The Washington War

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From The Wall Street Journal:

‘While millions of American soldiers, sailors, and Marines fought savage battles around the globe” during World War II, James Lacey tells us, a war also raged in Washington. It was fought with intensity and with an impact as critical as outcomes on distant battlefields. Despite a surface appearance of chaos, “titanic rows almost always led to better outcomes than would have prevailed had there been a single man or apparatus dictating events.” Their central figure was President Franklin D. Roosevelt, “a master manipulator who generated results via conflict and always resisted delegating ultimate authority.” In the end, Mr. Lacey argues in “The Washington War,” such conflict vindicated American democracy and sealed Roosevelt’s claim to greatness.

As president from 1933, Roosevelt had devoted most of his time and effort to the American struggle against the Depression. The military budget suffered severe cuts. Public sentiment was strongly convinced that the nation’s participation in World War I had been a costly mistake. Congress passed a series of neutrality acts that forbade certain kinds of American trade with warring nations. All indicators of public opinion registered a sense that the United States had no compelling interest on the European continent.

Speaking in Chicago, the epicenter of American isolationism, on Oct. 5, 1937, Roosevelt spotlighted a “reign of terror and international lawlessness.” Peaceful nations, he said, needed to quarantine the aggressors of the world. The backlash was overwhelming, and the president adjusted his rhetoric accordingly. His authority was further diminished by domestic failures, including his bid to “pack” a hostile Supreme Court and his attempt to “purge” conservative Democratic congressmen who had voted against his proposals. Interior Secretary Harold Ickes described him as “punch drunk from the punishment.” By the end of 1938, it seemed that FDR would be remembered at best as a semi-successful chief executive who had ameliorated the Depression and achieved little in foreign affairs.

In September 1939, the outbreak of war in Europe gave Roosevelt a new relevance that bordered on indispensability. He sent Sumner Welles to Europe as, in effect, a personal envoy and peace negotiator. When Welles’s mission proved hopeless, the president pursued policies that favored Britain and France. After the French collapsed in 1940, leaving Hitler the effective master of continental western Europe, FDR concentrated on a program of all-out aid to Britain.

It was at this point, as Mr. Lacey shows, that two relationships became central to Roosevelt’s foreign policy. The first was with Harry Hopkins, who had managed work relief programs during the New Deal years. He had no foreign-policy credentials but possessed good judgment. A journalist described him as having “a mind like a razor, a tongue like a skinning knife, a temper like a Tartar and a sufficient vocabulary of parlor profanity . . . to make a mule skinner jealous.” As Mr. Lacey notes, Hopkins had “a long and public feud” with Ickes, going back to the mid-1930s; the difference had less to do with ideas than with personality: “Each thoroughly despised the other.”

. . . .

Roosevelt dispatched Hopkins to London with the mission of evaluating England’s determination and viability—and, not least, forming a sense of its new prime minister, Winston Churchill. Hopkins would eventually become, in effect, the midwife of a close but complex relationship between the president and the prime minister.

The second relationship was with Churchill himself. On Aug. 3, 1941, Roosevelt departed from Washington on what was billed as a fishing vacation. Reporters who followed the presidential yacht at a distance instead witnessed a double posing as the president, who had transferred to a Navy cruiser that transported him to Newfoundland, met with Churchill. The two leaders sized each other up and developed a positive relationship. They issued a document, rather grandly named the Atlantic Charter, that highlighted the conflict between Nazism and Anglo-American liberalism.

. . . .

Tactically, the Pearl Harbor raid was an enormous success for the Japanese. Strategically, it was a fatal misstep. It united American sentiment for war. Congress shouted its assent the next day and soon followed with declarations against Japan’s Axis allies, Germany and Italy.

Washington became the capital city of the war effort. Once a sleepy upper-South city, it was transformed into a small metropolis with big-city virtues and vices. “While the city’s prostitutes were doing a booming business, the city’s churches were often packed to capacity at all hours of the day,” Mr. Lacey tells us. “When Roosevelt came on the radio to announce the start of a new offensive, it was not the bars that filled up, it was the churches.”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Sorry if you encounter a paywall)