PART III

The Fate of the World

1937  1945

34.

AND THEN EVENTS RODE TO HIS RESCUE. NOT AT ONCE, AND NOT IN the way Roosevelt or anyone else would have wished, but in such fashion as to allow a subtle and canny leader to make the most of them.

If Roosevelt’s first term was all about domestic policy, his second term centered increasingly on foreign affairs. This played to his strength, to a degree most Americans only gradually appreciated. Roosevelt’s first-term allergy to foreign policy was topical rather than systemic; he kept clear of the world not because he lacked strong views but because he realized his views weren’t generally shared. As a convinced democrat he could tell himself he had no business leading the American people where the people weren’t willing to go; as a career Democrat he remembered how Woodrow Wilson’s presidency had wrecked upon the shoals of Americans’ aversion to foreign entanglements. He determined not to repeat Wilson’s mistake.

In 1937 foreign affairs polarized American politics more strongly than ever. Unlike the fights over the New Deal, the struggle between the internationalists and the isolationists blurred party and ideological lines, pitting Democrats against Democrats, Republicans against Republicans, liberals against liberals, conservatives against conservatives. Valid arguments, historical and contemporary, were adduced on both sides of the debate. The internationalists contended that the lesson of the World War was that Europe’s troubles became America’s, sooner or later, and that the thugs of the world would never behave till the responsible nations, including the United States, compelled them. The isolationists countered that the lesson of the war was that Europe was a sinkhole for idealism and a graveyard for American youth; they asserted that the Europeans could handle their criminal elements themselves and would do so if made to know the Americans were not coming to their rescue. As for Asia, the isolationists saw little threat to the United States from Japanese expansion into China. Some thought the Japanese might actually improve the neighborhood by forcing China to modernize, much as Japan had modernized under pressure from the West two generations before. The internationalists countered that Japan was upsetting the balance of power in the Far East, besides brutalizing all who fell under its sway.

Roosevelt’s views tended strongly—albeit not uniformly—internationalist, but his governing coalition contained many isolationists, and he didn’t want to jeopardize the New Deal over the problems of other countries. His torpedoing of the London economic conference was isolationist in effect if not in explanation, and it won him favor with the America-firsters in his party and among the Republicans. His endorsement of the World Court lost him much of that favor, while his acquiescence in the neutrality law had a neutral effect.

He might have attempted to maintain his balance between the two sides if the fascists hadn’t forced the issue. Mussolini, after blustering against Ethiopia for months, ordered an assault on the East African kingdom. The mismatch between the opposing armies shocked even jaded war reporters; when Emperor Haile Selassie’s criers shouted “Up with your spears!” to his subjects, the criers weren’t speaking metaphorically. Against the defenders’ spears, the Italian invaders threw modern tanks and fighter airplanes. The Ethiopian state was crushed under the fascist jackboots.

About the time Addis Ababa fell, a second front opened in the fascists’ war on civilization. The Spanish republic had been struggling for years, challenged by reactionaries in the army and others dissatisfied with leftward trends in Spanish affairs. In July 1936 General Francisco Franco led the army in a revolt against the government. What was intended as a coup stalled and then metastasized as the government refused to give way. The Spanish civil war pitted the center and left of Spanish politics against the right, with the former, calling themselves Loyalists, comprising republicans, socialists, and communists, and the latter, the Nationalists, including monarchists, militarists, Catholic clergy, and fascists. The conflict grew more complicated as foreigners joined the fray. Some came as volunteers, mostly supporting the Loyalists; others came under orders from their home governments. Italy sent infantry and armored units to bolster the Nationalists; Germany contributed transport planes, bombers, and crews to the Nationalist cause. The Soviet Union countered these with contributions of planes, other weapons, and military advisers to the Loyalists. Most Americans sympathized with the Loyalists; as many as three thousand enlisted in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of foreign fighters. But few Americans wanted the United States government to get involved.

Neither did Roosevelt. Shortly after the Spanish war began, the president traveled to Chautauqua, New York, to address that community’s venerable gathering of summer self-improvers. “I have seen war,” he said, referring to his 1918 tour of France. “I have seen blood running from the wounded…. I have seen children starving…. I hate war.” Roosevelt said he couldn’t prevent war, but he could register America’s strong disapproval. “I can at least make clear that the conscience of America revolts against war and that any nation which provokes war forfeits the sympathy of the people of the United States.”

The Spanish war escalated during the spring of 1937. In April German warplanes in support of the Nationalists bombed the Basque town of Guernica in northern Spain. The attack killed hundreds and leveled most of the town, and foreshadowed a new phase in the evolution of warfare: strategic bombing for the purpose of destroying the morale of civilian populations. German officials later acknowledged what seemed obvious at the time: that the Nazis were testing their air force for potential use against more challenging targets. Between that ominous prospect and the immediate revulsion against the fascist cause, Guernica became a symbol—immortalized by Pablo Picasso—of civilization under siege by the forces of organized violence. “At 2 A.M. today, when the writer visited the town, the whole of it was a horrible sight, flaming from end to end,” a front-page article in the New York Times declared. “The reflection of the flames could be seen in the clouds of smoke above the mountains from ten miles away. Throughout the night houses were falling, until the streets were long heaps of red, impenetrable ruins.” The article continued:

In the form of its execution and the scale of the destruction it wrought, no less than in the selection of its objective, the raid on Guernica is unparalleled in military history. Guernica was not a military objective. A factory producing war material that lay outside the town was untouched. Two barracks on the outskirts containing small forces were untouched. The town was not near the lines. The objective of the bombardment seemingly was demoralization of the civilian population and destruction of the cradle of the Basque race.

The reaction in America was immediate. Religious groups staged protests. The pastor of the Park Avenue Episcopal Church in New York called for a world-wide strike of mothers against the murder of the children of Guernica. A petition signed by scores of clerics, educators, lawmakers, corporate officers, and union officials condemned “the unspeakable crime of war on women and children, waged with a brutality and callousness unparalleled in modern times.” In Congress, William Borah, whose clarion voice seldom rang out across the Senate chamber anymore, summoned his old energy and indignation. “Here fascism presents to the world its masterpiece,” Borah said of Guernica. “It has hung upon the wall of civilization a painting that will never come down—never fade out of the memories of men.” The destruction of Guernica, the Idaho Republican asserted, was “the most revolting instance of mass massacre of modern times.”

Yet the anger offered little guidance for action. Some of the protesters advocated American aid to the beleaguered Loyalists. Others urged invoking the neutrality law against Germany and Italy. Still others held that the United States should withdraw more deeply into its isolationist shell.

Roosevelt did invoke the neutrality law against Spain, forbidding the shipment of American arms and ammunition to that country’s government. But he declined to include Germany or Italy in the embargo, contending that since Spain didn’t consider itself at war with those countries, neither should the United States. Moreover, to invoke the law against Germany and Italy, on grounds of their intervention in the Spanish struggle, would logically require invoking it against the Soviet Union and France, which were aiding the Loyalists. Besides entangling the United States in Europe’s affairs to a far greater degree than Roosevelt was willing to hazard, such a move might actually harm the Loyalists.

A THIRD FRONT in the fascist war of conquest erupted halfway around the world during the summer of 1937. Japanese troops tangled with Chinese soldiers at the Marco Polo Bridge outside Peiping (later Beijing). The Japanese magnified the clash into an excuse to occupy Peiping and thrust south into the Chinese heartland. By autumn the fighting had grown into a full-scale war between Japan and China. As in the case of the Spanish war, Americans had little difficulty distinguishing the aggressors from the victims in the Sino-Japanese war. Their sympathies went out to the Chinese.

What else would go out to the Chinese was the question Roosevelt had to wrestle with. To invoke the neutrality law and embargo weapons to both sides would favor the Japanese, whose military-industrial base was far better developed than China’s. Yet not to invoke the law in what patently was a war would violate the law’s spirit and risk embroiling the United States in the East Asian conflict. Neither China nor Japan had chosen officially to declare their conflict a war, leaving the president room for discretion.

He measured domestic opinion during an October visit to Chicago. The visit started promisingly. Tens of thousands of Roosevelt’s supporters lined the route of his motorcade down Jackson Boulevard and fell in line behind the president’s car as it moved up Michigan Avenue. Airplanes circled overhead; boats on the Chicago River and Lake Michigan whistled and blared their greetings.

But the cheering stopped and the audience listened, many in hostile silence, as the president described the turbulent condition of world affairs. “The present reign of terror and international lawlessness began a few years ago,” Roosevelt explained. It had grown steadily worse as fascist aggressors, without bothering to declare war, wreaked havoc on the blameless. “Civilians, including vast numbers of women and children, are being ruthlessly murdered with bombs from the air…. Innocent peoples, innocent nations, are being cruelly sacrificed to a greed for power and supremacy.” Until now the violence afflicted only countries separated by wide oceans from America, and isolationists contended that it would remain a distant threat. But they deluded themselves, Roosevelt said. Should the violence continue, every part of the world would suffer. “Let no one imagine that America will escape, that America may expect mercy, that this western hemisphere will not be attacked.” One course only could avert disaster. “The peace-loving nations must make a concerted effort to uphold laws and principles on which alone peace can rest secure.” Roosevelt likened the wave of lawlessness to a medical contagion. “When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease.”

Roosevelt didn’t specify what he meant by a quarantine. In fact, lest his audience—in Chicago and beyond—think he was advocating military action, he stressed the opposite. “It is my determination to pursue a policy of peace. It is my determination to adopt every practicable measure to avoid involvement in war.” Yet a desire for peace wasn’t enough. “There must be positive endeavors to preserve peace.”

ROOSEVELT HAD WANTED to get the attention of the country, and by the evidence of the press reaction, he succeeded. The tenor of the reaction—in particular to his mention of a “quarantine”—varied dramatically. The isolationist Chicago Tribune was deeply skeptical. “Japan will not easily be beaten to her knees,” the Tribune warned, “and the threat of a boycott may only serve to inflame the patriotic ardor of the Japanese.” The Oregonian, speaking for many on the West Coast, asserted that the interests of the other great powers in China were larger than the interests of the United States; those other powers ought to take the lead in chastising Japan. The Baltimore Sun adopted a different view, calling the speech “an admirable restatement of the principles of international morality.” The Washington Post read it as a rejoinder to the isolationists. “The forces now fighting intolerable aggression, whether in the case of the Chinese at Shanghai or the Spaniards defending Madrid, are neither cowards nor weaklings,” the Post said. “With the assurance that the United States has not forgotten all moral standards in its ostrich hunt for security, the strength of their resistance will be redoubled.”

The ambivalence afforded Roosevelt little guidance. “Do you care to amplify your remarks at Chicago, especially where you referred to a possible quarantine?” a reporter asked him at a news conference the next day.

“No,” Roosevelt answered, obviously uncomfortable.

The correspondents pressed him to say something.

“I can only talk really completely off the record,” the president said.

What did the president mean by a quarantine? a reporter asked. “As I interpreted it, you were speaking of something more than moral indignation…. Is anything contemplated?”

“No. Just the speech itself.”

Economic sanctions?

“Not necessarily. Look, ‘sanctions’ is a terrible word. They are out the window.”

What, then?

“I can’t tell you what the methods will be. We are looking for some way to peace.”

Would there be a conference of the opponents of fascism?

“No. Conferences are out the window. You never get anywhere with a conference.”

Roosevelt wished he had never raised the issue of a quarantine. “It is a terrible thing,” he told speechwriter Sam Rosenman, “to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead, and to find no one there.”

35.

JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES THOUGHT ROOSEVELT SHOULD HAVE THE benefit of the best economic thinking in the world, which was why the English economist had written the American president in the aftermath of the Hundred Days. Keynes critiqued certain aspects of the New Deal even as he offered encouragement and a lesson in the theory of employment and money he was then developing. “You have made yourself the trustee for those in every country who seek to mend the evils of our condition by reasoned experiment within the framework of the existing social system,” Keynes said. “If you fail, rational change will be gravely prejudiced throughout the world, leaving orthodoxy and revolution to fight it out. But if you succeed, new and bolder methods will be tried everywhere, and we may date the first chapter of a new economic era from your accession to office.”

Keynes described Roosevelt’s leadership task as comprising economic recovery and institutional reform. The latter could wait; in fact it ought to wait. “Haste will be injurious, and wisdom of long-range purpose is more necessary than immediate achievement.” Recovery came first. In this realm the president had got some things right but others wrong. His administration should have paid more attention to increasing the purchasing power of consumers. “In the economic system of the modern world, output is primarily produced for sale; and the volume of output depends on the amount of purchasing power.” A depression was, by definition, a shortfall of demand; the remedy to a depression must come in one of three forms. Individuals could be induced to spend more, businesses could be persuaded to spend more, or government could decide to spend more. In a depression the first two sources of spending—individuals and businesses—typically failed. “It is, therefore, only from the third factor”—government—“that we can expect the initial major impulse.”

Roosevelt had read Keynes’s letter and filed it away. His view of Keynes coincided with his view of most other academic economists, which was that they didn’t understand how policy was made in the real world of politics. In any case, by the time Keynes wrote—in December 1933—the economy appeared to be recovering. The president saw no reason to jeopardize the recovery to suit the notions of an English intellectual.

Roosevelt had occasion to dust off Keynes’s letter in the autumn of 1937. At the very moment when he was trying to nudge Americans toward greater responsibility for world peace, the American economy was falling off a cliff. The 1937 plunge wasn’t as deep as the dive that followed the stock crash of 1929, but it was swifter and, because it came after four years of improvement, more disheartening. Industrial activity in early 1937 had finally topped that of 1929, while unemployment had diminished to less than 15 percent. Relief rolls were down and were scheduled to shrink further as Roosevelt’s determination to end relief in favor of jobs shaped the new laws of that season. As long as unemployment, a lagging indicator of the economy as a whole, remained in double digits, it would have been impolitic for Roosevelt to declare the depression ended. Yet it wasn’t unreasonable for him to think in such terms.

Then, for no good reason anyone could discern, the recovery suddenly lurched into reverse. The stock market collapsed, with the Dow Jones average plunging from 190 in August to 115 in October. Wealth vanished more rapidly than at the worst of the 1929 crash. Corporate profits plummeted by four-fifths. Steel production fell by three-quarters. Unsold autos jammed factory and dealer lots. As the furnaces were banked and the assembly lines shut down, two million people lost their jobs, crowding back onto the relief rolls Roosevelt had hoped to render obsolete.

The “Roosevelt recession,” as the president’s critics alliteratively labeled it (when they weren’t calling it the “Democratic depression”), reopened nearly every aspect of the debate that had surrounded the New Deal from its inception. Republicans and other conservatives naturally blamed the government’s intrusion into the private sector. No depression in American history had lasted so long, they correctly noted, and none had witnessed such overweening ambition on the part of government. Ergo, the ambition had prolonged the depression. “Right in the midst of good business, we have a loss of billions of dollars to thrifty folk,” asserted Bruce Barton, the ad man, who was now running for Congress on the Republican ticket. “There is only one reason: politics and the threat of more politics…. There is no possible explanation of the present fear and loss except one: too many politicians monkeying too much.”

A person didn’t have to be campaigning for office or to consider incumbents monkeys to credit at least some of Barton’s argument. The very flexibility on which Roosevelt prided himself had the perverse effect of rendering investors unable to make reasoned judgments about where to put their money. Lammot du Pont, the current spokesman of the famous family, explained the view from Wall Street:

Uncertainty rules the tax situation, the labor situation, the monetary situation, and practically every legal condition under which industry must operate. Are taxes to go higher, lower, or stay where they are? We don’t know. Is labor to be union or non-union?…Are we to have inflation or deflation, more government spending or less?…Are new restrictions to be placed on capital, new limits on profits?…It is impossible even to guess at the answers.

Nor was it only conservatives who held this opinion. Adolf Berle, of the original Brain Trust, conceded the capitalists’ argument. “Practically no business group in the country has escaped investigation or other attack in the last five years,” Berle said. “Irrespective of their deserts, the result has been shattered morale. We have not, in the absence of a large Government ownership program, any class or group to whom we may turn for economic leadership. It is, therefore, necessary to make that group pull itself together.” Henry Morgenthau argued a similar case. The Treasury secretary had advocated deficit reduction from the beginning, contending that a balanced budget would do more for the economy, by boosting business morale, than almost anything else the administration could do. The nosedive of 1937 strengthened his case. “We are headed right into another depression,” he told the president. Morgenthau granted, for tactical purposes if no other, that federal deficits had been acceptable during the president’s first term, to deal with the emergency. But conditions had changed. “The domestic problems which face us today are essentially different from those which faced us four years ago…. We want to see private business expand. We believe that much of the remaining unemployment will disappear as private capital funds are increasingly employed…. We believe that one of the most important ways of achieving these ends at this time is to continue progress toward a balance of the federal budget.”

A competing faction within the administration asserted that Berle and Morgenthau had it all wrong. These younger New Dealers were a cadre of lawyers, economists, and other ambitious fellows who had come to Washington to take part in Roosevelt’s reformation of the American political economy. Thomas Corcoran, nominally counsel to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation but actually an adviser with broad portfolio, was their unofficial leader; Benjamin Cohen, Isador Lubin, Leon Henderson, and Jerome Frank were Tommy the Cork’s lieutenants. These “janizaries,” as their critics called them, lived for their jobs, talking politics and economics from early morning at work till late at night over drinks in Corcoran’s Georgetown home. They had experience in neither elective politics nor practical business, but they professed to tell the politicians and the businessmen what to do. They were often clever enough to get away with it. Their mindset was that of the progressives of a generation before: they blamed big capital for the economy’s woes, and they looked to government—that is, to the agencies they themselves staffed—to make the profiteers mend their irresponsible ways.

Their diagnosis of the 1937 slump was just the opposite of Morgenthau’s. They pointed out that the federal budget that year was closer to balance than any since the New Deal’s start, on account of reductions in relief spending and increases in taxes, particularly the payroll taxes that funded the new Social Security system. The ergo for them was that the declining deficit had caused the recession. Their prescription was to expand the deficit so that government spending would provide what private spending did not.

The young New Dealers bolstered their arguments with the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes. The British economist published his magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, in 1936. The work involved intricate analysis of all manner of economic and monetary policies, but for political practitioners the moral was that government ought to intervene, energetically and forthrightly, when the private sector failed. As the moral pertained to the 1937 recession, the federal government should increase the deficit as a countercyclical correction to the shortfall in private consumption.

Keynes couldn’t expect Roosevelt to read his whole book, which even for economists was heavy slogging. So he summarized its main points in another letter. Consumption, Keynes told Roosevelt, was the key to recovery. Private consumption languished—this was the essence of the recession—and therefore public consumption must expand. In particular the government must spend more—much more—than it took in, so that the deficit would put money in the hands of people who would spend it again, in their turn. The people who received the money must be the poor and middling, not the rich; ordinary farmers and workers, not powerful business owners. Ordinary people spent their incomes, from necessity; the rich might sit on the money, depriving it of its multiplier value.

Keynes didn’t suggest that Roosevelt write off the rich and the business classes. The cooperation of business would ultimately be essential in sustaining any recovery. But the economist urged the president to treat the capitalists with caution.

Businessmen have a different set of delusions from politicians and need, therefore, different handling. They are, however, much milder than politicians, at the same time allured and terrified by the glare of publicity, easily persuaded to be “patriots,” perplexed, bemused, indeed terrified, yet only too anxious to take a cheerful view, vain perhaps but very unsure of themselves, pathetically responsive to a kind word. You could do anything you liked with them, if you would treat them (even the big ones) not as wolves and tigers but as domestic animals by nature, even though they have been badly brought up and not trained as you would wish. It is a mistake to think that they are more immoral than politicians. If you work them into the surly, obstinate, terrified mood of which domestic animals, wrongly handled, are so capable, the nation’s burdens will not get carried to market, and in the end public opinion will veer their way.

BETWEEN THE FISCAL conservatism of Morgenthau and the budget hawks and the liberalism of the junior New Dealers, with the unsolicited kibitzing of Keynes on the side, Roosevelt had to chart a course for the American economy. His head and his past were on the side of the budget cutters; his instincts had always been to trim government spending. But his heart and his politics were on the side of the spenders. He resented the failure of investors—many of whom came from backgrounds similar to his own—to acknowledge their debt to the community at large and their obligation to repay it. And he appreciated that fat capitalists made easy targets.

The October 1937 edition of the Fireside Chats came a week after Roosevelt’s Chicago speech on quarantining aggression. He touched briefly, and vaguely, on the themes of that earlier speech, but most of his talk treated the domestic economy, in particular the role of business in triggering the current recession. Roosevelt didn’t target all businessmen; as when he attacked Republicans, he distinguished the evil few from the virtuous many. The former, besides withholding investment funds, had been spreading malicious stories about government, thereby undermining the democratic faith of the latter. “Most business men, big and little, know that their government neither wants to put them out of business nor to prevent them from earning a decent profit,” the president said. “In spite of the alarms of a few who seek to regain control of American life, most business men, big and little, know that their government is trying to make property more secure than ever before by giving every family a real chance to have a property stake in the nation.” Roosevelt echoed his salvos of the 1936 campaign when he blamed “private monopolies and financial oligarchies” for endangering American prosperity by refusing to lower unconscionably high prices. On Wall Street, not in Washington, should Americans seek the villains in the current recession. The government was doing everything it could to undo the harm the business barons had done. “We are already studying how to strengthen our antitrust laws in order to end monopoly, not to hurt but to free legitimate business.”

Roosevelt extended the attack in his annual message to Congress, delivered at the beginning of 1938. The recession had worsened with the winter; the prospects of recovery had retreated commensurately. More than ever the American future required the cooperation of honest businesses and their resources, Roosevelt said. “Capital is essential.” And capital could expect to be rewarded. “Reasonable earnings on capital are essential.” But capital, for its own sake and that of the country, must not overreach. “Misuse of the powers of capital or selfish suspension of the employment of capital must be ended, or the capitalistic system will destroy itself through its own abuses.” Roosevelt identified the worst of the abuses: “tax avoidance…security manipulations…price rigging…collusive bidding…unfair competition…intimidation of local or state government.” Most of these practices resulted from excessive concentration of corporate power in the hands of a very few firms, whose directors belligerently asserted their right to employ their property as they saw fit. Roosevelt didn’t deny the right, but he linked it to responsibility. “The man who seeks freedom from such responsibility in the name of individual liberty is either fooling himself or trying to cheat his fellow men. He wants to eat the fruits of orderly society without paying for them.”

BLAMING GREEDY CAPITALISTS might be a political strategy, but it wasn’t an economic policy. Roosevelt had to decide whether to cut spending or expand it. At first he leaned toward Morgenthau, hoping that the back of the depression had been broken and that the current difficulties were fleeting. If this was so, he was willing for government’s role to diminish. In October 1937 he met with congressional leaders and declared his intention of balancing the budget by fiscal 1939. “The President told them with a real ‘burr’ in his voice,” Morgenthau recorded in his diary, “that he expected to balance the budget, that he wanted enough money to balance the budget, that he expected to keep expenditures down so he could balance the budget, and that if any committee passed an appropriation over and above his estimates he would immediately serve notice on that committee that they must find the additional revenue.”

Within a week of this meeting, however, the stock market lurched down again, suffering the single day’s biggest loss in six years. Even Morgenthau was shaken, calling the sell-off “an hysteria resembling a mob in a theater fire.” When the market didn’t recover, and as the effects of the dive rippled into the larger economy, Roosevelt reconsidered his devotion to a balanced budget. He called a cabinet meeting to consider his options. None appeared new or particularly effective. “I am sick and tired,” he said, “of being told by the cabinet, by Henry, and by everybody else for the last two weeks what’s the matter with the country, and nobody suggests what I should do.”

After a long silence, Morgenthau spoke up. “You must do something to reassure business,” the Treasury secretary said.

“You want me to turn on the old record,” Roosevelt replied.

“What business wants to know is this: Are we headed toward state socialism, or are we going to continue on a capitalistic basis?”

“I have told them that again and again.”

“Tell them for the fifteenth time. That’s what they want to know.”

Jim Farley echoed: “That’s what they want to know.” The president should explain that he was going to cut the cost of government.

“All right, Jim,” Roosevelt answered. “I will turn on the old record.”

Morgenthau left the meeting encouraged. “This is the first time that the cabinet had ever talked on a man-to-man basis with the President and that we did not sit back and either talk trivialities or listen to him,” Morgenthau recorded.

Yet the more Roosevelt thought about the recession, the angrier he grew at the greedy capitalists. In a telephone conversation he told Morgenthau that a “wise old bird” had informed him that big business was behind the recession, self-consciously sabotaging the economy in order to force the administration to back away from reform.

Morgenthau inquired who the owl was. Some were better informed than others, he said.

“It is not necessary for you to know,” Roosevelt responded.

Morgenthau, surmising that the owl was the president himself, anticipated a change in course. It came in stages. The Treasury secretary was scheduled to speak to an audience that would include business bigwigs; he wanted to tell them that a balanced budget was still the administration’s goal. He showed his draft to Roosevelt, who read Morgenthau’s words: “This administration is going to do everything possible to promote a continuation of recovery and to balance the budget through cutting expenditures. But I wish to emphasize that in no event will this administration allow anyone to starve.” The latter sentence was already a concession to the spenders in the administration. Yet it wasn’t enough for Roosevelt. He appended an additional promise: “Nor will it abandon its broad purpose to protect the weak, to give human security, and to seek a wider distribution of our national wealth.”

Morgenthau choked. “If you want to sound like Huey Long,” he told the president, “I don’t.” But he gave the speech, with Roosevelt’s coda. And it convinced no one in the business community that the administration was serious about reducing the deficit—for the good reason that the administration, regardless of what Morgenthau wanted, was not serious. Each week brought worse news about the economy. In December the Labor Department calculated that nearly two million people had lost their jobs since September. Government economists predicted that another million would be laid off by the middle of January. This was no financial stumble but a broad economic collapse. The early months of 1938 seemed eerily like the start of 1933. Hunger once more threatened millions; tent cities sprang up anew—and might have been called Rooseveltvilles if the term hadn’t been so awkward. The federal capacity to provide relief had been deliberately reduced the previous summer; it could not re-expand fast enough to cover the growing need. Sixty thousand men and women went without food for a week in Cleveland when local agencies couldn’t make up for the federal shortfall. Chicago closed down its relief offices lest they be crushed by the burden of those who descended upon them.

The acuteness of the emergency created a consensus in the administration that strong measures had to be taken. Even Morgenthau, calling the rate of decline “something terrible,” advocated an increase in relief spending. “If $250 million will stop this downward spiral, it’s cheap,” he said. Roosevelt agreed. He called the money-committee chairmen from Congress to the White House and requested the quarter billion.

Yet the deeper issue remained. What was the meaning of the New Deal? Was it a stopgap program to get the private sector back on its feet and then fade away? Or was it a permanent reorientation of the political economy, with government guiding business forever?

Roosevelt refused to decide definitively. But as the economy continued to languish, he let the radical New Dealers speak their minds as if on the administration’s behalf. Robert Jackson, a janizary who headed the Justice Department’s antitrust division, declared that the downturn had been caused by a “strike” of the capitalists against the people. “Certain groups of big business have now seized upon a recession in our prosperity to liquidate the New Deal and to throw off all governmental interference with their incorporated initiative and their aristocratic anarchy,” Jackson said. The monopolists were cynically disingenuous in blaming the government for the slump. “The only just criticism that can be made of the economic operations of the New Deal is that it set out a breakfast for the canary and let the cat steal it.”

Harold Ickes was older than the janizaries, but he yielded nothing to them in his disdain for big capital. America’s economic troubles, Ickes proclaimed, were the fault of “the sixty families who have brought the rest of the business men of the United States under the terror of their domination.” Their malign efforts were nothing new. “It is the old struggle between the power of money and the power of the democratic instinct.” But the stakes were higher than ever. “Big business fascism” was closer than most Americans realized. “We say that Germany isn’t Germany any more. Italy isn’t Italy any more…. Should we be getting ready to say ‘America isn’t America any more’?”

Roosevelt kept quiet, still pondering his options. “As I see it,” Morgenthau remarked at a lunch in March 1938, “what you are doing now is just treading water.”

“Absolutely,” Roosevelt replied.

But when the stock market dove again a week later, with no improvement in the broader economy, Roosevelt decided to take on big capital himself. He ordered Jackson at Justice to prepare antitrust suits against the most obvious monopolists. “Get plenty strong,” the president said. “We’re going into training for the heavyweight championship.”

And he finally decided between the retrenchers and the expansionists. Several of the latter followed the president to Warm Springs, where he was taking his spring vacation. Morgenthau considered such blatant advocacy beneath him, and he soon regretted his hauteur. “They just stampeded him,” the Treasury secretary moaned. “He was completely stampeded. They stampeded him like cattle.” Morgenthau underestimated the president’s intellectual autonomy, but he accurately assessed the result of the lobbying.

Roosevelt unveiled his decision in a Fireside Chat in April. He said that after much deliberation he had determined that the public interest required the federal government to make “definite additions to the purchasing power of the nation.” These would take the form, primarily, of increases to public works: $1 billion for permanent improvements to buildings and the like in the states, counties, and cities; $300 million for slum clearance; $100 million for highways; $37 million for flood control and reclamation; $25 million for improvements to federal buildings.

This spending was intended to promote prosperity, but it had a larger goal: the survival of democracy. “Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations,” Roosevelt said, “not because the people of those nations disliked democracy, but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion and government weakness.” Forced to choose between voting and eating, desperate people chose the latter. Americans had a justified faith in their own democratic institutions, but the health of these institutions required a collective effort to secure the material needs of the ordinary citizens of the country. “The very soundness of our democratic institutions depends on the determination of our government to give employment to idle men.” For the first time—but not for the last—Roosevelt described the New Deal as a bulwark of American defense.

The people of America are in agreement in defending their liberties at any cost, and the first line of that defense lies in the protection of economic security. Your government, seeking to protect democracy, must prove that government is stronger than the forces of business depression.

THE LINK BETWEEN prosperity and democracy—between economic security at home and the security of American institutions and values in a world of troubles—came naturally in the spring of 1938. The war in China had escalated till it touched Americans. In December 1937 an American gunboat, the Panay, patrolling the Yangtze River in accord with treaties between the United States and China, suffered attack by Japanese warplanes near Nanking. The presence of the Panay and its purpose in being there were no surprise to the Japanese, who had been informed by the vessel’s commander of its location and its mission of evacuating American nationals from the zone of the fighting. But for reasons that escaped the commander and his men, more than a dozen Japanese planes bombed and strafed the craft, killing three Americans, wounding eleven others, and sending the vessel to the river bottom.

Roosevelt responded at once with indignation. “Please tell the Japanese Ambassador,” he directed Cordell Hull:

1. That the President is deeply shocked and concerned by the news of indiscriminate bombing of American and other non-Chinese vessels on the Yangtze, and that he requests that the Emperor be so advised.

2. That all the facts are being assembled and will shortly be presented to the Japanese Government.

3. That in the meantime it is hoped the Japanese Government will be considering definitely for presentation to this Government:

a. Full expressions of regret and proffer of full compensation.

b. Methods guaranteeing against a repetition of any similar attack in the future.

Roosevelt’s insistence that the Japanese emperor be advised of the American president’s shock and concern was more than diplomatic protocol. During this period, American officials never quite knew where decisions in Tokyo were being made. The emperor, of course, was the head of the Japanese state, but whether he was the head of the Japanese government was unclear. Roosevelt feared that if the militarists behind the war in China had their way with Japan’s foreign policy, the United States would have no choice but to confront them with force. His hope, consequently, for averting conflict was that the militarists would not have their way. If the emperor learned how seriously the United States took the attack on the Panay, perhaps he would rein in the generals.

Roosevelt never discovered whether the emperor got his message. Japanese officials informed the State Department that the attack had been an unhappy mistake. “This was the lamest of lame excuses,” Hull later remarked, and it grew lamer as additional evidence arrived showing that Japanese patrol boats had machine-gunned survivors fleeing the sinking Panay. The secretary of state was convinced that the attack was a warning to the United States not to get involved in Japan’s fight with China.

Roosevelt agreed, although the question remained as to who was giving the warning. The Japanese government conveyed its “profound apology” and agreed to Roosevelt’s other conditions, including reparations and assurances against similar incidents in the future. Whether this would bind the “wild, runaway, half-insane men,” as Hull described the leaders of the Japanese army on the Yangtze, was another matter.

Roosevelt had to prepare for the possibility that it wouldn’t. He didn’t want to take military action against Japan, in part because the U.S. navy currently lacked the ability to project American power against Japan in China and in part because he knew he had almost no support in Congress for such action. The isolationist bloc remained solid; its leaders decried as “jingoism” any suggestion of a stern response to the gunboat sinking. “If Japan has accepted responsibility and apologizes, there is not much more that the United States can do,” Democrat Elbert Thomas of Utah told the Senate. “You can’t go to war with a nation which admits it was wrong.” Thomas’s Republican colleague from Nevada, Pat McCarran, asserted, “We should have been out of China long ago.”

Consequently Roosevelt explored other means of influencing Japan’s conduct. He asked Morgenthau to ascertain the executive’s legal authority to seize Japanese assets in the United States. If the president lacked legal authority, the Treasury secretary was to determine whether the assets could be seized extralegally and whether the Japanese could do anything about it. “After all,” Roosevelt told the cabinet, “if Italy and Japan have evolved a technique of fighting without declaring war, why can’t we develop a similar one?”

MORGENTHAU’S EFFORTS bore fruit that would be harvested only later. With Tokyo giving every indication of making good on its promise to prevent future attacks, Roosevelt lost what leverage he might have had to budge the isolationists.

In any event, he wasn’t ready to start a fight in Congress, for he had a fight on his hands already. The conservative opposition to Roosevelt’s domestic program intensified during the spring and summer of 1938. His allies in Congress had sponsored a measure designed to put a floor under wages and a ceiling over hours, but the bill bogged down in conference when corporate executives claimed it would ruin their businesses, besides violating their freedom of contract. Southern conservatives—Democrats to a man—backed business on this one, asserting that the administration’s bill would deny their region its competitive advantage and trample their cherished states’ rights. With great effort Roosevelt’s allies managed to get a bill passed, one that mandated a forty-cent minimum wage and a forty-hour standard week, but it included so many exemptions and loopholes as to cast the whole enterprise into question. Amid the deliberations, liberal Democrat Martin Dies of Texas proposed an amendment in meaningful jest: “Within ninety days after the appointment of the Administrator, she shall report to Congress whether anyone is subject to this bill.” The amendment failed but the question remained. The bill’s one worthy accomplishment was banning child labor in interstate commerce. After signing the measure, Roosevelt put down the pen and declared, “That’s that,” referring to child labor but also to his near-term hopes for broader workplace reform.

The president met similar resistance on taxes. Business-sympathetic Democrats joined Republicans in blaming high taxes for the recession and sought to reduce them, especially those that targeted capital gains and undistributed profits. Roosevelt opposed the reduction, still deeming business, not business taxes, responsible for the slump. But he couldn’t keep his legislative forces in line, and the lawmakers approved a tax bill with the provisions he disliked. He refused to sign the bill, saying it undermined the principle of progressivity in taxation by taxing small profits and large profits at the same rate. “That, my friends, is not right,” he declared. Yet because the Treasury needed a tax measure, he let the bill become law without his signature. He promised to revisit the tax issue when the new Congress convened after the 1938 elections.

THE CONSERVATIVE REVOLT caused Roosevelt to wonder whether the entire New Deal was at risk. The southern Democrats had always been reluctant reformers, and with the president presumably a lame duck their reluctance had become defiance. It was hardly inconceivable that a Republican president, elected in 1940, would forge an alliance with the conservative southern Democrats and dismantle the New Deal bit by bit—or all at once.

Roosevelt might have retreated in order to consolidate his position. He could have given the conservatives enough of what they wanted on peripheral issues like minimum wages to ensure support for such central programs as Social Security. He could have turned the New Deal in a cautiously moderate direction.

But the president chose a different path. Convinced of both the correctness of his vision for America and the continuing potency of his personal charm, he took the fight to the conservatives. He declared war within his own party. During the late winter and spring of 1938 he directed his most trusted assistants, including his son James, who had taken over some of Louis Howe’s responsibilities, and Harry Hopkins, who was becoming the president’s all-purpose fixer, to identify Democratic primaries where administration support might tip the balance between pro–and anti–New Deal candidates. The White House operatives focused on the South, where conservative opposition was strongest and where segregationist politics guaranteed the general-election victory of whichever candidate won the Democratic primary. They scored an early victory in May in Florida when James Roosevelt proclaimed the administration’s support for Claude Pepper, a New Deal liberal, and Pepper went on to trounce his primary opponent, an outspoken anti–New Dealer.

The president himself kept aloof till the primary season heated up at the start of the summer. In late June he took his campaign to the air. “There will be many clashes between two schools of thought, generally classified as liberal and conservative,” he told a Fireside Chat audience. The liberal school was able to recognize that the novel conditions of modern life necessitated new remedies and ways of thinking; the conservatives were not. The conservative school wanted government to ignore modern problems. “It believes that individual initiative and private philanthropy will solve them—that we ought to repeal many of the things we have done and go back, for instance, to the old gold standard, or stop all this business of old age pensions and unemployment insurance, or repeal the Securities and Exchange Act, or let monopolies thrive unchecked—return, in effect, to the kind of government we had in the twenties.” The question was whether voters would agree with this reactionary position. Roosevelt thought they should not, and, to illustrate his point, he told a story he said came from China. “Two Chinese coolies were arguing heatedly in the midst of a crowd. A stranger expressed surprise that no blows were being struck. His Chinese friend replied: ‘The man who strikes first admits that his ideas have given out.’” Americans ought to take the lesson. “I know that neither in the summer primaries nor in the November elections will the American voters fail to spot the candidate whose ideas have given out.”

It was a risky strategy, causing Roosevelt’s most seasoned political advisers to groan. “The Boss has stirred up a hornet’s nest,” John Nance Garner observed. “The feeling is becoming intensely bitter. It’s downright unhealthy.” Jim Farley told the president directly, “Boss, I think you’re foolish.”

Roosevelt appreciated the risk he was taking. He remembered how Wilson’s appeal for a vote of confidence in the war effort had backfired in 1918; his current appeal for a vote of confidence in the New Deal might backfire, too. He understood that second-term presidents often suffer from voters’ sixth-year itch and that congressional elections often turn on local, idiosyncratic issues. But he considered the stakes sufficiently high to warrant the risk, and he plunged ahead. He toured the country, stopping in states and districts with close races pitting his allies against his enemies. In Louisville he endorsed Alben Barkley over the Kentucky senator’s conservative opponent. In Oklahoma City he told an audience that Senator Elmer Thomas had been “of enormous help to me and to the administration,” and he castigated Thomas’s rival as a perennial naysayer.

In Georgia the “purge,” as Roosevelt’s opponents and much of the press were calling it, grew the most personal. Walter George was a three-term senator who was as solidly planted in the upper chamber as a person could be. He feared neither Republicans nor Democratic presidents. He disdained most aspects of the New Deal, and he didn’t hesitate to vote his disdain. Yet Roosevelt bearded the old lion in his Barnesville den. Speaking to George’s face—and the faces of Governor E. D. Rivers and Georgia’s other senator, Richard Russell—Roosevelt reminded his listeners that he was an adoptive son of their state. He said he had nothing against Senator George as an individual. “He is, and I hope always will be, my personal friend. He is beyond question, beyond any possible question, a gentleman and a scholar.” But he was wrong politically. “On most public questions he and I do not speak the same language.” Roosevelt explained that as a Democratic president he needed the cooperation of Democrats in Congress to carry out the people’s will. “That is one of the essentials of a party form of government. It has been going on in this country for nearly a century and a half.” Roosevelt put two questions to Georgia Democrats as they approached the primary. Was their candidate a fighter for the broad objectives of the party and the administration? And did he honestly believe in those objectives? “I regret that in the case of my friend, Senator George, I cannot honestly answer either of these questions in the affirmative.”

Roosevelt wasted his breath. Georgia voters rejected his advice and returned George to the Senate. South Carolina voters did the same for Cotton Ed Smith after Roosevelt visited the Palmetto State. Maryland voters reelected Millard Tydings over Roosevelt’s opposition.

The president suffered a shellacking that season beyond the failure of his purge. The Republicans picked up eight seats in the Senate and eighty-one in the House. They netted a gain of thirteen governorships, winning with Harold Stassen in Minnesota and John Bricker in Ohio and barely losing with Thomas Dewey in New York, where Roosevelt’s protégé Herbert Lehman clung to office by the thinnest of margins. The Democrats still held the balance in both houses of Congress, but the purge’s failure predictably emboldened southern conservatives in their defiance of the White House. “It’s time to stop feeling sorry for the Republicans,” Jim Farley grumbled.

36.

“THERE WERE ONLY TWO PEOPLE WHO STOOD UP TO FRANKLIN,” Eleanor remarked years later to Henry Morgenthau. “You and Louis.”

“No, you are wrong,” Morgenthau replied. “There were three—Louis, myself, and Eleanor Roosevelt.”

The question of who stood up to Franklin became more critical the longer Roosevelt remained in office. Howe, Morgenthau, and obviously Eleanor had known Roosevelt for many years before he became president. They appreciated the growth in his stature and power, but they never lost touch with the ordinary man he had been—and the ordinary man he still was beneath the trappings of office. But Howe died, and Eleanor spent more and more of her time on her own causes: her travels, her lectures, her column. Morgenthau stayed in daily contact with Roosevelt, but his influence was diluted by the many others who laid claim to the president’s time and energy. And nearly all these others knew Roosevelt only as president—as the man who, among other things, could advance or retard their careers, who could bestow or withhold favors.

Harry Hopkins was one of these, and he was conspicuously excluded by Eleanor and Morgenthau from the short list of persons who stood up to Franklin. Eleanor couldn’t decide what she thought about Hopkins. Her heart went out to him when his wife died of cancer in 1937, leaving him bereft and solely responsible for their five-year-old daughter, Diana. Hopkins himself had been diagnosed with cancer, and while doctors, on removing a large part of his stomach, thought they had got it all, no one could be sure. “Just before Christmas in 1938 Mrs. Roosevelt came to our house in Georgetown to see me,” Hopkins later wrote Diana.

At that time I was feeling none too well. I had seen a great deal of Mrs. Roosevelt during the previous six months, and the day she came out she told me she thought I seemed to be disturbed about something, and wondered if it was a feeling that something might happen to me and that there was no proper provision for you. She told me that she had been thinking about it a good deal and wanted me to know that she would like for me to provide in my will that she, Mrs. Roosevelt, be made your guardian.

Hopkins knew the story of Eleanor’s own orphanhood, and he doubtless guessed that her experience had sensitized her to Diana’s situation. He gratefully accepted the offer.

Yet he realized it was much more about Diana than about him. After taking some pains to bring Hopkins into the inner circle of the White House family, Eleanor began to wish she hadn’t. His actions as czar of relief stole headlines she thought should have been Franklin’s. And when he attracted criticism she resented the bad light he brought on the administration. Conservatives repeated endlessly a statement attributed to Hopkins that he forever denied having made but that seemed to summarize the Hopkins attitude toward relief and politics: “We shall tax and tax, and spend and spend, and elect and elect.” At every opportunity the conservatives slapped him down. In 1937, amid the uproar provoked by Roosevelt’s court-packing plan, the House of Representatives wrote a rider into the relief appropriations bill, cutting Hopkins’s salary from $12,000 to $10,000. “This was pure spite,” the Baltimore Sun asserted, “for what is a saving of $2,000 a year in a job like that? But while the business has no monetary significance, it is highly significant as revealing the emotional state of members. They must hate Hopkins with a frantic hatred when they are driven to do as childish a thing as cutting $2,000 off his salary to express their anger and resentment.”

It was spite, to be sure, but there was something else. After the 1936 election, political handicappers predictably looked to the 1940 race. Most assumed that Roosevelt would be tempted to try for a third term but that, like every one of his predecessors who had felt the temptation, he would resist it. Presumably he would cast his support to a candidate committed to preserving and perhaps extending the New Deal. Vice President Garner was too conservative, besides being a Southerner. Various otherwise likely senators and governors had looked askance at significant parts of the Roosevelt reforms. In effect, only the loyalists were left. Of these, Hopkins was the most loyal and arguably the most able. Hopkins mentally worked through the process of elimination and began to fancy himself presidential material.

Roosevelt didn’t discourage him. In the spring of 1938 he invited Hopkins to the White House for a chat. The conversation commenced with Roosevelt venting the anger he still felt at the conservatives on the Supreme Court. He explained that it had long been tradition for the chief justice, at the start of each autumn session of the court, to call the White House to inform the president that the court had convened. The president would then invite the justices over for a visit. Justice Hughes had been careful to follow the tradition for the first three years of Roosevelt’s presidency, but he had failed to do so in 1936. Roosevelt took this lapse as a conscious affront. “And remember,” he told Hopkins, “this was six months before the court fight started.”

Roosevelt mused about appointments to the court before sidling around to the question of his own successor. He didn’t disqualify himself for 1940, but he described his “personal disinclination” to run again and explained that Eleanor definitely didn’t want him to run. He said the family finances required the replenishment a former president might accomplish but a sitting president could not. Hyde Park was costing his mother more than she was earning in interest and dividends from the family trust.

Roosevelt listed several possible candidates for the Democratic nomination, only to explain why each wouldn’t do. Cordell Hull was too old. Harold Ickes was too crotchety. Henry Wallace and Frank Murphy lacked broad constituencies. Jim Farley wanted the nomination as much as anyone, but Roosevelt judged him the “most dangerous” of the plausible prospects because of his growing disenchantment with the New Deal and his weak understanding of foreign affairs.

Roosevelt finally came around to Hopkins. The president noted the fact of Hopkins’s divorce, which would upset Catholics and some others. But his second marriage had turned out well—before his wife’s recent death—and other candidates had survived worse scandals. Grover Cleveland had fathered a son out of wedlock, had owned up, and had been elected twice. A larger question was Hopkins’s health. Campaigning for president was a trying job, being president more trying still. Hopkins seemed to be healthy enough now, but voters would wonder whether he could stand the strain. Yet Roosevelt remarked that he himself had neutralized the presidential health question as it applied to him; on balance it needn’t disqualify Hopkins.

Roosevelt and Hopkins were the only persons present at this meeting. The sole record was Hopkins’s notes, jotted down afterward, which ended with the phrase “assurances and hopes.” Roosevelt never spoke so unguardedly to Hopkins again on the subject of a possible successor. Perhaps he was as sincere as Hopkins apparently thought he was; perhaps he was thinking out loud. Perhaps Hopkins, like so many others who fell under Roosevelt’s spell, heard more than Roosevelt actually said.

In any case, Hopkins gave the impression, even without saying anything explicitly, of having the inside track to the nomination, which didn’t endear him to others around the president. Hopkins encouraged—goaded, some said—Roosevelt to attempt the purge of the Democratic conservatives; when the effort backfired, Hopkins’s critics were happy to hand him the blame. Hopkins’s colleagues from the early days of the administration remembered how he told them to ignore politics. “We’re here to implement a policy,” he had said. But as the presidency loomed in his mind’s eye, politics rose alongside it. He grew impatient at the “goddam New Dealers” for their excessive spending, conveniently ignoring that he had taught them most of what they knew on the subject.

Meanwhile he left Eleanor behind. “Here was Harry who was Mother’s protégé to start with,” Anna Roosevelt remembered, “and suddenly Harry became Father’s protégé.” Eleanor tried to mask her hurt at what she interpreted as Hopkins’s betrayal, as she always tried to mask her hurt. But the mask occasionally slipped. She feigned illness as an excuse to hole up in a small apartment she kept on East Eleventh Street in New York. To one friend, however, she related the cause of her distress. “I haven’t been ill at all,” she told Esther Lape. “Something happened to me. I haven’t gotten used to people who say they care for me but are only interested in getting to Franklin. But there was one person of whom I thought this was not true, that his affection was for me. I found this was not true, and I couldn’t take it.”

PRESIDENTS OFTEN TURN to foreign affairs when their domestic agendas stall. Roosevelt might have felt relief at reverting to diplomacy in the autumn of 1938 had the diplomacy of that season not been so uniformly disheartening. The civil war in Spain ground forward to an increasingly inevitable victory for the fascists. Ethiopia struggled for breath beneath the treads of the Italian tanks. Japan continued its brutalization of China. Hitler flaunted his scorn for international opinion more flagrantly than ever.

Congress meanwhile tightened the strictures on Roosevelt’s conduct of foreign policy. The Neutrality Act of 1935 had been modified in 1936, extending the president’s discretion as to whether a state of war existed but requiring him, in the event of war, to caution Americans against travel on belligerent vessels, and forbidding American loans to belligerents. A subsequent revision, in 1937, directly banned travel on belligerent ships and required that belligerent purchases of American goods—other than weapons, which continued to be embargoed—be carried away in non-American ships. In each case the experience of the World War motivated the legislators. The travel ban was intended to avert another Lusitania; the cash-and-carry provision was to prevent the emergence of an American financial stake in the victory of one side or the other and to keep belligerent warships from attacking American merchant vessels.

Roosevelt would have preferred complete freedom in formulating American policy toward foreign wars, but so long as he maintained the right to determine when a war existed, he saw little reason to expend political capital against the isolationists. They were fighting the last war, which had been duly declared by all participants. He prepared to fight the next war, which, by recent and continuing evidence, might well not be. From Roosevelt’s perspective, the critical question wasn’t what American law would allow but what American public opinion would tolerate. With the public on his side, Roosevelt could outflank the isolationists; without the public, any victory over the isolationists would be empty.

Briefly it appeared that the isolationists might mobilize public opinion against the president. Louis Ludlow was a moderate Democrat but a radical democrat, besides being an Indiana isolationist. He hatched a plan to put war to a popular vote and succeeded so far with his scheme as to get Congress to consider a constitutional amendment writing it into the supreme law of the land. In the angry aftermath of the Panay sinking, the Ludlow bill was reported out of committee, where the administration’s allies had contained it for months, and was put on the schedule for a floor vote. Roosevelt watched the water rise beneath the measure, hoping it would ebb on its own. When it didn’t, but threatened to swamp the administration, he issued a stern warning. The proposed amendment, he said, would “cripple any President in his conduct of our foreign relations” and would “encourage other nations to believe that they could violate American rights with impunity.” Roosevelt credited the sincerity of the sponsors in their desire to keep the United States out of war. But they were misguided. “It would have the opposite effect.”

Roosevelt’s harsh words frightened dozens of Democrats into deciding against the amendment, and it failed. But by asserting his primacy in foreign policy, Roosevelt increased the political stakes for himself of whatever followed.

As it happened, those stakes were increasing for reasons independent of the contest between the legislature and the executive in America. For many years Hitler had agitated for the absorption of his Austrian homeland into the German empire; after taking control in Berlin he directed a campaign of sabotage against the Austrian government. The 1934 assassination of the Austrian chancellor was followed by terrorist attacks on other Austrian officials and institutions. In March 1938 Hitler threatened to invade Austria unless the government agreed to Anschluss, or union, with Germany. After the cowed government agreed, he invaded anyway, on grounds that the two countries were now one and therefore that the invasion wasn’t really an invasion.

Roosevelt viewed the developments in Central Europe with impotent alarm. Privately he described the Nazis and their ilk as “international gangsters,” and his first thought after the takeover of Austria was to issue a condemnation from the White House. But given the strength of isolationist sentiment in Congress, he realized that there was nothing he could do to reverse Hitler’s coup and that American condemnation followed by American inaction would simply discredit the United States as a nation and himself as president. He let Cordell Hull issue a statement expressing America’s “serious concern” and left it at that.

Roosevelt might have done more had other countries come to Austria’s aid. But the French and British had been even more traumatized by the World War than the Americans had, and though an American-style isolationism wasn’t an option for them—Germany and Italy were simply too close at hand—appeasement was. Before long appeasement would become the most vile label anyone could hang around a diplomat’s neck, but in 1938 it was a politically defensible policy. Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister and the foremost apostle of appeasement, was willing to go to almost any length to avert a repetition of the carnage of the war. If the Austrians wouldn’t defend themselves against Hitler, Chamberlain saw little reason for the British to do so. Psychology and politics aside, Chamberlain appreciated that Britain wasn’t militarily ready for a war with Germany. In a year or two it might be. Whatever bought time, therefore, improved Britain’s chances of dealing successfully with the German tyrant.

Roosevelt found it convenient to follow Britain’s lead. The isolationists wouldn’t let him get out in front of London; his own concern at Germany’s growing power wouldn’t let him fall far behind. Roosevelt’s imitative policy persisted through the summer of 1938 as Hitler put pressure on the government of Czechoslovakia. A postwar godchild of Wilson’s, carved out of the defeated Austro-Hungarian empire, Czechoslovakia exemplified both the lofty principle of self-determination and the complex practice of creating new states from the wreckage of old ones. The portion of Czechoslovakia that bordered Germany contained three million Germans; like Austria, this region—called the Sudetenland—included some honest advocates of a “greater Germany,” some opportunistic Nazi sympathizers, and many people simply hoping to survive the near future without another war. Hitler initially called for autonomy within Czechoslovakia for the Sudeten Germans, but he escalated by September to demand annexation of the region to the German reich.

His ultimatum put the French and British in a bind. France had a treaty with Czechoslovakia nominally guaranteeing Czechoslovakia’s security, but most French citizens had no desire to fight Germany over the borders of a country that hadn’t existed twenty years earlier. Britain was even less enthusiastic, lacking both the formal commitment of a treaty and the geographic adjacency that always made Germany loom larger to the French than to the British. Yet even Chamberlain had to worry that Hitler’s appetite for conquest would grow with the eating.

Roosevelt shared the worry. The president hadn’t figured out what to make of Hitler. He couldn’t tell how much of Hitler’s bombast was sincere and how much was cynical. He didn’t know, at any given point, whether Hitler was bluffing or serious. He couldn’t say whether Hitler wanted the fruits of war or war itself. He hoped the German people possessed the sense to turn from Hitler to someone more reasonable, but he had no idea if they would. In other words, he knew as much, and as little, about Hitler’s motives and plans as anyone outside Hitler’s inner circle—or perhaps Hitler’s head—knew.

The president admitted he was operating in the dark. “You cannot get news,” he told reporters, off the record, as the Czech crisis intensified. “The fellows covering that situation—there is no way in which they can get the dope, the plain facts…. While our State Department dispatches are not as wild as the newspaper stories, they are darned near, and that is saying a lot.” Roosevelt wanted the French and the British to stand up to Hitler, but not if that would lead to war—and definitely not if it required any commitment from the United States.

The president at first let Cordell Hull speak for the administration. The secretary of state called in the German ambassador to warn confidentially but pointedly where Berlin’s actions were leading. The path of “force, militarism, and territorial aggression,” Hull said, could easily provoke a general conflict that would make the last war look tame. “There will scarcely be left a trace of the people who brought it on or those against whom it was waged.” In public, though, Hull confined himself to generalities. He observed the tenth anniversary of the Kellogg-Briand Treaty by remarking on the “great tragedy of today,” namely that the spirit of that antiwar covenant was being lost. “In certain parts of the world strife and conflict are bringing untold misery to millions, and in other parts the idea of warfare is being actually glorified.”

The British and French had hoped for more from the United States and may even have expected it. The French ambassador asked Hull whether the president was communicating secretly with the Germans or the Czechs.

He wasn’t. As controversial as public diplomacy could be while the isolationists held the balance of effective power in Congress, its explosive potential was nothing next to that of secret diplomacy. Roosevelt had to assume that any secret initiative of his would leak and that when it did the isolationists would grow stronger than ever.

Accordingly, when the crisis reached the point where he had to take action of some sort, he did so in full view of the public. By mid-September Hitler had worked himself and the German people into a war frenzy; Nazi tanks and infantry massed along the border separating German territory from Czech Sudetenland. The Czech government, in contrast to the Austrian government, refused to yield to Hitler’s demands. War in the heart of Europe loomed.

Britain’s Chamberlain, determined not to give up on peace, flew to the rescue, or tried to. The prime minister was in his seventieth year and had never been on a plane. But he stowed his misgivings in his briefcase, armed himself with an umbrella against the German rain, and flew off to meet the Nazi dictator. An interview at Berchtesgaden yielded a formula for Sudeten self-determination that appalled the Czech government and left Hitler only slightly more satisfied. But the plan saved sufficient face that Britain and France forced it on the Czechs, who were made to understand that they could expect no help from either country if they resisted.

Yet Hitler wasn’t appeased. He had wanted war, and Chamberlain’s arrangement deprived him of a promising pretext. After muttering to himself for a few days, he declared that the Sudeten Germans must be protected by the troops of the German reich. Once again war clouds boiled above the mountains of Moravia.

At this point Roosevelt weighed in. The president circulated a memo to the governments of Germany, Czechoslovakia, Britain, and France declaring the peace of Europe to be in “immediate danger.” An outbreak of war would be disastrous, he said. “The lives of millions of men, women and children in every country involved will most certainly be lost under circumstances of unspeakable horror. The economic system of every country involved is certain to be shattered.” Claiming to speak as an honest broker—“The United States has no political entanglements. It is caught in no mesh of hatred”—the president called on all parties to keep talking till they found a solution. “So long as negotiations continue, differences may be reconciled. Once they are broken off reason is banished and force asserts itself.”

It was an utterly vacuous statement, as Roosevelt realized. But it was the best he could do. Even without the pressure from the isolationists—even had Roosevelt been a free agent in the matter—he wouldn’t have done much more than he did. America’s strategic interest in Czechoslovakia’s borders was nil, and Roosevelt’s political interest was scarcely greater. It was easier to argue that the mapmakers had got things wrong in dissecting the Hapsburg empire than to say that the United States should become involved in a Central European fight. Perhaps Hitler would have to be dealt with at some point, but America could find a more compelling set of circumstances.

As much as anything, Roosevelt’s memo was written for the record. He wrote again for the record after Hitler answered his appeal with a wordy defense of Berlin’s position. The Czech government was the problem, Hitler said, not the German government or the long-suffering Sudeten Germans. And the Czech government must bear the blame if the negotiations failed, as appeared likely. “It does not rest with the German Government, but with the Czechoslovakian Government alone, to decide, whether it wants peace or war.”

Roosevelt replied to Hitler as one statesman to another. “The world asks of us who at this moment are heads of nations the supreme capacity to achieve the destinies of nations without forcing upon them, as a price, the mutilation and death of millions of citizens,” the president stated. “History, and the souls of every man, woman, and child whose lives will be lost in the threatened war, will hold all of us accountable.” Yet Roosevelt was even less forthcoming regarding a role for America than in his earlier message. “The Government of the United States has no political involvements in Europe, and will assume no obligations in the conduct of the present negotiations.”

Roosevelt’s diffidence left Chamberlain to rescue the peace—at Czechoslovakia’s cost. The British prime minister flew to Munich, where he met with Hitler and French premier Édouard Daladier, as well as Italy’s Mussolini, who joined the negotiations at Hitler’s behest. Chamberlain and Daladier gave Hitler the Sudetenland. He gave them his word that the Sudetenland was all he wanted.

THE MUNICH ACCORD won the democracies time—during which Hitler turned his aggressiveness in another direction. The November murder of a minor German diplomat in Paris by a man identified as a Polish Jew provided the pretext for a rampage against everything Jewish in Germany. Nazi gangs looted and burned Jewish businesses, homes, and synagogues in hundreds of cities, towns, and villages and terrorized Jews, thousands of whom were arrested. Jews were expelled from Munich. Previous outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence, though obviously sanctioned and orchestrated by the ruling party, had typically been attributed to Communists or criminal elements; in this case the regime didn’t bother to deny its imprimatur. “The justified and understandable anger of the German people over the cowardly Jewish murder of a German diplomat in Paris found extensive expression during last night,” the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, asserted. “In numerous cities and towns of the Reich, retaliatory action has been undertaken against Jewish buildings and businesses.” Goebbels, applauding the “healthy instincts” that had given rise to the violence, went on to say that additional chastisement was in store for the Jews. “A final answer to the Jewish assassination in Paris will be given to Jewry by way of legislation and ordinance.” A series of decrees soon followed proclaiming the purpose of effecting the “liquidation of the Jews” and the “elimination of Jews from German economic life.” A fine of one billion marks was levied on the Jewish people collectively; immediate repair of the damage to Jewish property was required, at the owners’ expense; insurance payments for the property damage were confiscated by the government; Jews were barred from operating most businesses or holding responsible positions in German corporations; Jews were forbidden to patronize theaters, dance halls, and other places of public recreation.

This latest pogrom elicited protests from governments and other groups across Europe and North America. Roosevelt declared that the news from Germany had “deeply shocked” American public opinion. “I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth-century civilization.” To underscore his concern, Roosevelt recalled the American ambassador from Berlin.

More quietly Roosevelt examined methods to alleviate the plight of German Jews. The immigration quotas from Germany had been filled, but some ten to fifteen thousand German Jews were in the United States on visitors’ visas. If they returned home, they would suffer the same treatment as Jews who had never left. “I don’t know, from the point of view of humanity, that we have a right to put them on a ship and send them back to Germany under the present conditions,” Roosevelt mused to reporters. He possessed the authority to extend the visitors’ visas for six months, and he chose to exercise it. Congress theoretically could override the president’s decision, but the legislature wasn’t in session. “They will be allowed to stay in this country under the six months’ extension,” Roosevelt said, “because I cannot, in any decent humanity, throw them out.”

A reporter asked if the president intended to extend the extension when the six months ended.

“Yes,” he said.

“And on and on?”

“I think so.”

Fifteen thousand was a very small number given the scope of the tragedy befalling the Jews, but it was the best Roosevelt could do at the moment. The isolationists in Congress were as leery of saving European Jewry as they were of challenging fascism; at the core of the isolationist philosophy was the belief that the problems of other countries and peoples were for those other countries and peoples to solve. Even for the fifteen thousand, Roosevelt had to reassure the skeptics that the refugees would not be eligible for citizenship. He explained that their numbers wouldn’t grow, since the German government had stopped issuing passports to Jews. And he said that he wouldn’t ask Congress to raise the immigration quota. Revealing perhaps more than he intended, Roosevelt concluded his remarks on the refugees with a sigh. “It is a very difficult problem,” he said.

FOREIGN POLICY GOT no easier during the following months. In January 1939 Roosevelt for the first time opened his State of the Union address with a discussion of international affairs. “A war which threatened to envelop the world in flames has been averted,” he said, referring to the Czech crisis. “But it has become increasingly clear that world peace is not assured. All about us rage undeclared wars, military and economic. All about us grow more deadly armaments, military and economic. All about us are threats of new aggression, military and economic.” Never had Roosevelt spoken so forthrightly about the threat to America and its values.

Storms from abroad directly challenge three institutions indispensable to Americans, now as always. The first is religion. It is the source of the other two—democracy and international good faith. Religion, by teaching man his relationship to God, gives the individual a sense of his own dignity and teaches him to respect himself by respecting his neighbors. Democracy, the practice of self-government, is a covenant among free men to respect the rights and liberties of their fellows. International good faith, a sister of democracy, springs from the will of civilized nations of men to respect the rights and liberties of other nations of men. In a modern civilization, all three—religion, democracy and international good faith—complement and support each other.

Roosevelt wasn’t ready to challenge the isolationists directly. He proposed no military action against the foes of religion, democracy, and international good faith. But as he had suggested in his quarantine speech fifteen months earlier, he said there were methods short of war for dealing with aggression. At a minimum, America should avoid actions that encouraged aggressors. The neutrality law embodied a noble sentiment, but it operated erratically and sometimes to the benefit of aggressors. This deficiency should be rectified.

The president pushed harder in the area of armaments. Citing the “old, old lesson that probability of attack is mightily decreased by the assurance of an ever ready defense,” he asked Congress for $525 million in new money for defense. The army would receive $450 million and the navy $65 million, with $10 million for the training of civilian air pilots. Two-thirds of the army’s share, or $300 million, would be used to purchase airplanes—there being, at this time, no separate air force. Roosevelt took pains to assert that preparation for war did not imply intention for war. His request for appropriations did not “remotely intimate” that he had “any thought” of engaging in another war on European soil, he said. Even so, prudence required preparing for the worst.

Roosevelt’s arms request was still pending when Hitler again bolstered the president’s argument for a stouter defense. In March 1939 the Nazi dictator decided that the Sudetenland wasn’t enough of Czechoslovakia for Germany and imposed a German protectorate over the Czech portions of the country. Some observers interpreted this step as more of the same bullying as before; others perceived a difference, in that for the first time Hitler was annexing non-German territories to the reich. Either way, the action belied Hitler’s Munich promise to aggress no more, and it put Europe and the world on notice that Germany’s appetite remained unsated.

Roosevelt and his advisers drew the same conclusion. “No one here has any illusions that the German Napoleonic machine will not extend itself almost indefinitely,” Adolf Berle remarked after meeting with the president and top officials of the State Department. Berle went on to describe the administration’s conundrum regarding Hitler.

1. Whatever we do, we shall have to go alone. Neither France nor Britain can be trusted; they are frightened and unfrank. This is particularly true of the British government.

2. Any move we make will be the first move in a constant irritating policy which will lead to a modified state of war.

3. In the event the European situation does explode, we are then in the war in any event.

4. There is no use merely irritating. Unless we are prepared to knock out the principal, I do not see that we gain much.

As he had before, Roosevelt let others in the administration take the lead in responding to Hitler’s latest outrage. The White House kept quiet while the State Department issued the administration’s formal protest. Yet even this came cloaked in generalities, mentioning neither Hitler nor Germany and touching but lightly on Czechoslovakia. “Acts of wanton lawlessness and of arbitrary force are threatening world peace and the very structure of modern civilization,” the State Department memo asserted.

Reporters naturally inquired whether Roosevelt had anything to add. Not on the specific subject of Czechoslovakia, he said. A newsman took his hint. “Mr. President,” he asked, “do you want a revision of the neutrality legislation this session?”

“Put the question a little differently,” Roosevelt prompted. “Do we need legislation on neutrality at this session? The answer is: Yes.” But he did not elaborate.

Roosevelt’s reluctance was politically calculated. In private he was getting “madder and madder,” Harold Ickes observed. The president ordered administrative measures—ones not requiring congressional approval—to punish Germany and prevent its benefiting from the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. He imposed new duties on imports from Germany and suspended special trade arrangements with Czechoslovakia lest Germany sneak its own exports into America under Czech labels.

In April Roosevelt took a bolder step than any he had attempted before. He sent simultaneous public messages to Hitler and Mussolini urging them to commit their governments to peaceful resolution of difficulties with other countries. “Hundreds of millions of human beings are living today in constant fear of a new war,” he said. Each week brought a new threat. “If such threats continue, it seems inevitable that much of the world must become involved in common ruin.” Recent events were especially ominous. “Three nations in Europe and one in Africa have seen their independent existence terminated. A vast territory in another independent nation of the Far East has been occupied by a neighboring state…. This situation must end in catastrophe unless a more rational way of guiding events is found.” The governments of Germany and Italy had repeatedly declared that they desired peace. If this was true, Germany and Italy shouldn’t object to making their desires specific. Roosevelt asked for promises that Germany and Italy would not attack other countries; he listed thirty-one by name. He offered to serve as an intermediary with those countries, which would be expected to offer reciprocal pledges of non-aggression. Once the process of guaranteeing got under way, the United States would undertake an additional leadership role in the realms of disarmament and freer trade—the former to ease the crushing burden of defense, the latter to ensure access of all countries to necessary supplies and markets.

Roosevelt explained that the American government offered these proposals “not through selfishness or fear or weakness.” It spoke, rather, from a sincere desire to spare the world new conflict. He hoped the governments of Germany and Italy would respond in kind. “Heads of great governments in this hour are literally responsible for the fate of humanity in the coming years…. History will hold them accountable.”

Roosevelt didn’t really expect a positive response. Words hadn’t halted Hitler and Mussolini before, and words probably wouldn’t halt them now. But he needed to speak out, if only for the record. The president concluded an Easter vacation in Georgia with a grim farewell. “My friends of Warm Springs,” he said, “I have had a fine holiday here with you all. I’ll be back in the fall if we do not have a war.”

Hitler reacted about as Roosevelt anticipated. The German dictator took the president’s message to the Reichstag and used it as a prop in another diatribe against the Versailles system and the iniquitous constraints it placed on German prosperity. “Mr. Roosevelt!” Hitler sneered. “The vastness of your nation and the immense wealth of your country allows you to feel responsible for the history of the whole world and for the history of all nations.” Germany had neither such luxury nor such pretensions. “In this state there are roughly 140 people to each square kilometer, not 15 as in America. The fertility of our country cannot be compared with that of yours. We lack numerous minerals which nature has placed at your disposal in unlimited quantities.” Hitler rejected as ridiculous Roosevelt’s assertion that the German government owed something to the world. “I cannot feel myself responsible for the fate of the world, as this world took no interest in the pitiful state of my own people. I have regarded myself as called upon by Providence to serve my own people alone and to deliver them from their frightful misery.”

WHILE FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT’S appeal to the fascist conscience of Germany and Italy was failing, Eleanor Roosevelt’s appeal to the democratic conscience of America fared better. During the same week of April 1939 that the president sent his message to Hitler and Mussolini, Marian Anderson sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and Eleanor Roosevelt was largely responsible.

For all his expressed concern for the downtrodden, Franklin Roosevelt had done little for African Americans as African Americans. To be sure, they enlisted in the CCC and took jobs with the PWA and WPA. And black farmers received benefits from the AAA, although because the crop-support payments went to landowners rather than tenants, and because blacks tended to be tenants, blacks received less from the agriculture agency than their numbers would have indicated. Yet Roosevelt left the most obvious source of black inequality—the Jim Crow system of segregation—untouched. The reason for his hands-off attitude was politically unassailable: southern Democrats would have revolted even more violently against the New Deal had it attacked segregation. Roosevelt judged that civil rights reform must await a more enlightened time and probably another administration.

Eleanor acknowledged fewer political constraints. She made a point of visiting black homes on her tours of the rural South, and she invited African American leaders to the White House to discuss methods of addressing black problems. Walter White, the head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, became a regular correspondent. White pointed out that NRA codes for the South typically included a lower wage for blacks than whites; Eleanor put White in touch with Donald Richberg, Hugh Johnson’s successor at the NRA. Though the wage differentials didn’t disappear, White and the NAACP discovered they had an ally in the White House.

But not the one they really wanted. A priority for African American leaders during the 1930s—as for decades—was a federal anti-lynching law. Eleanor arranged for White to discuss the measure with the president, and she prepared him by relating objections her husband had raised when she had brought up the bill over dinner. By the time White entered the president’s office, he was ready. “Joe Robinson tells me the bill is unconstitutional,” Roosevelt said. White adduced evidence suggesting that the Senate majority leader was wrong. Roosevelt offered another objection; White countered again. After a couple more thrusts and parries, the president grew annoyed. “Somebody’s been priming you,” he said. “Was it my wife?” White, not wishing to implicate Eleanor, kept still.

Roosevelt granted that justice might favor the anti-lynching law. But politics didn’t. “I did not choose the tools with which I must work,” he said. Southerners, by virtue of their seniority in Congress, controlled the most important committees in the House and Senate. “If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass…. I just can’t take the risk.”

Because he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, the anti-lynching bill failed. “I’m sorry about the bill,” Eleanor wrote White. “Of course, all of us are going on fighting, and the only thing we can do is hope we have better luck next time.”

Roosevelt often tolerated his wife’s political causes with indifference or even resigned humor, but he was genuinely irritated at the encouragement she had given White to press an issue that threatened real harm to the New Deal coalition. “Walter White for some time has been writing and telegraphing the President,” press secretary Steve Early wrote in a memo intended for Eleanor’s eyes. “Frankly, some of his messages to the President have been decidedly insulting.”

Eleanor fired back. She conceded that White perhaps had an obsession with lynching. But he had reason. “If I were colored,” she said, “I think I should have about the same obsession that he has.”

Roosevelt let the White matter drop—and Eleanor opened a new front in the civil rights campaign. She brought African American contralto Marian Anderson to the White House for a recital. The evening went splendidly; Anderson’s voice was in top form, and few persons thought twice about the politics of the matter.

But when Howard University tried to arrange a performance by Anderson at Constitution Hall, the reaction was decidedly different. Washington in the 1930s suffered from a lack of facilities for any large indoor event. The deficiency had become drenchingly obvious at Roosevelt’s second inauguration, prompting Harold Ickes to propose the construction of an auditorium to render such presidential heroics—or theatrics—unnecessary. “I pointed out that it was absurd that the capital of the richest country in the world should be the only one in any of the leading countries that lacked a proper public auditorium,” Ickes recalled. But no action had been taken, and Constitution Hall remained the largest venue. Yet it wasn’t a public space, being controlled by the Daughters of the American Revolution. The Daughters refused permission for the Anderson performance, despite regularly granting permission for white speakers and singers to use the hall.

The ban provoked complaints from groups and individuals more attuned to equal rights than the Daughters. Eleanor Roosevelt, a formerly proud Daughter, resigned in public protest. “The question is, if you belong to an organization and disapprove of an action which is typical of a policy, should you resign or is it better to work for a changed point of view within the organization?” she wrote in her column. In other cases of disagreement, she had often chosen to work from within. But now she couldn’t. The affront to equality was too great. “To remain as a member implies approval of that action, and therefore I am resigning.”

She didn’t leave it at that. She encouraged Walter White and Anderson’s manager, Sol Hurok, to approach Harold Ickes about a concert on government property. Ickes responded enthusiastically and took the matter to Roosevelt, who told him to go ahead. The concert was held on Easter Sunday afternoon. A special stage was constructed at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, on the side facing the Washington Monument. The crowd was estimated at seventy-five thousand, with blacks and whites represented about equally. They stretched far down either side of the reflecting pool, and loudspeakers projected Anderson’s voice for all to hear. The major radio networks broadcast the performance across the country.

Ickes introduced Anderson, giving the DAR the back of his hand. “There are those, even in this great capital of our democratic republic, who are either too timid or too indifferent to lift up the light that Jefferson and Lincoln carried aloft,” the interior secretary said. “In this great auditorium under the sky, all of us are free. When God gave us this wonderful outdoors, and the sun, the moon, and the stars, He made no distinction of race, creed, or color.”

Anderson commenced with “America,” in her own oblique riposte to the Daughters. She segued to a love aria from La Favorita and then “Ave Maria” by Schubert. “She sang with her eyes closed, effortlessly and without gestures, as enchantment settled on the notables up front and on the multitude out beyond,” the music critic of the Washington Post observed. Anderson concluded with four spirituals, culminating in “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” At the end of the performance the audience erupted into applause lasting several minutes and crowded toward Anderson with such excitement that she had to be hustled up into the memorial proper, to take shelter beside the Emancipator himself.

Eleanor stayed away, lest her presence further provoke the bigots and detract from the moment. But Walter White acknowledged her role. “Thanks in large measure to you,” the NAACP director declared, “the Marian Anderson concert on Sunday was one of the most thrilling experiences of our time.”

37.

UNDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES, ROOSEVELT WAS HAPPY FOR THE DISTRACTION. He was pressing for repeal of the neutrality law but wasn’t making much headway. Key Pittman, the Nevada Democrat who headed the Senate foreign relations committee, had introduced another revision of the law, eliminating the mandatory arms embargo and putting all foreign trade on a cash-and-carry footing. Roosevelt liked the former provision but not the latter. “While the cash-and-carry plan works all right in the Atlantic,” he said, “it works all wrong in the Pacific.” Britain and France had the money and ships to purchase and fetch American supplies, but China was short of both.

The isolationists stood firm. “Roosevelt wants to fight for any little thing,” a suspicious Hiram Johnson told his son, and the California Republican judged it the responsibility of Congress to see that the president couldn’t. The Senate foreign relations committee leaned toward easing the restrictions on the president, but when Pittman held hearings on the neutrality law, the testimony simply splintered the administration’s allies. “We have eighteen members present at this hearing, and so far we have eighteen bills,” Pittman told Roosevelt.

Roosevelt invited committee members to the White House, where he and Cordell Hull argued that an arms embargo would make war more likely by diminishing the usable influence of the United States. As a concession Roosevelt said he could tolerate a cash-and-carry amendment. He added—and indeed emphasized—that he had no intention of sending American troops to Europe in the event of a war there.

He resorted to extraneous inducements as well. Nevada’s Pittman had lobbied for the silver interests of his state almost since the Populist era; Roosevelt persuaded the Senate to boost silver subsidies. He took comparable care of other legislators.

When even this strategy failed, he brought the leaders of both parties in the Senate, along with Vice President Garner, back to the White House. “It was a desperate effort,” Hull acknowledged, “but both the President and I felt we had to make one last, supreme attempt to prevail on the Senate leaders to recognize fully and clearly the perils to our own nation that were just ahead if war should come to Europe.”

Roosevelt opened the meeting with criticism of Gerald Nye, the arch-isolationist, and suggested that if Nye could be circumvented the arms embargo might be lifted.

William Borah interrupted. “There are others, Mr. President,” the Idaho Republican asserted.

“What did you say, Senator Borah?” Roosevelt asked.

“There are others, Mr. President.” Borah asserted his own opposition to repeal of the embargo, and he said the president was exaggerating the likelihood of war in Europe.

Roosevelt turned to Hull. “Cordell, what do you think about the possibility of danger ahead?”

“If Senator Borah could only see some of the cables coming to the State Department about the extremely dangerous outlook in the international situation, I feel satisfied he would moderate his views.”

Borah snorted. “I have my own sources of information,” he said. “And on several occasions I’ve found them more reliable than the State Department.”

Hull grew hot. “Never in my experience had I found it nearly so difficult to restrain myself and refrain from a spontaneous explosion,” he recalled. “I knew from masses of official facts that piled high on one another at the State Department that Borah was everlastingly wrong.” He said almost as much to Borah’s face: “I scarcely know what to think about anything in the light of the complacent way Senator Borah has brushed aside the whole mass of facts we have at the State Department, which completely disprove his theory that there will be no war.”

Whether the others present agreed with Borah or with Hull on the danger of war, the senators backed Borah on the politics of neutrality. Roosevelt polled the group, and to a man they said the arms embargo could not be repealed. “Well, Captain,” Garner told Roosevelt, “we may as well face the facts. You haven’t got the votes, and that’s all there is to it.”

PERHAPS HIS DEFEAT on the arms embargo inclined the president to indulge himself at congressional expense when the opportunity arose. The same session of the legislature that refused to untie his hands on foreign policy provided him a minor victory on government reorganization—in particular by authorizing the establishment of an administrative office for the federal judiciary. Amid the thunder out of Europe and Asia and the fight for control of foreign policy, almost no one paid any attention to the measure. But Roosevelt did, and he made the country pay attention, too.

“Today, August 7, 1939, deserves special recognition,” the president declared upon signing the judiciary bill, “because it marks the final objective of the comprehensive proposal for judicial reorganization which I made to the Congress on February 5, 1937.” Other Democrats groaned that the president was reminding the country of the court-packing debacle, but Roosevelt, still stinging from that embarrassing defeat, insisted on raising it. And he insisted that it wasn’t a defeat after all. He reiterated several parts of the reform bill that had been lost in the furor over the issue of additional justices, and he congratulated himself for their successful incorporation in subsequent measures.

But these were the filler of his court-reorganization scheme, as everyone knew. The nut of the matter was the hostility of the Supreme Court to New Deal legislation. “Measures of social and economic reform were being impeded or defeated by narrow interpretations of the Constitution,” Roosevelt recalled, “and by the assumption on the part of the Supreme Court of legislative powers which properly belonged to the Congress.” On this point his victory was sweetest. “It is true that the precise method which I recommended, was not adopted, but the objective, as every person in the United States knows today, was achieved. The results are not even open to dispute.”

He was right. The Supreme Court’s reversals in the spring of 1937, upholding the constitutionality of the Wagner Act and other pro-labor legislation, had been followed by the retirement of Associate Justice Willis Van Devanter. Roosevelt nominated Alabama senator Hugo Black to replace the conservative Van Devanter, and although Black’s nomination evoked protests over his former membership in the Ku Klux Klan, his Senate connections and Roosevelt’s stature sufficed to win Black the approval of the upper house. Roosevelt got another nomination in 1938 and two more in 1939, by which time the court was more Roosevelt’s than Charles Evans Hughes’s. Conservatives admitted as much by their cries of complaint. Roosevelt relished the distress. “Attacks recently made on the Supreme Court itself by ultraconservative members of the bar indicate how fully our liberal ideas have already prevailed,” he said in his August 1939 signing statement. Speaking at a press conference the next day, he added: “I think it is very important to stress the fact that out of the seven objectives—and they are all very, very important objectives—six were obtained by legislation, and the seventh by the opinions and decisions of the Supreme Court itself.”

“A thousand per cent,” a reporter remarked. “It is a good batting average, Mr. President.”

Roosevelt nodded his head and smiled.

THE SAME REPORTER, Richard Harkness, asked what the president thought about the refusal of Congress to repeal the arms embargo. Roosevelt interrupted: “Don’t, for Heaven’s sake, say ‘The Congress,’ but a substantially unanimous Republican minority in both Houses, both the House and Senate, plus about twenty per cent, twenty-two per cent of the House and twenty-five per cent of the Senate.”

Roosevelt’s point, of course, was that the isolationists were a minority, albeit one that had managed to stymie the administration. He went on to assert another point. “They made a bet,” he said, referring to the isolationists’ prediction that there would not be a war in Europe.

