TWENTY

STAB IN THE BACK

On this tenth day of June, 1940, the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor.

—FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, JUNE 10, 1940

WITH GERMAN ARMOR slicing through Poland’s defenses, Roosevelt met the press in the Oval Office shortly before noon on September 1. “Can we stay out of this?” he was asked. “I not only sincerely hope so,” FDR replied, “but I believe we can and every effort will be made by this Administration so to do.”¹ Later Roosevelt told the cabinet that his World War I experience was eerily familiar. The president said he felt he was picking up an interrupted routine. “Unless some miracle beyond our present grasp changes the hearts of men the days ahead will be crowded days—crowded with the same problems, the same anxieties that filled to the brim those September days of 1914. For history does in fact repeat.”²

In London, Chamberlain spoke feebly to Parliament, a waffling, self-pitying address that gave no indication Britain intended to stand by its commitment to the Poles. When Arthur Greenwood, the acting leader of the Labour opposition, rose to reply, Leo Amery, one of many prominent Conservatives appalled at Chamberlain’s limp response, shouted, “Speak for England, Arthur.” The House erupted with a mighty cheer, and Greenwood gave a brief, stirring speech that reflected the mood of the country: “I wonder how long we are prepared to vacillate … when Britain, and all Britain stands for, and human civilization are in peril.”³ A thunderous, prolonged ovation greeted Greenwood’s remarks. As one member noted, “A puff would have brought the Government down.”⁴ With Parliament in revolt the cabinet recovered its lost courage. At 8 A.M. Sunday, September 3, the British government informed Berlin that unless it received assurances within three hours that Germany would begin an immediate withdrawal of its forces from Poland, Great Britain would declare war. At 11:15, with no response, a dispirited Chamberlain informed a radio audience and later Parliament, “This country is now at war.” Five hours later France followed suit.^*

Roosevelt addressed the nation Sunday night in a fireside chat. “This nation will remain a neutral nation,” said the president, “but I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well. Even a neutral has a right to take account of facts. Even a neutral cannot be asked to close his mind or his conscience.”⁵

FDR’s first order of business was repeal of the Neutrality Act. So long as the act remained on the books, the United States was precluded from providing aid to any of the belligerents, even if they paid cash on the barrelhead. Congress had adjourned for its annual recess, and the members were spread across the country. On Wednesday, September 13, after touching base with the leadership of the House and Senate, Roosevelt summoned the legislators into special session the following Thursday.⁶ “My own personal opinion,” he wrote Judge Walton Moore, counselor of the State Department, “is that we can get the votes in the House and Senate but that the principal difficulty will be to prevent a filibuster in the latter.”⁷

Isolationist opposition mobilized quickly. The following evening Senator William E. Borah of Idaho, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate’s longest-serving member, delivered a blistering attack over a national radio hookup. European wars, said the aged Borah, were “wars brought on through the unconscionable schemes of remorseless rulers.” If the United States sold European countries arms, “we would be taking sides, and that would be the first step to active intervention.”⁸ Borah’s speech resonated strongly among those determined to keep the United States out of war.

Roosevelt recruited the Republican leadership to respond. Alf Landon, Frank Knox, and Henry L. Stimson waded into the fray to support immediate repeal. The academic establishment joined the fight. President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia, James B. Conant of Harvard, and Karl Compton of MIT, together with the presidents of Princeton and Yale, mobilized the nation’s educators to support repeal. The Kansas editor William Allen White organized a wide array of notables through the Non-Partisan Committee for Peace Through Revision of the Neutrality Act.^*

The battle escalated on September 15, when Charles A. Lindbergh, one of the country’s sentimental heroes, addressed a national audience at least as large as that which had listened to FDR’s fireside chat twelve days before. “This is not a question of banding together to defend the white race against foreign invasion. This is simply one of those age-old struggles within our own family of nations—a quarrel arising from the errors of the last war—from the failure of the victors to follow a consistent policy either of fairness or force.”⁹ Lindbergh, who had received Germany’s second highest decoration from Hermann Göring shortly after Munich,^† tapped into a vast reservoir of antiwar sentiment. Midwestern progressives, old-line socialists and Communists, Christian pacifists, cryptofascists such as Father Coughlin, and the German-American Bund launched an avalanche of letters, postcards, and telegrams to representatives and senators demanding retention of the arms embargo. Legislators previously disposed in favor of repeal began to waiver. One Republican congressman reported receiving 1,800 messages after Lindbergh’s speech, only 76 of which supported repeal.¹⁰

When FDR met with the congressional leadership on September 20, the day before Congress would convene, it was clear that outright repeal of the Neutrality Act was beyond reach. “The trouble is,” said Senate Republican leader Charles McNary of Oregon, “if we repealed the whole Neutrality Act people would think we were repealing our neutrality.”¹¹ Roosevelt reached a bipartisan compromise: repeal the arms embargo, but put the sale of weapons on a “cash-and-carry” basis. No sales on credit; no U.S. funding; no bank loans; no American transport.

To emphasize the urgency of repeal, FDR chose to address Congress directly. Roosevelt always delivered his annual message in person, but not since Warren Harding in 1923 had a president spoken to Congress during the session.¹² Recognizing the bad blood that had accumulated during the past two years, the president was at his conciliatory best. “These perilous days demand cooperation among us without a trace of partisanship. Our acts must be guided by one single hard-headed thought—keeping America out of war.” To avoid offending Anglophobic midwesterners and Irish Catholics, Roosevelt downplayed aid to Britain and France while emphasizing that repeal of the embargo would aid the cause of peace. The “cash-and-carry” requirement would avoid economic entanglement and keep American vessels out of the war zone.

