Roosevelt (90 page)

Everybody seemed to want Truman, Roosevelt said with an air of finality. The meeting broke up, but Hannegan, worried that the President might change his mind, got him to pencil a one-line note that Truman was the right man.

How to inform Wallace and Byrnes that Truman had the nod? As usual Roosevelt left this distasteful job to his subordinates. Rosenman and Ickes got hold of Wallace, who had just returned from China. The Vice President was calmly adamant. People were starving to death in Asia by the hundreds of thousands, he told the emissaries; he would talk politics only to the President. At the White House he showed Roosevelt his list of delegate support, his high standing in the polls. Roosevelt seemed to be surprised and impressed. He even discussed possible tactics. And he promised the Vice President a letter of personal endorsement. As he left, the President reached up and put his arm around him. “I hope it’s the same team again, Henry.”

Byrnes was equally obdurate. When Hannegan and Walker came with the bad news, he insisted on phoning the President at Hyde Park, and he took down the President’s answer in shorthand. Was the President allowing people to speak for him?

Roosevelt: “I am not favoring anybody. I told them so. No, I am not favoring anyone.”

Why were Hannegan and Walker quoting him as favoring Truman or Douglas?

“Jimmy, that is all wrong. That is not what I told them. It is what they told me.” He had not expressed preference for anyone.

Again Byrnes pressed him on the matter.

Roosevelt: “We have to be damned careful about words. They asked if I would object to Truman and Douglas and I said no. That is different from using the word ‘prefer.’…” He ended by virtually urging Byrnes to run.

By the time the Democrats convened in Chicago they were in a delicious state of confusion. While vice-presidential fever was sweeping the leadership, the delegates milled about in more than the usual state of ignorance. Byrnes had lined up Truman’s support so solidly behind his own candidacy that the Missourian was not fulfilling his assigned role as number-one dark horse. Hannegan and his friends were trying to sidetrack Wallace without putting in
Byrnes. Hillman was working hard for Wallace but keeping a line of retreat open to Truman. Ickes was working for either Douglas or Truman—some said just for Ickes. Before the convention started, the President had stopped his train in Chicago on his way to San Diego and complicated things further by reissuing his penciled chit to Hannegan to read as an endorsement of Truman
and
Douglas—either to show he was not trying to run the convention or just to keep things confused.

Wallace’s big weapon was a letter Roosevelt had written about him to the convention chairman: “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.” But the letter ended by leaving the matter up to the convention. To some it looked like the kiss of death; others wondered if it might put the Vice President over the top. It might have if Hannegan and his cohorts had not finally broken Truman loose from his pledge to Byrnes. Roosevelt, by now in San Diego, had to do this job, too; after Hannegan had got Truman together with Walker, Flynn, and Chicago boss Edward J. Kelly in a room at the famous Blackstone Hotel and put a call through to the President, Roosevelt demanded: “Have you got that fellow lined up yet?”

The answer was no. Truman still could not believe that the President was supporting him over Byrnes and Wallace.

“Well, tell the Senator,” the President said, “that if he wants to break up the Democratic party by staying out, he can; but he knows as well as I what that might mean at this dangerous time in the world….” Convinced at last, Truman asked Byrnes to release him. Wallace led the pack strongly on the first ballot, with Truman, Bankhead, and Barkley following, but the city bosses and the Southern Bourbons converged on the next ballot to put Truman over. Earlier Roosevelt had been routinely renominated; Harry Byrd received eighty-nine votes, virtually all from Southerners, and Farley one. The President had asked for and got a short, mildly New Deal, internationalist platform. He gave his acceptance speech from San Diego over the radio to the delegates sitting in the Chicago Stadium.

“I have already indicated to you why I accept the nomination that you have offered me—in spite of my desire to retire to the quiet of private life….

“I shall not campaign, in the usual sense, for the office. 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. I shall, however, feel free to report to the people the facts about matters of concern to them and especially to correct any misrepresentations….

“What is the job before us in 1944? 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 President rarely closed an address by quoting a famous speech, but the peroration of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural seemed apt for the occasion:

“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.”

After allowing a decent interval for Democratic convention oratory Dewey resumed his campaign against the tired administration and one-man government. The best way to counter this line of attack, Roosevelt knew, was through action rather than words. His long trip to California, Hawaii, and Alaska was to be testament to a Commander in Chief radiating energy and confidence. But Dewey had a point. So much did depend on that one man. And as the domestic battlelines were forming there were ominous signs that the pressure was too heavy, the body too fragile.

In his railway car in San Diego just before he was to leave to watch the landing exercise, the President was chatting with his son James. Suddenly his face turned white and agonized. “Jimmy, I don’t know if I can make it—I have horrible pains.” For minutes his father’s eyes were closed, his face drawn, his torso convulsed by waves of pain. He refused to let Jimmy cancel his appearance. Then he recovered and was able to leave for the exercise. However serious this episode may have been, it was not reported to Bruenn.

Rumors were spreading. A story circulated even in the White House that the President had had a secret operation at Hobcaw in May. In Hawaii, Roosevelt received word from Hopkins in Washington that an FBI agent in Honolulu had reported to J. Edgar Hoover that the Pacific trip had been canceled because of the President’s ill-health. He hoped the report was untrue, Hopkins wired, but if true that some other reason would be given. “The underground is working overtime here in regard to your health.” Leahy replied that the President had worked fourteen hours
straight the day before and was never in better health, and that the FBI agent should be disciplined for making a false report.

