Part 14 (1/2)

Others also noticed Roosevelt's speaking ill of Churchill. ”Towards the end of the war, when he was an ailing man,” Lord Chandos wrote of Roosevelt, ”he . . . could not help a derogatory and ironical tone from creeping in, even when talking to a devoted lieutenant like myself.”

”Poor old Winston keeps on thinking . . . ,” Roosevelt once said to Chandos, only to find that Churchill's colleague, as Chandos put it, ”profoundly believed that poor old Winston was right.”

TO CHURCHILL'S CREDIT, he was careful about how he talked about Roosevelt. At Yalta, Moran noted that ”though we have moved a long way since Winston, speaking of Roosevelt, said to me in the garden at Marrakesh, 'I love that man,' he is still very reticent in criticism. It seems to be dragged out of him against his will. And with half a chance he will tell over dinner how many divisions the Americans had in a particular show against our handful, and how their casualties in that engagement dwarfed ours, and things of that kind.” As Churchill lost point after point to Roosevelt and to Stalin-usually about Poland or the Balkans-he kept his tongue in check. ”In all these arguments, the President's view carried the day,” Mary said. ”Yet I never heard my father, at any time during all the stress of war, say a vengeful or savage word about the President.”

They knew each other so well. One day, Roosevelt complained to James Byrnes that Churchill's monologues were holding up business. ”Yes, but they were good speeches,” Byrnes said. Snapped out of his irritation, Roosevelt chuckled. ”Winston doesn't make any other kind,” he replied.

AFTER A RUSSIAN BANQUET, Charles Portal, Churchill's trusted air chief, wrote a blunt account to Pamela Churchill. Acknowledging that he was writing as he ”let the vodka settle,” Portal gave Roosevelt no quarter. ”FD was very wet indeed and just blathered,” he said. ”U.J. in marvelous form & so was big W, but as usual he ran away from the interpreter & was untranslatable. . . . Honestly, FDR spoke more tripe to the minute than I have ever heard before, sentimental twaddle without a spark of real wit.” Was Roosevelt too sick to be effective at the conference? Most observers thought him unwell but in basic control of the public business before him. ”He was lethargic, but when important moments arose, he was mentally sharp,” recalled Bohlen. ”Our leader was ill at Yalta, the most important of the wartime conferences, but he was effective.”

Hours and hours were spent in the big white ballroom debating Poland. By the time the leaders sat down in the Crimea, the Red Army controlled the nation over whose sovereignty Britain had gone to war nearly six years before, and, as Stalin once remarked, ”Whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.” At Yalta there were disputes over borders and the postwar Polish government, and Stalin made vague promises about ”free and unfettered elections,” but in the end came the cold war, and a Soviet sphere. Looking back, Averell Harriman thought Roosevelt and Churchill made ”an honest attempt to build an orderly relations.h.i.+p with the Russians and there was a certain amount of give and take on our part in the hope of achieving orderly settlements. The fact that we tried and failed left the main responsibility for the Cold War with Stalin, where it belongs.”

Anna tried to keep Roosevelt rested, but it was not easy. ”While they were away, Anna kept us posted about her father's health and what was happening on the trip,” Eleanor recalled. ”I am a bit exhausted but really all right,” Roosevelt wrote his wife.

Churchill hosted dinner at the Vorontsov villa on the last night, February 10. It was a convivial evening of shop talk, reminiscence, and promises of great things to come. Churchill was variously upset and sentimental; Stalin was both friendly and vicious; Roosevelt played referee.

Roosevelt had not spoken of Eleanor much, but tonight he invoked her, recalling the first summer of his presidency. ”In 1933 my wife visited a school in our country,” he said. ”In one of the cla.s.srooms she saw a map with a large blank s.p.a.ce on it. She asked what was the blank s.p.a.ce, and was told they were not allowed to mention the place-it was the Soviet Union.” That story of Eleanor's, Roosevelt said, was one of the reasons he had reached out to Moscow to open diplomatic relations. The personal was a consistent theme. ”There was a time when the Marshal was not so kindly towards us, and I remember that I said a few rude things about him, but our common dangers and common loyalties have wiped all that out,” Churchill said in a toast to Stalin. ”The fire of war has burnt up the misunderstandings of the past. We feel we have a friend whom we can trust, and I hope he will continue to feel the same about us. I pray he may live to see his beloved Russia not only glorious in war, but also happy in peace.”

Churchill took Roosevelt and Stalin into the traveling map room so that they could survey their joint progress. It was, Churchill said, ”the zenith of the Map Room's career.” For half an hour, the three men talked and contemplated what they had wrought. Cleves had fallen, prompting Churchill to regale Roosevelt and Stalin with the story of Anne of Cleves, one of Henry VIII's wives. Then he began to sing the World War I song ”When We've Wound Up the Watch on the Rhine.”

