No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Read online

  When MacKenzie King and Jay Moffat, the American minister to Canada, arrived, a round of cooling drinks was served. The president, Moffat noted, was tired but exhilarated from his long drive across the hot country roads inspecting the troops. He wished, he said, that everyone who opposed the draft could see with their own eyes what he had seen that day—the proof that voluntary enlistments would not suffice. “He talked at random about whatever came into his head,” Moffat recalled. “His talk on the whole was brilliant and the charm of the man, a happy blend of Chief of State, man of the world, and host, was never more vivid.” He was anxious to get the full text of the Willkie speech, for the first reports were fragmentary.

  At dinner, Stimson joined the president’s party. In the middle of the meal, the text of Willkie’s speech came in over the wire. All conversation stopped as the president read the speech. A broad smile came over his face when he reached Willkie’s endorsement of both the draft and aid to the Allies. If this was true, the master politician declared, if Willkie was agreeing with the administration on all these issues, then “Willkie is lost.” Historians in later years would agree with Roosevelt’s instant analysis, considering Willkie’s failure to delineate how he differed from the president a fatal blunder. But the men on the train that night were thrilled. Stimson described the speech as “able and courageous,” and Moffat called it “a godsend.”

  The remainder of the evening, Stimson recorded, passed in a happy discussion of the destroyer deal. The president told the Canadian prime minister that he “had originally felt he would require the action of Congress in order to release the destroyers,” but that he had decided to go ahead on his own. The two heads of state agreed that, once the agreement was signed, American crews should bring the destroyers to some place in Canada where they could officially be turned over to Britain. “Almost with tears in his eyes,” King thanked the president and agreed to telegraph Churchill that night to send British crews to Canada at once to man the ships. Time was of the essence, for, even as Roosevelt and King were meeting, the sky in southern England had become “a place of terror, raining blazing planes, shell splinters, parachutes, even flying boots.” And with each passing day, the RAF losses were mounting.

  Roosevelt’s discussion with King and Stimson lasted late into the night, after which the president and King went to sleep in adjoining compartments. The next morning, at breakfast, Stimson told Moffat that he had gone to sleep much easier as a result of the late-night talks. Indeed, so important was the destroyer deal in Stimson’s mind that he dared to profess that “perhaps today would mark the turn of the tide of the war.” In talking with Stimson that morning, Moffat observed in the old man a new energy: “the old war horse smelled the smell of battle, and rejoiced. It had given him a new zest in life.”

  In the days that followed, however, an unexpected obstacle arose when Churchill balked at the idea of announcing the trade publicly. He had no problem turning over his bases for destroyers, but he preferred to see the two transactions as two friends in danger helping each other with gifts rather than “anything in the nature of a contract, bargain or sale.” If the bases were seen as payment for the destroyers, he told Roosevelt, “people will contrast on each side what is given and received,” and since there was no comparison between the questionable value of the antiquated craft and the permanent strategic security afforded to the U.S. by the island bases, the prime minister would look foolish.

  Roosevelt appreciated Churchill’s predicament, but he also understood that the only way to win popular approval in America for the deal was to present it as a shrewd Yankee bargain. So Churchill was told that the U.S. Constitution made it impossible for the president to send essential weapons as a gift; the destroyers could only come as a quid pro quo in an exchange which added to the security of the United States. With no way out, Churchill agreed to the exchange.

  • • •

  There remained the problem of announcing the agreement to the Congress and the American public. “Congress is going to raise hell over this,” Roosevelt predicted. He had hoped to keep the deal under wraps until the Selective Service Act passed the Congress, but by early September Great Britain’s need for the ships was so urgent that he could no longer afford to wait.

