Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (125 page)

Roosevelt played along. He, too, hoped for an eleventh-hour agreement, although he hardly expected it. His attitude was the American counterpart of Kurusu’s: any agreement must be on America’s terms. But unlike Kurusu, whose military deadline required him to push for a swift settlement of the outstanding issues between the United States and Japan, Roosevelt was happy to delay. Henry Stimson and Frank Knox had been saying for months that the army and navy needed time to prepare. They continued to say so. Roosevelt sought to give them as much of the time they needed as possible.

Hull met with Kurusu and Nomura almost daily during November; Roosevelt received one or the other about once a week. His themes were firmness and patience. “Nations must think one hundred years ahead, especially during the age through which the world is passing,” he told Nomura on November 10. Japan should slow down. It needn’t solve its problems all at once. The president said he and Secretary Hull had been working only half a year on the issues Japan considered essential, whereas the Japanese government had been engaged for a decade. Tokyo must let Washington catch up. “Patience is necessary,” Roosevelt said.

The president pondered additional measures for gaining time. He jotted a note to Hull sketching a formula for postponing a crisis with Japan for perhaps six months. The American government would offer to ease the economic restrictions on Japan, Roosevelt suggested, and would encourage peace negotiations between Japan and China, if Japan would promise not to send new troops to Indochina and not to declare war on the United States should America enter the European conflict.

Roosevelt knew it was a stretch. He would be asking Japan to abandon its ten-year project of controlling China and to ignore its treaty commitment to Germany in exchange for an easing of restrictions Washington might reimpose at a moment’s notice. In fact, the more the president thought about his offer, the less he liked it. The militarists in Tokyo might use it for propaganda purposes and become even more bellicose.

He had just about decided to drop the idea when the Japanese took the matter out of his hands. Kurusu told Roosevelt at a White House meeting that things could explode at any minute. “All the way across the Pacific it is like a powder keg,” he asserted. “Some way must be found to adjust the situation.” Kurusu nonetheless refused to modify the demands he made on behalf of his government. The Japanese were willing to withdraw their troops from southern Indochina to northern Indochina, he said, and to remove all their troops from Indochina, but only upon “the restoration of peace between Japan and China or the establishment of an equitable peace in the Pacific area.” Meanwhile the United States should unfreeze Japan’s financial assets, restore the flow of American oil to Japan, and help Japan secure the resources it needed from the Dutch East Indies.

Hull later described the Japanese proposals as “of so preposterous a character that no responsible American official could ever have dreamed of accepting them.” Hull was overstating things with the advantage of hindsight, but the Japanese offer did fall seriously short, for it required the United States to accept Japanese hegemony in East Asia—at this point little imagination was required to realize what Tokyo meant by “an equitable peace in the Pacific area.” Roosevelt had consistently rejected such an outcome, and he wouldn’t accept it now.

On November 25, a Tuesday, the president gathered what he was already calling his “war cabinet” to the White House. Stimson spoke for the War Department, Knox for Navy, and Hull for State. General George Marshall, the army chief of staff, and Admiral Harold Stark, the chief of naval operations, represented the uniformed services. For some weeks the group had been discussing the war in Europe and the Atlantic, and Stimson, for one, anticipated more of the same talk. But Roosevelt “brought up entirely the relations with the Japanese,” Stimson recorded in his diary. The secret Japanese deadline had just passed—Tokyo being fourteen hours ahead of Washington—and Roosevelt expected war at any time. “We were likely to be attacked, perhaps next Monday,” Stimson paraphrased the president, “for the Japanese are notorious for making an attack without warning, and the question was what we should do. The question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves. It was a difficult proposition.”

Stimson’s diary would provoke great controversy after the war, when this portion of it was published as part of an investigation into the events leading to American intervention. Given that the Japanese attack Roosevelt predicted did come—at Pearl Harbor—Stimson’s account lent credence to charges that Roosevelt deliberately sacrificed the American force there to the Japanese. Roosevelt’s defenders would counter that the president’s use of the word “we” encompassed the British as well as Americans and that he was thinking of an attack on Singapore or Malaya. Alternatively, Stimson may have transcribed the president’s comments carelessly, as his diary entries often reflected haste. More persuasive is the argument that Roosevelt was thinking of an attack on the Philippines. The consensus at the November 25 meeting was that the Japanese would be moving south from Indochina. “Any such expedition to the South as the Japanese were likely to take would be an encirclement of our interests in the Philippines,” Stimson’s diary continued. Though scheduled for independence in 1946, the Philippines remained American territory. They were lightly defended, partly out of congressional stinginess and partly because they
were
going to become independent. Quite possibly Roosevelt thought a Japanese attack on the Philippines would constitute a sufficient casus belli. Such an attack would not allow, in the words of Stimson’s diary, “too much danger to ourselves,” and it certainly would get the attention of Congress.

One thing is certain: no one at the November 25 meeting mentioned Hawaii or Pearl Harbor. The thought seems not to have crossed Roosevelt’s mind as he increased the diplomatic pressure on Japan. A fresh report, which the president received on November 26, revealed that the Japanese were sending additional troops to Indochina. “He fairly blew up,” Stimson recorded. “It was an evidence of bad faith on the part of the Japanese”—that while their emissaries in Washington were ostensibly negotiating a truce, their armies in Asia were expanding the war. The new evidence confirmed Roosevelt’s belief that war could no longer be avoided or even much delayed. That same day he delivered his answer to the Japanese proposal. The heart of his message was a one-sentence demand: “The Government of Japan will withdraw all military, naval, air, and police forces from China and from Indochina.”

