Part 3 (1/2)
Like Churchill, Roosevelt sensed the making of a memorable chapter in history. In his speech accepting the Democratic nomination on July 19, 1940, Roosevelt said: In times like these-in times of great tension, of great crisis-the compa.s.s of the world narrows to a single fact. The fact which dominates our world is the fact of armed aggression, the fact of successful armed aggression, aimed at the form of Government, the kind of society that we in the United States have chosen and established for ourselves. It is a fact which no one longer doubts-which no one is longer able to ignore.
It is not an ordinary war. It is a revolution imposed by force of arms, which threatens all men everywhere. It is a revolution which proposes not to set men free but to reduce them to slavery-to reduce them to slavery in the interest of a dictators.h.i.+p which has already shown the nature and the extent of the advantage which it hopes to obtain.
That is the fact which dominates our world and which dominates the lives of all of us, each and every one of us. In the face of the danger which confronts our time, no individual retains or can hope to retain, the right of personal choice which free men enjoy in times of peace. He has a first obligation to serve in the defense of our inst.i.tutions of freedom-a first obligation to serve his country in whatever capacity his country finds him useful.
Like most men of my age, I had made plans for myself, plans for a private life of my own choice and for my own satisfaction, a life of that kind to begin in January, 1941. These plans, like so many other plans, had been made in a world which now seems as distant as another planet. Today all private plans, all private lives, have been in a sense repealed by an overriding public danger. In the face of that public danger all those who can be of service to the Republic have no choice but to offer themselves for service in those capacities for which they may be fitted.
Those, my friends, are the reasons why I have had to admit to myself, and now to state to you, that my conscience will not let me turn my back upon a call to service.
He and Churchill both thought in grand terms. ”I think the greatest drive in Franklin's objectives in life was that he wanted to be remembered in history because he had an historical sense and he saw whatever he did in the framework of history,” Eleanor said. Marquis Childs mused that Roosevelt had mastered the complexities of America's rise to world power with a kind of ”feminine intuition,” and now his intuition told him the country was ready to move toward engagement.
SIR WILLIAM WISEMAN, a friend of Walter Lippmann's, returned to Was.h.i.+ngton from a visit to London in midsummer and told Lippmann: ”I think they'll resist. The morale is good. If they can see any light at the end of the tunnel, they'll resist. But if the tunnel is black all the way, no people can stand it, and only the Americans can provide that light.”
In the last week of July, Churchill wrote Roosevelt for the first time in eight weeks.
It is some time since I ventured to cable personally to you, and many things both good and bad have happened in between. It has now become most urgent for you to give us the destroyers, motor-boats and flying-boats for which we have asked. The Germans have the whole French coastline from which to launch U-boats and dive-bomber attacks upon our trade and food, and in addition we must be constantly prepared to repel by sea action threatened invasion in the narrow waters. . . .
Latterly the Air attack on our s.h.i.+pping has become injurious. In the last ten days we have had the following destroyers sunk: Brazen, Codrington, Delight, Wren, and the following damaged: Beagle, Boreas, Brilliant, Griffin, Montrose, Walpole, total ten. All this in the advent of any attempt which may be made at invasion. Destroyers are frightfully vulnerable to Air bombing, and yet they must be held in the Air bombing area to prevent sea-borne invasion. We could not keep up the present rate of casualties for long, and if we cannot get a substantial reinforcement, the whole fate of the war may be decided by this minor and easily remediable factor. I cannot understand why, with the position as it is, you do not send me at least 50 or 60 of your oldest destroyers.
Then he laid it on the line. ”Mr President,” Churchill said, ”with great respect I must tell you that in the long history of the world this is a thing to do now.”
Like Churchill, Roosevelt was a student of the writings of Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan. Mahan argued that control of the seas was essential to a nation's capacity to project power-a lesson the British knew well, since the might of the Royal Navy had been a fundamental element in building their empire. Now Roosevelt wanted mastery of the sea, and British naval bases were key to controlling the Atlantic.
