Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood With Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour

by Lynne Olson

  Before the end of the war, Winant and the other chief delegates of the European Advisory Commission—Britain’s William Strang and the Soviet Union’s Feodor Gusev—had hoped to hammer out a comprehensive, long-range policy for the development of postwar Germany. Their efforts, however, were thwarted by the governments of the United States and Soviet Union. “None of the Allies seemed to have a clear idea of the kind of Europe which should result from Germany’s defeat,” wrote historian Daniel J. Nelson, “and none of them had anything resembling a master plan for a new Europe.”

  Yet, despite the difficulties they faced (akin to “running a race hampered by both a millstone and leg irons,” observed one historian), the EAC representatives could justly claim credit for some real, if limited, accomplishments. High on the list were the agreements they drew up for the division of Germany and Berlin, which, after being put into effect, helped prevent a chaotic and potentially violent East-West struggle for territory and influence in Germany at the end of the war. Indeed, although repeatedly challenged by the Soviets, the agreements remained in force until the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s.

  As Strang observed in his memoirs, “Never before … had agreements of such volume or importance been reached with the Soviet government.” An official British history, meanwhile, called the European Advisory Commission “the most successful inter-Allied organization in working with the Russians.” Another study of the war described the agreements concluded by the commission as “significant achievements of wartime diplomacy … as important as any agreements reached at Yalta or Potsdam [a Big Three conference held in July 1945].”

  The delegates’ successes, restricted though they were, revealed the importance of quiet, behind-the-scenes diplomacy and negotiation, on which Winant had placed such a high value. Despite the difficulties they faced, he, Strang, and Gusev developed close personal relationships with one another during the EAC’s eighteen-month tenure. “In our informal meetings, we gained each other’s confidence,” Strang recalled. “Step by step, we thrashed out our differences, patiently [and], it sometimes seemed, interminably.” Yet, having demonstrated that the Allies could indeed work together, the three commission members were prevented by their governments from capitalizing on that cooperation and expanding their mandate.

  After the war, Winant’s frustration over the U.S. government’s nonsupport of the EAC was exacerbated by claims from Harry Hopkins and other ex-officials of the Roosevelt administration that the EAC—not Washington or Moscow—was largely to blame for the failure to devise long-term solutions for the postwar governance of Germany. “The machinery of the EAC moved so slowly,” Hopkins complained, failing to note that disarray and foot-dragging within the administration were among the key reasons for that slowness.

  In the immediate aftermath of the war, Winant was also disturbed by what he believed was America’s shirking of its duty to lead the way in reviving the wrecked economies of war-ravaged nations. The U.N.’s Economic and Social Council, on which he served, had no authority to force member states to take action in mending the wounds of the conflict, and, as a result, turned out to be little more than a debating society.

  Depressed by his powerlessness on the world scene, the former ambassador was plagued, too, by personal difficulties. For many years, he had been deeply in debt, in large part because of his lifelong habit of giving financial aid to others. He had borrowed a great deal of money from friends and had taken out thousands of dollars in loans on his life insurance policies, only to lose the policies when he could not keep up his payments. To help pay off the huge sums he owed, Winant had signed a contract with Houghton Mifflin to write several books, including three volumes of a memoir. But writing, like speaking, proved to be extremely difficult for him. Caught up as he had been in the excitement and pressure of dealing with major world problems, he found it hard to adjust to the solitary, lower-key life of a writer. “He was much too restless a soul” to be satisfied with such an existence, noted Bernard Bellush, Winant’s biographer.

  Still not recovered from the physical and emotional strains of the war, Winant was also bone-tired. “I have never seen a more exhausted man in my life,” a friend and former business partner of Winant’s said shortly after the war. “He had aged tremendously.” Mary Lee Settle would later describe the war-caused enervation that she, Winant, and others experienced as a “deep brutal exhaustion that had seeped into our souls, our bodies, our relationships with each other, a kind of fatal disease of exhaustion.” Eric Sevareid, who was only thirty-two when the war ended, noted that he had “a curious feeling of age, as though I had lived through a lifetime, not merely through my youth.”

