No Ordinary Time, Page 87

  For many volunteers, the chance to move from service units to combat units was the answer to their dreams. Though Negro service troops had played a critical role building bridges, constructing airports, driving trucks filled with food, clothing, and medical supplies through mud, snow, and sleet, Negroes resented seeing such a large percentage of their men (over 90 percent) assigned to the rear lines. “It is hard to identify one’s self with fighting a war,” one Negro soldier said, “when all one does is dig ditches and lay concrete.”

  For months, civil-rights leaders and the black press had been protesting the War Department’s failure to use Negro soldiers in a combat capacity. Only three Negro divisions had been established, and of these only one, the 92nd, fighting with the Fifth Army in Italy, had seen extensive action on the battlefield. The 93rd had been sent to the South Pacific in 1943, but had participated in few engagements; the Second Cavalry had reached North Africa in early 1944 only to be broken up into service units. “My brother is now serving in the 2d cavalry division,” Mrs. Francis Lewis wrote FDR when the conversion took place. He was “trained for a year approximately for combat duty,” but now his division has been transformed into a labor unit. Please, she begged, “give our colored soldiers the opportunity to take their rightful place in this democracy.”

  “It is hard to decide which is more cruel,” Lucille Milner observed in The New Republic, “this new pattern of murdering the ambition, the skills, the high potential contributions of the gifted Negro or the old pattern of physical brutality.”

  When asked to justify its position, the War Department had consistently fallen back on the poor records of Negro combat troops in World War I and the inability of the Negroes, as Stimson put it in a statement that became known as the “Negro is too dumb to fight” policy, “to master efficiently the techniques of modern warfare.”

  “It so happens,” Stimson went on, “that a relatively large percentage of Negroes inducted in the Army have fallen within the lower educational classifications,” so low that training proved impossible. According to a recent study, Stimson argued, 20 percent of Negroes and 74 percent of whites were rated in grades 1, 2, and 3 (considered the most rapid learners) by army classification tests; whereas 80 percent of Negroes and 26 percent of whites fell into grades 4 and 5 (considered the slowest learners).

  No one could argue with Stimson’s facts; what he failed to mention was the direct relationship between level of schooling and performance on the test. In the 1940s, almost 75 percent of the Negro registrants came from the poorest regions of the country, the Southern and border states, where educational and economic opportunities were so limited that four out of five Negroes had not completed the fourth grade. Indeed, the performance of whites from these same areas was almost as poor as blacks. Nationwide, of course, whites fared much better, with 41 percent of the white registrants having graduated from high school, compared with only 17 percent of the blacks. These differences in schooling proved to be major determinants of success on the classification tests.

  Stimson’s statement raised a passionate outcry in the black community. “The consensus,” NAACP official Roy Wilkins wrote Roosevelt, was that Mr. Stimson had “offered gratuitous insult” to all Negro soldiers, miserably reflecting “upon the ability and patriotism of Negro citizens generally.” What did the Negro soldier think about Mr. Stimson’s blanket statement? The Crisis asked. “He considers it a vicious attack upon his manhood.” But now, in the wake of the Battle of the Bulge, Negro soldiers were finally to be given a chance.

  The first twenty-five hundred volunteers assembled in Noynes, France, in early January to begin a six-week course in tactics and weapons. The training was rigorous. When the six weeks were up, officers arrived to take the soldiers to their new assignments. Only then did the Negro soldiers learn that a change had been effected: instead of being integrated on an individual basis, they were to be formed into platoons and then sent into white combat units. Though disappointed by the change, the Negro volunteers remained enthusiastic about their adventure. “They were used to broken promises,” Jean Byers shrewdly observed in her study of the Negro soldier, “and were anxious to prove their capabilities.”

  Within the mixed divisions, blacks and whites ate, slept, and played ball together; they used the same bathrooms and the same showers; they were given a chance to know and respect each other. As they fought their way together across Germany, prejudices would break down.

