Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (158 page)

The rumors gained sufficient credence that the White House felt obliged to have Ross McIntire refute them. The president’s health was “good, very good,” Roosevelt’s primary doctor declared in September. The president had caught the flu some while earlier, but so had many other people. “He’s right back in shape now.” When this statement failed to stifle the whispers, McIntire held another press conference. “The President’s health is perfectly O.K.,” he declared. “There are absolutely no organic difficulties at all.” McIntire acknowledged that Roosevelt looked thin, but he said this was by the president’s own choice. He had decided to lose some weight, had succeeded, and had become “proud of his flat—repeat f–l–a–t—tummy.” McIntire added, “Frankly, I wish he would put on a few pounds.”

Roosevelt himself addressed the rumors, at first obliquely. In a radio address from the White House he lamented that the current campaign had been marred by “even more than the usual crop of whisperings and rumorings.” Voters almost certainly had not heard the end of them. “As we approach election day, more wicked charges may be made—and probably will—with the hope that someone or somebody will gain momentary advantage. Hysterical last-minute accusations or sensational revelations are trumped up in an attempt to panic the people on election day.” But he was confident the people would not be panicked.

The campaign didn’t cure what ailed him, but it rekindled his fighting spirit, as campaigns always did. He asked Sherwood if he had listened to any of Dewey’s speeches. Sherwood hadn’t. “You ought to hear him,” Roosevelt said. “He plays the part of the heroic racket-buster in one of those gangster movies. He talks to the people as if they were the jury and I were the villain on trial for his life.” The president explained that he himself would be speaking to a Teamsters dinner the next Saturday night. “I expect to have a lot of fun with that one,” he said, smiling.

He did have fun. He lambasted the Republicans for callous disregard of the truth. Some were denying that they had ever opposed such popular New Deal measures as Social Security. “Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery,” Roosevelt told the Teamsters, “but I am afraid that in this case it is the most obvious common or garden variety of fraud.” Many Republicans were calling him a tyrant. “They have imported the propaganda technique invented by the dictators abroad.” The most shameless of the critics said he had left America unready for war. “I doubt whether even Goebbels would have tried that one.” Roosevelt’s audience grew more indignant with each lash of his tongue. The emotional level was just where he wanted it when he slyly shifted direction.

These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family doesn’t resent attacks, but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I had left him behind on the Aleutian Islands and had sent a destroyer back to find him—at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars—his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since. I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself—such as that old, worm-eaten chestnut that I have represented myself as indispensable. But I think I have a right to resent, to object to libelous statements about my dog.

T
HE FALA STORY
—replayed endlessly over the radio and in newsreels, with Roosevelt’s sarcasm dripping anew each time—disarmed Dewey. Roosevelt delivered a handful of additional addresses in Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, and New York. The New York address culminated a four-borough tour in an open car amid a cold, driving rain. Most of Roosevelt’s companions begged off, but the president didn’t want to disappoint the millions of voters who lined the streets, and he wanted to bury the charges that he was on his deathbed. The cheering crowds didn’t know that his car periodically darted into garages where he put on dry clothes and took warming shots of brandy.

In early October Al Smith died at the age of seventy. Smith and Roosevelt had been estranged for years, with Smith endorsing Willkie in 1940 after backing Landon in 1936. Smith all but volunteered for service in the Roosevelt administration after Pearl Harbor, yet the president ignored his feelers. Smith’s death, however, gave Roosevelt an opportunity to make amends, on his own terms, and to reflect on those better times when Smith had served the Democratic party, and particularly its urban constituencies, well. “Al Smith had qualities of heart and mind and soul which not only endeared him to those who came under the spell of his dynamic presence in personal association, but also made him the idol of the multitude,” Roosevelt said. “Frank, friendly and warmhearted, honest as the noonday sun, he had the courage of his convictions, even when his espousal of unpopular causes invited the enmity of powerful adversaries.” Those adversaries, of course, had become Roosevelt’s own, and Smith’s 1928 defeat proved, after the 1929 crash and the ordeal of the Hoover years, to be a badge of Democratic pride. “In a bitter campaign, in which his opponent won, Al Smith made no compromise with honor, honesty, or integrity. In his passing the country loses a true patriot.”

