Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (139 page)

W
HETHER THEY WOULD
guide the Vichy officials in North Africa was the critical question—for Roosevelt, for Churchill, and most directly for Eisenhower. The resistance of the French forces in North Africa to the American landings varied from place to place, but Eisenhower, as theater commander, considered it imperative to reduce that resistance however possible. His political agent, Robert Murphy of the American State Department, had sounded out French officers in North Africa and suggested that some might be willing to order their troops to stand down. Admiral Jean Darlan was the ranking French officer in North Africa; after initially declaring the American invasion an egregious blunder, he decided, with Murphy’s assistance, that it might be a stepping-stone to political power for himself. He gave the order to cease fire.

What American newspapers dubbed the “Darlan deal” was a bargain of necessity. Darlan wasn’t the Americans’ first choice to lead the French forces in North Africa. That distinction belonged to General Henri Giraud, who had resisted the German invasion in 1940 until he was captured. He spent the next two years in a prisoner of war camp and then made a spectacular escape. He eluded the Gestapo, which had orders to assassinate him, and he found his way to Gibraltar to offer his services to Eisenhower ahead of the Torch landings. But the French troops in North Africa refused to accept him as their leader, taking their orders instead from Darlan. And they accepted Darlan’s orders to cease fire only after the German army, as Pétain had feared, occupied Vichy and the rest of France. The occupation, Darlan told the troops, meant that Pétain was effectively a prisoner and that his orders to resist the invasion were given under duress. But the marshal had sent
him
—Darlan—secret orders authorizing him to act in Pétain’s name. Or so Darlan said, and his word sufficed. The deal was done.

The reaction in America astonished Eisenhower and surprised even Roosevelt. The thrust of the complaints was that the United States was collaborating with Nazi collaborators, sacrificing its principles at the very outset of the fighting. Eisenhower defended his actions in a cable to the Combined Chiefs of Staff that was forwarded to Roosevelt. Eisenhower declared that in all of North Africa there was only one man with the stature to secure the cooperation Torch required. “That man is Darlan.” If Darlan was repudiated, Eisenhower went on, several bad results would ensue, including a resumption of French resistance, a substantial increase in Allied losses, and a dramatic slowing of the entire operation.

Roosevelt stood by Eisenhower. To reporters he cited what he described as “a nice old proverb of the Balkans that has, as I understand it, the full sanction of the Orthodox Church…. It says, ‘My children, you are permitted in time of great danger to walk with the devil until you have crossed the bridge.’” To the American people he declared, “I have accepted General Eisenhower’s political arrangements made for the time being in North Africa and Western Africa.” The arrangement with Darlan had ensured the success of the operation, Roosevelt said. But the president emphasized, and reemphasized, that the arrangement was provisional. “The present temporary arrangement in North and West Africa is only a temporary expedient, justified solely by the stress of battle. The present temporary arrangement has accomplished two military objectives. The first was to save American and British lives on the one hand, and French lives on the other. The second was the vital factor of time. The temporary arrangement has made it possible to avoid a mopping up period in Algiers and Morocco.”

The president wrote to Eisenhower directly. “I appreciate fully the difficulties of your military situation,” he said. “I am therefore not disposed to in any way question the action you have taken.” But the general needed to bear a few things in mind:

1. That we do not trust Darlan.

2. That it is impossible to keep a collaborator of Hitler and one whom we believe to be a fascist in civil power any longer than is absolutely necessary.

3. His movements should be watched carefully and his communications supervised.

As luck, good and bad, would have it, the Darlan deal faded in importance. The good luck was that of the Allies. The Torch operation proceeded well if not smoothly. The Americans and British expanded their beachheads in Morocco and Algeria and pushed east toward Tunisia. Meanwhile British forces under Bernard Montgomery stunned the Germans at El Alamein in Egypt, winning Britain’s first important victory on the ground against Nazi forces and driving Rommel back into the western desert. “This is not the end,” Churchill said. “It is not even the beginning to the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Meanwhile on the eastern front, the Red Army commenced a major counterattack against the Germans at Stalingrad.

The bad luck was Darlan’s. On December 24 he was assassinated in Algiers by a young man who apparently resented the admiral’s recent actions. Churchill later mused on how Darlan’s misfortune was his final gift to the Americans and British: “Darlan’s murder, however criminal, relieved the Allies of their embarrassment at working with him, and at the same time left them with all the advantages he had been able to bestow during the vital hours of the Allied landings.”

49.

“W
E HERE ARE ALL HIGHLY GRATIFIED BY THE BRILLIANT SUCCESSES
of American and British armed forces in North Africa,” Stalin cabled Roosevelt not long after the landings. The Soviet dictator dismissed criticism of the Darlan deal. “It seems to me that the Americans used Darlan not badly in order to facilitate the occupation of Northern and Western Africa,” he wrote to Churchill, who shared the letter with Roosevelt. “The military diplomacy must be able to use for military purposes not only Darlan but”—Stalin cited a Russian proverb—“even the Devil himself and his grandma.”

Roosevelt hoped to capitalize on the success and good feeling to engage Stalin directly for the first time. “The more I consider our military situation and the necessity for reaching early strategic decisions, the more persuaded I am that you, Churchill and I should have an early meeting,” he wrote Stalin on December 2. “I am very anxious to have a talk with you…. I can see no other way of reaching the vital strategic decisions which should be made very soon by all of us together. If the right decision is reached, we may, and I believe will, knock Germany out of the war much sooner than we anticipated.”

