Franklin And Winston Part 9

THE LAST WEEKEND of November 1942 is telling about the range and play of Roosevelt's mind and emotions at this point in the war. There was success in North Africa but still no set plan for what George Marshall believed was the essential step: the invasion of occupied France. Churchill would soon argue to capitalize on the Mediterranean victories by pus.h.i.+ng for more operations in that zone, and Stalin was awaiting a Second Front in Western Europe.

But Roosevelt, at home in Hyde Park, was thinking ahead to the shape of the world after the conflict. One afternoon over Thanksgiving, Roosevelt asked Daisy to go with him to Top Cottage for a picnic. "Our conversation was momentous," Daisy noted. He told her he was hoping for another high-level meeting soon in part because "there is a growing demand for a definite statement about our intentions after the war." Churchill's imperialism worried him-so much so that Roosevelt predicted the Soviets would be easier to deal with in the coming years. "He thinks Stalin will understand his plan better than Churchill," Suckley wrote. "In general it consists of an international police force run by the four countries [the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and China]. . . . Self determination to be worked out for colonies over a period of years, in the way it was done for the Philippines. I wondered how the Empire owners will take to it."

As Roosevelt pondered the idea of what would become the United Nations, he and Daisy went to his cousin Polly Delano's. "She met us at the door, looking well. . . . We had a lovely time at 'tea' with a crackling fire & Tom Collinses," Daisy said. "Polly is so sweet with him & he is devoted to her. . . . F. was happy & full of stories." Warmed by the fire and the c.o.c.ktails in the cool Hudson Valley dusk, cheered by his thoughts on building a new global order, Roosevelt had a bit too much to drink. "F. drove me home from Polly's," Suckley said. "He confessed on the way that he felt 'ivre' [drunk]-Polly must have made his [Tom Collins] very strong." But he had reason to indulge himself: The world was looking brighter.

On November 29, Churchill, who was turning sixty-eight the next day, told Britain that 1943 "must be a stern and terrible year," but it would, as always, be confronted "with a strong will, a bold heart and a good conscience." He did not want the good news from North Africa to lull his listeners into thinking the hard work was over. "I promise nothing," Churchill said. "I predict nothing." Winning battles did not mean winning the war, and just as the British had borne early defeats with equanimity, so now they must resist overreacting to success. He quoted Kipling, whose verses both he and Roosevelt carried in their heads.

If you can dream-and not make dreams your master; If you can think-and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same . . .

This was insightful psychological leaders.h.i.+p on a grand scale: The natural reaction of a war-weary people to the glory of El Alamein-it had indeed been a long time since London could celebrate a victory-was to exhale and begin to think that perhaps the worst was over. Churchill knew better and told the nation so. "I know of nothing that has happened yet which justifies the hope that the war will not be long, or that bitter and b.l.o.o.d.y years do not lie ahead," he said in his broadcast. "Certainly the most painful experiences would lie before us if we allowed ourselves to relax our exertions, to weaken the discipline, unity and order of our array, if we fell to quarrelling about what we should do with our victory before that victory had been won. We must not build on hopes or fears, but only on the continued faithful discharge of our duty, wherein alone will be found safety and peace of mind." Their duty would take them to Berlin. "Remember that Hitler with his armies and his secret police holds nearly all Europe in his grip. Remember that he has millions of slaves to toil for him, a vast ma.s.s of munitions, many mighty a.r.s.enals, many fertile fields."

CHURCHILL WAS CONDUCTING business but taking short breaks for personal occasions. Clementine gave him a lovely birthday party-Mary remembered that the rooms in the Annexe "looked particularly pretty with so many 'birthday' flowers." Despite his warnings about the road ahead, the outlook for the war was much more encouraging on Churchill's sixty-eighth birthday than it had been on either his sixty-sixth or sixty-seventh, and his intimates sensed the changing calculus. This year, Mary wrote, "the bright gleam of victory added l.u.s.ter and joy to these family rejoicings."

ROOSEVELT AND CHURCHILL were to meet in Casablanca in January 1943. Clementine was thinking fondly of her husband as he left. "My darling," she wrote him, "The 'Annexe' and 'No 10' are dead & empty without you-Smoky [the Annexe cat] wanders about disconsolate-I invite him into my room & he relieves his feelings by clawing my brocade bed-cover & when gently rebuked, biting my toe through it." The Roosevelts' pre-Casablanca exchanges seem to have centered less on how much they might miss each other and more on how much Roosevelt hated flying and the physical dangers he might face-hardly cheering thoughts. "It was his first long trip by air across the water and I had hoped he would be won over to flying, but instead he disliked it more than ever," Eleanor recalled. "I tried to tell him that the clouds could be as interesting as waves, but he always said: 'You can have your clouds. They bore me after a certain length of time.' " Daisy sensed Roosevelt's ambivalence about the flight across the sea. "I think F. has mixed feelings about this trip," she said. "He is somewhat excited about it-The adventure of it-seeing all he will see, etc. On the other hand it is a long trip, with definite risks-But one can't and mustn't think of that."

"Of course, I have seen the President constantly"

Churchill carries the strategic day at Casablanca, January 1943 IN CASABLANCA, Churchill was in his element. "The weather is bright with occasional showers and like a nice day in May for temperature . . . ," Churchill wrote Clementine. "The countryside is verdant with lush gra.s.s in the meadows and many fine trees, some of which are palms. Around the whole circle of villas is drawn a circle of barbed wire, ceaselessly patrolled by American sentries, and around that again is a circle of anti-aircraft guns." Cabling Clementine about Roosevelt, Churchill said: "I think he was delighted to see me, and I have a very strong sense of the friends.h.i.+p which prevails between us."

Casablanca was full of the princ.i.p.als' kith and kin: Elliott, FDR Jr., Randolph, and Robert Hopkins were within the compound. "These meetings meant a great deal to Franklin and also to the boys, and Franklin always came home full of stories of what they had said and done," Eleanor recalled. "For my part, I was always grateful when these meetings were possible, for it meant that I got firsthand news of my sons." Churchill loved spending time with Randolph; apparently life was less contentious away from home. "I was very glad to see him and have had long talks with him, and also quite a lot of Bezique," Churchill told Clementine. "He is very well, and the President, who has both his sons here, invited him to come to several of the Conferences." Harry Hopkins noted: "Much good talk of war-and families-and the French. I went to bed at 12 but I understand that the Pres. and Churchill stayed up till two."

