TWENTY-ONE
I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.
—FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, OCTOBER 30, 1940
WITH WILLKIE’S NOMINATION and the appointment of Knox and Stimson, the fight over foreign policy shifted to Capitol Hill. On June 28, 1940, at the behest of Senator David I. Walsh of Massachusetts, chairman of the Naval Affairs Committee, Congress amended the defense appropriations bill to prohibit the sale of military equipment to any foreign power unless the chief of staff of the Army and the chief of naval operations certified it to be nonessential to national defense. Walsh, who was passionately isolationist, shared the anti-British sentiments of many of his Irish constituents and was determined to head off the delivery of twenty new torpedo boats to Great Britain.1
The act placed enormous pressure on General Marshall and Admiral Harold R. Stark, the chief of naval operations, both of whom worried increasingly about the denuded state of America’s defenses. “If we were required to mobilize after having released this equipment and were found short,” Major Walter Bedell Smith of the general staff warned Marshall and Morgenthau, “everyone who was a party to the deal might hope to be hanging from a lamp post.”2 FDR called off the torpedo boat transfer but continued to press the military for increased aid to Britain.
The isolationist sentiment on Capitol Hill removed the last doubts Roosevelt had about seeking a third term. FDR now saw himself more as commander in chief than president and recognized the necessity to prepare the nation for war.3 When the delegates to the Democratic National Convention convened in Chicago on July 15, 1940, there was no serious doubt he would accept renomination. If anything, Willkie’s selection by the GOP made his candidacy all the more likely because no other Democrat stood a chance of winning in November.
Roosevelt refused to tip his hand. By not doing so he dominated events in Chicago. He selected the site because he believed Mayor Kelly would control the galleries. He sent Hopkins (now partially recovered) to set up shop in the Blackstone Hotel—not a campaign headquarters but a communications post.* And he asked Judge Samuel Rosenman to come to the White House: a personal visit that could have no purpose other than to prepare his acceptance speech. FDR wanted to be drafted but declined to say so. That frustrated the delegates on the floor, who were awaiting their marching orders, and the president relished the suspense.
The script did not play out as Roosevelt intended. On Monday, the first day, the proceedings were listless. The Chicago Daily News reported that the delegates were drafting Roosevelt “with the enthusiasm of a chain gang.”4 The president wanted to be renominated by acclamation, but Garner would not cooperate and neither would Farley. When FDR telephoned to suggest ever so obliquely that an actual ballot might be dispensed with, Farley rejected the proposal out of hand. “That’s perfectly silly,” he told the president.5 Even worse for Roosevelt, Farley as national chairman, not Mayor Kelly, controlled the tickets to the gallery. When FDR’s name was mentioned by the mayor in his welcoming remarks, the convention’s response was tepid. Farley, on the other hand, received a prolonged ovation even though the massive pipe organ—which was to have sounded “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling”—remained mysteriously silent. “Power failure,” snapped Mayor Kelly.6
Tuesday began badly for the president as well. Hopkins, often condescending when dealing with politicians but now even more abrasive because of his illness, was probably the last man in Washington who should have been entrusted with managing a campaign. Delegates were infuriated by his assumed power over the convention and resentful at the way he exercised it.† “Harry seems to be making all his usual mistakes,” Eleanor told friends at Val-Kill, where she listened to the proceedings over the radio. “He doesn’t seem to know how to make people happy.”7
Even the platform miscarried. A sizable group of isolationists led by Senators Wheeler and Walsh insisted on including a plank aimed at blocking any intervention abroad: “We will not participate in foreign wars and we will not send our army or navy or air force to fight in foreign lands outside of the Americas.” Roosevelt salvaged the plank at the last moment by adding the words “except in case of attack,” which Walsh and Wheeler grudgingly accepted.8
At a strategy session attended by Senator James Byrnes and Attorney General Robert Jackson Tuesday morning in Hopkins’s suite at the Blackstone, Harold Ickes said that “if the Republicans had been running the convention in the interests of Willkie, they could not have done a better job than we were doing.”9 Hopkins took offense, and Ickes put the case directly to the president. He sent a telegram rather than telephone. “It is too easy to divert a telephone conversation and the President is adept at that.” Ickes wrote to FDR at length, but his message boiled down to one sentence: “This convention is bleeding to death and your reputation and prestige may bleed to death with it.” Ickes asked Roosevelt to come to Chicago and take charge. “There are more than nine hundred leaderless delegates milling about like worried sheep waiting for the inspiration of leadership that only you can give them.”10
Frances Perkins, attending her sixth Democratic convention, agreed. She had known FDR more than thirty years and was much closer to him than Ickes. She chose to telephone. (“He was always easy to get on the phone and willing to interrupt whatever he was doing to talk to one of his associates.”) He would be renominated, Perkins told the president, but “the situation is just as sour as it can be.” Like Ickes, she urged him to come to Chicago.
“No, no, I have given it full consideration,” Roosevelt replied. “I thought it all through both ways. I know I am right, Frances. It will be worse if I go. People will get promises out of me that I ought not to make. If I don’t make promises, I’ll make new enemies. If I do make promises, they’ll be mistakes. I’ll be pinned down on things I just don’t want to be pinned down on, yet. I am sure that it is better not to go.”
“What can we do?” asked Perkins.
“How would it be if Eleanor came?” said FDR. “I think she would make an excellent impression. You know, Eleanor always makes people feel right.”
Perkins agreed. “Call her,” the president said. “I’ll speak to her too, but you tell her so that she will know I am not sending her on my own hunch.”11
When Perkins called Eleanor, she found her reluctant. “I thought it utter nonsense,” ER wrote later.12 She was also concerned about Farley. Both Eleanor and Frances Perkins were very fond of the chairman and regretted that he and Franklin were now rivals. Finally, ER said she would go only if Farley invited her. “I am not going to add to the hard feelings,” she told Perkins.13
Eleanor put in a call to Farley in Chicago, who was so overcome by the first lady’s gesture he could barely speak.14
“I don’t want to appear before the convention unless you think it is all right,” said Eleanor.
“It’s perfectly all right with me,” Farley replied when he regained his composure.
“Please, don’t say so unless you really mean it.”
“I do mean it and I am not trying to be polite. Frankly, the situation is not good. Equally frankly, your coming will not affect my situation one way or the other. From the President’s point of view I think it desirable, if not essential, that you come.”15
Eleanor made arrangements to fly to Chicago Wednesday. Rather than use government transportation, she called C. R. Smith, the head of American Airlines and an old friend, who put his personal plane at her disposal.
