THE GLEAMING LIGHTS OF the house shone against the dark that enveloped the south lawn and the woods and the Hudson below. Inside, a host of family and friends celebrated over scrambled eggs as the final clinching returns came in through the chattering teletype machines. The President sat with a small group in the dining room, his coat off and his necktie loosened, tally sheets spread out before him. It was election night, November 5, 1940.
Toward midnight the guests rushed to the windows at the sound of a commotion outside. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s neighbors were straggling down the entrance road and mustering in a singing, jostling crowd before the portico. Their torches threw dancing tongues of red light onto the ancient trees, the thick hemlock hedge around the rose garden, the long white balustrade. A drum-and-bugle corps blared out victory tunes. An exuberant banner proclaimed SAFE ON THIRD.
A door opened. Franklin Roosevelt moved haltingly to the balustrade. He leaned on a son’s arm, his face full and ruddy in the glow of the cameramen’s flares. Arrayed with him were his mother, Sara, his wife, Eleanor, his sons Franklin and John and their wives. At the rear of the portico, standing alone, his face exultant, Harry Hopkins smacked his fist into his palm as he performed a little pirouette of triumph. Out front a boy darted forward with a placard on which the words SAFE ON THIRD had been clearly printed over OUT STEALING THIRD, and the President laughed with the crowd.
It was a moment of enormous relief for Roosevelt. Earlier in the evening he had been upset by early election returns from New York; but far more important, he had been worried for weeks about the ominous forces that seemed to be lining up with the opposition. There were altogether too many people, he felt, who thought in terms of appeasement of Hitler—honest views, most of them, he granted, but views rising out of materialism and selfishness. Vague reports had come in of obscure fifth-column activities. Speaking to Joseph Lash that election night, Roosevelt was blunt: “We seem to have averted a Putsch, Joe.”
But now, standing before the crowd, Roosevelt could forget the stress of the campaign. He joked with his neighbors and reminisced about this “surprise” celebration—actually an old election-night tradition at Hyde Park.
“A few old greybeards like me,” he said, “go back to 1912 and 1910. But I think that, except for a very few people in Hyde Park, I go back even further than that. I claim to remember—but the family say that I do not—and that was the first election of Grover Cleveland in 1884.
“I was one and a half years old at that time, and I remember the torchlight parade that came down here that night….
“And this youngster here, Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., was just saying to me that he wondered whether Franklin, 3rd, who is up there in that room, will also remember tonight. He also is one and a half years old….
“We are facing difficult days in this country, but I think you will find me in the future just the same Franklin Roosevelt you have known a great many years.
“My heart has always been here. It always will be.”
“The same Franklin Roosevelt you have known …” A few in the crowd must have remembered Franklin as a small boy snowshoeing across the fields, shooting birds for his collection, skating and ice-boating on the Hudson. Then Hyde Park had not seen much of him for a time. Fall after fall he had left for school—for four years at Groton and for another four at Harvard.
He had returned to settle down with his widowed mother, but not for long; soon he made a suitable marriage with his distant cousin Eleanor Roosevelt, a niece of President Theodore Roosevelt. Again he had left Hyde Park—this time for Manhattan, where he studied and practiced law. Hyde Park had seen a good deal of him in the fall of 1910 when he campaigned strenuously to capture a seat in the New York Senate. But then he was off again—to Albany, where he spent two years as an anti-Tammany Democrat; to Washington, where he served Woodrow Wilson as Assistant Secretary of the Navy; to the political crossroads of the nation, as he campaigned in 1920 for the vice presidency.
Then suddenly he was home again, his body seemingly shrunken, his long legs inert, his political career in ruins. For seven years he had searched for a cure for the effects of infantile paralysis, resting at Hyde Park, crawling around lonely beaches in Florida, swimming in the buoyant waters of Warm Springs, in Georgia. He never found the cure. But he had found himself, steadied his political course, struck out for the highest stakes in the nation’s politics. In 1928 his neighbors had helped send him to Albany, where he governed New York for four years. In March 1933 he had left Hyde Park for Washington, amid a numbing depression, to preside exuberantly for eight years over a nation in upheaval and regeneration.
September 18, 1940, Rollin Kirby, reprinted by permission of the New York Post
And then 1940. He had broken tradition to win a third-term nomination, taken on a formidable adversary in Wendell Willkie, and plunged into the maelstrom of shifting political alliances and seething political reactions to events abroad. He had faced isolationists in both parties, a labor turncoat in John L. Lewis, a bleak parting with his old campaign manager, James A. Farley. Hitler dominated events in America. The presidential politician who above all had sought to keep his choices wide and his timing under control had had, at the height of the campaign, to send destroyers to England and to draft American boys.
October 14, 1940, Rollin Kirby, reprinted by permission of the New York Post
The pursuit of victory had exacted a heavy price. In the last desperate days, Roosevelt had made some fearsome concessions to the isolationists. After Willkie hurled the flat prediction that a third term would mean dictatorship and war, Roosevelt had assured the “mothers of America” categorically that “your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” Yet his whole posture toward Hitler for months had been founded on the assumption that fascism was a menace to democracy everywhere, that the Nazis would not be content with the conquest of Europe but, with their junior partners, Italy and Japan, would ultimately carve up the world. Still, there was this flat pledge to the mothers of America.
And now he was back, at the height of his power and prestige. Who was this Franklin Roosevelt? The master campaigner who had evaded the Republican attack and then outflanked and beaten his enemies in the last two weeks of the campaign? The son of Hyde Park who had never really left home, who had measured men and events by old-fashioned standards of noblesse oblige, aristocratic responsibility, inconspicuous consumption? The graduate of Groton who was still inspired by Rector Endicott Peabody’s admonitions about honesty, public morality, fair play? The state legislator who had embraced an almost radical farm-laborism at the height of Bull Moose reform? The Democratic-coalition politician who had learned to barter and compromise with Tammany chiefs, union leaders, city bosses, Western agrarians, Republican moderates, and isolationist Senators? The Wilson internationalist who had fought for the League of Nations but then abandoned it? The humanitarian who could spend billions for relief and recovery but almost obsessively preach the need for a balanced budget? The foe of totalitarianism who had stood by, vocal but inactive, during the agony of Munich? Could he be all these things?
No one—certainly not his Hyde Park neighbors—could have answered such questions this election night of 1940. They might have seen some significance, however, in the people gathered around Roosevelt on that mild November evening.
There was his mother, still active and bustling in her eighty-seventh year. A belle of the 1870’s, later a young wife to a much older man, she had been the dominating influence on Franklin’s early character. She had struggled to keep her son in his Hyde Park frame. Politics, she felt, was for vulgar men. But she was proud of her son’s success, and a little defensive. This very election night she was confiding to a reporter that she could not understand why businessmen hated her son so. “They say he has been stirring up class hatred, but there is nothing in his heart to justify that. We were not brought up to consider whether people were rich or poor.”
