No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Read online

  As a result, in 1940, the U.S. Army stood only eighteenth in the world, trailing not only Germany, France, Britain, Russia, Italy, Japan, and China but also Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. With the fall of Holland, the United States would rise to seventeenth! And, in contrast to Germany, where after years of compulsory military training nearly 10 percent of the population (6.8 million) were trained and ready for war, less than .5 percent of the American population (504,000) were on active duty or in the trained reserves. The offensive Germany had launched the morning of May 10 along the Western front was supported by 136 divisions; the United States could, if necessary, muster merely five fully equipped divisions.

  In the spring of 1940, the United States possessed almost no munitions industry at all. So strong had been the recoil from war after 1918 that both the government and the private sector had backed away from, making weapons. The result was that, while the United States led the world in the mass production of automobiles, washing machines, and other household appliances, the techniques of producing weapons of war had badly atrophied.

  All through the winter and spring, Marshall had been trying to get Secretary of War Henry Woodring to understand the dire nature of this unpreparedness. But the former governor of Kansas was an isolationist who refused to contemplate even the possibility of American involvement in the European war. Woodring had been named assistant secretary of war in 1933 and then promoted to the top job three years later, when the price of corn and the high unemployment rate worried Washington far more than foreign affairs. As the European situation heated up, Roosevelt recognized that Woodring was the wrong man to head the War Department. But, try as he might, he could not bring himself to fire his secretary of war—or anyone else, for that matter.

  Roosevelt’s inability to get rid of anybody, even the hopelessly incompetent, was a chief source of the disorderliness of his administration, of his double-dealing and his tendency to procrastinate. “His real weakness,” Eleanor Roosevelt observed, “was that—it came out of the strength really, or out of a quality—he had great sympathy for people and great understanding, and he couldn’t bear to be disagreeable to someone he liked . . . and he just couldn’t bring himself to really do the unkind thing that had to be done unless he got angry.”

  Earlier that spring, on at least two occasions, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes had brought up the Woodring problem with Roosevelt, suggesting an appointment as ambassador to Ireland as a face-saving gesture. The president did not think this would satisfy Woodring. “If I were you, Mr. President,” Ickes replied, “I would send for Harry Woodring and I would say to him, ‘Harry, it is either Dublin, Ireland for you or Topeka, Kansas.’ The President looked at me somewhat abashed. Reading his mind, I said, ‘You can’t do that sort of thing, can you, Mr. President?’ ‘No, Harold, I can’t,’ he replied.”

  The confusion multiplied when Roosevelt selected a staunch interventionist, Louis Johnson, the former national commander of the American Legion, as assistant secretary of war. Outspoken, bold, and ambitious, Johnson fought openly with Woodring, bringing relations to the sorry point where neither man spoke to the other. Paralyzed and frustrated, General Marshall found it incomprehensible that Roosevelt had allowed such a mess to develop simply because he disliked firing anyone. Years earlier, when Marshall had been told by his aide that a friend whom he had ordered overseas had said he could not leave because his wife was away and his furniture was not packed, Marshall had called the man himself. The friend explained that he was sorry. “I’m sorry, too,” Marshall replied, “but you will be retired tomorrow.”

  Marshall failed to understand that there was a method behind the president’s disorderly style. Though divided authority and built-in competition created insecurity and confusion within the administration, it gave Roosevelt the benefit of conflicting opinions. “I think he knew exactly what he was doing all the time,” administrative assistant James Rowe observed. “He liked conflict, and he was a believer in resolving problems through conflict.” With different administrators telling him different things, he got a better feel for what his problems were.

  Their attitude toward subordinates was not the only point of dissimilarity between Roosevelt and Marshall. Roosevelt loved to laugh and play, closing the space between people by familiarity, calling everyone, even Winston Churchill, by his first name. In contrast, Marshall was rarely seen to smile or laugh on the job and was never familiar with anyone. “I never heard him call anyone by his first name,” Robert Cutler recalled. “He would use the rank or the last name or both: ‘Colonel’ or ‘Colonel Cutler.’ Only occasionally in wartime did he use the last name alone . . . . It was a reward for something he thought well done.”

