No Ordinary Time, Page 61

  But all in his power was not very much. In early November, Roosevelt had requested a new war-powers bill that would have given him the power to suspend laws that were hampering “the free movement of persons, property and information into and out of the United States.” The intent of the legislation was simply to make it easier for Allied military and industrial consultants to come in and out of the United States, but had it passed it might have opened the gates of immigration to Jewish refugees. Once this was made clear, the bill had no chance. The powerful conservative coalition, strengthened immeasurably by the by-elections, crushed it. “The ugly truth,” Newsweek observed, “is that anti-Semitism was a definite factor in the bitter opposition to the President’s request.”

  “The question of the Jewish persecution in Europe is being given top news priority by the English and the Americans,” Goebbels remarked in his diary that same week. “At bottom, however, I believe both the English and the Americans are happy that we are exterminating the Jewish riff raff.”

  • • •

  A Gallup poll released on December 8 revealed that Eleanor Roosevelt was probably “the target of more adverse criticism and the object of more praise than any other woman in American history.” Few Americans, Gallup found, were neutral in their feelings about this powerful woman who had refused to accept the traditional role of a president’s wife. Nearly half the people polled were emphatically positive in their approval, pleased with the fact that “she has a personality of her own and doesn’t allow herself just to sit at home and do nothing.” Her “social consciousness and her efforts on behalf of the poor” drew particular praise, as did her ability “to take a stand on almost any current problem.” With equal fervor, however, about two out of five persons expressed strong disapproval of almost everything about her. “She ought to stay at home, where a wife belongs; she is always getting her nose into the government’s business; why the way she acts, you’d think the people elected her president; she interferes in things that are not her affair; she is stirring up racial prejudice.” With such strong feelings on both sides, the strangest moment came for one field reporter when an old man scratched his head and said, “Never heard of her.”

  Yet, beneath her public face, beneath the courage, tenacity, and conviction she showed to the world, there remained a striking vulnerability which revealed itself once again during the Christmas holidays. As she raced from one activity to the next, organizing parties for the White House staff and the soldiers who guarded the president, distributing Christmas presents to the poor, attending the children’s party of the Kiwanis Club and the tree-lighting ceremony at the Salvation Army, she admitted to Joe Lash that she had come of late years “to dread, not what I do for those I love, but the mass production side & the formal impersonal things I have to do. I’m always with so many people & always so alone inside . . . .”

  Still, she kept to her usual back-breaking schedule, even on Christmas Day, which found her, in between church services and luncheon for fifteen at the White House, motoring to Walter Reed Hospital to see the soldiers who had been wounded in the invasion of North Africa. As she went from bed to bed, she was introduced to a young man whose body was so badly burned he could barely speak. The doctor told her he had been a pianist. She said nothing then, but a few weeks later she wrote the commanding officer of the hospital and asked him to tell the soldier whose hands were burned that, as soon as he was able, if he would like to practice on the White House piano, he should feel free to do so. “This was the beginning of a friendship that was to continue until Mrs. Roosevelt’s death,” the soldier, Hardie Robbins, later recalled. “I didn’t know that I would be in the hospital for seventeen months, but after a year’s practice on the White House Steinway, Mrs. Roosevelt invited me to lunch with her and the President.”

  New Year’s Eve in the White House was a far more festive occasion than it had been in 1941. As the U.S. approached its thirteenth month of fighting, the president retained, reporters observed, “the same buoyancy of confidence and determination” as he had at his first inaugural. Though America’s first year of war had been strenuous, dangerous, and frustrating, it had ended on a triumphant note with the invasion of North Africa.

  “Looking back across the year,” I. F. Stone wrote, “the President has much with which to be pleased. The task of mobilizing a fairly prosperous and contented capitalist democracy for war is like trying to drive a team of twenty mules, each stubbornly intent on having its own way. Only by continual compromise with the ornery critters is it possible to move forward at all. Examined closely, by the myopic eye of the perfectionist, Mr. Roosevelt’s performance in every sphere has been faulty. Regarded in the perspective of his limited freedom of choice and the temper of the country, which has never really been warlike, the year’s achievements have been extraordinary.”

  “At the end of the first year of her intensified war effort,” The New York Times boasted, “the United States was turning out more war materiel than any other country in the world. She was producing more than Great Britain, more than Russia, more than Germany with all the resources of Europe at her disposal.”

  To be sure, there was unhappiness and frustration all around. There were complaints that the army was trying to take over the entire civilian economy. War Production Board head Donald Nelson’s decision the previous January to leave procurement in the hands of the military, rather than place it in the hands of a civilian agency, was criticized as a sign of weakness. There were concerns about the president’s decision in March 1942 that “pending antitrust suits deemed capable of interfering with war production be dropped and that such suits be avoided as far as possible during the conflict.” This action, which brought an end to New Dealer Thurman Arnold’s trust-busting division in the Justice Department, was seen by The New York Times as “one of the first major indications that the Chief Executive was prepared to subordinate internal social struggles to the prosecution of the war.”

