Franklin And Winston Part 6

"And I shall talk with him, too," Churchill replied.

Reaching Was.h.i.+ngton, Winant listened as Roosevelt told him what he knew thus far. Winant told Roosevelt he had a friend nearby who wanted to speak to him. "You will know who it is as soon as you hear his voice," Winant said.

Churchill took the phone. "Mr. President," he said, "what's this about j.a.pan?"

"It's quite true," Roosevelt replied. "They have attacked us at Pearl Harbor. We are all in the same boat now."

Winant had another word with Roosevelt, and then Churchill took the telephone again. He could not hide his own feelings about the turn events had taken.

"This certainly simplifies things," Churchill told Roosevelt. Then he added: "G.o.d be with you."

THOUGH SHE WAS in the White House that Sunday, Eleanor felt shut out in the swarm of war. She remembered saying good-bye to her thirty luncheon guests-even before word of the attack, Roosevelt had sent his regrets, though some Delano cousins of his were staying with the Roosevelts-and she then "waited till Franklin was alone to slip into his study, but I realized he was concentrating on what had to be done and would not talk about what had happened until this first strain was over." Quietly his wife withdrew, closing the door and leaving the president of the United States, surrounded by his nautical prints and model s.h.i.+ps, with his thoughts of the very real naval devastation that had now drawn America into war. Eleanor sought what had been her refuge since the summer of Lucy Mercer twenty-three years before. "I went back to work," she recalled.

Roosevelt and Churchill were in character-and in many ways at their best-on this December Sunday. Handling the telephone himself, wearing an old sweater of his son James's he had saved for years, Roosevelt was masterful, directing troop movements with General George Marshall and planning diplomatic calls with Cordell Hull. He was personally at the helm. On the phone with an official in Honolulu at one point, he turned to those gathered in the room and said, "My G.o.d, there's another wave of j.a.p planes over Hawaii right this minute."

It was a day during which Roosevelt's highly personal leaders.h.i.+p worked. "Many of the moves required the President to sign an executive order," wrote Robert Sherwood. "The President instructed the person to whom he talked to go ahead and execute the order and he would sign it later." At about five in the afternoon, Roosevelt summoned Grace Tully. "He was alone, seated before his desk on which were two or three neat piles of notes containing the information of the past two hours," Tully said. "The telephone was close by his hand. He was wearing a gray sack jacket and was lighting a cigarette as I entered the room. He took a deep drag and addressed me calmly: 'Sit down, Grace. I'm going before Congress tomorrow. I'd like to dictate my message. It will be short.' "

Roosevelt began, Tully recalled, with "the same calm tone in which he dictated his mail. Only his diction was a little different as he spoke each word incisively and slowly, carefully specifying each punctuation mark and paragraph. 'Yesterday comma December 7 comma 1941 dash a day which will live in world history dash the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of j.a.pan period paragraph.' " The speech was brief. "I ask," Roosevelt concluded, "that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by j.a.pan on Sunday comma December 7 comma a state of war has existed between the United States and the j.a.panese Empire period end." Hopkins came in and added one line: "With confidence in our armed forces-with the unbounded determination of our people-we will gain the inevitable triumph-so help us G.o.d." There was another edit, this one from Roosevelt: "world history" became "infamy."

Eleanor returned to the center of action and noted that her husband was "more serene than he had appeared in a long time." It was the same grace under pressure she had seen at Campobello two decades before. "I think it was steadying to know finally that the die was cast," Eleanor said of December 7. "One could no longer do anything but face the fact that this country was in a war; from here on, difficult and dangerous as the future looked, it presented a clearer challenge than the long uncertainty of the past." The president was calm as he faced the storm.

WHILE ROOSEVELT DEMONSTRATED his capacity to manage a crisis firsthand, Churchill hurled himself into action. "No American will think it wrong of me," he wrote after the war, "if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy. I could not foretell the course of events. I do not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of j.a.pan, but now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! Yes, after Dunkirk; after the fall of France; after the horrible episode of Oran; after the threat of invasion, when, apart from the Air and the Navy, we were an almost unarmed people; after the deadly struggle of the U-boat war-the first Battle of the Atlantic, gained by a hand's-breadth; after seventeen months of lonely fighting and nineteen months of my responsibility in dire stress, we had won the war. England would live; Britain would live; the Commonwealth of Nations and the Empire would live."

He felt his obligations as host to Winant and Harriman keenly and remembered that, after the call to Roosevelt, "we then went back into the hall and tried to adjust our thoughts to the supreme world event which had occurred, which was of so startling a nature as to make even those who were near the centre gasp. My two American friends took the shock with admirable fort.i.tude. We had no idea that any serious losses had been inflicted on the United States Navy. They did not wail or lament that their country was at war. They wasted no words in reproach or sorrow. In fact, one might almost have thought they had been delivered from a long pain."

