THERE WAS A GREAT flutter in Union Station as the President’s train pulled in three days after the election. Truman, Stimson, Wallace, and other notables climbed aboard to welcome the conquering hero back to the capital. The Police Band sounded “Hail to the Chief” with ruffles and flourishes. It was like New York all over again. Despite the driving rain the President ordered the top put down; Truman and Wallace squeezed in with him, while young Johnnie Boettiger sat grandly in front. Outside, in Union Plaza, 30,000 people waited in the downpour. The car stopped and a panel of microphones was slid across the President’s lap. He would always remember this welcome home, he told the crowd.
“And when I say a welcome home, I hope that some of the scribes in the papers won’t intimate that I expect to make Washington my permanent residence for the rest of my life!”
Behind police motorcycles a long sleek line of limousines paraded up Pennsylvania Avenue. A half-dozen bands played. Over 300,000 people, including federal employees given time off and children let out of school, craned their heads and applauded as the presidential car went by. Soon after reaching the White House the President was greeting the staff, receiving congratulations from officials, and holding a press conference. He had no news, he said, except that he had underestimated his electoral votes. A reporter asked: “Mr. President, may I be the first to ask if you will run in 1948?” The President laughed with the others at the hoary old question.
It was a time of sweet victory. Not only had he beaten Dewey by 432 electoral votes to 99, but he had won the big Northeastern states, half the Midwest, including Illinois and Michigan, and all the West except Wyoming and Colorado. Only the Plains states had gone solidly for Dewey. The President’s strength in Congress had been boosted. Formidable isolationists or conservatives had fallen: Gerald Nye, James J. Davis, of Pennsylvania, Guy Gillette; and leading Senate stalwarts, including Bob Wagner, Claude Pepper, Elbert Thomas, of Utah, Scott Lucas, of Illinois, Lister Hill, of Alabama, and Alben Barkley, had kept their seats. There were some attractive new faces both in the Senate—Brien McMahon, of Connecticut, Fulbright, of Arkansas, Wayne Morse, of Oregon—and in the House—Helen Gahagan Douglas, California New Dealer; Emily Taft Douglas, of Chicago, wife of a University of Chicago economics teacher named Paul Douglas, then serving in the Marines; Adam Clayton Powell, of New York, who claimed to be the first Negro Congressman from the East. Once again Roosevelt had won out against the great majority of the nation’s newspapers; not only the Hearst-Patterson-McCormick-Gannett press, but also Henry Luce’s Life and a number of internationalist journals had supported Dewey. And once again he had beaten John L. Lewis in the mine leader’s own precincts in Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
© Low, world copyright reserved, reprinted by permission of the Trustees of Sir David Low’s Estate and Lady Madeline Low
Above all, he had won the referendum of 1944 for American participation in a stronger United Nations. The “great betrayal” of 1920 would not be repeated. He had strengthened his own hand for future negotiations. Congratulations flowed in from abroad—from Churchill, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung.
Physically, the campaign had taken its toll. At times Roosevelt had completely disregarded his rest regimen; he had had to be strenuously active for long periods of time. He seemed more tired than ever after the election; his appetite was poor, his color only fair. But Bruenn found that his blood pressure was actually lower when he was out on the hustings, and when he examined the President two weeks after the election he found that his lungs were clear, the heart sounds were clear and of good quality, there were no diastolic murmurs. Roosevelt’s blood pressure was 210/112.
Politically, the victory concealed some weaknesses. The Republicans had been defeated, but not the two congressional parties; the “unholy” coalition of conservative Democrats and Republicans would still largely control Congress, at least on domestic affairs. Roosevelt’s popular-vote margin of 3.6 million votes out of 48 million cast was the narrowest since Wilson’s hairline victory over Hughes in 1916. In retrospect it would seem remarkable that a forty-two-year-old governor with experience in neither war nor diplomacy could come so close to toppling a world leader at the height of a global war. Most important, events in eastern Europe were threatening to erode the very premises on which Roosevelt had won the election and made solemn commitments to the American people.
Europe was trembling with hope and fear, change and convulsion. As the Germans were driven out of France and Greece and the vast areas overrun by the Red Army, tormenting political problems flared up in their wake. Roosevelt had hoped to postpone politics until after the war was won, but political problems would not wait—especially those of eastern Europe.
For months now, Poland had linked war and politics, ancient quarrels and future hopes, Chicago ward bosses and Kremlin strategists. On the prompting of Roosevelt and others, Stalin saw Mikolajczyk in Moscow early in August, only to urge the “émigré group” to come to terms with the Committee of National Liberation, the Lublin Poles. The two Polish groups met and failed to agree. By this time Roosevelt was facing heightened election pressure from Polish-American groups at home. In Washington and on his campaign trip to Chicago he promised representatives of the Polish-American Congress that the principles of the Atlantic Charter in general and the integrity of Poland in particular would be protected.
The torment of Warsaw foreshadowed future calamity. When Soviet troops neared the Polish capital at the end of August, underground forces mainly loyal to the London Poles struck at the Germans from houses, factories, and sewers. In moments the city was engulfed in a bitter street-to-street battle. In the next few days, as the fighting became more and more desperate, the Warsaw Poles begged for help from Churchill, who persuaded Roosevelt to send with him a joint message to the Marshal.
“We are thinking of world opinion if the anti-Nazis in Warsaw are in effect abandoned. We believe that all three of us should do the utmost to save as many of the patriots there as possible. We hope that you will drop immediate supplies and munitions to the patriot Poles of Warsaw, or will you agree to help our planes in doing it very quickly? We hope you will approve. The time element is of extreme importance.”
A shocking reply came from Stalin:
“Sooner or later the truth about the handful of power-seeking criminals who launched the Warsaw adventure will out. Those elements, playing on the credulity of the inhabitants of Warsaw, exposed practically unarmed people to German guns, armour and aircraft. The result is a situation in which every day is used, not by the Poles for freeing Warsaw, but by the Hitlerites, who are cruelly exterminating the civil population….” Stalin promised, however, that his troops would try to repulse German counterattacks and renew their offensive near Warsaw.
