Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (159 page)

Americans responded by handing Roosevelt a resounding fourth victory. He polled 25.6 million popular votes and 432 electoral votes, against 22 million popular and 99 electoral for Dewey. His popularity reached to the House, where the Democrats reversed their downward trend and gained twenty seats. In the Senate the two parties broke even.

55.

“D
EAREST
F
RANKLIN,
” E
LEANOR WROTE IN EARLY
D
ECEMBER
1944:

I realize very well that I do not know the reasons why certain things may be necessary nor whether you intend to do them or do not intend to do them. It does, however, make me rather nervous to hear you say that you do not care what Jimmy Dunne thinks because he will do what you tell him to do and that for three years you have carried the State Department and you expect to go on doing it. I am quite sure that Jimmy Dunne is clever enough to tell you that he will do what you want and to allow his subordinates to accomplish things which will get by and which will pretty well come up in the long-time results to what he actually wants to do.

Cordell Hull’s uncertain health had finally forced him to resign, after serving longer than any other secretary of state in American history. Roosevelt hadn’t chosen a replacement, and Eleanor worried that James Dunne, Hull’s assistant, was taking the State Department in an illiberal direction.

Eleanor worried constantly these days, and not simply about the State Department. She was having an eventful, sometimes fulfilling, but often frustrating war. She quit the Office of Civilian Defense after conservatives in Congress vented their displeasure at her causes by cutting funding to the OCD. “I offered a way to get at the president,” she observed afterward. She began visiting military hospitals and bases around the country, but when her sons went overseas she determined to follow their example, to the degree a president’s spouse could. She traveled to England, where she visited with Churchill and his wife. “One feels that she has had to assume a role because of being in public life, and that the role is now a part of her,” she wrote of Clementine Churchill, in words she knew applied to herself as well. “One wonders what she is like underneath.” She met with the king, the queen, and assorted lesser royals. She saw the destruction from the German bombs in the Battle of Britain. She toured British and American military facilities and spoke with Eisenhower and his lieutenants. Her matter-of-fact manner impressed everyone she encountered. “Mrs. Roosevelt has been winning golden opinions here from all for her kindness and her unfailing interest in everything we are doing,” Churchill informed Roosevelt.

Her journey to England piqued her desire to get closer to the fighting. A Washington appearance by Madame Chiang suggested where Eleanor might go next. Eleanor was initially as smitten by China’s First Lady as most people were. She told Franklin what a gentle, sweet character she was. But Madame Chiang’s visit coincided with Franklin’s troubles with John L. Lewis and the mine workers, and Roosevelt innocently asked her, “What would you do in China with a labor leader like John Lewis?” Eleanor recalled the moment: “She never said a word, but the beautiful, small hand came up very quietly and slid across her throat—a most expressive gesture.” Roosevelt afterward inquired mischievously of Eleanor: “Well, how about your gentle and sweet character?” Years later, when Eleanor found other reasons to differ with Madame Chiang, she would say: “Those delicate little petal-like fingers—you could see some poor wretch’s neck being wrung.”

Madame Chiang’s visit provided the impetus for Eleanor to arrange a trip to the Pacific theater. She did so with mixed feelings. “This trip will be attacked as a political gesture,” she wrote a friend. “I am so uncertain whether or not I am doing the right thing that I will start with a heavy heart.” Her doubts didn’t lessen when some of the theater officers made clear that they didn’t appreciate her coming. Douglas MacArthur in Australia was even more disrespectful of her than he was of her husband. He wouldn’t take the time to speak to her, and he refused her request to get closer to the front, saying he couldn’t spare the personnel a woman of her stature required as protection. “This is the kind of thing that seems to me silly,” she wrote Franklin. She said she would be happy with a single sergeant as a guide. To a friend she wrote, “I’ve never been so hedged around with protection in my life. It makes me want to do something reckless when I get home, like making munitions!”

MacArthur handed Eleanor off to Captain Robert White, who at first resented the assignment. He had joined the army to fight the Japanese, not to chauffeur civilians who had no business in the war zone. But his experience with Eleanor changed his mind. “Wherever Mrs. Roosevelt went she wanted to see the things a mother would see,” White wrote later.

She looked at kitchens and saw how food was prepared. When she chatted with the men she said things mothers would say, little things men never think of and couldn’t put into words if they did. Her voice was like a mother’s, too. Mrs. Roosevelt went through hospital wards by the hundreds. In each she made a point of stopping by each bed, shaking hands, and saying some nice, motherlike thing. Maybe it sounds funny, but she left behind her many a tough battletorn GI blowing his nose and swearing at the cold he had recently picked up.

Eleanor’s maternal instincts extended to politics once she returned home. She encouraged her husband to keep the liberal faith, lest the poor and otherwise unfortunate lose out amid the effort to win the war. She tried to persuade him to retain Henry Wallace as vice president, considering Wallace the most reliable of the dwindling number of New Dealers in the administration. “I wrote a column on Wallace but Franklin says I must hold it till after the convention,” she told a friend to whom she could air her frustration. “I wish I were free!” At other moments she seemed more eager for a fourth term than Franklin was. “I don’t think Pa would really mind defeat,” she wrote James. “If elected he’ll do his job well I feel sure, and I think he can be kept well to do it, but he does get tired, so I think if he is defeated he’ll be content…. I am only concerned because Dewey seems to me more and more to show no understanding of the job at home or abroad.”

