Pearl Harbor (6 page)

A tired, sick, and exhausted Hull lacked the energy and desire to engage in the delicate acts of diplomacy with envoys he considered dishonest and morally inferior. “I have washed my hands of it,” he told Stimson, “and it is now in the hands of you and Knox, the Army and Navy.” Perhaps convinced that Japan would never dare risk war with the United States, Hull intentionally drew a line in the sand that Japan would never accept. Probably he, like Acheson, simply assumed that Japan would back down.
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Concerned about Hull's hard line, FDR's military advisers weighed in and made sure that he was fully aware of the risks involved in a war with Japan. Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Admiral Harold “Betty” Stark and Army Chief of Staff George Marshall, both recently handpicked to join the FDR team, wanted to delay war with Japan for as long as possible.

Both men had impressed FDR with their skill, poise, and independence. Roosevelt met his future CNO for the first time in 1914 when Stark, a navy lieutenant, was assigned to escort the future president and current assistant navy secretary to the family vacation home in Campobello. Stark skillfully maneuvered the ship through the treacherous waters near the compound. They stayed in touch over the next few decades, and when FDR needed someone to oversee the expansion of the navy, he passed over fifty more senior officers and appointed Stark, promoting him from vice admiral to admiral.

George Marshall, a descendant of John Marshall, the third and legendary chief justice of the Supreme Court, caught FDR's attention in 1938 when, as a low-ranking brigadier general, he accompanied a group of his superiors to the White House for a meeting with the president. FDR asked the group if they shared his enthusiasm for a new fleet of large planes. They all nodded in agreement—all except Marshall. His stone-faced expression must have caught Roosevelt's attention. “Don't you agree, George?” Roosevelt asked. “No, Mr. President, I do not agree
with you at all,” Marshall responded. Roosevelt found Marshall's honesty refreshing. The following year, he promoted Marshall to the position of chief of staff of the U.S. Army, even though he was ranked thirty-fourth on the seniority list.
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Marshall and Stark had a similar view of the world: They both believed that Germany represented the primary threat to American interests, and they hoped to direct precious military resources to the European theater. Protecting Britain and defeating Nazi Germany was their top priority. While mindful of the dangers of Japan's aggressive stance in the Pacific, they recognized the nation did not yet have the ability to fight two wars. They desperately needed time to train new recruits; to build ships, planes, and tanks; and to beef up the American capabilities in the Philippines.

While they realized that Japan would likely attack British outposts in the Pacific, they emphasized that the United States was not prepared to fight a two-front war. Marshall and Stark sent FDR a memorandum warning that the U.S. fleet “is inferior to the Japanese Fleet and cannot undertake an unlimited strategic offensive in the Western Pacific. In order to be able to do so, it would have to be strengthened by withdrawing practically all naval vessels from the Atlantic except those assigned to local defense forces.” As a result, they argued for delay. “The most essential thing now, from the United States viewpoint, is to gain time,” they wrote. “Precipitance of military action on our part should be avoided as long as consistent with national policy.”
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Even as they advised Roosevelt against war with Japan, Marshall and Stark warned their commanders in the Pacific of its possibility. On November 27, with the negotiations clearly near an end, the War Department sent warnings to Lieutenant General Walter Short, the commander of army forces in Hawaii. The message stated: “Japanese future action unpredictable but hostile action possible at any moment.” The navy issued an even stronger statement to Admiral Husband Kimmel: “This dispatch is to be considered a war warning.” Stark later testified that he deliberately opened his message with the dramatic
statement “to accentuate the extreme gravity of the situation.” The message continued: “Negotiations with Japan . . . have ceased, and an aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days.”
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There was ample reason to be concerned. On December 2, Japan's emperor approved a war order, setting the date as December 8 (December 7 in Hawaii and Washington). Tokyo sent a message to its ambassador in Washington to burn their code machines—an ominous order suggesting the diplomatic effort had come to an end. At the same time, American military intelligence started receiving reports of a large Japanese fleet of thirty-five transporters, eight cruisers, and twenty destroyers that were moving south from Indochina toward Thailand. “This was confirmation,” Hull noted, “that the long-threatened Japanese movement of expansion by force to the south was under way.”
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Roosevelt, however, was still not ready to accept a colossal distraction of a war in the Pacific. Against the unanimous advice of his closest advisers, FDR sent a message to the emperor on December 6 in a last-ditch effort to prevent hostilities. He had made a similar appeal to the emperor in 1937 following the attack on the
Panay
, and he was convinced that the move led to the resolution of the issue. He was hoping it would work again. Roosevelt knew that Japan had been at war for nearly a decade and that his peace overture could, at best, delay but not prevent a confrontation .
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“I address myself to Your Majesty at this moment in the fervent hope that Your majesty may, as I am doing, give thought in this definite emergency to ways of dispelling the dark clouds.” The concentration of troops in Indochina, he wrote, created a “deep and far reaching emergency,” which threatened peaceful relations with the United States. The only way to dispel “the dark clouds,” he wrote, was for Japan to withdraw its forces from Indochina.
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That evening Roosevelt entertained thirty-two guests at dinner in the White House. “This son of man has just sent his final message to the Son of God,” he told the party. Roosevelt talked about how when
the current crisis blew over, he hoped to take a winter vacation from Washington and travel to Key West to sit in the sunshine. An old friend from New York noted that FDR “looked very worn . . . and after the meat course he was excused and wheeled away. He had an unusually stern expression.” The president returned to his study, where he toyed with his stamp collection. He still held out hope that his last-minute appeal would convince the Japanese to call off any further military moves.
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But Roosevelt's message had not been transmitted to the emperor. The Japanese leadership had already made the decision for war; aircraft carriers were fast approaching Hawaii. Fearing that FDR's peace overture would complicate their political problems at home, the Japanese military held the message hostage, refusing to pass it on to either the emperor or the American ambassador, Joseph Grew. It arrived ten hours late, at 10:30 p.m. The emperor did not receive it until a few minutes before planes appeared in the skies over Oahu.

