1944

by Jay Winik

  Now, the New York Post called Long’s testimony “false and distorted,” and members of Congress erupted at his chicanery. A baffled and angry Emanuel Celler could barely contain himself; he spoke for many when he said that Long “drips with sympathy for the persecuted Jews, but the tears he sheds are crocodile.” He called for Long’s resignation, and concluded, “The State Department has turned its back on the time-honored principle of granting havens to refugees.”

  So, far from being derailed, the Gillette-Rogers resolution continued to pick up steam in December. Watching these events closely, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was ready to skip hearings altogether and act on the resolution before the full Senate after the holiday recess—on January 24, 1944. “The problem is essentially a humanitarian one,” the committee reported, unanimously. “It is not a Jewish problem alone. It is a Christian problem and a problem for enlightened civilization.”

  The report continued: “We have talked; we have sympathized; we have expressed our horror; the time to act is long past due.” Senator Gillette confidently predicted that the resolution would sail through the Senate “without a dissenting vote.”

  Meanwhile, administration officials, especially in the Treasury Department, were carefully monitoring the situation as well. Morgenthau said, “This is a boiling pot on the Hill. He can’t hold it; it is going to pop, and you have either got to move very fast, or the Congress of the United States will do it for you.” He and others worried that the president, FDR the humanitarian, FDR the redeemer, FDR the war leader, could be deeply wounded by an open airing of these questions and take on a new sobriquet: FDR, complicit in the Holocaust.

  All that would change on Christmas Day.

  RETURNING FROM HIS SUMMIT in Tehran, where he had met with Stalin for the first time, a triumphant but weary Roosevelt boarded a train in Washington and journeyed north to Hyde Park for the holidays. On the surface, Christmas Day was a magical affair. For the first time in more than a decade, Roosevelt was spending Christmas with his family in their beloved home. The upstate New York air was chilly but clean. The house was adorned with red ribbons and wreaths and a dazzling tree. The family thrilled to the sounds of local carolers, even as Roosevelt delighted his guests with a reading of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, each word delivered with his trademark upper-class Eastern accent.

  Yet he was also suffering from influenza—again. First came the coughing. Then the chills. Then the aching.

  By the time he went to bed that night, most of official Washington was sipping eggnog or eating goose or climbing into pajamas. There was, however, a notable exception. Little did Roosevelt know that at the same time one young lawyer in the Treasury Department, Josiah DuBois Jr., was working overtime on a memorandum for the secretary, Henry Morgenthau. It was one of the most significant memorandums in America’s history.

  He wrote, “One of the greatest crimes in history, the slaughter of the Jewish people in Europe, is continuing unabated.” He spoke of “the tragic history of this government’s handling of this matter” and the fact that officials in the State Department “have not only failed to use the governmental machinery at their disposal to rescue Jews from Hitler, but have even gone so far as to use this governmental machinery to prevent the rescue of those Jews.” He warned that “time is most precious” yet said the State Department had been “kicking the matter around for over a year without producing results; giving all sorts of excuses for delays upon delays.” He laid out in shocking detail the chronology of the government’s indifference, complicity, or obstructionism (or outright anti-Semitism), and prominently mentioned the Riegner memo arising out of Eduard Schulte’s efforts. He mocked Breckinridge Long’s “pious remarks” and noted that Long twisted the facts. He recounted the sordid story of the State Department cable that ordered the suppression of information coming from Switzerland about the Holocaust. He quoted, at length, members of Congress who were critical of the administration.

  He concluded: “If men of the temperament and philosophy of Long continue in control of immigration administration, we may as well take off that plaque from the Statue of Liberty and black out the lamp beside the golden door.”

  After finishing the eighteen-page memo, he underlined its explosive title: “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews.”

  THE MATTER NOW FELL to Morgenthau. How likely was he to assume the mantle of the conscience of the administration? As it happened, fate and the fickleness of history would make this the supreme moment of his illustrious life.

