by Max Hastings
Many Tory MPs, Eden among them, shared the grandees’ distaste for the United States. Cuthbert Headlam, admittedly something of an old woman, wrote of Americans with condescension: “They really are a strange and unpleasing people332: it is a nuisance that we are so dependent on them.” A Home Intelligence report found “no great enthusiasm for the US333 or for US institutions among any class of the British people … There was an underlying irritation largely due to American ‘apathy.’” Fantastically, some British officers questioned whether it would be in Britain’s interests for America to become a belligerent. Air Marshal Sir John Slessor, with the British mission in Washington in April 1941, noted that some of his colleagues believed that “it wouldn’t really pay us for the US334 to be actively engaged in the war.” Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, later C-in-C of Bomber Command, wrote with characteristic intemperance about the difficulties of representing the RAF in Washington in 1941. It was hard to make progress, he said bitterly,
when one is dealing with a people so arrogant335 as to their own ability and infallibility as to be comparable only to the Jews and the Roman Catholics in their unshakeable conviction that they alone possess truth. As to production generally out here. This country is now at a crossroads. Up to date they have had a damn fine war. On British dollars. Every last one of them. The result has been a magnificent boom after long years of black depression and despair … They lose no opportunity of impressing upon us individually how magnificently they are fighting [sic] and how inept, inefficient and idiotic and cowardly is our conduct of those few miserable efforts we ourselves are making in battle and in industry … Such production of war materials as has been achieved up to date has therefore been all to their profit and in no way to their inconvenience … They will come in when they think that we have won it. Not before. Just like they did last time. They will then tell the world how they did it. Just like they did last time.
If Harris’s tone was absurdly splenetic, it was a matter of fact that Britain and France provided the surge of investment that launched America’s wartime boom. In 1939, U.S. gross national output was still below its 1929 level. Anglo-French weapons orders and cash thereafter galvanised U.S. industry, even before Roosevelt’s huge domestic arms programme took effect. Between 1938 and the end of 1942 average income per family in Boston rose from $2,418 to $3,618 and in Los Angeles from $2,031 to $3,469, figures admittedly boosted by inflation and longer working hours. It could be argued—and indeed was, by the likes of Harris—that Britain exhausted its gold and foreign currency reserves to fund America’s resurrection from the Depression.
In London, ministers and generals found it irksome to be required to lavish extravagant courtesies upon transatlantic visitors. Hugh Dalton grumbled about attending a party given at the Savoy by the Sunday Express for American broadcaster Raymond Gram Swing: “It is just a little humiliating336, though we shall soon get more and more used to this sort of thing, that the majority of the Ministers of the Crown plus foreign diplomats, British generals and every kind of notability in the press world have to be collected to help to boost this, I am sure, quite admirable and well-disposed American broadcaster.” Dalton was disgusted when the guest of honour asked him blithely whether there were factions in Britain willing to make peace with Germany. Nor was such impatience confined to ministers. Kenneth Clark of the Ministry of Information suggested the need for a campaign against “the average man’s … unfavourable view337 of the United States as being a country of luxury, lawlessness, unbridled capitalism, strikes and delays.”
The British were exasperated by American visitors who told them how to run their war, while themselves remaining unwilling to fight. A British officer wrote of Roosevelt’s friend the flamboyant Col. William “Wild Bill” Donovan: “Donovan … is extremely friendly to us338 & a shrewd and pleasant fellow and good talker. But I could not but feel that this fat & prosperous lawyer, a citizen of a country not in the war, & which has failed to come up to scratch even in its accepted programme of assistance, possessed very great assurance to be able to lay down the law so glibly about what we and other threatened nations should & sh[ou]ld not do.”
It is against this background of British resentment and indeed hostility towards the United States that Churchill’s courtship of Roosevelt must be perceived. The challenge he faced was to identify what D. C. Watt has called “a possible America,”339 able and willing to deliver. This could only be sought through the good offices of its president. Churchill, least patient of men, displayed almost unfailing public forbearance towards the United States, flattering its president and people, addressing with supreme skill both American principles and self-interest. He was much more understanding than most of his countrymen of American utopianism. On the way to Chequers one Friday night late in 1940, he told Colville that “he quite understood the exasperation340 which so many English people feel with the American attitude of criticism combined with ineffective assistance; but we must be patient and we must conceal our irritation. (All this was punctuated with bursts of ‘Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree’.)”
