Franklin And Winston Part 11

Roosevelt started out with the Pacific, and Stalin replied that the Soviets "much appreciated what we were doing in that theatre, and that it was only the fact that the Germans fully engaged him that prevented him cooperating with us!" General Brooke wrote. "This was cheering news and implied Russian help as soon as Germany was defeated." The conversation inevitably turned to OVERLORD. Roosevelt said they must stand by the Quebec decision for a May invasion, but doing anything earlier in 1944 was out of the question because the Channel was such "a disagreeable body of water."

Churchill weighed in, noting pointedly that the British "had every reason to be thankful that the English Channel was such a disagreeable body of water"-a reference to 1940 and the first half of 1941, when the other two men at the table with Churchill were not in the fight, but he was.

Hopkins was watching the interplay of the three men with fascination, and his eyes fell on the one man with the power to break up the Roosevelt-Churchill friends.h.i.+p. "Hopkins noted that Stalin was grayer than when he had seen him last in the summer of 1941 and also much dressier, now wearing a uniform with gold epaulettes each bearing a large, white star fastened with a red pin," Sherwood wrote. "Stalin doodled and smoked during the meetings. His voice was quiet-barely audible."

He may have felt that he did not need to speak loudly to make his case. He knew what he wanted. Roosevelt asked Stalin his thoughts about operations in the Mediterranean-operations that, if undertaken, might mean delaying the cross-Channel attack. "Stalin replied that it seemed to him unwise to scatter the Allied effort," Harriman recalled. "He argued for treating Overlord as the main operation." France was the place to strike.

Churchill seemed game and delivered a determined speech about the preeminence of OVERLORD. "The enterprise was absorbing most of our preparations and resources," he recalled telling Roosevelt and Stalin. "The British and American Governments had now set themselves the task of carrying out a cross-Channel invasion in the late spring or summer of 1944. The forces which could be acc.u.mulated by that time amounted to about sixteen British and nineteen United States divisions-a total of thirty-five divisions."

After conjuring the power of OVERLORD, Churchill made a different case to his colleagues at the table; as Bohlen put it, his "real feelings then began to emerge."

"THE EARLY SPRING and summer of 1944," Churchill recalled saying, "were still six months away however, and the President and I had been asking ourselves what could be done during these six months with the resources available in the Mediterranean that would best take the weight off Russia, without postponing Overlord for more than perhaps a month or two." Might it be worth having the staffs look into what could be possible in the Mediterranean? Roosevelt said he "personally felt that nothing should be done to delay the carrying out of Overlord"-and a delay, he went on, "might be necessary if any operations in the eastern Mediterranean were undertaken." Churchill, however, would not give up on the other fronts. "I earnestly hoped that I should not be asked to agree to any such rigid timing of operations as the President had suggested," Churchill recalled. To the contrary, Bohlen noted, Churchill "said that he personally favored some flexibility in the exact date of Overlord, and proposed that the staffs examine the various possibilities in the morning. Stalin, for the first time a little grumpy, complained that he had not expected to discuss technical military questions and had no military staff, but Marshal Voros.h.i.+lov would do his best."

Churchill tried to put the best face on the disagreement, saying "although we were all great friends, it would be idle for us to delude ourselves that we saw eye to eye on all matters. Time and patience were necessary." There was, Churchill seemed to think, some hope. Perhaps, in the end, at the highest level, he could rescue British strategy from Roosevelt and Stalin.

FRESH FROM ROASTING turkeys and baking pumpkin pies in Cairo, Roosevelt's Potomac mess crew grilled steaks for dinner. After making martinis, Roosevelt gave one to Stalin and waited for a reaction. Stalin said nothing. Roosevelt finally asked him what he thought of the drink, and Stalin replied, "Well, all right, but it is cold on the stomach." The two of them were already playing to each other and excluding Churchill. "When I first got to Teheran, Stalin came to call on me," Roosevelt later told Daisy. "Of course I did not get up when he came into the room. We shook hands, & he sat down, and I caught him looking curiously at my legs and ankles. Later, I entertained him at dinner, and was sitting at the table when he & the others came in. When Stalin was seated, on my right, he turned to the interpreter & said: 'Tell the President that I now understand what it has meant for him to make the effort to come on such a long journey-Tell him that the next time I will go to him.' " Across culture, ideology, and temperament, they were trying to form a connection. (As it turned out, though, the "next time," at Yalta in 1945, Roosevelt would have to travel even farther.) The dinner conversation took a turn that Churchill did not like. Picking up on his earlier remarks to Roosevelt, Stalin denounced the French. "The entire French ruling cla.s.s, he said, was rotten to the core," Harriman recalled. "Having handed their country over to Hitler, the French now were actively helping the common enemy, and, in Stalin's view, they deserved no consideration from the Allies. It would be unjust and positively dangerous to leave them in possession of their former empire, Stalin insisted."

