David Kaiser. No End Save Victory: How FDR Led the Nation into War. New York, New York: Basic Books, 2014. 416 pp. $27.99 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-465-01982-3.
Reviewed by Edgar F. Raines (U.S. Center for Military History)
Published on H-War (June, 2018)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey (Air University)
A President and the Approach of War
In 1936, while accepting the nomination for a second term as president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt told the National Democratic Convention that “this generation has a rendezvous with destiny.” The rendezvous that the president had in mind at the time was undoubtedly the continuation and culmination of the domestic reforms of his first term—the New Deal. Instead, history and fate combined to give him and his generation an altogether different one, a battle to defend the ideas and ideals of Western civilization. That rendezvous began with the German offensive on the western front in April 1940 against Denmark and Norway and ended with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Those twenty months are the subject of David E. Kaiser’s No End Save Victory: How FDR Led the Nation into War. Kaiser provides an almost day-by-day account of the formulation and execution of US national defense policy and strategy during this period.
Until the late summer of 1937 FDR had been content to largely continue the policies of his predecessors in foreign affairs: noninvolvement in the affairs of Europe, the Good Neighbor Policy in Latin America, the closest thing to a new departure in New Deal foreign policy, and continued nonrecognition of the Japanese seizure of Manchuria combined with no intention of using force to stop any further Japanese aggression against China. For its security, the United States depended upon a combination of the Royal Navy dominating the Atlantic and the US Navy serving as a check on its Japanese counterpart in the Pacific. The US Army was not much larger than the 100,000-man German army following the treaty of Versailles, while the American air force, the US Army Air Corps, numbered only about 2,000 aircraft of all types. (Kaiser rather understates the degree to which the Air Corps was modernized in the 1930s but he is not wrong about its size.) The Roosevelt administration had undertaken a modest naval building program in 1935, but this was as much a New Deal measure to pump money into the economy as it was to strengthen the navy. FDR, ever the disciple of Alfred Thayer Mahan, always regarded a stronger navy as a good thing in itself.
The Second Sino-Japanese War, beginning with the Marco-Polo-Bridge Incident in July 1937, led the administration in the person of Secretary of State Cordell Hull to condemn this violation of international law by the Japanese. In October, with the war spreading from northern to central China, FDR in a speech in Chicago labeled the conflict a direct threat to the security of the Western Hemisphere and called for a “quarantine” of the aggressor. At the same time he gave absolutely no details about how such a quarantine might work in practice, either in the speech or the press conference afterward. (Kaiser reprints in its entirety the transcript of the press conference to convey what it was like for the press to pin the president down—“very much like chasing a vagrant beam of sunshine around a vacant room,” to quote Henry L. Stimson facing the same dilemma later in a meeting on national defense (p. 150).
Such behavior caused some contemporaries to consider Roosevelt as an intellectual lightweight at best or a buffoon at worst. In truth his actions represented a sophisticated political approach to the situation, one repeated many times in the years ahead. FDR would publicly enunciate a principle, often in eloquent language, but give no details of how he might in practice implement it. Over the next months his cabinet officers would debate those questions, sometimes bursting into the public press in the process. Meanwhile, the president might already be having subcabinet officers, the ubiquitous Harry Hopkins, or members of departmental planning staffs pursue discreet initiatives. As events moved in the direction the president anticipated, the public pressure to do something intensified. Eventually, at a time the president deemed appropriate, the public outcry “forced” him to do what he had always wanted to do. In the case of the Quarantine Speech, FDR sent Capt. Royal Ingersoll, the chief of the Navy’s War Plans Division, to London to confer with a representative of the Royal Navy—who turned out to be the First Sea Lord, Lord Chatfield. Roosevelt planned to quarantine Japan by a distant blockade in which the British would move their main fleet to Singapore and the Americans would move their main fleet to Pearl Harbor. Although the technical discussions between the navies went well, the new British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, did not trust Roosevelt. In the end he preferred to deal with Adolph Hitler. While this particular initiative proved abortive, Roosevelt returned time and again to the idea of a distant blockade, particularly in the context of the US embargo on shipping war materiels to Japan. He only abandoned the idea when the chief of naval operations told him it was not technically feasible.
Contemporaries found FDR somewhat inscrutable, comparing him to a sphinx. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes had once famously evaluated FDR’s distant cousin Theodore Roosevelt as having “a first-class temperament but a second-class mind,” and to contemporaries in the 1930s the description seemed equally applicable to FDR. Herbert Hoover, hardly an unbiased observer, called him “a chameleon on plaid,” and the New York reporter Elmer Davis said he was a man who thought the shortest distance between two points was a corkscrew.[1] Roosevelt referred to himself as a juggler. Just to complicate things even more, the president often conducted business orally. So the first historians who examined the official records often found gaps in what happened at the point of decision.
