Franklin And Winston Part 15

Henry Morgenthau joined the party for supper on the night of April 11. They had a bowl of caviar from Stalin, but once that was gone there was only uninspiring fare-meatb.a.l.l.s and waffles with chocolate sauce for dessert. The evening improved, Shoumatoff recalled, "as Roosevelt and Morgenthau began recalling different amusing and entertaining incidents about Churchill."

IN LONDON THAT WEEK, Churchill was writing Clementine, promising her that he would "let you know about the President's moves." Attending an April 9 war cabinet meeting, Churchill "said that he hoped the day of the celebrations would be known as VE-day," according to the minutes. From the Soviet Union, Clementine cabled Churchill: "I miss my quiet evenings with you"-as rare as they were. Churchill had added this note in his own hand to a long letter to her: "My darling one I think always of you & am so proud of you." Roosevelt and Eleanor were in touch, if in a more restrained way. "I carried on my usual round of duties," Eleanor said of that week, "hearing by telephone daily from Warm Springs. All the news was good."

As Wednesday, April 11, drew to a close, Roosevelt was listening to ghost stories around the fire. Shoumatoff had the floor with a spooky saga about the black pearl necklace of Catherine the Great. "Upon finis.h.i.+ng my story, another was about to be told when Dr. Bruenn and his a.s.sistant arrived," she recalled. "The President, like a little boy, asked to stay up longer, but finally consented to retire, telling me he would be ready for my painting in the morning."

It had been a good day. Roosevelt took his gruel and, settling into bed, said: "Now I'm all relaxed again!"

EARLY ON THURSDAY, April 12, Roosevelt read old newspapers while he waited for the new editions to arrive from Atlanta. In London, Churchill would take Bernard Baruch, the American financier, to dinner at the Savoy with the Other Club that evening. "Churchill talked with admiration about the President," Baruch recalled, "and about Harry Hopkins, of whom he was also very fond."

Roosevelt was dressed and brought into the living room. "His colour was good & he looked smiling & happy & ready for anything," wrote Daisy. He was looking out at the sunlight as Bill Ha.s.sett arrived with the mail. His feet up on a wicker stool, his card table before him, Roosevelt set to work.

At about twelve-forty, the tray with midday gruel was brought in. "He interrupted his reading for a moment & took some gruel," Daisy noted, "continued his reading, took more gruel." Roosevelt told the women: "We have fifteen minutes more to work." Daisy was crocheting; Shoumatoff was painting; Lucy sat nearby; Polly was putting water in a bowl of roses in her room.

Daisy s.h.i.+fted her gaze from her sewing to Roosevelt. "F seemed to be looking for something: his head forward, his hands fumbling-I went forward & looked into his face."

"Have you dropped your cigarette?" she asked him.

"I have a terrific pain in the back of my head," Roosevelt said.

"I told him to [put] his head back on his chair," Daisy recalled, but he could no longer control what he did. It was one-fifteen, and the president of the United States was suffering a cerebral hemorrhage.

Daisy reached for Roosevelt's telephone-it sat next to his chair, connecting him to the world he had governed until that moment-to call for Dr. Bruenn as the president was carried to bed.

Daisy opened his collar and clutched his right hand. "Two or three times he rolled his head from side to side, opened his eyes," Suckley recalled. "Polly thinks he looked at us all in turn. He may have, I could see no signs of real recognition in those eyes-twice he drew up the left side of his face, as if in pain." Lucy tried to help, waving camphor beneath his nose. Nothing worked. Soon Bruenn rushed in.

"We must pack and go," Lucy said to Shoumatoff. Franklin Roosevelt's secrets would be kept.

They went across the yard. By two-thirty, Lucy and Shoumatoff were off.

ELEANOR WAS IN the White House discussing the United Nations conference with an adviser to the American delegation when Polly Delano rang Was.h.i.+ngton. "We are worried about Franklin, he has had a fainting spell," she told Eleanor. Eleanor talked to Dr. McIntire, who was in contact with Bruenn and suggested Eleanor keep an engagement at a benefit at the Sulgrave Club. They would fly together to Warm Springs that night. McIntire, Eleanor said, "was not alarmed." At three thirty-five, Roosevelt stopped breathing.

Churchill and Baruch, who knew nothing of this, were still at the Savoy. Lucy wiped tears away as her car moved toward Aiken.

At the Sulgrave, Eleanor was called to the telephone. It was Steve Early, asking her to return to the White House. Ever dutiful, Eleanor said her good-byes at the party and then sat, she recalled, "with clenched hands" as she was driven home. "I knew down in my heart that something dreadful had happened."

In a soft southern spring, he slipped away. Just sixty-three years old, Franklin Roosevelt was dead.

STEVE EARLY BROKE the news to Eleanor at the White House. She sent a telegram to her sons, all of whom were overseas. "Father slept away. He would expect you to carry on and finish your jobs."

The Other Club had adjourned. Churchill was in the Annexe. "I am very glad your visit to Leningrad was so pleasant and interesting," he was writing to Clementine. "Here everything is quiet except politics. Love."

