On the morning of Sunday, November 17, 1940, William and Louise Leahy were having breakfast in their small guesthouse in the gardens of La Fortaleza, when an aide approached with an official telegram from Franklin Roosevelt.1
We are confronting an increasingly serious situation in France because of the possibility that one element of the French Government may persuade Marshal Pétain to enter into agreements with Germany which will facilitate the efforts of the Axis Powers against Great Britain and there is even the possibility that France may actually engage in a war against Great Britain. . . . We need in France at this time an ambassador who can gain the confidence of Marshal Pétain . . . I feel that you are the best man available for this mission.2
Ambassador to France, a nation just conquered by Nazi Germany, with a government in chaos and a population ground down by defeat—Leahy had never imagined himself in such a role. Yet Franklin Roosevelt was asking, and the admiral did not hesitate. On the back of the telegram he scribbled a note saying that he could be ready to leave Puerto Rico in a week, and had the message relayed immediately by navy radio. It actually took him ten days to prepare. He and Louise hurriedly packed their possessions, taking their pets and a few mementoes from their time on the island. Leahy was particularly fond of a cane made from a shark’s spine, and he was given a going-away present of a Spanish sword. In between packing he held final meetings with staff members and friends, including Edward Flynn, the head of the Democratic National Committee, who made a point of stopping off in Puerto Rico on holiday to pay his respects to the supposedly non-political Leahy.3
When Leahy left Puerto Rico, no one was neutral. The Coalición celebrated.4 Many Puerto Rican newspapers expressed regret, some even hoping that Leahy would be sent back to the island after his job in Europe was over. Secretary Ickes was downright depressed. Having finally found a governor who could make a difference, he worried about the future: “I told the President that in taking Leahy away from Puerto Rico he was depriving the island of the best Governor that we had ever sent down there. . . . Leahy has done an upstanding job. He hasn’t played favorites and he hasn’t allowed the politicians to kick him about, although he hasn’t mixed in politics.”5
The selection of Leahy for France sheds light on Roosevelt’s mind-set at this point in the war. The serving ambassador to France prior to Leahy was William Bullitt, a wealthy, volatile, and charming egomaniac from Pennsylvania. Over his lifetime Bullitt used his money to indulge a range of interests; in the 1930s, he teamed up with Sigmund Freud to write a psychological study of Woodrow Wilson, concluding that Wilson’s great love interest was his father, which in turn led Wilson to view his father, an evangelical minister, as God, and Wilson himself as Jesus Christ.6 Naturally, Bullitt believed he was the right man to shape American foreign policy and used his wealth and connections to become a diplomat. First named the ambassador to the Soviet Union, Bullitt moved from Soviet sympathizer to a hard-line opponent of communism. At the same time, he steadily declined in Roosevelt’s eyes, having committed two significant sins. The first was that he had started a romantic relationship with Missy LeHand, the president’s personal secretary, confidante, and rumored lover.7 By interposing himself emotionally and physically between the president and one of the few people Roosevelt relied upon, Bullitt had become a threat. This was compounded by Bullitt’s behavior during May and June 1940, when the German Army poured into France. During these fraught months Bullitt, an extreme Francophile, crossed some deep psychological threshold. No longer simply seeing himself as the American ambassador, he began casting himself as a physical rebuke to the Nazi invaders. As the French capital was about to fall to the Germans, and while the French government was relocating to Bordeaux, Bullitt proclaimed to Roosevelt that he planned to stay in Paris as an international sign of defiance and a beacon of hope for those left behind. He even proposed to announce over the radio that he would personally confront the German invaders so that they knew the world was watching.8 This grandiose step was the kind of posturing Roosevelt detested, and he cabled back to Bullitt to go to Bordeaux and continue representing the government to the French government.9 Yet Bullitt remained in the French capital. From that moment Roosevelt decided that Bullitt was not to be trusted to act calmly or keep his mouth shut.10 A few months later, when Roosevelt was able to recall Bullitt to Washington for consultations, he was determined to appoint someone he could trust to replace him.
