21
BY JULY, WASHINGTON, D.C., WAS sweltering in all respects.
If only he could get away, the President sighed to his staff. Fortunately, he did not have long to wait. A “getaway” had been selected several months before, as a presidential retreat—and it was almost ready.
“Early in the spring of 1942, possibly late March or early April while having his sinuses packed one evening in [Dr.] Ross McIntire’s office, President Roosevelt remarked about as follows,” Roosevelt’s naval aide, Captain McCrea, later related—attempting in his somewhat stilted English to recall the President’s request.
“‘Both of you’—referring to Ross McIntire and me—‘know how very much I like to go to Hyde Park for weekend breaks. With the war on, I am conscious of the fact that I cannot go to Hyde Park as often as I have in the past’”—for the overnight journey from Washington to the Hudson Valley and then back was too time-consuming. Nevertheless, the President had said, “‘I would like very much to dodge, as far as possible, the heat and humidity of the Washington summer: additional air conditioning is not for me, as you well know. As I have often told you, Ross, I never had sinus trouble until I became shipmates with air conditioning. The two may not be related but nevertheless I associate this condition’”—at which he tapped his sinus area with a forefinger—“‘with air conditioning. Now, cannot we locate an area within easy access of Washington where it would be possible to set up a modest rustic camp, to which I could go from time to time on weekends or even overnight and thus escape for a few hours at least the oppressiveness of the Washington summer? I suggest this as an alternative to the Potomac’”—referring to the USS Potomac, the presidential yacht—“‘since the Secret Service people are adamant against my using it, except on selected occasions.’
“‘Now I know that President Hoover had a camp on the Rapidau in the Catoctin mountains,’” the President had gone on to explain his idea. “‘I know nothing about it but that might be a good area to investigate, anyway. Ross, I want John and you and Steve Early [FDR’s press secretary] to find some place which will fit not alone my needs, but provide for the housing of the clerical staff which usually accompany me to Hyde Park. Remember now: nothing elaborate—something most modest, functional and within easy distance of the White House. This last requirement is important, so no doubt the choice of location will be limited to nearby Virginia and Maryland. Since the summer is approaching you should get after this as soon as possible.’”1
McCrea, McIntire, and Early had diligently begun their search.
“The Hoover camp was quickly eliminated,” McCrea later recollected. The thirty-first president’s camp had been built “alongside a nearby stream and had very little view of the surrounding countryside. President Hoover was interested in stream fishing and the camp, while ideal for that, did not fill the needs of President Roosevelt.”
The general area, however, seemed ideal. “Nearby, atop the Catoctin Mountains at some 1800 feet elevation, was located a modest model recreation camp which had been built by the Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Progress Administration,” as part of the New Deal economic-stimulus program in the early days of the Depression. “The exact number of the buildings involved escapes me at the moment but it could not have been more than eight or ten. The buildings were small save for one somewhat larger building which had a mess hall and kitchen. The larger of the cottages could, we thought, with a few alterations be adapted for the President’s needs and the needs of his staff.”2
The chief of the Bureau of Yards and Docks had then been brought in—a man who was no “stranger to action,” as McCrea neatly put it. “In a few short days this building was altered by the Seabees to provide for a combination dining and living room, the President’s bedroom, and three small bedrooms. All the small bedrooms had a common bath[room], which had no key! The living room area was, by usual standards, small, no larger in size than a modest living room. At one end was a stone fireplace which contributed greatly to the comfort of the place. The President’s bedroom was the largest of the four bedrooms, but it too could be said to be of modest size. One side of the President’s bedroom was equipped with a large hinged panel which, when tripped, would fall outward, and serve in an emergency as a ramp and escape route for the President’s wheelchair. A combination kitchen and pantry adjoined the dining room. A screened in porch—entrance to which was via the dining room, providing a spectacular view of the surrounding countryside—completed the structure.”
The man responsible for the camp, the President had decided, should be his naval aide. “‘John,’ said he, ’since I shan’t be using the Potomac except on rare occasions you, in addition to your other duties, are hereby appointed the proprietor and landlord of the camp. And by the way, all camps should have a name. Let’s see. I think it quite appropriate that we call this camp Shangri-la’—referring of course to the mythical area. . . . ‘What do you say to this?’”3
McCrea had said he would be honored—the camp accommodations of “USS Shangri-la” somewhat primitive, but the views stunning, and the air mercifully cool compared with Washington. On Sunday, July 5, 1942, the President drove with Harry Hopkins, McCrea, and a party of friends including Daisy Suckley to “what the papers are calling Shangri-La, ‘a cottage in the country’!” as Daisy noted. “No one is supposed to know, in order to give the President some privacy, and also for safety. But I am sure alien spies can find it out somehow without the slightest trouble.”4
Walking with Hopkins to see the swimming pool, Daisy now found the President “cheerful & delighted & rested”—and reading Jane’s Fighting Ships, the famous encyclopedia of the world’s warships.5
Back in Washington the next day, refreshed by his trip to Shangri-la, the President took the first step in bending the chiefs of staff to his will over Gymnast. With the War Department still parrying his wishes, the President needed a new stratagem.
