AN ESSENTIAL THEME OF THIS BOOK has been leadership, the intangible quality that empowers human beings to influence events through their influence on each other. It is instantly recognizable in the present yet arduous to reconstruct when the present has faded into the past. The record of what a leader did does not necessarily tell us what he (or she) was. Least of all does it convey their aura, the halo of intensity that caused their contemporaries to listen when they spoke. It is not definable in any other terms than that. Ulysses Grant is the prime exemplar; all observers of him agreed that everything about his personality was undistinguished except for the fact that in his presence men behaved differently. When Grant was there a current flowed. Roosevelt as President conveyed a similar electricity.
All of his principal military subordinates possessed the same quality in some measure, though they were utterly unlike one another in training and temperament, applied themselves to dissimilar challenges, and did so with highly individualistic styles: Marshall for making an army, King for reanimating a navy, Arnold for inventing an air force, MacArthur for symbolizing a cause, Eisenhower for forging an alliance, and so on. The suitability of each to his task makes him seem in hindsight almost indistinguishable from it, as though no other choice were imaginable. But these were picked men, either by conscious presidential design (Marshall, MacArthur, Nimitz) or by having survived Roosevelt’s scrutiny (King, Arnold, Eisenhower) or by being suited to his intentions (Vandegrift, Stilwell, LeMay). Together the Joint Chiefs and their theater commanders gave a cohesion and decisiveness to the American high command that allowed the President when it suited him to maintain, as far as the conduct of the war was concerned, that they were in charge. This was not the case: He was in charge.
Leadership of the kind Roosevelt practiced required him to devote himself to detail while rising—or appearing to rise—above it. The cardinal rule is: Pay attention! Few other occupants of the office in our time can so attentively have minded the store, and been so minutely committed to being the master of any given situation. Yet the machinery of this was largely invisible to any but his immediate staff. The thousands of day-to-day decisions, minor as well as momentous, that make up the full texture of administration are precisely those that he went to the greatest lengths to conceal. He did not want anyone to know how he did it. “All the hard things were made to seem easy,” wrote his onetime colleague Rexford Tugwell. “He left nothing to help us see how magnificent his achievement was. On the contrary, he put every possible obstacle in the way…. There are carloads of papers, records galore, correspondence in reams; and remarkably little of it is of much essential use … There is hardly a dependable record of a conversation in Franklin Roosevelt’s whole life.”
He enjoyed seclusion, and relished the atmosphere of secrecy with which wartime security requirements permitted him to surround his comings and goings. “Mr. Roosevelt,” said White House correspondent Merriman Smith, “made a fetish of his privacy during the war.” His departures for Hyde Park mainly took place from a basement railroad siding under the Bureau of Engraving and Printing on Fourteenth Street, where he would not be seen; Hyde Park phones were connected to the White House switchboard so that callers often did not know which location they had reached; White House staff accompanying him were put up not in Pough-keepsie hotels (as previously) but in the Vanderbilt mansion nearby, where the President insisted that “Hackie”—Louise Hachmeister, the chief switchboard operator of legendary competence—be quartered in Mrs. Vanderbilt’s boudoir and that it be decorated with blue ribbons. He drove over in his Ford sedan equipped with hand controls to visit them.
Insofar as possible he protected the process by which he arrived at conclusions from unnecessary outside interference, and surely this is why so many who knew him found him so baffling. “His character was not only multiplex,” wrote Robert Sherwood, “it was contradictory to a bewildering degree.” His purposes were best served if their point of origin was obscure, located somewhere in what Sherwood called “his heavily forested interior.”1 The conversion of intention into action was too important to be exposed to manipulation by others. Yet one wonders if he was really so complicated as he managed to appear. Sherwood himself believed that Roosevelt would eventually be less of a mystery to his biographers than he was to his co-workers, and this is true. Out of complexity he achieved simplicity, and it is the simplicity that now comes through so clearly. The clues are scattered, but they can be reassembled.
Contradictions did not greatly matter so long as he was in command, and in command he always was, of every occasion, of every condition with which the presidency could confront him. The possibility that something might turn up he could not deal with seemed never to cross his mind. He greeted each day in anticipation of enjoying it to the full. His memory for particulars was unpredictable but wide-ranging; he would now and then astonish, as he did Patton at Casablanca or Kenneth Pendar at Marrakech, by the breadth and perception of his knowledge, even though equally often he might display a surprising gap of incomprehension, equally shrouded in self-assertiveness. But any omissions were more than redeemed by his ability to tie it all together; his intelligence was adhesive and synoptic. The fact that things relate to other things was not merely a condition of his thinking but its guiding principle—and this enabled him not only to perceive the war as a whole but to convey that perception of it to his constituency, to provide the sense of purpose his nation and its people had to have if their generous energies were to be liberated.
President Roosevelt’s style of national leadership was both warm and lofty, both intimate and distant. It has often been noted that by his voice alone, through the medium of radio, he was able to convince people in the millions that he was speaking directly to them (whether he would have done better or worse with television, the more mercilessly demanding medium, is a subject for reflection). For many of the young men and women in the armed services he was the President, the only one they had ever been consciously aware of. He was quite simply there, a part of their lives, and he exuded confidence, a sense of being on top of the world; the idea of anyone else being President did not naturally come to mind. That—and the buoyancy, the hat brim turned up in front, the cigarette holder at a jaunty angle—made him an unbeatable politician and a reassuring Commander in Chief. It contributed to the widespread sense of deprivation and emptiness when he died.
He was also an emblem of the war’s objectives, the expression of a continuity between the humane impulses of the New Deal and those implied by a determination to defeat the dictatorships. He put great store by the Atlantic Charter—with its promise, only slightly qualified, of self-determination for all peoples—though it came from a British draft (by Sir Alexander Cadogan), was never issued as anything but a press release, and seems to have had little impact on public opinion. Of his own authorship, however, were the Four Freedoms—of speech, of worship, from want, and from fear—enunciated in his State of the Union message to Congress in January 1941, an address so impressive that the Third Inaugural following it was something of an anticlimax.
In the military, the Four Freedoms were not on every tongue; a survey of American soldiers in 1943 showed that over a third had never heard of them and only 13 percent could name three or all four. But the spirit got through. Another survey (in 1942) showed that 65 percent believed that they were fighting to “guarantee democratic liberties to all peoples of the world.” If a sense of elevated motive was not obligatory in World War II, it was permissible. After V-J Day, Bernard DeVoto, stalled in a railway club car somewhere in Indiana, listened to a group of soldiers arguing. One of them was defending the corruption and storm-trooper brutalities of Huey Long on the grounds that he had done a lot for Louisiana and that graft was just “business.” Finally, one of the others said, “Where you spent the war, Mac, didn’t you hear what it was about?”2
German interrogators of American prisoners in Tunisia were quick to discover how little “motivated” many of the latter were in German terms (reports of this were pleasing to Hitler). But Pearl Harbor had provided the American soldiers, sailors, and airmen with all the motivation they needed: We had been attacked, therefore we must reply in kind, and win. Civilians thrust into uniform were skeptical about the military—its drill, its makework, its pretensions and formalities—but by and large they put up with it as an unpleasant necessity. If there was no extravagant zeal—so conclude Samuel Stouffer and his collaborators in their monumental study The American Soldier—neither was there defeatism. The mood was one, with few illusions, of Let’s get it over with. GI humor was sardonic, and it did not spare the President.
