Roosevelt

by James Macgregor Burns

  “We are now in this war. We are all in it—all the way. Every single man, woman, and child is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking of our American history. We must share together the bad news and the good news, the defeats and the victories—the changing fortunes of war.

  “So far, the news has been all bad. We have suffered a serious set-back in Hawaii. Our forces in the Philippines, which include the brave people of that Commonwealth, are taking punishment, but are defending themselves vigorously. The reports from Guam and Wake and Midway Islands are still confused, but we must be prepared for the announcement that all these three outposts have been seized.

  “The casualty lists of these first few days will undoubtedly be large.…It will not only be a long war, it will be a hard war.” But the United States could accept no result but victory, final and complete.

  Roosevelt still had to deal with the awkward fact that the Nazis had not yet declared war—and might not. He simply asserted that Germany and Italy “consider themselves at war with the United States at this moment just as much as they consider themselves at war with Britain or Russia.” For weeks, the President said, Germany had been telling Japan that if it came in, it would receive the “complete and perpetual control of the whole of the Pacific area” and that if it did not, it would gain nothing.

  “That is their simple and obvious grand strategy. And that is why the American people must realize that it can be matched only with similar grand strategy. We must realize for example that Japanese successes against the United States in the Pacific are helpful to German operations in Libya; that any German success against the Caucasus is inevitably an assistance to Japan in her operations against the Dutch East Indies; that a German attack against Algiers or Morocco opens the way to a German attack against South America, and the Canal….”

  Roosevelt’s White House was now in battle uniform, but in its own casual way. The bright light under the portico no longer shone at night; Mrs. Henrietta Nesbitt, the housekeeper, went shopping for blackout curtains; gas masks were handed out and put aside. Morgenthau, who controlled the Secret Service, ordered the White House guard doubled. He also wanted to ring the grounds with soldiers and to place light tanks at the entrances, but Roosevelt demurred. No tanks, no men in uniform inside the fence, and only one soldier about every hundred feet outside it. Work was hastily begun on a special air-raid shelter in the vault of the Treasury, but the President did not take this seriously either. He told Morgenthau he would go down there only if he could play poker with the Secretary’s hoard of gold.

  Tuesday passed, and Wednesday—still no declaration from Berlin. But by now Hitler had made up his mind and was simply waiting to stage his announcement. After receiving the news of Pearl Harbor at his headquarters behind the bleeding Russian front, he had flown back to Berlin during the night of December 8-9. He would declare war on the United States; he would not demand that Japan intervene against Russia. His reasoning was, as usual, a combination of rational calculation and personal emotion. He could not bluff Tokyo, for Roosevelt had been so provocative that a German-American war was inevitable anyway. There was little that he could offer Japan in the Pacific struggle and hence little he could threaten to withhold. Japan could not wound the Soviet Union mortally from the east; Stalin had thousands of miles to trade off in Siberia. It was better that Japan focus its efforts in the Pacific, and since the war had become global anyway, the stronger the Japanese effort in that ocean, the better for Hitler in the Atlantic, where he hoped to cut off American war supply to Britain and Russia. Above and beyond all this, though, was Hitler’s xenophobia and racism. He did not need the racially inferior Japanese to help him beat Russia, and he had only hatred and contempt for Americans, half Judaized, half Negrified, and certainly not a warrior race.

  For months the Führer had publicly kept his temper in the face of Roosevelt’s threats and name-calling. Now he could pour out his hatred. On December 11 he appeared before his puppet Reichstag, assembled in Berlin’s Kroll Opera House. He began by denouncing “that man who, while our soldiers are fighting in snow and ice, very tactfully likes to make his chats from the fireside, the man who is the main culprit of this war….

