Isolationists launch “the Great Debate,”
Kennedy keeps his powder dry, both sides
suffer prominent defections.
PREPARATIONS WERE SOON under way for the legislative battle of Lend-Lease. The isolationists in Congress were not the same people as when Roosevelt had begun his presidency. A number of older figures from the Senate had faded from the scene.
William E. Borah, the Lion of Idaho, had died in January 1940. Ernest Lundeen was killed in August 1940 when his plane was struck by lightning. James Couzens lost a primary election in 1940 and died shortly afterward. And Lynn J. Frazier lost his Senate seat the same year. Old isolationist campaigners Hiram Johnson, aged seventy-four, and Arthur Capper, seventy-five, had run out of steam and played little part in events.1 Others had changed their minds. George W. Norris, founder of the New Deal’s Tennessee Valley Authority, was once a fierce isolationist but, horrified by photographs of the Japanese atrocities in Manchuria, had changed his tune by 1940.
A new generation of isolationists had taken their place.2 In the Senate, Nye led a formidable group on the powerful Foreign Relations Committee. Fish, the butt of Roosevelt’s election speeches, was the ranking member on the House Foreign Relations Committee.3
Thus, the scene was set for what isolationists called “the Great Debate.” Though there were passionate arguments in homes and bars throughout America, the action was soon focused on Congress, its speeches and hearings from expert witnesses. For once, the whole discussion about whether to intervene in war came together in one place. Every major figure who had taken a position was prominently involved in the battle.
As so often happens in politics, the debate appeared to be cast upside down. Roosevelt led the war party, albeit a party reluctant to go to war, and the Lend-Lease bill was evidence that the president and his administration were convinced that war was imminent and it was time to prepare. The end of Britain’s independence would put America next on the Axis conquest list. Yet throughout the debate, Democrats and administration supporters insisted that Lend-Lease would not facilitate America’s entry into the war but instead help keep it out.
The isolationists and non-interventionists in Congress were the peace party, yet they saw clearly that Lend-Lease was not a measure to maintain peace but was tantamount to a declaration of war against the Axis. As Taft put it, “I do not see how we can long conduct such a war without actually being in the shooting end of the war as well as in the service-of-supply end which this bill justifies.”4
The ambiguity suited Roosevelt. Ambiguity was central to his nature, and he reveled in his ability to manipulate others by saying one thing while doing another. The division in his mind appeared to perfectly complement the paradox at the heart of the American people, of whom 85 percent were against military intervention, while 65 percent wished to “aid Great Britain, even at the risk of war.” Lend-Lease was an ingenious means to allow Americans to follow these incompatible paths simultaneously.
Those who took part in the Lend-Lease debate did so without benefit of hindsight. The trigger that would eventually draw America into war could not have been imagined at that time. Yet some saw more clearly than others what the future might hold and most of those were conscious that, with or without Lend-Lease, America was already well on the way to war.
Most were aware that the defeat of Lend-Lease would not prevent war unless America was prepared to make its peace with Nazism. For some, even that alternative was better than war. The most pivotal debate on America’s involvement therefore emerged as something of a fait accompli, with the characters performing as if in a play, reciting lines that revealed their impotence in the face of a war that, thanks to Hitler’s territorial ambitions, was knocking on America’s door.
The motive that led Roosevelt to demand a war bill in the guise of a peace bill was his continuing fear of American public opinion, particularly when that opinion was expressed and amplified through Congress. It had been forty months since Roosevelt delivered the “quarantine speech,” his initial attempt to educate Americans that conflict might be coming, however much they might wish to remain at peace. Although granted an unprecedented third term, the president had toyed with the voters by telling them what they wanted to hear: that he would not send Americans into a foreign war, even though he knew it was most unlikely that he would be able to fulfill his promise.
He believed war was coming, whatever he promised. But to tell the truth would invite America’s defeat as well as his own. Instead, he chose to play an elaborate game of subterfuge, disguising the foreboding that had preoccupied him for years with his stock-in-trade, a well-rehearsed jocularity that, to many isolationists and pacifists, appeared to reveal his true cynicism, cruelty, and deceit.