He wrote telegrams after midnight. One was to Hopkins, cosigned with Harriman: "Thinking of you much at this historic moment-Winston, Averell."

Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, then en route to the Soviet Union, reached Churchill that night. "He was quite naturally in a high state of excitement," Eden recalled. He found Churchill was already full of plans to go to Was.h.i.+ngton. Eden, however, "was not sure that the Americans would want him so soon."

Eden was right. When Roosevelt dictated his speech to Grace Tully, it concerned one nation-j.a.pan. He did not mention Germany. Eden seemed to understand this distinction; Churchill did not. "The United States and Britain were now allies," Eden said, "in the war against j.a.pan."

Against j.a.pan-not yet against Germany. Typically, Churchill had suppressed nuance in his delight over the events of the day. Thus began a fraught week as Roosevelt put off Churchill's excited talk of a quick trip to Was.h.i.+ngton.

Would Hitler take America on? There was no word. On Monday, Roosevelt put on his navy cape, went to Capitol Hill, and declared war. On the night of December 8, Robert Sherwood and Sam Rosenman left the White House after dark. "There had been wild rumors about a German air attack to be launched from submarines, and many cities in the United States had already inst.i.tuted blackouts," Rosenman recalled. The bright lamp that usually lit the White House on the Pennsylvania Avenue side, Rosenman noticed, had been shut off. "I wonder how long it will be before that light gets turned on again," Rosenman recalled saying to Sherwood. "I don't know," Sherwood replied, "but until it does, the lights will stay turned off all over the world. That light has been the only ray of hope to millions of people, and those millions will still look to this house and to that man inside it as their only hope of deliverance."

On Tuesday, in a fireside chat, Roosevelt tied Germany, master of Europe for nearly a year and a half, to the emerging conflict. It was a brilliant strategic talk, one that connected seemingly disparate continents and players in a coherent whole for Americans still trying to make sense of the news. "We must realize for example that j.a.panese successes against the United States in the Pacific are helpful to German operations in Libya; that any German success against the Caucasus is inevitably an a.s.sistance to j.a.pan in her operations against the Dutch East Indies; that a German attack against Algiers or Morocco opens the way to a German attack against South America and the Ca.n.a.l," Roosevelt said. ". . . We are now in the midst of a war, not for conquest, not for vengeance, but for a world in which this nation, and all that this nation represents, will be safe for our children. We expect to eliminate the danger from j.a.pan, but it would serve us ill if we accomplished that and found that the rest of the world was dominated by Hitler and Mussolini."

Stirring words, but Roosevelt did not want Churchill descending on him until he had a better idea of what Hitler was going to do. Playing for time, Roosevelt drafted, but did not send, two letters suggesting he and Churchill wait to confer. "Delay of even a couple of weeks might be advantageous," one of them said.

The Americans apparently did raise questions about the dangers Churchill would face crossing the Atlantic, but the prime minister would not be thwarted. In a note to Churchill written after his speech declaring war, Roosevelt repeated a phrase from the call on Sunday. "Today all of us are in the same boat with you and the people of the Empire and it is a s.h.i.+p which will not and cannot be sunk." Churchill seized on the words and began quoting them back to Roosevelt. "Now that we are as you say 'in the same boat,' " he told Roosevelt on Tuesday, "would it not be wise for us to have another conference. . . . It would also be a very great pleasure to me to meet you again, and the sooner the better."

HITLER SETTLED THE question on Thursday, December 11, 1941, when he declared war on the United States. "I understand only too well that a world-wide distance separates Roosevelt's ideas and my ideas," Hitler said. "Roosevelt comes from a rich family and belongs to the cla.s.s whose path is smoothed in the democracies. I was the only child of a small, poor family and had to fight my way by work and industry. When the Great War came Roosevelt occupied a position where he got to know only its pleasant consequences, enjoyed by those who do business while others bleed. . . . As for the German nation, it needs charity neither from Mr. Roosevelt nor from Mr. Churchill. . . . It wants only its rights! It will secure for itself this right to live even if thousands of Churchills and Roosevelts conspire against it."

Why did Hitler do it? Partly because he misjudged Roosevelt and America. "I don't see much future for the Americans," Hitler said in January 1942. "It's a decayed country. And they have their racial problem, and the problem of social inequalities. . . . My feelings against Americanism are feelings of hatred and deep repugnance. . . . Everything about the behavior of American society reveals that it's half Judaized, and the other half Negrified. How can one expect a State like that to hold together-a country where everything is built on the dollar." He had not counted on Churchill's stalwart defense of Britain in 1940; now, as 1941 drew to a close, he did not count on Roosevelt's strength and determination. It was one of Hitler's many mistakes, and one from which he could never recover.