Then came a call from Was.h.i.+ngton with the news from Warm Springs. "I felt as if I had been struck a physical blow," Churchill recalled. The long courts.h.i.+p, with its joys and frustrations, had come to an end. "I have just heard the grievous news of President Roosevelt's death," he added to the cable to Clementine. He had been writing Mary, too, who had just been decorated for her service in antiaircraft batteries in northwest Europe. Telling her the news in a postscript, Churchill noted: "You know how this will hit me."

It was late, too late to do much, but Churchill discharged his duties. "Get me the palace," he said to an aide, and Churchill briefed the king's private secretary, who told George VI. In the night, Churchill cabled Lord Halifax in Was.h.i.+ngton to ask if he might come to the funeral. Halifax put in calls to Harry Hopkins and Ed Stettinius.

AT FIVE FORTY-FIVE P.M. in New York, in Studio 28 at CBS, an episode of Wilderness Road, a serial about the adventures of Daniel Boone, was beginning. Four minutes later, armed with only a two-word news bulletin from Warm Springs-"F.D.R. DEAD"-broadcaster John Charles Daly announced: "We interrupt this program to bring you a special news bulletin from CBS World News. . . . President Roosevelt is dead."

In his Was.h.i.+ngton office, Richard Strout of The New Republic was reminded of Edwin M. Stanton's words at the death of Lincoln: "Now he belongs to the ages."

CBS cut to Douglas Edwards in London. "London and the British nation are deeply shocked at the news," Edwards reported. "I was in a Red Cross canteen filled with American soldiers getting a late night snack. They were stunned. . . . Everyone wondered if there couldn't be some mistake. . . . Both King George and Prime Minister Churchill were informed immediately and were deeply shocked and grieved. . . . Britain will always remember President Roosevelt as one of the first men who saw the danger, even before America entered the War. He was the man who sent to these islands the implements with which to fight after the dark days of Dunkirk."

From the State Department, Chip Bohlen called to give the news to Harry Hopkins, who was at the Mayo Clinic. "I guess I better be going to Was.h.i.+ngton," was all Hopkins could say.

Clementine was aboard a train in Moscow, waiting to pull out for Stalingrad, when she heard. "We come with bad news," Molotov told her. "President Roosevelt is dead." Clementine, Mary wrote, "was stunned by this grievous news: She at once understood its import to the course of events, and knew also what a deep and personal loss the President's death would be to Winston." At Clementine's suggestion, the party paused in respectful silence, and then she made her way to the British emba.s.sy to call her husband.

After flying from Was.h.i.+ngton, Eleanor entered the Little White House in Georgia. "At Warm Springs, everybody was scared to tell her Lucy had been there," recalled Trude Lash. "They were right to be scared." But in a sudden outburst, Polly Delano revealed that Lucy had been there; Anna had often been the go-between. "The one thing that hurt again, when he died, was finding out he saw Lucy again, which he had promised not to do," said Mrs. Lash. "Mrs. R. was estranged from Anna over this for quite a while. My feeling was, and I told Mrs. R. this, 'How could Anna not do what her sick and ailing father asked her to do?' Anna said, 'I could not do much for my father but I could do that.' "

Whatever anguish the news of Lucy caused-and it must have been severe-Eleanor once again coped by following form and fulfilling a public role. "E.R. sent us off to bed, for some rest," noted Daisy, "even if we don't sleep." Eleanor prepared to see her husband home.

"Poor E.R.-I believe she loved him more deeply than she knows herself, and his feeling for her was deep & lasting," Daisy noted. "The fact that they could not relax together, or play together, is the tragedy of their joint lives, for I believe, from everything that I have seen of them, that they had everything else in common. It was probably a matter of personalities, of a certain lack of humor on her part-I can not blame either of them. They are both remarkable people."

"JESUS IT WAS a shock," Kathleen Harriman wrote Pamela Churchill of Roosevelt's death. "Red flags with black borders hung from all houses today throughout Moscow-something I'd have not guessed would happen." Of Truman, Kathleen noted: "The best that can be said is that he's 'safe.' What a time to have a leader replaced by a safe man!"

Readers of the London News Chronicle were told this as they rose in the morning after Roosevelt's death: "FDR had won the affection of the world. It is not only the Americans but all the United Nations who have lost a great leader. Franklin D. Roosevelt was the 20th century's man of destiny. He became democracy's champion when many other statesmen much closer to the threat of danger were slumbering or appeasing. As for Britain, Franklin D. Roosevelt must always hold a place in its affections so long as this nation lasts, a place that few if any foreigners have ever held in Britain." At midnight in New York, as dawn approached in London, CBS broadcast a hymn: "Now the Day Is Over." A few of its verses: Now the day is over, Night is drawing nigh, Shadows of the evening Steal across the sky.

Jesus, give the weary Calm and sweet repose; With thy tenderest blessing May our eyelids close.

Grant to little children Visions bright of thee; Guard the sailors tossing On the deep, blue sea.

Comfort every sufferer Watching late in pain Those who plan some evil From their sin restrain.

EARLY THE NEXT morning, Friday, April 13, Churchill received Halifax's answer to his overnight cable. "Have spoken to Harry Hopkins and Stettinius, who are both much moved by your thought of possibly coming over and who both warmly agree with my judgment of the immense effect for good that would be produced," Halifax wrote. "Nor do I overlook the value if you came of your seeing Truman." Churchill ordered that a plane be ready to fly to Was.h.i.+ngton that night. During the day he did what he did so well: compose compa.s.sionate cables. A world seemed to be ending-the very personal one of car rides at Hyde Park, Christmas at the White House, and fis.h.i.+ng at Shangri-la.

