No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Read online

  In point of fact, although the president had known for nearly two weeks that Churchill was coming to Washington, he was not expecting the prime minister until the following day. The original schedule had called for the prime minister, after ten days at sea, to anchor in Chesapeake Bay and then cruise up the Potomac River to Washington. But once he arrived on American soil, Churchill’s doctor, Lord Moran, explained, “he was like a child in his impatience to meet the President. He spoke as if every minute counted. It was absurd to waste time; he must fly.”

  The flight to Washington made a lasting impression on Churchill’s aide-de-camp Commander C. R. (Tommy) Thompson. “It was night time. Those in the plane were transfixed with delight to look down from the windows and see the amazing spectacle of a whole city lighted up.” Though blackout restrictions had been issued for Washington, they were not yet fully in force; compared with London, the city seemed ablaze with light. “Washington represented something immensely precious. Freedom, hope, strength. We had not seen an illuminated city for five years. My heart filled.”

  The president was waiting at the airport, propped against a big car, when Churchill’s plane landed. Churchill clasped Roosevelt’s hand and then introduced him to Lord Moran. “Even in the half-light,” Moran later recalled, “I was struck by the size of his head. I suppose that is why Winston thinks of him as majestic and statuesque, for he has no legs to speak of.”

  Eleanor greeted her guests as they stepped off the elevator on the second floor, inviting Churchill and his aides for a cup of tea. “The President was in his wheelchair,” Eleanor’s houseguest—an old friend, Mrs. Charles Hamlin—recalled, “and all were laughing and talking and in excellent spirits.” Shorter by almost a head than Roosevelt, Churchill wore a knee-length double-breasted coat, buttoned high, in seaman fashion. He gripped a walking stick to which was attached a flashlight for the purpose of navigating London blackouts. “He reminded me of a big English bulldog who had been taught to give his paw,” Mrs. Hamlin observed.

  At dinner that first night, as at all subsequent dinners, the conversation sparkled, Roosevelt and Churchill vying with one another to assume center stage. Surrounded by guests, including Minister of Aircraft Production Lord Beaverbrook, British Ambassador to the United States Lord Halifax, Secretary and Mrs. Hull, and Undersecretary and Mrs. Welles, the president looked sublimely self-confident. The conversation turned to the president’s first meeting with the prime minister, at Argentia. Roosevelt laughingly recalled that the news of the secret meeting had leaked from the British side, not the American. It must have been the British Cabinet, Roosevelt suggested, since, unlike the American president, the prime minister had to get permission to leave the country from his Cabinet. No, Churchill retorted, twinkling his eyes, “It must have been the women.”

  Over the course of the evening, the conversation developed into a peculiar tug of war. When Roosevelt was at center stage, gaily holding forth, Churchill would slump into silence, his chubby face petulant. Then, after five minutes of surly biding, Churchill would enter the conversation with an unforgettable quip that turned all eyes toward him—at which point the president would once again begin to talk. Finally, just before dinner ended, the president held up his glass of champagne. “I have a toast to offer—it has been in my head and on my heart for a long time—now it is on the tip of my tongue—‘To the Common Cause.’”

  “At ten o’clock,” Eleanor recorded, “the gentlemen left us to consult together, while the ladies made conversation until after midnight, when their husbands returned a bit shamefaced to take them home . . . . I still remember that as time wore on that evening I suddenly caught myself falling asleep as I sat trying to talk to my guests.” It is little wonder that Eleanor’s head occasionally nodded. In addition to preparing for Churchill’s arrival and conducting a press conference at the OCD, her fifteen-hour day found her attending a half-dozen Christmas celebrations for various alley dwellers, putting in an appearance at the headquarters of the Salvation Army, sitting in on a meeting of the American committee for British Catholic relief, and looking in on the Washington premiere of Adeste Fideles, a film of Christmas in wartime Britain.

  Churchill was installed in the Rose Suite, on the second floor of the family quarters. His valet slept in the adjoining dressing room, and his two secretaries were given the Lincoln study, across the hall. The White House staff had worked all day shifting beds around to accommodate Churchill and his staff. The quiet upstairs hall was turned into the headquarters of the British government, with a flow of messengers carrying secret documents in the old red leather dispatch cases so characteristic of the British Empire. The Monroe Room was emptied of its furniture and transformed into a map room to provide a place for Churchill to hang the large maps that had come with him from England, representing the present strategic situation on land, sea, and air.

