ALSO BY JONATHAN W. JORDAN MAPS INTRODUCTION THERE WAS A TIME WHEN A LIBERAL DEMOCRAT, A CONSERVATIVE REPUBLICAN, a general who served both parties, and an admiral who served none set aside profound differences and led America through history's greatest bloodletting. Through nostalgia's myopic lens, it is easy to see a united nation, its resolve hardened by Pearl Harbor, swept inexorably to victory on the broad shoulders of the GI, the wings of the B-29, and the buoyant spirit that brought the world baseball, Duke Ellington, the Ford Model A and the Lone Ranger. A nation to whom triumph came as naturally as manifest destiny. Yet these images tell only a small part of the story. The vast mural of World War II--waves of heavy bombers, marines raising Old Glory, snaking lines of deuce-and-a-half trucks--has become part of the American legacy. But that mural was not painted overnight. In 1939 Rosie was a homemaker, not a riveter. Black sailors served as butlers, not gunners, and America reposed its safety in a handful of green, ill-equipped divisions led by untested middle-aged officers. From May 1940 until the war's end, the American war machine lurched forward, determined but not sure-footed, ensnared by material shortages and enmeshed in bare-knuckle politics. To break the empires of Hitler, Hirohito and Mussolini, liberals compromised with big business and Republicans compromised with Democrats. The Army cut deals with the Navy, and both swallowed trade-offs with unions, farmers, miners and factory owners. American generals and admirals horse-traded with their British cousins, and commanders of all branches courted congressional chairmen, business leaders and, journalists. In Washington's marble corridors, the United States entrusted four men with the prosecution of America's war. General George Catlett Marshall, the Army's top soldier, won the admiration of Churchill, Stalin and Truman. Admiral Ernest J. King, a Porthos of the sea, saw in the oceans the key to America's global power. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, an old-line Republican from old-moneyed Long Island, distrusted the rapidly changing world, yet he championed futuristic weapons to prevent future wars. And over these men hovered Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a liberal Democrat thrown into a war where his friends became enemies, his enemies trusted allies. He had staked his legacy on domestic reform, yet found himself shaping the world alongside Josef Stalin and Winston Churchill. A devious, self-described "juggler," Roosevelt would shift his political base, draw his nation toward war, weld an alliance with a dictator and an imperialist, and found a global institution dedicated to peace. • • • Roosevelt, Marshall, Stimson, and King are now ghostly images of our past, men who speak to us through grainy black-and-white newsreels and scratchy archived recordings. We see them through a glass darkly: Roosevelt, a rakish cigarette holder clenched between broad white teeth, assures the nation the only thing it has to fear is fear itself. Marshall, a constellation of stars on each shoulder, stares inscrutably into the distance as he ponders global strategy. A mustachioed Stimson and a bald, scowling King, giants behind the curtain, stand in the background, barely remembered faces in a faded gray photograph. But in 1941, these ghosts lived in a world bursting with fire and fear. A world unraveling along two seams, where America could peer over either shoulder and see bubbling lakes of red. A nation unaware that it was on the road to a golden age that would be purchased with rivers of blood, mountains of treasure, and years of suffering. A road that would begin with a strange sound rippling over a tropical paradise. PROLOGUE IT BEGAN AS A LOW HUM, A SUNDAY MORNING RUMBLE FROM THE ISLAND'S north side. To the islanders, the sound announced another training exercise at Wheeler or Hickam. Or perhaps a flight of bombers winging in from distant California. "Must be those crazy Marines," one sailor muttered as he took in fresh air through an open porthole. The wind brushed past the few clouds that had bothered to show up that morning. Oahu's golfers, sailors, housewives, and soldiers stirred themselves for a day much like the previous Sunday, or the Sunday before that, or any other Sunday they could recall. The Bears would be playing the Cards at Comiskey Park, the Black Cat on Hotel Street was open for the breakfast hangover crowd, and Waikiki theaters would be showing a Ty Powers-Betty Grable film that afternoon. Readers who caught the morning's New York Times couldn't miss the page one headline: "Navy is superior to any, says knox." But that hum, so commonplace to the islanders, was followed by an odd roll of distant thunder. Which, to the untrained ear, sounded much like practice artillery. Or bombs.1 • The general stepped onto his porch near Washington's Potomac River. He had finished his horseback ride on a sorrel named Prepared, and a lanky, thick-headed Dalmatian named Fleet trotted at his heels. He wiped his boots, entered the house, and headed for the shower. As he was rinsing, his orderly announced an urgent call from the War Department. Colonel Bratton wished to speak to him about a matter he could not discuss over the telephone.2 Toweling off and changing into his gray business suit, General George Marshall climbed into the back of his government-issue Plymouth and rode to the Munitions Building, a crowded office complex on Constitution Avenue near Washington's famed Reflecting Pool. He strode into his sterile second-floor office shortly after eleven a.m. On his desk sat a lengthy typewritten message intercepted from Tokyo.3 The 5,000-word cable addressed to Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura sounded ominous, yet its meaning was unclear. Another intercepted cable, decoded that morning, directed Nomura to deliver the long message to the U.S. government at exactly one o'clock local time on the afternoon of December 7. There was something about that one o'clock deadline making Bratton jumpy. It made Marshall jumpy, too.4 Marshall's blue eyes sifted the message. Frowning, he picked up his phone and called Admiral Harold Stark, chief of naval operations. They needed to warn the Pacific theater that trouble lay ahead. "What do you think about sending the information concerning the time of presentation to the Pacific commanders?" he asked Stark. "We've sent them so much already," Stark replied. "I hesitate to send any more. A new one will be merely confusing." Marshall hung up. He thought for a moment, then pulled out a sheet of paper and scratched out a warning to his commanders in the Pacific. A few moments later, he called Stark back and read him the message. "George," said Stark, "there might be some peculiar significance in the Japanese ambassador calling on Hull at one p.m. I'll go along with you in sending that information to the Pacific."5 • Black plumes rose from Oahu's center as the attackers swarmed from the north-west, southwest, and east. Hundreds of them--Zeros, Vals, Kates--descended on their targets. They spit fire at scampering men, skimmed waves and dove on warships slow to realize that Pearl Harbor was under attack. Explosions rocked the harbor as men in dungarees, khakis, and undershirts, some with helmets, some without, dashed for anything offering cover. As the air filled with inky smoke, the attackers broke into small formations and plunged onto their main victims: the moored giants lining Battleship Row. Antiaircraft guns barked, men screamed, and the tattoo of a hundred Brownings filled the air. But the deep basso sound of torpedoes and bombs dominated the symphony of death.6 • To the clinking of fork and knife on White House china, Franklin Roosevelt chatted over one of Mrs. Nesbitt's bland lunches with his gaunt warhorse, Harry Hopkins. The two political veterans, like nearly everyone in Washington, had been watching the diplomatic picture unravel to the brink of war. Roosevelt's orders to hunt German U-boats in the Atlantic was a gauntlet thrown at Hitler, while in the Far East, conquest by Japan was followed by American economic sanctions. Sanctions spurred new conquests, which begat fresh sanctions. By Thanksgiving, autumn's circular dance had brought the two partners within a knife's edge of war. At twenty minutes of two, an aide interrupted lunch to announce an urgent call from the secretary of the navy. Roosevelt took the black handset and listened as Frank Knox told him of a report the Navy had received from Honolulu. The Japanese were bombing Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt listened, thanked him, and hung up. He turned to Hopkins. "There must be some mistake," a wide-eyed Harry said when Roosevelt broke the news. Roosevelt shook his head. It was just the kind of unexpected thing the Japanese would do, he said. His voice growing cold, he added, "If this report is true, it takes the matter entirely out of my hands."7 • The ancient Utah suffered the first mortal blow. As her crew raised the colors over her fantail, a formation of Kates screamed down onto tiny Ford Island. They skimmed the waves and long, cigarlike tubes fell from their bellies and plowed the water's surface. The attackers climbed, and a massive explosion shook Utah to her keel. A jagged wound gaped from her hull, and the target ship swallowed salt water and listed hard to port. As the sea poured in, her thick starboard moorings fought to keep her deck above the insistent waves. The moorings lost.8 Succeeding bomber groups pointed their noses toward Battleship Row. A torpedo rocked Oklahoma from stem to stern and two more pierced her wounded side. She lurched to port, smoke billowing from her hatches as men leaped into the oily sea. Salt water flooded her iron viscera, and she listed until her starboard propeller rose over the water's roiling surface. As she slipped below the waterline, four hundred terrified men scrambled belowdecks, clambering through hatches and up ladders, racing the rising water, every man clawing for that priceless path to daylight.9 Oklahoma 's sisters fought back, spitting AA shells into the sky as fast as gunners could shove them into smoking breeches. But the Japanese tigers pounced from every direction, strafing, dropping 800-kilogram bombs, skimming the water's edge as torpedo sights aligned angle and distance. Above screams of men and machines, a violent blast shook Tennessee . Another jolted West Virginia , whose captain lay dying in her conning tower. With a convulsion that rattled the harbor, Arizona leaped out of the water, her magazine a fuming volcano. In nine minutes, she took eleven hundred men to the bottom.10 Smoke obscured vision as scorched shells cooked off, steam boilers exploded, and the harbor was swathed in thick, oily smoke. Men--ants scurrying over steel giants--swarmed in all directions, sprinting to action stations, diving for cover, swimming through blazing water, saving themselves. Sacrificing themselves.11 • Walking the halls of the Munitions Building, the old lawyer was feeling his age. It had been a week of conferences, memoranda, cabinet meetings, and telephone calls, and the tired statesman with the shock of white hair ached for a rest. If he could shake loose from Washington, get away to his home on Long Island, he thought, he could catch up on some sorely needed sleep.12 But he wasn't about to shake loose from Washington, or get home to Long Island, or catch up on his sleep. Things had gone from bad to worse--much worse--over the last twelve days. The president had rejected Japan's last offer, and intercepted cables from Tokyo implied the Emperor's diplomats were about to break off negotiations. The question on everyone's mind was not whether Japan would fight, but when and where. 13 So Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, Wall Street's old Republican stalwart, would await his leader's call. On the morning of December 7, Stimson's thoughts turned to a draft message President Roosevelt would deliver to Congress on the crumbling picture in the Far East. The president also wished to discuss Tokyo's latest intercepted message, which seemed to herald a rupture in diplomatic relations. Buckling his worn leather briefcase, Secretary Stimson made the six-block walk to the old State, War, and Navy Building next door to the White House. There he and Navy Secretary Frank Knox were ushered into the austere office of Secretary of State Cordell Hull, a colorful old-line liberal from middle Tennessee. Stimson, Knox, and Hull were convinced that the Japanese were up to something. They mulled over what the president should tell Congress, but given the high stakes and ambiguity of Japan's position, they reached few solid conclusions. The "War Cabinet," as Stimson liked to call the group, broke up and went their separate ways. Stimson went home to lunch. The clock's hands had swept past the lunch hour when Stimson peered over his reading glasses at an approaching aide. There was phone call from the president, the aide said. Stimson walked to the phone and picked up the receiver. "Have you heard the news?" an excited voice asked. "Well, I have heard the telegrams which have been coming in about the Japanese advances in the Gulf of Siam." "Oh, no, I don't mean that," said Franklin Roosevelt, his voice rising. "They have attacked Hawaii! They are now bombing Hawaii!"14 • The second wave flew in from the east and tightened up for the attack run. Battleship Row was in flames, but the pilots who swarmed over the burning ships meant to leave nothing alive. Diving, climbing, pitching, and banking, they sent bombs and bullets flying in every direction. The battleships Maryland , Tennessee , and Pennsylvania belched clouds of black smoke, their hulls and structures a mangled mess. The wounded Nevada , her boilers churning, managed to slip her cables and limp past Arizona 's sinking corpse. As she pulled forward, Nevada drew the attention of some Val dive-bombers, which dipped their noses and dropped like ravenous hawks. Six bombs found their marks. Explosions rocked the battleship's forestructure and bridge, and men were torn to shreds as flames drove back her fire crews. She steered hard to port and two tugs crashed into her side, heaving the shattered ship toward the relative safety of the beach.15 • As the cruiser Augusta swayed on a gentle tide at Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay, her wiry fleet commander, Ernest J. King, settled down for his afternoon nap. The admiral, known for his short temper, was recovering from another of his recent trips to Washington--visits to educate policy makers about strategy and U-boats and the limits of American naval power. "Hell, I've got to go down to Washington again to straighten out those dumb bastards once more," he would tell his staff, without a hint of irony.16 When he leaned his thin frame over Augusta 's bridge window, Ernie King looked every inch a fighting admiral. His nose was sharp as a corvette's bow. He had a bald forehead that resembled a destroyer's round turret, and his quick brown eyes squinted over a quicker tongue. Dressed in a blue jacket with gold braid, a cigarette resting between his fingers, the admiral was Jove, Mars, and Neptune to every man in his fleet. King had worked at his desk all morning, then lunched with his chief of staff. He usually took a siesta in his finely appointed cabin, but on this day he had not slept long before a marine knocked on his hatch. When King answered, the marine handed him a note. He read the message. Of course it could happen. He had done it himself three years earlier in a fleet exercise, when he launched a surprise carrier raid on Pearl. That time the umpires told him he had blown Wheeler and Hickam fields to hell. It looked like the umpires were right. The next day King told his aide to pack his bags for another trip to Washington. Those dumb bastards were going to need help.17 • The death rattles of Utah , Arizona , and Oklahoma mingled with howls from West Virginia , Nevada , and California . Near their scorched hulks lay the smaller ships: cruisers, destroyers, tugs in various states of disrepair, all smothered in wind-whipped smoke. Zeros buzzed like mosquitoes over the wreckage of Hickam, Bellows, Kaneohe, Ford, and Wheeler fields, strafing targets of opportunity and pouncing on the few Hawks that managed to get airborne. The Emperor's pilots beamed as they saw the prostrate hulks of capital ships and neat lines of smashed American planes. After two hours of carnage, the sword returned to its sheath. The Zeros banked north, covering the triumphant retreat of dive- and torpedo bombers, and the second wave disappeared into the western sky. On ground and water, amid flaming seas, among the smoke, the oily stench, the