Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941

511 Pages·2013·5.03 MB·English

by  Lynne Olson

Copyright © 2013 by Lynne Olson
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
R H and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
ANDOM OUSE
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for permission to reprint excerpts from
The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh by Charles A. Lindbergh, copyright © 1970 by Charles A.
Lindbergh and renewed 1998 by Anne Morrow Lindbergh and Reeve Lindbergh, and excerpts from War
Within and Without: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1939–1944 by Anne Morrow
Lindbergh, copyright © 1980 by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt. All rights reserved.
All images are from the Library of Congress with the exception of this page and this page, which
PHOTO CREDITS:
are from Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, and this page, which is reprinted courtesy of
Century Association Archives Foundation.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Olson, Lynne.
Those angry days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s fight over World War II, 1939–1941 / by Lynne
Olson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN: 978-0-679-60471-6
1. World War, 1939–1945—United States. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Diplomatic history. 3. Roosevelt,
Franklin D. (Franklin Delano), 1882–1945—Political and social views. 4. Lindbergh, Charles A. (Charles
Augustus), 1902–1974—Political and social views. 5. Isolationism—United States—History—20th century.
6. Intervention (International law)—History—20th century. 7. United States—Politics and government—
1933–1945. 8. Political culture—United States—History—20th century. 9. United States—Foreign relations
—1933–1945. 10. United States—Military policy. I. Title.
D753.O47 2013
940.53′10973—dc23 2012025381
www.atrandom.com
Jacket design: Michael Boland for The Boland Design Company
Jacket images: The New York Public Library/Art Resource, N.Y. (Charles Lindbergh), © Bettmann/Corbis
(Franklin D. Roosevelt), Herbert Mason/Daily Mail/Getty Images (St. Paul’s Cathedral)
v3.1
Though historians have dealt with the policy issues, justice has not been done to the searing
personal impact of those angry days.
—
ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER JR.
In a democracy, a politician is supposed to keep his ear to the ground. He is also supposed to
look after the national welfare and to attempt to educate the people when, in his opinion, they
are off base.
—
JOHN F. KENNEDY
You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else.
—
WINSTON CHURCHILL
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
INTRODUCTION
1. “A MODERN GALAHAD”
2. “WE WERE FOOLS”
3. “WHERE IS MY WORLD?”
4. “YOU HAVEN’T GOT THE VOTES”
5. “THIS WAR HAS COME HOME TO ME”
6. “I AM ALMOST LITERALLY WALKING ON EGGS”
7. “PARANOIA CAN BE CATCHING”
8. “THE ART OF MANIPULATION”
9. “IS THIS WAR OUR CONCERN?”
10. “WHY DO WE NOT DEFEND HER?”
11. “THE GREATEST OF ALL OUR AMBASSADORS”
12. “THE PEOPLE SAVED THE DAY”
13. “CONGRESS IS GOING TO RAISE HELL”
14. “AN AMERICAN FIRST, AND A REPUBLICAN AFTERWARD”
15. “THE YANKS ARE NOT COMING”
16. “THE BUBONIC PLAGUE AMONG WRITERS”
17. “A NATIONAL DISGRACE”
18. “WELL, BOYS, BRITAIN’S BROKE”
19. “A RACE AGAINST TIME”
20. “A TRAITOROUS POINT OF VIEW”
21. “DER FÜHRER THANKS YOU FOR YOUR LOYALTY”
22. “WHERE IS THIS CRISIS?”
23. “PROPAGANDA … WITH A VERY THICK COATING OF SUGAR”
24. “SETTING THE GROUND FOR ANTI-SEMITISM”
25. “HE WAS NOT GOING TO LEAD THE COUNTRY INTO WAR”
26. “THE GREATEST SCOOP IN HISTORY”
27. “LET’S LICK HELL OUT OF THEM”
28. AFTERMATH
Dedication
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
O
n a soft April morning in 1939, Charles Lindbergh was summoned to the
White House to meet President Franklin D. Roosevelt, arguably the only person
in America who equaled him in fame. The images of the two men had been
indelibly impressed on the nation’s consciousness for years—Lindbergh, whose
solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927 had mesmerized and inspired his
countrymen, and Roosevelt, whose energetic, confident leadership had helped
jolt a Depression-mired America back to life.
