The study of leadership—moral, literary, political, and military—has been my abiding interest for almost forty-five years as a biographer and historian.
My particular fascination with FDR goes back to American Caesars, a Suetonian-style biography of the last twelve U.S. presidents, which I published in 2010. Researching the opening chapter on President Roosevelt, I found it hard to believe that no military biographer or military historian had tackled his military leadership in World War II as commander in chief in a full-scale work. Once I completed American Caesars I was able to examine the literature and original documentation more closely. I became even more intrigued—especially at the difference in command styles adopted by Churchill and Roosevelt in directing World War II.
I knew perhaps more than many people of my generation about Winston Churchill as a military leader, and as a striking personality, for I had stayed with him and Lady Churchill at their home at Chartwell, in Kent, while a student at Cambridge University. Moreover, I had spent many, many hours discussing Churchill’s leadership with my quasi godfather, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, who revered the former prime minister—but lamented his intrusions into the battlefield, and his failure to understand the principles of effective modern command. Later on, over the period of a decade, I spent yet more time interviewing men and women who had known or served under the Prime Minister in World War II for Monty, my official life of Montgomery, published in three volumes in the 1980s—in each of which Winston Churchill played a major part.
On the American side, I was also lucky to have interviewed many of the senior surviving World War II commanders and staff officers, from General Mark Clark to Generals “Lightning Joe” Collins, Max Taylor, and Jim Gavin; from General Al Gruenther to General Freddie de Guingand. In the course of my work I had also gotten to know many senior American World War II military writers and historians, from Forrest Pogue to Russell Weigley, Steve Ambrose, and Carlo D’Este.
And on the German side I was fortunate, too. Thanks to a semester at Munich University and my first marriage to a German (who died tragically in 1973), I had good command of the German language, and sources not available or translated for use by many British or American writers.
In short, I felt confident enough in 2010 to tackle such a project afresh.
The result, The Mantle of Command: FDR at War, presents a very different portrait than the conventional characterization of President Roosevelt as commander in chief in World War II. In this respect I was blessed by being able to interview the last living member of FDR’s White House team in World War II, Commander George Elsey, who worked in the Map Room, as well as several members of FDR’s family, including his granddaughter Ellie and his step-grandson Tom Halsted. Working my way through the many diaries, memoranda, and correspondence kept by the members of the President’s staff and military officials, held in various archives in the United States and United Kingdom, I tried my best to reconstruct the story wie es eigentlich gewesen ist—how it really was.
For reasons of length I had decided from the beginning to focus on selected landmark moments or episodes in FDR’s performance as commander in chief in World War II that best illustrate his responses both to defeat and to victory in war, for good or ill. Unfortunately, even this attempt at condensation proved a failure. The eleven-month period between Pearl Harbor and the first landings of American troops on the threshold of Europe—Operation Torch—seemed to me too important not to reconstruct and get right, given the many alternative, often misleading, accounts that have been given over the years: in particular, that of Winston Churchill in his monumental opus, The Second World War.
Interviewing so many World War II commanders and their staffs, I had learned how much of history, in the end, is dependent on the perspective or point of view of the participant. The main perspective of The Mantle of Command, let us be clear, is unabashedly that of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the White House he used as his command post in 1941 and 1942. The story, moreover, is a quite fatal one, in terms of world history. Had FDR, in the first year of America’s involvement in World War II, not learned to wear the mantle of command so firmly, and to overrule his generals, it is quite possible Hitler would have achieved his aim when declaring war on the United States on December 11, 1941: winning the war in Europe. It is a sobering reflection.
Naturally, in retelling and recasting this extraordinary story I have subjected certain reputations to revision, from those of Winston Churchill and General George Marshall to General Douglas MacArthur and the war secretary, Colonel Henry Stimson. I hope I am not unsympathetic to their memories, serving to the best of their abilities in a world crisis such as we hopefully will never have occasion to repeat or replicate; nevertheless, it seemed important to me to recount the saga from FDR’s perspective with absolute if compassionate honesty, since the President did not live to do so. Every other major military participant managed to impart his own account, either autobiographically or via a chosen plaidoyer; only President Roosevelt’s POV as commander in chief has remained dark since his death in 1945.
In researching and writing this account—which will be followed by a concluding work—I was helped by a small but wonderful army of professional colleagues, friends, and family. I’d like first to thank my educator wife, Dr. Raynel Shepard, for her everlasting patience in the book’s genesis, research, writing, and preparation. Next: Ike Williams, my literary agent in Boston, who saw immediately the potential importance of the undertaking—and found me a well-tempered, experienced commissioning publisher and editor in Bruce Nichols of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Bruce not only cut and clarified my often prolix prose, but recognized the need for two separate books to do justice to FDR’s wartime story.
