Dinner With Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table

by Cita Stelzer

  “My wife and I tried two or three times in the last forty years to have breakfast together, but it didn’t work. Breakfast should be had in bed alone. Not downstairs after one has dressed.” It is reported that Churchill’s eyes twinkled as he reported this.28

  Averell Harriman’s private notes and memories of Churchill, written in 1962, tell of another and rather unusual breakfast. “We left (Baltimore) at midnight and got to (Botwold) at 8 o’clock by my watch, but noon local time. They served us scotch whisky and cold lobster for breakfast. Churchill seemed to thrive on it. I thought it a little rough.”29

  Neither the simplicity nor the privacy Churchill demanded of breakfast served as models for the lunches and dinners and he unquestionably noticed the difference between the management of the presidential household and his own residences in the UK. Mrs. Henrietta Nesbitt, principal White House housekeeper from 1933 until 1946, was in charge of all menus and foods, and of all servants, meal planning and purchases. She is generally acknowledged by all who were subjected to her foods and menu-planning to be the worst housekeeper in White House history. She had run a bakery-from-home in Hyde Park, New York. Mrs. Roosevelt, having taken a fancy to her home-made breads and pies, invited her to Washington in 1933 to be head housekeeper at the White House, and retained full confidence in Mrs. Nesbitt in spite of her lack of experience and the numerous missteps during her on-the-job learning, and in spite of the President’s constant complaints about her cooking and her menu choices. Even the President of the United States was not master at his own table so long as his wife supported the White House cook. Mrs. Roosevelt, preferring the outside arena of policy to the management of the social aspects of life inside the White House, saw little need to modernise the White House kitchen, which was “like an old-fashioned German rathskeller with a great deal of ancient architectural charm”. The icebox was lined in wood, Mrs. Nesbitt’s predecessors had left no cookbooks, and there were only a few utensils. Fortunately for future researchers, Mrs. Nesbitt decided that when she left the White House she “was going to leave behind complete lists”.30 So we have detailed menus, with her notes, of every lunch and dinner – but not breakfast – served at the White House while the Prime Minister lived there.

  Mrs. Nesbitt paints a picture of the British delegation:

  Even Mr. Churchill looked poor-coloured and hungry, though he was heavy-set and, one could tell, had enjoyed good living. But they had pared to the bone over there, holding Hitler at bay, so I tried to feed them up while we had the chance. Every time the Churchill group came, it seemed we couldn’t fill them up for days. Once we cooked for guests who didn’t come, and offered it to some of the Englishmen who had just risen from the table, and they sat right down and ate the whole meal through, straight over again.31

  Most of the thirteen dinners, and some of the lunches the President and the Prime Minister shared, began with the cocktail ceremony. Roosevelt was known for his robust and unusual cocktails – the proportions of his martinis were said to be “unfortunate”.32 Charles “Chip” Bohlen, one of Roosevelt’s diplomats and his interpreter at Teheran, says the martinis were made with a “large quantity of vermouth, both sweet and dry, with a small amount of gin”.33 No mention of the infamous Argentine vermouth to which he had introduced his British guest at Placentia Bay.

  The first White House dinner at which Churchill had an opportunity to deploy his combination of charm and draw on the careful planning he had done before and during his transatlantic voyage, was at a “semiformal” dinner on the day he arrived, 22 December 1941.34 A note on the menu reads “17 people 8:30 Mrs. R.”35 Seventeen people settled down for dinner; one, the Prime Minister, also settled down to work. Guests that night included Cordell Hull, Secretary of State, and Under-Secretary of State Sumner Welles, both with wives; British Ambassador Lord Halifax and Lady Halifax; Beaverbrook, British Minister of Aircraft Production; Mrs. Bertie Hamlin, wife of the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and an old Roosevelt friend; the President’s wife and Harry Hopkins. Mrs. Hamlin recalls the President’s champagne toast at the end of the dinner: “To The Common Cause”. That surely was music to Churchill’s ears.