He dictated a message to Eleanor. "Accept my most profound sympathy in your grievous loss, which is also the loss of the British nation and of the cause of freedom in every land. I feel so deeply for you all. As for myself, I have lost a dear and cherished friends.h.i.+p which was forged in the fire of war. I trust you may find consolation in the magnitude of his work and the glory of his name."

To Hopkins, who, as Churchill knew, understood Roosevelt's s.h.i.+fting affections, he cabled: "I understand how deep your feelings of grief must be. I feel with you that we have lost one of our greatest friends and one of the most valiant champions of the causes for which we fight. I feel a very painful personal loss, quite apart from the ties of public action which bound us so closely together. I had a true affection for Franklin."

Writing Truman, whom he had never met, Churchill said: "Pray accept from me the expression of my personal sympathy in the loss which you and the American nation have sustained in the death of our ill.u.s.trious friend. I hope that I may be privileged to renew with you the intimate comrades.h.i.+p in the great cause we all serve that I enjoyed through these terrible years with him. I offer you my respectful good wishes as you step into the breach in the victorious lines of the United Nations."

"I feel a very painful personal loss, quite apart from the ties of public action which bound us so closely together"

Clementine, Eleanor, and Churchill at Roosevelt's grave, March 12, 1946 He went to the House of Commons and, in a hushed voice, said, "The House will have learned with deepest sorrow the grievous news which has come to us from across the Atlantic and which conveys to us the loss of a famous President of the United States, whose friends.h.i.+p for the cause of freedom and for the causes of the weak and poor have won him immortal renown. It is not fitting that we should continue our work this day. I feel that the House will wish to render its token of respect to the memory of this great departed statesman and war leader by adjourning immediately."

George VI sent Churchill a handwritten note. "I cannot tell you how sad I am at the sudden death of President Roosevelt. The news came as a great shock to me. I have lost a friend, but to you who have known him for so long & so intimately during this war, the sudden loss to yourself personally of a colleague & helpmate in the framing of far reaching decisions both for the prosecution of the war & for the future peace of the world must be overwhelming. I send you all my sympathy at this moment."

All the trumpets were sounding. Churchill was at his eloquent, emotional best. As the hours pa.s.sed by, however, he wavered on going to Was.h.i.+ngton. The flight was scheduled for eight-thirty that evening, but by seven forty-five, with "no decision reached-P.M. said he would decide at aerodrome," Alexander Cadogan noted. The tide of emotion and reminiscence and mourning running high, he nevertheless chose not to go.

EVERYTHING IN HIM would have pressed him to make the trip. It was a dramatic occasion-the death of a great man-and he knew he should see Truman, who was unknown to him. "It would have been a solace to me to be present at Franklin's funeral," Churchill told Hopkins, "but everyone here thought my duty next week lay at home, at a time when so many Ministers are out of the country." But the logistics of a weekend in Was.h.i.+ngton and Hyde Park could have been managed, even with the travel time involved in 1945, even with Germany on the verge of collapse. Churchill, meanwhile, often decided to do what he wanted to do despite what "everyone here" thought. The king was an exception to that (there had been the D-Day contretemps), but the prime minister's letter to George VI does not suggest that the king had taken a stand either way.

Here is what Churchill told George VI: "I am touched by the kindness of Your Majesty's letter. The sudden loss of this great friend and comrade in all our affairs is very hard for me. Ties have been shorn asunder which years had woven. We have to begin again in many ways. I was tempted during the day to go over for the funeral and begin relations with the new man. However so many of Your Majesty's Ministers are out of the country, and the Foreign Secretary had arranged to go anyhow, and I felt the business next week in Parliament and also the ceremonies connected with the death of Mr Roosevelt are so important that I should be failing in my duty if I left the House of Commons without my close personal attention. I had to consider the tribute which should be paid to the late President, which clearly it is my business to deliver. The press of work is also very heavy. Therefore I thought it better that I should remain here in charge at this juncture."

Some have argued that his failure to go to Was.h.i.+ngton and Hyde Park suggests the relations.h.i.+p between Roosevelt and Churchill was professional, not personal. There is, however, a more complicated possibility: that the decision was partly political and partly emotional, the product of a prideful moment in which Churchill, after playing the suitor to Roosevelt, wanted to himself be courted. If raw politics had been the sole force in their friends.h.i.+p, there would have been no question about Churchill's going. He needed to get on good terms with Truman. This was the optimum time for Churchill to shape a new president's worldview. He could unleash his eloquence about the dangers of Stalin on a new audience, one not yet tired of being lectured. Truman was eager. "At no time in our respective histories, has it been more important that the intimate, solid relations which you and the late President had forged between our countries be preserved and developed," Truman cabled Churchill on April 13. "It is my earnest hope that before too long, in the furtherance of this, we can arrange a personal meeting. . . . You can count on me to continue the loyal and close collaboration which to the benefit of the entire world existed between you and our great President."