Tuesday evening the clouds parted and the convention came to life. Mayor Kelly regained control. Farley might command the tickets to the gallery, but the Chicago police determined access to the convention site. By the time the delegates were called to order, Chicago Stadium was packed with Cook County regulars waiting for the mayor’s signal. The principal address would be given by Senator Alben Barkley upon assumption of his duties as permanent chairman. Nominating speeches would follow. Twice, in 1932 and 1936, Barkley had brought the delegates to a partisan frenzy with his stem-winding keynotes, and in 1948 he would exceed even those performances with a keynote speech that galvanized a fractured and dispirited Democratic party to press on to victory. In 1940 he was at his rhetorical best. As the audience stomped and cheered, Barkley delivered a litany of New Deal accomplishments and Republican failures. Thirteen minutes into the oration he casually mentioned the president’s name, igniting the pent-up emotion on the floor and precipitating an unplanned demonstration that lasted almost an hour. When order was restored, Barkley continued another thirty minutes. At the conclusion he announced the magic words the delegates were waiting for: a message from the president of the United States:
The President has never had and has not today any desire or purpose to continue in the office of President, to be a candidate for that office, or to be nominated by the convention for that office. He wishes in all conviction and sincerity to make it clear that all of the delegates at this convention are free to vote for any candidate.
That is the message which I bear to you tonight from the President.16
The vast crowd in Chicago Stadium was speechless for a moment. What did Roosevelt mean? The statement said neither yes nor no. Five, ten, fifteen seconds, and then bedlam broke loose.17 From loudspeakers all over convention hall a powerful voice boomed out “We want Roosevelt,” “We want Roosevelt,” over and over. Delegates joined in, the galleries emptied onto the floor, state standards crowded into the aisles, the Chicago police band marched in playing “Happy Days Are Here Again,” the city firemen tooted “Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones,” and this time there was no power failure as the giant electric organ joined the celebration. It was pure pandemonium, and through it all that deep penetrating voice could be heard above the noise that filled the arena: “We want Roosevelt,” “Everybody wants Roosevelt,” “The world needs Roosevelt.” In a tiny office in the stadium basement, his mouth inches away from a microphone, belting out the message, sat Chicago’s leather-lunged superintendent of sewers, fifty-four-year-old Thomas D. Garry, who would gain convention immortality as “the voice from the sewers.”18
The balloting Wednesday was pro forma. Roosevelt swept the field with 946 votes, Farley received 72, Garner 61, Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland 9, and Cordell Hull, whose name had not been placed in nomination, 5. Shortly after midnight, the roll call complete, Farley moved to make the vote unanimous.
Equally pro forma was FDR’s call to Hull that night offering him the vice presidential nomination.19 When Hull again declined—he had turned Roosevelt down three times in the two past weeks—the president called Hopkins and said he wanted Wallace to be the nominee—Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace, a choice that jolted party leaders no less than TR’s selection by the Republican convention in 1900.20* Roosevelt wanted Wallace because he was concerned about carrying the farm belt against a transplanted Hoosier like Willkie; he wanted a liberal to carry on the New Deal tradition should that be necessary; and he wanted someone whose antifascist credentials were impeccable. Wallace had done an outstanding job at Agriculture, his revolutionary work as a scientist to develop hybrid corn was transforming the face of American farming, and unlike the crusty, embittered Garner, Roosevelt found him likable and loyal. On the negative side, Wallace had never run for elective office. He was regarded by many as a mystic fascinated by the occult, a crackpot quality that professional politicos found difficult to comprehend.21 And his loyalty to the Democratic party appeared uncertain. His father had been secretary of agriculture under Harding and Coolidge, and Wallace had not registered as a Democrat until the 1936 election. “Just because the Republicans have nominated an apostate Democrat,” shouted one leader, “let us not for God’s sake nominate an apostate Republican.”22
Other candidates were off and running. Hopkins urged FDR to take Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. Speaker Bankhead believed FDR had promised the post to him. Paul McNutt wanted it, and so did the RFC’s Jesse Jones. Wallace had no tangible base of support. He would have to be forced down the throat of a convention already aggrieved and bitter. Jimmy Byrnes (who also wanted the job) suggested Jones or Alben Barkley; Farley suggested anyone but Wallace—preferably Jones, Bankhead, or McNutt in that order. Eleanor concurred. “I’ve been talking to Jim Farley and I agree with him. Henry Wallace won’t do,” she told FDR. “Jesse Jones would bolster the ticket, win it business support and get the party contributions.”23
When Roosevelt remained adamant, Hopkins and Byrnes fell into line and began to work the convention on Wallace’s behalf. Jones bowed to presidential pressure and withdrew. (When Hopkins resigned as secretary of commerce on August 22, 1940, FDR named Jones to replace him.) That left Bankhead, McNutt, and Wallace. Nominations were scheduled for Thursday evening. After his name was placed before the convention, McNutt withdrew. “Franklin Roosevelt is my leader and I am here to support his choice for vice president.”24 That left Bankhead and Wallace. Before the voting began, and with the outcome very much in doubt, FDR received a crucial assist. Escorted by party chairman Farley, Eleanor Roosevelt made her way to the platform. The entire convention rose to its feet in a rousing burst of applause. The obvious affection ER and Farley shared provided a healing effect. The bitterness on the floor subsided. Eleanor began her speech with a tribute to Farley: “I think nobody could appreciate more what he has done for the party and I want to give him here my thanks and devotion.” Mrs. Roosevelt hit the right note. The convention that had booed Wallace’s name when the nominations were made listened with rapt attention as she moved on. “This is no ordinary time,” said ER. “No time for weighing anything except what we can best do for the country as a whole.” Without mentioning Wallace by name, she asked the delegates to support her husband’s choice. “No man who is a candidate or who is President can carry this situation alone. This is only carried by a united people who love their country and who will live for it … to the fullest of their ability.”25
When she finished, Chicago Stadium was absolutely still. “The hot and weary delegates caught her mood and gravity and fell silent,” reported the United Press. “She has done more to soothe the convention bruises than all the efforts of astute Senators,” said the New York Daily News.26When Barkley asked the clerk to call the roll of the states, tempers had subsided. Without ER’s intervention, it is not clear that Wallace would have won.