  When told about the plan for integrated platoons, 64 percent of the whites were skeptical. Three months later, 77 percent said their attitudes had become highly favorable. “When I heard about it,” a platoon sergeant from South Carolina admitted, “I said I’d be damned if I’d wear the same patch they did. After that first day when we saw how they fought I changed my mind. They’re just like any of the other boys to us.”

  At one point, in the midst of heavy fighting, a black platoon was so decimated that a white squad had to be added to it. “You might think that wouldn’t work,” the company commander said, “but it did. The white squad didn’t want to leave the platoon. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Treated with equality, the Negro platoons fared brilliantly. “They are aggressive as fighters,” one white lieutenant said. “The only trouble is getting them to stop. They just keep pushing.”

  “I am mighty proud of these men,” Lieutenant Robert Trager announced. “I have seen them in action that other soldiers wouldn’t go through. I can say truthfully they are the best platoon I have ever led barring none.”

  Though Negroes were returned to their former segregated units after the Battle of the Bulge was over, the excellent performance of the integrated platoons demonstrated once again the waste and impracticality of segregation. Under the pressure of events, traditional attitudes were slowly shifting. Startling changes had occurred in a short period of time.

  • • •

  The Christmas holidays found the Roosevelt family together at Hyde Park. Anna and John were there, along with Sistie, Buzz, and Johnny; Ethel DuPont, FDR, Jr.’s wife, had come with their three children; and Elliott had arrived with his new wife, Faye Emerson. She is “pretty, quiet and hard,” Eleanor told Hick, “but I don’t think she is more than a passing house guest.”

  On Christmas Eve, Roosevelt sat in his customary place to the right of the fire for his annual reading of A Christmas Carol. In the corner of the book-lined library, surrounded by huge piles of presents, the candlelit tree glistened. At Roosevelt’s feet, grandchildren of varying ages were sprawled on the rug, listening with noisy delight as the consummate old actor concocted different voices for each character, from the nervous pitch of Bob Cratchit to the bullying tone of Ebenezer Scrooge. “Next year,” Eleanor said quietly when the reading was done, “we’ll all be home again.”

  On Christmas Day, Elliott accompanied his father on a long drive around the estate to inspect the tree cuttings. Later that night, father and son sat together by the fire in the president’s bedroom, talking. “Father spoke to me about Mother in terms I had never heard him use before,” Elliott recalled. “You know, he said, ‘I think that Mother and I might be able to get together now and do things together, take some trips maybe, learn to know each other again.’ He talked at length of his appreciation of her as a person, her strength of character, her value to him. ‘I only wish she wasn’t so darned busy,’ he said. ‘I could have her with me much more if she didn’t have so many other engagements.’”

  After nearly forty years of marriage, Roosevelt still retained an intense admiration for his unusual wife, who, despite her stubbornness, her eccentricities, her moodiness, and her lack of understanding of him, remained, he told Elliott, “the most extraordinarily interesting woman” he had ever known. Thinking back to the polio attack that had nearly ended his life, he could not help remembering how steadfast she had been, how vigorously she had raised her voice against his mother in behalf of a full recovery. And surely their life together since then had be
en full, dramatic, and memorable.

  The next day, Elliott took it upon himself to tell his mother what his father had said. “I was delighted when Mother expressed the same desire, that the day would soon come when their intimidating workloads could be rearranged to give them more time together.”

  “I hope this will come to pass,” Eleanor said, her lips parting in a smile.

  CHAPTER 23

  “IT IS GOOD TO BE HOME”

  As the year 1945 dawned, Roosevelt’s health preoccupied his family and friends. On days when his eyes looked bright or his color seemed good or his spirits were high, his colleagues convinced themselves that their beloved chief would see the war to its end after all. “President in gleeful mood,” Hassett exulted on January 11, detailing the teasing way in which Roosevelt had characterized the entrance he and Pa Watson had made into the bedroom that morning: “said we tripped in like fashion mannequins and, sitting there in bed, gave an imitation.” A few days earlier, Budget Director Harold Smith recorded his own delight in finding that the president was looking “very well” and seemed in good form.

