Excerpts

Chapter One I The Big Leak Blazoned in huge black letters across the front page of the December 4, 1941, issue of the Chicago Tribune was the headline: F.D.R.'S WAR PLANS! The Washington Times-Herald , the largest paper in the nation's capital, carried a similarly fevered banner. In both papers Chesly Manly, the Tribune's Washington correspondent, revealed what President Franklin D. Roosevelt had repeatedly denied: that he was planning to lead the United States into war against Germany. The source of the reporter's information was no less than a verbatim copy of Rainbow Five, the top-secret war plan drawn up at FDR's order by the joint board of the United States Army and Navy.     Manly's story even contained a copy of the president's letter ordering the preparation of the plan. The reporter informed the Tribune and Times-Herald readers that Rainbow Five called for the creation of a 10-million-man army, including an expeditionary force of 5 million men that would invade Europe in 1943 to defeat Adolf Hitler's war machine. To all appearances the story was an enormous embarrassment to President Roosevelt. When he ran for a third term in 1940, the president had vowed that he would never send American soldiers to fight beyond America's shores.     Neither Roosevelt admirers nor Roosevelt haters, who by this time were numerous, were likely to forget his sonorous words, delivered at the Boston Garden on October 29, 1940, at the climax of his campaign for an unprecedented third presidential term: "While I am talking to you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance. I have said this before but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars." In Buffalo three days later he made an even more emphatic declaration: "Your president says this country is not going to war."     The Rainbow Five leak also made a fool or a liar out of Senator Alben W. Barkley of Kentucky, the Senate Democratic majority leader. On August 9, 1941, the president and England's prime minister Winston Churchill had met in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, to affirm Roosevelt's determination to give England all aid short of war. They had issued a declaration of human rights, the Atlantic Charter, as a rallying cry for the struggle against dictatorship. Manly had written a story based on another leak, reporting plans for an American expeditionary force. Barkley had risen in the Senate and denounced Manly for writing a "deliberate and intentional falsehood." Manly and the Tribune now demanded a public apology from Barkley. Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the fiercely antiwar owner of the Tribune , reminded readers that in 1919, the paper had leaked the verbatim text of the Versailles Treaty, revealing Woodrow Wilson's abandonment of a peace of reconciliation to Europe's revenge-hungry politicians.     In Congress, antiwar voices, most but not all Republicans, rose in protest. For more than two hours, unnerved House Democratic leaders delayed consideration of the administration's $8.24 billion arms bill, a key element in the expansion of the army and navy to fight the war designed by Rainbow Five. Heretofore this controversial legislation had been disguised as a purely defensive measure. Republican congressman George Holden Tinkham of Massachusetts declared that the nation had been "betrayed" and received unanimous consent for his motion to put Manly's story into the Congressional Record . "The biggest issue before the nation today is the Tribune story," said Republican congressman William P. Lambertson of Kansas. "If it isn't true, why doesn't the president deny it?"     In the Senate, Democrat Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, a leading critic of Roosevelt's policy of supporting the foes of Germany, Italy, and Japan, declared that the story proved everything he had been saying. On a radio program in early 1941, the sharp-tongued Wheeler had accused the president of having a "New Deal ... foreign policy" that would "plow under every fourth American boy." Americans of the time immediately got the sarcastic reference to a controversial 1930s federal program that paid farmers to plow under crops to create artificial shortages and bolster prices.     Roosevelt had denounced Wheeler's metaphor as "the rottenest thing that has been said in public life in my generation." The senator was unbothered by this presidential outburst. He had won reelection in 1940 by 114,000 votes. FDR had carried Montana by only 54,000 votes. Moreover, the western Democrat was not the only person to resort to such rhetoric. Antiwar folk artists Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and other members of the group known as the Almanac Singers (forerunners of the Weavers) had recently issued a record featuring the song "Plow Under." During the 1940 presidential campaign, beetle-browed John L. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers Union, arguably the most powerful labor leader in the country, had urged his followers to vote against Roosevelt, lest he "make cannon fodder of your sons." II Although Hitler had crushed France and the rest of Europe except for Great Britain and was now rampaging through Russia, most Americans felt no strong desire to stop him. Disillusion with the American experience in World War I permeated the nation. The soaring idealism with which Democrat Woodrow Wilson had led the country into that sanguinary conflict "to make the world safe for democracy" had ended in the vengeful Treaty of Versailles. Thanks in large part to that document, Europe's statesmen had created a world in which democracy soon became ridiculed and dictatorships of the left and right ran rampant. Worse, America's democratic allies, England and France, had welshed on repaying billions of dollars loaned to them to defeat Germany.     All this had been scorched into American hearts and minds in hearings conducted in the mid-1930s by progressive Republican Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota, who purported to prove that profit-hungry munitions makers and bankers, not Wilsonian idealism, had propelled America into World War I. As a result of these hearings, which the Roosevelt administration had made no attempt to contradict, Congress passed a series of neutrality acts that forbade Americans to loan money or send armaments to any belligerent. These laws had won huge majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives and Roosevelt had signed them without a word of disapproval.     If it was difficult for the president to whip up any enthusiasm for fighting Germany, arousing alarm about the threat from Japan seemed next to impossible, except in California, where Japanese (and Chinese) phobia had been endemic for a hundred years. Tokyo was clearly on the march to dominate Asia. Since 1937 Japan's war with China had given her control of virtually the entire Chinese coast, enabling Tokyo to cut off all supplies for China's armies except along a tortuous path through the mountains of south China, known as the Burma Road.     In 1940, Japan's rulers had allied their nation with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in the Tripartite Pact. This venture created what some newspapers called "a Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis," though no one had a clear idea of how the alliance worked. The pact had emboldened Japan to occupy the northern half of French Indochina (Vietnam) in a bloodless coup that the defeated French accepted as a fait accompli. In 1941 Tokyo seized the southern half of the colony. But Indochina and the rest of Asia were 7,000 miles away in a world that remained murkily mysterious and remote to most Americans.     A majority of those polled favored aid to embattled China and Great Britain, but other polls revealed that 80 percent were opposed to declaring war on Germany or Japan as long as they committed no hostile acts toward America. Many viewed with great uneasiness Roosevelt's escalating belligerence with Germany. U.S. Navy ships were convoying war supplies destined for England as far east as Iceland. This policy had already produced three clashes between U-boats and American destroyers. III If the Tribune story caused consternation in Congress, its impact in the War Department could be described as catastrophic. General Albert C. Wedemeyer has provided the most vivid recollection. "If I live to be a hundred," he told this writer in the spring of 1986, "December fourth, nineteen forty one, will still seem like yesterday." (He was an erect six feet five and mentally alert at eighty-nine.) Although only a major in the War Plans Division, Wedemeyer, a 1918 graduate of West Point, had already been tabbed by his superiors as a man with a bright future. In 1936 they had sent him to Berlin, where he spent two years studying at the German War College. When Roosevelt ordered the preparation of Rainbow Five, the forty-four-year-old major was given the task of writing it.     General Wedemeyer recalled the atmosphere he encountered when he walked into the War Department's offices at 7:30 A.M. on December 4. "Officers were standing in clumps, talking in low tones. Silence fell, and they dispersed the moment they saw me. My secretary, her eyes red from weeping, handed me a copy of the Times-Herald with Manly's story on the front page. I could not have been more appalled and astounded if a bomb had been dropped on Washington."     For the next several days Wedemeyer almost wished a bomb had been dropped on him. He was the chief suspect in the leak of Rainbow Five, which within the closed doors of the War Department was called the Victory Program. He had strong ties to America First, the largest antiwar group in the nation, with 800,000 vociferous members, including Charles Lindbergh and retired General Robert E. Wood, chairman of Sears, Roebuck. Both Wedemeyer and his father-in-law, Lieutenant General Stanley D. Embick, were known to be opponents of Roosevelt's foreign policy, which they thought was leading the United States into a premature and dangerous war.     This was a full year before anyone realized Adolf Hitler might try to exterminate Europe's Jews. Embick and Wedemeyer viewed the world through the realistic eyes of the soldier. They had no use for Hitler's Third Reich and its anti-Semitic policies. But many other European countries, notably Soviet Russia, practiced anti-Semitism, either covertly or openly. The New York Times Moscow correspondent had pointed out that Josef Stalin had shot more Jews in his late-1930s purges of supposedly disloyal Communists than Adolf Hitler had thus far killed in Germany.     