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World War II – Franklin Roosevelt – Craig Nelson
167 Plays1 year ago
Ep 025 – Nonfiction. Before the outbreak of World War II, the U.S. military was about the same size as Bulgaria's-- far too small to take on Hitler’s Germany. Craig Nelson discusses how FDR set out to change this in his new book, "V Is For Victory: Franklin Roosevelt's American Revolution & the Triumph of World War II."
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Transcript
FDR's Transformative Presidency
00:00:00
Speaker
If you look at the country we were in 1933 when he started and what we were in 1945 when he died, there is no period of time that's as big of a change. He saw both the Great Depression and the rise of global fascism.
00:00:15
Speaker
And he turned the country upside down to be able to do that. Besides the obvious things like social security, he really established the idea that national security extends outward into the world. And that by using pressure release valves like the United Nations and the Monetary Fund, we could keep and have kept World War III from happening.
00:00:36
Speaker
So his ideas, his fundamental ideas were the minute he realized he was going to win the war, he started turning to, what can we do to make sure this doesn't happen again?
Interview with Craig Nelson
00:01:06
Speaker
Today, I am really excited to have on Craig Nelson for his new book, V is for Victory, Franklin Roosevelt's American Revolution and the Triumph of World War II. Craig Nelson is the author of several books, including Pearl Harbor, From Infamy to Greatness, and the New York Times bestseller Rocket Man, The Epic Story of the First Man on the Moon.
00:01:29
Speaker
His book, The Age of Radiance, was a Penn Award finalist, chosen as one of the year's best books by NBC News, and his writing has appeared in publications like Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal, Salon, National Geographic, and many others. Craig, how are you doing today? I am fantastic. I'm having a once in a lifetime experience with this book, and it's an honor and a pleasure to join you AJ.
00:01:51
Speaker
Oh, that's wonderful. Well, the pleasure is all mine. And I liked your book a lot. And we were talking before we went on that you've been, you're all over the place. You're doing all sorts of interviews. And it's really great that you were able to join me here today. And this is a really, this topic, I feel like I, if somebody before I read your book, if somebody asked me, you know, are you familiar? Do you know a lot about FDR? I've been like, yeah, like, of course, iconic. Like I know all there is to know.
00:02:20
Speaker
Yet I found that I lacked a lot of kind of basic things about FDR when I was reading your book. And your style too is very readable, so I enjoyed that a lot. I guess first, just in your own words, what would you say your book is about?
Logistics and WWII
00:02:37
Speaker
Well, I think
00:02:39
Speaker
What happened with this book that originally began with a very wacky little comment that a military analyst said to me, he said, you know, on the battlefield, logistics eats strategy for lunch. And I was sort of breathless at this because I thought, what are we military historians doing? Oh, we talk about strategy. No one talks about logistics. So then I started looking into this and went down this sort of rabbit hole of
00:03:04
Speaker
New World War II theories. And one group is pushing that it's the tens of millions of dead Russians that was the secret to winning victory in World War II. And the other is that it was the arse of democracy. And none of these things, just so people listening, no, none of these things are considered the only thing that won World War II. They're all the little things that pushed it over the edge and gave us the winning.
00:03:28
Speaker
So I started writing just a sort of ordinary, straightforward, how the arsenal of democracy went into World War II, but then it started cascading into other
U.S. Pre-WWII Challenges
00:03:39
Speaker
issues. Like the fact is that by the time the actual arsenal started in 1940, American public was already geared up to doing something because France had fallen and that was like a national catastrophe for us. That's when people really woke up and got scared, you know, a year and a half before Pearl Harbor. But from
00:03:58
Speaker
the depression to that moment, no one wanted to lift a finger to do anything. So the book ends up becoming about a nation that is at its worst moment in its history, broken down by bitterness over World War I,
00:04:13
Speaker
beaten down by the Great Depression and devastated strangely enough by the Spanish flu. This is in the middle of all this. And we're like just lost. We're full of despair. We're hopeless. We're completely beaten down. And this bunch of people rises to defeat the greatest evil in human history.
00:04:32
Speaker
So that's what the book ended
FDR's Leadership in WWII
00:04:33
Speaker
up being about. Oh, that's great. Well, just kind of on that note, if somebody came up and said, Craig, did FDR win World War II for us, for the United States? Would you say yes?
00:04:46
Speaker
I would say if you need to pick one person who's responsible, it's FDR. Because if you take the other figures, Churchill did an incredible job of keeping his country together. And reliving that story and researching this book was so amazing. But he really, after 41, he isn't really significant, frankly. And Stalin is significant, but he's only significant from 42, 43.
00:05:14
Speaker
And from then on, from 43 to 45, the whole game is the United States. And pretty much the Pacific theater, the French and the English had so much to gain because they got back their colonies, tragically with Vietnam, of course.
00:05:29
Speaker
But the Americans really won that war, too. So you really see how the United States goes from this.
U.S. Military Expansion
00:05:38
Speaker
So in the mid-30s, we had armed forces of 135,000, meaning we were 14th in size between Portugal and Bulgaria. I mean, it's so unimaginable now, the way we live now, to imagine it.
00:05:56
Speaker
It's from the very first to the 30s, the United States had produced 33 techs.
00:06:02
Speaker
So for anyone training in the 30s, if you're in training to be in a tank battalion, you marched with your four other guys who would be in your tank and pretended you were in a tank marching down the road. And if you're lucky, they got you a least good humor ice cream truck to pretend that was your tank. I mean, it's just so extraordinary. So that's where you started. And look where we ended. I remember. So in your book, you've got a
00:06:29
Speaker
you have three lines with tank numbers that were produced. And the first line is like pre-1939 America produced like 80 tanks. And then I think like the last like 1942 to 1945 America produced 80,000 tanks or some number like that. But like the contrast, I was like, wow, that's incredible. Yeah.