  And the guardians of small business continued to worry. Despite the passage of the Small Business Act in May 1942, which set up a capital fund of $150 million to finance the conversion of small plants to war work, big business continued to receive the lion’s share of military contracts. In 1940, historian John Blum points out, approximately 175,000 companies provided 70 percent of the manufacturing output of the U.S., while one hundred companies produced the remaining 30 percent. By the beginning of 1943, that ratio had been reversed. The hundred large companies formerly holding only 30 percent now held 70 percent of all government contracts.

  But with billions of dollars expended on the war effort in 1942, unemployment had virtually ended, and millions of Americans had moved above the poverty line. There was much to celebrate as the year came to an end.

  • • •

  The New Year’s festivities at the White House began with cocktails at seven-thirty, followed by dinner at eight. The Hopkinses, the Morgenthaus, the Sherwoods, and the Rosenmans were there, along with Prince Olav and Princess Martha. Dinner was followed by a private screening of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. The film could not have been more appropriate, though few of the guests understood its significance at the time. In ten days, Roosevelt was scheduled to leave for his next secret war conference with Churchill; his destination was Casablanca.

  While a mood of good cheer enveloped the White house, Missy LeHand was in a state of despair as she sat alone with her sister in her Somerville house. The first months at home had been difficult. “She would see the news, hear the news, read the news, and it was so hard for her,” neighbor Dawn Deslie recalls. “You’d sense the total frustration of someone who’d been at the center of everything and now could not even speak your name.” Gradually, Missy had established her own routine. To accommodate her illness, the downstairs den was converted into a bedroom and a full-time nurse was hired. Missy would work with the therapist in the mornings, take rides with friends in the afternoons, and frequently go to the movies at Harvard Squ
are in the evenings.

  Still, Missy’s heart belonged to the one person who never visited and rarely called. Roosevelt did pen occasional notes to her, but talking with her on the telephone continued to be too painful, wearying, and aching an ordeal. Consumed by his own loss of her working presence, he seemed immune to her incalculably larger hurt. Fate had dealt a nasty turn to both of them, but, whereas Roosevelt had managed to sterilize his memories and suppress his powerful feelings, Missy had only managed to make her memories more vivid and intense.

  For hours on end, she would sift through her treasure chest of mementos—the colorful invitations and handwritten notes that served as physical reminders of the glamorous life she had once enjoyed. Over the years, she had kept a signed copy of every major speech the president had delivered. The informal tone of his various signatures revealed the warmth of their relationship. “For Marguerite, who helped to prepare the inaugural,” he wrote beside the first inaugural address. “A successful speech though not a gem,” he scrawled beside a copy of his Convention Hall speech in Philadelphia in October 1940. “From Who do you think,” he teased in sending along another campaign speech that same month. But sorting through mementos of the past must have only reminded Missy of her terrible loss.

  “She started crying New Year’s Eve about 11:30 and we couldn’t stop her,” her sister Ann Rochon reported to the president. “And then she had a heart spell and kept calling ‘F.D., come, please come. Oh F.D.’ It really was the saddest thing I ever hope to see, we were all crying, she was very depressed all through the Holidays and that was the climax. She was expecting you to call Christmas day and when we sat down to dinner her eyes filled with tears and she said ‘A Toast to the President’s health’ and there again in the middle of dinner—another toast to you. She loves your gift and kept saying sweet, lovely, beautiful, I love it. She watches for the Postman every trip . . . . She worries about you all the time.”

  In the president’s study, a round of champagne was served at midnight. The first toast the president offered was his customary one: “To the United States of America.” He then added a new toast, which brought a smile to Eleanor’s face: “To the United Nations.” It meant, she exulted, that “we really are conscious of this bond between the United Nations,” a bond that must be strong enough and permanent enough to keep us together in peace as well as war. Eleanor offered the next toast: “To those members of the family and friends who are in other parts of the world and unable to be with us tonight.”

  The final toast, coming from a man who found it difficult to say what he was feeling at any given moment, was perhaps the most heartfelt. “To the person who makes it possible for the President to carry on,” Roosevelt said, as he gestured gently toward Eleanor, an affectionate smile on his face.

  CHAPTER 16

  “THE GREATEST MAN I HAVE EVER KNOWN”

  The President was in high spirits in the early days of 1943. At midnight, January 9, he was set to begin the first leg of a seventeen-thousand-mile top-secret journey to Casablanca for a ten-day meeting with Winston Churchill. The trip promised the drama and adventure upon which his health of spirit depended. He would be the first president in history to fly overseas, the first since Abraham Lincoln to visit his troops in an active theater of war.

  The security concerns were agonizing. Casablanca was filled with Vichyites and Axis agents; if the Germans discovered the site of the conference, protection could not be guaranteed. Indeed, it was later determined that the Germans did find out, through a coded message in Berlin, that a summit meeting was taking place at Casablanca, but fortunately, because the word “Casablanca” was translated literally as “white house” instead of the Moroccan city, Hitler assumed the meeting was in Washington.