Embick and Wedemeyer did not believe the United States should fight unless it was attacked or seriously threatened. They scoffed at Roosevelt's claim that Germany planned to invade South America, acidly pointing out that if the Nazi leader were to land an army in Brazil, his reputed prime target, the Germans would be farther away from the United States than they were in Europe. Both men also knew that America was not prepared to take on the German and Japanese war machines.     At the same time, Wedemeyer and Embick (who was descended from German-Americans who had emigrated to America before the Revolution) were men of honor, true to their oaths of allegiance as officers of the United States Army. (Admiral William Leahy, Roosevelt's military chief of staff, praised Embick's "superlative integrity.") Although they disagreed with the president's policy, there was no hesitation to obey his orders. "I never worked so hard on anything in my life as I did on that Victory Program," Wedemeyer recalled. "I recognized its immense importance, whether or not we got into the war. We were spending billions on arms without any clear idea of what we might need or where and when they might be used. I went to every expert in the Army and the Navy to find out the ships, the planes, the artillery, the tanks we would require to defeat our already well-armed enemies."     One conclusion Major Wedemeyer drew from this research was particularly alarming. There was a gap of eighteen months between the present U.S. military posture and full readiness to wage a successful war. To discover this secret splashed across the front pages of two major newspapers for the Germans and Japanese to read was dismaying enough. But it was the "political dynamite" in the revelation that Wedemeyer dreaded even more.     His civilian boss, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, told reporters that the man who had leaked Rainbow Five was "wanting in loyalty and patriotism," and so were the people who had published it. Wedemeyer was summoned to the office of John McCloy, assistant secretary of war. He was not invited to sit down. He therefore stood at attention. "Wedemeyer," McCloy snarled, "there's blood on the fingers of the man who leaked this information." IV Frank C. Waldrop, at that time the foreign editor of the Washington Times-Herald , has contributed another recollection of that emotional morning in the War Department. He visited the scene in pursuit of a story that had nothing to do with Rainbow Five and encountered a friend on the War Plans staff, Major Laurence Kuter. "Frank," a white-lipped Kuter said, "there are people here who would have put their bodies between you and that document."     J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, was summoned to the office of Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox and urged to launch an investigation. Hoover called in the chief of naval operations, Admiral Harold R. Stark, and Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, who had been in charge of preparing the navy's portion of the Victory Program, and began interrogating them. Hoover asked if there was any dissatisfaction with the plan among naval officers. Turner, exhibiting his talent for political infighting, caustically informed Hoover that all the navy's officers considered Rainbow Five an "army" plan, "impractical of consummation" and "ill-advised." This was Turner's way of saying the navy wanted to fight Japan first, not Germany.     Later in this tumultuous morning two FBI agents appeared in Wedemeyer's office and examined the contents of his safe. Their eyes widened when they discovered a copy of the Victory Program with everything that had appeared in the newspapers underlined. The sweating Wedemeyer explained that he had just done the underlining to get a clear idea of how much had been revealed. The two agents began an interrogation of Wedemeyer and other army and navy officers that continued for months.     Several army staff officers said they strongly suspected Wedemeyer of being the leaker. An anonymous letter, obviously written by an insider and addressed to the secretary of war, accused the harassed major and General Embick. The writer claimed Embick hated the British and "condemns Britain" for Germany's decision to declare war. There was an unfortunate germ of truth in this accusation. Embick, an 1899 West Point graduate, had served in England as a staff officer during World War I. He grew to loathe the arrogance with which the British demanded that Americans feed doughboys into their decimated regiments and abandon plans to form an independent army in France.     Wedemeyer's prospects grew even bleaker when the FBI discovered he had recently deposited several thousand dollars in the Riggs National Bank in Washington. He explained it was an inheritance from a relative. He admitted that he knew General Robert E. Wood, Charles Lindbergh, and other leaders of America First and agreed with some of their views. He often attended America First meetings, although never in uniform.     