Perhaps weary of song and story, Stalin took a shot at Churchill. As Sir Richard Pim recalled it, Stalin ”suggested that the British might wish to make an earlier armistice than the Russians.” Taunted out of his happy mood, Churchill ”looked hurt and in a corner of the Map Room, with his hands in his pockets, gave us a few lines of his favourite song 'Keep right on to the end of the road.' Stalin looked extremely puzzled.” Roosevelt waded in with a grin, saying to the Soviet interpreter, ”Tell your Chief that this singing by the Prime Minister is Britain's secret weapon.” Roosevelt was doing what he liked best: keeping peace between his two allies. And, for a moment, it was working.

The issue of the United Nations organization played a central role at Yalta. After several years of imprecise talk-usually by Roosevelt-a plan thrashed out in the summer and fall of 1944 at Dumbarton Oaks in Was.h.i.+ngton proposed a Security Council (the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, China, and ultimately France would be permanent members) and a General a.s.sembly. The organization would have the ability, with its members, to exert force-militarily, by sanction, or by suasion-to try to keep order in what was inevitably a disorderly world. Gone were the debates about regional councils; a global body was to take shape-if it all could be worked out with Stalin, who wanted extra votes in the General a.s.sembly for the Soviet Republics. (Eventually he got two.) There were other issues-questions of veto power, trustees.h.i.+ps for former colonies, and refugee matters among them-and a conference in San Francisco in late April would finalize things. Roosevelt died believing a global, not a regional, organization was the proper means for a new international order. The UN agreements at Yalta, Roosevelt would tell Congress on March 1, 1945, ”ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries-and have always failed,” he said, sitting as he spoke for the first and only time in a congressional address in his twelve years as president. ”We propose to subst.i.tute for all of these, a universal organization in which all peace-loving nations will finally have a chance to join.”

Churchill long defended the regional approach, with ”men of the greatest eminence” from each sphere serving on a ”Supreme Body.” He was not particularly impressed by the UN's early days: ”The summoning of all nations, great and small, powerful or powerless, on even terms to the central body may be compared with the organization of an army without any division between the High Command and the divisional and brigade commanders.” Churchill, though, never ruled out the possibility of progress. ”But,” he added, ”we must persevere.”

Hope-with Churchill, as with Roosevelt, there was always hope. In these last years of the war, from establis.h.i.+ng monetary policy at Bretton Woods to the United Nations, the two men were trying to build inst.i.tutions to prevent the last half of the twentieth century from repeating the mistakes of the first half, which had given the world two wars. Ultimately, because of Soviet aggression, the Americans, the British, and much of Western Europe would add the Atlantic alliance to that equation, but Roosevelt's and Churchill's ability to see far ahead-or at least to attempt to see far ahead-was striking. They were not soft, but they were optimistic. ”The purpose of the United Nations is to make sure that the force of right will, in the ultimate issue, be protected by the right of force,” Churchill said in 1946. His words about the organization's other missions might surprise those who tend to think of him as a creature of the nineteenth, not the twentieth, much less the twenty-first, century. ”Peace is no pa.s.sive state, but calls for qualities of high adventure and endeavor,” Churchill said in 1950. ”Through the United Nations we must not only prevent war but feed the hungry, heal the sick, restore the ravages of former wars, and a.s.sist the peoples of Africa and Asia to achieve by peaceful means their hopes of a new and better life.”

ON SUNDAY MORNING, February 11, 1945, the final editing session for the communique went smoothly. Churchill had the most changes. Among them, he wanted to eliminate the use of the word joint, arguing that to him the term meant ”the Sunday family roast of mutton.” In the czar's former billiards room, the Big Three signed the Declaration on Liberated Europe, pledging that ”The establishment of order in Europe and the rebuilding of national economic life must be achieved by processes which will enable the liberated peoples to destroy the last vestiges of n.a.z.ism and fascism and to create democratic inst.i.tutions of their own choice. This is a principle of the Atlantic Charter-the right of all peoples to choose the form of Government under which they will live-the restoration of sovereign rights and self-Government to those peoples who have been forcibly deprived of them by the aggressor nations.” The Allies would continue to strive for peace in which ”all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.”

”I hope you will like communique published tomorrow morning,” Churchill wrote Clementine. ”We have covered a great amount of ground and I am very pleased with the decisions we have gained.” He was in a good humor. ”P.M. seems well,” Alexander Cadogan noted, ”though drinking buckets of Caucasian champagne which would undermine the health of any ordinary man.”

