Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood With Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour

by Lynne Olson

  In late December 1940, Roosevelt, with considerable fanfare, announced a new plan to aid Britain. Caught up in fears for his country’s survival, Churchill had no way of knowing the enormous impact that the proposal would ultimately have on Britain and the war. All he knew was that the president had made vast, vague promises before and that nothing much had resulted from them.

  He was correct in thinking that, until then, FDR’s approach to Britain’s plight had been cautious and vacillating. But by the end of December, the president had come to realize that Britain was indeed running out of money and that America must do considerably more to prevent the defeat of the last country still holding out against Hitler. In response to a long, eloquent, and desperate letter from Churchill, he unveiled a groundbreaking new plan that would allow the government to lend or lease war matériel to any nation the president considered vital to the defense of the United States. The Lend-Lease program, he declared, would transform America into the “arsenal of democracy.”

  In the House of Commons, Churchill called Lend-Lease “the most unsordid action in the history of any nation,” but, privately, he was not that impressed. Instead of expressing his appreciation to Roosevelt, he wrote a sharp note, questioning details of the plan and noting that it would not go into effect for several months, even if passed by Congress. In the meantime, how could his financially pressed country pay for the weapons it urgently needed now? Appalled by the hostility of Churchill’s draft, the British embassy in Washington urged him to tone it down and to offer unequivocal thanks to Roosevelt for the new offer of aid. The prime minister reluctantly agreed to an expression of gratitude but retained his skepticism and anxiety. “Remember, Mr. President,” he wrote, “we do not know what you have in mind, or exactly what the United States is going to do, and we are fighting for our lives.”

  As 1941 dawned, Churchill’s apprehension over his country’s precarious future and his resentment at the United States for not doing more to help were shared by a growing number of his countrymen. When Britons were asked in a public opinion poll which non-Axis countries they rated most highly, the United States came in last. “The percentage of unfavorable criticism of America—our friend—equals that of Italy—our enemy,” noted the poll takers.

  It was during this increasingly poisonous period that Joseph Kennedy finally submitted his resignation as U.S. ambassador to Britain. Kennedy had contributed greatly to the widening gulf between the two countries and their leaders. His successor would now have the monumentally difficult task of trying to heal the breach.

  To take on that problematic assignment, the president turned to a shy, tongue-tied former New England governor, a man once touted as a likely successor to Roosevelt himself.

  IN THE 1920S and early 1930s, John Gilbert Winant had won national attention as the youngest and most progressive governor in the country. But in 1936, this rising Republican star with presidential dreams forfeited his political future by attacking the GOP for its slashing assaults on the New Deal. Bemused by Winant’s self-sacrificing idealism, Roosevelt, whose own devotion to ideals never got the better of his instincts for political survival, dubbed him “Utopian John.”

  Like the president, Winant came from an old, well-connected New York family with Dutch antecedents. The son of a real estate broker, he grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, a poor student but avid reader who lost himself in the novels of Charles Dickens and biographies of his lifelong hero, Abraham Lincoln. His parents, who had an “extremely unhappy” marriage and were later divorced, were miserly in showing any love or affection to him and his three brothers, he once told his secretary. Winant’s father, a friend reported, “always told him to be seen and not heard.”

  At the age of twelve, the bookish, sensitive boy was sent to St. Paul’s, the exclusive prep school nestled below the foothills of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, on the outskirts of the state capital of Concord. It was the defining moment of Winant’s life. He loved the school, but even more, he loved the woods and rolling hills of New Hampshire; as a student, he would walk for hours in the Bow Hills overlooking St. Paul’s. Many years later he would tell a reporter that they “came to mean more to him than any other place on earth. He felt at home there.”

  Modeled after English public schools like Eton, St. Paul’s tried to impress upon its pupils, most of whom came from affluent New York, Boston, and Philadelphia families, the importance of public service. “Our function is not to conform to the rich and prosperous world which surrounds us but rather, through its children, to convert it,” Dr. Samuel Drury, St. Paul’s rector, declared. While most St. Paul’s students had no intention of turning their backs on that “rich and prosperous world,” Winant developed an enthusiasm for social reform that would last the rest of his life.

  During his years at St. Paul’s, he became one of its top student leaders, demonstrating a newfound talent to persuade and galvanize others. A few years later, after withdrawing from Princeton because of poor grades, he returned to the school to teach American history. Determined to instill a social conscience in his students, Winant was, in the words of Tom Matthews, one of his pupils, “an incredibly inspiring teacher, conveying the burning conviction that the United States was a wonderful country, the most gloriously hopeful experiment man had ever made.” In the evenings, his students would cram into his small, book-filled room to continue the discussions begun in the classroom about Lincoln, Jefferson, and others in Winant’s pantheon of heroes. “Like most of the St. Paul’s boys of my generation, I admired John Gilbert Winant to the point of idolatry,” said Matthews, who thirty years later would become managing editor of Time magazine.

  The day after the United States entered World War I, Winant quit his teaching job and paid his way to France, where he became a pilot in the fledgling U.S. flying corps. His aviation skills were somewhat shaky, as he later acknowledged to his friends Ed and Janet Murrow; while he was “all right” in the air, he needed “the greatest luck” to take off and land. “He appears to have cracked up innumerable planes,” Janet Murrow wrote to her parents. “It’s really a wonder he’s still alive.”