FBI agents hurried to Nebraska, the general's home state, to investigate his German origins. They were befuddled to discover his German-born grandfather had fought for the Confederacy. His Irish-American mother called him long distance to ask him what in the world he had done. She thought he was in danger of being shot at sunrise. General Wedemeyer smiled when he told this part of the story in 1986 but in 1941 he found nothing about his ordeal amusing. V Meanwhile the White House was reacting to the big leak in several ways. Although FDR "approved" Secretary of War Stimson's statement, the president refused to discuss the matter at a press conference on December 5. Stimson had also refused to take any questions from reporters. Roosevelt allowed reporters to question his press secretary, Steve Early, who claimed he was not in a position to confirm or deny the authenticity of the story. Early added that it was customary for both the army and the navy to concoct war plans for all possible emergencies. Sensing that this was an absurd way to discuss Rainbow Five, which included the president's letter ordering its preparation, Early stumbled on to assert that it was also customary to ask the president's permission to publish one of his letters.     The press secretary undercut himself again by admitting that this was an official, not a personal, letter, hence a public document. Then he lamely pointed out that the president's letter made no specific mention of an expeditionary force. But Early did not attempt to deny the president had seen Rainbow Five and given it his tacit approval.     On only one topic did Early seem forthright. He said that the newspapers were "operating as a free press" and had a perfect right to print the material, "assuming the story to be genuine." It was the government's responsibility to keep the report secret. Almost in the same breath he added that other papers were free to print the story too, depending on whether they thought such a decision was "patriotic or treason." Obviously Early was practicing what Washington pundits later called damage control.     After his histrionics with Major Wedemeyer, John McCloy coolly informed Clarence Cannon, the head of the House Appropriations Committee, and John Taber, the ranking House Republican, that there were no plans for an American expeditionary force. They brought his assurance back to their colleagues; Cannon declared that the whole story, which he implied was fictitious, was designed to wreck the appropriations bill. The next day the House voted the more than $8 billion to enlarge the army to 2 million men and expand the navy and the army and navy air forces at a similar rate.     In his diary Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes recorded his outrage at the leak of Rainbow Five. Few men in Roosevelt's administration, except perhaps Ickes's colleague, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr., were more ardently prowar. At a cabinet meeting on December 6, Ickes urged the president to punish the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald . Attorney General Francis Biddle said he thought they could be prosecuted for violating the Espionage Act. FDR asked Secretary of War Stimson if Colonel McCormick, the owner of the Tribune , was a member of the army reserve and if so, could he be court-martialed? Stimson said no to both questions, which seem to have been more playful than serious. Ickes recorded his bafflement that Roosevelt, although apparently angry, showed no real interest in taking action against the Tribune .     White House speechwriter and Roosevelt intimate Robert Sherwood later described Rainbow Five as "one of the most remarkable documents in American history, for it set down the basic strategy of the global war before the United States was involved in it." The plan had distilled "two years of wartime deliberations" by American army and navy staffs and "upwards of a year of exchanges of information and opinion by British and American staffs working together in secret." In the light of such an opinion, Roosevelt's seeming indifference to the source of the leak becomes even more puzzling.     Elsewhere, the reaction to the big leak was quite different. The U.S. government's Foreign Information Service was staffed by interventionists. Far from exhibiting any embarrassment, they decided to send the story abroad by shortwave radio as proof of America's determination to defeat the Axis powers. The British, struggling to cope with savage German air and submarine offensives, headlined it in their newspapers as a beacon of hope.     Interest in Rainbow Five was at least as intense elsewhere in the world. On December 5 the German embassy in Washington, D.C., had cabled the entire transcript of the newspaper story to Berlin. There it was reviewed and analyzed as "the Roosevelt War Plan." Tokyo also paid considerable attention to the plan. One big daily paper headlined the story with: United States Lack of Preparedness Exposed by American Paper. Another paper called it: United States Gigantic Dream Plan for War. A third bannered: Secret United States Plans Against Japan and Germany Are Exposed. (Continues...) Excerpted from The New Dealers' War by Thomas Fleming. Copyright © 2001 by Thomas Fleming. Excerpted by permission. 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