Roosevelt (88 page)

From the start the President had protected his role as Commander in Chief. In appointing Leahy he had made clear that the Admiral would be a leg man, a collector of military advice, a summarizer—“whatever’s necessary from the point of view of the Commander in Chief.” The reporters did not quite understand. Would Leahy be Chief of Staff to the United Nations strategic command?

“He will be Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief….”

“He will definitely be chief of staff?”

“To the Commander in Chief,” the President put in amid laughter.

“Yes, sir.”

“Of the Army and Navy, Mr. President?”

“No. To the Commander in Chief.” More laughter.

The President’s job description was so predictive of what Leahy would do for the rest of the war that years later the Admiral used
it to describe his work at the White House. Perhaps it was not strange that Leahy’s assignment remained much the same over the years, for Roosevelt’s whole command structure was remarkably stable. He did not hire and fire commanders as Lincoln did. The men who started out with him—Stimson, Marshall, King, Arnold, Leahy—were with him at the end. Only Knox and Stark were missing, the first because of his death, the second a casualty of feeling after Pearl Harbor. Even substituting Marshall for Eisenhower was for the President too much of a disruption of a settled array of relationships.

How, then, did Roosevelt withdraw from this comfortable interplay when political and strategic considerations demanded? The paradox of civil-military relations, William Emerson has pointed out, is that “in the strategic sphere, in all that concerns the structure and deployment of military forces, political leadership must be responsive to technical military opinion and advice, but it must, at whatever cost, shape and direct the military instrument to support and serve its own purposes. ‘War,’ as Clausewitz pointed out, ‘has its own grammar but not its own logic.’ ” The framers of the Constitution had given the President, as Alexander Hamilton said, “the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces, as first general and admiral of the confederacy,” and events since 1787, including the revolution in war making, had enormously broadened the Commander in Chief’s military powers and political responsibilities. He could delegate some of these powers but not, ultimately, the responsibility.

Roosevelt tried to resolve the paradox—to the extent he recognized it—by splitting his military role from his political. As Commander in Chief he left major military planning decisions in the hands of his Joint Chiefs and military planners. His differences with his chiefs over military policy arose not because he was following political objectives and they were pursuing military ones, but because of differing views as to correct military policy. In the months before and after Pearl Harbor he was bent on bringing about that concert of Anglo-American power that would best contain Hitler, while his chiefs were more concerned with husbanding American war production for their poorly equipped forces. The Joint Chiefs themselves were none too united, with Marshall eager to build up ground power in Britain, King naval power in the Pacific, and Arnold air power everywhere. Even so, most of the military disagreements between the President and his chiefs occurred in the early and middle phases of the war. As the war progressed the military thinking of Commander in Chief and Joint Chiefs converged, partly because of their increasing rapport, but mainly because the military build-up and Soviet as well as
American military needs now called for the strategy that the Chiefs had long pressed—a central blow at Germany through France.

Meantime Roosevelt pursued some of his political goals separately. He clung tenaciously—almost fanatically—to his unconditional-surrender doctrine in the face of misgivings even among the military. He not only rejected their queries but seemed to reject the very notion that the military had a right to raise them. This seemed a bit odd, since the military would have to apply the doctrine in the first stages of surrender, and since the President’s great precedent for the doctrine was a confrontation between two generals.

It was he, the Commander in Chief, who would do the coordinating of the political and the military. Such co-ordination called for an almost philosophical detachment in the White House, a capacity to look at things whole, to avoid the dangers of immediacy, opportunism, expediency, piecemeal planning. But to the extent that Roosevelt immersed himself in the role of the soldier and of the Commander in Chief, he was unable to take that balanced and comprehensive view of things that properly arrayed the military against the political, the short-run against the long, the psychological against the operational, the principled against the expedient. And he had no strategic staff in the White House to help him do this. Hopkins had served in this capacity to some degree, but he was too much of an operator like the President, and toward the end too ill and exhausted, to satisfy such a vital need.