As the debate in Congress began, the isolationists were in the minority and on the defensive: polls showed that 61 percent of Americans were in favor of Lend-Lease. Gallup suggested that the Southern states were even more in favor of “all-out” aid to Britain than the Anglophile East Coast states. Isolationist strength was concentrated in Chicago and the Midwest. The isolationists were also divided and poorly organized. Bickering at the top of the No Foreign War Committee ensured that its influence on the debate was feeble. Although America First had gathered a great number of supporters opposed to America entering the war, the isolationist movement suffered for lack of a clear and charismatic leader.
Had Kennedy, a well-liked Democrat with ample private funds, agreed to become America First’s leader, the debate might have taken a different turn. He might have been able to persuade some Democrats in the House to change their minds and Lend-Lease might have been defeated. But as he remained an ambassador until February 1941, when the president finally named his successor, Kennedy was tied to Roosevelt.
Wood’s exasperation at Kennedy’s vacillation over whether to head America First was heartfelt; the movement was day by day losing momentum. So long as no replacement could be found, Wood was obliged to remain at the helm. Ill-equipped for such a prominent public role, but undeterred, Wood launched an assault upon the president’s expanded powers, picking up on the blank check analogy Roosevelt had privately used when crafting the bill. “He wants a blank check book with the power to write away your manpower, our laws and our liberties,” Wood declared.5
With Kennedy keeping his powder dry, isolationism’s uncompromising star turn was Lindbergh, though he still held no official position in America First and declined repeated invitations to join the No Foreign War Committee. When the committee’s chairman, Verne Marshall, nonetheless repeatedly cited Lindbergh as a friend and supporter, the flier was obliged to deny he was involved. “I found myself unable to support its methods and policies,” he wrote. Lindbergh’s fierce individualism, combined with his need to control every aspect of his life, made him reluctant to work with others even if they wholly agreed with him.
The differences between the two sides in the debate were fundamental, yet less profound than at first appeared. Many isolationists were pro-British and favored American rearmament as well as arming Britain, short of war. Typical was the No Foreign War Committee, which took radio time on New Year’s Day for Marshall to declare, “Let no one try to smear us with the brush of the anti-British,” for there was nothing in the organization’s objectives “which would in the slightest degree hamper or seek withdrawal of full and legal help to our sister English-speaking nation.”6 The committee was, however, alarmed at the Lend-Lease bill as written, giving sweeping powers to the president and depriving Congress of the power to decide when war began.
The issue of convoying was a key difference. Not only would convoying of British merchant ships by the US Navy threaten American lives, it would most likely draw America into direct conflict with German vessels which might in turn trigger general hostilities. Yet how else would the supplies cross the Atlantic safely? As historian Charles A. Beard, sympathetic to the non-interventionists and highly suspicious of Roosevelt’s motives, put it, “It would seem strange for the United States to manufacture huge quantities of supplies for Great Britain, turn them over to British ships in American harbors, and then quietly allow German submarines to send them all to the bottom of the sea.”7 Roosevelt scoffed at suggestions in the press that American ships would soon be accompanying British merchant vessels across the Atlantic. “I have never considered using American naval vessels to convoy ships bearing supplies to Great Britain,” he insisted.8
For all the questions about how much Lend-Lease would cost and whether it removed Congress’s constitutional role in declaring war, the principal argument against Lend-Lease boiled down to a simple contention: a measure designed to keep America democratic and safe from war would lead to dictatorship at home and Americans fighting abroad.
One substantial figure did emerge to rally the isolationist cause, but he, too, felt unable to accept the leadership of the opposition to Lend-Lease: the former president Herbert Hoover. He was not an ideal champion. Few former presidents find it easy to rekindle interest in their ideas after they leave the White House. Voters feel they have had their turn and should make way for new blood. The earnest, able administrator Hoover still suffered from the taint that as president he presided passively over the stock market crash of 1929 and did little in his remaining years as president to counter the mass unemployment and general misery of the ensuing Great Depression.