They bet the nation, made a large wager with the nation, which may affect, if they lose it, about a billion and a half human beings. Now, that is pretty important. They have said, “There will be no war until sufficiently long after we come back in January so that we can take care of things after we come back.” I sincerely hope they are right. But if they are not right and we have another serious international crisis they have tied my hands, and I have practically no power to make an American effort to prevent such a war from breaking out. Now that is a pretty serious responsibility.

It grew more serious—very much more serious—within weeks. For two decades the principal enemy of the German National Socialists had been the German Communists and their ideological kin in other countries. The Communists had provided the foil for the Nazis, the specter they conjured to elicit the support of German industrialists and bankers. In time the German Communists—intimidated, assassinated, or incarcerated—lost credibility as a threat, and the Nazis turned to the Jews. But foreign Communists continued to stir the fascist blood, which flowed hot in the Spanish civil war. By the time the Spanish conflict ended, with a fascist victory in early 1937, the Nazis appeared primed to take on the Bolsheviks directly.

For their part the Bolsheviks—which was to say, the Communists of the Soviet Union—had tried to stiffen the spine of the democracies against the Nazis. Whatever Roosevelt’s intentions in offering recognition to the Soviet Union in 1933, Stalin had accepted the American president’s conditions in the hope, however vague and distant, of outflanking the Germans. That same year the Soviet government ratified a nonaggression treaty with France. In 1934, not long after Germany walked out of the League of Nations, the Soviet Union walked in, to enhance its international respectability and its prospects of linking up with the Western Europeans. In 1935 Stalin ordered the Comintern, the ostensibly independent but obviously subservient (to Moscow) international congress of Communist parties, to support the “Popular Front,” a tactical alliance of the Communist parties of the Western democracies with Socialists and other anti-fascist groups. In 1938 Stalin strove to steel the Western democracies against Hitler’s demands on Czechoslovakia, offering military assistance to the Czechs and lobbying for a seat at the table in Munich.

But the West rebuffed his overtures, accounting them as cynical as they certainly were. Yet cynical or not, they were more substantial than anything Czechoslovakia was getting from the West, and their rejection by the democracies caused Stalin to reconsider his strategy. The Popular Front failed to warm up the West, where many conservatives—among others—still spoke of communism as being a greater threat than fascism and openly endorsed a strategy of provoking a fight between the two authoritarian ideologies, the better to destroy both. Stalin’s cynicism took a new direction as he pondered an ideological truce with Hitler, perhaps embodied in a nonaggression pact.

Hitler found his own path to the same destination. The Nazi leader had never considered Poland’s borders any more legitimate than those of Czechoslovakia, in that the resurrected Polish state contained territory taken from the second German reich after the World War. The Polish Corridor, separating East Prussia from the rest of Germany, was an especial abomination. The plains of Poland meanwhile offered the “lebensraum,” or living space, for which Hitler had lusted since composing Mein Kampf in the early 1920s. Almost incessantly the Nazi government and its propaganda machine conducted a psychological war against the Poles. Yet Hitler reasonably assumed that any German military thrust into Poland would provoke a Soviet response, perhaps drawing Germany into a war it wasn’t ready to fight.

Hitler may or may not have been as cynical as Stalin, but he was at least as shrewd. He took note when Stalin fired his cosmopolitan (and Jewish) foreign minister, Maxim Litvinov, and replaced him with the provincial (and ethnic Russian) Vyacheslav Molotov. And he responded positively when, in August 1939, Stalin suggested the possibility of a nonaggression pact.

The deal was concluded in short order. On August 22 Berlin stunned the world by announcing that Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop would travel to Moscow to sign the agreement. Special editions of German papers carried the news, extolling as a masterstroke what would have been accounted treason just weeks before. Ribbentrop was the author of the 1937 Anti-Com-intern Pact, marrying Germany and Japan in everlasting enmity to the Soviet Union; now Ribbentrop was being feted in the very homeland of the Bolshevik beast.

“IT IS STILL too early to judge the implications of this new coup,” the New York Times remarked on the day of the announcement, echoing a sentiment shared by observers across the planet. “But one immediate significance revealed itself when German quarters spread the rumor that Herr Hitler was also determined to force a solution this week of the German-Polish conflict…. A German solution will be sought by diplomacy if possible; if not, by the German Army.”

Roosevelt did what he could to encourage the diplomatic solution. Hitler had never responded—other than in his scathing Reichstag speech—to the president’s letter of the previous April urging a promise of nonaggression against Germany’s neighbors. At a loss as to what else to do, Roosevelt wrote another letter. “I am again addressing myself to you with the hope that the war which impends, and the consequent disaster to all peoples everywhere, may yet be averted,” he told Hitler. Without presuming to judge between the claims of Germany and Poland, Roosevelt called upon the German government—and the Polish government: he wrote a similar letter to Poland’s president—to engage in direct negotiations, to submit their dispute to arbitration, or to appoint an impartial mediator. “I appeal to you in the name of the people of the United States, and I believe in the name of peace-loving men and women everywhere, to agree to the solution of the controversies existing between your government and that of Poland through the adoption of one of the alternative methods I have proposed.”

Poland predictably accepted Roosevelt’s offer. Hitler, equally predictably, ignored it. The dictator likewise brushed aside efforts by Britain and France for a diplomatic solution to the crisis. He delivered an ultimatum to the Polish government that, if accepted, would have dismembered the Polish state. But even this demand wasn’t serious, for rather than await a reply, he gave his army the order to march. On September 1, a million German troops poured east, and the second European war in a generation began.

“IT IS AN eerie experience walking through a darkened London,” Kathleen Kennedy wrote.

You literally feel your way, and with groping finger make sudden contact with a lamp post against which leans a steel-helmeted figure with his gas mask slung at his side. You cross the road in obedience to little green crosses winking in the murk above your head. You pause to watch the few cars, which with blackened lampsmove through the streets. With but a glimmer you trace their ghostly progress. You look, and see no more, the scintillating signs of Piccadilly and Leicester Square, the glittering announcements of smokes and soaps. Gone are the gaily-lit hotels and nightclubs; now in their place are somber buildings surrounded by sandbags. You wander through Kensington Garden in search of beauty and solitude and find only trenches and groups of ghostly figures working sound machines and searchlights to locate the enemy. Gone from the parks are the soapbox orators and the nightly strollers. But yet the moon shines through and one can see new beauties in the silent, deserted city of London. It is a new London, a London that looks like Barcelona before the bombs fell.

Kathleen Kennedy was the nineteen-year-old daughter of Joseph P. Kennedy, the American ambassador to Britain. Joe Kennedy was an odd choice for the post, being Irish by descent and a bootlegger and stock market speculator by profession. His Irish blood inclined him to think ill of the British, while his bootlegging and speculation caused many respectable Democrats to think ill of him. But he had opened his wallet to Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 and was rewarded with appointment as founding chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. More than a few observers wondered that Roosevelt had set this fox to guard the henhouse, but the appointment paid off with high marks for both Kennedy and the SEC. Kennedy endeared himself further to Roosevelt by taking on Father Coughlin and demonstrating that the radio priest didn’t command the allegiance of all American Catholics. Kennedy revealed a soft spot for fascism during the Spanish civil war, when he reminded Roosevelt that American Catholics wanted no truck with the Communist-backed Loyalists. Roosevelt didn’t want to intervene in Spain, either, although for different reasons, and in 1938 he sent Kennedy to London as American ambassador.

The Court of St. James’s was the stuffiest assignment for any American diplomat, and it gratified Roosevelt’s sense of humor to think of Kennedy causing the toffs to choke on their toddies. Yet Kennedy got on famously with the government of Neville Chamberlain, in fact becoming the prime minister’s staunchest defender against those who criticized his policy of appeasement. And when the policy apparently failed—when the war began in 1939—he continued to defend it, saying that it hadn’t failed at all but bought Britain precious time. “It is a terrible thing to contemplate,” he wrote in his diary on September 3, the day Britain and France declared war on Germany for its invasion of Poland, “but the war will prove to the world what a great service Chamberlain did to the world and especially for Britain.” If the prime minister had let Hitler start a war at the time of the Munich conference, Kennedy said, he would not have had public opinion behind him. “A great many people in England and especially in the dominions were not at all convinced that Hitler’s demands on Sudetenland were not fairly reasonable.” Moreover, Britain might have had to go to war alone, as France wasn’t eager to fight. Finally, Britain had been utterly unready for war. “England’s condition to meet an air raid attack was almost pathetic. They couldn’t have licked a good police force attack in the air. Anti-aircraft guns and organization was pathetic. The Germans would have come over and slaughtered the people.”

England’s anti-aircraft capacity still left much to be desired, which was why Kathleen Kennedy and her siblings had to stumble about in the dark of blacked-out London. “Joe returned from an exploring trip with a very swollen, black eye,” she wrote of her eldest brother. “No one believed his story of walking into a lamp post until we read in the next morning’s paper of hundreds bumping into trees, falling on the curb, and being hit by autos with such results as broken legs, fractures, even death. Thus now one hears tap, tap, tap, not of machine guns but of umbrellas and canes as Londoners feel their way homeward.”

Kathleen’s comments were for herself and her family; her father’s were for Roosevelt. “High Government officials are depressed beyond words that it has become necessary for the United States to revert to its old Neutrality Law,” the ambassador wrote. Chamberlain and the others wanted the opportunity to purchase American equipment, on a cash-and-carry basis. But they felt Washington was letting them down. “America has talked a lot about her sympathies but, when called on for action, has only given assistance to Britain’s enemies.” All the same, London would continue to look to Washington and would lay plans accordingly. “The English are going to think of every way of maintaining favorable public opinion in the United States, figuring that sooner or later they can obtain real help from America.”

Kennedy warned against trusting Britain’s capacity to tend to anything but its self-interest, however sweet its words might be. “As long as we are out of the war and the possibility is still present that we might ever come in, England will be as considerate as she can not to upset us too much. Because of course she wants to drag us in.” Kennedy related a story from his days in business. Charles Schwab, the steel man, had told him during the First World War that labor always seemed to get the better of negotiations with management. “I asked him why, and he said, ‘Joe, because that’s their problem 365 days of the year.’” The British were in a similar position with respect to the United States, Kennedy told Roosevelt. “It is their problem now twenty-four hours a day.”

ROOSEVELT RARELY confined himself to a single view on any subject, and for a counterpoint to Kennedy’s warnings about Britain he cultivated the current incarnation of John Bull himself. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill had communicated only once since their 1918 encounter, and only in one direction. In 1933 Churchill sent Roosevelt a copy of his biography of Marlborough—a Churchill ancestor—containing an inscription endorsing the New Deal: “With earnest best wishes for the success of the greatest crusade of modern times.” This sentiment might have read oddly, coming from a Tory, but Churchill’s politics were unpredictable on various subjects other than the British empire, which he defended with unwavering determination. Churchill had been railing against Hitler for years and decrying the appeasement policies of Chamberlain only slightly less long; as those policies came a cropper with the German invasion of Poland, Churchill appeared a possible, even likely, successor to Chamberlain. The prime minister felt obliged to bring Churchill into the cabinet, as First Lord of the Admiralty, a position he had held during the First World War.

Churchill’s appointment provided Roosevelt a pretext for striking up a correspondence. “It is because you and I occupied similar positions in the World War that I want you to know how glad I am that you are back again in the Admiralty,” Roosevelt wrote Churchill on September 11, 1939. “Your problems are, I realize, complicated by new factors, but the essential is not very different…. I shall at all times welcome it if you will keep me in touch personally with anything you want me to know about.” The president invited Churchill to bypass the normal channels of the American State Department and the British Foreign Office. “You can always send sealed letters through your pouch or my pouch.” (Lest this invitation cause trouble with Chamberlain, Roosevelt wrote the prime minister on the same day: “I hope you will at all times feel free to write me personally and outside of diplomatic procedure about any problems as they arise.”)

Roosevelt’s letter to Churchill arrived in early October, the mails having been slowed by the outbreak of the war and the concern it raised for the security of shipping. Churchill responded almost at once with a telephone call taking Roosevelt at his word that he would welcome personal exchanges. The American naval attaché in Berlin had been informed by a German admiral that the British were planning to blow up an American passenger ship, the Iroquois, sailing from Ireland to America with more than five hundred Americans evacuating the war zone and to try to pin responsibility on the Germans. The attaché reported the information to Washington, where the administration queried British officials, who naturally threw the blame—for disinformation—back on the Germans. Churchill raised the subject in his telephone conversation with Roosevelt. He warned the president that the Germans might be intending to destroy the ship themselves and blame the British. The danger from submarines was nonexistent in the part of the Atlantic the Iroquois had reached. “The only method can be a time-bomb planted at Queenstown,” Churchill said. “We think this not inconceivable.” Churchill went on to urge Roosevelt to publicize the German deception. “Full exposure” of all the facts known to the American government, he said, was the “only way of frustrating the plot.” Action was “urgent.”

Roosevelt realized that Churchill had his own agenda in speaking as he did. Publicity was by no means the only way of frustrating the German plot, if indeed there was a plot. A search of the Iroquois would do quite well and would be necessary in any event. But Roosevelt followed Churchill’s advice in publicizing the threat. The inconclusiveness of the intelligence left many newspaper readers puzzled but nonetheless made the point the president most wanted made: that the European war posed a danger to Americans.

THE TIMING WAS crucial, for Roosevelt was in the thick of a battle of his own, to repeal the arms embargo. He had observed the final descent to war with a feeling of helpless irresponsibility. At a news conference just hours after the German troops invaded Poland, he began to redeem the credit he had accumulated with the press during the previous six years. He explained how he had learned of the invasion just before three o’clock that morning and how William Hassett, his assistant, had immediately informed the press associations. “I do not believe at this particular time of this very critical period in the world’s history,” he added, “that there is anything which I can say, except to ask for full cooperation of the press throughout the country in sticking as closely as possible to facts. Of course that will be the best thing for our own nation, and, I think, for civilization.” Roosevelt noted that rumors often flew faster than facts during moments of crisis. He urged the reporters to take care before repeating whatever they had heard. “It is a very simple thing to check either with the State Department, or any other department concerned, or with the White House.” He provided a current example. “The secretary of state called me up about fifteen minutes ago, before I came over here, and said there was a report out—I do not know whether it was printed or not, but if it was printed it would be a pity—that we had sent out a general order for all American merchant ships to return to American ports.” The report was not true, and it wasn’t especially damaging. But it did sow confusion and in some cases alarm. Roosevelt added, “I do not think there is anything else I can tell you about that you do not know already.” Yet he agreed to answer questions.

“I think probably what is uppermost in the minds of all the American people today is, ‘Can we stay out?’” a reporter asked. “Would you like to make any comment at this time on that situation?”

“Only this, that I not only sincerely hope so, but I believe we can; and that every effort will be made by the administration so to do.”

“May we make that a direct quote?”

“Yes.”

The president reiterated his position when he took to the airwaves two days later, after Britain and France had declared war on Germany. In one of his most succinct Fireside Chats, Roosevelt explained that until that very morning he had “hoped against hope that some miracle would prevent a devastating war in Europe and bring to an end the invasion of Poland by Germany.” But such was not to be. He reminded his listeners of his efforts to preserve the peace. And he affirmed that he was as determined as ever to keep the United States at peace. “Let no man or woman thoughtlessly or falsely talk of America sending its armies to European fields. At this moment there is being prepared a proclamation of American neutrality. This would have been done even if there had been no neutrality statute on the books, for this proclamation is in accordance with international law and in accordance with American policy.”

All the same, Americans must recognize the danger to their country.

You must master at the outset a simple but unalterable fact in modern foreign relations between nations. When peace has been broken anywhere, the peace of all countries everywhere is in danger. It is easy for you and for me to shrug our shoulders and to say that conflicts taking place thousands of miles from the continental United States, and, indeed, thousands of miles from the whole American hemisphere, do not seriously affect the Americas—and that all the United States has to do is to ignore them and go about its own business. Passionately though we may desire detachment, we are forced to realize that every word that comes through the air, every ship that sails the sea, every battle that is fought, does affect the American future.

For this reason, the kind of neutrality Roosevelt proclaimed was not the sort Wilson had requested a generation earlier. “This nation will remain a neutral nation, 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.”

AFTER THE STRUGGLE with Congress that summer, there was no doubt that Roosevelt would invoke the arms embargo, which he did on September 5, in accord with the neutrality law of 1937. And after his statement to the American people, there was no doubt he would try to persuade Congress to revise the neutrality law and repeal the arms embargo. “I hope and believe that we shall repeal the embargo within the next month,” Roosevelt wrote Neville Chamberlain.

The president called a special session of Congress, and when the lawmakers convened on September 21 a message from Roosevelt awaited them. Special sessions devoted to foreign affairs were rare in American history, convened primarily when a president asked for a declaration of war. Roosevelt assured the legislators, and the American people, that nothing could be farther from his mind. The question was: how to stay out of war? The president reminded the lawmakers that he had asked them to repeal the arms embargo only three months earlier, and they had refused. He reminded them that he had been warning of just such an outbreak of war as had recently occurred. He reminded them that he had said that a legislatively mandated neutrality might have an unneutral effect and thereby facilitate aggression. He reminded them that America’s historic neutrality had been a matter of executive policy rather than legislative mandate.

This historic position, he said, should be the goal, at least with respect to weapons. Congress should repeal the embargo provisions of the 1937 act. “They are, in my opinion, most vitally dangerous to American neutrality, American security and, above all, American peace.” The embargo blindly failed to distinguish between aggressors and their victims, encouraging the former and preventing the latter from purchasing the requisites of their defense. Roosevelt allowed that certain parts of the neutrality law might remain as currently written or even be strengthened. American ships might be barred from traveling in war zones. American citizens might be prevented from sailing on belligerent ships. Foreign purchases might be required to be cash-and-carry. He would leave to Congress how to handle such provisions.

But the arms embargo must be repealed. The critics would contend, as they had contended for years, that repeal would move the United States closer to war. They were as wrong now as they had always been. “It offers far greater safeguards than we now possess or have ever possessed, to protect American lives and property from danger. It is a positive program for giving safety…. There lies the road to peace!”

The isolationists disagreed, but the outbreak of the war, after Borah and the others had dismissed the prospect, enhanced Roosevelt’s reputation for diplomatic prescience and put the isolationists on the defensive. Public opinion swung to the president’s side. A Gallup poll showed a solid majority of Americans supporting repeal of the arms embargo; the only group opposing repeal, and that by a small margin, was German-born immigrants.

The Gallup poll showed something else. While 95 percent of respondents wanted the United States to stay out of the war, 84 percent wanted Britain and France to defeat Germany. “In other words,” George Gallup explained, “the surveys point unmistakably to the fact that the present debate over changing the neutrality act—both in Congress and throughout the country—cannot be regarded as solely a debate on ‘pure’ neutrality. To a great many Americans the issue is simply one of helping England and France, without going to war ourselves.”

The isolationists dug in. They held rallies in several cities, demanding genuine neutrality and excoriating Roosevelt and the British and French for endangering it. Charles Lindbergh, the isolationists’ celebrity, claimed to be even-handed between the belligerents, but his language echoed themes being trumpeted by the Nazis. America’s link to Europe, Lindbergh said, was “a bond of race and not of political ideology.” The aviator explained: “It is the European race we must preserve; political progress will follow. 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 in its protection, to fight side by side with the English, French and Germans, but not with one against the other for our mutual destruction.” Lindbergh was willing to accept a modification of the arms embargo suggested by Herbert Hoover, one allowing the sale of defensive weapons but forbidding the export of offensive arms. “For the benefit of Western civilization we should continue our embargo on offensive armaments,” Lindbergh declared.

Roosevelt recognized that he had the isolationists at a disadvantage on the arms embargo. And having said his piece, he brought forward other advocates of repeal. The White House produced military experts who dismissed the distinction between offensive and defensive weapons. Fighter planes could shoot down enemy bombers, they said, but they could also support advancing tanks. Even bombers could be defensive if used against an invading army or to preempt an air attack.

As the isolationists grew desperate, they lashed out at Roosevelt more vehemently than ever. One isolationist senator, Democrat Joel Bennett Clark of Missouri, reported that the president had attended an Episcopal service at which the priest asked God to preserve King George of England against his enemies. “I certainly do not want to impose the duty on the president of the United States of getting up and walking out of the church during the prayer,” Clark said, perhaps not reflecting on Roosevelt’s difficulty in walking under any circumstances. “But the news of it went out to the civilized world; and, after the incident, to have the president have his picture taken with the pastor, glancing at this prayer book which had been presented by the King and Queen, does not add anything to our general reputation for impartiality and neutrality.” Several isolationists predicted that the campaign for embargo repeal was the opening round of the 1940 presidential campaign. Whether or not the United States actually went to war, Roosevelt would cast himself as commander in chief and urge Americans not to change leaders amid a crisis.

The isolationists realized they were fighting a losing battle. “You can’t lick a steamroller,” Charles W. Tobey, a Republican senator from New Hampshire, lamented. On the decisive votes, Roosevelt prevailed by wide margins: 63 to 30 in the Senate, 243 to 181 in the House. The president reiterated that the measure was intended to preserve America’s peace, not threaten it. “I am very glad that the bill has restored the historic position of the neutrality of the United States,” he said.

ROOSEVELT’S VICTORY brought joy to Britain. “The repeal of the arms embargo, which has been so anxiously awaited in this country, is not only an assurance that we and our French Allies may draw on the great reservoir of American resources,” Neville Chamberlain wrote Roosevelt. “It is also a profound moral encouragement to us in the struggle in which we are engaged…. I am convinced that it will have a devastating effect on German morale.”

Repeal brought joy to particular groups in America as well. The same edition of the New York Times that bannered the congressional turnaround tucked a two-inch article on an inside page. “Los Angeles aircraft manufacturers looked forward tonight to the greatest boom in the history of their industry as a result of the arms embargo repeal,” the paper’s California correspondent noted. “Douglas, Lockheed and North American, the principal factories here, hold more than $110,000,000 worth of foreign and domestic orders, and expect them to be doubled.”

At the time the war in Europe began, the depression in America was nearly a decade old. Nine million men and women remained unemployed, and the nation’s output was still below its 1929 level. Thousands of factories were idle or half staffed; mines produced at far below capacity; ships, barges, and trains begged for traffic. The arms embargo hadn’t figured centrally in stifling growth, but its lifting, combined with the anticipated demand by the American military for armaments, brought new hope to American heavy industry. The aircraft sector responded first, from an expectation that this war, to a greater degree than any before, would be fought in and from the skies. Yet if the war lasted, everything associated with fighting—trucks, tanks, ships, rifles, bullets, boots, blankets, uniforms, foodstuffs—would be in tremendous demand. Such was the lesson, at any rate, of the First World War, which had set the American economy humming. Such was the hope of American manufacturers, American workers, and American farmers as the war in Europe commenced.

Roosevelt encouraged the hope, which had double meaning for him. Precisely when he determined to try for a third term is unclear. He never revealed his thinking on the subject. Perhaps there was no single moment of decision. Perhaps the possibility of doing what no other president had done took shape in his unconscious mind and emerged only slowly in his consciousness. But at some level, unconscious or otherwise, he weighed his options and their relative merits. To retire would free him of the strain of executive responsibility. Four years as governor and eight years as president made for a long time in charge. His personal constitution seemed to be standing the strain fairly well, but the machinery would start creaking sooner or later.

But what would he retire to? His memoirs, perhaps, which doubtless would earn him a sizable advance and allow him to bolster the family finances. Yet he had never written more than twenty pages in his life. His stamp collection? That was a mindless diversion from work, not anything to pursue for its own sake. The Warm Springs Foundation? It was thriving without him. To a genteel life at Hyde Park? There he would be back under his mother’s roof and his mother’s attempted domination. Sara was grudgingly pleased that he had become president, but she wasn’t inordinately impressed. And Hyde Park was her home before it was his. He had gone into politics partly to get away from Sara, and he had returned to politics after polio to stay away from her. He would be fifty-nine a week and a half after leaving the White House in 1941, if he did leave then. The thought of moving back in with his mother scarcely inspired him.

Neither did the thought of retiring to a life with Eleanor. The life they currently shared revolved almost entirely around politics. The children were adults and had lives of their own. The rationale of holding the marriage together for their sake had vanished. They had given Franklin and Eleanor several grandchildren, but even persons far more devoted to domesticity than Franklin and Eleanor didn’t find grandchildren sufficient grounds for sustaining a loveless marriage.

The love indeed had gone out of the marriage. A certain fondness survived—a remnant warmth resulting from long familiarity, shared experiences, and similar values. But if Eleanor’s thoughts tarried more than briefly on her husband’s happiness—or his unhappiness, his frustration, his satisfaction, his fear, his anger—she didn’t reveal them to him. And if he wondered, in his odd idle moment, how she was faring—or even where she was, on those very many days when she wasn’t in Washington—he didn’t let on.

Retire? As at so many other junctures in his career, Roosevelt looked to Uncle Ted—and what he saw disposed him to remain in the arena. Theodore hadn’t known what to do with himself after the presidency. He frantically slaughtered the wildlife of the African veld on a year-long safari, but even the blood of the lions and elephants hadn’t slaked his ambition, and he returned to politics, only to be rebuffed by the party he had led. He again sought release in physical action: an ill-conceived expedition to the darkest heart of the Amazon. He nearly died, and the experience ruined his health permanently. He became a bitter partisan, reviling Wilson in language he would have considered seditious had the attacks been leveled against him when he was president. Franklin’s personality differed from Theodore’s, and Franklin knew it. But the Rough Rider’s final decade didn’t speak well for voluntary retirement from the presidency.

Nor did the experience of other recent presidents. In Franklin’s adulthood, only Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, and Coolidge left the White House other than by death or defeat. Wilson was broken in health and spirit during his last eighteen months in office, and he never recovered. Coolidge’s retirement was graceful enough, but Roosevelt didn’t consider Silent Cal a role model for much of anything. Besides, even the quiet confines of rural Vermont proved more than Coolidge could handle; he expired before the term he chose not to run for did.

There was another reason not to retire. Although Roosevelt lacked the organized understanding of history possessed by Uncle Ted, he knew what made for greatness in American history, if only because he had seen how the same knowledge in Theodore had eaten away at the Colonel’s soul during the First World War. Theodore knew—and Franklin learned—that presidential greatness required rising to a historic challenge. George Washington was accounted great for leading America to independence in the Revolutionary War. Abraham Lincoln was reckoned great for having held the country together during the Civil War. The war that broke out in Europe in 1914 had presented Wilson with the opportunity for comparable greatness. Theodore Roosevelt recognized this, and the recognition, combined with the knowledge that he, not Wilson, would have been the one to benefit from the opportunity had the Republican nomination in 1912 not been stolen by the Taft forces, rankled him mercilessly. The fact that Wilson, at war’s end, fumbled the opportunity rankled him the more.

Franklin Roosevelt knew the story well, having observed it from the unique position of being at once inside the Wilson administration and inside the Roosevelt family. And he understood that the war that was now beginning in Europe afforded him an opportunity at least comparable to what Theodore had coveted and Wilson mishandled. He himself had had one historic opportunity to rise to greatness—and he had fallen short. In public he was politician enough to proclaim the successes of the New Deal in treating the symptoms of the Great Depression; in private he was honest enough to recognize the New Deal’s central failure—to end the depression itself.

But now fate threw him another opportunity, one that might allow him to remedy his failure even as it gave him the chance to write his name in bold letters across the history of the world. Whether as peacemaker or warmaker, the American president at this moment of crisis would hold the balance of global power in his hands. The United States had tipped the balance in the First World War but then retreated from responsibility for the result. It could tip the balance again—and it certainly would, if Franklin Roosevelt was in command. The stakes were higher than ever. Not merely Europe but Asia was at risk. And the challenge was more profound than ever. Fascism threatened the very existence of democracy. The freedoms on which America had been established might survive or they might be extinguished. Whether it was the one or the other could well rest with the man who held the American presidency during the next few years. A side effect of the fighting abroad would almost certainly be the recovery of the American economy. Whoever was president at the time would get the credit.

Such a chance at greatness had been given to no president in American history. It was an opportunity the like of which few persons in the long course of human history had ever faced.

Retire? Hardly.

38.

“HITLER IS TALLER THAN I JUDGED FROM HIS PHOTOGRAPHS,” SUMNER Welles wrote Roosevelt from Berlin.

He has, in real life, none of the somewhat effeminate appearance of which he has been accused. He looked in excellent physical condition and in good training. His color was good, and while his eyes were tired, they were clear. He was dignified both in speech and movement, and there was not the slightest impression of the comic effect from moustache and hair which one sees in his caricatures. His voice in conversation is low and well modulated. It had only once, in our hour and a half ’s conversation, the raucous stridency which is heard in his speeches—and it was only at that moment that his features lost their composure and that his eyes lost their decidedly “gemütlich” look. He spoke with clarity and precision, and always in a beautiful German, of which I could follow every word, although Dr. Schmidt of course interpreted, at times inaccurately.

Roosevelt had sent Welles to Germany to size up Hitler and the Nazi leadership. The undersecretary of state’s public charge was to listen and observe. “This visit is solely for the purpose of advising the President and the Secretary of State as to present conditions in Europe,” Roosevelt told the press in February 1940. “Mr. Welles will, of course, be authorized to make no proposals or commitments in the name of the Government of the United States.” Privately Roosevelt authorized Welles to go further: to see if the good offices of the American president might induce the Germans to call off their war before engaging Britain and France directly. The odds appeared slim; Hitler could not step back without losing face. But it was worth a try. If it worked, it would be a brilliant stroke, benefiting millions of Europeans, saving the United States from possible involvement in the conflict, and almost certainly bringing a second Nobel Peace Prize to the Roosevelt family.

The president’s efforts to downplay the Welles mission failed; the undersecretary’s approach aroused “the greatest interest in the highest government circles here,” according to the American chargé d’affaires in Berlin, Alexander Kirk. German leaders had no illusions that Welles was simply gathering facts; they assumed he was attempting, on Roosevelt’s behalf, to compel Germany to abandon the causes that had guided its policies for the last three years. They determined to resist anything of the kind.

“The Minister received me at the door, glacially and without the semblance of a smile or a word of greeting,” Welles wrote Roosevelt after a session with Foreign Minister Ribbentrop. “I expressed my pleasure at being afforded the opportunity of talking with him, and spoke in English, since I knew that he spoke English fluently, having passed, as a wine salesman, several years in England, and four years in the United States and Canada. The Minister looked at me icily and barked at the famous Dr. Schmidt, the official interpreter, who stood behind him: ‘Interpret.’”

Welles explained that President Roosevelt had authorized him “to ascertain whether there existed a possibility of the establishment of a sound and permanent peace in Europe.” The American government was not interested in anything temporary or precarious. Whatever the foreign minister cared to disclose would be for the president’s ears only.

“Ribbentrop then commenced to speak and never stopped, except to request the interpreter from time to time to translate the preceding portion of his discourse, for more than two hours,” Welles wrote Roosevelt. “The Minister, who is a good-looking man of some fifty years with notably haggard features and grey hair, sat with his arms extended on the sides of his chair and his eyes continuously closed. He evidently envisioned himself as the Delphic Oracle.” The sum of the oracle’s message was that Germany had no quarrel with the United States and that no aspect of its foreign policy impinged on America’s legitimate interests. The hostile attitude the Roosevelt administration had adopted toward Germany came therefore as a mystery to German leaders, himself included. “He could only assume that lying propaganda had had a preponderant influence.”

In his account to Roosevelt, Welles said he had felt obliged to hold his tongue and not respond to Ribbentrop. “He was so obviously aggressive, so evidently laboring under a violent mental and emotional strain, that it seemed to me probable that if I replied at this juncture with what I intended to say, violent polemics would presumably ensue.”

Ribbentrop didn’t require the encouragement. He angrily lectured Welles on the course of Germany’s European diplomacy, explaining how the Führer had sought good relations, particularly with England, but had been rebuffed. “Time and again England had not only repulsed his overtures with scorn—and the German word ‘Hohn’ came out like the hiss of a snake—but had with craft and guile done her utmost to prevent the German people from once more assuming their rightful place in the family of nations.” The English had provoked the current war by goading the Polish government to unreasonable demands. The German government knew this for a fact. “It had incontrovertible proof that England had incited the Poles to determine upon war against Germany,” Welles reported Ribbentrop as saying. “And it had incontrovertible proof that statesmen of countries not in the slightest degree connected with the issues involved had urged the Polish government to make no concession of any nature to Germany.

“Here the Minister paused and looked pointedly at me,” Welles recounted. Ribbentrop seemed to be adding the United States to the list of agents provocateurs. Welles said nothing.

German patience had been pressed to the limit, Ribbentrop continued. “The Poles had undertaken every kind of cruel repression against the German minority in Poland.” The torture and the mutilation inflicted on the Germans were “unbelievable.” The foreign minister offered to provide Welles with photographic and documentary evidence. “Finally Germany, to protect Germans in Poland, and as means of self-defense against Polish mobilization, had been forced to take military action.” At which point, for no good reason, England and France had declared war on Germany. “Germany would not have declared war on England and France,” Ribbentrop asserted.

Looking to the future, the foreign minister described Germany’s goals. “Germany wished for nothing more in Europe than what the United States possessed through the Monroe Doctrine in the Western Hemisphere. As a great power she was entitled to the safeguarding of her vital interests.” Ribbentrop referred to his time in the United States and said he understood that Americans felt—“quite legitimately”—that the Monroe Doctrine was essential to American security. Accordingly they should understand why Germans felt similarly about their own sphere of interest.

Germany would defend its interests against those who had declared war against it. “Germany was strong and completely confident of victory. She had immense military superiority, and from her eastern and southern neighbors she could obtain the raw materials she required.” The German government and people were prepared for a long war, but they believed it would be a short one. The American undersecretary had come to learn of Germany’s peace terms. They were simple. The “will on the part of England to destroy Germany” must be “killed once and for all.” Unfortunately, there appeared to be no shortcut to that end. “I see no way in which that can be accomplished,” Ribbentrop concluded, “except through Germany victory.”

The diatribe left Welles exhausted and discouraged. “Ribbentrop has a completely closed mind,” the undersecretary wrote Roosevelt. “It struck me as also a very stupid mind…. He is clearly without background in international affairs, and he was guilty of a hundred inaccuracies in his presentation of German policy during recent years.” Welles mentally tried to wash himself of Ribbentrop’s venom as he left the meeting. “I have rarely seen a man I disliked more,” he told the president.

HITLER, BY COMPARISON, was a sweetheart, at any rate in personal style and tone. Roosevelt valued Welles’s report on Ribbentrop as revealing the mindset of the Nazis generally, but the president really wanted to know about Hitler. Not since Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo had a single person held such power of life and death over Europe. If Hitler wanted a continent-wide war, that war would ensue. If he did not, it wouldn’t. Roosevelt needed to know what Hitler wanted, and Welles’s job was to find out.

The exterior of the building that housed the chancellor’s office looked like a factory. “My car drove into a rectangular court with very high blank walls,” Welles wrote Roosevelt. “At one end was a flight of broad steps leading into the Chancery. Monumental black nudes flanked the portico to which the steps led. The whole impression of the court was reminiscent of nothing other than a prison courtyard.” A company of soldiers gave the Nazi salute as Welles passed. The head of the chancery, Otto Meissner, greeted Welles cordially. The two waited as others entered the building. “We then formed a procession of some twenty couples headed by Meissner and myself, and with very slow and measured tread first traversed a tremendously long red marble hall, of which the walls and floor are both of marble; then up a flight of excessively slippery red marble steps into a gallery which, also of red marble, has windows on one side and tapestries on the other. The gallery is lined on the tapestry side by an interminable series of sofas, each with a table and four chairs in front of them.” Off the gallery was a series of drawing rooms; in one of these Welles waited the few minutes until Hitler was ready to receive him.

The chancellor invited Welles to sit beside him and nodded to the undersecretary to speak. Welles reiterated that he came with no proposals. But he went on—“in as eloquent terms as I could command”—that President Roosevelt yet hoped that there might be a basis for a “stable, just, and lasting peace.” If statesmanship failed, a “war of annihilation” would ensue. “From such a war as that, who would be the victors?…Not only would the belligerents be the losers, but also the neutrals, of which the United States was the most powerful. We as a people now realized fully that such a war must inevitably have the gravest repercussions upon almost every aspect of our national structure.”

Hitler answered “very quietly and moderately,” Welles related to Roosevelt. But the substance of his response was identical to that of Ribbentrop. He taxed Britain and France for trying to prevent Germany from achieving its rightful place among nations, for provoking the Poles to make unreasonable demands on Germany, and for declaring war on Germany without justification. He asserted that Germany needed resources from beyond its borders simply to survive. He reminded Welles that Germany had existed as an empire half a millennium before Columbus discovered the New World. The German people “had every right to demand that their historical position of a thousand years should be restored to them.”

Hitler warned against thinking that a change of government would alter Germany’s policies. “I am fully aware that the allied powers believe that a distinction can be made between National Socialism and the German people,” he told Welles, speaking simultaneously to Roosevelt.

There was never a greater mistake. The German people today are united as one man, and I have the support of every German. I can see no hope for the establishment of any lasting peace until the will of England and France to destroy Germany is itself destroyed. I fear that there is no way by which the will to destroy Germany can be itself destroyed, except through a German victory. I believe that German might is such as to ensure the triumph of Germany, but if not, we will all go down together.

Welles tried not to appear shaken by this apocalyptic statement. He replied that it was the belief of the American government that the nations of Europe could find grounds for a stable and lasting peace and that no nation, let alone all of them, would have to “go down.”

“Hitler looked at me,” Welles wrote Roosevelt, “and remained quiet for a moment or two. He then said, ‘I appreciate your sincerity and that of your Government, and I am grateful for your mission. I can assure you that Germany’s aim, whether it must come through war or otherwise, is a just peace.’ I replied by saying that I would remember the phrase the Chancellor had used.”

WELLES’S REPORTS WERE as close as Roosevelt ever got to Hitler, and the experience was sobering. Whether the German dictator was a madman was difficult to say, but he certainly was determined. He would have his continental war—Roosevelt essentially abandoned what slim hopes he had entertained of preventing it—and Europe would be put on the rack again.

The agony started in earnest in the spring of 1940. The eerie quiet that had followed the conquest of Poland was abruptly broken in April when Hitler ordered his armies into Norway and Denmark. Next came a German invasion of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, followed in turn by the main event of the fighting season: an all-out assault on France.

“The scene has darkened swiftly,” Winston Churchill wrote Roosevelt on May 15. Churchill had just become prime minister, replacing Chamberlain, whose appeasement policy was being torn to shreds by the German panzer divisions. Churchill was by no means the favorite of the Conservative party regulars, but, like Theodore Roosevelt among America’s Republicans a generation earlier, he was too popular to be denied.

Churchill had prepared for the premiership by, among other tactics, cultivating Roosevelt. For months he had sent the president detailed accounts of the naval battles between the Royal Navy and the German fleet. Roosevelt responded as Churchill’s informants, knowing the American president’s passion for the sea, suggested he would. “Ever so many thanks for that tremendously interesting account of the extraordinarily well-fought action of your three cruisers,” Roosevelt wrote upon receiving one such report. “I wish much that I could talk things over with you in person—but I am grateful to you for keeping me in touch, as you do.”

Churchill intended that the personal connection deepen. “Although I have changed my office,” he wrote Roosevelt, “I am sure you would not wish me to discontinue our intimate, private correspondence.” With the Germans overrunning the Low Countries and thrusting into France, the prime minister described the Allies’ predicament and their hopes for American help.

The enemy have a marked preponderance in the air, and their new technique is making a deep impression upon the French. I think myself the battle on land has only just begun…. The small countries are simply smashed up, one by one, like matchwood…. We expect to be attacked here ourselves, both from the air and by parachute and airborne troops in the near future, and are getting ready for them. If necessary, we shall continue the war alone, and we are not afraid of that.

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. You may have a completely subjugated, Nazified Europe established with astonishing swiftness, and the weight may be more than we can bear.

Churchill asked Roosevelt to modify the American position from neutrality to “nonbelligerency,” by which he meant the United States would become an ally in all but actual fighting. He pleaded for warships, in particular destroyers to counter the threat from German submarines. The destroyers might merely be loaned, as British shipyards were laying new keels rapidly. “This time next year we shall have plenty,” Churchill said. British supply lines could break in the meantime, though, without the additional sub-hunters. He asked for as many aircraft as the United States could spare, at least several hundred. These might also be loaned and might be repaid by planes already being constructed in American factories for the British air force. Similarly for antiaircraft weapons and ammunition—“of which again there will be plenty next year if we are alive to see it.” Other materials, raw and finished, were hardly less critical. Britain would pay in kind or cash for them, though not at once. “We shall go on paying dollars for as long as we can, but I should like to feel reasonably sure that when we can pay no more, you will give us the stuff all the same.”

Roosevelt responded cautiously. He was far too canny not to realize that Churchill had been wooing him; he intended for the wooing to persist. “I am sure it is unnecessary for me to say that I am most happy to continue our private correspondence,” he assured the prime minister. “I am, of course, giving every possible consideration to the suggestions made in your message.” But the measures Churchill recommended were beyond his legal authority as president. The destroyer loan was a case in point. “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 Congress at this moment.” Congress would object that America needed the destroyers itself. And Congress might well be right. Besides, accomplishing the transfer would take at least six or seven weeks, by which time the contest in the Atlantic presumably would have been decided. As for the planes Churchill wanted, these would have to come from the factories, not from America’s military inventory. And they would have to be paid for. Roosevelt’s silence on Churchill’s request for credit indicated that the money must appear up front. “The best of luck to you,” Roosevelt closed, in words that must have sounded ironic when Churchill read them.

The prime minister refused to be dissuaded. Every day the news from France grew more dire; every day the threat to Britain increased. “I understand your difficulties, but I am very sorry about the destroyers,” the prime minister wrote Roosevelt on May 20. “If they were here in six weeks they would play an invaluable part.” The planes he had requested were, if anything, even more crucial. “The battle of France is full of danger to both sides. Though we have taken heavy toll of enemy in the air and are clawing down two or three to one of their planes, they have still a formidable numerical superiority. Our most vital need is therefore the delivery at the earliest possible date of the largest possible number of Curtiss P-40 fighters now in course of delivery to your army.”

Churchill tried to impress on Roosevelt the stakes of the current struggle. It was nothing less than life or death for democracy and individual liberty. “Our intention is, whatever happens, to fight on to the end in this Island,” he asserted.

Members of the present administration would likely go down during this process should it result adversely, but in no conceivable circumstances will we consent to surrender. If members of the present administration were finished and others came in to parley amid the ruins, you must not be blind to the fact that the sole remaining bargaining counter with Germany would be the fleet, and if this country was left by the United States to its fate, no one would have the right to blame those then responsible if they made the best terms they could for the surviving inhabitants.

Excuse me, Mr. President, putting this nightmare bluntly. Evidently I could not answer for my successors, who in utter despair and helplessness might well have to accommodate themselves to the German will.

Roosevelt, on receiving this message, had to ask whether Churchill was serious. Would the British really surrender their fleet, the instrument of their global greatness these last two centuries? Without a navy Britain would lose its empire, and without its empire Britain would be nothing more than a small island in a cold sea.

Roosevelt couldn’t read Churchill’s mind. He could ask himself what he would have done in similar circumstances. As a navy man he couldn’t imagine surrendering the American fleet so long as it had fuel and friendly ports to sail to. And he had difficulty imagining Churchill—who still identified himself in correspondence with Roosevelt as a “former Naval Person”—surrendering the Royal Navy so long as Canada’s ports remained beyond the reach of the Nazis. Churchill alluded to his successors; perhaps they wouldn’t be as devoted to the fleet as he. But even Chamberlain had seen the light, finally, and was said to be backing Churchill’s determined stance.

Roosevelt had to assume that Churchill was exaggerating for effect. He knew he would have exaggerated, had he been in Churchill’s position. A man didn’t reach the top of the greasy pole of politics, in either Britain or America, without learning to tailor his talk to his audience. Even as Churchill held out to Roosevelt the prospect of surrender, he swore to Parliament that he would never surrender—and that neither would England. The last week of May saw the British Expeditionary Force—the army London had sent to France—caught between the German Wehrmacht and the English Channel. For several agonizing days it looked as though the entire force of nearly 200,000 might be captured or destroyed. But desperation, bravery, and fair weather allowed the army’s escape through the port of Dunkirk and its evacuation to England, where it lived to fight another day.

On June 4 Churchill vowed that it would keep fighting as long as humanly possible. “Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous states have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail,” he told the House of Commons.

We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France; we shall fight on the seas and oceans; we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air; we shall defend our island whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches; we shall fight on the landing grounds; we shall fight in the fields and in the streets; we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. And even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and liberation of the old.

CHURCHILL’S WORDS were tremendously stirring, but they directly belied Churchill’s warning—or threat—that the fleet would be surrendered to the Germans. And what was Roosevelt to make of Churchill’s reference to a New World rescue of the Old—“in God’s good time”?

Roosevelt had his own timetable. England’s crisis coincided with the climax of the primary season in American presidential politics. The isolationists had lost to Roosevelt on the issue of the arms embargo in the autumn of 1939, but their influence revived as the elections of 1940 approached. On the thirteenth anniversary of his famous transatlantic flight, Charles Lindbergh decried what he considered outlandish descriptions of the Nazi threat to the United States. Alarmists spoke as though the Germans were on America’s doorstep. They weren’t, Lindbergh said, and wouldn’t be even if they conquered all of Europe. Assertions of American vulnerability to air raids were simply delusional. “The power of aviation has been greatly underrated in the past,” Lindbergh said, speaking as America’s aviation expert. “Now we must be careful not to overrate this power in the excitement of reaction.” If anything, the rise of air power made America more impregnable than in the past, for it allowed the extension of America’s defenses far out to sea. “Great armies must still cross oceans by ship…. And no foreign navy will dare to approach within bombing range of our coasts.” The demands for intervention were purely political, Lindbergh said. “The only reason that we are in danger of becoming involved in this war is because there are powerful elements in America who desire us to take part. They represent a small minority of the American people, but they control much of the machinery of influence and propaganda. They seize every opportunity to push us closer to the edge.” The appropriate answer to their demands was political, as well. “It is time for the underlying character of this country to rise and assert itself, to strike down these elements of personal profit and foreign influence.”

Even if Roosevelt had believed Churchill about Britain being on the brink of surrender, he would have moved forward only slowly. To rescue Britain simply to hand the American government over to the isolationists would have been folly. Roosevelt’s vision was grander than Churchill’s. His view encompassed not merely Europe but Asia, the Pacific as well as the Atlantic. And his time horizon stretched beyond the present moment, beyond the impending election, to the coming decades and generations. Roosevelt wasn’t more prone to rationalization than most other politicians in democracies, who have regularly argued to themselves and others that they couldn’t accomplish the great things they intended if they didn’t get elected. But he wasn’t conspicuously less prone, either. He would do what he could to keep England fighting, but until November it wouldn’t be nearly what Churchill wanted.

For months Italy had been threatening to enter the war on Germany’s side. For months Roosevelt had been trying to prevent Mussolini from taking that step. He wrote the Italian dictator confidentially to warn against a “further extension of the area of hostilities” and delivered his sharpest threat thus far of American intervention: “No man can today predict with assurance, should such a further extension take place, what the ultimate result might be—or foretell what nations, however determined they may today be to remain at peace, might yet eventually find it imperative in their own defense to enter the war.”

Mussolini was unmoved. “Italy has never concerned itself with the relations of the American republics with each other and with the United States (thereby respecting the Monroe Doctrine),” he replied, “and might therefore ask for reciprocity with regard to European affairs.” A second letter from Roosevelt, in which the president described himself as “a realist” and said that a broader war “would pass beyond the control of heads of state,” produced no greater effect. “There are two fundamental motives which cannot escape your spirit of political realism,” Mussolini told the president, “and those are that Italy is and intends to remain allied with Germany, and that Italy cannot remain absent at a moment in which the fate of Europe is at stake.” After tarrying a bit longer, to let the fate of Europe become that much clearer—which was to say, to let Germany roll across northern France toward Paris—Mussolini declared war on Britain and France.

Roosevelt responded with his strongest public statement yet. “On this tenth day of June, 1940, the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor,” he declared. Roosevelt had been planning for some weeks to address the graduates of the University of Virginia, and he intended his speech to be a riposte to Lindbergh and the isolationists. Mussolini’s war declaration, which came just as the president was getting ready to leave Washington for Charlottesville, bolstered his case. The president decried the “obvious delusion that we of the United States can safely permit the United States to become a lone island, a lone island in a world dominated by the philosophy of force.” Careful listeners caught the repetition of “lone” and the reference it made to Lindbergh, the “Lone Eagle.” An island might be the dream of the isolationists, but they could not be more wrong, Roosevelt said. “Such an island represents to me and to the overwhelming majority of Americans today a helpless nightmare of a people without freedom—the nightmare of a people lodged in prison, handcuffed, hungry, and fed through the bars from day to day by the contemptuous, unpitying masters of other continents.” American safety required simultaneous action on two fronts. “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 in the Americas may have equipment and training equal to the task of any emergency.”

AMID THE WORSENING news from the Continent, Roosevelt’s promise of aid to the opponents of fascism sounded to Churchill like the peal of salvation. “We all listened to you last night and were fortified by the grand scope of your declaration,” the prime minister wrote the president. “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.” Roosevelt’s promise encouraged Churchill to renew his request for specific American aid. Airplanes would be required to repel the air assault and possibly amphibious invasion Hitler was sure to direct at England soon. But destroyers were needed even more. “The Italian outrage makes it necessary for us to cope with a much larger number of submarines which may come out into the Atlantic and perhaps be based on Spanish ports. To this the only counter is destroyers.” Churchill had previously asked for forty or fifty; now “thirty or forty” would do. “We can fit them very rapidly with our ASCICS”—a version of sub-seeking sonar—“and they will bridge the gap of six months before our war-time new construction comes into play. We will return them or their equivalents to you without fail at six months notice if at any time you need them.” Earlier Churchill had spoken as though the fate of Europe would be decided within weeks; his chronology now expanded, but time remained of the essence. “The next six months are vital. If while we have to guard the East Coast against invasion a new heavy German-Italian submarine attack is launched against our commerce, the strain may be beyond our resources, and the ocean traffic by which we live may be strangled. Not a day should be lost.”

Churchill’s appeal was seconded in the most poignant way from France, where the French army was battling for its life. “For six days and six nights our divisions have been fighting without rest against an army which has a crushing superiority in numbers and material,” French premier Paul Reynaud wrote Roosevelt. “Today the enemy is almost at the gates of Paris.” The French would never yield, Reynaud vowed. “We shall fight in front of Paris; we shall fight behind Paris; we shall close ourselves in one of our provinces to fight, and if we should be driven out of it we shall establish ourselves in North Africa to continue the fight, and if necessary in our American possessions.” Reynaud urged Roosevelt to tell the Americans that France was fighting on their behalf. “Explain all this yourself to your people, to all the citizens of the United States, saying to them that we are determined to sacrifice ourselves in the struggle that we are carrying on for all free men.” As the president did so, he should elaborate on what he meant in promising support to the opponents of aggression. “I beseech you to declare publicly that the United States will give the Allies aid and material support by all means short of an expeditionary force. I beseech you to do this before it is too late.”

ROOSEVELT WAS TOUCHED by the pleas from across the Atlantic; who wouldn’t have been? But the brave words of Reynaud and Churchill were belied by the dismal performance of the French and British armies in the field. Reynaud might be a tiger and Churchill a bulldog, but their soldiers were pussycats, at least to judge by the results of their actions. To promise aid to a losing cause would make Roosevelt appear foolish at a moment when cunning was called for. And it might jeopardize American security by squandering resources that would be more effective if kept in American hands.

His Charlottesville speech had had multiple audiences. Roosevelt hoped to encourage the British and French to fight on; their armies continued to be America’s first line of defense abroad. He also hoped to counter the isolationists, who remained a potent political force at home. Roosevelt judged that the arguments of Lindbergh and the others were wrong, but he understood that they weren’t implausible. The Atlantic was still a formidable barrier to any attack on the United States; reinforced by ships patrolling American waters and planes flying out from American bases, it would allow Americans to repel any invasion Hitler might mount. Of course Roosevelt had to think beyond mere physical security; American prosperity and American values would be at risk in a world dominated by a hostile regime and a vicious ideology. But on this question Roosevelt reaped what he had sown during the first years of his administration. By adopting a nationalist approach to economic recovery, Roosevelt had told the American people, in essence, that the world didn’t matter. He had been wrong, as he may have known at the time and certainly figured out later. Yet to admit as much didn’t seem prudent.

Hitler’s campaign in France proceeded with appalling success. “Our army is now cut into several parts,” Reynaud cabled Roosevelt on June 14. “Our divisions are decimated. Generals are commanding battalions.” The Germans had entered Paris. The unthinkable was at hand. Only four days after vowing to Roosevelt to fight forever, Reynaud sounded a different note. “At the most tragic hour of its history, France must choose. Will she continue to sacrifice her youth in a hopeless struggle?…Or will France ask Hitler for conditions of an armistice?”

The French government hadn’t decided, Reynaud told the president. And he appealed to Roosevelt, in terms more desperate than ever, to help it hold on. “The only chance of saving the French nation, vanguard of democracies, and through her to save England, by whose side France could then remain with her powerful navy, is to throw into the balance, this very day, the weight of American power.” Reynaud appreciated that the American president couldn’t declare war by himself. But he could urge Congress to declare war. And he must do so, at once. “If you cannot give France, in the hours to come, the certainty that the United States will come into the war within a very short time, the fate of the world will change. Then you will see France go under like a drowning man and disappear after having cast a last look toward the land of liberty from which she awaited salvation.”

39.

IT WAS TOO LATE. AND IT WAS TOO EARLY. ROOSEVELT LEARNED FROM Churchill that Reynaud had already asked that France be released from its alliance with Britain in order to negotiate a separate peace with Germany. Churchill implored Reynaud to continue the struggle, saying that only Hitler would benefit from an armistice. “He needs this peace in order to destroy us and take a long step forward to world mastery,” the prime minister explained to Roosevelt. Churchill seconded Reynaud’s final appeal to the American president. “This moment is supremely critical for France,” Churchill said. “A declaration that the United States will, if necessary, enter the war might save France. Failing that, in a few days French resistance may have crumbled and we will be left alone.”

There would be no such declaration. Roosevelt wasn’t ready to take that step. “I am doing everything possible,” he said privately, referring to various measures to increase the supply of war material to France and Britain. He probably believed it. But he defined the possible narrowly, and in the context of American politics. “I am not talking very much about it,” he continued, “because a certain element of the press, like the Scripps-Howard papers, would undoubtedly pervert it, attack it, and confuse the public mind.”

Yet talking about it was precisely what France needed. A straightforward commitment from Roosevelt would mean as much, at the moment, as American arms. Roosevelt refused to oblige, and France went down. On June 21 Hitler received France’s representatives in the same railroad car and in the same part of the Compiègne forest where Germany’s envoys had signaled their capitulation in November 1918. The next day the French accepted Hitler’s terms, which provided for the disarmament of most of the French military and the surrender of the northern three-fifths of the country to German occupation and control. The French were allowed to govern the southern rump of the country and to retain possession of their navy, which in any event had sailed beyond Hitler’s reach.

Roosevelt declined to comment on what could be interpreted only as a disaster for democracy and a stunning blow to American security. He left the ill tidings to Cordell Hull to deliver. “These are black days for the human race,” the secretary of state intoned. “These are ominous days for us in this country.” The forces of evil were rampant in the world. “Never before have these forces flung so powerful a challenge to freedom and civilized progress as they are flinging today. Never before has there been a more desperate need for men and nations who love freedom and cherish the tenets of modern civilization to gather into an unconquerable defensive force every element of their spiritual and moral resources, every ounce of their moral and physical strength.”

ROOSEVELT WOULD have said more than he did say if the fall of France hadn’t coincided with the quadrennial summer season for national political conventions. The Republicans went first, being the challengers, and their convention produced what the editors of the New York Times dubbed a “political miracle.” Wendell Willkie, a forty-eight-year-old son of Elwood, Indiana, was the darkest of dark horses, a lawyer and businessman who had never sought public office and who hadn’t been considered for the presidency until just weeks before the convention. He had entered no primaries, wooed no delegates, hired no professional campaign advisers. He had been a Democrat most of his life, converting to Republicanism only after Roosevelt took the New Deal in what Willkie—with others—perceived as a deliberately anti-business direction. Many Republicans still distrusted his Democratic antecedents. James Watson of Indiana thought forgiveness had gone too far. “If a whore repented and wanted to join the church,” Watson said, “I’d personally welcome her and lead her up the aisle to a pew. But by the Eternal, I’d not ask her to lead the choir the first night!”

The one thing that made Willkie acceptable to a nominating majority of the convention—on the sixth ballot—was his internationalist pedigree. To many Republicans the isolationists, including such Senate stalwarts as Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan and Robert Taft of Ohio, had become an embarrassment. Some agreed with Roosevelt that American security required a forward stance on the troubles in Europe, even if they were as vague as he in articulating that conviction. Some simply didn’t want to concede to the Democrats the large and growing portion of the electorate that was tilting internationalist. Willkie had been as forthright as Roosevelt in criticizing the arms embargo; he was even more outspoken than the president in advocating aid to Britain.

Willkie’s internationalism was part of what made him such an improbable candidate. He couldn’t well criticize Roosevelt’s foreign policy, at one of the very few times in American history when foreign policy appeared likely to determine the outcome of a presidential election. He harped on the New Deal, although less on particular programs than on the excessive influence it accorded the federal government. “What I am against is power,” Willkie said. “Power ruins anybody that has it. It’s the worst corrupting thing in the world.”

What went almost without saying was that in criticizing power Willkie was criticizing Roosevelt’s run for a third term. The Republican candidate couldn’t be explicit because Roosevelt hadn’t been renominated yet. In fact he hadn’t even announced his candidacy. But he was quietly engineering another nomination. The first step was negative—simply not renouncing a third term as the Democratic convention approached. Roosevelt’s silence paralyzed potential rivals within the party, who couldn’t declare their own candidacies without breaking with a president of their own party who was doing his best, as most Democrats were willing to acknowledge, to guide the country through dangerous times and who, should he be renominated and reelected, would be able to visit vengeance on the apostates. Southern conservatives who had defied Roosevelt on the New Deal and survived his purge didn’t have to worry, but in the Jim Crow era southern conservatives couldn’t be elected president and didn’t bother to run. All the others had to weigh the risks of taking on a popular president and party leader. “What’s the Boss going to do?” John Nance Garner asked Jim Farley in the spring of 1940.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Farley answered. The postmaster general and party chairman coveted the nomination for himself, and he had told friends he would let his name be put to the convention. “I’ve given up guessing,” he said.

Garner eyed Farley closely. “I guess he’s going to run,” the vice president said.

“It begins to look that way,” Farley acknowledged.

“Hell,” said Garner, “he’s fixed it so nobody else can run.”

Roosevelt’s second step was to arrange for the convention to be held in Chicago. The Windy City remembered his 1932 nomination and how he had electrified the delegates and the country by flying in to accept the nomination in person. Expectations of presidents and presidential candidates hadn’t been the same since, and if Roosevelt was to challenge history in a try for a third term, Chicago was the place for the challenge to be made.

His third step was to orchestrate a draft. He didn’t have to do this himself, for as in every administration there were plenty of people hoping for another four years in office. The New Deal had been good to Illinois Democrats and especially to the boss of Chicago’s Democratic machine, Edward Kelly, whose men were expected to stampede the convention for Roosevelt. Kelly’s affection for Roosevelt was as self-interested as most things the boss did—and as self-interested as the support for Roosevelt displayed by other bosses. “They did not support Roosevelt out of any motive of affection or because of any political issues involved,” Edward Flynn, who would succeed Jim Farley as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, recalled. “Rather they knew that opposing him would be harmful to their local organizations. The Roosevelt name would help more than it could hurt, and for that reason these city leaders went along on the third-term candidacy.”

The Roosevelt stampede started slowly. Mayor Kelly welcomed the delegates to his city, and when he mentioned the president’s name in his opening address the Chicago delegates were supposed to erupt into a mad ovation. But they either misunderstood what was expected or simply missed their cue; the reaction to Kelly’s phrase “our beloved President—Franklin Delano Roosevelt” was no more than tepid.

Jim Farley tried to keep it that way. Farley had accepted a job in the front office of the New York Yankees but hadn’t begun his duties; his appearance at the convention, as exiting party chairman, was supposed to be his swan song, with the possibility that the delegates would, at the eleventh hour, discover his charms. As it happened, the swan song was “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” played by the convention band at the request of persons unknown. A flustered Farley banged the gavel against the laughter that rolled across the floor of the Chicago Stadium.

Roosevelt kept quiet and mostly out of sight—sailing on the Potomac, weekending in Hyde Park—while the convention conducted its business. Everyone assumed that he would be nominated, but no one seemed to understand how his nomination would occur. Roosevelt’s strategy exasperated even some of his oldest associates. “The President’s refusal to take anyone, with the possible exception of Harry Hopkins, into his confidence annoyed me,” Harold Ickes recorded in his diary. “I have thought for some time that he was overplaying his role of indifference and was displaying too much coyness. It is all very well for him to try to create the impression generally that he had nothing to do with the third-term movement and was indifferent to it, but I know that this has not been his state of mind.” Ickes had particular reason to be miffed. He had been the first member of the administration to go public with support for a third term and for months had waged the fight on his own. “Having declared for him, I persisted, keeping the issue alive, speaking and writing on the subject, to say nothing of doing a great deal of work.” Ickes had made certain that Roosevelt’s name appeared on primary ballots, thereby frustrating Farley and other potential opponents and securing for the president sufficient delegates to control the convention.

Ickes’s suspicions notwithstanding, Hopkins evidently didn’t know any more about Roosevelt’s intentions than Ickes did. Hopkins’s only instruction from Roosevelt was a handwritten note, addressed to William Bankhead, the temporary chairman of the convention:

Dear Will,

When you speak to the Convention on Monday evening will you say something for me which I believe ought to be made utterly clear?

You and my other close friends have known and understood that I have not today and have never had any wish or purpose to remain in the office of the President, or indeed anywhere in public office after next January.

You know and all my friends know that this is a simple and sincere fact. I want you to repeat this simple and sincere fact to the Convention.

A change of schedule caused the note to be read by Alben Barkley, the permanent chairman of the convention, rather than by Bankhead. But it remained the sum of Roosevelt’s spoken or written advice to his supporters and the rest of the convention.

Yet Hopkins took it upon himself to organize the pro-Roosevelt forces in Chicago. They didn’t organize easily, given the resentment many veteran Democrats felt toward Hopkins and the New Dealers. Ickes and Frances Perkins arrived in Chicago expecting to lead the Roosevelt charge, only to discover that Hopkins had established headquarters already, in the Blackstone Hotel, and was giving orders as though in the president’s name. The effort nearly backfired, in that many of the delegates found Farley much easier to work with than Hopkins. Some muttered against Hopkins; others simply stayed away from the convention, leaving hundreds of seats empty.

The interim result was mass confusion. “Apparently I am not the only one around here who does not know anything,” Farley remarked to reporters. Farley was realizing that he had no chance for the nomination, but by now he was worrying that the party would look foolish. He concluded that the only recourse was to keep a sense of humor. “If we can go through this without taking it too seriously, or taking ourselves too seriously,” he said, “it will be all right.”

The confusion deepened even as it began to be resolved. Amid Senator Barkley’s reading of Roosevelt’s statement of lack of interest in another nomination, an electronically amplified voice rumbled through the arena, calling, “We want Roosevelt! We want Roosevelt!” The cry was echoed by Mayor Kelly’s minions and then spread across the convention floor. A curious reporter traced the mysterious voice to the basement, where a Kelly placeman—the superintendent of sewers, appropriately—commanded the sound system, reading from a printed script.

The spontaneity may have been contrived, but the enthusiasm for Roosevelt was sincere enough, once it got going, and the convention proceeded to renominate him by acclamation. The delegates might have retired in good order and comparatively good feeling had Roosevelt not taken the unusual step of dictating his running mate. In this regard, as in so many others, Roosevelt broke with accepted practice. Conventions still expected to exercise their own prerogative in selecting vice presidential candidates. But Roosevelt wanted to get rid of Garner, who was too close to the southern conservatives he had been trying to purge. Garner wasn’t sad to go, yet neither he nor just about anyone else was happy at the replacement Roosevelt named: Henry Wallace, the secretary of agriculture. Harold Ickes and Cordell Hull had each hoped to be named. But neither fitted Roosevelt’s specifications. Precisely what those specifications were he never said, but one, presumably, was the potential to be president. Hull came up short. “He goes about looking like an early Christian martyr, and people think that he is wonderful just on the basis of his looks,” Roosevelt told Ickes. “However, no one has ever attacked him on the basis of his record, and I regard him as the most vulnerable man we could name.” If Roosevelt told Hull why Ickes wouldn’t do, the secretary of state declined to record the explanation.

Why Roosevelt chose Wallace was hardly clearer. Perhaps he saw a president in Wallace, but he soon changed his mind, as events would prove. Doubtless he thought the formerly Republican agriculture secretary would appeal to farmers who might be tempted to return to the Republican fold. Quite possibly he liked Wallace because the rest of the party didn’t. The animus toward this latecomer to the party was palpable. “Just because the Republicans have nominated an apostate Democrat,” one angry delegate told the convention, referring to Willkie, “let us not, for God’s sake, nominate an apostate Republican.” Frances Perkins put the matter more diplomatically but no less accurately when she recalled, “The party longs to promote its own, and Wallace was not its own.” Roosevelt might well have calculated that an unpopular Wallace nomination would leave him free to tap his successor after his reelection.

But the Wallace nomination almost produced a revolt. Ickes, calling it a “damned outrage,” threatened to leave the administration and the party; the convention as a whole prepared to nominate its own choice. Only when Roosevelt let out that he was drafting a speech refusing the nomination and would deliver it if the convention rejected Wallace did reality prevail and the delegates decide they would rather have Roosevelt with Wallace than someone other than Roosevelt without Wallace.

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT learned for certain that her husband intended a third term at the same time the rest of the world did: during the convention. She hadn’t originally liked the idea. “I had luncheon today with Mrs. Roosevelt at the White House,” Harry Hopkins wrote in the spring of 1939.

She asked Diana to come with me, and together with two or three of her friends we lunched out on the porch. After luncheon we went out in the gardens—Mrs. Roosevelt had her knitting—and discussed for three hours the state of the nation.

Mrs. Roosevelt was greatly disturbed about 1940. She is personally anxious not to have the president run again…. She feels the President has done his part entirely…. She thinks that the causes for which he fought are far greater than any individual person, but that if the New Deal is entirely dependent upon him, it indicates that it hasn’t as strong a foundation as she believes it has with the great masses of people. Mrs. Roosevelt is convinced that a great majority of the voters are not only with the President, but with the things he stands for, and that every effort should be made to control the Democratic Convention in 1940, nominate a liberal candidate, and elect him.

Eleanor’s feelings on an extension in the White House gradually changed. No liberal candidate emerged except for Roosevelt, who made certain that no such candidate could emerge. Eleanor meanwhile reconsidered what a third term would mean for her. On one hand it would lengthen the period of her political juvenility, when she could not speak or write without weighing her words against the wishes and policies of her husband. It would also postpone the reclamation of her private life, which she had all but surrendered after the disastrous West Coast trip with Lorena Hickok. On the other hand, a third term would afford her a continuation of her unique political influence. Eleanor didn’t underrate her intelligence or insight, but she appreciated full well the leverage her position as presidential spouse gave to her innate talents. If Franklin retired, she would be much freer than at present, and much less influential.

She followed the proceedings of the convention by radio from the Val-Kill cottage at Hyde Park. She heard Alben Barkley read Franklin’s letter to the delegates. She saw the newspaper accounts of disarray among Roosevelt’s lieutenants at Chicago, and she received a call from Frances Perkins pleading with her to come and calm things down. She inquired of Franklin whether her presence would be appropriate. “It might be very nice for you to go,” he answered. “But I do not think it is in the least necessary.”

It wasn’t necessary for Roosevelt’s renomination, which followed shortly. Yet it seemed, if not strictly necessary, at least strongly advisable as the battle for the vice presidency broke out. Jim Farley added his voice to those urging her to come lest the party fall ignominiously apart. “The situation is not good,” Farley said. “I think it desirable, if not essential, that you come.” She took a chartered plane to the Chicago air field, where a throng of reporters awaited her at the American Air Lines hangar. “Are you happy about the nomination?” one shouted.

“Happy?” she responded, without the smile expected of a nominee’s wife. “I don’t know how anyone could be particularly happy about the nomination in the present state of the world. It is a tremendous responsibility to be nominated for the presidency.”

“Was the president willing for you to come? Did he wish you well?”

“I don’t remember that he wished me well.” She smiled now, to soften what she realized sounded harsh. “I suppose, of course, that he was willing for me to come—or I would not have come.”

A car whisked her to the convention hall, where she was rushed to the podium to quell the revolt against Roosevelt’s selection of Henry Wallace. She stressed the need for party unity, for all to pull behind the president in this hour of world peril. “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, with the highest ideals, with a determination that their party shall be absolutely devoted to the good of the nation as a whole.”

Eleanor’s statement was just the touch necessary to bring the anti-Wallace factions into line. Perhaps their revolt was chiefly symbolic; perhaps they would have found their own way back into the fold. But with Eleanor lecturing them on the obligation to party and country, they had no choice.

ROOSEVELT DECLINED to address the delegates in person. He wished to preserve his air of reluctance but also to make clear that he was answering the call not simply of the Democratic party but of the American people. He had intended to retire after two terms, he asserted by radio. “Eight years in the presidency, following a period of bleak depression, and covering one world crisis after another, would normally entitle any man to the relaxation that comes from honorable retirement.” But the world crises mounted, as they had not mounted for generations, culminating in the war that had begun the previous September. Even then, though, he had planned to leave the White House in January 1941. “This fact was well known to my friends, and I think was understood by many citizens.”

Roosevelt’s friends might have wondered who they were, for none could recall the disclaimers he alluded to. The president left them to their questions. “It soon became evident, however, that such a public statement on my part would be unwise from the point of view of sheer public duty. As President of the United States, it was my clear duty, with the aid of the Congress, to preserve our neutrality, to shape our program of defense, to meet rapid changes, to keep our domestic affairs adjusted to shifting world conditions.” Roosevelt’s language assumed a more assertive tone. “It was also my obvious duty to maintain to the utmost the influence of this mighty nation in our effort to prevent the spread of war, and to sustain by all legal means those governments threatened by other governments which had rejected the principles of democracy.” In this single sentence Roosevelt both framed the election campaign and indicated where he would be leading the country during the next six months—and the four years after that, voters willing.

Americans who disagreed with this interpretation of presidential duty were free to vote against it, Roosevelt said. But they should weigh the risk. “If our Government should pass to other hands next January—untried hands, inexperienced hands—we can merely hope and pray that they will not substitute appeasement, and compromise with those who seek to destroy all democracies everywhere, including here.” The fate of nations—of the American nation, to be sure, but of other nations as well—would turn on the current election. Americans confronted one of the great choices of history.

It is not alone a choice of government by the people versus dictatorship. It is not alone a choice of freedom versus slavery…. It is the continuance of civilization as we know it versus the ultimate destruction of all that we have held dear—religion against godlessness; the ideal of justice against the practice of force; moral decency versus the firing squad; courage to speak out, and to act, versus the false lullaby of appeasement.

IN JULY 1940 the German Luftwaffe commenced bombing raids against British airfields, naval stations, and cities. The attacks on the military facilities appeared to be intended to weaken British defenses against an impending amphibious assault, the attacks on the cities to weaken British morale. British fliers of the Royal Air Force fended off the German bombers as best they could, but there were simply too many attackers and too many targets for the RAF pilots to handle them all.

The Battle of Britain—as the air contest was called—intensified through August to a September climax, during which the Germans pounded London relentlessly. “The last three nights in London have been simply hell,” Joseph Kennedy wrote his wife on September 10.

Last night I put on my steel helmet and went up on the roof of the Chancery and stayed there until two o’clock in the morning watching the Germans come over in relays every ten minutes and drop bombs, setting terrific fires. You could see the dome of St. Paul’s silhouetted against a blazing inferno that the Germans kept adding to from time to time by flying over and dropping more bombs.

Kennedy naturally kept close touch with Churchill, who expressed grave concern that Hitler would follow up the bombings with an invasion. The prime minister determined to redeem Roosevelt’s promise to supply the anti-fascist forces—meaning Britain, at this stage—with the materiel they needed to defend themselves. Shortly after Roosevelt accepted renomination by the Democrats, Churchill renewed his plea for weapons. “It has now become most urgent for you to let us have the destroyers, motor boats and flying boats for which we have asked,” he said. “The Germans have the whole French coast line from which to launch U-boats, dive-bomber attacks upon our trade and food, and in addition we must be constantly prepared to repel by sea action threatened invasion in the narrow waters.” Destroyers were more critical than ever, for in the last ten days the German bombers had sunk or crippled eleven of Britain’s destroyers. And they would probably sink or cripple many more. “Destroyers are frightfully vulnerable to air bombing, and yet they must be held in the air bombing area to prevent seaborne invasion.” Resupply of the destroyers was imperative. “If we cannot get a substantial reinforcement, the whole fate of the war may be decided by this minor and easily remediable factor.”

Churchill, the former naval person, may have realized that a request for ships would resonate more fully with fellow navalist Roosevelt than a request for aircraft or tanks. Or perhaps, like Roosevelt, he simply appreciated the value of ships more than that of planes and tanks. In any event, the American destroyers became the touchstone of Anglo-American diplomacy as the Battle of Britain raged in the skies over the English Channel and England itself. Churchill let pass no opportunity to remind Roosevelt that a comparative handful of ships might make the difference to democracy for generations to come and that the president, by a bold stroke, might make himself a hero forever.

Of course Churchill needed to convince Roosevelt that the ships wouldn’t be wasted—that Britain wouldn’t go under even after receiving the American assistance. This was no easy task, for with the skies over London raining German bombs, Britain’s future was hardly assured. Yet Churchill refused to be discouraged. “He was smoking a cigar when I entered and asked me if I would have a scotch highball and said he would have one,” Kennedy recorded after a visit to the prime minister. Fortified by the tobacco and booze, Churchill exuded optimism. “He was confident about everything. He felt that Hitler would invade and soon, but that he would get a terrible reception. In fact the only thing that disturbed him was that Hitler might not invade and Churchill would be in a bad way in that he built up the defenses and army to fight Hitler. He said the British soldiers would probably want their money back, because they won’t be satisfied with the show.”

Churchill perhaps protested too much to Kennedy, whose pessimism regarding Britain’s prospects was no secret. But the prime minister said essentially the same thing to Roosevelt. “I am beginning to feel very hopeful about this war if we can get round the next three or four months,” he wrote the president. “The air is holding well. We are hitting that man”—Hitler—“hard in both repelling attacks and in bombing Germany.” The crucial question, as before, was the supply of warships. “The loss of destroyers by air attacks may well be so serious as to break down our defence of the food and trade routes across the Pacific.” And it put the burden of saving freedom squarely upon Roosevelt. “Mr. President, with great respect I must tell you that in the long history of the world, this is a thing to do now.”

Having crossed the Rubicon of a third-term nomination, Roosevelt decided he was ready to cross the Atlantic of closer engagement in the European war. Churchill’s words weren’t inconsequential; the prime minister’s growing hopefulness made an American investment in England’s future appear a better bet than it had before. But Roosevelt’s own state of mind was at least as significant. He hadn’t known what the reaction to his nomination would be. The isolationists, of course, would complain. So would the Republicans and conservative Democrats who had found fault for years. But the crucial element was the broad constituency of ordinary Americans who had been his political base from the beginning. If they took exception to a third term—to his placing himself above George Washington and every other previous president—he would be in trouble. But they didn’t take such exception, at least not loudly or in large numbers. They seemed to be accepting his argument that the current world crisis justified an exception to the two-term rule.

Encouraged by this non-reaction, Roosevelt responded to Churchill more positively than in any previous message. “It is my belief that it may be possible to furnish to the British Government as immediate assistance at least fifty destroyers,” Roosevelt wrote Churchill. Yet there was a catch, or rather a quid pro quo. “Such assistance, as I am sure you will understand, would only be furnished if the American people and the Congress frankly recognized that in return there for the national defense and security of the United States would be enhanced.” Roosevelt knew that Churchill’s reflexive response would be to say that anything that helped Britain defeat the Nazis would enhance American security. But though the president might agree, Congress and the American people would require collateral of a more concrete nature. Roosevelt elaborated:

It would be necessary, in the event that it proves possible to release the materiel above mentioned, that the British Government find itself able and willing to take the two following steps:

1. Assurance on the part of the Prime Minister that in the event that the waters of Great Britain become untenable for British ships of war, the latter would not be turned over to the Germans or sunk, but would be sent to other parts of the Empire….

2. An agreement on the part of Great Britain that the British Government would authorize the use of Newfoundland, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Trinidad and British Guiana as naval and air bases by the United States.

Roosevelt explained that the details of the bases agreement needn’t be decided at once. As to the assurance regarding the destroyers, the prime minister need make no public announcement; a private pledge to the president would do.

Roosevelt’s offer wrapped strategy inside politics and then bundled the package into strategy again. The proposed swap of destroyers for bases made sense strategically: factories in the United States could always build more ships, but ports to base them were in limited supply. Should Britain fall and America have to defend the Western Hemisphere against German assault, the bases—which spanned the western Atlantic from Canada to South America—would be essential.

The deal made even more sense politically. As confident as Roosevelt was becoming regarding a third term, he had no intention of provoking another outburst of isolationism. The deal could be defended as a sharp bargain: as Roosevelt exploiting Britain’s extremity to acquire real estate the British would never have surrendered otherwise, in exchange for some out-of-date ships that weren’t much good to America anyway.

And the canny politics of the deal would enhance America’s security by increasing Roosevelt’s room for maneuver. Roosevelt’s ego had always been robust, ever since Sara had centered her world, and such of the larger world as the family’s ample resources allowed, on her only child. It had grown with each political success, till by now, on the verge of setting a record for presidential longevity, Roosevelt accounted himself at least the equal of America’s greatest chief executives. He certainly considered himself more capable of dealing with challenges to American security than Wendell Willkie or Jim Farley or anyone else who had put himself forward as a candidate for president.

And why not? He had been studying the presidency for forty years, practicing the craft for eight. He had been engaged personally in matters touching national security since before the First World War. Could Willkie say that? Could anyone else in America? For that matter, could Hitler match his knowledge of the world? Could Mussolini? Could Stalin? Of the world’s current leaders, only Churchill came close to Roosevelt in decades devoted to the strategic arts. And Churchill had been head of his country’s government a mere few months. For most of the previous decade—while Roosevelt had been wrestling with the rise of Germany and Japan—Churchill had been a gadfly swatted by elements of his own party as often as by the opposition.

During the summer of 1940 Roosevelt emerged, in his own mind, as the great statesman of the modern era. He realized that it lay in his power to command the heights of international affairs. It would, at any rate, if he did two things: keep Britain fighting and complete his electoral coup. The destroyers-for-bases deal would serve both purposes.

CHURCHILL THRILLED at the president’s offer. “I need not tell you how cheered I am by your message or how grateful I feel for your untiring efforts to give us all possible help,” he wrote Roosevelt. “You know well that the worth of every destroyer that you can spare to us is measured in rubies.” Churchill accepted Roosevelt’s conditions. The assurance about making sure the ships stayed out of German hands accorded with Churchill’s own strong, and oft-stated, inclinations. “We intend to fight this out here to the end, and none of us would ever buy peace by surrendering or scuttling the fleet.” Yet Churchill appreciated Roosevelt’s willingness not to publicize such a promise. “In any use you may make of this repeated assurance you will please bear in mind the disastrous effect from our point of view and perhaps also from yours of allowing any impression to grow that we regard the conquest of the British Islands and its naval bases as any other than an impossible contingency.” As to the bases the president desired, these would present no problem. Churchill, like Roosevelt, was willing to leave the geographical details to a later date. “We can discuss them at leisure.”

The details proved to be more difficult than either Churchill or Roosevelt had anticipated. Churchill’s political problems were only somewhat less pressing than Roosevelt’s; no more than the American president could the British prime minister be seen as giving away assets important to national defense. Churchill proposed treating the transfer of the destroyers and the leasing of naval bases as separate issues. “I had not contemplated anything in the nature of a contract, bargain or sale between us,” he wrote Roosevelt. “Our view is that we are two friends helping each other as far as we can.” Any acknowledgment of a quid pro quo would create difficulties. “Once this idea is accepted, people will contrast on each side what is given and received. The money value of the arms would be computed and set against the facilities, and some would think one thing about it and some another.”

American politics pushed Roosevelt in the other direction. For him, the quid pro quo was essential lest the isolationists be stirred once more into effective action. There was some constitutional question whether the president could transfer American military assets to another country simply on his own authority, but the more important question was the political one of whether he should do so. Roosevelt’s sensitivity to the politics of the matter was such that he tried to gain Willkie’s approval of the deal before he announced it. To some extent this effort was motivated by a sincere desire for bipartisanship in foreign policy. Roosevelt had taken two steps toward bipartisanship by appointing a pair of Republicans to head the cabinet defense departments. Henry Stimson, William Howard Taft’s secretary of war and Herbert Hoover’s secretary of state, returned, at the age of seventy-two, to the War Department. Frank Knox, the publisher of the Chicago Daily News and the Republican candidate for vice president in 1936, took over the Navy Department. Yet bipartisanship was hardly the whole story of the approach to Willkie. Roosevelt reckoned that if Willkie signed on to the destroyer deal, he would give voters even less reason than they already had to swap the incumbent for the challenger. If he refused to accept it, his professed desire to grant Britain all the aid it required would be seen as hollow.

