Technology Day 1995 - "War, Technology, Peace and Change"

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GRAY: Good morning.

[APPLAUSE]

I'm Paul Gray, chairman of the Institute's governing board, and it is my privilege and pleasure to welcome all of you to this 1995 Technology Day. Before I begin the introductions, however, there's a question I want to put to all of you, or at least to all of you who were at Symphony Hall last night. Wasn't that an evening, huh?

[APPLAUSE]

We have displayed here on the stage, or we had a moment ago, the photographs of Jay Stratton and Jerry Wiesner. And you will have noticed that this Technology Day program is dedicated to the memory of Jay and Jerry, both of whom passed away in this last year, and both of whom were deeply involved throughout their lives with MIT, and in particular with that effort that is the focus of our activities this morning, the Second World War at this institution. And it seemed appropriate for the committee to make that dedication.

The Technology Day program this morning focuses on World War II and MIT. The Institute played important roles in the war effort, and it was profoundly and irreversibly changed by the war, as was the whole fabric of American society. In this morning's program, 50 years, give or take a month or two, from the end of the war, we reflect on the origins of that conflict, on the Institute during the war years, and on the continuing influence of the World War II experience on society, on this nation's universities, and on this special place.

Our principal and keynote speaker this morning is a distinguished biographer and historian whose work has illuminated the American political scene in the 20th century. Doris Kearns Goodwin earned her PhD in government at Harvard, where she was a Woodrow Wilson fellow, and where she served as professor of government for 10 years. In the 1960s, she served as assistant to President Lyndon Johnson, whom she assisted in the preparation of his memoirs.

In the last 18 years, she has published three important, highly acclaimed big books, each of which became a bestseller. In 1976, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. In 1987, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. And most recently, in 1994, No Ordinary Time-- Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, the American Home Front During World War II. For this most recent book, she was awarded just a few months ago the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for history.

Dr. Goodwin appears frequently in public affairs programs on television, and has made appearances in documentaries for PBS concerning LBJ, the Kennedy family, FDR, and, as a measure of her breadth, Ken Burns' series on the history of baseball.

[LAUGHTER]

Dr. Goodwin is eminently qualified to put World War II in perspective for us at the outset of this morning's program. Please join me in welcoming Doris Kearns Goodwin to MIT.

[APPLAUSE]

GOODWIN: Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

Let me say before I begin that it has been my great privilege in these last few months to have two loves of mine come together at the same time. First, more obviously, my love of baseball, reflected in this 18-hour history of baseball that Ken Burns put on the air where he needed an irrational female fan, so he kept showing me over and over again, so that when my book on Franklin and Eleanor came out at the same time, embarrassingly, it took me more years to write the book than it took the war about which it was written to be fought. It did finally come out at the same time, but more people have asked me about baseball than about Franklin and Eleanor as I've wandered around the country.

However, these two loves are not really as separate as they might seem, for I often root my love of history to the day when my father bought me my first big red score book when I was only six years old, and taught me that mysterious and wonderful art of keeping score play by play, inning by inning while he was at work during the day so that, when he came home at night, I could record for him the history of that day's Brooklyn Dodgers game.

And when you're only six or seven and your father thinks you're doing OK as an historian, it's a great impetus to do it later in life. He made it even more magical for me, for he never told me that all of this was actually described in the newspapers the next day. So I thought, without me, he would never know what happened to our beloved Brooklyn Dodgers.

But to the main story at hand, it seems to me that the story of the homefront in World War II is really the story of the transformation of a nation, a nation whose economy in 1939 and 1940 was still paralyzed in depression, with 17% unemployment, a nation in which only one out of four Americans graduated from high school, one in 20 completed college, in which the average worker earned less than $1,000 a year and the majority of citizens lived in small towns stratified along class and ethnic lines.

It is the story of an army which, in 1940, stood only 18th in the world, trailing not only Germany, Britain, and France, but also Belgium, Spain, and Holland, of a military establishment that possessed only 400 combat planes, a mere one-day supply in the current European war, and almost no modern tanks, weapons, or guns.

And yet, following the fall of Western Europe to Nazi Germany, and then the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt was able to mobilize the American people to work together for a common cause against a common enemy, forging an unparalleled partnership between government and business, which provided generous loans and incentives to build new factories to produce the weapons and the planes and the tanks, which stimulated 15 million Americans to leave their hometowns and to congregate where the war plants were in the north and in the west, so that somehow, one year after Pearl Harbor, this democracy was so mobilized that America had not only caught up to Nazi Germany, but was outproducing also the Axis powers combined and all the Allied powers combined, so that our weapons were being used by our allies in all the corners of the world.

