Franklin And Winston Part 14

Others also noticed Roosevelt's speaking ill of Churchill. "Towards the end of the war, when he was an ailing man," Lord Chandos wrote of Roosevelt, "he . . . could not help a derogatory and ironical tone from creeping in, even when talking to a devoted lieutenant like myself."

"Poor old Winston keeps on thinking . . . ," Roosevelt once said to Chandos, only to find that Churchill's colleague, as Chandos put it, "profoundly believed that poor old Winston was right."

TO CHURCHILL'S CREDIT, he was careful about how he talked about Roosevelt. At Yalta, Moran noted that "though we have moved a long way since Winston, speaking of Roosevelt, said to me in the garden at Marrakesh, 'I love that man,' he is still very reticent in criticism. It seems to be dragged out of him against his will. And with half a chance he will tell over dinner how many divisions the Americans had in a particular show against our handful, and how their casualties in that engagement dwarfed ours, and things of that kind." As Churchill lost point after point to Roosevelt and to Stalin-usually about Poland or the Balkans-he kept his tongue in check. "In all these arguments, the President's view carried the day," Mary said. "Yet I never heard my father, at any time during all the stress of war, say a vengeful or savage word about the President."

They knew each other so well. One day, Roosevelt complained to James Byrnes that Churchill's monologues were holding up business. "Yes, but they were good speeches," Byrnes said. Snapped out of his irritation, Roosevelt chuckled. "Winston doesn't make any other kind," he replied.

AFTER A RUSSIAN BANQUET, Charles Portal, Churchill's trusted air chief, wrote a blunt account to Pamela Churchill. Acknowledging that he was writing as he "let the vodka settle," Portal gave Roosevelt no quarter. "FD was very wet indeed and just blathered," he said. "U.J. in marvelous form & so was big W, but as usual he ran away from the interpreter & was untranslatable. . . . Honestly, FDR spoke more tripe to the minute than I have ever heard before, sentimental twaddle without a spark of real wit." Was Roosevelt too sick to be effective at the conference? Most observers thought him unwell but in basic control of the public business before him. "He was lethargic, but when important moments arose, he was mentally sharp," recalled Bohlen. "Our leader was ill at Yalta, the most important of the wartime conferences, but he was effective."

Hours and hours were spent in the big white ballroom debating Poland. By the time the leaders sat down in the Crimea, the Red Army controlled the nation over whose sovereignty Britain had gone to war nearly six years before, and, as Stalin once remarked, "Whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise." At Yalta there were disputes over borders and the postwar Polish government, and Stalin made vague promises about "free and unfettered elections," but in the end came the cold war, and a Soviet sphere. Looking back, Averell Harriman thought Roosevelt and Churchill made "an honest attempt to build an orderly relations.h.i.+p with the Russians and there was a certain amount of give and take on our part in the hope of achieving orderly settlements. The fact that we tried and failed left the main responsibility for the Cold War with Stalin, where it belongs."

Anna tried to keep Roosevelt rested, but it was not easy. "While they were away, Anna kept us posted about her father's health and what was happening on the trip," Eleanor recalled. "I am a bit exhausted but really all right," Roosevelt wrote his wife.

Churchill hosted dinner at the Vorontsov villa on the last night, February 10. It was a convivial evening of shop talk, reminiscence, and promises of great things to come. Churchill was variously upset and sentimental; Stalin was both friendly and vicious; Roosevelt played referee.

Roosevelt had not spoken of Eleanor much, but tonight he invoked her, recalling the first summer of his presidency. "In 1933 my wife visited a school in our country," he said. "In one of the cla.s.srooms she saw a map with a large blank s.p.a.ce on it. She asked what was the blank s.p.a.ce, and was told they were not allowed to mention the place-it was the Soviet Union." That story of Eleanor's, Roosevelt said, was one of the reasons he had reached out to Moscow to open diplomatic relations. The personal was a consistent theme. "There was a time when the Marshal was not so kindly towards us, and I remember that I said a few rude things about him, but our common dangers and common loyalties have wiped all that out," Churchill said in a toast to Stalin. "The fire of war has burnt up the misunderstandings of the past. We feel we have a friend whom we can trust, and I hope he will continue to feel the same about us. I pray he may live to see his beloved Russia not only glorious in war, but also happy in peace."

Churchill took Roosevelt and Stalin into the traveling map room so that they could survey their joint progress. It was, Churchill said, "the zenith of the Map Room's career." For half an hour, the three men talked and contemplated what they had wrought. Cleves had fallen, prompting Churchill to regale Roosevelt and Stalin with the story of Anne of Cleves, one of Henry VIII's wives. Then he began to sing the World War I song "When We've Wound Up the Watch on the Rhine."

