One Faction Hopes Roosevelt Notes “Bum Advice”

Saturday June 17, 1944

WASHINGTON (Routers)

The first ten days of the invasion of the European mainland have brought back with a vengeance the deep splits that have long existed within the Roosevelt administration and the Democratic Party over policy toward Vichy France.

Already there is a behind-the-scenes effort by former senior Democratic government officials and party leaders to convince President Roosevelt that the advice he has received from Secretary of War Stimson and Secretary of State Hull has been wrong and even dangerous to long-term U.S. national interests.

Citing past public statements by some officials associated with the administration about the prospective ease with which the European continent could be won and the warm welcome U.S. forces would receive from the French people, one former Democrat appointee said he and his allies were looking at “whether this president has learned something from this bum advice he has been getting.”

Other Republicans and Roosevelt administration officials, also expressed concern that the Eisenhower invasion plan, with its “rolling start” using a relatively small force, was based on faulty assumptions that the Germans would be fooled by Patton’s feint at Calais, and that advances might be rapid. Moreover, there is fear among some officials, especially in the State Department, that postwar diplomacy, if handled poorly, could result in further U.S. estrangement from allies and international institutions.

Roosevelt, who appears to value tension among his top advisers, “has been very Delphic on this and hard to read” on the emerging internal debate, an adviser said.

Secretary Hull has stressed his support for the war plan, and those operating behind the scenes said they were acting without his blessing. Indeed, among this group, there is criticism of him for failing to combat some of the assumptions about the war with Germany more forcefully. “Hull won’t pick up the fight and won’t represent State Department professionals who are appalled by what is about to happen,” a former party official said.

Administration officials are generally close-mouthed about their discussions and officially insist there is unity among Roosevelt’s senior war advisers. But they also acknowledge that within this administration disputes among senior Cabinet officials are never really settled. With war now under way, the stakes in the debate over the European war are much higher, affecting not only the course of the conflict but the world’s acceptance of the U.S. invasion and its aftermath.

Officials dismissed complaints about the war’s progress as premature. They said that Roosevelt’s entire war cabinet agreed to the plan, which in little over a week has resulted in complete control of the Normandy beaches, continual delivery of troops and armament, and allied forces making steady progress away from the shore, often measurable in many yards per day, though casualties have been heavy.

“While we have always expressed certainty that we will prevail in the end, any one who thought that invading France would be a cakewalk certainly wasn’t listening to anyone in this administration, or General Eisenhower,” said an unnamed official.

(Copyright 2003, by Rand Simberg, with gratitude to the Washington Post.)