It is also the story of the forgotten years of the civil rights revolution, a watershed experience in which the seeds of the protest movements of the succeeding decades were sown. And it is the story of more than 19 million women who poured into factory jobs during the war previously held by men, performing beyond everyone's expectations as truck drivers, welders, riveters, and stevedores, creating new expectations and new problems that would ultimately set the stage for the women's movement in the decades ahead. And it is the story of the GI Bill of Rights, which carried more than two million veterans into college after the war, so much so that 50% of the college enrollment was veterans in the late '40s, transforming higher education, research institutions, and lifting the educational horizons of an entire generation.

It is this story I wish to tell you today, using as my vehicle the remarkable relationship between Franklin Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor, during the war, hoping that this personal narrative will bring you the larger story of the homefront and bring it to life. Let me say at the outset that, if I have to point to one quality of Franklin Roosevelt's that made and shaped his leadership of the homefront during the war, it would be his absolute confidence in himself, in his country, and in the democratic system of government.

Even in the grimmest days of 1940, after France fell to Germany and England stood alone, Roosevelt had absolutely no doubt that, once the dormant energies of democracy were mobilized, the US would fully meet the German threat, that the uncoerced energy of a free people would inevitably outperform a totalitarian regime. It was this confidence that allowed him to ship our limited supplies to England when England stood alone against Germany, and it was this confidence that allowed him to invest more than $2 billion in a theoretical enterprise to build the atomic bomb.

And more importantly, he was able to communicate his confidence and faith to the American people, helping to energize a massive shift to a wartime economy, and helping to bring about the commitment of the American citizens to working three shifts, 24 hours a day, to produce the unimaginable quantities of weapons that eventually did win the war.

He helped to create the dedication of scientists and researchers and universities like this to produce the groundbreaking discoveries that improved radar, created large-scale production of penicillin, developed plasma, proximity fuses, and the jet engines. His strength came, in my judgment, in leading the people step by step, never getting too far ahead of them, but always moving them forward little by little toward his goals.

And in shaping public opinion, he understood intuitively the importance of rationing his appearances, something our current political leaders seem not to have understood, in order to guarantee and guard the dignity of the office and to ensure that each appearance has a dramatic effect. Thus, he limited his celebrated fireside chats to only two or three a year, only 30 in the entire 12 years of his presidency.

And the result was, as Saul Bellow describes in a recent memoir, he would describe walking down a Chicago street in the middle of the war when one of Roosevelt's rare fireside chats was on the air. He said that every single car had pulled over to the curb to listen, every single house had it on, and you could see inside the windows people sitting in their living rooms, in their kitchen with their radios before them.

He said that it was such a moment that you felt not only connected to Roosevelt's voice, and he said you could keep walking down the street and not miss a word of what he was saying because everyone was listening, but you felt connected to everyone else in the country because you realized they, too, were experiencing that same moment. And when a leader is able to create that sense of connection between the fellow Americans, it's probably the greatest strength that leader has.

I think my favorite Roosevelt fireside chat took place in February of 1942, when we were at one of the lowest depths of the war, several months after Pearl Harbor, losing battles in the Pacific. He asked everyone in the country before he gave his address to get a map out so that they could follow the progress of the war in this far-flung place. Well, suddenly, there was this huge run on maps all across the country, so much so that the New York Times interviewed the guy who ran C.S. Hammond's map store in New York. And he had been there for 25 years. He said he had never sold so many maps in his whole time that he was there. And then he added this wonderful comment, he said, even my wife of 25 years, who hates maps, asked me to bring a map home.

So then I started thinking, what kind of a marriage did these two people have? This is when you go off the track as a biographer. But nevertheless, she's sitting there at the kitchen table like everyone else, listening to Roosevelt talk very soberly about why it will take many months before the tide of the war will turn, explaining to them what the battles are that are going on in the Pacific.

