Roosevelt (36 page)

Thoroughly disappointed in the bill, the President took the unusual step of calling House members of the conference committee to his office to persuade them to moderate the farm provisions in the Senate version. Once again his persuasion seemed to work. After a long and bitter session, the conference committee agreed on a suffer measure. Roosevelt’s establishment of the new War Labor Board, with power to stabilize wages, mollified some Congressmen; even so, the price bill passed the House by a margin of only twenty-five votes over the opposition. Despite the negative recommendation of at least one OPA administrator, the President signed the bill. Perhaps he sensed even then that he would have to ask Congress for broader anti-inflation powers—a move that he did make within three months. Meanwhile, he would proceed one step at a time.

In a graceful statement on signing the compromise bill he concluded—perhaps a bit wryly after all the vexing delays—by quoting a remark of Woodrow Wilson: “The best form of efficiency is the spontaneous cooperation of a free people.” But it was Wilson, too, who had extolled presidential leadership of a free people.

G
RADUALLY THE WHITE HOUSE
changed into a military command post during the early weeks of 1942. Soldiers and heavy chains barred the gates. Listening devices lay in the grounds. Artillerymen manned antiaircraft guns on the roof of the mansion and behind false terraces on the lawns. The long line of tourists passing through the first-floor rooms came to an end by order of the Secret Service. Employees had to have passes; visitors had to be listed in advance and carefully checked through the gates. The President could no longer dine out at a hotel; the annual Cabinet dinner given to him and the First Lady had to be held at the White House.

The President was half-amused, half-exasperated by the precautions. What a wonderful opportunity, he speculated at the Cabinet dinner, for Hitler to drop a bomb and catch so many important people at one gathering. “If all of us except Frances were killed we would have a woman President!”

In his oval study on the second floor and in his oval office in the executive wing Roosevelt’s routine was much the same as before. Now, however, he had a map room like Churchill’s, and on his way to and from the office he liked to look in at the large charts with task forces and convoys clearly indicated, scan the latest bulletins, and chat with the young officer in charge. But the White House was a somewhat cheerless place, especially after Churchill left. Roosevelt had no family there. Eleanor was busier than ever with her work in the Office of Civilian Defense and in countless other activities. The burden of events—now most of it of a crisis nature—pressed harder than ever on staff and President alike. Evenings were less relaxed; there were more telephone calls, more messages and queries that could not wait.

He had occasional relief from pressure. At some point during the harrowing months just before or after Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt began seeing Lucy Mercer again. Their romance had seemed to be finished forever in 1920 when she had married Winthrop Rutherfurd, a well-to-do widower almost thirty years her
senior, and even more the next year when Roosevelt had become an invalid and the ward of his mother and his wife. But some time later he managed to get back in touch with her, and she had shown up in Washington occasionally for official ceremonies during the first two terms. Her husband had recently suffered a stroke and was slowly dying, and the White House had become a lonelier place for Roosevelt than before. He found her the same poignant, diverting woman he had known a quarter-century earlier.

The revival of this
affaire de coeur
was well known to some in the White House but not to Eleanor Roosevelt. He would meet Lucy on a road beyond Georgetown and they would drive for a couple of hours; very occasionally friends arranged other meetings. When he once asked Anna whether she would mind if “an old friend” came to dinner, his daughter hesitated for two or three seconds, then said of course she would not. Doubtless the relationship was essentially temperamental rather than physical. Lucy Mercer still epitomized Roosevelt’s ideal of womanliness. She had a charming smile, almost bittersweet features, and graceful, statuesque figure; she attracted him, too, with her relaxed vivacity, complete absorption in his talk of politics, people, and olden times, and her lack of demands on him—except to see him again.

But even more than Lucy’s diversions, Roosevelt felt the pull to Hyde Park, to the place where he could throw off some of his cares and escape some of his burden, especially the burden of appointments. He firmly opposed his wife’s suggestion that the big house there be turned into a convalescent home; he reminded her that he would not be able to cruise at sea and doubted that he could even use the
Potomac
because of the target she would make for planes from a hostile carrier. “O.K. My conscience is free,” she wrote on the memo. So every two or three weeks during the winter and spring the President took the long slow train to Hyde Park for stays of five to ten days.

