Franklin And Winston Part 8

Mary called Clementine's view "a most uncharacteristic reflex, for she greatly admired spontaneous and brave actions." Randolph Churchill is often seen as a pale imitation of his father, with an outsize appet.i.te for ambition (and drink). But he was fierce in war, felicitous in journalism, and his father's first official biographer. "In the event Clementine took no action, and Randolph pursued his intention of joining the Special Air Service," Mary wrote of his decision. Mary saw the likely truth: "One cannot help feeling that in this matter her judgment went a little astray; but at this time of intense strain her first thought was for Winston"-as it always had been and would be.

There was another source of tension in the Churchills' private universe this year. Randolph had learned that his wife, Pamela, had carried on an affair with Averell Harriman, who was also married. Pamela and Harriman had met when Harriman came to London at Roosevelt's behest in 1941. Randolph believed that his parents had known about the liaison and done nothing to stop it. Churchill, however, does not appear to have been a particularly good student of such things, and a letter of Clementine's from the period suggests she was unaware of the affair. Still, an anguished son lashed out at his parents. "When Randolph levelled this accusation against his father, a battle royal erupted at Downing Street, following which his mother-fearful that Winston might have a seizure-banned Randolph from their home for the rest of the war," wrote Winston S. Churchill, the son of Randolph and Pamela. According to young Winston, Mary "was outraged that her father should be abused in this way. Though loyal to Randolph and, like her sisters, scandalized at what had befallen him, Mary . . . told him that the best thing he could do was to rejoin his unit and go to the Front. Mary poignantly records in her wartime diary: 'I think the greatest misfortune in R's life is that he is Papa's son-Papa has spoilt and indulged him & is very responsible.' "

ROOSEVELT PRESIDED OVER a spirited and sometimes tense household, too. "I think there was always a tendency on Franklin's part to try and draw his family into discussions of public affairs, and there was as a result a great deal of sometimes argument between us, on ideas and policies, and practical politics," recalled Eleanor. "But I think it was something that my husband enjoyed in an intellectual way." There was never any doubt where the true power lay. One evening on the presidential train, the Roosevelt children were at dinner with their parents and some members of the cabinet. The guests, Eleanor said, "looked so horrified when they heard the boys arguing violently with Franklin on a number of points that I finally felt impelled to explain that in our family the boys had always been encouraged to express their opinions." Then Eleanor concluded: "I did not add what was soon evident: that their father always waited while they expressed themselves loudly and forcefully and until each one had had his say, and then demolished them with a few well chosen arguments of his own." Demolished is a pretty strong word, one that suggests the president often liked having the last word.

The Roosevelts had to fight two overwhelming forces for their father's attention: polio and politics. But James, the eldest, insisted that "we five Roosevelt children never wholly lost our Pa-our affectionate, witty, loyal, and even overloyal Pa. He could find time, even while nations shook and the world burned, to write each of us debonair little notes about our personal affairs. He also could and did take infinite pains to bring us into his...o...b..t, to give us front-row seats from which we might witness the shaping of the momentous events in which he was involved. But we did lose a good part of that personal Pa of ours-and not even he was strong enough to prevent it-when we had to begin sharing him with the world."

The Roosevelts had four sons and a daughter, the Churchills three daughters and a son. (Both families lost a child early on.) Every family-or nearly every family-has its private dramas and peculiar rhythms of affection and disappointment. Families at the top of political life are not really different: We just know more about them. Even in the middle of political and military storms, their broods-Roosevelt called his "the chicks"; Churchill referred to his as "the kittens"-were in their heads and hearts. Roosevelt and Churchill left the discipline to their wives, relishing their children unaffectedly. "His letters show a touching interest and concern for his nursery," Mary wrote of her father. "His children, and later his grandchildren, were always conscious that he loved to have them around. 'Come to luncheon,' he would say to someone, extending an invitation to Chartwell, adding with obvious relish: 'You'll find us all bunged up with brats.' " Anna Roosevelt was a great comfort to her father, and Mary was a source of enormous pride to both her parents.

Some of the children, though, were more difficult than others. In both families there were problems of unhappy marriages, serial divorces, drinking, and next-generation political and business failures. "One day in Washington I had a very delightful chat with the President about two weeks before he died," the war correspondent William Walton wrote Pamela Churchill after seeing Roosevelt in 1945. "He asked me all kinds of things about D-Day, parachuting, Paris, Germany and London." Pamela kept a portrait of Roosevelt next to one of Churchill in her house. "Eventually I told him the most beautiful woman in London had his picture in her drawing room," Walton wrote. "He was pleased to hear it was you and said he hoped to meet you someday because he'd heard so much about you. Then with a great roar of laughter he said, 'But that R[andolph] what a handful he is! What a handful!' I think for the PM to have such a problem child rather delighted him since he had so many of his own. . . ."

THERE IS NO question that the long shadow Churchill and Roosevelt threw had an impact on their children. "Nothing grows under the shadow of a great tree," Randolph said of his father. "It was a shock to the boys to discover that in the White House, if they wanted to really talk to their father beyond a casual conversation with other people around, they had to ask for an appointment," Eleanor recalled, "and even when they got the appointment, sometimes affairs of state would be so important that they didn't get the full attention of their father." Mary made a similar observation. "As children, we soon became aware that our parents' main interest and time were consumed by immensely important tasks, besides which our own demands and concerns were trivial," she wrote. "We never expected either of our parents to attend our school plays, prize-givings, or sports' days." But they made the best of it. "We knew they were both more urgently occupied, and any feelings of self-pity were overborne by a sense of gratification that their presence was so much required elsewhere."

A love of grandchildren linked Churchill and Roosevelt. Churchill wept at young Winston's baptism in 1940 ("Poor infant," Churchill said amid tears, "to be born into a world such as this"). Roosevelt insisted on having his grandchildren in the White House for his fourth inaugural in 1945.

Randolph and Pamela's divorce in December 1945 troubled Churchill, and he wrote a touching letter about it to Pamela's mother-a note of grace and magnanimity. "I grieve vy much for what has happened wh put an end to so many of my hopes for the future of Randolph & Pamela," Churchill said. "The war strode in havoc through the lives of millions. We must make the best of what is left among the ruins. Everything must be centred upon the well-being & happiness of the Boy. Pamela has brought him up splendidly. There must be friendship to shield him from the defects of a broken home. . . . It is a comfort that the relations between our families remain indestructible."

