Franklin And Winston Part 7

"The fact that my American forebears have for so many generations played their part in the life of the United States, and that here I am, an Englishman, welcomed in your midst, makes this experience one of the most moving and thrilling in my life, which is already long and has not been entirely uneventful," Churchill told the Congress. "I wish indeed that my mother, whose memory I cherish across the vale of years, could be here to see. By the way, I cannot help reflecting that if my father had been American and my mother British, instead of the other way round, I might have got here on my own."

THEY LOVED IT; he had them from the first. The opening of this speech is among the best-known pa.s.sages in the Churchill canon, particularly in America, but even more interesting is his next point, which is quoted less often: "In that case, this would not have been the first time you would have heard my voice," he said. "In that case I should not have needed any invitation, but if I had, it is hardly likely it would have been unanimous. So perhaps things are better as they are."

Those three sentences reveal a striking self-awareness on Churchill's part. He knew he was a complex man, someone who could be hard to get along with. But he then proceeded to show why his peacetime fault of bullheadedness was a wartime gift. He had found in Was.h.i.+ngton, he said, "an Olympian fort.i.tude which . . . is only the mask of an inflexible purpose and the proof of a sure and well-grounded confidence in the final outcome. We in Britain had the same feeling in our darkest days."

He spoke of battles to come. "Some people may be startled or momentarily depressed when, like your President, I speak of a long and hard war. But our peoples would rather know the truth, sombre though it may be. And after all, when we are doing the n.o.blest work in the world, not only defending our hearths and homes but the cause of freedom in other lands, the question of whether deliverance comes in 1942, 1943, or 1944 falls into its proper place in the grand proportions of human history." Churchill questioned the sanity of the j.a.panese. "What kind of a people do they think we are?" he asked. "Is it possible they do not realize that we shall never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?"

Churchill spoke for thirty-five minutes, but the performance was so fluid that one correspondent said it had seemed like just five minutes in the galleries. It had flown by for the speaker, too. "Inside, the scene was impressive and formidable, and the great semicircular hall, visible to me through a grille of microphones, was thronged," Churchill recalled, the orator savoring his success. "What I said was received with the utmost kindness and attention. I got my laughter and applause just where I expected them. . . . The sense of the might and will-power of the American nation streamed up to me from the august a.s.sembly. Who could doubt that all would be well?"

As he left the floor, Churchill turned and flashed his "V for Victory" sign. "The effect was instantaneous, electric," The Was.h.i.+ngton Post reported. "The cheers swelled into a roar. Usually restrained Harlan Fiske Stone, Chief Justice of the United States, raised his arm in a return salute . . . and fingers spread in the victory sign were raised in scores of places throughout the chamber." Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland was glowing with admiration. "That fellow's really got it," Tydings said. "You can follow that fellow anywhere." Senator Burton Wheeler, an isolationist, allowed: "It was a clever speech and one that generally will appeal to the American people." Churchill greeted the senator at lunch afterward and told his companions, with typical magnanimity, that he had discouraged criticism of the men of Munich in Britain because "if the present criticizes the past, there is not much hope for the future."

Leaving the Capitol, Churchill felt as he had the night he became prime minister: that he was walking with destiny and fulfilling a mystical role. "It was with heart-stirrings that I fulfilled the invitation to address the Congress of the United States," Churchill recalled. "The occasion was important for what I was sure was the all-conquering alliance of the English-speaking peoples. I had never addressed a foreign Parliament before. Yet to me, who could trace unbroken male descent on my mother's side through five generations from a lieutenant who served in George Was.h.i.+ngton's army, it was possible to feel a blood-right to speak to the representatives of the great Republic in our common cause. It certainly was odd that it should all work out this way; and once again I had the feeling, for mentioning which I may be pardoned, of being used, however unworthy, in some appointed plan." When Churchill got back to the White House, he went to see Roosevelt, who "told me I had done quite well." Not exactly effusive praise, but Churchill was pleased by the compliment-he remembered it for years and included the detail in his memoirs.

THAT NIGHT, after Churchill went to bed, he rose to open a window. "It was very stiff," he told Moran the next day. "I had to use considerable force and I noticed all at once that I was short of breath. I had a dull pain over my heart. It went down my left arm. It didn't last very long, but it has never happened before. What is it? Is my heart all right?" After listening to Churchill's heart, Moran realized Churchill might have suffered an episode of angina pectoris. "The textbook treatment for this is at least six weeks in bed," the doctor calculated. "That would mean publis.h.i.+ng to the world-and the American newspapers would see to this-that the P.M. was an invalid with a crippled heart and a doubtful future. And this at a moment when America has just come into the war, and there is no one but Winston to take her by the hand." Even telling Churchill the full truth, Moran believed, would be risky. "I knew, too, the consequences to one of his imaginative temperament of the feeling that his heart was affected. His work would suffer. . . . Right or wrong it seemed plain that I must sit tight on what had happened, whatever the consequences."

