MacArthur greatly resented being called from his headquarters in Australia for what he justly considered a political photo op. All the same, one important issue required a presidential decision. Would the route to Japan run through Taiwan (Nimitz’s preference) or the Philippines (MacArthur’s imperative)? Despite the mutual wariness that characterized the Roosevelt-MacArthur relationship, the president bought the general’s argument. The United States owed the Filipinos as speedy a liberation as possible, and Roosevelt could not have been impervious to the political lift of an American return to the Philippine archipelago just weeks before the election.12
On July 29, the president left for the Aleutians, where he visited two bases and made a point of mingling with enlisted men. Two weeks later, he was at Bremerton, Washington, delivering a nationally broadcast speech from the deck of a destroyer to 10,000 shipyard workers. The event was a near disaster. A brisk wind ruffled the pages of his address and rocked the ship. He suffered an onset of sharp angina chest pains, struggled to maintain his footing, and had difficulty following his text. The next day, his train left on the four-day trip to Washington, DC, with its most important passenger under doctor’s orders to do nothing but rest.13
The pictures and stories quickly followed—of a commander in chief flanked by MacArthur and Nimitz, lunching with enlisted men, and fishing in Alaska with other enlisted men. The White House press operation helpfully calculated the length of the trip at approximately 15,000 miles and reckoned that FDR, during his entire presidency, had logged 306,265 miles in the service of the nation.14
By the time Roosevelt returned to Washington, he, his lieutenants, and the larger political world increasingly focused on the new order emerging from the war. It was easy to feel that the future of humankind lay in the balance.
On August 21, a conference to establish a postwar United Nations Organization convened at Dumbarton Oaks in the Georgetown section of Washington. It would adjourn on October 7, having drawn up a plan for an international body not too different from the old League of Nations. Predominant liberal opinion in the United States and Britain held that the League had failed because of American aloofness and that a successor body with full, committed American membership could maintain world peace and stability. Conservative warnings about the inevitability of conflicts among nations had little impact in a country determined to believe that the great sacrifices of total war could lead to an era of total peace.
The Dumbarton Oaks conference revealed rifts between the United States and the Soviet Union. The USSR insisted on the right to veto actions on, and even prevent discussion of, issues in the new organization. Moreover, the USSR asserted that, since Great Britain supported independent memberships for each of its Commonwealth nations, and since the United States could rely on the votes of most Latin American nations, the sixteen Soviet republics should have individual voting status. The conference adjourned with these items unresolved and effectively left to negotiations between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. A final meeting to establish the new international organization was scheduled for the spring of 1945 in San Francisco.15
The most immediately pressing postwar problem was thoroughly predictable and utterly intractable: the future of Poland. The ideals of the Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms, reinforced politically by a large Polish American voting bloc that in 1940 had backed Roosevelt by huge margins, required its freedom and independence. In June 1944, the president had welcomed to the White House the Polish prime minister in exile, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, a genuine democrat who led the Polish Peasants Party. Roosevelt made no promises, but the release of public letters in which the president proclaimed his devotion to the valor of the Polish nation underscored the cordial atmosphere. In fact, he knew that the United States could do little to affect the future of Poland and other eastern European nations and assumed postwar Soviet domination there. At Teheran, he had told Averell Harriman, “I don’t care two hoots about Poland.”16
The USSR had appropriated the eastern half of Poland as its share of the spoils from the Nazi-Soviet pact and clearly aspired to control the entire country at the end of the war. In fact, much of that Soviet-occupied area was not ethnically Polish. At Teheran, both Roosevelt and Churchill had indicated to Stalin that they would not oppose a new eastern Polish boundary along the World War I Curzon Line, which roughly delineated the western border of the 1939 Soviet occupation. Poland would be “compensated” with territory detached from eastern Germany, a move that would likely create lasting German animosity and leave the Poles dependent upon Soviet protection. Moreover, Stalin was determined that the new Poland would have a “friendly” Communist government, based on a regime established by the USSR at Lublin.
By the end of July, the Red Army had advanced across eastern Poland to the Vistula River. Warsaw was on the opposite bank. As the Soviets paused for resupply and reinforcements, lightly armed Polish partisans in the city staged an audacious uprising against the German occupiers. Loyal to the government-in-exile in London, they hoped to establish its claim as a legitimate liberation force. At the beginning, Radio Moscow encouraged the uprising, but Soviet forces on the other side of the river, after their immediate supply needs had been met, did nothing to assist it. Stalin instead shifted divisions to the south to consolidate Soviet control in Hungary and Romania.