The United States would send the destroyers over in exchange for a promise that the Royal Navy would dispatch the fleet to North America if the Germans overran England and for ninety-nine-year leases for air and naval rights in the British West Indies, Newfoundland, and Bermuda. When Lippmann told Wiseman about the destroyer deal, Wiseman replied: ”Well, that'll do it. It will give [them] something to go on with.”
Churchill knew he was not getting the best of deals. ”The President, having always to consider Congress and also the Navy authorities in the United States, was of course increasingly drawn to present the transaction to his fellow-countrymen as a highly advantageous bargain whereby immense securities were gained in these dangerous times by the United States in return for a few flotillas of obsolete destroyers,” Churchill later wrote. ”This was indeed true; but not exactly a convenient statement for me.”
Churchill had no choice. ”We intend to fight this out here to the end, and none of us would ever buy peace by surrendering or scuttling the fleet,” he wrote Roosevelt on August 15. Then, with apparent resentment, he added: ”But in any use you may make of this repeated a.s.surance you will please bear in mind the disastrous effect from our point of view, and perhaps also from yours, of allowing any impression to grow that we regard the conquest of the British Islands and its naval bases as any other than an impossible contingency. The spirit of our people is splendid.”
THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT was not quite in tune with the mood Churchill had created in England. Roosevelt was thinking of darkness. Led by Churchill, the British were living in the light. Common dangers bind people together, if only for a short while. ”Oddly enough, most of us were very happy in those days,” wrote C. P. Snow of that English summer. ”There was a kind of collective euphoria over the whole country. I don't know what we were thinking about. We were very busy. We had a purpose. We were living in constant excitement, usually, if we examined the true position, of an unpromising kind. In one's realistic moments, it was difficult to see what chance we had. But I doubt if most of us had many realistic moments, or thought much at all. We were working like mad. We were sustained by a surge of national emotion, of which Churchill was both symbol and essence, evocator and voice.”
The practical politician in Roosevelt did not care how evocative Churchill was. He wanted the base leases to give himself domestic cover for sending the destroyers over. If America appeared to be getting the better end of the bargain, then Roosevelt could argue he was being shrewd, not sentimental-or stupid, since the war picture was still discouraging for the British. Confronted with a hostile Congress, Roosevelt took executive action and put the deal into effect-a brave political gamble so close to the November elections.
It was not exactly an even trade, and Churchill only grudgingly gave Roosevelt the a.s.surance the president wanted. ”You ask, Mr President, whether my statement in Parliament on June 4th, 1940, about Great Britain never surrendering or scuttling her Fleet 'represents the settled policy of His Majesty's Government,' ” Churchill wrote Roosevelt on the last day of August. ”It certainly does. I must, however, observe that these hypothetical contingencies seem more likely to concern the German Fleet or what is left of it than our own.”
Churchill was doing what he often did with an uncomfortable reality: He was recasting it in more attractive terms. ”Thus all was happily settled,” he later wrote. Churchill had, he recalled, tried ”to place the transaction on the highest level, where indeed it had a right to stand, because it expressed and conserved the enduring common interests of the English-speaking world.” In his mind's eye Churchill saw the two nations ”somewhat mixed up together,” and he relished the image. ”Like the Mississippi,” he told the House of Commons in August, ”it just keeps rolling along. Let it roll. Let it roll on full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant, to broader lands and better days.”
A comforting prospect, but only a prospect: The destroyers were not there yet, and Churchill now had a more immediate problem. In these same August weeks, Hitler unleashed air attacks as a prelude to a possible September invasion-all while Roosevelt was driving a tough bargain for destroyers that would not appear for months (and even then would have maintenance problems).
WHILE CHURCHILL WAS negotiating with Roosevelt, the Luftwaffe attacked England on August 13; the Germans called it ”the Day of the Eagle.” The Battle of Britain was beginning. On August 16, Churchill and Lord Ismay went to the operations room of No. 11 Group, Fighter Command. ”There had been fighting throughout the afternoon; and at one moment every single squadron in the Group was engaged; there was nothing in reserve, and the map table showed new waves of attackers crossing the coast,” Ismay recalled. ”I felt sick with fear.” At the end of the day the British fought well. Leaving for Chequers, Churchill said to Ismay: ”Don't speak to me; I have never been so moved.” Five minutes pa.s.sed, and the prime minister said: ”Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few”-a phrase he would repeat in an inspiring speech to the House and to the nation.
