Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (114 page)

C
HURCHILL THRILLED
at the president’s offer. “I need not tell you how cheered I am by your message or how grateful I feel for your untiring efforts to give us all possible help,” he wrote Roosevelt. “You know well that the worth of every destroyer that you can spare to us is measured in rubies.” Churchill accepted Roosevelt’s conditions. The assurance about making sure the ships stayed out of German hands accorded with Churchill’s own strong, and oft-stated, inclinations. “We intend to fight this out here to the end, and none of us would ever buy peace by surrendering or scuttling the fleet.” Yet Churchill appreciated Roosevelt’s willingness not to publicize such a promise. “In any use you may make of this repeated assurance you will please bear in mind the disastrous effect from our point of view and perhaps also from yours of allowing any impression to grow that we regard the conquest of the British Islands and its naval bases as any other than an impossible contingency.” As to the bases the president desired, these would present no problem. Churchill, like Roosevelt, was willing to leave the geographical details to a later date. “We can discuss them at leisure.”

The details proved to be more difficult than either Churchill or Roosevelt had anticipated. Churchill’s political problems were only somewhat less pressing than Roosevelt’s; no more than the American president could the British prime minister be seen as giving away assets important to national defense. Churchill proposed treating the transfer of the destroyers and the leasing of naval bases as separate issues. “I had not contemplated anything in the nature of a contract, bargain or sale between us,” he wrote Roosevelt. “Our view is that we are two friends helping each other as far as we can.” Any acknowledgment of a quid pro quo would create difficulties. “Once this idea is accepted, people will contrast on each side what is given and received. The money value of the arms would be computed and set against the facilities, and some would think one thing about it and some another.”

American politics pushed Roosevelt in the other direction. For him, the quid pro quo was essential lest the isolationists be stirred once more into effective action. There was some constitutional question whether the president could transfer American military assets to another country simply on his own authority, but the more important question was the political one of whether he
should
do so. Roosevelt’s sensitivity to the politics of the matter was such that he tried to gain Willkie’s approval of the deal before he announced it. To some extent this effort was motivated by a sincere desire for bipartisanship in foreign policy. Roosevelt had taken two steps toward bipartisanship by appointing a pair of Republicans to head the cabinet defense departments. Henry Stimson, William Howard Taft’s secretary of war and Herbert Hoover’s secretary of state, returned, at the age of seventy-two, to the War Department. Frank Knox, the publisher of the
Chicago Daily News
and the Republican candidate for vice president in 1936, took over the Navy Department. Yet bipartisanship was hardly the whole story of the approach to Willkie. Roosevelt reckoned that if Willkie signed on to the destroyer deal, he would give voters even less reason than they already had to swap the incumbent for the challenger. If he refused to accept it, his professed desire to grant Britain all the aid it required would be seen as hollow.

Roosevelt sent William Allen White, Theodore Roosevelt’s old admirer and, as the chairman of the self-appointed Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, the leading Republican interventionist, to talk to Willkie. The Republican nominee, doubtless perceiving Roosevelt’s game—and with perceptions perhaps sharpened by recollection of Roosevelt’s refusal to cooperate with Hoover in 1932—declined to be drawn in.

This simply increased the president’s caution. He emphasized the value of the bases to American security, while ignoring the contribution of the destroyers to Britain’s defense. In a letter to a skeptic from his own party, Senator David Walsh of Massachusetts, the chairman of the naval affairs committee, Roosevelt related a tale of a run-in with a Dutchess County farmer that may have been apocryphal.

I told him the gist of the proposal, which is, in effect, to buy ninety-nine-year leases from Great Britain for at least seven naval and air bases in British colonial possessions—not including the Dominion of Canada, which is a separate study on my part. The farmer replied somewhat as follows:

“Say, ain’t you the Commander-in-Chief? If you are and own fifty muzzle-loadin’ rifles of the Civil War period, you would be a chump if you declined to exchange them for seven modern machine guns—wouldn’t you?”

Roosevelt continued in his own voice, pleading sincerity and claiming a certain expertise in naval strategy.

Frankly, my difficulty is that as President and Commander-in-Chief I have no right to think of politics in the sense of being a candidate or desiring votes. You and I know that our weakness in the past has lain in the fact that from Newfoundland to Trinidad our sole protection offshore lies in the three contiguous islands of Porto Rico, St. Thomas, and St. Croix. That, in the nature of modern warfare, is a definite operating handicap. If for fifty ships, which are on their last legs anyway, we can get the right to put in naval and air bases in Newfoundland, the Bahamas, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Trinidad and British Guiana, then our operating deficiency is largely cured.

Roosevelt reminded Walsh that the founder of their party, Thomas Jefferson, had purchased Louisiana under comparable circumstances, while France was beset by England. “He did this without even consulting the Congress. He put the deal through and later on he asked the House Committee on Appropriations to put $15,000,000 into the appropriation bill.” The bases in question were no Louisiana, but the transfer was a bargain nonetheless. “The fifty destroyers are the same type of ship which we have been from time to time striking from the naval list and selling for scrap for, I think, $4,000 or $5,000 per destroyer. On that basis, the cost of the right to at least seven naval and air bases is an extremely low one from the point of view of the United States Government—i.e., about $250,000!”

With the press Roosevelt was even more artful. He announced at a news conference that some American naval and military officers were visiting England. “This has nothing to do with destroyers,” Roosevelt told the reporters. “But I am initiating, holding conversations with the British government for the acquisition of naval bases and air bases for the defense of the Americas and particularly with relationship to the Panama Canal.”