The question was: Who? Whomever he sent to Vichy, Roosevelt believed, would have the most difficult and important American ambassadorial job in continental Europe. Some suggested Gen. John J. Pershing, America’s World War I commander, yet at more than eighty years old and in poor health, the notion was impractical. It was Sumner Welles, Roosevelt’s most trusted State Department adviser, who first came up with the idea of sending William Leahy. In Welles’s memoirs he describes the admiral as someone deeply valued by Roosevelt “as a close friend and as a man of exceptional character, wide knowledge and incisive mind.”11 He recalled the moment in November 1940 when he first suggested Leahy as the next ambassador to France.
When I was shown to the President’s bedroom I found him eating his usual hearty breakfast of grapefruit, coffee, cereal and eggs. He was sitting up in bed with a brown knitted sweater pulled over his pyjamas. The morning was grey and raw, and as an added protection his blue cloak was thrown around his shoulders. Over the bedspread were scattered the New York Times, and the Herald Tribune, and the Washington Post, which constituted his early morning reading.
“Have you any ideas,” he asked.
When I suggested Admiral Leahy, the President’s face lit up as it always did when a new idea appealed to him. Without further ado he seized the telephone at his bedside and asked the operator to get the Admiral on the long-distance telephone.12
On the morning of December 2, 1940, Leahy arrived in New York Harbor aboard the SS Borinquen, the same ship that had brought him to Puerto Rico fifteen months before, and was soon on a flight en route to Washington, DC. Within three hours of his arrival on the East Coast he was sitting in the White House with Franklin Roosevelt.13 Louise, complete with dog, canary, and luggage, did not reach Washington until five hours later.
Roosevelt, scheduled to leave Washington later that day until after Christmas, was determined to have as much time as possible with his friend. For the remainder of the morning, more than two hours, the two men talked, the president laying out his hopes and priorities for American policy toward France.14 Leahy was to be Roosevelt’s official representative, and knowing that the president valued loyalty, he was determined to follow Roosevelt’s instructions to the letter—literally. Before departing for France a few weeks later, Leahy asked for a document spelling out exactly the president’s priorities. The letter he received—which was drafted by the State Department, which probably meant Welles—was heavily detailed and more than a little daunting. Leahy was supposed to convince the French to cooperate with their conquerors as little as possible.15
The specific points of the letter give an important indication of Roosevelt’s views of France and the war. To begin with, France was still considered a significant source of power, for either good or ill. For that reason, the number one priority in Roosevelt’s mind was for Leahy to establish as close a relationship as possible with Marshal Pétain. The famous World War I commander Pétain had an extraordinarily high opinion of himself (not uncommon in field marshals) and came to view himself as some sacred father to a French nation of louche teenagers. Roosevelt believed that Pétain was opposed to succumbing completely to Germany, and he wanted Leahy to do everything possible to drive a wedge between the marshal and the real bogeyman in American minds, Pierre Laval.16 Roosevelt, astutely, judged Laval to be the most motivated political force for French collaboration with Germany, describing him as an “evil genius” as early as November 1940.17 Short, ambitious, and far too clever for his own good, Laval would come to dominate the French collaborationist government for most of the war. He was strongly supported by a number of Germans, including the Nazi ambassador to France, Otto Abetz. Pétain, however, had fired Laval in December 1940, and keeping him away from the levers of power was one of Leahy’s greatest preoccupations.
The second point, and geopolitically the most important, was that Leahy should make it perfectly clear to the Vichy leaders that Roosevelt was going to use the immense resources of the United States to support Great Britain and all other powers willing to fight Nazi Germany. In other words, the United States was not going to let the Germans win. The following points built upon this, and Leahy was to make it clear that any extra aid that France gave to Germany or Italy would be considered an unfriendly act by the United States. Finally, if the United States felt at any time that a French act would endanger American security, the country would not hesitate to act, even to the point of seizing parts of the French Empire.