“In a period when it is sometimes said that free discussion is no longer compatible with national safety, may you by your deeds show the world that we of the United States are one people, of one mind, one spirit, one clear resolution, walking before God in the light of the living.”¹³

Public approval was overwhelming. The White House mail room was inundated with messages of support. Even Senator Borah thought it was a good speech and said privately that he favored “cash and carry.”¹⁴ A Gallup poll immediately following the president’s speech indicated that 60 percent of Americans now supported repeal and 84 percent favored an Allied victory.¹⁵ On September 28 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 16–7 to send the bill to the floor. This time Senators George and Gillette voted with the president.¹⁶

On the same day the Foreign Relations Committee reported the “cash-and-carry” bill, the beleaguered Polish garrison in Warsaw capitulated. Organized resistance ended. The Soviet Union, pursuant to the deal Stalin had struck with Hitler, intervened on September 17, and from that point on Poland’s fate was sealed. Germany and the USSR proclaimed a Boundary and Friendship Treaty defining Poland’s division. The Soviets acquired nearly half of Poland’s territory and one third its population. Germany gained the remainder. Like Austria and Czechoslovakia, Poland disappeared from the map of Europe. The Poles had fought bravely; their losses in battle totaled 70,000 killed, 133,000 wounded, and 700,000 captured. The Nazi war machine did not go unscathed, however; the final figures from Berlin listed 10,572 killed, 30,322 wounded, and 3,400 missing. The first great battle of World War II had ended in total defeat for the Allied powers.

With Poland’s collapse the momentum to repeal the arms embargo accelerated. Isolationist stalwarts Styles Bridges of New Hampshire and Robert Taft of Ohio endorsed “cash and carry.” On October 5, Henry L. Stimson put the fox among the chickens when he departed from White House strategy and bluntly warned the country that “Britain and France are now fighting a battle which, in the event of their losing, will become our battle.” Hull had tried to get Stimson to delete the reference to Britain and France, but Stimson, characteristically, refused. To the administration’s surprise, Stimson’s speech was well received—so well that tens of thousands of copies were printed for national distribution.¹⁷ Bishop Bernard Sheil of Chicago delivered a powerful radio address supporting repeal, as did Al Smith, both designed to overcome Irish Catholic opposition. Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland, back in the fold, told his colleagues, “Civilization demands that we give all the aid we can to a nation attacked, and not run like cowards until our turn comes.”¹⁸

Roosevelt kept a low profile. These were tense times for the president. “I am almost literally walking on eggs” he wrote Canada’s Lord Tweedsmuir.¹⁹ For relaxation the president turned to poker, usually on Saturday evenings. Ickes, Robert Jackson, Pa Watson, Admiral Ross McIntire, FDR’s doctor, and Steve Early usually filled the places at the table. “We played until half past twelve,” Ickes reported after one such session. “We broke up because the President was tired, having had his sleep interrupted for two or three nights by flash news from Europe.” Roosevelt enjoyed wild-card games, especially “Woolworth’s,” a seven-card hand with fives and tens wild. “We were playing dollar limit,” said Ickes. “I won $53.50. The President was the heaviest loser. The game cost him about $35. One thing about playing with the President, we do not have to curry favor by letting him win.”²⁰

At least once a month, more often if possible, Roosevelt took a cruise to nowhere on the presidential yacht Potomac. Downriver, sometimes as far as Point Lookout, the president lolled about and slept late. Missy, Pa Watson, Doc McIntire, and, when he was up to it, Harry Hopkins usually accompanied him. At the White House, FDR averaged fifteen appointments a day, dictated two dozen or so letters to Missy and Grace Tully, and continued to meet the press twice a week. Briefings from the State Department and the military consumed more and more time, cables and state papers streamed across his desk, and there was always the weekly cabinet meeting. He swam less often now, perhaps three times a week, and his blood pressure had climbed to 179/102, which Dr. McIntire dismissed as normal for a man of fifty-eight.²¹

Lindbergh spoke again on October 13, but the wind was gone from his sails. His overtly racist remarks fell flat. “Our bond with Europe is a bond of race and not political ideology.… Racial strength is vital—politics a luxury. If the white race is ever seriously threatened, it may then be time for us to take our part for its protection, to fight side by side with the English, French, and Germans. But not with one against the other for our mutual destruction.”^22*

On the eve of the Senate vote, Roosevelt broke his self-imposed public silence to dispel whatever popular fears remained. Speaking to the Herald Tribune Forum on October 26, FDR lambasted those “orators and commentators beating their breasts and proclaiming against sending the boys of American mothers to fight on battlefields of Europe.” That was “one of the worst fakes in current history,” said Roosevelt. “The simple truth is that no person in any responsible place … has ever suggested the remotest possibility of sending the boys of American mothers to fight on the battlefields of Europe. That is why I label that argument a shameless and dishonest fake.”²³

Roosevelt worked both sides of the street. He held out repeal of the arms embargo as a step toward peace, while the purpose of the repeal was to aid the Allies. The implicit logic was that by helping Britain and France defeat Hitler, the United States would not have to fight.

The following day, after four weeks of debate, the Senate voted to repeal the arms embargo, 63–30. Southern Democrats supported the president down the line. Eight of twenty-three Republicans voted for repeal. Except for Independent George Norris of Nebraska, western progressives and populists voted against. On November 2, 1939, the House fell in line, 243–181. The voting pattern was similar: southerners supporting FDR, progressives against.

