From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (88 page)

A more telling, if less frequently offered, criticism is that the Roosevelt administration might have been more conciliatory toward Japan. Had it abandoned, at least temporarily, its determination to drive the Japanese from China and restored some trade, it might have delayed a two-front war when it was not yet ready to fight one major enemy. Having already learned what seemed the hard lessons of appeasement, U.S. officials rejected a course of expediency. Rather, they backed a proud nation into a position where its only choices were war or surrender.
¹³⁰
Japan chose war, with fateful consequences for both nations. For the Japanese, ultimately, a brilliant tactical maneuver proved a catastrophic strategic blunder, rallying the United States as nothing else could have for a fight to the finish. Hitler solved Roosevelt's dilemma in the Atlantic. Although not bound to do so by the defensive clauses in the Tripartite Pact, he declared war four days later. After a long period of hesitation and indecision, the United States was at war.

T
HE YEARS FROM
1931 to 1941 brought major changes in U.S. foreign policy. Responding to the Great Depression and the threat of a new world war, Americans in the mid-1930s embraced isolationist attitudes and endorsed neutrality policies that in the event of war called for the sacrifice of traditional neutral rights for which the nation had fought in 1812 and 1917. The Munich Conference and especially the fall of France produced another reversal. Many anxious Americans now concluded that their values and interests were threatened by events abroad and that their
security required them to assist nations combating the Axis menace even at the risk of war.

Franklin Roosevelt took the lead in educating Americans to this new perspective on world affairs. He has been criticized for his timidity in responding to World War II and for underestimating his powers of persuasion. But he had vivid memories of Wilson's defeat and feared getting too far out in front of public opinion. He therefore moved with great caution, giving time for events to underscore the lessons he sought to teach and for U.S. rearmament to gain steam. Step by step between 1939 and 1941, he abandoned neutrality and, through aid to Britain and other nations fighting Hitler, took the United States to the brink of war. In orchestrating this great transformation, FDR stretched the powers of his office to unprecedented extents. At times, he was less than candid with the American people. He used dubious if not illegal means to spy on his political foes. He created the basis for what would be called the imperial presidency and for the Cold War national security state. By articulating the notions that America could be truly secure only in a world in which its values prevailed and that its way of life could best be defended by acting abroad, he set forth the intellectual underpinnings for an American globalism that would take form in World War II and flourish in the postwar years.
¹³¹

"The problems which we face are so vast and so interrelated," Franklin Roosevelt explained to Ambassador Joseph Grew on January 21, 1941, "that any attempt even to state them compels one to think in terms of five continents and seven seas."
¹
Thus, almost a year before Pearl Harbor, FDR came to appreciate the enormously transformative impact of World War II on U.S. foreign relations. Even prior to December 7, 1941, Americans had begun to reassess long-standing assumptions about the sources of their national security (a phrase just coming into use). While often obscuring the intent and significance of his actions, the president had taken major steps toward intervention in the European and Asian wars. What the fall of France did not accomplish in terms of reshaping American attitudes and institutions, Pearl Harbor did. The Japanese attack on Hawaii undermined as perhaps nothing else could have the cherished notion that America was secure from foreign threat. The ensuing war elevated foreign policy to the highest national priority for the first time since the early republic. By virtue of its size, its wealth, its largely untapped economic and military potential, and its distance from major war zones, the United States, along with Britain and the Soviet Union, assumed leadership of what came to be called the United Nations, a loose assemblage of some forty countries. During the war, it built a mammoth military establishment and funded a huge foreign aid program. It became involved in a host of complex and often intricately interconnected diplomatic, economic, political, and military problems across the world, requiring a sprawling foreign policy bureaucracy staffed by thousands of men and women engaged in all sorts of activities in places Americans could not previously have located on a map. This time, Americans took up the mantle of world leadership spurned in 1919. "We have tossed Washington's Farewell Address in to the discard," Michigan's isolationist senator Arthur Vandenberg lamented before Pearl Harbor. "We have thrown
ourselves squarely into the power politics and power wars of Europe, Asia, and Africa. We have taken the first step upon a course from which we can never hereafter retreat."
²