In a communication to Churchill and Roosevelt, the Soviet leader characterized the Warsaw insurgents as an irresponsible “handful of criminals.” The Russian command on the east bank of the Vistula rejected US and British requests for landing rights and other assistance in efforts to supply the insurgents via airdrops. In the end, only the Royal Air Force made a substantial, if ineffective, attempt and suffered significant losses to German fire. In early September, the remainder of the partisan force surrendered. The episode so incensed George F. Kennan, the number two official at the American embassy in Moscow, that he recommended to Ambassador Harriman threatening cessation of US aid to the Soviet Union. The moral foundation for such a course was undeniable; as a practical matter, its implementation and the consequent break in the alliance were unthinkable. Roosevelt could only watch from afar, recall Stalin’s disregard at Teheran for the problem of the Polish American vote in the United States, and hope that the Russian leader’s cynicism had not done him much political damage. He surely concluded that Soviet dominance of Poland after the war was inevitable. Perhaps he also wondered what further concessions might be necessary to maintain the US-Soviet relationship.17
By then the future of a defeated Germany was the subject of intense discussion within the administration. The United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union had agreed that there would be a postwar military occupation and were in the process of establishing boundaries for their respective zones. The Department of State promoted a plan for the economic and political rehabilitation of Germany within a liberal economic framework. Enlightened and intelligent in principle, the proposal clashed with the bitter feelings engendered by a brutal total war.
No one felt those emotions more deeply than Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr., motivated especially by what he had learned of the Holocaust. Punishment of German leaders for war crimes, taken for granted by all concerned, was insufficient, Morgenthau argued. The problem was Germany itself and ingrained attitudes of arrogance, authoritarianism, and militarism that defined the German people, who were “beasts.”
Even the partition of Germany into several smaller states would not prevent future horrors. The victors had to destroy Germany’s capacity to wage war once and for all. The nation had to be irreversibly deindustrialized and made into a “pastoral state” wholly agricultural in its economy and thus incapable of modern warfare. The key to achieving this objective would be the destruction of the German industrial heartland, the Ruhr valley. Its mines should be shut down and its factories leveled. Morgenthau envisioned army engineers flooding and dynamiting “every steel mill, . . . every coal mine, every c
hemical plant, every synthetic gas business.” What to do with all the displaced workers? Feed them, and presumably their families, in army soup kitchens. “Sure it is a terrific problem. Let the Germans solve it. Why the hell should I worry about what happens to their people?”18
Roosevelt seemed sympathetic. “We either have to castrate the German people or . . . treat them in such manner that they can’t just go on reproducing people who want to continue the way they have in the past,” he told Morgenthau.19
Secretary of War Henry Stimson was the main opponent to what became known as the Morgenthau Plan. With characteristic (and thoroughly justified) moral indignation, he argued that it could result in the starvation of 30 million people. He was also rightly concerned that Europe as a whole could not recover economically without a strong German industrial sector, and he persisted in his dissent despite sharp criticism from the president.
Roosevelt briefly adopted the Morgenthau Plan and pushed it on Churchill when they met in Quebec from September 11 to 16. Perhaps persuaded by Morgenthau’s dubious assertion that the suppression of German heavy industry would pave the way for the resurgence of Britain as Europe’s industrial powerhouse, Churchill signed on. The War Cabinet had to ratify the prime minister’s assent and later subjected it to skeptical analysis. “In the event,” Churchill would write later, “with my full accord, the idea of ‘pastoralizing’ Germany did not survive.”
A similar trend developed in the United States. Word of the Morgenthau Plan leaked to the public. That fall, Republican candidate Thomas Dewey denounced it as a political gift to Hitler worth ten divisions in its potential to inspire a retreating German army to fight on. Roosevelt’s own enthusiasm dimmed. Final planning for the occupation of Germany would ultimately fall to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, men motivated more by practical military and administrative considerations than by Morgenthau’s fierce anti-Germanism.20
A final postwar issue surfaced to public notice: the emerging Soviet hegemony in east-central Europe. Churchill pushed unsuccessfully for another Big Three meeting in late 1944. Roosevelt, focusing his limited energy on his reelection effort, responded that such a conference had to be postponed. Churchill and his cabinet colleagues, feeling a sense of urgency, arranged a bilateral conference with Stalin. The prime minister, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, and the rest of the War Cabinet had effectively written off Poland and Czechoslovakia as hopeless cases in which Britain had no pressing interest. Determined to maintain British influence in Greece and Turkey, the keys to the eastern Mediterranean, they hoped to demarcate Soviet and British spheres of dominance in southeastern Europe. Roosevelt disassociated himself from the discussions but arranged to have Ambassador Harriman sit in as an observer.
Accompanied by Eden, Churchill arrived in Moscow on October 9. Meeting with Stalin that evening and perhaps taking advantage of Harriman’s inability to attend, he wrote out on a sheet of paper his proposition and passed it over to Stalin:21
Rumania
Russia
90%
The Others
10%
Greece
Great Britain (in accord with U.S.A.)