With Europe at war all eyes turned to Roosevelt. Was a third term in the offing? The president kept his own counsel. He did nothing to indicate that he was a candidate, but, more significantly, he did nothing to suggest he was not. Garner, who worked closely with the White House to secure passage of the “cash and carry” bill, believed Roosevelt would run. “He didn’t talk like a man who was coming to the end of his term. He didn’t say that war was inevitable, but he gave the impression that if there was one he intended to run it.”²⁴

The idea of a third term was a political bugbear. No presidential incumbent had ever sought one. Roosevelt sometimes joked about the possibility, but never in such a way that would tip his hand. “The country is sick and tired of Roosevelts,” he told Ed Flynn, recalling what “Uncle Ted” had said when third-term speculation arose: “They are sick of looking at my grin, and they are sick of hearing what Alice had for breakfast.”²⁵

As speculation increased, FDR encouraged and exploited it. He relished the backdrop at the annual Gridiron Dinner of Washington journalists in December 1939—a giant sphinx with Roosevelt’s face complete with pince-nez and the cigarette holder at a jaunty angle. The chances are that FDR had not made up his mind. The fieldstone library at Hyde Park he had designed to house his papers and memorabilia—the nation’s first presidential library—was nearing completion, as was his hilltop dreamhouse above Val-Kill. The three-bedroom cottage was built to FDR’s specifications, with extra-wide doors and no thresholds so that his wheelchair could roll easily, and he and Missy had gradually furnished it to his liking. “It’s perfect, just perfect,” he would often say.²⁶

There was also the question of his health. Roosevelt was fifty-eight, but twelve years in Albany and Washington had taken their toll. “No, Dan, I just can’t do it,” he told Teamster president Daniel Tobin just after Christmas. “I am tired. I really am. I can’t be president again. I have to get over this sinus. I have to have a rest. I want to go home to Hyde Park. I want to take care of my trees. I want to make the farm pay. I want to write history. No, I just can’t do it.”²⁷

In January 1940 Roosevelt signed a contract with Collier’s magazine to become a contributing editor at $75,000, a year commencing after he left office in 1941. Collier’s had offered substantially more, but FDR considered it inappropriate to earn a greater salary as editor than he had as president of the United States. The contract ran for three years, several editorial assistants were provided, and Roosevelt would write twenty-six articles annually.²⁸ His mind was apparently made up. “I definitely know what I want to do,” he told Henry Morgenthau. “I do not want to run unless between now and the [Democratic] convention things get very, very much worse in Europe.”²⁹

When the elderly George Norris visited the White House in February to urge FDR to run for a third term, he said much the same thing: “George, I am chained to this chair from morning till night. People come in here day after day, most of them trying to get something from me, most of them things I can’t give them, and wouldn’t if I could. You sit in your chair in your office too, but if something goes wrong or you get irritated or tired, you can get up and walk around, or you can go into another room. But I can’t. I am tied down to this chair day after day, week after week, month after month. And I can’t stand it any longer. I can’t go on with it.”³⁰

William Bullitt, paying a quick visit to Washington from his post in Paris, reports having dinner at the White House with FDR and Missy in late February. Roosevelt collapsed and fell unconscious at the table. Admiral McIntire was summoned and after examining the president said he had suffered a “very slight heart attack.” FDR was put to bed, and nothing further was said. McIntire evidently thought it was nothing out of the ordinary.³¹

Meanwhile, anxious contenders edged toward the starting gate. On December 18, 1939, Vice President Garner announced his candidacy. “I see that the vice president has thrown his bottle—I mean his hat—into the ring,” Roosevelt quipped at cabinet.³² Garner’s candidacy was a protest against the New Deal, FDR, and a third term rolled into one. He had little chance. John L. Lewis’s classic put-down of the vice president as a “labor-baiting, poker-playing, whiskey-drinking, evil old man” rang true among too many of the party’s rank and file.^*

James Farley also eyed the office. An energetic fifty-one, Farley was immensely popular with the party’s professional politicians. But his Catholicism was a handicap, and his lack of familiarity with policy issues was dumbfounding. Ignorance of economics and foreign affairs has never been a bar to high office, but in 1940 the nation required more than Farley could offer. Chicago’s Cardinal Mundelein, the Democratic party’s unofficial prelate, attempted to talk Farley out of running, but to no avail. “I will not let myself be kicked around by Roosevelt or anyone else,” said Farley.³³

Cordell Hull played his cards closer to his chest. He was betting that Roosevelt would not run and that he would be the natural fallback. FDR encouraged Hull to believe as much. At a cabinet dinner in early 1940, Mrs. Hull sat next to the president and told him her husband did not like to make speeches. “Well, tell him he had better get used to it,” Roosevelt replied. “He’ll have a lot of it to do soon.”³⁴ Hull considered it incompatible with his position as secretary of state to campaign for the nomination. Knowing that Roosevelt’s support was all he needed, he chose to wait.³⁵“I believe the world is going straight to hell,” he told FDR, “and I think I can be of greater service in the State Department.”³⁶

Other potentials faded early. Harry Hopkins, with whom the president felt most comfortable, was literally at death’s door, hospitalized first at the Mayo Clinic, then at the Naval Hospital in Washington, with an as-yet-undiagnosed digestive ailment. Paul V. McNutt, the former governor of Indiana, whom Roosevelt appointed to head the newly established Federal Security Agency, was new to the ways of Washington and mistook the president’s hearty welcome for political support. Henry Wallace, Securities and Exchange Commission head William O. Douglas, and Attorney General Robert H. Jackson all had the presidential urge, but with little professional support their candidacies failed to materialize.