Hoover was reluctant to rekindle the bruising head-to-head contest with Roosevelt that saw him ejected from the White House in 1932 after a single term. However, Hoover’s sense of self-importance and public duty encouraged him to press his personality upon public policy. Willkie called him “the real brains” behind opposition to Lend-Lease.9 Lindbergh had a more sober view of his movement’s tacit leader. “He has stability and, I think, integrity,” he wrote. “But he lacks that intangible quality that makes men willing to follow a great leader even to death itself.”10
As one of Wilson’s team during the Paris peace talks in 1919, Hoover had helped to unravel the diplomatic tangle that prevented vast numbers of defeated Germans and Austrians being adequately fed as a result of the Allies’ continuing trade embargo. In September 1939, as Europe once again went to war, Hoover had picked up where he left off, urging Roosevelt to persuade Churchill to ease the embargo on all supplies, including food and medicines, imposed by the British upon German occupied territories. Britain was itself under siege and under threat from German occupation. But its overwhelming naval strength ensured it could still freeze ocean-going trade with Germany and its new, hungry European conquests, deprived by their occupiers of food supplies to ensure that Germans were adequately fed.
So long as the Royal Navy dominated the Atlantic sea routes, America was powerless to halt Britain’s siege of continental Europe. Lend-Lease offered an opportunity for Hoover to argue for a quid pro quo: the British could have all the war equipment they asked for if they would allow food and humanitarian supplies to reach the vanquished nations. Churchill and Roosevelt viewed Hoover as a naive meddler whose good intentions were jeopardizing their desire to contain Hitler in Europe. Hoover’s humanitarian pleas were ignored.
Hoover began to formulate arguments to be marshaled against Lend-Lease in the congressional hearings and to provide rigorous thinking to a campaign conspicuously lacking in brainpower. After a campaign tour against Lend-Lease that took him to a number of cities, Hoover reported to William R. Castle, who had first recruited Lindbergh to become active in the antiwar cause, that Americans still widely misunderstood the purpose of the proposed legislation. “It is a war bill, yet 95 percent of the people think it is only aid to Britain,” he wrote.
Hoover thought the bill would award Roosevelt the sort of dictatorial powers only granted to a leader in time of war. “The bill: surrenders to the President the power to make war,” he said. “Any subsequent action by Congress will be rubber stamp work; empowers the President to drive the country still further toward a national socialistic state; [and] empowers the President to become [the] real dictator of opposition policies to the Axis. He can determine who, in what way and how much aid any nation may receive from the United States.”11
Shortly after the Lend-Lease bills were published in both houses of Congress, Hoover issued a statement questioning the “enormous surrender” of congressional oversight ceded by the new law.12 He began rallying opponents of Lend-Lease and urged them to speak up. “We have secured a continuous stream of able radio speakers and have more coming up,” he wrote. “I think we are going to defeat the big issue in this bill, that is giving the President the power to make war.”13 Beyond questioning Roosevelt’s intentions, Hoover also offered advice on how to make the isolationist message better understood. Yet for all his ideas and energy, the former president persistently declined invitations from America First to broadcast for them.
Hoover wrote to Taft, saying that, while he supported helping Britain, questions should be raised about British payments for materiel already contracted and payments made for future supplies. Would they still stand? Or were they to be part of the new arrangement? Hoover also suggested that Britain’s war aims should be explored. After its initial goal, to prevent a German invasion of the British Isles, what next? What exactly was America signing up to? When the war was over, how should disarmament and a permanent peace be brought about? Hoover pointed to a profound omission in the president’s war plans: if America was drifting into war with other nations, what did Roosevelt hope to get out of it? And what part did he expect America to play in the postwar world? What was the endgame?
A tart early shot at the president came from Wheeler, who hit at the heart of the moral argument about lending rather than giving aid to Britain, considering that the British were the front line of America’s defense against the common enemy of Nazism. “If it is our war,” Wheeler asked, “how can we justify lending them stuff and asking them to pay us back? If it is our war, we ought to have the courage to go over and fight it. But it is not our war.”14
At the president’s State of the Union address on January 6, Prince Olaf of Norway, driven from his country by the Nazi occupation, sat with Eleanor in the Senate gallery. “The United States as a nation has at all times maintained clear, definite opposition to any attempt to lock us in behind an ancient Chinese wall while the procession of civilization went past,” Roosevelt said. “We oppose enforced isolation for ourselves or for any other part of the Americas. . . . The future and the safety of our country and of our democracy are overwhelmingly involved in events far beyond our borders.”