groan of melting steel, lay the bodies of 2,402 dead and dying men. Another 1,247 lay scattered about the harbor, on stretchers, grass, or pavement, as nurses and medics fought to save them.18 • Roosevelt's large hands closed around a typed memorandum, the first of many he would receive that day. In a few efficient sentences, the note described a scene of devastation: Oklahoma capsized, Tennessee burning, minelayer Oglala possibly lost. Airfields smashed. Planes gone. He squinted at the paper, then wrote down the date and time it arrived on his desk.19 Franklin Roosevelt's handsome face took on a gossamer calm that afternoon as the world rushed into his study. While two desk telephones clanged like alarm bells, news flooded in on waves of messengers, each phone slip or memo more agonizing than the last. The surface fleet was burning on the water. The air fleet was burning on the ground. Casualty counts could not be verified for some time, but the death toll would be appalling. The battleship Arizona-- into which a young Frank Roosevelt had hammered the ceremonial first bolt in 1914--lay beneath Pearl's choppy waves, her steel hull now a tomb for hundreds of silenced sailors.20 In a cyclone of conversations, phone calls, jostling couriers, advisers and cabinet ministers, Roosevelt sat at his cluttered desk, a cigarette between his fingers. He spoke in a voice that remained steady and controlled, and he gave clear, unhurried instructions to his lieutenants: Send for Marshall and Stark. Assemble the cabinet. Execute standing orders for war. Freeze Japanese assets. Place all munitions factories under guard.21 As his blue eyes watched the ghastly picture unfold, Roosevelt remained grave, shaken but businesslike. He made none of his usual small talk as he organized message slips into neat little piles on his desk. He called for his secretary, Grace Tully, and took a deep drag on a cigarette as she walked in with her stenographer's pad. "Sit down, Grace," he said. "I'm going before Congress tomorrow." He began dictating a rough draft of his message to Congress, to the American people, to the world. "Yesterday, comma, December 7, 1941, comma, a date that will live in world history . . ."22 • • • That evening, Roosevelt met with his cabinet in the second-floor study as the leadership of the House and Senate began gathering outside his door. His eyes had lost their sparkle, his humor was gone, and his jaw showed none of the confident, angular jut the world had known these past nine years. Through pursed lips he narrated the day's events. It was, he said, the "most serious meeting of the cabinet since the spring of 1861." Describing the scene of destruction, Roosevelt's famous voice halted. The nation's great communicator could scarcely force himself to utter the words--words confessing a disaster that had fallen on his watch. Perhaps seven out of eight battleships had been lost, and many men had died that day. Cabinet secretaries who hadn't heard the full report were dumbfounded. Those who knew listened in mortified silence. His emotions getting the better of him, Roosevelt twice stopped in mid-thought to bark at his navy secretary, "Find out, for God's sake, why the ships were tied up in rows!" A red-faced Knox shot back, "That's the way they berth them!" Roosevelt ended the meeting, then nodded to his study door, where the leadership of Congress awaited. Powerful men standing outside that door would demand to know what went wrong. And the American people, standing behind them, would demand to know how their president would avenge the dead of Pearl Harbor.23 PART ONE 1940-1941 It is a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead--and find no one there. --FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT ONE May 1940 THE WARM, CLUTTERED STUDY ON THE SECOND FLOOR WAS THE CENTER OF Franklin Roosevelt's world. As White House staff flitted about, straightening up, polishing, and tending the first family's living quarters, the president dominated the oval-shaped room. Stamp books lay on small tables, sailing ship paintings vied with old maps for wall space, and knickknacks crowded the desks and mantelpiece of the "Oval Study." It was Roosevelt's office, parlor and sanctuary. For a man confined to a wheelchair--for whom going up or down a flight of stairs was a three-man project--the Oval Study was, in a sense, the cerebral cortex of the U.S. government. The famous Oval Office in the adjacent West Wing served as the president's formal workplace, a setting for important meetings, press conferences, photo opportunities and diplomatic chats. But in the upstairs study, with its nautical theme and view of the Washington Monument, Franklin Roosevelt felt free to unwind over drinks, gossip with friends, and chart America's course. On the evening of May 9, 1940, as Washington's spring warmth ebbed, Roosevelt was relaxing in his sanctum when an aide announced an urgent telephone call from Europe. Handset pressed to his ear, Roosevelt listened intently as Ambassador John Cudahy described German bombers swarming over the Dutch, Belgian, Luxembourg, and French skies. German paratroopers were blanketing airfields and fortresses. The Belgian king called up his reservists, the Grand Duke of Luxembourg fled to France, and the French army was bracing for blitzkrieg.1 Roosevelt had hoped the Nazi tide would break against the Anglo-French levee that stretched from the English Channel to the Swiss border. But the Germans sliced through the Allied lines with their armored spearheads, and the Luftwaffe rained death from above. Hanging up the phone, Roosevelt leaned back in his seat and considered the possibilities: What if the Germans were thrown back? What if France collapsed? What if, as in the previous war, a long, bloody stalemate gripped Europe? Each scenario implied a dozen political calculations, only a few of which Roosevelt could see clearly from his upstairs study in safe, isolated America.2 At 2:40 a.m., his calculations exhausted, Roosevelt turned in for the night. His powerful arms shifted his frame into an armless wheelchair, and a handsome black valet named George Fields wheeled the president into his bedroom.3 • • • FDR awoke five hours later to his usual morning routine: a bath and shave, then back to bed for breakfast. As he sat in his pajamas, a baggy sweater pulled over the top, he munched on toast and eggs--about the only thing Mrs. Nesbitt cooked properly--and devoured the New York Times , Herald Tribune , Baltimore Sun , Washington Post , and Washington Herald . The sum of those sources confirmed the disaster Cudahy described the night before. Bombs smashed French fortresses. German panzers clanked toward Paris, and the battle for Western Europe was joined.4 At two p.m., a valet wheeled Roosevelt into the neoclassical Cabinet Room to face a tense collection of ministers. Seated around the long wooden table were Vice President Henry Wallace, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, Attorney General Robert Jackson, Commerce Secretary Harry Hopkins, and his war and navy secretaries, Harry Woodring and Charles Edison. Little business was normally accomplished in Roosevelt's cabinet meetings. Part social hour, part pep rally, they were filled with presidential anecdotes, musings, and a smattering of departmental reports that none of the other secretaries cared about. Interior's Harold Ickes described to his diary one cabinet meeting in which the stern Secretary Perkins delivered a twenty-minute discourse on labor relations: As usual, only the President listened to her. Harry Hopkins wrote me a note. . . . Bob Jackson was nodding from time to time and at intervals he and Morgenthau were joking about something. Hull sat with the air of an early Christian martyr, with his hands folded, looking at the edge of the table without seeing it or anything else. . . . As usual, I studiously avoided being caught by Perkins' basilisk eye. Henry Wallace was contemplating the ceiling.5 But this day was different. Talk centered on military questions, which should have been the province of Secretaries Woodring and Edison. But the afternoon's discussion was dominated by the enigmatic secretary of commerce.6 • • • Harry Lloyd Hopkins was America's most unlikely-looking vice-regent. Balding, toothy, and wrapped around an emaciated frame that barely supported his weight, the native of Sioux City, Iowa, looked like some rumpled nebbish who had wandered off a White House tour group. He had cut his teeth heading local welfare agencies when he was drawn into the spinning orbit of Franklin Roosevelt, first as Governor Roosevelt's emergency relief director, then as the free-spending head of the Works Progress Administration during the New Deal's heyday, and finally, as secretary of commerce. Harry Hopkins had no training as a diplomat, economist or military strategist, but he possessed a razor-sharp mind and uncanny judgment that friends admired and foes despised. FDR had even considered him as a potential successor to the presidency, a praetorian who could be trusted to safeguard the holy tenets of the New Deal.7 If Hopkins had a weakness--aside from horse races, late-night drinking, and bare-knuckle politics--it was his health. In 1937 a massive tumor had forced doctors to remove three-quarters of his stomach. His eviscerated body could barely digest fats and proteins, and doctors gave him four months to live. Harry lived, but his remarkable spark left him, often for months at a stretch, and one journalist likened him to "an ill-fed horse at the end of a hard day."8 In Roosevelt's kingdom, titles were deceptive. He gave Hopkins the Commerce Department because the strain of the WPA job overtook his physical stamina. Later, when Commerce proved too arduous, FDR made him "special assistant to the President," an undefined role advising his liege on matters ranging from bomber production and legislation to screenings of White House movies. At FDR's request, Hopkins moved into the second floor of the White House. His proximity to the president, along with his loyalty and keen instincts, made him a formidable power broker at 1600 Pennsylvania. "The extraordinary fact," wrote speechwriter Bob Sherwood, "was that the second most important individual in the United States Government during the most critical period of the world's greatest war had no legitimate official position nor even any desk of his own except a card table in his bedroom. However, the bedroom was in the White House."9 • • • That May afternoon, Hopkins sat in the Cabinet Room, glass-eyed and inert as Madame Perkins droned. But when Roosevelt invited the Commerce Department to have its say, the rumpled corpse in the gray suit sprang to life. Rubber , Hopkins announced. Rubber and tin would be the keys to the next war. Rubber went into military hardware ranging from bomber tires to intravenous bags, gas masks to tank treads. It was a vital strategic asset, and 90 percent of it came from colonies of two nations Hitler invaded--French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies. The United States could smelt its own steel; it could buy bauxite from Africa and refine its own oil. But the humble rubber tree had become America's Achilles' heel. Words and statistics tumbled out as Harry outlined problem and solution. A private company, funded by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, would quietly buy up a year's supply of rubber, tin, and other strategic materials. Overt government purchases would augment the stockpile. America would buy what it needed to arm itself and the democracies--assuming it had time.10 While Hopkins rattled off the details of his materials stockpile campaign, a bulletin arrived from London: British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had just stepped down, and Winston Churchill, Britain's First Lord of the Admiralty, would probably be asked to form the new government. Roosevelt had met Churchill two decades before, and had begun corresponding with him secretly in 1939. He nodded approvingly. Winston, he told his cabinet, was the best man England had, "even if he was drunk half the time."11 • • • Six days later, senators and representatives packing the Capitol's House chamber stood as the sergeant-at-arms announced the arrival of the President of the United States. Roosevelt, dressed in a blue pin-striped suit, his tie crisply knotted, walked slowly down the aisle, his right hand on a cane, his left on the forearm of a burly Secret Service agent. Beneath his dark trousers stood ten pounds of steel braces holding his polio-stricken legs erect.* In a sleight-of-foot illusion practiced over twenty years, FDR had trained himself to mimic walking by using his back and side muscles to heave one leg up and forward, and then the other. Painful but passable, all it required was a steady arm to lean on and a strong cane. Smiling through the discomfort, nodding genially to congressmen he passed, Roosevelt walked to the wooden dais, fully aware of his task: to shock a nation nestled in the comforting cocoon of isolation. To convince a hostile Congress that the time had come to arm America and its allies. To set production goals so high, every industrial leader would think on a scale never before envisioned. The job of the man encased in leg braces was to shake a nation out of a paralysis of the mind and get it running to safety.12 "These are ominous days," his measured cadence began. "Days whose swift and shocking developments force every neutral nation to look to its defenses in the light of new factors. The brutal force of modern offensive war has been loosed in all its horror. New powers of destruction, incredibly swift and deadly, have been developed; and those who wield them are ruthless and daring. No old defense is so strong that it requires no further strengthening and no attack is so unlikely or impossible that it may be ignored." The greatest threat, he explained, was modern airpower. A flight from Greenland to New England took six hours; from West Africa to Brazil, seven; from Brazil to the Canal Zone, less than seven. And the preponderance of airpower lay in Adolf Hitler's hands. Germany had more warplanes aloft than all its enemies combined, and its assembly lines in the Ruhr, Silesia, and the Saar Palatinate could outproduce all competitors.13 To balance the scales, Roosevelt asked Congress for $1.8 billion in military appropriations. He called for a bigger army. He called for a two-ocean navy. He called for an industrial base capable of turning out fifty thousand warplanes each year.14 • • • Fifty thousand planes? Every aerospace expert knew it was an impossible dream. The nation's entire aircraft industry couldn't turn out ten thousand planes in a year; normal production was about two thousand. Besides, the Army lacked fifty thousand pilots, training fields for fifty thousand cadets, and repair shops to keep fifty thousand planes flying. Roosevelt might just as well suggest that America would send a man to the moon. He had set an outlandish production goal that would have Hitler, Göring, and every other German laughing their kopfs off.15 But Roosevelt had immense faith in his people's ability to do whatever they were asked, if they understood why they were doing it. When he took office in 1933, he saw a nation ravaged by depression and ruin. Back then, stabilizing the banking, securities, real estate and labor systems seemed impossible. Restoring jobs while holding down ruinous inflation seemed impossible. But Roosevelt also saw, beneath the dust, among broken cornstalks and idled coke furnaces, a resourceful people who could set things right if properly led. "There are some who say that democracy cannot cope with the new technique of government developed in recent years by some countries--by a few countries which deny the freedoms that we maintain are essential to our democratic way of life," he told Congress. "This I reject."16 • Franklin Roosevelt may have rejected the notion that democracy cannot cope with a totalitarian state, but the man charged with planning the next war saw a scale tipped heavily in Germany's favor. In 1920, Congress had demobilized much of the Army, and the Great Depression nearly finished off what Congress did not. By 1939, when Hitler's panzers rolled into Poland, America was a third-rate power. The Army consisted of fewer than 200,000 men, about a quarter of whom were fully trained. Counting men with modest National Guard training or doughboys of the First World War, America could scratch together perhaps 400,000 men who had marched in straight lines at one time or another. Across the ocean, Germany boasted nearly seven million active and reserve soldiers, most of whom were veterans of campaigns in Poland, the Low Countries, and France. Goose-stepping alongside were another million