Kaiser labored under no such difficulties. Many biographers have traced Roosevelt’s life in detail since his death. Kaiser indicates that books by Geoffrey Ward, Kenneth S. Davis, and Frank Friedel were among the most helpful. He argues that Roosevelt’s behavior as a politician was rooted in some of his earliest childhood experiences. With two adoring parents and no siblings, he learned that the most important thing for him to do was to keep his parents happy. Whatever he actually thought about his circumstances, such as when he went to boarding school at Groton, he affected a genial, happy persona. Later, when he married a woman whose outlook, tastes, and interests were entirely different from his own, his habit of burying his feelings and affecting a sunny disposition stood him in good stead. It also proved a valuable asset in a political career. He could always conceal what he was really thinking. This psychological shield stood his nation in good stead during the Great Depression and the dark days of World War II. There was also a price to pay. He found it difficult to have real friends (his private secretary, Missy LeHand, and his cousin Daisy Suckley were two of only a very few people with whom he could unburden himself), and he died of congestive heart failure at age sixty-three.
“Roosevelt,” writes Kaiser, “had an unusual mind.” He possessed amazing depth of knowledge in areas that deeply interested him, “stamps, ship models, rare books, and the naval forces of the United States” (p. 36). In other words he was not a systematic thinker; he was by no means a theoretician. He was on the other hand an exceptionally gifted practical politician who on his best days had an instinctive feel for popular opinion. He also knew something about a great many things, and as Kaiser later demonstrates, how they were connected. FDR demonstrated this talent perhaps most strikingly on the question of mobilization.
The approach of war in Europe produced a reaction by the president and his administration. The Munich Agreement spurred Roosevelt to secure increases in the Navy and Army Air Corps and direct the armed services to begin planning for a possible two-ocean war—the first of the Rainbow Plans. In September 1939 a majority of Americans favored an Allied victory in the European war but did not favor US intervention on the side of the Allies (a position with which the president may well have sympathized). FDR was able to secure a modification of the neutrality laws to allow “cash and carry.” The German offensive in the spring of 1940 sparked the beginning of serious preparations for industrial mobilization. Initially the object was the defense of the Western Hemisphere. Only in 1941 did the president shift to preparations for waging offensive war in the Atlantic.
Ever since 1958 with the publication of Arthur M. Schlesinger’s The Coming of the New Deal, scholars have recognized that FDR depended upon competing sources of information to ensure that he, rather than his subordinates, made key decisions.[2] Richard Neustadt elevated this to one of the defining characteristics of Roosevelt as president in his Presidential Power.[3] Not surprisingly, Kaiser finds the president using the same approach when guiding mobilization. But in Kaiser’s hands this technique is not an end in itself. Mobilization involved shifting productive capacity from meeting civilian needs to meeting military needs. Given the public’s attitude, this was an effort fraught with political peril. Having labor and management equally represented in the mobilization process and giving both access to the president meant that all the controversial decisions reached the president’s desk along with all the pros and cons for any decision. In this minuet of mobilization, timing was everything, and Roosevelt wanted to ensure that he controlled both the timing of a decision and its explanation to the public. A misstep could have set back the effort months, even years, or have been fatal to the entire enterprise. In spelling this out in such vivid detail, Kaiser makes a real contribution to our understanding of the 1940–41 mobilization.
Kaiser is also able to show the president’s hand in most key decisions. While Roosevelt often did not write things down, the people he talked to usually did afterward so that they could pass along his instructions to their subordinates. Consequently, agency records and the personal papers of key officials, which often include detailed diaries, can answer many previously unanswerable questions. Kaiser has performed an impressive amount of research to do just that. In addition, where the record is barren, he uses the historian’s ancient tool of chronology to suggest where and when FDR intervened to good effect, as in the initiation of the first of the Rainbow plans (p. 44).
Kaiser does a very good job of suggesting that Roosevelt, or at least someone with Roosevelt’s political skill and intellect, was indispensable for the success of American preparations for war. He does not in the process slight the other members of the administration. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall Jr., Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Harold R. Stark, mobilizers Donald Nelson and William Knudsen, Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Undersecretary of State Sumner Wells and to a somewhat lesser extent Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, Secretary of Commerce Jesse Jones, Chief of the Army Air Corps Lt. Gen. Henry H. Arnold, and Commander of the US Fleet Admiral J. O. Richardson receive biographical sketches and an exposition of where they stood on issues. Kaiser may not believe in the great man theory of history, but he does believe that the upper reaches of the Roosevelt administration were inhabited by some very talented people. Hull and Knox are somewhat startling additions to this list. Hull was often left out of presidential decisions, but Kaiser argues that he played a key role in selling administration policy to the public. On the basis of Kaiser’s evidence, it is clear that Knox did, too. Hull, Knox, Stark, Nelson, Knudsen, Wells, Arnold, and Richardson deserve scholarly biographies, each of which promises to open up different perspectives on the Roosevelt administration. Eleanor Roosevelt played a key role in securing better treatment for African Americans at war plants, but greater strides would come in race relations after the war. (As a result of negotiations with black leaders, Dean William Hastie of the Howard University Law School became Stimson’s Aid on Negro Affairs. Hastie also deserves a biography.) For this reviewer one question remains: was Secretary of Labor Francis Perkins as uninvolved in the labor disputes of the era as her sporadic mention in the text would suggest or is her omission due largely to a secondary literature focused on the War Department?
