FDR - Jean Edward Smith [89]
* Twenty years later, seasoned by the responsibilities of the presidency, the revelations of the Nye Committee about the prewar machinations of America’s munitions makers, and his own second thoughts, FDR recanted his harsh judgment of Bryan. To Daniels he wrote, “Would that W.J.B. had stayed on as Secretary of State—the Country would have been better off.” FDR to JD, October 3, 1934, Daniels Papers, Library of Congress.
† Roosevelt suffered a sudden appendicitis attack in Washington the morning of July 1 and was operated on that afternoon. Daniels ordered the secretary’s yacht, Dolphin, to take him to Campobello to recover and checked regularly on his progress. TR wired his concern, as did the Japanese naval attaché, Commander Kichisaburo Nomura. At the time of Pearl Harbor, Nomura was Japanese ambassador to the United States.
* Daniels saw preparedness as a means of preventing war; FDR looked on it as a prerequisite. Many years later Daniels recalled that Franklin on any number of occasions came into his office and said, “We’ve got to get into this war.” Each time Daniels replied, “I hope not.” Daniels, interview with Frank Freidel, May 29, 1947, quoted in Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Apprenticeship 267 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952).
* Eleanor’s brother Hall and three of TR’s sons were among those who attended the Plattsburgh camp in 1915. Richard Harding Davis, the noted journalist who had immortalized TR’s charge up San Juan Hill for the New York Herald, was just back from covering the war in Europe and also enrolled. Davis recalled that his squad included “two fox-hunting squires from Maryland, a master of fox hounds, a gentleman jockey from Boston, and two steeple chase riders who divided between them all of the cups the country offers.” Quoted in Geoffrey C. Ward, A First-Class Temperament 309 (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).
* British Naval Intelligence intercepted Zimmermann’s message and quickly decoded it but did not pass it on to the American embassy in London until February 23. Ambassador Walter Hines Page immediately flashed it to the State Department, which was able to verify its authenticity by checking it against American cable intercepts. The United States had the coded German message on file but had not bothered to decipher it. Once its authenticity was established, Secretary of State Lansing, Bryan’s successor, passed the telegram to Wilson.
EIGHT
LUCY
You were a goosy girl to think or even pretend to think that I don’t want you here all the summer, because you know I do! But honestly you ought to have six weeks straight at Campobello.
—FRANKLIN TO ELEANOR, JULY 16, 1917
WHEN CONGRESS DECLARED war on April 6, 1917, the United States was a second-class military power.1 The Army, relegated to showing the flag in Latin America and pursuing Mexican banditti, consisted of 108,399 men, a third of whom were on garrison duty in Panama, Hawaii, and the Philippines. The various state militias, recently formed into a National Guard, added but another 200,000, and there was no organized reserve.2 The Navy numbered slightly more than 60,000 in all ranks, with a mere 197 ships on active service.
Within six months the Navy’s strength expanded fourfold. By war’s end nearly half a million men had joined the fleet and the number of ships exceeded two thousand. During the same time, the Army grew to 2.4 million men.3 General