"Well," Churchill said, "is my heart all right?"

"There is nothing serious," Moran said. "You have been overdoing things."

"Now, Charles, you're not going to tell me to rest. I can't. I won't. n.o.body else can do this job. I must. What actually happened when I opened the window?" Churchill asked. "My idea is that I strained one of my chest muscles. I used great force. I don't believe it was my heart at all."

Moran stuck to his plan. "Your circulation was a bit sluggish. It is nothing serious. You needn't rest in the sense of lying up, but you mustn't do more than you can help in the way of exertion for a little while."

In 1950 Churchill wrote that "in trying to open the window I strained my heart slightly, causing unpleasant sensations which continued for some days." Reflecting on the incident years later, a doctor told Martin Gilbert: "In fact the course adopted by Moran on this occasion was quite correct. To have ordered bed rest for six weeks would not have been good therapy as there is no evidence that this does the patient any good and only tends to make them neurotic." Churchill's acknowledgment of the episode in his memoirs was oblique. "These great occasions imposed heavy demands on my life and strength, and were additional to all the daily consultations and ma.s.s of current business," Churchill wrote of the Was.h.i.+ngton visit. "In fact, I do not know how I got through it all." Clementine worried he was working at a desperate pace. "I have been thinking constantly of you & trying to picture & realize the drama in which you are playing the princ.i.p.al-or rather it seems-the only part," she wrote him. "I pray that when you leave, that the fervour you have aroused may not die down but will consolidate into practical & far-reaching action." It was her husband's prayer, too-one he held so fervently that his blood was running high.

ON NEW YEAR'S MORNING 1942, Roosevelt and Churchill sat together in George Was.h.i.+ngton's pew at Christ Church in Alexandria and sang "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." The rector, Reverend Edward Randolph Welles, read Was.h.i.+ngton's Prayer for the United States and preached that "the spirit of Christ alone stands in the way of successful n.a.z.i world domination, for it alone can inspire a successful will to resist and provide sufficient power to achieve victory." Eleanor had to slip her husband cash for the collection plate, since he rarely carried money. "When these little things are taken care of by others as a rule, it is easy always to expect them to be arranged," Eleanor recalled. The hymns echoing in their heads, Roosevelt and Churchill drove on to Mount Vernon, where Roosevelt watched as Churchill laid a wreath of chrysanthemums and irises at the first president's tomb.

Back at the White House later that day, Joseph Lash was seated next to Churchill. "I was too awe-struck to open my mouth," Lash recalled. "Hitler had sounded awfully anxious in his New Year's Day message, Churchill observed, even invoking Almighty G.o.d," Lash recalled. " 'But we have a presumption on the Deity,' he added, looking at the president, who was known to be pressing the Russians hard to permit religious freedom." Roosevelt had been wrestling with the Soviets over adding a reference to the defense of religious freedom in an Allied declaration to be signed that evening. Amba.s.sador Maxim Litvinov had resisted its inclusion, preferring the phrase freedom of conscience. Churchill remembered that Roosevelt had "had a long talk" with Litvinov alone "about his soul and the dangers of h.e.l.l-fire," but what worked was a deft Rooseveltian formulation in which the president a.s.sured Litvinov that "conscience" and "religion" were synonymous. Roosevelt, Robert Sherwood recalled, said, "The traditional Jeffersonian principle of religious freedom was so broadly democratic that it included the right to have no religion at all-it gave to the individual the right to wors.h.i.+p any G.o.d he chose or no G.o.d." Churchill was so amused by Roosevelt's theological maneuvering that he told Roosevelt he would make him archbishop of Canterbury if Roosevelt lost the next campaign. ("I did not however make any official recommendation to the Cabinet or the Crown upon this point," Churchill noted, "and as he won the election in 1944 it did not arise.") Roosevelt was Churchill's sole concern. "He was always full of stories, but at meals, no matter how far apart the two were sitting or who was next to him, Churchill tried to talk with FDR-the whole flow of Churchill's conversation was directed at the President," said Trude Lash, who was at lunch that day and would marry Joe in 1944. "You couldn't have a big ego if you were sitting next to him, because you might be hurt that he didn't seem to take an interest in you."

THEY HAD WORK to do that night. Roosevelt and Churchill were to adopt "A Declaration by the United Nations," a kind of successor doc.u.ment to the Atlantic Charter, affirming that the Allies were fighting because they were "convinced that complete victory over their enemies is essential to defend life, liberty, independence, and religious freedom."

The guests came back together for dinner before the signing. Roosevelt mentioned his "stab in the back" speech at Charlottesville-the address that had so excited and yet so disappointed Churchill about America's readiness for war. Not surprisingly, Roosevelt was the hero of Roosevelt's story, though Eleanor got a cameo. "Although il Duce had just brought Italy into the war," Joseph Lash recalled, "the State Department had made the president take the cutting ['stab in the back'] phrase out of the prepared text. On the way to the university, however, Roosevelt had decided to restore it. He asked Mrs. Roosevelt what she thought. If he felt he should, he ought to use it had been her advice."

