HOME                                                           CHAPTER XI--SUNSET
 

 In the summer of 1944 with the quadrennial presidential election in the offing, the Gallup Poll revealed that many Americans were concerned about the state of Roosevelt's health. The press photographers had always obligingly avoided shots of FDR being carried or using his wheelchairs, but now Colonel Robert McCormick's Chicago Tribune printed a series of photos showing that the chief executive's features had dramatically aged since 1933, causing FDR's press secretary to be extra-careful about the angles that photographers were using in shooting the chief. The Republicans began talking about tired old men. The theme was never fully developed during the campaign, partly because FDR undertook his trip to the West Coast, Hawaii, and Alaska to quiet rumors about his health, and campaigned vigorously in the final weeks. But the Republicans had a better issue than they realized. FDR had become increasingly vulnerable, and the country with him. For, had he died before inauguration day in January 1945, he would have given way to Henry Wallace, a left-wing mystic, who would have been on a collision course with the increasingly conservative Congress. After that date, had FDR been  incapacitated, like Woodrow Wilson, he would have precipitated a power struggle within the presidency, which might have lasted the full four years of his term. In short, those who urged him to run again, knowing his condition, trod a cynical, risky road, even after replacing Wallace on the ticket with the Missouri Senator Harry Truman. Truman early realized the truth about  his chief's health and assumed that one day, not far off, he would succeed him.

Roosevelt's fragility was discovered in March 1944 when, after a bout with the flu, he entered the naval hospital in Bethesda for a long-overdue physical examination, whose results convinced the doctors that he urgently needed a change in his regimen. For a time he improved, although he spent more and more time resting at Hyde Park, at his retreat in the Catoctin mountains and at Warm Springs. Apparently he never asked the doctors for the details of his condition or seriously considered foregoing a fourth term, and maintained his optimistic demeanor. His wife declined to give up her own career to nurse him, and the task devolved on some of the doting ladies in his entourage and on his daughter Anna, who eventually moved into the White House. His people kept quiet about their secret, and endeavored to lessen the strain on him, and he fell increasingly behind in his paperwork.  To divert him, Anna arranged for him to see his old flame, the now widowed Lucy Mercer, on the sly.

Inevitably he was less responsive to the important issues that his staff brought to him as the war rose to a crescendo.(1)

Luckily, FDR's management style didn't include day by day supervision of his people, like his friend Churchill's. FDR insisted on dealing directly with the service chiefs, cutting out the War and Navy civilian heads. He was fascinated with military operations, but he usually deferred to the professionals, with the glaring exception of Chinese affairs. In fact, after the disaster at Pearl Harbor and the painful defeats in the Far East, he seldom influenced his commanders on how to conduct the war in the Pacific. Douglas MacArthur had his own fief, and Admiral King ran the rest of the show. FDR was extremely discouraged by the Navy's attitude after Pearl Harbor when it refused to invest its limited resources in what Admiral King considered a ruinous strategy of trying to hold the Philippines and the East Indies. In February 1942 FDR was writing Hopkins about carrier strikes against Japan and raids by "small, powerfully-armed landing forces" which would relieve pressure on Southeast Asia. The Doolittle raid was a fortunate product, but the powerfully-armed landing forces didn't exist. FDR's pique at the Navy was such that he laid it down that it should be given none of the action in developing the atomic bomb, despite the fact that the Navy was the more technically oriented of the services. Some of the Navy professionals were resentful at what they considered the unfair treatment of Richardson and Kimmel. FDR nevertheless intervened when Leahy discovered that Admiral King was keeping quiet about the seriousness of the crisis at Guadalcanal.(2)

Through his usual ‘unofficial observers' the president kept his favorite projects in play. To bolster the defenses of the Panama Canal he had hoped to acquire a naval base in the Galapagos Islands, which he had visited during one of his seagoing vacations. Late in 1941 he decided to sponsor a commercial venture in the Islands by a Navy reservist, Paul Foster, as a means of gaining a foothold, but Fosters maneuvers cut across State Department negotiations. Years afterward, Foster claimed that the imbroglio could  have caused a coup against the pro-American regime in Ecuador. According to Foster's recollections, just after Pearl Harbor the chief executive was sufficiently worried about a Japanese raid on the Canal, and sufficiently unhappy with the Army and Navy commanders in the area, to suggest that the relatively junior Foster accept an independent command. Meanwhile, Ecuador allowed use of the Galapagos by American forces.

