Abstract
So much for the old canard that President Franklin Roosevelt had no foreign policy and merely reacted to day-by-day events. By his own admission he was disingenuous, deceptive and devious. Unfortunately — or perhaps fortunately for those of us who have made a career and a living out of studying the sly squire of Hyde Park — Roosevelt did not then go on to describe just what those inconsistent and diametrically opposite policies really were. All we can do is take him at his word since, in this instance, he had no idea that historians would ever know what he said.2 What is clear from the President’s self-analysis of his own foreign policy methodology is that consistency can be discerned only if we concentrate on long-term, broad issues.
‘You know I am a juggler, and I never let my right hand know what my left hand does … I may have one policy for Europe and one diametrically opposite for North and South America. I may be entirely inconsistent, and furthermore I am perfectly willing to mislead and tell untruths if it will help win the war.’—Franklin D. Roosevelt, May 19421
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Notes and References
Roosevelt quoting himself speaking to a special study group on Latin America; memorandum of a conversation between Roosevelt and Morgenthau, 15 May 1942, Presidential Diary, p. 1093, Henry Morgenthau Jr. papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library (FDRL), Hyde Park, NY.
On this matter of keeping an historical record, Roosevelt vociferously opposed keeping written accounts of policy deliberations. In 1934, for example, he refused to let Henry Morgenthau’s personal secretary take notes at Cabinet meetings; in 1943 he rejected Churchill’s proposal to publish the minutes of the Council of Four meetings from 1919 with the comment that ‘no notes should have been kept’. Roosevelt to Hull, 16 September 1943, US Dept. of State, Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) (Washington: USGPO, 1865-), Conferences at Washington & Quebec, 1943, p. 1338n. Warren F. Kimball, ‘The Most Unsordid Act’ Lend-Lease, 1939–1941 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969) p. 4.
Jerald A. Combs, The History of American Foreign Policy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986) pp. 293, 315.
That this scholar was the Director of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Dr William Emerson, only heightens the point.
Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain and the War against Japan, 1941–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); David Reynolds, The Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance, 1937–1941: A Study in Competitive Competition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); D.C. Watt, Succeeding John Bull: America in Britain’s Place (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Lloyd C. Gardner, A Covenant With Power: America and World Order from Wilson to Reagan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Wm. Roger Louis, Imperialism At Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 1941–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). For other entries into the lists see Combs, American Foreign Policy, pp. 293, 315.
Bradford Perkins, Castlereagh and Adams: England and the United States, 1812–1823 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), is the best study of the American actions and reactions at the peace talks at Ghent.
In fact, that command structure, which would have been impossible without broad political agreement, is unique in modern military annals. See Warren F. Kimball (ed.) Churchill & Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence (3 vols.; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984) I, p. 9, especially Note 16.
See, for example, the arguments presented by John L. Gaddis, ‘The Long Peace: Elements of Stability in the Postwar International System’, International Security, 10, no. 4 (Spring 1986) 111–12.
See David Reynolds, The Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance, esp. Chapter 1.
As quoted in R.R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution, vol. I, The Challenge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959) p. 239.
Kimball, Churchill & Roosevelt, I, R-2x. See also C-4x and C-8x, and Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm (Boston Houghton Mifflin, 1948) pp. 529–30.
The German map can be found in the President’s Secretary’s File (PSF), Safe: Germany (FDRL). The FBI map is from a report of March 1942, Harry L. Hopkins papers, box 144 (FDRL). The exaggerated nature of American fears is discussed in Watt, Succeeding John Bull, pp. 78–79, 91. The origins of the German map are discussed in Stanley E. Hilton, Hitler’s Secret War in South America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981) p. 204.
Woodward, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War, vol. IV (London: HMSO, 1975) Chapter XLIX. Halifax as quoted in Bryce Wood, Dismantling the Good Neighbor Policy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985) p. 72. This is also the testimony of Sir Evelyn Shuckburgh who was in the British Embassy in Buenos Aires during much of World War II; remarks by Sir Evelyn Shuckburgh at the ‘Argentina Between the Great Powers, 1939–1946’ conference, St Antony’s College, Oxford, 3–5 July 1986.
Kimball, Churchill & Roosevelt, III, R-579.
Ibid., R-651, p. 397.
Ibid., C-832.
Cherwell to Churchill in Halifax to the Foreign Office, 29 October 1944. FO 954 (Eden papers)/14B, LA/44/37, p. 525, Public Record Office (PRO) Kew, England.
