FDR - Jean Edward Smith [388]
While the balloting was under way at Chicago, Roosevelt was scheduled to review an amphibious-landing exercise staged by the 5th Marine Division, a dress rehearsal for its next Pacific operation. Just as he was about to leave for the exercise he suffered a sudden seizure. The president turned deathly white, with a look of agony in his face. “Jimmy, I don’t know if I can make it—I have horrible pains.” Roosevelt struggled to speak. James wanted to call a doctor, but FDR resisted. “Both of us thought he was suffering from some sort of acute digestive upset—Father himself was positive it had nothing to do with his heart.” James helped him lie flat on the floor of his railroad car and watched in terrified silence for ten minutes or so as his father recovered. “Never in all my life had I felt so alone with him—and so helpless.” Gradually color returned to the president’s face and he opened his eyes. “Help me up now, Jimmy. I feel better.” Minutes later Roosevelt was seated in an open car, smiling jauntily and waving to spectators as he headed out to watch the marines hit the beach.91
FDR sailed for Pearl Harbor July 21, 1944, accompanied by Leahy, Sam Rosenman, and his dog, Fala. The crossing was uneventful, save for Rosenman having to intervene to protect Fala’s pelt from young seamen who wished to clip a souvenir lock of the famous dog’s hair. “The poor dog was in danger of being completely shorn.”92 At 3 P.M., Wednesday, July 26, the Baltimore docked in Honolulu to the cheers of an immense crowd of Hawaiians alerted to Roosevelt’s arrival. Nimitz and some forty flag officers sprinted up the gangway to greet the president on the quarterdeck. One commander was conspicuously absent. “Where’s Douglas?” FDR asked Nimitz. An embarrassed silence followed. As the presidential party prepared to debark, the scream of police sirens shattered the calm. Onto the dock roared a motorcycle phalanx of Honolulu’s finest, followed by what Rosenman remembered as “the longest open car I have ever seen.”93 In front was a military driver in starched khaki; in back—MacArthur.
“Hello, Doug,” said the president. “What are you doing with that leather jacket on? It’s darn hot today.”
“Well, I’ve just landed from Australia,” MacArthur replied. “It’s pretty cold up there.”94
Between strategy sessions Roosevelt toured the island’s installations, driving in an open car through the streets of Honolulu flanked by MacArthur and Nimitz, with Leahy riding shotgun beside the driver. Visiting a military hospital, Roosevelt asked a Secret Service man to wheel him slowly through the amputee wards occupied by patients who had lost one or both legs. The president stopped at one bed after another, chatting briefly. He wanted to show his useless legs to those who would face the same affliction.* “I never saw Roosevelt with tears in his eyes,” Rosenman recalled. “That day as he was wheeled out of the hospital he was close to them.”95
The strategy issue Roosevelt faced was simple enough. The Joint Chiefs— Admiral King, General Arnold, and to a lesser extent General Marshall—wanted to bypass the Philippines, land on Formosa, and take the fight quickly to the Japanese home islands. “Bypassing the Philippines is not synonymous with abandoning them,” Marshall reminded MacArthur at the beginning of July.96
MacArthur insisted that the Philippines be liberated first. It was as much a moral issue as a military one. Filipinos looked on the United States as their “mother country.” To leave them at the mercy of a Japanese army of occupation, said MacArthur, would be “a blot on American honor.”97
MacArthur made a masterly presentation, speaking as he customarily did without notes, and concluded with a strictly military analysis: Luzon was more important than Formosa because with it went control of the South China Sea. Japan’s lines of communication to its southern outposts would be cut; the Filipinos, unlike the Formosans,