Joseph E. Persico (15 page)

However relatively weak the nation, FDR was determined to share whatever he could to shore up Britain. To him, England's plight was not something discovered solely in Churchill's cables or the cold assessments of his military analysts, but a highly personal matter. He had an English friend who dated back to his youthful trips abroad, Arthur Murray, a business executive and former member of Parliament. The two regarded themselves as distantly related. During the Blitz, Murray's wife wrote, “Dear Mr. President (Cousin Franklin) . . . I am going this afternoon to sort out . . . bundles of warm clothes for the children and women who have been evacuated. . . . This is the first few names on my list; John Hodson (aged 10) one parent killed in air raid, other missing; George Elton (aged 12) mother killed, father in army abroad; Elsie Burrey (age 7) both parents killed; Harry Young, mother missing, father killed at Dunkirk. And the list goes on.”

His visceral conviction that Britain's fight was America's fight had led FDR to take the daring step in September of giving the British the fifty old destroyers before Congress had a chance to say no. But it was not enough. As 1940 drew to a close, Churchill had sent FDR a letter arriving on December 9 that spelled out Britain's peril. After a depressing inventory of British losses from the Blitz—the plants destroyed, the arms lost, the ships sunk by U-boats—he laid bare his country's plight: Britain was going broke. “The moment approaches where we shall no longer be able to pay cash for shipping and other supplies.” Roosevelt wanted both to save Britain from collapse and buy time for the United States to rearm. But, as a neutral, how did he surmount the tangle of obstacles, the reluctance of commercial interests to loan money to a sinking ship, the congressional resistance to outright gifts? The answer came about in Rooseveltian fashion, in another gestation discernible nowhere but in the President's mind. As Harry Hopkins put it, “I began to get the idea that he was refueling, the way he so often does when he seems to be resting and carefree. . . . Then, one evening, he suddenly came out with it—the whole program. He didn't seem to have any clear idea how it could be done legally. But there wasn't a doubt in his mind that he'd find a way to do it.” FDR would simply circumvent the obstacles in his path through a device of ingenious simplicity. The United States would send Britain weapons and supplies without charge. Then, after the war, the British could pay for them or return them. The program, passed by Congress and signed by the President on March 11, 1941, was called lend-lease.

An impatient President next wanted to press aid to Britain beyond lend-lease. The only question was how rapidly he dared move. On April 11, with Hitler's Wehrmacht triumphing in Yugoslavia, Greece, and North Africa, Roosevelt initiated a secret operation. He informed the man who held the purse strings for him, budget director Harold Smith, to find money to covertly finance American patrols to protect British shipping in the Atlantic. He shared his intentions with only four members of his cabinet because, as he put it, the rest “could not keep their mouths shut.” On April 10, Henry Stimson, among those trusted, confided to his diary that he had spent “a very long day at the White House. . . . The President had evidently been thinking,” he wrote, “how far he could go toward the direction [of] the protection of the British transport line. He had made up his mind that it was too dangerous to ask the Congress for the power to convoy.” Roosevelt feared that if such a resolution were pressed now it would probably be defeated. From the heaps of books and papers cluttering his office, the President asked Stimson to hand him his favorite atlas. He opened it to the Atlantic, and drew a pencil down a vertical line between the easternmost bulge of Brazil and the westernmost bulge of Africa, at roughly longitude 25 degrees. “He is trying to see how far over in the direction of Great Britain we could get,” Stimson later wrote in his diary. “His plan is then that we shall patrol the high seas west of this median line, so that they will be within our area.” In the President's scheme, American planes and ships would accompany the British convoys and alert them to the presence of German raiders or submarines. Soon after the meeting with Stimson, FDR quietly informed a delighted Churchill of this extended support for Britain. And a stretch it was. By executive fiat, FDR had swept Iceland and Greenland, over twenty-one hundred miles from the U.S. border, into the Americas, no different from Cuba, Argentina, or Peru, just as he had done earlier with the Azores.