Stalin’s mounting temper stemmed partly from frustration. His troops had in fact been forced back from Warsaw by savage German counterattacks. The Warsaw Poles had not co-ordinated their plans with him; he suspected they were trying to force his hand. He did not want American and British airmen poking around his rear bases, especially at the very time his forces were pulling back. But he was moved by colder calculations. By now he was fully sponsoring the Lublin Poles. He did not propose to help liberate Warsaw from the Nazis only to leave it in the hands of bourgeois Poles who were the pawns of London and Washington. Better to let the Warsaw elements destroy themselves by their foolhardy action.
In a last try Churchill asked Roosevelt to agree to a joint message that implored Stalin to allow Allied aircraft to land behind the Russian front after dropping war supply to the beleaguered Poles; privately Churchill suggested to Roosevelt that if Stalin did not reply they ought to send the planes and “see what happens.” Roosevelt would not go along on this. Distressed though he was by Stalin’s attitude toward the Warsaw tragedy, he feared that pressure on Moscow would jeopardize more important long-range military co-operation with Russia, especially in the Far East. In mid-September Stalin finally relented and allowed bombers to drop some supplies. But it was too late; resistance was nearing an end.
A quarter of a million Warsaw Poles were dead; most of the city was in ruins. Somehow Roosevelt managed to resist Churchill’s and Mikolajczyk’s importunities about Warsaw at the same time he was holding his own with Polish-Americans in the election campaign. He even asked Churchill to hush up any controversial announcement about Poland until after Election Day. Two weeks after the election, when former envoy Arthur Bliss Lane urged him to demand of Moscow that the independence of Poland be maintained, and added that if the country was not strong when it had the biggest Army, Navy, and Air Force in the world it never would be, the President asked sharply, “Do you want me to go to war with Russia?”
In despair Mikolajczyk appealed directly to Roosevelt. He was being pressed to accept the Curzon Line without any reservations, he cabled. The Poles would feel terribly deceived and wronged if after all their efforts and sacrifices they were faced with the loss of nearly one-half their territory. “I retain in vivid and grateful memory your assurances given me in the course of our conversations of June, last, in Washington, pertaining particularly to Lwow and the adjacent territories.” For the last six hundred years Lwow had been a Polish city no less than Cracow and Warsaw. Would the President not throw his decisive influence into the scales by appealing to Stalin?
The President sent Mikolajczyk an evasive reply, adding that Harriman would discuss the question of Lwow with the Polish leader privately. A few days later, caught between the Allies’ caution and his associates’ militancy, but with his warm feeling for Roosevelt evidently undiminished, Mikolajczyk resigned. This left Roosevelt and Churchill with no leader of the London Poles who could serve as a bridge to Moscow and the Lublin Poles. Playing for time, Roosevelt in mid-December appealed to Stalin not to recognize the Lublin group before the three leaders met in January.
The Marshal was unbending. The polish émigré government, he said, was a screen for criminal and terrorist elements who were murdering officers and men of the Red Army in Poland. Meantime the Polish National Committee—the Lublin group—was strengthening and expanding the Polish government and Army and carrying out agrarian reform in favor of the peasants. The Soviet Union, he went on, was a border state to Poland and was carrying the main brunt of the battle for its liberation. The Red Army had to have a peaceful and trustworthy Poland to its rear as it fought into Germany. If the Lublin Poles transformed themselves into a provisional government, the Soviet government would have no reason not to recognize them.
He was disturbed and deeply disappointed by this message, Roosevelt responded to Stalin. “I must tell you with a frankness equal to your own that I see no prospect of this Government’s following suit and transferring its recognition from the Government in London to the Lublin Committee in its present form. This is in no sense due to any special ties or feeling for the London government.” There was simply no evidence that the Lublin Committee represented the people of Poland. “I cannot ignore the fact that up to the present only a small fraction of Poland proper west of the Curzon Line has been liberated from German tyranny, and it is therefore an unquestioned truth that the people of Poland have had no opportunity to express themselves in regard to the Lublin Committee….” Would Stalin not wait for the three of them to meet?
Stalin’s reply was terse. The London Poles were disorganizing things and thus aiding the Germans. Roosevelt’s suggestion to postpone was “perfectly understandable to me” but he—Stalin—was powerless. The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR had already notified the Lublin Poles that it intended to recognize the provisional government of Poland as soon as it was formed.
It was interesting to see, Churchill scornfully cabled to Roosevelt, that the “Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR” had now been brought up into the line.
During these months of fall 1944 Roosevelt and Churchill were only superficially united in their attitude toward Stalin. At the climax of the coalition effort the two Western leaders were divided over strategy for dealing with Russia, with Communism in general, and indeed with all the forces of change erupting in the wake of the Nazi armies.
Churchill was trying to play a close game of Realpolitik with the Marshal. Journeying to Moscow early in October, he and Eden had hardly sat down with the Russians in the Kremlin when he decided on a quick gambit. Stating that London and Moscow must not get at cross-purposes in the Balkans, he pushed across the table to Stalin a half-sheet of paper with a simple, stark list giving Russia 90 per cent predominance in Rumania and 75 per cent in Bulgaria, Britain 90 per cent in Greece, and dividing Yugoslavia and Hungary fifty-fifty between Russia and the West. Stalin had paused only a moment, then with his blue pencil made a large tick on the paper and passed it back to Churchill.
There had been a long silence. The paper lay in the middle of the table. Then Churchill said: “Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner?” He proposed to burn the paper. “No, you keep it,” said Stalin.
This was precisely the kind of high-level trading over spheres of interest that had worried Roosevelt about a Churchill-Stalin meeting. He had had Harriman attend the meetings, but his Ambassador to Russia had no power to commit the President. So the crucial matters—the veto, Poland, Germany, Far Eastern strategy—were put off until the three leaders could meet.
If Realpolitik united Churchill and Stalin, it divided Churchill and Roosevelt. An acrimonious dispute flared over Italy between Washington and London early in December when the British informed Premier Ivanoe Bonomi that the appointment of Count Sforza, a symbol of antifascism to many liberals and leftists, would be unacceptable. Winant was instructed to inform the Foreign Office that Washington regretted this intervention in an internal Italian political crisis, especially without prior consultation. Incensed, Churchill made it known to Washington that he considered Sforza a dishonorable intriguer and mischief-maker and that he felt entitled to tell the Italians this “because we have been accorded command in the Mediterranean, as the Americans have command in France, and therefore we have a certain special position and responsibility.” He had an added grievance: he felt that he had done his best to ease the Italian situation for the President, especially before the presidential election.
