The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (2014) s01e06 Episode Script

1 Announcer: Previously on "The Roosevelts," FDR champions sweeping new programs Man: Social security represents a redefinition of the American social contract.
Announcer: While confiding in a discreet friend Woman: Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt evidently don't get on together.
Announcer: As the shadow of war hung over Europe.
And now part 6 of "The Roosevelts: An Intimate History.
" Announcer: Funding for this program was provided by members of The Better Angels Society, a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating Americans about their history through documentary film.
Members include Jessica and John Fullerton The Pfeil Foudation Joan Wellhouse Newton Bonnie and Tom McCloskey and The Golkin Family Additional funding was provided by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, dedicated to strengthening America's future through education; by the National Endowment for the Humanities, exploring the human endeavor; by Mr.
Jack C.
Taylor and by Rosalind P.
Walter.
Major funding was provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by the generous contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.
Thank you.
Female announcer: Before the names Theodore, Eleanor, and Franklin were indelibly etched into the American consciousness and the course of human history was forever changed by their individual endeavors, a prominent family made a point of teaching the value of altruism, the power of perseverance, and the virtue of helping out one's fellow man.
Narrator: In the late summer of 1939, the growing threat of war was not enough to deter President Franklin Roosevelt's 85-year-old mother, Sara delano Roosevelt, from undertaking her annual visit to see her sister Dora in Paris.
Man on newsreel: It's an old story to Mrs.
Roosevelt.
Finance minister Bonnet greets her and she is entertained by high officials of the French government at a special Narrator: But when the state department realized war was about to begin and warned all Americans to leave Europe, she reluctantly agreed to sail for home.
Reporters met her on the dock at Marseille.
Newsreel reporter: Mrs.
Roosevelt, what do you think of the international situation? I can only hope for peace, but I must say that after seeing that wonderful review yesterday, I feel that France is prepared for anything.
And can only hope and pray that it will be peace.
Reporter: Will the president run for a third term? I have never even heard him speak of a third term.
He always considers the pleasure of returning to his home in Hyde Park after the present term is over.
Narrator: Franklin Roosevelt was more than halfway through his second 4 years as president in the summer of 1939.
None of his predecessors had dared defy the precedent set by George Washington and run for a third term.
At first, FDR did not expect to do so, either.
Work had begun on a presidential library at Hyde Park where he planned to store his papers and write his memoirs, and he had built himself a hilltop cottage nearby where he could get away from visitors and where both his close personal secretary Missy Lehand and his devoted distant cousin Daisy Suckley separately hoped to live with him.
He told another relative, "I am a tired and weary man.
" Man: He loved to go there with Daisy Suckley and just talk and watch the sunset over the Hudson and enjoy himself.
And he would serve tea in the afternoon, um, himself.
They would bring him a toaster and he would toast the bread for his guests and then he could hand them the toast.
And he thought it was a wonderful gesture and he loved being able to do it all by himself, no servants involved.
And they thought it was a wonderful gesture, which made it even more wonderful.
And he was himself there.
It was not his mother's house.
It was not his wife's house and it was totally accessible.
Narrator: Eleanor Roosevelt was weary, too.
"There is no end to the appointments, teas, social obligations," she wrote.
That year alone, she would entertain 323 overnight guests, oversee dinner for 4,729 more visitors, preside over tea for over 9,000, and shake hands with another 14,000 all that while dictating a daily column, delivering 45 lectures, conducting a weekly radio program, and trying to focus on the host of social issues that took her all over the country.
She did not want 4 more years of it, she told an old friend, and couldn't wait for the day when she could at long last "take on a job and see it through to a conclusion" on her own.
If FDR didn't leave the White House in 1941, she had warned her daughter Anna, she would.
Then, just two days after the president's mother got back to New York, everything changed.
[Gunfire.]
[Man shouts indistinctly.]
[Ringing.]
Woman, as Eleanor: September 2, 1939.
At 5:00 this morning, our telephone at a friend's apartment in New York rang, and it was my husband in Washington to tell me the sad news that Germany had invaded Poland and that her planes were bombing Polish cities.
I feel no bitterness against the German people.
I am deeply sorry for them, as I am for the people of all other European nations facing this horrible crisis.
But for Hitler, the man who has taken this responsibility on his shoulders, I can feel little pity.
It is hard to see how he can sleep at night And think of the many people in many nations whom he may send to their deaths.
Narrator: When the Great War had broken out in 1914, Woodrow Wilson had called upon all Americans to remain neutral "in thought as well as deed.
" As the Second World War began, FDR was careful not to make the same request.
Franklin: This nation will remain a neutral nation, but I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well.
Even a neutral has a right to take account of facts.
Even a neutral cannot be asked to close his mind or close his conscience.
Narrator: Roosevelt and most of his fellow citizens sympathized with Hitler's victims and with France and England when they went to war to stop him.
But an even bigger majority was opposed to any American involvement overseas for fear that - - the allies would pull the United States into another war.
To keep out of the fight.
I think we should stay out of this entirely.
Another war, not for me.
This time America should keep out and I know I will.
Man: The American suspicion of British intentions, American reluctance and isolationism to go into yet another foreign war, were deep and real forces that constrained FDR.
FDR's leadership from '39 through Pearl Harbor, was, you know, one step forward and try not to have to take two back.
And it was a game of inches.
Let no man or woman, thoughtlessly or falsely, talk of sending American armies to European fields.
Narrator: The United States was poorly prepared for conflict.
The army was smaller than that of Romania's; fewer than 174,000 men in uniform, fitted out with tin hats and leggings issued during the Great War and carrying rifles designed in 1903.
The army still owned tens of thousands of cavalry horses.
Even Roosevelt's beloved Navy was only marginally bigger than it had been when he took office.
On the day the war in Europe began, General George C.
Marshall took the oath as Army Chief of Staff.
He was able, taciturn, and so blunt that after he had vigorously disagreed with the president, his fellow generals assumed his career was over.
Instead, when the time came, FDR reached down past the names of 34 of them to put George Marshall in charge.
There's a wonderful upside to massive egotism and that is a confidence in having the most powerful, strong-minded people around you.
Narrator: The question became how far Roosevelt dared go to help the allies.
3 weeks after Hitler invaded Poland, FDR called upon Congress to revise the Neutrality Act and end the embargo on the sale of arms to belligerents but only by arguing that the stronger the allies got the less likely it was the United States would ever have to go to war.
After 6 bitter weeks of debate, Congress did lift the ban, but insisted that arms could only be sold on a "cash and carry basis.
" Most of the progressive midwestern Republicans, who had once supported new deal legislation, were isolationists opposed to any aid to the allies.
Roosevelt found himself more dependent than ever before on the conservative Southern Democrats he'd once tried to purge from his party.
After the Nazis devastated Poland, a shadowy, 7-month lull settled over Europe.
Senator William Borah, an isolationist from Idaho, dubbed it the "Phony War.
" Then, in the spring of 1940, [glass shatters.]
the Phony War became real once again.
In April, the Nazis invaded Denmark and Norway.
On May 10, German bombers filled the skies over brussels, Amsterdam, Rotterdam And German troops invaded the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France.
The following day, Winston Churchill, who had warned for years of the Nazi threat to Britain, became prime minister.
Meacham: One of the mysteries of history is why is it do certain moments produce exactly the right human beings.
And we were incredibly fortunate.
Churchill did something FDR couldn't do; Churchill stood alone, stared across the Channel, and said, "Hitler has gone that far and he will go no farther.
" Roosevelt did something that Churchill couldn't do.
He shrewdly managed American public opinion to a moment when the world's greatest democracy was willing to project force to defend its values in a distant land.
They couldn't have done what they did without each other.
