The Chairman

by Kai Bird

  Because the president was not scheduled to arrive for two days, McCloy, Douglas, and twenty-one other passengers took off in a four-engine C-54 plane for a day-long excursion to Jerusalem. They almost didn’t make it. Fifteen minutes after takeoff, the plane’s number-two engine sputtered and died. As they were approaching Lydda Airport in Palestine, their number-three engine sputtered as well, but the plane landed safely on three engines. McCloy immediately reported the incident and told military intelligence that he suspected sabotage; the subsequent investigation, however, revealed nothing.73

  This one-day visit to Palestine gave McCloy his first direct exposure to the political problems surrounding Zionism. An American Franciscan priest named Father Pascal took his party around Jerusalem on a guided tour. They visited all the usual holy places, including the Holy Sepulcher, which McCloy thought “tawdry.” Soon their conversation turned to the “Palestine question” and specifically the “Jews’ disregard of the Arab,” concerning which McCloy concluded, “I gather there was a good bit of bitterness. . . .”74

  Back in Cairo that Sunday evening, he had dinner at the home of the U.S. minister to Egypt, Alexander C. Kirk. Also invited were Lew Douglas and Averell Harriman. McCloy had not seen Harriman for many months. Only the previous October, Harriman had been shifted from London to become Roosevelt’s ambassador in Moscow. At one point in the evening, Harriman took McCloy aside and emphasized that the Russians firmly believed that it was well within the powers of America and Britain to “take more [Nazi] divisions off their front than we had thus far accomplished.” And though they now took for granted that Overlord would be launched the following spring, they also wanted the Allies to do something, somewhere, during the current winter season.

  Over the next few days, McCloy had several long luncheons with General Marshall, Bill Donovan, and his British counterparts. In between these meetings, he found some army officers who could play a decent game of tennis and even took some time out with Marshall for a tour of the Great Pyramids. At noon on Thanksgiving Day, he was summoned to the Kirk villa for a photo session. The president, Churchill, Chiang Kai-shek, and all their top aides gathered in the garden to pose for the photographers. It was a dry, warm, and thoroughly pleasant day. McCloy stood next to Harry Hopkins on the fringe of the group. Harold Macmillan described the scene for his diary: “. . . it was really like a sort of mad garden party in a newsreel produced of Alice in Wonderland. “75 Afterward, McCloy had lunch with Roosevelt, Hopkins, and Lord Leathers, the British minister for war transport. On the agenda was a discussion about civil-affairs matters, specifically Allied policy for occupying Germany.

  The British had already passed to the president a copy of Operation Rankin, a contingency plan for the occupation of Germany if there were a sudden collapse of Nazi authority in Berlin. Rankin envisioned dividing Germany up into a number of occupation zones. When McCloy cabled Washington for instructions as to whether the United States preferred to be allocated a northern or a southern occupation zone, he received back an “eyes-only” cable saying that the State Department had no view. Moreover, he was told that Secretary of State Hull only wished that it be emphasized in any negotiations over Rankin that “no advantage shall accrue to the U.S. or to any of our allies” from any such occupation zones.76 This struck McCloy as evading the realities. The United States was going to have to make some political choices before the war ended, and McCloy believed they should be made in Washington, not London.

  He warned Hopkins, “On every cracker barrel in every country store in the U.S. there is someone sitting who is convinced that we get horn-swoggled every time we attend a European conference.” As the war progressed toward a favorable conclusion, he argued, the GIs would want to return home and the American people would wish “to liquidate the European involvement.” These tendencies, McCloy told Hopkins, would ultimately be “fatal to both British and American interests.” The British had to recognize, he thought, that it was in their interest to have the postwar future of Europe determined in Washington, not London.77

  This was not a simple jurisdictional dispute. McCloy could see that the British were prepared to strike deals with the Soviets that the Americans were not yet ready to contemplate, and he felt frustrated that Washington hadn’t given more thought to these political issues. “I get the impression,” he wrote Stimson, “from my observations of how this conference operates that British military strategy is greatly influenced by British political strategy. . . . They act as if they believe thoroughly Clausewitz’s doctrine that military and state policy are interwoven and that one is merely the other in a different form.” He then went on to complain that, whereas the British political strategy was pronounced, the “lack of one on our side has been just as pronounced.”