Churchill was sympathetic. According to Lash, Churchill said "he knew that feeling. . . . He was always having to take things out of his speeches." It was a moment of commiseration for men at the top who could be p.r.o.ne-often understandably-to self-pity.

There was chat about Hitler and about Stalin. "The best thing to do with Hitler, the president . . . said, would be to put him on a s.h.i.+p from which he would disappear," Lash noted. Churchill reminisced about his own battle in Russia after the revolution there. "Churchill recalled that in 19181919 he had . . . gotten as far as Tula, just south of Moscow, in his effort to overthrow the Bolsheviks," Lash said. "Now, however, he forgave 'the Russians in proportion to the number of Huns they killed.'

" 'Do they forgive you?' Hopkins asked.

" 'In proportion to the number of tanks I send,' Churchill replied."

ROOSEVELT AND CHURCHILL adjourned to the Oval Study, where Roosevelt signed the declaration first, then Churchill. Then came the Soviet and Chinese envoys. For Churchill, long the only bulwark against the Axis, it was thrilling. "Four fifths of the human race," Churchill said. He liked this phrase, and as with many phrases he liked, this was not the first time he had used it. Three weeks before, declaring war on j.a.pan, he had told the House of Commons: "We have at least four-fifths of the population of the globe upon our side."

Churchill's pride in what Britain had done alone under his leaders.h.i.+p was never far from his mind, and he would later indulge it in debates with Roosevelt and Stalin. But tonight, twenty-eight months to the day since the invasion of Poland, Churchill, Joseph Lash wrote, "stalked around the study with a look of great satisfaction on his face."

THE MEN AROUND Roosevelt were worried that their guest's rhetorical triumph on Capitol Hill would overshadow their boss as the State of the Union message drew near. Steve Early, "fiercely loyal and jealous of his Chief's prestige," Sherwood recalled, "kept charts showing the fluctuations of the size of the President's radio audiences and he did not welcome the appearance of a new star attraction in a field which Roosevelt had so long monopolized." Roosevelt was as compet.i.tive as any man who ever lived, but in this flush season of friends.h.i.+p, Sherwood said, he "was not troubled; he was greatly amused by his friends' concern." Churchill may have sensed something of the behind-the-scenes drama, for when Roosevelt read a draft to him, Churchill was flattering. "It went over big," Roosevelt told his advisers later. Perhaps one reason Roosevelt was able to laugh off his aides' anxiety about his rank in the rhetorical arena was that the politician in him understood that whatever the style of the speech, its substance would guarantee his preeminence in the emerging firm of Roosevelt & Churchill.

American strength would carry the day, and power would follow the money, the men, the s.h.i.+ps, the planes, the tanks-the lion's share of which would come from the United States, not Britain. Beaverbrook had arrived and urged more, more, more, with an energy that appealed to Roosevelt. "We cannot wage this war in a defensive spirit," Roosevelt told Congress on January 6, 1942. "As our power and our resources are fully mobilized, we shall carry the attack against the enemy-we shall hit him and hit him again wherever and whenever we can reach him."

Roosevelt, meanwhile, was praising his guest behind his back-a sign of genuine admiration. Sam Rosenman dined at the White House on a January evening when Churchill was out and recalled that "the conversation was mostly about Churchill-Roosevelt was most enthusiastic about him and praised his rugged, bold approach to the problems of the war."

It had been a long few weeks. "My American friends thought that I was looking tired and ought to have a rest," Churchill recalled, so he took off for five days at the sh.o.r.e in Florida, relaxing at Lend-Lease administrator Edward Stettinius's place near Palm Beach. Clementine was cheered by the thought that her husband would be getting a rest. "I am happy that you are slipping away to the South for . . . rest & suns.h.i.+ne," she wrote him. Churchill's hours were also weighing on Roosevelt. "This routine was beginning to get Roosevelt down," Rosenman said, "and he laughingly remarked that he was looking forward to the Prime Minister's departure in order to get some sleep."

TIRED, CHURCHILL TOOK his exhaustion out on his party at the beach. "Nothing seems to be right," recalled Lord Moran, noting that Churchill was "in a belligerent mood. . . . He was just hitting out blindly, like a child in a temper." The storm pa.s.sed as Churchill splashed naked in the surf ("half-submerged in the water like a hippopotamus in a swamp," Moran said). Inspector Thompson had tried to get Churchill into a pair of swimming trunks but failed. "n.o.body knows I am staying in this place, and I have only to step out of the back door into the sea," Churchill said.

"You could be seen through gla.s.ses, sir," Thompson said.