Roosevelt sent William Allen White, Theodore Roosevelt’s old admirer and, as the chairman of the self-appointed Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, the leading Republican interventionist, to talk to Willkie. The Republican nominee, doubtless perceiving Roosevelt’s game—and with perceptions perhaps sharpened by recollection of Roosevelt’s refusal to cooperate with Hoover in 1932—declined to be drawn in.

This simply increased the president’s caution. He emphasized the value of the bases to American security, while ignoring the contribution of the destroyers to Britain’s defense. In a letter to a skeptic from his own party, Senator David Walsh of Massachusetts, the chairman of the naval affairs committee, Roosevelt related a tale of a run-in with a Dutchess County farmer that may have been apocryphal.

I told him the gist of the proposal, which is, in effect, to buy ninety-nine-year leases from Great Britain for at least seven naval and air bases in British colonial possessions—not including the Dominion of Canada, which is a separate study on my part. The farmer replied somewhat as follows:

“Say, ain’t you the Commander-in-Chief? If you are and own fifty muzzle-loadin’ rifles of the Civil War period, you would be a chump if you declined to exchange them for seven modern machine guns—wouldn’t you?”

Roosevelt continued in his own voice, pleading sincerity and claiming a certain expertise in naval strategy.

Frankly, my difficulty is that as President and Commander-in-Chief I have no right to think of politics in the sense of being a candidate or desiring votes. You and I know that our weakness in the past has lain in the fact that from Newfoundland to Trinidad our sole protection offshore lies in the three contiguous islands of Porto Rico, St. Thomas, and St. Croix. That, in the nature of modern warfare, is a definite operating handicap. If for fifty ships, which are on their last legs anyway, we can get the right to put in naval and air bases in Newfoundland, the Bahamas, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Trinidad and British Guiana, then our operating deficiency is largely cured.

Roosevelt reminded Walsh that the founder of their party, Thomas Jefferson, had purchased Louisiana under comparable circumstances, while France was beset by England. “He did this without even consulting the Congress. He put the deal through and later on he asked the House Committee on Appropriations to put $15,000,000 into the appropriation bill.” The bases in question were no Louisiana, but the transfer was a bargain nonetheless. “The fifty destroyers are the same type of ship which we have been from time to time striking from the naval list and selling for scrap for, I think, $4,000 or $5,000 per destroyer. On that basis, the cost of the right to at least seven naval and air bases is an extremely low one from the point of view of the United States Government—i.e., about $250,000!”

With the press Roosevelt was even more artful. He announced at a news conference that some American naval and military officers were visiting England. “This has nothing to do with destroyers,” Roosevelt told the reporters. “But I am initiating, holding conversations with the British government for the acquisition of naval bases and air bases for the defense of the Americas and particularly with relationship to the Panama Canal.”

“Did I understand you to say, Mr. President, that they had no relation to destroyers?” a reporter pressed.

“I would not use it,” Roosevelt responded opaquely, regarding the information he had just given them. “That is just a little private tip.”

The reporters were puzzled. The president was the one who had brought up the destroyers at this session. “This is a matter of destroyers?” one asked.

“It is not a matter of destroyers. That is exactly the point…. The emphasis is on the acquisition of the bases—that is the main point—for the protection of this hemisphere…. That is all there is to say.”

Of course that was not all there was to say. Roosevelt recognized belatedly that to deny the connection between the destroyers and the bases would be futile and transparently disingenuous. Yet the formula he ultimately devised was hardly better. He announced a combination gift and trade involving naval and air bases in Newfoundland, Bermuda, the British West Indies, and British Guiana, and American destroyers. “The rights to bases in Newfoundland and Bermuda are gifts—generously given and gladly received,” the president explained. “The other bases mentioned have been acquired in exchange for fifty of our over-age destroyers.” Roosevelt said nothing more about the ships, stressing instead the defense benefits of the agreement. “The value to the Western Hemisphere of these outposts of security is beyond calculation.”

40.

THE FORTUNES OF WAR DECREED THAT BY THE TIME OF ROOSEVELT’S announcement no one seriously disputed that the bases could be valuable to the United States. Germany’s bombing of Britain grew ever fiercer; night after night the Luftwaffe turned London into a blazing spectacle. Perhaps the British would survive the Nazi onslaught; perhaps not. But any military regime that could deliver such destruction was one that had to be reckoned with.

Yet Roosevelt’s handling of the destroyer-for-bases deal, after his clumsy manipulation of the Democratic convention, reinforced his reputation for dubious maneuvering. The isolationists were the most insistent in asserting that the president was conspiring to take the United States to war against Germany, but one didn’t have to be an isolationist to conclude that he wasn’t telling all he knew.

Roosevelt’s response to the threat from Japan was more straightforward. The war in China, now nearly three years old, had slowed Japan’s progress toward what it was calling its “Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere,” but the outbreak of war in Europe, by distracting France and Britain, presented Tokyo with temptations to additional expansion it couldn’t resist. In June 1940 the Japanese government pressured French Indochina and British Burma, demanding that they close their borders with China—to prevent the anti-Japanese forces in China from receiving outside help—and intimating that if the demand wasn’t met military action would follow.

Japan’s renewed assertiveness compelled Roosevelt to reconsider his attitude toward Tokyo. During the previous three years Japan seemed to have trapped itself in China, where it could neither defeat the government forces headed by Chiang Kai-shek nor pull back without suffering a grave loss of face and momentum. The stalemate had allowed Roosevelt to concentrate on Europe. But now Japan was on the march again, and the administration must respond.

It was a delicate business, though. To react too strongly would risk a war Americans weren’t ready or willing to fight. To react too gently would teach the Japanese militarists that the United States could be treated with impunity.

Roosevelt’s first step was a negative one. He refused to renew the commercial treaty that had framed American trade with Japan for decades and that expired in January 1940. The president’s purpose was to remind the Japanese of their dependence on the United States for vital raw materials, including oil and scrap iron and steel. Some in the administration wanted him to go further, to an embargo of oil and scrap. But for the time being he preferred to hold this stronger sanction in abeyance.

He complemented the economic nudge with a series of warnings by Cordell Hull to Japanese officials. The Japanese government defended its Asian sphere by invoking the American Monroe Doctrine. Hull rejected the comparison as absurd. “There is no more resemblance between our Monroe Doctrine and the so-called Monroe Doctrine of Japan than there is between black and white,” the secretary of state told the Japanese ambassador in Washington. America’s doctrine was defensive; Japan’s bastardized version was a cover for the most egregious aggression. Hull told the ambassador that the growing chaos in the world had stiffened the resolve of the United States. “The American people have now become thoroughly awakened, aroused, and alert in regard to any threatened injuries to American rights and interests.” Their heightened vigilance, Hull added, was a “matter of great gratification to those of us in charge of the foreign affairs of the nation.” The secretary directed Joseph Grew in Tokyo to share a sentiment with the Japanese government: “The United States has no aggressive designs, but it will be ready to defend itself against any aggression which may be undertaken against it.”

When the warnings produced no positive result, Roosevelt ratcheted things up a notch. In July 1940 he directed that a recent law restricting strategic exports be interpreted to include aviation fuel. Nothing in the interpretation singled out Japan, but the Japanese understood the directive as targeting them, as Roosevelt intended. The Japanese embassy protested that the new rules were “tantamount to an embargo.”

Roosevelt squeezed a bit more. In September he added scrap iron and steel to the restricted list. Again, Japan was not mentioned specifically, but the Japanese government, again accurately, denounced the new measure as an “unfriendly act.”

The embargoes failed in their broader purpose, though. Japan’s aggressive impulses raged unabated. “There cannot be any doubt that the military and other elements in Japan see in the present world situation a golden opportunity to carry their dreams of expansion into effect,” Joseph Grew wrote from Tokyo. “The German victories, like strong wine, have gone to their heads.” The militarists wanted to grab what they could while the chance persisted. “It has been and is doubtful that the saner heads in and out of the government will be able to control these elements.”

AMID THE GROWING threats from Germany and Japan, Roosevelt sought to strengthen the American military. In May 1940, as German planes shocked the world into recognizing the destructive potential of airpower, the president called for a dramatic increase in American aircraft production. “I should like to see this nation geared up to the ability to turn out at least 50,000 planes a year,” he told Congress. American factories were currently making less than a quarter of this number. He urged a speedup of the army’s plans for purchasing tanks, trucks, and artillery. To fund the buildup he asked for nearly one billion dollars in new money.

Two weeks later, as the French folded and the British fled before the Nazi onslaught, Roosevelt requested another billion dollars to prepare the army to train new recruits. “The one most obvious lesson of the present war in Europe is the value of the factor of speed,” he said. “There is definite danger in waiting to order the complete equipping and training of armies after a war begins.” He also requested authority from Congress to call out the national guard and to bring the army reserve into active service.

After the fall of France the president returned to Congress again, this time asking for five billion new dollars. “The principal lesson of the war up to the present time is that partial defense is inadequate defense,” he said. “If the United States is to have any defense, it must have total defense.” Roosevelt asserted a goal of acquiring equipment for an army of two million men, with comparable increases in the strength of the navy and the army’s air force.

As to where the soldiers would come from, Roosevelt broached a controversial subject. He mentioned “a system of selective training” to ensure that the manpower existed for most effective use of all the new weapons. He declined to specify what he meant by selective training, but other administration officials, including army chief of staff George Marshall, acknowledged that conscription—a draft—was the plan.

A conscription bill was introduced in Congress but bogged down, prompting Roosevelt to put his own shoulder behind it, albeit tentatively. A reporter prodded him at a press conference in early August: “There is a very definite feeling, Mr. President, in congressional circles that you are not very hot about this conscription legislation.”

“It depends on which paper you read,” Roosevelt responded.

“Well, I read my own, which I believe in.”

“I am damned if I do, and I am damned if I do not,” Roosevelt rejoined. “I am bound to be criticized whatever I do. Now, on this particular bill, everybody knows that if I were to come out and send up to the Hill a particular measure, what would you boys do, most of you? You would say that the President is ‘ordering Congress.’ ‘Old Mr. Dictator, he is just ordering Congress to pass his bill.’” Roosevelt talked around the subject for several minutes before citing his experience in the Wilson administration. “We figured out pretty well in 1917 that the selective training or selective draft was the fairest and in all ways the most efficient way of conducting a war if we had to go to war. I still think so, and I think a great majority of the people in the country will think so, when they understand it.”

Additional circumlocution ended with a reporter’s attempt to extract a usable statement. “There is a very quotable sentence right there, if you will permit it,” the reporter said.

“What is it?”

“That you are distinctly in favor of a selective training bill—”

“And consider it essential to adequate national defense. Quote that.”

Roosevelt’s remarks provoked the expected response from the isolationists, who condemned them as another step toward American fascism. Arthur Vandenberg approvingly circulated a letter from former War Secretary Harry Woodring denouncing the conscription bill as a measure “that smacks of totalitarianism.” Democrat Burton Wheeler of Montana contended that the compulsory enlistment of Americans ought to require a national referendum. Labor leaders opposed the draft, with the heads of five railroad brotherhoods calling conscription the “very antithesis of freedom.” Scores of faculty at the City College of New York signed a petition rejecting conscription.

Yet broader measures of opinion indicated support for Roosevelt and the draft. A survey of papers by the journal Editor & Publisher found that 80 percent favored some form of conscription. A Gallup poll revealed that Americans at large supported a draft by a margin of two to one, with comfortable majorities even in traditionally isolationist states of the Midwest.

(Whether registering opposition to the draft, a realistic appraisal of its chances of passage, or other emotions entirely, thousands of young couples flooded marriage license bureaus across the country, in recognition of the fact that the conscription bill would exempt married men. “This is the biggest day we’ve had this year,” the chief clerk in New York City explained. “I hear most couples talking of the proposed draft now pending before Congress. I think it’s the reason for this large crowd…. We were able to take care of all of them and send everybody home happy.”)

Despite the popular support, Roosevelt declined to push any harder for conscription without assurances that his backing wouldn’t be used against him. He approached Willkie regarding a joint statement in support of the draft. He wasn’t surprised, given Willkie’s negative response to his earlier effort on behalf of the destroyers-for-bases deal, when the Republican nominee rebuffed the overture. This didn’t prevent him from complaining that Willkie was placing his own interest above that of the country. “He has no desire to cooperate and is merely playing politics,” Roosevelt wrote to an ally in Congress.

Shortly thereafter, though, Willkie issued an independent endorsement of the draft, freeing Roosevelt to take the lead on the issue. Critics were advocating postponing a decision till the new year; reporters asked for Roosevelt’s reaction. “I am absolutely opposed to the postponement,” he said. “It means in these days—and we all know what the world situation is—nearly a year of delay…. We cannot afford a year.”

With the president, his Republican challenger, and a large majority of the American public behind conscription, not even the isolationists in Congress could stop the bill. In September the legislature approved the first peacetime draft in American history. “America stands at the crossroads of its destiny,” Roosevelt said, on signing the measure. “We must and will marshal our great potential strength to fend off war from our shores. We must and will prevent our land from becoming a victim of aggression. Our decision has been made.”

THE ELECTION OF 1940 should have been one of the most momentous in American history. Franklin Roosevelt was trying to break the oldest taboo in American politics, the one that had always prevented what American democrats—a group that overlapped with American Democrats, but not precisely—had feared: the emergence of a permanent presidency. They knew the power of incumbents and how incumbents could manipulate the political process to their benefit and to the exclusion of challengers. They might well have rewritten the Constitution to forbid third terms if they hadn’t assumed that the ghost of George Washington was forbidding enough.

Roosevelt’s attempted lese majesty would have provoked a fundamental debate if there hadn’t been a war on. The fact of the war, of course, was what provided Roosevelt’s political cover. He knew perfectly well there wouldn’t be such a debate. At least he wouldn’t participate in one, relying on the war as his excuse not to.

The Republicans attempted to force the issue. The party organized a national “No Third Term Day,” marked by anti-Roosevelt rallies in hundreds of cities and towns across the country. Willkie, calling Roosevelt “Mr. Third-term Candidate,” raised the question at every chance. “If you elect him for a third term, there will be no limit to the imagination of what he has a mandate to do,” Willkie told an appreciative audience in Montana. In Syracuse he asserted that Roosevelt, after failing to reorganize the Supreme Court in 1937, had nonetheless packed the court with justices who shared his expansive view of federal power. “Give him another four years and he will fill with his own men not only the Supreme Court but the entire federal judiciary. This is the pattern of dictatorship, the usurpation of power by manufactured emergencies, the circumvention of the legislature, the capture of the courts…. These are the last steps on the road to absolute power.” After Roosevelt still refused to be drawn, Willkie demanded, “Since he won’t discuss the principles of a third term, what does he think about a fourth term?” The president and his supporters were contending that his experience qualified him for extended tenure. If this argument held true, it presumably would be employed again after twelve years, and then after sixteen. “You can pursue that argument on into infinity. You will come to the conclusion that Louis XIV, the worst despot in history, was the best ruler because he served the longest. So I would like to have the third-term candidate enlighten the American people.”

Willkie wanted Roosevelt to enlighten the American people about his war plans as well. “Are there any international understandings to put America into the war that we citizens do not know about?” The Republican nominee recounted the Democrats’ handling of the First World War, when American boys had fought and died for a dream that bore no resemblance to reality. “We do not want to send our boys over there again. And we do not intend to send them over there again. And if you elect me president, they won’t be sent.” Willkie challenged Roosevelt to make a similar promise.

This demand got Roosevelt’s attention. Polls showed that a double-digit Roosevelt lead in late September had slipped to six points by the end of October. According to Gallup’s interpretation of the peculiar politics of the Democratic party, the race was therefore nearly even. “A lead of 53 percent for the President is actually the equivalent of a neck-and-neck race,” George Gallup explained, “because, owing to surplus Democratic majorities in the South, a Democratic President normally requires about 52 percent of the nation to win.”

Roosevelt responded with a statement that seemed necessary at the time but that would haunt him later. Speaking at Boston on October 30, he accused the Republicans of “political shenanigans” and Willkie of “unpatriotic misstatement of fact.” He praised what the New Deal had done for ordinary Americans and pledged to carry the good work forward. Then, addressing himself specifically to the “mothers and fathers” of America, he declared:

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.

ROOSEVELT’S STATEMENT served its immediate purpose. The Willkie tide crested and ebbed, and Roosevelt won his third term by a popular margin of 55 percent to 45 percent, and 449 to 82 in electors.

The campaign left Roosevelt weary. Willkie’s badgering had finally persuaded him, just days before the election, to forswear a fourth term, but only obliquely. In a discussion of what he hoped to accomplish in a third term, he had asserted, almost as an aside: “When that term is over, there will be another president.” He hadn’t mentioned the topic again.

But at the first post-election press conference, a newsman read back Roosevelt’s statement and inquired, “Did you definitely mean that?”

Perhaps the campaign had drained his patience. Doubtless the juggling between the contest at home and the wars in Europe and Asia had worn him down. In any event, he responded with uncharacteristic testiness. “Oughtn’t you to go back to grade school and learn English?” he snapped at the reporter.

“That was your meaning?”

“Read it. I am not teaching you English. Read it.”

“I have read it, sir.”

“Read it again.”

NO ONE WAS happier at Roosevelt’s reelection than Winston Churchill. “I did not think it right for me as a foreigner to express any opinion upon American policies while the election was on,” Churchill wrote the president the day after the balloting. “But now I feel you will not mind my saying that I prayed for your success and that I am truly thankful for it.” Britain had survived the German bombings, which after their September climax had diminished as the fighter planes of the Royal Air Force inflicted increasing damage on the Luftwaffe. To spare their bombers, the Germans now largely confined their raids to nights. These still spoiled English sleep, but they accomplished less meaningful destruction. And the onset of autumn’s nasty weather in the Channel obviated any real threat of invasion until the spring. “We are now entering upon a somber phase of what must evidently be protracted and broadening war,” Churchill continued. “Things are afoot which will be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe, and in expressing the comfort I feel that the people of the United States have once again cast these great burdens upon you, I must avow my sure faith that the lights by which we steer will bring us safely to anchor.”

Roosevelt didn’t respond at once. The immediate crisis was over, as Churchill himself acknowledged. The need now was to plan for the longer haul—for the “protracted and broadening war” of the prime minister’s description. Having pledged to avoid engagement in foreign wars, Roosevelt intended to keep his distance from Britain. But Britain remained America’s best hope, in Roosevelt’s view, for precisely such non-engagement. Roosevelt in late 1940 was no more eager for war than the isolationists. Yet their contention that a German victory in Europe would not be cause for alarm, that the United States might defend itself by fighting from American shores, struck Roosevelt as naïve and myopic. Doubtless America could defend itself, by itself, in the Western Hemisphere. But the task would be needlessly difficult. As valuable as he had made the bases in Newfoundland, Bermuda, and the West Indies out to be, they were nowhere so valuable a base as Britain, from which bombers might reach the heart of Germany. To retreat to the Western Hemisphere would be to concede control of the Atlantic and its shipping lanes to the Germans. To keep Britain in the war, by contrast, would threaten to bottle the German navy up in the Baltic and North seas.

There was more involved than mere fighting. This war would end, sooner or later. The world would have to be reconstructed. Roosevelt had seen it badly reconstructed once; the result was the current conflict. A reconstruction based on Nazi control of Europe would be far worse. Roosevelt favored democracy over dictatorship for reasons of morality and virtue; how could an American not? But he also believed that democracy was more stable, more peaceful, and more conducive to prosperity—to the prosperity of those living in the democratic countries and to that of their neighbors as well. In a world where fascists flourished, America would know neither peace nor prosperity. Roosevelt couldn’t yet see how fascism would be eliminated, but he instinctively understood that it must not be allowed to spread any farther than it already had.

What, then, should be his policy—America’s policy? It was simple, really: to keep Britain fighting as long and effectively as possible. Every month, every year perhaps, that Britain remained at grips with Germany was a month, a year, during which the United States might remain at peace. As bold as Hitler had proven, he couldn’t dream of attacking the United States without defeating Britain first. “Does anyone seriously believe that we need to fear attack anywhere in the Americas while a free Britain remains our most powerful naval neighbor in the Atlantic?” the president asked the American people in a Fireside Chat in December 1940.

Does anyone seriously believe, on the other hand, that we could rest easy if the Axis powers were our neighbors there? If Great Britain goes down, the Axis powers will control the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australasia, and the high seas—and they will be in a position to bring enormous military and naval resources against this hemisphere. It is no exaggeration to say that all of us, in all the Americas, would be living at the point of a gun—a gun loaded with explosive bullets, economic as well as military.

Isolationists imagined a negotiated peace with Hitler and his accomplices. These “American appeasers,” Roosevelt said, should ask the Austrians and the Czechs about negotiating with the Nazis. They should ask the Poles and Belgians and Dutch and Norwegians about the possibility of peace in the vicinity of German fascism. The nature of modern dictatorship was to expand by force. The Axis regimes spoke of a new order, but it was the oldest order in the world: a tyranny of terror and oppression. The British were bravely struggling against this tyranny; America’s fate depended on Britain’s success. “There is far less chance of the United States getting into war if we do all we can now to support the nations defending themselves against attack by the Axis than if we acquiesce in their defeat, submit tamely to an Axis victory, and wait our turn to be the object of attack in another war later on.” London wasn’t asking for American soldiers, nor were American soldiers being offered. Any claim to the contrary was a “deliberate untruth.” American weapons, not American soldiers, were what was required. Indeed, providing weapons would help ensure that American soldiers not go into battle. Roosevelt coined a phrase that would summarize American policy for the following year, and beyond, when he declared: “We must be the great arsenal of democracy.”

THE POLICY THAT became known as Lend-Lease had multiple purposes. The obvious one was that which Roosevelt identified in his December Fireside Chat: to keep Britain in the war, that the United States might stay out. This part of Roosevelt’s aim was perfectly sincere, at least in the short term. Whether it was realistic over time was another question. Quite likely the British, with American weapons and equipment, could hold the Germans at bay, as they had done so far without American help. But it seemed quite unlikely that the British, even with American arms, could somehow reverse the German victories on the Continent. Roosevelt hadn’t decided how long the United States could live with a Nazified Europe, but everything in his public and private statements indicated his belief that the cohabitation couldn’t be permanent. At some point, in some way, American power would have to be brought more directly to bear.

Yet even in the near term, becoming the arsenal of democracy would serve purposes other than bolstering Britain. It would allow the expansion of America’s defense industry. This would be good for America’s own defense, both in deterring attack and in fighting a war should deterrence fail. American businesses and workers would perfect their skills making weapons for export and in the process become ready to build for America’s own use if the need arose. “Orders from Great Britain are therefore a tremendous asset to American national defense, because they automatically create additional facilities,” Roosevelt told reporters at a December press conference. “I am talking selfishly, from the American point of view—nothing else.”

Putting Americans to work building weapons would have broader economic benefits as well. Jobs of any sort remained scarce in America in late 1940; whatever the government could do to find or create jobs would be welcomed. Defense jobs, moreover, were preferable to the kinds of jobs the New Deal had typically provided, in two respects. First, they paid better. Second, they came without the political and psychological baggage of make-work. At this stage Roosevelt didn’t expect the defense industry to pull the country out of the depression, but it might well get the process started.

How to fund democracy’s arsenal was a question. Would the British pay for the weapons? Would the American government? If the British, would they be required to pay cash, or would they be allowed to borrow? If the American government, would it expect to be reimbursed by the British at some point?

Roosevelt had dealt with these issues before, or at any rate seen them dealt with at close hand. “I remember 1914 very well,” he told reporters. Conventional wisdom at the outbreak of the First World War had predicted a short struggle, on the reasoning that the belligerents would run out of cash. “There was the best economic opinion in the world that the continuance of war was absolutely dependent on money in the bank. Well, you know what happened.” What happened first was that Americans had put up the money, the Allies had got their weapons, the American economy had boomed, and the Allies had won the war. What happened later was that the war debts poisoned relations between the United States and the Europeans during the decade and a half after the war.

Roosevelt wanted to gain the benefits of war production while preventing the postwar hangover. “What I am trying to do is to eliminate the dollar sign,” he said. “Get rid of the silly, foolish old dollar sign.” Needless to say, not everyone thought the dollar sign was so silly, but none of the reporters called Roosevelt on it before he provided a better hook for their stories.

Let me give you an illustration: Suppose my neighbor’s home catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him to put out his fire. Now, what do I do? I don’t say to him before that operation, “Neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15; you have to pay me $15 for it.” What is the transaction that goes on? I don’t want $15—I want my garden hose back after the fire is over. All right. If it goes through the fire all right, intact, without any damage to it, he gives it back to me and thanks me very much for the use of it. But suppose it gets smashed up—holes in it—during the fire; we don’t have to have too much formality about it, but I say to him, “I was glad to lend you that hose; I see I can’t use it any more, it’s all smashed up.” He says, “How many feet of it were there?” I tell him, “There were 150 feet of it.” He says, “All right, I will replace it.” Now, if I get a nice garden hose back, I am in pretty good shape.

The president conceived of something similar regarding aid to Britain.

The thought is that we would take over not all, but a very large number of, future British orders; and when they came off the line, whether they were planes or guns or something else, we would enter into some kind of arrangement for their use by the British on the ground that it was the best thing for American defense, with the understanding that when the show was over, we would get repaid sometime in kind, thereby leaving out the dollar mark in the form of a dollar debt and substituting for it a gentleman’s obligation to repay in kind. I think you all get it.

Not all the reporters did get it. Roosevelt had cautioned them about inquiring too closely of a project that was still in the conceptual stage, but one couldn’t resist. “Would the title still be in our name?” he asked.

“You have gone and asked a question I told you not to ask,” the president replied. “It would take lawyers much better than you or I to answer it.”

“Let us leave the legal phase out of it entirely,” another reporter asked. “The question I have is whether you think this takes us any more into the war than we are.”

“No, not a bit,” the president replied.

THIS LAST ASSERTION was what provoked all the controversy when the president presented Lend-Lease to Congress in January 1941. He proposed that the legislature underwrite the expansion of American war production facilities and that it appropriate funds to pay for the weapons and supporting equipment the facilities produced. These weapons should be sent to the countries battling aggression, with compensation to be deferred until after the battle was won. Roosevelt again rejected the isolationist assertion that his plan would push the United States closer to war, but more than ever he embraced the cause of those fighting fascism. And for the first time he spoke explicitly of war aims.

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.

The Lend-Lease bill—introduced in the House with the curious designation, for a bill affirming Anglo-American solidarity, H.R. 1776—evoked the expected response from the isolationists. Several derided the notion that Hitler would threaten the United States even if he conquered Britain. Gerald Nye called the bill a war measure in all but name. “Make no mistake about it,” the North Dakota Republican declared of the struggle against the president’s proposal. “This is a last-ditch fight. This is our last fight before the question of war itself is raised. If we lose it, war is almost inevitable.” Hiram Johnson of California was more succinct: “This bill is war.” Republican Robert Taft of Ohio drew laughs from even supporters of the bill when he remarked, “Lending war equipment is a good deal like lending chewing gum—you certainly don’t want it back.” Wendell Willkie’s endorsement of the general idea of Lend-Lease, albeit without reference to a specific bill, prompted the Republican isolationists to remind anyone who would listen that Willkie didn’t speak for the Republican party. Democrat Burton Wheeler distanced himself from Willkie differently. “Do not be dismayed because Mr. Willkie, lately of the Commonwealth & Southern, is on the side of Mr. Roosevelt,” Wheeler told his isolationist friends. “This puts all the economic royalists on the side of war.”

Wheeler went on to lash Lend-Lease as an insult to the American people, an injury to the American Constitution, and an affront to American values. “Never before have the American people been asked or compelled to give so bounteously and so completely of their tax dollars to any foreign nation,” Wheeler said. “Never before has the Congress of the United States been asked by any president to violate international law. Never before has this nation resorted to duplicity in the conduct of its foreign affairs. Never before has the United States given to one man the power to strip this nation of its defenses in time of war or peace.” Speaking as a skeptic in regard to Roosevelt’s domestic policies too, the Montana senator called Lend-Lease another “New Deal AAA foreign policy—plow under every fourth American boy.”

Roosevelt took the criticism personally—or at least affected to. He called Wheeler’s statement “the most dastardly, unpatriotic thing” he had ever heard. “Quote me on that,” he told reporters. “That really is the rottenest thing that has been said in public life in my generation.”

Roosevelt had to deal with questioning from within his own administration as well. John Nance Garner wasn’t quite out the door; his replacement by Henry Wallace wouldn’t be official until January 20. At his final cabinet meeting the vice president made his distrust of Lend-Lease felt. “Garner was there, flushed of face and loud of voice and at least half full of whisky,” Harold Ickes recorded.

We spent a lot of time talking about the lend-lease bill and the question of England’s financial ability to pay for more material in this country. Over and over again, in a loud voice and with his customary bad English, Garner kept insisting that he was under the impression from what had been said at Cabinet on previous occasions that the British had plenty of wealth in this country that could be turned into dollars and used to buy munitions. The burden of his song was: “Why, Mr. President, you told us that the British had three or four billion of dollars in this country that could be spent here. The British, per capita, are the richest in the world, and if they care anything about their freedom, they ought to be willing to spend all that they have.”

Roosevelt might have ignored Garner but for the fact that the crusty Texan articulated, in his distinctive way, an undercurrent of Anglophobia that still flowed broadly in America. Roosevelt wanted not simply a victory on Lend-Lease but a mandate. The measure would be a vote of confidence in his ability to guide America through the troubles ahead. To silence the skeptics he persuaded Churchill to open Britain’s account books to American perusal. “So far as I know,” Henry Morgenthau told the House foreign affairs committee, “this is the first time in history that one government has put at the disposal of another figures of this nature.” The numbers revealed that the British were indeed strapped, for ready cash if not for illiquid assets. In any event, the whole purpose of Lend-Lease was to put off haggling over just such questions until the military emergency was past.

Churchill provided crucial assistance of another sort. In a radio speech broadcast to America, the prime minister explained that Britain did not want and would not require American troops. “In the last war the United States sent two million men across the Atlantic, but this is not a war of vast armies, hurling immense masses of shells at one another,” Churchill said. “We do not need the gallant armies which are forming throughout the American Union. We do not need them this year, nor the next year, nor any year that I can foresee.” Roosevelt had sent Churchill part of a poem by Longfellow. “I think this verse applies to you people as it does to us,” Roosevelt had written. Churchill now read the verse to the American people:

Sail on, Oh Ship of State!

Sail on, Oh Union strong and great!

Humanity with all its fears,

With all the hopes of future years,

Is hanging breathless on thy fate!

The prime minister asked rhetorically what answer he could give to Roosevelt, “this great man, the thrice-chosen head of a nation of 130 million?” The answer was simply this:

Put your confidence in us. Give us your faith and your blessing, and under Providence all will be well. We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire…. Give us the tools and we will finish the job.

Equally essential to the success of the Lend-Lease bill was the cooperation of certain members of Congress who hadn’t backed the president on other issues. The war in Europe was splintering the opposition to the administration. Since Roosevelt’s first term, the anti–New Deal coalition had consisted of Republicans, conservative southern Democrats, and some maverick western Democrats. The war aroused different emotions than the New Deal, and even as many Republicans crossed party lines to join the president, southern Democrats, reflecting the strong patriotic streak of their region, found their way to the president’s side. The support of the Southerners was amplified—just as their opposition had been—by their control of the most important committees. After Henry Morgenthau satisfied the pertinent committees regarding the effects of Lend-Lease on American finance, and Cordell Hull, Henry Stimson, and Frank Knox did the same regarding American diplomacy, the American army, and the American navy, respectively, the committees reported the bill favorably to their full houses.

More important than anything, though, was Roosevelt’s personal popularity. The 1940 election had demonstrated his appeal to the American people as of November; his actions and words since then had enhanced the widespread feeling that this was the man who should be leading the country through these dangerous times. A poll conducted amid the deliberations over Lend-Lease put the president’s approval rating at 71 percent, the highest in the seven-year history of the Gallup organization.

With the stars aligned, Lend-Lease moved steadily, if deliberately, through Congress. An isolationist filibuster was averted. Amendments were added, dropped, revised, and re-added, without materially altering the president’s design. The Senate and House passed the measure in early March, the former by a vote of 60 to 31, the latter by 317 to 71.

“Let not the dictators of Europe or Asia doubt our unanimity now,” Roosevelt declared. “Yes, the decisions of our democracy may be slowly arrived at. But when that decision is made, it is proclaimed not with the voice of any one man but with the voice of one hundred and thirty millions. It is binding on us all. And the world is no longer left in doubt.”

41.

HARRY HOPKINS ARRIVED IN LONDON MIDWAY THROUGH THE CONGRESSIONAL debate over Lend-Lease. Edward R. Murrow, the American journalist who had made his reputation broadcasting news of the German blitz against the British capital, met Hopkins and inquired what brought him to England. “I suppose you could say that I’ve come here to try to find a way to be a catalytic agent between two prima donnas,” Hopkins replied.

One of the prima donnas Hopkins knew as well as anyone did. By early 1941 Hopkins had become Roosevelt’s indispensable man. He combined the functions of a civilian chief of staff and a cabinet secretary without portfolio. He had instant access to the president and to whatever passed across the president’s desk. He knew what Roosevelt knew; he often felt what Roosevelt felt, sometimes before Roosevelt did. And he juggled all this without holding any formal title. “The extraordinary fact,” Robert Sherwood wrote, “was that the second most important individual in the United States Government during the most critical period of the world’s greatest war had no legitimate official position nor even any desk of his own except a card table in his bedroom. However, the bedroom was in the White House.”

Hopkins moved into the White House in the spring of 1940. His bedroom—a suite, actually—was located in the southeast corner of the second floor, looking out across the lawn to the Washington Monument and the Virginia hills beyond the Potomac. The suite had been a single room during the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln used it as his study. Hopkins’s four-poster bed displaced the desk on which the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. More recently the suite had served as quarters for distinguished guests; Britain’s George VI slept there during a state visit in 1939. After Hopkins moved in, guests stayed across the hall, in the suite in the northeast corner. On several visits to Washington during the war, Winston Churchill would become quite familiar with Hopkins, as they bumped into each other in the hall every day.

The acquaintance began in January 1941. For some time Roosevelt had been dissatisfied at having to communicate with Churchill through letters and the occasional telephone call. The destroyers-for-bases deal could have been concluded much sooner, he believed, if he had been able to speak with Churchill in person. A comparable thought occurred to him as he laid the groundwork for Lend-Lease and had to estimate Britain’s liquid assets and its collateral. “You know,” he told Hopkins, “a lot of this could be settled if Churchill and I could just sit down together for a while.”

“What’s stopping you?” Hopkins rejoined.

“Well, it couldn’t be arranged right now.” Roosevelt couldn’t leave America with his historic third inauguration pending, and he couldn’t invite Churchill without seeming to confirm the isolationists’ charge that he was selling the country out to England.

“How about me going over, Mr. President?”

Roosevelt initially rejected the idea. Hopkins had charge of the president’s speech writing team, among his other duties, and with the annual message and the inaugural address coming up, Roosevelt didn’t think he could spare him. Besides, Hopkins would manage the administration’s end of the contest for Lend-Lease.

Hopkins responded that the president’s regular speech writers—Sam Rosenman and Bob Sherwood—knew their work well enough to get along without supervision. Anyway, Roosevelt always did the final editing himself. As for managing the Lend-Lease bill, Hopkins said he would do as much harm as good with the lawmakers. “They’d never pay any attention to my views, except to vote the other way.”

Roosevelt still refused. Yet some weeks later, without informing Hopkins of any change of mind, he announced at a press conference that Hopkins would be traveling to England as his “personal representative.”

The reporters knew Hopkins had the president’s ear and confidence. “Does Mr. Hopkins have any special mission, Mr. President?” one asked.

“No, no, no!”

“Any title?”

“No, no.”

“Will anyone accompany Mr. Hopkins?”

“No, and he will have no powers.”

Though Hopkins had lobbied for the mission, the journey almost killed him. He had never fully recovered from his cancer and surgery, and transoceanic air travel, especially during wartime, tested the hardiest constitution. Hopkins flew by Pan American Clipper, a flying boat better known for durability than for speed or comfort. He suffered horribly from motion sickness and had to be guided gently off the plane after it reached England. But he was taken in hand by the British government and made as comfortable as possible in London.

For all Roosevelt’s press conference disclaimers, Hopkins had a definite, if somewhat unspecific, mission. “I want to try to get an understanding of Churchill and of the men he sees after midnight,” he told Edward Murrow. His first meeting with the prime minister took place not long after his arrival. “Number 10 Downing Street is a bit down at the heels because the Treasury next door has been bombed a bit,” Hopkins reported to Roosevelt. “The Prime Minister is no longer permitted to sleep here and I understand sleeps across the street.” Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s personal assistant, guided Hopkins in.

Bracken led me to a little dining room in the basement, poured me some sherry, and left me to wait for the Prime Minister. A rotund, smiling, red-faced gentleman appeared, extended a fat but none the less convincing hand and wished me welcome to England. A short black coat, striped trousers, a clear eye, and a mushy voice was the impression of England’s leader as he showed me with obvious pride the photography of his beautiful daughter-in-law and grandchild.

Hopkins told Churchill that President Roosevelt would be happy for a chance to meet the prime minister, but only later in the spring, after the Lend-Lease program was safely launched. Churchill reciprocated the feeling. “He talked of remaining as long as two weeks and seemed very anxious to meet the President face to face,” Hopkins recounted.

Churchill reflected on the war to date and projected its future course. He said Germany could not invade Britain successfully. “He thinks Hitler may use poison gas,” Hopkins related, “but if they do England will reply in kind, killing man for man—‘for we too have the deadliest gases in the world’—but under no circumstances will they be used unless the Germans release gas first.” The prime minister asserted that air power would determine the outcome of the war. “Churchill said that while Germany’s bombers were at the ratio of 2¹/2 to 1”—as against the British—“at the present time, that would soon be reduced to 1¹/2 to 1, and then he felt they could hold their own in the air. Indeed he looks forward, with our help, to mastery in the air, and then Germany with all her armies will be finished. He believes that this war will never see great forces massed against one another.”

Hopkins had intended to be in England for a couple weeks; instead he stayed six. Churchill fascinated him. The prime minister held the key to Britain’s success, Hopkins told Roosevelt.

Churchill is the government in every sense of the word. He controls the grand strategy and often the details. Labor trusts him. The army, navy, air force are behind him to a man. The politicians and upper crust tend to like him. I cannot emphasize too strongly that he is the one and only person over here with whom you need to have a full meeting of minds.

Hopkins wasn’t simply gathering intelligence for Roosevelt; he was also representing Roosevelt to the British. The president, of course, appreciated this part of the mission, and he guessed Hopkins would charm his hosts, in his disarmingly American way, as much as he had charmed Roosevelt. And so he did. From valets to cabinet ministers they praised his unaffected, unassuming approach. “Mr. Hopkins was very genial, considerate—if I may say so, lovable,” a waiter at Claridge’s Hotel, which Hopkins made his headquarters, remarked. Max Beaverbrook, Churchill’s minister of war production, hosted a dinner for Hopkins and invited the London press. “Hopkins rose, looking lean, shy and untidy, grasping the back of his chair,” a reporter present recalled.

His words were private, so no notes were taken. But if it had been possible to record the sentences that came quietly and diffidently from the lips of Harry Hopkins they would have compared well for nobility of expression with the splendid oration which Mr. Roosevelt had delivered two days earlier when he was sworn in for the third time as President of the United States.

Not that Hopkins repeated or even echoed the President’s speech. He talked in more intimate terms. Where the President had spoken of America’s duty to the world, Hopkins told us how the President and those around him were convinced that America’s world duty could be successfully performed only in partnership with Britain. He told us of the anxiety and admiration with which every phase of Britain’s lonely struggle was watched from the White House, and of his own emotions as he travelled through our blitzed land. His speech left us with the feeling that although America was not yet in the war, she was marching beside us, and that should we stumble she would see we did not fall. Above all he convinced us that the President and the men about him blazed with faith in the future of democracy.

THE FOREIGN REACTIONS to Lend-Lease varied predictably by country and government. Adolf Hitler scorned the program as desperately ineffectual. “No power and no support coming from any part of the world can change the outcome of this battle in any respect,” the German dictator declared. “International finance and plutocracy wants to fight this war to the finish. So the end of this war will, and must, be its destruction.” A spokesman for Joseph Stalin interpreted the new development in similarly economic terms: “The war is taking the form of a contest between the world’s strongest capitalist industrial machines—a contest for speed, quantity, and quality in the production of weapons.”

The prospective recipients of the American aid naturally adopted a more positive view. Churchill declared the program “a new Magna Charta, which not only has regard to the rights and laws upon which a healthy and advancing civilization can alone be erected, but also proclaims, by precept and example, the duty of free men and free nations, wherever they may be, to share the responsibility and burden of enforcing them.” Robert Gordon Menzies, the prime minister of Australia, which with the rest of the empire was fighting alongside Britain, said to the Americans, “You are neutral and we are at war, but you have made the whole world understand that the moral and material might of a great neutral country can always be placed behind the belligerent who fights for justice.” Jan Christiaan Smuts, the South African prime minister and senior member of Britain’s imperial war cabinet, put the matter most succinctly and, arguably, most accurately. “Hitler has at last brought America into the war,” Smuts said.

Roosevelt still resisted this characterization but with nothing like the verve of the previous months. The convincing majorities for Lend-Lease demonstrated the willingness of Americans to look the Axis danger in the face. And the language of the Lend-Lease Act revealed Congress’s confidence in Roosevelt to guide them against that danger. Entitled “An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States,” the measure authorized the president to “sell, transfer title to, exchange, lease, lend, or otherwise dispose of” any defense article to “the government of any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States.” Not without reason had critics of the bill called it a blank check.

Roosevelt’s first move upon passage of the bill was to ask Congress to fill in the blank on the amount line of the check. He sought $7 billion, which had seemed a huge sum only months before but now looked like a mere down payment. In supporting his request, Roosevelt spoke in more belligerent terms than ever. The vote in favor of Lend-Lease, he said, was “the end of any attempts at appeasement in our land,…the end of compromise with tyranny and the forces of oppression.” The decision to join the struggle required that Americans make sacrifices. “Whether you are in the armed services; whether you are a steel worker or a stevedore; a machinist or a housewife; a farmer or a banker; a storekeeper or a manufacturer—to all of you it will mean sacrifice in behalf of your country and your liberties.” Americans would experience the war effort in their daily lives. “You will have to be content with lower profits, lower profits from business because obviously your taxes will be higher. You will have to work longer at your bench, or your plow, or your machine, or your desk.” Some Americans might think that since the fighting remained far away, they weren’t as deeply involved as those on the front lines. Such an attitude could lead to disaster. “It’s an all-out effort—and nothing short of an all-out effort will win.”

ROOSEVELT CONTRIBUTED to the all-out effort by exercising his executive powers to the limit. He created, by presidential fiat, an Office of Price Administration and Civilian Supply, modeled on the executive agencies that commandeered the American economy during the First World War, and a National Defense Mediation Board, to settle strikes that threatened to disrupt war production. He jawboned coal miners and operators in a bituminous dispute to resume mining—“in the interest of national safety.” He urged labor and management in general to adopt a wartime mentality. “Our problem is to see to it that there is no idle critical machine in the United States,” he said. “The goal should be to work these machines twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week.” He requested new funds to allow the National Youth Administration to train defense workers. He seized foreign cargo ships in American ports, where many of them had been caught by the war, on grounds that they were clogging the harbors and could be put to better use by the American merchant marine. He ordered the secretary of war to supervise a major increase in the production of heavy bombers. “Command of the air by the democracies must and can be achieved,” he said.

He kicked off a campaign for the sale of Defense Savings Bonds and Defense Postal Savings Stamps by purchasing the first bond for Eleanor and the first hundred stamps for his grandchildren. He called on Congress to raise taxes to pay for the war effort. “Defense is a national task to which every American must contribute in accordance with his talents and treasure,” he wrote Robert Doughton, the chairman of the House ways and means committee.

He redrew the map of the Western Hemisphere, annexing Greenland to greater North America and thereby casting the net of the Monroe Doctrine around that North Atlantic island. He negotiated American basing rights in Greenland with the stranded Danish ambassador. “Under the present circumstances the Government in Denmark cannot, of course, act in respect of its territory in the Western Hemisphere,” Roosevelt explained.

He ordered American warships to extend their patrols far out into the Atlantic and protect the Lend-Lease fleet against Germany’s disconcertingly successful submarine campaign. But he did so quietly, even deceptively, denying that the patrols were anything like convoys. When reporters pressed him on the matter, he insisted on the difference, though he had difficulty explaining what that difference was. “I think some of you know what a horse looks like,” he said. “I think you also know what a cow looks like. If, by calling a cow a horse for a year and a half, you think that that makes the cow a horse, I don’t think so.”

“Mr. President, can you tell us the difference between a patrol and a convoy?”

“You know the difference between a cow and a horse?”

Roosevelt’s spring campaign of war readiness culminated at the end of May with a declaration of unlimited national emergency. “What started as a European war has developed, as the Nazis always intended it should develop, into a world war for world domination,” the president told the American people. Those persons who contended that Hitler had no designs beyond Europe were the same ones who had said he had no designs on Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium, or France. Yet even if Hitler left the Americas alone, the consequences of Nazi rule elsewhere would destroy the American way of life.

The American laborer would have to compete with slave labor in the rest of the world. Minimum wages, maximum hours? Nonsense! Wages and hours would be fixed by Hitler…. Farm income? What happens to all farm surpluses without any foreign trade? The American farmer would get for his products exactly what Hitler wanted to give…. Even our right of worship would be threatened. The Nazi world does not recognize any God except Hitler.

Roosevelt told his radio audience that the central front in the struggle against fascism had shifted from the air over Britain to the seaways that linked the Old World to the New. The Battle of the Atlantic extended from the ice pack around Greenland nearly to Antarctica. German submarines were torpedoing British ships, and even neutral vessels, at an alarming rate. The British were fighting valiantly, but they weren’t winning. The Germans were sinking ships far faster than the British—even with American help—could replace them. Until now the United States hadn’t taken on the Germans directly, Roosevelt said. Nor would America take them on unless attacked. Yet Americans must understand what it meant to be attacked in the age of modern warfare. “Some people seem to think that we are not attacked until bombs actually drop in the streets of New York or San Francisco or New Orleans or Chicago…. They are simply shutting their eyes to the lesson that we must learn from the fate of every nation that the Nazis have conquered.” Americans must prepare themselves ahead of the attack. “It would be suicide to wait until they are in our front yard.”

Roosevelt explained that in strengthening American patrols of the Atlantic he would be guided by two fundamental principles:

First, we shall actively resist wherever necessary, and with all our resources, every attempt by Hitler to extend his Nazi domination to the Western Hemisphere….

Second, from the point of view of strict naval and military necessity, we shall give every possible assistance to Britain and to all who, with Britain, are resisting Hitlerism or its equivalent with force of arms.

The implementation of these principles demanded the utmost effort by the entire country—hence the declaration of national emergency. “The nation will expect all individuals and all groups to play their full parts, without stint, and without selfishness, and without doubt that our democracy will triumphantly survive.”

THREE WEEKS LATER the worst-kept secret in modern military history surprised the only person who really needed to know it. The chancelleries, embassies, and intelligence ministries of Western Europe had been buzzing for months with rumors that Hitler was going to double-cross Stalin and attack the Soviet Union. The rumors were plausible enough. No one believed that the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact of 1939 had been anything more than a truce of convenience, and almost everyone believed that Hitler, frustrated by his failure to batter the British into surrendering, would be just the type to take out his frustrations on the Russians. The single thing that cast doubt on the rumors was that a German attack on the Soviets would be so stupid. Why would Hitler willingly take on a new enemy—one as large and manpower-rich as Russia—before he had defeated the enemies he already had? But perhaps that was the diabolical genius of the plan: it was so patently stupid that Stalin would never believe Hitler would attempt it.

Plenty of other people believed he would. “From every source at my disposal including some most trustworthy, it looks as if a vast German onslaught on the Russian frontier is imminent,” Churchill wrote Roosevelt on June 14. “Not only are the main German armies deployed from Finland to Roumania, but the final arrivals of air and armoured forces are being completed.” If true, the rumors foretold a crucial shift in the nature of the war. “Should this new war break out, we shall of course give all encouragement and any help we can spare to the Russians, following the principle that Hitler is the foe we have to beat. I do not expect any class political reactions here and trust that a German-Russian conflict will not cause you any embarrassment.”

Embarrassment wasn’t the word Roosevelt would have used. When Germany on June 22 did indeed attack the Soviet Union, opening an eastern front in the European war, Hitler went far toward making a prophet of Roosevelt, who had already declared the conflict a world war, provoked by Hitler’s insatiable appetite for conquest. But beyond the satisfaction that came from proven prescience, Roosevelt couldn’t help fearing that this new development would complicate the strategy he was gradually laying out before the American people. Roosevelt remembered how Wilson had capitalized on the first stage of the Russian revolution of 1917, which toppled the czar and brought Russia—briefly—into the realm of democracy. At the moment of requesting a war declaration, Wilson had been able to say that the purpose of the war was to make the world safe for democracy. Roosevelt had been following Wilson till now, stressing that the most visible victims of fascism had been democracies. By attacking Stalin—by diverting the major part of his army from Western Europe to the East—Hitler lessened the logistical strain on the emerging Anglo-American alliance, but he added to Roosevelt’s political burdens. The president only lately had begun to feel that the isolationists were being effectively neutralized; this would give them new life. Should he assert that the United States ought to assist the Soviets—as Churchill clearly wanted America to do—the isolationists’ complaint that American resources were propping up British imperialism would be echoed by their outcry that the administration was supporting communism.

Churchill pushed the president harder, and more publicly, in a radio address broadcast in America as well as Britain. “It is not for me to speak of the action of the United States,” the prime minister acknowledged. “But this I will say: if Hitler imagines that his attack on Soviet Russia will cause the slightest divergence of aims or slackening of effort in the great democracies who are resolved upon his doom, he is woefully mistaken.” Anyone could see that whatever helped Hitler hurt the cause of freedom, and what harmed Hitler served freedom. “The Russian danger is, therefore, our danger and the danger of the United States, just as the cause of any Russian fighting for his hearth and home is the cause of free men and free peoples in every quarter of the globe.”

Roosevelt wasn’t inclined to be so forthright. He let the State Department weigh in on the relative merits of fascism and communism. Both systems denied fundamental human freedoms, including the right to worship as one’s conscience directed, Undersecretary Sumner Welles explained. Yet in wartime choices had to be made. Hitler was on the offensive against democracy; Stalin was not. The conclusion was irresistible: “Any rallying of the forces opposing Hitlerism, from whatever source these forces may spring, will hasten the eventual downfall of the present German leaders and will therefore redound to the benefit of our own defense and security.” Even so, Welles declined to say whether the United States would assist the Soviets in their fight against Germany. And he told reporters that Roosevelt hadn’t made a decision on the subject.

Welles wasn’t exactly lying; Roosevelt had not made a formal decision on aid to Russia. He knew what he intended to do, but he wished to gauge the public reaction before he shared his thinking with the public. The isolationists responded much as he expected. “It’s a case of dog-eat-dog,” Senator Bennett Clark, a Democrat from Missouri, declared. “Stalin is as bloody-handed as Hitler. I don’t think we should help either one. We should tend to our own business, as we should have been doing all along.” Harry Truman, Missouri’s other senator, also a Democrat, suggested an even-handed—and bloody-handed—approach. “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia,” Truman said. “If Russia is winning we ought to help Germany…. Letthem kill as many as possible.” Truman tilted slightly toward Stalin, however: “I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.” Robert M. La Follette, the Wisconsin Progressive, predicted that interventionists in America—he didn’t identify Roosevelt by name, but he didn’t have to—would soon begin “the greatest whitewash act in all history,” to make Russia into an acceptable ally. “The American people will be told to forget the purges in Russia by the OGPU, the confiscation of property, the persecution of religion, the invasion of Finland, and the vulture role Stalin played in seizing half of prostrate Poland.”

Eight months earlier—before the 1940 election—Roosevelt might have heeded the criticism and stepped back. But when the isolationists’ arguments failed to catch on with the broader public, the president moved swiftly to put Russia on the American aid list. He ordered the Treasury to release $40 million in Soviet assets that had been frozen when Moscow and Berlin were de facto allies, and he directed that export licenses be granted to the Kremlin for items previously barred.

“Is the defense of Russia the defense of the United States?” a reporter asked.

Roosevelt declined to answer. But he made clear by his actions that the defense of Russia would assist the defense of the United States.

FOR TWO DECADES Missy LeHand had scarcely left Roosevelt’s side. She served as secretary, gatekeeper, surrogate wife, second mother, adoring partisan, loving friend. She gave up any semblance of a normal life to serve him. He knew it, and he loved her for it. And when she fell ill, typically from overwork and overworry, he suffered from the loss of her steady support and warm companionship.

She had experienced a few breakdowns before but each time had quickly recovered. In June 1941, however, the day before the Germans invaded Russia, she collapsed from a major stroke. Her right side was paralyzed, and she could no longer speak. Roosevelt ensured she was well cared for, and amid the stunning news from Europe and the complications the new twist in the war created for American policy, the president spent time each day at her hospital bedside. He told her stories: about office politics, about Churchill’s latest letter or cable, about his troubles with the isolationists. She couldn’t reply, and he didn’t know how much of what he said she understood. He laughed, in the bluff way he had long laughed at his own infirmity. She couldn’t laugh but only cry.

When the doctors at the hospital had done all they could for her, he put her on the train to Warm Springs. He paid for her medical care and rehabilitation, and when it became apparent that she would never recover, he revised his will to ensure her support in the event he died before she did. “I owed her that much,” he told James. “She served me so well for so long, and asked so little in return.”

AS MISSY’S CANDLE flickered, another flame glowed brighter. Since their 1918 parting, Roosevelt and Lucy Mercer had kept their distance from each other. She married a widower, Winthrop Rutherfurd, who was as much older than she was as James Roosevelt had been older than Sara. Lucy was devoted to Rutherfurd, bearing him one child, looking after his five other children, and tending to him as his health eventually failed. But she couldn’t help observing the rise of Franklin Roosevelt. They corresponded sporadically. She congratulated him on the birth of his first grandchild—“though I do not know exactly what one’s feelings are on that question,” she wrote. He asked Missy to get her a ticket to his 1933 inaugural ceremony and to send the White House limousine to fetch her from her sister’s house near Dupont Circle. They didn’t meet on this day, or at his second or third inaugural ceremony, both of which Lucy likewise attended.

They spoke occasionally by phone. Through Missy and Grace Tully he let the White House operator know that her calls were to be put directly through to him. Sometimes they conversed in French, lest passing ears listen in. They talked of old times and old friends and of the latest news.

Their first personal encounter in over two decades seems to have occurred in June 1941, about the time of Missy’s stroke. Lucy’s husband had also suffered a stroke, and Lucy traveled to Washington to request the president’s help in getting Winthrop admitted to Walter Reed Hospital. The White House log recorded her as “Mrs. Johnson” and indicated that the visit lasted almost two hours.

What the one-time lovers said to each other on this occasion cannot be known. They wrote nothing down, and the White House staff exercised the greatest discretion in keeping the visit quiet. But the meeting lifted for a moment the burdens each carried—his great burdens of state, her more personal burdens—and they agreed to meet again.

AMERICAN OFFICIALS expected Japan to exploit the sudden shift in the European war; their only question was how audacious Tokyo would become now that Russia, Japan’s historic competitor in Northeast Asia, was fighting for its life against Germany. “There are two groups in Japan,” Cordell Hull told Lord Halifax, the British ambassador in Washington. “One is pro-German; the other is a peace group among high officials.” The secretary of state explained that his sources asserted that the latter group wanted to turn away from Japan’s aggressive policies, to pull Japanese troops out of China, and to prevent a Pacific war. “But I have not taken this too seriously,” Hull added.

Roosevelt wasn’t taking it too seriously either—although he refused to discount it entirely. As America’s involvement in Europe increased, the president sought to maintain America’s distance from Asia. Hitler posed a central threat to America, Roosevelt judged; Japan merely a peripheral one. The United States would have to deal with Japan’s warlords eventually, but not now. If a peace party, however tentative, existed in Tokyo, American policy ought to help it along.

The peace party seemed to weaken during the summer of 1941. In July Japanese troops occupied southern Indochina. The Japanese ambassador explained to Sumner Welles, filling in for the ailing Hull, that Japan imported a million tons of rice each year from Indochina and that it feared that “de Gaullist French agents” and “Chinese agitators” were fomenting unrest in the region. The move was strictly precautionary.

The ambassador repeated his argument the next day to Roosevelt, who wasn’t buying it. The president lectured the ambassador on the patience the United States had shown Japan during the preceding two years. At substantial expense to America’s own war effort, the administration had allowed the export of oil products to Japan. Roosevelt was candid as to his motives. “If these oil supplies had been shut off or restricted, the Japanese government and people would have been furnished with an incentive or a pretext for moving down upon the Netherlands East Indies.” The United States had sought peace in Southeast Asia, and it still sought it. But the latest move by Japan, into southern Indochina, created an “exceedingly serious problem” for the United States. The ambassador’s contention that it was defensive didn’t wash. Surely the Japanese government did not think that any outside power, especially under present circumstances, had designs on Indochina. And as for rice production, the mere occupation by military forces would disrupt the supply chain more than any subversion by alleged foreign agents.

Roosevelt offered to guarantee Japan what it said it wanted from Indochina. He would do “everything within his power” to obtain an international agreement to neutralize Indochina, to prevent Gaullist or Chinese agents from getting a foothold there, and to ensure that Japan received the rice it required. But in exchange Japan must withdraw its forces from the region. Roosevelt added a warning that although Germany might be Japan’s ally at the moment, the Japanese would gravely err to put much trust in Berlin. Russia was discovering the depths of German treachery. Hitler, the president said, intended the “complete domination of the world.” Japan would not be exempt.

Roosevelt expected little positive response from Tokyo. “I have had no answer yet,” he wrote Harry Hopkins a few days later. “When it comes it will probably be unfavorable. But we have at least made one more effort to avoid Japanese expansion.”

Roosevelt decided not to wait. On July 26 he took his strongest step thus far: he froze Japanese assets in the United States. The executive order sounded fairly innocuous; its purpose was “to prevent the use of the financial facilities of the United States and trade between Japan and the United States in ways harmful to national defense and American interests.” But the effects of the order could be devastating. The American president, without consulting Congress, had declared economic war on Japan.

42.

JOSEPH DAVIES HAD BEEN AMERICAN AMBASSADOR TO MOSCOW DURING the 1930s. His tolerance for Stalinism was thought by certain of his professional peers to be excessive—some said his memoir, Mission to Moscow, should have been titled Submission to Moscow—but he had the distinction of being one of the very few Americans who had ever met Stalin personally, and Roosevelt wanted to know whether he thought Stalin and the Russians could survive the German onslaught. “The resistance of the Russian Army has been more effective than was generally expected,” Davies replied. Yet the outcome still hung in the balance. Davies supposed the Germans might well conquer White Russia, the Ukraine, and much of Russia proper, perhaps including Moscow. But Stalin could retreat beyond the Urals and carry on the fight from there. Either of two contingencies might prevent such action: an internal revolution that toppled Stalin in favor of a pro-German regime, or a decision by Stalin himself to make peace. Davies thought the former unlikely, given the historic tendency of Russians to rally around “Mother Russia” in time of trouble. The latter would depend on Stalin’s assessment of the balance of forces. “Stalin is oriental, coldly realistic, and getting along in years,” Davies wrote. “He believes that Russia is surrounded by capitalistic enemies. In ’38 and ’39 he had no confidence in the good faith of either Britain or France or the capacity of the democracies to be effective against Hitler. He hated and feared Hitler then just as he does now. He was induced to make a pact of non-aggression with Hitler as the best hope he had for preserving peace for Russia.” He might do so again.

Such an outcome must be prevented at any cost, Davies said. If it was prevented, the results would be most beneficial to America. Hitler had taken a huge chance by invading Russia; for the United States to keep Russia fighting would probably spell his doom. Moreover, cultivating Russia would increase America’s leverage with Japan, which would have to worry about its back as it drove farther south. For these reasons, the Russians must not be allowed to think that the likes of Harry Truman spoke for the American government.

Specifically, I fear that if they get the impression that the United States is only using them, and if sentiment grows and finds expression that the United States is equally a capitalistic enemy, it would be playing directly into the hands of Hitler, and he can be counted upon to use this in his efforts to project either an armistice or peace on the Russian front…. Word ought to begotten to Stalin direct that our attitude is “all out” to beat Hitler.

This was precisely the word Harry Hopkins took to Moscow, on Roosevelt’s behalf. The president agreed with Davies—and with Churchill—that necessity mandated cooperation with the communists of Russia against the fascists of Germany. Roosevelt didn’t underestimate the differences between the United States and the Soviet Union and between democracy and communism. But Nazi Germany was the great danger of the moment, and Roosevelt believed in dealing with first things first.

“I ask you to treat Mr. Hopkins with the identical confidence you would feel if you were talking directly to me,” Roosevelt wrote Stalin, in a letter of introduction Hopkins carried to Moscow in late July 1941. “He will communicate directly to me the views that you express to him and will tell me what you consider are the most pressing individual problems on which we could be of aid.”

Hopkins discovered that diplomacy among the Russians was not for the faint of heart—or head or belly. “It was monumental,” he wrote of the dinner honoring him on his arrival. “It lasted almost four hours.” The food came in course after groaning course, the drink in toast after mind-blurring toast. Hopkins hadn’t had much experience with vodka, but he was a quick study. “Vodka has authority. It is nothing for the amateur to trifle with. Drink it as an American or an Englishman takes whiskey neat, and it will tear you apart. The thing to do is to spread a chunk of bread (and good bread it was) with caviar, and, while you are swallowing that, bolt your vodka. Don’t play with the stuff. Eat while you’re drinking it—something that will act as a shock absorber for it.”

Stalin was an acquired taste, as well. He told Hopkins he reciprocated Roosevelt’s desire for frank communications, and then he launched into a lecture on political morality. “Mr. Stalin spoke of the necessity of there being a minimum moral standard between all nations,” Hopkins wrote Roosevelt. “Without such a minimum moral standard, nations could not co-exist. He stated that the present leaders of Germany knew no such minimum moral standard and that, therefore, they represented an anti-social force in the present world.” The Germans thought nothing of signing a treaty one day, breaking it the next, and signing a new and contradictory treaty. “Nations must fulfill their treaty obligations,” Stalin said. “Or international society could not exist.”

Hopkins didn’t know what to make of Stalin’s sermonizing. This was the man who murdered his political opponents and liquidated entire classes of people—and now he was complaining of Hitler’s lack of integrity? Hopkins was relieved when the talk turned more concrete, to the subject of American aid. “I told Mr. Stalin that the question of aid to the Soviet Union was divided into two parts. First, what would Russia most require that the United States could deliver immediately, and, second, what would be Russia’s requirements on the basis of a long war?”

Stalin evidently had given the matter serious thought. In the immediate category he specified twenty thousand anti-aircraft guns, a million rifles, and an unspecified number of large-caliber machine guns. Over the longer term he wanted aviation fuel and aluminum for airplane construction. “Give us anti-aircraft guns and the aluminum and we can fight for three or four years,” he said.

At a second meeting—also held in the evening, as Stalin’s meetings typically were—Hopkins asked for Stalin’s frank assessment of the fighting. Stalin admitted to having been surprised by the German invasion; even till the last moment, he said, he had not believed that Hitler would strike. As a result of his error, many of Russia’s 180 divisions had been far from the frontier when the battle began, and the Germans enjoyed an early advantage. But in the month since then, Russia had mobilized another 50 divisions, and expected to muster as many as 350 divisions by the spring of 1942. He guessed that Germany could field 300 divisions. He said he was eager to get as many of his divisions as possible into battle—“because then the troops learn that Germans can be killed and are not supermen.” He characterized the morale of the Russian soldiers as “extremely high,” acknowledging that this said less about socialism than about patriotism. “They are fighting for their homes and in familiar territory.” As for the Germans, they seemed to be tired. German prisoners said they were “sick of war.” Even so, the Germans couldn’t be counted out. “Stalin repeatedly stated that he did not underrate the German Army,” Hopkins wrote Roosevelt. “He stated that their organization was of the very best and that he believed that they had large reserves of food, men, supplies, and fuel.” Stalin said that part of the reason the British had failed to stand up to the Germans in 1940 was that they had underrated the Wehrmacht. “He did not propose to do this.” He thought the Germans had sufficient fuel, food, and reserves to conduct a winter campaign, but autumn rains would prevent anything more than defensive actions after the beginning of October. By then the Red Army would have dug in. “Mr. Stalin expressed repeatedly his confidence that the Russian lines would hold within 100 kilometers of their present position”—in other words, west of Leningrad, Moscow, and Kiev.

Looking further into the future, Stalin said that it was “inevitable” that the United States would enter the war. “The might of Germany was so great that, even though Russia might defend herself, it would be very difficult for Britain and Russia combined to crush the German military machine.” Possibly the mere declaration of war by the United States would break German morale. But more likely the war would be “bitter and long.” Stalin said he looked forward to joint operations. “He wanted me to tell the President that he would welcome the American troops on any part of the Russian front, under the complete command of the American army.” He also welcomed working with President Roosevelt. “He repeatedly said that the President and the United States had more influence with the common people of the world today than any other force.”

Hopkins came away from his meetings most impressed: with the determination of the Russians to defend their territory and with Stalin as a man. “Not once did he repeat himself,” Hopkins wrote. “There was no waste of word, gesture, nor mannerism. It was like talking to a perfectly coordinated machine, an intelligent machine.” Stalin didn’t lack a sense of humor, but it was as controlled as everything about the man. “He laughs often enough, but it’s a short laugh, somewhat sardonic, perhaps. There is no small talk in him. His humor is keen, penetrating. He speaks no English, but as he shot rapid Russian at me he ignored his interpreter, looking straight into my eyes as though I understood every word that he uttered.” Hopkins spent six hours with Stalin over two meetings. When the second meeting ended, Hopkins’s time with the dictator was over. “He said good-bye once, just as only once he said hello. And that was that.”

DURING THE SPRING of 1941, as the German emphasis in the war against Britain shifted from the air to the sea, from an attempt to bomb the British into submission to an effort to starve them, German submarines and surface vessels targeted the convoys of ships that carried Lend-Lease provisions from America. Of the German surface vessels the most feared was the Bismarck, a great battleship that commenced service in May 1941. Fast, formidably armed, and heavily armored, the Bismarck prepared to prowl the North Atlantic, blast the convoys, refuel at sea, and wreak general havoc. The British knew about the Bismarck from naval attachés and others who had watched it being built before the war began, and they learned of its mission from messages intercepted and decrypted under the top-secret Ultra program. They sent their best ships, the battleship Prince of Wales and the battle cruiser Hood, to meet the Bismarck and its companion, the Prinz Eugen, in the Denmark Strait. But ten minutes into the battle the Bismarck put a fifteen-inch shell into the magazine of the Hood, touching off a tremendous explosion that split the Hood in two and sent the pieces directly to the bottom, with the loss of all but three of its crew of fourteen hundred. The Prince of Wales, also damaged, was forced to retreat, allowing the Bismarck, itself wounded and leaking fuel, to steam into the open Atlantic.

Churchill, alarmed at the threat the Bismarck posed to the lifeline from America and determined to avenge the Hood’s destruction, issued a terse order: “Sink the Bismarck.” Every available ship and aircraft was summoned to chase the German battleship. Torpedo planes scoured the surface of the sea; after finding the Bismarck they skimmed the waves below the effective field of its anti-aircraft guns and launched their single torpedoes before veering aside. The German ship zigzagged sharply to dodge the underwater missiles, but one scored a lucky hit near the vessel’s rudder. The steering mechanism jammed, leaving the Bismarck to trace a large circle in the ocean. As the British realized the ship’s disability, they closed in to deliver the coup de grace. They pounded the Bismarck relentlessly with shells and additional torpedoes. The ship’s end came on the morning of May 27, when it sank in three miles of water.

The Prince of Wales had been repaired by the time Hopkins arrived in London en route home from Moscow. The Russian eating and drinking, the need to be as sharp as Stalin, and the thousands of miles of travel had nearly killed Roosevelt’s envoy. “Harry returned dead beat,” Churchill informed Roosevelt. Consequently Hopkins was most appreciative when Churchill offered to ferry him across the Atlantic in the finest style and comfort the Royal Navy could offer, aboard the Prince of Wales.

The warship was taking the prime minister to meet the American president. Roosevelt had put off seeing Churchill until now, mostly from fear of reviving the isolationists. But with the opening of the Russian front by the Germans and the extension of the Southeast Asian front by the Japanese, Roosevelt decided that the strategic benefits of a conference with Churchill outweighed the political costs.

Yet he shrouded the meeting in secrecy till he was confident of the outcome. He cited security as the reason, and security afforded ample cause for concern. Churchill was fair game for the Germans, and if a torpedo or bomb that killed the British prime minister also dispatched the American president, Churchill’s principal supplier, no tears would fall in Berlin. Significantly, though, Churchill wasn’t worried about the meeting’s becoming known, and he prepared a statement that he and the president were rendezvousing “on board ship somewhere in the Atlantic.” But Roosevelt vetoed even this vague announcement. “All that need be said is: ‘The Prime Minister is on a short vacation,’” Roosevelt declared. “Any statement now is a direct invitation to the Germans to attack the Prime Minister and his party both going and returning. When in doubt, say nothing!”

The warning was wasted. Reporters in London noticed that Churchill’s top military advisers had gone missing at the same time the prime minister dropped out of sight. Their counterparts in Washington remarked something similar about America’s top brass and the president. British papers surmised publicly that something was afoot. German radio repeated the story before long.

Roosevelt nonetheless plotted an elaborate scheme for losing his newspaper tail. Newfoundland’s Placentia Bay, where the United States was constructing one of the bases it had bargained the destroyers for, had been agreed upon as the site for the meeting. “I was faced with a practical problem of extreme difficulty,” Roosevelt explained with after-the-fact relish. “I knew that the British prime minister is not constantly accompanied by newspaper men nor camera men, whereas I was always accompanied”—the only exceptions being sea cruises when newspapermen representing the press associations followed the president’s vessel on escorting destroyers. To foil the reporters, Roosevelt informed them—or misinformed them—that he would be vacationing aboard the Potomac but that in light of the other demands on American defense he couldn’t justify bringing a destroyer escort. The reporters would have to stay home.

They bought the story. He traveled by train to New London, Connecticut, where he made a show of boarding the Potomac. He stopped at Nonquit, Massachusetts, the next day, for a conspicuous shore visit and an afternoon of fishing in full view of the bathers on the beach. At dusk the Potomac steamed off in the direction of the Cape Cod Canal. The deception began as night fell. “At eight o’clock we reversed course,” Roosevelt said.

Going around the south end of Cuddyhunk Island, we anchored in the midst of seven U.S. warships at about 11 p.m., at Menemsha Bight on the western end of Martha’s Vineyard. All ships were darkened. At dawn Tuesday, August fifth, the U.S.S. Potomac ran along side of the flagship U.S.S. Augusta and we transferred my mess crew, provisions, etc.

We found on board Admiral Stark and General Marshall, who joined the Augusta via a destroyer from New York late the previous evening. At 6:30 a.m. the U.S.S. Augusta and the U.S.S. Tuscaloosa, accompanied by five new destroyers, stood out into the open sea. We headed east past Nantucket Shoals Lightship until we were far outside any shallow waters where hostile mines could conceivably be laid. That evening we were 250 miles out in the ocean.

Smiling to himself, Roosevelt prepared for his meeting with Churchill. He knew that Churchill would be asking more than he—Roosevelt—was inclined to give. Churchill wanted commitments: ideally a commitment by the United States to enter the war, but at least a commitment to some specific war aims. American commitments would serve two purposes: they would ease the military burden on Britain, and they would lessen the political strain on Churchill’s government. Ordinary politics in Britain had been suspended by the war; Churchill faced no general election in the near term, and he didn’t worry much about a no-confidence vote in Parliament. But he had bet his political future on defeating Hitler, and he didn’t see how it could be done without American belligerence.

Roosevelt was as leery of commitment as Churchill was eager for it. Roosevelt remembered the Allied secret treaties of the First World War and what an embarrassment they had become for Wilson. Any commitments that emerged from a secret meeting with Churchill would be lumped into a comparably invidious category not only by the isolationists but by the larger group that always worried that American means might be harnessed to British ends. Besides, he had been cultivating American public opinion for months, with all the care he could summon. Americans were moving in the right direction. The slightest misstep could reverse the momentum, with political and military implications he preferred not to contemplate.

Furthermore, Roosevelt had the advantage over Churchill and knew it. He outranked Churchill, to begin with, being a head of state to Churchill’s mere head of government. He wouldn’t belabor this point or flaunt it, but it was something neither would forget. More important was the matter of American power. Roosevelt wielded instruments of coercion Churchill could only envy. Already American industry was tipping the balance in the anti-fascist struggle. American support for Britain had helped persuade Hitler to redirect his army from west to east. The promise of American support for Russia was steeling Stalin against anything like a second rapprochement with Berlin. American financial power allowed Roosevelt to turn American industry fully toward war without worrying where the money would come from. The name alone of Lend-Lease exemplified the Americans’ insouciance regarding cash. A loan, a lease, a gift—all this could be determined later. American military power would complement the country’s industrial and financial might, should Washington abandon its proxy policy and enter the war itself. The 130 million Americans were numerous enough to defeat the 70 million Germans, even assuming equivalent arms. But the arms would not be equivalent. American soldiers would have more and probably better weapons than the Germans by the time their armies closed upon each other. A two-front war—should the United States find itself simultaneously fighting Japan (population 75 million)—would slow the Americans somewhat, compelling them to make choices. But the outcome could hardly be questioned.

Finally, there was the moral power the president wielded. America wasn’t perfect, but compared with the fascists of Germany and Japan, the communists of Russia, and the imperialists of Britain, Americans looked remarkably benign to the ordinary people of the world. Roosevelt’s reputation was especially compelling. He was known as the rich man who stood up for the common man, the president who put down the Big Stick in favor of being a Good Neighbor, the friend of China, the decolonizer of the Philippines (admittedly a work still in progress). Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, even Churchill’s Britain—none of these served as a beacon of hope to the oppressed of the world. None provided a model other peoples would freely emulate. Roosevelt’s America provided just such a model, and Roosevelt knew it.

HIS KNOWLEDGE informed the most important achievement of the Atlantic Conference, as it soon came to be called. Roosevelt’s Augusta and Churchill’s Prince of Wales reached Placentia Bay on August 9. Churchill, as protocol commanded, prepared to cross to Roosevelt’s vessel for the initial visit. Harry Hopkins got there first. The ocean voyage with Churchill had restored him somewhat, and he hastened over to the Augusta to greet the president. Between the sessions with Churchill, Hopkins would brief Roosevelt on his Russia trip; for now he sent a note back to Churchill. “I have just talked to the President,” he said, “and he is very anxious, after dinner tonight, to invite in the balance of the staff and wants you to talk very informally to them about your general appreciation of the war…. I imagine there will be twenty-five people altogether. The President, of course, does not want anything formal about it.”

Asking Churchill to speak informally was like asking a lion to hide its mane. After the meal—a modest affair of broiled chicken, spinach omelets, sweet potatoes, cupcakes, and chocolate ice cream—was cleared away, Churchill waxed eloquent about the course of battle till now, extolling the valor of Britain’s fliers and seamen, decrying the treachery of the Germans, offering qualified praise for the Russians, wondering at the intentions of Japan.

Roosevelt mostly listened. “I saw Father in a new role,” Elliott remembered. Franklin and Eleanor’s rebellious son had found his way back to the family as the threat of war increased. Without their knowledge he enlisted in the army air force. Franklin learned of the enlistment when Elliott visited the White House and let himself into the Oval Office, between two of the president’s scheduled appointments. “Look, Pop,” he said, and handed over his army orders. Years later he remembered Roosevelt’s reaction. “He glanced at the piece of paper with my orders on it and looked up with tears in his eyes…. He couldn’t speak for a moment. Then, ‘I’m very proud.’” A few days later, at a Hyde Park dinner, Roosevelt proposed a toast: “To Elliott. He’s the first of the family to think seriously enough, and soberly enough, about the threat to America to join his country’s armed forces. We’re all very proud of him. I’m the proudest.”

To show off his soldier son to Churchill, and because he always liked the company of his children, Roosevelt arranged for Elliott to accompany him to Placentia Bay. Elliott sat with Roosevelt and Churchill at the dinner aboard the Augusta. He was surprised that his father let others control the conversation. “My experience of him in the past had been that he dominated every gathering he was part of, not because he insisted on it so much as that it always seemed his natural due. But not tonight. Tonight Father listened.” And he took in the show. “Churchill reared back in his chair, he slewed his cigar around from cheek to cheek and always at a jaunty angle, he hunched his shoulders forward like a bull, his hands slashed the air expressively, his eyes flashed.” His message was that America ought to join the British in the battle against fascism. “The Americans must come in at our side. You must come in, if you are to survive.”

Roosevelt and the other Americans enjoyed the performance but gave away nothing. “Father listened, intently, seriously, now and then rubbing his eyes, fiddling with his pince-nez, doodling on the tablecloth with a burnt match. But never an aye, nay, or maybe came from the Americans sitting around that smoke-filled saloon.”

The next morning the president returned Churchill’s call. As it was Sunday, Roosevelt was treated to what he later characterized as a “very remarkable religious service” on the quarterdeck of the Prince of Wales, in the shadow of the vessel’s great guns. “There was their own ship’s complement, with three or four hundred bluejackets and marines from American ships, on the quarterdeck, completely intermingled, first one uniform and then another uniform,” Roosevelt said. “The service was conducted by two chaplains, one English and one American, and, as usual, the lesson was read by the captain of the British ship. They had three hymns that everybody took part in, and a little ship’s altar was decked with the American flag and the British flag. The officers were all intermingled on the fantail…. I think everybody there, officers and enlisted men, felt that it was one of the great historic services. I know I did.”

After the service the British and American staffs got down to business. Alexander Cadogan, Churchill’s undersecretary for foreign affairs, had come with drafts of parallel statements to be sent by the British and American governments to the Japanese. The heart of the statement Cadogan proposed for Roosevelt was that any further aggression by Japan in the southwestern Pacific would produce a situation in which the American government “would be compelled to take counter measures even though these might lead to war.” This was no more than Churchill was prepared to state on behalf of Britain, but it was crucial, from the prime minister’s point of view, that Roosevelt be equally forthright. “He did not think that there was much hope left, unless the United States made such a clear-cut declaration, of preventing Japan from expanding further to the south,” Sumner Welles recorded of Churchill. “In which event the prevention of war between Great Britain and Japan appeared to be hopeless.” The hopelessness followed from the fact that British Malaya and Singapore lay athwart the obvious course of Japanese expansion. “He said in the most emphatic manner that if war did break out between Great Britain and Japan, Japan immediately would be in a position through the use of her large number of cruisers to seize or to destroy all of the British merchant shipping in the Indian Ocean and in the Pacific, and to cut the life-lines between the British Dominions and the British Isles unless the United States herself entered the war.” But if the United States joined Britain in threatening hostilities against Japan, Tokyo might pull back.

Roosevelt refused. In the first place, he thought an ultimatum might have just the opposite effect from deterrence. The war party in Japan would employ it to whip up nationalistic feeling and force the government into doing precisely what Roosevelt was warning them against. In the second place, he wasn’t ready for war. The American navy required additional preparation, and the army’s training program had only begun to produce results. Besides, Roosevelt was still arguing in public that military training was for the purpose of preventing American involvement. The last thing he intended to do was issue any war ultimatums.

Instead he issued a broad statement of principles. What came to be called the Atlantic Charter seemed to the British delegation to be hardly more than a press release, the sort of document heads of government agree to when they can’t concur on anything substantial. Its eight points constituted Anglo-American war aims, although at Roosevelt’s insistence and with Churchill’s acquiescence they were awkwardly called “common principles in the national policies of their respective countries on which they base their hopes for a better future for the world.” The first point eschewed aggrandizement, territorial or otherwise. The second forswore territorial changes not in accord with the “freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned.” The third affirmed “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.” The fourth promised equal terms of trade to all nations, with “due respect” for the “existing obligations” of the United States and Britain. The fifth endorsed improved labor and living standards in all countries. The sixth looked forward, “after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny,” to a peace “which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.” The seventh supported free travel and commerce across the world’s oceans. The eighth called on the nations of the world to disarm, “pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security.”

The language of the Atlantic Charter was inelegant but artful—as artful in places as diplomatic prose ever gets. The “existing obligations” disclaimer in the free trade clause exempted the entire British empire, which was based on the exclusionary model of imperial preference. The “wider and permanent system of general security” was Roosevelt’s substitute for the “effective international organization” of the British draft. Roosevelt wasn’t ready, at this stage, to talk about a new League of Nations, and he was certain the American people weren’t ready to hear about it.

All the same, the endorsement of self-determination in points two and three proved revolutionary—so revolutionary that Churchill began qualifying it almost as soon as he got back to England. “At the Atlantic meeting we had in mind, primarily, the restoration of the sovereignty, self-government, and national life of the states and nations of Europe now under the Nazi yoke,” he told Parliament. “That is quite a separate problem from the progressive evolution of self-governing institutions in the regions and peoples which owe allegiance to the British Crown.”

