Through Dangerous Waters
O'NEILL, WILLLAM L.
Through Dangerous Waters FDR: The War President: 1940-1943 By Kenneth S. Davis Random. 928 pp. $39.95. Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Professor of history, Rutgers; author, "A Democracy...
...We realize today that there was probably no way to avert the Cold War, but Roosevelt could not know that...
...We can be grateful as well to Kenneth Davis for retelling this epic story with such skill and grace...
...In dealing with Stalin, the British Prime Minister never forgot for a moment either the sheer evil of Communism as a system or the wickedness of its leader...
...For these and other reasons Americans must be grateful that it was Roosevelt and not some lesser figure who steered the ship of state through such dangerous waters...
...If the Allies only pursued their own ends, failed to recognize the USSR's legitimate needs and worries, and kept Stalin at arm's length, they would bring about what they most feared...
...To those ends FDR did all he could to establish personal relations with the Soviet leader, ignoring as a rule moral and ideological considerations...
...Yet if he had, it is highly unlikely that he would have come up with any bombshells, since the archives have been mined by a great many scholars...
...They argue that his approach revealed his lack of moral fiber, his inability to see the evils of Communism, permitting Stalin to deceive him and gain numerous postwar advantages...
...by that time the Allies were clearly winning World War II and Roosevelt had made most of his important decisions...
...Delay, he feared would create an irresistible public demand for an all-out war against Japan, which would postpone Germany's defeat and profoundly antagonize Stalin...
...Perhaps the most dramatic exception was his decision to invade North Africa in the fall of 1942...
...But, unlike Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, who meddled incessantly, Roosevelt trusted his commanders...
...With this fifth book, however, Davis brought his story up to the end of 1942...
...Without them, though, he never would have withstood the blows fate dealt him, including separation from his greatest love, Lucy Mercer...
...After she was put under the care of relatives in Massachusetts the President never again contacted her...
...But none of the new information to date would have compelled Davis to radically revise his manuscript...
...Davis was an admirer of FDR, so his biography is hardly critical...
...That is why he agreed with Churchill that the best place to start was in Morocco and Algeria, where the Vichy French were not expected to put up much resistance...
...I discovered the reason when I fried to skim some of its pages...
...Marshall was fanatically devoted to a projected assault on occupied France, codenamed Sledgehammer...
...and the death of his mother, for whom he was still wearing mourning bands more than a year after she died in September 1941...
...It is a pity Davis did not live long enough to give us his thoughts on FDR's last years, but there is enough in this volume to let us see how he judged FDR as a war President...
...In the process he overruled General George C. Marshall, the War Department and almost everyone else in the high command...
...It was Eleanor who kept in touch, visiting Missy and sending her cards and gifts...
...Davis would no doubt have benefited from some recent research...
...But Marshall, who was so daring in his plans for Sledgehammer, perhaps because it would be mounted largely by the British, became enormously conservative in planning Torch...
...Its advantage was that it would relieve the pressure on Russia to a limited extent...
...He has drawn a telling comparison between FDR and Churchill that explains much...
...Accordingly, he put her behind him...
...Consequently, in all his relations with the Soviets Churchill was a consistent fighter for British interests and did not care in the least what Stalin thought of him...
...Grace Tully, FDR's longtime secretary, once wrote that he was incapable of friendship...
...polio, which nearly killed him and cost him the use of his legs...
...Missy's illness crippled her and changed her personality...
...Roosevelt was extremely eager to have U.S...
...Yet FDR was no fool...
...He was fully informed on the issues, and all big decisions had to pass his inspection...
...author, "A Democracy at War: America's Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II" Kenneth S. Davis, a respected novelist and historian, died in 1999 before he could complete his projected sixvolume biography of President Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...During the remainder of his Presidency FDR would increasingly focus on postwar planning, especially on the all-important question of how to maintain good relations with the Soviet Union...
...But FDR paid for Missy's substantial medical bills out of his own pocket, and revised his will so that she would be provided for by his estate up to 50 per cent of its total income— the rest going to Eleanor...
...As Davis shows, it was a brave one, taken in the face of enormous resistance from the President's most trusted military advisors, as well as one that required a grasp of grand strategy exceeding theirs...
...Davis was more comfortable writing about Roosevelt's strengths: his genuine if not unlimited sympathy for the disadvantaged, his hatred of the Axis powers, his faith in democracy and the Four Freedoms...
...Davis was a masterful writer, and even his set pieces on subjects that have frequently been treated and are well known— such as how FDR brilliantly sold the nation on the Lend-Lease plan to provide Britain with war matériel—possess a freshness that makes you feel you're learning about them for the first time...
...But he wanted the battles against Germany to be won...
