No Ordinary Time, Page 81

  Meanwhile, Roosevelt was up to his usual games, making each person who came to see him feel that he was the one the president wanted. “He said I was his choice,” Henry Wallace recorded in his diary after a meeting on July 10, and at lunch later that week, “He drew me close and turned on his full smile and a very hearty hand clasp, saying, ‘I hope it will be the same team.’” Yet, at Shangri-la two weeks earlier, Roosevelt had assured Jimmy Byrnes that he was the president’s choice for vice-president. “You are the best qualified man in the whole outfit,” Roosevelt told Byrnes; “if you stay in you are sure to win.”

  The plot thickened on July 11, when Roosevelt met with the political bosses—DNC Chair Robert Hannegan, Frank Walker, and Ed Flynn—to discuss the vice-presidency. Over dinner and drinks, with everyone in shirtsleeves because of the oppressive heat, the full list of candidates was examined. Wallace was rejected out of hand. He was too intellectual, too liberal, too idealistic, too impractical, the bosses claimed. If he were nominated, he would cost the ticket from one to three million votes. Byrnes was just as quickly undone; as a lapsed Catholic and a Southerner with segregationist views, he would alienate Catholics and Negroes. Barkley was a good man, but he was too old.

  Roosevelt proposed Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. Before Roosevelt appointed him to the Court in 1939, Douglas had been a professor of law at Yale and the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, where he led the fight to bring public utilities under federal regulation. He was young and energetic, the president said, and, what was more, he played an interesting game of poker. Despite Roosevelt’s obvious enthusiasm for Douglas, no one else picked up the idea. The talk turned then to Senator Harry Truman. He was a good Democrat, he was from the Midwest, his record on labor was good, and, as Flynn observed, “he had never made any ‘racial’ remarks.” Concerned about Truman’s age, which no one could pinpoint (he was sixty), Roosevelt sent for the Congressional Directory to check his date of birth. But by the time the Directory arrived, the conversation had drifted to other subjects. As the meeting broke up, Roosevelt turned to Hannegan and said, “Bob, I think you and everyone else here want Truman.”

  Pleased with the turn of events, Hannegan asked Roosevelt to put something in writing. Using a pencil, Roosevelt scribbled an unofficial one-line note on the back of an envelope. “Bob, I think Truman is the right man.” It was more than Hannegan had hoped to achieve, but, given Roosevelt’s propensity for telling each person what he wanted to hear, it was not enough. A day or so later, Roosevelt was again urging both Wallace and Byrnes to run. The decision was still up in the air.

  • • •

  In the midst of all the confusion, the president set out for California in his private railroad car, the Ferdinand Magellan, on the first leg of a monthlong journey that would ultimately take him to Hawaii for a discussion of Pacific strategy. Boarding the train in Hyde Park, accompanied by Eleanor and Tommy, Pa Watson and Sam Rosenman, Grace Tully and Dr. Bruenn, he ordered the engineers to move slowly so he would not arrive in San Diego until the convention had completed its balloting for the presidential nomination.

  Politics could not be avoided altogether, however. When the train reached Chicago, Bob Hannegan came aboard. The president was just finishing lunch with Eleanor and Sam Rosenman. “We excused ourselves,” Rosenman recalled, “and left Hannegan alone with the President for about an hour.” The convention was convulsed in bloody turmoil, the DNC chair said; unless the president made his wishes known, there was no telling what would happen. Though still reluctant to “dictate” to the convention after his experience in 1940, Roosevelt agreed to sign a letter which said in essence that he would be very glad to run with either Bill Douglas or Harry Truman, since either one “would bring real strength to the ticket.”

  At the last minute, Hannegan came running back to Grace Tully. “Grace, the President wants you to retype this letter and to switch the names so it will read ‘Harry Truman and Bill Douglas.’”

  “The reason for the switch was obvious,” Tully later observed. “By naming Truman first it was plainly implied by the letter that he was the preferred choice. By that narrow margin and rather casual action did one man rather than another, perhaps one policy rather than another, eventually arrive at the head of the American government in April of 45.”