  Despite the last-minute arrangements, Eleanor lamented, she was unable to give the prime minister all the things he liked to have. In the morning, Churchill confronted the President’s butler Alonzo Fields. “Now, Fields,” Churchill began, his bare feet sticking out below his long underwear, his crumpled bedclothes scattered on the bed, the floor strewn with British and American newspapers, “we had a lovely dinner last night but I have a few orders for you. We want to leave here as friends, right? So I need you to listen. One, I don’t like talking outside my quarters; two, I hate whistling in the corridors; and three, I must have a tumbler of sherry in my room before breakfast, a couple glasses of scotch and soda before lunch and French champagne and 90 year old brandy before I go to sleep at night.”

  “Yes, sir.” Fields nodded, not offended in the least by the prime minister’s gruff, straight-talking manner.

  In the days that followed, the president and prime minister stayed up talking, drinking brandy, and smoking cigars until 2 or 3 a.m. Accustomed to late hours, Churchill managed to disappear every afternoon for a long nap. “I’ll be back,” he would suddenly say in the midst of a conversation with Roosevelt. After two hours, during which Roosevelt had remained at his desk in the Oval Office, Churchill would reappear, reinvigorated.

  Several times during these late nights, Roosevelt’s head nodded. But soon a remark of Churchill’s would rouse him, the conversation would resume, and there would be peals of merry laughter. “There is no question,” Eleanor observed, “when you are deeply interested it is possible to go on working til all hours of the night. But for the people who have to wait up til you are through it is a deadly performance.”

  For the better part of three weeks, despite Eleanor’s efforts, the late nights continued. “Mother would just fume,” Elliott recorded, “and go in and out of the room making hints about bed, and still Churchill would sit there.” It almost seemed, Elliott believed, as if Churchill were deliberately goading Eleanor by keeping Franklin up drinking brandy and smoking cigars. Repulsed by the abundant trays of liquor that accompanied Churchill wherever he went, Eleanor went to Franklin, White House maid Lillian Parks recalled, and told him “that she worried about Churchill’s influence on him because of all the drinking. FDR retorted she needn’t worry because it wasn’t his side of the family that had a drinking problem.”

  On the second day of his visit, the prime minister had joined the president in an extraordinary dual press conference. Wearing a polka-dot bow tie, a short black coat, and striped trousers, he stared imperturbably into space, his long cigar between his compressed lips, as Roosevelt spoke. When the time came for him to speak, reporters in the back of the crowded room called out that they could not see him. Asked to stand, he not only complied, but scrambled atop his chair. “There was a wild burst of applause and then cheering,” The New York Times reported, “as the visitor stood there before them, somewhat shorter than many had expected, but with confidence and determination written on the countenance so familiar to the world.” In answer to questions, Churchill said the most immediate problem was allocating scarce materials to the forces fighting Hitler in
various theaters of the world. However, once the great productive power of the United States was turned loose, he predicted, the problem of choosing where and when war supplies should be sent would be eliminated.

  In the course of the Arcadia Conference, as the Christmas talks came to be known, the president and prime minister reaffirmed the commitment they had made at Argentia to a strategy of dealing with Germany first. This was now made more difficult for Roosevelt by the overwhelming desire of the American people—strengthened with each new defeat in the Pacific—to take revenge upon Japan. “The news around us is pretty gloomy,” Stimson recorded in his diary during Churchill’s visit. The Japanese were sweeping through Malaya and the Philippines with astonishing ferocity. On December 12, a force of three thousand Japanese had come ashore on the coast of Luzon, in the Philippines; twelve days later, seven thousand Japanese troops had landed at Lamon Bay; the main Japanese force struck at Lingayen Gulf on the day Churchill arrived in Washington. Within a matter of days, Guam, Wake, and Hong Kong had fallen. In the Philippines, General Douglas MacArthur, General Jonathan Wainwright, and their troops were trapped on the southern tip of the Bataan Peninsula and the rock of Corregidor. These were the battles that held the attention of the American people. It was American territory that was being invaded, and American men who were dying. Nonetheless, Roosevelt never wavered from his resolve to defeat Germany first.