And we wouldn't be who we are without the two of them.
Narrator: By early June, the Germans would force 338,000 British and French troops across the English Channel, leaving behind at Dunkirk hundreds of thousands of tons of armaments and heavy equipment.
"The scene has darkened swiftly," Churchill told Roosevelt in the first of a series of nearly 2,000 secret wartime messages between the prime minister and the president.
"The small countries are simply smashed up, one by one, like matchwood," he said.
"We expect to be attacked here ourselves.
If necessary, we shall continue the war alone, and we are not afraid of that.
" But unless the united states would sell Britain several hundred aircraft and lend her 40 to 50 destroyers, he could not promise to hold out for long.
Roosevelt had been corresponding quietly with Churchill for almost a year.
He had been first lord of the admiralty then, but Roosevelt had understood he might well be Prime Minister one day.
Meacham: FDR reached out to him, interestingly.
Almost never happened for the head of state of one nation to write a cabinet minister.
FDR wrote in his usual way, very breezy, saying, "if you have anything you would like me to know, please send it and I will answer.
Stay in touch with me directly.
Stay in touch with me directly.
" Roosevelt and Churchill shared a love of ships.
They understood naval power.
And Churchill recognized that as he put it, "the new world was going to have to step forth to the rescue and liberation of the old.
" To him the new world was embodied in Franklin Roosevelt.
Narrator: Roosevelt did all that he felt he could to help.
Franklin: Members of the Senate and of the House of Representatives.
These are ominous days days whose swift and shocking developments force every neutral nation to look to its defenses in the light of new factors.
The brutal force of modern offensive war has been loosed in all its horror.
Narrator: The president asked for half a million more men for the army and then called for the building of 50,000 warplanes within the next 12 months, enough planes to outstrip the German air force in a single year and to provide sufficient additional aircraft for sale to Britain.
Franklin: $896 million.
Narrator: Critics thought he was delusional.
50,000 planes was 10 times the country's current capacity.
We'll work at top speed.
People said, "it's impossible.
It can't be done.
" He said, "the American people like to be challenged to do the impossible.
Then they do the possible.
" Franklin: There are some who say that democracy cannot cope with the new techniques of government developed in recent years by a few countries which deny the freedoms that we maintain are essential to our Democratic way of life.
That I reject.
Meacham: He understood that without political power, without the marshaling of it, without the cultivation of it, all the high principles and all the soaring rhetoric in the world wouldn't make any difference.
And I would argue that hi his finest hour was the run-up to the Second World War because he was leading a nation that would just as soon had thrown him out of office as fight the forces of the Third Reich.
And yet he got, got us there.
Woman, as Eleanor: June 20, 1940.
Anna darling: The Republican convention seems so "usual" and the times so "unusual" that I find it hard to reconcile the two.
France is crushed.
What will be Hitler's next move? South America or the U.
S.
A.
? And will Japan be acting with them in a concerted plan? It looks that way just now.
What a sad world.
Narrator: Two days after France surrendered to the Nazis, the Republicans met at Philadelphia to choose their presidential nominee.
The front-runners were mostly isolationists.
But the events in Europe shook the delegates and in the end they chose an unlikely but remarkable dark-horse: A big, rumpled, corporate attorney from the midwest who had once been a democrat and who also believed the United States had a crucial role to play abroad Wendell Willkie.
FDR believed him "the most formidable candidate" the Republicans could possibly have chosen.
and the preservation of American democracy.
[Crowd cheering.]
Narrator: Roosevelt continued to remain silent about whether or not he would break with tradition and run for a third term.
He continued to keep his own counsel, did nothing to discourage others from announcing their candidacies, including his own former campaign manager Jim Farley.
And he refused to attend the upcoming Democratic convention in Chicago, claiming the international situation was far too grave.
Instead, he dispatched his close advisor Harry Hopkins to try to organize a supposedly spontaneous "draft.
" Many delegates Southern conservatives, Farley loyalists, those opposed to a third term for any man felt used and angry.
Labor secretary Frances Perkins called FDR from Chicago, pleading with him to appear personally and calm things down.
If he didn't, she said, he wouldn't have the party behind him in the fall.
He refused to come, but suggested she ask his wife if she would appear on his behalf.
Eleanor Roosevelt was at Val-Kill, listening to the convention on the radio.
There had been changes in her inner circle.
Her friendship with Nancy cook and Marion Dickerman, with whom she'd built her cottage, had cooled.
She saw less of Lorena Hickok and Earl Miller, too.
But with her this evening was a new friend and confidant, a former youth leader named Joseph Lash, who had become a sort of surrogate son.
The Democrats were in trouble, she told him.
They hadn't ended unemployment.
They now seemed about to break the no-third-term ban, which she believed was "a very great tradition.
" And she felt that her husband had already served his purpose in history.
[Telephone ringing.]
The phone rang.
It was Frances Perkins.
Would she go to Chicago? Only if the president asked her himself, she answered.
She wanted to be coaxed and she wanted Franklin to do the coaxing.
She spoke to FDR.
"Well, would you like to go?" He asked.
"No, I wouldn't like to go.
I'm very busy.
Do you really want me to go?" Yes, he finally answered.
"Perhaps it would be a good idea.
" She boarded a plane and headed to Chicago.
Meanwhile, as the nominations began, Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky, the convention chairman, told the delegates he had a message for them from the president.
Barkley: The president has never had, and has not today, any desire or purpose to continue in the office of president, to be a candidate for that office, or to be nominated by the convention for that office.
He wishes, he wishes in all earnestness and sincerity to make it clear that all of the delegates to this convention are free to vote for any candidate.
Narrator: As Barkley finished, a single disembodied voice began a chant.
Man: We want Roosevelt.
We want Roosevelt.
Narrator: Delegates joined in.
[Delegates chanting "We want Roosevelt".]
Narrator: It was later discovered that the chanting was led by the Chicago superintendent of sewers, broadcasting from somewhere in the basement.
Roosevelt! Narrator: Roosevelt was re-nominated on the first ballot.
But then word came that FDR wanted Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace as his vice president.
A rebellion began to brew.
Wallace was too liberal for many conservatives; he had never run for office; and he had once been a Republican.
FDR wouldn't budge.
"Damn it to hell," he said.
"They will go for Wallace or I won't run.
" To emphasize that he meant it, he wrote out a statement: If the Democrats could not unite behind a liberal ticket, he would decline the honor of their nomination.
Eleanor arrived just before the vice presidential nominations began and took a seat beside Mrs.
Wallace.
When Wallace's name was introduced, delegates booed and jeered.
Then, just before the vote, Eleanor rose to speak.
The convention fell silent.
No first lady had ever spoken to a national convention before.
She thanked Jim Farley for his lifetime of service to the Democratic Party and then called upon the delegates to rally to a cause greater than themselves.
Eleanor: This is no ordinary time, no time for weighing anything except what we can best do for the country as a whole.
This is only carried by a united people who love their country and who will live for it to the fullest of their ability, with the highest ideals, with a termination and through doing what this country can, to bring the world to a safer and happier condition.
[Crowd cheering.]
Narrator: After Eleanor's speech, a united convention nominated Henry Wallace for vice president on the first ballot.
The audience had been "just like lambs," she said.
When Harry Hopkins escorted her back to the airport for the flight home, she told him, "you young things don't know politics.
" Woman: FDR frequently does not credit Eleanor Roosevelt or thank her to her face but he'll thank her publicly.
Like the Democratic convention in 1940.
He tells people how wonderful she was.
And she says out loud and in public and on the radio, "well, he never told me that he thought that.
" And so there's a little tension always and a little hurt always.
But there's an abiding respect and admiration and love.
I am deeply appreciative.
I'm overwhelmed.
