Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (108 page)

R
OOSEVELT’S VICTORY
brought joy to Britain. “The repeal of the arms embargo, which has been so anxiously awaited in this country, is not only an assurance that we and our French Allies may draw on the great reservoir of American resources,” Neville Chamberlain wrote Roosevelt. “It is also a profound moral encouragement to us in the struggle in which we are engaged…. I am convinced that it will have a devastating effect on German morale.”

Repeal brought joy to particular groups in America as well. The same edition of the
New York Times
that bannered the congressional turnaround tucked a two-inch article on an inside page. “Los Angeles aircraft manufacturers looked forward tonight to the greatest boom in the history of their industry as a result of the arms embargo repeal,” the paper’s California correspondent noted. “Douglas, Lockheed and North American, the principal factories here, hold more than $110,000,000 worth of foreign and domestic orders, and expect them to be doubled.”

At the time the war in Europe began, the depression in America was nearly a decade old. Nine million men and women remained unemployed, and the nation’s output was still below its 1929 level. Thousands of factories were idle or half staffed; mines produced at far below capacity; ships, barges, and trains begged for traffic. The arms embargo hadn’t figured centrally in stifling growth, but its lifting, combined with the anticipated demand by the American military for armaments, brought new hope to American heavy industry. The aircraft sector responded first, from an expectation that this war, to a greater degree than any before, would be fought in and from the skies. Yet if the war lasted, everything associated with fighting—trucks, tanks, ships, rifles, bullets, boots, blankets, uniforms, foodstuffs—would be in tremendous demand. Such was the lesson, at any rate, of the First World War, which had set the American economy humming. Such was the hope of American manufacturers, American workers, and American farmers as the war in Europe commenced.

Roosevelt encouraged the hope, which had double meaning for him. Precisely when he determined to try for a third term is unclear. He never revealed his thinking on the subject. Perhaps there was no single moment of decision. Perhaps the possibility of doing what no other president had done took shape in his unconscious mind and emerged only slowly in his consciousness. But at some level, unconscious or otherwise, he weighed his options and their relative merits. To retire would free him of the strain of executive responsibility. Four years as governor and eight years as president made for a long time in charge. His personal constitution seemed to be standing the strain fairly well, but the machinery would start creaking sooner or later.

But what would he retire to? His memoirs, perhaps, which doubtless would earn him a sizable advance and allow him to bolster the family finances. Yet he had never written more than twenty pages in his life. His stamp collection? That was a mindless diversion from work, not anything to pursue for its own sake. The Warm Springs Foundation? It was thriving without him. To a genteel life at Hyde Park? There he would be back under his mother’s roof and his mother’s attempted domination. Sara was grudgingly pleased that he had become president, but she wasn’t inordinately impressed. And Hyde Park was
her
home before it was his. He had gone into politics partly to get away from Sara, and he had returned to politics after polio to stay away from her. He would be fifty-nine a week and a half after leaving the White House in 1941, if he did leave then. The thought of moving back in with his mother scarcely inspired him.

Neither did the thought of retiring to a life with Eleanor. The life they currently shared revolved almost entirely around politics. The children were adults and had lives of their own. The rationale of holding the marriage together for their sake had vanished. They had given Franklin and Eleanor several grandchildren, but even persons far more devoted to domesticity than Franklin and Eleanor didn’t find grandchildren sufficient grounds for sustaining a loveless marriage.

The love indeed had gone out of the marriage. A certain fondness survived—a remnant warmth resulting from long familiarity, shared experiences, and similar values. But if Eleanor’s thoughts tarried more than briefly on her husband’s happiness—or his unhappiness, his frustration, his satisfaction, his fear, his anger—she didn’t reveal them to him. And if he wondered, in his odd idle moment, how she was faring—or even where she was, on those very many days when she wasn’t in Washington—he didn’t let on.

