Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (120 page)

When the doctors at the hospital had done all they could for her, he put her on the train to Warm Springs. He paid for her medical care and rehabilitation, and when it became apparent that she would never recover, he revised his will to ensure her support in the event he died before she did. “I owed her that much,” he told James. “She served me so well for so long, and asked so little in return.”

A
S
M
ISSY’S CANDLE
flickered, another flame glowed brighter. Since their 1918 parting, Roosevelt and Lucy Mercer had kept their distance from each other. She married a widower, Winthrop Rutherfurd, who was as much older than she was as James Roosevelt had been older than Sara. Lucy was devoted to Rutherfurd, bearing him one child, looking after his five other children, and tending to him as his health eventually failed. But she couldn’t help observing the rise of Franklin Roosevelt. They corresponded sporadically. She congratulated him on the birth of his first grandchild—“though I do not know exactly what one’s feelings are on that question,” she wrote. He asked Missy to get her a ticket to his 1933 inaugural ceremony and to send the White House limousine to fetch her from her sister’s house near Dupont Circle. They didn’t meet on this day, or at his second or third inaugural ceremony, both of which Lucy likewise attended.

They spoke occasionally by phone. Through Missy and Grace Tully he let the White House operator know that her calls were to be put directly through to him. Sometimes they conversed in French, lest passing ears listen in. They talked of old times and old friends and of the latest news.

Their first personal encounter in over two decades seems to have occurred in June 1941, about the time of Missy’s stroke. Lucy’s husband had also suffered a stroke, and Lucy traveled to Washington to request the president’s help in getting Winthrop admitted to Walter Reed Hospital. The White House log recorded her as “Mrs. Johnson” and indicated that the visit lasted almost two hours.

What the one-time lovers said to each other on this occasion cannot be known. They wrote nothing down, and the White House staff exercised the greatest discretion in keeping the visit quiet. But the meeting lifted for a moment the burdens each carried—his great burdens of state, her more personal burdens—and they agreed to meet again.

A
MERICAN OFFICIALS
expected Japan to exploit the sudden shift in the European war; their only question was how audacious Tokyo would become now that Russia, Japan’s historic competitor in Northeast Asia, was fighting for its life against Germany. “There are two groups in Japan,” Cordell Hull told Lord Halifax, the British ambassador in Washington. “One is pro-German; the other is a peace group among high officials.” The secretary of state explained that his sources asserted that the latter group wanted to turn away from Japan’s aggressive policies, to pull Japanese troops out of China, and to prevent a Pacific war. “But I have not taken this too seriously,” Hull added.

Roosevelt wasn’t taking it too seriously either—although he refused to discount it entirely. As America’s involvement in Europe increased, the president sought to maintain America’s distance from Asia. Hitler posed a central threat to America, Roosevelt judged; Japan merely a peripheral one. The United States would have to deal with Japan’s warlords eventually, but not now. If a peace party, however tentative, existed in Tokyo, American policy ought to help it along.

The peace party seemed to weaken during the summer of 1941. In July Japanese troops occupied southern Indochina. The Japanese ambassador explained to Sumner Welles, filling in for the ailing Hull, that Japan imported a million tons of rice each year from Indochina and that it feared that “de Gaullist French agents” and “Chinese agitators” were fomenting unrest in the region. The move was strictly precautionary.

The ambassador repeated his argument the next day to Roosevelt, who wasn’t buying it. The president lectured the ambassador on the patience the United States had shown Japan during the preceding two years. At substantial expense to America’s own war effort, the administration had allowed the export of oil products to Japan. Roosevelt was candid as to his motives. “If these oil supplies had been shut off or restricted, the Japanese government and people would have been furnished with an incentive or a pretext for moving down upon the Netherlands East Indies.” The United States had sought peace in Southeast Asia, and it still sought it. But the latest move by Japan, into southern Indochina, created an “exceedingly serious problem” for the United States. The ambassador’s contention that it was defensive didn’t wash. Surely the Japanese government did not think that any outside power, especially under present circumstances, had designs on Indochina. And as for rice production, the mere occupation by military forces would disrupt the supply chain more than any subversion by alleged foreign agents.

Roosevelt offered to guarantee Japan what it said it wanted from Indochina. He would do “everything within his power” to obtain an international agreement to neutralize Indochina, to prevent Gaullist or Chinese agents from getting a foothold there, and to ensure that Japan received the rice it required. But in exchange Japan must withdraw its forces from the region. Roosevelt added a warning that although Germany might be Japan’s ally at the moment, the Japanese would gravely err to put much trust in Berlin. Russia was discovering the depths of German treachery. Hitler, the president said, intended the “complete domination of the world.” Japan would not be exempt.

Roosevelt expected little positive response from Tokyo. “I have had no answer yet,” he wrote Harry Hopkins a few days later. “When it comes it will probably be unfavorable. But we have at least made one more effort to avoid Japanese expansion.”