Stimson, Knox, and Stark became (along with Winston Churchill) advocates of early entry into the war to save Great Britain. Roosevelt resisted such pressure not only because of US public opinion but also because he did not have enough navy for both the Atlantic and the Pacific. Moreover, ammunition stocks were so low in the United States that the army would not have enough to both train draftees and conduct major operations overseas until mid-1942. Because of Japan’s southward expansion, beginning in September 1940 with the occupation of northern French Indochina, and the codebreaking that allowed US intelligence to read Japanese diplomatic messages, FDR knew that if the United States intervened on Britain’s side, the Japanese were committed to going to war with the United States. Throughout the remainder of 1940 and the first half of 1941, until the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa, the president and his advisors remained concerned that Britain could not survive a German invasion. In 1940 Roosevelt’s policy was not to risk the weak Atlantic fleet in a futile effort to rescue Britain.
The alternative nightmare and equally dangerous to the United States was a German offensive south through French North Africa to Dakar, the point at which Africa was closest to South America. This opened up visions of Nazi subversion throughout Latin America, possibly even accompanied by some sort of airborne invasion of Brazil. The German assault on the Soviet Union ended that possibility, at least in the near term. Roosevelt had an intuitive grasp of grand strategy, which he demonstrated by immediately pledging to extend Lend Lease to the Soviet Union. Throughout 1941 he also became more aggressive in the Atlantic as the building program of the late 1930s began providing the Atlantic fleet with more modern warships. In May FDR began exploring the possibility of using US Marines to replace the British garrison in Iceland and began to do so in July. The navy started convoying US merchantmen to Iceland. Later, FDR allowed Allied vessels to join these convoys. US warships went from shadowing German submarines and broadcasting their location to the British to attacking those submarines. By late 1941 Roosevelt was actively courting war with Germany in the Atlantic.
Roosevelt has been criticized by David M. Kennedy and other historians for having frozen Japanese assets in the United States—in essence embargoing trade (including oil) with Japan and thereby pushing Japan toward war. Kaiser demonstrates that Roosevelt only agreed to the embargo once he knew through intercepted Japanese diplomatic messages that the Japanese government had resolved to move into Southeast Asia (pp. 277-78). Even then it was not clear that the Japanese would attack the Philippines, but Roosevelt had concluded that a Japanese attack on the Dutch East Indies would compel American entry into the conflict.[4]
Kaiser also attempts to analyze FDR, his advisors, and his policies through a generational lens. This effort is only partially successful. Observations about how voters expected political leaders to rhetorically define policies, the role of national radio addresses, and the reading habits of voters are insightful. Kaiser could well have developed these insights further. Seeing FDR’s policy choices through a generational lens is somewhat more problematic because different members of the same generation had very different reactions to those policies. They were anything but uncontroversial in their day.
Generation as an analytical concept is about the shared experiences of people of a similar age. In other words, it deals with culture and the changes in culture. Some gifted historian in the future may write a great book about FDR’s generation, the so-called Missionary Generation. Such a volume, however, will have a cultural rather than a policy focus.
No End Save Victory lacks the breadth of William L. Langer’s and S. Everett Gleason’s two-volume The World Crisis and American Foreign Policy, the second volume of which covers almost exactly the same period as Kaiser’s study. Langer and Gleason, some twenty years before international relations became the newest thing in diplomatic history, showed just how to write from such a perspective. In discussing the Japanese move into northern Indochina, for example, they reported on the policy formulation in Tokyo, the reaction in Vichy France, the somewhat independent strategy pursued by the governor general in Hanoi, the reaction of the British government, the stance of the governor general of the Dutch East Indies, and the approach taken by the Roosevelt administration in Washington.[5] Kaiser is much more focused. He briefly describes the Japanese policy and then concentrates on the American response. What Kaiser loses in breadth he gains in depth. His emphasis is always on policies, but he shows how personalities—none more important than the president’s—and situations impacted their formulation, explanation to the public, and execution. It is an impressive performance. The book deserves a wide readership.
Notes
[1]. Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life (New York: Viking, 2017), 15.
[2]. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Coming of the New Deal, vol. 2 in The Age of Roosevelt, 3 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1958), 520-22, 527-29.
[3]. Richard E. Neustadt, Presidential Power: The Politics of Leadership (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1960), 157.
[4]. David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, The Oxford History of the United States, ed. C. Vann Woodward (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 510–13.
[5]. William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Undeclared War, 1940-1941, vol. 2 in The World Crisis and American Foreign Policy, 2 vols. (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1968), 3–21. The original edition was published in 1953.
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Citation:
Edgar F. Raines. Review of Kaiser, David, No End Save Victory: How FDR Led the Nation into War.
H-War, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2018.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=42357
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