The Last 100 Days

by David B. Woolner

  The two leaders exchanged gifts. The king presented FDR with a fabulously bejeweled sword, and Anna and Mrs. Roosevelt with fine perfume, dazzling jewelry, and beautiful “harem attire.” In addition to the spontaneous gift of his spare wheelchair, the president gave the king a ceremonial medallion from his fourth inauguration and, as perhaps a not-too-subtle hint about the American desire to open an airfield in Dhahran on the Arabian peninsula, promised that a DC-3 Dakota, the twin engine, propeller-driven aircraft that was the mainstay of US commercial aviation, would soon be delivered to him. The king had never flown, and had no pilots or aircraft in his kingdom, so FDR said that he would arrange for an American pilot and crew to serve as the king’s aircrew. The much-loved DC-3—in use for years and flown by the same pilot who delivered it, Joseph Grant—became “a fitting symbol of the US-Saudi relationship.” It also stimulated the king’s interest in developing air travel within the kingdom with the aid of American companies, which is precisely what Roosevelt hoped it would do.18

  In the days that followed the meeting, Colonel Eddy sent in a number of reports detailing how much the king had enjoyed the experience. Owing to his strong desire not to let the Palestinian question cast a shadow over what he saw as a burgeoning relationship between the Arab world and the United States, Eddy was pleased at FDR’s stated commitment “to make no change in its basic policy in Palestine without full and prior consultation with both Jews and Arabs.” Admiral Leahy was also satisfied at the way the talks had gone, noting in his diary that the frank exchange between the king and FDR over the Palestine-Jewish difficulty “should be of great value to the President in his approach to or recession from the problem.” Indeed, in Leahy’s view “the King’s directness” was most gratifying as “it may prevent our starting a bloody war between the Jewish inhabitants of Palestine and the Arab World.”19

  Leahy’s assessment of the king’s unyielding stance on the question of further Jewish immigration into the region is certainly accurate. But given Eddy’s proclivity for the Arab point of view, his official account of FDR’s meeting with Ibn Saud may have left out some key information. One person who strongly suspected that Eddy was deeply anti-Zionist, and perhaps even anti-Semitic, was James G. McDonald, the former League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and chairman of the President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees that FDR established in 1938. McDonald would go on to serve on the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry that was established by the British and American governments in December 1945 to make recommendations regarding the resettlement of Jews after the war. Part of this effort also involved looking into the impact that further Jewish settlement would have on the political, economic, and social conditions in Palestine. McDonald was part of a team that interviewed—and rejected—Eddy for the position of secretary to the committee, as “within a half an hour, he evinced such marked anti-Zionist feeling that no further argument was necessary to convince my colleagues he was unacceptable.”20

  In March 1946, three of the six members of the Anglo-American committee would travel to Riyadh to discuss the question of Jewish immigration into Palestine with Ibn Saud, much as FDR had done a year before. From the record of these conversations it appears that FDR went even further than the somewhat tentative record left by Eddy. According to the king, FDR recommended that he allow 3 million Jews to settle in Palestine—a suggestion that the king flatly rejected with the remark that he found “it was strange that America had agreed to accept 30,000 persons in her territory while she wished to impose on our country some millions.”21

  Despite the persistent obstinacy that Ibn Saud exhibited on both of these occasions, FDR certainly enjoyed the cultural aspects of the encounter. As he wrote to his cousin Daisy a few days later, seeing King Ibn Saud with his whole court, including “slaves, taster, astrologer and 8 live sheep… was a scream!” Still, as FDR’s subsequent comments make clear, he was not pleased with the substance of their talks. The meeting had certainly been “sobering and instructive,” and the king was far more sophisticated and worldly than FDR had expected—but also far more obdurate. As FDR told his son Elliott some time later, “Of all the men he had talked to in his life, he had got the least satisfaction from the iron-willed Arab monarch.”22 FDR hinted at the same sentiment two weeks later, when he revealed in his Yalta address to Congress that he felt he learned more about the problem of Arabia—“the Muslim problem, the Jewish problem—in talking with Ibn Saud for five minutes, than I could have learned in the exchange of two or three dozen letters.”23 This was a frank admission that solving the Palestinian problem was going to be far more difficult than FDR had imagined.