Roosevelt knew this would be as unacceptable to Tojo and his colleagues as their offer was to him. Having fought for ten years to carve out a sphere in China, they were hardly going to abandon their objective so easily. Yet the president thought there was no other reasonable position he could take, even considering the likely consequences. “This seems to me a fair proposition for the Japanese,” he wrote Churchill. “But its acceptance or rejection is really a matter of internal Japanese politics. I am not very hopeful, and we must all be prepared for real trouble, possibly soon.”

The president called Kurusu and Nomura to the White House. He expressed his disappointment that the Japanese government had not treated the American proposals seriously. “We have been very patient in our dealing with the whole Far Eastern situation,” he said. “We are prepared to continue to be patient.” But Japan must abandon its aggressive ways. It must withdraw from China, and it ought to reconsider its alliance with Germany. Perhaps the Japanese believed Germany represented the wave of the future. They were mistaken. Germany would fail in its efforts to subjugate Europe, Roosevelt said, if for no other reason than it lacked the manpower to impose its will so broadly. Should the Japanese government follow the path of Hitlerism, it too would fail. “Japan will be the ultimate loser.”

The next day Roosevelt left for Warm Springs, for a belated Thanksgiving vacation. He had scarcely arrived when the State Department learned that Tojo was scheduled to give a speech before the most extreme expansionist group in Tokyo. American intelligence had belatedly discovered that the November 25 deadline had been extended to November 29; Hull, upon reading an advance text of Tojo’s speech, worried that it might be the signal for an attack. He called Warm Springs and recommended that the president return to Washington.

Roosevelt did so, arriving in time to receive a cable from Churchill. The British were reading the same intercepts as the Americans; the prime minister urged a final joint effort on behalf of Pacific peace. “It seems to me that one important method remains unused in averting war between Japan and our two countries,” Churchill wrote on November 30, “namely a plain declaration, secret or public as may be thought best, that any further act of aggression by Japan will lead immediately to the gravest consequences. I realize your constitutional difficulties, but it would be tragic if Japan drifted into war by encroachment without having before her fairly and squarely the dire character of a further aggressive step…. Forgive me, my dear friend, for presuming to press such a course upon you, but I am convinced that it might make all the difference and prevent a melancholy extension of the war.”

Roosevelt declined Churchill’s offer. Having resisted the prime minister’s entreaties for eighteen months, he was as reluctant as ever to do anything that smacked of going to war on behalf of the British empire. The Japanese were poised to strike; Roosevelt expected the blow to fall at any moment. The best brains in Washington were predicting an attack against or in the direction of British Southeast Asia. If this occurred, after the United States had issued a joint ultimatum with Britain, an American war declaration would look to all the world—including a great many Americans—like a defense of British imperialism. Nor could the president be sure Congress would approve such a war declaration. If it didn’t, Roosevelt would appear an impotent fool.

Roosevelt summoned Nomura and Kurusu to the State Department. Hull was ill again; in his place Sumner Welles read a statement by the president. The statement explained that the president had received reports of Japanese troop movements in southern Indochina. Such movements strongly suggested “further aggression.” Citing Germany’s history of encroachment upon its neighbors, Roosevelt’s statement expressed concern that Japan was preparing an assault against Malaya, Burma, the East Indies, or the Philippines. The president demanded to know Japan’s intentions.

W
HILE
R
OOSEVELT
awaited Japan’s reply, the
Chicago Tribune
broke a blockbuster story under banner headlines:

F.D.R.’S WAR PLANS
!

G
OAL
I
S
10 M
ILLION
A
RMED
M
EN

H
ALF TO
F
IGHT IN
A.E.F.

The story, which appeared on Thursday, December 4, was based on a top-secret plan prepared at Roosevelt’s request by a joint board of the army and navy. The
Tribune
’s well-connected Washington correspondent, Chesly Manly, had acquired a copy of the plan, which Robert McCormick, the bitterly anti-Roosevelt owner of the
Tribune,
was delighted to publicize. The essence of Manly’s four-thousand-word story was that the American military command was already preparing for a European war effort far larger than that of the First World War. “Germany and her European satellites cannot be defeated by the European powers now fighting against her,” Manly quoted the secret war plan. “If our European enemies are to be defeated, it will be necessary for the United States to enter the war, and to employ a part of its armed forces offensively in the Eastern Atlantic and in Europe and Africa.” This new American Expeditionary Force would comprise as many as five million soldiers, who would take part in a major offensive against Germany during the summer of 1943.

Reporters naturally questioned the administration as to the veracity of the
Tribune
’s story. Steve Early, speaking for the president, at first refused to confirm or deny the report. But gradually the administration tacitly conceded that the plan was genuine, while asserting that its significance had been exaggerated. Henry Stimson explained that war planners made all sorts of plans; the particular preparations that had been leaked reflected merely one set of contingencies. “They have never constituted an authorized program of the government,” Stimson said. Nor did the plan tell the Germans anything the Germans couldn’t guess on their own. Even so, the
Tribune
should be ashamed. “The chief evil of their publication is the revelation that there should be among us any group of persons so lacking in appreciation of the danger that confronts the country and so wanting in loyalty and patriotism to their government that they would be willing to take and publish such papers.” Harold Ickes had harsher words for the
Tribune,
at least in his diary. “If we had been at war,” Ickes said, “this publication would have constituted treason.”