Roosevelt (87 page)

The next evening Roosevelt and his party—Leahy, McIntire, Rosenman, and aides—boarded the heavy cruiser
Baltimore,
destination Honolulu. Guarded by air patrols and six destroyers, the grim, stripped-down cruiser traveled under wartime conditions, no lights showing. The President read and slept a good deal. The only casualty on the trip was Fala’s dignity as a result of the crew’s fattening him with tidbits and snipping locks from his hair to send home as souvenirs.

Rows of ships with men standing smartly at attention in their whites greeted the Commander in Chief in Pearl Harbor. Nimitz and a brace of naval and military officers clambered up the gangplank to welcome the President; only MacArthur was missing. After an uneasy delay the President and his party were about to disembark when an automobile siren wailed, a huge open car rolled onto the dock, circled, and drew up at the gangplank—and out stepped MacArthur, in leather windbreaker, creased suntans, and jaunty gold-braided cap. Suddenly summoned from Australia for a military conference with the President—his first meeting with the Commander in Chief in seven years—he had arrived with only one aide and with no reports, plans, maps, or charts, but with a determination to appeal to the highest authority for his plan to redeem the Philippines. The Marianas campaign had not settled Pacific strategy but only sharpened the old dispute.

In a cream stucco mansion overlooking Waikiki’s rolling surf Nimitz and MacArthur argued their differences in front of Roosevelt and Leahy. Those differences were sharp but not profound. Tracing distances on a huge chart with a long bamboo pointer, Nimitz once again proposed bypassing the Philippines and moving direct to the attack on Formosa, and MacArthur once again urged the liberation of the Philippines and the bypassing of Formosa. But Navy strategists saw dire problems in assaulting Formosa without securing the Philippine flank, and army planners recognized that it was not a matter of either taking the Philippines or bypassing them, but of which islands in the archipelago to take, in what sequence, on what dates, and with what forces.

In such a situation Roosevelt was at his best, skillfully placating both the Admiral and the General, steering the discussion away
from absolutes, narrowing the differences. MacArthur was at his most persuasive with Roosevelt when he took the stand that America had a moral responsibility to redeem its promises to liberate the Filipinos and to free imprisoned Americans. He claimed later that he also told the President—in a private session—that if their Filipino “wards” were left to languish in their agony, “I dare say that the American people would be so aroused that they would register most complete resentment against you at the polls this fall,” but that the President had already made his decision, stating: “We will not bypass the Philippines. Carry on your existing plans. And may God protect you.”

Roosevelt asked MacArthur to stay on to take a ride with him around the island. With Leahy and Nimitz they drove in an open car through streets lined with saluting servicemen and cheering Hawaiians, while Rosenman and Secret Service men worried about a well-placed bomb. The Commander in Chief reviewed the Army’s famous 7th Infantry Division, saw wounded men unloaded from an ambulance plane that had just flown in to Hickam Field from the Marianas, watched a combat team make a simulated attack on a house, and kept remarking on the transformation of Oahu since his visit ten years before, when he witnessed an exercise in which, as he recalled, seven of the twelve World War I tanks broke down, and half the trucks.

At a naval hospital Roosevelt asked to be wheeled through wards occupied by men who had lost arms and legs. He wanted to display himself and his useless legs to these boys who would have to face the same bitterness as he had for twenty-three years, Rosenman wrote later.

After three strenuous days on Oahu the President and his original military party reboarded the
Baltimore
and headed almost due north to Adak. For five days the cruiser plowed north in steadily worsening weather. Cables from Washington and the fighting fronts followed, with reports of heavy fighting and steady progress in France and Italy. And with some grievous news, too—that President Manuel Quezon was dead, a few months short of the planned liberation of his country; that Missy LeHand had finally died after her long illness; that Joseph Kennedy’s oldest son, Joe Jr., had been killed in an air attack on German submarine pens.

