AUTHOR’S NOTE: The war years are treated synoptically for reasons explained in the preface. The concluding observations on Roosevelt’s character in the third section of this Epilogue are based mainly upon the previous chapters, but these observations, I hope, may throw some light on the events pictured in broad strokes in this Epilogue.
A MONTH AFTER ROOSEVELT’S ELECTION Hitler threw down the gage of world battle. In a fiery speech to the Berlin armaments workers the Fuehrer pictured the global conflict as a gigantic class struggle. Britain and America, rich nations ruled by capitalists, had millions of unemployed; in Germany all had jobs, and work was the supreme value. “There are two worlds that stand opposed to each other.… With this world we cannot ever reconcile ourselves. … I can beat any other power in the world.…”
Three weeks later Roosevelt answered the challenge. Quoting Hitler’s words, he said in a fireside chat that the Axis “not merely admits but proclaims that there can be no ultimate peace between their philosophy of government and our philosophy of government.” Hence, he said, the United States could not encourage talk of peace until the aggressors abandoned all thought of conquering the world.
The President interpreted the election as a mandate for the United States to become a great “arsenal of democracy.” In the last weeks of 1940 he slowly worked out the policies underlying Lend-Lease, under which the President would be empowered to lend or lease equipment to nations whose defense he considered necessary to the security of the United States. Britain was being stripped to the bone, Churchill had warned the President privately, and Roosevelt told reporters that he was merely trying to get rid of the “silly, foolish, old dollar sign.” When Lend-Lease passed Congress, Roosevelt scored a legislative victory that was a milestone in the organizing of world resistance to Hitler.
So far, so good—even the isolationists could hardly deny that the act was a logical projection of the election mandate to step up aid to the democracies, especially at a time when Hitler was scoring a series of striking victories in the Balkans and elsewhere. But what would happen if circumstances called for something more than material help from the arsenal? Forced back on the defensive during the election, Roosevelt had made peace the supreme issue. Rearmament, aid to Britain, the destroyer deal, hemispheric unity—all these he had proclaimed as means of keeping America out of war. To be sure, in his December fireside chat he faced up to the perils involved. “If we are to be completely honest with ourselves, we must admit that there is risk in any course we may take.” But then he drew quickly back on the limb. The cardinal aim was not American security, not democratic survival, not destruction of Nazism, but peace.
Circumstances soon were forcing the President’s hand. With German submarine packs and battle cruisers roaming the North Atlantic in early 1941, the crucial question was insuring the safe arrival of the cargoes. Churchill sent reports of grave losses. The direct solution to the problem was outright naval escort for shipping, but Roosevelt’s cautious tactics—defending Lend-Lease as a method of assuring Hitler’s defeat without serious risk of war for America— now boomeranged. The more vigorously the navy tried to protect the lifelines to Britain the more likely were provocative incidents.
Once again Roosevelt was caught between divided administration counsels, between the conflicting demands of isolationists and interventionists. Once again there was a period of veering and drifting in the White House; once again Roosevelt’s advisers—Stimson, Ickes, and others—lamented the President’s failure to lead. And once again Roosevelt responded to the situation by improvisation and subterfuge. He publicly ordered intensified naval patrolling in the now enlarged security zones; he privately ordered a policy of seeking out German ships and planes and notifying British units of their location. On May 27, while pickets trudged dourly back and forth in front of the White House with their antiwar signs, Roosevelt announced his issuance of a proclamation of “unlimited national emergency.” The next day, however, he took much of the sting out of his move by disclaiming any positive plans along new lines.
The President, said Hopkins, “would rather follow public opinion than lead it.” Indeed, as Roosevelt anxiously examined public opinion polls during 1941, he once again was failing to supply the crucial factor of his own leadership in the equation of public opinion. His approach was in sharp contrast to that of his great world partner. “Nothing is more dangerous in wartime,” Churchill said later in the year, “than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of a Gallup poll, always feeling one’s pulse and taking one’s temperature.… There is only one duty, only one safe course, and that is to try to be right and not to fear to do or say what you believe to be right.”
The shattering Nazi attack on Russia on June 22 came like a thunderclap amid the torpid Washington calm. Many Americans were caught between a loathing for communism as a philosophy and the practical need to work with the Russians against Nazism—but not the President. When Fulton Oursler of Liberty magazine sent him a proposed editorial titled “We Still Say ‘To Hell with Communism,’ ” Roosevelt wrote back that he would condemn the Russian form of dictatorship equally with the German form but also would make clear that the immediate threat to America was Germany. The President spurred the sending of supplies to Russia and took steps to forestall organized opposition to such aid.
So intent was the President on immediate tactical moves rather than grand strategy that his loftiest pronouncement of the year—the Atlantic Charter, proclaimed jointly with Churchill—was almost a by-product of the Atlantic Conference of the two leaders in July. Most of the conference discussions were devoted to an intensive consideration of the host of production, logistical, co-ordinating, and intelligence matters in which the affairs of the two nations were so intertwined. The lofty pronouncements were actually scribbled on pieces of paper and issued as a press release, but their reception by a people yearning for presidential leadership and direction converted them into a historic act.