He pointed the finger at Lindbergh, Kennedy, and their sort: “We must always be wary of those who with sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal preach the -ism of appeasement. We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American eagle in order to feather their own nests.” As for Lend-Lease, “We are committed to full support of all those resolute peoples, everywhere, who are resisting aggression and are thereby keeping war away from our Hemisphere.”15
Roosevelt’s strictures upset Lindbergh, who wrote in his diary, “The pall of the war seems to hang over us today.” His dislike of Roosevelt was intense. “I have tried to analyze his thinking,” he wrote, “but it is extremely difficult, for the man is so unstable . . . I feel sure he would, consciously or unconsciously, like to take the center of the world’s stage away from Hitler. I think he would lead this country to war in a moment if he felt he could accomplish this object.”
Lindbergh realized the stakes were high for both the president and America. “If Roosevelt took this country into war and won, he might be one of the great figures of all history,” Lindbergh wrote. “But if we lost, he would be damned forever.” He tried to make sense of paradoxical polling that showed Americans in favor of helping Britain while wishing to stay out of the war. “In other words,” he wrote, “we seem to want to have Britain win without being willing to pay the price of war.”16
Roosevelt’s State of the Union promised “to change a whole nation from a basis of peacetime production of implements of peace to a basis of wartime production of implements.”17 The president did not wait for Congress to pass the Lend-Lease legislation before demanding a budget of $17.5 billion, of which 62 percent ($10.8 billion) was ear-marked for defense. The 1,000-plus pages of the budget spelled out how the money would be spent: the army would increase its manpower from its June 1940 figure of 250,000 to 1.4 million by 1942 and would be “equipped with the most modern devices of motorized and mechanical warfare”; the navy would increase by 42,000 sailors to 232,000 and be divided into the Atlantic, Pacific, and Asiatic fleets; and it revealed that “behind the lines a whole new defense industry is being built” with federal money, including 125 new plants. Roosevelt appointed labor leader Sidney Hillman18 and industrialist William S. Knudsen19 to head the federal Priority Board, to hasten the manufacture of war materiel and commission car makers such as General Motors and Ford to build warplanes. Late in 1940, the government contracted with Ford to begin producing Pratt and Whitney engines, and the following year contracted him to make B-24 bombers. The budget did not include the cost of aid for Britain if Lend-Lease were approved.
Roosevelt worked best one-to-one with political friends and felt he did not quite grasp Churchill’s personality or the exact nature of the shortages facing Britain. Churchill was a Falstaffian figure to whom Roosevelt would have to play both Henry IV and the young Prince Hal—a louche fellow who outspent the considerable earnings he made from his prodigious pen. This did not in itself alarm Roosevelt, but until he could effect a face-to-face meeting, he needed to know the man he was dealing with.
There were reports that Churchill, notwithstanding his American mother, was privately anti-American and that, despite the warmhearted letters he wrote to the president, he held Roosevelt in low regard. “You know, a lot of this could be settled if Churchill and I could just sit down together for a while,” Roosevelt told Hopkins, which allowed his closest aide, in the absence of an ambassador in London, to volunteer to fly to London and arrange a summit between the two leaders. With some reluctance, Roosevelt agreed.
Since contracting stomach cancer in 1937, Hopkins had taken permanent refuge in the White House, having stayed over one night after dinner and then failed to move out. In the intervening years, he had established a pivotal role in Roosevelt’s life as his principal confidant and fixer, a worthy successor to Louis Howe, who had so ably managed Roosevelt’s early political career.
Roosevelt told reporters on January 3 that he would be sending Hopkins to London but refused to be drawn on the purpose of the visit. Asked whether Hopkins had been given any special brief, the president said, “No, no, no.” Asked whether Hopkins would be given a title, he replied, “No, no.” Asked whether Hopkins would travel alone, the president said, “No, and he will have no powers.”20 So, on January 7, Hopkins boarded a Pan Am Clipper bound for Lisbon to discover exactly what Churchill was like and what Britain most urgently needed. Roosevelt told Ickes that he wanted Hopkins to get properly acquainted with the prime minister “so that [Hopkins] can talk to Churchill like an Iowa farmer.”21
Two days after the State of the Union, on January 8, a second defection rocked the Lend-Lease debate, a desertion far more significant than William Allen White’s switch to the non-interventionists. Wendell Willkie, who throughout the election had adopted a robust non-interventionist stance, told a meeting of the Women’s National Republican Club at the Hotel Astor, New York, that “America cannot remove itself from the world. . . . If Britain falls before the onslaught of Hitlerism, it will be impossible over a period of time to preserve the free way of life in America.” He issued a warning: “If the Republican party . . . makes a blind opposition to [the Lend-Lease] bill and allows itself to be presented to the American people as the isolationist party, it will never again gain control of the American government.”22
The next day, January 9, from his headquarters at the Hotel Commodore, New York, Willkie declared his unequivocal support for Lend-Lease. He agreed that power to administer the scheme should be vested in the president alone, “because democracy could defend itself from aggression only by giving extraordinary powers to the elected executive,” and he warned against “appeasers, isolationists, and lip-service friends of Britain” who would seek to sabotage the bill.23
Some slight differences with the administration remained. Willkie insisted on “thorough debate” of Lend-Lease in Congress, while the White House wanted it passed with minimum delay. Willkie also wanted a time limit set on Lend-Lease powers, allowing Congress at regular periods to decide whether to continue them.
