Franklin And Winston Part 3

Like Churchill, Roosevelt sensed the making of a memorable chapter in history. In his speech accepting the Democratic nomination on July 19, 1940, Roosevelt said: In times like these-in times of great tension, of great crisis-the compa.s.s of the world narrows to a single fact. The fact which dominates our world is the fact of armed aggression, the fact of successful armed aggression, aimed at the form of Government, the kind of society that we in the United States have chosen and established for ourselves. It is a fact which no one longer doubts-which no one is longer able to ignore.

It is not an ordinary war. It is a revolution imposed by force of arms, which threatens all men everywhere. It is a revolution which proposes not to set men free but to reduce them to slavery-to reduce them to slavery in the interest of a dictators.h.i.+p which has already shown the nature and the extent of the advantage which it hopes to obtain.

That is the fact which dominates our world and which dominates the lives of all of us, each and every one of us. In the face of the danger which confronts our time, no individual retains or can hope to retain, the right of personal choice which free men enjoy in times of peace. He has a first obligation to serve in the defense of our inst.i.tutions of freedom-a first obligation to serve his country in whatever capacity his country finds him useful.

Like most men of my age, I had made plans for myself, plans for a private life of my own choice and for my own satisfaction, a life of that kind to begin in January, 1941. These plans, like so many other plans, had been made in a world which now seems as distant as another planet. Today all private plans, all private lives, have been in a sense repealed by an overriding public danger. In the face of that public danger all those who can be of service to the Republic have no choice but to offer themselves for service in those capacities for which they may be fitted.

Those, my friends, are the reasons why I have had to admit to myself, and now to state to you, that my conscience will not let me turn my back upon a call to service.

He and Churchill both thought in grand terms. "I think the greatest drive in Franklin's objectives in life was that he wanted to be remembered in history because he had an historical sense and he saw whatever he did in the framework of history," Eleanor said. Marquis Childs mused that Roosevelt had mastered the complexities of America's rise to world power with a kind of "feminine intuition," and now his intuition told him the country was ready to move toward engagement.

SIR WILLIAM WISEMAN, a friend of Walter Lippmann's, returned to Was.h.i.+ngton from a visit to London in midsummer and told Lippmann: "I think they'll resist. The morale is good. If they can see any light at the end of the tunnel, they'll resist. But if the tunnel is black all the way, no people can stand it, and only the Americans can provide that light."

In the last week of July, Churchill wrote Roosevelt for the first time in eight weeks.

It is some time since I ventured to cable personally to you, and many things both good and bad have happened in between. It has now become most urgent for you to give us the destroyers, motor-boats and flying-boats for which we have asked. The Germans have the whole French coastline from which to launch U-boats and dive-bomber attacks upon our trade and food, and in addition we must be constantly prepared to repel by sea action threatened invasion in the narrow waters. . . .

Latterly the Air attack on our s.h.i.+pping has become injurious. In the last ten days we have had the following destroyers sunk: Brazen, Codrington, Delight, Wren, and the following damaged: Beagle, Boreas, Brilliant, Griffin, Montrose, Walpole, total ten. All this in the advent of any attempt which may be made at invasion. Destroyers are frightfully vulnerable to Air bombing, and yet they must be held in the Air bombing area to prevent sea-borne invasion. We could not keep up the present rate of casualties for long, and if we cannot get a substantial reinforcement, the whole fate of the war may be decided by this minor and easily remediable factor. I cannot understand why, with the position as it is, you do not send me at least 50 or 60 of your oldest destroyers.

Then he laid it on the line. "Mr President," Churchill said, "with great respect I must tell you that in the long history of the world this is a thing to do now."

Like Churchill, Roosevelt was a student of the writings of Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan. Mahan argued that control of the seas was essential to a nation's capacity to project power-a lesson the British knew well, since the might of the Royal Navy had been a fundamental element in building their empire. Now Roosevelt wanted mastery of the sea, and British naval bases were key to controlling the Atlantic.

The United States would send the destroyers over in exchange for a promise that the Royal Navy would dispatch the fleet to North America if the Germans overran England and for ninety-nine-year leases for air and naval rights in the British West Indies, Newfoundland, and Bermuda. When Lippmann told Wiseman about the destroyer deal, Wiseman replied: "Well, that'll do it. It will give [them] something to go on with."

Churchill knew he was not getting the best of deals. "The President, having always to consider Congress and also the Navy authorities in the United States, was of course increasingly drawn to present the transaction to his fellow-countrymen as a highly advantageous bargain whereby immense securities were gained in these dangerous times by the United States in return for a few flotillas of obsolete destroyers," Churchill later wrote. "This was indeed true; but not exactly a convenient statement for me."

