by Lynne Olson
The American invasion, meanwhile, proved to be a gold mine for the shopkeepers and other small businessmen near the square. “There was not a tailor, a shoemaker, a laundry or a cleaner in our neighborhood that did not start working overtime to cope with this influx,” a Londoner remarked. “Whereas eighteen months earlier, during the night raids, these little tradesmen had carried on stoically with an order here and there, prosperity now burst upon them. They hammered and sewed, they ironed and they washed, all day and far into the night.”
KNOWN AS “LITTLE AMERICA,” Grosvenor Square acquired another nickname—”Eisenhowerplatz”—when General Dwight Eisenhower arrived in June to assume command of American forces in the European theater. The selection of the fifty-one-year-old Eisenhower to take charge of American troops was, at first glance, an odd one. An obscure general with an infectious grin and affable manner, he had never commanded an Army unit larger than a battalion and had never fought in a war. Much to his dismay, he, like George Marshall, had been a staff officer for most of his career; he’d come to England from Washington, where he had headed the War Plans Division and had been the chief architect of the American plan to invade the Continent.
Beneath Eisenhower’s gregarious, easygoing persona, however, was a keen mind, fierce ambition and resolve, and explosive temper. A Marshall protégé, he was a master organizer and prodigiously hard worker. Above all, he was one of America’s few generals who was not an Anglophobe. From the start, he was determined to forge a close working relationship with his country’s new allies; indeed, he described himself as a “fanatic” on the subject. “Gentlemen,” he told his staff shortly after arriving in London, “we have one chance and only one of winning this war, and that is in complete and unqualified partnership with the British…. I shall govern myself accordingly and expect you to do likewise.”
Nonetheless, his introduction into the sniffy upper-class world in which his British counterparts operated was a rocky one. A country boy from Abilene, Kansas, Eisenhower had grown up in a house on the wrong side of the tracks, with no running water or indoor plumbing. “There is no question,” wrote one of his biographers, “that poverty steeled young Dwight’s ambition and his determination to excel [and to] succeed.” Yet, although he concealed it well, his humble roots also left him with a deep sense of insecurity, a fear of being perceived as a country bumpkin—a not uncommon unease felt by other Americans when mingling with upper-crust Britons. “He feared nothing so much as exposure,” said an associate.
When Eisenhower visited the country estate of Lord Mountbatten, the commander of British combined operations, the evident disdain of the elderly manservant who unpacked the meager contents of his suitcase so embarrassed him that he left the man an especially large tip. He was made equally self-conscious by the haughty butler assigned to him at Claridge’s, who made no secret of his scorn for the general’s unassuming ways. Eisenhower detested everything about Claridge’s, including his suite, with its black-and-gold sitting room—”Makes me feel as if I’m living in sin”—and its “whorehouse pink” bedroom. (He later moved to the Dorchester but felt no more comfortable there.)
He also hated the social whirl of wartime London. “Despite the fact that he was tremendously sought after by London hostesses, he became almost as much of a recluse as Greta Garbo,” recalled Kay Summersby, the young Irishwoman who became his driver in the capital. “He was impatient with anything that took his time or energy away from the war.” After one society reception, he stormed to Summersby, “I don’t think my blood pressure can take it if one more silly woman calls me ‘My deeaah general.’ I’m nobody’s goddamned ‘deeah general,’ and I’m not fighting this war over tea cups.” Shortly after he arrived in London, Eisenhower instituted a seven-day workweek in his command. “After all, it is a war,” he said. “We’re here to fight and not to be wined and dined.”
In his rejection of a high-profile social presence in London, as in much else, Eisenhower resembled Gil Winant, with whom, he said later, he formed a close working relationship and intimate friendship. Both were unpretentious, modest men who hated the floodlight of publicity and who put all their energy into work. Although not frequent churchgoers, they both were deeply religious. Above all, both were determined to do everything in their power to make the U.S.-British alliance a success. “From the outset he regarded Anglo-American friendship almost as a religion,” General Pug Ismay, Churchill’s liaison with the British chiefs of staff, said of Eisenhower. Throughout the war, he remained the voice of reason and conciliation, even in the midst of the most bitter disputes. His emphasis on teamwork went unappreciated by many of his own American generals, who later would accuse him of favoring the British over his countrymen.