When the State Department put out a critical press release about British policy in Italy, Churchill went into a towering rage. He dispatched a cable to Roosevelt that Sherwood later described as the most violent outburst in all their correspondence. He reminded Roosevelt of all his past support on the Darlan affair and other issues. Roosevelt, who was at Warm Springs at the time and feeling rather detached from the rumpus, deplored any offense that the press release might have given but firmly reminded the Prime Minister that Italy was still “an area of combined Anglo-American responsibility” and that the British had acted on their own in blocking Sforza.
One reason for Churchill’s anger was the obvious implication for Greece of Washington’s failure to support him in Italy. Armed with Stalin’s agreement that he could control this sphere and with Roosevelt’s acquiescence in temporary British predominance, Churchill was determined that his nation’s ancient ally in the eastern Mediterranean would not become a political void and hence prey to E.L.A.S., the strong Communist and guerrilla movement there. After the Germans pulled out, E.L.A.S. had made a bid for power in Athens, only to become locked in a struggle with British troops quickly sent in by London. Liberal and leftist groups in Britain and the United States flared up at what seemed a British ploy to enthrone reaction and to kill those who had fought the Nazis most zealously.
Intent on his mission of saving Greece from Communism, Churchill was bitter over the lack of sympathy in Washington. It almost seemed to him that outside the War Cabinet his only solid supporter was Stalin, who was saying nothing about Greece. Churchill was furious when a message in which he instructed the British general in Greece not to hesitate to shoot rebels if necessary leaked out in the American press, evidently through the State Department. At this juncture Roosevelt sent him a long, almost benevolent letter stating that he was sorry about Churchill’s difficulties in Greece but he could not stand with his old friend there. “Even an attempt to do so would bring only temporary value to you, and would in the long run do injury to our basic relationships.” Roosevelt made a number of specific suggestions—including, promise a regency instead of the return of the King—that Churchill found utterly useless. For the Prime Minister the only recourse was more troops, which eventually did put down E.L.A.S.
More troops. In Greece and Poland and elsewhere troops were becoming the arbiters of strategy. Were they to shape the new world as they had the old?
Harriman’s answer was yes—at least before he sat in on Churchill’s conference with Stalin. In mid-September he had informed the White House that relations with the Russians had taken a startling turn in the last two months. On issue after issue they were silent or indifferent or obstinate. Their attitude seemed to be that it is “our obligation” to help Russia and accept its policies because “she had won the war for us.” Unless Washington took issue with this policy, Harriman warned, Russia would become a world bully.
Hull asked Harriman to spell out his views further. On reflection Harriman seemed more temperate—or ambivalent. Stalin, he said, seemed to have two strings to his bow—friendliness toward the West, and suspicion and hostility to it. The Russian people craved peace; they wanted the close Allied relations to continue after the war; Stalin could not disrupt the alliance without causing grave concern among the Russian people. On the other hand the Soviet leaders keenly felt the backwardness of their country; they were unduly sensitive and suspicious; and powerful elements close to the Marshal would insist on independent action where Russian security was strongly affected.
Practically, this meant, Harriman said, that Moscow would often take unilateral action; would block consideration by a United Nations security council of any question close to its national interests; would insist on shaping its own relations with neighboring states. Harriman’s advice was ambivalent, too—meet the Russians more than halfway, but “oppose them promptly with the greatest of firmness” when they seemed to “go wrong.”
All this left it to Roosevelt to decide when he should oppose the Russians, or when he should yield and release—it could be hoped—the potential for friendship and good will that even his hardheaded Ambassador saw in the Russian people.
In the Far East Roosevelt was facing a sharp and ominous contrast by the fall of 1944 between the brilliant military advances scored in the Pacific and the political-military stalemate on the land mass of Asia.
The invasion of Leyte challenged the imperial high command even more blatantly than had Saipan. The Philippines shielded the vital lifelines across the South China Sea; they formed huge steppingstones for the American assault on Formosa, the Chinese coast, on Japan itself. Once again, as in the Marianas, Japanese naval chiefs planned a combined attack on the task forces guarding the American amphibious forces. As MacArthur’s infantry deepened the beachhead on Leyte, Japanese striking forces moved toward the central Philippines from the Singapore area and from Japan. Defending the Leyte waters were the Seventh Fleet, commanded by Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid, who was under MacArthur, and the Third Fleet, under Bull Halsey, who was responsible to Nimitz’s command post thousands of miles away at Pearl Harbor.
The enemy’s big counteroffensive began on October 23. The largest Japanese fleet, under Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita, with two superbattleships and a dozen cruisers, advanced directly across the Sibuyan Sea toward San Bernardino Strait, only to meet such fierce attacks by submarines and carriers that after two days it turned about and started back west. To the south another Japanese fleet, under Vice Admiral Shoji Nishimura, ran into a perfectly planned ambush in the Surigao Strait and was almost annihilated. A third and smaller enemy fleet sortied down from the Inland Sea, not to fight, but to lure Halsey’s big force north and thus leave the landing forces unguarded. Halsey, burning to come to grips with what he thought was the main enemy carrier strength, and persuaded that Kurita’s force was manageable if not beaten, steamed north to meet the enemy head on.
An epic of confusion and gallantry followed. Kurita’s fleet, battered but still formidable, turned back east to go for the unprotected invasion ships. Not one of the major Japanese fleets knew just what the others were doing. Halsey was about to close with the northern enemy fleet when he turned about to help block Kurita’s move. Too late—Kurita was already pounding the little collection of escort carriers and destroyers that lay between him and Leyte. Kurita’s battleships and heavy cruisers were just about to catch and sink the lightly armored American ships when he suddenly broke off the action for fear that Halsey’s big fleet would catch him. But Halsey had managed to steam three hundred miles north and three hundred miles south without engaging the main enemy forces.