...This does not excuse his behavior but helps to explain it...
...Despite an inner reserve, he had considerable empathy, one of the reasons he was such an effective politician...
...Ruthlessness and iron will were not qualities people associated with FDR in his lifetime...
...Still, the reader might well ask: if there is nothing new here, why bother to tackle this very long volume...
...For that and other reasons the campaign in North Africa was much longer and harder than had been expected...
...While Davis has acknowledged the dark side of FDR, he took pains where possible to lighten it...
...Every student of FDR knows he did not ordinarily interfere in military affairs...
...In addition to being cheerful and selflessly devoted, she wrote many of the letters he signed stood up to him when she thought he was wrong —something apparently done by no one else in his inner circle, except Eleanor— and was for many of Roosevelt's aides and advisors the sole indispensable person on his staff...
...Davis did not follow up this observation, but it is certainly true and has often been used by Roosevelt's critics...
...troops in battle against German forces as soon as possible...
...Davis has redefined these traits, arguing that they were part of a considered strategy: FDR believed forthrightness was naïve and ineffective, so he approached problems from all angles, kept his own counsel, misdirected when he had to, and sought always to wait until all cards were on the table before playing his hand...
...Its disadvantage was that the invasion would fail because German troops in France vastly outnumbered the handful of Allied divisions available for use in 1942...
...Far from being Stalin's dupe, FDR was pursuing the only course that seemed to have any chance at all of succeeding...
...Unlike FDR's earlier major biographers—who have included James MacGregor Burns and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.—Davis made no effort to master the Roosevelt archives...
...How he protected himself behind walls of granite was never better demonstrated than when Marguerite LeHand suffered a crippling stroke in December 1941...
...A work in progress by Greg Robinson has found that FDR was personally more responsible for the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans than previously thought...
...What he rightly understood was that a real peace after the War would depend entirely on maintaining a working relationship with the Soviet Union...
...He agreed with many historians, and individuals having first-hand experience, that beneath Roosevelt's chatty and affable veneer there were icy depths that have never been plumbed...
...Davis did not live to tell the whole story, but there was enough friction between Stalin and his Western partners in 1942 over launching a second front in Europe for this volume to give a sense of how the author would have handled later tensions...
...FDR visited while she was trying to recuperate in Washington, but could not endure her anguish and tears...
...Clay Blair's important 1998 book...
...At bottom, Davis agreed with Roosevelt's critics, but he represents as assets to a world leader what might seem defects in more ordinary circumstances...
...historians long ago established that he was worried by Stalin and sometimes angry at him...
...The Allies could then advance on Axis troops in Tunisia, who would be squeezed between the offensive from the west and Britain's Eighth Army attacking from the east...
...At the same time, he was reasonably candid about his subject's faults...
...Most Roosevelt scholars, even friendly ones, have had to admit that FDR was crafty and devious, a great manipulator and extremely secretive...
...Thus despite all that went wrong in North Africa, most historians believe Roosevelt made the right decision...
...This gave Hitler time to sendreinforcements to Tunisia in a doomed effort to hold it, depriving him of men and munitions badly needed on the Eastern Front and actually benefiting the Soviets more than Sledgehammer would have done...
...Roosevelt displayed the same grasp in his relations with Stalin...
...For example...
...Some passages are a little ornate, but Davis had a sharp eye for detail and repeatedly finds the exact fact or quotation that drives home his point...
...Above all, so far as this book is concerned, he was a superb war leader...
...Roosevelt, on the other hand, regarded Stalin as a man like other men, if much more difficult than most, whose trust it might be possible to win in the interests of the Grand Alliance and world peace...
...Marshall was so distressed by Roosevelt's order to cancel Sledgehammer and implement what became Operation Torch that he actually threatened to quit, an uncharacteristic act of pique that Roosevelt brushed aside...
...His love for Missy made him vulnerable to her suffering...
...Davis' work is based almost entirely on secondary accounts and other published material...
...Missy," as everyone called her, was nominally FDR's secretary, actually his office wife, and beyond that his constant companion, possible mistress, and for years probably the most important person in his life...
...Hitler's U-boat War: Tire Hunted, 19421945, conclusively establishes that after America's entry into the War there was no danger of Germany cutting the vital Atlantic lifeline between North America and Great Britain because Hitler had so few U-boats and the Allies so many ships and planes...
...He was also tolerant, slow to anger, and when angry skillful at masking it...
...Had he failed to make the efforts he did, he would be criticized now as a leader who helped bring about the Cold War instead of trying to prevent it...
...Though Davis did not say so, it appears that Stalin respected Churchill for this—to the degree he respected anyone—while at the same time having his prejudices against the British confirmed...
Vol. 83 • November 2000 • No. 5