These trips were unpublicized, by the President’s emphatic instructions. With his small party—Hassett, Grace Tully, one or two secretaries, a doctor, sometimes Hopkins, and always some Secret Service men—he would drive from the White House behind an army truck carrying his luggage and papers and board the presidential train at a secluded siding. On the B&O he slept, talked, sipped cocktails with his staff, watched the passing people and foliage, occasionally went over reports and signed executive orders.

From Manhattan a New York Central locomotive would take him to Highland, across the river from Poughkeepsie and seven miles from Hyde Park. Soon the President would be happily installed in what was now his own home, with his staff in the Vanderbilt mansion three miles up the river. He had an intense interest in
that mansion, its former owners, and present appointments; he quizzed Hassett and the others about their rooms and laughed with them over the Vanderbilts’ effort to copy the decor of French royalty. He contrasted the artificial grandeur of the mansion with the plainer and simpler houses of the old Hudson Valley families; he was maintaining his own home as his mother had, he told Hassett, and as his family had for a century or more. What he really meant, Hassett concluded, was that old-fashioned families did not show off.

During these trips Hassett became in effect Roosevelt’s first secretary. While sitting with the President on the train, or meeting him in the morning in the bedroom or even the bathroom—“Have a seat on the can, and remember your pants are up,” Roosevelt told him once—or spreading documents out in the little study while the President’s heavy signature dried, he and his chief talked about their common interests: old books and authors, old family friends and national personages, birds, trees—above all, Dutchess County politicians, places, and happenings. Roosevelt had a comfortable sense of ownership of the place; he happily listed for the authorities his possession of a farm truck, dump truck, station wagon, and his little Ford, though he was not sure whether he also owned a little garden truck. And he never lost his feeling for the local flora and fauna. He timed one of his Hyde Park visits to see his dogwood in bloom, and later the same May he left the house at four in the morning to go bird watching at Thompson’s Pond in Pine Plains. His face lighted up later when he told how at daybreak he heard the note of a marsh wren, then a red-winged blackbird, then a bittern. He claimed to have identified the notes of twenty-two birds in all.

Roosevelt probably never had a “typical day” in his life, but a Saturday at Hyde Park late in March impressed people around him with the range of his interests and the continual flux of his mind. In the morning he chatted with Hassett about a variety of matters, including Sir Basil Zaharoff and American munitions makers who dealt with the Nazis. He then told Hassett of his plans to make a quick, unpublicized visit to New York City, without escort (a plan that failed). Later he discussed Pacific command problems with Hopkins. Then he motored over to the Vanderbilt mansion, called down Hackie (Louise Hackmeister, White House head telephone operator) and Hassett, whom he addressed as Empress Josephine and Cardinal Richelieu, and exchanged more Vanderbilt lore with them. Later he worked on antitrust matters and other affairs of state. In the evening he drove his old Ford, with its special hand levers, over to Eleanor’s Val-Kill cottage for dinner, bringing with him Grace Tully, Hopkins, and Hopkins’s daughter,
Diana. In front of the fireplace there was much talk of cousins, grandchildren, and friends. At dinner Eleanor peppered her husband with questions she had picked up in her travels—questions about destroyers being sent out without detectors, a rumored lack of incendiaries, the fall in bomb output resulting from a strike. Roosevelt dismissed the reports as “scuttlebutt.” He talked about the clamor for a unified command but said Marshall knew nothing about ships and King nothing about the Army. He waxed indignant about isolationist newspapers that would not keep military secrets—and the failure of the Justice Department to crack down on them. He then admitted a certain affection for Arthur Krock and Mark Sullivan as ancient but dependable fixtures, claimed that he got along better with Stalin than the British did—this was only a hunch, he admitted, when challenged by his wife—discussed new methods of dental treatment in the Army, remembered the time he gave his dentist a “haymaker” by mistake when coming out of laughing gas, defended Walter Winchell, teased Grace Tully for allegedly snitching a piece of ham on Friday, then wondered what would be substituted for rubber girdles during the war shortage and was assured by the ladies that the problem had been solved. The President left for the big house about ten. It was a godsend that he could relax this way, Mrs. Roosevelt said to her guests afterward; otherwise he could not have stood three terms in office, especially this last one.

