Franklin And Winston Part 13

She and Randolph apparently struck a deal. "Me, having agreed to remove the baby from C. & to find a place of my own in the country for the baby, & that during this last year until our divorce is through & complete that I will not see too much of his parents. Now, I consider that quite reasonable, & one thing I know now, is that R is just as keen as I am to get free-and that if I stick to this bargain, which I will do, I think everything will go forward smoothly & there should be no more rows over me. . . ."

What may have been driving Randolph to take such a hard line about Pamela enjoying the glamour of his parents' company was not any desire to separate young Winston from his grandparents-far from it-but the simmering suspicion in Randolph's heart that his father did nothing to stop (and, in Randolph's view, may have abetted) Pamela's affair with Harriman.

It was a suspicion so deep-seated that it managed to disrupt a cruise aboard Aristotle Ona.s.sis's yacht in 1963, less than two years before Churchill's death. Ona.s.sis often hosted the former prime minister aboard the Christina in those last years, and this time Randolph joined the party. One night Randolph began spewing what Anthony Montague Browne, who was there, politely called in his memoirs "violent reproaches relating to his wartime marriage." It was a difficult moment. "Short of hitting him on the head with a bottle, nothing could have stopped him," Montague Browne recalled. "It was one of the most painful scenes I have ever witnessed." If the destruction of the Randolph-Pamela marriage could evoke such rage on a pleasant evening two decades later, then the wartime "rows" over Pamela between Churchill and Randolph must have indeed been painful for both father and son at a time when Churchill was leading the nation.

CHURCHILL AND ROOSEVELT would see each other again at Quebec in September. "This visit of mine to the President is the most necessary one that I have ever made since the very beginning as it is there that various differences that exist between the Staffs, and also between me and the American Chiefs of Staff, must be brought to a decision," Churchill wrote Clementine on August 17. "We have three armies in the field. The first is fighting under American Command in France, the second under General Alexander is relegated to a secondary and frustrated situation by the United States' insistence on this landing on the Riviera. The third on the Burmese frontier is fighting in the most unhealthy country in the world under the worst possible conditions to guard the American line over the Himalayas into their very over-rated China. Thus two-thirds of our forces are being mis-employed for American convenience, and the other third is under American command." He was feeling the loss of control but tried to be cheerful. "These are delicate and serious matters to be handled between friends in careful and patient personal discussion," Churchill added. "I have no doubt we shall reach a good conclusion, but you will see that life is not very easy."

Churchill was sick again. On September 1-the fifth anniversary of Hitler's invasion of Poland-Churchill landed back in England after a journey to Italy. He had a temperature of 103. Clementine found him "crumpled & feverish," she told Mary. "I was sick with fright." A touch of pneumonia was back, but all was soon well. "I was on a 24-hour leave pa.s.s, and I bolted up to London," Mary wrote. "On my arrival at the Annexe I found my parents having dinner together in my father's room-he was sitting up in bed attired in his glorious many-hued bedjacket, with my mother by his side in one of her lovely housecoats: It was a most rea.s.suring sight, and I enjoyed the loving welcome they gave me." Still, Churchill was nearly seventy, under the greatest imaginable stress and fending off pneumonia. Life was indeed far from easy.

CHURCHILL WAS ALSO increasingly worried about Soviet influence in the east. "Good G.o.d," he stormed to Lord Moran, "can't you see that the Russians are spreading across Europe like a tide; they have invaded Poland, and there is nothing to prevent them marching into Turkey and Greece!" A crisis in the Polish capital was a particularly tragic case. What Churchill called "the martyrdom of Warsaw" was under way. Closing in on the city, the Soviets broadcast an appeal for the Poles to rise up against their German occupiers, which the underground heroically did-while the Russians sat outside the capital. The Germans and the Poles, whom Stalin wanted to dominate after the war, were destroying each other at close quarters.

Churchill and Roosevelt asked Stalin to intervene-or at least let Anglo-American forces intervene, by dropping supplies to the Polish fighters. "We believe that all three of us should do the utmost to save as many of the patriots there as possible," Roosevelt wrote in a message Churchill cosigned on August 19. Moscow balked, saying the Americans and the British could go ahead but could not use landing grounds in Soviet territory to refuel. Stymied-they needed those bases; two British attempts to fly from Italy were, Churchill said, "forlorn and inadequate"-Roosevelt and Churchill were losing the point to the Soviets as the Germans killed innocent Poles. Calling the Warsaw situation "a dirty business" in a letter written the week of August 19, Averell Harriman said of the Soviets: "I realize it is essential that we make every effort to find a way to work with them and, in spite of disagreements, I am still hopeful. But one thing is certain, that when they depart from common decency we have got to make them realize it."

Churchill was outraged by accounts of the violence in the city and forwarded an eyewitness report to Roosevelt and Stalin. "The dead," it said, "are buried in backyards and squares." The Poles needed help, and Churchill, his heart stirred, proposed a radical solution to Roosevelt: If Stalin failed to reply to a renewed request from both of them, then they should proceed without him, send the flights over, use the bases behind Soviet lines, and take their chances. It was a dramatic, bold, brave idea, but Roosevelt said no. He had business to do with Stalin-the Americans wanted rights to Soviet bases in Siberia for a.s.saults on j.a.pan-and was not willing to risk a fight with him over Warsaw.

Churchill was long anguished over the episode, one that would come to seem typical of disputes with the Soviets as the war drew to a close. "When the Russians entered the city three months later they found little but shattered streets and the unburied dead," Churchill wrote in 1953. "Such was their liberation of Poland, where they now rule. But this cannot be the end of the story." And, of course, it would not be.

