To his sons, FDR portrayed the British and the Germans as having been engaged in a struggle over trade for decades: a struggle that had turned into a new war between the revived German Empire and the ailing British Empire: a war the United States could not simply exploit out of greed—“what will profit us most greatly,” as isolationists such as his former ambassador to London, Joseph P. Kennedy, advocated—since its outcome would affect the very future of the world. This did not mean that the U.S. should favor, let alone save, Britain as a colonial empire, however.
The United States had a noble Constitution, deriving from its Declaration of Independence from Britain, which the President was proud to uphold, and which as president he felt bound to embody, as far as was possible, in his foreign policy: that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” This fundamental striving for “Liberty” made the U.S. a natural enemy of Nazism. “Leaving to one side for the moment that Nazism is hateful,” he told Elliott, “and that our natural interests, our hearts, are with the British,” there was, he confided to his son, “another angle. We’ve got to make clear to the British from the very outset that we don’t intend to be simply a good-time Charlie who can be used to help the British Empire out of a tight spot, and then be forgotten forever.” Taken aback, Elliott had feigned incomprehension.
“I think I speak as America’s President when I say that America won’t help England in this war,” Roosevelt made clear to his son, “simply so that she will be able to ride roughshod over colonial peoples.”52
Elliott, five years later, claimed to have been astonished at this revelation. “I think,” he recalled telling his father, “I can see there will be a little fur flying here and there in the next few days.”53
Early next morning, Saturday, August 9, 1942, the grand bout began—heralded by the arrival of the Prime Minister’s battleship.
Normally, Churchill rose late, liking to work in bed, dictating to a secretary. This time, however, the Prime Minister was up soon after dawn, standing on the admiral’s bridge aboard HMS Prince of Wales—“eager and restless as a boy, longing for the first sight of the Stars and Stripes,” as one of the two journalists he’d unwisely brought with him recorded. “Just out of bed, his sandy hair still ruffled by the pillow, he stood watching the sea that stretched to the New World. In a few hours ceremony and anthems would begin, but in that quiet opening of the day, like a warrior awakened from his tent, he stood unarmed at dawn, surveying the scene, wondering maybe what the day would bring forth.”54
Things soon went wrong. The battle-scarred Prince of Wales (which had narrowly avoided being sunk by the German battleship Bismarck in May) was due to anchor in Placentia Bay at 9:00 A.M. When, preceded by an American destroyer and shadowed by two U.S. flying boats circling above, the ship’s company fell in at 8:30 A.M.—marines with fixed bayonets, Mr. Churchill standing in his dark-blue uniform as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, and a marine band ready to play—the huge thirty-five-thousand-ton battleship began to tilt and “started turning to starboard,” Churchill’s military assistant, Colonel Jacob, recorded in his diary that night. To Jacob’s surprise, “we found ourselves heading out again.”55
The two nations were, it appeared, observing different times—the U.S. following Eastern Standard Time, the British observing Newfoundland Time.
“We kicked our heels for an hour and a half,” Jacob noted, “and then went through the whole process again,” steaming slowly past the anchored vessels of the American armada: the men called to attention as they passed each vessel, until they reached a central body of clear water and the USS Augusta.56
The British band played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” while across the water they heard “God Save the King.” “The Prime Minister stood with the Chiefs of Staff and others at the after end of the Quarter Deck,” Colonel Jacob noted, “and through our glasses we could see President Roosevelt under an awning just below the Bridge of the ‘Augusta.’”57 Dropping anchor some three hundred yards away, the formalities continued with the piping aboard of Admiral King’s chief of staff, stepping up the gangway from a launch. There followed, for Churchill, another wait of one and a half hours before he was invited to board the President’s gleaming cruiser.
