Presidents of War by Michael Beschloss

Author:Michael Beschloss
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2018-10-08T16:00:00+00:00

Now the President faced a thicket of political challenges. He wished to persuade Congress and the American people to back his efforts to strengthen American defense and aid England, as well as the forcible draft of young men for the armed forces, unprecedented in peacetime, which would incite many people to say that he was pushing the nation into the war. Unless he helped the British people to stave off Germany, they might conclude that resistance was futile and demand Churchill’s replacement by another leader who would make the best deal possible with Hitler.

At the end of June, Roosevelt was startled when the Republicans at Philadelphia nominated a dark horse, Wendell Willkie. A New York utilities executive and registered Democrat until 1939, Willkie had been promoted by northeastern internationalists who wished to aid England. Eleanor wrote her friend Lorena Hickok that she had a “hunch” that Willkie would defeat her husband. Responding to the challenge, the President broadened his Cabinet in early July by appointing two Republicans—Frank Knox as Secretary of the Navy and Henry Stimson as Secretary of War.

To prevent the emergence of a serious opponent for his party’s nomination, Roosevelt had encouraged almost every major Democrat to run, and hence split the field. It did not require much vanity for him to conclude that no one else could match his leadership skills in handling the European crisis. In July, when his convention met in Chicago, he was privately willing to become the nation’s first third-term President.*7 He knew that the best way to do this was to feign unwillingness or indifference about staying in office and be “drafted” by the delegates.

The convention chairman, Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky, conveyed a message from Roosevelt, at the White House, that he lacked “any desire or purpose to continue in the office of President” and that delegates were “free to vote for any candidate.” This provoked a well-orchestrated demonstration, with organ music and a marching band, in which Chicago’s superintendent of sewers, Thomas Garry, from beneath the hall, roared over loudspeakers, “Everybody wants Roosevelt!” and “The world needs Roosevelt!” The President was anointed on the first ballot. Roosevelt enjoyed such mastery of the convention that when delegates rebelled against his choice for Vice President—Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, a Republican until 1936—he prevailed by threatening to decline the presidential nomination. Ensuring his command of foreign policy, he penciled in a crucial change to the Democratic platform, which pledged that the country “will not participate in foreign wars,” adding “except in case of attack.”

Two weeks after his renomination, Roosevelt called for a peacetime military draft. The isolationist Senator Burton Wheeler, Democrat from Montana, warned that if Congress passed such a bill, it would “slit the throat of the last great democracy still living” and “accord to Hitler his greatest and cheapest victory.” But the Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, insisted that there was “no conceivable way” to ensure national defense without conscription. Stimson agreed. Against the backdrop of the

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