Churchill himself knew the United States much better than most of his compatriots, having spent a total of five months there on visits in 1895, 1900, 1929 and 1931. “This is a very great country, my dear Jack,” he wrote enthusiastically to his brother back in 1895, when he stopped by en route to the Spanish war in Cuba. “What an extraordinary people the Americans are!” He was shocked by the spartan environment of the West Point Military Academy, but much flattered by his own reception there: “I was … only a Second Lieutenant341, but I was … treated as if I had been a General.” During his December 1900 lecture tour, he was introduced in New York by Mark Twain, and told an audience in Boston: “There is no one in this room who has a greater respect for that flag than the humble individual to whom you, of the city which gave birth to the idea of a ‘tea party,’ have so kindly listened. I am proud that I am the natural product of an Anglo-American alliance; not political, but stronger and more sacred, an alliance of heart to heart.”
He had met Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Hoover, along with Vanderbilts and Rockefellers, Hollywood stars, Henry Morgenthau, William Randolph Hearst and Bernard Baruch. He had lectured to American audiences in 1931–32 about the perceived shared destiny of the English-speaking peoples. Many of his British contemporaries saw in Churchill American behavioural traits, above all a taste for showmanship, that his own class disliked, but which were now of incomparable value. Humble London spinster Vere Hodgson perceived this, writing in her diary: “Had he been pure English aristocracy342 he would not have been able to lead in the way he has. The American side gives him a superiority complex—in a way that Lord Halifax would not think in good taste—but we need more than good taste to save Britain at this particular moment.”
In 1940–41, Churchill sometimes displayed private impatience towards perceived American pusillanimity. “Here’s a telegram for those bloody Yankees,”343 he said to Jock Colville as he handed the private secretary a cable in the desperate days of May 1940. In dispatches to Washington, the malignant U.S. ambassador Joseph Kennedy made the worst of every such remark which he intercepted. He translated Churchill’s well-merited dislike of himself into allegations that the prime minister was anti-American. Kennedy’s dispatches inflicted some injury upon Britain’s cause in Washington, cauterised only when Roosevelt changed ambassadors in 1941, replacing Kennedy with John “Gil” Winant, and Churchill embarked upon personal relationships with the president, Harry Hopkins and Averell Harriman. Churchill’s broadcasts, however, already commanded large American audiences, and imposed his personality upon Roosevelt’s nation in 1940–41 almost as effectively as upon his own people. By late 1941, Churchill ran second344 only to the president in a national poll of U.S. radio shows’ “favourite personality.” “Did you hear Mr. Churchill Sunday?” Roscoe Conkling Simmons asked his readers in the Chicago Defender on May 3, 1941. “You may be against England, but hardly a
gainst England as Mr. Churchill paints her … Did you note how he laid on the friendship of Uncle Sam?” Churchill’s great phrases were repeated again and again in the U.S. press, “blood, toil, tears and sweat” notable among them.
If Churchill had not occupied Britain’s premiership, who among his peers could have courted the United States with a hundredth part of his warmth and conviction? There was little deference in his makeup—none, indeed, towards any of his own fellow countrymen save the king and the head of his own family, the Duke of Marlborough. Yet in 1940–41, he displayed this quality in all his dealings with Americans, and, above all, with their president. When the stakes were so high he was without self-consciousness, far less embarrassment. To a degree that few of his fellow countrymen proved able to match between 1939 and 1945, he subordinated pride to need, endured slights without visible resentment, and greeted every American visitor as if his presence did Britain honour.