Still, if Roosevelt and his fellow soldiers sought victory for its own sake too keenly, it was in part because the American people wanted a simple military victory. For most Americans, as Louis Morton has said, “war was an aberration, a nasty business to be got over with….Postwar politics only complicated the problem and delayed the end. Beat the bully and bring the boys home—that was the American approach to war.” And to make military victory the highest goal of the nation, as Morton further suggests, both constricts strategy and overburdens the armed forces.

Roosevelt’s role as Commander in Chief contrasted significantly with Churchill’s. The Prime Minister met frequently with his Joint Chiefs—often twice a day—and badgered them with chits that went into major details of planning and tactics. As his own Minister of Defence he felt free to communicate directly with theater commanders and to advise them on operations, though generally he left final decisions with the men in the field. Churchill was more disposed than Roosevelt to bring new men into top command positions. Valid or not, his military plans and political goals were closely related. Roosevelt seldom held formal meetings with
his Joint Chiefs of Staff, though he was in close touch with them individually and through Leahy. He rarely pressed and never hectored them. The apparent result was considerable autonomy for the JCS, but only within a community of outlook long nurtured between the Commander in Chief and his fellow soldiers in the Pentagon and Navy Building.

Stalin on this score resembled Churchill more than Roosevelt. Major and sometimes minor battle plans were cleared with the Kremlin, though younger generals coming to the top of the heap on the basis of performance won more and more freedom of initiative. Marshal Georgi Zhukov found Stalin clearheaded, businesslike, and willing to be differed with. Stalin, according to Isaac Deutscher, was in effect his own commander in chief, minister of defense, quartermaster, minister of supply, foreign minister, and even his own
chef de protocole.
Neither Stalin nor Roosevelt imposed military dogmas or blueprints on his commanders; both acted as arbiters and adjusters. Stalin’s donning of a marshal’s uniform bespoke his solidarity with the Red Army, while Roosevelt symbolically donned uniform in becoming a soldier among soldiers.

Hitler prodded and harangued and bullied his generals. He followed operations minutely and intervened daily, sometimes hourly. If Roosevelt occasionally complained that his military planners were conservative and exaggerated the difficulties, Hitler castigated his to their faces as incompetents, cowards, nincompoops, and he sacked generals who retreated in violation of his orders. Hitler made himself Commander in Chief of the Army—“a little matter of operational command,” he told General Franz Haider, “something anyone can do”—as well as Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces.

Still, whatever small difficulties the President had with the military could not compare with Hitler’s. In July, as it became clear that the Allies were in France to stay, the disaffection among German officers erupted in a plot to kill the Führer. The bomb went off in the conference room at the Wolfsschanze headquarters; Hitler survived.

The President got news of the attempt just before leaving San Diego for his journey to Honolulu on the
Baltimore.
He had a flicker of hope that the German “revolt” might get worse, but reports arrived that Hitler had quickly established control of the situation. Three days before, Premier Tojo had resigned, with his entire Cabinet, on the announcement of the fall of Saipan. Roosevelt could not be dismissed by an Emperor or deposed by ministers or generals. But he was the only military commander who could be sacked by the voters. As his destroyer neared Puget Sound his mind was on the presidential election, which was already well under way.

T
HERE IS SOMETHING BOTH
strange and sublime about a great democracy conducting free elections in the midst of total war. Strange because at the very time a people is most unified over its goals and most determined to achieve them it divides into contending parties, mobilizes behind opposing doctrines, and pits gladiator against gladiator in the electoral arena. Sublime because in the act of holding an election a people reaffirms its faith in the democratic process despite all the compelling reasons to suspend it. Even Britain, a seedbed of democratic practice, postponed general elections during World War II, as in the first war.

Some doubted that the nation—or at least Roosevelt—could go through with a wartime presidential election. At a press conference early in February a reporter mentioned rumors in the anti-Roosevelt press that the election would be called off. Roosevelt pounced on him.

“How?”

“Well, I don’t know. That is what I want you to tell me.”

“Well, you see,” Roosevelt said, “you have come to the wrong place, because—gosh—all these people around town haven’t read the Constitution. Unfortunately, I have.”