  It was a wonder, since Winant also possessed a reckless courage that prompted him to volunteer for observation missions over enemy lines that others considered suicidal. When he landed after one such mission, one of his plane’s wings had been ripped by a piece of shrapnel, the engine cowling was pierced, and part of the propeller was missing. Having enlisted as a private, he ended the war as a captain, in charge of an observation squadron near Verdun.

  Shortly after returning home, Winant married Constance Russell, a wealthy young socialite whose grandfather had been president of the National City Bank of New York (now Citibank). Many of the couple’s friends and acquaintances considered it a misguided match: she had no interest in politics, history, or social reform—the main preoccupations of her husband—and much preferred shopping, party giving, theater going, and spending time in places like Southampton and Bar Harbor. “It was one of those high-society marriages where I don’t think they were together very much,” recalled Abbie Rollins Caverly, whose father had been one of Winant’s closest friends and political associates. “They had very little in common. He would sit up all night, brooding over how to make things better. She loved to throw parties.”

  Following the war, Winant made some money of his own from investments in Texas oil wells. He and Constance settled down to a life of affluence, with an apartment on Park Avenue, chauffeur-driven limousine, butler and maids, yacht, and a stable of Arabian horses. At the same time, however, he had not given up his love for New Hampshire or his burgeoning interest in public service, which had led to a brief stint in the New Hampshire House of Representatives before he went off to France.

  In 1919, the Winants bought a house, a roomy white colonial, in Concord, about a quarter of a mile from St. Paul’s. From his book-lined library, with its Gilbert Stuart portrait of Thomas Jefferson and first editions of Dickens and John Ruskin, Wina
nt could gaze out on his favorite spot in the world, the pine-covered Bow Hills. While his wife continued to spend most of her time in New York, he made the Concord house his base and in 1920 was elected to the New Hampshire Senate.

  The gradual transformation of this diffident, stammering young idealist into a successful politician was surprising in itself. The fact that the transformation took place in a rural, highly conservative state like New Hampshire was nothing short of remarkable. In the Senate, Winant became leader of the minuscule liberal wing of the GOP, introducing legislation to limit the workweek for women and children to forty-eight hours, regulate wage standards, and abolish capital punishment. Most of his fellow legislators came from farming areas, with little understanding of, or interest in, the lamentable living and working conditions of the laborers in New Hampshire’s textile mills and other factories. Although they rejected Winant’s legislative agenda, he refused to give up what most people considered his quixotic quest for reform.

  In 1924, at the age of thirty-five, Winant announced his decision to run for governor, dropping off a copy of his announcement at the office of the state’s leading newspaper, the Manchester Union-Leader. Frank Knox, who owned the Union-Leader and was widely regarded as a shoe-in for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, buried the story deep in the paper, giving it only four lines. Winant’s candidacy, in the view of the Republican old guard, was laughable. Who did this liberal New Yorker think he was? New Hampshire voters would never accept him—a rich outsider, an intellectual, and a terrible speaker to boot.

  They were certainly right about his speaking ability. Tall and brooding, his profile suggesting a refined Abraham Lincoln, he stood tensely before campaign audiences, his lean face set, his hair as rumpled as his Brooks Brothers suit, his shaggy eyebrows arched over deep-set, piercing gray eyes. His hands clenching and unclenching, he groped for the right word or phrase to express what he wanted to say. Sometimes it would take him minutes to find it, resulting in pauses as agonizing for the people straining to hear him as for Winant himself. “People in the audience wanted to help him, to shout out the word he was searching for,” said one New Hampshire resident. After one of Winant’s speeches, a woman murmured to an acquaintance: “It’s too bad. Such a nice boy—and so badly shell-shocked during the war.”

  Curiously enough, however, his halting way of speaking helped win him support in his travels throughout the state. Reserved and taciturn themselves, New Hampshire voters found him a welcome contrast to the glib politicians they usually encountered. As awkward as his speeches were, they conveyed warmth and sincerity—and gave his listeners the sense of being taken into his confidence. His audiences “begin by feeling sorry for him,” the New York Times reported. “They end by standing in the aisle and cheering him.”

  In the primary, he was opposed by the state’s GOP machine, as well as by most of New Hampshire’s newspapers and business interests. Nonetheless, he handily defeated Knox and then trounced the Democratic incumbent in the general election.*

  As New Hampshire’s chief executive, Winant was a man well ahead of his time, showing a zeal for economic justice and social change that equaled or bettered the reforming instincts of New York’s Franklin Roosevelt and far surpassed those of most of his other gubernatorial colleagues around the country. He liked to say that he learned his Republicanism from his hero, Abraham Lincoln, who, Winant declared, valued human rights over property rights. During the Depression, the governor pressed successfully for the creation of radical new state welfare programs that prefigured the New Deal, including an expansion of public works, aid for the elderly, emergency help for dependent mothers and children, and a minimum wage act. He smuggled a young reporter from the Concord Daily Monitor into a meeting of the Executive Council, a powerful state government body that acted as a check on the governor and whose meetings had always been closed. The next day, the reporter wrote a front-page story on the council’s de liberations, and, from then on, its meetings have been open to the public.