90%
Russia
10%
Yugoslavia
50–50%
Hungary
50–50%
Bulgaria
Russia
75%
The Others
25%
The Soviet dictator paused for a moment, then used a blue pencil to make a “large tick” at the top of the paper, which he then pushed to the middle of the conference table. It sat there for a moment before Churchill, assuming that the mark signified agreement, allowed that some might consider the accord cynical and suggested burning it. “No, you keep it,” Stalin replied. Whatever their private doubts, he and Eden took Stalin’s mark as a serious commitment and clearly tried (with little success) to make the most of it in subsequent discussions with Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov.22
However obscure the details may have been, there was a widespread understanding in the United States that the Russians had successfully asserted dominance in Poland and that Churchill and Stalin had divided influence in southeastern Europe roughly along the lines of their respective military strengths in that part of the world. Washington-based French journalist Andre Geraud, writing in the New York Times under the pseudonym “Pertinax,” accurately described the proposal Churchill had offered. Sophisticates such as Walter Lippmann argued that spheres of influence were a fact of international life, but their reasoning appealed only to other sophisticates. Critics of the administration gained a much wider audience when they denounced the resort to power politics and found Roosevelt guilty by association.23
On August 18, 1944, Roosevelt and vice presidential nominee Harry S. Truman lunched al fresco at the White House under a great magnolia tree planted more than a century earlier by Andrew Jackson. The president told Truman that he would have to carry the burden of campaigning. Truman, who had not seen Roosevelt face-to-face in more than a year, was shocked by his haggard visage and the trembling of his hand as he attempted to pour cream into his coffee. That did not stop him from telling reporters, “The President looked fine. . . . He’s still the leader he’s always been and don’t let anybody kid you about it.” A few weeks later, Truman attended a White House reception with his close friend Eddie McKim. As they left, McKim looked at the White House and said, “You’re going to be living in that house before long.” Truman replied, “Eddie, I’m afraid I am.”24
Roosevelt’s Republican opponent, Thomas E. Dewey, was a formidable challenger. No longer simply the crime-busting district attorney of 1940, Dewey had won election as governor of New York in 1942. Forty-two years old in 1944 and sporting a dapper mustache, he had the looks of a matinee idol. Ideologically, he was somewhere in the center of his party, conservative enough to criticize New Dealism but receptive to the social mission of government, internationally minded but wary of the Soviet Union. Defeating Wendell Willkie decisively in the Wisconsin presidential primary, he had glided to the nomination. His running mate, Governor John Bricker of Ohio, was a concession to the party’s right and, as was the case with Truman among the Democrats, neither an asset nor a liability.
Dewey lacked warmth but exuded energy and competence. Above all, he sought to capitalize on the dissatisfactions of nearly three years of total war. He promised a fresh and energetic administration to replace a tired team. He depicted Roosevelt as running a statist regime that feared peace and a return to mass unemployment. The president could, he asserted, offer nothing beyond a resumption of “the dole.” The Republicans, he pledged, would provide jobs for all through a free enterprise economy. Yet, at times he could sound almost New Dealish, advocating the extension of Social Security benefits to such excluded groups as farmers, domestic workers, and the self-employed. He endorsed the principle of publicly provided medical care for those who could not afford it. He assured the nation of his commitment to postwar collective security arrangements to secure the peace but also called for a rapid military demobilization and reliance on a volunteer armed force.
Hard-core conservative and isolationist Republicans had some qualms but found their candidate far preferable to “that man in the White House.” If a fair amount of Dewey’s rhetoric was facile, it had a visceral appeal to an electorate that had experienced the turmoil of the last four years. In the end, his appeal all came down to one simple maxim: “It’s time for a change.”25
As the campaign got under way, Wendell Willkie was its most prominent wild card. He had staked out positions on domestic policy and international relations that seemed almost Rooseveltian. The title of his 1943 chronicle of a trip that circled the planet, One World, alone alienated a critical mass of Republicans. His relationship with the president was cordial but wary. Roosevelt had arranged for Sam Rosenman to meet secretly with Willkie in New York on
July 5, just after the Republican convention. Speaking for the president, Rosenman proposed a party realignment in which the progressive wing of the Republican Party would join with liberal Democrats, leaving reactionary Democrats and Republicans to contemplate a conservative alternative. He assured Willkie that the idea had nothing to do with the election.
Willkie, Rosenman recalled, was enthusiastic but unwilling to make any commitments before the November vote. Roosevelt surely hoped to coax an endorsement from him and may have envisioned him as the possible chief executive of the new United Nations Organization. Willkie appears to have been thinking of another shot at the presidency in 1948 and might well have pursued the realignment plan. All such possibilities became moot when he was hospitalized on September 6, purportedly suffering from exhaustion but actually afflicted with serious coronary problems. He died on October 8, having made no endorsement.26
While Dewey presided over a relatively united party, the Democrats consisted of three distinct factions in search of a unifying principle: the South, the northern big-city machines, and organized labor. Labor, stronger and more visible than ever, was represented by a new phenomenon, the CIO Political Action Committee (CIO-PAC), headed by Amalgamated Clothing Workers chief Sidney Hillman. The city machines, once massive vote producers, were fading and possessed limited clout at the White House. The South, having for generations supported the Democratic Party as a guarantor of white supremacy, was increasingly restless with administration support for Negro civil rights. The most visible sign of insurgency came in Texas, where a faction calling itself the “regulars” attempted to place independent electors on the Democratic ballot and launched a primary battle against Speaker Sam Rayburn. They reportedly enjoyed the quiet sympathy of Secretary of Commerce Jesse Jones.27
Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century Page 55