In Adak the President found intense activity at a nearly completed advance base. He talked to officers and men at the naval air station. “Gentlemen, I like your food. I like your climate.” Much laughter. “You don’t realize the thousands upon thousands of people who would give anything in this world to swap places with you.” Incredulity. It was standing operating procedure in the Aleutians to call the theater the worst iced-over hellhole a man
could be stationed in. But here was the Commander in Chief dwelling at length on Alaska as a new frontier for settlement by ex-servicemen after the war. The Alaskan coast, he went on to say, reminded him of the waters off Maine and Newfoundland he had known as a boy. The weather was familiar, too—continuing wind and rain and fog along the Alaskan coast and all the way back to Bremerton.

For the trip back, the President and his party, including Fala, changed to a destroyer, but their weather luck did not change. It was so foul that on the train crossing the country on the way back to Washington Roosevelt dictated a long complaint entitled “Mary Had a Little Lamb—1944 Version,” which blamed the Navy for the “low” that had encouraged Admiral McIntire, the President said, to use a new word with almost every sentence.

To observe the superb co-ordination of arms and of units in mock combat, to cause the face of a wounded soldier to light up with surprise and pleasure, to lie in his bunk in the skipper’s cabin and feel the engines of the great cruiser strain and pound underneath him, to find Pearl Harbor immensely expanded, with ships and docks back in service, to explore with Nimitz and MacArthur the imposing alternatives in the Pacific—never had Roosevelt assumed the role of Commander in Chief more intensely than in his days in the Pacific. He had not invited Marshall or King or Arnold to take part in the Honolulu conferences; this time the President wanted to deal with his theater commanders alone, except for Leahy. He would be tested in the fall as chief executive and chief politician; he also wanted—indeed, he preferred—to be tested as Commander in Chief.

He relished the title, according to Hull. The Secretary wrote later that at a Cabinet dinner, when Hull was to propose a toast, the President asked him please to try to address him as “Commander in Chief,” not as “President.” Admiral King wrote, also much later, that a few weeks before the Honolulu meetings Leahy had come to his office and said that the President would like to have King cease using the customary term “Commander in Chief” of both the United States fleet and the Atlantic and Pacific fleets, and to change the designation to commander of each individual fleet. Thus there would be but one Commander in Chief. Was this an order or a request? King asked. It was not even a request, Leahy said, but he knew that the President would like to have it done. King concluded that Roosevelt simply wanted to play up his role in an election year.

But it was more than that. Roosevelt not only assumed the role of Commander in Chief, but he embraced it and lived it. Just as he liked to tell reporters about his own journalistic days (mainly on the
Harvard Crimson
), or farmers that he was a tree grower, or businessmen that he had been in various financial ventures, so he would be a soldier among soldiers. But the feeling of involvement in the military role probably went much deeper; partly because that role was so crucial for a nation at war and partly because he felt keen deprivation at not having seen active service in World War I. He wanted to be a soldier, a professional. It had not been enough to be Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the first war; he had been desperately anxious for service overseas. It was not enough to be President of the United States; he must be symbolically in uniform.

One result was a close rapport between the President and his military chieftains. He often volunteered the observation that he had never overruled his staff. “We haven’t had any basic differences,” he said, referring to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “and even haven’t had any minor disagreements.” This was true only in the narrow sense that the Joint Chiefs may never have come up with a firm and final plan that was flatly vetoed by the Commander in Chief; in fact, he had overridden the advice of military advisers in deciding on the invasion of Africa and in other decisions, and many a showdown was averted because the military men knew the President’s views and never allowed disagreements to come to a head. The significant fact is that the President saw such a congruence and even boasted about it. In the occasional real disputes between the President and the Chiefs, he tried to win his way by quiet pressure and maneuver; he would not permit a showdown.

Even when the President felt strongly about an issue for political reasons, he was reluctant to overrule the military. Such an issue was the noncommissioning of Fiorello La Guardia. Son of an army bandmaster, reared on western army posts, proud of his World War I service as an aviator, the Mayor had been eager to join Eisenhower’s civil-affairs staff. The “Little Flower” saw a great role for himself in Italy, but in any event he wanted to be in uniform, especially that of a brigadier general.

