WELL, IT IS NOW 60 hours since the Old Smiler returned to the White House from his great adventure,” William Allen White wrote in his Gazette on Roosevelt’s return from Casablanca. “Biting nails—good, hard, bitter Republican nails—we are compelled to admit that Franklin Roosevelt is the most unaccountable and on the whole the most enemy-baffling President that this United States has ever seen…a certain vast impudent courage….Well, damn your smiling old picture, here it is….We, who hate your gaudy guts, salute you.”
Not all the Roosevelt watchers back home were as gallant as the old Kansas Republican. After the first flush of excitement over the President’s trip abroad, Washington seemed to revert to its usual condition of guerrilla warfare. Power was so fragmented on Capitol Hill that Congress was able neither to support the President’s domestic program wholeheartedly nor to muster support for real alternatives. But Congress could always investigate. The Dies Committee girded itself for further onslaughts against federal bureaucrats. Congressman Howard W. Smith, of Virginia, long a conservative Democratic foe of the President, fished for administrative failures.
Politics seemed to have fallen to a new wartime low of spite and pettiness. The kind of publicity that the President particularly detested was aroused by his provocative nomination early in January of Edward J. Flynn as Minister to Australia. Flynn had been exonerated of the much-publicized charge of having city workers pave a courtyard of his country home with city-owned paving blocks, but the chairman of the third-term campaign was still fair game. Willkie called the nomination crassly cynical. Flynn ran into such heavy weather on Capitol Hill that, by mutual agreement, the President withdrew his nomination. It did not help matters that during the furore over Edward Flynn the movie actor Errol Flynn was undergoing a lurid trial for statutory rape of two teen-agers, or that the other Flynn also was found not guilty.
Some of Roosevelt’s friends were as critical of the defense effort as his enemies. “One year after Pearl Harbor,” reported a Senate Education and Labor Subcommittee headed by New Deal Senator Claude Pepper, “the Nation looks in vain for a unified program of all-out war production. Each new crisis in production evokes a piecemeal attempt at solution.” In the House, the Tolan Committee called for an end to “the drift” in war production. Washington infighting seemed brisker than ever. Czars jousted with czars, army officials with Navy, civilians with soldiers. The manpower program was in a muddle. Senator Vandenberg complained in his diary of a “complete and total lack of authentic liaison between the White House and Congress in respect to war responsibilities.”
The President sailed through all these reefs and shoals with his usual outward imperturbability and private annoyance. Editor White watched Roosevelt at a press conference on February 12. “He seemed to be gay, sure of himself, a bit festive at times, informative, indeed illuminating,” noted the long-time observer of famous men. He noticed that Roosevelt had grown notably heavier since coming to the White House. But “his growth has not been in paunch. It has been above his navel. His shoulders have widened. His neck and jowls have filled out. His head has taken a new form….” Roosevelt was a vital person, White kept thinking. But that night, sitting after dinner in the new Statler Hotel while Roosevelt gave a Lincoln’s Day speech, he felt that in the few hours Roosevelt had grown tired. His voice seemed to lose its fire. In the final sentences his voice dropped, and White could hardly hear him.
White ruminated on Roosevelt’s enemies. There were two Republican schools of thought about the President. One “speaks of him trippingly on the tongue as that ‘God damn Roosevelt,’ short, snappy, and staccato, but without grinding the vocal gears. The other crowd snarls it savagely, adagio, making two words out of God—like Gawud—and two out of damn—like da-yum—growled with heart-pumping scorn and generally with a table-pounding drumbeat. I belong to the lighter, staccato left wing….”
After a year or so of “all-out” war mobilization, though, some in Washington were wondering if the President as Chief Executive was not his own worst enemy.
In a farsighted move a year and a half before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt had established the Office for Emergency Management in the Executive Office of the President. The OEM had become a peculiarly Rooseveltian instrument—flexible, informal, adaptable—for spawning, nourishing, and embracing a host of defense units that Roosevelt could not fit easily into the existing departmental structure and that captured far more public attention than the mother office ever did. The OEM, indeed, later was pushed aside, but the concept and spirit of emergency management hung over all the fifty or sixty war agencies that would come to life. The origin of the two words is not clear; probably they were Roosevelt’s. Certainly they summed up the curious combination of orderly management and crisis government that characterized his war administration.
That administration never settled down; it never freed itself of the prod and aura of crisis. The rapidly changing battle needs, the stupendous appetite for war production, the ever-shifting impact of science and technology, the zest and combativeness of the chieftains Roosevelt recruited for his war agencies, and the President’s own administrative habits kept his regime in almost constant turmoil. Students of public administration would long argue whether the creativity, flexibility, competitiveness, even rugged individualism nurtured by those habits outweighed the wasted effort, faulty coordination, disorder, delays, muddle. The striking fact was that the White House itself, despite its boasts and claims, was never really satisfied with its organization for war, as evidenced by its continual making and breaking of war chiefs and their agencies until the European war was almost over.
On the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor—two and one half years after the United States began its first serious mobilization, in the wake of the fall of France—the administration still faced crises of production. The nation had not achieved the balanced, assured output necessary for its great offensives in the Mediterranean and the Pacific. Production of military airplanes more than doubled from 1941 to 1942 but was still short of the President’s call for 60,000 planes; the output of combat planes fell even more below his goals. The navy yards turned out an aircraft carrier and a dozen battleships and cruisers, but the loss of four carriers and five heavy cruisers in 1942 still left fleet strength little greater at the end of 1942 than before Pearl Harbor. Landing-craft output skyrocketed but lagged behind both goals and needs. The production of merchant ships totaled over eight million tons—seven times the 1941 output—but still a million tons short of the President’s announced goal—a serious lag considering that the Allies had lost an average of a million tons a month. Somervell admitted to Raymond Clapper on the last day of 1942 that shipment of four hundred tanks to North Africa had cleared out the surplus. Artillery and machine-gun turnout was also short.
The President had been a little defensive about war production in his State of the Union address to Congress in January 1943. He granted that plane and tank production fell short numerically—“stress the word numerically”—but noted that models were changing, becoming heavier and more complex. The arsenal of democracy, he said, was making good, and he hit out at criticism based on guesswork and malicious falsification. But he remained dissatisfied with war production during early 1943. “The war goes on and on—” he wrote to Beaverbrook in March, “and while I think we are gaining, it is difficult for you and me to curb our impatience, especially when our military and naval friends keep saying that this cannot be done and that cannot be done and this time schedule seems so everlastingly slow to us.” A few weeks later Baruch reported that shipbuilding was going well, escort vessels improving, high-octane gasoline coming along better, but aircraft production still lagged. “We are making planes but not as many as we should.”