By now, both Churchill and Roosevelt seemed to be accustomed to the cycle of their friends.h.i.+p. They would disagree about some large matter (about Warsaw, Greece, Italy, the Balkans), but the policy question would seem to be soothed with personal words and, often, affectionate companions.h.i.+p. A ritual-and, like most rituals, rea.s.suring in its familiarity. The consistent elements were Churchill's optimism and magnanimity ("I have no doubt we shall reach a good conclusion," as he had told Clementine) and Roosevelt's capacity to do what he wanted to do while trying to make Churchill feel loved and valued. ("Where is your landing spot?" Roosevelt asked the America-bound Churchill in the middle of the uprising. "If New York you and I could go to [Quebec] together on my train.") THEIR PRIVATE WORLDS in the days before meeting in Quebec in September 1944 reflected their personalities and explain their approaches to each other. Aboard the Queen Mary, Churchill, still sick, was by turns expansive, indulgent, hilarious, gloomy, verbose, and hardworking. In Was.h.i.+ngton and Hyde Park, Roosevelt, also sick and complaining that he felt "like a boiled owl," was secretive, ebullient, and able to s.h.i.+ft from one universe to another with ease.

Surrounded by the people he was most comfortable with-Clementine, Colville, Lindemann, and Ismay-Churchill was thinking about British politics. Mulling over a more liberal postwar era, he suspected there would be "inevitable disillusionment at the non-appearance of an immediate millennium" after the victory over the Axis, something that would make "the glamour fade from a Government which had won the war." But the prime minister claimed to be resigned to any fate that came his way. If a left-wing majority was inevitable, "what is good enough for the English people, is good enough for me." He was generous minded, musing that he would not "beat up" on the Americans again about the ANVIL argument. "He will suggest that the controversy be left to history and add that he intends to be one of the historians," Colville wrote. Churchill played bezique and tucked into two Trollope novels-Phineas Finn and The Duke's Children.

His mood grew more melancholy. Toward the end of the voyage, he plunged into his work, once losing his temper over a proposal from the war cabinet. "He dictated a violent reply (which was never sent) full of dire threats," Colville said.

AS CHURCHILL HELD forth, played cards, and escaped the crush of work for a few hours in the fictional milieu of Victorian politics, Roosevelt hid his emotional life in plain sight. Roosevelt was aboard his train bearing north from Was.h.i.+ngton to Hyde Park and then on to Quebec. Instead of heading straight to the Hudson, however, the train stopped in northwestern New Jersey, near Allamuchy, to see Lucy at her late husband's estate.

The Rutherfurds' English-style manor house was set amid fields and woods; the weather was pleasantly breezy. Daisy, who accompanied FDR, and Lucy had seen to it that everything was arranged for Roosevelt's comfort. "Mrs. Rutherfurd had a lovely room all ready for the P. to take his rest," Daisy wrote, "even to turning down the best linen sheets-but he wasn't going to miss any of his visit & did not rest until we got back on the train." Lucy knew her man, letting him play expert in chief on all matters rural. (He liked to call himself a "tree grower.") "The Pres. is going to look over the whole 1,300 acres-farms, woods, etc. & advise them what to do," Daisy noted. "It is the usual problem of diminished incomes & how to keep a large place going with fewer servants than one needs."

After Roosevelt's tour of the grounds, there was discussion of where he should be seated for lunch. "I finally went to the Pres.," said Daisy, "& he settled it: he sat at Mrs. Rutherfurd's right!" Daisy was struck by the tableau before her: Guests included Lucy's stepchildren and Prince and Princess Alexandre Chimay. "The whole thing was out of a book-a complete setting for a novel, with all the characters at that lunch table, if one counts"-she knowingly added-"the absent husbands and wives etc." It was a remarkable scene: a wartime president of the United States, en route to a conference with the prime minister of Great Britain, stealing a few hours to lunch with a long-ago love, surrounded by t.i.tled guests and extended relatives, all discreet enough to know that the whereabouts of this most public of men were to be guarded with tact.

Back on the train, Roosevelt took a nap. The claims of real life a.s.serted themselves. Earlier in the day, Churchill had written him to announce he was bringing Mrs. Churchill to Quebec. When Roosevelt awoke from his rest, he cabled Churchill: "Perfectly delighted that Clemmie will be with you. Eleanor will go with me." Eleanor was on the platform at Hyde Park's Highland Station, and she drove Daisy and Roosevelt to Val-Kill for supper. There were lobsters, and Trude Lash served applekuchen. No one talked about what Roosevelt had had for lunch-or where. As Daisy wrote in her diary that day: "How little one knows of the inner life of others."

THE ROOSEVELTS ARRIVED at Quebec a few minutes ahead of the Churchills. As the prime minister and the president greeted each other, a reporter noted the "look of affection on the faces of the two men as they clasped hands."

"h.e.l.lo, Winston!"

"h.e.l.lo, Franklin!"

While the men talked of war, their wives' contrasting styles created some friction. "Clementine was less 'public relations' conscious than Mrs. Roosevelt, and was somewhat put about when the latter announced her intention of broadcasting to the Canadian people, and told Clementine that she had been invited to do so too," wrote Mary. "I was staggered and reluctant," Mrs. Churchill recalled. "First of all I said I could not possibly do it at such short notice and thought that I had nothing to say. But finally I was hounded into doing it." The prodigious pace Mrs. Roosevelt set for herself was not Mrs. Churchill's, who was a more deliberate and more easily tired woman. "Clementine's struggles with the preparation of the broadcast had been severely interrupted by the necessity for her to attend, with Mrs. Roosevelt, a luncheon party given by the wife of the Lieutenant-Governor of Quebec," wrote Mary. It did not go well. She was working on the radio speech-part of which was to be in French-when an official luncheon intervened, with seven courses, four wines, several liqueurs, and sixty-five guests to greet. "I am sorry to confess that I was in a filthy temper," Clementine wrote her children.