I have a memory that could probably be duplicated by others a hundred times over. I was riding in the back of an army truck full of soldiers, somewhere in the middle of England in the middle of the night, going where or why I have long since forgotten, a moment suspended in time. Mimicking the familiar accent, a voice out of the dark said, “I hate waahr.” Pause. Then another voice: “Elean-or hates wa-ahr.” Pause, and another: “Fala hates wa-ahr.” Finally, “Sistie and Buzzie [Roosevelt grandchildren] hate wa-ahr.” It was not vindictive, it was mocking: a manifestation of the “black” humor common to many armies, which surfaced later in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Like the Marine on Guadalcanal shouting “Blood for Franklin and Eleanor” at the Japanese, it reflected a view that incorporated the presidential presence without being overawed or intimidated by it.
He was thus the right kind of leader for that kind of war. There was a sense of fitness in his being at the head of armed forces that remained essentially nonmilitaristic in nature, a sense that under his direction they would not be given over to pomp and gold braid but put to practical purposes, and purposes that he as leader of two liberal-democratic administrations had embodied. (One reason he won the 1940 election was that voters, when surveyed and asked to assume that war was coming, preferred Roosevelt to Willkie as a potential Commander in Chief by a margin of 18 percent.3)
For many Americans, as Studs Terkel has reminded us, it was “the good war,” though no war can possibly be called “good” that kills and maims so many of the helpless, so many women and children, as did World War II. It was “good” only in that it gave many who participated in it a feeling of being lifted outside themselves, of performing at a higher pitch than ever before, of being fully engaged in a transcendent cause. In any large and complex organization, let alone a nation, the last of these convictions comes only from the top.
What did Roosevelt attempt and what part of it did he achieve? On Christmas morning, the President liked to read aloud to his children and grandchildren (there were thirteen of the latter) from Dickens’s Christmas Carol. Perhaps we may imagine him then, on Christmas Eve of December 1941, visited in his sleep by the Ghost of Christmases to Come, who offers to be questioned.
“Will Hitler be beaten?”
“Hitler will die by his own hand in the ruins of Berlin. The Anglo-American and Russian armies will link arms across the fallen body of a devastated and defeated Germany.”
“And Japan?”
“The emperor will surrender even before your soldiers reach his homeland. His cities will be in ashes, his industry wrecked, his navy sunk beneath the sea. The scientific experiment Einstein has commended to you will prove successful, and Japan will feel the searing heat of its incandescence, rivaling the sun’s.”
“Will the war be long and painful?”
“It will be won in less time than a presidential term. No enemy bomb will have fallen on continental American soil. American dead will be no more than a few hundredths of those in uniform.”
“And afterward, will there be a new and better world?”
“There will. The ancient empires will crumble as you expect, the colonial peoples will be free, and they will join in the parliament of man you will have convened.”
“Shall I live to see this?”
“That alone I may not tell you.”
“Well enough. I rest content.”
President Roosevelt accomplished in essentials what he set out to do, nearly everything he might have hoped for. Not only was his victory total but he left behind him a nation grown to a wealth and strength never before seen. Its gross national product had risen from $91 billion to $166 billion; its index of industrial production, from 100 to 196; its merchant marine, which stood in 1939 at 17 percent of the world total compared to Europe’s 63 percent, now exceeded that of all European nations combined.4 Its navy and strategic air forces were without peer, and it was the sole possessor of the Absolute Weapon. The United Nations were being formed under its aegis; their headquarters would be located—where else?—in its world capital, New York. Merely as a by-product of fighting the war, without initially intending to or fully understanding it, the United States had become the foremost international power.
To this amazing performance the President greatly contributed, but how much? The view could be advanced that the genie was already in the bottle and that all he had to do was pull the cork. An ability to win the war was latent in the America of 1939: in the oil fields, the bauxite mines, the Mesabi range, the pent-up waters of the Tennessee and the Columbia; in an unexploited industrial potential and an underemployed work force; in a Navy with a venerable sea-fighting tradition, in a Marine Corps teaching itself techniques no one else believed in, in an Air Corps yearning to stretch its wings, in the citizen Army dreaming in the mind of George C. Marshall. It was Roosevelt’s first and foremost strength that he knew all this—out of seven years’ having steered the ship of state, out of a lifetime’s immersion in American politics and an absorptive curiosity about every aspect of American life, out of an instinct for optimism and action, out of the mixture of all these together that was singularly his—and he knew he could put his trust completely in this awareness.
If fault were to be found in his prewar conduct of affairs, it might be for his failure to mobilize the national energies sooner. A precious year was lost in 1940 that could have been spent in speeding up preparedness and bringing preponderant military force into existence earlier than 1944. He judged it impossible to do this and win a third-term election at the same time; he judged that the New Deal was still a sure thing politically while a war was not, and who is to gainsay him? Although by 1942 he was able to put the New Deal into temporary storage, in 1939 his one chance of preparing for war at all was to go on functioning not as a harbinger of conflict to come but as the New Deal’s presiding genius. “By one of the most far-reaching and meaningful paradoxes in history,” writes Eliot Jane-way, “he survived the New Deal by continuing to symbolize it during the war years; and, because he symbolized the New Deal when there could be none, the New Deal in turn survived him.”5 It was, if you wish, an exercise in chameleon-like political expediency, but it was phenomenally effective.
Roosevelt stretched the boundaries of executive authority (as Lincoln did) and let precedents accumulate for single-handed presidential action that would later prove susceptible to abuse. The White House during his tenure had no ostentation and very little class (Ickes claimed never to have had a decent meal there and abominated the champagne), but he gave the office glamour and hence in part contributed to the “imperial presidency” that in subsequent years acquired ornamental trappings beyond reason or need; and he allowed the war to fortify the position of the corporate giants without whom he could not fight it (as Woodrow Wilson and Josephus Daniels might have warned him would happen). Both in the New Deal and above all in the war, he acculturated American businessmen to the idea that government need not be their enemy but can in fact undergird the economy, and in so doing he helped bring about that intermingling of industry with the military that has become so forbiddingly durable a feature of American life, threatening to impede a more peaceable quest after the public good.
Roosevelt thought of armaments as a drain on the nation. He had once calculated that over 90 percent of all national deficits from 1921 to 1939 were caused by payments for past, present, and future wars. “Don’t forget that the elimination of costly armaments is still the keystone,” he wrote to Adolph Berle, Jr., in connection with postwar planning, “for the security of all the little nations and for economic solvency.”6 Since he intended that the peace should be maintained by American armed force, he cannot have thought to eliminate it, but that he would have worked to increase it is difficult to conceive. The idea of an arms race, or of the United States as dispenser of munitions to the smaller nations, who then might use them on one another, would have been abhorrent to him.