There was debate about French politics, Allied strategy, and the tension between Western Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Pacific. Anfa, the Casablanca suburb where the conference unfolded, was comfortable, and Roosevelt and Churchill got along easily. "We had a very agreeable and successful evening, showing him our Map Room . . . ," Churchill told Clementine after dinner one night. "And then Harry Hopkins produced five negro soldiers who sang most melodiously to us." While the princ.i.p.als relaxed, the subordinates charged with their safety were jumpy-which amused Roosevelt and Churchill. Mike Reilly was on patrol one evening when he glimpsed someone walking in the darkness near Roosevelt's villa. "The old bloodhound in me took charge and I stalked the intruder," Reilly recalled. "I stepped from behind a bush, directly in his path, only to have Winston Churchill look up and inquire blandly, 'What's the matter, Mike, did you think I was some person of evil design?' "

Churchill had reason to be in good humor. The British were winning the strategic skirmishes. Their vision: Press ahead in the Mediterranean. Why not strike Sicily now and continue planning for an eventual cross-Channel operation? Churchill "was a man of extraordinarily strong convictions and a master in argument and debate," recalled Dwight Eisenhower, who watched Churchill at work in operational planning. "Completely devoted to winning the war and discharging his responsibility as Prime Minister of Great Britain, he was difficult indeed to combat when conviction compelled disagreement with his views. . . . He could become intensely oratorical, even in discussion with a single person, but at the same time his intensity of purpose made his delivery seem natural and appropriate. He used humor and pathos with equal facility, and drew on everything from the Greek cla.s.sics to Donald Duck for quotation, cliche and forceful slang to support his position."

In conference, Churchill was often at his best in these January days. Despite the difficulties of preparing for a 1943 landing and bridgehead-difficulties that might not have been overcome in time-General Marshall continued to urge the direct approach over the British one. "Roosevelt seemed to hold a position midway between Marshall and Churchill, midway between wanting to thrust at the underbelly and thrust across the Channel," wrote James MacGregor Burns, the Roosevelt biographer. The president knew the Western European operation was the "main effort," Burns noted, but "his fancy was taken by immediate, opportunistic ventures, especially when Churchill was there to suggest them."

At Casablanca, Churchill carried the point: The invasion of France would be delayed. Still, striking France in 1943 was not ruled out: Churchill and Roosevelt approved a buildup of troops in England for a possible landing in France in 1943 and also signed off on the strategic bombing of Germany.

"IT IS IN every respect as I wished & proposed," Churchill wrote his wife. "Of course I have seen the President constantly and we have had nearly all our meals together."

One day, Churchill was strolling on the beach near the compound and came across a group of American sailors. "One of them had a guitar, and they were playing and singing," said an army photographer who recorded the story in the private Secret Service log of the conference. "The Prime Minister got in his car and started to drive off, but after a moment told his driver to stop and back up. When he got back to where the sailors were, Mr. Churchill stuck his head out of the window and said, 'How about playing me a tune?' Of course the sailors agreed, and they gathered around Mr. Churchill's car and sang him two songs, one of them being, 'You Are My Suns.h.i.+ne.' " Churchill-a fan of popular songs, the worse the better-loved it. Later, before a session with photographers, "Churchill asked his man Sawyers for his false teeth [really a few teeth in a removable plate] and said he wished the pictures were going to be taken later in the day, because he didn't look his best at twelve o'clock, but he liked the idea of pictures because he loved publicity," recalled Harry Hopkins. "He told me he could put on a very warlike look whenever he wanted to."

Victorious on strategy, Churchill could afford to worry about other things. The king of Morocco was to dine with the president and the prime minister, and since Muslim tradition forbade serving alcohol, Churchill told Hopkins, the meal was to be "Dry, alas!; with the Sultan. After dinner, recovery from the effects of the above."

THE MEETING, which had been conducted in secrecy, was made public on Sunday, January 24, 1943. The first item of business in the press conference held on the lawn outside Roosevelt's villa was a handshake between Charles de Gaulle and Henri Giraud. The rivalry between the leaders of the French consumed a great deal of Roosevelt and Churchill's time and energy in Casablanca and throughout the war. Roughly put, de Gaulle, whose defiant Free French spirit impressed Churchill and resonated with Churchill's own worldview, was in exile in London and considered himself the representative of the one true France. Roosevelt was, to say the least, less enthralled with the tall, haughty de Gaulle. After the successful invasion of North Africa, the Roosevelt administration recognized Admiral Jean Darlan, a Vichyite, as the governor of the French colonies in North Africa-until Darlan was shot to death on Christmas Eve 1942. Then Roosevelt-again pa.s.sing over de Gaulle-turned to General Giraud, a de Gaulle rival. By the time Roosevelt and Churchill reached Casablanca, it had become clear that the two factions needed to unite. When de Gaulle finally arrived at Anfa-he had come only under pressure from Churchill, who wanted to please Roosevelt-he was underwhelmed by the president. "Behind his patrician mask of courtesy, Roosevelt regarded me without benevolence . . . ," de Gaulle wrote. "He meant the peace to be an American peace, convinced that he must be the one to dictate its structure . . . and that France in particular should recognize him as its savior and arbiter." In any event, Roosevelt and Churchill wanted a de GaulleGiraud photo and got it during the press conference. France was a consistent irritant, one more problem for Churchill to have to manage in order to keep Roosevelt cheerful and in good humor. (To Clementine, Churchill referred to "the squalid tangles of French North African politics.") ROOSEVELT AND CHURCHILL were the picture of unity in the sunlight that Sunday. Reporters, Time noted, "found a well-pleased Franklin Roosevelt in the garden of the villa where he had stayed: he was comfortable in a light grey suit, the angle of his long cigarette holder was even jauntier than usual." Churchill seemed at home, too. "Somehow it all seemed the most natural thing in the world," Newsweek wrote of the image of the two of them.