"The Great Republic" was at war at last. Through the ensuing decades of what Henry Luce, founder of the Time-Life magazine empire, would call "the American Century," a national myth took shape about World War II: that we fought to defeat Hitler and to preserve democracy. And America did-ultimately. Yet the United States. .h.i.t back only when it was, as Roosevelt said on December 8, "suddenly and deliberately attacked by . . . the Empire of j.a.pan"-and entered the war against Germany only when it was clear that Hitler would join Tokyo's fight. From Churchill's perspective, perhaps the better night to have celebrated was December 11, after Hitler's declaration, rather than December 7.

WITH CHRISTMAS COMING, Roosevelt and Churchill were united. "Delighted to have you here at White House," Roosevelt cabled Churchill. A new phase of their friends.h.i.+p was beginning. "At one of our meetings after the USA had come into the war, someone was still adopting the careful att.i.tude that had been necessary before the entry of the USA . . . ," said General Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the imperial general staff. "Winston turned to him, and with a wicked leer in his eye, said, 'Oh! That is the way we talked to her while we were wooing her, now that she is in the harem we talk to her quite differently!' "

PART.

II.

GETTING ON FAMOUSLY.

Winter 1941 to Late Summer 1943.

"Let the children have their night of fun and laughter"

Roosevelt and Churchill light the National Christmas Tree, December 24, 1941.

CHAPTER 5.

A COUPLE OF EMPERORS.

A White House Holiday-Churchill's Heart Scare-.

An Embarra.s.sing Telephone Call.

"I HAVE READ TWO BOOKS," Churchill wrote Clementine from his Atlantic crossing aboard the Duke of York, "Brown on Resolution and Forty Centuries Look Down." The novels may have fanned his romantic vision of his mission. The second is about Napoleon and Josephine; the first, a 1929 story by C. S. Forester, tells the tale of a b.a.s.t.a.r.d English boy, Albert Brown, who grows up to serve in the Royal Navy during World War I and, armed with only a rifle, single-handedly holds up a German crew on Resolution, a stony spit in the Galapagos Islands. It was the kind of story Churchill loved. Early in Brown's life, his mother decides he will go into the navy, and she lovingly tries to advance his career. What Churchill could have chosen to take from the tale was the image of a devoted mother doing her best for her boy, a boy who would grow to do great things. It was how he liked to remember Jennie and how he liked to think of himself, the warrior fighting against all odds.

"He is a different man since America came into the war," Lord Moran said of Churchill. "The Winston I knew in London frightened me. I used to watch him as he went to his room with swift paces, the head thrust forward, scowling at the ground, the sombre countenance clouded, the features set and resolute. . . . I could see that he was carrying the weight of the world, and wondered how long he could go on like that and what could be done about it. And now-in a night, it seems-a younger man has taken his place." Churchill, who flew from Hampton Roads, Virginia, to Was.h.i.+ngton, cabled Roosevelt to "on no account come out to meet me," but Roosevelt drove to the airfield on December 22 to greet the flight in the dusk.

Roosevelt's charm was in full force. "He made me feel that I had known him for a long time," Moran recalled of their first few minutes of conversation. "It was very sweet of him to think of shaking my hand," said Patrick Kinna, the Churchill a.s.sistant who had met Roosevelt at Newfoundland. Inspector Thompson was "honoured and touched" to find that Roosevelt remembered him from the Atlantic rendezvous. "Come along, Thompson, I am very pleased to see you again," Roosevelt said.

Churchill, Time noted, "swept in like a breath of fresh air, giving Was.h.i.+ngton new vigor, for he came as a new hero." Gone was Roosevelt's skepticism about Churchill's staying power; gone, too, was Churchill's frustration with Roosevelt's failure to fully engage the enemy.

They now shared largely identical interests and would treat the world, and themselves, to a pageant of personal diplomacy. Mutual admiration can be seductive-if you are one of the people being admired. These weeks at the White House belong to a vanished age, but the human forces shaping the time Roosevelt and Churchill spent together-affection, shared drama, and hints of tension-almost always play some role in high politics.

