No Ordinary Time, Page 79

  The American people were far less generous toward the first wave of Japanese Americans who had been given permission to leave the internment camps in the West to work in other parts of the country. In Great Meadows, New Jersey, where a critical shortage of farm labor existed, a farmer by the name of Edward Kowalick had hired a Japanese American named George Yamamoto. Kowalick was delighted with his new employee; the young Japanese American’s suggestions saved hours of work in the greenhouse. But once the townspeople of Great Meadows became aware of Yamamoto’s presence, trouble began. A mass meeting was called; the following day, a small shed on the farm was burned and a sign reading “One Mile to Little Tokyo” was placed on the road leading to Kowalick’s farm. After two weeks of tension, Kowalick finally agreed to dismiss Yamamoto; the neighbors celebrated by throwing Kowalick a surprise party.

  Similar tensions were generated elsewhere. In Chicago, Eleanor learned of another “deplorable incident.” A meat packer had employed a half-dozen Japanese Americans to work in his meat plant. The hiring was done in cooperation with the War Relocation Authority. Things went fine until an army colonel came into the plant and ordered the meat packer to get rid of the six workers. The meat packer resisted, but the colonel insisted, and the men were discharged.

  At the same time, the number of Japanese Americans serving in the U.S. Army continued to grow, reaching thirty-three thousand. “I’ve never had more whole-hearted, serious-minded cooperation from army troops,” Lieutenant Colonel Farrant Turner said of the all-Japanese 100th Infantry Battalion, which fought with great distinction in Italy and France. The 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which also fought in Italy and France, was known as the “Christmas tree regiment,” because it became the most decorated unit in the entire army. In seven major campaigns, the combined 100th and 442nd suffered 9,486 casualties and won 18,143 medals for valor, including almost ten thousand Purple Hearts. In addition, more than sixteen thousand Nisei served in military intelligence in the Pacific, translating captured documents.

  At Topaz, Manzanar, Poston, Heart Mountain, and other relocation camps, the parents of fallen heroes accepted the extraordinary honors on behalf of their sons. The color guard turned out as the medals of the dead were pinned on their mothers’ blouses. The familiar sadness of the ceremony was multiplied by its setting: a tawdry tar-paper barrack surrounded by strips of barbed wire which denied the parents of the honored soldiers the very freedom for which their sons had died.

  The only answer to this hideous situation, Eleanor had long argued, was to close the camps and begin a massive program of education, reminding every American of his commitment to democracy. Harold Ickes agreed with Eleanor. Now that military necessity could no longer be used to justify the incarceration, “the continued retention of these innocent people,” he told the president in June, “would be a blot upon the history of this country.”

  Roosevelt listened to them both, but he refused to be pushed. “The more I think of this problem of suddenly ending the orders excluding Japanese Americans from the West Coast, the more I think it would be a mistake to do anything drastic or sudden,” he wrote Edward Stettinius on June 12. (Stettinius was serving as the acting secretary of state in place of the ailing Cordell Hull.) “I think the whole problem for the sake of internal quiet should be handled gradually, i.e., I am thinking of two methods: a) seeing with great discretion, how many Japanese families would be acceptable to public opinion in definite localities on the West Coast, b) seeking to extend greatly the distribution of other families in many parts of the U.S . . . . Dissemination and distribution constitute a great method of avoiding public outcry.”

  There was some merit to Roosevelt’s idea of distribution, but by deciding to wait until after the election to rescind the exclusion order, he bears responsibility for extending what was already one of America’s darkest hours.

  • • •

  An even darker chapter in the history of the world was being written that summer as Hitler, facing defeat in his conventional war against the Allies, redoubled his efforts to exterminate the Jews. In this phase of the Final Solution, more than one million additional Jews were being rounded up from Western and Central Europe and transported by train to Hitler’s “vast kingdom” of secret death camps—Auschwitz, Dachau, Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno—where nearly two million Jews had already been killed.

