No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Read online

  But popular success was not matched at the administrative level. In the midst of the drive, Undersecretary of War Patterson discovered to his horror that some quartermaster had ordered dozens of aluminum chairs and brass cuspidors. “He laughed over this,” David Lilienthal recorded in his diary, “saying that if you didn’t take it as a joke, it would be awful.” Worse still, the authorities eventually determined that, though scrap could be remelted for peacetime purposes, only virgin aluminum could be used in the making of planes. Nonetheless, what Roosevelt had stirred up with the great aluminumscrap drive was nothing less than an exhibition of the dormant energies of a patriotic democracy.

  • • •

  By the middle of the summer, heartened by the reports Hopkins had cabled from Moscow, the president was fully committed to sending Russia everything she needed as quickly as possible. “I am sick and tired of hearing that they are going to get this and they are going to get that,” he told his Cabinet during a forty-five-minute outburst on Friday afternoon, August 1; “the only answer I want to hear is that it is under way.”

  The president directed his fire mainly at Stimson, who looked “thoroughly miserable,” Morgenthau observed. It was, Ickes wrote, “one of the most complete dressings down that I have witnessed.” The Russian war had been going on for six weeks, Roosevelt pointed out, and, despite our initial promises, we had done nothing for them. He believed that the War Department and the State Department were giving the Russians a runaround. “Get the planes off with a bang next week,” Roosevelt insisted, specifying that 150 pursuit planes be sent along with a smaller number of four-engine bombers. “I want to do all of this at once,” he declared, “in order to help their morale.”

  Stimson thought the attack “highly unfair,” arguing that the delay was “due largely to the uncorrelated organization which the President had set up.” He had never seen a list of Russian wants, nor had the War Department. The slip-up was not the fault of the War Department, he countered, but of Harry Hopkins’ organization. With Hopkins away, there was no one with authority to cover sales to other countries. Furthermore, Stimson insisted, even if the administrative snafus were straightened out, the United States simply did not have the equipment to supply both Britain and Russia. “All of these other people are just hellbent to satisfy a passing impulse or emotion,” Stimson remarked in his diary, “and they have no responsibility over whether or not our own army and our own forces are going to be left unarmed or not.”

  General Marshall heartily agreed with this sentiment. “In the first place,” Marshall wrote Stimson, “our entire Air Corps is suffering from a severe shortage . . . . If any criticism is to be made in this matter, in my opinion it is that we have been too generous to our own disadvantage and I seriously question the advisability of our action in releasing the P-40s at this particular time.”

  But the president refused to back down, saying that “we must get ’em, even if it was necessary to take them from the troops.” He was really in a “hoity-toity humor,” Stimson wrote, “and wouldn’t listen to argument.” Ickes was delighted: for the first time in months, he observed, the president seemed tough, alert, and “very much on the ball,” finally recognizing that “this was a time to take some risks.” Ickes’ own view of the Russian aid situation was that “we ought to come pretty close to stripping ourselves, if necessary, to supply England and Russia, because if these two countries between them can defeat Hitler, we will save immeasurably in men and money.”

  As soon as the Cabinet meeting was over, the president designated Wayne Coy, whom he considered one of his best administrators, to take charge of Russian orders. “We have done practically nothing to get any of the materials they asked for on their actual way to delivery in Siberia,” Roosevelt wrote Coy the next morning. “Please get the list and please with my full authority, use a heavy hand—act as a burr under the saddle and get things moving!”

  Even with the president’s order, it was not easy to get things moving. “Our own Army and Navy were impoverished,” Coy later explained. “Congress and the American press were demanding more supplies for the Army then in training.” It was only “little by little,” Coy wrote, that “there came to be an understanding that Russia’s ability to hold off the German hordes gave us greater time to train and equip an Army and Navy and build up military production. As that opinion grew, the Russian supply program grew.”

  With the signing of the first Moscow protocol in the fall, the U.S. committed itself to a long list of supplies, including trucks, tanks, submachine guns, fighter planes, light bombers, enough food to keep the Russian soldiers from starving, and enough cotton, blankets, shoes, and boots to clothe and bed the entire Russian army. A few weeks later, the president formally declared the defense of the Soviet Union vital to the United States, bringing Russia under lend-lease. A massive aid program, second in size only to the British, was finally under way.

  • • •

  On August 3, Roosevelt left Washington, supposedly for a midsummer fishing trip in the waters of Cape Cod. “My husband, after many mysterious consultations,” Eleanor recalled, “told me that he was going to take a little trip up through the Cape Cod Canal . . . . Then he smiled and I knew he was not telling me all that he was going to do.”

  “There was nothing about the start of the trip to make us think that it was other than the usual thing,” Dr. McIntire recalled. The party consisted only of Pa Watson, naval aide Captain John Beardall, and McIntire—“all tried and true fishermen.” To be sure, McIntire noted that Roosevelt seemed particularly excited, but the doctor attributed his lightened mood “to the lift that a vacation at sea always gave him.”