After the photograph of the Frenchmen was taken, Roosevelt announced: "The elimination of German, j.a.panese and Italian war power means the unconditional surrender by Germany, Italy, or j.a.pan. That means a reasonable a.s.surance of future world peace. It does not mean the destruction of the population of Germany, Italy or j.a.pan, but it does mean the destruction of the philosophies in those countries which are based on conquest and the subjugation of other people."

The conference had its headline. "Unconditional surrender" has provoked much historical debate-did such an inflexible Allied position discourage anti-Hitler Germans from rising up? Did the ultimatum make our enemies fight even more viciously?-but it became fixed policy. One important aspect of Roosevelt's proclamation is what it says about his ability to pursue seemingly contradictory courses at once, a gift that made him a remarkable leader. Picnicking with Daisy at Hyde Park, he had laid out his view of an order in which countries would move into an era of multilateralism in an international organization; sitting with Churchill in the garden at Anfa, he made the most extreme kind of unilateral statement. But the ideas were linked: Crush the dictators in order to make a new world. It was a complicated political and diplomatic maneuver to execute, but Roosevelt, who could operate on different intellectual and emotional levels, was suited to the task in a way a less nimble politician would not have been.

WHILE THE WORLD took in the spectacle of the conference-PRESIDENT'S DARING AIR TRIP, FIRST EVER BY U.S. EXECUTIVE, GIVES WHOLE ALLIED WORLD A THRILL; SEVERE BLOW TO AXIS MORALE SEEN, reported The Was.h.i.+ngton Post-Roosevelt and Churchill drove to Marrakech. Along the way, they had a picnic lunch. "Many thousand American troops were posted along the road to protect us from any danger," Churchill recalled, "and aeroplanes circled ceaselessly overhead."

They were to stay at a villa called La Saadia (variously known as the Villa Taylor and Flower Villa), then occupied by Kenneth Pendar, the American vice-consul in Marrakech. As Roosevelt and Churchill arrived in an olive-drab Daimler limousine, Pendar's servant Louis produced a tea service that, Pendar recalled, "looked like an Oriental potentate's." Churchill asked Pendar to show him the villa's tower. "As we climbed up, I saw his shrewd eyes taking in everything," Pendar wrote. "From the open terrace he told me how much he loved Marrakech and how much he had enjoyed sketching here before the war, during his last visit."

"Don't you believe, Pendar," Churchill said, "that it can be arranged for the President to be brought up here? I am so fond of this superb view that it has been my dream to see it with him. All during the Conference I have looked forward to coming down here to this beautiful spot."

Churchill counted the steps-there were sixty of them-on the way back down. "Mr. President, both Mr. Pendar and I are most anxious for you to see the view from the tower," Churchill said to Roosevelt when they returned to the terrace. "It is unique. Do you think you could be persuaded to make the trip?"

"I have every intention of going up there if these good men can take me," Roosevelt said, gesturing to his aides. "Two men carried the President up with his arms around their shoulders, while another went ahead to open doors, and the rest of the entire party followed," Pendar recalled. Roosevelt kept up a stream of cheerful chatter. Churchill followed, singing, "Oh, there ain't no war, there ain't no war."

It was sunset. Pendar described the scene in nearly mystical terms. "Never have I seen the sun set on those snow-capped peaks with such magnificence," he wrote of the view Roosevelt and Churchill took in together. "There had evidently been snow storms recently in the mountains, for they were white almost to their base, and looked more wild and rugged than ever, their sheer walls rising some 12,000 feet before us. The range runs more or less from east to west, and the setting sun over the palm oasis to our right shed a pink light on the snowy flank of the mountains. With the clear air, and the snow on the range, it looked near enough for us to reach out and touch its magnificence."

As the temperature dropped, Churchill sent for Roosevelt's coat, which he then put around the president's shoulders-shades, again, of Sir Walter Raleigh and Elizabeth. "It's the most lovely spot in the whole world," Churchill said to Roosevelt. "Just as the sun set (we were all silent) the electric light on the top of every mosque tower in Marrakech flashed on to indicate to the faithful the hour of prayer," Pendar wrote. There is a photograph of this moment at the pinnacle, with a seated Roosevelt gazing out and a gentle Churchill looking at Roosevelt with tenderness in his eyes.

A little while later, Churchill donned a siren suit and monogrammed black velvet slippers for dinner. Roosevelt was lying on a couch in the salon. As Pendar approached him, Roosevelt smiled and said, "I am the Pasha, you may kiss my hand."

AT THE DINNER TABLE, Pendar sat between Roosevelt and Churchill. In a sign both of the holiday spirit of the occasion and of the eternal truth that when presidents crack jokes, their audiences laugh-however unfunny the jokes may be-the Secret Service log of the evening records this: "Mr. Pendar was telling the President of a Sultan who, of all things, had a steamboat in one of the large pools located in the extensive garden surrounding his palace. It seemed that the boat capsized with the Sultan in it and that the Sultan was drowned. A round of laughter greeted the President's remark that perhaps the Sultan had never been in water before."

There was lobster and filet mignon, and Louis, Pendar's servant, appeared with a ma.s.sive dessert, a profiterole about three feet high. "I see the pastry cooks have been busy for days and days, preparing for our secret visit," Churchill said to Pendar. Lord Moran noted that the president and the prime minister "made little affectionate speeches to each other, and Winston sang." Pendar raised the subject of de Gaulle, but Churchill shut him down, saying: "Oh, let's don't speak of him. We call him Jeanne d'Arc and we're looking for some bishops to burn him."

There was, Harry Hopkins recalled, "much banter." Pendar was "struck by the fact that, though Mr. Churchill spoke much more amusingly than the President, it was Mr. Roosevelt who dominated any room they were in, not merely because he was President of the United States, but because he had more spiritual quality than Mr. Churchill, and, I could not help but feel, a more profound understanding of human beings. I was very much surprised by this because, having seen Mr. Churchill often in the pre-war days, I had felt sure that no one could eclipse his personality."

The party adjourned to a salon to work on a message to Stalin. At a makes.h.i.+ft writing table-as Pendar put it, "The salon at La Saadia was not meant for work"-Roosevelt and Churchill stayed at it until three-thirty in the morning, telling Stalin about the decisions they had made-decisions that, with their emphasis on the Mediterranean rather than Western Europe, were not going to please Stalin, who continued to feel he was doing most of the fighting against the Germans.

