Finest Years (25 page)

He had met presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Hoover, along with Vanderbilts and Rockefellers, Hollywood stars, Henry Morgenthau, William Randolph Hearst and Bernard Baruch. He had lectured to American audiences in 1931-32
about the perceived shared destiny of the English-speaking peoples. Many of his British contemporaries saw in Churchill American behavioural traits, above all a taste for showmanship, that his own class disliked, but which were now of incomparable value. Humble London spinster Vere Hodgson perceived this, writing in her diary: ‘
Had he been pure English aristocracy
he would not have been able to lead in the way he has. The American side gives him a superiority complex—in a way that Lord Halifax would not think in good taste—but we need more than good taste to save Britain at this particular moment.'

In 1940-41, Churchill sometimes displayed private impatience towards perceived American pusillanimity. ‘
Here's a telegram
for those bloody Yankees,' he said to Jock Colville as he handed the private secretary a cable in the desperate days of May 1940. In dispatches to Washington, the malignant US ambassador Joseph Kennedy made the worst of every such remark which he intercepted. He translated Churchill's well-merited dislike of himself into allegations that the prime minister was anti-American. Kennedy's dispatches inflicted some injury on Britain's cause in Washington, cauterised only when Roosevelt changed ambassadors in 1941, replacing Kennedy with John ‘Gil' Winant, and Churchill embarked upon personal relationships with the president, Harry Hopkins and Averell Harriman. Churchill's broadcasts, however, already commanded large American audiences, and imposed his personality upon Roosevelt's nation in 1940-41 almost as effectively as upon his own people.
By late 1941
, Churchill ran second only to the president in a national poll of US radio shows' ‘favourite personality'. ‘Did you hear Mr Churchill Sunday?' Roscoe Conkling Simmons asked his readers in the
Chicago Defender
on 3 May 1941. ‘You may be against England, but hardly against England as Mr Churchill paints her…Did you note how he laid on the friendship of Uncle Sam?' Churchill's great phrases were repeated again and again in the American press, ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat' notable among them.

If Churchill had not occupied Britain's premiership, who among his peers could have courted the US with a hundredth part of his
warmth and conviction? There was little deference in his make-up—none, indeed, towards any of his own fellow countrymen save the King and the head of his own family, the Duke of Marlborough. Yet in 1940-41 he displayed this quality in all his dealings with Americans, and above all their president. When the stakes were so high he was without self-consciousness, far less embarrassment. To a degree that few of his fellow countrymen proved able to match between 1939 and 1945 he subordinated pride to need, endured slights without visible resentment, and greeted every American visitor as if his presence did Britain honour.

By far the most important of these was, of course, Harry Hopkins, who arrived on 8 January 1941 as the president's personal emissary, bearing a letter to King George VI from his fellow head of state, saying that ‘Mr Hopkins is a very good friend of mine, in whom I repose the utmost confidence.' Hopkins was a fifty-year-old Iowan, a harness-maker's son who had been a lifelong crusader for social reform. He met Roosevelt in 1928, and the two men formed an intimacy. Hopkins, the archetypal New Dealer, in 1932 became federal relief administrator, and one of the strongest influences on the administration. Roosevelt liked him in part because he never asked for anything. It was the heady scent of power that Hopkins savoured, not position or wealth, though he had a gauche enthusiasm for nightclubs and racetracks, and was oddly flattered by press denunciations of himself as a playboy. He cherished contrasting passions for fungi and the poetry of Keats. The high spot of his only pre-war visit to London, in 1927, was a glimpse of Keats's house. A lonely figure after the death of his second wife from cancer in 1937, he was invited by FDR to live at the White House. Hopkins had pitched camp there ever since, with the title of Secretary of Commerce and undeclared role of chief of staff to the president, until he was given responsibility for making Lend-Lease work.

Hopkins's influence with the president was resented by many Americans, not all of them Republicans. He was widely unpopular, being described by critics as ‘FDR's Rasputin', an ‘extreme New Dealer'.

At the outset of World War II he had been an instinctive isolationist, writing to his brother: ‘
I believe that we really can
keep out of it. Fortunately there is no great sentiment in this country for getting into it, although I think almost everyone wants to see England and France win.' Physically, he cut an unimpressively dishevelled figure, his long neck and gaunt features ravaged by the stomach cancer that had almost killed him. Many people who met Hopkins perceived, through the haze from the cigarettes he chain-smoked, ‘a walking corpse'. A
Time
photograph of him carried the caption: ‘
He can work only seven
hours a day.' Brendan Bracken, sent to greet Hopkins off the flying-boat that brought him to Poole harbour, was appalled to find this vital visitor slumped apparently moribund in his seat, unable even to unfasten his seatbelt. The relationship with the British upon which the envoy now embarked became the last important mission of his life.