"If they are that much interested, it is their own fault what they see," Churchill replied. As he was swimming, there was word of a shark sighting. "They said it was only a 'ground shark'; but I was not wholly rea.s.sured," Churchill remembered. "It is as bad to be eaten by a ground shark as by any other. So I stayed in the shallows from then on." He told Thompson to stand watch against the shark as he lolled at the edge of the water, but, Thompson said, "we saw no more of it." When Churchill rose to return to the villa, he merrily took credit for the shark's disappearance. "My bulk must have frightened him away!"

There was one uncomfortable moment for Churchill, an episode that suggests for all the warm words and cheery meals, he remained insecure about his place in Roosevelt's affections. Churchill described the incident as "amusing, though at the moment disconcerting." Wendell Willkie wanted to see Churchill while the prime minister was in the United States, but, Churchill recalled, "Roosevelt had not seemed at all keen about my meeting prominent members of the Opposition, and I had consequently so far not done so." Despite Roosevelt's tacit embargo on contacts with Republicans, Churchill asked his staff to get Willkie on the phone. This is Churchill's account of the ensuing debacle: "After some delay I was told, 'Your call is through.'

"I said in effect, 'I am so glad to speak to you. I hope we may meet. . . . Can you not join the train at some point and travel with me for a few hours? Where will you be on Sat.u.r.day next?'

"A voice came back: 'Why, just where I am now, at my desk.'

"To this I replied, 'I do not understand.'

" 'Whom do you think you are speaking to?'

"I replied, 'To Mr. Wendell Willkie, am I not?'

" 'No,' was the answer, 'you are speaking to the President.'

"I did not hear this very well, and asked, 'Who?'

" 'You are speaking to me,' came the answer, 'Franklin Roosevelt.'

"I said, 'I did not mean to trouble you at this moment. I was trying to speak to Wendell Willkie, but your telephone exchange seems to have made a mistake.' "

Roosevelt ignored this. " 'I hope you are getting on all right down there and enjoying yourself,' said the President. Some pleasant conversation followed about personal movements and plans, at the end of which I asked, 'I presume you do not mind my having wished to speak to Wendell Willkie?'

"To this Roosevelt said, 'No.' And this was the end of our talk."

And this was the end of our talk: a distant and correct "No." Churchill was mortified. This was a serious gaffe, the fact of his going behind Roosevelt's back compounded by his failing to recognize Roosevelt's voice even after Roosevelt identified himself. That alone probably annoyed Roosevelt, who did have one of the most recognizable voices in the world in January 1942. Churchill must have been churning with anxiety, so he did what suitors and friends the world over do when they make a mistake: He enlisted an envoy to see what the damage was. "It must be remembered that this was in the early days of our friends.h.i.+p," Churchill said, "and when I got back to Was.h.i.+ngton I thought it right to find out from Harry Hopkins whether any offence had been given." To Hopkins, Churchill wrote: "I rely on you to let me know if this action of mine in wis.h.i.+ng to speak to the person named"-Churchill is so embarra.s.sed now that he does not even use Willkie's name-"is in any way considered inappropriate, because I certainly thought I was acting in accordance with my duty to be civil to a public personage of importance." Hopkins was brief but rea.s.suring. This was at worst a small b.u.mp in an ever wider road of friends.h.i.+p. "Hopkins said that no harm had been done," Churchill recalled.

Preparing to return, he had telephoned Roosevelt, and this time he knew whom he was talking to. Churchill tried charm-and it worked. "I mustn't tell you on the open line how we shall be travelling," he said, "but we shall be coming by puff puff."

THE AUTHOR LOUIS ADAMIC and his wife, Stella, were ushered into the White House for dinner with Roosevelt and Churchill on the evening of January 13, 1942. Thus began one of the odder and least-known episodes in the annals of the Roosevelt-Churchill friends.h.i.+p. Adamic was a Slovenian-born writer who had published a book, Two-Way Pa.s.sage, which argued that Americans who had come from the devastated countries of Europe should return after the war to help build democratic inst.i.tutions. Predictably, the idea attracted Mrs. Roosevelt's attention, and she invited the author and his wife to meet Roosevelt.

The tone of Two-Way Pa.s.sage-and of the book Adamic would write about this single night, Dinner at the White House-was hostile to the British empire and to Churchill. Moreover, Adamic added a footnote to the 1946 book about the evening quoting a Was.h.i.+ngton columnist who alleged that Churchill had shaped British policy toward Greece because the country's chief English creditor, the Hambros Bank of London, had "bailed Winston Churchill out of bankruptcy in 1912." Churchill sued Adamic for libel in England and won. Yet even taking his ideological bias against Churchill into account, Adamic's description of the evening offers a window on the subtleties of the blossoming friends.h.i.+p.

AS THE ADAMICS entered the Oval Study for drinks, Roosevelt looked well. The last time Adamic had seen Roosevelt up close, in July 1940, had not been encouraging. Talking then about America's lack of preparedness for war, "His hands, gesturing for emphasis, lighting one cigarette after another, and flicking the ashes off his wrinkled seersucker coat, shook rather badly," Adamic wrote. "The rings under his eyes were very dark and deep." But now "there was no trace of ill-health, weariness or doubt. F.D.R. looked extraordinarily fit, self-possessed, relaxed-on top of the world."