  The originally scheduled roast leg of lamb had been replaced at the last minute with broiled chicken. We can only suppose that the President’s last-minute announcement that he would be joined by distinguished guests caused chaos in Mrs. Nesbitt’s kitchen. Or perhaps the roast leg of lamb was deleted in favour of broiled chicken because there just wasn’t enough lamb to feed seventeen people.

  Neither this menu nor the other menus during the Churchill visit catered specifically to English tastes or to the preferences of the Prime Minister. Indeed, on the day following the first White House dinner, the lunch led off with a cream soup, much disliked by Churchill as we shall see in Chapter 10, in this instance cream of celery soup. The following courses – kedgeree and grilled tomatoes and raspberry Mary Anne – may have made Churchill long for some home cooking and for his favourite cook in Britain, Mrs. Landemare.

  The President loved sauerkraut and pigs’ knuckles and had that dish served to Churchill, who politely asked what they were. When told, Churchill, on his best behaviour, only responded, according to Alonzo Fields, that they were “very good, but sort of slimy”.36

  The Prime Minister might have consumed the dish, but if so it would have been for no reason other than to please his host, on whose goodwill so much was riding.

  Churchill was famously an animal lover, with special affection for those he knew personally. In his affectionate squiggles to Clementine he depicted himself as a pig. He refused to eat suckling pig as he had raised pigs at Chartwell and claimed to know them. During the First World War when food was in short supply, he refused to carve a goose from his farm at Lullenden, saying: “You’ll have to carve it, Clemmie. He was my friend.”37

  No matter. Churchill had come to do business, not to eat. His principal goal was to persuade the President that the Germany First strategy he had enshrined in the series of memoranda written on the sea voyage to America – an “immense feat of intellectual effort and foresight”, according to historian Andrew Roberts38 – was in America’s interests. So for him the Christmas festivities, no matter how welcome in themselves, were an interruption in the private time he felt he needed with Roosevelt. In the event, as later discussions revealed, Roosevelt had already decided that “Germany first” was the policy that would hasten victory in what had become a world war.39 It was left to the Prime Minister to sell his plan for implementing that strategy – which proved no small chore given the competing claims on resources.

  Meanwhile, with Christmas only two days away, the White House was decorated with evergreens, Christmas balls and wreaths. As in all houses full of children waiting for Christmas Day, the mood was excited and expectant, in part because of the Roosevelts’ desire to convey calm and cheer only a few weeks after the Pearl Harbor disaster. It must have been doubly busy with messengers delivering gifts, journalists prying and the British military and political staffs with their red boxes needing the Prime Minister’s attention: a “hugger-mugger”40 atmosphere in which two powerful heads of state lived side by side, an unusual situation under almost any circumstances, and especially unusual when the two leaders were planning what would undoubtedly be a long war against two determined and mutual enemies.

  As if that were not enough chaos, Churchill and Roosevelt held a press conference, American style, the Prime Minister wearing a polka-dot bow tie, striped trousers and a short black jacket, and responding to complaints from the press “boys” in the rear that he could not be seen by standing on a chair.

  To add to the managerial problems, the reaction to Churchill’s visit was electric: gifts, cards and letters to the Prime Minister poured in. Gifts were turned over to the British embassy, which catalogued them, showed them off to the press and sent out the requisite thank-you notes. One, a signed photo of the prizefighter and world champion Jack Dempsey, was perhaps sent because De
mpsey had battered the much bigger Luis Angel Firpo into submission, and the sender was hoping Britain would similarly batter larger Germany. Among the oddest were a bag of lima beans with instructions for cooking; a copy of George Washington’s will; a painting of the great seal of the State of Ohio;41 and a six-foot tall V sign made of lilies.42 More knowledgeable donors sent bottles of brandy and boxes and boxes of cigars that continued to be the gift of choice to Churchill from admirers throughout the war. More important than any gifts as tokens of the American public’s growing affection for the Prime Minister was an invitation from Congress to address a Joint Session of Congress on the day after Christmas.

