The Illusion of Victory by Thomas Fleming Read Free Book Online Page A

war, Roosevelt wanted the president to authorize him to raise a volunteer division that would sail for Europe immediately to show the flag and hearten the Allies. The idea appalled Scott and all the other aging bureaucrats on the general staff. They vividly recalled TR’s performance in the Spanish-American War, in which he not only won fame charging Spanish rifle pits on Kettle and San Juan hills, but also relentlessly criticized the army bureaucracy’s appalling lapses in arming, clothing and feeding the soldiers. The general staff had ordered coldeyed Major Peyton C. March to prepare a paper denouncing the idea of a volunteer division. This document was now in the hands of Secretary of War Baker, making Scott feel that the army was safe from a Roosevelt coup d’état. 54
    Roosevelt was on his way from Florida to make his request for a volunteer major generalship in person. Further undermining his hopes was a tall, handsome major named Douglas MacArthur, who was serving as Secretary of War Baker’s information officer—the army’s first venture into public relations. MacArthur was ordered to tell reporters that Roosevelt’s volunteerism would mess up the planned draft. The major was already so popular with the fourth estate that a few days later, twenty-nine reporters presented a letter to Baker, praising him as a man who “helped to shape the public mind.” All in all, it looked as if the army would win its first battle without shedding a drop of blood. 55
    In the same building, another tall, extremely handsome young man was toiling at his desk in the Navy Department. Assistant Secretary Franklin Roosevelt was possibly the happiest civilian in the government. He had been lobbying overtly and covertly for a declaration of war on Germany for well over a year. He even met clandestinely with his wife’s uncle (and his distant cousin), Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson’s most outspoken critic, to discuss how to put pressure on the president. 56
    The younger Roosevelt hoped that hostilities would oust his lethargic boss, Josephus Daniels, and make the thirty-five-year-old New Yorker secretary of the navy. Through his worshipful right-hand man, gnomelike Louis Howe (who sometimes signed his letters “Your slave and servant”), Roosevelt had sponsored a series of backstairs attacks on Daniels, calling for his replacement by his “virile-minded, hardfisted civilian assistant,” in the words of one complaisant newspaper. 57
    With war virtually declared, Roosevelt began trying to embarrass Daniels almost openly. When a reporter asked him if the fleet had been mobilized yet, the assistant secretary said he did not know,“but you have a right to know. Come along and we’ll find out.”
    He led the reporter into Daniels’s office and said,“Here’s a newsman. He wants to know, and all the rest of us want to know, whether the fleet has been ordered mobilized.”
    The portly, mild-mannered Daniels, who maintained an amazing tolerance of Roosevelt’s behavior, replied that an announcement would be made in due course.
    Out in the corridor, Roosevelt muttered to the reporter, “You see?” With a shrug and a contemptuous look over his shoulder at Daniels’s closed door, he added,“It was the best I could do.” 58
    Roosevelt’s impatience with his slow-moving chief was fueled by the widespread assumption that the major U.S. role in the war would be on the ocean. In the April 4 New York Tribune , Cass W. Gilbert told his readers that the notion of sending a large U.S. army overseas was a “phantasy.” There were simply not enough ships to transport men along with the food that England and France needed to feed their civilians and the munitions that would enable their armies to kill more Germans. Underlying this vision of a more or less bloodless war was the assumption that American infantrymen were not needed. It was evident to everyone who read U.S. newspapers that England, France and Russia were winning the war.