Churchill had no choice. "We intend to fight this out here to the end, and none of us would ever buy peace by surrendering or scuttling the fleet," he wrote Roosevelt on August 15. Then, with apparent resentment, he added: "But in any use you may make of this repeated a.s.surance you will please bear in mind the disastrous effect from our point of view, and perhaps also from yours, of allowing any impression to grow that we regard the conquest of the British Islands and its naval bases as any other than an impossible contingency. The spirit of our people is splendid."

THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT was not quite in tune with the mood Churchill had created in England. Roosevelt was thinking of darkness. Led by Churchill, the British were living in the light. Common dangers bind people together, if only for a short while. "Oddly enough, most of us were very happy in those days," wrote C. P. Snow of that English summer. "There was a kind of collective euphoria over the whole country. I don't know what we were thinking about. We were very busy. We had a purpose. We were living in constant excitement, usually, if we examined the true position, of an unpromising kind. In one's realistic moments, it was difficult to see what chance we had. But I doubt if most of us had many realistic moments, or thought much at all. We were working like mad. We were sustained by a surge of national emotion, of which Churchill was both symbol and essence, evocator and voice."

The practical politician in Roosevelt did not care how evocative Churchill was. He wanted the base leases to give himself domestic cover for sending the destroyers over. If America appeared to be getting the better end of the bargain, then Roosevelt could argue he was being shrewd, not sentimental-or stupid, since the war picture was still discouraging for the British. Confronted with a hostile Congress, Roosevelt took executive action and put the deal into effect-a brave political gamble so close to the November elections.

It was not exactly an even trade, and Churchill only grudgingly gave Roosevelt the a.s.surance the president wanted. "You ask, Mr President, whether my statement in Parliament on June 4th, 1940, about Great Britain never surrendering or scuttling her Fleet 'represents the settled policy of His Majesty's Government,' " Churchill wrote Roosevelt on the last day of August. "It certainly does. I must, however, observe that these hypothetical contingencies seem more likely to concern the German Fleet or what is left of it than our own."

Churchill was doing what he often did with an uncomfortable reality: He was recasting it in more attractive terms. "Thus all was happily settled," he later wrote. Churchill had, he recalled, tried "to place the transaction on the highest level, where indeed it had a right to stand, because it expressed and conserved the enduring common interests of the English-speaking world." In his mind's eye Churchill saw the two nations "somewhat mixed up together," and he relished the image. "Like the Mississippi," he told the House of Commons in August, "it just keeps rolling along. Let it roll. Let it roll on full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant, to broader lands and better days."

A comforting prospect, but only a prospect: The destroyers were not there yet, and Churchill now had a more immediate problem. In these same August weeks, Hitler unleashed air attacks as a prelude to a possible September invasion-all while Roosevelt was driving a tough bargain for destroyers that would not appear for months (and even then would have maintenance problems).

WHILE CHURCHILL WAS negotiating with Roosevelt, the Luftwaffe attacked England on August 13; the Germans called it "the Day of the Eagle." The Battle of Britain was beginning. On August 16, Churchill and Lord Ismay went to the operations room of No. 11 Group, Fighter Command. "There had been fighting throughout the afternoon; and at one moment every single squadron in the Group was engaged; there was nothing in reserve, and the map table showed new waves of attackers crossing the coast," Ismay recalled. "I felt sick with fear." At the end of the day the British fought well. Leaving for Chequers, Churchill said to Ismay: "Don't speak to me; I have never been so moved." Five minutes pa.s.sed, and the prime minister said: "Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few"-a phrase he would repeat in an inspiring speech to the House and to the nation.

On August 23, the Luftwaffe bombed London; two days later Britain launched a counterstrike on Berlin. Then, on September 7, the Germans blitzed London, killing-in a single night-more than 300 people and injuring 1,337. The Luftwaffe would come day after day and night after night for eight months. Amid the terror, however, the British, bolstered by Churchill, refused to give in. "How I wish you could see the women of England, particularly the older women-it is staggering-their courage and endurance," Nancy Astor, the tart-tongued American woman who had married well, been elected to Parliament, and after a period of appeas.e.m.e.nt in the 1930s become an enthusiastic patriot during the war, wrote The Was.h.i.+ngton Post's Eugene Meyer. "To see them, as I have, gazing at what was their home, now a heap of ashes, their neighbors dead, and sometimes their own families too, and yet they look at you with steadfast English eyes and say, 'Hitler won't beat us this way.' It makes you feel that war is not such a dreadful thing if it brings out this in people."

On September 17, Hitler postponed SEA LION, his code name for a full-scale invasion of Britain. After subduing much of Western Europe, he had thought he could bring Britain into line, but he had not counted on Churchill and the British people standing so fast. Frustrated in the west, Hitler began to plan a strike against Stalin in the east. But in Britain, the Blitz wore on, killing in all more than forty thousand people-at least five thousand of them children.