Admiral Harold Stark, the Chief of Naval Operations, had become accustomed to being summoned to the White House at odd hours. FDR's performance invariably mesmerized him. He once told an interviewer: “When we were squidging as far as we could in North American waters,” FDR produced books “to prove that Iceland was in the western hemisphere. . . . I don't think anyone could equal him. He could sit and plot all the towns that would be passed on a flight down Brazil and over to India.” When the Navy, on FDR's flimsy authority, was ordered to build a chain of offshore bases, Stark complained to Roosevelt, “I'm breaking all the laws.” Roosevelt replied, “That's all right Betty [Stark's unlikely nickname], we'll go to jail together.”

On April 24 the President closeted himself with Stimson and Knox to consider how best to explain his increasingly bellicose posture to the American people. Stimson was struck by the sinuosity of the President's thought processes. FDR kept referring to the new patrol policy as “principally a defensive measure,” saying that the force in the Atlantic was merely going to patrol, looking out for any aggressors and reporting them. After hearing this semantic wiggle several times, Stimson interjected with a bemused smile, “But you are not going to report the presence of the German fleet to the Americas. You are going to report it to the British fleet.” After leaving the White House that day, Stimson wrote in his diary of the President's latest gambit, “He seems to be trying to hide it into the character of a purely reconnaissance action which it really is not.”

The next day, the President had a press conference scheduled, and Stimson urged him to level with the reporters if the patrol issue came up. When the question was indeed raised, FDR stuck by his story. “Now this is a patrol, and has been a patrol for a year and a half, still is, and from time to time has been extended,” the President explained, “for the safety of the Western Hemisphere.” He made no mention of the patrols passing intelligence on German naval movements to British warships.

Henry Stimson had one constituency and one duty, the country's armed forces and their state of preparedness. FDR had a nationwide constituency that ran from isolationists to interventionists, and he had to gauge just how far he dared get ahead of the public. Indeed, when a month after the press conference, a German submarine sank an American freighter, the
Robin Moor,
in the South Atlantic but outside the patrol zone, the President made the required rhetorical fuss, branding the attack piracy, demanding compensation from Germany, and kicking German consular staffs out of the country. But he did not make of the matter another
Lusitania.

On May 24 an event at sea forced FDR's combative streak back to the surface. He was informed that the German pocket battleship
Bismarck
had escaped British attackers and was headed toward the Americas. FDR considered the maneuver a threat to U.S. security. His aide Sam Rosenman has described the President's quandary regarding the
Bismarck:
“Should he order submarines to attack it? What would the people say if he did? There would obviously not be enough time to ask Congress.” The British navy solved the President's dilemma when, on May 26, it sank the
Bismarck
far closer to France than to the United States.

The President, however, was not appeased. To him, the incident underscored the
potential
of Nazi aggression against the Americas. He summoned Rosenman and Robert Sherwood, a three-time Pulitzer Prize–winning dramatist, and said that he wanted them to help him write a tough speech to be delivered at the Pan American Union, where he was scheduled to speak on May 27, commemorating Pan American Day. One day after the
Bismarck
went to the bottom, FDR, in black tie, his brow moist with sweat on one of the steamiest days of the year, was wheeled into the East Room of the White House to address an audience of Latin American diplomats and their spouses. The occasion was customarily marked by boilerplate paeans to hemispheric solidarity. It quickly became apparent that this speech, which only the trusted Grace Tully had been allowed to type, was not primarily intended for the Latin Americans seated on gilded chairs in the room. The Roosevelt voice, at once commanding yet intimate, was being heard by some eighty-five million people over radio. FDR came quickly to the point. “[W]hat started as a European war has developed, as the Nazis always intended it should develop, into a world war for world domination. No, I am not speculating about this,” he went on. “I merely repeat what is already in the Nazi book of world conquest. They plan to treat the Latin American nations as they are now treating the Balkans. They plan to strangle the United States.” He portrayed a Nazi octopus, its tentacles already enveloping Europe, now stretching across North Africa toward the Suez Canal and capable of reaching the Azores and Cape Verde Islands in the Atlantic only “seven hours distance from Brazil” for modern bombers.

