Roosevelt (63 page)

But Roosevelt’s enemies found some solace in his methods. Late in 1942 the
Japan Times-Advertiser
editorialized that whatever the congressional clamor for a new unity of command, Roosevelt would never let anyone overshadow him, that he preferred “multi-phased calculations” such as playing one faction against the other and using disunity rather than unity as a means of control, that he was not a military strategist but a public-relations man and hence that America’s war organization would not move out of the formative stage. This organizational view of Roosevelt’s presidency was duly forwarded to the White House, where it was dismissed, if even noticed, but the criticisms of Roosevelt’s executive leadership and management could not be ignored. Indeed, just as Roosevelt’s “one-man” administration had become in 1939 a fiery issue that spilled over into the 1940 election, the charge of bungling and mismanagement at the top of the executive branch loomed as a potential issue for 1944.

Most of the critics failed to see that their canons of orderly, “businesslike” administration, clear delegation of power, proper span of control, effective co-ordination, and the other textbook doctrines were not always—or even usually—relevant to the needs of the man in the oval office. For his problem was less one of
management
than of dramatizing goals, enunciating principles, lifting hopes, pointing out dangers, raising expectations, mobilizing popular energies, recruiting gifted aides and administrators, harmonizing disputants, protecting administrative morale. Even crusty Henry
Stimson was not immune to Roosevelt’s healing balm. At the height of his annoyance with the President over poor administration, he admitted that a long talk with the President “tended to remove all of the unpleasant feeling which I have gradually been getting into…it indicated that his friendship and confidence in me were still unimpaired…he was very solicitous about Mabel’s health….”

For Roosevelt it was a question of power. When critics charged that he would not make Baruch or some other strong man a super-czar because he wanted to hoard his own authority or feared a rival, they were quite right. Partly it was a matter of temperament; as a prima donna, Roosevelt had no relish for yielding the spotlight for long. But mainly it was a matter of prudence, experience, and instinct. The President did not need to read Machiavellian treatises to know that every delegation of power and sharing of authority extracted a potential price in the erosion of presidential purpose, the narrowing of options, the clouding of the appearance of presidential authority, the threat to his reputation for being on top. He grumbled about his own problems.

“The Treasury is so large and far-flung and ingrained in its practices,” he told Marriner Eccles, “that I find it almost impossible to get the action and results I want—even with Henry [Morgenthau] there. But the Treasury is not to be compared with the State Department. You should go through the experience of trying to get any changes in the thinking, policy and action of the career diplomats and then you’d know what a real problem was. But the Treasury and the State Department put together are nothing compared with the Na-a-vy. The admirals are really something to cope with—and I should know. To change anything in the Na-a-vy is like punching a feather bed. You punch it with your right and you punch it with your left until you are finally exhausted, and then you find the damn bed just as it was before you started punching.”

In no particular did Roosevelt more flagrantly violate the precepts of public administration than in the casual variety of people he was willing to see. He was not easily accessible, but his accessibility was unpredictable. Late in 1943 the young American Chargé d’Affaires in Lisbon, George Kennan, feared that the State Department was making so heavy-handed a demand on Portugal for facilities in the Azores that the pressure might antagonize Salazar and push Franco over to the Nazis. When Kennan tried to take some initiative in assuring Lisbon that the United States would respect Portuguese sovereignty in all Portuguese territory, he was whisked back to Washington. There he was brought to the Pentagon and to a Kafkaesque meeting of Stimson, Knox, Marshall, Acting Secretary of State Stettinius, and other high officials. Kennan was
alternately mystified and horrified by the discussion. No one seemed aware of his background reports, interested in his present views, or aware of the facts and the problem. Coolly dismissed from the meeting, he slunk away in despair. But he appealed to his Chief at State, who passed him on to Hopkins, who set up a meeting with the President. Roosevelt jovially waved Kennan to a scat, said he failed to understand how Lisbon could possibly suspect his intentions in the Azores—why, had he not as Assistant Secretary of the Navy personally supervised the dismantling of Azores bases in the
last
war?—and promised to give him a personal letter to take to Salazar. Kennan was elated but puzzled. What about the Pentagon meeting? “Oh, don’t worry,” Roosevelt said with a debonair wave of his cigarette holder, “about all those
people
over there.”

