ISSUE: Winter 1978
Winston Churchill wrote after the first World War that the action of the United States in the war period depended upon the workings of Woodrow Wilson’s “mind and spirit to the exclusion of almost every other factor.” Churchill believed that Wilson’s exercise of supreme power, without what he considered the proper cabinet and legislative consultation, meant that the president alone “played a part in the fate of nations incomparably more direct and personal than any other man.”
It was a part, we know now after the experience of the sixties and early seventies, that no individual should play, great though a president’s power must be in a major war. In World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt also played a decisive role in the fate of nations, yet he was more alert to public opinion than Wilson. Roosevelt was a better politician than Wilson and he recognized to a greater extent than Wilson did the necessity to consult cabinet and Congress and other important men inside and outside government. Roosevelt, in short, was gregarious, an essential quality in a political leader. Wilson sought the counsel of others, particularly in his last two or three years in office, less than any president in this century before Nixon. As Lord Devlin said in his excellent study of Wilson, Too Proud to Fight: Wilson s Neutrality, the president believed that the “essence of political leadership lay in the power to mobilize public opinion.” But “the canvassing of influential men and the exchanging of support, which form so large a part of political management, were things which Wilson did not understand and which, if they could not be dispensed with, he left to others.” This was unquestionably Wilson’s greatest weakness and led to his greatest defeat.
Roosevelt was assistant secretary of the navy under Wilson, and he was determined not to make the same mistakes in World War II. FDR recognized that a political leader must not go so far ahead of the voters as to lose them, and he knew that words alone could not convince men to follow him. Roosevelt had ignored public opinion and his own party leaders in the Supreme Court fight of 1937 and had lost. While he was often intolerant of his critics, much as Wilson was, he understood their power and the necessity to mollify them when he could, to outmaneuver them if possible, to take two steps forward and one back to gain an objective. Devlin describes Wilson’s diplomacy as “continuous expostulation,” noting that Wilson understood, no one better, “the language of exposition, but not the language of maneuver.”
To an unusual degree, Roosevelt understood both.
These comparisons are brought to mind by Joseph P. Lash’s fascinating book, Roosevelt and Churchill, 1939-41, a gold mine of lessons in American history and particularly of the American presidency. Roosevelt was successful in many things because he was a shrewd politician. Lash portrays him also as a skilled strategist and long-range thinker, in both the political and military sense. He is shown as a man who thought in strategic terms and thought more deeply than was apparent to many persons who watched his performance as America prepared for war. He was a leader strong enough to resist the entreaties of Churchill and cabinet members like Stimson, Knox, Ickes, and Morgenthau who advocated a more aggressive war policy in 1940 and 1941. At the same time, while using all his skill as a tactician in fighting off the isolationists, Roosevelt refused to be diverted from his main objective of aiding Britain and preparing America for war.
The picture one got of Roosevelt in his press conferences was of an improvisor, who dragged his feet, who was casual about many things and at times was superficial. The correspondence with Churchill, however, shows the President as a man who thought globally and in large strategic terms, a man who had a clearer view of all the factors both at home and abroad than many of his advisors.
This study of the relationship of Roosevelt and Churchill illustrates the importance of individuals and the play of their personalities as well as the force of theory and great ideas on the march of history. Churchill’s resoluteness, which FDR sensed early on, was a powerful factor in the President’s conviction that he should give all possible aid to Britain. In their thinking and planning, both these two former naval persons were deeply influenced by an American military philosopher, a strategist who had affected Britain’s military experts as well as American leaders from Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin Roosevelt.
This meant that on grand strategy the two men’s thoughts evolved along similar lines. Captain Alfred T. Mahan, whose writings Roosevelt and Churchill had studied, maintained that sea power was the basis of world power in those pre-nuclear days and that the United States should develop sea power and cooperate with Britain’s. Moreover, Mahan argued that naval power must be concentrated rather than dispersed. He believed that Britain’s power should be concentrated in the Atlantic and that America’s should be concentrated in the Pacific, concentrated for defense of the home waters and for the offense when attacking. Mahan’s doctrines remained a guide for the two men even though at times events forced some dispersions, often to their sorrow. Without control of the seas, Britain would have been starved very early in the war, the invasion of the continent could never have been mounted, and the Japanese could not have been defeated.