Italians under dictator Benito Mussolini, veterans of Il Duce' s Ethiopian campaign.17 Even if the United States enlisted another million and a half men--putting the Army a scant five million behind Germany--those inductees would have nothing to fire, fly, or drive. For a generation, the business of America had been business. The America of 1940 excelled at making automobiles and ironing boards, Corn Flakes and Coca-Cola. Congressmen spent money on projects that would get them reelected, and there were few projects in the military budget that fit that sacred criterion. Electrical plants in Tennessee and dams in Nevada trumped range finders and dive-bombers on the great congressional shopping list. Lacking reserves of ammunition and gasoline, the Army could scarcely drill its regulars, let alone equip the Guardsmen. The buck private of 1940 wore his father's helmet, laced his father's puttees, and shouldered his father's 1903 Springfield rifle. On maneuvers, trucks played the part of tanks, flour bags replaced grenades, and telephone poles filled in for artillery. "My God, we were carrying some wooden machine guns and all kinds of damn mortars that were nothing but logs," remembered Colonel Dwight Eisenhower, then a staffer with the Third Army. And Third Army was one of the lucky units.18 If the Army had one thing in its favor, it was a devoted core of well-educated officers. These middle-aged men formed a pyramid of regimental, divisional, corps, and army commanders. And on the apex of this pyramid stood one man whose job was to find the weapons, barracks, vehicles, and money his men needed to fight. • • • George Catlett Marshall was sworn in as the Army's highest-ranking officer on the day German troops crossed into Poland. Distinguished-looking at fifty-nine, his ruddy face had not yet broken irretrievably with the handsome features of his youth. His reddish hair, now a mellowing silver, hadn't retreated in disorder, and his sharp nose set off a prominent upper lip that gave way to a soft, kindly chin. In manner, he was respectful yet aloof, a straitlaced sphinx who let neither friendship nor enmity supplant his dispassionate judgment. But when his ice-blue eyes found carelessness, sloth, or stupidity, his temper blazed like a howitzer barrage. He would usually bawl out the offending officer, or turn ice-cold, which, to the career officer, was worse. Marshall spent much of his adult life struggling to keep this lurking fire--a rage that physically rattled his heart--buried within his breast.19 Marshall's intensity welled from an upper-middle-class childhood in Pennsylvania's coal country. When he was a boy in the late nineteenth century, his family rode the ups and downs of Gilded Age capitalism from near-wealth to near-poverty. His sister remembered young George as an "ornery little boy" who dumped water buckets on her boyfriends and was apt to throw things like cake tins when he got mad. An indifferent student in high school, in the fall of 1897 Marshall decided to pursue a college education below the Mason-Dixon Line at Virginia Military Institute.20 Twenty years before Marshall's birth, VMI students had rallied to the colors at the Battle of New Market, and ten cadets had given their lives for the Confederate cause. Southerners who idolized Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee took no liking to the lanky Pennsylvanian from a city called Uniontown. His Keystone State accent made him a natural target for hazing, and officially overlooked abuse took on a vicious character early in his first, "rat" year. During his second week at school, a gang of upperclassmen forced him to squat over a naked bayonet until ordered to stop. He obeyed until his strength gave out and he sank down onto the blade, leaving a bloody gash on his upper thigh and buttock. Yet Cadet Marshall said nothing to the school's doctors who patched up his wound, and he kept his mouth closed to school investigators as well. His stoicism earned him a pass from hazing for the rest of the year, and during the next three years his military bearing evolved into a gentility worthy of a General Lee. Astute but not intellectual, he graduated fifteenth in a class of thirty-three. His self-discipline and strict adherence to regulations propelled him to first captain of his senior class, the institution's highest cadet rank, setting him on the road to a lieutenant's commission in the United States Army. As a field soldier, Marshall marked time in common Old Army posts: the Philippines, China, the American West. But Marshall's superiors recognized his potential as a staff officer, and the Army began limiting his time as a field commander. In 1918, as a staffer with the First U.S. Army, he carved out a reputation as an organizational genius. After the Armistice, he spent several happy postwar years with his beloved wife, Lily, in Washington, where he served as aide to General John "Black Jack" Pershing, America's hero of the Great War. Marshall's bucolic life was shattered in 1927 when Lily died while recovering from a thyroid operation. Heartbroken, Marshall buried his grief by throwing himself into his work. At the Infantry School in Fort Benning, Georgia, Marshall--now a colonel approaching fifty--led a drive to reform the school. He reorganized the infantry curriculum, improved living conditions for the school's soldiers, and widened his circle of civilian and military acquaintances. One of those new acquaintances was the charismatic founder of the new Center for Infantile Paralysis at Warm Springs, just a few miles east of Benning: New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Another was Katherine Tupper Brown, a widow with three teenage children whom Marshall courted, then married in 1930.21 Three years later, the War Department placed Colonel Marshall in command of nineteen new Civilian Conservation Corps camps. The camps were part of a New Deal public works program to provide employment to young men by teaching them to plant trees, cut trails, and build erosion breaks in national forests. The job of training these young men was repugnant to most regular officers, but Marshall threw himself into the work. The CCC was an interesting, fresh assignment, and Marshall felt his work in training civilians to act in teams would help him diagnose and remedy the growing pains of a large citizen army that one day might be called to defend America's shores. By the late 1930s, Marshall, now a brigadier general, found himself back in Washington at the War Department. As head of the Army's War Plans Department, then deputy chief of staff, Marshall completed his apprenticeship in that mysterious, fluctuating power known as Washington politics. Working the corridors of power in a double-breasted gray business suit, the one-star general meticulously courted legislators, journalists, and movers within the administration.*22 • • • When the time came for the president to select the Army's next chief of staff, few Washington insiders would have put money on the horse from Uniontown. For one thing, he was no politician. Marshall was terrible at remembering names, or pronouncing them correctly, and made a point of honor of refusing personal requests of senators and congressmen except when strictly merited. Marshall also prided himself on straight talk, a practice repugnant to most politicians, including his commander-in-chief. At one White House meeting, FDR proposed a massive aircraft purchase program for the Army Air Corps. Far from being grateful, Marshall bluntly informed the president there was no point in buying planes when the Air Corps lacked pilots, mechanics, spare parts, training fields, and aerodromes to house and service them. Annoyed by the brigadier's impudence, Roosevelt gave Marshall the cold shoulder and abruptly ended the meeting. Disagreeing with the president should have ended Marshall's career. But Marshall had won the backing of Harry Hopkins and the retired General Pershing, whose name commanded respect. The cadet who refused to rat out his upperclassmen had, over the years, built a reputation as honest, closemouthed, and loyal. So in April, FDR summoned him to the White House and told him he would become the Army's next chief of staff.23 The prospect thrilled Marshall, but he kept his exuberance in check. Sitting before the president, Marshall warned Roosevelt that as chief of staff he would have to tell him unpleasant things from time to time. "Is that all right?" asked Marshall. "Yes," said FDR pleasantly. Marshall stared at him. "You said 'yes' pleasantly, but it may be unpleasant," he warned. Unpleasant advice was a condition Roosevelt felt he could live with, for he believed he could trust Marshall to follow orders and keep his mouth shut once a decision was made. "When I disapprove his recommendations," he told Sam Rayburn, the powerful Speaker of the House, "I don't have to look over my shoulder to see whether he is going to the Capitol to lobby against me." Four days later, President Roosevelt announced Marshall's appointment as U.S. Army chief of staff, effective September 1, 1939.24 TWO THE DAGGERS OF WASHINGTON WERE EASILY MATCHED BY THE BAYONETS of Army politics. Marshall was an old-style patriot, a D'Artagnan who served the Republic, not the party that happened to be in power at the moment. But he was not naive. To do his job effectively, the chief of staff had to be a lobbyist, accountant, lawyer, carnival barker, encyclopedia, and Wizard of Oz. He gave speeches to shore up the Army's public support. He provided data to Congress and the White House on appropriations and other laws affecting the Army, which were often hot political potatoes. He answered to the secretary of war--a political appointee--whose bailiwick extended to politicized aspects of Army administration, such as weapon procurement and training camp construction. And some of the time, he was a soldier.1 • • • If the sinews of war are money, as Cicero claimed, in 1939 America's sinews were thin and brittle. Congress had grown used to cutting Depression-era budgets, and in ten years Marshall's paycheck had been cut twice. The Army had 188,656 officers, nurses, and enlisted men the year Marshall took the helm, making it a third the size of the Belgian or Romanian armies. It was a drop in the bucket compared to the legions of Hitler and Mussolini spread over Europe.2 To turn Congress around, Marshall spent the spring of 1940 testifying before appropriations subcommittees and buttonholing committee chairmen. "After the World War," he told Congress, "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." He warned, "If Europe blazes in the late spring or summer, we must put our house in order before the sparks reach the Western Hemisphere." Now Europe was blazing.3 • • • To put that house in order, Marshall first had to win over a president who was anxious to stop Hitler, but hesitated, in post-Depression times, to ask Congress to fork over big bales of cash to the military. Marshall, the outsider, would have to find the right way to approach Roosevelt to get things moving at the top. The logical go-between, so far as the Constitution was concerned, was the secretary of war, Harry Woodring. But Woodring was one of Roosevelt's isolationist cronies, and Roosevelt had better cronies for Marshall's purposes. Bypassing Woodring, he made an appointment to see the secretary of the treasury. Henry Morgenthau Jr., a Dutchess County neighbor of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, was one of FDR's oldest friends. Lacking the financial cunning to take over his father's real estate business, Henry Jr. took up farming. His friendship with Roosevelt was the rock upon which his fortunes rested, and when FDR was elected president in 1932, Morgenthau hoped his friend would appoint him secretary of agriculture. FDR appointed Henry Wallace, a prominent Iowan, to that spot, but not long afterward, his treasury secretary fell ill and was forced to resign. Roosevelt asked Morgenthau to fill the vacancy. It did not matter to Roosevelt that, as Gladys Guggenheim Straus joked, he had managed to find "the only Jew in the world who doesn't know a thing about money." Roosevelt was used to pulling the important levers himself, and he saw Morgenthau, like Secretary of State Cordell Hull, as a figurehead--a fungible man whose basic loyalty ensured that the New Deal's dogma would be zealously preached and observed.4 Morgenthau was also a man who could help Marshall. On May 13, as Hitler's panzers were crashing through France, Roosevelt summoned Morgenthau, Marshall, Budget Director Harold Smith, Secretary of War Woodring and Assistant Secretary Louis Johnson to the Oval Office to discuss cuts in the Army's $657 million appropriations request. Since Woodring was an isolationist, and Marshall had little influence with Roosevelt, it was up to the treasury secretary to convince Roosevelt to resist any further budget reductions. Morgenthau made the Army's pitch, but Roosevelt insisted on additional cuts. Morgenthau pressed his point, then argued with Roosevelt until the annoyed president cut him off. "I am not asking you, I am telling you," he declared. "Well, I still think you're wrong," huffed Morgenthau. "Well, you've filed your protest," said Roosevelt, signaling that the meeting was at an end. "Mr. President," pressed Morgenthau, playing his last card, "will you hear General Marshall?" "I know exactly what he would say. There is no necessity for me to hear him at all." Disregarding the less-than-subtle hint, Marshall walked straight to Roosevelt's desk. Practically standing over the president, he asked, "Mr. President, may I have three minutes?" "Of course, General Marshall." In well over three minutes, Marshall let loose a machine-gun burst of facts, statistics, figures and logic. He described shortages that would dismember operations, logistical gaps that would sire defeats, and lack of funding that would undermine their shared duty to provide for the common defense. He ended his fusillade, saying, "I don't quite know how to express myself about this to the President of the United States, but I will say this--that you have got to do something and you've got to do it today." Set on his heels, Roosevelt said nothing. As he looked at the general bearing down on him with his blue eyes, Roosevelt finally grasped the enormity of the problem Marshall had been describing to Harry Hopkins, Henry Morgenthau, Congress, and anyone else who would listen. He told Marshall to come back the next day with a list of what he needed. Before long, the sinews of war were thickening around Marshall's skeletal force.5 • George Marshall's life settled into a rhythm pendulating between Quarters One, his redbrick residence at Fort Myer, and the old Munitions Building on Constitution Avenue. He awoke early and took a half-hour ride on Rosita, Prepared, or one of his other horses, sometimes alone, sometimes with Katherine or old friends like Colonel George Patton. Over breakfast, he would skim up to nine newspapers, and by 7:15 he would be sitting in the back of his government-issued Plymouth for the seven-minute drive to his office.6 Marshall started his workday behind his large mahogany desk, reviewing messages that had come in overnight from sources around the world. Eventually he established a morning briefing system that gave him the world's big picture. Using a series of maps and charts, Marshall's "G-2" (Intelligence) and "G-3" (Operations) staffs presented a panoramic view of the world at war, region by region. Marshall would often make decisions during the briefing, usually on his own authority, sometimes after consulting with the secretary, sometimes with a call to the White House. The briefings underscored the interconnected nature of the war's moving fronts, ensuring he would not become bogged down in local crises at the expense of global strategy.7 Napoleon once quipped, "An army crawls on its belly," but the U.S. Army crawled on paperwork. Mountains of it. It would have taken dozens of George Marshalls to respond to the requests pouring in from thousands of directions. When he assumed his post, sixty-one staff officers reported to the chief of staff, as well as thirty important and 350 unimportant unit commanders. After Marshall rewrote this unwieldy system, only five officers had unbridled access to the chief.8 Most of Marshall's daily contact was limited to his general staff secretary, three regular secretaries, and an aide. To preserve his energy for the most important matters, Marshall appointed a secretariat to act as his paper gatekeeper. Headed by Colonel Orlando Ward, Lieutenant Colonel Omar Bradley, and Major Walter Bedell "Beetle" Smith, the secretariat arrived a few hours ahead of the chief each day to sift through a mountain of fresh paperwork. These men worked through most of the Army's routine issues, and Marshall expected those issues to be handled without his day-to-day supervision. "Don't fight the problem; solve it," he told them.9 To those who worked for him, Marshall was all business. He seemed born without a sense of humor; if he had one, aides figured, he always left it in his car. Except for his chronic problem remembering names correctly, he was proper, direct, and unequivocal--efficient as a drill press, with the same human warmth. As his civilian secretary Mona Nason charitably put it, "He was a perfectionist himself, and he did the others the honor of expecting them to be perfect too."