Perhaps weary of song and story, Stalin took a shot at Churchill. As Sir Richard Pim recalled it, Stalin "suggested that the British might wish to make an earlier armistice than the Russians." Taunted out of his happy mood, Churchill "looked hurt and in a corner of the Map Room, with his hands in his pockets, gave us a few lines of his favourite song 'Keep right on to the end of the road.' Stalin looked extremely puzzled." Roosevelt waded in with a grin, saying to the Soviet interpreter, "Tell your Chief that this singing by the Prime Minister is Britain's secret weapon." Roosevelt was doing what he liked best: keeping peace between his two allies. And, for a moment, it was working.

The issue of the United Nations organization played a central role at Yalta. After several years of imprecise talk-usually by Roosevelt-a plan thrashed out in the summer and fall of 1944 at Dumbarton Oaks in Was.h.i.+ngton proposed a Security Council (the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, China, and ultimately France would be permanent members) and a General a.s.sembly. The organization would have the ability, with its members, to exert force-militarily, by sanction, or by suasion-to try to keep order in what was inevitably a disorderly world. Gone were the debates about regional councils; a global body was to take shape-if it all could be worked out with Stalin, who wanted extra votes in the General a.s.sembly for the Soviet Republics. (Eventually he got two.) There were other issues-questions of veto power, trustees.h.i.+ps for former colonies, and refugee matters among them-and a conference in San Francisco in late April would finalize things. Roosevelt died believing a global, not a regional, organization was the proper means for a new international order. The UN agreements at Yalta, Roosevelt would tell Congress on March 1, 1945, "ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries-and have always failed," he said, sitting as he spoke for the first and only time in a congressional address in his twelve years as president. "We propose to subst.i.tute for all of these, a universal organization in which all peace-loving nations will finally have a chance to join."

Churchill long defended the regional approach, with "men of the greatest eminence" from each sphere serving on a "Supreme Body." He was not particularly impressed by the UN's early days: "The summoning of all nations, great and small, powerful or powerless, on even terms to the central body may be compared with the organization of an army without any division between the High Command and the divisional and brigade commanders." Churchill, though, never ruled out the possibility of progress. "But," he added, "we must persevere."

Hope-with Churchill, as with Roosevelt, there was always hope. In these last years of the war, from establis.h.i.+ng monetary policy at Bretton Woods to the United Nations, the two men were trying to build inst.i.tutions to prevent the last half of the twentieth century from repeating the mistakes of the first half, which had given the world two wars. Ultimately, because of Soviet aggression, the Americans, the British, and much of Western Europe would add the Atlantic alliance to that equation, but Roosevelt's and Churchill's ability to see far ahead-or at least to attempt to see far ahead-was striking. They were not soft, but they were optimistic. "The purpose of the United Nations is to make sure that the force of right will, in the ultimate issue, be protected by the right of force," Churchill said in 1946. His words about the organization's other missions might surprise those who tend to think of him as a creature of the nineteenth, not the twentieth, much less the twenty-first, century. "Peace is no pa.s.sive state, but calls for qualities of high adventure and endeavor," Churchill said in 1950. "Through the United Nations we must not only prevent war but feed the hungry, heal the sick, restore the ravages of former wars, and a.s.sist the peoples of Africa and Asia to achieve by peaceful means their hopes of a new and better life."

ON SUNDAY MORNING, February 11, 1945, the final editing session for the communique went smoothly. Churchill had the most changes. Among them, he wanted to eliminate the use of the word joint, arguing that to him the term meant "the Sunday family roast of mutton." In the czar's former billiards room, the Big Three signed the Declaration on Liberated Europe, pledging that "The establishment of order in Europe and the rebuilding of national economic life must be achieved by processes which will enable the liberated peoples to destroy the last vestiges of n.a.z.ism and fascism and to create democratic inst.i.tutions of their own choice. This is a principle of the Atlantic Charter-the right of all peoples to choose the form of Government under which they will live-the restoration of sovereign rights and self-Government to those peoples who have been forcibly deprived of them by the aggressor nations." The Allies would continue to strive for peace in which "all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want."

"I hope you will like communique published tomorrow morning," Churchill wrote Clementine. "We have covered a great amount of ground and I am very pleased with the decisions we have gained." He was in a good humor. "P.M. seems well," Alexander Cadogan noted, "though drinking buckets of Caucasian champagne which would undermine the health of any ordinary man."

Churchill would live to see and fight the cold war. Roosevelt would be dead by then, but whatever compromises the president made at Yalta on issues relating to the postwar world, there is evidence that he would have taken a hard line against Soviet totalitarianism had he lived. "Yalta was only a step towards the ultimate solution Franklin had in mind," Eleanor recalled. "He knew it was not the final step. He knew there had to be more negotiation, other meetings. He hoped for an era of peace and understanding, but he knew that peace was not won in a day-that days upon days and years upon years lay before us in which we must keep the peace by constant effort."

