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

by Lynne Olson

  When Japan occupied Indochina, the president retaliated economically, hoping that the restrictions imposed by the United States would restrain Japan without forcing it into war. But America’s actions—the freezing of Japanese assets in the United States and an embargo on the shipment of oil, as well as iron and steel products—served only to infuriate the Japanese. The crisis continued to escalate.

  At their meeting in Newfoundland, Churchill, at Winant’s suggestion, had appealed to Roosevelt to join him in warning the Japanese that any future incursions in Asia would be met with British and American force. It was impossible for Britain to respond on its own: its military cupboard was virtually bare, with no troops to send to Singapore or Malaya, no spare ships to patrol the waters off those colonies. Field Marshal Sir John Dill, Alan Brooke’s predecessor as chief of the Imperial General Staff, told Brooke that the country “had done practically nothing to meet the threat … that we were already so weak on all fronts that it was impossible to denude them any further.” But Roosevelt declined to issue a blunt ultimatum. As the situation in the Far East grew more perilous, Churchill feared that Britain might soon face a war with Germany and Japan—all without American assistance.

  What would it take, the prime minister wondered, to propel Roosevelt and his country into this conflict? Again and again, the president had tiptoed to the edge of confrontation, only to pull back at the last minute. In September, he had seemed on the verge of entering the fray in the Battle of the Atlantic. After the American destroyer Greer exchanged torpedoes with a German submarine in the middle of the Atlantic (resulting in no damage or casualties), Roosevelt announced that, from then on, American vessels would “shoot on sight” any German U-boats or warships they encountered. At the same time, he ordered a Navy escort for all merchant shipping—not just U.S. ships—as far as Iceland. In effect, he had embarked on a naval war against Germany.

  His decision won widespread support from the American people. Yet there still was no popular sentiment for taking the final, irrevocable step of an official declaration of war, not even when two more American naval vessels were fired upon by German submarines. On October 16, the destroyer Kearny was badly damaged by German torpedoes when it raced to the rescue of a convoy under attack. Two weeks later, another destroyer, the Reuben James, was sunk near Iceland, killing 115 members of its crew. But, instead of a popular outcry in the United States, demanding that Roosevelt avenge “our boys,” the predominant reaction seemed to be one of apathy.

  “In this looming crisis, the United States seemed deadlocked—its President handcuffed, its Congress irresolute, its people divided and confused,” wrote James MacGregor Burns, a Roosevelt biographer. “Now—by early November 1941—there seemed to be nothing more [FDR] could say. There seemed to be little more he could do. He had called his people to their battle stations—but there was no battle.”

  Near the end of his emotional tether, Churchill railed to his subordinates about America’s paralysis and Roosevelt’s unwillingness to do anything about it. In a speech to the House of Commons, he declared: “Nothing is more dangerous in wartime than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of Gallup polls or of feeling one’s pulse or taking one’s temperature…. There is only one duty, only one safe course, and that is to be right and not to fear to do or say what you believe to be right.”

  Ed Murrow agreed. The continuing reluctance of the United States to enter the conflict had so infuriated him that he briefly considered leaving CBS to become a full-time activist for American intervention. He also flirted with the idea of pushing Winant to run for president in the next election. “If some time in the unpredictable future, you decide to go home and seek political power,” he told the ambassador in his letter, “I may be one of the ‘goodly company’ to travel with you.”

  MURROW HAD NOT been back to the United States since 1938—a time that seemed almost unimaginable now, a time when the world was not at war. Over and over, he had been told he’d become a celebrity at home, that everyone was listening to his broadcasts, that he had greatly influenced public opinion. From New York, Bill Shirer had written to Murrow: “Everywhere I go, old dowagers and young things ask if I know you and whether you really are as handsome as your photographs and what you eat for breakfast and when you are coming home.”

  But when he sat in that stuffy, closet-sized BBC studio every night, inhaling the rank odor of cabbage, it was difficult to grasp that millions of people thousands of miles away had clicked on their radios just to hear him. There was a remoteness to the process of broadcasting, a sense that his words were absorbed by the ether like tiny paper boats swallowed up by the sea.