In Europe, meanwhile, the military situation was shrouded in fog. After Poland’s defeat, both sides settled into a period of watchful waiting. Troops deployed with theatrical precision, but no shots were fired. The Germans, taking advantage of their recent battlefield experience, honed their maneuver tactics and air-to-ground coordination. The French, whose tactical doctrine traced to World War I, assiduously dug fortifications. The British, equally confident that the home-front hardships induced by the Allied economic blockade would bring Germany to its senses, dithered and did little. “The accumulation of evidence that an attack is imminent is formidable,” Chamberlain wrote his sister, “and yet I cannot conceive myself that it is coming.” On April 5, 1940, the prime minister gloated to the National Conservative Union meeting in London, “Hitler has missed the bus”—a gaffe second only to his “Peace in our time” proclamation after Munich.³⁷

In Berlin, witty Germans who looked west spoke of Sitzkrieg. The French called it le drôle de guerre. Ironically, it was Senator Borah who baptized the situation with a name when in December 1939 he spoke of the “phony war” on the western front. If the stalemate in Europe had continued, FDR would likely have retired. “I think my husband was torn,” said Eleanor years later. “He would often talk about the reasons against a third term, but there was a great sense of responsibility for what was happening.”³⁸

FDR did not ask Eleanor’s advice, nor did she offer it. “I never questioned Franklin about his political intentions. The fact that I myself never wanted him to be in Washington made me doubly careful not to intimate that I had the slightest preference.”³⁹

The calm in Europe was shattered on April 9, 1940, at precisely 4:20 A.M., an hour before dawn, when German troops moved unopposed across Schleswig-Holstein’s unfortified border with Denmark. Simultaneously, combat-ready Nazi landing parties went ashore all along the Norwegian coast from Oslo to Narvik. The British and French were caught flat-footed. Danish independence was snuffed out by the time most Danes finished breakfast. Norway resisted for two weeks. In strategic terms the occupation of Denmark gave Germany a stranglehold on the Baltic. The audacious defeat of Norway provided Hitler a valuable psychological victory. But the long-term military impact was questionable. Norway’s ports proved less useful than the Kriegsmarine had anticipated; iron ore from Lorraine later diminished the importance of Swedish sources, and for the remainder of the war the occupation of Norway consumed vast numbers of German soldiers who could have been better deployed elsewhere.⁴⁰

Norway’s defeat became Chamberlain’s. On May 10, rather than face the inevitable vote of no confidence in the House, Chamberlain resigned.^* He was succeeded by Winston Churchill. “I felt as if I were walking with Destiny and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial,” wrote Churchill.⁴¹ Roosevelt was less sanguine. “I suppose Churchill was the best man England had,” he told his cabinet, “even if he was drunk half of his time.”⁴²

That same day, German forces stormed across the Belgian and Dutch frontiers. In the north, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s Army Group B smashed through Holland’s defenses, paratroopers seized bridges, and motorized infantry followed on, while the Luftwaffe paralyzed Dutch resistance. The main German thrust was mounted by von Rundstedt’s Army Group A in the Ardennes. Rundstedt would repeat the maneuver in December 1944 at the Battle of the Bulge. In 1940 the Ardennes forest was the pivot between the Maginot Line to the south and the bulk of the French Army strung out along the Belgian border; in 1944 it was the hinge between Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery’s British and Canadian force in the north and General Omar Bradley’s American army group in the south. Because of the hilly, heavily wooded terrain, the Allies deemed it impenetrable to enemy armor and it was lightly held. Three German panzer corps, some two thousand tanks, slashed through in five days, opened a fifty-mile gap in the French lines, and were streaking toward the English Channel. At seven-thirty in the morning of May 15, French premier Paul Reynaud telephoned Churchill with the bad news. Speaking in English, Reynaud said, “We are defeated. We have lost the battle.”⁴³

Later that day, Churchill cabled Roosevelt, his first message to the president since becoming prime minister: “The scene has darkened swiftly. The small countries are simply smashed up, one by one, like matchwood. We expect to be attacked ourselves in the near future. If necessary, we shall continue the war alone.… But I trust you realize, Mr. President, that the voice and force of the United States may count for nothing if they are withheld too long.”

Churchill proceeded to ask Roosevelt for immediate assistance: “forty or fifty of your older destroyers,” several hundred late-model aircraft, antiaircraft weapons, and ammunition, plus steel and other raw materials.⁴⁴ The following day FDR made a dramatic appearance before a joint session of Congress to ask for a supplemental defense appropriation of $1.2 billion. The proposal had been in the works for some time, but the news from France gave it increased urgency. Roosevelt’s face was drawn, his knuckles white as he gripped the lectern. His voice was resolute. “The brutal force of modern offensive war has been loosed in all its horror. No old defense is so strong that it requires no further strengthening and no attack is so unlikely that it may be ignored.”

The United States was currently producing 6,000 airplanes a year. Roosevelt asked for 50,000. He requested funds for modernizing the Army and Navy, as well as to increase production facilities for everything that was needed. Recognizing the power of the America First lobby, he also asked Congress to take no action that would hamper delivery of U.S. planes to the Allies.⁴⁵ At the end of the month, with the war in France going badly, Roosevelt asked for another $1.9 billion.⁴⁶ By May 1941, one year later, Congress had appropriated a total of $37.3 billion for defense—a figure roughly four times the entire federal budget in 1939.⁴⁷

The day after receiving Churchill’s request, Roosevelt responded. Airplanes, antiaircraft weapons, ammunition, and steel, said the president, would be provided. But the destroyers were unavailable. “As you know a step of that kind could not be taken except with the specific authorization of Congress and I am not certain that it would be wise for that suggestion to be made to the Congress at this moment.”⁴⁸

Churchill was sympathetic. “We are determined to persevere to the very end whatever the result of the great battle in France may be. But if American assistance is to play any part it must be available.”⁴⁹

