FDR - Jean Edward Smith [384]
Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz put the matter into perspective:
Roosevelt was a man with considerable, but certainly not unlimited, power to influence the course of events in Europe. And he prioritized the use of that power in what he believed was the most effective manner: win the war as quickly as possible and save as many Jews as was consistent with the first priority and the political realities that limited his power.
Reasonable people can debate specific decisions, indecisions, actions and inactions.… But no one should question Roosevelt’s motives or good will toward the Jewish victims of the world’s worst human atrocity.60
A second pressing matter Roosevelt faced was the status of General Charles de Gaulle and his Free French movement. With D-Day the issue became acute. Were those portions of France that were liberated to be governed by Eisenhower and the SHAEF general staff as occupied territory, or would the provisional regime of de Gaulle—the French Committee of National Liberation (FCNL)—hold sway? Eisenhower, who had lived in Paris for two years (1928–1929) and knew France well, unequivocally favored de Gaulle.61 He wanted the military cooperation of the French resistance, which was inextricably linked to the FCNL, and above all wanted a civil authority to govern France, freeing his headquarters of the administrative burden. So too did Churchill. “It is very difficult to cut the French out of the liberation of France,” he told Roosevelt on May 26, 1944.62 But FDR resisted. Abetted by State Department mandarins enthralled by Vichy’s rollback of the social excesses of the Third Republic and fortified daily by the anti–de Gaulle rants of Admiral Leahy, his former ambassador to Pétain, the president petulantly refused to recognize the FCNL as the legitimate or even provisional government of France.63
The best that can be said for Roosevelt’s intransigence is that the president wished to delay recognizing any French government until the people of France could make a free choice after the war. “We have no right to color their views or to give any group the sole right to impose one side of a case on them,” he told Eisenhower on May 13, 1944.64 But the fact is that by 1944 de Gaulle had established his government in exile as the legitimate successor to the Third Republic. He had swept the competitors from the field, leaving only Vichy as an alternative—which the Allies under no circumstances could accept. In seeking an alternative to de Gaulle, Roosevelt was flogging a dead horse. The president’s attitude, as the general presciently observed, “seemed on the same order as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”65
At Roosevelt’s insistence, de Gaulle (who was in Algeria at the time) was not informed of the invasion until two days before D-Day. At Eisenhower’s urging, he was brought to England, taken to Ike’s headquarters, and given a complete briefing. Afterward Eisenhower sheepishly gave him the copy of a speech SHAEF wished him to deliver to the French people after the troops had landed.66 De Gaulle refused. Aside from the limp military prose (which would have been reason enough to decline), de Gaulle rejected categorically the idea that as head of the provisional government of the French Republic his words should be dictated by the Allies. Churchill intervened and eventually