Franklin D Roosevelt and America’s European Pivot

Dr Michael Fullilove is the executive director of the Lowy Institute in Sydney, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. A Rhodes scholar and a former prime ministerial adviser, he writes widely on global issues for publications such as The New York Times, Financial Times, The Daily Beast and Foreign Affairs. His recent book, Rendezvous with Destiny: How Franklin D. Roosevelt and five extraordinary men took America into the war and into the world, has been widely praised To discuss his work on the US and the work of Roosevelt’s 1941 envoys, Michael Fullilove addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 15 October 2013.

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT AND AMERICA’S EUROPEAN PIVOT

 MICHAEL FULLILOVE

Thank you Gerard and thank you for the invitation to speak to The Sydney Institute. It is a pleasure to be here. The Sydney Institute is one of the great institutions of our city, and our country, and Gerard and Anne Henderson are both Sydney institutions themselves!

This evening I’ll be talking about my recent book, Rendezvous with Destiny: How Franklin D. Roosevelt and five extraordinary men took America into the war and into the world, and its contemporary relevance, particularly to the US “pivot” or “rebalance” to Asia. The origin of the book was actually my master’s thesis that I wrote at Oxford back in 1998-1999. I’d first like to share with you why I wrote Rendezvous with Destiny.

I wanted to write about this topic for three reasons.

First, I wanted to write about FDR – the greatest statesman of the twentieth century. FDR saved American democracy from Depression, led Allies to victory over the dictators, won four consecutive presidential elections, and did all this with a broken body. He was a seductive, effervescent figure – Churchill said that meeting Roosevelt for the first time was like opening your first bottle of champagne.

Second, the period between the start of the Second World War in September 1939 and the American entry into war in December 1941 was the turning point of the twentieth century. The disposition of forces in the world changed utterly – by the time of Pearl Harbor the coalition was in place that would inevitably defeat the dictators. This period saw the transformation of America from a nervous, isolationist middle power into global leader – beat domestic isolationists and foreign enemies.

When war broke out in Europe in September 1939, Americans were anxious to isolate themselves from the conflict. Franklin Roosevelt wanted to help the democracies in their fight against the dictatorships, but he was hemmed in by congressional and public opposition. His extraordinary achievement was to navigate these constraints and move a divided and hesitant America toward ever greater involvement in the war.

Within two short years, America had rearmed and remobilised. A torrent of Lend-Lease aid was flowing eastward to Churchill’s Britain and Stalin’s Soviet Union, and the United States was waging an undeclared naval war against Germany in the Atlantic. By the time of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, America’s course was set for global leadership. This was, in fact, the start of the American century in which we’re still living.

In these two years, America turned. But how did it turn so quickly? How did FDR come to have such faith in the ability of the UK and the USSR to withstand the force of the Axis attacks? How could he obtain the intelligence he craved, and take the measure of Churchill and Stalin, when he was trapped in a wheelchair in Washington? FDR distrusted the State Department – he is supposed to have joked after Pearl Harbor: “My State Department is neutral in this war and I hope it stays that way”– and regarded most US diplomats as cookie-pushers and conservatives in striped pants. The ambassadorial reports he received from Joseph Kennedy and others were invariably defeatist in tone.

This brings me to my final reason for writing Rendezvous with Destiny. I wanted to write the kind of history I like to read. I didn’t want to simply write about vast impersonal forces. I wanted to write about individuals – individuals with big personalities and great strengths as well as colourful frailties.

Hedged in on all sides, FDR turned to five associates, only one of whom had any background in international affairs, and sent them on special missions to Europe.

First off the mark was Sumner Welles, a chilly patrician described by Time as “a casting director’s dream of a diplomat”. Eventually railroaded out of the State Department for making homosexual advances to African-American porters on the president’s train. Welles was sent around Europe in the spring of 1940, meeting with Mussolini in Rome, Hitler and his acolytes in Berlin, the leaders of the Third Republic in Paris, and Neville Chamberlain’s government in London. FDR was looking for ways to help the British and French, but he had not yet settled on an effective policy.

By the late summer, the world had changed utterly. Hitler had unleashed his Blitzkrieg, France had fallen, and only Britain and her Empire remained standing – and who knew for how long? Now “Wild Bill” Donovan – war hero, lawyer, adventurer and future spymaster – visited a lonely United Kingdom at the president’s behest to determine whether Britain could hold out against the Nazis. Donovan’s eyewitness report helped convince FDR that this was a country worth backing, and American aid began to flow.

In November 1940, Roosevelt won an unprecedented third term as president, and his war policy toughened further. He threw a lifeline to Britain in the form of Lend-Lease, and dispatched three men to help secure it. Presidential confidant Harry Hopkins, the scruffy, sickly social worker from Sioux City, Iowa who became the whirling dervish at the center of the New Deal, was sent to explain Lend-Lease to Winston Churchill

Churchill was duchessing Hopkins around northern Scotland. Hopkins had been careful in what he said. On the way back to London they stopped in Glasgow where he gave one of the few speeches of his mission.

Those who heard it never forgot it. The Scottish Labour MP and civil defence commissioner, Tom Johnston, hosted a private dinner in the prime minister’s honour at the North British Station Hotel, a stately railway hotel located on George Square. There, in Room 21 overlooking the square, the visitors supped with the Lord Provost of Glasgow and one to two other local notables. After toasts to the King and the President, Johnston prevailed upon an exhausted Hopkins, whose face was white and drawn, to say a few words to the table.

