Roosevelt (68 page)

Roosevelt’s relationship with his staff preserved the dignity of his office and person while also permitting boisterous jokes and a light playfulness. He was forever deprecating Watson’s fishing and hunting exploits and laying election or other bets with Early or McIntyre. Shortly after the Munich crisis, from North Carolina where he had gone to rest because of lung lesions, McIntyre wrote Missy Le Hand a note that was a take-off on the kind of letters that flooded the White House. The President rose to the occasion:

My dear Mr. McIntyre:

I am often touched, but seldom have I been so touched as by your letter to Miss Le Hand. It was one of a very small number of letters which occasionally she shows to me. Both of us were dissolved in tears.

Your one hundred per cent support in the mountains of North Carolina means more to me than carrying Vermont.

I am glad that you and your good wife are church-going people. That will keep you both from drink and from evil ways.

I hope that you and your family have not been seriously hurt by the Republican depression and that you are able to buy shoes and stockings for the children.

You are such a fine citizen that if we have to go to war with Hitler I am sure you will be the first to enlist.

Your Friend,

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Nor did foreign crisis bring any major change in the President’s working habits. He still conducted business in a flurry of telephone
calls, personal conferences, formal correspondence cleared with appropriate agencies, informal letters cleared with no one, chits to secretaries and cabinet officers, evening conferences. Ordinarily Roosevelt worked closely with Hull, and the two men—the one flexible, fast-moving, resourceful; the other dogged, cautious, rigid—complemented each other nicely. But as usual, Roosevelt would not confine himself within administrative channels. He often communicated directly with the icy, hardheaded Welles, with the talented Berle, with a host of ambassadors and ministers, with the Pope, with old friends at home like Cox and Baruch, with countless other friends abroad. Knowing the distant ramifications of foreign policy, searching for ideas and expedients, he discussed the world situation with Ickes and Hopkins and Wallace as well as with the State Department men.

The foreign policies that emerged from this welter were the product of no single person, although the President dominated the process. Indeed, they were more a simple response to events abroad than to a set plan or program of foreign policy making at home. Gossipy little notes from diplomats, long letters by clipper pouch, formal pronunciamentos by foreign leaders, urgent cables picked up by chattering instruments, decoded, mimeographed, and stamped “Secret and Confidential”—these brought the news of ceaselessly changing affairs abroad. Still lacking a firm strategy, Roosevelt and his policy makers struggled in the second half of
his second term to divine the meaning of affairs and to fashion a role for the most powerful democracy on earth.

The tangled strands of history allow for little neatness. There was never a sharp turning point when Roosevelt’s absorption with domestic matters left off and his concern for foreign affairs began. Despite the President’s later talk about shifting roles from “Dr. New Deal” to “Dr. Win the War,” the fitful rush of events would allow no simple shift. While Roosevelt was struggling with recession in March 1938, the Nazis overran Austria. While he was still trying to purge conservative Democrats later that year, Hitler thrust into the Sudetenland. While the President was jousting with a rebellious Congress early in 1939, Hitler swallowed the rest of Czechoslovakia and turned his eyes in new directions.

Despite the isolationist tendencies of the early New Deal, the President had never ignored the rest of the world. And now, midway through his second term, he would not allow the roar of events abroad to drown out his liberal projects at home. How to build a viable foreign policy and yet sustain the New Deal, all in a context of fast-moving events abroad and changing economic and political conditions at home—this was the central job in the latter part of his second term, and one that would challenge even Roosevelt’s political dexterity and resourcefulness.

A month after seizing Austria, Hitler appealed to his people for another four years of power to consolidate the gains of the new
Gross-Deutschland.
On April 11, 1938, it was announced that a gratifying 99 per cent of the people—including Austrians—approved. Once again the Fuehrer moved fast. Ten days later he ordered his generals to draw up new plans for aggression.

Who could doubt where he would strike next? Czechoslovakia now lay like a blunt wedge driven into the heart of the new Germany. Czechoslovakia was both spawn and symbol of Versailles, a proud democracy, a buttress of the League of Nations, an ally of France and Russia, a small nation but well armed and supplied behind natural defenses, and a nation, in the Fuehrer’s eyes, of Slav subhumans. As usual Hitler brought to his strategy a superb combination of military, diplomatic, and psychological power.

