Roosevelt listened to his wife, but in the debate between Donald Nelson and labor leaders on one side and James Byrnes and the military on the other, he came down on the side of the military, agreeing with Byrnes that the country should not be asked to do two things at once, to pursue an all-out war-production effort while simultaneously releasing materials and facilities for civilian production. Better to risk unemployment in selected areas then to divide the nation’s attention at a time when casualties on both fronts were mounting.
The argument over reconversion came to be known as “the war within a war.” The fight between the military and the civilian elements, Nelson believed, was one of the most severe fights the government ever witnessed. Byrnes strenuously urged that Roosevelt remove Nelson from his post as war-production chief and replace him with someone sympathetic to the military’s point of view. Roosevelt agreed that something had to be done, but, in characteristic fashion, he refused to face the issue head on, electing instead to send Nelson on a special mission to China to determine how China’s industrial potential could be strengthened for more effective use against the Japanese. It was a graceful exit but an exit nonetheless, making room for the triumph of the military-industrial interests.
• • •
Late in the afternoon on November 27, after a busy day of engagements, Roosevelt boarded the train for Warm Springs, Georgia, for a three-week vacation at the Little White House. This was his first extended visit to Warm Springs since Pearl Harbor, and he was eagerly looking forward to his traditional Thanksgiving meal with the polio patients.
Eleanor had elected to stay in Washington. Since Laura and Margaret were accompanying Roosevelt, she told Hick, “I don’t have to go.” She planned instead to celebrate Thanksgiving in Lexington, Virginia, with Joe and Trude Lash. Lash had returned from the South Pacific in October and had married Trude in early November in a simple ceremony in New York City, which Eleanor attended. Their marriage must not have been easy for Eleanor, however close she had grown to Trude. Once again, she was the outsider looking in, wishing the couple well, but knowing that her special relationship with the intense young sergeant would never be the same. “You and Joe were very sweet to let me share your evening after the wedding,” Eleanor wrote Trude the next day, “and I am very grateful and love you both very much.”
Eleanor’s plans for Thanksgiving did not materialize. Shortly before she was ready to leave, she received a letter from Joe telling her he feared her presence would jeopardize his chances for admission to Officers Candidate School. “Mrs. Roosevelt’s feelings were hurt as you know they can be,” Tommy explained to Esther Lape. “Trude was smart enough to sense this and so they wrote an appeasing letter,” in which they begged forgiveness, reinvited her, and admitted that what they had done in disinviting her was wrong, “that no one should weigh love against expediency.”
“But the weighing was already done,” Tommy shrewdly observed, “and nothing would make ER go now. These brilliant people don’t seem to be able to understand ER. If the whole thing had been put on the basis of wanting her no matter the cost, she wouldn’t have gone.”
“A new LL crisis,” Anna confided in John, “brought on by Joe and his gal. It may blow over but for the present it makes for the usual tenseness.”
Longing for company, Eleanor filled her calendar with engagements. In the forty-eight hours after her husband left, she met with two Yugoslavians who presented her with a report on the terrible conditions existing among the civilian population in Yugoslavia; hosted a small luncheon for the widow of Presidential Appointments Secretary Marvin McIntyre, who had died in December 1943; entertained a group of veterans from the Naval Hospital; brought the biographer Catherine Drinker Bowen to tea; met with twenty-three students from American University; had cocktails with Hick; dined with nine guests on the South Portico; hosted an evening with British war correspondent William Courtney; and paid a late-night call to Elinor Morgenthau, who was alone for the evening. On returning to the White House at ten-thirty, she worked on her mail until well after midnight, and then began a letter to Trude.
“I am very depressed tonight,” she admitted. “Elliott called me from Beverly Hills to say he was going to be married on Saturday. He says he has known the girl, Faye Emerson, by name some time. He told me when here, however, he did not mean to marry til he was home, had a job etc. and I fear it is just another of his quick actions because of loneliness. I’ve certainly not succeeded in giving my children much sense of backing. I called FDR and told him and he took it calmly . . . . I have a curious kind of numb and dread feeling.”