Churchill n.o.bly rose to the defense of his downtrodden ally across the Channel. "When Churchill protested that he could not conceive of the civilized world without a flouris.h.i.+ng France," Harriman recalled, Stalin brushed Churchill aside. Stalin knew from his meeting with the president, of course, that this tracked with Roosevelt's view (in fact, Roosevelt said at the table that he "in part agreed" with Stalin), leaving Churchill-not for the first time, or the last-as the odd man out.

Turning to Germany, Stalin "seemed to favor dismemberment and the harshest possible treatment to prevent the recrudescence of German militarism," Bohlen noted. Stalin claimed he did not think the country could be trusted to remain peaceful, and, Harriman recalled, "told of visiting Leipzig in 1907 when some two hundred German workers failed to appear at an important rally because, Stalin said, there was no controller on the railway platform to punch their tickets on arrival. Without properly punched tickets, these stalwart representatives of the German working cla.s.s were too timid to leave the station. There was, as he saw it, no hope of changing a popular mentality so totally obedient to authority." No one in the room appears to have been bold enough, or impolite enough, to point out the irony of a Soviet dictator making this argument about another nation. The president thought the whole evening "very jolly" until, for him, it came to an abrupt end.

"ROOSEVELT WAS ABOUT to say something else when suddenly, in the flick of an eye, he turned green and great drops of sweat began to bead off his face; he put a shaky hand to his forehead," Bohlen recalled. "We were all caught by surprise. The President had made no complaint, and none of us had detected any sign of discomfort." It was about half-past ten in the evening. Mike Reilly, John Boettiger, and Vice Admiral Ross McIntire, the president's physician, were dining outside the emba.s.sy when word came of the collapse.

"I tried to ask questions but they practically pushed me into the car and Mike said, 'We've got to hurry, the Boss is sick,' " Boettiger later told Anna. "My heart sunk at that and we dashed off to the Soviet emba.s.sy. . . . We rushed up to the house and to FDR's room. . . . Ross went in immediately to see what was what. The P. had been feeling fine all day but after dinner was over got to feeling faint. Ross said he had a lot of gas on his stomach, but he made him quite comfortable and we were all greatly relieved." Chatting with his son-in-law for ten minutes, Roosevelt appeared pleased with how the day had gone-a day on which Churchill had felt at least occasionally overlooked and contradicted. "He was greatly set up over the day's events," Boettiger wrote Anna, "felt a great deal had been accomplished and he was thoroughly satisfied in every way."

Back in the conference room, where the guests had gone after Roosevelt was wheeled away, Churchill, perhaps hoping to keep the Big Three from becoming the Big Two, had his own chance to talk with Stalin without Roosevelt. Sitting on a sofa, they engaged in a substantive exchange about Germany and Poland. The gossipy American take on the scene, however, had an anti-Churchill flavor. "I learned later that the P.M. had done most of the talking," wrote Boettiger.

"I might have added, but did not, that we had been the longest in the war"

Churchill's sixty-ninth-birthday dinner at Teheran, November 30, 1943 ANXIOUS TO RECONNECT with his friend to compare notes, Churchill reached out to Roosevelt the next morning. "As I knew that Stalin and Roosevelt had already had a private conversation, and were of course staying in the same building, I suggested that the President and I might lunch together before the second plenary meeting that afternoon," Churchill recalled. "Roosevelt however declined, and sent Harriman to me to explain that he did not want Stalin to know that he and I were meeting privately. I was surprised at this," Churchill added, "for I thought we all three should treat each other with equal confidence."

This second rebuff stung, too. "It is not like him," Churchill said to Moran. Roosevelt was refusing to break bread with someone whom he had just toasted at Thanksgiving in the warmest possible terms. Suddenly uncertain of his place in Roosevelt's world-typically, Churchill seems to have suppressed Roosevelt's springtime subterfuge with Stalin, which had foreshadowed this autumnal drama-Churchill was keeping count, noting: "The President after luncheon had a further interview with Stalin and Molotov, at which many important matters were discussed, including particularly Mr. Roosevelt's plan for the government of the post-war world."

In his quarters with Stalin at three forty-five P.M. on November 29, Roosevelt spun out his vision of the Four Policemen and a United Nations organization with an executive committee to settle disputes and enforce order. Stalin appeared interested but noncommittal, wondering whether such a body's decisions would be "binding." Roosevelt's reply: "Yes and no"-a sign that there was still much work to be done. But the conversations were continuing. (On the final day of the meeting, Stalin would weigh in for "a world-wide and not regional" organization.) The two then went next door, where Churchill had a presentation to make. In a gesture to its unlikely ally, Britain had commissioned a ceremonial saber, the Sword of Stalingrad, to honor the Soviet resistance to Hitler. Despite his likely curiosity about what had transpired between Roosevelt and Stalin moments before, Churchill, as always, drew rea.s.surance from ceremony.