After lunch, the lieutenant-governor's wife, Lady Fiset, announced that Eleanor had a few words to say to the group. "I tried to hide behind a palm tree because I saw what was coming next," Clementine wrote home in the third person. "But it was no use. When Mrs. Roosevelt had ceased, Lady Fiset said Mrs. Churchill would now like to reply to Mrs. Roosevelt. Mrs. Churchill was fished from behind the palm tree-and I won't repeat to you what I said because I have forgotten, being under the influence of the luncheon."

As harried as she was, Clementine apparently did not show it, and Eleanor seemed not to notice.

ROOSEVELT AND CHURCHILL were in their usual pattern, discussing weighty subjects, dining, and unwinding with an evening movie before another late-night session. Dr. McIntire had sent word to Admiral Brown, the naval aide, that Roosevelt should not stay up late. It was a losing battle until Brown thought to enlist Churchill's help in keeping something approaching reasonable hours. "The party broke up that night immediately after the movies, about ten thirty," recalled Brown. "As we all moved off together toward our quarters, Mr. Churchill, his arm firmly held by Mrs. Churchill, muttered to me, 'Aren't I a good boy?' "

Much to Churchill's satisfaction, Roosevelt offered Churchill generous economic aid. "While going to bed the P.M. told me some of the financial advantages the Americans had promised us," Colville wrote on September 14. " 'Beyond the dreams of avarice,' I said. 'Beyond the dreams of justice,' he replied." Churchill offered, and Roosevelt accepted, the use of the Royal Navy in the closing conflict against j.a.pan-a means, in part, of maintaining Britain's role as America's partner. And there was the inevitable talk of European strategy. Churchill quoted Milton's Lycidas (after the Germans left Italy, Churchill said, "We should have to look 'for fresh fields and pastures anew' ") as he raised the possibility of a thrust out of Italy toward Vienna, saying that "an added reason for this right-handed movement was the rapid encroachment of the Russians into the Balkans and the consequent dangerous spread of Russian influence in this area."

Then there was the curious episode of the "Morgenthau Plan." The idea: Return Germany to a preindustrial, pastoral state by taking away its industrial capacity. Though the concept got as far as a paper signed by both Roosevelt and Churchill, it died after the conference.

Before leaving Quebec, the two men, wearing academic regalia, received honorary degrees from McGill University in the suns.h.i.+ne on the roof of the Citadel. Then they met the press, with Churchill the more eloquent; Roosevelt spoke in a whisper that Colville thought could barely be heard above the click of the cameras.

"I am sorry to confess that I was in a filthy temper"

Eleanor and Clementine delivering a joint radio address at Quebec, September 1944 IT WAS A touching scene. In private at Quebec, Churchill had told Colville he believed Roosevelt was "very frail," and now, on the sun-splashed roof of the old fort, the St. Lawrence River far below, Churchill talked about the importance of personal contact in political affairs-in particular, of the importance of his personal contact with the president sitting to his side.

"Our affairs are so intermingled, our troops fighting in the line together, and our plans for the future are so interwoven that it is not possible to conduct these great affairs . . . without frequent meetings between the princ.i.p.als," Churchill said. When, he continued, he had "the rare and fortunate chance to meet the President of the United States, we are not limited in our discussions by any sphere. We talk over the whole position in every aspect-the military, economic, diplomatic, financial. All-all is examined. And obviously that should be so. And the fact that we have worked so long together, and the fact that we have got to know each other so well under the hard stresses of war, makes the solution of problems so much simpler, so swift and so easy it is."

In a pa.s.sage that suggests he understood how much easier it was for leaders to turn each other down when they were exchanging wires instead of glances across a table, Churchill added: "What an ineffectual method of conveying human thought correspondence is [laughter]-telegraphed with all its rapidity, all the facilities of our-of modern intercommunication. They are simply dead, blank walls compared to personal-personal contacts. And that applies not only to the President and the Prime Minister of Great Britain, it applies to our princ.i.p.al officers who at every stage enter in the closest a.s.sociation, and have established friends.h.i.+ps which have greatly aided the tasks and toil of our fighting troops."

Chieftains, Churchill was saying, must meet in camp together. It was the same point Roosevelt had tried to make on that lost night at Gray's Inn more than a quarter century before. Now Churchill saw that even the most pa.s.sionate words-and Lord knows he wrote millions of them, in cables and books and speeches-did not have the same power to convince as many fewer words spoken within a room of human beings trained in the arts of manners and devoted to the same ends. Meetings often produce a kind of magic, but magic can fade. Such is the power and peril of personal diplomacy.

The hours were wearying. Roosevelt phoned Daisy when he arrived in Hyde Park on September 17 and told her "it was a good conference; much was accomplished," but "he wanted to sleep all the time."

HARRY HOPKINS WAS at Hyde Park, too. "He was obviously invited to please me," recalled Churchill, and Hopkins tried to explain his fall from grace. "He had declined in the favour of the President," Churchill said, and Roosevelt once even failed to speak to Hopkins when he was a little late for a meal. But soon the old three-way chemistry kicked in, and "it was remarkable how definitely my contacts with the President improved," Churchill recalled, "and our affairs moved quicker as Hopkins appeared to regain his influence." Roosevelt and Churchill were back in their old, good form, friends united against the world, with the loyal Hopkins just a step behind, there to serve.

Even by Roosevelt standards, it was an eclectic gathering. The Churchills and the duke of Windsor were there, along with Roosevelt's Hudson Valley circle. Eleanor, Clementine told her daughters, "loves her meals out of doors and so life at Hyde Park is a succession of picnics. It is rather fun really, and clever, because, when you have a lot of foreign guests whom you do not know planked down on top of you, it all fills in the time. I went for two terrific walks with Mrs. Roosevelt, who has very long legs and out-walks me easily."