It was a troubling season on many fronts. The Battle of the Atlantic had long been under way between American and British s.h.i.+ps and German U-boats. A vital factor from the first days of the war, the Atlantic lifeline was essential to keeping Britain armed and fed. Italy's declaration of war and ensuing battles for British and French possessions in Africa helped turn the Mediterranean into a critical war zone. For much of the rest of the war, the Axis and the Allies would fight along the top of the African continent. Arguably the largest strategic stake was Allied control of Egypt, which served as a bulwark against Axis moves to cut the Suez Ca.n.a.l and threaten the oil-rich Middle East. Meanwhile, on September 27 j.a.pan signed the Tripart.i.te Pact, linking Tokyo with Berlin and Rome.

IN THE UNITED STATES, the RooseveltWendell Willkie race was close. "Let me say to you, if you elect me President of the United States, no American boys will ever be sent to the shambles of the European trenches," Willkie told audiences in the autumn of 1940. Roosevelt watched his opponent carefully. The critical moment came in Boston a week before the election. Playing to isolationists himself, Roosevelt declared: "I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: 'Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.' " Until now, Roosevelt had also said "except in case of attack." Today he dropped it. When Sam Rosenman challenged Roosevelt about abandoning the qualifier, an irritated president replied: "Of course we'll fight if we're attacked. If somebody attacks us, then it isn't a foreign war, is it? Or do they want me to guarantee that our troops will be sent into battle only in the event of another Civil War?" But his sharp tone suggests he was uncomfortable with the late October omission.

Churchill observed the contest with "profound anxiety. . . . No newcomer into power could possess or soon acquire the knowledge and experience of Franklin Roosevelt. None could equal his commanding gifts." Those words were written after the war, when Churchill was using his memoirs to cement the Anglo-American alliance during the cold war, but it was true that he had more than a year invested in Roosevelt, and the destroyer deal suggested Roosevelt's heart was in the right place. Though some historians have argued that a Willkie administration would have had the same ultimate policies as Roosevelt's did, there is evidence he would not have been quite as open to Churchill as Roosevelt eventually was. Willkie, Henry Wallace noted after a conversation later in the war, "expressed himself as having very little use for Churchill, saying that he was altogether too self-a.s.sured, that a self-a.s.sured man made a poor planner. He said Churchill was gifted with the ability to speak like a Demosthenes and write like an angel. . . . He had no one to suggest as Churchill's subst.i.tute; nevertheless it was obvious that he has no confidence in Churchill."

In the fall of 1940, another campaign was afoot. The shrewdest men in Churchill's inner circle were building up Churchill in the eyes of the establishment in Roosevelt's capital. Replying to a letter Eugene Meyer had sent him with a clipping about British war orphans finding homes in the United States, Brendan Bracken laid out Churchill's case. "You cannot imagine how grateful the English are to your country for all you are doing for us," Bracken wrote. "In the midst of our lonely and desperate fight against the greatest military power in the world and its carrion allies, we are heartened by the great help and sympathy given us by the United States." Echoing Churchill's tone with Roosevelt-one of determination and disproportionate grat.i.tude-Bracken wrote Meyer: "England will never forget what America is doing for her. And I believe that this War will not have been in vain if it ends by welding the foreign naval and military policies of England and America into an instrument which can stifle the rebirth of tyranny, race prejudice, and all the other beastly systems bred by n.a.z.is and Fascists. We are having a rough time, but our people are very cheerful, and inflexible in their determination to carry this War through to a successful conclusion. Grief, destruction, and death must be our lot for many months, and perhaps years, to come. But we shall never surrender. And we are getting stronger and our people are adapting themselves to bombing and all the other hards.h.i.+ps created by War."

Bracken hoped that such letters-Meyer was the publisher of one of the newspapers Roosevelt read over breakfast in his bed in the White House every morning-would rea.s.sure influential Americans at a critical time. Meyer, who was prointervention, was delighted by Bracken's message, writing back: "America is profoundly impressed by the splendid defense put up by your people by air warfare and the high morale of a united people. I heard the Prime Minister speaking to France the other day on the radio. Please congratulate him upon his splendid work and especially on his marvelous oratory." (In the broadcast to the French, Churchill had said: "Remember we shall never stop, never weary, and never give in, and that our whole people and Empire have vowed themselves to the task of cleansing Europe from the n.a.z.i pestilence and saving the world from the new Dark Ages.") Meyer was right that Americans were impressed with British courage, but an October 1940 poll found that 83 percent did not think "the United States should enter the war against Germany and Italy at once."

ON ELECTION NIGHT Roosevelt set up headquarters in the dining room at Hyde Park. There was a news ticker in the adjoining smoking room; the smoking room was small, dominated by bookcases and a huge pair of antlers over a fireplace. This evening was, Secret Serviceman Mike Reilly recalled, the one time he saw "FDR's nerves give him a real rough time." The early returns were not encouraging.

