Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941

by Lynne Olson

  Her pain was compounded when she discovered that the French aviator and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was in New York and that because he was “on the other side,” she would not be able to see him. The year before, she had become emotionally involved with Saint-Exupéry after he wrote a highly laudatory preface to the French edition of her book Listen! The Wind. Even before they met, she felt a deep kinship with the French aristocrat turned mail pilot, whose bestselling books—Wind, Sand and Stars and Night Flight—described the exhilaration and dangers of flying and human relationships in lyrical, mystical language that Anne greatly admired. He, in turn, was so taken with Listen! The Wind that he insisted on writing a much longer preface than the publisher requested and regaled his fellow pilots with passages from the book.

  In August 1939, the charming, voluble Saint-Exupéry spent a weekend with the Lindberghs at their house on the north shore of Long Island. He did not speak English, and Anne’s French was somewhat halting. Nonetheless, the two were in each other’s company for hours, pouring out their thoughts about writing and life. She was overwhelmed by his interest in her—“not because I was a woman to be polite to, to charm with superficials, not because I was my father’s daughter or C.’s wife; no, simply because of my book, my mind, my craft.”

  In breathless, schoolgirl-like prose, Anne described in her diary that precious time with Saint-Exupéry, comparing their encounter to “summer lightning” and declaring, “My heavens, what a joy it was to talk, to compare, to throw things out, to be understood like that without an effort.” She had finally found a soulmate, and for the rest of her life, she would look back on that weekend as one of the happiest, most exhilarating times she had ever spent. She missed Saint-Exupéry terribly when he left, and for years afterward, her diary was studded with references to him.

  When France declared war against Germany, Saint-Exupéry joined the French air force, flying reconnaissance missions over enemy lines. After France capitulated ten months later, he returned to the United States. As Anne saw it, there was now an unbridgeable gulf between them—he, a passionate anti-Fascist, and she, a supposed apologist for Fascism, “the bubonic plague among writers.” The idea of a rift between her and the man she had come to love was deeply painful.

  Sequestered in their rambling white farmhouse, the Lindberghs led a lonely, reclusive life. A big black German shepherd patrolled the grounds, and local police set up a guard post on the road leading to the house. The family had almost nothing to do with their wealthy, mostly interventionist-minded neighbors, one of whom was Secretary of War Henry Stimson. Virtually all the East Coast establishment figures who had befriended Lindbergh after his flight had cut off contact with him.

  When an acquaintance of Anne’s told J. P. Morgan partner Thomas Lamont, a friend of the Morrow family who had befriended Lindbergh, that the Lindberghs were lonely and suggested he visit them, Lamont retorted icily: “I [will] have nothing to do with them.” Henry Breckinridge, Lindbergh’s longtime New York lawyer, not only rejected Lindbergh socially but spoke out against him, equating his former friend and client to such turncoats as Norway’s Vidkun Quisling and France’s Pierre Laval and declaring that “he who spreads the gospel of defeatism is an ally of Adolf Hitler.” In Washington, Admiral Jerry Land, chairman of the U.S. Maritime Commission and Lindbergh’s second cousin, erupted in anger when a friend mentioned the flier. “I just can’t talk about him any more!” Land declared. “I think he’s gotten into bad hands, and he’s all wrong.”

  In her struggle to cope with this flood tide of rejection, Anne had one important solace: despite the intense strain on their relationships, her own family never abandoned her. Indeed, all the Morrows, including her mother, worked extraordinarily hard to maintain the closeness that was so important to them. When William Allen White made a speech boasting about the “really smart trick” he had played in persuading Elizabeth Morrow to deliver a radio broadcast countering Lindbergh’s isolationist arguments, Elizabeth shot off a sharp letter to White, chiding him for the snideness of his comments. “Colonel Lindbergh and I differ about what our country’s attitude toward the war should be,” she wrote, “but each honors the sincerity of the other’s opinions, and there is no misunderstanding between us.”