“Their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other,” the two leaders proclaimed. “… They respect the right of all people to choose the form of government under which they will live.… They will endeavor … to further the enjoyment of all states, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access … to the trade and to the raw materials of the world.… They desire to bring about the fullest collaboration between all Nations” for social security and economic welfare. “They believe that all of the Nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons, must come to the abandonment of the use of force.…”
But high-sounding words were not enough by themselves. What would Roosevelt do? The activists around him burned with anxiety over the President’s refusal to take decisive action—to provide naval escort, to order all-out naval attack in the Atlantic, even to declare war. The President still proceeded cautiously. He felt that he could act decisively only in answer to a decisive act by the enemy. Hitler, now concentrating on Russia, refused him such an act. No incidents or provocations, the Fuehrer told his admirals. The lack of an overt act deprived the President of the weapon he needed—the chance to dramatize a situation, to interpret an event. He needed such an opportunity both to arouse the people and, even more, to galvanize Congress. For legislative support was never assured; in mid-August the House of Representatives threw a scare into the administration when it extended selective service by a margin of only one vote.
Then, early in September 1941, there occurred the incident that seemed to give Roosevelt his chance—an incident implicit in presidential orders given months before. While en route to Iceland the American destroyer Greer learned from the British of a German submarine, trailed it for several hours, and periodically notified the British of its position; finally the submarine loosed two torpedoes against the Greer, both of which missed; then the Greer depth-charged the submarine, with unknown results. Quickly seizing on the incident, Roosevelt reported in a fireside chat that the Greer had been attacked, but said nothing of the preliminaries. Soon orders went out to the fleet to set up full-scale naval escorting and to “shoot on sight.”
Still Hitler rejected his admirals’ renewed pleas for all-out attacks on the Atlantic supply lines. Russian conquest was his goal; the United States could be dealt with later. It was in a different quarter that the decisive event occurred.
In Tokyo in mid-October 1941, the cabinet of Prince Konoye, caught between the militarists’ zeal for expansion and foreign efforts to contain Japan’s Asiatic ambitions, surrendered power to a new government headed by the fire-breathing general Hideki Tojo. The change tightened the Far Eastern deadlock. Tokyo was willing to settle matters with Washington only if its long-developed plans for expansion were accepted. Roosevelt and Hull wanted stabilization in the Far East but not at the expense of China or of the Good Neighbor ideals they had so often preached. Unlike Konoye, Tojo would not brook delay in further expansion. “If a hundred million people merge into one iron solidarity to go forward,” the new prime minister boasted, “nothing can stop us.”
The new Japanese cabinet then embarked on an elaborate double game. Conversations were to be continued with Washington, but the moment they broke down—as the militarists, at least, expected—the decision for war would be taken up at once. On November 5 operational orders were issued, with the warning: “War with Netherlands, America, England inevitable.…” The date for the attack was set tentatively for December 8, 1941.
Intensive negotiations then ensued between Washington and Tokyo. Roosevelt was eager to work out any acceptable stopgap arrangement in order to play for time, and the Japanese negotiators were genuinely hopeful of agreement. But fundamentally it was a case of the immovable object and the irresistible force: Japan was intent on expansion, the United States opposed further aggression in the Orient. And all the discussions took place under the harsh time limits imposed by Tojo.
Proposals and counterproposals followed, but all to no avail. By early December the President knew that the Japanese would strike soon—but he knew not where. Most reports to Washington stressed the likelihood of Japanese moves in Southeast Asia or the South Pacific. On the night of December 6, as Roosevelt, still fighting for time, dispatched a plea and a warning to Emperor Hirohito, Japanese carriers were plowing toward their positions northwest of Oahu.
That same night, commenting to Roosevelt that the Japanese would attack at their own convenience, Hopkins lamented that the United States could not strike the first blow and prevent any sort of surprise.
“No,” said the President, “we can’t do that. We are a democracy and a peaceful people. But we have a good record.…”
Early on the afternoon of the following day, Sunday, December 7, Roosevelt and Hopkins had just finished eating lunch when the telephone rang. It was Knox.
“Hello, Frank.”
“Mr. President, it looks as if the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor.”
“No!”
The bombs that shattered the fleet in Pearl Harbor shattered as well the stalemate in Roosevelt’s war policy. In the first hours of turmoil after news of the attack there were some who could think only of the fleet’s lack of readiness. Connally turned savagely on Knox with a barrage of questions. Others thought the President should issue a long review of his policy toward Japan in his war message.
But the President would have none of it. To him the only important fact was the fact of war itself. “We are in it,” he kept saying to his advisers. When he appeared before a joint session next day and somberly asked Congress to declare the existence of a state of war, the two most important words in his short speech were “Hostilities exist.” The crucial act had occurred for which the President could find no substitute in speech or deed. “Hostilities exist”—a few climactic hours had taught the lessons that Roosevelt had never quite been able to teach.
“I think the Boss really feels more relief than he has had for weeks,” one cabinet member said to another as they left his study. When Germany and Italy declared war on the United States four days after Pearl Harbor, world battle lines had formed.
From the President’s behavior during the following weeks one might have thought that all that had gone before had been merely preparation for this hour—as perhaps it was. Roosevelt, said Sumner Welles, a close observer at the time, “demonstrated the ultimate capacity to dominate and control a supreme emergency, which is the rarest and most valuable characteristic of any statesman.” It was like 1933 all over again, but projected onto an infinitely larger stage. Roosevelt was businesslike, serene, cheerful, grave, tireless, confident.
Backed now by a united people, he could exploit his superb flair for bringing warring parties together behind a common goal. Labor-management unity was a brilliant case in point. During the year before Pearl Harbor coal miners, shipbuilders, airplane-engine workers, and tens of thousands of others had gone on strike. The President had had to seize several defense plants. The central issue was “union security”—an issue so divisive that it had caused the collapse of the nation’s chief mediation agency. Ten days after Pearl Harbor a “warm, confident, buoyant, serious” President summoned labor and employer delegates to the White House, told them it would be a “thrilling thing” if they could agree soon on basic problems, and proceeded to set up a board to work out a compromise on union security that was to prove one of the most creative and enduring achievements of the war administration.
