Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (119 page)

He redrew the map of the Western Hemisphere, annexing Greenland to greater North America and thereby casting the net of the Monroe Doctrine around that North Atlantic island. He negotiated American basing rights in Greenland with the stranded Danish ambassador. “Under the present circumstances the Government in Denmark cannot, of course, act in respect of its territory in the Western Hemisphere,” Roosevelt explained.

He ordered American warships to extend their patrols far out into the Atlantic and protect the Lend-Lease fleet against Germany’s disconcertingly successful submarine campaign. But he did so quietly, even deceptively, denying that the patrols were anything like convoys. When reporters pressed him on the matter, he insisted on the difference, though he had difficulty explaining what that difference was. “I think some of you know what a horse looks like,” he said. “I think you also know what a cow looks like. If, by calling a cow a horse for a year and a half, you think that that makes the cow a horse, I don’t think so.”

“Mr. President, can you tell us the difference between a patrol and a convoy?”

“You know the difference between a cow and a horse?”

Roosevelt’s spring campaign of war readiness culminated at the end of May with a declaration of unlimited national emergency. “What started as a European war has developed, as the Nazis always intended it should develop, into a world war for world domination,” the president told the American people. Those persons who contended that Hitler had no designs beyond Europe were the same ones who had said he had no designs on Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium, or France. Yet even if Hitler left the Americas alone, the consequences of Nazi rule elsewhere would destroy the American way of life.

The American laborer would have to compete with slave labor in the rest of the world. Minimum wages, maximum hours? Nonsense! Wages and hours would be fixed by Hitler…. Farm income? What happens to all farm surpluses without any foreign trade? The American farmer would get for his products exactly what Hitler wanted to give…. Even our right of worship would be threatened. The Nazi world does not recognize any God except Hitler.

Roosevelt told his radio audience that the central front in the struggle against fascism had shifted from the air over Britain to the seaways that linked the Old World to the New. The Battle of the Atlantic extended from the ice pack around Greenland nearly to Antarctica. German submarines were torpedoing British ships, and even neutral vessels, at an alarming rate. The British were fighting valiantly, but they weren’t winning. The Germans were sinking ships far faster than the British—even with American help—could replace them. Until now the United States hadn’t taken on the Germans directly, Roosevelt said. Nor would America take them on unless attacked. Yet Americans must understand what it meant to be attacked in the age of modern warfare. “Some people seem to think that we are not attacked until bombs actually drop in the streets of New York or San Francisco or New Orleans or Chicago…. They are simply shutting their eyes to the lesson that we must learn from the fate of every nation that the Nazis have conquered.” Americans must prepare themselves ahead of the attack. “It would be suicide to wait until they are in our front yard.”

Roosevelt explained that in strengthening American patrols of the Atlantic he would be guided by two fundamental principles:

First, we shall actively resist wherever necessary, and with all our resources, every attempt by Hitler to extend his Nazi domination to the Western Hemisphere….

Second, from the point of view of strict naval and military necessity, we shall give every possible assistance to Britain and to all who, with Britain, are resisting Hitlerism or its equivalent with force of arms.

The implementation of these principles demanded the utmost effort by the entire country—hence the declaration of national emergency. “The nation will expect all individuals and all groups to play their full parts, without stint, and without selfishness, and without doubt that our democracy will triumphantly survive.”

T
HREE WEEKS LATER
the worst-kept secret in modern military history surprised the only person who really needed to know it. The chancelleries, embassies, and intelligence ministries of Western Europe had been buzzing for months with rumors that Hitler was going to double-cross Stalin and attack the Soviet Union. The rumors were plausible enough. No one believed that the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact of 1939 had been anything more than a truce of convenience, and almost everyone believed that Hitler, frustrated by his failure to batter the British into surrendering, would be just the type to take out his frustrations on the Russians. The single thing that cast doubt on the rumors was that a German attack on the Soviets would be so stupid. Why would Hitler willingly take on a new enemy—one as large and manpower-rich as Russia—before he had defeated the enemies he already had? But perhaps that was the diabolical genius of the plan: it was so patently stupid that Stalin would never believe Hitler would attempt it.

Plenty of other people believed he would. “From every source at my disposal including some most trustworthy, it looks as if a vast German onslaught on the Russian frontier is imminent,” Churchill wrote Roosevelt on June 14. “Not only are the main German armies deployed from Finland to Roumania, but the final arrivals of air and armoured forces are being completed.” If true, the rumors foretold a crucial shift in the nature of the war. “Should this new war break out, we shall of course give all encouragement and any help we can spare to the Russians, following the principle that Hitler is the foe we have to beat. I do not expect any class political reactions here and trust that a German-Russian conflict will not cause you any embarrassment.”

