Roosevelt avoids declaring for a
third term, Churchill succeeds Chamberlain,
Hitler makes his westward move.
ROOSEVELT STARTED the election year of 1940 by reminding Americans in his State of the Union address that “like it or not, the daily lives of American citizens will, of necessity, feel the shock of events on other continents.” He continued, “But there are those who wishfully insist, in innocence or ignorance or both, that the United States of America as a self-contained unit can live happily and prosperously, its future secure, inside a high wall of isolation while, outside, the rest of Civilization and the commerce and culture of mankind are shattered.”
He tried to persuade voters to prepare for trouble ahead. “I can understand the feelings of those who warn the nation that they will never again consent to the sending of American youth to fight on the soil of Europe. . . . I can also understand the wishfulness of those who oversimplify the whole situation by repeating that all we have to do is to mind our own business and keep the nation out of war. But there is a vast difference between keeping out of war and pretending that this war is none of our business.”
The president tempered his candor by insisting on his sincere desire to keep America out of the war. “The first President of the United States warned us against entangling foreign alliances,” he said. “The present President of the United States subscribes to and follows that precept.”1 The following day, he asked for $1.8 billion ($30 billion in 2014 terms) to spend on defense.
In the midst of the Battle of Neutrality, the Republican presidential hopeful Alf Landon, who agreed with Roosevelt’s general foreign policy position, added to the president’s discomfort by suggesting that he should publicly declare he would not stand for a third term. Roosevelt kept mum and urged all his closest political allies to do the same. Although he had all but taken the decision to stand in 1940, to be sure of winning his party’s nomination it was still too early for the president to clarify his intentions.
So long as Roosevelt maintained his silence, the 1940 Democratic race could not start in earnest. When asked by a reporter to respond to a senior Democrat’s appeal for Roosevelt to serve a third term, the president declared, “The weather is very hot.” When another asked him what his reelection plans were, the hapless journalist was told to “put on a dunce cap and stand in the corner.”2
The failure of the president to make his position clear helped Kennedy. Until Roosevelt declared, no Democratic donors would give a dime to another candidate, as if Roosevelt ran it would almost certainly prove to have been a waste of money. Kennedy, however, needed no financial backers. He was rich enough to fund his own campaign. Roosevelt still feared a Kennedy candidacy as an outside chance, but felt that so long as the ambassador was confined to London, he would be incapable of organizing a viable campaign. He did not fear Lindbergh as a Republican presidential candidate, because the aviator was a divisive figure without charm or political experience. He was, however, anxious that Lindbergh might ally himself with an isolationist like Kennedy and make the election a referendum on whether America should stay out of the war.
Events in Europe did not suggest that now would be a good time for Roosevelt to declare. Despite the high drama of September 1939, there was little movement on the Western Front. In the east, however, the Blitzkrieg—the first use of a new, fast-moving military strategy—had quickly overcome the ill-equipped and ill-trained Polish forces and led to the partition of that country. In October, following his secret deal with Hitler, Stalin swallowed the eastern part of Poland and the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, before, at the end of November, turning his invasion force on Finland.
Meanwhile, as “spontaneous” pro-Roosevelt third-term campaigns began to emerge in Chicago and elsewhere, potential Democratic runners began circling the paddock. In May 1939, a “Garner for President” office was set up in Dallas, Texas, to promote John Nance Garner, the sixty-nine-year-old, twice-elected vice president who had been imposed upon the president by Hearst. Roosevelt held Garner in contempt, and when the vice president was absent from a cabinet meeting was openly rude about him. Garner, in turn, was weary of being excluded from decision-making and held constitutional objections to Roosevelt serving more than two terms. His isolationist credentials were confirmed by Henry Ford, who declared, “Jack Garner would make a mighty fine president.”3 Early polling by Gallup put Garner near the top of a short list of Democratic contenders with 50 percent, but only so long as the president was not a candidate.
More popular than Garner in early polling was James A. Farley, the Postmaster General from New York, who was chairman of the Democratic National Committee and knew the party inside out. Like Kennedy, he was an Irish American Roman Catholic, which led some to suggest that his religion made him unelectable. Certainly the Catholic prelate Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago thought so. He told Farley he hoped he would “do nothing to involve the Catholics . . . in another debacle,”4 a reference to Alfred E. Smith’s5 crushing defeat in the presidential election of 1928. Farley told Mundelein, “I am not planning to secure the nomination myself,” though it was by no means clear that he meant it.
