The President’s Men

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/books/review/rendezvous-with-destiny-by-michael-fullilove.html

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Each time an American president sends soldiers, mercenaries, jets or drones to fight abroad, those of us whose historical knowledge or memories reach back to the last century recall when this nation entered into armed conflict the old-­fashioned way, by declaring war on an enemy. Americans appear to have an endless appetite for stories about World War II, perhaps because it was the last war “declared” by Congress and the only war of the 20th century that continues to be viewed sympathetically by a majority of every segment of the population.

In “Rendezvous With Destiny: How Franklin D. Roosevelt and Five Extraordinary Men Took America Into the War and Into the World,” Michael Fullilove, an Australian writer on foreign affairs (with whom I share an American publisher), tells the familiar story of how Franklin Roosevelt cajoled, frightened and ultimately persuaded the American public and Congress to aid the British in their war against Germany, then to fight alongside them. He does so by focusing on the missions of five men he identifies as Roosevelt’s “personal envoys,” Sumner Welles, William J. (Wild Bill) Donovan, Wendell Willkie, Harry Hopkins and Averell ­Harriman.

Roosevelt had little faith in the competence or loyalty of his appointed ambassadors and the State Department’s career diplomats, most of whom, he thought, were Republicans and out of tune with his priorities. To gather intelligence and administer his foreign-assistance programs, he substituted his own representatives for State Department officials, thoroughly disrupting established lines of authority.

In early 1940, six months after Britain and France declared war on Germany in response to the Nazis’ invasion of Poland, Roosevelt instructed the only man in the State Department whose counsel he sought, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, to travel to Europe to ascertain whether there was any hope of initiating peace talks. Welles confirmed what the president had feared: that a broader war was much more likely than a negotiated peace. Within weeks of Welles’s mission, the Germans had invaded Denmark and Norway and then slashed their way through Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. In mid-June 1940, France surrendered. “Only Britain and her empire,” Fullilove writes, “remained standing — and who knew for how long?”

What was Roosevelt to do? The United States ambassador to Britain, Joseph P. Kennedy, urged him not to get involved. The German military machine was invincible, Kennedy insisted. American military equipment sent to Britain would, after a successful German invasion, end up part of the Nazi arsenal.

Unwilling to give up on Britain, but wary of ignoring his ambassador’s near-frantic warnings, the president endorsed the recommendation of Frank Knox, his secretary of the Navy, that William Donovan, Roosevelt’s law school classmate and a war hero, be sent to Britain to verify or rebut Kennedy’s claims. On concluding his mission, Donovan informed the president that the British had “excellent prospects of pulling through,” but to do so, they needed American assistance.

Roosevelt agreed to provide 50 over-age destroyers in return for long-term leases on British military bases. Congress and the 1937 Neutrality Act forbade him to do more. Only after his election to a third term in 1940 did Roosevelt come up with a brilliant new strategy for “lending” the British the military equipment they required but could not pay for in cash.

In January 1941, he asked his friend and adviser Harry Hopkins to travel to Britain as his personal representative, confer with Prime Minister Winston Churchill and lay the groundwork for lend-lease. After lend-lease was approved by Congress in March, the individual Roosevelt put in charge of coordinating the program with the British was another personal envoy, Averell Harriman. That summer, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Roosevelt again ignored established diplomatic lines of authority and dispatched Harry Hopkins to Moscow to meet with Joseph Stalin to discuss future American assistance.

The fifth man in Fullilove’s honor roll of presidential envoys is Wendell Willkie, who, only weeks after losing the presidential election to Roosevelt, decided to travel to London “to witness the conditions firsthand and get a perspective on the lend-lease issue.” Willkie had endorsed the legislation (with minor revisions) in January, effectively deflating Republican opposition.

Fullilove’s decision to tell the story of America’s entry into World War II through the missions of these men makes for an entertaining, if truncated history. We get fine capsule biographies of five remarkable Americans, accounts of their travels to and within war-torn Europe, intimate details of their lives and loves (including Harriman’s affair with the woman who became his wife 30 years later, Pamela Churchill, the prime minister’s daughter-in-law) and firsthand reports of Churchill’s off-the-cuff monologues, culinary habits (he prized English mutton) and film-viewing preferences (he hated “Citizen Kane,” but adored “Lady Hamilton,” a Napoleonic war love story). We also gain a better understanding of how Churchill, recognizing the importance of American assistance to the survival of the British Empire, went out of his way to ingratiate himself with each of the president’s men.

Regrettably, in this, as in other histories written as collective biographies, the whole ends up being less than the sum of its parts. The fault is with the artificiality of Fullilove’s “personal envoys” category. Welles was sent overseas in 1940 not simply as Roosevelt’s envoy, but because, as under secretary of state, he was the logical choice for this particular diplomatic mission. Donovan was dispatched not by Roosevelt, but by the secretary of the Navy. Wendell Willkie went on his own. Harriman did not report to Roosevelt, but to Harry Hopkins. The only true personal envoy, the only man whom the president fully trusted to speak for him, was Hopkins. Fittingly, Hopkins’s missions to London and Moscow dominate this book, as they should.

There is a second, related problem with the architecture of Fullilove’s history. By organizing his narrative around five men, four of whom were announced interventionists (Welles is the outlier), Fullilove misses much of the drama then playing out: back home, a sustained, vitriolic debate was going on over whether the United States had any obligation, moral or strategic, to come to the aid of the British. In the nation’s elite colleges, in Congress, before standing-room-only crowds in lecture halls and to radio audiences in the tens of millions, isolationists were arguing that it was senseless, if not self-­destructive, for the United States to arm the British in what might very well end up being a losing cause. Every bomber, destroyer and rifle sent overseas was one less weapon available to defend the country against possible attack.

The process through which Franklin Roosevelt led the nation from neutrality to war was not nearly as straightforward — “relentless” is the word used here — as Fullilove claims. Roosevelt was not dissembling when he declared during the 1940 campaign that he had no intention of sending American boys to fight in Europe. He delayed joining the battle as long as he possibly could, and asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany on Dec. 11, 1941, three days after the declaration of war against Japan — and only after Hitler had declared war on the United States.

<NYT_AUTHOR_ID> <p>David Nasaw is the Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the author, most recently, of “The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy.”