"U.J. in marvelous form & so was big W, but as usual he ran away from the interpreter & was untranslatable"

Churchill at Livadia Palace, February 8, 1945 Churchill is often depicted as the more perceptive of the two men on the question of the Soviets, and there is no doubt that during the war the prime minister predicted "grave troubles" from Stalin, to use his phrase from Quebec in 1943. Anti-Soviet testimony from Churchill is not hard to come by. But the fact of the matter is that Churchill, like Roosevelt, did not like to foreclose options; he, like Roosevelt, understood that politics is almost always a matter of nuance and shades of gray. In 1940 it had not been: Opposing Hitler was a moral imperative in which Churchill had, rightly, seen only black and white. Returning from Yalta, Churchill thought all might be well. "The impression I brought back from the Crimea, and from all my other contacts, is that Marshal Stalin and the Soviet leaders wish to live in honourable friends.h.i.+p and equality with the Western Democracies . . . ," he told the House of Commons. Privately, Churchill said: "Poor Neville Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I don't think I'm wrong about Stalin." When it turned out that the facts did not support these hopeful words, Churchill would be the first to take a strong stand against the spread of communism. He would have agreed with Eleanor's a.s.sessment of Roosevelt's view: that politics and diplomacy are stories without end, requiring constant attention, keen thinking, and an appreciation of complexity.

Leaving Livadia on that Sunday, Roosevelt was driven to Sevastopol to survey the battlefield where the Light Brigade had made its doomed charge nearly a century before. Stalin-"like some genie," Sarah recalled-disappeared. As Roosevelt departed, Churchill-who was to see Roosevelt once more on Thursday-tried to maintain his cheer but found it difficult. "The President's decrepitude has filled him with grief and dismay," Moran said. Sarah thought her father "suddenly felt lonely."

CHURCHILL DECIDED IT was time for an adventure. To him action was generally the answer to anything. Rather than following the plan to "easily, orderly, and quietly" leave Yalta the next morning, Sarah recalled, her father announced that they would leave now. "Why do we stay here?" Churchill asked. "Why don't we go tonight-I see no reason to stay here a minute longer-we're off!"

There was silence, then chaos. "Trunks and large mysterious paper parcels given to us by the Russians-caviar we hoped-filled the hall," Sarah wrote. "Laundry arrived back clean but damp. Naturally fifty minutes gave my father time to change our minds several more times." He nearly broke his valet's spirits. "Sawyers on his knees, tears in his eyes, surrounded by half-packed suitcases, literally beat his chest in truly cla.s.sical style and said: 'They can't do this to me.' " Churchill, Sarah recalled, relished the rumpus. "My father, genial and sprightly like a boy out of school, his homework done, walked from room to room saying: 'Come on, come on!' " They were off to spend a few days aboard HMS Franconia. Later, when Sarah asked him whether he was tired, Churchill said: "Strangely enough, no. Yet I have felt the weight of responsibility more than ever before and in my heart there is anxiety."

BACK ON THE Quincy, moored in Great Bitter Lake in the Suez Ca.n.a.l, Roosevelt settled in for a few days of royal Middle Eastern callers. "We got away safely from the Crimea, flew to the Ca.n.a.l & saw King Farouk, then emperor Haile Sela.s.sie, & the next day, King Ibn Saud of Arabia with his whole court, slaves (black), taster, astrologer, & 8 live sheep," Roosevelt wrote Daisy. "Whole party was a scream!" He was enjoying the fact that Churchill was annoyed he was meeting alone with the three kings. Churchill had summoned all three to come to him after they had seen Roosevelt. "Mr. Churchill was rather suspicious of why was Father talking to these three heads of state and he was not invited," Anna recalled. "Father was thoroughly amused. . . . He was getting a great kick out of life."

ON THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 1945, off Alexandria, Roosevelt and Churchill sat together aboard the Quincy. The world had turned over many times since their hands had first clasped at sea. "The President seemed placid and frail," Churchill said. With Hopkins they discussed Britain's role in developing atomic weapons after the war. Churchill and Lindemann (the "Prof") were eager "to do work here on a scale commensurate with our resources"-a bid to remain in the arena, vital and respected. Roosevelt, Churchill told Lindemann later, "made no objection of any kind" and said that the first real trials for the bomb would come in September. (As it happened, events at Los Alamos moved more quickly.) They then had what Churchill called "an informal family luncheon" with Anna, Sarah and Randolph Churchill, Hopkins, and Gil Winant. "I saw WSC to say goodbye," Roosevelt told Daisy. Their visit lasted an hour and fifty-six minutes; just before four o'clock, Roosevelt gave Churchill an alb.u.m of photographs from the 1944 Quebec meeting and they took their leave of each other. It was not to be for long: Roosevelt was due in England soon. "I felt that he had a slender contact with life," Churchill recalled. "I was not to see him again. We bade affectionate farewells."

AT HIS MEETING with Ibn Saud after the president's, Churchill and Muslim custom collided, but Churchill won. "I had been told that neither smoking nor alcoholic beverages were allowed in the Royal Presence," Churchill recalled. "As I was the host at luncheon I raised the matter at once, and said to the interpreter that if it was the religion of His Majesty to deprive himself of smoking and alcohol I must point out that my rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars and also the drinking of alcohol before, after, and if need be during all meals and in the intervals between them," Churchill told the Saudi potentate. "The King graciously accepted the position."