Embarrassment wasn’t the word Roosevelt would have used. When Germany on June 22 did indeed attack the Soviet Union, opening an eastern front in the European war, Hitler went far toward making a prophet of Roosevelt, who had already declared the conflict a world war, provoked by Hitler’s insatiable appetite for conquest. But beyond the satisfaction that came from proven prescience, Roosevelt couldn’t help fearing that this new development would complicate the strategy he was gradually laying out before the American people. Roosevelt remembered how Wilson had capitalized on the first stage of the Russian revolution of 1917, which toppled the czar and brought Russia—briefly—into the realm of democracy. At the moment of requesting a war declaration, Wilson had been able to say that the purpose of the war was to make the world safe for democracy. Roosevelt had been following Wilson till now, stressing that the most visible victims of fascism had been democracies. By attacking Stalin—by diverting the major part of his army from Western Europe to the East—Hitler lessened the logistical strain on the emerging Anglo-American alliance, but he added to Roosevelt’s political burdens. The president only lately had begun to feel that the isolationists were being effectively neutralized; this would give them new life. Should he assert that the United States ought to assist the Soviets—as Churchill clearly wanted America to do—the isolationists’ complaint that American resources were propping up British imperialism would be echoed by their outcry that the administration was supporting communism.

Churchill pushed the president harder, and more publicly, in a radio address broadcast in America as well as Britain. “It is not for me to speak of the action of the United States,” the prime minister acknowledged. “But this I will say: if Hitler imagines that his attack on Soviet Russia will cause the slightest divergence of aims or slackening of effort in the great democracies who are resolved upon his doom, he is woefully mistaken.” Anyone could see that whatever helped Hitler hurt the cause of freedom, and what harmed Hitler served freedom. “The Russian danger is, therefore, our danger and the danger of the United States, just as the cause of any Russian fighting for his hearth and home is the cause of free men and free peoples in every quarter of the globe.”

Roosevelt wasn’t inclined to be so forthright. He let the State Department weigh in on the relative merits of fascism and communism. Both systems denied fundamental human freedoms, including the right to worship as one’s conscience directed, Undersecretary Sumner Welles explained. Yet in wartime choices had to be made. Hitler was on the offensive against democracy; Stalin was not. The conclusion was irresistible: “Any rallying of the forces opposing Hitlerism, from whatever source these forces may spring, will hasten the eventual downfall of the present German leaders and will therefore redound to the benefit of our own defense and security.” Even so, Welles declined to say whether the United States would assist the Soviets in their fight against Germany. And he told reporters that Roosevelt hadn’t made a decision on the subject.

Welles wasn’t exactly lying; Roosevelt had not made a formal decision on aid to Russia. He knew what he intended to do, but he wished to gauge the public reaction before he shared his thinking with the public. The isolationists responded much as he expected. “It’s a case of dog-eat-dog,” Senator Bennett Clark, a Democrat from Missouri, declared. “Stalin is as bloody-handed as Hitler. I don’t think we should help either one. We should tend to our own business, as we should have been doing all along.” Harry Truman, Missouri’s other senator, also a Democrat, suggested an even-handed—and bloody-handed—approach. “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia,” Truman said. “If Russia is winning we ought to help Germany…. Letthem kill as many as possible.” Truman tilted slightly toward Stalin, however: “I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.” Robert M. La Follette, the Wisconsin Progressive, predicted that interventionists in America—he didn’t identify Roosevelt by name, but he didn’t have to—would soon begin “the greatest whitewash act in all history,” to make Russia into an acceptable ally. “The American people will be told to forget the purges in Russia by the OGPU, the confiscation of property, the persecution of religion, the invasion of Finland, and the vulture role Stalin played in seizing half of prostrate Poland.”

Eight months earlier—before the 1940 election—Roosevelt might have heeded the criticism and stepped back. But when the isolationists’ arguments failed to catch on with the broader public, the president moved swiftly to put Russia on the American aid list. He ordered the Treasury to release $40 million in Soviet assets that had been frozen when Moscow and Berlin were de facto allies, and he directed that export licenses be granted to the Kremlin for items previously barred.

“Is the defense of Russia the defense of the United States?” a reporter asked.

Roosevelt declined to answer. But he made clear by his actions that the defense of Russia would
assist
the defense of the United States.

F
OR TWO DECADES
Missy LeHand had scarcely left Roosevelt’s side. She served as secretary, gatekeeper, surrogate wife, second mother, adoring partisan, loving friend. She gave up any semblance of a normal life to serve him. He knew it, and he loved her for it. And when she fell ill, typically from overwork and overworry, he suffered from the loss of her steady support and warm companionship.

She had experienced a few breakdowns before but each time had quickly recovered. In June 1941, however, the day before the Germans invaded Russia, she collapsed from a major stroke. Her right side was paralyzed, and she could no longer speak. Roosevelt ensured she was well cared for, and amid the stunning news from Europe and the complications the new twist in the war created for American policy, the president spent time each day at her hospital bedside. He told her stories: about office politics, about Churchill’s latest letter or cable, about his troubles with the isolationists. She couldn’t reply, and he didn’t know how much of what he said she understood. He laughed, in the bluff way he had long laughed at his own infirmity. She couldn’t laugh but only cry.