Adamic was watching Roosevelt, taking everything in. "He was giving the last few flips to the silver c.o.c.ktail shaker. His face was ruddy and his close-set gray eyes flashed with an infectious zest . . . ," Adamic wrote. "A servant placed a bowl of popcorn before F.D.R., who said, 'Ah-thank you,' and took a handful and began to toss it dexterously into his mouth. . . . Maybe an evening like this, I thought, is his way of keeping sane while in the dead center of an overwhelming insanity."

Churchill appeared. He struck Adamic at first as shorter than expected, "a rotund, dumpy figure. . . . Yet, as he advanced into the room, a semi-scowl on his big, chubby, pink-and-white face with its light-blue eyes, the knowledge of his performance since Dunkerque and something about his person gave him a ma.s.sive stature. He moved as though he were without joints, all of a piece: solidly, unhurriedly, impervious to obstacles, like a tank or a bulldozer."

"h.e.l.lo, Winston," Roosevelt said.

"Evening, Mr. President," Churchill said, calling him by his t.i.tle in mixed company. It was a mark of deference not unlike Churchill's habit of wheeling Roosevelt around the house, a custom Churchill, in his active historical imagination, linked to Raleigh's spreading his cloak before Queen Elizabeth. Watching the two men, Adamic observed that "they were obviously friends, but-perhaps less obviously-friends of a special kind, in whose relations the personal and the supra-personal were turbulently mingled."

Roosevelt asked, "Had a good nap, Winston?"

"Churchill scowled . . . or perhaps 'pouted' is the more accurate word," Adamic wrote, "and sticking his cigar in his mouth, mumbled something neither Stella nor I understood, although the room was very still."

"Will you have one of these, Winston?" Roosevelt called out from the drinks tray.

"What are they?"

"Orange Blossoms."

"Churchill made a face," Adamic recalled, "but he accepted the c.o.c.ktail and drank it dutifully."

They went downstairs for dinner. Churchill rode the elevator with Roosevelt, and when everyone reached the ground floor, Eleanor stopped the guests and discussed the portraits on the walls while Roosevelt went ahead to the dining room. "On the train going home that night it occurred to Stella and me," Adamic wrote, "that Mrs. Roosevelt had held Churchill and the ladies in the hall . . . to give the President, whom an attendant had wheeled from the elevator into the dining room, a chance to switch from the wheelchair to his seat at the table"-another example of Roosevelt's masterly stagecraft. "It's strange to say now," George Elsey said after the war, "but you did not really notice he could not walk. He was a sort of Mount Rushmore being wheeled around, and all you noticed after a while was the Mount Rushmore part."

Margaret "Rollie" Hambley (later Margaret Hendrick) was there, too, and wrote Daisy Suckley an observant letter about the dinner. "The Prime Minister is about 5 7" and quite fat about the waist. . . . He has a very pink face, whitish-red thin hair, and very piercing pale blue eyes," Hambley wrote. "He looks just like his pictures and his nose has a very strange shape-it looks as if it were chiseled. . . . He has a very keen mind much more so than the Pres. but of course he has not all that wonderful charm and personality." Hambley also noticed that despite Churchill's public oratory, in person "he has a very poor voice. One can hardly understand him it is so indistinct and stammering, but he uses the most wonderful language imaginable. He speaks very often in similes and metaphors, comparing the Germans to hawks, and Von Ribbentrop to a clown." Twinkling, Churchill began to talk about how terrible Hitler was to "bomb all the beautiful scotch whiskey and cigar warehouses," Hambley wrote. "He said he didn't know what would happen to a country when its supplies of whiskey and cigars ran out."

Roosevelt was enjoying this, and he and Churchill then told a story about a Christmas gift gone bad. A box of cigars had arrived at the White House from Cuba, but, Hambley wrote, the box "was filled with worms." Groaning, Hambley "refused to eat any more food, but he seemed to delight in my illness and went into more & more detail of how they crept through each cigar."

Amid the ebb and flow of the conversation-which, Hambley wrote, touched on "cigars, the 30 points, German religion, Von Ribbentrop, Carol of Rumania . . . whiskey, college reunions"-a guest asked about King Zog of Albania.

As Adamic recalled it, Roosevelt cried out: " 'Zog!'

"The upper part of his body leapt up so that he almost seemed to rise," Adamic wrote. "We all looked at him. He leaned over the table and pointed a finger at Churchill: " 'Winston, we forgot Zog!'

"Churchill puckered his lips as if to say: So what, or, as he probably would have put it: Well? . . .

