FDR - Jean Edward Smith [293]
FDR’s first impulse was to ask Congress for authorization. The United States had 200 four-funnel destroyers from World War I, and in late 1939 172 of the vessels had been refitted and returned to service. Fifty of them could probably be spared.53 But with the selective service bill pending on Capitol Hill there was a danger of legislative overload, and it was possible both measures might fail. Also, the destroyer deal would fall squarely in the bailiwick of Naval Affairs Committee chairman David I. Walsh, possibly the most intransigent opponent of the transaction in the Senate. To pry the bill loose would not be easy.
Without congressional authorization the road seemed barred. To lease the vessels to a belligerent ran afoul of international law; the Walsh amendment to the 1940 Defense Appropriations Act required the chief of naval operations to sign off on the vessels, and Admiral Stark had recently testified to their usefulness when he had obtained the funds to have them refitted; and above all, the Espionage Act of 1917 made it a criminal offense to deliver naval vessels to a country at war.54
On July 19 Benjamin Cohen, who had moved from the White House to become general counsel of Ickes’s public works domain, provided Ickes with a skillfully argued memorandum suggesting that the president could release the destroyers to Britain on his own authority as commander in chief. Ickes forwarded the memorandum to the White House but was not convinced.55 Neither was Roosevelt. “This memorandum from Ben Cohen is worth reading,” he told Navy secretary Frank Knox, “but I frankly doubt it will stand up. Also I fear Congress is in no mood at the present time to allow any form of sale.” FDR told Knox it might be possible at a later date to get Congress to permit the sale of the destroyers to Canada for hemisphere defense, but at present there was nothing that could be done.56
Just when it appeared that the administration’s efforts had run aground, Roosevelt received an unexpected assist. On July 11, 1940, at a dinner at New York’s prestigious Century Club hosted by Lewis Douglas, thirty distinguished and influential Americans from across the political spectrum formed themselves into a loose alliance to arouse the country to the danger the defeat of Britain would pose and the need to do everything possible to prevent it. Among the guests were Time’s Henry Luce; Admiral William Standley, the former chief of naval operations; Ivy League presidents James Conant of Harvard and Ernest Hopkins of Dartmouth; Henry Sloan Coffin and Henry Van Dusen of the Union Theological Seminary; lawyers Dean Acheson, Charles Burlingham, Allen Dulles, and Thomas Thacher; journalists Herbert Agar, Joseph Alsop, Elmer Davis, and Walter Millis; and Francis Pickens Miller of the Council on Foreign Relations, who became executive director of what became known as the “Century Group.”
The group discussed a number of proposals that evening, but the one that hit home was the suggestion that the United States provide Britain with the fifty destroyers it needed in exchange for naval bases in the Western Hemisphere.57 That is the first proposal to trade destroyers for bases on record, which is a surprise since the isolationist press had long favored the acquisition of naval installations in the Americas in exchange for cancellation of Britain’s war debts. At the direction of the Century Group, Alsop took the proposal to Lord Lothian,