by Lynne Olson
In 1942, many members of Parliament, as well as a large number of British government officials, would have agreed with Roosevelt that India must be given more autonomy and, at some point, its independence. Some also would have agreed that Britain had a great many stains on its colonial record. What they objected to was the American attitude toward British imperialism, which they regarded as smug, self-righteous, and deeply hypocritical.
After all, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the United States had embarked on its own version of imperialism, seizing half of Mexico, invading Cuba, and annexing Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippines, among other territories. Oliver Stanley, the British colonial minister, reminded Roosevelt of that fact in 1945 when the president said to him: “I do not want to be unkind or rude to the British, but in 1841, when you acquired Hong Kong, you did not acquire it by purchase.” Stanley shot back: “Let me see, Mr. President, that was about the time of the Mexican War.”
But Roosevelt, like most of his compatriots, refused to accept the imperialist label. As Americans saw it, the United States had been an expansionist power, not a colonial one: its mission was to civilize and protect, not exploit, the foreign peoples who came under its dominion. According to the historian Justus Doenecke, “Roosevelt’s picture of American history was highly chauvinistic. In his view, American action in the world arena reflected sheer altruism.” But not all residents of U.S.-controlled territories viewed it that way, nor did the British, who had often used the altruism argument themselves when adding to their empire.
Churchill and others in the British government also suspected that behind the Americans’ high-minded sermons about freeing British possessions from colonial rule was a generous dollop of economic self-interest. Their suspicions would certainly have been reinforced if they had overheard a casual comment that Roosevelt made to his son Elliott at Casablanca: “British bankers and German bankers have had world trade pretty well sewn up in their pockets for a long time, despite the fact that Germany lost in the last war. Well, now, that’s not so good for American trade, is it?” In the sardonic view of Anthony Eden, “Roosevelt’s dislike of colonialism, while it was a principle with him, was none the less cherished for its possible advantages.”
Those advantages included British bases in the Pacific, on which the Pentagon had its eye, and oil concessions in the Middle East. Aware that America’s oil reserves were insufficient to meet its future needs, U.S. government officials were determined to break Britain’s dominance in the region and acquire concessions of their own. American businessmen, meanwhile, were anxious to acquire access to markets protected by Britain’s imperial preference system, which bound Britain and its empire together in an economic common market and imposed stiff tariffs on imported goods from nonempire countries. While the military alliance between the two countries was unprecedently close, “it is similarly true,” as historian Kathleen Burk has noted, “that the United States treated Britain as a rival which had to be cut down.”
Even before the United States entered the war, Washington, citing rumors that the British were using Lend-Lease goods for export, pressured London to agree to forgo not only the export of American supplies but also the export of British goods of a similar nature. The reports of British abuse of Lend-Lease for their own economic gain proved to be unsubstantiated, but American policymakers remained adamant that Britain must be prevented from acquiring any commercial edge during the war. Eden and other British officials were infuriated by the U.S. demands, which they viewed as economic blackmail, but in the end, Gil Winant convinced them to sign the agreement, citing the importance of minimizing “friction and misunderstanding on both sides.” As it happened, the reduction of British exports during the war helped open many world markets to American penetration. At the end of the conflict, British exports had plummeted 50 percent while American exports had expanded threefold.
At the same time, however, the British strenuously resisted another American effort to use Lend-Lease as a stick. In the summer of 1941, the Roosevelt administration proposed that, as a payback for Lend-Lease, the British agree to end its imperial preference system. Arguing that such trade discrimination greatly inhibited international economic growth, American officials pushed free trade as the path to postwar peace and prosperity. As the British saw it, free trade was particularly good for the United States, which had long sought access to empire trade on equal terms but, at the same time, insisted on keeping its own high tariffs. (The Americans argued that their tariffs were not discriminatory because they applied to all U.S. trading partners.)
