by Lynne Olson
What’s more, he ordered Harry Hopkins, during one of his trips to London, to inform Churchill and Harriman that Harriman’s job was to implement Lend-Lease, not to make policy or meddle in political matters. Hopkins told the embassy’s military attaché, General Raymond Lee: “I have given Harriman the most strict and explicit instructions not to touch anything which is in any way political. That is the ambassador’s business and his alone. I also told Churchill that we had at that moment in England the best, the finest and most highly qualified ambassador … and that he must deal with Winant direct and fully in all matters which had any political aspect whatever.”
Those instructions, however, were delivered with a wink and a nudge. Hopkins, who took Harriman with him to all his meetings with Churchill and British military leaders, had no intention of cutting his friend out of the political loop. He was overheard telling Harriman to “be careful” because Winant “was after all, the ambassador.” Taking their cue from the president’s right-hand man, Churchill and Harriman paid little attention to the president’s admonition.
When Eleanor Roosevelt paid an official visit to England in the fall of 1942, Hopkins, making clear that he considered Harriman to be the key American in London, urged her not to bother with Winant but to deal directly with the Lend-Lease administrator during her stay. The president’s wife was furious. “I had known Mr. Winant for a long time, and I had great respect and admiration for him, as did my husband,” she later wrote. “I made no answer to Harry’s suggestion except to say that I had known Averell Harriman since he was a small boy.” (She left unmentioned the fact that she had never thought much of him.) “Harry always tended to lean primarily on his own friends … I think he never really knew or understood Mr. Winant.”
In London, Mrs. Roosevelt would have nothing to do with Harriman. Instead, she relied on Winant for advice about virtually every aspect of her visit, including her short stay with the king and queen at Buckingham Palace. Like Eisenhower, she felt trepidation and “a feeling of inadequacy” at the thought of socializing with British aristocracy, and particularly with the monarch himself. She was so nervous, in fact, that she began to wonder “why on earth I had ever let myself be inveigled into coming on this trip.” Although Winant helped relieve some of her worries, she, again like Eisenhower, was embarrassed by the paltriness of her wardrobe and wondered what the maid at Buckingham Palace thought when she unpacked the few items of clothing in her suitcase. Years afterward, Mrs. Roosevelt would wryly note that in America, “a country where people had shed their blood to be independent of a king, there is still an awe of royalty and the panoply which surrounds it.”
When she wrote about her trip in her memoirs, Mrs. Roosevelt observed that the time she spent with Winant helped deepen their friendship and increased her admiration for this shy man who “gave little thought to his own comfort but much thought to helping his friends…. I prized highly what he gave me, and I had a feeling that he shed light in many dark places.”
ANGRY AND DISCOURAGED by the bureaucratic end runs around him (“He took it as a personal affront,” said one of his aides), Winant was also bone-tired. As he always had done—in New Hampshire, Washington, and Geneva—he worked nonstop, driving himself to the point of exhaustion. “He carried the troubles of the world on his shoulders,” noted political attaché Theodore Achilles. “He found it extremely hard to relax.” The ambassador’s only exercise was an occasional walk through London’s parks.
Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins and David Gray, the U.S. ambassador to Ireland and Eleanor Roosevelt’s uncle, were among Winant’s many friends who worried about what they considered his excessive devotion to work. Perkins sent Winant some vitamin pills to give him more energy. Gray admonished his colleague: “If you break down, what does any of it amount to? Your personality and sense of values are the important thing, and, if necessary, you should be kept in a glass case or, better yet, spend two or three days a week in the country, walking yourself tired.” Sharing Gray’s and Perkins’s concerns was Anthony Eden, who later described Winant as “caring much for his work, little for party politics, and not at all for himself.”
In fact, Eden and Winant were quite alike—in their workaholic tendencies as in much else. The forty-three-year-old foreign secretary usually was at his desk in the Foreign Office from early morning to late in the evening, snatching a few hours of sleep at night in a small flat he kept in the same building. A skilled negotiator and master diplomat (“one of the best I have ever met,” Winant said), Eden, like his American friend, also found himself overshadowed and bypassed by his boss—in his case, the prime minister, who continually poached on Eden’s turf of foreign affairs.
In the 1930s, Eden had been the golden boy of British politics—a handsome, glamorous war hero and a figure of international stature before he turned thirty-five. He was so popular in the country that when he resigned as Neville Chamberlain’s foreign secretary in 1938 over the prime minister’s appeasement of Mussolini, he might well have successfully challenged Chamberlain for the premiership. But, as Eden himself said, “I lack the spunk,” and the leadership baton eventually went to Churchill. Although Eden complained throughout the war of Churchill’s interference with the Foreign Office, he nonetheless managed to carve out for himself a highly influential role in foreign affairs.