"Mike, I don't want to see anybody in here," Roosevelt said to Reilly.

"Including your family, Mr. President?"

Roosevelt replied, "I said 'anybody.' "

In the end, the news brightened, the room filled, and Franklin Roosevelt won, 54.7 percent to 44.8 percent.

ON THE DAY after the election, Churchill sent Roosevelt the following cable.

I did not think it right for me as a Foreigner to express my opinion upon American politics while the Election was on, but now I feel you will not mind my saying that I prayed for your success and that I am truly thankful for it. This does not mean that I seek or wish for anything more than the full, fair and free play of your mind upon the world issues now at stake in which our two nations have to discharge their respective duties. We are entering upon a sombre phase of what must evidently be a protracted and broadening war, and I look forward to being able to interchange my thoughts with you in all that confidence and goodwill which has grown up between us since I went to the Admiralty at the outbreak. Things are afoot which will be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe, and in expressing the comfort I feel that the people of the United States have once again cast these great burdens upon you, I must avow my sure faith that the lights by which we steer will bring us all safely to anchor.

A brilliant, generous, eloquent note-and Roosevelt chose not to answer it. Churchill was fretting. At the conclusion of another cable ten days later, Churchill wrote: "I hope you got my personal telegram of congratulation." Roosevelt did not reply.

Calculated or inadvertent, the oversight bothered Churchill for years. Anyone who has ever had a carefully composed, heartfelt letter go unacknowledged knows the feeling: The writer wants the satisfaction of knowing his words. .h.i.t the mark. In this case, Churchill never got that. He attended to the wound by explaining it away. In the volume of his memoirs published in 1949, Churchill wrote: "Curiously enough, I never received any answer to this telegram. It may well have been engulfed in the vast ma.s.s of congratulatory messages which were swept aside by urgent work." One thing is clear. Winston Churchill was still very much the suitor in the courts.h.i.+p of Franklin Roosevelt.

AS NOVEMBER FADED into December, Churchill was writing a letter he believed to be "one of the most important" of his life. Churchill's courage in the spring and summer had staved off the immediate threat of destruction, but Britain was now settling down into a drawn-out conflict. The cable went through numerous revisions, and Lord Lothian was a key adviser-an example of how Churchill shared Roosevelt's ability to profit from the ideas of those around him. The president was better at distilling the work and thinking of others; as a leader, he was in many ways more a conductor of an orchestra than a composer of music. The prime minister was more self-sufficient (and virtually always wrote his own speeches, cables, and minutes) but he liked to consult experts, and in this case Lothian, among others, helped him as he prepared the cable to Roosevelt. The result was cla.s.sic Churchill-long, well argued, and pa.s.sionate yet practical.

"Even if the United States were our Ally, instead of our friend and indispensable partner, we should not ask for a large American expeditionary army," Churchill wrote to Roosevelt; this was not the time to ask for soldiers. Congress had pa.s.sed the Selective Service Act in September, but with the proviso that draftees could serve only in the Western Hemisphere or American territories like the Philippines. "s.h.i.+pping, not men, is the limiting factor. . . . The danger of Great Britain being destroyed by a swift, overwhelming blow, has for the time being very greatly receded. In its place, there is a long, gradually-maturing danger, less sudden and less spectacular, but equally deadly. This mortal danger is the steady and increasing diminution of sea tonnage." To Roosevelt he argued: "The decision for 1941 lies upon the seas. Unless we can establish our ability to feed this Island, to import the munitions of all kinds which we need, unless we can move our armies to the various theatres where Hitler and his confederate, Mussolini, must be met, and maintain them there, and do all this with the a.s.surance of being able to carry it on till the spirit of the Continental Dictators is broken, we may fall by the way, and the time needed by the United States to complete her defensive preparations may not be forthcoming." Britain was running out of money, Germany had her essentially surrounded, and Churchill, who believed in taking the fight to fronts far from home, needed help.

Roosevelt and Hopkins had left for a cruise in the Caribbean aboard the Tuscaloosa in early December. "He had only his own intimates around him," Churchill recalled. "Harry Hopkins, then unknown to me, told me later that Mr. Roosevelt read and re-read this letter as he sat alone in his deck-chair, and that for two days he did not seem to have reached any clear conclusion. He was plunged in intense thought, and brooded silently." The result of the brooding: Lend-Lease, which would provide supplies and cash to Britain. Churchill's long letter had done its work.

In a fireside chat on December 29, Roosevelt spoke in a less ornate way than Churchill would have, but there was strength in the simplicity of his imagery.

Tonight, in the presence of a world crisis, my mind goes back eight years to a night in the midst of a domestic crisis. It was a time when the wheels of American industry were grinding to a full stop, when the whole banking system of our country had ceased to function.