" 'Albania is a belligerent on our side,' said the President. He scratched his head. 'I believe there's an Albanian Minister or representative here-we must get him to sign our little doc.u.ment.' " Roosevelt and Churchill had neglected to get Albania, one of their allies, to affix an official signature to the declaration they had promulgated on New Year's Day. There was laughter, but Adamic was troubled by the tone of the gathering. "A couple of emperors!" he said to himself. ". . . Says one emperor to the other across the dinner table: 'Oh say, we forgot Zog.' It's funny as h.e.l.l. But too d.a.m.ned personal, haphazard, high-handed, casual. What else have they overlooked?"

When the Adamics left for a concert with Eleanor, Roosevelt and Churchill stayed behind, chatting and joking. Hambley and Anne Curzon-Howe, a school friend of Hambley's, rose to leave Roosevelt and Churchill alone, but the president stopped them, saying, "Where do you think you're off to? Sit down."

He was relieved to have an undemanding audience. "Mrs. Roosevelt invited these people she got interested in," Hambley said of the Adamics, "and I don't think FDR was happy that they were there when Churchill was. FDR and Churchill relaxed after they left."

Churchill tried to be charming. He and young Miss Curzon-Howe shared a distant ancestral bond in England, and Churchill said to her, "Call me Cousin Winston because of our Curzon connection."

The subject of growing old came up. "The P.M. said that a woman was as old as she looked; a man was as old as he felt; and a boy was as old as he was treated," Hambley noted. Churchill appeared downcast. "You know I must be the oldest man ever to have been in the White House." No, no, Roosevelt interjected. "The Pres. said there had been someone 95 there, so he cheered up."

They were in their element. "Brandy and the usual cigars were going strong," Anne Curzon-Howe recalled, "and W. and FDR seemed to be getting on famously and capping each other's stories."

THE NEXT NIGHT was Churchill's last in Was.h.i.+ngton, and he dined alone with Roosevelt and Hopkins. There were doc.u.ments to initial, and the three friends lingered an hour beyond the prime minister's scheduled departure time. It seems to have been a sentimental farewell. Hopkins tried a light touch in a letter he gave Churchill to take to Clementine, writing: "You would have been quite proud of your husband on this trip. First because he was ever so good-natured. I didn't see him take anybody's head off and he eats and drinks with his customary vigor, and still dislikes the same people. If he had half as good a time here as the President did in having him about the White House he surely will carry pleasant memories of the past three weeks."

Yet the friendly words were also tinged with the certain knowledge that victory would not be theirs overnight. Roosevelt and Churchill knew war was not a game; it was by their order that men would die. When Churchill signed a copy of the first volume of his book The River War for Roosevelt during his stay, his salutation captured the melancholy burden of ultimate command: "Inscribed for President Franklin D. Roosevelt by Winston S. Churchill," the prime minister wrote. "In rough times January 1942." Roosevelt's parting words to Churchill struck the same note. "Trust me," the president said, "to the bitter end." They would see the "rough times" through-side by side.

"There is no worse mistake in public leaders.h.i.+p than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away"

Clementine, Mary, and Winston Churchill at Westminster Abbey on the National Day of Prayer, March 19, 1942.

CHAPTER 6.

I THINK OF YOU OFTEN.

Churchill Faces a Storm at Home-Family Dramas-Roosevelt.

Comforts Churchill-A Sunday Morning in the Oval Study.

"IT WAS TO NO sunlit prospect that I must return," Churchill said of mid-January 1942. Robert Sherwood called this season the "winter of disaster." It had begun, really, more than a month before, when the j.a.panese sank the Prince of Wales and the Repulse. Many of the sailors who had prayed with Churchill and Roosevelt were killed. ("Nearly half those who sang," Churchill wrote in his recollection of the church parade, "were soon to die.") Pearl Harbor had been another dark chapter. January and February brought more horror. "The underrated j.a.panese forces shattered all previous Allied appraisals and calculations, and did so with such bewildering speed that the pins on the walls of the map rooms in Was.h.i.+ngton and London were usually far out of date," Sherwood wrote. The war in North Africa was troubling, too. The German commander, Erwin Rommel, was successfully driving east toward Tobruk. This was the world Roosevelt and Churchill were confronting, and Roosevelt was drawing on his mysterious supply of confidence and courage to face it.

He had lit the fires of American production. The generals were building the army. The man who had overcome polio and restored faith during the Depression believed he would win this war, too. Late one night after the true extent of the damage at Pearl Harbor had become clear, Sam Rosenman stopped by the White House following a presidential broadcast and discovered Roosevelt in his study with his stamp collection. "There was no excitement here now, no hectic atmosphere of false rumors; there was no fear-not even disquietude," Rosenman recalled. Over ginger ale (for Rosenman) and a beer (for FDR), the speechwriter was impressed by the president's equanimity. "There was a man at a big desk, smoking a cigarette, poring over his stamps. There was concern, yes, deep concern; but it was a calm concern. He was worried, deeply worried; but there was no trace of panic. His face was resolute, even grim; but it was confident and composed." Hopkins sensed the same thing after Churchill's return to England. "The President is amazingly calm about the war," Hopkins noted after seeing Roosevelt on January 24.

