Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (4 page)

Roosevelt asked Marshall about the disposition of the army in the Pacific and particularly of the army’s air forces in the Philippines. Marshall said he had ordered Douglas MacArthur, the commanding general in Manila, to take every precautionary measure. The president directed that the Japanese embassy in Washington and Japan’s consulates in other cities be protected against vigilante violence and that Japanese citizens in the United States be placed under surveillance. He rejected a military cordon around the White House but ordered Stimson and Knox to safeguard America’s arsenals, private munitions factories, and key bridges.

Roosevelt told the group he would go to Congress the next day. Cordell Hull recommended a detailed description of Japan’s history of aggression in Asia and the Pacific. Roosevelt rejected the advice. His statement would be succinct, he said. The only thing that mattered at the moment was that Japan had attacked America and killed many Americans.

As the group dispersed to carry out his orders, Roosevelt dealt with messages and queries that arrived by phone, cable, and courier. Winston Churchill called from England. “Mr. President, what’s this about Japan?” the prime minister asked.

“It’s quite true,” Roosevelt answered. “They have attacked us at Pearl Harbor. We are all in the same boat now.”

“This certainly simplifies things,” Churchill said.

During the course of the afternoon, new information detailed the disaster in Hawaii. Five battleships had been sunk or were on fire and sinking. Several other vessels had been destroyed or seriously damaged. More than a hundred aircraft had been blasted beyond repair. More than two thousand sailors and soldiers had been killed, and more than a thousand others wounded. Late in the afternoon, word arrived that Japanese planes had attacked American bases in the Philippines and, despite Marshall’s warning to MacArthur, inflicted heavy damage.

Calls came from the Justice and Treasury departments, where officials needed guidance on how to respond to the apparent state of war with Japan. Press secretary Stephen Early ran in and out of the Oval Office, relaying information from the president to reporters. Harry Hopkins recommended a meeting of the full cabinet and a presidential briefing of the congressional leadership. Roosevelt summoned Grace Tully, his personal secretary, and dictated a draft of the message he would deliver to Congress the next day.

The cabinet gathered at half past eight in the Oval Office. The department secretaries crowded around the president’s desk, feeling the weight of history on their shoulders. Roosevelt reinforced the feeling by describing the session as the most important cabinet meeting since Lincoln had convened his secretaries at the beginning of the Civil War.

Roosevelt read the group the draft of his message to Congress. Hull complained that it was too short and unspecific. The president ignored him.

At nine-thirty the congressional leaders arrived. Roosevelt explained the situation in the Pacific. He formally requested the opportunity to speak to Congress the next day. A time was set: half past noon. The lawmakers asked whether the president would seek a war declaration. He said he hadn’t decided.

They didn’t believe him, and he didn’t expect them to. He realized that if he acknowledged a decision for war, the news would be all over Washington within minutes of the legislators’ leaving, and all over the world within hours. He didn’t want to preempt himself or slight Congress.

The lawmakers were ready to declare war even without a presidential request. Tom Connally of Texas emerged from the White House demanding vengeance against the Japanese. “Japan started this war in treachery,” Connally said. “We will end it in victory.” Warren Austin of Vermont considered war a foregone conclusion. “Of course it’s war,” Austin said. “I can’t see any other sequel.” Harry Byrd of Virginia vowed to “wipe Japan off the map.”

Even the isolationists supported war. Robert Taft of Ohio characterized a war declaration as necessary and inevitable. Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan had previously charged Roosevelt with trying to take America to war and had criticized him harshly. “But when war comes to us,” Vandenberg now said, “I stand for the swiftest and most invincible answer.” New York’s Hamilton Fish promised to address America from the floor of the House of Representatives and urge the people to unite behind the president. “And if there is a call for troops,” Fish said, “I expect to offer my services to a combat division.”

T
HE
A
MERICAN PEOPLE
reacted more slowly. Most had followed the growing crisis in Asia with varying degrees of concern but also with the knowledge that previous crises had come and gone without entangling America directly. Most had expected that this crisis too would pass. The small number paying the closest attention had, with Roosevelt, supposed that the Japanese would attack somewhere; with Roosevelt nearly all of these imagined the blow would fall on Thailand or Malaya. Almost no one considered Hawaii a likely target.

The news from Pearl Harbor shocked the nation. The first reports reached Seattle and San Francisco as churches were emptying from morning services; congregants shared the ill tidings in shocked whispers. The news caught Kansas farm families sitting down to midday dinner; fathers and mothers looked at their teenage sons and suddenly saw soldiers about to be sent overseas. The news arrived in Chicago at halftime of a football game between the hometown Bears and the archrival Green Bay Packers and made the game seem suddenly unimportant. The news halted tourists in Manhattan’s Times Square, where they huddled against the December chill to read the sobering bulletins crawling along the headline tickers. In Boston the local CBS radio affiliate interrupted its review of the year’s top stories to break the story that outdid them all.