For his part, the President had slept well, and was almost as excited as Churchill—though for a different reason. “All set for the big day tomorrow,” he’d written his cousin the night before. “I wish you could see this scene. By the way,” he cautioned, “don’t ever give any times or places or names or numbers of ships!”58
Anxious not to be blindsided by any misunderstanding, Roosevelt had ordered Harry Hopkins to transfer immediately from the Prince of Wales—on which he had sailed with Churchill, following his dramatic air journey to the Kremlin—to the USS Augusta after the British battleship anchored. General Arnold, too, was summoned from his quarters on the Tuscaloosa. The airman was “received on deck by President, Stark, Marshall, King, Watson, Elliott Roosevelt, and F. Roosevelt, Jr.,” as Arnold noted in his diary. “First to appear from below Sumner Welles then A. Harriman; soon a boat from the Prince of Wales, Harry Hopkins came aboard.”59
Hopkins had earlier cabled the President a long report of his tête-à-tête with Stalin in Moscow—telling the President that the Russians were not about to cave in. Now, in person, he was anxious to confirm to the President and the chiefs of staff that he had not been whitewashing the Russian situation, as the U.S. Army chief of staff feared. Contrary to General Marshall’s military intelligence reports from Europe—most especially those of the U.S. military attaché in Moscow—there was absolutely no doubt in Hopkins’s mind that Hitler’s invasion of Russia had by then nowhere near succeeded. “The Russians are confident, claim 2,500 plane output a month without counting 15 training planes a day,” Arnold wrote in his diary, impressed. “Stalin claims the Russians have 24,000 tanks.”60
Twenty-four thousand? Marshall was skeptical, since Hopkins was no military expert, yet the President chose to trust his emissary’s judgment, at that moment, more than Marshall’s—perhaps because it was what he wanted to hear. Hopkins also reported that Stalin had begged him—as had Churchill, in May—to ask the President to enter the conflict and declare war on Germany.
For President Roosevelt, Hopkins’s verbal summary on the USS Augusta that morning became the keystone he needed in putting into effect the latest plan he’d concocted the day before with Welles and Harriman. If the Soviet Union was to hold out until the following year, when America would be fully armed and ready for combat in Europe, it was in America’s best interests—as the President had drummed into his staff at the White House throughout July—to provide as much weaponry and aid as possible to the Russians, rather than giving all foreign aid to Britain, let alone enter the war on Britain’s behalf, with all the military responsibilities and commitments this would require. Neither Stalin nor Churchill, ironically, seemed to have any idea how puny were current U.S. armed forces, at least with regard to offensive capacity, outside the continental United States. Moreover, the Selective Service extension bill was hanging by a thread in Washington, and the vast majority of the nation (between 75 and 80 percent, according to polls)61 remained unwilling to go to war to save Britain’s imperial possessions—and even less willing to go to war to save Russia’s Communist empire, however much they might distrust Hitler.
Swearing his chiefs of staff once again to silence in terms of U.S. military strategy, the President made clear that he alone, as president and commander in chief, would be in charge of the two-day meeting. There would be no U.S. military “team”: only a commander in chief backed by his various army, navy, and air officers as advisers.
Having cleared the air, the President was helped to his feet by his sons, acting as his equerries, ready to receive the British prime minister and his entourage.
Promptly at 11:00 A.M. on August 10, 1941, the admiral’s barg
e of the HMS Prince of Wales approached the USS Augusta. As the bullheaded, chubby-faced Prime Minister in his peaked cap mounted the gangway, stepped onto the deck, and walked forward to shake hands with the waiting President, standing upright by the guardrail beside his son Elliott—Mr. Roosevelt a head taller than his British counterpart and dressed in a light-gray Palm Beach suit and hat—the introductory ceremonies came to a climax: the Prime Minister handing over a letter of introduction from his sovereign, King George VI, who had met and stayed with President Roosevelt at Hyde Park two years before.
