No Ordinary Time, Page 93

  “I am too shocked to talk,” Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley told reporters. “It is one of the worst tragedies that ever happened.” Mr. Republican, Senator Robert Taft agreed. “The President’s death,” he said, “removed the greatest figure of our time at the very climax of his career, and shocks the world to which his words and actions were more important than those of any other man. He dies a hero of the war, for he literally worked himself to death in the service of the American people.” And Alf Landon, Republican presidential nominee in 1936 said, “it is tragic he could not have lived to see the fruition of his greatest undertaking.”

  Even the normally staid New York Times was extravagant in its editorial praise. “Men will thank God on their knees a hundred years from now, that Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the White House . . . . It was his hand, more than that of any other single man, that built the great coalition of the United Nations . . . . It was his leadership which inspired free men in every part of the world to fight with greater hope and courage. Gone, now, is this talent and skill . . . . Gone is the fresh and spontaneous interest which this man took, as naturally as he breathed air, in the troubles and the hardships and the disappointments and the hopes of little men and humble people.”

  • • •

  Churchill once said that to encounter Franklin Roosevelt, with all his buoyant sparkle, his iridescent personality, and his inner élan was like opening your first bottle of champagne. Roosevelt genuinely liked people, he enjoyed taking responsibility, and he adored being president. Alone among our modern presidents, he had “no conception of the office to live up to,” political scientist Richard Neustadt noted, “he was it. His image of the office was himself-in-office.” He did not have the time or the inclination for a melancholy contemplation of the “burdens” of the presidency. “Wouldn’t you be President if you could?” he once naïvely asked a friend. “Wouldn’t anybody?”

  Whether sorting his stamp collection with Missy LeHand at his side, inspecting the troops in the company of his wife, probing the latest Hollywood gossip with Harry Hopkins, enjoying the company of a stylish woman, co-opting a potential rival, delivering a fireside chat, charming a disgruntled Cabinet officer, exchanging repartee with reporters or confidences with Churchill, Roosevelt’s ebullience permeated every aspect of his leadership. “Under Roosevelt,” historian William Leuchtenburg observed, “the White House became the focus of all government—the fountainhead of ideas, the initiator of action, the representative of the national interest. He took an office which had lost much of its prestige and power in the previous twelve years and gave it an importance which went well beyond what even Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had done. [He] re-created the modern Presidency.”

  “He was one of the few statesmen in the twentieth century, or any century,” the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote, “who seemed to have no fear of the future.” Though the United States was miserably unprepared for war in the spring of 1940, Roosevelt never doubted that the American home front would eventually win the war, that the uncoerced energies of a free people could overcome the most efficient totalitarian regime. To his mind, there was no danger too great, no challenge too profound to yield to the combined efforts of the American people. He would provide the framework, the opportunity, and the inspiration, and the people would do the rest.

  It was fashionable during the war to decry the chaos and confusion in Washington, the mushrooming bureaucracies with overlapping jurisdictions and inconsistent mandates. Yet it seems, with the luxury of hindsight, that no other form of organization could have produced the triumphs and transformations of Roosevelt’s America. Indeed, it was not an organization at all. There was no master plan, no neat division of responsibilities, no precise allocation of burdens. The conduct of the nation during the war mirrored the temperament, the strengths, and the frailties of a single man. A lesser man, a man of smaller ego, would have sought greater control, more rigid lines of responsibility and authority. But Roosevelt never felt that he or his leadership was threatened by multiplicity and confusion. He could try everything; he could move in different directions at the same time; he could let the horses run, never doubting his ability to rein them in should they threaten to become uncontrollable. As long as the home front was big at the base, as long as the great majority of the American people were involved in the production effort, he could afford to let things be confused at the top.

  His critics were certain that he would straitjacket the free-enterprise system once the war began. To this day, Franklin Roosevelt remains the symbol of big government and the controlled economy. Yet, under Roosevelt’s wartime leadership, the government entered into a close partnership with private enterprise, enabling business to realize its full potential for the first time in many years. Despite the wide variety of government controls, private producers freely negotiated their contracts with the government, and no one was told where to move or where to work. Business was exempted from antitrust laws, allowed to write off the full cost of investments, given the financial and material resources to fulfill contracts, and guaranteed a substantial profit. The leader who had once proclaimed his intention to master the forces of organized money had become their greatest benefactor.