But then he calls on American history to give strength and confidence to the American people. He recalls what it was like for Washington in the winters at Valley Forge, what it was like for the pioneers going over the Rocky Mountains, what it was like in the early days of the Civil War. And he's so certain that democracy will win out over the totalitarian powers that his speech produces thousands of telegrams at the end, telling him that he has to go on the air every day. It's the only way morale will be sustained. But he writes back saying, intuitively understanding, if my speeches ever become routine, they will lose their effectiveness. So he understood that prestige and that majesty, in a sense, of the presidency, and how to time his appearances when they were absolutely necessary.

Indeed, Winston Churchill, the incomparable leader himself of England, fully comprehended the importance of Roosevelt's confidence in mobilizing his people. Churchill once said to encounter Roosevelt for the first time, with all his buoyant sparkle, his iridescent personality, and his sublime confidence was like opening your first bottle of champagne.

Now, this was an extraordinary comment coming from a man long accustomed himself to being the center of attention, but Churchill had come to know and admire Roosevelt greatly, having spent weeks and even months at a time actually living in the White House, spending his time in a room diagonally across from Roosevelt's bedroom, bringing his valets, his stewards, and his habits with him, which included starting to drink early in the morning wine, moving to Scotch and whiskey in the middle of the day and the afternoon, and ending up at brandy before he went to bed at night, and somehow saving England in the process of all this.

He indeed became part of an intimate circle of friends who lived in those small family quarters of the White House with the Roosevelts during the war, including Franklin's secretary, Missy LeHand, who really was, in many ways, his other wife when Eleanor traveled, Franklin's closest advisor and friend, Harry Hopkins, who occupied a bedroom right next to his, Eleanor's closest friend, Lorena Hickok, who helped her to become the First Lady that she was, and lived in a bedroom next to Eleanor's study, Franklin's mother, Sarah, who occupied the best guest suite whenever she arrived, and of course Winston Churchill.

I found myself so intrigued by all these wonderful characters living in such close quarters that I kept imagining the fabulous conversations they must have had at night, and wished so often that I could just see those family quarters, to picture who had lived where 50 years ago. I happened to mention this on a radio program in Washington one night, which Hillary Clinton heard. So she called me up at the radio station and invited me to sleep overnight in the White House so that we could figure out where everybody had slept 50 years ago.

So I had this wonderful night in the White House where, after a state dinner, my husband and I wandered through the rooms with President and Mrs. Clinton, and figured out every single place where everyone had been. And the best part of all was that we realized we were staying in Winston Churchill's bedroom. So there was no way I could sleep that night. I just kept picturing Winston Churchill behind me the whole time.

In fact, one of my favorite stories of the war took place in that very bedroom. In January of 1942, when Churchill was staying there, he and Roosevelt were set to sign a document later that afternoon putting the associated nations, 23 of them, against the Axis powers. But no one liked the word associated nations because it had no rhythm or ring. So early that morning, Roosevelt came up with the idea that he was so excited about to call themselves United Nations, which of course it became.

So he had himself wheeled into Churchill's bedroom to tell him the news, but Churchill had just stepped forth from the tub with absolutely nothing on. So Roosevelt said, I'm so sorry, I'll come back in a few minutes. But Churchill, with that amazing ability to speak spontaneously, said, oh, no, the prime minister of Great Britain has nothing to hide from the president of the United States.

[LAUGHTER]

[APPLAUSE]

So somehow, while Roosevelt describes United Nations, Churchill thinks it's a great idea. He then quotes in full memory from a poem by Lord Byron where the term United Nations was used. So whenever I got into the tub that night, then Churchill was really there.

[LAUGHTER]

Indeed, I believe through all the turmoil of the worst days of the war, a central quality of Roosevelt's character was his capacity to relax with his friends and associates, to cast off his worries and simply enjoy himself, thus replenishing his energies to face the struggles of the following day. Every night, he had the same ritual. He had a cocktail hour with his associates on that second floor, and the rule was you were not allowed to talk about politics. You could talk gossip, you could tell who was involved with whom, you could discuss movies and Hollywood, anything but politics.

When Eleanor was away, his secretary Missy LeHand presided. She listened adoringly to the same old stories and jokes he liked to tell over and over again. When Eleanor did come, she somehow couldn't help herself but bring up slum clearance or civil rights, but most of the time the rules prevailed. And then if he were anxious during the day, Missy would arrange a poker game at night with his cabinet, which he loved to relax, and could again forget the cares of state.

