No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Read online

  Five Christmases earlier, Missy had sent Franklin and Eleanor a sparkling letter, which thanked her boss for giving her such a happy year but ended on an ominous note: “I guess I’m usually too flippant to tell you ‘Well done’ but it sounds so inadequate somehow. However, you must know how proud I am every time you get something accomplished—which is all the time—just being with you is a joy I can’t explain.

  “Please let me do things for you—you are the ones who have my love and only real devotion—without that I would have little reason for taking up space, don’t you think?”

  Unable now to do things for the man she loved, Missy apparently lost faith in her reason for “taking up space.” One night, during the 1941-42 holidays, the telephone rang in the home of Dr. C. E. Irwin, medical director of the Warm Springs foundation. It was after midnight, but he dressed and left immediately for Missy’s cottage. As the sun was coming up, he returned, frazzled and confused. “I don’t know what I’m going to do about Missy,” he told his wife, Mabel, shaking his head in disbelief and sadness. “I think she tried to kill herself tonight.”

  There is no evidence that Franklin and Eleanor were ever told of this suicide attempt in Missy’s cottage that night. Not a word was said in the chatty letter Missy’s sister Ann Rochon wrote to Eleanor after visiting Missy over the holidays. “Missy and I had a lovely Christmas together and I want you to know how much she enjoyed all the wonderful presents that you and the President sent to her.”

  • • •

  “Xmas was a very sad day for me,” Eleanor admitted to her daughter. “I think Pa enjoyed all the officialdom and he did know that much of importance was being accomplished. I wish I could be less personal. It just didn’t seem as though anywhere around there was much personal feeling. We didn’t bother about stockings and nothing seems to have much zest but I suppose life must be like this till we return to peace!”

  Churchill, too, was out of sorts on Christmas Day. Though he was his usual animated self through the afternoon working session, he retreated into silence at the formal dinner. Guests included Martha and Olav, Lord and Lady Halifax, Henry and Elinor Morgenthau. If the president seemed “jolly and care free” to Lord Moran, the prime minister was “silent and preoccupied” as he turned over in his restless mind the speech he was scheduled to deliver the following day before a joint session of Congress.

  “He just wasn’t having a good time,” Morgenthau observed. “You see him on one side of Mrs. Roosevelt and Beaverbrook on the other, and Beaverbrook’s face is a map of life, but in Churchill’s face there is absolutely nothing . . . . He asked three times to be excused after dinner so, he says, ‘I can prepare these impromptu remarks for tomorrow.’”

  Of course, the remarks were anything but impromptu. As Churchill fully appreciated, the invitation to a foreigner to speak before a joint session of Congress was “a tremendous occasion.” He could remember “nothing quite like it in his time,” he told Moran. “The two democracies were to be joined together and he had been chosen to give out the banns . . . . He knew, of course, that some of the senators were not all friendly to the British. Would they perhaps show it? This morning he decided that what he was going to say to them was all wrong. At any rate, he had to finish his speech before he went to bed. He yawned wearily. He would be glad when it was all over . . . . He got up and asked the President to excuse him.”

  When Churchill left, sheets of music were handed out to the sixty-odd guests, and the president led everyone in singing carols. So astonishing was Roosevelt’s appetite for life that evening, Moran marveled, that “it was difficult to believe that this was the man who was taking his nation into a vast conflict.”

  The prime minister’s methods of preparing a speech fascinated Hopkins. Trained by years of vigorous debate in the House of Commons, Churchill liked to think on his feet, dictating his speeches as he paced up and down the room, imagining that a large crowd had already assembled. At various times, he would refer to notes he had made in the preceding days, but most of the phrasing and imagery emerged from his head and his heart, a product, Isaiah Berlin once observed, of his capacity “for sustained introspective brooding, great depth and constancy of feeling—in particular, feeling for and fidelity to the great tradition for which he assumes a personal responsibility.” This peculiar pride in the British people had assumed a major role in Churchill’s speeches in the dark days of 1940.

  Hopkins told Moran, during a long conversation in his bedroom one evening, that it was interesting to hear two great orators with such different methods. When Roosevelt prepared a speech, Hopkins observed, he “wastes little time in turning phrases; he tries to say what is in his mind in the shortest and simplest words. All the time he gives to that particular speech is spent in working out what each individual in his audience will think about it; he always thinks of individuals, never of a crowd.”

  In contrast, though Churchill had learned by long experience the feel of an audience as a whole, he knew little about their individual lives, their experiences, their aspirations. Churchill, Isaiah Berlin observed, in contrast to Roosevelt, “does not reflect a social or moral world in an intense and concentrated fashion; rather, he creates one of such power and coherence that it becomes a reality and alters the external world by being imposed upon it with irresistible force.”

  At noon on the 26th, Churchill was still working on his speech when the motorcade arrived at the back entrance of the White House to take him to the Senate Chamber. “Churchill is always quiet before a speech,” C. R. Thompson observed. “It is dangerous to speak to him. There is one little ritual between us. I must always ask him whether he has remembered to put his speech glasses in his pocket. He is forgetful of them, and has great difficulty reading typed notes without them. He patted his pocket. Yes, he had them.”