One of the things the Roosevelts and the Churchills shared with many of the people they led in the war was anxiety about their children in uniform. Concern for the children-their own and the other men's-became a running theme for Roosevelt, Churchill, Hopkins, and Beaverbrook. "I hope you have good news of your boys," Beaverbrook wrote Roosevelt in the summer of 1944. "It must be a constant preoccupation with you." It was. "I think my husband would have been very much upset if the boys had not wanted to go into the war immediately, but he did not have to worry very much because they either were already in before the war began, or they went in immediately," Eleanor recalled. "After that, actually, we had one advantage, I suppose, and that was that we always did know what was happening in the war picture, and therefore we knew more quickly where our own children were involved, and what was going on, but I think this made us more conscious of the difficulties of parents, whose children were scattered all over, and who couldn't know as quickly as we could know-perhaps had weeks of anxiety before they got news of any kind." James, Elliott, John, and Franklin Jr. saw action. Randolph would be under fire in different theaters and sustained injuries; and his sisters, Diana, Sarah, and Mary, were in uniform, Mary manning an antiaircraft battery in London and later in northwest Europe. Hopkins's sons, Robert and Stephen, served (Stephen would die in the Pacific); Beaverbrook's son Max won fame as a fighter pilot.

This human dimension of Roosevelt's and Churchill's wartime lives has been largely forgotten, but the safety of their children was always on their minds, and they often asked after each other's broods. "Seeing their sons go off to war was hard on both my husband and Harry Hopkins," Eleanor recalled. "Both of them would have liked to take their sons' places. They wanted their sons to do what they could for the country, but humanly they wished they could be side by side with them. I think one of the secrets of Harry's eagerness to take any trips Franklin might suggest, and Franklin's insistence on himself taking trips which he felt might be of service lay in the strong subconscious desire to share the dangers their sons were going through." Those pins in the map rooms, from London to Washington, had faces attached to them-and some of those faces were their own children's.

THERE WERE FORTY-FIVE months between Pearl Harbor and V-J Day, and the debate over where to establish a front other than the one in the east, where the Germans and the Soviets were slaughtering each other-a debate carried out between Roosevelt and Churchill, face-to-face and pen-to-pen-would consume twenty-four of those months. Churchill himself best expressed the cultural background of the argument. "In the military as in the commercial or production spheres the American mind runs naturally to broad, sweeping, logical conclusions on the largest scale," he wrote. "It is on these that they build their practical thought and action. They feel that once the foundation has been planned on true and comprehensive lines all other stages will follow naturally and almost inevitably. The British mind does not work quite in this way. We do not think that logic and clear-cut principles are necessarily the sole keys to what ought to be done in swiftly changing and indefinable situations. In war particularly we a.s.sign a larger importance to opportunism and improvisation, seeking rather to live and conquer in accordance with the unfolding event than to aspire to dominate it often by fundamental decisions. There is room for much argument about both views. The difference is one of emphasis, but it is deep-seated."

Many American officials, led by George Marshall, believed the path to victory lay in going straight at Hitler's Fortress Europe. Churchill, however, worried that the Allies did not yet have the power to reconquer Europe and would continue to advance other operations, many in the Mediterranean, until he believed there was sufficient force to carry the day in France. The scale and scope of attacking a fortified French coast and establishing a bridgehead worried the prime minister, who was haunted by memories of past failures. "When I think of the beaches of Normandy choked with the flower of American and British youth, and when, in my mind's eye, I see the tides running red with their blood," Churchill would say to Dwight Eisenhower, "I have my doubts . . . I have my doubts." One day, the combined strength of Roosevelt and Stalin would force him to act. But until then, Churchill pushed with vigor and eloquence for action in other theaters in the hope of winning the war without a dangerous landing on the coast.

Roosevelt was thinking along different lines in early 1942 and dispatched Hopkins and Marshall to London. "What Harry and Geo. Marshall will tell you all about has my heart and mind in it," Roosevelt wrote Churchill on April 3. "Your people and mine demand the establishment of a front to draw pressure off the Russians, and these peoples are wise enough to see that the Russians are today killing more Germans and destroying more equipment than you and I put together." The idea: to prepare for an April 1, 1943, invasion across the Channel, with a plan, as a memorandum approved by Roosevelt put it, "for immediate action by such forces as may be available from time to time." A 1942 landing, in other words, might come either to "(a) take advantage of a sudden German disintegration or (b) 'as a sacrifice' to avert an imminent collapse of Russian resistance."

While saying that Roosevelt's strike, if successful, would be "one of the grand events in all the history of war," Churchill was anxious. The majority of troops would be British; there were enormous issues about landing craft and logistics; and, as Churchill recalled, "neither we nor our professional advisers could devise any practical plan for crossing the Channel with a large Anglo-American army before the late summer of 1943." Churchill had other concerns as well, including using troops to defend India from j.a.pan. There had to be additional options for action against Germany while the Allies built up force to crack Fortress Europe. What about North Africa, a possibility that had first been broached by Roosevelt and Churchill at Washington? The conversations would go on.

"The war strode in havoc through the lives of millions"

Pamela Digby and Randolph Churchill on their wedding day, October 4, 1939 THE FATE OF India was another area of disagreement between Roosevelt and Churchill. Roosevelt thought it past time to grant the Indians self-rule, and he had brought up the subject at Christmas 1941. "The President had first discussed the Indian problem with me, on the usual American lines during my visit to Washington in December, 1941," Churchill recalled. "I reacted so strongly and at such length"-translation: I went on and on and on-"that he never raised it verbally again." In the middle of the Second Front negotiations in April, Roosevelt had written Churchill urging that the British allow India to govern itself. The telegram arrived at three o'clock one morning at Chequers. Churchill rejected Roosevelt's advice in a late-night conversation with Harry Hopkins. The prime minister could not shut up about it. "Churchill said that he personally was quite ready to retire to private life if that would do any good in a.s.suaging American public opinion," Sherwood wrote after reviewing Hopkins's notes, "but he felt certain that, regardless of whether or not he continued as Prime Minister, the Cabinet and Parliament would continue to a.s.sert the policy as he had stated it."

As he listened to Churchill rage on at this late hour, Hopkins became convinced that, as Sherwood put it, "India was one area where the minds of Roosevelt and Churchill would never meet." Roosevelt thought Churchill sentimental about the subcontinent; Churchill thought Roosevelt idealistic.

The next day, Churchill had calmed down. "I used to see a lot of Churchill in the two and a half years I was in England," Averell Harriman recalled, "and things would come up, and I would tell him, 'Don't send that telegram to the President, it's the wrong thing to say,' and he would growl and say he was going to send it. And the next morning it would be about 7:30. He'd call me into his room, while dictating, [and say,] 'What do you think of this?' He'd have an entirely new telegram. He'd never admit he was wrong. Then I'd say, 'Your idea about this is exactly right.' "

Hopkins now saw what Harriman had seen. After ranting at Hopkins in the wee hours, Churchill framed his actual answer to Roosevelt in as friendly a way as he could. "You know the weight which I attach to everything you say to me, but I did not feel I could take responsibility for the defence of India if everything has again to be thrown into the melting pot at this critical juncture . . . ," Churchill cabled Roosevelt on April 12, 1942. "Anything like a serious difference between you and me would break my heart and surely deeply injure both our countries at the height of this terrible struggle." Roosevelt dropped the subject-for the time being.