  Since the trip was an official secret, there were no scheduled stops, no crowds to address, no questions to answer. Yet, as the armor-plated train slowly wended its way through the steel mills of Indiana and the cornfields of Oklahoma, rumors began to spread. At various stations along the way, the familiar face of Mrs. Roosevelt was seen; on numerous platforms, the president’s little dog, Fala, was spotted taking a stretch. These sightings soon dispelled any questions: the president’s train was passing through!

  “The trip out was slow and peaceful,” Tommy reported to Esther Lape. “We did little work, read and played gin-rummy.” For Roosevelt, the leisurely pace of the trip was ideal. For him, the train was a small human community, a society of friends whose conversation was all he needed for stimulation.

  This was the first occasion in a long while on which Roosevelt and his wife had spent so much relaxing time together. “The slow speed was a good thing for us both,” Franklin later wrote her.

  The unbroken hours allowed Franklin to share with Eleanor his hopes for the future, evoking a picture of the happiness that would be theirs once the presidency was over. He wanted to take her on a trip around the world, he said. He talked of buying land in the Sahara Desert and of demonstrating to the Arabs the miracles that could be accomplished through irrigation, electrification, and reforestation. “I think it would be fun,” he said, “to go and live in the desert for two or three years and see what we could do.” He went over all the details of that faraway period—imagining the trip on a slow freighter that would allow them to take in all the sights along the way.

  Engrossed as Eleanor must have been in the charm of the conversation, she still felt the need to protect herself, to preserve the physical and emotional space that had grown between them. She could not let him continue without interrupting him, without reminding him that she had hated long sea voyages ever since she was a child. Undeterred, Franklin went on to suggest a happy compromise. If Eleanor preferred, she could travel instead by air, swooping down to meet his freighter at all the locations they wished to visit and explore!

  Whereas Franklin would have lingered on the train for several additional weeks, Eleanor couldn’t wait to escape. “Mrs. R was impatient at the slow speed and the waste of time,” Tommy observed. Work refused to leave her mind, even for these few summer days. “I don’t know that I’m being very useful on the trip as there is nothing to do,” she wrote Trude Pratt. “FDR sleeps, eats, works and all I do is sit through long meals which are sometimes interesting and sometimes very dull.” If Roosevelt sensed his wife’s discomfort, it must have been frustrating for him to realize that she alone was immune to his charms. He could regale everyone else with his sparkling conversation, but his wife was bored!

  More than likely, Roosevelt remained oblivious to Eleanor’s distress. Though he liked to think he was savoring her presence, he spent almost no time with her alone. “I don’t know why we went,” Tommy complained, no doubt echoing Eleanor’s sentiments, “as there were many cronies on the train so the President would not have been lonesome.” Once again, the possibility of real togetherness was opened and closed before either partner fully understood what was going on.

  • • •

  When the train reached San Diego on July 20, 1944, Franklin and Eleanor were joined by their son Jimmy and John’s wife, Anne Clark, who had moved with their children to California when her husband was transferred to the Pacific. Lunch was served at Anne’s house in Coronado, and Jimmy hosted a family dinner. After dinner, Eleanor and Tommy left for Los Angeles, where a plane was waiting to carry them back to Washington.

  The next morning, while the convention readied itself for the
presidential balloting, Roosevelt was scheduled to review an amphibious-landing exercise in Oceanside, California. Just before he was about to leave, he turned “suddenly white,” Jimmy recalled; “his face took on an agonized look.”

  “Jimmy, I don’t know if I can make it,” he said. “I have horrible pains.” Jimmy was so frightened he wanted to call the doctor, but Roosevelt resisted. It was just stomach pains, he insisted, indigestion from eating too fast and not being able to exercise. He’d be all right in a few minutes if only Jimmy would help him out of his berth and let him stretch out flat on the floor for a while. “So for perhaps ten minutes,” Jimmy wrote, “Father lay on the floor of the railroad car, his eyes closed, his face drawn, his powerful torso occasionally convulsed as the waves of pain stabbed him. Never in all my life had I felt so alone with him—and so helpless.”