  Late in 1946, Winant returned to London to work on his first book, a memoir of the early years of his ambassadorship, and to try again to persuade Sarah Churchill, who had obtained her divorce a year earlier, to continue her relationship with him, although he himself was still married. When Winston Churchill learned of Sarah’s divorce, he had called her to him and whispered in her ear: “Free!” She did not answer him, because she knew she was not: she was still emotionally involved with Winant. “Men can be free—perhaps—but women never,” she later wrote to her father. Quoting Lord Byron—”Love is of man’s life a part. Tis a woman’s whole existence”—Sarah added: “Well, it is men who wish, and demand that it should be so!”

  Sarah wrestled with her dilemma: to keep her independence and hurt Winant or remain involved with him and feel trapped. In that same letter, she asked her father: “Have you ever felt imprisoned? Have you ever felt a cage of circumstance, even affection, hemming you in? Or have you always been, no matter how bitter the moment, free?” She finally resolved the issue by taking an acting job in a movie shot in Italy. “For the moment,” she wrote Churchill, “I am more or less free—but then again only at someone else’s expense…. It seems I must always hurt the person who loves me.”

  Refusing to accept the end of the affair, Winant stayed on in London through the spring of 1947, sharing with its residents the hardships of the harshest winter in Britain since 1881. Temperatures plummeted to below zero, and a series of blizzards buried the country in a deep blanket of snow. A severe shortage of coal resulted in a draconian cutback in electricity. Schools and offices lost their heat; streetlights were turned off; shop windows were dark; pipes froze; and factories closed down temporarily, crippling British industry, so critical to the nation’s economic recovery.

  In February, Winant was among the guests at the wedding of Mary Churchill to Christopher Soames, a military attaché at the British embassy in Paris. The ceremony took place at St. Margaret’s Church in Westminster, which was unheated and unlighted, except for four candles on the altar. The Dorchester Hotel ballroom, where the reception was held, was lit partly by candles and partly by electricity run by a small emergency generator.

  That same month, Herbert Agar and his wife, Barbie, took Winant to see a play in the West End. On the way to the theater, they walked past the empty husks of the Shaftesbury and other theaters that had been bombed in the Blitz, looking eerily like Roman ruins, with their auditoriums and stages open to the sky. As he walked out of the theater lobby after the play, Winant was immediately surrounded by playgoers who recognized him. Men took off their hats, and women beamed. “Good evening, Mr. Winant,” several said. He chatted with the crowd for a few minutes before going on his way.

  The king of England, meanwhile, demonstrated the country’s high esteem for the former ambassador in a more formal way. On New Year’s Day 1947, George VI awarded Winant an honorary Order of Merit, arguably the most coveted and exclusive of all British honors and the only one that Churchill would accept for his wartime service. When the king presented the award to Winant at a Buckingham Palace ceremony, the American murmured his thanks and slipped the box containing the decoration into his pocket. Bemused, the British monarch asked: “Don’t you want to look at it?” Removing the box from his pocket, Winant handed it to the k
ing, who opened it to show him its contents. “You deserved it more than anyone,” the queen told him.

  Yet the honor, significant as it was, did little to assuage his growing loneliness and depression. Shortly afterward, he invited John Colville to dinner at his rented house in Mayfair. “The difference from former days,” Churchill’s ex–private secretary recalled, “was that on this occasion, Winant, who had been wont to listen and to supply an occasional thoughtful comment, wanted to talk.” He talked through dinner and late into the night over brandy and cigars—about his days as New Hampshire governor, about the ILO, about the troubles in his marriage. Finally, at 4 A.M., Colville announced that he really must go. “Don’t leave me,” Winant pleaded. “Please don’t leave me.” Later, Colville would write: “Perhaps I should not have done so. I realized he was lonely and that something strange was happening under the surface; but I was very tired and I imagined we were both a little drunk.”