  Roosevelt also reaffirmed America’s commitment to lend-lease. In an emergency action on the night of Pearl Harbor, the army had stopped the movement of all supplies to Britain and Russia in order to ensure that its own needs would be met. Hitler’s propagandists triumphantly announced to the world that America’s supply line had been cut off. But at the Arcadia Conference, Roosevelt declared that America’s entry into the war would bring an increase, not a decrease, in lend-lease supplies.

  In the Soviet Union, the struggle for survival had reached a crucial stage. During seven months of fighting, the Russians had lost more territory than the whole of France, and more people than all the other combatants combined. In September, German troops had reached the outskirts of Leningrad and had cut the city off from communications and supplies. By the end of December, as the siege of Leningrad entered its seventeenth week, more than three thousand Russians were dying of starvation every day. “Even daily air raids no longer make any special impression,” survivor Elena Skrjabina recalled. “Everyone is occupied with only one thought; where to get something edible so as not to starve to death.”

  As the death rate in Leningrad grew, there weren’t enough coffins to contain the bodies. “When you leave the house in the morning,” Skrjabina recorded in her diary, “you come upon corpses lying in the streets. The corpses lie around for a long time since there is no one to take them away.” The first week of January, a friend of Skrjabina’s dropped by. “He was always a gay, lively, young man but now he is unrecognizable. He came to find out if the large gray cat which belonged to an actress living in our apartment house was still alive. He was in hopes that the cat had not been eaten since he knew how much the actress adored it. I had to disappoint him. All animals have been eaten, either by occupants of our house or by our agile neighbors.”

  More than one million people would die in Leningrad before the nine-hundred-day siege came to an end, but in late December 1941, the tide of war in Russia was beginning to turn. As the Russian winter set in, the Red Army unleashed a massive counterattack against the thinly clad German soldiers. (Hitler had refused to issue sufficient winter coats or boots on the ground that the war in Russia was supposed to be over by winter.) In the extreme cold, which reached temperatures of minus forty degrees Fahrenheit, even minor wounds could lead to shock and death. In a single day in December, more than fourteen thousand German soldiers had to undergo amputation as a result of frostbite. Now it was Germany’s turn to experience the desperate suffering of war.

  While the president and prime minister continued their discussions, the chiefs of staff of both countries met in order to establish a method of unified command. On the American side, the Joint Chiefs were represented by Chief of Staff General George Marshall; Commander General, U.S. Army Air Force, Henry Arnold; Commander in Chief of Naval Forces Ernest King; and Roosevelt’s personal military representative, Admiral William Leahy; on the British side by Field Marshal Sir John Dill, Chief of the Imperial General Staff; Chief of Air Staff Sir Charles Portal; Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound; and Lord Beaverbrook. The British wanted to create two committees—one in London, the other in Washington—but Roosevelt wanted a single structure, and after what Hopkins called “a hell of a row,” he got what he wanted. The war would be run from Washington. A Combined Chiefs of Staff organization was set up, along with a Combined Munitions Board to pool resources and move them from spot to spot around the world.

  “Our people are very unhappy about the decision,” Lord Moran noted, “and the most they will agree to is to try it out for a month. They were, however, brought back to good humor by the final figures of the production estimates (45,000 aircraft in 1942, 100,000 in 1943; 45,000 tanks in 1942, 75,000 in 1943). I think Winston, more than anyone here, visualizes in detail what this programme means to the actual conduct of the war. He is drunk with the figures.”

  “We live here as a big family,” Churchill telegraphed Labour Party leader Clement Attlee, “in the greatest intimacy and informality, and I have formed the very highest regard and admiration for the President. His breadth of view, resolution and his loyalty to the common cause are beyond all praise.”