What is clear is that if he had not won, Roosevelt would not have run for a third term. In the White House, FDR listened to the proceedings in the upstairs study, playing solitaire. “His face was grim,” Sam Rosenman remembered. As the vote tally seesawed, Roosevelt asked Missy for pad and pencil and began writing. He gave the draft to Rosenman. “Sam, take this inside and go to work on it. Smooth it out and get it ready for delivery. I may have to deliver it very quickly, so please hurry it up.” Should Wallace lose, FDR would decline the nomination.* “If I ever saw him with his mind made up it was that night,” said Rosenman.27
On the floor of Chicago Stadium, South Carolina’s James Byrnes moved rapidly from delegation to delegation. “For God’s sake, do you want a president or vice president.”28 The vote continued nip and tuck. Eight states, including Ohio and Pennsylvania, passed. When Wyoming was called at the end of the roll, Bankhead held a two-vote lead. The states that passed clamored for attention. Barkley recognized Mayor David Lawrence of Pittsburgh, who cast 68 of Pennsylvania’s 72 votes for Wallace. Ohio (52), New Jersey (32), and Michigan (38) followed. Wallace was over the top. Other delegations shifted. The final tally gave Wallace 627 of the convention’s 1,100 delegates, a tribute to the muscle of the White House rather than Wallace’s support. After Speaker Bankhead’s brother, Senator John Bankhead of Alabama, offered the traditional motion to make Wallace’s nomination unanimous, the “no”s outshouted the “aye”s by a considerable margin.29 As Wallace moved toward the podium to deliver his acceptance speech, Byrnes intercepted him.
“Don’t do it, Henry. Don’t go out there. You’ll ruin the party if you do.”30
Crestfallen, Wallace walked away. The convention adjourned. For Roosevelt, it was an expensive victory. Farley resigned as national chairman, southerners felt slighted at the treatment Bankhead received, the organization bosses despised Wallace, and the rank-and-file delegates felt bullied by the president. “Everyone got out of Chicago as fast as he could,” wrote Ickes. “What could have been a convention of enthusiasm ended almost like a wake.”31 Roosevelt’s determination to force Wallace on the convention resembled the obstinacy he had displayed during the 1937 Court-packing fight and the congressional purge in 1938. Commander in chief or not, he had not lost his capacity to shoot himself in the foot.
In Europe the situation was grim. With the defeat of France, the Battle of Britain began. Willkie’s nomination had removed the questions of preparedness and aid to Britain from the campaign agenda, and the election would not be waged on those issues. Nevertheless, sizable segments in both parties continued to fight a rearguard action to ensure American neutrality. The two principal issues involved Churchill’s May 15 request for fifty older American destroyers and the need for peacetime conscription. Public opinion hung in the balance. Gallup Polls in June and July 1940 indicated that 61 percent of Americans believed the most important task for the United States was to stay out of the war. At the same time, 73 percent favored all possible aid to Britain short of war. On the question of whether the United States should send airplanes to England “even though it might delay our own national defense program,” respondents divided 49 percent in favor, 44 percent against.32
Bipartisan legislation for a peacetime draft, the first in American history, was introduced in the Senate on June 20 by Nebraska Democrat Edward R. Burke and in the House the next day by New York Republican James W. Wadsworth. This was not an administration measure. Burke was an anti–New Deal Democrat who vigorously opposed FDR’s Court-packing plan and had earned the president’s ill will. Wadsworth, who had served two terms in the U.S. Senate (1915–1927), was an upstate Republican from Livingston County and an old friend of Roosevelt but scarcely in the liberal wing of the party.33
The bill was framed by a private citizens group headed by Grenville Clark, Stimson’s former law partner, and was accorded little chance of passage.* James Byrnes, the Democratic whip, said there was “not a Chinaman’s chance.”34 Labor’s William Green called voluntary enlistments, not the draft, “the American way.”35 John L. Lewis, with his gift for invective, denounced the proposal as “a fantastic suggestion from a mind in full intellectual retreat.”36 Religious leaders such as the Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick, an internationalist on many issues, vigorously opposed the plan.37 The Progressive George Norris, who continued to support the president, was convinced that conscription would end in military dictatorship. Isolationists had a field day. “The idea of letting the boys sit around for a year playing stud poker and blackjack is poppycock,” said Senator Guy Gillette of Iowa.38 “The only emergency in this country is the one conjured up by those who want to send our boys to Europe or Asia,” proclaimed North Dakota’s Gerald Nye. “Militarism repugnant to every American instinct and institution,” announced Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri. “If this bill passes,” said Montana’s Burton K. Wheeler, “it will slit the throat of the last great democracy still living. It will accord to Hitler his greatest and cheapest victory. On the headstone of American Democracy he will inscribe: ‘Here lies the foremost victim of the war of nerves.’ ”39
Roosevelt initially kept the bill at arm’s length. It was an election year, and he did not wish to move too far ahead of public opinion. “Governments such as ours cannot swing so far so quickly,” he wrote his old friend Helen Rogers Reid, the wife of the publisher of the Herald Tribune, an old childhood neighbor and playmate. “They can only move in keeping with the thought and will of the great majority of our people. Were it otherwise the very fabric of our democracy—which after all is government by public opinion—would be in danger of disintegration.”40
Privately he encouraged Grenville Clark and his allies to press forward but suggested they downplay the compulsory aspect. With FDR’s blessing, Stimson and Marshall testified repeatedly on Capitol Hill in favor of the Burke-Wadsworth bill. “Selective service was the only fair, efficient, and democratic way to raise an army,” Stimson told the House Military Affairs Committee.41 Marshall said there was “no conceivable way” to secure the men necessary for the nation’s defense “except by the draft.”42 Public opinion lurched forward. At the time of France’s surrender, slightly more than half of Americans polled favored selective service. On July 20, less than a month later, the figure stood at 69 percent, and by late August it was 86 percent.43
The combination of Clark’s public relations effort, the testimony of Stimson and Marshall, plus the intrepid stand Britain was making against the Luftwaffe’s assault paid dividends. On July 24, 1940, the Senate Military Affairs Committee reported the Burke-Wadsworth bill favorably. Five days later Roosevelt asked Congress for authority to call the National Guard and the Reserve Officers Corps to active duty.44 On August 2 FDR fired his first public shot in favor of the draft. Meeting the press for the 666th time since assuming office, Roosevelt said he was distinctly in favor of a selective training bill and considered it essential for national defense.45 Willkie added his endorsement on August 17. Echoing Stimson’s remarks, Willkie said that selective service “is the only democratic way in which to assure the trained and competent manpower we need in our national defense.” When a reporter told Willkie that if he wanted to win the election he would come out against the draft, Willkie shot back, “I would rather not win the election than do that.”46
Willkie’s support for the draft “broke the back” of the opposition, said California’s isolationist senator Hiram Johnson.47 The democratic aspect of selective service carried the day. On August 28 the Senate passed the Burke-Wadsworth bill 69–16, a majority of Republicans voting in favor. In the House, New York’s Hamilton Fish, the ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, introduced a crippling amendment to delay selective service registration until after the election and limit the size of the draft to 400,000 men. Fish’s amendment carried narrowly; Stimson, FDR, and Willkie protested vigorously; and the provision was stripped from the final conference report that reconciled the House and Senate versions. On September 14 the bill, essentially as the Clark group had prepared it originally, passed the Senate 47–25 and the House 232–124. Roosevelt signed it into law two days later, and on October 16, 1940, more than 16 million men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five registered for the country’s first peacetime draft.
