Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (122 page)

Finally, there was the moral power the president wielded. America wasn’t perfect, but compared with the fascists of Germany and Japan, the communists of Russia, and the imperialists of Britain, Americans looked remarkably benign to the ordinary people of the world. Roosevelt’s reputation was especially compelling. He was known as the rich man who stood up for the common man, the president who put down the Big Stick in favor of being a Good Neighbor, the friend of China, the decolonizer of the Philippines (admittedly a work still in progress). Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, even Churchill’s Britain—none of these served as a beacon of hope to the oppressed of the world. None provided a model other peoples would freely emulate. Roosevelt’s America provided just such a model, and Roosevelt knew it.

H
IS KNOWLEDGE
informed the most important achievement of the Atlantic Conference, as it soon came to be called. Roosevelt’s
Augusta
and Churchill’s
Prince of Wales
reached Placentia Bay on August 9. Churchill, as protocol commanded, prepared to cross to Roosevelt’s vessel for the initial visit. Harry Hopkins got there first. The ocean voyage with Churchill had restored him somewhat, and he hastened over to the
Augusta
to greet the president. Between the sessions with Churchill, Hopkins would brief Roosevelt on his Russia trip; for now he sent a note back to Churchill. “I have just talked to the President,” he said, “and he is very anxious, after dinner tonight, to invite in the balance of the staff and wants you to talk very informally to them about your general appreciation of the war…. I imagine there will be twenty-five people altogether. The President, of course, does not want anything formal about it.”

Asking Churchill to speak informally was like asking a lion to hide its mane. After the meal—a modest affair of broiled chicken, spinach omelets, sweet potatoes, cupcakes, and chocolate ice cream—was cleared away, Churchill waxed eloquent about the course of battle till now, extolling the valor of Britain’s fliers and seamen, decrying the treachery of the Germans, offering qualified praise for the Russians, wondering at the intentions of Japan.

Roosevelt mostly listened. “I saw Father in a new role,” Elliott remembered. Franklin and Eleanor’s rebellious son had found his way back to the family as the threat of war increased. Without their knowledge he enlisted in the army air force. Franklin learned of the enlistment when Elliott visited the White House and let himself into the Oval Office, between two of the president’s scheduled appointments. “Look, Pop,” he said, and handed over his army orders. Years later he remembered Roosevelt’s reaction. “He glanced at the piece of paper with my orders on it and looked up with tears in his eyes…. He couldn’t speak for a moment. Then, ‘I’m very proud.’” A few days later, at a Hyde Park dinner, Roosevelt proposed a toast: “To Elliott. He’s the first of the family to think seriously enough, and soberly enough, about the threat to America to join his country’s armed forces. We’re all very proud of him. I’m the proudest.”

To show off his soldier son to Churchill, and because he always liked the company of his children, Roosevelt arranged for Elliott to accompany him to Placentia Bay. Elliott sat with Roosevelt and Churchill at the dinner aboard the
Augusta.
He was surprised that his father let others control the conversation. “My experience of him in the past had been that he dominated every gathering he was part of, not because he insisted on it so much as that it always seemed his natural due. But not tonight. Tonight Father listened.” And he took in the show. “Churchill reared back in his chair, he slewed his cigar around from cheek to cheek and always at a jaunty angle, he hunched his shoulders forward like a bull, his hands slashed the air expressively, his eyes flashed.” His message was that America ought to join the British in the battle against fascism. “The Americans
must
come in at our side. You must come in, if you are to survive.”

Roosevelt and the other Americans enjoyed the performance but gave away nothing. “Father listened, intently, seriously, now and then rubbing his eyes, fiddling with his pince-nez, doodling on the tablecloth with a burnt match. But never an aye, nay, or maybe came from the Americans sitting around that smoke-filled saloon.”

The next morning the president returned Churchill’s call. As it was Sunday, Roosevelt was treated to what he later characterized as a “very remarkable religious service” on the quarterdeck of the
Prince of Wales,
in the shadow of the vessel’s great guns. “There was their own ship’s complement, with three or four hundred bluejackets and marines from American ships, on the quarterdeck, completely intermingled, first one uniform and then another uniform,” Roosevelt said. “The service was conducted by two chaplains, one English and one American, and, as usual, the lesson was read by the captain of the British ship. They had three hymns that everybody took part in, and a little ship’s altar was decked with the American flag and the British flag. The officers were all intermingled on the fantail…. I think everybody there, officers and enlisted men, felt that it was one of the great historic services. I know I did.”

