Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (156 page)

With firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.

N
O SOONER HAD
Roosevelt surfaced in San Diego than he disappeared again. He boarded the cruiser
Baltimore
for a swift passage to Hawaii, to inspect the base where America’s war had started and to consult the general who aimed to end it. Since 1942 the war in the Pacific had produced some of the hardest fighting in American military history. The Guadalcanal campaign lasted six months, cost six thousand American lives, and revealed how difficult dislodging the Japanese from their island strongholds would be. In New Guinea the climate and terrain proved as formidable as the enemy; American and Australian troops struggled up and down precipitous ridges drenched in rain and cloaked with impenetrable vegetation. Every species of tropical disease and parasite—malaria, dysentery, typhus, dengue fever, ringworm, jungle rot—attacked the troops from the outside in and the inside out.

Progress was painfully slow, but it was progress still. By the summer of 1944 the Allies had captured positions in the Gilbert and Marshall islands, in addition to the Solomons and New Guinea. American carrier-based planes blasted a Japanese base at Truk in the Carolines. In June at the “Marianas turkey shoot” American fighters destroyed over two hundred Japanese planes while losing but twenty of their own. The securing of airfields on Guam and Tinian in the Marianas brought Japan’s home islands within reach of American B-29 bombers. And as the end game in Europe began to unfold, Roosevelt was ready to shift more of his—and America’s—attention to the Pacific. This meant talking to Douglas MacArthur.

The president’s Pacific tour had other purposes as well. It would boost the morale of the inhabitants of Oahu and honor the memory of the Pearl Harbor dead. It would allow him to review the rank-and-file in Hawaii and Alaska. It would enable him to campaign for president as commander in chief.

Chester Nimitz, the admiral in charge of the major part of the Pacific, had no particular problem with this last aspect of Roosevelt’s tour. But MacArthur, the commander for the Southwest Pacific, did. MacArthur was the most political officer of his generation, and yet he was remarkably clumsy every time he ventured near the political arena. He had angled for the 1944 Republican nomination for president but been swatted aside by Dewey. The rejection stung, and now MacArthur took umbrage at being made a prop in Roosevelt’s reelection campaign. He cursed the president all the way from his headquarters in Australia to the meeting in Hawaii. “The humiliation of forcing me to leave my command to fly to Honolulu for a political picture-taking junket!” he declared to everyone in earshot on his B-17 from Brisbane. “In all my fighting days I’ve never before had to turn my back on my assignment.”

He made his resentment plain on Roosevelt’s arrival. The
Baltimore
lowered the gangway at Pearl Harbor, and Nimitz and dozens of other officers came on board. “One officer was conspicuously absent,” Sam Rosenman recalled.

It was General Douglas MacArthur. When Roosevelt asked Nimitz where the General was, there was an embarrassed silence. We learned later that the General had arrived about an hour earlier, but instead of joining the other officers to greet the Commander-in-Chief, he had gone by himself to Fort Shafter.

After we had waited on the
Baltimore
for some time for the General, it was decided that the President and his party would disembark and go to the quarters on shore assigned to them. Just as we were getting ready to go below, a terrific automobile siren was heard, and there raced onto the dock and screeched to a stop a motorcycle escort and the longest open car I have ever seen. In the front was a chauffeur in khaki, and in the back one lone figure—MacArthur.

There were no aides or attendants. The car traveled some distance around the open space and stopped at the gangplank. When the applause of the crowd died down, the General strode rapidly to the gangplank all alone. He dashed up the gangplank, stopped halfway up to acknowledge another ovation, and soon was on deck greeting the President.

Roosevelt refused to respond to MacArthur’s unstated challenge, except for a minor poke. “Hello, Doug,” he said. “What are you doing with that leather jacket on? It’s darn hot today.”

MacArthur had never liked the uniforms the regular army wore. While seconded to the Philippine government during the 1930s, he designed for himself the gaudiest field marshal’s uniform Eisenhower, then his chief of staff, had ever seen. The nonregulation leather jacket was his latest fashion statement.

“I’ve just landed from Australia,” he told Roosevelt, pointing his corncob pipe at the sky. “It’s pretty cold up there.”

Roosevelt led the officers on a round of inspections. He visited the wreck of the
Arizona,
lying where it sank in Pearl Harbor. He toured the navy yards and addressed the troops at Schofield Barracks. He had himself rolled through an amputee ward at one of the hospitals, letting the wounded warriors see that their commander in chief couldn’t walk. Sam Rosenman had grown accustomed to Roosevelt’s disability, but he found the experience deeply moving. “He had known for twenty-three years what it was to be deprived of the use of both legs,” Rosenman recalled. “He wanted to display himself and his useless legs to those boys who would have to face the same bitterness. This crippled man on the little wheel chair wanted to show them that it was possible to rise above such physical handicaps.” Roosevelt spoke to the young men, one by one, and offered smiling encouragement. But he, too, was touched. “I never saw Roosevelt with tears in his eyes,” Rosenman remarked. “That day as he was wheeled out of the hospital he was close to them.”

In his tour of the island he traveled in an open vehicle, which unnerved his security team. “Many of the inhabitants were pure Japanese or descended from mixed marriages of Japanese,” Rosenman wrote. “Frequently, Admiral Nimitz, General MacArthur, and Admiral Leahy were in the car with him. Following behind in the procession, I could not help thinking how dreadful a toll one well-placed bomb would take. The Secret Service men were worried to distraction.”