When the war came, he could be criticized for doing the opposite of his temporizing on preparedness. He pushed the military into action before they were ready for it: in the Doolittle Raid with its unanticipated by-product at Midway, in the landings at Guadalcanal and on North Africa. By what close calls these enterprises avoided failure the reader will have seen, but their success produced the annus mirabilis of 1942 for American arms, the base on which everything that followed was built. It is my contention that this—second only to the wisdom of his appointments to the major commands—was Roosevelt’s most significant contribution to the war. It perceptibly shortened that war and lowered its cost in American lives. If ever Danton’s precept “de l’audace, encore de l’audace, et toujours de Vaudace” was proved in practice, it was so here. “I was too weak to defend,” said Robert E. Lee, “so I attacked.” It was not prudent, it was not even, except by generous interpretation, a “calculated” risk, but it was militarily and politically sound. It made the completeness of the victory certain far sooner than would otherwise have been.
Not to say that others of his strategies were without consequence. High among them in effect on the outcome would be his insistence on the full delivery of Lend-Lease to Russia. The President had to prod and prod to get this done. “Nothing would be worse than to have the Russians collapse …,” he told Secretary Morgenthau in March 1942. “I would rather lose New Zealand, Australia or anything else than have the Russians collapse.” By midsummer, deliveries were beginning to catch up with promises and thereafter the outpouring continued, with interruptions caused mostly by the hazards of the Murmansk convoy run. “It is no exaggeration,” wrote German General Siegfried Westphal, “to say that, without this massive American support, Russia would scarcely have been able to take the offensive in 1943.” The ultimate tributf was paid by Stalin at Teheran when he said that without American production the war would have been lost.7 It was Roosevelt who put the American arsenal behind Russia’s otherwise strained and spartan resistance to the German on-slaught.
Aid to Britain went without saying; it began early and was sustained throughout by the President, as it was in June 1940 over the opposition of Marshall and Stark, at a time when it mattered, and again in March 1943 over Marshall’s and the Joint Chiefs’ objections, at a time when the health and vitality of the British people still depended on it. Aid to Britain was necessary not only because the self-interest of the United States required the continued existence of Great Britain as a major power, but because Nazi Germany was the number one enemy and Britain was already clenched in mortal conflict with it. The principle of Atlantic-first was the fulcrum on which the success of American strategy rested; the choice was by no means Roosevelt’s alone, but he was one of the first in it, eloquent and thoroughly understanding in its defense, and unfailing in its firm assertion against Marshall and King when in July 1942 they proposed to abandon it.
Aid to China was a fruitless goal, one that beckoned the President into futility. It is odd—and perhaps a salutary lesson—that the two countries he most conspicuously mishandled, China and France, were those he thought he knew best. (He was rescued from his dead-end French policy by Eisenhower and Churchill.) Roosevelt was pressured by American opinion to accord China in his public pronouncements a greater role in the war than he privately knew it could have. Perhaps he allowed his China “policy” to go astray because he believed it didn’t matter very much. “There are forces there which neither you nor I understand,” he wrote to a friend in 1935, “but at least I know that they are almost incomprehensible to us Westerners. Do not let so-called facts or figures lead you to believe that any Western civilization’s action can ever affect the people of China very deeply.”
He had a point (it is the same conclusion Barbara Tuchman comes to at the end of her book about Stilwell)8 and it is a useful corrective to naivete about the transplantation overseas of American attitudes. But it is also an excuse for inattention and inaction, and the theory that at least one intractable Chinese institution (the army) could not be changed by a Westerner was proved wrong by Stilwell at Ramgarh and on the Ledo Road. “By not doing, all things are done,” say the Taoists. By Roosevelt’s not doing, a number of things were done in China, many of them bad, but he saw that Chiang’s demise would precipitate more problems foreign and domestic than he cared to think about, and that the Chinese Communists were by no means a preferable alternative. So he clung to his ideal of a coalition government under Chiang, an objective his successor (with the able assistance of George Marshall) continued vainly to strive after.
But on the whole, so well conceived were Roosevelt’s strategies, so complete their realization, that he might not unfairly be regarded as a contributor to the overconfidence of the postwar years, to what Denis Brogan in 1952 called “the illusion of American omnipotence.” The experience of a victorious global war fostered the belief that every American objective must be readily attainable, and encouraged that tendency to resort prematurely to pure power, to prefer military solutions over diplomatic ones, which in recent years George Kennan has spoken out against with his usual cogency and force.
Whether the President, had he lived out his fourth term, would have put a curb on this jingoistic excess we cannot tell, but there are grounds for guessing that he might have tried. He had too good a sense of history, of human fallibility. He knew that there are limits, that a nation cannot be roused to high endeavor (as Woodrow Wilson had taught him) more than once in a generation, and that “you cannot,” as on one occasion he told a younger man, “just by shouting from the housetops, get what you want all the time.”9
♦
A subtheme of this book has been the interaction of war with politics, which I trust the text has managed to demonstrate is more complex than is often assumed. Note first of all that the permeation of the GIs’ war by a certain New Deal spirit did not necessarily extend to the high command. Roosevelt’s lieutenants were not drawn from his political supporters. Only rarely—as in the case of Fiorello La Guardia, who was blocked by Stimson and Marshall—did he attempt to secure a military appointment for a political ally, or—as in the case of Joseph Alsop—grant an officer’s commission to a friend over military reluctance.
What would now sound like a reactionary and racist undertone would not then have been considered offensive within the professional officer class. Admiral King was contemptuous of the democratic process and, at least in his early encounters with it, unable to hide his annoyance when testifying before Congress.10 Lack of sympathy for the President’s domestic policies finds an extreme in MacArthur, whose anti-New Deal bias was so notorious as to constitute a strength, a reason for Roosevelt to pacify him. Stilwell seems at times to lapse into a conventional Roosevelt-hating posture similar to his brother’s, and various degrees of anti-liberal-Democratic belief can be found in Nimitz, Spruance, and—with his own characteristic extravagance—Patton. Men like Marshall, Bradley, and Vandegrift managed to achieve a common-man touch without in any way identifying themselves with its political manifestation.
But “politics” can cover too many meanings to be used as a simple, self-evident noun, and the military in their professional conduct were never as spotlessly apolitical as advertised. Eisenhower is the preeminent example of a general whose mission drew him into the political sphere whether he wished to be there or not, and he demonstrated such skills in the process that the momentum of it took him to the presidency. Moreover, neither MacArthur, Marshall, nor King hesitated to use political arguments with President Roosevelt when they felt the need: MacArthur for the Philippine campaign (we have a national obligation), Marshall for Overlord (the American people will not tolerate further diversions), and King for defending Australia and New Zealand (they are “white man’s” countries); while in turn there were none of the President’s “military” strategies, even though they made military sense, that did not also have a heavy political component.
Roosevelt concentrated American power on the destruction of the enemy before all else rather than on the creation of what others thought to be favorable postwar circumstances, and this has earned him criticism for a lack of geopolitical savvy, for lack of appreciation of war as a means to political ends. But it should be understood that postwar circumstances favorable to others did not therefore look favorable to him, and that a world cleared of the two towering adversaries was to him a slate wiped clean, a blank page of history on which he then could write. His political objectives did not end with total victory, as has been implied, but began there. His goal was a postwar world in which peace would be secured by a multinational organization dominated by the United States and enforced by American military power. It did not need the intricate prewar structure of “political” affiliations and alliances that had so obviously failed, now so obviously lay in ruins, and could now so obviously be superseded.