The “right decision” Roosevelt referred to, the one that would “knock Germany out of the war,” was one he needed Stalin’s help achieving. But he couldn’t tell Stalin about it by letter or cable; they must speak in person. Roosevelt hoped to use Stalin to sway Churchill toward a second front in Europe as soon as possible. The president assumed Churchill would find further reasons for delay, for insisting that the Mediterranean was the crucial theater. Roosevelt knew that Stalin favored an immediate second front; together they might force a commitment to Europe out of Churchill.

This was exactly what Churchill feared, and it caused him to push Stalin away. “I think I can tell you in advance what the Soviet view will be,” the prime minister wrote Roosevelt. “They will say to us both, ‘How many German divisions will you be engaging in the summer of 1943?’” Churchill didn’t have a good answer to that question, and he didn’t want to be pressed by Roosevelt and Stalin into one that would jeopardize his plans for the Mediterranean.

Stalin was less receptive to a tripartite conference than Roosevelt expected. He didn’t like to travel, perhaps partly from the chronic fear dictators have that their enemies will conspire against them in their absence but also, in his particular case at this particular time, because the battle for Stalingrad had reached a critical juncture. Red Army troops had trapped the Germans in the city; victory in the most important battle of the war was in sight. “It is impossible for me to leave the Soviet Union,” Stalin wrote Roosevelt. “Front business absolutely prevents it, demanding my constant presence near our troops.”

Roosevelt didn’t want to appear the supplicant, so he let the matter drop. He settled for another two-way meeting with Churchill. Since the war began, Roosevelt had missed his winter vacations, and the idea of a sunny spot appealed to him. Why not North Africa, which had the additional benefit of being where the fighting was? “I prefer a comfortable oasis to the raft at Tilsit,” he wrote Churchill, making a point at once about his holiday preferences and his historical sensibility. The raft at Tilsit referred to an 1807 meeting in the middle of Prussia’s Neman River between Napoleon and Russia’s Alexander I, which resulted in the de facto division of Europe between France and Russia. Whether Roosevelt intended to imply that he wanted no part in a modern division of Europe—or whether he
did
intend such an outcome, only negotiated in more congenial surroundings—he left for Churchill to divine.

T
HE OASIS TURNED
out to be Casablanca, and a holiday mood surrounded the meeting from the start. The conference was code-named Symbol, and Roosevelt played the symbolic angle for a lark. “The aliases from this end will be (a) Don Quixote and (b) Sancho Panza,” he wrote Churchill, referring to himself and Hopkins. The prime minister responded in kind. “Should you bring Willkie with you,” he joked, “suggest code word Windmill.”

The president traveled by plane in mid-January 1943. The trip was his first by air in eleven years, since the lurching ride that had landed him dramatically at the 1932 Democratic convention in Chicago. He remembered at once why he hadn’t repeated the Chicago experiment. “I’m not crazy about flying, though it does save time if you have very little,” Roosevelt wrote Eleanor en route. “Rather bumpy both days and once or twice last night.” To his son John he complained, “I dislike flying the more I do of it!”

Roosevelt’s trip to Africa was also the first air journey by a sitting American president and the first presidential crossing of an ocean at war. Not surprisingly, Roosevelt’s security team, led by Michael Reilly of the Secret Service, was relieved when the C-54 transport, dubbed the “Sacred Cow,” landed and taxied to a stop and the president emerged, gamely smiling and full of political good cheer.

Elliott Roosevelt, by now a lieutenant colonel in the army’s air reconnaissance division, greeted his father at the Casablanca air field. The Roosevelt boys came under predictable scrutiny during the war, as the president’s critics and some of his friends wondered whether they were receiving special treatment. One Republican congressman, William Lambertson of Kansas, declared that Roosevelt had personally interceded with the War Department to ensure that his sons not be sent to combat zones.

Elliott was the least likely of the four boys to suffer such criticism in silence, and he didn’t. He wrote to Representative Fritz Lanham of his home district of Fort Worth, Texas, and requested the opportunity to defend the family’s honor. Lanham read Elliott’s letter before the House. “Inasmuch as I know that the Congressman”—Lambertson—“could not be referring to me, because I am here with the troops in North Africa,” Elliott asserted dryly, “and because I know that my brother Franklin has been on a destroyer in the North Atlantic and still is, there can be only two brothers to whom the gentleman in question refers, my brothers James and John.” Neither required defending from the likes of Lambertson, Elliott said, but he was doing so anyway. “The fact that my brother James has won the Navy Cross for gallantry in action”—with the marines in the Pacific—“speaks for itself.” John, the youngest, was with the navy’s supply corps. “He’s been fighting like hell ever since he got in to go on foreign service, and I know that my father or anyone else isn’t going to stop him before this show is over.” Elliott went on to say, “If the Congressman questions my service, you might tell him that I have spent over two-thirds of my service in the past two years on foreign duty. I’ve been in every lousy spot the Air Corps can think of to send its men. It’s not much fun, I can tell you, especially the butterflies that fly around in your stomach when the German gets the range and lets loose everything he’s got at your plane.” Elliott asked Lanham to relate these sentiments to the Kansas congressman personally, on his and his brothers’ behalf. “Try to explain to him that we, as soldiers, don’t care whether or how much he disagrees with the President, but for God’s sake let us fight without being stabbed in the back for the sake of politics.”

At these words, the members of the House burst into applause. One of the Republicans requested that the record show that the applause came from both sides of the aisle. Lambertson of Kansas, apparently forewarned, had absented himself.