BY MID-JUNE 1942, the war news was better, at least in the Pacific. In the first week of June, the navy had won the critical battle at Midway, a victory that avenged Pearl Harbor. Churchill was coming to America to see Roosevelt about the conflicting strategic ideas. Would there be a landing, however small, in France in 1942, or would the Allies focus on North Africa?

Roosevelt was at Hyde Park when Churchill arrived in Washington. The old place had become even more important to him since Sara's funeral. Daisy Suckley noticed that the "big house without his mother seems awfully big & bare-she gave him that personal affection which his friends & secretaries cannot do, in the same way." To Sara, Daisy said, Roosevelt "was always 'my boy,' and he seemed to me often rather pathetic, and hungry for just that kind of thing." In front of the fireplace in the library one evening that winter with Roosevelt, Daisy noted that "Mrs. Roosevelt's chair [was] so very strikingly empty-I was conscious of it all the time, and feel he is, too."

In reaction to Sara's death, Roosevelt had become even more obsessed with continuity and control in his private universe. Eleanor had taken time in the spring to clear out the two East 65th Street homes. "We had lived in those houses since 1908 and one can imagine the acc.u.mulation of the years," Eleanor recalled. "My mother-in-law never threw anything away. It was a tremendous job. My husband had not been in either house since 1932, yet he could tell me exactly what he wanted and where it would be. That spring he spent about two hours in the houses and noticed everything that had been moved . . . the crates and boxes and barrels were marked so the things could be stored at Hyde Park and my husband could unpack gradually." Dips into these boxes-which were really dips into his past-sustained him. Sitting at Hyde Park, the pieces of his life around him, enabled Roosevelt to channel his grief into nostalgia. Eleanor was understandably ambivalent about Roosevelt's immersion in memory; he had apparently failed to say thank you for all she had done to move the belongings up the Hudson. "It did not all go as smoothly as we had hoped," she remembered, "and one or two things he later wanted especially could not be located until I had time myself to delve into the crates and boxes stored in the cellar of the house." A striking scene: Eleanor Roosevelt rooting around in the bas.e.m.e.nt of a house in which she never felt entirely at home, seeking what her husband wanted.

ON THE MORNING of Friday, June 19, Churchill flew into New Hackensack airport near Hyde Park to "the roughest b.u.mp landing I have experienced." Roosevelt met him in his blue Ford, which he could drive by himself with hand-controlled levers, and whizzed his guest around the estate. Churchill was impressed with Roosevelt's driving but was a bit uneasy when the president would roar up to "the gra.s.s verges of the precipices over the Hudson." The prime minister offered a silent prayer: "I hoped," Churchill recalled, "the mechanical devices and brakes would show no defects."

It was a profitable ride. Driving along, Churchill said, "all the time we talked business, and . . . we made more progress than we might have done in formal conference." The tone of the strategic conversations between the two princ.i.p.als can be inferred from a note Churchill gave Roosevelt during the stay. It was impa.s.sioned, practical-and effective: "No responsible British military authority has so far been able to make a plan for September 1942 which had any chance of success unless the Germans become utterly demoralized, of which there is no likelihood," Churchill wrote. "Have the American staffs a plan? If so, what is it? What forces would be employed? At what points would they strike? What landing-craft and shipping are available? Who is the officer prepared to command the enterprise? What British forces and a.s.sistance are required?" Compelling words, and they would hit their mark.

Churchill was fascinated by his friend's home, which must have pleased Roosevelt. While the president got ready for lunch on this June Friday, Churchill was shown to his room upstairs. Known as the Pink Room, the small suite was filled with huge English prints and faced west, toward the Hudson. Coming down, Churchill found Daisy Suckley alone in the front hall. He became shy; where Roosevelt would have turned on the charm, tossing his head back and smiling broadly, Churchill hesitated. "Seeing a strange woman, he stopped on the lower stair landing & examined a painting," Daisy wrote. "I started to gaze at something, too-it may have been the trees! He turned & came down the last two steps-he smiled-I smiled. We shook hands-I introduced myself-We wandered down the hall to the Library." It was the kind of house familiar to Churchill, a mix of paintings, family portraits, books, photographs in silver frames, broad views of green, the scent of tobacco smoke.

"There seemed to be real friendship & understanding between F.D.R. & Churchill," Daisy noted as she watched them together for the first time. "F.D.R.'s manner was easy and intimate-His face humorous, or very serious, according to the subject of conversation, and entirely natural. Not a trace of having to guard his words or expressions, just the opposite of his manner at a press conference, when he is an actor on a stage-and a player on an instrument, at the same time."

EACH MAN WAS a good student of the other. Roosevelt asked Daisy a favor: Would she arrange for a tea at Top Cottage the next day? Scotch and ice were to be on offer-"in case Mr. C. might like some," Daisy noted. She innocently added in her diary: "He evidently takes it quite regularly." Meanwhile, Churchill used Harry Hopkins as a conduit for business, the prime minister recalled, "so that the ground was prepared and the President's mind armed upon each subject."

One afternoon, they all lunched in the minty green dining room. Afterward Roosevelt was wheeled into his little study on the ground floor, a secluded room facing east, where he could sit and look out across the front porch. Originally built in a 1915 addition to the house as a cla.s.sroom for the Roosevelt children, the study had become a hideaway for Roosevelt, who liked to work there surrounded by nautical prints, a New York Democratic National Convention delegation sign, and gla.s.s-fronted bookcases.

Roosevelt invited Churchill and Hopkins in for a chat. "The room was dark and shaded from the sun," Churchill recalled. A globe sat on the floor; Churchill remembered the desk nearly filled the office. They had gathered to discuss what the British called "Tube Alloys"-the effort to build an atomic bomb.

In August 1939, Churchill had been briefed by Lindemann, his friend and scientific adviser, about the possibilities of splitting the atom, and Roosevelt had learned of the potential for such a weapon in October of that year, when Alexander Sachs, an occasional Roosevelt economics adviser who had served in the National Recovery Administration, brought the president a letter from Albert Einstein. In June 1940, Roosevelt approved pushing ahead on research. In Britain, Churchill had had the same reaction as the president: Push ahead. The British were making progress, Churchill now reported to Roosevelt in the small room, and the time had come for a research plant. Churchill suggested he and Roosevelt join forces. The Germans were in the race, too, and there was not a moment to lose. "What if the enemy should get an atomic bomb before we did!" Churchill said. "However skeptical one might feel about the a.s.sertions of scientists, much disputed among themselves and expressed in jargon incomprehensible to laymen, we could not run the mortal risk of being outstripped in this awful sphere." Amid the familiar-his books, his papers, his cigarettes-the sun shining outside, so focused on the momentous subject at hand that he did not appear to notice the heat, Roosevelt agreed. "I strongly urged that we should at once pool all our information, work together on equal terms, and share the results, if any, equally between us," Churchill recalled. And so it was. Soon the Manhattan Project would be under way.

