Rendezvous with Destiny

(See Cover)

It was no longer a question after Moscow. The whole world, tongue aclack, waited only to hear when & where Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill would meet. The Nazi satellite radios guessed at everything but Mr. Roosevelt’s room number. There was even talk that the Big Three might turn out to be a Big Four, with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek joining the historic rendezvous.

What Will They Talk About? When the President, the Prime Minister and the Premier-Marshal sit down with Pavlov, Stalin’s brilliant interpreter who can take English shorthand notes of Russian conversation and vice versa, not they but History will decide the prime agenda of their talk. The course of history for a generation would be influenced by what they said. But as they began the Big Three would be driven no less than lesser men by the compulsions of History-past and History-present. Plainly, the first question which history poses to Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill, the one on which the other answers all depend is: How to defeat Germany most swiftly?

The outlines of future Allied strategy may have been drawn at Casablanca and Quebec, but the kaleidoscope of the war leaves many a great military decision to be taken by the commanders in chief. Exactly when, exactly where and in how much force shall the “second front” be opened? Vast problems of supply must be worked out. A sample major accomplishment possible: the granting of Russian bases to U.S. and British airmen in western Russia, for the aerial destruction of eastern Germany and the industrial targets of the Balkans.

Another sample of the momentous decisions to be reached: it is definitely believed that before Christmas General George C. Marshall will go abroad to assume his supreme command of the Anglo-American armies, to direct the main attack on the German Fortress. On his staff are to be Russian officers, experienced in battling the Germans in the East. The Soviets can thus not only trade knowledge but can time their strategy more intimately. The plan is, further, for General Dwight D. Eisenhower to return to Washington as Chief of Staff, but not, he hopes, until he captures Rome. In the interim, Lieut. General Joseph T. McNarney is to be Acting Chief of Staff.

With the mass assault cross-channel thus coming on, the time is obviously near when the Allies must agree on how they shall deal with a defeated Germany. An Allied Council to govern Germany during the periods between military collapse and final peace terms, was reportedly agreed on in principle at Moscow. The complex details of its policy remain to be worked out. If the Big Three could agree on the broader terms of the peace, they could make great political moves. Item: they might issue a joint ultimatum to the German people, stating for the first time the detailed aftermath of surrender, thus trying to alienate them from Hitler, as Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points wedged between them and the Kaiser in 1918.

Will They Like Each Other? The range of other issues which the three (or four) leaders may discuss is as wide as the world their alliance now dominates. Should the smaller United Nations, as Wendell Willkie urged last week, be invited at once to join and share in the Moscow Declaration for the postwar world? The explosive problem of postwar boundaries may be publicly postponed to the peace conference, as was proposed at Moscow, but some private discussion can hardly be avoided. Item: not only Poles are growing anxious over the final boundaries of Poland. Should Russia’s needs or the Atlantic Charter prevail? It thus at once becomes evident that at this meeting the cards, good and bad, must all be on the table.

Beyond the immediate job of victory the triumvirate confronts the task of building a lasting superstructure on the foundation laid at Moscow; of building a world in which, as Secretary Hull hopefully declared to Congress last week (see p. 21), “there will no longer be need for spheres of influence, for alliances, for balance of power.” The hopes of millions for such a world may be shattered unless these three great personal leaders succeed in establishing among themselves a solid bond of confidence in each other’s good faith and good will.

Each of the Big Three’s Mister Bigs possesses enormous personal power. Each has demonstrated spectacular qualities of leadership. Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill, old foe of “the foul baboonery of Bolshevism,” reportedly did not hit it off too well at their meeting last year. Hence the fate of millions living and yet unborn will be deeply affected by whether —after they have looked into each other’s eyes for the first time and have taken each other’s measure day by day—a man named Roosevelt and a man named Stalin each decides that the other is a man to be liked, trusted and respected. If they do, a world Thanksgiving may lie ahead.

War President. Joseph Stalin will meet a calm and confident man. Behind his self-imposed veil of secrecy, President Roosevelt has grown steadily more buoyant. At times his face is lined and pouched with weariness, but he looked wearier a year ago than now. Today he is like a fighter in the tenth round of a 15-round bout. Plenty of hard punching lies ahead. But he has felt out his opponent now, and is sure he can take him.

Most Americans now 40 were still in their 20s when Franklin Roosevelt entered the White House; thousands of U.S. soldiers and sailors fighting around the world remember no other President. Yet associates still marvel at his Gargantuan appetite for work, his ability to relax in the midst of it, his endless gay optimism. As it has to everyone else, the strain of war has wrenched, strained and hacked at his basic traits of character. But in the President’s case the grind has only polished what was already polished, only toughened what was already steel-strong.

He still relishes jokes and wisecracks. He can still drop off for a cat nap anywhere, anytime. He still looks forward to a nightly old-fashioned or two in his study before dinner as a high point of his day. He has grown almost impervious to political criticism. He rarely becomes angry at all—and then it is usually when somebody snipes at him through one of his children. The four Roosevelt sons in service help explain the President’s great sensitiveness to the casualty lists—always the first thing he asks about when told of a battle.* That sensitiveness, in turn, his intimates say, helps explain his Darlanesque “expediency” dealings. The President has said, in effect: Maybe we shouldn’t deal with this fellow, but if we do I think we can accomplish our objective and save 30,000 lives.

