THE WEEKS OF MAY and early June 1941 had been among the most trying in Roosevelt’s life. Although he, too, had had ample warning of Hitler’s mobilization in the east, he could not be sure that this was not a massive feint for an attack on the British Isles or elsewhere. Britain’s heavy needs, China’s plaintive cries for help, Matsuoka’s continental fence-mending, Pétain’s and Franco’s vulnerability in the Mediterranean, the isolationist clamor in Congress, the pressure of the militants around him—these and a host of other scourges put the President under heavy strain. His May cold dragged on. With the press he was less open and genial as the spring neared its end, with his subordinates less tolerant and patient.
“…I wish to God,” he wrote to Senator Josiah Bailey, of North Carolina, in regard to convoying, “I could make out what all this full-dress debate they are talking about in the Senate relates to. Why debate convoys?” Convoying was a matter for experts, not for “laymen like you or I.” A few days later he burst out in a letter to an isolationist Congressman: “…When will you Irishmen ever get over hating England? Remember that if England goes down, Ireland goes down too….” When former Congressman Bruce Barton wrote in to complain of inconsistent figures from the administration, the President replied: “…It is hard to explain technical problems either to the Congress or to the people in view of the distorted values which are promptly given to one phase or the other of a complete picture.” The master interpreter to the American people of complex problems at this point seemed to have lost his touch.
As usual the President was trying to gauge public opinion, and as usual public opinion was blurred and drifting. Americans seemed fiercely protective of their own shores, very doubtful that Britain could survive without American aid, and very sure that American naval escort of war materials to Britain would put the country into war. In mid-May, Pa Watson got an advance tip on a Gallup Poll; the figures he gave his boss indicated that about a quarter of the respondents felt that the President had not gone far enough in helping Britain, almost a quarter thought he had gone too far, and about half answered “just about right.” During the following weeks interventionist feeling seemed to run ahead of presidential action. A majority seemed to be in favor of convoying, for example. But what kind of convoying, where, at what risk of shooting? On the specific and crucial policy questions public opinion was, as usual, hazy and volatile.
Amid the impenetrable events of early 1941 people seemed to be waiting for some clarifying event or galvanizing incident—or at least for some clear lead from the top. Only the President could give such a lead. By late May the militants were putting heavy pressure on their chief to speak bluntly to the people and proclaim an unlimited national emergency. Stimson sensed that the President was waiting for the accidental shot of a German or American commander to move the country into war, when he should have been considering the “deep principles” underlying the question. Ickes wrote to the President that Hitler would not create an incident until he was ready, and he would strike when ready, incident or no incident. Morgenthau was still militant; Hull, still cautious of action, if not of word.
Finally deciding on a speech, the President went about its preparation in a curious way. He would not ask Sherwood or Rosenman to put in a declaration of unlimited emergency, and he professed surprise when he found it in a draft. High officials tussled over the text of the speech as if it were a declaration of war. Stimson wanted a statement about the transfer of fleet units to the Atlantic; Hull objected. Some favored a stark presentation of shipping losses in the Atlantic; the Chiefs of Staff objected. Roosevelt was set on two matters: he would not mention Japan, for fear of provoking that country toward war; he would mention Russia, in case Germany forced it into war.
The speech had a dramatic prelude. The German battleship Bismarck suddenly slipped through the North Sea fogs and headed into the North Atlantic. “We have reason to believe that a formidable Atlantic raid is intended,” Churchill cabled to Roosevelt. “Should we fail to catch them going out, your Navy should surely be able to mark them down for us.” The battle cruiser Hood and other mighty ships would be on its track, he added. “Give us the news and we will finish the job.” But contrary news came to the White House: the Bismarck had sunk the Hood and was now on the loose. The President got the news while sitting behind his desk in the oval study, where he was working with Sherwood and others on his speech. He wondered whether the Bismarck would head straight toward Martinique. “Suppose she does show up in the Caribbean,” he speculated almost casually. “We have some submarines down there. Suppose we order them to attack her and attempt to sink her? Do you think the people would demand to have me impeached?” Two days later the President took a call from the Navy Department. The Bismarck had been cornered by British Navy units and blasted by shells and torpedoes. Roosevelt hung up and said exultantly, “She’s sunk!”
After this prelude and all the rumors and anticipation, the final speech, on May 27, was somewhat anticlimactic. The setting was anomalous: inside the East Room, representatives of Latin-American republics sat uncomfortably on gilt ballroom chairs; outside, Communist pickets trudged up and down the sidewalk with their antiwar placards. The President began his address boldly with a flat declaration that the Nazis were bent on world domination. He was not speculating, he insisted; it was already in the “Nazi book of world conquest.” The Nazis, he said, “plan to treat the Latin American Nations as they are now treating the Balkans. They plan then to strangle the United States of America and the Dominion of Canada.” American labor would be oppressed, unions crushed, the farmer regimented and impoverished, churches threatened, children perhaps sent off “goosestepping in search of new gods.”
Was the President picturing a Nazi-occupied nation, or a Nazi-besieged one? The speech was not clear on this and other matters. It seemed to reflect the struggle over its composition and the President’s indecision over strategy. Roosevelt, though speaking in his usual arresting way, meandered on and on, from the geography of Nazi strategy, to the Battle of the Atlantic, to the need of responding to Hitler before he came too close—“Our Bunker Hill of tomorrow may be several thousand miles from Boston”—to a statement of national policy that offered little that was new, to a rebuttal of “sincere” pacifists and a denunciation of the “sinister” ones. He did release the alarming figures of the rate of German sinkings of merchant ships, and he made his strongest statement to date of his determination to deliver supplies to Britain by whatever means was necessary. But he did not say how he would do this beyond patrolling; he made no mention of transferring fleet units to the Atlantic, and he ignored the crucial question of actual escort of convoys. But toward the end he achieved a stirring climax:
“As the President of a united and determined people, I say solemnly:
“We reassert the ancient American doctrine of freedom of the seas.
“We reassert the solidarity of the twenty-one American Republics and the Dominion of Canada in the preservation of the independence of the hemisphere….
“We in the Americas will decide for ourselves whether, and when, and where, our American interests are attacked or our security is threatened.
“We are placing our armed forces in strategic military positions.
“We will not hesitate to use our armed forces to repel attack….
“Therefore…I have tonight issued a proclamation that an unlimited national emergency exists and requires the strengthening of our defense to the extreme limit of our national power and authority….”
Soon after the talk, while Roosevelt happily listened to Irving Berlin play “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” and other presidential favorites, telegrams began to come to the White House. Later in the evening Sherwood found the President immensely relieved. Sitting in bed surrounded by hundreds of wires he said: “They’re ninety-five per cent favorable! And I figured I’d be lucky to get an even break in this speech.” The newspapers in the morning gave him strong editorial support.
The militants were relieved, too; however lacking in specifics, the speech was a moving statement of national resolution and a call to vigorous action. But then came one of the Rooseveltian backtracks that had so often reduced his associates to despair. At a press conference next day, with plaudits still ringing in his ears, the President denied that he planned to use the Navy for convoying escorts, or to ask Congress to change the Neutrality Act, or to issue executive orders to effectuate his proclamation. These comments, Stimson lamented, almost undid the effect of his speech; even Hopkins was perplexed by the shift. The President’s determination was soon put to the test. On June 11 reports began to arrive from survivors landing in Brazil of the torpedoing of their ship, the American freighter Robin Moor, by a U-boat in the South Atlantic three weeks earlier. Hopkins urged his chief to use the incident as reason to escalate from naval observation patrols to a security patrol to protect American-flag ships. After his first flush of anger, the President refused to do this; he was content to report the sinking to Congress as an example of the kind of Nazi threat he had pictured in his address.
The President still had no strategy except a strategy of no strategy. His main general policy was to wait on events—not any event, but one mighty event—to create the context for action. Such an event was Hitler’s invasion of Russia. By the end of June the world was watching the Red Army at bay—and watching London and Washington, too.
So quick, eloquent, and audacious was Churchill’s response to Russia’s plight that for years his words distorted peoples’ memories of the events of late June 1941. “We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime,” Churchill told the nation barely twelve hours after hearing of the invasion. “From this nothing will turn us—nothing.…It follows, therefore, that we shall give whatever help we can to Russia and the Russian people….” Hitler’s invasion of Russia, he said, was no more than a prelude to an assault on Britain itself.
Such was the steely rhetoric, but actually the first days of what would become the United Nations were marked by suspicion and near-paralysis. Communication between London and Moscow had been almost nonexistent during the spring months: Stalin and Molotov had kept a frosty distance from Sir Stafford Cripps, the British Ambassador; Churchill and Eden had doubted that Soviet Ambassador Ivan M. Maisky in London had the confidence of his chiefs. The Kremlin had smoldered over Britain’s refusal to recognize its writ in the Baltic. Some Russians now wondered if Churchill had instigated the Nazi attack; certainly he wanted it, they judged, and was this the real purpose of the Rudolf Hess caper? Moscow seemed ominously quiet even after Churchill’s address.
There were fears in London that the Red Army could not hold out for more than a few weeks. Would the Russians then surrender, or even join Hitler in an attack on Britain? A hundred Nazi divisions smashing and clawing their way east could not overcome years of mutual suspicion and hostility.
