Exceptional (2 page)

Dick Cheney

Liz Cheney

May 2015

Wilson, Wyoming

You have completed your mission with the greatest victory in the history of warfare. You have commanded with outstanding success the most powerful military force that has ever been assembled. . . . You have made history, great history, for the good of all mankind.

—GENERAL MARSHALL LETTER TO GENERAL EISENHOWER, MAY 7, 1945

O
n the president's plain wooden desk were half a dozen microphones, two newly sharpened pencils, a note pad, and a
pack of Camels. A small audience, including actor Clark Gable and his wife, Carole Lombard; the president's mother, Sara Roosevelt; Secretary of State Cordell Hull; and other cabinet members, had gathered. It was the sixteenth fireside chat of FDR's presidency, December 29, 1940. The mood was somber and the room was hot as the president arrived. “My friends,” he began, “this is not a fireside chat on war. It is a
talk on national security.”

Most of Europe had fallen to Hitler. Britain stood alone. Without America's aid, she might not survive. Recalling the economic crisis of 1933, Roosevelt said the same “courage and realism” would be required to face the rising threat to America's security. “Never before
since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock,” Roosevelt said, “has our American civilization been in such danger as now.” Declaring his intent to keep the nation out of “a last-ditch war,” Roosevelt went on to describe why the security of the United States depended upon the defense of Great Britain:

They ask for the implements of war, the planes, the tanks, the guns, the freighters, which will enable them to fight for their liberty and for our security. Emphatically we must get these weapons to them in sufficient volume and quickly enough, so that we and our children will be saved the agony and suffering of war which others have had to endure.

Referring to those who argued for appeasement, Roosevelt pointed to the experience of the past two years, and said it had proven that negotiations with Hitler were futile:

No nation can appease the Nazis. No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it. There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness. There can be no reasoning with an incendiary bomb. We know now that a nation can have peace with the Nazis only at the price of total surrender.

To do what was required, America must discard “business as usual” and turn its full productive power toward producing the armaments needed for the defense of freedom. No strikes or lockouts, no concern about postwar surplus plant capacity or the desire for luxury goods must be allowed to stop America doing what the world required. “We must be the great arsenal of democracy. For us, this is an emergency as serious as war itself.”

Roosevelt's determination to mobilize the nation was crucial to
the success of the effort he knew we needed to mount. It had not been an easy or clear path getting to this point. The American people were war-weary and isolationist sentiment was strong. In the aftermath of World War I we had demobilized and retreated behind our oceans, hoping, as George Washington had advised, to avoid entangling our “peace and prosperity” in the fortunes of Europe. While we were turned inward, Adolf Hitler began his Blitzkrieg.

ON THE EVENING OF Thursday, August 31, 1939, General George C. Marshall dined at the home of Supreme Court
justice Harlan Stone. Marshall was to be sworn in the next morning as Army chief of staff. The dinner guests gathered in the elegant brick home at 2340 Wyoming Avenue in Washington, D.C., during a time when one grim report from Europe followed another. Eighteen months earlier Hitler had annexed Austria. Thirteen months earlier he had taken the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. Six months after that, despite the promises he'd made to British prime minister Neville Chamberlain at Munich, Hitler sent his troops into Prague and took all of Czechoslovakia. Just eight days before the Stones' dinner party, the Nazis had signed a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact alleviated Hitler's concern that he would have to fight on two fronts and allowed him to turn his attention to Poland.

During dinner, Marshall was
called to the telephone. Hitler's troops were massing on the Polish border. Hours later, as Marshall slept in Quarters One at Fort Myer, the second call came. It was 3:00
A.M.
German planes were bombing Warsaw. Turning to his wife, Marshall said, “It has come.” Then he dressed and headed for his office in the Munitions Building on
Constitution Avenue.

Three miles to the east, across the Potomac River, another call had come in. America's ambassador to France, William C. Bullitt, had
a message for President Roosevelt from the ambassador to Poland, Anthony Biddle. The German invasion had begun. “Well, Bill,” the president responded to Bullitt on hearing the news, “it has come at last.
God bless us all.” Then he reached for a pencil and paper and made these notes of the call:

The President received word at 2:50 am by telephone from Ambass. Biddle through Ambass. Bullitt that Germany has invaded Poland and that four cities are being bombed. The Pres. directed that all Navy ships and Army commands be notified
by radio at once.

In bed

3:05 am

Sept 1, '39

FDR

The Germans had assembled a massive force of
sixty divisions, more than 1.5 million troops, for the invasion of Poland. Thousands of tanks and armored cars poured across the Polish frontier as German planes bombed cities, roads, railroads, munitions depots, and
columns of fleeing refugees. Warsaw fell on September 27. The last Polish force was
defeated on October 6. The Poles had been able to hold out against Hitler's onslaught for only a few weeks—and Poland's army
was significantly larger and better equipped than the United States Army of 1939.

