A Cabinet at War

...BY ALVIN S. FELZENBERG A recent Washington Post headline for an excerpt from Bob Woodward's Bush at War read, "A Struggle for the President's Heart and Mind...

...He vigorously pressed for the destruction of its industrial base in the Ruhr valley...

...Roosevelt resolved that, this time, things would be different...

...Just as Lincoln transformed the Civil War from a "struggle to save the Union" into a crusade to abolish slavery, Roosevelt had it within his grasp to record the United States as firmly and irrevocably against genocide...

...Tugs of war to influence a president are as old as the presidency itself...

...It could not have appeared at a better time...

...Franklin Roosevelt was certainly that kind of president—most of the time...

...As Woodrow Wilson's assistant secretary of the Navy, Roosevelt was privy to Allied war plans during the First World War and had been an eyewitness to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919...

...These deficiencies, he felt, made it easier for Nazi-instigated lies such as the "stabbed in the back" theory to gain popular currency...

...Though the British were both able and willing to take this step, they deferred to their senior partner...

...In ruling out this option, Roosevelt let pass an opportunity to redefine the objectives of the most devastating war in history...

...In The Conquerors Beschloss breaks new ground with his treatment of this much maligned and usually underestimated Treasury secretary...

...Because of Morgenthau's relentless prodding, Roosevelt eventually established a War Refugee Board charged with the task of rescuing Jews as Allied forces advanced against the Nazis...

...Though he was wrong about postwar policy towards Germany, Morgen-thau was right in pushing the administration to do more about the plight of Jews in Europe...

...Right though he was about postwar German policy and much else, Harry Truman was dead wrong about Morgenthau...

...Had he done that, Roosevelt might have bequeathed a less murky legacy to his successors...

...Morgenthau lost the struggle for the president's heart and mind...

...Prior historians have placed the blame on Morgenthau's nemesis, McCloy...

...A highly assimilated Jew (the second person of his religion ever appointed to a cabinet position—the first, Oscar Straus, was Teddy Roosevelt's commerce secretary), Morgenthau became increasingly troubled by what he had learned about the systematic destruction of Jews and other "undesirables" in the death camps...

...But Beschloss suggests that though the voice was McCloy's, the decision was Roosevelt's...

...He attributed Germany's aggressive stance toward its neighbors and its instigation of two world wars to this trait...

...Among the questions Roosevelt had to face, once the United States was at war with Germany, were what terms of peace to seek and what kind of postwar Germany the Allies would bring into being...

...Morgenthau worried that Roosevelt—his Hyde Park neighbor— would look upon his entreaties as "special pleading," but he nonetheless pressed on...

...Stalin certainly had much to gain by a weaker Germany...

...White was later identified as a Soviet agent...

...He told cronies that Roosevelt's treasury secretary was a nut and a blockhead "who did not know sh—t from apple butter...

...Sharing his initial views, but for different reasons, was Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau...

...Under its auspices, Swedish banker Raoul Wallenberg was sent to Hungary, where he saved thousands of lives...

...That increased casualties and stiffened German resolve to fight on, but Roosevelt had his reasons for insisting on these terms...

...Although it is this group of "realists" that eventually prevailed, Morgenthau, the persistent "idealist," also achieved some painful, but not insignificant, victories...

...Arguing against the "Morgenthau plan" were Stimson, McCloy, and their allies, who favored the full integration of Germany into Europe...

...Roosevelt acted decisively and firmly in resolving the first...

...Overriding the objections of some of his military advisers—as well as Churchill— Roosevelt decreed that the Allies would pursue a policy of unconditional surrender...

...He believed the only way to ensure that Germany would never be able to start another war was to transform it into an agrarian nation...

...The German people would know who had started, waged, and lost the war...

...They saw a strong democratic Germany as a necessary bulwark against what was already an expansionist Soviet Union...

...Such is the theme of Michael Beschloss's new book, The Conquerors...

...He is editor of Keys to a Successful Presidency...

...Roosevelt and McCloy saw it as a distraction from the main objective of winning the war...

...assistant John McCloy...

...Had such a headline run sixty years ago, the president would have been Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the advisers struggling for his heart and mind would have been Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., War Secretary Henry L. Stimson, and Stimson's Alvin S. Felzenberg writes and lectures about the American presidency...

...But the argument he started goes on...

...At his insistence, Roosevelt overruled the State Department and allowed a small number of Jewish refugees into the country...

...With Hitler's rise to power, Roosevelt came to believe the Allies had made a mistake in ending that earlier conflict with an armistice...

...Making more than cameo appearances in such a story would have been Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, General Dwight D.Eisenhower, and, oh yes, Harry Truman, the man both history and Roosevelt selected to complete Roosevelt's work...

...Of all the battles Morgenthau lost, the most controversial remains the American decision not to bomb the death camps or the railroads leading to them...

...The same conscience that drove him led him to conduct an investigation after the war as to whether his deputy, Harry Dexter White, had manipulated him into pushing policies that might favor the Soviet Union...

...Nor had they had to endure the carnage that Belgium and France had witnessed...

...Actually, the man Roosevelt delighted in calling "Henry the Morgue" knew a hell of a lot...

...Claiming special expertise on the subject because he had spent many summers on the Continent as a child and had a rudimentary knowledge of the German language, Roosevelt did conclude that the country must shed its "Prussian militarism...

...Roosevelt, however, remained open to differing points of view as events changed...

...An underlying lesson in Beschloss's well-written narrative is that presidents can find kernels of wisdom in advice they reject as well as in what they follow...

...Roosevelt was less certain about the kind of Germany the West should create once the war was won...

...He felt the best way to eradicate it was to return to the twenty fief-doms, free cities, and provinces that had coexisted until Bismarck forged them into a nation in the 1870s...

...Beschloss argues that their failure to act deprived the Allies of the opportunity to "deliver a moral statement . . . that the Americans and the British understood the historical gravity of the Holocaust...

...Along with General John Pershing and others, he concluded that because foreign troops had never occupied Germany, its people never learned they had been defeated...

...It takes a president of extraordinary vision and sense of purpose to know that...