Yes, these men and their hypnotized followers call this a new order.
It is not new—and it is not order.
For order among Nations presupposes something enduring—some system of justice under which individuals, over a long period of time, are willing to live. Humanity will never permanently accept a system imposed by conquest and based on slavery.29
FDR then called upon his fellow citizens to shield the “great flame of democracy from the blackout of barbarism,” so that the Four Freedoms would not be superseded by tyranny.
By the time FDR arrived at the Presidential Room of the Statler Hotel in March 1945, however, the contrast between the man who had so boldly defied the forces of hate on the eve of the American entry into the war and the one who was about to address the White House correspondents on the eve of victory could not have been greater. There were about two hundred guests present. At 7:30 p.m., precisely on time, a Marine Band launched into “Hail to the Chief,” and as the audience rose, FDR was rolled into the room “leaning forward in his wheelchair, looking old and thin and scrawny-necked.” Unlike past occasions, he seemed to pay no attention to the audience as they stood and applauded, not even when he reached his seat. While FDR continued to stare blankly ahead, as Allen Drury observed, “[w]e might not have been there at all, and for the moment it gave one the uneasy feeling that, perhaps preoccupied beyond all such social graces, he did not know we were.”30
It was only after the president had been formally introduced that “he noticed, snapped out of it, [and] waved and laughed a little in a deprecating way” as if to imply that all of the attention was not really necessary. Something of the old FDR then seemed to return. The president laughed at the jokes being told and genuinely seemed to enjoy himself as he ate his meal, sipped his wine, and smoked steadily throughout the evening. Watching him closely, Drury later reflected, “there came again that strange wonderment,” that “puzzled question implicit in the attitude of every audience he meets in this city that knows him better than any other—yet knows him not at all. ‘What manner of man is this?’ men seem to ask, and they never find the answer.”31
At the close of the evening FDR opted not to deliver a speech but, rather, gave the assembled press “a story” from his seated position at the table. “But first,” the president said, with a hint of humor in his voice, “I want to give you a word, the word Humanity. We all love Humanity,” he went on, “you love Humanity, I love Humanity. Humanity’s with me all the time. I go to bed and I dream of Humanity, I eat breakfast and there’s Humanity, Humanity follows me around all day. So with that in mind, with that word, Humanity, here’s your headline and here’s your story—in the name of Humanity, I am calling off the press conference for tomorrow morning!”32
And with that, and while the crowd rose to its feet and roared with laughter, FDR shifted back into his wheelchair to depart. Now, as he was being wheeled out of the room, he acknowledged the applause and attention, so that the last image many saw of FDR that evening was with his head thrown back, a bright smile on his face, waving his right hand in the friendly, reassuring manner they had all seen countless times before.33
THE PRESIDENT’S MEETING WITH THE US DELEGATION ABOUT THE Soviet request for three seats in the General Assembly was set for 10:30 a.m. Friday morning. But thanks to another late night spent conversing with Lord Athlone and Princess Alice after returning to the White House from the correspondents’ dinner, FDR was already running an hour behind schedule by the time the delegates had gathered around his desk.
The president laid out in colorful but misleading terms what had transpired at Yalta on the Soviet request for extra seats. He downplayed the firmness of his agreement with Stalin and Churchill on this question, and in words reminiscent of his equivocal backing of Henry Wallace in 1944 said, “If he were a delegate at San Francisco he personally would favor the Soviet proposal.”34
The delegates were stunned, and Senator Vandenberg was incredulous. As he later wrote, “Why was this news held back when presumably the country was told all about the ‘Yalta compromise’ on voting (but not a word about this)?”35 The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that “[t]his will raise hell.”36 Adding to the tension was the possibility that “the deal” FDR had struck with Churchill and Stalin would be leaked to the press, before some sort of solution could be found, further dampening public and congressional enthusiasm for the world organization.37
Seeking to head off this possible outcome, FDR had arranged to spend the next hour in a far-ranging interview with New York Times columnist Anne O’Hare McCormick.38 Although McCormick found him gaunt and tired, she also noted that his normally discursive mind was uncommonly focused on one issue: the world organization. As McCormick listened and later reported, the president presented his arguments in favor of the organization “with a clarity and vigor that belied his look of weariness” and convinced his listener “that all his hopes of success in life and immortality in history were set on getting an international security organization in motion.”39
Reflecting on his years in office, FDR said he was now looking to the future, beyond the present destruction and chaos, and seeing himself as the “chief architect of a new structure rising out of the wreckage.”40
When McCormick asked if it might not have been better to allow more time to prepare for the conference, FDR replied that in fact he regretted that the conference could not have been held in March, because a shorter interval between Yalta and San Francisco might have prevented many misunderstandings. “Delay was the dangerous element in enterprises that were launched at the moment of high tide in the affairs of men,” he said. “I am not afraid of being too early for the rendezvous, I am afraid that the appointed moment will roll by and we shall be too late.”