It's just the beginning of the battle.
It's the beginning of the battle for the preservation of America.
Newsreel narrator: The homecoming for Wendell Willkie, its most distinguished son, and the waiting throngs get their first glimpse of the candidate and Mrs.
Willkie shaking hands with old friends along the way.
Willkie comes back home to Indiana.
Narrator: As Willkie barnstormed back and forth across the country, Roosevelt tried to remain above the political battle.
As a sign of bipartisanship, he named two eminent Republicans to his cabinet Henry L.
Stimson, as Secretary of War, and as secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, who had fought alongside Theodore Roosevelt as a Rough Rider.
Two issues demanded immediate attention, and either one could have lost him the election.
First he needed a military draft it would be the first military draft in peacetime in U.
S.
history.
But initially, he didn't dare publicly support a bill for it, that was working its way through Congress, for fear of Republican attack.
Opponents besieged Capitol Hill mothers' groups, college students, clergymen.
"If you pass this bill," said Senator Burton K.
Wheeler of Montana, "you slit the throat of the last democracy still living.
" Willkie: We must face a brutal but a terrible fact Narrator: Then, Wendell willkie defied his advisors and many in his own party and came out in favor of the draft bill as the best way to shore up the nation's defenses.
A relieved Roosevelt now enthusiastically endorsed it, too; it was, he said, "America's answer to Hitlerism.
" More than 16 million men between the ages of 21 and 35 were registered on the draft rolls.
But Roosevelt also needed to find a way to respond to Winston Churchill's desperate calls for help.
German bombs were now falling on London.
An all-out German assault across the English Channel seemed likely.
Arming Britain was "nothing more than a guess," FDR admitted to a member of his cabinet.
If he guessed wrong and Britain fell, he would have accomplished nothing except further to enrage Hitler.
Joseph Kennedy, Roosevelt's ambassador in London, believed Britain's surrender "inevitable.
" So did the president's top military commanders.
They argued that America's military needs should take precedence over those of any foreign power.
Goodwin: In 1940, when we were only 18th in military power, isolationist country, no one here wanting us to get involved in Europe's wars, he took the enormous chance of giving England everything he could despite the joint chiefs saying to him, "if you do this and England falls, you'll be impeached.
" Narrator: FDR overruled them all.
On September 2, 1940, he signed an executive order transferring 50 overage destroyers to Britain in exchange for leases on British bases in the Western hemisphere.
Congress was not consulted.
Isolationists were outraged.
There was talk again of impeachment.
Students at Yale University formed the America first committee dedicated to "impregnable national defense" but no help whatsoever for embattled Britain.
Hundreds of thousands signed up, including Charles Lindbergh and the actress Lillian Gish; the poet Robert Frost and the composer Charles Ives and two Ivy Leaguers Gerald Ford and John F.
Kennedy.
Man: He was governing a country peopled by the descendants of people who came here to get away from there, to get away from the old world and its entanglements and its bloodshed and all the rest.
"Broad oceans, placid neighbors, what do we care about those people over there?" And he had to be very careful to the point of assuring people late in the 1940 campaign that American boys would not die in foreign wars.
He knew better probably by that time.
Narrator: The Oyster Bay Roosevelts, like the rest of the country, were divided over the issue.
Kermit Roosevelt, who had always remained friendly with Franklin and Eleanor, was already serving in the British army.
But Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.
campaigned against U.
S.
involvement.
And when Alice Roosevelt Longworth told a reporter that rather than vote for a third term for Franklin, she'd cast her ballot for Hitler, the president told Eleanor he didn't want "to have anything to do with that damned woman again.
" We don't have to have a third term.
Narrator: Republicans tried to keep the third-term issue alive, but both sides realized the real issue was the war.
England will not only survive, England will win.
The efforts of this administration to arm itself adequately for purposes of defense.
Narrator: Roosevelt had always been careful to say that the United States would never go to war "except in case of attack.
" In Boston, where many Irish voters opposed any aid to Britain, he deliberately dropped even that qualifier.
And while I'm talking to you fathers and mothers, 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 war.
[Crowd cheering.]
Narrator: "That hypocritical son of a bitch!" Willkie said when he heard Roosevelt's Boston pledge.
"This is going to beat me.
" Woman, as Eleanor: Today, no one can honestly promise you peace at home or abroad.
All any human being can do is to promise that he will do his utmost to prevent his country from being involved in war.
Man on radio: While the battle is still raging, Republican headquarters Narrator: On election night at Springwood, the returns were at first so close that even FDR's optimism faltered momentarily, and he asked to be left alone.
But by the end of the evening, the tide had once again turned toward Roosevelt.
Narrator: He won 449 electoral votes to Willkie's 82.
At midnight, he was brought outside to greet his neighbors.
"We, of course, face difficult days in this country," he told them.
"But I think you will find me in the future just the same Franklin Roosevelt you have known a great many years.
" "My heart has always been here.
It always will be.
" Woman, as Eleanor: Because this is the first time a president has been elected for a third term, I looked at my children, at the president's mother, and then at the president himself, and wondered what each one was feeling down in their heart of hearts.
I feel that any citizen should be willing to give all that he has to give to his country in work or sacrifice in times of crisis.
Meacham: Roosevelt saw the Second World War as the Great War of national liberations.
That democracies were gonna spring up around the world and they would be looking to America for some paternal guidance, perhaps some of the old Wilson in him.
But it was Roosevelt's capacity and ability to talk about the world as a neighborhood that really began to change how Americans saw the world.
Roosevelt was dictating his "four freedoms" speech and said, "we shall be for freedom of speech everywhere in the world.
We shall be for freedom from want everywhere in the world.
" And Harry Hopkins interrupted him and said, "Mr.
President, I don't think you should say everywhere in the world because Americans aren't gonna give a damn about people in Java.
" And FDR came right back at him and he said, "well, you know Harry, they're gonna have to give a damn about people in Java from now on.
" Narrator: In his State of the Union message for 1941, Roosevelt tried to describe the kind of world he hoped would emerge from the war.
Franklin: First is freedom of speech and expression everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want which means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear which, translated into world terms, means a worldwide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor anywhere in the world.
That is no vision of a distant millennium.
It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.
That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny, which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.
Man: He had a gift that Theodore didn't have and that was the gift of eloquence, of being able to deliver speeches that made people want to rise to do better than they thought they could.
And very few presidents have had that.
Narrator: Now Roosevelt redoubled his efforts at aiding Hitler's enemies.
Franklin: We shall send in ever increasing numbers ships, planes, tanks, guns.
That is our purpose and our pledge.
Narrator: When Britain could no longer pay for arms, he devised "lend-lease," allowing him to continue providing those ships, planes, tanks, and guns so long as the British promised to return them when the war was over.
Roosevelt compared it to lending a neighbor a garden hose.
Will: Lend-lease was deft politics in the virtuous dissembling of a man determined to gently and for the best of motives trick the country into moving in a direction it did not want to go.
It was shrewd.
It was tiny cat feet tip-toeing into an international conflict by almost imperceptible and utterly unthreatening increments.
Newsreel narrator: The Teutonic Hordes have fallen upon the Russian land once again Narrator: After Hitler sent his legions into the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Roosevelt persuaded Congress to extend lend-lease to Russia, as well.
The Red Army would now be trying to repel the invaders with trucks made by the Ford Motor Company.
And when Nazi submarines preyed on convoys carrying American supplies in the North Atlantic, he first ordered naval vessels to shoot on sight and then got Congress to arm American merchant ships.
Soon, the United States would be engaged in a deadly but undeclared war at sea.
Roosevelt faced a threat from the other side of the world, as well, where he feared Japan was about to make good on Theodore Roosevelt's old prophecy of an attack on American holdings in the Pacific that would lead to what TR had called "one of the most disastrous conflicts the world has ever seen.
