffensive—rapidly coming to be called the Battle of the Bulge—a stunning tactical blow, but it symbolized the military plight of the West at the end of 1944. Even before the attack, Churchill had warned Roosevelt that “we have definitely failed to achieve the strategic object which we gave to our armies five weeks ago.” Allied bombing of Germany was rising to a peak, but so was German war production, as indicated by the great supplies that the Wehrmacht had stored for the attack.

  The reports from the Bulge were still gloomy, aside from the valiant defense of Bastogne and other points, when Roosevelt entrained from Washington for Christmas at Hyde Park. His spirits improved as his grandchildren took over the mansion and gifts were piled high in the living room. Elliott was there, with his new wife, Faye Emerson. Christmas Eve the President spoke to the nation, dwelling on the soldiers who were far from home. He also sat in his old rocker next to the fireplace and began his annual reading of The Christmas Carol. Halfway through, a three-year-old grandson suddenly noticed a gap in the President’s lower jaw, where he had neglected to insert his false tooth. Fixing the President with his gaze he cried out, “Grandpère, you’ve lost a tooth!” The President smiled and kept on reading, but when the young man advanced on him and asked, “Did you swallow it?” the President laughed and closed the book.

  “There’s too much competition in this family for reading aloud.”

  “Next year,” said Elliott’s wife, “it’ll be a peacetime Christmas.”

  “Next year,” said Eleanor Roosevelt, “we’ll all be home again.”

  PART 5

  The Last Hundred Days

  NINETEEN The Supreme Test

  BERLIN IN JANUARY 1945 lay in ruins under a relentless day-and-night bombing. Whole blocks had collapsed in rubble, which burned and smoldered for days. The vast columned Chancellery was half destroyed, its concrete roof smashed through, its imperial halls seared by fire and explosion. To an undamaged wing of the Chancellery Hitler returned in mid-January from his command post in the west; from here, in a conference room with deep leather chairs and thick carpet, the Führer directed his dying battalions. During bombings he moved to a huge concrete shelter in the Chancellery garden.

  By now his pale, puffy face, stooped shoulders, shuffling gait, and slack left arm and trembling hand made him look like an old man, but he had lost none of his fanaticism. There was an indescribable flickering glow in his eyes, a visitor noted; when crossed, he raised his fists and shouted his rage. But he still was talking strategy. By now his great counteroffensive to the west had failed. In the east, 180 Soviet divisions opened an attack on a vast front stretching from the Baltic to the Carpathians. The Führer’s only remaining hope was that the unnatural coalition against him would crack, as the Bolsheviks tried to possess the Balkans and the Middle East, the Americans tried to take over British possessions, and the English tried to strengthen themselves in the Mediterranean. “Even now,” he told his generals, “these States are at loggerheads, and he who, like a spider, sitting in the middle of his web, can watch developments, observes how these antagonisms grow stronger and stronger from hour to hour.…”

  Moscow was now far behind the front. People were flocking to ballet and concert halls. Almost every night hundreds of guns roared out their victory salutes; some evenings fireworks burst over Red Square for hours, lighting up the huge gold stars on the Kremlin towers. No longer did Stalin have to attend to the details of battle; the strategy was set for the capture of Germany. In response to a plea from Churchill, the Marshal stepped up preparations for a winter offensive that might take some of the pressure off the German lunge into the Ardennes. Despite bad weather the Red Army attacked, and Churchill thanked Stalin for his “thrilling message” reporting the offensive. Soon Stalin boasted in an order of the day that his winter attack had thwarted the German winter offensive in the west.

  London, peppered for months by flying bombs, was still under fire from long-range rocket bases in Holland. The people were now in their sixth year of war. Churchill, after spending Christmas in Athens coping with the civil strife there, returned to London to confront the deepening cleavage between Russia and the West over Poland. A meeting with Stalin seemed more imperative than ever. It was clear that the Marshal was adamant against leaving his country, so Churchill and Roosevelt glumly agreed on Yalta as a meeting place. The Prime Minister, elated when Roosevelt decided to go by sea to Malta and thence by air to the Crimea, cabled that he would be waiting on the quay. “No more let us falter. From Malta to Yalta. Let nobody alter!”

  In Los Alamos the lights burned late in the laboratories; thousands of Oppenheimer’s scientists and technicians labored in their tiny sectors of the vast project. On the next to last day of 1944 Groves informed Marshall: “It is now reasonably certain that our operations plans should be based on the gun type bomb, which, it is estimated, will produce the equivalent of a ten thousand ton TNT explosion. The first bomb, without previous full scale test which we do not believe will be necessary, should be ready about 1 August 1945. The second one should be ready by the end of the year and succeeding ones…at intervals thereafter…the 509th Composite Group, 20th Air Force has been organized and it is now undergoing training as well as assisting in essential tests….” Stimson underscored the key words in presenting the report to Roosevelt within hours after Marshall received it.

  Tokyo was ablaze during the first hours of January 1945 from the bombings of B-29’s that were now making regular runs from the Marianas. As the Emperor returned from family prayers he could smell smoke drifting across the gardens of the Imperial Palace. Only the day before he had sharply questioned Prime Minister Kuniaki Koiso about the setbacks on Leyte. What measures were being taken to retrieve the situation? Imperial Headquarters, unable to reinforce the outlying islands or pull troops back because of American air and naval attacks, began to prepare for a last-ditch stand in Japan. Air Forces were instructed to indoctrinate their pilots in the kamikaze spirit of death-dealing self-sacrifice.

  A peace group was arising around the Emperor, but the Army was still in control of the war. The peace party feared that Communism might spread from North China to Japan if political chaos developed in the wake of military defeat. The Americans were insisting on unconditional surrender. What to do? The Emperor showed Prince Konoye a verse he had once written:

  “Sublime is the moment

  When the world is at peace

  And the limitless deep

  Lies bathed in the morning sun.”

  “THE ONLY WAY TO HAVE A FRIEND…”

  In Washington the White House came to life as Franklin Roosevelt returned from Hyde Park and swung into the typically heavy January work load of the American President—the budget, the annual message to Congress on the state of the union, the legislative program, major appointments. He had also to prepare for his fourth inaugural—and make plans for his climactic meeting with Churchill and Stalin.

  It was time, too, to gauge public attitudes toward the great international issues that were coming to a head. Cantril’s reports in January 1945 were worrisome. He had discovered, he informed the White House and the State Department, a significant decline since the previous June in public confidence that the President and other officials were successfully handling the nation’s interests abroad, though support personally for Roosevelt remained high. There had also been a decrease, he reported, in the appreciation and knowledge of Britain’s own war effort. Over twice as many Americans now felt that Britain was fighting mainly to keep its power and wealth as felt it was fighting to preserve democracy. The Russian war effort rated much higher
in public attitudes.

  Cantril’s summary of opinion on postwar organization carried a sharp warning to the President. Although the vast majority of Americans now favored a strong international organization necessarily dominated by the big powers, their outlook was a mixture of expediency and idealism. Without roots in any broad or long-range conception of self-interest or extensive knowledge, internationalist opinion had little intellectual basis and was hence prone to fickleness and skepticism as events occurred that did not fit into the framework of idealism. “With opinion uncrystallized and with people generally disinterested in the mechanics needed to achieve lasting peace, there is little doubt that they expect and desire strong leadership and would support the policies and mechanics the President felt necessary to achieve the ideals he has expressed—particularly if the reasons for proposed steps were made clear.”