No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Read online

  But, talking with Eleanor on the three-hour train ride to Charlottesville, the president began to reconsider. He understood the wisdom of the State Department’s advice, he told her, but he wanted for once to speak candidly, without holding back out of diplomatic courtesy. Eleanor fully supported him in his desire, encouraging him to reinstate the controversial phrase. “If your conscience won’t be satisfied unless you put it in I would put it in,” she advised. When the train pulled into Charlottesville, the sentence was back in the text. Feeling altogether satisfied with the speech now, the president waved and smiled at the crowd gathered at the station. A reporter who had traveled with the president’s party observed a marked change in Roosevelt’s demeanor: whereas he had looked “grave and pale” when he boarded the train in Washington, he now appeared wholly relaxed; “the decision that he had made seemed to strengthen him.”

  Several thousand persons crowded the Memorial Gymnasium and applauded loudly as the president, in traditional cap and gown, stood at the podium. Speaking slowly and forcefully, Roosevelt uttered the words that would stick in public memory long after the rest of the speech was forgotten. “On this tenth day of June, 1940, the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor.”

  Churchill was listening to the president’s speech with a group of his officers in the Admiralty War Room at midnight his time. When they heard Roosevelt’s angry charge against Italy, Churchill recalled, “a deep growl of satisfaction” spread across the room. “I wondered about the Italian vote in the approaching presidential election; but I knew that Roosevelt was a most experienced American party politician, although never afraid to run risks for the sake of his resolves.”

  The President’s stiff denunciation of Italy captured the imagination of the crowd, but far more important was Roosevelt’s ringing public confirmation of America’s policy of aiding the Allies. Placing aid to the Allies and America’s own military buildup on an equal basis, he told his audience: “We will extend to the opponents of force the material resources of this nation,” and at the same time, “we will harness and speed up those resources in order that we ourselves in the Americas may have the equipment and training equal to the task of any emergency and every defense . . . . We will not slow down or detour. Signs and signals call for speed: full speed ahead.” There were no disclaimers in Roosevelt’s pledge, no qualifying adjectives to diminish the force of his promise to extend “the material resources of this nation” to the Allies.

  “We all listened to you,” Churchill cabled Roosevelt, “and were fortified by the grand scope of your declaration. Your statement that the material aid of the United States will be given to the Allies in their struggle is a strong encouragement in a dark but not unhopeful hour.” Though the amounts involved, in terms of the supplies needed in modern war, were small, they were tremendously important from a strategic and political point of view. For, with the president’s pledge at Charlottesville, the British had gained their chief objective—a share in America’s vast industrial potential.

  The president’s pledge, army historians suggest, reflected his “determined faith, not fully shared by the Army staff nor even by General Marshall,” that American industry could produce munitions for the Allies in ever-increasing volumes without “seriously retarding” the rearmament program at home. While he appreciated the enormous task involved in converting factory production from household items to weapons of war; while he understood the complications involved in teaching those without the proper experience and skill how to build tanks and planes; while he recognized that millions of people would have to move from locales in which they had long been settled, he believed that, in the end, American industry would come through.

  The president returned to the White House that night, “full of the elan of his Charlottesville speech,” Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle recorded. “He had said for once, what really was on his mind, and what everybody knew; and he could speak frankly, and had done so.” It was a liberating feeling. It was “holiday time” for FDR, Jr., as well, who had brought two of his classmates with him back to the White House. At midnight, as Eleanor readied herself for the night train to New York, she found all of them involved in a fiery discussion with Harry Hopkins about world economics. “Though I mildly suggested that a little sleep would do them all good, I left them convinced that the discussion had just begun.”

  The media were quick to recognize the significance of Roosevelt’s talk. “It was a fighting speech,” Time reported, “more powerful and more determined than any he had delivered since the war began.” With this speech, Time concluded, “the U.S. had taken sides. Ended was the myth of U.S. neutrality . . . . Ended was the vacillating talk of aiding the Allies; nothing remained now but to get on with the job.” Writing in a similar vein, the New York Post maintained that Roosevelt “rose to the occasion and gave to the country the pronouncement for which it has waited . . . . The most productive nation in the world has thrown its productive capacity into the scales.”

  • • •

  But when all was said and done, there was nothing “the most productive nation in the world” could do to save France. At dawn on the morning of June 14, German troops entered Paris. Parisians awakened to the sound of German loudspeakers warning that any demonstrations or hostile acts against the troops would be punishable by death. At every street corner decrees were posted: all radio stations were now in the hands of the Germans, all newspapers suspended, all banks closed.

  Here and there knots of people stood and watched as thousands of Nazi troops marched in goosestep toward the Arc de Triomphe. Women wept and crossed themselves; the men were grim. At Napoleon’s tomb the German soldiers methodically searched the battle flags to remove every German flag they could find—each one symbolizing a lost German battle in the Great War. The German troops swept down the Champs-Elysées, from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier; past the Gardens of the Tuileries, past the Louvre to the Hôtel de Ville, where they made their headquarters. As the German national anthem blared from every corner, Dr. Thierry de Martel, director of the prestigious American Hospital and a good friend of Ambassador Bullitt’s, decided that life under the German occupation would be intolerable. He plunged a hypodermic needle filled with a fatal dose of strychnine into his arm.