Churchill would live to see and fight the cold war. Roosevelt would be dead by then, but whatever compromises the president made at Yalta on issues relating to the postwar world, there is evidence that he would have taken a hard line against Soviet totalitarianism had he lived. ”Yalta was only a step towards the ultimate solution Franklin had in mind,” Eleanor recalled. ”He knew it was not the final step. He knew there had to be more negotiation, other meetings. He hoped for an era of peace and understanding, but he knew that peace was not won in a day-that days upon days and years upon years lay before us in which we must keep the peace by constant effort.”

”U.J. in marvelous form & so was big W, but as usual he ran away from the interpreter & was untranslatable”

Churchill at Livadia Palace, February 8, 1945 Churchill is often depicted as the more perceptive of the two men on the question of the Soviets, and there is no doubt that during the war the prime minister predicted ”grave troubles” from Stalin, to use his phrase from Quebec in 1943. Anti-Soviet testimony from Churchill is not hard to come by. But the fact of the matter is that Churchill, like Roosevelt, did not like to foreclose options; he, like Roosevelt, understood that politics is almost always a matter of nuance and shades of gray. In 1940 it had not been: Opposing Hitler was a moral imperative in which Churchill had, rightly, seen only black and white. Returning from Yalta, Churchill thought all might be well. ”The impression I brought back from the Crimea, and from all my other contacts, is that Marshal Stalin and the Soviet leaders wish to live in honourable friends.h.i.+p and equality with the Western Democracies . . . ,” he told the House of Commons. Privately, Churchill said: ”Poor Neville Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I don't think I'm wrong about Stalin.” When it turned out that the facts did not support these hopeful words, Churchill would be the first to take a strong stand against the spread of communism. He would have agreed with Eleanor's a.s.sessment of Roosevelt's view: that politics and diplomacy are stories without end, requiring constant attention, keen thinking, and an appreciation of complexity.

Leaving Livadia on that Sunday, Roosevelt was driven to Sevastopol to survey the battlefield where the Light Brigade had made its doomed charge nearly a century before. Stalin-”like some genie,” Sarah recalled-disappeared. As Roosevelt departed, Churchill-who was to see Roosevelt once more on Thursday-tried to maintain his cheer but found it difficult. ”The President's decrepitude has filled him with grief and dismay,” Moran said. Sarah thought her father ”suddenly felt lonely.”

CHURCHILL DECIDED IT was time for an adventure. To him action was generally the answer to anything. Rather than following the plan to ”easily, orderly, and quietly” leave Yalta the next morning, Sarah recalled, her father announced that they would leave now. ”Why do we stay here?” Churchill asked. ”Why don't we go tonight-I see no reason to stay here a minute longer-we're off!”

There was silence, then chaos. ”Trunks and large mysterious paper parcels given to us by the Russians-caviar we hoped-filled the hall,” Sarah wrote. ”Laundry arrived back clean but damp. Naturally fifty minutes gave my father time to change our minds several more times.” He nearly broke his valet's spirits. ”Sawyers on his knees, tears in his eyes, surrounded by half-packed suitcases, literally beat his chest in truly cla.s.sical style and said: 'They can't do this to me.' ” Churchill, Sarah recalled, relished the rumpus. ”My father, genial and sprightly like a boy out of school, his homework done, walked from room to room saying: 'Come on, come on!' ” They were off to spend a few days aboard HMS Franconia. Later, when Sarah asked him whether he was tired, Churchill said: ”Strangely enough, no. Yet I have felt the weight of responsibility more than ever before and in my heart there is anxiety.”

BACK ON THE Quincy, moored in Great Bitter Lake in the Suez Ca.n.a.l, Roosevelt settled in for a few days of royal Middle Eastern callers. ”We got away safely from the Crimea, flew to the Ca.n.a.l & saw King Farouk, then emperor Haile Sela.s.sie, & the next day, King Ibn Saud of Arabia with his whole court, slaves (black), taster, astrologer, & 8 live sheep,” Roosevelt wrote Daisy. ”Whole party was a scream!” He was enjoying the fact that Churchill was annoyed he was meeting alone with the three kings. Churchill had summoned all three to come to him after they had seen Roosevelt. ”Mr. Churchill was rather suspicious of why was Father talking to these three heads of state and he was not invited,” Anna recalled. ”Father was thoroughly amused. . . . He was getting a great kick out of life.”