Roosevelt was aware that France was obligated to provide certain support to the Nazis because of the harsh terms imposed by the Germans under the June 1940 armistice. However, he wanted the French to provide only the minimum possible aid consistent with those terms. If there was one area of French support that most obsessed Roosevelt, it was the French Fleet. More space in the letter was devoted to discussing this than any other question. Both Roosevelt and Leahy were convinced that sea power would ultimately determine the outcome of the Second World War.18 Their long-standing vision of sea power as the determinant of global power had remained undimmed even with all the conquests of the German Army in 1939 and 1940. Both felt completely comfortable in saying that the British (with American aid) would win the war in the end if they maintained naval supremacy. Roosevelt even lectured his cabinet about the value of sea power while Leahy was in Vichy. In April 1941, he turned one cabinet meeting into a history class, outlining American naval developments from the Revolution to the present day, putting particular stress on the need to protect commerce on the high seas.19 A few weeks later, when the United States was in the midst of its first major crisis with the Vichy government over collaboration, Roosevelt once again returned to the importance of sea power during a cabinet meeting, saying that “it looked as if we would have to go back and found our military policy on the sea-power theory of Admiral Mahan. As he saw it, the determining thing at present is control of the seas.”20
As such, the French Fleet mattered to Roosevelt more than any other single element of French power. It had been built up considerably between 1935 and 1939 and had some strong and excellently designed warships under its control, including the Dunkerque-class battleships. The Germans left them under the control of Vichy, worried that if they tried to take them for themselves the British would step in and grab them first.21 Even though the British had destroyed or heavily damaged some of these vessels during their controversial surprise attack on the French Fleet at Mers-el-Kérbir, the French Navy remained a real prize in both Roosevelt’s and Leahy’s eyes. Welles referred to it as the president’s “paramount” concern, and Leahy was to make sure that the Germans were not allowed to make use of it.22
Another element of concern in the letter was the fate of the French Empire, almost all of which remained under Vichy control. French North Africa, including modern-day Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, caused the most worry. If the Germans could exert control over this region, it was feared they could deal a devastating blow against British air-and sea power in the Mediterranean and open new ways to attack trade in the Atlantic. Secondly, French Indochina—modern-day Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—was considered a vital block to the southward expansion of Japan. It is notable that the anticolonialist Roosevelt was more than happy to guarantee continued French rule in their empire, if the French were willing to keep out the Germans and the Japanese.
It was a formidable list that Roosevelt had constructed, particularly considering the relative lack of power Leahy could hope to deploy on the United States’ behalf when compared to that of the Nazi invaders. That was not to say that Leahy was entirely without influence. He could attempt to modify Vichy behavior using both the carrot and the stick. The United States was providing the French people, economically crippled and paying enormous occupation costs to the Germans, with food aid in various forms. The withdrawal of this support would make an already deplorable situation in France even worse.23 The United States also stood willing to send aid to French North Africa. Keeping the empire intact was one of the great goals of the Vichy regime, and yet, being a conquered power itself, it would find it almost impossible to maintain control if others wished to seize parts of it. Leahy could also point to the reality of American economic might and the fact that when the dust settled, the United States would still be left standing as a Great Power. Finally, there was the legitimacy offered by the physical presence of the American ambassador. The Vichy regime, always aware of the cataclysmic source of its origin, craved international recognition. The American ambassador was perhaps the most powerful symbol of its legitimacy, and Leahy’s removal would make Vichy seem even more of a puppet state than it already was. Leahy could also use the press to put pressure on Vichy. In his diary, he mentions regular meetings with American reporters based in Europe. One that he praised as particularly effective (and whom he used regularly to plant important stories) was G. H. Archambault of the New York Times.24 It was certainly no accident that the first major story that Archambault published after Leahy’s arrival in France was a loud declaration by the admiral that the British would win the war.25
So Leahy did have some sources of influence, though they were rather esoteric when contrasted with the enormous German boot placed squarely on the French windpipe. From the perspective of those in Vichy, the United States was a long way away and out of the war. Germany was in control of almost all of Europe, had defeated the French Army, held more than a million French military personnel as hostages, and could invade Vichy at any time. If Leahy was preaching to them about eventual victory, those in Pétain’s regime could point to more immediate concerns.