There was Eleanor Roosevelt, radiant and vivacious tonight in a red chiffon dress, so busy entertaining forty or so guests that she hardly paused to hear the election returns. A tortured childhood had seemed to make her sensitive to misfortune and, though this ugly duckling had made a fine marriage, her private troubles had not ceased. She had had to endure Sara’s benevolent dictatorship at Hyde Park, years of supervising five young children—and then the discovery that her gay, handsome husband was in love with another woman. This was Lucy Mercer, whom Eleanor had brought into the family as a part-time social secretary. Almost ten years younger than Roosevelt, she was a Catholic, and poor but of a noted Maryland family. She had won Roosevelt’s heart with her pretty face, artless, beguiling way, and her touching love for him. The affair had ended, Eleanor must have realized, mainly because Franklin feared his mother’s reaction and the political cost. But had the affair really ended? Certainly it had seemed so during Roosevelt’s invalidism, but one evening during her husband’s convalescence Eleanor had talked about it to her daughter, Anna, and had broken down and cried.
Now, facing her third term in the White House, she was no longer the controversial First Lady of the mid-thirties. Most people had come to accept—many had come to admire—her endless travels and her championship of youth, Negroes, sharecroppers, the poor in general. Out of her private sufferings had emerged an indomitable public lady, compassionate, gracious, even gay, but also imposing, a bit didactic, tenacious, sometimes hard as steel. But the private woman was still sensitive and vulnerable. She and her husband had the kind of affection and mutual consideration that temper a long marriage; but she was an ever-present conscience. “When you take a position on an issue,” Roosevelt once protested, “your backbone has no bend!” In many respects she was but a member of the President’s staff. Perhaps in a sense she willed it this way; Joan Erikson concluded that Eleanor Roosevelt had first become a decisive woman when, remembering how as a girl she had been unable to prevent the father she adored from being institutionalized, she resolved to help her polio-stricken husband to stay active in public life.
There was Henry Morgenthau, Jr., a Dutchess County neighbor for many years. The Secretary of the Treasury was virtually a member of the Roosevelt family, with an especially close relation to Roosevelt’s sons. Fussy, thin-skinned, morose, he was sometimes a bother to the Roosevelts, but the President prized him for his absolute loyalty, his solid convictions, and, perhaps most of all, his fellow feeling for Dutchess County, its trees and land and crops.
And there was Harry Hopkins, by 1940 the President’s chief aide. On the surface Hopkins was still the keen, casual, tough-talking New Dealer who had infuriated the conventional with his outspoken distaste for conservatives, his frequenting of race tracks, his jabbing attacks at friend and foe alike. But underneath, Hopkins had changed since the heady days of the New Deal. Scourged by illness, steadied by relentless demands, he had lost some of his “gee whiz” attitude toward rubbing shoulders with celebrities. He had given up the Secretaryship of Commerce in August 1940 to work and live in the White House as Roosevelt’s eyes, ears, and legs. Instantly empathetic to the President’s needs and moods, broadly educated by his chief in the ways and wiles of bureaucratic politics, he was essentially a means of presidential management and manipulation.
Others were at Hyde Park that night: Missy LeHand and Grace Tully, both gay, devoted, long-time presidential secretaries who laughed at their boss’s endlessly repeated stories and gave him the relaxed after-dinner companionship that was so hard for Eleanor Roosevelt to provide; Samuel Rosenman, an old friend from gubernatorial days, now the President’s chief speech writer; Stephen Early, a florid, sometimes suave, sometimes bristling Virginian, in charge of the President’s press relations; Marvin McIntyre, a former newspaperman and a friend of Roosevelt’s since Navy Department days; General Edwin Watson, known as “Pa” in the White House, another Southerner, genial, bluff, adept at letting the right people see his chief and mollifying the disappointed; Robert Sherwood, a playwright and eloquent liberal, who had been drafted to help with the 1940 campaign speeches and who had stayed on.
And Roosevelt himself? People were still trying to take the measure of the man. By the end of his second term his bewildering complexity had become his most visible trait. He could be bold or cautious, informal or dignified, cruel or kind, intolerant or long-suffering, urbane or almost rustic, impetuous or temporizing, Machiavellian or moralistic. Most political leaders embody contrasting traits; the baffling question about Roosevelt was what kind of internal standard, if any, determined which of his qualities would appear in what situations.
And always there was his mercurial capacity to move from one mood to another, to deal with portentous public events with little private evasions, to lose himself as a political leader, at least for a moment, in some strange or funny role. For instance, shortly before Christmas 1940—at a time when Roosevelt was working on one of the momentous speeches of his presidency—a letter arrived for Fala from Henrik Van Loon’s dog Noddle. Back went a letter to Noddle from Fala. “The cookies were grand and I am glad you like me and I am glad, too, that you have never been on a train because the long rides on swaying cars over rolling wheels—just like five thousand mile cruises to see a lot of islands—ain’t no fun for us folks….P.S. I prefer to walk in the yard where trees grow and there is some place to scratch.”
Was there a discernible core of ideas and values behind the glittering façades? What kind of crucible would prove the iron in the man?
At the moment Roosevelt was greeting his Hyde Park neighbors, Luftwaffe bombers were dumping their loads onto London and turning back toward the Continent. It was almost dawn; all-clear sirens wailed, and groggy Londoners stumbled out of their shelters after the fiftieth consecutive night of Nazi bombing. Great craters pocked the heart of the ancient capital; buildings stood like skeletons; much of the dock area was rubble. Tiny paper Union Jacks fluttered on top of Londoners’ homes.
Winston Churchill exulted over Roosevelt’s re-election. He had not dared to speak his mind before, “but now,” he wrote to the President on this day, “I feel you will not mind my saying that I prayed for your success and that I am truly thankful for it.” That did not mean, he added guardedly, “that I seek or wish for anything more than the full, fair, and free play of your mind upon the world issues now at stake….We are entering upon a sombre phase of what must evidently be a protracted and broadening war….Things are afoot which will be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe….” Unaccountably Roosevelt never acknowledged this message; perhaps his silence was eloquent.
It was a somber time for Churchill. Resolute in war, defiant in defeat, he was impatient and fretful in these days of delay and uncertainty, when eddies and crosscurrents were cleaving the great tides of war. Britain had stood alone; the Royal Air Force had ground down the Luftwaffe; Hitler had postponed and then called off the cross-channel invasion; defenses in Britain and in Africa had been bolstered. But now sinkings in the Atlantic were increasing at a sickening rate; Germany was putting pressure on Vichy France and Franco Spain; the Free French had just fumbled a plan to seize Dakar. At home, production was lagging and the politicians were bickering.
