Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (130 page)

The dinner ran long, with neither Roosevelt nor Churchill eager to see the visit end. Ten o’clock was approaching as the prime minister made ready to depart.

The President and I drove with Churchill to his train to Norfolk, Virginia. A special train had been put on the siding at Sixth Street. The President said goodbye to Churchill in the car, and I walked with him and put him on the train….

On the way back, the President made it perfectly clear that he too was very pleased with the meetings. There was no question but that he grew genuinely to like Churchill, and I am sure Churchill equally liked the President.

Hopkins had given one of Churchill’s aides a small package for Clementine Churchill, the prime minister’s wife, whom Hopkins had befriended in London. The package contained a few presents and a brief letter. “You would have been quite proud of your husband on this trip,” Hopkins wrote. “He was ever so good natured. I didn’t see him take anybody’s head off…. If he had half as good a time here as the President did having him about the White House, he surely will carry pleasant memories of the past three weeks.”

46.

R
OOSEVELT GREETED THE NEW YEAR IN 1942 AS THE MOST POWERFUL
man in American history. He headed a government stronger and more unified for war than any American government before it. He led a nation with greater capacity for war than any other nation in world history. He stood as first among equals in the most formidable wartime alliance ever gathered.

His political and moral standing was higher than it had ever been. His third election had confirmed his continuing popularity, and the coming of war had demonstrated his prescience. His rhetorical style—in speeches, Fireside Chats, and press conferences—had always been persuasive, but now that the fascists had made him a prophet, his words were more irresistible than ever. He had long spoken for the suffering people of America, staggering under the weight of the depression. Now he spoke for the suffering people of the world, crushed beneath the boot heel of fascism.

No powerful man lacks enemies; even the most persuasive leader leaves some people unconvinced. Pearl Harbor buried isolationism, at least for the moment, but it didn’t transform the isolationists into fans of the president. Indeed, it drove some over the edge into conspiracy theories. So conveniently did the pieces of the international puzzle fall into place for Roosevelt after December 7 that the hard-core haters convinced themselves that he had engineered the whole thing. A noisy handful were already alleging that he had consciously allowed the attack on Pearl Harbor as providing a “back door” to the war against Germany. In time the charge would spawn a small library of books and articles claiming to prove Roosevelt’s culpability. The charge was plausible from the start, and it gained plausibility with the release, decades later, of the Magic intercepts, which demonstrated that Roosevelt knew war with Japan was coming.

Yet half the world had known war with Japan was coming. What Roosevelt did not know was
where
it was coming. Thailand seemed likely, or Malaya or Burma. The Philippines was the logical choice if the Japanese decided to attack an American possession directly. But Pearl Harbor seemed beyond their reach. The strongest evidence that Roosevelt did
not
expect an attack on Hawaii was his failure to put the Pacific battleships to sea. It would have been a simple matter to send the big vessels on patrol, leaving a few smaller craft in harbor to absorb the Japanese bombs and torpedoes. This certainly would have provided the casus belli he needed. So also an attack against which the American forces in Hawaii had been warned. In either case Roosevelt could have gone before Congress the next day and delivered precisely the same message he actually presented. And he would not have lost the major part of his Pacific fleet. For Roosevelt, who identified emotionally with the U.S. navy, to have deliberately allowed such destruction was beyond imagination. Or at least it was beyond the imagination of any not blinded by hatred of Roosevelt for other reasons.

Of course he brought the conspiracy theories upon himself. Even his most ardent supporters suspected he had manipulated the truth during the eighteen months before Pearl Harbor. His pledges that the destroyer-for-bases deal and Lend-Lease took America no closer to war rang hollow now. His election-eve promise not to send American boys to fight a foreign war was preserved by the fact that Hawaii wasn’t foreign, but it was belied by the near certainty that those boys would be fighting far beyond American soil or even the Western Hemisphere.

With the suspicions swirling about him, Roosevelt had a new task of persuasion, one greater than any he had faced before. The depression had tested his skills of reassurance and inspiration; the war now tested them to a far greater degree. The banking crisis had called for patience; the war called for sacrifice. The New Deal had been born in three months; the war would last three years—if America was lucky. Americans had been required to tighten their belts during the depression; they would have to bury their dead, by the many thousands, during the war.

They would have to work and sacrifice, as they had never worked and sacrificed in their lives. In his first wartime State of the Union address, delivered in early January 1942, Roosevelt spelled out the goals he was setting for the American people. War production would expand dramatically. “In this year, 1942, we shall produce 60,000 planes,” he said. “This includes 45,000 combat planes—bombers, dive bombers, pursuit planes…. Next year, 1943, we shall produce 125,000 airplanes, including 100,000 combat planes…. This year, 1942, we shall produce 45,000 tanks…. Next year, 1943, we shall produce 75,000 tanks.” Similarly for anti-aircraft guns: 20,000 in 1942 and 35,000 in 1943. For merchant ships: 6 million deadweight tons in 1942 and 10 million in 1943.