There was talk of complicity between the president and his former rival when it was revealed that Willkie, like Hopkins, was also going to London to meet Churchill. This sense of collusion was heightened when Willkie traveled to Washington to be personally briefed by Hull for two hours on the state of the war, then met alone with Roosevelt, who gave him a personal letter of introduction to Churchill.
The president took a piece of headed paper and wrote, “Wendell Willkie will give you this—he is truly helping to keep politics out over here.” Until that moment, even in the heat of the election, the president had not once mentioned Willkie by name. Then, noting that “I think this applies to you people as it does to us,” he wrote from memory some lines by Longfellow.
Sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!24
After a time, Churchill responded with some verse by Arthur Hugh Clough.
For while the tired waves vainly breaking
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look! the land is bright.25
Willkie’s defection set off a wave of recrimination among Republicans. Willkie’s immediate predecessor, Landon, who had been roundly defeated by Roosevelt in 1936, asserted that Willkie would not have been nominated by the Republicans in 1940, nor would Roosevelt have been elected, if voters had known that the two men agreed on American involvement in the war. “There is no essential difference between Mr. Willkie’s position and Mr. Roosevelt’s position, which is to go to war if necessary to help England [sic] win,” Landon declared.
Isolationists felt duped, and reminded one another that Willkie had been foisted on them by rich eastern seaboard Republican bigwigs. They convinced themselves that Willkie’s desertion would not affect a single vote in Congress. But their claim that, having so recently been a Democrat, Willkie was no longer the Republican leader was somewhat confused by a declaration by Senator Warren R. Austin,26 acting head of the party, that he would support Willkie on Lend-Lease so long as the president’s powers were kept in check. McCormick, however, was furious at Willkie’s treachery. “Mr. Willkie entered the Republican party as a mysterious stranger,” his Chicago Tribune wrote. “He may take his leave, quite as suddenly, still a stranger to the party’s principles, although no longer mysterious.”27
The day Willkie defected, the president invited congressional leaders to the White House to discuss management of the bill through Congress. No Republican was invited. The bill was to be launched in both houses simultaneously on January 17. Frankfurter came up with the title, “a bill further to promote the defense of the United States, and for other purposes,” and the House parliamentarian, Lewis Deschler,28 artfully numbered it HR 1776, the year of America’s declaration of independence from British rule.
Fish, leading the charge against the bill in the House, took aim at his old tormentor. “It looks as if we are bringing Nazism, fascism, and dictatorship to America and setting up a Führer here,” he said. John M. Vorys, a Republican from Ohio, judged the bill little more than “a streamlined modern declaration of war.”29
In the Senate the next day, the arch-isolationist Hiram Johnson, ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, who had lent his name to the bill forbidding arms sales to belligerents, was quick off the mark. “I am neither an appeaser nor a Hitlerite. I want to see Hitler whipped and Britain triumphant,” he said. But the bill was “monstrous.” “I decline to change the whole form of my government on the specious plea of assisting one belligerent.” He said the bill would make America a dictatorship and “a member of the totalitarian states.”