  As FDR’s Yalta address was carried live on national radio, these extemporaneous comments led some among American Zionists to speculate that he may have abandoned his previous support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. But as he told Rabbi Stephen Wise in a meeting in the White House on March 16—and as he authorized Wise to say afterward—his position on Palestine remained unchanged; he stood by the statement he made in October that he would seek to find ways to realize a Jewish state in the region.24

  Wise’s private record of this meeting is even more revealing. As he wrote in a letter to Chaim Weizmann shortly thereafter, FDR did something he almost never did: admit defeat. “The one failure of his trip,” FDR confessed, “had been his meeting with Ibn Saud.” Indeed, the president had arranged this meeting “for the sake of your cause” and he deeply regretted his inability to make any impression on the Saudi ruler. “I have never so completely failed to make an impact upon a man’s mind as in his case,” FDR said. Worse still, he now feared that if Ibn Saud united the Arab states in “a holy war,” they could defeat the small contingent of Jews in Palestine. Perhaps the only course now, “since we cannot move Ibn Saud,” is to put “the case up to the first meeting of the Council of the United Nations, whenever it meets.”25

  FDR made a similar statement to Harold Hoskins at roughly the same time. Over lunch at the White House, Eleanor observed that it now appeared as if the Zionists might be willing to risk a fight with the Arabs over their demands. FDR replied by reminding her that “there were 15,000,000 to 20,000,000 Arabs in and around Palestine and that, in the long run, he thought these numbers would win out.” In the same conversation, FDR indicated he now agreed with Hoskins’s previously stated claim that a Zionist state could be installed and maintained only by force. The two men thought that perhaps the sole solution might be to turn Palestine into an international territory for all three religions under some sort of arrangement worked out in the United Nations Organization after the war.26

  No strong supporter of Zionism himself, Hoskins was anxious to know whether the subject had come up at Yalta, and in particular, if Stalin had expressed a view. To which FDR responded that Palestine had not been discussed in any substantive manner, but thanks to a brief conversation with the marshal on the question, he had been able to determine that Stalin was “neither pro-Zionist nor anti-Zionist” but “at least he was not the Jew-hater” that he was often made out to be.27

  In the meantime, back in Egypt, Ibn Saud was busy speaking with Churchill, who, as Admiral Leahy recorded, insisted on seeing the Saudi monarch and the other two potentates “undoubtedly with the purpose of neutralizing any accomplishment the President may have made during his talks with the three kings.”28 To a certain extent, that was true, as Churchill began his talks by “confidently wielding” what Ibn Saud privately described to Eddy as “the big stick” and asking the king point-blank “for information regarding his conversation with President Roosevelt.”29 Prior to the meeting, Churchill had indicated to the British minister to Saudi Arabia that he had no intention of mentioning Palestine during his conversation with the king.30 But after reading the record of the conversation handed to him by the Saudi monarch—which included a reference to FDR’s persistent attempts to bring Ibn Saud around to a more sympathetic point of view on the question—Churchill intimated that the president h
ad also spoken to him about the subject. Churchill pressed the king on the issue of a Jewish homeland. After reminding him that Great Britain had fended off various potential enemies and “had supported and subsidized” him for twenty years, he insisted that since his government had seen the king through difficult days, “she [Great Britain] was entitled to request his assistance in the problem of Palestine.” Surely such a strong Arab leader as the king could “effect a realistic compromise with Zionism.”31

  But the king still absolutely refused to consider the request. “The promotion of Zionism from any quarter must indubitably bring widespread bloodshed and widespread disorder to the Arab lands,” he said. A far better move would be for the British to stop Jewish immigration to the region at once. In the face of these arguments, Churchill “laid the big stick down” and in an echo of FDR indicated that though he could make no promise on halting Jewish immigration to Palestine he was willing to assure the king that “he would oppose any plan of immigration which would drive the Arabs out of Palestine or deprive them of the means of livelihood there.”32

  And so neither FDR nor Churchill was able to make any headway with the Saudi king on Jewish immigration or the question of a homeland in Palestine. Caught between his support for the Zionist cause, on the one hand, and his desire to maintain good relations with the Arab world, on the other, FDR would struggle with this dilemma right up to the moment of his death.

