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

by Lynne Olson

  Sarah had always felt whipsawed between the men she loved. “You’ve no idea how tough it is, having a famous husband and a famous father,” she once exclaimed to a friend. Knowing that Churchill had never forgiven Vic Oliver for snatching Sarah away from him, she worried how he would react if her relationship with Winant became public. Feeling imprisoned in a “cage of affection,” Sarah told Winant she planned to resume her acting career. She deeply cared for him but saw no future with him.

  ED MURROW’S PERSONAL and professional life was also in considerable flux. In the fall of 1944, his wife had resigned from the British-American Liaison Board, pleading “mental and physical exhaustion.” Janet had had enough of Murrow’s increasingly open affair with Pamela Churchill and decided she needed to get away to think things over. She returned to the United States to see her parents, both of whom were ailing, and to reassess her marriage. As soon as she left, Murrow began bombarding her with a series of pining letters. “For many things I owe you much,” he wrote her on her birthday, September 18. “For the way you wear your hats…. For your kindness to friends…. For your willingness to risk the loss of dough and position for a principle…. More and more you are the important part of my life.” In another letter, he observed: “I am lonesome as can be…. Saw Clemmie [Churchill] in the Lobby, who asked for you…. How long is it since we went walking together or just loafed? … If we have any sense, the best years of our lives should be ahead of us.” In yet another, he acknowledged: “Maybe I had begun to take your love and kindness and tolerance too much for granted.”

  Yet, for all his tender missives to Janet, Murrow continued to see Pamela, who, while still carrying on her affair with Frederick Anderson, had greatly stepped up the pressure on Murrow to divorce Janet and marry her. In a letter to Harriman late in the war, she noted that she and Murrow had had a serious quarrel over her relationship with Anderson. The night after the row, she wrote, “Fred took me to dine at Ciro’s … and we danced away til midnight.” Notwithstanding Pamela’s fickleness, Murrow, according to several friends, was indeed thinking of divorcing Janet and marrying her.

  Before making a final decision, however, he returned to the United States in early 1945 for a month’s vacation with Janet at a Texas dude ranch. “We didn’t talk about Pamela at all,” Janet recalled. “We were very happy to be together.” During that time, she became pregnant. For years, both she and Murrow had longed to have a child, and the birth of their son, Casey, in November 1945 brought an end to his involvement with Churchill’s daughter-in-law, even though, as he later told a friend, “I’ve never been so in love with anybody in my life.” According to Pamela, Murrow sent her the following terse telegram breaking off the affair: “Casey Wins.”

  Four months after Casey was born, the Murrows, after nine years in England, prepared to move back home. Murrow had accepted an offer from Bill Paley to become vice president of news and public affairs at CBS. He didn’t really want the job, telling Janet he hated the idea of being cooped up in an executive suite. In recent trips to the United States, he had also felt uncomfortable with the stark contrast between American living standards and those in England and the rest of Europe. “We live in the light, in relative comfort and complete security,” he broadcast to his fellow Americans shortly before the end of the war. “We are the only nation engaged in this war which has raised its standard of living since the war began. We are not tired, as all Europe is tired.”

  He was concerned, too, by what he viewed as the arrogance of the United States, its seeming reluctance to work closely with Britain and other less powerful countries after the war. “This is a great nation,” he told his listeners. “I have seen its power thrown round the world. But we must live with the world. We cannot dominate it.” Yet, for all his doubts and concerns about going back to the United States, it was still home. He needed, he felt, to return to his roots.

  Nonetheless, leaving London proved to be an extraordinarily wrenching experience. In the British capital, he had come of professional age, learning his craft with the help of his BBC colleagues, to whom he was considerably closer, both personally and professionally, than to the CBS staffers in New York. Indeed, midway through the war, Brendan Bracken, at Churchill’s behest, had asked him to become deputy director of the BBC, in charge of all its programming—news and entertainment—worldwide. It was a remarkable offer but one that Murrow, after considerable thought, reluctantly declined. He was worried, among other things, that as an American, he would be put in “an awkward position” in the event of “a real conflict of views” between the United States and Britain after the war. Still, he was greatly moved by the honor paid him. “Can you imagine an American broadcasting company asking an Englishman to take charge of it?” he asked Felix Frankfurter.*

  Shortly before leaving London in March 1946, Murrow bade farewell to the British people in a broadcast over the BBC. As a young man, he said, he had visited Britain three times—and had come away with decidedly unfavorable impressions. “Your country was a sort of a museum piece,” he observed, “pleasant but small. You seemed slow, indifferent and exceedingly complacent…. I thought your streets narrow and mean, your tailors over-advertised, your climate unbearable, your class consciousness offensive. You couldn’t cook. Your young men seemed without vigor or purpose. I admired your history, doubted your future, and suspected that the historians had merely agreed upon a myth.” Yet, he acknowledged, “always there remained in the back of [my] youthful and undisciplined mind, the suspicion that I might be wrong.”