In Czechoslovakia the Fuehrer had an immensely useful tool for his ambitions—the minority of about three million Sudeten Germans who had long been demanding more autonomy from Prague. For several years he had been subsidizing the Nazi leader of the Sudetens, Konrad Henlein. While shouting to the world about righting the wrongs of an oppressed minority, Hitler instructed Henlein to “demand so much that we can never be satisfied.” At the same time, Hitler worked to complete Prague’s diplomatic isolation. He played on Polish and Rumanian fears of Moscow so that Russia would not be able to pass across those countries to come to Czechoslovakia’s aid in the event of invasion. He tempted Poland and Hungary with the prospect of slices of Czech territory. As for the Western powers, Hitler divined correctly the French fear of war and he stressed to the British the oppression of the Sudetens and the folly of a great conflict over their return to the Fatherland. To protect his own flank he paid a state visit to Rome and loudly proclaimed to Mussolini, who was still anxious over the Nazi absorption of Austria, that the frontier of the Alps would be “forever inviolable.”

Only two forces could stop Hitler, and he overbore both of them. One was a group of generals who feared that Germany was not strong enough to wage a major war. Alternately pleading with the military and bullying them, the Fuehrer pushed aside the veteran commanders and insisted on his plan of conquest. The other potential obstacle was united opposition from Russia and the West. But the central strategic premise on which Hitler operated—“there is
no solidarity in Europe,” as he put it—held true. Ironically, there was a brief moment when the two forces might have united. A small group of officers and civilian officials conspired to seize Hitler as soon as he ordered the attack on the Czechs. But their plan turned on the question whether Britain and France would come to Prague’s aid.

Would they? The difference between Hitler and the Western leaders was crucial: In order to destroy Czechoslovakia the former was willing to risk a general war while Chamberlain and Daladier, to save Czechoslovakia, were not willing to risk such a war. Russia and the Western nations each feared being deserted by the other to face alone the rising German might.

The United States, of course, still carried little weight in the quivering balance of power politics. It did little more than watch and worry. Despite his preoccupation with the continuing recession and a balky Congress during the spring of 1938, Roosevelt followed European developments with care. He received a great deal of information on the complex chess game in Europe—so much, indeed, and from such varied sources that his hopes alternately rose and fell.

On the over-all course of affairs the President had fixed ideas. Looking on the Nazis and Fascists as gangsters who ultimately would have to be restrained, he had deep misgivings about Chamberlain’s appeasement policies. When he heard that the prime minister was ready to recognize Mussolini’s conquest of Ethiopia in return for a pact of friendship, the President said that if when a police chief made a deal with gangsters the result was no more holdups, the police chief would be a hero, but if the gangsters reneged the police chief would go to jail. Chamberlain, he felt, was taking a very long chance.

But these were private sentiments, not public action. Unwilling to throw his weight into the balance, the President was still confined to a policy of pinpricks and righteous protest. No risks, no commitments, was the motto of the White House. When he heard that a German battleship was to stop off in the West Indies, he ordered an American war vessel to be there at the same time. When Germany wanted helium from the United States for its dirigibles, the President for a time encouraged Ickes, who had control of its allotment, to stall them off. Meanwhile Hull specialized in protests. The Secretary of State repeatedly denounced international lawlessness and, when tension began to rise over Hitler’s posture toward Czechoslovakia, he solemnly called attention to the Kellogg antiwar pact signed a decade before. Men of power in Europe laughed off America’s moral protestations. Ciano, Italy’s cynical foreign minister, noted in his diary how he listened solemnly while a visiting
American played the usual gramophone record and then turned on a record of his own.

Only one commitment was the President willing to make. Speaking in mid-August at Queen’s University in Ontario, he assured the Canadians in words that Roosevelt himself had inserted in a State Department draft, that “the people of the United States will not stand idly by if domination of Canadian soil is threatened by any other Empire.” But Czechoslovakia, not Canada, was next on the Nazi timetable.

