Roosevelt (11 page)

And so in early 1941 Hillman and Knudsen and their colleagues and rivals and clients carried on as best they could, coping with the social ills of twelve years of depression, partial recovery, and recession; often running separately under Roosevelt’s loose rein; trying to convert men and plans to a war that was swiftly changing, to an American strategy that was obscure, to a leadership that delayed decisions for agonizing weeks and then moved overnight without warning. During the early weeks of 1941 a strike by thousands of workers at the Allis-Chalmers plant in Milwaukee—holder of a forty-million-dollar contract for turbines—seemed to symbolize OPM’s problems. Hillman had to deal with left-wing union leaders, AFL and CIO factions, a company president who was antiunion and an isolationist, and a dispute over union status that was legally complex and ideologically explosive. He and his aides managed to get the workers back on the job, only to have the management in effect go on strike. As these and other disputes seized the nation’s headlines, conservative Congressmen denounced Hillman as pro-Communist and prepared measures to limit the right to strike.

The President had called for “speed now”; in the late winter of 1941 everything seemed to conspire against action by a still-floundering democracy.

One morning early in April, John Gunther, already famous for his inside reports on Europe and Asia, visited Roosevelt to give his impressions from a recent tour of Latin America. Pa Watson told him that he could have only six or seven minutes; it was a crowded day, and the President was running behind. Gunther waited tensely. At the moment, Roosevelt was talking with the Commissioners of the District of Columbia; they took so long that Gunther’s appointment had to be reset for the afternoon. When he finally was admitted to the oval office, the President was leaning back in his chair, Fala was biting a squealing doll, Missy LeHand was clearing up some papers. Roosevelt shoved himself forward. “Hello, how are you?” he called out brightly. Quickly put at ease, Gunther mentioned that he had visited all twenty Latin-American republics. The President asked one question: “What are the bad spots?” Panama, said Gunther, adding that its president was an adventurer—and also a Harvard man.

“My goodness,” Roosevelt said. “Not really. Is he a
Harvard
man?” The President mentioned two other Latin-American dictators. “They’re both bad men, really bad, shocking, but they’ve done good things.”

Then, while Gunther sat in embarrassment thinking of the presidential time he was taking, his host began a monologue. The chatty, discursive talk went on and on—how the President had once met President Stenio Vincent, of Haiti; how Argentina really was a problem, but that one solution might be (Gunther shuddered) “colonizing” it; how Lend-Lease was going to help all along the line because (a big wink) “money talks”; how Iquitos, Peru, should become a free port; how he once told President Getulio Vargas, of Brazil, that if he were in his place he simply wouldn’t stand for most Brazilian public utilities being owned outside Brazil; how the tourist business might be stimulated in Chile; how some foolish American politicians had opposed the Pan-American Highway because it might be a route for invasion of the United States (“as if a real enemy would use
roads
!”);how Gunther ought to have met a certain chap in Puerto Rico, who lived on Such-and-Such street, had once been married to So-and-So, and liked very dry Martinis; how he often made idealistic speeches but knew full well that what really counted in Latin America was power; and how (laughing) no Latin American knew how to sail a ship.

Suddenly a quick movement of the eyes, Gunther noticed, and the President began talking about Europe. Gunther’s embarrassment grew, but now more because of the President’s seeming indiscretions. We were not ready for convoys across the Atlantic “yet.” Yes, the power of the Japanese was overestimated. Yes, we already had full plans to take over the whole Atlantic sphere, including Greenland. No, it would take about two months to get effective relief to Yugoslavia. Yes, Natal was necessary, but we could have it for the asking. Gunther got a remark in here; he said that he thought before the war was over the Union Jack and the Hammer and Sickle would be on the same side, and that the Red Army “might save us all.” “Really! What makes you think that?” Roosevelt said, and laughed.