Winant’s friendship with the foreign secretary was, with the exception of his involvement with Sarah Churchill, the relationship most important to him in London. The two were in close contact virtually every day, either on the phone or in person; Winant was one of the few people given the key to a private elevator that went directly to Eden’s office. On weekends, Eden often took Winant with him to his country house in Sussex, where the two worked on their official papers in the garden. Eden was an avid gardener: “I have never known anyone,” Winant recalled, “who cared more about flowers or vegetables or fruit trees, or the wind blowing across wheat fields, or the green pastures which marked out the Sussex Downs.” When they wanted a break from work, Winant and Eden would lay their papers aside and root out weeds in the garden. “We would put our dispatch boxes at either end,” Winant said, “and when we had completed a row, we would do penance by reading messages and writing the necessary replies. Then we would start again on [weeding].”
As close as he was to Eden, however, Winant found his greatest comfort in his deepening relationship with Sarah Churchill. She had separated from Vic Oliver in late 1941, and sometime later, she and Winant embarked on an affair. After leaving Oliver, Sarah had given up her acting career and joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. Independent as ever, she rejected her father’s offer of a job in the operations room at RAF Fighter Command and instead became an analyst of reconnaissance photos at an RAF base in Berkshire. It was a demanding, high-pressure, top secret post, and she found, to her great surprise and satisfaction, that she was very good at it. Among other things, she and the other analysts examined aerial photographs of German shipping facilities, trying to determine and predict movements of the enemy’s naval forces.
In late 1942, on the day before the Allied invasion of North Africa, her father told her with barely suppressed excitement: “At this very moment, sliding stealthily through the Straits of Gibraltar under cover of darkness, go 542 ships for the landings in North Africa.”
Not exactly, said Sarah. “It’s 543.”
Churchill stared stonily at his daughter. “How do you know?”
“I’ve only been working on it for three months.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I believe there is such a thing as security.”
Churchill’s face clouded over, and Sarah feared he would scold her for her impudence. Instead, he chuckled, and at dinner that night at Chequers, told the story of her one-upsmanship with great relish.
For the rest of the war, Sarah led two separate lives: weekdays of intense, all-consuming work in Berkshire and weekends at Chequers or her small flat in Park Lane, a five-min
ute walk from the American embassy. Winant spent as much time with her as he could. Unlike Harriman and Pamela Churchill, whose affair had now become common knowledge in London, Sarah and Winant were exceptionally discreet about their involvement. Her separation from her husband had been kept secret from everybody but her family and friends; to keep up appearances, she still occasionally appeared in public with Oliver. Since both she and Winant were still married, albeit unhappily, Sarah was determined to avoid a scandal that, in her view, would cause great damage both to Winant and to her adored father.
As careful as they were, however, it was impossible to keep the relationship a total secret. Several people close to Churchill, including John Colville, learned about it, as did Churchill himself, Sarah believed. Years later she would wistfully write about this “love affair which my father suspected but about which we did not speak.”
IN THE MIDST OF JUGGLING THE MYRIAD PROBLEMS, BOTH PROFESSIONAL and personal, that confronted him in the spring and summer of 1942, Winant received a call from Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party and deputy prime minister. Attlee told the ambassador he needed his help to resolve an urgent domestic crisis that had little to do with the Anglo-American alliance.
Early in June, coal miners in northern England had gone out on strike, posing a grave threat to the country’s war production and perilously fragile economy at a time when the Allies’ military outlook was at its bleakest. With the Germans close to capturing the Suez Canal and seemingly on the verge of victory in the Soviet Union, it was the worst possible moment for a coal strike—a point that Attlee, Ernest Bevin, and other Labour members of the coalition government made when trying to persuade the miners to end the walkout. The strikers, however, were obdurate. It was then that Attlee turned to Winant. Would he travel to Durham to help settle the strike?
Involving the ambassador of the United States in a British labor dispute was, by any standard, an exotic, even revolutionary, idea. But Attlee, who had been a friend of Winant’s since the mid-1930s, knew how popular the American was with British workingmen. In his ILO days, Winant had toured Britain’s depressed areas at the Labour Party’s request and made recommendations for easing the regions’ widespread unemployment. As ambassador, he had made several trips outside London to visit miners and other industrial workers. “He had an unusual understanding of working men,” noted an ILO colleague. “He was born of rich parents but was able to speak the same language as Bevin, who was born and bred a worker.”
On one trip to South Wales, Winant was introduced to two retired miners standing by the roadside, whom he engaged in a spirited conversation. “He understood them, and they understood him,” observed the Labour MP Arthur Jenkins, who made the introductions. “Many times since that day I have met those men, and they always ask about the ambassador. Those few minutes together made them friends of John Winant.” Jenkins added: “Most people in this country feel that well nigh any problem could be satisfactorily settled if we could assemble in the conference room men with his qualities.”
When the Office of War Information’s Wallace Carroll traveled throughout Britain during the war, he, too, was asked about Winant wherever he traveled. “If you went among the miners of Wales, they would tell you, ‘Your man Winant, he’s all right.’ And if you talked to the textile workers of Lancashire or the shipyard workers along the Clyde, they would say, ‘We know Winant—he’ll never let us down.’ ”
WINANT DIDN’T NEED Attlee to tell him how perilous a prolonged coal strike would be for Britain. Coal was the life’s blood of British industry, and its production, in the words of one historian, “was every bit as essential to Britain’s victory as going on the battlefield.” Yet mining that coal was, as it always had been, dangerous, miserable, poorly rewarded work. Miners descended half a mile underground into the blackness of a coal pit; worked in a crouched position in a cramped tunnel for seven hours or more a shift; inhaled toxic fumes and coal dust; risked injury and death every day; and, for that, were paid wages that barely kept them and their families from starvation.
