FDR - Jean Edward Smith [376]
* Under German tutelage Mussolini proclaimed the “Italian Socialist Republic” with its headquarters at Salò on the banks of Lake Garda in northern Italy. Badoglio and King Victor Emmanuel fled safely to the Adriatic resort city of Brindisi, where they were protected by British forces. The Italian Navy, including four battleships, sailed to Malta, where it ceremoniously surrendered to the British.
* Einstein’s letter, dated August 2, 1939, was drafted initially by the Hungarian émigré physicist Leo Szilard and delivered personally to FDR by New Deal businessman Alexander Sachs, then with Lehman Brothers and an old friend of the president. Sachs recounted to Roosevelt Napoleon’s error when he rejected Robert Fulton and Robert R. Livingston’s offer to build a fleet of steamships and suggested that Einstein’s letter represented a similar technological breakthrough. According to Sachs, Roosevelt’s interest was piqued and he ordered an authentic bottle of Napoleon brandy to be brought out—a Roosevelt family heirloom. FDR poured two glasses, gave one to Sachs, and sat back to listen as Sachs summarized Einstein’s presentation. Roosevelt comprehended its import instantly. “Alex, what you are after is to see that the Nazis don’t blow us up.” “Precisely,” Sachs replied. Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb 313–314 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985). For the text of Einstein’s 1939 letter, see Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times 556–557 (New York: World Publishing, 1971).
* “If I had known that the Germans would not succeed in constructing the atom bomb, I would have never lifted a finger,” said Einstein years later. Quoted in Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust War 263 (New York: Basic Books, 1977).
* When Republicans regained control of Congress in 1947, Brewster became chairman of the Special Senate Committee Investigating the National Defense Program—the old “Truman Committee.” Brewster’s first target was Howard Hughes, whose Hughes Aircraft Company had been awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to develop an enormous transport plane made of plywood (the “spruce goose”). Critics charged that Brewster—“the kept senator of Pan American Airways”—was pursuing Hughes because TWA, which Hughes owned, was challenging Pan Am’s dominance of transatlantic travel. After five days of hilarious hearings in the Senate Caucus Room, Hughes demolished Brewster and made the committee look foolish. When Hughes successfully flew the plane during a test in November 1947, the committee abruptly closed the investigation. (One of the highlights of my life as a teenager growing up in Washington, D.C., was to attend the hearings and witness Hughes’s aplomb before the committee.) The Hughes flying boat remains the largest plane ever built, with a wingspan of 320 feet (compared to the Boeing 747’s 195 feet) and a weight of 400,000 pounds (versus 378,000.) Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, Empire: The Life, Legend and Madness of Howard Hughes 145–160 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979).
* It is unfortunate that no one from the State Department attended FDR’s meeting with the military chiefs on the Iowa or was privy to his views on zonal boundaries. The Teheran conference placed the matter in the hands of a newly created European Advisory Commission based in London. The United States was represented by Ambassador John G. Winant and his deputy, George Kennan, but neither was familiar with Roosevelt’s wishes and the commission quickly adopted a proposal framed by the British cabinet that established the demarcation between east and west more or less on the Elbe River, with Berlin located 110 miles inside the Russian zone.
The fumbled decision on zonal boundaries in Germany plagued the Western powers throughout the Cold War and can be attributed in no small measure to FDR’s exclusion of the State Department from administration planning following Welles’s resignation. The War Department’s failure to inform State of the president’s position is equally inexcusable. Of course, if Hull had not vindictively pursued