Still, Churchill stayed home. Was Churchill, tired of dancing to another man's tune, relieved Roosevelt was dead? Had it all been an act? No-like so many human relations.h.i.+ps, Roosevelt and Churchill's was a mix of the selfish and the unselfish, of artifice and affection. Churchill could be put out with Roosevelt. Who, having spent five years in such an exhausting and exhilarating dance, would not have been-much earlier and much more so than Churchill was? From Churchill's perspective, Roosevelt withheld some essential part of himself to the end. What Churchill may not have realized is that Franklin Roosevelt did that with everyone in his life-it was how he lived. Even Roosevelt's widow was coming to terms with her husband's emotional deceptions in these hours.

A possible answer to the funeral riddle may lie in this paragraph from Churchill's letter to George VI: Moreover I think that it would be a good thing that President Truman should come over here at about the same time as was proposed by his predecessor. He could visit his Armies in Germany, and he could be Your Majesty's guest. The actual ceremonial would have to be reconsidered but I am sure it would be a great advantage if he could come during the month of May, even if the clouds of May were likely to dissolve in rain. I am making this proposal to him and to Stettinius very strongly through Anthony.

He wanted Truman to come to him. Perhaps Churchill was making a bid to take Roosevelt's place as the senior partner in the alliance, to become, in the last hours of the war he had fought longer and harder than anyone, the quarry rather than the suitor. Years of slights may have welled up in those hours, exacerbated by the glowing tributes flowing to Roosevelt. Yes, Roosevelt had seen the dangers of the dictators, but Churchill had, too. Yes, Roosevelt had saved the world, but Churchill had, too.

Remaining in London was a close call. No one could be more forgiving than Churchill, but for a moment, a pa.s.sing moment, he seems to have indulged in a fit of pride, for himself and for Britain. Roosevelt had never traveled far to see only Churchill, instead forcing Churchill to come to him-or to him and Stalin. The question of a state visit was important in those days. "England has lost a great friend and a hero," CBS's Larry LeSueur had broadcast from London on April 12. "Above all, they had one day dreamed of seeing Roosevelt in the British capital." If he could get Truman to come to him, Churchill may have thought in those feverish hours on April 13, then perhaps the world would see that he, and Britain, were still forces to be reckoned with. It was the kind of maneuver Roosevelt would have appreciated. The word of his decision went out. "Prime Minister Churchill wanted to come but was too busy," reported the a.s.sociated Press. The gamble failed. Truman had too much to do, too much to learn, to travel in those crowded first weeks. Thus a Churchill dream died a little, largely unremarked death. "In the after-light I regret that I did not adopt the new President's suggestion," Churchill recalled. He had taken a leap-and fallen short. He got back up and moved forward.

THE RITES FOR Roosevelt in the East Room were brief. Angus Dun, the Episcopal bishop of Was.h.i.+ngton, presided over the twenty-three-minute service. "In his first inaugural the President bore this testimony to his own deep faith: 'So first of all let me a.s.sert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself-nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance,' " Bishop Dun said. "As that was his first word to us, I am sure he would wish it to be his last; that as we go forward to the tasks in which he has led us, we shall go forward without fear, without fear of the future, without fear of our allies or of our friends, and without fear of our own insufficiency."

Roosevelt was taken north by train to Hyde Park. There was the clop-clop-clop of the horses drawing Roosevelt's caisson up the hill from the railway siding, along the same road he and Churchill had traveled together, talking of war. In the rose garden, the rector of St. James's, George Anthony, read the burial office for his senior warden.

"I WAS SO terribly sad about FDR-he is deeply and genuinely mourned here," Pamela Churchill wrote Kathleen Harriman. In London, Roosevelt was remembered at St. Paul's. "We who represent the two great English-speaking peoples," said the cathedral's dean, "are specially bound to pray that through our cooperation one with another the great causes for which Franklin Delano Roosevelt laboured may be brought to fruition for the lasting benefit of all the nations of the world." The congregation sang "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"-"to its great tune," The Times of London observed, "known familiarly enough to British people though less familiar, as it appeared, in their mouths." Afterward, Amba.s.sador Gil Winant, who had read the lesson from Revelation, walked Churchill, who was crying, to the door. Churchill lunched at the Annexe, "feverishly composing," recalled Jock Colville, the tribute he was to pay Roosevelt in the House that afternoon.

"MY FRIENDs.h.i.+P WITH the great man to whose work and fame we pay our tribute today began and ripened during this war," Churchill told the House of Commons. "I had met him, but only for a few minutes, after the close of the last war, and as soon as I went to the Admiralty in September 1939, he telegraphed inviting me to correspond with him direct on naval or other matters if at any time I felt inclined. Having obtained the permission of the Prime Minister, I did so. . . . When I became Prime Minister, and the war broke out in all its hideous fury, when our own life and survival hung in the balance, I was already in a position to telegraph to the President on terms of an a.s.sociation which had become most intimate and, to me, most agreeable. This continued through all the ups and downs of the world struggle until Thursday last, when I received my last messages from him."

He ran through an accounting of their contacts, from the number of messages to days spent together.

"I conceived an admiration for him as a statesman, a man of affairs, and a war leader. I felt the utmost confidence in his upright, inspiring character and outlook, and a personal regard-affection I must say-for him beyond my power to express today. His love of his own country, his respect for its const.i.tution, his power of gauging the tides and currents of mobile public opinion, were always evident, but added to these were the beatings of that generous heart which was always stirred to anger and to action by spectacles of aggression and oppression by the strong against the weak. It is, indeed, a loss, a bitter loss to humanity that those heartbeats are stilled forever."