Washington had been even cooler than London in its formal posture toward the Soviets. For some weeks Hull and Welles had been parleying about relatively minor matters with the Russian Ambassador, Constantine Oumansky, whom they found fretful and stubborn. Only a week before the invasion the State Department had formalized a position of undertaking no approach to Moscow, treating Russian approaches with reserve, offering concessions only for a strict quid pro quo, and making clear to the Russians that improved relations were more important to Moscow than to Washington. Many in the American Army, as in the British, doubted Russia’s capacity to stop the Wehrmacht.
Roosevelt’s feelings toward Moscow were more mixed than his subordinates’. Often since the auspicious days of late 1933, when he had recognized the Bolshevik government, the President had been frustrated by Soviet policy; he positively disliked Oumansky and saw as little of him as possible. He had no illusions about the dictatorial nature of the Soviet regime, its secretiveness, rigidity, and greed for territory or satellites. On the other hand, he was somewhat optimistic about the Russians holding out—partly because of heartening words from former Ambassador Joseph E. Davies, at this time in Wisconsin. He was confident of his talent for working with any anti-Hitler government. He had a vague optimism about the Soviets’ long-run potential for neighborly relations with the democracies. Above all, he feared the possibility of Communist expansion far less than the fact of fascist aggression, and hence wanted to buck up the Soviet defenders—at least with words.
He approved a limp State Department declaration that while fascism and Communism were both bad, fascism was so much worse that any assistance to the anti-Hitler forces, no matter what the source, would benefit American security. He told reporters that “of course we are going to give all the aid we possibly can to Russia,” but he was vague as to when and how—and Britain still had priority on American arms production. When Fulton Oursler, of Liberty, sent him the draft of his first postinvasion editorial, on the theme “To Hell with Communism” and sharply attacking the Soviet regime, Roosevelt replied that “if I were at your desk I would write an editorial condemning the Russian form of dictatorship equally with the German form of dictatorship—but at the same time, I would make it clear that the immediate menace at this time to the security of the United States lies in the threat of Hitler’s armies….”
So Roosevelt’s first reactions to Russia’s plight were sympathetic, expedient, and cautious. Certainly he would issue no clarion call for a grand coalition against fascism or even for all-out aid to Russia.
He did take a couple of immediate steps, partly as trial balloons. He unfroze forty million dollars of Soviet funds in the United States, but made clear to the press that American aid to Russia would be effective only in the event of a long war, and he was not sure of Soviet needs anyway. His other action was a most effective piece of inaction: by failing to invoke the Neutrality law against Russia he insured that Vladivostok would stay open for American shipping. Otherwise he was content to let Churchill take the lead.
Paradoxically, at the time—and of the highest importance for the future—the first impact of the Nazi invasion of Russia was to push Washington and London closer together behind the Atlantic First strategy. In warning that Hitler’s attack on Russia was no more than a prelude to his assault on Britain, Churchill was establishing an even heavier claim on American aid. In Washington, too, pressure on Roosevelt intensified less to send aid to Russia than to escalate naval operations in the Atlantic. Thirty hours after news of the invasion, Stimson wrote to Roosevelt that he had been doing little but reflecting on the implications of this “almost providential occurrence” for sharply stepped-up Anglo-American operations in the Atlantic. It would take Hitler six weeks to two months to clean up Russia, Knox told the President, and that time must not go by “without striking hard—the sooner the better.” Within forty-eight hours of news of the attack Admiral Stark was telling the Commander in Chief that he should immediately seize the psychological opportunity to start escorting ships openly. Knox stated publicly that the nation had a “god-given chance” to “clear the path across the Atlantic.” Like Stimson, he evidently felt that the Lord was against the Russians, perhaps because the Reds did not recognize Him.
For a moment the President veered toward such a direct approach. He authorized the Navy to escort American shipping, “including shipping of any nationality, which may join such convoys” west of Iceland. Here was a crucial step—the escorting of ships, inevitably including British ships, which would seek the shelter of a United States Navy-protected convoy. Then the President retreated. The actual operations orders of July 25 postponed the escorting of other than American ships.
Once again Knox and the other militants were in despair. Why did their chief not take the direct logical step of simply—and openly—protecting all friendly shipping in the West Atlantic? Their chief had his reasons. He was wary both of congressional opposition and of Far Eastern implications. But more than that, he was waiting on events to propel the nation toward full intervention in the Atlantic. Some events a President can create, however, and the biggest event of July was the American occupation of Iceland.
This project, long in the making, had glinted with complexities. The British had taken over Iceland—a pistol pointed at England, America, and Canada, as Churchill saw it—after its mother country, Denmark, had been overrun in 1940. The British and American military agreed early in 1941 that the United States would defend the island in the event of war. Later, Churchill, in the face of a feared Nazi attack, had hoped that Roosevelt would take it over, partly to relieve British forces, but mainly to hasten combined operations by his and Roosevelt’s navies along the great supply routes of the North Atlantic. The President would act only on the invitation of the Icelandic Prime Minister, but this gentleman wanted American protection without having to embarrass his Nazi-supervised government in Copenhagen by asking for it. Patiently Roosevelt worked out a delicate minuet of invitation and acceptance; on July 7 he was ready to announce that the Navy had just arrived in Iceland in order to supplement and eventually replace the British.
Roosevelt could have had no doubt as to the seriousness of his move into Iceland. On June 17 Admiral Stark sent Hopkins a copy of his proposed instructions to the 1st Marine Brigade for “operations” in Iceland. The task: “IN COOPERATION WITH THE BRITISH GARRISON, DEFEND ICELAND AGAINST HOSTILE ATTACK.” He wanted the President to approve the order, Stark told Hopkins, because there was so much “potential dynamite” in it. The normal thing to do, he went on, was to put the 4,000 American troops under British command, as the British wanted, but he could not go quite that far. “I have, however, as the President will note, ordered the force to cooperate with the British (in defending a British base operated by the British against the enemy). I realize that this is practically an act of war.” Stark got the words he wanted at the bottom of the page—“OK FDR.”
The American occupation of Iceland, Churchill told the House of Commons, was an event of “first-rate political and strategic importance”—one of the signal events of the war. Since large American and British traffic would now have to pass through those perilous waters, “I daresay it may be found in practice mutually advantageous for the two navies to assist each other….” So they did, but the nature of the assistance was ambiguous. What were Roosevelt’s ships and planes to do in “escorting, covering, and patrolling, as required by circumstances”? Were they to shoot first? On what grounds? At what targets? Or should they wait to be attacked? Decisive events seemed likely to turn on obscure and fugitive factors—visibility in the brumous Atlantic, communication in heavy seas, perceptions of the foe’s intentions on the part of young commanders perhaps longing for action.
The uncertainty did not bother Roosevelt, who always thrived on disarray. At the very least he was realizing the simple aim of helping Britain in the North Atlantic; but much more, he was quietly challenging the Nazis on a crucial ocean front—one that they had taken up themselves when Hitler in the early spring had extended the German blockade and combat area to cover Iceland. Roosevelt would not yet order his Navy to shoot on sight; he would not yet openly escort British ships. He would let these things happen by day-to-day chance and necessity in the fog of Atlantic battle.
If ever there was a point when Roosevelt knowingly crossed some threshold between aiding Britain in order to stay out of war and aiding Britain by joining in the war, July 1941 was probably the time. Others, including Morgenthau and Ickes, had crossed this threshold earlier, and more decisively. If Roosevelt was still waiting on events, he was now nudging them in a direction that would deepen the cold war in the Atlantic and produce a crisis.
But his tactics were still at the mercy of Hitler’s strategy. And the Führer still saw this situation with unblinking insight. For months Admiral Raeder, apprehensive about the flow of supplies across the Atlantic, had urged him to step up hostilities by seizing the Azores or by attacking American warships and merchantmen or by extending the blockade area. As if to goad his Führer, he drew up a list of twenty unneutral or hostile actions by Washington since the beginning of the war. Hitler was unruffled. Until Operation BARBAROSSA was well under way, he instructed Raeder, he wanted no provocative incident that Roosevelt could seize on to make war. Hitler not only refused to accelerate, but he decelerated. He insisted that Raeder take measures to insure that American vessels not be attacked by mistake—not that he would call a U-boat commander to account, he added, for an honest error.
Hitler had not been led afield by a passing whim of generosity. He reserved the right, he told Raeder, to deal with the United States “severely” after beating Russia. Meantime the Admiral must restrain his raiders and U-boats. Roosevelt must not have his incident.
While Hitler concentrated on Russia and played down the Atlantic in the early summer of 1941, Roosevelt concentrated on the Atlantic and played down the Pacific. Hitler was trying to avoid a showdown with the United States while he dealt with Russia; Roosevelt was trying to avoid a showdown with Japan while he engaged Hitler in the Atlantic. Churchill was dedicated to beating Germany—just how, he was not sure. And Japan wavered between moving north and driving south, all the while concentrating on its effort in China. Such were the main thrusts of the chief antagonists in the early summer of 1941, but in the ponderously swaying mobile of global strategies secondary stresses could throw the opposing weights out of balance.