  Anne was particularly grateful that her close ties with her sister, Con Morgan, had not unraveled. After dinner with the Morgans one night, she expressed her delight that she and Con “can still talk. It was a good evening, a cementing one, keeping the bridges open.” In 1943, Anne noted to an acquaintance that Con and Aubrey Morgan and their English colleagues in New York had been far kinder and more welcoming to her and Charles during that difficult time than any of Anne’s old friends.

  Aubrey Morgan, for his part, was determined not to give up his long-standing friendship with his brother-in-law, no matter how much they might disagree on a wide spectrum of issues. He and John Wheeler-Bennett, Morgan’s colleague at the British Press Service, spent many evenings with Lindbergh, “arguing, debating, and fundamentally dissenting in the most amicable fashion,” Wheeler-Bennett recalled. “We never lost our tempers nor jeopardized our friendship.”

  Wheeler-Bennett did not believe that Lindbergh was at heart anti-British—it was just that he felt that Britain could not win the war. “Nothing that Aubrey or I could say could compel his comprehension of Britain’s genius for improvisation and her gift for inspired amateurism,” Wheeler-Bennett wrote. “He had simply written Britain off as a bad bet. He disapproved of President Roosevelt’s policies of ‘all aid short of war’ on the grounds there was no point in throwing good money after bad.”

  Years later, Morgan would tell Reeve Lindbergh, “Your father never really understood the British character.” To reporters who could not believe that the brothers-in-law, with their wildly disparate views, could get along so well, Morgan laughingly said that their relationship stood as an “eternal refutation of the invincibility of British propaganda.”

  ANNE’S STEADFAST RELATIONSHIP WITH her family was one of the few bright spots in her life that fall. Her misbegotten defense of her husband’s isolationist stance had certainly not helped diminish the attacks on him. If anything, it intensified them.

  Everything that Lindbergh said or did continued to be front-page news. He had switched his focus from radio broadcasts to speaking at antiwar rallies throughout the country, which invariably drew huge, adoring crowds. Those who did not share his views deluged the White House and FBI with letters suggesting that he be silenced. “How can such an utterly disgusting yellow-bellied traitor as Charles A. Lindbergh be allowed to spew off at the mouth?” a Texas man wrote to President Roosevelt. “He should be tied with a long chain and dropped in the middle of the Atlantic, where his body will no longer contaminate the U.S.A.” Other correspondents urged that Lindbergh be dispatched immediately to Germany.

  Thousands of abusive letters were sent directly to the Lindberghs, many with such obscene, violent language that the U.S. Post Office began inspecting their mail. One letter, addressed to “Dear Nazi Lindbergh,” demanded he stop his antiwar speeches “or else you will not see your other baby alive within three weeks from today.”

  What infuriated Lindbergh’s critics was not just his opposition to the government’s interventionist policy but his seeming lack of concern and sympathy for the suffering of the bomb-battered British and other victims of the Nazis. “There is nothing lovable about this Lindbergh,” an Omaha newspaper declared. “It is impossible to warm up to him.… We turn from him amazed. Is it possible there is a human being whose feelings are not touched, if ever so little, by the spectacle of a world boiling in misery and fear?”

  Even some of his fellow isolationists voiced concern about his refusal to condemn Nazi tactics and to express hope for the survival of Britain. Norman Thomas advised Lindbergh to declare “your personal opposition to the cruelty, intolerance and tyranny of fascism. Make it clear that at the very least, a desirable peace would mean the continuance of Great Britain a
nd her self-governing dominions as absolutely independent nations with real power, not as puppets to Hitler.” The isolationist historian Charles Beard warned Lindbergh that he was “doing great damage to the cause of staying out of war by repeatedly saying in public that Britain has lost the war.”

  Lindbergh’s archconservative friend William Castle was another who urged him to be more careful about what he said. “He does not care about his own reputation so long as he is saying what he believes to be true,” Castle wrote in his diary. “I said that … I cared for his reputation only because it was an asset for those of us who believe in keeping out of the war [and] that he must not get the reputation of being pro-German.” Castle offered to vet Lindbergh’s speeches for overly inflammatory language—a proposition that Lindbergh politely declined. He spent hours on each speech, carefully choosing each word. He was going to say what he wanted to say, and he didn’t care if it made him a pariah.

