The Mantle of Command

by Nigel Hamilton

  Had Churchill’s military decisions been sounder, his dictatorial approach might have been forgivable; as it was, even the former British prime minister Arthur Balfour called him a “a genius without judgment.”51

  By comparison, the President—who appeared to lack a foolproof administrative machine to convey dictatorial orders, as Churchill possessed—was blessed by something far more important: the gift of good judgment. Lacking an imperial-style apparatus to assemble information on paper and then impart his decisions, and, moreover, a believer in the American system of checks and balances in making decisions that affected the nation, Roosevelt relied on his own sunny personality, not obedience, Dr. Wilson noted. Churchill “beat down opposition and struck men dumb who had come to the Cabinet to expostulate.” By contrast, the President “was not a strong administrator,” but “he got the work done by picking the right man for a particular job—he was a good judge of men—and trusting him to do it; he encouraged and inspired his man to get on with his job. If he didn’t he got rid of him. And of course the man he trusted gave of his best. The plan worked.”52

  As he later looked back across the course of the war, Dr. Wilson—who knew Churchill probably better than anyone—found himself lost in admiration of Roosevelt. “To lead a nation in this fashion calls for unusual qualities,” he wrote. “Roosevelt had them. Men came away from the White House feeling better.” The President had not always solved their problems, “he had not even given them directions, but he sent them away determined to carry out their task . . . Roosevelt’s detachment was always taking me by surprise; he kept his head above the sea of administrative problems; his task was not to straighten them out, it was to harness the nation to its work.”53

  Confident in his choice of subordinates, even when they failed to match his expectations, the President was thus not only a master politician, but a master of happy, confident delegation—whereas Churchill, who “unlike the President was not a good judge of men” and had “so often been let down when he entrusted to others the solution of anything,” attempted to run everything, down to the last detail. “Winston tried to do the work of three men, he had his finger in every pie,” Dr. Wilson reflected, recalling Foreign Secretary Eden’s heartfelt protest, “I do wish he’d leave me to do my own job!”54

  “Certainly it is not in that mood that men do their best work,” the doctor chronicled. “Roosevelt knew this. The P.M. never did. Once I said to him, ‘Hitler seems to tackle not only the strategy of his campaigns, but also the details.’ Winston looked up at me with a mischievous smile spread over his face. ‘That’s exactly what I do,’ he said.”55

  Churchill had said this with cheeky pride. Dr. Wilson—like so many of those serving the Prime Minister—found himself disappointed by this aspect of his genius-patient: a man who could see the larger picture so brilliantly, yet would interfere with, chide, overrule, and bring to ruin even his most professional subordinates. “He got caught up in a web of detail,” Wilson wrote, “like a fly in a spider’s web.”56

  How, then, was it possible for a national leader of such poor military judgment to get on with a U.S. commander in chief blessed with fine judgment, but a completely different approach to man management?

  Dr. Wilson, watching the combination over the ensuing days, noted something strange—a key perhaps to how the miracle was effected. For the first time in his life, as Dr. Wilson observed, Churchill listened. And accepted his new position, not as the President’s equal but as his honored vizier.

  For his part, Colonel Jacob also watched Churchill’s transformation or submission—though with incredulity. On Christmas Eve, 1941, at a meeting in the Monroe Room, temporarily serving as Churchill’s Map Room, “at which the Prime Minister and our [British] Chiefs of Staff were discussing matters of domestic concern,” a “peculiar incident” occurred, Jacob recorded in his diary.57

  “In the middle of the meeting, the door opened and in came the President in the wheeled chair and joined us. He asked various questions, and then said he feared the news from the Philippines was not good, and that it looked as it would very soon be impossible to get any more air reinforcements into Manila as the aerodromes would be in the enemy’s hands. He felt it would be for the Joint Chiefs of Staff to consider where, in the circumstances, the reinforcements could go. The Prime Minister agreed, and so did our [British] Chiefs of Staff.”58

  Once the President and Prime Minister had left to have dinner, Colonel Jacob, as a good staff officer, asked the British chiefs of staff—Field Marshal Dill, Admiral Pound, Air Marshal Portal—if he should draw up a record of the meeting for the U.S. chiefs of staff, so they could duly discuss the President and Prime Minister’s haunting question about the reinforcements at their conference meeting the next day, Christmas Day, at 3:00 P.M. The British chiefs said yes.

  The next day, Christmas Day, there was an explosion that rocked the new Grand Alliance.

  “At 3’oclock the meeting was just starting when an urgent call came for [Brigadier] Jo [Hollis] to go to the White House. Off he went,” Jacob recorded. “Not long after that, I was called out to answer the telephone, and found Jo on the line. He said there was a regular flutter in the dovecote, and that we had dropped a brick, but he couldn’t quite make out what we had done wrong. The Prime Minister had said that we had issued some Minutes containing statements, or a Directive, by the President, and that this had given offence. We must realize that the President had to be treated with ultra respect, and we had been guilty of some kind of lèse-majesté.”59

  “Lèse majesté” was an apt phrase for the realization, among dutiful British staff officers serving Mr. Churchill, that there was a new military monarch whose wishes and concerns must be treated as senior to those of their own, hitherto dictatorial, prime minister/minister of defense. Above all, they must never, ever embarrass the new monarch in terms of his U.S. war council and cabinet—which the President ran in a quite different way to that of Mr. Churchill.