"When, after a few sentences of explanation, I handed the splendid weapon to Marshal Stalin, he raised it in a most impressive gesture to his lips and kissed the blade," Churchill recalled. "It was carried from the room in great solemnity, escorted by a Russian guard of honour. As this procession moved away, I saw the President sitting at the side of the room, obviously stirred by the ceremony." The moment of unity dissipated fast as the three sat down to business.

THE CONFERENCE, Chip Bohlen believed, "was approaching a crisis; there was a real question whether it was to be a success. At a meeting of military chiefs a few hours earlier, the British, at first hesitant, were raising additional objections to fixing the date for Overlord."

Stalin, as Moran had suggested on Sunday, missed little. "Stalin would have made a fine poker player," Ismay wrote. "His expression was inscrutable as the Sphinx and it was impossible to know what he was thinking about. He did not speak much, but his interventions, made in a quiet voice and without any gestures, were direct and decided. Sometimes they were so abrupt as to be rude. He left no doubt in anyone's mind that he was master in his own house." He spoke that way now. More than two years of Allied debate, changing minds, tactical feints, and evasive cables were coming to a head around the green-covered table.

"Who will command Overlord?" Stalin asked. Roosevelt admitted that this was not settled: The president was trying to choose between Marshall and Eisenhower.

Watching the uncomfortable exchange between Roosevelt and Stalin, Churchill could not have missed the tension. "Stalin said bluntly," Churchill recalled, "that the operation would come to nought unless one man was placed in charge of all the preparation for it." Stalin waved off the news that a British officer, Lieutenant General Frederick Morgan, was to be the chief staff officer to the still unnamed supreme commander. "Stalin made it plain that until the supreme commander was appointed he could not take seriously the promise of a cross-Channel invasion," noted Harriman. "For him the appointment was a specific a.s.surance that the invasion would take place." Roosevelt, who prided himself on being practical and hardheaded, may have been embarra.s.sed by the challenge from Stalin, fearing that the lack of a definitive answer could make him look as soft as Churchill on the larger question of the invasion. Reading the conference doc.u.ments later, Robert Sherwood, a gifted observer, wrote that Roosevelt must have been "sorely tempted" to name one of the generals then and there and move on, but another part of the Roosevelt character-the instinct to wait and see-won out. Roosevelt could guess the conference was going to end with OVERLORD as the next great commitment, so he absorbed the blow and let the conversation roll on. Sherwood sensed the currents at work: "Churchill employed all the debater's arts, the brilliant locutions and circ.u.mlocutions, of which he was a master, and Stalin wielded his bludgeon with relentless indifference to all the dodges and feints of his practiced adversary; while Roosevelt sat in the middle, by common consent the moderator, arbitrator and final authority."

Stalin pushed for a firm date in May-no later. "I don't care if it is the 1st, 15th, or 20th, but a definite date is important," Stalin told Roosevelt and Churchill in what Bohlen thought was "an almost matter-of-fact tone."

CHURCHILL'S LAST CHANCE was at hand. Stalin, with Roosevelt's tacit and sometimes explicit help, was leading the Allied cause from the east to the west, to a dangerous operation that evoked memories of the debacles of a generation before. After relighting his cigar, Churchill plunged ahead. "He talked of keeping the enemy busy by capturing Rhodes, then starving out the other Greek islands and reopening the Dardanelles," Harriman recalled. "If Turkey agreed to enter the war . . . these operations could be carried out with comparatively few troops. But it would be necessary to keep in the Mediterranean some sixty-eight landing craft needed for the cross-Channel invasion, which could force a delay of a month or two in that operation. He was, therefore, reluctant to give Stalin his unalterable commitment that Overlord would be scheduled for May."

There was much back-and-forth, but in the end Roosevelt came down closer to Stalin's position than to Churchill's. OVERLORD would be the "dominating operation." That was that. Churchill had lost. Roosevelt had chosen Stalin over him.

"I wish to pose a very direct question to the Prime Minister about 'Overlord,' " Stalin said, eyeing Churchill. "Do the Prime Minister and the British Staff really believe in 'Overlord'?"

Even when he was under stress, Churchill's eloquence did not desert him. "Provided the conditions previously stated for 'Overlord' are established when the time comes," Churchill replied, "it will be our stern duty to hurl across the Channel against the Germans every sinew of our strength."

The meeting broke up. "Churchill was irked, to put it mildly, by Stalin's pointed question," Bohlen noted. Moran found a gloomy Churchill getting ready for dinner. "Winston was pacing the room, mumbling to himself: 'Nothing more can be done here,' he muttered." It was going to be a long night: Stalin was the host for the evening. "You are late, Sir," his valet told Churchill.

"b.l.o.o.d.y," Churchill said, then left for the banquet.