Growing more emotional, Churchill turned to the central fact about Roosevelt that shaped his life: his paralysis. Churchill was candid and caring. He had watched Roosevelt force himself across the deck of the Prince of Wales; he had wheeled Roosevelt through White House corridors, bargaining for his nation's survival; he had mounted the steps of Marrakech as the president of the United States was carried to the top of the tall tower, vulnerable yet dominant.

"President Roosevelt's physical affliction lay heavily upon him. It was a marvel that he bore up against it through all the many years of tumult and storm. Not one man in ten millions, stricken and crippled as he was, would have attempted to plunge into a life of physical and mental exertion and of hard, ceaseless political controversy. Not one in ten millions would have tried, not one in a generation would have succeeded, not only in entering this sphere, not only in acting vehemently in it, but in becoming indisputable master of the scene. In this extraordinary effort of the spirit over the flesh, of will-power over physical infirmity, he was inspired and sustained by that n.o.ble woman his devoted wife, whose high ideals marched with his own, and to whom the deep and respectful sympathy of the House of Commons flows out today in all fullness."

He saluted Roosevelt's clarity in the isolationist fog, his leaders.h.i.+p in drafting the Atlantic Charter, and his role in the "great operations" in all theaters. But at Yalta, Churchill said, he noticed that Roosevelt was ailing.

"His captivating smile, his gay and charming manner, had not deserted him, but his face had a transparency, an air of purification, and often there was a faraway look in his eyes. When I took my leave of him in Alexandria harbor, I must confess that I had an indefinable sense of fear that his health and his strength were on the ebb. But nothing altered his inflexible sense of duty. To the end he faced his innumerable tasks unflinching. One of the tasks of the President is to sign maybe a hundred or two State papers with his own hand every day, commissions and so forth. All this he continued to carry out with the utmost strictness. When death came suddenly upon him 'he had finished his mail.' That portion of his day's work was done. As the saying goes, he died in harness, and we may well say battle harness, like his soldiers, sailors, and airmen, who side by side with ours are carrying on their task to the end all over the world. What an enviable death was his! He had brought his country through the worst of its perils and the heaviest of its toils. Victory had cast its sure and steady beam upon him."

An admirer of the glorious, Churchill bowed to what the birthplace of his mother had become under Roosevelt.

"In the days of peace he had broadened and stabilized the foundations of American life and union. In war he had raised the strength, might and glory of the great Republic to a height never attained by any nation in history. With her left hand she was leading the advance of the conquering Allied armies into the heart of Germany, and with her right, on the other side of the globe, she was irresistibly and swiftly breaking up the power of j.a.pan. And all the time s.h.i.+ps, munitions, supplies, and food of every kind were aiding on a gigantic scale her allies, great and small, in the course of the long struggle. But all this was no more than worldly power and grandeur, had it not been that the causes of human freedom and of social justice, to which so much of his life had been given, added a l.u.s.ter to this power and pomp and warlike might, a l.u.s.ter which will long be discernible among men. He has left behind him a band of resolute and able men handling the numerous interrelated parts of the vast American war machine. He has left a successor who comes forward with firm step and sure conviction to carry on the task to its appointed end. For us, it remains only to say that in Franklin Roosevelt there died the greatest American friend we have ever known, and the greatest champion of freedom who has ever brought help and comfort from the new world to the old."

MOVING WORDS. "Winston rose and spoke about Roosevelt," Harold Nicolson, the author and Labour MP, wrote his son. "I did not think him very good-nothing like as good as when he made the funeral oration on Neville Chamberlain, which was truly Periclean." But, Nicolson added, "Which all shows that when one really does mind deeply about a thing, it is more difficult to write or speak about it than when one is just faintly moved by pity or terror."

THE MAGNITUDE OF the evil Roosevelt and Churchill had been fighting against was becoming ever more widely known. On April 12, Eisenhower visited a n.a.z.i concentration camp at Ohrdruf, near Buchenwald. The general was so horrified, Martin Gilbert wrote, that he "at once telephoned Churchill to describe what he had seen, and then sent photographs of the dead prisoners to Churchill, who circulated them to each member of the British Cabinet." "There is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilised men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races of Europe," Churchill told Anthony Eden in the last year of the war.

The day Roosevelt died, Ed Murrow of CBS walked through Buchenwald. The prisoners he saw were too weak to rise from their cots; he watched a man fall over dead. Inmates showed Murrow the numbers tattooed on their arms. He walked into a room with a concrete floor. "There were two rows of bodies stacked up like cordwood," Murrow told his listeners. "They were thin and very white. Some of the bodies were terribly bruised, though there seemed to be little flesh to bruise. Some had been shot through the head, but they bled but little."

It was a painful report. "If I've offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I'm not in the least sorry," Murrow said of the scenes he saw on April 12. "I was there on Thursday, and many men in many tongues blessed the name of Roosevelt. For long years his name had meant the full measure of their hope. These men who had kept close company with death for many years did not know that Mr. Roosevelt would, within hours, join their comrades who had laid their lives on the scales of freedom."