  The date he chose for the startling announcement was September 3; the place, the tiny vestibule of his private car on the Roosevelt train, forty-five minutes after he had departed from South Charleston, West Virginia, where he was inspecting restoration work being done on a long-abandoned ordnance plant. With no knowledge of the stunning announcement the president was about to make, New York Daily News correspondent Doris Fleeson observed that morning that Roosevelt’s face had a yellowish tint and that he was irritable, which she interpreted as a sign of fatigue in a man of his genial temperament. After luncheon with the president on the first day out, financier Bernard Baruch confided in TVA head David Lilienthal that the president seemed to be “brooding about something”; his mind wasn’t on what they were talking about, and twice he said that “he might get impeached for what he was about to do.”

  The mystery was solved at noon, when the president called a press conference in the sitting room of his private car. The room comfortably accommodated seven, the Time correspondent observed, but “twenty odd jammed in, jostling each other as the train rolled along.” He did not have much to tell them, the president announced half-apologetically, his face unable to hide a smile at the enormity of the secret he was about to reveal. What he was going to relate, the president suggested, was “the most important event in the defense of the U.S. since Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase.” He then went on to explain that in return for fifty destroyers he had acquired from the British the right to nine strategic bases. When the president was asked if the Senate needed to ratify the agreement, he said no. “It is all over. It is done.” As the reporters raced from the room to file their stories, the drawn shade of the window revealed FDR, “massive-gray-headed, smiling,” relieved that the thing was done.

  As Roosevelt expected, the news of the deal provoked harsh criticism in Washington. While approving the trade in principle, Wendell Willkie denounced Roosevelt’s decision to bypass Congress as “the most dictatorial and arbitrary of any President in the history of the U.S.” The St. Louis Post Dispatch agreed, noting that Roosevelt had merely informed Congress of the agreement. “Note well the word ‘informed.’ The President is not asking Congress—the elected representatives of the people—to ratify the deal. He is telling them that it has already been ratified by him. Mr. Roosevelt today committed an act of war. He also becomes America’s first dictator.”

  The news reached the House of Representatives just as the final debate was to begin on the draft legislation. The president’s timing stunned even his staunchest supporters. “If Mr. Roosevelt can do what he likes with our destroyers without consulting Congress,” Representative Frances Bolton argued in her maiden speech on the floor, “and we give him our boys, God alone knows what he will do with them.” When she finished she received a standing ovation.

  But as far as Roosevelt was concerned, the end justified the means. If fifty old destroyers which had been collecting rust and barnacles helped turn the tide of battle in Britain’s favor, then the risk was worth taking. Churchill agreed, understanding as he did that, beyond the transfer of the ships, the deal represented “a decidedly unneutral act by the U.S.” According to every standard of history, Churchill later wrote, the German government would have been justified in declaring war upon the U.S. for the destroyer deal. Explaining the deal to the Parliament, Churchill predicted that, from this moment on, the affairs of the British Empire and the U.S. would inevitably be mixed together, rolling along unstoppably like the Mississippi River. “Let it roll on,” he cried, “full flood, inexorable, benignant, to broader lands and developments.”

  Even as Churchill spoke, the American destroyers, one reporter observed, “their four tunnels raking sharply, canvas caps laced over the black
muzzles of anti-aircraft guns on deck, sleek brass-nosed torpedoes nursing dynamite death below decks,” were arriving at the entrance to Halifax Harbor, where, “by the long arm of coincidence,” Churchill joked, they were met by a British ship, carrying the first batch of British crews.

  For days, American sailors had worked to give the ships a fresh coat of paint and stock them with every necessary piece of equipment. The British captains, weary from battle, were overwhelmed by the immaculate condition of the ships and the lavishness of the provisions. “There were coffee makers, china, silver and table cloths in the wardroom,” author Philip Goodhart reported, “pencil sharpeners in the cabins while such unaccustomed luxuries as tinned asparagus, corn, chipped beef, clams, instant coffee, tomato juice and pumpkins bulged out of the store cupboards.” At ten o’clock on the morning of September 9, the ships were decommissioned by the U.S. Army in a simple ceremony. Before noon, they were on their way to do battle in the Atlantic.