Thirteen days later a blindfolded Secretary Stimson dipped a ladle carved from a beam taken from Philadelphia’s Independence Hall into a huge fishbowl filled to the brim with bright blue celluloid capsules, each of which contained a number that would determine the order in which men would be called up. Stimson gave the first capsule to FDR, who opened it and announced, “One hundred fifty-eight.”48 At the end of October, the first 16,000 inductees reported for duty. Over the next year, at the rate of 50,000 a month, 600,000 men would be called to active duty. The draftees, together with 500,000 regular Army troops and 270,000 from the National Guard, would form eleven full-strength divisions, an air force of 5,000 planes, and all the support personnel a force of that size required. The Army, which numbered 189,839 men at the end of 1939, would top 1.4 million by mid-1941.49
Britain’s need for destroyers grew ever more pressing. Three times in June, Churchill repeated his request.50 Britain was down to its last sixty-eight vessels, with which it had to defend not only its trade routes against German U-boats but patrol the Channel against possible invasion. “We must ask therefore as a matter of life and death to be reinforced with these destroyers. We will carry out the struggle whatever the odds but it may be beyond our resources unless we receive reinforcement.”51 On June 26 King George VI, who unlike his brother David (Edward VIII) stood resolute against Nazi aggression, departed from protocol to add his personal plea for the destroyers. “I well understand your difficulties,” he wrote Roosevelt, “and I am certain that you will do your best to procure them for us before it is too late.”52
FDR’s first impulse was to ask Congress for authorization. The United States had 200 four-funnel destroyers from World War I, and in late 1939 172 of the vessels had been refitted and returned to service. Fifty of them could probably be spared.53 But with the selective service bill pending on Capitol Hill there was a danger of legislative overload, and it was possible both measures might fail. Also, the destroyer deal would fall squarely in the bailiwick of Naval Affairs Committee chairman David I. Walsh, possibly the most intransigent opponent of the transaction in the Senate. To pry the bill loose would not be easy.
Without congressional authorization the road seemed barred. To lease the vessels to a belligerent ran afoul of international law; the Walsh amendment to the 1940 Defense Appropriations Act required the chief of naval operations to sign off on the vessels, and Admiral Stark had recently testified to their usefulness when he had obtained the funds to have them refitted; and above all, the Espionage Act of 1917 made it a criminal offense to deliver naval vessels to a country at war.54
On July 19 Benjamin Cohen, who had moved from the White House to become general counsel of Ickes’s public works domain, provided Ickes with a skillfully argued memorandum suggesting that the president could release the destroyers to Britain on his own authority as commander in chief. Ickes forwarded the memorandum to the White House but was not convinced.55 Neither was Roosevelt. “This memorandum from Ben Cohen is worth reading,” he told Navy secretary Frank Knox, “but I frankly doubt it will stand up. Also I fear Congress is in no mood at the present time to allow any form of sale.” FDR told Knox it might be possible at a later date to get Congress to permit the sale of the destroyers to Canada for hemisphere defense, but at present there was nothing that could be done.56
Just when it appeared that the administration’s efforts had run aground, Roosevelt received an unexpected assist. On July 11, 1940, at a dinner at New York’s prestigious Century Club hosted by Lewis Douglas, thirty distinguished and influential Americans from across the political spectrum formed themselves into a loose alliance to arouse the country to the danger the defeat of Britain would pose and the need to do everything possible to prevent it. Among the guests were Time’s Henry Luce; Admiral William Standley, the former chief of naval operations; Ivy League presidents James Conant of Harvard and Ernest Hopkins of Dartmouth; Henry Sloan Coffin and Henry Van Dusen of the Union Theological Seminary; lawyers Dean Acheson, Charles Burlingham, Allen Dulles, and Thomas Thacher; journalists Herbert Agar, Joseph Alsop, Elmer Davis, and Walter Millis; and Francis Pickens Miller of the Council on Foreign Relations, who became executive director of what became known as the “Century Group.”
The group discussed a number of proposals that evening, but the one that hit home was the suggestion that the United States provide Britain with the fifty destroyers it needed in exchange for naval bases in the Western Hemisphere.57 That is the first proposal to trade destroyers for bases on record, which is a surprise since the isolationist press had long favored the acquisition of naval installations in the Americas in exchange for cancellation of Britain’s war debts. At the direction of the Century Group, Alsop took the proposal to Lord Lothian, the British ambassador in Washington, who listened with interest but gave no commitment. (Lothian, as Philip Henry Kerr, had been a member of the Century Club since 1938 and was well acquainted with Alsop.) Luce, for his part, put the proposal to FDR on July 25 and met with a similar cautious response. “Harry, I can’t come out in favor of such a deal without the support of the entire Time-Life organization,” said Roosevelt.58
Encouraged by reports from Lothian of possible American support, Churchill renewed his plea for the vessels on July 31. “It is some time since I ventured to cable personally to you,” he told FDR. “In the past ten days we have had eleven destroyers sunk or damaged,” said Churchill.
Destroyers are frightfully vulnerable to air-bombing, and yet they must be held in the air-bombing area to prevent sea-borne invasion. We could not keep up the present rate of casualties for long, and if we cannot get a substantial reinforcement the whole fate of the war may be decided by this minor and easily remediable factor.
