In the early spring of 1941, Hoover informed Berle that the British, as Berle later explained to Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, had set up in the United States “a full size secret police and intelligence service [which] enters into the whole field of political, financial, industrial and probably military intelligence.… I have reason to believe that a good many things being done are probably in violation of our espionage acts.”
With Hoover’s assistance, Berle began a strenuous campaign to shut down most or all of Stephenson’s operation. Both officials supported a bill by Senator Kenneth McKellar, a Tennessee Democrat, to impose severe restrictions on the work of all foreign agents, friendly or otherwise, in the United States, including the requirement that they open their records to the FBI.
BSC fought back, assigning an agent to “get the dirt” on Berle and reportedly tapping his phones. When Hoover discovered the surveillance, he told Stephenson he wanted the agent out of the country by six o’clock that night. Although Stephenson professed “surprise and horror that any of his men should do such a thing,” he did as the FBI chief demanded.
Shortly after Pearl Harbor, the McKellar bill was passed by Congress and sent to the president for his signature; Donovan, on behalf of Stephenson, persuaded FDR to veto it. A later amended version, which specifically exempted BSC from its restrictions, was approved by Roosevelt and enacted into law.
As Hoover and Berle probably should have known, the president would never have agreed to emasculate an organization that had proved so useful in his battle against those he considered his and his country’s enemies, both foreign and domestic.
* On August 31, 1940, Lundeen was killed, along with twenty-four other passengers, in a commercial airliner crash near the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Two weeks after Lundeen’s death, columnist Drew Pearson reported that the senator, whom he called “a rabid pro-German isolationist,” had been under investigation by the FBI at the time of the crash for collaboration with the Reich. Pearson also raised the possibility of the plane’s sabotage. Neither allegation was ever proven.
CHAPTER 22
“WHERE IS THIS CRISIS?”
By the summer of 1941, morale in the U.S. Army had sunk to rock bottom. Young men drafted the previous year talked of going AWOL; some even raised the possibility of mutiny. In a camp in Mississippi, soldiers watching a newsreel booed loudly when images of President Roosevelt and General George Marshall flashed on the screen.
Here the draftees were, digging latrines, peeling potatoes, and endlessly drilling, all for a measly thirty dollars a month, while friends back home were earning six and seven times that much in defense factory jobs. And for what? There was no war, and despite what the president said in his May 27 speech, there didn’t appear to be a national emergency, either. Anyone with eyes could see that life was proceeding as usual outside the training camps. “Where is this crisis?” one draftee grumbled. “All I see are people with more dough than they had before and more dough for the guys who’ve already got it.” Why should he and the others have to make sacrifices when no one else had to? In fact, why the hell were they there?
No one seemed to know. “As far as the men can see,” Life noted, “the Army has no goal. It does not know whether it is going to fight, or when or where. If the U.S. political leaders have set any military objective, they have not made it clear to the Army. This is reflected in the training, which is not geared to any real military situation.”
The country’s faltering defense mobilization program revealed the same lack of direction. Roosevelt continued to refuse to appoint a czar of war production, and administration of the effort remained chaotic. Bitter conflict had erupted everywhere. Defense industries were plagued by strikes and shortages. Government bureaucrats clashed with businessmen brought to Washington to help direct the mobilization effort. Army, Navy, and Air Corps officials fought with one another to get a bigger slice of the procurement pie. As Attorney General Francis Biddle observed, the bickering “gave the country a sense of disunity and a feeling that the administration did not know where it was going.”
In August, the editors of Fortune reported that America was “not merely falling short” in becoming the arsenal of democracy that Roosevelt had envisaged; it was “failing spectacularly, in nine different ways and nine different places.” Among the problems, the magazine said, was the fact that Americans had “not yet been asked to do what is necessary to win.”
The key question was, as it had been for months: What was the country’s key objective in this fight? Was it solely a defense of the Americas and aid for Britain—or was it active participation in the war? Whatever it was, “the people at the top better damn quick give us something we can sink our teeth in, believe in—before it’s too late,” one soldier declared.
An anxious Henry Stimson had begun to wonder if it wasn’t already too late. “Tonight I feel more up against it than ever before,” he wrote in his diary in early July. “It is not clear whether this country has it in itself to meet such an emergency. Whether we are really powerful enough and sincere enough and devoted enough to meet the Germans is getting to be more and more of a real problem.”
According to polls, a majority of Americans continued to hold what seemed, at first glance, diametrically opposite views of what their country’s role should be. In one Gallup survey, three-quarters of those questioned said yes when asked whether they favored going to war if there was no other way to defeat the Axis. Eighty percent said they thought the United States would have to go to war eventually. Yet, when asked if the country should enter the conflict now, an identical 80 percent said no.
These opinions, however, were not as contradictory as they appeared. Understandably, Americans were reluctant to plunge into war unless and until they felt it was necessary. And so far, they were not convinced it was. According to Stimson and other interventionists, it was the president’s obligation to connect the dots for the American people, to persuade them that in order to defeat Hitler, the United States must take bold action now. If only he would lead, they said, the people would follow. Among those who argued this position was Hadley Cantril, a social psychologist who had become, in effect, Roosevelt’s private pollster.