I well remember that while I sat in my study in the White House, preparing to talk with the people of the United States, I had before my eyes the picture of all those Americans with whom I was talking. I saw the workmen in the mills, the mines, the factories; the girl behind the counter; the small shopkeeper; the farmer doing his spring plowing; the widows and the old men wondering about their life's savings. I tried to convey to the great ma.s.s of American people what the banking crisis meant to them in their daily lives.

Tonight, I want to do the same thing, with the same people, in this new crisis which faces America.

We met the issue of 1933 with courage and realism.

We face this new crisis-this new threat to the security of our nation-with the same courage and realism.

Never before since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock has our American civilization been in such danger as now.

For on September 27, 1940, this year, by an agreement signed in Berlin, three powerful nations, two in Europe and one in Asia, joined themselves together in the threat that if the United States of America interfered with or blocked the expansion program of these three nations-a program aimed at world control-they would unite in ultimate action against the United States.

The n.a.z.i masters of Germany have made it clear that they intend not only to dominate all life and thought in their own country, but also to enslave the whole of Europe, and then to use the resources of Europe to dominate the rest of the world. . . .

The history of recent years proves that the shootings and the chains and the concentration camps are not simply the transient tools but the very altars of modern dictators.h.i.+ps. They may talk of a "new order" in the world, but what they have in mind is only a revival of the oldest and the worst tyranny. In that there is no liberty, no religion, no hope.

Saluting Churchill's people, Roosevelt said, "In a military sense Great Britain and the British Empire are today the spearhead of resistance to world conquest. And they are putting up a fight which will live forever in the story of human gallantry." Though Roosevelt did not say so explicitly, the author of that story was Winston Churchill. The time had come, Roosevelt concluded, for America to be "the great a.r.s.enal of democracy."

IN MUCH THE way Churchill's rhetoric had defined the debate and shaped perceptions of the war since May 1940, the reelected Roosevelt's major speeches in late December and early January were designed to deepen his country's understanding of the conflict and its stakes. After his "a.r.s.enal of democracy" performance, the president went to work on his State of the Union message. Sitting in his study with Rosenman and Hopkins one night, Roosevelt dictated: We must look forward to a world based on four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression-everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to wors.h.i.+p G.o.d in his own way-everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want-which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation everywhere a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants.

The fourth is freedom from fear-which, translated into international terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fas.h.i.+on that no nation anywhere will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor.

Listening as Rosenman wrote the president's words on a yellow pad, Hopkins took issue with Roosevelt's term "everywhere in the world."

"That covers an awful lot of territory, Mr. President," Rosenman recalled Hopkins saying. "I don't know how interested Americans are going to be in the people of Java."

"I'm afraid they'll have to be someday, Harry," Roosevelt replied. "The world is getting so small that even the people in Java are getting to be our neighbors now."

Roosevelt was as much-if not more-a student of people as he was a man of ideas, and while he was enunciating the principles of a newly democratic world, he was increasingly interested in seeing Churchill.

At Christmastime, Roosevelt was talking with Hopkins, who had moved into the White House on May 10 and never left. "You know-a lot of this could be settled if Churchill and I could just sit down together for a while," Roosevelt said to Hopkins. Though ill-much of his stomach had been removed because of cancer in 1937, and he suffered from terrible digestive troubles-Hopkins, deeply loyal to Roosevelt, drove himself forward. "Harry had the capacity to be a relaxing friend," recalled Frances Perkins. "You could stand going on with a conversation at ten o'clock at night if you'd had a good laugh at nine."

"How about me going over, Mr. President?" Hopkins asked.

The idea made sense. "Harry is the perfect Amba.s.sador for my purposes," Roosevelt often said. "He doesn't even know the meaning of the word 'protocol.' When he sees a piece of red tape, he just pulls out those old garden shears of his and snips it. And when he's talking to some foreign dignitary, he knows how to slump back in his chair and put his feet up on the conference table and say, 'Oh, yeah?' "

THERE WAS MUCH to discuss. As 1940 closed, Churchill was concerned about American plans to take some British gold reserves in South Africa as payment for supplies, about the condition of the destroyers that were finally making their way into English hands, and about the details of Lend-Lease. To load the gold aboard a U.S. wars.h.i.+p in Cape Town, Churchill told Roosevelt, "will disturb public opinion here and throughout the Dominions and encourage the enemy, who will proclaim that you are sending for our last reserves." The destroyers were not, to say the least, in the best repair. "Please do not suppose we are making any complaints about the condition of these vessels," Churchill told the president. "It may however be an advantage to your yards to know the kind of things that happen when s.h.i.+ps that have been laid up so long are put into the hardest service in the Atlantic." And Lend-Lease pleased but somewhat puzzled Churchill, who frankly admitted to Roosevelt that he felt "anxiety" about the details as they struggled to defend their homeland and take the fight to the Axis in other theaters. "Remember, Mr President," Churchill wrote on New Year's Eve 1940, "we do not know what you have in mind, or exactly what the United States is going to do, and we are fighting for our lives."