ON THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 1945, off Alexandria, Roosevelt and Churchill sat together aboard the Quincy. The world had turned over many times since their hands had first clasped at sea. ”The President seemed placid and frail,” Churchill said. With Hopkins they discussed Britain's role in developing atomic weapons after the war. Churchill and Lindemann (the ”Prof”) were eager ”to do work here on a scale commensurate with our resources”-a bid to remain in the arena, vital and respected. Roosevelt, Churchill told Lindemann later, ”made no objection of any kind” and said that the first real trials for the bomb would come in September. (As it happened, events at Los Alamos moved more quickly.) They then had what Churchill called ”an informal family luncheon” with Anna, Sarah and Randolph Churchill, Hopkins, and Gil Winant. ”I saw WSC to say goodbye,” Roosevelt told Daisy. Their visit lasted an hour and fifty-six minutes; just before four o'clock, Roosevelt gave Churchill an alb.u.m of photographs from the 1944 Quebec meeting and they took their leave of each other. It was not to be for long: Roosevelt was due in England soon. ”I felt that he had a slender contact with life,” Churchill recalled. ”I was not to see him again. We bade affectionate farewells.”

AT HIS MEETING with Ibn Saud after the president's, Churchill and Muslim custom collided, but Churchill won. ”I had been told that neither smoking nor alcoholic beverages were allowed in the Royal Presence,” Churchill recalled. ”As I was the host at luncheon I raised the matter at once, and said to the interpreter that if it was the religion of His Majesty to deprive himself of smoking and alcohol I must point out that my rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars and also the drinking of alcohol before, after, and if need be during all meals and in the intervals between them,” Churchill told the Saudi potentate. ”The King graciously accepted the position.”

EVEN FROM WAs.h.i.+NGTON, Eleanor could tell that there were ”dark clouds” hovering over the Quincy on its voyage home. Pa Watson was stricken. Roosevelt had been counting on Hopkins to help him prepare his speech to Congress about Yalta, but Hopkins was too sick to go on. He would recuperate at Marrakech, staying at La Saadia. Roosevelt's good-bye, Robert Sherwood wrote, ”was not a very amiable one.” Roosevelt asked Sam Rosenman, who was on a mission to London, to cross the Atlantic with him. ”I had never seen him look so tired,” Rosenman said once he saw the president. ”He had lost a great deal more weight; he was listless and apparently uninterested in conversation-he was all burnt out.”

Then Watson died at sea. From afar Daisy knew what it meant: ”Franklin feels his death very much, & will miss him dreadfully-He always leaned on him, both figuratively and physically-'Pa' was a Rock, the only one of the aides who gave a feeling of security to F.D.R. when he stood with his braces-Always cheerful, ready with a joke, and completely & unselfishly devoted to F.D.R.” Roosevelt rarely showed sadness, but it was different this time. His aides worried, Sherwood recalled, that ”the very extent to which he talked about his sadness” could mean ”he himself was failing.”

In his grief, Roosevelt gave rein to his tarter feelings about Churchill. Deeply compet.i.tive, he was possibly reacting to the world with some bitterness as he sensed his own powers dimming. ”Roosevelt was p.r.o.ne to jealousy of compet.i.tors in his field,” Rosenman wrote. ”He liked flattery, especially as he grew older, and seemed frequently to be jealous of compliments paid to others for political sagacity, eloquence, statesmans.h.i.+p or accomplishments in public life. He liked so much to excel that he took almost as much pleasure in being told he was a better poker player than someone else as he did in being told that Willkie was not as good an orator as he was, or that he, Roosevelt, was a better politician than Farley.” On the voyage, Roosevelt told Rosenman that ” 'dear old Winston' was quite loquacious in these conferences; that he liked to make long speeches-sometimes getting into irrelevancies; that he quite obviously irritated Stalin by these long discourses; and that at times he, Roosevelt, had to get Churchill back to the subject at hand. Now that victory seemed pretty close and the time was drawing near for carrying out some of the tough principles contained in the Atlantic Charter, the President was beginning to feel that the traditions of British imperialism were playing too heavy a part in Churchill's thinking.”

Roosevelt called the reporters on board into his cabin and took the same superior tone about Churchill when the conversation turned to colonial possessions in the Pacific.

Question: Is that Churchill's idea on all territory out there, he wants them all back just the way they were?

The President: Yes, he is mid-Victorian on all things like that.

Question: You would think some of that would be knocked out of him by now.

The President: I read something Queen Wilhelmina said about the Dutch East Indies. She's got a very interesting point of view. I think it was a public statement concerning the plans about her islands; they differ so from the British plans. The Javanese are not quite ready for self-government, but very nearly. Java, with a little help by other nations, can probably be ready for independence in a few years. The Javanese are good people-pretty civilized country. The Dutch marry the Javanese, and the Javanese are permitted to join the clubs. The British would not permit the Malayans to join their clubs. . . .

