Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (2 page)
Authors: H. W. Brands
Tags: #U.S.A., #Biography, #Political Science, #Politics, #American History, #History
Prologue
F
RANKLIN
R
OOSEVELT’S
S
UNDAY MORNING BEGAN AS MOST OF HIS
Sundays began: with a cigarette and the Sunday papers in bed. He wasn’t a regular churchgoer, confining his attendance mainly to special occasions: weddings, funerals, his three inaugurations. In his youth and young adulthood he had often spent Sundays on the golf course, but his golfing days were long over, to his lasting regret. This Sunday morning—the first Sunday of December 1941—he read about himself in the papers. The
New York Times
gave him the top head, explaining how he had sent a personal appeal for peace to the Japanese emperor. Neither the
Times
nor the
Washington Post,
which provided similar coverage, included the substance of his appeal, as he had directed the State Department to release only the fact of his having approached the emperor. This way he got credit for his efforts on behalf of peace without having to acknowledge how hopeless those efforts were. The papers put the burden of warmongering on Japan; the government in Tokyo declared that its “patience” with the Western powers was at an end. Heavy movements of Japanese troops in occupied Indochina—movements about which Roosevelt had quietly released corroborating information—suggested an imminent thrust against Thailand or Malaya.
Sharing the headlines with the prospect of war in the Pacific was the reality of war in the Atlantic and Europe. The German offensive against the Soviet Union, begun the previous June, seemed to have stalled just short of Moscow. Temperatures of twenty below zero were punishing the German attackers, searing their flesh and freezing their crankcases. The Germans were forced to find shelter from the cold; the front apparently had locked into place for the winter. On the Atlantic, the British had just sunk a German commerce raider, or so they claimed. The report from the war zone was sketchy and unconfirmed. The admiralty in London volunteered that its cruiser
Dorsetshire
had declined to look for survivors, as it feared German submarines in the area.
Roosevelt supposed he’d get the details from Winston Churchill. The president and the prime minister shared a love of the sea, and Churchill, since assuming his current office eighteen months ago, had made a point of apprising Roosevelt of aspects of the naval war kept secret from others outside the British government. Churchill and Roosevelt wrote each other several times a week; they spoke by telephone less often but still regularly.
An inside account of the war was the least the prime minister could provide, as Roosevelt was furnishing Churchill and the British the arms and equipment that kept their struggle against Germany alive. Until now Roosevelt had left the actual fighting to the British, but he made certain they got what they needed to remain in the battle.
The situation might change at any moment, though, the Sunday papers implied. The Navy Department—which was to say, Roosevelt—had just ordered the seizure of Finnish vessels in American ports, on the ground that Finland had become a de facto member of the Axis alliance. Navy secretary Frank Knox, reporting to Congress on the war readiness of the American fleet, assured the legislators that it was “second to none.” Yet it still wasn’t strong enough, Knox said. “The international situation is such that we must arm as rapidly as possible to meet our naval defense requirements simultaneously in both oceans against any possible combination of powers concerting against us.”
Roosevelt read these remarks with satisfaction. The president had long prided himself on clever appointments, but no appointment had tickled him more than his tapping of Knox, a Republican from the stronghold of American isolationism, Chicago. By reaching out to the Republicans—not once but twice: at the same time that he chose Knox, Roosevelt named Republican Henry Stimson secretary of war—the president signaled a desire for a bipartisan foreign policy. By picking a Chicagoan, Roosevelt poked a finger in the eye of the arch-isolationist
Chicago Tribune,
a poke that hurt the more as Knox was the publisher of the rival
Chicago Daily News.
Roosevelt might have chuckled to himself again, reflecting on how he had cut the ground from under the isolationists, one square foot at a time; but the recent developments were no laughing matter. Four years had passed since his “quarantine” speech in Chicago, which had warned against German and Japanese aggression. The strength of the isolationists had prevented him from following up at that time, or for many months thereafter. But by reiterating his message again and again—and with the help of Hitler and the Japanese, who repeatedly proved him right—he gradually brought the American people around to his way of thinking. He persuaded Congress to amend America’s neutrality laws and to let the democracies purchase American weapons for use against the fascists. He sent American destroyers to Britain to keep the sea lanes open. His greatest coup was Lend-Lease, the program that made America the armory of the anti-fascist alliance.
He had done everything but ask Congress to declare war. The Sunday papers thought this final step might come soon. He knew more than the papers did, and he thought so, too.
B
UT THERE WAS
something he didn’t know, or even imagine. Roosevelt was still reading the papers when an American minesweeper on a predawn patrol two miles off the southern coast of the Hawaiian island of Oahu, near the entrance to Pearl Harbor, spotted what looked like a periscope. No American submarines were supposed to be in the area, and the minesweeper reported the sighting to its backup, the destroyer
Ward.
The report provoked little alarm, partly because Hawaii was so far from Japan and partly because Pearl Harbor’s shallow bottom seemed sufficient protection against enemy subs. Some officers on the
Ward
questioned the sighting; eyes play tricks in the dark. Perhaps there
was
an American sub in the area; this wouldn’t have been the first time overzealous security or a simple screwup had prevented information from reaching the patrols. In any event, the
Ward
responded slowly to the asserted sighting and spent most of the next two hours cruising the area and discovering nothing.
While the desultory search continued off Oahu, Roosevelt in Washington pondered the latest diplomatic correspondence. American experts had cracked Japan’s code more than a year earlier; since then Roosevelt had been secretly reading over the shoulder of the Japanese ambassador. Yesterday evening—Saturday, December 6—he had read a long message from Tokyo to the Japanese embassy. The message answered an ultimatum from Roosevelt, coming after many weeks of negotiations with the Japanese, in which the president insisted that Japan give up the territory it had seized in Southeast Asia and disavow designs on more. The Saturday message from Tokyo left no doubt that the Japanese government rejected the president’s ultimatum.
“This means war,” Roosevelt told Harry Hopkins, his closest adviser and constant companion these days. Hopkins agreed. Hopkins added that since war had become unavoidable, there would be advantages to striking the first blow.
Roosevelt shook his head. “We can’t do that,” he said. “We are a democracy and a peaceful people.” He paused. “We have a good record.”
But there was something strange about the Saturday message. The introduction explained that it contained fourteen parts, yet only thirteen were included. The final part had been withheld until this morning, Sunday. A courier brought it to the White House just before ten o’clock. Roosevelt read it quickly. It said what anyone could have inferred from the previous parts: that Japan was breaking off the negotiations with the United States. The Japanese ambassador was instructed to deliver this news to the State Department at one o’clock that afternoon. The precision of the instruction was unusual. Why one o’clock? The most probable answer appeared to be that the delivery would coincide with the expected Japanese attack against Thailand or Malaya.
At six o’clock Hawaiian time—eleven o’clock in Washington—a task force of six Japanese aircraft carriers turned into a stiff wind three hundred miles north of Oahu. The ships and their four hundred warplanes constituted the most powerful naval strike force ever assembled till then—a fact that made it all the more remarkable that the carriers had managed to slip away from Japan and steam for eleven days toward Hawaii undetected by American intelligence or reconnaissance. Nor did any Americans see or hear the wave after wave of torpedo planes, bombers, and fighters the carriers launched into the predawn sky. The planes formed into assigned groups and headed south.