  The more the president’s aides fretted over the risk he was taking, the more excited Roosevelt became, his enthusiasm like that of a young child escaping the control of his parents. To preserve absolute secrecy, elaborate deceptions were planned at every point. From Washington, the presidential train headed north as if it were taking Roosevelt and Hopkins on a routine trip to Hyde Park. But once it reached Baltimore, it turned around and came back on a different line, heading south to Miami, where a Boeing Clipper stood ready to carry the travelers across the Atlantic to North Africa. From his window, Roosevelt glimpsed the jungle of Dutch Guiana, the vast Amazon River, and the western rim of the Sahara Desert.

  Equally merry, Churchill was heading toward Casablanca in a Liberator bomber. Observing the prime minister’s high spirits, Lord Moran noted that, whenever he got away from his red dispatch boxes, he put his cares behind him. “It’s not only that he loves adventure; he feels, too, at times that he must ‘let up’ . . . shed for a little the feeling that there are more things to do in the 24 hours than can possibly be squeezed in.” Perhaps, Moran suggested, the president also had that feeling. “It’s the instinct to escape, to take a long breath. Besides, neither of them, in a way, have ever grown up.”

  Not even the crude accommodations on the flight managed to dampen Churchill’s mood. In the stern of the unheated bomber, two mattresses were stretched side by side, one for the prime minister, the other for Lord Moran. In the middle of the night, Moran awoke with a start to find Churchill crawling down into the well below. He had burned his toe on the red-hot metal connections of an improvised heating arrangement placed at the foot of his mattress. Hours later, Moran awoke again to discover a shivering prime minister on his knees, trying to keep out the draft by putting a blanket against the side of the plane. “The P.M. is at a disadvantage in this kind of travel,” Moran wryly noted, “since he never wears anything at night but a silk vest. On his hands and knees, he cut a quaint figure with his big, bare, white bottom.”

  The site of the conference was the Anfa Hotel, a creamy-white structure shaded by palm trees, overlooking the Atlantic. For weeks, the soldiers of General Patton’s Third Battalion had worked to surround the hotel and its environs with two lines of heavy barbed wire. If anyone so much as approached these lines, he risked being shot by hundreds of American infantrymen stationed on the roofs. Heavy anti-aircraft batteries were deployed throughout the area. Every morsel of food and every drop of liquor to be consumed by the president and the prime minister had been tested by medical officers and then placed under heavy guard. Still, Patton remained feverishly nervous about the whole affair. “I hope you’ll hurry up and get the hell out of here,” he raged at Dr. McIntire the day of the president’s arrival. “The Jerries occupied this place for two years and their bombers know how to hit it. They were around ten days ago and it’s a cinch they’ll be back.”

  The president and the prime minister were installed in separate villas fifty yards apart. The president’s villa boasted a two-story living room with French windows that looked out on a luscious orange grove, a master bedroom with heavy drapes and a sunken bathtub, and two bedrooms on the second floor: one for Harry Hopkins and the other for Elliott and FDR, Jr., who had been summoned to Casablanca to join their father. The president had also requested the presence of Hopkins’ twenty-one-year old son, Robert, who was stationed in Tunisia as a combat photographer. For young Robert, whose parents were divorced when he was seven and who had rarely seen his father while he was growing up, the chance to share daily meals and conversation was a great treat.

  Within minutes of the president’s arrival, Churchill was at the door, ready for a drink before dinner. As always, the two friends were delighted to see one another. “Father was . . . not a bit tired,” Elliott recalled. “He was full of his trip, the things he’d seen.” Relief and pleasure were evident in the glow of his eyes and the smile on his face. Here in Casablanca, there was no need to think about Ickes or Stimson or Morgenthau, no need to worry about the nagging concerns of politics.

  Through a relaxed, candlelit dinner, the conversation flowed. The talk was of Stalin and the Eastern front. Roosevelt had hoped that Stalin would agree to join the summit, but the Russian leader had cabled that h
e could not leave his country in the midst of the Battle of Stalingrad. For five months, the German Sixth Army, victors in Belgium and Holland in 1940, had been engaged in savage fighting in and around Stalingrad. In September, Nazi dive-bombers had set fire to large portions of the city, and the German army had rammed its way through the Russian defenses in the northwestern sector. “Stalingrad makes me ashamed,” Eleanor had written Hick in October, at the height of the battle, commenting that, in the absence of a second front, the Soviet forces were carrying the brunt of the land fighting against the Germans.

  Somehow, the Russians had managed to hang on, however, and in late November, the Red Army had launched a counteroffensive which cut the German army in two, trapping nearly three hundred thousand German soldiers without food, supplies, or ammunition. When Roosevelt and Churchill met in Casablanca, German, rations had been reduced to a few ounces of bread a day, and more than ninety thousand German troops had died from starvation. It was now only a matter of days until German Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus would be forced to surrender his huge German force. “After nearly three and one half years of victories, conquests, advances and the exhilaration of creating fear and uncertainty,” British historian Martin Gilbert wrote, “the Germans appeared vulnerable. The inevitability of triumph was gone.”