Interested primarily in quick profits, most British mine owners had done little or nothing to modernize their operations and improve their employees’ working conditions, which reminded one observer “more of work in the [slave] galleys which are portrayed in the films than modern conditions of industrial Labour.” In the previous twenty years, the number of coal miners had fallen dramatically. Young men from coal regions had increasingly looked elsewhere for jobs; when the war began, they flocked to enlist in the military. Meanwhile, the productivity of those still in the pits had plummeted, leading to a serious shortfall of coal that spelled trouble not only for war production but also for the heating of British homes.
When war broke out, stringent government controls, including wage controls and a ban on strikes, were imposed on miners. In return, they were promised an improvement in working conditions and an increase in wages. Those pledges, however, were not always kept. In 1941, for example, the management of a Northumberland mine asked its workers to increase their output; when they complied, they then were asked to accept a cut in pay.
Aggrieved by what they considered exploitation by both their employers and the government, the miners who went out on strike in the summer of 1942 thought it was time that someone started thinking about them. Like other Britons, they had accepted the rigorous wartime regimentation and controls imposed by the state on its citizens, as well as the forfeiture of most of their personal rights. Early in the conflict, the government had been given a blank check to do virtually anything it wanted to ensure public safety and wage war. Precious British liberties like habeas corpus were swept away. Government officials were given the authority to jail indefinitely without trial any person judged to be a danger to the public interest. They also could prevent the holding of demonstrations; requisition without payment any building or other property, from a horse to a railway; tell farmers what to plant and what to do with their crops; and enter anyone’s home without warning or a warrant.
At the same time, the government mobilized the vast majority of adults in the nation to participate directly in the war effort; in late 1941, Britain became the first major industrial country to draft its female citizens for war work. As Ed Murrow told his listeners, “Everything save conscience can now be conscripted in this country.” By 1943, the level of government control over its people had “drawn so tight,” wrote historian Angus Calder, “that one could say, with only a little exaggeration, that every seamstress, every railway guard … was as crucial a part of the national effort as aircraft fitters on assembly work or soldiers.”
Although most Britons “hated, with the free Englishman’s sense of injured personal dignity, this maze of complexities called ‘government controls,’ ” most acknowledged their necessity for the duration. British civilians, like soldiers on far-off battlefields, had been on the front lines since the summer of 1940. Like British troops, they had sacrificed and suffered for their country; many had died. Now, they felt, the government owed them something in return—the promise of major reforms after the conflict that would put an end to the rigid, class-bound British society of prewar days and create social justice and economic opportunity for all. During the war, recalled the writer C. P. Snow, Britons had two major concerns: “what they were going to eat today and what was going to happen in Britain tomorrow. It’s important to remember how idealistic everyone was in those days, despite the rigours and pressure of war.”
That same hope and idealism infected a good many Americans who spent time in Britain during the war. Among them were Winant, Murrow, and Eleanor Roosevelt, who, during her visit to the country in 1942, was delighted to see that British women from widely varied economic backgrounds were working so closely together in the war effort. “These British Isles,” she later wrote, “which we always regarded as class conscious, as a place where people were so nearly frozen in their classes that they rarely moved from one to another, became welded together by the w
ar into a closely knit community in which many of the old distinctions lost their point.”
For his part, Murrow had predicted the melting down of the old Britain and the forging of a new nation as early as the fiery hell of the Blitz. If this war was about anything, he thought, it was about the well-being and future of ordinary people. War had a purpose beyond the defeat of Germany and certainly beyond the restoration of the status quo ante. The postwar world had to commit itself to the eradication of poverty, inequality, and injustice.
In 1940, as Britain fought for its survival, Murrow was already raising questions about its postwar future. “What are the war aims of this country?” he asked in one broadcast. “What shall we do with victory when it’s won? What sort of Europe will be built when and if this stress has passed?” He told his American listeners: “There must be equality under the bombs.” The British working man “must be convinced that, after all he has suffered, a better world will emerge.”
Murrow’s vision of a brave new world was shared by a number of other American correspondents in London. “We would talk about this, Ed and I, Scotty Reston, and the others,” recalled Eric Sevareid. “We thought that perhaps a wonderful thing was happening to the British people. Some kind of moral revolution was underway, and out of it would come the regeneration of a great people…. For the first time, the war seemed to have taken on a positive meaning.”
FOR WINSTON CHURCHILL, however, such discussions were nothing but pie-in-the-sky blather. His only goal in 1942 was victory over the Axis, and he resented the raising of issues that he considered irrelevant, distracting, and likely to cause friction within his coalition government. “With Winston, war is an end in itself rather than a means to an end,” Lord Moran noted in his diary. “It fascinates him, he loves it … he neither believes in nor is interested in what comes after the war.”