In Washington the President jubilantly summoned reporters to his office. He had received a report from Admiral Halsey, he announced, that “the Japanese Navy in the Philippine area has been defeated, seriously damaged and routed by the U.S. Navy in that area.” Statistics later told the tale—the Japanese lost 306,000 tons of combat ships, including three battleships and ten cruisers in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, and the Americans 38,000. And behind the statistics, aside from brilliant seamanship and bad communications, was the ever-expanding industrial power and naval technology of the United States.
On the dusty plains of China, on the other hand, and in the jungles of Burma, the infantryman was still king, especially when assisted by aerial knights who could leap over obstacles. In the early months of 1944 the Japanese struck with their infantry forces against two vulnerable areas, India and China. Tokyo’s strategy was as much political as military—to divide the people and destroy the governments of the two most populous nations in the world.
In Burma the Japanese attacked along the coast of Arakan in an effort to outflank a British advance south, only to be outflanked in turn and then repulsed as Mountbatten supplied his troops by air. The enemy then advanced on the Imphal Plain to the northwest; here again the British used gliders and air-borne troops skillfully to hold the attack. The approaches to India were secure, at least for a time. Roosevelt sent Churchill his congratulations on “an epic achievement for the airborne troops, not forgetting the mules.” To the east, Stilwell, who had left CBI theater headquarters to assume command in the field, deployed Chindits, Chinese, and Americans to capture the airfield at Myitkyina and hence safeguard the lifelines to China.
These heroic efforts soon were overshadowed by the successes Tokyo was scoring in its other great military-political effort. By late spring strong Japanese spearheads were cutting through disorganized Chinese resistance in Honan to seize control of Hankow-Canton communications and threaten Chennault’s advance air bases. Ambassador Clarence E. Gauss cabled that Chungking had been thrown into despair. Chinese peasants, he reported, were even turning on the Kuomintang troops. Stilwell, arriving in Chungking from his Burma headquarters early in June to resume his duties as commander of American troops, Chief of Staff to the Generalissimo, and trainer of his armies, shifted Hump tonnage to Chennault, but he feared that on the ground there was nothing to stop the Japanese.
The melting away of Chiang’s troops before enemy ground attacks realized Roosevelt’s worst fears about China. More than anyone, other than the Generalissimo himself, he bore responsibility for the diversion of men and war supply to China. He had personally sponsored Chennault’s efforts. He particularly had encouraged the Generalissimo, exhorting and persuading but not demanding or cajoling or really bargaining. Churchill had been skeptical of the effort in China; others had urged the White House to get tough with Chungking, but the President, sensitive to the tangle of military problems and political disloyalties surrounding Chiang, had insisted that he be treated as an ally, as chief of state, and indeed as one of the Big Four.
And now after all his patient efforts in China, Roosevelt’s strategy seemed to be crumbling. The President’s tone with the Generalissimo took on an edge of sharpness. “The extremely serious situation which results from Japanese advances in Central China,” he radioed on July 6, “which threatens not only your Government but all that the United States Army has been building up in China, leads me to the conclusion that drastic measures must be taken immediately if the situation is to be saved.” He asked Chiang to put Stilwell in full command, under himself, of all Chinese forces. He added that he knew how Chiang felt about Stilwell, but the future of all Asia was at stake.
Chiang replied that he agreed in principle but asked for a delay, for “Chinese troops and their internal political conditions are not as simple as those in other countries”; he also asked Roosevelt to send a personal representative to help adjust relations between Stilwell and himself. The President agreed and chose Major General Patrick J. Hurley, an Oklahoma Republican, corporation lawyer, Secretary of War under Hoover, negotiator between Mexico and expropriated American oil companies, more recently a roving diplomat for the President, a towering picture-book general with considerable experience of almost everything except China. As Hurley proceeded to China, the Japanese were pressing on. In mid-September Stilwell cabled to Marshall that “the jig is up in South China.”
It was not, seemingly, in northern China. Armed with instructions from Roosevelt, Hurley plunged into the trackless problem of helping bring a settlement between the Kuomintang and Mao Tsetung’s Communist regime. He arrived at a time when American officials in China were at last seeing Chinese Communism firsthand. On Roosevelt’s prompting, Vice President Wallace had persuaded Chiang in June to allow embassy and army officers to visit Yenan, the Communists’ capital, for personal observations and talks. The visiting Americans, liberated from the drift and demoralization of Chungking, felt that they had come into a different country and were meeting a different people. From Mao down, the officials impressed them with their cordiality, directness, and lack of show. There were few police in Yenan, no beggars, no desperate poverty, the observers reported to Chungking and Washington. Morale was high. People were serious, busy, organized, confident. Even Hurley seemed to become drawn into Yenan’s intoxicating atmosphere of discipline and dedication.
The Communists did not conceal their interest in the United States and its President. They bombarded their visitors with questions. Might America swing back to isolationism and let China “stew in her own juice”? Was it really interested in democracy? Did it realize that Chiang was in no way representative of China, that even Hitler had a better claim to power? Much depended on Roosevelt—was he going to be re-elected? Chairman Mao, in a fine humor after dancing gaily with his wife, sat down next to an American second secretary during a lull and talked about the possibility of a Kuomintang-Communist compromise. He thought Roosevelt would not put any pressure on Chungking until after the election because he would not want to stir up Chiang’s supporters.
“We will wait,” Mao added. “We have had a long training in patience.” Laughingly he asked about Roosevelt’s chances of re-election.
Roosevelt at the moment was far more worried about the Generalissimo than about the Chairman or even perhaps his own re-election chances. As the Japanese pressed on in eastern China, and as Chiang showed no signs of reorganizing and reforming his government, or seeking unity with the Communists, the President decided on a firmer hand. In a stinging cable to Chiang he said that China was facing the disaster he had feared. Chiang would have to assume personal responsibility for what was happening.
“I have urged time and time again in recent months that you take drastic action to resist the disaster which has been moving closer to China and to you.” He and Churchill had just decided at Quebec, he went on, to accelerate operations to open the land line to China. “The action I am asking you to take” was “at once placing General Stilwell in unrestricted command of all your forces.”