STALIN GAVE A cla.s.sic Russian dinner, with rivers of vodka and wine. The prime minister also seemed to be on the menu. Stalin "overlooked no opportunity to needle Churchill," Bohlen said. And Harriman noted needling "without mercy," with Stalin implying that Churchill-who had made the case against Hitler earlier, and better, than anyone-was "nursing some secret affection for the Germans" and "wanted a soft peace." Hard words to take from a man who had cut a deal with Hitler four years before. With a worsening cold, about to turn sixty-nine, and tired from the day, Churchill could not find the right key in which to respond. "Instead of getting honestly indignant or pa.s.sing the teasing off as a joke, Churchill adopted a plaintive tone that conveyed a sense of guilt," Bohlen recalled. "The performance was certainly not one of Churchill's best."

Stalin's dinner-table strategy seemed designed to cast Churchill's reservations about a direct a.s.sault on France as part of a broader pattern of weakness. "Stalin's remarks at the dinner included one to the effect that he and FDR saw eye to eye on things," noted John Boettiger, "but that Churchill had softened up between wars."

Watching Churchill's distress at dinner, Roosevelt apparently offered no help, no rea.s.suring gesture, no kind word. "I did not like the att.i.tude of the President, who not only backed Stalin but seemed to enjoy the Churchill-Stalin exchanges," Bohlen recalled. "Roosevelt should have come to the defense of a close friend and ally, who was really being put upon by Stalin." Harriman noticed the same unattractive streak in Roosevelt's character: "He always enjoyed other people's discomfort. I think it is fair to say that it never bothered him very much when other people were unhappy." As long as Roosevelt was cheerful and getting his way-and the two were connected-he could live with the fact that others might be off balance, which was the case tonight. "I have gathered that we and the Russians are in practically complete agreement," Boettiger wrote Anna, "and that the British are not too happy about it."

The Stalin-Churchill conversation was, Bohlen noted, "acrid." Facing Stalin and feeling removed from Roosevelt's...o...b..t-he had still not met alone with the president in Teheran-Churchill divined a larger political truth in his personal dilemma. "I realized at Teheran for the first time what a small nation we are," he said later. "There I sat with the great Russian bear on one side of me, with paws outstretched, and on the other side sat the great American buffalo, and between the two sat the poor little English donkey who was the only one, the only one of the three, who knew the right way home."

Throughout the edgy exchanges, Roosevelt was either silent or sided with Stalin, leaving Churchill on his own. Roosevelt had his plan: Under no circ.u.mstances should he be seen joining forces with Churchill against Stalin, even at the dinner table. Churchill was taking it all well, but then Stalin began to joke about "a serious and even deadly aspect of the punishment to be inflicted upon the Germans," Churchill recalled. "The German General Staff, he said, must be liquidated." Fifty thousand, Stalin said, should be "rounded up and shot."

Churchill was appalled. Stalin, others in the room believed, was speaking in what was, for him, a jocular vein. He made the remark about the fifty thousand Germans, Bohlen said, "with a sardonic smile and wave of the hand."

Churchill, however, believed Stalin was proposing a serious plan for retribution. And Churchill had had enough.

"The British Parliament and public will never tolerate ma.s.s executions," Churchill told the room. "Even if in war pa.s.sion they allowed them to begin, they would turn violently against those responsible after the first butchery had taken place. The Soviets must be under no delusion on this point."

Stalin did not budge. "Fifty thousand," he said, "must be shot."

By his own account, Churchill was now "deeply angered" and said: "I would rather be taken out into the garden here and now and be shot myself than sully my own and my country's honour by such infamy."

It was all going wrong, and Roosevelt, who, Boettiger recalled, "had seen the twinkle in Stalin's eye," sailed into the conversation. Signaling his own opinion of his role as arbiter of the Allied fate, he adopted Stalin's tone. "As usual, it seems to be my function to mediate this dispute," Roosevelt said. So he would offer a compromise-only forty-nine thousand German officers should be shot. "By this he hoped, no doubt, to reduce the whole matter to ridicule," Churchill recalled, and the prime minister noticed that "Eden also made signs and gestures intended to rea.s.sure me that it was all a joke." The crisis was beginning to pa.s.s when Elliott Roosevelt, of all people, made matters worse. Roosevelt's son had not been asked to the occasion but had been spotted lurking by the door and invited in. Just after his father spoke, Elliott, who had been deep into the champagne, in his own recollection rose "somewhat uncertainly" and, Churchill recalled, "made a speech, saying how cordially he agreed with Marshal Stalin's plan and how sure he was that the United States Army would support it."

This "intrusion," as Churchill called it, sent the prime minister into a fury, and he stormed from the table. Churchill could not afford to be honest about his frustration with the president, so he may have overreacted to Roosevelt's son: After all, Churchill had no other way of expressing his mounting resentment about how he was being treated by the man he had thought was his friend.