Taft said the bill “combines all the faults of the worst New Deal legislation, including unlimited delegation of authority and blank-check appropriations.” Only a “rubber-stamp Congress” would agree to such terms. Clark summed up the general feeling among isolationists, that they were being presented with “a bill to authorize the President to declare war abroad and a totalitarian government at home.”30
Landon made an early entry into the debate, dismissing Lend-Lease as a typically “slick scheme” of Roosevelt. He, too, claimed to support sending arms to Britain, but drew a line close to America’s borders for where help should cease. “Those who really mean all aid to England [sic] short of war should specifically say: no convoying, no American ships in war zones,” he said. “The minute an American ship is sunk and the American flag is fired upon and Americans are killed, we are then in the war, as we should be, with men.”
Like Kennedy, he doubted that a British victory was, as Roosevelt contended, essential to America’s national interest. “If Hitler wins, it will be a ‘new and terrible era’ for a time,” he said. “But in the end free labor will always whip forced labor, and without going to war to do it.” He recommended direct subsidies to Britain, an option that “runs no risk of involving us in war.” As for the hosepipe comparison, “The lending of war material, the garden hose scheme, might better be compared to lending a cake of ice in July in Kansas, with the same hope of recovery.”31
Before the debate opened in Congress, Senator Wheeler of Montana had invited Johnson and eight other leading non-interventionists to plot opposition to the president’s measure in both houses. When Johnson declined the leadership, Wheeler stepped up. Wheeler, who was unwell the day the debate opened in the Senate, sent a message saying he would address Lend-Lease in a broadcast the following Sunday.
His was a more complex position than many opponents of intervention, as befitted his colorful personal history. Born in Massachusetts and finding work first in Boston, Wheeler’s life might have turned out differently had he not broken a journey in Butte, Montana, lost everything to card sharks playing poker, and stayed on to practice law. He became a progressive, left-leaning, pro-labor Democrat dubbed “the Yankee from the West.” He stood against Roosevelt in the 1924 election as the Progressive Party’s vice presidential candidate, with Robert La Follette Sr. at the top of the ticket. He became a putative presidential candidate himself in 1940 when the powerful anti-Roosevelt labor leader John L. Lewis, a staunch isolationist, led a “Draft Wheeler” campaign.
Wheeler may have looked mild, with a soft face, wire-framed spectacles, and thinning hair, but his political style was anything but. Although he had been in favor of the New Deal, he parted ways with Roosevelt when the president tried to pack the Supreme Court in 1937. Wheeler’s much-heralded Sunday evening broadcast on January 12 alluded to the New Deal’s Agricultural Adjustment Act, known simply as “Triple A.” To lift cotton prices, Triple A paid farmers generous subsidies to destroy a quarter of their cotton crop and plow it under.
Wheeler found in the Lend-Lease bill a headline-grabbing comparison he knew would inspire isolationists in the Midwest, who had benefited most from the New Deal. He called Lend-Lease “the New Deal’s ‘Triple A’ foreign policy” that would “plow under every fourth American boy.” If Americans wanted to back Britain, he said, “then we should lend and lease American boys. . . . Our boys will be returned. Returned in caskets, maybe. Returned with bodies maimed. Returned with minds warped and twisted.” The analogy may have been apt, but Wheeler’s blunt words were widely considered a tasteless slur on the president’s intentions.
Wheeler further charged:
Never before have the American people been asked or compelled to give so bounteously and so completely of their tax dollars to any foreign nation. Never before has the Congress of the United States been asked by any President to violate international law. Never before has this nation resorted to duplicity in the conduct of its foreign affairs. Never before has the United States given to one man the power to strip this nation of its defenses. Never before has a Congress coldly and flatly been asked to abdicate.32
Wheeler’s brutal description of what war would mean to American families set the tone for the rest of the battle. Roosevelt usually met criticism with a grin and a smart remark. But he was so aghast at being pictured as a butcher that he told White House reporters he was disgusted by Wheeler’s contribution, accusing him of saying “the most untruthful, the most dastardly, unpatriotic thing that has ever been said. That really is the rottenest thing that has been said in public life in my generation.” For once the president insisted, “Quote me on that.”33
Wheeler was not done. The following week, he accused Roosevelt of diplomatic skullduggery, charging that Churchill had secretly demanded “a declaration of war by this country” and that Hopkins’s mystery mission to London was to discover “what immediate steps can be taken [by America] short of a war declaration.” He claimed that the British government was demanding far more than the president was admitting. “They not only want planes and ships at this time, but they also want pilots to man the planes and sailors to man the ships,” he said. “Every American ought to realize that Mr. Roosevelt is leading us down the road to war, not step by step but leap by leap.”34 Wheeler felt that by calling him out on the prospect of American boys dying in the field of battle, he had disturbed Roosevelt’s eternally calm demeanor. “Apparently the President lost his temper,” he remarked with glee.35
Isolationism was not merely a conservative phenomenon, as a rally of 20,000 Communists in Madison Square Garden, New York, in January 1941, to mark the death of Lenin, dramatically attested. Earl Browder, the Communists’ general secretary, declared that America was already “in the war.” Wilson had been modest in his ambition to “make the world safe for democracy”; Roosevelt “proposes to take his brand of democracy and that of Winston Churchill and make it supreme over the whole world.” Israel Amter, who presided over the convention, said, “Roosevelt tells us that the war is being forced upon us. But is it not a strange fact that the Soviet Union lies next door to Germany and yet it cannot be forced into the war?”36 Each mention of the president’s name sparked a round of booing.
