No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Read online

  Moreover, “without allowing too much danger to ourselves,” is the important phrase in the president’s conversation with Stimson. Common sense suggests that, if the president had known beforehand about Pearl Harbor, he would have done everything he could to reposition the fleet and disperse the airplanes to ensure minimal damage. For the purposes of mobilizing the American people, one American ship torpedoed by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor would have sufficed. It is inconceivable that Roosevelt, who loved the navy with a passion, would have intentionally sacrificed the heart of its fleet, much less the lives of thirty-five hundred American sailors and soldiers, without lifting a finger to reduce the risk. It is an inquiry that obscures the more important question that Senator Connally posed: “How did it happen that our warships were caught like tame ducks in Pearl Harbor?”

  It happened because the U.S. forces at Pearl Harbor were fatally unprepared for war on the morning of December 7. “Neither Army or Navy Commandants in Oahu regarded such an attack as at all likely,” Secretary Knox explained to Roosevelt. “Both [General Walter Short and Admiral Husband Kimmel] felt certain that such an attack would take place nearer Japan’s base of operations, that is, in the Far East.” Lack of readiness characterized every aspect of the base—from the unmanned aircraft batteries to the radar station whose sentries went off duty at 7 a.m. that morning.

  A great military base, historian William Emerson explains, takes years of planning and coordination. “The anti-aircraft artillery must be tied into the central command post. The ground observer corps must fill in where the radar system leaves off. People must react to each other with the speed of Las Vegas croupiers.” None of this had yet come together at Pearl Harbor, which had been only a minor naval base until the early summer of 1940, when the decision was made to base the fleet there. “We are operating on a shoestring,” Rear Admiral Patrick Bellinger had warned in January 1941, with great deficiencies in planes, equipment, materiel, personnel, and facilities. It was estimated that one effective patrol through 360 degrees, at a distance of eight hundred miles, with necessary relief in planes and pilots, required at least 180 reconnaissance planes. Nowhere near this number was available at Pearl Harbor, nor was there manpower to operate them. Nor, once the attack came, was there adequate anti-aircraft artillery or an adequate number of fighter planes.

  But this was not the time for recriminations. “The damage was done,” Dr. McIntire said, “and the thing to do was to repair it.” Not the least of Roosevelt’s strength as a leader was his ability to close his mind against the setbacks of the past and focus instead on making plans. Relief came in action: in perusing troop dispositions with General Marshall, in getting Stimson and Knox to mount guards around defense plants, in placing the Japanese Embassy under surveillance, in putting the final touches on his speech to the Congress.

  At a little past 10 p.m., in the middle of the president’s meeting with Cabinet and congressional leaders, Missy telephoned from Warm Springs. She wanted to talk with the president. Grace Tully took the call, heard the distress in Missy’s voice as her old friend struggled desperately to make herself intelligible. But there was no way Grace could interrupt the president to ask him to speak with Missy. Instead, she typed out a message. “Missy telephoned and wanted to talk with you. She is thinking about you and much disturbed about the news. She would like you to call her tonight. I told her you would if the conference broke up at a reasonable hour—otherwise you would call her in the morning.”

  Toward midnight, the meeting in the president’s study drew to a close; and while every face wore an expression of regret and reproach, there was also relief. For Stimson, it was in the knowledge “that the indecision was over and that a crisis had come in a way which would unite our people.” No matter how great the damage, at least, the matter was settled. “You know,” Frank Knox whispered to Frances Perkins, “I think the boss must have a great load off his mind. I thought the load on his mind was just going to kill him, going to break him down. This must be a great sense of relief to him. At least we know what to do now.”

  • • •

  “Monday was almost worse than Sunday,” Marquis Childs observed. “A merciful kind of shock prevailed under the first impact and now as that wore off, the truth was inescapable.” In Washington, the rumors of damage “hovered like a low-hanging gas, spreading the panic that seemed to infect the capital.” On the same day as Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had attacked the Philippines, Malaya, Wake Island, Guam, and Hong Kong.

  At noon, under heavy security, the president motored from the East Gate of the White House to the Capitol, where, to deafening applause, he delivered a brief but powerful speech. From his first words, commemorating the day that would “live in infamy,” to his call upon Congress to declare that, since “the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7th, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire,” the president’s anger and indignation burned through. His head held high, his chin thrust out, Roosevelt roused his audience to a standing ovation when he pledged that “this form of treachery shall never endanger us again. The American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.” The Congress responded unambiguously to the president’s call; both chambers approved a declaration of war, with only one dissenting vote—that of white-haired Representative Jeanette Rankin of Montana.

  Isolationism collapsed overnight. “American soil has been treacherously attacked by Japan,” former President Herbert Hoover stated. “Our decision is clear. It is forced upon us. We must fight with everything we have.” Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, who had struggled long and hard against American involvement in the war, phoned the White House to tell the president that “he would support him without reservation.” Even Representative Hamilton Fish of New York, one of Roosevelt’s severest critics, urged the American people “to present a united front in support of the President.” After months of vacillation, confusion, and hesitation, the United States was committed at last to a common course of action.