One of my favorite stories is he had an annual poker game on the night that Congress was set to adjourn. And the rule was that whenever the Speaker of the House called to say they were adjourning, whoever was ahead at that moment would win the poker game. On one particular night, he was playing with Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau and several others. And at 9:30, when the Speaker called to say they were adjourning, Morgenthau that was way, way ahead of Roosevelt, so Roosevelt took the phone and just pretended it was someone else on the phone.

So they kept playing, and they kept playing, until midnight when finally Roosevelt pulled ahead, so he asked the aide to bring him the phone immediately. Oh, Mr. Speaker, you're adjourning, that's fine. He brings all the chips, he wins all the money. Everything's great until the next morning, when Morgenthau reads in the newspaper that the Congress had adjourned at 9:30. They said that he was so angry that he actually resigned his post as cabinet member until, of course, Roosevelt cajoled him into staying.

Roosevelt was also able to relax with movies. He loved adventure movies and mystery movies. Again, when Eleanor did choose the movies, it would somehow become The Grapes of Wrath or a documentary on civil rights. And he could relax on long fishing trips in the middle of the war, 10-day fishing trips when he could be out of touch with people. It was on one of these fishing trips, in fact, when, in the midst of Britain's financial crisis, through the solitude and the time, his creative juices came to fruition, and he was able to come up with a brilliant idea of Lend-Lease.

And then, from his home in Hyde Park, where he went 200 times during his presidency, he received the enormous solace of just remembering a root, a place where he had known since he was a child, all of which allowed him, I think, to make the presidency not a burden, as so many other leaders have found it, but rather a continual source of vitality.

And even more importantly, in some ways, this peace, this equanimity that he felt within himself freed up resources, psychic resources, that allowed him to be extremely receptive to the needs of others. He had, the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin once suggested, an exceptionally sensitive awareness, conscious or subconscious, of the desires, the hopes, the fears, the loves, the hatreds of the human beings who composed his democracy. This uncanny awareness, Berlin argued, was the source of Roosevelt's genius. It was almost as if the inner currents, the tremors of human society were registering themselves within his nervous system with a kind of seismological accuracy.

Now, where this uncanny knowledge came from is partly a mystery. As a child, his mother, Sarah, claimed Roosevelt was remarkably intuitive, able to anticipate the desires of his parents even before he was told what to do, able to sense the tensions in the family when his father became an invalid, knowing exactly how to respond. Then, too, his bout with polio undoubtedly made him even more aware of what other people were thinking and feeling, ever determined to make sure that no one felt pity for him.

The polio produced a plowing up of his nature, Frances Perkins, his Labor Secretary, once said. He became much more patient, more tolerant, more warm-hearted, more empathetic to others for whom fate had also dealt an unkind hand. But I think Franklin Roosevelt would be the first to admit that, beyond his intuition and beyond his experience of polio, his extraordinary knowledge of the hopes and the fears and the needs of the American people came as a result of his wife Eleanor's remarkable ramblings around the country, for she was, as he said over and over again after his polio, his eyes and his ears.

Their partnership was indeed unparalleled. She was the first First Lady to travel the country from one end to the other, serving as a voice for people without power, for poor, for migrant workers, for blacks, for women, the first to testify before a congressional committee, the first to write a syndicated column, and the first to hold regular press conferences where she made a simple rule that only female reporters could cover her press conferences, which meant that every newspaper in the country had to hire usually its first female reporter.

[LAUGHTER]

[APPLAUSE]

Now, this partnership was all the more remarkable when one realizes that it was born in the pain of Eleanor's discovery in 1918 that Franklin was having an affair with a young woman named Lucy Mercer. When Eleanor came upon a packet of love letters Lucy had written to her husband, she said that the bottom dropped out of her world. She offered him a divorce at once, but after long discussions, they agreed to stay together. He promised he would never see Lucy Mercer again. And more importantly, this catastrophe in their married life reconstituted the marriage, giving Eleanor the freedom to go outside the marriage to find fulfillment.

She became involved in teaching and settlement housework. She got close to a group of women activists who taught her that she had a whole range of talent she had never known before, for public speaking, for organizing, for articulating a cause. And then her activism became critical when he contracted polio three years later and had to spend weeks and months at a time at Warm Springs, Georgia, desperately trying to walk on his own power again.