Many of those peoples didn’t think so, which was why they latched onto the Atlantic Charter with the passion they did, and why Roosevelt became their hero. As for the audience whose reaction worried the president more at the moment—members of Congress and the American public—they had different concerns. “Are we any closer to entering the war?” a reporter asked the president at his first news conference upon arriving home.

“I should say no,” Roosevelt replied.

“May we quote directly?”

“You can quote indirectly.”

ONE REASON ROOSEVELT didn’t want to be quoted was that he wasn’t telling the truth. At least he wasn’t telling the reporters, and through them the American public, what he had told Churchill. Or perhaps it was Churchill who bent the story. On his return to England the prime minister reported the Newfoundland meeting to his cabinet. Roosevelt, Churchill said, had laid out a strategy designed to ensure American entry into the fighting. “He would wage war, but not declare it,” Churchill explained. “He would become more and more provocative…. Everything was to be done to force an ‘incident.’…He would look for an ‘incident’ which would justify him in opening hostilities.”

Given the way events unfolded, Churchill’s assertion rings truer than Roosevelt’s denial. But Roosevelt also told Churchill that a request for a war declaration would tie Congress in knots, consuming the whole autumn. He knew what fear, fanned by the isolationists, could do, for even while he and Churchill were meeting at Placentia, the House of Representatives was debating whether to extend the term of service of draftees beyond the twelve months authorized under the Selective Service Act of 1940. The extension had slipped through the Senate, but isolationists in the House were attempting to demagogue the bill to death. Roosevelt warned of the dire consequences of sending the soldiers home. Training and readiness had been necessary in 1940, he declared in a written message, and were even more necessary now. “The danger today is infinitely greater. We are in the midst of a national emergency.” To release the troops would compromise America’s fundamental security. “We would be taking a grave national risk.”

The president’s words had the desired effect, barely. On the final day of Roosevelt’s meeting with Churchill, the House agreed to the extension by a single vote.

The closeness of the decision explained Roosevelt’s reluctance to level with the press and the public about his intentions, and it inspired him to additional efforts to ready Americans for the showdown he considered increasingly inevitable. On September 11 he held a Fireside Chat in which he explained that an American warship, the Greer, had been attacked by a German submarine off the coast of Greenland. “She was carrying American mail to Iceland,” Roosevelt explained. “She was flying the American flag. Her identity as an American ship was unmistakable.”

This was true enough. The ship was indeed carrying mail, it was flying the flag, and its identity was unmistakable—at least to the crew of the British plane the Greer was helping hunt and depth-charge the German submarine in question. Roosevelt declined to mention this utterly unneutral, presumptively illegal collaboration, just as he declined to share the conclusion of an internal U.S. navy study that the German submarine commander quite possibly thought he was firing on a British ship.

Roosevelt went on to describe the German attack as “piracy—piracy legally and morally.” It was, moreover, “one determined step toward creating a permanent world system based on force, on terror, and on murder.” The Nazi threat to America was no longer hypothetical. “The danger is here now.” Describing German submarines and raiders as “rattlesnakes of the Atlantic,” the president announced a new policy: “If German or Italian vessels of war enter the waters the protection of which is necessary for American defense, they do so at their own peril.”

Roosevelt didn’t specify what those waters were. But given that he had already claimed the Atlantic clear to Iceland as part of America’s defense perimeter, the new approach amounted to a naval war against Germany—ordered by the president, on his authority alone.

“I have no illusions about the gravity of this step,” he assured his listeners, in what might have been his frankest statement of the evening. “I have not taken it hurriedly or lightly. It is the result of months and months of constant thought and anxiety…. In the protection of your nation and mine it cannot be avoided.”

43.

WHETHER THIS STEP WOULD BE FOLLOWED BY ANOTHER DEPENDED, as always for Roosevelt, on the reaction of the public. By now—two years into the European war, four years into the Asian war—Roosevelt could see quite clearly where he thought the United States must go. American democracy must engage fascism directly. Germany’s hold on the European continent must be broken; Japan’s thrust into China and Southeast Asia must be reversed. And he knew the order in which these tasks must be accomplished. Germany must go down first; Japan could wait. In part this ordering reflected Roosevelt’s personal familiarity with Europe; having spent, cumulatively, years of his life in Europe, he could visualize Nazi rule far more easily than he could conjure images of the Japanese occupation of China and Indochina. But it also revealed his understanding of the nature of power. Japan, for all its ambitions, remained a comparatively backward, poor country. Conceivably Japan could subdue Chinese resistance, although this seemed less likely now than ever. Possibly it would capture the resources of the East Indies. But not for decades, if ever, would Japan be more than a regional power. Germany, on the other hand, was almost within artillery range of becoming a global power. If the Germans defeated the Russians, little would stand between Hitler and the oil fields of the Middle East. The Nazis might then sever the British lifeline to India, depriving Britain of most of what made it an empire. Britain itself couldn’t hold out for long after that. Whether or not the defeat of Britain included capture of the British navy, Hitler would be in position to build up his own fleet. And whether or not he then assaulted the Western Hemisphere militarily, he would, by his control of Europe, severely damage America economically.

Roosevelt’s reasoning caused him to try to provoke a war in the Atlantic even while he attempted to avoid one in the Pacific. As bold a strategist as the president was, he didn’t welcome a two-front war. “I simply have not got enough navy to go round,” he told Harold Ickes. “And every little episode in the Pacific means fewer ships in the Atlantic.” Germany had to be dealt with first—and the sooner, in fact, the Atlantic war started, the better. If the recent past was any guide, the Japanese might well exploit American engagement with Germany to extend their conquests farther south and west. But once the German question was settled, the United States could deal with Japan.

Roosevelt was pleased to learn that the American people were coming around to his view of the Nazi threat. According to a Gallup poll, 68 percent of Americans endorsed what the papers had taken to calling the president’s “shoot on sight” policy toward German warships in the Atlantic. On the broader question of what the United States should do about Hitler, 70 percent said the German dictator must be defeated even if it meant war for the United States. Walter Lippmann, no fan of Roosevelt on many issues, summarized the evolving state of the American mind when he wrote, “After twenty years the American people are emerging from what is undoubtedly the most un-American period in the history of the nation…. A cleansing gale has begun to blow across the land and through the corridors and into the musty chambers where, for two decades, Americans have lived so luxuriously”—Lippmann seemed to have forgotten the depression—“but so uneasily, so far beneath themselves. The shock of the World War has unloosed it, but this wind is the very breath of the American spirit itself, proud, confident and sure.”

Roosevelt certainly thought so, and, with the rising wind at his back, he pressed American policy forward. On October 9 he called on Congress to repeal the “crippling provisions” of the current neutrality law. One such provision barred American ships from entering belligerent ports; another banned the arming of merchant ships for self-defense. Reversing the former would facilitate deliveries of Lend-Lease supplies; undoing the latter would allow Americans to defend themselves. “The practice of arming merchant ships for civilian defense is an old one,” Roosevelt explained. “Through our whole history American merchant vessels have been armed whenever it was considered necessary for their own defense.” It was now more necessary than ever. “We are faced not with the old type of pirates but with the modern pirates of the sea who travel beneath the surface or on the surface or in the air destroying defenseless ships without warning.” An armed merchantman couldn’t prevent a German submarine from firing torpedoes, but it could force that submarine to fire while still submerged and at a distance, giving the merchantman a fighting chance. It couldn’t keep German planes from dropping bombs or torpedoes, but it could compel the pilots of those planes to dodge antiaircraft fire.

Roosevelt asserted that he wasn’t advocating belligerence. “The revisions which I suggest do not call for a declaration of war any more than the Lend-Lease Act called for a declaration of war.” He was simply insisting on Americans’ historic right to traverse the seas unmolested. And he took the opportunity to reemphasize the Nazi threat.

I say to you solemnly that if Hitler’s present military plans are brought to successful fulfillment, we Americans shall be forced to fight in defense of our own homes and our own freedom in a war as costly and as devastating as that which now rages on the Russian front…. The ultimate fate of the western hemisphere lies in the balance.

Berlin appeared to confirm the president’s warning several days later. The shoot-on-sight policy had the predictable effect of making German commanders quicker to fire than before. In mid-October a Lend-Lease convoy came under attack by German submarines. An American destroyer, the Kearny, escorting the convoy, replied with a barrage of depth charges. One of the submarines put a torpedo in the Kearny’s side, killing eleven of the crew and seriously damaging the vessel, which nonetheless limped into an Iceland port.

“The shooting has started,” Roosevelt declared. “And history has recorded who fired the first shot.” The war had become personal. “America has been attacked. The U.S.S. Kearny is not just a navy ship. She belongs to every man, woman, and child in this nation.” The president listed the home states of the eleven sailors killed, before extrapolating: “Hitler’s torpedo was directed at every American, whether he lives on our sea coasts or in the innermost part of the country, far from the seas and far from the guns and tanks of the marching hordes of would-be conquerors of the world.”

Roosevelt proceeded to drop a bombshell of his own.

I have in my possession a secret map made in Germany by Hitler’s government—by the planners of the new world order. It is a map of South America and a part of Central America, as Hitler proposes to reorganize it. Today in this area there are fourteen separate countries. But the geographical experts of Berlin have ruthlessly obliterated all existing boundary lines; they have divided South America into five vassal states, bringing the whole continent under their domination. And they have also so arranged it that the territory of one of these new puppet states includes the Republic of Panama and our great life line—the Panama Canal….

Your Government has in its possession another document, made in Germany by Hitler’s Government. It is a detailed plan, which, for obvious reasons, the Nazis did not wish and do not wish to publicize just yet, but which they are ready to impose, a little later, on a dominated world—if Hitler wins. It is a plan to abolish all existing religions—Catholic, Protestant, Mohammedan, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jewish alike. The property of all churches will be seized by the Reich and its puppets. The cross and all other symbols of religion are to be forbidden. The clergy are to be forever liquidated, silenced under penalty of the concentration camps, where even now so many fearless men are being tortured because they have placed God above Hitler.

The isolationists immediately suspected a forgery. The timing and alleged content of the documents the president described were simply too convenient—too supportive of the administration’s agenda. They demanded that he publish the documents.

Roosevelt may have smelled something fishy, too, for he declined the isolationists’ demand. The White House pleaded security concerns, but the provenance of the map, in particular, was dubious. Decades later a retired British agent claimed to have drawn the map himself, for the purpose of pulling the United States closer to war with Germany. Roosevelt knew enough of British propaganda tactics from the First World War to know that British forgers were clever. Yet he also knew that none of the skeptics would be able, in the near term, to disprove the veracity of the documents. And they did indeed serve his agenda.

If Roosevelt hoped the Kearny would be his Lusitania, he was disappointed. No groundswell of support greeted his call for stronger measures. Even the arming of merchant ships seemed a measure too far for those who suspected the president of deliberately provoking incidents on the Atlantic. “If we take this one further step,” isolationist Democrat D. Worth Clark of Idaho told the Senate, “our power to resist will be gone. We will be utterly at the mercy of two men, one of them Adolf Hitler and the other Franklin D. Roosevelt.” Nor were hard-core isolationists the only ones who held back. Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the grandson of Wilson’s bête noire, had voted for Lend-Lease, conscription, and every one of the president’s defense bills, but he drew the line at sending American ships into belligerent ports. “It is one thing to be an arsenal for other countries,” the Massachusetts Republican asserted. “It is another thing for our men to be fighting on the battlefield. Measures tending to make us a more effective arsenal should receive support. Those which send us onto the battlefield are still, I believe, to be resisted. If Americans are to be killed in belligerent waters, I fear that we will not be able long to delay the sending of our men to the theaters of this war.”

Not even another attack on an American vessel, far more serious than that on the Kearny, could convince the skeptics. The Reuben James was escorting a convoy off Iceland when a pack of German submarines began firing torpedoes. One hit the American destroyer in the magazine, producing a blast that sheared off the bow and quickly sank the vessel. More than a hundred members of the crew died.

Roosevelt might have taken the incident as the occasion for another stirring speech, or perhaps a diplomatic move against Germany. But he didn’t. Instead he waited to assess the public reaction—which, unfortunately for his plans, split along the same lines as before. Administration supporters deemed the sinking of the Reuben James further proof of the German menace; Tom Connally of Texas, the chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, called it “outrageous evidence of the murderous and defiant attitude of the Nazis.” But the isolationists contended that the attack revealed why the neutrality law should not be revised. “If the losses are going to be this heavy in convoying in our defensive waters,” Robert Taft said, “they may be so heavy convoying the rest of the way into British ports that we won’t have anything left to defend ourselves with.” Gerald Nye said bluntly, “You can’t expect to walk into a barroom brawl and hope to stay out of the fight.”

The opposition froze Roosevelt in his tracks. He refused to take even the symbolic step of suspending relations with Berlin. A reporter queried him on the subject. “Lots of people who think just as you do on this war issue also think that a continuance of diplomatic relations with Germany is a form of dishonesty,” the reporter said. “Would you elaborate your thoughts?”

“Only off the record,” Roosevelt responded. “I would have to make it completely off the record.”

The reporters listened intently, hoping for some new revelation. All they got was a tepid disclaimer. “We don’t want a declared war with Germany because we are acting in defense, self-defense—every action. And to break off diplomatic relations—why, that won’t do any good…. It might be more useful to keep them the way they are.”

Roosevelt’s caution reflected his sense that he had enough votes for the changes he wanted in the neutrality law, but only just enough. At a White House conference on November 5, the Democratic congressional leadership told the president that the opposition to the revisions was stubborn and strong. House speaker Sam Rayburn and House majority leader John McCormack suggested that a final push from the president could be crucial. Roosevelt complied by sending a letter for Rayburn and McCormack to read to their colleagues. “Failure to repeal these sections would, of course, cause rejoicing in the Axis nations,” the president asserted. “Failure would bolster aggressive steps and intentions in Germany, and in the other well-known aggressor nations under the leadership of Hitler.”

The House needed the nudge. An impassioned debate ended in a narrow victory for the president: 212 to 194, with 53 Democrats, including 28 who had sided with the president on the war previously, defecting to the opposition. The result in the Senate was similarly favorable but no more enthusiastic: 50 in favor of revision, 37 against.

“Naturally, the President is pleased with the result,” William Hassett, Roosevelt’s assistant, told the press. The president wasn’t pleased enough to hail the result himself, and he understood that if neutrality revision required this much effort, a war declaration was out of the question for the foreseeable future.

ROOSEVELT WAS CERTAIN by now that he knew Hitler’s mind, regarding overall strategy if not every tactical twist. He may have read too much into Hitler’s intentions for the Western Hemisphere, or he may simply have exaggerated those intentions for political effect. But he doubtless got it right when he spoke of the dependence of the Nazi regime on war and when he concluded that there would be no peace so long as Hitler governed Germany.

Japan, by contrast, remained an enigma to Roosevelt, as to most outside observers. The Japanese prime minister, Prince Konoye, appeared to desire peace, but it was impossible for Roosevelt to tell whether Konoye had any real influence or was simply being used by the militarists to disguise their own predominance. During the late summer and autumn of 1941, while Roosevelt was launching his undeclared war in the Atlantic, he weighed a request from Konoye for a meeting. “Japan and the United States are the last two major powers who hold the key to international peace,” the prime minister wrote. “That the two nations should fall into the worst of relations at this time would mean not only a disaster in itself, but also the collapse of world civilization.”

Roosevelt wasn’t eager for a meeting, not knowing how much of the Japanese government Konoye spoke for. But he was even less eager for a Pacific war, and so he entered into discussions regarding an appropriate date and place. Konoye suggested Hawaii; Roosevelt countered with Alaska, which would require less time for him at sea. Konoye accepted Juneau and asked that the meeting be held as soon as possible—on account, as the Japanese ambassador in Washington put it, “of the efforts of a third country and fifth columnists in Japan, who are now behind a press campaign against the United States, to disturb Japanese-American relations.”

The fifth columnists were Konoye’s rivals among the military; the third country was Britain, which was indeed hoping to disturb Japanese-American relations. As he had during the Atlantic Conference, Churchill was urging Roosevelt to take a tougher stance against Japan, lest the Japanese attack Britain’s Pacific holdings and the United States remain on the sidelines.

Roosevelt wasn’t yet ready to risk a Pacific war, but neither was he willing to risk a meeting that might make him look as foolish as Neville Chamberlain had looked after Munich. He strung Konoye along, trying to coax some commitments to better behavior out of the Japanese government before he agreed to sit down with the prime minister. When Konoye couldn’t deliver those commitments, the meeting fell through.

Roosevelt immediately began to wonder if he shouldn’t have been more accommodating, for Konoye’s inability to arrange a meeting with the American president resulted in the collapse of his administration. “It is with great regret and disappointment that my colleagues and I have had to resign owing to the internal political situation, which I may be able to explain to you sometime in the future,” Konoye wrote cryptically to American ambassador Joseph Grew. The departing premier went on to express the hope “that you and your government will not be too disappointed or discouraged either by the change of cabinet or by the mere appearance or impression of the new cabinet.”

Discouragement wasn’t the word for the American reaction; alarm was more accurate. Konoye’s replacement was General Hideki Tojo, who had commanded the Kwantung Army, as the legion that enforced Japan’s writ in the puppet state of Manchukuo was called. While minister of war in 1940 Tojo had directed the negotiations leading to the Axis alliance with Germany and Italy. His elevation to the premiership signaled—accurately, as events proved—that the military had seized command of Japanese policy once and for all.

Roosevelt guessed as much. The day before Tojo’s takeover of the government, he wrote Churchill, “The Jap situation is definitely worse, and I think they are headed north.” What Roosevelt meant was that Japan would attack Russia, exploiting Stalin’s current preoccupation with Hitler. This prospect wasn’t good, since it would complicate the vital task of keeping Russia in the fight against Germany. But it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. “In spite of this, you and I will have two months of respite in the Far East.”

Tojo’s coup occurred between Roosevelt’s writing and Churchill’s reply. “The Japanese menace…,” the British prime minister asserted, “has grown so much sharper in the last few days…. Events are now telling their own tale.” Yet the latest development simply threw Churchill back on the advice he had given Roosevelt in Newfoundland. “The stronger the action of the United States towards Japan, the greater the chance of preserving peace.” To buck up the president, Churchill pledged his country’s full support. “Should, however, peace be broken and the United States become at war with Japan, you may be sure that a British declaration of war upon Japan will follow within the hour.” As a demonstration of what ought to be done, Churchill dispatched the Prince of Wales—“that big ship you inspected,” Churchill wrote to Roosevelt, to avoid putting the vessel’s name in a cable that might be intercepted—to the British base at Singapore. “This ought to serve as a deterrent on Japan. There is nothing like having something that can catch and kill anything.” The prime minister concluded: “The firmer your attitude and ours, the less chance of their taking the plunge.”

ROOSEVELT’S DIPLOMACY during the weeks that followed was devoted to keeping Japan from taking the plunge. The prospects weren’t encouraging. In a cable from Tokyo, Grew noted that the government was whipping up war fever. “Empire Approaches Its Greatest Crisis,” the American ambassador quoted a headline in one of the leading newspapers in the Japanese capital. He went on to predict, if the Japanese didn’t get their way in the current talks with the United States, “an all-out, do-or-die attempt, actually risking national hara-kiri, to make Japan impervious to economic embargoes abroad rather than to yield to foreign pressure.” Grew was exceedingly glum. “This contingency not only is possible but is probable.” He added that action by Japan “may come with dangerous and dramatic suddenness.”

Grew’s pessimism appeared to be confirmed by an intercepted message from Japan’s foreign minister, Shigenori Togo, to Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura in Washington. For some months American and British cryptographers had been able to decode certain Japanese diplomatic cables; the “Magic” intercepts allowed Washington and London to learn what Tokyo was telling its embassies. On November 5, Togo informed Nomura that if a deal with the United States was to be struck it would have to be soon. “Because of various circumstances, it is absolutely necessary that all arrangement for the signing of this agreement be completed by the 25th of this month,” Togo said. “I realize that this is a difficult order, but under the circumstances it is an unavoidable one.” What Togo did not tell Nomura, although the ambassador could infer as much, was that the military was already planning to go to war. November 25 was the date when the decision to strike or to stand down would be made.

Roosevelt and Hull drew the same conclusion from Togo’s November 25 deadline. “This, to us, could mean only one thing,” Hull wrote. “Japan had already set in motion the wheels of her war machine, and she had decided not to stop short of war with the United States if by November 25 we had not agreed to her demands.”

Hull shared this inference with the rest of the cabinet at a meeting on November 7. The secretary of state recounted the recent events and messages and declared, “Relations are extremely critical. We should be on the lookout for a military attack by Japan anywhere at any time.” Understandably sobered, the cabinet encouraged the president to prepare the American people.

Armistice Day followed shortly; Roosevelt took the occasion to remind Americans what their country represented in the world. A generation earlier, Americans had gone to war in Europe. The isolationists had since derided that effort, contending that the United States had been deluded by the leaders of Britain and France into doing the Europeans’ dirty work. The isolationists, Roosevelt said, were dangerously wrong. Fortunately, most Americans were wiser. “We know that it was, in literal truth, to make the world safe for democracy that we took up arms in 1917,” the president asserted. “It was, in simple truth and in literal fact, to make the world habitable for decent and self-respecting men and women that those whom we now remember gave their lives.” Americans understood that democracy and decency had to be defended. Roosevelt quoted Alvin York, the much-decorated hero of the First World War: “Liberty and freedom and democracy are so very precious that you do not fight to win them once and stop. You do not do that. Liberty and freedom and democracy are prizes awarded only to those peoples who fight to win them and then keep fighting eternally to hold them.” The American people agreed with Sergeant York rather than with the isolationists, Roosevelt said. “They believe that liberty is worth fighting for. And if they are obliged to fight they will fight eternally to hold it.”

Despite their pessimism regarding the prospects for Asia and the Pacific, administration officials continued to meet with Japanese diplomats. Ambassador Nomura appeared to Roosevelt and Hull to be an honest professional with a sincere desire to find common ground between his government and America’s. This desire may have been what prompted Tojo and Togo to send reinforcement, in the person of Saburo Kurusu, the former Japanese ambassador to Berlin, to Washington. “Kurusu seemed to me the antithesis of Nomura,” Hull remembered. “Neither his appearance nor his attitude commanded confidence or respect. I felt from the start that he was deceitful.” Hull allowed that Kurusu might strive for an accommodation, but it would be entirely on Japan’s terms. And if accommodation failed, Kurusu’s mission had a second purpose. “He was to lull us with talk until the moment Japan got ready to strike.”

Roosevelt played along. He, too, hoped for an eleventh-hour agreement, although he hardly expected it. His attitude was the American counterpart of Kurusu’s: any agreement must be on America’s terms. But unlike Kurusu, whose military deadline required him to push for a swift settlement of the outstanding issues between the United States and Japan, Roosevelt was happy to delay. Henry Stimson and Frank Knox had been saying for months that the army and navy needed time to prepare. They continued to say so. Roosevelt sought to give them as much of the time they needed as possible.

Hull met with Kurusu and Nomura almost daily during November; Roosevelt received one or the other about once a week. His themes were firmness and patience. “Nations must think one hundred years ahead, especially during the age through which the world is passing,” he told Nomura on November 10. Japan should slow down. It needn’t solve its problems all at once. The president said he and Secretary Hull had been working only half a year on the issues Japan considered essential, whereas the Japanese government had been engaged for a decade. Tokyo must let Washington catch up. “Patience is necessary,” Roosevelt said.

The president pondered additional measures for gaining time. He jotted a note to Hull sketching a formula for postponing a crisis with Japan for perhaps six months. The American government would offer to ease the economic restrictions on Japan, Roosevelt suggested, and would encourage peace negotiations between Japan and China, if Japan would promise not to send new troops to Indochina and not to declare war on the United States should America enter the European conflict.

Roosevelt knew it was a stretch. He would be asking Japan to abandon its ten-year project of controlling China and to ignore its treaty commitment to Germany in exchange for an easing of restrictions Washington might reimpose at a moment’s notice. In fact, the more the president thought about his offer, the less he liked it. The militarists in Tokyo might use it for propaganda purposes and become even more bellicose.

He had just about decided to drop the idea when the Japanese took the matter out of his hands. Kurusu told Roosevelt at a White House meeting that things could explode at any minute. “All the way across the Pacific it is like a powder keg,” he asserted. “Some way must be found to adjust the situation.” Kurusu nonetheless refused to modify the demands he made on behalf of his government. The Japanese were willing to withdraw their troops from southern Indochina to northern Indochina, he said, and to remove all their troops from Indochina, but only upon “the restoration of peace between Japan and China or the establishment of an equitable peace in the Pacific area.” Meanwhile the United States should unfreeze Japan’s financial assets, restore the flow of American oil to Japan, and help Japan secure the resources it needed from the Dutch East Indies.

Hull later described the Japanese proposals as “of so preposterous a character that no responsible American official could ever have dreamed of accepting them.” Hull was overstating things with the advantage of hindsight, but the Japanese offer did fall seriously short, for it required the United States to accept Japanese hegemony in East Asia—at this point little imagination was required to realize what Tokyo meant by “an equitable peace in the Pacific area.” Roosevelt had consistently rejected such an outcome, and he wouldn’t accept it now.

On November 25, a Tuesday, the president gathered what he was already calling his “war cabinet” to the White House. Stimson spoke for the War Department, Knox for Navy, and Hull for State. General George Marshall, the army chief of staff, and Admiral Harold Stark, the chief of naval operations, represented the uniformed services. For some weeks the group had been discussing the war in Europe and the Atlantic, and Stimson, for one, anticipated more of the same talk. But Roosevelt “brought up entirely the relations with the Japanese,” Stimson recorded in his diary. The secret Japanese deadline had just passed—Tokyo being fourteen hours ahead of Washington—and Roosevelt expected war at any time. “We were likely to be attacked, perhaps next Monday,” Stimson paraphrased the president, “for the Japanese are notorious for making an attack without warning, and the question was what we should do. The question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves. It was a difficult proposition.”

Stimson’s diary would provoke great controversy after the war, when this portion of it was published as part of an investigation into the events leading to American intervention. Given that the Japanese attack Roosevelt predicted did come—at Pearl Harbor—Stimson’s account lent credence to charges that Roosevelt deliberately sacrificed the American force there to the Japanese. Roosevelt’s defenders would counter that the president’s use of the word “we” encompassed the British as well as Americans and that he was thinking of an attack on Singapore or Malaya. Alternatively, Stimson may have transcribed the president’s comments carelessly, as his diary entries often reflected haste. More persuasive is the argument that Roosevelt was thinking of an attack on the Philippines. The consensus at the November 25 meeting was that the Japanese would be moving south from Indochina. “Any such expedition to the South as the Japanese were likely to take would be an encirclement of our interests in the Philippines,” Stimson’s diary continued. Though scheduled for independence in 1946, the Philippines remained American territory. They were lightly defended, partly out of congressional stinginess and partly because they were going to become independent. Quite possibly Roosevelt thought a Japanese attack on the Philippines would constitute a sufficient casus belli. Such an attack would not allow, in the words of Stimson’s diary, “too much danger to ourselves,” and it certainly would get the attention of Congress.

One thing is certain: no one at the November 25 meeting mentioned Hawaii or Pearl Harbor. The thought seems not to have crossed Roosevelt’s mind as he increased the diplomatic pressure on Japan. A fresh report, which the president received on November 26, revealed that the Japanese were sending additional troops to Indochina. “He fairly blew up,” Stimson recorded. “It was an evidence of bad faith on the part of the Japanese”—that while their emissaries in Washington were ostensibly negotiating a truce, their armies in Asia were expanding the war. The new evidence confirmed Roosevelt’s belief that war could no longer be avoided or even much delayed. That same day he delivered his answer to the Japanese proposal. The heart of his message was a one-sentence demand: “The Government of Japan will withdraw all military, naval, air, and police forces from China and from Indochina.”

Roosevelt knew this would be as unacceptable to Tojo and his colleagues as their offer was to him. Having fought for ten years to carve out a sphere in China, they were hardly going to abandon their objective so easily. Yet the president thought there was no other reasonable position he could take, even considering the likely consequences. “This seems to me a fair proposition for the Japanese,” he wrote Churchill. “But its acceptance or rejection is really a matter of internal Japanese politics. I am not very hopeful, and we must all be prepared for real trouble, possibly soon.”

The president called Kurusu and Nomura to the White House. He expressed his disappointment that the Japanese government had not treated the American proposals seriously. “We have been very patient in our dealing with the whole Far Eastern situation,” he said. “We are prepared to continue to be patient.” But Japan must abandon its aggressive ways. It must withdraw from China, and it ought to reconsider its alliance with Germany. Perhaps the Japanese believed Germany represented the wave of the future. They were mistaken. Germany would fail in its efforts to subjugate Europe, Roosevelt said, if for no other reason than it lacked the manpower to impose its will so broadly. Should the Japanese government follow the path of Hitlerism, it too would fail. “Japan will be the ultimate loser.”

The next day Roosevelt left for Warm Springs, for a belated Thanksgiving vacation. He had scarcely arrived when the State Department learned that Tojo was scheduled to give a speech before the most extreme expansionist group in Tokyo. American intelligence had belatedly discovered that the November 25 deadline had been extended to November 29; Hull, upon reading an advance text of Tojo’s speech, worried that it might be the signal for an attack. He called Warm Springs and recommended that the president return to Washington.

Roosevelt did so, arriving in time to receive a cable from Churchill. The British were reading the same intercepts as the Americans; the prime minister urged a final joint effort on behalf of Pacific peace. “It seems to me that one important method remains unused in averting war between Japan and our two countries,” Churchill wrote on November 30, “namely a plain declaration, secret or public as may be thought best, that any further act of aggression by Japan will lead immediately to the gravest consequences. I realize your constitutional difficulties, but it would be tragic if Japan drifted into war by encroachment without having before her fairly and squarely the dire character of a further aggressive step…. Forgive me, my dear friend, for presuming to press such a course upon you, but I am convinced that it might make all the difference and prevent a melancholy extension of the war.”

Roosevelt declined Churchill’s offer. Having resisted the prime minister’s entreaties for eighteen months, he was as reluctant as ever to do anything that smacked of going to war on behalf of the British empire. The Japanese were poised to strike; Roosevelt expected the blow to fall at any moment. The best brains in Washington were predicting an attack against or in the direction of British Southeast Asia. If this occurred, after the United States had issued a joint ultimatum with Britain, an American war declaration would look to all the world—including a great many Americans—like a defense of British imperialism. Nor could the president be sure Congress would approve such a war declaration. If it didn’t, Roosevelt would appear an impotent fool.

Roosevelt summoned Nomura and Kurusu to the State Department. Hull was ill again; in his place Sumner Welles read a statement by the president. The statement explained that the president had received reports of Japanese troop movements in southern Indochina. Such movements strongly suggested “further aggression.” Citing Germany’s history of encroachment upon its neighbors, Roosevelt’s statement expressed concern that Japan was preparing an assault against Malaya, Burma, the East Indies, or the Philippines. The president demanded to know Japan’s intentions.

WHILE ROOSEVELT awaited Japan’s reply, the Chicago Tribune broke a blockbuster story under banner headlines:

F.D.R.’S WAR PLANS!

GOAL IS 10 MILLION ARMED MEN

HALF TO FIGHT IN A.E.F.

The story, which appeared on Thursday, December 4, was based on a top-secret plan prepared at Roosevelt’s request by a joint board of the army and navy. The Tribune’s well-connected Washington correspondent, Chesly Manly, had acquired a copy of the plan, which Robert McCormick, the bitterly anti-Roosevelt owner of the Tribune, was delighted to publicize. The essence of Manly’s four-thousand-word story was that the American military command was already preparing for a European war effort far larger than that of the First World War. “Germany and her European satellites cannot be defeated by the European powers now fighting against her,” Manly quoted the secret war plan. “If our European enemies are to be defeated, it will be necessary for the United States to enter the war, and to employ a part of its armed forces offensively in the Eastern Atlantic and in Europe and Africa.” This new American Expeditionary Force would comprise as many as five million soldiers, who would take part in a major offensive against Germany during the summer of 1943.

Reporters naturally questioned the administration as to the veracity of the Tribune’s story. Steve Early, speaking for the president, at first refused to confirm or deny the report. But gradually the administration tacitly conceded that the plan was genuine, while asserting that its significance had been exaggerated. Henry Stimson explained that war planners made all sorts of plans; the particular preparations that had been leaked reflected merely one set of contingencies. “They have never constituted an authorized program of the government,” Stimson said. Nor did the plan tell the Germans anything the Germans couldn’t guess on their own. Even so, the Tribune should be ashamed. “The chief evil of their publication is the revelation that there should be among us any group of persons so lacking in appreciation of the danger that confronts the country and so wanting in loyalty and patriotism to their government that they would be willing to take and publish such papers.” Harold Ickes had harsher words for the Tribune, at least in his diary. “If we had been at war,” Ickes said, “this publication would have constituted treason.”

Isolationists cited the war plan as further evidence of Roosevelt’s duplicity. Even as the president proclaimed his devotion to peace, they said, he was preparing for war. Burton Wheeler demanded a congressional investigation, with witnesses required to testify under oath. Hamilton Fish adopted an attitude of pained astonishment. “I refuse to believe that the President has given his support to any proposal for such an expeditionary force,” the New York Republican asserted, in tones that indicated just the opposite: that he did believe it. “If we crush the German army, the Russian army will overrun Germany, this country will be left bankrupt and impoverished, and communism will come, bringing chaos and revolution.”

The isolationist uproar was still building on Saturday, December 6, when Roosevelt dispatched a letter to Emperor Hirohito. This was an extreme step for an American president, or any other head of government; the emperor, considered divine by the Japanese, didn’t receive regular mail. But Japan and America confronted a “deep and far-reaching emergency,” Roosevelt said, and extreme steps were required. The president asserted that the escalation of Japanese force levels in Indochina was pushing Southeast Asia toward war. He didn’t know whether Hirohito could cancel what was afoot with Japan’s military, but he thought the emperor ought to try. “A continuance of such a situation is unthinkable.” Roosevelt again called for the evacuation of Japanese troops from Indochina; in exchange he offered to guarantee the neutralization of that French colony. “Both of us,” he concluded, “for the sake of the peoples not only of our own great countries but for the sake of humanity in neighboring territories, have a sacred duty to restore traditional amity and prevent further death and destruction in the world.”

44.

THE LOOMING PROSPECT OF WAR ADDED NEW RESPONSIBILITIES TO Eleanor Roosevelt’s portfolio, without subtracting any of the old ones. She still wrote her newspaper column, conducted her press conferences, and broadcast her weekly radio addresses. As part of his declaration of national emergency, Roosevelt had established an Office of Civilian Defense and appointed New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia to be director. La Guardia asked Eleanor to become his associate. She initially said no, having enough else to do and remaining leery of taking a paid government post and thereby raising complications for Franklin.

But a pair of deaths in the autumn of 1941 caused her to reconsider. Hall Roosevelt had been Eleanor’s companion during the bleak years after their parents died. Hall inherited much more of their physical attractiveness than Eleanor did, but also more of their emotional instability. Decades of excessive drinking eventually caught up with him, and he came to a slow, agonizing end. “It has been a hard two weeks,” Eleanor wrote a friend shortly after the death, “and from last Sunday until yesterday morning more harrowing than I could tell you.”

The second death hit Franklin harder than Eleanor. Sara Roosevelt had suffered a stroke in June, and though she still made the annual trip to Campobello, she spent most of her time there confined to her bedroom. Eleanor visited her mother-in-law while Franklin was meeting with Churchill off Newfoundland; what Eleanor saw didn’t afford much hope. “I think she is failing fast,” she wrote of Sara in mid-August. Sara rallied on the news of the Atlantic Conference, as she took pride in her son’s emergence as a leading figure not just in American politics but in world affairs. She returned to Hyde Park, where Eleanor helped her settle back in.

For a few days she appeared to be gaining strength, but then she weakened once more. Eleanor called Franklin and told him to come to Hyde Park as quickly as possible. He arrived on the morning of September 6, a Saturday. Sara brightened to see him, as she always did when he returned home. He told her of his sessions with Churchill, laughingly describing the slip he had given the press, movingly relating the Sunday service aboard the Prince of Wales, seriously recounting the discussions leading to the Atlantic Charter. He did the talking; she was content to listen. After what seemed her best day in weeks, she prepared for bed. Suddenly she fell unconscious. A clot, like that which had caused her stroke, lodged in her pulmonary artery, depriving the brain of oxygen.

Franklin spent the night at her bedside; Eleanor came in and out. The next morning, just before noon, Sara quietly expired. To the astonishment of everyone present, at almost the moment of her death an ancient oak on the property, not far from the house, crashed to the ground. There was no wind, nor had rain softened the ground. Roosevelt gazed at the prone giant, remembering the hours spent playing under its limbs and doubtless reflecting on the fitting moment of its demise.

“The funeral was nice and simple, the casket in the library on the south side and only a spray of Hyde Park flowers on it,” Eleanor wrote Anna, who had moved to the West Coast. “We drove to the churchyard and Father stood by the car through the interment service.” Franklin had fallen silent upon Sara’s death, shutting himself off from his official duties and from as many visitors and well-wishers as he reasonably could. He ordered the road that ran by the estate to be closed lest Sara’s final peace—and his sorrow—be disturbed.

To Eleanor he seemed composed, if subdued. “Pa has taken Granny’s death very philosophically,” Eleanor wrote Anna. Grace Tully saw something different. Roosevelt’s secretary was helping her boss sort through Sara’s things after the funeral. “She had carefully saved and tagged his christening dress, his first pair of shoes, his baby hair, and some of his childhood toys,” Tully recalled. These mementos of his childhood, and this evidence of his mother’s loving care, summoned fifty-eight years of mixed feelings to the surface, and for one of the rare times in his life Roosevelt broke down.

Had he been a different man, and Eleanor a different woman, Sara’s death might have inaugurated a reconciliation. Sara had come between them from the start of their relationship, and now she was gone. But Franklin turned inward, rather than toward Eleanor. “He never looked toward the grave,” one of the few reporters allowed at the funeral noted, “nor did he return an anxious glance cast his way by his wife.” He made a gesture in Eleanor’s direction afterward, when he said she might take Sara’s room in the big house as her own. “I just can’t, and told him so,” Eleanor explained to Anna. She couldn’t forget all the slights Sara had inflicted upon her, and she couldn’t forgive Franklin for waiting this long to put her ahead of his mother. She couldn’t risk the kind of rejection she had suffered from every man she had loved, including Franklin. The moment of possibility passed.

James Roosevelt watched his parents struggle with their feelings. He later recounted what the lost opportunity cost his father. “Hyde Park could be only a palliative, not a cure, for the loneliness that was eating inside Father,” James said. “Nowhere in the world really was there anyone for him with whom he could unlock his mind and his thoughts. Politics, domestic economy, war strategy, postwar planning he could talk over with dozens of persons. Of what was inside him, of what really drove him, Father talked with no one.”

THE DEATHS OF Hall and Sara prompted Eleanor to accept La Guardia’s offer of a post in civilian defense. In a world where personal relationships were so fraught and disappointing, duty was a source of comfort. Duty quieted the questions love raised but never answered satisfactorily. During the autumn of 1941 she threw herself into the work of civil defense, devoting evenings and weekends to securing the home front in the event of war. She and some colleagues were working late at the White House on Saturday evening, December 6; before the others departed she took them to bid the president good night. Roosevelt had just dispatched his eleventh-hour appeal to the Japanese emperor. “This son of man has just sent his final message to the Son of God,” he grimly joked.

Eleanor turned to the last-minute details for a large luncheon to be held at the White House the next day. The guests were all eager for a chance to break bread with the president. But on Sunday morning Franklin told her that he couldn’t spare the time. She wasn’t surprised, for he had begged off from numerous events during the previous months. Besides mourning his mother, he had the best excuse anyone could imagine: world peace required his presence elsewhere. There were, moreover, considerations of fatigue. “People naturally wanted to listen to what he had to say,” Eleanor remembered. “But the fact that he carried so many secrets in his head made it necessary for him to watch everything he said, which in itself was exhausting.” More and more often, Roosevelt simply had a quiet meal in his study with Harry Hopkins or Grace Tully.

He was sharing lunch with Hopkins that Sunday, December 7, when the call from the Navy Department informed him of the attack on Pearl Harbor. He immediately summoned his top military and diplomatic advisers: Stimson, Knox, Marshall, Stark, Hull. They assessed the meaning and consequences of the attack even as updates from Hawaii explained its horrific extent. Marshall and Stark related the orders they had sent to General MacArthur in the Philippines and other American commanders across the Pacific. Roosevelt took a call from Churchill; the prime minister expressed condolences for American losses and good wishes for the struggle ahead.

Roosevelt brought in Grace Tully. “Sit down, Grace,” he said. “I’m going before Congress tomorrow. I’d like to dictate my message. It will be short.”

Tully was struck by how composed the president seemed. He had been lighting a cigarette when she came in. “He inhaled deeply, then he began in the same calm tone in which he dictated his mail,” she remembered. “Only his diction was a little different, as he spoke each word incisively and slowly, carefully specifying each punctuation mark and each paragraph.”

The message was indeed short, containing fewer than five hundred words, and it required Roosevelt scarcely longer to dictate than it would to read. The president showed it to Hull, who urged him to add a bill of particulars against Japan. Roosevelt declined. Hopkins suggested a sentence for the end, which Roosevelt accepted.

He ate a quick dinner with Hopkins and Tully and convened the cabinet at eight thirty. He impressed upon the secretaries the gravity of the task before them. At nine he brought in the congressional leadership. He furnished the senators and representatives the latest reports from Hawaii. To a man they insisted on a war declaration.

Additional briefings filled the rest of the evening and spilled beyond midnight. At one o’clock on the morning of December 8 he got into bed. Sleep came slowly. In less than twelve hours he would speak to Congress, to the American people, and to the world. He knew he was right in rejecting Hull’s advice for a longer message; at this moment words could be but the faintest echo of the thunder of deeds. He understood that it had long been so when America entered wars. It certainly had been so for the wars of his lifetime. Theodore Roosevelt and the war hawks of 1898 had shouted for war against Spain, but only the destruction of the Maine rendered a war declaration possible. Woodrow Wilson had concluded by the beginning of 1917 that democracy could not withstand a German victory in the First World War, but it was only after German U-boats began sinking American merchantmen that he got Congress to agree. In each case the loss of American life and the destruction of American property added a deeply emotional element to the logical arguments about national interest. This addition was crucial, for the American political system didn’t respond to logic alone. Franklin Roosevelt had watched TR and Wilson, and learned. His own experience with the isolationists confirmed the lesson. For four years he had warned the nation that fascism posed a grave threat to America’s way of life; only now, with the smoke billowing above Pearl Harbor, could Congress concede he was right.

Yet the attack on Pearl Harbor wasn’t simply a casus belli; it was a debacle. America’s Pacific fleet had been eviscerated by the Japanese bombs and torpedoes; American shipyards would have to work overtime for years to replace the vessels destroyed at Pearl. The lost lives, of course, could never be replaced. Some sort of attack had been necessary to make the isolationists understand the fascist threat, but this attack was a disaster.

Roosevelt knew it, and knew he would have to deal with it. But the time for that would come. The task of the moment was to commit the country to the war. Consequently, when the president addressed the legislature at half past noon on December 8, he spoke succinctly. “Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy,” he said, “the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the empire of Japan.” The attack was unprovoked and obviously premeditated. And it was part of a larger aggressive design.

Yesterday the Japanese Government also launched an attack against Malaya. Last night Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong. Last night Japanese forces attacked Guam. Last night Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands. Last night the Japanese attacked Wake Island. And this morning the Japanese attacked Midway Island.

For months Roosevelt had lavished words on the looming threat; now that the threat had taken the form of bombs, torpedoes, and fiery death, he didn’t need to. “The facts of yesterday and today speak for themselves.” A mere six minutes after he began, he ended:

Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger…. I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese empire.

THE COMBINATION of Roosevelt’s words and Japan’s actions got the president what he wanted. In 1917 Congress had debated Wilson’s war request for four days, and more than fifty members had finally voted against the war declaration. This time there was no debate and almost no opposition. The Senate approved the war resolution twenty-five minutes after Roosevelt finished speaking, the House ten minutes later. The Senate vote was unanimous; in the House the sole dissenter was Republican Jeanette Rankin, who, in her one previous term in Congress, had voted against war in 1917. (Her Montana constituents would respond in 1942 as they had in 1918, retiring her again to private life.)

Roosevelt signed the war resolution at ten minutes past four in a sober ceremony attended by leaders of both parties. He made no further statement and took no questions. His silence reflected his continuing wish to let Japan’s crimes speak for themselves, but it also acknowledged the fact that he had no answer to a crucial question on everyone’s mind. Did war with Japan mean war with Germany?

More precisely, he had no answer he could share with the American people. Roosevelt had wanted war with Germany; instead he got war with Japan. He still wanted war with Germany, and he expected it. His Magic eavesdroppers had intercepted a cable from Berlin to Tokyo, dated November 29, assuring the Japanese that if they “became engaged in a war against the United States, Germany would of course join in the war immediately.” But Roosevelt couldn’t share his knowledge without revealing his source, which he definitely would not do.

Anyway, he couldn’t be absolutely certain Hitler would fulfill his pledge to Tokyo. The German dictator had lied before. Roosevelt spent the first twenty-four hours after Pearl Harbor making sure Congress declared war on Japan; he spent the next seventy-two hours ensuring that Germany declared war on the United States. On the evening of Tuesday, December 9, the president delivered his first war message to the American people. The central theme of this Fireside Chat was the unity of aggression. “The sudden criminal attacks perpetrated by the Japanese in the Pacific provide the climax of a decade of international immorality,” the president said. He traced the ten-year arc of aggression, from Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, through Italy’s rape of Ethiopia, Germany’s serial assaults on Austria, Czechoslovakia, Scandinavia, the Low Countries, France, and Russia, and culminating in Japan’s attack at Pearl Harbor. “It is all of one pattern.”

Japan had attacked the United States, Roosevelt acknowledged, but Hitler had put the Japanese up to it. “For weeks Germany has been telling Japan that if Japan did not attack the United States, Japan would not share in dividing the spoils with Germany when peace came. She was promised by Germany that if she came in she would receive the complete and perpetual control of the whole of the Pacific area.” The Germans and Japanese conducted their military and naval operations according to a single global plan, one that treated any victory for an Axis nation as a victory for all. Japan had struck the United States more openly than Germany and Italy had thus far, but the danger from those countries was no less. “Germany and Italy, regardless of any formal declaration of war, consider themselves at war with the United States at this moment just as much as they consider themselves at war with Britain or Russia.” Americans must recognize the global challenge and confront it. “We expect to eliminate the danger from Japan, but it would serve us ill if we accomplished that and found that the rest of the world was dominated by Hitler and Mussolini.”

The struggle would test the courage and endurance of the American people. “It will not only be a long war, it will be a hard war,” Roosevelt said. The conflict had begun for America in the Pacific, but it would not end there. “The United States can accept no result save victory, final and complete. Not only must the shame of Japanese treachery be wiped out, but the sources of international brutality, wherever they exist, must be absolutely and finally broken.”

HITLER DIDN’T SHARE much with Roosevelt, but he accepted the president’s conclusion that the struggle between fascism and democracy was a fight to the death. And on December 11 he did precisely what Roosevelt wanted him to do. He notified the American embassy that Germany was declaring war on the United States. “Our patience is ended,” Hitler told the Reichstag, by way of explanation. “The American president and his plutocratic clique have always in the past considered us a poor people. They were right! But this poor people wishes to live…. It wishes to ensure that it will never again be robbed by the rich nations of the earth, who refuse it its rightful place in the sun.”

“The long known and the long expected has thus taken place,” Roosevelt asserted in a new message to Congress. This time the president sent his words by courier for the clerks of the Senate and House to read to their chambers, but his relief was palpable nonetheless. After years of warning Americans against the fascist threat, after months of stretching his authority and bending the truth in an effort to educate the American people, even while striving to prevent Hitler from completing his conquest of Europe, Roosevelt would receive his mandate to wage the fight in full earnest. “The forces endeavoring to enslave the entire world now are moving toward this hemisphere,” he said. “Never before has there been a greater challenge to life, liberty, and civilization…. I therefore request the Congress to recognize a state of war between the United States and Germany.”

Not even Montana’s Rankin could bring herself to oppose the president (although she did abstain). The Senate voted 88 to 0 for war against Germany, the House 393 to 0. The approving tallies were a bit larger on a companion war declaration against Italy, as straggling members arrived late. The signing ceremony was as subdued as the votes. “I’ve always heard things came in threes,” Roosevelt remarked. “Here they are.”

45.

“SO WE HAD WON AFTER ALL,” WINSTON CHURCHILL EXULTED. “THE United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death.”

With Roosevelt the prime minister adopted a slightly less celebratory tone. “Now that we are, as you say, ‘in the same boat,’ would it not be wise for us to have another conference?” he cabled Roosevelt on December 9. “We could review the whole war plan in the light of reality and new facts, as well as the problems of production and distribution. I feel that all these matters, some of which are causing me concern, can best be settled on the highest executive level. It would also be a very great pleasure to me to meet you again, and the sooner the better.”

Roosevelt was willing to meet Churchill, but not at once. He assumed that Churchill’s team of soldiers and diplomats had thoroughly prepared an Anglo-American war plan, and he wanted time to develop America’s own version. He drafted a reply putting Churchill off. “In August it was easy to agree on obvious main items—Russian aid, Near East aid, and new form Atlantic convoy,” he said. “But I question whether situation in Pacific area is yet clear enough to make determination of that character. Delay of even a few weeks might be advantageous.”

But before he could send this message shocking news arrived from Southeast Asia. The Japanese attack on British Malaya was no hit-and-run affair, like the raid on Pearl Harbor, but the opening of an amphibious invasion. Britain’s naval command dispatched the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, both recently deployed to Singapore, against the invaders. A Japanese submarine reported their approach, and on the morning of December 10 the Japanese sent a large force of bombers and torpedo planes against the British ships. In a lopsided battle—the British lacked air cover—the Prince of Wales and the Repulse suffered multiple heavy blows from bombs and torpedoes before capsizing and sinking. Several hundred officers and men went down with their ships.

The news of the sinking stunned British and Americans alike. The Japanese success at Pearl Harbor had been attributed to surprise, but there was nothing surprising—except the outcome—in the attack on the Prince of Wales and Repulse. Suddenly the Pacific war seemed far more serious than it had just hours before. Roosevelt scrapped his draft message to Churchill and sent another message in its place. “Delighted to have you here at the White House,” Roosevelt said. “Naval situation and other matters of strategy require discussion…. The news is bad but it will be better.”

IT HADN’T IMPROVED much by the time Churchill arrived. He came by battleship, the newly commissioned Duke of York, which conducted its shakedown cruise carrying the prime minister and his advisers west. Like the voyage of Roosevelt to Britain in 1918—aboard a vessel similarly being shaken down—Churchill’s transit was alternatively tedious and harrowing. At first it slowed to the speed of the most laggard of its escort, but Churchill’s navy minister, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, grew impatient, declaring that the Duke of York was more likely to ram a U-boat than be torpedoed by one. With Churchill’s assent Pound gave the order for the ship to cut loose from the escort and dash ahead on its own. The wintry North Atlantic lived up to its reputation; so many waves crashed over the deck of the battleship that Max Beaverbrook groused that he might as well have traveled by submarine.

The American navy and coast guard expected the Duke of York to steam up the Potomac to Washington, but Churchill, wishing to speak with Roosevelt as soon as possible, disembarked at Hampton Roads on December 22 and took a plane the rest of the way. He found Roosevelt waiting at Washington’s airport. “I clasped his strong hand with comfort and pleasure,” Churchill recalled. Darkness had descended over the capital, and the president’s car took the two statesmen swiftly to the White House, where an informal dinner awaited them. Roosevelt, as always, mixed the drinks; Churchill imbibed appreciatively. When the dinner was called, the prime minister wheeled the president into the dining room—thinking, by his own recollection, “of Sir Walter Raleigh spreading his cloak before Queen Elizabeth.”

Nothing of business had been put on the evening’s agenda, but discussion inevitably turned to the war. Several issues demanded resolution. The first entailed strategic priorities, in particular whether the war in Europe and the Atlantic took precedence over the war in Asia and the Pacific. Churchill and his military men thought it did although, after the destruction of the Prince of Wales and Repulse, with less confidence than before. They recalled that the Americans had concurred in this opinion for several months. But that was before Pearl Harbor, which created a new political dynamic in America. As solicitous as Roosevelt had shown himself to be of American public opinion, Churchill couldn’t help worrying that Europe might not loom so large in American strategic thinking as it had.

A related issue involved the nature of Anglo-American collaboration. Both Roosevelt and Churchill remembered the suspicions and outright hostility that had developed during the First World War when British and French generals demanded that American troops be employed as reinforcements in British and French units, under British and French command, and America’s generals had refused. The squabbling had diminished the effectiveness of the anti-German coalition and probably prolonged the war. Neither Roosevelt nor Churchill wished to repeat the experience. But how best to prevent it—how most efficiently to coordinate the American and British war efforts—required careful thinking and possibly vigorous discussion.

At a higher level than either military strategy or command coordination was the matter of war aims. During the First World War, Wilson had insisted on America’s being an “Associated” power rather than an Allied power; his diffidence reflected his refusal to fight for the imperial purposes that motivated Britain and France. Roosevelt and Churchill had dealt with some of these issues at the Atlantic Conference, but the Atlantic Charter left a great deal unsaid. In any event it committed only the Americans and the British. The anti-Axis ranks included the Soviet Union, China, and several other countries. A statement of purpose on the part of all of them was desirable, almost necessary.

Other questions were logistical. Now that the Americans were themselves fighting, would they be able and willing to continue supplying the recipients of Lend-Lease at the pre–Pearl Harbor level? Assuming agreement on the priority of Europe and the Atlantic, how might American military and naval power be brought most effectively to bear? How soon could American troops start fighting the Nazis? And where?

These last questions inspired much of the table talk that night at dinner. Since June 1940 France had held an anomalous position between Germany and Britain. The Wehrmacht occupied the north and west of the country, while the south was governed by the regime of Marshal Philippe Pétain, headquartered at Vichy. Pétain took care not to provoke Hitler, which meant that his policies were mildly to egregiously collaborationist. But he wasn’t a Nazi, and presumably he had the best interests of France at heart. Of greater concern to Roosevelt and Churchill, he controlled what remained of the French fleet and of France’s overseas empire, including French North Africa.

Hitler’s decision to let Pétain govern Vichy France reflected the reality that there were only so many German troops, and most were currently occupied in Russia. Yet Germany’s Russian offensive had stalled for the winter about the time Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and many observers wondered how long Berlin would tolerate such independence as Vichy exercised.

The question came up at the Roosevelt-Churchill dinner. “There was general agreement that if Hitler was held in Russia he must try something else, and that the most probable line was Spain and Portugal en route to North Africa,” Churchill reported to the war cabinet, in the only contemporary account of the evening. “There was general agreement that it was vital to forestall the Germans in North Africa.” The emphasis on North Africa indicated the importance of that region for Mediterranean transit, which linked Britain to India, and also the prospect that North Africa would be where American troops would first enter the fight against Germany. “The President said that he was anxious that American land forces should give their support as quickly as possible wherever they could be most helpful, and favoured the idea of a plan to move into North Africa.”

Nothing was decided that evening, and Churchill retired to his bedroom on the second floor of the White House, which became his home for the next three weeks. Harry Hopkins was across the hall, and just beyond Hopkins’s suite the prime minister directed his support staff to re-create a version of the map room at his command headquarters in London. Roosevelt admired the maps and became a regular visitor; he subsequently ordered the establishment of his own map room downstairs.

The president and the prime minister swapped bedroom visits. Both began their days working in bed, although Roosevelt’s day typically commenced earlier than Churchill’s. Sometimes Roosevelt would roll into Churchill’s room; sometimes Churchill would pad into Roosevelt’s. In either case the smoke from Roosevelt’s cigarettes would mingle with the heavier fumes of Churchill’s cigars, and ashes would fly as each man punctuated his sentences with a jab of his favorite form of tobacco.

Hopkins later dined out on a story of a Roosevelt visit to Churchill’s bedroom that caught the prime minister emerging from his bath with not even a towel between his rosy, rotund flesh and the historic atmosphere of the White House. Roosevelt modestly apologized and started to wheel himself out. Churchill proclaimed that neither apology nor departure was necessary. “The Prime Minister of Great Britain,” he said, “has nothing to conceal from the President of the United States.”

Robert Sherwood wondered at Hopkins’s version and asked Churchill about it. Nonsense, Churchill replied. He never greeted the president without at least a towel. Besides, he said, “I could not possibly have made such a statement as that. The president himself would have been well aware that it was not strictly true.”

THE DISCUSSIONS became more businesslike with the arrival of the supporting casts. Certain large questions were disposed of readily. Churchill and the British were delighted to discover that however much Pearl Harbor may have jolted the American people, it hadn’t swayed the president or the American military from the conviction that Europe was the central theater in the war against the Axis. “Our view remains that Germany is still the prime enemy and her defeat is the key to victory,” a paper jointly produced by the American and British chiefs of staff averred. “Once Germany is defeated, the collapse of Italy and the defeat of Japan must follow…. Therefore it should be a cardinal principle of A-B”—American-British—“strategy that only the minimum of force necessary for the safeguarding of vital interests in other theaters should be diverted from operations against Germany.”

Somewhat thornier was the structure of American-British collaboration. George Marshall would be the quiet hero of America’s war before the conflict ended; he started earning his reputation at the Washington conference. “As a result of what I saw in France”—during the First World War—“and from following our own experience, I feel very strongly that the most important consideration is the question of unity of command,” Marshall told a meeting of the American and British officers. The group had been talking tactics, and although the discussion had been friendly it hung up on various details. Marshall contended that the hang-ups would recur—and be multiplied for each theater of the war—without unity of command. “I am convinced that there must be one man in command of the entire theater—air, ground, and ships. We cannot manage by cooperation. Human frailties are such that there would be emphatic unwillingness to place portions of troops under another service. If we make a plan for unified command now, it will solve nine-tenths of our troubles.”

Marshall’s British counterparts weren’t so sure, and neither was Churchill. The British guessed that, given America’s advantage over Britain in troop numbers and armament, the theater commanders would tend to be American. Sir Charles Portal, the chief of the Royal Air Force, argued that decisions regarding force allocation and similar matters were better made by the “highest authority”—namely the national governments. “When the allocation is decided upon, the directive has been formulated, and the forces allotted, everything else moves smoothly.”

Churchill approached the command question in a meeting with Roosevelt. He conceded that unity of command was well and good where there was a “continuous line of battle,” as there had been in France during the First World War. But the current situation in the Pacific was different. The scattered condition of the forces and fighting dictated that decisions would have to be made from central headquarters, presumably Washington.

Roosevelt responded that Washington wasn’t receiving good intelligence from the Pacific theater. “The reports we are getting from the Far East are very sketchy,” he said. A commander on the spot would certainly do better.

Churchill rejoined that a commander on the spot would do worse. “In some cases the troops are separated by a thousand miles,” he said. At that distance a commander lacked the personal touch that made theater command advisable. He also lacked the broad perspective a commander based in Washington would have.

At this point in the conversation Max Beaverbrook handed a note to Harry Hopkins. “You should work on Churchill,” Beaverbrook’s note said. “He is being advised. He is open-minded and needs discussion.”

Hopkins took the first opportunity to buttonhole Churchill. “Don’t be in a hurry to turn down the proposal,” Hopkins said. The prime minister might be pleasantly surprised by the theater commander the president had in mind.

“I was complimented by the choice,” Churchill said of Roosevelt’s nomination of Sir Archibald Wavell, the commander of British imperial forces in India. But the prime minister wasn’t immediately convinced. “It seemed to me that the theatre in which he would act would soon be overrun and the forces which could be placed at his disposal would be destroyed by the Japanese onslaught.” Yet after Hopkins orchestrated an informal meeting between Churchill and Marshall, at which the American general reiterated his arguments for unified command with the quiet sincerity that informed all his recommendations, Churchill allowed himself to be persuaded. “It was evident that we must meet the American view,” he remarked later.

As part of the same deliberation, the Americans and British decided to establish a Combined Chiefs of Staff, consisting of the joint chiefs of staff of the British and American military establishments or their proxies. The headquarters of the Combined Chiefs would be in Washington. This arrangement favored the American side, in that the American principals would normally be present at Combined Chiefs meetings while their British counterparts would often be represented by deputies. But the headquarters had to be somewhere, and Washington, besides being the capital of the stronger power, was more centrally located between the two major theaters of the war.

Some thought was given to including a Soviet representative on the combined staff. But the possibility was no sooner raised than it was dismissed. Neither Roosevelt nor Churchill knew Stalin, and they saw no reason to let the Soviet dictator in on any more information than was necessary. Besides, they reasoned that the Russians had their hands full battling the Germans. Sending a top general to Washington would take that officer away from where he was needed. Finally, the Soviets weren’t at war with Japan, which put them in a different position than the Americans and the British. So the Soviets weren’t invited. As matters turned out, Stalin didn’t complain.

SOVIET SENSIBILITIES did have to be considered on the issue of war aims. The outline of what the United States and Britain were fighting for had been established at the Atlantic Conference and articulated in the Atlantic Charter. But the war had grown since then, and Roosevelt deemed essential the inclusion of all the nations that, by choice or circumstance, found themselves fighting the Axis. It was Roosevelt who suggested the label “United Nations” for the anti-Axis coalition. And it was Roosevelt who included religious freedom as a principle the United Nations ought to be fighting for.

This was what rubbed the Soviets the wrong way. Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, complained that a religious freedom clause was deliberately provocative. Litvinov allowed that the Soviet government—meaning Stalin, as everyone realized—might accept “freedom of conscience” as a substitute. Roosevelt stood firm, even as he noted that in American practice, dating to Jefferson and the other founders, religious freedom was understood to include the right to embrace no religion at all. Surely Stalin could live with that.

Stalin could, and did. The document that Litvinov signed on behalf of the Soviet Union—beneath the signatures of Roosevelt and Churchill but above the signatures of T. V. Soong, the Chinese foreign minister, and of the representatives of the other anti-Axis governments—committed the signatory nations to the “common program of purposes and principles…known as the Atlantic Charter.” The signatories also promised “to defend life, liberty, independence, and religious freedom, and to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands.”

The declaration was less airy regarding military strategy.

(1) Each Government pledges itself to employ its full resources, military or economic, against those members of the Tripartite Pact and its adherents with which such Government is at war.

(2) Each Government pledges itself to cooperate with the Governments signatory hereto and not to make a separate armistice or peace with the enemies.

There was art in the first pledge, in that the signers committed to fight not the entire Axis but only those Axis countries with which they were already at war. Thus Russia didn’t declare war on Japan and didn’t propose to.

The hard core of the declaration lay in the second pledge, forswearing any separate peace. If this pledge could be believed, the three great powers of the United Nations—as well as the lesser powers—would fight together till Germany was defeated. Each would resist all temptations to strike a deal with Hitler or his successors. They were in the war together until the bitter end.

CHURCHILL HAD INTENDED to remain in Washington a week and be headed home by the beginning of the new year. But he got on so well with Roosevelt that he extended his visit to three weeks.

At times the relationship threatened to become too cordial for America’s good. “Generals Arnold, Eisenhower, and Marshall came in to see me,” Henry Stimson wrote in his diary for Christmas Day 1941, “and brought me a rather astonishing memorandum which they had received from the White House concerning a meeting between Churchill and the President and recorded by one of Churchill’s assistants.” The war secretary was referring to Henry—“Hap”—Arnold, the commander of America’s air corps, and Dwight Eisenhower, the operations chief of the general staff, besides the chief of staff.

It reported the President as proposing to discuss the turning over to the British of our proposed reinforcements for MacArthur. This astonishing paper made me extremely angry and, as I went home for lunch and thought it over again, my anger grew until I finally called up Hopkins, told him of the paper and of my anger at it, and I said if that was persisted in, the President would have to take my resignation.

The memorandum in question had been compiled by Leslie Hollis, a brigadier general in the Royal Marines and the secretary of the British chiefs of staff. Roosevelt and Churchill had been discussing the dire peril of the British garrison in Malaya following the sinking of the Prince of Wales and Repulse. Churchill’s military and naval chiefs explained that they were diverting all available units to Singapore in an effort to hold that crucial garrison. Roosevelt remarked that the American reinforcements currently en route to the Philippines via Australia would be unlikely to be able to fight their way to the Philippines in time to relieve Douglas MacArthur. “His view was that these reinforcements should be utilized in whatever manner might best serve the joint cause in the Far East,” Hollis recorded, “and in agreement with the Prime Minister he expressed the desire that the United States and British Chiefs of Staff should meet the following day to consider what measures should be taken to give effect to his wishes.”

The purpose of Hollis’s memo was to inform the American chiefs of the president’s commitment; the memo’s effect was to alarm Arnold, Eisenhower, and Marshall and infuriate Stimson. The war secretary phoned Harry Hopkins, who said he would check the matter out. In a few minutes he called back and said he had asked Roosevelt, in the presence of Churchill, about the diversion of American reinforcements to Malaya. Roosevelt denied that any commitment had been made, and Churchill supported the president. Stimson was dubious and told Hopkins so. “I then read to him extracts from the paper…,” Stimson wrote in his diary, “and he said that they certainly bore out my view.”

Roosevelt apparently had realized his mistake even as he denied making it, and Churchill was sufficiently gracious—and farsighted—to cover for him. Nothing more was said about sending the American forces to Singapore, beyond an oblique remark by Roosevelt that evening in a session with Stimson, Marshall, Arnold, Hopkins, and a few others. The president led a review of recent developments. “We discussed various things which were happening and the ways and means of carrying out the campaign in the Far East,” Stimson recorded. “Incidentally and as if by aside, he flung out the remark that a paper had been going around which was nonsense and which entirely misrepresented a conference between him and Churchill.” Stimson kept quiet—till he got home to his diary. “This incident shows the danger of talking too freely in international matters of such keen importance without the President carefully having his military and naval advisers present…. I think he felt he had pretty nearly burned his fingers and had called this subsequent meeting to make up for it. Hopkins told me at the time I talked with him over the telephone that he had told the President that he should be more careful about the formality of his discussions with Churchill.”

WHILE HOPKINS WAS warning Roosevelt to resist Churchill’s charm, the prime minister was testing that charm on the American people. Roosevelt had invited him to speak from the White House balcony the night before Christmas. “This is a strange Christmas Eve,” Churchill told the crowd of several hundred gathered in the darkness of the mansion’s garden. “Almost the whole world is locked in deadly struggle, and with the most terrible weapons which science can devise the nations advance upon each other.” And yet, for a moment, a different mood reigned. “Here, amid all the tumult, we have tonight the peace of the spirit in each cottage home and in every generous heart. Therefore, we may cast aside, for this night at least, the cares and dangers which beset us, and make for the children an evening of happiness in a world of storm.”

Two days later Churchill became the first British prime minister to address the American Congress. His rhetorical reputation preceded him; his defiant speeches during the bleak moments of 1940 had stirred the souls even of many who wished to keep America’s distance from Britain. Now he was an ally, a comrade-in-arms, and America tuned in—his speech was broadcast by the major radio networks—to hear him speak.

He reminded his audience of his American maternity. “I wish indeed that my mother, whose memory I cherish across the veil of years, could have been here to see me,” he said. “By the way, I cannot help reflecting that if my father had been American and my mother British, instead of the other way around, I might have got here on my own.” After letting the laughter subside, Churchill continued in the same vein. “In that case, this would not have been the first time you would have heard my voice. In that case I would not have needed any invitation. But if I had it is hardly likely that it would have been unanimous.” More laughter. “So perhaps things are better as they are.”

He turned serious as he noted that he, like the legislators in front of him, served at the will of the people. This was the glory of democracy, and its strength. “In my country, as in yours, public men are proud to be the servants of the state and would be ashamed to be its masters.” And this was what distinguished America and Britain from those that made war against them.

Churchill thanked the members of Congress for the assistance America had provided Britain in its darkest hour. He pledged Britain’s assistance to America in the struggle ahead. The contest would be neither swift nor easy. But progress would come. “I think it would be reasonable to hope that the end of 1942 will see us quite definitely in a better position than we are now; and that the year 1943 will enable us to assume the initiative upon an ample scale.” Churchill understood that his listeners included more than a few persons who had long discounted the threat fascism posed to democracy. His own country had contained many of similar short sight. Changing their minds had been difficult. “Prodigious hammer blows have been needed to bring us together today.” But the hammer blows had done their work. “Here we are together defending all that to free men is dear.” Fate had chosen the English-speaking peoples.

He must indeed have a blind soul who cannot see that some great purpose and design is being worked out here below, of which we have the honor to be the faithful servants…. In the days to come the British and American people will for their own safety and for the good of all walk together in majesty, in justice, and in peace.

The speech was a tremendous hit. Alben Barkley, the Senate majority leader, characterized Churchill’s comments as “auspicious and impressive.” Frederick Van Nuys, a Democratic senator from Indiana, declared, “The speech was a grand résumé not only of past conditions but of what we may expect in the future.” Joseph Guffey of Pennsylvania called it “one of the greatest speeches I have ever heard.” Even Burton Wheeler, the crusty isolationist, admitted that the address was “clever” and “one which will appeal to the ordinary American,” although he added that what America needed at present was “less oratory and more action.”

By every measure Churchill’s visit was a smashing success for Roosevelt no less than for the prime minister. The two leaders demonstrated that their administrations could work together. Their staff chiefs might argue about this tactic or that, but on the essential elements of strategy they concurred. Germany would be the focus of their countries’ combined efforts; Japan would be held at bay. A single commander would direct operations in each theater. The Atlantic Charter would motivate the war effort.

And Roosevelt and Churchill would cooperate as partners and friends. “The last evening of Churchill’s visit the President, Churchill, and I had dinner together,” Harry Hopkins wrote.

The President and Churchill reviewed together the work of the past three weeks, and Churchill expressed not only his warm appreciation of the way he and his associates had been treated but his confidence that great steps had been taken towards unification of the prosecution of the war.

The dinner ran long, with neither Roosevelt nor Churchill eager to see the visit end. Ten o’clock was approaching as the prime minister made ready to depart.

The President and I drove with Churchill to his train to Norfolk, Virginia. A special train had been put on the siding at Sixth Street. The President said goodbye to Churchill in the car, and I walked with him and put him on the train….

On the way back, the President made it perfectly clear that he too was very pleased with the meetings. There was no question but that he grew genuinely to like Churchill, and I am sure Churchill equally liked the President.

Hopkins had given one of Churchill’s aides a small package for Clementine Churchill, the prime minister’s wife, whom Hopkins had befriended in London. The package contained a few presents and a brief letter. “You would have been quite proud of your husband on this trip,” Hopkins wrote. “He was ever so good natured. I didn’t see him take anybody’s head off…. If he had half as good a time here as the President did having him about the White House, he surely will carry pleasant memories of the past three weeks.”

46.

ROOSEVELT GREETED THE NEW YEAR IN 1942 AS THE MOST POWERFUL man in American history. He headed a government stronger and more unified for war than any American government before it. He led a nation with greater capacity for war than any other nation in world history. He stood as first among equals in the most formidable wartime alliance ever gathered.

His political and moral standing was higher than it had ever been. His third election had confirmed his continuing popularity, and the coming of war had demonstrated his prescience. His rhetorical style—in speeches, Fireside Chats, and press conferences—had always been persuasive, but now that the fascists had made him a prophet, his words were more irresistible than ever. He had long spoken for the suffering people of America, staggering under the weight of the depression. Now he spoke for the suffering people of the world, crushed beneath the boot heel of fascism.

No powerful man lacks enemies; even the most persuasive leader leaves some people unconvinced. Pearl Harbor buried isolationism, at least for the moment, but it didn’t transform the isolationists into fans of the president. Indeed, it drove some over the edge into conspiracy theories. So conveniently did the pieces of the international puzzle fall into place for Roosevelt after December 7 that the hard-core haters convinced themselves that he had engineered the whole thing. A noisy handful were already alleging that he had consciously allowed the attack on Pearl Harbor as providing a “back door” to the war against Germany. In time the charge would spawn a small library of books and articles claiming to prove Roosevelt’s culpability. The charge was plausible from the start, and it gained plausibility with the release, decades later, of the Magic intercepts, which demonstrated that Roosevelt knew war with Japan was coming.

Yet half the world had known war with Japan was coming. What Roosevelt did not know was where it was coming. Thailand seemed likely, or Malaya or Burma. The Philippines was the logical choice if the Japanese decided to attack an American possession directly. But Pearl Harbor seemed beyond their reach. The strongest evidence that Roosevelt did not expect an attack on Hawaii was his failure to put the Pacific battleships to sea. It would have been a simple matter to send the big vessels on patrol, leaving a few smaller craft in harbor to absorb the Japanese bombs and torpedoes. This certainly would have provided the casus belli he needed. So also an attack against which the American forces in Hawaii had been warned. In either case Roosevelt could have gone before Congress the next day and delivered precisely the same message he actually presented. And he would not have lost the major part of his Pacific fleet. For Roosevelt, who identified emotionally with the U.S. navy, to have deliberately allowed such destruction was beyond imagination. Or at least it was beyond the imagination of any not blinded by hatred of Roosevelt for other reasons.

Of course he brought the conspiracy theories upon himself. Even his most ardent supporters suspected he had manipulated the truth during the eighteen months before Pearl Harbor. His pledges that the destroyer-for-bases deal and Lend-Lease took America no closer to war rang hollow now. His election-eve promise not to send American boys to fight a foreign war was preserved by the fact that Hawaii wasn’t foreign, but it was belied by the near certainty that those boys would be fighting far beyond American soil or even the Western Hemisphere.

With the suspicions swirling about him, Roosevelt had a new task of persuasion, one greater than any he had faced before. The depression had tested his skills of reassurance and inspiration; the war now tested them to a far greater degree. The banking crisis had called for patience; the war called for sacrifice. The New Deal had been born in three months; the war would last three years—if America was lucky. Americans had been required to tighten their belts during the depression; they would have to bury their dead, by the many thousands, during the war.

They would have to work and sacrifice, as they had never worked and sacrificed in their lives. In his first wartime State of the Union address, delivered in early January 1942, Roosevelt spelled out the goals he was setting for the American people. War production would expand dramatically. “In this year, 1942, we shall produce 60,000 planes,” he said. “This includes 45,000 combat planes—bombers, dive bombers, pursuit planes…. Next year, 1943, we shall produce 125,000 airplanes, including 100,000 combat planes…. This year, 1942, we shall produce 45,000 tanks…. Next year, 1943, we shall produce 75,000 tanks.” Similarly for anti-aircraft guns: 20,000 in 1942 and 35,000 in 1943. For merchant ships: 6 million deadweight tons in 1942 and 10 million in 1943.

Americans would have to sacrifice personally to support this production. “War costs money,” Roosevelt said. “So far, we have hardly even begun to pay for it. We have devoted only 15 percent of our national income to national defense…. Our war program for the coming fiscal year will cost $56 billion or, in other words, more than half of the estimated annual national income. That means taxes and bonds and bonds and taxes. It means cutting luxuries and other non-essentials. In a word, it means an all-out war by individual effort and family effort in a united country.”

The demands of the war would push everything else aside. “Our task is unprecedented, and the time is short. We must strain every existing armament-producing facility to the utmost. We must convert every available plant and tool to war production. That goes all the way from the greatest plants to the smallest—from the huge automobile industry to the village machine shop.” Factories would operate twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. “Only this all-out scale of production will hasten the ultimate all-out victory…. Lost ground can always be regained, lost time never.”

As much as the war would strain Americans physically, it would challenge them mentally and morally. The war would bring bad news; Americans must be ready. “We have already tasted defeat. We may suffer further setbacks. We must face the fact of a hard war, a long war, a bloody war, a costly war.”

How long would the war last? “There is only one answer to that. It will end just as soon as we make it end, by our combined efforts, our combined strength, our combined determination to fight through and work through until the end—the end of militarism in Germany and Italy and Japan.”

TO RALLY SUPPORT for the war in general was one thing; to persuade the American people of a particular strategy was something else. The Germany-first strategy developed in the talks with the British was no secret militarily, or at least it was nothing anyone with a modest grasp of geopolitics couldn’t figure out unassisted. But it wasn’t an obvious strategy politically. America had been attacked in the Pacific, not in Europe. American anger blazed against Japan, not against Germany. For Roosevelt to tell Americans they should ignore Japan for now and defer their vengeance risked confusing the public, deflating the war spirit, and distracting the political system.

But they had to be told, if not all at once. Roosevelt commenced the process in a Fireside Chat on February 23, a Monday. He had hoped to speak on Washington’s Birthday, the day before, but in response to pastors’ complaints that his radio sermons were competing with their own, he had begun avoiding Sundays. The White House had alerted the press that Roosevelt would be discussing global strategy and suggested that newspapers print maps of the world in that Monday’s editions. Hundreds took the suggestion, with the result that when the president went on the air, his listeners were ready for a lesson in global strategy.

“This is a new kind of war,” Roosevelt said.

It is different from all other wars of the past, not only in its methods and weapons but also in its geography. It is warfare in terms of every continent, every island, every sea, every air lane in the world. That is the reason why I have asked you to take out and spread before you a map of the whole earth, and to follow with me the references which I shall make to the world-encircling battle lines of this war.

The papers rustled in American homes as Roosevelt walked his listeners around the globe, explaining the significance of each area to American strategy.

Look at your map. Look at the vast area of China, with its millions of fighting men. Look at the vast area of Russia, with its powerful armies and proven military might. Look at the British Isles, Australia, New Zealand, the Dutch Indies, India, the Near East, and the continent of Africa, with their resources of raw materials, and of peoples determined to resist Axis domination. Look too at North America, Central America, and South America.

It is obvious what would happen if all of these great reservoirs of power were cut off from each other either by enemy action or by self-imposed isolation. First, in such a case, we could no longer send aid of any kind to China—to the brave people who, for nearly five years, have withstood Japanese assault, destroyed hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers and vast quantities of Japanese war munitions. It is essential that we help China in her magnificent defense and in her inevitable counteroffensive—for that is one important element in the ultimate defeat of Japan.

Second, if we lost communication with the Southwest Pacific, all of that area, including Australia and New Zealand and the Dutch Indies, would fall under Japanese domination. Japan in such a case could release great numbers of ships and men to launch attacks on a large scale against the coasts of the Western Hemisphere—South America and Central America, and North America, including Alaska. At the same time, she could immediately extend her conquests in the other direction toward India, and through the Indian Ocean to Africa, to the Near East, and try to join forces with Germany and Italy.

Third, if we were to stop sending munitions to the British and the Russians in the Mediterranean, in the Persian Gulf, and the Red Sea, we would be helping the Nazis to overrun Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Persia, Egypt and the Suez Canal, the whole coast of North Africa itself, and with that inevitably the whole coast of West Africa—putting Germany within easy striking distance of South America, fifteen hundred miles away.

Fourth, if by such a fatuous policy we ceased to protect the North Atlantic supply line to Britain and to Russia, we would help to cripple the splendid counteroffensive by Russia against the Nazis, and we would help to deprive Britain of essential food supplies and munitions.

This new war was truly a world war, and it would be fought on a world front. On freedom’s side, it was being fought by a broad alliance. “The United Nations constitute an association of independent peoples of equal dignity and equal importance,” Roosevelt said. All members shared the burdens of war; all shared the same high purposes. “The Atlantic Charter applies not only to the parts of the world that border the Atlantic but to the whole world; disarmament of aggressors, self-determination of nations and peoples, and the four freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.”

ON THE SAME evening that Roosevelt was conducting his lesson in global strategy, a Japanese submarine surfaced off California near Santa Barbara and lobbed a few shells landward. Quite clearly the purpose was psychological: to steal the president’s thunder. The mission succeeded. The same papers that carried Roosevelt’s speech included articles about this first attack on the American mainland.

Roosevelt learned a lesson: not to announce major speeches so far in advance. He also detected an opportunity: to impress on Americans the differences between wartime and peacetime. Roosevelt worried from the start about the dissemination of war news. Congress had no sooner declared war on Japan than the president urged caution in repeating reports about the fighting. The initial news from Hawaii had been followed by wild speculation on what the Japanese were up to and where they might strike next. Roosevelt tamped down the rumors by refusing to comment on most of them, but his silence prompted suspicions that the White House knew more than it was saying. A journalist raised the issue at Roosevelt’s first wartime news conference. “This is not an impudent question, sir, but it might clear up things,” he said. “Do you intend to give the public the benefit of all of the reports you get?”

“I am going to give—all of us are going to give—everything to the public, on two conditions,” Roosevelt replied. “The first is that it is accurate. Well, I should think that would seem fairly obvious. And the second is that in giving it out it does not give aid and comfort to the enemy…. I should think that those two conditions ought to be put up in every office in Washington.”

A reporter remarked sardonically that there was no need to post the rules in government offices. “It is impossible to get any information from any department now,” he complained. “They give you the run-around.”

“Well, then, you can’t assume that the information has conformed to the two conditions.”

“You ought to have someone there who can say whether it does conform.”

“That has got to be determined by the higher officers—the army and navy.”

“But we have been told that these officers have no information—have instructions not to talk on any subject.”

“I think that is probably correct.”

“Where does that put us?”

“It means that you have got to wait—sit and wait on this information, because you can’t determine whether certain information conforms to those two principles. We can’t leave that determination in the hands of a third assistant…. It has got to come from the top.”