The old landmarks were vanishing. Bombs pitted famous London monuments; old clubs simply disappeared between teatime and supper. Often, Churchill was compelled to quit 10 Downing Street for a headquarters thirty-five feet below ground. There, in a monastic bedroom, he carried on his work, dictating clear, witty, marvelously precise instructions; attaching red labels reading ACTION THIS DAY to his orders and queries; and presiding over meetings in a cavernous yellow chamber protected by steel girders. He was restless underground. When he heard heavy bombing he climbed painfully to a rooftop, where, in his Air Force overcoat and cap, thick siren suit, with gas mask and steel helmet, he puffed stolidly on a long cigar and watched London burning. His daily schedule was quite different from Roosevelt’s. He started work in midmorning in a bed strewn with cables and reports, met with his aides later in the morning, presided exuberantly over a staff luncheon, took a long nap in the afternoon whenever the spirit moved him, conferred further or toured a blitzed section of the city, and then went through a strenuous evening of dictation, conferences, and idle talk until far past midnight—often to the dismay of his colleagues.
By the end of 1940 these colleagues were acquiring the professionalism, steadfastness under pressure, and mild cynicism of old war hands. Churchill’s compact, nonpartisan War Cabinet comprised the Labour party’s leader, Clement Attlee, as Lord Privy Seal; Herbert Morrison, a long-time Cockney trade-union boss, as Home Secretary; Sir Kingsley Wood, as Chancellor of the Exchequer; Lord Halifax, as Foreign Secretary. Churchill was his own Minister of Defence. General Sir Hastings L. Ismay, a highly professional soldier who somehow coped with Churchill petulant as well as Churchill puckish, headed the Defence Secretariat; Sir John Dill presided over the Imperial General Staff; Lord Louis Mountbatten was Chief of Combined Operations. The death of Neville Chamberlain in early November 1940 and the return of Anthony Eden to the Foreign Office at year’s end (with Halifax shifted to the British Embassy in Washington) seemed to symbolize the final triumph of the Churchill men. The Prime Minister, at the height of his powers in his mid-sixties, drove them remorselessly, in turn infuriated, inspired, confounded, and consoled them.
By this time Churchill was on terms of slightly circumspect but close familiarity with Roosevelt, even though they had met only once, during World War I—a meeting Roosevelt professed to remember and Churchill did not. Their messages flowed back and forth freely. The Former Naval Person, as he still signed himself, could send as late as 2:00 A.M. a cable that would go directly to the American Embassy in London, which would flash it to the White House through special coding machines; often Roosevelt would have it before he went to bed. Sometimes the President’s reply was awaiting Churchill when he awoke in the morning.
Churchill had looked on with admiration as Roosevelt defied the Nazis abroad and the isolationists at home. He had rejoiced when Roosevelt trounced his opposition at the polls. Now—presumably—the President would act.
There were subdued differences between the two, however, even at this early stage. Each was his nation’s agent; each was a patriot. The interests of their nations, so closely intertwined during these months, could always branch off; they could even break apart, as had those of Vichy and London. Roosevelt had turned away Churchill’s plea for destroyers in May, when they were most needed; the deal in September, though warmly greeted in London, would bring only half a dozen of the old craft into action by the end of 1940. The destroyers themselves had been the lesser stakes in the game. Churchill’s main goal had been to entangle the two nation’s affairs and interests beyond possibility of separation and divorce. Roosevelt had wanted instead a straight quid pro quo that he could present to a wary Congress as a simple Yankee horse trade. The two leaders had compromised: Churchill had treated the exchange of destroyers and leased bases as a “parallel transaction” reflecting the mutual interests of the two countries; Roosevelt had presented it to Congress as the quid and quo of a deal.
Churchill had won his main goal. “I have no doubt,” he told the House of Commons, “that Herr Hitler will not like this transfer of destroyers, and I have no doubt that he will pay the United States out, if he ever gets the chance.”
But now, with Roosevelt’s trial by votes over, there was a curious lull and resistance in Washington. Where were the stepped-up actions and bold new departures that the election returns seemed to warrant? The Roosevelt administration seemed to be following a clear policy of “America First.” Washington was still demanding “cash and carry”; increasingly, London was finding it hard to supply either.
A month after the election Churchill wrote perhaps the most important letter of his life. “My Dear Mr. President,” it began. “As we reach the end of this year, I feel you will expect me to lay before you the prospects for 1941. I do so with candour and confidence, because it seems to me that the vast majority of American citizens have recorded their conviction that the safety of the United States, as well as the future of our two Democracies and the kind of civilisation for which they stand, is bound up with the survival and independence of the British Commonwealth of Nations. Only thus can those bastions of sea-power, upon which the control of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans depend, be preserved in faithful and friendly hands….”
He went on to assess the strategic situation. Britain could not match the immense armies of the Germans, but through air and sea power it could meet the Nazis where only comparatively small forces could be brought into action. To defend Africa and southern Asia, as well as the home islands, Britain was forming between fifty and sixty divisions. “Even if the United States were our ally, instead of our friend and indispensable partner, we should not ask for a large American expeditionary army.” Shipping was the limiting factor. “The decision for 1941 lies upon the seas.” Here Churchill revealed recent shipping losses: over 400,000 tons in the five weeks ending November 3. “The enemy commands the ports all around the northern and western coasts of France. He is increasingly basing his submarines, flying-boats, and combat planes on these ports and on the islands off the French coast. We are denied the use of the ports or territory of Eire in which to organize our coastal patrols by air and sea. In fact, we have now only one effective route of entry to the British Isles, namely, the northern approaches, against which the enemy is increasingly concentrating, reaching ever farther out by U-boat action and long-distance aircraft bombing.” Britain’s battleship strength, even with the King George V and the Prince of Wales coming into action, provided a dangerously small margin of safety.
Churchill touched on the fields of danger. At any point Vichy could go over to Hitler; if the French Navy were to join the Axis, “the control of West Africa would pass immediately into their hands, with the gravest consequences to our communications between the Northern and Southern Atlantic, and also affecting Dakar and of course thereafter South America.” It seemed clear that in the Far East Japan was thrusting southward through Indochina to Saigon and other naval and air bases, thus threatening Singapore and the Dutch East Indies.
What did Churchill ask the United States to do? Item by item he laid out his requests: 1. reassertion by the United States of the doctrine of the freedom of the seas, so that American ships could trade with countries against which there was not an effective legal blockade; 2. protection of this lawful trading by American warships (“I think it is improbable that such protection would provoke a declaration of war by Germany upon the United States, though probably sea incidents of a dangerous character would from time to time occur. Herr Hitler has shown himself inclined to avoid the Kaiser’s mistake….His maxim is ‘One at a time’ ”); 3. failing these the gift, loan, or supply of a large number of American warships, especially destroyers, to help maintain the Atlantic route, and extension by the United States Navy of its sea control of the American side of the Atlantic; 4. “good offices” to induce Eire to co-operate on such matters. A shopping list of specific needs followed. Then finance: “The moment approaches when we shall no longer be able to pay cash for shipping and other supplies….I believe you will agree that it would be wrong in principle and mutually disadvantageous in effect if at the height of this struggle Great Britain were to be divested of all saleable assets, so that after the victory was won with our blood, civilisation saved, and the time gained for the United States to be fully armed against all eventualities, we should stand stripped to the bone.” Such a course, he said, would not be in the moral or the postwar economic interest of either country.