" Japan's military leaders had been on the move for a decade.
They had attacked China, taken advantage of the war in Europe to sign a defense pact with Germany and Italy, and stationed troops in French Indochina.
Roosevelt warned them to go no further.
He halted the sale of aviation fuel and scrap metal and, when that did not work, froze their assets in the United States to prevent the purchase of the American supplies they needed to continue their advance.
And, as a deterrent, he dispatched a large part of the Pacific fleet to Hawaii, to the naval base at Pearl Harbor.
Franklin: And if you were to ask me, I would tell you frankly Will: In domestic policy, Eleanor Roosevelt, having the luxury of not being responsible to constituencies, not having complicated presidential relationships with a complicated party that controlled Congress, being emancipated from these practicalities, she could peer over the horizon and she saw rather well the coming issues of race and of poverty.
If we turn away from the needs of others, we align ourselves with those forces which are bringing about this suffering.
Goodwin: In part it was her dependability that people who believed in liberal values knew she would stand up at every moment in time for those values.
People who were poor knew that she'd be fighting for them; people who were migrant workers knew she'd be there; people who were miners knew that she'd climb down to a mine and then tell FDR what he needed to do; and most importantly, I think, African Americans knew that she would be their champion.
Narrator: The growth of defense industries put 6 million Americans to work in just 12 months, with thousands more signing on every day.
The focus on defense had revived the economy, and Eleanor Roosevelt shared her husband's wish to ready the country for the war both feared was coming.
But she was concerned that hundreds of thousands of Americans, through no fault of their own, were being left out.
Firms that had never hired black workers saw no reason to change their policy.
"We have not had a negro worker in 25 years," said the standard steel corporation of Kansas City, "and do not plan to start now.
" African Americans had voted overwhelmingly for Franklin Roosevelt in 1940, and were bitterly disappointed when the president backed away from what they had thought was a private pledge to end the old policy of segregating the armed forces and allow black and white Americans to fight for their country, side by side.
Discrimination in defense jobs was the last straw.
In the spring of 1941, A.
Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, threatened to bring 100,000 black protestors to Washington on July 1 unless something was done about it.
FDR feared bloodshed.
Washington was a Jim Crow city.
Randolph refused to back down.
The president asked his wife to see what she could do.
The first lady had advocated an anti-lynching bill her husband had not been able to support; had outraged white southerners by visiting black colleges and posing with their students; and when a Birmingham, Alabama policeman told her she could not sit among black citizens at a segregated meeting, she had moved her chair between the black and white sections to demonstrate the absurdity of the situation.
Now she did as her husband suggested.
"You know where I stand," she told Randolph.
But, she went on, the march would be "a very grave mistake.
I am afraid it will set back the progress which is being made: Towards better opportunities and less segregation.
" Randolph respectfully refused to back off.
His deadline grew closer.
The first lady persuaded FDR that he had better meet with Randolph and her friend Walter White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Together, they helped negotiate the language of a new executive order.
It created a fair employment practices commission to combat discrimination in defense plants.
The FEPC had no enforcement powers.
It could only investigate complaints and issue directives asking that discrimination be eliminated.
But it represented the first federal action on civil rights since reconstruction.
Randolph called off his march.
When Eleanor Roosevelt got word she wired him: "I hope from this first step we may go on to others.
" Woman: A woman wrote to the commission and told them how her son was discriminated against.
And in the letter she added, "please let me hear from you at once, because, Mr.
President, if you cannot do anything, I need to write to Mrs.
Roosevelt.
" Ha ha! So there was that confidence that Mrs.
Roosevelt would get it done.
But she was also ahead of people in trying to open up opportunity.
Goodwin: When Franklin Roosevelt signed the executive order that forced companies through incentives and sanctions to open their doors to black Americans, it had a huge impact on the whole civil rights movement for the future because young black men and women got jobs at skill levels they had never enjoyed before.
And they were part of that sense of accomplishment that the country felt when they saw those ships being produced, when they saw those tanks being made or the planes being rolled out onto the field.
They knew they'd been part of that energy.
Narrator: On June 5, 1941, a new name appeared on FDR's appointment calendar: "Mrs.
Paul Johnson.
" Only Missy Lehand and a few other members of the president's innermost circle knew her true identity.
Back in 1918, Roosevelt had promised his wife he would never see his old love Lucy Mercer again and she had married winthrop rutherfurd, a wealthy widower far older than she.
But she and the president had quietly kept in touch.
He'd made sure she had a ticket to each of his inaugurations.
White House operators had orders to put through calls from "Mrs.
Johnson.
" Now Lucy's husband, whom she had cared for faithfully for years, had been incapacitated by illness, and Franklin had invited her to come and see him at the White House.
Eleanor was away.
Lucy was discreetly led in a back way and ushered into the family quarters for a quiet dinner.
The evening before Mrs.
Rutherfurd's first visit, the president's personal secretary Missy Lehand, who had always seen herself as the closest person to the man she called F.
D.
, had suddenly collapsed at a staff party.
She had suffered the first of two strokes that would rob her of the power of speech.
She was put to bed in her room on the third floor of the White House.
Roosevelt was wheeled in every day to visit.
She did not improve, was sent to Warm Springs, brought back to the White House, finally moved back in with her family in Somerville, Massachusetts.
As always, Roosevelt hid his feelings.
But he quietly called in his lawyer and had his will changed so that in the event of his death, half of his estate would go to pay for her care.
"I owed her that much," he told his son James.
"She served me so well for so long and asked so little in return.
" Meanwhile, Lucy Rutherfurd continued to come to the White House from time to time for tea or dinner, and sometimes she and the president took quiet rides together through Rock Creek Park always when Eleanor was out of town.
Man: New London, Connecticut.
August 3, 1941.
Dropping the cares of official duties for a long-sought rest at sea, president Roosevelt sailed tonight from the new London submarine base for a week's salt-water vacation.
The presidential yacht "Potomac" headed into Long Island sound in the afterglow of sunset to take the chief executive away from the tension of duties which the critical international situation has made unusually wearing.
"The New York Times.
" Man, as Franklin: August 5.
Dear Daisy, even at my ripe old age, I feel a thrill in making a getaway especially from the American press.
Curiously enough, the "Potomac" still flies my flag and tonight will be seen by thousands as she passes through the Cape Cod canal, while in fact the president will be about 250 miles away.
Narrator: All his life, FDR loved knowing secrets no one else knew and nothing pleased him more than to be able to sail north undetected to rendezvous for the first time with the Prime Minister of Great Britain.
Man, as Franklin: Argentia Bay, Newfoundland.
Saturday, August 9, 1941.
Dear Daisy, the huge new H.
M.
S.
"Prince of Wales" came up the bay with two escorting corvettes and anchored alongside of us at 9:30.
Winston Churchill came on board at 11.
We all met on the top deck and were duly photographed and then Churchill stayed on board and lunched with me alone.
He is a tremendously vital person and in many ways is an English mayor Laguardia.
Don't say I said so! I like him and lunching alone broke the ice both ways.
Meacham: In August, 1941, Churchill is desperate to figure out how to engage FDR's heart.
How do you get him into the struggle which Churchill is basically fighting alone? He decides to use the language and imagery of faith the world of groton, of St.
James Church, the high anglican world from which Roosevelt came.
Churchill picked 3 hymns "Eternal father strong to save," "Oh God our help in ages past," and "Onward Christian soldiers.
" Men: Soldiers marching as to war On the way back from the service, FDR said to his son Elliott, with no expectation that it would be repeated, "Onward Christian soldiers," we are Christian soldiers, "and we will go on with God's help.
