Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (124 page)

The opposition froze Roosevelt in his tracks. He refused to take even the symbolic step of suspending relations with Berlin. A reporter queried him on the subject. “Lots of people who think just as you do on this war issue also think that a continuance of diplomatic relations with Germany is a form of dishonesty,” the reporter said. “Would you elaborate your thoughts?”

“Only off the record,” Roosevelt responded. “I would have to make it completely off the record.”

The reporters listened intently, hoping for some new revelation. All they got was a tepid disclaimer. “We don’t want a declared war with Germany because we are acting in defense, self-defense—every action. And to break off diplomatic relations—why, that won’t do any good…. It might be more useful to keep them the way they are.”

Roosevelt’s caution reflected his sense that he had enough votes for the changes he wanted in the neutrality law, but only just enough. At a White House conference on November 5, the Democratic congressional leadership told the president that the opposition to the revisions was stubborn and strong. House speaker Sam Rayburn and House majority leader John McCormack suggested that a final push from the president could be crucial. Roosevelt complied by sending a letter for Rayburn and McCormack to read to their colleagues. “Failure to repeal these sections would, of course, cause rejoicing in the Axis nations,” the president asserted. “Failure would bolster aggressive steps and intentions in Germany, and in the other well-known aggressor nations under the leadership of Hitler.”

The House needed the nudge. An impassioned debate ended in a narrow victory for the president: 212 to 194, with 53 Democrats, including 28 who had sided with the president on the war previously, defecting to the opposition. The result in the Senate was similarly favorable but no more enthusiastic: 50 in favor of revision, 37 against.

“Naturally, the President is pleased with the result,” William Hassett, Roosevelt’s assistant, told the press. The president wasn’t pleased enough to hail the result himself, and he understood that if neutrality revision required this much effort, a war declaration was out of the question for the foreseeable future.

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OOSEVELT WAS CERTAIN
by now that he knew Hitler’s mind, regarding overall strategy if not every tactical twist. He may have read too much into Hitler’s intentions for the Western Hemisphere, or he may simply have exaggerated those intentions for political effect. But he doubtless got it right when he spoke of the dependence of the Nazi regime on war and when he concluded that there would be no peace so long as Hitler governed Germany.

Japan, by contrast, remained an enigma to Roosevelt, as to most outside observers. The Japanese prime minister, Prince Konoye, appeared to desire peace, but it was impossible for Roosevelt to tell whether Konoye had any real influence or was simply being used by the militarists to disguise their own predominance. During the late summer and autumn of 1941, while Roosevelt was launching his undeclared war in the Atlantic, he weighed a request from Konoye for a meeting. “Japan and the United States are the last two major powers who hold the key to international peace,” the prime minister wrote. “That the two nations should fall into the worst of relations at this time would mean not only a disaster in itself, but also the collapse of world civilization.”

Roosevelt wasn’t eager for a meeting, not knowing how much of the Japanese government Konoye spoke for. But he was even less eager for a Pacific war, and so he entered into discussions regarding an appropriate date and place. Konoye suggested Hawaii; Roosevelt countered with Alaska, which would require less time for him at sea. Konoye accepted Juneau and asked that the meeting be held as soon as possible—on account, as the Japanese ambassador in Washington put it, “of the efforts of a third country and fifth columnists in Japan, who are now behind a press campaign against the United States, to disturb Japanese-American relations.”

The fifth columnists were Konoye’s rivals among the military; the third country was Britain, which was indeed hoping to disturb Japanese-American relations. As he had during the Atlantic Conference, Churchill was urging Roosevelt to take a tougher stance against Japan, lest the Japanese attack Britain’s Pacific holdings and the United States remain on the sidelines.

Roosevelt wasn’t yet ready to risk a Pacific war, but neither was he willing to risk a meeting that might make him look as foolish as Neville Chamberlain had looked after Munich. He strung Konoye along, trying to coax some commitments to better behavior out of the Japanese government before he agreed to sit down with the prime minister. When Konoye couldn’t deliver those commitments, the meeting fell through.

Roosevelt immediately began to wonder if he shouldn’t have been more accommodating, for Konoye’s inability to arrange a meeting with the American president resulted in the collapse of his administration. “It is with great regret and disappointment that my colleagues and I have had to resign owing to the internal political situation, which I may be able to explain to you sometime in the future,” Konoye wrote cryptically to American ambassador Joseph Grew. The departing premier went on to express the hope “that you and your government will not be too disappointed or discouraged either by the change of cabinet or by the mere appearance or impression of the new cabinet.”

Discouragement wasn’t the word for the American reaction; alarm was more accurate. Konoye’s replacement was General Hideki Tojo, who had commanded the Kwantung Army, as the legion that enforced Japan’s writ in the puppet state of Manchukuo was called. While minister of war in 1940 Tojo had directed the negotiations leading to the Axis alliance with Germany and Italy. His elevation to the premiership signaled—accurately, as events proved—that the military had seized command of Japanese policy once and for all.

