Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (118 page)

“What’s stopping you?” Hopkins rejoined.

“Well, it couldn’t be arranged right now.” Roosevelt couldn’t leave America with his historic third inauguration pending, and he couldn’t invite Churchill without seeming to confirm the isolationists’ charge that he was selling the country out to England.

“How about me going over, Mr. President?”

Roosevelt initially rejected the idea. Hopkins had charge of the president’s speech writing team, among his other duties, and with the annual message and the inaugural address coming up, Roosevelt didn’t think he could spare him. Besides, Hopkins would manage the administration’s end of the contest for Lend-Lease.

Hopkins responded that the president’s regular speech writers—Sam Rosenman and Bob Sherwood—knew their work well enough to get along without supervision. Anyway, Roosevelt always did the final editing himself. As for managing the Lend-Lease bill, Hopkins said he would do as much harm as good with the lawmakers. “They’d never pay any attention to my views, except to vote the other way.”

Roosevelt still refused. Yet some weeks later, without informing Hopkins of any change of mind, he announced at a press conference that Hopkins would be traveling to England as his “personal representative.”

The reporters knew Hopkins had the president’s ear and confidence. “Does Mr. Hopkins have any special mission, Mr. President?” one asked.

“No, no, no!”

“Any title?”

“No, no.”

“Will anyone accompany Mr. Hopkins?”

“No, and he will have no powers.”

Though Hopkins had lobbied for the mission, the journey almost killed him. He had never fully recovered from his cancer and surgery, and transoceanic air travel, especially during wartime, tested the hardiest constitution. Hopkins flew by Pan American Clipper, a flying boat better known for durability than for speed or comfort. He suffered horribly from motion sickness and had to be guided gently off the plane after it reached England. But he was taken in hand by the British government and made as comfortable as possible in London.

For all Roosevelt’s press conference disclaimers, Hopkins had a definite, if somewhat unspecific, mission. “I want to try to get an understanding of Churchill and of the men he sees after midnight,” he told Edward Murrow. His first meeting with the prime minister took place not long after his arrival. “Number 10 Downing Street is a bit down at the heels because the Treasury next door has been bombed a bit,” Hopkins reported to Roosevelt. “The Prime Minister is no longer permitted to sleep here and I understand sleeps across the street.” Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s personal assistant, guided Hopkins in.

Bracken led me to a little dining room in the basement, poured me some sherry, and left me to wait for the Prime Minister. A rotund, smiling, red-faced gentleman appeared, extended a fat but none the less convincing hand and wished me welcome to England. A short black coat, striped trousers, a clear eye, and a mushy voice was the impression of England’s leader as he showed me with obvious pride the photography of his beautiful daughter-in-law and grandchild.

Hopkins told Churchill that President Roosevelt would be happy for a chance to meet the prime minister, but only later in the spring, after the Lend-Lease program was safely launched. Churchill reciprocated the feeling. “He talked of remaining as long as two weeks and seemed very anxious to meet the President face to face,” Hopkins recounted.

Churchill reflected on the war to date and projected its future course. He said Germany could not invade Britain successfully. “He thinks Hitler may use poison gas,” Hopkins related, “but if they do England will reply in kind, killing man for man—‘for we too have the deadliest gases in the world’—but under no circumstances will they be used unless the Germans release gas first.” The prime minister asserted that air power would determine the outcome of the war. “Churchill said that while Germany’s bombers were at the ratio of 2
¹
/2 to 1”—as against the British—“at the present time, that would soon be reduced to 1
¹
/2 to 1, and then he felt they could hold their own in the air. Indeed he looks forward, with our help, to mastery in the air, and then Germany with all her armies will be finished. He believes that this war will never see great forces massed against one another.”

Hopkins had intended to be in England for a couple weeks; instead he stayed six. Churchill fascinated him. The prime minister held the key to Britain’s success, Hopkins told Roosevelt.

Churchill
is the government in every sense of the word. He controls the grand strategy and often the details. Labor trusts him. The army, navy, air force are behind him to a man. The politicians and upper crust tend to like him. I cannot emphasize too strongly that he is the one and only person over here with whom you need to have a full meeting of minds.

Hopkins wasn’t simply gathering intelligence for Roosevelt; he was also representing Roosevelt to the British. The president, of course, appreciated this part of the mission, and he guessed Hopkins would charm his hosts, in his disarmingly American way, as much as he had charmed Roosevelt. And so he did. From valets to cabinet ministers they praised his unaffected, unassuming approach. “Mr. Hopkins was very genial, considerate—if I may say so, lovable,” a waiter at Claridge’s Hotel, which Hopkins made his headquarters, remarked. Max Beaverbrook, Churchill’s minister of war production, hosted a dinner for Hopkins and invited the London press. “Hopkins rose, looking lean, shy and untidy, grasping the back of his chair,” a reporter present recalled.