This is a frank account of our present situation, and I am confident that you will leave nothing undone to ensure that fifty or sixty of your oldest destroyers are sent to me at once.…
Mr. President, with great respect I must tell you that in the long history of the world this is a thing to do now.59
Lothian followed up Churchill’s cable with a lengthy late-night meeting with Secretary Knox on August 1. Both agreed the destroyers were vital. Knox asked point-blank if the British had considered trading base sites in the Western Hemisphere for the vessels. Lothian conceded they had not. Knox agreed to raise the issue at cabinet the next day, and Lothian volunteered to query his government.60
The cabinet convened on August 2 in crisis mode. Stimson, who could remember tense sessions under Taft and Hoover, called it “one of the most serious and important debates that I have ever had in a cabinet meeting.”61 Knox recounted his conversation with Lothian and suggested the destroyers be traded for bases in the West Indies. Hull questioned whether the acquisition of British territory might not violate Inter-American agreements. FDR said it might, but the bases could be leased instead of transferred, which would not pose a problem.
There were two sticking points. It was unanimously agreed that congressional authorization would be required, and FDR worried about the political fallout. Without Willkie’s support, Republicans on Capitol Hill would not go along. Wallace, Attorney General Robert Jackson, and Ickes thought it would be risky to consult him. He might refuse and leave the administration holding the bag. Knox, Stimson, and Hull disagreed. Everyone in the room turned to Farley, whose political judgment weighed heavily with his colleagues. “Consult him,” said Farley. “It is good for the country, and what is good for the country is good politics.”62 FDR agreed. That evening he called Kansas editor William Allen White, a mutual friend of the two candidates, who was vacationing near Willkie in Colorado. White thought Willkie would agree and said he would give it a try.63
On August 3 Churchill replied to Lothian. His Majesty’s Government would agree to swap bases for destroyers but would prefer to lease the facilities to the United States rather than transfer title. That dovetailed with FDR’s desire. “It is vital to settle quickly,” Churchill told Lothian. “Now is the time when we want the destroyers. Go ahead on these lines full steam.”64
The Century Group, meanwhile, stepped up its public pressure. On August 4, at the group’s behest, General of the Armies John J. Pershing, the nation’s most revered military hero, spoke to the country over a national radio hookup from his home in Washington’s Carlton Hotel. “The British Navy needs destroyers to convoy merchant ships and to repel invasion. The most critical time is the next few weeks and months. Today may be the last time when, by measures short of war, we can still prevent war.”65
Pershing’s address kicked off a national campaign to make it politically possible for Roosevelt to act. On August 5, 1940, Time bannered Britain’s need for destroyers. The New York Times and the Herald Tribune followed suit. The Century Group scored another coup on August 11, when the Times published a long and closely reasoned letter from Dean Acheson and three other prominent lawyers arguing that the president could transfer the destroyers to Britain on his own authority without additional legislation.66 “At the time my friend and classmate Charles Merz had charge of the editorial page of The New York Times,” wrote Acheson. “I showed him the opinion and suggested putting it forth as a letter to the Times, to be prominently displayed on the editorial page in the Sunday edition. He approved of this and published it.”67 Acheson’s letter was a reworking and expansion of Ben Cohen’s original memo, and it found a responsive audience. Stimson thought the prospect of getting Congress to act was poor, but Acheson’s “carefully worked out paper … adds a speck of light on the situation.”68
Until Acheson’s letter appeared, no one at the upper levels of the administration contemplated bypassing Congress. But Frankfurter supported the idea, and on August 15 Stimson called FDR. “He said he felt very, very much encouraged,” the secretary recorded in his diary. Roosevelt told Stimson he “would talk it over with the Attorney General tomorrow morning and is evidently ready to push it ahead.”69
Negotiations with Willkie were not going as well. While White and members of the Century Group urged the GOP nominee to speak out forthrightly, Herbert Hoover and other figures in the party advised him to avoid any commitment. The upshot was that Willkie remained silent. “It’s not as bad as it seems,” White telegraphed FDR. “I have talked with both of you on this subject and I know there is not two bits worth of difference between the two of you.”70 When Willkie officially announced his candidacy on August 17, he came tantalizingly close to backing the swap without explicitly endorsing it. He proclaimed his “wholehearted support for the president in whatever action he might take to give the opponents of force the material resources of the nation,” adding that “the loss of the British fleet would greatly weaken our defense.”71
Armed with Acheson’s letter to the Times, Jackson provided FDR with an official Opinion of the Attorney General supporting the president’s authority to trade the destroyers for bases under his authority as commander in chief.72 Jackson said the intervening statutes, such as the Espionage Act of 1917, were not intended to apply to such transactions.* With the green light from the Justice Department, the details fell into place. The United States agreed to deliver the fifty destroyers in parcels of eight to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where British crews would be waiting to take possession. In return, Great Britain would provide the United States with ninety-nine-year leases to bases in Newfoundland, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Antigua, Saint Lucia, Trinidad, and British Guiana—a total of eight. To satisfy British pride (Churchill had also to consider public opinion) and to avoid any appearance that His Majesty’s Government had been outbargained, it was agreed that the bases in Newfoundland and Bermuda would be a free gift to the United States from Great Britain, the other six provided in return for the destroyers.73 General Marshall and Admiral Stark had no trouble signing off—the bases provided far more security than fifty World War I destroyers—and on August 30, 1940, Stark ordered the Commander Destroyers Atlantic Squadron to proceed to Boston with the first eight destroyers. D-Day for the transfer would be September 6.74
Roosevelt announced the deal while on a war plant inspection tour in Charleston, West Virginia. “This is the most important action in the reinforcement of our national defense since the Louisiana Purchase,” he said to newsmen traveling with him.75 Churchill told Parliament that the affairs of the United States and Great Britain henceforth would be “somewhat mixed up together. I do not view the process with any misgiving. I could not stop it if I wished; no one can stop it. Like the Mississippi, it just keeps rolling along.”76 Willkie said “the country will undoubtedly approve,” but regretted “the President did not deem it necessary to secure the approval of Congress.”77
Public reaction was overwhelmingly favorable. On Capitol Hill criticism was muted. The transaction was so manifestly to America’s advantage that even the most ardent isolationists found it difficult to find footing. Litigation brought by individual citizens to challenge the constitutionality of FDR’s action was routinely dismissed by federal district courts because the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue.78
The destroyer deal jump-started Roosevelt’s reelection campaign. A Gallup Poll in late August showed FDR and Willkie in a virtual dead heat, the president leading 51 to 49 percent. By mid-September Roosevelt had opened a ten-point gap.79 Willkie had failed to find a winning issue or to breach the New Deal coalition. Despite his endorsement by John L. Lewis, American workers remained staunchly Democratic. Willkie was booed from factory windows in Detroit, he was egged in Pontiac, and a rock was hurled through his train window in Grand Rapids.80 Stories circulated about his German ancestry, about signs in his Indiana hometown reading “Nigger, don’t let the sun go down on you.”81 Willkie’s unpolished campaign style was both an asset and a liability. Voters responded favorably to his openness and unaffected sincerity, but his inexperience on the stump led to more than the usual number of foot-in-mouth encounters. Speaking to a labor audience in Pittsburgh he announced he would appoint a secretary of labor directly from the ranks of organized labor—a slam at Frances Perkins that drew raucous cheers. Hoping to get another big hand he added gratuitously, “And it will not be a woman either.”