On countless other occasions Roosevelt protected his own purposes by seeing people far down the administrative line. Still, a President’s care and nurture of his own power for his myriad ends—winning elections, dealing with friend and foe abroad, protecting the presidential ego, defending the integrity of his position as the chief and only elected federal executive—are not easily and automatically translated into effective war mobilization or national economic power. Certain of his qualities played their part in the countless errors, delays, and wastes in the nation’s war effort.

One of these was his ambivalence toward planning itself. In no function were the two chief executives in Roosevelt more at odds with each other. He had long been a planner. He had established numberless planning agencies; he had staffed them well; he had paid attention to their reports. But planning, to Roosevelt, was a sharply limited exercise. It was segmental; he was interested in plans for specific regions, watersheds, industries, not—despite his critics—in “economic planning” or in some grand reshaping of the nation. He was critical of the National Resources Planning Board for indulging in lofty schemes, especially in the economic realm. And Roosevelt’s planning was limited in time. Repeatedly he restrained the military from making commitments more than six months or a year ahead. He was also ambivalent toward the administrative canons of unification, co-ordination, integration. He encouraged such tendencies in individual departments, especially in the military, but he resisted unification of the whole executive branch through planning or co-ordinating machinery. He never allowed the Cabinet or the OWM to serve as a collective agency for unified decision making. Over-all co-ordination was glaringly absent in the one area—fiscal and monetary policy—where it was most necessary and potentially effective. The Budget Bureau, under Harold Smith’s leadership, was eager to effect a marriage of budgeting and planning—“formal, informal, or of the shotgun
type”—but the bureau never fashioned joint tools for planning, budgeting, and programing as a means of directing and co-ordinating the whole executive branch.

In the absence of strong, comprehensive, long-run planning instruments, Roosevelt’s wartime agencies were typically organized to cope with existing, dramatic crises rather than to head off less visible, potentially bigger ones; thus the establishment of a Rubber Director when the rubber supply was collapsing, the Office of Defense Transportation when the railroads seemed about to fail, the fuel and oil czardoms after those commodities were imperiled. Hence Roosevelt’s mobilization machinery tended to be more the prisoner of events than the master of them. The most comprehensive control agencies, OES and OWM, never realized their paper potential as means of planning, programing, and control. These agencies were under men—Byrnes and Vinson—who had little authority or temperament for top-level planning, but preferred to deal with disputes batted up by contending agencies, to act on the basis virtually of adversary proceedings, to mediate, negotiate, reconcile, adjust. Roosevelt encouraged them in this. He wanted no superczars in the White House outside of himself.

Nor was the mobilization structure in itself conducive to strong leadership, planning, and control. The agencies and their hundreds of subunits had grown like coral reefs. The pyramid of executive action had been built largely through “layering”—the piling of new agencies on top of others, culminating in the OWM—rather than through planning from the top down. Layering had great merits, but it tended to keep power diffused through the existing levels and it inhibited effective planning and programing from the White House even if Roosevelt had been inclined to it.

These tendencies toward piecemeal, reactive war organization were reinforced by Roosevelt’s bent toward dealing with one set of problems at a time rather than establishing priorities across a wide front and over a long span of time. In particular he constantly stressed the importance of “winning the war”—that is, gaining a military victory as quickly and inexpensively as possible—rather than seeking at the same time to gain broader, more complex goals, such as “winning the peace.” He did not believe fully in separating the short-run from the long, as indicated by the fact that he was taking up postwar problems and goals long before war’s end. But he did so as much for the purpose of keeping his own choices wide and preventing others from capturing and shaping postwar issues—in short, to prevent other persons’ planning—as for the purpose of his own long-run planning. And his philosophy permeated his administration and inhibited or enervated long-term planning.

