This meant that on grand strategy the two men’s thoughts evolved along similar lines. In their thinking and planning, both these two former naval persons were deeply influenced by an American military philosopher, a strategist who had affected Britain’s military experts as well as American leaders from Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin Roosevelt. Churchill’s resoluteness, which FDR sensed early on, was a powerful factor in the President’s conviction that he should give all possible aid to Britain. This study of the relationship of Roosevelt and Churchill illustrates the importance of individuals and the play of their personalities as well as the force of theory and great ideas on the march of history. The correspondence with Churchill, however, shows the President as a man who thought globally and in large strategic terms, a man who had a clearer view of all the factors both at home and abroad than many of his advisors. The picture one got of Roosevelt in his press conferences was of an improvisor, who dragged his feet, who was casual about many things and at times was superficial. At the same time, while using all his skill as a tactician in fighting off the isolationists, Roosevelt refused to be diverted from his main objective of aiding Britain and preparing America for war. He was a leader strong enough to resist the entreaties of Churchill and cabinet members like Stimson, Knox, Ickes, and Morgenthau who advocated a more aggressive war policy in 19. He is shown as a man who thought in strategic terms and thought more deeply than was apparent to many persons who watched his performance as America prepared for war. Lash portrays him also as a skilled strategist and long-range thinker, in both the political and military sense. Roosevelt was successful in many things because he was a shrewd politician. Lash’s fascinating book, Roosevelt and Churchill, 1939-41, a gold mine of lessons in American history and particularly of the American presidency. These comparisons are brought to mind by Joseph P. To an unusual degree, Roosevelt understood both. Devlin describes Wilson’s diplomacy as “continuous expostulation,” noting that Wilson understood, no one better, “the language of exposition, but not the language of maneuver.” While he was often intolerant of his critics, much as Wilson was, he understood their power and the necessity to mollify them when he could, to outmaneuver them if possible, to take two steps forward and one back to gain an objective. Roosevelt had ignored public opinion and his own party leaders in the Supreme Court fight of 1937 and had lost. FDR recognized that a political leader must not go so far ahead of the voters as to lose them, and he knew that words alone could not convince men to follow him. Roosevelt was assistant secretary of the navy under Wilson, and he was determined not to make the same mistakes in World War II. As Lord Devlin said in his excellent study of Wilson, Too Proud to Fight: Wilson s Neutrality, the president believed that the “essence of political leadership lay in the power to mobilize public opinion.” But “the canvassing of influential men and the exchanging of support, which form so large a part of political management, were things which Wilson did not understand and which, if they could not be dispensed with, he left to others.” This was unquestionably Wilson’s greatest weakness and led to his greatest defeat. Wilson sought the counsel of others, particularly in his last two or three years in office, less than any president in this century before Nixon. Roosevelt, in short, was gregarious, an essential quality in a political leader. Roosevelt was a better politician than Wilson and he recognized to a greater extent than Wilson did the necessity to consult cabinet and Congress and other important men inside and outside government. Roosevelt also played a decisive role in the fate of nations, yet he was more alert to public opinion than Wilson. It was a part, we know now after the experience of the sixties and early seventies, that no individual should play, great though a president’s power must be in a major war. Winston Churchill wrote after the first World War that the action of the United States in the war period depended upon the workings of Woodrow Wilson’s “mind and spirit to the exclusion of almost every other factor.” Churchill believed that Wilson’s exercise of supreme power, without what he considered the proper cabinet and legislative consultation, meant that the president alone “played a part in the fate of nations incomparably more direct and personal than any other man.” Roosevelt & Churchill, 1939-1941: The Alliance That Saved the West.
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