It was no simple matter, Roosevelt knew, to be belligerent in the Atlantic and pacific in the Pacific. The two fronts were linked in numberless ways: Hitler’s hope for Japanese action against Russia; Tokyo’s stake in Hitler’s attack east; Britain’s eastern interests and obligations; Vichy’s vulnerable authority over Indochina; the Dutch presence in the East Indies, all combined with the interests of secondary powers. The President had to calculate how these strains and thrusts were cantilevered by the complex and ever-shifting balances of military power and strategy. One blow could put the whole fragile mobile in motion, but in what direction neither he nor any other leader could foretell. He had to consider, too, the internal forces at work—the rivalries in Tokyo between diplomats and the military, between soldiers and sailors, even between sailors and sailors; the extent of the weariness and disarray of Chiang’s armies; differences among the men of Vichy as to whether they should fight to hold Indochina. And always the differences at home, within Congress, within the administration, within the State Department and even the White House—and among the people, his constituents.
These were some of the imponderables in the global balance of mid-1941, but Roosevelt did not perceive them in this kind of systematic, categorized frame. He still preferred to deal with situations piecemeal, plucking the day’s problem out of the tangle of events, turning it over, seeing its involvement in wider issues but not trying to deal with them as a whole. He was not seeking to be a grand strategist. In telling reporters one day that the country was not yet making the effort it should, he quoted with relish, from Sandburg, Lincoln’s remarks to some visitors in 1862. The people, Lincoln had said, “have not buckled down to the determination to fight this war through; for they have got the idea into their heads that we are going to get out of this fix somehow by strategy! That’s the word—strategy….”
If Roosevelt was not making strategy, he was still recognizing priorities—especially the Atlantic over the Pacific. He felt that his policy of “babying” the Japanese along, of keeping them off balance, after two years was holding off a showdown in the Pacific. When Ickes pressed him to cut off oil to Japan, Roosevelt responded that “it is terribly important for the control of the Atlantic for us to help to keep peace in the Pacific. I simply have not got enough Navy to go round—and every little episode in the Pacific means fewer ships in the Atlantic.” One trouble with this simple priority was that it could easily be disrupted by a turn of events. And in early summer 1941 Roosevelt’s Atlantic First policy was nearly overturned, not by a hostile nation, but by Cordell Hull himself.
By mid-June Hull’s long negotiations with Nomura were producing, phrase by phrase, an elaborate formulation for a détente in the Far East. Some of the most controversial points—especially the basis for a Japanese settlement with Chungking—were nebulous, but Tokyo seemed willing at least to discuss some kind of withdrawal from China. Hull’s note late in June showed no sign of retreat from principles the Secretary had long preached: Wilsonian morality, international justice, equity, free trade, economic nondiscrimination, neighborly friendship.
All this was pure Hull, and surprised no one. But along with this moralistic note Hull gave Nomura an oral statement that had an unusually sharp edge. After a generous reference to the Ambassador himself it went on to assert that “some Japanese leaders in influential official positions are definitely committed to a course which calls for support of Nazi Germany and its policies of conquest.” So long as Japanese leaders took such a position and aroused the people behind it, Hull went on indignantly, how could there be a settlement?
The Hull who asked this question was a tired, disappointed, and somewhat ailing man. After all his efforts to restore morality among nations he could not discern in Tokyo any real spirit of compromise. At times a terrible simplifier himself, he perceived Japanese leaders as neatly divided into two groups, one for peace, the other pro-German. Roosevelt, who had a strong streak of moralizing, too, but who coupled it with realistic and even Machiavellian attitudes, was content to let Hull sermonize to both the good guys and the bad guys in Tokyo while he played his main hand in the Atlantic.
Hull’s note arrived in Tokyo during a sticky period for the Konoye government. Matsuoka, under pressure from Hitler and Ribbentrop, had been urging his colleagues to seize this supreme opportunity to erase the Russian menace in the north. Konoye and most of the military feared Russia’s hardy Siberian troops and distrusted Hitler; why not wait until the Wehrmacht had broken Russia’s back, they still argued, and then move in for the kill? But, insisted Matsuoka, “we can’t take the fruits of victory without having done something. We have to either shed blood or engage in diplomacy. It’s best to shed blood….” First strike north, he urged, then go south. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. His skeptical colleagues preferred to reverse the order. The next objective, it was decided, was Indochina, with its tin and rubber, strategic relation to China, and fine possibilities as a jumping-off spot for further expansion south. On July 2 the Imperial Conference ratified this plan, at the same time deciding to prepare for—though it did not hope for—war with America and Britain.
“…The Japs are having a real drag-down and knock-out fight among themselves,” Roosevelt wrote to Ickes on July 1, “and have been for the past week—trying to decide which way they are going to jump—attack Russia, attack the South Seas (thus throwing in their lot definitely with Germany) or whether they will sit on the fence and be more friendly with us. No one knows what the decision will be….”
At this point a desperate Matsuoka seized almost with relief on Hull’s provocative words. An outrageous communication, he proclaimed to his colleagues. It was inexcusable for Nomura to transmit such a statement. America was seeking to destroy Japanese leadership in East Asia. Roosevelt was a demagogue; he was trying to lead his country into war.
The stage seemed set for a slandered Matsuoka to improve his shaky position through a bellicose policy north and south. But here surprising events intervened. By now Konoye and his colleagues had about enough of the impulsive, talkative Foreign Minister. His spring trip now seemed a fiasco. When Matsuoka stiffly rejected Hull’s note without at the same time sending an agreed-on counterproposal, Konoye, playing his hand carefully, asked his Cabinet to resign; the Prime Minister then reappointed the same members except for Matsuoka. The new Foreign Minister was Admiral Teijiro Toyoda, a friend of Nomura’s who was expected to have Washington’s confidence. Hull also eased matters by agreeing to the return of his note.
The moment seemed ripe for a détente, but it was already too late. Tokyo was still set on the seizure of Indochina. Washington knew of the planned move because its cryptographers, in a brilliant feat, had broken a key Japanese code. In mid-July Tokyo put pressure on Vichy to allow Japanese troops into Indochina, with the right to use airfields and naval bases at Saigon and elsewhere. Admiral Jean-François Darlan, lacking support from Berlin, capitulated. Forty thousand Japanese troops moved into southern Indochina and quickly took control of the country.
Now it was Washington’s turn to wax indignant. Hull feared that Japan was breaking forth on a general program of expansion. Welles told Nomura to his face—and stated to the public next day—that Japan was bent on a policy of force and conquest. The Cabinet militants in Washington seized on Japan’s move to urge drastic action.
Now the President intervened. Flanked by Welles and Stark, he told Nomura late in July that he had allowed the continued export of oil to Japan—despite the outcries of oil-starved motorists on the East Coast—in order to prevent a showdown in the Pacific; if Japan now tried to seize East Indies oil, the Dutch would resist, Britain would help them—and a grave situation would result. But if Japan would reconsider its occupation of Indochina, the United States would combine with other Western nations and with Japan to neutralize Indochina in the manner of Switzerland. Nomura, who had told Welles that he personally deplored the move into Indochina, was interested but pessimistic. Roosevelt ended by warning the envoy that Hitler was bent on conquering the world, not merely Europe or Africa.
The next day Roosevelt froze all Japanese assets in the United States, as well as all Chinese, the latter at Chiang’s request. He notified Tokyo that the Panama Canal would be closed for repairs, and he took the long-planned step of mustering the Philippine military forces into United States service under Lieutenant General Douglas MacArthur. Newspapers rejoiced at the President’s forthright action. Actually he planned to proceed cautiously in denying licenses; he would not cut off all gasoline, for example, but only high octane. His chief, Ickes grumbled, was still unwilling to draw the noose tight. He preferred “to slip the noose around Japan’s neck and gave it a jerk now and then.” To Stimson the President’s fear that cutting off oil altogether would start a war was the “same old rot.” Stark and the Navy planners, on the other hand, had warned Roosevelt that an embargo would probably bring more Japanese aggression. So if the President held a noose in one hand he still held out an olive twig in the other.
Tokyo’s first reaction to the freeze was bellicose. Toyoda warned Grew that if the United States made any hostile move toward Indochina, “on the exclusively theoretical ground that it contradicts general doctrinaire principles which the American government embrace”—a slap at Hull—Tokyo would not be able to suppress an outburst of nationalist resentment, which was already aroused over American aid to China. Grew now saw the “vicious circle of reprisals and counter-reprisals” heading toward war. No response came to Roosevelt’s neutralization proposal.
The crucial question always facing Roosevelt was whether firmness or conciliation would deter the Japanese. Now came a turn that seemed to justify the freeze. The moderates in Tokyo had been surprised by Washington’s response to the move south. They, too, were waiting on events: America was angry, Russia was fighting hard, Britain was still intact. They knew that Japan could not desert the Axis, quit China, or pull back from Indochina, but were other compromises possible? The Emperor and his advisers, Konoye, and key Navy leaders began to press during August for serious counterproposals to Washington. Konoye toyed with the idea of a dramatic personal meeting with Roosevelt, perhaps in Hawaii.