It fell to Stilwell to deliver this message personally to the Generalissimo. Vinegar Joe could not resist a surge of pleasure in presenting to his chief the kind of near-ultimatum that for months he had wanted Washington to send. “I handed this bundle of paprika to the Peanut and then sank back with a sigh,” he wrote happily in his diary. “The harpoon hit the little bugger right in the solar plexus, and went right through him. It was a clean hit, but beyond turning green and losing his power of speech, he did not bat an eye. He just said to me, ‘I understand.’ ”
For Stilwell it was but a brief moment of triumph. The Generalissimo was stung by the handling of the message as well as by its content; a subordinate had thrust upon him an ultimatum. Stilwell must go, he hold Hurley; he was unfitted for the vast, complex, and delicate duties of the new command. He had never been able to get along with the Generalissimo. Chiang would tolerate him no longer.
So the gauntlet was thrown at Roosevelt’s feet. Marshall urged him to stand behind Stilwell. It was a last chance to appeal to liberal, reformist, or even Communist elements in China. But here Roosevelt hesitated. Expressing his surprise and regret to Chiang, he agreed that Stilwell be relieved as Chiang’s chief of staff but asked that he be placed in direct command of Chinese troops in Yunnan and Burma. Chiang refused. He stood by his original demand that Stilwell be relieved of all his offices and replaced. And now Roosevelt submitted. Stilwell would be brought home. Clearly no American general would take over-all command of the armed forces of Nationalist China. There would be no basic reorganization of the Chinese Army, no fundamental social reform, no pressure on Chiang to make a settlement with the Communists—and probably no real drive against the Japanese in South China. By November 1944 Roosevelt’s China strategy seemed to be in ruins.
Why did Roosevelt reverse his China strategy at the critical moment? Stilwell’s answer was simple: the Commander in Chief was a weak and procrastinating politician, an “old softy” who had refused to bargain with Chiang, who knew little about China, and who was probably ill, to boot. The truth, as usual, was not so simple. Roosevelt, with his sensitivity to personalities, doubtless felt that he was responding mainly to Chiang’s insistence on his prerogatives as chief of state, to Stilwell’s crusty individualism and inability to get along with Chiang, Mountbatten, or Chennault, to the views of Hurley, who was siding with the Generalissimo against Stilwell. But his main reason for ending pressure on Chiang stemmed from his basic Chinese strategy.
Since Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt had been pursuing two aims in China: to strengthen it as the central base for the final attack on Japan, and to treat it as a great power that would be a bulwark of Asian stability and democracy after the war and a focus of American co-operation with Asia. While the first aim was a matter of military need and the latter of long-run hopes, the two goals meshed. By sending men, munitions, and money to China he was strengthening its postwar as well as its war role; by including China as one of the Big Four, by bringing it into summit conferences such as that at Cairo, he was bolstering Chungking’s legitimacy, giving it a greater claim on war supply and on participation in military decisions.
Roosevelt sharply modified his first goal during 1944. As Chiang’s armies melted away before the Japanese ground attack, as Chennault not only failed to break up that attack but also lost his advance air bases, as Chiang refused to undertake drastic reforms of his government and army command, and—most important by far—as American amphibious forces hopped across the Pacific with ever-growing power and momentum, the President lost hope that China would constitute the main springboard for the climactic assault on the home islands. Stalin’s promise to take on the Japanese armies in Manchuria sometime after Hilter’s fall, along with the anti-Japanese and pro-American attitude of the Yenan Communists, made Chiang’s role even less vital. In telling the Generalissimo twice in October that the ground situation in China had deteriorated so sharply that he no longer wanted an American officer to take command of Chiang’s forces under the Kuomintang, Roosevelt was not only venting his frustration, but he was signaling his changed military policy, and he was demonstrating once again that essentially military considerations dominated his basic strategy.
The shift in military policy, however, was not accompanied by a shift in political. Faced with his failure in China, Roosevelt had a choice of only two fundamental alternatives. He could continue or even accelerate his military effort in China and try to persuade or compel Chiang to produce basic reforms, thus giving the government the military basis for its aspirations as a great power; or he could scale down his political goals for China at the same time he scaled down his military ones. In fact, the President tried to do both and ran the risk of succeeding in neither. He kept talking to and about China as a great power even while he was giving higher and higher military priorities to other theaters.
This separation of strictly military and operational from broad political or strategic considerations in Asia exemplified Roosevelt’s approach to the European situation, too. Europe First had been his firm priority from the start, regardless of political-military implications for Asia. And in planning strategy in Europe he and Stimson and Marshall had put it to the more politically minded British that the invasion of France was the quickest, cheapest, and surest means of defeating Germany. Churchill had struggled to plant Allied influence in the Balkan area, only to give in to Roosevelt’s insistence on nourishing the invasion of France even at the expense of the Allied effort in northern Italy. In the fall of 1944, as Allied troops pressed to the border of Germany, the American emphasis on a focused, massed military effort, regardless of political considerations, seemed vindicated.
Other examples of Roosevelt’s setting military over political priorities could be cited—his cautious approach to rescuing the Jews of Europe, his handling of the occupation zones in Germany, his withholding of atomic information from the Russians—but his absolute insistence on unconditional surrender seemed to some at the time and to many in retrospect as the clearest example of his subordination of long-run political concerns to immediate military ones. The practical purposes of unconditional surrender were to allow the Allied commands to concentrate on winning a total military victory over Germany, to strengthen the anti-Hitler military coalition by insuring that neither Russians nor Anglo-Americans would negotiate for a separate peace, and to help insure that the Russians would live up to their promise to join the war against Japan. Neither Churchill nor Stalin supported the doctrine with Roosevelt’s determination, but each gave it lip service while seeking to modify it to meet particular situations.