It was in these familiar and cheerful surroundings, in the serenity of Hyde Park, that the Commander in Chief received much of the shocking news from the Pacific.

Rarely has a hemispheric strategy functioned so strikingly as did the Japanese grand offensive in the Pacific in the early months of 1942. The plan was audacious. Once the heavy units of America’s Pacific fleet had been destroyed or neutralized at Pearl Harbor and westward, a task force would cut the Navy’s line of communications across the Pacific by capturing Wake and Guam. Secured on their eastern flank, naval and army forces would then sweep south in a series of carefully phased movements.

In the first phase, lasting about seven weeks, one division from the army in South China would capture Hong Kong; two and a half divisions and one air division would assault the Philippines from Formosa; and in the southwest one army would occupy Thailand and then move into southern Burma, thus cutting the vital communications link between India and Malaya, while a larger army seized a bridgehead in northern Malaya and then drove south
toward Singapore. In the second phase, taking another seven weeks, reinforced troops would advance south from the Philippines to capture key points in Borneo, the Celebes, and Timor, while the Guam-Wake task force moved on New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago. In the third phase, operations against Java and Sumatra would be completed, and in the fourth, the occupation of Burma and the seizure of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal. By this time Tokyo would have attained its strategic objective—a vast defense perimeter stretching from the India-Burma frontier, through the Bay of Bengal, Sumatra, Java, Timor, New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, the Marshall and Gilbert Islands, and Wake, to the Kuriles.

That was the plan and that was what happened, though at different tempos. Seven hundred Japanese landed on the beaches of Agaña, in Guam, on December 10 and forced the tiny garrison’s surrender after a half-hour fire fight. Wake took longer. A “fixed aircraft carrier” moored over a thousand miles from Midway, the little atoll was manned by about five hundred Marines, who had a few small artillery pieces and a dozen Grumman Wildcats lacking both armor and self-sealing fuel tanks. The first air attack knocked out most of the Wildcats on the ground. Bombing continued for three days, after which the Japanese tried a landing—only to be miraculously driven off by Wake’s gun crews, with the loss of two destroyers. A relief expedition of carriers and support vessels was dispatched from Pearl Harbor but retired faintheartedly after a series of mishaps. After more air strikes had worn the defenders down, Japanese warships and transports returned on December 23 and overwhelmed the garrison in bloody fighting.

In the Philippines the Japanese planned to destroy America’s Far East Air Force and then capture Luzon with a five-pronged ground assault, and that is what they did. Faulty communications and bad luck marked MacArthur’s air defense. When the Zeroes roared down on Clark Field ten hours after the Pearl Harbor attack, they saw with surprise and relief B-17’s and fighters nicely lined up, evidently preparing to take off.

In hardly more than an hour the Japanese knocked out thirty-five of the exposed planes and crippled American air power in the Philippines. MacArthur, who a day or two before had told military colleagues that he was absolutely secure against air attack, reported that the Japanese planes had been brilliantly handled and thought that some of them were perhaps handled by white pilots. Three hundred miles north, the Japanese, under Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma, were beginning their first landings on Luzon; in the next two weeks, in the face of harassment from the United States Navy, foul weather, and occasional communications failures
of their own, they put thousands of troops on the northwestern, northern, and southeastern coasts of the long sprawl of Luzon, with the main concentration in Lingayen Gulf. In a final thrust—from the sea just before Christmas—twenty-four transports landed an infantry division in Lamon Bay, at the “rear entrance” to Manila.

For China, Tokyo planned a quick seizure of the foreign concessions in Shanghai and Tientsin as well as Hong Kong. The former had no chance to hold out; the crew of the river gunboat
Wake
had to surrender after failing to scuttle her—the only American ship to surrender in the whole war. The British and Canadian forces in Hong Kong put up unexpectedly strong resistance, but the increasingly familiar Japanese pattern—heavy bombing followed by overwhelming ground power—brought the surrender of the garrison on Christmas Day.