For the rest of that day and through the night, Americans listened and waited. They listened to their radios to learn the extent of the damage. How many ships had been lost? How many servicemen killed? They waited to hear what the disaster meant. Would it be war? Surely yes, but what kind of war? War against whom? Japan, of course, but Germany as well? War for how long? To what end?

Their questions extended to the person who would provide them the beginning of answers. All knew the aspect Roosevelt presented to the public. How could they
not
know the face and voice of the man who had served longer than any other president in American history? Yet few professed, and none convincingly, to fathom the mind and heart, the motives and inspirations, that lay beneath and behind this familiar presence.

Not that people didn’t form opinions—strong opinions. His enemies excoriated him as a communist and damned him for disregarding property rights and violating the canons of the capitalist marketplace. The wealthy denounced him for having betrayed the class of his birth.
Time
magazine devoted a lead article to the “burning bitterness” the better-off felt for Roosevelt. “Regardless of party and regardless of region,” the Henry Luce weekly asserted, “today, with few exceptions, members of the so-called Upper Class frankly hate Franklin Roosevelt.” Their hatred was heightened by their confusion as they reflected on Roosevelt’s apostasy. Why did he do it? What could have converted this scion of privilege into a radical critic of the established order?

Roosevelt’s friends were no less mystified. They applauded his boundless energy, his unsinkable optimism, his bold willingness to employ the engines of government to tackle the social and human consequences of the worst industrial depression the nation had ever experienced. But they too wondered at the sources of his governing philosophy. What traumas or epiphanies had transformed a Hudson Valley patrician into a champion of the common people of America? Those on the inside scratched their heads, and sometimes tore their hair, at his leadership style, which set aides against aides, cabinet secretaries against cabinet secretaries, and the Democratic party against itself. After more than eight years they remained astonished at his ability to make visitors to the White House come away thinking he had agreed with whatever they had told him, without in fact his agreeing to anything.

Mostly they marveled at the calm he exuded at the eye of one storm after another. The signature line of his first inaugural address—that the only thing America had to fear was fear itself—had seemed a rhetorical flourish when inserted into the text, a brave but essentially empty effort to calm the country at the most dangerous moment of its worst financial crisis. But once those words were spoken, in his steady, confident tenor, and after they flashed across the radio waves to every neighborhood, village, and hamlet in the country, they magically acquired a substance that soothed the worst of the fears and allowed the president and Congress to pull the financial system back from the brink.

The insiders knew something of the source of his confidence. They knew how his golden youth of wealth, travel, and athletic vitality had segued into a charmed young adulthood of political preference and rapid advance—and how the brilliant career had been cut short, apparently, by a devastating attack of polio. Crushed by despair, he had clawed his way back to hope; struck down physically, he gradually regained his feet. He reentered the political arena, a fuller man for what he had lost, a deeper soul for what he suffered. His touch with the people seemed surer than ever, his voice more convincing. The people responded effusively, electing him governor of New York twice, then president overwhelmingly. They applauded his performance on their behalf and reelected him by a still larger margin. And after another four years they defied historical precedent and conventional wisdom to reelect him again. It was a record to imbue anyone with confidence.

Yet much of the mystery remained. He was gregarious, genuinely enjoying spirited conversation and the company of others. But the substance of the conversations flowed in one direction; though he talked a lot, he gave nothing away. Not even his wife—his companion and ally of thirty-six years—professed to know his mind. He rarely read books other than dime mysteries, so his tastes in reading furnished few clues. He kept no diary. His letters were singularly opaque. He spoke with journalists more often than any president in American history, yet though his remarks treated policy in detail, they revealed little of the policy maker. His speeches evinced his devotion to democracy, to fair treatment of ordinary people, and to American national security, and did so with passion and eloquence. But the wellsprings of that devotion, the source of that passion, remained hidden. He seemed to like it that way.

R
OOSEVELT LEFT THE
White House at noon on Monday, December 8, for the mile-and-a-quarter drive to the Capitol. His Secret Service contingent, mustered to maximum strength and tuned to a quivering degree of suspicion, scowled at the masses that lined both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue. After yesterday, who knew what form the enemy might take? The scores of thousands, however, registered only support for the president. They cheered, not lustily, not even enthusiastically, but with a strangely moving somberness.

His car pulled close to the rear entrance of the House chamber. In his early days in politics he would leap from his car at every opportunity to shake hands and kiss babies. Now he had to be lifted into a wheelchair and rolled to the speaker’s room. He waited there until half past twelve, when, with the further help of strong arms and the heavy steel braces that locked his knees into place, he shuffled the several feet to the dais.

He gripped the lectern to steady himself, and let the room fall quiet. Immediately before him, on his left, sat the nine justices of the Supreme Court, their black robes more appropriate today than usual. To his right were the ten cabinet secretaries. Eighty-two senators sat behind the justices and the secretaries; the other fourteen members of the upper house were still hurrying back from the out-of-town locations where the stunning news had caught them. Three hundred eighty-nine members of the House of Representatives filled the seats behind the senators, demoted to the rear despite being the regular tenants of the chamber. Hundreds of visitors packed the galleries.