If nothing else had happened while we were here, that would have cemented us.
" Narrator: Roosevelt still could not commit American forces to the struggle against Hitler.
But he and Churchill issued what came to be called the Atlantic Charter.
It called for "the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny.
" It also pledged a postwar world in which every nation controlled its own destiny, an end to the kind of colonialism Winston Churchill had stood for all his life.
As the conference at sea ended, back in Washington Congress extended the service of draftees from one year to 2 1/2 years but by just a single vote.
Had it not done so, it would have dangerously weakened the newly-built army.
On Saturday morning, September 6, 1941, FDR made an unscheduled visit to Springwood.
Sara Delano Roosevelt, now 86, was failing.
As always, she was eager to see him.
"When my son comes and sits there beside me with the smile that is not reserved for the voters," she'd once told a friend, "I just look at his face and think it has everything wisdom, goodness, and sweetness.
" He was rolled into her room and spent the day with her, telling her about his talks with Churchill, talking over old times, pausing only to read dispatches from the White House.
Late that evening, she lapsed into a coma.
She died of heart failure the following afternoon.
A few minutes later, without wind or rain or lightning, the greatest of all the great oak trees on the Roosevelt estate groaned and toppled to the ground.
Geologists would later blame an especially thin layer of earth that blanketed a base of solid rock, but those who had known Sara Delano Roosevelt were not so sure.
She was buried in the little graveyard behind St.
James Church where her husband had been laid to rest 41 years earlier.
Eleanor Roosevelt wrote a friend that while she personally felt "no deep affection or sense of loss" at her mother-in-law's death, "it is hard on Franklin.
" It was hard and whenever he could in the coming years, he, and sometimes his daughter Anna, would stop by the grave of the mother who had taught him to believe he would succeed at whatever he set out to do, that no task was too great for him to take on.
Woman, as Daisy: That big house without his mother seems awfully big and bare.
She gave him that personal affection which his friends and secretaries cannot do in the same way.
He was always "my boy," and he seems to me often rather pathetic, and hungry for just that kind of thing.
Daisy Suckley.
Narrator: Daisy Suckley, the president's worshipful cousin, had once dreamed of living with Franklin in the hilltop cottage she'd helped him plan.
The war and the third term had shattered that dream.
But FDR gave her a job as archivist in his new library so that she could be with him whenever he felt the need of quiet, admiring company.
And she looked after Fala, the mischievous Scotty that had been her gift to him and that would become the most famous dog on earth.
Woman, as Daisy: His wife is a wonderful person, but she lacks the ability to give him the things his mother gave him.
She is away so much, and when she is here she has so many people around the splendid people who are trying to do good and improve the world the "uplifters," the president calls them that he cannot relax and really rest.
Narrator: Eleanor Roosevelt suffered a loss of her own that same month.
Hall Roosevelt, the younger brother for whom she'd felt responsible since the early deaths of their parents, died in a Washington hospital as she sat helpless at his bedside.
He had been bright and promising when young, filled with all the Roosevelt energy, and had become an able engineer and city official.
But the curse of alcoholism that had killed his father destroyed him, too.
"My idea of hell if I believed in it," Eleanor confided to her friend Joe Lash before the end came, "would be to sit and watch someone breathing hard, struggling for words, when a gleam of consciousness returns and thinking," this was once the little boy "I played with and scolded.
He could have been so much and this is what he is.
" On the morning of September 29 less than two weeks after her mother-in-law died, just two days after burying her brother Eleanor left the White House grounds without an escort and walked 8 blocks north to Dupont Circle to a brand-new office and a brand-new job.
I'm so happy to welcome Narrator: New York mayor Fiorello Laguardia, director of the newly created Office of Civil Defense, had asked her to become his unsalaried assistant in charge of civilian volunteers.
She saw her new job as a chance to keep the spirit of the new deal alive even under the threat of war.
Effective defense, she insisted, demanded "better nutrition, better housing, better day-to-day medical care, better education, better recreation for every age.
" But she quickly ran into trouble.
Federal agencies resisted incursions onto their territory.
Southern mayors resented her determination to recruit black as well as white volunteers.
When she hired a dancer friend to help with physical training, Congress passed a resolution meant to ridicule her by banning the use of public funds for "fan-dancing.
" "Mrs.
Roosevelt," a Michigan woman wrote to her, "you would be doing a great service if you would simply go home and sew for the Red Cross.
"Every time you open your mouth, the people of this country dislike and mistrust you more.
" Within 4 months, Eleanor Roosevelt would feel she had no choice but to resign.
Woman, as Eleanor: People can understand that an individual, even if she is a president's wife, may have independent views and must be allowed the expression of an opinion.
But actual participation in the work of the government, we are not yet able to accept.
[Bells chiming.]
Eleanor: Ladies and gentlemen, I'm speaking to you at a very serious moment in our history.
The cabinet is convening and the leaders in Congress are meeting with the president.
The State Department and army and Navy officials have been with the president all afternoon.
Narrator: On Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, Japanese planes had attacked Pearl Harbor.
All afternoon, news reports repeated the same meager information.
The president did not plan to address Congress until the following day.
But that evening, on her weekly radio program, it fell to the first lady of the United States of America to try to reassure her frightened fellow citizens about what lay ahead.
Eleanor: For months now the knowledge that something of this kind might happen has been hanging over our heads and yet it seemed impossible to believe, impossible to drop the everyday things of life and feel that there was only one thing which was important preparation to meet an enemy no matter where he struck.
That is all over now and there is no more uncertainty.
We know what we have to face and we know that we are ready to face it.
I should like to say just a word to the women in the country tonight.
I have a boy at sea on a destroyer.
For all I know, he may be on his way to the Pacific.
Many of you all over this country have boys in the services who will now be called upon to go into action.
You cannot escape a clutch of fear at your heart and yet I hope you will rise above these fears.
Whatever is asked of us I am sure we can accomplish it.
We are the free and unconquerable people of the United States of America.
Narrator: Meanwhile, the president was grim but relieved.
"You know," the secretary of the Navy said to Frances Perkins, "I think the boss must have a great load off his mind.
I thought the load on his mind was just going to kill him.
At least we know what to do now.
" Americans had broken the Japanese code.
Roosevelt knew an attack in the Pacific was imminent.
But he expected it to be launched against British and Dutch outposts, not Hawaii.
Man: This wasn't simply the way he was gonna get the United States into war.
This was a debacle of the first order.
And for Roosevelt this was supremely personal.
Roosevelt had laid the keel for the battleship that became the USS "Arizona.
" Roosevelt looked on those ships at Pearl Harbor as though they were his babies.
And it was said that the calmest person in the room in the White House that day was Franklin Roosevelt.
Absorbing the information as it came in, slowly figuring out what to do, giving that unflappability to the people around him so that they then got strength from his own strength.
It was one of those moments when you saw what he was made of.
Franklin: A date which will live in infamy.
Last night, Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong.
Last night, Japanese forces attacked Guam.
Last night, Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands.
Last night, the Japanese attacked Wake Island.
And this morning, the Japanese attacked Midway Island.
Japan has therefore undertaken a surprise offensive, extending throughout the Pacific area.
I ask that the Congress declare a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese empire.
Narrator: The following day, wearing a mourning armband in memory of his mother, FDR would sign the declaration of war.
On December 11, Hitler and Mussolini, siding with their Japanese ally, declared war on the United States.
Will: He got a big assist from Hitler, who, in a fit of absent-mindedness and contempt, declared war on a spin without thinking it through.
Meacham: And that is a sign of FDR's political skill and deftness that he waited and made Hitler take the first move against the United States so there could be no public reluctance at all in our ultimate struggle to get to Berlin.