Clementine also worried about Roosevelt's apparently waning powers. She had not seen him for a year and, like her husband, thought the president weaker than he had seemed in AugustSeptember 1943. Roosevelt, she wrote home to Mary, "with all his genius does not-indeed cannot (partly because of his health and partly because of his make-up)-function round the clock, like your Father. I should not think that his mind was pinpointed on the war for more than four hours a day, which is not really enough when one is a supreme war lord."

Roosevelt and Churchill also talked about Tube Alloys. (They always seemed to be discussing the bomb at Hyde Park.) A group of scientists in the know had been arguing that the United States and Britain should tell the international community what was in the offing; Churchill and Roosevelt said no. "The suggestion that the world should be informed regarding Tube Alloys, with a view to international agreement regarding its control and use, is not accepted," read a secret memorandum approved by Churchill and Roosevelt. "The matter should continue to be regarded as of the utmost secrecy; but when a 'bomb' is finally available, it might perhaps, after mature consideration, be used against the j.a.panese, who should be warned that this bombardment will be repeated until they surrender."

Churchill had his money, his role in the Pacific, and his way on the atomic project. He was refreshed by his time with Roosevelt. On the way to Quebec, Moran and Colville had had a chat about Churchill's condition. "The P.M. had slight temperature again and was highly irascible," Colville wrote. "Lord Moran . . . told me he does not give him a long life and he thinks that when he goes it will be either a stroke or the heart trouble which first showed itself last winter at Carthage." Meeting Churchill in New York after the prime minister's stay in Hyde Park, Colville thought he was "looking far, far better. . . ."

Roosevelt, however, was looking worse and worse. After Churchill left Hyde Park, Roosevelt spent some time there with Anna and Daisy. "The Pres. roused himself & went off to get washed up for dinner," Suckley said. He did not like the look of the political scene. "The Pres. says he feels there is an excellent chance of his being defeated in the election-that Dewey is making a very good campaign," Daisy wrote. "The Pres. is planning his life after he leaves the W.H. It will be so different, without the many 'services' supplied to him by the govt. He will 'write' and can make a lot of money that way-Also, his corr. will be tremendous-he feels he won't be able to afford Miss Tully & that she would not be happy in Hyde Park, away from her family-More problems!" In the first week of October, George Elsey accompanied Roosevelt on another trip to Hyde Park. "The President thought it was conceivable that Dewey could beat him," Elsey recalled, "and he wanted me to inspect the library and recommend what security measures would be necessary to protect his cla.s.sified papers."

CHURCHILL AND CLEMENTINE had a luncheon table dustup when they got home. The subject is unknown, but it can be inferred that Churchill spoke roughly, contradicting Clementine. At one-thirty in the morning on October 8, Churchill wrote his wife: "My darling One, I have been fretting over our interchange at luncheon yesterday. I am sure that no one thought of it as more than my making my own position clear, and that it all pa.s.sed in the ripple of a most successful party. Anyhow forgive me for anything that seemed disrespectful to you, & let yr morning thoughts dwell kindly on yr penitent apologetic & ever loving W."

Churchill had adventure on his mind in October and decided to try his luck a second time with a three-way meeting. "I feel sure that personal contact is most necessary," he cabled Roosevelt on September 29, 1944, urging him to join a session with Stalin. With the election at hand, Roosevelt said no, but Churchill went ahead. "As the Soviet armies moved into Eastern Europe, Churchill became concerned about the political structure Moscow would set up with its military power," Chip Bohlen recalled. "The Soviets were making military moves with obvious post-war implications. Instead of keeping full pressure on the central target, Germany, Stalin was diverting troops to Bulgaria and Hungary, two secondary targets. Churchill made up his mind to go to Moscow without Roosevelt, and notified the President accordingly."

Churchill thought he could do business with Stalin. For all his skepticism about Stalin's motives and designs, Churchill-like Roosevelt-believed in personal diplomacy. "All might yet be well if he could win Stalin's friends.h.i.+p," Moran noted. "After all, it was stupid of the President to suppose that he was the only person who could manage Stalin." Churchill would go to Moscow while Roosevelt campaigned. "In the afternoon the P.M., while signing photographs (including one for Stalin) and books, began reading Vol. I of Marlborough aloud to me and continued about Sir Winston Churchill's home life and pa.s.sion for heraldry for nearly an hour," wrote Colville. "At the end he said that as I had been subjected to this ordeal he would give me a copy for Christmas."

In the first week of October, Roosevelt drafted a cable wis.h.i.+ng Churchill "every success" on his trip. Bohlen was at the State Department when Hopkins, who had come across the message to Churchill in the map room, called him. "Chip, get the h.e.l.l over here in a hurry," Hopkins said. Bohlen recalled, "I found Hopkins sitting in his White House office, one leg draped over the arm of a chair." He handed Bohlen Roosevelt's cable-Hopkins had stopped it from being sent; in the map room, Robert Sherwood wrote, "the officers had no way of knowing that there had been any change in Hopkins' position in the White House and they complied with his order"-and asked what Bohlen thought. "I said that . . . it was dangerous to allow Churchill to speak for us in dealing with Stalin," Bohlen recalled. "In effect, that was what Roosevelt was doing."