She kept his political hopes alive by going from one meeting to the other so that, when he came back and won the governorship, she was there. And then when he became president, her travels multiplied. She traveled 200 days a year, so much so that the Washington Post once had a headline, "Eleanor spends night in White House," exclamation point. Visiting southern blacks, migrant workers, CCC camps, bringing him back an honest appraisal of which of his programs were working and which were failing, the kind of evaluation that leaders rarely get.

Then the war came along and threatened this partnership, which had worked so brilliantly during the Depression, for now the president was spending more and more time with military men, with businessmen, with conservatives, with southern congressmen, and Eleanor felt that she had lost her partner, and in so doing lost her sense of self.

She cycled into one of her periodic depressions, coming out of it only when she realized there was still a critical fight to be fought to try and make the war a vehicle for social reform at home so that, when the soldiers came home at the end of the war, the country would be a more socially just place. It meant she had to become an agitator, often working at cross purposes with her husband, for his sole concern was to win the war. She had to be relentless, often a pest, but he understood the importance of what she was pushing him to do, and his presidency was immeasurably enriched as a result.

Nowhere was her influence greater than on civil rights. At the start of the war, blacks were openly discriminated against in the factories. But through the combination of A. Philip Randolph threatening a march on Washington and Eleanor's negotiations, Franklin Roosevelt agreed to create the first Fair Employment Practice Commission with sanctions to force companies to open their doors to blacks. And by the end of the war, more than two million blacks had jobs at all levels of skills in factories they never would have had before.

I was able to interview one of these men, who became the first black motorman in the Philadelphia mass transit system. And he told me he had scored 95 on the test, and he was so excited his first morning on the job he got to the station, to the bus station, early, but there were no buses running, no trolleys, no trains, no subways. He didn't know what had happened. He went home to discover that the 10,000 white workers had all gone on strike because he, the first black man, was coming to work that day.

So the strike went on for four days, paralyzing Philadelphia's war production system, until finally Roosevelt took decisive action. He issued a very simple statement. He told the striking workers, if they did not come back to work on Monday, they would all be drafted on Tuesday morning. They came back to work. And on Tuesday morning, William Barber became the first black motorman in Philadelphia.

So, too, in the military. Whereas at the start of the war blacks were serving in the lowest level jobs in the Army and the Navy, by the end, through the combination of the growing civil rights movement and Eleanor's agitation, they were serving in every branch of the Army and Navy, as pilots, tank men, doctors, paratroopers, and the number of black officers had grown from five in 1940 to over 7,000 in 1945.

It took so many memos on Eleanor's part on civil rights to poor General Marshall in the War Department, who was trying to create an army, that he finally had to create a separate general just to deal with Eleanor Roosevelt's communications. But her pressure worked. And in many ways, it seems to me that her contributions on civil rights are some of the most affirming moments in the history of the homefront.

But she was also far ahead of her time in championing the movement of women into the factories during the war. Through her speeches and her columns, she countered the early resistance on the part of factory owners to employing women. They never thought the women could operate these complicated machines. They thought women would disrupt the camaraderie at the factory. But once more and more men went off to the war, they had to turn to women. And eventually, by the middle of the war, 50% and 60% of the shipyards and the factories that were making the planes, the jobs were held by women.

And the amazing thing was the productivity went way up. So these factory owners had to do a big study to figure out how it had happened that women had been able to learn to operate these complicated machines. And I love the answer that came back on one of the studies. They said it was very simple. When a woman was asked to operate a new piece of machinery, unlike a man, she would ask directions.

[LAUGHTER]

[APPLAUSE]

I think any of us who have ever driven endlessly around without directions being asked know what that's about. Well then, once Eleanor saw the importance of women to the war effort, it was she who convinced government and business to create a full-fledged partnership to create daycare centers operating 24 hours a day, almost like a Head Start program for the children during that period of time. They worked out a situation where, if you worked a day shift, a hot meal was waiting for you at the end of the day to bring home to your family, all of which allowed that productivity to continue unmatched, and was an example of the unparalleled partnership of Franklin and Eleanor.

Now, to be sure, Roosevelt's sensitive antennae, in part helped by Eleanor, produced occasional problems. So skillful was he in sensing what other people wanted him to say that he often made people feel he was agreeing with them and what they were saying when he really wasn't agreeing at all. Perhaps in the long run, one disillusioned aide said fewer friends would have been lost by bluntness than by the misunderstandings that arose from his engaging and charming ambiguity.