If military strategy, in Samuel Morison’s words, is the art of defeating the enemy in the most economical and expeditious manner, Roosevelt must rate high as a military strategist. As Commander in Chief he husbanded military resources in both the Atlantic and the Pacific until the enormous power, industrial and technological, of the nation could be brought to bear on the military scene. Despite endless temptations to strike elsewhere he stuck firmly to an over-all strategy of Atlantic First, and in Europe, despite the diversions of Africa and Italy, he and his military chiefs finally delivered the full weight of the Anglo-American effort into France. He helped gain a maximum Soviet contribution to the bleeding of German ground strength and brought Allied troops into the heart of Germany at just the right time to share in and claim military victory; he found the right formula for getting the most militarily from the Russians without letting them, if they had so wished, occupy the whole continent. And if he was deliberate and single-minded in Europe, where victory demanded consistency and continuity of effort, he was opportunistic and flexible in the early stages of the Pacific war. He shifted from a strategy of depending on China and Formosa as huge bases for ground forces to stepped-up island-hopping by amphibious forces. Compared with Soviet, German, and even British losses, and considering the range and intensity of the effort and the skillful and fanatical resistance of the enemy, American casualties in World War II were remarkably light.
He had been an architect of military victory. Well could the Commander in Chief boast in his Navy Day campaign talk in Philadelphia on October 27, 1944, that, since Navy Day a year before, the Army, Navy, and Air Force had participated in no fewer than twenty-seven landings in force on enemy-held soil and that “every one of those 27 D-Days has been a triumphant success.” Until the final days of 1944 Roosevelt never met a major military defeat after the setbacks of Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Kasserine Pass, and in the Pacific during the first fifteen months of the war.
But grand strategy—achieving the nation’s broad and enduring goals by marshaling its full military, diplomatic, economic, and psychological resources—puts a much harsher test to a Commander in Chief.
Grand strategy requires not only putting ends before means, political goals before military, long-run aims before immediate successes. It is not merely, in the Clausewitzian sense, the subordination of war to diplomacy, and diplomacy to politics. It is the marshaling of a series of plans and decisions in every relevant area of a nation’s life—war, diplomacy, economics, popular opinion, domestic politics—in such an order that power and action can be mobilized persistently and widely behind a people’s enduring principles and goals, that the instrumental ends and means—governmental policies, military decisions, institutional patterns—be continually readapted in the light of the wider purposes being served, and that the goals and principles be reassessed in the light of those ends and means. The language of grand strategy is the language of priorities. The priorities serve and structure a nation’s ideology.
It has become conventional to see Roosevelt as a master pragmatist or opportunist or improviser who waged war without political ends in mind, or who at least subordinated his ends to his means and made a mess of the former, or even of both. The dichotomy was not this simple.
Roosevelt had political goals; few leaders in history, indeed, have defined them with more eloquence or persistence. He expressed these goals most broadly and simply in the Four Freedoms—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from fear, freedom from want—a bit more extensively in the Atlantic Charter, and at great length in a host of pronouncements, campaign speeches, press releases, fireside chats, letters, and conversations. The Four Freedoms, he said, were the “ultimate stake,” perhaps not immediately attainable throughout the world, “but humanity does move toward those glorious ideals through democratic processes.” Those freedoms would be realized through the more specific aims of the Atlantic Charter—the end of territorial aggrandizement, the right of all peoples to choose their own form of government, the free and fair sharing of raw materials, international collaboration to raise living standards, abandonment by nations of the use of force. Serving these goals in turn were a host of still more concrete policies and institutions: Big Power unity and co-operation, the complete eradication of Nazism, general disarmament, a United Nations with power to enforce the peace, and a variety of international agencies and arrangements for specific purposes in education, transportation, relief, refugees, and many other fields.
It is said that while Roosevelt stated noble ultimate ends and appropriate instrumental ends and generally believed in them, he ignored or compromised them when an immediate purpose or advantage could thereby be achieved, that he was supremely subject to what Alfred Vagts has called the vice of immediacy. He decided in favor of the invasion of North Africa, for example, without fully grasping its inevitable effect of delaying the cross-channel attack on Germany; and he “walked with the devil” in the person of Darlan and Franco and Badoglio without seeing the implications for democratic principle and morale. Too, in 1942 he could urge on Smuts that the United Nations not adopt a hard-and-fast strategic policy for 1943 until 1942 operations were concluded. And he could tell Churchill, in perhaps the most revealing phrase of all, that the “political considerations you mention are important factors, but military operations based thereupon must be definitely secondary to the primary operations of striking at the heart of Germany.”
The sharpest indictment of Roosevelt on this score concerns unconditional surrender. It has been ably argued that this policy, on which he insisted to the end and which was gleefully exploited by Goebbels, may well have hardened the resistance of the German people and of the Wehrmacht, discouraged the resistance to Hitler inside the armed forces and without, prolonged the war, and caused unnecessary loss and bloodshed, and that all of this was at variance with Roosevelt’s goals. Yet unconditional surrender is a prime example of how the standard indictment of Roosevelt can be turned around and can require a closer look at his grand strategy.
Unconditional surrender flatly contradicts the usual argument that Roosevelt was pragmatically and opportunistically concerned with immediate specific results at the expense of the more general and long run. It was fully apparent to the President, as to his friends and critics, that the Nazis could exploit unconditional surrender to stiffen resistance to the Allies. Indeed, the President’s own Chiefs of Staff had advised him to modify the doctrine for military reasons. The Commander in Chief not only insisted on unconditional surrender, but he also resisted Machiavellian notions that he modify the doctrine publicly and later apply it in fact. Roosevelt’s ultimate insistence on a direct attack on Germany, whatever the military cost, as compared to a strategy of encirclement or attrition, his decision to recover the Philippines largely for symbolic reasons despite practical military arguments for bypassing them, his own warning to Senators that there could be no sharp division between political and military matters are other examples of his willingness to subordinate immediate military advantage to broader goals.
The real point is less Roosevelt’s simple separation of political ends and military means than his capacity to marshal his means of all kinds—military, institutional, propagandistic, diplomatic, and indeed political—in support of his most fundamental objectives. His failures lay in linking the ends and the means. Thus he was banking on Soviet popular as well as governmental confidence in the willingness of the Big Four to share and sacrifice together, yet he agreed to a long delay in the cross-channel attack. He wished to recognize the potential role of the several hundred million Chinese people but made Chungking a poor third in the allocation of military assistance, and he was unwilling to apply the political pressure that was the only conceivable way to bring about military and possibly political and economic reforms in China. He was deeply concerned about colonialism and expressed strong views to the British about India in particular, only to draw back when Anglo-American collaboration seemed threatened. Even when Churchill appealed to him in 1944 for some ships after an ammunition ship had exploded in Bombay Harbor sinking vessels loaded with 36,000 tons of grain, Roosevelt refused to divert shipping from military needs.