As events unfolded in Europe, the nation’s Democratic primaries passed almost unnoticed. Oregon voters went to the polls on May 17 and voted 9 to 1 for Roosevelt over Garner. In Nebraska, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, Roosevelt slates were unopposed. In Wisconsin, FDR took twenty-one delegates to Garner’s three. In Illinois he swept all fifty-eight. In California, which Garner carried in 1932, Roosevelt won all but one delegate. Even Texas chose a pro-Roosevelt delegation.⁵⁰ FDR made no public reference to the primaries and did not campaign, but he did not prevent supporters from filing slates on his behalf.^*

In France the war proceeded with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. On May 20 German armor reached the Channel coast at Abbeville, slicing France in two. On the twenty-second the panzers wheeled north pinning the French First Army, the 350,000 men of the British Expeditionary Force, and the Belgian Army against the sea. The Belgians surrendered on May 28, and the bulk of the BEF, together with some 100,000 French troops, were evacuated from Dunkirk between May 29 and June 2.⁵¹ Left behind was the equipment of the British Army, including all of its artillery, small arms, 7,000 tons of ammunition, and 120,000 vehicles. “Never has a nation been so naked before her foes,” wrote Churchill.⁵²

The British losses at Dunkirk created an even greater need for American assistance, but Churchill’s request for weapons had been pigeonholed by the War Department. Secretary Woodring opposed providing anything, General Hap Arnold stressed the prior needs of the Army Air Corps, and the general staff worried about hemispheric defense. General Marshall cut through the resistance. Recognizing that the president wanted to provide everything possible, Marshall ordered Army supply depots inventoried, redefined American requirements, and declared surplus more or less what the British needed. Working closely with Treasury secretary Morgenthau, Marshall arranged for the equipment to be sold directly to two U.S. corporations, Curtiss-Wright and United States Steel, which resold it to the British at cost. Solicitor General Francis Biddle sprinkled legal holy water over the transaction, and by June 5 some 22,000 .30-caliber machine guns, 25,000 Browning automatic rifles, 900 75 mm howitzers, 58,000 antiaircraft weapons, 500,000 Enfield rifles left over from World War I, and 130 million rounds of ammunition were on their way to Britain. “I am delighted to have that list of surplus material which is ‘ready to roll,’ ” Roosevelt wrote Morgenthau. “Give it an extra push every morning and every night until it is on board ship.”⁵³ Except for tanks, which were in short supply, the British Army was substantially rearmed within six weeks after returning from Dunkirk.^*

In France, the military situation turned hopeless. The French had lost thirty of their best divisions, the Belgians and Dutch were out of the war, and the BEF had been evacuated. On June 5 the Germans turned south. Panzers crashed through the French line on the Somme, the defense collapsed in confusion, and the Germans crossed the Seine virtually unopposed four days later. Paris was declared an open city, the government fled first to Tours and then to Bordeaux, and General Maxime Weygand, the French commander in chief, urged Reynaud to ask for an armistice. “I am obliged to say that a cessation of hostilities is compulsory.”⁵⁴

On Monday, June 10, Roosevelt headed for Charlottesville, Virginia. FDR, Jr., was graduating from law school, and the president had been invited to give the commencement address. As Roosevelt boarded the train, he received word that Italy had declared war on France, launching thirty-two divisions against the lightly held Alpine passes and the Côte d’Azur. Whatever doubts FDR held about his future course vanished with Mussolini’s attack. That night, disregarding State Department objections, he went full out. In a voice dripping with scorn, the president told the university’s graduands, “On this tenth day of June, 1940, the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor.”

To believe that the United States could exist as “a lone island in a world dominated by the philosophy of force,” said Roosevelt, was “an obvious delusion.” America’s duty was clear: “We will extend to the opponents of force the material resources of this nation; and at the same time, we will harness and speed up the use of those resources in order that we ourselves may have equipment and training equal to the task. Signs and signals call for speed—full speed ahead.”⁵⁵

Roosevelt’s “stab-in-the-back” speech marked the decisive turning point in American policy. Though polls indicated that only 30 percent of the nation believed an Allied victory possible, FDR unequivocally placed himself shoulder to shoulder with Britain and France.⁵⁶ Listening to the president on the radio, Churchill could scarcely contain his enthusiasm. “We all listened to you last night and were fortified by the grand scope of your declaration. Your statement that the material aid of the United States will be given to the Allies in their struggle is a strong encouragement in a dark but not unhopeful hour. Everything must be done to keep France in the fight. The hope with which you inspired them may give them the strength to persevere.… I send you my heartfelt thanks and those of my colleagues for all you are doing and seeking to do for what we may now indeed call a common cause.”⁵⁷

Despite Churchill’s hopes, the weight of the Nazi offensive proved too much for the embattled Third Republic. On June 14 the Germans entered Paris. On the sixteenth Reynaud resigned and was succeeded by Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain, the aged hero of World War I’s Battle of Verdun. Two hours later Pétain sued for peace. On Saturday, June 22, in the Forest of Compiègne, in the very same railway car in which the 1918 armistice had been signed, Hitler personally presided over France’s surrender.

When Roosevelt returned from Charlottesville, he reorganized his cabinet for action. Charles Edison was eased out as secretary of the Navy, and Harry Woodring was dumped from the War Department. FDR prevailed upon the New Jersey Democratic organization to nominate Edison for governor (he won the post in November); Woodring, who continued to drag his feet on rearming the British, was cut adrift.⁵⁸

On June 19, 1940, less than a week before the Republican nominating convention in Philadelphia, Roosevelt announced that Colonel Frank Knox, the publisher of the Chicago Daily News, the old Rough Rider who had been Alf Landon’s running mate in 1936, would succeed Edison at the Navy Department. Joining Knox at the War Department would be Colonel Henry L. Stimson of New York, the principal foreign policy spokesman for the eastern establishment, Hoover’s former secretary of state, and Taft’s secretary of war.