When Eisenhower first arrived in the British capital, both Murrow and Winant helped guide him through its social and political minefields. Harry Butcher, Eisenhower’s personal aide, noted in his diary that the general “was having difficulty in determining who was important and who was not, who should be seen and who could be put off…. I got Ed Murrow to help us on this.”
Winant, meanwhile, came to the general’s rescue in a thorny situation related to his heavy smoking. For much of his life, Eisenhower had been a chain-smoker, a habit that intensified as the pressures on him grew more intense. The ambassador repeatedly reminded him that, at official British dinners, there was to be no smoking until near the end of the dinner and the offering of toasts, a ban that Eisenhower repeatedly forgot. Finally, to make it easier on him and to avoid a minor strain in Anglo-American relations, Winant arranged that, at dinners where Eisenhower was present, the toasts would be offered immediately following the serving of the first course.
After establishing his headquarters at 20 Grosvenor Square, diagonally opposite the embassy, the general frequently crossed the square to consult Winant on various issues, and Winant did the same. The two “see eye to eye” on almost everything, Butcher observed. Noting the similarity between his and Eisenhower’s outlook and attitudes, the ambassador, who referred to himself as “another of Ike’s lieutenants,” sometimes asked his advice on such things as the wording of a cable to Washington. In turn, Eisenhower sought Winant’s help on a number of questions, including the relationship between the British public and American troops in the country.
In London, Winant was the civilian counterpart to Eisenhower, directing the embassy staff as well as overseeing the London outposts of a rapidly growing number of American wartime civilian agencies. The military and civilian operations were enormous: in 1942, more than three thousand people worked for the U.S government in London, a figure that would skyrocket over the next two years.
The embassy itself was now the diplomatic nerve center for the war in Europe and a focal point for coordination of the Allied war effort. With 675 staffers, it was also the largest U.S. mission in the world, requiring twenty-four telephone operators to handle the more than six thousand calls that flooded in each day. The post of ambassador “was a big job when [Winant] came to it; it has developed into a gigantic one now,” the New York Herald Tribune wrote. “His functions, methods, and surroundings are more like those of a president of a big corporation.” Winant’s burden was “extremely heavy,” noted one British official. “Everything, inevitably, found its way to the Ambassador’s desk.”
Among the new agencies whose work Winant oversaw were the London branches of the Office of War Information, Board of Economic Warfare, and Office of Strategic Services, America’s first official intelligence agency. The equivalent of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and Special Operations Executive, the OSS had two principal functions: to obtain information about the enemy and to promote the sabotage of enemy armaments, facilities, and morale. From the heavily guarded OSS headquarters at 70 Grosvenor Street, agents would later be sent to France and other occupied countries, as well as into Germany itself.
Winant was as bad an administrator as ever, missing appointments, keeping people waiting, sometimes for
getting the names of his own personal staff. Once, in a fit of absentmindedness, he asked Herschel Johnson, his minister-counselor, to take a letter as he paced back and forth in his office. As the number two man at the embassy, Johnson, not surprisingly, was annoyed at being asked to perform a stenographer’s job; nonetheless, he pulled out a pen and jotted down Winant’s dictation. Entering the ambassador’s office a few days later, Johnson again found Winant dictating a letter, oblivious to everything but the ideas he was trying to frame into words. This time, it was Admiral Harold Stark, the former chief of naval operations and now the chief of American naval forces in the European theater, who was sitting in a chair and frantically scribbling down what the ambassador said.
