Roosevelt (12 page)

Superficially there was a sort of pattern to Roosevelt’s working day. Ensconced behind his big desk by 10:00
A.M.
or so, he usually saw visitors through the rest of the morning, during the luncheon period (when a hot tray was brought in), and well into the afternoon. He spent the rest of the afternoon dictating letters and memos—most of them pithy but friendly little messages. His week had some pattern, too. He saw the congressional Big Four—the Vice President, the Speaker, and the majority leader of each chamber—on Monday or Tuesday; met with the press on Tuesday afternoons and Friday mornings; and presided over a Cabinet meeting on Friday afternoons.

This schedule could be easily upset by any kind of crisis, however, and there seemed to be no pattern at all in the way that Roosevelt actually did his work. Sometimes he hurried through appointments on crucial matters and dawdled during lesser ones. He ignored most letters altogether, sent many over to the agencies to be answered, turned over some to Watson or Early or Hopkins for reply, under their name or his. Sometimes he even wrote letters for an aide or secretary to sign. He took many phone calls (though few at night), refused others, saw inconsequential and even dull people and ignored others of apparently greater political or intellectual weight—all according to some mystifying structure of priorities known to no one, perhaps not even to himself.

Yet if Roosevelt’s working habits lacked system and plan, they bespoke a habit of mind, a style of intellect, a
sens de l’état
that
could be summed up in one word: accessibility. After eight years of pressure in the White House mold Roosevelt was still endlessly curious; he was still reaching out for ideas, open to innovation, willing to experiment. He corresponded and/or talked with an amazing variety of people: Supreme Court justices; royalty, including King George VI and King Haakon, of Norway; old family friends from Dutchess County; poets and novelists, including Carl Sandburg and Upton Sinclair; old political colleagues from Albany days; radicals, including Norman Thomas; journalists; old friends and diplomats, perhaps William Phillips, from Rome, Francis Sayre, from Manila, or Grew, from Tokyo; old Wilsonians, including Josephus Daniels; chiefs of government, including Canada’s Mackenzie King; wise old men, including Grenville Clark, of New York and New Hampshire, and Bernard Baruch, of Lafayette Park; as well as Cabinet members, Senators, Representatives, undersecretaries, bureau and agency chiefs, governors, mayors, leaders of business, agriculture, and labor, veterans, and a host of other interest groups, with all their subleaders, opposition leaders, and rebels.

Inevitably this breadth and variety made for some superficiality of contact and probably of comprehension. No one—not even his wife or sons—felt that he could get close enough to the President to understand him. No one could assume that he himself was indispensable; Raymond Moley, Thomas Corcoran, and even his son James had moved in and out of the bright orbit of influence. Now that Hopkins was on top, people—Eleanor Roosevelt among them—were wondering how long the friendship would last, and whether Hopkins could stand the heartbreak if the time came when he might not be needed. Roosevelt was committed to no man or woman, nation or ally, cause or principle, but to some goal so deeply buried within himself and yet so transcendent that few could discern it amid the complex and turbulent events of the time.

But Roosevelt was not given to musing on such matters. He presided gaily over his White House. He kept channels open, fought routine, sabotaged institutionalization, knocked heads together, “locked people in rooms” until they agreed. He could confront with equal aplomb Ickes’s obsessive efforts to wrest the Forest Service away from Agriculture, his son John’s phone call asking his father to make arrangements for diaper service for a forthcoming visit of his wife and baby, the latest demand from Churchill for emergency aid, Eleanor’s proddings to appoint liberals, and still cope with the voracious demands on his time and temperament. Amid emergencies he could pen joshing notes to his secretaries, challenge Ickes to catch bigger fish on the next expedition, record a memory of a long-forgotten episode of his childhood, and send
Mrs. Watson (with copies to the Secret Service and the FBI) a newspaper photo of Pa with an Apple Blossom Queen. On the eve of the greatest crisis of all, with Hitler turning to the most fateful venture in modern history, with Roosevelt leading an underprepared and undermobilized people at a moment of great peril, the “power center of the Western world” was a cluttered study or office inside an executive department inside a gracious home.