  A few months later, with Sarah now in Rome, Winant returned to New Hampshire. He finally finished the first volume of his memoirs, which provided him some relief. He also was greatly heartened when George Marshall, now Truman’s secretary of state, outlined what came to be known as the Marshall Plan, a far-reaching program to jump–start the economic recovery of Britain and the rest of Europe. Belatedly, the Truman administration had realized it must take urgent steps to assist Europe if total economic collapse and the spread of Communism were to be warded off. “It is now obvious that we grossly underestimated the destruction to the European economy by the war,” said undersecretary of state Will Clayton after a fact-finding tour across the Continent. “Millions of people in cities are slowly starving.” After a drought and disastrous harvest in 1946, the countries of Europe were, in the words of the writer Theodore H. White, “as close to destitution as a modern civilization can get.”

  In the spring of 1947, Truman sent Averell Harriman to Europe to organize and oversee distribution of Marshall Plan aid. Winant, who desperately wanted to have a role in the program, was ignored by the administration. In a speech at an international forum sponsored by the New York Herald Tribune in October, he challenged the audience with the question: “Are you doing as much today for peace as you did for this country and civilization in the days of war?” He added: “I know I’m not.”

  On November 2, Winant paid a surprise visit to Abbie Rollins Caverly, the daughter of an old friend, who had served as his assistant at the ILO in Geneva in the late 1930s. Caverly had just given birth to her first child, and Winant, who had given her away at her wedding, traveled from Concord to her home in Vermont “to make sure I was all right,” she recalled. “I think he felt responsible for me in his own way.” During the brief visit, she added, Winant seemed “tired and lonely … obviously dispirited.”

  Returning to Concord, Winant made a call to the Reverend Philip “Tubby” Clayton, an old friend from London, who was in the United States to encourage American young people to come to the British capital to help restore its bombed-out buildings and aid its residents. Winant had met Clayton, the vicar of All Hallows Church, near the Tower of London, during the war and had agreed to help raise funds and recruit young Americans for his new project. On the phone, Winant told Clayton that he urgently needed to speak to him. Clayton, however, had a speech to deliver that night and said he would get together with his friend as soon as he could.

  Winant, whose wife was in New York, spent much of the following day in his bedroom in Concord. Early in the evening, his housekeeper, who had been with him in Britain, brought him his dinner on a tray. When she returned a couple of hours later, the tray was untouched.

  At about nine o’clock, the fifty-eight-year-old Winant rose from his bed and walked down the hall to the former bedroom of his son John, with its panoramic view of his beloved Bow Hills. Years before, he had commented about this sylvan setting, to which he had come at the age of fourteen and never really left: “To the tiny valley I owe the sense of peace and to the rolling hills a sense of time.” But for John Gilbert Winant, that sense of peace was no longer to be found. Kneeling on the floor, he took a pistol from the pocket of his dressing gown. He steadied his left elbow on a chair, pointed the gun to his head, and fired. Hearing the thud of his body, his housekeeper and secretary rushed upstairs. The former U.S. ambassador to Britain died half an hour later.

  In a front-page story on Winant’s suicide, the New York Times noted that his death “has affected the people of Britain to an extent that few of his countrymen will understand. There was grief for his passing, not only in the elegant Victorian surroundings of the Connaught Hotel, where he used to dine, but in cab ranks, pubs, and fish and chip shops…. Tonight at the Bull and Bush in Willesden, a scrubby suburb, a little man told a reporter, ‘I reckon we all lost a friend in ’im. He understood people like us, ’e did.’ ”

  The palpable sense of loss was a remarkable tribute to a man who, in the words of the Daily Express, “walked with Britain at her greatest” and helped her survive. “What he said, the English trusted and believed,” declared the New York Herald Tribune. “He did more than people will ever know to maintain the solidarity of the two great democracies in their hour of desperate need. The loss to the nation, as to his friends, is beyond measuring.” About Winant’s death, the Manchester Guardian reflected: “It is a terrible thing to consider about our postwar world that John Gilbert Winant could no longer bear to live in it.”