Narrator: All 4 of the president's sons had volunteered.
So did all 3 of Theodore Roosevelt's surviving sons.
6 of TR's grandsons, who were old enough to serve, also signed on.
With the country under attack, political differences were forgotten.
"It seems to me," Archie Roosevelt wrote FDR, "that regardless of the bitterness that many people feel toward the "Hyde Park" Roosevelts or the "Oyster Bay" Roosevelts, they have to admit that the whole clan has turned out to a man.
" "It is something in which I think we can take a certain amount of pride.
" Woman, as Eleanor: Washington.
December 24, 1941.
The president, who has been very mysterious as to what was going to happen over the holidays, finally decided to tell me that the British Prime Minister, Mr.
Winston Churchill, and his party were arriving sometime in the late afternoon or evening.
It had not occurred to him this might require certain moving of furniture to adapt rooms for the purposes for which the Prime Minister wished to use them.
Man: o little town of Bethlehem Narrator: The White House had changed since December 7.
Armed sentries now stood guard to keep tourists off the grounds.
There were machine gun emplacements on the roof and blackout curtains over the windows.
But FDR had refused to allow the Secret Service to camouflage the White House, and insisted that the annual Christmas tree ceremony take place as scheduled as a sign of continuity in wartime.
The Prime Minister of Great Britain concurred.
Man: the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight Churchill: Let the children have their night of fun and laughter.
Let the gifts of father Christmas delight their play.
Let us grown-ups share Meacham: They were brought together by force of circumstance.
They were men who, as C.
S.
Lewis once put it, "we picture lovers face-to-face but friends side-by-side.
Their eyes look ahead.
" They shared a common interest, a common bond the defeat of Hitler and the security of their own places in history.
They both saw themselves as great historical actors, as great heirs of familial and national political traditions.
One was the cousin of a president, the other was the son of, of a man who had been an enormously important, ah, Victorian politician.
Churchill was a Marlborough, Roosevelt was a Roosevelt.
They heard the music of history in their heads and they were devoted to the idea that they could save the world.
Churchill: These same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world.
And so in God's mercy, a Happy Christmas to you all.
Meacham: The message from that whole visit at Christmas was that the forces of democracy were at last together.
And FDR, in a toast at dinner when Churchill was in the White House said, "to the common cause, which I can now truly say is a common cause.
" Narrator: The Prime Minister was the Roosevelts' guest for 3 weeks.
Night after night, FDR sat up with him till two or 3 in the morning.
Churchill needed little sleep but lots of alcohol: Sherry before breakfast; scotch and soda before lunch; champagne and brandy in the evening.
Eleanor Roosevelt disapproved of the drinking and the late hours and she worried about the prime minister's unshakable devotion to the sprawling British empire which both she and her husband believed should not be allowed to survive long after the war.
But she liked him.
He and her husband, she said, "looked like boys playing soldier.
They seemed to be having a wonderful time.
" Once, according to Harry Hopkins, the president came up with what he thought was a grand idea: The 26 countries now pledged to subscribe to the principles of the Atlantic Charter should be called the "United Nations.
" He had himself wheeled across the hall and entered his distinguished guest's bedroom without knocking so that he could tell him about it.
Churchill had just climbed out of the bathtub, naked, pink and gleaming.
FDR apologized for bursting in.
Nothing to apologize for, Churchill said.
"The prime minister of Great Britain has nothing to conceal from the president of the United States.
" On the Pacific front, bad news was coming in from everywhere.
Roosevelt and Churchill received the dispatches together.
Japanese troops had landed in Thailand and Singapore, Burma and Borneo, Hong Kong and the Philippines where they were driving American forces down the Bataan peninsula.
The American public was clamoring for revenge.
On the other side of the globe, the Germans occupied almost all of Europe, were threatening Egypt and the Suez canal in North Africa, and were moving steadily toward Moscow [gun cocks.]
Along a thousand-mile front.
[Gunshot.]
Back in the White House, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed that Germany, with its vast armies and mighty industrial machine, would have to be defeated first.
But that would take time: To mobilize, train, and equip a force powerful enough to destroy Hitler's armies.
Until that time, the allies would have to remain on the defensive in the Pacific.
[Cheering.]
Franklin: In which we are constantly being challenged by our enemies.
We must all face the hard fact that our job now Goodwin: In February of '42, the country was at a very low ebb of morale.
We were losing battles in the Pacific.
So Roosevelt decided he was gonna give a speech Franklin: Take out and spread before you a map of the whole earth.
Goodwin: And he asked everybody to get a map before them so he could tell them the far-flung battles of the war.
The man who ran C.
S.
Hammond's map store in New York said he sold more maps that single week than he'd sold an entire year.
Roosevelt gets on the radio.
Everybody's sitting there with their maps spread before them.
He explains the battles.
Franklin: The broad oceans which have been heralded But most importantly, what he does is to warn people that there will be failures before there is victory.
We will have losses before we have wins.
Then he reminded people that Washington had stood by at Valley Forge when the supplies were almost done, the pioneers going over the Rocky Mountains, the early days of the civil war.
We will get through this.
Franklin: From Berlin, and Tokyo and Rome, we have been described as a nation of weaklings "Playboys" who would hire British soldiers, or Russian soldiers, or Chinese soldiers to do our fighting for us.
Let them tell that to General MacArthur and his men.
Let them tell that to the marines! Goodwin: And there were so many telegrams that came into the White House that night, that speech was so effective, that they said, "you've gotta go on the radio every day.
It's the only way morale will be sustained.
" But he wrote back with knowing insight.
He said, "if my speeches ever become routine, they will lose their effectiveness.
" So he only delivered 30 fireside chats in his 12 years, which meant that everybody listened when those chats were delivered.
Saul bellow said you could walk down the street on a hot Chicago night and everybody would have the radio on so you could hear it coming out of the windows of the cars, coming out of the windows of the houses and not miss a word of his speech.
If he had done it too often, he would have lost that.
Franklin: We Americans will contribute unified Narrator: The initial German invasion of the Soviet Union had stalled outside Moscow But a spring offensive in 1942 sent 225 fresh divisions more than 4 1/2 million men racing across Russia.
And Josef Stalin, the Soviet premier, demanded the allies open a second front in Western Europe to relieve the pressure on his beleaguered people.
American planners had a straightforward idea of how to beat the Germans invade France in the spring of 1943 and drive right for Berlin.
But the British, haunted by memories of the butchery on the Western front in the Great War, were wary of moving so fast.
A defeat on the French coast, Churchill warned, was "the only way in which we could possibly lose this war.
" Instead, he favored attacking German and Italian forces in North Africa to keep Egypt and the oil fields of the Middle East from falling into enemy hands.
American commanders thought invading Africa would be a dangerous, wasteful diversion.
Rather than accept the British plan, General Marshall proposed that the United States abandon the Germany-first strategy and go on the offensive in the Pacific.
Roosevelt overruled him.
A premature attack in the Pacific was exactly what Germany wanted, he wrote; it would only mean the recapture of a "lot of islands," and would do nothing to help the Russians.
The proposal was therefore "disapproved.
" He signed his response: "Roosevelt, Commander in Chief.
" The invasion of occupied France would have to be delayed.
Preparations began for American troops to land in North Africa.
Meanwhile, the news from the Pacific continued to be bad.
But even the president's critics were astonished at his serenity.
Once he had made a decision, nothing seemed to faze him.
Franklin had learned from his struggle against polio, his wife said, "that if there was nothing you could do about a situation, then you'd better try to put it out of your mind.
" The president worked at his stamp collection, chatted with visitors, presided over a carefree cocktail hour every afternoon.
He established his own secret map room in a former ladies' cloakroom in the White House basement so that he could personally follow the movements of American ships and armies.