“The phone rang with a low buzz, and I made to go,” Gunther wrote later. “He picked up the receiver, waving me to stay. Then began ten or eleven long minutes during which he said, ‘Yes, Harry…No, Harry…Why, I thought that had been done, Harry!’ He looked angry and nervously, forcefully, stabbed with a pencil at a pad. ‘All right, I’ll see to it, it’s done now, thanks, Harry.’ ” Gunther thought this must be Harry Hopkins, but when Roosevelt leaned back in his chair, cupping the phone to his ear, and began a long discussion of the history of American foreign policy and of
“your” Manchurian doctrine, Gunther realized it was Stimson. “Then I saw a quick rather hurt expression on FDR’s face, and he laid the phone down suddenly. Obviously, Mr. Stimson had cut him off.” Roosevelt stuck out his hand to Gunther and said, “So long! I’ve got to
run
along now!”

Scores of visitors had Gunther’s experience: the long anxious wait outside, while Watson bustled around trying to keep a semblance of the agenda, the sudden admission to the ample room, the radiant smile and flung-up arm of welcome, the disconcerting use of the visitor’s first name (disconcerting especially to Englishmen), and then the talk—bright, smooth, animated, discursive, but rarely on the purpose of the visitor’s call. Many visitors felt cheated; they inferred that the President did not want to confront their problem, that he was deliberately diverting them. They were right only in part, perhaps the lesser part. Roosevelt had to talk, to laugh, to tell stories, to dramatize, to dominate the room, to exhibit his amazing array of information, to find bearings and moorings in his own experiences and recollections. But there were no histrionics; there was not even an attempt at grandeur. Sitting behind his desk, with its casual display of mementos, souvenirs, and gimcracks, the President put his visitors at ease with his expansiveness, openness, geniality.

The White House seemed to mirror its master’s personality. By now journalists were picturing the President’s home as the center of Free World decision making, the pivot of American power, the economic GHQ of the anti-Nazi coalition. Roosevelt had become President of the World, said the
New Republic
’s TRB after the passage of the Lend-Lease Act. Visitors from abroad, accustomed to showy palaces for even pip-squeak dictators, were astonished by the lack of front and ostentation in the President’s home. Even more they were charmed by the simplicity and grace of the White House architecture, grounds, and some of its decor. And if they were important or lucky enough to visit the second floor of the house, they were surprised and a bit abashed by the casual appointments and cluttered quarters.

The second floor was pure Roosevelt; indeed, it seemed to Robert Sherwood that the President’s and the First Lady’s rooms had come almost to duplicate the rooms at Hyde Park. Bisecting the second floor was the same kind of long, narrow hall, haphazardly furnished with bookcases, photographs of crowned heads—most of them throneless, Sherwood noted—and prints. In 1941 Hopkins was living in a small suite in the southeast corner; Eleanor Roosevelt had a sitting room and bedroom in the southwest corner. Between them was the President’s oval study, and off that were a bedroom and bath. The north side of the hallway was taken up mainly by guest
rooms, large and small. In one of them hung Dorothy McKay’s famous
Esquire
cartoon showing a moppet writing
ROOSEVELT
on the pavement in front of his house while his sister called out to their mother in the doorway: “Wilfred wrote a bad word.”

The oval study—the decision-making center of the Free World—was actually a modest room, rather casually furnished, with naval prints and family phototgraphs pinned to the walls. Here Roosevelt liked to sit in the evening making an occasional phone call, sorting out his stamps, telling long anecdotes to his secretaries. On the third (and top) floor Missy LeHand, who was seriously ill by 1941, had a small sitting room and bedroom; the other rooms were used for overflow guests, especially for grandchildren at Christmastime. There was an air of small-town friendliness about the place extending through all the members of the staff, Sherwood remembered, and even to the Secret Service and White House police.

Washington reporters happily noted the symbolism: the President lodged in the center of the second floor, with Eleanor Roosevelt on his left and Harry Hopkins to his right. This was a comment on Hopkins’s reputed desertion of the New Deal for the war, but actually both the First Lady and the First Assistant were committed liberals and internationalists. If they diverged in their approach to politics, much of their divergence was reflected in Roosevelt himself.