Roosevelt met with humor the accusation that he was demanding more powers for himself so that he could become a dictator. On January 17, he was asked whether it was true that under the bill he would be able to give away the American navy or buy the Royal Navy. “The bill does not prevent the president from standing on his head,” Roosevelt replied, “but the president does not expect to stand on his head.”37 He suggested that perhaps the bill would be worded to allow him to buy the German navy, which would certainly solve one pressing problem. Asked whether he had consulted over Lend-Lease with the Vatican, Roosevelt roared with laughter and quipped that perhaps he should buy the Vatican navy.
Meanwhile, the disparate isolationist leaders lined up the historian Beard, the president’s perennial critic, and McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, to persuade Lindbergh and Kennedy to appear as star witnesses in the congressional hearings.38 On January 10, Fish had sent a telegram to Lindbergh, urging him to testify against the “most important and far reaching Administration bill ever presented to Congress.” Lindbergh agreed to testify on January 23.
On January 14, Fish cabled Kennedy and asked him to take pride of place as the first to testify. Kennedy, who as an ambassador remained under his obligation to refrain from criticizing administration policy so long as Roosevelt delayed naming a successor, consulted with Welles. Out in the cold, Kennedy was still angry at the president but needy for his attention. He felt that his reputation had been damaged when Luce’s Life magazine ran a display of Roosevelt’s top “foes” in the Lend-Lease battle, with himself prominent among them, alongside Charles and Anne Lindbergh, and described as “defeatist about Britain, in favor of a quick peace.”39 “I am sick and tired of being attacked by both sides and think I am at least entitled to state my position clearly,” Kennedy told Welles, adding, as if there were any doubt, “I’m sore.” Kennedy bought radio time to put the record straight, and agreed to appear before the House committee. Hoover, like Kennedy, lived in the Waldorf Towers and made a neighborly visit to the ambassador, who read out a draft of his impending broadcast. Hoover declared it “one of the finest speeches he had ever heard.”
Hoover was bullish about the chances of defeating the bill, telling Kennedy that “the Republicans were going to stand quite solidly against the bill and if the Democrats could marshal 50 or 60 votes against the bill they would kill it.”40 Hoover hoped Kennedy would come out cleanly against Lend-Lease and spur a Democratic revolt in the House.
Alarmed at the damage Kennedy might inflict, Roosevelt summoned the ambassador to the White House. Although it was mid-morning, Roosevelt, dressed in pajamas, welcomed Kennedy into his bathroom, invited him to perch on the toilet seat, and started to shave. Kennedy told the president he was “for all aid to Britain short of going to war,” but warned that if Lend-Lease were forced through Congress against the opposition of people like him, “it would leave a very bad taste.”41 Kennedy urged the president to allow Democrats to make changes to the bill, and Roosevelt said he was prepared to allow an amendment proposed by the Republican James Wadsworth to set up a joint House/Senate oversight committee to monitor implementation of Lend-Lease.