Grave differences still separated the two nations, but at the very least these second thoughts in Tokyo would give Roosevelt another month to press his main efforts in the Atlantic.
During the foreboding days of early summer 1941 conflict centered in two critical sectors: in the cold gray waters of the North Atlantic and on the vast plains of Mother Russia. And the nature of the struggle in each case would have gladdened the heart of Tolstoy’s General Kutuzov.
In Russia the Red Army was reeling back as whole corps were fed piecemeal into the Nazi grinder and simply disappeared. Communications broke down; supply failed; soldiers moved blindly ahead and died; generals blundered and were shot for cowardice. The Russian front turned into an inferno of smashed roads, blazing dumps, crazed horses, blasted tank parks, milling officers and men. Yet in all the confusion and despair, heroism and funk, a General Kutuzov might have seen omens of the future: conscripts from all over the Soviet Union dumped out of freight trains and moving off, cardboard suitcases in hand, toward the front; long lines of Nazi tanks mired in the black mud and waiting for the earth to harden; Russians holding out in trenches, basements, burned-out tanks for days and weeks—and in the Wehrmacht the faint beginnings of doubt as the Russians, unlike Poles and Frenchmen earlier, showed signs of stiffening.
The North Atlantic presented a contrasting face of war. Moving in ten or twelve stately columns, a thousand yards apart, the great convoys of fifty or sixty merchantmen plowed slowly through summer seas. Speedy, sharply wheeling destroyers and corvettes darted back and forth on the ten-mile periphery. Everything was carefully planned: the assembling of the convoys, the evasive ocean routes, the elaborate zigzagging designed to outwit raiders without undue wasted motion. But in the thick, stormy nights, as the screening ships closed in to keep station, anything could happen—including a skirmish between an American destroyer captain, not sure of the application of his orders, and a German U-boat commander, impatient with his.
Ultimately these unlike fronts would become linked by the imperatives of global war, but for the moment all eyes were riveted on the Russian convulsion. By early July the military in both London and Washington were ready to write off the Red Army; it was only a matter of time, the experts said, and of how the West could exploit that time. There was fear that Stalin would quit—or even make another deal with Hitler. Churchill’s position was one of pure expediency. He would never forget or excuse Russia’s unconcern during the long months that the British alone were manning the ramparts against Germany. When Maisky pressed him for more aid Churchill burst out: “We never thought our survival was dependent on your action either way…. You have no right to make reproaches to us!” But there was no question of his immediate position; he would walk with the devil to beat Hitler.
Most Americans were less willing to walk with Satan. The isolationists were having a field day; frustrated by growing support for co-operation with Britain, they eagerly seized on a potent new reason to reject intervention in general and aid to Bolshevik, godless Russia in particular. “The heat is off,” proclaimed the Chicago Tribune jubilantly. A Communist victory, said Senator Taft flatly, would be far more dangerous than a fascist one. John T. Flynn, columnist for the New Republic, demanded: “Are we going to fight to make Europe safe for Communism?” Herbert Hoover opposed any aid to the Soviets because it would simply help Russia seize more land and would make a “gargantuan jest” of fighting Hitler to save democracy. Senator Harry Truman struck a common note: “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances….”
Interventionists fell back on expediency. It was not time, warned the Committee to Defend America, to let ideology blind Americans to the need to counter Nazism. Walter Lippmann wrote that Americans should react to the new war as adult men, not as children quarreling over ideology. Many interventionists were pessimistic about Russia’s chances of survival and urged that America seize the opportunity to redouble aid to Britain. It was argued, indeed, that such aid would prolong Soviet resistance, for American planes could enable the British to step up their bombing offensive against Germany. The single most important impact of the Nazi invasion, at least in the interventionist press, was to enhance the importance of the Atlantic Alliance and Atlantic First.
And Roosevelt? He had no yen to clash with the militant anti-Communists, the church groups, Polish-Americans, Finnish-Americans, patriotic societies, and a host of other ideological groups. He was trying to see through the clamor of the articulate groups on both sides and divine the feelings of a wider public. Within ten days of the invasion he had received from Hadley Cantril, a noted public-opinion analyst at Princeton, the summary results of recent polls. The Nazi attempt to enlist moral support for a holy war against Russia had so far completely failed with Americans, Cantril reported. The overwhelming majority of Americans wanted Russia to win the war against Germany. But most people opposed helping Russia to as great an extent as Britain; if the invasion produced any change in opinion it was toward more aid to Britain. For Roosevelt the policy implication must have been clear: he could aid Russia, but not at the expense of Atlantic First.
Everything depended, Roosevelt felt, on Russia’s ability to hold out until winter, and hence on the masses of soldiers manning the long and precarious front, on their officers, on their leaders in the Kremlin—and on the long supply lines to Russia from outside. Could the Soviets hang on? As the Germans plunged deeper into Russia, the President received conflicting advice. The military were still dubious; Ambassador Laurence Steinhardt, in Moscow, was pessimistic at first; former Ambassador Davies remained more hopeful. Late in July a cable arrived from Hopkins, who had returned to London to iron out strategic and logistical questions. Would the President like him to go to Moscow? Stalin could be influenced to maintain a permanent front despite his losses, Hopkins suggested, and a personal envoy might convince him “that we mean business on a long term supply job.” Roosevelt jumped at the chance to get his direct line into the Kremlin.
Hopkins, gaunt and ailing, traveled in a Catalina flying boat on the long route north of Norway to the Soviet port of Archangel. After a four-hour banquet and two hours’ sleep, he flew on to Moscow, where Steinhardt briefed him on the situation there, grumbled about the Kremlin’s secretiveness, and took him to see Stalin.
“I told Mr. Stalin that I came as personal representative of the President,” Hopkins reported back to Roosevelt. “…I expressed to him the President’s belief that the most important thing to be done in the world today was to defeat Hitler and Hitlerism. I impressed upon him the determination of the President and our Government to extend all possible aid to the Soviet Union at the earliest possible time.” What did Russia need immediately, Hopkins asked, and what would it require for a long war? Immediately, antiaircraft guns, large machine guns, and rifles, Stalin said; later, high-octane aviation gas and aluminum. “Give us anti-aircraft guns and the aluminum and we can fight for three or four years.”
After talks with Molotov and Cripps, Hopkins saw Stalin again. The President, he told Stalin, was anxious to have his analysis of the war. Stalin estimated that the German Army had 175 divisions on Russia’s front when the invasion started, had increased this number to 232, and could mobilize a total of three hundred divisions. “…Mr. Stalin stated that he can mobilize 350 divisions and will have that many divisions under arms by the time the spring campaign begins in May 1942.”
On and on Stalin had talked—about the need to blood his troops so they would realize Germans were not supermen; how Russians still kept fighting even when cut off and left far behind the lines; the impression he had of a slight decrease in German pressure; the quality—in great detail—of the opposing tanks and aircraft; how the Red Army discounted all divisions, whether Finnish, Rumanian, Italian, or Spanish, other than the German. Toward the end he asked Hopkins to give the President the following personal message: “…Hitler’s greatest weakness was found in the vast numbers of oppressed people who hated Hitler and the immoral ways of his Government.” These people could receive the kind of encouragement and moral strength they needed to resist Hitler from only one source, and that was the United States. “He stated that the world influence of the President and the Government of the United States was enormous.”
It was inevitable, Stalin had gone on, that the United States “should finally come to grips with Hitler on some battlefield. The might of Germany was so great that, even though Russia might defend herself, it would be very difficult for Britain and Russia combined to crush the German military machine. He said that the one thing that could defeat Hitler, and perhaps without ever firing a shot, would be the announcement that the United States was going to war with Germany. Stalin said that he believed, however, that the war would be bitter and perhaps long; that if we did get in the war he believed the American people would insist on their armies coming to grips with German soldiers; and he wanted me to tell the President that he would welcome the American troops on any part of the Russian front under the complete command of the American Army.” This last proffer was an astonishing concession from the ruler of Russia.
There had been no waste of word, gesture, or mannerism, Hopkins remembered later. “It was like talking to a perfectly coordinated machine, an intelligent machine. Joseph Stalin knew what he wanted, knew what Russia wanted, and he assumed that you knew….”
Actually Stalin gave Hopkins a far more hopeful picture of Soviet resistance than the situation then warranted. But Hopkins’s reports steeled Roosevelt’s determination to speed all possible aid to Russia. During July that aid had been dismayingly low—less than seven million tons of materials—compared to Russia’s enormous need. Aid had been caught in a quagmire of problems: the Russians were not exact as to what they needed; each Washington agency, anxious to hoard supplies for its own mission, passed the buck to other “shops”; State, Treasury, and the RFC bickered over measures to buy Russian gold and to extend credits to Moscow; Stimson hated to part with planes already assigned to Britain or to his own forces. Roosevelt had to admit that he could not spare some items—notably antiaircraft guns—because he did not have any himself. But he always had to worry that Stalin, feeling deserted by the perfidious West, might simply quit—or even go over to Hitler’s side. And his enemies were becoming noisier at home.
“If somebody kidnaps Wheeler and shanghais him on board an outgoing steamer for the Congo,” he wrote to Frankfurter, “can a habeas corpus follow him thither? You need not answer, if you don’t want to because it would never get as far as the Supreme Court! Wheeler or I would be dead, first!”