  It wasn’t until the thirty-three-year-old broadcaster stepped off the Pan Am Clipper in New York that the reality of his fame finally set in. As Bill Paley put it, “Edward R. Murrow had become a national hero.” Waiting for him was a flock of print reporters and newsreel journalists, all of them acting as if he were Greta Garbo or Clark Gable. Everywhere he went in New York over the next few weeks, he was followed by autograph seekers, photographers, and newspaper and magazine writers begging for interviews. As unsettling as this celebrity was for Murrow, he had even more difficulty coming to grips with America’s continued refusal to commit itself to war.

  When he arrived, he found the isolationists in full cry—an “America First” rally at Madison Square Garden, Senator Burton Wheeler and Charles Lindbergh escalating their demands that Roosevelt keep the country at peace. Although isolationist leaders were gradually losing support in the country, they had become considerably more strident and aggressive in their attacks on the president and his administration. The interventionist movement was equally outspoken in firing back. It was, said one historian, “a period of loud noise in the nation.”

  Like his fellow London-based correspondents who had returned home, Murrow had trouble coping with the sheer normality of America, the seeming lack of concern about the fighting and dying on the other side of the ocean, the apparent refusal to acknowledge that Americans had any stake in the outcome of this cataclysm. “He walked along Fifth Avenue and Madison and saw the stores stocked with beautiful things, and it positively made him angry,” said a friend. “He’d see all the food in the restaurants and say ‘I don’t think I can eat, when I think of what’s going on back there.’ ” In a letter to a friend, the English socialist Harold Laski, Murrow said he was “spending most of my time trying to keep my temper in check,” seeing “so many well-dressed, well-fed, complacent-looking people” and hearing “wealthy friends moaning about ruinous taxation.” He added: “Words mean something entirely different over here…. Maybe it was a mistake to come.”

  Had all his broadcasts about the horror and heroism of the Blitz gone for naught? Had he failed in his effort to put Americans in the shoes of those caught up in war? Years later, he would remark during a BBC broadcast: “It is difficult to explain the meaning of cold to people who are warm, the meaning of privation to people who have wanted only for luxuries…. It is almost impossible to substitute intelligence for experience.” Perhaps. But as speaker after speaker noted at a gala banquet in Murrow’s honor at the Waldorf-Astoria, he had done more to bridge that gap of understanding than anyone had previously thought possible.

  The December 2 banquet was Bill Paley’s idea. “Almost every eminent American,” he said, “pressed us for an invitation,” and more than one thousand dignitaries attended. When Murrow was introduced, the black-tie audience rose to its feet in a crescendo of cheers and applause. To Janet Murrow, sitting at a front-row table, her husband seemed “stunned by the whole thing—it was so out of our experience.” Murrow did not mince words that night: if Britain was to survive and Hitler to be stopped, America had to enter the war. The conflict, he said, would be decided “along the banks of the Potomac. General headquarters for the forces of decency is now on Pennsylvania Avenue.”

  Those who spoke in his honor, however, maintained that, despite the doubts Murrow expressed about Amer
ica’s resoluteness, the country had drawn closer to war, even if it was not yet fully committed. One of the key reasons for that shift, they said, was his reporting from London. “You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames that burned it,” the poet Archibald MacLeish observed. “You laid the dead of London at our door and we knew that the dead were our dead … were mankind’s dead.” In a telegram read to the guests, President Roosevelt declared: “You … who gather tonight to honor Ed Murrow repay but a tiny fraction of the debt owed him by millions of Americans.” To underline their appreciation for what Murrow had done, Roosevelt and his wife invited the Murrows to dine with them at the White House. The date was fixed for Sunday, December 7.

  IN ENGLAND, GIL WINANT and Averell Harriman had been invited to spend December 7 with the Churchills at Chequers. As he drove to the prime minister’s country house, Winant knew that the day would be anything but relaxing. The Japanese were on the move, and an attack was expected at any moment. The day before, Roosevelt had been handed a belligerent message from the Japanese government to their embassy in Washington. After reading the dispatch, which had been cracked by U.S. Army code breakers, the president declared, “This means war.” Two large convoys of Japanese warships had been sighted steaming south, but no one knew their exact destination. All the intelligence pointed, however, to Malaya, Singapore, or the Dutch East Indies.

