Roosevelt (83 page)

On January 20, 1945, Roosevelt took the oath of office for the
fourth time; to save money and energy the inaugural was held in front of the White House rather than at the Capitol. He spoke for only a few minutes. “In the days and the years that are to come, we shall work for a just and honorable peace, a durable peace, as today we work and fight for total victory in war.…” As the President spoke, Allied troops in Europe stood on the threshold of victory. Hitler’s armies, except for a precarious hold in Hungary and northern Italy, had been forced back onto German soil. In the Pacific, American forces were preparing heavy assaults on islands barely a thousand miles from Tokyo.

“We can gain no lasting peace if we approach it with suspicion and mistrust—or with fear,” the President said in his inaugural; and in this spirit he met with Churchill and Stalin two weeks later at Yalta. Roosevelt faced resolutely this supreme test of Big Three co-operation. He was tired; he was frail; Churchill noticed that his face had “a transparency, an air of purification, and often there was a far-away look in his eyes.” But even at Yalta, he could be as gay, charming, and buoyant as ever. His mind moved as quickly and as acutely as ever over the great range of problems that the conference considered.

Out of the hard bargaining at Yalta issued a series of compromises. No nation had its own way. Stalin made concessions on German reparations, on voting arrangements in the projected world organization, on the question of a French zone of occupation in Germany, and on several other matters. Moreover, the date of Russia’s entrance into the war against Japan was fixed. Yet Stalin also gained some large demands. While the conference did not “give” him Poland, which was already occupied by Red troops, the terms of the agreement may have facilitated ensuing Soviet control of that country. And in the Far East Stalin was granted the Kurile Islands, the southern part of Sakhalin, and extensive spheres of influence in North China.

Had Roosevelt, the man who boasted of his prowess as a “hoss-trader,” finally been outbargained? Many would later cry that he had. Yet a verdict must take account of the different operating methods of the two men. Roosevelt, as always, was acting pragmatically, opportunistically, tactically. As usual, he was almost wholly concerned about the immediate job ahead—winning the war. Japan had yet to be overcome, and the military advised that the invasion and conquest of the homeland would be long and fanatically resisted. The first test of the atomic bomb was long in the future. His generals and admirals insisted—and the President agreed—that a Russian attack on Japan was essential.

Stalin, on the other hand, was thinking already of political arrangements in the postwar world. This granite-hard son of serfs,
schooled in blood and violence, had always thought and acted several moves ahead of his adversaries—this was one reason he had defeated them. He had, moreover, few illusions about the postwar world; his revolutionary and Marxist background had taught him that, however friendly the Roosevelts and Churchills might be now, the inexorable laws of history would produce new tensions among nations, and Russia would have to be strong. Churchill, too, was aware of the political implications of victory; he, too, whatever his romantic Edwardian temperament, could see the storms ahead—had he not written bluntly that “the story of the human race is War”? But Churchill, unlike Stalin, did not have the continental land power to give strength to his strategy.

Roosevelt, a match for these men in the military direction of a war, was handicapped, when it came to the considerations of peace, by the belief that better days must lie ahead. Poignantly, in his inaugural address just before Yalta, he had quoted his old schoolmaster Peabody as saying that in life there would always be peaks and valleys, but that the “great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward; that a line drawn through the middle of the peaks and the valleys of the centuries always has an upward trend.” But Marx and Lenin seemed to have taught Stalin better than Peabody taught Roosevelt.

Such, at least, was the verdict of some of those who looked back from the years of bitterness and disillusion that followed the war. The verdict of still later years might be different. For beyond the military and political considerations of Yalta was the supreme accomplishment that Roosevelt wished to present to the world—the fact of Three Power co-operation. It was quite characteristic of him that in the existence of this accomplishment as interpreted by him to a world hungering for leadership, he should see the best chance of a lasting peace. Again and again, in his report to Congress on the Yalta Conference, his words came back to the supreme fact of the unity of the three great powers. Later generations, looking back from more tranquil years, might see this as the crowning achievement of Yalta—one that dwarfed even the most far-reaching maneuvers of the Machiavellians.