Manpower was a growing problem all through 1943. Manpower! For ten years the Roosevelt administration had struggled to find jobs for workers; now it had to find workers for jobs. Over-all statistics looked good but they concealed serious problems. Unemployment, which was still running at about nine million in mid-1940, fell off to less than a million by mid-1943. In the same span of time womanpower rose from almost fourteen to almost nineteen million. In February, after months of complaints by Congress and the press, Roosevelt called for a minimum wartime work week of forty-eight hours in defense plants and federal agencies; by mid-1943 average weekly hours in manufacturing were about forty-five, though shipbuilders and some others were working sixty hours or more. Turnover and absenteeism, however, continued at alarming rates. The Boeing plant in Seattle, which had 39,000 employees in June 1943, had employed 250,000 people during the previous three years. Labor supply was also uneven across the country. On the West Coast and in the Northeast it reached emergency proportions.
Roosevelt seemed curiously passive about the manpower crisis, which had been predicted months ahead. The War Manpower Commission under Paul McNutt had been unable to cope with the situation in advance, in part because the WPB and the armed services had far more control of the situation than did the commission, in part because the manpower crisis was slower in showing up than rival crises, in part because McNutt neither was a strong chief nor ran a strong agency. The President toyed with a plan to make Ickes Secretary of Labor, with control of manpower, but gave up the idea when people—including Ickes’s young wife—warned that the two jobs would be too much for the sixty-nine-year-old Interior chief. Roosevelt seemed far more upset by charges that too many federal civilian employees were receiving deferments than by the broader problem.
“I will make you a good-sized bet,” he complained to Harold Smith, “that in the hundreds of Government offices people—young men without a lot of children—are running mimeograph machines or blue-printing machines when the work could just as well be done by women or older men.” Manpower was, perhaps, too vast and collective and even impersonal a problem to engage Roosevelt’s feelings, which usually seized on specifics close at hand. In the end he kept McNutt as head of manpower. As it turned out, the steps that might have headed off some labor shortages—use of occupation rather than dependency status as the main test in Selective Service, for example, or the placing of war plants and contracts in areas of high labor supply—were not taken when they could have had full effect. Problems were met mainly by improvisation, such as emergency recruitment campaigns and furloughing trained workers from the Army. By mid-1943 the White House was deeply concerned about the growing manpower crisis; by the end of the year it was facing the grim need of national-service legislation.
All these emergencies paled, however, next to the labor ferment of 1943—at least in the crisis management of the White House. “The labor problem is again to the fore—” Roosevelt wrote to Mackenzie King late in the year, “but then scarcely six months have ever gone by since I have been in office, the past ten and a half years, without a ‘labor crisis.’ ” In 1943 hardly a week went by without a crisis. The year had just started when 15,000 coal miners left their jobs in a wildcat strike, and the President had to order them back to work. Walkouts in rubber, plastics, railroads, coal—several times—and a host of other industries followed. So often was Roosevelt forced to order men back to work that the White House lost something of its legitimacy and force as a court of last appeal. Throughout these troubles the administration was under heavy pressure from Congressmen who were worried about their constituents’ fuel and other needs—or who saw good fishing in troubled waters.
Bituminous-coal mines became the stormiest battleground. A two-year contract between miners and operators was due to expire in the spring of 1943. John L. Lewis, as truculent and histrionic as ever, was demanding a two-dollar-a-day wage boost in a flat challenge to the President’s stabilization program. Lewis had become a towering but isolated figure. His wife had just died; he had broken angrily with Murray; he hated Roosevelt; he was now the villain of the radicals, as once he had been their hero. Having led in the demolition of the old mediation board, he now welcomed his chance to boycott the War Labor Board, which he publicly exhorted to resign and cease casting its “black shadow” over American workers.
Late in April the miners began walking out. “Not as President—not as Commander in Chief—but as the friend of the men who work in the coal mines,” the President urged the men to return to the pits.
In the fall of 1940, when Lewis had appealed to his miners to vote against Roosevelt, they had stood by their friend in the White House; now the President was appealing to these same friends to stick to the battle of production—and they were standing by Lewis. The Commander in Chief moved to seize the mines; he, Byrnes, and Sherwood prepared a fireside chat to the people. Even while the President was on his way to the oval office and its microphones, word came that the miners would return to work in two days. The President went ahead with his talk anyway. He spoke in urgent tones.
“A stopping of the coal supply, even for a short time, would involve a gamble with the lives of American soldiers and sailors and the future security of our whole people.” He blamed the strike directly on the leaders of the mine workers. “You miners have sons in the Army and Navy and Marine Corps. You have sons who at this very minute—this split second—may be fighting in New Guinea, or in the Aleutian Islands, or Guadalcanal, or Tunisia, or China, or protecting troop ships and supplies against submarines on the high seas.” He cited case after case of miners or sons of miners who had been wounded or decorated. He appealed to the miners’ pride: “The toughness of your sons in our armed forces is not surprising. They come of fine, rugged stock….” He concluded: “I believe the coal miners will not continue the strike against their government.”
February 2, 1940, Rollin Kirby, reprinted by permission of the New York Post
That night, with the miners headed back to work, the President celebrated Byrnes’s birthday by throwing a party for those who had worked on the broadcast. The President led in singing “Happy Birthday” and then rendered “When I Grow Too Old to Dream” jointly with his War Mobilizer. Sherwood was the life of the party, dancing and flapping his arms as he sang “When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along.”
But the speech had been wasted on the wrong occasion. The miners, now back at work, awaited the Labor Board’s decision, then struck again when they were denied their pay boost. The summer weeks were full of snarls. Lewis “recommended” that the miners return to work but somehow his order now had less effect. Ickes, who held possession of the pits as Solid Fuels Administrator, bickered with the War Labor Board, which suspected him of making secret deals with Lewis, and demanded that the President order Attorney General Biddle to stop arresting strikers. Congress fretted and thundered—and passed the Smith-Connally bill, restricting labor’s right to strike. Roosevelt vetoed the bill, in part because it collided with labor’s no-strike pledge, only to have Congress pass it over his veto by wide margins.
The White House was cabled the text of an editorial in the army paper Stars and Stripes: “…Speaking for the American soldier, John Lewis, damn your coal black soul.”
His patience running out, the President ordered Stimson, McNutt, and Selective Service Director General Lewis B. Hershey to waive the age-deferment provisions and start drafting striking miners between thirty-eight and forty-five years old. This was only a temporary expedient. Miners drifted back to work during the summer, then began walking out again in the fall. Once again the President appealed to them; he ordered Ickes to repossess the mines and let the Labor Board offer more money for more work. Most miners returned; some stayed out. But coal troubles badgered the President until well into 1944. It seemed impossible to come to grips with Lewis. Byrnes was convinced that the miners’ chief was sabotaging production even when he seemed to be co-operating, and wanted his chief to tell Lewis so, but Roosevelt would not. He knew the limits of his power.