A special pin marked the whereabouts of the destroyer aboard which his son Franklin was serving.
When Roosevelt was rolled into the map room every morning, that was always the first pin he looked for.
Wartime security allowed the president to spend as much time as possible out of public sight and away from the White House at the center for polio patients he'd created at Warm Springs, Georgia; at a new hideaway in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland that he called "Shangri-La," which would later come to be called Camp David; and at home at Springwood, where the grounds were now patrolled day and night.
He was there on may 6 when he learned that Corregidor, the last American outpost in the Philippines, had surrendered.
Just 4 days later, before dawn, he, Daisy Suckley, and a handful of aides and secret servicemen drove to a nearby pond to take part in the annual census of dutchess county birds.
From the back seat of his car, a seemingly unconcerned FDR claimed to have identified 108 species 22 of them by their songs alone.
Woman, as Daisy: He seemed really to enjoy every minute.
It is the kind of thing he has privately given up any idea of ever doing again, so it did him lots of good.
In that far-off silent place, with myriads of birds waking up, it was quite impossible to think much of the horrors of war.
I think Roosevelt handled it brilliantly in the sense that the fundamental job in the Second World War was to mobilize the American economy.
Narrator: Congress granted Roosevelt sweeping wartime powers to reorganize American industry, and he made the most of them.
The result was improvised, inconsistent, and often inefficient 6 new federal agencies with overlapping responsibilities were established in a single year.
But it would make possible the defeat of Germany, Italy, and Japan.
"If you're going to try to prepare for war in a capitalist country," Secretary of War Stimson said, "you have to let business make money out of the process.
" FDR now found himself working hand-in-glove with many of the "economic royalists" whose hatred he'd welcomed just 5 years earlier.
The biggest companies got the biggest contracts and earned the biggest profits.
Antitrust laws were overlooked.
Taxes on ordinary Americans rose.
Again and again, he urged industry to greater efforts.
When advisors handed him estimates of what they thought could realistically be achieved, he crossed them out and wrote in larger numbers of his own.
"The production people can do it if they really try," he said.
They did try and they did do it.
Goodwin: His role was to mobilize the forces of the American people behind the war.
Without the productivity that this country was able to marshal by 300,000 planes and two million trucks and 5,000 cargo ships, we would never have had the supplies which we gave to our allies in all far corners of the world to win that war.
He was directly responsible for getting this country to hum again, to support the soldiers at every step along the way.
Narrator: Idle factories were soon back in business.
Nearly all manufacturing was converted to the war effort.
In 1941, more than 3 million cars had been manufactured in the United States.
Only 139 more were made during the entire war.
Instead, Chrysler made fuselages.
General Motors made airplane engines, guns, trucks, and tanks.
And at its vast willow run plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan 67 acres of assembly lines under a single roof that one observer called "The Grand Canyon of the mechanized world" the Ford Motor Company performed something like a miracle 24 hours a day.
The average Ford car had some 15,000 parts.
The B-24 liberator long-range bomber had 1,550,000 parts.
One came off the line at Willow Run every 63 minutes.
War mobilization would give the allies the "crushing superiority" in arms Roosevelt insisted they needed for victory.
It also brought the Great Depression to an end, creating so many new jobs so fast that for the first time in a generation there was soon a labor shortage in the United States.
Will: The great battles of the Second World War, the defeat of the Third Reich was accomplished using American weapons.
So the job was to do what the brain trusters and the new deal mentality wanted to do anyway, which was mobilize the American people into a great collective effort.
And that's what war is.
Goodwin: Eleanor feared when the war came that she would no longer have the centrality that she'd enjoyed with him during the 1930s.
Similar fears that when she first became first lady that she wouldn't be as needed or wanted.
But boy, she found a way once again.
Narrator: Eleanor Roosevelt continued to share her husband's sense of urgency about American defense and, like any other mother, she had wept when her boys went off to war.
But she was also unhappy with what seemed to her to be FDR's abandonment of reform.
The president was now consumed with mobilization and the war.
He made only token objections when Congress voted to end the civilian conservation corps, the works progress administration, the national youth administration.
He was "Dr.
Win-the-War" now, he explained, no longer "Dr.
New Deal.
" Further domestic progress would have to wait till the fighting ended.
Eleanor Roosevelt would not easily accept that decision.
If he were no longer interested in listening to other new dealers, she would speak for them.
"No one who ever saw Eleanor Roosevelt facing her husband," an aide remembered, "and, holding his eye firmly," say to him, "Franklin, I think you should " Or, "Franklin, surely you will not " Will ever forget the experience.
" She initially supported FDR's decision to inter behind barbed wire some 110,000 Japanese-Americans who happened to live along the west coast 2/3 of them American citizens.
"I recognize," she told a friend, "it has to be done.
" But when she realized that stories of internee disloyalty were untrue, that they were being singled out only because of their race, she made an unannounced visit to one of their camps, lobbied her husband to close them all, and was only dissuaded from bringing an interned family home to live in the White House when he told her the secret service would not allow it.
Man: It is blood on your hands, Mrs.
Roosevelt.
You have been personally proclaiming and practicing social equality at the white house and wherever you go.
"Jackson, Mississippi Daily News.
" Narrator: During the war, hundreds of thousands of black Americans moved north, where they found defense jobs and trouble from a society not yet willing to accommodate them.
In 1943 alone, there were race riots in 47 cities.
35 people died in Detroit.
"I suppose," the first lady said, "when one is forced to realize that an unwelcome change is coming, one must blame it on one or something.
" She was painfully aware of the absurdity of continuing to ask young African Americans to fight for democracy while serving in armed forces that were still segregated.
"Unless we make the country worth fighting for by negroes," she wrote one of her critics, "we will have nothing to offer the world at the end of the war.
" Eleanor Roosevelt had also battled on behalf of admitting Jewish refugees to the United States for as long as the Nazis were willing to grant them exit visas.
Restrictive immigration laws frustrated her.
So did the actions of obstructionists within the state department, some genuinely concerned that German spies would slip into the country, some blatantly anti-semitic.
And she had been unable to persuade FDR to get rid of those bureaucrats.
He had been the only leader of a Democratic nation to dare denounce the Nazi mistreatment of Jews after Kristallnacht in 1938.
When news began to reach him at the end of 1942 that the Germans had moved on from mistreatment to mass murder, he joined Churchill and Stalin and 10 allied overnments-in-exile in promising to prosecute and punish those responsible for what they called this "bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination.
" And he eventually created the War Refugee Board that provided funds and authorization to help Jews flee from the edges of the Nazi empire.
Roosevelt understood that Hitler was the master of Europe.
Europe's Jews were his prisoners and intended victims.
And, as he told a Jewish visitor, we "cannot treat these matters in normal ways.
We are dealing with an insane man.
" There was nothing else to do, he believed, other than to obliterate that madman and his monstrous regime.
Woman, as Daisy: Saturday, November 8, 1942.
Shangri-La.
A historic day.
After dinner, as we were getting settled in chairs, he said at 9 that "something will break on the radio" And at 9 we got the news of the landing of our troops on North Africa.
It was thrilling and for the president it was a tremendous climax.
Narrator: The landings went smoothly.
Casualties were low.
"Thank God!" Roosevelt said.
"Thank God!" But the raw U.
S.
troops soon found the fighting far tougher than they'd expected.
It would take 7 bloody months to drive the Germans from North Africa.
Elliott Roosevelt, who had pulled strings to get into combat despite his bad eyesight, piloted unarmed reconnaissance planes again and again over enemy territory.
In January of 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill made their way into the war zone to Casablanca in Morocco, where FDR declared the allies united in their goal nothing less than "unconditional surrender.