* "Perfectionism" was one word for it. Descriptions among his staff usually ran something like, "He scared the hell out of the men." When Miss Nason offered to transfer with him in case he was moved out of Washington, Marshall, touched by her loyalty, remarked that no other staffer had offered to move with him. "It's difficult for people to offer because you're so reserved, sir," she replied. Marshall flatly replied, "I have to be, or they'd walk all over me."10 One of Marshall's most important lieutenants was a fellow Pennsylvanian named Major General Henry H. Arnold, head of the Army Air Corps and Marshall's assistant chief of staff for air matters. A bona fide aviation pioneer, Arnold had been trained by the Wright brothers, and he had set three early altitude records. An avid--almost rabid--proponent of airpower, Arnold pushed for the development of a long-range strategic bomber and an expansion of the Air Corps into an autonomous branch of service. His zeal earned him the enmity of many Army staff officers, most line officers, all of the Navy, and even a few journalists like the AP's Steve Early, whose influence with Roosevelt as presidential press secretary nearly sank Arnold's career.*11 Known to friends as "Hap" for his boyish smile and genial personality, Arnold was also one of Marshall's few friends who could get away with office levity. He once sent a comic actor into Marshall's office posing as a pushy Polish émigré seeking a U.S. Army officer's commission. Annoying Marshall by casually referring to him as "colonel" and "captain" in broken English, the man eventually offered Marshall a fine Polish bride in exchange for a commission. As an enraged Marshall was throwing the man out of his office, Arnold burst through the door, howling with laughter.12 Although Marshall's formal job was to manage the Army, he kept a close eye on Washington's power brokers. He memorized the names of the key congressional committee chairmen, journalists, informal advisers, and White House staffers, and he assigned liaison officers to keep those players informed and pacified. Important ones he occasionally hosted for dinner at Quarters One, or took to lunch at Washington's Alibi Club. For Marshall, social engagements were all business; after one dinner party, he calculated that requests made to him that single evening required him to follow up with thirty-two letters and several radiograms.13 By 1940, General Marshall was becoming a power in his own right. Reflecting later, he believed his influence grew because "in the first place, they were certain I had no ulterior motives. In the next place, they had begun to trust my judgment. But most important of all, if Republicans could assure their constituency that they were doing it on my suggestion and not on Mr. Roosevelt's suggestion, they could go ahead and back the thing. [The president] had such enemies that otherwise the members of Congress didn't dare seem to line up with him. And that was true of certain Democrats who were getting pretty bitter."14 Washington power brokers, of course, included the press. The men and women armed with notepads and telephone lists might help or hurt the Army, but because they had space to fill for their readers, they were incapable of doing nothing. Marshall gave these journalists his time and regularly brought them into his office for briefings, both on and off the record. At these briefings, Marshall won over the Fourth Estate, not so much for what he said, but for the way he said it. At a later press conference that became part of the Marshall legend, he briefed some thirty veteran correspondents on the complexities of the war's larger picture. Rather than take questions one at a time, he asked the reporters to give him all their questions before he spoke. Some asked detailed, technical questions, while others wanted to know about broad, geostrategic issues. After everyone had asked their questions, Marshall leaned back in his chair and began speaking. He spoke for forty minutes, without notes, on the war's various facets, going around the world in an integrated presentation that addressed every question from every reporter. As he worked into his narrative the answers to each question, he looked directly at the reporter who posed it. It was, said one journalist, "the most brilliant interview I have ever attended in my life."15 Marshall's twin obsessions were organization and personnel. He built a cadre of hardworking staffers who possessed the intelligence and self-confidence to make decisions without passing everything up to him. He spent hours weeding out the verbose, the inarticulate, and the indecisive. Taking a special dislike to self-promoters--who are as abundant in the Army as anyplace else--he looked for men who put the country's interest above their own. One of his wartime planners, Brigadier General Dwight Eisenhower, vividly remembered the chief's views on promotions, a subject dear to every career officer's heart. "I want you to know that in this war the commanders are going to be promoted and not the staff officers," Marshall told the overworked staff officer. "You are a good case. General Joyce wanted you for a division commander . . . You're not going to get any promotion, you're going to stay here on this job and you will probably never move." Eisenhower, his bald forehead turning crimson, sputtered, "General, I don't give a good God damn about your promotion. I was brought in here to do my duty, I am going to do that duty to the best of my ability and I don't care." As Eisenhower got up and marched to Marshall's door, he looked back sheepishly at his boss. "By God there was a little quick of a smile," he recalled. He later reflected, "[Marshall's] obsession about disliking people that were self-seeking in the matter of promotion or anything else, it was really terrific."*16 The men who survived Marshall's weeding-out process left their marks on the service a thousand different ways. When, for example, "Beetle" Smith learned of a small two-seater being peddled by the Bantam Car Company, he looked into it and made a three-minute pitch to Marshall. Marshall told Beetle to get fifteen samples and have them tested. The contraption, nicknamed the "jeep," was quickly snapped up by every branch of the Army as fast as Bantam, Willys, and Ford could roll them out.17 • • • In the office, Marshall worked with an intensity that awed his associates. But the Army's business was a marathon, not a sprint. He was known for saying no one ever had an original idea after three o'clock, and to keep up his canter, he regularly went home for lunch, took an hour's nap, and left the office each day around four or five in the afternoon. Westerns, detective stories, and The Saturday Evening Post formed the core of his pleasure reading, and he enjoyed lighthearted plays and comedic musicals. His aides, including Lieutenant Colonel Frank McCarthy and his bodyguard, Sergeant James Powder, kept track of everything from notes of things he promised to do for congressmen to his travel kit, which they stocked with pocket novels, chocolate bars, and dime-store reading glasses the chief was forever misplacing.18 The few who knew Marshall outside the office saw a warmth and sense of humor that he withheld from his official family. Though childless, he had a soft spot in his heart for children, especially Katherine's teenage son, Allen Brown. His passion was gardening, he enjoyed Gilbert and Sullivan, he was a fine fishing and duck-hunting companion, and he chuckled at funny stories, even if he was inept at repeating them. He would insist that his staffers get away for occasional vacations, telling them, "I don't want tired men making decisions that affect human lives." When he came home from overseas trips, he was meticulous about writing wives of officers he knew to let them know how their husbands were doing.19 • • • In the words of one journalist, George Marshall was "the most self-confident man who ever wore pants." But the self-confident general often fretted over wild schemes his commander-in-chief might dream up when left to his own devices. He later admitted, "I frankly was fearful of Mr. Roosevelt's introducing political methods of which he was a genius into a military thing. . . . You can't treat military factors in the way you do political factors."20 In 1939, FDR moved the Joint Army-Navy Board into the Executive Office of the President. This bureaucratic shell game, largely unnoticed by Congress or the public, bypassed the secretaries of war and navy and gave Roosevelt a direct line to the nation's military planners. FDR thus became the loom through which all strategic threads ran. New York Times military correspondent Hanson Baldwin, one of the few pressmen who noticed the shift, remarked, "The President is paying even closer attention than formerly to national defense problems and is assuming even more completely his prerogatives as commander-in-chief."21 Cutting out the secretary of war made Marshall uncomfortable. In Marshall's mind, even a machine as cumbersome as an army could function like a Swiss watch as long as duties were logically allocated, men were dedicated, and the organization was properly structured. It bothered him that the president was back-channeling information from the Army. But strict organization was tiresome, even anathema to Roosevelt. As a victim of infantile paralysis at age thirty-nine, he realized life had a certain randomness, and he had learned to become comfortable with inconsistency, even enjoy it. He treated lines of responsibility with benign neglect, to be used when convenient and disregarded when they got in the way. He would dole out overlapping projects to sworn enemies, bypass chains of command, and refuse to bind himself to any precedent that might not suit him in the future. A master of the art of ignoring problems until they solved themselves, FDR encouraged dissent and talked out of both sides of his mouth. Lines would remain fuzzy, opportunities would be seized as they stumbled across his desk, and a film of unpredictability would shadow the American high command.22 Roosevelt's informality especially troubled Marshall. He winced at the president's "cigarette-holder gestures"--a wave of the hand and blithe assurance that things would work out all right. Worst of all, one never knew when the president was making small talk and when he was mining facts for a critical decision. "Informal conversation with the president could get you into trouble," Marshall remembered. "He would talk over something informally at the dinner table and you had trouble disagreeing without embarrassment. So I never went."23 Marshall also avoided visits to Springwood, Roosevelt's Hyde Park mansion. He kept his distance from FDR's inner circle, discouraged Roosevelt from calling him by his first name, and even tried to avoid laughing at the president's jokes. When Harry Hopkins suggested that Roosevelt would welcome Marshall occasionally dropping by for a martini in the presidential study, Marshall replied, "I'm at the president's disposal and he knows it, twenty-four hours of the day. But if I attempted to step out of character, then it would be artificial, and I just don't think that I can or should do it."24 Marshall knew that when someone approached the president with an unpleasant or difficult subject, Roosevelt could parry and feint like a French swordsman. "It was frequently said in those days by politicians who had seen Mr. Roosevelt that they never got a chance to state their case," he reminisced. "He was quite charming and quite voluble and the interview was over before they had a chance to say anything." The best Marshall could do was avoid prolonging FDR's homespun homilies by remaining silent until the president drew a breath, then jump into the problem.25 When Roosevelt did ask Marshall for his opinions, he gave them straight and to the point. He counseled subordinates to put written recommendations to the president in plain English, without flourish, preferably condensed to one page. "He is quickly bored by papers, lengthy discussions, and by anything short of a few pungent sentences of description," Marshall told them. "You have to intrigue his interest."26 Another problem that defied solution was FDR's penchant for talking to key decision-makers without having anyone spread the word about what he was saying. Marshall once complained to Hopkins, "The President at times sees Admiral Leahy, Admiral King, Arnold, or me and then the problem is, who summarizes what has occurred and provides a check to see that the necessary instructions are sent around." He warned Hopkins, "We may get into very serious difficulties in not knowing the nature of the President's revisions of the drafts of messages we submit to him. All of these things may easily lead to tragic consequences."27 THREE AS ROMMEL AND GUDERIAN ADMINISTERED THE FRENCH ARMY ITS LAST rites, Prime Minister Winston Churchill sent Roosevelt a "Most Secret" message vowing to carry on the struggle even if France fell. But to continue that struggle, he needed weapons to defend his island nation while his battered army, being driven off the Continent, licked its wounds. He needed forty or fifty destroyers, he said. He also needed torpedo boats. Several hundred fighter planes. Antiaircraft guns. Ammunition. Artillery sights. Raw steel.1 The request was hardly unexpected, but it arrived at a moment when the Army's pantry, if not bare, was thinly stocked. Marshall warned Henry Morgenthau, whom FDR had placed in charge of weapons sales, "The shortage is terrible, and we have no ammunition for antiaircraft and will not for six months. So if we give them the guns they could not do anything with them. . . . Antitank guns, the situation is similar, a shortage . . . 