The military situation in the months after Pearl Harbor was unremittingly grim. From January to March 1942, FDR speechwriter Robert Sherwood later recalled, Japan swept across the Pacific and Southeast Asia with such stunning speed that the "pins on the walls of map rooms in Washington and London were usually far out of date."
³
Singapore fell on February 15, "the greatest disaster to British arms which our history records," according to Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
⁴
By mid-March, Japanese forces had conquered Malaya, Java, and Borneo, landed on New Guinea, and occupied Rangoon. For weeks, U.S. and Filipino troops valiantly held off enemy invaders. Without food, clothing, and drugs, exhausted from disease and malnutrition, they fell back to Bataan and then Corregidor and finally surrendered on May 6. From Wake Island in the Central Pacific to the Bay of Bengal, Japan reigned supreme.

In Europe, Hitler had delivered on his promise of a "world in flames." Germany retained the upper hand in the Battle of the Atlantic through much of 1942, destroying eight million tons of shipping and threatening to sever the vital trans-Atlantic lifeline. The Axis controlled continental Europe. The Red Army had stopped the Wehrmacht short of Moscow and with the help of "General Winter" had mounted a counteroffensive, but Germany remained strong enough to launch a spring 1942 offensive that once again threatened Soviet defeat. Hitler sent armies into North Africa to seize the Suez Canal and cripple British power in the Middle East. Through Gen. Erwin Rommel's brilliant generalship, the Germans nearly succeeded in the early summer of 1942. Had Spain bowed to Hitler's pressure and entered the war, Germany could have controlled Gibraltar and the Mediterranean. At the height of their power, the Axis dominated one-third of the world's population and mineral resources. The Allies most feared in these perilous months an Axis linkup in the Indian Ocean and central Asia to defeat the USSR, secure the vast oil reserves of the Middle East, and end the war.

Although nowhere near ready for a two-front war, the United States was much better prepared than in 1917. The National Guard was called to active duty, and a selective service system had been in place for more than a year, expanding the army from 174,000 in mid-1939 to nearly 1.5 million two years later. By 1945, the nation had more than 12.1 million men and women in uniform. In the months before Pearl Harbor, the army had trained with antiquated equipment and makeshift substitutes. American industry could not produce the supplies needed to rearm the United States and fill the plates of allies seated at what Churchill called "the hungry table." But Roosevelt had used the emergency of 1940–41 to set ambitious production goals, doubling the size of the combat fleet and producing 7,800 military aircraft. By removing any doubt about full U.S. involvement in the war, Pearl Harbor eliminated the last barrier to full mobilization. War production stimulated a stagnant economy, brought spare production into operation, and converted unemployment into an acute labor shortage. It would be 1943 before the miracle of U.S. war production was fully realized, but it was evident much sooner that Roosevelt's goals, seemingly fantastic at the time, would be far surpassed.

With the onset of global war, the making of foreign policy became more complex—and even more disorderly. The president's advisers were deeply divided both ideologically and on the basis of personality. Vice President Henry A. Wallace became the most vocal spokesman for a liberal internationalism that would extend the benefits of the New Deal to other peoples, provoking conservatives to denounce him and his "radical boys" as the "postwar spreaders of peace, plenty, and pulchritude."
⁵
The State Department receded further into the background, in part from FDR's disdain for that "haven for routineers and paper shufflers."
⁶
In addition, the escalating Hull-Welles feud nearly paralyzed the department until Hull's cronies forced the undersecretary's dismissal after revelations of a homosexual encounter. A crippled and demoralized department continued to shape trade policy and produced reams of paperwork on postwar issues, but the exhausted and increasingly dispirited Hull was not invited to the major Big Three conferences and did not even get minutes of the 1943 Casablanca meeting.