On August 23, the Luftwaffe bombed London; two days later Britain launched a counterstrike on Berlin. Then, on September 7, the Germans blitzed London, killing-in a single night-more than 300 people and injuring 1,337. The Luftwaffe would come day after day and night after night for eight months. Amid the terror, however, the British, bolstered by Churchill, refused to give in. ”How I wish you could see the women of England, particularly the older women-it is staggering-their courage and endurance,” Nancy Astor, the tart-tongued American woman who had married well, been elected to Parliament, and after a period of appeas.e.m.e.nt in the 1930s become an enthusiastic patriot during the war, wrote The Was.h.i.+ngton Post's Eugene Meyer. ”To see them, as I have, gazing at what was their home, now a heap of ashes, their neighbors dead, and sometimes their own families too, and yet they look at you with steadfast English eyes and say, 'Hitler won't beat us this way.' It makes you feel that war is not such a dreadful thing if it brings out this in people.”
On September 17, Hitler postponed SEA LION, his code name for a full-scale invasion of Britain. After subduing much of Western Europe, he had thought he could bring Britain into line, but he had not counted on Churchill and the British people standing so fast. Frustrated in the west, Hitler began to plan a strike against Stalin in the east. But in Britain, the Blitz wore on, killing in all more than forty thousand people-at least five thousand of them children.
It was a troubling season on many fronts. The Battle of the Atlantic had long been under way between American and British s.h.i.+ps and German U-boats. A vital factor from the first days of the war, the Atlantic lifeline was essential to keeping Britain armed and fed. Italy's declaration of war and ensuing battles for British and French possessions in Africa helped turn the Mediterranean into a critical war zone. For much of the rest of the war, the Axis and the Allies would fight along the top of the African continent. Arguably the largest strategic stake was Allied control of Egypt, which served as a bulwark against Axis moves to cut the Suez Ca.n.a.l and threaten the oil-rich Middle East. Meanwhile, on September 27 j.a.pan signed the Tripart.i.te Pact, linking Tokyo with Berlin and Rome.
IN THE UNITED STATES, the RooseveltWendell Willkie race was close. ”Let me say to you, if you elect me President of the United States, no American boys will ever be sent to the shambles of the European trenches,” Willkie told audiences in the autumn of 1940. Roosevelt watched his opponent carefully. The critical moment came in Boston a week before the election. Playing to isolationists himself, Roosevelt declared: ”I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: 'Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.' ” Until now, Roosevelt had also said ”except in case of attack.” Today he dropped it. When Sam Rosenman challenged Roosevelt about abandoning the qualifier, an irritated president replied: ”Of course we'll fight if we're attacked. If somebody attacks us, then it isn't a foreign war, is it? Or do they want me to guarantee that our troops will be sent into battle only in the event of another Civil War?” But his sharp tone suggests he was uncomfortable with the late October omission.
Churchill observed the contest with ”profound anxiety. . . . No newcomer into power could possess or soon acquire the knowledge and experience of Franklin Roosevelt. None could equal his commanding gifts.” Those words were written after the war, when Churchill was using his memoirs to cement the Anglo-American alliance during the cold war, but it was true that he had more than a year invested in Roosevelt, and the destroyer deal suggested Roosevelt's heart was in the right place. Though some historians have argued that a Willkie administration would have had the same ultimate policies as Roosevelt's did, there is evidence he would not have been quite as open to Churchill as Roosevelt eventually was. Willkie, Henry Wallace noted after a conversation later in the war, ”expressed himself as having very little use for Churchill, saying that he was altogether too self-a.s.sured, that a self-a.s.sured man made a poor planner. He said Churchill was gifted with the ability to speak like a Demosthenes and write like an angel. . . . He had no one to suggest as Churchill's subst.i.tute; nevertheless it was obvious that he has no confidence in Churchill.”