The President shared with his audience an intense debate going on behind the scenes. In their secret correspondence, Churchill had confided to Roosevelt that German submarines were sinking ships faster than Britain could replace them. American military chiefs had been dead set against FDR's revealing to the Germans how well their wolf pack strategy was working. Furthermore, they feared that by publicly discussing German naval operations, British codebreaking successes might be compromised. FDR overruled his chiefs. He assumed that German submariners kept a fairly accurate tally of their scores. More important than protecting secrecy was to substantiate his claim that the wolf packs were a menace to the United States and to arouse the American people from their complacency. And so he told his perspiring, brow-mopping audience, “The blunt truth is this—and I reveal this with the full knowledge of the British government, the present rate of Nazi sinking of merchant ships is more than three times as high as the capacity of British shipyards to replace them; it is more than twice the combined British and American output of merchant ships today. . . . We shall give every possible assistance to Britain and to all who, with Britain, are resisting Hitlerism.” He continued, “Our patrols are helping now to insure delivery of the needed supplies to Britain. All additional measures necessary to deliver the goods will be taken.” America's situation had changed, the President declared. Until now, the war in Europe had required only a “limited” national emergency. That stage was over. He now proclaimed, “an unlimited national emergency exists.”

After the speech, FDR retreated to the Monroe Room, where he was joined by Harry Hopkins and Robert Sherwood, who had brought along the songwriter Irving Berlin. Sam Rosenman had always been impressed by FDR's capacity to shift gears instantly. “The President was able to relax completely, or the job would have killed him earlier,” Rosenman noted. “He was an expert at dividing his day into periods of work and play, of excitement and relaxation, of importance and minutiae.” That evening, setting aside the significant step he had taken with his speech, FDR asked Berlin to play the piano for him. He wanted to hear the composer's first big hit, “Alexander's Ragtime Band.” Berlin complied, continuing with an impromptu concert of his other favorites. Afterward, a beaming President retired to his bedroom. Sherwood popped in to say good night and found FDR still in high spirits. He was blanketed under almost a thousand telegrams. “They're ninety-five per cent favorable,” he grinned. “And I figured I'd be lucky to get an even break on this speech.” In Vichy France, FDR's ambassador, Admiral William Leahy, saw the speech as more than increased preparedness. To the admiral, whose association with FDR preceded World War I, the President had declared war against Hitler.

For all FDR's charges of a German threat, the truth was that Hitler still hoped to avoid a conflict with America. He had issued his navy strict orders against sinking American ships. He had no intention of attacking either North or South America. That spring, his eye had turned in the opposite direction, toward the East. Nevertheless, FDR continued to believe in the genuineness of a Nazi threat. One consequence was his warming to the idea of an American intelligence agency, thus far the unsuccessful objective of Admiral Godfrey. The admiral had spent two weeks in Washington plotting how to place his case before FDR. Finally, he found an opening wedge. A fellow Briton, Sir William Wiseman, who had been chief of British intelligence in America during World War I, knew the publisher of
The New York Times,
Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who was persuaded to intercede on Godfrey's behalf. Thereafter, the admiral was invited to dinner at the White House, and promised an hour alone with the President afterward.

Godfrey and Ian Fleming had been doing their homework, meeting with Bill Donovan at his Georgetown townhouse to help him draft a “Memorandum of Establishment of Service of Strategic Information.” The draft began: “Strategy, without information upon which it can rely, is helpless. Likewise, information is useless unless it is intelligently directed to the strategic purpose.” The United States clearly lacked an instrument to implement this logic of warfare. “Our mechanism of collecting information is inadequate,” the paper continued. The potential enemy surely did not make that mistake: “It is unimaginable that Germany would engage in a $7 billion supply program without first studying in detail the productive capacity of her actual and potential enemies. It is because she does this that she displays such a mastery in the secrecy, timing and effectiveness of her attacks.” The United States must establish “a coordinator of strategic information, who would be responsible directly to the President.” The plan also heeded Donovan's earlier concern: “. . . [T]he proposed centralized unit will neither displace nor encroach upon the FBI, Army and Navy Intelligence, or any other department of the Government.” Again, aping the British pattern, Donovan's draft noted: “. . . [T]here is another element in modern warfare, and that is the psychological attack against the moral and spiritual defenses of a nation. In this attack, the most powerful weapon is radio.”