Democratic Justice, page 64
On the afternoon of April 12, Frankfurter went for a long walk in Rock Creek Park with British ambassador Lord Halifax. Halifax had to return to the embassy by 4:30 p.m. so they stopped at the old Peirce Mill to pick up the ambassador’s car. During the ride back to Frankfurter’s home, Halifax asked about Roosevelt’s physical condition. Frankfurter “fear[ed] the worst.” He described how the president had looked like a “doomed man” at his inauguration, how “ghastly” Roosevelt had looked at Pa Watson’s funeral nearly two months ago, and even worse at Frankfurter’s last glimpse of the president. Four hours before Roosevelt left for Warm Springs on March 29, Frankfurter had accompanied British minister of production Oliver Lyttelton and minister of food John J. Llewellin to meet the president at the White House. Frankfurter had been “simply shocked” at the change in the president’s appearance. Two hours after Halifax and Frankfurter parted ways on April 12, Frankfurter heard the news that Roosevelt had died of a cerebral hemorrhage at age sixty-three. Despite being prepared for the president’s death on an intellectual level, Frankfurter was stunned: “One cannot take in for a long time that such a vital force is spent.” He was only glad that, unlike Wilson, whose stroke in the fall of 1919 had left him incapacitated, Roosevelt died with all his faculties. Two and a half hours after Roosevelt’s death and with the cabinet present, Chief Justice Stone swore in Harry Truman as the next president.
The next night, the Frankfurters stopped by the home of Secretary of War Stimson. The Stimsons had finished dinner with Ellen McCloy, whose husband John was in France to plan the future of postwar Germany. They had a “very pleasant and cheering chat” about what Roosevelt had done for his country and for the free world. Stimson liked Roosevelt, admired his judgment on foreign policy and the war, but thought he had run a “disorderly” White House. Truman had urged the entire cabinet, especially Stimson and other officials crucial to the war effort, to stay.
The next morning at 9:55 a.m., Frankfurter watched with the other justices, the cabinet, President Truman, and Roosevelt family members and close friends as Roosevelt’s funeral train pulled into Union Station. An estimated 500,000 people lined the streets as six white horses pulled the president’s flag-draped casket on a caisson escorted by 2800 troops, 1000 police officers, and 400 firefighters and followed by cars carrying public officials to the northwest gate of the White House.
At 3:55 p.m. in the East Room of the White House, Felix and Marion Frankfurter sat in the second row with the other justices and their wives waiting for the start of Roosevelt’s official state funeral. A few minutes later, they forgot to stand when President and Mrs. Truman entered. After twelve plus years of Roosevelt, they were unaccustomed to the idea of anyone else as president. The Truman family sat in the first row in front of the justices. Shortly before 4:00 p.m., everyone stood as Eleanor Roosevelt and her family walked in and took their seats in the first row on the other side of the aisle. It was a humid April day and hot and stuffy with 150 people packed into the East Room and another 50 in the adjacent Blue Room. Frankfurter thought Reverend Angus Dun performed the half-hour funeral service “beautifully.”
That night around 9:30 p.m., the Frankfurters arrived early at Union Station to board a 17-car special train bound for Hyde Park, New York. “The Secret Service took extraordinary precautions . . .,” the New York Times reported. “Probably never before had such an assemblage of leaders of the United States Government traveled on one train.” Members of the Roosevelt family, President Truman and his family, most of the cabinet, all nine justices, and other dignitaries spent the night talking in somber tones. The Frankfurters sat next to their friend Frances Watson, who was in mourning over her husband Pa’s death.
The next morning at the burial service, Frankfurter and his fellow justices stood in the west side of the rose garden. Under a bright sunshine and a deep blue sky, eight West Point cadets escorted the caisson up the hill. An old rector recited a few prayers followed by a benediction as the casket was lowered into the ground. West Point cadets fired a 21-gun salute. A bugler at the foot of the grave played taps. “I wish you had been at Hyde Park when we took leave of him,” Frankfurter wrote C. C. Burlingham. “It was a perfect day and a flawless ceremony. The sky was swept clean, the Gods smiled on him at the last and there was a tang in the air that sharpened the pain.”