"I think this verse applies to your people as it does to us"

The Longfellow quotation Roosevelt wrote out from memory and sent to Churchill, January 1941.

CHAPTER 3.

JESUS CHRIST! WHAT A MAN!.

A Mission to London-Churchill Courts Hopkins-.

"Sail On, O s.h.i.+p of State"

THE PRIME MINISTER did not understand who was coming to see him. "Churchill had no idea who my father was," said Robert Hopkins. "He thought he was some social worker and could not see why the President was sending him over." Harry Hopkins, John Martin recalled, was "not a person who had appeared on the world stage. The Foreign Office didn't realize he was as important as he was." Mary Soames remembered that Churchill's circle was "all geared up" before Hopkins-"a mystery man," she called him-arrived. Hopkins had concerns of his own. Jean Monnet, a Frenchman who was working with the British Purchasing Commission in Was.h.i.+ngton, told him "to waste no time with the Minister of This or That in the British Cabinet, for Churchill is the British War Cabinet, and no one else matters." According to Robert Sherwood, Hopkins "became a bit fed up with hearing so much about the almighty Churchill, and exclaimed, 'I suppose Churchill is convinced that he's the greatest man in the world!' "

Hopkins's insecurity is interesting. When he later went to Moscow to meet with Stalin, he said to himself, as he once recalled to Marquis Childs, "Here I am, the son of a harness maker from Grinnell, Iowa . . . walking down the hall of the Kremlin to meet the man who rules all these people, and I am going to talk to him, in a sense, as an equal, about the conduct of this war. Just think of it!" The remark struck Childs. "It seemed to me a rather tragic and in a sense poignant commentary on the man, and in a sense on America," Childs said. "In a sense it was a commentary on this fantastic role of responsibility and leaders.h.i.+p into which we were precipitated, and our unreadiness for it, because at that moment you should not have been thinking about how you were the son of a harness maker."

Hopkins wanted to be respected, and he wanted his country and his chief to be respected. And Roosevelt, for all his self-confidence, was not immune to worrying about whether someone-in this case Churchill-liked him. Joseph Lash related this anecdote of Felix Frankfurter: The justice had adopted two English children for the duration, and their nanny brought them by to meet Roosevelt. "Later the justice called Roosevelt to thank him and to report that although the president had made a conquest of the girl, her younger brother was holding out," Lash wrote. "That bothered Roosevelt. 'Send him over and give me half an hour with him alone,' Roosevelt demanded. The idea that anyone, male or female, could resist him really disturbed him." All of us want to be liked: Roosevelt was no exception. There was a rumor-Churchill believed it originated with Joseph Kennedy-that Churchill disliked both Roosevelt and the United States. (This despite the pleading, personally pleasant tone of most of Churchill's messages.) Hopkins's task, then, was not only diplomatic, it was human as well: to gauge whether Churchill and Roosevelt, who already thought of Churchill as a "stinker" from the Gray's Inn evening, could get along.

AS HOPKINS HEADED over in January 1941, Churchill was learning who his guest was, and, Robert Sherwood said, "ordered the unrolling of any red carpets that might have survived the Blitz." Within minutes of Hopkins's arrival in London, the Luftwaffe struck. The charge d'affaires at the American emba.s.sy, Herschel V. Johnson, took Hopkins to Claridge's. They talked amid blasts of antiaircraft fire. Long a faraway drama, the war was now quite real.

Protective of Roosevelt, driven in part by the insecurities that he confessed to Childs, Hopkins was on edge as the mission began. Cannily, Churchill had struck a preemptive blow the afternoon of Hopkins's arrival. "Churchill had been informed of Hopkins' devotion to Roosevelt," Sherwood wrote, "and of his possible suspicion of anyone who might presume to challenge Roosevelt's position of pre-eminence among world statesmen."

So informed, Churchill said in a speech the day Hopkins landed in England: "I have always taken the view that the fortunes of mankind in its tremendous journey are princ.i.p.ally decided for good or ill-but mainly for good, for the path is upward-by its greatest men and its greatest episodes. I therefore hail it as a most fortunate occurrence that at this awe-striking climax in world affairs there should stand at the head of the American Republic a famous statesman, long versed and experienced in the work of government and administration, in whose heart there burns the fire of resistance to aggression and oppression, and whose sympathies and nature make him the sincere and undoubted champion of justice and of freedom, and of the victims of wrongdoing wherever they may dwell."