In an apparent reference to Roosevelt’s suggestion the previous year that Farley run for governor of New York, which Farley interpreted as an attempt to put him off aiming for the White House, Farley told the cardinal, “I will not let myself be kicked around by Roosevelt or anyone else.”6 Mundelein told him he hoped Roosevelt would stand for a third term. Nonetheless, at the end of January 1940 Farley filed his name for inclusion in the Massachusetts Democratic primary in March.
George Earle,7 the popular, wealthy, well-connected pro-labor governor of Pennsylvania, was, by April 1937, second in the polls to Farley, and, as a former minister to Austria, could claim some foreign policy experience. He sought Roosevelt’s blessing for a run by declaring his devotion to the president in June 1937. “There are . . . no men in the Democratic party or any other party who reach knee-high in stature, mentally and morally, to Franklin D. Roosevelt,” he said. “Between the third-term precedent and the welfare of the country, can any patriotic citizen hesitate as to which course he will take?” On this issue, at least, Roosevelt heartily agreed with him.
Not far behind in popularity was Senator Burton K. Wheeler,8 a liberal centrist from Montana and, until the Supreme Court-packing drama, a fervid New Dealer. By the end of 1939, however, he had become an isolationist and fierce opponent of Roosevelt. His principal backer was the mineworkers’ union leader and fellow isolationist John L. Lewis.9 To dampen the senator’s chances, the president let slip to Jim Farley, “If Wheeler should be nominated for President, I’d vote for a Republican.”10
The governor of Indiana, Paul V. McNutt,11 whose good looks caused Roosevelt to dismiss him as “that platinum blond S.O.B. from Indiana,”12 was the Democratic frontrunner in the months leading up to the presidential election of 1936, until Roosevelt announced that he was seeking reelection. McNutt’s record as governor, in particular calling in the National Guard to break strikes, for which he was dubbed “the Hoosier Hitler,” made him unpopular among both labor unions and party activists in general. Yet by November 1939, with McNutt declaring he would run only if the president declined a third term, McNutt’s campaign managers believed their man could win.
Among the no-hopers was a Houston, Texas, businessman, Jesse Jones,13 who was favored by other Texas businessmen but by few outside the state. He was running such an imperceptible campaign that George Creel, Woodrow Wilson’s head of wartime propaganda, described it as “as loud as the tramp of a timorous kitten.”
To divide and rule his opponents, Roosevelt encouraged other no-hope candidates so that no one could establish a firm foothold. His close aide Hopkins, director of the WPA, was heartened to be told by Roosevelt that he was his hand-picked heir. The two had a long conversation about the chances of success, with Roosevelt reminding Hopkins that his divorce was sure to be an issue, though not perhaps an insurmountable one. He cited as a precedent President Grover Cleveland,14 who had admitted to an illegitimate child. Apart from having to endure on the stump the constant chant of “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa?”, he suffered no electoral harm from the scandal.
More seriously, Hopkins was diagnosed with cancer in the summer of 1939 and was given little time to live. After most of his stomach was removed, he recuperated at Kennedy’s Florida estate, but his poor health persisted and he returned to be treated at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. For Roosevelt, bolstering Hopkins’s presidential hopes was a way of keeping his dear friend alive while further muddying the waters.
Among other close allies Roosevelt flattered into believing they were his natural heir was former Republican Henry Wallace, secretary of agriculture, from Iowa, and Secretary of State Hull, who was perhaps too serious-minded to enjoy the knockabout of a campaign but, having watched at close quarters the war in Europe unfolding, could at least boast extensive knowledge of foreign affairs. There were other passing flavors of the month, among them Senator Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri. At the end of 1939, polls put Garner, Farley, and Hull at the top of a long line of hopefuls.