In 1940, Cantril had created the Office of Public Opinion Research at Princeton University to study public attitudes on political and social issues. He worked closely with George Gallup’s polling organization, also based in Princeton, New Jersey, which did the actual canvassing of the public. Cantril’s group helped design questions for the Gallup pollsters and conducted its own analyses of Gallup data. A strong liberal and FDR loyalist, Cantril offered his services to the White House, making it clear he would do everything he could to make the polls on which he worked serve the president’s needs: “We can get confidential information on questions you suggest, follow up any hunches you may care to see tested regarding the determinants of opinion, and provide you with the answers to any questions asked.”
For the next year, Cantril used the Gallup operation to get responses to specific questions posed by the White House, which in turn were used to formulate the administration’s political strategy. Cantril repeatedly stressed to presidential aides the need for confidentiality regarding Roosevelt’s privileged access to the survey results and his involvement in their design. “Since all of these questions were on the most recent Gallup poll,” he wrote to FDR adviser Anna Rosenberg in May 1941, “I am trusting you and your friend [the president] not to let others in Washington know about them. The old problem of property rights—plus the fact that if certain Senators know about this, they would raise hell with Gallup, and his faith in me would be shaken.”
A couple of weeks after FDR’s speech declaring an unlimited national emergency, a puzzled Roosevelt asked Cantril why the public, in the most recent polls, no longer seemed as enthusiastic about what he had said as they had immediately after the speech. The main reason, Cantril replied, was that Roosevelt had “failed to indicate any new, overt pol
icy that people could readily conceptualize, and that ‘national emergency’ meant little when it required no change whatever in daily life.” He went on: “Any increase in interventionist action resulting from a Presidential radio address will not be maintained unless the address announces or is shortly followed by action.”
Each time the president had proposed a bold move, such as Lend-Lease or the destroyers-bases deal, a large majority of Americans had supported him, Cantril pointed out. And he was sure that a similar majority would back FDR now if he called for convoying or other more extreme measures to help Britain, even if it involved considerable sacrifice on the public’s part. “I have tried to make this point dozens of times,” Cantril told Anna Rosenberg in a memo, “but somehow there seems little connection between the information all of us gather and policy formation.” Echoing Cantril’s view, George Gallup had earlier noted that “the best way to influence public opinion” on an issue was “to get Mr. Roosevelt to talk about it and favor it.”
In Cantril’s opinion, Roosevelt faced a greater political risk by not acting than by calling for new initiatives to aid the British. He predicted large Republican gains in the next congressional election, stemming, he said, from the public’s dissatisfaction with the absence of strong presidential leadership. Using capital letters to make his point, Cantril wrote to Rosenberg: “WHAT THE PEOPLE WANT IS TO BE TOLD WHAT TO DO.”
Roosevelt, however, refused to accept Cantril’s argument. The more favorable the poll results were for him and his policies, the less he seemed to believe them. He was clearly more influenced by his own more pessimistic assessment of public opinion, which he saw reflected in the words and actions of the diminished but still potent isolationist bloc in Congress.
Insisting that a majority of Americans had not yet grasped “the facts of life” about the war, despite considerable evidence to the contrary, he was reluctant to test his leadership in a showdown with his opponents. Although Robert Jackson and others around Roosevelt believed that he, in Jackson’s words, “could have gone much farther in disregarding Congress … as far as public sentiment was concerned,” FDR disagreed. He felt, said his speechwriter Samuel Rosenman, that “this was no time to get out too far in advance of the American people. Nor was it a time to meet a defeat in Congress at the hands of isolationists.”
In a letter to Winston Churchill, Lord Halifax, who had succeeded Lord Lothian as British ambassador, explained Roosevelt’s dilemma as the president saw it: “His perpetual problem is to steer a course between (1) the wish of 70% of Americans to keep out of war; (2) the wish of 70% of Americans to do everything to break Hitler, even if it means war. He said that if he asked for a declaration of war he wouldn’t get it, and opinion would swing against him.”
AMONG THOSE CONFOUNDED BY Roosevelt’s months-long inertia was the German government. Less than two weeks after the president’s fire-eating speech on May 27, word came that a German submarine had sunk the American freighter Robin Moor in the south Atlantic, well outside Germany’s declared war zone. Violating international conventions, the submarine captain had put the Robin Moor’s crew in lifeboats with scant food and water and without radioing their position to ships that might be nearby. The crewmen drifted in the Atlantic for nineteen days before their rescue on June 9.
Hitler and his men worried that the sinking, which was in direct violation of the Führer’s orders to stay away from U.S. ships, would bring America into the war—or, at the very least, result in U.S. naval protection for convoys. American interventionists, including those in the president’s circle, pressed him to retaliate by ordering the Navy to begin escort duty immediately. But to Germany’s relief, Roosevelt responded with considerably more moderation, ordering the closing of German consulates in the United States and freezing all Axis-owned assets.