Coal was not the President’s only burden. The railroad unions were equally militant and equally hungry for a wage increase, but the circumstances were markedly different. The railroad unions had long held a special relation with the federal government under the Railway Labor Act, with its orderly mediation procedures. When an emergency board recommended an eight-cents-an-hour increase for railroad employees early in 1943, and the Director of Economic Stabilization set it aside, the Chairman of the National Railway Labor Panel, William M. Leiserson, appealed to the President to sustain the emergency board. A deadlock ensued between Leiserson, who had for so long umpired railroad labor disputes that in a later day he would have been dubbed “Mr. Railroad Labor,” and stabilization officials. There were continuing appeals to the President. But railroad labor, divided between operating and “non-op” unions and into various crafts, was far less united than the mine workers. After the wage dispute had simmered through the summer and early fall, several of the unions became restive, and Leiserson raised Byrnes’s temper by virtually boycotting the economic stabilizers.
Matters came to a head just before Christmas. With the railroad unions threatening to strike, Roosevelt met for hours, day after day, with the parties. Railroad labor split: the chiefs of the trainmen, engineers, and non-ops agreed to White House arbitration, but the heads of the other brotherhoods would not yield despite direct appeals by the President. Two days after Christmas 1943 the President directed Stimson to seize and operate the railroads. Three weeks later the government gave up control after the President had arbitrated the dispute.
On New Year’s Eve Marshall had been so concerned by the railroad situation, Byrnes heard, that he considered going on the radio, describing the military aspect, and then resigning. So 1943 had ended on the labor front as it had started—in crisis.
The disputes that had crowded into the White House were complex and varied, but they had one common aspect: resort to the President. The White House became a conciliation office, mediation board, arbitration court, all in one. And it was not well equipped for this function. Pressure, haste, and improvisation in crisis marked its procedures. The President, as usual, maintained his marvelous temper under the stress, but his personal approach exacted its price. Thus when union chiefs were claiming that the President himself had promised them the eight cents, Byrnes had to inform his chief gently that he probably had done so. And the labor crises cut deeply into the President’s time, often during periods when great strategic decisions were being shaped.
If Roosevelt depended all too readily on his flair for personal management in handling home-front crises during 1943, those crises were also having an impact on his presidential organization. Under constant pressure the White House was not only expanding, but it was gaining new form and power. Even while the President stuck to his old administrative habits, a new executive structure was arising around him.
Changes came by fits and starts. A year after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt’s defense organization was still a public issue. Appointing czars, shoring up the WPB, making Byrnes Economic Stabilization Director—these and other steps did not long satisfy the critics. In Congress the Truman and the Migration Committees continued to call for more centralized authority. A Senate Military Affairs Subcommittee reported that war mobilization was “in crisis.” Nelson was under fire for not standing up to the military in the scramble for supplies and production, and the WPB was racked by disputes among its top officials. In the Senate friends of the President sponsored a bill for a super-superagency that would take over and boss a dozen war agencies. Byrnes, struggling with a tide of stabilization problems that cut across bureaucratic empires and their czars, began to lean toward the idea of an office of war mobilization with broad powers to direct the whole war effort.
For a moment the President toyed with a move he had long resisted—to re-establish the WPB as the supreme mobilization agency on the model of the War Industries Board of World War I. And he even decided to appoint the very man, Bernard Baruch, who had headed the earlier board and had the prestige, status, and self-assurance to rebuild and command an agency rivaling the White House in publicity and power. He must have been sorely disturbed by the state of mobilization and the conflicts between and within his war agencies—especially the WPB—to appeal to Baruch. But appeal to him he did, in a letter that frankly admitted that he was “coming back to the elder statesman for assistance.” Surprised and pleased, Baruch debated whether he should give up his freedom—as symbolized by his “office” on a Lafayette Park bench—and whether he was physically up to it. He was on his way to New York City to consult his doctor when, as luck would have it, he fell ill, and it was a week before he returned to Washington to tell the President he had decided to accept. Roosevelt, leaning back in his chair and puffing on an uplifted cigarette, greeted him with his usual geniality.
“Mr. President,” Baruch began, “I’m here to report for duty.” Roosevelt did not reply; he seemed not even to have heard. Baruch knew something had gone wrong. The President said: “Let me tell you about Ibn Saud, Bernie.” He chatted a bit about the Mid-East. Then he abruptly stopped talking, excused himself, and departed for a Cabinet meeting. He never again mentioned the WPB post to Baruch. Swallowing his pride, groping for some explanation, Baruch concluded that there must have been intervention by Hopkins, who seemed to Baruch full of the suspicion and self-protectiveness that grip men so close to the throne.
Doubtless Hopkins did influence Roosevelt’s change of heart, but a far more important factor also intervened. Both the President and his Economic Stabilization Director were leaning more and more during early 1943 toward the idea of a mobilization office directly under the President rather than in a vast, independent new agency under a new superczar. Byrnes had been working in the east wing for some months and was already dealing with a variety of problems outside his stabilization duties. He proposed a new office of war mobilization with wide powers over war production, allocation, and manpower (except for men in uniform), that he take on this broader role, and that his job as Economic Stabilizer be passed on to Fred M. Vinson, a former Congressman and an old friend.
It was not easy for Roosevelt to go along with this plan. The press had already dubbed Byrnes “Assistant President” and “Chief of Staff”—terms Roosevelt disliked—and throughout his presidency he had resisted sharing his powers with any rival person or office of this sort. On the other hand, he trusted Byrnes. The former Justice was not one to jump onto a white charger and gallop off with the war effort. Long sanded and buffed in the Southern folkways and parliamentary grooves of Capitol Hill, he was cautious, judicious, if narrow-gauged in vision and imagination. He preferred to deal with appeals from clashing agencies rather than to issue plans and commands from on high. He proposed to continue to operate with a tiny staff, headed by Roosevelt’s old friend and adviser Benjamin Cohen. Instead of congealing into a whole new bureaucratic layer, his office would co-ordinate policy among the existing war agencies. And he would claim the services of the ablest people—even of Baruch, who gamely continued to advise Byrnes and the White House.