Nothing said by Roosevelt about the presidency at this time could be taken at face value. Over lunch with Farley at Hyde Park in August 1939, the president said that the Manhattan district attorney Thomas E. Dewey15 would be the Republican candidate and, although “arrogant and ambitious,” would “make a formidable opponent.” While giving Farley no encouragement, the president declared Garner “impossible,” said Wallace was agreeable but felt he did not have the “it” factor, and responded to McNutt’s name with a firm thumbs-down. As for his own intentions, Roosevelt whispered, “Jim, I am going to tell you something I have never told another living soul. Of course I will not run for a third term. Now I don’t want you to pass this on to anyone because it would make my role difficult if the decision were known prematurely.”16
Roosevelt’s mother, Sara, appeared to confirm as much when, in September, on her eighty-fifth birthday, she said, “I don’t think my son has the slightest wish for a third term. He is thinking only about the war.”17 Roosevelt, meanwhile, said the war meant he could not take a decision “until the spring, March or April.”18 In March 1940, Roosevelt was insisting that others could win the 1940 election. “I deprecate the attitude of some of our friends that unless I run, no other Democrat can be elected,” he wrote to the Democratic governor of Illinois, Henry Horner.19
Whether the president would or wouldn’t run became a national joke, Roosevelt’s continuing silence eliciting a ditty from a reporter: “He’s riding high, and he’s riding straight / He’s heading straight for the White House gate.” Even Roosevelt himself began to joke about it. Laying the cornerstone of his presidential library at Hyde Park in November 1939, he paused before saying, “And may I add, in order that my good friends of the press will have something to write about tomorrow . . .” He surveyed the crowd of reporters before continuing, “that I hope they will give due interpretation to the expression of my hope that”—and he paused again—“when we open the building to the public it will be a fine day.”20 Krock reported, “Whatever Mr. Roosevelt may intend, he is obviously enjoying it.”21
Speculation was not confined to America. On her return from her visit to Hyde Park in July the previous year, Queen Elizabeth had told Kennedy that the president had confided to her that he “absolutely does not want to be a candidate.”22 Kennedy could barely contain his delight. Yet after lunch at Buckingham Palace at the end of November, Kennedy noted that the queen still “wanted to know if Roosevelt would want Third Term. All English hope so.”23
Frustrated by the welter of ambiguous information, the press began drawing attention to Roosevelt’s dilemma by dubbing him the Sphinx, a soubriquet gratefully taken up by political cartoonists. In “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” Drew Pearson summed up Roosevelt’s predicament: “If the President talks now, the chances are ten to one he will take himself out of the race; whereas if he continues silent until next spring, pro-third term sentiment within the party may be stoked up to such an extent that even if he said he wasn’t a candidate he might be ‘drafted’ anyway.”24
A hint of the president’s true intentions came when he made it known that he thought the Democratic Convention should be held in July or August, leaving new candidates little time to campaign for the election in November. Farley, for one, was not to be deterred. In January 1940, at a Jackson Day Democratic fundraiser in Washington, Farley, seated beside the president, opened his remarks with, “Fellow candidates.” Landon, the titular head of the Republican Party, continued to taunt Roosevelt about his intentions. “If the President would just give the spirit of unity an opportunity to work in this country, it would be so helpful,” he said. “Instead he makes it difficult by his foxy way of hiding, playing with the third-term proposition.”25
The president betrayed more than he intended when replying to a complaint from a feminist, Mary Dewson,26 that there were not enough portraits of women on postage stamps. Pointing out that “old Martha Washington was the only female face on letters” until his inauguration, that he had “even put Whistler’s mother on a stamp,” and that “if you had asked me to put Greta Garbo’s face on a stamp, I might have listened,” he promised that “if we inaugurate a Democratic President in 1941, I will guarantee that he will provide one new female stamp each year.”27
Visiting the White House in December 1939, Kennedy stood on the front steps and gave a not entirely convincing endorsement of Roosevelt for a third term. Once alone with the president, however, Kennedy popped the question. “No, Joe, I can’t do it,” Roosevelt replied. “I’m tired. I can’t take it. What I need is a year’s rest. You do too. . . . I just won’t go for a third term unless we are in war. Even then, I’ll never send an army over. We’ll help them, but with supplies.”
The president then gave Kennedy his opinion of the Democratic runners, calling Hull a ditherer, McNutt unfocused, and Hopkins too unwell, before surprising Kennedy by saying, “There’s yourself.”28 It was neither an encouragement nor a deterrent. Kennedy was perplexed. At the time, Farley was enjoying an early surge in Massachusetts, which was due to hold its primary on March 5.29 Eager to undermine Farley while flushing out Kennedy, the president played on the ambassador’s vanity, telling him that it did not seem fair that Farley should be romping away in Kennedy’s backyard. Perhaps, he said, Kennedy should run as a “favorite son.”
As if by coincidence, in January 1940 a “Kennedy for President” campaign suddenly emerged in Massachusetts, with Kennedy’s fingerprints all over it. Krock was chief cheerleader. But to Kennedy’s disappointment, the flurry of activity did not develop into a stampede, though it was enough of a distraction to dampen the early enthusiasm for Farley, which pleased the president.
If Kennedy was going to make a serious bid, he felt he would have to enter the race at the last minute, when and if Roosevelt declared he would not run. To jump in earlier would incur the president’s wrath. He would look disloyal and ungrateful. Above all, perhaps, he would look overtly ambitious and irresponsible, leaving his London post when Britain was at war. Only if he held back would he be able to gain the president’s blessing.