“If, as I believe, you are convinced, Mr. President, that the defeat of the Nazi and Fascist tyranny is a matter of high consequence to the people of the United States and to the Western Hemisphere, you will regard this letter not as an appeal for aid, but as a statement of the minimum action necessary to achieve our common purpose.”
News of Roosevelt’s re-election came to Adolf Hitler in his modern Reichskanzler’s palace on the Wilhelmstrasse. The Führer made no public statement; he allowed no provocative remarks. But two days later he gave an answer of sorts—to Roosevelt, to Churchill, to all his enemies—in Munich, on the seventeenth anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch.
“I am one of the hardest men Germany has had for decades, perhaps for centuries, equipped with the greatest authority of any German leader,” Hitler gasconaded to his old comrades, jammed around him in the swastika-bedecked hall. “But above all, I believe in my success. I believe in it unconditionally….” He evoked his comrades’ memories of World War I. Germany had been poorly armed when war broke out, but it had held for four years. For four years the Allies strained themselves, “and then they had to get the American magician-priest, who found a formula that took in the German nation, trusting in the word of honor of a foreign President.”
He had wanted the closest friendship with England, Hitler went on. “If England had agreed, good. They did not agree. Also good.”
He turned to Britain’s ally—and made a curious concession. “As far as American production figures are concerned, they cannot even be formulated in astronomical figures. In this field, therefore, I do not want to be a competitor. But I can assure you of one thing: German production capacity is the highest in the world….Germany today, in any case, is, together with her Allies, strong enough to oppose any combination of powers in the world….”
The world listened; this was the man who, between one summer and the next, had overwhelmed six nations; the man who was now threatening to invade Britain, seize Gibraltar, and overrun the Balkans. Yet November 1940 was a time of frustration and indecision for Hitler, just as it was for Churchill. The conqueror of Europe had journeyed across France to persuade Spain’s Francisco Franco to allow Nazi troops to take Gibraltar and other strategic outposts in the western Mediterranean. Impressed by Britain’s survival and pressed by Churchill, the Caudillo had bickered and shilly-shallied through nine hours of tortuous talk with Hitler; rather than go through that again, Hitler said later, he would prefer to have four or five teeth taken out. Vichy was also an irritation. On the way back to Berlin, Hitler had met with Marshal Henri Pétain; the old man had been courteous and reserved, but made only vague promises about collaborating with the New Order.
But it was Mussolini—Hitler’s old comrade in arms—who had been most vexing of all. Il Duce was one of the few persons Hitler really admired; even so he had not been willing to take his junior partner into his full confidence. Piqued in turn by Hitler’s coups and faits accomplis, Mussolini had ordered his troops to invade Greece on October 28, with the least and latest possible notice to Berlin. The Führer got the news on the way back from his talks with Franco and Pétain. He was almost beside himself. Fall was the wrong time to attack through the mountains; the fragile balance of power in the Balkans would be upset; Mussolini was supposed to conserve his troops for his main thrust against the British in North Africa. Abruptly, Hitler ordered his train south to Florence to meet and deter the Duce. Too late; Mussolini greeted him on the platform with the announcement—almost as though mimicking Goebbels in Berlin—“Victorious Italian troops crossed the Greco-Albanian frontier at dawn today.”
And then—most galling of all—the invasion had floundered. Greek soldiers, waiting in mountain recesses, had routed the Italians and sent them back into Albania. The British took the opportunity to occupy Crete and Lemnos, greatly strengthening their position in the eastern Mediterranean. Now the Rumanian oil fields were threatened by the RAF. Now Hitler would have to send divisions south. Was Mussolini an ally or an embarrassment?
Yet, all these were pinpricks compared with Hitler’s main concern during the dark November days of 1940. He was approaching a momentous strategic decision: whether to risk a two-front war.
Nothing had proved Hitler’s military genius more strikingly than his capacity to isolate his foe diplomatically and militarily and then dispose of him: thus Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, France. Was Britain next? If things had gone according to tentative plan, German forces would have been invading Britain by the fall of 1940, while Russia stood by, wary but inactive, and the United States looked on, concerned but impotent. Britain, however, had refused to co-operate. It would be spring before a heavy invasion smash could be mounted, but by then British resistance would be tougher, and the German admirals were still dubious about the operation. Aside from the tactical risks of a cross-channel invasion, there was always the enigma of Roosevelt. What would the meddlesome President do? He had sent destroyers and munitions at the height of an election campaign; was it conceivable that he would let his Navy stand by idle while German troops poured across the Channel?
Then there was Russia. Hitler had long planned to crush the despised Bolshevik-Slav-Jewish regime to the east; this was probably the most fixed part of his world plan. But when? The non-aggression pact of 1939 had been merely a device to gain time and leverage. Stalin had not only taken every jot of his share of the booty while Hitler was busy attacking Frenchmen and Englishmen in the west, but he had calmly occupied the Rumanian lands of northern Bukovina and Bessarabia and seized Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as well. Russian behavior was unbearable. But it posed a harsh dilemma. Should Hitler turn east before disposing of Britain? Could he manage a two-front war—with the ever-increasing likelihood of massive American aid to the English? At a conference in mid-November Admiral Erich Raeder, Commander in Chief of the Navy and a more maritime-minded strategist than the Führer, once again warned him against a showdown with Russia before Britain was finished off.
Hitler looked yearningly east, but he paused. Was an alternative possible—a repetition of the strategy of 1939, but on a continental scale? The Tripartite Pact, signed by Germany, Italy, and Japan in September 1940 in the great Hall of Ambassadors, had been aimed mainly at facing Roosevelt with the prospect of a strengthened Japan and diverting him from aid to Britain. What if Moscow could now be induced to join the pact? Would this not discourage Roosevelt and demolish Churchill’s last hope of aid from either Washington or Moscow? With this heady aim in mind Hitler had invited the Russian Foreign Minister to Berlin.
Vyacheslav Molotov arrived on November 12. A band played the march of welcome; an honor guard strutted; there were even Russian flags, with the long-hated hammer and sickle. But surrounding everything was a glacial atmosphere, which seemed to deepen as Molotov was driven through silent crowds under leaden skies to his apartment in the Tiergarten.
Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop lost no time in confronting his guest with the cardinal issue. Britain was beaten, he declared flatly, and would be begging for peace. Churchill, to be sure, was depending on aid from America, but, he proclaimed, “the entry of the United States into the war is of no consequence at all for Germany.” Germany would never again allow an Anglo-Saxon to land on the European Continent. While Molotov listened with poker face, Ribbentrop pumped up his trial balloon. The British Empire would be carved up. “Everything turns to the south”—Germany to its former colonies in central Africa; Italy to the African Mediterranean coast; Japan to Southeast Asia and the western Pacific. What about Russia? Would not Moscow want access to the open seas through the Dardanelles? Molotov was silent, except to ask about specifics with an annoying literalness of mind.
Molotov was just as cool and reserved when he met with Hitler later in the day. The Führer rambled, in his talk, across the face of the globe, dividing real estate. Britain was through. The United States could not be a threat for decades—“not in 1945 but at the earliest in 1970 or 1980.” Molotov patiently waited out Hitler’s harangue; then he again turned to specifics. The questions were steady and remorseless. Just what would the New Order mean? What part would the Soviet Union play? Exactly what areas was Japan promised? What about Moscow’s interest in Turkey and the Balkans? “The questions rained down upon Hitler,” his interpreter later remembered. “No foreign visitor had ever spoken to him in this way in my presence.”
Hitler could barely keep his temper in the presence of this icy Bolshevik with old-fashioned pince-nez perched below a bulging forehead and with his jabbing questions. The Führer suggested that the talks be recessed, since an air raid was possible. The next day’s discussion was even more strained. The two men jousted over the same issues: Finland, the Baltic, the Balkans, Turkey. In vain the Führer tried to divert Molotov from Europe and toward the south with vague suggestions of a “purely Asiatic territory in the South”—presumably India. During the afternoon the talks degenerated into a spate of petty broils.
Hitler gave up. He again turned Molotov over to Ribbentrop, who, in diplomatic line of duty, had to attend a gala banquet at the Russian Embassy. Winston Churchill, lacking an invitation to the Berlin festivities, sent his greetings in the form of RAF bombers. Ribbentrop was just about to reply to Molotov’s toast when the air-raid sirens wailed and the guests fled. He escorted Molotov to a shelter, where he made another effort to convince him to seize this last chance to remount the Nazi world band wagon. Again and again, while the explosions rumbled, Ribbentrop asserted that Britain was through. Molotov looked at him. “If that is so, why are we in this shelter, and whose are those bombs that fall?”
The thwarted Führer still did not make a final decision to turn against Russia. He ordered planning and preparations against the East to continue, but for a while kept open various alternatives to the foreboding prospect of a second front.
In December he set off a propaganda barrage aimed at arousing the workers of the world against the plutocrats in Britain and America. Standing on a platform in the Rheinmetall-Borsig Works of Berlin, with a bristling artillery piece as a backdrop, he proclaimed that the stakes were far greater than the fate of one nation: “It is rather a war of two opposing worlds.” Britain, he said, had seized control of sixteen million square miles of the surface of the earth.
“All my life I have been a ‘have-not.’ At home I was a ‘have-not.’ ” He rambled on, flaying the capitalists of the world, their kept press and political parties. “If in this world everything points to the fact that gold is fighting against work, capitalism against peoples, and reaction against the progress of humanity, then work, the peoples, and progress will be victorious. Even the support of the Jewish race will not avail the others….
“Who was I before the Great War? An unknown, nameless individual. What was I during the war? A quite inconspicuous, ordinary soldier. I was in no way responsible for the Great War. However, who are the rulers of Britain today? They are the same people who were warmongering before the Great War, the same Churchill who was the vilest agitator among them during the Great War….” Hitler was now in his second hour of oratory. He roamed further through history and across the globe—but with no mention of America or Russia. He pictured the New Order of which he dreamed—a new order of peace, reconstruction, the supremacy of work over capitalism—“the Great German Reich of which great poets have dreamed….
“Should anyone say to me: ‘These are mere fantastic dreams, mere visions,’ I can only reply that when I set out on my course in 1919 as an unknown, nameless soldier I built my hopes of the future upon a most vivid imagination. Yet all has come true….”
Official Japan feigned a posture of indifference toward Roosevelt’s re-election; hostility was allowed to show only in the lower echelons. The President must now reorient his Far Eastern policy, said a Foreign Office spokesman; his present attitude was “unfeasible and too far-fetched.” A newspaper recalled Roosevelt once saying “I hate war,” but now he seemed to be leading his country directly into one. The only hope was that Americans would overcome their misunderstanding of Japan’s New Order. Comment soon died away; a more pleasing event was at hand in Tokyo—two days of celebrating the founding of the Japanese Empire twenty-six centuries before.
The ceremony fused ancient and modern Japan. In dead silence a huge crowd awaited the Emperor beneath the gray walls of the ancient military camp that had become the Imperial Palace. Chrysanthemums stood in martial rows around dazzling floral designs. Precisely on time, the imperial standard could be seen moving slowly through the trees, followed by a crimson Rolls-Royce. The caravan crept across the double bridge spanning the moat; bands played the national anthem; the Emperor and Empress disembarked and seated themselves behind a table covered with brocade.
The notables of Japan flanked Hirohito; his brothers and other nobility, old statesmen and warriors who still had access to the throne, and his Cabinet stood rigid and solemn in their frock coats. Here was the Foreign Minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, brilliant, mercurial, talkative, unpredictable, a graduate of the University of Oregon, where he had suffered the real and imagined humiliations of a hotel busboy to put himself through college; the Minister of War, Hideki Tojo—“Fighting Tojo,” to his young schoolmates—now a brusque, sharp-minded army general who had built his reputation in governing the Emperor’s troops in Manchuria; Navy Minister Zengo Yoshida, the tireless agent of his service; the Premier, Prince Fumimaro Konoye, a handsome aristocrat, towering over his colleagues only in height, adroit, versatile, but also irresolute and hypochondriacal, lacking both the means and the will to bridle his military colleagues.
The Emperor arose; Prince Konoye shouted the banzais; 50,000 people bobbed in rippling waves, and throughout Japan millions of villagers, assembled before their elders, bowed to their Emperor. In front of the palace all eyes fastened on Hirohito, man, god, high priest, symbol, and emperor. He looked every inch not an emperor, but he played the part destined for him: a patient ceremonialist, dutiful family man, titular autocrat with influence over the drift of affairs through a look or a gesture but without decisive control over major decisions.
Next day, at an equally stately ceremony, Roosevelt’s old friend and fellow Grotonian Ambassador Joseph C. Grew spoke for the diplomatic corps. He faced the Emperor, bowed, got out spectacles and manuscript, read, bowed, replaced his manuscript and spectacles, bowed again, turned backward, and paced solemnly to his place. It was a bland address, calling for peace and mutual cooperation and new contributions by Japan to culture, but the Ambassador was pleased that Hirohito seemed to nod vigorous approval of his main points. Was this a sign to the military? Grew could not tell.