  In May, the UP reported that three hundred thousand Hungarian Jews were being taken from the Hungarian countryside to Auschwitz and Birkenau. In desperation, rescue advocates pleaded with Washington to bomb the railway lines from Hungary to Auschwitz in order “to slow down or stop the deportations.”

  The request was forwarded to the newly created War Refugee Board, which the president, under strong pressure from Henry Morgenthau, had finally agreed to establish in January 1944. The goal of the board was “to develop positive, new American programs to aid the victims of Nazism while pressing the Allies and neutrals to take forceful diplomatic action in their behalf.” If only it had been set up earlier, War Refugee Board Director John Pehle wistfully noted years later, “things might have been different. Finally there was a place where rescue advocates could go; finally there was a claimant agency mandated to aid the victims of Nazism.”

  In the early days of spring, the WRB had succeeded in getting Roosevelt to issue his strongest statement yet on the issue, accusing Germany of “the wholesale systematic murder of the Jews” and promising the world that Germany’s crimes, “the blackest crimes in all history,” would not go unpunished by the Allies. In May, Pehle had scored another victory when Roosevelt agreed to establish an emergency shelter for Jewish refugees in an abandoned army camp in Oswego, New York. Both actions, however, as Pehle freely admits, came far too late to make much difference. If America had lent its prestige to the idea of sanctuaries for refugees in 1939-40, when Hitler was still willing to let the Jews go, perhaps other countries would have followed suit. But once extermination replaced emigration, the only hope for rescue lay in military action aimed at stopping the killing process itself.

  The request for Allied bombing of the rail lines ended up on the desk of John McCloy, Stimson’s assistant secretary. Though McCloy was not an anti-Semite like Breckinridge Long, he shared some of the stereotypes and prejudices against Jews held by many men of his generation and social milieu, including a suspicion of any information coming from Jewish sources. His answer to the request was a definite no. “The War Department is of the opinion,” he wrote, “that the suggested air operation is impracticable,” for it would require “diversion of considerable air support” essential for other operations and was of such “doubtful efficacy” that it made no sense.

  Pehle refused to give up. The following week, he forwarded another request to McCloy, this time suggesting that the concentration camps themselves should be bombed, so that “in the resultant confusion some of the unfortunate people might be able to escape and hide.” Though a large number of inmates would inevitably be killed in such an operation, any action was better than none for a people who were already doomed. What was more, Pehle argued, “if the elaborate murder installations were destroyed, it seems clear the Germans could not reconstruct them for some time.”

  Once again, McCloy delivered a negative response, arguing that the camps were “beyond the maximum range” of Allied dive-bombers and fighter planes stationed in the U.K., France, and Italy. “The positive solution to this problem,” he insisted, repeating the old refrain, “is the earliest possible victory over Germany.”

  McCloy’s argument that the targets were beyond the reach of Allied bombers was not technically true. In fact, long-range American bombers stationed in Italy had flown over Auschwitz several times that spring in search of the I. G. Farben petrochemical plant which was close by. Jan Karski and Elie Wiesel were later given a chance to see some of the aerial reconnaissance photos that were taken on those flights. “It was the saddest thing,” Karski recalled. “With a magnifying glass we could actually
read the names and numbers of the Hungarian Jews standing on line waiting to be gassed. Yet McCloy claimed the target was too far away.”

  • • •

  Having rallied his energies for D-day, Roosevelt succumbed to exhaustion and melancholy in the weeks that followed. Though he seemed his old self when he appeared in public, his confident smile still masking vulnerability, it was increasingly obvious to those closest to him that his characteristic ebullience had diminished. For this man who adored good food, good liquor, and good conversation, the Spartan regime the doctors had ordered had erased much of the joy of daily life.

  And, despite the new diet and the new schedule, he was still suffering from frequent headaches and chronic fatigue, his body no longer able to supply the stamina he needed to get through his appointments. Eleanor confided in Anna that one day he had unexpectedly cried out: “I cannot live out a normal life span. I can’t even walk across the room to get my circulation going.”