  “I will pass over the insulting attacks made by this so-called President against me. That he calls me a gangster is uninteresting. After all, this expression was not coined in Europe but in America, no doubt because such gangsters are lacking here. Apart from this, I cannot be insulted by Roosevelt, for I consider him mad, just as Wilson was…. First he incites war, then falsifies the causes, then odiously wraps himself in a cloak of Christian hypocrisy and slowly but surely leads mankind to war, not without calling God to witness the honesty of his attack—in the approved manner of an old Freemason….

  “A world-wide distance separates Roosevelt’s ideas and my ideas. Roosevelt comes from a rich family and belongs to the class whose path is smoothed in the democracies. I was only the child of a small, poor family and had to fight my way by work and industry.” He dwelt on the contrast between them: in the Great War Roosevelt had a pleasant job, while the Führer had been an ordinary soldier; Roosevelt had remained in the Upper Ten Thousand, while Hitler had returned from the war as poor as before; after the war Roosevelt had tried his hand at financial speculation, while Hitler lay in the hospital. Roosevelt as President had not brought the slightest improvement to his country. Strengthened by the Jews all around him, he turned to war as a way of diverting attention from his failures at home.

  The German nation wanted only its rights. “It will secure for itself this right even if thousands of Churchills and Roosevelts conspire against it….

  “I have therefore arranged for passports to be handed to the American chargé d’affaires today, and the following—” The rest of Hitler’s words were drowned out in applause as the Deputies sprang to their feet. That afternoon Ribbentrop coldly handed the American Chargé d’Affaires Germany’s declaration of war and dismissed him. Later in the day the three Axis nations declared their unshakable determination not to lay down arms until the Anglo-Americans were beaten and not to make a separate peace. The President sent written messages to Congress asking that a state of war be recognized between Germany and Italy and the United States. Not one member of Congress voted against the war resolutions.

  A CHRISTMAS VISITOR

  The war news from the Pacific was almost all bad. The Japanese were following their Pearl Harbor strike with lightning thrusts in the Philippines, Guam, Midway, Wake Island, in Kota Bahru, Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong. The small, almost defenseless garrison on Guam faced impossible odds. Marines on Wake beat off the first Japanese landing, but the Pacific fleet was too crippled to send help, and it was clear that the Japanese would return. After smashing Clark Field, near Manila, enemy planes were striking at Cavite naval base. The Japanese, with nearly absolute freedom of naval and air movement, were rushing troops and arms west, south, and east.

  From the Japan Times & Advertiser, December 20, 1941, courtesy of the Japan Times

  The most crushing news of all arrived in Washington on the tenth. Japanese bombers from Saigon, catching the Prince of Wales and the Repulse at sea without air cover, had bombed and torpedoed the great ships to the bottom. In London, Churchill twisted and writhed in bed as the import of the news sank in on him: the Japanese Navy was supreme from the Indian Ocean to the eastern Pacific.

  For Roosevelt and his military chiefs the long-dreaded predicament was now fact: cut to the bone to help its allies, the nation’s Army and Navy suddenly had to guard dozens of vital sectors. Rumors spread that Japanese warships were headed back to Hawaii, to Panama, even to California. Frantic calls for protection came in from coastal cities. The Army and Navy dared not be caught napping a second time. For a while all was improvisation and inadequacy. Antiaircraft regiments had to be sent to the West Coast without most of their guns. Aviation schools were stripped to fill out combat groups. A convoy of five ships, halfway to the Philippines with infantry,
artillery, munitions, and seventy dive bombers and pursuit planes, was ordered back to Hawaii. But Stimson and Marshall, anxious to buck up MacArthur in his travail, appealed to the President, who asked the Navy chiefs to reconsider their decision. The convoy was rerouted to Brisbane.

  During these days Roosevelt was never seen to lose his air of grave imperturbability, punctuated by moments of relief and laughter. He not only kept cool; he watched himself keep cool. He took the time to write to Early a curious memo noting the many comments that “the President seems to be taking the situation of extreme emergency in his stride, that he is looking well and that he does not seem to have any nerves.” People tended to forget, the memo went on, that the President had been through this kind of thing in World War I, that he had personally visited practically all defense activities throughout the United States and many abroad, that he had gone to Europe in the spring of 1918 on a destroyer and “probably saw a greater part of the war area than any other American.” Roosevelt had long been defensive about his failure to don uniform in World War I; now he was in psychological uniform as Commander in Chief.

