Roosevelt (17 page)

After the spring crises it seemed to many that the decision to escort convoys could no longer be put off. At a White House meeting Stimson, Knox, and now Hopkins urged the President to act. If the Navy was turned loose, Knox said, it “would clean up the Atlantic in thirty days.” But forthright action in the Atlantic required in advance the transfer of a fleet from the Pacific, and the President quailed at this global redisposition. Here Hull affected the problem. For weeks he had been holding interminable discussions with Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura, who had been presenting the more pacific face of Japan. Hull feared that Tokyo would misinterpret withdrawal of fleet units from the Pacific as a sign of weakness. Stimson and Marshall tried to convince their chief that Hawaii was impregnable; but the President feared that Singapore, Australia, and the Dutch East Indies would be vulnerable without the American Navy. In vain Stimson urged on him that Britain could protect Singapore if the United States would reinforce the Atlantic. The President, backed by Hull and aware that the military itself was divided, would not move the fleet—and he would not order Atlantic escorts.

Harold Carlisle, The Des Moines Register and Tribune Syndicate, from the Washington
Post,
April 29, 1941

May 5, 1941, Rollin Kirby, reprinted by permission of the New York
Post

Roosevelt hoped that stepped-up patrolling would help in the Atlantic. Then, he told Stimson and Knox late in April, he could inform Latin-American capitals about Axis raiders. Stimson bridled. “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.” With his simplicity and directness and his narrower military responsibilities, he wanted Roosevelt to be honest with himself. The President must take the lead and also the risk, Stimson felt, for the public would not tell him ahead of time if they would follow him. But the President would not lead.

Was Roosevelt hoping that patrolling would trigger an incident that would dramatize Hitler’s threat to the hemisphere and unite Americans behind a bolder strategy? Ickes and others were
convinced that he was. But evidently no ordinary incident would do. On April 10 the American destroyer
Niblack,
while picking up survivors from a torpedoed Dutch merchantman, had made sound contact with a submarine and had driven it off with depth charges. This episode—the first military encounter between American and German armed forces—Roosevelt had not used to dramatize the emergency. What was he waiting for?

A deepening crisis of confidence enveloped the administration in May. No one knew what was going to be done, Stimson complained. Morgenthau, who had now concluded that the United States must go to war to save Britain, felt that both Roosevelt and Hopkins were groping as to what to do. Wallace wrote that the farm people of Iowa were ready for a “more forceful and definite leadership.” Hopkins at one moment defended the President and in the next urged the military leaders to press their chief harder. In a tragicomic moment Stimson actually interrupted Hull’s croquet game to enlist support for a changed policy. The croquet player continued his game. Roosevelt’s personal friends—MacLeish, Frankfurter, William C. Bullitt—were deeply troubled. Ickes met secretly with Stimson, Knox, and Jackson to discuss ways of putting pressure on the President; all agreed that Roosevelt was failing to lead, that the country wanted more action and less talk, that something dramatic was needed to seize the attention of the world. It was Stimson who finally belled the cat. The people, he told the President to his face, must not be brought to combat evil through some accident or mistake, but through Roosevelt’s moral leadership.

Why was Roosevelt so passive? His lieutenants searched for clues. He was in and out of bed with an enervating fever during much of May, but he seemed no more militant during his ups than his downs. He was watching Congress and public opinion warily—especially an anticonvoy resolution in the Senate—but he seemed no more purposeful after the resolution was blocked. Clearly he felt constrained by his peace pledges—to Stimson, he seemed “tangled up in the coils of his former hasty speeches on possible war and convoying as was Laocoön in the coils of the boa constrictors”—but the militants were not urging a declaration of war, but simply more drastic action. Bullitt perhaps came closest to understanding Roosevelt’s mind at this point. The President realized that the United States would stand alone and vulnerable if Britain went down, Bullitt reported to Ickes after a long talk with Roosevelt, but he could not bring himself to go in simply and directly. He was still waiting for a major provocation from Hitler even while recognizing that it might not come at all. Above all, he was trusting to luck, to his long-tested flair for timing, and to the fortunes of war. He had no plans. “I am waiting to be pushed into
the situation,” he told Morgenthau in mid-May—and clearly it had to be a strong shove.

So the crisis of confidence was also a crisis of strategy. Roosevelt was still waiting on events. When he and Hull caviled at shifting fleet units from the Pacific, he was ultimately responding to Hitler’s strategy of bolstering Tokyo in order to divert America from Europe. But the President had the virtues of his strategic defects; at least he would stay flexible, loose, ready to seize the opportunity. During May he agreed to shift about a quarter of the Hawaiian fleet to the Atlantic. And under pressure from the militants he considered making a major speech in which he would declare an unlimited national emergency—but then to their despair he delayed the speech.

The President wanted to move foot by foot. At a Cabinet meeting he had contended that patrolling was a step forward. Stimson burst out: “Well, I hope you will keep on walking, Mr. President. Keep on walking!”