50-caliber, our situation is the same." The Army Air Corps was training pilots in mocked-up wooden boxes, and General Arnold pointed out that the delivery of even one hundred planes to Britain--about a three-day supply of RAF battle losses--would set the Air Corps training program back six months.2 Europe's democracies looked done for, and it was Marshall's job to build America's arsenal, not give weapons to allies on the brink of surrender. • • • Roosevelt mulled over Churchill's plea, fully aware that a wrong guess about British aid would cost the country dearly. He firmly believed the best way to fight Hitler was with American machines and British blood. But shipping off weapons that might be needed to defend the Western Hemisphere, should London fall, was one of the biggest gambles he had faced since the Hundred Days of 1933. Agonizing over the possibilities, he admitted to Harold Ickes, "If I should guess wrong, the results might be serious." Beetle Smith put it more bluntly to a friend: "Everyone who was a party to the deal might hope to be found hanging from a lamp post."3 Eleanor Roosevelt once quipped, "The president never thinks. He decides." After three weeks of dithering, he decided. The guns would go to Britain. If industry stepped up production, and if he could keep America out of war a little longer, he could make good his losses in weapons. So he hoped.4 There were three hitches. First, naval warships posed special problems, because they constituted a floating steel wall against invasion. Isolationists vehemently opposed the sale of warships, and with Republicans and pacifist Democrats taking aim at him, the summer of 1940 was not the time to force the destroyer question. The warships would have to wait.5 Second, neutrality laws forbade the government from selling weapons to belligerents. Private contractors could sell them for cash, but arms merchants did not have warehouses full of 75-millimeter fieldpieces, tanks, or machine guns. Roosevelt couldn't muster the votes in Congress to repeal the neutrality statutes, so he asked his lieutenants to figure a way around them.6 Morgenthau, Marshall, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles and Acting Attorney General Francis Biddle sent staffers scurrying through old laws to find a loophole. Biddle's lawyers, being lawyers, soon came up with a clever answer: If the weapons were declared "surplus" by the Army Chief of Staff, they could be sold to private corporations, which could in turn resell them to qualified buyers on a "cash-and-carry" basis. Morgenthau would ensure that the only qualified buyer would be Great Britain, and the U.S. Navy would ensure that no unfriendly country could show up to take delivery. Biddle's theory was a beautiful piece of legalistic clockwork. It gave Roosevelt the power to lend Britain a hand, and it seemed legal--or at least legal enough. All that remained was to have General Marshall declare Churchill's aid "surplus," and have Secretary Woodring approve the shipment. Unwilling to entrust this job to Woodring, an isolationist at heart, Roosevelt handed the whip to Morgenthau and told him to crack it without mercy. "Give it an extra push every morning and every night until it is on the ships," he commanded. Morgenthau obediently pressured Marshall to get the weapons into British hands.7 The Army was desperately short of everything, but Marshall did his best to fulfill the president's wish. After sending ordnance clerks to scour armories and warehouses, he tracked down large stocks of World War I rifles, old Lewis machine guns, French 75s, and other semi-obsolete equipment he probably could call "surplus" with a straight face. By giving the British the benefit of every doubt--and counting in the Army's inventory some weapons that were still on assembly lines--Marshall's staff calculated that the Army could part with half a million Enfield rifles, 35,000 machine guns, 500 fieldpieces, a stock of .30-caliber ammunition, and other odds and ends without endangering national security. Marshall signed off, but with serious misgivings. To describe five hundred artillery pieces as "surplus" in 1940 was to stretch the definition like a worn-out inner tube. "It was the only time that I recall that I did something that there was a certain amount of duplicity in it," he later admitted. Other men felt the same way. Assistant Secretary of War Louis Johnson told Roosevelt he wanted a promise that if he, as assistant secretary, were convicted of a felony in shipping the weapons to Britain, Roosevelt would pardon him. Roosevelt threw back his head and let out a hearty laugh. Johnson was not laughing with him.8 Once Marshall came across, the Army moved quickly. Top-priority cables went to arsenals around the country, and weapons were packed in gooey cosmolene and shipped to the Army's arsenal in Edison, New Jersey, for loading onto freighters bound for Liverpool. As the Germans closed in on Paris, Marshall's "surplus" sat in warehouses along Edison's Woodbridge Avenue, ready for loading onto His Anxious Majesty's ships. The last requirement to send them over the ship rails was authorization from the secretary of war.9 And there lay the final catch. Harry Woodring, a former governor of Kansas, reflected America's isolationist heartland. A fixture at the War Department since 1936, Woodring was acutely concerned with the health of America's farms and factories. He wanted combines, not cannon, rolling off assembly lines, and he refused to authorize military aid to Britain unless the President of the United States ordered him to do it. Otherwise, he said, the weapons would stay in America, where they belonged.10 FDR again had to lean on his own functionaries. He ordered Woodring to sign the transfer orders, and under protest, Woodring grudgingly complied. With the last Rube Goldberg link completed, British transports were loaded up and steamed for England, their holds bulging with weapons that would be pointed at Germans before long. America was wriggling out of neutrality's cocoon.11 • • • The arms deal was cloaked in the darkest secrecy--or the darkest secrecy possible, given the number of soldiers, clerks, teamsters, stevedores, diplomats, and railroad workers involved. But a transfer of this size could not be kept under wraps for long, and Roosevelt knew he must get in front of the story. He decided to announce the sale at a June 10 commencement speech at the University of Virginia, where his son Franklin Jr. was graduating from law school. Shortly before he and Eleanor boarded a train for Charlottesville, Roosevelt learned that Italy had just declared war on France and Britain. Mussolini wanted to share in the spoils of war, and Italian claims to French territory would wilt like overcooked linguini if he waited until France surrendered. Sitting in the White House editing a draft of his commencement speech, Roosevelt borrowed a phrase from Bill Bullitt, his ambassador to France, that painted a picture of fascist Italy plunging a knife into the back of its next-door neighbor. State Department Undersecretary Sumner Welles was horrified at the draft's "stab in the back" language, and he argued vehemently that Roosevelt must delete the phrase from his speech. Reluctantly, FDR agreed.12 On the three-hour train ride from Washington, he mulled over the speech with Eleanor in his private railcar. He told her he wanted to speak candidly to the American people, without diplomatic niceties diluting unpleasant truths. His "stab in the back" phrase might rile State--and it would certainly infuriate the Nazis, who claimed they had been stabbed by Jews and Communists--but FDR felt the public should have the facts laid bare, at least in this instance. He asked what she thought. Eleanor was her husband's social conscience, the angel of his better self. With her receding jaw, short-chopped hair, and tapered, oval eyes, she was not pretty, and their marriage, based on respect and necessity, had long lost the embers of passion. It was little more than a political partnership with the added wrinkle of shared offspring. Over drinks with his buddies, FDR would make cutting remarks about Eleanor and the "she-men" and "squaws" who lurched to her progressive banner. But he appreciated Eleanor's vast mental energies, and he valued her as both a moral barometer and a political sounding board. However lifeless their marriage had become, Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt were indispensable to each other. Eleanor thought over her husband's question, though the answer to her was obvious. As the train clacked along the tracks, she replied, "If your conscience won't be satisfied unless you put it in, I would put it in."13 • • • "On this, the tenth day of June 1940, the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor," Roosevelt told the assembled throng of graduates, parents, and journalists. Standing before a sea of black-gowned collegians, Roosevelt declared, "We will extend to the opponents of force the material resources of this nation. . . . All roads leading to the accomplishment of these objectives must be kept clear of obstructions. We will not slow down or detour. Signs and signals call for full speed ahead."14 It was a rousing speech, but isolationists were reading different signs and signals. FDR's foreign policy, bellowed North Dakota Senator Gerald Nye, was "nothing but dangerous adventurism." David Walsh, an isolationist Democrat from Massachusetts, thundered from the Senate floor, "I do not want our forces deprived of one gun, or one bomb or one ship which can aid that American boy whom you and I may someday have to draft." Charles Lindbergh, the hero who flew the Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic, accused Roosevelt of whipping up a "defense hysteria." He warned his countrymen that foreign invasion would become a threat only if "American people bring it on through their own quarreling and meddling with affairs abroad."15 Lindbergh and many smaller voices of isolation spoke for a following that had never bought into the German threat. Most Americans wanted to stay out of a European war, and a hit song of 1939, "Let Them Keep It Over There," summed up popular sentiment. With liberal pacifists, socialists, pseudo-fascists, and anti-Rooseveltians singing a Hallelujah Chorus of isolation, FDR would have to shift elements of his power base and forge a coalition outside the New Deal faithful.16 While much of his own party turned against him, a growing number of Republicans--hard-liners on foreign policy--were openly sympathetic. "When I read Lindbergh's speech, I felt it could not have been better put if it had been written by Goebbels himself," Herbert Hoover's former secretary of state, Henry Stimson, wrote to Roosevelt. Republican dailies like the Boston Herald and San Francisco Monitor threw their voices behind aid to Britain. Republican businessman Wendell Willkie, a contender for the presidency in 1940, told his party's keynote speaker that if the leadership "attempts to put the Republican Party on record as saying what is going on in Europe is none of our business, then we might as well fold up."17 Sensing a new alignment of the planets, FDR began courting leaders on the other side of the aisle. "The President's calling lists cut across party lines," wrote a New York Times journalist who shadowed the president for a day. "Republicans who opposed his policies in 1936 are almost as numerous as well-wishing Democrats in the parade across the White House lobby."18 • As foreign conflict loomed large in Roosevelt's calculations, he preferred not to think about what to do with his obstinate secretary of war, Harry Woodring. "Every time I try to fire him," Roosevelt joked with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, "he says, 'My wife is expecting a baby and I want it to be able to say that I was born when my daddy was the secretary of war.'"19 Roosevelt's advisers felt Woodring had to go. But Roosevelt was, by nature, an optimist who believed every man was his friend until proven different. "His real weakness," Eleanor once told an interviewer, was that Roosevelt "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."20 But angry or not, there could be only one commander-in-chief. Roosevelt needed the War Department carrying out presidential policy, not creating policy of its own. He hated firing old friends, but events were forcing a change at the top. He needed to find new friends. FOUR THE LAST REPUBLICAN WHOM FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT WHOLEHEARTEDLY supported was Cousin Theodore. Since then, he had fought the Grand Old Party in every election. With his victories over Herbert Hoover in 1932 and Alf Landon four years later, FDR had become the opposition's Public Enemy Number One, its John Dillinger, Ming the Merciless, tormentor and nemesis. Along the way, however, Roosevelt had found a few Republicans who did not see him with horns and a pitchfork, while there were more than a few Democrats who did. His big blunders since 1936--a misfired attempt to pack the Supreme Court, a purge of conservative Democrats--had cost him dearly. As New Deal Democrats and liberal pacifists opposed military support for Britain, FDR began reaching out to backbenchers whose credibility among their own kind was unimpeachable. • • • At age seventy-two, Henry Lewis Stimson was an old-line patrician devoted to the twin ideals of American exceptionalism and civic virtue. A graduate of Phillips Academy, Yale University, and Harvard Law School, Stimson had served in some public capacity under nearly every president since Teddy Roosevelt. He had been a U.S. attorney under the elder Roosevelt, secretary of war under President Taft, governor-general of the Philippines under Coolidge, and secretary of state under Hoover. Of average build and height, Stimson wore his white, bowl-cut hair parted in the middle, the same way he had worn it as a young lawyer of the late 1800s. With a salt-and-pepper mustache bristling over his upper lip, he resembled a throwback to the robber baron days when his father had run a Wall Street investment bank for tycoons like Jay Gould and Cornelius Vanderbilt. A disciple of the first President Roosevelt, Stimson, like T.R., believed in a vigorous life spent in service to his country, God, and the Republican Party, more or less in that order. He hunted big game, rode big horses, played a bully game of tennis, and worked with an intensity that belied his age. At fifty, he had shipped off as an infantryman to fight the Kaiser and mustered out of the war with the rank of colonel. During his years out of government service, he testified before Congress on foreign policy matters and corresponded with government officials he had known over his long career.1 When he was secretary of state in the late 1920s, Stimson paid $800,000 to acquire Woodley, a Federal-style mansion near Rock Creek Park formerly owned by Martin Van Buren, Grover Cleveland, and other notables. After Hoover's defeat in 1932, Stimson and his wife, Mabel, moved back to their Huntington, Long Island, estate, Highhold, but kept Woodley to rent to well-bred friends such as Colonel George S. Patton Jr. and State Department Assistant Secretary Adolf Berle.2 Like Roosevelt, Stimson saw the new brand of imperialism as a clear and present danger. With an enemy like Hitler, he told Congress, it made no sense to wait until the foe has "killed off the last nation that stood between us and safety." On the other side of the globe, when Japanese troops overran the Chinese province of Manchuria in 1932, he became one of China's most ardent supporters in Washington. As outgoing secretary of state, he articulated the "Stimson Doctrine," which refused to recognize any treaty forced upon a nation through military conquest. As a private citizen, he worked with industrial elites to boycott trade with Japan.3 Though he shared Roosevelt's desire to halt the fascist tide, Stimson remained ambivalent toward the man. Stimson believed Roosevelt was prone to welsh on gentlemen's agreements. He wholeheartedly agreed with fellow Republicans who found most of the president's initiatives "half-baked and dangerous," and upon his departure in 1933, President Hoover warned Stimson that Roosevelt would misrepresent things told to him in private.4 But Roosevelt had decided to give the War and Navy Departments a political transfusion, and he would use opposition blood. He considered a short list of Republicans, including Alf Landon and New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. Justice Felix Frankfurter, whom Stimson had hired out of law school decades earlier, suggested adding Stimson to the list. Roosevelt liked the idea, but worried that Stimson's age and health might rule him out. Another friend of Stimson's, ignoring medical ethics, went straight to Stimson's personal doctor and asked whether his patient had any significant health problems. Sidestepping those same ethics, the doctor replied that he would answer the question only because the answer was "no."5 Frankfurter relayed this private medical information to Roosevelt. FDR thought about it, but for the moment he did nothing. He had another man to consider. • • • William Franklin Knox had run the Chicago Daily News before tossing his fedora into the 1936 election as Republican vice-presidential nominee. He had risen through the American middle class, from gym teacher, grocery clerk, and street reporter to newspaper publisher and Republican Party leader. When America declared war on Spain in 1898, he flocked to Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders banner and took part in the famed charge near San Juan Hill. He again volunteered during the First World War and came home, like Stimson, wearing a colonel's eagles.6 While Knox idolized the Oyster Bay Roosevelt, he had no love for the Hyde Park variant. After FDR defeated Hoover in 1932, Knox turned his sharp pen against the New Deal. During the 1936 campaign, he attacked Roosevelt's domestic programs with a vengeance. As he told one Boston audience, "The country needs fewer and better Roosevelts." After he recovered from the crushing defeat of 1936, Knox's interventionist beliefs drew him toward the "lesser Roosevelt's" orbit. When Japanese aircraft sank the gunboat USS Panay in the Yangtze River in 1937, he telegrammed Roosevelt to assure him of "my unequivocal support in any further measures you may find it necessary to take to maintain American self-respect and respect for America abroad in a world that has apparently gone drunk and mad." Three years later, he would have dropped the word "apparently."7 Like Stimson, Knox's Republican bona fides made him a perfect choice for a coalition cabinet. It didn't hurt that Knox's rival newspaper was Robert McCormick's Chicago Tribune , flagship of the McCormick-Patterson newspaper syndicate, which had bitterly opposed FDR since 1932. If Knox were willing to throw in his fortunes with a Democrat, he would make a solid addition to FDR's cabinet. FDR had asked Knox to join him in the past. Each time Knox declined, explaining that unless war became imminent, he could not in good conscience join a Democratic administration. Hitler's panzer lunge over the Meuse