  On the evening of 23 December, cocktails were followed by dinner at eight p.m., once again featuring typical 1940s American fare. That evening the menu was:

  Noodle soup

  Roast beef

  Stuffed potatoes, broccoli

  Orange & cress salad

  Bavarian cream pie

  Coffee

  We can only assume that at some point Churchill managed to obtain a glass or two of champagne: although no champagnes or wines are listed on these detailed menus, they undoubtedly were available. (Today the White House menus list the wines served with each course.) In the days that followed, the President and Prime Minister typically stayed up talking, drinking brandy and smoking until two or three a.m. For the better part of three weeks, despite Eleanor Roosevelt’s efforts, the late-night sessions continued. She was no more successful than Clementine Churchill in bringing such evenings to a close. “Mother would just fume,” the President’s son, Elliott, recorded, “and go in and out of the room making hints about bed, and still Churchill would sit there.”43

  On Christmas Eve, meetings between principals and their military and political staffs went on as usual amid the bustle typical of any large house the day before Christmas – in this case a house with two political giants living side by side.

  At twilight, in weather warmer than usual for December, the President and the Prime Minister went onto the White House’s South Portico balcony for the traditional ceremony of the lighting of the national Christmas tree. Somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 people stood outside the White House singing carols and listening to Churchill say: “I cannot truthfully say that I feel far from home”,44 adding another building block to the special relationship he was constructing. Both the President’s and Churchill’s words were broadcast across the United States and overseas.

  At dinner that night, an American guest, Percy Chubb, noted that the President was “buoyant” but Churchill “subdued”. Always working, even at a Christmas Eve dinner, Churchill fretted about Britain’s food supply and commented that the Americans were shipping too many powdered eggs to Britain, “the only thing you can make with them is Spotted Dick”45, steamed suet pudding, served with custard, widely disliked, to boys at English boarding schools such as the one attended by a young Winston Churchill. FDR, needling, said: “Nonsense. You can do as much with a powdered egg as with a real egg.” Chubb responded by asking “How could you fry a powdered egg?”46

  On Christmas morning, the Prime Minister and the President, along with invited guests and their families, attended a special Divine Service, “surrounded by bevies of G-Men, armed with Tommy-guns and revolvers”,47 at the Foundry Methodist Church on 16th and P Streets in Washington. It was during that service that Churchill first heard the carol, “O Little Town of Bethlehem”.

  After the service, on to lunch. Once again, it began with the cream soup.

  Cream of green pea soup

  Broiled sweetbreads

  Candied sweet potatoes

  Peas and creamed onions

  Chicory and cress salad

  Ice-cream and cake

  Fortunately, the Prime Minister was focused more on selling his war strategy than on what was put on his plate.

  That Christmas night at the White House, at eight p.m., the President and Prime Minister sat down together for a traditional American Christmas dinner, 1941 style, in the State Dining Room, surrounded by some forty to fifty family members and friends, but oddly, no children, who apparently dined somewhere else. Churchill’s physician noted that guests stood around in a circle while Mrs. Roosevelt went around shaking hands. Once again, dinner was American fare, with the soup mercifully clear:

  Oysters on the half shell

  Clear soup with sherry

  Celery and assorted olives

  Roast turkey with chestnut dressing

  Deerfoot sausage (a well-known American brand)

  Giblet gravy

  Beans and cauliflower

  Casserole of sweet potatoes

  Grapefruit salad and cheese crescents

  Plum pudding and hard sauce and ice-cream Cake

  One of Mrs. Roosevelt’s guests, Betty Hight, starry-eyed at the sumptuousness of that Christmas dinner and the richness of the setting, wrote to her family:

  … we ate with gold cutlery … from the Cleveland Administration. The plates had been designed by FDR and the horseshoe table with square corners had been decorated with huge bowls of red carnations … with holly and ivy in between … gold urns containing fruit were placed here and there.