Armed with his written instructions, Leahy and Louise departed for Vichy on December 23, 1940.26 It was one of the worst journeys of their lives. Winter storms over the Atlantic raised huge swells, and Christmas was spent clinging to a couch in the captain’s cabin. They had a brief respite when they arrived in the Portuguese capital of Lisbon. Having been warned, they then stocked up on food to bring to Vichy, which was suffering from severe shortages. The trip from Lisbon to Madrid went smoothly enough, but the train from Madrid to Barcelona was dreadful. The Leahys elected to take the day train, thinking they would have wonderful views of the Spanish countryside. What was supposed to be an eleven-hour scenic break became a chaotic twenty-five-hour expedition. “Unspeakably dirty,” the Leahys’ unheated carriage was crammed with so many people that many had to lie on the floor to sleep. After a quick rest in a mediocre Barcelona hotel, the couple set off for France by automobile, their luggage following in a truck. An hour from the French border, they discovered that a bridge they’d expected to cross was gone, destroyed during the Spanish Civil War. Rashly, they tried to ford the river in their little car, but it broke down, leaving them stranded and surrounded by water for more than an hour until rescue arrived. Once they finally crossed the border into France, things improved. Pétain, understanding the importance of the American ambassador’s arrival, arranged for an escort to bring the Leahys to Montpellier. There they were served an excellent meal in the Hôtel Métropole and then put on pétain’s private train for the trip to Vichy. When they arrived, Leahy noted how cold everything was.
Vichy was a strange town for a nascent state, and not one that Leahy found particularly genial. A relatively successful spa town before the war, favored by wealthy hypochondriacs with rheumatism and stomach complaints, Vichy was chosen as the temporary capital of the French government because it had a large number of hotel rooms and a modern telephone service and was far enough inside unoccupied France that the Germans would not fear that the French government would flee. There wasn’t much to do in terms of recreation. One could attend the opera or take the water cure—both of which Leahy did, but neither of which he particularly enjoyed.
The real entertainment in Vichy came in the form of limitless servings of gossip and intrigue. A government that wasn’t fully sovereign, in a small city that seemed permanently on the edge of a nervous breakdown, Vichy struck Leahy as part soap opera, part asylum, part tragedy. The unstable nature of the place was made clear during his first two meetings with Pétain. On January 8, two days after arriving, Leahy was ushered in for his formal reception with the marshal and found himself impressed by the Frenchman’s physical strength and mental acuity. Yet when the two had their first proper conversation the next day, Pétain struck Leahy as a tired old man unwilling to take any significant steps to stand up to Nazi Germany. It was the beginning of a schizophrenic relationship. As Roosevelt wanted, Leahy developed (for a while) a strong personal relationship with Pétain.27 Pétain obviously believed that Leahy was worth cultivating and used his own brand of charm to convince the American that he wanted the Germans to lose the war and that he saw the United States as France’s greatest hope in the future. Leahy, in return, developed some sympathy for Pétain, believing him to be an honest patriot who was doing what he thought was best to protect the French people. Leahy believed that there was no one else capable of holding the French government together at the time. The caveat to all this was his view that Pétain (and with him the vast majority of the French people) had been so psychologically traumatized by their defeat that, even had they wished to, they lacked the strength to take any step that would have antagonized their German masters. The depth of despair that Leahy discovered in France went beyond what he had expected. Less than a month after arriving he wrote in his diary that the “total defeat of the French Army has left the people with a sense of shame, helplessness, and loss of self-respect that inclines them toward any compromise with the Germans as the least harmful of many possibilities.”28 For Leahy, a convinced Democrat, the most worrying political aspect of this loss of self-respect within the Vichy regime was its openly authoritarian direction. It seemed to him that military defeat was being used to discredit the entire notion of representative government and France seemed to be drifting toward becoming something close to the Italian form of a Fascist state.29
If there was one man in Vichy who seemed convinced of the inevitability of German victory, it was the dominant political actor at the time of Leahy’s arrival, Adm. François Darlan. Even today he is a man who divides opinion, particularly when it comes to the depth and enthusiasm of his collaboration policy. One view is that Darlan was more a willing collaborator who pushed the policy further than needed (both for his personal benefit and that of the glory of France) and had some sympathy with a number of Fascist domestic policies. The other view of Darlan—that he was caught in an impossible situation that would have overwhelmed almost any political operator, and chose the collaboration policy because it was the only thing he could do—is more sympathetic.