Roosevelt guessed as much. The day before Tojo’s takeover of the government, he wrote Churchill, “The Jap situation is definitely worse, and I think they are headed north.” What Roosevelt meant was that Japan would attack Russia, exploiting Stalin’s current preoccupation with Hitler. This prospect wasn’t good, since it would complicate the vital task of keeping Russia in the fight against Germany. But it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. “In spite of this, you and I will have two months of respite in the Far East.”

Tojo’s coup occurred between Roosevelt’s writing and Churchill’s reply. “The Japanese menace…,” the British prime minister asserted, “has grown so much sharper in the last few days…. Events are now telling their own tale.” Yet the latest development simply threw Churchill back on the advice he had given Roosevelt in Newfoundland. “The stronger the action of the United States towards Japan, the greater the chance of preserving peace.” To buck up the president, Churchill pledged his country’s full support. “Should, however, peace be broken and the United States become at war with Japan, you may be sure that a British declaration of war upon Japan will follow within the hour.” As a demonstration of what ought to be done, Churchill dispatched the
Prince of Wales—
“that big ship you inspected,” Churchill wrote to Roosevelt, to avoid putting the vessel’s name in a cable that might be intercepted—to the British base at Singapore. “This ought to serve as a deterrent on Japan. There is nothing like having something that can catch and kill anything.” The prime minister concluded: “The firmer your attitude and ours, the less chance of their taking the plunge.”

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OOSEVELT’S DIPLOMACY
during the weeks that followed was devoted to keeping Japan from taking the plunge. The prospects weren’t encouraging. In a cable from Tokyo, Grew noted that the government was whipping up war fever. “Empire Approaches Its Greatest Crisis,” the American ambassador quoted a headline in one of the leading newspapers in the Japanese capital. He went on to predict, if the Japanese didn’t get their way in the current talks with the United States, “an all-out, do-or-die attempt, actually risking national hara-kiri, to make Japan impervious to economic embargoes abroad rather than to yield to foreign pressure.” Grew was exceedingly glum. “This contingency not only is possible but is probable.” He added that action by Japan “may come with dangerous and dramatic suddenness.”

Grew’s pessimism appeared to be confirmed by an intercepted message from Japan’s foreign minister, Shigenori Togo, to Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura in Washington. For some months American and British cryptographers had been able to decode certain Japanese diplomatic cables; the “Magic” intercepts allowed Washington and London to learn what Tokyo was telling its embassies. On November 5, Togo informed Nomura that if a deal with the United States was to be struck it would have to be soon. “Because of various circumstances, it is absolutely necessary that all arrangement for the signing of this agreement be completed by the 25th of this month,” Togo said. “I realize that this is a difficult order, but under the circumstances it is an unavoidable one.” What Togo did
not
tell Nomura, although the ambassador could infer as much, was that the military was already planning to go to war. November 25 was the date when the decision to strike or to stand down would be made.

Roosevelt and Hull drew the same conclusion from Togo’s November 25 deadline. “This, to us, could mean only one thing,” Hull wrote. “Japan had already set in motion the wheels of her war machine, and she had decided not to stop short of war with the United States if by November 25 we had not agreed to her demands.”

Hull shared this inference with the rest of the cabinet at a meeting on November 7. The secretary of state recounted the recent events and messages and declared, “Relations are extremely critical. We should be on the lookout for a military attack by Japan anywhere at any time.” Understandably sobered, the cabinet encouraged the president to prepare the American people.

Armistice Day followed shortly; Roosevelt took the occasion to remind Americans what their country represented in the world. A generation earlier, Americans had gone to war in Europe. The isolationists had since derided that effort, contending that the United States had been deluded by the leaders of Britain and France into doing the Europeans’ dirty work. The isolationists, Roosevelt said, were dangerously wrong. Fortunately, most Americans were wiser. “We know that it was, in literal truth, to make the world safe for democracy that we took up arms in 1917,” the president asserted. “It was, in simple truth and in literal fact, to make the world habitable for decent and self-respecting men and women that those whom we now remember gave their lives.” Americans understood that democracy and decency had to be defended. Roosevelt quoted Alvin York, the much-decorated hero of the First World War: “Liberty and freedom and democracy are so very precious that you do not fight to win them once and stop. You do not do that. Liberty and freedom and democracy are prizes awarded only to those peoples who fight to win them and then keep fighting eternally to hold them.” The American people agreed with Sergeant York rather than with the isolationists, Roosevelt said. “They believe that liberty is worth fighting for. And if they are obliged to fight they will fight eternally to hold it.”

Despite their pessimism regarding the prospects for Asia and the Pacific, administration officials continued to meet with Japanese diplomats. Ambassador Nomura appeared to Roosevelt and Hull to be an honest professional with a sincere desire to find common ground between his government and America’s. This desire may have been what prompted Tojo and Togo to send reinforcement, in the person of Saburo Kurusu, the former Japanese ambassador to Berlin, to Washington. “Kurusu seemed to me the antithesis of Nomura,” Hull remembered. “Neither his appearance nor his attitude commanded confidence or respect. I felt from the start that he was deceitful.” Hull allowed that Kurusu might strive for an accommodation, but it would be entirely on Japan’s terms. And if accommodation failed, Kurusu’s mission had a second purpose. “He was to lull us with talk until the moment Japan got ready to strike.”