  As army chief of staff, Marshall remained wary of Roosevelt’s relaxed style. “Informal conversation with the President could get you into trouble,” Marshall later wrote. “He would talk over something informally at the dinner table and you had trouble disagreeing without embarrassment. So I never went. I was in Hyde Park for the first time at his funeral.”

  As the officials sat in the Cabinet Room, at the great mahogany table under the stern, pinch-lipped stare of Woodrow Wilson, whose portrait hung above the fireplace, their primary reason for gathering together was to share the incoming information from Europe and to plan the American response. Ambassador John Cudahy in Brussels wired that he had almost been knocked down by the force of a bomb which fell three hundred feet from the embassy. From London, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy reported that the British had called off their Whitsun holiday, the long weekend on which Londoners traditionally acquired the tan that had to last until their August vacation—“tangible evidence,” Kennedy concluded, “that the situation is serious.”

  Plans were set in motion for the army and navy to submit new estimates to the White House of what they would need to accomplish the seemingly insurmountable task of catching up with Germany’s modern war machine. For, as Marshall had recently explained to the Congress, Germany was in a unique position. “After the World War practically everything was taken away from Germany in the way of materiel. So when Germany rearmed, it was necessary to produce a complete set of materiel for all the troops. As a result, Germany has an Army equipped throughout with the most modern weapons that could be turned out and that is a situation that has never occurred before in the history of the world.”

  • • •

  While the president was conducting his meeting in the Cabinet Room, the men and women of the press were standing around in small groups, talking and smoking behind a red cord in a large anteroom, waiting for the signal that the press conference in the Oval Office was about to begin. The reporters had also been up late the night before, so “some were a little drawn eyed,” the Tribune’s Mark Sullivan observed. “We grouped about talking of—do I need to say? I felt that . . . for many a day and month and year there will be talk about the effect of today’s events upon the United States. We shall talk it and write it and live it, and our children’s children, too.”

  The meeting concluded, the president returned to his desk, the red cord was withdrawn, and the reporters began filing in. In the front row, by tradition, stood the men representing the wire services: Douglas Cornell of Associated Press, Merriman Smith of United Press, and George Durno of the International News Service. Directly behind them stood the representatives of the New York and Washington papers. “Glancing around the room,” a contemporary wrote, “one sees white-haired Mark Sullivan; dark Raymond Clapper; tall Ernest Lindley . . . and husky Paul Mallon.” Farther back were the veterans of the out-of-town newspapers, the radio commentators, and the magazine men, led by Time’s Felix Belair. And then the women reporters in flat heels, among them Doris Fleeson of the New York Daily News and May Craig, representing several Maine newspapers.

  Seated at his desk with his back to the windows, Roosevelt faced the crowd that was now spilling into the Oval Office for his largest press conference ever. Behind him,
set in standards, were the blue presidential flag and the American flag. “Like an opera singer about to go on the stage,” Roosevelt invariably appeared nervous before a conference began, fidgeting with his cigarette holder, fingering the trinkets on his desk, exchanging self-conscious jokes with the reporters in the front row. Once the action started, however, with the doorkeeper’s shout of “all-in,” the president seemed to relax, conducting the flow of questions and conversation with such professional skill that the columnist Heywood Broun once called him “the best newspaperman who has ever been President of the United States.”