River changed everything. On June 19, as Congress was passing a massive bill funding a two-ocean navy, Roosevelt rang up Knox and offered him his choice of the War or Navy Department. Henry Stimson, he said, would get whichever department Knox didn't choose. Knowing Stimson had been head of the War Department under Taft, Knox told Roosevelt he didn't know enough about the Army, so FDR gave him the job of navy secretary.8 It didn't matter to Roosevelt that Knox knew even less about the Navy than he did the Army, for Roosevelt intended to act as his own naval secretary. As commander-in-chief, Roosevelt would set naval policy himself; he wanted a functionary, not a policy maker. A superb coastal yachtsman, FDR often reminisced about his years as Woodrow Wilson's assistant secretary of the navy. He intended to direct naval affairs regardless of who his nominal secretary might be.9 • • • That same day, White House telephone operator Louise Hachmeister tracked down Henry Stimson at his apartment in New York's Pierre Hotel. Moments later, FDR's voice came on the line. He wanted to know if Stimson would accept the job of secretary of war. Stimson agreed, on condition that he would not be required to participate in partisan politics. Roosevelt couldn't have been happier to make this concession, and he sent the names of Knox and Stimson to the Senate for approval just as Republicans began gathering in Philadelphia for their 1940 national convention.10 The twin appointments stung GOP delegates and party faithful. The New York Times reported that Stimson and Knox were "virtually read out of the Republican party," and angry Republican senators prepared for a gritty confirmation battle. Time commented, "If there was an opportunity to debate calmly the merits of Republicans Stimson and Knox in a Democratic Cabinet, the opportunity disappeared in the feverish political atmosphere of Convention Week. Senatorial debate grew bitter [and] reached a new low in wild charges and venomous insinuations, punctuated with cries of warmongering from isolationists, and virtual accusations of treason."11 But isolationist cries were weakening in the heartland. Churchill's defiant speeches from London, FDR's "stab in the back" address, and the Nazi onslaught in Europe had swung a narrow margin of public support to Britain's side. In July, Elmo Roper's opinion pollsters found that more than two-thirds of the public favored some kind of aid to Britain. Mainstream newspaper editors came out sympathetically for aid to the democracies, and a whimsical cartoonist signing his name "Dr. Seuss" began lampooning Republican isolationists by drawing their party symbol as an amusing half-elephant/half-ostrich creature, burying its head in the sand. He called his animal a "GOPstrich."12 Aftershocks from this seismic shift among voters rattled Capitol Hill offices. Despite partisan rancor and the opposition of men like Democratic Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, another isolationist firebrand, Stimson's appointment passed on July 9 by a vote of fifty-six to twenty-eight. Knox was confirmed the next day by an even greater margin. Roosevelt's cabinet now included two new war chiefs carrying their second Roosevelt banner--Franklin's, not Teddy's.13 • • • The new secretary of war found an indispensable ally in the Army's chief of staff. Stimson had first met Marshall in France during the Great War, where the two men rode horseback together and shared a mess. Even then, Marshall stood out in Stimson's estimation as a sharp mind and first-rate soldier, and when President Coolidge sent Stimson to the Philippines as governor-general, Stimson unsuccessfully tried to persuade Marshall to join him as his military aide.14 At the end of June, Stimson invited Marshall to visit him at Highhold, and on the twenty-seventh Marshall flew to Long Island's Mitchell Field and took the twenty-minute drive to Highhold. There he had dinner with Henry and Mabel Stimson, and the two men talked genially until midnight. He breakfasted early and flew back to Washington, reassured that he and the new secretary would forge a good working relationship. Marshall enjoyed his brief stay. "They are both delightful people and their farm is charming," he told his wife, Katherine.15 The two men were well matched. Neither harbored ambitions to move into the White House. Stimson trusted Marshall to handle the Army's affairs with Congress, the president, the press, and the British, while Marshall deferred to Stimson on administrative matters. Whenever FDR cut Stimson out of the chain of communication, Marshall briefed him on what the president was doing. Their adjacent offices in the Munitions Building were connected by a door, and that door was, at least figuratively, always open.16 On workdays Stimson, like Marshall, was an "early to bed, early to rise" man. He would awaken at five or six in the morning, dictate his diary entries for the previous day, then leave for work by eight. He threw himself into the department's workload with the fierce intensity he gave his law firm clients, and like Marshall, he disliked tackling complex problems after four or five in the afternoon. He relied on a talented team of lieutenants that included Jack McCloy, another former Wall Street lawyer, and Robert Patterson, who wore the belt of a German soldier he had killed in the First World War.* Stimson's nights were quiet. He avoided the Washington dinner party circuit and dined at home with Mabel and a few guests, mostly old upper-crust friends like the Pattons or the Frankfurters. He might play a round of lawn tennis with friends or colleagues, but usually he and Mabel spent their evenings reading together or listening to the radio. On weekends they escaped Washington's humidity by flying to Highhold, and among the faux rustic charms of his estate, he could unwind, visit old friends, play tennis and ride horses.17 • For three centuries, the British Empire had stretched across the world's oceans. Unlike the great land empires of Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon, Britannia's rule depended on mastery of a line of choke points strung like pearls on a necklace. In 1940, the most important of these pearls were the West Indies, Gibraltar, Cairo, India, Singapore, and Hong Kong. As long as each of these redoubts held, the United Kingdom could shift its resources to defend any threatened portion of her empire. Yet even with these colonies, Britain could not fight a world war without the resources of North America. The empire depended on Canada and the United States for raw materials to feed its factories, and for fruits and grains to feed its workers. The Atlantic shipping lanes carried that food and material; should Hitler slice those arteries, the blood spilling onto the Atlantic floor would ensure England's death. The Royal Navy's best weapon against the U-boat menace was the humble destroyer, the tough rat terriers built to corner and sink submarines. But when Stimson and Knox took the oath of office, half of Britain's prewar destroyer fleet had been sunk or damaged. By mid-June, the Royal Navy had only sixty-eight destroyers fit for combat.18 Finding little opposition in the mid-Atlantic, Hitler's gray wolves unleashed hell. U-boats and bombers based in occupied France, Norway, and the Low Countries sank 155 merchant ships between April and June 1940, faster than Britain could replace its losses.19 The United Kingdom could not survive at this pace. In his May letter to Roosevelt, Churchill had requested fifty destroyers. He urged his request again in June and July with growing urgency. He assured Roosevelt the Royal Navy could make do even with the old four-stack destroyers of World War I vintage. But he needed those warships, and he needed them now. On naval matters, Roosevelt and Churchill spoke the same language. FDR had been assistant navy secretary at the time Churchill had been First Lord of the Admiralty, the equivalent of the U.S. naval secretary. Roosevelt wanted to throw a lifeline to his drowning ally, but because the sale of fighting ships would pose insurmountable political problems, he felt he had to decline. Warships guarded America's shores and produced a feeling of safety that howitzers and fighter planes did not. Senator Walsh, an isolationist, was chairman of the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs, and FDR could not afford to antagonize the isolationist wing at such a delicate time. Yet time was a luxury that Britain could no longer afford. On July 31, an anxious Churchill pleaded anew for the destroyers, concluding, "Mr. President, with great respect I must tell you that in the long history of the world, this is a thing to do now."20 Roosevelt shut himself in the balmy White House, shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, and struggled to find a way to send Churchill those destroyers.* He told his cabinet, "The survival of the British Isles under German attack might very possibly depend on their getting these destroyers."21 But neither he nor his cabinet could figure out how to do it. The answer, and obstacle, was Admiral Harold L. Stark, chief of naval operations and Marshall's opposite number in the Navy. Affable and scholarly, with round glasses anchored below a shock of thick white hair, Stark was the Navy's top strategic thinker and a man with the credentials to persuade Congress to go along. He was also eager to please his commander-in-chief. But as he sat in his spacious office at Main Navy, the Navy's Washington command post, he shook his head. The entire fleet had only 230 destroyers from Manila to the Virgin Islands. How could the Navy Department sell a fifth of its destroyer fleet without crippling America's thinly spread defense? Stark's objection was no abstract policy problem; to him, it was personal. Under a statute authored by Senator Walsh, Stark was required to certify in writing that any ships sold to a foreign government were "not essential to the defense of the United States." Five months earlier, when Stark asked Congress to put the old four-stacks back into commission, he had testified that those destroyers were essential to the nation's defense. Stark felt he had been placed in a terrible position of having to break his word to Congress, or embarrass the president by refusing to go along. Like a martyr resigned to the stake, Stark suggested he should be relieved of command, rather than be forced to recant his congressional testimony.22 Roosevelt brought the question to his cabinet on August 2, and there Frank Knox unwrapped an idea that had been batted around some months earlier: Instead of selling the destroyers for cash, why not swap them for British naval bases in the Caribbean and Canada? Cabinet members supported the concept, but most assumed congressional approval would be necessary. That meant pulling along members of the Republican minority in an election year--an impossible task. Through Stimson, Roosevelt quietly reached out to pro-British Republicans for support, but even Stimson could make no headway.23 Roosevelt decided the stakes were too high to allow the fate of Britain to rest in the hands of Congress and a conscience-stricken admiral. He asked Dean Acheson, a Washington lawyer and former treasury undersecretary, to look through the laws and opine whether he needed congressional approval for a ships-for-bases trade. Acheson prepared a memorandum concluding that the commander-in-chief could authorize the transfer if the new bases would, on balance, increase the nation's security. If the bases were more valuable than the destroyers, Admiral Stark could honestly certify that the ships were unnecessary to national defense.24 Two days later, Roosevelt convened a luncheon at the White House with Stimson, Knox, Morgenthau, and Undersecretary Welles. He told his lieutenants--two conservative Republicans and two liberal Democrats--that he would accept Acheson's advice and make the deal with Churchill. He would inform Congress after the bargain was struck. He would catch hell from both sides of the aisle, probably, but it had to be done.25 Roosevelt's patchwork of legalisms would hardly have convinced a neutral jurist. But FDR saw the issue in simpler terms: As commander-in-chief of the armed forces--and head of state--he could send warships wherever they would do the country the most good. In 1907, the elder Roosevelt had done the same thing when he sent the Great White Fleet around the world, and FDR felt he had a better case for action than Cousin Theodore had.26 To Roosevelt, legal technicalities were fine so long as they didn't conflict with either the common defense or the general welfare--the really important things that follow the Constitution's opener, "We the People." His attorney general, Robert Jackson, later remarked, "The President had a tendency to think in terms of right and wrong, instead of terms of legal and illegal. Because he thought that his motives were always good for the things that he wanted to do, he found difficulty in thinking that there could be legal limitations on them."27 Admiral Stark knew that serving Roosevelt sometimes required bending those legal limitations. Some years earlier, when FDR had ordered him to build a set of bases in South America under dubious authority, Stark remarked that he would do it, but "I'll be breaking all the laws." "That's all right, Betty," Roosevelt joked, using Stark's Naval Academy nickname. "We'll go to jail together."28 Roosevelt offered Churchill fifty destroyers in return for ninety-nine-year leases on seven British possessions off the Canadian coast and in the Caribbean Sea. It was a stiff price to pay, but a desperate Churchill accepted. The details would be worked out between FDR and Prime Minister Mackenzie King of Canada.29 Roosevelt took Stimson with him to meet with the Canadian PM in upstate New York, near where the First U.S. Army was holding maneuvers. Because the secretary of the navy was not invited and the secretary of state was on vacation, Roosevelt negotiated the deal through his secretary of war. "It is a funny situation," Stimson told his diary two days later . "For the last few days I have been acting more as Secretary of State than Secretary of War." 30 FDR didn't care about procedural formalities. He announced the deal in a press conference two weeks later. The destroyers-for-bases agreement, he claimed, was "probably the most important thing that has come for American defense since the Louisiana Purchase." When asked if the Senate had to ratify his decision, a beaming president said the deal "is all over. It is done."31 With a wave of Roosevelt's cigarette holder, Churchill had his destroyers. But the decision, Stimson knew, courted risk. Where, he wondered, would that leave America? FIVE FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT LOVED TREES. HE TOOK PRIDE IN SELECTING THE varieties his workers planted around Hyde Park. He talked trees with his neighbors, and in his travels up and down the eastern United States he studied the maples, pines, sassafras, poplars, magnolias, and oaks that filled the landscape from Campobello to Warm Springs. He understood, better than any other American, how the growing war effort mimicked those arboreal sentinels. The roots of the nation's might lay buried in its farms, mines, factories, and homes. The thick trunk--Congress, the White House, the War and Navy Departments, and the hundred-odd civilian agencies that ran the mobilization effort--channeled resources drawn from those roots. From that unruly trunk flowed arms, ammunition, food, supplies, and men into the ground, air, and sea forces, logistical departments, civil affairs, and diplomatic and intelligence services. Roosevelt, his budget director once observed, "was the only one who really understood the meaning of total war. " He appreciated, better than most of his military advisers, how a fighter plane sent to China affected Japan's threat to Russia, Russia's war with Germany, and Germany's campaign against Britain. As Roosevelt told a group of reporters, "There is just one front, which includes at home as well as abroad. It is all part of the picture of trying to win the war."1 He liked to say, "If war does come, we will make it a New Deal war." Roosevelt had already organized masses of men to fight unemployment and inflation. If the Great Depression could be overcome by American determination and competent leadership, that same energy, he believed, could vanquish the tyrants of Europe.2 • • • Yet America's power still lay dormant. In 1940, its arms production was a quarter of Germany's. Steel plants were producing a third of their capacity. Shipyards took years to produce warships, and raw materials like tin, bauxite, and rubber were in dangerously short supply. American industry held immense potential, but