THERE WAS A vocal school in the United States that thought America's central focus should be j.a.pan, not Germany. That j.a.pan would consume Roosevelt worried Churchill as he wandered the White House. As Roosevelt and his generals saw it, however, Hitler represented the most significant long-term threat. "The principle of Germany first was based on strictly military reasoning," Sherwood wrote. "It was a.s.sumed-and, it would seem from the results, correctly-that Germany had far greater potential than j.a.pan in productive power and scientific genius and, if given time to develop this during years of stalemate in Europe, would prove all the more difficult if not impossible to defeat." It would be Hitler first, Tojo after.

Churchill's main task on the Duke of York-the novels had been a diversion-were three long papers laying out his vision of the conflict's coming years. North Africa and the Middle East would be secured in 1942; the Allies must build naval strength in the Pacific; Germany would be bombed; and, in 1943, there would be Anglo-American landings in "three or four" of the countries from a pool of Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, France, Italy, and the Balkans. Churchill believed, too, that bombings of the Reich's homeland and attacks on the German periphery could possibly do much of the Allies' work for them. "It must be remembered," he told Roosevelt, "that we place great hopes of affecting German production and German morale by ever more severe and more accurate bombing of their cities and harbours and that this, combined with their Russian defeats, may produce important effects upon the will to fight of the German people, with consequential internal reactions upon the German Government." Though the question of landings would become a critical point of political and personal contention, at this juncture Roosevelt largely agreed, and their decisions were made in an intimate setting. "As we both, by need or habit, were forced to do much of our work in bed, he visited me in my room whenever he felt inclined, and encouraged me to do the same to him," Churchill recalled. The prime minister's hours kept Roosevelt up later than he was accustomed to. "Churchill would wander into the President's bedroom at any hour if he had something to talk over," said George Elsey, a young naval reservist who went to work in the White House map room.

The late-night conversations were fueled by war and drink. "We had to remember to have imported brandy after dinner," Eleanor recalled. "This was something Franklin himself did not have as a rule." But the rules were all being broken. "Never had the staid butlers, ushers, maids, and other Executive Mansion workers seen anything like Winston before," said Mike Reilly. "He ate, and thoroughly enjoyed, more food than any two men or three diplomats; and he consumed brandy and scotch with a grace and enthusiasm that left us all openmouthed in awe."

Churchill's traveling map room caught Roosevelt's fancy. "FDR was fascinated and told his naval aide to set up the same kind of operation," recalled Elsey. "They found a small room downstairs next to the oval Diplomatic Reception Room on the ground floor and installed standard gray gunmetal desks and put cork on the walls, where they attached maps of the Atlantic and Pacific theaters." Once Roosevelt had his own version, "Churchill would come to the Map Room any time, day or night," said Elsey. "Once my Army counterpart had taken off his uniform and hung it up so that it would be fresh in the morning, and all of a sudden the Prime Minister came barging in and found the poor guy in his underwear."

ON CHURCHILL'S FIRST full day in the White House, Grace Tully looked out a French window next to the Oval Office and saw "a chubby, florid, bald-headed gentleman dressed in one-piece, blue denim coveralls and with a big cigar in his mouth shambling toward my office." In the White House for the first time, Churchill was exploring the house and grounds alone before lunching with Roosevelt.

They ate at the president's trinket-strewn desk, a Roosevelt tradition. (Lord Chandos once had cold lobster and mayonnaise sauce with Roosevelt in the Oval Office. "Soon there were lobster sh.e.l.ls all over the desk," Chandos recalled, "and not a little mayonnaise had found its way on to the papers, the commissions, the reprieves and the reports which littered it.") The Roosevelt-Churchill lunch seems to have gone swimmingly, for Churchill was twinkling when, after changing from his siren suit into a black coat and blue-and-white polka-dot bow tie, he came back to the Oval Office at four P.M. for a presidential press conference. Sitting to Roosevelt's right behind the crowded desk, a cigar in his mouth, a wire basket of papers and a silver thermos of water just before him, Churchill was in his element. His face, noted one correspondent, had "a healthy pink tinge." Watching the huge numbers of reporters file in, Steve Early remarked, "I would like to get the gate receipts today."

Introducing Churchill, Roosevelt, wearing gray pinstripes and smoking a cigarette in an ivory holder, said, "He is quite willing to take on a conference, because we have one characteristic in common. We like new experiences in life." The Was.h.i.+ngton Star noted the stagecraft: "Two great statesmen-showmen, sharing the star parts in a world drama that will be read and studied for centuries to come, played a sparkling and unique scene at the White House yesterday. They were President Roosevelt, debonair and facile as usual, and Britain's Prime Minister Churchill, jaunty and ruddy." The atmosphere in the office, the Star wrote, was "electric."