In the early days of the war, Murrow said, Churchill had said to him: "One day the world and history will recognize and acknowledge what it owes to your President." There had been tears in Churchill's eyes.

"I saw and heard the first installment of that at Buchenwald on Thursday," Murrow said. "It came from men from all over Europe. Their faces, with more flesh on them, might have been found anywhere at home. To them the name 'Roosevelt' was a symbol, a code word for a lot of guys named 'Joe' who are somewhere out in the blue with the armor heading east." Churchill had promised to never surrender; with the might of America, Roosevelt had made Churchill's vows reality.

HITLER SHOT HIMSELF in his Berlin bunker on April 30. Clementine was still in the Soviet Union when the news arrived of the German surrender on May 8. "All my thoughts are with you on this supreme day my darling," she cabled Winston. "It could not have happened without you. All my love."

Churchill had won. Thinking of the ma.s.ses in London, "during the morning, following enquiries which he had made," wrote Martin Gilbert, "he received a.s.surances from Scotland Yard and the Ministry of Food that there was no shortage of beer in the capital." Addressing the nation, Churchill reviewed the war and reminded his people of the magnitude of their achievement. "After gallant France had been struck down we, from this Island and from our united Empire, maintained the struggle single-handed for a whole year until we were joined by the military might of Soviet Russia, and later by the overwhelming power and resources of the United States of America," Churchill said. "Finally almost the whole world was combined against the evil-doers, who are now prostrate before us." The day was theirs.

Late that evening, after Churchill dined with Sarah and Diana, thousands surged through London, crying for Churchill. From a balcony overlooking Whitehall, Churchill stood at the summit of his long life. "My dear friends, this is your hour," he said. "This is not victory of a party or of any cla.s.s. It's a victory of the great British nation as a whole. We were the first, in this ancient island, to draw the sword against tyranny. After a while we were left all alone against the most tremendous military power that has been seen. We were all alone for a whole year."

He had them as he had before, appealing to their courage, giving them faith, lifting them to heights they did not know they could reach until he pointed the way. "The lights went out and the bombs came down," Churchill said. "But every man, woman and child in the country had no thought of quitting the struggle. London can take it. So we came back after long months from the jaws of death, out of the mouth of h.e.l.l, while all the world wondered. When shall the reputation and faith of this generation of English men and women fail? I say that in the long years to come not only will the people of this island but of the world, wherever the bird of freedom chirps in human hearts, look back to what we've done and they will say 'Do not despair, do not yield to violence and tyranny, march straight forward and die if need be-unconquered.' "

VERY SHORTLY AFTER the president's death, Eleanor apparently gave Daisy a Shoumatoff picture of Roosevelt to pa.s.s on to Lucy Rutherfurd. Given the turmoil Lucy had caused her not once, in 1918, but again now, with the revelation of her continuing role in Roosevelt's life, Eleanor's gesture is intriguing. It was exquisitely gracious, the act of a n.o.ble, sensitive woman who had hated sharing her husband with Lucy during his lifetime yet was able to rise above the jealousies and pain of such a moment to share something of him now. (To argue that Eleanor was banis.h.i.+ng any trace of Lucy or Shoumatoff would be wrong: A copy of the artist's 1943 portrait of Roosevelt hung in Eleanor's living room at Val-Kill.) The present also accomplished something else, whether Eleanor consciously calculated this or not. As she had after 1918, she remained Mrs. Roosevelt, and the power to give gifts confers a certain authority and status on the giver. Sending Lucy the picture showed that Eleanor knew all and was in control. In Aiken on Wednesday, May 2, 1945, Lucy took up a pen to write Eleanor a note of thanks.

Dear Eleanor- Margaret Suckley has written me that you gave her the little water color of Franklin by Mme. Shoumatoff to send me. Thank you so very much-you must know that it will be treasured always- I have wanted to write you for a long time to tell you that I had seen Franklin and of his great kindness about my husband when he was desperately ill in Was.h.i.+ngton, & of how helpful he was too to his boys-and that I hoped so very much that I might see you again- I can't tell you how deeply I feel for you and how constantly I think of your sorrow-You-whom I have always felt to be the most blessed and privileged of women-must now feel immeasurable grief and pain and they must be almost unbearable- The whole universe finds it difficult to readjust itself to a world without Franklin-and to you and to his family-the emptiness must be appalling- I send you-as I find it impossible not to-my love and my deep deep sympathy.

As always- Affectionately Lucy Rutherfurd With these well-chosen words, which are now in Eleanor's papers at Hyde Park, Lucy made the best of the most awkward of situations. In the upper left-hand corner of the first page of the letter, there is a faint abbreviation in pencil: "ans," shorthand for "answered." Though there is no copy of Eleanor's reply, the notation means that she, too, followed well-mannered form and acknowledged Lucy's letter. The episode is an elegant epilogue to one of the most complicated personal stories in presidential history-a story that ends with two women who loved Franklin Roosevelt treating each other with civility and grace.