CHURCHILL WAS FEELING queasier, at least politically. He faced a no-confidence vote in the House. "Home again with the Prime Minister who is now the daring young man on the flying trapeze," Lord Beaverbrook cabled Averell Harriman on January 18. "Clementine hated to see Winston so beset on all sides," wrote Mary Soames. Churchill was out of sorts. "One of the characteristics of this great man was his incapacity for dwelling anywhere but on the peaks, or in the abyss," recalled Beaverbrook. "Gloom or glory, near-despair or complete triumph-these were the opposed climates of his being." A cold made things worse. "In spite of the shocks and stresses which each day brought," Churchill said of the effort it took him to prepare a long speech defending himself to the House of Commons at this time, "I did not grudge the twelve or fourteen hours of concentrated thought which ten thousand words of original composition on a vast, many-sided subject demanded"-language that suggests he did "grudge" the task-"and while the flames of adverse war . . . licked my feet, I succeeded in preparing my statement and appreciation of our case." He then recalled-perhaps unconsciously, for he does not cite her-a point in Clementine's 1940 letter urging him to be gentler with his subordinates. "I also remembered that wise French saying, 'On ne regne sur les ames que par le calme.' " He was trying to do as Clementine had suggested-steady himself in public and keep the snarling in private to a minimum.

Churchill believed people reacted to the world in the way he did, and his understanding of leaders.h.i.+p flowed from that premise. In Churchill's cosmos there was joy in the journey; without darkness there could be no light. This was one reason he often spoke of "our long story" or "our island story"-stories require conflict and challenges, victories and defeats. He wanted a part in the battles of his time so that he would live in the legend of the ages, and he a.s.sumed others did, too. It was no coincidence that in his "Finest Hour" broadcast he tied the trials of the present to the collective consciousness of the world to come. Men will still say was a call to arms reminiscent of Shakespeare's Henry V bracing his men to fight at Agincourt with the image of how the tale would be told from generation to generation: "This story shall the good man teach his son. . . ." Be brave now, and the future will cherish your memory and praise your name-an impressive, if risky, means of leaders.h.i.+p, for under stress not all of us are like Bedford and Exeter.

For Churchill there was a fundamental democratic instinct at work, too. His definition of heroism offered the possibility of glory for everyone, not just great men like Marlborough and Nelson and Wellington (or Churchill and Roosevelt). "Trust the people," Lord Randolph used to say. Because Churchill was leading a nation that had been threatened by invasion (and might yet be again) and in which people faced attack from the air, he was talking about war not as a distant phenomenon, but rather as one in which all of his listeners were both targets and potential soldiers. They deserved the truth. "There is no worse mistake in public leaders.h.i.+p than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away," Churchill wrote. "The British people can face peril or misfortune with fort.i.tude and buoyancy, but they bitterly resent being deceived or finding that those responsible for their affairs are themselves dwelling in a fool's paradise."

At his best, Roosevelt held essentially the same view as Churchill. "The news is going to get worse and worse before it begins to get better," Roosevelt said in the winter of 1942. "The American people must be prepared for it and they must get it straight from the shoulder." People respect candor if they are confident their leaders have a plan for moving forward. They do not like being talked down to or misled. It is the covenant of modern democracies: Tell it to us straight, and we will do what it takes. In a Was.h.i.+ngton's Birthday broadcast from the White House while Churchill was confronting his problems on the home front, Roosevelt said: "For eight years General Was.h.i.+ngton and his Continental Army were faced continually with formidable odds and recurring defeats. Supplies and equipment were lacking. In a sense, every winter was a Valley Forge. Throughout the Thirteen States there existed . . . selfish men, jealous men, fearful men, who proclaimed that Was.h.i.+ngton's cause was hopeless, that he should ask for a negotiated peace." Roosevelt quoted Thomas Paine: "Tyranny, like h.e.l.l, is not easily conquered." Churchill was grateful, calling the speech "heartening."

Rising above his cold, Churchill's ten thousand words answered his own critics with force. Before the vote on January 29, Churchill made a final point. "In no way have I mitigated the sense of danger and impending misfortunes-of a minor character and of a severe character-which still hang over us. But at the same time I avow my confidence, never stronger than at this moment, that we shall bring this conflict to an end in a manner agreeable to the interests of our country, and in a manner agreeable to the future of the world." He won 464 to 1. Behind the scenes, Churchill was still seething. "The naggers in the press were not however without resource," he snapped, las.h.i.+ng out, as many politicians do, at journalists. "They spun round with the alacrity of squirrels. How unnecessary it had been to ask for a Vote of Confidence! Who had ever dreamed of challenging the National Government?"