Yet, for all his eccentric administrative habits, Winant continued to be an inspirational leader who, in the words of Wallace Carroll, “exerted an uncanny magnetism.” Echoing Eisenhower’s orders to his staff, the ambassador insisted that all agency officials and embassy employees in his domain must work together as a team. For the most part, they complied; by virtually all accounts, a close and harmonious collaboration existed among the many American government departments in London. “Every informant … agrees that Ambassador Winant is largely responsible for the high degree of cooperation that exists here among representatives of the Army, Navy, State Department, Board of Economic Warfare, OWI, OSS, and others,” reported Bert Andrews, the New York Herald Tribune’s chief Washington correspondent.
As wartime Washington mushroomed, Andrews had devoted much of his time to reporting on the bitter feuds and conflicts that had erupted within and among government agencies, all of them vying for more power and influence. “Many of us,” recalled assistant secretary of state Dean Acheson, “spent an inordinate amount of time in bureaucratic warfare for survival” in what was called “the Battle of Pennsylvania Avenue.”
Andrews decided to travel to London to “to see whether the representatives of American agencies in England were getting along any better” than their counterparts back home. He was pleased, he told his readers, to discover that they were. “The Winant system seems to work admirably,” Andrews concluded, “and the scene is, oh, so peaceful, compared with the feuding grounds in Washington.”
ONE IMPORTANT FIGURE, however, was, most emphatically, not a player on the Winant team. Averell Harriman continued to undermine the ambassador, communicating directly with Hopkins and Roosevelt and in general involving himself in Anglo-American issues that were Winant’s province. Even worse, according to the journalist Harrison Salisbury, “Averell substantively undercut Winant’s relationship” with Churchill.
When Churchill visited Washington after Pearl Harbor, Harriman wangled an invitation from the prime minister to accompany him. But when he arrived, American officials, who had ignored him at the Placentia Bay conference, once again paid him little heed. In the view of Secretary of State Cordell Hull and others, Harriman was vastly exceeding his brief as Lend-Lease expediter. Nonetheless, when Churchill made a second visit to Roosevelt in June 1942, Harriman was again at the prime minister’s side. Two months later, when Churchill decided he must travel to Moscow to explain to Stalin why there would be no second front that year, Harriman persuaded Churchill and Anthony Eden that an American official—namely, he—should be present at the meetings. Roosevelt initially refused to give permission for Harriman’s trip, but, when Churchill, at Harriman’s request, cabled the president urging his attendance, FDR gave in.
Just as he had excluded Laurence Steinhardt from his Lend-Lease talks with Stalin the year before, Harriman now persuaded Churchill to bar Steinhardt’s successor as ambassador, Admiral William Standley, from the latest discussions. A former chief of U.S. naval operations, Standley was furious at Harriman’s highhandedness and considered him a dilettante, “a moth fluttering around the sparks and the flame.” Archibald Clark Kerr, the new British ambassador to Moscow, had a similarly jaundiced view of Harriman; he believed that Churchill’s fondness for the American stemmed from Harriman’s obsequiousness to the prime minister. “Every now and then [Churchill] would take Harriman by the hand, making remarks like ‘I am so glad, Averell, that you’re here with me. You are a tower of strength,’ ” Clark Kerr wrote sourly in his diary. “I think Harriman’s presence is bad for him…. [He’s] no more than a champion bum sucker.”
After returning to London, Harriman kept in frequent communication with Churchill but failed to keep Winant informed of his dealings with the British leader. For all his public protestations of support for the ambassador, Harriman privately disparaged Winant as a dreamer—too idealistic, too concerned about helping his fellow man, not pragmatic or tough enough to operate in the cutthroat world of wartime politics. To Harriman, it was incomprehensible that Winant would occasionally keep British officials and other VIPs waiting in his outer office while he talked to GIs or other nondignitaries. It was equally unfathomable to the Lend-Lease representative that, when Winant hosted one of his rare receptions at the U.S. ambassador’s official residence in Kensington, he often paid more attention to the embassy’s janitors, charwomen, and other employees, whom he had invited, than to his official guests. Years later, Harriman indicated to journalist Elie Abel, who collaborated with him on his autobiography, that Roosevelt should have chosen him as ambassador: “I think I could have done as well if I had been ambassador and had this [Lend-Lease] job, too.”