Roosevelt’s fight against inflation went on amid crises, controversy, and congressional onslaughts. Exhausted, ill, and bleeding from his political wounds, Henderson resigned as OPA head at the end of 1942. The President replaced him with former Senator Prentiss M. Brown, in the hope of improving the agency’s relations with Congress, but, with Henderson out of the way, Congressmen redoubled their efforts to pressure OPA into relaxing price controls and raising price ceilings, at least for their more organized and articulate constituents. Business condemned it for being too tough, labor for being too soft, and even its own officials for lacking direction and drive.
Prices in turn squeezed farmers and workers, whose own income was regulated by agencies other than the OPA. By heavy majorities Congress passed the Bankhead bill, which would bar the deduction of subsidies paid to farmers in the computation of parity prices. Roosevelt was painfully aware that every increase in prices—especially food prices—fueled the drive of militant unions like the Mine Workers to break through the Little Steel wage formula. Proclaiming that nobody had fought harder than he to help farmers get parity prices for their crops, he vetoed the Bankhead bill and a week later issued a dramatic call to “hold the line” on prices and wages. The next day Senators and Representatives deluged the White House with requests to see the President personally; Roosevelt told Watson to pass them on to Byrnes. Philip Murray, the usually soft-spoken union chief, banged on Byrnes’s table to drive home his point that unless he could deliver wage increases to CIO members he would be outflanked by Lewis and his Mine Workers. But Roosevelt seemed unmoved by the clamor and the complaints. He had the OPA follow his hold-the-line call with a rollback order that actually shaved the prices of some foods.
The biggest feud within the administration was yet to come. All through the spring of 1943 a dispute was brewing that would erupt into the most spectacular rupture among Roosevelt’s crisis agencies. The antagonists were Jesse Jones, Secretary of Commerce and boss of the RFC, and Vice President Henry Wallace, head of the Board of Economic Warfare. Even for Roosevelt’s administration the two were gloriously antipodal: Jones, a onetime RFC member under Hoover, taciturn, shrewd, practical, cautious; Wallace, hero of the Lib Labs, dreamy, Utopian, even mystical, yet with his own bent for management and power. Jones’s distaste for Wallace was less ideological than professional; he could not abide the BEW’s speculative practices, its overbuying, its dubious projects. War or no war, the business of the RFC was business. His corporation, Jones announced flatly, “does not pay $2 for something it can buy for $1.” Liberals roared over the story—possibly true—that when a fire consumed a New Jersey warehouse filled with tons of precious rubber, Jones remarked, “What’s the trouble? It was insured, wasn’t it?”
Roosevelt’s penchant for overlapping assignments had joined the two men in unholy wedlock. The BEW was empowered to obtain strategic materials from foreign sources through preclusive buying and other methods, but it was not given its own funds, and the RFC remained banker for BEW’s foreign activities. BEW ordered RFC to finance the planting in Haiti of Cryptostegia—a rubber project dear to Roosevelt’s heart. Jones refused. BEW then asked RFC to finance an experimental rubber project in Africa. Again RFC resisted. For months Jones and Wallace waged an intensive but quiet fight at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue over the key question of which agency could veto what.
The struggle surfaced during the heat of June 1943. Inflamed by Jones’s latest effort to crop his powers, Wallace denounced the Texan for “hamstringing” the war effort. Jones called Wallace’s charges hysterical, dastardly, malicious, and false. The President asked Byrnes to “get Henry and Jesse together and harmonize their differences.” The two men came to an armistice meeting in Byrnes’s office but refused to smoke a peace pipe; Jones would not even speak to the Vice President, and Byrnes feared that he would physically assault him. Within hours the two men were publicly hurling charges back and forth.
Prompted by Byrnes, the President now acted with dispatch. He fired both gladiators from their war jobs by abolishing the BEW, setting up an Office of Economic Warfare under Leo T. Crowley, and switching the Export-Import Bank, the rubber and petroleum agencies, and other dukedoms out of Jones’s empire and into the new OEW. To the heads of all federal agencies he dispatched a stern warning that while he recognized the nervous strain they were working under in wartime, if they disagreed among themselves publicly instead of submitting their dispute to Byrnes or himself, “I ask that when you release the statement for publication, you send to me a letter of resignation.”
Roosevelt’s sternness impressed the country, but his aides were probably more skeptical. They must have doubted that their chief would change his old administrative habits for long. He had issued a similar warning the year before. One assistant, indeed, knew that whatever Wallace’s and Jones’s transgressions, much of the blame for Washington’s civil war lay with the President. Foreign economic policy was a case in point. In February 1943 Budget Director Smith had cautioned his chief that the North African operation had provided a warning signal of “impending breakdowns in our international operations.” Item by item Smith described duplication, confusion, disorganization—the division of authority and responsibility among a host of agencies, the muddle over dealing with foreign requirements, the fragmented foreign-aid and subsidy operations in Latin America, the split control of imports and development projects, the tendency of competing agencies to make isolated spot adjustments rather than to follow a comprehensive plan. Smith proposed a basic reorganization and consolidation of agencies.
As usual the President waited for a crisis before acting. As usual he acted by reshuffling people and creating a new agency. Smith contended that whatever the advantage of keen competition of several new agencies during the formative period, a strongly unified foreign administration was now imperative. But whatever Roosevelt’s impatience with public brawling, he essentially did not mind—he even welcomed—competition.
“A little rivalry is stimulating, you know,” he once said to Frances Perkins. “It keeps everybody going to prove he is a better fellow than the next man. It keeps them honest too.”
Still, war has its own imperatives. At some point at the height of the war the first Chief Executive—the improviser, the disorganizer, the unsettler—gave way to a second. Perhaps it was when he set up the Office of War Mobilization and an “assistant President.” Perhaps it was when he confessed, “I get so many conflicting recommendations my head is splitting.” The shift was gradual, occurring in his slowly increasing reliance on the White House staff. By the end of 1943 virtually a new system of presidential government had grown out of the makeshift arrangements of old. The foundation had been laid for a powerful Executive Office, a huge war structure, and a vastly expanded social-welfare organization, which were to characterize the presidency for decades to come. During World War II, indeed, the modern presidency was created—and by a man who temperamentally had a decided preference for the White House as it was in the days of Woodrow Wilson or Theodore Roosevelt.
While the demands of war forced the creation of modern presidential government, violence itself was being revolutionized. Modern war had become essentially a warfare of machines, and the weapons rolling off American assembly lines startled even science-fiction writers: radar-guided rockets, amphibious tanks, bazookas, proximity-fused shells, napalm jellied-gasoline flame throwers. Old cavalryman George Patton concluded that “we will have to devise some new method of warfare.”
Weapons technology, the imperatives of war, and the improvisations of Roosevelt fitted productively. The speed of weapons development resulted from just those Rooseveltian habits that produced confusion elsewhere: division of authority, overlapping responsibilities, no unified program, changing agencies, improvisation in crisis, and reliance on talented individuals, not orderly administration.