Hopkins agreed and asked Bohlen to work on a replacement, as well as a cable to Stalin. "While I was drafting the telegrams, Hopkins found the President shaving," Bohlen said. "Hopkins pointed out the danger we had seen in the 'good luck' message. Realizing his mistake, Roosevelt became somewhat agitated and instructed Hopkins to stop the message. He was relieved when Hopkins told him that he had taken the liberty of holding it." Bohlen's new cable to Churchill asked that Averell Harriman be allowed to observe the sessions, and, more important, the note to Stalin read: You, naturally, understand that in this global war there is literally no question, political or military, in which the United States is not interested. I am firmly convinced that the three of us, and only the three of us, can find the solution to the still unresolved questions. In this sense, while appreciating the Prime Minister's desire for a meeting, I prefer to regard your forthcoming talks with Churchill as preliminary to a meeting of all three of us. . . .

Stalin's reply was dry and revealing: "I supposed that Mr. Churchill was going to Moscow in accordance with the agreement reached with you at Quebec. It happened, however, that this supposition of mine does not seem to correspond to reality." The team in the White House was relieved. "It was apparent that Churchill had told Stalin that he was in a position to speak for Roosevelt, since he knew, from a recent meeting with the President in Quebec, the President's thoughts," Bohlen recalled. "Our wire certainly put Stalin on his guard."

LATE ON HIS first evening in Moscow in October 1944, after struggling to get enough hot water for his bath, Churchill sat down with Stalin in the Kremlin.

"The moment was apt for business," Churchill recalled, and the two spent hours talking diplomacy and politics, from the Balkans to Poland to Germany. In personal terms for the prime minister, the problems of the past (of Stalin's pact with Hitler, the angry cables, the harsh hours at Teheran, Warsaw, among so many other things) and fears about the future (which Churchill occasionally worried would be marked by conflicts with Moscow) were largely put to the side as they worked.

"Churchill had high regard for all very powerful, top men," recalled Anthony Montague Browne. From Moscow, Churchill wrote Clementine: "I have had vy nice talks with the Old Bear. I like him the more I see him." He was anxious about whether he had fully recovered in his wife's affections after his note of apology, adding: "Darling you can write anything but war secrets & it reaches me in a few hours. So do send me a letter from yr dear hand." (He was out of the marital woods: Clementine replied with "Tender love. I hope to see you soon.") Churchill, who briefly ran a fever and worried that his pneumonia was back yet again, was attentive to Roosevelt, writing him frequently. "I have to keep the President in constant touch & this is the delicate side," Churchill told Clementine. He spoke of the presidential campaign. "Although I hear the most encouraging accounts from various quarters about United States politics," Churchill cabled Roosevelt on October 18, "I feel the suspense probably far more than you do or more than I should if my own affairs were concerned in this zone. My kindest regards and warmest good wishes." Roosevelt appreciated the sentiments. When reviewing the draft of a reply, he changed the awkward "I do hope your health has not been undermined" to a warmer "I do hope you are free of the temperature and really feeling all right again."

SAt.u.r.dAY, OCTOBER 21, 1944, was, Sam Rosenman remembered, "a cold, rainy, bone-chilling day" in New York City. Scheduled to tour the city's five boroughs, Roosevelt refused to cancel and hurled himself into the task, riding fifty-one miles through the city's streets in an open car-"letting the elements have their way," The New York Times wrote, "while he had his." It was a tactical masterstroke: Pictures of his resilience in the rain, printed around the country so late in the campaign, helped undercut the argument that he was too old and too sick for another term. "After this, the rumors about Roosevelt's bad health became less audible," recalled Rosenman. While Roosevelt kept moving, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia was worn out. "I think I am tough," the mayor said after riding through the rain, "but he took it better than I did."

After a change of clothes and a drink of bourbon at Eleanor's Was.h.i.+ngton Square apartment-she had taken it as a Manhattan pied-a-terre-Roosevelt went to the Waldorf to sketch a vision of America's new role in the world. There could be no more isolation; the United States had paid too high a price for the Lindbergh view. In October, a Life editorial ent.i.tled "Republicans in Congress: Their Record Is 'Isolationist' and So Are a Few of Them. But Isolationism Is Dead" argued that isolationism was no longer an issue, a point that annoyed Roosevelt, who had invested so much in trying to educate the nation about its inescapable ties to the rest of the world. "Anybody who thinks that isolationism is dead in this country is crazy," Roosevelt told Sherwood. "As soon as this war is over, it may well be stronger than ever." Roosevelt balked when Sherwood suggested using a quotation from a recent Churchill address in which Churchill declared, "The United States was now at the highest pinnacle of her power and fame." Sherwood was surprised at Roosevelt's reaction. "What Winston says may be true at the moment, but I'd hate to say it," Roosevelt said. "Because we may be heading before very long for the pinnacle of our weakness." The lure of Fortress America might rea.s.sert itself. Reflecting on Roosevelt's remark, Sherwood noted: "I've always a.s.sumed that he was looking forward to the approaching moment when the reaction might set in, and isolationism again be rampant, and the American people might again tell the rest of the world to stew in its own juice."

Roosevelt saw how the nation could address itself to the outside world, keep the peace, and spread democracy. His speech in Manhattan on this rainy night was the testament of a practical idealist. "The power which this nation has attained-the political, the economic, the military, and above all the moral power-has brought to us the responsibility, and with it the opportunity, for leaders.h.i.+p in the community of nations," the president said. "In our own best interest, in the name of peace and humanity, this nation cannot, must not, and will not s.h.i.+rk that responsibility."

But we should not swagger. "The kind of world order which we, the peace-loving nations must achieve, must depend essentially on friendly human relations, on acquaintance, on tolerance, on una.s.sailable sincerity and good-will and good faith. We have achieved that relations.h.i.+p to a very remarkable degree in our dealings with our Allies in this war-as I think the events of the war have proved." Humility was essential. "We are not fighting for, and we shall not attain a Utopia," Roosevelt said. "Indeed, in our own land, the work to be done is never finished. We have yet to realize the full and equal enjoyment of our freedom. So, in embarking on the building of a world fellows.h.i.+p, we have set ourselves a long and arduous task, a task which will challenge our patience, our intelligence, our imagination, as well as our faith."