A reporter asked Roosevelt to clarify what he meant by a news report giving aid and comfort to the enemy. “Does that mean that no bad news is going to be given out?”

“No, no,” the president replied. “It depends on whether the giving out is of aid and comfort to the enemy.”

Roosevelt’s rules weren’t particularly helpful to reporters, as this exchange suggested. Reporters and editors often had to guess as to what would help the enemy and what wouldn’t. Yet to a remarkable degree they accorded the president and the administration the benefit of the doubt. Their trust reflected, in varying combinations, their patriotism, their worries about alienating readers, and the respect they had developed for Roosevelt during the previous nine years. Roosevelt’s cultivation of the press through hundreds of press conferences had amassed for him a store of goodwill against which he was able to draw during the war. For nearly a decade he had given them story after story, besides providing the best show in Washington. His audience valued his performance.

He continued to cultivate the press after the war began. He restricted information regarding his own movements and whereabouts, to the annoyance of some members of the press corps. And he resolutely enforced, to the extent he could, his two rules of wartime media, especially the one about information that might aid the enemy. But the censoring and repressive hand of government was light compared with its weight in the past. Roosevelt was no First Amendment purist; as on many other subjects, his concerns regarding civil liberties were pragmatic and political rather than ethical. He remembered the Espionage and Sedition Acts of the First World War. He recalled in particular how they had alienated large parts of Wilson’s liberal base and contributed to the buildup of pressures that exploded poisonously after the war, dooming Wilson’s peace plan and polarizing the country for a decade. Roosevelt was playing a long game, already reckoning how the war should end. He needed the press on his side, and he did what he could to keep it there.

IN CERTAIN OTHER respects, the Roosevelt touch was far from light. Since the mid-1930s the president had feared the emergence of a fifth column in the United States (at the time, in fact, when this term for domestic disloyalty was being popularized in the Spanish civil war). In August 1936 Roosevelt met with J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to discuss “subversive activities in the United States, particularly Fascism and Communism,” according to Hoover’s memorandum of the meeting. Hoover, again according to his own account, initially demurred, explaining that the FBI’s charter confined its investigations to violations of the law. Political activities were off limits. Yet Hoover mentioned a possible way around the stricture. A law left over from the First World War allowed the bureau to respond to requests from the State Department for information. Roosevelt took the suggestion and the next day brought Hoover back to the White House. This time Cordell Hull was present. The secretary of state had even less use for subversives than Roosevelt did, and a saltier vocabulary. “Go ahead and investigate the hell out of those cocksuckers,” Hull told Hoover.

The bureau stepped up its surveillance upon the outbreak of the war in Europe, and did so openly. “The Attorney General has been requested by me to instruct the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the Department of Justice to take charge of investigative work in matters relating to espionage, sabotage, and violations of the neutrality regulations,” Roosevelt announced on September 6, 1939. The needs of efficiency motivated the president’s decision. “This task must be conducted in a comprehensive and effective manner on a national basis, and all information must be carefully sifted out and correlated in order to avoid confusion and irresponsibility.” But the centralization of counterespionage also reflected Roosevelt’s desire to have direct access to the information the investigators unearthed.

During the next two years the FBI compiled lists of potentially worrisome foreign nationals. The Alien Registration Act of June 1940—often called the Smith Act, for its sponsor in the House of Representatives, Howard Smith of Virginia—loosened the legal reins on the bureau by making a federal crime of advocacy of the overthrow of the American government. Active Communists presumably fell within the scope of the law, as perhaps did closet Nazis and fellow travelers of both the extreme left and the far right. On signing the Smith Act, Roosevelt assured the American people that loyal aliens need have no fear of government. Others had better watch out. “With those aliens who are disloyal and are bent on harm to this country, the government, through its law enforcement agencies, can and will deal vigorously.”

The focus on aliens followed the historic practice of most countries during wartime. Governments typically detained enemy aliens on grounds that they posed a prima facie security threat. Normally the aliens were deported to their home countries, but when deportation was inconvenient or impossible, they were sometimes held for the duration of the conflict.

The American government adopted this practice immediately after Pearl Harbor. By December 1941 Hoover and the FBI had identified thousands of Japanese, German, and Italian aliens in the United States; Roosevelt gave the order to round them up. Several thousand were arrested within days—some of the Germans and Italians even before the declarations of war between their home countries and the United States.

The arrests largely quelled public concern about espionage and sabotage as they involved the Germans and Italians. Roosevelt deliberately downplayed the matter. The wartime policy of the FBI, adopted with the president’s approval, was to minimize news of the activities of Axis agents, lest the public become aroused. An internal FBI document explained: “There must not be permitted to develop any vigilante system of wartime law enforcement.”

Managing passions toward the Japanese, however, proved beyond the capacity of the bureau, and beyond the political will of the president. The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor naturally provoked alarm at the possibility of additional attacks against Americans and American soil. This alarm, combined with the puzzlement that the United States had been caught so unprepared, primed Americans to imagine espionage or sabotage among Japanese nationals living in America. The hoary concept of the “yellow peril” reemerged, coloring attitudes toward anyone of Japanese ancestry. The American intelligence apparatus, having snoozed through Pearl Harbor, grew suddenly insomniac, and like other insomniacs it conjured nightmares from fragments of fact, worst-case scenarios, and whole cloth. Rumors were accepted as truth, or at least as working approximations of truth, by those charged with preventing another Pearl Harbor.

General John DeWitt headed the army’s Western Defense Command, with responsibility for the West Coast. Determined not to be California’s counterpart to Admiral Husband Kimmel or General Walter Short—two officers already under investigation for failing to defend Pearl Harbor—DeWitt took every report most seriously. Stray radio signals became secret transmissions from Japanese spies to ships offshore. When the signals fell silent, their very silence indicated the insidious guile of the enemy.

The material interests of others inflamed DeWitt’s suspicions. For decades the neighbors and economic competitors of the Chinese and Japanese in California and nearby states had resented the Asians’ willingness to work long and hard for low wages and modest profit margins; at every opportunity some of those competitors had tried to elbow them aside legally or physically. Pearl Harbor provided a new opportunity, and demands at once arose to drive the Japanese from their homes, their farms, and their businesses. The more forthright didn’t disguise their intentions. “We’re charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons,” a spokesman for the California Grower-Shipper Vegetable Association said. “We might as well be honest. It’s a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown man.”

Elected officials followed the popular mood and sometimes led it. California’s attorney general, Earl Warren, called for the imposition of martial law. “In view of the circumstances, the problem becomes a military problem rather than one in civil government,” Warren said. The mayor of Los Angeles demanded the removal of Japanese from the “combat zone,” meaning most of the West Coast. Several members of the city council endorsed the mayor’s demand.

Pundits joined the calls for removal. Walter Lippmann insisted that security preempted civil liberties. In an essay written from San Francisco and titled “The Fifth Column on the Coast,” Lippmann asserted, “The Pacific Coast is in imminent danger of a combined attack from within and from without…. It is a fact that the Japanese navy has been reconnoitering the Pacific Coast more or less continually and for a considerable period of time, testing and feeling out the American defenses. It is a fact that communication takes place between the enemy at sea and enemy agents on land.” Americans ignored these facts at their peril, Lippmann said. He denied that removal of Japanese Americans from the coastal zone would violate their constitutional rights. “Nobody’s constitutional rights include the right to reside and do business on a battlefield. And nobody ought to be on a battlefield who has no good reason for being there. There is plenty of room elsewhere for him to exercise his rights.” Westbrook Pegler rarely agreed with Lippmann, but on this subject the outspokenly conservative columnist did. “We are so damned dumb and considerate of the minute Constitutional rights and even of the political feelings and influence of people whom we have every reason to anticipate with preventive action!” Pegler said. “The Japanese in California should be under armed guard to the last man and woman right now, and to hell with habeas corpus until the danger is over.”

Confident of public support, DeWitt requested authority to remove the Japanese—including American citizens of Japanese descent—from the West Coast. His request at first divided the Roosevelt administration. Henry Morgenthau thought things were proceeding too fast. “When it comes to suddenly mopping up 150,000 Japanese and putting them behind barbed wire…,” the Treasury secretary said, “I want at some time to have caught my breath.” Attorney General Francis Biddle initially opposed removal, vowing that “the Department of Justice would not under any circumstances evacuate American citizens.”

Henry Stimson was torn. “The second generation Japanese can only be evacuated either as part of a total evacuation, giving access to the areas only by permits,” the war secretary wrote in his diary, “or by frankly trying to put them out on the ground that their racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or trust even the citizen Japanese. This latter is the fact but I am afraid it will make a tremendous hole in our constitutional system to apply it.” Yet Stimson, as head of the War Department, had to consider the alternatives. “It is quite within the bounds of possibility that if the Japanese should get naval dominance in the Pacific, they would try an invasion of this country; and if they did, we would have a tough job meeting them.” He added, “The people of the United States have made an enormous mistake in underestimating the Japanese.” Stimson was determined that this mistake not be repeated, and so he recommended to Roosevelt that DeWitt’s evacuation request be approved.

Roosevelt, of course, had the final decision. The president could have overridden Stimson, and perhaps his conscience urged him to. But its urgings were neither loud nor strong, and they had to compete with his political sensibilities. Even less than DeWitt or Stimson could Roosevelt afford another Pearl Harbor, and at a moment of ignorance as to Japan’s capabilities, he couldn’t say with confidence that the Japanese community in California did not harbor spies and saboteurs. During peacetime he was as staunch an advocate as the next person of the principle that individuals should be treated as individuals and not as part of a suspect class, but during wartime he thought this principle might be modified in the larger national interest.

Roosevelt chose not to inquire too deeply into the War Department’s reasoning. Stimson sought an interview with Roosevelt to discuss relocation, but the president declined, saying he was busy. This was true enough, given the unprecedented demands on his time, but it also reflected his wish to avoid a face-to-face airing of the issues involved. Stimson had to settle for speaking to Roosevelt by telephone. The president told the war secretary to do what he thought best. John McCloy, Stimson’s assistant, recalled Roosevelt saying, “There will probably be some repercussions, but it has got to be dictated by military necessity.” Roosevelt added, “Be as reasonable as you can.”

On February 19, the president issued Executive Order 9066 asserting that “the successful prosecution of the war requires every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage to national-defense material, national-defense premises, and national-defense utilities” and authorizing the secretary of war “to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate military commanders may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded.” The order did not single out either the West Coast or the Japanese, but it was universally understood to apply peculiarly to that region and those people.

And it was widely applauded, especially when, just four days later, the Japanese submarine shelled the California coast near Santa Barbara. The evacuation began within weeks; ultimately some 110,000 men, women, and children of Japanese descent were removed to internment camps in the desert regions east of the Sierra Nevada and Cascades. Seventy percent of the internees were American citizens. By most evidence, the great majority of those removed had been enthusiastic about living in America before the war began. Some, not surprisingly, had second thoughts in their bleak new homes.

AMONG THE BASE motives that inspired the internment of the Japanese Americans was the most basic human motive of all: fear. During the five months after Pearl Harbor—the period when the relocation policy was formulated, approved, and implemented—the armies and navy of imperial Japan appeared invincible. Tokyo’s strategy of stunning the Americans and British with lightning blows against Hawaii, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Malaya and of then driving south to seize the oil of the Dutch East Indies unfolded to perfection. The crippling of the American Pacific fleet prevented Washington from reinforcing General MacArthur in the Philippines. This was just as well, given MacArthur’s hopeless condition by the end of the first day of fighting there. Despite his several hours’ warning after Pearl Harbor, MacArthur inexplicably allowed his air force to be blasted on the ground by Japanese attackers, leaving Luzon, the main Philippine island, open to invasion by Japanese land forces. The combined American and Philippine army was forced to retreat to the Bataan Peninsula, while MacArthur and his staff holed up on Corregidor, a rock at the entrance to Manila Bay.

MacArthur demanded reinforcements. “The Philippine theater is the locus of victory or defeat,” he declared. For the United States to fail to defend the Philippines with every resource at its disposal would be a “fatal mistake.”

Roosevelt agreed rhetorically. “The people of the United States will never forget what the people of the Philippine Islands are doing this day and will do in the days to come,” he promised. “I give to the people of the Philippines my solemn pledge that their freedom will be redeemed and their independence established and protected. The entire resources, in men and in material, of the United States stand behind that pledge.”

But there was something disconcerting to Filipinos about the president’s use of the word “redeem,” which suggested that Philippine freedom had already been lost. And there was something even more unsettling about the emerging Europe-first strategy, which clearly contradicted Roosevelt’s pledge to devote the “entire resources” of the United States to the defense of the Philippines.

Not for the last time, global strategy forced a deferral of promises. MacArthur did not receive his reinforcements, and four decades of short-changing Philippine defense culminated in four months of misery for the islands’ defenders. “Our troops have been subsisted on one-half to one-third rations for so long a period that they do not possess the physical strength to endure the strain placed upon the individual in an attack,” the American commander on Bataan, Jonathan Wainwright, asserted. In early April the Bataan garrison was compelled to surrender—only to suffer even more grievously on the forced march to prisoner camps and in the camps themselves.

Roosevelt meanwhile ordered MacArthur to leave Corregidor for Australia, to fight another day. MacArthur resisted. “These people are depending on me now,” he informed the president. “Any idea that I was being withdrawn for any other purpose than to bring them immediate relief could not be explained.” Roosevelt repeated his order, more emphatically than before. MacArthur complied this time, departing in the dead of night by PT boat and dodging Japanese patrols till he reached the southern island of Mindanao, from which he flew to Darwin, Australia. “The President of the United States ordered me to break through the Japanese lines and proceed from Corregidor to Australia for the purpose, as I understand it, of organizing the American offensive against Japan,” he told reporters on his arrival. “A primary purpose of this is relief of the Philippines. I came through and I shall return.”

As disappointing as the loss of the Philippines was to Americans, it was not nearly as devastating as the loss of Singapore was to the British. For decades British imperial planners had based their strategy for Southeast Asia on the island fortress at the tip of the Malay Peninsula. But like the Americans regarding the Philippines, the British had been distracted by other demands on their resources. The outbreak of the war in Europe additionally deprived Singapore, which by December 1941 possessed but a fraction of its projected strength. The dispatch of the Repulse and Prince of Wales was supposed to improve the situation; their destruction sank Singapore’s hopes with them. Japanese troops drove down the peninsula during January 1942 and captured Singapore and its garrison of seventy thousand in early February.

The fall of Singapore shocked the British like no event of the war thus far. “When I reflect how I have longed and prayed for the entry of the United States into the war, I find it difficult to realize how gravely our British affairs have deteriorated by what has happened since December seven,” Churchill wrote Roosevelt. “We have suffered the greatest disaster in our history at Singapore, and other misfortunes will come thick and fast upon us.”

He was right. The collapse of Singapore opened Burma and the East Indies to Japanese invasion. Rangoon fell within weeks, enabling Japanese forces to close the Lend-Lease supply line to the beleaguered Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek. Japanese troops landed on Java and soon controlled that most populous island of the East Indies. Japanese troops occupied the northeastern coast of New Guinea and seized key positions in the various island groups of the southwestern Pacific.

By April 1942 the Japanese empire covered an enormous swath of the earth’s surface, from the International Date Line in the east almost to India in the west, and from the North Pacific nearly to Australia. To be sure, much of this was empty ocean—but it was ocean commanded by the Japanese fleet. The Anglo-American strategy had been to contain Japan in the Pacific while concentrating on Germany in Europe. How well the Americans and British would do against Germany remained to be seen. Against Japan they were failing miserably.

PART OF THE problem, Roosevelt thought, was Britain’s backward policy in Asia. Indian nationalists had been agitating to eject Britain from India for generations. Their efforts—like the efforts of nationalists in other countries over the decades—took heart from America’s traditional and continuing anti-imperialism. Wilson’s call for self-determination resonated with Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and other leaders of the nationalist Indian Congress party, who drew on America’s Declaration of Independence in writing a similar declaration for India in 1930. Nehru appealed explicitly to Americans for support in articles in Foreign Affairs and Atlantic Monthly, published as the tide of war was rising a decade later. Britain’s declaration of war against Germany in 1939 triggered an outbreak of nonviolent noncooperation in India, partly from resentment that the British imperial government had included India in the war declaration without consulting Indian leaders and partly from hope that Britain’s distress would compel London to offer independence—perhaps deliverable at war’s end—in exchange for India’s assistance against the Axis. The British government was pondering the situation when Churchill took power in the spring of 1940.

Churchill’s India problem became Roosevelt’s India problem at the time of the Atlantic Conference. The Atlantic Charter’s affirmation of the “right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live” seemed to support the position of the Indian nationalists, and Roosevelt’s silence in response to Churchill’s denials that the charter applied to the British empire encouraged allegations of American hypocrisy. Such allegations were most potent in Asia, where the Japanese had been saying for years that nothing really distinguished American imperialism from the British, French, and Dutch versions.

Roosevelt broached the India issue in his conversations with Churchill in Washington during December 1941 and January 1942. But Churchill rebuffed the president’s overtures. “I reacted so strongly and at such length that he never raised it verbally again,” Churchill recalled with satisfaction.

Yet the issue didn’t disappear. If anything, it grew more pressing after the surrender of Singapore made a Japanese invasion of India suddenly possible. Japan’s theater commanders capitalized on their momentum and their country’s prestige among Asians by calling on Indian nationalists to embrace the Axis as a means of expelling the British. The Japanese enlisted thousands of Indian troops taken prisoner at Singapore in what would become the pro-Japanese Indian National Army.

Given the collapse of Singapore, Roosevelt had to weigh the prospect that India would put up hardly more of a fight, especially if the Japanese could credibly cast themselves as liberators. Roosevelt didn’t like being called a hypocrite any more than most people do, but what really worried him about the Indian situation was the damage it was doing to American prestige and, through American prestige, to American power. America’s power was military and economic, but it was also moral. The peoples of the world looked not to Britain and Churchill for hope and guidance but to America and Roosevelt. And Roosevelt intended to keep it that way.

The president knew what a reactionary Churchill was on imperial issues, and he feared that the prime minister’s determination to crush the independence movement would get the better of his strategic sense. Besides, the course Churchill had charted might fail on its own terms. By refusing even to consider independence, the prime minister might render independence inevitable—on terms that simultaneously ensured the alienation of India from the Allied cause. Roosevelt understood as well as Churchill that the Indian army was what made Britain a world power. The Royal Navy was important, to be sure. But what allowed Britain to fight far above its weight in international affairs was the Indian army. Without India, Britain would shrink to a mere shadow of its current self. And that shadow wouldn’t be of much help to Roosevelt in defeating the Axis.

The president decided to risk Churchill’s wrath. “I have given much thought to the problem of India,” he wrote the prime minister in March 1942. “As you can well realize, I have felt much diffidence in making any suggestions, and it is a subject which, of course, all of you good people know far more about than I do.” But he had to speak his mind. “I have tried to approach the problem from the point of view of history and with a hope that the injection of a new thought to be used in India might be of assistance to you.” The president reminded Churchill how the American colonies, upon breaking away from Britain, had established thirteen separate and sovereign governments. The Articles of Confederation had guided the states to victory in the Revolutionary War but had been replaced by the federal Constitution of 1787. “It is merely a thought of mine,” Roosevelt said, “to suggest the setting up of what might be called a temporary government in India, headed by a small representative group, covering different castes, occupations, religions, and geographies.” This group would be recognized by London as a Dominion government, albeit a temporary one. It would last for the duration of the war and for a year or two afterward. It would give way to a permanent successor, to be established by Indians much as the federal government of the United States had been established by Americans after the Revolutionary War. Roosevelt didn’t claim this was a perfect solution, but he thought it offered a path forward. “It might cause the people there to forget hard feelings, to become more loyal to the British Empire, and to stress the danger of Japanese domination.” He assured Churchill he didn’t wish to impose any solution to the India problem. “It is, strictly speaking, none of my business,” he said—before concluding, significantly, “except insofar as it is a part and parcel of the successful fight that you and I are making.”

Churchill liked Roosevelt, and he admired the president’s gifts of leadership. But he considered him dangerously naïve about issues relating to the British empire. Churchill replied that the president failed to appreciate that the nationalists in India hardly spoke for the whole population. For Britain to grant independence—which Churchill did not for one second propose to do—would be politically immoral as well as militarily imprudent. “We must not on any account break with the Moslems, who represent a hundred million people and the main army elements on which we must rely for the immediate fighting. We have also to consider our duty towards thirty to forty million Untouchables and our treaties with the princes’ states of India, perhaps eighty millions.” Japan was almost at India’s eastern border. “Naturally we do not want to throw India into chaos on the eve of invasion.”

Churchill had a point about the Muslims—the “martial races,” he often called them—being the backbone of the Indian army. The Congress party was a Hindu league, and the Hindus had never enlisted in the army in large numbers. Yet Roosevelt realized that, as important as India’s soldiers were to the Allied war effort, the credibility of the Atlantic Charter was equally important. For Churchill simply to ignore the Indian demands for self-determination risked grave damage to American interests.

In fact Churchill did not simply ignore the Indian demands; he punished their authors. During the summer of 1942 Gandhi proclaimed the “Quit India” movement, a campaign of civil disobedience designed to force the British to grant independence. Churchill responded within days by jailing Gandhi, Nehru, and some hundred thousand of the rank and file of the Congress party.

Roosevelt responded to the mass jailing by forwarding to Churchill a letter from Chiang Kai-shek conveying the Chinese leader’s dismay at the “disastrous effect” of the British action on pro-Allied morale in Asia. “At all costs the United Nations should demonstrate to the world by their action the sincerity of their professed principle of ensuring freedom and justice for men of all races,” Chiang wrote Roosevelt. Over Chiang’s words, Roosevelt asked Churchill: “What do you think?”

Churchill thought as little of Chiang’s meddling as he had of Roosevelt’s. By chance or design, the Quit India campaign nearly coincided with the first anniversary of the Atlantic Charter. The American Office of War Information had indicated its intention of commemorating the occasion with a robust reiteration of the charter’s principles. Churchill warned Roosevelt against anything that might create problems for the British government. “Its proposed application to Asia and Africa requires much thought,” Churchill asserted. “Great embarrassment would be caused to the defence of India at the present time by such a statement as the Office of War Information has been forecasting.” The prime minister expressed confidence that he could rely on the president. “I am sure you will consider my difficulties with the kindness you always show me.”

Roosevelt did consider Churchill’s difficulties, although kindness had little to do with it. The attitude of Asians counted in Roosevelt’s thinking about the world, but the cooperation of Britain counted more. The president ordered the OWI to back off, and he issued an innocuously vague reaffirmation of the Atlantic Charter’s general principles. “I am sure you will have no objection to a single line,” he wrote Churchill. “It omits wholly anything which would raise questions or controversy.”

47.

“I REALIZE HOW THE FALL OF SINGAPORE HAS AFFECTED YOU AND THE British people,” Roosevelt wrote Churchill amid the disasters of early 1942. “It gives the back-seat drivers a field day. But no matter how serious our setbacks have been, and I do not for a moment underrate them, we must constantly look forward to the next moves that need to be made to hit the enemy.”

How to hit the enemy—this was the question that pushed all others to the rear. The enemy kept hitting America, and not simply in the far Pacific. The formal outbreak of war between the United States and Germany brought the Battle of the Atlantic right up to America’s shore. American merchantmen hugged the East Coast and dimmed their running lights for safety, but America’s coastal communities negligently left their building lights on, allowing German U-boats to silhouette the vessels against skylines of Miami, Atlantic City, and other urban areas. The ensuing torpedo strikes and sinkings, within easy viewing distance of the beaches, frightened and dismayed Americans. For six months the Germans decimated American transatlantic shipping, destroying nearly four hundred vessels totaling two million tons.

Roosevelt sorely wanted to respond, but he couldn’t figure out how. For all that he had prepared America for war prior to Pearl Harbor, much more needed to be done before American forces could engage the Germans or Japan. The administration needed to expand the army dramatically and train and equip the soldiers. It needed to enlarge the navy to defend American shipping and transport the army to where the soldiers would fight. It needed to construct an air force that would cover the ships and soldiers in transit and in combat and destroy the enemy’s ability to retaliate. All this was in the works, but it took time. And time wasn’t something Roosevelt could wholly count on. America’s war effort would never be stronger than the willingness of the American people to make war. After Pearl Harbor they were hot to fight, but with each month that Pearl Harbor receded into the past, their temperature declined. Unless the administration could show progress—unless it could demonstrate that the evil-doers were being punished for their sins—Roosevelt risked the dissipation of the pro-war sentiment he had spent so much time and effort summoning. The autumn would bring elections. Roosevelt wouldn’t be on the ballot, but the voters would speak. They would certainly have something to say about the war.

Roosevelt’s impatience to hit the enemy prompted a daring raid on Japan’s home islands—the riposte, as it were, to Pearl Harbor. The Japanese attack had revealed the feasibility of launching light aircraft from ships, bearing small loads of bombs or torpedoes. But almost no one believed that large bombers with substantial payloads could take off from ships. Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle of the army air forces was one of the rare optimists, and in early 1942 he proposed to lead a squadron of modified B-25 bombers launched from aircraft carriers against Japan. Roosevelt approved the plan, and on April 1 sixteen B-25s were loaded onto the Hornet in San Francisco Bay. The Hornet steamed west and rendezvoused north of Hawaii with the Enterprise, another carrier, which provided air protection for the Hornet. The two ships and their escorts proceeded toward the projected launch point, some six hundred miles east of Japan. But at seven hundred miles they encountered a Japanese patrol boat, which radioed their presence to Japan before being sunk by American fire. Doolittle decided to launch at once lest they lose any more of the element of surprise. The planes got off safely, despite heaving seas, and skimmed the waves single file before fanning out as they crossed the Japanese coast. “Thirteen B-25s effectively bombed Tokyo’s oil refineries, oil reservoirs, steel and munitions plants, naval docks and other military objectives,” Doolittle reported, in a message forwarded from Hap Arnold to Roosevelt. “One bomber attacked the Mitsubishi airplane factory and other military objectives at Nagoya with incendiary bombs. Two other bombers also attacked Osaka and Kobe with incendiaries. We all took care to avoid bombing schools, hospitals, churches and other non-military objectives.” The bombers encountered heavy anti-aircraft fire, barrage balloons, and pursuit from Japanese fighters. Yet they got away, continuing toward China and, in one case, toward Russia. They had hoped to reach friendly territory, but the early launch and other adverse factors caused them to run out of fuel. Most crash-landed, yet only five crewmen were killed. Arnold took pleasure in telling Roosevelt that the American bombs began falling over Tokyo in the middle of a propaganda broadcast by the Japanese government in which a woman speaking in English (one of a type Americans would learn to call “Tokyo Rose”) was explaining how secure Japan was from air attack. Of the aftermath of the attack, Arnold added wryly: “With the fifteen planes reported located in East China, one interned in Siberia, and one which the Japanese claim is on exhibition, there is a total of seventeen accounted for—which is one more than we sent over.”

The report of the mission put Roosevelt in high spirits, though he declined to confirm details. “How about the story about the bombing of Tokyo?” a reporter asked at the president’s next news conference.

“You know occasionally I have a few people in to dinner,” Roosevelt replied. “And generally in the middle of dinner some—it isn’t an individual, it’s just a generic term—some ‘sweet young thing’ says, ‘Mr. President, couldn’t you tell us about so and so?’ Well, the other night this sweet young thing in the middle of supper said, ‘Mr. President, couldn’t you tell us about that bombing? Where did those planes start from and go to?’ And I said, ‘Yes. I think the time has now come to tell you. They came from our new secret base at Shangri-La!’”

The reporters laughed appreciatively.

“And she believed it!”

YET THE DOOLITTLE raid, while better than nothing, was a pinprick. It got Tokyo’s attention but did nothing to diminish Japan’s war-making capacity.

A much bigger blow landed two weeks later. The Japanese, trying to build on their string of victories, sent a task force against Australian-held Port Moresby in New Guinea, hoping to secure the southern flank of their Pacific empire and provide a base for attacks against Australia. American and British intercepts revealed the outlines of the operation, and the American naval command dispatched an aircraft carrier group to block Japan’s advance. In the five-day Battle of the Coral Sea, culminating on May 7 and 8, planes from the opposing carrier groups revealed the future of naval warfare by bombing and strafing each other’s ships while the vessels themselves never made direct contact. Japan won on points, taking out the American carrier Lexington in exchange for a smaller carrier of its own. But the American side claimed both a strategic victory, for repelling Japan’s southward advance and keeping the southern sea lanes open, and a moral triumph, by demonstrating that the Japanese weren’t invincible after all.

The Americans landed a still heavier blow another month later. The Japanese sent four carriers and seven battleships to seize Midway Island northwest of Hawaii. The broader purpose of the operation was to draw the core of America’s fleet, in particular the carriers that had escaped the attack on Pearl Harbor, into a battle that would decide the fate of the Pacific for years to come. The Battle of Midway did just that, although not as the Japanese intended. As before, American cryptanalysts deciphered the Japanese messages, allowing Chester Nimitz, the American commander, to anticipate the Japanese actions. For four days in early June, planes from each side battered the ships of the other. The Americans had the greater success, and when the smoke cleared the Japanese had lost four carriers and some two hundred aircraft, against one carrier and a hundred planes for the Americans. The Japanese were forced to retreat.

If the Battle of the Coral Sea had slowed Japan’s momentum, the Battle of Midway reversed it. The loss of Japan’s carriers at Midway did far more damage to Tokyo’s ability to project power than the loss of the American battleships at Pearl Harbor had done to America’s might. Almost at once the United States gained the naval advantage in the Pacific. Given America’s industrial superiority over Japan, the American lead would only grow.

AND YET, as satisfying as the naval victories over Japan were, they didn’t give Roosevelt what he needed most. Germany remained the primary enemy, and Germany remained beyond reach. Until America took the war to Europe, victory would be a distant dream.

How to get to Europe was the crux of discussion, debate, suspicion, and recrimination among the Allies for more than two years. Roosevelt’s military advisers contended that the shortest route was the best. The United States, in concert with Britain, should build up forces in England for a thrust across the Channel to France. Germany would defend France, and the battle would be joined.

Churchill and the British proposed a different strategy. In their thinking, a cross-Channel invasion was too risky. France was too well defended. Better to strike at the Mediterranean underbelly of the Axis. American and British forces should land in North Africa and occupy the southern shore of the Mediterranean, from which they could cross to Italy and eventually drive into Germany from the south. In the meantime, securing the Mediterranean would protect the British position in Egypt and the lifeline to India.

Most of the arguing over where to strike took place between the American and British governments, but an interested third party—and recurrent participant—was the government of the Soviet Union. For Stalin and the Russians, the primary concern was relieving the pressure on the eastern front. Whatever required the Germans to transfer the greatest number of troops away from the East was the best strategy for the Allies. And nothing, in Stalin’s view, would draw off more Germans than an Anglo-American invasion of France, as soon as possible. Anything else would hardly be worth the bother.

Roosevelt’s position on the second front shifted and wobbled. At times he heeded the cross-Channel counsel of his own advisers, at times the Mediterranean entreaties of Churchill. A president of a different personality and leadership style—a Theodore Roosevelt, for example—might have decided the matter at once and pressed forward with implementation. But Roosevelt left the question open for many months. Some of his hesitation reflected the changing military context, but most revealed his perception that Allied decisions had to come by consensus. Each of the three countries played a different but vital role in the war, giving each of the three leaders, in effect, a veto over important aspects of Allied strategy.

The United States remained the arsenal of democracy—and of communism, in the case of the Soviet Union. By directing supplies to this theater or that, America could shape the course of the war. Given time, the United States would build the most powerful military machine in history, with the capacity to crush almost any foe—but not by itself. America would continue to need its allies, who would supply much of the manpower to wield the weapons, and die in the process.

Britain possessed a formidable navy, a respectable army, and an empire that, though restive in places, still provided London a global reach. Most irreplaceably, Britain would serve as the springboard for the invasion of France, whenever it happened to come.

The Soviet Union’s role was to keep Hitler occupied and to kill Germans—lots and lots of Germans. Every German who died on the eastern front was one fewer the Americans and British would have to fight themselves, when their turn came.

Given the complementary nature of these functions, consensus was the only feasible form of Allied decision making. And consensus suited Roosevelt perfectly. He had always preferred to persuade, cajole, and manipulate people rather than to browbeat or intimidate them. His approach had worked with the diverse domestic factions that came together behind the New Deal; Roosevelt assumed it would work with the oddly matched international coalition that was fighting the Axis.

But it drove his advisers to distraction. Stimson and Marshall had gotten a taste of the Roosevelt style in the initial meetings with Churchill at Washington, and they nearly gagged on it. The flavor didn’t improve much during the rest of the war. Roosevelt’s lieutenants naturally wanted him to make the decisions they thought best for the country, but, failing that, they simply wanted him to make decisions. Yet as often as he seemed to make a decision, he would revisit and reconsider it.

DURING THE SPRING of 1942 Marshall and the American military chiefs seemed to have won the second-front argument. Roosevelt indicated his preference for an early invasion of France by sending Marshall and Harry Hopkins to London to sell the policy to Churchill. Hopkins carried a note from the president to the prime minister. “What Harry and Geo. Marshall will tell you all about has my heart and mind in it,” Roosevelt said. “Your people and mine demand the establishment of a front to draw off pressure on the Russians, and these peoples are wise enough to see that the Russians today are killing more Germans and destroying more equipment than you and I put together.”

Hopkins and Marshall arrived in England on the morning of April 8 and went straight into a meeting with Churchill. “Marshall presented in broad outlines our proposals to the Prime Minister,” Hopkins recorded. Marshall considered the session a remarkable success. “He thought that Churchill went a long way,” Hopkins wrote. “He—Marshall—expected far more resistance than he got.”

Yet Churchill wasn’t convinced. He escorted Marshall and Hopkins to a meeting with Britain’s service chiefs. The prime minister applauded the “momentous proposal” the Americans had brought from the president. To such a plan, he said, the British government could only assent. Yet he couldn’t help pointing out the complications it would raise for British policy. The great concern at the moment was the threat that German forces thrusting through the Middle East would join up with Japanese forces driving west across the Indian Ocean. To ignore this threat, and to devote excessive manpower and materiel to a premature invasion of Europe, would be a grave mistake. Alan Brooke, the chief of the imperial general staff, seconded Churchill’s concern. If the Japanese gained control of the Indian Ocean, Brooke said, the southern supply route to Russia would be lost, with the collapse of Russia itself possibly to follow. Inasmuch as the major purpose of a western front in Europe was to relieve the pressure on the Russians, the proposed operation would be bizarrely misguided.

Hopkins rose to rebut the British reservations. If the American people had their way, he said, the United States would focus its efforts on Japan, which had attacked American forces and territory directly. But the president, on the counsel of his military advisers, had made a basic decision to “direct the force of American arms against Germany.” The president had brought the American public around to his way of thinking, and now they wished to fight—“not only on the sea but on land and in the air.” And Europe was where such fighting could best be done.

Churchill thanked Hopkins for his forceful statement. The prime minister looked past his own and Brooke’s reservations to declare that the British and American governments had achieved “complete unanimity” on general strategy and now could “march ahead together in a noble brotherhood of arms.” Planning for a “great campaign for the liberation of Europe” should move forward with the “utmost resolution.”

Hopkins and Marshall left the meeting confused. Were they to heed Churchill’s assurances or his reservations? They conveyed their confusion to Roosevelt on their return to America. The president determined to stress the positive. “I am delighted with the agreement which was reached between you and your military advisers and Marshall and Hopkins,” the president wrote Churchill. “They have reported to me on the unanimity of opinion relative to the proposal which they carried with them…. I believe that this move will be very disheartening to Hitler and may well be the wedge by which his downfall will be accomplished.”

Roosevelt refused to be diverted by a letter from Churchill himself. The letter affirmed Churchill’s “whole-hearted” support for the European operation, but it appended “one broad qualification” relating, as in the London meetings, to the Middle East and Indian Ocean. “It is essential that we should prevent a junction of the Japanese and the Germans,” Churchill said. “Consequently, a proportion of our combined resources must, for the moment, be set aside to halt the Japanese advance.”

Perhaps Roosevelt believed events of the next few months would prove Churchill’s fears of an Axis link across the bottom of Asia as groundless as he thought them to be. Perhaps he relied on his powers of persuasion to bring Churchill around to an early assault on France. Perhaps he judged that by seizing on Churchill’s statement of support for the European operation he could start the machinery required to make the operation happen and that once the machinery kicked into motion there would be no stopping it. In any event, he exuded only encouragement. “I am very heartened at the prospect, and you can be sure that our army will approach the matter with great enthusiasm and vigor,” he wrote Churchill. He added, for good measure: “I feel better about the war than at any time in the past two years.”

IN THE SAME letter, Roosevelt informed Churchill: “I have a cordial message from Stalin telling me he is sending Molotov and a general to visit me.”

Stalin, for understandable reasons, became suspicious whenever the Americans and British discussed strategy among themselves, without him or an envoy present. Given that the Americans and British were always talking among themselves—this was what the Combined Chiefs of Staff did—Stalin spent most of the war suspicious of Roosevelt and Churchill.

The dithering of the British and Americans over a second front made him even more suspicious. The way to fight Germans was to fight Germans, he believed—the way the Red Army did. Stalin felt particular pressure during the first months of 1942. For almost a year the Russians had carried the burden of the fighting against Germany, and though winter had stalled the Wehrmacht short of Moscow, spring would doubtless bring another offensive. Hitler had taken personal command of the army, which meant that the new drive almost certainly would be more ferocious than the last. Stalin was desperate for anything that would ease the strain, and nothing would accomplish more toward that end than a western front.

Roosevelt assured Stalin that America had Russia’s best interests at heart. “I am looking forward to seeing Molotov, and the moment I hear of the route, we shall make preparations to provide immediate transportation,” the president wrote. “I do hope Molotov can stay with me in the White House while he is in Washington, but we can make a private home nearby available for him if that is desired.”

The visit proved more difficult than Roosevelt expected. Molotov was never cheerful among capitalists, but now he was gloomier than usual as his arrival coincided with the surrender of a Soviet army of 200,000 to the Germans at Kharkov. For his country’s sake, and perhaps for his own, he judged it imperative to bring home a commitment to a second front.

Roosevelt was uncomfortable for different reasons. “His style was cramped,” Hopkins observed. The need for interpreters slowed the talks to a crawl, essentially negating what little effect the Roosevelt charm might have had on the Soviet diplomat. And Molotov was simply a hard case, as arrogant ideologically as he was personally humorless.

Molotov’s communist ideology afforded him confidence in the ultimate victory of socialism. But between the present and the millennium, he acknowledged, socialism needed help from its capitalist allies. Molotov said that 1942 looked grim and 1943 hardly better. Hitler was preparing a “mighty, crushing blow,” which had already begun to fall. The Red Army might not be able to withstand it. “Mr. Molotov therefore put this question frankly,” Samuel Cross, a Harvard professor of Slavic languages who sat in on the meeting and took notes, recorded: “Could we undertake such offensive action as would draw off 40 German divisions?” If the answer was yes, Molotov had great confidence. “The war would be decided in 1942.” If no, he couldn’t predict. A delay of the second front until 1943 would render many things much less certain. “If you postpone your decision,” he told Roosevelt, “you will have eventually to bear the brunt of the war, and if Hitler becomes the undisputed master of the continent, next year will undoubtedly be tougher than this one.”

Roosevelt answered Molotov by turning to Marshall. “Could we say to Mr. Stalin that we are preparing a second front?” he asked the general.

“Yes,” Marshall replied.

According to Cross’s notes: “The President then authorized Mr. Molotov to inform Mr. Stalin that we expect the formation of a second front this year.”

This was the message Molotov had come to Washington to hear, and though it was followed by several days of discussion in which Roosevelt’s advisers appended qualifications and disclaimers, it was the message that informed the joint statement that closed the discussions:

Full understanding was reached with regard to the urgent tasks of creating a second front in Europe in 1942.

The statement left a little room for interpretation. The “full understanding” applied, grammatically speaking, to the “urgent tasks.” But to ordinary readers—and to the extraordinary reader in the Kremlin who had sent Molotov to Washington—the operative phrase was “second front in Europe in 1942.”

BEFORE MOLOTOV LEFT, Roosevelt broached another subject, less pressing but no less important than the second front. He had not discussed this subject in any detail with Churchill, but he wanted to raise it with Stalin, through Molotov. “We know there will be two kinds of postwar settlements,” the president said. “First, those among the United Nations, and, second, arrangements for the reconstruction of the other nations with a view to ensuring a more stable form of peace.” Regarding the former, Roosevelt suggested that at war’s end the Soviet Union and Britain should repay debts incurred under Lend-Lease on a principal-only basis; the United States would waive any interest. Referring to the problems the debts from the First World War had caused, the president said he hoped to prevent similar problems among the Allies after this war. He asked Molotov to present this proposal to Stalin “for the purpose of exploring it without commitments.”

Regarding the other nations—Germany, Japan, and Italy—Roosevelt suggested that a peace settlement must start with disarmament and extend to inspection and control of those countries’ weapons industries. The president proposed that the senior members of the United Nations—the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and China—should police any postwar settlements, serving as “guarantors of eventual peace.” Their police actions would extend beyond Germany and Japan. “There are, all over the world, many islands and colonial possessions which ought, for our own safety, to be taken away from weak nations,” Roosevelt said.

Molotov cabled Roosevelt’s recommendations to Moscow and, before departing, was able to answer that Stalin was “in full accord with the President’s ideas on disarmament, inspection, and policing, with the participation of at least Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and possibly China.”

CHURCHILL READ THE Roosevelt-Molotov statement with great interest, especially the part about the second front in Europe in 1942. No sooner had Molotov left Washington than the prime minister embarked for the American capital, to make sure Roosevelt didn’t mean what he had just said.

Henry Stimson tried to ready Roosevelt for the prime minister’s wiles. “May I very briefly recall to your memory the sequence of events which led to and the background which surrounds this problem,” the war secretary wrote, perhaps consciously dropping the question mark from what clearly was not intended as a question. During the Anglo-American talks in Washington the previous December, he reminded Roosevelt, both sides had agreed on the value of a second front in 1942. “The one thing Hitler rightly dreaded was a second front. In establishing such a front lay the best hope of keeping the Russian Army in the war and thus ultimately defeating Hitler. To apply the rapidly developing manpower and industrial strength of America promptly to the opening of such a front was manifestly the only way it could be accomplished.” These considerations had given rise to Bolero, as the plan for a buildup in Britain preparatory to an invasion of France was called. Bolero would yield benefits even before the invasion took place, Stimson said. “The menace of the establishment of American military power in the British Isles would be immediately evident to Hitler. It at once tended to remove the possibility of a successful invasion of Britain, Hitler’s chief and last weapon. It awoke in every German mind the recollections of 1917 and 1918.” Recent events—the German advances in Russia, which increased the strain on the Soviet government, and the American victory over Japan at Midway, which diminished the pressure on the United States in the Pacific—rendered Bolero even more advisable. “Under these circumstances, an immense burden of proof rests upon any proposition which may impose the slightest risk of weakening Bolero,” Stimson concluded. “No new plan should even be whispered to friend or enemy unless it was so sure of immediate success and so manifestly helpful to Bolero that it could not possibly be taken as evidence of doubt or vacillation in the prosecution of Bolero.”

Stimson had the strong support of Marshall. “You are familiar with my view that the decisive theater is Western Europe,” the chief of staff wrote Roosevelt. “That is the only place where the concerted effort of our own and the British forces can be brought to bear on the Germans.” Any effort by Churchill to divert American forces to the Mediterranean must be resisted. “A large venture in the Middle East would make a decisive American contribution to the campaign in Western Europe out of the question. Therefore, I am opposed to such a project.”

Whether Churchill could have overcome the opposition of Stimson and Marshall without help is unclear. On reaching America the prime minister traveled to Hyde Park, where Roosevelt was spending the weekend. Churchill handed the president a memo outlining his concerns about Bolero. German depredations upon Allied shipping in the Atlantic had been especially severe of late; Churchill wondered whether these would disrupt the Bolero buildup. At the least, they must delay things. “We are bound to persevere in the preparation for Bolero, if possible in 1942 but certainly in 1943,” he said, in an affirmation that was really a negation. He noted that Bolero thus far was merely an aspiration, while the invasion of France—code-named Sledgehammer—for which Bolero was to be the precursor, was hardly a dream. “No responsible British military authority has so far been able to make a plan for September 1942 which had any chance of success unless the Germans become utterly demoralized, of which there is no likelihood.” The Americans weren’t any farther along. “Have the American staffs a plan? If so, what is it? What landing craft and shipping are available? Who is the officer prepared to command the enterprise?”

Churchill worried that a premature Channel crossing would fail. He recalled the carnage of the First World War, and especially the debacle at Gallipoli, the botched 1915 invasion of Turkey that he had advocated and helped plan. He feared that an attack on France might become a second Gallipoli and thereby hearten the Germans, demoralize the British, and alienate the Americans. “The British Government would not favour an operation that was certain to lead to disaster, would compromise and expose to Nazi vengeance the French population involved, and would gravely delay the main operation in 1943,” Churchill explained to Roosevelt. “We hold strongly to the view that there should be no substantial landing in France this year unless we are going to stay.”

It was clear to Churchill that the British and Americans were not prepared to establish a permanent presence in France. This being so, they should think about alternatives to Bolero. “Ought we not be preparing within the general structure of Bolero some other operation by which we may gain positions of advantage and also directly or indirectly to take some of the weight off Russia?”

The other operation was Gymnast, an Anglo-American invasion of French North Africa. Churchill’s argument for Gymnast gained sudden and unexpected strength in the middle of the prime minister’s visit. On June 21 Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps captured Tobruk, the last British outpost west of Egypt. With little in Egypt itself to slow a German advance to the Suez Canal, Churchill’s nightmare of an Axis connection across the Indian Ocean grew ominously realistic.

“This was one of the heaviest blows I can recall during the war,” Churchill wrote afterward. “Not only were its military effects grievous, but it had affected the reputation of the British armies.” The garrison at Tobruk had surrendered to a German force half its size. “I did not attempt to hide from the President the shock I had received. It was a bitter moment. Defeat is one thing; disgrace is another.”

Only rarely during the war was Roosevelt required to make snap decisions. Typically he had weeks or months to weigh his options. This was one of the rare times. “What can we do to help?” he asked Churchill.

“Give us as many Sherman tanks as you can spare, and ship them to the Middle East as quickly as possible,” Churchill said.

Roosevelt sent for Marshall and asked him whether any tanks were available. Marshall replied that the Shermans were just coming off the production lines. The first few hundred had been issued to America’s own armored divisions. “It is a terrible thing to take the weapons out of a soldier’s hands,” Marshall said. But when Roosevelt made plain that he wanted the British to have the tanks, the staff chief didn’t object. He volunteered that he could probably find some self-propelled guns as well.

“To complete the story,” Churchill recalled, “the Americans were better than their word. Three hundred Sherman tanks, with engines not yet installed, and a hundred self-propelled guns, were put into six of their fastest ships and sent off to the Suez Canal. The ship containing the engines for all the tanks was sunk by a submarine off Bermuda. Without a single word from us, the President and Marshall put a further supply of engines into another fast ship and dispatched it to overtake the convoy. ‘A friend in need is a friend indeed.’”

AN EVEN GREATER gift was Gymnast. No decision was reached between Bolero and Gymnast during Churchill’s visit, but the prime minister’s fear for the Suez Canal shifted the balance from the former to the latter. Roosevelt knew perfectly well he couldn’t order Bolero to proceed unless Churchill assented; without the British government’s enthusiastic support, any operation based in Britain would be doomed from the start. Roosevelt made a calculated decision to humor Churchill, partly from genuine concern for a wartime comrade but partly in the belief the humoring would pay off in the end.

Roosevelt’s good humor extended beyond the issue of a second front into an arena of warfare that hadn’t existed a few years earlier. A decade before the First World War, Albert Einstein had asserted the equivalence of mass and energy and provided an equation (E = mc²) connecting the two. Several months prior to the Second World War, Otto Hahn observed what Einstein had predicted, when the German chemist split uranium into lighter elements amid a burst of energy. The publication of Hahn’s result prompted Einstein, encouraged by fellow physicist Leo Szilard, to write to Roosevelt. In a letter dated August 2, 1939, Einstein explained the recent developments and warned that a determined government could employ them to produce “extremely powerful bombs of a new type.” The German government apparently agreed, for it had embargoed exports of uranium from mines in Czechoslovakia. The United States, Einstein told Roosevelt, would be remiss not to commence research in this critical new field.

Roosevelt, impressed by Einstein’s reputation and logic, authorized a small program that proceeded slowly but gained momentum, confidence, and scientific support during the next eighteen months. In the autumn of 1941 a committee of the National Academy of Sciences recommended a crash program of atomic development. Roosevelt assented, and the group that would direct what came to be called the Manhattan Project held its inaugural meeting on December 6, 1941.

Meanwhile scientists in Britain began their own atomic effort. The “Directorate of Tube Alloys” pushed forward along lines that paralleled those of the Americans. The work succeeded well enough that Churchill, at the time of his June 1942 visit to Washington, had to decide whether to move from research to production. It was a big step, one he wasn’t sure Britain could handle—at least not alone.

He raised the matter with Roosevelt on June 20 at Hyde Park. “Our talks took place after luncheon, in a tiny little room which juts out on the ground floor,” Churchill remembered. “The room was dark and shaded from the sun,” but it was still, from an English point of view, oppressively warm. “My two American friends”—Hopkins sat in—“did not seem to mind the intense heat.” Churchill explained the progress British scientists had made, and how they were convinced a bomb by war’s end was feasible. Roosevelt responded that American scientists were proceeding well, too. Churchill proposed an Anglo-American collaboration. “I strongly urged that we should at once pool all our information, work together on equal terms, and share the results, if any, equally between us.”

Roosevelt accepted Churchill’s offer. Roosevelt wasn’t a hard bargainer, generally believing that good will warranted leaving something on the table at the end of a negotiation. In this case it was unclear what any bargaining would be about. The atom bomb project might yield nothing at all. Even if it succeeded, it would produce something no one had ever seen, and no army or air force ever deployed.

The next question was where the production facilities should be located. Yet the question was no sooner asked than it was answered. They couldn’t be in Britain, which wholly lacked the fissionable materials bomb making required. Transporting uranium across the Atlantic made little sense given the danger from U-boats and the other demands on Allied shipping. Churchill considered Canada and went so far as to contend, after the fact, that had Roosevelt declined his offer, “we certainly should have gone forward on our own power in Canada.”

It didn’t come to that. Roosevelt wasn’t going to let the bomb building out of the United States. With no publicity, and with nothing committed to paper between them, the president and the prime minister put their two countries into the joint business of developing a bomb that would transform warfare forever.

AS THE PROSPECTS for an early second front in Europe dwindled, Roosevelt’s advisers began to mutter among themselves about reconsidering the Europe-first strategy. They were itching to fight, on grounds strategic, political, and personal. The longer the United States remained on the sidelines, the stronger the Axis grew. The longer the American public had nothing to cheer about, the more likely support for the war would dwindle. And the longer the army’s officers remained in their headquarters, as opposed to being on the battlefield, the more distant their chances for distinction and promotion.

Stimson later claimed that the War Department’s planning for a Pacific offensive in 1942 was a bluff, intended to push Roosevelt toward a decision in favor of invading France. Perhaps it was a bluff, to him. But Marshall, whose sense of professional decorum put him above such ploys, and Admiral Ernest King, whose irascibility was legendary, weren’t bluffing. “One thing that might help win this war is to get someone to shoot King,” Dwight Eisenhower vented in his diary after a typical session with the admiral. “He’s the antithesis of cooperation, a deliberately rude person, which means he’s a mental bully.” King had an imperial vision of the navy’s importance among the services. “The navy wants to take all the islands in the Pacific, have them held by army troops, to become bases for army pursuit and bombers,” Eisenhower said. “Then the navy will have a safe place to sail its vessels.” But King was a fighter, which appealed to Roosevelt, the more so when King presented what he called “an integrated, general plan of operations” for the Pacific. “We have now—or soon will have—‘strong points’ at Samoa, Suva (Fiji), and New Caledonia (also a defended fueling base at Bora Bora, Society Islands),” King informed Roosevelt. “A naval operating base is shortly to be set up at Tongatabu (Tonga Islands) to service our naval forces operating in the South Pacific. Efate (New Hebrides) and Funafuti (Ellice Islands) are projected additional ‘strong points.’” Roosevelt located all these places on his map of the South Pacific. “Given the naval forces, air units, and amphibious troops, we can drive northwest from the New Hebrides into the Solomons and the Bismarck Archipelago,” King continued. “Such a line of operations will be offensive rather than defensive—and will draw Japanese forces there to oppose it, thus relieving pressure elsewhere.”

Roosevelt received King’s recommendation in early March; two weeks later he promoted the admiral to chief of naval operations. During April and May, as the likelihood of an early Channel crossing diminished, King contended that any postponement in Europe would free up resources for the Pacific campaign. Roosevelt listened carefully, and in June, on the last day of Churchill’s visit to Washington, the president approved the offensive, which would begin with an attack on the obscure island of Guadalcanal in the southern Solomon Islands.

CHURCHILL CUT SHORT his visit to return to London to face a censure vote in Parliament. A noisy minority was demanding answers about the military situation in North Africa. Although Churchill was confident of defeating the motion, he judged its mere raising an affront to his leadership, and he determined to crush it. Roosevelt could count votes, even at a transatlantic distance, almost as well as Churchill could, and he too expected the prime minister to survive handily. But he recognized that the prime minister would be distracted till the insurgents were defeated, and in any event he wished to know just how strong Churchill was.

Quite strong, as matters proved. The no-confidence motion was beaten by 475 to 25. “Good for you,” Roosevelt congratulated Churchill upon learning the news.

Churchill, heartened by his parliamentary victory, proceeded to drive a stake through the heart of an early second front in Europe. “No responsible British General, Admiral, or Air Marshal is prepared to recommend Sledgehammer as a practicable operation in 1942,” he wrote Roosevelt. The invasion itself would be risky, and a beachhead, if established, would be difficult to defend. The mere effort would jeopardize greater plans. “The possibility of mounting a large-scale operation in 1943 would be marred if not ruined.” The United States and Britain must shift their attention to North Africa. “Gymnast is by far the best chance for effective relief to the Russian front in 1942…. Here is the true second front of 1942.”

Roosevelt finally agreed. But he knew his military men did not. He could simply have ordered them to get on board with Gymnast, knowing that Marshall was a good enough soldier to have acquiesced without further complaint and that King had the Pacific campaign to keep him busy. Yet he preferred that they be persuaded, by the same logic that had persuaded him. “You will proceed immediately to London as my personal representatives for the purpose of consultation with appropriate British authorities on the conduct of the war,” Roosevelt directed Marshall and King, who would be accompanied by Hopkins. Certain principles ought to inform the London consultation. “We should concentrate our efforts and avoid dispersion…. Absolute coordinated use of British and American forces is essential…. All available U.S. and British forces should be brought into action as quickly as they can profitably be used…. It is of the highest importance that U.S. ground troops be brought into action against the enemy in 1942.” For the record, Roosevelt still supported an early western front in Europe. “In regard to 1942, you will carefully investigate the possibility of executing Sledgehammer. Such an operation would definitely sustain Russia this year. It might be the turning point which would save Russia this year.” Even so, he didn’t rule out alternatives. “If Sledgehammer is finally and definitely out of the picture, I want you to consider the world situation as it exists at that time, and determine upon another place for U.S. troops to fight in 1942.”

Having framed the discussions this way, Roosevelt wasn’t surprised that they resulted in the abandonment of the early western front. “Marshall and King pushed very hard for Sledgehammer,” Hopkins reported after a week in London. But the British stood firmly against it, and Marshall and King reluctantly concluded what Roosevelt already had: that without British support, Sledgehammer simply couldn’t go forward.

This left North Africa, as Roosevelt knew it would. And the decision having been arrived at, even if apparently by default, the president was eager to press forward. Roosevelt replied to Hopkins that he wanted to move “full speed ahead” on the North Africa campaign.

48.

“I SHOULD GREATLY LIKE TO HAVE YOUR AID AND COUNTENANCE IN my talks with Joe,” Churchill wrote Roosevelt on August 4. “Would you be able to let Averell come with me? I feel that things would be easier if we all seemed to be together. I have a somewhat raw job.”

Joe was Stalin, Averell was Harriman, who had been with Roosevelt at the Atlantic Conference and would become ambassador to Moscow, and the raw job was explaining that there wouldn’t be a second front in Europe in 1942. Eight months after the signing of the Declaration of the United Nations, the leaders of the principal members of the alliance had yet to meet. Churchill was traveling to the Middle East, to buck up the troops in Egypt, and he decided to fly on to Moscow. Roosevelt declined to join him. The president considered the United States the first among equals in the Grand Alliance—the armorer of Britain and Russia, the exemplar of democracy—but until American troops got into the fight he would be at a diplomatic disadvantage to Churchill and Stalin, and American interests would suffer accordingly. Yet he wanted a representative at the Churchill-Stalin meetings. So he sent Harriman.

Stalin received the unwelcome news much as Churchill expected. “Stalin took issue at every point with bluntness almost to the point of insult, with such remarks as you can’t win wars if you aren’t willing to take risks and you mustn’t be so afraid of the Germans,” Harriman cabled Roosevelt after the initial session. Churchill attempted to mollify Stalin by explaining the rationale for the North African operation. “The Prime Minister drew a picture of a crocodile,” Harriman wrote, “and pointed out that it was as well to strike the belly as the snout.” Stalin inquired of the details of the proposed operation, displaying what Harriman characterized as a “masterful grasp of its implications.” He displayed genuine interest when Churchill described the bombing campaign against Germany already begun by Britain, which the Americans would soon join. “Homes as well as factories should be destroyed,” Stalin said. He and the prime minister discussed targets. “Between the two of them they soon destroyed most of the important industrial cities of Germany,” Harriman informed Roosevelt.

But Stalin returned to the failure of his allies to fulfill their promise. In a long session that ran far past midnight, he declared that the Anglo-American reversal left Russia in the lurch. “The Soviet Command built their plan of summer and autumn operations calculating on the creation of a second front in Europe in 1942,” he said. “It is easy to grasp that the refusal of the government of Great Britain”—Stalin singled out Britain, since Churchill was there, but he spoke to Roosevelt as well—“to create a second front in 1942 in Europe inflicts a moral blow to the whole of the Soviet public opinion.” Stalin rejected the Anglo-American argument that 1943 would be better than 1942 for opening a front in France. On the contrary, the Germans had sent all their best troops to Russia, leaving France unguarded. “We are of the opinion, therefore, that it is particularly in 1942 that the creation of a second front in Europe is possible and should be effected.”

Roosevelt rejoined from afar. “I am sorry that I could not have joined with you and the Prime Minister,” he cabled Stalin. “I am well aware of the urgent necessities of the military situation, particularly as it relates to the situation on the Russian front.” The president noted that American forces were engaging the Japanese at Guadalcanal—which, he conceded, didn’t do Russia any direct good, in that Russia and Japan were not at war. “I know very well that our real enemy is Germany and that our force and power must be brought against Hitler at the earliest possible moment. You can be sure that this will be done just as soon as it is humanly possible to put together the transportation.” Meanwhile, Roosevelt said, the United States would increase its supplies to the Soviet Union, sending a thousand tanks and various other arms, including aircraft, within the month. All the same, he knew that troops were the critical issue. “Believe me when I tell you that we are coming as strongly and as quickly as we possibly can.”

“EVERYTHING FOR US now turns on hastening Torch,” Churchill wrote Roosevelt upon leaving Moscow. Torch was the new name for Gymnast, and it connoted the hopes of the British and Americans to set North Africa on fire, or at least to let it light the way to Europe and eventual victory. The prime minister reiterated the “really grievous disappointment” the Russians felt upon learning that there would be no second front soon, and he judged the North Africa operation, essential on its own terms, to be indispensable in restoring the credibility of Britain and the United States as Russia’s allies.

The operation required a commander. Churchill had already broached the subject with Roosevelt, in the context of the broader issue of European command. “It would be agreeable to us if General Marshall were designated for supreme command of Round-up and that in the meantime General Eisenhower should act as his deputy here,” the prime minister wrote the president. Round-up was the heir to Sledgehammer, and it designated a second front in 1943 or after. Marshall, as the most forceful advocate of the second front, seemed the obvious choice. Churchill went on to say that Eisenhower could oversee preparations for Torch, which would test American troops and prepare them for Round-up. “As soon as Torch has taken shape, he would command it.”

Roosevelt demurred regarding a commander for the invasion of Europe. He didn’t think he could spare Marshall, and he didn’t have another obvious candidate. In any event, he understood that the decision for North Africa pushed France even farther into the future. Field Marshal Sir John Dill, Churchill’s representative on the Combined Chiefs staff in Washington, knew the American military mind as well as anyone. He wrote Churchill on August 1 describing American thinking. “The President has gone to Hyde Park for a rest, but before going he issued orders for full steam ahead on Torch at the earliest possible moment,” Dill said. “In the American mind, Round-up in 1943 is excluded by acceptance of Torch.” Roosevelt wasn’t sharing this view with Stalin, preferring his formula of “we are coming as quickly and powerfully as we possibly can.” But it meant that he could wait on choosing a commander for Europe.

For now he was happy to accept Churchill’s suggestion of Eisenhower for Torch. Roosevelt didn’t know Eisenhower well, but he had implicit faith in the judgment of Marshall, and Marshall liked Eisenhower.

“THE ATTACK should be launched at the earliest practicable date,” Roosevelt told Churchill of the North African operation. “The date should be consistent with the preparation necessary for an operation with a fair chance of success, and accordingly it should be determined by the Commander-in-Chief”—Eisenhower—“but in no event later than October 30th.”

The timing was important for Russian morale—the sooner the better. It was also important to Roosevelt politically. By the end of October the United States would have been at war for eleven months, with little to show for the effort and sacrifice Roosevelt had asked of the American people. And elections would be at hand. The president didn’t worry about his own popularity, if only because he wasn’t on the ballot. But the Democratic majority in Congress had declined dramatically since 1936, and anything that contributed to voter dissatisfaction might undermine what remained of that majority.

The Republicans treated the war issue with some delicacy, yet not all that much. Wendell Willkie had become Roosevelt’s favorite Republican—except for Henry Stimson and Frank Knox—by his support of measures Roosevelt deemed essential to national security. On one occasion Harry Hopkins made a slighting remark about Willkie and provoked “as sharp a reproof” as Robert Sherwood heard Roosevelt utter in the decade they worked together. “Don’t ever say anything like that around here again,” the president told Hopkins. “Don’t even think it. You of all people ought to know that we might not have had Lend-Lease or Selective Service or a lot of other things if it hadn’t been for Wendell Willkie. He was a godsend to this country when we needed him most.” Roosevelt revised his feelings somewhat in September 1942 when Willkie showed up in Moscow and gave a press conference in which he sympathized with the Russian demands for a second front. “They are almost prayerfully anxious for more aid,” Willkie said. “They appreciate the help they are getting from us, but do not consider it adequate. The morale value of a second front would be enormous.”

Roosevelt affected not to notice. When a reporter sought a reaction to Willkie’s comments, the president feigned ignorance.

“You did not know that was going on?” the reporter pressed.

“Oh, I had read some headlines, but I didn’t think it was worth reading the stories,” Roosevelt said.

The president hadn’t planned an extensive political campaign, intending to let his work on the war speak for itself and for the Democrats. But he decided to help with the phrasing. In a Fireside Chat in mid-September he reminded Americans that there were “four main areas of combat” in the war: the Russian front, the Pacific, the Middle East, and Europe. “Various people urge that we concentrate our forces on one or another of these four areas,” he said. But most of those people didn’t have sufficient information to render valid judgments regarding priorities. “Certain vital military decisions have been made. In due time you will know what these decisions are—and so will our enemies. I can say now that all of these decisions are directed toward taking the offensive.” The president explained that in nine months of war the United States had sent three times as many men overseas as it had during the comparable period of the First World War. “We have done this in spite of greater danger and fewer ships. And every week sees a gain in the actual number of American men and weapons in the fighting areas.” The deployments would continue to go forward until America and its allies achieved victory—a victory that would render irrelevant the current talk of one front or another. “This war will finally be won by the coordination of all the armies, navies, and air forces of all of the United Nations operating in unison against our enemies.”

Roosevelt complemented this speech and his few others of the campaign with a tour of defense plants. He visited a converted Chrysler factory in Detroit that built tanks, a Ford facility in Willow Run, Michigan, that produced B-24 bombers, an Allis-Chalmers plant in Milwaukee that made ammunition, a Boeing plant in Seattle that assembled B-17s, a Kaiser yard in Portland, Oregon, that constructed cargo ships, an Alcoa smelter in Vancouver, Washington, that turned bauxite into aluminum, and a Higgins yard in New Orleans that churned out landing craft.

Roosevelt’s security detail enforced secrecy regarding his movements, which annoyed the press even as it created opportunities for workers at the plants he visited—and at some he didn’t visit. It became a fairly common practice for workers arriving home late to claim that the president had dropped by their plant that day. If a spouse expressed surprise, remarking that the local papers had said nothing about a presidential visit, the tardy worker would explain that it was a state secret. On his stop at the Portland Kaiser yard, Roosevelt made a joke of the security that surrounded him. His daughter, Anna, accompanied him and launched a ship, which skidded down the ways into the water. The president rolled forward in his open car, in plain view of newsreel cameras and many thousands of the workers. “You know,” he said over the loudspeaker, “I am not supposed to be here today.” The crowd laughed appreciatively. But Merriman Smith, a reporter with the United Press syndicate who was detailed to follow the president without knowing where the next stop would be or what he would be able to tell of what he observed, wasn’t amused. “Damned if I saw anything to laugh about,” Smith said.

Here was the President of the United States making an important public appearance in front of twenty thousand people, yet the newspapers and radio stations had to play like they knew nothing about it. Although three reporters whose normal duty was to send news to thousands of outlets around the world were standing only a few feet from him, the President went on with his joke:

“You are the possessors of a secret which even the newspapers of the United States don’t know,” he told the shipworkers. “I hope you will keep the secret because I am under military and naval orders, and like the ship that we have just seen go overboard, my motions and movements are supposed to be secret.”

Roosevelt knew his actions irked the press. But amid the other demands the war made of him, he was willing to let the reporters fend for themselves. “Quite frankly I regard freedom of the press as one of the world’s microscopic problems,” he told Steve Early at a moment of particular strain.

THERE WAS MORE to the campaign than speeches and inspections of defense plants. The headlong pace of war production was overheating the economy following a decade of chill, and, after two terms of trying to raise prices, Roosevelt found himself having to hold them down. Or perhaps it was Congress that had to do the restraining—the responsibility for prices was a matter of dispute. In April the president had put forward a seven-point program designed, as he stated seven times in the accompanying message to the legislators, “to keep the cost of living from spiraling upward.” By September much of the program had been implemented by executive order. The president and the agencies reporting to him had set ceilings on many prices; they had controlled rents; they had established a system of rationing consumer goods; they had issued regulations curbing consumer debt; and they had facilitated the purchase of war bonds. But two points remained: limits on farm prices and higher taxes on incomes. The president was forbidden by existing law from capping farm prices till they reached 110 percent of “parity,” the benchmark from the era of the First World War. As for taxes, Congress still wrote the codes.

In a special message to the legislature on September 7, Roosevelt urged the lawmakers to push ahead on these two remaining fronts. He asked for authority to “stabilize the cost of living”—that is, to set maximum prices on farm goods and other as yet uncontrolled items. For the moment he merely asked. But if the legislature refused to grant him authority—the deadline he set was October 1—he would do on his own authority what needed to be done. “Inaction on your part by that date will leave me with an inescapable responsibility to the people of this country to see to it that the war effort is no longer imperiled by threat of economic chaos…. I shall accept the responsibility, and I will act.”

As for taxes, Roosevelt characterized a tax increase as “one of the most powerful weapons in our fight to stabilize living costs.” Raising taxes would reduce Americans’ discretionary income and thereby diminish the upward pressure on prices. It would also redistribute the burden of the war. The wealthy were having a wonderful war: profits and dividends were higher than in more than a decade. Roosevelt proposed to eliminate loopholes that let the rich off easily and to boost tax rates sharply at the upper end. “In the higher income brackets, the tax rate should be such as to give the practical equivalent of a top limit on an individual’s net income after taxes, approximating $25,000.” This was strong stuff, amounting to a confiscatory marginal rate on the highest incomes. But it was no more than what he proposed for corporations. “We must recapture through taxation all wartime profits that are not necessary to maintain efficient all-out war production.”

Before the war, Roosevelt had defended similar, albeit less ambitious, measures as promoting economic and social equality. He still emphasized equality, but with a wartime twist. “Such provisions will give assurance that the sacrifices required by war are being equitably shared.” Redressing inequality was crucial, now and for the future. “Next to military and naval victory, a victory along this economic front is of paramount importance. Without it our war production program will be hindered. Without it we would be allowing our young men, now risking their lives in the air, on land, and on the sea, to return to an economic mess of our own making.”

Roosevelt’s ultimatum to Congress won him the price authority he wanted, although the legislators saved a bit of their self-respect by making him wait till just after his deadline had passed. On October 2 he signed the price bill and the next day created the Office of Economic Stabilization, charged with developing and enforcing “a comprehensive national economic policy relating to the control of civilian purchasing power, prices, rents, wages, salaries, profits, rationing, subsidies, and all related matters.” It wasn’t lost on conservatives that the administration now had greater control of the economy than during the headiest period of the NRA, but under the duress of the war their complaints sounded unpatriotic.

Roosevelt’s victory on taxes was even more galling. The president didn’t quite get the confiscatory rates he wanted on incomes over $25,000, but he came very close. The Revenue Act of 1942 pushed personal tax rates to a marginal maximum of 88 percent even as it reduced exemptions and nearly tripled the number of people subject to income taxes. A special “Victory Tax” took 5 percent of all incomes over $624, with a portion to be remitted after the war was won.

Roosevelt signed the tax bill without comment, preferring not to remind voters two weeks before the election how deeply the government was dipping into their wallets. But in a Fireside Chat he emphasized that the burden of war was widely shared. “This whole nation of 130,000,000 free men, women, and children is becoming one great fighting force,” he said.

Some of us are fighting the war in airplanes five miles above the continent of Europe or the islands of the Pacific, and some of us are fighting it in mines deep down in the earth of Pennsylvania or Montana. A few of us are decorated with medals for heroic achievement, but all of us can have that deep and permanent inner satisfaction that comes from doing the best we know how, each of us playing an honorable part in the great struggle to save our democratic civilization.

THE SURPRISING THING about the 1942 elections wasn’t that the Democrats lost ground but that they lost as little as they did. Americans had never before been asked to weigh in on a ten-year-old presidency. Given their tendency to tire of incumbents, voters could have been expected to remove members of Roosevelt’s party in large numbers. The removals, in fact, were modest. The Democrats lost eight seats in the Senate (the Republicans gained nine, knocking off Nebraska independent George Norris too). But they still controlled the upper house by nineteen seats. The Democratic losses were predictably larger in the House, where Roosevelt’s party dropped forty-seven and the Republicans gained forty-five. But here, also, the Democrats still led, by thirteen seats—a slim margin by the standards of the Roosevelt years yet more than enough to control the leadership positions and the agenda.

The Democrats doubtless would have done better had the North African invasion been launched on schedule. But the final preparations lagged, and General Eisenhower refused to be rushed. Roosevelt, to his credit, did nothing to force things along. “When I went in to see Roosevelt and told him about Torch,” George Marshall recalled of the prelanding briefings, “he held up his hands in an attitude of prayer and said, ‘Please make it before Election Day.’ However, when I found we had to have more time and it came afterward, he never said a word. He was very courageous.”

Roosevelt awaited reports of the landings at Shangri-La, the new presidential retreat in the Maryland mountains north of Washington. The Secret Service had vetoed the pleasure cruises Roosevelt habitually took aboard the Potomac as liable to wartime sabotage or assault. The president himself vetoed the air-conditioning system in the White House, which aggravated his sinus condition. And so he took to the hills during hot weather—and decided he liked them during cooler weather as well. He, Harry Hopkins, Grace Tully, and a few others were amusing themselves on the Saturday evening after election day. Hopkins knew what was afoot; Tully knew something was afoot, but not what. “F.D.R. was on edge,” she remembered. The others gradually sensed the tension. Roosevelt explained that he was expecting an important call.

Finally the telephone rang. Tully answered it. It was from the War Department. “The Boss’s hand shook as he took the telephone from me,” she recalled. “He listened intently, said nothing as he heard the full message, then burst out: ‘Thank God. Thank God. That sounds grand. Congratulations. Casualties are comparatively light—much below your predictions. Thank God.’”

He put down the phone and turned to the group. “We have landed in North Africa. Casualties are below expectations. We are striking back.”

Roosevelt complemented the military operation with messages to the various parties involved. The company commanders distributed a note from the president to the troops. “Upon the outcome depends the freedom of your lives, the freedom of the lives of those you love,” Roosevelt declared.

To the people of France, Roosevelt delivered a message in French, broadcast by the BBC. “I speak to you as one who was with your army and navy in France in 1918,” he said. “No two nations exist which are more united by historic and mutually friendly ties than the people of France and the United States.” American troops had invaded French territory for the sole purpose of defeating France’s oppressors. “Do not obstruct, I beg of you, this great purpose. Help us where you are able, my friends, and we shall see again the glorious day when liberty and peace shall reign again on earth. Vive la France éternelle!”

To Marshal Pétain, the Vichy leader, Roosevelt sent a letter. An early draft commenced, “My dear old friend,” and described the marshal as the “venerated hero of Verdun.” But Churchill, to whom the draft was referred, complained that it was “much too kind,” and the phrases were dropped and the tone hardened. Roosevelt justified the Anglo-American invasion on grounds of preemptive self-defense, claiming that Germany and Italy were planning to occupy North and West Africa, to the jeopardy of the United States and the United Kingdom. Roosevelt told Pétain that the invading forces were equipped with “massive and adequate weapons of modern warfare” that would be available “for your compatriots in North Africa in our mutual fight against the common enemy.” The marshal should join the fight, or at least not hinder it. The United States had only the best intentions toward France. “My clear purpose is to support and aid the French authorities and their administrations. That is the immediate aim of these American armies. I need not tell you that the ultimate and greater aim is the liberation of France and its Empire from the Axis yoke.”

Pétain was unpersuaded. “You invoke pretexts which nothing justifies,” he replied to Roosevelt. “We are attacked; we shall defend ourselves; this is the order I am giving.”

Pétain’s position was hardly unreasonable. France remained at Germany’s mercy, and the American invasion of North Africa would certainly provoke a German response that would make life more miserable for ordinary French men and women. France as a whole was not ready to throw off the Nazis. Until it was, patience and caution would guide the Vichy government.

WHETHER THEY WOULD guide the Vichy officials in North Africa was the critical question—for Roosevelt, for Churchill, and most directly for Eisenhower. The resistance of the French forces in North Africa to the American landings varied from place to place, but Eisenhower, as theater commander, considered it imperative to reduce that resistance however possible. His political agent, Robert Murphy of the American State Department, had sounded out French officers in North Africa and suggested that some might be willing to order their troops to stand down. Admiral Jean Darlan was the ranking French officer in North Africa; after initially declaring the American invasion an egregious blunder, he decided, with Murphy’s assistance, that it might be a stepping-stone to political power for himself. He gave the order to cease fire.

What American newspapers dubbed the “Darlan deal” was a bargain of necessity. Darlan wasn’t the Americans’ first choice to lead the French forces in North Africa. That distinction belonged to General Henri Giraud, who had resisted the German invasion in 1940 until he was captured. He spent the next two years in a prisoner of war camp and then made a spectacular escape. He eluded the Gestapo, which had orders to assassinate him, and he found his way to Gibraltar to offer his services to Eisenhower ahead of the Torch landings. But the French troops in North Africa refused to accept him as their leader, taking their orders instead from Darlan. And they accepted Darlan’s orders to cease fire only after the German army, as Pétain had feared, occupied Vichy and the rest of France. The occupation, Darlan told the troops, meant that Pétain was effectively a prisoner and that his orders to resist the invasion were given under duress. But the marshal had sent him—Darlan—secret orders authorizing him to act in Pétain’s name. Or so Darlan said, and his word sufficed. The deal was done.

The reaction in America astonished Eisenhower and surprised even Roosevelt. The thrust of the complaints was that the United States was collaborating with Nazi collaborators, sacrificing its principles at the very outset of the fighting. Eisenhower defended his actions in a cable to the Combined Chiefs of Staff that was forwarded to Roosevelt. Eisenhower declared that in all of North Africa there was only one man with the stature to secure the cooperation Torch required. “That man is Darlan.” If Darlan was repudiated, Eisenhower went on, several bad results would ensue, including a resumption of French resistance, a substantial increase in Allied losses, and a dramatic slowing of the entire operation.

Roosevelt stood by Eisenhower. To reporters he cited what he described as “a nice old proverb of the Balkans that has, as I understand it, the full sanction of the Orthodox Church…. It says, ‘My children, you are permitted in time of great danger to walk with the devil until you have crossed the bridge.’” To the American people he declared, “I have accepted General Eisenhower’s political arrangements made for the time being in North Africa and Western Africa.” The arrangement with Darlan had ensured the success of the operation, Roosevelt said. But the president emphasized, and reemphasized, that the arrangement was provisional. “The present temporary arrangement in North and West Africa is only a temporary expedient, justified solely by the stress of battle. The present temporary arrangement has accomplished two military objectives. The first was to save American and British lives on the one hand, and French lives on the other. The second was the vital factor of time. The temporary arrangement has made it possible to avoid a mopping up period in Algiers and Morocco.”

The president wrote to Eisenhower directly. “I appreciate fully the difficulties of your military situation,” he said. “I am therefore not disposed to in any way question the action you have taken.” But the general needed to bear a few things in mind:

1. That we do not trust Darlan.

2. That it is impossible to keep a collaborator of Hitler and one whom we believe to be a fascist in civil power any longer than is absolutely necessary.

3. His movements should be watched carefully and his communications supervised.

As luck, good and bad, would have it, the Darlan deal faded in importance. The good luck was that of the Allies. The Torch operation proceeded well if not smoothly. The Americans and British expanded their beachheads in Morocco and Algeria and pushed east toward Tunisia. Meanwhile British forces under Bernard Montgomery stunned the Germans at El Alamein in Egypt, winning Britain’s first important victory on the ground against Nazi forces and driving Rommel back into the western desert. “This is not the end,” Churchill said. “It is not even the beginning to the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Meanwhile on the eastern front, the Red Army commenced a major counterattack against the Germans at Stalingrad.

The bad luck was Darlan’s. On December 24 he was assassinated in Algiers by a young man who apparently resented the admiral’s recent actions. Churchill later mused on how Darlan’s misfortune was his final gift to the Americans and British: “Darlan’s murder, however criminal, relieved the Allies of their embarrassment at working with him, and at the same time left them with all the advantages he had been able to bestow during the vital hours of the Allied landings.”

49.

“WE HERE ARE ALL HIGHLY GRATIFIED BY THE BRILLIANT SUCCESSES of American and British armed forces in North Africa,” Stalin cabled Roosevelt not long after the landings. The Soviet dictator dismissed criticism of the Darlan deal. “It seems to me that the Americans used Darlan not badly in order to facilitate the occupation of Northern and Western Africa,” he wrote to Churchill, who shared the letter with Roosevelt. “The military diplomacy must be able to use for military purposes not only Darlan but”—Stalin cited a Russian proverb—“even the Devil himself and his grandma.”

Roosevelt hoped to capitalize on the success and good feeling to engage Stalin directly for the first time. “The more I consider our military situation and the necessity for reaching early strategic decisions, the more persuaded I am that you, Churchill and I should have an early meeting,” he wrote Stalin on December 2. “I am very anxious to have a talk with you…. I can see no other way of reaching the vital strategic decisions which should be made very soon by all of us together. If the right decision is reached, we may, and I believe will, knock Germany out of the war much sooner than we anticipated.”

The “right decision” Roosevelt referred to, the one that would “knock Germany out of the war,” was one he needed Stalin’s help achieving. But he couldn’t tell Stalin about it by letter or cable; they must speak in person. Roosevelt hoped to use Stalin to sway Churchill toward a second front in Europe as soon as possible. The president assumed Churchill would find further reasons for delay, for insisting that the Mediterranean was the crucial theater. Roosevelt knew that Stalin favored an immediate second front; together they might force a commitment to Europe out of Churchill.

This was exactly what Churchill feared, and it caused him to push Stalin away. “I think I can tell you in advance what the Soviet view will be,” the prime minister wrote Roosevelt. “They will say to us both, ‘How many German divisions will you be engaging in the summer of 1943?’” Churchill didn’t have a good answer to that question, and he didn’t want to be pressed by Roosevelt and Stalin into one that would jeopardize his plans for the Mediterranean.

Stalin was less receptive to a tripartite conference than Roosevelt expected. He didn’t like to travel, perhaps partly from the chronic fear dictators have that their enemies will conspire against them in their absence but also, in his particular case at this particular time, because the battle for Stalingrad had reached a critical juncture. Red Army troops had trapped the Germans in the city; victory in the most important battle of the war was in sight. “It is impossible for me to leave the Soviet Union,” Stalin wrote Roosevelt. “Front business absolutely prevents it, demanding my constant presence near our troops.”