FDR was alive to the opportunities of the Alaskan theater for bombing Japan, for supplying the USSR, and possibly drawing her into the contest against Japan. Early in 1942, Marshall and King advised him against an Alaskan buildup as long as Stalin was stubborn about entering the war. But then, later on, in May, when the Japanese began their move on the Aleutians, Washington thought it might be a preliminary to an attack on Siberia. Foster was dispatched to the Aleutians. Reportedly, FDR tried to get permission for him to visit Petropavlovsk on Kamchatka, and the Russians, fearful that the Japanese would hear of it, swore to shoot him down. As it was, Foster and Simon Buckner, the Army Alaskan commander, barely got back before the Japanese moved against Dutch Harbor. The Russians agreed to study a proposal for an air link between Petropavlovsk and Nome, but discouraged staff talks on possible operations in the Soviet maritimes.

FDR strongly backed the subsequent offensives that drove the Japanese from the Aleutians and even came up from Hawaii to visit the isolated American servicemen there in 1944. He stopped at Kodiak, and had his picture taken there fishing in a small lake; the photo shows him, buttoned up against the cold rain, holding a very small trout, a metaphor for the war in the Aleutians.(3)

The Joint Chiefs fought among themselves about what to do in the Pacific, but with the awful example of Winston Churchill before them, were wise enough to patch together agreements to keep FDR out of their hair. As far as it can be determined--the evidence is mainly negative--neither FDR nor his chief of staff Bill Leahy contributed much to the deliberations and Leahy left the impression that he curbed FDR's flights of fancy. Marshall testified that Leahy worked mostly on the political aspects. So there was an end to FDR's  prewar habit of brainstorming about actions in the Pacific. Ernie King operated what amounted to a fleet headquarters from the old World War I Navy building on Constitution Avenue, kept his hand in by periodical confabs with Admiral Nimitz, and visited the White House less often than he did before the war as commander of the Atlantic Fleet. He kept trying to strip Knox of the shore establishment and his supply and procurement functions. If Knox had been brought on board to get control of the Navy, it never worked out.  King saw Knox as a leaker to his newspaper cronies, and never told him any more than he had to. The iron-willed admiral had to be repeatedly restrained by FDR from formally reorganizing the Navy Department.

When Knox died in April 1944, James Forrestal succeeded. In turn he could do little with the redoubtable King. King didn't care for the tribe of politicians, and his biographer reports that when FDR died, the admiral said that he had never liked him and would refuse to look sad.(4)

Contrary to widespread belief, Franklin Roosevelt had lost his taste for international organizations by the time World War II came along. He had loyally supported Wilson's views when he ran as a vice-presidential candidate in 1920, but was disillusioned by British and French use of  the League of Nations. He became a practitioner of Realpolitik. Internationalists, he observed, made a lot of noise, but delivered few votes. For the immediate postwar era, he envisaged the "Four Policemen" taking charge, the United States, Britain, the USSR, and China. China as a great power aroused little enthusiasm in the breasts of Stalin and Churchill, the latter complaining that China would be America's ‘fagot vote,' or stand-in, in the United Nations. The president was dead set against proposing any international machinery; he felt that it would lead to a lot of windy debate by the public and in the Congress, and only came round when the matter threatened to become an issue in the 1944 election. Initially he thought of a small traveling security executive which would meet in different countries. He confided to one of the ladies who tended him that he hoped that this organ might be convened in island locations, such as Hawaii or the Azores, because he enjoyed traveling by ship and disliked air travel. Despite a lack of enthusiasm by the Navy, he sponsored the construction of the Alaska class of ‘battle cruisers' on which he could voyage in comfort. He even spoke of inviting some of his lady friends along, disregarding the sailor's belief that ladies aboard were bad luck. But by 1945, he saw in the proposed United Nations organization a hope of getting along with the increasingly intransigent Russians. But then he almost wrecked the fledgling organization by neglecting to announce the bargain he had made with Stalin at Yalta for two extra memberships for the USSR in the UN.(5)