  Amid the surge of patriotism that suddenly enveloped the country, union leaders hastily agreed that there would be “no strikes or lockouts” for the duration of the war. All disputes would be peacefully settled by a new War Labor Board, to be created by the president. “Labor’s response to the Axis attack has been splendid and spontaneous,” Sidney Hillman reported to the president five days after Pearl Harbor. After a series of conferences with representatives of the CIO and the AFL, Hillman was able to promise Roosevelt “that the outlook for constructive participation by labor in the victory effort is good.”

  Eleanor had accompanied her husband to the Capitol when he made his speech, but as soon as he was finished, she rushed back to the White House to prepare for an overnight trip to the West Coast. Amid reports that Los Angeles and San Francisco might soon be attacked, she and Fiorello LaGuardia felt the need to strengthen civilian-defense organization and morale. At present, the OCD had a total of 950,000 people enrolled as air-raid wardens, fire-fighting auxiliaries, and medical corpsmen. Now the time had come to assign specific people to specific posts in order to translate plans into action. “Hell, this isn’t a pinochle party we’re having,” LaGuardia said, “It’s war.”

  En route to Los Angeles, the pilot brought Eleanor a wire report that San Francisco was being bombed by the Japanese. When she awakened LaGuardia to tell him the news, he put his head out of the curtains, “looking for all the world like a Kewpie,” Eleanor recalled. If the report was true, he said, “we will go direct to San Francisco.” The mayor’s instantaneous response was so characteristic of him that Eleanor “glowed inwardly.” When the report proved erroneous, the mayor and the first lady proceeded as planned to Los Angeles. There they met with the governor of California, the mayor of the city, and the State Counsel of Defense. “I am not here to give you any message,” Eleanor said. “I am here to get down to work. I came here to find out from you what are the most helpful things we i
n Washington can do to help you. Tell me what you found lacking and what you want.”

  As Eleanor traveled up and down the coast, she bore witness to the growing hysteria directed against aliens and citizens of Japanese descent. Within two hours of Pearl Harbor, FBI agents had begun taking key Japanese leaders into custody. California is “a zone of danger,” the LA Times proclaimed the day after the attack. It is the duty of alert citizens “to cooperate with the military authorities against spies, saboteurs and 5th columnists.” As the panic spread, government officials swooped down upon Japanese banks, department stores, produce houses, and newspapers, locking their doors with giant padlocks. Houses where aliens lived were searched for pictures or documents that might suggest loyalty to the emperor of Japan; drawers and closets were rummaged for anything that might conceivably be used as a weapon. In the process, thousands of radios and cameras were confiscated.

  “Rumors were everywhere,” recalled Jiro Ishihara, a young Japanese American who was in high school in East Los Angeles at the time. “We’d hear that the person down the street had been picked up for having feudal dolls and that a neighbor had been taken away for having Japanese recordings. So my father burned everything that had the slightest connection to Japan. When you contributed to the Japanese relief fund, you got these magnificent certificates, but they had the imperial seal on them, so we threw them into the fire along with everything else. The hardest problem was a small sword my father had been given when he first came to the States by an old swordmaster in his family. That sword meant a lot to him, so we asked a Jewish friend of ours to hold it for us. It was a terrible time.”

  Swimming against the rising tide of prejudice and fear, Eleanor had her picture taken with a group of American-born Japanese in Tacoma, Washington. In the statement that accompanied the picture, she warned of unwarranted suspicions against loyal citizens. “Let’s be honest,” she said. “There is a chance now for great hysteria against minority groups—loyal American born Japanese and Germans. If we treat them unfairly and make them unhappy we may shake their loyalty which should be built up. If you see something suspicious, report it to the right authorities, but don’t try to be the FBI yourself.”

  “We know,” Eleanor wrote in her column, “there are German and Italian agents, Japanese as well, who are here to be helpful to their own nations. But the great mass of people, stemming from these various national ties, must not feel they have suddenly ceased to be Americans.”

  Eleanor’s call for tolerance antagonized many Californians. “When she starts bemoaning the plight of the treacherous snakes we call Japanese, with apologies to all snakes,” the Los Angeles Times proclaimed, “she has reached the point where she should be forced to retire from public life.” Undeterred, she continued to speak out: “I think almost the biggest obligation we have today is to prove that in a time of stress we can still live up to our beliefs and maintain the civil liberties we have established as the rights of human beings everywhere.”

  While Eleanor was on the West Coast, Franklin delivered a fireside chat in which he outlined a program for doubling and quadrupling war production by increasing working hours, establishing factories, and using more available materials for war production. Later that night, Sam Rosenman stopped by to see if the president was still up. As he entered the oval study, he found Roosevelt sitting at his desk, at work on his stamps, smoking a cigarette. “He was all alone,” Rosenman remarked. “If Missy had been well she would have been sitting up with him in the study that night. She always did in times of great stress to see whether there was anyone he wanted to call or talk to . . . . The President looked up as I came in and smiled . . . a sad and tired smile.”

  To be sure, Princess Martha was still available for pleasant companionship—she had dinner with the president two of the six nights Eleanor was on the West Coast—but in moments of crisis like this, calling for work round the clock, there was no substitute for the devoted love and loyalty of Missy LeHand.