The room was full. "I wish you would just stand up for one minute and let them see you," Roosevelt said to Churchill. "They can't see you." Churchill mounted his chair and waved his cigar. "It was terribly exciting," said Alistair Cooke, the British journalist. Accustomed to commanding this room and this audience, Roosevelt sat back and delightedly-even proudly-watched Churchill cast his spell.

"Go ahead and shoot," Roosevelt said to the reporters.

"Mr. Prime Minister, isn't Singapore the key to the whole situation out there?"

"The key to the whole situation is the resolute manner in which the British and American Democracies are going to throw themselves into the conflict."

"Mr. Minister, could you tell us what you think of conditions within Germany-the morale?"

"Well, I have always been feeling that one of these days we might get a windfall coming from that quarter, but I don't think we ought to count on it. Just go on as if they were keeping on as bad as they are, or as good as they are. And then one of these days, as we did in the last war, we may wake up and find we ran short of Huns." [Laughter]

"Do you think the war is turning in our favor in the last month or so?"

"I can't describe the feelings of relief with which I find Russia victorious, the United States and Great Britain standing side by side. It is incredible to anyone who has lived through the lonely months of 1940. It is incredible. Thank G.o.d."

"Mr. Minister, can you tell us when you think we may lick these boys?"

For the first time, Churchill looked puzzled. To that point, The Was.h.i.+ngton Post reported, he had been "flinging back answers that almost caught the questions in mid-air." But he did not understand what "lick" meant; Early went over and translated for him.

"If we manage it well," Churchill answered with a smile, "it will only take half as long as if we manage it badly." [Loud laughter]

"Mr. Prime Minister, in one of your speeches you mentioned three or four of the great climacterics. Would you now add our entry into the war as one of those, sir?"

"I think I may almost say, 'I sure do.' " [Loud laughter]

"Mr. Prime Minister, during your talks here, will you take up economic, and diplomatic, and post-war problems?"

"I hope not too much on them. Well, really, we have to concentrate on the grim emergencies, and we-when we have solved them, we shall be in a position to deal with the future of the world in a manner to give the best results, and the most lasting results, for the common peoples of all the lands. But one has only a certain amount of life and strength, and only so many hours in the day, and other emergencies press upon us too much to be drawn into those very, very complicated, tangled and not in all cases attractive jungles."

"Mr. Minister, have you any doubt of the ultimate victory?"

"I have no doubt whatever."

Roosevelt took pride in his guest's triumphant turn. "The smiling President looked like an old trouper who, on turning impresario, had produced a smash hit," Newsweek wrote. "And some thought they detected in his face admiration for a man who had at least equaled him in the part in which he himself was a star."

The press conference was an example of how Roosevelt and Churchill helped transform how the story of politics was told in the middle of the twentieth century. They both understood the significance of ma.s.s media-of newspapers, radio, magazines, and newsreels-and always had. Roosevelt had been the top editor on the Harvard Crimson, and Churchill had made himself famous as a war reporter. Later both exploited radio. In America, Roosevelt's persona and habits-the cigarette and its holder, his dog-were part of the popular consciousness; in Britain, Churchill's oft photographed courageous countenance was a powerful symbol of defiance. On afternoons like this one in Was.h.i.+ngton, or on the deck of the Prince of Wales the previous August, these two political actors were, in a way, designing the stage set of modern politics.

THAT EVENING, the household a.s.sembled for c.o.c.ktails in the Red Room before dinner. Making drinks was one of the few physical activities Roosevelt-who sometimes called it "children's hour"-could easily handle in public. "At c.o.c.ktail time everything was beautifully stage-managed so that he could be in control, despite his disability," said Mary Soames. "He would be wheeled in and then spin around to be at the drinks table, where he could reach everything. There were the bottles, there was the shaker, there was the ice. It was all beautifully done. There was never an effort or scurry. He loved the ceremony of making the drinks; it was rather like, 'Look, I can do it.' It was formidable. And you knew you were supposed to just hand him your gla.s.s, and not reach for anything else. It was a lovely performance."

Roosevelt was fond of what he called martinis, but there was not a consistent recipe for his mixed drinks. "To my unpracticed eye he seemed to experiment on each occasion with a different percentage of vermouth, gin and fruit juice," recalled Sam Rosenman. "At times he varied it with rum-especially rum from the Virgin Islands." Roosevelt preferred gin.