See, for example, Damonte Taborda to Sumner Welles, 6 February 1942, PSF-Welles 1942, box 96 (FDRL).
Morgenthau, Presidential Diary, 14 October 1939, p. 0352.
Those arguments are summarised by Bryce Wood, Dismantling the Good Neighbor Policy, and with some intensity in Randall Bennet Woods, The Roosevelt Foreign-Policy Establishment and the ‘Good Neighbor’: The United States and Argentina, 1941–1945 (Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1979).
The US economic counsellor in Buenos Aires, 1942–1944, Merwyn K. Bohan, said in 1974 that he felt ‘Mr Roosevelt more or less gave Argentina to Mr Hull to play with, to keep him out of his hair’. Oral interview, Harry S. Truman Library, as quoted by Ronald C. Newton, ‘Disorderly Succession: Great Britain, the United States, and the “Nazi Menace” in Argentina, 1938–1947’, see Chapter 6 in this volume.
This liberal credo for Latin America is seen quite clearly in the statement made by US representatives at the Buenos Aires conference in 1936. Hull’s thinking is discussed in Arthur W. Schatz, ‘The Anglo-American Trade Agreement and Cordell Hull’s Search for Peace, 1936–1938’, Journal of American History, 57, no. 1 (1970) pp. 85–103. A good example of the limits of Roosevelt’s liberalism is in his relations with the Gover6nment of Panama. See John Major ‘F.D.R. and Panama’, The Historical Journal, 28, no. 2 (1985) pp. 357–77. The role of Brazil is fully and persuasively discussed by Stanley E. Hilton in chapter 8 of this book. All this must be read in the light of the reports that flowed in constantly, particularly from the FBI, indicating that Argentina looked to Japan, Germany, and anywhere but Washington for friends and advice. See for example, J. Edgar Hoover to Harry Hopkins, 11 February 1944, Hopkins papers, box 140-Special Assistant to the President, ‘FBI Reports: Argentina’ (FDRL).
Kimball, Churchill & Roosevelt, II, C-297/1, pp. 222ff., and III, C-631.
Hull to Roosevelt, 17 June 1944, FRUS, 1944, V, pp. 124–25.
Hull to Roosevelt 13 September 1944, FRUS, Conf. at Quebec, 1944, p. 395.
A quick glance at either Cordell Hull’s memoirs or the various books by Sumner Welles demonstrates American preoccupation with its leadership role in the western hemisphere. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1948); Welles, Seven Decisions That Shaped History (New York: Harper’s, 1951) and Where Are We Heading? (New York: Harper’s, 1946).
Such complaints were expressed frequently and with some fervour, but seem to have had no appreciable effect on Anglo-American relations at the time. In addition to citations in B. Wood, Dismantling of the Good Neighbor Policy, and Lloyd C. Gardner, Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964) pp. 212–13, Noel Fursman of Oxford University has been kind enough to provide a number of additional examples from the British Public Record Office files. In each of the following documents, the drafter believed that the Americans were deliberately using the war to gain economic advantage: Reading (Min. of Economic Warfare) to Lyal (Dept. of Overseas Trade), 31/5/43, A55098/PRO 33901; Bonham Carter (Min. of Information) to Gallop (Foreign Office), 22/2/43, AS 1960/PRO 33903; Kelly (Amb. in Buenos Aires) to Foreign Office, 19/2/43, AS 2855/33907.
The differences, if there are any, between Churchill’s concept of postwar spheres of influence and Roosevelt’s regionalism — spheres of leadership — is a subject for another paper.
B.J.V. Perowne as quoted in B. Wood, Dismantling of the Good Neighbor Policy, pp. 96–97.
UE 813/PRO 45694. I am once again indebted to Noel Fursman for this citation.
Perhaps the word rivalry is applicable at the local level, but a reading of Churchill-Roosevelt exchanges on Latin America indicates that it was not so at the level of high policy. See index entries under Latin America and Argentina in Kimball, Churchill & Roosevelt. The most recent study of the broad issue of Anglo-American rivalry in the Second World War, D.C. Watt’s Succeeding John Bull, has no separate chapter or section devoted to Latin America, and properly so.
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© 1989 Guido di Tella and D. Cameron Watt
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Kimball, W.F. (1989). ‘The Juggler’: Franklin D. Roosevelt and Anglo-American Competition in Latin America. In: di Tella, G., Watt, D.C. (eds) Argentina between the Great Powers, 1939–46. St Antony’s/Macmillan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10977-7_2
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