EVEN FROM WAs.h.i.+NGTON, Eleanor could tell that there were "dark clouds" hovering over the Quincy on its voyage home. Pa Watson was stricken. Roosevelt had been counting on Hopkins to help him prepare his speech to Congress about Yalta, but Hopkins was too sick to go on. He would recuperate at Marrakech, staying at La Saadia. Roosevelt's good-bye, Robert Sherwood wrote, "was not a very amiable one." Roosevelt asked Sam Rosenman, who was on a mission to London, to cross the Atlantic with him. "I had never seen him look so tired," Rosenman said once he saw the president. "He had lost a great deal more weight; he was listless and apparently uninterested in conversation-he was all burnt out."

Then Watson died at sea. From afar Daisy knew what it meant: "Franklin feels his death very much, & will miss him dreadfully-He always leaned on him, both figuratively and physically-'Pa' was a Rock, the only one of the aides who gave a feeling of security to F.D.R. when he stood with his braces-Always cheerful, ready with a joke, and completely & unselfishly devoted to F.D.R." Roosevelt rarely showed sadness, but it was different this time. His aides worried, Sherwood recalled, that "the very extent to which he talked about his sadness" could mean "he himself was failing."

In his grief, Roosevelt gave rein to his tarter feelings about Churchill. Deeply compet.i.tive, he was possibly reacting to the world with some bitterness as he sensed his own powers dimming. "Roosevelt was p.r.o.ne to jealousy of compet.i.tors in his field," Rosenman wrote. "He liked flattery, especially as he grew older, and seemed frequently to be jealous of compliments paid to others for political sagacity, eloquence, statesmans.h.i.+p or accomplishments in public life. He liked so much to excel that he took almost as much pleasure in being told he was a better poker player than someone else as he did in being told that Willkie was not as good an orator as he was, or that he, Roosevelt, was a better politician than Farley." On the voyage, Roosevelt told Rosenman that " 'dear old Winston' was quite loquacious in these conferences; that he liked to make long speeches-sometimes getting into irrelevancies; that he quite obviously irritated Stalin by these long discourses; and that at times he, Roosevelt, had to get Churchill back to the subject at hand. Now that victory seemed pretty close and the time was drawing near for carrying out some of the tough principles contained in the Atlantic Charter, the President was beginning to feel that the traditions of British imperialism were playing too heavy a part in Churchill's thinking."

Roosevelt called the reporters on board into his cabin and took the same superior tone about Churchill when the conversation turned to colonial possessions in the Pacific.

Question: Is that Churchill's idea on all territory out there, he wants them all back just the way they were?

The President: Yes, he is mid-Victorian on all things like that.

Question: You would think some of that would be knocked out of him by now.

The President: I read something Queen Wilhelmina said about the Dutch East Indies. She's got a very interesting point of view. I think it was a public statement concerning the plans about her islands; they differ so from the British plans. The Javanese are not quite ready for self-government, but very nearly. Java, with a little help by other nations, can probably be ready for independence in a few years. The Javanese are good people-pretty civilized country. The Dutch marry the Javanese, and the Javanese are permitted to join the clubs. The British would not permit the Malayans to join their clubs. . . .

Question: This idea of Churchill's seems inconsistent with the policy of self-determination?

The President: Yes, that is true.

Question: He seems to undercut the Atlantic Charter. He made a statement the other day that it was not a rule, just a guide.

The President: The Atlantic Charter is a beautiful idea. When it was drawn up, the situation was that England was about to lose the war. They needed hope, and it gave it to them. We have improved the military situation since then at every chance, so that really you might say we have a much better chance of winning the war now than ever before. . . .

Question: Do you remember the speech the Prime Minister made about the fact that he was not made Prime Minister of Great Britain to see the empire fall apart?

The President: Dear old Winston will never learn on that point. He has made his specialty on that point. This is, of course, off the record.

The Roosevelt who said all of this-from the condescending "dear old Winston" to the insensitive "England was about to lose the war" (a war Roosevelt had not joined at that point)-was falling back on an old, unattractive trait: self-importance, the unfortunate flip side of his wonderful confidence.

He was tired, and sick, and, as Rosenman saw, jealous of rivals. Anthony Trollope once wrote that a blind giant-a creature who has lost great strength but is doomed to remember what it was like to wield power even in his weakened state-is the essential tragic figure. There was a trace of Trollopian tragedy about Roosevelt's view of Churchill in these days after Yalta as the failing president lashed out, reminding the world that he was the true power.

CHURCHILL, WHO KNEW Roosevelt's circle well, sensed what Roosevelt was feeling about Watson, Churchill's Thanksgiving dance partner in Cairo. "Accept my deep sympathy in your personal loss . . . ," he cabled Roosevelt. "I know how much this will grieve you. . . . I do hope you have benefited by the voyage and will return refreshed." Daisy found Roosevelt both optimistic and worn out on his return on February 27. "He says the conference turned out better than he dared hoped for; he is happy about it," she noted. But he was having "an exhausting time seeing people-'fixing' things which have gotten out of hand during his absence. Everyone waits around for him to 'lead' & guide."