  When the parade was over, jubilant Nazi soldiers photographed each other before the Arc de Triomphe, at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and in the Gardens of the Tuileries. Racing one another to the top of the Eiffel Tower, a group hauled down the French flag that had flown on the mast atop the tower and replaced it with the German swastika. After the 9 p.m. curfew, Paris, save for the tread of Nazi guards patrolling the city’s old cobblestones, fell silent.

  A week later, Hitler laid down his terms for an armistice, and, in the same railroad car in a clearing in the woods at Compiègne where the Germans had capitulated to the Allies in 1918, a defeated and humiliated France concluded a truce. After the signing, Hitler ordered that the historic carriage and the monument celebrating the original French victory be conveyed to Berlin. Then, in an attempt to obliterate even the slightest physical memory of Germany’s earlier defeat, he ordered that the pedestal of the carriage and the stones marking the site be destroyed. With the French surrender, Adolf Hitler was now the master of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and France.

  The French collapse produced a sharp drop in American hopes for an Allied victory. By the end of June, only a third of the American people believed Britain would win the war. Though a majority still continued to favor sending aid to the Allies, the level of support was dropping. General Marshall and Admiral Stark were now convinced that they had been right all along. Five days after the surrender, they urged the president to discontinue all aid to Britain at once and transfer most of the fleet from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The president flatly rejected both proposals. In what is considered “one of his most decisive prewar moves,” he decreed tha
t aid to Britain would proceed and that the fleet would stay at Pearl Harbor. The positioning of the fleet was of great importance to Churchill, who had told Roosevelt privately he was looking to him “to keep that Japanese dog quiet in the Pacific.”

  In backing Churchill that critical spring despite the opposition of his military, Roosevelt was placing his faith in the American people. Though he had seen support for the Allies fluctuate with news from abroad, he sensed a significant shift in the public mood. Isolationism still remained a powerful force, but a majority of Americans were beginning to understand that they could no longer escape from commitment, that they had a role to play in the world. For the moment, they were willing to extend themselves only so far; their chief goal in aiding the Allies was to keep the U.S. out of the war. But for now, that was as far as Roosevelt needed or even wanted to go.

  • • •

  On June 20, after weeks of hesitation, Roosevelt finally resolved the continuing public feud in the War Department. He fired Secretary of War Woodring and announced a sweeping reorganization of his Cabinet. “When the President did decide to get rid of anybody,” author John Gunther has written, “he could usually only bear to do so after deliberately picking a quarrel, so that he could provoke anger and then claim that he himself was not to blame.” In this case, the quarrel was ready-made in Woodring’s refusal to agree to the president’s requests for releasing munitions to England.

  Woodring’s departure was the moment Assistant Secretary Louis Johnson, FDR’s faithful ally, had been dreaming of for years. Surely, now, the president would make good on his long-standing promise to elevate Johnson to the high post of war secretary. But, unbeknownst to Johnson, the president had conceived a brilliant plan which left the assistant secretary out in the cold.

  The plan called for a reorganization of both the War Department and the Navy Department to make possible a coalition Cabinet. For secretary of war, Roosevelt selected Republican conservative Henry Stimson, the patron saint of the Eastern establishment. At seventy-three, his gray hair cut straight across his broad brow, Stimson had served under every president since William McKinley, working for William Howard Taft as secretary of war and for Herbert Hoover as secretary of state. A graduate of Phillips Academy, Andover; Yale, Skull and Bones, and Harvard Law School, Stimson was as deeply connected to the upper strata of American government and society as any man alive. He was a curious mixture of conservatism and liberalism, known as an excellent manager with an unusual ability to bring out the best in those around him. “Even if I had had any hope that the President would make me Secretary of War,” Interior Secretary Harold Ickes recorded in his diary, “I would have had to admit . . . that the Stimson appointment was excellent.”

  As navy secretary, the President chose Colonel Frank Knox, the Chicago Daily News publisher who had been Alf Landon’s running mate on the Republican ticket in 1936. Unlike Stimson, Knox had come up the hard way, moving from grocery clerk to gym teacher, from cub reporter to publisher. A colorful figure at sixty-seven, with an open, pleasant face and reddish hair, Knox still cherished the memory of charging up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. As conservative on domestic issues as Stimson, Knox was a forceful speaker, an unsparing critic of the New Deal. Taken together, historian Bruce Catton observed, the appointments were further evidence of “a truce between the New Deal and big business . . . a bit of assurance that the defense effort was not to be a straight New Deal program.”