Lash subtitled his book “the partnership that saved the West.” We know now that the partnership succeeded, that the West was saved from the greatest threat of modern times. But we can never quite forget that the victory over Hitler was not foreordained. Luck played a signal role, particularly when one considers Roosevelt’s step-at-a-time policy. There are a thousand “ifs,” or “iffy questions,” as FDR frequently said in reply to press conference questions—if the British air force had failed in 1940, if Britain had been as divided politically as France, if Russia had been defeated in six weeks, as many experts at the time predicted, if Japan in 1941 had attacked Britain and the Netherlands but not the United States, if Hitler had developed nuclear power before the United States.
Roosevelt was as clearly alive to all these dangers as anyone. Yet in 1940 and 1941, he followed a cautious approach, dictated by the fear of a divided America, which would have been an ungovernable America. His critics charged then that he could not make up his mind, that he vacillated and failed to provide the forceful leadership which the times demanded. Churchill worked almost from the beginning of his prime ministry to convince Roosevelt that America must enter the war if victory was to be won. Despite Churchill’s “give us the tools and we will finish the job,” the prime minister knew that Britain could not win alone. Others knew it as well. In 1941, shortly after Churchill’s first meeting with Roosevelt, General Smuts of South Africa, who was impatient with Roosevelt, cabled Churchill: “We shall not win this war without active American assistance.”
Through much of 1941, Churchill tried to persuade Roosevelt to issue a declaration warning the Japanese that if they attacked British or Dutch possessions in the Pacific the United States would respond with military action. Both Churchill and Roosevelt knew that Germany was pressuring Japan to take aggressive action in the Pacific, and it was widely believed that the attack would be on the European powers, not the United States. Churchill knew that defeat of Britain and the Netherlands in the Far East would be the surest way of diverting America’s attention from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and he did not want that to happen. But FDR repeatedly rejected Churchill’s overtures. A week before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt told Lord Halifax, the British ambassador in Washington, that he did not believe the country would support war if the Japanese attacked the British and Dutch only. Even at that late date, Roosevelt declined to join in a declaration that an attack on Britain and the Netherlands would constitute an attack on the United States.
Smuts had again cabled Churchill that the war might “end in stalemate and thus fatally for us” without active American intervention. Smuts urged Churchill to make a personal appeal to Roosevelt to enter the war. The prime minister replied that he had made the argument many times and did not believe another appeal would be of any use. “We must not underrate his Constitutional difficulties,” Churchill wisely replied. “He may take action as Chief Executive but only Congress can declare war. . . . We must have patience and trust to the tide which is flowing our way and to events.”
Events moved rapidly after that cable, and Roosevelt was saved by a dramatic but costly action that united American opinion—the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Without that unifying event, Roosevelt’s policy might have been an utter failure, and the United States might have been left alone in the struggle with the dictators. To the very moment of the Japanese attack, Roosevelt was guided by his assessment of what Congress and the public would permit. He remembered that an outraged opinion led by powerful elements in Congress defeated Wilson’s proposals for peace. He did not know that similar divisions in the country later would make it impossible for Lyndon Johnson to direct a war in Asia and require Nixon to resign the Presidency.
In a larger context, the lesson is clear: Roosevelt’s policy of gradualism, of refusing to go farther than Congress and public opinion would permit, worked, and the West was saved. But the experience demonstrated the inhibitions a democracy imposes on the president’s authority. The consent of the governed is a fundamental. Yet it is also true that if Britain and Russia had fallen, if Hitler had become supreme in Europe and Japan supreme in Asia, Roosevelt’s policy would have been judged a failure. The United States would have been isolated and faced with the decision to fight alone a long and exhausting war or to negotiate a settlement with the dictators.