3

“This means war”

S
OON AFTER Roosevelt retreated to his study, he was joined by his close friend Harry Hopkins, who would shadow the president for the next twenty-four hours. Like most chief executives, FDR often found the presidency a lonely position that left him surrounded by people who always wanted something from him. Over time, FDR learned to be suspicious of the senior members of his own administration. When he needed to relax, FDR often turned to old friends and relatives who had no connection to government. Hopkins was the exception: By all accounts, he and Roosevelt shared a special bond that endured until the day FDR died.
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Harry Hopkins, born in Iowa in 1890, became a social worker in New York City after graduating from Grinnell College. After the onset of the Great Depression, Hopkins took a position as head of New York State's Temporary Emergency Relief Administration under Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt. Hopkins followed Roosevelt to Washington after the 1932 election and spent the next few years developing ingenious new ways to spend the nation's money. He headed up a series of New Deal alphabet-soup agencies designed to provide work and relief to struggling families: the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the Civil Works Administration (CWA), and the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

Over the years, the two men formed a close bond. Hopkins understood Roosevelt's moods. He knew the appropriate time to talk
business and when his boss needed to relax. He had an instinctive feel for when he could push FDR and when it was time to back off. His real talent was in turning Roosevelt's vague ideas into concrete programs. Hopkins was not a big thinker or a political visionary. He divided people into two groups: “talkers” and “doers.” Hopkins was the consummate “doer.” He knew how to move the bureaucracy and help FDR achieve his goals. Above all else, Roosevelt knew that Hopkins would protect his interests and remain totally discreet in the process. As Roosevelt's friend and speechwriter Robert Sherwood noted, “Hopkins made it his job, he made it his religion, to find out just what it was that Roosevelt really wanted and then to see to it that neither hell nor high water, nor even possible vacillations by Roosevelt himself, blocked its achievement.”
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Although Hopkins won the president's trust and friendship, by 1935 he had alienated powerful members of Congress and found himself at odds with more conservative members of the administration who were pushing Roosevelt to scale back spending. “He was regarded as a sinister figure by all of Franklin D. Roosevelt's enemies and by many of Roosevelt's most loyal friends,” Sherwood noted. People resented his enormous power and his privileged access to the president. When questioned by Republican presidential hopeful Wendell Willkie about why he kept Hopkins around, Roosevelt responded, “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.”
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In 1937, a few weeks after his wife died, Hopkins was diagnosed with stomach cancer and had a large portion of his intestines removed. The surgery eradicated the cancer, but it also prevented him from properly digesting food, leaving him shockingly thin. FDR jokingly referred to him as “the half man” because of his sickly, frail appearance.
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In December 1938, Roosevelt appointed Hopkins secretary of commerce, but Hopkins was too sick to work. He spent months at the Mayo Clinic, but his condition was grave. “The doctors have given Harry up for dead,” Roosevelt told friends. Unwilling to let his friend go without a fight, FDR intervened and had Hopkins transferred to Washington, where navy physicians managed to save his life. Hopkins offered the president his resignation, but FDR refused to accept it, saying, “Why you'll be back in your office in a couple of weeks and going great guns!” The recovery was slow, however, and Hopkins remained very sick and largely bedridden for months.
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In May 1940, Hopkins mustered the strength to attend dinner at the White House. He looked awful and felt worse. Roosevelt was so concerned that he told him to spend the night. He would call the White House his home for the next three and a half years. “It was Harry Hopkins who gave George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart the idea for that play of theirs, ‘The Man Who Came to Dinner,'” quipped Grace Tully. Hopkins lived in the Lincoln Suite, which consisted of a large bedroom with a four-post bed, a small sitting room, and a bath. The room was just two doors down the hall from FDR. His daughter, Diana, moved into a bedroom on the third floor.
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With a room down the hall from the president's private study, Hopkins needed no appointment to stroll down and discuss events with Roosevelt. After breakfast, numerous times throughout the day, and often in the evenings after dinner, he would casually saunter into the president's study and talk over the day's news. They enjoyed the same kind of humor, poking fun at other officials and telling off-color jokes. Often in the evening the two men could be heard laughing from inside the president's private study. Most of all, they were both staunch liberals and devoted internationalists.

By the winter of 1941, Hopkins appeared a ghost of a man. A friend once described his physical appearance as being akin to “an ill-fed horse at the end of a hard day.” But he refused to let his deteriorating health slow him down. He smoked four packs of Lucky Strikes
a day. He also loved the racetrack, always betting at the two-dollar window. He enjoyed the company of women. Frequent nightlong soirees at various clubs and bars earned him the reputation as a playboy. “Our biggest job is to keep Harry from ever feeling completely well,” said the White House physician, Admiral Ross T. McIntire. “When he thinks he's restored to health he goes out on the town—and from there to the Mayo Clinic.”
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Roosevelt trusted Hopkins more than his own State Department. Beginning in 1940, after Hopkins left the Commerce Department, Roosevelt gave him the title of special assistant to the president and used him as a private envoy. Roosevelt trusted Hopkins to lead delicate diplomatic missions, communicate messages, and gather intelligence. In the spring of 1941, FDR sent him as a special envoy to Winston Churchill. FDR wanted to assess British morale and offer assurance that America would be sending aid. Churchill, who, like Roosevelt, appreciated Hopkins's ability to zero in on a problem, nicknamed him “Lord Root of the Matter.” Despite fragile health that required frequent stays in the hospital, Hopkins continued in this role of amateur diplomat while cementing his position as Roosevelt's alter ego.