"Both men had a catching quality of optimism, but with the President I kept feeling that it was tinged with a deep realization of far distant and over-all problems," Pendar recalled. "The Prime Minister seemed much more in the present and more of an extrovert. The President, on the other hand, often sat gazing into s.p.a.ce as he worked. That night he had a look that was not exactly sad, yet it was the look of someone who comprehended sadness." Over a nightcap, Roosevelt said to Churchill: "Now, Winston, don't you get up in the morning to see me off. I'll be wheeled into your room to kiss you goodbye."

"Not at all, Mr. President," Churchill said. "I can get into my rompers in two twos, and I'll be on hand to see you off." But Churchill was still in bed when Roosevelt arrived in Churchill's room four hours later to say farewell. Churchill leapt from his pillows-"we heard his bedroom slippers flopping on the stone floor" with the force of his exertions, Moran recalled-and put on what Pendar called "the weirdest outfit I have ever seen"-rompers, slippers, an air marshal's cap, and a flowing dressing gown with black velvet collar and cuffs. (Hopkins, who was also seeing his son Robert off to the front on another flight, referred to it as Churchill's "ever flaming bathrobe.") The president and the prime minister went to the airport together, and Churchill hurried into the plane to get Roosevelt settled, "greatly admiring his courage under all his physical disabilities and feeling very anxious about the hazards he had to undertake." As Roosevelt made himself comfortable on board, Churchill and Harry Hopkins chatted for a moment. "Churchill and I took one last walk together," Hopkins recalled. "He is pleased by the conference-expressed great confidence of victory-but warned of the hard road ahead."

CHURCHILL SAID, "Come, Pendar, let's go home. I don't like to see them take off." From the limousine, Pendar looked back and watched the president's plane climb into the Moroccan morning. "Don't tell me when they take off," Churchill said. "It makes me far too nervous. If anything happened to that man, I couldn't stand it. He is the truest friend; he has the farthest vision; he is the greatest man I've ever known."

Back at La Saadia, Churchill told Moran that he could say one thing for rising so early-"You can get in an extra cigar." Cabling Clementine, Churchill was warm about Roosevelt and proud that Marrakech had been such a hit. "My friend has gone," he wrote. "They all admit I had not over-stated the beauty of this place." After returning to bed for an hour, Churchill, Pendar recalled, was "storming around the blue-green-and-silver bed like a furious cherub." Irrepressible, he was ready for the next thing. "Sawyers, my painting things," Churchill said to his valet. "Please put them out on the tower." He mounted the steps again and, his friend in his thoughts, painted the view for Roosevelt. Churchill was full of Anglo-American visions as he later lunched on the terrace. He talked of a future common currency, striking the same note he had long before with James Roosevelt at Chartwell. "This is as I see it-the money of the future, the dollar sterling." Relaxed, he said, "Now, Pendar, why don't you give us Morocco, and we shall give you India. We shall even give you Gandhi, and he's awfully cheap to keep, now that he's on a hunger strike." Staying on India, Churchill added, "There are always earnest spinsters in Pennsylvania, Utah, Edinburgh, or Dublin, persistently writing letters and signing pet.i.tions and ardently giving their advice to the British Government, urging that India be given back to the Indians and South Africa back to the Zulus or Boers, but as long as I am called by His Majesty the King to be his First Minister, I shall not a.s.sist at the dismemberment of the British Empire."

Clementine was eager to see Churchill, whose code name was "Mr. Bullfinch" and who went on to meetings in Cairo and Turkey after Casablanca. Writing him, she said: "I am following your movements with intense interest. The cage is swept and garnished fresh water and hemp seed are temptingly displayed, the door is open and it is hoped that soon Mr Bullfinch will fly home." Charmed, Churchill replied: "Keep cage open for Sat.u.r.day or Sunday. Much love." In Was.h.i.+ngton, Eleanor was also waiting "anxiously," she recalled, "for news of my husband and the rest of the party."

IN THE WEEKS after Churchill and Roosevelt parted, Churchill came down with pneumonia, and Roosevelt found himself with a slight temperature and sinus problems on the trip home, which included a stop in Gambia. Roosevelt wrote Churchill a double-edged get-well note. "I think I picked up sleeping sickness or Gambia fever or some kindred bug in that h.e.l.l-hole of yours called Bathurst," he told the prime minister. Then he was all kindness: "Please, please, for the sake of the world, don't overdo these days. You must remember that it takes about a month of occasional let-ups to get back your full strength. . . ."

January 30, 1943, was Roosevelt's sixty-first birthday. Never one to miss marking such an occasion with Roosevelt, Churchill wrote: "Many happy and glorious returns of the day from your friend. Winston." "Gone are the days when the democracies s.h.i.+vered in their boots while two scrubby dictators put their heads together at the top of the Brenner Pa.s.s," The New York Times wrote on January 30. "It is for the dictators to speculate and s.h.i.+ver now."

"Churchill will understand. I will take care of that."

Churchill and Roosevelt at Shangri-la, May 1943.

CHAPTER 8.

I KNOW HE MEANS TO MEET STALIN.

A Letter from Lucy Rutherfurd-.

Roosevelt's Secret Overture to Moscow-.

Fis.h.i.+ng at Shangri-la-A Moonlit Drive.

IN WAs.h.i.+NGTON AGAIN in May 1943, Churchill was nostalgic, reciting limericks about s.e.x and savoring the drama of 1940. Roosevelt asked him whether the Belgian refugees now in England were "behaving any better this time than they did in World War I." Yes, Churchill replied. "He said in War No. I unfortunately there were a large number of 'tarts' from Ostend," Henry Wallace recalled. "He spoke of a very Victorian lady friend of his who had taken in a couple of these tarts as her patriotic duty. They proceeded to stay in bed until along about 10 o'clock in the morning and doing no work about the house. The lady suggested that they might make themselves useful which they proceeded to do by bringing in some gentleman friends, quite horrifying the Victorian lady." Breaking into "some rather ribald verse," Churchill added: "Put on your bustle and get out and hustle."

One night, Roosevelt showed a new Signal Corps film called The Battle of Britain. "It is excellent, so much so that the P.M. wept," recalled Anna Roosevelt.