Darlan was the frantic instigator of the Vichy government, serving Pétain as not only the government’s vice president but also eventually as foreign minister, interior minister, navy minister, and minister for national defense. For a while he was even referred to as Pétain’s heir apparent. He was suspicious of everyone, including Leahy, and made sure to limit the time Pétain and Leahy could spend together alone. In some ways Leahy tried hard to cultivate warm relations with his fellow naval officer. While he viewed Darlan with deep skepticism, he considered him infinitely preferable to Pierre Laval. As keeping Laval from returning to power was such a high priority, it was in Leahy’s interest not to subvert Darlan’s position.
Darlan also struck Leahy as emotionally unstable, dangerously impulsive, and devious. He tried hard to understand the French admiral, recognizing that as long as Pétain had faith in Darlan, the latter would be the most important political actor in Vichy. Therefore it was important to try to work with Darlan to achieve Roosevelt’s goals. Yet there were two main problems that would have to be faced. The first, as Leahy saw it, was that Darlan had a “psychopathic” hatred of Britain and the British Navy and seemed pleased that British influence on the Continent had been, in Darlan’s mind, broken. While Leahy felt Darlan’s anti-British sentiments were misguided (though psychologically comprehensible, considering what he had experienced), he was mystified by Darlan’s analysis of the world situation. He believed that Darlan “definitely underestimates British Sea Power” and might even be willing to use the remaining units of the French Navy against the British if the Royal Navy continued blockading trade with France. It was as if Darlan had taken all the shame he felt about French defeat and translated those emotions into a black loathing of France’s former ally. During some of his anti-British rants, Darlan would become unhinged.30 His eyes would bulge out with anger and his face would redden, one of the reasons, perhaps, that his American code name in diplomatic cables was “Popeye.”31
Leahy was not only worried about Darlan’s Anglophobia. He was depressed to see that Darlan “expresses himself very freely as being in favor of economic collaboration with Germany.”32 That Darlan was willing to tell Leahy straight out that he favored greater collaboration might seem foolhardy but was indicative of one of the profound splits in Vichy. Darlan, like most in the upper echelon of Vichy politics, had decided by this point that the United States, for all its fine words, would never intervene decisively in the European war. The assumption was both that Germany was too strong and would impose a new European order, whereas the US was too soft and unwilling to make the necessary sacrifices. Darlan made an explicit comparison between the United States in 1941 and France before the war when he claimed that America was in a greater state of “decomposition” than the Third Republic.33 In comparison, the French admiral seemed dazzled by German manliness. He told Leahy that while the American soldier was too used to luxury, and demanded to be fed steak for dinner, German soldiers could survive on the nutrition supplied by a handful of pills.34
This respect from Darlan, and others, for Nazism/Fascism over democratic systems seemed to grow throughout the spring of 1941. The successful and rapid German invasions of Yugoslavia and Greece once again made Germany seem unstoppable. Up through April, Leahy seemed to be achieving his fundamental goals in Vichy. He had lobbied successfully to keep the Vichy government from moving the battleship Dunkerque from Algeria, where it had been damaged during the British attack on Mers-el-Kérbir, back to France—where it would have been much easier for the Germans to seize.35