  Betty Hight mentions that a “sauterne wine” was served as well as champagne.48 Churchill surely would have been sufficiently sensitive to the suffering of his countrymen to have compared the lush dinner with the thin fare available in Britain under the rationing programme in which he was so heavily involved, and under which the availability of vegetables often depended on the ability of each household to grow its own.

  No charades, no Christmas crackers as in an English house, but an after-dinner showing of the film Oliver Twist. Churchill, with his mind on the importance of his speech to a Joint Session of Congress the next morning, uncharacteristically excused himself early to do his homework, a process that lasted until two in the morning. He knew that his first speech to America’s elected representatives (there would be two more) was of critical importance for explaining the British position, and persuading the legislators who controlled the military’s purse strings and could oppose any presidential strategy if they chose to do so. In the event, it was another triumph for the Prime Minister.

  Sir Charles Wilson was with Churchill when he returned to the White House after the speech. Churchill thought it had gone well but was worried about something else: the reaction of some congressmen led him to fret that he was not in touch with Americans, other than the President. He knew that he would one day need the goodwill of top government officials. So he told Sir Charles he was planning a dinner at the British embassy for members of the Roosevelt administration, including Cordell Hull, then Secretary of State, and key congressmen.

  That evening he confided an even greater worry to his physician. He told Sir Charles Wilson that he had been experiencing shortness of breath, dull pain down his left arm and pains in his chest, which he wanted to attribute to his excitement at the opportunity for intimate meetings with the President, saying: “It has all been very moving.”49 Sir Charles diagnosed “coronary insufficiency”, for which the prescription would then have been complete bed rest for six weeks, but knowing Churchill would never have accepted, he made the decision not to tell him the truth.

  Needing a few days’ rest to recover from his heart attack, and according to Andrew Roberts, “keen not to overstay his welcome in Washington”,50 Churchill flew to Pompano Beach, Florida, to stay at the seaside villa owned by Edward Stettinius, then a presidential aide. Commander Thompson describes the meals:

  The President had sent down a staff from the White House to look after us, but apparently the cook had not been warned of the P.M.’s somewhat rigid preference for simple meals. He liked plain English cooking, and enjoyed roast beef or steak so much that, with rationing in force at home, he often saved half his portion at dinner-time and had it for breakfast next morning. I think he could have been perfectly happy to lunch off cold roast beef every day of his life, but o
ur new cook felt he was on his mettle and on our first day there he provided an elaborately prepared clam chowder. [It was declined] and Mr. Churchill said firmly “If you haven’t any clear soup, please bring me a plate of Bovril, double strength.” As the butler had never heard of Bovril (which the P.M. pronounced Boe-vril), the request caused some consternation in the kitchen.51

  Fortifying sunshine, some dips in the warm ocean, a return by train to the White House for a few final dinners, and back to Britain on a transatlantic flight, then considered very risky except by the American pilots. So successful had Churchill’s table-top diplomacy been that General George Marshall later complained that Roosevelt “would communicate” only with Churchill on matters affecting the conduct of the war, leaving Marshall and others scrambling to find out what the two leaders had in mind.52

  Notes

  1. Kimball (ed.), Churchill & Roosevelt, The Complete Correspondence, Volume I, p. 286

  2. Smith, Jean Edward, FDR, p. 542

  3. Meiklejohn, Diaries, Reel 52. Harriman had also brought over the gift of an electric shaver which the Prime Minister wanted to use constantly. Voltages were of course a problem.

  4. Churchill, Volume III, p. 538

  5. Harvey (ed.), p. 70

  6. Kimball (ed.), p. 286

  7. Ive, p. 72

  8. Richardson, pp. 84-85. Jacob joined Churchill on the Duke of York.

  9. Soames (ed.), Speaking For Themselves, p. 461

  10. Pawle, The War and Colonel Warden, p.145

  11. Martin, John, Downing Street; The War Years, p. 69

  12. Gilbert, Churchill, Road to Victory, 1941-1945, Volume VII, p. 18