  Escorted to a small waiting room beside the Senate Chamber, Churchill paced rapidly up and down the room, mumbling whole sections of the speech to himself. Suddenly he stopped and looked directly at Moran, his eyes popping. “Do you realize we are making history?”

  Minutes later, Churchill stood at the podium before the crowded chamber, his fingertips under the lapels of his coat, his heavy gold watch chain hanging from the pocket of his striped trousers. “I cannot help reflecting,” he began, “that if my father had been American and my mother British, instead of the other way round, I might have got here on my own.” The effect of these words was electric; cheers and laughter instantly overwhelmed the entire audience. Then, when the laughter died down, Churchill’s voice quieted to a whisper as he spoke of the difficulties ahead in the struggle against the Axis powers.

  He warned that the forces ranging against the Allies were powerful, bitter, and ruthless, and that “without doubt there is a time of tribulation before us during which ground will be lost which will be hard and costly to regain.” But, with a magnificent confidence that contagiously echoed in repeated ovations, he drove home his central message that “the task which has been set is not above our strength, its pangs and trials are not beyond our endurance.” In eighteen months, he pledged, American and British industry would produce results in war power “beyond anything that has been seen or foreseen in the dictator states.”

  His voice rising to a fury, he condemned Nazi tyrannies, heaped scorn on Mussolini, and questioned the sanity of the Japanese. “What sort of people do they think we are?” he shouted. “Is it possible they do not realize that we shall never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?”

  At this juncture, David Lilienthal recorded in his diary, the place erupted, “the first sound of blood lust I have yet heard in the war.” Overall, it was a masterpiece, Lilienthal concluded, “the color and the imagery of his style, the wonderful use of balance and alliteration and the way he used his voice to put emotions into his words. Why at one point he made a growling sound that sounded like the British lion!”

  When Churchill fini
shed, the Washington Post reported, there was a moment’s silence, and then a mighty roar, as members of the House and Senate, the Cabinet, the Supreme Court, and the galleries were on their feet, clapping and cheering. “They had witnessed a magnificent drama. Now they wanted an encore.” With a brilliant gesture, Churchill obliged. He turned, smiled, and then let his fingers shape the letter “V,” the brave symbol captive peoples of Europe had engraved on history as a salute to victory. Throughout the chamber, hundreds of arms were raised in a return salute. It was a stunning climax to a speech which the Post ranked with Edmund Burke’s defense of the American colonies.

  When Churchill returned to the White House to join the president at a Cabinet meeting, he was sweating freely but a thrilling sense of mastery possessed him. “I hit the target all the time,” he exulted to Moran. The laughter and applause had come just where he expected them. “It was a great weight off his chest,” Moran noted in his dairy.

  That evening, the president made up his mind that everyone had worked hard enough and needed relaxation, so he provided a movie in the upper hall, The Maltese Falcon. For two hours, the president and prime minister, Beaverbrook, and Canada’s Prime Minister MacKenzie King watched as Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade engaged in his memorable quest for a priceless statuette. Since Eleanor had retired to her study to catch up on her mail, her friend Mrs. Charles Hamlin sat in the front row between the president and prime minister. In the end, Mrs. Hamlin later remembered, when Bogart gave up Brigid O’Shaughnessy, the girl he loved, to justice, Mr. Churchill recalled that when he was home secretary a very similar case had come up to him. “It was a tragic case and the man did give up the girl.” Churchill seemed very sad at the memory. When the picture was over, Eleanor rejoined the party and found “everyone completely restored to working capacity.”

  Eleanor watched the developing affection between the president and prime minister with a worried eye. “She saw in Churchill a male tendency to romanticize war,” Eleanor’s grandson Curtis Roosevelt observed. “She had a memory of Teddy Roosevelt caring about the environment and social progress but then getting totally caught up in the Spanish-American War. And she remembered FDR in Europe after the First World War, knowing he would have traded absolutely everything to be one of the heroic soldiers wounded in battle.”

  “Nobody enjoyed the war as much as Churchill did,” Martha Gellhorn wryly observed. “He loved the derring-do and rushing around. He got Roosevelt steamed up in his boy’s book of adventure.”

  No sooner, for instance, had Roosevelt seen Churchill’s mobile map room than he wanted one of his own so that he, too, could visualize the progress of the war. Within days, a sophisticated map room was created on the ground floor of the White House in a low-ceilinged room that had previously been a coatroom for women. Located between the diplomatic reception room and Dr. McIntire’s office, it provided easy access for the president when he visited the doctor for his daily massage. “The walls were covered with fiberboard,” naval aide George Elsey recalled, “on which we pinned large-scale charts of the Atlantic and the Pacific. Updated two or three times a day, the charts displayed the constantly changing location of enemy and Allied forces. Different shape pins were used for different types of ships, a round-headed pin for destroyers, a square head for heavy cruisers. For the army we had a plastic cover with a grease pencil to change the battle lines as new dispatches came in.”

