Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (126 page)

Isolationists cited the war plan as further evidence of Roosevelt’s duplicity. Even as the president proclaimed his devotion to peace, they said, he was preparing for war. Burton Wheeler demanded a congressional investigation, with witnesses required to testify under oath. Hamilton Fish adopted an attitude of pained astonishment. “I refuse to believe that the President has given his support to any proposal for such an expeditionary force,” the New York Republican asserted, in tones that indicated just the opposite: that he
did
believe it. “If we crush the German army, the Russian army will overrun Germany, this country will be left bankrupt and impoverished, and communism will come, bringing chaos and revolution.”

The isolationist uproar was still building on Saturday, December 6, when Roosevelt dispatched a letter to Emperor Hirohito. This was an extreme step for an American president, or any other head of government; the emperor, considered divine by the Japanese, didn’t receive regular mail. But Japan and America confronted a “deep and far-reaching emergency,” Roosevelt said, and extreme steps were required. The president asserted that the escalation of Japanese force levels in Indochina was pushing Southeast Asia toward war. He didn’t know whether Hirohito could cancel what was afoot with Japan’s military, but he thought the emperor ought to try. “A continuance of such a situation is unthinkable.” Roosevelt again called for the evacuation of Japanese troops from Indochina; in exchange he offered to guarantee the neutralization of that French colony. “Both of us,” he concluded, “for the sake of the peoples not only of our own great countries but for the sake of humanity in neighboring territories, have a sacred duty to restore traditional amity and prevent further death and destruction in the world.”

44.

T
HE LOOMING PROSPECT OF WAR ADDED NEW RESPONSIBILITIES TO
Eleanor Roosevelt’s portfolio, without subtracting any of the old ones. She still wrote her newspaper column, conducted her press conferences, and broadcast her weekly radio addresses. As part of his declaration of national emergency, Roosevelt had established an Office of Civilian Defense and appointed New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia to be director. La Guardia asked Eleanor to become his associate. She initially said no, having enough else to do and remaining leery of taking a paid government post and thereby raising complications for Franklin.

But a pair of deaths in the autumn of 1941 caused her to reconsider. Hall Roosevelt had been Eleanor’s companion during the bleak years after their parents died. Hall inherited much more of their physical attractiveness than Eleanor did, but also more of their emotional instability. Decades of excessive drinking eventually caught up with him, and he came to a slow, agonizing end. “It has been a hard two weeks,” Eleanor wrote a friend shortly after the death, “and from last Sunday until yesterday morning more harrowing than I could tell you.”

The second death hit Franklin harder than Eleanor. Sara Roosevelt had suffered a stroke in June, and though she still made the annual trip to Campobello, she spent most of her time there confined to her bedroom. Eleanor visited her mother-in-law while Franklin was meeting with Churchill off Newfoundland; what Eleanor saw didn’t afford much hope. “I think she is failing fast,” she wrote of Sara in mid-August. Sara rallied on the news of the Atlantic Conference, as she took pride in her son’s emergence as a leading figure not just in American politics but in world affairs. She returned to Hyde Park, where Eleanor helped her settle back in.

For a few days she appeared to be gaining strength, but then she weakened once more. Eleanor called Franklin and told him to come to Hyde Park as quickly as possible. He arrived on the morning of September 6, a Saturday. Sara brightened to see him, as she always did when he returned home. He told her of his sessions with Churchill, laughingly describing the slip he had given the press, movingly relating the Sunday service aboard the
Prince of Wales,
seriously recounting the discussions leading to the Atlantic Charter. He did the talking; she was content to listen. After what seemed her best day in weeks, she prepared for bed. Suddenly she fell unconscious. A clot, like that which had caused her stroke, lodged in her pulmonary artery, depriving the brain of oxygen.

Franklin spent the night at her bedside; Eleanor came in and out. The next morning, just before noon, Sara quietly expired. To the astonishment of everyone present, at almost the moment of her death an ancient oak on the property, not far from the house, crashed to the ground. There was no wind, nor had rain softened the ground. Roosevelt gazed at the prone giant, remembering the hours spent playing under its limbs and doubtless reflecting on the fitting moment of its demise.

“The funeral was nice and simple, the casket in the library on the south side and only a spray of Hyde Park flowers on it,” Eleanor wrote Anna, who had moved to the West Coast. “We drove to the churchyard and Father stood by the car through the interment service.” Franklin had fallen silent upon Sara’s death, shutting himself off from his official duties and from as many visitors and well-wishers as he reasonably could. He ordered the road that ran by the estate to be closed lest Sara’s final peace—and his sorrow—be disturbed.

To Eleanor he seemed composed, if subdued. “Pa has taken Granny’s death very philosophically,” Eleanor wrote Anna. Grace Tully saw something different. Roosevelt’s secretary was helping her boss sort through Sara’s things after the funeral. “She had carefully saved and tagged his christening dress, his first pair of shoes, his baby hair, and some of his childhood toys,” Tully recalled. These mementos of his childhood, and this evidence of his mother’s loving care, summoned fifty-eight years of mixed feelings to the surface, and for one of the rare times in his life Roosevelt broke down.

Had he been a different man, and Eleanor a different woman, Sara’s death might have inaugurated a reconciliation. Sara had come between them from the start of their relationship, and now she was gone. But Franklin turned inward, rather than toward Eleanor. “He never looked toward the grave,” one of the few reporters allowed at the funeral noted, “nor did he return an anxious glance cast his way by his wife.” He made a gesture in Eleanor’s direction afterward, when he said she might take Sara’s room in the big house as her own. “I just can’t, and told him so,” Eleanor explained to Anna. She couldn’t forget all the slights Sara had inflicted upon her, and she couldn’t forgive Franklin for waiting this long to put her ahead of his mother. She couldn’t risk the kind of rejection she had suffered from every man she had loved, including Franklin. The moment of possibility passed.