Knox, whose appointment had been in the works for some time, cleared it with Landon before accepting.^* To make the public aware of the gravity of the international situation, he insisted that a Republican join him at the War Department. The war cabinet, so to speak, must be bipartisan. Roosevelt initially thought of his old Columbia Law School classmate William Donovan for the post but at the suggestion of Justice Felix Frankfurter turned to Stimson.⁵⁹ Knox also requested that the appointments be deferred until after the Republican convention. Roosevelt declined. It was important to stress the bipartisan nature of the defense effort, he told Knox. Even more important, if the GOP nominated an isolationist candidate, Knox and Stimson would be deemed guilty of bad sportsmanship in joining FDR’s team afterward.⁶⁰ Stimson, whom Roosevelt surprised with a telephone call to his apartment at New York’s Pierre Hotel on the morning of the nineteenth offering the appointment, had his own conditions. Fully aware of the internecine struggle between Woodring and Undersecretary Louis Johnson, he wanted a free hand to name his own assistants. FDR agreed, and Stimson brought to Washington a remarkable team that remained throughout the war: Judge Robert P. Patterson of the U.S. Court of Appeals as undersecretary, John J. McCloy as assistant secretary, and Robert A. Lovett as assistant secretary for air. Knox brought New York investment banker James V. Forrestal to Washington as undersecretary. With the exception of Forrestal, none of these appointees supported the New Deal and none had ever voted for FDR. Patterson had been appointed to the federal bench by Herbert Hoover in 1931; McCloy was the managing partner of Cravath, Swaine, and Moore;^† Forrestal was president of Dillon, Reed; and Lovett was a senior partner at Brown Brothers, Harriman. Nevertheless, they proved devoted administrators who rendered superb service to the president and the nation.⁶¹

Roosevelt not only undercut the isolationist opposition on the eve of the Republican convention, he added two of the most powerful GOP foreign policy voices to the cabinet. On June 18, prior to their appointments, both men had delivered speeches on national defense. In Detroit, Knox had called for compulsory military training, a million-man Army, the most powerful air force in the world, and unstinting aid to Great Britain. Stimson, speaking at the Yale commencement in New Haven, had asked for repeal of the Neutrality Act in its entirety, reinstitution of the draft, and the use of the U.S. Navy to convoy supplies to Britain.^* By advocating a peacetime draft, Knox and Stimson prepared the way for the president to follow.⁶²

The appointment of Knox and Stimson cast a pall over the Republican convention. Roosevelt had not only upstaged the event but exposed the deep fissure in the GOP over foreign policy. Not since Bull Moosers and Old Guard fought it out in 1912 had the party been so divided. The isolationist wing, stung to the quick by Knox and Stimson’s defection, proceeded to read them out of the party—a mean-spirited response that did the Republicans no good with an electorate increasingly concerned about national defense. Keynote speaker Harold Stassen, striking a more responsive chord, noted that the appointment of two distinguished Republicans merely reflected the lack of talent among the Democrats. His only regret, said Stassen, was that the Grand Old Party was not replacing the rest of Roosevelt’s “New Deal incompetents.”⁶³

Four candidates vied for the nomination. Thomas E. Dewey, New York City’s thirty-seven-year-old racketbusting district attorney, was the front runner. A forceful public speaker, Dewey started like a house afire, claiming 67 percent of the Republican vote in a May 9 Gallup poll. But with Hitler’s invasion of the Low Countries and France’s defeat, Dewey’s lead diminished. His youth and inexperience worked against him, and his too-clever-by-half ambiguity concerning Nazi aggression satisfied no one.^† The more voters saw of Dewey, the less they liked him: “Cold as a February iceberg,” in the words of one of his most ardent supporters.⁶⁴

Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan was a distant second. A Senate fixture since his arrival in 1928, the courteous and fair-minded Vandenberg mistook approval by his colleagues for electoral support. He disdained primaries—“Why should I kill myself to carry Vermont?”—and soon found himself trailing badly.⁶⁵ Running neck and neck with Vandenberg was freshman Ohio senator Robert A. Taft, son of the former president and chief justice. In the Senate little more than a year, Taft’s sense of entitlement left few doubts that he was ready to take on the presidency. Vandenberg and Taft appealed to the same constituency: the isolationist hard core of the GOP who had never forgiven FDR for defeating Hoover in 1932. Vandenberg’s campaign was low-key and understated; Taft’s strident and self-righteous. “There is a good deal more danger of the infiltration of totalitarian ideas from the New Deal circles in Washington than there ever will be from activities of the Communists or the Nazis.”⁶⁶

The convention dark horse was Wendell L. Willkie, the folksy, forty-eight-year-old Hoosier lawyer who had risen to become president and chief executive officer of Commonwealth and Southern, the nation’s largest utility holding company. An outsider to politics, Willkie’s huggy-bear good looks made him what David Halberstam called “the rarest thing in those days, a Republican with sex appeal.” John Gunther called him “one of the most loveable, most gallant, most zealous, and most forward-looking Americans of this—or any—time.”⁶⁷ The fact is, Willkie was a lifelong Democrat, from a family of lifelong Democrats, who turned Republican in early 1940.⁶⁸ He had gained prominence as a progressive, independently minded businessman who could hold his own in public forums with the nation’s leading intellectuals. He wrote for The Atlantic Monthly, The Saturday Evening Post, Fortune, Reader’s Digest, and The New Republic—where he defended the free speech rights of Nazis and Communists.⁶⁹ He charmed the nation’s radio audience with an April 1940 guest appearance on the phenomenally popular Information Pleaseprogram hosted by The New Yorker’s Clifton Fadiman^* and routed the New Deal’s Robert H. Jackson in a widely listened to policy debate on Town Meeting of the Air.