Once the crisis was over, Hitler made it clear to Admiral Erich Raeder that for the next few months, his navy must avoid any more incidents of this kind. They must not attack any ships, inside or outside the combat zone, unless they were clearly marked enemy vessels. And under no circumstances were American ships to be targeted.
The reason for Hitler’s caution became obvious on June 22, 1941, when two million German troops launched a lightning attack on the Soviet Union. Almost no one believed that the Russians could hold out for much longer than six or seven weeks. But in the eyes of American interventionists, that period, however short it might be, provided the perfect opportunity for dramatic new steps to aid the British. “For the first time since Hitler loosed the dogs of war on this world, we are provided with a God-given chance to determine the outcome of this worldwide struggle,” Frank Knox declared in a nationwide radio broadcast. “While his back is turned, we must answer his obvious contempt with a smashing blow that can and will change the entire world perspective.”
Knox, Henry Stimson, and Admiral Stark pressured Roosevelt to order immediate naval protection for all merchant shipping crossing the Atlantic. Stark acknowledged to FDR that such action “would almost certainly involve us in war” but added that “much more delay might be fatal to Britain’s survival.” On July 2, the president, to the delight of Stark and the others, ordered plans drawn up for U.S. ships to begin escort duty the following week. But a few days later, he had second thoughts and canceled the order.
A man who liked to keep his options open for as long as possible, Roosevelt decided to wait and see how events developed. Unlike his advisers, he still wasn’t convinced that the situation was urgent. As he viewed it, Hitler had relieved the pressure on Britain by invading Russia, giving his administration a little more time to assess the situation and decide what to do. He cautiously followed Churchill’s lead in promising aid to the Russians but, while the British prime minister pledged immediate, all-out support, Roosevelt was initially vague about the extent of American help and when it would begin.
Such reluctance was hardly surprising. He faced strong opposition from isolationists, many of whom, like Charles Lindbergh, were ferociously anti-Soviet. At an America First rally in San Francisco, Lindbergh declared that while he opposed U.S. alliances with foreign countries, he “would a hundred times rather see my country ally herself with England, or even with Germany with all her faults, than with the cruelty, the godlessness, and the barbarism that exist in Soviet Russia.” Unsurprisingly, this inflammatory remark touched off another round of bitter attacks against him.
But antagonism to the idea of aid for Russia was not confined solely to the isolationists. A substantial number of Americans, including some who supported the president’s policies, opposed helping Joseph Stalin’s Communist dictatorship. Senator Harry Truman of Missouri spoke for many when he said: “If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible.”
Senior officers in the Army were among the most outspoken opponents of aid to Stalin and his country. Many shared Lindbergh’s passionate antipathy toward the Soviet Union and Communism, and they strongly resisted sending any munitions so urgently needed by their own service to a country they considered their enemy.
Nonetheless, when Roosevelt finally joined Churchill in August in pledging to send planes, tanks, trucks, and other aid to Stalin, most Americans, seeing Germany as a far greater immediate danger to the United States than Russia, supported the president’s decision.
WHILE STILL RESISTING THE idea of convoying, Roosevelt did take advantage of Hitler’s preoccupation with Russia that summer to make another move in the Atlantic chess game. For months, Churchill had been urging him to send U.S. troops to Iceland, a former Danish territory in the North Atlantic strategically located near the convoy route between Canada and Britain. Britain had occupied the island shortly after Denmark was seized by Germany in 1940, and Churchill was anxious to transfer the British forces there to battlefields in the Middle East.
On July 8, four thousand U.S. Marines landed in Iceland. In a statement to the American
public, Roosevelt explained his decision as purely a defensive measure, taken to prevent the Germans from using the subarctic island as “a naval or air base for eventual attack against the Western Hemisphere.” Since Iceland lay 3,900 miles east of New York, it’s understandable that some considered that rationale a bit outlandish.
Still, public reaction was largely favorable. That came as a surprise to Roosevelt, who, as so often before, had prepared himself for a “vitriolic outburst.” In its August 4 issue, Life sardonically noted: “The people voting 70% to 80% against war in the polls still were not ready to lead the President. But a resounding 61% approval of the occupation of Iceland seemed to show that they were ready to follow where the President led.”
FDR’s action in Iceland was seen by many as an attempt to placate American interventionists and to bolster the morale of the British, rather than as a deliberate step toward war. Hans Thomsen assured his superiors in Berlin that the president was not interested “in carrying on a full war with all its consequences.” As Thomsen saw it, Roosevelt probably would continue taking interim actions, like closing the German consulates and occupying Iceland, “which basically obligate America to very little and do not involve any immediate dangers.”
Yet no one could deny that the U.S. takeover of Iceland was a direct challenge to Germany, considerably raising the ante in the Atlantic war of nerves. On July 8, the head of the German submarine force requested permission to attack American ships off the coast of Iceland. Hitler, however, reiterated his order that no U.S. vessel was to be sunk, even inside the combat zone. “It is absolutely essential that all incidents with the United States should be avoided,” the German navy was told. “Germany’s attitude to America is therefore to remain as before: not to let herself be provoked, and to avoid all discussion.”