Moreover, so desirous was he of making other people like him that he was unable to fire anyone, neither his isolationist Secretary of War Henry Woodring until the crisis finally occurred in Western Europe, nor his drunken valet who was supposed to help him every morning out of bed into the bathroom, nor the dramatic housekeeper who refused to prepare the meals for him that he liked, saying that she knew better what was good for him.

One must also concede more serious failures of perception and vision that led to his forcible relocation of the Japanese-Americans and the lack of a more decisive response to the extermination of the European Jews. And yet, in the end, I believe Roosevelt's strengths far outweighed his weaknesses. Despite clashing interests and disparate goals, he kept the American people moving forward together through the two greatest crises of this century, first the Depression, and then the war. And always he kept his strength on the side of freedom and his trust in the uncoerced energy of the ordinary citizen.

Through the whole of Franklin's career, Eleanor once said, despite maneuvering and flexibility and some deviousness, there was never any deviation from his original objective to make life better for the average man, woman, and child. Indeed, it was Eleanor's abiding love and deep respect for Roosevelt's great strengths as a leader that allowed her, in the months after his death, to come to terms with the deep hurts in their personal relationship.

During the war, Roosevelt had suffered a series of losses. His secretary, Missy LeHand, though she was only in her early 40s, suffered a devastating stroke, and was never able to speak intelligibly again. Three months later, his mother, Sarah, died at Hyde Park. At that point, he turned to Eleanor and asked her essentially to stay home and stop traveling. He needed her even more as a companion than as a political partner.

It's one of those moments when, as a biographer, you want to reach back in time and say, Eleanor, just do it. I know that you love him and I know he loves you, and I know he won't live much longer. But I understand fully why she couldn't make that commitment. She'd been so hurt so many years before, and had built up slowly a sense of herself in the outside world that she couldn't give up.

So she started traveling more and more, and in his loneliness, he finally brought their eldest daughter, Anna, in to take Missy's place as his hostess in the White House when Eleanor was away. It became complicated for, when Eleanor would return from her trips, sometimes she would feel displaced by her own daughter, with whom she'd been very close. She had confided in Anna early on the story of Lucy Mercer, and Anna had strongly taken her mother's side. But now, in many ways, Anna was now becoming her father's daughter.

Everything got more complicated in that last year of Roosevelt's life, when, in spring of 1944, he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. He was sent to Bernard [? Baruch's ?] plantation to recuperate for a month, and it was there essentially that he saw Lucy Mercer for the first time since 1918. She'd married a very wealthy older man named Winthrop Rutherfurd, lived in South Carolina not far from [? Baruch's ?] plantation, and Rutherfurd had just died several months before that.

I'm convinced that, in seeing Lucy at this point, it was simply a friendship in his life. It may have rekindled him a memory of what it was like when he was young, before his polio, a memory of what it was like when his body was strong, before the heart disease that was now deteriorating him day by day. But he didn't trust that Eleanor would understand that it was simply a friendship, and must have remembered the pledge that he had made so many years before.

So he realized the only way he could see Lucy regularly would be to have her come to the White House when Eleanor was away. And the only person he trusted with that delicate task was his daughter, Anna. You can imagine the dilemma that Anna found herself in, knowing what it would mean to her mother if she ever found out. But Anna could see that her father was dying in a way that Eleanor never did, and as a result Anna made the decision to allow Lucy to come to the White House six times in that last year of Roosevelt's life, always having dinner with Roosevelt.

And I've checked, and Eleanor was doing what she wanted to at that period of time. She was with women when they won awards for excellence in the factory, with civil rights leaders when the laws came down desegregating the [? PX's ?] in the Army camp. So it all might have worked out with no one being hurt but for the fact that Lucy happened to be in Warm Springs, Georgia when Franklin died.

She knew enough to leave, but when Eleanor flew down later that night, a spinster cousin who was there and always been jealous of Eleanor, always loved Franklin, when asked to describe what had happened in that last day, as you would do at a moment of death, told her that Lucy had been there. And even more, that Lucy had been at the White House many times that last year, and that her daughter Anna had been the one to make those visits possible.

I can't even imagine the dignity that Eleanor was able to muster within herself that allowed her to go with her husband's body on the famous train trip from Warm Springs to Washington DC, never letting the world know the hurt she must have been feeling inside. When she got to the White House, she confronted Anna. All that Anna could say was I didn't know what to do, I loved you both so much and felt caught in a crossfire. And Anna later said her mother was so angry with her that she was sure that their relationship had been destroyed forever.