Politically, Willkie supported virtually all of the accomplishments of the New Deal except the TVA.⁷⁰ He had an established record of fighting the Klan in Indiana, and was a firm friend of civil liberties. In foreign policy he supported Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations, advocated American membership in the World Court, and backed unlimited aid to the Allies. “England and France constitute our first line of defense against Hitler,” he told the Akron, Ohio, post of the American Legion in May. “If anyone is going to stop Hitler, they are the ones to do it. It must therefore be in our advantage to help them every way we can, short of declaring war.”⁷¹

Willkie had become a Republican because he disliked and distrusted FDR. Personal ambition was part of it. He had lost Commonwealth and Southern’s struggle with TVA over electric rates and had failed to prevent passage of the Public Utilities Holding Act, which severely crimped its power. He believed that Roosevelt had steered the Democratic party away from its liberal ideals and converted it into the party of centralized bureaucracy and big government. Still dedicated to the social goals of the New Deal, including national health care, Willkie saw Roosevelt as a threat to individual liberty. The possibility of a third term was a manifestation of that threat.

Willkie was a political outsider in the sense of not being a career politician. But he was very much an establishment insider, a director of the Morgan Bank, and a member of every important club in New York. Harold Ickes accurately described him as “a simple barefoot lawyer from Wall Street.” Alice Roosevelt Longworth said that of course Willkie’s candidacy sprang from the grass roots—“the grass roots of a thousand country clubs.”⁷²

Willkie was supported by thousands of We Want Willkie clubs that had sprouted up across America. He was the candidate of media moguls such as Helen and Ogden Reid of the New York Herald Tribune, Roy Howard of the Scripps-Howard chain, John and Gardner Cowles of The Des Moines Register, Minneapolis Star, and Look magazine, and Henry and Clare Boothe Luce of Time, Life, Fortune, and Vanity Fair. “A vote for Taft is a vote for the Republican party,” said Life on May 13, 1940. “A vote for Willkie is a vote for the best man to lead the country in a crisis.” Willkie charmed reporters who covered the campaign. At his press conference on the third day of the convention, hard-bitten journalists gave him a prolonged standing ovation—a scene that could have come straight from Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

To his Republican rivals Willkie’s campaign appeared hopelessly amateurish. Yet the advertising was handled by Bruce Barton and John Young, the heads of two of the most powerful advertising firms in America; the chairman of the convention committee on arrangements (with absolute control over tickets to the gallery) was one of Willkie’s earliest supporters; keynote speaker Stassen became Willkie’s floor manager; and presiding officer Joe Martin of Massachusetts, the House minority leader, favored Willkie. Martin was a solid anti–New Deal isolationist, but he recognized that Willkie was the only candidate who might topple FDR.⁷³

The Republican platform sidestepped a confrontation between the party’s isolationist and internationalist wings. The foreign policy plank, said H. L. Mencken, was “so written that it will fit both the triumph of democracy and the collapse of democracy.”⁷⁴ Connoisseurs of political hara-kiri thrilled when the GOP unveiled Herbert Hoover for a prime-time radio address to a national audience. Democratic strategists regarded Hoover’s quadrennial appearances at Republican conventions as electoral reinsurance for victory in November.

On Thursday morning, June 27, with balloting scheduled to begin that afternoon, the Herald Tribune leaked (two days early) the results of the most recent Gallup Poll, showing Willkie out in front with 44 percent to Dewey’s 29 percent and Taft’s 13 percent. The impact was immediate. When the roll of the states was called, Dewey, as expected, led with 360 votes, Taft polled 189, and Vandenberg 76, but Willkie had 105—substantially more than had been expected.^* The second ballot followed immediately. Willkie gained 66, Taft 14, Vandenberg held firm, but Dewey’s support began to erode. On the third ballot Willkie moved into second place, ahead of Taft. On the fourth Dewey’s strength collapsed and it was now a two-way race between Willkie and Taft, with Willkie leading 306–254.

Chants of “We want Willkie” from the packed gallery threatened to drown out the proceedings on the floor. The Republicans had not gone past the first ballot at any convention since 1920 (when Harding was nominated on the tenth ballot), and Convention Hall was pure pandemonium. Chairman Joe Martin gaveled down efforts by Dewey and Taft supporters to adjourn, and Willkie’s momentum accelerated. On the fifth ballot Alf Landon switched the Kansas delegation to Willkie, and on the sixth ballot it was all over. Willkie defeated Taft 655–318, Governor John Bricker of Ohio moved to make the vote unanimous, and at 1:30 A.M. Friday the convention adjourned.

The following day Willkie named Senate Republican leader Charles McNary of Oregon as his running mate. McNary was from the West, isolationist, pro–public power, and far more conservative on most issues than Willkie. But he was well liked in Washington by his colleagues on both sides of the aisle, and Roosevelt found him easy to work with. “I have the general opinion that the Republicans have nominated their strongest possible ticket,” said FDR at cabinet the next day.^75*

For Roosevelt, Willkie’s nomination was a mixed blessing. His internationalism removed the question of aid to Britain from the election agenda, but of the four potential Republican candidates he would be the most difficult to defeat. Unlike Taft, Vandenberg, and Dewey, Willkie appealed to the middle-of-the-road voters FDR needed most. Of the four, only he had a chance of cracking the Roosevelt coalition.

^* As a sop to the increasingly bellicose Tory rank and file, Chamberlain recalled Winston Churchill from the political wilderness to reassume his World War I responsibilities as first lord of the Admiralty. “Churchill in the Cabinet,” exclaimed Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring. “That means the war is really on.” Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich 165 (New York: Macmillan, 1970).