  He had told his mother-in-law, among others, that he didn’t want a German victory, that he opposed Nazi persecution of the Jews, and that he believed a British defeat would be “a tragedy to the whole world.” At the same time, he continued to insist that Britain had already lost the war and should agree to a negotiated peace. Although he maintained repeatedly that he was neutral, the only combatant he criticized was Britain.

  Even with the mushrooming growth of America First, Lindbergh remained isolationism’s most potent weapon. His opinions, journalist Roger Butterfield observed, “have become as significant as bombs.… The magic of his legendary name, the appeal of his personality, the sincerity with which he comes before the microphone, have persuaded millions of Americans who were only half persuaded before that there is no reason for the U.S. to fight or fear Hitler.”

  Increasingly, President Roosevelt considered Lindbergh to be a major threat to his presidency and the survival of Britain. He and other interventionists would soon launch an all-out campaign to neutralize his influence. But first, FDR had to deal with another potent rival—Wendell Willkie.

  CHAPTER 17

  “A NATIONAL DISGRACE”

  By any measure, the 1940 presidential campaign was one of the nastiest in modern American history. Henry Wallace called it “exceedingly dirty.” Robert Sherwood labeled it “a national disgrace” and “a dreadful masquerade, in which the principal contestants felt compelled to wear false faces.” Marcia Davenport, the wife of Wendell Willkie’s campaign manager, described it as “a disgraceful slugging match in which neither candidate wholly kept his integrity.”

  Yet at its beginning, there was considerable optimism that the contest might be relatively civilized. No major differences existed between Willkie and Franklin Roosevelt on policy issues. Willkie had voiced his support for many of the New Deal’s social programs and, despite the bitter opposition of GOP bosses, had done the same for the president’s foreign policy. Indeed, he had been considerably bolder than FDR in his emphasis on the importance of sending aid to Britain as quickly as possible.

  For Willkie, however, that similarity of views would swiftly become a serious problem—just one of a host of difficulties, many of them self-inflicted, that began almost immediately after the Republican convention. Instead of capitalizing on the nationwide excitement engendered at the convention and making appearances throughout the country, Willkie and his aides took a working vacation for five weeks in the Colorado mountains. Years later, an aide conceded, “We let what was the hottest thing in the world get cold.”

  Once his campaign did begin, it was, by all accounts, the most disorganized in memory—“a fountain of anarchy and confusion,” according to Marcia Davenport. Raymond Clapper observed, “Seldom has there been more chaos in a presidential campaign,” adding that “if the Willkie administration in the White House functioned with no more unity, coordination, and effectiveness than the Willkie administration in the campaign, then the Government would be almost paralyzed.”

  Willkie and Russell Davenport, who resigned as managing editor of Fortune to direct the campaign, made it abundantly clear from the start that they wanted little to do with Republican bosses, seemingly unaware that they needed the party’s resources, in both money and manpower, to mount a full-fledged national contest. On the campaign train, a virtual state of war existed between Willkie’s band of amateurs and the old-guard Republicans who occasionally traveled with the candidate.

  But the most daunting challenge facing Willkie was how to convince Americans that, notwithstanding his agreement with Roosevelt on most major issues, there were important enough differences to warrant voting for a political neophyte over a seasoned veteran. The Republican decided on three lines of attack: Roosevelt’s continuing inability to mend the economy and lower the high unemployment rate; his failure to mobilize industry and rearm the country swiftly enough in the face of a fast-growing German threat; and his alleged dictatorial instincts, as exemplified by his decision to run for a third term.

  On all three counts, however, circumstances worked against Willkie. Although unemployment did remain unacceptably high and war mobilization was indeed in a state of disarray, enough defense money had been pumped into the economy over the previous few months to ignite a boom in jobs and spending. And even though voters remained wary about a third term, that concern, for many, was outweighed by their inclination to support the incumbent at a time of international crisis.