There was always a streak of the isolationist in Roosevelt. He was fully determined that the United States not be enmeshed in the restoration of colonial rule, and since this was inconsistent with maximum support for Britain, it produced much friction and some heated exchanges with Churchill on the subject of India. The anticolonialism of Americans in the Far East—especially in its sometimes feckless, knee-jerk form—raised many British hackles. (Christopher Thorne has written an admirable and copiously documented book about this, called Allies of a Kind.) But the President was equally standoffish about Europe. He liked to tease Churchill about France and Italy being Britain’s postwar responsibility, yet behind this was a serious (and, as it turned out, unfounded) belief that after the war European countries would revert to their historic squabbles among themselves, from which the United States should remain aloof. And of course he hoped that American avoidance of involvement would prevent a falling-out among the victorious allies, especially Russia.
Too much has been made of Roosevelt’s chatty way of saying that he thought he could “get along” with “Uncle Joe,” as though this somehow epitomized an attitude of naive innocence about Soviet communism (Churchill’s very similar words are forgotten) or a belief that Soviet-Ameri can understanding would guarantee the peace. Such was not the inner trend of Roosevelt’s thoughts about Russia, and his record of hatred and contempt for the Soviet dictatorship, while not the equal of Churchill’s, was a long and valid one (see, for example, his speech to the American Youth Congress of February 1940, which earned him boos and hisses from that organization’s leftist members).
Examples of Russian ham-handed behavior were multiplying in the months before the President died and were beginning to anger him, as he indicated to Senator Arthur Vandenberg in March, just before the senator departed for the United Nations Conference in San Francisco.11 Harriman, who saw more of both men than anyone else, thought that Stalin was afraid of Roosevelt, of his worldwide popularity,12 and this would not be in conflict with Stalin’s oft-quoted remark to Milovan Djilas that Churchill was the kind of man who would go into your pocket for a kopeck but that Roosevelt went only for the larger denominations. De Gaulle said that Roosevelt thought he could fool the Russians.
It need not come as a surprise, since there were good reasons for it, that Roosevelt was more cynical in exposing his view of the postwar world to de Gaulle than he seems to have been with anyone else. The President could recognize a realist when he saw one and he wished, after such a history of antipathy on his own part, to pay de Gaulle the compliment of confiding in him. De Gaulle spent five days in Washington during July 1944 and received the first-class VIP treatment. He was met at the door of the White House by the President personally. He held meetings with the Vice-President and several cabinet members, with the Joint Chiefs, and with the chairmen of the House and Senate committees on foreign affairs. “I observed with admiration the flood of confidence that sustained the American elite,” he wrote, “and discovered how becoming optimism is to those who can afford it.”13 This was an astute observer.
The Roosevelt who revealed himself to de Gaulle was a very different man from the liberal internationalist we have come to expect. A streak of the World War I imperialist was still alive in him too, and shows itself here in a clear connection with military power in its rawest and most naked form. The President’s vision of a postwar international organization, said de Gaulle, required “the installation of American forces on bases distributed throughout the world and of which certain ones would be located on French territory.”
This was not just idle talk. In January 1945, Roosevelt blandly argued to the State Department that the United States should establish a base on Clipperton Island, off the coast of Mexico, inasmuch as title to Clipperton was disputed between France and Mexico (not true: Mexico acknowledged French sovereignty), and in “the utmost secrecy” he ordered that a weather station be set up there, guarded by American troops. The State Department disagreed, and the President’s death ended the matter.14
“In his mind,” wrote de Gaulle, “a four-power directory—America, Soviet Russia, China, and Great Britain—would settle the world’s problems.” An assembly of the other Allied nations would give “a democratic appearance” to the authority of the Big Four, and of that four, two (China and Britain) would be beholden to the United States and in need of its cooperation. The “horde of small and middle-size states” could be influenced by offers of American aid. “Roosevelt,” de Gaulle wrote, “thus intended to lure the Soviets into a group that would contain their ambitions and in which America could unite its dependents.” (So indeed did the United Nations operate during its early years, though no longer.) In any such global prospect as this, questions relating to Europe—which were uppermost in de Gaulle’s thoughts—seemed to the President “quite subordinate.” De Gaulle adds: “As was only human, his will to power clothed itself in idealism.”
The “monumental conception” Roosevelt “dreamed of turning into reality” seemed to de Gaulle full of danger. It risked the loss of the Western civilization the war had been intended to save. He promptly answered the President by saying that the restoration of the West was what mattered, and that if this could be accomplished, the rest of the world would take it for an example.15 How right he was! By comparison, Roosevelt’s scheme seems flawed by an unwarranted assumption that American world hegemony would be harmless because its purposes were benign, and certainly there was some substance to the widespread European suspicion that Americans contemplated dismembering the colonial empires politically in order to take them over economically. De Gaulle’s vision of a resurgent West was realized by Roosevelt’s successors, by Truman and Acheson, and not by their predecessor’s foresight.
But to picture Roosevelt as a closet imperialist goes too far. There is I think a better explanation in the book that saturated his thinking in his youth. The voice we are hearing here is that of Alfred Thayer Mahan, the Mahan whose The Influence of Seapower upon History so powerfully exposed the young Roosevelt to the proposition that by looking after its own self-interest, a great power (in Mahan’s example, Britain between 1660 and 1783) can keep an unstable world in balance. The application of that stabilizing principle to a turbulent world of newly emerging nations would readily have commended itself to the mature Roosevelt.
For all his residual avoidance of compromising foreign entanglements, the President made clear to de Gaulle that he knew the war had ended American isolationism forever, and it had. His postwar military vision was tolerably prescient; his worldwide network of American bases has been in existence now for forty years. If one rewrites the Mahan formula to read “two” great powers, and makes allowance for the brutal domineering of its neighbors together with grandiose world ambitions by one, and the sometimes necessary, sometimes disastrous interventions in Asia by the other, then so the balance has been (more or less) preserved. It is not peace, but neither is it the war that would consume both superpowers and all else besides, and the deployment of American force—including those bases that Roosevelt visualized—sustains it.
♦
Another subtheme of these pages—and a major one—has been the decline of British preeminence and the replacement of Churchill by Roosevelt at the head of the Grand Alliance. This is a subject that both British and American writers, for their several reasons, approach with diffidence; it is embarrassing for the one, and immodest for the other, of the two surviving partners from a tempestuous relationship. Once again de Gaulle is a student of the phenomenon who proves attentive, since it vitally affected his interests—indistinguishable as they were from those of France—and since he preferred Britain’s competitive cunning to America’s splendid indifference. He noted British discomfort at their country’s diminished position almost as soon as the Americans began to arrive in England, and London streets to fill with “good-natured, bad-mannered” American soldiers. “The British,” wrote de Gaulle of the spring of 1942, “did not conceal their gloom … at finding themselves dispossessed of the leading role they had played—and so deservingly!—for the last two years.”16
The degree of cultivation—genuine, be it added—among educated Englishmen made it almost inevitable that they should perceive Americans as shallow and backward. “The fact is,” wrote Harold Nicolson to his wife, Vita, in November 1943, “that the United States are the only really Tory power in the world. We are far more advanced. I despair sometimes about the Americans. They have no keel and veer in every wind.”17 To these British products of sound classical schooling the analogy was bound to occur between themselves as ancient Greeks and the Americans as early Romans, needing to be rescued from their clumsy muscularity and introduced to their obligations and duties as inheritors. This makes for good literary small talk but bad history, for the fact is (to echo Nicolson) that the Americans did have a keel, however immature and moralistic their opinions, and that the British were becoming disconnected from their own moorings in a sequence of events that American bumptiousness could neither account for nor arrest.