Retire? As at so many other junctures in his career, Roosevelt looked to Uncle Ted—and what he saw disposed him to remain in the arena. Theodore hadn’t known what to do with himself after the presidency. He frantically slaughtered the wildlife of the African veld on a year-long safari, but even the blood of the lions and elephants hadn’t slaked his ambition, and he returned to politics, only to be rebuffed by the party he had led. He again sought release in physical action: an ill-conceived expedition to the darkest heart of the Amazon. He nearly died, and the experience ruined his health permanently. He became a bitter partisan, reviling Wilson in language he would have considered seditious had the attacks been leveled against him when he was president. Franklin’s personality differed from Theodore’s, and Franklin knew it. But the Rough Rider’s final decade didn’t speak well for voluntary retirement from the presidency.

Nor did the experience of other recent presidents. In Franklin’s adulthood, only Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, and Coolidge left the White House other than by death or defeat. Wilson was broken in health and spirit during his last eighteen months in office, and he never recovered. Coolidge’s retirement was graceful enough, but Roosevelt didn’t consider Silent Cal a role model for much of anything. Besides, even the quiet confines of rural Vermont proved more than Coolidge could handle; he expired before the term he chose not to run for did.

There was another reason not to retire. Although Roosevelt lacked the organized understanding of history possessed by Uncle Ted, he knew what made for greatness in American history, if only because he had seen how the same knowledge in Theodore had eaten away at the Colonel’s soul during the First World War. Theodore knew—and Franklin learned—that presidential greatness required rising to a historic challenge. George Washington was accounted great for leading America to independence in the Revolutionary War. Abraham Lincoln was reckoned great for having held the country together during the Civil War. The war that broke out in Europe in 1914 had presented Wilson with the opportunity for comparable greatness. Theodore Roosevelt recognized this, and the recognition, combined with the knowledge that he, not Wilson, would have been the one to benefit from the opportunity had the Republican nomination in 1912 not been stolen by the Taft forces, rankled him mercilessly. The fact that Wilson, at war’s end, fumbled the opportunity rankled him the more.

Franklin Roosevelt knew the story well, having observed it from the unique position of being at once inside the Wilson administration and inside the Roosevelt family. And he understood that the war that was now beginning in Europe afforded him an opportunity at least comparable to what Theodore had coveted and Wilson mishandled. He himself had had one historic opportunity to rise to greatness—and he had fallen short. In public he was politician enough to proclaim the successes of the New Deal in treating the symptoms of the Great Depression; in private he was honest enough to recognize the New Deal’s central failure—to end the depression itself.

But now fate threw him another opportunity, one that might allow him to remedy his failure even as it gave him the chance to write his name in bold letters across the history of the world. Whether as peacemaker or warmaker, the American president at this moment of crisis would hold the balance of global power in his hands. The United States had tipped the balance in the First World War but then retreated from responsibility for the result. It could tip the balance again—and it certainly would, if Franklin Roosevelt was in command. The stakes were higher than ever. Not merely Europe but Asia was at risk. And the challenge was more profound than ever. Fascism threatened the very existence of democracy. The freedoms on which America had been established might survive or they might be extinguished. Whether it was the one or the other could well rest with the man who held the American presidency during the next few years. A side effect of the fighting abroad would almost certainly be the recovery of the American economy. Whoever was president at the time would get the credit.

Such a chance at greatness had been given to no president in American history. It was an opportunity the like of which few persons in the long course of human history had ever faced.

Retire? Hardly.

38.

“H
ITLER IS TALLER THAN
I
JUDGED FROM HIS PHOTOGRAPHS,”
S
UMNER
Welles wrote Roosevelt from Berlin.

He has, in real life, none of the somewhat effeminate appearance of which he has been accused. He looked in excellent physical condition and in good training. His color was good, and while his eyes were tired, they were clear. He was dignified both in speech and movement, and there was not the slightest impression of the comic effect from moustache and hair which one sees in his caricatures. His voice in conversation is low and well modulated. It had only once, in our hour and a half ’s conversation, the raucous stridency which is heard in his speeches—and it was only at that moment that his features lost their composure and that his eyes lost their decidedly “gemütlich” look. He spoke with clarity and precision, and always in a beautiful German, of which I could follow every word, although Dr. Schmidt of course interpreted, at times inaccurately.