When Lindbergh was ushered into the Oval Office, he found FDR seated
behind his desk. It was their first face-to-face encounter, but no one would have
guessed that from the president’s warm, familiar manner. Leaning forward to
clasp Lindbergh’s hand, Roosevelt welcomed him as if he were an old friend,
asking him about his wife, Anne, who, the president noted, had been a high
school classmate of FDR’s daughter, Anna.
His head thrown back, with his trademark cigarette holder tilted rakishly
upward, Roosevelt exuded charm, joie de vivre, and an unmistakable air of
power and command. During his thirty-minute chat with Lindbergh, he gave no
sign of the many grave problems weighing on his mind.
He was, in fact, in the midst of one of the greatest crises of his presidency.
Europe was on the brink of war. The month before, Adolf Hitler had seized all of
Czechoslovakia, violating the promise he had made at the 1938 Munich
conference to cease his aggression against other countries. In response, Britain
and France had promised to come to the aid of Poland, the next country on
Germany’s hit list, if it were invaded. Both Western nations, however, were
desperately short of arms, a situation that FDR was trying to remedy. But he was
faced with a dilemma. Thanks to the provisions of neutrality legislation passed
by Congress a few years earlier, Britain and France would be barred from buying
U.S. weapons once they declared war on Germany. As Roosevelt knew, his
chances of persuading the House and Senate to repeal the arms ban were close to
zero.
But he mentioned none of that in his conversation with Lindbergh. Nor, in the
course of his genial banter, did he betray any hint of the considerable suspicion
and distrust he felt for the younger man sitting opposite him. Five years before,
Roosevelt and Lindbergh had engaged in what the writer Gore Vidal called a
“mano a mano duel,” in which the president emerged as the loser. FDR hated to
lose, and his memories of the 1934 incident were still raw and bitter.
The clash had been prompted by Roosevelt’s cancellation of airmail delivery
contracts granted by his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, to the nation’s largest
airlines. Charging fraud and bribery in the contract process, Roosevelt directed
the U.S. Army Air Corps to start delivering the mail. Lindbergh, who served as
an adviser to one of the airlines, publicly criticized FDR for ending the contracts
without giving the companies a chance to respond.
Less than seven years after his history-making flight, the thirty-two-year-old
Lindbergh was the only person who could match the fifty-two-year-old president
in national popularity. They were alike in other ways, too. Both were strong-
willed, stubborn men who believed deeply in their own superiority and had a
sense of being endowed with a special purpose. They were determined to do
things their own way, were slow to acknowledge mistakes, and did not take well
to criticism. Self-absorbed and emotionally detached, they insisted on being in
control at all times. A friend and distant relative of FDR’s once described him as
having “a loveless quality, as if he were incapable of emotion.” Of Lindbergh, a
biographer wrote: “The people he called friend were mainly, to him, good,
functional, temporary acquaintances. He seemed to have taken much more than
he gave in the way of warmth and affection.”
The conflict between the president and Lindbergh quickly became front-page
news. A former airmail pilot himself, Lindbergh warned that Air Corps fliers had
neither the experience nor the right type of instruments in their planes to take on
the extremely hazardous job of delivering the mail, which often involved night
flying in blizzards, heavy rain, and other extreme weather. To the
administration’s embarrassment, his assessment proved correct. In the four
months that Army pilots flew the mail, there were sixty-six crashes, twelve
deaths, and, as one writer put it, “untold humiliation” for the Air Corps and
White House. On June 1, 1934, following rushed negotiations between the
government and airlines to come up with new delivery agreements, the
commercial companies resumed mail delivery.
For the first time in his year-old presidency, FDR found himself bested in the
court of public opinion. According to the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.,
“the fight dented the myth of Roosevelt’s invulnerability. It quickened the pace
and intensity of criticism of the administration.… [It] also uncovered in Charles
Lindbergh a man who perhaps appealed to more American hearts than anyone
save Franklin Roosevelt.”
The following year, Lindbergh took his family to live in England, then France.
During his three-year stay in Europe, he made several highly publicized trips to
Nazi Germany, where he inspected aircraft companies and air force bases—and
made clear he thought that the German air force was invincible and that Britain
and France must appease Hitler.