CHURCHILL HAD SEEN the gray images of the day and wrote a note of concern and congratulation. "I was delighted to see the proofs of your robust vigour in New York," Churchill told Roosevelt on October 23. "Nevertheless I cannot believe that four hours in an open car and pouring rain with a temperature of 40 and clothes wet through conform to those limits of prudence which you would be so ready to prescribe if it were my case. I earnestly hope you are none the worse and should be grateful for rea.s.surance. I cannot think about anything except this . . . election."

Roosevelt's reply was charming. "My journey to New York was useful and rain does not hurt an old sailor," he wrote back. "Thank you for your advice nevertheless. I am in top form." He could always do two things at once and was now enjoying the fight. In Hartford, Connecticut, one day, Alistair Cooke watched as Roosevelt gave a flat whistle-stop speech to a crowd of insurance workers. Smiling his big, toothy smile, waving broadly at the audience, he whispered to a Secret Service man out of the side of his mouth: "Let's get the h.e.l.l out of here." Cooke remembered being "shocked" at the deftness of the performance: Roosevelt was "so tough and yet could keep this smile."

He and Churchill debated a new Big Three meeting. "The Pres. was full of pep-'exalte'-as he put it," Daisy noted the Sunday before the election. "Two more days & then preparations for his meeting with Churchill & Stalin." The dangers Churchill had faced informed Roosevelt's election eve broadcast. "When we think of the speed and long-distance possibilities of air travel of all kinds to the remotest corners of the earth, we must consider the devastation wrought on the people of England, for example, by the new long-range bombs," Roosevelt said. "Another war would be bound to bring even more devilish and powerful instruments of destruction to wipe out civilian populations. No coastal defenses, however strong, could prevent these silent missiles of death, fired perhaps from planes or s.h.i.+ps at sea, from cras.h.i.+ng deep within the United States itself. This time, this time, we must be certain that the peace-loving nations of the world band together in determination to outlaw and to prevent war."

On election day, Hopkins kept Churchill up-to-date. "The voting is very heavy in industrial centers," he cabled Churchill. "We are not likely to know definitely before 10:00 p.m. our time which will make it pretty late even for you." Still, Churchill kept watch, receiving the verdict from Hopkins deep in the London night: "It's in the bag," Hopkins told him.

Roosevelt spent the evening as he always did, in the dining room at Hyde Park, with three telephones and tabulation sheets. Anna, Trude Lash, John Roosevelt, and William Ha.s.sett, a White House secretary, brought reports back and forth from the ticker machine in the smoking room. He won, 53.5 percent to 46 percent. Late in the evening, Roosevelt went out to speak to the torchlight parade; in the flush of history-a third term had been unprecedented, a fourth beyond imagination-he did not appear to notice the cold. "It was chilly out there, but F.D.R. only, with cape open, seemed unconscious of it," said Daisy. He was, she added, "full of 'fight'!"

Warm words arrived from London the next afternoon. "I always said that a great people could be trusted to stand by the pilot who weathered the storm," Churchill wrote Roosevelt. "It is an indescribable relief to me that our comrades.h.i.+p will continue and will help to bring the world out of misery." Then, smarting still from the snub when Roosevelt failed to acknowledge his 1940 telegram of congratulations, Churchill enclosed it once more. He never gave up.

"THE ELECTION WAS a great triumph for the President," Hopkins wrote Beaverbrook on November 15. "Even in the middle west, where we thought isolationism was rampant, we found that not to be the case and President got a very large vote even in the states he failed to carry. . . . The election was all the more amazing in view of the fact that there was indication of great prejudice against the Fourth Term and toward our past domestic policies. A great many people who would not normally have voted for the President, voted for him, I think largely because of the war and the feeling that Dewey was not quite grown up enough to handle the peace."

Hopkins knew his chief and the prime minister had heavy work ahead. "The President is, naturally, pleased," he told Beaverbrook, "but I am sure realizes fully the many headaches that are before him."

"THE WAR UNFORTUNATELY seems to have stagnated a bit doesn't it," Pamela Churchill wrote Averell Harriman in the autumn of 1944, "the foolish optimism of a few weeks ago seems to have died down, & people are resigned to the fact that they will have to grind their way through another long winter of war. . . . London is as black as ever, one notices no difference."

Remembering that November 30 was Churchill's seventieth birthday-Roosevelt did not always commemorate the occasion, but he did this year-Roosevelt wrote: "Ever so many happy returns of the day. I shall never forget the party with you and UJ a year ago and we must have more of them that are even better. Affectionate regards." Roosevelt chose to forget-or chose to act as though he had forgotten-his chilliness toward Churchill in those busy days.

The Churchills were happy to have Winston at home for his birthday. "There was a glorious dinner party at the Annexe," Mary wrote: flowers, a cake with seventy candles, bundles of presents. Beaverbrook toasted Churchill, who answered with words that brought tears to Mary's eyes. "He said we were 'the dearest there are'-he said he had been comforted and supported by our love." It was not an entirely serene family season. The Churchills had apparently asked Pamela and young Winston to join them for Christmas, but there were the old worries about Randolph's reaction to his estranged wife's being included in his own family's celebrations. Churchill found himself writing a delicate note to his daughter-in-law. "I find that our Christmas plans may cause friction as some of the family are worried about the effect on Randolph when he hears the news," he told her. "Clemmie & I therefore with great regret suggest to you that we fix another date for you to come and bring Winston. She & I were looking forward so much to seeing you & him around the Christmas tree. But I am sure that another weekend later on will be better for all. I do hope this will not cause you inconvenience."