  Fortunately for the president, the initial attacks against the destroyer deal were more than balanced by expressions of approval as the advantages to America in gaining the bases became clear. Though his technique was occasionally deplored, Roosevelt was universally praised for his skill in getting the better end of the deal. “We haven’t had a better bargain,” the Louisville Courier Journal exulted, “since the Indians sold Manhattan Island for $24 in wampum and a demi John of hard liquor.” “The President’s bargain,” the Washington Post gleefully noted, “was the first major expansion of the American frontier since the Spanish American War.”

  Popular approval for the destroyer deal strengthened the hand of the president’s supporters on conscription, as did rising approval of the draft in the polls, and when the vote was finally taken, first in the Senate and then in the House, the historic legislation passed by a comfortable margin.

  • • •

  Thus reassured on the twin issues of the destroyers and the draft, a confident and composed president headed for a weekend rest at Hyde Park. The old house was charged with excitement when the president arrived on the morning of September 7. The cause of the excitement was the presence of Crown Princess Martha of Norway. Tall and willowy, full of light and gaiety, the thirty-nine-year-old Martha looked, in the words of reporter Bess Furman, “exactly as a princess should look.” Everything in her appearance, from her gray dress and her gold jewelry to her high cheekbones and chiseled mouth, bespoke good breeding. A handsome woman with large brown eyes, long lashes, and a clear complexion, Princess Martha was to become one of the president’s most intimate companions.

  Martha’s birth, in Stockholm, had occasioned a twenty-one-gun salute in both Norway and Sweden to mark the arrival of the granddaughter of Oscar II, king of the combined union of Norway and Sweden. By the time Martha grew up, Norway and Sweden had ended their union, but the blood ties between the dynasties of the two countries remained strong. Martha’s father was a Swedish prince, the younger brother of the Swedish King Gustav V. Her mother was a Danish princess, the younger sister of the Norwegian King Haakon VII. Martha was only a child when she met her first cousin and future husband, Prince Olav. As the only son of King Haakon, Olav was Norway’s adored “little prince.” Songs and poems were written in his honor, and his picture hung on every schoolroom wall. When Olav and Martha became engaged in 1929, Norway went wild with excitement. As the couple rode through the streets of Oslo on their wedding day, they were cheered by tens of thousands of jubilant spectators. The marriage soon produced two princesses, Ragnhild and Astrid, and a prince, Harald, destined one day to follow his father to the throne.

  The royal family’s reign had been brought to an abrupt end when the Nazis invaded Norway in early April 1940. For two months, the king and the members of the Parliament had bravely resisted German demands for surrender, moving deeper and deeper into the north woods to avoid capture. “I cannot accept the German demands,” Haakon told his nation as the infuriated Germans tried to kill him. “It would conflict with all that I have considered to be my duty as King of Norway . . . .” When advancing German troops made it impossible for Haakon to hold out any longer, he and his son fled to London to set up a government in exile, while Princess Martha, concerned about the safety of her children, accepted an offer of asylum from President Roosevelt.

  Roosevelt had met both Olav and Martha in the spring of 1939, when the royal couple traveled to the United States to dedicate the Norwegian exhibit at the World’s Fair. From the first moment the president saw Martha, dressed in her favorite shades of gray, he was entranced by her good looks and her lively manner. No sooner had they exchanged greetings than the princess asked the president what he thought of the speech Hitler had delivered that morning. All day long, Roosevelt had avoided comment on the speech, claiming that he had not heard it, but now, confronted with a direct question by the princess, he was forced to reply. “It left the door about an inch open,” he told Martha in an offhand judgment that would make headlines the following day. To the delight of both Franklin and his mother, the royal couple spent a weekend that spring at Hyde Park, enjoying a festive picnic, a concert by the Vassar College Choir, and a large country dinner.