With no plan or destination in mind, Churchill marched into another room, which, he recalled, "was in semi-darkness. I had not been there a minute before hands were clapped upon my shoulders from behind, and there was Stalin, with Molotov at his side, both grinning broadly, and eagerly declaring that they were only playing, and that nothing of a serious character had entered their heads." Churchill was touched. "Stalin has a very captivating manner when he chooses to use it, and I never saw him do so to such an extent as at this moment."

Churchill agreed to rejoin Stalin and Roosevelt but never conceded he was wrong. "Although I was not then, and am not now, fully convinced that all was chaff and there was no serious intent lurking behind," he reflected in 1951, "I consented to return, and the rest of the evening pa.s.sed pleasantly."

STILL, IT HAD been a tempestuous day. That Churchill was so upset he bolted from the company of his allies suggests the scope of the emotional storm raging at Teheran and the degree to which Roosevelt had successfully distanced himself from Churchill. If Roosevelt sympathized with Churchill's feelings, he did not show it. He rather enjoyed the spectacle. "Joe teased the P.M. like a boy," Roosevelt reported to his cabinet, "and it was very amusing."

IN THE MORNING, Churchill regrouped. Two could play this game. "The fact that the President was in private contact with Marshal Stalin and dwelling at the Soviet Emba.s.sy, and that he had avoided ever seeing me alone since we left Cairo, in spite of our hitherto intimate relations and the way in which our vital affairs were interwoven, led me to seek a direct personal interview with Stalin," Churchill recalled of November 30.

Alone with Stalin, Churchill professed devotion to the United States and then suggested Roosevelt was also a stumbling block to the Second Front. "I began by reminding the Marshal that I was half American and had a great affection for the American people," Churchill recalled. "What I was going to say was not to be understood as disparaging to the Americans and I would be perfectly loyal towards them, but there were things which it was better to say outright, between two persons."

The possible OVERLORD delay, he suggested to Stalin, was more their fault than his. The Americans were pressing an amphibious operation against j.a.pan in the Bay of Bengal, and "I was not keen about it," Churchill told Stalin. If not for that, there would be enough resources to carry on in the Mediterranean and launch OVERLORD as scheduled. Then, playing to Stalin's point about a supreme commander for OVERLORD, Churchill said "it was vital to get an early decision on the appointment of the Commander-in-Chief." Churchill solemnly a.s.sured Stalin that he "had urged" Roosevelt "to decide before we all left Teheran." Stalin, Churchill reported, "said that was good."

With Churchill, Stalin was blunt about why he was so insistent on OVERLORD at the soonest possible date. "If there were no operations in May 1944, then the Red Army would think that there would be no operations at all that year," Stalin said. "The weather would be bad and there would be transport difficulties. . . . If there was no big change in the European war in 1944, it would be very difficult for the Russians to carry on. They were war-weary. He feared that a feeling of isolation might develop in the Red Army"-a veiled threat, but still a threat, of a separate peace with Hitler.

The Big Three lunched together, and Roosevelt read the Allied recommendations aloud: "We will launch Overlord during May, in conjunction with a supporting operation against the South of France on the largest scale that is permitted by the landing craft available at that time." In his diary, Roosevelt wrote: "The conferences have been going well-tho' I found I had to go along with the Russians on Military plans. This morning the British came along too, to my great relief."

IT WAS CHURCHILL'S sixty-ninth birthday, and his joy at being in the arena-he called it a "crowded and memorable day" on which he transacted "some of the most important business with which I have ever been concerned"-was mixed with flashes of pride. In his memoirs, he tried to be lighthearted about the preparations for the dinner that night, but he could not keep from betraying a note of resentment about his declining role in the alliance, and his remarks echoed his words with Harriman on Sunday. "Hitherto we had a.s.sembled for our conferences or meals in the Soviet Emba.s.sy," Churchill recalled. "I had claimed however that I should be the host at the third dinner, which should be held in the British Legation. This could not well be disputed. Great Britain and myself both came first alphabetically, and in seniority I was four or five years older than Roosevelt or Stalin. We were by centuries the longest established of the three Governments; I might have added, but did not, that we had been the longest in the war; and finally, November 30 was my birthday." Note the not very well suppressed anger: "I might have added, but did not"-except for posterity in his memoirs-"that we had been the longest in the war."

It was, Sarah Churchill said, "a never-to-be-forgotten party." Chip Bohlen admired the scene. "The table was set with British elegance," he wrote. "The crystal and silver sparkled in the candlelight." Roosevelt sat on Churchill's right, Stalin on his left. "Together we controlled practically all the naval and three-quarters of all the air forces in the world, and could direct armies of nearly twenty millions of men, engaged in the most terrible of wars that had yet occurred in human history," Churchill recalled. "I could not help rejoicing at the long way we had come on the road to victory since the summer of 1940, when we had been alone, and, apart from the Navy and the Air, practically unarmed, against the triumphant and unbroken might of Germany and Italy, with almost all Europe and its resources in their grasp."