00:06:52
Speaker
One really measure of this is the warplane production and the tank production. So with tanks, there's a fantastic story. The guy who ends up first running the arsenal of democracy is this fantastic character named Bill Knudsen, who was president of GM. And at one point Knudsen figures out he needs to make a lot of damn tanks. So he starts calling everybody he could pick up and he lands on K.T. Keller.
00:07:17
Speaker
who's head of Chrysler, and he calls up KT and goes, KT, I need you to make tanks. And Keller goes, oh, sure, Bill, I'd love to. What are tanks? When can I see one? And this is how rare they were in the United States at this time. And that one Chrysler tank arsenal would end up making more tanks than the entire Nazi effort throughout the whole of the war, one plane.
00:07:41
Speaker
And the incredible power of what we now call the Rust Belt was this incredible engine of power during that.
00:07:48
Speaker
Well, when you talk about the arsenal of democracy, explain to the audience, what are you talking about?
Economic Struggles and New Deal
00:07:55
Speaker
So in 1938, France and England decided they would give Hitler a piece of Czechoslovakia and he would stop waging war. And this did not work out. It didn't work out again when we gave Putin a piece of Crimea and he would stop waging war. So now we firmly know that appeasement does not work. But one person who really did not like this idea in 1938
00:08:16
Speaker
was Roosevelt. So he decided the answer was to launch a program that would dramatically increase American warplane production. And he did this by having federal funds be loaned out so companies could expand their production and expand their plants pretty much risk-free. And this program was a tremendous success. It boosted our own air forces and it boosted the
00:08:40
Speaker
remaining European democracies at that moment of England and France, and it also boosted the American economy. So when he saw that, and this was in 38, three years before Pearl Harbor. So when he saw that, Roosevelt first realized two things. He realized that here was a solution to his fears of Hitler crossing the Atlantic and invading
00:09:00
Speaker
the United States, which he was convinced would happen eventually. But also it was something he could sell politically because we were making money. So the arts of democracy was this profound boost of war capability in the United States that also put the finishing touches to the Great Depression. Yeah, in which still a
00:09:21
Speaker
political strategy to this day that many politicians use. You'll often hear people in Congress talk about how such and such company has built 10,000 airplanes in their state or something like that. So I don't know if that was a tactic invented by FDR, but he certainly did a good job of mobilizing people around it.
00:09:43
Speaker
Take us back actually to the beginning of FDR's administration, because I thought this was very striking that you wrote about in your book.
00:09:53
Speaker
Because it's easy to forget how bad things were economically in America when FDR took office. The Great Depression were a few years in, so folks are really feeling the consequences of that. Describe America economically and in terms of the poverty in America when FDR took office.
00:10:15
Speaker
So the first thing I want to say is, I want to apologize to all you readers who buy this book and go, I'm getting a World War II book. And then you open the first page and it goes, 1933. So I just want to say, there's a reason it's starting in 1933, and you'll be glad. And it's not that long. I promise we'll get to the good stuff quick. So what happens is that
00:10:36
Speaker
Herbert Hoover is president and people really feel that he's not doing anything to try and help this candidate. He's waiting for the market to self-correct and it's not. And he's not really doing much and the American public is really fed up with him. So there's this great joke going around about Hoover that he asked what if his aides to borrow a nickel to use the payphone to call the friend and the aides said,
00:10:57
Speaker
Here's a dime called both of them. So that shows you the joke being that he's only got two friends, right? Yes. Yeah. I love this contempt that people had for him at that time. So Roosevelt wins in a landslide.
00:11:12
Speaker
And here he is, he's paralyzed from the waist down,
Shift in U.S. Military Strategy
00:11:16
Speaker
but he travels more than any presidential candidate had ever traveled. He portrays this incredible muscular ferocity, sort of like this unconquerable force that he gives a vigor that he pulls across, even though he's always in a wheelchair. And so he wins. And the very first thing that happens, of course, after giving this speech, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
00:11:39
Speaker
He goes on to the radio and the radio at this point is like the internet is now even called the box we live in. And Roosevelt would become a master of the radio. He would become the biggest star during the radio era. And he goes on to the radio and it's announced, we want to come into your home and give a little fireside chat. So this is the first of them. And he says to people, you know,
00:12:02
Speaker
Our banking crisis, where 5,000 banks have failed taking all the customer savings with them, and it is really just continuing. It is a cascading drama that's going on. It's so terrible that the Treasury Department is staying up 72 hours straight to figure out where to send printed bills to rescue the banks. And so it's called the banking crisis, and it's really a nightmare. He gets on the radio and he goes, you know,
00:12:26
Speaker
The banks don't just put your money in a vault. They invest it. And they're making money when you let them invest it. And it's much better for you than keeping your money under the bed and just stop being afraid of this. Just forget about it. It's not anything to be worried about. That speech solved the banking crisis. What it would be deviled over for decades or years and years was solved in one Roosevelt speech on the radio.
00:12:50
Speaker
He then went into overdrive, trying to fix every broken thing about America at this time. And this was, I mean, one of my heartbreaking stories about this period is a little girl's at school, and she starts sobbing and sobbing. And the teacher says, what's wrong, honey? And she's like 13, 14 years old. She goes, I'm so hungry. I just can't think about anything else. I'm just so hungry. And the teacher said, it's OK, honey. No one go home and get something to eat. And the little girl says, I can't. It's my sister's turn to eat.