Fully aware of Americans’ alarm over Soviet behavior in Eastern Europe, FDR admitted that the necessity to ensure Soviet support for the world organization was the principal reason he had journeyed to Yalta. It was also one of the main reasons he was so impatient to get to San Francisco. It was the German attack on Russia that “drew the Soviets into the military coalition,” he said, and ever since the American entry into the war his administration had made “a consistent effort to overcome the Soviet Union’s deep-seated suspicions and draw it into a full political partnership.” Maintaining that cooperation may have made it necessary to “ignore rebuffs” or engage in compromises that he did not always like, but these had to be weighed against the simple fact that without Russian cooperation there could be no international security, and “every lesser consideration had to be subordinated to that essential aim.”
The second reason FDR was in a hurry was that he could not count on domestic support. Concerned that differences over war settlements “might cause a recession of popular sentiment,” and convinced that American public enthusiasm for the world organization was at as high a level as it ever would be, he insisted it was crucial to move ahead quickly. “We must strike while the iron is hot,” FDR said. “We can’t afford to let disappointment over specific solutions pull us back again from the course we have to take, however hard it is. If we all go our own ways, there will be no guarantee of peace or justice for any nation.”41
FDR FOLLOWED UP THIS EXTRAORDINARY INTERVIEW WITH A QUIET luncheon with Anna. He then convened what would be his last cabinet meeting. With Stimson on vacation in Florida, and Stettinius at his country estate in Virginia resting in advance of the San Francisco conference, there was not much discussion of the war, other than to mark the happy news of the Allied forces’ progress in Europe and the steady recovery of Harold Ickes’s son. With the possibility of a coal strike still looming, FDR speculated that it might be necessary to order a government takeover of the mines, and since he would soon be heading out of town for a rest, he suggested that Ickes draft the required authorization that he could sign before he departed.42
As was his habit when he was planning to leave Washington for an extended period, FDR met
with each of his cabinet members privately for a few minutes to check up on matters particular to them. The last cabinet member to see him—as always, based on rank—was Frances Perkins. Unlike her worrisome encounter with him the day before his inauguration in January, this time she found the president in a happy and expansive mood, “lively and full of pep” in anticipation of his departure for Hyde Park and Warm Springs. She later remembered her last conversation with him.
“All I am going to do while I’m there,” FDR said in reference to his trip south, “is work on my speech for the United Nations. Then I’m going to fly out there and make that speech—but I’m not going to stay, Frances, I’m not going to stay. I am going to make the speech,… meet all the delegates, and then I am going to come right back.”
“But why not stay a while?” Perkins asked.
“No, I want this thing done without me,” FDR said. “It’s all fixed, it’s all arranged and it will be much better,” he continued, if “I did not take part in it and sort of bully it through.” Then the president paused for a moment, and suddenly said, “I’m going to tell you something, Frances. Eleanor and I are going to England!”
With anticipation and pleasure, FDR reflected to a somewhat astonished Perkins on how long he had wanted “to see the British people for himself,” how Eleanor’s wartime visit had been such a great success, and how the two of them owed it to the English to make a return visit. “I want to go,” he continued, “and this seems the best time.” He had even asked Eleanor “to order her clothes and get some fine ones so that she will make a really handsome appearance.”
“But, the war!” Perkins protested. “I don’t think you ought to go, it’s terribly dangerous! Why, the minute [the Germans] know you are at sea they’ll send every submarine they own to get you.” At which point FDR put his right hand to the side of his mouth and whispered, “The war in Europe will be over by the end of May.”
“Are you sure?” Perkins asked. “Yes,” came the firm reply. “The war will be over. We are going to make a state visit to England.”
Then, leaning back in his chair, and clearly in the mood to talk, he said:
“You know, Frances, when the war’s over and everything’s all settled and the United Nations is operating, I would like to go out to Saudi Arabia and the Near East. I think if Eleanor and I went out there we could do a magnificent job.”
“We could bring some engineers with us. There’s water beneath the desert. You just have to bore for it… and you will get water to irrigate. There’s a wonderful opportunity for that country. The people… live dreadfully,” he went on. “They live without the necessities of life. All they need is water. I talked to old Ibn Saud about it, and he wasn’t interested at all. But I would like to go out to the Near East, and I would like to get the water up and irrigate it and start a new way of life there. We could do wonders.”
Listening, Perkins could not help but think that FDR “was looking to the next chapter of his life. He was thinking of the war as over.… He’d fought the good fight. He’d done his chore. He’d launched the United Nations. He was going to make his state visit to England, see his friends, and then go to the Near East.”43
DISTURBED BY THE PRESIDENT’S SCHEDULE AND BY HIS CONTINUED weight loss, which was exacerbated by the fact that he insisted he “could no longer taste his food,” both Drs. McIntire and Bruenn again urged him to cut back on his relentless activity. To help him regain his appetite, and recover from what Dr. Bruenn now described as FDR’s “anorexia,” they suspended his daily dose of digitalis and repeatedly implored him to eat.44
There was no indication that his heart condition had worsened, and his blood pressure was more or less stable, but his color was poor and he continued to look tired. Because FDR was unwilling to heed their advice, the two physicians more or less ordered him “to take a period of complete rest” during his time away from the White House and, if possible, to stay away from the Oval Office for a full month—much as they had advised the previous spring, when FDR spent a full four weeks convalescing at “Hobcaw,” the vast North Carolina estate of Bernard Baruch.