Then it was back to the war. Roosevelt had a quotation from Lincoln framed and dispatched to England with a note: "For Winston on his Birthday-I would go even to Teheran to be with him again." The greetings gave Churchill "the greatest pleasure . . . I cannot tell you how much I value your friends.h.i.+p or how much I hope upon it for the future of the world, should we both be spared," Churchill wrote Roosevelt. A touching-and appropriate-prayer: Should we both be spared.

"I hope to do in one hour what Winston did in two"

Roosevelt addresses Congress after Yalta, March 1, 1945.

CHAPTER 12.

I SAW WSC TO.

SAY GOODBYE.

The Meeting at Yalta-Roosevelt and Churchill Part-.

A "Lovers' Quarrel"-The President Goes to Warm Springs.

THEIR LAST TIME together would be far from home. "We could not have found a worse place for a meeting if we had spent ten years on research," Churchill grumbled to Hopkins as the Big Three prepared to meet at Yalta. He would get through it, he said, "by bringing an adequate supply of whiskey" to fend off typhus and lice. "The P.M. remained in bed," Jock Colville wrote of one morning in early January 1945. "He is disgusted that the President should want to spend only five or six days at the coming meeting between 'the Big Three' and says that even the Almighty required seven to settle the world. (An inaccuracy which was quickly pointed out to him. Viz. Genesis I.)"

Churchill wanted a preconference session with Roosevelt. Arguing for a meeting at Malta before they traveled to Russia, Churchill ignored the scriptural hairsplitters around him and told Roosevelt, "I do not see any other way of realising our hopes about World Organisation in five or six days. Even the Almighty took seven." Roosevelt finally agreed, pleasing Churchill. "I shall be waiting on the quay," he had cabled Roosevelt on January 1. "No more let us falter! From Malta to Yalta! Let n.o.body alter!"

The days of companions.h.i.+p and brinksmans.h.i.+p were warmer then than they seem from afar. Yalta is now seen as the opening diplomatic act of the cold war, the point at which Stalin began to st.i.tch what Churchill called the "Iron Curtain." To the players in the Crimea, though, the meeting was hard but hopeful work-and it was the true twilight of Roosevelt and Churchill's friends.h.i.+p.

FOR ROOSEVELT, IT had been a quiet fourth Inauguration Day. With difficulty he stood in his braces. ("All the sentimental ladies who love him were ready for tears!" noted Daisy.) He did not go to the Capitol but took the oath on the South Portico of the White House. His address to a small crowd of five thousand was brief, about five minutes long, an encapsulation of his creed that politics is not clinical but human, America an unfinished experiment, the world a neighborhood and nations families within it. "Our Const.i.tution of 1787 was not a perfect instrument; it is not perfect yet," he said. "But it provided a firm base upon which all manner of men, of all races and colors and creeds, could build our solid structure of democracy."

Engagement, not isolation, was the right road ahead. "And so today in this year of war, 1945, we have learned lessons-at a fearful cost-and we shall profit by them," he said. "We have learned that we cannot live alone, at peace; that our own well-being is dependent upon the well-being of other nations, far away. We have learned that we must live as men and not as ostriches, nor as dogs in the manger. We have learned to be citizens of the world, members of the human community. We have learned the simple truth, as Emerson said, that 'the only way to have a friend is to be one.' "

He was fighting to preserve his strength-"after the inauguration it was clearer every day that Franklin was far from well," Eleanor recalled-and he decided that Anna should go with him. "Anna was very, very good at looking after her father-having the right people talk to him at the right time, protecting him," said Kathleen Harriman, who would be at Yalta, as would Sarah Churchill.

AROUND THE s.h.i.+P en route to the conference, Roosevelt joked about Churchill's determination to rendezvous beforehand. "There was a lot of sort of amusing talk about the fact that Churchill insisted on meeting us when we docked at Malta," Anna remembered. "The joke was that a cable came through from Stalin saying, 'I said Yalta, not Malta.' " Not especially witty, but the chatter shows the Roosevelt party poking fun at Churchill's eagerness to stay close to Roosevelt.

Churchill, meanwhile, was flying through the winter night. "I had a serious alarm coming over lest I was going to have another attack, for my temperature went to 10212 in the night," Churchill wrote Clementine on February 1. "But it all pa.s.sed off agreeably. . . . The President arrives at the first light of dawn and I shall go to see him as soon as he desires it."

Roosevelt and Churchill met in the Grand Harbor at Valletta, Malta. Churchill and Sarah went over to lunch with Roosevelt aboard the Quincy. "We found him sitting in the sun with his daughter," recalled Sarah. Roosevelt was "very friendly," Churchill told Moran. "He must have noticed the candle by my bed when we were at the White House, because there was a small lighted candle on the luncheon table by my place to light my cigar."

The small attentions meant much to Churchill. "If you talk to him about books and let him quote to you from his marvelous memory everything on earth from Barbara Frietchie to the Nonsense Rhymes and Greek tragedy, you will find him easier to deal with on political subjects," Eleanor advised Harry Truman after Roosevelt's death. "He is a gentleman to whom the personal element means a great deal." The personal had to suffice at Malta. Roosevelt declined to talk about substance, preferring to wait for the sessions with Stalin. The two flew to the Crimea. Upon landing at Saki, Bohlen recalled, they were offered vodka, champagne, caviar, smoked sturgeon, and black bread.

They needed the sustenance. They had a difficult ride ahead of them. "The eighty-mile drive over the mountains to Yalta was made under lowering clouds that spat rain and a little wet snow," Bohlen wrote. Roosevelt tried to rest en route. He rode with Anna, and the prime minister was in a separate car with Sarah. "How the President endured that endless and tiring drive I cannot imagine," Sarah recalled. One way was by not riding with Churchill, who would have talked during the trip. "I put the clamps on," Anna wrote John Boettiger, and they pressed on to Yalta with the prime minister safely out of the way for a few restful hours.