  But even as he reached out to business during the war years, Roosevelt insisted on preserving the social gains of the previous decade. His partnership with business was not forged at the expense of American labor. On the contrary, the American workingman during the war enjoyed full employment, generous earnings, new fringe benefits, and a progressive tax code. Union membership expanded by more than six million. In less than half a decade, the Depression, which Roosevelt had fought so vigorously but with limited success, had been ended. Fueling this advance of business and labor was the material reality of an extraordinary, seemingly limitless, flow of weapons and vehicles far in excess of those Roosevelt predictions which had been scorned as “visionary” by economists and businessmen alike. Though Roosevelt had not lived to see the end of the war, his goal of making America “the arsenal of democracy” was abundantly fulfilled before he died. Between 1940 and 1945, the United States contributed nearly three hundred thousand warplanes to the Allied cause. American factories produced more than two million trucks, 107,351 tanks, 87,620 warships, 5,475 cargo ships, over twenty million rifles, machine guns, and pistols, and forty-four billion rounds of ammunition. “There is little doubt,” army historians conclude, “that America’s outpouring of war materiel rather than an Allied preponderance of manpower was the dominant factor in winning the war.”

  “The figures are all so astronomical that they cease to mean very much,” historian Bruce Catton wrote. “Say that we performed the equivalent of building two Panama Canals every month with a fat surplus to boot; that’s an understatement, it still doesn’t begin to express it all, the total is simply beyond the compass of one’s understanding. Here was displayed a strength greater even than cocky Americans in the old days of unlimited self-confidence had supposed; strength to which nothing—literally nothing, in the physical sense—was any longer impossible.”

  Roosevelt’s success in mobilizing the nation to this extraordinary level of collective performance rested on his uncanny sensitivity to his followers, his ability to appraise public feeling and to lead the people one step at a time. More than any previous president, he studied public opinion: he read a variety of newspapers; he analyzed polls; he traveled the country when he could and dispatched his wife when he could not; he brought in people of clashing temperaments to secure different points of view; he probed visitors at dinner; he tried out his ideas on reporters. But more than diligence was involved. Like any great artist, Roosevelt relied on his own intuition to fit the smallest details and the most disparate impressions into a coherent pattern. He was able to sense what the people were thinking and feeling.

  Above all, he possessed a magnificent sense of timing. He understood when to invoke the prestige of the presidency and when to hold it in reserve, when
to move forward and when to pull back. “I am like a cat,” he once said. “I make a quick stroke and then I relax.” He was committed to the Allied cause from the start of the war, but he understood that he had to bring an isolationist people along little by little, through a combination of decisions, speeches, and events.

  He let the reaction to the Nazi invasion of Western Europe build before he addressed the joint session of Congress on May 16, 1940. He let a citizens’ group take the lead on the draft in the summer of 1940 while he focused on making the destroyer deal with Britain. Then, when it looked as though the draft would be defeated, he delivered a strong endorsement that carried the bill through. He sat quietly for days on the Tuscaloosa after receiving Churchill’s urgent plea for help with Britain’s financial crisis until he suddenly emerged with the idea of “lending” Britain weapons to be paid back in kind after the war. Then, perfectly sensing just how far the public was willing to go at that moment, he successfully sold the idea of lend-lease to the Congress and the country as America’s best alternative to war. He resisted strong pressure to convoy ships in the spring of 1941, believing that convoys would bring America into the war before the American people were ready. Yet, once again perfectly sensing the state of public feeling—in which the growing commitment to the Allied cause was undercut by the fear of sending American boys abroad—he dramatized the grim situation on the seas by declaring an “unlimited emergency,” which made it seem that he was moving further than he really was. Determined not to carry a divided country into war, he waited for events to unify the nation. The wisdom of this assessment was confirmed when the extension of the draft passed the House by only a single vote in August 1941. It would take the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to shatter isolationism once and for all and create the unified support necessary to win the war.

  Roosevelt’s sense of timing was also manifest in his actions as commander-in-chief. Once again, he knew when to invoke his powers and when to hold them in reserve. He picked a first-class military team—Marshall, King, Arnold, Leahy—and gave them wide latitude to run the war. Never once, Stimson admiringly remarked, did Roosevelt overturn his commanders’ decisions for personal or political motives. Though the Democrats would have been greatly strengthened in the 1942 elections if the invasion of North Africa had occurred a few days earlier, he did not interfere with Eisenhower’s decision to begin the landing six days after the election. Through the worst days of the war—the weeks after Pearl Harbor, the early days at Guadalcanal, the Battle of the Bulge—he remained calm and imperturbable, earning the deep respect of every single one of his commanders.

  Yet, at critical junctures, he had the courage to force action over the protest of his military advisers, and almost all of these actions had a salutary effect on the war. In 1940, he insisted on giving all aid to Britain short of war, though his military chiefs warned him that he was jeopardizing America’s own security in so doing. He brought Russia under the lend-lease umbrella at a time when his military advisers believed Russia had almost no chance of holding out. He encouraged the Doolittle raid on Japan, which led to great success at Midway. He personally made the hotly debated decision to invade North Africa, and later granted MacArthur permission to recapture the Philippines. It was Roosevelt who gambled on the production of the B-29 superbomber, decided to spend $2 billion on an experimental atomic bomb, and demanded that the Allies commit themselves to a postwar structure before the war was over.