  There were other days, however, when his lips were blue and his hands shook, when his mind was unable to focus and his best attempts to rally his energies collapsed in exhaustion. After a Cabinet meeting on January 19, Frances Perkins had an anguished sense of the president’s enormous fatigue. “He had the pallor, the deep gray color of a man who had long been ill,” she observed. “He looked like an invalid who had been allowed to see guests for the first time and the guests had stayed too long.”

  Sometimes, Perkins recalled, Roosevelt could go in a matter of hours “from looking pretty well to looking very badly,” almost as if the spring of is remarkable vitality had suddenly snapped. His eyes would assume a glassy look, his jaw would slacken, and his mouth would droop. His fatigue at that point was apparently so deep that he was not even aware that he had lost control of the muscles in his face.

  There was a story told on Capitol Hill that winter of two senators, Wyoming’s Joseph O’Mahoney and Connecticut’s Frank Maloney, who came to see the president on successive half-hours. Both were old friends of Roosevelt’s, both had been to the Oval Office dozens of times. When O’Mahoney emerged at the end of the first half-hour, Maloney was anxious to know how the president seemed. “He was absolutely terrific,” O’Mahoney said. “He told some wonderful stories, he talked about what a pain in the ass a certain person was; he was funny; he was charming; it was just like old times.” Reassured by this excellent report, Maloney went in and sat down. Roosevelt looked up but said nothing, his eyes fixed in a strange stare. After a few moments of silence, Maloney realized that Roosevelt had absolutely no idea who his visitor was. A pious Catholic, Maloney crossed himself and ran to get Pa Watson, fearing the president had suffered a stroke. “Don’t worry,” Watson said. “He’ll come out of it. He always does.” By the time Maloney returned to the Oval Office, Roosevelt had pulled himself together. Smiling broadly, he greeted Maloney warmly and launched into a spirited conversation.

  So the days passed, some good, some bad, as Roosevelt moved toward an unprecedented fourth term.

  • • •

  On the morning of inauguration day, January 20, 1945, the family quarters of the White House echoed with the sounds of children racing through the corridors, anxious to play outside in the newly fallen snow. Roosevelt had insisted that every grandchild—a baker’s dozen in all, ranging in age from two to eighteen—attend the ceremony. He wanted the family all together, Eleanor later recalled, “realizing full well this would certainly be his last inauguration, perhaps even having a premonition that he would not be with us very long . . . .”

  The White House “bulged at the corners,” Eleanor recalled, with every bedroom, dressing room, and maid’s room on both the second and third floors occupied. In order to find space for two grandchildren and their nurse who arrived at the last minute, Eleanor had to give up her own bedroom suite and sleep in the maid’s quarters on the third floor. “I was not too comfortable, nor, I fear, too sweet about it,” she admitted, but she was determined to honor her husband’s request.

  Roosevelt had also asked that his eldest son, Jimmy, on whose arm he had leaned through three inaugurations, be granted temporary duty in Washington so that he could be present at this fourth ceremony. Jimmy later recalled standing beside his father that morning as Roosevelt gazed out the window across the snow-covered lawn, watching the children coast down the hill and then race to the top again. Though the gentle slope of the White House lawn could hardly compare with the sledding hill at Hyde Park, Roosevelt delighted in watching his grandchildren enjoy the same simple pleasures he had enjoyed as a child.

  Turning his attention to the morning papers, Roosevelt’s eye was drawn to the headline story in The New York Times: “Housekeeper Rejects Roosevelt’s Menu Choice for Luncheon.” The story detailed the battle between the president and Mrs. Nesbitt over the president’s desire to serve chicken à la king at his inaugural luncheon for two thousand guests. “We aren’t going to have that because it’s hot and you can’t keep it hot for all those people,” Mrs. Nesbitt flatly stated, suggesting that her word in this case was law, no matter what her boss desired. She would serve chicken salad instead, along with unbuttered rolls, coffee, and unfrosted cake.