  Frustrated by his inability to inflict much political damage on his opponent, Willkie was even more annoyed when, throughout September and into October, FDR acted as if he didn’t even exist. The wily old pro was giving the amateur a master class in politics. Instead of engaging in traditional campaigning, he stayed above the fray, emphasizing his role as commander in chief by making heavily publicized inspection tours of booming shipyards and munitions and aircraft plants. Such visits were meant to underscore not only FDR’s dedication to a strong national defense but also the steady increase in defense-related jobs.

  While Roosevelt seemed oblivious to the fact that a presidential campaign was actually under way, his aides did their best to undermine the public’s trust and confidence in the Republican nominee. They did so in part by skillfully playing on the divisions and contradictions in the GOP, attempting to tar the liberal, interventionist Willkie with the isolationism and extreme conservatism that dominated the Republican Party.

  The word began to circulate that Willkie was nothing but a stalking horse for reactionary, big-business Republicans who planned a Fascist-style takeover of the government if he were elected. “The time has arrived to tell the American people bluntly of the plan to return this Government to Wall Street,” declared an unsigned campaign memo found in Harry Hopkins’s White House papers. “It will be a sorry day for labor and for other groups in this country who always have an uphill battle to fight if this sordid group is brought into this country in the dead of night.”

  There’s no question that Roosevelt was still passionately hated by a substantial segment of the business community and that a number of prominent businessmen, fearing for their profits, had advocated a negotiated peace between the British and Hitler. But no evidence has ever come to light to support the idea that corporate leaders were planning a putsch or that Wendell Willkie was anything but a liberal who opposed the reactionaries in his own party as strongly as he did Roosevelt.

  Nonetheless, FDR and many of those around him apparently convinced themselves that a Willkie victory would be followed almost immediately by a Fascist coup d’état. “Willkie is distinctly dangerous,” Harold Ickes wrote in his diary. “With him in the White House, the monied interests would be in full control and we could expect an American brand of fascism as soon as he could set it up.” Henry Wallace, meanwhile, noted in his diary that Roosevelt “was convinced that Willkie at heart was a totalitarian.”

  Because of the GOP’s diehard isolationist image, Willkie was also vulnerable to the charge that his election would be welcomed, even advocated, by Nazi Germany and its adherents in
the United States. In speech after speech, Wallace, the designated brawler on the Democratic ticket, came within an inch of saying that a vote for Willkie would be a vote for Hitler. “The Republican candidate is not an appeaser and not a friend of Hitler,” the vice presidential nominee said in a speech in rural Nebraska. “But you can be sure that every Nazi, every Hitlerite, and every appeaser is a Republican.” In another address, Wallace insisted that he did not mean to “imply that the Republican leaders are willfully and consciously giving aid to Hitler. But I wish to emphasize that the replacement of Roosevelt, even if it were by the most patriotic leadership that could be found, would cause Hitler to rejoice.”

  Disregarding the deliberate murkiness of Wallace’s phrasing, newspaper headlines focused on the intent of his message. The New York Daily News trumpeted WILLKIE IS HITLER’S MAN, SAYS WALLACE, while the Des Moines Register’s wording was slightly more restrained: NAZIS PREFER GOP—WALLACE. In an editorial rebutting Wallace’s contentions, The New York Times, which endorsed Willkie after having backed Roosevelt in the two previous presidential elections, declared: “We are under no illusion that Hitler and Mussolini like Mr. Roosevelt. We are also under no illusion that they will like Mr. Willkie any better … for Mr. Willkie is just as vigorously pro-America, and just as bitterly anti-Axis, as Mr. Roosevelt.”

  The fact that Willkie’s parents were German immigrants was regarded by Democratic pols as another possible bit of political pay dirt. Acting on behalf of the president, Harold Ickes asked the FBI to run a background check on Willkie, but J. Edgar Hoover, who had been advised by one of his top agents that such a blatantly political investigation would be “a serious mistake,” denied the request. Nonetheless, a whispering campaign about Willkie’s German ancestry, including rumors that his last name was really Wulkje, was set in motion by Democratic regulars. Unsigned pamphlets were circulated asserting that Willkie approved of Hitler’s theory of the Germans as a master race and charging that his sister was married to a Nazi naval officer. In fact, she was married to the U.S. naval attaché in Berlin.