FDR - Jean Edward Smith [285]
For Roosevelt, Willkie’s nomination was a mixed blessing. His internationalism removed the question of aid to Britain from the election agenda, but of the four potential Republican candidates he would be the most difficult to defeat. Unlike Taft, Vandenberg, and Dewey, Willkie appealed to the middle-of-the-road voters FDR needed most. Of the four, only he had a chance of cracking the Roosevelt coalition.
* As a sop to the increasingly bellicose Tory rank and file, Chamberlain recalled Winston Churchill from the political wilderness to reassume his World War I responsibilities as first lord of the Admiralty. “Churchill in the Cabinet,” exclaimed Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring. “That means the war is really on.” Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich 165 (New York: Macmillan, 1970).
* The committee’s leadership included Henry R. Luce, the publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune; New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia; the investment bankers Thomas Lamont and Henry I. Harriman; Thomas Watson of IBM; the department store tycoon Marshall Field; the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr; the film actors Helen Hayes and Melvyn Douglas; the cultural historian Lewis Mumford; and the rising Democratic politicians J. William Fulbright and Adlai E. Stevenson.
† At a dinner in his honor at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin on October 19, 1938, Lindbergh was presented with the Service Cross of the German Eagle with Star “by order of the Führer.” Kenneth S. Davis, The Hero: Charles A. Lindbergh and the American Dream 380–382 (New York: Doubleday, 1959).
* Lindbergh expanded on his views a few days later in an article in the November Reader’s Digest. “It is time to turn from our quarrels and to build our White ramparts again.… Our civilization depends on a united strength among ourselves; … on a Western Wall or race and arms which can hold back either a Genghis Khan or the infiltration of inferior blood.” Charles A. Lindbergh, “Aviation, Geography, and Race,” Reader’s Digest 64–67 (1939).
* Lewis’s remarks were made in testimony before the House Labor Committee in July 1939. “Yes, I made a personal attack on Mr. Garner,” said Lewis, “because Garner’s knife is searching for the quivering, pulsating heart of labor.” When the Texas congressional delegation prepared a rebuttal denying that Garner did any of the things Lewis charged, one member refused to sign: the second-term congressman from Texas’s tenth district, Lyndon Baines Johnson. The New York Times, July 28, 1939.
* Parliament’s great debate on war policy took place May 7–8, 1940. Leo Amery from the Tory backbench launched the missile that brought Chamberlain down, quoting Cromwell’s injunction to the Long Parliament, “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.” On the second day of the debate Lloyd George gave the last great speech of his career, in the course of which he defended Churchill who as first lord of the Admiralty had taken responsibility for Norway’s fall: “The right honorable gentleman must not allow himself to be converted into an air raid shelter to keep the splinters from hitting his colleagues.” When the House divided on the evening of May 8, forty-one dissident Conservatives voted with the Labour opposition and sixty more abstained. Chamberlain recognized the inevitable and submitted his resignation. Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography 576–588 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).
* Illinois primary law required a sworn statement from a potential candidate that he was indeed seeking the office before his name could be placed on the ballot. Garner complied, but Roosevelt was at sea on the USS Houston when the deadline expired. Illinois election officials nonetheless placed his name on the ballot. Bascom N. Timmons, Garner of Texas 269–270 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948).
* “When the ships from America approached our shores with their priceless arms,” wrote Churchill, “special trains were waiting in all the ports to receive