  To be sure, there were errors in Roosevelt’s wartime leadership. A precious year was lost in 1940–41, when the mobilization process was not pushed hard enough, when, as Washington lawyer Joe Rauh noted, “the arsenal of democracy was more democracy than arsenal.” Indeed, had it not been for the period of borrowed time provided by the heroic resistance of the British and the Russians, the United States might not have been able to overcome the head start of the Axis in time to influence the course of the war. And once the mobilization got under way, he failed to protect small business against the military’s tendency to lavish its contracts on the nation’s industrial giants. It was during the war years that the links were forged that would lead to the rise of the “military-industrial complex” in postwar America.

  One must also concede the failures of vision that led to the forcible relocation of the Japanese Americans, and the lack of a more decisive response to the extermination of the European Jews. Totally focused on winning the war, Roosevelt mistakenly accepted the specious argument that incarceration of the Japanese Americans was a military necessity. In so doing, he deprived tens of thousands of men, women, and children of Japanese descent of their civil liberties, and trampled on values he himself cherished.

  Sorting out Roosevelt’s actions and inactions with respect to the European Jews is more complicated. He believed that winning the war was the best means of rescuing the Jews. And there was merit to his belief. By the time the news of the systematic murder of the Jews reached the West in mid-1942, it was too late to mount a massive rescue effort short of winning the war as quickly as possible. But Roosevelt’s intensity of focus blinded him to a series of smaller steps that could have been taken—the War Refugee Board could have been established earlier and given more authority; the United States could have applied more pressure on Germany to release the Jews and more pressure on neutral countries to take them in; the United States Air Force could have bombed the train tracks and the concentration camps. “None of these proposals guaranteed results,” holocaust scholar David Wyman admits. “But all deserved serious consideration . . . . Even if few or no lives had been saved, the moral obligation would have been fulfilled.”

  But in the end, Roosevelt’s strengths far outweighed his weaknesses. Despite confusions and conflicts, clashing interests and disparate goals, the American people were successfully combined in an unparalleled national enterprise. Indeed, at times, it seemed as if Roosevelt alone understood the complex and shifting relationship between the nation’s effort at home and its struggle across the globe. “More than any other man,” historian Eric Larrabee concludes in his study of Roosevelt’s wartime leadership, “he ran the war, and ran it well enough to deserve the gratitude of his countrymen then and since, and of those from whom he lifted the yoke of the Axis tyrannies. His conduct as Commander in Chief . . . bears the mark of greatness.”

  • • •

  It was nearly midnight by the time Eleanor reached Warm Springs. She was, everyone commented, calm and composed when she arrived. When she walked into the living room, she embraced her two cousins and Miss Tully. Then she sat down on the sofa and asked each of them to tell her exactly what had happened. Tully recounted her own schedule that day; she had been dressing for lunch when she first heard the president was sick and had been in the living room when he died. Eleanor listened quietly and then turned to Margaret, who described sitting on the sofa crocheting when the president slumped forward in his chair.

  Then Laura began to speak, telling Eleanor some brutal truths: Franklin had been sitting for a portrait when he collapsed. The painter was a friend of Lucy Rutherfurd’s. Mrs. Rutherfurd was there as well, sitting in the alcove by the windows. The two women had been staying in the guest cottage as Franklin’s guests for the past three days.

  “It was a malicious thing to do,” Eleanor’s niece Eleanor Wotkyns later suggested, “but very fitting for her. She was a small, petty woman, jealous all her life of Eleanor’s great success. Though she thought herself every bit as smart as Eleanor, she hadn’t done a thing in her life except raise red setters and let her chauffeur drive her to dog shows all over the country. This was an act of revenge.”

  Laura’s explanation was that “Eleanor would have found out anyway.” Too many people knew the president had been sitting for a portrait when his cerebral hemorrhage struck. Too many people knew that Lucy was there. Still, Laura must have understood how devastating the news would be to Eleanor. Henceforth, thoughts of her husband’s final days would be inextricably linked in her mind with thou
ghts of Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd.

  When Laura finished speaking, Eleanor walked into the bedroom to see her husband’s body. She closed the door behind her and remained inside—alone with her husband—for more than five minutes. When she emerged from the bedroom, Tully recalled, her eyes were dry and her face was composed. She sat down on the sofa again and questioned Laura further. Had Franklin seen Lucy at other times in recent years? Yes, Laura replied. Lucy had dined at the White House a number of times. Had anyone else been present? Yes, she and Margaret and . . . Anna. Indeed, Anna was the one who had arranged Lucy’s visits.

  Eleanor gave no visible sign then or in the days to come of the pain she must have felt on hearing these words. “At a time like that, you don’t really feel your own feelings,” she explained later. “When you’re in a position of being caught in a pageant, you become part of a world outside yourself and you act almost like an automaton. You recede as a person. You build a facade for everyone to see and you live separately inside the facade. Something comes to protect you. I was well prepared for it. My grandmother brought me up to prepare for it, in a social way. I was never permitted as a child to say that I had a headache. I was trained to put personal things in the background.”