  To the members of the White House staff, he seemed curiously withdrawn. Though both politicians and the public expected him to head the Democratic ticket for the fourth time when the party convened in July, he showed no interest whatsoever in the nominating process. His mind seemed preoccupied with intimations of death.

  Sam Rosenman recounted a troubling conversation in the Oval Office that summer when the president suddenly turned to him and said that, if the country wanted to build a small memorial to him after he died, he would like it to be situated “in the small park triangle where Constitution and Pennsylvania Avenue cross facing east.” Grace Tully recalled an equally disturbing moment, when, in the midst of dictating a letter, the president abruptly switched the subject. “I told Margaret,” he mused, “that if anything ever happened to me she is to get Fala. I’m quite sure that Eleanor will be too busy to look after him and he’s devoted to Margaret.”

  Anna tried to cheer her father with light conversation and amusing stories. With Eleanor settled in Hyde Park for the summer, Anna lunched with her father every day under the magnolia tree, joined him at the pool in the afternoon, and dined with him in his bedroom at night. On the one hand, he remained as she had known him as a child, good-natured and uncomplaining. Though he would acknowledge from time to time that he was tired, “it wasn’t a complaint,” Anna recalled, “it was a statement of fact.”

  Yet she could not help seeing that he was in fact depressed, and that there was no one with whom he could share his feelings. Though she tried to break his impenetrable façade, the patterns of a lifetime held: the father who had smiled and joked as he was being carried off to the hospital with infantile paralysis was still unable to let his guard down in front of his daughter. Late at night, when she returned to her bedroom suite with John, she railed against “the legacy of self-containment” that had encouraged her father all his life to deny feeling helpless or weak, leaving him forever mistrustful of intimacy.

  It was during this period, at some point in late June or early July, that Roosevelt approached his daughter with a whispered request. “What would you think,” he is said to have asked, not giving her time to say anything in reply, “about our inviting an old friend of mine to a few dinners at the White House. This would have to be arranged when your mother is away and I would have to depend on you to make the arrangements.”

  Anna knew at once that the old friend was Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd. And she knew with certainty that her mother would be destroyed if she ever found out. Though the affair had taken place almost three decades earlier, Franklin had promised Eleanor that he would never see Lucy again. “It was almost like a trap in time,” Trude Lash later observed. “He couldn’t tell Eleanor that he wanted to see Lucy because it was stuck somewhere in the past.”

  Anna’s first reaction was one of anger toward her father for plunging her into an extremely awkward situation. “It was a terrible decision to have to make in a hurry,” she later said. Anna had long taken her mother’s side in this dispute, sympathizing keenly with the trauma her mother had suffered when she discovered Lucy’s letters.

  At the same time, Anna knew that her father’s strength was failing and she understood how important it would be for him to enjoy some evenings that were, as she put it, “light-hearted and gay, affording a few hours of much needed relaxation.” If seeing Lucy again provided the inspiration he needed to assuage his loneliness and buoy his spirits, then who was she to sit in judgment? After all, she herself had fallen in love with her second husband before she was divorced from her first. At thirty-eight years of age, no longer regarding her father from the vantage point of a child, she was learning to accept his weaknesses and enjoy his strengths. If he wasn’t perfect, neither was she. “While they were my parents,” she later said, “nevertheless they had reached an age where they were certainly entitled to lead their own private lives without having me, of all people, or any of their children say, ‘You shouldn’t do this’ or ‘You shouldn’t see this person or the other person.’”

  Still, it was intolerable to imagine the hurt her mother would experience if she found out. But, as long as the dinners were classified as private engagements not included in the official guest lists, there was no reason to believe that Eleanor would know. “Standards were different in those days,” reporter Bob Donovan recalled. “I’m sure there were some reporters, friends of the White House, who knew about Lucy. But none of them ever thought about exposing the situation. The newspaper business in those days was not so damn serious as it is today; it was a hell of a lot more fun. We didn’t think we were angels; we knew all the things we were doing; so to point our hand at someone else wouldn’t seem sporting!”