In all confidence, the President had admitted to Daisy, he was more “depressed by the situation” than he was letting on. “If Egypt is taken, it means Arabia, Afghanistan, etc., i.e. the Japs & Germans control everything from the Atlantic to the Pacific—that means all the oil wells, etc. of those regions—a bleak prospect for the United Nations.”
“I asked where the blame lies for the present situation in Egypt,” the President’s confidante noted in her diary after speaking with him. The President thought about her question, then answered with surprising candor. “He said partly Churchill, mostly the bad generals.”6
Was he, the President, any better than Churchill, though? Were American generals any better than their British counterparts?
Roosevelt found it difficult to understand why Marshall remained so intransigent in pressing for a cross-Channel attack, while objecting to an American invasion of French Northwest Africa. Yes, Russia needed help—but so, too, did the British in Egypt. And urgently. The British Eighth Army seemed to be in its death throes in North Africa, as Rommel drove its remnant forces back almost a thousand miles to Alamein, the last defensive position before Cairo and Alexandria. Was this, then, the best moment to launch a supremely risky cross-Channel Second Front assault that had almost no chance of success, given the number of German divisions defending the French coast and interior? Would not an American landing in Northwest Africa—in Rommel’s rear—be the saving of the British in the Middle East, as well as a safe area in which U.S. forces could learn the art of modern war?
Field Marshal Dill, the British representative on the Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee, had been even more pessimistic than Churchill—prompting the President to say to him “that the trouble with the British is that they think they can beat the Germans if they have an equal number of men, tanks, etc.” As the President pointed out to Dill, this was a serious error. It was simply “not so—the Germans are better trained, better generaled.”7
It was, the President reflected, a fact of life—“You can never discipline an Englishman or an American as you can a German,” he told Daisy what he’d shared with Dill.8
Daisy was charmed by the observation, noting it in her diary. Yet its significance in the President’s growing realism went deeper than even she realized. For in that casual, consoling remark to Dill, the President of the United States had put his finger on the problem that his own U.S. generals were still not confronting.
Americans might scoff at the British failure to fight the Germans effectively, despite two years’ experience of German tactics and interservice skills in action. Would Americans fare better in battle, though, straight off the mound? And was it fair to put them into battle in the supposedly right place but at the wrong time—when they would only get slaughtered? American troops, like most English soldiers, were for the most part citizen warriors, the President reflected—not professionals. They lacked the sort of self-sacrificing discipline that seemed second nature to German and Japanese troops.
American and British individualism was, in effect, their undoing against such an enemy. Yet it was also, Roosevelt felt, their ultimate strength—if they could be encouraged to work together toward a realistic, common cause in which they believed, and were put into battle in operations that had a reasonable chance of success.
This, then, was the insight that came to the President after Tobruk—and marked a profound shift in his thinking as his nation’s commander in chief. Millions of American troops were being called to serve their country. They would do fine, he was sure, if they could be given the chance to learn the arts of modern warfare against German or Japanese troops, on ground of their own choosing, not the enemy’s. The hostile beaches of mainland France, the President emphatically recognized, were not the place to do it, not yet—whatever General Marshall and his cohort of War Department staffers maintained.
Emboldened by his insight, the President formally asked Bill Leahy to resign on July 6, 1942, as ambassador to Vichy France. He was, the President requested, to leave the State Department, go back on the “active” list as a four-star admiral, and become the President’s first-ever “military assistant.”
The President had, it seemed, hit upon a solution to his Second Front problem. As Roosevelt explained over lunch with the admiral, at his desk in the Oval Study, Leahy would have his own office at the White House, once reconstruction of the East Wing was completed. As to the responsibilities of his new job, Roosevelt was deliberately vague—but Leahy knew the President well enough to know what he was plotting.
Besides, the admiral—whose wife had died unexpectedly after surgery at a hospital in France that spring—was lonely in Washington. He was thus happy to accept the position: bracing himself for what was, undoubtedly, in store.