But then, in the summer of 1945, after his death in April, something happened in Eleanor's heart, as she began traveling the country again. For everywhere she went, people-- porters, taxi drivers, elevator operators-- told her how much they loved her husband, how much better their lives were as a result of his leadership. Blacks shared with her a sense of the mastery of the jobs that they had felt, the pride and the courage they took in the battlefield. Women talked of the new independence they had found during the war, the pleasure and the sociability of the workplace, the feeling of accomplishment.

Though the factories were already firing women to make room for the returning men, though the daycare centers were being shut down unceremoniously as the war was drawing to a close, there had been a permanent shifting away from the women's consciousness, a powerful turning point in the history of women. Work had proved liberating, a new consciousness had been formed, and there would be no going back.

She talked to veterans who were going to college on the GI Bill of Rights, where, despite overcrowding in housing and classrooms, they were determined to make the most of their most extraordinary opportunity. She talked to laborers who took pride in the fact that unions were stronger at the end of the war than ever before, despite Roosevelt's partnership with business that had so worried Eleanor at the start of the war. She'd been fighting him on so many fronts during the war that she had lost sight of the larger picture, but now she realized that the war had indeed become a vehicle for social reform in more ways than she ever could have imagined.

The small-town America where people clung to their roots, immobilized within their ethnic and income class, had passed into history. Between the 50 million Americans who had moved to a different part of the country to find work and the 12 million more who entered the armed forces, more than 20% of the population had participated in what became known as the Great Migration. And the habit of mobility, which would prove both liberating and fragmenting, had become ingrained.

No segment of American society had been left untouched. More than 17 million new jobs had been created. Industrial production had gone up 100%. Corporate profits had doubled. And the GNP had jumped from 100 billion to 215 billion. The society of a few haves and a multitude of have nots had been transformed. A redistribution of income had produced a genuine middle class for the first time. Moreover, the pent-up demand, desire matched by money, would fuel a postwar boom that would expand that middle class still further.

And the American economy had not been merely revitalized, it had been altered. A revised social contract had been defined between government and the business community, a new partnership like the new partnership between the government and the universities that would alter the face of the country in the decades ahead.

As Eleanor began to absorb the extent of all these changes, she began to feel, she later said, in a somewhat romantic image, as if a giant transference of energy had taken place, that at the start of the war Roosevelt was strong and productive and vital, and the country was weak, unprepared, and isolationist. But by the end, through his projection of his energy onto the country, the country had gotten stronger and stronger, while he was drained of energy and got weaker and weaker. And finally, he had died, but the country had emerged stronger and more socially just than ever before.

As she listened to the emotion in the voices of all the people who talked with her about what he had done for them, she was able to reach within herself and to forgive him fully for resuming that friendship with Lucy in the last year of his life. And then, just as the war came to an end, after six long years of struggle, to go to her daughter Anna and forgive her, as well, affording a reconciliation between mother and daughter that re-established a close relationship between the two women that lasted for the rest of their lives.

So in conclusion, as I look at this complex story of the American homefront during the war, I can only say I feel empathy for both Franklin and Eleanor. I'm absolutely convinced they never meant to hurt one another. They were simply trying to get through their lives with the best possible mixture of respect and affection through friendship, work, and love. Sure, it is possible to look from the outside in, as the media would immediately do today, and accuse Roosevelt of infidelity for resuming his friendship with Lucy, accuse him perhaps even of harassment for his close relationship with his secretary Missy LeHand, and accuse the daughter Anna of betrayal of her mother.

But every one of those labels, in my judgment, would totally miss the mark of trying to understand the lives of these large individuals. For in the end, I believe the real challenge of history is to resist the tendency so prevalent today to label, to stereotype, to expose, to denigrate, and instead to bring common sense and empathy to our subjects so that the past can truly come alive, if only for a few moments, in all of its beauty, glory, sadness, and complexity. I thank you so very much.

[APPLAUSE]

GRAY: Doris, thank you so much for that wonderfully insightful portrait of America and of American leadership during the war. Your comments, particularly on the way in which the war and the leadership provided by the Roosevelts changed the social assumptions for blacks and women, I think are particularly important for us to understand. And I hope that many people, including many in the media, listen to your plea at the end to step away from the stereotypes and to express empathy and understanding for those in leadership positions in our nation.