“Mr. Chairman, I am not making speeches over here,” said Hopkins. “I am reporting what I see to Mr. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, my President, a great man, a very great man. But now that I am here and on my feet perhaps I might say in the language of the old book” – and here he paused, and looked straight down the table at Churchill – “Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people and thy God my God.” And then he lowered his voice and said, very quietly, “Even unto the end.”

Hopkins sat down in silence. Everyone in the room was moved. Churchill was in tears, just as he would weep afterward when retelling the story. “He knew what it meant,” recalled the prime minister’s doctor, Charles Wilson. “Even to use the words seemed like a rope thrown to a drowning man.”

FDR’s fourth envoy, Averell Harriman – an ambitious, handsome railroad heir and banker – was charged with delivering the aid to London. He found time to romance Winston Churchill’s daughter-in-law, and years later Pamela married Averell and transformed herself into Pamela Harriman, socialite, fundraising queen and mentor to President Clinton, who appointed her his ambassador to France. She died at a great age swimming laps at The Ritz in Paris – which is how I want to go myself. The Ritz was Sumner Welles’s hotel in Paris when he was on mission.

Roosevelt even put to work his rumpled, charismatic opponent in the 1940 presidential election, Wendell Willkie, “the Indiana dynamo”, whose visit to London and Dublin was a public relations triumph, lifting British morale, winning over wary Americans and edging the Republican Party away from isolationism.

In the course of Willkie’s meeting with FDR before his trip, the president took a sheet of White House stationery and wrote a letter to Winston Churchill for delivery by his recent rival. It was addressed to “A Certain Naval Person” and the envelope was marked “Kindness of Honorable Wendell Willkie”. The letter, containing lines from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Building of the Ship,” read as follows:

Dear Churchill

Wendell Willkie will give you this—He is truly helping to keep politics out over here.

I think this verse applies to your people as it does to us:

“Sail on, Oh Ship of State!


Sail on, Oh Union strong and great.

 Humanity with all its fears,


With all the hopes of future years,

Is hanging breathless on thy fate.”

As ever yours

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Then, in summer 1941, Hitler let the dice fly, ordering the invasion of Russia. Again it was the frail Harry Hopkins who dominated proceedings, returning to Britain to confer with Churchill and making a death-defying journey to Moscow to meet with Joseph Stalin. Hopkins’ mission gave Roosevelt the confidence to gamble on aiding the Soviet Union against the advice of most of his counselors. Hopkins provided a character reference for the Soviet Union, just as Bill Donovan had earlier provided one for the United Kingdom.

A few months later, on 7 December 7 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. The next day, the United States declared war on Japan, and three days after that Germany declared war on the United States. At last America was in the war, and FDR was a war president.

* * *

I think that the events I describe in Rendezvous with Destiny are relevant to America’s “pivot” to Asia.

President Barack Obama’s most important foreign policy initiative in his first term was his attempt to pivot the United States toward Asia. The country took a strategic detour by invading Iraq and prolonging its occupation of Afghanistan. America is overly invested in the Middle East and underinvested in Asia, where its greatest future challenges and opportunities lie. Now President Obama seeks to rebalance the country’s portfolio.

It makes powerful strategic sense for the United States to rebalance its foreign policy toward Asia, where so many of its future opportunities and challenges lie. Wealth and power are shifting eastward. China’s economy is expected to be the world’s biggest within the next five years; it is already the world’s largest source of economic growth, the largest exporter of goods, and the second-largest importer of goods. It holds more US Treasury securities than any other country. The Asian region is also the home of established economic powers such as Japan, still the world’s third largest economy, as well as emerging economic powerhouses such as India and Indonesia.

If the economic outlook in Asia is positive, the security outlook is increasingly unpredictable. The Taiwan Strait is calm, but there are worrying tensions on the Korean peninsula and in the East and South China Seas.

These challenges make the pivot urgent. If Washington cannot reassure its Asian allies that sequestration and defense cuts will not reduce the US military presence in Asia, they may take matters into their own hands. Equally, China may conclude that America lacks staying power and resolve.

Washington must walk a fine line, reassuring allies without emboldening them and projecting strength to China without belligerence. But it is remarkably difficult to pivot a country as large and diverse as the United States. Arguably, the last successful pivot took place in 1939-1941.

In these two years, America turned. As I explained earlier FDR and his envoys were responsible for the turn. It was a campaign of subtle diplomacy, carried off with great flair. Roosevelt’s tactical shifts were ceaseless, yet behind them a clear and inexorable direction can be discerned. Roosevelt’s pivot outward – and especially his turn to Europe – involved supreme presidential concentration and the diversion of resources on a massive scale.

This is what it takes to pivot America. If Roosevelt’s successor as president is now to reorient the country away from some of the responsibilities FDR assumed – including its heavy obligations in the Middle East – it will take a similar effort.

Obama’s challenge may not be as urgent or deadly as Roosevelt’s. Plainly, a rising China is in no way analogous to the Axis regimes. Yet without a strong US presence, the region faces strategic uncertainty, power imbalances and the risk of destabilising rivalry.

In closing, let me return to the Second World War. One of the things I loved about this period was how charming the characters were. FDR once cabled Churchill: “It is fun to be in the same decade with you.” And it was.

My favourite story in the book is about a conference between Roosevelt and Churchill that was held in Washington shortly after Pearl Harbor. The visitors were accommodated at the White House and, on one occasion, Roosevelt accidentally surprised Churchill in the middle of his morning bath. FDR apologised and made to leave, but Churchill supposedly rose like a sea monster from the bathtub and stood before him, naked, plump, pink, and dripping. Unashamed, he declared, “The prime minister of Great Britain has nothing to conceal from the president of the United States.”

It is difficult to imagine Xi Jinping having that kind of relationship with President Obama. Perhaps for that we should be thankful.