Immediately after the election she challenged Roosevelt to make good on his economic bill of rights. Harry Hopkins recounted a conversation the three of them had, in which Eleanor did most of the talking. “Mrs. Roosevelt urged the President very strongly to keep in the forefront of his mind the domestic situation because she felt there was a real danger of his losing American public opinion in his foreign policy if he failed to follow through on the domestic implications of his campaign promises,” Hopkins said. Eleanor stressed full employment—“the organizing of our economic life in such a way as to give everybody a job”—and she told Franklin and Hopkins that they simply had to do more than they were doing. “This was an overwhelming task and she hoped neither the President nor I thought it was settled in any way by making speeches.”

R
OOSEVELT DIDN’T
need the reminder that words weren’t deeds, but other deeds just then took precedence over his economic bill of rights. The war—both wars, in fact—remained to be won. The distinctness of the conflicts—the one in Europe, the other in the Pacific—became a major issue in American diplomacy during the last months of 1944 and the first months of 1945. The war in Europe was going as well as the Allies could hope. The American and British armies rolled through France during the summer of 1944, with Roosevelt, Churchill, and Eisenhower tactfully letting de Gaulle’s Free French army liberate Paris, in support of an uprising by the anti-German resistance there. “Men and women,” de Gaulle declared upon entering the capital: “We are here in the Paris that rose to free herself—the Paris oppressed, downtrodden, and martyred, but still Paris—free now, freed by the hands of Frenchmen, the capital of fighting France, of great eternal France.”

Roosevelt congratulated de Gaulle and his compatriots, while reminding them that it wasn’t just French hands that freed Paris. “We rejoice with the gallant French people at the liberation of their capital,” the president said, “and join in the chorus of congratulation to the commanders and fighting men, French and Allied, who have made possible this brilliant presage of total victory.”

The Allies pressed east, driving the Germans out of most of Belgium and the Netherlands in September and reaching the Rhine by the end of the month. Optimists, remembering the sudden disintegration of the second German reich at the end of the First World War, spoke of celebrating Christmas in Berlin. But the Germans dug in and launched a ferocious counterattack. The Battle of the Bulge (named for the westward swelling in the front) alarmingly recalled the German successes of 1940. For six weeks from mid-December the Germans threw every unit they could spare into the fight and inflicted the heaviest casualties American forces suffered during the entire war. But the Allied lines ultimately held, and the failed effort exhausted the Germans.

The Soviets meanwhile closed in from the east. The Russians drove the Germans out of the Ukraine and White Russia and fought their way across Poland. The Red Army troops entered East Prussia, some with their own visions of an Orthodox Christmas in Berlin (Stalin having loosened up on religion during the war). But logistics and winter intervened, and the final push awaited the spring of 1945.

In the Pacific the third anniversary of American belligerence found American forces sweeping all before them. MacArthur’s troops advanced through the Philippines, reaching the outskirts of Manila by the end of January 1945. A monthlong battle liberated the city, although little remained standing by the time the guns fell silent. In early February American B-29s flying from the Marianas began a firebombing campaign against Japan, which culminated, for the moment, in a three-hundred-plane assault on Tokyo that left the city a blazing ruin.

American scientists and engineers prepared an even more devastating attack. In December 1944 Roosevelt received a briefing on the Manhattan Project from Leslie Groves, the commanding general of the atomic bomb program, and George Marshall. Groves and Marshall explained that the project’s scientists and engineers had been pursuing two approaches to an atomic bomb. One approach, relying on the implosion of fissionable material, had appeared promising, in part because it required only a modest amount of the critical substance. Groves had hoped that an implosion bomb might be ready for use by the late spring of 1945. But technical difficulties emerged, necessitating a larger amount of fissionable material, which would require additional months to refine. “We should have sufficient material for the first implosion type bomb sometime in the latter part of July,” Groves told Roosevelt. A small number of additional implosion bombs would follow.

The second kind of bomb would produce its explosion by firing part of the fissionable material at the other part. This “gun-type” bomb would produce a much larger blast—the equivalent of ten thousand tons of TNT, as opposed to five hundred tons with the implosion device. The first such bomb, Groves said, should be ready “about 1 August 1945.” A second gun-type bomb would not be ready until the end of the year.

Roosevelt listened very carefully to the briefing. He probably didn’t fathom all the technical details, but he understood perfectly the crucial matter of timing. The bomb makers weren’t offering him anything usable before late July. Roosevelt knew enough about bureaucracies to guess that this was an optimistic forecast. The autumn of 1945 sounded more likely than the summer for the first use of an atomic bomb, assuming the complicated gizmo worked at all. Anything like a campaign of atomic bombing would probably have to wait until 1946 at the earliest.