Roosevelt didn’t want to appear the supplicant, so he let the matter drop. He settled for another two-way meeting with Churchill. Since the war began, Roosevelt had missed his winter vacations, and the idea of a sunny spot appealed to him. Why not North Africa, which had the additional benefit of being where the fighting was? “I prefer a comfortable oasis to the raft at Tilsit,” he wrote Churchill, making a point at once about his holiday preferences and his historical sensibility. The raft at Tilsit referred to an 1807 meeting in the middle of Prussia’s Neman River between Napoleon and Russia’s Alexander I, which resulted in the de facto division of Europe between France and Russia. Whether Roosevelt intended to imply that he wanted no part in a modern division of Europe—or whether he did intend such an outcome, only negotiated in more congenial surroundings—he left for Churchill to divine.

THE OASIS TURNED out to be Casablanca, and a holiday mood surrounded the meeting from the start. The conference was code-named Symbol, and Roosevelt played the symbolic angle for a lark. “The aliases from this end will be (a) Don Quixote and (b) Sancho Panza,” he wrote Churchill, referring to himself and Hopkins. The prime minister responded in kind. “Should you bring Willkie with you,” he joked, “suggest code word Windmill.”

The president traveled by plane in mid-January 1943. The trip was his first by air in eleven years, since the lurching ride that had landed him dramatically at the 1932 Democratic convention in Chicago. He remembered at once why he hadn’t repeated the Chicago experiment. “I’m not crazy about flying, though it does save time if you have very little,” Roosevelt wrote Eleanor en route. “Rather bumpy both days and once or twice last night.” To his son John he complained, “I dislike flying the more I do of it!”

Roosevelt’s trip to Africa was also the first air journey by a sitting American president and the first presidential crossing of an ocean at war. Not surprisingly, Roosevelt’s security team, led by Michael Reilly of the Secret Service, was relieved when the C-54 transport, dubbed the “Sacred Cow,” landed and taxied to a stop and the president emerged, gamely smiling and full of political good cheer.

Elliott Roosevelt, by now a lieutenant colonel in the army’s air reconnaissance division, greeted his father at the Casablanca air field. The Roosevelt boys came under predictable scrutiny during the war, as the president’s critics and some of his friends wondered whether they were receiving special treatment. One Republican congressman, William Lambertson of Kansas, declared that Roosevelt had personally interceded with the War Department to ensure that his sons not be sent to combat zones.

Elliott was the least likely of the four boys to suffer such criticism in silence, and he didn’t. He wrote to Representative Fritz Lanham of his home district of Fort Worth, Texas, and requested the opportunity to defend the family’s honor. Lanham read Elliott’s letter before the House. “Inasmuch as I know that the Congressman”—Lambertson—“could not be referring to me, because I am here with the troops in North Africa,” Elliott asserted dryly, “and because I know that my brother Franklin has been on a destroyer in the North Atlantic and still is, there can be only two brothers to whom the gentleman in question refers, my brothers James and John.” Neither required defending from the likes of Lambertson, Elliott said, but he was doing so anyway. “The fact that my brother James has won the Navy Cross for gallantry in action”—with the marines in the Pacific—“speaks for itself.” John, the youngest, was with the navy’s supply corps. “He’s been fighting like hell ever since he got in to go on foreign service, and I know that my father or anyone else isn’t going to stop him before this show is over.” Elliott went on to say, “If the Congressman questions my service, you might tell him that I have spent over two-thirds of my service in the past two years on foreign duty. I’ve been in every lousy spot the Air Corps can think of to send its men. It’s not much fun, I can tell you, especially the butterflies that fly around in your stomach when the German gets the range and lets loose everything he’s got at your plane.” Elliott asked Lanham to relate these sentiments to the Kansas congressman personally, on his and his brothers’ behalf. “Try to explain to him that we, as soldiers, don’t care whether or how much he disagrees with the President, but for God’s sake let us fight without being stabbed in the back for the sake of politics.”

At these words, the members of the House burst into applause. One of the Republicans requested that the record show that the applause came from both sides of the aisle. Lambertson of Kansas, apparently forewarned, had absented himself.

ELLIOTT ACCOMPANIED his father to the villa reserved for the president. “It was quite a place,” Elliott recalled. “The living room must have been twenty-eight feet high; it was two stories up, with great French windows that looked out on an extremely handsome garden.” Sliding steel curtains, apparently installed recently, could cover the windows against bullets or shrapnel; a swimming pool had been converted to a makeshift air raid shelter. The renovations pleased Mike Reilly; Roosevelt was more impressed, in an ironic way, by the gaudy décor of the master bedroom. He whistled softly, grinned, and observed, “Now all we need is the madame of the house.”

Churchill had a villa next door. The prime minister was feeling fuller of himself than usual. “It gave me intense pleasure,” he remembered, “to see my great colleague here on conquered or liberated territory which he and I had secured in spite of the advice given him by all his military experts.” Those same military experts had accompanied the president or were meeting him in Casablanca, but Churchill was confident they could be beaten into submission once again.

In fact the sessions of the military men were comparatively uncontroversial. Marshall and the Americans still favored France; the British remained focused on the Mediterranean. But with the American presence in North Africa now a fait accompli, the differences were mostly matters of emphasis. And after several days of debate the Combined Chiefs produced a document that laid out Anglo-American priorities for 1943. Topping the list was security of sea communications, on the unchallengeable reasoning that unless the U-boats could be cleared from the Atlantic, or at least their threat reduced dramatically, the logistical buildup required for any major offensive would be in jeopardy. Second was assuring a continuing supply of materiel to the Soviet Union. Russia was by no means out of the woods; a collapse of the Red Army, while hardly anticipated, wouldn’t be the strangest thing to happen in the annals of warfare. In third place was the extension of the operations in the Mediterranean. Agreement on this point required some yielding by Marshall and the Americans, but less than might have been expected. The new year had already begun, and by no stretch of the imagination could a major offensive against France be mounted in the few months between the present and the summer fighting season. Realistically, 1944 was the year for the invasion of France; the Combined Chiefs’ paper simply formalized the obvious. This was the thrust of the paper’s fourth point, which outlined the buildup of Allied forces in Britain during 1943, in preparation for a Channel crossing the following spring. The buildup would include the establishment of heavy bomber units that would be able to reach Germany and win control of the air. The final point of the paper dealt with the Pacific–Far Eastern theater, where the present strategy—of supplying China’s army and rolling up Japan’s island positions one by one—would continue.

The politics of the conference were more difficult. As the Darlan deal demonstrated, the North African operation had knocked the French question off the shelf where it had been sitting unstably since 1940 and put it back into play. The heart of the question was whether the French were allies or enemies. But because an open, public debate on the issue was impolitic, Roosevelt and Churchill settled for considering which of the French might be allies. Darlan’s assassination relieved them of the embarrassment their first brush with Vichy entailed, but it didn’t remove the temptation to deal with those who had cooperated with the Nazis. Henri Giraud lacked the egregiously collaborationist record of Darlan, but after escaping his prisoner of war camp he had returned to France and supported the Vichy government. He subsequently worked with Eisenhower in Torch and, after the assassination of Darlan, became the American military’s candidate for leadership among the anti-German French.

The British candidate was Charles de Gaulle, who despised Vichy and everyone associated with it, including Giraud. He often appeared to despise the Americans, especially after the Darlan deal. He tolerated the British, chiefly because they provided him a refuge and let him act as though he embodied the essence of France. Roosevelt wasn’t original when he described de Gaulle as thinking himself some mystical amalgam of Jeanne d’Arc and Clemenceau; the combination occurred to Churchill and Eisenhower, among others. Eisenhower understood why de Gaulle was so widely disliked by his fellow French officers. “At the time of France’s surrender in 1940,” Eisenhower wrote after the war, “the officers who remained in the Army had accepted the position and orders of their government and had given up the fight. From their viewpoint, if the course chosen by De Gaulle was correct, then every French officer who obeyed the orders of his government was a poltroon. If De Gaulle was a loyal Frenchman they had to regard themselves as cowards.”

Churchill grudgingly respected de Gaulle. “I had continuous difficulties and many sharp antagonisms with him,” Churchill wrote.

I knew he was no friend of England. But I always recognized in him the spirit and conception which, across the pages of history, the word ‘France’ would ever proclaim. I understood and admired, while I resented, his arrogant demeanor. Here he was—a refugee, an exile from his country under sentence of death, in a position entirely dependent upon the good will of Britain, and now of the United States. The Germans had conquered his country. He had no real foothold anywhere. Never mind; he defied all.

De Gaulle defied Churchill when the prime minister attempted to persuade him to join the conference at Casablanca. “De Gaulle is on his high horse,” Churchill told Roosevelt at one of their private sessions. “Refuses to come down here. Refuses point blank…. He’s furious over the methods used to get control in Morocco and Algeria and French West Africa. Jeanne d’Arc complex. And of course now that Ike has set Giraud in charge down here…” Churchill shook his head in bafflement.

Roosevelt guessed that there was more to the Churchill–de Gaulle story than the prime minister was letting on. Elliott Roosevelt was present at this late-night meeting, which ended with Churchill agreeing to a recommendation by Roosevelt that de Gaulle be informed that he would lose all Allied support if he didn’t come to Casablanca at once. When Churchill retired for the night, Roosevelt asked Elliott to stay, as he felt like talking. “I sat with him while he got into bed, and afterwards kept him up for the time it takes to smoke two or three cigarettes,” Elliott recalled. Elliott remarked that Churchill hadn’t looked as upset as his words about de Gaulle sounded. “Was I just imagining things, or isn’t the P.M. really worried by de Gaulle’s pouting?” he asked his father.

“I don’t know,” Roosevelt replied, laughing. “I hope to find out in the next few days. But I have a strong sneaking suspicion that our friend de Gaulle hasn’t come to Africa yet because our friend Winston hasn’t chosen to bid him come yet. I am more than partially sure that de Gaulle will do just about anything, at this point, that the Prime Minister and the Foreign Office ask him to do.”

“How come?”

“Interests coincide. The English mean to maintain their hold on their colonies. They mean to help the French maintain their hold on their colonies. Winnie is a great man for the status quo. He even looks like the status quo, doesn’t he?” Roosevelt remarked that Britain’s interest in the Pacific theater was closely related to colonial questions. “Burma—that affects India, and French Indochina, and Indonesia. They’re all interrelated. If one gets its freedom, the others will get ideas. That’s why Winston’s so anxious to keep de Gaulle in his corner. De Gaulle isn’t any more interested in seeing a colonial empire disappear than Churchill is.”

Elliott asked how Giraud figured in the equation.

“I hear very fine things about him from our State Department people.” Robert Murphy was State’s, and Eisenhower’s, liaison with the French general. “He’s sent back reports that indicate Giraud will be just the man to counterbalance de Gaulle.”

Elliott expressed surprise that de Gaulle needed counterbalancing. “All the reports we get—you know, in the newspapers and so on—tell of how popular he is, in and out of France.”

“It’s to the advantage of his backers to keep that idea alive.”

“Churchill, you mean? And the English?”

Roosevelt nodded. “De Gaulle is out to achieve one-man government in France. I can’t imagine a man I would distrust more. His whole Free French movement is honeycombed with police spies. He has agents spying on his own people. To him, freedom of speech means freedom from criticism—of him.”

Elliott thought about this for a moment. As he did, his father yawned. Elliott got up to go. Roosevelt motioned for him to stay. He had more on his mind. “The thing is,” Roosevelt said, “the colonial system means war. Exploit the resources of an India, a Burma, a Java; take all the wealth out of those countries, but never put anything back into them, things like education, decent standards of living, minimum health requirements—all you’re doing is storing up the kind of trouble that leads to war.”

Elliott said he had noticed Churchill’s cold glower when India was even mentioned.

“India should be made a commonwealth at once,” Roosevelt said. “After a certain number of years—five perhaps, or ten—she should be able to choose whether she wants to remain in the empire or have complete independence.” As a commonwealth, India could begin to build the institutions of health and education needed to raise the living standard of her people. “But how can she have these things when Britain is taking all the wealth of her national resources away from her, every year? Every year the Indian people have one thing to look forward to, like death and taxes. Sure as shooting, they have a famine. The season of famine, they call it.”

Roosevelt’s flight from America had stopped in British Gambia. He had seen and heard only a little of the country, but that little revealed a lot. “At about eight-thirty”—in the morning—“we drove through Bathurst to the airfield. The natives were just getting to work—in rags, glum-looking…. They told us the natives would look happier around noon-time, when the sun should have burned off the dew and the chill. I was told the prevailing wage for these men was one and nine—one shilling, nine pence. Less than fifty cents.”

“An hour?”

“A day! Fifty cents a day! Besides which they’re given a half-cup of rice…. Dirt, disease, very high mortality rate…. Life expectancy—you’d never guess what it is. Twenty-six years! These people are treated worse than the livestock. Their cattle live longer!”

Roosevelt asked Elliott, who had been stationed in Algeria, what things were like there. Elliott said it was much the same story. A few people—the white colonials and some favored locals—lived very well, but the vast majority suffered in poverty, disease, and ignorance.

Roosevelt explained what he proposed to do. France would be restored as a world power and then given back her colonies, but only in trust. Each year the French would have to report on the progress their colonies had made.

Elliott asked whom they would report to.

“The organization of the United Nations, when it’s been set up…. When we’ve won the war, the four great powers will be responsible for the peace. It’s already high time for us to be thinking of the future, building for it…. These great powers will have to assume the task of bringing education, raising the standards of living, improving the health conditions of all the backward, depressed colonial areas of the world. And when they’ve had a chance to reach maturity, they must have the opportunity extended them of independence—after the United Nations as a whole have decided they are prepared for it. If this isn’t done, we might as well agree that we’re in for another war.”

Roosevelt’s last cigarette had gone out. Elliott looked at his watch.

“Three-thirty, Pop.”

“Yes. Now I am tired. Get some sleep yourself, Elliott.”

THE WEEK PLAYED out much as Roosevelt anticipated. Churchill professed to be urging de Gaulle to come to Casablanca, but the general, he said, was obdurate. Roosevelt meanwhile met with Giraud, who was delighted at the American attention. Giraud spoke no English, and though Roosevelt had an interpreter, Robert Murphy, he made do, for the most part, in Giraud’s language. The general emphasized his determination to fight. “No distractions should be permitted to interfere with the conduct of the war,” he said. He declared that all he required was American arms. “Only give us the arms. Give us the guns and the tanks and the planes. It is all we need.”

Roosevelt asked where the troops to employ the arms would come from.

“We can recruit colonial troops by the tens of thousands!”

Who would train them?

“There are plenty of officers under my command. It constitutes no problem. Only give us the arms!”

Roosevelt tried to get Giraud to address the political problems of the war. The president was thinking ahead to how France would be reconstituted as a great power, and he didn’t want to have to rely on de Gaulle. But he got nowhere. “Giraud swept these questions aside,” Elliott Roosevelt, present at the meeting, recalled. “He was single-minded.” Arms were the general’s idée fixe. After Giraud left, Roosevelt shook his head. “I’m afraid we’re leaning on a very slender reed,” he told Elliott.

Roosevelt’s disappointment with Giraud made him want to see de Gaulle all the more. Giraud’s focus on fighting and certain other of his comments suggested that he could work with the more political de Gaulle. Roosevelt needled Churchill about de Gaulle over cocktails and meals. Hopkins worked on Churchill as well. The prime minister said he was doing what he could, but de Gaulle was stubborn.

Roosevelt began to wonder whether de Gaulle would ever come. “We delivered our bridegroom, General Giraud, who was most cooperative on the impending marriage and, I am sure, was ready to go through with it on our terms,” the president wrote Cordell Hull. “However, our friends could not produce the bride, the temperamental lady de Gaulle. She has got quite snooty about the whole idea and does not want to see either of us, and is showing no intention of getting into bed with Giraud.”

But Roosevelt had traveled a long way, and he wasn’t going to leave without making every effort to bring de Gaulle to the altar. Henry Stimson, who got the story from Roosevelt upon the president’s return to America, related Roosevelt’s final effort. Roosevelt and Churchill were talking, and the prime minister registered, or perhaps feigned, exasperation at de Gaulle’s refusal to budge from London. “Roosevelt asked whether de Gaulle got any salary and who paid him,” Stimson wrote. “Churchill replied that he, Churchill, paid it. Then said the President, ‘I should suggest to him that salaries are paid for devoted and obedient service and, if he doesn’t come, his salary would be cut off.’ De Gaulle came the next day.”

Yet he didn’t come happily, and his unhappiness showed. He met only briefly with Roosevelt, and in private. No interpreter or note taker was present, although Roosevelt stationed an assistant outside the door, which was kept slightly ajar. De Gaulle, noticing the door and guessing the presence of the note taker, spoke so softly as to be inaudible to Roosevelt’s aide. The aide did hear what Roosevelt said. The president defended the Darlan deal, which he knew de Gaulle despised. And he predicted that winning the war would necessitate other compromises. But he said that Giraud had made clear that his sole ambition was to get on with the fighting, until French soil was freed of the enemy. Roosevelt related a bit of American history, explaining how the Civil War had divided the nation for a time but how after the war “the people realized that personal pride and personal prejudices must often be subordinated for the good of the country as a whole.” Roosevelt expressed hope that the people and leaders of France would adopt a similar view. “The only course of action that will save France is for all of her loyal sons to unite to defeat the enemy.”

The meeting lasted twenty minutes. De Gaulle agreed to nothing—except the one thing Roosevelt wanted most, for now. On the final day of the conference the president managed to get de Gaulle and Giraud to his villa at the same time. Churchill was there, too. “De Gaulle was a little bewildered,” Hopkins observed.

Churchill grunted. But the president went to work on them…. De Gaulle finally agreed to a joint statement, and before he could catch his breath, the President suggested a photograph. By this time the garden was full of camera men and war correspondents who had been flown down the day before. I don’t know who was the most surprised, the photographers or de Gaulle, when the four of them walked out—or rather the three of them, because the President was carried to his chair…. The President suggested de Gaulle and Giraud shake hands. They stood up and obliged. Some of the camera men missed it, and they did it again.

ROOSEVELT HAD ONE more trick to play. News of the conference had been blacked out until this final day, and the president wished to give the press corps a story. He arranged a news conference for himself and Churchill, and he commenced with a summary of what had been discussed and decided on. Much was innocuous and predictable, but the news-hungry correspondents scribbled furiously. They thought he had covered all the major topics and was wrapping up when he suddenly added:

Another point. I think we have all had it in our hearts and our heads before, but I don’t think that it has ever been put down on paper by the Prime Minister and myself, and that is the determination that peace can come to the world only by the total elimination of German and Japanese war power.

Some of you Britishers know the old story—we had a general called U. S. Grant. His name was Ulysses Simpson Grant, but in my, and the Prime Minister’s, early days he was called “Unconditional Surrender” Grant. The elimination of German, Japanese, and Italian war power means the unconditional surrender by Germany, Italy, and Japan. That means a reasonable assurance of future world peace. It does not mean the destruction of the population of Germany, Italy, or Japan, but it does mean the destruction of the philosophies in those countries which are based on conquest and the subjugation of other people.

Churchill afterward acknowledged “some feeling of surprise” at Roosevelt’s unveiling of the policy of unconditional surrender. The policy itself had been in the works for months. It initially arose in American planning the previous May, and it reflected the unsatisfactory denouement of the First World War, which had ended with the German armistice. Roosevelt raised the issue with Churchill at Casablanca, where the prime minister apparently registered some reservations as to whether it ought to apply to Italy, which he—like some of the American planners—thought might be lured away from the Axis by adept diplomacy joined to military duress. Churchill referred the matter to the war cabinet in London, which replied that the surrender policy should not exclude Italy. As Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden cabled for the cabinet: “Knowledge of all rough stuff coming to them is surely more likely to have desired effect on Italian morale.”

But neither the British cabinet nor the prime minister had said anything about making the policy public—hence Churchill’s surprise at Roosevelt’s doing so without warning. The president’s statement left Churchill no choice. “In my speech which followed the President’s,” Churchill wrote later, “I of course supported him and concurred in what he had said. Any divergence between us, even by omission, would on such an occasion and at such a time have been damaging or even dangerous to our war effort.”

KEEPING CHURCHILL off balance was a conscious aspect of Roosevelt’s strategy. Keeping Stalin off balance came with the territory of the Grand Alliance. As part of their conclusion of the Casablanca conference, Roosevelt and Churchill composed a letter to Stalin. “We have decided the operations which are to be undertaken by American and British forces in the first nine months of 1943,” they wrote. “We believe these operations, together with your powerful offensive, may well bring Germany to her knees in 1943…. We are in no doubt that our correct strategy is to concentrate on the defeat of Germany, with a view to achieving early and decisive victory in the European theatre.” So far so good, Stalin must have thought. But as he read on he saw nothing about an invasion of France. “Our immediate intention is to clear the Axis out of North Africa…. We have made the decision to launch a large scale amphibious operation in the Mediterranean at the earliest possible moment…. We shall increase the Allied bomber offensive from the U.K. against Germany.” The best the British and Americans could offer by way of a second front was the promise of a buildup of forces in Britain and a professed desire “to re-enter the Continent of Europe as soon as practicable.”

“I thank you for the information,” Stalin replied curtly. Perhaps the Soviet leader felt betrayed; perhaps he thought his allies were reverting to capitalist form. Whatever the case, his displeasure was clear. He reminded the president and prime minister of their earlier promise regarding Germany. “You yourselves set the task of crushing it by opening a second front in Europe in 1943.” The Soviet Union awaited fulfillment of this promise. “I should be very obliged to you for information on the concrete operations planned in this respect and on the scheduled time of their realization.”

Churchill drafted a joint response. The prime minister explained that the British and Americans expected to complete the conquest of North Africa by the end of April. “When this is accomplished, we intend, in July, or earlier if possible, to attack Italy across the Mediterranean.” Roosevelt revised Churchill’s draft, not wishing to commit to an invasion of Italy proper, which in any event would anger Stalin the more, as distracting the Allies further from France. Roosevelt’s version, which was the one sent to Moscow, said the Americans and British would attack Sicily. Churchill’s draft had continued: “We are aiming for August for a heavy operation across the Channel, for which between seventeen and twenty British and U.S. divisions will be available.” Roosevelt again revised, keeping the August date but eliminating the commitment to a particular number of divisions, which seemed to him impossible to guarantee. He added a disclaimer: “The timing of this attack must of course be dependent upon the condition of German defensive possibilities across the Channel at that time.”

Stalin wasn’t mollified in the least. He asked why it would take until April to mop up in North Africa and why until August or later to invade France. The Red Army had closed the ring at Stalingrad and captured some hundred thousand German troops (and nearly two dozen generals). Hitler’s army was reeling. “In order to prevent the enemy from recovering, it is highly important, in my opinion, that the blow from the West should not be postponed until the second half of the year, but dealt in the spring or at the beginning of summer.”

This time Roosevelt answered by himself. The delay in North Africa, he said, had been caused by “unexpected heavy rains that made the roads extremely difficult for both troops and supplies en route from our landing ports to the front lines and made the fields and mountains impassable.” As to the second front: “You may be sure that the American effort will be projected onto the Continent of Europe at as early a date subsequent to success in North Africa as transportation facilities can be provided by our maximum effort.” He closed: “We hope that the success of your heroic army, which is an inspiration to us all, will continue.”

Stalin rejected Roosevelt’s explanation and a similar message from Churchill. His anger seethed from between the lines as he lectured the president on what the Americans and British had promised and repeatedly failed to deliver. “You will recall that you and Mr. Churchill thought it possible to open a second front as early as 1942 or this spring at the latest.” No second front had appeared, leaving the burden on the Red Army. “The Soviet troops have fought strenuously all winter and are continuing to do so, while Hitler is taking important measures to rehabilitate and reinforce his army for the spring and summer operations against the U.S.S.R. It is therefore particularly essential for us that the blow from the West be no longer delayed, that it be delivered this spring or in early summer.” Stalin concluded ominously: “I must give a most emphatic warning, in the interest of our common cause, of the grave danger with which further delay in opening a second front in France is fraught.”

50.

WAS IT A WARNING, OR A THREAT? WAS STALIN SUGGESTING THAT the Red Army might break under unrelieved pressure? Or that the Soviet government might reverse course once more and seek accommodation with Germany? Or was it a political tactic? Was Stalin simply compiling a case to use against the Americans and British at a postwar peace conference? Would Stalin claim the moral high ground for having fought longer and harder than the Anglo-Americans?

While Roosevelt pondered the possibilities, certain matters of domestic governance required his attention—except that nothing after Pearl Harbor was exclusively domestic. For sixty years the United States had closed its borders to nearly all immigration from China. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 reflected the racism and xenophobia of its time, and though the government of China had protested the unfavorable treatment accorded its nationals—in a period when America’s borders were open to almost everyone else—its weakness allowed Washington to ignore the complaints. The singularity of Chinese exclusion diminished in the 1920s with the adoption of quotas on immigration generally. China continued to complain during the 1930s, but amid the economic depression and the isolationism of the decade, few in America listened. The onset of the Pacific war changed things. China became an ally and a fellow member of the United Nations. Meanwhile, however, Japan used the issue of Chinese exclusion—which had been broadened to encompass other Asians and extended to a ban preventing Asians resident in the United States from becoming citizens—as a propaganda tool against America. The Atlantic Charter was a sham, Tokyo asserted, in the face of America’s ongoing discrimination against Asians.

Roosevelt recognized the damage the hoary policy did to the war effort. As a first step toward rectifying the situation, he directed the drafting of a treaty relinquishing America’s extraterritoriality rights in China. Extraterritoriality—the principle that Americans in China were subject to American laws, not Chinese laws—was a vestige of the nineteenth century, when the United States joined Britain and other imperial powers in the system of “unequal treaties” that exploited China’s weakness to the advantage of the West. “The abolition of the extraterritorial system in China is a step in line with the expressed desires of the government and the people of the United States,” Roosevelt declared in forwarding the new treaty to the Senate. “The spirit reflected by the treaty will, I am sure, be gratifying to the governments and the peoples of all the United Nations.” The Senate took the president at his word and approved the pact.

Roosevelt followed up by asking Congress to repeal the Chinese exclusion laws. “Nations, like individuals, make mistakes,” the president said. “We must be big enough to acknowledge our mistakes of the past and to correct them. By the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Laws, we can correct a historic mistake and silence the distorted Japanese propaganda.” Repeal would remove the stigma China labored under in American law, and it would allow Chinese nationals their rightful place in the American immigration system. This wasn’t saying much, given the pro-European bias of the immigration quotas. Roosevelt himself admitted—in fact boasted, albeit quietly—that the Chinese quota would be “only about 100 immigrants a year.” Organized labor needn’t worry. “There can be no reasonable apprehension that any such number of immigrants will cause unemployment or provide competition in the search for jobs.”

Roosevelt went on to urge the repeal of the law against citizenship for persons of Chinese descent. “It would be additional proof not only that we regard China as a partner in waging war but that we shall regard her as a partner in days of peace.” He did not propose to change the citizenship laws as they applied to other Asians, and he acknowledged that the discrepancy would favor China. But China deserved it. “Their great contribution to the cause of decency and freedom entitles them to such preference.” Roosevelt didn’t detail his big plans for China after the war. Some of the legislators knew what he had in mind; others did not. But again Congress followed the president’s lead and repealed the offensive statute.

RACE AROSE IN another context during this same period. Eighty years, almost to the week, after race riots convulsed New York City during the Civil War, race riots erupted in Detroit and Los Angeles. The Detroit riots reflected the strains the wartime economy had placed on the fabric of American social relations and the ambivalent response of Roosevelt and the federal government to those strains. Even before Pearl Harbor, the effects of the approach of war—in the form of the economic revival and the inception of the draft—inspired African American leaders to press for equal treatment for blacks in the military and in the workplace. A. Philip Randolph, the longtime director of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, headed the effort. Randolph shrewdly invited Eleanor Roosevelt to the union’s annual convention, in Harlem, in 1940. The First Lady was welcomed and granted the opportunity to address the delegates; she reciprocated by arranging a meeting between Randolph and the president.

Roosevelt greeted Randolph, Walter White of the NAACP, and a small group of other black leaders and thanked them for coming. He listened intently as they presented a petition entreating the government to end segregation in the armed services and in defense work. They left, as so many visitors to the White House left, thinking Roosevelt had agreed with them. A short while later, however, even as the president personally asserted that, in federal defense contracts, “workers should not be discriminated against because of age, sex, race or color,” a White House spokesman declared that “the policy of the War Department is not to intermingle colored and white enlisted personnel in the same regimental organizations.”

Randolph felt betrayed. At least he acted that way. He declared that if the president would not respond to reasoned argument, other forms of persuasion might be necessary. He called for a protest march on Washington by African Americans, to shame the president and the government into doing what was right. Randolph laid the groundwork for the protest during the spring of 1941 and scheduled the march for July 1.

Roosevelt was an egalitarian at heart, if a sometimes paternalistic one, and he might have desegregated the armed forces had politics and the war not constrained him. But he knew that desegregation would antagonize the South and incite those same southern senators and congressmen who had prevented him from taking a stand for civil rights until now. In addition, amid his careful cultivation of popular support for war readiness and ultimate intervention, he opposed anything that distracted the public from the overriding issue of national security. A march by Negroes on Washington, with its white, essentially southern police force, might well result in bloodshed, which was the last thing Roosevelt needed. Finally, he resented anything that smacked of political extortion.

The president talked the matter over with Eleanor. She was in sympathy with Randolph’s goals even more than Roosevelt was, but she agreed with her husband that a march would be counterproductive. “I feel very strongly that your group is making a grave mistake at the present time to allow this march to take place,” she wrote Randolph. “I feel that if any incident occurs as a result of this, it may engender so much bitterness that it will create in Congress even more solid opposition from certain groups than we have had in the past.” When Randolph refused to call off the march, Roosevelt dispatched Eleanor to New York to talk to Randolph and Walter White personally. “Get it stopped,” he said.

Eleanor met Randolph and White at New York’s City Hall. She repeated her argument that the march could get out of control and provoke a backlash. Randolph threw the responsibility for violence back at her—and her husband. “I replied that there would be no violence unless her husband ordered the police to crack black heads,” Randolph recalled. He and White stood firm. Eleanor, with Roosevelt’s permission, arranged another meeting of the black leaders with the president.

This session took place two weeks before the scheduled march. Roosevelt asked how many people Randolph and White would bring to Washington. Randolph said one hundred thousand.

Roosevelt looked at Randolph skeptically, then turned to White. “Walter, how many people will really march?”

“One hundred thousand, Mr. President,” White said.

“You can’t bring one hundred thousand Negroes to Washington,” Roosevelt responded. “Somebody might get killed.”

Not if the president came out and addressed the marchers, Randolph said.

Roosevelt ignored the suggestion. “Call it off,” he said, “and we’ll talk.”

Without explicitly canceling the march, Randolph and White accepted Roosevelt’s offer to let them help draft an executive order along the lines they desired. The writing began that day in the Cabinet Room, and it continued for several days thereafter as the various parties likely to be affected registered their objections and support.

A week before the scheduled march, Roosevelt issued the executive order. “I do hereby reaffirm the policy of the United States that there shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin,” the president said. To enforce the policy he established a Committee on Fair Employment Practice.

The formula worked—for Roosevelt and, to a lesser degree, for Randolph and White. The march was canceled, and the principle of nondiscrimination began to be implemented. The executive order was silent on segregation in the military; as part of the bargain Roosevelt persuaded Randolph and White to leave the soldiers alone.

Roosevelt could compel defense employers not to discriminate, but he couldn’t compel white workers and black workers to fraternize in the workplace. Nor could he convince white workers that blacks didn’t erode their bargaining power. During the Second World War a second great migration from the South to the North occurred, and the tensions it induced in cities like Detroit mirrored the tensions of the First World War and the first migration. During the summer of 1943 the tension passed the snapping point. On June 20 a large crowd of blacks and whites gathered at Belle Isle, a public park in the Detroit River. The hot weather and the consumption of alcohol by many of the picnickers contributed to a series of scuffles that escalated into concerted violence. Mistaken reports circulated that whites had killed three blacks; blacks responded with random attacks against whites. By late evening the city was out of control, and before federal troops brought order the next day, thirty-four people—twenty-five blacks and nine whites—had been killed.

The riots in Los Angeles revealed a different set of strains. The Immigration Act of 1924 had exempted Mexicans from the quota system because immigration from Mexico had never been large and because employers of Mexican workers—typically commercial farmers in California, Arizona, and Texas—resisted the effort to restrict their work force. As both a cause and a consequence of the open border between the United States and Mexico, the most common pattern of movement was not immigration but migration—a back-and-forth flow of workers from Mexico to the United States during the growing season and from the United States to Mexico during the winter.

Gradually, though, communities of Mexican Americans emerged in Los Angeles and other cities, producing and experiencing the same kinds of stresses that characterized ethnic communities elsewhere. In the barrio of East Los Angeles, many young Mexican Americans distinguished themselves by wearing oversized, elaborately styled “zoot suits,” which were an emblem of both ethnic and second-generational identity. The zoot suits also made their wearers easy targets when racial and ethnic tensions emerged during the summer of 1943. In this case the participants were the young Mexican Americans and the mostly white sailors and soldiers from the military facilities in Los Angeles. A series of murders and assaults triggered broader violence, and lurid reporting in the local press kept it going.

A certain civilian-military friction among the young males aggravated the usual mixture of racial and ethnic antagonism. Sailors and soldiers assaulted the zoot suiters, ripping their clothes off and cutting the long hair that completed the look. “We’ll destroy every zoot suit in Los Angeles County before this is over,” one seaman vowed. Evidence of police favoritism toward the military men prompted the Mexican government to complain, causing the mayor of Los Angeles in turn to tell Mexico City to butt out. “They are Los Angeles youth,” Fletcher Bowron asserted, “and the problem is purely a local one.” Bowron went on to say, “We are going to see that members of the armed forces are not attacked. At the same time, we expect cooperation from officers of the Army and Navy to the extent that soldiers and sailors do not pile into Los Angeles for the purpose of excitement and adventure and what they might consider a little fun by beating up young men whose appearance they do not like.”

Bowron’s warning prompted the military to restrict the movements of the soldiers and sailors. Civil and military police stepped up patrols, and the rioting gradually ended. An uneasy calm settled over the city, and Angelenos returned their attention to the war against the Axis.

ROOSEVELT DECLINED to comment on the domestic disturbances. Before the war he would have felt pressure to say something, perhaps to take action. But the war liberated him from all manner of issues he preferred to avoid. With the world in the balance, few could fault him for delegating lesser matters to subordinates.

The fate of the world preoccupied the president during 1943. Roosevelt had hardly returned from Africa when British foreign secretary Eden arrived on his doorstep. Roosevelt didn’t know Eden well, except that he seemed quite a different sort from the half-American Churchill. Yet he and Roosevelt got on famously. “Anthony spent three evenings with me,” the president informed Churchill midway through Eden’s visit. “He is a grand fellow and we are talking everything from Ruthenia to the production of peanuts!” In fact Roosevelt found Eden easier to work with than Churchill, as the president teasingly hinted to the prime minister: “We seem to agree on about 95 percent of all the subjects—not a bad average.”

Roosevelt and Eden did indeed range widely, but they spent most of their time envisioning Europe at the war’s end. They agreed that Russia would demand changes in the prewar status quo. Eden predicted that Stalin would insist, at the least, on incorporation of the Baltic states into the Soviet Union. Roosevelt concurred, although he remarked that this would provoke “a good deal of resistance in the United States.” The president didn’t imagine he could prevent Stalin from taking the Baltics. “Realistically,” he said, “the Russian armies will be in the Baltic states at the time of the downfall of Germany, and none of us can force them to get out.” But Roosevelt didn’t intend simply to give the Baltic issue away. “We should use it as a bargaining instrument in getting other concessions from Russia.”

Such concessions might involve Poland. Eden and Roosevelt agreed that the Polish question could well be the most difficult to resolve. Poland’s boundaries would have to be reconfigured, although neither Roosevelt nor Eden thought geography would be the sticking point. The real problem was the makeup of the postwar Polish state. A Polish government in exile currently operated out of London, and it was even more obstreperous than de Gaulle’s Free French. “The Poles are being very difficult about their aspirations,” Eden told Roosevelt. “Poland has very large ambitions after the war…. Privately they say that Russia will be so weakened and Germany crushed that Poland will emerge as the most powerful state in that part of the world.”

Roosevelt acknowledged Poland’s desires—and the unlikelihood of their being realized. He couldn’t say so publicly, as it would stir up Poles in America, but Poland’s fate at the war’s end would be decided by the great powers, not by the Poles. And it would be part of a larger settlement with broader goals. “As far as Poland is concerned,” Roosevelt said, “the important thing is to set it up in a way that will help maintain the peace of the world.”

The Polish question hinged on the German question. And the heart of the German question was whether there would be a single Germany after the war or multiple Germanys. The Russians, Eden supposed, would opt for the multiple versions. “Stalin has a deep-seated distrust of the Germans,” Eden said. “He will insist that Germany be broken up into a number of states.”

Roosevelt agreed that Germany must be dismembered. Prussia, in particular, must be split off. “The Prussians cannot be permitted to dominate all Germany.” But he didn’t want to repeat the mistakes of Versailles, in which the victors imposed a settlement that Hitler eventually used against them. “We should encourage the differences and ambitions that will spring up within Germany for a separatist movement and, in effect, approve of a division which represents German public opinion.”

To Eden, Roosevelt spoke for the first time at length of his hopes for the international organization that would manage the peace settlement. Churchill had been promoting a European council, with responsibility for regional security. Roosevelt rejected the plan as divisive and distracting. The president favored a single body—emerging from the wartime United Nations—divided into two parts. The larger part would be advisory and would include every independent country that wanted to join. “This body should be world-wide in scope,” Roosevelt said. The smaller part, by number of countries, would be where the true power lay. “The real decisions should be made by the United States, Great Britain, Russia, and China, who will be the powers for many years to come that will have to police the world.”

Eden agreed that the United Nations should be global in membership. And he didn’t dispute the need for guidance by the great powers. But he doubted that China was ready for such a role. He thought the Chinese would probably have to fight a revolution among themselves before their problems were sorted out. In any event, he said, he “did not much like the idea of the Chinese running up and down the Pacific.”

But Roosevelt insisted. Some country had to police Asia, and it obviously couldn’t be Japan. Moreover, promoting China would yield diplomatic dividends. “China,” the president predicted, “in any serious conflict of policy with Russia will undoubtedly line up on our side.”

THE QUESTION OF who would be lining up with whom played a central role in talks between Roosevelt and Churchill a few weeks later. Yet it wasn’t Russia against the West that worried Roosevelt’s advisers; it was Roosevelt against them. “I fear it will be the same story over again,” Henry Stimson recorded in his diary. “The man from London will arrive with a program of further expansion in the eastern Mediterranean and will have his way with our Chief, and the careful and deliberate plans of our staff will be overridden. I feel very troubled about it.”

Stimson and the military men had been working on Roosevelt since Casablanca for a commitment to a particular date for the cross-Channel invasion. “The United States accepts the strategic concept that the war will be won most speedily by first defeating Germany,” the American joint chiefs of staff reiterated ahead of Churchill’s visit. “Defeating Germany first involves making a determined attack against Germany on the Continent at the earliest practicable date…. All proposed operations in Europe should be judged primarily on the basis of the contribution to that end.” This was nothing new, of course, but the fact that it had to be restated revealed the concern on the part of Stimson and the chiefs that the president hadn’t been convinced—at least not convinced sufficiently to withstand Churchill’s arguments in the direction of the Mediterranean.

The talks started promisingly, from Stimson’s point of view. Churchill performed as expected. There were no differences of opinion between the British and the Americans, the prime minister said, merely questions of “emphasis and priority.” He proceeded to emphasize the Mediterranean, declaring that the immediate objective was to “get Italy out of the war by whatever means might be the best.” The defeat of Italy, Churchill predicted, would “cause a chill of loneliness over the German people and might be the beginning of their doom.”

Roosevelt responded more forthrightly than Stimson had feared. The president wondered aloud whether the early defeat of Italy would be an unmixed blessing. “Italy might drop into the lap of the United Nations, who would then have the responsibility of supplying the Italian people.” He himself, he said, had “always shrunk from the thought of putting large armies in Italy.” A major offensive there could easily bog down. “This might result in attrition for the United Nations and play into Germany’s hands.” At the least, the cost of occupying Italy must be examined before any commitment to an invasion could be made.

Meanwhile, Roosevelt said, preparations for the invasion of France “should begin at once.” After two years of talking, the American and British governments should settle on “a concrete plan to be carried out at a certain time.” A Channel crossing, the president said, should be “decided upon definitely as an operation for the spring of 1944.”

The principals adjourned to let their subordinates fight things out. George Marshall asserted that Italy would suck the life from a second front in France. Any operation “invariably created a vacuum in which it was essential to pour more and more means.” An invasion of Italy would commit the British and Americans through 1943 and “virtually all of 1944.” Such a commitment would have serious consequences. “It would mean a prolongation of the war in Europe, and thus a delay in the ultimate defeat of Japan, which the people of the United States would not tolerate.” Marshall put the matter as directly as he could: “We are now at the crossroads. If we are committed to the Mediterranean…it means a prolonged struggle and one which is not acceptable to the United States.”

Marshall’s navy colleague William Leahy, who held the post of chief of staff to the commander in chief, chimed in to assert that the Pacific could “not be neglected.” It was too vital to American strategy. “Immediate action” was necessary to keep China in the war. For this reason, if no other, “the war in Europe must be brought to a rapid decisive close at the earliest possible date.”

Leahy’s comment gave Alan Brooke an opening for a counterattack. The chief of the British imperial staff fully agreed that the war in Europe must be ended as swiftly as possible. This was why Italy was so essential. “Only by continuing in the Mediterranean can we achieve the maximum diversion of German forces from Russia,” Brooke said. Focusing on France would take time, giving the Germans a chance to catch their breath. No major operations would be possible “until 1945 or 1946,” far too late to do Russia any good.

Charles Portal, the chief of the British air staff, supported Brooke, declaring that a follow-through in Italy was essential to the success of a Channel crossing. Absent the relief provided by an Italian front, the Red Army might break. The Germans then would be able to send nearly all their troops west to oppose an invasion of France.

For day after day the two sides pounded each other with a verve that, some of the participants must have reflected, ought better have been applied against the Axis. They discussed certain other matters, for diversion almost as much as for anything else. They considered how many bombers might be employed from Britain against targets in Germany and what those targets ought to be. They argued how best to assist China and what balance of blockade, bombardment, and direct assault would be required for the ultimate defeat of Japan. But always they came back to the central question of Italy versus France.

They were still debating when Churchill took his case to the American people, through their elected representatives. Five hundred days had passed, the veteran orator elegantly reminded a joint session of the Senate and House, since he had last addressed them, with “every day a day in which we have toiled and suffered and dared shoulder to shoulder against the cruel and mighty enemy.” The fact that Congress had invited him back was a “high mark in my life,” Churchill modestly asserted. “It also shows that our partnership has not done so badly.”

The prime minister assured his listeners—who included, as before, a national radio audience—that Britain had as large a stake in defeating Japan as America had. “It may not have escaped your attention that I have brought with me to this country and to this conference Field Marshal Wavell and two other commanders in chief from India. Now, they have not traveled all this way simply to concern themselves about improving the health and happiness of the Mikado of Japan.” Churchill pointed out that Britain was already contributing directly to the destruction of Germany by the bombing raids it conducted in concert with the Americans. “Our air offensive is forcing Germany to withdraw an ever-larger proportion of its war-making capacity from the fighting fronts in order to provide protection against the air attacks.” He recalled the discouragement he had felt, during his last visit to Washington, when he learned of the fall of Tobruk. “That, indeed, was a dark and bitter hour for me.” But the bitterness was eased, almost at once, by gratitude. “I shall never forget the kindness, the delicacy, the true comradeship which our American friends showed me and those with me in such adversity.” The Sherman tanks President Roosevelt dispatched to Egypt had been crucial in the campaign to stem the German advance and ultimately reclaim North Africa.

Churchill didn’t engage the issue of Italy versus France, at least not directly. But his preference for Italy was well known, and in recounting the glorious victories thus far of American and British arms in the Mediterranean, he left little doubt in the minds of his congressional audience or his radio listeners as to where he thought the next blows should fall. “The enemy is still proud and powerful. He is hard to get at. He still possesses enormous armies, vast resources, and invaluable strategic territory. War is full of mysteries and surprises. A false step, a wrong direction of strategic effort, discord or lassitude among the Allies might soon give the common enemy the power to confront us with new and hideous facts.”

ROOSEVELT HAD ALWAYS known the end game would be the hardest part; he just didn’t know it would begin so soon. Churchill’s political eloquence proved more than a match for Marshall and Leahy’s military reasoning, and the invasion of Italy went forward. In July 1943 an American army under George Patton and a British army under Bernard Montgomery crossed from North Africa to Sicily. A week of fighting brought Patton to within sight of Palermo, the Sicilian capital, which he proposed to take. Patton’s immediate superior, British general Harold Alexander, initially authorized the attack but then reversed himself. Patton received the authorization order clearly enough but claimed that the countermand had been garbled in transmission; he plunged ahead and captured the city.

The fall of Palermo precipitated a crisis in the Italian government. Mussolini lost his nerve and then, astonishingly, his job. King Victor Emmanuel, until recently overawed by Mussolini but now fortified by growing restiveness among the dictator’s own circle, demanded his resignation. Mussolini meekly consented and was promptly arrested.

The news caught American leaders, like nearly everyone else, by surprise. “Mr. President, what is your reaction to the sudden change in the Italian government?” a reporter inquired of Roosevelt on the afternoon of July 27.

“Reaction?” Roosevelt answered, playing for time.

“Yes, sir.”

“I never have reactions. I am much too old.” The ensuing laughter bought him another moment.

“Did you have the information that Mussolini would make his exit?” a reporter asked.

“No. No.”

“Could you tell us whether there is likely to be any change in our unconditional surrender policy?”

“Oh, I think the secretary of state covered all that pretty well yesterday.” In fact Hull had dodged the question, refusing either to reiterate the policy or to say that it had changed.

“Mr. President, if there should be an unconditional surrender, do you think…”

“How did you start that sentence? What word?”

“Uh, oh…”

More laughter as Roosevelt reminded the group of his oldest rule: “I don’t think it’s useful for me to go into the details of hypothetical questions.”

It was especially not useful given that he himself didn’t know what the policy was. Unconditional surrender had been problematic from the start, seeming to handcuff American and British leaders. Yet this was precisely the point, for in tying Roosevelt and Churchill to the mast of the harshest possible anti-Axis policy, it reassured Stalin, who had ample reason—starting with the long history of Anglo-American anti-Bolshevism and continuing through the repeated postponement of the second front—to doubt the steadfastness of his capitalist allies. But the problems with the policy persisted. Did Washington and London really intend to make no distinction among Italians, in the present case, or among Germans, when their time came? Did the deposing of Mussolini make no difference whatsoever?

The Office of War Information, America’s propaganda arm, didn’t see that anything had changed. Robert Sherwood’s agency, reading—metaphorically and almost literally—from the old script, regarded the events in Rome as producing a distinction without a difference. The OWI lambasted Victor Emmanuel as “the moronic little king” and “the Fascist king” in its Voice of America broadcasts. The new head of the Italian government, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, was accounted “a high ranking Fascist.”

Reporters immediately inquired whether Roosevelt agreed. Were the OWI broadcasts authorized by the president and the State Department?

“Neither of us,” Roosevelt replied. “Nor by Bob Sherwood. And I think Bob Sherwood is raising hell about it now. It ought never to have been done.” The reporters scribbled down the president’s answer. “Only don’t quote me as saying ‘raising hell,’” he added.

“The first crack in the Axis has come,” Roosevelt told the nation the next day. “The criminal, corrupt, Fascist regime in Italy is going to pieces. The pirate philosophy of the Fascists and the Nazis cannot stand adversity.” Roosevelt noted, gloating, that Hitler had not been willing or able to save Mussolini. “In fact, Hitler’s troops in Sicily stole the Italians’ motor equipment, leaving Italian soldiers so stranded that they had no choice but to surrender.” Regarding terms of surrender, the president explained:

Our terms to Italy are still the same as our terms to Germany and Japan—“unconditional surrender.” We will have no truck with Fascism in any way, in any shape or manner. We will permit no vestige of Fascism to remain.

Yet this very statement, and those that followed it, hinted that things were neither as simple nor as clear-cut as that two-word slogan suggested. Unconditional surrender applied to the Fascists; did it apply to Italy as a whole? Maybe, maybe not. “Eventually Italy will reconstitute herself,” Roosevelt said. “It will be the people of Italy who will do that, choosing their own government in accordance with the basic democratic principles of liberty and equality.” The president declined to indicate how long “eventually” would be or to describe the state of government Italy would experience until then. He did declare that the Allies would treat the people of Italy—and the peoples of the other Axis powers, in their turn—fairly and humanely. “It is our determination to restore these conquered peoples to the dignity of human beings, masters of their own fate, entitled to freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.” Roosevelt refused to go beyond this generic reaffirmation of the Atlantic Charter. The present, he said, was not the time to discuss the details of a peace settlement. “Let us win the war first.”

IT WASN’T TOO soon for Americans to discuss among themselves their own postwar future. The sudden collapse of Mussolini’s regime, which had ruled Italy for two decades, suggested that fascism might be more brittle than it seemed from the outside and that the war might end more rapidly than anyone had imagined. Roosevelt had put off asking what American society would look like after the war, thinking there was plenty of time for that. Now he offered some hints.

The Four Freedoms, of course, should apply to Americans as well as to people in other countries, and while freedom of speech and freedom of religion were secure enough, freedom from want and freedom from fear required work. All Americans must enjoy these freedoms, Roosevelt said. But the task of guaranteeing them might well begin with assurances to the millions of soldiers, sailors, and airmen who would be demobilized at the conclusion of the fighting. They were making the greatest sacrifice; they deserved the greatest attention.

The president proposed what amounted to a GI bill of rights. First on his list was a mustering-out bonus large enough to cover living expenses for a reasonable period between discharge from the military and the assuming of civilian jobs. Second, unemployment insurance for those unable to find jobs. Third, government funding for further education. Fourth, credit with Social Security for the time spent in the military. Fifth, medical care and rehabilitation for those injured in the service. Sixth, pensions for disabled veterans.

Roosevelt realized he was walking a narrow line, even apart from the ambition and cost of his demobilization program. Talking about policies to be implemented after the war risked distracting Americans from the job at hand. “We still have to knock out Hitler and his gang, and Tojo and his gang,” he declared. “We still have to defeat Hitler and Tojo on their own home grounds.” If anything, the recent developments should stimulate Americans to greater efforts than ever. “We must pour into this war the entire strength and intelligence and will power of the United States,” he concluded. “We shall not settle for less than total victory.”

EISENHOWER GROANED at Roosevelt’s public reaffirmation of unconditional surrender. The policy might make sense to the politicians, but it rendered the army’s job more difficult—and more costly in terms of casualties. Eisenhower knew from the Ultra intercepts that Hitler had responded to Mussolini’s fall by ordering German troops to Italy. Nazi forces were currently racing from France and Austria into northern Italy toward Rome. Eisenhower hoped to persuade the Italians to turn against the Germans, giving him half a chance to keep the capital from falling into Hitler’s hands. But they had to be offered something in exchange for switching sides—some assurance, for example, that occupation by the Allies would be less onerous than occupation by the Germans. If Roosevelt was to be believed, such assurance was precisely what he was forbidden to offer. Unconditional surrender—nothing less.

Yet Eisenhower had reason to think Roosevelt was not to be believed. Two days after Roosevelt addressed the nation, the president consulted Churchill on the prospects for Italy. “It seems highly probable that the fall of Mussolini will involve the overthrow of the Fascist regime and that the new government of the King and Badoglio will seek to negotiate a separate arrangement with the Allies for an armistice,” Roosevelt wrote. “Should this prove to be the case, it will be necessary for us to make up our minds first of all upon what we want, and secondly upon the measures and conditions required to gain it for us.” The overriding goal, as always, was “the destruction of Hitler and Hitlerism.” Every advantage that could be wrung out of Italy toward this goal should be exploited. A first such advantage would be control of Italian territory and transportation facilities, for use against the Germans. A second would be control, ideally by surrender, of the Italian fleet. “The surrender of the fleet will liberate powerful British naval forces for service in the Indian Ocean against Japan and will be most agreeable to the United States,” Roosevelt said. A third advantage would be the cooperation of the Italian army in fighting the Nazis. How best to attain these advantages was the question. “In our struggle with Hitler and the German army we cannot afford to deny ourselves any assistance that will kill Germans,” Roosevelt told Churchill. “The fury of the Italian population may now be turned against the German intruders who have, as they will feel, brought these miseries upon Italy and then come so scantily and grudgingly to her aid…. We should stimulate this process.”

Churchill worried that Roosevelt was going soft. The prime minister liked the policy of unconditional surrender and thought he and the president ought to stick to it. Eisenhower should sit tight and wait for the Italians to come to him. “It is for their responsible government to ask formally for an armistice on the basis of our principle of unconditional surrender,” Churchill said. Eisenhower should not try to make the Italians’ fate appear any less harsh than it truly was. “There are great dangers in trying to dish this sort of dose up with jam for the patient.” Yet Churchill did accept one Roosevelt recommendation: that Eisenhower refrain from broadcasting any surrender demands. “They would certainly shock the Italian people and would give the Germans full information on which to act.”

Roosevelt responded with a poke where he knew Churchill was sensitive. “I told the press today that we have to treat with any person or persons in Italy who can give us, first, disarmament and, second, assurance against chaos,” he wrote the prime minister. “I think also that you and I after an armistice comes could say something about self-determination in Italy at the proper time.”

The reference to self-determination got Churchill’s attention, as Roosevelt knew it would. The prime minister replied that he didn’t want the president to get the wrong impression regarding an Italian surrender. “My position is that once Mussolini and the Fascists are gone, I will deal with any Italian authority which can deliver the goods,” Churchill wrote. “We have no right to lay undue burdens on our troops.” Perhaps some concessions could be offered; quite possibly they would never have to be fulfilled. “It may well be that after the armistice terms have been accepted, both the King and Badoglio will sink under the odium of surrender and that the Crown Prince and a new Prime Minister may be chosen.” But as for self-determination: “I should deprecate any pronouncement about self-determination at the present time, beyond what is implicit in the Atlantic Charter.” The wrong people might get ideas. “We must be careful not to throw everything into the melting pot.”

While Roosevelt and Churchill debated the terms of surrender, their military and diplomatic advisers did the same. The whole process took weeks—which Eisenhower couldn’t easily spare. The Allied commander gnashed his teeth and tore what little hair he had left. “Poor Eisenhower is getting pretty harassed,” Harold Macmillan, Churchill’s political liaison to Eisenhower, remarked. Eisenhower himself longed for the era of sailing ships, when a general in the field had no choice but to act on his own judgment. “In my youthful days I used to read about commanders of armies and envied them what I supposed to be a great freedom in action and decision,” he wrote his wife, Mamie. “What a notion!! The demands upon me that must be met make me a slave rather than a master.”

Eisenhower grew even more upset when the dithering among the politicians allowed the Germans to get almost to Rome. Badoglio surrendered unconditionally in public, but with private assurances from Eisenhower—tacitly authorized by Roosevelt and Churchill—that leniency would be granted in proportion to Italy’s help against the Germans. Eisenhower thereupon broadcast a radio message urging Italy’s soldiers to redirect their fire against the Germans.

Roosevelt and Churchill offered similar encouragement from afar. “Now is the time for every Italian to strike his blow,” the president and prime minister declared jointly on September 10.

The liberating armies of the Western world are coming to your rescue. We have very strong forces and are entering at many points. The German terror in Italy will not last long…. Strike hard and strike home. Have faith in your future. All will come well.

But all did not come well. The delay allowed the Germans to beat the Americans to Rome. The Germans seized the city, compelling Victor Emmanuel and Badoglio to flee. The prime minister ordered Italy’s troops to turn against the Germans, but by the time most of the soldiers got the word, they had been disarmed by the Germans or had disarmed themselves—dropping their guns and packs, shedding their uniforms, and going home.

Eisenhower was angry and disappointed. “We are in for some very tough fighting,” he warned the Combined Chiefs.

51.

NOTHING REVOLUTIONIZES THE ART OF WAR LIKE WAR ITSELF. MILITARY technology changes slowly during peacetime, as arms makers improve on old designs and experiment with new ones. But until the shells start flying, no one really knows which of the improvements and experiments will stick. Weapons that seemed marginal take center stage; old standbys become obsolete overnight.

The U.S.S. Iowa wasn’t exactly obsolete in the autumn of 1943, but it contributed far less to America’s force projection than its designers had thought it would. When the Iowa’s keel was laid in June 1940, battleships were still the state of the naval art, and the Iowa was built to be the class of America’s battleships. It was nearly nine hundred feet long, with a beam of more than a hundred feet. It boasted nine acres of deck and platform space, and 157 guns, including a main battery of nine 16-inchers. It had two catapults for launching planes, engines that developed over 200,000 horsepower, and a maximum speed of thirty-three knots.

But even before the Iowa was commissioned in February 1943, naval combat had passed the battlewagons by. Aircraft carriers were the wave of the present and future, capable of standing off much farther than the battleships and of inflicting much greater damage. The Iowa was relegated to a supporting role. Its principal mission during the rest of the war would be to shield American carriers in the Pacific from enemy counterattack.

Yet before it reached the Pacific, it had to cruise to North Africa. Roosevelt’s journey to Casablanca in 1942 had cured him of the transatlantic air itch, and when he decided in the autumn of the following year to re-inspect the Mediterranean war zone, he commandeered the Iowa. The great ship handled the stormy Atlantic with aplomb. “Heavy following seas were running now, but the Iowa rode them comfortably,” the navy lieutenant keeping the log of the president’s journey recorded on the second day out. But even the Iowa had to take precautions. “The seas continued to increase throughout the afternoon, and for a while it was necessary to keep all hands off the top side. One man, R. Uriate (Seaman second class, U.S.N.), suffered slight bruises and a big scare when a wave coming over the main deck caught him and knocked him against a heavy object.”

The Iowa’s skipper, Captain John McCrea, was pleased to show off his vessel’s capabilities, especially to such an appreciative observer as Roosevelt. An air defense exercise revealed how the navy had adapted to modern tactics of aerial assault. “Live ammunition was fired from a number of units of the ship’s anti-aircraft battery (5-inch, 40 mm. and 20 mm. guns) to demonstrate for the Commander-in-Chief what a veritable curtain of fire a ship of this type can offer as a ‘greeting’ for enemy planes bent on attacking,” the log keeper explained.

Another part of the exercise hadn’t been scripted. “During the lull after one round of the series of firings, a moment of extreme tension was brought on by an unexpected explosion, of an underwater nature, in the vicinity of the ship. This explosion was followed by the terse announcement, ‘This is not a drill.’” All aboard naturally assumed that a torpedo had exploded, especially as the Iowa had sharply altered course just moments before. Indeed a torpedo had detonated, but it was friendly rather than enemy fire, for whatever small comfort that was worth. One of the destroyers serving as the Iowa’s anti-sub-marine screen had accidentally fired a torpedo in the Iowa’s direction. The destroyer’s captain subsequently explained the mishap as caused by a short circuit in the firing mechanism, probably the result of moisture from the rough seas. In any event, the torpedo’s wake was spotted by one of the Iowa’s lookouts, who warned the bridge, initiating the evasive maneuver that left the torpedo behind. “Had that torpedo hit the Iowa in the right spot, with her passenger list of distinguished statesmen, military, naval, and aerial strategists and planners, it could have had untold effect on the outcome of the war and the destiny of our country,” the log keeper mused.

Ernest King thought so, too. The gruff navy chief, who was among the distinguished near casualties, was all for sacking the destroyer’s captain on the spot. But Roosevelt intervened, explaining that the embarrassment of almost killing several layers of his commanders was punishment enough.

Roosevelt found the voyage invigorating. He interspersed presidential business—meeting with his military and naval advisers, discussing politics and diplomacy with Hopkins, tending to the correspondence that followed him via radio from Washington—with the pleasure of watching the navy go about its business. Whenever he could he simply sat on deck. “The President spent more than an hour on the flag bridge during the afternoon, seemingly enjoying the squally weather,” the lieutenant recorded.

The closer they got to Africa, the tighter the security drew. An escort aircraft carrier, the Santee, provided air cover, with fighter planes scouring the skies around the president’s ship. The Iowa stopped transmitting Roosevelt’s radio messages. Written versions were physically transferred to another vessel and broadcast from many miles away, lest the Germans home in on the radio signals. As the task group approached the Strait of Gibraltar, all ships went to general quarters in readiness for attack. They passed the strait under cover of darkness on the night of November 19, and the Iowa anchored just west of Oran the next morning. “Total distance, Hampton Roads, Virginia, to Oran, Algeria, via our route, 3806 miles.”

ROOSEVELT WAS MET at Oran by Eisenhower and several less senior officers, including Elliott Roosevelt and Franklin Jr. Eisenhower and Franklin Jr. joined Roosevelt for the 650-mile flight to Tunis; Elliott flew in another plane. The president observed the wrecks of the large number of German aircraft that still littered the Tunisian countryside, and he toured the ruins of ancient Carthage. He inspected Elliott’s photo reconnaissance squadron, which comprised six thousand American, British, and French fliers and technicians. The next day he visited the battlefields around Tunis, and Eisenhower supplied details of the fighting there. Burned-out American and German tanks attested to the bitterness of the struggle, as did the one American and several German military cemeteries. A camel caravan sauntered by in the distance, the drivers and animals seemingly oblivious to the most recent intrusion on their ancient lifestyle.

To talk with Eisenhower and observe the battle sites was the smaller part of Roosevelt’s purpose in returning to Africa. The larger part was to meet a man he had been wrestling with for three years but never encountered personally. Chiang Kai-shek had less of a messiah complex than Charles de Gaulle, perhaps because messiahs have never figured so centrally in Chinese culture as in the cultures of the West. But Chiang was fully as convinced as de Gaulle that he embodied his country, and his actual command of a government and an army—as opposed to de Gaulle’s dreams of such command—tended to corroborate his conviction. Yet it was only a tendency, and opinions differed as to the degree and quality of Chiang’s command, not to mention the character and credibility of the Chinese government and the army.

Photo Insert Two

With Hoover en route to the Capitol

With Franklin Jr. and Sara, 1933

With Hopkins

At the wheel at Hyde Park

War against Japan

With Churchill in Washington, December 1941

The handshake: Giraud and de Gaulle

At Casablanca with Hopkins (back left), Harriman (back right), Marshall (front left), and King (front right)

With Stalin at Teheran

With Eisenhower, who has just been informed he will command the invasion of France

With MacArthur, Nimitz, and Leahy in Hawaii

One of Yalta’s lighter moments

At Hyde Park holding Fala and comforting a young friend

With Eleanor at Hyde Park

In his element

Warm Springs, April 11, 1945

Roosevelt’s liaison to Chiang was General Joseph Stilwell, who despised Chiang. “Vinegar Joe” turned violently acidic in describing the generalissimo, as Chiang styled himself. “Peanut” was Stilwell’s private name for Chiang, and the appellation referred only partly to the shape of his shaved head. (Stilwell was mildly more respectful of Roosevelt, whom he called “Frank” in his diary.) Stilwell couldn’t decide whether Chiang was more hopeless as a general or as a president. “Peanut is really no dictator,” Stilwell remarked with regret. “He issues an order. Everybody bows and says ‘sure.’ But nobody does anything. He knows all about the smuggling and the rottenness, but he hasn’t the power to cure it…. Opium traffic in Yunnan still enormous. Guarded by soldiers. Big stocks of hoarded gas, cloth, and other commodities…. The Chinese Red Cross is a racket. Stealing and sale of medicines is rampant…. Malnutrition and sickness is ruining the army; the higher-ups steal the soldiers’ food. A pretty picture.”

In fairness to Chiang, the task before him was all but impossible. Beset by the Japanese for a dozen years, beleaguered by indigenous Communists for even longer, Chiang fought a war on two fronts. This was what outraged Stilwell, who argued that Chiang and Mao Zedong, the Communist leader, should bury the hatchet for the duration of the war against Japan. Neither was persuaded; with four thousand years of Chinese history behind them, each took the long view of China’s predicament. Japan was a problem of the moment, soon to be vanquished—by the United States if not by the Chinese. The real prize was control of the Chinese government.

Roosevelt’s time frame didn’t stretch thousands of years, but it did extend into the future, particularly with respect to China. The president flew from Tunis to Cairo, where he met with Chiang and Churchill. The British prime minister thought Roosevelt asked too much of the Chinese leader, and of China. “I was impressed by his calm, reserved, and efficient personality,” Churchill afterward wrote of Chiang. But he added that he “did not in those days share in the excessive estimates of Chiang Kai-shek’s power or of the future helpfulness of China.”

Roosevelt refused to be put off. As he had suggested to Elliott at Casablanca, China was going to be America’s postwar counterweight to Russia—and perhaps to Britain as well. At Cairo, Roosevelt affirmed China’s membership in what was coming to be called the Big Four. A dinner meeting in Roosevelt’s borrowed villa brought the president and Hopkins together with Chiang and Madame Chiang, the fascinating former Soong May-ling. Madame Chiang was one of three Soong sisters, daughters of an American-educated Methodist minister-entrepreneur and a beautiful, ambitious mother. The eldest of the three girls, Soong Ai-ling, was known as “the one who loves money” she married the richest man in China. The middle girl, Soong Ching-ling, called “the one who loves China,” married Sun Yat-sen, the first president of the Republic of China. The youngest, Soong May-ling, “the one who loves power,” married Chiang Kai-shek. In the bargain she persuaded Chiang to give up Buddhism for Christianity. Madame Chiang’s mastery of English, which she had perfected at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, her beauty, which seemingly increased as she grew older, and her political astuteness, which hardly ever faltered, made her a favorite among American legislators and a formidable presence in Washington. Roosevelt never refused her a White House interview, and he had great difficulty refusing her requests on behalf of her husband.

At the Cairo dinner Chiang and Madame Chiang got Roosevelt to reiterate his support for China’s status as the postwar peer of America, Russia, and Britain. The Chinese minutes of the meeting—apparently the only record made—explained that “President Roosevelt expressed his view that China should take her place as one of the Big Four and participate on an equal footing in the machinery of the Big Four group and in all its decisions.” Chiang responded that China would gladly do so.

Roosevelt went on to inquire of Chiang’s opinions regarding postwar Japan. Ought the Japanese to be allowed to retain the institution of the emperor? Chiang answered that this question should be left to the Japanese to decide. Roosevelt asserted—again according to the Chinese minutes—that “China should play the leading role in the post-war military occupation of Japan.” Chiang again demurred, this time saying that China lacked the where-withal for such an occupation. “The task should be carried out under the leadership of the United States…. China could participate in the task in a supporting capacity should it prove necessary.”

ROOSEVELT DELIBERATELY kept his Cairo visit short, not wishing to give Stalin additional reason for thinking he and Churchill—and perhaps Chiang—were colluding against Russia. But the visit did include Thanksgiving Day, and the president hosted a dinner for Churchill and his daughter Sarah, who served as her father’s personal assistant; for Elliott Roosevelt, who had rejoined his father in a temporary similar capacity; for Robert Hopkins, who had likewise joined his father; and for several others. “Let us make it a family affair,” Roosevelt decreed, laughing.

Churchill afterward described the host’s bravura performance.

Two enormous turkeys were brought in with all ceremony. The President, propped up high in his chair, carved for all with masterly, indefatigable skill. As we were above twenty, this took a long time, and those who were helped first had finished before the President had cut anything for himself. As I watched the huge platefuls he distributed to the company I feared that he might be left with nothing at all. But he had calculated to a nicety, and I was relieved, when at last the two skeletons were removed, to see him set about his own share. Harry, who had noted my anxiety, said, “We have ample reserves.”

Toasts were offered, speeches made. After dinner the group adjourned to the villa’s main room, where several of the official meetings had been held. The tables, now empty of papers, were pushed against the walls. A phonograph played dance music. Sarah Churchill, the only woman present, was on her feet all night. “She had her work cut out,” her father said, “and so I danced with ‘Pa’ Watson, Roosevelt’s trusted old friend and aide, to the delight of his chief, who watched us from the sofa.” Churchill savored the memory. “For a couple of hours we cast care aside. I had never seen the President more gay.”

THE HARD WORK began in Teheran. Roosevelt wouldn’t have gone clear to Cairo to meet Chiang, important though he intended for China to be. Cairo was a stop on the way to Teheran, where the most important conference of the war thus far would take place. Stalin had grudgingly agreed to leave the Soviet Union, but only for adjacent Iran. Roosevelt and Churchill, with consciences uneasy over their failure to provide a second front, humored the Soviet leader’s comparative immobility.

For several hours out of Cairo, Roosevelt’s Sacred Cow seemed a flying carpet. The plane winged east, crossing the Suez Canal at Ismailia before the pilot turned north to give the president a view of what most Americans still called the Holy Land and the inhabitants Palestine. The plane circled Jerusalem, its roofs shining in the morning sun. Across the desert to Mesopotamia—Iraq—they flew, traversing the Euphrates and Tigris rivers and spotting Baghdad off to the south. The pilot found the highway that ran from Abadan to Teheran. Paralleling the road was the railroad to Russia. “From the air we sighted train loads and motor convoys loaded with U.S. Lend-Lease supplies, bound from the Persian Gulf port of Basra to Russia,” Roosevelt’s log keeper recorded. The fair weather and clear skies allowed the pilot to follow the road through the mountain passes rather than climb over the peaks. The plane never exceeded eight thousand feet in altitude, almost a mile below some of the mountain tops.

Even before the Sacred Cow landed in Teheran, the skirmishing for position at the conference had begun. Stalin told Averell Harriman of his worry that the city was too dangerous for the kind of commuting that would be required between the American legation, where President Roosevelt presumably would stay, and the Russian embassy, where he, Stalin, would be. Teheran had been under German control until only a few months previous, and the city almost certainly continued to hide Nazi agents and sympathizers, who might take advantage of any assassination opportunity. Stalin explained that the Russian embassy compound was large and commodious; he would be happy for President Roosevelt to stay there. No such provision was necessary for Prime Minister Churchill, as the British legation almost adjoined the Soviet embassy, and in any event the British had a much larger presence in Teheran than the Americans did.

Roosevelt accepted Stalin’s offer, to the dismay of Roosevelt’s security team. The Soviet embassy naturally crawled with Soviet agents, most of whom apparently carried weapons under their coats. Robert Sherwood remembered the Teheran conference as a “nervous time” for Mike Reilly and his Secret Service men, “who were trained to suspect everybody and who did not like to admit into the President’s presence anyone who was armed with as much as a gold toothpick.”

Churchill didn’t like Roosevelt’s decision either, but he took it with good grace, to the point of claiming partial credit. By Churchill’s account, Soviet foreign minister Molotov had asserted that Soviet intelligence had uncovered an active plot to assassinate one or more of the Allied triumvirate. “If anything like that were to happen,” Molotov said, “it could produce a most unfortunate impression.” Speaking for himself, Churchill later wrote: “This could not be denied. I strongly supported Molotov in his appeals to the President to move forthwith inside the Soviet Embassy…. We prevailed upon Mr. Roosevelt to take this good advice, and next afternoon he moved with his whole staff.” If the event in fact unfolded as Churchill remembered, it almost certainly said less about Churchill’s powers of persuasion than about Roosevelt’s ability to act as though he needed persuading.

ROOSEVELT UNSETTLED Churchill a bit more by arranging for his first meeting at Teheran to be with Stalin, alone except for their translators. Roosevelt assumed that the Russians had planted listening devices in the room, but since he was speaking to Stalin he wasn’t worried. He supposed the British had not been able to bug the room.

“I am glad to see you,” Roosevelt said. “I have tried a long time to bring this about.”

Stalin took responsibility for the delay, politely but in a manner that reminded Roosevelt of the continuing difference between their two countries with respect to Germany. Stalin said he had been “very occupied because of military matters.”

Stalin’s style during the Teheran conference contrasted sharply with his practice at home. At least so it seemed to Charles Bohlen, Roosevelt’s translator, who had been stationed in Moscow before the war. Bohlen had studied Stalin closely, and he considered him in top form at Teheran. “I reflected on Stalin’s fluency and his lack of hesitation in choosing his words,” Bohlen recalled.

There was a kind of texture to his Russian that might be called an accent. His Georgian accent was not particularly noticeable to my ear, although I was subsequently told that some cultured Russians found it irritating. Stalin also seemed to me to be considerate of his interpreter and to be meticulous in observing the length of time that he spoke. He spoke quietly, never raised his voice, and frequently used expressions designed to indicate a certain humbleness of spirit…. In Teheran, Stalin used phrases like “in my opinion,” “I could be wrong, but I think,” and “I believe,” with no hint of the arbitrary dictator. I noticed him break from this mold only once, when I approached him from behind with a request from Roosevelt. I had interfered with his study of the Russian text of the final communiqué, and he was tired. Without turning, he snapped over his shoulder, “For God’s sake, allow us to finish this work.” Then he turned and saw that the interruption came not from a Russian but from an emissary of the President of the United States. This was the only time I ever saw Stalin embarrassed.

In response to Stalin’s remark about being occupied militarily, Roosevelt inquired about the conditions on the battlefront. Stalin said things were not going well. The Red Army had recently lost an important town and was about to lose a crucial railway center. The Germans were bringing up fresh divisions and were increasing the pressure at several points.

But did the initiative not remain with the Russian army? asked Roosevelt.

Stalin said it did, overall. Yet at the moment his troops were unable to mount significant offensive operations, except in the Ukraine.

Roosevelt said he wished it were in his power to compel the removal of thirty or forty German divisions from the Soviet front. This was a principal aim of the United States and Britain, he said, and it would be a subject of conversation in the days to come. But for the moment he wanted to talk about the postwar settlement. He related that he had had an “interesting conversation” with Chiang Kai-shek in Cairo regarding the future of China.

Stalin frowned. “The Chinese have fought very badly,” he said. He put the blame on Chiang and his associates, saying the dismal performance of the troops was “the fault of the Chinese leaders.”

Roosevelt didn’t defend Chiang at this point. Instead he explained how the United States proposed to strengthen China with additional supplies. He let the conversation turn to France, about which Stalin expressed equally vigorous views. General de Gaulle, Stalin said, was “very unreal” in his activities. He acted as though he commanded a great state, when in fact he commanded nothing at all.

Roosevelt agreed. Yet he implied that de Gaulle or someone like him would be essential to reconstructing France after the war. “In the future,” the president said, “no Frenchman over forty, and particularly no Frenchman who had ever taken part in the present French government, should be allowed to return to a government position.” Roosevelt went on to say that while Churchill believed that France must quickly be reconstructed as a strong nation, he disagreed. “Many years of honest labor will be necessary before France is re-established,” he said. “The first necessity for the French, not only for the government but for the people as well, is to become honest citizens.”

Stalin suggested that France ought not to be allowed to reclaim its colonial empire. No Allied blood, for example, should be spilled to restore French rule in Indochina.

Roosevelt said he agreed “one hundred percent.” After a century of French rule, the inhabitants of Indochina were worse off than they had been when the French arrived. Roosevelt took this opportunity to re-inject Chiang and China into the conversation. Chiang had said at Cairo that the Indochinese weren’t ready for independence. Roosevelt explained that he had replied that perhaps an international trusteeship of some sort could be established, leading to independence within twenty or thirty years.

Stalin said he concurred completely.

Roosevelt extrapolated from Indochina to India, which must receive its independence after the war as well. But he added, by way of warning, that it would “be better not to discuss the question of India with Mr. Churchill.”

Stalin agreed that India was a “sore spot” with the British.

Roosevelt said he would like to discuss India further, at a more convenient time. He added in passing that he thought the solution to India’s social and economic problems would be reform from the bottom, “somewhat on the Soviet line.”

Stalin said the Indian question was complicated by the caste structure of the country. He added, with no apparent enthusiasm: “Reform from the bottom would mean revolution.”

The conversation lasted an hour. The president and the marshal were informed that Churchill had arrived. As they went out to meet the prime minister, Roosevelt told Stalin he had enjoyed their informal chat and hoped to repeat it.

IN CONTRAST TO the Roosevelt-Stalin tête-à-tête, the three-sided plenary that followed was a full-dress, fully staffed affair. A round table had been brought in, lest a table with straight sides and sharp corners somehow connote precedence among the three contingents. Twelve men sat around the table: Roosevelt, Hopkins, Harriman, and Bohlen for the Americans; Churchill, Anthony Eden, cabinet deputy secretary Lord Ismay, and interpreter Arthur Birse for the British; Stalin, Molotov, Defense Commissar Klimenti Voroshilov, and interpreter V. N. Pavlov for the Russians. George Marshall would have joined Roosevelt, displacing Harriman, but, to the general’s lasting chagrin, he misunderstood the schedule and was out touring Teheran while the others gathered.

By common consent, Roosevelt took charge of this first meeting. He strove from the outset to keep it from growing too ponderous. He said that as the youngest of the three present, he ventured to welcome his elders. He added, “We are sitting around this table for the first time as a family, with the one object of winning the war.” He explained to Stalin that it had been his and Churchill’s practice, at their previous meetings, to be perfectly frank and confidential—“to publish nothing but to speak our minds very freely.” He hoped the same practice would apply now. He said the general staffs of the three countries could handle most of the military discussions. “Marshal Stalin, the Prime Minister, and I have many things to discuss pertaining to conditions after the war.”

He turned to Churchill, who remarked that the three of them represented “the greatest concentration of power the world has ever seen.” Churchill continued: “In our hands here is the possible certainty of shortening the war, the much greater certainty of victories, but the absolute certainty that we hold the happy future of mankind.” The prime minister expressed the hope that they might prove themselves worthy of “this God-given opportunity.”

Roosevelt nodded, then looked to Stalin. “Perhaps our host would like to say a few words,” the president said.

“I take pleasure in welcoming those present,” Stalin responded. “I think that history will show that this opportunity has been of tremendous importance. I think the great opportunity which we have and the power which our people have invested in us can be used to take full advantage within the frame of our potential collaboration.” He paused to let the translator catch up. “Now let us get down to business,” he said.

Roosevelt obliged. He offered a survey of the war and its meaning, starting with the Pacific and with China. He explained that American strategy toward Japan was based, for the present at least, on the principle of attrition: of destroying more Japanese ships and planes than the Japanese could replace. It was essential to this strategy that China continue to tie down the largest part of Japanese resources. “We must definitely keep China actively in the war,” he said.

From the Pacific the president moved to Europe. He merely alluded to the delays in opening a second front before reaffirming that the cross-Channel invasion would occur in the late spring of 1944. Weather would prevent anything earlier. “The Channel is such a disagreeable body of water,” Roosevelt said, before adding, “No matter how unpleasant that body might be, however, we still want to get across it.” (Churchill couldn’t help interrupting: “We were very glad it was an unpleasant body of water at one time.”)

The projected timetable raised the question of what America and Britain could do in the meantime to ease the burden on the Soviet Union—and it provoked the principal disagreement of the afternoon. Churchill, as always, argued for an operation in the Mediterranean. The British and Americans might push from Rome into the Po Valley, he said, or even strike at Germany from Italy. Perhaps complementarily, a thrust toward the Turkish Straits and the Black Sea would open up new possibilities for provisioning the Soviet Union.

Stalin wasn’t buying. He may have suspected the Anglo-Americans of trying to renege again on their second-front promise, or he may have imagined that Churchill was seeking a foothold in Turkey to use against Russia after the war. Either way, he rejected Churchill’s plan. He said it would be wrong “to scatter the British and American forces.” France was the primary target for their armies, and if they needed something to do while they waited for the Channel to calm, they could attack southern France. “This would be a much better operation than to scatter forces in several areas distant from each other.”

Roosevelt let Churchill and Stalin joust a bit before entering the debate on Stalin’s side. The marshal’s proposal regarding southern France was of “considerable interest,” the president said. He thought the military planners should examine it carefully.

Stalin, encouraged, said that the Soviet experience demonstrated the value of launching a major offensive from two directions at once. “The Red Army usually attacks from two directions, forcing the enemy to move his reserves from one front to the other. As the two offensives converge, the power of the whole offensive increases. Such would be the case in simultaneous operations from southern and northern France.”

Churchill again objected, but Roosevelt, ignoring him, asserted that the military staffs should set to work at once on the subject of an attack on southern France to precede or accompany the cross-Channel invasion.

THE GROUP BROKE long enough to reconvene for dinner. The meal included an “unbelievable quantity of food,” according to Bohlen, who had endured many such repasts in Moscow. Cold hors d’oeuvres preceded hot borscht, accompanied by salads, fruits, compotes, various meats, fish, an assortment of wines, and gallons of vodka. Bohlen noticed that Stalin drank very little vodka, preferring wine—“which is understandable when it is remembered that he was born in Georgia, a wine-producing area.”

The table talk focused on the future of Europe. Stalin declared that the ruling class of France was “rotten to the core” and deserved to be punished for its collaboration with the Nazis. Even now, he said, the French were actively aiding the Germans. Consequently it would be “not only unjust but dangerous” to rely on France for postwar security. And France should be stripped of its colonial possessions.

Churchill answered that the marshal did the French a disservice. France was a defeated country, he said, and had suffered grievously under the occupation.

Stalin dismissed Churchill’s characterization with a sneer. The French hadn’t been defeated, he said. They “opened the front” to the German armies. He cited the views of the Vichy ambassador in Moscow as typical of the French ruling classes. The ambassador repeatedly stated that the future of France lay with Nazi Germany and not with Britain or America.