In April, things changed significantly as information was passed to Leahy that Darlan was trying to push ahead and force a new collaborative partnership with the Germans. It was typical of how Leahy and the American embassy found out information. If the upper echelon of Vichy leadership was loyal to Pétain, there was a whole faction of mid-level functionaries who were unconvinced that Germany would win and were willing to help the American government by providing as much information as possible. In this intelligence endeavor and all other efforts, Leahy was helped by an excellent diplomatic team. For the rest of his life Leahy remained fond of three members of the embassy staff, H. Freeman Matthews (his chargé d’affaires), Comm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter (his naval aide), and Douglas MacArthur II (third secretary in the embassy).36 They all developed contacts within Vichy and, with the information Leahy was getting himself, provided Washington with practically real-time knowledge of developments inside Pétain’s government. All three were exceptionally skilled and went on to have excellent careers, often helped along by Leahy. Matthews, who was the senior diplomat under Leahy, became the head of the European desk of the State Department in 1944 and later the undersecretary of state. Hillenkoetter became the head of the CIA in 1947, with Leahy instrumental in his selection. MacArthur, the nephew of the famous general—who was himself a long-standing friend of Leahy’s—would eventually serve as US ambassador to Japan, Belgium, Austria, and Iran.37
Enough people inside the Vichy government were willing to provide intelligence that Leahy divided French officials into three groups to attempt to understand their motivations.38 There were the out-and-out collaborationists, anti-democrats, and anti-Semites who saw much to be admired in the Fascist way of life and who were quite eager to secure for France a prized position in the new German order. There was the “France Must Live” group, who were not pro-German but who believed an overall German victory was almost certain and that the Vichy government must protect France by gaining favor with the Nazis. Finally there were those Leahy, rather parochially, called the pro-Americans. They did not believe Germany would win the war, had faith that American power would prove decisive in the end, and were willing to be as helpful as possible to the United States. This the last group did by feeding as much information as possible directly to the American ambassador or those working with him. At times the real problem that Leahy and the American diplomatic corps had was trying to sift through the huge mass of intelligence they were being fed.
Many of these sources would play major roles in postwar France. One, Maurice Couve de Murville, would be the foreign minister and then prime minister under Charles de Gaulle. Serving in the Finance Ministry in 1941, he was a regular source of confidential information for Leahy, who grew to trust him implicitly.39 Another important source, particularly early in Leahy’s tenure, was the poet and diplomat Jean Chauvel, who led the Foreign Ministry’s Far Eastern Affairs section.40 By the end of the war Chauvel was working as secretary-general of the Foreign Ministry in Charles de Gaulle’s government and later he would be the French ambassador to the United Nations.
Chauvel handed over to Leahy all the confidential information he could sneak out of the Foreign Ministry. On June 13, 1941, for instance, he informed Leahy that the French had discovered from German sources that the Nazis would soon launch their invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa.41 Leahy quickly passed the intelligence to Washington. Chauvel was partly motivated to commit such brazen if honorable treason against his own government because he wanted the United States to work with France to resist Japanese encroachments against French Indochina and saw the war in Europe as part of this global struggle.42
It was Chauvel who first passed to Leahy information that contributed to one of the most fateful decisions of World War II, Franklin Roosevelt’s July 1941 decision to embargo oil shipments to Japan, a move that led directly to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt’s embargo, almost always seen as emerging from a bilateral dispute between the United States and Japan, has never been properly understood. As such, his decision strikes some as confusing, unprepared, or even unintentional—an extremely harsh if mysterious overreaction that resulted in war.43 However, this decision was not confused at all, but built upon a dialogue between Leahy, Welles, and Roosevelt that had been going on for months. Indeed, it only makes sense if the role of Leahy and Vichy France are added to the equation.