Now in his eighth year in Tokyo, he had reported to Washington a series of dismal events: assassinations of key government leaders by army fanatics; the tightening grip on Manchuria; Tokyo’s joining with Berlin in the Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936; the move into China, with the capture of Shanghai and the rape of Nanking; the ever-heightening pressure on Chiang Kai-shek’s government; the fierce, furtive clashes of Japanese and Russian troops in Asia. The military clearly had been given its head, but there were times of hesitation, when the moderates seemed to have their chance, especially after the shocking news—at least to genuinely anti-Communist military chiefs—of the Russo-German Pact of 1939. Patient, correct, polished, outwardly imperturable but inwardly mystified and anguished, Grew had counseled moderation, in the hope that the military’s fortune would run out.
Adolf Hitler’s blitz through the Low Countries, the fall of France, the threatened invasion of Britain had echoed thunderously in the councils of Tokyo. Dutch, French, even British possessions seemed ready to be plucked. Impatient to seize the opportunity, military leaders in July 1940 had forced a moderate government to quit and had established a new government under Konoye. A hard line was then set. In order to settle the “China incident,” Nationalist China’s supply lines were to be severed, which would mean a flanking move through Indochina. Such a move would in turn antagonize Washington and London and would require offsetting support in the West. Hitler and Mussolini, eager to divert American efforts into the Pacific, would readily accept a stronger Axis coalition.
Late in August, Tokyo extracted from Vichy an accord that recognized Japan’s immediate military interest in Indochina. In this pinch the French had turned to Roosevelt for help, but the administration, deep in a political contest, offered nothing but moralisms. Washington’s attitude was hardening, however—as was that of its man in Tokyo. In a cable that was to become famous as the “Green Light” message, Grew stated that “Japan today is one of the predatory powers; she has submerged all moral and ethical sense and has become unashamedly and frankly opportunist, seeking at every turn to profit by the weakness of others. Her policy of southward expansion definitely threatens American interests in the Pacific.” Japan must be deterred no longer by words, but by American power.
Grew’s views strengthened the hands of those advisers who were urging Roosevelt to use his only immediate weapon. Late in September the administration decided on a complete embargo on all types of iron and steel scrap—but not on oil—to Japan and announced a new loan to China.
By now Tokyo was fishing in deep waters. For several weeks Matsuoka had been negotiating with the Germans over a tripartite pact. The burning question was the extent to which Berlin would recognize Japan’s sphere of interest. A hopeful list of acquisitions under Japan’s New Order had been drawn up: Indochina, Thailand, British Malaya, British Borneo, the Dutch East Indies, Burma, Australia, New Zealand, India, “etc.,” with Japan, Manchuria, and China as the New Order’s heartland. To Tokyo’s surprise and delight Hitler’s envoy had gone along with this list, except possibly for India, which might be reserved for Russia. The Germans made clear, however, that Japan must help them keep America out of the European war.
Supporting the treaty, Matsuoka stated flatly to the Privy Council: “Germany and Japan have a common aim in concluding this pact. Germany wants to prevent America’s entry into the war, and Japan a Japanese-American conflict.” But the elder statemen pondered Article 3 of the pact: “Germany, Italy and Japan agree…to assist one another with all political, economic and military means if one of the three Contracting Powers is attacked by a Power at present not involved in the European War or in the Chinese-Japanese conflict.” Could war be prevented better by appeasing Roosevelt or through a show of coalition power? But it was too late for second thoughts; in September the Japanese signed the Tripartite Pact.
Publicly the United States had responded calmly to the news of the pact but an intense struggle over policy continued. The pact had bolstered the position of the hawks, who wanted a tougher line against Japan. The administration was divided, some members fearing that stronger measures—especially an embargo on oil—would precipitate a war that the country was not yet ready to fight. The President considered a number of alternatives, including a shift of naval strength westward, even to Singapore, or a naval patrol, but he decided to play for time.
“Now we’ve stopped scrap iron,” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote him a week after Election Day, “what about oil?”
“The real answer which you cannot use,” he replied “is that if we forbid oil shipments to Japan, Japan will increase her purchases of Mexican oil and furthermore, may be driven by actual necessity to a descent on the Dutch East Indies.” And that, he added, might encourage the spread of war in the Far East.
Tokyo, for its part, was quiet. Matsuoka insisted that the pact was not directed against the United States; he even invited Washington to join the pact and to help the Axis make the world into one big family. It was this kind of bravado that led Cordell Hull to say that Matsuoka was as crooked as a basket of fishhooks.
In mid-December Grew sent “Dear Frank” a personal year-end assessment of the Pacific situation. After eight years of effort, he told the President, he found that diplomacy had been defeated “by trends and forces utterly beyond its control, and that our work has been swept away as if by a typhoon….” He put the main problem directly to the President: “Sooner or later, unless we are prepared…to withdraw bag and baggage from the entire sphere of ‘Greater East Asia including the South Seas’ (which God forbid), we are bound eventually to come to a head-on clash with Japan.
“A progressively firm policy on our part will entail inevitable risks—especially risks of sudden uncalculated strokes, such as the sinking of the Panay, which might inflame the American people—but in my opinion these risks are less in degree than the far-greater future dangers which we would face if we were to follow a policy of laissez faire….
“It is important constantly to bear in mind the fact that if we take measures ‘short of war’ with no real intention to carry those measures to their final conclusion if necessary, such lack of intention will be all too obvious to the Japanese, who will proceed undeterred and even with greater incentive, on their way. Only if they become certain that we mean to fight if called upon to do so will our preliminary measures stand some chance of proving effective and of removing the necessity for war—the old story of Sir Edward Grey in 1914….
“You are playing a masterly hand in our foreign affairs,” he concluded, “and I am profoundly thankful that the country is not to be deprived of your clear vision, determination, and splendid courage in piloting the old ship of state.” These remarks were pleasing and barbed; the pilot in the White House, who had stayed on the bridge in part by promising to keep the American people out of war, now had to face Realpolitik.
Two days after the election Franklin Roosevelt’s train rolled slowly south along the Hudson River, was shunted through New York City, and then bore him through the long night to Washington. In the morning Eleanor Roosevelt, Vice President-elect Henry A. Wallace, and several thousand Washingtonians greeted him at Union Station. Two hundred thousand people lined Pennsylvania Avenue. The returning hero, back from the wars like some conqueror of old, jubilantly doffed his familiar campaign fedora as the limousine inched its way to the White House. Thousands followed the car, poured through the open White House gates, swarmed over the lawn, and chanted “WE WANT ROOSEVELT!” until the President and the First Lady appeared on the north portico.