00:13:20
Speaker
So people, I felt those, the stories that you share like that, you talk about in West Virginia, it was kind of normalized for mothers to talk about how it was the time of year where a lot of their babies die because they can't, they don't have any food, they're starving.
00:13:36
Speaker
I mean, things are really bad. Of course, it starts with the banking crisis, but the on the ground effects are extreme poverty all across the country, but especially in, you write about West Virginia, several other places where people are dying because things are so bad.
00:13:55
Speaker
Yeah.
Isolationism and Opposition
00:13:56
Speaker
We have this idea of men in their snazzy Hamburg hats waiting in line for you to get bread. This sort of elegant form of the Depression. It was just gruesome. People were digging through garbage mounds looking for meat. I mean, just horrible. They were putting their kids in orphanages because they can't afford to take care of them anymore. And kids
00:14:19
Speaker
14 and 15 lying that they're 16 so they can get into the Navy. It's just really gruesome. And Roosevelt, more or less, fixes everything pretty fast. So in his first 100 days, he comes up with 14 immense pieces of legislation.
00:14:36
Speaker
And one congressman looking at it said, it reads like the first chapter of Genesis because it was so fundamental. And some of the things he did were so simple. So for example, he establishes the Security and Exchange Commission so that you can be comfortable investing in Wall Street bonds and stocks. Before that,
00:14:57
Speaker
If you were a Wall Street investor, if you were JP Morgan or Joseph P. Kennedy, you knew all the inside information and you were safe. But anyone else, you were snookered. So this allowed other people to invest. He did the same thing with mortgages so that people could invest in mortgages. But the greatest kind of thing he did was he created ways for people to feel good about themselves. And one of them was the Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC.
00:15:23
Speaker
And this took poor people out of the city and got them working, helping in forestry and natural resources and water resources and national parks and all these other things. And they learned really the basic things like how to read a blueprint and how to erect a basic shed and how to do these sort of fundamental things. And he put the running of the CCC to the military and the runner of it was George Marshall.
00:15:52
Speaker
So here's George Marshall getting the experience he needs to become a general. And all these people going through this fundamental training that they would need to join the military. And it's all happening during the New Deal before anyone even knows about World War II. Yeah, we'll talk about the military in 1933 when FDR takes office. We talked a little bit about how few tanks the country produced. But when FDR comes into office, what's the military like? And then how does that change in the lead up to World War II?
00:16:21
Speaker
So at one point, the head of the army has a guy named Malin Craig. And when Roosevelt first starts talking about trying to get ready for dealing with Europe, Malin Craig says, oh, no, we're just going to defend the continental United States. We don't need to worry about Europe. They can't come over here. We've got the Atlantic Ocean. So this holds sway with the military. I mean, the military is as isolationist as Charles Lindbergh for some time.
00:16:49
Speaker
And they don't really recognize. And finally, when France falls, oh, excuse me. So, Marshall becomes head of the army after the fall of Poland. And when France falls, he suddenly turns to Roosevelt and says, you've got to do something. We've only got this bare minimum of people to defend. We can't defend the continental United States. And so, all of a sudden, they realize that he had been right all along and they need to clean this up fast.
00:17:17
Speaker
But at one point, a terrified Congress interviews the head of the Air Force called the Army Air Corps at that moment. And he goes in and it's Hap Arnold, who was a villain, who was a great hero in my book about the duel and the raid. But it's not such a great hero. I recently so he also I learned he had four heart attacks.
00:17:38
Speaker
He was really, he had some health issues going on. Anyway. So my first World War II book was about a little moment called the Do Little Raid, which Hap Arnold helped organize. And there's a thorough biography of that. He learned flying with the Wright brothers.
00:17:55
Speaker
team, and there was a guy in a black cart waiting next to the airfield. It was the undertaker, because he had a steady stream of visits from people learning to fly. Anyway, so Hap Arnold appears before Congress, I think this is 39 or 40, and they say, so what do you have to defend the continental United States? And he says, well, I have 300 planes, and they stink. So they aren't really up to speed at all, and I have 300 planes. So there's
00:18:23
Speaker
135,000 troops in 300 planes to defend the Western Hemisphere. If you're putting that against, we'll say right before 1939, if you're comparing the American military size to, let's say, Germany, what's the numbers comparison there between Germany and the US? We're 14th in size in the world between Portugal and Bulgaria.
00:18:48
Speaker
So bigger than Bulgaria would be the American motto for recruitment. Nice.
Industry and War Production
00:18:55
Speaker
Well, you mentioned Charles Lindbergh, who factors a lot into your story here. Talk about why Lindbergh was such an important and antagonistic role in this story that you've written.
00:19:10
Speaker
So I found this a really moving story, partly because I found such horrible things that Lindbergh said later in his career. But it starts off very sad. So Lindbergh becomes the first person to cross the Atlantic. And people forget that he had been an air mail pilot who was using celestial navigation, which he didn't know about well, and flying by himself. And it was pretty much the most dangerous stunt you could come up with.
00:19:39
Speaker
But he won. And the Americans really needed a hero at this moment. And he was the guy. So everyone sort of flocks to him. He's probably the most famous American in the world besides or maybe ahead of Roosevelt. But what happens next is that his baby is kidnapped and murdered.
00:19:55
Speaker
And Lindbergh decides this is the fault of American society. He takes his family into exile in Europe, and there he meets a bunch of hoity-toity Britons who say, you know, Hitler's going to win all this. There's nothing we can do about it. So you just get on this train and, you know, get on the bandwagon.
