FDR - Jean Edward Smith [286]
“All of this reads easily now, but at that time it was a supreme act of faith and leadership for the United States to deprive themselves of this very considerable mass of arms for the sake of a country which many deemed already beaten.” Winston S. Churchill, Their Finest Hour 143, 272 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949).
* After meeting with Landon, Knox wrote Roosevelt, “In the light of events which almost hourly show greater implications for us and for the world, our thinking was animated solely by our desire to promote national unity in the face of grave national peril.” Knox to FDR, May 21, 1940, FDRL.
† As managing partner of Cravath, Swaine, and Moore, McCloy had supervised the preparation of the Supreme Court brief for the Schechter Brothers challenging the constitutionality of the New Deal’s National Industrial Recovery Act. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495 (1935). Kai Bird, The Chairman: John J. McCloy, The Making of the American Establishment 101 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).
* That same week, Stimson also gave the commencement address at Andover. Unaware of FDR’s impending call, the seventy-three-year-old Stimson told his young listeners that he envied them because they had the opportunity to choose between “right and wrong,” to stand up for good against evil. “I wish to God that I was young enough to face it with you.” Among the audience that day was sixteen-year-old George Herbert Walker Bush, for whom Colonel Stimson became a lifelong hero. Godfrey Hodgson, The Colonel: The Life and Times of Henry Stimson, 1867–1950 214 (New York: Knopf, 1990); Jean Edward Smith, George Bush’s War 136–137 (New York: Henry Holt, 1992).
† Dewey’s biographer Richard Norton Smith called him “the first American casualty of the Second World War.” A novice in foreign affairs, Dewey turned for advice to John Foster Dulles, a senior partner at Sullivan and Cromwell, who was then in a pro-German phase. As Dewey later expressed it, Foster believed that “Hitler was a passing phenomenon who would disappear.” America’s proper role was “to stand aside and hopefully wait until a stalemate would occur and then exercise our weight to bring about a peace.” Smith, Thomas E. Dewey and His Times 302–303 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982).
* In addition to Fadiman, the program’s regulars included the columnist Franklin P. Adams of the New York Post, the composer and pianist Oscar Levant, Charles Kieran of The New York Times, and the sportswriter Heywood Hale Broun.
* A majority of the convention, 501 votes, was required to nominate. On the first ballot 730 votes were cast for the four front runners. The remaining 270 were split among nine favorite sons. Congressional Quarterly, Guide to U.S. Elections 161 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1975).
* Not all Republicans agreed. Former Indiana senator James E. Watson, referring to Willkie’s Democratic roots, complained, “If a whore repented and wanted to join the church I’d personally welcome her and lead her up the aisle to a pew. But I’d not ask her to lead the choir the first night.” Mary Earhart Dillon, Wendell Willkie 143 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1952).
TWENTY-ONE
FOUR MORE YEARS
I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.
—FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, OCTOBER 30, 1940
WITH WILLKIE’S NOMINATION and the appointment of Knox and Stimson, the fight over foreign policy shifted to Capitol Hill. On June 28, 1940, at the behest of Senator David I. Walsh of Massachusetts, chairman of the Naval Affairs Committee, Congress amended the defense appropriations bill to prohibit the sale of military equipment to any foreign power unless the chief of staff of the Army and the chief of naval operations certified it to be nonessential to national defense. Walsh, who was passionately isolationist, shared the anti-British