Lucy was much immersed in the past as the spring wore on. Daisy sent her some snapshots, including some taken at Top Cottage. "I have looked at them long-& with the magnifying gla.s.s-and they are good," Lucy wrote Daisy on May 9, 1945, and happily accepted Daisy's apparent offer to mail her pictures from the last days in Georgia-which then produced another thank-you letter from Lucy. "Your note with the enclosure was a v. great pleasure and joy," she wrote Daisy on May 20. "I love having the one from Warm Springs-though they make the pain in one's heart even sharper." Suckley, who was working on organizing the Roosevelt archives at Hyde Park, seems to have asked Lucy about the possible whereabouts of a diary that FDR had kept of his trip to Europe in 1918-the trip that ended, of course, with Eleanor's discovery of the love affair. The diary might be in Eleanor's or Franklin's papers, Lucy told Daisy, and then, from memory, she wrote out the details of Roosevelt's tour with some precision: who he had been with, battlefields he had visited, what he had seen at the front. Writing inside a folded notecard imprinted AIKEN, SOUTH CAROLINA, she then recounted what had happened on July 29, 1918. "He called on King George V-met Churchill-spoke-I think-at a Gray's Inn dinner?-where there was much oratory-from elder statesmen." Perhaps engrossed in thoughts of that difficult time when she had fallen in love with a married man, Lucy hurriedly concluded: "Let me know if you do not find it-the diary-Thank you so much for the snapshots-I must run-as they are calling me-With love Lucy."

There is other evidence that her memories of Roosevelt were sometimes painful; she seems to have missed him deeply. Anna arranged for Lucy and a friend to visit Hyde Park on Sat.u.r.day, June 9, a time when the home and the grave were not yet open to the public-and a day that Eleanor spent in New York City. It was fair, mild, and partly cloudy; Roosevelt had been lying in the rose garden for not quite two months. "The memory will be with me always," Lucy later wrote Daisy of that summer Sat.u.r.day. But the reminders of the president appear to have been rather too much for Lucy, for when Suckley invited her to return to Dutchess County for a holiday at Wilderstein, she declined. "And now about your very great thoughtfulness in asking me to stay-You know how much I should like to-and someday perhaps I may be able to ask you if you will have me," Lucy wrote Daisy from Allamuchy on June 19. "But you-who know all of the facts-will understand that just now I do not feel I should go."

According to Suckley's unpublished account of Lucy and her friend's stop in Hyde Park, there was "much excitement a half hour after they left: The lieutenant in charge of the guard was handed their card of admis[sion] given them in Wash. by Anna. It appears that the cards have to be signed by either Mrs. R. or Mr. Palmer the new superintendent-and they have to be given up at the main entrance, where the visitor has to register! Much ado about very little! The ladies had got safely away however!" Though the library was open to the public, the 1235 Military Police Battalion kept watch over the gravesite and the house in those early days after Roosevelt's death. Presumably hearing of the bureaucratic flap later in a letter from Daisy, Lucy wrote: "It distresses me that you were given so much trouble by my descent upon you. I had been led to believe that I could slide in and out again without being a burden to anyone-but evidently this was not to be-and I am sorry that you were held up all down the line-in your work and by the guards-I loved seeing you however and thank you for making it all as easy as possible-in difficult circ.u.mstances for all."

MARY, WHO WENT with Churchill to Potsdam for a meeting of the new Big Three near Berlin in July 1945, was relieved when her father emerged happy from his first conversation with Truman. "He told me he liked the President immensely-they talk the same language," Mary wrote Clementine. "I nearly wept for joy and thankfulness, it seemed like divine providence. Perhaps it is FDR's legacy."

For Averell Harriman, there was evidence at Potsdam that Churchill's fears about Stalin were on the mark. "Marshal," Harriman remarked to Stalin at the conference, "this must be a great satisfaction to you to be in Berlin." Stalin paused before answering. "Czar Alexander," he replied, "got to Paris."

IN THE NEW MEXICO desert, the first atomic test was successful. "The atomic bomb is a reality," Henry Stimson told Churchill on July 17. The prime minister and Mary returned to England on July 25 for the general election-the one Churchill had hoped Roosevelt might help him with. The map room was on watch to monitor the returns, and Churchill went to bed thinking he would win. "However, just before dawn I woke suddenly with a sharp stab of almost physical pain," Churchill recalled. "A hitherto subconscious conviction that we were beaten broke forth and dominated my mind. All the pressure of great events, on and against which I had mentally so long maintained my 'flying speed,' would cease and I should fall."

The man who had spent his life hurling himself forward found one of his worst nightmares-the loss of alt.i.tude, a crash to earth-coming true. He was turned out of office. "What is there to say-nothing but that there has been a landslide to the left in British politics," Pamela wrote Averell and Kathleen Harriman. "The leader in the Times today summed it up best when they said, 'Grat.i.tude belongs to history & not to politics.' . . . On the personal angle, the P.M. has taken it wonderfully-but it's hard all the same. . . . Poor Clemmie I feel very deeply for her-and I know you both will feel as I do for we all three feel very deeply towards W. don't we."

In August, j.a.pan gave in under the blow of two products of Tube Alloys, weapons Churchill had helped make possible on distant afternoons at Hyde Park. But the voters had made their choice.

Patrick Kinna saw Churchill at No. 10 after the electoral defeat was clear. "Come to the Cabinet Room with me," Churchill said. Then, Kinna recalled, "the Prime Minister started reminiscing about the war, back to the days when he first met Roosevelt and met Stalin." Visibly upset, Churchill said: "And now the British people do not want me anymore."