THE SLEEP IN the car had done Roosevelt good. When he reached Livadia Palace, he was greeted by Kathleen Harriman. "The Pres. arrived in great form & is very pleased with his suite," Kathleen wrote Pamela Churchill. "Harry arrived not very well & went straight to bed with dia (can't spell it) anyway. . . . The doctors ordered him to eat nothing but cereal & the fool had 2 huge helpings of caviar, cabbage soup with sour cream & then his cereal," Kathleen told Pamela. "He really is a fool. That brought his pains back & since then he's eaten in bed, but been at all the meetings." Churchill was in the Vorontsov villa, and Stalin came to see him, arriving five minutes early. "W was only just rushed to the door in time," Charles Portal wrote to Pamela.

Roosevelt repeated his Teheran play and asked to see Stalin alone the first day. (He would not meet privately with Churchill until the fifth day.) "The two leaders greeted each other as old friends . . . ," noted Bohlen. "Smiling broadly, the President grasped Stalin by the hand and shook it warmly."

Talking with Roosevelt, Stalin broke into a rare ("if slight," Bohlen recalled) smile. Roosevelt told his host that the scenes of destruction on the drive to Yalta-the Germans had fought here-had made him even "more bloodthirsty than a year ago," and he said he hoped Stalin would again offer his Teheran toast about executing fifty thousand German officers-a reminder of the moments when they froze Churchill out, and a signal to Stalin, Bohlen wrote, "that the United States was not joining Britain in any united negotiating position." Playing to Stalin's distrust of the English, Roosevelt added that he would now "tell the Marshal something indiscreet, since he would not wish to say it in front of Prime Minister Churchill, namely that the British for two years have had the idea of artificially building up France into a strong power. . . ."

As always, Churchill had much on his mind as Roosevelt and Stalin spoke. A plane carrying part of the British delegation crashed en route, killing thirteen people. "Ave went over & saw the P.M. last night late-He's apparently in a discouraged state of mind," Kathleen wrote Pamela. "It must be sort of dampening too to the spirits of their party-having that accident. At this point everyone's crossing their fingers & hoping for the best."

At dinner after the first session on Sunday, February 4, Churchill seemed defensive at times. According to Bohlen's minutes, Stalin had made some dismissive remarks about the rights of small nations to play a role on the global stage, and there was talk about "the rights of people to govern themselves in relation to their leaders." Then Churchill "said that although he was constantly being 'beaten up' as a reactionary, he was the only representative present who could be thrown out at any time by the universal suffrage of his own people"-and that "personally he gloried in that danger."

Roosevelt hung back as Stalin said that "the Prime Minister seemed to fear these elections." Churchill was quick to reply, Bohlen noted, that "he not only did not fear them but that he was proud of the right of the British people to change their government at any time they saw fit."

Stalin was once again Roosevelt's main focus. The Pacific was high on Roosevelt's agenda. The conflict was expected to take another two years-at their lunch aboard the Quincy at Malta, Roosevelt and Churchill talked about 1947 as the likely year for victory over j.a.pan-so the Soviet role loomed large before anyone knew whether the Manhattan Project would produce a usable weapon. In that light, Stalin's agreement to join the fight against j.a.pan-first discussed in Teheran-was critical. "When the Russians said at Yalta that they would fight j.a.pan, Admiral King came out and said, 'We've just saved two million Americans,' " recalled Kathleen Harriman. The casualty estimate would vary, but whatever the number, the stakes were enormous.

CHURCHILL EXPERIENCED A wide range of emotions at Yalta. "I do not suppose that at any moment in history has the agony of the world been so great or widespread," he told Sarah one day. "Tonight the sun goes down on more suffering than ever before in the world." Yet, one evening, Churchill would call for three cheers for Stalin.

"Winston is puzzled and distressed," Lord Moran said. "The President no longer seems to the P.M. to take an intelligent interest in the war; often he does not seem even to read the papers the P.M. gives him." Churchill was facing similar criticism. In January, his Labour colleague Clement Attlee had written Churchill a candid letter protesting, Jock Colville said, "the PM's lengthy disquisitions in Cabinet on papers which he has not read and on subjects which he has not taken the trouble to master."

ROOSEVELT WAS GROWING exasperated with Churchill along the same lines. "I suppose they became quite wearied with Papa banging on about things they didn't think were important," said Mary Soames.

In the Livadia Palace, as Churchill launched into a speech, a tired Roosevelt wrote a note to Ed Stettinius, the new secretary of state: "Now we're in for a half hour of it." According to John Gunther, Roosevelt once snapped: "Yes, I am tired! So would you be if you had spent the last five years pus.h.i.+ng Winston uphill in a wheelbarrow." Roosevelt must have signaled some of this feeling to Churchill, Gunther reported, for Churchill looked "as if he were about to get hit" in these sessions at the end of the war.

In private, Roosevelt-who Kathleen noted was "getting a big kick out of presiding over the meetings (he's the youngest you know)"-was alternately kind and snappish about Churchill. "When they were apart, FDR could be very emotional about 'Winnie,' as he called him when Churchill wasn't around," said George Elsey, "but then seconds later he'd put him down." Almost certainly exaggerating at a small dinner one night with Anna and a handful of other Americans, Roosevelt claimed Churchill had been in poor fettle at the plenary that afternoon; the prime minister had not had his nap. "According to the President, the Prime Minister had sat at the table and drifted off into a sound sleep from which he would awake very suddenly making speeches about the Monroe Doctrine," one guest said. "The President said he had to tell him repeatedly that it was a very fine speech, but that it was not the subject under discussion."