After meeting again with Roosevelt in February, the ambassador made an announcement. While he found the suggestion he should run “flattering,” he reminded Americans, “I now occupy a most important government post which at this particular time involves matters so precious to the American people that no private consideration should permit my energies or interests to be diverted. . . . I must with positiveness state that I am not a candidate.”30 Obliged to bide his time until the president had declared his intentions, Kennedy announced that he would return to London, via Italy, on the George Washington.
Kennedy was far from happy at being held hostage by Roosevelt, and he could not contain his irritation. Behind closed doors in the office of Bill Bullitt, the ambassador to Paris who was back in Washington to report to Hull on the inadequacies of the French plans to resist a German invasion, Kennedy made clear his disenchantment with the president in “lurid” and “unrestrained” language. J. M. Patterson, publisher of the New York Daily News, and Doris Fleeson, the News’s Washington reporter, witnessed the outburst but did not file a report.31
“He began to criticize the President very sharply, whereupon Bill took issue with him,” reported Ickes in his diary. “The altercation became so violent that Patterson finally remarked that he suspected he was intruding and Doris Fleeson left, but Joe continued to berate the President.” Bullitt accused him of disloyalty and indiscretion, daring to criticize the president in such vulgar language in front of journalists. “Joe said that he would say what he Goddamned pleased before whom he Goddamned pleased,” wrote Ickes.32
Even as Kennedy was berating the president, Roosevelt was making arrangements for a new slap to Kennedy’s sense of self-respect. To demonstrate to Americans that he was exploring all avenues to peace, even though he had no intention of making a bargain with Hitler, in late February Roosevelt dispatched Sumner Welles on a tour of European capitals. (He ruled out sending him to visit Stalin as a protest against the Soviet invasion of Finland.) The Welles peace tour was an empty gesture and the president neither granted his special emissary discretion to make proposals nor encouraged him to believe the mission would bear fruit, telling him that the odds of his mission succeeding were a thousand to one.
Kennedy had been given no hint of the Welles peace initiative by the president and took it as another deliberate slight when he found out. Enraged, the ambassador again complained to Roosevelt for excluding him.
Welles met with Mussolini in Rome on February 26 and with Hitler in Berlin on March 1–3, after which Kennedy, traveling to London via Genoa, caught up with him. According to Kennedy, Welles said, “[Hitler] was in a mood to make a reasonable peace and the French and English somewhat in the same frame of mind.”33 In London, however, Welles changed his view after spending a late-night, three-hour session with Churchill.
Churchill, who to Welles’s alarm had been sipping whiskies all afternoon, made a good impression. Welles was left in no doubt by Churchill that a negotiated peace would be a travesty and that “the war must be fought to a finish.”34 The American emissary told a British official that he was “extremely impressed” by what he had been told and considered Churchill “one of the most fascinating personalities he had ever met.”35
Kennedy was furious that Welles had been so easily won over. When asked by the press on his return to London whether America remained isolationist, Kennedy declared, “If you mean by isolation a desire to keep out of the war, I should say it is definitely stronger.”36 It was a petulant response to once again being left in the dark by the president.
Those who hoped the Welles mission would return with an olive branch were disabused by the president in a fireside chat on March 16. Peace was desirable but should not come at any price, he said. “It cannot be a lasting peace if the fruit of it is oppression, or starvation, or cruelty, or human life dominated by armed camps. It cannot be a sound peace if small nations must live in fear of powerful neighbors.”37 The broadcast marked the end of talk in the administration of a negotiated peace. Like Churchill, what Roosevelt had in mind was not negotiated peace but German surrender and Allied victory.
The stakes on Roosevelt winning a third term climbed ever higher for the British. As Queen Elizabeth had hinted to Kennedy, Britain dearly wanted Roosevelt to stay at his post. A new president was unlikely to be as Anglophile or as supportive as Roosevelt. Dining with Kennedy in March 1940, Churchill, too, “asked whether Roosevelt would run for 3rd term,” recalled Kennedy. “I said probably if it were necessary to keep things right in U.S. He said of course we want him, but we must be careful U.S. doesn’t know that.”38
A week later, Kennedy changed his mind about the chances of Roosevelt running, writing to Rose, with whom he rarely shared political gossip, that the president would not run, “so obviously I’m out [of the administration].” If the president withdrew from the race he had not yet entered, it was still possible that Kennedy could emerge as a compromise candidate and cash in on his years of isolationist statements. “Knowing myself as I do, when I’ve been home 6 months I’ll want to get going again,” he told Rose. “Maybe old age and a bad stomach will change me. I don’t know. I guess I’m a restless soul: Some people call it ambition.”39
Ever eager to involve Roosevelt in military decisions, Churchill had asked Kennedy when visiting the White House in February to seek approval from the president for the Royal Navy to place mines in Norwegian waters, to prevent steel and iron ore from reaching German war factories. British intelligence suggested that Scandinavia would be Hitler’s next conquest. There was a schoolboy element to Churchill’s war games and he suggested that, to confound German code-breakers, Kennedy should send a cable saying, “Eunice would like to go to party” if the president approved the mission.40 Roosevelt duly approved the action and Kennedy sent the cryptic message.