Half a world away from Roosevelt—and a world away in mind and outlook—Joseph Stalin, too, was watching Adolf Hitler, playing for time, hoping for the best. If Hitler and Roosevelt were near-opposites in ideology and temperament, the Soviet dictator and the American President seemed almost polar opposites in personal style: the one hard, stolid, patient, granitic; the other dexterous, articulate, supple, noncommitted. Both were outlanders—Roosevelt the product of a graceful Hudson River culture; Stalin, of the violent, poverty-ridden, hate-seared land of Georgia—and both had moved into the political heartland and mastered it. But while Roosevelt had risen through the loose, fragmented politics of an open society, Stalin had played a different game, slowly amassing influence in a monolithic party structure, effacing himself to avoid the ripostes of Trotsky and other Bolshevik luminaries, building alliances, jockeying for key posts, and then, after acquiring the party leadership, coldly isolating and destroying his political adversaries.

Stalin was the supreme ideologue, calculating and acting within a closed logical system, viewing the world through vulgate-Marxist prisms. Roosevelt was the supreme opportunist, eschewing dogma, avoiding final commitments. They spoke different political languages. Stalin preferred the “practical arithmetic” of agreements to the “algebra” of declarations, as he once remarked to Eden, but Roosevelt preferred political algebra—the forms, symbols, devices that facilitated day-to-day compromise even at the risk of disagreement and misunderstanding.

Now, by a hard twist of fate, the ideologue was not controlling
history, and the opportunist could not long evade it. Hitler had not only forced these disparate men into the same camp, but also forced them into a similar global stance. Strategically they were both marching to the Nazi drum beat.

As a strategist, Stalin had sought to combine ideology and
Realpolitik
in the service of Bolshevism and the motherland. His armies were to stand clear of the long-expected death struggle of fascist and bourgeois states; meanwhile they would prevent hostile encirclement of Mother Russia and avoid a two-front war. During the 1930’s he had tried warily and sporadically through Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov to join Western nations in efforts at collective security. The West, its leaders irresolute and divided, fearful of both fascism and Bolshevism, had temporized too long. Stalin’s ideological radar picked up, amplified, and distorted the complex forces at work in the West, exaggerating the influence of Russophobes and Red baiters in Western chancelleries, assuming that “monopoly capitalism” would be bound by the ineluctable logic of history to attack Bolshevism, perceiving every conciliatory move toward Hitler as a capitalist plot to deflect Nazi expansion to the east. Munich was not only a surrender to Hitler but also a catalyst of fear and mutual suspicion between Moscow and the West. Within a year Stalin had replaced Litvinov with the glacial Molotov, signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler, and stunned the world with his ideological and military flip-flop.

Molotov rubbed the salt of
Realpolitik
into Western wounds. Only recently, he conceded before the Supreme Soviet, Germany and Russia had been enemies. “The situation has now changed,” he went on blandly, “and we have stopped being enemies. The political art in foreign affairs is…to reduce the number of enemies of one’s country, and to turn yesterday’s enemies into good neighbors.”

But how good were the good neighbors, now hundreds of miles closer to Moscow after the partition of Poland? Stalin had played the diplomatic game with Hitler, bargaining, pressuring, protesting, appeasing, and always hoping that Axis and Allies would bleed each other to debility if not death. As a strategist Stalin faced a dilemma like Roosevelt’s. He led a people conditioned to wanting to stay out of other people’s wars, namely “European” wars. Stalin knew that Russian soldiers would fight badly in the attack but defend their motherland tenaciously if invaded. He was almost as restricted as Roosevelt in seizing the strategic initiative; hence Hitler held it.

The fall of France, the siege of Britain, the accession of Japan to the Axis upset the balance of power and hostility on which Stalin had been counting. If Britain should go down and America stay neutral, Moscow would face the peril of isolation on a Nazi-dominated continent. A logical strategy might have been to build
a global counter-coalition to the Axis, but the anti-Hitler leaders were crippled by suspicion and history. Britain had been cool to Moscow, especially over the Soviet attack on Finland and the Bear’s swallowing up of the little Baltic states. The United States, remote and unfriendly, still maintained in 1940 the “moral embargo” placed on aircraft exports to Russia after the Soviet bombing of Finnish towns. “I shall not dwell on our relations with the U.S.A. If only because there is nothing good to report,” Molotov told the Supreme Soviet, amid laughter, in August 1940.

Such was the course of affairs when Molotov journeyed to Berlin in November 1940. He returned with Hitler’s vague proposals that Russia adhere to the Axis, be guaranteed existing frontiers, and receive a free hand in the south—toward the Indian Ocean. Stalin saw his chance to bargain. He would not join the Axis unless Hitler withdrew his troops from Finland, recognized Bulgaria as part of the Soviet sphere of influence, and supported Moscow’s historic ambition to gain bases in the Dardanelles. Probably Stalin knew that these were impossible conditions for the Führer. At this juncture there was still a small possibility that Hitler would turn west rather than east. But during early 1941 events in the Balkans seemed to gather a momentum of their own. Helplessly Stalin watched the Germans infiltrate Bulgaria and crush Yugoslavia and Greece.

It was the eleventh hour for a counter-coalition to stop the surging Nazis. In January 1941 Roosevelt lifted the moral embargo against the Soviets; in February and March Welles informed the Kremlin of reports that Hitler planned to attack east. But Soviet ideology and narrow
Realpolitik
and American ideology and isolationism made a unified stand impossible. Britain remained hostile, partly because Moscow was still sending raw materials to Germany. By mid-June 1941 Washington was still sharply curbing economic intercourse with the Russians.