At sea, he had worked with Rosenman on a speech to deliver to Congress. He knew what Churchill had reported to the House of Commons. In 1940 and 1941, Churchill told his colleagues, Britain's course "seemed plain and simple. If a man is coming across the sea to kill you, you do everything in your power to make sure he dies before finis.h.i.+ng his journey. This may be difficult, it may be painful, but at least it is simple." Now, however: We are now entering a world of imponderables, and at every stage occasions for self-questioning arise. It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time. . . .

No one can guarantee the future of the world. There are some who fear it will tear itself to pieces and that an awful lapse in human history may occur. I do not believe it. There must be hope. The alternative is despair, which is madness. The British race has never yielded to counsels of despair.

Just before entering the House of Representatives to deliver his own report on March 1, Roosevelt remarked, "I hope to do in one hour what Winston did in two."

WRITING MARY ABOUT Churchill's homecoming to England after Yalta, Clementine said that she found Churchill "imbibing whisky and soda. He is marvellously well-much, much better than when he went off for this most trying and difficult of Conferences." At this late hour in the war, the Churchills seemed to be drawing closer to each other while the Roosevelts continued their long minuet of affection and annoyance. Clementine was to travel to Russia for the Red Cross, a long and dangerous journey even in the best of times, and the war was still going on. She turned sixty en route, and Churchill made sure the British amba.s.sador in Cairo gave her his birthday note. "Your lovely Birthday telegram was handed to me in Church this morning . . . ," Clementine wrote Churchill. "I was so pleased."

Eleanor and Roosevelt were not having as smooth a time. "For the first time I was beginning to realize that he could no longer bear to have a real discussion, such as we had always had," Eleanor recalled of the post-Yalta period. Eleanor drew her own strength-her own ident.i.ty-from constant action and work and may have a.s.sumed everyone else did, too, even her ailing husband. Roosevelt's faltering condition, she recalled, "was impressed on me one night" in a three-way discussion with Harry Hooker, a New York lawyer who was close to the Roosevelts. The subject, Eleanor wrote, was "the question of compulsory military service for all young men as a peacetime measure." Hooker was for it; Eleanor "argued against it heatedly." The debate went too far. "In the end, I evidently made Franklin feel I was really arguing against him and I suddenly realized he was upset," Eleanor recalled. "I had forgotten that Franklin was no longer the calm and imperturbable person who, in the past, had always goaded me on to vehement arguments when questions of policy came up. It was just another indication of the change which we were all so unwilling to acknowledge."

As their fortieth wedding anniversary came in March, Eleanor had spent nearly twenty-seven years since learning of her husband's love affair taking refuge in public affairs. Now, sadly, Roosevelt was losing his ability to meet her on that common ground.

STALIN WAS ALREADY breaking his Yalta promises, strengthening the communist hand in Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe. Churchill began inundating Roosevelt with cables-thirteen in the thirty days since they parted. "I feel that this is a test case between us and the Russians of the meaning which is to be attached to such terms as Democracy, Sovereignty, Independence, representative Government and free and unfettered elections," Churchill wrote Roosevelt of Poland. In the middle of March, however, Roosevelt was willing to see how events turned out as Allied diplomats in Moscow wrangled over Poland, telling Churchill: "I feel that our personal intervention would best be withheld until every other possibility of bringing the Soviet Government into line has been exhausted." Churchill was stymied again.

Stymied, but thinking warmly of the president. "I hope that the rather numerous telegrams I have to send you on so many of our difficult and intertwined affairs are not becoming a bore to you . . . ," Churchill wrote on March 17.

I always think of those tremendous days when you devised Lend-Lease, when we met at Argentia, when you decided with my heartfelt agreement to launch the invasion of Africa, and when you comforted me for the loss of Tobruk by giving me the 300 Shermans of subsequent Alamein fame. . . .

I am sending to Was.h.i.+ngton and San Francisco most of my ministerial colleagues on one mission or another, and I shall on this occasion stay at home to mind the shop. All the time I shall be looking forward to your long-promised visit. Clemmie is off to Russia next week for a Red Cross tour as far as the Urals to which she has been invited by Uncle Joe (if we may venture to describe him thus), but she will be back in time to welcome you and Eleanor.

Peace with Germany and j.a.pan on our terms will not bring much rest to you and me (if I am still responsible). As I observed last time, when the war of the giants is over, the wars of the pygmies will begin. There will be a torn, ragged and hungry world to help to its feet: and what will Uncle Joe or his successor say to the way we should both like to do it? . . . The advantage of this telegram is that it has nothing to do with shop. . . . All good wishes.

Winston.