  The information was derived from the War and Navy Departments; it was hand-delivered by messenger several times a day and then transferred to the big maps. Special pins revealed the location of the leaders of the Big Three. Churchill’s pin was shaped like a cigar, FDR’s like a cigarette holder, Stalin’s like a briar pipe. Since top-secret dispatches came in at all hours, the map room was manned around the clock by three shifts of officers taken from the navy, army, and air force. Beyond the map-room personnel, access was strictly limited to Roosevelt, Hopkins, Marshall, King, and Leahy.

  There was one occasion, however, when Eleanor, passing the map room on her way down the hall, happened to glance inside. There, in front of the brightly colored charts, she saw her husband and Churchill engaged in animated conversation, pointing at different pins in various theaters of the war. “They looked like two little boys playing soldier,” Eleanor observed. “They seemed to be having a wonderful time, too wonderful in fact. It made me a little sad somehow.”

  • • •

  On New Year’s Day, 1942, the president and the prime minister motored through the countryside of Virginia to lay a wreath on George Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon. On the way down, Eleanor later told her friend Justine Polier, Churchill kept saying, “After the war we’ve got to form an Anglo-American alliance to meet the problems of the world.” And Franklin kept nodding his head and saying, “Yes, yes, yes!” Eleanor said nothing. Unlike Churchill, she did not believe that “we should stress the control of the English speaking people when peace comes.” On the contrary, she thought that “all people who believe in democracy” should be included in whatever institution or organization controlled the peace. To focus on Anglo-American control was simply the “old British colonialism in a new form.”

  Ordinarily, Eleanor would have interrupted immediately, but she was intimidated by Churchill’s dogmatic assertions. It seemed to her that once he gave his opinion the matter was concluded. So she sat in silence until she couldn’t stand it anymore. “You know, Winston,” she finally blurted out, “when Franklin says yes, yes, yes it doesn’t mean he agrees with you. It means he’s listening.” Churchill listened to her stonily, a scowl on his face.

  Churchill apparently did not comprehend the highly visible role Eleanor had been playing for nearly ten years as first lady—her public speeches, syndicated column, trips to slums, mines, factories. When Eleanor asked him at a luncheon a few days later what Mrs. Churchill was doing during the war, he puckishly expressed his delight that his wife, and indeed the wives of all his ministers, did not engage in any public activities but stayed at home—failing to acknowledge the extensive role British women were already playing in the war effort. A strange silence fell on the table as all eyes turned toward Eleanor. But she never “batted an eyelash,” according to Sam Rosenman, and the conversation resumed.

  “Churchill wasn’t very fond of Mother,” Elliott Roosevelt recalled. “They were always very polite to each other but they were totally different personalities. She believed in the future and the expansion of democracy everywhere, while he was basically a monarchist at heart.”

  After lunch on New Year’s Day, Lash, Tommy, and Eleanor gathered in Mrs. Roosevelt’s sitting room and compared impressions of the president and prime minister. “The Prime Minister has the richer temperament,” Lash began, “but the President is a more dependable, steadier man in a crisis.” When Lash finished, Tommy clapped her hands and said she and Mrs. Roosevelt felt the same. The president was more hardheaded, they felt. He was less brilliant, but more likely to do the right thing. The president also gave the impression of being more under control, of never letting himself go.

  “I like Mr. Churchill,” Eleanor wrote Anna, “he’s lovable and emotional and very human but I don’t want him to write the peace or carry it out.”

  • • •

  During the last week of December, twenty-six nations at war with the Axis had negotiated a declaration of unity and purpose. The document, entitled “A Declaration by the United Nations,” pledged the full resources of each signing nation to the fight against the Axis, reiterated adherence to the principles of the Atlantic Charter, and pledged each country not to make a separate peace. It was Roosevelt who had come up with the phrase “United Nations” to express the common purpose that united the Allies.

  Accounts vary as to how the president communicated his suggested title to the prime minister. By far the best story was told by Harry Hopkins, who claimed the president was so excited by his inspiration that he had himself wheeled into Churchill’s bedroom early one morning, just
as the prime minister was emerging from his bath, stark naked and gleaming pink. “Bathtubs,” Churchill once said, “were a contrivance that America had foisted upon the British but there was nothing like a hot bath . . . lying back and kicking one’s legs in the air—as at birth.”

  The president apologized and said he would come back at a better time. No need to go, Churchill said: “The Prime Minister of Great Britain has nothing to conceal from the President of the United States!”

  The declaration was signed in the president’s study at 10 p.m. As the invited guests gathered round, Mrs. Hamlin recalled, “It was as quiet as a church in the study—not a whisper, the only sound came from Fala who was stretched out sleeping heavily—oblivious of the momentous happenings.”

  The president signed first. Perhaps he should have used the title “commander-in-chief,” he remarked. “President ought to do!” Hopkins said dryly. Then the prime minister signed. Roosevelt looked at the signature. “Hey, ought you not to sign Great Britain and Ireland?” Churchill agreed, amending his signature. Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov signed next for the Soviet Union, and finally Chinese Ambassador T. V. Soong for China. “Four-fifths of the human race,” observed Churchill. “In the room,” Lash recorded, “there was a sense of Hitler’s doom being sealed.”