Ironically, tall Lord Halifax, the man King George VI would have preferred to see as prime minister on the resignation of Neville Chamberlain the year before, was now in Washington, demoted from foreign secretary to British ambassador to the United States. Instead, as the Prime Minister of Great Britain, there stood little Winston Spencer Churchill—short, pudgy, menacing, and pugnacious—who had yearned all his life for the post, and had finally got it. Like most of the world, the King, however, had quickly responded to Churchill’s rhetoric, if not his style of decision-making. The King’s letter, when the President read it through, was brief but nicely phrased. He was glad, George VI wrote, “that you have an opportunity at last of getting to know my Prime Minister. I am sure you will agree that he is a very remarkable man, and I have no doubt that your meeting will prove of great benefit to our two countries in pursuit of our common goal.”62
“Our common goal” was delicately put—neither mincing nor presumptuous. “We all met on the top deck and were duly photographed & then Churchill stayed on board & lunched with me alone,” the President confided to his cousin afterwards.63
The Lion of England was, if not on American soil, then under American custodial protection.
At their private luncheon the President was polite, but noncommittal.
As Roosevelt’s aide and speechwriter Robert Sherwood would describe, “If either of them could be called a student of Machiavelli, it was Roosevelt; if either was a bull in a china shop, it was Churchill.”64
Certainly Churchill was bullish. He began by stating how privileged he felt to meet Mr. Roosevelt at last in person. The President corrected him, however, pointing out that they had already met. Did Churchill not remember the occasion? It had been twenty-three years earlier, at a Gray’s Inn dinner during World War I, when Churchill was a British cabinet minister and minister of munitions. Roosevelt had been in London on an official visit as assistant U.S. secretary of the navy. Churchill had ignored him.
Strike one to the President.
When Churchill then admitted that, in addition to the twenty-eight members of his military, diplomatic, and scientific staff, he had also brought along two British journalists and a five-man camera crew, in direct contravention of Roosevelt’s instructions regarding “no media,” the President was understandably irritated. Given his own determined efforts to escape the American press and preserve privacy as well as secrecy, the Prime Minister’s faux pas seemed extraordinarily gauche. Churchill quickly assured the President that the journalists would not be permitted to board any U.S. vessel, or to interview the President or any American officers, or to publish any account of the meeting when they returned, at least not until the following year.
Strike two to the President.
This agreed, the President, as host, ran over the agenda for the two days of meetings—making it clear that the get-together was not, repeat not, to be seen as a formal conference of political and military leaders gathering to make war. The President and Prime Minister were meeting merely to discuss matters as leaders of their respective countries: the one neutral, the other at war with Germany. Each U.S. chief of staff would be permitted to meet with his British opposite number to learn more of British needs—but with no roundtable discussion or semblance of a formal conference that could in any way be construed by people at home as an alliance. Most important of all, the President announced, he wanted to issue with the Prime Minister a joint declaration of principles, or war aims, in order to inspire the peoples of the “enslaved” countries and others.
For Winston Churchill, the President’s easy charm—he began straightway calling him Winston—belied a steely American assurance that was close to arrogance: a projection of intelligent confidence in his own judgment that was hard to dent. The President was like a player holding all the cards—at least the cards that mattered—with little indication that he had any intention of declaring war on anyone.
Understandably, Churchill’s heart sank. Hopkins had seen his own role as that of catalyst between “two prima donnas,” but was unable to do much to relieve the tension. The summit thus lurched into second gear—Hopkins hoping food and libation might ease the encounter.
To Elliott Roosevelt, who was invited for coffee after the “tête-à-tête” luncheon, the atmosphere seemed little better. He found the two world leaders “politely sparring,” as they sat facing each other. “My information, Franklin, is that the temper of the American people is strongly in our favor,” Churchill claimed. “That in fact they are ready to join the issue.”
“If you are interested in American opinion, I recommend you read the Congressional Record every day, Winston,” the President retaliated tartly.
“Two ideas were clashing head-on,” Elliott recalled: “the P.M. clearly was motivated by one governing thought, that we should declare war on Nazi Germany straightaway; the President was thinking of public opinion, American politics, all the intangibles that lead to action and at once betray it.”