Churchill and Roosevelt wore black tie, Stalin a uniform. "Gla.s.ses were never permitted to stand empty and the champagne consumed would float a battles.h.i.+p!" John Boettiger wrote home. To Sarah, Stalin was "a frightening figure with his slit, bear eyes," yet tonight he seemed jovial. "Specks of light danced in his eyes like cold suns.h.i.+ne on dark waters," she noted. "He pounced on every remark with a dry and often sly humour." Usually, the target was Churchill. "When the President spoke, Stalin listened closely with deference," recalled Averell Harriman, "whereas he did not hesitate to interrupt or stick a knife into Churchill whenever he had the chance."

Aware of the drama of the occasion, the "little English donkey" rose to toast Roosevelt and Stalin. Roosevelt, Churchill said, "had devoted his entire life to the cause of defending the weak and the helpless." His Soviet guest, Churchill said, had earned the t.i.tle "Stalin the Great." Roosevelt then spoke of his "long admiration for Winston Churchill and his joy in the friends.h.i.+p which had developed between them in the midst of their common efforts in this war."

AFTER CHURCHILL DELIVERED what he, as host, had planned to be the last toast of the evening, Stalin asked if he might have the floor. And thus the focus of the party moved from the guest of honor and his nation's sacrifices to Roosevelt and America.

"I want to tell you, from the Russian point of view, what the President and the United States have done to win the war," Stalin said. "The most important things in this war are machines. The United States has proven that it can turn out from 8,000 to 10,000 airplanes per month. Russia can only turn out, at most, 3,000 airplanes a month. England turns out 3,000 to 3,500, which are princ.i.p.ally heavy bombers. The United States, therefore, is a country of machines. Without the use of those machines, through Lend Lease, we would lose this war." True enough, but without Churchill, much of Europe might have been lost to Hitler before Roosevelt and Stalin were in the fight at all.

ROOSEVELT APPARENTLY WENT to bed that night still worried he had not truly broken through to Stalin. He needed to feel he had charmed Stalin and thought he had failed so far. When he got back to Was.h.i.+ngton, he told the story of the attempt to Frances Perkins-an account that mixed pride and evident hunger for control.

"You know, the Russians are interesting people," Roosevelt said to Perkins. "For the first three days I made absolutely no progress. I couldn't get any personal connection with Stalin, although I had done everything he asked me to do. I had stayed at his Emba.s.sy, gone to his dinners, been introduced to his ministers and generals. He was correct, stiff, solemn, not smiling, nothing human to get hold of. I felt pretty discouraged. If it was all going to be official paper work, there was no sense in my having made this long journey which the Russians had wanted. They couldn't come to America or any place in Europe for it. I had come there to accommodate Stalin. I felt pretty discouraged because I thought I was making no personal headway. What we were doing could have been done by the foreign ministers."

Roosevelt had fretted about his next move. "I thought it over all night and made up my mind I had to do something desperate," he said. "I couldn't stay in Teheran forever. I had to cut through this icy surface so that later I could talk by telephone or letter in a personal way. I had scarcely seen Churchill alone during the conference. I had a feeling that the Russians did not feel right about seeing us conferring together in a language which we understood and they didn't."

Roosevelt decided on his course. It was, he knew, a maneuver for political gain executed on an emotional battlefield. "On my way to the conference room that morning we caught up with Winston," the president recalled, and he put Churchill on warning.

"Winston, I hope you won't be sore at me for what I am going to do," the president said to him. Churchill, Roosevelt recalled, "s.h.i.+fted his cigar and grunted."

"I began almost as soon as we got into the conference room," Roosevelt said. "I talked privately with Stalin. I didn't say anything that I hadn't said before, but it appeared quite chummy and confidential, enough so that the other Russians joined us to listen. Still no smile."

By now, Churchill must have seen what was coming.

"Then I said," Roosevelt recalled to Perkins, "lifting my hand up to cover a whisper (which of course had to be interpreted), 'Winston is cranky this morning, he got up on the wrong side of the bed.'

"A vague smile pa.s.sed over Stalin's eyes, and I decided I was on the right track."

Encouraged, Roosevelt picked away at Churchill. "As soon as I sat down at the conference table, I began to tease Churchill about his Britishness, about John Bull, about his cigars, about his habits. It began to register with Stalin. Winston got red and scowled, and the more he did so, the more Stalin smiled. Finally Stalin broke out into a deep, hearty guffaw, and for the first time in three days I saw light."

Roosevelt pushed even more. "I kept it up until Stalin was laughing with me, and it was then that I called him 'Uncle Joe.' He would have thought me fresh the day before, but that day he laughed and came over and shook my hand. . . . From that time on our relations were personal, and Stalin himself indulged in an occasional witticism. The ice was broken and we talked like men and brothers."