“Franklin Roosevelt cannot escape becoming a national saga,” Frankfurter wrote in a memorial essay for the Harvard Alumni Bulletin. He reminisced about Roosevelt’s “friendliness,” “optimism,” and “resoluteness” in the face of the Great Depression; his calmness after Pearl Harbor, which prompted Stimson to remark after that first cabinet meeting, “There is my leader”; and Roosevelt’s recognition that “the utter defeat of Nazism was essential to the survival of our institutions.”
The day before Roosevelt’s death, the U.S. Army had liberated the concentration camp at Buchenwald; a few days later, the British liberated Bergen-Belsen. Delegates from around the world convened in San Francisco for two months to establish the United Nations. The Axis powers were crumbling. On April 28, Mussolini was hanged. Two days later, Hitler committed suicide in his bunker. Frankfurter knew that the defeat of the Axis powers would define Roosevelt’s presidency more than the New Deal, his fireside chats, and his failed court-packing plan. “Roosevelt will claim an even larger share of history as long as the civilization endures that he helped to save,” he wrote. “Fluctuations of historic judgment are the common lot of great men and Roosevelt will not escape it. What history will ultimately say, it is for history to say. Only one thing is certain: he will remain among the few Americans who embody its traditions and aspirations.”
ON THE TRAIN home from Roosevelt’s funeral, many cabinet members and politicians stopped mourning Roosevelt; they schemed about their political futures in the Truman administration, and some even met with Truman himself. Frankfurter was not among them. Unlike others on the train home from Hyde Park, he professed no interest in who would stay or who would go.
In the days after Roosevelt’s death, newspaper reporters and columnists speculated that Frankfurter’s influence in the Truman administration would be “dimmed” and that the justice would “spend more time on” his “official duties.” The conventional wisdom was that the “palace guard” of Frankfurter, Hopkins, and Rosenman could not possibly have the same personal relationship with Truman that they had with Roosevelt. “Justice Felix Frankfurter no longer will slip in the back door of the White House o’nights to use the political lobe of his judicial brain to jockey for Frankfurter-endorsed appointments in key Administration posts,” syndicated columnist John O’Donnell wrote, “—and so the Frankfurter boys are packing up.” The last part of the prediction turned out to be wrong. Many of Frankfurter’s friends, former students, and law clerks—Stimson, Patterson, and McCloy in the War Department; Acheson, new assistant secretary MacLeish, Ben Cohen, and Hiss in the State Department; Prichard in the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion; and many people in the solicitor general’s office and elsewhere in the Justice Department—stayed in the administration. Frankfurter insisted to Stimson that the secretary of war “may have more influence with Truman than he did” with Roosevelt because the late president “was so much more self-sufficient.” Frankfurter was optimistic about Truman because “he is an educable man and it all depends who will do the educating.” With Stimson, Acheson, and Frankfurter’s other allies in the administration, they would be Truman’s teachers. Apropos of Joe Kennedy’s remark to Roosevelt in October 1944, Truman would see Frankfurter “twenty times a day.”
CHAPTER 27
The Real Architect of the Victory
A few weeks after Roosevelt’s death, Henry Stimson received word that Frankfurter wanted to see him “on some important matter” and invited the justice to a May 3 lunch at the Pentagon. Frankfurter usually visited the secretary of war at his Woodley estate for dinner or after-dinner conversation. This meeting, however, was top secret.
