Roosevelt (62 page)

The British invention of the resonant cavity magnetron, which produced enough power to make possible radar in the microwave region, was the most essential advance. Immediately following the first exchange of scientific secrets, the NDRC, with assistance from British specialists, established the large Radiation Laboratory at MIT for research, design, and construction of radar for short-run use. NDRC scientists subsequently developed 150 different microwave radar systems for ground, air, and sea as requested by the War and Navy Departments for tactical operations. The most powerful radar ever built, the Microwave Early Warning System, developed in 1942, was contained in five trucks and operated by a company of soldiers.

The greatest need in the first year of war was for an effective radar in American planes searching for far-ranging U-boats. The Army installed search radar developed by the Radiation Laboratory in B-24 Liberators and in a group of B-18’s, which together helped drive the submarines away from the East Coast. To make possible night bombing of Germany and Japan, British and American scientists invented the Plan Position Indicator and the three-centimeter “Mickey,” with glowing radar maps. A Ground Controlled Approach system was contrived by NDRC to direct aircraft landings in bad visibility. The development of a diverse assortment of radar systems, all closely tied to military needs, was OSRD’s biggest contribution to Axis defeat. In other areas the scientists, divorced from military weapons, focused simply on dramatic innovations.

OSRD’s organizational concentration on developing new weapons led, according to its Deputy Director, Irvin Stewart, to a tendency to place great faith in the weapon or instrument itself, while the importance of the man-instrument combination was relatively slow to be realized. Wars are fought with machines run by men, and while the development of machines spurted forward, the training of their users fell behind. Anyone can throw a Molotov cocktail, but the special skills needed to operate and interpret electronic equipment cannot be produced as quickly as the equipment itself. OSRD developed weapons, the Army trained soldiers, but no one concentrated on the man-weapon combination.

With no central control under Roosevelt of both weapons development and soldier training, an unnoticed revolution took place. America had traditionally relied on hastily drafted civilians to fight its wars, but technical weapons now required professionally
trained men. The specialization of weapons demanded combat teams of experts and careful co-ordination between them, a coordination not to be learned in two months of basic training. What OSRD’s new weapons required was a large, specialized, professional standing army in peacetime in order to fight a war; but a large standing army in peacetime was against American tradition and the Constitution. Fragmented organization meant no responsible agency to deal with such broad problems.

Similar difficulties arose in production. The weapons were as complicated to manufacture as to use, and temporarily converted industries had trouble making them. Only a permanent defense industry could work intensively with the civilian scientists advising and improving on the latest weapon advances. Around the country—at Seattle, Washington, and at Oak Ridge, Tennessee—a military-industrial complex was slowly, almost invisibly, developing. Roosevelt’s improvisation speeded the weapons development immensely, yet fragmented authority hampered use, and the lack of a comprehensive, stable agency prevented considerations beyond military expediency from getting a hearing.

To glimpse the titanic military and economic power mobilized by the Roosevelt administration at war’s mid-point in 1943, to consider the heavy political forces beating on the White House from the nation and from abroad, to assess the endless problems, appeals, complaints, queries, demands that flowed into the President’s office, to recall that for many months after Pearl Harbor the President operated with the help of one talented but ailing deputy, a small, overworked staff, and a shifting array of aides collected from outside the White House—all this is to marvel at the aplomb, the gaiety, the buoyancy, the grace with which Franklin Roosevelt presided over the White House during the years of war crisis. Whatever the muddles and delays, the disputes and outright failures, the President would not duck responsibility. Cartoonists might picture the ship of state lurching and yawing, but no one could doubt who controlled the tiller.

Old Washington hands wondered how he did it. How could one man dominate, even if he did not always control, the dispersed, disorganized, ever-shifting and expanding bureaucracy? How did he remain Chief Executive in fact as well as in title?

The President stayed in charge of his administration by the methods that had seemed to serve him so well in the earlier, prewar years—by drawing fully on his formal and informal powers as Chief Executive; by raising goals, creating momentum, inspiring
a personal loyalty, getting the best out of people; by skillful timing, now waiting endlessly while his aides chafed, sometimes moving quickly before his staff was even informed, but usually choosing a time when his target—a foot-dragging agency or bovine official—was most vulnerable; by deliberately fostering among his aides a sense of competition and a clash of wills that led to disarray, heartbreak, and anger but also set off pulses of executive energy and sparks of creativity; by maintaining an extremely wide “span of control”—or at least of attention, encouragement, and intervention; by handing out one job to several men and several jobs to one man, thus strengthening his own position as a court of appeals, as a depository of information, and as a tool of co-ordination; by ignoring or bypassing collective decision-making agencies, such as the Cabinet, and dealing instead with varying combinations of persons from different agencies; by often delving into specific, even tiny matters that some official had assumed were far below or beyond the Chief Executive’s reach; by sometimes withholding information, sometimes supplying it, to keep aides and officials in line; by maintaining his own private storehouse of intelligence, drawn from countless letters, memos, gossip, and fed by contending subordinates; by retiring behind the protection of rules, customs, conventions when they served his needs and evading them when they did not—and always by persuading, flattering, juggling, improvising, reshuffling, harmonizing, conciliating, manipulating.

No one saw this Chief Executive more often or more closely than his Budget Director, Harold Smith, who was exasperated as Roosevelt transgressed the orthodox canons of administration even while he gaped with disbelief at his chief’s broken-field running. In his diary Smith recorded the range of Roosevelt’s interests, his inability to extricate himself from odd details and ideas even at the height of a world war.

