Roosevelt (54 page)

Buoyancy—this was the quality that struck Roosevelt’s staff and friends during the anxious months of planning, waiting, and managing during late 1942. Despite Hassett, he was often ruffled—by reporters, by critics, by delays—but he was quick to recover. As always he found strength in friends, anecdotes, banter, the daily routine of visits, dictating letters, signing documents with the broad-pointed pen he had given Hassett.

And always the darting interest, the instant response, the nimble recovery, the endless curiosity, the quick, almost automatic self-protectiveness. He instructed his naval aide to tell the Navy band that the “Star-Spangled Banner” should be played with fewer frills. He asked his wife to cut down the food bill in the light of the new income-tax law, especially in the large portions served at meals brought up to the study. “I know of no instance where anybody has taken a second help—except occasionally when I do—and it would be much better if I did not take a second help anyway.” He wrote to Admiral King, who had informed him primly that he would shortly be sixty-four and hence retirable, “So what old top? I may even send you a birthday present!” (And he did—a framed photograph of himself.) He dunned neighbor Morgenthau for his annual dues ($750) to the Dutchess County Democratic party. He sent his half-niece a transcription of his grandmother’s Hyde Park diaries, confessing that neither he nor his niece would have found Hyde Park life sixty years back very exciting. He thanked Fred Allen for sending him a coffee bean, which had ended his anguished coffeeless breakfasts and “made the sun come out”; otherwise he would have resigned as Commander in Chief and taken appointment as a sergeant major in Brazil, where he could have coffee six times a day. He told Ickes, who had invited himself to lunch and threatened to bring his own food, that he would fall into the clutches of the Secret Service and that the President would rather go out to “dine with my old farmer’s wife named Jane.” He wrote to Herbert Bayard Swope—signing the memo with Grace Tully’s initials—that the President would never speak to him again.

“He is affronted and insulted by your suggestion that his French is ‘as good’ as that of Winston. Furthermore, the President’s accent is not only infinitely superior but his French profanity is so explosive that you had better not be within a half mile of him when it goes off.” If Swope was such a linguist, he could go to Albania,
where the third front was to be established. “Incidentally, a little bird tells us that the pulchritude of the Albanian mountain females is an added attraction. When do you want to shove off?”

He was pleased when Eleanor Roosevelt planned to visit England and he listed people she must see—mainly top royalty. “People whom you should see if they call on you”—more royalty, and a few commoners, including Eduard Beneš, of Czechoslovakia. He wrote letters for her to King George VI and to Queen Wilhelmina. To his wife’s query as to whether she should take anything to King George and Queen Mary and to Churchill he replied,
“No.”

On Thanksgiving Day he invited the leaders of his war government—Cabinet members, Army and Navy chiefs, war agency heads, along with the Supreme Court—to worship with him at a special service in the East Room. There he read his Thanksgiving Proclamation. “…Yes, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil,” the President intoned in a soft, hushed voice. To David Lilienthal, sitting near him, he looked like one of the senior wardens of his little church at Hyde Park, drawing up his eyebrows as he read the words, singing almost soundlessly the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Afterward he greeted people cheerily, sometimes boisterously, taking their hands in his huge grip, saying a word to their wives like a minister at the church door after the service.

He had much to give thanks for. It looked as though the turning point of the war had at last been reached, he told the Herald Tribune Forum. Despite his annoyance about the flap over Darlan, the weeks after the invasion were a time of solace for the President. “I am happy today in the fact that for three months I have been taking it on the chin in regard to the Second Front and that that is now over,” he wrote his old Navy chief, Josephus Daniels. He had the pleasure of sitting back in his chair, puffing contentedly on a cigarette, telling reporters about the long process of planning
TORCH,
lecturing them mildly on how a second front could not just be bought in a department store, ready-made. He even scored with the columnists. It seemed as though the United Nations had a grand strategy after all, some of them decided, what with American forces drawing the Japanese into the Solomons, the Russians overextending the Germans in the Caucasus, and then the pincers closing on the enemy in Africa. Roosevelt was one of the greatest war presidents, with a grasp of total and global strategy, Major George Fielding Eliot wrote.