By far the most important of these was, of course, Harry Hopkins, who arrived on January 8, 1941, as the president’s personal emissary, bearing a letter to King George VI from his fellow head of state, saying that “Mr. Hopkins is a very good friend of mine, in whom I repose the utmost confidence.” Hopkins was a fifty-year-old Iowan, a harness maker’s son who had been a lifelong crusader for social reform. He met Roosevelt in 1928, and the two men formed an intimacy. Hopkins, the archetypal New Dealer, in 1932 federal relief administrator, and one of the strongest influences on the administration. Roosevelt liked him in part because he never asked for anything. It was the heady scent of power that Hopkins savoured, not position or wealth, though he had a gauche enthusiasm for nightclubs and racetracks, and was oddly flattered by press denunciations of himself as a playboy. He cherished contrasting passions for fungi and the poetry of Keats. The high spot of his only prewar visit to London, in 1927, was a glimpse of Keats’s house. A lonely figure after the death of his second wife from cancer in 1937, he was invited by FDR to live at the White House. Hopkins had pitched camp there ever since, with the title of secretary of commerce and the undeclared role of chief of staff to the president, until he was given responsibility for making Lend-Lease work.
Hopkins’s influence with the president was resented by many Americans, not all of them Republicans. He was widely unpopular, being described by critics as “FDR’s Rasputin,” and an “extreme New Dealer.” At the outset of World War II, he had been an instinctive isolationist, writing to his brother: “I believe that we really can keep out345 … Fortunately there is no great sentiment in this country for getting into it, although I think almost everyone wants to see England and France win.” Physically, he cut an unimpressively dishevelled figure, his long neck and gaunt features ravaged by the stomach cancer that had almost killed him. Many people who met Hopkins perceived, through the haze from the cigarettes he chain-smoked, “a walking corpse.”346 A Time photograph of him carried the caption: “He can work only seven hours a day.”347 Brendan Bracken, sent to greet Hopkins when his flying boat landed at Poole Harbour, was appalled to find this vital visitor slumped apparently moribund in his seat, unable even to unfasten his seatbelt. The relationship with the British upon which the envoy now embarked became the last important mission of his life.
On January 10, 1941, Churchill welcomed Hopkins for the first time in the little basement dining room of Downing Street—the house was somewhat battered by bomb blast—for a tête-à-tête lunch which lasted three hours. The guest opened their conversation with the forthrightness which characterised Hopkins’s behaviour: “I told him there was a feeling in some quarters that he, Churchill, did not like America, Americans or Roosevelt.” This was Joseph Kennedy’s doing, expostulated the prime minister, and a travesty. He promised absolute frankness. He said that he hoped Hopkins would not go home until he was satisfied “of the exact state of England’s need348 and the urgent necessity of the exact material assistance Britain requires to win the war.” He then deployed all his powers to charm his guest, with unqualified success.
Hopkins’s intelligence and warmth immediately endeared him to Churchill. Throughout his political life, the president’s man had decided upon courses of action, then pursued them with unstinting energy. If he arrived in Britain with a relatively open mind, within days he embraced the nation, its leader, and its cause with a conviction that persisted for many months, and did incalculable service. That first Friday evening, the American drove to join the prime minister and his entourage at Ditchley, in Oxfordshire, Churchill’s weekend residence on moonlit nights during the blitz, when Chequers was perceived to be vulnerable to the Luftwaffe. The text of the Lend-Lease bill, now beginning its hazardous passage through Congress, had just been published. Britain’s dependence on the outcome was absolute. However, Churchill warned the chancellor, Kingsley Wood, that he himself would say nothing to Washington about looming British defaults on payments for arms should Lend-Lease fail to pass the U.S. legislature: “We must trust ourselves to [the president].”