  “I hope to be gone ten days,” Roosevelt wrote his mother in Campobello. “The heat in Washington has been fairly steady and I long to sleep under a blanket for the first time since May. But I am feeling really well and the progress of the war is more conducive to my peace of mind—in spite of the deceits and wiles of the Japs. Do take care of yourself and you will read shortly daily reports from the Potomac.”

  Before he left, the president made plans to join Princess Martha for a sail in Buzzards Bay, along the coast of Massachusetts, where she was vacationing with her children for the month of August. “I hope this map will be sufficient for you to find us on the cross marked,” the princess wrote the president. “It is the second small pier on the right hand side when entering the bay. It belongs to the New Bedford Yacht Club which is a square house with a bright green roof. I am very much looking forward to your visit.”

  On the morning of the 4th, a clear and sunny day, the president’s yacht found the spot, picking up Princess Martha and her brother Prince Carl of Sweden. Nearly twelve months had passed since Martha’s arrival in the U.S., and in that time Roosevelt had seen more of this good-natured, pretty woman than of any other person beyond his immediate White House circle. The little party fished, ate lunch on the dock, and fished some more. People sailing small boats that day swore they had seen the president of the United States at the edge of the yacht, dressed in a sport shirt and slacks. “They came back and told their friends,” Frances Perkins recalled. “People said they were absolutely crazy and they had dreamed something.” At the end of the relaxing day, the Potomac headed back to South Dartmouth. As the yacht neared the harbor, the president loaded his royal guests onto a speedboat and personally escorted them to the dock. Then, under a bright moon, the Potomac sailed to Martha’s Vineyard.

  The real adventure began as the Potomac came upon a flotilla of American warships—including the heavy cruiser the U.S.S. Augusta and five destroyers. On the decks of the Augusta were all the principal officers of the U.S. Armed Forces—General George Marshall; Admiral Harold Stark; General Henry Arnold, commander of the U.S. Army Air Force; and Admiral Ernest King, commander-in-chief of naval forces. Transferring to the Augusta, the president prepared to begin a secret journey through treacherous seas to a conference off the coast of Newfoundland with Winston Churchill.


  On the other side of the Atlantic, Churchill was readying himself for his part of the historic voyage on board a new British battleship, the Prince of Wales. On the morning of his departure, Churchill’s aide-de-camp found him as excited as a schoolboy. “Churchill probably never had shown so much exuberance and excitement since Harrow,” Commander W. H. Thompson wrote. “He bumped over the grass of his country place like a balloon dragged by a hurrying child. He was all smiles and mystic gestures, quick lurches of the head, whispers.” Three times that morning, Churchill asked Thompson when they were due to depart, and when the appointed hour finally arrived, he jumped into the waiting car and “flashed his most bewitching smile.”

  “We are just off,” Churchill cabled Roosevelt as the Prince of Wales put out to sea. “It is 27 years ago today that the Huns began their last war. We must make good job of it this time. Twice ought to be enough. Look forward so much to our meeting.”

  Harry Hopkins had flown thirty hours in rough weather from Moscow to the airfield at Archangel, on the White Sea, to the British airbase at Scapa Flow, Scotland, so that he could meet up with the Prince of Wales and journey with Churchill to the Atlantic Conference. In the middle of his flight, he realized he had left his satchel of life-sustaining medicines in Moscow, but he refused to turn back, knowing that if he did he would miss his connections with Churchill. Without his daily injections, he became desperately ill. By the time he arrived aboard the Prince of Wales, he seemed, Robert Sherwood has written, “at the end of the last filament of the spider’s web by which he was hanging on to life.” But after eighteen hours of sleep and emergency transfusions, he miraculously revived. In the mornings, he worked on his Russian report; in the afternoons, he sat with Churchill on the deck talking; in the evenings, he and Churchill spent hours playing backgammon for a shilling a game.

  Through the entire seven-day trip, Churchill was irrepressibly cheerful. He sang merrily, walked informally about the ship, and for the first time in months read books for pleasure. He was about to meet the legendary president of the United States, and he could no longer contain his excitement. “You’d have thought Winston was being carried up to the heavens to meet God!” Hopkins later said. In his conversations with Hopkins, Churchill struggled to find out what kind of man Roosevelt was underneath. What did the New Deal really mean to him? What did he really think of Germany? Across the Atlantic, Roosevelt was asking Frances Perkins, who had known Churchill as a young man before World War I, a similar set of questions. What kind of fellow was he? Would he keep his word? Was he angry at anybody? Did anger becloud his judgment at times?

  Hopkins understood how important it was for the future of both Britain and the U.S. that these two men get along. Knowing both personalities, he could see that they had much in common. They had both learned through long experience, one reporter wrote, that “the longest way around is sometimes the shortest way home. Both had a gift for rhetoric, an instinct for the telling phrase. They were both students of politics and history.” But there were differences—Roosevelt, Hopkins believed, was more of an idealist in international affairs; Churchill was still an old-style imperialist. Roosevelt was almost always charming, enjoying gossip and small talk, whereas Churchill tended to be gruff, wasting little time on pleasantries. On the other hand, Churchill was more forthright and open with people than Roosevelt. Hopkins’ main concern was that both men, accustomed to being the focus of attention, would continually try to take center stage. He feared their formidable egos would clash. “I suppose you could say,” he told CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow when he first arrived in London to meet Churchill, “that I’ve come here to try to find a way to be a catalytic agent between two prima donnas.” But Hopkins’ worries would soon be put to rest. From the moment the two men met, it was clear that they were destined to be not only allies in a common cause but special friends.