Roosevelt cabled to Eisenhower asking him to put La Guardia on his staff. Eisenhower agreed but complained to the War Department. Stimson and Marshall intervened at the White House just in time to try to persuade the President not to make La Guardia a brigadier general, but to commission him a colonel and send him to Charlottesville for civil-affairs training. “Eternal vigilance is the price of efficiency in this curious Administration,” Stimson grumbled. When McCloy told the Mayor of the decision, La Guardia
came to Washington to see Stimson. The Secretary reported to Roosevelt on the interview that had followed.

“1. I told him that there were two lines, of which he could follow either but not both. He could be a soldier or he could be a propagandist. He couldn’t do both. The Army does not handle propaganda.

“2. As a friend I strongly advised him to remain in his present pulpit of the mayoralty and to use his influence with Italians from there; that his words would carry much further than if he was a civilian soldier, let alone a make-believe General….”

Roosevelt replied in the stiffest letter he had ever sent a senior Cabinet member.

“Frankly, I think you have this LaGuardia business all wrong.

“I do not agree with your paragraph #1 wherein you told him that he could be a soldier or he could be a propagandist and that he could not be both.

“In view of my knowledge of literally hundreds of officers that you have commissioned out of public life who are neither soldiers or propagandists, I do not see how you could offer him one of the two alternatives….

“I do not like your second paragraph wherein you suggested that he ought not to be a make-believe General. In the strict sense of the word, you have a great many make-believe Generals….

“I do not think that LaGuardia wants ‘adventure.’ I think that is imputing a motive to him which is not strictly fair to him. Like most people wth red blood, he does hope he can get war service….”

Stimson answered with a long placating letter, but did not retreat an inch. A month later Roosevelt spoke up for La Guardia in a brief conversation with Stimson, though only mildly, and a few months later was still talking to the Secretary about a possible reconsideration. But La Guardia never got his commission.

Even when the President might have had a gust of public feeling behind him he refrained from interfering in military matters. He refused to intervene when an army general, in a much-publicized action, punished soldiers who had “yoo-hooed” at him while he was playing golf. When reporters pressed him to comment on the hubbub over Patton’s slapping two soldiers in Sicily, the President reminded them of the story about Lincoln, who had said when informed that his successful commander drank, “It must be a good brand of liquor.” Nor did he intervene later when Patton avowed that Britain and the United States would run the world of the future. For a highly political man Roosevelt had shown remarkable restraint in influencing the selection of generals. Even Stimson had granted that his record “was unique in American war history
for its scrupulous abstention from personal and political pressure.” At the same time, as Commander in Chief, he did not hesitate to propose specific ideas and changes to the military. He personally authorized the Navy to take extra risks in Atlantic convoying because of the need for emergency tonnage in Africa. He queried King as to whether carrier catapults had been brought into action in Pacific fighting, and Knox and Leahy as to the relative merits of several destroyers as against one heavy cruiser in protecting carriers. He suggested that carriers cope with suicide air attacks by improvising masts and wire on flight decks to be raised and lowered quickly, like barrage balloons. He gave special instructions to both the Army and the Navy about the need to rotate personnel. Yet in making these interventions—especially to the Navy—the Commander in Chief seemed to be acting as a leader of the team rather than as a civilian outsider.

Nor, in contrast to some of his predecessors, did he overturn many sentences following courts-martial. The exceptions are notable. He was vastly amused, in reviewing the dismissal from the Marine Corps of a young second lieutenant, to discover that the young man had simply allowed a sergeant to shoot a “limping” calf for a steak meal, outside the naval reservation at Guantanamo. The President put him on probation for a year—“This man must be taught not to shoot calves”—and seemed surprised that Marine Corps headquarters was distressed. He also put on probation a Navy nurse who had gone absent without leave at Norfolk in order to join her sailor husband for a delayed honeymoon. Hassett pleaded leniency for her. It was arbitrary to refuse her request to join her husband for a honeymoon, he argued. “It was arbitrary for her to go A.W.O.L.,” the President countered.