  In this, the biggest crisis of his life, Roosevelt’s first instinct was to unify the nation, his next to unify the anti-Axis world. Churchill had asked if he could come over to Washington at once, for military conferences, and Roosevelt gladly agreed. While Churchill sailed westward on his new battleship the Duke of York, Roosevelt took steps to solidify the spirit of unity that had swept the country after Pearl Harbor.

  Party harmony was no problem; the President accepted pledges from the Democratic and Republican National Chairmen of cooperation during the war and suggested that the two party organizations could help civil defense. Nor did the Great Debate have to be adjourned; former isolationists were tumbling over themselves with promises of support. The most worrisome continuing division was between management and labor. The National Defense Mediation Board had been devastated by the resignation of the CIO representatives. Clearly new machinery was necessary for industrial peace. Shortly after Pearl Harbor the President asked union chiefs and the Business Advisory Council of the Commerce Department to designate representatives for a conference to draft a basic wartime labor policy. The first and essential objective of the conference, the President made clear, would be to reach a unanimous agreement to prevent strikes during the war period.

  The President invited the conferees to the White House for a preliminary talk. In they came: industrialists who had hated Roosevelt; Lewis, who had broken with him in the 1940 election; Green, friendly but wary. The President greeted each delegate and then spoke to the group for almost half an hour—about the need to do “perfectly unheard of things” in war, about the need for a complete agreement quickly, for a time limit on conference speeches, for a self-imposed discipline. He had just been thinking of an old Chinese proverb, he said: “Lord, reform Thy world, beginning with me.”

  There was not much difference between labor and management, the President went on. “It’s like the old Kipling saying about ‘Judy O’Grady an’ the Colonel’s Lady.’ They are both the same under the skin. That is true in this country, especially this country, and we want to keep it so.” His manner, Frances Perkins noted, was both sober and buoyant, confident and serious, and even touched with humility. The shock of Pearl Harbor, she felt, the hazards ahead, had acted like a spiritual purge and left him simply stronger, more single-minded. The conferees went on to their labors moved by the President, if still unsure of finding common ground.

  Christmas was nearing, but a strange Christmas for the nation and for the Roosevelts. Thousands of men were taking their last leaves before shipping out; other thousands had their Christmas furloughs canceled; whole outfits were pulled out of posts and bases overnight. The Roosevelts were not immune to the new anxieties of war. In New York a few days before Christmas Joseph Lash talked with Eleanor Roosevelt on the phone. He found her worried and despondent in her Sixty-fifth Street home; she mentioned having had a hard day and then burst into tears. Lash wondered if she was upset by some trouble in her work at the Office of Civilian Defense; but not so. She and the President, she told him, had said good-by to their son James, who was headed for Hawaii, and to Elliott. They had to go, of course, but it was hard; if only by the law of averages, not all her boys would return. She wept again, then steadied herself. No one saw the President weep. Probably he could not; on his desk awaiting his signature was a bill that could send seven million men, from twenty to forty-four years old, off to the battle fronts.

  Only one sock—Fala’s—would hang from the White House mantle, it was reported. But on December 22 Winston Churchill arrived in Washington, and life at the White House was instantly transformed.

  Roosevelt was waiting, propped against his car, at the Washington airport as Churchill flew in from Hampton Roads, where he and his party had disembarked. With the usual plump cigar clamped in his teeth, the Prime Minister marched over to the President and “clasped his strong hand with comfort and pleasure,” Churchill wrote later. After a semiformal dinner for seventeen the Prime Minister was installed in the big bedroom across from Hopkins’s, with his cherished traveling map room nearby.