Even so, Roosevelt made one colossal—though understandable-miscalculation. His plans assumed that he, as President of the United States for another four years, would be around to keep the fact of one world alive, to symbolize it for peoples everywhere, to mediate between Stalin and Churchill. But time was fast running out.

Roosevelt’s voice was strangely thick and blurred as he told Congress about Yalta. He stumbled and halted; he ad-libbed irrelevancies. At times his face and words flamed with the old eloquence,
then it seemed to ebb away. Thus it was constantly in the final weeks. His body seemed to sag heavily in his chair or in the arms of his porters; his hands trembled so that the act of fixing his pince-nez or lighting his cigarette took all his powers of concentration; his gray-blue eyes clouded, his face went slack, his head hunched over. Then, suddenly, miraculously, the old gayness and vitality would return. At his last press conference in Washington the repartee raced from Canadian relations to the new peace organization to New York City politics to Yalta to night baseball; the President was as quick, humorous, and deft as ever.

At the end of March Roosevelt left for Warm Springs. The usual crowd was waiting when the train pulled into the little Georgia town. There was the usual bustle of activity at the end of the rear car. But something was different. Roosevelt’s big frame, slumped in the wheel chair, seemed to joggle slightly as he was rolled along the platform. His face, once so strong and well fleshed, seemed wasted; the jaw, once so firm, quivered perceptibly. A murmur swept through the crowd.

But as usual, after a few days of rest, the gray pallor faded, some of the old vitality returned. Doctors sent reassuring reports to Eleanor Roosevelt in Washington. Sitting in his cottage, watching the fresh green countryside under the warm sun, the President was able to relax, to look over new stamps, to play with Fala, to think about the past and about the future.

It was early April, and the culmination of the war was at hand. Reports arriving daily told of victories on all battlefronts. In Europe, American and Allied troops were sweeping into the heart of Germany. In the Pacific naval forces were fighting off the heaviest Japanese air attacks of the war and clamping their grip on Okinawa. It was the culmination for Roosevelt too. He knew that war in Europe would be over in a few weeks. He knew now that Japan could not fight long against the power that would be massed against her after Germany’s defeat. He knew that delegates from the united nations would meet soon in San Francisco to set up the permanent peace organization, and he knew that the United States would join it.

It was a time for rest—a time when the President could think about the long vacation that he would take in the summer and about a trip to Britain, a time when he could even toy with the idea of quitting the presidency as soon as the big jobs were done. He could think about the house at Hyde Park that was awaiting him, about the library with its mass of papers and mementos.

It was time too—though no one knew it at the moment—for a last look at the living man.

Those who knew Roosevelt best could agree fully on only one point—that he was a man infinitely complex and almost incomprehensible. “I cannot come to grips with him!” Ickes cried more than once, and the words were echoed by a host of congressmen, politicos, diplomats, and bureaucrats who dealt with the canny politician in the White House. His character was not only complex, Robert Sherwood observed, it was contradictory to a bewildering degree.

The contradictions continually bemused or galled Roosevelt’s lieutenants. He was almost unvaryingly kind and gracious, yet a thin streak of cruelty ran through some of his behavior. He remained unruffled and at ease under the most intense pressures; yet when pricked in certain ways he struck out at his enemies in sharp, querulous words. He found ways to evade bores and know-it-alls, yet he patiently listened to Ickes’ complaints and demands hour after hour, week after week, year after year. He juggled huge figures with an almost casual air, yet he could work long minutes over a knot to save the string and over a telegram to cut it down to ten words. He liked new ideas, people, and projects, but he wanted an element of fixity in his surroundings. He shifted nimbly from one set of policies to another—from economy to spending, from central planning to trust busting, from intervention abroad to neutrality, from party action to national action.