Roosevelt’s exasperation came to a head at a Cabinet meeting on August l. He opened it with a pointed remonstrance on the “runaround” given the Russians during the previous month. “I am sick and tired of hearing that they are going to get this and they are going to get that.” He did not want to hear what was on order; he wanted to hear what was on the water. The Cabinet sat agape at their chief’s unusual performance; after half an hour of the lecture they tried to reply. Stimson, much annoyed, complained that he had not been informed as to Russia’s actual needs. Morgenthau pointed out that with Hopkins away no one in town had authority to get the aid under way. Ickes had a helpful suggestion, too—that one of the newest bombers be sent to Russia by way of Japan, adding that it could set fire to Tokyo on the way by dropping a few incendiary bombs.
The President was not to be put off. He wanted a hundred or more fighters to go to the Soviets right away. “Get the planes right off with a bang next week,” he told Stimson, even if they had to be taken from the American Army. He said that he would put one of the best administrators in Washington in charge of the Russian order. The President chose Wayne Coy right after the meeting and instructed him “with my full authority use a heavy hand and act as a burr under the saddle….Step on it.”
Coy tried to step on it, but he had a poor engine and a meager gas supply. It was weeks before total exports to Russia reached even thirty million dollars’ worth. An air of expediency and feverish improvisation hung over the whole operation. Roosevelt could not make a clear moral issue of aid to Russia because of anti-Soviet attitudes; he could not make a strategic reformulation because he could not bank on Russian survival. His main goal was still simply to prolong Russian resistance. He was committed to a strategy of giving top priority to Britain and the Atlantic nations—a strategy shaped with his military chieftains over a long period and now encased in legislative, bureaucratic, financial, and political channels, interests, and expectations.
Hitler’s lunge into Russia and the developing Soviet resistance were rapidly altering power balances around the world, with enormous implications for grand strategy; but the United States was still adhering to a strategy of Atlantic First.
Speed, and speed now, the President had ordered in March, but neither the economy nor the ship of state responded briskly to this call from the bridge. Two months later, war supply was in a state of crisis in the face of voracious demands from Britain for its home defense, from the vast Middle East theater, from Roosevelt’s generals and admirals for their own dire needs. In early summer the decision to aid Russia boosted demand once again. Outwardly the President seemed as confident as ever, even debonair, about his mobilization arrangements. Actually the delays and emergencies must have helped cause his occasional sullenness of the spring. No matter how much he improvised he could not overcome the deadly imbalance: war supply was increasing by small increments and break-throughs; war demand, by huge leaps and bounds.
The President put the best face on things even when he knew that progress was unsatisfactory. After giving out some hopeful defense-spending figures at a press conference in early April he jousted with the press.
Reporter: “How much do you think that this should be accelerated in your own mind? You say it is much too slow.”
The President: “More.”
“What is being done?”
“I can’t give you a figure on that.”
“What is being done to do that?”
“Well, we will just keep on using ‘chestnut burs’ all the time. You are familiar with the use of ‘chestnut burs’ to make a mule go.”
“Can you identify the mule?”…
“You ought to, you come from Missouri, Frank.”
“I came from Minnesota, sir.” (By now much laughter)
“Mr. President, what are the main reasons why the progress is, as you say, much too slow?”
“Oh, thousands, thousands of reasons.”
“I say the main.”
“Individuals—mostly human beings.”
“Can you break that down?”
“No.”
“Mr. President, do you agree…that the next hundred days are going to be crucial in our production program?”
“Yes, and the next hundred after that”—laughing—“and the next hundred after that probably. I can’t see as far ahead as that….”
The President created some momentum simply by setting up new agencies. In March, faced with a doubling of strikes since December, he established a National Defense Mediation Board, of three members for the public and four each for labor and industry, to help keep labor peace through conciliation, voluntary arbitration, and fact-finding. In April he set up the Office of Price Administration and Civilian Supply—he had rather liked the term “price adjustment”—under Leon Henderson, who had become an increasingly vocal champion of the consumer. In May he created the Office of Civilian Defense, under an even shriller New Dealer and dynamic city administrator, Fiorello La Guardia, of New York, to serve as the co-ordination point for federal, state, and local efforts to protect civilians in emergencies. None of these agencies had much formal authority. The OPA held its breath waiting for its maximum price “schedule” to be challenged in the courts, but the threat of publicity and of denying government contracts enabled Henderson to improvise day by day until a price-control law could be passed. Roosevelt chose La Guardia for civilian defense more for his speech-making and promotional than his executive abilities.
Conflict and tumult seemed to dog every step Roosevelt’s defense chiefs took during this period. Old-line government officials, accustomed to administrative propriety and orderly procedures, sparred with dollar-a-year men who had not been anointed by civil service and were used to more direct action. Though there was never a clear-cut division between military and civilian officials, inevitably the military, under fierce pressure from the commanders down the line, fought for a larger share of the production cake, while civilians tried to protect the manpower and supply needs of farmers and manufacturers. Army and Navy procurement officials competed with one another and even among themselves for scarce items. Disputes broke out not only between agencies but also between different divisions of the same agency and even between hierarchies of the same division.
The loudest clamor rose from a familiar battleground, labor versus management, but now the issue was charged with emotional appeals to Patriotism and Victory. During most of April 400,000 of John L. Lewis’s bituminous-coal miners were out on strike, and it took the combined efforts of Secretary Perkins, the NDMB, and the President to settle not only the main bread-and-butter issues but also the question of the forty-cent differential in the daily wage rates between the northern and southern regions. Contests between mine operators and Lewis’s miners had become such standing operating procedure in Roosevelt’s life as to be an almost comforting sign of normality. Far more distressing was a wildcat strike in early June at the Los Angeles plants of the North American Aviation Company, which was turning out military aircraft.
News of the walkout aroused indignation in the Cabinet next day. Stimson urged strong measures; Hull wanted the Justice Department to make an example of the labor agitators; Jackson raised the question of how aliens could be deported when their motherland—including Russia—would not receive them; Roosevelt suggested loading some of the worst of them onto ships and putting them off on some distant beach with just enough supplies to carry them for a while. Even Hillman, knowing that Communists had goaded the union membership to strike despite pleas from its own leadership, favored a showdown. On June 9 the President ordered the Secretary of War to take over the plant; soon troops mustered in front of it, fixed their bayonets, and drove back the unresisting pickets. But bayonets could not make planes, and it was some time—indeed, late June—before full production was assured. Roosevelt’s action brought a flood of congratulatory mail to the White House, but it brought also many protests, especially from a wide range of union people, that this was a step toward fascism. And the episode fueled more charges from Lewis that Hillman was a betrayer of labor, and sharper demands in Congress for restrictive labor laws.
Cutting across most of the conflicts in Washington was one that combined old issues of ideology with urgent new issues of defense. This was expansionism versus “business as usual,” as the liberals defined it. New Dealers—some of them in Roosevelt’s defense agencies and in the White House itself—charged that big business was deliberately holding down defense production so that it could profit from the civilian sector, now swollen by defense spending; that it was monopolistic and restrictionist and hence unable to go all out for defense. Businessmen pointed to the extensive conversion that had taken place and contended that labor was unwilling to surrender its own restrictive practices and that New Dealers would not sacrifice labor and welfare policies that were a drain on the defense effort. Automobiles pinpointed the issue. With steel and aluminum and other metals in ever-shorter supply, the big auto plants at midyear were still turning out cars and trucks at the rate of four or five million a year. Knudsen as a symbol was an easy target for the liberals and expansionists—how could dollar-a-year men cut back their own industry?
By late spring the mobilization program seemed to be faltering. Economist John Maynard Keynes, in Washington, warned friends of the administration that it must ruthlessly convert to war production even if it meant two or three months of unemployment. There were shortages of such essential munitions as small-arms ammunition, antiaircraft guns and ammunition, and antitank guns. A private report to the President spelled out the bleak picture. Speed in placing ordnance contracts: of an eight-billion-dollar program, a little more than half contracted, and actual cash disbursements less than a billion. Lend-lease: program seven billion, contracts about two billion. Progress of heavy-bomber program: “peak production of 500 monthly not expected until middle of 1943 under present schedules.” Even training of seamen for new merchant vessels had fallen behind by more than half. Each of these figures could be documented, the report noted. It was headed simply COULD BE BETTER.
The failures and setbacks were aired in the most visible of all arenas, a Senate investigating committee whose hearings were open to press and public. A Democratic Senator from Missouri, Harry S Truman, had become highly critical of the defense effort, partly because he had been rebuffed in trying to get defense contracts for small businessmen in his state. Re-elected to a second term in 1940, he had made a quiet tour of army camps, quizzed contractors, workers, and officials. After unearthing delays and makeshift he returned to Washington determined to launch an investigation that would expose the failures without emulating earlier Senate wartime committees, which, Truman knew as a student of American history, had infringed on executive power.
