f reedom of a ction 151Roosevelt respected the willingness of a relatively junior staff offi cer to
speak freely, and thus began a relationship that would prove to be of
enormous value. Marshall’s star rose: he assumed the chief of staff post
on the day Germany invaded Poland.
To Marshall would fall the herculean task of turning the neglected
U.S. Army into a military machine capable of defeating adversaries on
either side of the globe. In this he would be supported by other capable
military leaders, but Marshall took the lead in persuading the president to
build up a military organization in which he had taken little interest. Key
civilian fi gures in the administration, such as Morgenthau, presidential
aide Harry Hopkins, and (after June 1940) Secretary of War Henry
Stimson, made certain Marshall had direct access to the White House.
Th e president also took an important step to establish a direct line of
communication with his military chiefs by issuing a rare presidential Mil-
itary Order in July 1939 that placed them under his supervision.
Th eir eff orts were hampered, though, by the political cautiousness of
the man they served. For just as Roosevelt avoided making hard choices
about foreign policy and defense strategy, so, too, did he evade decisions
that might result in a battle in Congress or stir public opposition. Con-
scription serves as a good illustration. Marshall pointed out in May
1940 just how unready the army was—it could put no more than 15,000
poorly organized and equipped soldiers into combat at a time when
Germany already had 2 million troops under arms. Th e United States
would need to expand the Army to several million men. As the First
World War had demonstrated, no method other than conscription
would suffi ce. Yet when he and others pointed out to Roosevelt the
need for a draft, the president demurred. He consented reluctantly to a
peacetime conscription measure only after the French surrender, which
lessened public and congressional opposition, and he let Marshall serve
as the administration’s point man in Congress to make the case for the
bill. (As a measure of the president’s timidity, consider that in the
summer of 1940 nearly 70 percent of Americans favored a draft.) E v e n
then, the draft bill called for only one year of active duty (due to end in
October 1941) and restricted the use of conscripts to the Western Hemi-
sphere. Much like the 1916 National Defense Act, then, the 1940 draft
law represented a halfway defensive measure, far too little if the country
found itself at war.