Prewar weapons development had lagged. In the peacetime Army, Marshall told Stimson, the technical services were preeminent because “the fellow that controls the contracts and expenditures…is the only one Congress is interested in,” and Congress controlled the purse strings. For the Army, cost accounting was more important than weapons development. While Congress cut weapons-research appropriations, Hitler drove thousands of scientists from Europe to America and stirred American scientists to political action. During 1938-40 the National Academy of Sciences urged a government organization of science to provide the United States with better weapons and techniques. The problem and the forces gravitated toward Roosevelt, the center of power.
After establishing the civilian National Defense Research Committee and appointing Vannevar Bush chairman, the President had requested co-operation from the War and Navy Departments. To the surprise of many, the services eventually complied. Swamped with heavy demands to train pilots, construct tank factories, adapt to jungle, desert, and mountain warfare, the services had little time left for inventing new weapons. The admission of civilians to full-fledged military status, especially for the invention of dramatic new weapons, was a bitter pill, but Stimson and Marshall insisted on co-operation.
At first, the technical services and the scientists merely stayed out of each other’s way, for, as Bush found, “basically, research and procurement are incompatible.” As the gap between NDRC research and Ordnance procurement grew, however, a crisis threatened: the research tended to be isolated and useless. Prodded by Hopkins, Bush, and Conant, in June 1941 Roosevelt reshuffled agencies and personnel, over the objections of Army Ordnance, the WMC, outside scientists, the OPM, and Ickes, who had a different plan. Though the President created the Office of Scientific Research and Development to bridge the gap between research and production, and shifted Bush from NDRC to the new OSRD, power remained fragmented, and no comprehensive plan emerged. But OSRD and the services learned to compromise their differences.
While NDRC was in its infant stages, Roosevelt had ridden the momentum of public dismay after the fall of France to set up an American-British exchange of secret scientific information. Soon the British arrived in Washington with a black box full of scientific secrets. Five months later, the President reciprocated by sending Conant to London to reveal American developments. A blatant violation of neutrality, the Anglo-American scientific trade provided an early boost to American weapons progress and later helped co-ordinate existing Allied scientific effort. Roosevelt’s masterly timing, disrespect for ordained practices, and improvisation gave the speed necessary for American weapons superiority.
In a mimicry of Roosevelt’s methods, OSRD achieved military break-throughs in most unmilitary fashion. With no research laboratories of its own, OSRD farmed out research jobs to the universities and industrial laboratories, which in turn garnered scientists from all over the nation; one radiation center had sixty-nine different institutions represented on its staff. The odd mixture of Harvard University and Standard Oil produced the no less odd and no less powerful mixture of soap powder and gasoline called “napalm,” which was to ravage almost every major city in Japan. OSRD loosely co-ordinated the research, collaborated with the British, urged new weapons on the Army, and won 99 per cent of its fights with Selective Service over deferments of scientists. On balance the decentralization and loose co-ordination probably gave speed to weapons developments.
As scientists puzzled out new weapons, the military puzzled over how to use them. The airplane was already making old strategies obsolete and forcing commanders to re-evaluate their weapons. By mid-1943, the Navy’s most valuable ships were aircraft carriers, the most destructive weapons were air-borne bombs, and the defeat of Germany seemed to rest most heavily on the long waves of American and British bombers. To defeat submarines, the airplane was aided by radar and statistically deduced search patterns; to destroy Germany’s most vaunted air weapon—the V-1 rocket bombs—scientists developed SCR-594 ground radar, the M-9 electrical director for antiaircraft guns, and the radio proximity fuse. Soon most of the German missiles would be destroyed in the air. But the record was uneven, as trial and error slowly built up knowledge of how to use the weapons. The thousand-bomber flights were awe-inspiring, as were the mathematically based analyses of photographs of bomb damage, but the actual effect on German military capacity remained to be seen.
Weapons technology had endless built-in problems. Roosevelt and his advisers worried about using the proximity fuse for fear the Germans would copy it. Tank crews found the gyrostabilizers on tank guns too complex and delicate to manage, so disconnected them. All down the line, new weapons created problems of use that the military had to solve in action.
In the spring of 1942, Stimson and Bush recognized the problems and urged Roosevelt to create a Joint Committee on New Weapons and Equipment to bring civilian scientists in at the strategic planning level. Roosevelt acquiesced to the co-ordination, but only at a lower level—under the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This co-ordination was at once not high enough for atomic-bomb planning and too high for most weapons. Civilians were not brought into contact even with staff planners. Co-ordination lagged.
Radar systems were a big exception; they were the best coordinated and most useful in combat of all OSRD projects. Some of radar’s success traces to Stimson’s almost Victorian sense of family. Throughout the war, he was one of the leading exponents of new weapons and techniques, and especially of radar. He had become fascinated by radar through his cousin, Alfred Loomis, a lawyer and pioneer in microwaves. Soon after NDRC was organized, Loomis was appointed head of a radar section under the Detection and Controls Division. By the spring of 1942, Stimson even had a special personnel consultant for radar and was using his influence and authority to get radar soundly established as a smoothly operating weapon of war.
The British invention of the resonant cavity magnetron, which produced enough power to make possible radar in the microwave region, was the most essential advance. Immediately following the first exchange of scientific secrets, the NDRC, with assistance from British specialists, established the large Radiation Laboratory at MIT for research, design, and construction of radar for short-run use. NDRC scientists subsequently developed 150 different microwave radar systems for ground, air, and sea as requested by the War and Navy Departments for tactical operations. The most powerful radar ever built, the Microwave Early Warning System, developed in 1942, was contained in five trucks and operated by a company of soldiers.
The greatest need in the first year of war was for an effective radar in American planes searching for far-ranging U-boats. The Army installed search radar developed by the Radiation Laboratory in B-24 Liberators and in a group of B-18’s, which together helped drive the submarines away from the East Coast. To make possible night bombing of Germany and Japan, British and American scientists invented the Plan Position Indicator and the three-centimeter “Mickey,” with glowing radar maps. A Ground Controlled Approach system was contrived by NDRC to direct aircraft landings in bad visibility. The development of a diverse assortment of radar systems, all closely tied to military needs, was OSRD’s biggest contribution to Axis defeat. In other areas the scientists, divorced from military weapons, focused simply on dramatic innovations.
