Roosevelt by James MacGregor Burns Read Free Book Online Page A

over.
    This was no rabbit pulled out of a presidential hat. Churchill’s letter had acted merely as a catalyst. A British shipbuilding mission had recently arrived in Washington to contract for ships to be built in the United States. For weeks, perhaps months, the President had been thinking of building cargo ships and leasing them to Britain for the duration. Why not extend the scheme to guns and other munitions? This apparently simple extension, however, represented a vast expansion and shift in the formula. There was no way that Britain could return thousands of planes and tanks after the war; there was no way that Americans could use them if it did. Maritime Commission officials had opposed even the leasing of ships, on the ground that the United States would not need a large fleet after the war and would be stuck with a lot of useless vessels. If this was true of ships, it was doubly true of tanks and guns. But so adroitly and imaginatively did Roosevelt handle the matter that for a long time its critics made every objection except the crucial one.
    Armed with his formula, restored and buoyant after his trip, the President returned to Washington on December 16 and plunged into a series of conferences with his anxious advisers. The next two weeks were one of the most decisive periods in Roosevelt’spresidency. His foxlike evasions were put aside; now he took the lion’s role.
    In one of the surprises he enjoyed engineering he sprang his plan at a press conference. Though he disclaimed at the start that there was “any particular news,” the reporters could tell from his airs—the uptilted cigarette holder, rolled eyes, puffing cheeks, bantering tone—that something was up. He began casually. He had been reading a good deal of nonsense, he said, about finances. The fact was that “in all history no major war has ever been won or lost through lack of money.” He scornfully recalled meeting his banking and broker friends on the Bar Harbor Express at the outset of World War I and their telling him that the war could not last six months because the bankers would stop it. Some “narrow-minded people” were talking now about repealing the Neutrality Act and the Johnson Act and about lending money to Britain. That was “banal.” Others were talking about sending arms, planes, and guns to Britain as a gift. That was banal, too. The best idea—talking selfishly, from the American point of view, “nothing else”—was to build production facilities and then “either lease or sell the materials, subject to mortgage,” to the people on the other side.
    “Now what I am trying to do is to eliminate the dollar sign. That is something brand new in the thoughts of practically everybody in this room, I think—get rid of the silly, foolish old dollar sign.
    “Well, let me give you an illustration: Suppose my neighbor’s home catches on fire, and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him to put out his fire. Now what do I do? I don’t say to him before that operation, ‘Neighbor, my garden hose, cost me $15; you have to pay me $15 for it.’ What is the transaction that goes on? I don’t want $15—I want my garden hose back after the fire is over. All right. If it goes through the fire all right, intact, without any damage to it, he gives it back to me and thanks me very much for the use of it.” If his neighbor smashed it up he could simply replace it.
    The reporters pressed him. Would this mean convoying? No. The Neutrality Act would not need to be amended? Right! Was congressional approval necessary? Yes. Would such steps bring a greater danger of getting into war than the existing situation? No, of course not. Nobody asked the President what use repayment “in kind” would be after the war, and hence why his plan was not an outright gift of munitions.
    By now Berlin could no longer remain quiet. Fearing that