Eleanor tried to put a good face on things, writing Churchill: "I know that you and Mrs. Churchill both are probably very happy and look forward to a few years of less strenuous life, and yet to those who lay down the burdens of great responsibility, there must come for a while a sense of being rudderless." Her last point was closer to the truth than her first. Churchill could think of little worse than a "less strenuous life."

ROOSEVELT HAD BEEN dead nearly a year when Churchill's motorcade drove up the tree-lined drive to the main house at Hyde Park. It was March 12, 1946. Churchill was in America to speak at a college in Truman's home state-Westminster in Fulton, Missouri-to warn the world about Stalin's expanding sphere. Playing poker on the train to Missouri, Churchill had turned sentimental about his mother's country. "If I were to be born again, there is one country in which I would want to be a citizen. There is one country where a man knows he has an unbounded future." Where? he was asked. "The USA, even though I deplore some of your customs." Which ones? "You stop drinking with your meals."

Now, along the Hudson, Eleanor met Churchill and Clementine, and they walked to the garden. The former prime minister stood, hatless, staring at his friend's grave. Watching Churchill, Eleanor "felt sure that he was thinking of the years when he and my husband had worked in such close cooperation to win the war." Only the clicks of newsmen's cameras capturing the scene broke the silence as Churchill contemplated the white tombstone and the flowers before it. "I think it was a day of great emotion for Mr. Churchill," Eleanor wrote. "Besides the respect he had for my husband as a statesman, which made it possible for them to work together even when they differed, he also had a real affection for him as a human being, just as my husband had for him."

For three minutes Churchill said nothing, his hands in his overcoat pockets. Franklin Roosevelt had been perhaps the most complex human being he had ever known-difficult and demanding and frustrating, but compelling and warm and sparkling. Dark and light, mixed up together.

CHURCHILL LIVED ANOTHER two decades. He became philosophical about his defeat at the polls in 1945. Walter Annenberg, the American publis.h.i.+ng magnate and future amba.s.sador to the Court of St. James's, sat next to Churchill at a dinner hosted by Bernard Baruch in the early autumn of 1949. "During the course of our conversation I happened to mention my great disappointment in the British voters in their summary rejection of him so soon after the war, the point being one of ingrat.i.tude," Annenberg recalled in a letter to Kay Halle. With a chuckle, Churchill had replied: "Neither look for nor expect grat.i.tude but rather get whatever comfort you can out of the belief that your effort is constructive in purpose."

He returned to Downing Street as prime minister from 1951 to 1955, won the n.o.bel Prize for Literature, accepted the Order of the Garter, became an honorary citizen of the United States, and in the eyes of much of the world he was considered, as Isaiah Berlin put it, "the largest human being of our time." A letter from America addressed only to "The greatest man in the World, England" was quickly delivered to his house. At seventy-five, Churchill said: "I am prepared to meet my Maker. But whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter." He was stoic and charming about his mortality. "I look forward to dying," he once said. "Sleep, endless, wonderful sleep-on a purple, velvety cus.h.i.+on. Every so often I will wake up, turn over, and go to sleep again."

When he died in 1965-on the same date his father had died in 1895, January 24-Churchill was borne through London on the gun carriage that had carried the coffin of Queen Victoria. "He, with Franklin Roosevelt, gave us our finest hour," remarked Adlai Stevenson, the American amba.s.sador and twice the Democratic nominee for president. "He was not afraid of blood or sweat-or anything else, for that matter." In a heavy black veil, walking on Randolph's arm, Clementine followed the coffin in and out of St. Paul's, with Mary and Sarah just behind. Churchill would have loved the voices of the mourners along the route-the people whose supply of beer he had worried about on the day Hitler was defeated. A reporter for The New York Times heard a c.o.c.kney dismiss the cold winter wind. "Little enough to do for him," the man said. "Think what he did for us. I'm Labor, mind, but we wouldn't have got through if it weren't for the old gentleman. What was I doing? The P.B.I.-Poor b.l.o.o.d.y Infantry-France, Africa, Italy, the lot. I tell you, we wouldn't have got through if it hadn't been for him."

In St. Paul's, the congregation sang "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and, as the coffin was carried from the church, "O G.o.d Our Help in Ages Past." Churchill was taken to St. Martin's Churchyard at Bladon, just outside the walls of the park at Blenheim Palace. He was buried next to his parents.

"My husband had looked forward to the joy of sharing with Mr. Churchill the grat.i.tude of the people of England"

Eleanor Roosevelt visits Winston Churchill in London, April 1948

EPILOGUE.

THEM'S MY SENTIMENTS EXACTLY ON THE DAY Churchill celebrated his sixty-ninth birthday at Teheran, Roosevelt dispatched Averell Harriman to find a present before the evening's dinner. Harriman went to see an old friend, Joseph M. Upton, a curator at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art who was then stationed in the Iranian capital. Upton sold Harriman a twelfth-century Kashan bowl from his personal collection. "Mr. Roosevelt gave me for a birthday present a beautiful Persian porcelain vase," Churchill wrote after the war, "which, although it was broken into fragments on the homeward journey, has been marvelously reconstructed and is one of my treasures."