It had been, Churchill said, a "grave and fateful decision." They then drove up to Top Cottage for "tea," where Daisy made sure Churchill got his Scotch while Roosevelt ate egg sandwiches with mustard greens. "Conversation was a little slow," Daisy noted. "Everyone sits around waiting for the P. & Mr. C. to speak-It must be quite a strain on them both-" It was, and therein lies one of the conundrums of a great leader's life. Being constantly, or nearly constantly, expected to perform is tiring, but perhaps the only thing worse would be to not be constantly, or nearly constantly, expected to perform.

ROOSEVELT AND CHURCHILL took the overnight train to Washington, where it was a warm Sunday with brief thundershowers expected in the afternoon and evening. At the White House, Churchill "glanced at the newspapers, read telegrams for an hour, had my breakfast, looked up Harry across the pa.s.sage, and then went to see the President in his study." Lord Ismay-it was his birthday-was with him. A telegram on pink paper was brought in and handed to Roosevelt. "Tobruk has surrendered," the note read, "with twenty-five thousand men taken prisoners."

The Germans had humiliated the British. In the desert, Erwin Rommel had taken the garrison that could be key to the Middle East and its treasures. The notion of surrender was anathema to Churchill, who had sworn-to his people, to his enemies, to Franklin Roosevelt-never to give in. "Defeat is one thing; disgrace is another," Churchill thought. "Not only were its military effects grievous, but it had affected the reputation of the British armies. At Singapore 85,000 men had surrendered to inferior numbers of j.a.panese. Now in Tobruk . . . seasoned soldiers had laid down their arms to perhaps one-half of their number." Churchill believed Tobruk's fall to be "one of the heaviest blows I can recall during the war." It was, he said, "a bitter moment." Two summers before, he would not have let his true feelings show. Today he did. "I did not attempt to hide from the President the shock I had received," Churchill recalled. The meaning was immediately apparent to those in the White House. "This was a body blow for Churchill," wrote Sherwood. "It was another Singapore. It might well be far worse even than that catastrophe in its total effect-for, with Tobruk gone, there was little left with which to stop Rommel from pushing on to Alexandria, Cairo-and beyond. The prospect of a German-j.a.panese junction now loomed larger than ever as a possibility or even probability, and remained so for weeks thereafter."

ROOSEVELT SPOKE UP and, Ismay recalled, "in six monosyllables he epitomized his sympathy with Churchill, his determination to do his utmost to sustain him, and his recognition that we were all in the same boat."

"What can we do to help?" Roosevelt asked, reaching out to his anguished comrade. "I remember vividly being impressed by the tact and real heartfelt sympathy that lay behind these words," recalled General Brooke, who was there. "There was not one word too much or too little." In this same room in December, Roosevelt had received the news of Pearl Harbor. He knew what it was like to be in charge and yet feel powerless. His hard-earned powers of empathy were now deployed in the service of his friend, who himself had earned Roosevelt's trust by proving his courage and steadfastness in 1940 and 1941. "Roosevelt's heart warmed to his beleaguered friend and his sympathetic actions in support were the tonic which did as much as anything to restore Churchill," recalled Jock Colville.

"Give us as many Sherman tanks as you can spare, and ship them to the Middle East as quickly as possible," Churchill said, trying to think-and look-ahead.

After calling for George Marshall, Roosevelt put the problem to him. "Mr. President," Marshall replied, "the Shermans are only just coming into production. The first few hundred have been issued to our own armoured divisions, who have hitherto had to be content with obsolete equipment. It is a terrible thing to take the weapons out of a soldier's hands." But like Roosevelt, he was instinctively kind toward Churchill. "Nevertheless," Marshall continued, "if the British need is so great they must have them; and we could let them have a hundred 105-mm. self-propelled guns in addition." It was a critical gesture, for, as Ismay recalled, "they arrived in time to play a big part in the victory of Alamein."

THE DECISION WAS made quickly. "It is interesting to consider what might have happened if the business which they put through in a matter of minutes in the White House had been handled through normal official channels," Ismay recalled. "A desperate appeal for tanks might have come from General Auchinleck to the CIGS. The General Staff would have said to themselves: 'There are none available here, but there is just a chance that Washington might be able to help.' A telegram would have gone to the Pentagon, and the probable reaction would have been, 'We are sorry that we cannot do anything at the moment. The only available Shermans have just been issued to our own troops, and it would be impossible to take them away . . .' [and] the chances of this vital equipment arriving in time would have been remote."

They adjourned for lunch, and as they ate, Eleanor was amazed by the fort.i.tude of her husband and his friend. "To neither of those men was there such a thing as not being able to meet a new situation," she noted. "I never heard either of them say that ultimately we would not win the war. This att.i.tude was contagious, and no one around either of them would ever have dared to say, 'I'm afraid.' " Churchill was outwardly brave but inwardly crushed.

"What matters is that it should happen when I am here," he said to Moran later that day. "I am ashamed. I cannot understand why Tobruk gave in. More than 30,000 of our men put their hands up. If they won't fight-" Churchill, Moran recalled, stopped. "It was the President who told me," Churchill mused. "He was very kind." Writing long afterward about how Roosevelt and Hopkins reacted to Tobruk, Churchill noted: "Nothing could exceed the sympathy and chivalry of my two friends. There were no reproaches; not an unkind word was spoken." At that moment, Churchill recalled, he felt like the unhappiest Englishman in North America since General Burgoyne-the officer who surrendered at Saratoga.

IF ROOSEVELT HAD been distant or cross or even just ambivalent when the telegram arrived-not unthinkable prospects-Churchill might have had a harder time regaining his footing after the news came. Churchill quoted an aphorism to describe Roosevelt's reaction to Tobruk: "A friend in need is a friend indeed." On this Sunday morning, Roosevelt fulfilled a definition of friendship Churchill had written about in his novel, Savrola: "A man loves his friend," Churchill had noted, because "he has stood by him perhaps at doubtful moments."

Believing himself secure in Roosevelt's affections and esteem, Churchill was able to channel his uneasiness into action. "Winston's buoyant temperament is a tremendous a.s.set," Moran noted in his diary. "The fall of Tobruk, like the loss of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, has been a blow between the eyes. Not only Cairo and Alexandria, but the Suez Ca.n.a.l and all the oilfields of the Near East seem to be at the mercy of Rommel. And yet, before I left his bedroom on Sunday, Winston had refused to take the count; he got up a little dazed, but full of fight."