“Why didn’t he have sense enough to leave well enough alone?” FDR asked Frances Perkins. “He was going good. Why did he have to insult every woman in the United States? It will make them mad, it will lose him votes.” Which apparently it did.82
The campaign bristled with the customary ad hominem, but it was directed at the candidates’ stance on public issues. The private lives of public figures were strictly private in 1940. The press respected that, politicians were more tolerant, and neither party sought to exploit personal lapses on the other side. The Democrats had two potential problems: Henry Wallace’s mysticism and Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles’s homosexuality. In late August the Republican National Committee obtained a packet of letters Wallace had written in 1933 and 1934 to a White Russian émigré and cult leader, Nicholas Roerich. Wallace had engaged Roerich in 1933 to undertake an analysis of drought-resistant grasses in Mongolia and had evidently fallen under his spell. The letters, addressed “Dear Guru,” resonated with occult speculation sufficient to call into question Wallace’s emotional stability. At Willkie’s specific direction the Republicans did not make use of the material.83 Similarly, Welles’s sexual orientation did not enter the campaign even though senior executives of the Southern Railroad possessed affidavits from Pullman car porters attesting to the undersecretary’s overtures. Returning to Washington from Speaker Bankhead’s Alabama funeral on September 22, 1940,* Welles, who had been drinking heavily, propositioned each of the porters working in his car for oral sex. They refused and afterward reported the incident to their employers. The affair became a matter of Washington gossip but attracted no public notice.84
For the Republicans the problem involved Willkie’s long-standing extramarital relationship with Irita Van Doren, editor of the book review section of the Herald Tribune, the former wife of Columbia’s renowned historian Carl Van Doren, and one of the nation’s most influential literary figures. The granddaughter of a Confederate general and one year older than Willkie, she and the GOP standard-bearer had become companions in the late thirties. Irita introduced Willkie to New York’s literary world and became his cultural mentor. Among those who gathered under her roof were Carl Sandburg, Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf, André Maurois, James Thurber, Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy Thompson, John Gunther, and William L. Shirer. Irita helped write Willkie’s speeches and articles and, as one of Wendell’s friends observed, was largely responsible for his “acceptance of himself as a political leader with original and important ideas.”85
Irita was tall and slender, with dark eyes and a mass of pretty curls. “She was not pretty, but she was beautiful,” said Shirer. “The kind of woman I like to look at,” wrote Harold Ickes. “Physically well set up, but intelligent.”86 Hiram Hayden of the American Scholar thought “her graciousness was innate. It came from a sweetness deep within her.”87 FDR, who thrived on such gossip, said he understood she was “an awful nice gal.”88 During the campaign Irita remained in the background and Edith Willkie, the candidate’s wife, traveled with her husband. “Politics makes strange bedfellows,” Edith joked to reporters.89 Like FDR’s relationship with Eleanor, the Willkie marriage was one of residual affection and political expediency. “At the time I felt like [my mother] might be getting the short end of the stick,” recalled Irita’s daughter Barbara, “but that wasn’t the case. She was wise enough to know that she had everything except the title. They were endlessly and happily in love.”90 The Democrats made no issue of the arrangement and did nothing to spread stories even by word of mouth.* It was their ace-in-the-hole should the Republicans go after Wallace.
Willkie campaigned tenaciously. The candidate, his staff, and seventy-five reporters spent seven weeks on a campaign train crisscrossing America. Willkie traveled 18,785 miles, visited 31 states, and delivered 560 speeches.91 Roosevelt stayed close to the White House, making the occasional visit to a war plant or defense installation, all the while retaining the pose of commander in chief, the statesman above the fray. And with marked success. The more Willkie campaigned, the farther he fell behind. A Gallup Poll taken in late September indicated that Roosevelt’s lead had increased to twelve points. When voters were asked who they thought would win in November, 68 percent said FDR.92
Willkie found himself without a cause. The third-term issue fizzled. “I would rather have FDR with all his known faults than Willkie with his unknown qualities,” said New York’s independent mayor Fiorello La Guardia.93 On domestic matters Willkie supported the accomplishments of the New Deal. Unemployment provided a talking point, but the war boom had begun, workers were streaming back to factories, steel mills were humming with new orders, and the construction industry was working at full capacity. On foreign policy Willkie supported aid to Britain, selective service, and rearmament. It was a “me too” campaign which except for Willkie’s winning personality provided the voter few reasons to change. Roosevelt was “not a perfect man,” Carl Sandburg told a national radio audience, yet he was “more precious than fine gold.”94
With his campaign in danger of imploding, Willkie shifted gears. Pressed by his Republican handlers to become more aggressive, Willkie reversed course on foreign policy. At first he moved cautiously. In Boston on October 11 he promised an enormous crowd, including many traditional Democrats of Irish and Italian extraction, “We shall not undertake to fight anybody else’s war. Our boys shall stay out of European wars.”95 As Willkie’s poll numbers crept up, he intensified his attack. He became the peace candidate and FDR the warmonger. “If [Roosevelt’s] promise to keep our boys out of foreign wars is no better than his promise to balance the budget, they’re already almost on the transports.”96 Excess begat excess. Willkie hinted that secret agreements were in place to take the United States to war. “On the basis of [Roosevelt’s] past performance, you may expect war by April, 1941, if he is elected,” he told an audience in Baltimore.97
By mid-October Willkie’s attacks were sending tremors through Democratic ranks. Ed Flynn, who had succeeded Farley as national chairman, sent dire warnings of the defection of Italian voters in the Bronx and of Germans, who could turn the tide in the Midwest. The Irish vote in Massachusetts was in play, and Senator Walsh, up for reelection, was campaigning on an anti-Roosevelt, isolationist platform.98 A Gallup Poll taken the second week in October showed that if there were no war in Europe, Willkie would defeat Roosevelt 53 to 47 percent.99
Roosevelt surveyed the damage and decided it was time to respond. “I’m fighting mad,” he told Harold Ickes on October 17.100 The following day the White House announced that the president would make five campaign speeches in the final two weeks leading up to the election, ostensibly to correct Republican misstatements.101
FDR opened the campaign at a mass rally in Philadelphia the night of October 23. “I consider it a public duty to answer falsifications with facts,” he told the cheering crowd. “I will not pretend that I find this an unpleasant duty. I am an old campaigner, and I love a good fight.”102 Roosevelt had never been better. His timing was flawless. “He’s all the Barrymores rolled into one,” a reporter exclaimed.103
Roosevelt said the Republicans (he never mentioned Willkie by name) charged that there were secret agreements to take the country to war.