Others filled the vacuum. Elder statesman Henry Stimson presided over war production and played a key role in developing the atomic
bomb. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. exploited his position as FDR's Hudson Valley neighbor to frame postwar economic programs and encroach on State's turf in designing policies for China and postwar Germany. Dubbed by Churchill "Lord Root of the Matter" for his incisive mind and matter-of-fact approach to problem-solving, the cadaverous former social worker and New Deal relief administrator Harry Hopkins remained the president's alter ego until chronic illness and a mysterious parting of the ways with his boss reduced his influence. The indispensable person was Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall. He "towers above everybody else in the strength of his character and in the wisdom and tactfulness of his handling of himself," Stimson observed with obvious admiration. Marshall brought stability to the chaos that was wartime Washington. An administrative genius, he was, in Churchill's words, the "true 'organizer of victory.' "
⁷

To meet the rapidly expanding demands of a host of new global diplomatic and military problems, FDR created a huge foreign policy bureaucracy that would become a permanent fixture of American life. Even before Pearl Harbor, he concluded that the State Department could not cope with the exigencies of total war. Thus, as with New Deal domestic programs, he established emergency "alphabet soup" agencies. Some of them were given deceptively innocent names, perhaps reflecting the nation's continuing innocence, more likely to obscure their purpose. An Office of Facts and Figures, later the Office of War Information (OWI), was responsible for propaganda at home and abroad; The Coordinator of Information, precursor to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—and subsequently the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—was America's first independent intelligence agency.

These new agencies assumed various wartime tasks. OWI censored the press and churned out posters, magazines, comic books, films, and cartoons to undermine enemy morale and sell the war and U.S. war aims to allies and neutrals.
⁸
The Office of Lend-Lease Administration (OLLA) ran that essential wartime foreign aid program.
⁹
Wallace's Board of Economic Warfare (BEW) conducted preemptive purchasing to keep vital raw materials out of enemy hands and manipulated trade to further the war effort. The
Office of Foreign Relief and Rehabilitation Operations (OFRRO) handled relief programs in liberated areas. Headed by a World War I Medal of Honor winner, the flamboyant Col. William "Wild Bill" Donovan, the OSS at its peak employed thirteen thousand people, as many as nine thousand overseas. Bearing a distinct Ivy League hue, it brought to Washington scholars such as historians Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Sherman Kent, and even the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, to analyze the vast amounts of information collected on enemy capabilities and operations. Clandestine operatives such as the legendary Virginia Hall slipped into North Africa and Europe to prepare the way for Allied military operations and carried out black propaganda operations and "dirty tricks" in Axis-occupied areas and enemy territory. OSS agents in various guises worked with partisan and guerrilla groups in the Balkans and East Asia. In Bern, a Secret Intelligence unit headed by Allen Dulles established contact with opponents of Hitler and gathered information about the Nazi regime.
¹⁰

The emergency agencies had a mixed record. BEW had more than two thousand representatives in Brazil, provoking the foreign minister half-jokingly to tell a U.S. diplomat that if more "ambassadors of good will" were sent to his nation "Brazil would be obliged to declare war on the United States."
¹¹
In best Rooseveltian fashion, there was rampant overlap of responsibility and duplication of effort. A "coordinator" in wartime Washington, Wallace joked, "was only a man trying to keep all the balls in the air without losing his own."
¹²
Bitter turf battles set off what one official deplored as "another war."
¹³
The squabbles in Washington undoubtedly pleased a president who seemed to enjoy such things, but conflict in North Africa between civilian relief agencies grew so disruptive that the army had to take over. When an especially nasty feud between Wallace and conservative Secretary of Commerce Jesse Jones went public, the president relieved Wallace and combined the economic agencies into the Foreign Economic Administration. Despite their incessant squabbling, the agencies carried out essential wartime tasks. They were also a prolific breeding ground for postwar internationalism, providing a baptism by fire for such prominent postwar leaders as George W. Ball, Adlai E. Stevenson, and Dulles.