At Warm Springs, Roosevelt saw only a handful of visitors during his entire stay. In the mornings, he slept late, read, and attended to his mail; in the afternoons, he sunned himself on the terrace behind his house, swam in the pool, and rambled about the countryside in his ’38 Ford; in the evenings, he sat beside the fieldstone fireplace in his living room, talking with Laura, Margaret, and a few local friends.
Roosevelt loved Warm Springs: the rugged terrain, the climate, the rustic cottage he had designed, “a little house,” he once wrote, “flush with the ground in front but in back out over the ravine a porch as high as the prow of the ship. Wonderful for sunsets. A home for all the time I’ll spend here.”
Many times in the course of his presidency, Franklin had drawn solace from the “little house,” but perhaps never more so than on this extended trip. The day after he arrived, Lucy Rutherfurd appeared. Taking up residence in the guest cottage, to the left of the main house, she was an ideal companion, joining Roosevelt on his afternoon drives, sitting by his side on the porch, talking over meals, reading by the fire.
Perhaps, for a few moments, Roosevelt knew the happiness of belonging to someone, of being together, of completing a circuit of emotion. In his fitted auto he drove with Lucy for hours, maneuvering the dusty roads with skill, delighting in the spectacular views, the hills of stately oaks and pines, the fields dotted with mountain laurel and wild azaleas. At times he would slip away from his cottage without the Secret Service, relishing the freedom of the open road.
On Saturday morning, December 2, Roosevelt finished his mail earlier than usual. At noon, he and Lucy drove off together to his favorite picnic retreat, Dowdell’s Knob, overlooking the Pine Mountain Valley. The peaceful afternoon long remained in Lucy’s mind. “You know,” she told Anna months later, “your father drove me in his little Ford up to . . . Dowdell’s Knob, and I had the most fascinating hour I’ve ever had. He just sat there and told me of some of what he regarded as the real problems facing the world now. I just couldn’t get over thinking of what I was listening to, and then he would stop and say, ‘You see that knoll over there? That’s where I did this-or-that,’ or ‘You see that bunch of trees?’ Or whatever it was. He would interrupt himself, you know. And we just sat there and looked.”
“As Lucy said all this to me,” Anna recalled, “I realized Mother was not capable of giving him this—just listening. And of course, this is why I was able to fill in for a year and a half, because I could listen.”
While Franklin was with Lucy, Eleanor was embroiled in a policy struggle in Washington. Before leaving for Warm Springs, Roosevelt had appointed Edward Stettinius to replace the retiring Cordell Hull as secretary of state. Stettinius had asked for and been given authority to appoint his own assistant secretaries. When the appointments were announced, Eleanor was very upset to find that Stettinius had surrounded himself with conservatives, including James Dunn, a wealthy croquet-playing diplomat who had allied himself with General Franco in Spain, and Will Clayton, a former member of the Liberty League and the biggest cotton broker in the world.
After an unsatisfactory phone conversation with Franklin about the situation, Eleanor sat down on the night of December 4 and wrote a long, irritated letter to her husband: “I realize very well that I do not know the reasons why certain things may be necessary . . . . It does, however, make me rather nervous for you to say that you
do not care what Jimmy Dunne [sic] thinks because he will do what you tell him to do and that for three years you have carried the State Department and you expect to go on doing it. I am quite sure that Jimmy Dunne is clever enough to tell you that he will do what you want and to allow his subordinates to accomplish things which will get by and which will pretty well come up in the long time results to what he actually wants to do.
“The reason I feel we cannot trust Dunne is that we know he backed Franco and his regime in Spain. We know that now he is arguing Mr. [John] Winant and the War Department in favor of using German industrialists to rehabilitate Germany because he belongs to the group which Will Clayton represents, plus others, who believe we must have business going in Germany for the sake of business here.