In the fall of 1940, another campaign was afoot. The shrewdest men in Churchill's inner circle were building up Churchill in the eyes of the establishment in Roosevelt's capital. Replying to a letter Eugene Meyer had sent him with a clipping about British war orphans finding homes in the United States, Brendan Bracken laid out Churchill's case. ”You cannot imagine how grateful the English are to your country for all you are doing for us,” Bracken wrote. ”In the midst of our lonely and desperate fight against the greatest military power in the world and its carrion allies, we are heartened by the great help and sympathy given us by the United States.” Echoing Churchill's tone with Roosevelt-one of determination and disproportionate grat.i.tude-Bracken wrote Meyer: ”England will never forget what America is doing for her. And I believe that this War will not have been in vain if it ends by welding the foreign naval and military policies of England and America into an instrument which can stifle the rebirth of tyranny, race prejudice, and all the other beastly systems bred by n.a.z.is and Fascists. We are having a rough time, but our people are very cheerful, and inflexible in their determination to carry this War through to a successful conclusion. Grief, destruction, and death must be our lot for many months, and perhaps years, to come. But we shall never surrender. And we are getting stronger and our people are adapting themselves to bombing and all the other hards.h.i.+ps created by War.”
Bracken hoped that such letters-Meyer was the publisher of one of the newspapers Roosevelt read over breakfast in his bed in the White House every morning-would rea.s.sure influential Americans at a critical time. Meyer, who was prointervention, was delighted by Bracken's message, writing back: ”America is profoundly impressed by the splendid defense put up by your people by air warfare and the high morale of a united people. I heard the Prime Minister speaking to France the other day on the radio. Please congratulate him upon his splendid work and especially on his marvelous oratory.” (In the broadcast to the French, Churchill had said: ”Remember we shall never stop, never weary, and never give in, and that our whole people and Empire have vowed themselves to the task of cleansing Europe from the n.a.z.i pestilence and saving the world from the new Dark Ages.”) Meyer was right that Americans were impressed with British courage, but an October 1940 poll found that 83 percent did not think ”the United States should enter the war against Germany and Italy at once.”
ON ELECTION NIGHT Roosevelt set up headquarters in the dining room at Hyde Park. There was a news ticker in the adjoining smoking room; the smoking room was small, dominated by bookcases and a huge pair of antlers over a fireplace. This evening was, Secret Serviceman Mike Reilly recalled, the one time he saw ”FDR's nerves give him a real rough time.” The early returns were not encouraging.
”Mike, I don't want to see anybody in here,” Roosevelt said to Reilly.
”Including your family, Mr. President?”
Roosevelt replied, ”I said 'anybody.' ”
In the end, the news brightened, the room filled, and Franklin Roosevelt won, 54.7 percent to 44.8 percent.
ON THE DAY after the election, Churchill sent Roosevelt the following cable.
I did not think it right for me as a Foreigner to express my opinion upon American politics while the Election was on, but now I feel you will not mind my saying that I prayed for your success and that I am truly thankful for it. This does not mean that I seek or wish for anything more than the full, fair and free play of your mind upon the world issues now at stake in which our two nations have to discharge their respective duties. We are entering upon a sombre phase of what must evidently be a protracted and broadening war, and I look forward to being able to interchange my thoughts with you in all that confidence and goodwill which has grown up between us since I went to the Admiralty at the outbreak. Things are afoot which will be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe, and in expressing the comfort I feel that the people of the United States have once again cast these great burdens upon you, I must avow my sure faith that the lights by which we steer will bring us all safely to anchor.
A brilliant, generous, eloquent note-and Roosevelt chose not to answer it. Churchill was fretting. At the conclusion of another cable ten days later, Churchill wrote: ”I hope you got my personal telegram of congratulation.” Roosevelt did not reply.
Calculated or inadvertent, the oversight bothered Churchill for years. Anyone who has ever had a carefully composed, heartfelt letter go unacknowledged knows the feeling: The writer wants the satisfaction of knowing his words. .h.i.t the mark. In this case, Churchill never got that. He attended to the wound by explaining it away. In the volume of his memoirs published in 1949, Churchill wrote: ”Curiously enough, I never received any answer to this telegram. It may well have been engulfed in the vast ma.s.s of congratulatory messages which were swept aside by urgent work.” One thing is clear. Winston Churchill was still very much the suitor in the courts.h.i.+p of Franklin Roosevelt.