  Henry Morgenthau Jr. was a product of generations of German Jews, devout Jews who were learned Hebrew teachers and businessmen, ritual slaughterers and impassioned rabbis. Weathering financial straits in Germany in 1866, his family looked across the Atlantic to seek greater opportunities and emigrated to the post–Civil War United States. One grandfather, an unsuccessful inventor (his inventions included a label machine), forever teetered on the verge of bankruptcy. By contrast, Morgenthau’s ambitious, visionary father, Henry Sr., had a distinguished career. Wealthy and tough-minded, vain and manipulative, he yearned to become secretary of the treasury. He almost did. He was a self-made real estate mogul, and an early supporter of Woodrow Wilson during Wilson’s first presidential campaign. During World War I, he received the plum assignment of ambassador to Turkey, where he tirelessly struggled to induce the United States to intervene when the Turks carried out their murderous campaign against the Armenians of forced marches and wholesale killing, beginning in April 1915. Moving easily in and out of establishment circles, he was a friend of Steven Wise’s as well.

  Henry Sr. had lofty goals for his quiet, recalcitrant son. Born in May 1891 to riches and privilege, Henry Jr. seemed destined for success. But as a youngster, he had a run of bad luck. Sent to school at Exeter, he was despondent. It turned out he suffered from a cognitive impairment—or in today’s terms, a learning disability—that made writing a challenge and talking a chore; he lasted only two years in school. His father provided him with a tutor, but that didn’t work either. He entered Cornell with an eye to receiving an architecture degree. Once again bad luck struck; he dropped out. At his wit’s end, his father found a construction site where he set Henry up as a timekeeper, hoping this would at least give him an entrée into real estate. That backfired as well when Morgenthau contracted typhoid fever.

  By temperament, he was shy, introverted, and prone to self-doubt. Socially, he was awkward. And he could be withdrawn, even brooding. Moreover, his health was also often impaired. He suffered from debilitating migraines and nausea, and slept fitfully. When he was diagnosed with typhoid fever, his father acted boldly and shipped Henry to a ranch in Texas to convalesce. There he realized that his great passion was farming, one of the few matters his father had no interest in, but the young Morgenthau pursued it ardently. He returned to Cornell to study architecture and agriculture, graduated this time, and in 1913 bought a dilapidated thousand-acre apple and dairy farm in Dutchess County, New York. By his own account, it was a “desperate move” to carve out his own unique identity, away from his overbearing father. It did more than that; suddenly he made a series of wise decisions.

  In 1916 he married Elinor Fatman, the well-connected and wily granddaughter of one of Lehman Brothers’ founders. A former drama student at Vassar, she was shrewd, perceptive, and, like Henry Sr., ruthlessly ambitious. They purchased another thousand acres in Dutchess County, creating Fishkill Farms, where, to his father’s chagrin, Henry lived as a gentleman farmer; they reared three children as well as an abundance of apples, rye, corn, cabbage, and beef cattle.

  Morgenthau soon became close with his famous neighbor, the amiable Franklin Roosevelt, who was then eyeing Albany as he plotted to become governor of New York. Once, when the Morgenthaus were invited for tea at Hyde Park, Roosevelt’s mother, Sara, observed in her diary, “Young Morgenthau was easy and yet modest and serious and intelligent.” She added, “The wife is very Jewi
sh.” Roosevelt and Morgenthau’s friendship quickly blossomed, as did their wives’. Where Roosevelt was talkative, Morgenthau was painfully reticent; where Roosevelt was brash and self-assured, Morgenthau bristled easily at social slights; where Roosevelt was good-humored, Morgenthau was dyspeptic, even dour. Playfully, Roosevelt called his good friend “Henry the Morgue.” He once suggested that Morgenthau run for sheriff of Dutchess County. But Morgenthau had hitched his wagon to Roosevelt’s star, and as time went on, Roosevelt increasingly prized Morgenthau for his unwavering discretion, his solid intelligence, and his absolute loyalty.

  Their friendship deepened and intensified in 1921 after Roosevelt’s political career suddenly seemed to be in ruins following his paralysis. Over time, Morgenthau became a virtual member of Roosevelt’s family and had an especially close relationship with his sons.