On 10 January 1941 Churchill welcomed Hopkins for the first time in the little basement dining room of Downing Street—the house was somewhat battered by bomb blast—for a
tête-à-tête
lunch that lasted three hours. The guest opened their conversation with the forthrightness that characterised Hopkins's behaviour: ‘I told him there was a feeling in some quarters that he, Churchill, did not like America, Americans or Roosevelt.' This was Joseph Kennedy's doing, expostulated the prime minister, and a travesty. He promised absolute frankness. He said that he hoped Hopkins would not go home until he was satisfied ‘
of the exact state
of England's need and the urgent necessity of the exact material assistance Britain requires to win the war'. He then deployed all his powers to charm his guest, with unqualified success.

Hopkins's intelligence and warmth immediately endeared him to Churchill. Throughout his political life the president's man had decided upon courses of action, then pursued them with unstinting energy. If he arrived in Britain with a relatively open mind, within days he embraced the nation, its leader and cause with a conviction that persisted for many months, and did incalculable service. That first Friday evening, the American drove to join the prime minister
and his entourage at Ditchley in Oxfordshire, Churchill's weekend residence on moonlit nights during the blitz, when Chequers was perceived to be vulnerable to the Luftwaffe. The text of the Lend-Lease Bill, now beginning its hazardous passage through Congress, had just been published. Britain's dependence on the outcome was absolute. However, Churchill warned the chancellor, Kingsley Wood, that he himself would say nothing to Washington about looming British defaults on payments for arms, should Lend-Lease fail to pass the US legislature: ‘We must trust ourselves to [the president].'

Hopkins was extraordinarily forthcoming to his hosts, who welcomed his enthusiasm after the cold scepticism of Joseph Kennedy. That first weekend, on the way to see Churchill's birthplace at Blenheim Palace, the envoy told Brendan Bracken that Roosevelt was ‘resolved that we should have the means of survival and of victory'. Hopkins mused to the great CBS broadcast correspondent Ed Murrow, then reporting from London: ‘
I suppose you could say
—but not out loud—that I've come to try to find a way to be a catalytic agent between two prima donnas.' Churchill, for his part, diverted his guest during the month of his visit with a succession of monologues, strewing phrases like rose petals in the path of this most important and receptive of visitors. At dinner at Ditchley, the prime minister declared:

We seek no treasure
, we seek no territorial gain, we seek only the right of man to be free; we seek his rights to worship his God, to lead his life in his own way, secure from persecution. As the humble labourer returns from his work when the day is done, and sees the smoke curling upwards from his cottage home in the serene evening sky, we wish him to know that no rat-a-tat-tat—[here he rapped on the table] of the secret police upon his door will disturb his leisure or interrupt his rest. We seek government with the consent of the people, man's freedom to say what he will, and when he thinks himself injured, to find himself equal in the eyes of the law. But war aims other than these we have none.

Churchill's old colleagues—the likes of Balfour, Lloyd George, Chamberlain, Baldwin, Halifax—had for years rolled their eyes impatiently in the face of such outpourings. Familiarity with Winston's extravagant rhetoric rendered them readily bored by it, especially when it had been deployed in support of so many unworthy and unsuccessful causes in the past. Yet now, at last, Churchill's words and the mood of the times seemed perfectly conjoined. His sonorous style had an exceptional appeal for Americans. Hopkins had never before witnessed such effortless, magnificent dinner-table statesmanship. He was entranced by his host: ‘Jesus Christ! What a man!' He was impressed by the calm with which the prime minister received news, often bad. One night during the usual evening film at Ditchley, word came that the cruiser
Southampton
had been sunk in the Mediterranean. The show went on.