But Churchill did not tarry long in reliving World War I and the heady first summer of his premiers.h.i.+p. This was, Averell Harriman recalled, a "bitter season." George Elsey was alone in the map room one May night when Roosevelt and Churchill came down to debate the Second Front. "Of course, once Churchill got us in the Mediterranean and North Africa, he didn't want to let go-it was always more, more, more," Elsey recalled. "Stalin had been pus.h.i.+ng, basically saying, 'When the h.e.l.l are you guys going to get on with your invasion?' " George Marshall and Sir John Dill, the British military representative in Was.h.i.+ngton, joined Roosevelt and Churchill. The argument went back and forth. "It was Marshall versus Dill, with the Prime Minister chiming in," Elsey said. "The President sat back and listened very carefully; Churchill never sat back. Roosevelt would let others duke it out, but not Churchill." Tonight it was a draw. The message to Moscow would be inconclusive. Elsey made a note to himself: "Americans overwhelmed by British oratory." Decades later, Elsey recalled: "Churchill was pressing for his 'soft underbelly of Europe' strategy, whereas Marshall-speaking for the U.S. Chiefs of Staff-was adamant that preparations for a cross-Channel attack must be made. The reply had to be evasive because there was still no agreement between the U.S. and U.K. leaders-and the Americans just could not match the torrent of the voluble Brits, especially Churchill."

In Was.h.i.+ngton, the British agreed to a target date of May 1, 1944, for the cross-Channel invasion. But would Churchill-could Churchill-stick to it? His seeming reluctance to cross the Channel inspired jokes. Henry Wallace recorded this one in his diary: "Someone called No. 10 Downing Street and insisted on speaking with the Prime Minister without giving his name. Churchill was finally put on and said, 'Look here, this is most irregular. This is Churchill speaking at this end.' The reply came back, 'Well, this is Joe at this end.' Churchill replied, 'Joe who?' The other voice said, 'Joe Stalin.' Churchill said, 'h.e.l.lo Joe. Where are you?' Joe Stalin replied, 'Oh, I am at Calais.' "

To Roosevelt, Churchill was becoming less of a separate power with whom he had to deal and more a part of the Roosevelt circle in the way so many others were-someone who was cherished but would be told what Roosevelt wanted to tell them, on Roosevelt's terms. When Roosevelt and Churchill had first gotten together at sea and then at Was.h.i.+ngton, said George Elsey, "Here was Winston Churchill, ten times larger than life to Americans at that point, the s.h.i.+ning knight who had kept Hitler at bay." Trude Lash remembered him as "the big man in the war, especially that first Christmas." In the spring and summer of 1943, though, Churchill's claim on Roosevelt's attention and energy in the circle of world leaders was loosening.

THEIR FAMILY LIVES were typically stressful this season. Clementine had had a tough spring. "Once again the pace and strain of her life and work were telling on her and the anxiety she had felt over my father's illness was now taking its forfeit," wrote Mary Soames. "She developed a painful boil, and had to undergo a series of inoculations and X-ray treatment, which were most exhausting, and for a short period she was virtually laid up. Although the treatments soon resulted in her improvement, Clementine was so obviously in an exhausted and rundown state that her doctor advised her to go away to the seaside." Meanwhile, John Boettiger, Anna Roosevelt's husband, was going into the service, which meant the Roosevelts had someone else close to them to worry about. "I imagine every mother felt as I did when I said good-bye to the children during the war," Eleanor recalled. "I had a feeling that I might be saying good-bye for the last time. It was a sort of precursor of what it would be like if your children were killed and never to come back. Life had to go on and you had to do what was required of you, but something inside of you quietly died."

With her husband in Was.h.i.+ngton, Clementine kept Churchill up-to-date on family and political news from London. She told him about an attempted "rapprochement" between Pamela and Randolph and baby Winston's service as a page in the wedding of a daughter of the duke of Marlborough ("Winston decided it was a bore standing," Clementine wrote on May 15, "so he lugged a ha.s.sock out of a pew into the aisle & sat on it"). Replying, Churchill alluded to the puzzling Roosevelt domestic scene. Eleanor, Churchill said, "was away practically all the time, and I think she was offended at the President not telling her until a few hours before I arrived of what was pouring down on her. He does not tell her the secrets because she is always making speeches and writing articles and he is afraid she might forget what was secret and what was not." Still, Churchill allowed, "no-one could have been more friendly than she was during the two or three nights she turned up."

ROOSEVELT WAS INDEED keeping secrets from his wife. The most explosive subject in the Roosevelt marriage-Lucy Mercer, who had married the wealthy Winthrop Rutherfurd in early 1920-was on his mind. FDR and Lucy had stayed in touch through the years, and their feelings for each other evidently remained strong. Eleanor was unaware of the enduring link between Franklin and Lucy, but the Rutherfurd circle was not unknown to the president. According to Joseph Alsop, when Lucy's husband became sick in 1941, Lucy "brought him to Was.h.i.+ngton for treatment," and Roosevelt was kind during his illness; family members recall that the president helped Mr. Rutherfurd get the best of care in the capital with a particularly good doctor at Walter Reed Hospital. Roosevelt received one of Lucy's stepsons, Winthrop, in the White House on occasion, as well as her daughter Barbara. The president also helped smooth out the details of one of the stepsons' military service, and once asked Anna, who was living in Seattle at the time, to "be nice" to a Rutherfurd stepson when he was briefly stationed there while in uniform. When Churchill addressed Congress again on this May trip, the president gave two tickets to Mr. and Mrs. John Rutherfurd, another Lucy stepson.

The Lucy-Roosevelt connection, however, was deeper and more complex than that of one old family friend to another. Tucked away in the Roosevelt archives in Hyde Park is part of a letter, almost certainly written in 1941, from Lucy to the president, whom she calls "poor darling." Long and handwritten, alternately practical, emotional, encouraging, sentimental, chatty, and sad, the note reveals much about the nature and extent of their relations.h.i.+p: her grasp of his need to be rea.s.sured and bolstered and praised; her eagerness (like Eleanor's) to give him counsel on politics and the mood of the country, even mentioning Churchill; her dependence on his judgment about the affairs of her own family; and, most poignantly, a hint of her regret that his sense of duty had, along with the coming of World War II, foreclosed the possibilities of a quiet life, perhaps a quiet life spent together. The letter indicates a striking level of engagement with the nuances of each other's worlds. Lucy jokes about catching a cold when he has one because they talk on the telephone, has a dead-on understanding of Harry Hopkins's role in the White House, knows about Roosevelt's travel plans, and refers to Barbara Rutherfurd as the "smallest"-signs that Lucy and FDR were in very close contact as the president prepared the nation for war.

