No Ordinary Time, Page 84

  During Churchill’s last night at Hyde Park, the conversation turned to the subject of the atomic bomb. The scientists at Los Alamos were now predicting that a bomb, equivalent to thirty thousand tons of TNT, would almost certainly be ready by August 1945. Admiral Leahy, who was present at the conversation, had little confidence in the whole project. He feared that Roosevelt had assumed too great a risk in allocating such huge sums of money to a mere experiment. But the president and the prime minister were hopeful that the bomb “might perhaps, after mature consideration be used against the Japanese, who should be warned that the bombardment will be repeated until they surrender.”

  Churchill also asked for assurance at this time that nothing would be said to the Russians about the bomb. In earlier conversations, Roosevelt had expressed the feeling that, since the Russians would find out about it sooner or later, they should at least be advised, as a gesture of friendship to an ally, that a bomb was in the making. But Churchill was adamant, and Roosevelt finally agreed in writing that the matter should continue to be regarded as of “the utmost secrecy.”

  The long days with Churchill were taxing on Roosevelt. “The President under a heavy strain ever since he went to Quebec,” Hassett noted, “continuous talking—sat up with Churchill until 1 o’clock this morning. Fortunately part of the strain is eliminated by departure of the Prime Minister tonight.” Soon after the Churchills’ departure at about 7 p.m., Roosevelt went to bed, leaving word that he wanted “to sleep right through the morning.”

  • • •

  By late September, when the president returned to Washington, Democratic leaders were filled with anxiety. The Republican challenger, Thomas E. Dewey, was running an efficient campaign. The steady barrage of Republican criticism—suggesting that the government was in the hands of tired old men who were destroying free enterprise, coddling labor, regimenting agriculture, and saddling the country with high taxes and dangerous debt—was achieving its desired effect. Dewey was rising in popularity, while Roosevelt was rapidly losing ground.

  The president had to prove to the electorate that he possessed the strength and resilience to rise to the Republican challenge. He began by announcing that he would go out on the stump for a series of speeches; his campaign would officially open on the evening of September 23 with an address to the Teamsters Union at the Statler Hotel in Washington, D.C. The announcement was greeted with relief by Democrats, but apprehension soon set in. Was the president up to the task?

  There was reason to worry. Roosevelt did not look good. His loss of weight made him seem much older than his sixty-two years. His color was bad. He had not given a major speech since his appearance at Bremerton, when he had suffered the angina attack in the middle of his delivery. Since then, continuing weight loss and lack of exercise had reduced the already frail muscles in his legs and hips to flab, making it almost impossible for him to maneuver on his braces. Within the White House, the consensus was that the president should no longer even try to walk. But Roosevelt refused to give in. On the eve of his Teamsters speech, he called Dr. McIntire into his bedroom. A few minutes later, when Sam Rosenman came into the room with the latest draft of the speech, he found the president “with his braces on walking up and down, leaning on the arm of Dr. McIntire.” In spite of the overwhelming volume of work facing him, Rosenman sadly noted, “he was literally trying to learn to walk again!”

  Though Roosevelt eventually did manage to regain sufficient use of his legs to allow him to stand up and speak for short periods from the rear platform of his train, he reluctantly agreed to deliver his Teamsters speech from a sitting position. Having worked over the speech through dozens of drafts, he was afraid to let anything interfere with his concentration and delivery.

  In the banquet hall that night were gathered all the leading Democrats in Washington, along with the leadership of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs and Warehousemen. As the president was introduced, a worried Anna, seated ten yards from the dais at a table filled with family and friends, turned to Rosenman. “Do you think Pa will put it over?” she whispered. “It’s the kind of speech which depends almost entirely on delivery, no matter how good the writing—if the delivery isn’t just right, it’ll be an awful flop.” Rosenman told her there was “no doubt in the world he’ll get it over fine,” covering his own anxiety with a reassuring tone.

  The President began smoothly with a joking reference to his advancing age. “Well, here we are together again—after four years—and what years they have been. You know, I am actually four years older, which is a fact that seems to annoy some people. In fact, in the mathematical field there are millions of Americans who are more than eleven years older than when we started in to clear up the mess that was dumped in our laps in 1933.”

  Roosevelt proceeded, with a voice that purred softly and then struck hard, to ridicule Republicans for trying to pass themselves off every four years as friends of labor after attacking labor for three years and six months. “The whole purpose of Republican oratory these days seems to be to switch labels. The object is to persuade the American people that the Democratic Party was responsible for the 1929 crash and the depression, and that the Republican Party was responsible for all social progress under the New Deal.”

  “Now,” he said, drawing out his words, “imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery—but I am afraid that in this case it is the most obvious common or garden variety of fraud.” Indeed, he went on, when he first heard the Republicans blaming the Democrats for the Depression, he rubbed his eyes and recalled an old adage: “‘Never speak of rope in the house of a man who has been hanged.’ In the same way, if I were a Republican leader speaking to a mixed audience, the last word in the whole dictionary that I think I would use is that word ‘depression.’”