Churchill countered that he could not conceive of a civilized world in which a “flourishing and lively France” did not play a central part.

Stalin waved his hand contemptuously. France was a “charming and pleasant country,” he said, but it could not be allowed to play any important role in international affairs after the war.

Roosevelt shifted the subject to postwar Germany. The president offered that the entire Nazi experience must be stricken from German minds. A start might be made by eliminating the word reich from the German vocabulary.

Stalin said the president didn’t go far enough. The problem wasn’t the Nazis but the Germans. They followed the orders of whatever group ruled in Berlin, without questioning the nature of the orders or the legitimacy of those who gave them. Stalin said that he personally had interrogated German prisoners and asked why they had butchered innocent women and children. They had answered simply that they had done what they had been ordered to do. Stalin cited another, earlier example from his own experience. In 1907 he had attended an important meeting of workers in Leipzig. Two hundred German delegates failed to appear because the railroad clerk who was supposed to punch their train tickets didn’t show up for work and the German delegates refused to leave the station without the required punch. This mentality of blind obedience to authority, Stalin said, could not be eradicated. Accordingly, German authority—and German power—must be forever constrained. “The Reich itself must be rendered impotent ever again to plunge the world into war.” Without getting specific, Stalin recommended a permanent occupation of Germany. “Unless the victorious Allies retain in our hands the strategic positions necessary to prevent a recrudescence of German militarism, we will have failed in our duty.”

Stalin seemed to give something back in another comment. He questioned the prudence of unconditional surrender as a stated policy toward Germany. He accepted the principle as military strategy but found it politically wanting. Anti-Hitler Germans, if any remained, would be unlikely to act against the Nazi regime in the face of such an ominously vague formulation. Better, Stalin said, for the Allies to declare what terms they would require at war’s end. By making the future concrete, even if unappealing, they would “hasten the day of German capitulation.”

ROOSEVELT’S PART in the dinner ended suddenly. The president was talking about the Baltic Sea and the need for outside countries to have access to it. Bohlen mistranslated and led Stalin to think the president was demanding access to the Baltic republics, which Moscow had annexed to the Soviet Union at the start of the war. The marshal bristled, but the misunderstanding was corrected and the moment passed. Bohlen recalled what happened next:

Roosevelt was about to say something else when suddenly, in the flick of an eye, he turned green and great drops of sweat began to bead off his face; he put a shaky hand to his forehead. We were all caught by surprise. The President had made no complaint, and none of us had detected any sign of discomfort.

Hopkins, moving quickly, directed that Roosevelt be taken to his room, where Ross McIntire, the navy physician who traveled with the president, examined him. McIntire pronounced the problem to be indigestion.

Roosevelt remained in his room, not returning to dinner. By the next morning he seemed fine. Everyone blamed the borscht, and almost no one thought any more of the incident.

THE GERMAN QUESTION recurred throughout the Teheran talks, and it afforded Roosevelt additional opportunity to improve his relationship with Stalin. Roosevelt’s move was instinctive, reflecting the sensitivity he had always displayed in social settings, but it was also deliberate, as he explained to Frances Perkins after the fact. “You know, the Russians are interesting people,” he said, in a recollection that smudged some details but captured the essence of the Teheran meeting.

For the first three days I made absolutely no progress. I couldn’t get any personal connection with Stalin, although I had done everything he asked me to do. I had stayed at his Embassy, gone to his dinners, been introduced to his ministers and generals. He was correct, stiff, solemn, not smiling, nothing human to get hold of. I felt pretty discouraged. If it was all going to be official paper work, there was no sense in my having made this long journey which the Russians had wanted. They couldn’t come to America or any place in Europe for it. I had come there to accommodate Stalin. I felt pretty discouraged because I thought I was making no personal headway. What we were doing could have been done by the foreign ministers.

I thought it over all night and made up my mind I had to do something desperate. I couldn’t stay in Teheran forever. I had to cut through this icy surface so that later I could talk by telephone or letter in a personal way. I had scarcely seen Churchill alone during the conference. I had a feeling that the Russians did not feel right about seeing us conferring together in a language which we understood and they didn’t.

On my way to the conference room that morning we caught up with Winston and I had just a moment to say to him, “Winston, I hope you won’t be sore at me for what I am going to do.” Winston just shifted his cigar and grunted. I must say he behaved very decently afterward.

I began almost as soon as we got into the conference room. I talked privately with Stalin. I didn’t say anything that I hadn’t said before, but it appeared quite chummy and confidential, enough so that the other Russians joined us to listen.

Still no smile.

Then I said, lifting my hand up to cover a whisper—which of course had to be interpreted—“Winston is cranky this morning. He got up on the wrong side of the bed.”

A vague smile passed over Stalin’s eyes, and I decided I was on the right track. As soon as I sat down at the conference table, I began to tease Churchill about his Britishness, about John Bull, about his cigars, about his habits. It began to register with Stalin. Winston got red and scowled, and the more he did so, the more Stalin smiled. Finally Stalin broke out into a deep, hearty guffaw, and for the first time in three days I saw light.

He also saw a change in Stalin’s behavior toward Churchill, which was one reason Churchill grew so red and scowling. Charles Bohlen summarized a dinner session shortly after the beginning of Roosevelt’s ingratiation offensive: “The most notable feature of the dinner was the attitude of Marshal Stalin toward the Prime Minister. Marshal Stalin lost no opportunity to get in a dig at Mr. Churchill. Almost every remark that he addressed to the Prime Minister contained some sharp edge, although the Marshal’s manner was entirely friendly.” Some of Stalin’s jabs were innocuous, the same kind of teasing Roosevelt had initiated. But others had steel at their cold heart. “At one occasion,” Bohlen recorded, “he told the Prime Minister that just because Russians are simple people, it was a mistake to believe that they were blind and could not see what was before their eyes.”

And what they—or at least Stalin—saw was the old anti-Bolshevism emerging in British policy, beneath what seemed a secret sympathy for Germany. Stalin tested Churchill with a brutal recommendation for the postwar treatment of the Germans. Asserting that the Allies must adopt “really effective measures” to ensure that Germany not rise again, he asserted that two conditions must be met. First, the Allies must retain possession of the “most important strategic points in the world” so that “if Germany moved a muscle she could be rapidly stopped.” Second: “At least 50,000 and perhaps 100,000 of the German commanding staff must be physically liquidated.”

Churchill objected vigorously to Stalin’s second point. “War criminals must pay for their crimes,” he conceded, as well as individuals who had committed “barbarous acts.” But “the cold-blooded execution of soldiers who had fought for their country” was something he could never countenance.

Roosevelt couldn’t tell whether Stalin was serious or simply goading Churchill. The president decided to treat Stalin’s proposal—the part about the mass executions—as a joke. He said he couldn’t go along with the marshal; the liquidation must be capped at “49,000.”

THE MOST SENSITIVE topic at Teheran involved Germany’s eastern neighbor. The future of Poland touched each man in a different way. For Stalin, Poland was a security issue. Thrice since the early nineteenth century, twice in Stalin’s lifetime, Poland had provided invaders of Russia a running start. Stalin insisted that Poland become a buffer state for the Soviet Union, a shield between Germany and Russia. This implied, although Stalin didn’t say so explicitly, a government in Poland that was subservient or at least friendly to Moscow.

For Churchill, Poland was a matter of honor. The German invasion of Poland had precipitated Britain’s declaration of war. If the war ended with Poland’s having simply traded German masters for Russian, neither Churchill as prime minister nor the British people collectively would be able to hold up their heads again.

The difference between Stalin and Churchill played out in their competing definitions of Poland’s future borders and their contradictory visions of Poland’s future government. Stalin wanted Poland moved as far west as possible, the better to guarantee Soviet security. Churchill had less concern about Poland’s borders, although he couldn’t accept a Soviet-Polish frontier that stole a large part of the Polish patrimony. But he wanted the Allies to recognize the Polish government in exile in London. Stalin, as skeptical of Churchill on this issue as on several others, assumed that any Poles London liked would be antagonistic toward the Soviet Union.

Roosevelt appreciated Stalin’s security concerns, and he shared Churchill’s desire to see Poland free of foreign domination. To these considerations he added one of his own, as he explained to Stalin in another private meeting. He reminded the marshal that the United States would conduct a presidential election in 1944, and he said that though he didn’t want to run again, he might feel obliged to if the war was still on. This was where the Polish question came in. “There are six to seven million Americans of Polish extraction,” Roosevelt said. “As a practical man I don’t wish to lose their vote.” He went on to say he appreciated Stalin’s concerns about the future of Poland. And he was inclined to agree with him on certain aspects of the Polish question, particularly as they affected borders. But for “political reasons” he had to put off any decisions about Poland, preferably until after November 1944.

Stalin acknowledged that he had wondered about Roosevelt’s reticence on Poland. But now that the president had explained, he understood.

WHAT MAY HAVE been Roosevelt’s most important decision of the war came at Teheran. The commitment to a date for the invasion of France—which by now had acquired the name Overlord—having been made, the Americans and British required a commander. The Americans would be supplying most of the men and materiel; hence Roosevelt would have the choice. Persons close to the question had assumed for many months that the president would choose Marshall. Roosevelt thought Marshall deserved this chance to make history, or at least to be remembered by history. “Ike, you and I know who was the Chief of Staff during the last years of the Civil War,” Roosevelt told Eisenhower during the stopover in Algeria en route to Cairo and Teheran. “But practically no one else knows, although names of the field generals—Grant, of course, and Lee, and Jackson, Sherman, Sheridan, and the others—every schoolboy knows them. I hate to think that fifty years from now practically nobody will know who George Marshall was. That is one of the reasons why I want George to have the big command. He is entitled to establish his place in history as a great general.”

John Pershing disagreed, at least with the conclusion that Marshall must go to Europe. The octogenarian general, who had been Marshall’s mentor and remained America’s most distinguished soldier, wrote Roosevelt advising that Marshall stay where he was. “We are engaged in a global war of which the end is still far distant,” Pershing explained, “and for the wise and strategical guidance of which we need our most accomplished officer as Chief of Staff. I voice the consensus of informed military opinion in saying that officer is General Marshall…. The suggested transfer of General Marshall would be a fundamental and very grave error in our military policy.”

Roosevelt replied with characteristic deftness. “My dear General,” he wrote, “You are absolutely right about George Marshall—and yet, I think, you are wrong, too!” Marshall was indeed the ideal chief of staff. “But, as you know, the operations for which we are considering him are the biggest that we will conduct in this war.” America required him in Europe. “The best way I can express it is to tell you that I want George to be the Pershing of the second World War—and he cannot be that if we keep him here.”

But gradually Roosevelt changed his mind. The longer he worked with Marshall, the more he appreciated Marshall’s rare gifts. No one else talked back to Roosevelt the way Marshall did; no one stuck so stubbornly to his beliefs in discussions with Churchill and the British brass. Yet no one carried out orders so loyally and efficiently once they were given. And no one embodied soldierly discretion more thoroughly than Marshall. Roosevelt concluded that he had to keep the Virginian close by him on the Potomac.

The only problem was that Marshall wanted the European job. He agreed with Roosevelt that he deserved it, and like Roosevelt he recognized that posterity never remembered desk officers. Saying no to much less worthy persons than Marshall had often caused Roosevelt pain; saying no to Marshall was almost more than he could manage.

During the Cairo conference he sent Harry Hopkins to talk to the general. “Hopkins came to see me Saturday night before dinner and told me the President was in some concern of mind over my appointment as Supreme Commander,” Marshall recalled. “I could not tell from Hopkins’ statement just what the President’s point of view was, and in my reply I merely endeavored to make it clear that I would go along wholeheartedly with whatever decision the President made. He need have no fears regarding my personal reaction.” Marshall declined to state his own opinion in the matter.

The next day Roosevelt himself summoned Marshall. “In response to his questions, I made virtually the same reply I made to Hopkins,” Marshall said.

I recall saying that I would not attempt to estimate my capabilities; the President would have to do that; I merely wished to make clear that whatever the decision, I would go along with it wholeheartedly; that the issue was too great for any personal feeling to be considered. I did not discuss the pros and cons of the matter. If I recall, the President stated, in completing our conversation, “I feel I could not sleep at night with you out of the country.”

Roosevelt wasn’t quite ready to announce a decision. Churchill was deferring to the president on the choice of a commander, but he hadn’t fully yielded on the commander’s responsibilities. The prime minister remained unconvinced that a single commander would do a better job than the Combined Chiefs in directing the ground, sea, and air forces of the two great powers in the most complicated military operation in history. Marshall and the American chiefs thought they had won this argument ahead of the North African invasion, and they grew exasperated to have to fight it again. But they considered the principle of unified command so important that they were willing to accept a British officer as commander—provided that the British commander be John Dill, who seemed the most capable of the British officers and the one most likely to enjoy the confidence of the American public.

Roosevelt wasn’t about to yield the command to a British officer, but the American chiefs’ self-denying statement provided him ammunition for use against Churchill. So too did a comment—a question, actually—by Stalin at the second meeting of the principals at Teheran. The American, British, and Russian military staffs had been discussing the progress of their campaigns and their plans for the future, when Stalin politely but sharply asked, “Who will command Overlord?”

“That has not yet been decided,” Roosevelt answered.

Stalin shook his head dismissively. The Anglo-Americans still weren’t serious, if they hadn’t chosen a commander. “Nothing will come of the operation,” he said, “unless one man is made responsible not only for the preparation but for the execution of the operation.”

Roosevelt realized the time was at hand. The main reason he had traveled all the way to Teheran was to win Stalin’s trust. He had made some progress but not enough. Churchill continued to grumble against a unified European command; the prime minister wanted to keep the Mediterranean separate, in part because he thought Roosevelt would choose Marshall, whose hostility to the Mediterranean operations Churchill favored was well known.

To satisfy Stalin, Roosevelt needed to make a decision now. To mollify Churchill, he couldn’t choose Marshall. The only other American with the stature for the European command was Eisenhower. Since Roosevelt wanted to keep Marshall in Washington anyway, this settled the matter.

On his return trip from Teheran, Roosevelt stopped in Tunis, where Eisenhower met him. The general climbed into the president’s car. “Well, Ike,” Roosevelt said, “you are going to command Overlord.”

52.

JUST BEFORE LEAVING WASHINGTON FOR CAIRO AND TEHERAN, ROOSEVELT had performed a minor miracle. Or perhaps it was more accurate to say he arranged for the performance of a minor miracle, which from his perspective was even better. The Senate approved a resolution sponsored by Tom Connally of Texas endorsing Roosevelt’s blueprint for the postwar structure of peace. “Resolved,” the measure declared:

That the Senate recognizes the necessity of there being established at the earliest practicable date a general international organization, based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all peace-loving states, and open to membership by all such states, large and small, for the maintenance of international peace and security.

The endorsement alone was significant; the magnitude of the endorsement—by 85 to 5—was even more significant. One of the dissenters was Hiram Johnson, who had voted against the Treaty of Versailles and didn’t see any reason to give Roosevelt what he had denied Wilson. Another was Burton Wheeler, whose isolationism had resurfaced not long after the smoke from Pearl Harbor cleared. But they were the ones isolated now. Nearly everyone else sided with the president.

The victory for the Connally resolution—or “peace resolution,” as its proponents managed to get the papers to call it—reflected Roosevelt’s success in casting the United Nations as more than a wartime alliance. The alliance would win the war, but it would also constitute the framework for the peace. Perhaps Roosevelt had realized from the start—from the moment he selected the name for the anti-Axis alliance—that by making the United Nations the vehicle of victory rather than something conjured up after the victory had been won, he would grant it a legitimacy in American thinking the League of Nations never enjoyed. Perhaps he was not so prescient and acted simply on intuition. If so, his intuition was uncanny, for it allowed him to win the battle Wilson had lost, even before the battle was joined.

Roosevelt’s miracle also reflected his shrewdness in keeping Cordell Hull around. During most of the 1930s the secretary of state had seemed extraneous to American foreign policy, chipping away at American tariffs by means of his reciprocal trade pacts but otherwise having little to do with the conduct of international affairs. Even after the start of the war Hull was often outside the loop of decision, with Roosevelt relying on Hopkins, Sumner Welles, and his own relationship with Churchill in directing American diplomacy. But Roosevelt knew that the time would come when Hull’s quarter century of service in Congress and his continued good standing among the senators and representatives would yield crucial benefits.

It was no coincidence that the Senate took up the Connally resolution when it did. Two weeks earlier Hull had traveled to Moscow to meet with his British, Russian, and Chinese counterparts. The quartet of foreign ministers produced a declaration affirming the unconditional surrender policy and proclaiming “the necessity of establishing at the earliest practicable date a general international organization, based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all peace-loving states, and open to membership by all such states, large and small, for the maintenance of international peace and security.” Hull’s connections on Capitol Hill made it easy for Connally to copy the operative paragraph from the Moscow declaration into his own resolution and for the eighty-five senators to vote in favor. Hull came out an internationalist hero, and Roosevelt got exactly what he wanted, without having to ask for it.

ROOSEVELT’S LEADERSHIP style didn’t always produce such happy results. Henry Stimson sometimes wished he had never come out of retirement. The war secretary filled his diary with such characterizations of Roosevelt as “the poorest administrator I have ever worked under” and “soft-hearted towards incompetent appointees.” In certain instances Roosevelt held the reins too tightly. “He wants to do it all himself,” Stimson wrote after he couldn’t get an answer out of the White House on a critical matter. Often the president ignored existing channels of authority. “Today the President has constituted an almost innumerable number of new administrative posts, putting at the head of them a lot of inexperienced men appointed largely for personal grounds and who report on their duties directly to the President and have constant and easy access to him.”

There was, of course, a method to Roosevelt’s madness. As during the days before the war, he insisted that he not become a prisoner of the bureaucracy, which, if given its preferences, might have handed him decisions ready-made. He knew that the risk of imprisonment increased during wartime, as the military expected a deference mere political appointees weren’t shown. Yet he considered it even more important to maintain control during wartime. Generals and admirals rarely like to admit that war is a political act, but Roosevelt never forgot it. The war had begun in politics—in the politics of fascism, communism, and democracy—and it would end in politics.

Yet the Roosevelt style exacted a cost. His habit of employing personal envoys irritated Hull, even insulted him. The secretary of state tolerated Hopkins, but only barely, and that because Hopkins worked for the president rather than for the State Department and because Hopkins seemed likely to die any day. Sumner Welles, by contrast, was more than Hull could stand.

Hull disliked Welles personally and despised him professionally. The undersecretary’s Groton-Harvard background was as different from Hull’s as a man’s could be. Hull thought Welles looked down on him, and he wasn’t wrong. Hull suspected Welles of undermining him and coveting his job, and he had a point there too.

Roosevelt reassured Hull by saying he didn’t want to invest the missions he sent Welles on with the importance they would inevitably acquire if undertaken by the secretary of state. Welles could work more quietly. But the reassurance rarely lasted, and Hull eventually concluded that Roosevelt simply didn’t trust him to handle delicate matters. Hull came close at times to demanding that the president choose between him and Welles, but he always pulled back, typically after Roosevelt said or did something to indicate that he was blowing things out of proportion.

Hull lay in wait for the moment Welles would stumble. One such moment had seemed to occur in September 1940. William Bankhead, lately the speaker of the House, had just died, and Roosevelt, wishing to shore up his southern flank, led a group of administration officials to the funeral in Jasper, Alabama. Hull was sick, and Welles assumed his place on the presidential train with Roosevelt, Vice President Wallace, assorted cabinet secretaries, and Supreme Court justice Hugo Black. The journey from Washington took twenty hours, most of them hot, and the funeral service itself filled another stifling two. Roosevelt and the rest of the entourage returned to the train for the trip back to Washington.

The president and most of the others retired early that evening, exhausted from the heat and the commotion of the journey. But Welles stayed up, talking and drinking. He kept drinking even after there was no one left to talk to. Finally, far into the morning of the third day out from the capital, he rang for a porter and requested coffee.

When the coffee arrived in Welles’s private compartment, the undersecretary was quite drunk. So said the porter later, and so Welles concurred. The porter also said that Welles had propositioned him: had offered him money for sexual relations. The porter rejected Welles’s advances and left, shortly telling some of his fellow employees what had happened. Their supervisor heard and informed the railroad’s onboard security chief, who told the head of the Secret Service detail assigned to the president. The Secret Service man investigated sufficiently to convince himself of the truth of the porter’s tale but then clamped down, insisting that no one say anything, least of all to the press.

The lid held tight, through the 1940 presidential election, only six weeks later, and for another two years after that. But a story like this was impossible to contain forever, especially once rumors wafted to those with an interest in seeing Welles destroyed.

Cordell Hull wasn’t the only one who resented Welles. William Bullitt harbored a bitterness still deeper. Bullitt was temperamental, even mercurial. He had served in the Wilson administration but, taking personal affront at a perceived slight, turned against the president to abet the opponents of the League of Nations. He went on to write a bilious account of Wilson’s presidency. Roosevelt, for political reasons, had made Bullitt ambassador to France, but after France fell Bullitt had little to do but complain about how little he had to do. A more decisive, bolder, or simply straightforward chief executive would have let Bullitt go, but Roosevelt judged it better to have Bullitt inside the stockade shooting out than outside shooting in. Simply disarming him didn’t seem possible. Wilson had tried, and Bullitt had gone over to the opposition. Roosevelt remembered and refused to repeat Wilson’s mistake.

Bullitt might well have wanted to take on Roosevelt, but lacking any obvious grounds for doing so, he settled for going after Welles. He disagreed with Welles on various policy issues, but his animus grew personal, as most things did for Bullitt—and as many things did involving Welles, the golden boy of the administration. Bullitt learned of the night on the train, and he began whispering about it around the capital. Drew Pearson, whose “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column specialized in just such gossip, heard the Welles tale but sat on it pending confirmation. Bullitt and Alice Roosevelt Longworth had once been an item; Bullitt made sure the story got to Alice, who had aged without maturing and who detested everything about the New Deal, including its author and his wife—her own kin. Alice added her voice to the anti-Welles murmuring.

If the story had simply been that Welles had made homosexual advances, it might not have threatened the curtain of silence that typically shrouded such matters in Washington in that era. Likewise, if the country had not been at war, Welles’s secret could have been safe. But the homosexuality of a diplomat during wartime was presumed to create a security risk, in that the diplomat, with access to confidential information, might be blackmailed. Cordell Hull didn’t have to hate Welles to worry that the national interest could be compromised by Welles’s continued employment at the State Department. That he did hate Welles simply made it easier to indulge Bullitt in Bullitt’s vendetta.

Roosevelt tried to separate himself from the whole business as long as he could. He considered Welles something of a protégé, and he enjoyed Welles’s company more than that of Hull. He also considered Welles far more capable than Hull. As for Bullitt, he had never trusted him though he sometimes found him useful.

But when Roosevelt heard that Bullitt was spreading stories about Welles, he grew incensed. Bullitt was visiting the Oval Office on State Department business; Roosevelt saw him coming and halted him at the door. “William Bullitt, stand where you are,” he said. The president’s next words were variously recorded. “You’ve tried to destroy a fellow human being; get out of here and never come back,” one version asserted. Another account was more dramatic. “Saint Peter is at the gate,” Roosevelt was said to have declared. “Along comes Sumner Welles, who admits to human error. Saint Peter grants him entrance. Then comes William Bullitt. Saint Peter says: ‘William Bullitt, you have betrayed a fellow human being. You can go down there!’”

Yet as much as he hated to do it, Roosevelt knew he had to cut Welles off. In August 1943, with the capital gossip growing more lurid, Welles received a call. “The President asked me to see him,” Welles wrote his wife the next day. “He said that he had never been angrier in his life at the situation in the State Department, which has now reached an impossible climax.” Roosevelt blamed Bullitt directly, for spreading “poison,” and Hull indirectly, for not reining Bullitt in and for speaking out of turn. “While I don’t think he does it deliberately,” Roosevelt told Welles, apparently giving the secretary some benefit of the doubt, “Hull complains about you to every senator and newspaperman he talks to.”

Welles answered that if Hull had ever asked for his resignation, he would have tendered it at once. “My devotion and affection for the President was the issue,” Welles wrote his wife. “I would never embarrass him, particularly in wartime. I would resign at once.” And indeed he offered to resign, on the spot.

Roosevelt rejected the offer. “I have known you since you were a little boy, before you went to Groton,” he said. “I have seen you develop into what you now are. I need you for the country. After all, whom have I got? Harry Hopkins is a sick man. I thought he would die when he joined me last week. We are just moving into the first critical stages of peace talks. You know more about that than anyone, and you can be of more value than anyone.”

Welles said he was touched by the president’s loyalty, but he didn’t see how he could continue to work with Hull, who clearly didn’t want him around. He repeated his resignation offer.

Roosevelt again rejected it. Welles responded that he would think the matter over and give the president a decision the following Monday.

That weekend, though, Welles’s body broke down. The strain of the situation contributed to a heart attack that didn’t kill him but allowed Roosevelt to accept his resignation without appearing to yield to Bullitt and the scandalmongers. The president never forgave Bullitt. He subsequently suggested that the ambassador might have a future in the politics of Philadelphia, his home city. Bullitt took the hint and announced for mayor. Roosevelt quietly sent a message to the Democratic bosses in Pennsylvania: “Cut his throat.”

THE FIVE WEEKS of Roosevelt’s journey to Cairo and Teheran constituted the longest stretch of his presidency away from the White House. He came home weary but exhilarated. “I do not remember ever seeing the President look more satisfied and pleased than he did that morning,” Sam Rosenman wrote of Roosevelt’s first day back in the office. “He believed intensely that he had accomplished what he had set out to do—to bring Russia into cooperation with the Western powers in a formidable organization for the maintenance of peace—and he was glad…. He was indeed the ‘champ’ who had come back with the prize.”

The White House press corps had missed him. And he had missed them. He regaled the reporters with stories of his top-level meetings. “We had an awfully good time—very successful—both in Cairo and Teheran,” he said. “We had one banquet where we had dinner in the Russian style. Very good dinner, too. Russian style means a number of toasts, and I counted up to three hundred and sixty-five toasts.” The reporters laughed appreciatively. “And we all went away sober. It’s a remarkable thing what you can do, if you try.” More laughter. “I made one glass of vodka that big”—indicating two fingers—“last for about twenty toasts.” Still more laughter.

Roosevelt so enjoyed himself with his regular audience that he broke one of his rules and talked on with a correspondent who lagged behind after the news conference ended and the other reporters had left. His remarks were off the record, but word of them got back to the others. The president had suggested that he no longer liked the label “New Deal” as a description of the administration’s approach to domestic affairs. “Would you care to express any opinion to the rest of us?” one of the other reporters inquired at the first opportunity.

“Oh, I supposed somebody would ask that,” Roosevelt replied. “I will have to be terribly careful in the future how I talk to people after these press conferences.” His voice expressed exasperation, but his subsequent remarks hinted that his stumble was staged. “How did the New Deal come into existence?” he inquired of himself.

There was an awfully sick patient called the United States of America, and it was suffering from a grave internal disorder—awfully sick—all kinds of things had happened to this patient, all internal things. And they sent for the doctor. And it was a long, long process—took several years before those ills, in that particular illness of ten years ago, were remedied. But after a while they were remedied. And on all those ills of 1933, things had to be done to cure the patient internally. And it was done; it took a number of years….

But since then, two years ago, the patient had a very bad accident—not an internal trouble. Two years ago, on the seventh of December, he was in a pretty bad smashup—broke his hip, broke his leg in two or three places, broke a wrist and an arm, and some ribs. And they didn’t think he would live, for a while. And then he began to come to. And he has been in charge of a partner of the old doctor. Old Dr. New Deal didn’t know “nothing” about legs and arms. He knew a great deal about internal medicine, but nothing about surgery. So he got his partner, who was an orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Win-the-War, to take care of this fellow who had been in this bad accident. And the result is that the patient is back on his feet. He has given up his crutches. He isn’t wholly well yet, and he won’t be until he wins the war.

WHILE REPORTERS explained to their readers how Dr. Win the War had displaced Dr. New Deal, Roosevelt prepared for the latter’s return to responsibility for the patient after the war. Most of Roosevelt’s State of the Union address of January 1944 dealt with the military situation, recounting past successes and predicting future ones. But the address also included his most comprehensive statement of postwar aims at home, a statement that was the most radical he ever uttered—and indeed more radical than any president before or after ever uttered. Reminding Congress and the radio public of the causes of the war, Roosevelt declared, “We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence…. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” Asserting that this political and economic truth was “self-evident,” Roosevelt proclaimed “a second bill of rights, under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.” These rights included:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

Roosevelt reminded his listeners that he had often spoken of the home front and the battle front as being part of a single democratic front. So they would remain when the fighting ceased. “After this war is won we must be prepared to move forward in the implementation of these rights to new goals of human happiness and well-being…. Unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.” The president spoke with cold earnestness in warning of a domestic reaction like that which followed the First World War. “If history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called ‘normalcy’ of the 1920s, then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of fascism here at home.”

THIS WAS POWERFUL, provocative language of a kind Americans hadn’t heard from Roosevelt for years. It reflected, among other things, the confidence he felt after Teheran. “Within the past few weeks, history has been made,” he told the American people in his State of the Union address. “And it is far better history for the whole human race than any that we have known, or even dared to hope for, in these tragic times through which we pass.” At Cairo and Teheran, he explained, he had discussed the central issues of the war with the leaders of the other major Allied powers. Prime Minister Churchill, of course, was an old friend. “We know and understand each other very well. Indeed, Mr. Churchill has become known and beloved by many millions of Americans.” Marshal Stalin and Generalissimo Chiang were new acquaintances. “We had planned to talk to each other across the table at Cairo and Teheran; but we soon found that we were all on the same side of the table.” Roosevelt characterized Chiang as “a man of great vision, great courage, and a remarkably keen understanding of the problems of today and tomorrow.” As for Stalin:

To use an American and somewhat ungrammatical colloquialism, I may say that I “got along fine” with Marshal Stalin. He is a man who combines a tremendous, relentless determination with a stalwart good humor. I believe he is truly representative of the heart and soul of Russia; and I believe that we are going to get along very well with him and the Russian people—very well indeed.

Roosevelt revealed that General Eisenhower would command the assault on Europe. “His performances in Africa, in Sicily, and in Italy have been brilliant. He knows by practical and successful experience the way to coordinate air, sea, and land power.” Few in the president’s radio audience were aware of the debate that had preceded Eisenhower’s appointment, and therefore few fully appreciated the concession Roosevelt made in adding: “General Eisenhower gives up his command in the Mediterranean to a British officer whose name is being announced by Mr. Churchill. We now pledge that new commander that our powerful ground, sea, and air forces in the vital Mediterranean area will stand by his side until every objective in that bitter theater is attained.”

Roosevelt for the first time publicly tipped his hand regarding the structure he envisioned for postwar peace.

Britain, Russia, China, and the United States and their allies represent more than three-quarters of the total population of the earth. As long as these four nations with great military power stick together in determination to keep the peace there will be no possibility of an aggressor nation arising to start another world war.

Roosevelt realized that a permanent policing role for the United States would arouse the isolationism that had gone dormant since Pearl Harbor but hadn’t disappeared. “There have always been cheerful idiots in this country who believed that there would be no more war for us if everybody in America would only return into their homes and lock their front doors behind them,” he said. Events had proven them tragically wrong, and the president hoped the lesson would last. “If we are willing to fight for peace now, is it not good logic that we should use force if necessary, in the future, to keep the peace?”

ROOSEVELT SPOKE so boldly about an economic bill of rights in part because he was engaged in a struggle for the allegiance of workers, who would benefit the most from his audacious agenda. The wartime wage and price controls functioned better in theory than in practice, and better for management than for labor. Wages were relatively easy to monitor, being far fewer in number than prices, which covered millions of items and whose controls could be evaded by resizing and relabeling. The cost of living advanced steadily during the war, outpacing wage rates. Workers’ real incomes increased, but only because of the extra hours of overtime. Union leaders realized that overtime wouldn’t last forever and reasonably argued that their members were actually losing ground.

Yet the unions’ predicament wasn’t entirely bleak. In 1942 the National War Labor Board ruled that in any workplace covered by a union contract new employees must be automatically enrolled in the union unless they specifically opted out during their first weeks on the job. This concession to the unions reflected the labor board’s appreciation of the difficulty union organizers were having with the massive influx of workers who knew nothing of the history of organized labor and its struggles; it also reflected the fact that corporate profits were soaring and management as a whole wasn’t in a position to complain.

Yet certain managers did complain. Montgomery Ward Company refused to honor the maintenance-of-membership rule, as the NWLB order was called. Attorney General Francis Biddle thereupon led a contingent of armed soldiers into the Chicago headquarters of Montgomery Ward and arrested Sewall Avery, the company president. Biddle’s action ignited a storm of protest among conservatives, but it warmed the hearts of union members and most of their leaders.

Not John L. Lewis, though. The mine workers’ chief and CIO founder had never forgiven Roosevelt for the president’s lack of support in the steel strike, and he was unimpressed by the maintenance-of-membership rule, which didn’t provide the UMW anything it didn’t already enjoy under the closed-shop—mandatory membership—contract it had negotiated by its own efforts with the mine operators. Lewis refused to be bound by the NWLB directives on wages, and when the miners’ contract expired in the spring of 1943, he ordered his men to strike. Half a million miners dropped their tools and headed out of the mines.

Roosevelt responded with a blistering telegram to Lewis, which he read to reporters at a news conference. “These are not mere strikes against employers of this industry to enforce collective bargaining demands,” he said of the walkouts. “They are strikes against the United States Government itself.” The work stoppage directly threatened the war effort. “The continuance and spread of these strikes would have the same effect on the course of the war as a crippling defeat in the field…. Without coal our war industries cannot produce tanks, guns, and ammunition for our armed forces. Without these weapons our sailors on the high seas, and our armies in the field, will be helpless against our enemies.”

Roosevelt’s telegram was addressed to Lewis, but his message was for the miners themselves. “I am sure that the men who work in the coal mines, whose sons and brothers are in the armed forces, do not want to retard the war effort…. Not as President, not as Commander in Chief, but as the friend of the men who work in the coal mines, I appeal to them to resume work immediately, and submit their case to the National War Labor Board for final determination.” In the event his friendly appeal didn’t suffice, Roosevelt was prepared to take stronger action. “If work at the mines is not resumed by ten o’clock Saturday morning”—May 1, 1943—“I shall use all the power vested in me as President and as Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy to protect the national interest and to prevent further interference with the successful prosecution of the war.”

The warning worked, and the strikers returned to the mines. But when the NWLB refused Lewis the two-dollar-a-day wage boost he was demanding, they walked out again. Roosevelt again lambasted Lewis. “The action of the leaders of the United Mine Workers coal miners has been intolerable,” he said, “and has rightly stirred up the anger and disapproval of the overwhelming mass of the American people.” Roosevelt’s verdict on Lewis was widely shared. A poll put Lewis’s unpopularity rating at 87 percent; the U.S. Army’s journal Stars and Stripes cursed, “John L. Lewis, damn your coal-black soul!”

Congress registered its disapproval by passing the Smith-Connally bill, a measure that reversed a decade of pro-labor laws by sharply curtailing the right to strike. The bill went much farther than Roosevelt intended. He had nothing against unions generally, only against Lewis and the UMW leadership. The great majority of workers had patriotically accepted a no-strike policy. “For the entire year of 1942, the time lost by strikes averaged only 5/100 of 1 percent of the total man-hours worked,” Roosevelt said. “That record has never before been equaled in this country. It is as good or better than the record of any of our allies in wartime.” For this reason, he said, he was vetoing the Smith-Connally bill.

But Congress overrode the veto, sending a message to other labor leaders not to follow Lewis’s lead—and to Roosevelt that he no longer controlled American labor policy.

Railroad workers resisted their lesson. In the autumn of 1943 they locked horns with federal officials who refused the wage increase they thought they deserved. Roosevelt interceded, conferring with the labor leaders, with railroad management, and with the board overseeing the dispute. But his jawboning failed, and the unions prepared to strike.

Roosevelt preempted them. “Railroad strikes by three brotherhoods have been ordered for next Thursday,” he told the public on Monday, December 27. “I cannot wait until the last moment to take action to see that the supplies to our fighting men are not interrupted. I am accordingly obliged to take over at once temporary possession and control of the railroads to insure their continued operation…. If any employees of the railroads now strike, they will be striking against the Government of the United States.”

Roosevelt’s seizure of the railroads got him what he wanted in the short term. Hours before his deadline, the unions canceled their strike order. The president had the War Department announce the cancellation; its message explained that the leaders of the three brotherhoods had given assurances that “they and the organizations they represent will take no action which might imperil the successful prosecution of the war.”

But the episode infuriated labor. AFL president William Green particularly resented the aspersions cast on the patriotism of the rail workers. George Marshall had declared, albeit not for attribution, that the railroad disputes were lengthening the war and costing thousands of lives. Green learned of Marshall’s statement and angrily hurled the allegation back at the government. “I hereby charge that the responsibility for the prolongation of these disputes rests entirely upon bungling, fumbling, and incompetent handling by government officials and agencies,” he said.

53.

IN JANUARY 1944 HENRY MORGENTHAU SCHEDULED AN UNUSUAL Sunday meeting with Roosevelt. Morgenthau came not only as Treasury secretary but as Roosevelt’s oldest friend in the administration and as a pleader of a special cause. Morgenthau’s ancestors were German Jews who had assimilated into mainstream American society. Morgenthau himself had rarely attended synagogue and, by all evidence, never observed Passover. “We Jews of America have found America to be our Zion,” Morgenthau’s father once said. “I am an American.” But during the war the son discovered his Jewish roots when Jewish leaders came to him with evidence that Hitler was systematically trying to exterminate Europe’s Jews.

Morgenthau initially hesitated to raise the matter with Roosevelt. He didn’t want to presume on their personal friendship, and the plight of Europe’s Jews was hardly the responsibility of the American Treasury Department. If any office in the administration was to deal with the issue, it ought to be the State Department. But Cordell Hull wasn’t interested, and Breckinridge Long, the assistant secretary to whom Hull referred refugee and related issues, was downright hostile. The State Department had a long history of anti-Semitism that reflected the old-stock Protestant values of the nineteenth-century founders of the American foreign service. Morgenthau concluded that if the fate of the Jews was left to the professional diplomats, there was little hope.

He began looking for an excuse to bring the Jewish question into the Treasury’s bailiwick. At the end of 1943 he found one, when the administration received a request to expedite money transfers to refugees from Hitler’s war machine. The State Department balked, but Morgenthau, reasoning that anything touching money involved the Treasury, determined to take the matter to Roosevelt. He scheduled a White House meeting.

Roosevelt may have guessed the purpose of the meeting, for others had raised the Jewish question with him. During the summer of 1942 Rabbi Stephen Wise, the head of the American Jewish Congress, wrote saying that Hitler was trying to annihilate the Jews, as he had threatened to do for years. Wise asked Roosevelt to issue a statement bringing the matter to American and world attention. He said he wanted to read the statement to a Madison Square Garden rally on behalf of the Jews, and he offered language for the president to use. Roosevelt wrote his own words. “Citizens, regardless of religious allegiance, will share in the sorrow of our Jewish fellow-citizens over the savagery of the Nazis against their helpless victims,” the president declared. “The Nazis will not succeed in exterminating their victims any more than they will succeed in enslaving mankind. The American people not only sympathize with all victims of Nazi crimes but will hold the perpetrators of these crimes to strict accountability in a day of reckoning which will surely come.”

Roosevelt issued similar statements on subsequent occasions, sometimes singling out the Jews as victims of Nazi violence, sometimes not. A month after the Madison Square Garden rally he asserted that new intelligence from Europe revealed that the Nazi occupation of various countries had “taken proportions and forms giving rise to the fear that as the defeat of the enemy countries approaches, the barbaric and unrelenting character of the occupational regime will become more marked and may even lead to the extermination of certain populations.” Those persons involved in such crimes would not escape. “The time will come when they shall have to stand in courts of law in the very countries which they are now oppressing and answer for their acts.”

In December 1942 Roosevelt brought Stephen Wise back to the White House. The rabbi and several other Jewish leaders delivered a detailed memorandum describing the Nazi extermination program. “Unless action is taken immediately,” Wise said, “the Jews of Hitler Europe are doomed.” Wise and the others asked for a new statement on behalf of the victims. Roosevelt replied, “Gentlemen, you can prepare the statement. I am sure that you will put the words into it that express my thoughts.” He added, “We shall do all in our power to be of service to your people in this tragic moment.”

Wise acted at once on the president’s offer. The rabbi emerged from the White House meeting to tell reporters that “the President said that he was profoundly shocked to learn that two million Jews had in one way or another perished as a result of Nazi rule and crimes.”

Roosevelt followed up with a message of his own—and of America’s allies. The president approved a statement by the United Nations condemning the Nazi campaign against the Jews. “From all the occupied countries Jews are being transported in conditions of appalling horror and brutality to Eastern Europe,” the statement declared. “The able-bodied are slowly worked to death in labor camps. The infirm are left to die of exposure and starvation or are deliberately massacred in mass executions. The number of victims of these bloody cruelties is reckoned in many hundreds of thousands of entirely innocent men, women and children.” The statement went on to vow that “those responsible for these crimes shall not escape retribution.”

Roosevelt kept his door open to the representatives of the Jewish cause. In the summer of 1943 a member of the Polish underground, Jan Karski, who at great personal risk had observed the extermination program in action, carried his eyewitness account to the West. Roosevelt invited him to the White House. Just what Karski told the president is unclear. Karski relayed a message from the Jews of Poland that if the Allies didn’t do something to stop the killing, the Jewish community there would “cease to exist.” But, according to his later recollection of the meeting, he kept to himself what he had seen with his own eyes. Whatever Karski’s words to Roosevelt, the president’s reply was succinct: “Tell your nation we shall win the war.”

These words didn’t satisfy Henry Morgenthau, and when he entered Roosevelt’s second-floor study on January 16, 1944, he came armed with a new report detailing the massacres. “One of the greatest crimes in history, the slaughter of the Jewish people in Europe, is continuing unabated,” the report began. Roosevelt listened to Morgenthau’s summary and scanned the report. He waved aside Morgenthau’s assertion that anti-Semitism at the State Department accounted for the lack of interest there in the Jewish troubles, but he accepted Morgenthau’s suggestion that responsibility for refugee affairs be moved from State to a special board answerable to the president. The War Refugee Board was assigned to take “all measures within its power to rescue the victims of enemy oppression who are in imminent danger of death and otherwise to afford such victims all possible relief and assistance consistent with the successful prosecution of the war.”

Following an order by Hitler to round up the Jews of Hungary, Roosevelt issued his most detailed and scathing condemnation of the Nazi policies:

In one of the blackest crimes of all history—begun by the Nazis in the day of peace and multiplied by them a hundred times in time of war—the wholesale systematic murder of the Jews of Europe goes on unabated every hour. As a result of the events of the last few days, hundreds of thousands of Jews, who while living under persecution have at least found a haven from death in Hungary and the Balkans, are now threatened with annihilation as Hitler’s forces descend more heavily upon these lands. That these innocent people, who have already survived a decade of Hitler’s fury, should perish on the very eve of triumph over the barbarism which their persecution symbolizes, would be a major tragedy.

Roosevelt had already declared that Hitler and his henchmen would be made to answer for their crimes. Now he promised that the reach of Allied justice would extend to those who collaborated with the Nazis. “All who share the guilt shall share the punishment.” Roosevelt urged Germans and others to sabotage Hitler’s plan. “I ask every German and every man everywhere under Nazi domination to show the world by his action that in his heart he does not share these insane criminal desires. Let him hide these pursued victims, help them to get over their borders, and do what he can to save them from the Nazi hangman. I ask him also to keep watch, and to record the evidence that will one day be used to convict the guilty.” Roosevelt pledged that the United States would employ “all means at its command” to assist the escape of Hitler’s intended victims, “insofar as the necessity of military operations permits.”

This last clause was crucial. Roosevelt remained convinced that the surest way to save the Jews was to win the war as quickly as possible. As it became apparent that a concentration camp at Auschwitz was a centerpiece of the German death machine, some Jewish spokesmen advocated bombing the camp or the rail lines feeding it. The bombing, the advocates argued, would slow the destruction of the Jews and thereby save lives. It would also make a political and moral statement that the Allies knew what was happening at Auschwitz and were trying to stop it.

But there were arguments against the bombing. In the first place, it would certainly kill some of the very people the Allies sought to save. Little imagination was required to predict that Hitler’s propagandists would display the bodies of those killed by the bombing and blame the Allies for many more Jewish deaths. Roosevelt was serious about bringing the war criminals to justice, and he didn’t want to spoil the evidence of their guilt. In the second place, bombing the camps or the rail lines would require the diversion of scarce resources. American and British bombers were fully employed during 1944 striking targets that contributed to the German war effort. To send planes over Auschwitz might well cost the lives of Allied soldiers. Finally, there was no guarantee bombing the camp would do any good. The rail lines could quickly be rebuilt, and the killing of Jews might be accomplished by other means.

How much of the argument Roosevelt heard, and how fully he participated in it, is unclear. John McCloy, the assistant secretary of war, told a journalist decades later that Harry Hopkins informed him during the summer of 1944 that Roosevelt had been urged by some Jewish leaders to order the bombing but that, in Hopkins’s words, “the Boss was not disposed to.” Hopkins asked McCloy to staff the request out. McCloy said he had already done so. The air force had rejected the bombing request on cost-benefit grounds. McCloy gave the negative report to Sam Rosenman, and, in McCloy’s words, “that was the end of that.” McCloy added, in his retrospective interview, that he “never talked” to Roosevelt about the subject.

But McCloy subsequently changed his story. He told Morgenthau’s son that he had indeed spoken to Roosevelt about bombing Auschwitz. The president, according to this later version, himself refused the request. He said the bombing would be ineffective and would appear to make the United States complicit in the killings. “We’ll be accused of participating in this horrible business,” Roosevelt told McCloy.

Which version, if either, is true is impossible to tell. The contemporary record is silent on the subject. What is clear is that the bombing did not take place and that it did not take place because Roosevelt did not want it to. He knew bombing was an option, and he could have overridden objections from the War Department, as he had overridden the department regarding the timing of the second front. But he thought bombing would be a mistake. Whether he spoke through Hopkins or McCloy, directly or indirectly, the decision—like every other important decision of the war—was his.

ONE REASON ROOSEVELT refused to countenance any distraction from the war against Hitler was that the struggle was reaching a critical phase. “Yesterday on June 4, 1944, Rome fell to American and Allied troops,” the president told the country in his only Fireside Chat of the year so far. “The first of the Axis capitals is now in our hands. One up and two to go!” The president dilated on the historical significance of Rome’s surrender and on the fact that troops from several of the United Nations—America, Britain, France, Canada, New Zealand, Poland, South Africa—took part in the fighting. He added, “Our victory comes at an excellent time, while our Allied forces are poised for another strike at Western Europe—and while the armies of other Nazi soldiers nervously await our assault.”

He could have said more on this last point, but doing so would have betrayed the greatest secret of the Allied war thus far. Roosevelt needed all his skills as an actor to concentrate on the radio script at hand, for he knew that even as he spoke the troops that had been training for the invasion of France were filing into the boats that would ferry them across the Channel. Aircraft loaded with paratroops were winging through the dark toward their drop zones behind the German lines. Within hours the world would know whether the largest amphibious operation in history was a success or a failure. If a success, it would mark the first step toward the liberation of France, and it would signal the beginning of the end of the Third Reich. If a failure, it would devastate Allied morale, perhaps causing Stalin to conclude that the Americans and British were as hapless as they had often seemed faithless. It would give Hitler’s regime a new lease on life. Not incidentally, it would mean the end of hope for Europe’s Jews.

But Overlord was not a failure. The first waves of American and British soldiers hit the beaches of Normandy after dawn on June 6. At Omaha Beach the Americans suffered heavy casualties, but at several other locations the German resistance was less formidable than Eisenhower, Marshall, and Roosevelt had feared. Within a few hours the heart-clutching phase of uncertainty had passed. The Allies secured a beachhead, and suddenly the sea, which had been their enemy, became their friend. With their control of the air and waves, they could transport attacking troops to the front faster than the Germans could reinforce the defenders. Within two weeks some 600,000 American and British soldiers had landed in Normandy, and the drive toward Paris began.

“MY LORD! All smiles, all smiles!”

Roosevelt hadn’t slept much after his radio address announcing the fall of Rome. He waited by the phone for word from the War Department that the troops had landed. It came in pieces, but by half past three—Washington time—on the morning of June 6 the news was official. The president received regular updates from then until his afternoon press conference. As the reporters—a record crowd of nearly two hundred—filled the room, he couldn’t help noticing how happy they all seemed.

“You don’t look like you’re so solemn yourself, Mr. President.”

“No, I’m not so solemn, I suppose,” Roosevelt replied, laughing. “I think this is a very happy conference today.”

“Mr. President, how do you feel about the progress of the invasion?”

“Up to schedule. And as the Prime Minister said, ‘That’s a mouthful.’” More laughter.

“Mr. President, how long have you known that this was the date?”

“I have known since”—Roosevelt paused for effect—“I would say Teheran, which was last December, that the approximate date would be the end of May or the very first few days of June. And I have known the exact date just within the past few days. And I knew last night, when I was doing that broadcast on Rome, that the troops were actually in the vessels, on the way across.”

A reporter asked why, if the decision was made so long ago, the invasion had occurred only now.

“Did you ever cross the English Channel?” the president asked.

“Never been across the English Channel.”

“You’re very lucky.”

“Tide? Is it largely a question of—”

“Roughness in the English Channel, which has always been considered by passengers one of the greatest trials of life, to have to cross the English Channel. And, of course, they have a record of the wind and the sea in the English Channel; and one of the greatly desirable and absolutely essential things is to have relatively small-boat weather, as we call it, to get people actually onto the beach. And such weather doesn’t begin much before May.”

“Well, was weather the factor, sir, in delaying from the end of May until the first week in June?”

“Yes, yes. After the June date was set, there was only an actual delay of one day.”

“Was it timed to come after the fall of Rome?”

“No, because we didn’t know when Rome was going to fall.”

“I THINK WE have these Huns at the top of the toboggan slide, and the full crush of the Russian offensive should put the skids under them,” George Marshall wrote Roosevelt a week after D-Day. Marshall almost never employed such informal language with the president, but the success of Overlord and the launch of the biggest Soviet offensive of the war thus far made him feel almost giddy.

Joseph Stalin was more restrained but hardly less optimistic. The Soviet dictator told Averell Harriman—as Harriman related to Roosevelt—that the Anglo-American invasion of France was “an unheard-of achievement, the magnitude of which had never been undertaken in the history of warfare.” Writing to Roosevelt directly, Stalin said, “It rejoices all of us and makes us confident of future successes.”

Churchill kept his emotions more fully in check. Some of his restraint doubtless reflected his long-standing resistance to the Channel crossing and his concern that things might yet go wrong. But in addition he had to deal with Charles de Gaulle. The French general realized that his homeland was about to be liberated by the American and British armies, and he sought to ensure that he rode at their head. “It is remarkable,” Churchill wrote Roosevelt in exasperation, “as he has not a single soldier in the great battle now developing.” The prime minister said he was doing all he could with de Gaulle. But if he reached an impasse, he might send the general to Washington. “I think it would be a great pity if you and he did not meet,” Churchill asserted wryly. “I do not see why I have all the luck.”

Roosevelt smiled as he read the prime minister’s lament. “He may visit Washington at the end of this month,” the president offered. “But there is no indication yet that he will be helpful in our efforts in the interest of his country.”

Roosevelt’s offer was an inexpensive gesture, as he knew that de Gaulle wouldn’t leave the French theater of operations. Meanwhile the president explained the glad tidings from France to the American people—and tried to keep the tidings from sounding tooglad. “While I know that the chief interest tonight is centered on the English Channel and on the beaches and farms and the cities of Normandy,” he declared in another Fireside Chat, “we should not lose sight of the fact that our armed forces are engaged on other battlefronts all over the world.” The situation in Europe, to be sure, was as promising as anyone could hope. “Germany has her back against the wall—in fact three walls at once! In the south, we have broken the German hold on central Italy…. On the east, our gallant Soviet allies have driven the enemy back from the lands which were invaded three years ago…. And on the west, the hammer blow which struck the coast of France last Tuesday morning, less than a week ago, was the culmination of many months of careful planning and strenuous preparation.” Yet it was a long way from Normandy to Berlin. Those months of planning and preparation would be followed by months of fighting and dying. And Tokyo was even farther away, in terms of the time and effort it would take American forces to get there. “We are on the offensive all over the world, bringing the attack to our enemies,” Roosevelt said. The attack must continue, to its ultimate global conclusion.

THE REPUBLICANS were in a fix in the summer of 1944 and knew it. The coming presidential election would be a referendum on the war, whether Roosevelt explicitly declared it one or not. And with the war going well, the incumbent would be nearly impossible to beat. Yet the Republicans could look beyond the war and position themselves for that new era.

The leading Republican candidates going into election season were Wendell Willkie and Thomas Dewey. Willkie was a known quantity, with a strong following among international-minded Republicans. But the regulars hadn’t liked him in 1940, when Roosevelt seemed at least a little vulnerable, and they liked him even less now, when Roosevelt looked unbeatable. They couldn’t imagine letting him lead the party into the postwar era.

Dewey was the fresh face of the GOP. He had won a reputation in New York City during the 1930s prosecuting gangsters and Wall Street manipulators. He lost a close race for governor in 1938, putting a scare into the Democrats, and captured the office in 1942, becoming the first Republican governor in two decades. Dewey was young: if victorious in 1944 he would be, at forty-two, the youngest person ever elected president. He was energetic and handsome. Like the rest of the party, he understood that he was running for the 1948 nomination as much as for the one at hand. Either way he looked a good bet.

The nomination was effectively decided when Dewey trounced Willkie in the Wisconsin primary in April. Willkie had declared the Wisconsin vote a test of his candidacy; when he lost, badly, he withdrew from the race, leaving the field to the New York governor. Dewey was nominated on the first ballot at the Republican convention in Chicago. Taking a page from Roosevelt’s biography, he accepted the nomination in person.

The Democrats arrived in Chicago three weeks later. The delegates knew the script—for the first part of the performance. In response to a White House–inspired query from the Democratic National Committee, Roosevelt declared that, if nominated, he would accept the nomination and, if elected, he would serve. “Every one of our sons serving in this war has officers from whom he takes his orders,” Roosevelt said. “Such officers have superior officers. The President is the Commander in Chief and he, too, has his superior officer—the people of the United States.” The Democratic delegates, standing in for the American people, ordered the president to seek a fourth term.

The scripting of the convention’s second act was less obvious. The campaign for the Democratic vice presidential nomination was, in one sense, very much like the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, in that the campaigners and their advocates were looking beyond Roosevelt. Democratic conservatives had always distrusted—or despised—Henry Wallace, deeming the former secretary of agriculture too liberal on most issues and too erratic on the rest. In 1940 they hadn’t been able to organize swiftly enough to block Wallace’s nomination, and in any event the looming war and the need for solidarity behind Roosevelt’s unprecedented third-term try compelled their acquiescence. But in 1944 they were better organized and even more determined not to risk handing the White House to anyone as closely identified with the New Deal as Wallace.

Roosevelt himself had cooled on Wallace the previous year, when the vice president tangled with Jesse Jones, the secretary of commerce, ostensibly over foreign economic policy but really over the direction of the party. Jones, a conservative Texas businessman, thought Wallace a crackpot. Roosevelt almost agreed at times, when the vice president spouted more of his Christian mysticism than usual. All the same, Roosevelt would have much preferred to keep the quarrel inside the administration. But when Wallace and Jones insisted on speaking out, the president took the highly unusual step of rebuking them in public. Wallace was let to know that if Roosevelt was on the ticket in 1944, he—Wallace—would not be.

As the Democratic delegates gathered in Chicago, the president wrote Samuel Jackson, the permanent chair of the convention:

The easiest way of putting it is this. I have been associated with Henry Wallace during his past four years as Vice President, for eight years earlier while he was Secretary of Agriculture, and well before that. I like him and I respect him and he is my personal friend. For these reasons I personally would vote for his renomination if I were a delegate to the convention. At the same time I do not wish to appear in any way as dictating to the convention. Obviously the convention must do the deciding.

The phrasing was classic Roosevelt. It appeared to endorse Wallace—a spokesman for the vice president professed to be “very happy” with the president’s letter—but in fact it had just the opposite effect. All the regulars remembered how Roosevelt had dictated the selection of Wallace in 1940 by threatening not to run. This time, in leaving the vice presidential nomination up to the convention, Roosevelt implicitly gave Wallace the heave-ho.

He furnished additional guidance. He arranged for Robert Hannegan, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, to inquire about the preferences of the White House. “You have written me about Harry Truman and Bill Douglas,” Roosevelt replied. “I should, of course, be very glad to run with either of them and believe that either one of them would bring real strength to the ticket.”

There was less to this response than met the eye. William Douglas was as suspect in conservative Democratic eyes as Henry Wallace. Roosevelt mentioned him simply as a sop to the New Dealers. The double endorsement in fact singled out Truman as the vice presidential nominee—and, in effect, the Democratic heir apparent.

The last of Roosevelt’s stage directions was a message to Truman himself. The Missouri senator was in his second term, and though best known as a protégé of the Kansas City Democratic boss, Tom Pendergast, he had lately distinguished himself probing fraud and waste in military procurement. As a midwestern border stater unassociated with the New Deal, Truman was thought to be acceptable to the conservatives and southerners in the party, the ones who were revolting against Wallace.

Truman knew he was being considered, but he balked at putting himself forward until Roosevelt made clear he wanted him on the ticket. The Senate had been the apex of his ambitions. “Hell, I don’t want to be president,” he told a reporter who said what everyone was thinking: that the vice presidential nomination might well lead to the White House. Besides, he had spent years in the Senate trying to rub off the stain of his Pendergast connections; to join the national ticket would stir up the old stories again.

Hannegan told Truman he had a note from Roosevelt endorsing him. But Hannegan’s refusal to let him see it naturally made him suspicious. Hannegan told Truman to come to his suite at the Blackstone Hotel. He placed a call to San Diego, where Roosevelt was inspecting naval installations. Truman could hear Roosevelt’s voice on the telephone from across the room.

“Bob, have you got that fellow lined up yet?” the president demanded.

“No,” Hannegan replied. “He’s the contrariest goddamn mule from Missouri I ever saw.”

“Well, you tell him if he wants to break up the Democratic party in the middle of the war, and maybe lose that war, that’s up to him!” Roosevelt hung up.

“Oh, shit!” Truman said. He felt trapped—just as others had been trapped by Roosevelt before. “Well, if that’s the situation, I’ll have to say yes. But why the hell didn’t he tell me in the first place?”

The selection proceeded as Roosevelt knew it would. Wallace led on the first ballot, receiving 429¹/2 votes against 319¹/2 for Truman, with the balance scattered among fourteen other candidates. But the votes for Wallace were so many empty gestures, as the second ballot, called immediately, made clear. Truman won in a landslide: 1,100 to 66.

The suddenness of the result caught Truman off guard. He was eating a sandwich on the platform of the convention hall when his victory was announced. Samuel Jackson insisted that he say a few words. Truman put down his sandwich and obliged. “You don’t know how very much I appreciate the very great honor which has come to the state of Missouri,” he said. “It is also a great responsibility which I am perfectly willing to assume. Nine years and five months ago I came to the Senate. I expect to continue the efforts I have made there to help shorten the war and to win the peace under the great leader, Franklin D. Roosevelt. I don’t know what else I can say, except that I accept this great honor with all humility. I thank you.” He sat down and finished his sandwich.

“I SHALL NOT campaign, in the usual sense,” Roosevelt said, in accepting the presidential nomination. “In these days of tragic sorrow, I do not consider it fitting. And besides, in these days of global warfare, I shall not be able to find the time.” Roosevelt was speaking from his rail car on a siding in Southern California. By the middle of his twelfth year in office, the president seemed to many Democrats almost like God, able to manipulate people and things at long distance. In 1932 he had flown into Chicago to address the delegates, descending from the clouds to deliver the news of the party’s rebirth. Now he addressed the delegates from half a continent away. The hall was the same—the cavernous Chicago Stadium. The lights were dimmed, as they had been in 1932. But this time there was no spotlight for the speaker, because there was no speaker. There was only Roosevelt’s voice, rumbling through the building’s amplification system, booming out of the dark as if from on high. As with most of the president’s wartime journeys, this trip to the West Coast had been shrouded in secrecy; no one in the hall knew where he was—Washington? Hyde Park? Cairo?—till he revealed his location in his speech.

“What is the job before us in 1944?” the disembodied voice demanded.

First, to win the war—to win the war fast, to win it overpoweringly. Second, to form worldwide international organizations, and to arrange to use the armed forces of the sovereign nations of the world to make another war impossible within the foreseeable future. And third, to build an economy for our returning veterans and for all Americans—which will provide employment and provide decent standards of living.

The people of the United States will decide this fall whether they wish to turn over this 1944 job—this worldwide job—to inexperienced or immature hands, to those who opposed Lend-Lease and international cooperation against the forces of aggression and tyranny, until they could read the polls of popular sentiment; or whether they wish to leave it to those who saw the danger from abroad, who met it head-on, and who now have seized the offensive and carried the war to its present stages of success….

They will also decide, these people of ours, whether they will entrust the task of postwar reconversion to those who offered the veterans of the last war breadlines and apple-selling and who finally led the American people down to the abyss of 1932; or whether they will leave it to those who rescued American business, agriculture, industry, finance, and labor in 1933, and who have already planned and put through much legislation to help our veterans resume their normal occupations in a well-ordered reconversion process.

The voice rumbled on. None of the listeners dared move, almost as though the omniscience it conveyed would see them, even in the dark. The instructions concluded with words drawn from another era and the final stages of another mortal conflict, spoken by America’s secular saint:

With firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.

NO SOONER HAD Roosevelt surfaced in San Diego than he disappeared again. He boarded the cruiser Baltimore for a swift passage to Hawaii, to inspect the base where America’s war had started and to consult the general who aimed to end it. Since 1942 the war in the Pacific had produced some of the hardest fighting in American military history. The Guadalcanal campaign lasted six months, cost six thousand American lives, and revealed how difficult dislodging the Japanese from their island strongholds would be. In New Guinea the climate and terrain proved as formidable as the enemy; American and Australian troops struggled up and down precipitous ridges drenched in rain and cloaked with impenetrable vegetation. Every species of tropical disease and parasite—malaria, dysentery, typhus, dengue fever, ringworm, jungle rot—attacked the troops from the outside in and the inside out.

Progress was painfully slow, but it was progress still. By the summer of 1944 the Allies had captured positions in the Gilbert and Marshall islands, in addition to the Solomons and New Guinea. American carrier-based planes blasted a Japanese base at Truk in the Carolines. In June at the “Marianas turkey shoot” American fighters destroyed over two hundred Japanese planes while losing but twenty of their own. The securing of airfields on Guam and Tinian in the Marianas brought Japan’s home islands within reach of American B-29 bombers. And as the end game in Europe began to unfold, Roosevelt was ready to shift more of his—and America’s—attention to the Pacific. This meant talking to Douglas MacArthur.

The president’s Pacific tour had other purposes as well. It would boost the morale of the inhabitants of Oahu and honor the memory of the Pearl Harbor dead. It would allow him to review the rank-and-file in Hawaii and Alaska. It would enable him to campaign for president as commander in chief.

Chester Nimitz, the admiral in charge of the major part of the Pacific, had no particular problem with this last aspect of Roosevelt’s tour. But MacArthur, the commander for the Southwest Pacific, did. MacArthur was the most political officer of his generation, and yet he was remarkably clumsy every time he ventured near the political arena. He had angled for the 1944 Republican nomination for president but been swatted aside by Dewey. The rejection stung, and now MacArthur took umbrage at being made a prop in Roosevelt’s reelection campaign. He cursed the president all the way from his headquarters in Australia to the meeting in Hawaii. “The humiliation of forcing me to leave my command to fly to Honolulu for a political picture-taking junket!” he declared to everyone in earshot on his B-17 from Brisbane. “In all my fighting days I’ve never before had to turn my back on my assignment.”

He made his resentment plain on Roosevelt’s arrival. The Baltimore lowered the gangway at Pearl Harbor, and Nimitz and dozens of other officers came on board. “One officer was conspicuously absent,” Sam Rosenman recalled.

It was General Douglas MacArthur. When Roosevelt asked Nimitz where the General was, there was an embarrassed silence. We learned later that the General had arrived about an hour earlier, but instead of joining the other officers to greet the Commander-in-Chief, he had gone by himself to Fort Shafter.

After we had waited on the Baltimore for some time for the General, it was decided that the President and his party would disembark and go to the quarters on shore assigned to them. Just as we were getting ready to go below, a terrific automobile siren was heard, and there raced onto the dock and screeched to a stop a motorcycle escort and the longest open car I have ever seen. In the front was a chauffeur in khaki, and in the back one lone figure—MacArthur.

There were no aides or attendants. The car traveled some distance around the open space and stopped at the gangplank. When the applause of the crowd died down, the General strode rapidly to the gangplank all alone. He dashed up the gangplank, stopped halfway up to acknowledge another ovation, and soon was on deck greeting the President.

Roosevelt refused to respond to MacArthur’s unstated challenge, except for a minor poke. “Hello, Doug,” he said. “What are you doing with that leather jacket on? It’s darn hot today.”

MacArthur had never liked the uniforms the regular army wore. While seconded to the Philippine government during the 1930s, he designed for himself the gaudiest field marshal’s uniform Eisenhower, then his chief of staff, had ever seen. The nonregulation leather jacket was his latest fashion statement.

“I’ve just landed from Australia,” he told Roosevelt, pointing his corncob pipe at the sky. “It’s pretty cold up there.”

Roosevelt led the officers on a round of inspections. He visited the wreck of the Arizona, lying where it sank in Pearl Harbor. He toured the navy yards and addressed the troops at Schofield Barracks. He had himself rolled through an amputee ward at one of the hospitals, letting the wounded warriors see that their commander in chief couldn’t walk. Sam Rosenman had grown accustomed to Roosevelt’s disability, but he found the experience deeply moving. “He had known for twenty-three years what it was to be deprived of the use of both legs,” Rosenman recalled. “He wanted to display himself and his useless legs to those boys who would have to face the same bitterness. This crippled man on the little wheel chair wanted to show them that it was possible to rise above such physical handicaps.” Roosevelt spoke to the young men, one by one, and offered smiling encouragement. But he, too, was touched. “I never saw Roosevelt with tears in his eyes,” Rosenman remarked. “That day as he was wheeled out of the hospital he was close to them.”

In his tour of the island he traveled in an open vehicle, which unnerved his security team. “Many of the inhabitants were pure Japanese or descended from mixed marriages of Japanese,” Rosenman wrote. “Frequently, Admiral Nimitz, General MacArthur, and Admiral Leahy were in the car with him. Following behind in the procession, I could not help thinking how dreadful a toll one well-placed bomb would take. The Secret Service men were worried to distraction.”

The president chatted innocuously with MacArthur on their drives around Oahu, but back in the living room of the Waikiki house where he was staying he got down to business. A wall map showed the current disposition of American forces in the Pacific. “Well, Douglas,” Roosevelt said, “where do we go from here?”

MacArthur was expecting the question. “Leyte, Mr. President,” he said, pointing to the Philippines. “And then Luzon.”

At this stage of American strategy in the Pacific, informed opinion split between those who advocated approaching Japan via the Philippines and then Taiwan and those who favored bypassing the Philippines and advancing directly to Taiwan. The army generally favored the former route, and the navy the latter. MacArthur was staking the army’s claim—and his own—to the Philippines, and he spent the afternoon trying to bring the president to his side of the argument. He spoke with a fervor that wore Roosevelt out. “Give me an aspirin before I go to bed,” Roosevelt remarked to his doctor at the end of the session. “In fact, give me another aspirin to take in the morning. In all my life nobody has ever talked to me the way MacArthur did.”

Roosevelt was noncommittal but not discouraging. No decisions were made that week in Hawaii, yet the president gave MacArthur reason for optimism. At a press conference concluding the visit, Roosevelt said he had had “two very successful days” with MacArthur and the other officers, talking about “future plans.”

A reporter, bolder than the rest, inquired about those plans. “When General MacArthur was about to leave the Philippines,” the reporter observed, “I recall he said something to the general effect that ‘I will return.’ In view of the setting of this meeting with him, is there anything that you could tell us? Is that true now?”

“We are going to get the Philippines back,” Roosevelt said. “And without question General MacArthur will take a part in it.” But the president felt obliged to add: “Whether he goes direct or not, I can’t say.”

The reporter persisted. “Can we say that General MacArthur will return to the Philippines?”

“He was correct the day he left Corregidor, and I told him he was correct.”

54.

FOR MOST OF THE WAR ROBERT SHERWOOD SAW ROOSEVELT ON A REGULAR basis. His duties as a speech writer and then as director of the Office of War Information made him part of the White House family. But he spent the first several months of 1944 away from Washington on OWI business, and by the time he returned he hadn’t seen the president in more than half a year. He paid a visit at first opportunity. “I was shocked by his appearance,” Sherwood recalled. “I had heard that he had lost a lot of weight, but I was unprepared for the almost ravaged appearance of his face. He had his coat off and his shirt collar seemed several sizes too large for his emaciated neck.”

After twenty years on stage, eleven in a continuous run, the old performer was showing the strain. Since mounting the dais at the Democratic convention in 1924, Roosevelt had rarely been out of the spotlight and almost never out of character. The New York governorship and the New Deal presidency allowed intermissions, moments when he could catch his breath and gather himself. But the war, which began for Roosevelt, if not for America, about 1937, never stopped, and neither could its American protagonist.

Any war leader would have staggered under the burden. Churchill suffered a severe case of pneumonia after the Teheran conference; some of his associates weren’t sure he’d recover sufficiently to retain the premiership. Stalin’s health was a better-kept secret, but various reports suggested some kind of nervous breakdown amid the Nazi offensive of 1941.

Yet Roosevelt’s burden was greater than those of his Grand Alliance partners. As both head of government and head of state, he combined the roles of Churchill and King George VI. Churchill boasted that he might be turned out at any moment, but that possibility was more theoretical than real. The confidence votes weren’t even close. And unlike Roosevelt, he didn’t have to lead his party in wartime elections, because Britain’s flexible constitution allowed elections to be suspended for the duration. As for Stalin, he governed by diktat. He didn’t have to kiss babies, woo their parents, or cajole their representatives. He didn’t shoot his subjects as often as he had during the 1930s, in part because the Germans were shooting so many that he couldn’t afford to waste the remainder. But everyone remembered the purges and acted accordingly.

The demands of democracy aside, Roosevelt’s burden was peculiarly personal. He had determined, not long after contracting polio, that he would deny its effects on his life and dreams. The sheer physical effort of standing in his braces, of staggering forward, step by lurching step, of smiling through the sweat and the clenched hands gripping the lectern for dear life, would have exhausted anyone. But the emotional effort was at least as great. He couldn’t show his anger at his lost athleticism, his vanished virility, his physical dependence on others. He couldn’t be discouraged or despondent. Roosevelts didn’t show their feelings, Delanos even less. And this Roosevelt, this Delano, showed his feelings least of all. To allow others inside, to let them see the man behind the actor, would spoil the effect he had taken such pains to create.

The effect—of the fearless leader, the happy warrior, the father figure on whom the nation relied—was as central to his own equilibrium as it was to the country’s. His isolation hadn’t begun with the polio. He had been emotionally isolated since boyhood. His close relationships had always been with persons not his equal. He had no close friends as a boy or young man, no one at Groton or Harvard in whom he genuinely confided. After he entered politics he had mentors and protégés; as he advanced he lost the mentors and was left with only protégés and attendants. Louis Howe, Missy LeHand, Harry Hopkins, and the lesser members of the White House family subordinated themselves, their careers, their personal lives to him. After Howe died, none would talk back to him as Louis had. Missy’s stroke deprived him of another, softer voice. Roosevelt might have confided in his children as they matured, but the emotional code instilled in him by his father and especially his mother prevented such intimacies.

The result of all this was that the actor never left the stage. By the twelfth year in the presidential spotlight, the performer’s constitution was breaking down. The first conclusive evidence of incipient failure appeared in March 1944. Ross McIntire, the president’s physician, was a navy doctor who specialized in ears, noses, and throats. He received the assignment as presidential physician because he knew Cary Grayson, Woodrow Wilson’s doctor, who was a friend of Roosevelt’s, and because at the time of Roosevelt’s first inauguration, sinus complaints were his only chronic medical condition—aside, of course, from the paraplegia. For decades presidents had been treated by army or navy doctors, partly on account of the cost saving to the patients, at a time when presidents weren’t paid very well, and partly because the president’s doctor had to be able to travel with the president on the president’s schedule—something few physicians in private practice would have been willing to do. This tradition meant that presidents often didn’t receive the best care possible. Military doctors typically weren’t at the leading edge of their fields, and the fact that those treating the president were dealing with their commander in chief inhibited their assertiveness. McIntire was no exception to the rule. He was perfectly adequate in treating head colds and other pedestrian maladies, and he was adept at the politics of the navy and of Washington, eventually becoming a vice admiral and the surgeon general of the navy. But he was over his head in treating a patient with chronic complicated illnesses.

To his credit he realized his limitations, albeit belatedly. Roosevelt returned from Teheran in December 1943, having traveled seventeen thousand miles in five weeks. The success of his first meeting with Stalin had boosted his spirits, as did the time he spent aboard ship, but the whole endeavor wore him down. He contracted influenza and spent most of his Hyde Park Christmas holiday coughing and aching. The cough and discomfort persisted into January and February, causing the cancellation of several engagements, including press conferences, which naturally prompted speculation about what was wrong with the president. McIntire finally ordered a full workup in March, bringing in specialists, including Howard Bruenn, a young navy cardiologist. The conditions of Bruenn’s consulting reflected navy practice; as a junior officer, he reported to his superior, McIntire, rather than to his patient, Roosevelt.

“He appeared to be very tired, and his face was very gray,” Bruenn recalled of his initial examination. “Moving caused considerable breathlessness.” The patient coughed frequently. His pulse was seventy-two beats per minute; his blood pressure was 186 over 108. Fluoroscopy and X-rays revealed that the left ventricle of the heart was enlarged and the pulmonary vessels engorged. “Accordingly, a diagnosis was made of hypertension, hypertensive heart disease, and cardiac failure (left ventricle), and acute bronchitis,” Bruenn wrote. “These findings and their interpretation were conveyed to Surgeon General McIntire. They had been completely unsuspected up to this time.”

This wasn’t quite true. McIntire had diagnosed hypertension in Roosevelt in 1937 and again in 1941, although he missed the other maladies. Bruenn proceeded to file a memorandum with McIntire prescribing the standard treatment of that day for such cases: bed rest for a week or two, regular doses of digitalis to ease blood flow through the heart, codeine for the cough, and reduction of dietary salt and gradual weight loss to bring down the blood pressure.

“This memorandum was rejected because of the exigencies and demands on the President,” Bruenn wrote. McIntire pointed out the obvious: Roosevelt wasn’t a normal patient. He could take the digitalis, he could cut back on his salt, and he could lose weight. But he couldn’t stop working, not with a war on. McIntire directed Bruenn to monitor the situation.

The younger doctor did so, examining Roosevelt three or four times a week and ordering electrocardiograms and various other tests. The bronchitis eased, in part as a result of Roosevelt’s curtailment of cigarettes, to six per day. But the hypertension worsened. On April 4 his blood pressure was 226 over 118. Roosevelt reported sleeping well and said he felt fine. Yet he was strikingly incurious about his condition. “At no time,” Bruenn remembered, “did the President ever comment on the frequency of these visits or question the reason for the electrocardiograms and the other laboratory tests that were performed from time to time; nor did he ever have any questions as to the type and variety of medications that were used.”

Roosevelt’s lack of curiosity may have reflected the medical ethos of the time, when patients typically deferred to physicians more than they would later. It may have mirrored Roosevelt’s preoccupation with his work. With his head full of the war, he would let the doctors worry about his health. It may have indicated a conscious or unconscious act of denial: to refuse to acknowledge that something was gravely amiss. Denial had been his initial strategy for dealing with polio, and in retrospect he couldn’t argue with the results. Denial might be the most productive way to deal with a failing heart.

Roosevelt couldn’t stop working, but he could take a working vacation. Bernard Baruch volunteered his South Carolina estate, and the president, McIntire, Bruenn, and several members of the White House entourage headed to the Carolina coast. The weather was fair though a bit cool for April. Roosevelt slept late each morning and remained in bed till noon, reading newspapers and answering correspondence. He ate lunch with the group, joined by Baruch and occasional visitors, including Eleanor, Anna, his cousin Daisy Suckley, and military and civilian officials who came down from Washington. After lunch he would nap and in the late afternoon go fishing or for a drive around the plantation. Every day a special plane from the capital brought documents that required signatures; Roosevelt dealt with these before dinner, which began about seven and was the high point of the day. “The conversation was animated, with the President playing the dominant role,” Bruenn wrote. “It ranged from reminiscences with Mr. Baruch over earlier contemporaries and incidents to a discussion of recent and current events.”

ONE VISITOR TO Baruch’s plantation wasn’t recorded in the official log. Roosevelt had continued to see Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, more frequently following the death of her husband in early 1944. By then Anna was back living at the White House, where she assumed some of the responsibilities of the peripatetic Eleanor and some of the tasks of Missy LeHand. She had to be careful not to confuse the portfolios, especially when Roosevelt one day asked, “What would you think about our inviting an old friend of mine to a few dinners at the White House? This would have to be arranged when your mother is away, and I would have to depend on you to make the arrangements.” Anna had learned the story of Lucy years before from Eleanor, and at first she hesitated, out of loyalty to her mother. “It was a terrible decision to have to make,” she recalled.

But her love for her father won out. Having come to see him through the eyes of an adult—one who, like him, had been unlucky in love—Anna realized how hungry he was for the kind of companionship that Lucy could provide and that Eleanor couldn’t or wouldn’t. The First Lady always had an agenda. She rarely met with her husband without bringing up her current causes. These were generally worthy and often underrepresented in the policy circles of the administration, and before the war Roosevelt had been willing for her to push him on such matters. But the war was wearing him down, and he didn’t have the energy or time for Eleanor’s projects.

For years Missy LeHand had played the second wife, the devoted helpmeet who asked nothing besides the chance to serve the man she loved. But Missy was dying. That he had lost Sara about the time Missy fell ill doubled the blow. From birth Roosevelt had been doted on by at least one woman; now there was none. Anna helped fill the gap, but as a daughter there was only so much she could do.

One thing she did was smuggle Lucy into the White House. A first private dinner was arranged, then several more. Finding evenings when Eleanor was away was easy, given her endless travel schedule. The White House staff and Secret Service agents were discreet. As far as Anna could tell, the meetings consisted of nothing more than dinner and pleasant talk, which eased her conscience. “They were occasions which I welcomed for my father,” she said, “because they were light-hearted and gay, affording a few hours of much needed relaxation.”

Roosevelt met Lucy outside the White House as well. On fair afternoons he would have himself driven to the home of a mutual friend near Leesburg, Virginia. He and Lucy would visit there, or she would join him in the back seat of the car for a tour of the countryside. In one instance he stopped the presidential train en route from Washington to Hyde Park to visit her at a home she kept in New Jersey. At least once she spent the weekend with him at Shangri-La. And in the spring of 1944, during his month at Baruch’s South Carolina estate, Lucy drove over from her winter home at Aiken. Baruch provided the ration coupons to purchase gasoline for the journey.

“I HAD REALLY a grand time down at Bernie’s,” Roosevelt wrote Harry Hopkins after returning to Washington. “Slept twelve hours out of the twenty-four, sat in the sun, never lost my temper, and decided to let the world go hang. The interesting thing is the world didn’t hang. I have a terrific pile in my basket, but most of the stuff has answered itself.”

Howard Bruenn concurred, to a point. “He slept soundly and ate well,” Bruenn recorded. The president’s spirits and demeanor were much improved. But his blood pressure remained high and in fact got worse, rising to as much as 240 over 130. “He complained of soreness in the back of his neck and a throbbing sensation all through the body.” Bruenn and McIntire sent him to bed for two days, and the symptoms subsided.

A new symptom—intermittent abdominal pains—caused McIntire to order X-rays of the gall bladder. When the images revealed gallstones, the president was placed on a low-fat diet of 1,800 calories per day. During the next few months he showed no new symptoms, weathering his journey to California, Hawaii, and Alaska quite well.

But on the return, while giving a speech at a naval facility in Bremerton, Washington, he felt a pressure in his chest that radiated out to both shoulders. The incident lasted perhaps fifteen minutes, and the pressure had disappeared by the time he finished talking. Bruenn checked him for signs of a heart attack but found nothing.

The train journey home was slow and uneventful. Roosevelt stuck to his diet, so well that he shed fifteen pounds. “As usually happens with weight loss of this degree, the President had lost some flesh from his face,” Bruenn noted. “His features had become sharpened and he looked somewhat haggard in place of his normal, robust appearance.” Bruenn and McIntire told him he had lost all the weight he needed to lose, and they eased the caloric restrictions on his diet. But he didn’t have much appetite, partly because of the blandness of his food, and the weight loss continued.