The note was written from Aiken, South Carolina, where the Rutherfurds had a house, on the eve of a trip an ill Roosevelt was planning to take. Lucy begins by offering kind words about his plight in facing isolationist sentiment-and recommending potential allies in the business community.

Day by day the news becomes increasingly ominous and complex and one feels that the responsible heads of the Democracies must indeed be super-men-or at least a dozen super-men to each nation-clothed with the power of life and death. Living-as we do here-in a community of pleasure-seekers-who cannot see farther than the gloves in their hands-one is terrified by the lack of vision-or understanding of what is going on in the world and so close to us-but T[hank] G[od] there seems to be more sympathy with the administration and a backing up of its foreign policy. . . .

The most able man in these parts is George Mead of the Mead Corporation-who served on the Business Men's Council for a number of years-I always feel he might be a help to you-in some capacity-as an ironer-outer of sorts-though I may have the wrong slant on him-I think you might get Harry Hopkins to bring him to lunch with you sometime when you are alone. . . .

Then Lucy turns to family matters.

This kind of letter is best unwritten and unmailed-and poor darling-to give you one more thing to read or think about is practically criminal-though some day I should like to ask your advice about my youngest step-son who is studying law at the University of Virginia and has one more year-He wonders if it would be more interesting and better training for him to take a job in Was.h.i.+ngton-perhaps with a political slant to it. . . . It seems to me life in Was.h.i.+ngton where he could have a house and a garden would be better than life in N.Y. where they say most of the lawyers work themselves to death.

I hope my other s. son wrote you to thank you about his company-He was to have done so-but the letter may not have reached you.

Of course the war may change everything for these boys-and making plans ahead these days makes very little sense.

I am so thankful that you are getting away soon-the only thing is that all your anxieties go away with you-even your bad throat.

The 'smallest' sends you her love-Bless you- As ever L.

In an almost dreamy postscript, Lucy talks of things as she would like them to be-and, possibly, how she would have liked them to have been if affairs of the heart had turned out differently in the last years of the last world war.

P.S.

Time is closing in on going-away time and I hesitate to send this without last-minute instructions-Have been housed with a bad cold (caught over the telephone?) and not allowed out! Never the less worried-Newspapers arrive a day late here-which is trying, and radio reception the worst in the world-which is even more trying. I suppose now more than ever one must live each day as it comes. . . . If only it will be a friendly world-a small house would be a joy-and one could grow vegetables as well as flowers-or instead of-oh dear-there is so much I should like to know-how much hope you have-and the thousand questions one does not like to ask-The old gentleman here [someone in Aiken] says you have a close agreement with Churchill as to what will happen after the war- I know one should be proud-very very proud of your Greatness-instead of wis.h.i.+ng for the soft life-of joy-and . . . the world shut out. One is proud-and thankful for what you have given to the world-and realizes how much more must still be given-this greedy world-which never asks in vain-You have breathed new life into its spirit-and the fate of all that is good is in your dear blessed & Capable hands--. . . .

NOW, IN THE SPRING of 1943, Lucy commissioned Elizabeth Shoumatoff, a Russian-born artist, to paint Roosevelt's portrait in the White House.

Shoumatoff's description of Lucy helps explain Mrs. Rutherfurd's enduring appeal to Roosevelt. "Very tall . . . exquisitely lovely and gracious, she impressed you not so much by her striking appearance as by the s.h.i.+ning quality in her features, particularly in her smile . . . ," Shoumatoff wrote. The painter had also done a portrait of Winthrop Rutherfurd. "He looked like an English peer with his chiseled features, sharp eyes, and a sarcastic expression around his mouth; yet there was something about his face that vaguely resembled FDR," Shoumatoff said of Mr. Rutherfurd. "Lucy, at one time, admitted this herself." Lucy asked Shoumatoff if she would like to paint Roosevelt. "He has such a remarkable face," Lucy said. "There is no painting of him that gives his true expression." As Shoumatoff walked into the Oval Office, Roosevelt asked, "How is Mrs. Rutherfurd? And how is Barbara?"

Lucy had nearly ruined his career-a divorced man could never have had a future in politics in those days, and for all the complexities of their marriage, Roosevelt loved Eleanor, and she him-but down the years, amid global war, Roosevelt was willing to risk a row with his wife to maintain a link with a woman who had captured his imagination when he was young. Roosevelt's gift for secrecy was one of his most fundamental characteristics. A man who could juggle so many conflicting emotions in his relations.h.i.+ps with women could do the same in his relations.h.i.+ps with men-a lesson Churchill was about to learn.

THE PRESIDENT AND the prime minister had spent enough time together by May 1943 that they were accustomed to each other's manners and moods, for better and for worse. On the one hand, they were comfortable with each other through long hours, and from Churchill's everlastingly enthusiastic point of view, they remained the chummy comrades-in-arms they had been since Newfoundland. When the subject of the 1944 presidential election came up, Churchill told Roosevelt, "I simply can't go on without you."

Churchill was so taken by the atmosphere of friends.h.i.+p and goodwill that an old fear was new again: What if Roosevelt were to leave the White House? "In my long talks with the President I naturally discussed American politics," Churchill wrote Clementine from Was.h.i.+ngton on this trip. "Although after 12 arduous years he would gladly be quit of it"-though given Roosevelt's love of office and sense of duty, that was debatable-"it would be painful to leave with the war unfinished and break the theme of his action. To me this would be a disaster of the first magnitude. There is no-one to replace him, and all my hopes for the Anglo-American future would be withered for the lifetime of the present generation-probably for the present century." Churchill's bet for British power was centered on America and on Roosevelt. The United States and England, Churchill said in Was.h.i.+ngton, "could pull out of any mess together."

