Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (140 page)

E
LLIOTT ACCOMPANIED
his father to the villa reserved for the president. “It was quite a place,” Elliott recalled. “The living room must have been twenty-eight feet high; it was two stories up, with great French windows that looked out on an extremely handsome garden.” Sliding steel curtains, apparently installed recently, could cover the windows against bullets or shrapnel; a swimming pool had been converted to a makeshift air raid shelter. The renovations pleased Mike Reilly; Roosevelt was more impressed, in an ironic way, by the gaudy décor of the master bedroom. He whistled softly, grinned, and observed, “Now all we need is the madame of the house.”

Churchill had a villa next door. The prime minister was feeling fuller of himself than usual. “It gave me intense pleasure,” he remembered, “to see my great colleague here on conquered or liberated territory which he and I had secured in spite of the advice given him by all his military experts.” Those same military experts had accompanied the president or were meeting him in Casablanca, but Churchill was confident they could be beaten into submission once again.

In fact the sessions of the military men were comparatively uncontroversial. Marshall and the Americans still favored France; the British remained focused on the Mediterranean. But with the American presence in North Africa now a fait accompli, the differences were mostly matters of emphasis. And after several days of debate the Combined Chiefs produced a document that laid out Anglo-American priorities for 1943. Topping the list was security of sea communications, on the unchallengeable reasoning that unless the U-boats could be cleared from the Atlantic, or at least their threat reduced dramatically, the logistical buildup required for any major offensive would be in jeopardy. Second was assuring a continuing supply of materiel to the Soviet Union. Russia was by no means out of the woods; a collapse of the Red Army, while hardly anticipated, wouldn’t be the strangest thing to happen in the annals of warfare. In third place was the extension of the operations in the Mediterranean. Agreement on this point required some yielding by Marshall and the Americans, but less than might have been expected. The new year had already begun, and by no stretch of the imagination could a major offensive against France be mounted in the few months between the present and the summer fighting season. Realistically, 1944 was the year for the invasion of France; the Combined Chiefs’ paper simply formalized the obvious. This was the thrust of the paper’s fourth point, which outlined the buildup of Allied forces in Britain during 1943, in preparation for a Channel crossing the following spring. The buildup would include the establishment of heavy bomber units that would be able to reach Germany and win control of the air. The final point of the paper dealt with the Pacific–Far Eastern theater, where the present strategy—of supplying China’s army and rolling up Japan’s island positions one by one—would continue.

The politics of the conference were more difficult. As the Darlan deal demonstrated, the North African operation had knocked the French question off the shelf where it had been sitting unstably since 1940 and put it back into play. The heart of the question was whether the French were allies or enemies. But because an open, public debate on the issue was impolitic, Roosevelt and Churchill settled for considering
which
of the French might be allies. Darlan’s assassination relieved them of the embarrassment their first brush with Vichy entailed, but it didn’t remove the temptation to deal with those who had cooperated with the Nazis. Henri Giraud lacked the egregiously collaborationist record of Darlan, but after escaping his prisoner of war camp he had returned to France and supported the Vichy government. He subsequently worked with Eisenhower in Torch and, after the assassination of Darlan, became the American military’s candidate for leadership among the anti-German French.

The British candidate was Charles de Gaulle, who despised Vichy and everyone associated with it, including Giraud. He often appeared to despise the Americans, especially after the Darlan deal. He tolerated the British, chiefly because they provided him a refuge and let him act as though he embodied the essence of France. Roosevelt wasn’t original when he described de Gaulle as thinking himself some mystical amalgam of Jeanne d’Arc and Clemenceau; the combination occurred to Churchill and Eisenhower, among others. Eisenhower understood why de Gaulle was so widely disliked by his fellow French officers. “At the time of France’s surrender in 1940,” Eisenhower wrote after the war, “the officers who remained in the Army had accepted the position and orders of their government and had given up the fight. From their viewpoint, if the course chosen by De Gaulle was correct, then every French officer who obeyed the orders of his government was a poltroon. If De Gaulle was a loyal Frenchman they had to regard themselves as cowards.”

Churchill grudgingly respected de Gaulle. “I had continuous difficulties and many sharp antagonisms with him,” Churchill wrote.

I knew he was no friend of England. But I always recognized in him the spirit and conception which, across the pages of history, the word ‘France’ would ever proclaim. I understood and admired, while I resented, his arrogant demeanor. Here he was—a refugee, an exile from his country under sentence of death, in a position entirely dependent upon the good will of Britain, and now of the United States. The Germans had conquered his country. He had no real foothold anywhere. Never mind; he defied all.

De Gaulle defied Churchill when the prime minister attempted to persuade him to join the conference at Casablanca. “De Gaulle is on his high horse,” Churchill told Roosevelt at one of their private sessions. “Refuses to come down here. Refuses point blank…. He’s furious over the methods used to get control in Morocco and Algeria and French West Africa. Jeanne d’Arc complex. And of course now that Ike has set Giraud in charge down here…” Churchill shook his head in bafflement.