Roosevelt congratulated him by likening Churchill's parliamentary test to the American declaration of war on j.a.pan. "We also had one vote in opposition," Roosevelt remarked on January 30, alluding to one pacifist dissent on Pearl Harbor. It was no small comparison, and Churchill understood that. Roosevelt was saying they were in this together.

Still, the critics were not going away. "There is very little to cheer us these days because the news is so dreadful," Nancy Astor wrote Eugene Meyer. "However, I am certain it will be better." But, in an apparent reference to Churchill's domestic woes, Lady Astor added: "These shake-ups are good, and there is no good following a man-you have got to follow a principle. I have never met a man I could follow always-I've only read of them."

SINGAPORE, BRITAIN'S PRIZE in the Pacific, soon fell, further complicating Churchill's life. "I speak to you all under the shadow of a heavy and far-reaching military defeat," Churchill said in a broadcast on February 15, 1942, admitting the scope of the disaster. "It is a British and Imperial defeat." It was a time, like 1940, for courage. "This, therefore, is one of those moments when the British race and nation can show their quality and their genius. This is one of those moments when it can draw from the heart of misfortune the vital impulses of victory. Here is the moment to display that calm and poise combined with grim determination which not so long ago brought us out of the very jaws of death"-another echo of Clementine's personal counsel, now being applied to the whole nation. "Here is another occasion to show-as so often in our long story-that we can meet reverses with dignity and with renewed accessions of strength."

Churchill pointed out that American sea power had been "dashed to the ground" at Pearl Harbor. "There were numerous expressions of irritation at this statement in Was.h.i.+ngton, as though Churchill were attempting to escape censure by blaming it all on the U.S. Navy," wrote Sherwood, "but it did not bother Roosevelt at all." The president waved away the talk. As a fellow politician, he understood what Churchill was going through. "Winston had to say something," Roosevelt said.

Privately, Churchill remained disconsolate. "I realize how the fall of Singapore has affected you and the British people," Roosevelt wrote Churchill on February 18, dismissing attacks from those who did not know what it was like to be in their jobs. "It gives the well-known back seat drivers a field day but no matter how serious our setbacks have been, and I do not for a moment underrate them, we must constantly look forward to the next moves that need to be made to hit the enemy," he told Churchill. "I hope you will be of good heart in these trying weeks because I am very sure that you have the great confidence of the ma.s.ses of the British people. I want you to know that I think of you often and I know you will not hesitate to ask me if there is anything you think I can do."

Roosevelt's words were a mark of the new Roosevelt-Churchill connection. Another mark was Churchill's reciprocal candor in confiding his troubles to Roosevelt. Two years before, Churchill had tried to conceal his anxiety from Roosevelt, but now he was more direct. "I do not like these days of personal stress and I have found it difficult to keep my eye on the ball," he wrote to Roosevelt on February 20.

Two weeks later, Churchill added: "When I reflect how I have longed and prayed for the entry of the United States into the war, I find it difficult to realize how gravely our British affairs have deteriorated by what has happened since December seven. We have suffered the greatest disaster in our history at Singapore, and other misfortunes will come thick and fast upon us. Your great power will only become effective gradually because of the vast distances and the shortage of s.h.i.+ps."

"This may be a critical period," Roosevelt wrote back, still trying to cheer Churchill up, "but remember always it is not as bad as some you have so well survived before."

LIKE ROOSEVELT, Clementine wanted to find a way to help Churchill. "Clementine was of course deeply concerned for Winston: she saw every day the toll the weight of the war exacted from him, and he confided to her all his worries and tribulations," Mary wrote. "With her brave and stoical outlook"-a feature Clementine shared with Eleanor-"she accepted that the strain and burden of the work could scarcely be otherwise. But however and whenever she saw a chance to ease his burden or to spare him extra worry, she did so, and she could be fiercely protective if she thought unnecessary anxieties or problems were added to those it was inevitable he had to bear." By her own account, though, Clementine sometimes made things worse (another parallel with Eleanor). She and Churchill tangled over Beaverbrook's role-Churchill's old friend was causing friction in the government, and Clementine thought he should go. The force of the Churchills' quarrel can be inferred from a note Clementine wrote her husband: "I am ashamed that by my violent att.i.tude I should just now have added to your agonizing anxieties-Please forgive me."

In the spring of 1942, their son, Randolph, who had been working as a staff officer in Cairo, decided to become part of a paratroop squad. It was a courageous, glamorous, impetuous thing to do-the kind of thing his father would have done. When Churchill told Clementine of Randolph's plan, she apparently turned to stone, later writing: "Please don't think I am indifferent because I was silent when you told me of Randolph's cable to Pamela saying he was joining a parachute unit . . . but I grieve he has done this because I know this will cause you harrowing anxiety, indeed even agony of mind. . . . Surely there is a halfway house between being a Staff Officer and a Parachute Jumper? . . . considering he has a very young wife with a baby to say nothing of a Father who is bearing not only the burden of his own country but for the moment that of an unprepared America, it would in my view have been his dignified & reasonable duty."