Riding with Roosevelt, Eleanor, and Hopkins to Shangri-la for the weekend of May 15, Churchill saw a sign for a candy named for Barbara Frietchie, the Civil War character who had defied Confederate troops. Roosevelt could recall only a few lines of John Greenleaf Whittier's poem about her: Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, But spare your country's flag, she said.

Churchill jumped in and "sailed steadily on," reciting the rest of the verses. "I got full marks for this from my highly select American audience, none of whom corrected my many misquotations."

Noticing a sign for Gettysburg, he asked how far away the battlefield was. About forty miles, he was told. "Why, this may have been the very road by which Longstreet moved up," Churchill said. He was transported back eighty years and told the tale of the battle. As he remembered this phase of the conversation in the car, he "was encouraged to discuss at some length the characters of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, two of the n.o.blest men ever born on the American continent." Military history was a shared pa.s.sion between Roosevelt and Churchill, a perennial source of "animated conversation," as Grace Tully put it. But was he really encouraged to lecture his fellow pa.s.sengers? There was more monologue than discussion this afternoon: Churchill appears to have held forth at such length, and in such detail, that he put his listeners to sleep. "After a while silence and slumber descended upon the company as we climbed with many a twist and turn up the spurs of the Alleghenies," Churchill recalled. On the grounds at Shangri-la, Churchill was excited to see a pool of trout, "newly caught in the neighbouring stream and awaiting the consummation of their existence."

IN HIS CABIN, Roosevelt worked on his stamps. Churchill painted an evocative portrait of the afternoon in his memoirs: "I watched him with much interest and in silence for perhaps half an hour as he stuck them in, each in its proper place, and so forgot the cares of State," Churchill wrote. That Roosevelt felt familiar enough with Churchill to have Churchill with him in this most private of moments-it was with his stamps that he unwound and refreshed himself for formidable guests like Churchill-suggests a level of comfort. "My friends.h.i.+p with the President was vastly stimulated," Churchill told Clementine. In Roosevelt's mind, however, Churchill was now less a force to contend with than he was a permanent part of Roosevelt's universe-a universe in which Roosevelt was in charge.

Lord Beaverbrook was also at Shangri-la, and he left an account at odds with Churchill's more sentimental version. "Roosevelt sat in a big chair, his wheelchair placed in a corner between two windows so that he got the bright light," Beaverbrook recalled after the war. "Churchill, at his side, was pressing for tanks, oil, and every conceivable article of war. And Roosevelt was dodging all the while-he would have to consult George Marshall, he said, or one or another person. Roosevelt would bring their conversations to an end by taking out his stamp book. 'Isn't this a beauty from Newfoundland?' he would say. And Churchill would stump off into another room, fretting at the delay." If Beaverbrook's memory is sound, Churchill was interpreting his time with Roosevelt as he would have liked it to go rather than as it went-which was in keeping with Churchill's character.

"IT'S A BEAUTIFUL spot and dinner was fun . . . ," Anna Roosevelt wrote her husband of that night at Shangri-la. "This evening I also discovered for the first time that the P.M. picks his teeth all through dinner and uses snuff liberally. The sneezes which follow the latter practically rock the foundations of the house and he then blows his nose about three times like a foghorn. I admired his snuff box and found it was one that had once belonged to Lord Nelson-and then, like the idiot I am, I allowed him to badger me into trying some of the snuff. No sneezes came to relieve the tickle in my snozzle and I wept copious tears for at least five minutes! The P.M. teased me unmercifully for not taking enough . . . !" Churchill found the family setting congenial. "We could not have been on easier terms," he wrote Clementine.

Yet Roosevelt was not being entirely open with Churchill. "The President had great charm," Mary Soames recalled, "but it was rather like a searchlight beam that moves." While Roosevelt was tinkering with his stamps and Churchill was taking snuff with Anna, a Roosevelt envoy, former American Amba.s.sador Joseph E. Davies, was en route to Stalin with a private letter from Roosevelt, asking to see Stalin-without Churchill. Davies had left for the Soviet Union on May 6; Churchill arrived at the White House on May 11. It was cla.s.sic Roosevelt: Be seemingly open and friendly with Churchill, keep him close at Shangri-la, but also try to win over Stalin.

The president had not told Churchill he was suggesting a private session with Stalin. And in fact, Roosevelt's message went out of its way to emphasize that Churchill should be excluded from an initial meeting. Roosevelt's secret letter to Stalin worked through the options for a summer rendezvous. He ruled out Africa ("too hot"), Khartoum ("in British territory"), and Iceland ("too difficult a flight"). Then Roosevelt, saying he was speaking "quite frankly," revealed his true thinking about why they should avoid the Atlantic: "That would make it difficult not to invite Churchill." But they had to find a solution. "Discussions were always simpler and less apt to be prolonged as between two than three," Roosevelt said. Why not the other side of the world? Either the American or Soviet side of the Bering Strait, Roosevelt said, "would be convenient." It would be a long haul from Was.h.i.+ngton, but the president thought it worth the journey. "F. said he will be taking another trip in about two months. I know he means to meet Stalin somewhere," Daisy wrote. "He feels it will do a great deal of good toward mutual understanding & working out a better system for after the war."

ROOSEVELT THOUGHT OF the maneuver in personal terms. "Three is a crowd and we can arrange for the Big Three to get together thereafter," Roosevelt told Davies. "Churchill will understand. I will take care of that."

He took care of it by lying. Averell Harriman, not Roosevelt, initially broke the news to Churchill after the prime minister returned to London. (Harry Hopkins, Sherwood recalled, "laughed as he wished Harriman the best of luck in his mission.") As Hopkins suspected (and Roosevelt, too, or he would not have kept the feeler secret from a friend with whom he was in constant company), Churchill was disturbed by the prospect of being sidelined.

"My father was a very limpid character in some ways," Mary said. "I don't say naive; he was not naive. He was limpid." His daughter used the word limpid in the sense of being transparent, not weak, and he expected others to be transparent, too. Churchill's anguish at the overture to Stalin is evident in a cable he wrote Roosevelt. "Averell told me last night of your wish for a meeting with U.J. in Alaska a deux," Churchill said, pleading to be included in any meeting.