If the war seemed at a turning point toward the end of 1942, Roosevelt seemed—a year after Pearl Harbor, two years after his decision for Lend-Lease, halfway through his third term—to be facing a turning point, too. For two years he had been stressing war problems
and playing down long-run economic and social issues. He had usually evaded questions about planning for the postwar period. Now, in the first flush of victory, he seemed to be thinking more about future social and economic problems, at home and abroad.

New Dealers had been worried that fall. The town seemed, more than ever, full of big businessmen who now seemed to be running things rather than denouncing things in the Chamber of Commerce Building across from the White House. The President gave an “honorable discharge” to the old Works Progress Administration—symbol of the “Second Hundred Days” of Roosevelt’s progressivism at the height of its fervor and turbulence in 1935—and dropped one or two other New Deal agencies. Democratic leaders, according to Washington reporters, were privately conceding that great blocs of labor, farm, and independent votes had gone Republican; the President had lost his political touch, having failed in his two key aims of saving Norris and defeating Dewey; Congress was already in revolt; old New Dealers like Morgenthau, Wallace, and Ickes were unpopular, worn out, fumbling. There were reports—true this time—that Henderson would be out by Christmas.

A sense of defeat hung over Washington, Lilienthal felt—not of military defeat, but of the purposes for which Americans had been told the war was being fought. He sensed a disorganization of spirit, a vacuum at the center that was being filled with reaction, weariness, cynicism. His fears deepened when he went in to see the President in mid-December about some proposals to have lame-duck Senator Norris visit the Tennessee Valley and the Arkansas and other possible river-valley developments, and report back to the President. He suggested that Norris might also report on the possible role of TVA’s abroad, where there was intense interest in Roosevelt’s experiment.

The President was leery. No, he said, we had better leave the foreign thing out; the other night an NAM speaker had said that the administration had in mind a TVA on the Danube. Lilienthal did not contest the point. He left the White House with a heavy heart. He had heard the stories that the President was interested only in a military victory. “Godamighty”—it was true. One speech before the National Association of Manufacturers—and the man pulled away from the fundamental proposition of America’s interest in the welfare of the rest of the world.

Lilienthal had left so that Roosevelt could lunch alone with Norris; then he returned. He seemed to find a changed man. Roosevelt had told Norris that he wanted him to report on the Tennessee Valley project and what it meant to the future of America and to other parts of the world. Lilienthal was elated. He confessed to the President that he had left his office discouraged. Roosevelt leaned
back in his chair. He looked as Lilienthal remembered him in the past, when he had fought back against his enemies and usually won. He had, thought Lilienthal, the handsomest fighting face in the world.

“I am going to fight back. I’m not going to take this lying down.” Roosevelt had his jaw stuck out. Lilienthal was standing, worried, knowing that Leahy and Marshall were waiting to come in. “I’m really going to
tell
this next Congress.” His speech would lay out a program that would give them and the country something to chew on. “Those boys in Guadalcanal and in Africa—does this Congress propose to tell them they are going to come back to fear about jobs, fear about the things a man can’t prevent, like accident, sickness, and so on? Well, they will have a chance to go on record about it, to divide on that
political
issue.” And as the President got off point after point, he would grin or wink. Lilienthal shook hands to go, but the President was keyed up and went on talking. Lilienthal was aroused, too, and blurted out something he had been aching to say but never expected to have the chance to—that it was when the President took the offensive that the people were with him.

Christmastime came, with parties at Hyde Park for soldiers guarding the Commander in Chief’s home; then the President and First Lady returned to Washington for Christmas itself. On New Year’s Eve they had their usual small party for close friends, and as usual toasted the United States of America. The company drank to the President; he in turn toasted his wife as the one who made it possible for him to carry on; at his suggestion glasses were raised to friends and family in far-off parts of the world. Then the President offered a new toast: “The United Nations.”