  The audience loved it. They howled, clapped, and cheered. One teamster was so excited, Merriman Smith wrote, that he beat the silver tray with a soup ladle, while his colleague at a neighboring table smashed glasses with a wine bottle. At the family table, Anna’s smile brightened, and she began to relax. “The Old Master still had it,” the reporter from Time observed. “He was like a veteran virtuoso playing a piece he has loved for years, who fingers his way through it with a delicate fire, a perfection of timing and tone, and an assurance that no young player, no matter how gifted, can equal. The President was playing what he loves to play—politics.”

  Then came the climax of the speech, in which he pitted his dog, Fala, against the entire Republican establishment. “These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons,” Roosevelt said in a mock-serious tone. “No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family doesn’t resent attacks, but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I had left him behind on the Aleutian Islands and had sent a destroyer back to find him—at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars—his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since. I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself . . . but I think I have a right to resent, to object to libelous statements about my dog.”

  The audience went wild, laughing and cheering and calling for more. And the laughter carried beyond the banquet hall; it reverberated in living rooms and kitchens throughout the country, where people were listening to the speech on their radios. The Fala bit was so funny, one reporter observed, that “even the stoniest of Republican faces cracked a smile.” In closing, the president outlined the tasks ahead: finishing the war as speedily as possible; setting up international machinery to assure that the peace, once established, would not be broken again; reconverting the economy from the purposes of war to the purposes of peace.

  As the familiar voice said good night, the audience was on its feet, shouting and applauding. “There were tears
in the eyes of many,” Rosenman observed, “including his daughter Anna.”

  “The 1944 campaign was on,” Time reported, “and Franklin Roosevelt had got off to a flying start . . . . The Champ had swung a full roundhouse blow. And it was plain to the newsmen on the Dewey Special that the challenger had been hit hard—as plain as when a boxer drops his gloves and his eyes glaze.”

  With his triumphant speech behind him, Roosevelt boarded the overnight train for Hyde Park, where he joined Eleanor and Princess Martha for three days in the crisp country air.

  • • •

  Still, all indications pointed to a close race, with the president’s health a major concern. It was rumored that Roosevelt had suffered a stroke, that he had had a major heart attack, that he had undergone a secret operation for cancer, that he was forced to carry a male nurse around with him for the purpose of emptying his bladder two or three times a day. “Let’s not be squeamish,” the New York Sun declared, “six presidents have died in office.” The only counterattack, Roosevelt decided, was to go before as many people as possible so they could make up their own minds about his vigor and health.

  The president began his tour in New York City on Saturday, October 21. The plan called for him to drive in an open Packard through four of the five boroughs—Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Manhattan. If the expected crowds materialized, he could easily see three million people in the course of the day. In theory, the plan was excellent, but the weather refused to cooperate. When the president’s train reached Brooklyn at 7 a.m., a cold rain was falling, the tail end of a hurricane. The rain flooded the streets, dashed against the buildings, and beat down on the heads of the sidewalk crowds.

  Dr. McIntire pleaded with the president to close the Packard’s canvas top, but Roosevelt was adamant. The people had come to see that he was still alive and well, and he was determined to give them what they wanted. Taking off his navy cape, he positioned himself in the rear seat of the car, grinning and waving at enormous crowds whose ardor had not been in any way diminished by the dismal weather. The rain drenched his gray suit, splattered his glasses, and ran down his cheeks, but the president never stopped smiling and the crowds went wild. At Ebbets Field, he received a thunderous ovation as he hoisted himself to a standing position and hobbled toward a lectern positioned behind second base. He had rooted for the Dodgers for years, he said, flashing his best smile. His radiance in the midst of the storm, Hassett noted, seemed undeniable proof that he was physically up to the job.

  He was thoroughly soaked by the time his talk was finished, but he laughingly confided to Anna that Dr. McIntire had arranged to bring the car into a Coast Guard motor pool, where he was able to make a complete change of clothes without leaving the car. The green Packard continued through Queens to the Bronx, then went on to Harlem, Broadway, and the garment workers’ district. Huge crowds continued to line the streets; at every stop, hundreds of thousands of people were standing in the pouring rain to catch a glimpse of their president.

  In midafternoon, the cavalcade pulled up to Eleanor’s apartment at 29 Washington Square, where there was a second complete change of clothes for Roosevelt, a late lunch, and a short rest. Though Eleanor had purchased the apartment more than two years earlier, this was the first time Roosevelt had seen it. As she showed her husband around the tall-ceilinged, gracefully decorated rooms, Eleanor asked if he had noticed that there were no steps leading into the apartment. He nodded happily. Everything had been arranged for his comfort, she noted. There were two rooms connected by a bathroom which could be shut off from the rest of the apartment just in case he ever wanted to stay. Franklin said he liked it very much.

  In the library, overlooking Washington Square, drinks were served. Dr. McIntire prescribed a glass of bourbon to warm the president up. Roosevelt gulped it down and asked for a second, and then a third. “It was the only occasion,” Grace Tully later recalled, “on which I knew him to have more than a couple of drinks.” The bourbon did the trick; after lunch, the president retired to the bedroom for a restful nap.