  These carefree days seemed far removed in August 1940, when Martha and her children joined eight hundred American refugees aboard the army transport ship the American Legion for the perilous voyage to the United States. Troubled by rumors of a Nazi plan to kidnap the princess and her son, the ship was forced to take a circuitous route from the Arctic port of Petsamo, Finland, down the Norwegian coast, through the mined waters of the North Atlantic into New York. When the ship landed safely, Martha spoke to the press, denouncing Hitler in “brave words” that impressed Eleanor. From the docks in New York, the princess journeyed to Hyde Park, accompanied by her children, her lady-in-waiting, the court chamberlain, and a retinue of servants.

  It was clear at once that the president regarded the effervescent princess as a superlative addition to his household. At breakfast, lunch, or dinner, she sat upright in her chair, a never-failing smile on her face, and when the president spoke, she gazed into his face in a girlish, good-humored way. It was amusing to watch her flirt, one witness reported. “Martha would sit and simper and tell him how wonderful and beautiful he was.” She would bat her eyes and put on “a little girl act,” and the president “seemed to eat it up.”

  “Nothing is more pleasing to the eye,” Roosevelt once observed, “than a good-looking lady, nothing more refreshing to the spirit than the company of one, nothing more flattering to the ego than the affection of one.” Roosevelt was a ladies’ man by temperament, Jimmy Roosevelt explained, “at his sparkling best when his audience included a few admiring and attractive ladies.” Little wonder, then, that the president developed such strong feelings of affection for Martha, who sat by his side, giggling and looking “adoringly” at him. “He seems to like it tremendously,” one guest reported, “and there is a growing flirtatious intimacy . . . .”

  Anna’s daughter, Eleanor Seagraves, a teenager at the time, recalls the spark Martha provided to the Roosevelt household. “She was a lot of fun, and not at all stiff or stuffy. I remember that her lady-in-waiting had a tattoo on her arm.” Down-to-earth, practical, and unassuming, Martha had an open, vivacious personality which served her well.

  On Saturday evening, September 7, the entire Roosevelt household, including Martha, Sara, Eleanor, and Missy, journeyed to nearby Peekskill for an end-of-summer clambake at the home of the Morgenthaus. “It became a kind of annual event,” Henry Morgenthau III explained. “There was beer and brandy and singing. FDR would join in the singing. It was that kind of free, relaxed evening with good food that FDR enjoyed.” It was cold that night, Eleanor wrote in her column, “but the big bonfire looked warm and we all wore plenty of warm garments.” After dinner, the entire party went into the living room for a square dance. “Mrs. Roosevelt loved to square dance,” Morgenthau recalled.

  While the Roosevelt party was enjoying the fe
stivities at the Morgenthaus’, over six hundred German bombers were coming down in long shallow dives over London, the heaviest attack ever delivered on a single city. More than four hundred people were killed in a matter of minutes, and fourteen hundred were seriously injured. Buses and trains stopped running, the lights went out, and large fires sprang up all over the city. “The London that we knew was burning,” one horrified Londoner later wrote—“the London which had taken thirty generations of men a thousand years to build . . . and the Nazis had done that in thirty seconds.”

  Earlier that week, in what would later prove to be a great tactical error, German Air Marshal Hermann Goering had decided to shift his priorities from daylight attacks on the RAF in southern England to massive night bombings of London. The decision was in part an emotional one, reflecting a desire to retaliate against the British people for the recent bombing of Berlin, which, unbeknownst to the Germans, had resulted from a minor navigational error. Goering also hoped to destroy the will of the British people by disrupting the daily life of their capital.

  Goering’s shift in tactics came at just the wrong moment. After a month of heavy fighting in the air, the battered RAF Fighter Command was on the verge of exhaustion. The German superiority of numbers was beginning to tell. “A few more weeks of this,” journalist William Shirer has written, “and Britain would have no organized defense of its skies. The invasion could almost certainly succeed.” The raids on London, which would continue for fifty-seven consecutive nights, gave the RAF a chance to recover, regroup, and regain the upper hand. By mid-October, long after Goering had promised Hitler that the RAF would be driven from the skies, the British Fighter Command was still in control. The prerequisite for the invasion had not been met, forcing Hitler on October 12 to postpone the preparations for “Sea Lion” until the following spring.