All the President’s command and confidence were needed during the early months of 1942, as the nation suffered staggering reversals along the vast Pacific front. Japanese forces swallowed Guam, Wake, the Philippines. Malaya, Burma, the Dutch East Indies fell. Everywhere the Axis maintained its relentless advance: in North Africa the Germans drove the British back into Egypt; they seemed to have the Russians on the point of collapse; they still exacted a heavy toll in the Atlantic. The Japanese landed in the Aleutians, reached the borders of India, threatened Australia.
Not only did Roosevelt have to maintain an air of resolution and confidence during the long, dreary days of defeat, he had to stick to the central strategic decisions—to make the main effort first against Germany while holding off Japan—in the face of the “Japan-firsters” who looked on that nation as America’s only real enemy. Roosevelt worked amid a thousand pressures. He had to mediate among his own rival services, among theater commands, between war front and home front, between the desperate needs of Russians and British. As usual the more exacting problems moved relentlessly along the lines of command into his office; as usual the President tackled them cheerfully, turning quickly from crucial questions of strategy, to administrative minutiae, to galling problems of personnel; as usual he operated tirelessly among the never-ending babble of politicians, admirals, legislators, generals, diplomats, bureaucrats.
The President understood, too, that his soldiers’ slow, grudging retreat was buying time for the economy to shift into high gear. Having turned from one expedient to another in the months before Pearl Harbor, he established in January 1942 a relatively centralized mobilization direction in the War Production Board. Exploitation of the nation’s enormous resources was the main job of 1942 and one that called for a tenacious fight against inflation as war spending neared one hundred million dollars a day. Here again, Roosevelt seemed to have been superbly trained for the job. No longer did he face the need to decide between the agonizing alternatives—between spending and budget balancing—for which he had never been educated. That decision had been made for him. Now his job was to stave off the inflationary pressures of businessmen, labor, farmers. The notions that had run through his economic thinking for years—notions of a balanced economy, of a central harmony of interests, of mutual sacrifice for mutual gain—supplied an indispensable background for his efforts toward stabilization.
Roosevelt’s utter concentration on the task at hand—winning military victory—raised difficult problems, just as his absorption with winning elections at whatever cost had created difficulties during the peace years. It was all very well for Hopkins, reflecting his chief’s attitude, to apply to every policy the simple test “Will it help to win the war?” but such a test was likely to ignore broader strategic aspects of winning the war—and the relation between winning the war and defending democracy. Two examples illuminate the dilemma:
Early in 1942 Roosevelt authorized the military to uproot thousands of Japanese-Americans on the West Coast and relocate them in concentration camps in the interior. To the military this seemed a wise precaution, but in the long run it was a compromise with the ideas the nation was supposed to be fighting. Again, in September 1942, exasperated by the failure of Congress to pass a bill to stabilize the cost of living, including the prices of farm commodities, Roosevelt in effect ordered Congress to act in three weeks and warned that if the legislators failed to act he would. Congress sullenly complied. Here was an astonishing usurpation of power in a nation fighting for democratic ideas and processes.
Roosevelt would have made the same defense of his drastic actions as had another war president eighty years before. “Was it possible,” Lincoln asked, “to lose the nation and yet preserve the Constitution? A limb may be amputated to save a life, but a life is never wisely given to save a limb.” Yet a democratic people always faces the ultimate question, Which is life and which is limb?
During 1943 the tide turned. In May, Allied forces drove the enemy out of Tunisia. Two months later they invaded Sicily; two months after that, Italy; and on September 3, 1943, Italy surrendered. Elsewhere the massive counterattack slowly gained momentum. American troops mopped up the Japanese in Guadalcanal and Buna, launched amphibious assaults in the Solomons, New Georgia, New Guinea, Tarawa. The American and British navies were winning the Battle of the Atlantic. Most decisive of all, the Russians drove the Germans back from Stalingrad early in the year after an epic siege.
By the end of 1943 victory for the Allies was no longer seriously in doubt. The question now was less whether they would win than whether they could win in such a way as to make a lasting peace more likely.
This year was also a year of the great international conferences, where questions of war strategy and postwar peace policy were taken up. Roosevelt and Churchill met at Casablanca, Washington, and Quebec; Roosevelt, Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek met at Cairo; Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met at Teheran. At this last conference the thorny problem of the second front was finally settled, and soon afterward General Dwight D. Eisenhower was made its supreme commander.
Teheran brought together three towering personalities and a “concentration of physical power and political authority unique in the whole history of mankind.” Roosevelt beforehand was keenly confident of his capacity to establish a workable and mutually beneficial personal relationship with Stalin. So he did—as long as negotiations involved immediate problems of beating the Nazis. But on the longrun strategic questions involving the pattern of power in Europe after the war the President’s preoccupation with military victory put him at a disadvantage to both Churchill and Stalin. Yet Roosevelt probably believed that the crowning need both for winning the war and securing the peace was the visible fact of Allied co-operation.
“I may say that I ‘got along fine’ with Marshal Stalin,” he told the people in his Christmas Eve 1943 fireside chat, “… and I believe that we are going to get along very well with him and the Russian people—very well indeed.” And he told Miss Perkins gleefully how he had broken the ice with Stalin by deliberately baiting Churchill about his Britishness, his cigars, and his habits.