  When Winant arrived at Chequers in early afternoon, he found Churchill waiting for him outside. The ambassador had scarcely emerged from his car when Churchill exclaimed: “Do you think there will be war with Japan?” When Winant said, “Yes,” the British leader declared: “If they declare war on you, we shall declare war on them within the hour.”

  “I understand, Prime Minister,” Winant said. “You have stated this publicly.”

  “If they declare war on us, will you declare war on them?”

  “I can’t answer that, Prime Minister. Only the Congress has the right to declare war under the United States Constitution.”

  Churchill was silent for a moment, and Winant knew what he was thinking: a Japanese attack on British territory in Asia would force his country into a two-front war, with no lifeline from the United States. Then he roused himself and, turning to Winant “with the charm of manner that I saw so often in difficult moments,” said to the American: “We’re late, you know. You get washed, and we will go in to lunch together.”

  A large house party that included Kathleen Harriman and Pamela Churchill had gathered at Chequers that weekend. But the weather was cloudy and cold, and Churchill—tired, moody, and obviously depressed—uncharacteristically had little to say to anyone. Most of the guests had already gone home Sunday when dinner was served a little before nine o’clock. Exhausted by family and war worries, Clementine Churchill stayed in her room. At the table that night were the Harrimans, Pamela, Winant, a couple of Churchill’s staffers, and the prime minister himself, who spent much of the dinner with his head in his hands, absorbed in his thoughts. It was Churchill’s habit to listen to the nine o’clock BBC news and, rousing himself from his gloom, he asked Sawyers, his valet, to bring in his flip-top portable radio, a gift from Harry Hopkins a few months before.

  It seemed a routine broadcast at first: war communiqués at the beginning, followed by a few tidbits of domestic news. Then, at the end, one brief, unemotional sentence: “The news has just been given that Japanese aircraft have raided Pearl Harbor, the American naval base in Hawaii.” There was silence around the table until Churchill, sitting bolt upright, shouted, “What did he say? Pearl Harbor attacked?” Stunned, Harriman repeated, “The Japanese have raided Pearl Harbor.” Commander C. R. Thompson, Churchill’s naval aide, interrupted the American: “No, no, he said Pearl River.” As Harriman and Thompson argued, Sawyers entered the dining room. “It’s quite true,” the valet told Churchill. “We heard it ourselves outside. The Japanese have attacked the Americans.”

  With that, Churchill was on his feet and heading toward the door, exclaiming, “We shall declare war on Japan!” Throwing his napkin on the table, Winant jumped up and ran after him. “Good God,” he said, “you can’t declare war on a radio announcement!” Churchill stopped and, looking at him quizzically, asked, “What shall I do?” When Winant said he would call Roosevelt at once, Churchill replied, “And I shall talk to him too.”

  A few minutes later, FDR was on the phone. “Mr. President, what’s this about Japan?” Churchill asked. Roosevelt replied: “They’ve attacked us at Pearl Harbor. We are all in the same boat now.” The prime minister was euphoric, and so were his two American guests. In an early draft of his memoirs, Churchill recalled that Winant and Harriman received the news about Pearl Harbor with “exaltation—in fact they nearly danced with joy.” (Indeed, according to John Colville, Winant and Churchill “sort of danced around the room together” that night.) In his final draft, Churchill replaced his description of unrestrained jubilance with a toned-down version: “They did not wail or lament that their country was at war…. In fact, one might almost have thought that they had been delivered from a long pain.” He shared that exuberant sense of release. That night, he wrote, he “slept the sleep of the saved and thankful,” quite convinced now that “we had won the war. England would live.”