And now the daily routine, fashioned during eight years in office, began again in the famous old mansion. Around 8:30 A.M. the President, a cape thrown around his shoulders, breakfasted in bed while he skimmed rapidly through dispatches and newspapers—usually the New York Times and the Herald Tribune (especially flown from New York), the Washington papers, the Baltimore Sun, and the Chicago Tribune—his eyes lighting with radar speed on presidential and political items. Eleanor might come in at this point with an urgent plea, and then presidential aides—Hopkins, Watson, Early, McIntyre, the old White House hand William D. Hassett, presidential physician Ross T. McIntyre for a brief check-up. Around 10:00 A.M. the President’s valet, Arthur Prettyman, trundled him into the White House elevator in his small armless wheel chair, lowered him to the ground floor, and wheeled him through the colonnade to his office, now accompanied by Secret Service men with baskets of presidential papers. Fala might meet his master on the way and receive a presidential caress. After the President’s return to his study around 5:30 came a relaxed and garrulous cocktail hour, as the President painstakingly measured out the liquor and dominated the conversation at the same time. Usually he dined with immediate members of his family and staff, and in the evening variously worked on speeches, leafed through reports, reminisced with his secretaries, or toyed with his collections of stamps and naval prints.
Friday was usually Cabinet day; on the Friday after the election the President met with his official family for the first time since he had left for the campaign battles. The Cabinet of November 1940 was ripe in years, experience—and disagreements. The members with the greatest political weight, measured either by formal authority or by easy access to the President and his influence, were (along with Morgenthau) Secretary of State Cordell Hull, courtly, conspicuously patient and long-suffering until the point when he could explode under pressure with a mule skinner’s temper and damn his enemies, foreign and domestic; Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, no intimate of the President, but a man of such moral stature in American politics and strong and plain opinions that he exerted a constant, if unseen, influence on his chief; Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the first woman Cabinet member in American history, utterly loyal to the President and to Eleanor Roosevelt, a sweet-talking conciliator of rival politicians and labor leaders, her official mien hardly concealing a sensitive feminine personality; and, oddly, Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes, the Eeyore of the Cabinet if Morgenthau was its Rabbit, a prowling defender of his bureaucratic turf, prickly and petty but insufferably right-minded on the big issues, a host to his chief for poker and a grumpy guest of the President for fishing.
The Cabinet was a brier patch of rivalries and differences. Stimson and most of the others fretted over Hull’s procrastinations and precautions; Hull, for his part, suspected, sometimes rightly, that certain of his colleagues would be happy to take over some of his department’s responsibilities; Morgenthau, in moving ahead on aid to Britain, jousted with both the State and War Departments; Ickes had battled with virtually all his colleagues, and pursued his most passionate determination, next to thwarting Hitler, to filch the Forest Service from the Department of Agriculture.
But the Cabinet was broadly united on the cardinal issue of 1940. Hull had warned Latin-American diplomats of a wild runaway race by “certain rulers” bent on conquest without limit. Stimson was gradually becoming convinced that war was not only inevitable but also necessary to clear the field for a decisive effort. Morgenthau feared and hated the Nazis and yearned to help Britain as fully as American resources allowed. Ickes for years had been publicly reviling Hitler and for months urging a full embargo against Japan. The others were strong interventionists.
Every ounce of the Cabinet’s talent and militance was needed in the fall of 1940. It was clear that Britain faced a crisis of shipping, supply, and money. There were rumors of mighty strategic decisions being made in enemy capitals. Interventionists were demanding action; the President had a mandate for all aid to Britain short of war—why didn’t he deliver? But nothing seemed to happen. When Lord Lothian, the British Ambassador, returned from London late in November with a warning that his nation was nearing the end of its financial resources, Roosevelt told him that London must liquidate its investments in the New World before asking for money.
While official Washington waited for marching orders, the President took a four-day cruise down the Potomac to catch up on his sleep. Then he upset press predictions by making no changes in his Cabinet, tried unsuccessfully to persuade the aged General John J. Pershing to serve as ambassador to Vichy France, asked Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish to find out if the Cherable Islands, which he had once told reporters he would visit, could be found in poetry or fiction (they could not), and called for an annual Art Week under White House sponsorship. The President made it clear that he would not ask for repeal or modification of the Neutrality Act, which forbade loans to belligerents, or of the Johnson Act, which forbade loans to countries that had defaulted on their World War I debts.
At a press conference, the President fended off reporters who were looking for big postelection decisions on the war. It was all very good-natured. Asked by a reporter whether his economy ban on civilian highways included parking shoulders for defense highways, the President could not resist the opening.
“Parking shoulders?”
“Yes, widening out on the edge, supposedly to let the civilians park as the military go by.”
“You don’t mean necking places?”
The reporters roared, but they got precious little news. The administration seemed to be drifting. Then on December 3 the President boarded the cruiser Tuscaloosa for a ten-day cruise through the Caribbean. Besides his office staff he took only Harry Hopkins.
While Roosevelt fished, watched movies, entertained British colonial officials—including the Duke and Duchess of Windsor—and looked over naval bases, Cabinet officers back in Washington struggled with the dire problem of aid to Britain. Production officials agreed that American industry could produce enough for both countries, and army chiefs were happy to supply British as well as American needs, for this would require an enormous expansion of defense production facilities, but what about the financing? The British in Washington contended that they could not possibly pay for such a huge program. Morgenthau asked Jesse Jones, head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, if he could legally use its funds to build defense plants. For the War Department, yes, said Jones, but not for the British. Stimson argued that the administration must no longer temporize, but present the whole issue to Congress, and the others agreed. But this seemed a counsel of despair; everyone could imagine the explosion on Capitol Hill if the issues were clearly drawn. And would the President risk a legislative defeat of this magnitude?
A thousand miles south, Navy seaplanes were bringing the President daily reports on these anxious searchings. Then, as the Tuscaloosa sat off Antigua in the bright sun, a seaplane arrived with Churchill’s fateful postelection letter. No one remembered later that Roosevelt seemed especially moved by it. “I didn’t know for quite a while what he was thinking about, if anything,” Hopkins said later. “But then—I began to get the idea that he was refueling, the way he so often does when he seems to be resting and carefree. So I didn’t ask him any questions. Then, one evening, he suddenly came out with it—the whole program. He didn’t seem to have any clear idea how it could be done legally. But there wasn’t a doubt in his mind that he’d find a way to do it.”
The “whole program” was Lend-Lease—the simple notion that the United States could send Britain munitions without charge and be repaid not in dollars, but in kind, after the war was over.
This was no rabbit pulled out of a presidential hat. Churchill’s letter had acted merely as a catalyst. A British shipbuilding mission had recently arrived in Washington to contract for ships to be built in the United States. For weeks, perhaps months, the President had been thinking of building cargo ships and leasing them to Britain for the duration. Why not extend the scheme to guns and other munitions? This apparently simple extension, however, represented a vast expansion and shift in the formula. There was no way that Britain could return thousands of planes and tanks after the war; there was no way that Americans could use them if it did. Maritime Commission officials had opposed even the leasing of ships, on the ground that the United States would not need a large fleet after the war and would be stuck with a lot of useless vessels. If this was true of ships, it was doubly true of tanks and guns. But so adroitly and imaginatively did Roosevelt handle the matter that for a long time its critics made every objection except the crucial one.