In January 1939, a few blocks west of the White House, George Washington University had hosted a Conference on Theoretical Physics where the hot topic was the news that the uranium nucleus had been split at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. The scientists excitedly rushed home to their labs to confirm the phenomenon, but after a while there ensued an eerie silence. The topic dropped out of the newspapers because the scientists realized that the war offices of the powers would inevitably interest themselves in the possibilities of a super-explosive. A new era for mankind was dawning, but it took months for the light to travel from George Washington's campus to the White House. In July, two Jewish physicists, refugees from Hitler's Germany, tracked down Albert Einstein at his summer cottage on Long Island. They were concerned that Germany might already be at work on a super-explosive. Speaking German and drinking iced tea, they composed a letter to Roosevelt pointing out the dire possibilities--though Einstein said the idea of a bomb hadn't occurred to him. The letter was presented to FDR by a banker friend of his, Alexander Sachs, and the president cut through the scientific jargon to the idea that he didn't want the Germans to "blow us up."

That the Germans didn't make much progress along those lines was due to their utter confidence that they would win the war before they could develop a bomb. They made some faulty experiments and really gave up on the idea by mid-1942, although this wasn't known to the Allies. Roosevelt and Churchill decided to pool their resources and produce the raw material in the United States, out of reach of German aviation. The Russians had their own program and presently began spying on that of their allies. The atomic bomb would come along too late to use on Germany. The job of producing it was given to the Army's General Leslie Groves, the engineer officer who had built the Pentagon, who would work under the general supervision of Henry Stimson. By Christmas 1944, the outlook was for something to be ready by mid-1945, and Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed that it might be used "after mature consideration" against Japan.

Roosevelt made no pretense about being knowledgable about "atomistics'" He relied initially on Henry Wallace, a successful plant scientist, on Stimson, and on Vannevar Bush, who headed up the program to harness American science to the war effort. He was sympathetic to Churchill's complaint that British scientists were being shut off from data newly developed in the States, signed an agreement to remedy the situation, then forgot about the whole thing--the document had to be dug out of his papers years later. In August 1944 Stimson complained that the president was too spacey to discuss the grave issues posed by the atomic program; and the last time--March 1945--Stimson met with FDR on atomic matters, the secretary had to fight off a suggestion by James Byrnes, the "assistant president" for domestic affairs, that an independent inquiry be authorized to be sure that Groves and his Manhattan District were on the right track. Admiral Leahy, for instance, was convinced that the bomb, then untested, was a monstrous ‘lemon' someone had sold the president, which couldn't possibly work.(6)

By mid-1944, there were signs that a Japanese peace party--a loose collection of nobles and naval officers encouraged by the emperor, was looking for a way out of the war. They were handicapped by Roosevelt's unconditional surrender formula, which gave them no idea of what they might expect in the way of terms, and actually the administration hadn't made up its mind. FDR was a hard liner and the Japanese would have had little joy about his idea that the Chinese might be one of their occupying powers. He also thought them tainted as a race. In mid-1942 the president had commissioned John Franklin Carter to prepare a series of world population and resettlement studies for use in postwar conferences--the so-called Migration Project. The president wished to include studies of miscegenation--mixing of various population strains--and had consulted Smithsonian scientist Alês Hrdlicka on the subject. Hrdlicka had been urging FDR for years to take a hard line with the Japanese, possibly because he had been harassed by the police while doing field work in Japan. The president asked Hrdlicka, for instance, if he thought the "nefariousness" of the Japanese was due to their basic racial stock being the "Hairy Ainu," the original inhabitants of the Japanese islands. He mused about crossbreeding the Japanese with the peaceful inhabitants of the Pacific islands to get rid of their warlike tendencies. The president freely discussed his bizarre theories with Sir Ronald Campbell, the British minister in Washington. Hrdlicka didn't share the president's notions, and in Carter's opinion was only interested in getting funds for his own research.(7)

The president's frail condition was evident to everyone at the inter-allied conference at Yalta on the Crimean Riviera where he traveled, sick as he was, to a meeting place ravaged by the war and excoriated by Churchill as probably the worst that could have been found, and where the Russians held the upper hand. His Washington doctors knew he was dying, had even been allowing him to be massaged by a ‘healer,' an ex-pugilist, recommended by Daisy Suckley, one of the ladies in his circle, the same who had made him a gift of Fala. Daughter Anna had moved into the White House and begun to think about a regency, relieving him of more of his daily grind.(8)

FDR wasn't always  very effective at conferences. At Yalta, Hopkins felt that he had scarcely kept his end up, though it is unlikely that a better advocate would have come away with more, considering the military balance. He tended to harass Churchill and defer, if not truckle, to Stalin. The minutes reveal him as making no very cogent suggestions. But he was up to his old tricks. Without telling anyone in advance he brought along Ed Flynn, who had managed the 1944 campaign and had been rejected by the Senate for a diplomatic post. FDR explained that he wished to use Flynn as a personal representative as he had used Pat Hurley. He introduced him to Stalin at the conference and sent him on to Moscow, his mission, to explore a rapprochement between the Vatican and Moscow on the status of the Catholics in Eastern Europe.