Though the prime minister and the president were determined to keep the mask of command on, there was much to worry about. Roosevelt rang Daisy that week and said, "The Germans are better trained, better generaled-'You can never discipline an Englishman or an American as you can a German'- . . . I asked where the blame lies for the present situation in Egypt. He said partly Churchill, mostly the bad generals-F. was depressed over the situation. If Egypt is taken, it means Arabia, Syria, Afghanistan, etc., i.e. the j.a.ps & Germans control everything across from the Atlantic to the Pacific-that means all the oil wells, etc. of those regions-a bleak prospect for the United Nations."

On his way to his plane-he was taking off from Baltimore-Churchill had a brush with a potential a.s.sa.s.sin. "The narrow, closed-in gangway which led to the water was heavily guarded by armed American police," Churchill recalled. "There seemed to be an air of excitement, and the officers looked serious. Before we took off I was told that one of the plainclothes men on duty had been caught fingering a pistol and heard muttering that he would 'do me in,' with some other expressions of an unappreciative character. He had been pounced upon and arrested. Afterwards he turned out to be a lunatic. Crackpates are a special danger to public men, as they do not have to worry about the 'getaway.' " Roosevelt had the same stoic view of a.s.sa.s.sination. After the shooting in Miami in 1933, Roosevelt had called Eleanor, who was giving a speech in Ithaca, New York. Calmly, Eleanor recalled, Roosevelt had said, "Of course, if someone did not care whether they were caught or not, they could always attack anybody no matter how much care the Secret Service took, no matter what was done." He felt particularly vulnerable-touchingly-on his crutches, on which he said he was "slow, of necessity, in getting out of the car." Going forward, Roosevelt told Eleanor, "You can't live with that on your mind all the time-you've got to forget it. We will just have to force ourselves never to think of these possibilities, otherwise life will be impossible."

AS HE HEADED home in June 1942, "this seemed to me to be a bad time," Churchill recalled. He beat back a vote of censure, and in the House he let the mask slip just enough to show his humanity. "Some people a.s.sume too readily that, because a Government keeps cool and has steady nerves under reverses, its members do not feel the public misfortunes as keenly as do independent critics," he said. "On the contrary, I doubt whether anyone feels greater sorrow or pain than those who are responsible for the general conduct of our affairs."

"Good for you," Roosevelt wrote Churchill after the vote on July 2, 1942. Roosevelt got away for the Fourth of July, paying his first visit to Shangri-la, a camp built by the Civilian Conservation Corps that the president had taken over as a retreat near Washington. To unwind, Roosevelt browsed through a copy of Jane's Fighting Ships.

IN JULY, both Roosevelt and Churchill went on record about reports from Europe on the horrors facing the Jewish people. In his 1935 essay about Hitler, Churchill had been eloquent on the question. "The Jews, supposed to have contributed, by a disloyal and pacifist influence, to the collapse of Germany at the end of the Great War, were also deemed to be the main prop of communism and the authors of defeatist doctrines in every form," Churchill wrote. "Therefore, the Jews of Germany, a community numbered by many hundreds of thousands, were to be stripped of all power, driven from every position in public and social life, expelled from the professions, silenced in the Press, and declared a foul and odious race. The twentieth century has witnessed with surprise, not merely the promulgation of these ferocious doctrines, but their enforcement with brutal vigour by the Government and by the populace." In a speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939-Roosevelt's birthday-Hitler had pledged to destroy the Jewish race. At a secret conference in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, on January 20, 1942, a handful of top German officials laid out the mechanics of the Final Solution, which was already unfolding in parts of Europe.

On July 21, twenty thousand people attended an event in Madison Square Garden organized by American Jewish groups. Roosevelt and Churchill sent statements. "Citizens, regardless of religious allegiance, will share in the sorrow of our Jewish fellow-citizens over the savagery of the n.a.z.is against their helpless victims," Roosevelt said. Churchill noted that "the Jews were Hitler's first victims" and said "retribution for these crimes" was "among the major purposes of this war."

It marked the first time they spoke out together against Hitler's crimes against the Jews. The debate over the Allied response to the Holocaust touches on anti-Semitism, prewar and wartime refugee policy, proposals for ransom and rescue, Arab sensitivities in the Middle East, and possible military strikes directed at rail lines or at the death camps. Churchill and Roosevelt spent little time on the issue together, however, and both men have been criticized since the war for failing to do more to save European Jewry from Hitler. Given the enormity of the crimes committed against the Jewish people and the central place the Holocaust has rightly come to occupy in our communal memory, some scholars now a.s.sign a measure of blame to the Allies for, in David S. Wyman's phrase, "the abandonment of the Jews." Critics say Roosevelt and Churchill were indifferent or even callous, refusing to take political or military risks for Jews; defenders argue that the two men were understandably focused on the complete military defeat of the Third Reich as the best way to save the Jews-and everyone else-from n.a.z.ism. In truth, neither man could have kept the Holocaust from happening, and the Allied military campaigns may have kept the Final Solution from being applied in the Middle East in the short term and unquestionably defeated n.a.z.ism entirely in the long term.

Churchill and Roosevelt had long grasped the threat Hitler posed to the Jews. In 1932, Churchill was researching his biography of Marlborough and went to Munich after touring the battlefield at Blenheim. Randolph and Clementine were with him. Hitler, who would come to power in January 1933, was also in Munich. A member of Hitler's entourage, the half-German, half-American Ernst Hanfstaengl (a Harvard alumnus who had become friendly with Franklin Roosevelt in the early years of the century) tried to arrange a meeting between Churchill and Hitler, but Hitler put Hanfstaengl off. "Hitler produced a thousand excuses, as he always did when he was afraid of meeting someone," recalled Hanfstaengl. "With a figure whom he knew to be his equal in political ability, the uncertain bourgeois re-emerged again, the man who would not go to a dancing-cla.s.s for fear of making a fool of himself, the man who only acquired confidence in his manipulation of a yelling audience." That night, Hanfstaengl and the Churchill party dined without Hitler at the Hotel Continental. "Why is your chief so violent about the Jews?" Churchill, a longtime Zionist, said to Hanfstaengl. "I can quite understand being angry with Jews who have done wrong or are against the country, and I understand resisting them if they try to monopolise power in any walk of life; but what is the sense of being against a man simply because of his birth? How can any man help how he is born?" Hanfstaengl mounted a defense, but Churchill closed the subject with this remark: "Tell your boss from me that anti-Semitism may be a good starter, but it is a bad sticker." The next morning, Hitler-who had not been told about Churchill's remarks about the Jews-continued to duck the British visitors, saying: "In any case, what part does Churchill play? He is in opposition and no one pays any attention to him."