  The “dovecote” was, in fact, the U.S. War Department—where Jacob’s neatly typed minutes of the British Map Room meeting had caused consternation.

  In his own diary, a seething Henry Stimson recorded how, upon returning from a Christmas horseback ride that morning, he’d been bombarded by irate “Generals Arnold, Eisenhower [the new head of the army’s Far Eastern Section of the War Plans Division, with a staff of one hundred], and Marshall” who “brought me a rather astonishing memorandum which they had received from the White House concerning a meeting between Churchill and the President and recorded by one of Churchill’s assistants”—i.e., Jacob. “It reported the President as proposing to discuss the turning over to the British of our proposed reenforcements [destined] for MacArthur. This astonishing paper made me very angry,” Stimson recorded, “and, as I went home for [Christmas] lunch and thought it over again, my anger grew until I finally called up Hopkins, told him of the paper and of my anger at it, and I said that if that was persisted in, the President would have to take my resignation; that I thought it was very improper to discuss such matters while the fighting was going on and to do it with another nation.”60

  Stimson’s furious reaction went to the very heart of the new alliance being forged in the prosecution of a modern, global war. The resignation of the Republican secretary of war, in the wake of Pearl Harbor and the Japanese invasion of the Philippines, would certainly have done more than upset the dovecote. “This incident shows the danger of talking too freely in international matters of such keen importance without the President carefully having his military and naval advisers present,” Stimson dictated on his tape recorder that night. “This paper, which was a record made by one of Churchill’s assistants, would have raised any amount of trouble if it had gotten into the hands of an unfriendly press”61—as the Victory Plan had done. Stimson felt, in fact, that he had personally saved the President from personal disaster at the hands of his own leaky War Department staff.

  Hopkins, sensing a dual threat—of resi
gnation, and of a deliberate leak—made as if aghast. “He was naturally very surprised and shocked by what I said and very soon called me back telling me that he had recited what I had said to the President in the presence of Churchill,” Stimson noted, “and they had denied that any such proposition had been made.”62

  “I think he felt he had pretty nearly burned his fingers,” Stimson speculated about the President—causing Roosevelt, in fact, to summon Stimson, Knox, Marshall, Arnold, King, Stark, and Hopkins to a new meeting at the White House on Christmas Day at 5:30 P.M. The President “went over with us the reports up to date of the various matters and we discussed various things which were happening and the ways and means of carrying out the campaign in the Far East,” the secretary of war noted. “Incidentally and as if by aside, he flung out the remark that a paper had been going around which was nonsense and which entirely misrepresented a conference between him and Churchill. I made no reply of course as he had given up, if he had ever entertained, the idea of discussing the surrender of MacArthur’s reenforcements [to the British].”63

  Stimson, who felt acutely the impotence of the U.S. Army as well as the Navy in confronting Japanese moves in the Far East, added that the episode had “pretty well mashed up” his Christmas.64 The episode was, however, a painful illustration of how careful the President, in a democracy such as the United States, was obliged to be, if he was to avoid impeachment or press lynching.

  Churchill, whose mother had been born an American and who had himself often traveled to the United States before the war, understood the danger only too well. Wisely he impressed upon his small army of note takers and imperial paper-wallahs that Britain would now have to accept a subordinate role in waging war against the Axis powers, and how important it would be for his staff to mind their p’s and q’s.

  Behind Secretary Stimson’s explosion at the War Department and his threat of resignation, of course, lay the awful truth of which both the President and his secretary of war were deeply aware: namely that, thanks largely to MacArthur’s poor generalship, the Philippine Islands were now doomed, whatever reinforcements were sent out from U.S. shores.

  MacArthur had lost his air force on the first day of war, and although he had insisted to the War Department since the summer that he would be able to hold the islands for six months against a Japanese invasion, there was never any real chance of resupplying him, let alone reinforcing him, once the Japanese sank the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. The distances were simply too immense, as Stimson, Eisenhower, and his team found when they marched their calipers across the Pacific Ocean: more than fifty-three hundred miles from Pearl Harbor to Manila, thirty-six hundred miles from Brisbane, Australia.

  “I’ve been insisting Far East is critical and no other sideshows should be undertaken,” Eisenhower would note in his diary a few days later. “Ships! Ships! All we need is ships!” Ike mourned some days after that. “Also ammunition, anti-aircraft guns, tanks, airplanes, what a headache!” The major general even briefly felt the President should reverse course—namely abandon the “Germany First” strategy that Stimson and the chiefs had laid down on December 23, 1941, and give in to Hitler’s calculation. The United States should “drop everything else,” Eisenhower penned, “and make the British retire in Libya,” if necessary abandoning the Middle East. “Then scrape up everything everywhere and get it to the Dutch East Indies, Singapore, and Burma for a new Alamo.”65

  Christmas Eve and Christmas Day at the White House were, in the circumstances, somewhat mournful compared with the prewar Roosevelt family celebrations—the Roosevelts’ four sons all in uniform now, and away from home.