His words were private, so no notes were taken. But if it had been possible to record the sentences that came quietly and diffidently from the lips of Harry Hopkins they would have compared well for nobility of expression with the splendid oration which Mr. Roosevelt had delivered two days earlier when he was sworn in for the third time as President of the United States.

Not that Hopkins repeated or even echoed the President’s speech. He talked in more intimate terms. Where the President had spoken of America’s duty to the world, Hopkins told us how the President and those around him were convinced that America’s world duty could be successfully performed only in partnership with Britain. He told us of the anxiety and admiration with which every phase of Britain’s lonely struggle was watched from the White House, and of his own emotions as he travelled through our blitzed land. His speech left us with the feeling that although America was not yet in the war, she was marching beside us, and that should we stumble she would see we did not fall. Above all he convinced us that the President and the men about him blazed with faith in the future of democracy.

T
HE FOREIGN REACTIONS
to Lend-Lease varied predictably by country and government. Adolf Hitler scorned the program as desperately ineffectual. “No power and no support coming from any part of the world can change the outcome of this battle in any respect,” the German dictator declared. “International finance and plutocracy wants to fight this war to the finish. So the end of this war will, and must, be its destruction.” A spokesman for Joseph Stalin interpreted the new development in similarly economic terms: “The war is taking the form of a contest between the world’s strongest capitalist industrial machines—a contest for speed, quantity, and quality in the production of weapons.”

The prospective recipients of the American aid naturally adopted a more positive view. Churchill declared the program “a new Magna Charta, which not only has regard to the rights and laws upon which a healthy and advancing civilization can alone be erected, but also proclaims, by precept and example, the duty of free men and free nations, wherever they may be, to share the responsibility and burden of enforcing them.” Robert Gordon Menzies, the prime minister of Australia, which with the rest of the empire was fighting alongside Britain, said to the Americans, “You are neutral and we are at war, but you have made the whole world understand that the moral and material might of a great neutral country can always be placed behind the belligerent who fights for justice.” Jan Christiaan Smuts, the South African prime minister and senior member of Britain’s imperial war cabinet, put the matter most succinctly and, arguably, most accurately. “Hitler has at last brought America into the war,” Smuts said.

Roosevelt still resisted this characterization but with nothing like the verve of the previous months. The convincing majorities for Lend-Lease demonstrated the willingness of Americans to look the Axis danger in the face. And the language of the Lend-Lease Act revealed Congress’s confidence in Roosevelt to guide them against that danger. Entitled “An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States,” the measure authorized the president to “sell, transfer title to, exchange, lease, lend, or otherwise dispose of” any defense article to “the government of any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States.” Not without reason had critics of the bill called it a blank check.

Roosevelt’s first move upon passage of the bill was to ask Congress to fill in the blank on the amount line of the check. He sought $7 billion, which had seemed a huge sum only months before but now looked like a mere down payment. In supporting his request, Roosevelt spoke in more belligerent terms than ever. The vote in favor of Lend-Lease, he said, was “the end of any attempts at appeasement in our land,…the end of compromise with tyranny and the forces of oppression.” The decision to join the struggle required that Americans make sacrifices. “Whether you are in the armed services; whether you are a steel worker or a stevedore; a machinist or a housewife; a farmer or a banker; a storekeeper or a manufacturer—to all of you it will mean sacrifice in behalf of your country and your liberties.” Americans would experience the war effort in their daily lives. “You will have to be content with lower profits, lower profits from business because obviously your taxes will be higher. You will have to work longer at your bench, or your plow, or your machine, or your desk.” Some Americans might think that since the fighting remained far away, they weren’t as deeply involved as those on the front lines. Such an attitude could lead to disaster. “It’s an all-out effort—and nothing short of an all-out effort will win.”

R
OOSEVELT CONTRIBUTED
to the all-out effort by exercising his executive powers to the limit. He created, by presidential fiat, an Office of Price Administration and Civilian Supply, modeled on the executive agencies that commandeered the American economy during the First World War, and a National Defense Mediation Board, to settle strikes that threatened to disrupt war production. He jawboned coal miners and operators in a bituminous dispute to resume mining—“in the interest of national safety.” He urged labor and management in general to adopt a wartime mentality. “Our problem is to see to it that there is no idle critical machine in the United States,” he said. “The goal should be to work these machines twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week.” He requested new funds to allow the National Youth Administration to train defense workers. He seized foreign cargo ships in American ports, where many of them had been caught by the war, on grounds that they were clogging the harbors and could be put to better use by the American merchant marine. He ordered the secretary of war to supervise a major increase in the production of heavy bombers. “Command of the air by the democracies must and can be achieved,” he said.

He kicked off a campaign for the sale of Defense Savings Bonds and Defense Postal Savings Stamps by purchasing the first bond for Eleanor and the first hundred stamps for his grandchildren. He called on Congress to raise taxes to pay for the war effort. “Defense is a national task to which every American must contribute in accordance with his talents and treasure,” he wrote Robert Doughton, the chairman of the House ways and means committee.