  He asked Stimson if the United States intended, in the aftermath of the war, to assert any economic or political interests outside its own borders. If so, such interests should be carefully defined, “so that our military people can act on it.” He suggested the United States ought to know now what “economic or other concessions we seek in Europe or the Pacific.. . . Our concept of what [is] the best re-arrangement of boundaries in Europe from an economic, military and political point of view should be known.” He suggested the formation of a special committee with representation from the State Department, the army, and the navy to “define our post-war policy. . . .” Such an interdepartmental committee, he said, would communicate directly with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “so that it can guide their military policy both during the war and after.”78 (Stimson eventually acted on McCloy’s suggestion by appointing him chairman of a newly formulated State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee in 1944.)

  McCloy’s brief at Cairo was civil affairs and occupation policy. But Stimson had asked him to keep him informed on the crucial decisions relating to Overlord. On this matter, he witnessed considerable rancor between the British and the Americans. Stimson had pleaded with Roosevelt to seize the initiative from the British, and this is exactly what the president did upon his arrival in Cairo. Roosevelt and Hopkins made it clear from the beginning that they were absolutely committed to a cross-Channel attack within six months. Churchill said he was “a hundred percent for OVERLORD,” but then proceeded to talk about how important it was to capture Rome. Afterward, Harry Hopkins snidely told the prime minister’s personal doctor, Lord Moran (Sir Charles Wilson), “Some of us are beginning to wonder whether the invasion will ever come off.” Stalin had agreed to meet Roosevelt and Churchill at Teheran on November 28, and Hopkins warned that, if Churchill continued to promote diversions from Overlord, “You will find us lining up with the Russians.”79

  The presidential party and Churchill left for Teheran on November 27, leaving behind McCloy, Douglas, and many others to await the results of the first face-to-face meeting with “Uncle Joe” Stalin. While they were gone, McCloy had little to do. He played some tennis and went sightseeing around Cairo. One day he saw Eisenhower and briefly discussed with him the furor set off a few days earlier by a Drew Pearson column that had reported that General George S. Patton had slapped two enlisted men in a Sicilian military hospital. McCloy decided to pay Patton a visit after the conclusion of the Cairo conference.

  Roosevelt and his entourage were due back from the Teheran negotiations on December 2. But McCloy had been reading minutes of some of the Teheran meetings, and that morning he air-messaged a brief letter to Stimson on what had been decided. The substance of the negotiations had focused on Overlord. Churchill had indeed once again tried to push his allies into some Balkans operations. But Stalin had forcefully rejected any campaign that would result in a delay in Overlord. In a pointed reference to Churchill’s schemes, he stated that the Soviets considered all efforts in the Eastern Mediterranean “diversionary.” Throughout this meeting, McCloy reported, Stalin was very direct and emphatic: “In fact, in many cases I got the impression that Marshal Stimson was talking and not Marshal Stalin.”80

  In Washington three day
s later, Stimson read McCloy’s summary of Teheran and exclaimed, “I thank the Lord that Stalin was there. In my opinion, he saved the day. He was direct and strong and he brushed away the diversionary attempts of the Prime Minister with a vigor which rejoiced my soul.”81 Stimson had finally seen his views triumph at Teheran. A firm date was set for Overlord; the cross-Channel attack would take place in May 1944. Both the Balkans operation and a proposed amphibious landing in Burma were abandoned, since either would result in the diversion of scarce landing craft from Overlord.