it would be years before speeches, laws, and government money could turn that potential into weapons fired by trained soldiers.3 FDR knew the New Deal was a four-letter word to most men running the war industries. In his 1936 campaign, he denounced business magnates as "economic royalists," a term that raised vague images of guillotines and Madame Defarge. The National Labor Relations Act alone--to say nothing of the minimum wage law, securities regulations, or taxes funding the National Recovery Act--guaranteed that the name "Roosevelt" would be cursed in the dark-paneled clubs where barons gathered to blow off steam and plot their defense against New Deal revolutionaries.4 Yet capitalism, like democracy, spreads power among many players, and some of those players agreed with Roosevelt's foreign policy. To bring these economic royalists into his fold, FDR established a seven-member board, christened the National Defense Advisory Commission (NDAC), to which he appointed William Knudsen of General Motors, Edward Stettinius of U.S. Steel, and Ralph Budd, chairman of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railway.5 It was an inspired decision. Knudsen, Stettinius, and Budd, natural leaders of the anti-Roosevelt clique, had spent eight years as outcasts in a New Deal-dominated Washington. Finding themselves welcomed back as patriots, they began bringing over fellow titans of industry. As with most of Roosevelt's decisions, a move in one direction was balanced by a move in the opposite. He ensured the left controlled the NDAC by giving progressives four of the board's seven votes. He appointed union leader Sidney Hillman, the Trotsky of organized labor, to give workers a voice on the committee. Leon Henderson, a New Deal zealot, was appointed to handle prices. University of North Carolina Dean Harriett Elliott would advocate for consumers, and Federal Reserve Board member Chester Davis would provide input on farm production. Most importantly, the board reported to the president, ensuring that if any serious threat to New Deal progressivism arose, the New Deal would win. In the NDAC, Roosevelt established a board charged with forging the tools of war. But he was careful not to take too great a step at one time. He knew the public would be torn between arms production and consumer goods, and at his press conference announcing the NDAC's formation, he was quick to reassure voters that rearmament would not force Americans to sacrifice too much butter for guns. "I think the people should realize that we are not going to upset, any more than we have to, a great many of the normal processes of life," he told a group of journalists. American women, he promised, "will not have to forgo cosmetics, lipsticks, ice cream sodas. . . . In other words, we do not want to upset the normal trend of things any more than we possibly can help."6 • Women might not have to forgo lipsticks, but young, able-bodied men would give up a great deal more than that before America would be ready to fight. In late May, FDR asked Congress to approve a contingency plan for calling up the National Guard, and in early June War Department planners urged Marshall to ask Congress to increase the size of the Regular Army to 530,000 men. Those men, they suggested, would form a cadre to train Guardsmen and draftees when the time was right. Into this lion's den Roosevelt trod with caution. As Camel butts piled in his desk ashtray, he plotted his course with the eye of an old sailor scanning the clouds for squalls. An early push for conscription, he concluded, would derail aid to Britain, because a draft in mid-1940 would exaggerate the Army's shortage of rifles, planes, and ammunition. Isolationists like Walsh, Wheeler, and Lindbergh would wail that British aid was leaving the new draftees without the tools they needed to do their jobs. Roosevelt disagreed. Better, he thought, to send those weapons overseas to fight Hitler now, rather than have them worn out or broken during basic training.7 Weighing on Roosevelt's mind was a fog of fear settling over the public. A coalition of isolationists, liberals, academics, and pacifists had rapidly coalesced against the draft, believing a draft would necessarily lead to war. Women calling themselves "Mothers of the USA" donned black veils and marched before the Capitol to oppose compulsory service. For now, FDR backed down. His problem, he admitted, was "to get the American people to think of conceivable consequences without thinking that they are going to be dragged into this war." He explained to one diplomat, "American mothers don't want their boys to be soldiers."* He quietly ordered his military advisers to plan for expansion, but cautioned them to say nothing that might alarm the public.8 • • • As Hitler tightened his grip on Western Europe, FDR's public silence about the draft threw Stimson and Stark into fits. It might take a year to turn a schoolteacher into a tanker or boatswain--longer for some specialists--and America needed those men now. Believing the public would follow its leader, Admiral Stark candidly told Roosevelt, "You could do so much more if you would strike out and lead."9 But as Roosevelt told his speechwriter, Sam Rosenman, "It is a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead--and find no one there."10 General Marshall, a veteran of the Civilian Conservation Corps mobilization, was in no hurry to strike out and lead. A giant conscripted army in the summer of 1940 would be unmanageable because the bewildered draftees would have no place to sleep, no chow to eat, and no one to salute. Marshall needed to train more sergeants and build more training camps before he could absorb a mass of conscripts. He was pressing every officer, congressman, and contractor to lay this foundation, but even with his officers moving at full speed, he knew the Army would not be ready for some months. Politically, Marshall saw conscription as a glass of milk that would sour if left on the table too long. No one could know when war would come; it might be in late 1940, perhaps next year--or perhaps never. But once the president called out the National Guard or conscripted civilians, the Army would have a treacherously short window in which to train and deploy those men. Before long, politically connected Guardsmen and their families would begin pressuring congressmen to send their sons and husbands home. If Congress gave way and released the draftees, the Army might become a gutted shell just as the crisis hit American shores. Marshall also knew a political danger awaited an army drafting its citizens. Muckraker journalists waited in the wings to break stories of a palace coup at the first sign of military expansion, and isolationists in the heartland would make a receptive audience. So Marshall insisted that any move to boost the Army's size must originate with Congress, not the War Department. The Army, he insisted, would play the role of reluctant bride led to the altar. "You might say," he mused later, "that the Army played politics in this period. That is a crude expression. Actually, we had a high regard for politics. We had regard for the fact that the president did not feel assured he would get the backing of the people generally and in the Middle West particularly and had to move with great caution."11 At the end of June, a Democratic senator and a Republican congressman introduced a bill instituting a peacetime draft. The public was now willing to talk about conscription. With Congress taking the lead, Marshall and Stark felt they could safely encourage passage of a selective service bill, coupled with a twelve-month federalization of the National Guard and appropriations for barracks, uniforms, and vehicles for the new draftees.12 The next step was to get a cautious president to strike out and lead. • • • After six weeks of prodding by Marshall, Stark, Stimson, and others, FDR publicly threw his weight behind the selective service bill. Sitting before a bank of reporters crowding his Oval Office on August 2, he took a question about the draft from the Baltimore Sun 's Fred Essary. "Mr. President," said Essary, "there is a very definite feeling in congressional circles that you are not very hot about this conscription legislation and as a result, it is really languishing." Roosevelt jumped on Essary's question with both feet. Declaring that selective service was essential to national defense, he said he hoped war would not come, but if it did come, the nation must be ready. "We figured out in 1917 that the selective training or selective draft was the fairest and in all ways the most efficient way of conducting a war if we had to go to war," he said. "I still think so, and I think a majority of the people in this country think so, when they understand it."13 He hoped they did. A peacetime draft was a supreme gamble in an election year. His traditional allies--youth organizations, New Dealers, organized labor--found military service repugnant. Conscription might provide the best hope for America's defense, but it also provided the best hope for Republicans looking to unseat their nemesis in the next election, should he run again.14 • It had gone almost without saying that Roosevelt would decline to run for a third term, a venerated custom observed by George Washington and respected by every president since 1796. Conservatives, including Stimson, felt it would be a mistake for him to run again. At times FDR considered progressive stalwarts like Cordell Hull, Harry Hopkins, South Carolina Senator James Byrnes, and others as possible successors. But by the summer of 1940, Roosevelt had no disciple with the right combination of skills for a wartime presidency. The fall of France had brought war closer to American shores, and as FDR saw it, the country couldn't afford to change horses in the middle of a rapidly filling stream.15 There was also the lure of the office, though Roosevelt wouldn't admit it. He had been at the center of power for nearly eight years, and he had enjoyed almost every minute at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. So in the wee morning hours of July 19, speaking from the White House broadcast room, Franklin Roosevelt explained his reasons for breaking Washington's sacred custom: Lying awake, as I have on many nights, I have asked myself whether I have the right, as commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy, to call on men and women to serve their country or to train themselves to serve and, at the same time, decline to serve my country in my own personal capacity if I am called upon to do so by the people. . . . 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 satisfactions 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.16 There was at least one other man who felt he could be of service to the republic. While Roosevelt's subalterns were building the case for conscription, Republicans meeting in Philadelphia nominated Indiana businessman Wendell Willkie for president. The war in general, and the draft specifically, would be the election's great issue. The Republican candidate could take that issue off the table by endorsing conscription, or he could use it as a political blackjack. To FDR's relief, Willkie took it off the table. In his acceptance speech he declared, "I cannot ask any American to put their faith in me without recording my conviction that some form of selective service is the only democratic way in which to assure the trained and competent manpower we need in our national defense." Willkie went even further, telling his audience he agreed with Roosevelt: The full material might of America must be brought to support the western democracies.17 Willkie was a political outsider with the horse sense to agree with a good idea, even if that idea came from his opponent. But horse sense and political sense are two different things, and Willkie's endorsement of the draft couldn't help his electoral prospects. He was failing to distinguish himself from his opponent, and he would be left playing "me, too" on two of the election's most important foreign policy issues. Reading a transcript of his challenger's speech that night, Roosevelt beamed. "Willkie is lost."18 • • • While the Republican nominee supported the draft, his fellow conservatives, Democratic isolationists, and pacifists fought a rearguard action to halt selective service. As the bill wound through both houses of Congress, they launched hit-and-run attacks with crippling amendments and procedural objections. The Senate came within one vote of prohibiting the use of the National Guard outside U.S. territorial limits, while Representative Hamilton Fish of New York, Roosevelt's implacable foe from Dutchess County, persuaded colleagues to defer the draft's implementation until after the election. Two congressmen became so bitter they exchanged curse words and blows in the House chamber.19 Marshall and Stimson spent long hours brokering compromises to defeat killer amendments, and they watched anxiously as the bill worked its way to the House and Senate floors in September. The deadlock was finally broken on the fourteenth, when the House and Senate passed a bill that Roosevelt, Stimson, Marshall, and Stark could support. Two days later, Roosevelt signed the bill in the Oval Office as Stimson, Marshall, and the chairmen of the House and Senate military affairs committees looked on, unsure whether to appear supremely pleased or stately and solemn.20 When Roosevelt lifted his fountain pen, sixteen and a half million men became eligible for military service. Marshall was now authorized to call up to 900,000 men annually to fill nine Regular Army infantry divisions, four armored and two cavalry divisions, and eighteen National Guard divisions. In the event the country needed a dramatic expansion--say, to five million or more--it was Marshall's hope to use these first draftees as the backbone of a larger force.21 That evening, General Marshall appeared on the CBS radio network. He announced, "For the first time in our history we are beginning in time of peace to train an army of citizen-soldiers which may save us from the tragedy of war."22 But to train that army of citizen-soldiers, Marshall would have to rein in a president intent on giving away his army's weapons. He was about to learn how hard that would be. SIX ON SEPTEMBER 7, 1940, REICHSMARSCHALL HERMANN GÖRING LAUNCHED his long-awaited bombing campaign to shatter British will to resist. For two months, swarms of Junkers and Heinkel bombers gathered nightly to drop ton after ton of incendiaries on London and other major cities. Civilians burned to death, or were crushed beneath the rubble of flats, cathedrals and storefronts. Air wardens directed terrified Londoners into Underground tunnels and fought blazes that lit the night sky. Ambulance drivers negotiated debris-choked streets in the dark, and flak gunners threw everything in their limbers at the bombers. Though Roosevelt ordered Stimson and Marshall to send England every weapon they could spare, Stimson doubted there was much left to give. "This is going to be a rather agonizing affair, because we have so little that we can give them, if anything," he told his diary.1 Three weeks into the Blitz, Roosevelt summoned his military advisers and Morgenthau to discuss weapons shipments to Britain. One item high on his list was Boeing's new B-17 "Flying Fortress" bomber. He wanted bombs dropping on Berlin, and he asked Marshall when he would ship those Fortresses to England. An uncomfortable pause. Marshall replied that the Army Air Corps had forty-nine bombers fit for duty on the continental United States . Forty-nine. "The President's head went back as if someone had hit him in the chest," wrote Stimson.2 But FDR recovered quickly, and he would not be put off by mere numbers, even if those numbers came from generals. Military men sometimes had to be pushed, or they would wait and wait until they had everything just right. Since everything would never be just right, Roosevelt wanted someone he trusted, someone like Morgenthau or Hopkins, doing the pushing. To Stimson and Marshall, the president was pushing the wrong way. An orderly plan for allocating weapons was needed, wrote Stimson, "so that we will not make the decisions, these vital decisions, as to what we give or do not give to the British, too haphazardly and under the emotion of a single moment." Frustrated with Roosevelt's extemporaneous donations, in early 1940 the Army's air chief, "Hap" Arnold, testified before Congress that Air Corps effectiveness was being adversely affected by arms shipments to Britain. When a furious Henry Morgenthau learned of Arnold's testimony, he went straight to FDR, who blew his stack. At his next meeting with Marshall and his staff, Roosevelt warned Arnold that there were places to which officers who did not "play ball" might be sent, "such as Guam." For the next nine months, Arnold was persona non grata at the White House.3 Roosevelt would make his generals play ball. When he learned the Army had no existing planes to spare for Britain, he turned his attention to aircraft still in production. Before year's end, he announced that the United States would split production of new warplanes with the United Kingdom on an "even-Steven" basis.4 Marshall held the line against Roosevelt's largesse. In a follow-up meeting, he had his aides show the president a chart indicating that only a third of the planes scheduled for production that month had actually been produced. He dryly asked whether the British would get half the number the Americans intended to produce or half the number they actually produced. Stung by the implication that he was selling every available plane to Britain, FDR looked sharply at Marshall. "Don't let me see that chart again," he growled. Unruffled, Marshall merely nodded. He had made his point.5 • • • The chart disappeared, but Congress did not. Churchill wasn't giving away more bases, and the Justice Department concluded that bombers could not be sold to Britain without congressional authorization. That required Marshall to certify that B-17 Flying Fortress bombers were unnecessary to U.S. defense, a patently absurd proposition. Running out of room to maneuver, Roosevelt suggested giving Britain a limited number of Forts to test under combat conditions. It would provide useful information for future design modifications, he claimed, which would enhance the nation's defense. In his diary that night, Stimson called it "the only peg on which we could hang the proposition legally." 