Roosevelt (45 page)

The obvious questions were always there: who of the many claimants should get what, how much, and when? Those who lost out in the strenuous competition were sorely tempted to appeal to the White House—to Hopkins and even to Roosevelt. The elaborate and constantly expanding machinery set up to free the President from lesser problems could also jam and eject crises back into the White House, often at the most unpropitious moments. The Commander in Chief was not averse to shouldering this burden; he often seemed to welcome it. “Come to Poppa,” he would tell the aggrieved. But there was always the possibility that the machinery would subvert or erode presidential purpose, especially when the machinery itself served narrower needs. Aid to Russia was a case in point.

Morgenthau came in to see the President in mid-March with some disturbing figures. Washington had agreed to deliver to the Soviets by April 1, 1942, 42,000 tons of steel wire, of which only 7,500 tons would have been shipped under existing schedules. The Secretary went down the gloomy list: 3,000 tools promised, 820 shipped; stainless steel—120 tons versus twenty-two; cold-rolled steel strips—48,000 tons versus 19,000; steel alloy tubes—1,200 tons versus none at all….

“I do not want to be in the same position as the English,” Roosevelt said as he contemplated these figures. “The English promised the Russians two divisions. They failed. They promised them help in the Caucasus. They failed. Every promise the English have made to the Russians, they have fallen down on….The only reason we stand so well with the Russians is that up to date we have kept our promises….

“I would go out and take the stuff off the shelves of the stores, and pay them any price necessary, and put it in a truck and rush it to the boat….Nothing would be worse than to have the Russians collapse.… I would rather lose New Zealand, Australia or anything else than have the Russians collapse.”

The President told Morgenthau to see to it personally that the “stuff” moved to Russia. He initialed a chit for his Secretary: “This is
critical
because (a) we
must
keep our word (b) because Russian resistance counts
most
today.” Morgenthau told his staff that the President wanted him to get all concerned together, that the boss felt “they had made a perfect monkey of him” on Russian aid and he would not stand for it.

For weeks the President prodded his agencies, which had many excuses for delays and inaction, including failures at the Soviet
end. By midsummer—a year after the original decision to aid Russia—deliveries were beginning to catch up with pledges. Through it all Roosevelt remained basically optimistic, even while the Russians were once again reeling back from German blows.

“The amusing thing about the President,” Morgenthau noted in his diary in September after listening to the President discuss the holocaust in Russia, “is that he can state these facts coolly and calmly whether we win or lose the war, and to me it is most encouraging that he really seems to face these issues, and that he is not kidding himself one minute about the war. That, to me, seems to be the correct attitude for a commander-in-chief to take.”

The Commander in Chief during these ominous summer weeks was worried by a prospect even more appalling than the overrunning of Russia—the possibility that the Nazis might have unlocked the secrets of the atomic bomb and might be building it.

It was now three years since Albert Einstein had written to the President to tell him that recent work by Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard led him to expect that the element uranium might be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future, that it might be possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium to generate quantities of new radiumlike elements, and that it was “conceivable—though less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed”—bombs so powerful, Einstein added, that they could blow up a whole port and its environs. Einstein’s letter was the culmination of passionate efforts by refugee scientists and others to press on the government their understanding of atomic energy, following Niels Bohr’s announcement that Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman in Berlin had achieved the fission of uranium atoms and the release of stupendous amounts of energy.

An atomic bomb in the hands of Hitler—this was unthinkable. How could the American government be alerted? After Fermi failed to interest the Navy Department early in 1939, it was decided that the President must be approached, and that this could best be done under the auspices of the celebrated Einstein. But it was not a time when even this name could unlock doors quickly. August and September 1939 were months of crisis and war in Europe. The letter was entrusted to Alexander Sachs, a financier and occasional adviser to the President, but it was not until mid-October 1939 that Sachs could get in to see the President.