All these administrative tendencies, both institutional and
Rooseveltian, toward the immediate, the concrete, the manageable were of the most profound importance in the life of the nation. World War II released social and economic forces that would have enormous impact on American life after the last bomb dropped. Millions of rural people were moving into cities and defense areas; millions of Negroes were leaving the farm, migrating north and west, tasting the delights and miseries, the opportunities and frustrations of city life; millions of women were working in factories and offices for the first time. The explosion of education—from the making of literates to the courses in languages and science—was a revolution in itself. Income, real as well as money, shot up, bringing infinite satisfactions and disappointments. Health, aid to women and children, and other welfare services were immensely expanded. Employment soared; the jobless dropped to an irreducible minimum of dedicated unemployables. Patterns of housing, congestion, employment, opportunity, discrimination were created that would closely affect the nation’s social and economic life for decades to come. How much these trends could have been affected by purposeful governmental action at the early stages is hard to say. But to the extent they could be affected, the emphasis on “Dr. Win the War” was bound to enhance the government’s short-run
management
only at the expense of long-run
leadership.
The burning cities of 1967 and 1968 were not wholly unrelated to steps not taken, visions not glimpsed, priorities not established, in the federal agencies of 1943 and 1944.

Toward the end of the war a sagacious authority on public administration, Luther Gulick, assessed the whole organization of the war government. The narrowest test of war organization, he wrote, was to muster the nation’s maximum resources to destroy the military power of its enemies. But this was an old-fashioned test, he concluded, which ignored long-range and continuing international economic and political problems at home and abroad. He would not apply the second test because the basic continuing elements of war and peace “played little if any role in the war organization of the United States for World War II.” On the narrower test of specific war organization he found much to praise and to blame. In part he was disappointed by the failures of planning, programing, and operations—brilliant in spurts, but on the whole not very effective.

Still, Gulick could not but be impressed by the military impact of war organization. Somehow “it worked”—somehow it produced a “mobilization of total national power and a welding together of world military operations beyond the highest dreams of 1939 or 1940 or the greatest fears of Hitler. Those of us who write recipes should taste their pudding!”

F
OR MONTHS THE PRESIDENT
had watched the shining white pantheon rising block by block on a swell of ground beyond the Tidal Basin. From his study window he could see the figure of the third President standing stiff and erect in its austere sanctuary; at night, when the lights were not blacked out, the figure would glow like a beacon. Through the tall columns Thomas Jefferson stared straight at the White House, his face set and stern.

By April 13, 1943 all was in readiness for the dedication of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial on the two hundredth anniversary of his birth. In commemoration, as in life, the Virginian had been able to divide as well as unite people. Bitter controversy had arisen over the design and location of the pantheon. Some had suggested that the memorial be built outside Washington—perhaps out in Virginia somewhere—but Roosevelt had insisted that the shrine be as conspicuous in the capital as the monuments to Washington and Lincoln. The removal of cherry trees had stirred further controversy, which the President had only exacerbated by suggesting that if ladies carried out their threat to chain themselves to the trees, a hoisting device be used to lift the trees and the enchained ladies out of the earth—new holes should then be dug and the trees and the ladies be placed in them—all to be done in a strictly humane manner.

Even on the day of commemoration, controversy continued. The Memorial Commission sponsoring committee included men who had fought bitterly in past years but were united now in tribute: James M. Cox, John W. Davis, Alfred E. Smith, Herbert Hoover, Alf Landon, Wendell Willkie. Their voices were muted on this day, but Republican Senator Edward H. Moore, of Oklahoma, was ready with a speech in which he assailed the New Deal party for paying lip service to Jefferson and charged that Roosevelt’s rule was leading to the same outcome as in Germany—Hitlerism. The President prefered to dwell this day on the Jeffersonian ideas and symbols that united Americans: freedom of mind and conscience, inalienable rights, liberty, the end of privilege.