Roosevelt may have exaggerated in his retelling of the tale to Perkins, but there is other evidence such a scene occurred. "I asked someone who was present if this episode actually had taken place as frequently described," wrote John Gunther. "You bet it did," Gunther's source said, "and it wasn't funny, either!"

Churchill himself, Roosevelt said, "behaved very decently afterward," but Churchill's stoicism was a brave front. "My father was awfully wounded at Teheran," said Mary Soames. "For reasons of state, it seems to me President Roosevelt was out to charm Stalin, and my father was the odd man out. He felt that very keenly." After a further moment's reflection, she added: "My father was very hurt, I think."

AFTER THE TWO had left Teheran, they returned to Cairo; on his way home to Was.h.i.+ngton from there, Roosevelt told Eisenhower he would command OVERLORD. Meanwhile Churchill was suffering from pneumonia and ended up convalescing in Marrakech, in the villa where he and Roosevelt had spent the evening at the beginning of the year. It was a scary time for the Churchills. The prime minister could not remember ever feeling so tired. He did not have the strength to paint. "Even tottering from the motor-car to a picnic luncheon in lovely weather amid the foothills of the Atlas was limited to eighty or a hundred yards," Churchill recalled. "I pa.s.sed eighteen hours out of the twenty four supine." Churchill still found himself drawn to the war-"events," he said, "continued to offer irresistible distraction." Clementine accepted his failure as a patient with good grace. "This is his day: He works in bed all the morning and gets up just in time to go for an expedition or for lunch in the garden, after which he goes for a drive," she told Mary. "Then he goes back again to bed till dinner. We try to prevent him sitting up late, but I am afraid he does." During his illness, Clementine told a friend: "I never think of after the war. You see, I think Winston will die when it's over."

AT THREE O'CLOCK on Christmas Eve afternoon, Roosevelt was wheeled into his presidential library at Hyde Park to deliver a fireside chat on Teheran. "The room was a mess, with microphones on his desk, Klieg lights facing him from every direction," Daisy noted. There were cables on the floor, and Eleanor, Anna, and Trude Lash tried to make themselves comfortable on the floor behind FDR's desk in the crowded room. Sitting with his family and friends on this fair but cold day in Dutchess County, Roosevelt explained the strange hour of the address to his listeners with a conceit that once again told Americans they were now a global force, whether they liked it or not. "That this is truly a world war was demonstrated to me when arrangements were being made with our overseas broadcasting agencies for the time for me to speak today to our soldiers and sailors and marines and merchant seamen in every part of the world," the president said into the microphones. "In fixing the time for this broadcast, we took into consideration that at this moment here in the United States, and in the Caribbean, and on the northeast coast of South America, it is afternoon. In Alaska and in Hawaii and the mid-Pacific, it is still morning. In Iceland, in Great Britain, in North Africa, in Italy and the Middle East, it is now evening. In the Southwest Pacific, in Australia, in China and Burma and India, it is already Christmas Day. So we can correctly say that at this moment, in those Far Eastern parts where Americans are fighting, today is tomorrow."

In a generous gesture to the ailing Churchill, Roosevelt said: "Of course, as you all know, Mr. Churchill and I have happily met many times before, and we know and understand each other very well." Perhaps still trying to soothe any lingering wounds, the president added: "Indeed, Mr. Churchill has become known and beloved by many millions of Americans, and the heartfelt prayers of all of us have been with this great citizen of the world in his recent illness." Kind thoughts, expressed in the most public of forums.

Then Roosevelt turned to the conversations at Teheran, glossing over the give-and-take around the green table. "Within three days of intense and consistently amicable discussions"-they were not, of course, consistently amicable from Churchill's point of view, or even from Roosevelt's, but this was no time to reveal any tensions within the alliance-"we agreed on every point concerned with the launching of a gigantic attack upon Germany."

As Churchill had done so often with the British, Roosevelt tried to prepare his people for hard work ahead. "The war is now reaching the stage where we shall all have to look forward to large casualty lists-dead, wounded, and missing," FDR said. "War entails just that. There is no easy road to victory. And the end is not yet in sight."

The paragraphs of the speech rolling on, the president got to a notable pa.s.sage, one that conveyed the sense of what Roosevelt had boasted about to Frances Perkins without going into the details of his personal maneuvering at the meeting. With no mention of Churchill-or of his teasing the prime minister "about his Britishness, about John Bull, about his cigars, about his habits"-the president said: "To use an American and somewhat ungrammatical colloquialism, I may say that I 'got along fine' with Marshal Stalin. He is a man who combines a tremendous, relentless determination with a stalwart good humor. I believe he is truly representative of the heart and soul of Russia; and I believe that we are going to get along very well with him and the Russian people-very well indeed." It was, after all, Christmas-a time for wishes.