  Gradually, his body stopped shaking and the color returned to his face. “Help me up now, Jimmy,” he said. “I feel better.” Minutes later, he was seated in an open car, heading to the amphibious-training base to witness the Fifth Marine’s practice invasion—a colossal exercise involving five thousand Marines and three thousand naval personnel. Situated atop a high bluff overlooking the beach below, he watched the smooth unloading of men and equipment from dozens of landing craft of the type recently used in the landings on Guam.

  During the afternoon, he received word from the convention chairman, Samuel D. Jackson, that he had been officially nominated for a fourth term as president. Later that night, speaking from the observation car of his train, he delivered his acceptance speech. “What is the job before us in 1944?” he asked. “First, to win the war—to win the war fast, to win it overpoweringly. Second, to form worldwide international organizations . . . And third, to build an economy for our returning veterans and for all Americans—which will provide employment and provide decent standards of living.”

  It was not a memorable speech, but the immense crowd filling the Chicago stadium loved it. As the familiar voice came booming through the amplifiers, forty thousand people cheered. Their captain would see them through after all.

  Afterward, with Jimmy by his side, a relaxed Roosevelt posed at the table, rereading portions of the speech so a pool of photographers could take pictures. Since there were no processing facilities in San Diego, all the film was flown up to Los Angeles, where the AP agreed to process it and transmit prints to everyone. At the AP, a young editor named Dick Strobel took the film out of the hypo fixing agent and exposed it to light. “There were several negatives to choose from,” Strobel later recalled. “In one his mouth was closed; in the other it was open. I chose the one with the open mouth, since it was more obvious that he was talking. I went into my office to write the caption while the darkroom technicians processed the print.”

  When the picture came out, the photographer, George Skaddings, was appalled. “Hey, you better look at this,” he told Strobel. The open mouth made Roosevelt look terrible: his eyes were glassy, his face was haggard, his expression weary. By then, however, it was close to 11 p.m., or 2 a.m. on the East Coast. The papers were yelling for the picture. Strobel decided he couldn’t wait any longer to print another negative. “I made the judgment to go with what we had.”

  The next day, Strobel recalled, “all hell broke loose,” as every anti-Roosevelt paper blew the picture up and displayed it prominently. In Washington, the president’s press secretary, Steve Early, was furious, and called Skaddings on the carpet. “It’s not my fault,” Skaddings insisted. “I just shot the picture. Some idiot in L.A. picked it.” Early kicked Skaddings off the tour, but the damage was done. The unfortunate photo, which Rosenman insisted bore no resemblance to the man he watched deliver the speech that night, provided Republicans with precisely the ammunition they needed to bolster their argument: the old man was no longer physically capable of being president.

  Nominations for the vice-presidency began the next afternoon. Wallace took an early lead, but by the end of the second ballot Truman had emerged the clear-cut victor. Back in Hyde Park, Eleanor was “sick about the whole business.” A fervent Wallace supporter, she “had hoped until the last,” she wrote Esther Lape, “that Mr. Wallace might have strength enough.” It was “bad politics” not to stick to Wallace, as well as “disloyal.” Nonetheless, she was much more satisfied with Senator Truman than she would have been with Byrnes or any of the other conservatives who were being considered. Though she did not know Truman, “from all I hear,” she wrote, “he is a good man.”

  • • •

  At midnight that Friday, July 21, following a zigzag course in a darkened cruiser, Roosevelt sailed westward from San Diego for Pearl Harbor. “Off in a few minutes,” he wrote Eleanor, but suggested he might have to hurry back earlier if the German revolt against Hitler got worse. The day before, a group of German officers led by Lieutenant Colonel Klaus von Stauffenberg had tried to assassinate Hitler. At the last minute, however, the briefcase holding the bomb had been inadvertently pushed to the far side of the room, and Hitler had survived the blast. Roosevelt’s trip to Hawaii would go forward as planned.