It was part of a process of placing what happened to French Indochina for Roosevelt into the context of the world war. The Japanese Army, in the typically reckless manner that characterized its actions in these years, had occupied parts of northern Indochina in 1940 after the fall of France. However, they created a figment of legitimacy by forcing the French government, which could not have stopped them if they had wanted, to acquiesce in their presence by stating that it was a temporary measure. The worry in 1941 was that the Japanese would move into the south of Indochina. Such a step would have brought the Japanese much closer to the Dutch East Indies, the most important source of oil and bauxite in East Asia, as well as to Malaya and the Philippines, the British and American colonies that barred their way to those natural resources.
The dialogue between Leahy, Welles, and Roosevelt about French Indochina started in February 1941, when Chauvel brought confidential French diplomatic cables into the American embassy and read them aloud to Leahy. The Japanese military in French Indochina had decided to strike south instead of north, and in the “near future” would move to take over the rest of the country.44 Chauvel argued that the move was part of a coordinated effort with Germany to distract the United States from intervening in Europe. Leahy agreed that the Germans and Japanese were acting in cahoots in the Pacific and in a report he sent to the State Department (Welles) after talking with Chauvel claimed that the Japanese “have reached some agreement with the Germans designed to keep us occupied in the Far East . . .”45
Chauvel’s report and Leahy’s estimation were mostly accurate, as both Adolf Hitler and his farcical foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, had urged the Japanese to direct their efforts southward and pledged them German support in case the United States opted for war.46 Chauvel kept feeding Leahy similar intelligence. In April 1941, he told Leahy, again exploiting confidential information straight from French foreign ministry sources, that the Japanese now had an extra incentive to attack Indochina and Singapore.47
What Roosevelt was hearing from Leahy was that any attempt by the Japanese to move into southern Vietnam was not just a Japanese issue, it was part of a greater Axis plan of attack. From that point on, Roosevelt started viewing the French Empire as an integrated whole for American policy and seeing any Japanese move toward Indochina as the equivalent of a German move toward North Africa. Leahy was told this explicitly in May 1941 (which was a particularly fraught period because of increased collaboration negotiations between Darlan and the Germans), and he told Pétain that the United States stood ready to take action against “any nation, including the Axis powers” that made a move to take over any part of the French Empire.48 Leahy was careful in his diary not to say exactly how threatening the language was, but he did record that the tone was so harsh that a shaken Pétain would not reply until Darlan came back from a meeting with the Germans.
When, therefore, the crisis over Indochina blew up in July, much of the thinking that Roosevelt had done on the subject had come through the lens of Leahy, Welles, and Vichy. This period represented their three-headed combination at its most effective. Regular communication flowed between Welles and Leahy as they dealt with the details of American-French relations. Welles would then go to Roosevelt for discussions and guidance and feed this back to Leahy. Direct communications between Leahy and Roosevelt was usually reserved for courier-borne letters. Leahy would send about one per month to the president. Detailed and gossipy, his letters provide some of the best descriptions of the situation at the time. Roosevelt’s direct letters to Leahy were less frequent, one every few months, and were written more to provide emotional support to his friend than to pass along any specific information. On the other hand, working through Welles, the two men could interact surprisingly quickly. If Leahy sent a message to Welles, he could be sure that it would be communicated rapidly to Roosevelt and the president was willing to act on Leahy’s recommendations. In April 1941, Leahy wired from France to recommend that Roosevelt should freeze German and Italian assets in the United States, an action the president ordered a few weeks later.49 In early 1942, after reviewing a report from Leahy that said that the Vichy government would not resist if the Germans moved into French North Africa, Roosevelt quickly passed along this view to Winston Churchill.50 On the other hand, if Roosevelt wanted something important from Leahy, he would tell Welles and news would quickly reach Vichy. When the Pétain government began its show trials of Third Republic political leaders such as Paul Reynaud, Édouard Daladier, and Leon Blum, Roosevelt went through Welles to tell Leahy to demand an official transcript from the French government.51
The interactions of the three were vital in the eventual decision to embargo oil to Japan. On July 16, 1941, during a meeting with Darlan and Pétain, Leahy was told that the French expected the Japanese to occupy southern Vietnam in the coming days.52 It seemed that everything he had been told since February was about to come true. Within two days the news had been reported back to the State Department. Leahy described the Japanese move not as a unilateral act but as part of a coordinated Japanese-German move to distract the United States. Smelling a Darlan-shaped rat, Leahy was dismissive when the French admiral tried to argue that the Japanese were not acting with German approval.