Roosevelt had sent Welles to Germany to size up Hitler and the Nazi leadership. The undersecretary of state’s public charge was to listen and observe. “This visit is solely for the purpose of advising the President and the Secretary of State as to present conditions in Europe,” Roosevelt told the press in February 1940. “Mr. Welles will, of course, be authorized to make no proposals or commitments in the name of the Government of the United States.” Privately Roosevelt authorized Welles to go further: to see if the good offices of the American president might induce the Germans to call off their war before engaging Britain and France directly. The odds appeared slim; Hitler could not step back without losing face. But it was worth a try. If it worked, it would be a brilliant stroke, benefiting millions of Europeans, saving the United States from possible involvement in the conflict, and almost certainly bringing a second Nobel Peace Prize to the Roosevelt family.

The president’s efforts to downplay the Welles mission failed; the undersecretary’s approach aroused “the greatest interest in the highest government circles here,” according to the American chargé d’affaires in Berlin, Alexander Kirk. German leaders had no illusions that Welles was simply gathering facts; they assumed he was attempting, on Roosevelt’s behalf, to compel Germany to abandon the causes that had guided its policies for the last three years. They determined to resist anything of the kind.

“The Minister received me at the door, glacially and without the semblance of a smile or a word of greeting,” Welles wrote Roosevelt after a session with Foreign Minister Ribbentrop. “I expressed my pleasure at being afforded the opportunity of talking with him, and spoke in English, since I knew that he spoke English fluently, having passed, as a wine salesman, several years in England, and four years in the United States and Canada. The Minister looked at me icily and barked at the famous Dr. Schmidt, the official interpreter, who stood behind him: ‘Interpret.’”

Welles explained that President Roosevelt had authorized him “to ascertain whether there existed a possibility of the establishment of a sound and permanent peace in Europe.” The American government was not interested in anything temporary or precarious. Whatever the foreign minister cared to disclose would be for the president’s ears only.

“Ribbentrop then commenced to speak and never stopped, except to request the interpreter from time to time to translate the preceding portion of his discourse, for more than two hours,” Welles wrote Roosevelt. “The Minister, who is a good-looking man of some fifty years with notably haggard features and grey hair, sat with his arms extended on the sides of his chair and his eyes continuously closed. He evidently envisioned himself as the Delphic Oracle.” The sum of the oracle’s message was that Germany had no quarrel with the United States and that no aspect of its foreign policy impinged on America’s legitimate interests. The hostile attitude the Roosevelt administration had adopted toward Germany came therefore as a mystery to German leaders, himself included. “He could only assume that lying propaganda had had a preponderant influence.”

In his account to Roosevelt, Welles said he had felt obliged to hold his tongue and not respond to Ribbentrop. “He was so obviously aggressive, so evidently laboring under a violent mental and emotional strain, that it seemed to me probable that if I replied at this juncture with what I intended to say, violent polemics would presumably ensue.”

Ribbentrop didn’t require the encouragement. He angrily lectured Welles on the course of Germany’s European diplomacy, explaining how the Führer had sought good relations, particularly with England, but had been rebuffed. “Time and again England had not only repulsed his overtures with scorn—and the German word ‘Hohn’ came out like the hiss of a snake—but had with craft and guile done her utmost to prevent the German people from once more assuming their rightful place in the family of nations.” The English had provoked the current war by goading the Polish government to unreasonable demands. The German government knew this for a fact. “It had incontrovertible proof that England had incited the Poles to determine upon war against Germany,” Welles reported Ribbentrop as saying. “And it had incontrovertible proof that statesmen of countries not in the slightest degree connected with the issues involved had urged the Polish government to make no concession of any nature to Germany.