If Roosevelt had to deal with Stalin in the posture of alliance, he had to deal with Hitler in the posture of war. It was a battle not only of armies and navies but of ideas and symbols as well. The Fuehrer, a master of propaganda, interpreted the war to his people as a struggle of the masses against the plutocratic nations of the world. The President, now the Allies’ chief propagandist with a constituency of three-quarters of the world, affirmed Freedom as the supreme symbol of the cause for which the Allies fought. As Hitler sought to divest this symbol of any meaning except liberty to exploit the masses, Roosevelt sought to strengthen the idea of Freedom as a positive idea—as freedom to gain peace and security after the war. Roosevelt, in short, was compelled as a means of winning victory itself to fashion means of attaining postwar goals; one result was that during 1943 a series of “united nations” conferences began to plan postwar social and economic arrangements.
During all this time the home front was never free of storm and controversy. A “little cabinet” of Byrnes, Rosenman, Hopkins, and the President’s personal chief of staff, Admiral William D. Leahy, struggled to clear bottlenecks and settle interagency feuds, but the war management reflected the familiar administrative habits of the commander in chief. Some “second-level” decisions he refused to delegate, and he continued to play officials and agencies off against one another. As in the past, the results were not altogether happy. Feeling between Hull and Welles became so sharp that the latter resigned as under secretary of state, and Wallace and Jones warred against each other so openly over international economic policy that the President removed both of them from their posts in this field. Still, the crucial goal at home—mobilization without severe inflation—was achieved.
It was in the party and legislative arena that the domestic political hostilities were sharpest. Right after Pearl Harbor Roosevelt had, quite characteristically, demanded an end to “partisan domestic politics” for the duration. He had even suggested that the two national party organizations be converted to civilian defense. But partisan politics would not die so easily. Under the inexorable calendar of American elections the regular off-year congressional contests were fought in 1942. Roosevelt carefully avoided Wilson’s mistake of asking for a Democratic Congress; still, his party almost lost control of Congress. The Democratic margin in the House fell from 91 to 14, and 8 seats were lost in the Senate.
The inexorable political calendar brought also the presidential election of 1944. With the anti-third-term tradition broken, Roosevelt could eschew his devious preconvention tactics of 1940. So a week before the Democratic convention convened in mid-July 1944 Roosevelt wrote the national chairman a simple, direct letter stating that he would serve again if “the Commander in Chief of us all”— the people of the United States—should order him to do so in November.
THE ONE DOLLAR QUESTION, March 14, 1944, H. M. Talburt and Don Patterson, © by the Washington Daily News
July 14, 1944, C. K. Berryraan, Washington Star
“All that is within me cries out to go back to my home on the Hudson River,” Roosevelt wrote, but “we of this generation chance to live in a day and hour when our Nation has been attacked, and when its future existence and the future existence of our chosen method of government are at stake.”
When it came to the vice-presidency, though, it was the same old Roosevelt. He made half-promises to more than one aspirant, refused to tell Vice-President Wallace frankly that he could not back his nomination if it divided the convention, and yet wrote Wallace a letter stating that he was his “personal” choice. Harry Truman was surprised to find that he was the President’s official choice; he would run, the Missouri Senator told Roosevelt’s men, “but why the hell didn’t he tell me in the first place?”
On one matter the political wheel came full circle. In June 1944 Roosevelt talked with Rosenman about the subject he had toyed with again and again in his four decades of political activity: party realignment. “We ought to have two real parties—one liberal and the other conservative,” he told Rosenman. The Democratic party must get rid of its reactionary elements in the South and attract to it the Republican liberals. He asked Rosenman to take the question up with Willkie, who had just been shouldered out of the Republican running by the G.O.P. regulars. At a secret meeting with Rosenman in New York early in July, Willkie expressed enthusiastic support for the idea of party realignment, and he agreed to work plans out jointly with the President. But on one thing Willkie was insistent. He could not meet with Roosevelt until after the election. At a time when he was still trying to keep some leverage in the Republican party he feared that co-operation with the President would be misinterpreted as a “sellout” on his part to the Democrats.
Roosevelt, however, wanted to pursue the matter before election, and it was here that his reputation for cunning and indirectness tripped him up. The more the President pressed for an early meeting the more Willkie was convinced that he was engaged in an election tactic rather than in a long-term strategic effort. A series of leaks to the press about the indirect communication between Roosevelt and Willkie served only to heighten the latter’s suspicion. In any case, it was too late; for Willkie, who had always spent his energies recklessly, died of a coronary thrombosis in October. Thus was lost perhaps the supreme opportunity in a generation for party realignment.
Oct., 1944, Tom Little, Nashville Tennessean
The President now faced his fourth campaign for office—this time against the vigorous, youthful Dewey, who in 1942 had won the governorship of New York over the divided Democrats in that state. Roosevelt’s tactics followed the classic pattern: long inspection trips, patient “nonpartisanship” while Dewey lambasted the “tired old men,” and then a series of swift thrusts in the last few weeks of the campaign. The first of these thrusts was the most devastating—the Teamsters Union speech that answered Republican libels against “my little dog, Fala.” From then on, a Democrat commented, the race was between “Roosevelt’s dog and Dewey’s goat.”
Roosevelt’s victory over Dewey by a margin of 333 electoral and about 3,600,000 popular votes was one more testament of his masterly campaigning. It was also a tribute to his supreme direction of military operations. In June, Allied armies had surged into Normandy; in midsummer American troops drove the Japanese out of Saipan and Guam; in October they landed in the Philippines. As the war fast reached its climax, issues of peace became ever more urgent.
The great tasks of peace lay ahead—but now, as the year of victory neared, Roosevelt was desperately tired. The ceaseless toil and tension of the war years were leaving their mark. Like the great actor he was, he could shake himself out of his weariness and take his old role before the people. Fighting off campaign rumors about his condition, he had handled the exacting “Fala” speech—which so easily could have flopped—with exquisite skill; he had driven gaily for hours through New York streets in a cold, driving rain. But at other times he seemed quite different. His face went slack; he slumped in his chair; his hands trembled more than ever.