The administration was cool at first. Such a probe would be at least an embarrassment and, even under a good Roosevelt man like Truman, might be the entering wedge for a Senate effort to run defense; and Truman, then fifty-seven years old, seemed little more than a parochial politician with a mediocre record of achievement. The White House was far more concerned about the threat of another investigation, proposed by Representative Eugene Cox, of Georgia, a New Deal foe. So, through Byrnes, it was agreed that Truman could go ahead. Roosevelt was not averse to having one more separate source of information on the defense situation; indeed, he had already discussed with defense chiefs a proposal to set up a small organization to prepare data.
The Senate Special Committee to Investigate the Defense Program was approved without opposition from the sixteen Senators then on the floor, though Byrnes did have its appropriation cut to $15,000 and he flanked Truman with four Democrats and two Republicans. Soon the committee was busily delving into the defense effort and winning headlines across the nation. Under the committee’s spotlight, officials conceded with unusual candor that sights had been set low, schedules had not been met, the nation had not been aroused to an all-out effort. At one point committee member Tom Connally was almost ready to ask for closed hearings. “We are just advertising to the world…that we are in a mess.”
Once again clamor arose in the land for stronger leadership by the President. The American people, proclaimed Walter Lippmann, were not being treated as they deserved to be treated. “They are not being dealt with seriously, truthfully, responsibly and nobly. They are being dealt with cleverly, indirectly, even condescendingly and nervously.” Frank Kent, in the Baltimore Sun, charged that the right kind of spirit did not exist among the people because it did not exist among the leaders. David Lilienthal, visiting Washington from Knoxville, where he ran the Tennessee Valley Authority, was reminded of the early days of 1933—the long hours, the excitement, the confusion, the griping about incompetence. He added in his diary: “But there are differences—the bold strokes of leadership, the clarion call, these aren’t quite as fresh and invigorating as then….”
How did the President react to these demands for leadership? Probably more than ever he felt that he understood pace and timing better than his critics did. They simply could not appreciate the web of restraints that surrounded him. It was not enough to cry out to high heaven for leadership and decisiveness. It was a matter of drawing millions of voters, thousands of opinion leaders, and hundreds of fellow politicians in Washington into a following that could be depended on both in the day-to-day exigencies of politics and at times of national crisis and decision making. The last group, the politicians, was the pivotal element. In midsummer the President experienced on Capitol Hill the kind of narrow escape that dramatized the divided government he was trying to lead and the dangers of sticking his chin out too far.
The Selective Service Act of 1940, enacted in the stress of an election year, had contained a politician’s compromise—a twelvemonth limitation on the selectees’ period of service. By early summer 1941 Roosevelt and his defense chiefs faced the prospect of a disintegrating army during the critical months ahead. The President was reluctant to revive the draft debate. He could see all the ingredients for trouble: servicemen charging that a solemn promise had been violated; a new isolationist uproar; a panicky Congress; a possible defeat. His congressional leaders, Rayburn and McCormack, were gloomy over the prospects of a measure to extend the service. Polls showed people to be closely divided on the question. The President allowed Stimson and Marshall to take the initiative; finally, upon their urging, he sent Congress a strong appeal for extension.
Events proceeded more perilously than even Roosevelt could have foreseen. Ham Fish saw the measure as “part and parcel of a gigantic conspiracy” to put the country into war. America First chapters sprang into action. Under Senator Wheeler’s frank a million antiwar postcards were sent out; some got into the hands of soldiers, prompting Stimson to accuse Wheeler of near-treason—a charge for which the Secretary later had to apologize. After the administration accepted a series of compromises—including an eighteen-month extension instead of an unlimited one—the bill passed the Senate handily, but the House by the closest shave—203 to 202. Defections took place in each sector of Roosevelt’s three-party coalition.
One vote had saved the Army. The episode had been a sorry one for all concerned. Neither the White House nor the War Department had dealt with Congress expertly. The House was simply craven, with even supporters of extension hunting for some way to put the onus on the President. Selectees, openly denouncing their Commander in Chief and the Chief of Staff, began to scrawl OHIO on latrine walls—OVER THE HILL IN OCTOBER. Administration men found on the Hill not only marked opposition to White House policies but also a current of deep personal hostility to and resentment of Roosevelt himself.
Even in the top councils of the administration feeling was mounting that the President was not supplying clear, sustained, and purposeful leadership.
If government as a whole in Washington had not yet responded to the world crisis, “government as usual” almost literally dominated the nondefense effort. Even the White House had to follow customs and procedures inherited from fifteen decades of presidential routine. The Chief of State threw out the first baseball of the 1941 season and watched the Yankees—also following the custom of the day—beat the Senators. He spoke feelingly to the thousands crowding the White House lawn for the annual Easter egg rolling. He greeted the usual delegations and bestowed the usual medals and other honors despite Pa Watson’s efforts to cut down on ceremonies. He received the usual tributes, serious and nonsensical; he had to accept a gorilla from Free French forces in Africa, and Fala was chosen president of Barkers for Britain. And he was the target of the usual death threats.
Like all chief executives, the President spent much of his time raising money and recruiting men. By the spring of 1941 soaring defense spending was putting heavy pressure on the peacetime tax structure. Actual spending was doubling and tripling over earlier months. There was a growing concern about equality of sacrifice during the crisis; a Treasury representative told the House Ways and Means Committee that one company with seventy million dollars’ worth of defense orders was subject to no excess-profits tax on 1940 earnings, although its profits had multiplied thirty times over the preceding year.
The President blew hot and cold on tax reform, depending in part on his reading of the political thermometer. Both Morgenthau and the House Ways and Means Committee favored a provision to require married couples to file joint income-tax reports in order to end the abuse of the existing provisions by wealthy men in community-property states like California. But Rayburn felt that was “a damn dangerous thing….All the married women and all the working women and all the Catholic priests and the Episcopalians” were against it. Roosevelt told the Treasury that for political reasons the provision must come out. But he pressed for a stronger excess-profits tax, and he astonished the Department by averring that he favored taxing all personal income above $100,000 a year at 99½ or 100 per cent.
“Why not?” he asked. “None of us is ever going to make $100,000 a year. How many people report on that much income?” But he did not press this confiscatory idea. The main need, in any event, was revenue. By summer the deficit was approaching the unprecedented figure of fourteen billion dollars. After asking in the spring for three and a half billion more in taxes, Roosevelt at the end of July recommended lowering exemptions for income-tax payers as a way to gain more revenue and also to let low-income-tax payers feel that they were making some contribution to the defense effort.
It fell to Roosevelt’s lot during these months to make the most important of all appointments—and the rarest. On July 1 Charles Evans Hughes, at seventy-nine still the very figure of a Chief Justice, retired from the Supreme Court. The obvious man to succeed him seemed to be Attorney General Jackson, forty-nine, a tested New Dealer, a friend of the President, a good lawyer, and a skillful mediator and negotiator. The press and the organized bar, however, quickly registered their preferences for a sitting member of the high bench, Harlan Stone, sixty-eight, an independent-minded, moderate liberal who had helped lead the Court away from its judicial standpattism of the 1930’s toward a recognition of the need for federal power.
For a few weeks suspense mounted as to whether the prize would go to Jackson or Stone—or to a dark horse. “We all think you should be C.J.,” a noted lawyer wrote to Stone, “but who can predict what F.D.R. will do? He has not the faintest idea of what goes to make a judge. ‘Views’ are all he seems to value….” The President consulted his old friend Felix Frankfurter, still a chief New Deal recruiting sergeant, who emphasized a point that was already clear to Roosevelt: the appointment of Stone, a Republican, would bolster the image of the President as a nonpartisan chief of state in time of emergency. The issue was not long in doubt; perhaps it never had been, for Roosevelt was able to give Stone’s empty seat to Jackson and thus put him in the running as the new Chief Justice’s likely successor.
Stone’s appointment won plaudits from most quarters; it was “so clearly and certainly and surely right,” said Archibald MacLeish, “it resounded in the world like the perfect word spoken at the perfect moment.”
Not all the President’s appointments were as easy or felicitous. The defense effort was creating an urgent demand for imaginative executives who could deal with business effectively without bending unduly to pressures. In April the President placed 85,000 additional positions under Civil Service. This action drew praise from “good-government” quarters, but it also betrayed weakness, for the Civil Service system that thwarted corruption and improper influence was also a shield for routineers lacking drive and imagination in the face of new defense needs, and hence for government as usual.
Roosevelt continued to be somewhat ambivalent about political appointments. In defense agencies he saw the need for nonpartisan policies. But he was under pressure from within the White House—even from his aides and secretaries, including Missy LeHand and Grace Tully—to crack down on appointments of lame-duck Republicans, or their assistants, to civilian agencies. He did not mind, he wrote to Jesse Jones, who was considered by New Dealers to be the most notorious offender, that in some of the defense agencies “we are employing dozens of men who have hated the Administration and fought all constructive change for years.” But in the regular agencies “I honestly think that we ought to have people work for us who believe in us—not just lip-service….What to do?” Jones stayed mute.