  “Yesterday a.m. Jimmy and I had a grand view of the landing operation at Camp Pendleton,” he told Eleanor, “and then I got the collywobbles and stayed in the train in the p.m. It was grand having you come out with me.”

  A tremendous crowd was gathered at the pier when the president’s cruiser pulled in. As far as the eye could see, men in whites were standing at attention at the rails of dozens of navy ships. A rousing cheer went up as the gangplank was lowered to receive Admiral Nimitz and some fifty high-ranking officials. Greeting everyone on the deck of the Baltimore, Roosevelt observed that one person was noticeably absent—General Douglas MacArthur. When asked where the general was, Nimitz retreated into an embarrassed silence. MacArthur’s plane from Brisbane had landed an hour earlier, but the general had insisted on going to his quarters first to drop off his bag and take a bath. The welcoming ceremony was just about to break up when a shrieking siren was heard, indicating MacArthur’s arrival. Stepping out from his limo, wearing his leather flying jacket, MacArthur acknowledged the tumultuous applause and raced up the gangplank.

  That evening, the president invited both Nimitz and MacArthur to join him for dinner at the elegant beach estate which had been made available to him during his stay. After dinner, the strategic talks began. Seated before a huge wall map of the Pacific, the president reviewed America’s situation, using a bamboo pointer to indicate the islands where battles were still being fought.

  For six weeks, the American navy had been engaged in a bitter struggle with the Japanese for the control of Saipan, Guam, and Tinian, three of the Mariana Islands. The battle for Saipan had been particularly bloody—more than fourteen thousand marines had been killed—but on July 9, the island had been secured. Two weeks later, both Guam and Tinian had been captured. These were major victories: with the Marianas under control, the mighty B-29s, the largest aircraft ever produced, would finally have the bases from which they could bomb Japan.

  Roosevelt’s interest in bombing Japan had never diminished, despite the overwhelming difficulties involved. For years he had followed the B-29 through its production and teething problems, never losing faith in General Arnold’s quest for a larger, heavier, and more powerful version of the B-17. “The B-29 was a great gamble,” military historian William Emerson observed. “General Arnold had committed $3 billion to its production before a single prototype had even been flown. This was more than the Manhattan Project. But Roosevelt backed him all the way, convinced that a superbomber was the only way to get at Japan offensively.”

  In mid-June, the first B-29s had taken off from eastern China: their target, the iron- and steelworks at Yawata on Kyushu Island. Though the raid produced little material damage, the boost to American morale was enormous. And now, with the capture of the Marianas, they could launch many more direct raids against Japan.

  The question was: where to go from here? Admiral Nimi
tz proposed a direct assault on Formosa and the Chinese coast, bypassing the Philippines and all the small islands along the way. MacArthur disagreed, pressing for the liberation of the Philippines and the bypassing of Formosa. America, he argued, had a moral responsibility to avenge the crushing defeat of 1942, to liberate the Filipinos and to free the American prisoners of war. If Roosevelt chose to bypass the Philippines, MacArthur warned, “I dare to say that the American people would be so aroused that they would register most complete resentment against you in the polls.”

  “In such a situation,” James MacGregor Burns has observed, “Roosevelt was at his best, skillfully placating both the Admiral and the General, steering the discussion away from absolutes, narrowing the differences.” In the end, Roosevelt sided with MacArthur, pledging that America would not bypass the Philippines. “As soon as I get back,” he promised the flamboyant general, “I will push on that plan [for liberating the Philippines] for I am convinced that as a whole it is logical and can be done.” As a matter of fact, Roosevelt went on, he wished he and MacArthur could swap places, though “I have a hunch that you would make more of a go as President than I would as General in retaking the Philippines.”

  When the strategy sessions were completed, the president traveled around Oahu, inspecting shipyards, hospitals, training grounds, and airfields. “At one of the hospitals,” Rosenman reported, “the President did something which affected us all very deeply. He asked a secret service man to wheel him slowly through all the wards that were occupied by veterans who had lost one or more arms and legs. He insisted on going past each individual bed. He wanted to display himself and his useless legs to those boys who would have to face the same bitterness.”