The camera that had projected Roosevelt’s radiant face throughout the world could also be cruel. One widely used picture of Roosevelt making his acceptance speech showed a gaunt, shadowed face and a slack, open mouth; Rosenman lamented that Early was not there to prevent that kind of picture from going out, as Early had done in the past.

Perhaps the President missed the feeling of human contact in making his acceptance speech from San Diego; perhaps his mind went back to his dramatic flight to the Chicago convention in 1932 to pledge “a new deal for the American people”; or to the Philadelphia acceptance speech in 1936, when he proclaimed that “this generation of Americans has a rendevous with destiny.” Certainly he wanted a live audience for his first appearance back on the mainland after his Pacific trip. He asked Mike Reilly to make arrangements for a speech in the Seattle baseball stadium. Reilly, anxious about security, appealed to Rosenman and Hopkins, who cabled that the President should not be in the position of having crossed the country in one direction in secrecy and then making a speech to a civilian audience on the way back. Why not speak from the deck of his destroyer with its guns as background? The President liked the idea.

To thousands of Bremerton workers jamming the docks—and to a nationwide radio audience—the President gave a chatty travelogue about his Pacific journey. To his aides the talk seemed a near-disaster. The President spoke in the open, against the wind; on the curved deck his braces, which he had been wearing less and less during the war years, were ill-fitting and uncomfortable; his delivery was tepid and halting. Rosenman’s heart sank as he sat by the radio and heard the rambling speech.

What Rosenman did not know—and probably Roosevelt himself never knew—is that during the first part of this speech the President was suffering the first and only attack of angina pectoris he had ever had, or would have. Standing just behind him, even Bruenn could not tell what was happening. For about fifteen minutes the oppression gripped Roosevelt’s chest and radiated to both shoulders; then the severe pain slowly subsided. Roosevelt told Bruenn right after the talk that he had had some pain; within an hour a white blood count was taken and an electrocardiogram tracing made. No unusual abnormalities were found.

Once again tongues started wagging. Rosenman knew all about the chatter at Washington and New York cocktail parties, about the questions people were asking: Has the master lost his touch? Is he a setup for Dewey’s punches? Some of Roosevelt’s intimates worried
less about this than about Roosevelt’s boredom with political detail. He had seemed curiously disengaged concerning the vice-presidential canvassing at the White House. At San Diego he told Jimmy that he didn’t give a damn whether the convention chose Douglas or Byrnes or Truman; the important thing was to get on with the war. The Bremerton speech—his first contact with the American people since his acceptance address over three weeks before—he prepared hastily on the destroyer without the help of speech writers. Still, he was not detached about the rumors of his bad health. When Reilly confessed to him that he had allowed reporters to glimpse the President at Hobcaw to counter their taunting claims that he was actually hospitalized in Boston or Chicago, Roosevelt’s lips tightened and his eyes glittered. “Mike, those newspapermen are a bunch of God-damned ghouls.”

The President’s most effective electioneering technique, at least early in the campaign, had always been that of maintaining his presidential posture, above the battle. While activists like Ickes chafed and fretted, while the Republican candidate sought to come to grips with his foe, Roosevelt continued just being President, offering as small a partisan flank as possible for the opposition to bombard.

Being President meant that he could propose and sign popular legislation. In early summer he approved the GI Bill of Rights, which revolutionized the whole approach to the returning soldier. The emphasis was less on a bonus or reward and more on education and individual achievement. Education or training at any level from primary grades to postgraduate would be allowed an ex-serviceman for one year plus the time served in the armed services, up to a total of four years. The bill also provided for a federal guarantee of half of the amount of loans made to veterans to buy or build homes, farms, and business properties; authorized substantial unemployment allowances for jobless veterans; set up machinery to help returning veterans find jobs; and authorized the building of more hospitals. The GI Bill was the capstone of a structure of veterans’ benefits fashioned during the war: dependency allowances; mustering-out pay; broad medical care; death and disability pensions; war-risk life insurance; re-employment rights for returning ex-servicemen, and more.

“It gives emphatic notice to the men and women in the armed forces,” Roosevelt said in signing the bill, “that the American people do not intend to let them down.” It was not the kind of action or statement that presented an inviting target to the Republicans.

Being President meant laying exciting plans for the postwar future. Roosevelt proposed perhaps the most dramatic of these
at summer’s end when he called for a Missouri River development plan that would be based on the TVA concept that a big river basin contains one river and one set of interrelated problems and opportunities. In spurning a piecemeal legislative program for the basin, the President defied the innumerable groups that clustered around the existing power, recreation, irrigation, transportation, agricultural, and commercial interests in the basin. He called, too, for a study of the Arkansas and Columbia River basins, also with the TVA model in view.

Being President meant upholding the law. In the heat of August the Philadelphia transit system, serving almost a million war workers, came to a halt when motormen quit work because eight black employees had been upgraded to motormen. Strike leaders protested that motormen sat on the same wooden benches between runs and “the colored people have bedbugs.” As thousands trudged to work in ninety-seven-degree heat and tension rose in the black enclaves, the President intervened from far out in the Pacific. Under his proclamation the Army took control of the transit system, ordered strikers to return, vainly waited two days for compliance—then moved 8,000 armed soldiers into the city, arrested the strike leaders, warned younger strikers that their draft deferments would be canceled, put two soldier guards behind each complying motorman, got the trolleys rolling again—and protected the Negroes’ rights to their jobs.

During these summer months Roosevelt was conducting a curious venture in grand political strategy at home—curious because he ordinarily shunned broad political planning, curious, too, because years later it was still unclear whether he was seriously engaged in fundamental political reform or simply attempting an election ploy.