00:20:12
Speaker
And he then is taken for a tour of the Luftwaffe. And they do this great thing that the Soviets would do with nuclear missiles when they wanted to fool our corona satellite during the Cold War. The Germans had like the same planes flying in circles around and around. It looked like they had all bunch of planes.
00:20:30
Speaker
And then they pointed out this technology they supposedly had, which they did not have, but they snuck right in. So he started announcing to the world that the Nazis were going to run everything and there's nothing you can do and just don't even fight. And then he decides that he's going to come back to America and convince Americans to not fight too. And this triggers a series from, say, 1939 to Pearl Harbor,
00:20:56
Speaker
This triggers a series of fights on the radio alternating between Lindbergh and Roosevelt. Roosevelt wants a marriage to help England and France and keep some democracy going in the world besides them and thinks Hitler is going to cross the Atlantic easily. And Lindbergh is promoting his ideas instead. And the two of them have what was then called the Great Debate, where they fight back and forth on the radio. I found that he was just like a character I didn't know much. He was a person I didn't know much about.
00:21:26
Speaker
But really, you know, imagine the kind of influence that the most famous person in America or one of the most famous people could have in swaying people to a particular cause. What did Roosevelt think of Charles Lindbergh? He thought he was a Nazi.
00:21:44
Speaker
So, I mean, the most incredible quote I came across, Lindbergh, and he published this, he wasn't even trying to keep it a secret, was that after Roosevelt won a third term, Lindbergh turned to everyone at the anti-Roosevelt party he was at and said, you know, the real solution is we have to take voting rights away from black people. And we have to show the Jews that if they think things are bad in Germany, they should see what might happen to them here. I mean, it just, wow.
00:22:11
Speaker
Another character who I didn't realize was, I had known a little bit about this, but Henry Ford, I did not realize that he was so anti-Semitic in how he conducted not just himself personally, but his business. I think he talked about being very proud of not hiring any Jewish people, is that correct?
00:22:34
Speaker
No, you have it slightly backwards. Right. So the basic story is that Henry Ford was the great genius of his era. He was the Steve Jobs of Detroit. He came up with the concept of how to combine different ideas from Colt Arms Pistol Maker and Singer Sewing Machine Maker and the
00:22:56
Speaker
Sears Roebuck Distribution Center and all the meat packing industry and he combined all of these ideas into mass production where the product went from person to person and no one bent over and no, you know, one person puts in the screw and the other person puts in the nut and all these ideas that he had that dramatically increased the speed and efficiency of manufacturing.
00:23:20
Speaker
And this even made the price of the cars drop. And he even did this amazing thing where he raised all of his workers' wages so that they could afford to buy cars. And it was called Fordism, and he was really considered the most progressive original thinker in business. And then he went crazy. And I'm not quite sure what happened, but he buys a newspaper called The Dearborn Independent,
00:23:44
Speaker
And he makes all of the Ford dealers carry it in their store. So if you want to buy a Ford, you're also hocked to buy a subscription to this newspaper. And the cover of things like Jewish jazz, moron music, and these really outrageous anti-Semitic things. So finally he gets sued and his friends just attack him over and over again. And he stops and he says, how can anyone say I'm anti-Semitic?
00:24:09
Speaker
I hired tens of thousands of Jews working for me and all this kind of stuff. But in fact, he maintained this sort of crazy idea because and it was really strange because he's refusing to help the arsenal of democracy at the same time that his plans in Germany are making stuff for the Nazis.
00:24:29
Speaker
And his plans in England are making stuff for the British, so he's already got this whole war-making machinery in operation. Then at the last minute, his son, Etsuko, said, you know, Eleanor Roosevelt said on the radio that if there's a national emergency, the president can take over for it. And that got him off his ass and got him out to the hours of the party.
00:24:50
Speaker
Yeah, you know, I actually, I was surprised to learn. I mean, I guess this would make sense because Ford has, at this time they had manufacturing plants all over the country, but they were making weapons here in, or they were making vehicles, military vehicles here in America, but also their plants were in Germany, helping the Germans with their war effort.
00:25:15
Speaker
So it's like a very interesting kind of take that Henry Ford, I suppose, had on his role in the world at this time. Talk a little bit about specifically the car industry.
00:25:31
Speaker
Talk about the automotive manufacturers and what their role was in the lead up and during World War II. So Detroit is almost an exact analogy to Silicon Valley. Detroit was the state of the art technology. They were a huge presence in American life. They had
00:25:50
Speaker
a huge number of subcontrast and subassemblies, they had a huge percentage of the nation's steel, aluminum, glass, copper, leather, you know, all of this was pouring into the car business. And as they
00:26:05
Speaker
ramped up production, the prices became lower and lower so more and more people could afford to buy cars. And they really had this sort of iron grip on the industrial age in the United States. And they did not want to give up their role making cars for civilians. They did not want to switch over to military production. Because as the arsenal of democracy first begins in 1940, suddenly everyone in America is making a lot of money and they all want to buy a car.
00:26:34
Speaker
So it takes a very long time to figure out the answer to this problem. Because on the one hand, the government is offering companies that they will cover all costs, the government will cover all costs, and pay you 8% of sales. So you're a guaranteed profit of 8% and you have no risk and no expenses, which to me sounds like a good deal. I'm in on that, right? I'll make bonds.
00:27:01
Speaker
Because of the outpouring of jobs, everyone's making money. So the car manufacturers are making a lot of money and they don't want to give it up. So the government comes up and the government can't seem to be forcing them into it. It has to look like they're coming along and doing their patriotic
FDR's Industrial Strategy
00:27:20
Speaker
duty.