During the weeks that followed, Hopkins spent twelve evenings with Churchill, travelled with him to visit naval bases in Scotland and blitzed south coast towns. He marvelled at his host's popularity and absolute mastery of Britain's governance, though he was less impressed by the calibre of Churchill's subordinates: ‘Some of the ministers and underlings are a bit trying,' he told Roosevelt. Eden, for instance, he thought talked too much. Hopkins attained a quick, shrewd grasp of the private distaste towards the prime minister that persisted among Britain's ruling caste: ‘The politicians and upper crust pretend to like him.' He was in no doubt, however, about the fortitude of the British people. ‘
Hopkins was, I think
, very impressed by the cheerfulness and optimism he found everywhere,' wrote Churchill's private secretary Eric Seal. ‘I must confess that I am surprised at it myself…PM…gets on like a house afire with Hopkins, who is a dear, & is universally liked.' Roosevelt's envoy told Raymond Lee: ‘
I have never had such
an enjoyable time as I had with Mr Churchill.'

Back in Washington, the president was much tickled by reports of Hopkins's popularity in Britain, as the Interior Secretary Harold Ickes noted: ‘
Apparently the first thing
that Churchill asks for when he gets awake in the morning is Harry Hopkins, and Harry is the
last one he sees at night.' Maybe so, growled the cynical Ickes, but even if the president had sent a bubonic plague-carrier, Britain's prime minister would have found it expedient to see plenty of him. Among the envoy's most important functions was to brief Churchill about how best to address the American people and assist Roosevelt's efforts to assist Britain. Above all, the prime minister was told, he should not suggest that any commitment of US ground troops was either desirable or likely. Hopkins concluded his report to the president: ‘People here are amazing from Churchill down,' he wrote, ‘and if courage alone can win—the result will be inevitable. But they need our help desperately.'

When the envoy landed back at New York's LaGuardia airport in February 1941, the new ambassador-designate to Britain, ‘Gil' Winant, called out to him as he descended from his plane: ‘Are they going to hold out?' Hopkins shouted back ‘Of course they are.' This was a self-consciously theatrical exchange for the benefit of the assembled throng of reporters, but nonetheless sincere. Thereafter, Hopkins's considerable influence upon the president was exercised towards gaining maximum American support for Britain. Londoner Vere Hodgson was among those who thrilled to a BBC broadcast by Roosevelt's envoy: ‘He finished with really glorious words of comfort: “People of Britain, people of the British Commonwealth of Nations, you are not fighting alone.” I felt after this the War was won.'

Yet, however successful was the Hopkins visit from a British perspective, it did not alter fundamentals. ‘
Winston is completely certain
of America's full help,' the Australian prime minister, Robert Menzies, wrote uncertainly during a visit to Chequers at the end of February 1941. ‘Is he right? I cannot say.' Franklin Roosevelt was conducting his nation's policy in accordance with a belief that he could not move faster than public opinion would allow. Such opinion was moving Britain's way. To the boundless relief of the prime minister, on 8 February the Lend-Lease Bill passed the House by 260 votes to 165, and on 8 March was endorsed by the Senate, sixty votes to thirteen. For months thereafter, the last of Britain's foreign exchange continued to be drained to pay for supplies—only 1 per
cent of war material used by Britain in 1941 represented fruits of Lend-Lease. But the new measure ensured that even when Britain's cash was exhausted, shipments kept coming. Importantly, 1940 Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie supported it—and Britain.

The president extracted for the British through Lend-Lease the most generous terms a US legislature would swallow, much preferable to the straight loans of World War I, which Britain alienated US opinion by failing to repay. A substantial minority of Americans, including many at the summits of industry and commerce, not merely opposed Roosevelt's policies, but hated the man. He perceived his own power as circumscribed, in a fashion which the prime minister underestimated. Unlike Churchill, Roosevelt never led a coalition government, though he included some prominent Republicans such as Henry Stimson in his cabinet. He always faced substantial opposition in Congress—sometimes only on lesser matters, but sometimes also on great ones. There was no doubt of his sincerity in desiring British victory. Having overcome his initial uncertainties about Churchill, partly thanks to Hopkins, by March 1941 he could declare to the American people: ‘In this historic crisis, Britain is blessed with a brilliant and great leader.' But Roosevelt considered himself lacking any mandate to dispatch American soldiers to fight in Europe. Until December 1941, while he provided increasing aid to Britain—‘We must become the great arsenal of democracy,' a phrase borrowed from the French economist Jean Monnet by way of the American judge Felix Frankfurter—he remained unwilling to lead a charge towards war. In this he was assuredly wise. If the United States had plunged into belligerence with Germany before Pearl Harbor, and even in the unlikely event that Roosevelt could have pushed a declaration of war through Congress, he would thereafter have led a divided country.