Yet so swiftly did he shift from dullness to buoyancy that even while his friends were whispering to one another about their concern there would be fresh reports that the President was showing his old form.
Roosevelt was desolately lonely, too, lonely in the midst of the White House crowd. Just as he had always stayed partly in the world symbolized by Hyde Park, so he had kept around him people who had represented that world. But they were slipping away. Sara Roosevelt died in 1941, and the President remarked to Eleanor that perhaps she had departed this world at the right time, for she might not like the postwar world. Endicott Peabody died late in 1944, and Roosevelt wrote his widow that the “whole tone of things is going to be a bit different from now on, for I have leaned on the Rector in all these many years far more than most people know.…” McIntyre died in 1943, Missy Le Hand the following year. Eleanor Roosevelt was often away on long war tours; all four Roosevelt sons were in uniform.
On January 20, 1945, Roosevelt took the oath of office for the fourth time; to save money and energy the inaugural was held in front of the White House rather than at the Capitol. He spoke for only a few minutes. “In the days and the years that are to come, we shall work for a just and honorable peace, a durable peace, as today we work and fight for total victory in war.…” As the President spoke, Allied troops in Europe stood on the threshold of victory. Hitler’s armies, except for a precarious hold in Hungary and northern Italy, had been forced back onto German soil. In the Pacific, American forces were preparing heavy assaults on islands barely a thousand miles from Tokyo.
“We can gain no lasting peace if we approach it with suspicion and mistrust—or with fear,” the President said in his inaugural; and in this spirit he met with Churchill and Stalin two weeks later at Yalta. Roosevelt faced resolutely this supreme test of Big Three co-operation. He was tired; he was frail; Churchill noticed that his face had “a transparency, an air of purification, and often there was a far-away look in his eyes.” But even at Yalta, he could be as gay, charming, and buoyant as ever. His mind moved as quickly and as acutely as ever over the great range of problems that the conference considered.
Out of the hard bargaining at Yalta issued a series of compromises. No nation had its own way. Stalin made concessions on German reparations, on voting arrangements in the projected world organization, on the question of a French zone of occupation in Germany, and on several other matters. Moreover, the date of Russia’s entrance into the war against Japan was fixed. Yet Stalin also gained some large demands. While the conference did not “give” him Poland, which was already occupied by Red troops, the terms of the agreement may have facilitated ensuing Soviet control of that country. And in the Far East Stalin was granted the Kurile Islands, the southern part of Sakhalin, and extensive spheres of influence in North China.
Had Roosevelt, the man who boasted of his prowess as a “hoss-trader,” finally been outbargained? Many would later cry that he had. Yet a verdict must take account of the different operating methods of the two men. Roosevelt, as always, was acting pragmatically, opportunistically, tactically. As usual, he was almost wholly concerned about the immediate job ahead—winning the war. Japan had yet to be overcome, and the military advised that the invasion and conquest of the homeland would be long and fanatically resisted. The first test of the atomic bomb was long in the future. His generals and admirals insisted—and the President agreed—that a Russian attack on Japan was essential.
Stalin, on the other hand, was thinking already of political arrangements in the postwar world. This granite-hard son of serfs, schooled in blood and violence, had always thought and acted several moves ahead of his adversaries—this was one reason he had defeated them. He had, moreover, few illusions about the postwar world; his revolutionary and Marxist background had taught him that, however friendly the Roosevelts and Churchills might be now, the inexorable laws of history would produce new tensions among nations, and Russia would have to be strong. Churchill, too, was aware of the political implications of victory; he, too, whatever his romantic Edwardian temperament, could see the storms ahead—had he not written bluntly that “the story of the human race is War”? But Churchill, unlike Stalin, did not have the continental land power to give strength to his strategy.
Roosevelt, a match for these men in the military direction of a war, was handicapped, when it came to the considerations of peace, by the belief that better days must lie ahead. Poignantly, in his inaugural address just before Yalta, he had quoted his old schoolmaster Peabody as saying that in life there would always be peaks and valleys, but that the “great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward; that a line drawn through the middle of the peaks and the valleys of the centuries always has an upward trend.” But Marx and Lenin seemed to have taught Stalin better than Peabody taught Roosevelt.
Such, at least, was the verdict of some of those who looked back from the years of bitterness and disillusion that followed the war. The verdict of still later years might be different. For beyond the military and political considerations of Yalta was the supreme accomplishment that Roosevelt wished to present to the world—the fact of Three Power co-operation. It was quite characteristic of him that in the existence of this accomplishment as interpreted by him to a world hungering for leadership, he should see the best chance of a lasting peace. Again and again, in his report to Congress on the Yalta Conference, his words came back to the supreme fact of the unity of the three great powers. Later generations, looking back from more tranquil years, might see this as the crowning achievement of Yalta—one that dwarfed even the most far-reaching maneuvers of the Machiavellians.
Even so, Roosevelt made one colossal—though understandable-miscalculation. His plans assumed that he, as President of the United States for another four years, would be around to keep the fact of one world alive, to symbolize it for peoples everywhere, to mediate between Stalin and Churchill. But time was fast running out.
Roosevelt’s voice was strangely thick and blurred as he told Congress about Yalta. He stumbled and halted; he ad-libbed irrelevancies. At times his face and words flamed with the old eloquence, then it seemed to ebb away. Thus it was constantly in the final weeks. His body seemed to sag heavily in his chair or in the arms of his porters; his hands trembled so that the act of fixing his pince-nez or lighting his cigarette took all his powers of concentration; his gray-blue eyes clouded, his face went slack, his head hunched over. Then, suddenly, miraculously, the old gayness and vitality would return. At his last press conference in Washington the repartee raced from Canadian relations to the new peace organization to New York City politics to Yalta to night baseball; the President was as quick, humorous, and deft as ever.