  DECEMBER 7 HAD dawned unseasonably warm in Washington. Taking advantage of the balminess, Ed Murrow was playing golf at the Burning Tree course in nearby Bethesda when he heard the news of Pearl Harbor. Returning to town, he drove past the Japanese embassy, where diplomats, their arms loaded with papers, scurried back and forth between the embassy and a bonfire in the garden. From their hotel, Janet called Eleanor Roosevelt, expecting to hear that their dinner invitation had been canceled. Absolutely not, replied Mrs. Roosevelt. “We still have to eat. We want you to come.”

  That evening, the Murrows threaded their way through throngs of people gathered outside the brightly lit White House, some in Lafayette Park across the street, others pressing against the tall iron fence in front. Inside the presidential mansion, there was an atmosphere of barely controlled chaos, with phones jangling and officials rushing from one office to another. After greeting Murrow and his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt explained that her husband was too busy to join them for dinner; he had been closeted in conferences since early afternoon.

  Those who saw the president that day testified to his extreme difficulty in coming to grips with the magnitude of the attack. When cabinet members entered his study for a meeting that evening, he didn’t look up. In fact, he acted at first as if they weren’t even there. “He was living off in another area,” noted Frances Perkins. “He wasn’t noticing what went on the other side of the desk…. His face and lips were pulled down, looking quite gray…. It was obvious to me that Roosevelt was having a dreadful time just accepting the idea that the Navy could be caught off guard.”

  After Mrs. Roosevelt and her guests finished a light supper of scrambled eggs and pudding, the president’s wife told Murrow that FDR wanted to see him. Could he stay a little longer? Janet went back to the hotel, while the broadcaster waited on a bench outside Roosevelt’s study, smoking cigarette after cigarette, as he watched cabinet members and congressional and military leaders hurry in and out. The tension in the air was palpable: striding down the corridor, a senator turned to the admiral beside him and shouted: “You’re not fit to command a rowboat!” Spotting Murrow, several officials, including Hopkins, Knox, Cordell Hull, and Henry Stimson, stopped to exchange gloomy comments on what was shaping up to be the most devastating military disaster in American history.

  Finally, near midnight, FDR called Murrow into his study. Here they were, arguably the two best communicators in the country, certainly the two best-known voices on American radio. But there was no time for reflections on that score or, for that matter, for any pleasantries at all. The president asked Murrow about the British public’s morale and then, over beer and sandwiches, told him of the staggering losses at Pearl Harbor—the eight battleshi
ps sunk or badly damaged, the hundreds of planes destroyed, the thousands of men dead, wounded, and missing. Roosevelt kept his rage under control until he started talking about the aircraft. “Destroyed on the ground, by God!” he exclaimed, pounding his fist on the table. “On the ground!” As Murrow later recalled, “the idea seemed to hurt him.”

  When he finally left the White House early the next morning, Murrow joined Eric Sevareid at CBS’s Washington bureau, a few blocks away. “What did you think when you saw that crowd of people tonight staring through the White House fence?” Murrow asked. Sevareid replied: “They reminded me of the crowds around the Quai d’Orsay a couple of years ago.” Nodding, Murrow said: “That’s what I was thinking. The same look on their faces that they had in Downing Street.”

  It was an expression both men knew well—the look of a people steeling themselves for war.

  THE MORNING AFTER PEARL HARBOR, CHURCHILL AWOKE FROM A sound sleep and announced he planned to leave at once for Washington. A dubious Anthony Eden told him he didn’t think the Americans would want to see him so soon. Eden was right. When Roosevelt heard about the prime minister’s proposed trip, he advised Lord Halifax, now the British ambassador in Washington, that it might be better to wait. But Churchill would brook no delay. “He was like a child in his impatience to meet the President,” recalled Lord Moran. “He spoke as if every minute counted.” Four days after the United States entered the war, Churchill and his military advisers were on their way to the American capital to set up the alliance he had pursued for so long.

  Aboard the battleship Duke of York, the British leader appeared, in the view of his doctor, to be decades younger than he had looked just days before. “The Winston I knew in London frightened me,” Moran wrote in his diary. “And now, in a night it seems—a younger man has taken his place…. The tired, dull look has gone from his eye. He is gay and voluble, sometimes even playful.”