An Englishman observing the American scene early in 1944 marveled at the differences in Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s situations. The Prime Minister had the backing of a united nation, S. K. Ratcliffe noted, while the President moved in an atmosphere of conflict—of political bitterness, industrial discord, racial tension, press opposition, Democratic party defections—and “of an enmity against him so intense and persistent that for a parallel in Britain we would have to go far back.”

The White House mail reflected the bitterness. “In conclusion candidate Roosevelt,” wrote a Californian, “you are a politician I would not trust; for you use men
to promote your desire for power and more power
and when their usefulness is at an end, they are cast aside, as you double-crossed Al Smith at the 1932 Chicago Convention in your deal with Hearst (whom you now revile),
McAdoo and Garner. Both you and your wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, have done more during your incumbency to promote and stir up class, racial hatreds….May God pardon you.” From a New Jerseyite: “The people of the U.S. of America do not like any longer boss rule, nor dictated by a machine….” Of the several hundred persons who wrote in against a fourth term some had specific complaints, some general, but many simply hated Roosevelt.

Many still loved him, or needed him. “Please President Roosevelt don’t let us down now in this world of sorrow and trouble. If we ever needed you is now. I believe within my heart God put you here in this world to be our Guiding Star….” Some letters came from organized groups; 6,100 steelworkers signed a petition, “We know that you are weary—yet we cannot afford to permit you to step down….” Few letters dealt with issues, programs, specific goals; here again a gap yawned between great cloudy war aims and peoples’ specific needs.

An undercurrent of worry about Roosevelt’s health ran through many letters from both friend and foe. From San Diego: “I don’t believe in working a good horse to death—so don’t try to carry the whole world on your shoulders.” From a woman in Brooklyn: “…You did many fine and wonderful things for this country, no doubt….Resign, retire to your New York State home rest—and in time enjoy the fruits of your endeavours.” One or two advised him to step down and head the peace delegation.

Messages came from Berlin, too. Election year had hardly started when Douglas Chandler, a former Hearst newspaperman who broadcast regularly from Germany under the name Paul Revere, called on his fellow Americans to repudiate the traitor, the charlatan, the weakling in the White House. America, he said, was on the brink of a reign of terror—and, even worse, inflation. “Get that man out of the house that was once white!” Adolf Hitler had cast his ballot early.

It might seem that, in theory at least, the most ticklish role in wartime politics would be the opposition’s. To conduct a campaign at home against an administration conducting a campaign against the enemy overseas, to agitate and divide the country, to attack the Commander in Chief—politicians might be expected to recoil from such unpopular ventures. But not the pragmatic office seekers of America. By the inexorable calendar of American politics it was election year and hence it was time to smite the party in power, war or no war. By early 1944 the GOP was seething with hope
and stratagems, and several men were seeking the Republican nomination.

The most active of these was Wendell Willkie. The 1940 nominee had refused to fade away after his defeat. His global travels, his writings, his calls for strong postwar world organization, his eloquent defense of Negroes and other minority groups, his double-barreled attacks on congressional Republicans and on the Roosevelt administration kept him in the public eye. But by 1944 he was a man without a party. He was still anathema to the congressional Republicans; he had never built a strong grass-roots organization within presidential Republican ranks, and what organized support he had mustered had partly melted away during the war.

Willkie was still a commanding figure, with his big burly frame, shaggy hair, muscular phrases, and blunt assaults on his enemies. But a note of desperate frustration was creeping into his speeches. He lambasted the reactionaries, bigots, and stand-patters in his own party even more bitterly than the racists and reactionaries in the Democratic. Introduced by an industrialist as “America’s leading ingrate” to those who had helped him in 1940, he burst out, “I don’t know whether you are going to support me or not and I don’t give a damn. You’re a bunch of political liabilities anyway.” He was forever telling Republicans that they could take him or leave him—and many left him. He said all the right things about the Democratic regime—one-man rule, confused administration, self-perpetuation in power—but his criticisms of presidential Democrats seemed to lack the bite and crunch of his attacks on congressional Republicans.