Although a staunch imperialist, Churchill did not much like the imperial preference system. But he and his cabinet were vehemently opposed to the idea of being coerced into agreeing to a postwar economic order that favored the United States. Indeed, they wondered, why was there any need for a Lend-Lease payback at all? At the pinnacle of its might as an empire, Britain paid its allies to fight on its behalf and did not expect financial reimbursement afterward. Why shouldn’t America follow Britain’s example?
In February 1942, Churchill raised that point in an irate cable to Roosevelt that was never sent: “It must be remembered that for a large part of 27 months we carried on the struggle single-handed…. Had we failed, the full malice of the Axis Powers … would have fallen upon the United States.” In a cable that was dispatched to the president, Churchill noted that the British cabinet had already decided the issue. It voted against swapping imperial preference for Lend-Lease, feeling that, if Britain did so, “we should have accepted an intervention in the domestic affairs of the British Empire.”
In the end, a compromise was worked out. It committed both governments to take postwar action to achieve international economic cooperation but eliminated an explicit British commitment to end imperial preference. The Americans, however, would raise the subject again at the end of the war, and, this time, the British would not escape.
THE UNRAVELING OF Churchill and Roosevelt’s relationship in the late stages of the war was exacerbated by the failing health of both leaders. The crushing, constant pressure of the conflict had taken an immensely heavy physical toll on them and on virtually every other major figure in their governments. In wartime diaries and letters, high-level British and American officials, both military and civilian, complained that the war’s physical and mental strain had left them perpetually exhausted, chronically ill, and, in many cases, drinking too much. Reading his waspish late 1943 diary entries several years later, Alan Brooke, for example, recalled that he had not been well at the time, adding: “I am inclined to think that I cannot have been very far off from a nervous breakdown.”
After the Casablanca conference in early 1943, both Roosevelt and Churchill fell seriously ill—Churchill with pneumonia and Roosevelt with influenza—and, afterward, both seemed to have lost much of the vitality that had been their trademark. When David Brinkley, then a young newspaper reporter, first saw Roosevelt in 1943 at the White House, he was shocked by the president’s ravaged face. “In newspaper and magazine and newsreel pictures, it was the face of a handsome man with strong, well-formed features,” Brinkley observed. “Here was the reality—a man who looked terribly old and tired…. This man’s face was more gray than pink, his hands shook, his eyes were hazy and wandering, his neck drooped in stringy, sagging folds.” When Brinkley asked FDR’s press secretary what was wrong with him, the official shrugged and said: “He’s just tired. Running a world war is a hell of a job.” Roosevelt, who had been president for eleven years at that point, was more than tired: he was showing the signs of the severe hypertension and heart disease that would kill him less than two years later. His family and aides were increasingly concerned by his growing listlessness and bouts of forgetfulness.
Overstrained and overtired, Churchill seemed to be losing his own legendary powers of concentration. “I began to feel … that the stupendous burden that he had been carrying so valiantly throughout the war was gradually crushing him,”
Alan Brooke remarked. Seven years older than the president, Churchill had been waging war for a considerably longer period than FDR—and under arguably greater pressure. That strain, compounded by the demands of frequent trips to visit Roosevelt, other allies, and British troops, made him gloomy, sick, tired, and even more impulsive than usual. The prime minister’s doctor noted that his work had begun to suffer. Brooke and others in the British government worried about Churchill’s abrupt change of moods and positions on strategy and tactics, his “inability to finish one subject before taking up another,” and an occasional “instability of judgment.” In October 1943, Brooke exploded in his diary: “I am slowly becoming convinced that in his old age, he is becoming less and less well balanced! I can control him no more…. He refuses to listen to any arguments.” In their increasingly frequent verbal battles, both Churchill and Brooke were, as Brooke’s biographer Arthur Bryant pointed out, “too exhausted to realize that the other was in the same state.”