  On Saturday morning, August 9, the Prince of Wales, with her flags flying and her band playing the Sousa march “Stars and Stripes Forever,” came within sight of the Augusta. “Around us were numerous units big and small from the U.S. Navy,” Churchill’s aide-de-camp Lieutenant Thompson recalled. “How hungrily Winston Churchill looked over their firepower. How we needed it!” With the naked eye, the figure of Franklin Delano Roosevelt could be discerned standing on the upper deck, supported by his son Elliott. As Churchill boarded the Augusta, the crowd stirred and the navy band struck up “God Save the King.” Roosevelt remained still for several instants. Then a smile began to run over his face like a rippling wave and his whole expression turned into one of radiant warmth. “I have never seen such a smile,” Thompson said. “At last, we’ve gotten together,” Roosevelt said, with that gay and brotherly cordiality which could not help charming the prime minister. “Yes,” Churchill nodded, with an equally agreeable elegance of intonation. “We have.”

  The opening discussion centered on what to do about Japan’s increasingly aggressive stance in the Pacific. For more than a year, Roosevelt had been trying to avoid a showdown with Japan, whose expansionist policies under Premier Fumimaro Konoye threatened American interests in the Pacific. To the president’s mind, a détente with Japan was essential to gain the time he needed to train the armed forces and mobilize the factories to accomplish the real end of American foreign policy—the destruction of the Hitler menace. Roosevelt believed an early war with Japan would mean “the wrong war in the wrong ocean at the wrong time.”

  In recent months, an intense struggle had broken out within the Cabinet. Stimson, Morgenthau, and Ickes were convinced that stronger measures—including a total embargo on oil shipments—were required, while Hull insisted that stopping oil would inevitably lead to war. In June, the debate over the oil embargo had assumed political significance at home when Ickes, in his capacity as fuel administrator, was forced to ration oil in New England. “It’s marvelous,” Morgenthau taunted the president, describing a cartoon just published in the Washington Star. “It’s got you leaning up against the gas tanks saying sorry, no gas today and . . . it’s got a car driving up with a Japanese as a chauffeur and Hull filling the gas tank . . . and Sumner Welles saying, any oil, sir, today?”

  Despite the urgings of Morgenthau and Ickes, the president continued to hold out against imposing an embargo, fearing it would simply drive Japan to the Dutch East Indies and that would mean war in the Pacific. “It is terribly important for the control of the Atlantic,” Roosevelt told Ickes on the first of July, “for us to help keep peace in the Pacific. I simply have not got enough Navy to go around—and every little episode in the Pacific means fewer ships in the Atlantic.”

  “The Japanese are having a real drag-down and knock-out fight among themselves,” Roosevelt further explained, “and have been for the past week—trying to decide which way they are going to jump—attack Russia, attack the South Seas (thus throwing in their lot definitely with Germany) or whether they will sit on the fence and be more friendly with us. No one knows what their decision will be.”

  But in mid-July, when forty thousand Japanese troops invaded rubber-rich Indochina and quickly took over the country, the president finally agreed to take retaliatory action. He froze all Japanese assets in the U.S., notified Japan that the Panama Canal would be closed for repairs, and announced that he was cutting off all high-octane, gasoline. Whereas Stimson and Ickes believed that all gasoline—not just high-octane, suitable for airplanes—should be embargoed, Roosevelt preferred to move one step at a time, “to slip the noose around Japan’s neck, and give it a jerk now and then.”

  Churchill was ready at the Atlantic Conference to take a tough line against Japan. He pleaded with Roosevelt to sign a joint declaration warning Japan that any future encroachment in the South Pacific would produce a situation in which the U.S. and Great Britain “would be compelled to take counter measures even though this might lead to war.” Roosevelt seriously considered Churchill’s proposal, but in the end he settled on a softer, unilateral message, fearing that the stron
g language of the joint declaration would guarantee war.

  Turning to the other side of the world, the two leaders forged a concrete arrangement which finally committed American envoys to escort both British and American ships as far as Iceland. Though Churchill had hoped for more dramatic evidence of American support, he came away convinced that Roosevelt “would wage war, but not declare it and that he would become more and more provocative” in the Atlantic, including forcing an incident at sea with Germany.

  But the Atlantic Conference would be remembered by posterity not so much for the strategic commitments that were made as for the Atlantic Charter, a stirring declaration of principles for the world peace to follow “the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny.” For some time, Roosevelt had been anxious to lay down a set of broad principles which would guide Allied policy during and after the war. Churchill readily agreed to the idea, eager for any means to identify the policies of the United States and Great Britain. The resulting declaration pledged the two countries to seek no territorial aggrandizement, pursue no territorial changes which did not accord with the wishes of the people concerned, respect the rights of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they would live, commit themselves to free trade, and work for both disarmament and a permanent system of general security.