Roosevelt guessed that there was more to the Churchill–de Gaulle story than the prime minister was letting on. Elliott Roosevelt was present at this late-night meeting, which ended with Churchill agreeing to a recommendation by Roosevelt that de Gaulle be informed that he would lose all Allied support if he didn’t come to Casablanca at once. When Churchill retired for the night, Roosevelt asked Elliott to stay, as he felt like talking. “I sat with him while he got into bed, and afterwards kept him up for the time it takes to smoke two or three cigarettes,” Elliott recalled. Elliott remarked that Churchill hadn’t looked as upset as his words about de Gaulle sounded. “Was I just imagining things, or isn’t the P.M. really worried by de Gaulle’s pouting?” he asked his father.

“I don’t know,” Roosevelt replied, laughing. “I hope to find out in the next few days. But I have a strong sneaking suspicion that our friend de Gaulle hasn’t come to Africa yet because our friend Winston hasn’t chosen to bid him come yet. I am more than partially sure that de Gaulle will do just about anything, at this point, that the Prime Minister and the Foreign Office ask him to do.”

“How come?”

“Interests coincide. The English mean to maintain their hold on their colonies. They mean to help the French maintain
their
hold on
their
colonies. Winnie is a great man for the status quo. He even
looks
like the status quo, doesn’t he?” Roosevelt remarked that Britain’s interest in the Pacific theater was closely related to colonial questions. “Burma—that affects India, and French Indochina, and Indonesia. They’re all interrelated. If one gets its freedom, the others will get ideas. That’s why Winston’s so anxious to keep de Gaulle in his corner. De Gaulle isn’t any more interested in seeing a colonial empire disappear than Churchill is.”

Elliott asked how Giraud figured in the equation.

“I hear very fine things about him from our State Department people.” Robert Murphy was State’s, and Eisenhower’s, liaison with the French general. “He’s sent back reports that indicate Giraud will be just the man to counterbalance de Gaulle.”

Elliott expressed surprise that de Gaulle needed counterbalancing. “All the reports we get—you know, in the newspapers and so on—tell of how popular he is, in and out of France.”

“It’s to the advantage of his backers to keep that idea alive.”

“Churchill, you mean? And the English?”

Roosevelt nodded. “De Gaulle is out to achieve one-man government in France. I can’t imagine a man I would distrust more. His whole Free French movement is honeycombed with police spies. He has agents spying on his own people. To him, freedom of speech means freedom from criticism—of him.”

Elliott thought about this for a moment. As he did, his father yawned. Elliott got up to go. Roosevelt motioned for him to stay. He had more on his mind. “The thing is,” Roosevelt said, “the colonial system means war. Exploit the resources of an India, a Burma, a Java; take all the wealth out of those countries, but never put anything back into them, things like education, decent standards of living, minimum health requirements—all you’re doing is storing up the kind of trouble that leads to war.”

Elliott said he had noticed Churchill’s cold glower when India was even mentioned.

“India should be made a commonwealth at once,” Roosevelt said. “After a certain number of years—five perhaps, or ten—she should be able to choose whether she wants to remain in the empire or have complete independence.” As a commonwealth, India could begin to build the institutions of health and education needed to raise the living standard of her people. “But how can she have these things when Britain is taking all the wealth of her national resources away from her, every year? Every year the Indian people have one thing to look forward to, like death and taxes. Sure as shooting, they have a famine. The season of famine, they call it.”

Roosevelt’s flight from America had stopped in British Gambia. He had seen and heard only a little of the country, but that little revealed a lot. “At about eight-thirty”—in the morning—“we drove through Bathurst to the airfield. The natives were just getting to work—in rags, glum-looking…. They told us the natives would look happier around noon-time, when the sun should have burned off the dew and the chill. I was told the prevailing wage for these men was one and nine—one shilling, nine pence. Less than fifty cents.”

“An hour?”

“A
day
! Fifty cents a
day
! Besides which they’re given a half-cup of rice…. Dirt, disease, very high mortality rate…. Life expectancy—you’d never guess what it is. Twenty-six years! These people are treated worse than the livestock. Their cattle live longer!”

Roosevelt asked Elliott, who had been stationed in Algeria, what things were like there. Elliott said it was much the same story. A few people—the white colonials and some favored locals—lived very well, but the vast majority suffered in poverty, disease, and ignorance.

Roosevelt explained what he proposed to do. France would be restored as a world power and then given back her colonies, but only in trust. Each year the French would have to report on the progress their colonies had made.

Elliott asked whom they would report to.

“The organization of the United Nations, when it’s been set up…. When we’ve won the war, the four great powers will be responsible for the peace. It’s already high time for us to be thinking of the future, building for it…. These great powers will have to assume the task of bringing education, raising the standards of living, improving the health conditions of all the backward, depressed colonial areas of the world. And when they’ve had a chance to reach maturity, they must have the opportunity extended them of independence—after the United Nations as a whole have decided they are prepared for it. If this isn’t done, we might as well agree that we’re in for another war.”

Roosevelt’s last cigarette had gone out. Elliott looked at his watch.

“Three-thirty, Pop.”

“Yes. Now I
am
tired. Get some sleep yourself, Elliott.”