ON NOVEMBER 12, 1943, Roosevelt boarded the USS Iowa in Chesapeake Bay for the first leg of an arduous journey to the Middle East—first, to Cairo, for a session with Churchill and China’s Chiang Kai-shek, and then to Tehran, for the Western leaders’ first conference with their fretful Soviet ally, Joseph Stalin. Neither Churchill nor Roosevelt wanted the summit to be held in Tehran (Roosevelt, recovering from a new bout with the flu, told Daisy Suckley that the Iranian capital was “full of disease”), and both tried to convince Stalin to meet somewhere else. Stalin refused: if they wanted to see him, they would have to accept the site he designated.
A day after Roosevelt’s departure, Churchill, who was suffering from a sore throat and heavy cold, sailed from Plymouth on the HMS Renown. Included in his large retinue were his daughter Sarah, acting as his personal aide-de-camp, and Gil Winant, who was making his first appearance at a Roosevelt-Churchill conference. While Averell Harriman, Winant’s bête noire, had managed to get himself included in all but one of the Western leaders’ wartime meetings, the ambassador had been sidelined from all of them except Cairo and Tehran. Even worse, as he saw it, was the fact that nobody in Washington ever let him know what happened at the sessions; he was forced to rely on Churchill and Eden to fill him in on what was discussed. In a letter to Roosevelt after the 1943 Quebec meeting, Winant noted that, except for briefings from the prime minister and Eden, “I have had no information … on any major policy decisions.”
With an Allied victory drawing closer and talks beginning on economic and political settlements, Winant was anxious to play a significant role in the construction of the postwar world. His frustration and anger at being bypassed and uninformed by the White House boiled over shortly before the Tehran conference, when British and American newspapers ran stories speculating that he would soon return to Washington as secretary of labor. The articles also referred to rumors that either Hopkins or Harriman would replace him in London. Winant immediately shot off a cable to Hopkins, informing him of the reports and adding that “these things would not be damaging if it were not known that you and Averell have done a considerable part of the exchange that normally falls to the office I hold.” Further, he declared, “an ambassador cannot be an effective representative in London unless he is better informed and given more support than I am receiving.”
As he had in the past, Hopkins sought to pacify Winant. “I know exactly how you feel,” he wrote, “and if I were in your shoes I would feel just the same.” The president’s chief aide denied the rumors of Winant’s being replaced, declaring that Roosevelt “not only has absolute confidence in you but feels you are doing the best job of any Ambassador to England…. I know of no one who has made a greater contribution to the war than you have, and that opinion is shared by all of your friends here.” This time, Hopkins’s soothing words were backed up by action: an invitation to Winant to come to Cairo and Tehran.
IN CAIRO, ROOSEVELT hosted a festive Thanksgiving dinner for Churchill and the other top-level British and American officials attending the conference, among them Winant and Harriman. That evening, the old Churchill-Roosevelt camaraderie was very much on display. The president carved two huge turkeys for those around the table, and, after the convivial meal, Sarah, the only woman there, danced with Winant and many of the other male guests, while her father waltzed happily around the room with General Edwin “Pa” Watson, Roosevelt’s chief military aide. In his dinner toast, Roosevelt remarked: “Large families are usually more closely united than small ones … and so, this year, with the people of the United Kingdom in our family, we are a large family, and more united than before. I propose a toast to this unity, and may it long continue!”
The unity, however, lasted only until Tehran. Throughout the conference, the president ostentatiously ignored Churchill, making clear he was far more interested in wooing Stalin, whose fury over the lack of a second front in Europe had steadily escalated in the previous few months. There was no doubt that, despite the image of a happy, problem-free alliance promoted by Churchill and Roosevelt in Britain and the United States, the Western allies’ relationship with the Soviets was in considerable trouble. At Tehran, Roosevelt’s plan, according to Cordell Hull, was to “talk Mr. Stalin out of his shell … away from his aloofness, secretiveness and suspiciousness until he broadens his views.” The president once told his cabinet he was sure that Stalin’s brief training for the Russian Orthodox priesthood had “entered his nature” and that he would behave in “the way in which a Christian gentleman should behave.” Said Charles Bohlen, a young American diplomat and Soviet expert who translated for the president at Tehran: “I do not think Roosevelt had any real comprehension of the great gulf that separated the thinking of a Bolshevik from a non-Bolshevik, and particularly from an American. He felt that Stalin viewed the world somewhat in the same light that he did.” Bohlen added: “A deeper knowledge of history and certainly a better understanding of foreign peoples would have been useful to the President.”