And now he was home, ostensibly to join General Henry “Hap” Arnold, head
of the Air Corps, in an effort to build up America’s own airpower as quickly as
possible. But was he plotting something else? The last thing Roosevelt needed
was a campaign to stir up public opposition to the idea of arms sales to Britain
and France. He had invited Lindbergh to the White House to get a sense of the
man, to try to figure out how much of a problem he might pose in the turbulent
days to come.
During his session with Roosevelt, Lindbergh was well aware that the
president was scrutinizing him closely. Writing later in his journal, he noted,
“Roosevelt judges his man quickly and plays him cleverly.” Although he thought
FDR “a little too suave, too pleasant, too easy,” Lindbergh still enjoyed the
encounter. “There is no reason for any antagonism between us,” he observed.
“The airmail situation is past.” He would continue to work with the
administration on ways to improve the nation’s air defenses, but, he added, “I
have a feeling that it may not be for long.”
Photographers swarm around Charles Lindbergh as he leaves the White House after a meeting with
President Roosevelt in April 1939.
He was right. In early September, just five months later, Hitler invaded
Poland, and Britain and France declared war on Germany. The following spring,
German troops swept through Western Europe, vanquishing France and
threatening Britain’s survival. As unofficial leader and spokesman for America’s
isolationist movement, Lindbergh emerged as Franklin Roosevelt’s most
redoubtable adversary in what would become a brutal, no-holds-barred battle for
the soul of the nation.
, Americans had viewed the war in Europe as if it were a movie—a
UNTIL MAY 1940 MOST
drama that, while interesting to watch, had nothing to do with their own lives.
But the shock of Germany’s blitzkrieg demolished that belief. It forced the
country to struggle with two crucial questions: Should it come to the aid of
Britain, the last hope of freedom in Europe? Or should it go even further and
enter the war?
For the next eighteen months, the debate over those issues raged throughout
the nation, from the White House and halls of Congress to bars, beauty parlors,
offices, and classrooms in the biggest of cities and smallest of towns. “The war
was everywhere,” one historian recalled. “It lay behind everything you said or
did.” Millions of Americans were swept up in the struggle, knowing that
whatever its outcome, their lives were likely to be profoundly affected. At stake
was not only the survival of Britain but the shape and future of America.
What was the United States to be? A fortress country that refused to break out
of its isolationist shell, still clinging to the belief that it could survive and thrive
only if it were free from entangling foreign commitments? The adherents to that
view pointed to the aftermath of World War I as proof of its validity. We had
been tricked, they argued, into coming to the aid of Britain and France in 1917,
thereby losing more than fifty thousand of our young men and providing our
allies with loans that were never repaid. We were supposedly making the world
safe for democracy, but in fact democracy had cravenly given way to Adolf
Hitler. Britain, France, and the rest of Western Europe had repeatedly
demonstrated an inability to settle their own disputes. If those countries refused
to stop Hitler when they could have, why should we bail them out again? We
must be ready to fight for the defense of our own nation, but for nothing and no
one else.
For their part, those who argued for U.S. intervention maintained that America
could no longer evade international responsibility: the times were too dire.
Britain’s survival was absolutely essential for our security and welfare. If the
British were defeated and Hitler controlled all of Europe, he would then move to
dominate Africa and infiltrate South America, thus posing a serious threat to the
United States. America, the interventionists argued, would have little chance to
survive as a free, democratic society.
Others in the interventionist camp emphasized what they viewed as America’s
moral obligation to stop Hitler—the embodiment, as they saw it, of pure evil.
How could we stand on the sidelines, they argued, while Nazi Germany enslaved
sovereign countries, went on a rampage against Jews, and threatened to wipe out
Western civilization as we know it?
The passions engendered by the debate were as high as its stakes. The CBS
correspondent Eric Sevareid remembered the period as “bitter” and “heart-
burning.” Arthur Schlesinger said the dispute was “the most savage political
debate in my lifetime.” He added: “There have been a number of fierce national
quarrels—over communism in the later Forties, over McCarthyism in the Fifties,
over Vietnam in the Sixties—but none so tore apart families and friendships as
this fight.”
One of the families most deeply affected was that of Lindbergh’s wife, Anne,
whose mother was an outspoken advocate for American involvement in the war
and whose brother-in-law, a Welshman named Aubrey Morgan, happened to be