Roosevelt did not answer, which worried Churchill the way Roosevelt's silence in 1940 about the reelection telegram did. Thirteen days later, Churchill added this line to another cable: "By the way, did you ever receive a telegram from me of a purely private character . . . ? It required no answer. But I should like to know that you received it."

In the end, it was as it had been in the beginning-an anxious Churchill, a colder Roosevelt. The next day, from Warm Springs, Roosevelt finally replied, saying, "I did receive your very pleasing message. . . . We hope that Clemmie's long flying tour in Russia will first be safe and next be productive of good which I am sure it will be. The war business today seems to be going very well from our point of view and we may now hope for the collapse of Hitlerism at an earlier date than had heretofore been antic.i.p.ated."

Roosevelt seemed to be moving closer to Churchill's vantage point on Russia. "I cannot conceal from you the concern with which I view the development of events of mutual interest since our fruitful meeting at Yalta," Roosevelt wrote Stalin.

Churchill had another case to press with Roosevelt: the race to Berlin. Eisenhower was pursuing a strategy that might allow the Soviets to reach the German capital first. Calling themselves "the truest friends and comrades that ever fought side by side," Churchill urged Roosevelt to overrule Eisenhower. "I say quite frankly that Berlin remains of high strategic importance . . . ," Churchill told Roosevelt. "The Russian armies will no doubt overrun all Austria and enter Vienna. If they also take Berlin, will not their impression that they have been the overwhelming contributor to our common victory be unduly imprinted in their minds, and may this not lead them into a mood which will raise grave and formidable difficulties in the future?" Told a change in course might cost one hundred thousand casualties, Roosevelt turned down Churchill's impa.s.sioned request. On April 5, throwing in his hand, Churchill wrote, "I regard the matter as closed and to prove my sincerity I will use one of my very few Latin quotations, 'Amantium irae amoris integratio est.' "

The map room's translation: "Lovers' quarrels always go with true love."

THE DAY BEFORE he left for a rest in Warm Springs at the end of March, Roosevelt had a word with Frances Perkins. Perkins asked if she could bring by some guests for a quick meeting in the middle of May. "I can't do that," Roosevelt told her. "I am going out to San Francisco to open the meeting, make my speech, and receive the delegates in a social and personal way." After that it was on to England with Eleanor. "I have long wanted to do it," Roosevelt said. "I want to see the British people myself. Eleanor's visit in wartime was a great success. I mean a success for her and for me so that we understood more about their problems. I think they liked her too. But I want to go. We owe it as a return visit, and this seems to be the best time to go. It is going to be all right. I told Eleanor to order her clothes and get some fine ones so that she will make a really handsome appearance."

"But the war!" Perkins said. "I don't think you ought to go. It is dangerous. The Germans will get after you."

"The war in Europe," Roosevelt said, "will be over by the end of May."

Churchill was also thinking of Roosevelt's pending visit to England. As he ate breakfast in bed at Chequers one morning, he talked about Roosevelt with Sam Rosenman, who was back in England. "The look which came into Churchill's eyes as he talked showed the strong bond of affection that had grown between these two great leaders," Rosenman recalled.

"There are two things which I wish you would convey for me to your great President-both matters of personal interest to me," Churchill said. "First, as you know, the President and Mrs. Roosevelt have accepted the invitations of their Majesties to make a visit to England during the month of May. Will you tell him for me that he is going to get from the British people the greatest reception ever accorded to any human being since Lord Nelson made his triumphant return to London? I want you to tell him that when he sees the reception he is going to get, he should realize that it is not an artificial or stimulated one. It will come genuinely and spontaneously from the hearts of the British people; they all love him for what he has done to save them from destruction by the Huns; they love him also for what he has done for the cause of peace in the world, for what he has done to relieve their fear that the horrors they have been through for five years might come upon them again in increased fury.

"Here is the second thing I want you to tell him," Churchill continued, Rosenman noted, "a bit sheepishly."

"Do you remember when I came over to your country in the summer of 1944 when your election campaigning was beginning? Do you remember that when I arrived, I said something favorable to the election of the President, and immediately the a.s.sociates of the President sent word to me in no uncertain terms to 'lay off' discussing the American election? Do you remember I was told that if I wanted to help the President get re-elected, the best thing I could do was to keep my mouth shut; that the American people would resent any interference or suggestion by a foreigner about how they should vote?"

With what Rosenman called "one of his most engaging laughs," Churchill said, "Now what I want you to tell the President is this. When he comes over here in May I shall be in the midst of a political campaign myself; we shall be holding our own elections about that time. I want you to tell him that I impose no such inhibitions upon him as he imposed upon me. The British people would not resent-and of course I would particularly welcome-any word that he might want to say in favor of my candidacy." Rosenman was impressed with his host. "I felt anew the glow of his warm personality-frank, blunt and direct."

Rosenman would never have a chance to deliver Churchill's message.

"We have fifteen minutes more to work"

Roosevelt and Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd at Warm Springs, April 1945.

CHAPTER 13.

YOU KNOW HOW THIS.

WILL HIT ME.