Confronted by evidence of his craftiness, Roosevelt falsely protested his innocence. "I did not suggest to UJ that we meet alone," Roosevelt replied, "but he told Davies that he a.s.sumed (a) that we would meet alone and (b) that he agreed that we should not bring staffs to what would be a preliminary meeting." Now that the idea was on the table, however, Roosevelt said, he saw a lot of merit in it. Stalin, he told Churchill, might "be more frank" if Churchill was not there. Roosevelt was looking ahead. "I want to explore his thinking as fully as possible concerning Russia's post-war hopes and ambitions," he told Churchill. Roosevelt proposed a compromise. He would have his session with "UJ," and then Churchill could pop over to North America-say, the Citadel in Quebec-and they would catch up then. In midcentury American courts.h.i.+p terms, Roosevelt was saying: "Let me go to the movies with the other girl, and we'll have a hamburger afterward."

Still playing fast and loose with the truth, Roosevelt added, "Of course, you and I are completely frank in matters of this kind. . . ."

Stalin soon took the issue off the table. His fury at the decisions Roosevelt and Churchill made at Was.h.i.+ngton-chiefly to schedule the cross-Channel attack for May 1, 1944, ruling out 1943-brought Roosevelt and Churchill back together. There would be no Roosevelt-Stalin meeting.

TWO DAYS AFTER Roosevelt's letter denying his unilateral gesture to Stalin, the president and the prime minister corresponded about Jewish refugees. In April 1943, American and British officials had held a meeting at Bermuda to discuss what could be done and suggested the Allies establish a camp in North Africa to house refugees who were fleeing Europe through Spain. Roosevelt and Churchill discussed the subject at Was.h.i.+ngton in May-one of their few known exchanges on the subject of the Holocaust-but apparently reached no final decision. "Our immediate facilities for helping the victims of Hitler's Anti Jewish drive are so limited at present that the opening of the small camp proposed for the purpose of removing some of them to safety seems all the more inc.u.mbent on us," Churchill wrote to Roosevelt on June 30, 1943, "and I should be grateful if you could let me know whether it has been found possible to bring the scheme into operation." After fighting objections from within the American bureaucracy, Roosevelt said yes, and plans for the camp went forward, though in the end the number rescued was tiny compared to Hitler's ruthless killing machines.

STUNG BY STALIN'S rejection of his invitation to confer, Roosevelt paid particular attention to Churchill that spring and summer. Roosevelt sent along photographs of the two of them fis.h.i.+ng at Shangri-la (Churchill thought them "a charming souvenir") and shared shop talk, writing him: "My Congress has retired for the night and I am still going strong." Roosevelt and Churchill were to meet at Quebec in August. Stalin refused to join them. When Churchill cabled Roosevelt about the arrangements, using the code name "Warden" and announcing that "Mrs. Warden" (Clementine) and "Lt. Mary Warden" (Mary Churchill) were coming with him, Roosevelt replied: "I am perfectly delighted." "Isn't he a wonderful old Tory to have on our side?" Roosevelt once asked Eisenhower.

Churchill rarely bore a grudge. "Not against a single person," said Anthony Montague Browne, who spent long years with Churchill after the war. "Not against a single soul." It was an extraordinary personal grace. "He seldom carries forward from the ledger of today into tomorrow's account," wrote Lord Chandos. "It has befallen me more than once to have a sharp and almost bitter argument with him of an evening, when hard blows were exchanged, and to find him the next morning benign and smiling and affectionate." Almost anything could be forgiven-and was.

ANOTHER CRUCIAL SUBJECT had been in the air at Was.h.i.+ngton-the structure of the peace, when peace came. Roosevelt was predictably gauzy on what he had in mind for what would become known as the United Nations. Early in the war-even before America was in the war, in fact-he and Churchill had alluded to a "wider and permanent system of general security" in the Atlantic Charter. On March 27, 1942, in a session with Anthony Eden in Was.h.i.+ngton, Roosevelt, according to Hopkins's notes, had said such a body "should be world-wide in scope" but that "there would be under this body regional councils." Then came the most interesting point: ". . . but, finally, that the real decisions should be made by the United States, Great Britain, Russia and China, who would be the powers for many years to come that would have to police the world." Much to Churchill's and Stalin's annoyance, Roosevelt's notion of the "Four Policemen" included China, which was America's hope for a democratic force in the Pacific amid competing British, French, Soviet, and j.a.panese interests. More than a year later, at a May 22, 1943, meeting at the British emba.s.sy in Was.h.i.+ngton, Churchill explained his own views to Vice President Wallace, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, and others, suggesting that three regional councils (for Europe, the Americas, and the Pacific) be set up under a "World Council." According to the notes of the session prepared by the British, Churchill "attached great importance to the regional principle." Influenced by Secretary of State Cordell Hull over the next several years, Roosevelt would subtly s.h.i.+ft his thinking from a regional division of the world to a more encompa.s.sing global organization-but the s.h.i.+ft would be slow and not unmarked by mixed signals from the president. A significant point about the Roosevelt-Churchill negotiations (and later, at Teheran and Yalta, the Roosevelt-Churchill-Stalin negotiations) over some kind of postwar structure was that they were trying to find some better way to manage conflicting interests and, if not eliminate, at least contain the threat of military and humanitarian disasters. They would not always agree about the means, but Roosevelt and Churchill shared the goal.

OVER THE FOURTH of July 1943, Roosevelt and Eleanor were together at Hyde Park. Roald Dahl, a fighter pilot, British secret service agent, and later the author of books such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, was visiting; in wartime Was.h.i.+ngton, Dahl was a friend of Vice President Henry Wallace's. Exaggerating a bit as he sat with Dahl, Roosevelt said, "I have had four dispatches from Winston today, one only a few minutes ago, and I have replied to each one of them. That is equivalent to writing four full pages of newspaper articles."

Later, over drinks at Polly Delano's-Roosevelt's tongue may have been loosened by the three jiggers of gin Polly poured into his Tom Collins-the president was asked: "Sir, what do you think of Churchill as a post-war Premier?"

"Well, I don't know," Roosevelt replied. "I think I would give him two years after the war has finished." Roosevelt understood that nothing was forever in politics. For his part, he said the American people have "seen so much of me and had me for so long that they will now do anything for a change. They are restless because they have nothing against me, but they have, as I said, seen so much of me that they want someone else. They just want a change. But, mark my words, after two years they will be shouting and yelling to go back to what they had before."