Question: This idea of Churchill's seems inconsistent with the policy of self-determination?

The President: Yes, that is true.

Question: He seems to undercut the Atlantic Charter. He made a statement the other day that it was not a rule, just a guide.

The President: The Atlantic Charter is a beautiful idea. When it was drawn up, the situation was that England was about to lose the war. They needed hope, and it gave it to them. We have improved the military situation since then at every chance, so that really you might say we have a much better chance of winning the war now than ever before. . . .

Question: Do you remember the speech the Prime Minister made about the fact that he was not made Prime Minister of Great Britain to see the empire fall apart?

The President: Dear old Winston will never learn on that point. He has made his specialty on that point. This is, of course, off the record.

The Roosevelt who said all of this-from the condescending ”dear old Winston” to the insensitive ”England was about to lose the war” (a war Roosevelt had not joined at that point)-was falling back on an old, unattractive trait: self-importance, the unfortunate flip side of his wonderful confidence.

He was tired, and sick, and, as Rosenman saw, jealous of rivals. Anthony Trollope once wrote that a blind giant-a creature who has lost great strength but is doomed to remember what it was like to wield power even in his weakened state-is the essential tragic figure. There was a trace of Trollopian tragedy about Roosevelt's view of Churchill in these days after Yalta as the failing president lashed out, reminding the world that he was the true power.

CHURCHILL, WHO KNEW Roosevelt's circle well, sensed what Roosevelt was feeling about Watson, Churchill's Thanksgiving dance partner in Cairo. ”Accept my deep sympathy in your personal loss . . . ,” he cabled Roosevelt. ”I know how much this will grieve you. . . . I do hope you have benefited by the voyage and will return refreshed.” Daisy found Roosevelt both optimistic and worn out on his return on February 27. ”He says the conference turned out better than he dared hoped for; he is happy about it,” she noted. But he was having ”an exhausting time seeing people-'fixing' things which have gotten out of hand during his absence. Everyone waits around for him to 'lead' & guide.”

At sea, he had worked with Rosenman on a speech to deliver to Congress. He knew what Churchill had reported to the House of Commons. In 1940 and 1941, Churchill told his colleagues, Britain's course ”seemed plain and simple. If a man is coming across the sea to kill you, you do everything in your power to make sure he dies before finis.h.i.+ng his journey. This may be difficult, it may be painful, but at least it is simple.” Now, however: We are now entering a world of imponderables, and at every stage occasions for self-questioning arise. It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time. . . .

No one can guarantee the future of the world. There are some who fear it will tear itself to pieces and that an awful lapse in human history may occur. I do not believe it. There must be hope. The alternative is despair, which is madness. The British race has never yielded to counsels of despair.

Just before entering the House of Representatives to deliver his own report on March 1, Roosevelt remarked, ”I hope to do in one hour what Winston did in two.”

WRITING MARY ABOUT Churchill's homecoming to England after Yalta, Clementine said that she found Churchill ”imbibing whisky and soda. He is marvellously well-much, much better than when he went off for this most trying and difficult of Conferences.” At this late hour in the war, the Churchills seemed to be drawing closer to each other while the Roosevelts continued their long minuet of affection and annoyance. Clementine was to travel to Russia for the Red Cross, a long and dangerous journey even in the best of times, and the war was still going on. She turned sixty en route, and Churchill made sure the British amba.s.sador in Cairo gave her his birthday note. ”Your lovely Birthday telegram was handed to me in Church this morning . . . ,” Clementine wrote Churchill. ”I was so pleased.”

Eleanor and Roosevelt were not having as smooth a time. ”For the first time I was beginning to realize that he could no longer bear to have a real discussion, such as we had always had,” Eleanor recalled of the post-Yalta period. Eleanor drew her own strength-her own ident.i.ty-from constant action and work and may have a.s.sumed everyone else did, too, even her ailing husband. Roosevelt's faltering condition, she recalled, ”was impressed on me one night” in a three-way discussion with Harry Hooker, a New York lawyer who was close to the Roosevelts. The subject, Eleanor wrote, was ”the question of compulsory military service for all young men as a peacetime measure.” Hooker was for it; Eleanor ”argued against it heatedly.” The debate went too far. ”In the end, I evidently made Franklin feel I was really arguing against him and I suddenly realized he was upset,” Eleanor recalled. ”I had forgotten that Franklin was no longer the calm and imperturbable person who, in the past, had always goaded me on to vehement arguments when questions of policy came up. It was just another indication of the change which we were all so unwilling to acknowledge.”