F.D.R. in Wartime

By Gene Farmer

ROOSEVELT: THE SOLDIER OF FREEDOM by James MacGregor Burns. 722 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $10.

This book concludes a two-part biography begun 14 years ago with the publication of Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox, a brilliant, admiring portrait of F.D.R. The first book focused sharply on the peculiar combination of idealism, political instinct and guile that allowed F.D.R. to bend events to his will in the exciting days of the various New Deals. The Soldier of Freedom necessarily takes a broader world view with far less penetrating results. Huge chunks of the book turn out to be rewrites of World War II history. Roosevelt is wheeled on and off the world stage; he never really dominates it. Although he presided over the mightiest military forces ever assembled, the skills that Roosevelt refined so remarkably in the domestic arena of the 1930s were not quite enough to let him control the conduct of a global war.

In 1941, the international balance was full of imponderables and uncertainties. But, Burns writes, "Roosevelt did not perceive them in this kind of systematic, categorized frame. He still preferred to deal with situations piecemeal, plucking the day's problem out of the tangle of events." Roosevelt's weaknesses in international dealings showed most obviously later, in his attempts to handle Joseph Stalin--but they were evident almost from the beginning. Convinced that the fall of Britain would be a disaster for the U.S., he seemed uncertain about what he could or should do to prevent it. Burns describes F.D.R. making up his mind bit by bit, never getting too far ahead of most of his own constituents; indeed, the White House was desperately scanning public-opinion polls long before that practice became a norm of presidential behavior under Lyndon Johnson. "I am waiting to be pushed into the situation," Roosevelt confided to Henry Morgenthau Jr. in 1941.

Perhaps the President's main failing lay in the buoyant optimism that had served a discouraged U.S. so well in the depressed 1930s. Always he had "confidence in his ability to persuade people face to face." In 1941, he would have liked to arrange a Pacific rendezvous with Japan's Premier Fumimaro Konoye, failing to comprehend (as Burns puts it) "that there were few misunderstandings between the two countries, only differences." Later, with the U.S. formally at war in Europe as well as Asia, he failed to perceive that the same observation would have applied just as well to the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.

At home, Burns asserts, Roosevelt's wartime administration "never freed itself of the prod and aura of crisis." For much of this F.D.R. was personally responsible: "The White House became a conciliation office, mediation board, arbitration court, all in one. And it was not well equipped for this function." Reacting to the flow of problems, F.D.R. developed a habit of creating agencies with overlapping functions. The result was "hell on his subordinates," as Secretary of War Henry Stimson grumbled almost daily in his diary. Accustomed to specific delegations of power and orderly staff work, Stimson, like many of his wartime colleagues, was often puzzled by the President's freewheeling methods. As U.S. charge d'affaires in Lisbon in 1943, George Kennan, involved in a complex negotiation with the Portuguese government about U.S. bases in the Azores, was astounded to have Roosevelt tell him: "Oh, don't worry about all those people over there" --meaning the entire Pentagon.

Yet, somehow it worked. The reason why is explained in one of Burns' paragraphs on F.D.R.'s one supreme gift as a war leader, the acquisition and the use of talent: "As much by some unerring instinct as by observation and insight, the President had made a host of brilliant appointments by midwar. Hopkins, Smith in the presidential office, Stimson, Marshall, Patterson in War, Forrestal in Navy . . . Eisenhower, Nimitz, MacArthur in the field--these men were not only instruments of a President's purpose but also adornments of a public service."

Burns illuminates various corners of Roosevelt's complex political personality; he was far from being an active civil libertarian at home. In an age accustomed to marches on Washington, it now seems strange that F.D.R. discouraged black militancy and seemed genuinely alarmed at the prospect of a fairly innocuous Negro march, which was called off at the last minute in 1941. "What would happen," the President asked, "if Irish and Jewish people were to march on Washington?"

Yet what little Roosevelt saw of poverty in Africa impressed him greatly and probably reinforced his pessimistic views of colonialism. At any rate, he did not hesitate to interfere brashly with his Allies' postwar plans. "Only a President with Rooseveltian self-confidence," Burns writes, "would have even dared touch the Indian cauldron in the early months of 1942"--a time when the Battle of the Atlantic was far from won.

"We can gain no lasting peace," Roosevelt was to say in his fourth inaugural address in January 1945, "if we approach it with suspicion and mistrust --or with fear." It was in that spirit that the President had confronted Joseph Stalin at Teheran in late 1943 and later at Yalta. Sensibly enough, Burns makes no extensive effort to justify Roosevelt's misjudgment of the Soviet dictator's reasonableness. He shows the President in private meetings trying to soften up Stalin with mildly anti-British statements and, along with Churchill, helping to wrest from him a few paper concessions about free elections in postwar Poland. At Yalta, though, Burns asserts, F.D.R.'s failure was not the result of ignorance, naivete, illness or perfidy --all of which have been suggested by hostile historians--but of the realities of the power situation and Roosevelt's own priorities. His major concerns were securing Russian agreement about the establishment of the United Nations and guaranteeing Soviet entry into the war against Japan, rather than trying to save an Eastern Europe that had already been lost. By the time the Yalta talks took place the Red Army had rolled past Warsaw and no signed document was going to roll it back.

One of the men Roosevelt hated most was Charles A. Lindbergh, who, during the 1941 lend-lease debate, testified: "I do not believe we are strong enough to impose our way of life on Europe and on Asia." Lindbergh's prediction has turned out to be uncomfortably close to the truth.

-Gene Farmer

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.