At 1:00 p.m., the justice arrived at the Pentagon with a memorandum in hand and some startling information. Stimson was surprised to learn that Frankfurter knew “quite a good deal” about S-1 and had discussed the project with Danish physicist Niels Bohr as well as with the late president. Over lunch, Frankfurter recounted his conversations with Bohr and Roosevelt and left Stimson the original copy of a memorandum reviewing the entire history. The memorandum detailed Bohr and Frankfurter’s preoccupation for more than a year—the necessity of sharing atomic secrets with the Soviet Union in an effort to build trust between the two countries and to avert a nuclear war.
The new president, not Stimson, worried Frankfurter. On issues of atomic energy, Truman was green. He had no knowledge of S-1 until Roosevelt’s death. As a U.S senator, he had chaired the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, or Truman Committee, and had asked Stimson about a large appropriation for a new weapon at plants in Washington State and Tennessee. The secretary of war had declined to answer for reasons of national security. On April 15, 1945, three days after Roosevelt’s death, Stimson briefed Truman for the first time about S-1. The new president understood why Stimson had refused to discuss the project with the Senate oversight committee. On April 25, Stimson presented Truman with a memorandum: “Within four months we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human history, one bomb of which could destroy a whole city.” He explained that many scientists in many countries knew about the technology and that controlling access to these weapons required international cooperation and inspections. He also raised the issue of sharing the technology with others and with “a certain moral responsibility upon us which we cannot shirk without very serious responsibility for any disaster to civilization . . .”
During his May 3 meeting with Frankfurter, Stimson explained that he had constituted an Interim Committee to address these issues and had asked Frankfurter’s former colleague James F. Byrnes to be a member. Frankfurter, according to Stimson, “was much relieved to find how well we had the affair in hand.”
Four days after Stimson’s meeting with Frankfurter, Germany officially surrendered. May 8 was celebrated as Victory in Europe (V-E) Day. “The road ahead is steep and rocky—but at least we have been saved from the abyss,” Frankfurter wrote Stimson. “And we can stop long enough to give thanks to the handful of men who apart from the anonymous millions in the services are the real architects of the victory. That you are of that very small company there is not a shadow of a doubt. I shudder to think what would have happened to us if you [had] not been at the head of the War Department.”
No one was more responsible for Stimson’s position as secretary of war than Frankfurter. To prepare the country for the looming war in Europe in 1940, the justice and law school classmate Grenville Clark had persuaded Roosevelt to name Stimson secretary of war and Judge Robert Patterson assistant secretary. For Frankfurter and many others, Stimson was the paragon of public service. He had hired Frankfurter to work in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan and in Taft’s War Department. A lifelong Republican, Stimson had been Hoover’s governor-general of the Philippines and secretary of state. His service to his country had inspired generations of elite young men. Many of them, like Stimson, had gone to Yale College, had been tapped for the secret society Skull and Bones, and had attended Harvard Law School. Before and after he joined the Harvard law faculty in 1914, Frankfurter was Stimson’s talent scout. Many of Frankfurter’s best men found their way onto Stimson’s War Department staff. In 1945, Stimson’s assistants included former Holmes secretaries George Harrison and Harvey Bundy and former student John J. McCloy.
The atomic bomb tested Stimson’s abilities and problem-solving skills and those of Harrison, Bundy, and McCloy. Two issues confronted them: (1) The decision about whether to drop the atomic bomb on Japan to hasten the end of the war in the Pacific; and (2) the question of sharing atomic secrets with the Soviet Union. Frankfurter left the first question up to the military and political experts. The second one, however, he refused to let die. He employed all his persuasive powers and administration contacts to influence Truman’s decision about sharing atomic secrets with the Soviets and ensuring a lasting peace.