With the best will in the world the Americans could not have restored to British prestige those sources of its strength that were still the interior landscape of so many British minds, in which centuries of victory and conquest were not to be erased from memory overnight. The military moves that the masters of empire longed to make as the war wound down (and that the American “keel” resisted) were rooted in prewar perceptions that now exposed themselves as delusory. A military presence on the Danube was a will-o’-the-wisp. In Germany, the importunate Montgomery could have been allowed to ride into Berlin on a white horse and the history of the ensuing years would not have been changed by so much as a comma. To exert “leadership over the countries of Western Europe” (which Sir Alexander Cadogan said was an “accurate assessment” of British aims) was beyond their reach. In the Mediterranean, of which so much had been made, Britain ended the war with more prominence than power, and the power was leaching away. Less than two years would pass before the Foreign Office, on February 21, 1947, informed the State Department that His Majesty’s Government could no longer carry the load of its obligations in Greece and Turkey, and the transfer of responsibility that had been implied became explicit.
American pretensions to a greater nobility of purpose were nonetheless aggravating to bear. Observing Roosevelt and Churchill at Cairo, Cadogan noted that the latter “had to endure much with a good grace, including explanations from the President of other powers’ higher morality.” What occasioned this sour aside was Roosevelt’s remarking to Churchill that national acquisitive instincts for territory as such were out of date, that a “new period has opened in the world’s history and you [Churchill] will have to adjust yourself to it.”18 One may agree that the President’s anticolonialism smacked of the doctrinaire, that his worldview was not inherently superior to Churchill’s in depth or subtlety, or that the British imperial presence in the world had done much good that Americans either knew nothing about or chose to disparage. But—and it is a necessary but—Roosevelt was essentially right. Churchill’s world could not be prolonged, not by him, not by the President. Whatever else one says of Roosevelt’s views, they proved to have a better fit with circumstance, to be in better tune with actuality, and to be open-ended toward a future of human possibilities thus far unattainable but now on the edge of realization. The “revolution of rising expectations,” as it came to be called, was one that the President could clearly see coming.
Yet the solidity of the Anglo-American compact surpasses that of any alliance known to history. There was continuous tension and disagreement, especially in the Far East, where conflicting national purposes could not be reconciled, but never on either side was the possibility allowed to arise of a break that would have imperiled the solemn march together, side by side, of their divergent interests. The vigorous arguments merely brought their leaders closer together. This we owe to the men they were, but above all to the principals, those two majestic egos who chose to subordinate vanity and short-term advantage to a long-term unity. One has only to compare the Grand Alliance with the Fascist Axis, “the Pact of Steel,” which presented a facade of shared ideology and protestations of undying loyalty, but never achieved a common strategy and crumbled at the touch of adversity. The Grand Alliance was in contrast unequivocally grand.
♦
Another subtheme has been flexibility, the same openness of mind that Roosevelt routinely showed, in its relation to the readiness with which all three of the services managed to adapt themselves in midwar to conditions they had not prepared for: the air force by changing its targets and by accepting the need for fighter escort, the Navy by making the aircraft carrier the major weapon, the Army by absorbing the fighter-bomber into the tank-artillery-infantry team. The first and third, and to some extent the second, were advanced from the bottom up rather than the top down, out of reactions to reality rather than theory. (All three also had in common the element of air power, the availability of which had its origins in Roosevelt’s prewar realization that if war came it would be an air war.) This willingness to innovate, in the experimental mode of General Kenney’s “Hell, let’s try it,” is too diffuse a characteristic to have a single source, but surely some influence on it can be seen in the examples the New Deal provided—the way the CCCs did for George Marshall, for instance, as an “antidote for mental stagnation”—and the presence of the Great Pragmatist himself in the presidency.
His armed services showed a remarkable capacity to learn from experience, especially about how to employ the components of amphibious warfare that in the beginning nobody knew how to coordinate properly. At Guadalcanal, command arrangements were confused and missions unclear, reconnaissance was ineffective and naval protection withdrawn at a crucial moment; unloading of supplies was incomplete, air power and reinforcement slow in being brought forward, and organized logistic backup at the start nonexistent. When the Solomons campaign ended, with the invasion of Bougainville little more than a year later, a degree of teamwork and efficiency had been reached that was almost reflexive.
The plan for Bougainville (under Halsey) was hazardous but continually revised in the light of emergent intelligence. All the Japanese airfields on the island were bombed out of commission beforehand and kept that way. A task force of submarines was assigned to screen the Bismarck Archipelago and another of carriers to raid nearby Japanese bases. Land-based air provided reconnaissance and support for the landings (under Vandegrift, now a lieutenant general and corps commander), which went off smartly, with lighter casualties than expected (78 killed, 104 wounded). By the end of the first day, a division was ashore and by the end of the second, all the cargo ships had been unloaded. A week later, the substantial buildup began to establish an airfield ringed by a perimeter on the model Vandegrift had invented at Guadalcanal.19
“Flexibility” is what Roosevelt liked in his loose structuring of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and in them he had found an effectively functioning instrument, primarily because Marshall and King pragmatically worked out their differences (with the exception of that over unified command in the Pacific, where Marshall was bound by the President’s policy of keeping MacArthur inside the administration’s camp and King chose not to make an issue of it). Otherwise each supported the other in the other’s theater of primary concern. The President’s advocacy of air power (and the need to parallel Britain’s independent air force) brought Arnold to the Joint Chiefs, and enabled the Air Forces to operate independently in virtually everything but name. The system of theater commanders, and a principle of granting them flexible responsibilities, linked the JCS to the armed forces in action. Leahy, in turn, linked the Joint Chiefs to the President. During the latter half of 1942 and most of 1943, Roosevelt’s first appointment of the day was always with Leahy, the JCS connection. As for the Combined Chiefs, John Gunther once asked a “high authority” how they worked in practice and received the answer: “In essence the Combined Chiefs are the White House.”20
Then there is the aspect of flexibility called timing, where the President’s intercessions were decisive. The Mediterranean strategy was properly speaking Brooke’s, but Roosevelt, too, had a Mediterranean strategy (as he showed at Quebec), unlike the Joint Chiefs’ and very like Brooke’s. Kent Roberts Greenfield believed that Roosevelt saw “sooner and more clearly than his military advisers” that the determining fact about the cross-Channel invasion was the date when it took place, that we should make “maximum and aggressive use of what we had [i.e., in the Mediterranean] until we had accumulated enough power to deliver a knock-out punch [i.e., in France].”21 Since this precluded Overlord in 1943, it made possible King’s acceleration of an advance in the Pacific far faster than either the British or the U.S. Army would have liked. The President did not have to argue for this; all he had to do was allow it—which he did. The notion that the United States could successfully fight wars in both hemispheres at once, or that the two wars could come to an end within months of one another, would have seemed outlandish in 1942. It was done, and it was the President’s setting of the pace that made it doable.