Just before the conference began, Harry Hopkins told Lord Moran: “You will find us lining up with the Russians.” The “us” to whom Hopkins referred included Harriman, Churchill’s old confidant and bezique partner. The new U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, who advised the president to stay with Stalin at the Soviet embassy in Tehran rather than with Churchill at the British legation, no longer functioned as an unofficial adviser to the prime minister, there to soothe and reassure him. Now he was seen by the British as an antagonist, who, in Brooke’s words, was “endeavouring to improve the American situation with Stalin at our expense.” Alexander Cadogan, the longtime permanent undersecretary of the Foreign Office, was infuriated when Harriman at one point gave him and Anthony Eden pointers on “how to conduct international conferences” when “I’ve forgotten a great deal more than he ever knew.” As the conference opened, Brooke told Lord Moran: “Stalin has got the President in his pocket.”
When Churchill invited Roosevelt to lunch, the president declined. Hopkins explained that Roosevelt did not want “the impression to get abroad that he and Winston are putting their heads together in order to plan Stalin’s discomfiture.” Instead, Roosevelt joined forces with Stalin to discomfit Churchill. At a dinner early in the proceedings, the Soviet leader persisted in needling the prime minister, while FDR, according to Bohlen, “not only backed Stalin but seemed to enjoy the Churchill-Stalin exchanges.” Bohlen, who years later would become ambassador to Moscow himself, remarked that the president “should have come to the defense of a close friend and ally, who was really being put upon by Stalin.” Roosevelt “always enjoyed other people’s discomfort,” Harriman later noted. “I think it is fair to say that it never bothered him very much when other people were unhappy.”
A couple of days later, the president decided to try another tactic to get Stalin on his side: mocking Churchill as Stalin had done earlier. He began by whispering to Stalin: “Winston is cranky this morning. He got up on the wrong side of the bed.” Encouraged by Stalin’s slight smile, the
president twitted Churchill directly, chaffing him about “his Britishness, about John Bull, about his cigars, about his habits.” The more Churchill reddened and scowled, the more the Russian leader smiled, until he finally broke into loud laugh. “For the first time in three days I saw light,” Roosevelt later exulted to Frances Perkins. “From that time on, our relations were personal. We talked like men and brothers.”
Bohlen disagreed with FDR’s analysis. In his view, the president’s ganging up on Churchill was “a basic error…. Russian leaders always expected and realized that Britain and the United States were bound to be much closer in their thinking and in their opinions than either could conceivably be with the Soviet Union. In his rather transparent attempt to dissociate himself from Churchill, the President was not fooling anybody and in all probability aroused the secret amusement of Stalin.”
Churchill, for his part, was greatly hurt by what his eldest grandson, also named Winston Churchill, called Roosevelt’s “childish exercise in currying favor.” According to the younger Churchill, the prime minister never made public how he felt about the incident, revealing only to his family “his huge disappointment and discomfort at what had happened.”
IN THE VIEW of most of those present, Stalin was easily the best negotiator of the three leaders at Tehran. There, and later at Yalta, British and American diplomats and military authorities shared the uneasy feeling, as one British official put it, that the “immediate gains had always gone to Russia; the vague promises about the future to the United States and Britain.” Stalin finally received a firm commitment for Operation Overlord, the long awaited invasion of mainland Europe. With Roosevelt’s help, the Soviet leader stymied Churchill’s proposal for expanded Allied operations in the Mediterranean and the Balkans. Stalin, in turn, promised to go to war against Japan after the defeat of Germany.