  Morgenthau also contrived to become Roosevelt’s ideal of a farmer. On a whim, he purchased the little-known journal American Agriculturist, and began touting the success of Fishkill Farms; this was pure bunk—actually, the farm was hemorrhaging money. It didn’t matter to Roosevelt. Now, when Roosevelt looked at Morgenthau he saw not only friendship but a shared affection for Dutchess County, for its soil and trees.

  And Morgenthau remained tireless in his support for Roosevelt. The two were perhaps the unlikeliest of allies: Roosevelt, the invalid graduate of Groton who never really left home, who measured men and events by the old-fashioned standards of noblesse oblige and aristocratic responsibility. Morgenthau, the insecure, wealthy New York Jew seeking to climb his way into the WASP establishment. Balding, he was well tailored, cared about the cut of his suits, and cultivated a patrician demeanor.

  For all their noble instincts, Roosevelt and his wife were hardly immune to the prejudices of their time; once, after attending a function for the Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch, Eleanor complained, “The Jew party was appalling.” For his part, Morgenthau was discreet about his Jewishness. Not surprisingly, he tended to avoid the synagogue and stayed away from the Jewish country clubs in Westchester County. He was also hesitant about Zionism. Keenly aware of the prejudices of the day, Morgenthau always insisted that he wanted to be thought of not as a Jew, but as “one hundred percent American.”

  Still, his courage and sincerity were without question. So was his hard work. When Roosevelt ran for governor in 1928, Morgenthau packed his bags and became Roosevelt’s de facto chauffeur and manager, driving the candidate 7,500 miles around the state in a beat-up old Buick. Meticulously planning Roosevelt’s campaign stops, he even hired entertainment for key events. Once elected, Roosevelt repaid Morgenthau by making him chairman of his farm advisory committee, and after that, conservation commissioner. One of Morgenthau’s most cherished possessions was a black-and-white photograph of the two of them smiling jauntily in an open car. Roosevelt had signed it: “From one of two of a kind.”

  Then Roosevelt was elected president in 1932. Morgenthau lobbied to be made secretary of agriculture, his lifelong dream, but midwestern party bosses scoffed at the idea because Morgenthau was Jewish, and a New York Jew at that. America wasn’t ready for it, so neither was Roosevelt. As a consolation, he appointed Morgenthau governor of the Farm Credit Administration. But then, a year later, Morgenthau got an even greater chance at glory, when William Woodin, Roosevelt’s first secretary of the treasury, became fatally ill. Once again, Morgenthau lobbied hard, going to the president himself. In his own words, he “put it on the line.” This time Roosevelt complied, first appointing Morgenthau undersecretary of the treasury, then making him only the second Jewish cabinet member in history.

  There were doubters. Critics scathingly chalked these appointments up to cronyism and even nepotism. Fortune mocked the new secretary of the treasury as the pampered son of a Jewish philanthropist and said he had few accomplishments except for spending “most of his life farming.” Gladys Straus, a prominent New York Republican donor, jibed that Roosevelt had somehow found “the only Jew in the world who doesn’t know a thing about money,” while even Morgenthau’s father insisted, “He’s not up to it.” The conservative budget chief Lewis Douglas grumbled about his “stupidity and Hebraic arrogance.”

  To his detractors, Morgenthau was prickly, stiff, ill suited for the job. Roosevelt thought otherwise. Finicky and ill-humored, Morgenthau was sometimes a nuisance, but as the president’s longtime adviser Louis Howe once noted, where others were concerned only with their own agendas, Morgenthau was always committed to Roosevelt’s best interests. And in an administration with such towering establishment figures as Henry Stimson, Cordell Hull, Sumner Welles, Dean Acheson, and his rival Harry Hopkins, as well as such intimates as Missy LeHand and Grace Tully, Morgenthau was unique. Keen, tough-talking, principled, he was almost always instantly responsive to the president’s changing moods, and even when he wasn’t, as the only cabinet member with a deep-seated friendship with the president—on his calendar, he had a regular lunch with Roosevelt every Monday—he maintained almost unparalleled access to the president. As World War II began, Roosevelt joked to Morgenthau, “You and I will run this war together.” More than once, Roosevelt and Morgenthau playfully exchanged jocular little notes at cabinet meetings. A jealous Cordell Hull complained that Morgenthau was trying to be the second secretary of state; and Morgenthau felt free to sarcastically mock the views of Secretary of War Henry Stimson behind his back.