^* The committee’s leadership included Henry R. Luce, the publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune; New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia; the investment bankers Thomas Lamont and Henry I. Harriman; Thomas Watson of IBM; the department store tycoon Marshall Field; the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr; the film actors Helen Hayes and Melvyn Douglas; the cultural historian Lewis Mumford; and the rising Democratic politicians J. William Fulbright and Adlai E. Stevenson.

^† At a dinner in his honor at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin on October 19, 1938, Lindbergh was presented with the Service Cross of the German Eagle with Star “by order of the Führer.” Kenneth S. Davis, The Hero: Charles A. Lindbergh and the American Dream 380–382 (New York: Doubleday, 1959).

^* Lindbergh expanded on his views a few days later in an article in the November Reader’s Digest. “It is time to turn from our quarrels and to build our White ramparts again.… Our civilization depends on a united strength among ourselves; … on a Western Wall or race and arms which can hold back either a Genghis Khan or the infiltration of inferior blood.” Charles A. Lindbergh, “Aviation, Geography, and Race,” Reader’s Digest 64–67 (1939).

^* Lewis’s remarks were made in testimony before the House Labor Committee in July 1939. “Yes, I made a personal attack on Mr. Garner,” said Lewis, “because Garner’s knife is searching for the quivering, pulsating heart of labor.” When the Texas congressional delegation prepared a rebuttal denying that Garner did any of the things Lewis charged, one member refused to sign: the second-term congressman from Texas’s tenth district, Lyndon Baines Johnson. The New York Times, July 28, 1939.

^* Parliament’s great debate on war policy took place May 7–8, 1940. Leo Amery from the Tory backbench launched the missile that brought Chamberlain down, quoting Cromwell’s injunction to the Long Parliament, “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.” On the second day of the debate Lloyd George gave the last great speech of his career, in the course of which he defended Churchill who as first lord of the Admiralty had taken responsibility for Norway’s fall: “The right honorable gentleman must not allow himself to be converted into an air raid shelter to keep the splinters from hitting his colleagues.” When the House divided on the evening of May 8, forty-one dissident Conservatives voted with the Labour opposition and sixty more abstained. Chamberlain recognized the inevitable and submitted his resignation. Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography 576–588 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).

^* Illinois primary law required a sworn statement from a potential candidate that he was indeed seeking the office before his name could be placed on the ballot. Garner complied, but Roosevelt was at sea on the USS Houston when the deadline expired. Illinois election officials nonetheless placed his name on the ballot. Bascom N. Timmons, Garner of Texas 269–270 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948).

^* “When the ships from America approached our shores with their priceless arms,” wrote Churchill, “special trains were waiting in all the ports to receive their cargo. The Home Guard in every county, in every town, in every village, sat up all through the nights to receive them. By the end of July we were an armed nation.…

“All of this reads easily now, but at that time it was a supreme act of faith and leadership for the United States to deprive themselves of this very considerable mass of arms for the sake of a country which many deemed already beaten.” Winston S. Churchill, Their Finest Hour 143, 272 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949).

^* After meeting with Landon, Knox wrote Roosevelt, “In the light of events which almost hourly show greater implications for us and for the world, our thinking was animated solely by our desire to promote national unity in the face of grave national peril.” Knox to FDR, May 21, 1940, FDRL.

^† As managing partner of Cravath, Swaine, and Moore, McCloy had supervised the preparation of the Supreme Court brief for the Schechter Brothers challenging the constitutionality of the New Deal’s National Industrial Recovery Act. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495 (1935). Kai Bird, The Chairman: John J. McCloy, The Making of the American Establishment101 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).

^* That same week, Stimson also gave the commencement address at Andover. Unaware of FDR’s impending call, the seventy-three-year-old Stimson told his young listeners that he envied them because they had the opportunity to choose between “right and wrong,” to stand up for good against evil. “I wish to God that I was young enough to face it with you.” Among the audience that day was sixteen-year-old George Herbert Walker Bush, for whom Colonel Stimson became a lifelong hero. Godfrey Hodgson, The Colonel: The Life and Times of Henry Stimson, 1867–1950 214 (New York: Knopf, 1990); Jean Edward Smith, George Bush’s War 136–137 (New York: Henry Holt, 1992).

^† Dewey’s biographer Richard Norton Smith called him “the first American casualty of the Second World War.” A novice in foreign affairs, Dewey turned for advice to John Foster Dulles, a senior partner at Sullivan and Cromwell, who was then in a pro-German phase. As Dewey later expressed it, Foster believed that “Hitler was a passing phenomenon who would disappear.” America’s proper role was “to stand aside and hopefully wait until a stalemate would occur and then exercise our weight to bring about a peace.” Smith, Thomas E. Dewey and His Times 302–303 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982).

^* In addition to Fadiman, the program’s regulars included the columnist Franklin P. Adams of the New York Post, the composer and pianist Oscar Levant, Charles Kieran of The New York Times, and the sportswriter Heywood Hale Broun.

^* A majority of the convention, 501 votes, was required to nominate. On the first ballot 730 votes were cast for the four front runners. The remaining 270 were split among nine favorite sons. Congressional Quarterly, Guide to U.S. Elections 161 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1975).

^* Not all Republicans agreed. Former Indiana senator James E. Watson, referring to Willkie’s Democratic roots, complained, “If a whore repented and wanted to join the church I’d personally welcome her and lead her up the aisle to a pew. But I’d not ask her to lead the choir the first night.” Mary Earhart Dillon, Wendell Willkie 143 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1952).