Finally, “after draining his glass, the P.M. heaved himself to his feet. It was close to two-thirty.” The quasi papal audience was clearly over. “Father mentioned he was sending, on behalf of our Navy, gifts to the officers and men of the Prince of Wales and her three escorting destroyers,” Elliott recalled. “The P.M. acknowledged this information with a nod and a short word, and left”—leaving Sir Alexander Cadogan, his chief diplomatic civil servant as undersecretary of the Foreign Office, to meet with Undersecretary Welles. They could discuss the President’s proposed declaration of principles and other matters—such as the threat from Japan.
Given the prohibition against alcohol being served on U.S. naval vessels, it had been, the diminutive Cadogan wrote in his diary, “a very unsatisfactory, dry, déjeuner à la fourchette”65—the Prime Minister so disappointed he had simply gone to bed with a stiff drink, once back onboard the Prince of Wales.
The Prime Minister could be forgiven for feeling disappointed, even humiliated.
Surely, he reasoned in his bunk, he had not sailed more than two thousand miles through heavy seas, often without air or sea escort (the ocean had turned too rough for the British destroyers to keep up), simply to be given American food parcels for his crew: an orange, two apples, half a pound of cheese, and two hundred cigarettes in each seaman’s package? He therefore hoped his second meeting with the President, when dining aboard the Augusta that evening, would prove more productive.
Harry Hopkins had sent a personal message over to the Prince of Wales, informing the Prime Minister that he had “just talked to the President.” Mr. Roosevelt was, Hopkins wrote, “very anxious, after dinner tonight, to invite in the balance of the [U.S.] staff and wants to ask you to talk very informally to them about your general appreciation of the war. . . . I imagine there will be twenty-five people altogether. The President, of course, does not want anything formal about it.”66
The President had also asked whether, as per their lunch conversation, the Prime Minister would be the one willing to try his hand at a first draft of the declaration of principles, in his inimitable English, so that it could become a true Anglo-American document: not a declaration of war, but a declaration of peace—at least, the peace they were seeking in confronting the Nazi menace, and after.67
To his cousin later that day the President described Churchill as “a tremendously vital person & in many ways is an English Mayor La Guardia!”—likening Churchill to the diminutive mayor of
New York, an authoritarian, excitable, liberal Republican. “Don’t say I said so!” Roosevelt enjoined Daisy, since the comparison was in some ways unflattering.
The President did not mean the description maliciously, however. He had, after all, recently made La Guardia his first director of civilian defense. “I like him,” he confided to Daisy his feelings about Churchill, “—and lunching alone broke the ice both ways.”68
The idea of getting Churchill to write a first draft of the President’s declaration of principles was certainly brilliant, though; it would force Churchill to own the project as much as the President did. The stratagem may well have issued from Hopkins’s fertile brain and his psychological understanding of the Prime Minister’s ego—flattering him by the request for a draft couched in high, stirring English prose, as well as a peroration before the American chiefs of staff that would impress them.
Hopkins, often on the point of death because of the stomach cancer he had suffered,69 had, after all, heard the Prime Minister give a number of spellbinding tour d’horizon talks on his two visits to Britain that year: Churchill’s rhetoric full of memorable metaphors and demonstrating a command of history and language, with an Olympian perspective that raised him head and shoulders above any English-speaking contemporary. Moreover, in asking Churchill to produce the first draft of a joint declaration of principles, the President would be putting the Prime Minister on the spot, since Churchill, as supplicant at the American court, could scarcely refuse. Vanity, Hopkins assured the President, would do the rest.
Roosevelt left nothing to chance, however. Dinner aboard the USS Augusta comprised hors d’oeuvres, broiled chicken, buttered sweet peas, spinach omelet, candied sweet potatoes, mushroom sauce, current jelly and hot rolls, with tomato salad, then cheese and crackers to follow. After dinner there was conversation—and once again, in talking to Churchill, the President emphasized the need for an articulation of common peace aims, or “joint Anglo-American declaration of principles,” as Sir Alec Cadogan noted of the evening.70
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