Churchill was not a fan of Roosevelt's drinks. "Churchill could not abide c.o.c.ktails of any kind," said Alistair Cooke of Churchill's experience as a presidential guest, "and so he was always handed this martini and . . . he got to the sort of routine that five minutes after, everybody was joking and so on, he would say, 'Mr. President, excuse me,' and he would go to the bathroom and he would immediately take the olive out and pour the thing down and then put water in it." (After leaving the White House, Churchill joked: "The problem in this country is the drinks are too hard and the toilet paper's too soft.") Churchill was a purist of a drinker, preferring Johnnie Walker Scotch with soda, brandy, Pol Roger champagne, and good wines. "It was not the amount that impressed us, although that was quite impressive," Mike Reilly recalled, "but the complete sobriety that went hand in hand with his drinking." Remarkably few people ever saw Churchill intoxicated. There can be little question, however, that the c.u.mulative effect of years of drinking was at least one factor among many in Churchill's personality. Alcohol raised his sense of drama, removed inhibitions, and invested the ordinary with a dimension of the extraordinary. His highs seemed higher, his lows lower.

Roosevelt did not attempt to match Churchill's pace, but he did consider c.o.c.ktail hour sacred. It was one of the few moments in his day when the world's troubles seemed to recede. Roosevelt spent much of the hour, as Mary Soames noted, making drinks for others ("How about another sippy?" he would ask, or, "How about a little dividend?") and telling (and retelling) stories.

There was another reason for his fondness for gathering people around him: his paralysis. "He needed an audience; he had to have people around," said George Elsey. "He was trapped in that chair and could not go out and mix and mingle." His confinement was not to be talked about, but it was the central fact of his life, and the c.o.c.ktail hour made a rough pa.s.sage smooth.

As with so much else in the Roosevelt household, though, c.o.c.ktail hour was complicated. Eleanor could never forget her family's history with alcoholism, and she worried about her sons indulging too much. "Mrs. Roosevelt was very afraid of excessive drinking, very bothered by it," Trude Lash said. "She couldn't stand it if she thought you'd had too many drinks." At times, Roosevelt conducted one party in the Oval Study and left Eleanor with lesser-known guests in the West Hall, where he would greet them on the way to the dining room on the first floor. "Drinking to excess is a type of emotional instability only one step short of what happens to people who actually go out of their minds," Eleanor once wrote. Occasionally she tried to make a go of it. "Mrs. Roosevelt was most abstemious, but she loved an Old Fas.h.i.+oned with lots of fruits and vegetables," Mrs. Lash recalled. " 'Warm it up a little,' she would say, which meant add more fruit, not more liquor."

ON THE EVENING of Churchill's afternoon session with reporters, whiskey sours were on offer. Churchill was delayed and so could skip the mixed drink without worrying about choking it down or beating a retreat to the bathroom. Percy Chubb, the husband of a grandniece of Theodore Roosevelt's, described the dinner party in detail to Martin Gilbert. "Churchill was subdued and looked tired" when he finally came in, Chubb recalled, noting that "after all, he had just arrived across the Atlantic and had faced a press conference on his arrival that day." The next morning, Churchill would write Clementine: "I have not had a minute since I got here to tell you about it. All is vy good indeed. . . . The Americans are magnificent in their breadth of view."

At dinner, Roosevelt and Churchill debated the Boer War, the conflict in which the Boers in South Africa rose up against their British masters. Roosevelt, who had supported the Boers when he was at Harvard, and Churchill, a veteran of those very battles, sparred for a time. Chubb thought "the President was in a buoyant mood and kept needling Churchill. . . . When he felt crowded too far, Churchill would take a puff of his cigar and counter attack with a verbal sally and then settle back again into his chair."

As Chubb recalled it, Roosevelt volunteered that he had been disappointed at Harvard-that he had not been as popular or as successful as he would have liked to have been, culminating in the snub by Porcellian. For Roosevelt this was an extraordinarily honest admission. "Churchill took a puff at his cigar and growled: 'When I hear a man say that his childhood was the happiest time of his life, I think (puff) my friend, you have had a pretty poor life.' "

A remarkable exchange: Roosevelt confiding, in mixed company, in Churchill; Churchill, who had long been forced to reimagine his childhood, striking a pugnacious pose in the face of an emotional confession. That Roosevelt was able to reveal something of his true feelings signaled his comfort with Churchill, and Churchill's bullish response was at heart affectionate. Life, Churchill was saying, was what happened when you grew up, not when you were growing up. That conviction was how he had coped, surviving his father's displeasure and his mother's occasional neglect, and now he pa.s.sed the counsel along to his friend.