" In the Pacific, American naval forces had already badly damaged the Japanese fleet at midway.
The marines had captured most of Guadalcanal though at a fearful cost and had raided Makin Island, too, where the president's eldest son, major James Roosevelt, was awarded the Navy cross for "extraordinary heroism.
" Within a few weeks, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union would finally be halted at Stalingrad.
Allied troops would soon invade Sicily where Franklin, Jr.
's destroyer would be badly damaged and he would win the Silver Star for carrying one of his wounded sailors to safety under fire.
Then the allies would have to begin the long, bloody struggle to take Italy.
But the cross-channel invasion of France that the Russians were demanding, that everyone including the enemy knew had to come, had been postponed yet again and was still more than a year away.
Major Kermit Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt's second son, who had accompanied him on his last great adventure in south America, had never recovered from his father's death.
He continued to suffer from crippling depression and, like his Uncle Elliott, drank too much.
His wife believed, as Theodore Roosevelt had believed, that depression would overwhelm Kermit unless he had a mission.
Franklin Roosevelt gave him a commission in the army and sent him to an airbase in Alaska where he was to help establish a militia force of Aleuts and Eskimos in case of Japanese invasion, just the kind of assignment his father would have relished.
It was too late.
On may 31, 1943, U.
S.
forces destroyed the enemy garrison on the island of Attu in the Aleutians.
The Japanese threat to Alaska had been lifted.
4 days later, Kermit Roosevelt put his service revolver under his chin and pulled the trigger.
It was thought best to tell his mother Edith 81 years old and still living at Sagamore Hill that he had died of a heart attack.
Woman, as Eleanor: This trip to the South Pacific will be attacked as a political gesture, and I am so uncertain whether or not I am doing the right thing that I will start with a heavy heart.
I'll go because other people think I should And where I do see our soldiers I'll try to make them feel that Franklin really wants to know about them.
Narrator: In the summer of 1943, Eleanor Roosevelt undertook a 5-week, 25,000-mile trip to the South Pacific on behalf of the Red Cross: Hawaii, Australia, and New Zealand and 17 islands, including Bora Bora, Samoa, Fiji, New Caledonia, Christmas Island, and Guadalcanal, where she got to see her young friend Joe Lash, now a sergeant in the army.
Admiral William F.
"Bull" Halsey, commander in the South Pacific, had been against her coming.
He had a war to fight, he said, and no time to waste welcoming a visiting "do-gooder.
" But when the first lady turned up and went to work, Halsey quickly changed his mind.
Man, as Halsey: Here is what Eleanor Roosevelt did in 12 hours: She inspected two Navy hospitals, took a boat to an officer's rest home and had lunch there, returned and inspected an army hospital, reviewed the 2nd marine raider battalion, made a speech at a service club, attended a reception, and was guest of honor at a dinner given by General Harmon.
When I say that she inspected those hospitals, I don't mean that she shook hands with the chief medical officer, glanced into a sunroom, and left.
I mean that she went into every ward, stopped at every bed, and spoke to every patient: What was his name? How did he feel? Was there anything he needed? Could she take a message home for him? I marveled at her hardihood, both physical and mental.
And she saw patients who were grievously and gruesomely wounded.
But I marveled most at their expressions as she leaned over them.
It was a sight I will never forget.
Narrator: "Over here," one soldier said, "she was something none of us had seen in over a year, an American mother.
" The family of every wounded soldier and sailor she visited got a personal letter.
But, just as her experience with the wounded of World War I had affected her, it took weeks for her to get over the impact of the horrors she had seen.
To the end of her life, she would remember the smell of the burn wards.
When she got back, just as she had predicted, Republicans attacked her for junketeering at the public's expense.
"The outcry in Congress is so great," she confided to a friend, "that FDR feels I should not use government transportation or even go on any long trips for awhile.
" "Later, I'm sure he'll say go ahead again, but just now it seems he wants a little peace.
" At the end of November, 1943, the president traveled 8,000 miles to Tehran, to confer again with Churchill and to meet for the first time with the Soviet premier Josef Stalin.
Stalin was taciturn, guarded, perpetually suspicious.
The bargaining was often tense.
Roosevelt hoped the United States, Russia, Britain, and China could work together once the war was over.
Stalin, whose Red Army was still bearing the brunt of the fighting, was determined to hold on to the Eastern European countries his men were capturing as they pushed the Germans back toward Berlin.
And he insisted upon the fastest possible opening of a second front.
Churchill resisted, still hoping an assault on France could be delayed or somehow avoided altogether.
Roosevelt, an aide remembered, "sat in the middle, by common consent the moderator, arbitrator, and final authority.
" In the end, the big three set the stage for victory.
The Americans and British would invade occupied France in the spring of 1944.
The Soviets would mount a simultaneous offensive from the east.
The hope was that the Nazis would be crushed between them.
But victory in Europe and in Asia still seemed very far away.
Woman, as Daisy: March 26.
Hyde Park.
The president had Mrs.
Rutherfurd for lunch, showed her his library, then to top cottage, and she didn't get away until about 6:30.
At dinner he felt fever coming on again and went to bed.
He has decided to go down to Washington in the morning to the naval hospital.
Narrator: Roosevelt had returned from Tehran exhausted and suffering from what admiral Ross McIntire, his physician and surgeon general, said was the flu.
Weeks went by.
He did not get better.
Grace Tully, his longtime secretary who had taken over for Missy Lehand, noticed that his hands now shook so badly he had trouble lighting his cigarette and he sometimes seemed to doze for a moment during dictation.
She and Daisy Suckley were worried.
So was the president's daughter Anna.
She had recently moved back into the White House with her children, and with her mother away was now acting as her father's hostess.
All 3 women feared admiral McIntire was not up to the job of caring for the president.
His expertise was sinuses.
Something else was wrong.
Anna insisted on answers.
On march 27, 1944, her father agreed to be wheeled into Bethesda Naval Hospital for an off-the-record examination by the chief of cardiology, Lt.
Commander Howard G.
Bruenn.
Bruenn was horrified by what he found.
The president was suffering from congestive heart failure.
His heart was dangerously enlarged; he was short of breath; and suffering from severe hypertension for which there was then no effective treatment.
4 days later, 3 senior physicians confirmed the diagnosis.
To reduce and slow the heart and to ease the strain on it, FDR was prescribed digitalis and put on a diet.
He was told to cut his smoking in half, urged not to work more than 4 hours a day.
Everyone was sworn to the strictest secrecy.
Admiral McIntire assured the press that FDR just had a touch of persistent bronchitis; "for a man of 62-plus," he said, he was doing fine.
"I am more worried than I let anyone know," Daisy Suckley confided to her diary.
"There must be something definitely wrong or they wouldn't have these consultations.
" Franklin: But, like a great many other people, I have had the flu.
Narrator: 1944 was another presidential election year.
The cross-channel invasion of Europe was still weeks away.
American forces had only just begun to fight their way island-by-island across the Pacific toward Japan.
And, although just a handful of people knew it, the commander-in-chief the most powerful man on earth was seriously, perhaps fatally, ill.
Announcer: Tomorrow night on "the Roosevelts," D-Day.
Franklin Roosevelt: Give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts.
Announcer: A weary president goes to Warm Springs.
Woman: He is completely let down, which means that he is relaxed and able to rest.
Announcer: And Eleanor carries on.
Woman as Eleanor: Courage is more exhilarating than fear, and in the long run, it is easier.
Announcer: Next time, the final chapter of "The Roosevelts: An Intimate History," Announcer: To learn more about the rich history and legacy of one of the most influential families in American history, go to PBS.
org/theroosevelts.
"The Roosevelts: An Intimate History" is available on blu-ray and DVD.
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