Armed with his formula, restored and buoyant after his trip, the President returned to Washington on December 16 and plunged into a series of conferences with his anxious advisers. The next two weeks were one of the most decisive periods in Roosevelt’s presidency. His foxlike evasions were put aside; now he took the lion’s role.
In one of the surprises he enjoyed engineering he sprang his plan at a press conference. Though he disclaimed at the start that there was “any particular news,” the reporters could tell from his airs—the uptilted cigarette holder, rolled eyes, puffing cheeks, bantering tone—that something was up. He began casually. He had been reading a good deal of nonsense, he said, about finances. The fact was that “in all history no major war has ever been won or lost through lack of money.” He scornfully recalled meeting his banking and broker friends on the Bar Harbor Express at the outset of World War I and their telling him that the war could not last six months because the bankers would stop it. Some “narrow-minded people” were talking now about repealing the Neutrality Act and the Johnson Act and about lending money to Britain. That was “banal.” Others were talking about sending arms, planes, and guns to Britain as a gift. That was banal, too. The best idea—talking selfishly, from the American point of view, “nothing else”—was to build production facilities and then “either lease or sell the materials, subject to mortgage,” to the people on the other side.
“Now what I am trying to do is to eliminate the dollar sign. That is something brand new in the thoughts of practically everybody in this room, I think—get rid of the silly, foolish old dollar sign.
“Well, let me give you an illustration: Suppose my neighbor’s home catches on fire, and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him to put out his fire. Now what do I do? I don’t say to him before that operation, ‘Neighbor, my garden hose, cost me $15; you have to pay me $15 for it.’ What is the transaction that goes on? I don’t want $15—I want my garden hose back after the fire is over. All right. If it goes through the fire all right, intact, without any damage to it, he gives it back to me and thanks me very much for the use of it.” If his neighbor smashed it up he could simply replace it.
The reporters pressed him. Would this mean convoying? No. The Neutrality Act would not need to be amended? Right! Was congressional approval necessary? Yes. Would such steps bring a greater danger of getting into war than the existing situation? No, of course not. Nobody asked the President what use repayment “in kind” would be after the war, and hence why his plan was not an outright gift of munitions.
By now Berlin could no longer remain quiet. Fearing that Roosevelt would turn over to Britain 70,000 tons of German shipping in American ports, and that the United States Navy might begin to escort cargo ships, a Wilhelmstrasse spokesman warned that Roosevelt’s policy of “pinpricks, challenges, insults, and moral aggression” had become “insupportable.”
January 8, 1941, Ernest H. Shepard,© Punch, London
But the climax of Roosevelt’s year-end effort was yet to come. On the evening of December 29 he was wheeled into the diplomatic reception room and seated in front of a plain desk covered with microphones indicating their networks: NBC, CBS, MBS. Around him in the hot little room was jammed a small and mixed group: Cordell Hull and other Cabinet members, Sara Roosevelt, Clark Gable and his wife, Carole Lombard. The President, wearing pince-nez and a bow tie, seemed grave but relaxed.
“This is not a fireside chat on war,” he began in his smooth, resonant voice. “It is a talk on national security; because the nub of the whole purpose of your President is to keep you now, and your children later, and your grandchildren much later, out of a last-ditch war for the preservation of American independence and all the things that American independence means to you and to me and to ours….
“Never before since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock has our American civilization been in such danger as now….
“The Nazi masters of Germany have made it clear that they intend not only to dominate all life and thought in their own country, but also to enslave the whole of Europe, and then to use the resources of Europe to dominate the rest of the world.”
Roosevelt quoted Hitler’s statement of three weeks earlier: “ ‘There are two worlds that stand opposed to each other.’ ”
“In other words, the Axis not only admits but proclaims that there can be no ultimate peace between their philosophy of government and our philosophy of government.”
The President then reviewed the history of Nazi aggression and the Nazis’ attempts to justify it by “various pious frauds.” He charged that Americans in high places were “unwittingly, in most cases,” aiding foreign agents. “The experience of the past two years has proven beyond doubt that no nation can appease the Nazis. No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it…. The American appeasers…tell you that the Axis powers are going to win anyway; that all this bloodshed in the world could be saved; that the United States might just as well throw its influence into the scale of a dictated peace, and get the best out of it that we can.
“They call it a ‘negotiated peace.’ Nonsense! Is it a negotiated peace if a gang of outlaws surrounds your community and on threat of extermination makes you pay tribute to save your own skins?”
Then the President renewed his pledge to keep out of war. “Thinking in terms of today and tomorrow, I make the direct statement to the American people that there is far less chance of the United States getting into war, if we do all we can now to support the nations defending themselves against attack by the Axis than if we acquiesce in their defeat, submit tamely to an Axis victory, and wait our turn to be the object of attack in another war later on.
“If we are to be completely honest with ourselves, we must admit that there is risk in any course we may take. But I deeply believe that the great majority of our people agree that the course that I advocate involves the least risk now and the greatest hope for world peace in the future….” The government did not intend to send an American expeditionary force outside its borders. “You can, therefore, nail any talk about sending armies to Europe as deliberate untruth.”
“Our national policy is not directed toward war. Its sole purpose is to keep war away from our country and our people.”
He appealed to the nation to put every ounce of its effort into producing munitions swiftly and without stint. “We must be the great arsenal of democracy. For us this is an emergency as serious as war itself….
“There will be no ‘bottlenecks’ in our determination to aid Great Britain. No dictator, no combination of dictators, will weaken that determination by threats of how they will construe that determination….”
The speech was sending a thrill of hope across the anti-Nazi world. Londoners, crouching by their radios, listened avidly to the now reedy, now vibrant voice coming across the Atlantic. On this night the Nazis were fire-bombing London in the heaviest attack the city had known. Far away in Tokyo, Grew felt that the speech marked a turning point in the war; he read it so often he came to know it almost by heart. Telegrams began streaming into the White House; later, secretaries reported that the letters and wires had run a hundred to one in support.
The speech had the bracing tonic of conviction and faith. “I believe that the Axis powers are not going to win this war,” the President said. “I base that belief on the latest and best information.” Actually, Roosevelt’s only information was his faith that Lend-Lease would pass Congress and make an Axis victory impossible.
He concluded with a plea for the mightiest production effort in American history: “As President of the United States I call for that national effort. I call for it in the name of this nation which we love and honor and which we are privileged and proud to serve. I call upon our people with absolute confidence that our common cause will greatly succeed.”