THE NEXT DAY was Christmas Eve, and the two men lit the Christmas tree on the South Lawn. The year before, Roosevelt had made a dark joke in the gloom of approaching war, saying with more than a little bitterness that the crowd was welcome to return in 1941 "if we are all still here." Now they were back-in no small measure because of Roosevelt's guest. "Our strongest weapon in this war is that conviction of the dignity and brotherhood of man which Christmas Day signifies-more than any other day or any other symbol," Roosevelt said. Such ceremonies can be routine, or flat, or overdone. Like the church service aboard the Prince of Wales, however, this one was apparently perfect. "There was a vast crowd, the voices drifted across the keen night air, the carols-old and yet for ever new-were sung in an atmosphere mellowed by the lights and the shadows," Inspector Thompson recalled. "The voices of the President and the Prime Minister rang out with a message of hope and courage to all who strove for freedom." s.h.i.+vering, Churchill-whom Roosevelt introduced as "my a.s.sociate, my old and good friend"-came to the microphones.

"I spend this anniversary and festival far from my country, far from my family, yet I cannot truthfully say that I feel far from home . . . ," Churchill said. "Here, in the midst of war, raging and roaring over all the lands and seas, creeping nearer to our hearts and homes, here, amid all the tumult, we have tonight the peace of the spirit in each cottage home and in every generous heart. Therefore we may cast aside for this night at least the cares and dangers which beset us, and make for the children an evening of happiness in a world of storm. Here, then, for one night only, each home throughout the English-speaking world should be a brightly-lighted island of happiness and peace."

Churchill evoked the hopes of a country, and a world, now living in fear. "Let the children have their night of fun and laughter," he continued. "Let the gifts of Father Christmas delight their play. Let us grown-ups share to the full in their unstinted pleasures before we turn again to the stern task and the formidable years that lie before us, resolved that, by our sacrifice and daring, these same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world." With Roosevelt taking in his moving words, Churchill concluded: "And so, in G.o.d's mercy, a happy Christmas to you all."

Struck by the solemnity of the task before her husband and her guest-and perhaps thinking, too, of her absent sons in the line of fire-Mrs. Roosevelt recalled "there was little joy in our hearts. The cold gripped us all so intensely that we were glad of a cup of tea on our return to the house."

Churchill probably declined the tea; his heart was racing. As he returned inside, he told Moran he "had had palpitations during the ceremony."

ELEANOR HAD BEEN worried about how Roosevelt would cope with the holiday, and Churchill's visit rescued it. "This was to be the first Christmas without my mother-in-law and I had dreaded it for my husband's sake," Eleanor recalled, "but the sudden influx of guests and the increasing work made it practically impossible for him to think too much about any personal sorrow." On the family front, the Churchills were unhappy about being apart. "Tender love to you and all-my thoughts will be with you this strange Christmas eve," Churchill wrote Clementine. "I miss you dreadfully," Clementine replied. "Time seems to stand still."

DESPITE HIS GENERAL aversion to going to church in the capital, Roosevelt liked spending Christmas mornings in Was.h.i.+ngton at the Foundry Methodist Church. Defending his decision to forgo an Episcopal service to mark the Nativity, Roosevelt once said, "What's the matter? I like to sing hymns with the Methodys." As they set off this year, he declared: "It is good for Winston to sing hymns with the Methodys." There were lilies on the altar in memory of Roosevelt's mother, The Was.h.i.+ngton Post reported, and the two men sat in the fourth pew from the front as the minister prayed for "those who are dying on land and sea this Christmas morning." "Certainly there was much to fortify the faith of all who believe in the moral governance of the universe," Churchill recalled.

The services and ceremonies were inspiring, but the business at hand was tangled and difficult. "In these first talks which my husband and the prime minister had," Eleanor recalled, "they faced the fact that there was a long-drawn-out war ahead during which there would be many setbacks, and that both of them, as leaders of their nations, would have to be prepared to bolster the morale of their people."

ROOSEVELT AND CHURCHILL were both intimately involved in strategic decisions and took a strong hand in running the military-Churchill more so in London than Roosevelt in Was.h.i.+ngton, but Roosevelt was an active commander in chief. After a conversation once with Lord Ismay, The Was.h.i.+ngton Post's Eugene Meyer observed, "I got the impression, of course, that the particular shaping up of the organization is closely related to the personality of the Prime Minister, and the fact that the present P.M. is himself a strategist in military affairs and in naval affairs he is a very strong influence in present forms and procedures."

At Christmas, there were the inevitably complicated questions of command and resource allocation, and the Americans favored the creation of a Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee, in Was.h.i.+ngton, to coordinate Allied strategy. (To sweeten the deal for the British, the Americans offered them a theater command in the Western Pacific, but events there were moving so quickly-and so badly-that the arrangement did not last.) After much maneuvering, Churchill agreed. His basic view of the practicalities of the alliance remained what it had been in theory all these months: that he and the president could work together even if they did not reach complete agreement at once. "For the first time," Moran recalled, "I have seen Winston content to listen. You could almost feel the importance he attaches to bringing the President along with him, and in that good cause he has become a very model of restraint and self-discipline." Surrounded by a vast array of issues-of strategy, of tactics, of supply, of command, of production-Churchill believed that, with Roosevelt, all would be well. When it came to munitions, for example, an Anglo-American committee was established with this concluding note: "Any differences arising, which it is expected will be rare, will be resolved by the President and the Prime Minister in agreement."