I give to you and to the people of this country this most solemn assurance:
There is no secret treaty, no secret obligation, no secret commitment, no secret understanding in any shape or form, direct or indirect, with any other Government, to involve this nation in any war or for any other purpose.104
Five nights later, after a fourteen-hour day touring New York City’s five boroughs in an open car—the crowds estimated at more than 2 million—Roosevelt gave another bang-up speech at Madison Square Garden. Mussolini had invaded Greece hours before, and the president expressed his sorrow. No “stab-in-the-back” accusation, simply his concern for “the Italian people and the Grecian people, that they should have been involved together in conflict.”
The speech was a slashing attack on the Republican leadership, everyone but Willkie, whom the president again did not mention. FDR was in a rhetorical groove, and the crowd roared its approval—especially after the tag line “Martin, Barton, and Fish” rolled off his tongue in rhythmic cadence. “Great Britain and a lot of other nations would never have received one ounce of help from us—if the decision had been left to Martin, Barton, and Fish.”* Several paragraphs later Roosevelt repeated the refrain, and the audience chanted it with him fortissimo.105
Roosevelt’s assault stunned the Republicans. With two speeches FDR had regained the initiative. Willkie responded with increased invective, and Roosevelt reciprocated. Two days later in Boston he ended the debate with a blockbuster: “I have said before, but I shall say it again and again and again. Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”106
“That hypocritical son of a bitch,” said Willkie, who was listening to the speech with his brother. “This is going to beat me.”107
On the train to Boston, Roosevelt had put the finishing touches on the speech. In past talks he had always added the words “except in case of attack,” just as the Democratic platform put it. When Sam Rosenman pointed that out, FDR dismissed it. “It’s not necessary. If we’re attacked it’s no longer a foreign war.”108 When all is said and done, Franklin Roosevelt was the most unforgiving of politicians. When the stakes were highest he was at his most ruthless. Farley and Bankhead learned that in Chicago. Willkie learned it when FDR spoke in Boston.
Roosevelt closed the campaign with a speech in Cleveland on November 2. Rosenman, who heard FDR deliver speeches for seventeen years, thought the 1940 Cleveland speech was his finest.
Although it was a campaign speech, it was pitched on a level far above the political battle. It expressed the President’s hopes, philosophy and aspirations; it laid out a blueprint for the America of the future. As an example of what the President could do in preparing a speech under great pressure of time and circumstance it was unequaled.
His delivery in this speech was better than in any other speech I have ever heard him make. It is difficult to analyze the oratory of a speaker to see what it is that makes his delivery of speeches effective and moving. Over the years I watched Roosevelt with ever-growing wonderment and admiration as he made speeches of all kinds with exactly the right effect. There were the homey fireside chats, the stirring campaign speeches of attack, the argumentative and persuasive addresses to the Congress, the extemporaneous informal remarks on the rear platform of a train, at a Thanksgiving dinner in Warm Springs, to a group of newspaper editors calling on him at the White House. Each speech seemed perfectly attuned to the audience and to the occasion.
Though FDR had a team of speechwriters, including Rosenman and the playwright Robert Sherwood, he did the final drafts himself, always in longhand. One of Roosevelt’s great advantages, said Rosenman, was that he knew the speech thoroughly from beginning to end. “He had worked so hard and continuously on it that he knew it almost by heart. He knew the development of the theme, he knew always what was coming next, and the result was that his delivery progressed in solid logical fashion from one point to another, making it easy to follow and understand him. He could look away from the manuscript so much that many people did not even know he was reading.”109
The most moving passages of the Cleveland speech painted FDR’s vision of what lay ahead:
I see an America where factory workers are not discarded after they reach their prime, where there is no endless chain of poverty from generation to generation, where impoverished farmers and farm hands do not become homeless wanderers, where monopoly does not make youth a beggar for a job.
I see an America whose rivers and valleys and lakes—hills and streams and plains—the mountains over our land and nature’s wealth deep under the earth—are protected as the rightful heritage of all the people.
I see an America where small business really has a chance to flourish and grow.
I see an America of great cultural and educational opportunity for all its people.
I see an America where the income from the land shall be implemented and protected by a Government determined to guarantee to those who hoe it a fair share in the national income.
An America where the wheels of trade and private industry continue to turn to make the goods for America.
I see an America with peace in the ranks of labor.
An America where the workers are really free. Where the dignity and security of the working man and woman are guaranteed by their own strength and fortified by the safeguards of law.
An America where those who have reached the evening of life shall live out their years in peace and security. Where pensions and insurance for these aged shall be given as a matter of right to those who through a long life of labor have served their families and their nation as well.
I see an America devoted to our freedom—unified by tolerance and by religious faith—a people consecrated to peace, a people confident in strength because their body and their spirit are secure and unafraid.110
On November 5, 1940, 50 million Americans went to the polls, the largest number ever. The final Gallup polls showed Roosevelt leading by a slim 52 to 48 percent. More worrisome was the state-by-state breakout. In addition to rock-ribbed Republican strongholds, Willkie held slim leads in Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, New York, and Pennsylvania—industrial states with large electoral vote totals the Democrats could ill afford to lose.111 FDR anticipated a cliffhanger. His entry in the traditional preelection poll taken by the White House press pool showed him with 315 electoral votes to Willkie’s 216.
