I have read surely 100 books, if not more, about Franklin Roosevelt and his times. I would guess that surely 50 quote the famous judgment of legendary Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who met FDR for the first time in 1933 when the then President Elect visited Holmes at his house in Washington, DC: “A second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament!”
The only problem is, Justice Holmes actually described Franklin’s intellect as “third rate”, according to former Kennedy-Johnson era speechwriter Richard Goodwin, in his fascinating (though largely forgotten) memoir, Remembering America A Voice from the Sixties, first published in 1988. Goodwin announced himself to the world as a young man by graduating first in his class from Harvard Law School (doesn’t everyone?) and getting a job clerking for legendary Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. It was Frankfurter who took FDR to meet the retired Justice, and it was or surely Frankfurter who supplied to the world Holmes’ famous take on the incoming president, likely bowdlerizing the original to avoid distressing either man1 and only giving the “real version” to a trusted protégé.
So, anyway, not only was Franklin glib, manipulative, gossipy, unreliable, and deceitful—all characteristics discussed in detail in Derek Leebeaert’s fascinating study, Unlikely Heroes, describing the interactions between FDR and his four longest-serving “lieutenants”, Harry Hopkins, Henry Wallace, Frances Perkins, and Harold Ickes—he was, well, “stoopid”.2 So how does a third-rate intellect get himself elected president four times, end the worst depression in history and also win the greatest war in history, effectively fighting, and winning, two world wars waged at opposite ends of the earth? Well, by being lucky and having the “temperament” to endure what must have seemed like endless setbacks while remaining sure that his “lucky star”3 would never fail him.
For Roosevelt certainly was “lucky”. His luck seemed to have run out on him after election day in November 1938, when Republicans made huge gains in the congressional elections and all the targets of Roosevelt’s attempted “purge” of the right-wing Democrats who had “failed” him in his war against the Supreme Court won easy re-election. At that point it must have seemed likely that Dr. New Deal would limp to the exit with unemployment still standing at 10% with the Republicans poised to regain the White House in 1940, at least hoping to undo all that Franklin had done. But Adolph Hitler had other plans.
Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 made it “possible” for Roosevelt to consider running for a third term, something that surely would have been met with derision—and probably helped bring about a Democratic defeat—if he had attempted it without a full-blown crisis. But it was the fall of France in June 1940, coming as a complete shock to everyone, that made a Roosevelt victory feasible, and, indeed, knowing the outcome, almost inevitable. In 1939, defense appropriations were about $1 billion. In 1940, about $5 billion, along with the first peace-time draft in American history. Despite a largely bumbling second term, many people still saw Roosevelt as something as a savior, and he won easily, with almost 55% of the popular vote and a crushing 449-82 margin in the Electoral College. It was the fall of France, which many people saw as presaging the actual fall of Western Civilization, that put FDR in the White House for the third time and allowed him to turn the page on his failure to restore American prosperity.
Roosevelt’s “luck” would continue in 1941. The collapse of France allowed Japan to expand rapidly into what had been French imperial territories, seizing control of Vietnam in July 1941 and provoking the U.S. to significantly tighten restrictions on the export of oil to Japan. Then, in my opinion, based largely on my reading of Dean Acheson’s memoirs, Acheon, then assistant secretary of state, acting without higher authorization, instituted a bureaucratic slowdown that made it impossible, rather than difficult, for Japan to obtain oil from the U.S.
Again in my opinion, Acheson did this in the hope of goading Japan into taking further aggressive action, likely seizing the oil available in the Dutch East Indies—which they did, but only after destroying the American Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor, which Acheson did not expect. In this memoirs Acheson claimed that the American people were readier to go to war than Roosevelt estimated, which I suspect was entirely untrue. And how provoking the Japanese into seizing the Dutch East Indies would allow FDR to declare war on Japan, and how that would justify the U.S. to also declare war on Germany and indeed embark on a “Germany First” strategy—well, it doesn’t seem that Acheson thought that far ahead, because Japanese seizure of the Dutch East Indies alone surely would not have done the job.