  Churchill, however, viewed Roosevelt’s conduct at Teheran as something of a betrayal.82 The prime minister had put off Stimson, Marshall, and other cross-Channel advocates as long as he could. And now the distrust the Americans felt toward Churchill, a distrust engendered by his evasive conduct over the last two years, had cemented their resolve to brook no further delays. Cairo and Teheran were thus turning points in both the war and the Anglo-American relationship. In the future, the Americans would dictate the course of the war, a role commensurate with their overwhelmingly superior contribution to the war effort. American and British troops, commanded by an American general, would finally be committed to an invasion of France and an advance upon Berlin from the west, while Soviet troops moved in from the east.

  Marshall and Stimson had been arguing for two years that the closest path for an attack on Berlin lay across the English Channel. Now there were indications from the Soviets that, the longer the Americans waited, the less concerned the Soviets were about opening a second front. The Soviet offensive on the Eastern front was meeting with such success that winter that a sudden collapse of Germany could not be ruled out. In that event, Stalin’s troops would occupy all of Germany. If American forces were to play any decisive role in the outcome of the war, they had to be committed against the German heartland as soon as possible. Besides, Roosevelt and Hopkins believed that they could work well with Stalin. In the midst of the Teheran conference, Hopkins told Lord Moran, who was Churchill’s confidant as well as his personal physician, “The President knows now that Stalin is ‘get-atable’ and that we are going to get along fine in the future.”83 McCloy understood and even concurred in the Overlord decision, but he still had worries about the military risks associated with the operation.

  With the Cairo conference winding down, McCloy boarded a plane bound for the Italian front, where he intended to survey civilian-control problems. Upon landing in a rainstorm in Palermo, Sicily, he met with General George S. Patton. He had a soft spot for this troublesome general; he was quite simply awed by the man’s bravado. In this meeting and in another session on his way back through Palermo, Patton quickly won his sympathy. After hearing the general’s explanation of the slapping incident, McCloy wrote in his diary, “Patton felt himself beached, was contrite but still in a fettle. He told me of the incident and described the emotions he felt when he moved from the man with his arm shot off to the whimperer whom he slapped and shook. Patton has the chemicals that make him a leader in battle. The Sicily campaign he ran was magnificent and the soldiers like him and feel proud of having been in his army.”84

  Subsequently, McCloy sent Eisenhower a memo reporting that “Patton was a bit downcast but soldierly. He was not very intelligent the way he handled himself, but [Abraham] Lincoln’s remark when they got after Grant comes to mind when I think of Patton—’I can’t spare this man—he fights.’ I hear that the hubbub is dying down in the States.”85 Instead of reprimanding Patton, McCloy told him he was an “inspiring leader,” and promised him an army to command in Europe. Afterward, Patton confided to his diary, “I think my luck is in again.”86

  After Palermo, McCloy headed for Naples, where he visited General Mark Clark, who took him on a tour of the front lines near Caserta. “We got in jeeps and buzzed up the line to the front,” McCloy wrote in his diary. “It was more like the last war than anything I had seen thus far, a muddy bruised road with trucks and vehicles of all sorts pounding along. Guns, trucks, and storage all along the route, and cannonading ahead . . . There was heavy artillery fire from our side and I saw a number of air missions. The mountain side was full of bursts and every now and then you could hear small arms fire. It was rough terrain. Supplies had to be man-handled up the approaches. . . .”87

  Soon afterward, tired and now anxious to return to Washington, McCloy left Italy on a flight for Algiers. There he once again saw Eisenhower, who was busy trying to organize his departure for London to take command of Overlord. Ike still felt beleaguered by his difficult relations with General de Gaulle, who by now had assumed sole command of four hundred thousand Free French troops. After evaluating the situation, McCloy concluded that these French forces would never be properly utilized unless de Gaulle was accorded the political recognition he demanded. Eisenhower agreed, and begged McCloy to change Washington’s policy.88

  McCloy knew just how hard this would be. At Teheran, the president had agreed with Stalin when the Soviet dictator observed that, though de Gaulle might represent the “soul of sympathetic France,” the “real physical France engaged under Pétain is helping our common enemy Germany. . . .” Stalin concluded that this “real physical France” should be punished for its collaboration.89 Roosevelt agreed and thought the French nation should be treated as an occupied country, not an ally, as de Gaulle would have it.