The president knew what Frankfurter was thinking because of gossipy phone calls—wiretapped, transcribed, and sent to the White House—with former student and law clerk Edward F. “Prich” Prichard, Jr. A trusted aide to fellow Kentuckian Fred M. Vinson in the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion, Prich worked in the East Wing and was not shy about sharing White House gossip. He socialized with Frankfurter, Isaiah Berlin, Phil and Katharine Graham, and other members of the Georgetown set. Yet he aroused the suspicions of Truman and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover as a Roosevelt loyalist, ardent New Dealer, and leaker to columnist Drew Pearson and other journalists. In an effort to curry favor with the new president, Hoover tapped Prich’s White House phone. The wiretaps caught Prich and Frankfurter dishing about the new administration. On the evening of May 8, Prich bragged to Frankfurter about writing a speech for Truman and compared himself to ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and the president to Bergen’s wooden dummy Charlie McCarthy. He also aroused Frankfurter’s concern about the new administration’s Soviet policy and claimed that the United Nations conference in San Francisco had been “mismanaged.” The justice argued that the new president “seems to be coming around” and “the Russians are determined to play ball.”
Five days after V-E Day, Frankfurter met with Roosevelt’s former ambassador to the Soviet Union, Joseph Davies. The friendship between Frankfurter and Davies dated to the Wilson administration, when Frankfurter had worked in the War and Labor Departments and Davies, a Wisconsin Democrat, had served as head of the Bureau of Corporations, the first chair of the Federal Trade Commission, and an economic adviser during the Paris Peace Conference. In 1936, Roosevelt named Davies to succeed William C. Bullitt as the ambassador to the Soviet Union. Ambassador Davies and his wife, General Foods heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, bought valuable Russian art at bargain prices from the Stalin-led government. Davies’s subordinates in the embassy viewed him as a “Pollyanna” who accepted what the Soviets told him at face value. “He took the Soviet line on everything,” Russia expert Chip Bohlen wrote, “except issues between the two governments.” After two years in the Soviet Union, Davies served as ambassador to Belgium and minister to Luxembourg. His 1941 best-selling book, Mission to Moscow, portrayed the Soviet Union and Stalin in a positive light and became a major motion picture viewed by experts as Soviet propaganda. He never shook the label of Soviet sympathizer and never wavered from his belief that American-Soviet cooperation was critical to the future of the world. At the end of April, Truman invited him to the White House for advice about how to negotiate with Soviet officials. A week earlier, Truman had taken a hard line with Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov yet had begun to question his “get tough policy.”
On Sunday, May 13, Davies visited Frankfurter at home. The justice, Davies wrote in his diary, “was worried over Russia” and “feared that there was dynamite ‘in the situation.’ ” Frankfurter did not reveal his knowledge of S-1 and, at that point, Davies knew nothing about the project. Instead, the justice told the story of Truman’s April 23 meeting with Stimson, Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, and Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal. During the meeting, they had reacted to an “insulting” note from Stalin to Roosevelt with “much ‘banging of fists’ on the table” and had insisted it was “ ‘high time’ to take a ‘tough line’ ” with the Soviets. Truman vowed to give them “a ‘one-two blow, straight to the jaw.’ ” Stimson, who was not the source of Frankfurter’s story, reserved judgment. The justice opened a copy of John Quincy Adams’s memoirs, described him as Davies’s “great predecessor in Russia,” and read a passage from Adams’s “The Mission to Russia,” which reflected the deteriorating U.S.-Soviet relationship since Roosevelt’s death. Frankfurter encouraged Davies to see Stimson and others “to avert the possible impending ‘disaster.’ ”
Davies, whose health did not permit him to accept a major diplomatic assignment, informed Frankfurter what had transpired between Truman and Molotov and that he had been corresponding with the Soviet foreign minister. He showed the justice his correspondence with Molotov as well as a four-page draft letter to Truman expressing dismay over “the rapid and serious deterioration” of relations between the Soviets and their Anglo-American allies. Davies’s letter argued that the danger was the isolation of the Soviet Union, that Truman was “in the best position to avert it for our country and for the world,” and that the situation required a practical approach rather than trying to “out-tough” the other side. Isolating the Soviets, Davies argued, “might prolong the war against Japan.” Frankfurter read it and thought it was “a great letter” and urged Davies to phone Truman and arrange an appointment for that afternoon.