00:27:20
Speaker
So what they do is they figure out there are four materials. If they can control the flow to companies of carbon steel, stainless steel, aluminum and copper, they can redirect the economy into almost any direction they want. And that's what they do. They tell the car manufacturers, hey, you're not getting any rubber for tires or any aluminum unless you switch over to warp war manufacturing. And that changes it.
00:27:48
Speaker
Well, just kind of on that note, when it comes to FDR, so you write about how one of the ways that FDR uniquely was able to win World War II was he was very masterful in getting all of these industry people together and producing
00:28:07
Speaker
for the war effort. In your research, just talk about some of the more interesting ways that FDR was able to get these manufacturing companies involved in the war.
00:28:20
Speaker
So FDR had started a program during the New Deal that is the most notorious program in the New Deal. It's called the National Recovery Administration. And the guy he had running this was sort of a lunatic who ran it into the ground, and it was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. And it's sort of when people want to attack FDR, they pick the NRA to do it. But the NRA
00:28:44
Speaker
was already trying to coordinate the economy to fix the depression, meaning they would assemble union leaders, corporate leaders, and federal bureaucrats, and try and all work out deals so that there wasn't so much competition with the companies that they were destroying each other profits, and the unions could take care of the workers, and there would be mass employment at decent wages, and they tried to do all these things to fix it. And it got trampled on.
00:29:13
Speaker
during the Great Depression, but it sort of reignites into the Arso democracy. So what Roosevelt does is he calls all these industry leaders and says, we really need your help. And this allows them to come to Washington and eventually do quite a bit of good for their company. But they get to be patriotic and they get to do their duty and they get to help with things such as the rubber shortage. So the head of a railroad comes in to fix the rubber shortage.
00:29:40
Speaker
And he does it in about a year and a half, and then goes back home. So it's an incredible story. One of my favorites is a guy named Henry Kaiser. So Henry
FDR's Leadership Style
00:29:50
Speaker
Kaiser is a gravel man, and he hears about the job to build the Boulder Dam. And he decides he's got to do it, but he doesn't have enough money. So he puts together something called the Six Companies, which is a consortium of different construction and engineering people across the country pulled into one company.
00:30:09
Speaker
and they produce the Boulder Dam on time and under budget. So he starts getting more and more and more jobs. He engineers the baby flat tops, the little aircraft carriers that protect convoys of shipping across the Atlantic that helped turn the tide of that war, but he also creates
00:30:27
Speaker
liberty ship yards all over the country. And he builds one after the next after the next. And he becomes so good at building these liberty ships that there's a little class of history. And in this high school class, the teacher says, what was the face that launched a thousand ships? And he thinks she's expecting the students to say, Ellen McTroy, and instead they say, Henry Kaiser.
00:30:52
Speaker
Very nice, very nice. What do you think it was about Efti? Was it just he was very charismatic?
00:30:59
Speaker
You talk about there's something that you write. He's meeting an actor. I forget which actor it is. It's like the most famous actor or something in America in FDR is like, you know, we're the two best actors in America. Talking about himself as somebody who's often playing a role and playing a part. Do you think it was just his sheer charisma that brought all these industry leaders together? Was it sharp political acumen? Was it his military knowledge himself?
00:31:26
Speaker
What was it that made FDR so special in this regard? Well, the two things about the Roosevelt's that I loved learning was that the first little one is that Eleanor didn't require secret service protection because she always had a gun in her purse.
00:31:40
Speaker
So I mean, that blew my mind because I always thought of her as this sweet grandmother. Oh no, she's like a ninja, Eleanor Roosevelt. So that was the good. The second thing that really amazed me was that, and I heard this from both a New Deal era aid and from a World War II era aid, was that they saw this
00:31:59
Speaker
Oh, happy go lucky. Let's have a beer. Isn't things great? I love your ideas, and I love your ideas too, and I love your ideas too. Isn't it great to be alive? Isn't America the greatest country in the world? This whole thing that FDR did, and they realized that it was all a persona, and that this wasn't the real guy at all. And they kept trying to look for clues as to what the real Roosevelt was like, and they could never see him.
00:32:27
Speaker
So he told Orson Welles that we're the greatest actors. That's who it was. And I think he learned acting because he had this tremendously suffocating mother. So in order to deal with her, he learned how to do all this acting to sort of grow up and be a person and get around her. And that was the key to Roosevelt's strength.
00:32:46
Speaker
And was he, I mean, his family obviously is very well known. Did he, as growing up, I imagine he didn't want for much. He didn't have like a hard childhood. I mean, you know, everybody's got hardship at some point, but he didn't seem to struggle so much from what I've read. Correct. Growing up. Yeah. His sled when he was a little boy was the sled of Napoleon III. So
00:33:12
Speaker
His father was very wealthy. So there was a split in the family. There were the Hyde Park or Hudson River Valley, Roosevelt's, which he was. And then there were the Oyster Bay, Long Island Roosevelt's, which Theodore was. And so Eleanor comes from the Oyster Bay, Long Island version. And they were here in the, since the very founding of the country, they come from when New York was a Dutch colony.
00:33:39
Speaker
And his family Bible that he swore in all of his igniterations, I think it was 600 years old and in Dutch. So it's a very storied family. In fact, his parents would have thought that the Astors were class drivers and climbers in Nuboree. Oh, those tacky Vanderbilt, right?