  Eleanor did her best as First Lady and hostess. “How hollow the words [“Merry Christmas!”] sounded that year!” she recalled. “On this visit of Mr. Churchill’s, as on all his subsequent visits, my husband worked long hours every day.” While the Prime Minister took a long nap each afternoon, the President caught up on his paperwork. Once Churchill was awake the President had again to play host to his guest—who, refreshed by his afternoon slumber, then kept the President up till all hours of the night. “Even after Franklin finally retired,” Eleanor explained, “if important dispatches or messages came in, he was awakened no matter what hour, and nearly every meal he was called on the telephone for some urgent matter.”66

  The President’s tradition of “mixing cocktails” at 6:00 P.M., or “children’s hour,” was one moment of Roosevelt’s day that remained sacrosanct no matter who the visitor might be. Confined to his wheelchair, the President had the opportunity to carry out an involved task himself, rather than instruct others to do it. “He would be wheeled in and then spin around to be at the drinks table, where he could reach everything,” one visitor recorded. “There were the bottles, there was the shaker, there was the ice. . . . And you knew you were supposed to just hand him your glass, and not reach for anything else,” lest this draw attention to the President’s disability.67

  The President’s signature creation was an FDR martini—although imbibers were aware that his mix of gin, vermouth, and fruit juice followed no hard-and-fast ratio, and included on occasion rum from the Virgin Islands.

  Churchill, however, hated the President’s cocktail hour. Moreover, he found the President’s favorite concoction foul, as another visitor noted—leading the Prime Minister to pretend to drink the martini, but in fact to take it with him to the bathroom after asking to be excused, and pour it down the sink—replacing it with water from the faucet!68

  The President, however, was the president. Told he should not light the traditional Christmas tree—which had been erected on the south side of the White House, rather than in Lafayette Square—for security reasons, Roosevelt dismissed such advice with a snort of ridicule. Instead he took the Prime Minister with him to witness the lighting, and participate in the prayers and carols on Christmas Eve; then on Christmas Day took his visitor to the Foundry United Methodist Church for an interfaith service, followed by lunch for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and their staffs, and the “biggest Christmas dinner we ever had—sixty people sat down at the table,” Mrs. Roosevelt chronicled proudly. After dinner a movie—Oliver Twist—more Christmas carols, and “the men worked until well after one o’clock in the morning.”69

  Secretary Morgenthau had sat opposite the Prime Minister at the huge dinner. The next day the secretary told his Treasury staff how puzzled he’d been by the legendary British leader. “You know, he has a speech impediment,” Morgenthau recounted (Churchill unable to pronounce the hard r sound). The Prime Minister had said very little, because “he just wasn’t having a good time,” Morgenthau surmised. The brilliant Treasury chief observed the faces of the British team closely. Max Beaverbrook’s countenance, creased and lined like that of a lizard, presented “a map of his life.” Churchill’s skin, by contrast, seemed completely smooth, as if untroubled and unscarred. To Morgenthau, Churchill appeared—erroneously, as it was to turn out, only a day later, when the Prime Minister experienced heart trouble—“literally in the pink of health.” Still and all, Churchill seemed preoccupied, Morgenthau was aware. He asked “three times to be excused after dinner so, he says, ‘I can prepare these impromptu remarks for tomorrow.’” Sitting next to Morgenthau for the movie, nevertheless, followed by a documentary film on the war so far, the Prime Minister had seemed at least cheered by newsreel shots of the campaign in Libya, remarking: “Oh, that is good. We have got to show the people that we can win.”70

  Unlike the great financier, Churchill understood the huge political import of what the President had next asked him to do: to address not only Congress, but the people of America and the free world, from the rostrum of the U.S. Capitol.

  For twenty-four hours the Prime Minister drafted and revised versions of his speech, even reading passages to the President, including the quotation from the 112th Psalm, “He shall not be afraid of evil tidings: his heart is fixed, trusting in the Lord.”

  Given that there were stirrings of
revolt among a number of members of Parliament back home in London, there was good reason for Churchill to be anxious. “I saw Winston for a quarter of an hour before luncheon in the Map Room at the White House, complete in grey romper suit,” the British ambassador had noted in his diary on Christmas Eve, “after which Stimson, whom I met as he came out from talking to him, must have reflected that he had never seen anything quite like it before.”71

  Stimson had not. Churchill “was still in dishabille, wearing a sort of zipper pajama suit and slippers,” the secretary of war described the Prime Minister, whom he had come to brief on the worrying situation in the Philippines. “This has been a strange and distressful Christmas,” Stimson noted the next day, after the “reenforcements” contretemps. “The news around us is pretty gloomy. Hong Kong has fallen; the Japanese have succeeded in making landings not only at Lingayen Gulf but two places south of Manila, and MacArthur has cabled that he was greatly outnumbered, would make the best fight he could, and retreat slowly down the Batan [sic] Peninsula and Corregidor,” while evacuating the Philippine government and declaring Manila an open city.72