Darlan suggested that Germany probably does not look with much favor on the acquisition of the Dutch Islands by Japan and that a consultation between French and German authorities might be used to delay a decision. He expressed a fear that Japan may move against Indochina within a week whether the French Government agrees or not. He did not mention what seems to be an obvious advantage to Germany in getting the United States involved in the Pacific if we should object to a Japanese move southward.53
When Leahy’s alarming report was received in Washington, it made a stir. The admiral was quickly cabled back with a verbal message (almost certainly from Roosevelt) that he was to give word to Pétain and Darlan about American opposition to such a move.54 Leahy told the French leadership that if they did not oppose the Japanese move they would lose Indochina regardless—because if the United States went to war in the Pacific the last thing they would do was hand back the French Empire afterward.55 Darlan then tried to convince Leahy that the Germans were not backing the Japanese move, but the ambassador thought it was all lies. By this time Leahy had given up hope that Vichy would do anything to help. Both Leahy and Welles believed that the French, who when dealing with the United States and the United Kingdom were endlessly sensitive about their imperial prerogatives, were being shockingly supine with the Japanese. It seemed particularly odd to them that at the exact moment when the French were endlessly complaining over British encroachments in Syria and even threatening to go to war against the United Kingdom, that Vichy would casually hand over control of Indochina without the slightest protest if, as Leahy was being told, the Germans did not want the Japanese to do this. It just didn’t make any sense to either man. When, therefore, the Japanese did move into southern Indochina in late July and Vichy sanctioned the move, it seemed to both Leahy and Welles (and one assumes Roosevelt) that it was part of a coordinated Axis plot. Welles remarked that the Japanese were being allowed in by the French with “hardly a protest,” while Leahy claimed that it was “spineless” and a further indication that the Axis was trying to befuddle the United States.56 Welles and Roosevelt both seemed worried that it could be a stepping-stone for Japan to aid Germany in its fight against Russia by thereupon attacking the Soviet Union.57 Furthermore, Leahy warned Roosevelt that if nothing were done in response, it would be an open invitation to the Germans to believe that they could seize French North Africa. As he wrote to the president in one of his personal letters: “Now that Vichy has without objection handed Indochina over to Japan it will be difficult to refuse Germany a present of French Africa when a new demand backed by threats is made.”58
The fact that two of the three people whom Roosevelt trusted most on foreign-policy issues at the time (the other was Harry Hopkins, but he was in the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941) were telling him that this was a move that needed a tough response helps explain just why Roosevelt took the hard line with the Japanese that he did. When Roosevelt explained his response to the Japanese move to his cabinet, Secretary Ickes described the American action as being necessitated by the “craven” cooperation of Vichy with the Axis.59 In the end, therefore, it makes no sense to see Roosevelt’s decision to take strong action against Japan over Indochina as some impromptu or impulsive move. It was a considered response to what was believed to be a coordinated Axis attempt to change the course of the global war. In that way, Leahy in Vichy made a material difference in pushing the United States down the road to Pearl Harbor. It is impossible to see any other American ambassador making such an impression on the president.