The Last Letters-.

"I Had a True Affection for Franklin"-.

Churchill in Winter.

IN THE MIDDLE of March 1945, Isador Lubin, the White House statistician, brought Roosevelt a new supply of gin from London. Roosevelt wrote to thank him in code, referring to the liquor as "it." " 'It' is going to Warm Springs and I am made very happy by 'it,' " Roosevelt wrote Lubin. " 'It' will be doled out with extreme care." The president had a bad cold. "All I need is some early spring sun and I'll be all fine," he said to Chester Bowles, the administrator of the Office of Price Administration. Anna could not come along to Georgia-her little boy Johnny was sick-but Roosevelt arranged for Daisy and Polly Delano to join him. "I kissed him goodbye and wished him a restful holiday," recalled Eleanor.

In the Little White House, Roosevelt relaxed, dipping into a new paperback mystery, The Punch and Judy Murders, an installment in the Sir Henry Merrivale series. A highlight of the stay was to be a big barbecue hosted by the mayor on Thursday, April 12; Roosevelt was then due in San Francisco for the founding meeting of the United Nations, where Anthony Eden would represent Britain. And, after that, at last, to London.

IN WARM SPRINGS, Churchill and war were in the foreground. "Another beautiful, warm day," Daisy noted on April 10. "F had his usual morning, with me reading the paper by his window, while he had his breakfast [and] read all the war dispatches in 2 or 3 papers-He has the whole western front in Europe in his head, knows exactly where each army is at any one moment. He says he has to, for sometimes he has to make decisions about operations. I was surprised at this, thinking that Eisenhower would have the final say about such things, but F explained it this way: Some time ago, Eisenhower made a forward movement in the southern part of the line. Winston Churchill promptly cabled F a protest. . . . F, knowing what the plans were, sent an explanation to W.S.C. backing up Eisenhower."

Roosevelt now shared Churchill's belief that Yalta was in tatters. "We've taken a great risk here, an enormous risk, and it involves the Russian intentions," Roosevelt had said to his aide Chester Bowles before leaving Was.h.i.+ngton. "I'm worried. I still think Stalin will be out of his mind if he doesn't cooperate, but maybe he's not going to; in which case, we're going to have to take a different view"-in essence, Churchill's view, which was, Bowles recalled, "Let's shake hands with the Russians as far east as possible."

Stalin was furious over reports that the Americans and the British were having conversations with an SS commander about the potential surrender of German forces in Italy. The Soviets, Churchill recalled, "might be suspicious of a separate military surrender in the South, which would enable our armies to advance against reduced opposition as far as Vienna and beyond, or indeed towards the Elbe or Berlin." The Kremlin was indeed suspicious, and Stalin dispatched scorching telegrams protesting the fact that the Soviets had not been included in the talks, which had taken place in Bern, Switzerland. In a blunt message of his own, Roosevelt told Stalin that "it would be one of the great tragedies of history if at the very moment of victory, now within our grasp, such distrust, such lack of faith should prejudice the entire undertaking after the collossal [sic] losses of life, materiel and treasure involved." Roosevelt sent a copy of the note to Churchill.

Churchill read it with satisfaction. This was more like it-Churchill and Roosevelt versus Stalin, not Roosevelt and Stalin versus Churchill. "If they are ever convinced that we are afraid of them and can be bullied into submission, then indeed I should despair of our future relations with them and much else," Churchill told Roosevelt on Thursday, April 5. Roosevelt agreed. "We must not permit anybody to entertain a false impression that we are afraid," he replied to Churchill the next day from Warm Springs. "Our Armies will in a very few days be in a position that will permit us to become 'tougher' than has heretofore appeared advantageous to the war effort."

BULLISH TALK, but Churchill could tell Roosevelt was feeling low. In a letter to Clementine, who was in Russia, Churchill said that "my poor friend is very much alone and, according to all accounts I receive, is bereft of much of his vigor."

In his weariness, Roosevelt was weighing drastic steps. He told Daisy and Polly that he was thinking of retiring in 1946, "after he gets the peace organization well started," Suckley said. "I don't believe he thinks he will be able to carry on. . . . On thinking further, one realizes that if he cannot, physically, carry on, he will have to resign. There is no possible sense in his killing himself by slow degrees, the while not filling his job-Far better to hand it over, and avoid the period of his possible illness, when he wouldn't be able to function."

It was a scenario he would mention again as he smoked a last cigarette on the night of Sat.u.r.day, April 7. "He talked seriously about the S. Francisco Conference, & his part in World Peace, etc.," Daisy wrote. "He says again that he can probably resign some time next year, when the peace organization-The United Nations-is well started." It is difficult to imagine he would ever have followed through with these most intimate of musings. He thought he was, as Daisy said elsewhere, "the hope of the world." And like Churchill, he had never surrendered.