  His wartime experience in Britain, Murrow said, showed him just how wrong he was. Faced with the greatest crisis in their history, Britons proved their true mettle, fighting back with all their might while remaining faithful to the principles of freedom and democracy. “The government was given dictatorial power, but it was used with restraint…. There was still law in the land. Representative government, equality before the law, all survived. There was no retreat from the principles for which your ancestors fought…. [Your example] will, I think, inspire and lift men’s hearts long after the names of most of the great sea and land engagements have been forgotten.” With strong emphasis, Murrow added: “I have been privileged to see an entire people give the reply to tyranny that their history demanded of them…. You have lived a life, not an apology.”

  In the days following his broadcast, letters from all over Britain poured in to the CBS office. “It is men like you,” one woman wrote, “who keep alive in our hearts the tiny flame of hope that some day, nations may grow to understand one another and learn to live in friendship and peace. Thank you, dear Ed Murrow.” A British naval officer wrote: “Please tell your people when you get home that we may not always be easy to understand but we do want to be good and loyal friends if you let us.” Echoing that view, another letter writer implored Murrow: “When you get home, make your farewell to us known to your own folk…. Tell them that we want, for friendship’s sake and for the world’s sake, the close continuing comradeship of our American Allies. You, sir, with your unmatched gift and power, can make our common cause live on. You can keep us close together and can keep alive an understanding which was good enough to win a war and surely good enough to cherish in peace.”

  Two weeks later, Murrow made his final CBS broadcast to listeners back home. For several hours beforehand, he moodily tramped the snowy streets of London, feeling, he told his British friends, like a deserter. At the end of the program, he signed off: “Now, for the last time, this is Edward R. Murrow in London.” When he was done, BBC engineers clipped the wires of the big desktop microphone he had used for the past nine years. Attached to it was a plaque prepared by the BBC news staff and engraved with these words:

  THIS MICROPHONE, TAKEN FROM STUDIO B4 OF BROADCASTING HOUSE, LONDON, IS PRESENTED TO EDWARD R. MURROW WHO USED IT THERE WITH SUCH DISTINCTION FOR SO MANY BROADCASTS TO CBS NEW YORK DURING THE WAR YEARS 1939 TO 1945

  Murrow, who prided himself on his unemotionalism, could not hol
d back his tears. Years later, he told Malcolm Muggeridge in a BBC television interview that of all the prizes and honors he had received over the course of his career, the microphone given him by the BBC was “the only trophy I have ever kept” and the one “I value above anything I have.”

  A MONTH AFTER Murrow’s departure, Gil Winant also took his leave from Britain. Truman finally had given him an appointment as America’s representative to the Economic and Social Council, a United Nations agency aimed at promoting international economic and social cooperation and development. It was not the job he wanted, but it did give him an opportunity to work to revive war-shattered countries in Europe and elsewhere. In March 1946, he resigned as ambassador, and Averell Harriman was named to take his place.

  As heartfelt as Britain’s farewell to Murrow had been, the outpouring of love and gratitude for Winant was nothing short of astonishing. Despite the disheartening outlook for their country, the British people had not lost sight of the fact that, thanks in no small part to the U.S. ambassador, the Anglo-American alliance had held together to win the war. Such a wartime bond had never existed before—and, in all likelihood, would never be duplicated again. Winant was showered with tokens of Britain’s esteem and thanks, including honorary degrees from Oxford and from Cambridge, which, in its citation, described him as a “close friend, trusted and beloved.” Echoing that feeling, Prime Minister Clement Attlee declared that no ambassador to Britain had ever “commanded to such an extent the love of the people of this country.”

  About Winant, the New Statesman noted: “Almost everyone in this country knows his name and respects him as a great American and as one of the best friends this country has ever had.” The ambassador was, the Daily Express remarked, “the personification of the finest part of America’s character.” The Daily Herald recalled how Winant “came to us in 1941 when we were in dire peril. He lived with us, suffered with us, and worked with us. His faith in us contributed immensely to our morale, and his work as a diplomat succeeded, during a vital period, in obtaining enormous reinforcements to our fast-diminishing resources…. He was with us, up to the neck, in our fight.” The British magazine Punch, known for its satiric barbs, went against type and ran a cartoon entitled “A Friend Indeed.” It showed a Cockney flower seller handing a bouquet to Winant and saying, “Goodbye, sir. You’ve helped us in bad times and we shan’t forget you.”

  After hearing of Winant’s departure, an Oxford law professor told him: “I do not think that it is possible for you to appreciate the great place that you have made for yourself in Anglo-American history.” John Martin, Winston Churchill’s former chief private secretary, wrote to the ambassador: “Those of us who served at No. 10 had a special opportunity of knowing what a friend in need you were to our country and how much that wonderful teamwork between the two nations is owed to you.” The “rather hard-boiled” manager of the Savoy Hotel remarked to an American reporter: “When he goes, we will lose the best American we’ve ever had here in London.” In a note to Winant, Herbert Agar, who had replaced Wallace Carroll as Office of War Information head in the British capital, declared: “My driver and all the English secretaries and charwomen have come to me asking that I tell you how personally bereft they feel at your leaving…. They think it is fine that the important people have told you how deeply they feel about you, but they, the little people, want to tell you too. I hope you do realize how widespread this feeling is. As for me, there is no way of expressing what I feel. The years of working for you have been the most satisfying years of my life.”