“I suppose I should trust blindly when I can’t know and be neither worried or scared and yet I am both and when Harry Hopkins tells me he is for Clayton etc. I’m even more worried. I hate to irritate you and I won’t speak of any of this again but I wouldn’t feel honest if I didn’t tell you now.”
But, of course, she did speak of it again, waiting only twenty-four hours to let him know that she was still very unhappy about the State Department. “Now if Clayton brings down [First National Bank of New York President] Leon Fraser,” she sarcastically remarked, “it will be perfect!” Before she closed, however, she noted that she was sending along the first page of a glowing letter she had received about the president’s leadership, “one of many which has come breathing faith and admiration and since I am such a pest I thought this might compensate a little!”
The following day, she pressured him on Yugoslavia. Her conversation with the two young Yugoslavians had convinced her that something had to be done to alleviate the desperate situation in that ravaged land, where communist leader Tito’s partisans were putting up a brave fight against the German army. She placed a call to Warm Springs. Dr. Bruenn, who had begged Eleanor time and again not to upset her husband, was in the living room when the call came. “She insisted that the president order troops and supplies to the partisans in Yugoslavia, forgetting what I’d said about not pushing him. He kept telling her it was impossible because there were no lines of communication and the Germans were occupying that part. But she kept pushing. He got more and more upset, as did I. She had tunnel vision. Anything interesting to her was paramount.”
Italy was next. She was glad, she told her husband, that the United States was officially protesting Churchill’s veto of the antifascist Count Carlo Sforza as foreign minister in the new Italian Cabinet, “but,” she went on, “are we going to use any real pressure on Winston? I am afraid words will not have much effect.”
Beyond dealing with the pressures from his wife, Roosevelt was bombarded with appeals from various members of his Cabinet anxious about their status in the postelection period. At seventy-seven, Stimson feared that the president might want a younger man to finish up with. He hated to be in the position where he might be dragged on beyond the time when the president really wanted him. Through Hopkins, Roosevelt let Stimson know that just the opposite was true: now that Hull was gone, Stimson was the only man of commanding stature in the Cabinet. The president wanted him to go on giving his advice and help as he had always given it.
Burdened with similar worries, Harold Ickes had sent Roosevelt a letter of resignation, hoping for reassurance that his services were still needed. Recognizing what Ickes wanted, Roosevelt penned a flattering letter from Warm Springs, teasing the old curmudgeon that if he said anything more about resigning he would find a Marine Guard from Quantico dogging his footsteps day and night. “Of course I want you to go along at the Old Stand where you have been for 12 years,” Roosevelt wrote. “We must see this thing together.”
“Your letter,” Ickes gratefully replied, “makes me feel all fluttery. To have you write about me as you did is like an accolade to my spirit. No one can be so generous as you and from no one else would what you wrote mean so much.”
Despite these intrusions, Roosevelt profited greatly from his days at Warm Springs. Dr. Bruenn was visibly pleased at the improvement in the president’s appearance. The color in his skin was normal, and his spirits were high.
Eleanor talked with her husband shortly before he left Warm Springs. She was very sorry, she said, but she could not be in Washington to meet him when he returned. Her aunt Tissie (Elizabeth Hall) had died, and she had to go to New York for the funeral. “He sounds as though his three weeks in Warm Springs, Georgia had given him much enjoyment,” she told her readers, “as well as time to think over the world and its affairs. Even if you are always at the end of a telephone wire, and if dispatches and pouches continue to come, still the change of scenery and the concerns of a different community . . . do something to one’s mind and spirit.”
• • •
On returning home, Roosevelt was greeted by the appalling news that on December 16 the Germans had caught the Allies by surprise with a massive counteroffensive in the Ardennes. Designed to drive the Allies back through Belgium to Antwerp on the North Sea, the daring German move, which became known as the Battle of the Bulge, dispelled Allied hopes for an early end to the war.
Hitler had been at work for months building up the kind of strike force that had served him so brilliantly early in the war. By mid-December, he had amassed more than 2,500 tanks, posted in 10 panzer divisions; in all, 250,000 German soldiers were facing a scant 80,000 Allied troops.