It was at this point that Robert Sherwood saw him and was shocked at his appearance. Others, too, wondered what was wrong with the president. Rumors circulated, with the election approaching, that the president was gravely ill. “You hear them everywhere you go,” journalist Marquis Childs wrote. Childs, a Roosevelt loyalist, refused to believe them. “This is wicked business,” he said. “It is the vilest kind of fear campaign.” But he knew what drove the campaign. “Some people hate the President so much that the wish is father to the thought that his health is seriously undermined. There is a type of frustrated individual who actually seems to get a malicious pleasure from hinting that he or she has inside information that Roosevelt is suffering from some serious ailment.”

The rumors gained sufficient credence that the White House felt obliged to have Ross McIntire refute them. The president’s health was “good, very good,” Roosevelt’s primary doctor declared in September. The president had caught the flu some while earlier, but so had many other people. “He’s right back in shape now.” When this statement failed to stifle the whispers, McIntire held another press conference. “The President’s health is perfectly O.K.,” he declared. “There are absolutely no organic difficulties at all.” McIntire acknowledged that Roosevelt looked thin, but he said this was by the president’s own choice. He had decided to lose some weight, had succeeded, and had become “proud of his flat—repeat f–l–a–t—tummy.” McIntire added, “Frankly, I wish he would put on a few pounds.”

Roosevelt himself addressed the rumors, at first obliquely. In a radio address from the White House he lamented that the current campaign had been marred by “even more than the usual crop of whisperings and rumorings.” Voters almost certainly had not heard the end of them. “As we approach election day, more wicked charges may be made—and probably will—with the hope that someone or somebody will gain momentary advantage. Hysterical last-minute accusations or sensational revelations are trumped up in an attempt to panic the people on election day.” But he was confident the people would not be panicked.

The campaign didn’t cure what ailed him, but it rekindled his fighting spirit, as campaigns always did. He asked Sherwood if he had listened to any of Dewey’s speeches. Sherwood hadn’t. “You ought to hear him,” Roosevelt said. “He plays the part of the heroic racket-buster in one of those gangster movies. He talks to the people as if they were the jury and I were the villain on trial for his life.” The president explained that he himself would be speaking to a Teamsters dinner the next Saturday night. “I expect to have a lot of fun with that one,” he said, smiling.

He did have fun. He lambasted the Republicans for callous disregard of the truth. Some were denying that they had ever opposed such popular New Deal measures as Social Security. “Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery,” Roosevelt told the Teamsters, “but I am afraid that in this case it is the most obvious common or garden variety of fraud.” Many Republicans were calling him a tyrant. “They have imported the propaganda technique invented by the dictators abroad.” The most shameless of the critics said he had left America unready for war. “I doubt whether even Goebbels would have tried that one.” Roosevelt’s audience grew more indignant with each lash of his tongue. The emotional level was just where he wanted it when he slyly shifted direction.

These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family doesn’t resent attacks, but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I had left him behind on the Aleutian Islands and had sent a destroyer back to find him—at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars—his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since. I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself—such as that old, worm-eaten chestnut that I have represented myself as indispensable. But I think I have a right to resent, to object to libelous statements about my dog.

THE FALA STORY—replayed endlessly over the radio and in newsreels, with Roosevelt’s sarcasm dripping anew each time—disarmed Dewey. Roosevelt delivered a handful of additional addresses in Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, and New York. The New York address culminated a four-borough tour in an open car amid a cold, driving rain. Most of Roosevelt’s companions begged off, but the president didn’t want to disappoint the millions of voters who lined the streets, and he wanted to bury the charges that he was on his deathbed. The cheering crowds didn’t know that his car periodically darted into garages where he put on dry clothes and took warming shots of brandy.

In early October Al Smith died at the age of seventy. Smith and Roosevelt had been estranged for years, with Smith endorsing Willkie in 1940 after backing Landon in 1936. Smith all but volunteered for service in the Roosevelt administration after Pearl Harbor, yet the president ignored his feelers. Smith’s death, however, gave Roosevelt an opportunity to make amends, on his own terms, and to reflect on those better times when Smith had served the Democratic party, and particularly its urban constituencies, well. “Al Smith had qualities of heart and mind and soul which not only endeared him to those who came under the spell of his dynamic presence in personal association, but also made him the idol of the multitude,” Roosevelt said. “Frank, friendly and warmhearted, honest as the noonday sun, he had the courage of his convictions, even when his espousal of unpopular causes invited the enmity of powerful adversaries.” Those adversaries, of course, had become Roosevelt’s own, and Smith’s 1928 defeat proved, after the 1929 crash and the ordeal of the Hoover years, to be a badge of Democratic pride. “In a bitter campaign, in which his opponent won, Al Smith made no compromise with honor, honesty, or integrity. In his passing the country loses a true patriot.”

Less than a week later, Wendell Willkie died. Smith’s passing had not been entirely unexpected, but Willkie’s death—by heart attack, following a strep infection, at the age of fifty-two—was a shock. Yet if Smith’s death allowed Roosevelt an opportunity to reaffirm his ties to urban Democrats, Willkie’s demise let him reach out to internationalist Republicans. Robert Sherwood thought Roosevelt respected Willkie’s talent and patriotism so highly that he would not have run for a fourth term if Willkie had won the Republican nomination. But Sherwood himself admitted that this was a “doubly hypothetical surmise,” in that the Republican regulars detested Willkie even more than they hated Roosevelt. The president consequently took pleasure in praising the “tremendous courage” of his erstwhile and now deceased opponent. “This courage, which was his dominating trait, prompted him more than once to stand alone and to challenge the wisdom of counsels taken by powerful interests within his own party.”

TWO WEEKS BEFORE the election Douglas MacArthur made good his pledge to return to the Philippines. The president had accepted MacArthur’s contention that American strategy and American honor dictated the early liberation of the Philippines, and on October 20 the general splashed ashore on the eastern Philippine island of Leyte. He was in full hero mode. As he stepped into his landing craft, he put a revolver in his pocket. “It’s just a precaution, just to make sure that I am never captured alive,” he said. He ordered soldiers out of the boats to make room for photographers, and no sooner had he waded through the surf to the sand than he had his signal corps rig a transmitter. “I have returned!” he told the Filipinos and the world. “By the grace of Almighty God, our forces again stand on Philippine soil…. Let no heart be faint. Let every arm be steeled. The guidance of Divine God points the way. Follow in his name to the Holy Grail of righteous victory!” To Roosevelt he wrote that the operation was going very well. The Filipinos were reacting “splendidly” to his efforts on their behalf. Victory was in sight. Yet the hero remained humble. “Please excuse this scribble,” he told the president, “but at the moment I am on the combat line with no facilities except this field message pad.”

Roosevelt responded with a comparable mix of sincerity and theater. “The whole American nation today exults at the news that the gallant men under your command have landed on Philippine soil,” he cabled the general. “I know well what this means to you. I know what it cost you to obey my order that you leave Corregidor in February 1942 and proceed to Australia. Since then you have planned and worked and fought with whole-souled devotion for the day when you would return with powerful forces to the Philippine Islands.” That day finally had come. “You have the nation’s gratitude and the nation’s prayers for success.”

Additional good news arrived within days, when a U.S. naval force annihilated most of what remained of the Japanese fleet, at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Four Japanese aircraft carriers, three battleships, eight cruisers, and a dozen destroyers went down with some ten thousand officers and men. The battle closed a chapter of naval warfare; never again would the Japanese fleet venture in force from its home waters.

ROOSEVELT COULD HAVE coasted to victory in the election, but he chose to press his advantage. In a radio address delivered before the Foreign Policy Association of New York, he described the present as a crossroads of history for democracy and personal freedom.

The power which this nation has attained—the political, the economic, the military, and above all the moral power—has brought to us the responsibility, and with it the opportunity, for leadership in the community of nations. It is our own best interest, and in the name of peace and humanity, this nation cannot, must not, and will not shirk that responsibility.

Roosevelt’s vision of American leadership entailed a radical departure in American diplomacy. He remembered well that American support for the League of Nations had broken over article 10 of the League covenant, pledging members to employ force against aggressors. Yet now he made such a pledge the crux of his election campaign.

The Council of the United Nations must have the power to act quickly and decisively to keep the peace by force, if necessary. A policeman would not be a very effective policeman if, when he saw a felon break into a house, he had to go to the town hall and call a town meeting to issue a warrant before the felon could be arrested…. If the world organization is to have any reality at all, our American representative must be endowed in advance by the people themselves, by constitutional means through their representatives in the Congress, with authority to act.

The contrast to the 1940 campaign could hardly have been more dramatic. Then Roosevelt had promised American mothers and fathers that he would not send their sons to fight in foreign wars. Now he promised those same mothers and fathers that he wouldsend their sons to do precisely that.

It was a bold move, but not a hugely risky one. In 1940 the isolationists had still been a threat; Roosevelt had had to proceed with caution. Now isolationism was a spent force and internationalism was on the rise. Yet he knew from experience how quickly the American mood could change, which was why he insisted on making the election a referendum on his internationalist vision.

Americans responded by handing Roosevelt a resounding fourth victory. He polled 25.6 million popular votes and 432 electoral votes, against 22 million popular and 99 electoral for Dewey. His popularity reached to the House, where the Democrats reversed their downward trend and gained twenty seats. In the Senate the two parties broke even.

55.

“DEAREST FRANKLIN,” ELEANOR WROTE IN EARLY DECEMBER 1944:

I realize very well that I do not know the reasons why certain things may be necessary nor whether you intend to do them or do not intend to do them. It does, however, make me rather nervous to hear you say that you do not care what Jimmy Dunne thinks because he will do what you tell him to do and that for three years you have carried the State Department and you expect to go on doing it. I am quite sure that Jimmy Dunne is clever enough to tell you that he will do what you want and to allow his subordinates to accomplish things which will get by and which will pretty well come up in the long-time results to what he actually wants to do.

Cordell Hull’s uncertain health had finally forced him to resign, after serving longer than any other secretary of state in American history. Roosevelt hadn’t chosen a replacement, and Eleanor worried that James Dunne, Hull’s assistant, was taking the State Department in an illiberal direction.

Eleanor worried constantly these days, and not simply about the State Department. She was having an eventful, sometimes fulfilling, but often frustrating war. She quit the Office of Civilian Defense after conservatives in Congress vented their displeasure at her causes by cutting funding to the OCD. “I offered a way to get at the president,” she observed afterward. She began visiting military hospitals and bases around the country, but when her sons went overseas she determined to follow their example, to the degree a president’s spouse could. She traveled to England, where she visited with Churchill and his wife. “One feels that she has had to assume a role because of being in public life, and that the role is now a part of her,” she wrote of Clementine Churchill, in words she knew applied to herself as well. “One wonders what she is like underneath.” She met with the king, the queen, and assorted lesser royals. She saw the destruction from the German bombs in the Battle of Britain. She toured British and American military facilities and spoke with Eisenhower and his lieutenants. Her matter-of-fact manner impressed everyone she encountered. “Mrs. Roosevelt has been winning golden opinions here from all for her kindness and her unfailing interest in everything we are doing,” Churchill informed Roosevelt.

Her journey to England piqued her desire to get closer to the fighting. A Washington appearance by Madame Chiang suggested where Eleanor might go next. Eleanor was initially as smitten by China’s First Lady as most people were. She told Franklin what a gentle, sweet character she was. But Madame Chiang’s visit coincided with Franklin’s troubles with John L. Lewis and the mine workers, and Roosevelt innocently asked her, “What would you do in China with a labor leader like John Lewis?” Eleanor recalled the moment: “She never said a word, but the beautiful, small hand came up very quietly and slid across her throat—a most expressive gesture.” Roosevelt afterward inquired mischievously of Eleanor: “Well, how about your gentle and sweet character?” Years later, when Eleanor found other reasons to differ with Madame Chiang, she would say: “Those delicate little petal-like fingers—you could see some poor wretch’s neck being wrung.”

Madame Chiang’s visit provided the impetus for Eleanor to arrange a trip to the Pacific theater. She did so with mixed feelings. “This trip will be attacked as a political gesture,” she wrote a friend. “I am so uncertain whether or not I am doing the right thing that I will start with a heavy heart.” Her doubts didn’t lessen when some of the theater officers made clear that they didn’t appreciate her coming. Douglas MacArthur in Australia was even more disrespectful of her than he was of her husband. He wouldn’t take the time to speak to her, and he refused her request to get closer to the front, saying he couldn’t spare the personnel a woman of her stature required as protection. “This is the kind of thing that seems to me silly,” she wrote Franklin. She said she would be happy with a single sergeant as a guide. To a friend she wrote, “I’ve never been so hedged around with protection in my life. It makes me want to do something reckless when I get home, like making munitions!”

MacArthur handed Eleanor off to Captain Robert White, who at first resented the assignment. He had joined the army to fight the Japanese, not to chauffeur civilians who had no business in the war zone. But his experience with Eleanor changed his mind. “Wherever Mrs. Roosevelt went she wanted to see the things a mother would see,” White wrote later.

She looked at kitchens and saw how food was prepared. When she chatted with the men she said things mothers would say, little things men never think of and couldn’t put into words if they did. Her voice was like a mother’s, too. Mrs. Roosevelt went through hospital wards by the hundreds. In each she made a point of stopping by each bed, shaking hands, and saying some nice, motherlike thing. Maybe it sounds funny, but she left behind her many a tough battletorn GI blowing his nose and swearing at the cold he had recently picked up.

Eleanor’s maternal instincts extended to politics once she returned home. She encouraged her husband to keep the liberal faith, lest the poor and otherwise unfortunate lose out amid the effort to win the war. She tried to persuade him to retain Henry Wallace as vice president, considering Wallace the most reliable of the dwindling number of New Dealers in the administration. “I wrote a column on Wallace but Franklin says I must hold it till after the convention,” she told a friend to whom she could air her frustration. “I wish I were free!” At other moments she seemed more eager for a fourth term than Franklin was. “I don’t think Pa would really mind defeat,” she wrote James. “If elected he’ll do his job well I feel sure, and I think he can be kept well to do it, but he does get tired, so I think if he is defeated he’ll be content…. I am only concerned because Dewey seems to me more and more to show no understanding of the job at home or abroad.”

Immediately after the election she challenged Roosevelt to make good on his economic bill of rights. Harry Hopkins recounted a conversation the three of them had, in which Eleanor did most of the talking. “Mrs. Roosevelt urged the President very strongly to keep in the forefront of his mind the domestic situation because she felt there was a real danger of his losing American public opinion in his foreign policy if he failed to follow through on the domestic implications of his campaign promises,” Hopkins said. Eleanor stressed full employment—“the organizing of our economic life in such a way as to give everybody a job”—and she told Franklin and Hopkins that they simply had to do more than they were doing. “This was an overwhelming task and she hoped neither the President nor I thought it was settled in any way by making speeches.”

ROOSEVELT DIDN’T need the reminder that words weren’t deeds, but other deeds just then took precedence over his economic bill of rights. The war—both wars, in fact—remained to be won. The distinctness of the conflicts—the one in Europe, the other in the Pacific—became a major issue in American diplomacy during the last months of 1944 and the first months of 1945. The war in Europe was going as well as the Allies could hope. The American and British armies rolled through France during the summer of 1944, with Roosevelt, Churchill, and Eisenhower tactfully letting de Gaulle’s Free French army liberate Paris, in support of an uprising by the anti-German resistance there. “Men and women,” de Gaulle declared upon entering the capital: “We are here in the Paris that rose to free herself—the Paris oppressed, downtrodden, and martyred, but still Paris—free now, freed by the hands of Frenchmen, the capital of fighting France, of great eternal France.”

Roosevelt congratulated de Gaulle and his compatriots, while reminding them that it wasn’t just French hands that freed Paris. “We rejoice with the gallant French people at the liberation of their capital,” the president said, “and join in the chorus of congratulation to the commanders and fighting men, French and Allied, who have made possible this brilliant presage of total victory.”

The Allies pressed east, driving the Germans out of most of Belgium and the Netherlands in September and reaching the Rhine by the end of the month. Optimists, remembering the sudden disintegration of the second German reich at the end of the First World War, spoke of celebrating Christmas in Berlin. But the Germans dug in and launched a ferocious counterattack. The Battle of the Bulge (named for the westward swelling in the front) alarmingly recalled the German successes of 1940. For six weeks from mid-December the Germans threw every unit they could spare into the fight and inflicted the heaviest casualties American forces suffered during the entire war. But the Allied lines ultimately held, and the failed effort exhausted the Germans.

The Soviets meanwhile closed in from the east. The Russians drove the Germans out of the Ukraine and White Russia and fought their way across Poland. The Red Army troops entered East Prussia, some with their own visions of an Orthodox Christmas in Berlin (Stalin having loosened up on religion during the war). But logistics and winter intervened, and the final push awaited the spring of 1945.

In the Pacific the third anniversary of American belligerence found American forces sweeping all before them. MacArthur’s troops advanced through the Philippines, reaching the outskirts of Manila by the end of January 1945. A monthlong battle liberated the city, although little remained standing by the time the guns fell silent. In early February American B-29s flying from the Marianas began a firebombing campaign against Japan, which culminated, for the moment, in a three-hundred-plane assault on Tokyo that left the city a blazing ruin.

American scientists and engineers prepared an even more devastating attack. In December 1944 Roosevelt received a briefing on the Manhattan Project from Leslie Groves, the commanding general of the atomic bomb program, and George Marshall. Groves and Marshall explained that the project’s scientists and engineers had been pursuing two approaches to an atomic bomb. One approach, relying on the implosion of fissionable material, had appeared promising, in part because it required only a modest amount of the critical substance. Groves had hoped that an implosion bomb might be ready for use by the late spring of 1945. But technical difficulties emerged, necessitating a larger amount of fissionable material, which would require additional months to refine. “We should have sufficient material for the first implosion type bomb sometime in the latter part of July,” Groves told Roosevelt. A small number of additional implosion bombs would follow.

The second kind of bomb would produce its explosion by firing part of the fissionable material at the other part. This “gun-type” bomb would produce a much larger blast—the equivalent of ten thousand tons of TNT, as opposed to five hundred tons with the implosion device. The first such bomb, Groves said, should be ready “about 1 August 1945.” A second gun-type bomb would not be ready until the end of the year.

Roosevelt listened very carefully to the briefing. He probably didn’t fathom all the technical details, but he understood perfectly the crucial matter of timing. The bomb makers weren’t offering him anything usable before late July. Roosevelt knew enough about bureaucracies to guess that this was an optimistic forecast. The autumn of 1945 sounded more likely than the summer for the first use of an atomic bomb, assuming the complicated gizmo worked at all. Anything like a campaign of atomic bombing would probably have to wait until 1946 at the earliest.

THIS ESTIMATE figured centrally in Roosevelt’s thinking as he approached the second meeting of the leaders of the Grand Alliance. He had known since the previous summer that he needed to meet again with Stalin and Churchill to plan the final thrust against Germany, the sequel regarding Japan, and the future of the United Nations. But Stalin refused to leave the Soviet Union just as the war on the eastern front was turning decisively in Russia’s favor, and Roosevelt was reluctant to stir up political trouble by traveling to the homeland of communism ahead of the election. Once the election was assured, however, he had Harry Hopkins quietly sound out the Soviet ambassador, Andrei Gromyko, as to where on Soviet soil Stalin would be willing to meet. Hopkins volunteered that the Crimean peninsula might be nice in winter. Stalin responded that the Crimea would be fine. “This was the first indication anyone around the President had that the President would even consider a conference in Russia,” Hopkins remembered. “All of the President’s close advisers were opposed to his going to Russia; most did not like or trust the Russians anyway and could not understand why the President of the United States should cart himself all over the world to meet Stalin.”

But Roosevelt was determined to go. He wanted another opportunity to cultivate Stalin. He wasn’t worried, after the election, about the political fallout. And he had never been to that part of Europe. Hopkins thought this last consideration decisive. “His adventurous spirit was forever leading him to go to unusual places,” Hopkins said.

Churchill objected loudly. “He says that if we had spent ten years on research we could not have found a worse place than Yalta,” Hopkins reported to Roosevelt. But the prime minister was outvoted, and after Roosevelt agreed to a pre-Yalta meeting with Churchill at British-controlled Malta, the prime minister acquiesced.

The Americans soon discovered the cause of Churchill’s objections to Yalta. The town had been a health spa in the period when Roosevelt’s father visited such places in search of relief from his heart condition. Its sheltered setting, nestled among mountains that kept out the frigid winds from the Ukrainian steppe while letting the low winter sun enter from the southern sky above the Black Sea, made it many degrees warmer than anything nearby. Russian czars built vacation palaces there; the Russian gentry bivouacked in somewhat lesser digs. The neighborhood declined after the execution of the last czar and the flight or extermination of most of the gentry, but the Soviet commissars and their favorites found use for some of the vestiges of the decadent capitalist order. The Livadia palace, constructed by Nicholas II, became to Russian tuberculosis patients under Stalin what Warm Springs was to polio patients under Roosevelt.

The German war was much harder on Yalta than the Soviet revolution had been. German theater commanders established their headquarters at the Livadia palace, but as the Red Army reclaimed the area, the Germans looted and gratuitously ravaged the palace and its environs. With other priorities, the Russian government made no attempt to restore the building, which fell further into disrepair. Rats and larger animals took over, bringing fleas and lice, which in turn brought diseases of various sorts, rendering the erstwhile showcase of the former health spa decidedly unhealthy.

No one thought much of the mess until mid-January 1945, when Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill scheduled their conference. Yalta thereupon received a crash rehabilitation. Soviet work crews cleared up the rubble in and around the Livadia. Dachas near Moscow were stripped of their furnishings to replace the pieces stolen or destroyed by the Nazis. Hotel staff were spirited away from other facilities and transported to the Crimea. In an exception to Soviet policy and philosophy, Stalin allowed U.S. navy medical crews to travel to Yalta to fumigate and sanitize the palace, where Roosevelt and the American contingent would be staying.

Roosevelt reached Yalta by sea, air, and land. A sea voyage carried him to Malta, where the British and American military staffs were comparing notes, coordinating plans, and generally prepping for their sessions with their Soviet counterparts. Roosevelt stayed at Malta long enough to have lunch and dinner with Churchill but not long enough to give Stalin more reason to suspect Anglo-American conspiracy. From Malta the Sacred Cow, well guarded by an escort of fighter planes, carried the president to Saki, the airfield nearest to Yalta but still eighty miles away. The road over the mountains to Yalta was endlessly winding and unnervingly narrow; it too was guarded, although perhaps not so well. The war obviously had depleted Russian ranks; many of the roadside guards were young girls.

Roosevelt arrived at night, and Stalin the next morning. Stalin and Molotov stopped by Roosevelt’s rooms at the Livadia that afternoon. The three were joined only by their interpreters, Charles Bohlen and V. N. Pavlov. Roosevelt remarked that on the ship coming over he had made a number of bets on whether American forces would reach Manila before Soviet forces got to Berlin. Stalin laughed and said he hoped the president had put his money on Manila. There was much hard fighting to be done between the Oder, where the eastern front currently ran, and the German capital.

Roosevelt replied that he had seen a sample of German rapacity on the road from Saki. As a result, he was “more bloodthirsty” than he had been the previous year at Teheran. He hoped the marshal would renew his call for “the execution of fifty thousand officers of the German army.”

Stalin said everyone was more bloodthirsty than before. The destruction in the Crimea was minor compared with what the Germans had done in the Ukraine. The Germans were “savages and seemed to hate with a sadistic hatred the creative work of human beings,” Stalin said. Roosevelt nodded agreement.

The president inquired as to how Stalin had gotten along with de Gaulle, who had visited Moscow several weeks earlier. Stalin said the French general was “unrealistic” about France’s postwar role. “France had done little fighting and yet de Gaulle demanded “full rights” with the Americans, British, and Russians.

Roosevelt volunteered to be “indiscreet” with Stalin, saying he wanted to tell the marshal something he wouldn’t say in front of Churchill. “The British for two years have had the idea of artificially building up France into a strong power which would have 200,000 troops on the eastern border of France to hold the line for the time required to assemble a strong British army.” Roosevelt added, “The British are a peculiar people and wish to have their cake and eat it too.”

Stalin asked Roosevelt whether he thought the French should have a zone of occupation in Germany, along with the Americans, Russians, and British.

Roosevelt said a zone for France was “not a bad idea,” but it would be given “only out of kindness.”

Stalin replied that kindness indeed would be the only reason to give France a sector of Germany.

Roosevelt and Stalin moved from the president’s suite to the grand ballroom of the palace, where they were joined by Churchill and various members of their entourages. Stalin asked Roosevelt to open the formal conference, as he had done at Teheran. The president obliged, thanking the marshal for arranging the meeting in such a lovely and historic spot. He expressed his hope and expectation that the three leaders and their parties would get to know one another better during their week together. There was much ground to cover—“the whole map of Europe, in fact.” But this afternoon, by agreement, the discussion would focus on the war against Germany.

Roosevelt turned to Stalin, who invited General Alexey Antonov, the deputy chief of the Russian general staff, to review the progress on the eastern front. Antonov provided great detail on the current and prospective operations of the Red Army, all of which appeared promising. They would be even more promising, he said, if the Americans and British would press harder in the west, in particular to prevent the transfer of any German units to the east.

George Marshall responded for the Anglo-Americans. He said the German bulge in the Ardennes, which had caused such concern a month earlier, had been eliminated. The Allied forces had pushed the front back to where it had been, and beyond. The American and British armies were nearing the Rhine, which they would cross in a few places as soon as they got there. But a broad offensive across the river would have to wait until the ice cleared, probably about March 1.

THE DISCUSSIONS turned to the settlement that would follow the war. The framework for the postwar United Nations organization had been worked out several months earlier at a conference at Dumbarton Oaks, a wooded estate near the embassy district of Washington. Representatives of the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and China had agreed that the organization would consist of a general assembly of most or all of the world’s nations, and a security council controlled by the Big Four. Details of membership and voting were left to Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill to decide.

The first Yalta dinner—a typical Russian feast, albeit less elaborate than the meals at Teheran, since Roosevelt was the host—avoided business while the food was being served. “Marshal Stalin, the President, and the Prime Minister appeared to be in very good humor throughout,” Bohlen observed. “No political or military subjects of any importance were discussed.” Only at the end did substance intrude. Stalin reaffirmed his position from Teheran that the three great powers, which had borne the brunt of the war and liberated the smaller victims of Nazi aggression, should have “the unanimous right to preserve the peace of the world.” Anything else would insult common sense. “It was ridiculous to believe that Albania would have an equal voice with the three great powers.” Russia, Stalin said, would do its part to keep the peace. He was willing to work with the president and the prime minister to safeguard the rights of the smaller powers. But he would “never agree to having any action of any of the great powers submitted to the judgment of the small powers.”

Roosevelt concurred. “The peace should be written by the three powers represented at this table,” the president said.

Churchill didn’t quite contradict Stalin and Roosevelt but recommended letting the lesser countries have their say. Reaching into his bag of proverbs, the prime minister declared, “The eagle should permit the small birds to sing, and care not where for they sang.”

The fate of Europe provided the theme of the second day’s discussions. The three military staffs had drawn a map of proposed occupation zones of Germany, to guide the planning for accepting a German surrender. The map gave an eastern zone, including Berlin, to the Soviet Union, a northwestern zone to Britain, and a southern and southwestern zone to the United States. Roosevelt circulated the map as a basis for discussion among the principals.

Stalin immediately pushed the discussion farther than Roosevelt had intended. The president was speaking of occupation zones, presumably temporary; Stalin said they should be talking about dismemberment, preferably permanent. The question had come up at Teheran, where, Stalin reminded Roosevelt and Churchill, they had concurred in principle that Germany should be broken up. “I would like to know, definitely,” Stalin said: “Do we all agree? And if so, what form of dismemberment?” How would the dismembered pieces be governed? “Will each part have its own government?”

Roosevelt tried to slow things down. He said the questions of dismemberment and governance could be decided later, as they grew out of the experience of military occupation.

Churchill offered a middle course. “I think we are all agreed on dismemberment,” he said, “but the actual method, the tracing of lines, is much too complicated a matter to settle here in five or six days. It requires very searching examination of geography, history, and economic facts…. If asked today, ‘How would you divide Germany?,’ I would not be able to answer.”

Stalin thought Churchill was stalling. Delay could cause serious problems, he said. No one knew how long the war would last. “Events in Germany are developing rapidly toward a catastrophe for them. In view of such rapid events, we should not be without preparation.” What would the terms of surrender be? Unconditional surrender had served well as a wartime slogan, but at war’s end there would be terms, whether formally announced or not. For example, should the Germans be told that their country was to be dismembered?

Churchill didn’t think so. “I see no need to inform the Germans at the time of surrender whether we will dismember them or not,” he said. “It is enough to tell them, ‘Await our decision as to your future.’”

“I think the Prime Minister’s plan not to tell the Germans is risky,” Stalin rejoined. To spring dismemberment on the Germans after surrender would put the political onus on the Allies. To include it in the formal surrender document would leave responsibility with the Germans, where it belonged.

Roosevelt sided with Stalin. “It will make it easier if it is in the terms and we tell them,” the president said.

Churchill wasn’t convinced. Telling the Germans in advance that their country would be divided up would make them fight harder. “Eisenhower doesn’t want that,” Churchill said. “We should not make this public.”

Roosevelt didn’t think the morale of the Germans was an issue at this late date. “My own feeling is that the people have suffered so much that they are beyond questions of psychological warfare.”

Stalin agreed with Churchill on the matter of current confidentiality. “These conditions for the moment are only for us. They should not be public until the time of the surrender.”

This settled the question for the time being. Roosevelt raised a related question, one he had spoken with Stalin about. Should France receive an occupation zone?

Churchill immediately said yes. “The French want a zone, and I am in favor of granting it to them,” he said. “I would gladly give them part of the British zone.”

Stalin objected, not only regarding the merits of France’s claim, which he continued to dismiss as lacking, but regarding the example it might set. “Would it not be precedent for other states?” More important: “Would it not mean that the French become a fourth power in the control machinery for Germany?” Such an arrangement, he said, was unacceptable.

It wasn’t unacceptable to Churchill. The French had occupied Germany earlier, after the First World War. “They do it very well, and would not be lenient,” the prime minister asserted. There was another reason for bringing the French in: “We want to see their might grow to help keep Germany down. I do not know how long the United States will remain with us in occupation.”

Stalin looked at Roosevelt. He knew, as Churchill knew, that the American role was the crux of the whole discussion of postwar Europe. Would the United States remain committed to European security? Everyone in the room followed Stalin’s gaze to Roosevelt. “I should like to know the President’s opinion,” Stalin said.

Roosevelt certainly had considered the matter, but he hadn’t yet articulated an answer. He spoke thoughtfully. “I can get the people and Congress to cooperate fully for peace,” he said, “but not to keep an army in Europe a long time. Two years would be the limit.”

NEEDLESS TO SAY, this forecast wasn’t included in the communiqué the three leaders issued at the midpoint of the conference. The fact of the Yalta meeting, like that of the previous top-level meetings, had been kept secret from the world. But with Germany on the ropes, Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill felt confident enough of their security to issue an interim announcement that they and their advisers were currently meeting “in the Black Sea area.” The talks were progressing well. “There is complete agreement for joint military operations in the final phase of the war against Nazi Germany.” Discussions of postwar security arrangements had begun. “These discussions will cover joint plans for the occupation and control of Germany, the political and economic problems of liberated Europe, and proposals for the earliest possible establishment of a permanent international organization to maintain peace.”

Whether it was wise to raise expectations in this way soon provoked debate. But at the time the communiqué fairly reflected the mood at Yalta. Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill had fought through hard times together, and their goal was in sight. They had taken the measure of one another and developed a reciprocal respect. Each put his own country’s interests first, but this was as it should be. Nor was it an impediment to peace, for the interests of the United States, Russia, and Britain overlapped sufficiently to allow the three governments to cooperate in the promotion of peace and security after the war. So it appeared, at any rate, at the beginning of February 1945.

The good feeling gave rise to a round of toasts at a dinner hosted by Stalin on February 8. The marshal—whom Bohlen characterized as “in an excellent humor and even in high spirits”—raised his glass to Churchill as “the bravest governmental figure in the world.” The world owed the prime minister a debt. “Due in large measure to Mr. Churchill’s courage and staunchness, England, when she stood alone, had divided the might of Hitlerite Germany when the rest of Europe was falling flat on its face.”

Churchill responded in kind. He praised Marshal Stalin as “the mighty leader of a mighty country, which had taken the full shock of the German war machine, had broken its back, and had driven the tyrants from her soil.” Looking ahead, Churchill prophesied, “In peace no less than in war, Marshal Stalin will continue to lead his people from success to success.”

Stalin then toasted Roosevelt. Stalin said he himself and Churchill had had relatively simple decisions to make during the war. They had been fighting for their countries’ existence. “But there was a third man, whose country had not been seriously threatened with invasion, but who had had perhaps a broader conception of national interest, and even though his country was not directly imperiled had been the chief forger of the instruments which had led to the mobilization of the world against Hitler.”

Roosevelt replied that the atmosphere at this dinner was “that of a family,” and he believed the same could be said of relations among their countries. “Great changes have occurred in the world during the last three years, and greater changes are to come…. Fifty years ago there were vast areas of the world where people had little opportunity and no hope, but much has been accomplished…. Our objectives here are to give to every man, woman, and child on earth the possibility of security and well-being.”

Stalin raised his glass again. He said it was not so difficult to maintain unity during wartime. The joint desire to defeat the common enemy held the alliance together. “The difficult task comes after the war, when diverse interests tend to divide the allies.” But he thought this alliance would meet the test of peace. “It is our duty to see that it does…. Our relations in peacetime should be as strong as they have been in war.”

Churchill concluded with his trademark orotundity. “We are all standing on the crest of a hill with the glories of future possibilities stretching before us,” the prime minister said. “In the modern world the function of leadership is to lead the people out from the forests onto the broad sunlit plains of peace and happiness. This prize is nearer our grasp than anytime before in history, and it would be a tragedy for which history would never forgive us if we let this prize slip from our grasp.”

THE FRIENDLY FEELING diminished a bit when the discussion turned to two especially sensitive subjects. Stalin insisted that the Ukraine, White Russia (Byelorussia), and perhaps Lithuania be seated in the United Nations general assembly. He didn’t pretend that these Soviet “republics” were independent of Moscow; he simply wanted to balance what he presumed would be the pro-American votes of several Latin American countries and probably the Philippines and the similarly pro-British votes of Canada, Australia, and other members of the Commonwealth. Roosevelt wasn’t inclined to deny Stalin’s demand, in part because he appreciated its rationale, in part because he didn’t want to spoil the good mood at Yalta, and in part because he understood that votes in the assembly wouldn’t really matter.

Yet he also understood that explaining any such concession, once he got home, wouldn’t be easy. Roosevelt wanted to have things both ways in the United Nations: to keep power in the hands of the Big Four but to create the appearance of equal representation, at least in the general assembly. To rig the voting in the assembly would seem a subversion of international equality.

The president tried to put the issue off until a later date. He launched into a rambling account of the evolution of the British Commonwealth and of the various ways of measuring size and influence in international affairs. But his filibuster failed with Stalin, who patiently heard the president out and then reiterated his original position. The Kremlin eventually got two extra votes in the assembly—not three: Roosevelt did manage to remove Lithuania from the list. What he got in return was Stalin’s agreement to support some extra votes for the United States in the assembly, if Washington desired them.

As ticklish as the issue of representation seemed at Yalta, its ramifications were nothing next to those involving Poland. The Polish question had emerged at Teheran but been filed among matters not currently urgent. By Yalta it had become most urgent. The Red Army had liberated Poland from Nazi control; the question now was whether Poland would be liberated from the Red Army. Most Poles demanded that it be, with ample reason. The Soviet government was denying responsibility for the 1940 massacre in the Katyn Forest of many thousands of Polish soldiers and civilians, whose bodies had been found by the Germans in 1943. The Kremlin claimed that the blood was on German hands (as the Kremlin would continue to claim for nearly fifty years). But many Poles knew that the Soviets had done the killing. They also knew that the Red Army had cynically sat across the Vistula River while the Nazis crushed an uprising of resistance forces in Warsaw during the summer of 1944. This time the Polish deaths were counted in the many scores of thousands, and the Russian role, albeit passive, was undeniable.

Two groups of Poles claimed to represent the reviving Polish nation. The self-appointed Polish government in exile in London was bitterly anti-Soviet; the Kremlin-appointed provisional government in Lublin was predictably pro-Soviet. The London Poles had the backing of the British and American governments and the impassioned support of Americans of Polish descent. The Lublin Poles enjoyed the endorsement of Stalin and the Red Army.

The immediate Polish problem at Yalta for Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill was to reconcile the two sets of claimants. The larger problem was to balance the desire of the United States and Britain to see democracy planted in Poland against the demand of the Soviet Union to secure its borders against future attack.

“I come from a great distance and therefore have the advantage of a more distant point of view of the problem,” Roosevelt said, in raising the Polish question. But his was not a disinterested view, as he readily admitted. “There are six or seven million Poles in the United States.” Nearly all of them had strong views on the Polish question. “Opinion in the United States is against recognition of the Lublin government, on the ground that it represents a small portion of the Polish people. What people want is the creation of a government of national unity, to settle their internal differences.” Roosevelt suggested the establishment of a council of representatives from the London and Lublin groups, which would oversee the creation of a permanent government and the holding of elections. Yet the president assured Stalin he understood Russia’s security concerns. “We want a Poland that will be thoroughly friendly to the Soviet Union for years to come. This is essential.”

Churchill joined Roosevelt in advocating a government of national unity. The prime minister reminded Stalin that for the British Poland was a question of honor. Britain had gone to war with Germany over Poland; Britain could accept no less than a postwar Poland that was “free and independent.”

Stalin responded that for Russia Poland was “not only a question of honor but also of security.” For centuries Poland had been a corridor of attack on Russia. “During the last thirty years our German enemy has passed through this corridor twice. This is because Poland was weak.” Stalin proposed that Poland be made strong. “It is not only a question of honor but of life and death for the Soviet state.” Roosevelt and Churchill had said they wanted a national unity government for Poland; Stalin doubted that this could be established. The London Poles called the Lublin group “bandits” and “traitors,” and “naturally the Lublin government paid the same coin to the London government.” Stalin preferred the Lublin group on grounds of their service to the Allied war effort. “As a military man, I must say what I demand of a country liberated by the Red Army. First, there should be peace and quiet in the wake of the army. The men of the Red Army are indifferent as to what kind of government there is in Poland, but they do want one that will maintain order behind the lines.” The Lublin group did that. As for the Londoners, they called themselves resistance fighters, but what they resisted was Poland’s liberation. “We have had nothing good from them, but much evil. So far their agents have killed 212 Russian military men. They have attacked supply bases for arms…. If they attack the Red Army any more, they will be shot.”

ROOSEVELT, CHURCHILL, and Stalin eventually reconciled their positions on most issues at Yalta, but the composition of the Polish government formed a persistent stumbling block. Roosevelt appealed to Stalin personally. “I am greatly disturbed that the three great powers do not have a meeting of minds about the political setup in Poland,” Roosevelt said in a note to Stalin. “It seems to me that it puts us all in a bad light throughout the world to have you recognizing one government while we and the British are recognizing another…. I am sure this state of affairs should not continue, and that if it does it can only lead our people to think there is a breach between us, which is not the case. I am determined that there shall be no breach between ourselves and the Soviet Union. Surely there is a way to reconcile our differences.”

Roosevelt suggested one such way. He conceded Stalin’s right to worry about the safety of the Red Army as the Soviet troops pushed toward Berlin. “You cannot, and we must not, tolerate any temporary government which will give your armed forces any trouble.” But the marshal must take account of the president’s political concerns. “You must believe me when I tell you that our people at home look with a critical eye on what they consider a disagreement between us at this vital stage of the war. They, in effect, say that if we cannot get a meeting of minds now, when our armies are converging on the common enemy, how can we get an understanding on even more vital things in the future?”

Roosevelt recommended a meeting of minds via a banging of heads. Stalin had said he would be willing to bring some of the Lublin Poles to Yalta. Roosevelt proposed that he and Churchill prevail on some representatives of the Londoners to come, too. Doubtless recalling the shotgun ceremony between de Gaulle and Giraud, the president imagined the two Polish parties, with appropriate encouragement from their sponsors, agreeing on a provisional government consisting of elements of both sides. “It goes without saying,” Roosevelt added—precisely because it did not go without saying—“that any interim government which could be formed as a result of our conference with the Poles here would be pledged to the holding of free elections in Poland at the earliest possible date. I know this is completely consistent with your desire to see a new free and democratic Poland emerge from the welter of this war.”

Stalin declined to answer this letter. Perhaps his offer to bring the Lubliners hadn’t been serious. Perhaps he feared being forced to compromise if the Londoners came. Perhaps he realized the Londoners would rather have met the devil in hell than Stalin at Yalta. The best he would do was allow the Londoners to travel to Moscow at a later date, to talk with the Lubliners.

Stalin realized he held the trump card in his negotiations with Roosevelt. While the president was speaking with Stalin and Churchill, the American chiefs of staff were meeting with their British and Soviet counterparts. The British were open and forthright, as were the Soviets on matters relating to Europe. But the Soviet generals refused even to talk about the other half of America’s—and Britain’s—war: the conflict with Japan. George Marshall and the American strategists were already laying plans for shifting the focus of American efforts to the Pacific; essential to their planning was knowledge of what the Soviets were going to do against the Japanese. Marshall and the American chiefs envisaged an invasion of the Japanese home islands sometime after the middle of 1945; they earnestly hoped that the Soviet Union would have declared war on Japan by then and would have moved substantial forces from Europe to the Far East. If Soviet units pinned down large parts of the Japanese army, many thousands of American lives would be saved and many months of fighting would be averted. Stalin had declared unspecifically at Teheran that the Soviet Union would join the war against Japan after Germany was defeated. Marshall and the chiefs needed to confirm this commitment and attach a date to it.

The Soviet timetable was the crucial issue for Roosevelt at Yalta—more immediate than voting procedures in the United Nations assembly, more pressing than the makeup of the Polish government. Those were details of the peace; Soviet entry into the conflict against Japan was a matter of the war, which still claimed priority. Roosevelt understood this, which was why he wouldn’t push Stalin any harder on Poland. Stalin knew it, which was why he stood his ground.

THE CONFERENCE ended with a communiqué summarizing the successes of the talks and disguising their failures. The former included close collaboration regarding the final stages of the war in Europe. “Nazi Germany is doomed,” the tripartite statement asserted. “The German people will only make the cost of their defeat heavier to themselves by attempting to continue a hopeless resistance.” An enigmatically worded pair of sentences explained that the three governments continued to agree on “unconditional surrender terms” toward Germany but that “these terms will not be made known until the final defeat of Germany has been accomplished.” The Big Three tipped their hand far enough to say that each of their armies would occupy a zone of Germany and that France would be invited to occupy a zone as well. The communiqué forecast harsh treatment of the Nazi party and the German war machine but said nothing about dismemberment.

On the United Nations, the three governments kicked the matter of representation and voting down the road—specifically, to San Francisco, where a meeting would begin in April to draft a charter of the United Nations organization along the lines established at Dumbarton Oaks. China and France would join the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain as sponsors.

The Yalta “Declaration on Liberated Europe” reaffirmed “our faith in the principles of the Atlantic Charter” and “our determination to build, in cooperation with other peace-loving nations, a world order under law, dedicated to peace, security, freedom, and the general well-being of all mankind.”

Poland rated a section of its own. “We reaffirm our common desire to see established a strong, free, independent and democratic Poland,” the communiqué asserted. A provisional government for Poland should be established, including both the Lublin Poles and the London Poles. “This Polish Provisional Government of National Unity shall be pledged to the holding of free and unfettered elections as soon as possible on the basis of universal suffrage and secret ballot.”

The communiqué was released from Yalta to an understandably curious world. What was not released was more important to Roosevelt than what was. A secret codicil declared:

The leaders of the three Great Powers—the Soviet Union, the United States of America and Great Britain—have agreed that in two or three months after Germany has surrendered and the war in Europe has terminated, the Soviet Union shall enter into the war against Japan.

56.

“IT WAS THE BEST I COULD DO,” ROOSEVELT TOLD ADOLF BERLE ON his return from Yalta. The Soviet commitment to the war against Japan was vital, allowing American military planners to move ahead confidently, knowing they’d have the help of the Red Army in taking on the Japanese. Stalin’s promise of free elections in Poland might prove hard to enforce; Roosevelt was enough of a Democrat to know the means by which his own party prevented free elections in the American South, and he assumed that Stalin was at least as clever as that. But the mere promise was more than Roosevelt could have demanded, given Russia’s existing control of Poland. And it was more than Churchill was offering India or the rest of the British empire. Perhaps Roosevelt made too much of personal trust among the leaders of governments, but what was his alternative? The United States couldn’t dictate the actions of the Soviet Union. It lacked the manpower and the political will. The only feasible option was to encourage decent behavior by the Kremlin, and the most likely way of doing this was to cultivate the Kremlin’s master. “I didn’t say it was good,” Roosevelt continued, in his Yalta summary to Berle. “I said it was the best I could do.”

There was something on Roosevelt’s mind the communiqué and codicil didn’t address. At one of the Yalta sessions, Stalin alluded to the mortality of the three leaders. They all understood, he said, that as long as they lived, they would not involve their countries in aggressive actions. They had experienced war and would do what was necessary to prevent its repetition. But times, and leaders, would change. “Ten years from now, none of us might be present,” Stalin said.

Roosevelt didn’t have ten years, and he knew it. He didn’t have more than four years, since he certainly couldn’t run for president again. He might have much less. At Yalta he carried on through force of will, but he felt his strength ebbing. The 1944 election campaign had revived him, but it also wore him out. He lost his appetite and lost more weight. His doctors removed all restrictions from his diet, and he was fed eggnogs to fatten him up. Yet he didn’t respond. “The President has lost ten pounds in the last two to three months and is, I think, rather worried about it,” his cousin Daisy Suckley wrote in her diary on Thanksgiving Day. “He looked very thin today, and his aches and pains worry me.” At the end of November, Roosevelt went to Warm Springs. His appetite improved, but his weight remained unchanged at 165 pounds. One of his molars became painfully loose and was extracted. He visited with friends and drove about the neighborhood. In early December he took a swim. The warm water seemed to relax him. But on leaving the water his blood pressure was higher than ever: 260 over 150. Though encouraged to eat, he complained that he couldn’t taste anything and he lost more weight.

The Christmas holidays saw little improvement. “I had quite a talk with Anna about her father’s health,” Daisy Suckley wrote. “It is a very difficult problem, and I am entirely convinced that he can not keep up the present rate—he will kill himself if he tries.” Roosevelt put on the paterfamilias role for a gathering of the grandchildren, but he couldn’t maintain the pose. “As the evening wore on, he seemed to me to be terribly tired and to be making an effort even in ordinary conversation.”

January brought the inauguration. The war and the president’s condition suggested a small ceremony, which was held at the White House rather than the Capitol. The day was cold, with snow on the ground, but Roosevelt insisted on giving his inaugural address without hat or overcoat. His spirits rose on the day’s excitement; he was in fine form at the reception that evening.

He remained in good spirits during the long journey to Yalta. The plane ride from Malta to Saki caused him some discomfort, on account of the noise and vibration, but he enjoyed the five-hour car trip from the airport at Saki to Yalta.

His health held up during the conference, despite the enormous pressure attending the talks. On one occasion, however, the tension told. He had been going back and forth with Stalin over Poland, and though he maintained his good humor during the session, he came out drained. “He was obviously greatly fatigued,” Howard Bruenn noted. “His color was very poor (gray).” For the first time, Roosevelt exhibited pulsus alternans, a regular variability in the amplitude of the pulse indicating failure of the left ventricle. Bruenn was alarmed and ordered that the president’s schedule be cut back. Roosevelt saw no visitors before noon, and he took a rest of at least an hour every evening before dinner. His condition stabilized, and the new symptoms went away.

Yet those who saw him daily wondered how long he had left. He appeared “very tired,” in Churchill’s estimate. “The President seemed placid and frail. I felt that he had a slender contact with life.” The most widely circulated photograph from the Crimean conference showed him sitting almost ghostlike between the full-cheeked Churchill and the ruddy Stalin.

The sea journey home allowed time for rest. Roosevelt spent an hour or two on deck every day and enjoyed his contact with the officers and men. The surprise casualty of the voyage was Pa Watson, who died suddenly of a stroke. Watson had been at Roosevelt’s right hand for years, and his passing was a blow. “Franklin feels his death very much,” Daisy Suckley observed, after he reached America.

HE MAY HAVE felt his own death approaching. On his arrival in Washington, Roosevelt threw himself into preparing his report to Congress. He worked a full schedule during the day and often into the night. His appetite failed again, as he complained once more of not being able to taste his food. He lost additional weight and grew more haggard.

His appearance before Congress occasioned further concern. For the first time he addressed the legislators from his wheelchair, for the first time spoke of his disability, and for the first time acknowledged fatigue. “I hope that you will pardon me for this unusual posture of sitting down during the presentation of what I want to say,” he began. “But I know that you will realize that it makes it a lot easier for me not to have to carry about ten pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs; and also because of the fact that I have just completed a fourteen-thousand-mile trip.” He looked around the chamber almost wistfully. “It is good to be home. It has been a long journey.”

He conceded feeling under the weather. But warming to his audience, he turned his illness into a joke. “I was well the entire time. I was not ill for a second, until I arrived back in Washington, and there I heard all of the rumors which had occurred in my absence.”

He let the chuckles subside before turning to the heart of his message. There were two main goals of the Yalta conference, he said. The first was to arrange the defeat of Germany as quickly as possible. The second was to ensure the international cooperation that would render the postwar settlement secure and lasting. Toward both goals, he was pleased to say, the conference had made important progress. “Never before have the major Allies been more closely united, not only in their war aims but also in their peace aims. And they are determined to continue to be united with each other, and with all peace-loving nations, so that the ideal of lasting peace will become a reality.”

Roosevelt said nothing about the Soviet commitment to enter the Pacific war. Indeed, to avoid tipping off the Japanese, the president prevaricated. “This conference concerned itself only with the European war and with the political problems of Europe, and not with the Pacific war,” he asserted. And he painted the Polish question in brighter colors than he knew it deserved. The Yalta promise of free elections in Poland was an “outstanding example of joint action by the three major Allied powers,” he said.

Perhaps he sensed he wouldn’t be addressing the legislators again. Perhaps he simply wanted to reiterate the point he had been making since 1937—the lesson he had learned after the last war. He departed from his text to talk from the heart.

The conference in the Crimea was a turning point, I hope, in our history and therefore in the history of the world. There will soon be presented to the Senate of the United States and to the American people a great decision that will determine the fate of the United States and of the world for generations to come. There can be no middle ground here. We shall have to take the responsibility for world collaboration, or we shall have to bear the responsibility for another world conflict….

For the second time in the lives of most of us, this generation is face to face with the objective of preventing wars. To meet that objective, the nations of the world will either have a plan or they will not. The groundwork of a plan has now been furnished, and has been submitted to humanity for discussion and decision. No plan is perfect. Whatever is adopted at San Francisco will doubtless have to be amended time and again over the years, just as our own Constitution has been. No one can say exactly how long any plan will last. Peace can endure only so long as humanity really insists upon it, and is willing to work for it—and sacrifice for it.

Twenty-five years ago, American fighting men looked to the statesmen of the world to finish the work of peace for which they fought and suffered. We failed them then. We cannot fail them again.

UNUSUALLY FOR a Roosevelt speech, his address to Congress read better than it sounded. He hesitated in his presentation and appeared to struggle at times for words. “I did not think it a particularly good speech,” the faithful William Hassett conceded. “The President ad-libbed at length—a wretched practice that weakens even a better effort.” But Howard Bruenn accepted Roosevelt’s explanation that, after departing from his prepared text to lend a personal tone to his comments, he had lost his place coming back.

Yet the symptoms of decline persisted. His color was worse than ever, and he was constantly tired. He agreed to follow Bruenn’s advice to go to Warm Springs and rest there as long as necessary for his condition to improve.

William Hassett had watched Roosevelt closely for months. “Tonight had another talk with Howard Bruenn about the President’s health,” he recorded on March 30.

I said: “He is slipping away from us, and no earthly power can keep him here.”

Bruenn demurred. “Why do you think so?” he asked.

Told him I understood his position—his obligation to save life, not to admit defeat. Then I reminded him that I gave him the same warning when we were here in December. He remembered. I said: “I know you don’t want to make the admission, and I have talked this way with no one else save one. To all the staff, to the family, and with the Boss himself I have maintained the bluff; but I am convinced that there is no help for him.”

Bruenn very serious…. He wanted to know how long I had had this feeling. I told him for a year, but worried particularly because of the Boss’s indifference after the Chicago convention—didn’t act like a man who cared a damn about the election.

Hassett noted that the Republican tactics in the 1944 campaign had reengaged Roosevelt. “F.D.R. got his Dutch up. That did the trick. He got madder and madder over Dewey’s technique.” But the improvement didn’t last much beyond the election.

I could not but notice his increasing weariness as I handled his papers with him, particularly at Hyde Park, trip after trip. He was always willing to go through the day’s routine, but there was less and less talk about all manner of things—fewer local Hyde Park stories, politics, books, pictures. The old zest was going.

I told Bruenn I had every confidence in his own skill; was satisfied that the Boss was the beneficiary of everything that the healing art can devise. I couldn’t suggest anything which should be done differently. But in my opinion the Boss was beyond all human resources. I mentioned his feeble signature—the old boldness of stroke and liberal use of ink gone, signature often ending in a fade-out.

He said that not important. Reluctantly admitted the Boss in a precarious condition, but his condition not hopeless. He could be saved if measures were adopted to rescue him from certain mental strains and emotional influences, which he mentioned.

I told him that his conditions could not be met and added that this talk confirmed my conviction that the Boss is leaving us.

For several days Bruenn seemed the better forecaster. Spring had arrived in Georgia, with warm days and cool nights. Roosevelt responded to the old place, and his appetite and energy returned. He spoke with friends and toured the countryside in his open car. He attended Easter services on April 1. On April 9 he had himself driven the eighty-five miles to Macon, where he met Lucy Rutherfurd and artist Elizabeth Shoumatoff, coming over from Aiken, South Carolina. Shoumatoff had painted his portrait and wanted to paint another. The two women joined Roosevelt and Daisy Suckley for the ride back to Warm Springs. Daisy wished they hadn’t gone so far. “The drive was too long,” she wrote that evening. “F. was chilly and looked awfully tired all evening.”

But Howard Bruenn was quietly encouraged. “His color was much better, and his appetite was very good,” the physician wrote on April 10. “He asked for double helpings of food.” Roosevelt seemed to be gaining weight, although he wasn’t actually weighed. He was sleeping well. He laid plans for a busy weekend, including a barbecue. He attended to the details sufficiently to remark that he had never liked barbecued pork; he told Hassett to request that the manager of the Warm Springs Hotel rustle up the ingredients for Brunswick stew—“preceded by an Old-fashioned cocktail.” On a drive about the grounds he encountered reporter Merriman Smith, who was on horseback. “His voice was wonderful and resonant,” Smith recalled. “It sounded like the Roosevelt of old. In tones that must have been audible a block away, Roosevelt hailed me with, ‘Heigh-o, Silver!’” To Henry Morgenthau, visiting on Treasury business, the president described his intention to open the United Nations conference in San Francisco in two weeks. “I have been offered a beautiful apartment by a lady in the top floor of some hotel, but I am not taking it,” he said. “I am going there on my train, and at three o’clock in the afternoon I will appear on the stage in my wheelchair, and I will make the speech. And then they will applaud me, and I will leave and go back on my train…. I will be back in Hyde Park on May first.”

“IN THE QUIET beauty of the Georgia spring, like a thief in the night, came the day of the Lord,” Hassett wrote on April 12. “Of course I had seen it coming for all too long, but little thought the end so near.”

Roosevelt awoke just after nine. Bruenn conducted the morning examination. “He had slept well but complained of a slight headache and some stiffness of the neck,” Bruenn noted. “He ascribed this to a soreness of the muscles.” Bruenn gave him a light massage, which alleviated the symptoms. “He had a very good morning.” Daisy thought Roosevelt seemed better than in many days. “He came in, looking very fine in a double-breasted grey suit and a crimson tie,” she wrote in her diary for that day. “His color was good, and he looked smiling and happy and ready for anything.”

Hassett saw things differently. “He was in good spirits but did not look well,” Hassett recorded. “Color bad; countenance registered great weariness.” Hassett left the president’s cottage to attend to minor business. The official pouch from Washington was late arriving and didn’t reach the compound until after noon. There was a large volume of mail, which Hassett carried up to the president’s cottage. “Was shocked at the President’s appearance,” he wrote. Elizabeth Shoumatoff was sketching Roosevelt, measuring his nose and other features, asking him to turn this way and that and generally—as Hassett interpreted the situation—making a pest of herself. “Altogether too aggressive,” Hassett remarked. Roosevelt was being patient, but with effort. “The President looked so fatigued and weary…. When I left the cottage, I was fully resolved to ask Bruenn to put an end to this unnecessary hounding of a sick man.”

Roosevelt didn’t notice Hassett’s concern. The president was seated at a table going through the mail. Lucy and Daisy occupied a sofa across the room. Daisy was crocheting; the two women chatted idly between themselves and with Roosevelt. Arthur Prettyman, Roosevelt’s longtime valet, and Joe Esperancilla, Prettyman’s helper, were putting out lunch. “We have fifteen minutes more to work,” the president told Shoumatoff.

Suddenly a strange expression came over his face. His head tilted toward the table, and his hands began to fumble among the letters. Daisy thought he was trying to find something.

I went forward and looked into his face. “Have you dropped your cigarette?” He looked at me with his forehead furrowed in pain and tried to smile. He put his left hand up to the back of his head and said, “I have a terrific pain in the back of my head.”

He slumped over and lost consciousness.

Prettyman and Esperancilla carried Roosevelt into his bedroom. Daisy called the Warm Springs operator and told her to locate Bruenn and send him at once. The doctor arrived in ten minutes and found Roosevelt pale, unconscious, and cold, but sweating profusely. His heart rate was 96 beats per minute, and his blood pressure 300 over 190. Mild spasms caused his body to twitch periodically. His right pupil was greatly dilated, suggesting bleeding in the brain. “It was apparent that the President had suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage,” Bruenn recorded. The cardiologist administered papavarine and amylnitrite, to ease the constriction of the blood vessels. He called Ross McIntire in Washington and explained the situation. McIntire immediately phoned another specialist, James Paullin, a consultant to the navy on Roosevelt’s case and others, in Atlanta.

Bruenn monitored Roosevelt’s condition during the next hour. The president rallied slightly. His color improved and his blood pressure fell to 210 over 110.

But then the left pupil began to dilate. Roosevelt’s respiration slowed considerably, and he became cyanotic—his skin began turning blue, starting with the fingertips, from lack of oxygen.

At 3:30, Bruenn noted that Roosevelt’s breathing was irregular yet fairly strong. Within the minute, though, the president stopped breathing. He gasped a few times, but then the gasps too ceased. Bruenn listened for a heartbeat but heard nothing. He attempted artificial respiration without effect. He injected Roosevelt with caffeine sodium benzoate in a skeletal muscle, and then adrenalin directly into the heart muscle. Neither restored the heart’s action. At this point Dr. Paullin arrived from Atlanta.

But there was nothing he could do, either. At 3:35 Bruenn pronounced Roosevelt dead.

57.

THE NEWS HIT AMERICA LIKE NOTHING SINCE PEARL HARBOR. THE White House announced the death as rush hour that Thursday evening was beginning on the East Coast. Riders on buses and trolleys heard rumors and stepped off to confirm them; straphangers clambered out of the subway tunnels to ask policemen and passersby if the reports were true. In residential neighborhoods women left dinners cooking on their stoves to meet neighbors at the street corners and share their shock. Restaurants closed early that evening. Some bars did the same; other stayed open to let their patrons drown their sorrow. Concert halls, theaters, and clubs canceled performances. At New York’s Stage Door Canteen, the director of The Seven Lively Arts Show came on stage during the early performance and signaled for the orchestra to stop playing. “I have a terrible announcement to make,” he said. “Out of respect to the memory of the President of the United States, this show cannot go on.” The audience had arrived before the tragic news was broadcast, and they looked at one another with puzzled expressions. “The President has just died,” the director explained, to gasps throughout the house.

The four major radio networks suspended commercial programming. The New York Stock Exchange announced that it would be closed the next day in the president’s honor. Early-season baseball games were canceled. Flags on government buildings dipped to half-staff. Fire departments sounded their alarms in the “four fives,” the fireman’s requiem. Church bells tolled. Moments of silence—some organized, some spontaneous—were observed on military bases, in government offices, in shops and businesses, at schools.

Men and women wept openly. “No matter what your politics, he was a great man and a good man,” a New Yorker declared, wiping the tears from his cheeks. An older gentleman in Washington said he felt “as though I had died myself.” A woman in the capital particularly mourned the timing. “If only he could have lived until after Germany falls,” she said.

Soldiers took the news especially hard. “‘My God!’ was the immediate and almost universal reaction,” a journalist with the Third Army in Germany recorded. “Most could say no more.” But a few did say more. “I can remember the president ever since I was a little kid,” a private first class from Kentucky explained. “America will seem a strange, empty place without his voice talking to the people whenever great events occur. He died fighting for democracy, the same as any soldier.” A private with the Seventh Army said, “I couldn’t believe such a thing could happen. President Roosevelt was so important to us, I can hardly believe he is gone.” An army air forces officer shook his head. “I feel just like we had lost the war,” he declared. “That’s how bad I feel.” A tank sergeant on leave in Paris responded with redoubled determination. He immediately contacted his superior officer and demanded permission to return to the front at once. “I voted for him four times for president,” he said. “Since I can’t vote for him the fifth time, the least I can do is go back up there and fight for him.” This Roosevelt loyalist refused to give the reporter his name, insisting on being identified as “just one of his fighting Joes.”

World leaders registered heartfelt admiration for the deceased and concern at what his passing implied. A Chinese government spokesman said that Chiang Kai-shek was “visibly stunned” on hearing of the death. Georges Bidault, the French foreign minister, called it “a great disaster.” Charles de Gaulle declared, “I am more shocked than I can say. It is a terrible loss not only for our country and me personally but for all human-kind.” Stalin lamented the departure of “the leader in the cause of ensuring the security of the whole world.”

In London, Churchill’s dismay was revealed in unaccustomed brevity. He addressed Commons:

The House will have heard, with the deepest sorrow, the grievous news which has come to us from across the Atlantic, which conveys to us the loss of the famous president of the United States, whose friendship for the cause of freedom and for the cause of the weak and poor has won him immortal fame. It is not fitting that we should continue our work this day.

The House thereupon adjourned.

Remembrance took various forms in other countries. France observed a national day of mourning, an honor never before accorded anyone not French. Schools in France spent the day teaching the life and achievements of Franklin Roosevelt. Courts and schools in Italy closed to honor the liberator of Italy from fascism. Crowds gathered on the streets and in the metro stations of Moscow, wondering what the news from America meant for Russia. In Scotland 130,000 soccer fans stood bare-headed and silent during a Glasgow match, mourning the father of Lend-Lease and the architect of the Grand Alliance. A spokesman for the Mexican government called Roosevelt’s death “an irreparable loss, not only to the United States but to the whole world.” In Havana, President Ramón Grau San Martín asserted, “Cuba has lost a great friend.” The prime minister of New Zealand called Roosevelt’s death “a colossal loss to mankind.” The Australian government issued a statement: “He gave everything to the cause of freedom and liberty and did not spare himself.”

The Axis governments responded ambivalently. The new Japanese prime minister, Kantaro Suzuki, conveyed his “profound sympathy” to the American people, even while adding, “I must admit Roosevelt’s leadership has been very effective and has been responsible for the Americans’ advantageous position today.” In Berlin, the Nazi propaganda machine required a day to get its orders from Joseph Goebbels. But once it did, it applauded the death of the “war criminal” Roosevelt as a “miracle,” on the order of the Führer’s survival of the bombing attempt against his life the previous summer.

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT WAS holding her regular press conference that Thursday morning in Washington. She had been worried about Franklin for months. “He should gain weight but hates his food,” she wrote a friend. “I say a prayer daily that he may be able to carry on till we have peace and our feet are set in the right direction.” The road to peace, Eleanor judged, ran through San Francisco, where America would join with the other countries to establish the permanent structure of international security. At her press conference she fielded questions implying that the United States could somehow dictate policy to the United Nations. She knew from talking to Franklin about Yalta that this wasn’t so, and she tried to disabuse reporters of the concept. “We will have to get over the habit of saying what we as a single nation will do,” she said. “When we say ‘we’ on international questions in the future, we will mean all the people who have an interest in the question.”

That afternoon she was meeting with a State Department adviser to the delegation the administration was planning to send to San Francisco when she was summoned to the telephone. Laura Delano was calling from Warm Springs saying that Franklin had fainted. He was currently in bed and under Dr. Bruenn’s care. Eleanor tactfully closed the meeting and called Ross McIntire. The admiral-doctor tried not to sound alarmed, and he suggested that she proceed with her afternoon schedule but fly with him to Warm Springs afterward. An abrupt cancellation would cause people to talk, perhaps needlessly.

She drove to an annual benefit for a thrift shop run by the Sulgrave Club, near Dupont Circle. She welcomed those attending and urged them to support this worthy cause. She had just finished speaking when a call came from the White House. Steve Early asked her to return to the mansion at once. “I did not even ask why,” she remembered. “I knew down in my heart that something dreadful had happened.” She apologized to her hosts without sharing her forebodings. “I got into the car and sat with clenched hands all the way to the White House. In my heart of hearts I knew what had happened, but one does not actually formulate these terrible thoughts until they are spoken.”

At the White House, Early and McIntire explained that the president had died. Eleanor wasn’t surprised, and she maintained her composure. “I am more sorry for the people of the country and the world than I am for us,” she said. She thought of the children. Anna was with her and heard the news directly. Eleanor cabled the sad tidings to the boys: Elliott in Europe, and James, Franklin Jr., and John in the Pacific. “Father slept away,” she said. “He would expect you to carry on and finish your jobs.”

Harry Truman had been summoned to the White House at the same time as Eleanor. The vice president was now shown into the First Lady’s sitting room. “Harry,” she said, “the President is dead.”

Truman, like so many others that day, was stunned. He required a few moments to find words. “Is there anything I can do for you?” he said.

“Is there anything we can do for you?” she responded. “You are the one in trouble now.”

A short while later reporters saw her leave the White House. “Mrs. Roosevelt’s tall figure was erect, and her step did not falter,” one of them wrote. “A trouper to the last,” another remarked.

AS SOON AS Roosevelt was stricken that afternoon, Lucy Rutherfurd knew she had to get away from Warm Springs at once. A presidential collapse—still more a presidential death, should it come to that—would be huge news. A first question reporters would ask would be who was with the president that day. People around Roosevelt had been covering up for her—and for him—for years. She didn’t want to make their task any more difficult.

She quickly gathered her things and drove off. She was back in Aiken before Eleanor arrived in Warm Springs from Washington. Whether Eleanor had an inkling that all wasn’t as it seemed or whether she simply asked what the reporters were asking, Laura Delano couldn’t lie to her cousin’s widow. She said that Lucy had been with the president in Warm Springs. She went on to say that Lucy had seen the president several times in Washington, with Anna’s assistance.

The revelation was numbing. Eleanor had been preparing herself for bad news since the war began. “I had schooled myself to believe that some or all of my sons might be killed, and I had long faced the fact that Franklin might be killed or die at any time.” But she admitted, in her memoirs, that this grim anticipation didn’t explain what she felt now. She didn’t mention Lucy by name, but those who knew of the relationship could read between the lines of what Eleanor did write.

Perhaps it was that much further back I had had to face certain difficulties until I decided to accept the fact that a man must be what he is, life must be lived as it is…. You cannot live at all if you do not learn to adapt yourself to your life as it happens to be. All human beings have failings; all human beings have temptations and stresses. Men and women who live together through long years get to know one another’s failings, but they also come to know what is worthy of respect and admiration in those they live with and in themselves.

If at the end one can say: “This man used to the limit the powers that God granted him; he was worthy of love and respect and of the sacrifices of many people, made in order that he might achieve what he deemed to be his task,” then that life has been lived well and there are no regrets.

ROOSEVELT HAD planned to go to San Francisco; instead he went home. A military contingent from Fort Benning drove to Warm Springs to salute the deceased president and escort the body to the train station. As the flag-draped casket made its way down Pine Mountain, old-timers wept while the younger staff and neighbors stared in somber silence. The funeral train pulled out of the station before noon, commencing the slow journey north.

Across Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia, mourners lined the route. Men and women, grandparents and toddlers, white and black, waited in daylight and in the dark to pay their respects to the only president the younger ones had ever known, the president who had made them all feel that the government of their country cared for them. He had given them reassurance during the most frightening phase of the depression, and confidence during the most trying days of the war.

It had been a remarkable accomplishment, reflecting a unique bond between the president and the American people. They put their faith in Roosevelt because he put his faith in them. He believed in democracy—in the capacity of ordinary Americans, exercising their collective judgment, to address the ills that afflicted their society. He refused to rely on the invisible hand of the marketplace, for the compelling reason that during his lifetime the invisible hand had wreaked very visible havoc on millions of unoffending Americans. He refused to accept that government invariably bungled whatever it attempted, and his refusal inspired government efforts that had a tremendous positive effect on millions of marginal farmers, furloughed workers, and struggling merchants—the very people who now lined his train route north.

Did he get everything right? By no means, and he never claimed he did. But he got a great deal right. He caught the banking system in free fall and guided it to a soft landing. He sponsored rules that helped prevent a recurrence of the banking collapse and of the stock market crash that preceded it. The programs his administration formulated furnished jobs and experience to much of a generation of young people. He helped the parents of these young people keep their homes and farms. He showed their grandparents that old age need not be accompanied by poverty. He gave workers a hand in their efforts to rebalance relations between labor and capital.

Beyond everything else, he provided hope. He didn’t end the Great Depression, which was too large and complex for any elected official to conquer. But he banished the despair the depression had engendered. He understood intuitively—or perhaps he learned from Uncle Ted and Woodrow Wilson—that the presidency is above all a moral office. A president who speaks to the hopes and dreams of the people can change the nation. Roosevelt did speak to the people’s hopes and dreams, and together they changed America.

They changed the world as well. Just as he trusted democracy to reach the right decisions regarding America, so he trusted democracy to reach the right decisions about the rest of the planet, if perhaps more slowly. He concluded, long before most other Americans did, that the United States must take responsibility for the defeat of international aggression. Yet he understood that he was merely president, not a czar, and that until Americans came to share his view any efforts to intervene in the struggles unfolding in Europe and Asia would be worse than wasted. He patiently, and sometimes deceptively, guided American opinion, through public statements and carefully measured actions, until the leader became the led and the country demanded what he had wanted—what he knew the country needed—all along.

His performance during the war was no more perfect than his New Deal policies had been. The fiasco of Pearl Harbor was neither a crime nor a conspiracy, but it was a fiasco nonetheless. The insufficient coordination of America’s war production impeded the efforts of the armies of the Grand Alliance. The repeated delays in opening the second front antagonized the Russians and perhaps prolonged the war.

But even more than in domestic matters, he got the big issues right. He held the alliance together. Contemporaries and historians often credited Hitler with providing the cement that kept Americans, British, and Russians working in concert. That assessment wasn’t wrong, but it was incomplete. Without Roosevelt to mediate between Churchill and Stalin, to dole out American supplies in sufficient quantities to keep the British and Russians fighting, the alliance might have splintered before the Axis did. Did Stalin trust Roosevelt? Probably not; the Soviet dictator hadn’t gotten to where he was by trusting others. But the more important question was whether he trusted Roosevelt’s judgment—Roosevelt’s judgment of the degree to which American and Russian interests coincided during the war and would continue to coincide after the war. The evidence suggests that Stalin did trust Roosevelt’s judgment. He tolerated the backsliding on the second front, and he had little difficulty coming to terms with the president on the fate of Germany.

Did Roosevelt trust Stalin? Probably more than the reverse. But if the president was less cynical than the Soviet strongman, he was no less pragmatic. He understood that Russia could insist on controlling Poland and that there wasn’t much he could do about it—because there wasn’t much the American people were willing to do about it. Had Roosevelt lived, he would have been obliged to lay out the facts of great-power life to the Poles and their American partisans. Had he lived, he would have had to manage the inevitable loosening of bonds among the Grand Allies. He would have had to face the emotional exhaustion that follows every great sacrifice and the fiscal tightening required to bring means and ends more closely into alignment. He didn’t choose the moment of his death, but had he scripted this part of his performance he couldn’t have timed his exit better. He left on a high note, before the predictable discord set in.

OTHERS HAD EXITED before he did; some stayed longer. Louis Howe, of course, was nearly a decade dead. Missy LeHand had died in the summer of 1944. Harry Hopkins succumbed to cancer the day before what would have been Roosevelt’s sixty-fourth birthday, in 1946. Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd died of leukemia in 1948.

Eleanor Roosevelt found her release from the White House personally liberating. Or perhaps it was her release from her marriage, which had constrained her even as her relationship to Franklin provided her a platform she never could have acquired on her own. But by 1945 she held that platform in her own right, and she spent the next seventeen years putting it to good use. She served as an American delegate to the United Nations General Assembly and helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which embodied much of what was noble and more than a little of what was unrealistic in her view of the world. She supported Adlai Stevenson in his two unsuccessful campaigns for president. She continued writing and speaking, and prodded the conscience of America far into her eighth decade. “She would rather light a candle than curse the darkness,” Stevenson said upon her death in 1962. “And her glow has warmed the world.”

BY THE TIME she died, the New Deal was almost thirty years old. In its maturity it exercised a hold on American life that would have gratified Roosevelt and appalled his opponents, including those angry, fearful types who had denounced him as a traitor to his class. Its power and durability owed much to a quirk of fate—a large quirk but one unconnected to American domestic politics and policy. If not for the outbreak of war in Europe, Roosevelt would not have run for a third term. If he had not run, the Republicans, campaigning on his second-term troubles, and on his larger failure to restore prosperity, probably would have seized the White House. And they surely would have begun dismantling major parts of the New Deal. The protections to labor would have been vulnerable to a management-friendly executive. The constraints on banks and the stock market would have yielded to the same groups that had resisted them in the first place. Social Security, the centerpiece of Roosevelt’s reforms, might have been particularly vulnerable, in that at the end of Roosevelt’s second term it had scarcely begun to pay out anything to the great majority of its contributors. For most taxpayers, Social Security as of 1940 was simply a drain on their pocketbooks.

But the war did come, Roosevelt did run, and the Republicans were barred from the White House for another dozen years. By then Social Security had developed a huge constituency, one so great that Dwight Eisenhower remarked that any president or party would have to be crazy to tamper with the system Roosevelt had created. And so it remained untouchable, except to expand its coverage and increase its benefits—and extend its spirit to such derivative programs as Medicare and Medicaid—into the twenty-first century.

Partly through his own doing, partly through the dice roll of circumstances, Franklin Roosevelt radically altered the landscape of American expectations. The small-government world of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was banished forever. Americans demanded more of their government: more services, more safeguards, more security. They got them—along with more taxes, more red tape, more intrusiveness. At times some Americans would wonder whether the cost was worth the benefit. But the skeptics were never convinced enough or numerous enough to turn back the clock and unravel Roosevelt’s handiwork. He gave Americans what most of them agreed the country required during the emergency of the depression, and they sufficiently liked what they got that they retained it after prosperity returned. In the generations that followed, as the American economy continued to thrive and as the benefits of America’s material fortune rained down on the wealthy even more than on persons of moderate means, the objective and honest of those who had once denounced Roosevelt for class betrayal recognized that, in a decade rife with fascists, militarists, and communists abroad and irresponsible demagogues at home, he was the best thing that could have happened to them.

The transformation Roosevelt wrought in America’s world role was no less radical than the change he effected in domestic affairs. America had turned its back on the world during the 1920s, and the depression reinforced Americans’ reluctance to think that what happened in Europe and Asia had relevance for them. Roosevelt did little to challenge this view during his first term. But beginning in 1937 he gradually awakened Americans to the dangers of ignoring that wider world and to the necessity of engaging it, for their own sake and others’. So well did he succeed that Americans never seriously reconsidered the conclusions he impressed upon them. In some cases they seemed to have learned Roosevelt’s lesson too well, making minor distant troubles imprudently their own. But a lifetime after his death, America remained committed to the principle that had guided his foreign policy: that close involvement with the world was America’s responsibility and in America’s best interest.

HALF A MILLION people greeted the presidential train in Washington and stood in silent tribute as the caisson rolled from Union Station to the White House. Twenty thousand gathered in front of the mansion and refused to go home long after the gates and doors closed behind the procession. A simple funeral service was held in the East Room. Of the boys only Elliott made it to Washington in time to take his place beside Eleanor and Anna. James was en route from the Philippines. He flew ten thousand miles but was delayed by bad weather on the final leg and missed the service by little more than an hour. Eleanor had asked that no flowers be sent, yet they arrived anyway, filling the entire ground floor of the White House and spilling out onto the terraces.

Shortly after the service the casket was returned to the train for an overnight trip to Hyde Park. President Truman, the cabinet secretaries, and the justices of the Supreme Court rode along; a second train carried members of Congress. For the last time Roosevelt ascended the hill from the Hyde Park train station, beside the Hudson, to the big house on the bluff. On a sunny morning with a cold wind he was laid to rest in the hedge-compassed garden between the house and the library he had built to accommodate his papers. A twenty-one-gun salute honored the fallen commander in chief; parade guards of soldiers, sailors, and marines lined the paths and lanes of the estate; warplanes flew in formation overhead; a bugler blew taps. As the body was lowered into the earth the group beside the grave sang “Now the Laborer’s Task Is O’er.”

But it wasn’t quite over yet. At the time Roosevelt died, he was preparing a message to be shared with the country on Jefferson Day. The White House published the message after his death, and it became his benediction and final bow.

“Americans are gathered together this evening in communities all over the country to pay tribute to the living memory of Thomas Jefferson, one of the greatest of all democrats,” he said. “And I want to make it clear that I am spelling that word ‘democrats’ with a small d.” Readers imagined Roosevelt pausing to smile, even laugh, as he would have delivered that line. His tone then turned more serious. As important as Jefferson had been in establishing democracy in America, he was equally important in making American democracy a vital element in world affairs. He had purchased Louisiana, sent the navy to punish the Barbary pirates, and held democracy forth as a beacon for other peoples. His legacy of responsibility persisted.

Today this nation which Jefferson helped so greatly to build is playing a tremendous part in the battle for the rights of man all over the world. Today we are part of the vast Allied force—a force composed of flesh and blood and steel and spirit—which is today destroying the makers of war, the breeders of hatred, in Europe and in Asia…. Today we have learned in the agony of war that great power involves great responsibility.

Roosevelt was proud that Americans had accepted their responsibility. And he was confident they would continue to shoulder it in the future. The Nazi regime was crumbling; the warlords of Japan would meet a similar fate.

But the mere conquest of our enemies is not enough. We must go on to do all in our power to conquer the doubts and the fears, the ignorance and the greed, which made this horror possible…. The work, my friends, is peace. More than an end of this war—an end to the beginnings of all wars. Yes, an end, forever, to this impractical, unrealistic settlement of the differences between governments by the mass killing of peoples.

Perhaps, in writing these words in his cottage at Warm Springs, he had had a premonition of his imminent death. Perhaps he simply chose to rework a line that had played well in the past. But in his final statement to the American people, Roosevelt echoed his first statement as their president.

To all Americans who dedicate themselves with us to the making of an abiding peace, I say: The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.

WINSTON CHURCHILL MISSED the funeral. The demands of the war prevented a journey to America. But the prime minister had been bracing himself emotionally for the loss of his partner. At the close of the Casablanca conference, Roosevelt made ready to leave. Churchill stopped him. “You cannot go all this way to North Africa without seeing Marrakech,” he said. “Let us spend two days there. I must be with you when you see the sunset on the snows of the Atlas Mountains.” Roosevelt put off his departure, and he and Churchill drove the hundred and fifty miles across the desert together. They spoke of the war and politics and of the history of the region and the future of the world.

Marrakech was everything Churchill promised. Its lush gardens afforded a respite from the desert, its ancient souks a reminder that life continued amid the war. An American living in the city loaned her villa to the eminent tourists, who arrived just as the sun was setting. The villa had a tower with a view of the mountains and of the city. Churchill climbed the sixty steps; Roosevelt was carried up by strong young men. The two watched the sun go down and saw the dimming light paint the snowy peaks with shifting pastels. Churchill smoked a cigar, Roosevelt a cigarette. “It’s the most lovely spot in the whole world,” the prime minister sighed.

By now the city had begun to glow, as the lamps in the mosque towers came on. Roosevelt and Churchill descended to a dinner celebrating the successes their countries had shared and the greater victories they expected. The prime minister, the president, and the dozen members of their party ate, drank, and sang far into the night.

The next morning Roosevelt awoke at dawn to board his plane. Churchill refused to let the president drive to the airfield unaccompanied. He put on slippers and robe and the two rode together. They shook hands a final time on the tarmac, and Roosevelt entered the plane.

As the door of the aircraft closed, Churchill turned to the American vice consul, Kenneth Pendar. “Come, Pendar, let’s go home,” he said. “I don’t like to see them take off.” The car carrying the prime minister and the diplomat began to pull away. Pendar watched through the rear window as the president’s plane gained speed. Churchill couldn’t look. “Don’t tell me when they take off. It makes me far too nervous.” He touched Pendar’s arm. “If anything happened to that man, I couldn’t stand it. He is the truest friend; he has the farthest vision; he is the greatest man I’ve ever known.”