Inferno - Max Hastings [119]
For half the previous decade, President Franklin Roosevelt had been expressing dismay about his people’s reluctance to acknowledge their own peril. On 30 October 1939, he wrote to U.S. London ambassador Joseph Kennedy: “We over here, in spite of the great strides towards national unity during the past six years, still have much to learn of the ‘relativity’ of world geography and the rapid annihilation of distance and purely local economics.” Given the strength of isolationism, however, between 1939 and 1941 he felt obliged to act with circumspection in aiding Britain. In many respects a cautious politician, he had to manage what one of his supporters called “the most volatile public opinion in the world.” The White House familiar Robert Sherwood wrote: “Before the advent of calamity in Western Europe and of Winston Churchill, the Allied cause did not have a good smell even in the nostrils of those who hated Fascism and all its evil works.”
The writer John Steinbeck spent some weeks in the spring of 1940 sailing down the Pacific coast of South America, from whence he wrote to a friend on 26 March: “We haven’t heard any news of Europe since we left and don’t much want to. And the people we meet on the shore have never heard of Europe and they seem to be the better for it. This whole trip is doing what we had hoped it might, given us a world picture not dominated by Hitler and Moscow, but something more vital and surviving than either.” Like many liberals, Steinbeck was convinced America would eventually have to fight, but viewed the prospect without enthusiasm. “If it weren’t for the coming war, I could look forward to a good quiet life for a few years,” he wrote on 9 July.
The morning after Hitler invaded Norway in April 1940, reporters crowded into FDR’s office and asked if this brought the United States closer to war. The president chose his words as carefully as ever: “You can put it this way: that the events of the past forty-eight hours will undoubtedly cause a great many more Americans to think about the potentialities of war.” Roosevelt avowed reluctance to run for a third presidential term in 1940, and intimated that only world crisis, and explicitly the fall of France, persuaded him to do so. “The question of whether Roosevelt would run,” wrote Adolf Berle, one of the president’s intimates, on 15 May that year, “is being settled somewhere on the banks of the Meuse River.” The president’s equivocation was probably disingenuous since, like most national leaders, he loved power. Posterity is assured that no American was better qualified to direct the nation through the greatest emergency in world history, but an insistent minority of Roosevelt’s countrymen, notably including the business community, rejected this proposition at the time. Donald Nelson, who later became overlord of America’s industrial mobilisation, wrote: “Who among us except the President of the United States really saw the magnitude of the job ahead? … All the people I met and talked to, including members of the General Staff, the Army and Navy’s highest ranking officers, distinguished statesmen and legislators, thought of the defensive program only as a