Hitler’s audacious plan had been revealed to the German military only four days before the offensive began, when a dozen German generals and field commanders were gathered in a bus in the middle of the night, driven aimlessly around the countryside to make them lose their bearings, and set down at the entrance to an underground bunker which turned out to be the Führer’s headquarters. There, from Hitler himself, “hunched in his chair,” William Shirer wrote, “his hands trembling, his left arm subject to a violent twitching which he did his best to conceal,” they learned for the first time of the mighty offensive intended to recapture the initiative for the Germans.
For ten days, with a thick mist rendering Allied operations in the air virtually impossible, the Germans drove forward, outnumbering and out-gunning the unprepared American troops. At the Schnee Eifel in southeastern Belgium, nearly nine thousand Americans were forced to surrender, marking the second-largest single mass surrender in American history (Bataan was the first). For those who had imagined that Germany was essentially defeated, this was a bitter and depressing period.
Through the worst days, Roosevelt remained calm. He followed the course of the attack on the wall charts in his map room, watching somberly as the red pins, signaling German forces, multiplied, forcing the green pins, signaling the United States, into a full retreat. Yet not once, Marshall marveled, did he seek to interfere in any way with Eisenhower’s command; not once did he force the Joint Chiefs to explain how this disaster had been possible. He had relied on these men through the entire war, and he would continue to rely on them now. “In great stress,” Marshall declared, “Roosevelt was a strong man.”
Roosevelt’s steadiness in the midst of the crisis kindled gratitude in Stimson as well. “He has been extremely considerate,” Stimson recorded in his diary. “He has really exercised great restraint, for the anxiety on his part must have been very heavy.”
Eleanor was not as stalwart as her husband. She found the bad news from Europe difficult to absorb. “I cannot help thinking,” she wrote, “of the weariness and disappointment of the men who have taken these miles of enemy territory and are now being driven back. Setbacks like these must be expected, but it makes one’s heart ache to think of the gloom and disappointment among our soldiers and the news of individual losses, which will come increasingly often knocking at our doors.”
By Christmas Eve, the worst of the German attack was over. With the clearing of the fog, the air superiority of the Allies was finally brought into play, and the battle began to turn. In less than a week’
s time, in what General James Gavin has called “an amazing performance,” General George Patton, Third Army commander, was able to move his entire army the fifty miles from the Saar River to Bastogne, positioning himself to attack the Germans from the south. By the middle of January, a month after the beginning of the offensive, the German forces were back to where they had started; the Bulge had been erased.
German losses were shocking—120,000 men killed, wounded, or missing, plus a loss of 1,600 planes, 600 tanks, and 6,000 vehicles. American casualties were also brutal, with 19,000 killed and 48,000 wounded. But the Americans could replenish their infantry and their supplies, whereas the Germans could not. Hitler’s wild gamble would cost him greatly; defeat in the West was now inevitable.
• • •
At the height of the Battle of the Bulge, with the army desperate for replacements, a dramatic call went out to all Negro units in the European theater. Representing a major break with traditional army policy, which kept blacks segregated in their own, predominantly service divisions, the call invited Negro soldiers to volunteer as infantrymen and fight side by side with white troops in the front lines. Negro volunteers were promised a six-week training period and then, for the first time, assignment “without regard to color or race to the units where assistance is most needed.” Those who answered the call would have “the opportunity of fighting shoulder to shoulder to bring about victory.”
The response to the army’s appeal was phenomenal. Within a matter of weeks, more than four thousand Negro soldiers had volunteered. Currently serving as truck drivers, construction engineers, stevedores, and longshoremen, the Negro soldiers recognized they were being presented with an opportunity to affirm their competence and courage on the battlefield and to prove that whites and blacks could work together. In one engineering outfit consisting of 186 men, 171 volunteered for combat. “We’ve been giving a lot of sweat,” one Negro ordnance man said. Now the time had come “to mix some blood” with the sweat.