But amid “government as usual” one action of the President during these troubled days of mid-1941 was a sharp departure from tradition—a departure, indeed, that opened a shaft of broken light down the whole course of American life in the years to follow. By the spring of 1941 discrimination in defense industries and—ironically—in federally sponsored training and employment programs was stirring Negro leaders to a new militancy. In April the National Negro Council urged the President to abolish discrimination in all federal agencies by executive order. Meetings of Walter White and fellow black leaders with Hillman and other defense officials brought little but promises; the Negroes wanted an antidiscrimination program with teeth. As a last resort the militant A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, had proposed a march on Washington unless the administration took stronger action against discrimination. Now White and Lester Granger, of the Urban League, and other leaders picked up the idea. The threatened march would bring tens of thousands of blacks into Washington on July 1.
Roosevelt’s attitude toward Negro rights had been a compound of personal compassion, social paternalism, political sensitivity to their increasing articulateness and to racism in Congress, and a practical realization of their importance to the defense effort. For years Eleanor Roosevelt had been trying to develop some rapport between Negro leaders and her husband and his staff; as early as 1935 she had tried to persuade Steve Early that Walter White did not mean to be rude and insulting, that if he was obsessed with the antilynching bill, “if I were colored, I think I should have about the same obsession that he has,” that his martyr complex was typical of minority-group people and was “probably an inferiority complex.” The general policy of the administration, if it had one, was separate but equal, in the armed forces, in civilian agencies, and—by exhortation—in defense industries, but the separation often thwarted the equality. Roosevelt had discouraged black militance and civil-rights controversy; he had reluctantly conferred with restless Negro leaders; he had also preached “equality of opportunity” again and again in speeches and in letters to Negro organizations. And in the campaign of 1940 he had made more definite pledges to black leaders than ever before. Now civil-rights spokesmen were asking him to deliver on both his principles and his promises.
He watched apprehensively the growing plan for the march. It seemed to offer a rude threat to the image of national unity he was carefully fostering. When direct but quiet pressure failed to budge the leaders, the President appealed to them through his wife. “I feel very strongly that your group is making a very grave mistake,” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to Randolph three weeks before the planned march. “I am afraid it will set back the progress which is being made, in the Army at least, towards better opportunities and less segregation.” During this tense period, she went on, an incident might arouse in Congress “even more solid opposition from certain groups than we have had in the past.” Crusades were successful sometimes—but not this time.
It was clearly a message from the President as well as the First Lady; still Randolph would not retreat without an executive order against discrimination. Roosevelt tried every compromise move he could: he met with Randolph and White along with his defense chiefs; he ordered the OPM to deal “effectively and speedily” with the problem; he tried all his arts of persuasion and conciliation. He still flatly opposed the march. “What would happen if Irish and Jewish people were to march on Washington?” he asked at the meeting, and answered the question himself: the American people would resent it as coercion.
But the President was beginning to weaken. In late June, with the march still scheduled, he sponsored a meeting of Mrs. Roosevelt, Aubrey Williams, head of the National Youth Administration, and Mayor La Guardia with the Negro leaders in New York. The meeting soon deadlocked, and Randolph and White threatened a march on the Little Flower’s City Hall, too. “What for, what have I done?” the Mayor cried. But they managed to negotiate the draft of an executive order, and the President approved it. At almost the penultimate moment the march was called off.
Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802, issued on June 25, 1941, was a pontifical document with very small teeth. The duty of employers and labor unions was “to provide for the full and equitable participation of all workers in defense industries, without discrimination because of race, creed, color, or national origin.” Defense contracts were to include such a provision, and federal agencies concerned with vocational and training programs for defense production were ordered to administer them without discrimination. A Committee on Fair Employment Practices was set up in OPM, but without any real policing power. The order—which someday would be called a landmark step in the nation’s greatest internal struggle—was greeted with mixed feelings by Negro leaders and with subdued interest on the part of the big-city press. The President granted the committee limited funds, and it was slow to get under way. But it was a beginning.
Late in the morning of Sunday, August 3, 1941, the presidential train pulled out of a muggy Washington and headed north. Franklin Roosevelt and a small group of friends were off on a boating and fishing expedition. Late in the day the presidential party arrived in New London, Connecticut. There the Commander in Chief was piped aboard his yacht Potomac, which in the afterglow of sunset headed into Long Island Sound.
Next morning the yacht, with her presidential banner flapping atop the mast, anchored off South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, in full view of hundreds on shore, took on Princess Martha, of Norway, and her two daughters, Prince Karl, of Sweden, and his party, and sailed out into Buzzards Bay, where the President and his royal guests bottom-fished from the stern of the yacht. They had only fair luck. In the evening the Potomac put back into South Dartmouth, the President taking the wheel of a Chris-Craft speedboat to land his guests at the yacht club. Next day the Potomac, still flying the presidential flag, proceeded north through the Cape Cod Canal, where onlookers gaped at the big figures of the President and his cronies sitting on the afterdeck.
But it was not the President they saw. Late the evening before, the Potomac had sped to the quiet waters off the western end of Martha’s Vineyard, where seven darkened warships were waiting. Early the next morning the President and his mess crew were transferred to the heavy cruiser Augusta. His top military command were already on board. Soon the Augusta was steaming east past Nantucket Shoals Lightship; then it swung north. Admiral Ernest J. King, in command, had taken all precautions; destroyers were disposed ahead off both bows; swinging out from the prow of the Augusta were batteries of sharp steel knives to cut mine cables; recently installed radar peered through the mists. Two days later the little fleet sighted the coast of Newfoundland and soon put into Argentia Harbor, in a small bay rimmed by low hills covered by scrawny pines and brush. Here the Americans awaited Winston Churchill, who was proceeding west on the Prince of Wales.
It would be a meeting the President and the Prime Minister had long hoped for, a meeting that had been forced to wait on the tumultuous events of 1940 and 1941. As experts in the dramatic, they had set the stage carefully. To sharpen the suspense—and to discourage undue fears and expectations at home—Roosevelt had insisted on the tightest secrecy; even Grace Tully had had no hint of the trip. Such precautions meant hasty staff preparation and no agenda; the military chiefs were given the latest possible notice. The President’s son Franklin was ordered to report so abruptly to the “Commander in Chief” on the Augusta that he feared he was in for some kind of dressing down from Admiral King; Elliott Roosevelt, summoned from his air-reconnaissance squadron in Newfoundland, was equally mystified. Churchill had preferred a more publicized rendezvous; he wanted to dramatize Anglo-American unity, conduct meaningful discussions, plan definite steps, win major commitments. Roosevelt wanted merely to meet Churchill, feel him out, exchange ideas and information, and achieve a moral and symbolic unity.
Early on August 9 the huge battleship Prince of Wales, still scarred from her encounter with the Bismarck, loomed out of low-hanging mists and dropped anchor. Soon Churchill was clambering aboard the Augusta, while the President stood arm in arm with Elliott and the band played the national anthems. “At last,” said Roosevelt, “we’ve gotten together.” The Prime Minister handed the President a letter from the King; staffs were presented to each other; soon the two men were meeting alone, except for Hopkins, who had come over on the Prince of Wales with Churchill. By the time Elliott joined them after lunch the men were deep in problems of Lend-Lease, diplomacy, and American public opinion. In the evening, after the two leaders and their staffs shared broiled chicken, spinach omelet, and chocolate ice cream in the Augusta’s mess, Churchill, at Roosevelt’s invitation, gave one of his enthralling appreciations of the military situation.
Rearing back in his chair, slewing his cigar around from cheek to cheek, hunching his shoulders forward, slashing the air with his hands, the Prime Minister described battles won and lost, spoke dourly of Russia’s chances, and in his great rolling phrases conveyed all at the same time a sense of Britain’s indomitability and its need for American intervention.
Roosevelt listened intently, fiddled with his pince-nez, doodled on the tablecloth with a burned match, occasionally put in questions. Next day, Sunday, he paid a return visit to the Prince of Wales. On the quarterdeck under the big guns President and Prime Minister attended religious services in the company of several hundred intermixed tars, bluejackets, and Marines spread out over the decks and turrets. It was another unforgettable ceremony, the Union Jack and Stars and Stripes draped side by side on the lectern, the President grave and attentive, Churchill, his Navy cap slightly askew, tearfully singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” American and British chaplains sharing in the reading of the prayers. It was a time to live, Churchill later reflected; nearly half of those who sang were soon to die.
Then to the business at hand. As the President expected, Churchill pressed from the start for stepped-up American action in the Atlantic and a stronger line in the Pacific. Despite the hopeful reports of Hopkins from Russia and continuing intelligence that the forces before Moscow were holding out, the two leaders evaluated aid to Russia on the basis of what could be spared from Atlantic and home needs. Churchill still was seeing Soviet aid as a temporary expedient; Roosevelt, more as a long-term enterprise; but neither was yet ready to gamble heavily on Soviet survival.
Roosevelt did not want to go, in the Atlantic, beyond the recently agreed-on policy of American escorts for all fast convoys between Newfoundland and Iceland. But his willingness to stretch neutrality past this breaking point was clear from his commitment on other Atlantic islands. Churchill told him that he planned to occupy the Canary Islands, perhaps even before a still-feared Nazi attack through Spain. Such a move, Churchill conceded, would inevitably cause a German-supported counterattack by Spain, in which case Britain could not live up to its promise to Portugal to defend the Azores. Would the United States do so instead? Roosevelt agreed, on the understanding that Portugal would make the request of him. Later Churchill called off the attack on the Canaries, but the incident showed how far Roosevelt was willing—given a crisis situation in Iberia—to allow a move as important as the occupation of the Azores to turn on Churchill’s initiative.