Flattery worked. Johnson told Hopkins about the remarks, and there was a kind of thaw. Face is important: People like to think the people they are dealing with respect and like them; that tends to keep the waters smooth and tempers cool. Hopkins then asked Edward R. Murrow of CBS to come see him. Murrow's broadcasts of the Blitz had shaped America's sense of the war, and Hopkins wanted to get the journalist's take on the British political scene and the nation's morale. "I suppose you could say that I've come here to try to find a way to be a catalytic agent between two prima donnas," Hopkins said when Murrow asked him what he was in London to do. "I want to try to get an understanding of Churchill and of the men he sees after midnight."

The next day, Hopkins reported to Roosevelt, in notes written on Claridge's stationery, he found No. 10 Downing Street "a bit down at the heels because the Treasury next door has been bombed more than a bit." Looking around, he discovered that "most of the windows are out-workmen over the place repairing the damage."

In a small dining room in the bas.e.m.e.nt, Brendan Bracken fixed Hopkins a sherry and excused himself. Suddenly, "a rotund-smiling-red faced gentleman appeared-extended a fat but none the less convincing hand and wished me welcome to England. A short black coat-striped trousers-a clear eye and a mushy voice was the impression of En-gland's leader as he showed me with obvious pride the photograph of his beautiful daughter-in-law and grandchild." (Pamela and young Winston, who had been born in October 1940.) Churchill and Hopkins took their seats.

CHURCHILL KNEW THE stakes of the lunch. He had to make the case that though Britain would fight on, she had to have more American aid. "Thus I met Harry Hopkins," Churchill wrote later, "that extraordinary man, who played, and was to play, a sometimes decisive part in the whole movement of the war. . . . This was the height of the London bombing, and many local worries imposed themselves upon us. But it was evident to me that here was an envoy from the President of supreme importance to our life." While Churchill's cook and housekeeper, Mrs. Landemare, brought lunch, the two men talked, Hopkins told Roosevelt, of "the difficulty of communication with the President at long range-there is no question but that he wants to meet the President-the sooner the better." As soup gave way to cold beef ("I didn't take enough jelly to suit the P.M.," Hopkins wrote Roosevelt, "and he gave me some more"), Hopkins was blunt. "I told him there was a feeling in some quarters that he, Churchill, did not like America, Americans or Roosevelt. This set him off on a bitter tho' fairly constrained attack on Amba.s.sador Kennedy who he believes is responsible for this impression. He denied it vigorously-sent for a Secretary to show me a telegram which he had sent to the President immediately after his election in which he expressed his warm delight at the President's re-election"-the telegram Roosevelt had failed to acknowledge.

Churchill s.h.i.+fted from defense to solicitude. "I told of my mission," Hopkins said. "He seemed pleased-and several times a.s.sured me that he would make every detail of information and opinion available to me." Churchill (who "took snuff from a little silver box") "hoped that I would not leave England until I was fully satisfied of the exact state of England's need and the urgent necessity of the exact material a.s.sistance Britain requires to win the war."

Then Churchill took the offensive, alluding to 1940 and promising to hang on no matter what Hitler might throw at him even yet. "He reviewed with obvious pride his own part in the war to date-he didn't know that England could withstand the onslaught after France fell-but he felt sure that it could-it did-and it will withstand the next one."

The meal had gone splendidly. Churchill and Hopkins "were so impressed with each other," Jock Colville wrote, "that their tete-a-tete did not break up till nearly 4." Churchill's luncheon performance, mixing praise of Roosevelt, a detailed grasp of the war, and reminders in a city under fire that it was Britain, not the United States, doing the fighting, made an impact. "I have never had such an enjoyable time," Hopkins said afterward. ". . . G.o.d, what a force that man has."

THE INITIAL CONNECTION between Roosevelt and Churchill was by proxy. The relations.h.i.+p was being shaped by not two but three men-the pragmatic Hopkins, the sentimental Churchill, and the wary Roosevelt. Churchill was charming Hopkins; Hopkins was a.s.sessing Churchill with a cold eye; Roosevelt was aloof, protected by distance as his emissary surveyed the landscape.

That Friday evening, Churchill, Clementine, and a handful of aides left for Ditchley, an eighteenth-century house near Blenheim; Hopkins would join them the next day. "Week-ends were anything but restful, because of the incessant concern of Churchill with everything that was going on everywhere (Roosevelt could get away from it all now and then, but Churchill never even wanted to try)," Sherwood wrote. Hopkins noted differences between Churchill's style and Roosevelt's. "Although h.e.l.l might be popping all about Roosevelt, it was rarely audible in his immediate presence, where tranquillity prevailed," Sherwood wrote. "Churchill, on the other hand, always seemed to be at his Command Post on the precarious beachhead and the guns were continually blazing in his conversation; wherever he was, there was the battlefront-and he was involved in the battles not only of the current war but of the whole past, from Cannae to Gallipoli."