By this point, rumors about the president’s decline had begun to cross the ocean. That very morning, the New York Times reported that many Soviet leaders had begun to express “interest in President Roosevelt’s health” as well as concern over reports that he was “suffering from strain.” The Times also reported that the Kremlin was interested “to know Vice President Truman’s views.”45
Churchill was even more concerned. In a highly personal telegram he had sent to FDR a few days before, the prime minister, bothered by the lack of communication between the two of them of late, expressed the hope that the numerous cables he had sent “on so many of our difficulties and intertwined affairs are not becoming a bore to you. Our friendship,” he continued, “is the rock on which I build for the future of the world.” And, perhaps longing for an earlier time, he wrote: “I always think of those tremendous days when you devised lend-lease, when we met at Argentia, when you decided with my heartfelt agreement to launch the invasion of North Africa, and… comforted me for the loss of Tobruk.” Indeed, now that the two leaders were finally nearing their first military goal, he could not help but remember “the part our personal relations have played in advance of the world cause.”46
“The formal naval person” would wait in vain for a response to this warm message, but in the meantime and unbeknownst to Churchill or Stalin, and perhaps even to FDR, the Secret Service had decided it could no longer ignore the obvious and assigned a twenty-four-hour guard to Vice President Truman.47
Chapter 16
Hudson Requiem
SATURDAY, MARCH 24, 1945—THE LAST FULL DAY THAT FRANKLIN Roosevelt would spend in the White House—proved to be a day of exhilaration and exhaustion for the president. The newspaper headlines that screamed across the country that morning brought the thrilling announcement that General George Patton’s Third Army had stormed over the Rhine and established “a solid and expanding bridgehead on the direct road to Berlin—265 miles away.” This was of course welcome news to FDR, who was also looking forward to his impending departure later that evening for a brief four-day visit to Hyde Park, followed by a short layover in Washington, and then on to Warm Springs, Georgia, where he would spend two and a half weeks “resting up,” as his doctors had ordered, before heading out to San Francisco.1
With victory in Europe now a foregone conclusion, and the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion focusing on its postwar plans, Secretary Byrnes decided it was time to give up his position as the director of the agency and resign. The president confessed to being “knocked off his feet” by Byrnes’s decision to resign before “V-E Day.” And even though the two men did not always see eye to eye and Byrnes’s departure could not have been entirely unexpected, his parting further diminished the circle of experienced aides the president could turn to.
On the same day, FDR announced that Stephen Early—who had been with him since the beginning of his presidency—had also decided to resign. Unlike Byrnes, however, Early agreed to stay on temporarily to fill the void left by the death of Pa Watson as appointments secretary; Jonathan Daniels, who had been serving as acting press secretary during Early’s absence in Europe and the Crimea, would now assume that position permanently.2
Between Byrnes’s resignation, Watson’s death, Early’s determination to leave, and Perkins’s willingness to stay on only after FDR refused her written resignation—not to mention Hull’s and Hopkins’s hospitalization—it was clear that running a global war and rescuing the nation from the Great Depression were taking their toll not just on FDR but also on many of his key advisers. Indeed, FDR’s slow but steady decline symbolized that of his entire administration. His death would signal the death of an era.
FDR’S OFFICIAL DUTIES THAT SATURDAY BEGAN WITH HIS TRYING TO work his way through the “voluminous mail” that always seemed to flood in whenever word got out that the president was abou
t to leave for Hyde Park. FDR then held separate meetings with Patrick Hurley and Bernard Baruch to discuss US policy in China and Baruch’s planned visit to London, respectively, before retiring to the third-floor Sun Parlor for a luncheon with Anna Rosenberg. Rosenberg, who had known FDR since his days as governor and had served in his administration in various capacities in the 1930s and ’40s, was the regional director of the War Manpower Commission.3 FDR had invited her to the White House to discuss how best to deal with the millions of American GIs who would be returning from the war. This included the possibility of establishing a guaranteed annual wage for American workers, an idea FDR had been contemplating for quite some time.4 They also resumed the discussion they began in January about the need for more psychiatrists to deal with the problem of psychological rehabilitation of the many sailors, soldiers, and airmen who would soon be entering civilian life.5 FDR always enjoyed Rosenberg’s company, and was delighted to see her. But the convivial atmosphere of their luncheon was suddenly interrupted when the president was handed a highly disturbing message from Marshal Stalin.
Tensions between FDR and Stalin had been building for some time over three issues: Stalin’s consistent rejection of FDR’s repeated requests for the Soviets to grant US aircrews the right to fly into Poland to extract American POWs; Soviet suspicions that the American decision to allow the secret “Bern talks” between General Wolff and the Anglo-American high command in Italy to proceed without Soviet participation might involve not just the possible surrender of German forces in Italy but the entire Western Front; and the failure of the negotiations among W. Averell Harriman, Archibald Clark Kerr, and Vyacheslav Molotov in Moscow to produce the reorganized Lublin regime called for in the Yalta agreement on Poland.
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