Roosevelt (81 page)

Circumstances soon were forcing the President’s hand. With German submarine packs and battle cruisers roaming the North Atlantic in early 1941, the crucial question was insuring the safe arrival of the cargoes. Churchill sent reports of grave losses. The direct solution to the problem was outright naval escort for shipping, but Roosevelt’s cautious tactics—defending Lend-Lease as a method of assuring Hitler’s defeat without serious risk of war for America— now boomeranged. The more vigorously the navy tried to protect the lifelines to Britain the more likely were provocative incidents.

Once again Roosevelt was caught between divided administration counsels, between the conflicting demands of isolationists and interventionists. Once again there was a period of veering and drifting in the White House; once again Roosevelt’s advisers—Stimson, Ickes, and others—lamented the President’s failure to lead. And once again Roosevelt responded to the situation by improvisation and subterfuge. He publicly ordered intensified naval patrolling in the now enlarged security zones; he privately ordered a policy of seeking out German ships and planes and notifying British units of their location. On May 27, while pickets trudged dourly back and forth in front of the White House with their antiwar signs, Roosevelt announced his issuance of a proclamation of “unlimited national emergency.” The next day, however, he took much of the sting out of his move by disclaiming any positive plans along new lines.

The President, said Hopkins, “would rather follow public opinion than lead it.” Indeed, as Roosevelt anxiously examined public opinion polls during 1941, he once again was failing to supply the crucial factor of his own leadership in the equation of public opinion. His approach was in sharp contrast to that of his great world partner. “Nothing is more dangerous in wartime,” Churchill said later in the year, “than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of a Gallup poll, always feeling one’s pulse and taking one’s temperature.… There is only one duty, only one safe course, and that is
to try to be right and not to fear to do or say what you believe to be right.”

The shattering Nazi attack on Russia on June 22 came like a thunderclap amid the torpid Washington calm. Many Americans were caught between a loathing for communism as a philosophy and the practical need to work with the Russians against Nazism—but not the President. When Fulton Oursler of
Liberty
magazine sent him a proposed editorial titled “We Still Say ‘To Hell with Communism,’ ” Roosevelt wrote back that
he
would condemn the Russian form of dictatorship equally with the German form but also would make clear that the immediate threat to America was Germany. The President spurred the sending of supplies to Russia and took steps to forestall organized opposition to such aid.

So intent was the President on immediate tactical moves rather than grand strategy that his loftiest pronouncement of the year—the Atlantic Charter, proclaimed jointly with Churchill—was almost a by-product of the Atlantic Conference of the two leaders in July. Most of the conference discussions were devoted to an intensive consideration of the host of production, logistical, co-ordinating, and intelligence matters in which the affairs of the two nations were so intertwined. The lofty pronouncements were actually scribbled on pieces of paper and issued as a press release, but their reception by a people yearning for presidential leadership and direction converted them into a historic act.

“Their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other,” the two leaders proclaimed. “… They respect the right of all people to choose the form of government under which they will live.… They will endeavor … to further the enjoyment of all states, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access … to the trade and to the raw materials of the world.… They desire to bring about the fullest collaboration between all Nations” for social security and economic welfare. “They believe that all of the Nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons, must come to the abandonment of the use of force.…”

But high-sounding words were not enough by themselves. What would Roosevelt
do
? The activists around him burned with anxiety over the President’s refusal to take decisive action—to provide naval escort, to order all-out naval attack in the Atlantic, even to declare war. The President still proceeded cautiously. He felt that he could act decisively only in answer to a decisive act by the enemy. Hitler, now concentrating on Russia, refused him such an act. No incidents or provocations, the Fuehrer told his admirals. The lack of
an overt act deprived the President of the weapon he needed—the chance to dramatize a
situation,
to interpret an
event.
He needed such an opportunity both to arouse the people and, even more, to galvanize Congress. For legislative support was never assured; in mid-August the House of Representatives threw a scare into the administration when it extended selective service by a margin of only one vote.

Then, early in September 1941, there occurred the incident that seemed to give Roosevelt his chance—an incident implicit in presidential orders given months before. While en route to Iceland the American destroyer
Greer
learned from the British of a German submarine, trailed it for several hours, and periodically notified the British of its position; finally the submarine loosed two torpedoes against the
Greer,
both of which missed; then the
Greer
depth-charged the submarine, with unknown results. Quickly seizing on the incident, Roosevelt reported in a fireside chat that the
Greer
had been attacked, but said nothing of the preliminaries. Soon orders went out to the fleet to set up full-scale naval escorting and to “shoot on sight.”

Still Hitler rejected his admirals’ renewed pleas for all-out attacks on the Atlantic supply lines. Russian conquest was his goal; the United States could be dealt with later. It was in a different quarter that the decisive event occurred.

In Tokyo in mid-October 1941, the cabinet of Prince Konoye, caught between the militarists’ zeal for expansion and foreign efforts to contain Japan’s Asiatic ambitions, surrendered power to a new government headed by the fire-breathing general Hideki Tojo. The change tightened the Far Eastern deadlock. Tokyo was willing to settle matters with Washington only if its long-developed plans for expansion were accepted. Roosevelt and Hull wanted stabilization in the Far East but not at the expense of China or of the Good Neighbor ideals they had so often preached. Unlike Konoye, Tojo would not brook delay in further expansion. “If a hundred million people merge into one iron solidarity to go forward,” the new prime minister boasted, “nothing can stop us.”

The new Japanese cabinet then embarked on an elaborate double game. Conversations were to be continued with Washington, but the moment they broke down—as the militarists, at least, expected—the decision for war would be taken up at once. On November 5 operational orders were issued, with the warning: “War with Netherlands, America, England inevitable.…” The date for the attack was set tentatively for December 8, 1941.