When George Marshall became Army chief of staff, America's army was slightly
smaller than Romania's. Demobilization in the aftermath of World War I, fueled in part by strong isolationist sentiment, had ensured America's standing army was insufficient in size, skills, equipment, and resources to adequately defend the nation. In the summer of 1939 there were only approximately
174,000 enlisted
men in the Army. Not a single infantry division was near its combat strength and there were
no armored divisions. There were
1,175 planes. Those who were lucky were training with 1903 Springfield rifles. Other units, lacking resources to purchase actual weapons, studied blueprints and drilled with
wooden machine guns. Speaking to a joint meeting of the American Military Institute and the American Historical Association at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, December 28, 1939, General Marshall announced that the Army was “probably less than 25% ready
for immediate action.”

Building and equipping a force capable of defending the nation would require money and time. Marshall wanted the American public to understand that expenditures on defense could not be delayed. In an interview in the
New York Times
in May 1939, he listed the items the Army needed most urgently. This included “planes, semi-automatic rifles, light machine guns, modernized artillery, anti-tank cannons, heavy-caliber guns,” and gunpowder. “Every one of these items,” Marshall said, “requires a year or longer to produce. A billion dollars the day the war is declared will not buy ten cents' worth of such material
for quick delivery.”

The situation had not improved much when, five months later, at dawn on May 10, 1940, Hitler launched an assault into Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg, heading for France. The next morning, Saturday, May 11, General Marshall arrived for a meeting in the office of Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau. Morgenthau knew additional resources were needed for defense and he was frustrated that requests for funding were arriving on the president's desk in a
one-off fashion. He wanted to see the big picture and knew Marshall was the man to draw it for him.

As Marshall detailed everything that was needed immediately, including significant increases in funding for additional men and equipment,
Morgenthau encouraged him not to hold back. “I don't scare easily,” he said a few hours into the meeting, “and I am not scared yet.” Marshall responded that the overwhelming need “makes me dizzy.” Morgenthau told him, “It makes me dizzy
if we don't get it.”

With Marshall at his side, Morgenthau placed a call to Colonel Edwin “Pa” Watson, Roosevelt's trusted military aide. He explained that Marshall had been asked to go up to Capitol Hill on Monday, May 13, to give “confidential figures” of what the Army needed. Morgenthau wanted Marshall to see the president first. Watson agreed to make time for them on
the president's schedule. When Marshall and Morgenthau arrived at the White House on Monday morning, both knew they were about to have a make-or-break meeting.

Morgenthau began by detailing the case for the massive and urgent buildup Marshall needed. He also urged the president to establish a civilian body to oversee the industrial mobilization required to arm America and her allies. The president wasn't convinced. After unsuccessfully attempting to sway Roosevelt, Morgenthau told him, “Well, I still think you're wrong.” “
You've filed your protest,” Roosevelt said.

Sensing that he was in serious danger of losing the argument, Morgenthau asked the president if he would at least hear directly from General Marshall. “Well, I know exactly what he would say. There is no necessity for me
hearing him at all.” General Marshall realized it was a desperate situation, “catastrophic in its possibilities.” Years later, Marshall explained, “I felt he might be president, but I had certain knowledge which I was sure he didn't possess or which
he didn't grasp.”

Marshall was a formal man, with the highest regard for the chain of command and for civilian control of the military. He declined invitations to socialize with the president, not wanting to become too familiar with the commander in chief. It was only because he believed
the future of the nation might be at stake that he was able to do what he did next.

As General Marshall recalled later, when Roosevelt was ending the meeting, Marshall walked over to him, “stood looking down at him and said, ‘Mr. President, may I have three minutes?' ” Perhaps startled by Marshall's directness, Roosevelt replied, “
Of course, General Marshall, of course.”

Marshall began by supporting Morgenthau's argument that the president should appoint a civilian organization to oversee the industrial side of mobilization. Roosevelt had said it was unnecessary because he was dividing the duties between Morgenthau, presidential advisor Harry Hopkins, and himself. To demonstrate the untenable nature of this plan, Marshall described the lunch he'd had with Morgenthau at the Treasury Department the previous week. Even though Morgenthau had given instructions that the two of them not be bothered, they were interrupted three times on the matter of closing the New York Stock Exchange. Morgenthau had simply been trying to “understand the enormity of our situation regarding military preparedness and he wasn't even allowed to do this,” Marshall said. He told the president that “none of you are supermen and Mr. Morgenthau has no more chance of managing this thing
than of flying.”

Marshall then detailed the needs of the Army. At that moment, when the Germans had two million men marching through Western Europe, the United States could
dedicate only 15,000 men to combat. Weapons, rations, ammunition, housing—
everything was needed. Finishing his presentation, which had exceeded the three minutes he asked for, Marshall summed up the stakes, telling the president: “If you don't do something . . . and do it right away, really do it today, I don't know what's going to happen
to this country.” Stunned, Roosevelt told Marshall to come back the next day to discuss details of the supplemental Army
appropriation he needed.