“Alex, what are you up to?” Roosevelt had demanded genially when Sachs came in. Sachs had an extraordinary answer, not only
in Einstein’s letter, but also in more recent atomic developments. Roosevelt’s interest flagged during the long explanation; he tried to end the whole business by remarking that though it was very interesting, government involvement at the moment seemed premature. Sachs wangled an invitation to breakfast, however, and spent part of the evening calculating how he could get through to the President. When in the morning Roosevelt asked him, “What bright idea have you got now?” Sachs told him about Napoleon’s rejection of Fulton when the inventor of the steamship tried to interest him in the idea.

“This is an example of how England was saved by the shortsightedness of an adversary,” Sachs went on. The President was quiet a few moments, thinking.

“Alex, what you are after is to see that the Nazis don’t blow us up.” He called in Watson. “Pa, this requires action.”

Action came in fits and starts, and always under the dread apprehension that the Germans might be ahead. Bohr compared the atomic scientists to the “Alchemysts of former days, groping in the dark in their vain efforts to make gold.” An advisory committee on uranium was created, with representatives of the Ordnance Departments of both the Army and the Navy, and with Lyman J. Briggs, Director of the National Bureau of Standards, as chairman. The President did not want the initial research and evaluation to be monopolized by one of the services. The committee met with Szilard and Fermi and others but made little progress in the first year. Both the theoretical and operational problems seemed immensely complicated.

Roosevelt did not press the matter. Late 1939 and early 1940 were taken up with the twilight war in Europe. On May 10, 1940 he addressed the Eighth Pan American Scientific Congress in Washington and stated that the “great achievements of science and even of art can be used in one way or another to destroy as well as to create.…If death is desired, science can do that. If a full, rich and useful life is sought, science can do that also….You and I, in the long run if it be necessary, will act together to protect and defend by every means at our command our science, our culture, our American freedom and our civilization….” In the audience was a young scientist named Edward Teller. He had not planned to attend, because he disliked politics and considered political speeches a waste of time. But the Netherlands had been invaded that day and the shaken physicist went. Sitting there he concluded that Roosevelt was saying that the duty of scientists was to see that the best weapons would be available for use if necessary, and Teller, who had had serious qualms about devoting himself to weapons, suddenly found his last doubts removed as to whether he should work on the atomic bomb.

The next month the President established the National Defense Research Committee, composed of such luminaries as President James B. Conant, of Harvard, and Karl T. Compton, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and at last extensive research on atomic fission with government funds was begun. Progress was slow. British scientists were also at work and were becoming somewhat more optimistic than their American counterparts. Early in October 1941 Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, reported to Roosevelt and Wallace the British view that a bomb could be constructed from U-235 that had been produced by a diffusion plant. Prognostications, he made clear, were still not definite. The President endorsed full interchange with the British and ordered policy considerations to be restricted to a small group composed of himself, the Vice President, Stimson, Marshall, Bush, and Conant. By the eve of Pearl Harbor the President’s orders were for full speed ahead. But, as usual, he was taking the experimental approach. If in six months the project was making definite progress, he would make available all the industrial and technological resources of the nation to bring about crash production of the atomic bomb.

By mid-1942 scientists were trying several different methods for extracting the U-235 isotope and plutonium. Harold C. Urey, at Columbia University, was conducting gaseous-diffusion research, physicists at the University of Virginia and the Standard Oil Company were studying the centrifuge method, and Ernest O. Lawrence was directing electromagnetic separation at Berkeley. Scientists at the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago, under Fermi, were working on plutonium research and planning to build the world’s first nuclear reactor. At this time there was still little to choose among the centrifuge, diffusion, and electromagnetic methods of separating U-235 and the uranium-graphite-pile and uranium-heavy-water-pile methods of producing plutonium. Conant, it was said, had the gambling spirit of the New England pioneers; and so did Roosevelt, who without evident hesitation approved tens of millions of dollars for pilot plants.

