FDR - Jean Edward Smith [183]
Roosevelt refused to be drawn in. He delayed ten days replying to Hoover’s “cheeky” letter and then brushed the president’s request aside. “I am equally concerned with you in regard to the gravity of the present banking situation, but my thought is that it is so very deep-seated that the fire is bound to spread in spite of anything that is done by way of mere statements.”59
An exception to FDR’s refusal to bail the Republicans out was in foreign policy. During the campaign Roosevelt virtually ignored international affairs—“I think Hoover’s foreign policy is about right,” he told Raymond Moley—and he chose not to make an issue of it after the election.60 At FDR’s invitation, Secretary of State Stimson visited Hyde Park on January 9, 1933, a cold, blustery Monday morning with rain turning to sleet and then to snow. Stimson was closeted with Roosevelt from eleven in the morning until five-thirty in the afternoon and later said he was “touched, overwhelmed by the kindness he showed me.… We both spoke with the utmost freedom and informality.” Roosevelt endorsed the administration’s efforts to embargo the shipment of arms to belligerents,* remained lukewarm to a world economic conference, and raised a number of questions about Latin America. Most important, he agreed fully with the most controversial aspect of Republican foreign policy, the so-called Stimson Doctrine, by which the United States refused to recognize the fruits of military aggression, specifically the Japanese conquest of Manchuria. “I had never had a talk with him before,” Stimson confided to his diary that evening, “but had no difficulty getting on.… I was much impressed with his disability and the brave way in which he paid no attention to it whatever.”61
Roosevelt’s endorsement of the Stimson Doctrine created a tizzy among his advisers. Moley and Tugwell told FDR his commitment might trigger war with Japan. The president-elect was unmoved. War might indeed occur, he allowed. In fact, it might be inevitable, given Japan’s imperial ambitions. And if that were the case, “it might be better to have it now than later.”62 Roosevelt said he had taken to speaking with Stimson daily over the telephone and that he intended to see the policy through. As Moley remembered the meeting, “Roosevelt put an end to the discussion by looking up and recalling that his Delano ancestors used to trade with China. ‘I have always had the deepest sympathy for the Chinese. How could you expect me not to go along with Stimson on Japan?’ ”63
Roosevelt used the four months between November and March to prepare for the presidency. The brain trust continued to work on policy, while FDR concentrated on putting his team together. Howe would be going to Washington, of course, as chief of staff to the president (the post was called secretary to the president in those days), as would Farley as postmaster general—the traditional post for the dispenser of party patronage, with a hundred thousand jobs at his disposal. Missy LeHand and Grace Tully would take over the White House secretarial duties, joined by Louise Hackmeister as chief telephone operator.* Hacky, as she was called, had manned the switchboard in all of Roosevelt’s campaigns and had a legendary feel for who should speak to the Boss and who should not. Rounding out the presidential office were Marvin McIntyre as appointments secretary and Steve Early as press secretary, charter members of the Cuff Links Club dating from FDR’s run for the vice presidency in 1920.
The cabinet proved more complicated. For the senior positions at State and Treasury, Roosevelt turned to two old Wilsonians, Cordell Hull and Carter Glass. Hull in many ways epitomized the up-from-poverty yearnings of the New Deal. The son of a hardscrabble dirt farmer from the mountains of southern Appalachia, Hull had served in the Spanish-American War as a captain of Tennessee volunteers and been elected to Congress in 1906 and to the U.S. Senate