  In the weeks before the election, Roosevelt had joked with Anna and Grace Tully that the main reason he wanted to be elected to a fourth term was to be in a position to fire Mrs. Nesbitt! Yet the election had come and gone and the humorless Nesbitt remained at her post, still insisting that her only duty was to produce “plain food plainly prepared,” regardless of the president’s special desires. If the coffee she sent on the breakfast tray tasted bitter, then he could make his own with a percolator beside his bed. If he had a special craving for the big white asparagus that came in large cans, then his secretaries could search around and find it! As long as Henrietta Nesbitt retained the title of chief housekeeper, she and she alone was in charge.

  For his fourth inaugural, Roosevelt dispensed with the traditional ceremony on the Capitol steps, as well as the marching bands, fancy floats, and hundreds of thousands of guests. “Who is there here to parade?” he replied when reporters asked whether there was going to be one. In keeping with the gravity of the moment, he prepared a five-minute speech to be delivered from the South Porch of the White House in front of the smallest inaugural crowd in generations. “Dog catchers have taken office with more pomp and ceremony,” Secret Service chief Mike Reilly noted.

  “The day was bitterly cold,” General Marshall’s wife, Katherine, recalled. “The President was pale and drawn, his hands trembled constantly, his voice appeared weak.” Yet his message was strong. Grasping the edge of the lectern, he spoke quietly and poignantly of the catastrophic war that was putting America through a supreme test, “a test of our courage, of our resolve, of our wisdom, of our essential democracy. If we meet that test—successfully and honorably—we shall perform a service of historic importance which men and women and children will honor throughout all time.”

  After the ceremony, the luncheon began. With two thousand guests it was the largest luncheon ever held during Roosevelt’s twelve years in the White House. Resting for a moment with Jimmy in the Green Room before facing the throng, Roosevelt was seized by a pain in his chest. “He was thoroughly chilled,” Jimmy recalled, “and the same type of pain, though somewhat less acute, that had bothered him in San Diego was stabbing him again. He gripped my arm and said, ‘Jimmy, I can’t take this unless you get me a stiff drink. You’d better make it straight.’ I brought him a tumbler half full of whiskey which he drank as if it was medicine. Then he went to the reception.”

  As always, the president made a determined effort to remain cheerful in the company of his guests. But he was tired and distracted, and it showed. Mrs. Woodrow Wilson was among the visitors that day; as she looked at the president, she was overcome with anxiety. “Oh, Mrs. Perkins,” she cr
ied when she saw the secretary of labor in the corridor, “did you get a good look at the President? Oh, it frightened me. He looks exactly as my husband looked when he went into his decline.”

  After making a short appearance at the public luncheon, the president retreated to the Red Room, where he relaxed with Princess Martha and a few friends, leaving Eleanor to circulate among the guests. All went smoothly except for one thing: the chickens Mrs. Nesbitt had bought for the chicken salad weren’t frozen properly, leaving only a small amount of usable chicken for a salad that was supposed to feed two thousand people. The problem did not go unnoticed. At a party later that night, the toastmaster, George Jessel, began his remarks: “Mrs. Roosevelt, I wish to ask you seriously how it is humanly possible to make chicken salad with so much celery and so little chicken.” Eleanor answered candidly, “I do not know, Mr. Jessup [sic]. I had a hard time finding any chicken myself.” Eleanor’s lighthearted response brought the house down.

  • • •

  Two days after his inauguration, Roosevelt embarked on a strenuous journey to meet Churchill and Stalin at Yalta, a Soviet port on the Black Sea. The secret meeting was intended to review the immediate military situation and to reach agreement on the structure of the postwar world.

  The White House buzzed with rumors, if Lillian Parks’ memory is to be trusted, that Eleanor “would finally be going with the President on something important”; the maids speculated that, with the sea air and the romance of the high seas, the president and first lady would become intimate once again.

  The rumors proved false. Though Eleanor had humbled herself to ask the president if she could go with him on the trip, he had invited Anna instead, making a choice that came out of his own feelings, his need for someone to take care of him, to sit by his side, to preserve his strength—all the things his wife could not do. “If you go,” he rationalized to Eleanor, “they will all feel they have to make a great fuss, but if Anna goes it will be simpler,” especially since Churchill and Harriman were both bringing their daughters.