T
HE SPRING SUN WAS
rising earlier now, climbing higher, burnishing the compacted snow in Moscow streets, washing away the grimy slush of Berlin, starting freshets down the mountains of Greece and Yugoslavia, drawing up poppies in the London ruins and blossoms in the chestnut trees along the Seine, bringing cherry trees to bud along the Washington Tidal Basin and peonies to bloom in the Emperor’s gardens in Tokyo. To soldiers this was fighting weather; along the endless war fronts and coastlines they redoubled their guard and lengthened their watches. Above all, this was Hitler’s time, when he liked to prod and bully and attack. All through the early spring, rumors flashed from capital to capital about the Führer’s next move.

It was a measure of Hitler’s genius, as well as of his power, that in the spring of 1941 he seemed capable of striking in any or all of four directions. The British were still bracing themselves for the possibility of a tremendous onslaught across the Channel. The Spanish were wary; Hitler had been pressuring Franco to allow him to launch a blitz on Gibraltar and then sweep into Africa. The Caudillo had refused, but now it was rumored that the Nazis would invade Spain and stage their blitz anyway. Meanwhile, Hitler kept Vichy France on a tight bit. Then there were reports that the Nazis were concentrating armor and air power in Sicily in order to help the beaten Italians in Libya. And the Balkans, divided by ancient quarrels and racked by internal turmoil, were taut under Nazi pressure.

Roosevelt followed Hitler’s chess moves with deepening anxiety. Encumbered by congressional resistance, inadequate arms, and by his own uncertainties, he tried nevertheless to throw his country’s meager weight into the scales. When Churchill cabled him late in March that the battleship
Malaya
had been torpedoed while escorting a convoy and he would be “much obliged” if she could be repaired in American yards, the President replied that he would be delighted. When Hitler put pressure on Pétain to line up with the Axis, Roosevelt had his Ambassador in Vichy, Admiral William
D. Leahy, reaffirm America’s faith in ultimate British victory. When Churchill warned the President that Vichy was planning to send the battleship
Dunkerque
from Oran to Toulon for repairs, and thus almost into the Nazi embrace, Roosevelt had Leahy lodge an emphatic and successful protest with Pétain. When the Greeks, fearful of Nazi invasion, begged the President to send thirty modern combat planes that he had long promised, the Commander in Chief pressed his Navy to provide the craft (but Greece would be overrun before they arrived). When Prince Paul, of Yugoslavia, showed signs of succcumbing to Nazi threats, Washington tried to persuade the Regent that the southern Balkans could be held against Hitler.

The President variously tried threats, bribes in the form of Lend-Lease goods, moral exhortation, and friendly counsel. But both his words and his actions had a hollow ring—for here was the most powerful democracy on earth urging small nations to resist the Nazi tide while it sat safely behind its Atlantic moat thousands of miles from the danger zone.

Amid these troubles the two great democracies occasionally found themselves at odds. The White House generally preferred to follow a conciliatory policy toward Pétain and a tough one toward Franco; the British tended to do the reverse. Churchill wanted Roosevelt to stage naval demonstrations in the East Atlantic to impress Portugal and other neutrals; the President was fearful of antagonizing Lisbon and reluctant to divert any of his fleet units from the Pacific. Churchill cabled that he would seize the Azores if Spain yielded to the Nazis or was overrun; Roosevelt cautioned him against such action unless Portugal was attacked, adding that if the British did seize the Azores they must make clear that it was not for permanent occupation. “We are far from wishing to add to our territory,” the Prime Minister answered with hurt pride, “but only to preserve our life and perhaps yours.”

If Washington at times was divided from London, it was also divided within itself. With Atlantic sinkings continuing at a horrifying rate, Stimson prodded the President early in the spring to seize the nettle and order the escorting of Allied ships by American warships and planes. His chief wanted to proceed more slowly—so slowly that some militants yearned for a scapegoat such as Hull, who also seemed cautious in both his Atlantic and his Pacific policy. Ickes barked into his diary: “Once again I say ‘Goddamn the Department of State.’ ”

But most people close to the administration saw the main lack of leadership in Roosevelt himself. Frances Perkins and Frank Walker found alarming lethargy and ignorance about foreign policy in their trips across the country. Frankfurter told Ickes he was at a loss to understand the President’s failure to take the
initiative. Stimson bluntly warned his chief late in April that the political situation was deteriorating and that the administration must lead.