OSRD’s organizational concentration on developing new weapons led, according to its Deputy Director, Irvin Stewart, to a tendency to place great faith in the weapon or instrument itself, while the importance of the man-instrument combination was relatively slow to be realized. Wars are fought with machines run by men, and while the development of machines spurted forward, the training of their users fell behind. Anyone can throw a Molotov cocktail, but the special skills needed to operate and interpret electronic equipment cannot be produced as quickly as the equipment itself. OSRD developed weapons, the Army trained soldiers, but no one concentrated on the man-weapon combination.
With no central control under Roosevelt of both weapons development and soldier training, an unnoticed revolution took place. America had traditionally relied on hastily drafted civilians to fight its wars, but technical weapons now required professionally trained men. The specialization of weapons demanded combat teams of experts and careful co-ordination between them, a coordination not to be learned in two months of basic training. What OSRD’s new weapons required was a large, specialized, professional standing army in peacetime in order to fight a war; but a large standing army in peacetime was against American tradition and the Constitution. Fragmented organization meant no responsible agency to deal with such broad problems.
Similar difficulties arose in production. The weapons were as complicated to manufacture as to use, and temporarily converted industries had trouble making them. Only a permanent defense industry could work intensively with the civilian scientists advising and improving on the latest weapon advances. Around the country—at Seattle, Washington, and at Oak Ridge, Tennessee—a military-industrial complex was slowly, almost invisibly, developing. Roosevelt’s improvisation speeded the weapons development immensely, yet fragmented authority hampered use, and the lack of a comprehensive, stable agency prevented considerations beyond military expediency from getting a hearing.
To glimpse the titanic military and economic power mobilized by the Roosevelt administration at war’s mid-point in 1943, to consider the heavy political forces beating on the White House from the nation and from abroad, to assess the endless problems, appeals, complaints, queries, demands that flowed into the President’s office, to recall that for many months after Pearl Harbor the President operated with the help of one talented but ailing deputy, a small, overworked staff, and a shifting array of aides collected from outside the White House—all this is to marvel at the aplomb, the gaiety, the buoyancy, the grace with which Franklin Roosevelt presided over the White House during the years of war crisis. Whatever the muddles and delays, the disputes and outright failures, the President would not duck responsibility. Cartoonists might picture the ship of state lurching and yawing, but no one could doubt who controlled the tiller.
Old Washington hands wondered how he did it. How could one man dominate, even if he did not always control, the dispersed, disorganized, ever-shifting and expanding bureaucracy? How did he remain Chief Executive in fact as well as in title?
The President stayed in charge of his administration by the methods that had seemed to serve him so well in the earlier, prewar years—by drawing fully on his formal and informal powers as Chief Executive; by raising goals, creating momentum, inspiring a personal loyalty, getting the best out of people; by skillful timing, now waiting endlessly while his aides chafed, sometimes moving quickly before his staff was even informed, but usually choosing a time when his target—a foot-dragging agency or bovine official—was most vulnerable; by deliberately fostering among his aides a sense of competition and a clash of wills that led to disarray, heartbreak, and anger but also set off pulses of executive energy and sparks of creativity; by maintaining an extremely wide “span of control”—or at least of attention, encouragement, and intervention; by handing out one job to several men and several jobs to one man, thus strengthening his own position as a court of appeals, as a depository of information, and as a tool of co-ordination; by ignoring or bypassing collective decision-making agencies, such as the Cabinet, and dealing instead with varying combinations of persons from different agencies; by often delving into specific, even tiny matters that some official had assumed were far below or beyond the Chief Executive’s reach; by sometimes withholding information, sometimes supplying it, to keep aides and officials in line; by maintaining his own private storehouse of intelligence, drawn from countless letters, memos, gossip, and fed by contending subordinates; by retiring behind the protection of rules, customs, conventions when they served his needs and evading them when they did not—and always by persuading, flattering, juggling, improvising, reshuffling, harmonizing, conciliating, manipulating.
No one saw this Chief Executive more often or more closely than his Budget Director, Harold Smith, who was exasperated as Roosevelt transgressed the orthodox canons of administration even while he gaped with disbelief at his chief’s broken-field running. In his diary Smith recorded the range of Roosevelt’s interests, his inability to extricate himself from odd details and ideas even at the height of a world war.
March 17,1943: “The President told me he had a job for me. He tried to find the papers but could not do so. However, he decided to tell me about it. He wants me to investigate the situation with respect to the Government’s purchasing the Empire State Building, about which Al Smith has talked to him recently. He…had turned the problem over to Jesse Jones, but Jones was getting nowhere with it.”
April 9, 1943: “…The President did not agree with our recommendation. He made a strong argument that physical fitness and recreation are properly separable, and asked that provision be made in the Office of Defense, Health and Welfare Services for a physical fitness group….”
May 8, 1943: “The President approved the Army budget.…I think he proposes to use it as a propaganda instrument in connection with the forthcoming conference concerning military strategy, with the near conclusion of the North African campaign.”
June 3, 1943: (The President had just awakened from a short afternoon nap.) “I said I was glad to know that he was following a regimen, since he is one of the most important men today. In passing off my comment, he made a remark to the effect that John L. Lewis apparently did not think he was very important and would be glad to see him out as President. The President said he made a comment—which he thought was a good crack—that he would be glad to resign as President if John L. Lewis committed suicide….
“The President pointed out that mint tea, for instance, would help to satisfy the population of Morocco and Algiers….”
August 31, 1943: “I reminded the President that he had received a letter from his Chief of Staff saying essentially that everything was lovely [in military planning], I commented that he, the President, knew different. The President suggested that we might continue this correspondence with another memorandum…in the vein, ‘Now boys, even if you are kidding yourselves, don’t try to kid the Commander in Chief….’
“The President commented that the Army was always crying that he did not understand the Army and that he was partial to the Navy. He said, ‘You know that I have been tougher with the Navy than with the Army.’ I had to admit that was true. Furthermore, he said that he had had more trouble with the Navy in this war than with the Army.”
Such was the unconventional Chief Executive as he was known to his subordinates, to conservative critics who castigated him for one-man rule and dictatorial tendencies, and to those who admired him precisely because he did not follow the usual rules of the game and standard principles of orderly administration. But there was another Chief Executive who had long been concerned with orderly executive management; who had established New Deal executive or co-ordinating committees and sometimes presided over them; who had set up a host of planning agencies; who had appointed a committee on executive management to shape proposals for more effective presidential direction and control; who had backed most of its proposals against one of the most fanatical counterattacks on Capitol Hill that he had ever encountered; who after the defeat of his first reorganization attempt had won extensive power to reorganize his own Executive Office and submit broader reorganization plans to Congress; who had created the Executive Office of the President and by transferring the Budget Bureau into it had immensely strengthened central presidential control; who had regrouped agencies into more coherent entities, such as the Federal Security Agency; who had secured a continuing authority to reorganize under war-powers acts and had fashioned and refashioned defense and war agencies to his liking.