Roosevelt was a practical man who proceeded now boldly, now cautiously, step by step toward immediate ends. He was also a dreamer and sermonizer who spelled out lofty goals and summoned people to follow him. He was both a Soldier of the Faith, battling with his warrior comrades for an ideology of peace and freedom, and a Prince of the State, protecting the interests of his nation in a tumultuous and impious world. His difficulty lay in the relation of the two. The fact that his faith was more a set of attitudes than a firmly grounded moral code, that it embraced hope verging on utopianism and sentiment bordering on sentimentality, that it was heavily moralistic, to the point, at least in the view of some, of being hypocritical and sanctimonious—all this made his credo evocative but also soft and pasty, so that it crumbled easily under the press of harsh policy alternatives and military decision.
Roosevelt’s moral credo was a patchwork of attitudes and instincts about honor, decency, good neighborliness, noblesse oblige. It was often hard to translate these attitudes and instincts into clear directives, operative programs, specific policies. His mind rejected comprehensive plans and long-run programs. He shrank from set institutional arrangements because these tended to freeze rather than invigorate end-means relations. Trumbull Higgins has said of Roosevelt that when his “dichotomies could not be resolved by the great political magician himself, they were left to circumstance.” But Roosevelt’s lofty dreams and his parochial compromises not only collided with one another; they also inflated the importance of each other, for the higher he set his goals and the lower he pitched his practical improvisations, the more he widened the gap between the existing and the ideal and raised men’s expectations while failing to fulfill them.
Roosevelt’s views of atomic secrecy are a case in point. All his instincts were toward trusting people, toward sharing, toward fostering the community of learning. Churchill had aroused his fears and suspicions at Hyde Park about the Soviet quest for atomic information, but when members of the scientific community became less alarmed about the German threat and more alarmed about the dangers of secrecy, and when scientists brought influence to bear in the White House during the fall of 1944, the President may have drifted back toward his original instinct of putting some trust in the Russians and restricting the use of the bomb. Alexander Sachs got in to see him in December and claimed later that Roosevelt agreed that the first step should be a nonmilitary demonstration of the bomb observed by international scientists and clergymen, following which a warning would be given, specifying the time and place of an imminent nuclear attack, thus permitting civilians to escape. But he never did instruct Stimson to carry out such a plan, and he took no step toward sharing the secret with the Russians. He talked about the global brotherhood of science and the ability of all peoples to work together for peace, but between the idea and the reality, between the conception and the creation, fell the shadow.
If Roosevelt was both realist and idealist, both fixer and preacher, both a prince and a soldier, the reason lay not merely in his own mind and background, but also in his society and its traditions. Americans have long had both moralistic and realistic tendencies, the first strain symbolized by Wilson, the second by the tough-minded men—Washington, Monroe, the two Adamses—who directed the foreign policy of the republic in its early years. No modern American statesman could fail to reflect this dualism. If Roosevelt’s values were a bit overblown and vaporous, they were developed against a background of liberal values and internationalist impulses so widely shared and diluted as to provide little ideological support for politicians and parties. To some extent Roosevelt succumbed to the classic dilemma of the democratic leader: he must moralize and dramatize and personalize and simplify in order to lead and hold the public, but in doing so he may arouse false hopes and expectations, including his own, the deflation of which in the long run may lead to disillusionment and cynicism.
American foreign policy in particular has been shaped by two diplomacies, as Russell Bastert has argued—one diplomacy of short-run expediency and manipulation, of balance of power and sphere of interest, of compromise and adjustment, marginal choices, and limited objectives, and another diplomacy—almost an antidiplomacy—of world unity and collective security, democratic principle and moral uplift, peaceful change and nonaggression. Then, too, the institutional arrangements in Washington—the separation of decision making between the State Department and the Pentagon, and in their lines of access to the President, the absence from the White House of a staff that could integrate diplomacy and military policy, the institutional gaps in Congress among legislators specializing in military, foreign, and domestic policies, and indeed the whole tendency in Washington toward fragmented policy making—all reinforced the natural tendency of the President to compartmentalize.
All great nations, all world leaders exhibit such dichotomies; everything depends on the actual combinations. Stalin, for all his ruthless opportunism, was so consistently intent on the long-run, or at least middle-run, goal of postwar Soviet security that in the darkest days after Hitler’s assault he would not barter or gamble on matters relating to that security. He was, like Roosevelt, a brilliant tactician, an actor and even a dissimulator; like Roosevelt he was a master of timing, of the art of “dosage”—measuring out pressure to what the traffic could bear—and of waiting and watching as well as striking out quickly; like Roosevelt he was superb in playing his adversaries off against one another. But Stalin far more than Roosevelt linked his wartime decisions to a strategy for long-run security, a strategy to which he adhered with steel-like tenacity. He had in abundance the defects of his virtue. Insecure, suspicious, parochial, he was so imbued with an essentially old-fashioned and brutal Realpolitik that he could never claim the impact on mass opinion and ideals of a Lenin, a Gandhi, or even a Roosevelt.