6 The peg gave way when Justice Department lawyers concluded that Roosevelt could not part with U.S. property without congressional permission, even for "testing" purposes. Stimson, a more experienced lawyer than anyone at Justice, then came up with another creative solution. Perhaps, he suggested, Marshall could certify that B-17 bombers were unnecessary if they were traded for B-24 Liberator bombers still on production lines but allocated to England under the "even-Steven" rule. This peg was nearly as shaky as the last one, but a sheepish Marshall complied. Like Admiral Stark, he had personal misgivings about using contorted legalisms to send weapons to London. Marshall later confessed, "I was a little ashamed of this because I felt that I was straining at the subject in order to get around the resolution of Congress."7 • • • Coming off the selective service victory, Henry Stimson trudged through the pains of an army in adolescent growth. Labor issues, housing shortages, production delays, and organizational flaws up and down the Army's structure consumed his working days and never seemed to be resolved. What vexed Stimson more than anything was FDR's penchant for making far-reaching decisions with no apparent method beyond whim or instinct. As Stimson saw it, two-thirds of the government's problems came from "the topsy-turvy, upside-down system of poor administration [by] which Mr. Roosevelt runs the government." After a particularly tiresome discussion on war production, Stimson told his diary, "Conferences with the President are difficult matters. His mind does not follow easily a consecutive chain of thought but he is full of stories and incidents and hops about in his discussion from suggestion to suggestion and it is very much like chasing a vagrant beam of sunshine around a vacant room." 8 Occasionally, however, the vagrant beam of sunshine surprised Stimson. Once he complained to FDR that the administration's price control board was retarding war production by holding prices artificially low. Roosevelt, an old hand at economic manipulation, knew that high wages and consumer-goods shortages were a recipe for crippling inflation. He told Stimson he did not want weapons production spurring a "boom of rising prices" before the war, because after the war he wanted no severe price drops disrupting the economy. The nation's long-term interest required prices to remain relatively stable, and that required government to regulate prices in the arms market. Stimson, the son of a Wall Street investment banker, believed in the free market like he believed in gravity or an all-powerful God. But he admitted he had not considered the economic impact of the war over the long run. As secretary of war, he didn't have to. But the president had to think about it every day. The more he saw of Roosevelt, the more Stimson admired the man. Some months later, after watching him digest a War Department study of tank production, Stimson mused, " It is marvelous how he can give so much attention to a detail and to do it so well as he has done this. . . . He has spread himself out extremely thin but nevertheless he does carry a wonderful memory and a great amount of penetrative shrewdness into each of these activities ."9 • There was one question neither Roosevelt nor Stimson could answer, because in 1940 there was no practical answer. The Regular Army, numbering nearly half a million men, included 4,700 black soldiers, two black line officers--one nearing retirement age--and four colored combat units led by white officers. Most black enlisted men were assigned as laborers in quartermaster, engineer, or infantry units. Compared to its sister services, the Army was progressive. The Air Corps would not train black pilots. The Navy had no black Annapolis graduates, and no black marines; with the exception of six petty officers, black sailors onshore were assigned dock and warehouse duties. Shipboard assignments for a Negro sailor were limited to cook or valet--"seagoing bellhops," the black press called them. Given the tremendous manpower expansion the war would require, it made sense to find ways to boost non-white enlistment. But the most Roosevelt would back in an election year was a Selective Service Act provision pledging to increase black military participation to the Negro proportion of the civilian population, about 10 percent. The catch, buried within the statute's language, was a proviso that no man of any race would be inducted "until adequate provision shall have been made for shelter, sanitary facilities, water supplies, heating and lighting arrangements, medical care and hospital accommodations." Whites had these accommodations, but since segregated facilities would require construction of a new set of barracks, hospitals, and other infrastructure, the "separate but equal" philosophy prevailing since Plessy sued Judge Ferguson would ensure that the Army remained all but closed to new black enlistees.10 Civil rights leaders, led by the Urban League's T. Arnold Hill and union organizer A. Philip Randolph, called on Roosevelt to open military doors to greater Negro participation. Their demand put FDR in a vise between two groups he could not afford to alienate--moderately conservative whites and reliably Democratic blacks. Under the pressure of an election year, Roosevelt had no choice but to meet with Randolph and Hill. On September 27, Roosevelt, Knox, and Stimson's assistant Robert Patterson met in the Oval Office with Randolph, Hill, and Walter White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. As they talked, Roosevelt's secret office recorder documented the exchange.11 "Mr. President," Randolph began, "it would mean a great deal to the morale of the Negro people if you could make some announcement on the role the Negroes will play in the armed forces of the nation. . . . I might say that it is the irritating spot among the Negro people." "Yeah, yeah," agreed Roosevelt. "They feel that they're not wanted in the various armed forces of the country and they feel that they have earned the right to participate." Roosevelt said he would add something about that in a speech he would give in the near future. "It's a start," said Randolph. "Hell, you and I know it's a step ahead," agreed Roosevelt. FDR explained his next steps in his typically serpentine fashion. "Now, you take the divisional organization. What are your new divisions? About twelve thousand men." "Fourteen. They vary--" began Patterson. "Yes, and twelve, fourteen thousand men," said Roosevelt. "Now suppose you have in there one--what do they call the gun units? Artillery?" "Batteries," said Patterson. "What?" "Batteries." "One battery, with Negro troops and officers, in there in that battery, uh, like for instance from New York, and another regiment, or battalion--that's half a regiment--of Negro troops. They go into a division, a whole division of twelve thousand. And you may have a Negro regiment, you would, here, and right over here on the right in line would be a white regiment in the same division, maintain the divisional organization. Now what happens? After a while, in the case of war those people get shifted from one to the other. The thing we sort of back into." As for the Navy, Roosevelt vaguely claimed that inroads were being made for black sailors outside the messmen's corps. Turning to Knox, he said, "Another thing I forgot to mention, I thought it about, oh, a month ago, and that is this: We are training a certain number of musicians on board ship, the ship's band. Now there's no reason why we shouldn't have a colored band on these ships, because they're darn good at it." The dismay on the faces of the black leaders set Roosevelt on his heels. "At worst, it will increase the opportunity," he said defensively. "That's what we're after."12 But Knox was not interested in opportunity. He had to work with the admirals whose officers would revolt, and he flatly declared that the Navy's special circumstances--men living and working in confined quarters--made integration unworkable. "We have a factor in the Navy that is not so in the Army, and that is that these men live aboard ship," he said. "In our history we don't take Negroes into a ship's company." He added that it was a particular problem for sailors and officers from Southern states. Trying to lighten the atmosphere, Roosevelt joked, "If you could have a Northern ship and a Southern ship it would be different."13 The civic leaders were not amused. But they left the Oval Office believing Roosevelt sympathized with them enough to act on their rather modest requests. FDR left the meeting torn between his notion of equality and the demands of the moment. His conscience told him that if war came, the Negro soldier deserved the right to etch his place among the nation's war monuments. Colored troops had fought bravely at Battery Wagner, San Juan Hill, and the Meuse-Argonne, and he saw acceptance of black troops as a morally compelling step. But the country was also facing a grave foreign threat, and he was facing an election year. The day Roosevelt met with Randolph, Hill, and White, General Marshall was writing Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. that it was no time "for critical experiments which would have a highly destructive effect on morale," such as service integration. With Europe under Hitler's jackboot, America could not afford to weaken its anemic military power through a new social initiative.14 Stimson agreed. He was the son of an abolitionist who had fought for the Union, but Henry Stimson's job was to build an Army, not reform society or rectify inequities rooted in 300 years of slavery. He told his diary, "This crime of our forefathers had produced a problem which was almost impossible of solution in this country and I myself could see no theoretical or logical solution for it at war times like these . " 15 • • • A stumble by the president's press secretary, Steve Early, triggered another lurch toward desegregation. When the September White House meeting produced no apparent results, black leaders turned to Eleanor Roosevelt. She began hounding the War Department to make concessions to the concept of equality, and aggressively followed up on complaints of discrimination by colored soldiers in training camps and surrounding towns.16 Pushed by Eleanor, the Army agreed to induct colored units into each major branch of service, including aviation training. It refused to integrate units below the brigade level, however. "The policy of the War Department is not to intermingle colored and white enlisted personnel in the same regimental organizations," it announced. "This policy has proven satisfactory over a long period and to make changes would produce situations destructive to morale and detrimental to the preparation for national defense."17 When the White House acknowledged the statement, Early gave journalists the misleading impression that the black leaders who met with Roosevelt agreed with the War Department's policy. The outraged trio called Early's statement a gross mischaracterization of their meeting with Roosevelt and denounced the Army's policy as "a blow at the patriotism of twelve million Negro citizens." Black newspapers picked up the cry, which echoed in the mainstream press. Harlem's Amsterdam News lashed out at the "Jim Crow Army," while the Kansas City Call carried the story under headlines blaring, "Roosevelt Charged With Trickery in Announcing Jim Crow Army Policy."18 The attacks stung FDR, who would be counting on heavy black voter turnout in November. When Eleanor explained to her husband the predicament the civil rights leaders were in--they had to respond to Early's statement, or their constituents would accuse them of selling out--Roosevelt issued a clarifying statement of his own. There was no fixed policy regarding future units, he said, so the War Department's policy was not necessarily the way things would always be. "At this time and this time only, we dare not confuse the issue of prompt preparedness with a new social experiment, however important and desirable it may be."19 Roosevelt's clarifying statement actually made his position less clear. But as a sop to civil rights leaders, he announced the promotion of Colonel Benjamin Davis, 36th Coast Artillery Regiment, to brigadier general. He also had Stimson appoint Howard Law School's Dean William Hastie as civilian aide to the secretary of war on matters of race.20 Stimson was furious at the election-year concessions. He frumped to his diary, "There is a tremendous drive going on by the negroes, taking advantage of the last weeks of the campaign in order to force the Army and the Navy into doing things for their race which would not otherwise be done and which are certainly not in the interest of sound national defense. " The root cause, he grumbled, was "Mrs. Roosevelt's intrusive and impulsive folly . " 21 Whether folly, political gamesmanship, or sound policy, the War Department made limited efforts to accommodate its commander-in-chief. Marshall formed a cavalry brigade from its two traditional colored regiments, the Ninth and Tenth, and he placed General Davis at the brigade's head. The Army Air Corps also began providing limited, indirect support for black pilots through the Civilian Pilot Training Program based near Tuskegee, Alabama.22 An annoyed Stimson doubted that the newly inducted men would develop the leadership skills required of combat officers, and he did little more than pay lip service to Dean Hastie's cause. During an unusually lighthearted cabinet meeting, he wrote, "I had a good deal of fun with Knox over the necessity that he was now facing of appointing a colored Admiral and a battle fleet full of colored sailors. . . . I told him that when I called next time at the Navy Department with my colored Brigadier General I expected to be met with the colored Admiral." 23 • FDR had declared Wendell Willkie's prospects dead in August, but by late September the morbid campaign had a curiously strong heartbeat. After a soft start, Willkie began throwing hard rhetorical punches hitting on the evils of a third-term presidency, and blistered Roosevelt's warmongering foreign policy. Cheering supporters in Republican strongholds played up the theme with the fervor of a tent-revival choir. If Roosevelt won, Willkie told an audience in October, "You can count on our men being on transports for Europe six months from now."24 Willkie's wave was rising, and no one knew when it would crest. By October, Roosevelt's lead appeared vulnerable, and just as the Gallup organization showed Willkie gaining in strength, John Lewis of the Congress of Industrial Organizations spurned Roosevelt, his longtime ally, and endorsed Willkie as the lesser of two evils. When the defection became public, labor leader Sidney Hillman remarked after the meeting that he had never seen Roosevelt "so thoroughly scared."25 Excerpted from American Warlords: How Roosevelt's High Command Led America to Victory in World War II by Jonathan W. Jordan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