  Suddenly the second floor of the White House was an imperial command post, with British officials hurrying in and out with their old red leather dispatch cases. The White House servants were soon agape at Churchill’s drinking, eating, and sleeping habits. The President and the Prime Minister were together for several hours every day, with Hopkins often present. They worked together in the closest familiarity: sometimes after cocktails Churchill would wheel Roosevelt in his chair from the drawing room to the elevator, as a token of respect, but also with his image of Raleigh spreading his cloak before Elizabeth. Eleanor soon discovered with concern that her guest took a long nap in the afternoon while her husband worked—but that the President hated to miss any of Churchill’s and Hopkins’s talk in the evening, and stayed up much later than usual.

  The two leaders and their staffs at once plunged into the business of war. Roosevelt’s first priority, however, was not military strategy, but a declaration of the “associated nations” to symbolize the unity and aspirations of the anti-Axis coalition. The President and the Prime Minister, using a State Department draft and working much as they had at Argentia, each wrote a separate statement and then blended them together. Since many governments had to be consulted, further drafting went on while the two leaders turned to immediate military problems.

  Christmas Eve they stood side by side on the south portico for the traditional ceremony of lighting the tree. A great throng waited in the cold blackness below. Addressing his listeners as “fellow workers for freedom,” Roosevelt said: “Our strongest weapon in this war is that conviction of the dignity and brotherhood of man which Christmas Day signifies….” He presented Churchill, who matched him in eloquence: “I have the honor to add a pendant to the necklace of that Christmas good will and kindness with which our illustrious friend, the President, has encircled the homes and families of the United States.” Christmas Day was observed without a single son or grandchild in the house. Roosevelt and Churchill attended an interdenominational service, dined with a company of sixty, listened to Christmas carols by visiting carolers—and then worked on the war until long after midnight.

  One paramount question had occupied Churchill and his colleagues as they plotted strategy in the ordered calm of the Duke of York. Would an aroused American people, venting its wrath over Pearl Harbor, force the President to turn the main weight of the nation against Japan, leaving Britain to cope alone with the Axis in Western Europe, Africa, and the Middle East? Had the carefully fashioned Atlantic First strategy collapsed when the first bombs were dropped in the Pacific? This cardinal question embraced numerous secondary ones. If Roosevelt stuck to Atlantic First—and it was Churchill’s supreme aim to induce him to do so—what would be the plan of attack against Hitler? How could Japan be contained or at least slowed in the Pacific while the Allies
concentrated on Germany? How would the Allied command be organized in the vast Pacific and Atlantic theaters? And how would new plans affect demand, supply, and transportation of munitions?

  Atlantic First was not left long in doubt. Roosevelt and his military chiefs quickly made clear that—even under the frightful pressure of Pacific defeats—the Americans still saw Germany as the main enemy and victory in Europe as crucial to the whole global effort. Indeed, little time was spent during these tumultuous days on any fundamental reconsideration of the long-planned priority. The old Plan Dog was almost taken for granted. Reassured, Churchill, in the first evening’s discussion, plunged into the next question-strategy for Europe.

  The Prime Minister had rarely been in better form. He had carefully worked out his plans for Europe and cleared them with his military men on the way across the ocean. Now, flanked by Beaverbrook and Halifax, he presented his case to Roosevelt, Hull, Hopkins, and Welles. If the Germans were held in Russia, he said, they would try something else—probably an attack through Spain and Portugal into North Africa. It was vital to forestall such a move. He than presented his plan—GYMNAST. He proposed that American forces invade Northwest Africa in the Casablanca area, and later hook up with British troops renewing their drive along the North African coast from the east into Tunisia.

  The eager Prime Minister wanted to launch the attack quickly—in three weeks, he hoped. He had 55,000 troops ready to load onto ships at short notice. The actual plan of operation would depend largely on whether the French authorities in Northwest Africa cooperated or not. It seemed to Churchill—and so he reported confidently to his War Cabinet—that Roosevelt favored the plan “with or without invitation” from the French.