FDR went on to startle Churchill by announcing that he couldn't stay longer at Yalta because he had arranged to meet with King Farouk of Egypt, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, and the Arab leader Ibn Saud. FDR had been interested for years in finding a home for the European Jews in the undeveloped areas of the world. He had been forewarned about Saud's opposition to Jewish immigration into Palestine, but hoped that a personal appeal might bear fruit. With Saud came a numerous retinue including food tasters and live sheep for his nourishment. FDR thought the whole thing a "scream." Despite Harry Hopkins' advice that it was all a bit of Rooseveltian horseplay, Churchill delayed his return to England until he could meet with Saud and Haile Selassie to assure himself that FDR wasn't up to some mischief in a part of the world the British felt was their sphere. It could be taken as a last echo of FDR's belief that his personal magnetism could change realities. Saud thoroughly rebuffed his proposals.(9)

Roosevelt died on April 12th at Warm Springs where he had gone for a rest. With him on that day was his inamorata Lucy Rutherfurd. He was sitting for a portrait she had commissioned of him, and was his usual cheerful self, even to throwing away his World War I draft card.(10)

The death at Warm Springs caused a brief spasm of optimism in Adolf Hitler's bunker in beleaguered Berlin, because, two centuries before, Frederick the Great had been saved by the unexpected demise of a major antagonist, the Russian czarina, But this time nothing saved the Reich, and a little more than two weeks later Hitler took his own life.(11)

Roosevelt passed away at a time when the war spun out of control for the Axis powers. The German Reich was about to expire and the Japanese were brought up against the fact that they were to be given the undivided attention of the Anglo-Americans and probably of the Russians as well. Had he survived a few months longer, it is uncertain how, even with his staff, a fading FDR would have coped with the new situation. He claimed to have been opposed to the Armistice in World War I, which allowed the Germans to assert that they hadn't been beaten in battle, only flummoxed by the treaties ending the war. Along with Churchill he had laid down unconditional surrender as Allied policy, but they embraced the regime the Fascist Grand Council offered as a successor to Mussolini. The Japanese peace party was oppressed by unconditional surrender, since it might spell the end of their tenure and their efforts to recover the nation from the control of the militarists who had ruled since the early thirties.

 Japanese diplomacy looked first to aligning with the USSR, hoping to play on the Kremlin's antagonism toward the Anglo-Americans. A price would have to be paid, but Japan might preserve some of its gains. But by the time of Yalta it was clear that the USSR would denounce its non-aggression pact and in time enter the war. Fearful of a Russian occupation and a Communist presence, the peace party cast its lot with the United States, which might agree to the continuation of the monarchy. Despite the wartime propaganda that demonized Hirohito, FDR and colleagues such as Stimson, Grew and Hull retained somewhat favorable impressions of his role and his difficulties with the military caste. FDR made no preparations, intellectual or otherwise, about how to deal with a defeated Japan, although State Department planners had reached the conclusion that it would be advisable to retain the Japanese monarchy. At this point, Jonathan Daniels, one of his administrative assistants, believed that as far as the postwar picture was concerned FDR was like a small boy  "playing trains with the world." Alexander Sachs wrote after the war that FDR had the idea of a demonstration of the bomb before loosing it on the Japanese. If he did, he never passed it on to Harry Truman. In fact he followed the American tradition of never telling the vice-president anything, not telling him that he was going to Yalta, or much about the unusual bomb being prepared.

By the time FDR visited Warm Springs for the last time, he no longer had the wit or the strength to lead the Republic.  His messages bore the imprint of Leahy or Marshall. Harry Truman naturally pledged himself to carrying forward the international policies of the popular Roosevelt but, as one writer put it, he had some trouble finding out what they were.(12)