  On Christmas Eve, the prime minister joined the president in the traditional Christmas-tree lighting ceremonies. The president had insisted on having the tree, despite the worries of the Secret Service, though he had agreed to relocate it from Lafayette Park to the southern grounds of the White House. Though the lights would still bring danger, historian William Seale observed in The President’s House, the Secret Service “could at least better protect the President this way; only those people invited as spectators would pass through the iron fence, while thousands of uninvited would remain outside.” For the fifteen thousand citizens who gathered in the clear twilight to hear the two leaders speak, it was a night to remember. A crescent moon hung overhead. In the distance loomed the Washington Monument, its red light burning, and farther south the monuments to Jefferson and Lincoln. Standing at the president’s right on the South Portico with the Marine Band playing “Joy to the World,” the prime minister smiled broadly as the president pressed the button which set the colored lights of the Christmas tree twinkling. As the crowd roared its approval, the president introduced his “old and good friend” to say a word to the people of America.

  The great orator did not disappoint. “Let the children have their night of fun and laughter,” he began. “Let the gifts of Father Christmas delight their thoughts, let us share to the full in their unstinted pleasure before we turn again to the stern tasks in the year that lies before us. But now, by our sacrifice and daring, these same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world.”

  For Eleanor, the Christmas holidays were distressing. For the first time in years, not a single Roosevelt child was home for the holidays: all four boys were in the service, and Anna was in Seattle. Joe Lash records in his diary a worrisome telephone conversation with Eleanor during this period. “Her voice did not have the customary ring to it, so I asked her how she was. There was a period of silence . . . . Then we both mumbled something inconsequential and hung up.” Sensing something was seriously wrong, Lash jumped into a taxi. “She started to scold me for having come,” Lash wrote, “and then confessed she had a hard day and burst into tears. I thought bad things had happened at OCD which shows how little I understand her.” She told Lash her melancholy was rooted in the loss of her four boys to the war. “She knew they had to do it, but it was hard. By the laws of chance not all four would return. Again she lost control and wept.”
/>   Only one sock hung on the mantel in the president’s room. Eleanor had put it there, labeled it for Fala, and filled it with rubber bones and toys. Ten-year-old Diana Hopkins also had a stocking, but it was hung by the fireplace in her father’s room. In the absence of children and grandchildren, the president decided to dispense with his traditional reading of Dickens’ Christmas Carol.

  After the Christmas-tree lighting ceremony, the president invited Martha and her husband, Crown Prince Olav (whom the president had once again brought over from England as a present for Martha), to the Red Parlor for tea with Churchill, Lord Beaverbrook, Lord Moran, and Harry Hopkins. In the midst of this festive gathering, Eleanor asked Franklin if he had called Missy in Warm Springs to wish her a merry Christmas. He replied that he had not called her and wasn’t planning to. This apparent callousness was something she simply couldn’t understand, she told Lash. “She could never get accustomed to his lack of real attachment to people,’” Lash recorded in his diary. “Could never conceive of him doing a reckless thing for a friend because of personal attachment. Said she had to have contact with people she loved to get refreshment and strength for her duties and work. President seemed to have no bond to people. Not even his children. Completely political person.”

  Yet, though Roosevelt’s remoteness was difficult for those who loved him, Eleanor understood that “it kept him from making mistakes,” it gave him an inner independence which freed him to make the right decisions for the right reasons, to be “the kind of person the times required.”

  Surely Missy understood Roosevelt’s temperament as well as Eleanor. “He was really incapable of a personal friendship with anyone,” she once confided in her friend, writer Fulton Oursler. But it was one thing to accept his remoteness while she herself was a vital participant in his world. It was quite another to sit in her cottage at Warm Springs, waiting for a phone call that never came. Among the possessions she treasured the most was a maroon box containing hundreds of engraved invitations to Marguerite A. LeHand—requests for the pleasure of her company at White House lunches, receptions, dinners; blue ribbons to admit the bearer to the presidential platform at the inaugural ceremonies; special passes to the 1932 Olympic games at Lake Placid; tickets to the Water Carnival at the U.S. Naval Academy; a seasonal pass from the New York State Racing Commission for entry to the Saratoga racetrack. But now the busy and fevered life these mementos represented had been replaced by monastic stillness as Missy sat in her wheelchair, desperately trying to make sense of her ruined life.