James Roosevelt watched his parents struggle with their feelings. He later recounted what the lost opportunity cost his father. “Hyde Park could be only a palliative, not a cure, for the loneliness that was eating inside Father,” James said. “Nowhere in the world really was there anyone for him with whom he could unlock his mind and his thoughts. Politics, domestic economy, war strategy, postwar planning he could talk over with dozens of persons. Of what was inside him, of what really drove him, Father talked with no one.”

T
HE DEATHS OF
Hall and Sara prompted Eleanor to accept La Guardia’s offer of a post in civilian defense. In a world where personal relationships were so fraught and disappointing, duty was a source of comfort. Duty quieted the questions love raised but never answered satisfactorily. During the autumn of 1941 she threw herself into the work of civil defense, devoting evenings and weekends to securing the home front in the event of war. She and some colleagues were working late at the White House on Saturday evening, December 6; before the others departed she took them to bid the president good night. Roosevelt had just dispatched his eleventh-hour appeal to the Japanese emperor. “This son of man has just sent his final message to the Son of God,” he grimly joked.

Eleanor turned to the last-minute details for a large luncheon to be held at the White House the next day. The guests were all eager for a chance to break bread with the president. But on Sunday morning Franklin told her that he couldn’t spare the time. She wasn’t surprised, for he had begged off from numerous events during the previous months. Besides mourning his mother, he had the best excuse anyone could imagine: world peace required his presence elsewhere. There were, moreover, considerations of fatigue. “People naturally wanted to listen to what he had to say,” Eleanor remembered. “But the fact that he carried so many secrets in his head made it necessary for him to watch everything he said, which in itself was exhausting.” More and more often, Roosevelt simply had a quiet meal in his study with Harry Hopkins or Grace Tully.

He was sharing lunch with Hopkins that Sunday, December 7, when the call from the Navy Department informed him of the attack on Pearl Harbor. He immediately summoned his top military and diplomatic advisers: Stimson, Knox, Marshall, Stark, Hull. They assessed the meaning and consequences of the attack even as updates from Hawaii explained its horrific extent. Marshall and Stark related the orders they had sent to General MacArthur in the Philippines and other American commanders across the Pacific. Roosevelt took a call from Churchill; the prime minister expressed condolences for American losses and good wishes for the struggle ahead.

Roosevelt brought in Grace Tully. “Sit down, Grace,” he said. “I’m going before Congress tomorrow. I’d like to dictate my message. It will be short.”

Tully was struck by how composed the president seemed. He had been lighting a cigarette when she came in. “He inhaled deeply, then he began in the same calm tone in which he dictated his mail,” she remembered. “Only his diction was a little different, as he spoke each word incisively and slowly, carefully specifying each punctuation mark and each paragraph.”

The message was indeed short, containing fewer than five hundred words, and it required Roosevelt scarcely longer to dictate than it would to read. The president showed it to Hull, who urged him to add a bill of particulars against Japan. Roosevelt declined. Hopkins suggested a sentence for the end, which Roosevelt accepted.

He ate a quick dinner with Hopkins and Tully and convened the cabinet at eight thirty. He impressed upon the secretaries the gravity of the task before them. At nine he brought in the congressional leadership. He furnished the senators and representatives the latest reports from Hawaii. To a man they insisted on a war declaration.

Additional briefings filled the rest of the evening and spilled beyond midnight. At one o’clock on the morning of December 8 he got into bed. Sleep came slowly. In less than twelve hours he would speak to Congress, to the American people, and to the world. He knew he was right in rejecting Hull’s advice for a longer message; at this moment words could be but the faintest echo of the thunder of deeds. He understood that it had long been so when America entered wars. It certainly had been so for the wars of his lifetime. Theodore Roosevelt and the war hawks of 1898 had shouted for war against Spain, but only the destruction of the
Maine
rendered a war declaration possible. Woodrow Wilson had concluded by the beginning of 1917 that democracy could not withstand a German victory in the First World War, but it was only after German U-boats began sinking American merchantmen that he got Congress to agree. In each case the loss of American life and the destruction of American property added a deeply emotional element to the logical arguments about national interest. This addition was crucial, for the American political system didn’t respond to logic alone. Franklin Roosevelt had watched TR and Wilson, and learned. His own experience with the isolationists confirmed the lesson. For four years he had warned the nation that fascism posed a grave threat to America’s way of life; only now, with the smoke billowing above Pearl Harbor, could Congress concede he was right.

Yet the attack on Pearl Harbor wasn’t simply a casus belli; it was a debacle. America’s Pacific fleet had been eviscerated by the Japanese bombs and torpedoes; American shipyards would have to work overtime for years to replace the vessels destroyed at Pearl. The lost lives, of course, could never be replaced. Some sort of attack had been necessary to make the isolationists understand the fascist threat, but
this
attack was a disaster.

Roosevelt knew it, and knew he would have to deal with it. But the time for that would come. The task of the moment was to commit the country to the war. Consequently, when the president addressed the legislature at half past noon on December 8, he spoke succinctly. “Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy,” he said, “the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the empire of Japan.” The attack was unprovoked and obviously premeditated. And it was part of a larger aggressive design.