As a grand strategist Churchill was a more subtle study. Not lacking in his own canons of honor and responsibility, he embodied a diplomatic and military tradition that had helped Britain, in protecting its tiny isles against the colossi on the Continent, to practice all the black arts of diplomacy deplored by Hull and the other Wilsonians. He was, in truth, the Whig aristocrat of the eighteenth century that Harold Laski called him during the war. He had the aristocrat’s saving compassion for the miserable, but he also had the Whig’s fatal incomprehension of the tumultuous forces gushing out of the revolutions in Russia and China and elsewhere. Compared with Roosevelt’s, his vision was long but narrow; he could see the relation between wartime strategy and postwar balances of power in Europe, but he could not imagine the surge of masses of people in Asia or Africa. Like Roosevelt he was an opportunist and improviser in his approach to grand strategy, but he lacked the comprehensive principles that gave at least a general direction and focus to Roosevelt’s day-to-day decisions. He himself, as he once wrote admiringly of Lloyd George, “surveyed the problems of each morning with an eye unobstructed by preconceived opinions, past utterances, or previous disappointments and defeats,” and in the wartime kaleidoscope of shifting values and prodigious events, his strategy drew from intuition and insight rather than long-run purpose and settled goals. Versatile, fertile, vigorous, he lacked the steadiness of direction, the comprehensiveness of outlook, the sense of proportion and relevance that mark the grand strategist. And his strategy was Western-oriented; Roosevelt at least glimpsed the explosive energy lying dormant in the billion people of Asia, especially when that energy was released and focused by the call of freedom that the antifascist leaders were trumpeting throughout the world.
Such, at least, was a possible judgment toward the end of 1944, and if history is written by the survivors, Roosevelt would not have the opportunity of Churchill and even of Stalin to vindicate himself in later years. But Roosevelt, like Churchill, would have argued that all the long-run plans of mortal men are subject to the caprices of chance and conflict, that, in sum, events control strategy—and in the dying days of 1944 a sudden, cruel event was being readied on the quiet Western Front.
After his triumphal return to Washington, the President had worked steadily to catch up on postponed business. Hassett, still smarting from election attacks on the tired, quarrelsome old men, noted that while his boss had been laboring like a Trojan, young Dewey had been resting for a fortnight in a suite at a posh vacation resort. Late in November, though, Roosevelt journeyed through a leaden rain with a retinue of secretaries, aides, and doctors to take a long Thanksgiving rest at Warm Springs, his first extended visit there since Pearl Harbor.
As usual, his work load followed him. Shortly after the election, Hull had announced his decision to retire, and all the President’s persuasiveness could not induce him to stay on until January 20 to round out “our Third Term,” as Roosevelt called it. The President chose Stettinius to succeed him. Though earnest and agreeable, the former Undersecretary could not ease the eternal tension between White House and State Department. When Stettinius submitted a mixed bag of nominations for assistant secretary—including Joseph Grew, James Dunn, Nelson Rockefeller, and Archibald MacLeish—the President signed the documents without enthusiasm, stating to Hassett that MacLeish was the only liberal in the lot. He wrote to the Librarian of Congress that he was thrilled that MacLeish was staying on in Washington, even if it meant jumping from one mausoleum to another.
The other appointments raised the hackles of old New Dealers, and the reporters were waiting to pounce on the President when he returned to Washington late in December. The redoubtable May Craig asked:
“Mr. President, this is a contentious question, but I would like a serious answer.”
“You would find it awfully hard to get, May.”
“There’s a good deal of question as to whether you are going right or left politically, and I would like your opinion on which way you are going.”
“I am going down the whole line a little left of center. I think that was answered, that question, eleven and a half years ago, and it still holds.”
“But you told us a little while ago,” another reporter said, “that you were going to have Dr. Win-the-War and not Dr. New Deal.”
“That’s right.”
“The question is whether you are going back to be Dr. New Deal after the war—”
“No, no. No. Keep right along a little to the left of center, which includes winning the war. That’s not much of an answer, is it?”
“No,” said May Craig amid laughter.
“However, you have broken the ice, May.”
“Mr. President,” someone asked, “if you are going down a little left of center, how does that match with the six appointments you sent up to the Hill on the State Department?”
“Very well.”
“Would you call them a little left of center?”
“I call myself a little left of center. I have got a lot of people in the Administration—oh, I know some of them are extreme right and extreme left, and everything else—a lot of people in the Administration, and I cannot vouch for them all. They work out pretty well, on the whole. Just think, this crowd here in this room—my gracious, you will find every opinion between left and extreme right.”
The President showed remarkable aplomb at this press conference considering the reports that had just been coming in from the European front. Three days before, the Germans had struck with power and ferocity in the Ardennes and broken through the light Allied defenses there. It was Hitler’s supreme gamble in the west. He had lost over three million officers and men by the end of autumn 1944; he had suffered over a million dead, wounded, and missing during the summer of 1944 alone; his cities were in ruins; he still felt the effects of the bomb attempt on his life. Finland had broken with Germany in September; Bulgarians and Rumanians were switching sides to Russia. But the Führer still carried a paper strength of ten million men and at least three hundred divisions and brigades, over forty of them armored, and Himmler scoured the country for another twenty-five divisions. Hitler won the grudging support of his generals for a “grand slam” that would re-create the spectacular days of 1940.
Anxiously Roosevelt and Leahy followed the attack on the wall charts in the map room, as the Germans encircled Bastogne and Saint-Vith and drove on west toward the great supply dumps. Not only was the counteroffensive—rapidly coming to be called the Battle of the Bulge—a stunning tactical blow, but it symbolized the military plight of the West at the end of 1944. Even before the attack, Churchill had warned Roosevelt that “we have definitely failed to achieve the strategic object which we gave to our armies five weeks ago.” Allied bombing of Germany was rising to a peak, but so was German war production, as indicated by the great supplies that the Wehrmacht had stored for the attack.
The reports from the Bulge were still gloomy, aside from the valiant defense of Bastogne and other points, when Roosevelt entrained from Washington for Christmas at Hyde Park. His spirits improved as his grandchildren took over the mansion and gifts were piled high in the living room. Elliott was there, with his new wife, Faye Emerson. Christmas Eve the President spoke to the nation, dwelling on the soldiers who were far from home. He also sat in his old rocker next to the fireplace and began his annual reading of The Christmas Carol. Halfway through, a three-year-old grandson suddenly noticed a gap in the President’s lower jaw, where he had neglected to insert his false tooth. Fixing the President with his gaze he cried out, “Grandpère, you’ve lost a tooth!” The President smiled and kept on reading, but when the young man advanced on him and asked, “Did you swallow it?” the President laughed and closed the book.
“There’s too much competition in this family for reading aloud.”
“Next year,” said Elliott’s wife, “it’ll be a peacetime Christmas.”
“Next year,” said Eleanor Roosevelt, “we’ll all be home again.”