FDR - Jean Edward Smith [273]
* The operative portion of what came to be known as the Ludlow Amendment provided:
Except in the event of an invasion of the United States or its Territorial possessions and attack upon the citizens residing therein, the authority of Congress to declare war shall not become effective until confirmed by a majority of all votes cast thereon in a Nationwide referendum.
The amendment also provided that Congress, by joint resolution, could refer the question of war or peace to the electorate “when it deems a national crisis to exist.” 75th Congress, 1st Session, House Joint Resolution 199. See Jean Edward Smith, The Constitution and American Foreign Policy 245 (St. Paul, Minn.: West Publishing Co., 1989).
* The 188 votes Ludlow received were for his resolution to bring the amendment to the floor, not for the amendment itself. Even if those 188 members were to vote for the amendment (which was not guaranteed), it would have fallen 102 votes shy of the 290 (two thirds of 435) required for passage.
† In a plebiscite on April 10 Austrians voted 99.75 percent for union with Germany. Historians of the Third Reich have often noted that Hitler took advantage of the euphoria surrounding the Anschluss to consolidate his hold on the German Army. Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg was relieved as war minister (Hitler himself assumed the office), General Freiherr von Fritsch was replaced as commander in chief, sixteen older generals (including Gerd von Rundstedt) were retired, and forty-four were transferred to less sensitive posts. Gordon A. Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640–1945 489 ff. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955); John W. Wheeler-Bennett, The Nemesis of Power: The German Army in Politics, 1918–1945 365–368 (London: Macmillan, 1961); Joachim C. Fest, Hitler 542–550 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974).
* Hopkins’s second wife, Barbara, Diana’s mother, died of cancer in the summer of 1937, when Diana was five years old. Until Hopkins remarried in July 1942, he and Diana lived off and on in the White House, where ER supervised Diana’s activities. Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 106–107 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948).
* Though Marshall ranked thirty-fourth, the rule that no one be appointed chief of staff who could not complete the four-year term before reaching the mandatory retirement age of sixty-five ruled out all but four general officers senior to Marshall. Of those, the odds-on favorite of military prognosticators was Major General Hugh A. Drum, commander of the First Army at Governors Island and the senior officer on active duty.
* As a child of seven I was privileged to watch from the window of my mother’s eighth-floor office in the Farm Credit Administration the parade escorting President Roosevelt and the King from Union Station to the White House. The crowd lining the parade route, estimated at 750,000, was the largest ever assembled in Washington. Will Swift, The Roosevelts and the Royals: Franklin and Eleanor, The King and Queen of England, and the Friendship That Changed History 113–114 (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2004).
TWENTY
STAB IN THE BACK
On this tenth day of June, 1940, the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor.
—FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, JUNE 10, 1940
WITH GERMAN ARMOR slicing through Poland’s defenses, Roosevelt met the press in the Oval Office shortly before noon on September 1. “Can we stay out of this?” he was asked. “I not only sincerely hope so,” FDR replied, “but I believe we can and every effort will be made by this Administration so to do.”1 Later Roosevelt told the cabinet that his World War I experience was eerily familiar. The president said he felt