FDR - Jean Edward Smith [67]
Daniels and Roosevelt made an odd couple. Yet they served together harmoniously for virtually the entire eight years of Wilson’s presidency. The strengths of one complemented the weaknesses of the other, and FDR learned from Daniels the folksy art of Washington politics. The fact is, Josephus Daniels was the only person to whom Franklin Roosevelt was ever directly subordinate. It was Daniels who made the decision to appoint him; it was Daniels who brought him to Washington; and it was Daniels who treated him as a father might treat a prodigal son whenever FDR wandered off the reservation. Daniels’s motives were primarily political. Aside from regional balance, the name Roosevelt was solid gold in every wardroom in the fleet. Daniels also recognized that an energetic assistant with an amateur’s knowledge of the sea would make his job easier. And though he did not know FDR well, he had liked him from their very first meeting and saw in him the future of the Democratic party.21 Roosevelt, who throughout his life called Daniels “Chief,” never forgot the debt he owed him.22 Upon taking office in 1933, one of FDR’s first acts as president was to appoint Daniels ambassador to Mexico, a post in which he served with distinction until 1941.23
FDR cut a splendid figure as assistant secretary: tall, athletic, well spoken, enthusiastic. Daniels called him “as handsome a figure of an attractive young man as I had ever seen.”24 The secretary, by contrast, was short, pudgy, slow-moving, and deliberate. Always slightly rumpled, he nevertheless dressed with studied southern formality—a tailored black frock coat in winter, white linen and seersucker in the summer. His pleated shirts were always white, his ties always black, and his high-top shoes always well polished. He wore broad-brimmed hats to shield his face from the sun and to the uninitiated looked like a stock figure from central casting.25
Courtly and modest, Daniels had an amiability that concealed an iron will and a remarkably wide-ranging intelligence. He was a tireless worker, a shrewd judge of people, and a longtime rebel against established authority. He suspected that what every admiral told him was wrong, and, as one observer noted, nine times out of ten he was correct.26 Daniels could be as stubborn as a country mule, and he was also without fear. Two months after taking office he went for a training flight with Lieutenant John H. Towers, the pioneer Navy aviator, in a rudimentary open-cockpit, 75-horsepower flying machine at the breathtaking speed of sixty miles an hour—the first high-ranking government official to fly in an airplane. Asked by President Wilson why he had risked his life in such a contraption, Daniels said it was his duty to sign orders for naval officers to fly and “I would not assign any man to any duty I would not try myself.”27
Daniels and William Jennings Bryan were intimate friends of long standing. They were also the two most radical members of Wilson’s cabinet. For seventeen years they had worked to free the common man from the clutches of trusts, railroads, robber barons, and whatever other vested interest appeared on the horizon. Daniels served as Bryan’s publicity director in each of his presidential campaigns, and the two shared a contempt for anything that smacked of wealth and special privilege. Together they sought to promote the values of an old-fashioned, rural, small-town America: pacifist, prohibitionist, and religiously fundamental. They opposed sin with the same vehemence that they opposed the plutocracy of the Republican party and often found it difficult to distinguish between the two.
Daniels brought these values to the Navy Department and aroused the wrath of the naval establishment in so doing. TR thundered that Wilson was guilty of “criminal misconduct in entrusting the State Department and the Navy Department