  FDR’s foray into the Near East, even though he largely failed to achieve his goals, nevertheless marks a significant turning point in the evolution of American foreign policy—a clear statement that the United States now regarded itself as a truly global power with global responsibilities extending far beyond the traditional US focus on the Western Hemisphere, Europe, and parts of East Asia.33

  It also marks the first formal intrusion by the American government into the struggle between the Arabs and the Jews in Palestine. Like most of the presidents who succeeded him, FDR tried to follow a dual-track policy in this newfound area of American interest: refusing to abandon his support for the creation of a Jewish homeland while simultaneously trying to maintain good relations with the Arab world. Fearful, as he said near the end of his life, that continued agitation for a Jewish state “might cause a third world war” or lead to such intense disturbances in the region that the result would prove “most harmful to Jewish settlement,” FDR did his best to placate both sides in the hope that the end of the war, and the establishment of the United Nations, would provide the context and opportunity needed to finally arrive at a definitive solution.

  We will never know, of course, what FDR may have accomplished in Palestine had he lived but a few more years. What we do know is that, as with so many other matters, FDR’s inclination in the final weeks of his life was to revert to the argument that any possible action on the question of a Jewish homeland would have to wait until “some future time,” as he intimated to the Saudi king and other Arab leaders in the final weeks before his death.34 This tendency toward procrastination—what FDR’s harsher critics would call equivocation—has resulted in a great deal of ex post facto criticism. But as FDR frequently lamented in private, the harsh military and political realities of the moment—which in his mind included the possibility of a major war in the region—often left him no choice but to put the best face he could on some very difficult problems, while trying to lay the groundwork for solving them in the future. One of the ironies and tragedies of the last period of FDR’s life is that, despite his poor health and his increasing premonitions of his own immortality, he believed he would have time to work through a number of monumental questions.

  FDR may have failed in his mission to the Great Bitter Lake, but there can be little doubt that his support for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine and his determination to find “ways to bring about its earliest realization” were sincere. As he said in a message delivered to the members of the National Labor Committee for Palestine as they prepared to celebrate the ancient feast of Passover less than two weeks before his death, he still harbored “sympathy with the Jewish People in the unparalleled sufferings they have been called upon to endure during these war years.”35

  Chapter 12

  Going Home

  ANNA RETURNED TO REJOIN HER FATHER ONLY A FEW MINUTES AFTER the Saudi king had safely departed the Quincy. The warship soon set off—bound first for Alexandria, to take on fuel and other supplies—before embarking for Algiers, and then the long voyage home to Virginia. As the ship made its way toward northern stretches of the Suez Canal, Anna took a few moments to type out another letter to her husband. She was not sure when there would be another “pouch drop,” and there was much exciting news to report, about her trip, incognito, to Cairo and the “pageant” she had missed that day.1 She was also happy to convey that the “OM” was “standing up under it all extremely well” since “the last scare” she had written about. Still, she was worried about the long journey that awaited them. Anna had just learned that one of her father’s principal speechwriters, Samuel Rosenman, who was in London on a special mission, would be flying down to join them in Algiers, to help FDR draft a message to Congress about the Yalta conference as they traversed the Atlantic. Anna would have preferred that her father “spend the entire crossing resting up.” Her worst fear was that he might experience a terrific “letdown” once he got home, and “crack under it as he did last year,” after Tehran. All they could do at this point, she lamented, was keep their fingers crossed that this would not happen again.2

  A few days before, FDR, too, had found some time to send a couple of quick notes home, both written on February 12, 1945, while he was on board the Catoctin. First, he penned a few lines to Daisy, whom he informed that though the evening meetings of the summit conference were “long and tiring” he was “really all right” as he had confined himself to “either work or sleep.”3 The second was a brief note to Eleanor—the first and only letter that he sent to her during the trip that conveyed a similar message, expressing his view that he thought the conference had wound up successfully and intimating that he was “a bit exhausted” but, using the same phrase, “really all right.”4