After the service the British and American staffs got down to business. Alexander Cadogan, Churchill’s undersecretary for foreign affairs, had come with drafts of parallel statements to be sent by the British and American governments to the Japanese. The heart of the statement Cadogan proposed for Roosevelt was that any further aggression by Japan in the southwestern Pacific would produce a situation in which the American government “would be compelled to take counter measures even though these might lead to war.” This was no more than Churchill was prepared to state on behalf of Britain, but it was crucial, from the prime minister’s point of view, that Roosevelt be equally forthright. “He did not think that there was much hope left, unless the United States made such a clear-cut declaration, of preventing Japan from expanding further to the south,” Sumner Welles recorded of Churchill. “In which event the prevention of war between Great Britain and Japan appeared to be hopeless.” The hopelessness followed from the fact that British Malaya and Singapore lay athwart the obvious course of Japanese expansion. “He said in the most emphatic manner that if war did break out between Great Britain and Japan, Japan immediately would be in a position through the use of her large number of cruisers to seize or to destroy all of the British merchant shipping in the Indian Ocean and in the Pacific, and to cut the life-lines between the British Dominions and the British Isles unless the United States herself entered the war.” But if the United States joined Britain in threatening hostilities against Japan, Tokyo might pull back.

Roosevelt refused. In the first place, he thought an ultimatum might have just the opposite effect from deterrence. The war party in Japan would employ it to whip up nationalistic feeling and force the government into doing precisely what Roosevelt was warning them against. In the second place, he wasn’t ready for war. The American navy required additional preparation, and the army’s training program had only begun to produce results. Besides, Roosevelt was still arguing in public that military training was for the purpose of
preventing
American involvement. The last thing he intended to do was issue any war ultimatums.

Instead he issued a broad statement of principles. What came to be called the Atlantic Charter seemed to the British delegation to be hardly more than a press release, the sort of document heads of government agree to when they can’t concur on anything substantial. Its eight points constituted Anglo-American war aims, although at Roosevelt’s insistence and with Churchill’s acquiescence they were awkwardly called “common principles in the national policies of their respective countries on which they base their hopes for a better future for the world.” The first point eschewed aggrandizement, territorial or otherwise. The second forswore territorial changes not in accord with the “freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned.” The third affirmed “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.” The fourth promised equal terms of trade to all nations, with “due respect” for the “existing obligations” of the United States and Britain. The fifth endorsed improved labor and living standards in all countries. The sixth looked forward, “after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny,” to a peace “which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.” The seventh supported free travel and commerce across the world’s oceans. The eighth called on the nations of the world to disarm, “pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security.”

The language of the Atlantic Charter was inelegant but artful—as artful in places as diplomatic prose ever gets. The “existing obligations” disclaimer in the free trade clause exempted the entire British empire, which was based on the exclusionary model of imperial preference. The “wider and permanent system of general security” was Roosevelt’s substitute for the “effective international organization” of the British draft. Roosevelt wasn’t ready, at this stage, to talk about a new League of Nations, and he was certain the American people weren’t ready to hear about it.

All the same, the endorsement of self-determination in points two and three proved revolutionary—so revolutionary that Churchill began qualifying it almost as soon as he got back to England. “At the Atlantic meeting we had in mind, primarily, the restoration of the sovereignty, self-government, and national life of the states and nations of Europe now under the Nazi yoke,” he told Parliament. “That is quite a separate problem from the progressive evolution of self-governing institutions in the regions and peoples which owe allegiance to the British Crown.”

Many of those peoples didn’t think so, which was why they latched onto the Atlantic Charter with the passion they did, and why Roosevelt became their hero. As for the audience whose reaction worried the president more at the moment—members of Congress and the American public—they had different concerns. “Are we any closer to entering the war?” a reporter asked the president at his first news conference upon arriving home.

“I should say no,” Roosevelt replied.

“May we quote directly?”

“You can quote indirectly.”

O
NE REASON
R
OOSEVELT
didn’t want to be quoted was that he wasn’t telling the truth. At least he wasn’t telling the reporters, and through them the American public, what he had told Churchill. Or perhaps it was Churchill who bent the story. On his return to England the prime minister reported the Newfoundland meeting to his cabinet. Roosevelt, Churchill said, had laid out a strategy designed to ensure American entry into the fighting. “He would wage war, but not declare it,” Churchill explained. “He would become more and more provocative…. Everything was to be done to force an ‘incident.’…He would look for an ‘incident’ which would justify him in opening hostilities.”

Given the way events unfolded, Churchill’s assertion rings truer than Roosevelt’s denial. But Roosevelt also told Churchill that a request for a war declaration would tie Congress in knots, consuming the whole autumn. He knew what fear, fanned by the isolationists, could do, for even while he and Churchill were meeting at Placentia, the House of Representatives was debating whether to extend the term of service of draftees beyond the twelve months authorized under the Selective Service Act of 1940. The extension had slipped through the Senate, but isolationists in the House were attempting to demagogue the bill to death. Roosevelt warned of the dire consequences of sending the soldiers home. Training and readiness had been necessary in 1940, he declared in a written message, and were even more necessary now. “The danger today is infinitely greater. We are in the midst of a national emergency.” To release the troops would compromise America’s fundamental security. “We would be taking a grave national risk.”