Harriman’s disdain for Winant rubbed off on his daughter and Pamela Churchill. “He’s not a good speaker or writer,” Kathleen Harriman wrote to her sister about the ambassador, “but despite that, everyone over here is still convinced he’s a great man, with capital letters. Anthony Eden spoke of him yesterday as being ‘one of the men who can influence the tide of world affairs.’ God help world affairs!”
IN THE SUMMER OF 1942, Winant appealed to Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins to clarify his authority. He may have been, as the Times of London later said, the “adhesive” of the Anglo-American alliance, but he found himself increasingly shut out of the two governments’ high-level deliberations and decision making. “Winant was very unhappy with the fact that I was the major personality in our relations with Churchill,” Harriman observed to Elie Abel. Deriding what he called the ambassador’s “stupid jealousy,” Harriman told Abel, “I utterly disregarded it.”
While Harriman certainly had a role to play in Winant’s exclusion, it was also due to Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s habit of communicating directly with each other, bypassing the State Department, Foreign Office, and their countries’ embassies. It stemmed, too, from the president’s long-standing habit of sending his own personal representatives and delegations to consult with foreign leaders without informing others in the administration who were working on the same issues. In a telegram to Hopkins, Winant reported that, when he contacted British ministries about a particular problem or concern, he was repeatedly told that a special U.S. mission had taken charge of the matter.
The ambassador was hardly the only major figure in the Roosevelt administration to find himself bypassed by the White House. Many cabinet secretaries and agency heads—among them, the highly respected war secretary, Henry Stimson—were also shut out of decision making directly related to their departments. That was the president’s style: to keep the reins of power and authority in his own hands and to control the programs and policies he considered most important to himself and the country. “Roosevelt always saw to it that he himself was last judge and arbiter,” one historian wrote.
No government official, however, felt the sting of exclusion more than did Cordell Hull. Throughout his eleven-year tenure as secretary of state, the courtly, white-haired Tennessean, who looked as if he’d just stepped out of a Victorian daguerreotype, was given virtually no role in the making of U.S. foreign policy. Winant told a British official that if Hull and Roosevelt “saw each other once a month, their relations could be considered very close.” Hull, a former senator and head of the Democratic National Committee, had been chosen for his c
abinet post not because of his experience in foreign affairs, which was nil, but because of his extensive political power and influence on Capitol Hill. In the years just before World War II and during the war itself, Roosevelt acted as his own secretary of state, ignoring not only Hull but the State Department as a whole. Winant, like other U.S. ambassadors, felt the brunt of that exclusionary policy.
In the view of James Reston, who took a short wartime sabbatical from the New York Times to serve in the U.S. embassy in London, the White House’s cavalier treatment of Winant and the Foreign Service officers who worked under him was nothing short of “a political disgrace.” In his memoirs, Reston declared: “I can think of nothing that has contributed more to the misconduct of American foreign affairs than the tendency to appoint inexperienced secretaries of state, bypass the Foreign Service, and try to operate foreign policy out of the White House.”
Although Roosevelt had no intention of curtailing his direct dealings with Churchill and the British government, he did have a high regard for Winant and the job he was doing in London; he once told his friend Belle Roosevelt that “there were very few people who were presidential timber, and one of the very few was Winant.” Learning of the ambassador’s unhappiness, the president tried to make amends. To Winant, he wrote in a somewhat incoherent letter: “You are doing a magnificent job—and I say that not only for myself but as an expression of what everybody over here is unanimous on. In fact, hardly a new job turns up in Washington that somebody does not suggest that I bring you back to handle it…. I tell them that there is no one over here that I or anybody else can think of who could fill your place in London.”