Americans would have to sacrifice personally to support this production. “War costs money,” Roosevelt said. “So far, we have hardly even begun to pay for it. We have devoted only 15 percent of our national income to national defense…. Our war program for the coming fiscal year will cost $56 billion or, in other words, more than half of the estimated annual national income. That means taxes and bonds and bonds and taxes. It means cutting luxuries and other non-essentials. In a word, it means an all-out war by individual effort and family effort in a united country.”

The demands of the war would push everything else aside. “Our task is unprecedented, and the time is short. We must strain every existing armament-producing facility to the utmost. We must convert every available plant and tool to war production. That goes all the way from the greatest plants to the smallest—from the huge automobile industry to the village machine shop.” Factories would operate twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. “Only this all-out scale of production will hasten the ultimate all-out victory…. Lost ground can always be regained, lost time never.”

As much as the war would strain Americans physically, it would challenge them mentally and morally. The war would bring bad news; Americans must be ready. “We have already tasted defeat. We may suffer further setbacks. We must face the fact of a hard war, a long war, a bloody war, a costly war.”

How long would the war last? “There is only one answer to that. It will end just as soon as we make it end, by our combined efforts, our combined strength, our combined determination to fight through and work through until the end—the end of militarism in Germany and Italy and Japan.”

T
O RALLY SUPPORT
for the war in general was one thing; to persuade the American people of a particular strategy was something else. The Germany-first strategy developed in the talks with the British was no secret militarily, or at least it was nothing anyone with a modest grasp of geopolitics couldn’t figure out unassisted. But it wasn’t an obvious strategy politically. America had been attacked in the Pacific, not in Europe. American anger blazed against Japan, not against Germany. For Roosevelt to tell Americans they should ignore Japan for now and defer their vengeance risked confusing the public, deflating the war spirit, and distracting the political system.

But they had to be told, if not all at once. Roosevelt commenced the process in a Fireside Chat on February 23, a Monday. He had hoped to speak on Washington’s Birthday, the day before, but in response to pastors’ complaints that his radio sermons were competing with their own, he had begun avoiding Sundays. The White House had alerted the press that Roosevelt would be discussing global strategy and suggested that newspapers print maps of the world in that Monday’s editions. Hundreds took the suggestion, with the result that when the president went on the air, his listeners were ready for a lesson in global strategy.

“This is a new kind of war,” Roosevelt said.

It is different from all other wars of the past, not only in its methods and weapons but also in its geography. It is warfare in terms of every continent, every island, every sea, every air lane in the world. That is the reason why I have asked you to take out and spread before you a map of the whole earth, and to follow with me the references which I shall make to the world-encircling battle lines of this war.

The papers rustled in American homes as Roosevelt walked his listeners around the globe, explaining the significance of each area to American strategy.

Look at your map. Look at the vast area of China, with its millions of fighting men. Look at the vast area of Russia, with its powerful armies and proven military might. Look at the British Isles, Australia, New Zealand, the Dutch Indies, India, the Near East, and the continent of Africa, with their resources of raw materials, and of peoples determined to resist Axis domination. Look too at North America, Central America, and South America.

It is obvious what would happen if all of these great reservoirs of power were cut off from each other either by enemy action or by self-imposed isolation. First, in such a case, we could no longer send aid of any kind to China—to the brave people who, for nearly five years, have withstood Japanese assault, destroyed hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers and vast quantities of Japanese war munitions. It is essential that we help China in her magnificent defense and in her inevitable counteroffensive—for that is one important element in the ultimate defeat of Japan.

Second, if we lost communication with the Southwest Pacific, all of that area, including Australia and New Zealand and the Dutch Indies, would fall under Japanese domination. Japan in such a case could release great numbers of ships and men to launch attacks on a large scale against the coasts of the Western Hemisphere—South America and Central America, and North America, including Alaska. At the same time, she could immediately extend her conquests in the other direction toward India, and through the Indian Ocean to Africa, to the Near East, and try to join forces with Germany and Italy.

Third, if we were to stop sending munitions to the British and the Russians in the Mediterranean, in the Persian Gulf, and the Red Sea, we would be helping the Nazis to overrun Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Persia, Egypt and the Suez Canal, the whole coast of North Africa itself, and with that inevitably the whole coast of West Africa—putting Germany within easy striking distance of South America, fifteen hundred miles away.

Fourth, if by such a fatuous policy we ceased to protect the North Atlantic supply line to Britain and to Russia, we would help to cripple the splendid counteroffensive by Russia against the Nazis, and we would help to deprive Britain of essential food supplies and munitions.

This new war was truly a world war, and it would be fought on a world front. On freedom’s side, it was being fought by a broad alliance. “The United Nations constitute an association of independent peoples of equal dignity and equal importance,” Roosevelt said. All members shared the burdens of war; all shared the same high purposes. “The Atlantic Charter applies not only to the parts of the world that border the Atlantic but to the whole world; disarmament of aggressors, self-determination of nations and peoples, and the four freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.”