  For seven years, twice a week, the president had sat down with these reporters, explaining legislation, announcing appointments, establishing friendly contact, calling them by their first names, teasing them about their hangovers, exuding warmth and accessibility. Once, when a correspondent narrowly missed getting on Roosevelt’s train, the president covered for him by writing his copy until he could catch up. Another time, when the mother of a bachelor correspondent died, Eleanor Roosevelt attended the funeral services, and then she and the president invited him for their Sunday family supper of scrambled eggs. These acts of friendship—repeated many times over—helped to explain the paradox that, though 80 to 85 percent of the newspaper publishers regularly opposed Roosevelt, the president maintained excellent relations with the working reporters, and his coverage was generally full and fair. “By the brilliant but simple trick of making news and being news,” historian Arthur Schlesinger observed, “Roosevelt outwitted the open hostility of the publishers and converted the press into one of the most effective channels of his public leadership.”

  “History will like to say the scene [on May 10] was tense,” Mark Sullivan wrote. “It was not . . . . On the President’s part there was consciousness of high events, yet also complete coolness . . . . The whole atmosphere was one of serious matter-of-factness.”

  “Good morning,” the president said, and then paused as still more reporters filed in. “I hope you had more sleep than I did,” he joked, drawing them into the shared experience of the crisis. “I guess most of you were pretty busy all night.”

  “There isn’t much I can say about the situation . . . . I can say, personally, that I am in full sympathy with the very excellent statement that was given out, the proclamation, by the Queen of the Netherlands.” In that statement, issued earlier that morning, Queen Wilhelmina had directed “a flaming protest against this unprecedented violation of good faith and all that is decent in relations between cultured states.”

  Asked if he would say what he thought the chances were that the United States could stay out of the war, the president replied as he had been replying for months to similar questions. “I think that would be speculative. In other words, don’t for heaven’s sake, say that means we may get in. That would be again writing yourself off on the limb and sawing it off.” Asked if his speech that night would touch on the international situation, Roosevelt evoked a round of laughter by responding: “I do not know because I have not written it.”

  On and on he went, his tone in the course of fifteen minutes shifting from weariness to feistiness to playfulness. Yet, in the end, preserving his options in this delicate moment, he said almost nothing, skillfully deflecting every question about America’s future actions. Asked at one point to compare Japanese aggression with German aggression, he said he counted seven ifs in the question, which meant he could not provide an answer. Still, by the time the senior wire-service man brought the conference to an early close, “partly in consideration of the tired newspaper men and partly in consideration of the President,” the reporters went away with the stories they needed for the next day’s news.

  • • •

  While the president was holding his press conference, Eleanor was in a car with her secretary, Malvina Thompson, heading toward the Choate School near the village of Wallingford, Connecticut. Built in the middle of three hundred acres of farm and woodland, with rolling hills stretching for many miles beyond, Choate was a preparatory school for young boys. The students were mostly Protestant, though in recent years a few Catholics had been admitted, including the two sons of Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, Joe Jr. and John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

  Like Missy, Malvina Thompson, known to her friends as Tommy, was a fixture in the Roosevelt household, as critical to Eleanor’s life as Missy was to Franklin’s. Short and stocky, with brown hair and a continual wrinkle in the bridge of her nose, the forty-eight-year-old Tommy had started working for Eleanor when Franklin was governor of New York. She had married Frank Scheider, a teacher in the New York public schools, in 1921 and divorced him in 1939. She had no children. She had her own room in every Roosevelt house: a sitting room and bedroom in the White House, a bedroom in Eleanor’s Greenwich Village apartment, and a suite of rooms at Val-Kill, Eleanor’s cottage at Hyde Park.

  Born of “good old Vermont granite stock,” Tommy was smart and tough with a wry sense of humor. “When she walked,” a relative recalled, “she gave the impression of saying ‘You’d better get out of my way or else.’” Tommy was the person, Eleanor said in 1938, “who makes life possible for me.”

  During the past seven years in the White House, Eleanor and Tommy traveled more than 280,000 miles around the United States, the equivalent of nearly a hundred cross-country trips. Franklin called Eleanor his “will o’ the wisp” wife. But it was Franklin who had encouraged her to become his “eyes and ears,” to gather the grass-roots knowledge he needed to understand the people he governed. Unable to travel easily on his own because of his paralysis, he had started by teaching Eleanor how to inspect state institutions in 1929, during his first term as governor.