But FDR benefited immensely from the tragedies that followed Acheson’s improvising: Japan did attack Pearl Harbor, stunning American opinion infinitely more than the fall of France. And then Hitler declared war on the U.S., allowing FDR to enter the European war with a justification that he never could have engineered on his own. He was even “lucky” in that all the U.S. aircraft carriers were out at sea and escaped the assault on Pearl, carriers that would allow the U.S. to achieve relative parity with Japanese forces in a remarkably short time, considering the horrendous first six months of the war, when America stumbled from one disaster to another.
In the war itself, it seems to me that FDR was “right” on the big issues a remarkable number of times. He was right not to listen to General Marshall, who wanted to invade France in 1943, when American forces were painfully unprepared for facing a “real” army; right not to listen to Churchill, who hoped to delay the invasion of Europe until at least 1945, by which time Stalin would probably have been in Paris, and in no mood to compromise. I have never read a historian who did not either implicitly or explicitly give an overall strong endorsement of FDR’s choices for commanding generals and admirals.4 He bet heavily on aircraft, on aircraft carriers, on bombers, and, of course, the atomic bomb, and, again, he was right. He was even “right” to accept Soviet domination in Eastern Europe at the infamous Yalta conference. There was no way for him to reverse it in the first place, and in the second, lacking the assurance of the possession of a working atomic bomb, he would need the full participation of Soviet forces in the invasion of Japan to keep American losses endurable. “We just saved a million American boys’ lives!” exclaimed the not very sentimental Admiral Ernie King (“A mental bully. The kind of man I hate,” according to Eisenhower) after the agreement was signed.
Roosevelt’s one great failure was his bizarre insistence on “normalizing” communists, who he insisted on seeing as largely well meaning though often paranoid idealists. They wanted the same things as “we” did, actually. They just carried away at times. He was never willing to see the Soviets as they were, proudly amoral totalitarians for whom terrorism and cruelty were always the first and best solution to any problem. There was never any excuse for this blindness, but Roosevelt persisted in it to the end of his life.
Afterwords
Richard Goodwin (remember him) is worth an entry of his own, which I hope to get around to sometime, a highly influential speechwriter for first JFK, then LBJ, then Eugene McCarthy (who toppled LBJ in the 1968 New Hampshire primary), and finally RFK, whose assassination understandably almost destroyed him. Goodwin had a remarkable ability to gain the confidence of a remarkable succession of powerful men, and his insights and recollections are well worth considering.
1. I ran this past ChatGPT, which informed me that the accuracy of either version is “disputed”, but I’d be surprised if either Goodwin or Frankfurter were mistaken. Frankfurter was Goodwin’s mentor and even patron saint—if Dick were ever tempted to settle for “good enough” he would stop and think “but that’s not what he would do”—and Frankfurter was both close to FDR (close enough to occasionally handle “off the books” matters for him) and, obviously beholden to him for putting him on the Supreme Court in the first place. Besides, Frankfurter could be pretty tart himself, describing Woodrow Wilson as “a self-righteous pedantic snob” and absolutely unloading on fellow Justice William O. Douglas—“That man is an opportunist and a malingerer. He’s more concerned about his public personality than the work of the Court. In fact, he doesn’t do his work. He just decides who he wants to win and then votes — a lazy, contemptible mind.”
2. Word wants to spell “stoopid” as “stooped”. Makes sense.
3. I’m sure Roosevelt never used this expression. It seems “likely” that it never occurred to him that God would ever let anything bad happen to Sara Roosevelt’s son.
4. Famous “bad picks” are Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short, caught flat-footed at Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, and General Lloyd Fredendall, generally held responsible for the embarrassing American defeat in North Africa at the Kasserine Pass, plus FDR’s failure to rein in General Douglas McArthur, particularly in his determination to reconquer the Philippines as a matter of personal honor rather than military purpose. But Roosevelt felt that MacArthur was politically untouchable, and he was probably right.