  Weighing these factors together, Anna told her father she would do as he asked. She would make sure that Lucy came in the back door—the Southwest Gate, across from the Executive Office Building. She would make it understood that the guest list that night was not to be given out. She would, in short, conspire with her father, hoping that her mother would not find out.

  Anna arranged for Lucy to visit over the weekend of July 7. It was the first of what would amount to more than a dozen secret meetings between the two old friends over the next nine months. The original plan called for Roosevelt to take Lucy away from Washington to Shangri-la, his mountain hideaway, but with General de Gaulle still in Washington after two days of meetings, the president decided to stay in the White House.

  The talks between President Roosevelt and General de Gaulle were intended to ease the tensions between the United States and the French Committee of National Liberation before Allied troops began moving forward into the French interior. Roosevelt wanted to ensure that American soldiers would receive maximum cooperation from the French underground once they finally broke away from the hedgerow country and began advancing toward Paris. But he had resisted giving official recognition to de Gaulle for months, on the grounds the choice should be French, the choice of forty million people, not something foisted on France by an outside power.

  The leader of the Free French arrived at the White House on Thursday afternoon, July 6. “He stepped from the automobile,” Hassett recorded, “with an air of arrogance bordering on downright insolence, his Cyrano de Bergerac nose high in the air.” Roosevelt was waiting at the door, “all smiles and cordiality.” There followed a round of official meetings and ceremonies, highlighted by a state dinner on Friday at which the president toasted the health of America’s “friend” General de Gaulle and spoke movingly of the common effort to remove every German boot from France, “once and for all.”

  At eight forty-five that evening, Lucy, having made arrangements to stay with a friend in Georgetown for the weekend, arrived at the White House. It had been a long day for the president, beginning with a press conference that morning at which he announced his decision to recognize the French Committee of National Liberation as the de facto authority in France, followed by a luncheon for thirty-six in the State Dining Room at one and a Cabinet meeting at two, but the president remained with h
is old friend until after eleven.

  The final meeting with de Gaulle was completed by noon on Saturday, after which Roosevelt lunched with Anna. Sitting under the grand magnolia tree which had been planted during Andrew Jackson’s days in the White House and still boasted huge branches, lemon-scented blossoms, and glossy leaves, Anna agreed to join her father that evening for dinner with Lucy.

  At 6:20 p.m. on Saturday, the president called for his car and asked to be driven to 2238 Q Street in Georgetown to call on Mrs. Rutherfurd. After he picked her up at the door, they drove together through the streets of Washington as they had done so many years before. Arriving at the White House, he brought her to his study, where Anna and John were waiting to join them for cocktails and dinner. If Roosevelt experienced a moment of awkwardness when he introduced his favorite child to the woman whose love had nearly destroyed his marriage, he undoubtedly covered it up.

  To Roosevelt’s delight, the two women liked each other. Anna was immediately impressed by Lucy’s “innate dignity and poise which commanded respect.” She found Lucy “most attractive and stately” but “warm and friendly” at the same time. For her part, Lucy understood immediately why this beautiful young woman with unbounded vitality, warmth, and humor meant so much to her father.

  Anna had not seen Lucy for nearly three decades, but she remembered her clearly. She recalled as a child “feeling happy” whenever Lucy was working in the house. “I liked her warm and friendly manner and smile,” Anna later wrote in an unpublished article. For her part, Lucy understood how important it was to Roosevelt that the two of them get along. “Anna is a dear fine person,” Roosevelt had written Lucy earlier; “I wish so much that you knew her.”

  The president’s butler, Alonzo Fields, served dinner. “You could sense that this was a special evening,” he later recalled. “You could feel that this was someone warm who cared a great deal about him. From then on, every time Lucy came, the president would have no one else but me serve them.”