The two Chief Executives had long lived together in a manner as baffling as Roosevelt’s ability to be both party leader and Chief of State, both leader of a popular majority and leader of the people, both conservative—or at least traditionalist—and liberal, both man of principle and man of expediency, without any apparent strain, except on his subordinates. The latter could never be sure which Roosevelt would confront them. By what inner compass or design the President decided to take on any one of these roles—or whether he consciously made decisions about his roles—was never clear even to intimates.
But on one great executive responsibility—the recruitment and positioning of talent—Roosevelt deserved credit by any test of administration. Somehow, as much by some unerring instinct as by observation and insight, the President had made a host of brilliant appointments by mid-war. Hopkins, Hassett, Smith in the presidential office, Stimson, Marshall, Patterson in War, Forrestal in Navy, Elmer Davis in OWI, Henderson and, later, Chester Bowles in OPA, Byrnes and Cohen in OWM, Bush and Conant in war science, Davis and Morse on the War Labor Board, Eisenhower, Nimitz, MacArthur in the field—these men were not only instruments of a President’s purpose but also adornments of a public service.
The fate of another adornment of the service, Sumner Welles, at State, poignantly reflected the anomaly of Roosevelt’s administrative ways. The President kept Welles on as Undersecretary because he was a superb presidential agent in a vast organization that often seemed beyond the grip of the White House. Hull of course resented the agent and the arrangement; “every department has its thun of a bitch,” he told a friend, “but I’ve got the all-American.” Welles’s place in Roosevelt’s court, along with his hauteur and his brilliance, made for enemies in Washington. And he was vulnerable. Someone spread rumors through Washington that he had made advances to a Negro porter on a train. Roosevelt heard that William Bullitt, long a rival to Welles, was the rumor monger. When the former envoy next came to the oval office, Roosevelt stopped him at the door.
“William Bullitt,” he trumpeted, “stand where you are.
“Saint Peter is at the gate. Along comes Sumner Welles, who admits to human error. Saint Peter grants him entrance. Then comes William Bullitt. Saint Peter says: ‘William Bullitt, you have betrayed a fellow human being. You—can—go—down—there.’ ” He told Bullitt he wished never to see him again. But he knew that Welles’s usefulness was over—and losing a “member of the family” may have accounted for some of Roosevelt’s feeling.
Clearly, Roosevelt’s administrative ways were hell on his subordinates. Grumbling day after day in his diary and to friends, Stimson spoke for many of his colleagues accustomed to clear-cut delegations of power, orderly staff work, regular channels.
“He wants to do it all himself….” “…the poorest administrator I have ever worked under in respect to the orderly procedure and routine of his performance…” “I often wish the President wasn’t so soft-hearted towards incompetent appointees….” “Today the President has constituted an almost innumerable number of new administrative posts, putting at the head of them a lot of inexperienced men appointed largely for personal grounds and who report on their duties directly to the President and have constant and easy access to him…better access to the President than his Cabinet officers have. The lines of delimitation between these different agencies themselves and between them and the departments is very nebulous….” “…the Washington atmosphere is full of acrimonious disputes over matters of jurisdiction….”
Oscar Cox complained, too, from his closer vantage point to White House operations, that major policy decisions were going by default, policies were not being swiftly executed, excessive demands were being made on the President’s time.
But Roosevelt’s enemies found some solace in his methods. Late in 1942 the Japan Times-Advertiser editorialized that whatever the congressional clamor for a new unity of command, Roosevelt would never let anyone overshadow him, that he preferred “multi-phased calculations” such as playing one faction against the other and using disunity rather than unity as a means of control, that he was not a military strategist but a public-relations man and hence that America’s war organization would not move out of the formative stage. This organizational view of Roosevelt’s presidency was duly forwarded to the White House, where it was dismissed, if even noticed, but the criticisms of Roosevelt’s executive leadership and management could not be ignored. Indeed, just as Roosevelt’s “one-man” administration had become in 1939 a fiery issue that spilled over into the 1940 election, the charge of bungling and mismanagement at the top of the executive branch loomed as a potential issue for 1944.
Most of the critics failed to see that their canons of orderly, “businesslike” administration, clear delegation of power, proper span of control, effective co-ordination, and the other textbook doctrines were not always—or even usually—relevant to the needs of the man in the oval office. For his problem was less one of management than of dramatizing goals, enunciating principles, lifting hopes, pointing out dangers, raising expectations, mobilizing popular energies, recruiting gifted aides and administrators, harmonizing disputants, protecting administrative morale. Even crusty Henry Stimson was not immune to Roosevelt’s healing balm. At the height of his annoyance with the President over poor administration, he admitted that a long talk with the President “tended to remove all of the unpleasant feeling which I have gradually been getting into…it indicated that his friendship and confidence in me were still unimpaired…he was very solicitous about Mabel’s health….”
For Roosevelt it was a question of power. When critics charged that he would not make Baruch or some other strong man a super-czar because he wanted to hoard his own authority or feared a rival, they were quite right. Partly it was a matter of temperament; as a prima donna, Roosevelt had no relish for yielding the spotlight for long. But mainly it was a matter of prudence, experience, and instinct. The President did not need to read Machiavellian treatises to know that every delegation of power and sharing of authority extracted a potential price in the erosion of presidential purpose, the narrowing of options, the clouding of the appearance of presidential authority, the threat to his reputation for being on top. He grumbled about his own problems.
“The Treasury is so large and far-flung and ingrained in its practices,” he told Marriner Eccles, “that I find it almost impossible to get the action and results I want—even with Henry [Morgenthau] there. But the Treasury is not to be compared with the State Department. You should go through the experience of trying to get any changes in the thinking, policy and action of the career diplomats and then you’d know what a real problem was. But the Treasury and the State Department put together are nothing compared with the Na-a-vy. The admirals are really something to cope with—and I should know. To change anything in the Na-a-vy is like punching a feather bed. You punch it with your right and you punch it with your left until you are finally exhausted, and then you find the damn bed just as it was before you started punching.”