AT CHEQUERS ON Friday, April 6, Churchill spoke of Roosevelt's nation with admiration and envy. "Talk was of the Americans, the P.M. saying that there was no greater exhibition of power in history than that of the American army fighting the battle of the Ardennes with its left hand and advancing from island to island towards j.a.pan with its right," Jock Colville wrote. Churchill hated that the empire was no longer the great force in the world. He felt the loss. "The only times I ever quarrel with the Americans are when they fail to give us a fair share of opportunity to win glory," he wrote Clementine that same day. "Undoubtedly I feel much pain when I see our armies so much smaller than theirs. It has always been my wish to keep equal, but how can you do that against so mighty a nation and a population nearly three times your own?"

The architect of the American achievement was wavering between strength and weakness in his little house. Sitting by the fire, working on his stamps, Roosevelt sketched one to mark the San Francisco UN meeting. "What do you think of this?" he asked Daisy and Polly, who were on the sofa. "A simple new stamp without engraving: '3 cents 3' on the top line, 'United States Postage' on the bottom line, and in the middle, 'April 25, 1945; Towards United Nations.' " Excited, Roosevelt asked for Frank Walker, the postmaster general. Told Walker was at the theater but could call back, Roosevelt sat up until the call came through. The design, Walker told Roosevelt, would be approved by midweek. "So can people in high places sometimes get things done in a few minutes!" Daisy said.

As he was tucked into bed, Roosevelt indulged in a touching ritual he had begun to play with his cousins. Under orders to take gruel to help regain weight, Roosevelt liked to pretend he was a child who had to be fed, with his cousins playing the role of mother. "I get the gruel & Polly & I take it to him," Daisy said. "I sit on the edge of the bed & he 'puts on an act': he is too weak to raise his head, his hands are weak, he must be fed! So I proceed to feed him with a tea spoon & he loves it! Just to be able to turn from his world problems & behave like a complete nut for a few moments, with an appreciative audience laughing with him & at him, both!" Daisy sensed the absurdity of the scene. "On paper it sounds too silly for words, and it is silly-but he's very funny and laughs at himself with us." When the gruel is gone, he is "left . . . relaxed & laughing-"

LUCY RUTHERFURD AND Elizabeth Shoumatoff arrived on Monday, April 9-they had come through Macon-and were shown their quarters in the cottage up the driveway from the main house. When they appeared in the big room at the Little White House, they found Roosevelt at his card table with c.o.c.ktail supplies. Surrounded by four women, the war going well, Roosevelt was relaxed. When Shoumatoff asked about the distance between Aiken and Macon, Roosevelt was reminded of Churchill's recent joke about the Crimea and happily repeated it for the company: "Let's not falter twixt Malta and Yalta!"

This led him to another Churchill story. If Shoumatoff's account is accurate, Roosevelt conflated events at Casablanca and Yalta, but the tale, both affectionate and condescending, is typical of Roosevelt's late view of Churchill. "I was giving a banquet for the King of Saudi Arabia, and you cannot drink or smoke in his presence, according to Eastern etiquette," Roosevelt said. (He may have meant the dinner for the sultan of Morocco at Casablanca.) "So I called up Winnie to remind him to have his drinks before, which he promptly forgot. At the dinner table, realizing this, he proceeded to sulk through the whole evening, just like this," and Roosevelt, Shoumatoff recalled, "made an amusing imitation of Churchill's expression." Carrying on with the story, Roosevelt said: "The idea of the banquet was to exchange friendly bows with the sultan, who controlled great quant.i.ties of oil, and surely Churchill's att.i.tude was of no help. At ten o'clock the sultan started to bid farewell. He had hardly left with his entourage when Winnie was already pouring Scotch into a gla.s.s!"

FOR PEOPLE-INCLUDING Churchill-who thought they ever understood Roosevelt, or that what they saw was what they got, there was one last reminder for his daughter that Roosevelt was a man of shadows. He kept Lucy's visit secret from his daughter. "He used to call me every night on the phone to find out how Johnny was," Anna recalled. "He called me the night before [he died], and he was just fine. He told me all about the barbecue that they were going to have the next day, and everything else. But there was a funny little thing there, just to show that he never discussed his real personal life with anyone. . . . Lucy Mercer was at Warm Springs. . . . In other words, his private life was his private life. And there was no doubt about it. Which I admire him for, I think it's fine. So I didn't know Lucy was there. No idea."

And he avoided confrontation to the very end. On April 11, Roosevelt, drafting a cable to Churchill at midday in the Little White House, suggested a middle course with Stalin. "I would minimize the general Soviet problem as much as possible because these problems, in one form or another, seem to arise every day and most of them straighten out as in the case of the Bern meeting," Roosevelt said. "We must be firm, however, and our course thus far is correct."

In the afternoon he took a ride with Lucy and Daisy. "Lucy is so sweet with F-No wonder he loves to have her around," Daisy noted of that Wednesday. "Toward the end of the drive, it began to be chilly and she put her sweater over his knees-I can imagine just how she took care of her husband-She would think of little things which make so much difference to a semi-invalid, or even a person who is just tired, like F."