  The “important people,” meanwhile, revealed their sense of loss at a series of farewell dinners that began with a gala function at London’s Mansion House at which both Attlee and the leader of the Opposition, Winston Churchill, spoke—”a unique honor,” in the words of the Daily Telegraph. Reporters covering that event and the others that followed were struck by the depth of feeling that speaker after speaker expressed for the U.S. envoy. “Official British reserve has seldom been so strongly forgotten as when the British Government said goodbye to Mr. Winant,” one British journalist wrote. According to the New York Times, the paeans to Winant were “infinitely more than a collection of polite phrases on a state occasion. In the deep emotion of these farewells one could sense that for Britons, Mr. Winant had been a very great ambassador.”

  “In adversity, we find our real friends—and such was John Gilbert Winant,” said the lord mayor of London. Lord Derby remarked: “In a long life, I do not remember any man who has ever rendered such signal service to his own country and ours.” Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, about to assume new diplomatic duties as British ambassador to Washington, said about Winant: “I propose to take him as my model.” Churchill, never one to hide his feelings, spoke with greater emotion than usual when he declared: “I would say without a moment of hesitation there was none who ever had a more momentous mission than Mr. Winant. There was none who came closer to the heart of Britain. There was none who, while upholding in the strictest manner the interests and rights of his own country, made us feel he was a true, faithful and unyielding friend.” Turning to Winant, the former prime minister said: “He is a friend of Britain. He is more: he is a friend of justice, freedom, and truth. He has been an inspiration.”

  No one, however, showed more sadness over Winant’s departure than Anthony Eden. In a choked voice, the former foreign secretary told an overflow crowd at a dinner at Lancaster House: “Neither you nor I nor the historian of the future will be able to estimate at its true value the contribution which Mr. Winant made to Allied unity and to Allied victory.” Tears glinting in his eyes, Eden raised his glass to the man he counted as one of his closest friends. “There is no man with whom I would rather have worked in such an ordeal, in so searching and testing a time, as John Gilbert Winant. No fairer, straighter man ever walked the earth.”

  In his quiet response, Winant said that the five years he spent in London were “hard years and grim years, but I would wish to have spent them nowhere else…. It’s not easy for me to say goodbye. I have never thought of myself as a foreigner in this land. We’ve shared so much together. We have had our common ideals and hopes and reverses, and our victories have been yours and ours together. I shall always feel that I am a Londoner.” Gazing around at the crowd before him, he ended with several lines from a Rudyard Kipling poem:

  I have eaten your bread and salt,

  I have drunk your water and wine,

  The deaths ye have died I have watched beside,

  The lives ye lent me were mine.

  As the ambassador sat down that evening, Anthony Eden was hardly the only one in the room struggling to hold back his tears.

  * Britain made its final repayment on the loan in December 2006, sixty years after it was first agreed to.

  * When Asa Briggs’s magisterial three-volume history of the BBC was published in the 1960s, Murrow’s photo, along with those of prominent BBC figures, was featured on the cover of the volume featuring the war years. He was the only non-BBC broadcaster to be included.

  LESS THAN TWO MONTHS AFTER RETURNING HOME, GIL WINANT stood on the dais of the House of Representatives chamber, looking out at the political and military elite of Washington. Before him sat congressmen and senators, as well as members of the Supreme Court, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and cabinet. President Truman was seated in the front row, directly below Winant; Eleanor Roosevelt was behind Truman; and General Eisenhower, now the Army chief of staff, sat nearby. They were all there to pay formal tribute to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had died sixteen months earlier. The event’s organizers had asked Winant to deliver the only address. “I am so glad you are going to make this speech,” Mrs. Roosevelt wrote him before the tribute. “No one could do it better.”

  What Winant said that day about Roosevelt could also have been said of him. “He dared to hope,” the former ambassador observed of his boss and friend. “There was never a time in the dark years of the Depression, or the black years of the w
ar, when he lost hope. He dared to hope for peace and believe in peace and to act for peace…. Believer in men, he thought of this republic of ours as part of that greater republic of mankind on which alone a true peace can be rested.”

  But there was no true peace in the world and, for Gil Winant, as for many others, very little hope. As Ed Murrow noted, “Seldom if ever has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear, with such a realization that the future is obscure.” The Grand Alliance had fallen apart, and the Cold War had begun, with Germany joining Eastern Europe as the conflict’s main political battlegrounds. Mired in a dispute over reparations from Germany, the Soviets and their former Western allies did not, as originally planned, set up a democratic postwar government in the country and then withdraw. Instead, they set out to make permanent what were meant to be temporary zones of occupation. As Winant had feared, the division of Germany ultimately resulted in the creation of “something like independent states, each of which [was] a watertight compartment,” with free movement cut off between the Soviet zone and those controlled by America, Britain, and France.