Lend-Lease Program
00:34:03
Speaker
Well, let's talk about when Germany invades Poland. September 1, 1939, what is FDR's reaction to the invasion of Poland? So he realizes that this is the end and this is the deal. And he starts immediately moving forward with two things. He makes
00:34:25
Speaker
George Marshall, the head of the army, and he starts moving forward with Lendley. So what happened during this period before Pearl Harbor is that he's taking one step, like one small step after the next, never getting ahead of public opinion.
00:34:41
Speaker
So he does this thing where he puts up an idea like at a press conference. He doesn't even go out and make a big speech about it. He puts up an idea at a press conference, maybe we should do this. And then he has sort of various proctors out in public making radio speeches and personal appearances also bringing up this idea.
00:35:01
Speaker
And then Lindbergh and his allies, Operation Called America First, put up their ideas and sort of the legislation gets sort of hammered out in public. And he does this first with something called cash and carry, which gets around the neutrality laws. And then he does it with Destroyers for Bases, which is a deal he does with Churchill where we give them old destroyers and they give us leases to Caribbean bases. And this deal,
00:35:29
Speaker
didn't look like it was good to Churchill, but he did it anyway to help unite the two countries. And to Americans, it looked like a great deal for getting rid of these cranky old ships that are no good and getting Caribbean bases. So each time, Roosevelt would try and satisfy a huge swath of political posturing. So everything was a good deal where it would help the economy
00:35:54
Speaker
And it would get around Americans' great reluctance to help Europe. Finally, he hits on Lend-Lease. And this is a really moving story because Lend-Lease was all really done through the machinations of the ambassador from Britain at this time, a guy named Lord Lothian. And one thing I really love about doing history is bringing back forgotten or under-recognized figures.
00:36:18
Speaker
And a great one is Lord Lothian Philip Kirk, who is so to the man or born, you can't imagine. But he immediately comes to America and
00:36:29
Speaker
wins Americans hearts. It starts when he's turning in his papers the first day he's ambassador at the White House and he comes up and this little black kitten starts rubbing against his legs so he puts it on his shoulder and continues the press conference. So the new British ambassador has a little kitten with him and so this is on the cover of every newspaper in America. But then what he does is
00:36:50
Speaker
He realizes that he doesn't want America to pity Britain. He wants us to see them as staunch allies. So he pretty much engineers the legend of Dunkirk that the British had sent all of their fishing boats and pleasure craft to rescue people off the coast of France and cross the English Chandos.
The Great Debate on WWII Involvement
00:37:09
Speaker
It was just a big movie a couple of years ago. And this is all. Yeah, it was great. So it's got the Shakespeare guys in it.
00:37:18
Speaker
Oh, I forget his name, but anyway. It was a good movie. But it's very much quite a bit different from the actual story, which is a terrible calamity of Dunkirk. Anyway, but Philip Kerr gets this idea of this staunch British empire. And so he's consulting with Churchill on what Churchill should say in his speeches. And he's consulting with FDR on how FDR should respond to what Churchill wants. So he's really coordinating these two things.
00:37:47
Speaker
And finally, this huge letter from Churchill Arise, and it's really at the very end of the rope for England. And he says that, you know, maybe it's in America's best interest to have their own Maginot Line out here in Europe instead of the Nazis at your doorstep, which is what's going to happen if England falls.
00:38:10
Speaker
Roosevelt comes up with the idea of lend lease and he says it at a press conference and it is one of the greatest speeches of all time and it begins, imagine your neighbor's house is on fire and you have a fine garden hose.
00:38:26
Speaker
And everyone who is alive that remembers this garden hose talk forever. And it's all the idea that your friend's house is on fire, you lend them your hose, and if you get it back, everything's just fine. And people really love this idea that if our garden hose can save the English, we should do it.
00:38:46
Speaker
And it completely changes the conversation of the United States. And in fact, I found out there's like a great moment in history. I found out that on the first ship going to England with Lindley's was a big pile of firehose. So we actually did send them home. Nice.
00:39:03
Speaker
Well, yeah. You're right about how unpopular most Americans saw getting involved in the war in Europe would be between the period, between 1939 and 1941. And there is this fine line that Roosevelt walks with Churchill all the time.
00:39:21
Speaker
Because Roosevelt, even though he understands there's a very real possibility that America is getting involved in this war, the public is not for that. Well, Churchill, obviously, he wants to save his country, which everyone thinks is on the verge of being invaded by the Germans.
00:39:42
Speaker
A lot of people, you write about this, a lot of people kind of play up this very cordial relationship between Roosevelt and Churchill, but it was often pretty contentious. Talk about some of the more contentious moments that they had.
00:39:56
Speaker
Well, first I want to say that everyone loves the bathtub story, that Churchill claims that Roosevelt came in on him naked and he said, I have nothing to hide from the president.
Alliance and Conflict with Churchill
00:40:08
Speaker
If you really want to fall down the rabbit hole of research, there are thousands of pages now about who said this bathtub story and how true could it have been. Anyway, so if anyone wants to look into that, you can have a lot of fun.
00:40:24
Speaker
What I thought was the most interesting in the fight that went on between Churchill and Roosevelt, and Roosevelt decided, oh, well, first I want to say that Roosevelt said the sweet thing about Churchill when he revealed that the mulberries, the artificial harbors that they took with them to Normandy, which allowed them to land on beaches, was Churchill's idea. And he said, he's got 100 ideas every day, and three of them are good. And I feel that's true about me. I, too, have 100 ideas a day in three of them.