  • • •

  In the days that followed Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt found himself in an awkward situation. He had been telling his countrymen for more than a year that Hitler’s Germany was the real enemy. He had expected that Germany would join Japan in declaring war against the United States. But time was passing and still nothing was heard from Berlin. “Was it possible,” political scientist James MacGregor Burns has written, “after all Washington’s elaborate efforts to fight first in Europe, with only a holding action in the Pacific, that the United States would be left with only a war in the Far East?”

  The answer came on December 11, when Adolf Hitler, who viewed America as a decadent democracy incapable of making a sustained commitment to war, delivered a vitriolic speech against Roosevelt and declared war against the United States. “A world-wide distance separates Roosevelt’s ideas and my ideas,” he began. “Roosevelt comes from a rich family and belongs to the class whose path is smoothed in the democracies. I was only the child of a small, poor family and had to fight my way by work and industry.” Whereas National Socialism had led to an unprecedented economic revival in Germany, Hitler claimed, Roosevelt’s New Deal had not succeeded in bringing about even the slightest improvement. “This is not surprising if one bears in mind that the men he had called to support him, or rather, the men who had called him, belonged to the Jewish element, whose interests are all for disintegration and never for order.” And then, Hitler contended, Roosevelt had provoked war in order to cover up the failures of his New Deal. “This man alone,” he thundered, “was responsible for the Second World War,” and under the circumstances, Germany “considers herself to be at war with the United States, as from today.”

  The next day, in response to a written request from the president, the United States Congress unanimously recognized that “a state of war exists between the United States, Germany and Italy.”

  • • •

  When Eleanor returned to Washington on December 15, the capital had moved to a wartime footing. “It seems like a completely changed world,” she noted sadly. Previously, casual visitors had been allowed to stroll around the White House grounds during the day. But now sentry boxes, staffed with Secret Service and White House guards, were set up at all the external gates. Only those with official appointments were allowed inside, and only after careful scrutiny. “No more Congressional constituents,” Lorena Hickok remarked, “no more government clerks hurrying through the grounds . . . no more Sunday tourists feeding the squirrels, taking snapshots and hanging around the portico hoping someone interesting would come out.”

  Eleanor chafed at the new restrictions; she particularly disliked the long blackout curtains, “gloomy in winter and hot in the summer,” that had been fitted on all the windows. Fires were no longer allowed in the fireplaces, Hick noted wistfully. It was feared that smoke rising from the chimneys would attract enemy bombers. “The house was chill and silent, as though it had died. Even Fala did not bark.”

  The week after Pearl Harbor, the Secret Service presented the president with a long report of recommended changes to improve White House security. It proposed covering the skylights with sand and tin, camouflaging the house, painting the colonnade windows black, setting up machine-gun emplacements on the roof, and building an air-raid shelter in a subbasement area of the new East Wing. The president rejected most of the suggestions, “with not a little annoyance,” though he finally agreed to the construction of a temporary shelter in the Treasury Department, which would be accessed by a tunnel that would run under the street from the White House to the Treasury.

  Secret Service agent Milton Lipson recalls sleeping in the shelter at night with a group of fellow agents as they practiced dry runs in the event of a bombing raid. “One of the Secret Service men would sit in a wheelchair, and then we would use our stopwatches to see how long it would take to get the president from the White House to the shelter. We got it down to under a minute.” When Morgenthau tried to get the president to visit the shelter, Roosevelt
told the Treasury secretary, “Henry, I will not go down into the shelter unless you allow me to play poker with all the gold in your vaults.”

  Though Eleanor understood the need for protection against a bombing attack, she insisted that the doors of the White House remain open to the American people. “Mrs. Roosevelt is very much annoyed today with Secret Service and indirectly with Morgenthau,” Tommy wrote Esther Lape on December 16, “because they insisted she could not have 350 foreign students in the White House for tea. Also because civilian defense counsel here does not want to have the usual lighted community Xmas tree across the street in Lafayette Park because it is so close to White House. In exasperation, Mrs. Roosevelt asked if they were going to take down the Washington monument because an enemy could measure the distance between it and the White House.”

  CHAPTER 12

  “TWO LITTLE BOYS PLAYING SOLDIER”

  About 9 a.m. on Monday, December 22, the president’s chief butler, Alonzo Fields, was summoned to the president’s bedroom. As he reached the door he heard a heated argument. “You should have told me,” Eleanor was saying. “Why didn’t you tell me? I can’t find Mrs. Nesbitt anywhere. If only I had known.” At this juncture, the president noticed Fields standing at the door. “Now, Eleanor, all that little woman would do even if she were here is to tell Fields what we can tell him ourselves right now. Fields, at eight tonight we have to have dinner ready for twenty. Mr. Churchill and his party are coming to stay with us for a few days.”

  “It had not occurred to him,” Eleanor bluntly observed in her column, unaccountably venting her anger before the entire country, “that this might require certain moving of furniture to adapt rooms to the purposes for which the Prime Minister wished to use them. Before all the orders were finally given, it was 10 a.m. and I was half an hour late for my press conference.”