  McCloy was not unaware of these political factors, but they weighed little in comparison with the simple military advantages to be gained by giving de Gaulle what he wanted. Besides, from his close dealings with the Gaullists, and particularly from the assessments of Jean Monnet, he felt the difficult general’s ultimate political ascendancy was inevitable. With the D-Day landings scheduled to occur in less than five months, he knew he had little time in which to change Roosevelt’s mind. He began his campaign by writing a memo to Stimson urging a rapprochement with de Gaulle. Given that the French general had recently won the allegiance of all the resistance groups operating inside France, the success of Overlord, he argued, might well be substantially improved if Eisenhower could coordinate his cross-Channel attack with well-timed sabotage and guerrilla actions. Even after a successful landing, the resistance groups and the French Committee’s cooperation might be essential in order to preserve Eisenhower’s lines of communications. Failure to recognize the Committee’s authority, he warned, might lead the resistance groups to conclude that “we intend to adopt a pro-Vichy policy.”90

  Stimson was only partially persuaded by these arguments. He shared the conviction with Roosevelt that France was headed for civil war and that Washington should do nothing to identify itself with one faction over the other.91 McCloy’s military-necessity argument convinced Stimson that the French Committee’s political authority should be recognized—but only in those coastal portions of France designated by the Allies as combat zones during the invasion. McCloy thought that impractical, and proceeded to bombard his boss with memos. At one point, an annoyed Stimson suggested that McCloy had been seduced by the “blandishments” of Jean Monnet, a charge McCloy hotly denied: “I seek one thing only—military advantage and help to Overlord.”92 Eventually, Stimson relented and agreed to “make an assault on the President who has been pretty stubborn with his distrust of de Gaulle.”93

  On the day they were scheduled to see the president, Stimson received word that his sister had suffered a stroke in New York, so he sent McCloy to the Cabinet meeting alone. McCloy got to make his pitch at the White House, and came away thinking that he had won Roosevelt’s approval for a limited recognition of de Gaulle’s Committee.94 He now sat down to write a specific set of instructions for Eisenhower on how to deal with the French resistance. When these were forwarded to Roosevelt for his signature, they were returned substantially altered. The president’s changes would make it very difficult for Eisenhower to conclude any formal arrangement with the Committee. Refusing to give up, Stimson and McCloy rewrote the instructions once again, and finally, nearly two months after he and Eisenhower had
agreed that U.S. policy toward de Gaulle would have to change, Roosevelt finally signed the new directive. Less than three months before D-Day, Eisenhower was now authorized to communicate with French resistance groups through the French Committee and recognize certain immediate postliberation responsibilities in local administration by the Gaullists. McCloy felt his perseverance in presenting sheer realities had finally altered official Washington’s policies toward de Gaulle.95

  In the coming months, however, the general’s imperiousness and Roosevelt’s distrust conspired to undo these practical arrangements. The matter eventually came to a head over the highly symbolic issue of whether de Gaulle would recognize the newly designed French currency to be used by Allied troops. Earlier in the year, McCloy had accompanied Henry Morgenthau to the White House, where they discussed the issue with’Roosevelt. The president was sick in his bed when they entered his room. McCloy had been told by Monnet that de Gaulle would not recognize the currency unless it had the words “République Française” printed across the paper to distinguish it from the Vichy regime. De Gaulle, of course, always referred to the “République,” not merely “France.” Roosevelt picked up on this immediately, and objected, “How do you know what kind of government you will have when the war is over. . . . Maybe we’ll have an emperor again.”

  McCloy tried to deflect this by suggesting, “If you fix it ‘République Française,’ then there is one less worry that de Gaulle is going to be a dictator.”