The President now thrives on the hardest work of his life. His early-morning routine has changed little: awake at 7:30; a quick but thorough go at the Washington and New York papers (he reads Columnists Clapper and Lippmann regularly); breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, toast and milk; then, propped in bed in his year-round lightweight, solid-color pajamas, with a blue cape around his shoulders, a chat with his secretaries on the day’s schedule. Despite their best efforts and the President’s recurring resolutions to cut down, his daily list of callers always seems to grow longer. Franklin Roosevelt likes people and loves an audience; Secretary “Pa” Watson still faces the problem of dragging away overtime visitors in the midst of Presidential anecdotes.

Assistant President. About 10 a.m. the President is wheeled over to his office. There, first thing, he attacks the mountains of mail and documents piled up in his workbaskets. He reads with page-at-a-glance rapidity. But part of his speed in getting through his paper work results from the fact that he reads military and State Department reports carefully, but most domestic messages get a quick send-off to James F. Byrnes in the opposite wing of the White House. Jimmy Byrnes has now actually become what so many of his predecessors were wrongly touted to be: a genuine Assistant President. Other intimates hesitate to say that the little ex-Senator and ex-Justice, who has grown steadily in Mr. Roosevelt’s esteem and confidence, is now closer to the President than is Harry Hopkins. But Jimmy sees him oftener in daytime than Harry does. One big difference: Hopkins’ after-dinner sessions with the President are almost always about war problems on which the President makes his own decisions next morning. Byrnes gets most of the big domestic problems to decide for himself. Aside from his concern about inflation, his associates say, the President is almost wholly immersed in the conduct of the war.

Leaving his office late (often at 6 instead of the peacetime 5 p.m.), the President rarely stops now for a swim. His personal wants are attended by Prettyman, a retired Negro sergeant who combines the courtesy of his race with the discipline of an old Army man, and Caesar, a strapping Filipino. After dinner (a few friends), the President may have a movie shown (Army and Navy films have priority), read reports or an occasional mystery story, or dictate to handsome Grace Tully or pretty Dorothy Jones Brady until bedtime. He usually gets to bed—except when Churchill is visiting—at 11:30. Very often, still, he ends the day with his beloved stamp collection, shoving the album under his bed when he grows sleepy. Solitaire, especially on train trips, and quick unpublicized visits to his trees and almost equally numerous relatives at Hyde Park are the President’s other diversions.

Museum of Presidents. One day early in 1942 nervous Henry Morgenthau decided that the White House should have a bomb shelter. The President agreed, but added a revealing addendum. New offices were also needed. While the construction work was going on, he proposed, why not look ahead and prepare the East Wing of the White House to be a museum? He made sketches, blueprints were drawn, carpenters carried them out. Now, in the wing where Byrnes, Hopkins, Leahy and Lubin have their offices, all is ready for carpenters to come again after the war, knock down old partitions, put up new ones to make a series of at least 31 rooms.

Each room—if Franklin Roosevelt’s plan is carried out—will contain the relics and mementos of a President of the U.S:

The President, thus architecting a room in history for each of the past Presidents, is designing his own place beside his 31 predecessors. As future visitors to that Presidential museum gaze at the mementos of Franklin Roosevelt, they will be well aware that he was an extraordinary man, with an extraordinary consciousness of history and of his part in it. But those future visitors may be able to answer with more assurance than the citizens of 1943 the question: How well and truly did President Roosevelt and the American people carry on the great heritage of the Republic?

That heritage has been variously expressed: it was expressed (though that statement was later repudiated) in the terms of Wilsonian idealism.

Roosevelt and Realism. When President Roosevelt was asked recently by the New York Times’s Anne O’Hare McCormick what he would say to Stalin, he replied that “to begin with he would announce that he was a realist and intended to discuss the problems that had to be dealt with in common on the basis of realism.”

That realism—as in its day Wilson’s wartime idealism—may reflect the mood of the American people.

In 1936, when Franklin Roosevelt said:

“This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with Destiny,” Destiny looked to the U.S. like such things as slum clearance and wider highways. Last week, abroad, Destiny appeared to be wearing, for the moment, the hard, square face of Joseph Stalin. At home, Destiny looked like “realism,” the 1943 American word of the moment.

With many Americans, realism meant a pessimism that could even conceive an American withdrawal into isolation again. With many more, realism was coming to mean an optimism that would fight through all obstacles and misunderstandings, through crisis after crisis, as long as there remained any sensible hope of a world organized in some substantial degree to keep the peace.

For the realism of the pessimist overlooks, too, the possibility that the American people, for all their wartime grabbing and grumbling, their nagging obsession with gasoline, meat and chewing-gum shortages, may be possessed of a deep sense of the world crisis in which they are involved, may be growing aware that their generation is shaping the history of the world. Their outward apathy may cover a realistic appraisal of the task they face, a grim realization that the better world they want is not to be built overnight in a glorious burst of crusading exaltation, but only by hard, slow, disagreeable, long-continued trial & error. Perhaps Americans must sacrifice old dislikes, perhaps even material advantages, to win to that better world.

In the person of their President, Franklin Roosevelt, they stand on the threshold of that world today.

* For news of one of them, see p. 38.