  “It was the best education I ever had,” she later said. Traveling across the state to inspect institutions for the insane, the blind, and the aged, visiting state prisons and reform schools, she had learned, slowly and painfully, through Franklin’s tough, detailed questions upon her return, how to become an investigative reporter.

  Her first inspection was an insane asylum. “All right,” Franklin told her, “go in and look around and let me know what’s going on there. Tell me how the inmates are being treated.” When Eleanor returned, she brought with her a printed copy of the day’s menu. “Did you look to see whether they were actually getting this food?” Franklin asked. “Did you lift a pot cover on the stove to check whether the contents corresponded with this menu?” Eleanor shook her head. Her untrained mind had taken in a general picture of the place but missed all the human details that would have brought it to life. “But these are what I need,” Franklin said. “I never remembered things until Franklin taught me,” Eleanor told a reporter. “His memory is really prodigious. Once he has checked something he never needs to look at it again.”

  “One time,” she recalled, “he asked me to go and look at the state’s tree shelter-belt plantings. I noticed there were five rows of graduated size . . . . When I came back and described it, Franklin said: ‘Tell me exactly what was in the first five rows. What did they plant first?’ And he was so desperately disappointed when I couldn’t tell him, that I put my best efforts after that into missing nothing and remembering everything.”

  In time, Eleanor became so thorough in her inspections, observing the attitudes of patients toward the staff, judging facial expressions as well as the words, looking in closets and behind doors, that Franklin set great value on her reports. “She saw many things the President could never see,” Labor Secretary Frances Perkins said. “Much of what she learned and what she understood about the life of the people of this country rubbed off onto FDR. It could not have helped to do so because she had a poignant understanding . . . . Her mere reporting of the facts was full of a sensitive quality that could never be escaped . . . . Much of his seemingly intuitive understanding—about labor situations . . . about girls who worked in sweatshops—came from his recollections of what she had told him.”

  During Eleanor’s first summer as first lady, Franklin
had asked her to investigate the economic situation in Appalachia. The Quakers had reported terrible conditions of poverty there, and the president wanted to check these reports. “Watch the people’s faces,” he told her. “Look at the conditions of the clothes on the wash lines. You can tell a lot from that.” Going even further, Eleanor descended the mine shafts, dressed in a miner’s outfit, to absorb for herself the physical conditions in which the miners worked. It was this journey that later provoked the celebrated cartoon showing two miners in a shaft looking up: “Here Comes Mrs. Roosevelt!”

  At Scott’s Run, near Morgantown, West Virginia, Eleanor had seen children who “did not know what it was to sit down at a table and eat a proper meal.” In one shack, she found a boy clutching his pet rabbit, which his sister had just told him was all there was left to eat. So moved was the president by his wife’s report that he acted at once to create an Appalachian resettlement project.

  The following year, Franklin had sent Eleanor to Puerto Rico to investigate reports that a great portion of the fancy embroidered linens that were coming into the United States from Puerto Rico were being made under terrible conditions. To the fury of the rich American colony in San Juan, Eleanor took reporters and photographers through muddy alleys and swamps to hundreds of foul-smelling hovels with no plumbing and no electricity, where women sat in the midst of filth embroidering cloth for minimal wages. Publicizing these findings, Eleanor called for American women to stop purchasing Puerto Rico’s embroidered goods.

  Later, Eleanor journeyed to the deep South and the “Dustbowl.” Before long, her inspection trips had become as important to her as to her husband. “I realized,” she said in a radio interview, “that if I remained in the White House all the time I would lose touch with the rest of the world . . . . I might have had a less crowded life, but I would begin to think that my life in Washington was representative of the rest of the country and that is a dangerous point of view.” So much did Eleanor travel, in fact, that the Washington Star once printed a humorous headline: “Mrs. Roosevelt Spends Night at White House.”