  Return journey from Yalta to Norfolk

  Not mentioned in either of FDR’s letters or in Anna’s correspondence with her husband was that few of the travelers on board the Quincy were “really all right.” Hopkins was still suffering from his many ailments, and on the very evening FDR wrote the brief assurances to Daisy and Eleanor, his longtime friend and personal secretary Edwin “Pa” Watson suffered a heart attack. This necessitated Watson’s immediate transfer to the Quincy’s sickbay upon the presidential party’s arrival at the Great Bitter Lake, where he remained in an oxygen tent under the watchful eye of Dr. Bruenn.5

  Now that they were finally under way again on this Valentine’s Day, 1945, Anna found that she was too excited to sleep. So as the sun dipped below the horizon, she clambered up to the flag bridge in time to get a good view of Port Said, the historic city and gateway to Suez. At approximately 10:40 p.m., the ship passed through the port’s submarine gate and out into the open Mediterranean for the overnight journey to their next port of call.6

  AS ANNA UNDERSTOOD IT, THE OSTENSIBLE REASON FOR THEIR LAYOVER in Alexandria, aside from the need to refuel, was to give Churchill the chance “to get a report” from FDR on his conferences with “the three kings” in advance of his own meetings with them. Like FDR, Churchill had left the Crimea shortly after the final luncheon meeting, in a hasty and unplanned departure that his daughter Sarah described as the very antithesis of the orderly and well-organized exit of the Americans.

  Apparently seized by a sudden fit of loneliness, with the president gone and Stalin having vanished “like some genie,” the impetuous Churchill, who originally had planned to leave Yalta the next morning, suddenly demanded that his party be ready to depart in fifty minutes. Much to Sarah’s amazement, and to Churchill’s valet’s grief, this task was accomplished in jus
t over an hour—inspired in part by the genial and sprightly behavior of the prime minister, “who like a boy out of school, his homework done, walked from room to room saying: ‘Come on, come on!’”7

  From Yalta, Sarah and her father spent two nights on the Franconia, which was anchored in Sevastopol. While waiting for his flight out, Churchill took the opportunity to visit the famous battlefield at Balaclava. On February 14 they flew on to Athens, where Churchill was relieved to see order restored and was deeply moved by the enormous crowd—estimated at forty thousand people—who had turned out to hear him speak in the city’s Constitution Square. The mayor honored Churchill’s presence in Athens by lighting up the Acropolis, the first time the ancient citadel had been illuminated since the arrival of the German forces in April 1941. As was often his wont, Churchill held court that evening at the British Embassy, where he regaled his guests deep into the night. At 7:35 a.m. the next morning, Churchill’s Sky Master, escorted by three RAF long-range fighters, bolted down the runway bound for Egypt and the last face-to-face encounter he would ever have with Franklin D. Roosevelt.8

  It was fitting that, as with their much-celebrated first wartime rendezvous in 1941, off the coast of Newfoundland—where they drafted the Atlantic Charter—the final meeting between these two iconic leaders took place on a warship. The historic port of Alexandria made for an apt setting in itself, and not only because it was named after one of history’s great conquerors; the city is also a mere seventy miles east of El Alamein, another site of great significance. It was at El Alamein that the British achieved their first great land victory over the Axis in November 1942, a victory that would not have been possible without the sudden and decisive intervention of FDR six months earlier. In a scene that came to symbolize the bond forged between the two men during the war, Churchill was in the White House when FDR made this fateful move. The president had just handed the prime minister a telegram informing him that the besieged British garrison at Tobruk had fallen. Tobruk possessed the only major port in the Western desert, and holding it was viewed as vital to the British defense of Egypt. As such, the news of its capture by the Germans left Churchill stunned and speechless. FDR finally broke the silence by asking “What can we do to help?” and, in consultation with General George Marshall and Field Marshal Alan Brooke, who were also in the room, made the controversial decision to divert a squadron of A-20 light bombers destined for Russia to the retreating British forces in Egypt, along with three hundred Sherman tanks and one hundred self-propelled guns that proved decisive to the subsequent victory. Years later, Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke wrote that “the Tobruk episode in the President’s study” helped lay “the foundations of friendship and understanding that built up during the war between the President and Marshall on the one hand and Churchill and myself on the other.”9