"There are wonderful sights to see with all these thousands of vessels"

Allied troops strike the Normandy coast on June 6, 1944.

CHAPTER 10.

THE HOUR WAS.

NOW STRIKING.

Both Men Battle Their Mortality-.

Tension and Triumph on D-Day-.

A Fight over the Next Front.

"IT'S BEEN A wonderful year in many ways: a complete change in the war situation," Alexander Cadogan wrote in his diary on New Year's Eve 1943. "Germany is beat-but when? That cowed herd of people can do nothing to help themselves, except fight like caged rats. And if they continue to do that, it will take us a long time to wipe them out. They may break at any moment, but I don't expect it. Meanwhile, I suppose we must, in the spring, embark on the most hazardous enterprise ever undertaken. If it goes wrong, it will set us back 2 years. I don't mean to be pessimistic, but it will be an awful gamble."

It was to be a twilight year for Roosevelt and Churchill, a time when light and dark were intermingled-a period of victories and casualties, of sentimental moments together and sour personal exchanges. The most significant act of the war was still to come, and, as Cadogan saw, a debacle in France would exact a high price. Churchill's government could be on the line: Remember the ferocity of questions about Singapore and Tobruk. Roosevelt faced a November election, and a defeat in northern France might tilt the race to New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican nominee.

The tone of the friends.h.i.+p between Roosevelt and Churchill grew autumnal in 1944. They joked and argued, then consoled and comforted each other. For both men, what was once charming or not worth mentioning could now grate, and after Teheran they were sometimes waspish about each other in private. "Winston has developed a tendency to make long speeches which are repet.i.tious of long speeches which he has made before," Roosevelt told Sam Rosenman-"rather tartly," Rosenman remembered. One evening during the 19431944 holidays, Churchill and Beaverbrook were musing about World War I and the conflict still raging-familiar topics around Churchill's table. At one point Churchill turned to his aide Commander C. R. "Tommy" Thompson and said, "But, Tommy, you will bear witness that I do not repeat my stories so often as my dear friend, the President of the United States."

For all the tensions, and there were many, each could still be warm to the other when together and speak fondly of the other when apart-a sign that, aside from the politics of the alliance, there was a personal bond at work that, though often tested, held them together.

AFTER A FAMILY Christmas at Hyde Park, Roosevelt was, Daisy said, "feeling a little miserably." By December 30, Anna and Daisy found he had a temperature and seemed "hectic & flushed. He felt 'at loose ends.' " At eleven-thirty on New Year's Eve, Roosevelt forced himself out of bed, put on a white bathrobe, and joined guests in his study. A fire was burning, and butlers arrived with eggnog, a drinks tray, and cakes. "Mrs. R. . . . looked pale & tired," Daisy said, "but has a lovely expression-With her & Anna I kept seeing in their faces the constant thought of their men overseas-What a pall hangs over them all-"

"Auld Lang Syne" was playing on the radio. Then Roosevelt said, "Our first toast will be the U.S. of A." Henry Morgenthau added: "The President of the U.S., G.o.d bless him." Mrs. Roosevelt then raised her gla.s.s: "Our boys overseas."

The Churchills were having their own complicated holiday in Marrakech. Clementine called the villa "a mixture of Arabian Nights and Hollywood," but Churchill was not bouncing back as quickly as he would like. "He is gaining strength every day, but very slowly indeed," Clementine wrote the family back home. "He is disappointed that his recovery is slow; but when in the end he is quite well, the slowness of his convalescence may be a blessing in disguise, as it may make him a little more careful when he has to travel." Like many families in close quarters, the Churchills got on one another's nerves. The day after New Year's was, Clementine said, "bad temper day! Everyone was cross-me especially. Sarah was very sensible and said 'Let's have a bad day, and make a fresh start tomorrow.' So that is what we are doing."

Churchill returned to England in mid-January 1944. "I have now got home again safely," he told Roosevelt on January 18, confiding that he was "all right except for being rather shaky on my pins." Pamela kept Averell and Kathleen Harriman in the loop, too, writing: "The P.M. is back today-It's always a relief to know he's safe home." Churchill was out of the woods: "Now thanked we all our G.o.d," Mary wrote.

IT WAS THE blackest of times for Harry Hopkins. He had married Louise Macy, a former fas.h.i.+on editor, in the president's study on July 30, 1942. (Hopkins had three sons by a first marriage that had ended in divorce, and a daughter, Diana, by his second wife, Barbara. Barbara had died of cancer in 1937.) Roosevelt wanted Harry and Louise and Diana to stay on and live in the White House, as Harry and Diana had since May 1940. "It seemed to me very hard on them to be obliged to start their married life in someone else's house, even though that house happened to be the White House," wrote Eleanor, who knew something about starting a marriage under another person's control. "Franklin finally said that the most important thing in the world at that time was the conduct of the war and it was absolutely necessary that Harry be in the house. That settled that."