At the end of March Roosevelt left for Warm Springs. The usual crowd was waiting when the train pulled into the little Georgia town. There was the usual bustle of activity at the end of the rear car. But something was different. Roosevelt’s big frame, slumped in the wheel chair, seemed to joggle slightly as he was rolled along the platform. His face, once so strong and well fleshed, seemed wasted; the jaw, once so firm, quivered perceptibly. A murmur swept through the crowd.
But as usual, after a few days of rest, the gray pallor faded, some of the old vitality returned. Doctors sent reassuring reports to Eleanor Roosevelt in Washington. Sitting in his cottage, watching the fresh green countryside under the warm sun, the President was able to relax, to look over new stamps, to play with Fala, to think about the past and about the future.
It was early April, and the culmination of the war was at hand. Reports arriving daily told of victories on all battlefronts. In Europe, American and Allied troops were sweeping into the heart of Germany. In the Pacific naval forces were fighting off the heaviest Japanese air attacks of the war and clamping their grip on Okinawa. It was the culmination for Roosevelt too. He knew that war in Europe would be over in a few weeks. He knew now that Japan could not fight long against the power that would be massed against her after Germany’s defeat. He knew that delegates from the united nations would meet soon in San Francisco to set up the permanent peace organization, and he knew that the United States would join it.
It was a time for rest—a time when the President could think about the long vacation that he would take in the summer and about a trip to Britain, a time when he could even toy with the idea of quitting the presidency as soon as the big jobs were done. He could think about the house at Hyde Park that was awaiting him, about the library with its mass of papers and mementos.
It was time too—though no one knew it at the moment—for a last look at the living man.
Those who knew Roosevelt best could agree fully on only one point—that he was a man infinitely complex and almost incomprehensible. “I cannot come to grips with him!” Ickes cried more than once, and the words were echoed by a host of congressmen, politicos, diplomats, and bureaucrats who dealt with the canny politician in the White House. His character was not only complex, Robert Sherwood observed, it was contradictory to a bewildering degree.
The contradictions continually bemused or galled Roosevelt’s lieutenants. He was almost unvaryingly kind and gracious, yet a thin streak of cruelty ran through some of his behavior. He remained unruffled and at ease under the most intense pressures; yet when pricked in certain ways he struck out at his enemies in sharp, querulous words. He found ways to evade bores and know-it-alls, yet he patiently listened to Ickes’ complaints and demands hour after hour, week after week, year after year. He juggled huge figures with an almost casual air, yet he could work long minutes over a knot to save the string and over a telegram to cut it down to ten words. He liked new ideas, people, and projects, but he wanted an element of fixity in his surroundings. He shifted nimbly from one set of policies to another—from economy to spending, from central planning to trust busting, from intervention abroad to neutrality, from party action to national action.
In many little ways inconsistency ruled: in the way he thanked some subordinates for their efforts and said nothing to others, intervened in some administrative matters and ignored others, had four men doing a single job in some instances (as Flynn once complained) and one man doing four jobs in others, was unaccountably frivolous about some matters and grave about others.
And there was the most baffling quality of all—his sheer, superb courage in facing some challenges, and his caution and indirection in facing others. He acted instantly, electrically, on certain decisions, and unaccountably postponed others for months. It was not strange that he should follow Machiavelli’s advice that a leader must be as brave as the lion and as shrewd as the fox, for this had long been the first lesson for politicians. But his metamorphoses from lion to fox and back to lion again mystified even his intimates.
Roosevelt’s complexities stemmed in part from the demands of political life. Gladstone once remarked that he had known and studied politicians for sixty years and they still remained to him a mysterious breed. Democratic politics is a highly competitive profession, and the successful politician must know how to conceal his hand and present different faces to different groups. Too, Roosevelt took a particular delight in mystifying people by keeping something up his sleeve. But the source of his complexity lay deeper than this.
Roosevelt was a complex man mainly because he was a deeply divided man. More than almost any other political leader of his time, he experienced a lingering between two worlds.
He had been born and raised in a class and in a tradition that formed the closest American approximation to an aristocracy. At home, at Groton, at Harvard, at the right houses of Boston and New York, he had absorbed a core of beliefs and a sense of security and assurance he would never lose. His background always brought the needle of his compass, no matter how it might waver for a time, back to true north. The major premises on which this society operated might be inarticulate, or at least fuzzy, but they had meaning. These premises were: that men can live together only on the basis of certain simple, traditional ethical rules; that men are essentially good and those who are not can be improved by example and precept; that despite ups and downs the world is getting better; that the wellborn must never compromise with evil; that the gentleman must enter government to help the less fortunate, that he must enter politics to purify it. And the turn-of-the-century world seemed to validate these ideas: it was stable, secure, peaceful, expansive.
Roosevelt was projected out of this world into bizarre and unanticipated phases of the twentieth century—a decade of muckraking, a decade of Wilsonian reform at home and Wilsonian idealism abroad; a decade of postwar cynicism and reaction; then the climactic years of depression, the New Deal, abroad the rise of brutish men to power, and the coming of a new war.