00:40:53
Speaker
So, so I love that quote. But the thing that was really struck me, and I didn't get to go into it in enough detail, this book was originally 1100 pages long. Wow, that's impressive editing, actually. So there's this one thing for people who haven't read it, it's about 400 now. So that's really, you know, it's quite a cut. And like $16. It's a good deal. 400 pages for 16. Anyway, so so I get
00:41:19
Speaker
I ended up unearthing this memoir of one of Roosevelt's, I mean, yeah, one of Roosevelt's kids. And he said that at their first dinner, you know, they started off very cordial and then immediately stopped fighting because Churchill's overriding plan during World War II was to restore the British Empire as it was under Queen Victoria, meaning he wants back all of these colonies. And
00:41:45
Speaker
And Roosevelt hates this idea. He thinks that imperialism was a cause of the Great Depression, that the empires are sucking these colonies dry, and then no one is ever developing, turning into the developing world, all the third world. And so he really fights him, and he makes him sign the Atlantic Charter, which pretty clearly says the British Empire is not being reformed, but that sort of gets lost in the shuffle after he dies in 45.
00:42:16
Speaker
Well, let's talk about Pearl Harbor, when Pearl Harbor is attacked.
Pearl Harbor and Strategic Focus
00:42:21
Speaker
Now, I think that just like normal kind of person on the street would say, when Pearl Harbor was attacked, complete surprise. And America was like, we were not ready at all.
00:42:36
Speaker
Our military was on its hind legs. But FDR had actually been slowly building up the military because, again, he saw the writing on the wall. If not getting involved, he often thought that if America had a robust military, that it would deter Germany and Hitler. I think one of the things that you write about is Czechoslovakia.
00:43:01
Speaker
Roosevelt thinks that never would have happened if Hitler had to think about this huge air force that America had. But since America had such a small military, they didn't have that kind of deterrence power. Talk about how much Roosevelt had actually built up the American military by the time Pearl Harbor happens. Right. So Roosevelt got through the first draft during peacetime. America had never had a draft during peacetime.
00:43:29
Speaker
And he actually let a group of New Yorkers called the Sentry Group get across this idea of doing this. So he actually had proxies doing this for him until it actually happened and was done and was signed. He had nothing to do with it, but he was the one behind the scenes doing this. So by the time of Pearl Harbor, we had about, I think it's 1.2 million under arms and trained. And we're bringing in, of course, we're bringing in a tremendous amount of volunteers after Pearl Harbor.
00:43:59
Speaker
We went from 135,000 to 1.2 million. When Pearl Harbor happens, besides the obvious that America has been attacked, what are some of the military challenges that FDR has to navigate and how does he do that successfully? The biggest problem is that
00:44:18
Speaker
Even at our height, until our very height in 1944, we really do not have the capability to run a two-ocean, three-continent war. And this is what's going on. So there's a tremendous amount of push to immediately destroy Japan, because as we all know from day of infamy,
00:44:39
Speaker
It was seen as a betrayal that we were negotiating new treaties with Japan because Americans didn't realize that we were the Saudi Arabia of the 1930s and we had cut off Japan's oil. So that was a big problem for Japan. But the ordinary Americans saw this as a terrible betrayal that someone who was an ally in World War I had secretly attacked us. So there was this outrage and they wanted to destroy Japan immediately.
00:45:06
Speaker
But ever since the early 1930s, with a plan called Rainbow Five, the War Department knew that they needed to defeat Germany
00:45:19
Speaker
And Japan would fall by itself, that if they went all out after Japan and let Germany thrive, they were doomed. But if they went after Germany first, Japan might work out to itself. So they came up with this Hitler first strategy. And they had to keep selling it over and over to the American public, and especially to the Navy, Ernest King wanted to also go after Admiral King, wanted to also go after
00:45:46
Speaker
But they really had to get to a certain point of Hitler being quelled before they could really turn their attention to Asia. And that's what they did. So how reluctant was the military at this time to listen to FDR?
FDR's Global Perspective
00:46:01
Speaker
Obviously, he's a commander in chief, but what did the generals in the military, what was their opinion of how he wanted the war to be conducted?
00:46:10
Speaker
So there was a big fight between the military and the head of the War Department, Henry Stimson, and FDR over Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa. The invasion of North Africa was supposed to be pretty much a cakewalk because everyone assumed we could convince the Vichy French, who were in Morocco and Algiers at that time, to sort of side with whoever was,
00:46:36
Speaker
had the biggest army in town, and they did. So it was a way, a dress rehearsal for Normandy and everything that would follow with an American army that was very inexperienced in combat. The Japanese had spent 10 years attacking the Chinese, so they were very experienced, and the Germans had been running rampage all over Europe for a number of years, but we had really no military experience.
00:47:03
Speaker
Everyone in the military wanted to immediately go for a Normandy-style across-channel invasion and go after Normandy. Well, the British didn't like this because it reminded them of a hideous World War I battle called the Somme, and they were obsessed with the Somme. It was all they could think about. So when the Normandy invasion happened, they still didn't want to do it. But especially, they didn't want to do it in 42.
00:47:30
Speaker
General Marshall had been misinformed about both his troop training and his number of landing vessels. And he actually thought he was going to be able to do a cross channel invasion in 42, which would have been a disaster. So it was really great that Roosevelt won out, but they
00:47:48
Speaker
They got it so badly that Marshall threatened to switch from Europe first to Asia first. And Roosevelt had to tell him, OK, let me see your Asia first policy. Let me see how you plan to invade Japan. And of course, he didn't have any plans to invade Japan. So that's not that.
00:48:05
Speaker
What would you say that if there was one thing about Roosevelt that led to him being so successful and to him leading America and the Allies to victory in World War II? What do you think that one thing would be?