On the drive out of London, Bracken told Colville that "Hopkins, the confidant of Roosevelt, was the most important American visitor to this country we had ever had. He had come to tell the President what we needed and to form an opinion of the country's morale. He could influence the President more than any living man." Hopkins did know Roosevelt as well as anyone could. He had the best possible grasp of how Roosevelt's heart and mind worked; he had, in fact, developed the same way of thinking. Roosevelt and Hopkins were practical idealists. They believed the world could be made better and that it was their duty to do all they could to that end, but liberal rhetoric and utopian schemes sometimes made them uncomfortable. So they talked tough, charting a course between left and right.

As the weekend began, Churchill seemed pleased with his first encounter with Hopkins. "Before dinner," Colville recalled, "we drank and thawed." The meal was "exquisite," and "afterwards Winston smoked the biggest cigar in history and became very mellow." At bedtime, Churchill took his leave "with a very full box and in an excellent temper." In Was.h.i.+ngton, meanwhile, the White House released the text of the Lend-Lease legislation. Churchill woke early on Sat.u.r.day, read the language of the law, and was "delighted by the new American bill which allows British wars.h.i.+ps the use of American ports and contains wide powers for the President in every sphere of a.s.sistance to us. He says this is tantamount to a declaration of war by the United States. At any rate it is an open challenge to Germany to declare war if she dares."

That evening, the party gathered in Ditchley's dining room. "The table," Colville noted, was "not over-decorated: four gilt candle sticks with tall yellow tapers and a single gilt cup in the centre." When the ladies withdrew, Hopkins "paid a graceful tribute to the P.M.'s speeches which had, he said, produced the most stirring and revolutionary effect on all cla.s.ses and districts in America." Roosevelt, Hopkins said, had arranged to have a radio brought into a cabinet meeting so that they could listen to Churchill.

Churchill, Colville wrote, was "touched and gratified" and added that "he hardly knew what he said in his speeches last summer; he had just been imbued with the feeling that 'it would be better for us to be destroyed than to see the triumph of such an imposter.' When, at the time of Dunkirk, he had addressed a meeting of Ministers 'below the line' he had realised that there was only one thing they wanted to hear him say: that whatever happened to our army we should still go on. He had said it." This history was being recast for Hopkins's ears. Churchill was already reimagining the events of May 1940, editing out the push for possible negotiations with the enemy. This was no time to even hint that there was anything but steel in the British soul.

Then, as the candles flickered, Churchill struck conciliatory notes about his opponents on the left. "After the war he could never lead a party Government against the Opposition leaders who had co-operated so loyally," Colville noted. "He hoped a national Government would continue for two or three years after the war so that the country might be undivided in its efforts to put into effect certain principles-or rather measures-of reconstruction. He then proceeded to give-after saying that the text of the American Bill that morning had made him feel that a new world was coming into being-a graphic description of the future, as he visualised it, from an international point of view. He began by saying that there must be a United States of Europe and he believed it should be built by the English; if the Russians built it, there would be communism and squalor; if the Germans built it, there would be tyranny and brute force."

Speaking in the "unhesitating manner which means he has really warmed to his subject," Churchill continued, as Lord Chandos, who was present, later recalled: We seek no treasure, we seek no territorial gains, we seek only the right of man to be free; we seek his rights to wors.h.i.+p his G.o.d, to lead his life in his own way, secure from persecution. As the humble laborer returns from his work when the day is done, and sees the smoke curling upwards from his cottage home in the serene evening sky, we wish him to know that no rat-a-tat-tat-here he rapped on the table-of the secret police upon his door will disturb his leisure or interrupt his rest. We seek government with the consent of the people, man's freedom to say what he will, and when he thinks himself injured, to find himself equal in the eyes of the law. But war aims other than these we have none.

"What," Churchill asked Hopkins, "will the President say to all this?"

Hopkins was silent, Chandos remembered, for "the best part of a minute," and then replied, "Well, Mr Prime Minister, I don't think the President will give a dam' for all that." Listening, Chandos was terrified. "Heavens alive," he thought, "it's gone wrong." Then, after another pause, Hopkins added: "You see, we're only interested in seeing that that G.o.ddam sonofab.i.t.c.h, Hitler, gets licked."

Amid laughter, the tension melted. "Winston hastily explained," Colville wrote, "that he had been speaking very freely and was just anxious to let Hopkins realise that we were not all devoid of thoughts of the future: he would be the first to agree that the destruction of 'those foul swine' was the primary and over-riding objective." "At that moment," Chandos recalled, "a friends.h.i.+p was cemented which no convulsion ever undermined."

The conversation masked a complex psychological and political dynamic. Here was Churchill, a soldier of empire, stepping back from the dire question of the moment-how to survive the Third Reich and liberate the conquered states on the Continent-to speak in sweeping terms about the philosophy behind the Allied effort. Churchill's remarks were calculated to rea.s.sure the old WPA administrator-and, through Hopkins, the president, who had given America the New Deal and often spoke about exporting democracy and social justice to other nations.