Roosevelt was also often seen as pro-Jewish (the "Jew Deal" was among the slurs his anti-Semitic foes used against him) in an era in which many Americans considered Jews suspect. As president he appointed many Jews to office, and when a sanitized translation of Mein Kampf was published in the West in 1933-one which censored some of Hitler's fiercer anti-Semitic observations-Roosevelt noted: "This translation is so expurgated as to give a wholly false view of what Hitler is and says-the German original would make a different story." After Kristallnacht, Roosevelt said that he "could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth century civilization" and summoned his amba.s.sador home from Berlin. And after a 1942 White House meeting, Rabbi Stephen Wise, a prominent American Zionist, wrote: "Thank G.o.d for Roosevelt. We ought to distribute cards throughout the country bearing just four letters, TGFR, and as the Psalmist would have said, thank Him every day and every hour."

Yet immigration quotas and anti-Semitism were political realities in both nations before and during the war, and though Roosevelt and Churchill were the most courageous of politicians, they were still politicians. Both countries allowed refugees in after Hitler's rise to power (for instance, 120,000 Germans and Austrians, 90 percent of whom were Jewish, came to the United States; 70,000 went to Britain). But there were dark chapters. In May 1939, the ship St. Louis brought more than 900 Jewish refugees to Cuba in the hope that they would be allowed into the United States; the pa.s.sengers were instead returned to pre-Holocaust Europe, where many nonetheless later died in the camps. Meanwhile, in 1939, London, worried about Arab reaction, limited immigration into Palestine, which was a British mandate. Immigration into Britain was also restricted.

Early in the war, the bureaucracies in London and Washington (Churchill and Roosevelt largely delegated the issue to the Foreign Office and the State Department) moved painfully slowly, if at all, in helping those Jews who could elude the grasp of the Third Reich to emigrate to safe havens. It is clear that Roosevelt and Churchill could have paid more attention to the question during the war and tried to take more action to move Jews out of harm's way, both by attempting to open their nations' doors wider to fleeing Jews and by more aggressively encouraging neutral countries to do the same. There were such efforts before 1944, but not many.

This is not just historical second-guessing: Some of Churchill's and Roosevelt's contemporaries believed the Allies should have been bolder. "In other days I would have come to you in sackcloth and ashes to plead for my people; it is in that spirit I write," Lady Reading of the World Jewish Congress wrote Churchill in January 1943. "Some can still be saved, if the iron fetters of the red-tape can be burst asunder." An aide to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau spent Christmas Day 1943-two years after America entered the war-writing a report ent.i.tled "Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews."

A few weeks later, in January 1944, Morgenthau, believing that anti-Semites in the State Department were not doing enough for Europe's Jews, helped convince Roosevelt to establish a War Refugee Board. The board managed to rescue thousands of Jews in the last year and a half of the conflict-a sign that earlier attention and action could have made a difference, even if undertaken at a moment when the Allies were not as strong militarily as they were by 194445 and even if the number of the rescued was small.

Retribution, not rescue, was a central feature in Churchill's and Roosevelt's remarks on the Final Solution. "a.s.suredly in the day of victory the Jew's suffering and his part in the struggle will not be forgotten," Churchill wrote The Jewish Chronicle in November 1941. "Once again, at the appointed time, he will see vindicated those principles of righteousness which it was the glory of his fathers to proclaim to the world. Once again it will be shown that, though the mills of G.o.d grind slowly, they grind exceedingly small."

A little over a year later, in December 1942, a Jewish delegation visited the White House to pet.i.tion Roosevelt about the plight of their European brethren. "The mills of the G.o.ds grind slowly," the president said, "but they grind exceedingly small." Richard Breitman, a leading scholar of the Allied response to the Holocaust, pinpointed Churchill's and Roosevelt's parallel language, and noted: "Their renditions were slightly different-for example, Roosevelt had the 'mills of the G.o.ds' (not G.o.d)-but the reappearance of this phrase indicated that Churchill and Roosevelt were handling Jewish requests in virtually the same way. They both wanted to concentrate on winning the war as quickly as possible. The threat of postwar retribution was the only diversion they would consider."

On December 17, 1942, the United States, Great Britain, nine other nations, and the French National Committee issued the Allied Declaration, which condemned Germany for "now carrying into effect Hitler's oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe. From all the occupied countries, Jews are being transported, in conditions of appalling horror and brutality, to Eastern Europe. In Poland, which has been made the princ.i.p.al slaughterhouse, the ghettos established by the German invaders are being systematically emptied of all Jews except a few highly skilled workers required for war industries. None of those taken away are ever heard from again." The declaration proclaimed that "this policy of cold-blooded extermination . . . can only strengthen the resolve of all freedom-loving peoples to overthrow the barbarious. .h.i.tlerite tyranny" and resolved that "those responsible for these crimes shall not escape retribution." At the time, total military victory was widely seen as the fastest route to rescue. "The most tragic aspect of the situation is the world's helplessness to stop the horror while the war is going on," The New York Times editorialized the day after the Allied Declaration was issued. "The most it can do is to denounce the perpetrators and promise them individual and separate retribution. But at least this we know: that there can be no compromise with this evil force. It must be driven from the face of the earth." The day of victory over Hitler would come. It was far too late for millions of innocents. But the day did come.

"I FEEL d.a.m.n depressed," Harry Hopkins scribbled across a piece of Downing Street stationery in the third week of July 1942. Churchill was like a cannon: wonderful and grand when he was at your side, blasting away at a common foe; terrible and defeating when he was across the field, blasting away at you. Hopkins was back in London, still haggling with the British over where the next major Allied operation would take place. While holding out hopes for an operation in Norway and suggesting planning for France should keep going, Churchill told Roosevelt he favored North Africa "as soon as possible." North Africa fit in with Roosevelt's main goal of the moment, which was, as Robert Sherwood characterized it, "U.S. ground forces must be put into position to fight German ground forces somewhere in 1942." Roosevelt had his reasons. "In this, Roosevelt was thinking not only of the effect on the Russians if eight autumn and winter months were to pa.s.s with no substantial action by Anglo-American forces; he was thinking also of the effect of inaction on the spirit of the American and British people, who might well begin to feel bogged down in the deadly lethargy of another period of 'Phony War,' " wrote Sherwood. That sealed it. Planning for an ultimate invasion in France would go forward, but the emphasis would be in the Mediterranean for now.

Delaying a major cross-Channel operation in 1942 was almost certainly the right call, and Churchill deserves credit for arguing that an attack on the periphery made more sense at this point. The Allies did not yet have the men, equipment, and experience they would need to break Hitler along the coast and inland, and a defeat would have been costly in lives and morale.