  Winant also reorganized and modernized his state’s administrative machinery and won passage of laws to reform banking, restrain the influence of the railroads, and expand the power of the state’s Public Service Commission to regulate utility companies. “Railroads and power combinations alike must be subservient to the public interest,” he told the state legislature. The New York Herald Tribune would later write that Winant “put through more progressive legislation than New Hampshire had ever known.”

  Not surprisingly, the railroads, utilities, textile mills, and other special interests in the state were hostile to virtually everything Winant did. So, too, were the conservative diehards in his own party. But he was enormously popular with the voters, who elected him to an unprecedented three terms as governor. “I don’t understand Winant and never did,” one New Hampshire politician remarked. “But I take my hat off to him. He knows how to win.” (Ironically, Winant’s landslide reelection in 1932 provided Herbert Hoover, his ideological opposite, a coattail long enough to hand the president a narrow victory in New Hampshire, one of only five states not carried by Hoover’s Democratic challenger, Franklin Roosevelt.)

  It was clear that much of Winant’s popularity as governor stemmed from his deep empathy and compassion for others. Years later, Dean Dexter, a former New Hampshire state legislator, would compare him to the idealistic characters that actor James Stewart played in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and other movies. For Winant, “every public policy was personal,” observed one historian. “It was about people, sometimes specific individuals, and the effect of the policy on them.” The door to his capitol office was open to anybody who wanted to see him; on most days, the corridors of the statehouse were crowded with people waiting for a few minutes of the governor’s time. Not infrequently, Winant would use his own money to pay a medical bill, cover an educational expense, or help start a business for an impoverished state resident or fellow World War I veteran who had asked for his help. During the Depression, he instructed the Concord police to allow transients to spend the night in the city jail, then feed them in the morning and send the bill to him. Walking to work, he would hand out all the money in his wallet to jobless men sunning themselves against the granite walls of the state capitol. Winant, said one friend, “carried the Christian injunction, ‘Give all thy goods to feed the poor,’ further than any person I have ever known.”

  When he left office in January 1935, Winant’s ideals and principles had won the endorsement of most of the state’s legislators, regardless of party. Some three decades later, Robert Bingham, Winant’s legislative counsel in Concord, would remark: “Whenever people want to measure the effectiveness of a governorship, they compare it with Winant’s three terms.” In 2008, William Gardner, New Hampshire’s longtime secretary of state, recalled how impressed he had been, after taking office, by how much state residents “revered and loved” Winant. “People still talked about him when I got here. He was special. Of all the governors we’ve had, he actually meant something to the people in a very personal way.”

  FROM WASHINGTON, President Roosevelt monitored Winant’s success in New Hampshire with considerable interest. Strikingly similar in their devotion to social reform, the two men had worked closely together as governors. Winant strongly supported FDR’s New Deal from the beginning, and New Hampshire was usually the first state to enroll in the many new relief programs that Roosevelt introduced in the first years of his administration. By autumn 1933, Winant had used New Deal funds to launch twelve major public-work projects and distribute tons of food to New Hampshire’s needy.

  The president, who “loved to pick off bright and promising young Republicans and make them his,” had already enlisted Winant’s help as an unofficial adviser on labor and other issues. In 1934 he had appointed the governor to head a special board of inquiry that helped end a crippling strike by the United Textile Workers union.

  As Roosevelt well knew, Winant increasingly was being touted as the man who might hea
d the 1936 Republican ticket. After the GOP debacle in 1932, it was clear the Republicans needed a “transfusion of new and youthful blood;” as one of the party’s few shining stars, Winant was seen by many as a possible presidential nominee.

  One of his boosters was the famed Kansas newspaper editor William Allen White, who praised him as the leading Republican on the horizon. The radio commentator Walter Winchell declared in a broadcast that Winant was being groomed by the New York Herald Tribune, an influential pro-Republican newspaper, as the next GOP candidate. Time and Collier’s reported that he had a good shot at the nomination, and the Boston Evening Transcript ran a headline declaring: “Winant Moves Higher on List for Presidency.” According to American magazine, the New Hampshire governor “has caught the imagination of the country…. He’s rich. He can’t make a speech. But he wants to do something for the people. And he does it.” Letters poured in to Concord from all over the country, urging Winant to run. “You personally carry the esteem and appreciation of this department to a greater degree than any other public official, either in the Democratic party or out of it,” wrote an employee of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration in Washington. Even Raymond Moley, a key member of Roosevelt’s New Deal brain trust, jumped on the Winant bandwagon, observing that he “would trade fifty Representatives, twenty Senators, six ambassadors and a couple of cabinet members for one Governor Winant.”

  The Winant boomlet, however, was bound to collapse. Even if he had made a bid in 1936, it’s probable that his speech-making problems would have greatly hindered his candidacy. But the point was moot because Winant, as a New Deal supporter, would never have challenged Roosevelt. He decided to put his presidential ambitions on hold, at least until the current incumbent left office.