As he left the White House, Kennedy made an ominous remark to reporters, hoping to draw maximum attention to his impending broadcast. “For once, I am going to say for myself what I have in my mind,” he told them.42 Before returning to New York, the ambassador discreetly consulted Wheeler, who said he was “delighted” that the president had condemned his “plow every fourth boy under” remark because it showed the isolationists “were making headway.”43
Kennedy made his broadcast on January 18. “Many Americans, including myself, have been subjected to deliberate smear campaigns merely because we differed from an articulate minority [that favors arming Britain],” he said. He denied he was or had ever been a defeatist. When he reported from London “the seriousness of the problems that faced the British,” he was telling the truth, as was his duty as an ambassador. “A prediction now of England’s [sic] defeat would be senseless,” he said. “One can recognize the enormous difficulties facing Britain without foreseeing its defeat.”
He said he resented being labeled an appeaser by “certain citizens who favor keeping America out of the war.” But “if I am called an appeaser because I oppose the entrance of this country into the present war, I cheerfully plead guilty.” Helping Britain would give America time to rearm, but “aid should not and must not go to the point where war becomes inevitable.”
As for neutrality, “This country certainly has committed acts sufficiently un-neutral to justify a less despotic tyrant than Hitler to declare war,” he said. “The American people obviously have not the slightest desire to remain neutral in the face of the aggression of the Axis powers.” He asked, who wanted war? “Certainly the isolationists (with whom I cannot sympathize) do not want war,” he said. “The President has declared on many occasions that he does not want war. Congress surely is dedicated to the task of keeping us at peace. Why, then, all the shouting?”
America was unprepared for war. “If I could be assured that America, unprepared as she now is, could by declaring war on Germany within the space of say a year end the threat of German domination, I would be in favor of declaring war right now. The inescapable point, however, is that we are not prepared to fight a war—even a defensive one—at the moment.” The war in Europe was not America’s war. “England is not fighting our battle. This is not our war. We were not consulted when it began. We had no veto power over its continuance,” he said.
Finally, he declared himself wholly against Lend-Lease. “I am unable to agree . . . that it has yet been shown that we face such immediate danger as to justify this surrender of the authority and responsibility of the Congress,” he said.44 But if the law passed, Americans should fall in behind the president.
Kennedy’s broadcast was a confused, self-contradictory, inconsistent, ill-argued mess that failed to impress either side in the Lend-Lease debate. Where was the decisive, snappy, combative Kennedy of the Globe interview? The ambassador was diagnosed by observers as suffering from personal distress at being shunned by the president, yet unable to break free of Roosevelt’s embrace. “Mr. Kennedy evidently felt himself to be virtually on trial, charged with disloyalty to the President,” was the Christian Century’s conclusion. The following night, on the eve of his appearance before the House committee, Kennedy spoke off the record to a small group of Washington reporters, all of whom were left feeling that the next day the ambassador would stop shilly-shallying and launch a blistering assault on Lend-Lease.
In the morning, confident that Kennedy was about to hole Lend-Lease below the waterline, Fish leapt to his feet when the ambassador entered the committee room and shook him vigorously by the hand. Kennedy was happy to be back in the limelight and exuded confidence as he answered questions for five hours. Yet for all the thousands of words he uttered, he only succeeded in magnifying the confusion sown by his broadcast. His most definitive statement was, “I do not want to see this country go to war under any conditions whatever unless we are attacked.” Otherwise he appeared muddled, poorly briefed, under-rehearsed, and out of his depth.
He wanted amendments made to the bill but could not say exactly what they should be. When asked point-blank what he wanted to change, he confessed, “I cannot express an opinion on that. I am not an expert on that at all. I have no experience drafting bills. I am afraid I am one of those critics that only becomes constructive after he sees what the other fellow has done.” He admitted, “I do not want to make any suggestions, because I do not know what I am talking about.”45 As the daylong testimony came to an end, Fish put a brave face on the confusion, lauding Kennedy as “the one man who, more than any other, is trying to keep the United States out of this war.” But few thought Kennedy had lived up to his carefully constructed reputation for talking truth to power.
Kennedy was aware that he had pleased neither side and wrote a self-pitying letter to Roosevelt’s son-in-law Boettiger complaining that “if my statements and my position means that . . . I am to be a social outcast by the administration, so be it.” The president told Boettiger, “It is, I think a little pathetic that he worries about being, with his family, social outcasts. As a matter of fact, he ought to realize of course that he has only himself to blame for the country’s opinion as to his testimony before the Committees. Most people and most papers got the feeling that he was blowing hot and blowing cold at the same time—trying to carry water on both shoulders.”46