Roosevelt was pleased with the decision. "I cannot help feeling that the past week represented a turning point in the whole war and that now we are on our way shoulder to shoulder," he wrote Churchill on July 27. They were-though they were marching in a different direction from the one Roosevelt's own generals wanted. But Roosevelt and Churchill were in charge, and Operation TORCH was about to begin.

CHURCHILL SOON FOUND himself on his way to Moscow to explain to Stalin why there would be no Second Front in Europe that year. Before the August 1942 meeting, Roosevelt wrote Churchill about how best to handle "Uncle Joe" on a human level. "We have got always to bear in mind the personality of our ally and of the very difficult and dangerous situation that confronts him," Roosevelt told Churchill, who knew plenty about the fear of invasion. "No one can be expected to approach the war from a world point of view whose country has been invaded. I think we should try to put ourselves in his place." Churchill's skepticism about Stalin ran deep. A conversation among Churchill, Charles Eade, and Clementine shed light on Churchill's sense of the Soviets. "Mr. Churchill remarked on the difficulty of dealing with the Russians . . . ," noted Eade. "I suggested that they were suspicious of us. He said yes, that was probably true, but at any rate, we had never signed a pact with Germany. . . . He then said he wished to tell a story, but stressed that if we ever retold it we must not attribute it to him. He said that a British representative went to Russia and was shown around the sights. He was taken round by a guide who said at one point: 'This is Winston Churchill Square, late Adolf Hitler Square.' A little further the guide said: 'This is the Eden Hotel, late Marshal Goering Hotel,' and proceeding on their way a little further the guide said, 'This is Beaverbrook Street, late Himmler Street.' At this point the guide offered his English visitor a cigarette and the Englishman taking it said, 'Thank you comrade, late b.a.s.t.a.r.d.' "

INTERESTINGLY-IF NOT entirely surprisingly-Churchill enjoyed himself around Stalin in August 1942. ". . . I was sure it was my duty to tell them the facts personally and have it all out face to face with Stalin, rather than trust to telegrams and intermediaries," Churchill recalled. "At least it showed that one cared for their fortunes and understood what their struggle meant to the general war." This was part of Churchill's code. He respected men who fought bravely, either on the battlefields or in conferences or in legislatures, and believed such warriors should honor and be known to one another. A perpetual enthusiast, Churchill chose to think his time with Stalin all went well. He made the case for North Africa-all the while promising a more direct attack in France in 1943-with a visual aid. "To ill.u.s.trate my point I had meanwhile drawn a picture of a crocodile, and explained to Stalin with the help of this picture how it was our intention to attack the soft belly of the crocodile as we attacked his hard snout. And Stalin, whose interest was now at high pitch, said: 'May G.o.d prosper this undertaking.' "

Back in London, Churchill told Charles Eade about his final evening with Stalin. "After their last official meeting, Stalin was quite worried at the thought of Mr. Churchill leaving Moscow without a further party, and the interpreter had asked whether the Prime Minister was 'preoccupied' that evening," Eade recalled. "As he was not, Churchill and Stalin had a drinking bout together which lasted through the night and caused Mr. Churchill to breakfast off aspirins in his plane high above Russia on his return journey."

WATCHING FROM AMERICA, Roosevelt had been worried about Stalin's reaction and about the approaching prospect of American ground troops facing German fire for the first time. "The P. has heavy worries about the world just now, & when in repose, his face is over serious & drawn," Daisy noted during a visit to Hyde Park with Roosevelt during Churchill's sojourn in Moscow. "His moments of relaxation are few."

Slightly cheerier-but only slightly-word about Roosevelt was reaching Churchill's circle. "The President is astonishingly well, in spite of the fact that the war, I know, bears very heavily on him," Hopkins wrote Beaverbrook in the autumn of 1942, "and he never ceases to think of ways and means of getting at the enemy and is ever impatient with the progress of the war."

At a lunch with Churchill around this time, Daniel J. Tobin, the American Teamsters leader, asked Churchill about how the Big Three-Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin-would operate together. "The substance of Churchill's reply to this was that he felt that Stalin was a man with whom he could work," recalled Charles Eade. "In any event he was quite sure that he and Roosevelt would not allow Stalin to exercise a predominating part in any post-war world, even if Stalin himself attempted to do so. At the same time he made it clear that his own view of Stalin was a high one." Then Churchill shifted his comments to Roosevelt. "His admiration for Roosevelt, however, was clearly of much greater quality. He spoke of Roosevelt's tremendous triumph over his physical disability and Mr. Churchill felt that here perhaps we had an example of the Almighty taking away with one hand the physical strength of a man, but, at the same time, giving with the other a great character which has played such a tremendous part in world affairs in the past few years." What Churchill intuited from afar in his 1934 article on Roosevelt-the connection between Roosevelt's paralysis and his courage and political pa.s.sion-had been confirmed and strengthened by intimate experience and observation. Churchill knew bravery when he saw it, and he had seen it, up close, in Roosevelt.

"The spirit of the English people is something to bow down to"

Eleanor in England, October 26, 1942.

CHAPTER 7.

YOU MAY KISS MY HAND.

Eleanor Roosevelt Calls on the Churchills-.

Rendezvous at Casablanca-A Sunset at the Pinnacle.

"I LIKE MR. CHURCHILL, he's loveable & emotional & very human," Eleanor wrote her daughter, Anna, in 1942, "but I don't want him to write the peace or carry it out." Though Churchill had a distinguished progressive record from the early years of the century, Eleanor could think of him only as a Tory imperialist. The Churchill circle sensed Mrs. Roosevelt's skepticism about the prime minister. "I do not think Mrs. Roosevelt ever really got my father," said Mary Soames. "She was very suspicious of him. He loved jokes and stories and was never earnest-not her sort at all." Yet, for a moment in the autumn of 1942, on a visit to England, Eleanor and Churchill's differences were largely submerged as Mrs. Roosevelt moved among those who had been fighting Hitler far longer than America had.

She was rather arch about Churchill as she arrived. "Every time Mr. Churchill came to the White House, he spoke of the time when my husband would visit Great Britain, but one felt that he had in mind a visit to celebrate a victory either in sight or actually achieved," Eleanor recalled. "I do not think it ever occurred to him that there was any good reason why I should go to Great Britain during the war. He a.s.sumed, I think, that I would go in my proper capacity as a wife when my husband went. However, it evidently occurred to Queen Elizabeth, for Franklin received some tentative inquiries about whether I would be interested in going over and seeing the role that the British women were playing in the war." Eleanor was happy to accept. "I know our better halves will hit it off beautifully," Roosevelt wrote Churchill in a letter Eleanor carried with her. Several days later, the president cabled the prime minister: "I would appreciate it if you would let me know occasionally how things are going with her." Roosevelt also dispatched honey and a Virginia ham as bread-and-b.u.t.ter gifts for the Churchills. "I so love Virginia hams," Clementine wrote Roosevelt.