On Tuesday evening FDR settled in with friends and staff at Hyde Park to take the returns. The early reports from New York and New Jersey were glum. As Ed Flynn had warned, Italian precincts were going heavily for Willkie and the Irish less so. Upstate, Democrats were running behind. In the city, only the Jewish vote was holding firm. Roosevelt asked to be left alone. With Mike Reilly of the Secret Service manning the dining room door, FDR tabulated the returns for the next hour by himself. The voter turnout (62.5 percent) was the greatest in more than three decades, and gradually the tide turned.112 By nine it was clear that the great industrial states in the East and Middle West would fall in behind the president.
The dining room doors were flung open, and the celebration began. By midnight the magnitude of the victory was clear. Roosevelt received 27,263,448 votes to Willkie’s 22,336,260. In the electoral college, FDR took 449 votes and Willkie won 82. Except for Maine, Vermont, and six farm states in the great plains, Willkie carried only Michigan and his native Indiana. Roosevelt won every large city in the country except Cincinnati. Labor and blacks remained in the Democratic column. A strong showing among Polish Americans helped offset the losses in the Italian community. German Americans for the most part voted Republican.113 The Democrats picked up six seats in the House, giving them a 268–162 majority, and lost three in the Senate, which they still controlled by well over 2 to 1.
The hostility between Roosevelt and Willkie faded quickly. Willkie conceded gracefully and called upon the nation to cast bitterness aside and give the president the support and respect he deserved. FDR invited Willkie to the White House and took an immediate liking to him. “You know, he’s a very good fellow,” Roosevelt told Frances Perkins. “He has lots of talent. I want to use him somehow. I want him to do something where the effort is nonpolitical but important. But I’d like to use him, and I think it would be a good thing for the country, it would help us to a feeling of unity.”114
* Hopkins found himself ensconced in the Blackstone’s suite 308/309, the same suite with “the smoke-filled room” in which Warren G. Harding had been selected to be the Republican nominee in 1920. Hopkins was connected to the White House with a direct line—the phone mounted in the bathroom to ensure privacy. Charles Peters, Five Days in Philadelphia 136 (New York: PublicAffairs, 2005).
† Hopkins was not a delegate to the convention and got onto the floor only by courtesy of a badge from Mayor Kelly designating him a deputy sergeant at arms. Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 179 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948).
* “Don’t any of you realize that there is only one life between this madman and the presidency?” thundered party chairman Mark Hanna—an observation that would not have been out of place in 1940. Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt 763 (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979).
* Roosevelt wrote in his draft that the Democratic Party could not continue to be divided between liberals and conservatives. “It would be best not to straddle ideals. It would be best for America to have the fight out. Therefore, I give the Democratic party the opportunity to make that historic decision by declining the honor of the nomination for the presidency.” For the full text, see Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 216–218 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952).
* Clark, a senior partner in the firm of Root, Clark, Buckner, and Ballantine, was a 1906 Harvard Law School classmate of Felix Frankfurter, and had clerked with FDR at Carter, Ledyard, and Milburn from 1907 to 1910. It was he who suggested to Frankfurter, who conveyed the suggestion to FDR, that Stimson be appointed secretary of war. In May 1940, at a series of small meetings of elite lawyers and businessmen in New York City’s Harvard Club, he organized the 2nd Corps of the Military Training Camp Association, a nostalgic reminder of the Plattsburg Movement organized at the Harvard Club after the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. Among those present were Langdon Marvin, Roosevelt’s old law partner; Julius Ochs Adler of The New York Times; Henry L. Stimson; Frank Knox; William J. Donovan; Lewis Douglas, who had been FDR’s first budget director; and Judge Robert P. Patterson of the U.S. Court of Appeals. The group issued a series of manifestos advocating military conscription and established a national network (the MTCA) to press the cause. General Marshall cooperated covertly with the group and in early June dispatched three officers, including Major Lewis B. Hershey, to New York to assist Clark’s organization in drafting a selective service bill. This was the measure Burke and Wadsworth introduced. Hershey subsequently became the first head of selective service. J. Gary Clifford and Samuel R. Spencer, The First Peacetime Draft 14–26 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986); Forrest C. Pogue, George C. Marshall: Ordeal and Hope 57–58 (New York: Viking Press, 1966).
* For Jackson’s view of the swap, see his That Man: An Insider’s Portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt 86–103, John Q. Barrett, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). Jackson’s Opinion was harshly criticized by Professors Herbert W. Briggs and Edwin Borchard in “Neglected Aspects of the Destroyer Deal,” 34 American Journal of International Law 569–587, 690–697 (1940). For support, see Quincy Wright, “The Transfer of Destroyers to Great Britain,” 34 AJIL 680–689 (1940).
* Speaker Bankhead, campaigning for the national ticket in Maryland, suffered a fatal hemorrhage and died at Washington’s Naval Hospital on September 15, 1940. Cognizant of his error at the time of Senator Joseph Robinson’s death, FDR not only attended the funeral in Jasper, Alabama, but instructed his entire cabinet to attend. The Southern Railroad laid on two special trains, one for the congressional delegation, another for the president’s party. Hull was detained in Washington, and Welles substituted for him at the funeral. Irwin Gellman, Secret Affairs: FDR, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Welles 219–220 (New York: Enigma Books, 1995).
* Willkie deplored the hypocrisy of politics and insisted that his private life was his own. Several times during the campaign he scheduled press conferences at Van Doren’s apartment. “Everybody knows about us—all the newspapermen in New York,” Willkie told his friends. “If somebody should come along to threaten me or embarrass me about Irita, I would say, ‘Go right ahead. There is not a reporter in New York who does not know about her.’ ” Steve Neal, Dark Horse: A Biography of Wendell Willkie 43–44 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1984).
* The reference, following FDR’s castigation of Republican Senators McNary, Vandenberg, Nye, and Johnson, was to Representatives Joseph W. Martin, Bruce Barton, and Hamilton Fish. Martin was House minority leader and had been named by Willkie to be Republican National Chairman; Barton, chairman of the board of the New York advertising firm Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, represented New York’s Seventeenth District on the fashionable Upper East Side; and Fish, Roosevelt’s Dutchess County neighbor and longtime nemesis, was the ranking member on Foreign Affairs.