I
AM GOING TO FIGHT
back,” the President had exclaimed to David Lilienthal. “I’m really going to
tell
this next Congress.” But as the time for his address to Congress neared, he shifted toward a more conciliatory role, in part because public-opinion studies indicated that people would respond favorably to a co-operative attitude toward Congress. He knew that 1943 would be a transitional sort of year—not one of desperate defense like most of 1942, but not yet the year for all-out attack, and certainly not the year for victory. He had decided it was time to talk about postwar hopes and policies, but he could not forget that the November elections had left him with the biggest Republican-Southern Democratic opposition he had yet faced.

Greeted by two minutes of applause as he made his slow way to the rostrum on January 7, 1943, he launched into a long speech that seemed to play on every note and mood.

He was confident. “The period of our defensive attrition in the Pacific is drawing to a close. Now our aim is to force the Japanese to fight. Last year, we stopped them. This year, we intend to advance.” In Europe the main task during 1942 had been to lessen the pressure on Russia by compelling Germany to divert some of its strength west. North Africa had opened up what Churchill had called the “under-belly” of the Axis, the President said.

He was belligerent. “I cannot prophesy. I cannot tell you when or where the United Nations are going to strike next in Europe. But we are going to strike—and strike hard. I cannot tell you whether we are going to hit them”—and here the President bit off the names of possible targets in a rhythmic, mocking tone—“in Norway, or through the Low Countries, or in France, or through Sardinia or Sicily, or through the Balkans, or through Poland—or at several points simultaneously. But…we and the British and the Russians will hit them from the air heavily and relentlessly….Yes, the Nazis and the Fascists have asked for it—and—they—are—going—to—get—it.”

He was conciliatory. He praised workers, farmers, and even
owners and managers for their war effort. He denied that Washington was a “madhouse”—except in the sense that it was the capital city of a nation that was fighting mad. He apologized for the number of complicated forms and questionnaires. “I know about that, I have had to fill some of them out myself.”

He was a bit more apologetic. There had been criticism of the war-production effort and much of it had had a healthy effect, he said. Some production goals had had to be adjusted downward, and others upward; airplane and tank production had fallen short numerically of the 1942 goals. But the over-all record would give no aid and comfort to the enemy. “I think the arsenal of democracy is making good.”

Above all, he wanted to talk about the peace. He reminded the Congress of his message on the Four Freedoms two years earlier. Soldiers would not be willing to come home to a bogus prosperity, to slums, or the dole, or selling apples on street corners. “I have been told that this is no time to speak of a better America after the war. I am told it is a grave error on my part.

“I dissent.

“And if the security of the individual citizen, or the family, should become a subject of national debate, the country knows where I stand.”

But it was of little account, he went on, to talk of attaining individual security if national security was in jeopardy. “Undoubtedly a few Americans, even now, think that this Nation can end this war comfortably and then climb back into an American hole and pull the hole in after them. But we have learned that we can never dig a hole so deep that it would be safe against predatory animals.” The President did not spell out postwar means and ends, but he made clear that he would not repeat the mistake of World War I of seeking a formula for permanent peace based on “magnificent idealism” alone.

And he was eloquent.

“I tell you it is within the realm of possibility that this Seventy-eighth Congress may have the historic privilege of helping greatly to save the world from future fear,” he said in closing.

“Therefore, let us all have confidence, let us redouble our efforts.

“A tremendous, costly, long-enduring task in peace as well as in war is still ahead of us.

“But, as we face that continuing task, we may know that the state of this Nation is good—the heart of this Nation is sound—the spirit of this Nation is strong—the faith of this Nation is eternal.”

The President submitted a “total war” budget that embodied his big plans. The figures were breath-taking. Current fiscal-year spending was running at seventy-seven billion; in the next fiscal year the
federal government would spend one hundred billion dollars. More than ten million people had been added to employment rolls or the armed forces in two and a half years; another six million would be needed during calendar 1943. Sensing Congress’s mood the President said that nonwar expenditures had been reduced two billion from the 6.5 billion of fiscal 1939—but “we are fast approaching the subsistence level of government.” He called for more taxes, but “I cannot ask the Congress to impose the necessarily heavy financial burdens on the lower and middle incomes unless the taxes on higher and very large incomes are made fully effective.” The President asked again for a limitation of $25,000 a year on salaries.