  Like most of Winant’s friends, the historian Allan Nevins struggled to understand the reasons for his suicide. In an essay that took the form of an open letter to Winant, Nevins wrote: “Was it that, like Hamlet, you found the times were hopelessly out of joint—that, as one of the best idealists and most truly humane men of your age, you were laboring in an environment that could offer you nothing but hopelessly cruel frustrations?”

  The former ambassador was buried at the Blossom Hill Cemetery in Concord, after a simple funeral service at which the St. Paul’s School choir sang “The Strife Is O’er.” His grave was heaped with flowers, including five dozen roses from Winston and Clementine Churchill and a large bouquet from Eleanor Roosevelt, who called Winant “as truly a war casualty as any of our other soldiers.” In her newspaper column, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote: “My husband and I both admired him and what was more important, we trusted him completely…. He helped us win the war. My heart weeps for the loss of a friend and for the loss of the possibilities for service which still lay before him.”

  Three weeks after Winant’s funeral, some five hundred people attended an unpublicized memorial service at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, at which Prime Minister Attlee read the lesson: “The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and there shall be no torment touch them.” Winston, Clementine, and Sarah Churchill were there, as were Ernest Bevin and a shaken Anthony Eden, who told reporters, “I have lost one of my closest friends.” Also at the service was twenty-two-year-old Rivington Winant, the former ambassador’s younger son, who was studying at Oxford. As soon as the news of Winant’s death broke, Eden retrieved Rivington from Oxford and brought him to stay with him at his country house. “He couldn’t have been kinder to me,” Rivington Winant said many years later. “He was really wonderful.”

  According to Walter Thompson, Churchill’s bodyguard, Winant’s “self-destruction was something Winston could not understand. He never got over it.” By several accounts, Sarah Churchill was even more shattered by Winant’s suicide. She had talked to him on the phone shortly before his death; afterward, she blamed herself for his depression, telling friends that she brought nothing but unhappiness to those who loved her. In the years to come, she would be relatively successful in her acting career, winning a leading role in the movie Royal Wedding with Fred Astaire, appearing several times on Broadway, and becoming the mistress of ceremonies of the American television series Hallmark Hall of Fame, which also featured her in several of its productions. In her personal life, however, she never recovered her emotional bearings
. Married twice more, she led a flamboyant life, complete with heavy drinking and wild parties, that caused considerable embarrassment for her parents. In September 1982, Sarah Churchill died in London at the age of sixty-seven.

  FOR ED MURROW, the news of Gil Winant’s death came as a terrible shock. He sat in a daze when he heard about it, shaking his head and exclaiming over and over, “What a waste! What a waste!” He and Janet, who were in London to visit friends and attend the wedding of Princess Elizabeth to Prince Philip of Greece, went to their old friend’s memorial service at St. Paul’s, held the day before the nuptials.

  Unlike Winant, Murrow had profited greatly from his wartime triumph. He and his band of reporters had returned to the United States as the “class act” of American journalism—“golden boys!” the publisher Michael Bessie called them. As vice president of news for CBS, Murrow presided over a worldwide organization of correspondents, newscasters, commentators, writers, editors, and producers. He also was the star of the network’s showcase radio news program Edward R. Murrow and the News, and, later, in the television era, of See It Now and Person to Person. He had it all, it seemed—fame, stellar reputation, large salary, lavish expense account, a luxurious apartment on Park Avenue, and a country house in upstate New York.

  But, despite the trappings of success, he never felt at home in New York, finding it difficult to shift from the austerity of wartime Britain to the affluence of postwar America. Even though Murrow himself was now wealthy, he was ill at ease with the frenetic pace, prosperity, and materialism of his own booming country. More than that, he keenly missed London and its people and often talked of the “grim and glorious years” he had spent there. He frequently returned to the British capital, bringing the Churchills and other friends food parcels and additional still scarce consumer items. He continued to order his suits from Savile Row and use British figures of speech in his conversation; one CBS colleague said he always thought of Murrow as “Sir Edward.” The broadcaster told his friends he had “left all of his youth and much of his heart in England.”