  But the domestic views of Stimson and Knox were of secondary importance to the president compared with the fact that both men were ardent interventionists, willing to take their stand against the isolationist tendencies of their own party. Time and again, both men had expressed themselves in support of generous aid to the Allies, on the theory that Nazism and all its implications must be destroyed. And their devotion to public service made them ideal choices for the Cabinet. While some Republicans vigorously protested Roosevelt’s “double cross” on the eve of the Republican convention and demanded that Stimson and Knox be read out of the Republican Party, the announcement was generally greeted with approval. “Abroad, these nominations will serve to emphasize the essential unity of America,” the Washington Post editorialized. “At home, this infusion of new blood should help accelerate the preparedness program.”

  Vastly pleased by the reactions to his surprise appointments, the president decided to spend the weekend of June 21 at his Hyde Park estate. It was the first time he had been able to enjoy his childhood home since early May. Traveling with Missy and Hopkins and a phalanx of reporters, he boarded his special train at midnight, Friday, at the railroad siding under the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, on 14th Street.

  Although the overnight journey to Hyde Park took less than ten hours, hundreds, even thousands of people were involved. For six hours before the president’s departure, all rail traffic was deflected from the tracks to be used, so that responsible railroad men could walk every yard of track, inspecting for cracks or broken switches. In the areas adjacent to the tracks, all parked cars were removed, lest they prove hiding places for conspirators. Security agents tested the food and drinks as they were loaded into the dining car. In the Pullman car in front of the president’s private car, typewriters and mimeograph machines were installed for his staff. The swirl of activity never stopped, with reporters gathering in the club car until the wee hours of morning, but in the president’s compartment the blinds were closed and all was quiet. Roosevelt was sound asleep.

  • • •

  That same weekend, Hitler decided to celebrate his victory over France with a visit to Paris, his first journey to the city which had enchanted him since his early years as an art student. So closely had he dreamed of Paris that he was certain he could find his way anywhere solely from his knowledge of the buildings and the monuments. Accompanied by a small group of architects and photographers, including Albert Speer, Hitler arrived at Le Bourget before dawn and drove straight to the Opéra, his favorite building. A white-haired French attendant led Hitler’s party through the sumptuous foyer and up the great ornamental stairway. When they reached the part of the stage in front of the curtain, Hitler, looking puzzled, told the attendant that in his mind’s eye he was certain a salon was supposed to be to the right. The attendant confirmed Hitler’s memory; the salon had been eliminated in a recent renovation. “There, you see how well I know my way about,” Hitler remarked in triumph to his entourage.

  From the Opéra, Hitler was driven down the Champs-Elysées and taken to the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and Napoleon’s tomb. In the tomb, he trembled with excitement and ordered that the remains of Napoleon’s son, which rested in Vienna, be transferred to Paris and placed beside those of his father. Minutes later, his mood having shifted, he ordered the destruction of two World War I monuments: the statue of General Charles Mangin, leader of the colonial troops, whose memorial included an honor guard of four Negro soldiers, and the monument to Edith Cavell, the English nurse who became a popular heroine and was executed in 1915 for aiding over two hundred Allied soldiers to escape from a Red Cross hospital in German-occupied Belgium.

  As the three-hour tour came to an end, an exhilarated Hitler told Speer: “It was the dream of my life to be permitted to see Paris. I cannot say how happy I am to have that dream fulfilled.” That evening, Hitler ordered Speer to resume at once his architectural renovations of Berlin. However beautiful Paris was, Berlin must, in the end, be made far more beautiful. “In the past I often considered whether we would not have to destroy Paris,” he confided to Speer. “But when we are finished in Berlin, Paris will only be a shadow. So why should we destroy it?”

  • • •

  The weather in Hyde Park was “delightfully cool and brilliant” when the president’s train pulled into Highland Station that Saturday morning. From the train station it was an easy ride over country roads to Springwood, the president’s thirty-five-room estate on the Hudson River. This was the place to which
Roosevelt would regularly return when he needed sustenance and peace, the place where he could always relax, no matter what was going on in the world.

  Today, as for so many days throughout his fifty-eight years, the president’s mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, was at the door to greet him. Her waist had thickened over the years, but at eighty-five, she was still a handsome woman, with her high forehead, her thick white hair, and her gold lorgnette. Exquisitely dressed in white or black, the only two colors she regularly wore, Sara moved with great distinctness, embodying in her carriage the impression of superiority. But there was warmth in her eyes, and her smile was so startlingly similar to her son’s that audiences at movie theaters broke into spontaneous applause when they saw her face.

  As the president kissed his mother at the door, reporters recollected that it was just a year ago at the same doorway that Sara Roosevelt had greeted the British monarchs, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, during their royal visit to Hyde Park. “The weather was much the same as it was on that historic week end last year,” one reporter observed, “and the hills across the Hudson River stood out as clearly against the backdrop of the Catskill Mountains to the north but there remained only a memory of the peace which existed in the world at that time.”

  It is said that, in the weeks before the king and queen arrived, Sara’s neighbors along the Hudson had asked her if she was going to redecorate the house. “Of course not,” she responded, in her best starchy manner, “they’re not coming to see a redecorated house, they’re coming to see my house.”