Hopkins was extraordinarily forthcoming to his hosts, who welcomed his enthusiasm after the cold scepticism of Joseph Kennedy. That first weekend, on the way to see Churchill’s birthplace at Blenheim Palace, the envoy told Brendan Bracken that Roosevelt was “resolved that we should have the means of survival and of victory.” Hopkins mused to the great CBS broadcast correspondent Ed Murrow, then reporting from London, “I suppose you could say—but not out loud349—that I’ve come to try to find a way to be a catalytic agent between two prima donnas.” Churchill, for his part, diverted his guest during the month of his visit with a succession of monologues, strewing phrases like rose petals in the path of this most important and receptive of visitors. At dinner at Ditchley, the prime minister declared:
We seek no treasure350, we seek no territorial gain, we seek only the right of man to be free; we seek his rights to worship his God, to lead his life in his own way, secure from persecution. As the humble labourer returns from his work when the day is done, and sees the smoke curling upwards from his cottage home in the serene evening sky, we wish him to know that no rat-a-tat-tat [here he rapped on the table] of the secret police upon his door will disturb his leisure or interrupt his rest. We seek government with the consent of the people, man’s freedom to say what he will, and when he thinks himself injured, to find himself equal in the eyes of the law. But war aims other than these we have none.
Churchill’s old colleagues—the likes of Balfour, Lloyd George, Chamberlain, Baldwin, Halifax—had for years rolled their eyes impatiently in the face of such outpourings. Familiarity with Winston’s extravagant rhetoric rendered them readily bored by it, especially when it had been deployed in support of so many unworthy and unsuccessful causes in the past. Yet now, at last, Churchill’s words and the mood of the times seemed perfectly conjoined. His sonorous style had an exceptional appeal for Americans. Hopkins had never before witnessed such effortless, magnificent dinner-table statesmanship. He was entranced by his host: “Jesus Christ! What a man!” He was impressed by the calm with which the prime minister received news, often bad. One night during the usual evening film at Ditchley, word came that the cruiser Southampton had been sunk in the Mediterranean. The show went on.
During the weeks that followed, Hopkins spent twelve evenings with Churchill, travelled with him to visit naval bases in Scotland and blitzed south coast towns. He marvelled at his host’s popularity and absolute mastery of Britain’s governance, though he was less impressed by the calibre of Churchill’s subordinates: “Some of the ministers and underlings are a bit trying,” he told Roosevelt. Eden, for instance, he thought talked too much. Hopkins attained a quick, shrewd grasp of the private distaste towards the prime minister that persisted among Britain’s ruling caste: “The politicians and upper crust pretend to like him.” He was in no doubt, however, about the fortitude of the British people. “Hopkins was, I think, very impressed351 by the cheerfulness and optimism he found everywhere,” wrote Churchill’s private secretary Eric Seal. “I must
confess that I am surprised at it myself … PM … gets on like a house afire with Hopkins, who is a dear, & is universally liked.” Roosevelt’s envoy told Raymond Lee, “I have never had such an enjoyable time352 as I had with Mr. Churchill.”
Back in Washington, the president was much tickled by reports of Hopkins’s popularity in Britain, as Interior Secretary Harold Ickes noted: “Apparently the first thing that Churchill asks for353 when he gets awake in the morning is Harry Hopkins, and Harry is the last one he sees at night.” Maybe so, growled the cynical Ickes, but even if the president had sent a bubonic plague carrier, Britain’s prime minister would have found it expedient to see plenty of him. Among the envoy’s most important functions was to brief Churchill about how best to address the American people and assist Roosevelt’s efforts to assist Britain. Above all, the prime minister was told, he should not suggest that any commitment of U.S. ground troops was either desirable or likely. Hopkins concluded his report to the president: “People here are amazing from Churchill down,” he wrote, “and if courage alone can win—the result will be inevitable. But they need our help desperately.”
When the envoy landed back at New York’s LaGuardia Airport in February 1941, the new ambassador-designate to Britain, “Gil” Winant, called out to him as he descended from his plane, “Are they going to hold out?” Hopkins shouted back, “Of course they are.” This was a self-consciously theatrical exchange for the benefit of the assembled throng of reporters, but nonetheless sincere. Thereafter, Hopkins’s considerable influence upon the president was exercised towards gaining maximum U.S. support for Britain. Londoner Vere Hodgson was among those who thrilled to a BBC broadcast by Roosevelt’s envoy: “He finished with really glorious words of comfort354: ‘People of Britain, people of the British Commonwealth of Nations, you are not fighting alone.’ I felt after this the War was won.”