To Ike and his associates Katherine Flynn and Hope Denekamp, therefore, and to Bruce Nichols and Melissa Dobson, my copyeditor, my deep gratitude. In terms of colleagues, I have been fortunate to have been a Senior Fellow in the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, for many years, and wish to thank Steve Crosby, his successor, Ira Jackson, the staff, and my colleagues there for their constant support—as also the University Provost, Winston Langley, and the ever-helpful staff of the University Library.
The staff and facilities of the Widener Library and Microfilm Department in the Lamont Library, Harvard University, have also been outstanding, as has been the staff of the Boston University Microfilm Department, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library at Hyde Park.
I’m deeply grateful, too, to those colleagues and friends who were willing to read and offer criticism of sections of the growing manuscript, as it evolved, beginning with my oldest Cambridge University friend, Robin Whitby; Professor Mark Schneider; Lieutenant Colonel Carlo D’Este; Professor David Kaiser; James Scott; and Professor Mark Stoler. I’d also like to record my thanks to members of my Boston club, The Tavern, who listened to my early readings from the manuscript and offered advice and encouragement—especially Stephen Clark, Frinde Maher, Alston Purvis, Ed Tarlov, David Scudder, David Amory, and Clive Foss.
Two conferences at which I gave papers based upon chapters of the manuscript were extremely helpful to my work. They were a Raymond E. Mason Jr. Distinguished Lecture on FDR’s “Great Spat” with Winston Churchill over India in 1942, delivered at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans as part of the second annual Winston S. Churchill Symposium in July 2012; and a paper on Torch, given at the invitation of Professor David Reynolds to the Guerre des Sables Conference of international World War II scholars at the École Française de Rome in November 2012. The 2012 International Conference on World War II, held at the National World War II Museum in December 2012, was also fruitful, and I thank the director, Dr. Nick Mueller (and conference organizer Jeremy Collins), for inviting me to speak along with fellow panelists Rick Atkinson, Gerhard Weinberg, Allan Millett, Christopher Browning, Conrad Crane, and Mark Stoler.
In the U.K. I would like to thank Allen Packwood, Director of the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, for his help on my visit there, and especially Professor David Reynolds for his hospitality and intellectual support in reexamining the fateful year, 1942, and the story of the collapse of the British Empire, together with its ramifications for FDR.
In London I would like to thank the wonderful staff of the Imperial War Museum’s Department of Documents: the former Curator, the late Rod Suddaby, and current Curator, Anthony Richards, for pointing me to useful Churchill and FDR material; also Phil Reid, Director of the IWM’s Cabinet War Rooms below Whitehall, for a wonderful personal tour. Also the Liddell Hart Military History Centre at King’s College—and my research assistant in London, Jean Simpson, for her help in obtaining documents.
Back in the U.S., I want to record my thanks to the staff of the Manuscript Division Reading Room at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., especially Jeff Flannery, the Head of Reference and Reader Services Section in the Manuscript Reading Room. Also the staff of the Operational Archives of the U.S. Naval History and Command, Washington Navy Yard, D.C., especially John Greco for his help. In Oakland, California, I’d like to thank the volunteers and staff of the presidential yacht, the USS Potomac, for their tour—and cruise in San Francisco Bay—in August 2012. And in Boston, my research assistant, Eric Prileson, a graduate of Northeastern University.
As President of BIO—Biographers International Organization—from 2010 to 2012 I was privileged to work with a wonderful committee of fellow biographers, and to participate in excellent annual conferences in Boston, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and New York. Thanks to them, the craft of biography has seemed vastly less isolating than in my earlier years, and I want to thank especially Elizabeth Harris and my fellow members of the Boston Biographers Group (BBG), who meet once a month to share progress on their individual projects. Listening to and comparing the practical challenges of biography of fellow practitioners, working on an extraordinary array of different life stories across different centuries, has been, over the past five years, a veritable lifeline to me, and I cannot too highly recommend joining such an organization to anyone contemplating or already working on a biography.
I’d like finally to acknowledge the memories of two women who died recently: Margery Heffron, who cofounded the Boston Biographers Group, but managed to complete her masterpiece, The Other Mrs. Adams, before she passed; and my mother, Olive Hamilton, who first invested me with my love of biography, and wrote many herself before passing in January 2012, at age ninety-six—twenty-two years after my father, Lieutenant Colonel Sir Denis Hamilton, DSO, who landed as a twenty-five-year-old battalion commander on D-day, four months after my birth—and inspired my fascination with leadership.