Both men were familiar with power. Governing was what Churchills and Roosevelts did. "I am a child of the House of Commons," Churchill dictated on Christmas Day, preparing for a speech to Congress. He remembered meeting the elite of his father's day in his youth. "It seemed a very great world in which these men lived," he once wrote, "a world where high rules reigned and every trifle in public conduct counted: a dueling-ground where although the business might be ruthless, and the weapons loaded with ball, there was ceremonious personal courtesy and mutual respect." Churchill carried a walking stick that had been a wedding gift from Edward VII. Through his filial devotion to Lord Randolph and his connection to the duke of Marlborough, Churchill took to exercising authority and guiding the life of his nation with grace. "Most of Churchill's ancestors had been politicians of one kind or another," recalled Maurice Ashley, his research a.s.sistant. "Political history was to him an absorbing interest if only because it was in part the story of his own family."

Roosevelt heard the same music. He had now been president of the United States longer than any man ever had, and his personal history was intertwined with the evolution of American power. Franklin Roosevelt had first visited the White House with his father in Grover Cleveland's day. Cleveland received father and son in his study one night after a long day. They found him, Sara later said, looking "more careworn than ever." Cleveland patted the five-year-old Roosevelt on the head and said, "My little man, I am making a strange wish for you. It is that you may never be President of the United States." Few presidential prayers have gone as unanswered as that casual one.

Roosevelt would boast that his great-great-grandfather Isaac Roosevelt, an early New York state senator and one of the ratifiers of the Const.i.tution, had led Was.h.i.+ngton's horse in the first inaugural parade. On election night in Hyde Park in 1940, he claimed he remembered the torchlight parade marking Cleveland's victory in 1884.

On Christmas Day 1941, a Roosevelt had ruled for sixteen of the forty years since the turn of the twentieth century, and Franklin Roosevelt had spent another seven years as part of President Wilson's extended official circle. He had come to Alice Roosevelt's wedding to Nicholas Longworth here; his grandchildren played in the Oval Office. When Roosevelt was elected in 1932, the head usher remembered the new First Lady from her days as "Miss Eleanor," a favorite niece of TR's visiting in the first years of the new century.

"We like new experiences in life"

Meeting the press in the Oval Office, December 23, 1941 Eleanor was struck, too, by how comfortable her husband felt in the White House on the night of his first inaugural in March 1933. "My husband did not go to the inaugural ball because he found it too difficult to go in and out of crowded places of that kind," Eleanor recalled. When she and the children returned from showing the flag, Eleanor wondered how Roosevelt was getting along. "I was interested because I felt that with my husband's sense of history, the first night in the White House would be a tremendously historic, impressive thing to him," she said. "But on this occasion, to my surprise, he behaved exactly as though he had always been there and never anywhere else."

CHRISTMAS DINNER 1941 WAS a large affair, with the British guests mingling with a pack of Roosevelt cousins. Churchill had been working on his congressional address and was thinking of putting a pa.s.sage from the 112th Psalm into the text when it came time to join the party. He wondered whether Roosevelt would approve of the pa.s.sage, and Lord Moran carried the Bible along to c.o.c.ktail hour. "The P.M. took the Bible from me and read his quotation to the President, who liked it," Moran recalled. The verse: "He shall not be afraid of evil tidings: his heart is fixed, trusting in the Lord." At dinner, Roosevelt reminded his guests that the king and queen had dined in this room on their 1939 visit, an event that had marked "a beginning of the coming together of the two English-speaking races"-borrowing one of Churchill's favorite phrases-"which would go on after the war." Everyone except Churchill sipped champagne; he was drinking whiskey. Churchill, Moran recalled, was "silent and preoccupied. Perhaps he was turning over in his mind tomorrow's speech to Congress."

While Churchill crafted his address into the night, Harry Hopkins was concerned that the recently isolationist Congress might not make a warm audience. Roosevelt wished Churchill luck as the prime minister set out for the trip up Pennsylvania Avenue on December 26. The mystery about how Churchill would find the crowd was quickly cleared up. A roar greeted the prime minister as he was escorted down the aisle to the Senate rostrum. In the White House, Roosevelt listened to the speech over the radio.