The theme of flexibility should not be let to obscure that of constancy. The means might vary, the ends did not. For a man who made so much of his determination to keep his options open, to take advantage of opportunities as they arose, and to sabotage any other decision-making machinery than his own, President Roosevelt was almost rigidly consistent in his overall geopolitical strategies for waging the war: in his support of Britain, Russia, and China; in his insistence on crushing Germany first; in his resolve on unconditional surrender by all his enemies; in his intent to establish a postwar “united nations” directed by a firm (which is to say, U.S.-controlled) union of the major victors. Nothing was allowed to get in the way of these aims, and military objectives were subordinated to—or, fortunately, coincided with—their attainment. It was a package program, in which war and politics were united to a degree rarely seen, and he stuck with it from start to finish.
Second only to the President’s encompassing perspective was his concentrated focus on the war’s point d’appui, on the one sector of the globe he could not afford to lose, the North Atlantic. His prompt and continued efforts to acquire bases that dominated it, to push the Navy into fighting there, testify to his acute perception of its overriding significance. In May 1941, eight months before Pearl Harbor, we find him reading a lesson in strategy to Churchill: “My previous message,” Roosevelt writes, “merely meant to indicate that should the Mediterranean prove in the last analysis to be an impossible battleground [not admissible by Churchill] that I do not feel that such fact alone would mean the defeat of our mutual interests. I say this because I believe the outcome of this struggle is going to be decided in the Atlantic and unless Hitler can win there he cannot win anywhere in the world in the end” (emphasis added). Hence also Roosevelt’s pressure for landings in the Atlantic islands, and on the African Atlantic coast, long before these were in any way feasible.
The more the American war is looked at in its entirety, the more fully the conclusion emerges that the invasion of North Africa was the pivotal move. None was more risky, none more extemporized, or none more unquestionably made at the President’s demand over the opposition of his service chiefs. It put the Axis powers on the defensive; by opening the Mediterranean theater, it made possible the capture of 275,000 Axis troops in Tunisia and in Italy the diversion of thirty divisions away from France and Germany; by postponing Overlord a year, it ensured that operation’s success and gave King his breathing space in the Pacific. That Roosevelt should have had all these benefits precisely in view ahead of time is asking too much, but it was his decision, it was the right one, and he sensed its criticality at the time. “I cannot help feeling,” he wrote Churchill a few days after he had made it, “that the past week represented a turning point in the whole war.”22 Conversely, failing to prevent the North African landings was among the worst of Hitler’s blunders.
Hitler and Roosevelt were the great antagonists; Roosevelt knew this from the beginning, Hitler not until too late. When the President sent Hopkins to London in early 1941, and Churchill tried to cultivate the arch-New Dealer by making one of his best welfare-of-the-people speeches (“he’s more left than you are,” Hopkins told Roosevelt later), Hopkins was said to have cut the Prime Minister short by saying, “The President didn’t send me here to listen to any of that stuff. All he wants to know is: how do you propose to beat that son of a bitch in Berlin?” Hitler in the delirium of his defeat paid Roosevelt the compliment of calling him “the greatest war criminal of all times,” but in the early days, when he should have known better, he brushed Roosevelt off as a “tortuous, pettifogging Jew” and Mrs. Roosevelt as someone whose “completely negroid appearance … showed that she too was half-caste.”23 If ever there was “the greatest war criminal of all times” it was Hitler, and it was Roosevelt above all others who accomplished his downfall, who brought him down to his tawdry end.
♦
A word must be added here about the war between Germany and Russia. In violence, in magnitude, and in human cost it dwarfs the rest of World War II; it was a battle of titans, a struggle that has seared the minds of the Russians who experienced it, and awed the Western historians who attempt to plot its course. More was at issue there than elsewhere, more was saved by resolute Russian endurance than could have been won (up to the Normandy invasion) by the Anglo-Americans in all their combined endeavors. A statement is apocryphally attributed to Stalin that the war was won by British brains, American brawn, and Russian blood (surely the Russian language would not produce that alliteration), and it rings true. Without the Russian absorption of the Wehrmacht in the east, the Anglo-Americans could never have overcome it at so little cost in the west. At the same time, however, a Russian offensive—after the Battle of Kursk had broken the backbone of the panzers in 1943—might have reached and reduced the Reich, but it could not have done so if the threat of war in the west had been absent. Without Roosevelt—that is, without a “second front” and Lend-Lease—a Russian offensive would (on German and Russian testimony alike) for some years have been unlikely or unachievable.
The Anglo-American European campaign of 1944-45, which still prompts admiration for its economy and decisiveness, does not find the President conspicuously standing forth as its author or directing its execution, but his influence is apparent in the determination that made it happen, the choice of its commander, and the shape imposed on it by sustaining the latter’s plan for southern France and rejecting a Balkan alternative. The concentration of Allied armies in Western Europe that came about as a result proved to have been an essential precondition of victory. The fact that by this time the President is becoming a figure in the military background should not conceal his position as the European war’s strategist in the word’s best meaning, as the one who sees to it that power is brought to bear at a time and place most favorable to the tactical exploitation of its superiority. A straight line, as he told Churchill, was still the shortest distance between two points. The extent of Roosevelt’s control is evidenced by the complaints of those who wished to control the campaign themselves, and discovered that they were unable to do so.
The planning of the Pacific war was a creature of circumstance that did not, except for its opening and closing phases, find Roosevelt calling every signal, inasmuch as the predominant element in it was that advance across the central Pacific the Navy had been thinking about for years. The thinking had been sound, and once again the accomplishment is impressive for its boldness and skill. King was right to insist that the Marianas were the key, though they would have been so for him even if Arnold had not wanted them as an air base, and though King was wrong to continue maintaining for so long that the final objective was the China coast. By early on encouraging King in the Solomons, and by allowing MacArthur to have his place in history, the President permitted the almost accidental evolution of the double-axis, “whipsaw” strategy that King favored and that proved to work so well. But should it have led to the Philippines in the form it did? If the Battle of Leyte Gulf was the object, then yes. If the sensible and nondestructive liberation of the Philippine Islands was the object, then no. The Philippine land campaign in its totality can be characterized as wasteful and inept, and Roosevelt went along with it for reasons that reflect great credit on him not as a strategist but only as a politician.
Lastly, the President’s long-standing desire to have Japan bombed from the air bore its grim fruit in the Marianas with the B-29s and the Fire Raids. No application of military force ever achieved so total and so horrible a success. In the shadow of the cloud over Hiroshima the Fire Raids have tended to fade in memory, yet they were far more destructive, more deliberately calculated, more primitive in conception and more intimate (if the word will serve) in the interaction between weapon and victim. “Guilt” is a term that must be used with restraint in contemplating the evils wrought by war, so long as nations continue (as they still do continue) to believe that war is an appropriate instrument of policy. Tragic sorrow at all of war’s gutting waste is more appropriate, and within that “all” the Fire Raids must not be forgotten. “Offhand it always seemed like a sort of sick way of doing things,” as the young Bert Stiles wrote of strategic bombing before he died, “and when the day turns up that we can start using other methods, I’m going to be one of the gladder people in the world.”