  It is interesting to imagine what Roosevelt might have thought as he looked about the cheerful apartment, observing a part of his wife’s life he had not seen before. Did his eyes travel about the rooms, conjuring images of Eleanor with her friends, serving dinner, sipping coffee after a night out at the theater? On her dresser, she kept a few framed pictures: one of the two of them when they were young, one of Anna and John, one of Joe Lash. For two decades, Eleanor had enjoyed an independent life apart from his, and now, for a few moments, he was a witness to that life.

  After resting for an hour, the president took a hot bath and dressed for dinner. Mixing a round of cocktails before he left, he seemed almost giddy as he was helped into his car and driven to the Waldorf-Astoria, where two thousand members of the Foreign Policy Association were waiting in the grand ballroom to hear him speak.

  The text of the speech was designed to focus on the new postwar organization, but the president was so relaxed at the dais that he began to ad-lib. Spotting Eleanor at a table just below him, he was reminded of a story she had told him in 1933 about a trip she had made to a fourth-grade history class. On the wall, he told the crowd, she had seen “a map of the world with a great big white spot on it—no name—no information. And the teacher told her that it was blank, with no name, because the school wouldn’t let him say anything about that big blank space. Oh, there were one hundred eighty to two hundred million people in that space which was called Soviet Russia. And there were a lot of children, and they were told that the teacher was forbidden by the school board even to put the name of that blank space on the map.” How much had changed since that time, he noted, now that the Americans and the Russians were fighting together against a common enemy.

  Listening from a table in the back of the room, Grace Tully wondered if the president would ever get to the prepared text. Sam Rosenman and Robert Sherwood, who had worked on the speech, were wondering the same thing. But the president was, as always, a pro. Returning to the text, he took up the most important question relating to the new world organization, the question that had destroyed the League of Nations. In an emergency, would it have the authority to commit the United States to the use of armed force without waiting for the Congress to act? The president’s answer was an emphatic yes.

  “Peace, like war,” he said, “can succeed only where there is a will to enforce it, and where there is available power to enforce it. The Council of the United Nations [the name Roosevelt had conceived the first time Churchill visited him in Washington had stuck] must have the power to act quickly and decisively to keep the peace by force, if necessary. A policeman would not be a very effective policeman if, when he saw a felon break into a house, he had to go to the Town Hall and call a town meeting to issue a warrant before the felon could be arrested. So to my simple mind it is clear that, if the world organization is to have any reality at all, our American representative must be endowed in advance by the people themselves, by constitutional means through their representatives in the Congress, with authority to act.”

  As the president ended his speech, he was given a standing ovation; cheers were still ringing in his ears when he was escorted to a waiting elevator to go to the basement, where, on New York Central tracks, his presidential train was waiting to take him to Hyde Park.

  The next morning, Hassett reported, the president was elated to discover that he had “no trace of a cold—not even a sniffle after his exposure in New York.” Though two of the three pool reporters and several hardy Secret Service men were fighting bad colds, he was none the worse for the wear. Indeed, far from hurting the president, Eleanor observed, the rainy campaign trip had done him good. “Not for a long time had he been in contact with the crowds, meeting with a lot of people and getting an impression of how they feel,” she said. It seemed almost as if Roosevelt had absorbed some of the strength and vitality of the many people who wanted so much to see their president that they were willing
to stand in a drenching rain for more than four hours. “Their enthusiasm for him and his feeling of being at one with them,” Eleanor observed, “seemed to give him an amount of exhilaration and energy and strength that nothing else did.”

  Roosevelt’s high spirits carried him through the rest of the campaign. At the end of October, he journeyed through seven states in three days, delivering major speeches in Philadelphia and Chicago. Once again he was subjected to rain and icy winds, but once again he emerged, in Hassett’s words, “brisk as a bee, brimming with health and spirits.”

  In the meantime, Eleanor observed, “the news from the Pacific is so startling that one holds one’s breath.” On October 18, American troops had shelled Japanese defenses on the island of Leyte, the first step in the dramatic battle to regain the Philippines. In contrast to the situation two years earlier, when the invasion of North Africa was launched too late to help the president in the midterm elections, this time Roosevelt was lucky. Two weeks before the elections, the nation awoke to banner headlines announcing that General MacArthur had landed in the Philippines; his famous pledge that he would return had been redeemed. “There were extremely light losses,” Roosevelt told his press conference that morning. “The enemy was caught strategically unaware.”

  Two days before the election, Roosevelt traveled to Boston, where he was scheduled to speak at Fenway Park. The trip evoked in speechwriter Robert Sherwood “painful memories” of the trip four years previously, when Roosevelt promised American mothers that their boys would never be sent into a foreign war. Sherwood asked Roosevelt if he would make a reference to that speech, emphasizing that, once the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, the war was no longer a foreign war. Roosevelt readily agreed. He referred to his 1940 pledge and then added: “I am sure that any real American would have chosen, as this Government did, to fight when our own soil was made the object of a sneak attack. As for myself, under the same circumstances, I would choose to do the same thing—again and again and again.” With the repetition of the phrase, the crowd applauded loudly.