00:48:21
Speaker
I think it was the fact that he was a very educated cosmopolitan person, that he really saw aspects of the world that almost no one else could see. Churchill was blinded to the suffering of his colonies, because he thought, oh, it's so much better for them to be part of the British empire than be overseeing their own government. The racist idea that Africa is much better in the hands of the Germans than in the hands of Africans.
00:48:51
Speaker
But Roosevelt, he could read German and French and Italian. He knew people from all over the world, and he had this incredible touch of seeing how humanity needed assistance in some way, that you couldn't allow capitalism to just run rampant all the time, that you had to leave out all helping hand. And I think this all happened because of his paralysis.
00:49:16
Speaker
that before he was such a lightweight thinker, his own cousin called him a feather duster. But after he started having a very warm heart to people who were disabled and people who had problems and a very cold eye to the people who weren't willing to help them politically. And that really changed him. And I think that was his fundamental secret. Well, in the title of your book,
00:49:42
Speaker
Franklin Roosevelt's American Revolution. I feel like American Revolution is a strong term to use. Why do you think this was another American Revolution? Because if you look at the country we were in 1933 when he started and what we were in 1945 when he died,
Legacy and Impact
00:50:01
Speaker
there is no period of time that's as big of a change. He solved both the Great Depression and the rise of global fascism, and he turned the country upside down to be able to do that. Besides the obvious things like social security, he really established the idea that national security extends outward into the world, and that by using pressure release valves like the United Nations and the Monetary Fund, we could keep and have kept World War III from happening.
00:50:30
Speaker
So his ideas, his fundamental ideas were the minute he realized he was going to win the war, he started turning to, what can we do to make sure this doesn't happen again? Instead of, oh, boy, we're going to get all these paintings from the Germans. You know, I mean, it was always the opposite of a normal. So you see something like the Marshall Plan was pretty much another Roosevelt idea, even though it happened.
00:50:53
Speaker
Truman, which rebuilt Europe back with our money, but they had to buy our stuff. So it was another economic boom for the United States. And I say he had a one-sith, many-she's policy. His idea for every policy he came up with, he wanted it to solve many problems at once, and it usually did.
00:51:14
Speaker
Well, just kind of like thinking about how necessary FDR would be to this type of American Revolution. I guess I was just trying to think like what the alternative to FDR would have been. What would you say if somebody like, I know this is at this point, like 10 years before, but somebody like Herbert Hoover, what if he were president during World War II? How do you think things would be different? Or maybe there's a different alternative that's more realistic.
00:51:42
Speaker
Well, if we hadn't had the infrastructure repairs and things like the hydroelectric power of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the building of all these schools and hospitals and things that the New Deal did, we couldn't possibly have been in a position to even think about taking on Nazi Germany. So if England had fallen and if Roosevelt hadn't been president, we would probably all be speaking German now.
00:52:11
Speaker
Well, you know, I thinking about today, how people think about FDR, it's weird because, and I don't know if you would agree to this. I feel like FDR is still a little bit controversial.
00:52:24
Speaker
politically, I remember I had in high school, I had a history teacher, and he always used to say that FDR didn't pull America out of the Depression, like winning World War II pulled America out of the Depression. And I feel like this is something that I hear a lot from people who are maybe a little bit more Republican leaning in their politics. I'm curious, why is there still controversy today if you believe there's controversy when it comes to FDR?
00:52:52
Speaker
Well, I like to say that FDR is the greatest politician in American history, and I mean that in every sense of the word. So he could be a real operator, and he could really flout the rules, and he could get away with murder. And I can imagine if you were against this, it would drive you crazy.
00:53:12
Speaker
Everyone would think, oh, he can't possibly win a third election. And then he did. And everyone, oh, he can't possibly win a fourth election. And then he did. So I could see where it would drive you insane. But fundamentally speaking, if we hadn't had, if, you know, when people call FDR a socialist, do you think restrictions on child labor is socialism? Do you think social security is socialism? I mean,
00:53:36
Speaker
I mean, all the things that we still live with, but do you think the Securities and Exchange Commission or the FDIC banking is socialism? It's just someone coming up with a crazy thing because they want to cut back welfare and the welfare state. Well, I wonder if you think that our modern perceptions of FDR, do you think those are changing? How is FDR being recorded in history?
00:54:04
Speaker
I think what's interesting about history is how the pendulum always swings back and forth. So we're in one kind of mood now, and in another 20 years, we'll be in a totally different mood.
00:54:21
Speaker
I think what's happening is FDR went through this period where he was like a god in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. And Truman was a doubt because he came after FDR and no one could live up to FDR. And then all of a sudden started swinging away, probably during the Reagan era, frankly, of that FDR was no good. He did a lot of terrible policies and all these things that should have never been stuck around for four terms and all this other stuff.
00:54:49
Speaker
So now I think it's swinging back and people are realizing that fundamentally what we think of as being American, including the Golden Gate Bridge and the Hoover Dam came to us from FDR. Well, what are you hoping readers take away from your book?
00:55:05
Speaker
I hope that they can see that a nation so beaten down and in such terrible straits rising to defeat global fascism. If Americans in that position could do that, just think of what we could do if we put our mind to it and put aside our differences. Wow, what a message. Well, Craig, this has been a great interview in your book. It was such a good read.
00:55:33
Speaker
Thanks for coming on. Are you working on anything next? You got anything around the corner? No, not yet. I hope to never work again, but we'll see. Good for you. Wonderful. Craig Nelson, V is for victory. Go buy a coffee. Go check it out from your library. Really a fascinating story, a great look at FDR. Craig, thanks again for your time today.
00:56:03
Speaker
Thank you AJ, it's been a pleasure and an honor.