March 17,1943:
“The President told me he had a job for me. He tried to find the papers but could not do so. However, he decided to tell me about it. He wants me to investigate the situation with respect to the Government’s purchasing the Empire State Building, about which Al Smith has talked to him recently. He…had turned the problem over to Jesse Jones, but Jones was getting nowhere with it.”

April 9, 1943:
“…The President did not agree with our recommendation. He made a strong argument that physical fitness and recreation are properly separable, and asked that provision be made in the Office of Defense, Health and Welfare Services for a physical fitness group….”

May 8, 1943:
“The President approved the Army budget.…I think he proposes to use it as a propaganda instrument in
connection with the forthcoming conference concerning military strategy, with the near conclusion of the North African campaign.”

June 3, 1943:
(The President had just awakened from a short afternoon nap.) “I said I was glad to know that he was following a regimen, since he is one of the most important men today. In passing off my comment, he made a remark to the effect that John L. Lewis apparently did not think he was very important and would be glad to see him out as President. The President said he made a comment—which he thought was a good crack—that he would be glad to resign as President if John L. Lewis committed suicide….

“The President pointed out that mint tea, for instance, would help to satisfy the population of Morocco and Algiers….”

August 31, 1943:
“I reminded the President that he had received a letter from his Chief of Staff saying essentially that everything was lovely [in military planning], I commented that he, the President, knew different. The President suggested that we might continue this correspondence with another memorandum…in the vein, ‘Now boys, even if you are kidding yourselves, don’t try to kid the Commander in Chief….’

“The President commented that the Army was always crying that he did not understand the Army and that he was partial to the Navy. He said, ‘You know that I have been tougher with the Navy than with the Army.’ I had to admit that was true. Furthermore, he said that he had had more trouble with the Navy in this war than with the Army.”

Such was the unconventional Chief Executive as he was known to his subordinates, to conservative critics who castigated him for one-man rule and dictatorial tendencies, and to those who admired him precisely because he did not follow the usual rules of the game and standard principles of orderly administration. But there was another Chief Executive who
had
long been concerned with orderly executive management; who had established New Deal executive or co-ordinating committees and sometimes presided over them; who had set up a host of planning agencies; who had appointed a committee on executive management to shape proposals for more effective presidential direction and control; who had backed most of its proposals against one of the most fanatical counterattacks on Capitol Hill that he had ever encountered; who after the defeat of his first reorganization attempt had won extensive power to reorganize his own Executive Office and submit broader reorganization plans to Congress; who had created the Executive Office of the President and by transferring the Budget Bureau into it had immensely strengthened central presidential control; who had regrouped agencies into more coherent entities, such as the Federal Security Agency; who had secured a continuing
authority to reorganize under war-powers acts and had fashioned and refashioned defense and war agencies to his liking.

The two Chief Executives had long lived together in a manner as baffling as Roosevelt’s ability to be both party leader and Chief of State, both leader of a popular majority and leader of the people, both conservative—or at least traditionalist—and liberal, both man of principle and man of expediency, without any apparent strain, except on his subordinates. The latter could never be sure which Roosevelt would confront them. By what inner compass or design the President decided to take on any one of these roles—or whether he consciously made decisions about his roles—was never clear even to intimates.

But on one great executive responsibility—the recruitment and positioning of talent—Roosevelt deserved credit by any test of administration. Somehow, as much by some unerring instinct as by observation and insight, the President had made a host of brilliant appointments by mid-war. Hopkins, Hassett, Smith in the presidential office, Stimson, Marshall, Patterson in War, Forrestal in Navy, Elmer Davis in OWI, Henderson and, later, Chester Bowles in OPA, Byrnes and Cohen in OWM, Bush and Conant in war science, Davis and Morse on the War Labor Board, Eisenhower, Nimitz, MacArthur in the field—these men were not only instruments of a President’s purpose but also adornments of a public service.

The fate of another adornment of the service, Sumner Welles, at State, poignantly reflected the anomaly of Roosevelt’s administrative ways. The President kept Welles on as Undersecretary because he was a superb presidential agent in a vast organization that often seemed beyond the grip of the White House. Hull of course resented the agent and the arrangement; “every department has its thun of a bitch,” he told a friend, “but I’ve got the all-American.” Welles’s place in Roosevelt’s court, along with his hauteur and his brilliance, made for enemies in Washington. And he was vulnerable. Someone spread rumors through Washington that he had made advances to a Negro porter on a train. Roosevelt heard that William Bullitt, long a rival to Welles, was the rumor monger. When the former envoy next came to the oval office, Roosevelt stopped him at the door.

“William Bullitt,” he trumpeted, “stand where you are.

“Saint Peter is at the gate. 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.’ ”
He told Bullitt he wished never to see him again. But he knew that Welles’s usefulness was over—and losing a “member of the family” may have accounted for some of Roosevelt’s feeling.

Clearly, Roosevelt’s administrative ways were hell on his subordinates. Grumbling day after day in his diary and to friends, Stimson spoke for many of his colleagues accustomed to clear-cut delegations of power, orderly staff work, regular channels.

“He wants to do it all himself….” “…the poorest administrator I have ever worked under in respect to the orderly procedure and routine of his performance…” “I often wish the President wasn’t so soft-hearted towards incompetent appointees….” “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…better access to the President than his Cabinet officers have. The lines of delimitation between these different agencies themselves and between them and the departments is very nebulous….” “…the Washington atmosphere is full of acrimonious disputes over matters of jurisdiction….”

Oscar Cox complained, too, from his closer vantage point to White House operations, that major policy decisions were going by default, policies were not being swiftly executed, excessive demands were being made on the President’s time.