When Roosevelt and Churchill met at Hyde Park in June 1942 they apprised each other of their progress with “Tube Alloys,” the English code name for the atomic project. Churchill was relieved when the President indicated that the United States would assume the responsibility for development. The project was already outstripping the managerial and governmental resources of the scientists, and in this same month the President ordered the Army to undertake the atomic-bomb program. A new division was created within the Army Corps of Engineers to direct the construction of massive research plants and secret atomic cities. The Manhattan Engineering District was launched in August 1942.

The desperate need for speed gripped the minds of officials and scientists alike. Roosevelt and Churchill knew of the efforts the Germans were making to obtain supplies of heavy water—a sinister term, eerie, unnatural, Churchill felt. Conant, analyzing the imperfect intelligence available, concluded that the Germans might be a year, but not more, ahead of the Allies. “Three months’ delay might be fatal,” he said.

T
WO OF FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT’S
traits charmed and puzzled his friends. One was his fascination with European royalty and his willingness to put himself out for its members. The other was his ability to talk at the end of a wearing day and to animate himself through the process of talking. Both these traits were especially noted in the spring and summer months of 1942.

Dispossessed royalty paraded through Washington and Hyde Park almost every week, or so it seemed to the commoners around. The President talked with King Peter about Nazi atrocities in Yugoslavia, presented a submarine chaser to Norway’s Crown Princess Martha, and had tea with Queen Wilhelmina at her summer place in Lee, Massachusetts, and invited her over to Hyde Park and to the White House. He treated her as a kind of beloved but crotchety great-aunt; “I’m scared to death of the old girl,” he confided to Grace Tully, in a tone of admiration. Wilhelmina got a sub chaser, too, with her name on it.

Rosenman marveled that when Crown Princess Juliana, of Holland, and her husband came in to see the President during a busy speech-writing session, work stopped and Roosevelt talked with his guests as though he had nothing to do. Hassett, with his republican Vermont blood, frowned on the time his chief spent with royalty, but the President seemed to enjoy his role. He did admit to Hassett that the chain of visiting heads of state, especially from Latin America, tired him because of their imperfect knowledge of English. Sometimes they even bored him. But Wilhelmina—nothing was too good for “Minnie,” Hassett noted. On her departure for England the President wrote to her that he would do his best “to look after Juliana and the babies.”

When Roosevelt this summer spent many weekends at “Shangri-La,” a camp in the Catoctin Mountains about sixty miles north of Washington, reporters wondered if he was tired of the demands and semiformality of Hyde Park. Certainly Hyde Park had its shortcomings as a retreat. The President wanted to go back home mainly for a holiday, to have a chance to read, sort out his books, decide
on new roads and tree plantings, but he was pursued there by visitors and telephone calls. When he made plans to build a small cottage on Dutchess Hill to “escape the mob,” reporters had labeled it his “Dream Cottage,” much to his annoyance.

Roosevelt’s main reason for favoring Shangri-La during this period was that it could be reached in a two-hour drive from the White House. Arrangements were simple to the point of crudeness there. His cottage had only two baths, one of them his; the other was shared by three bedrooms, and the President laughingly alerted his guests to the fact that the bathroom door did not close securely. Presidential aides roomed in rude pine cabins scattered about the area. The place was staffed by Filipinos borrowed from the
Potomac,
which was now on combat duty.

One rainy Saturday afternoon in the midsummer of 1942 the President left the White House with a small band of companions—the Samuel Rosenmans, Archibald MacLeishes, Grace Tully, his cousin Margaret Suckley, and Secret Service men. The party traveled in four cars whose low White House number plates had been changed to more anonymous digits. The cars moved slowly through the villages, stopping for traffic lights, and were unobserved except when the agents rode on the running board while passing through crowded streets. It was pouring at Shangri-La, too, but Roosevelt seemed not to mind. Wheeled through the cottage, he showed his guests to their rooms and complimented the messmen on their hanging of pictures sent from the White House, adding casually to his guests, “I may make a few changes tomorrow.”