Necessarily, there has been little emphasis in these pages on the domestic aspects of Roosevelt’s wartime presidency, despite their evident impact on the creation and deployment of military power. The national base had to be secure. Industry had to be mobilized, priorities set, manpower allocated, rationing instituted, prices held down, labor relations harmonized, the machinery of government kept agile and alert, and all this against a political background in which a shared goal of victory had by no means eliminated criticism and dissent. The publication of Isaiah Berlin’s literate and perceptive dispatches from Washington to the British Foreign Office has served as a reminder of how numerous and troublesome Roosevelt’s enemies still were. In nonmilitary and economic affairs, a potential coalition of Republicans and anti-administration (mostly southern) Democrats threatened the President’s authority in Congress and often seemed less intent on prosecuting the war than in using it as an opportunity for dismantling the New Deal.
Especially in its early stages, before American fighting men became heavily involved, the war was not universally popular and complaints that it was being mismanaged were common. In May 1942, the Office of Facts and Figures estimated that 17 million Americans (out of 130 million) were opposed to it in one way or another, and that 30 percent would be willing to talk peace with the German Army if it would get rid of Hitler.24 There was a somber side—racial tensions persisted; violence broke out in Detroit, Los Angeles, Newark—and an illusory one: The picture of the war presented by advertising, the media, and sometimes government itself struck the men in uniform as boastful and false, its overtones of piety and assumed American superiority as grotesquely in contrast with the boredom of military life and with the viciousness and risk of combat. The war was just as revealing of American vices as it was of virtues. But the home front held, and Roosevelt held it all together in a balance that was steady even when it looked precarious.
Throughout, the President generated around himself an atmosphere of calm; his office was well organized and ran smoothly. “Although hell might be popping all around Roosevelt,” wrote Sherwood, “it was rarely audible in his immediate presence, where tranquility prevailed.” Hopkins was struck by the contrast with Churchill: “the guns were continually blazing in his [Churchill’s] conversation”; Sherwood said, “wherever he was, there was the battlefront.” But to read through the President’s wartime press conferences you would hardly know that battles were being fought, victories lost and won; the reporters were not prepared to ask military questions and there was naturally much that Roosevelt could not have told them had they done so. From this restraint and absence of bravado on the President’s part comes much of the misapprehension that he refrained from involving himself in the war’s direction. He marched to his own internal rhythms. In the midst of everything else, he remained town historian of Hyde Park and found time to carry on a correspondence with a lady neighbor in Poughkeepsie about the pressing affairs of the Dutchess County Historical Society.25
Of course, he made military mistakes. It took him time to appreciate the fact that air power does not consist merely of aircraft but also of trained pilots, bases, and maintenance crews; and he seemed not always to be completely clear in his mind as to how various types of bomber differed from one another in range and load. He had no developed feel for the Army and how it worked, as he did for the Navy, and he therefore at first gravely underestimated how long it takes to produce trained ground-force units and how many of them would eventually be required (he was saved from this only by Marshall). As for the Navy, he shared some of its mistakes—for one, on the supposed lack of need for landing craft—and added another of his own in a misplaced enthusiasm for the “Sea Otter,” a small, shallow-draft, gasoline-driven freighter intended to be mass-produced, which proved to be impractically noisy and un-seaworthy.26 And also, until far too late, he was profoundly wrong about the military potential of China, both as a combatant and as a base for the B-29s.
One way of judging Roosevelt as Commander in Chief is to compare him with that ultimate standard in presidential military performance which is Abraham Lincoln. Their situations were vastly different: Lincoln dealt with his commanders seriatim, as one by one he had to recognize their inadequacies and replace them. He possessed no general staff but had to invent it in his own person. The image of him in the War Department telegraph office—looking into space and forming the words with his lips, as he wrote some of the most thoughtful and concise of military instructions—is not one in which Roosevelt can be imagined in his stead. But then, Lincoln was a natural, a born military mind, one of the finest his country has produced.
Here was this rustic country lawyer, with no military education, no experience with operations in the field, no knowledge of the theaters of war except through maps, and no prior acquaintance with his army and navy leaders. Yet he instituted the blockade, kept the border states in line, mobilized the northern armies, read each day’s dispatches, and gave both overall and specific guidance to the campaigns. His messages to McClellan were lessons in strategy and tactics McClellan was too self-infatuated to heed. Lincoln’s youth in the central valley prepared him to accept (when Winfield Scott suggested them) the possibilities it offered for isolating the Confederacy. Lincoln saw as his generals failed to that the objective was not Richmond but Lee’s army, and when he found in Grant a man who understood this he put him in charge and left him largely alone. Had he lived, the peace would have been more magnanimous.
Roosevelt was no Lincoln, if one is looking for Lincoln’s penetrating grip on what was wrong, say, with Meade’s failure to pursue Lee after Gettysburg. Roosevelt did not have to concern himself at that level; he did have a general staff, and one he could rely on; he could get some elements wrong and the general propositions right, as he did at Guadalcanal, the campaign he especially cared about, where he wrongly thought that we had overreached ourselves but rightly saw that the point of it was attrition, wearing the enemy down.
Roosevelt did not critique his field commanders in particulars, as Lincoln did. Again, he did not have to; in Marshall, King, and Arnold—as he told Hopkins—he had men “who really like to fight” and would see to it, without having to be needled by the President, that fighting was done. Roosevelt did not have Lincoln’s tactical gift, but he had something com parable to it in his ability to identify the essentials and place them in a balanced relationship with each other. Measured against Lincoln, Roosevelt had a mind of similar strategic capacity, and put it to work with similar effect. Churchill told Moran that Roosevelt was “the most skillful strategist of them all.” Better than Marshall? Moran asked. “Yes, better than Marshall.”27
Trying to follow the President’s thought processes could be a wearing task. Stimson, in a memorable phrase, said it was “very much like chasing a vagrant beam of sunshine around an empty room.” John Gunther once asked Mrs. Roosevelt, “Just how does the President think?” She replied, “My dear Mr. Gunther, the President never ‘thinks’! He decides.”28 Roosevelt was undeniably forceful, able, and intelligent to a degree, but his was not a syllogistic or logical mind, given to sequential reasoning, not a linear mind in McLuhan terms but a mosaic one, suited for the discerning of patterns and syntheses, “for knowing all kinds of diverse things at once in a flash,” at which, as Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins put it, he could be “almost clairvoyant.”
Madame Perkins’s biographer George Martin believed that while this talent “would be useful in any period … its application is particularly obvious in wartime.” Martin thought that “the approach of war gave [Roosevelt] an extraordinary opportunity to display it,” and that the war itself was an arena in which he could give it full rein; “as a wartime leader in the four years from 1940 through 1943, mobilizing the country for war and leading it to a point where victory was assured, he was brilliant. There were evidently many, many times when he truly could see it all: men, guns, ships, food, the enemy, the Allies, the war aims and finally the peace” (emphasis added).29
The verdict is compelling: More than any other man, he ran the war, and ran it well enough to deserve the gratitude of his countrymen then and since, and of those from whom he lifted the yoke of the Axis tyrannies. His conduct as Commander in Chief, on a par with or perhaps even above that as President in peacetime, bears the mark of greatness.