Churchill was ready with a hard line on Japan, too. Following the Sunday services he proposed to Roosevelt a joint declaration to Tokyo that “any further encroachment by Japan in the Southwest Pacific” would produce a situation in which Britain and the United States “would be compelled to take counter measures even though these might lead to war” between Japan and the two nations. Churchill, under pressure from the Dutch and the Pacific Dominions to enlist American aid if Japan attacked, wanted to intertwine American and British efforts in the Pacific just as had been done in the Atlantic. Above all, Churchill feared a showdown that would leave Britain, with its weakened defenses in Southeast Asia, holding the fort alone against the Japanese. He was certain that only the stiffest warning from Washington would have any deterrent effect.
Roosevelt was more wary. Even less than Churchill did he seek a war with Japan, but while the Prime Minister thought a showdown could be avoided through firmness, the President preferred to drag things out, to parley, to stall the Japanese along, to let them save face, at least for a month or so. Hence, instead of sending off Churchill’s near-ultimatum, he proposed to inform Nomura that if Tokyo would promise to pull out of Indochina, Washington would try to settle remaining issues with Japan, but that if the Japanese failed to respond to this proposal and continued their military expansion, the President would then have to take steps that might result in war between the United States and Japan. Churchill went along with this procedure, which left the initiative wholly with the President.
By now both men must have seen the veiled but acute differences that separated them on Japan. Churchill could gamble on a strong line, for such a line would either compel Japan to give up China and Indochina and further expansion and take the pressure off the British in the Far East, or it would produce an explosion. An explosion that propelled the United States into a Pacific war would project it into the Atlantic war, too—Churchill’s cardinal goal. The President preferred to delay any showdown until his Army and Navy were stronger, public opinion more receptive, and a two-front war more manageable. Meantime, he would follow his policy of Atlantic First.
While the two leaders agreeably negotiated and gently sparred, the military chiefs conducted almost wholly separate discussions on the Prince of Wales. First Sea Lord Sir Dudley Pound, Sir John Dill, and their cohorts tried to convince the Americans that increased aid and even intervention now would bring victory much sooner and more cheaply; the American Joint Chiefs tried to show the bareness of their cupboard, drained as it had been by the needs of Britain and other nations. Already in the discussions there were harbingers of future disagreement, as the British seemed bent on bombing, blockading, enveloping, and wearing out Germany, while the Americans—particularly Marshall—contended that it would be necessary for Allied ground forces to invade the Continent and close with the enemy. There were happier omens, too—especially the discovery that American and British officers could differ and occasionally clash, but also communicate, agree, and forge a closer working co-operation, each with considerable respect for the other side.
Strangely, the significance of the Argentia Conference would lie far less in strategic decisions and commitments, of which there were virtually none, than in a discussion of war aims toward which Roosevelt and Churchill had done little advance planning, but out of which came the Atlantic Charter, one of the most compelling statements of the war.
The President had discouraged open talk in the administration of specific postwar aims. It was all right to discuss lofty objectives, but debate over ways and means, he felt, might create dissension and divert attention from immediate diplomatic and military problems. Then, too, discussion of postwar matters assumed that there would be “war” first—which in turn could reopen old wounds from the League of Nations battle. “I have not the slightest objection toward your trying your hand at an outline of the post-war picture,” he told Adolf A. Berle in June. “But for Heaven’s sake don’t ever let the columnists hear of it….”
But events in 1941 forced Roosevelt’s hand. The Russo-German war was already raising dire questions of the future of truncated Poland; the Polish government-in-exile in London had to be considered, as did the big Polish voting blocs at home. Roosevelt was concerned that London might be making secret territorial deals, as in days of yore. Hull and Welles were already pressing for nondiscriminatory postwar economic policies. And there was a large body of sentiment among both Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s constituents for an evocation of moral principles and a statement of war aims—especially as to a new League of Nations.
It was best, Roosevelt had decided, to stick to very general principles and to very realistic, functional institutions. Churchill, always eager to couple British and American policy more tightly, wanted to make more specific commitments. He and his aides produced a draft that started off with high-sounding promises and got down to business in a call for “fair and equitable distribution of essential produce” both between and within nations. Welles was disturbed by the vagueness of this economic plank. A Wilsonian himself, he could never forget that his chief back home would be acutely displeased if the way was left open for autarchy. After some sharp bargaining with Churchill, while Roosevelt looked on sympathetically, the Undersecretary gained as strong a statement as the Prime Minister felt would be acceptable to the Dominions, with their stake in imperial preference. There was no reference to trade liberalization, to Welles’s keen disappointment.
The crucial discussion of war aims came late in the morning of August 11 in the Admiral’s quarters on the Augusta, which served as Roosevelt’s office and mess. Bright sunlight streamed through the portholes. Roosevelt sat in a gray suit, his shirt open at the collar; Churchill was still in naval uniform; Welles and Hopkins and one or two of the British staff sat by. The meeting was somewhat strained. Churchill was still upset by Welles’s demand for free trade, and by Roosevelt’s proposal that their joint statement make clear that there had been no commitments for the future between the two governments. Commitments were precisely what Churchill wanted to bring back to his country and to hearten the occupied nations. But the President feared the isolationist reaction to “secret agreements,” and Churchill had to settle for only slightly stronger language.
It was on postwar international organization that the two leaders had their bluntest confrontation. Churchill asked the President if the charter could explicitly endorse some kind of “effective international organization.” Roosevelt demurred; he said that he himself would not favor the creation of a new Assembly of the League of Nations, at least until after a period of time during which a British-American police force maintained security. Churchill warned that a vague plank would arouse opposition from strong internationalists. Roosevelt agreed, but he felt that he had to be politically realistic. Churchill gave in, with the understanding that he could add some language that would strengthen the plank without uttering the dread words “international organization” or invoking the ghost of Woodrow Wilson.
The final text of the Charter was agreed to on August 11. It read:
The President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill, representing His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom, being met together, deem it right to make known certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries on which they base their hopes for a better future for the world.
FIRST—Their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other;
SECOND—They desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned;
THIRD—They respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them;
FOURTH—They will endeavor, with due respect for their existing obligations, to further the enjoyment by all states, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity;
FIFTH—They desire to bring about the fullest collaboration between all Nations in the economic field with the object of securing, for all, improved labor standards, economic advancement, and social security;
SIXTH—After the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny, they hope to see established a peace which will afford to all Nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want;
SEVENTH—Such a peace should enable all men to traverse the high seas and oceans without hindrance;
EIGHTH—They believe that all of the Nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons, must come to the abandonment of the use of force. Since no future peace can be maintained if land, sea, or air armaments continue to be employed by Nations which threaten, or may threaten, aggression outside of their frontiers, they believe, pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security, that the disarmament of such Nations is essential. They will likewise aid and encourage all other practicable measures which will lighten for peace-loving peoples the crushing burden of armaments.
[Signed] FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
[Signed] WINSTON S. CHURCHILL
The Prince of Wales steamed out of Argentia Harbor late on the twelfth, as Roosevelt stood on the Augusta quarterdeck close by and the band played “Auld Lang Syne.” The two leaders parted as friends and comrades. Roosevelt had learned something of Churchill’s persuasiveness and persistence; Churchill had found how hard it was to commit the President when he refused to be cornered. Each had glimpsed the other’s political problems—Churchill, the continuing threat of American isolationism, memories of World War I and the League, fear of binding commitments; Roosevelt, the claims of the Dominions and Empire on London, the Prime Minister’s need to clear decisions with his War Cabinet within the hour, the hunger of the British for a far better postwar world than they had known. The two had amused, propagandized, flattered, annoyed, upstaged, and yielded to each other; their friendship had survived intact, deepened, and was ready for the heavier pressures to come.
The Augusta stood out to sea shortly after the British departed. It seemed as though history could not let go of the event. A journey that began in the company of old Scandinavian royalty and culminated in a convocation of the political and military leadership of the Atlantic world ended on the coast of Maine, with a visit from the President’s old headmaster, Endicott Peabody. And as Roosevelt left Portland by train, a young assistant to Secretary Knox, referred to in the Navy log as “Adelai Stevenson,” hurried in to see the President on an urgent strike matter.
It remained for Felix Frankfurter to take the full measure of the Atlantic meeting. The Justice was wont to write fulsome letters of praise to the President, but for once he did not rise above the occasion. Not even constant misuse could rob some phrases of their noble meaning, he wrote. Somewhere in the Atlantic, Roosevelt and Churchill had made history for the world.
“And like all truly great historic events, it wasn’t what was said or done that defined the scope of the achievement. It’s always the forces—the impalpable, the spiritual forces, the hopes, the purposes, the dreams and the endeavors—that are released that matter….
“It was all grandly conceived and finely executed….The deed and the spirit and the invigoration of a common human fraternity in the hearts of men will endure—and steel our will and kindle our actions toward the goal of ridding the world of this horror.”