ON OCTOBER 23, 1942, at Buckingham Palace, Eleanor, the Churchills, and the Royal family watched In Which We Serve, a Noel CowardDavid Lean movie telling the story of Lord Mountbatten's action under fire on the destroyer Kelly, which was sunk at the Battle of Crete. The film cuts back and forth between the men under fire and the lives and families they left behind at home. Mountbatten was there during the screening. "It was a novel experience to watch a movie about a man who was himself present," Eleanor recalled, "and a very moving experience to see it in the company of people who must have been deeply stirred by it." It was the kind of admiring reaction Harry Hopkins had had on his first visit. The evidence of the bombings in London also touched her, and the woman who had learned the art of close observation from her husband after he was stricken felt a sympathetic connection with the man who had led the country through its dark time.

People she met reminded her of characters in her own life and underscored the close ties between the world she was visiting and the one she inhabited at home. She spent a night with Queen Mary, George VI's mother. "This was something that Franklin had particularly wanted me to do because King George V and Queen Mary had been kind to his mother when she visited England," recalled Eleanor. "I think he thought of Queen Mary as in some ways rather like his mother, and therefore made a point of my seeing her." (Roosevelt had spent time with George V on the day in 1918 he had first met Churchill.) Eleanor's schedule was packed, her pace fast, and one day Clementine had to break off and rest while Eleanor went relentlessly on. In a personal letter to Roosevelt, Clementine tactfully neglected to mention how Eleanor was taxing her own energies. Like Churchill, Clementine was a gifted correspondent and knew the Roosevelts were to be handled carefully. "I have been fortunate in accompanying Mrs. Roosevelt on several occasions, & I wish I could describe the effect she has on our women & girls," Clementine wrote. "When she appears their faces light up with gladness & welcome. . . . Winston and I are both concerned that presently Mrs. Roosevelt may become very tired. . . ."

Churchill tried to intervene but was waved off. "I did my best to advise a reduction of her programme and also interspersing it with blank days, but I have not met with success," Churchill told Roosevelt on November 1, "and Mrs. Roosevelt proceeds indefatigably."

Clementine soldiered on. "On another day, when she was staying with us at Chequers, I took Mrs. Roosevelt to see a Maternity Hospital for the wives of officers in the three Fighting Services-She talked to each of the young mothers . . . ," Clementine wrote Roosevelt. "Then last Friday I accompanied Mrs. Roosevelt to Canterbury, & on to Dover-our front door step. We could just see the French coast line; it was a calm soft afternoon, & there was no enemy activity. Yet the very next day, Canterbury was viciously bombed by daylight & it may well be that among the casualties were some of the smiling excited women & children who pressed round her. It is indeed fortunate that her visit was twenty-four hours before the raid."

THEIR TIME TOGETHER was lit by the larger drama of the war-the near miss of the bombing of Canterbury, the sight of women in uniform as the whole population mobilized for the conflict-and both families could not help but see their lives intertwined with the struggle. The lines between the personal and the political were blurred, if not erased. "On each occasion that Winston has been to America he has told me of your great goodness and hospitality to him," Clementine told Roosevelt, "& I only wish that I could do something adequate to show you how I feel about this. I hope one day to meet you in person & tell you."

Churchill joined his wife in praising their guest to her husband. "Mrs. Roosevelt has been winning golden opinions here from all for her kindness and her unfailing interest in everything we are doing," Churchill wrote Roosevelt. "I think she has been impressed herself." She was, as were her liberal compatriots. "I remember my English friends saying, when the war broke out, 'Churchill belongs to another era,' " recalled Trude Lash, who had a left-leaning circle of acquaintances. "Then, to their credit, they later said, 'Churchill belongs to any era when England needs defending.' "

Asked at a London press conference about the possibility of closer ties between Britain and America after the war, Eleanor said, "I should say that there was such a prospect." Sounding much like her husband, she added: "It depends, of course, on knowing people; on how close your real feeling to them is." Later in her visit, she expanded on the theme. "I feel that the growing understanding between us will perhaps mean more in the future, not only to us but to the world, than we can now know."

Her words flowed partly out of her contact with the Churchills. "The spirit of the English people is something to bow down to," Eleanor wrote her husband. At one point, Eleanor and her hosts measured the dimensions and doorways of a Curzon Street apartment to make sure it could accommodate a wheelchair for Roosevelt's eventual visit to England.

There was one discordant note. At a small dinner in London, Eleanor and Churchill exchanged words over Loyalist Spain. "I remarked that I could not see why the Loyalist government could not have been helped, and the prime minister replied that he and I would have been the first to lose our heads if the Loyalists had won-the feeling against people like us would have spread," Mrs. Roosevelt recalled. "I said that losing my head was unimportant, whereupon he said: 'I don't want you to lose your head and neither do I want to lose mine.' Then Mrs. Churchill leaned across the table and said: 'I think perhaps Mrs. Roosevelt is right.' The prime minister was quite annoyed by this time and said: 'I have held certain beliefs for sixty years and I'm not going to change now.' "

Clementine, Eleanor recalled, "then got up as a signal that dinner was over." Eleanor's circle, of course, thought Churchill hopeless. "It annoyed Mrs. R. that Churchill would not let women argue with him," recalled Trude Lash. Actually he did let women argue with him: Violet Bonham Carter was one, and Clementine was a vocal interlocutor at the table and a frequent adviser on political questions; his letters to her are full of talk of his work, and she had always been a public help to him.

What he did not love was being interrupted. For a long time Clementine had dealt with her husband's storms by masking her true feelings (often later writing him about what had upset her). "One feels that, being in public life, she has had to a.s.sume a role and that the role is now a part of her," Eleanor recalled, "but one wonders what she is like underneath."

THE INVASION OF North Africa was at hand, and the two chiefs exchanged excited messages as the plans were approved in the first week of September.

"Hurrah!" Roosevelt cabled Churchill.

"Okay full blast," Churchill replied.

The news had been better of late. On the eve of El Alamein, a crucial battle, Churchill told Roosevelt: "All the Shermans and self-propelled guns which you gave me on that dark Tobruk morning will play their part." The ensuing victory over Rommel secured the Middle East and marked a key turning point in the war-one made possible, in part, because of Roosevelt and Churchill's Sunday together after Tobruk.

NOW THE ANGLO-AMERICAN landings in northwest Africa loomed. "For weeks, the P. has had something exciting up his sleeve-Only a handful knew