Hitler, too, had his eyes on the US presidential election and dearly hoped that an isolationist would win. In the meantime, lest America be brought needlessly into the war, he issued a “very strict order . . . not to do anything or say anything against the United States of America.”41
Over dinner with Kennedy, according to the ambassador’s diary, Churchill had “implied it would be almost worthwhile to stir up things by July in the war so Roosevelt would run.”42 There was no need for the British to “stir things up.” Hitler needed naval bases in Scandinavia from which to launch U-boat attacks on Allied vessels. He also wanted, as the British suspected, to secure Swedish iron ore that in winter had to be ferried by sea down the Norwegian coast.43 On April 9, without warning, he launched Exercise Weser, the invasion of Denmark and Norway.
By coincidence, Churchill had planned to invade Norway and lay mines in the sea routes on the same date. That morning, the British and German fleets steamed toward each other for an unexpected and unwelcome rendezvous in the North Sea. Before long, battle was joined. German naval losses were considerable, with three cruisers and ten destroyers sunk. But German troops, backed by air superiority and the rest of the German sea forces, arrived in Norway in merchant vessels and easily took control of Oslo, beating the British to the punch.
After a few days, the British forces that had occupied the northern Norwegian port of Narvik were obliged to make an ignominious retreat. Without remarking on the morality of the invasion, Lindbergh told his diary that the Germans’ “amazing success in taking over Norway” was “a victory for air power and a turning point in military history.”44
The failure to secure Norway was a setback for Britain and for Churchill’s reputation. The first naval sortie of his much-lauded return to the Admiralty was an ill-arranged debacle, and, while not as devastating and murderous as the losses suffered in his ill-judged attempted invasion of Turkey at Gallipoli in World War One,45 the failure of the Royal Navy to deflect the German invasion of Scandinavia proved an acute embarrassment to him and a profound shock to the Chamberlain government.
On May 7, the Commons began a two-day debate on “the conduct of the war,” at which Chamberlain and Churchill both spoke. It became clear that the prime minister’s party were in open rebellion and his grasp on the premiership slipping when he found himself saying, “I say this to my friends in the House—and I have friends in the House . . .”46 Churchill took up the phrase to taunt those members who had backed appeasement. “He thought he had some friends,” growled Churchill, “and I hope he has some friends. He certainly had a good many when things were going well.” Watching the debate from the gallery, Kennedy felt “that [Churchill] saw in the distance the mantle being lowered for his shoulders.”47
Two senior figures in the Commons controlled Chamberlain’s future. One was Lloyd George,48 who as prime minister had led the country to victory in 1918. “The nation is prepared for every sacrifice so long as it has leadership,” he declared. “The Prime Minister should give an example of sacrifice because there is nothing which can contribute more to victory in this war than that he should sacrifice the seals of office.” But the lethal intervention was that of the veteran Conservative MP Leo Amery,49 who, in a rousing speech cheered by both sides, borrowed from Oliver Cromwell’s dismissal of the Long Parliament, the meeting of the House of Commons during the English Civil War that sat for eight years: “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.”
Although Chamberlain’s government survived the vote of confidence that concluded the debate, so many of his own party either abstained or joined with the opposition to vote against him that Chamberlain knew he must resign. But who should replace him? Chamberlain preferred Halifax over Churchill, but in an awkward meeting between the three on May 9, when asked by the prime minister whether he would be prepared to serve under Halifax, Churchill remained silent. The awkward hush that followed proved one of the most important absences of sound in the history of Western civilization. “As I remained silent a very long pause ensued,” Churchill would later recall. “It certainly seemed longer than the two minutes which one observes in the commemorations of Armistice Day. Then at length Halifax spoke.”
Without conceding that Churchill was the better choice, Halifax told Chamberlain that as he sat in the Lords rather than the Commons, he was not best placed to become prime minister, who needed to be master of the more powerful lower house. “By the time he had finished,” Churchill remembered, “it was clear that the duty would fall upon me—had in fact fallen upon me.”50 On the evening of May 10, King George sent for Churchill and asked him to form a government of national unity to include Labour and Liberal members. That morning had come the startling news that Hitler’s forces were fast moving through the Netherlands and Belgium and, bypassing the Maginot Line, were crossing the French border through the dense forests of the Ardennes. The Battle of France had begun.