Less than a week later, Wendell Willkie died. Smith’s passing had not been entirely unexpected, but Willkie’s death—by heart attack, following a strep infection, at the age of fifty-two—was a shock. Yet if Smith’s death allowed Roosevelt an opportunity to reaffirm his ties to urban Democrats, Willkie’s demise let him reach out to internationalist Republicans. Robert Sherwood thought Roosevelt respected Willkie’s talent and patriotism so highly that he would not have run for a fourth term if Willkie had won the Republican nomination. But Sherwood himself admitted that this was a “doubly hypothetical surmise,” in that the Republican regulars detested Willkie even more than they hated Roosevelt. The president consequently took pleasure in praising the “tremendous courage” of his erstwhile and now deceased opponent. “This courage, which was his dominating trait, prompted him more than once to stand alone and to challenge the wisdom of counsels taken by powerful interests within his own party.”

T
WO WEEKS BEFORE
the election Douglas MacArthur made good his pledge to return to the Philippines. The president had accepted MacArthur’s contention that American strategy and American honor dictated the early liberation of the Philippines, and on October 20 the general splashed ashore on the eastern Philippine island of Leyte. He was in full hero mode. As he stepped into his landing craft, he put a revolver in his pocket. “It’s just a precaution, just to make sure that I am never captured alive,” he said. He ordered soldiers out of the boats to make room for photographers, and no sooner had he waded through the surf to the sand than he had his signal corps rig a transmitter. “I have returned!” he told the Filipinos and the world. “By the grace of Almighty God, our forces again stand on Philippine soil…. Let no heart be faint. Let every arm be steeled. The guidance of Divine God points the way. Follow in his name to the Holy Grail of righteous victory!” To Roosevelt he wrote that the operation was going very well. The Filipinos were reacting “splendidly” to his efforts on their behalf. Victory was in sight. Yet the hero remained humble. “Please excuse this scribble,” he told the president, “but at the moment I am on the combat line with no facilities except this field message pad.”

Roosevelt responded with a comparable mix of sincerity and theater. “The whole American nation today exults at the news that the gallant men under your command have landed on Philippine soil,” he cabled the general. “I know well what this means to you. I know what it cost you to obey my order that you leave Corregidor in February 1942 and proceed to Australia. Since then you have planned and worked and fought with whole-souled devotion for the day when you would return with powerful forces to the Philippine Islands.” That day finally had come. “You have the nation’s gratitude and the nation’s prayers for success.”

Additional good news arrived within days, when a U.S. naval force annihilated most of what remained of the Japanese fleet, at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Four Japanese aircraft carriers, three battleships, eight cruisers, and a dozen destroyers went down with some ten thousand officers and men. The battle closed a chapter of naval warfare; never again would the Japanese fleet venture in force from its home waters.

R
OOSEVELT COULD HAVE
coasted to victory in the election, but he chose to press his advantage. In a radio address delivered before the Foreign Policy Association of New York, he described the present as a crossroads of history for democracy and personal freedom.

The power which this nation has attained—the political, the economic, the military, and above all the moral power—has brought to us the responsibility, and with it the opportunity, for leadership in the community of nations. It is our own best interest, and in the name of peace and humanity, this nation cannot, must not, and will not shirk that responsibility.

Roosevelt’s vision of American leadership entailed a radical departure in American diplomacy. He remembered well that American support for the League of Nations had broken over article 10 of the League covenant, pledging members to employ force against aggressors. Yet now he made such a pledge the crux of his election campaign.

The Council of the United Nations must have the power to act quickly and decisively to keep the peace by force, if necessary. A policeman would not be a very effective policeman if, when he saw a felon break into a house, he had to go to the town hall and call a town meeting to issue a warrant before the felon could be arrested…. If the world organization is to have any reality at all, our American representative must be endowed in advance by the people themselves, by constitutional means through their representatives in the Congress, with authority to act.

The contrast to the 1940 campaign could hardly have been more dramatic. Then Roosevelt had promised American mothers and fathers that he would not send their sons to fight in foreign wars. Now he promised those same mothers and fathers that he
would
send their sons to do precisely that.

It was a bold move, but not a hugely risky one. In 1940 the isolationists had still been a threat; Roosevelt had had to proceed with caution. Now isolationism was a spent force and internationalism was on the rise. Yet he knew from experience how quickly the American mood could change, which was why he insisted on making the election a referendum on his internationalist vision.