♦
On October 11, 1939, the President was called upon by Alexander Sachs, a financier he had relied on in the early New Deal days, who read aloud to him a letter signed by Albert Einstein, calling his attention to recent developments in physics that might lead to a weapon of enormous destructive power. The letter had been drafted by Sachs and by two Hungarian refugee scientists, Eugene Wigner and Leo Szilard, who had persuaded Einstein to sign it. Szilard was deeply disturbed at reports from Europe which indicated that the Germans were already pursuing the “possibility in principle of the release of a chain-reaction in uranium,” followed by the menacing news that they had forbidden further export of uranium ore from Joachimsthal in Czechoslovakia, one of the two principal sources of supply. The other source was the Belgian Congo. Szilard wanted the United States to make certain that the Congo ore was kept beyond Hitler’s reach.30
Roosevelt’s concern was not at first aroused; he thought government involvement in a scientific matter like this would be premature. Sachs, despairing, managed to arrange an invitation to breakfast the next day and spent the evening trying to think of a way to get the President’s attention. He found it. At breakfast, he told Roosevelt about Napoleon’s rejection of Robert Fulton when Fulton tried to interest the emperor in the steamboat, so that England was saved only by the shortsightedness of her adversary. The President was silent for a few moments, and then said, “Alex, what you are after is to see that the Nazis don’t blow us up.” He sent for General Watson. “Pa,” said Roosevelt, “this requires action.”31
Many British and American scientists had been thinking along similar lines about the potentialities of atomic power, but the action the President would eventually ask for was not instantly forthcoming. He did soon appoint an Advisory Committee on Uranium, chaired by Dr. Lyman J. Briggs, to investigate the separation of uranium isotopes. In June 1940, the committee was placed under the newly formed National Defense Research Committee, headed by Dr. Vannevar Bush, and in April 1941, Bush asked the National Academy of Sciences to appoint a committee of prominent physicists to review progress thus far. Its chairman, Dr. Arthur Holly Compton, reported favorably to Bush, urging “a strongly intensified effort” and closer contact with British scientists, who were at that time further ahead than the Americans. On October 11, Roosevelt sent Churchill a letter suggesting that British and American efforts be jointly conducted.32
By November 1941, Vannevar Bush had in hand both a British report and the final report of the Academy committee under Compton, and on November 27 he transmitted the latter to President Roosevelt with his comments. This time, writes Compton, “action was immediate.” (He was among the American scientists who had been most intent on something being done.) Bush, Briggs, Compton, President James B. Conant of Harvard, and Ernest O. Lawrence (a founding father of atomic research) were asked to meet with the President. He told them to go ahead, to do everything possible to find out whether atomic bombs were feasible, and to report back within six months. If their report was favorable, they should expect all the resources the nation could spare to be made available. Meanwhile he would commit several millions of dollars to them out of a fund Congress had put at his disposal. The date was December 6, 1941.
Compton had never met or even seen Roosevelt before, and had never voted for him. “Yet,” Compton wrote later, “as I see it, we were rarely fortunate to have at the helm during these critical years a man of his degree of understanding, courage, and sympathy with men and women. No man of lesser understanding and courage could have made the decision to put so much of the nation’s strength into what any man of his experience would recognize as a very long chance indeed…. The final argument that convinced the President and his advisers was the danger to the nation in case the atomic program was neglected…. If atomic bombs could be made, only one plan was possible. We must get them first.”33
Churchill has described how on his second wartime visit to the United States, in June 1942, he met with the President at Hyde Park, in a room—“dark and shaded from the sun”—so small that Roosevelt’s desk nearly filled it (Hopkins was standing in the background), and discussed the question of whether or not to proceed with the construction of large-scale uranium processing plants, and if so, where? Since Britain was under enemy air reconnaissance and attack, the necessarily “vast and conspicuous factories” could not be built there. Canada was a possibility, particularly since the Canadians had been actively collecting uranium from their own sources. But Churchill was relieved “when the President said he thought the United States would have to do it. We therefore took the decision jointly, and settled a basis of agreement.”34 (Unhappily, the mood of share and share alike was not always consistent; the British were at times shabbily treated.)
At the University of Chicago, on December 2, 1942, in the squash court under the stands of Stagg Field, the first chain reaction of atomic fission was achieved. News of the success was relayed to Roosevelt and plainly was in his mind a month later when he gave his State of the Union speech to Congress. “Wars grow in size, in death and destruction …,” said the President. “I shudder to think of what will happen to humanity, including ourselves, if this war ends in an inconclusive peace.” In his last such message, two years later, again obviously thinking of the atom bomb, he said, “If we do not keep constantly ahead of our enemies in the development of new weapons, we pay for our backwardness with the life’s blood of our sons.” Sometime around June of 1944, he said to Grace Tully, “I can’t tell you what this is, Grace, but if it works, and pray God it does, it will save many American lives.”35
The industrial production of uranium isotope U-235 (and of the new element plutonium, which had similar potentialities as an explosive) went forward at two sites—Clinton, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington—located near abundant sources of hydroelectric power created by earlier Roosevelt administrations, in the Tennessee Valley Authority and at Bonneville Dam on the Columbia. But the Army officer in charge, General Leslie R. Groves, had concluded that there must be a laboratory devoted exclusively to the design and construction of the bombs, and he found a sufficiently secure place for it on an isolated mesa in New Mexico near Los Alamos. After a thorough canvass of the field, he had appointed as director J. Robert Oppenheimer, a physicist from the University of California at Berkeley, who as a teacher had been instrumental in bringing to the United States from Germany the “new” physics he had absorbed as a student of Max Born at Gottingen. Groves never believed, despite the venomous attacks on it during the witch-hunts of the 1950s, that his choice of Oppenheimer had been a wrong one.36
Oppenheimer and Roosevelt never met, but on June 29, 1943, the President addressed him a remarkable letter, in which it may be guessed that the hand of Vannevar Bush is in evidence but which nonetheless reflects an awareness of scientific sensibilities to which Roosevelt was at least willing to put his name. He reviewed the obvious reasons why Oppenheimer and his colleagues were engaged in “a hazardous matter under unusual circumstances … of such great significance to the nation” that it must be guarded more drastically than any other wartime secret. “Nevertheless,” the President went on, “I wish you would express to the scientists assembled with you my deep appreciation of their willingness to undertake the tasks which lie before them…. Whatever the enemy may be planning, American science will be equal to the challenge. With this thought in mind, I send this note of confidence and appreciation.”
Oppenheimer in part replied: “I should in turn transmit to you the assurance that we as a group are profoundly aware of our responsibility, for the security of our project as well as its rapid and effective completion. It is a great source of encouragement to us that we have your support and understanding. “37
When news of the President’s death reached Los Alamos, a number of the physicists began to gather near the door of the Main Tech building, with no other reason than the need to share their sense of transition and loss. Seeing what was happening, the director sent word to the other buildings that all who wished to do so might assemble at the flagpole for a brief observance. Oppenheimer spoke for about five minutes. Those who were there remember it as the moment above all others that symbolized for them their life on this lonely mesa. “It was beautiful,” said one. “By that I mean it was simple and moving with nothing fancy about it.”38 Then they went back to their dedicated, deadly work.
To be President of the United States in a major war is a man-killing job; the photographs of Lincoln taken year by year, as the shadows deepen and darken in his face, tell the story. During World War II, the Harvard Alumni Bulletin had the custom of publishing casualty lists of the university graduates by rank: majors, so many; corporals, so many; lieutenant commanders, so many; The list for April 1945 was headed:
Commander in Chief, 1.