Roosevelt would lead—but not by more than a step. He seemed beguiled by public opinion, by its strange combinations of fickleness and rigidity, ignorance and comprehension, by rapidly shifting optimism and pessimism. If the reading and radio-listening public, he told reporters one day, “read history, they ought not to go up on a pinnacle of hope one day because of a sea battle off Italy, and go down to the depths of despair the next day because of an Axis advance in Greece.” The war would be won, he went on, not by one sea fight “but by keeping the existence of the main defense of the democracies going—and, that is England—the British Empire.”

The President was dismayed by the defeatism and fatalism in the country. Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s
The Wave of the Future
had created a minor sensation with its picture of relentless—and seemingly authoritarian—forces at work. “These people,” the President told reporters, “say out of one side of the mouth, ‘No, I don’t like it, I don’t like dictatorship,’ and then out of the other side of the mouth, ‘Well, it’s going to beat democracy, it’s going to defeat democracy, therefore I might just as well accept it.’ Now, I don’t call that good Americanism….”

Yet Roosevelt himself seemed irresolute. When Norman Thomas wrote that convoys would bring total war, Roosevelt sent him a rather wary reply: “…I wish you could be here for a week sitting invisibly at my side. It would not be a pleasant experience for you because you would get a shock every ten minutes.

“You and I are, I think, about the same age and certainly we had hoped to live out our own lives under conditions at least somewhat similar to the past. Today I am not sure that even you and I can do that.”

But Roosevelt was facing an adversary who did understand the “complete change from older methods”—who, indeed, had helped produce the change. In the spring of 1941 Hitler was putting the final touches on his world strategy.

“Who was I before the Great War?” Adolf Hitler had demanded of the workers assembled before him at the Rheinmetall-Borsig Works in December. “An unknown, nameless individual.” But who was Hitler in the spring of 1941? To his people he had become both messiah and miracle worker—a man who had somehow pulled off the great deeds he had promised. To Churchill he was a guttersnipe, a gangster, a “monstrous abortion of hatred and defeat,”
and while these epithets were for public consumption they did not much exaggerate Churchill’s private view. To the Russians, despite the pact with Germany, Hitler personalized the final convulsions of capitalism and militarism. To millions of Americans and Britons he was a madman who went into frenzies, foamed at the mouth, fell to the floor, and chewed carpets.

To Roosevelt he was simply an enigma. There were odd resemblances between the two: both liked to talk, to dwell on old times with old friends, to act out roles, to be flattered, to play off friends as well as enemies against one another; they had both come to power at the same time. But the resemblances were superficial; the two men had emerged from different worlds, held almost opposite values.

Hitler as a boy had hated and feared his father and loved his mother, had moved repeatedly from place to place and from school to school, had a sense of self that was at once overblown and empty; Roosevelt loved his parents, had a strong feeling of family, place, identity. Hitler showed little ability to change and adjust; Roosevelt was growing and adapting throughout his life. Roosevelt had an average interest in sex and was restricted in part by lack of opportunity; Hitler had plenty of opportunity with women but was frustrated by his own inhibitions. Roosevelt loved to laugh; Hitler emitted at most a sort of barking gurgle. Roosevelt loved sun, water, and snow; Hitler hated them except at a distance. Roosevelt liked moderate amounts of tobacco, liquor, and meat; Hitler spurned all three. Hitler loved the grandiose, the morbid, the apocalyptic; Roosevelt, the tangible, the proximate, the concrete. Hitler was fascinated by blood, decapitation, by death in all its simplicity and finality; Roosevelt conducted a long love affair with life, with its endless complexity, surprises, and open-endedness.

Hitler was an ideologist. In his five decades of vagrancy, and of trench life, political combat, and finally the conquest of power, he had forged a system of values, a rigid theory of change, and a strategy of political action. The values were folkish, racist, xenophobic; they assaulted everything precious to the liberal mind—egalitarianism, altruism, tolerance, religion, individual liberty, internationalism. Hitler’s theory of change was not of personal flexibility and adaptation, but of unremitting racial and national conflict and brutal violence, with the strong climbing to power over the bodies of the weak; there was no place for the flabby liberal notions of due process, minority rights, civil liberty, parliamentarianism, gradualism, accommodation. Hitler was a true ideologist in that his values, his theory of change, and his political strategy meshed perfectly. And as an ideologist he considered his adversaries not merely wrong or evil, but also mad. Roosevelt was simply crazy, he
told his comrades; he behaved like a “tortuous, pettifogging Jew” because there was Jewish blood in his veins, and the “completely negroid appearance of his wife showed that she too was half-caste.”