Some nineteenth-century men could not effectively make the shift to the new century; insecure and frightened, they clung not only to the old moralities, as did Roosevelt, but also to the old methods, the old ways of business, the old distrust for government; they huddled within their class barriers. Roosevelt, however, made the jump with ease. He did so for several reasons: because he had not met absolute success socially at Groton or Harvard—for example, in his failure to make the best club in Cambridge—and thus was not absolutely committed to the old ways and institutions; because of the influence of Eleanor and Theodore Roosevelt; because he was drawn into the variegated political life of New York State; because he was vital and curious and ambitious.
Still other men of his generation, rejecting the past completely, found some kind of fixed mooring somewhere in this strange new world—but, again, not Roosevelt. He made no final commitment to any part of that world—not to Wilsonian idealism, nor to business money-making, nor to radicalism, nor to internationalism. Partly because of quick adaptability, partly because of the diverse make-up of his intimates, partly because he had little need for personal introspection, partly because of his tremendous self-assurance, he was able to shift back and forth among segments of this world and to make himself at home in all of them.
Success fed on success: as Roosevelt found that he could carry off brilliantly a variety of roles—as party leader, as man of affairs, as bureaucrat, as Hyde Park squire, as governor, as campaigner, as a heroic battler against polio—he played the roles more and more to the hilt. This was one reason why he presided so joyously in the White House, for today the great President must be a man of many roles. Roosevelt was a superb actor in the literal sense—in the way his face, his gestures, the tilt of his head communicated feeling, in the perfect modulation of voice and the timing with which he read his speeches, in his sense of the dramatic. He was a superb actor in the far more significant sense that he was responding in each of his roles not merely to an assigned script but to something within himself.
The result was a man of no fixed convictions about methods and policies, flexible as a broker because he had to mediate among conflicting worlds and experiences. To some, like Hoover, he seemed a “chameleon on plaid” because of this enormous flexibility. Indeed, even to some of his friends he seemed almost in a state of anomie, lacking any guideposts at all, because he rejected so many doctrines and dogmas. Quite naturally, because the mask often was almost impenetrable, they could not see the inner compass of certainty and rightness.
Caught between two worlds, Roosevelt compartmentalized his life. The results sometimes were ludicrous, as when he tried to force opposites to work together and could not understand why they failed. The results were at times unfortunate, for Roosevelt’s pseudointegration of his roles weakened his capacity to supply strong leadership and to make long-term strategic decisions or commitments when these were needed. It allowed the warring ideas and forces in American society not only to beat against him from outside but, because he incorporated as well as reflected these forces, to divide him from within.
Yet Roosevelt’s flexibility and opportunism had tremendous advantages too. In a time of whirling social change he could move fast to head off crisis at home and abroad. In a time when experimentation was vital, he could try one method, quickly drop it, and turn to another. In a time when Americans had to be educated in the meaning of events, he could act as an interpreter all the more effectively because he spoke so many languages of social experience. Leading a people of sublime diversity, presiding over a nation of nations, he could say with Walt Whitman:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Lincoln Steffens once remarked that Theodore Roosevelt thought with his hips. Franklin Roosevelt’s thinking was perhaps no more cerebral, but he thought with all five senses, perhaps with a sixth too. He had a radar set that could point in all directions, acute, sensitive, recording everything indiscriminately, and restoring the image in the responsive instrument that was Roosevelt’s mind.
Was there then no hard center, no core personality, no final commitment in this man? Watching his quicksilver mind run from idea to idea, visitors could hardly believe that stone or steel lay under the bright, smooth flow of talk. But something did. The more that mask and costume are stripped away from Roosevelt, the more the turn-of-century man of Hyde Park, Groton, and Harvard stands out.
Roosevelt, for all his deviousness, was basically a moral man in the sense that he felt so intensely the need to do right that he had to think he did right. He believed in doing good, in showing other people how to do good, and he assumed that ultimately people would do good. By “good” he meant the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule, as interpreted by Endicott Peabody. He meant the “simple rules of human conduct to which we always go back,” as he said in 1932. He meant “old-fashioned standards of rectitude,” as he said in signing the truth-in-securities bill in 1933. Significantly, Roosevelt always looked back into the past for his moralities; he did not try to fashion them anew.
These rules were not very precise, and Roosevelt did not want them to be precise. It was enough that they were there. Once when Eleanor Roosevelt raised with him the question of their children’s religious upbringing, he said simply that they should go to church and learn what he had learned. “But are you sure that you believe in everything you learned?” his wife persisted. “I really never thought about it,” he said with a quizzical look. “I think it is just as well not to think about things like that.” But he expected others to understand his simple rules of conduct, and to understand his own allegiance to them. When Richard Whitney’s financial irresponsibilities were disclosed, Roosevelt’s wealthy friends wrote to compliment him on not using the unhappy incident as part of a political attack on Wall Street. The President was amazed at the letters. “I wonder what sort of man they think I am,” he said.
Vague though it was, this set of moral rules embraced one idea in particular that was of cardinal importance to Roosevelt and to his country. This was the idea of man’s responsibility for the well-being of his fellow man. It was simply an extension of Sara Roosevelt’s notions of noblesse oblige, but it found enormous meaning in the new conditions of the twentieth century. For it underlay Roosevelt’s most important single idea—the idea that government had a positive responsibility for the general welfare. Not that government itself must do everything, but that everything practicable must be done. Whether government does it, or private enterprise, is an operating decision dependent on many factors—but government must insure that something is done.
Such was the essence of Roosevelt’s morality; such was the core of beliefs far below the surface.
Some politicians preach morality because it is safe to do so, because they prove thereby that they are on the right side between Good and Evil, because they reach the largest common denominator among their audience, not because they take their own preachments too seriously. Not so Roosevelt. Probably no American politician has given so many speeches that were essentially sermons rather than statements of policy. Like a preacher, he wanted and expected his sermons to serve as practical moral guides to his people. Roosevelt was so theatrical that his moral preachments were often dismissed with a smile. Actually he was deadly serious.