By summer’s end, 1938, Hitler was ready to move. Final plans were drawn up for deploying thirty-six divisions against the Czechs. To a frenzied, baying crowd of Nazis at Nürnberg he demanded “justice” for the Sudetens. Events crowded on one another during the rest of September. To Hitler’s surprise and delight, Chamberlain suddenly flew to Germany. While the wind howled and rain lashed the windowpanes, the prime minister conferred with the ex-corporal in his mountain house in Berchtesgaden. Hitler shouted that he would settle affairs with the Czechs even if it meant war.

Frightened by Hitler’s reckless attitude, Chamberlain returned to London to see if the cabinet would support the peaceful separation of the Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia. Hitler continued preparations for attack. A week later Chamberlain returned to Germany, happily bearing agreements from his country, France, and Czechoslovakia—the last obtained by putting Prague under severe pressure—for peaceful transfer of Sudeten districts. Amazed that the Czechs would submit, incensed at losing his chance of smashing them, Hitler balked. He now insisted on immediate occupation by his army. A desperate Chamberlain returned home; Hitler ordered assault regiments to their action stations; Londoners dug bomb shelters while mobilization orders went out to the fleet. As a last chance for peace Chamberlain turned to Mussolini, and the Duce, not yet ready for war, appealed to Hitler. Through the combined efforts of Mussolini and the moderates around Hitler, he was induced to join with Mussolini, Chamberlain, and Daladier in a conference where he would be granted by agreement what he wanted to take by force. Meeting in Munich on September 29, the four men arranged the partition of Czechoslovakia, and soon German troops were crossing into the Sudetenland, unopposed.

What was Roosevelt doing all this time? As the European crisis sharpened in early September he was campaigning in Maryland against Tydings and then spending some anxious days in Minnesota while Mayo Clinic surgeons operated on James’s ulcers. During the critical days of September he abruptly broke off further speaking plans and hurried back to Washington. He grasped the basic elements of the situation: Hitler’s determination to seize
Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain’s insistence on peace, the probable seizure of the Sudetenland, the likelihood of war within the next few years even if it was postponed by concessions. Could the United States play any part in the immediate crisis?

Once again, but this time in the teeth of impending disaster abroad, Roosevelt tried to throw his influence in the scale without making commitments. Again and again he and Hull called for international co-operation against lawlessness but drew the line at foreign entanglements. The President did not respond to the plea of President Eduard Beneš of Czechoslovakia that he urge Britain and France not to desert the Czechs. He would not allow Chamberlain to broadcast a direct message to the American people. He turned aside suggestions that he arbitrate. Instead he decided on an open appeal for peace to all the nations—to potential aggressor, bystander, and victim alike. But the appeal itself mentioned our spurning of “political entanglements”; it evoked polite answers from the democracies and a long diatribe from the Fuehrer filled with lies about the oppression of the Sudetens. The President then appealed to Hitler himself to agree to a conference over the crisis in some neutral spot, but with no involvement by the United States; this letter Hitler ignored, for matters were already turning his way.

September 1938 in America had been the month of a great hurricane. Breathless newscasters, working around the clock, had brought reports of winds, tidal waves, and floods in the Northeast, of the wreckage left in their wake, punctuated by the latest bulletin on the man-made storms abroad. At month’s end the calm blue skies seemed to heighten the outburst of relief over Munich’s outcome. “I have had a pretty strenuous two weeks,” Roosevelt wrote a friend, but a cruise taken in midsummer “made it possible for me to come through except for a stupid and continuing runny nose. A few days ago I wanted to kill Hitler and amputate the nose. Today, I have really friendly feelings for the latter and no longer wish to assassinate the Fuehrer.”

But the enormous sense of relief was deeply shaded by worry. Munich was probably not too great a price to pay if it insured permanent peace, Ickes said. “But will it? I doubt it very much, Hitler being the maniac that he is.” Hull issued a cool statement about the pact, but Welles a day or so later publicly stated that a superb opportunity had now come to establish a new world order based on justice and law. The nation’s press was divided, the more isolationist press hailing the result, other newspapers fretting over its meaning for the future. The President seemed divided too. “Good man,” he had cabled Chamberlain enigmatically after Hitler agreed to the Munich meeting, but he had deep misgivings as to
Chamberlain’s appeasement policy and its implications. He told Ickes darkly that he suspected Britain and France might offer Trinidad and Martinique to Hitler to keep him satisfied—and if they did he would send the fleet to take both islands.