The president chatted innocuously with MacArthur on their drives around Oahu, but back in the living room of the Waikiki house where he was staying he got down to business. A wall map showed the current disposition of American forces in the Pacific. “Well, Douglas,” Roosevelt said, “where do we go from here?”

MacArthur was expecting the question. “Leyte, Mr. President,” he said, pointing to the Philippines. “And then Luzon.”

At this stage of American strategy in the Pacific, informed opinion split between those who advocated approaching Japan via the Philippines and then Taiwan and those who favored bypassing the Philippines and advancing directly to Taiwan. The army generally favored the former route, and the navy the latter. MacArthur was staking the army’s claim—and his own—to the Philippines, and he spent the afternoon trying to bring the president to his side of the argument. He spoke with a fervor that wore Roosevelt out. “Give me an aspirin before I go to bed,” Roosevelt remarked to his doctor at the end of the session. “In fact, give me another aspirin to take in the morning. In all my life nobody has ever talked to me the way MacArthur did.”

Roosevelt was noncommittal but not discouraging. No decisions were made that week in Hawaii, yet the president gave MacArthur reason for optimism. At a press conference concluding the visit, Roosevelt said he had had “two very successful days” with MacArthur and the other officers, talking about “future plans.”

A reporter, bolder than the rest, inquired about those plans. “When General MacArthur was about to leave the Philippines,” the reporter observed, “I recall he said something to the general effect that ‘I will return.’ In view of the setting of this meeting with him, is there anything that you could tell us? Is that true now?”

“We are going to get the Philippines back,” Roosevelt said. “And without question General MacArthur will take a part in it.” But the president felt obliged to add: “Whether he goes direct or not, I can’t say.”

The reporter persisted. “Can we say that General MacArthur will return to the Philippines?”

“He was correct the day he left Corregidor, and I told him he was correct.”

54.

F
OR MOST OF THE WAR
R
OBERT
S
HERWOOD SAW
R
OOSEVELT ON A REGULAR
basis. His duties as a speech writer and then as director of the Office of War Information made him part of the White House family. But he spent the first several months of 1944 away from Washington on OWI business, and by the time he returned he hadn’t seen the president in more than half a year. He paid a visit at first opportunity. “I was shocked by his appearance,” Sherwood recalled. “I had heard that he had lost a lot of weight, but I was unprepared for the almost ravaged appearance of his face. He had his coat off and his shirt collar seemed several sizes too large for his emaciated neck.”

After twenty years on stage, eleven in a continuous run, the old performer was showing the strain. Since mounting the dais at the Democratic convention in 1924, Roosevelt had rarely been out of the spotlight and almost never out of character. The New York governorship and the New Deal presidency allowed intermissions, moments when he could catch his breath and gather himself. But the war, which began for Roosevelt, if not for America, about 1937, never stopped, and neither could its American protagonist.

Any war leader would have staggered under the burden. Churchill suffered a severe case of pneumonia after the Teheran conference; some of his associates weren’t sure he’d recover sufficiently to retain the premiership. Stalin’s health was a better-kept secret, but various reports suggested some kind of nervous breakdown amid the Nazi offensive of 1941.

Yet Roosevelt’s burden was greater than those of his Grand Alliance partners. As both head of government and head of state, he combined the roles of Churchill and King George VI. Churchill boasted that he might be turned out at any moment, but that possibility was more theoretical than real. The confidence votes weren’t even close. And unlike Roosevelt, he didn’t have to lead his party in wartime elections, because Britain’s flexible constitution allowed elections to be suspended for the duration. As for Stalin, he governed by diktat. He didn’t have to kiss babies, woo their parents, or cajole their representatives. He didn’t shoot his subjects as often as he had during the 1930s, in part because the Germans were shooting so many that he couldn’t afford to waste the remainder. But everyone remembered the purges and acted accordingly.

The demands of democracy aside, Roosevelt’s burden was peculiarly personal. He had determined, not long after contracting polio, that he would deny its effects on his life and dreams. The sheer physical effort of standing in his braces, of staggering forward, step by lurching step, of smiling through the sweat and the clenched hands gripping the lectern for dear life, would have exhausted anyone. But the emotional effort was at least as great. He couldn’t show his anger at his lost athleticism, his vanished virility, his physical dependence on others. He couldn’t be discouraged or despondent. Roosevelts didn’t show their feelings, Delanos even less. And
this
Roosevelt,
this
Delano, showed his feelings least of all. To allow others inside, to let them see the man behind the actor, would spoil the effect he had taken such pains to create.

The effect—of the fearless leader, the happy warrior, the father figure on whom the nation relied—was as central to his own equilibrium as it was to the country’s. His isolation hadn’t begun with the polio. He had been emotionally isolated since boyhood. His close relationships had always been with persons not his equal. He had no close friends as a boy or young man, no one at Groton or Harvard in whom he genuinely confided. After he entered politics he had mentors and protégés; as he advanced he lost the mentors and was left with only protégés and attendants. Louis Howe, Missy LeHand, Harry Hopkins, and the lesser members of the White House family subordinated themselves, their careers, their personal lives to him. After Howe died, none would talk back to him as Louis had. Missy’s stroke deprived him of another, softer voice. Roosevelt might have confided in his children as they matured, but the emotional code instilled in him by his father and especially his mother prevented such intimacies.