“Did I understand you to say, Mr. President, that they had no relation to destroyers?” a reporter pressed.

“I would not use it,” Roosevelt responded opaquely, regarding the information he had just given them. “That is just a little private tip.”

The reporters were puzzled. The president was the one who had brought up the destroyers at this session. “This is a matter of destroyers?” one asked.

“It is not a matter of destroyers. That is exactly the point…. The emphasis is on the acquisition of the bases—that is the main point—for the protection of this hemisphere…. That is all there is to say.”

Of course that was
not
all there was to say. Roosevelt recognized belatedly that to deny the connection between the destroyers and the bases would be futile and transparently disingenuous. Yet the formula he ultimately devised was hardly better. He announced a combination gift and trade involving naval and air bases in Newfoundland, Bermuda, the British West Indies, and British Guiana, and American destroyers. “The rights to bases in Newfoundland and Bermuda are gifts—generously given and gladly received,” the president explained. “The other bases mentioned have been acquired in exchange for fifty of our over-age destroyers.” Roosevelt said nothing more about the ships, stressing instead the defense benefits of the agreement. “The value to the Western Hemisphere of these outposts of security is beyond calculation.”

40.

T
HE FORTUNES OF WAR DECREED THAT BY THE TIME OF
R
OOSEVELT’S
announcement no one seriously disputed that the bases could be valuable to the United States. Germany’s bombing of Britain grew ever fiercer; night after night the Luftwaffe turned London into a blazing spectacle. Perhaps the British would survive the Nazi onslaught; perhaps not. But any military regime that could deliver such destruction was one that had to be reckoned with.

Yet Roosevelt’s handling of the destroyer-for-bases deal, after his clumsy manipulation of the Democratic convention, reinforced his reputation for dubious maneuvering. The isolationists were the most insistent in asserting that the president was conspiring to take the United States to war against Germany, but one didn’t have to be an isolationist to conclude that he wasn’t telling all he knew.

Roosevelt’s response to the threat from Japan was more straightforward. The war in China, now nearly three years old, had slowed Japan’s progress toward what it was calling its “Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere,” but the outbreak of war in Europe, by distracting France and Britain, presented Tokyo with temptations to additional expansion it couldn’t resist. In June 1940 the Japanese government pressured French Indochina and British Burma, demanding that they close their borders with China—to prevent the anti-Japanese forces in China from receiving outside help—and intimating that if the demand wasn’t met military action would follow.

Japan’s renewed assertiveness compelled Roosevelt to reconsider his attitude toward Tokyo. During the previous three years Japan seemed to have trapped itself in China, where it could neither defeat the government forces headed by Chiang Kai-shek nor pull back without suffering a grave loss of face and momentum. The stalemate had allowed Roosevelt to concentrate on Europe. But now Japan was on the march again, and the administration must respond.

It was a delicate business, though. To react too strongly would risk a war Americans weren’t ready or willing to fight. To react too gently would teach the Japanese militarists that the United States could be treated with impunity.

Roosevelt’s first step was a negative one. He refused to renew the commercial treaty that had framed American trade with Japan for decades and that expired in January 1940. The president’s purpose was to remind the Japanese of their dependence on the United States for vital raw materials, including oil and scrap iron and steel. Some in the administration wanted him to go further, to an embargo of oil and scrap. But for the time being he preferred to hold this stronger sanction in abeyance.

He complemented the economic nudge with a series of warnings by Cordell Hull to Japanese officials. The Japanese government defended its Asian sphere by invoking the American Monroe Doctrine. Hull rejected the comparison as absurd. “There is no more resemblance between our Monroe Doctrine and the so-called Monroe Doctrine of Japan than there is between black and white,” the secretary of state told the Japanese ambassador in Washington. America’s doctrine was defensive; Japan’s bastardized version was a cover for the most egregious aggression. Hull told the ambassador that the growing chaos in the world had stiffened the resolve of the United States. “The American people have now become thoroughly awakened, aroused, and alert in regard to any threatened injuries to American rights and interests.” Their heightened vigilance, Hull added, was a “matter of great gratification to those of us in charge of the foreign affairs of the nation.” The secretary directed Joseph Grew in Tokyo to share a sentiment with the Japanese government: “The United States has no aggressive designs, but it will be ready to defend itself against any aggression which may be undertaken against it.”

When the warnings produced no positive result, Roosevelt ratcheted things up a notch. In July 1940 he directed that a recent law restricting strategic exports be interpreted to include aviation fuel. Nothing in the interpretation singled out Japan, but the Japanese understood the directive as targeting them, as Roosevelt intended. The Japanese embassy protested that the new rules were “tantamount to an embargo.”

Roosevelt squeezed a bit more. In September he added scrap iron and steel to the restricted list. Again, Japan was not mentioned specifically, but the Japanese government, again accurately, denounced the new measure as an “unfriendly act.”

The embargoes failed in their broader purpose, though. Japan’s aggressive impulses raged unabated. “There cannot be any doubt that the military and other elements in Japan see in the present world situation a golden opportunity to carry their dreams of expansion into effect,” Joseph Grew wrote from Tokyo. “The German victories, like strong wine, have gone to their heads.” The militarists wanted to grab what they could while the chance persisted. “It has been and is doubtful that the saner heads in and out of the government will be able to control these elements.”