After eight years in White House service Eleanor Roosevelt was still the compassionate, idealistic, wholly engaged woman who had thrown herself into social welfare and liberal politics during the 1930’s. Assisted by her faithful “Tommy,” Malvina Thompson, she was still leading the seven lives of wife, mother, chief hostess, White House columnist, nationwide lecturer (one hundred lectures in 1940, about one-third of them paid), Democratic party voice and organizer, and spokeswoman in the White House for labor, Negroes, youth, tenant farmers, the poor, and women in general. If inevitably she could not wholly devote herself to any of these roles, she had learned to be well organized and efficient. And she still possessed the vigor that had awed and amused the country in the earlier White House years; in 1941, in her late fifties, she occasionally worked the whole night through and went right on the next day.

Hers was a conscience combined with an almost demonic commitment and tenacity. By now she had come to recognize that she could not have, even if she still wanted, a romantic or even close relation with her husband. Married now for thirty-six years, they treated each other with devotion, respect, and tolerance, but Roosevelt had learned how to withdraw into protective covering against his wife’s importunings; and Eleanor had learned to accept
her White House role as essentially a presidential aide, though a very special one, who was with the President far less than Grace Tully and Missy LeHand were. Often she was assailed by doubts; sometimes she was lonely in the White House crowd; but always there was the self-mastery and the passion that led her on to the next column, the next lecture, and the next cause.

Hopkins was made of quite different stuff. Years of growing power and racking illness had not changed him much; he was still the intense, brittle, tactless, irreverent operative who could prod defense bigwigs as mercilessly as he had once chastised state officials and relief administrators. Along with his chief he saw the New Deal as a source of strength to the nation at war, not a handicap to it, but now with a lower priority than defense preparation. He had become as intolerant of liberal ideologues as he had been of standpat businessmen. He had almost an extrasensory perception of Roosevelt’s moods; he knew how to give advice in the form of flattery and flattery in the form of advice; he sensed when to press his boss and when to desist, when to talk and when to listen, when to submit and when to argue. Above all, he had a marked ability to plunge directly into the heart of a muddle or mix-up, and then to act. “Lord Root of the Matter,” Churchill dubbed him.

By the spring of 1941 Hopkins had been living in the White House for a year, and was paying the price of standing and sleeping so close to throne and bedchamber. Ickes noted on a fishing trip with the President to the Everglades that Hopkins could walk into the President’s cabin without being announced or even knocking, and that the President handed him apparently confidential papers that he showed no one else. “I do not like him,” Ickes confided to his diary, “and I do not like the influence that he has with the President.” Baruch complained that Hopkins was like a jealous woman in keeping others away from Roosevelt; everyone else had to “play him in a triangle.”

Others were more charitable. Morgenthau found him deceptive and flamboyant but absolutely dedicated to the President. Stimson had his troubles with Hopkins but confided to
his
diary: “The more I think of it, the more I think it is a Godsend that he should be at the White House.” But Roosevelt liked him—for his acute common sense, his humorous cynicism, his ability to cut through protocol, ignore old jurisdictions, straighten out tangled lines of administration. When Willkie, on visiting the White House after the election, asked the President why he kept Hopkins so close in view of the distrust and resentment people felt toward his aide, Roosevelt could speak his mind:

“I can understand that you wonder why I need that half-man around me. But—someday you may well be sitting here where I am
now as President of the United States. And when you are, you’ll be looking at that door over there and knowing that practically everybody who walks through it wants something out of you. You’ll learn what a lonely job this is, and you’ll discover the need for somebody like Harry Hopkins who asks for nothing except to serve you.” The President was probably exaggerating for Willkie’s benefit, but there was a ring of conviction to his words. In April he put his aide in charge of Lend-Lease and thus at the heart of economic, political, and military decision making.

Roosevelt’s White House was a home inside a mansion inside an executive office. In 1941 the mansion was, to thousands of Americans, the first floor, with its Blue Room and Green Room and state dining room and all the rest, where the touring public could gawk during the day, and captains and kings were entertained at night. By 1941 the President was holding formal entertaining to a minimum; in wartime he would largely dispense with it. He spent most of his daytime working hours in the oval office in the southeast corner of the executive wing. Here he could look through the tall windows onto the hedges and garden outside.