Roosevelt decided not to wait. On July 26 he took his strongest step thus far: he froze Japanese assets in the United States. The executive order sounded fairly innocuous; its purpose was “to prevent the use of the financial facilities of the United States and trade between Japan and the United States in ways harmful to national defense and American interests.” But the effects of the order could be devastating. The American president, without consulting Congress, had declared economic war on Japan.

42.

J
OSEPH
D
AVIES HAD BEEN
A
MERICAN AMBASSADOR TO
M
OSCOW DURING
the 1930s. His tolerance for Stalinism was thought by certain of his professional peers to be excessive—some said his memoir,
Mission to Moscow,
should have been titled
Submission to Moscow
—but he had the distinction of being one of the very few Americans who had ever met Stalin personally, and Roosevelt wanted to know whether he thought Stalin and the Russians could survive the German onslaught. “The resistance of the Russian Army has been more effective than was generally expected,” Davies replied. Yet the outcome still hung in the balance. Davies supposed the Germans might well conquer White Russia, the Ukraine, and much of Russia proper, perhaps including Moscow. But Stalin could retreat beyond the Urals and carry on the fight from there. Either of two contingencies might prevent such action: an internal revolution that toppled Stalin in favor of a pro-German regime, or a decision by Stalin himself to make peace. Davies thought the former unlikely, given the historic tendency of Russians to rally around “Mother Russia” in time of trouble. The latter would depend on Stalin’s assessment of the balance of forces. “Stalin is oriental, coldly realistic, and getting along in years,” Davies wrote. “He believes that Russia is surrounded by capitalistic enemies. In ’38 and ’39 he had no confidence in the good faith of either Britain or France or the capacity of the democracies to be effective against Hitler. He hated and feared Hitler then just as he does now. He was induced to make a pact of non-aggression with Hitler as the best hope he had for preserving peace for Russia.” He might do so again.

Such an outcome must be prevented at any cost, Davies said. If it
was
prevented, the results would be most beneficial to America. Hitler had taken a huge chance by invading Russia; for the United States to keep Russia fighting would probably spell his doom. Moreover, cultivating Russia would increase America’s leverage with Japan, which would have to worry about its back as it drove farther south. For these reasons, the Russians must not be allowed to think that the likes of Harry Truman spoke for the American government.

Specifically, I fear that if they get the impression that the United States is only using them, and if sentiment grows and finds expression that the United States is equally a capitalistic enemy, it would be playing directly into the hands of Hitler, and he can be counted upon to use this in his efforts to project either an armistice or peace on the Russian front…. Word ought to begotten to Stalin direct that our attitude is “all out” to beat Hitler.

This was precisely the word Harry Hopkins took to Moscow, on Roosevelt’s behalf. The president agreed with Davies—and with Churchill—that necessity mandated cooperation with the communists of Russia against the fascists of Germany. Roosevelt didn’t underestimate the differences between the United States and the Soviet Union and between democracy and communism. But Nazi Germany was the great danger of the moment, and Roosevelt believed in dealing with first things first.

“I ask you to treat Mr. Hopkins with the identical confidence you would feel if you were talking directly to me,” Roosevelt wrote Stalin, in a letter of introduction Hopkins carried to Moscow in late July 1941. “He will communicate directly to me the views that you express to him and will tell me what you consider are the most pressing individual problems on which we could be of aid.”

Hopkins discovered that diplomacy among the Russians was not for the faint of heart—or head or belly. “It was monumental,” he wrote of the dinner honoring him on his arrival. “It lasted almost four hours.” The food came in course after groaning course, the drink in toast after mind-blurring toast. Hopkins hadn’t had much experience with vodka, but he was a quick study. “Vodka has authority. It is nothing for the amateur to trifle with. Drink it as an American or an Englishman takes whiskey neat, and it will tear you apart. The thing to do is to spread a chunk of bread (and good bread it was) with caviar, and, while you are swallowing that, bolt your vodka. Don’t play with the stuff. Eat while you’re drinking it—something that will act as a shock absorber for it.”

Stalin was an acquired taste, as well. He told Hopkins he reciprocated Roosevelt’s desire for frank communications, and then he launched into a lecture on political morality. “Mr. Stalin spoke of the necessity of there being a minimum moral standard between all nations,” Hopkins wrote Roosevelt. “Without such a minimum moral standard, nations could not co-exist. He stated that the present leaders of Germany knew no such minimum moral standard and that, therefore, they represented an anti-social force in the present world.” The Germans thought nothing of signing a treaty one day, breaking it the next, and signing a new and contradictory treaty. “Nations must fulfill their treaty obligations,” Stalin said. “Or international society could not exist.”

Hopkins didn’t know what to make of Stalin’s sermonizing. This was the man who murdered his political opponents and liquidated entire classes of people—and now he was complaining of Hitler’s lack of integrity? Hopkins was relieved when the talk turned more concrete, to the subject of American aid. “I told Mr. Stalin that the question of aid to the Soviet Union was divided into two parts. First, what would Russia most require that the United States could deliver immediately, and, second, what would be Russia’s requirements on the basis of a long war?”