One wonders what the world of 1995 would be like had not Franklin Roosevelt been in the White House in the 1940s, and had not Winston Churchill been at 10 Downing Street. I suspect, Doris, that, as there was a run on maps in February of 1942, there will soon be a run on No Ordinary Time in June of 1995.

[APPLAUSE]

I will now introduce the next four speakers, after which we will proceed without interruption or without further words from me. Because all four are familiar figures at the Institute, I shall be brief in these introductions.

Now, early publicity for this program, including particularly the poster that many of you have seen, indicated that Sheila E. Widnall, Secretary of the Air Force and professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, on leave, would be a participant. Unfortunately, the gnomes in the Pentagon concluded that her appearance would somehow constitute a conflict of interest. How that can be devised is beyond me, but in any case, Sheila had no choice but to withdraw. That withdrawal saddened her fully as much as it did all of us who were involved in planning this program.

Our next speaker, Robert C. Seamans Jr., has been associated with MIT for more than 50 years. He earned two degrees from the Institute, a master's degree in aeronautics in 1942 and an [? SCD, ?] a doctor of science, in instrumentation in 1951. During the next 40 years, he shuttled back and forth between Cambridge and Washington. I list just some of his activities in that time.

Deputy administrator of NASA during that key time in which NASA was so involved in the Apollo program. Hunsaker Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. Secretary of the Air Force. President of the National Academy of Engineering. First administrator of the Energy Research and Development Agency, which became later the Department of Energy. The [? Lutz ?] Professor of Environment and Public Policy at MIT. Dean of Engineering at MIT. And now, senior lecturer in Aeronautics and Astronautics here. Bob will speak from his personal experience about MIT during the war years.

Now, the speaker following Bob, who will comment on the ways in which the war influenced the Institute, deserves no introduction.

[LAUGHTER]

The third speaker--

[LAUGHTER]

--the third speaker is Lester C. Thurow, Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Professor of Management and Economics here, dean of the Sloan School of Management from 1987 to 1993, and, as Lester would put it, economics educator. Following his graduation from Williams College in 1960, Lester went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, and earned his PhD in economics at Harvard in 1964. After serving a term as a member of the staff of President Lyndon Johnson's Council of Economic Advisers, he taught at Harvard in economics, before coming to MIT to join our faculty in 1968.

Lester is a prolific author, and his four books have received very wide attention. His most recent book, Head to Head-- The Coming Economic Battle Among Japan, Europe, and America, published in 1992, describes what Americans must do to regain competitiveness in the world economy. Lester has been on leave from MIT this last year, and it would surprise me if there's not another book in the works. He writes a regular column for the Boston Globe. Lester will speak today about the economic impact of the war on American society.

Our fourth and final speaker is Charles Vest, who needs practically no introduction to this group of loyal alumni and friends. Chuck is a graduate in mechanical engineering from West Virginia University and the University of Michigan, where he served as Dean of Engineering and later as Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, before he was called to come to Cambridge in the summer of 1990 to assume the Institute's presidency. Chuck is the 15th president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He will reflect this morning on the future of relationships between the federal government and this nation's universities, relationships forged largely out of the cauldron of the war. It is now my pleasure to invite Bob Seamans to the lectern.

[APPLAUSE]

- Good morning.

- Good morning.

- While I move the podium up, I would like to say that I'm very much in debt to the MIT museum for going through reams and reams of cartons and notebooks and loose photographs in order to come up with the material that I'm going to use here this morning. I should also note that, when you look at these slides, they'll seem rather drab. And of course, you have to realize that, back in the early '40s, Kodachrome was not in wide use.

So now let me see if we can get a slide here. Good. This is MIT prior to World War II. Not too clear the campus. You won't be able to see it too clearly, so I'm going to take you on a walk around it. I will note that MIT started in Boston, so I'll proceed across the Mass Avenue Bridge. And as we come across Memorial Drive, we'll see the main building on the right. We'll see the Graduate House on the left, which is now [? Ashdown. ?] This is followed by the Coop. And then we come to Bexley Hall, then a very nondescript building that had such places in it as Walton's, where you could get somewhat of a luncheon for $0.82, and then the Armory. Directly across from the Armory was the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, building 33, which actually had open parking behind it.