Only a man deadly serious and supremely confident could have spent the time Roosevelt did trying to educate and elevate not only his own people but foreign leaders who seemed to others to be beyond redemption. There was something pathetic and yet almost sublime in the way that Roosevelt sent message after message to Hitler and other dictators. Partly, of course, it was for the record; but even more it was an expression of Roosevelt’s faith in the ultimate goodness and reasonableness of all men. His eternal desire to talk directly with his enemies, whether congressmen or dictators, reflected his confidence in his own persuasiveness and, even more, in the essential ethical rightness of his own position.
To Theodore Roosevelt the presidency was a “bully pulpit.” To Franklin Roosevelt it was the same—“pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.…”
How explain, then, the “other side” of Roosevelt—his shiftiness, his compromises, his manipulations? Why did he so often act like a fox?
Roosevelt was not an absolute moralist about means because, whatever his hopes or illusions about man’s possible redemption and ultimate goodness and reasonableness, he had few illusions about man’s nature. He knew that some men were selfish, irrational, vengeful, and mean. The practical statesman or man of affairs encounters ambitions and passions in his daily experience that put man in a strong, harsh light. Roosevelt got his education at the hands of tough labor leaders like Lewis, city bosses like Murphy and Hague, agrarian demogogues like Long, and—on the level of pure evil—Hitler and his camp followers. He learned the uses of power.
Roosevelt overcame these men because he liked and wanted power and, even more, because he wanted to defend the position of strength from which he could lead and teach the people. To seize and hold power, to defend that position, he got down into the dusty arena and grappled with rival leaders on their own terms. So sure was he of the rightness of his aims that he was willing to use Machiavellian means; and his moral certainties made him all the more effective in the struggle. To the idealists who cautioned him he responded again and again that gaining power—winning elections—was the first, indispensable task. He would use the tricks of the fox to serve the purposes of the lion.
During the war years Roosevelt became interested in Kierkegaard, and this was not surprising. The Danish theologian, with his emphasis on man’s natural sinfulness, helped explain to him, Roosevelt said, why the Nazis “are human, yet they behave like demons.” From Peabody’s homilies to Kierkegaard’s realities, from the world of Hyde Park to the world of Hitler, the way was long and tortuous; the fact that Roosevelt could traverse that road so surely, with so little impairment to his loftiest ideals, and with such courage and good humor, was the final and true test of the man.
Holmes had been right—a second-rate intellect but a first-rate temperament. To examine closely single aspects of Roosevelt’s character—as thinker, as organizer, as manipulator, as strategist—is to see failings and deficiencies closely interwoven with the huge capacities. But to stand back and look at the man as a whole, against the backdrop of his people and his times, is to see the lineaments of greatness—courage, joyousness, responsiveness, vitality, faith, and, above all, concern for his fellow man. A democrat in manner and conviction, he was yet a member of that small aristocracy once described by E. M. Forster—sensitive but not weak, considerate but not fussy, plucky in his power to endure, capable of laughing and of taking a joke. He was the true happy warrior.
Warm Springs on Thursday, April 12, was sunny and pleasant. Roosevelt sat in his cottage looking over his stamps. He had put on a dark blue suit and a Harvard-red tie for a painter who was doing his portrait. Sitting in his brown leather chair near the fireplace, he seemed unusually chipper and gay. For some reason he took his draft card out of his wallet and tossed it into a basket nearby. Then he looked at some reports with intense concentration.
Suddenly the President groaned. He pressed and rubbed his temple hard—then the great head fell back inert. Carried to his bed, he lived, breathing heavily but unconscious, for about four hours. He died at 4:35 P.M.; it was fourscore years almost to the day since Lincoln’s death.
The news sped to Eleanor Roosevelt in Washington, to Harry Truman, summoned suddenly to the White House from Capitol Hill, to Winston Churchill, who felt as if he had been struck a physical blow, to soldiers, sailors, and marines on far-off battle fronts. To four of these fighting men went a message from their mother: “He did his job to the end as he would want you to do.” At the Capitol building a young congressman, groping for words, spoke for his generation: “He was the only person I ever knew—anywhere—who was never afraid. God, how he could take it for us all.” Everywhere men and women wept, openly and without shame.
“All that is within me cries out to go back to my home on the Hudson River,” Roosevelt had said nine months before, and now at last he would return. Through the dark Southern night the funeral train moved slowly back to Washington. Marines and infantrymen escorted the black, flag-draped caisson through the streets of Washington, while a huge crowd stood silent and unmoving. There was a brief, simple service in the East Room of the White House; then the body was placed again on the funeral train, and Roosevelt for the last time traveled the old, familiar route along the Pennsylvania Railroad’s main line through Philadelphia and into Manhattan, then across Hell Gate bridge and up along the Hudson.
At the siding on the riverbank below the home, the coffin was moved from the train to a caisson drawn by six brown horses. There followed a lone horse, hooded, stirrups reversed and a sword hanging from the left stirrup—symbolic of a lost warrior. Marching in rigid columns of three at slow funeral cadence, the guard escorted the body up the steep winding road, through the dark woods, to the little plateau above. Behind the house, framed by the rose garden, were assembled the family and friends, old servants and retainers, and files of soldiers and sailors standing at rigid attention on the expanse of green grass.
A river breeze off the Hudson ruffled the trees above. A military band sounded the sad notes of its dirge. Muffled drums beat slowly and a bugler played the haunting notes of Taps as the coffin was slowly lowered into the grave. The warrior was home.