  In bureaucratic battles, Morgenthau was blunt, rarely sugarcoating his words. When the economy began to sour in 1938, it was he who warned Roosevelt about “a depression within a depression.” When Hitler broke promise after promise in the 1930s, and made one territorial demand after another, it was Morgenthau who felt the United States had no choice but to intervene in Europe: “If we don’t stop Hitler now, he is going right on to the Black Sea,” he insisted to Roosevelt: “Then what?” And while officials like Hull and John McCloy believed there was a significant difference between the evil Nazi regime and the everyday German people, Morgenthau saw Germans as “a war loving race” and the entire nation as guilty of war crimes.

  Still, as close as Morgenthau was to the president, he remained politically something of an orphan. His constituency was essentially one person: Roosevelt. A frown from the president sent Morgenthau into a funk; a grin, or a playful presidential word, made his day. And he knew that the president, so prone to evasion in private, so protean in his beliefs, had volatile moods and reveled in playing one adviser against another. Indeed, every day Morgenthau woke up worried that the president was trying to “get rid of him,” and he wrestled with the gnawing fear that it could be his last day in the administration. Once, he complained that the president was “bullying” and “browbeating” him.

  His fears and insecurity were heightened, and he became more reluctant to press the president on the plight of Jewish refugees, when he heard from Leo Crowley (the head of the Foreign Economic Administration) that Roosevelt had said, “This is a Protestant country, and the Catholics and Jews are here under sufferance.” Sufferance? Those words only made him more insecure, and it didn’t help later when he proposed to the president a long-term plan calling for a weak postwar Germany stripped of all heavy industry so that it could never again menace the world; Stimson recorded in his diary that Morgenthau was “a very dangerous advisor” who was “biased by his Semitic grievances.” For his part, McCloy said that Morgenthau should have no business dictating the terms of the peace, for the simple reason that “he is a Jew.” (Actually, Roosevelt himself once remarked that for all he cared, the Germans could eat from “soup kitchens.”)

  Early on in the war, Morgenthau discreetly sought to help Jewish refugees. But as the administration learned more about the hideous death march of the Holocaust—about the cattle cars, the piles of corpses, the murder of children and the elderly, the orphans living in terror and dying in terror, and the almost incomprehensible scope of the Final Solution—Morgenthau had an awakening. Incensed about the State Department�
��s reluctance to come to the aid of the refugees, he bluntly told Hull, whose wife was half Jewish: if you “were a member of the cabinet in Germany today, you would be, most likely, in a prison camp, and your wife would be God knows where.” (As it happened, one defiant woman, whose husband was Jewish, was beheaded in Germany in 1943.)

  So when Morgenthau received the memorandum from his aide Josiah DuBois, he immediately appreciated its gravity.

  Would he take it to Roosevelt? He once told an aide that his friendship with the president was what he valued “above everything else.” And he had also once lamented that “Roosevelt was not the greatest—let’s put it this way—on this Jewish problem.” Having spent his entire political life tethered to the president, and having stubbornly resisted being thought of as a token Jew in the cabinet, he now had to decide if he would risk all by bringing the matter straight to Roosevelt.

  But that was exactly what he would do.

  FOR MORGENTHAU THIS SITUATION had all the earmarks of a full-blown election-year scandal and more importantly a moral blight of historic proportions on the president’s record. Absent a change in policy, Morgenthau believed that Roosevelt would share the responsibility for the extermination of an entire people. Moreover, DuBois had said that if Morgenthau didn’t take any action on the report, “I’m going to resign and release” it to the press. The effect of that, combined with the pending debate in the Senate, would be devastating for the president.