In no particular did Roosevelt more flagrantly violate the precepts of public administration than in the casual variety of people he was willing to see. He was not easily accessible, but his accessibility was unpredictable. Late in 1943 the young American Chargé d’Affaires in Lisbon, George Kennan, feared that the State Department was making so heavy-handed a demand on Portugal for facilities in the Azores that the pressure might antagonize Salazar and push Franco over to the Nazis. When Kennan tried to take some initiative in assuring Lisbon that the United States would respect Portuguese sovereignty in all Portuguese territory, he was whisked back to Washington. There he was brought to the Pentagon and to a Kafkaesque meeting of Stimson, Knox, Marshall, Acting Secretary of State Stettinius, and other high officials. Kennan was alternately mystified and horrified by the discussion. No one seemed aware of his background reports, interested in his present views, or aware of the facts and the problem. Coolly dismissed from the meeting, he slunk away in despair. But he appealed to his Chief at State, who passed him on to Hopkins, who set up a meeting with the President. Roosevelt jovially waved Kennan to a scat, said he failed to understand how Lisbon could possibly suspect his intentions in the Azores—why, had he not as Assistant Secretary of the Navy personally supervised the dismantling of Azores bases in the last war?—and promised to give him a personal letter to take to Salazar. Kennan was elated but puzzled. What about the Pentagon meeting? “Oh, don’t worry,” Roosevelt said with a debonair wave of his cigarette holder, “about all those people over there.”
On countless other occasions Roosevelt protected his own purposes by seeing people far down the administrative line. Still, a President’s care and nurture of his own power for his myriad ends—winning elections, dealing with friend and foe abroad, protecting the presidential ego, defending the integrity of his position as the chief and only elected federal executive—are not easily and automatically translated into effective war mobilization or national economic power. Certain of his qualities played their part in the countless errors, delays, and wastes in the nation’s war effort.
One of these was his ambivalence toward planning itself. In no function were the two chief executives in Roosevelt more at odds with each other. He had long been a planner. He had established numberless planning agencies; he had staffed them well; he had paid attention to their reports. But planning, to Roosevelt, was a sharply limited exercise. It was segmental; he was interested in plans for specific regions, watersheds, industries, not—despite his critics—in “economic planning” or in some grand reshaping of the nation. He was critical of the National Resources Planning Board for indulging in lofty schemes, especially in the economic realm. And Roosevelt’s planning was limited in time. Repeatedly he restrained the military from making commitments more than six months or a year ahead. He was also ambivalent toward the administrative canons of unification, co-ordination, integration. He encouraged such tendencies in individual departments, especially in the military, but he resisted unification of the whole executive branch through planning or co-ordinating machinery. He never allowed the Cabinet or the OWM to serve as a collective agency for unified decision making. Over-all co-ordination was glaringly absent in the one area—fiscal and monetary policy—where it was most necessary and potentially effective. The Budget Bureau, under Harold Smith’s leadership, was eager to effect a marriage of budgeting and planning—“formal, informal, or of the shotgun type”—but the bureau never fashioned joint tools for planning, budgeting, and programing as a means of directing and co-ordinating the whole executive branch.
In the absence of strong, comprehensive, long-run planning instruments, Roosevelt’s wartime agencies were typically organized to cope with existing, dramatic crises rather than to head off less visible, potentially bigger ones; thus the establishment of a Rubber Director when the rubber supply was collapsing, the Office of Defense Transportation when the railroads seemed about to fail, the fuel and oil czardoms after those commodities were imperiled. Hence Roosevelt’s mobilization machinery tended to be more the prisoner of events than the master of them. The most comprehensive control agencies, OES and OWM, never realized their paper potential as means of planning, programing, and control. These agencies were under men—Byrnes and Vinson—who had little authority or temperament for top-level planning, but preferred to deal with disputes batted up by contending agencies, to act on the basis virtually of adversary proceedings, to mediate, negotiate, reconcile, adjust. Roosevelt encouraged them in this. He wanted no superczars in the White House outside of himself.
Nor was the mobilization structure in itself conducive to strong leadership, planning, and control. The agencies and their hundreds of subunits had grown like coral reefs. The pyramid of executive action had been built largely through “layering”—the piling of new agencies on top of others, culminating in the OWM—rather than through planning from the top down. Layering had great merits, but it tended to keep power diffused through the existing levels and it inhibited effective planning and programing from the White House even if Roosevelt had been inclined to it.
These tendencies toward piecemeal, reactive war organization were reinforced by Roosevelt’s bent toward dealing with one set of problems at a time rather than establishing priorities across a wide front and over a long span of time. In particular he constantly stressed the importance of “winning the war”—that is, gaining a military victory as quickly and inexpensively as possible—rather than seeking at the same time to gain broader, more complex goals, such as “winning the peace.” He did not believe fully in separating the short-run from the long, as indicated by the fact that he was taking up postwar problems and goals long before war’s end. But he did so as much for the purpose of keeping his own choices wide and preventing others from capturing and shaping postwar issues—in short, to prevent other persons’ planning—as for the purpose of his own long-run planning. And his philosophy permeated his administration and inhibited or enervated long-term planning.
All these administrative tendencies, both institutional and Rooseveltian, toward the immediate, the concrete, the manageable were of the most profound importance in the life of the nation. World War II released social and economic forces that would have enormous impact on American life after the last bomb dropped. Millions of rural people were moving into cities and defense areas; millions of Negroes were leaving the farm, migrating north and west, tasting the delights and miseries, the opportunities and frustrations of city life; millions of women were working in factories and offices for the first time. The explosion of education—from the making of literates to the courses in languages and science—was a revolution in itself. Income, real as well as money, shot up, bringing infinite satisfactions and disappointments. Health, aid to women and children, and other welfare services were immensely expanded. Employment soared; the jobless dropped to an irreducible minimum of dedicated unemployables. Patterns of housing, congestion, employment, opportunity, discrimination were created that would closely affect the nation’s social and economic life for decades to come. How much these trends could have been affected by purposeful governmental action at the early stages is hard to say. But to the extent they could be affected, the emphasis on “Dr. Win the War” was bound to enhance the government’s short-run management only at the expense of long-run leadership. The burning cities of 1967 and 1968 were not wholly unrelated to steps not taken, visions not glimpsed, priorities not established, in the federal agencies of 1943 and 1944.
Toward the end of the war a sagacious authority on public administration, Luther Gulick, assessed the whole organization of the war government. The narrowest test of war organization, he wrote, was to muster the nation’s maximum resources to destroy the military power of its enemies. But this was an old-fashioned test, he concluded, which ignored long-range and continuing international economic and political problems at home and abroad. He would not apply the second test because the basic continuing elements of war and peace “played little if any role in the war organization of the United States for World War II.” On the narrower test of specific war organization he found much to praise and to blame. In part he was disappointed by the failures of planning, programing, and operations—brilliant in spurts, but on the whole not very effective.
Still, Gulick could not but be impressed by the military impact of war organization. Somehow “it worked”—somehow it produced a “mobilization of total national power and a welding together of world military operations beyond the highest dreams of 1939 or 1940 or the greatest fears of Hitler. Those of us who write recipes should taste their pudding!”