AS NOVEMBER FADED into December, Churchill was writing a letter he believed to be ”one of the most important” of his life. Churchill's courage in the spring and summer had staved off the immediate threat of destruction, but Britain was now settling down into a drawn-out conflict. The cable went through numerous revisions, and Lord Lothian was a key adviser-an example of how Churchill shared Roosevelt's ability to profit from the ideas of those around him. The president was better at distilling the work and thinking of others; as a leader, he was in many ways more a conductor of an orchestra than a composer of music. The prime minister was more self-sufficient (and virtually always wrote his own speeches, cables, and minutes) but he liked to consult experts, and in this case Lothian, among others, helped him as he prepared the cable to Roosevelt. The result was cla.s.sic Churchill-long, well argued, and pa.s.sionate yet practical.
”Even if the United States were our Ally, instead of our friend and indispensable partner, we should not ask for a large American expeditionary army,” Churchill wrote to Roosevelt; this was not the time to ask for soldiers. Congress had pa.s.sed the Selective Service Act in September, but with the proviso that draftees could serve only in the Western Hemisphere or American territories like the Philippines. ”s.h.i.+pping, not men, is the limiting factor. . . . The danger of Great Britain being destroyed by a swift, overwhelming blow, has for the time being very greatly receded. In its place, there is a long, gradually-maturing danger, less sudden and less spectacular, but equally deadly. This mortal danger is the steady and increasing diminution of sea tonnage.” To Roosevelt he argued: ”The decision for 1941 lies upon the seas. Unless we can establish our ability to feed this Island, to import the munitions of all kinds which we need, unless we can move our armies to the various theatres where Hitler and his confederate, Mussolini, must be met, and maintain them there, and do all this with the a.s.surance of being able to carry it on till the spirit of the Continental Dictators is broken, we may fall by the way, and the time needed by the United States to complete her defensive preparations may not be forthcoming.” Britain was running out of money, Germany had her essentially surrounded, and Churchill, who believed in taking the fight to fronts far from home, needed help.
Roosevelt and Hopkins had left for a cruise in the Caribbean aboard the Tuscaloosa in early December. ”He had only his own intimates around him,” Churchill recalled. ”Harry Hopkins, then unknown to me, told me later that Mr. Roosevelt read and re-read this letter as he sat alone in his deck-chair, and that for two days he did not seem to have reached any clear conclusion. He was plunged in intense thought, and brooded silently.” The result of the brooding: Lend-Lease, which would provide supplies and cash to Britain. Churchill's long letter had done its work.
In a fireside chat on December 29, Roosevelt spoke in a less ornate way than Churchill would have, but there was strength in the simplicity of his imagery.
Tonight, in the presence of a world crisis, my mind goes back eight years to a night in the midst of a domestic crisis. It was a time when the wheels of American industry were grinding to a full stop, when the whole banking system of our country had ceased to function.
I well remember that while I sat in my study in the White House, preparing to talk with the people of the United States, I had before my eyes the picture of all those Americans with whom I was talking. I saw the workmen in the mills, the mines, the factories; the girl behind the counter; the small shopkeeper; the farmer doing his spring plowing; the widows and the old men wondering about their life's savings. I tried to convey to the great ma.s.s of American people what the banking crisis meant to them in their daily lives.
Tonight, I want to do the same thing, with the same people, in this new crisis which faces America.
We met the issue of 1933 with courage and realism.
We face this new crisis-this new threat to the security of our nation-with the same courage and realism.
Never before since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock has our American civilization been in such danger as now.
For on September 27, 1940, this year, by an agreement signed in Berlin, three powerful nations, two in Europe and one in Asia, joined themselves together in the threat that if the United States of America interfered with or blocked the expansion program of these three nations-a program aimed at world control-they would unite in ultimate action against the United States.