In many little ways inconsistency ruled: in the way he thanked some subordinates for their efforts and said nothing to others, intervened in some administrative matters and ignored others, had four men doing a single job in some instances (as Flynn once complained) and one man doing four jobs in others, was unaccountably frivolous about some matters and grave about others.

And there was the most baffling quality of all—his sheer, superb courage in facing some challenges, and his caution and indirection in facing others. He acted instantly, electrically, on certain decisions, and unaccountably postponed others for months. It was not strange that he should follow Machiavelli’s advice that a leader must be as brave as the lion and as shrewd as the fox, for this had long been the first lesson for politicians. But his metamorphoses from lion to fox and back to lion again mystified even his intimates.

Roosevelt’s complexities stemmed in part from the demands of political life. Gladstone once remarked that he had known and studied politicians for sixty years and they still remained to him a mysterious breed. Democratic politics is a highly competitive profession, and the successful politician must know how to conceal his
hand and present different faces to different groups. Too, Roosevelt took a particular delight in mystifying people by keeping something up his sleeve. But the source of his complexity lay deeper than this.

Roosevelt was a complex man mainly because he was a deeply divided man. More than almost any other political leader of his time, he experienced a lingering between two worlds.

He had been born and raised in a class and in a tradition that formed the closest American approximation to an aristocracy. At home, at Groton, at Harvard, at the right houses of Boston and New York, he had absorbed a core of beliefs and a sense of security and assurance he would never lose. His background always brought the needle of his compass, no matter how it might waver for a time, back to true north. The major premises on which this society operated might be inarticulate, or at least fuzzy, but they had meaning. These premises were: that men can live together only on the basis of certain simple, traditional ethical rules; that men are essentially good and those who are not can be improved by example and precept; that despite ups and downs the world is getting better; that the wellborn must never compromise with evil; that the gentleman must enter government to help the less fortunate, that he must enter politics to purify it. And the turn-of-the-century world seemed to validate these ideas: it was stable, secure, peaceful, expansive.

Roosevelt was projected out of this world into bizarre and unanticipated phases of the twentieth century—a decade of muckraking, a decade of Wilsonian reform at home and Wilsonian idealism abroad; a decade of postwar cynicism and reaction; then the climactic years of depression, the New Deal, abroad the rise of brutish men to power, and the coming of a new war.

Some nineteenth-century men could not effectively make the shift to the new century; insecure and frightened, they clung not only to the old moralities, as did Roosevelt, but also to the old methods, the old ways of business, the old distrust for government; they huddled within their class barriers. Roosevelt, however, made the jump with ease. He did so for several reasons: because he had not met absolute success socially at Groton or Harvard—for example, in his failure to make the best club in Cambridge—and thus was not absolutely committed to the old ways and institutions; because of the influence of Eleanor and Theodore Roosevelt; because he was drawn into the variegated political life of New York State; because he was vital and curious and ambitious.

Still other men of his generation, rejecting the past completely, found some kind of fixed mooring somewhere in this strange new world—but, again, not Roosevelt. He made no final commitment
to any part of that world—not to Wilsonian idealism, nor to business money-making, nor to radicalism, nor to internationalism. Partly because of quick adaptability, partly because of the diverse make-up of his intimates, partly because he had little need for personal introspection, partly because of his tremendous self-assurance, he was able to shift back and forth among segments of this world and to make himself at home in all of them.

Success fed on success: as Roosevelt found that he could carry off brilliantly a variety of roles—as party leader, as man of affairs, as bureaucrat, as Hyde Park squire, as governor, as campaigner, as a heroic battler against polio—he played the roles more and more to the hilt. This was one reason why he presided so joyously in the White House, for today the great President must be a man of many roles. Roosevelt was a superb actor in the literal sense—in the way his face, his gestures, the tilt of his head communicated feeling, in the perfect modulation of voice and the timing with which he read his speeches, in his sense of the dramatic. He was a superb actor in the far more significant sense that he was responding in each of his roles not merely to an assigned script but to something within himself.