Intensive negotiations then ensued between Washington and Tokyo. Roosevelt was eager to work out any acceptable stopgap arrangement in order to play for time, and the Japanese negotiators
were genuinely hopeful of agreement. But fundamentally it was a case of the immovable object and the irresistible force: Japan was intent on expansion, the United States opposed further aggression in the Orient. And all the discussions took place under the harsh time limits imposed by Tojo.

Proposals and counterproposals followed, but all to no avail. By early December the President knew that the Japanese would strike soon—but he knew not where. Most reports to Washington stressed the likelihood of Japanese moves in Southeast Asia or the South Pacific. On the night of December 6, as Roosevelt, still fighting for time, dispatched a plea and a warning to Emperor Hirohito, Japanese carriers were plowing toward their positions northwest of Oahu.

That same night, commenting to Roosevelt that the Japanese would attack at their own convenience, Hopkins lamented that the United States could not strike the first blow and prevent any sort of surprise.

“No,” said the President, “we can’t do that. We are a democracy and a peaceful people. But we have a good record.…”

Early on the afternoon of the following day, Sunday, December 7, Roosevelt and Hopkins had just finished eating lunch when the telephone rang. It was Knox.

“Hello, Frank.”

“Mr. President, it looks as if the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor.”

“
No!
”

The bombs that shattered the fleet in Pearl Harbor shattered as well the stalemate in Roosevelt’s war policy. In the first hours of turmoil after news of the attack there were some who could think only of the fleet’s lack of readiness. Connally turned savagely on Knox with a barrage of questions. Others thought the President should issue a long review of his policy toward Japan in his war message.

But the President would have none of it. To him the only important fact was the fact of war itself. “We are in it,” he kept saying to his advisers. When he appeared before a joint session next day and somberly asked Congress to declare the existence of a state of war, the two most important words in his short speech were “Hostilities exist.” The crucial act had occurred for which the President could find no substitute in speech or deed. “Hostilities exist”—a few climactic hours had taught the lessons that Roosevelt had never quite been able to teach.

“I think the Boss really feels more relief than he has had for weeks,” one cabinet member said to another as they left his study.
When Germany and Italy declared war on the United States four days after Pearl Harbor, world battle lines had formed.

From the President’s behavior during the following weeks one might have thought that all that had gone before had been merely preparation for this hour—as perhaps it was. Roosevelt, said Sumner Welles, a close observer at the time, “demonstrated the ultimate capacity to dominate and control a supreme emergency, which is the rarest and most valuable characteristic of any statesman.” It was like 1933 all over again, but projected onto an infinitely larger stage. Roosevelt was businesslike, serene, cheerful, grave, tireless, confident.

Backed now by a united people, he could exploit his superb flair for bringing warring parties together behind a common goal. Labor-management unity was a brilliant case in point. During the year before Pearl Harbor coal miners, shipbuilders, airplane-engine workers, and tens of thousands of others had gone on strike. The President had had to seize several defense plants. The central issue was “union security”—an issue so divisive that it had caused the collapse of the nation’s chief mediation agency. Ten days after Pearl Harbor a “warm, confident, buoyant, serious” President summoned labor and employer delegates to the White House, told them it would be a “thrilling thing” if they could agree soon on basic problems, and proceeded to set up a board to work out a compromise on union security that was to prove one of the most creative and enduring achievements of the war administration.

All the President’s command and confidence were needed during the early months of 1942, as the nation suffered staggering reversals along the vast Pacific front. Japanese forces swallowed Guam, Wake, the Philippines. Malaya, Burma, the Dutch East Indies fell. Everywhere the Axis maintained its relentless advance: in North Africa the Germans drove the British back into Egypt; they seemed to have the Russians on the point of collapse; they still exacted a heavy toll in the Atlantic. The Japanese landed in the Aleutians, reached the borders of India, threatened Australia.

Not only did Roosevelt have to maintain an air of resolution and confidence during the long, dreary days of defeat, he had to stick to the central strategic decisions—to make the main effort first against Germany while holding off Japan—in the face of the “Japan-firsters” who looked on that nation as America’s only real enemy. Roosevelt worked amid a thousand pressures. He had to mediate among his own rival services, among theater commands, between war front and home front, between the desperate needs of Russians and British. As usual the more exacting problems moved relentlessly along the lines of command into his office; as usual the President tackled them cheerfully, turning quickly from crucial
questions of strategy, to administrative minutiae, to galling problems of personnel; as usual he operated tirelessly among the never-ending babble of politicians, admirals, legislators, generals, diplomats, bureaucrats.

The President understood, too, that his soldiers’ slow, grudging retreat was buying time for the economy to shift into high gear. Having turned from one expedient to another in the months before Pearl Harbor, he established in January 1942 a relatively centralized mobilization direction in the War Production Board. Exploitation of the nation’s enormous resources was the main job of 1942 and one that called for a tenacious fight against inflation as war spending neared one hundred million dollars a day. Here again, Roosevelt seemed to have been superbly trained for the job. No longer did he face the need to decide between the agonizing alternatives—between spending and budget balancing—for which he had never been educated. That decision had been made for him. Now his job was to stave off the inflationary pressures of businessmen, labor, farmers. The notions that had run through his economic thinking for years—notions of a balanced economy, of a central harmony of interests, of mutual sacrifice for mutual gain—supplied an indispensable background for his efforts toward stabilization.

Roosevelt’s utter concentration on the task at hand—winning military victory—raised difficult problems, just as his absorption with winning elections at whatever cost had created difficulties during the peace years. It was all very well for Hopkins, reflecting his chief’s attitude, to apply to every policy the simple test “Will it help to win the war?” but such a test was likely to ignore broader strategic aspects of winning the war—and the relation between winning the war and defending democracy. Two examples illuminate the dilemma: