"His humorous twinkle is infectious"

Churchill in a ten-gallon Stetson at a Val-Kill picnic, August 1943 Sipping the stiff drink and talking of dogs-Fala was "engaged" to a dog of Daisy's, and Polly had a houseful of Irish setters-Roosevelt recalled one of his earliest transactions with Churchill: the destroyers-for-bases deal. As the president remembered it, "Winston said, 'Now how in the heck am I going to explain all this to the British people? They will say the Americans are taking our territory.' I said, 'Listen, Winston, those places are nothing but a headache to you-you know that.' " According to Dahl, Roosevelt said that he had told Churchill the British possessions in the Caribbean and the Atlantic were too costly and a "headache" for another reason. "Furthermore, these places are inhabited by some eight million dark-skinned gentlemen and I don't want them coming to this country and adding to the problem which we already have with our thirteen million black men," Roosevelt said. "I tell you, Winston, it is just a headache and you can keep it."

The anecdote is secondhand-Dahl reported it to Henry Wallace-and may well have been embellished in the retelling. But a.s.suming Roosevelt had such a conversation with Churchill-it could have taken place by telephone or at Newfoundland-it is interesting that he used racism to rea.s.sure Churchill. By casting the issue in such terms, Roosevelt may have been playing to the prime minister's colonial prejudices.

THE NEXT FEW weeks were to be the Roosevelt-Churchill friendship's last great summer holiday, with fishing and Anglo-American fanfare. Their wives were both acting out familiar dramas, with Clementine under the weather and Eleanor flying off at a critical moment.

Clementine, who had not yet met the man so central to her husband's life and work, was finally traveling to a conference but was exhausted and had to stay in Quebec while Churchill and Mary, who had come along as her father's aide-de-camp, visited Hyde Park.

Eleanor played hostess along the Hudson, but she was thinking of an imminent trip to the Pacific. She would be on hand for the Churchills for the first few days, then disappear west, leaving her husband to handle Churchill's party as it divided its time for the next few weeks among Quebec, Washington, and then again at Hyde Park. Left on his own amid important business and the potential collapse of Italy-it would surrender on September 3-Roosevelt turned to Daisy. "The P. asked me to lunch with them at Mrs. R's cottage, today, and to 'take care of Mary Churchill. . . .' "

It was now a twenty-five-year-old Roosevelt ritual. Roosevelt and Eleanor operated in their own worlds, which sometimes intersected and sometimes did not. Eleanor's delight in her quasi independence was evident in the relish she took in retelling the story of the impression her Pacific travel plans made on Churchill. "It was decided that my visit should be kept secret, so I went on about my daily business as usual," Eleanor wrote after the war. "Prime Minister Churchill, who was staying with us, still speaks occasionally of how surprised he was when I casually mentioned at dinner one night that I was leaving the next day for the Southwest Pacific. He looked aghast." Churchill, himself a man of adventure, admired her adventurous spirit. "Mr. Churchill insisted on cabling to all his people in the Pacific," Eleanor recalled, "and they were most kind wherever I met them."

THERE WAS A swim and picnic at Val-Kill that weekend. Very much at home, surrounded by family and friends, the two men chatted for about half an hour before getting into the president's car for the short trip to the picnic ground. Eleanor was coming out of the water when Roosevelt and Churchill pulled up to the cottage. "Mrs. R. had a couple of card tables set up; a broiler on wheels, for the hot dogs, and all supplies laid out for a large picnic lunch," Daisy noted. There was watermelon, which flummoxed the twenty-one-year-old Mary. "I didn't know how to manage at all," she said, prompting Roosevelt to warn her not to swallow any seeds "lest they grow watermelons in her stomach." Churchill, who wore a "ten-gallon" Stetson, sipped Scotch (he had what Daisy called a "special little ice-pail" on hand to cool his drink). As he downed a hot dog and a half, Churchill slipped a bite to Fala, whom he then patted and sent off to the edge of the pond, where the dog spent much of the picnic chasing an elusive muskrat. Sitting in the sun, the prime minister made a fascinating subject of study. "He is a strange looking little man," Daisy noted. "Fat & round, his clothes bunched up on him. Practically no hair on his head . . . He talks as though he had terrible adenoids-sometimes says very little, then talks quite a lot-His humorous twinkle is infectious. Mary & he are evidently very close; now & then they would joke together."

Watching Roosevelt and Churchill this weekend, Suckley "took away the impression that Churchill adores the P., loves him, as a man, looks up to him, defers to him, leans on him." In Churchill's company, meanwhile, Roosevelt was "relaxed and seemingly cheerful in the midst of the deepest problems."

That stifling weekend, they decided that an American would command OVERLORD, the major cross-Channel operation, given the larger number of Americans in the field, and-together this time-the two invited Stalin to meet with them, proposing Alaska in the fall. Following up on their June 1942 conversation about the atomic bomb, they also took another step forward, preparing a memorandum-the final version would be typewritten on Citadel stationery and signed by both men-promising to share the results of the Manhattan Project, keep it secret, and not to use the weapon against each other, or against anyone else, without mutual consent. Churchill had been worried that the Americans were cutting the British out of the loop, a violation of the deal he and Roosevelt had first struck on that hot afternoon the year before in the president's little study. Now, again at the pinnacle, Churchill rea.s.sured himself that all would be well.

WHEN CHURCHILL ARRIVED at Quebec from Hyde Park on Sunday morning, August 15, Clementine met the train. Mary found her "looking better," but Mrs. Churchill had not greatly improved. Even without having to make public appearances, Mary wrote, " 'Quiet little lunches' and long sight-seeing drives with kindly strangers are not restful and relaxing to someone like Clementine, whose strict sense of obligation always meant she would appear at her best, and be at her best, however tired she might feel."

Mrs. Churchill was underwhelmed by her husband's comrade-in-arms. After such a buildup over the years, Clementine found Roosevelt a bit much. "My mother could be very critical and, at the same time, admire somebody very much," Mary said. "That's how she was with the President. She respected him enormously, but she was also a sharp spotter of clay feet, and she thought he could be very vain." Roosevelt's early sin: a.s.suming too much familiarity. "He took the liberty of calling her 'Clemmie,' " Mary said. " 'Cheek!' she said. I howled with laughter; I thought it was very funny."

ONE DAY AT the conference, Princess Alice, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria's and wife of Canada's governor-general, asked one of her husband's a.s.sistants if Roosevelt and Churchill would sign her autograph alb.u.m, a book that had been bound and rebound through the decades as her collection grew. The man went to the traveling map room and asked George Elsey if he would get Roosevelt's signature. "I took it, and it had everybody in it you could think of: the Kaiser, the Czar, countless royal names that didn't mean anything to me," recalled Elsey. "When the President came in, I handed the Princess's collection to him, and Roosevelt sat there in wonder. As he took my Waterman in hand to sign, he said, 'How my mother would have loved this!' "

Churchill came in, signed his name without a second thought, and turned back to business. He may have been thinking of many other things. As Admiral Wilson Brown, Roosevelt's naval aide, saw it, "there was always a good deal of chaffing between the two leaders. Both seemed to enjoy the give and take of friendly sparring to reach a compromise." By the time they reached Quebec, Brown said, "we had driven the Germans out of Africa and Sicily; we had landed in Italy, and Mussolini's fall was expected at any moment." As Brown and others set up the traveling map room for Roosevelt, though, the major issue was the cross-Channel attack. "The Prime Minister's lively imagination was working at full blast," Brown recalled.

Churchill brought his feverish planning instincts to Quebec. "The problems facing the conference were . . . for the Normandy landing-how much steel could be spared to build landing craft, landing piers and temporary harbors without interfering with the shipbuilding schedule already underway to maintain our steady flow of troops to England with necessary supplies and equipment," said Brown. Churchill and Roosevelt were so absorbed by the details, so "excited and enthusiastic," that Brown had to be clever about intervening to keep the "Winston hours" from exhausting Roosevelt. "To break up a night session I several times invented a fict.i.tious telephone call from Washington when I could tell by [Roosevelt's] expression that he had had enough," said Brown. "He was always pleased by the subterfuge."

THE CONFERENCE WAS also full of bad jokes and fishing outings. One afternoon, Churchill took a sip of iced water and said, "This water tastes very funny."

"Of course it does," Harry Hopkins replied. "It's got no whisky in it. Fancy you a judge of water!"

Churchill cut closer to the bone with his wit. A U.S. operation in the Aleutians, two American possessions occupied by the j.a.panese in the Pacific, had not gone as planned. "Churchill was tickled at the American chagrin when we launched this enormous attack and the j.a.panese had evacuated before we could get there," recalled George Elsey. "Our force had been met by barking dogs, and for days Churchill would come into the traveling Map Room and say, 'How are we today-woof, woof, woof!' This annoyed FDR intensely-it was funny the first time, but it began to grate."

Roosevelt and Churchill took off one Friday for a fishing and picnic excursion. Roosevelt struck out completely, and Churchill caught a single fish, prompting the two to dub the fishing hole "One Lake." As Warren Kimball, the editor of the Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence, noted wryly, "The fifty small trout caught by others in the party apparently did not count."

As always, there were tangled military and political problems to settle-or, in many cases, to try to settle. Angry because he thought he was being shut out of the negotiations over the Italian surrender, Stalin dispatched a furious cable. The Soviet Union, he said, was tired of being the third wheel in the alliance: "I have to tell you," Stalin wrote, "that it is impossible to tolerate such situation any longer."

Stalin's rebuke was not received well. "We are both mad," Roosevelt told his aides after he and Churchill read it on August 24. Roosevelt's anger, Harriman recalled, made him "gayer than usual" at dinner that night, while Churchill "arrived with a scowl and never really got out of his ill humor all evening."

After the president went to bed, Churchill struck a dark note. "Stalin is an unnatural man," he mused. "There will be grave troubles."

"I HOPE LADY WARDEN is getting a real rest and that you are also. Also I hope you have gone to One Lake. Be sure to have big ones weighed and verified," Roosevelt, unable to let the inside joke drop, cabled Churchill, who had slipped away for a break after the meetings at Quebec. Both men were tired and trying to regain their energy. The Churchill party decamped to a lodge in the Laurentian Mountains. "We lived in comfortable log houses," John Martin recalled, "complete with electric light, sanitation, hot baths and a blazing log fire to sit round at night." There was a bath for Churchill, and the prime minister relaxed in the same way he had done two years before on holiday in Florida during the first meeting in Washington.

"W.S.C. in terrific form, singing Dan Leno's songs and other favourites of the Halls of forty years ago, together with the latest Noel Coward," recalled Alexander Cadogan; after a nap, there was "more singing at dinner." It was perfect for Churchill. "The President had wanted to come himself," Churchill recalled, "but other duties claimed him."

Roosevelt was probably just being polite. He needed to catch his breath, and more long nights with the prime minister was not the way to do that. When the president arrived back at Hyde Park after Quebec, Daisy thought he was "looking well, but tired. He said he would try to get rested before Churchill comes to Wash. next Wednesday. . . ."

Eleanor was still in the Pacific. Confiding in his cousin, Roosevelt told Daisy that "the Quebec Conference was a success but Russia is a worry. . . . The P. believes he can do more by consistent politeness, but they fear Stalin may be building up a case-The Allies not opening a second front, etc.-and make a separate peace with Germany."

In Washington, Harry Hopkins had collapsed again, though he refused to stay in bed when Roosevelt and Churchill regathered at the White House on September 1. The years of strain were showing. "Mr. [Churchill] didn't feel well; he had a cold . . . ," Daisy noted, and Roosevelt "looked rather tired, with dark rings under his eyes." Hopkins's doctors were prescribing three months of rest, but he waved them off, saying, "All those boys at the front are fighting & getting hurt & dying. I have a job to do here, & I'm going to do it." Cadogan spent a day "running between the P.M. in bed and the President in his study. The P.M.'s sleeping arrangements have now become quite promiscuous. He talks with the President till 2 a.m. and consequently spends a large part of the day hurling himself violently in and out of bed, bathing at unsuitable moments and rushing up and down corridors in his dressing-gown."

Still fighting to regain her equilibrium, Clementine toured Washington with Daisy. With Mary along, Suckley showed them the Lincoln Memorial ("very moving," Mary said), and Mrs. Churchill's perfectionist instincts were engaged at the Jefferson Memorial. "Mrs. C. & I were bothered with the dirty water which two dirty mops were flopping around the floor," noted Daisy. "We decided a hose would be much better." Clementine later took a tumble. "On our last day in Washington," Mary wrote, "while in a bookshop, Clementine missed her footing and fell down some steps, cracking her elbow; it was not serious, but very painful and hampering, as she had to carry her arm in a sling." Her host was not helping matters. One night, the names of Sarah Churchill and Elliott Roosevelt came up, and, Mary said, "the President leaned over to my mother and said, 'Wouldn't it be wonderful if something happened between those two?' Whereupon my mother drew herself up and said, 'Mr. President, I have to point out to you that they are both married to other people!' He met his match all right."

By this time Roosevelt was tired, using movies in the evenings, as Daisy put it, "to think, & to not have to talk to his guests." Churchill was still keeping him up too late.

"I'm nearly dead," Roosevelt told Frances Perkins. "I have to talk to the P.M. all night, and he gets bright ideas in the middle of the night and comes pattering down the hall to my bedroom in his bare feet." They were probably good ideas, Roosevelt allowed, but "I have to have my sleep." At two-thirty one afternoon, finishing a lunch with Daisy, Roosevelt "said he was so sleepy his brain wouldn't work, and he would take a nap at 3. . . . Just at this moment, in breezed the P.M., full of all sorts of things. . . . So vanishes the nap!"

CHURCHILL SPENT MONDAY, September 6, 1943, in Ma.s.sachusetts receiving an honorary degree from Harvard. Roosevelt "wants the ceremony at his old University to be up to English standards in pomp and colour," wrote Lord Moran. "I think he has been sticking pins into Conant, the President of Harvard."

"Twice in my lifetime," Churchill said at the Harvard convocation, "the long arm of destiny has searched across the oceans and involved the entire life and manhood of the United States in a deadly struggle." He put the challenge directly to his young listeners, many of whom wore military uniforms.

There was no use in saying "We don't want it; we won't have it; our forebears left Europe to avoid these quarrels; we have founded a new world which has no contact with the old." There was no use in that. The long arm reaches out remorselessly, and everyone's existence, everyone's environment, and outlook undergo a swift and irresistible change.

Why, Churchill asked, had this fate fallen to America? In words that echoed Roosevelt's own arguments against isolation and self-absorption, he went on: I will offer you one explanation-there are others, but one will suffice. The price of greatness is responsibility. If the people of the United States had continued in a mediocre station, struggling with the wilderness, absorbed in their own affairs, and a factor of no consequence in the movement of the world, they might have remained forgotten and undisturbed beyond their protecting oceans: but one cannot rise to be in many ways the leading community in the civilized world without being involved in its problems, without being convulsed by its agonies and inspired by its causes.

If this has been proved in the past, as it has been, it will become indisputable in the future. The people of the United States cannot escape world responsibility.

The people of Britain and America, Churchill said, must stand together.

There is no halting-place at this point. We have now reached a stage in the journey where there can be no pause. We must go on. It must be world anarchy or world order. Throughout all this ordeal and struggle which is characteristic of our age, you will find in the British Commonwealth and Empire good comrades to whom you are united by other ties besides those of State policy and public need. To a large extent, they are the ties of blood and history. Naturally, I, a child of both worlds, am conscious of these.

ON THE TRAIN trip back to Washington, "Winston enjoyed himself hugely, making V-signs from the train window at all the engine drivers on the line and at all the pa.s.sers-by," Cadogan said. "He quite unnecessarily rushes out on to the rear platform of the car, in a flowered silk dressing-gown, to attract and chat with anyone he can find on the platform at stopping-places. Makes Clemmie and Mary do the same-only they are conventionally dressed!"

The Harvard speech was the capstone of a longtime Churchill obsession, and it raised questions about a controversial idea: Anglo-Saxon superiority. After an earlier lunch in Washington with Roosevelt and Henry Wallace, Churchill had spoken "on his favorite theme, joint citizenship for certain purposes for the citizens of the British Empire and the United States-freedom to travel in any part of the United States or the British Empire for citizens of both countries," Wallace wrote in his diary. Churchill "expected England and the United States to run the world," Wallace noted. "I said bluntly that I thought the notion of Anglo-Saxon superiority inherent in Churchill's approach would be offensive to many of the nations of the world as well as to a number of people in the United States," Wallace recalled. "Churchill had had quite a bit of whisky which, however, did not affect the clarity of his thinking process but did perhaps increase his frankness. He said why be apologetic about Anglo-Saxon superiority, that we were superior, that we had the common heritage which had been worked out over the centuries in England and had been perfected by our const.i.tution." The prime minister believed this deeply. "He himself was half American," Wallace recorded, and "he felt that he was called on as a result to serve the function of uniting the two great Anglo-Saxon civilizations in order to confer the benefit of freedom on the rest of the world."

Wallace pursued a more progressive line of argument. "I suggested it might be a good plan to bring in the Latin American nations so that the citizens of the New World and the British Empire could all travel freely without pa.s.sports," the vice president recalled. "Churchill did not like this. He said that if we took all the colors on the painter's palette and mix them up together, we get just a smudgy gray brown." Wallace pushed back. "And so you believe in the pure Anglo-Saxon race or Anglo-Saxondom-ueber alles." Churchill replied that "his concept was not a race concept but a concept of common ideals and common history."

At its best, Churchill's vision of an Anglo-Saxon world order emphasized unique democratic virtues, and without his defense of freedom in the 1940s, the advances in civil rights and liberties that took place in the second half of the twentieth century might not have happened at all. Churchill and Roosevelt were both largely creatures of their time on questions of race and ethnicity, but fortunately their overriding concern was the preservation of those forces and inst.i.tutions-the American and British understandings of justice and fair play-that would ultimately move us to higher ground.

ON SEPTEMBER 10, Roosevelt left for Hyde Park. "He asked me to use the White House not only as a residence but for any conference I might wish to hold," Churchill recalled. "I availed myself fully of these generous facilities." He called a meeting to review the military situation in Italy and in the Pacific; events certainly warranted the session, but one suspects it would not have taken much for Churchill, so fresh from his Harvard address, to bring American and British officials together in the White House. Looking back, Churchill thought the gathering "an event in Anglo-American history."

But the transatlantic balance of power was shifting even as Churchill called the meeting to order. "All I want is compliance with my wishes, after reasonable discussion," Churchill once half joked, and since Pearl Harbor he had largely won Roosevelt's compliance. Now, though, an American, not a Brit, would lead the great invasion of Europe, and America's combat munitions production had moved from less than Britain's in 1940 to nearly four times as much. The New World was outpacing the Old.

It was time for Churchill to go home, and he accepted Roosevelt's invitation to stop in Hyde Park before the Atlantic crossing. Roosevelt apparently agreed to come to England around the time of the invasion, a prospect that elated Churchill. The day at Hyde Park, Mary wrote, "pa.s.sed very happily." The Churchills celebrated their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, and Winston told Clementine that "he loved her more and more every year."

Roosevelt organized a small supper. There were c.o.c.ktails and sherry by the fireplace; Daisy gave Mary a "signed" copy of The True Story of Fala, a book Suckley coauth.o.r.ed on the president's Scottie.

"The P.M. remarked on how well the P. looked-we all agreed that it was extraordinary-It seems as though the trials & difficulties of the office of President, in these days, act as a stimulant to the P.," Daisy noted. "They may take the place of the exercise which he can't have like other people."

Roosevelt toasted the Churchills. At about ten-twenty, Roosevelt drove Churchill down the hill to the special railroad siding.

"It was," Daisy noted, "a beautiful moonlit night," and Churchill's train was waiting. Pa.s.sing beneath the trees, the chug of the blue Ford's motor echoing in the quiet woods, Roosevelt and Churchill knew the most difficult battles and issues lay ahead: the cross-Channel operation, the ongoing war against j.a.pan, the atomic bomb, the structure of the United Nations. Churchill still thought he might be able to carry the day-perhaps control the timing of OVERLORD to pursue the war in the Mediterranean and, in the long run, preserve Britain's central role in world affairs. He hoped all this was possible because of the man driving him through the Dutchess County night. They were friends; was not anything possible if the American president and the British prime minister were together, which they seemed to be?

They came to a stop along the Hudson.

Just before boarding, Churchill leaned into Roosevelt's car. "G.o.d bless you," Churchill said.

Looking into Churchill's face now, in the darkness, Roosevelt may have sensed the rising emotion in his guest. So many years together by now; so many decisions; so many young men sent into battle. And it was really only beginning. Roosevelt's own heart was stirred.

"I'll be over with you, next spring," Roosevelt said. Churchill boarded the special.

"My dear Franklin," Churchill wrote from the train, ". . . We have all greatly enjoyed this trip, and I cannot tell you what a pleasure it has been to me, to Clemmie and to Mary to receive your charming hospitality at the White House and at Hyde Park. You know how I treasure the friendship with which you have honoured me and how profoundly I feel that we might together do something really fine and lasting for our two countries and, through them, for the future of all. Yours ever, W."

Roosevelt's reply was generous. "Delighted you are all safely home, and I hope you had a smooth run. All is quiet here. Congress has been here for a week and it is still quiet. My best to all three of you."

But Daisy had noticed something else at that last supper. There was, she told her diary, "a first very definite chill of autumn."

PART.

III.

THE CHILL OF AUTUMN.

Fall 1943 to the End.

"Winston, I hope you won't be sore at me for what I am going to do"

The Big Three at Teheran, November 1943.

CHAPTER 9.

I HAD TO DO.

SOMETHING DESPERATE.

A Makeshift Thanksgiving-.

Tough Times in Teheran-.

Roosevelt Turns on Churchill.

THE CHILL BETWEEN Roosevelt and Churchill came from the east, and it settled in slowly. "No lover," Churchill said after the war, "ever studied the whims of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt." In Teheran, the bill for Churchill's seduction of Roosevelt came due. From the destroyer deal to Lend-Lease, from the shipment of Shermans after Tobruk to cooperation on the atomic bomb, Roosevelt's intimate style of governing had long worked to Churchill's benefit. Now, at a meeting of the Big Three in Teheran, Roosevelt would turn on his old friend.

"By the time we got to the Teheran conference, one noticed that things were changing," recalled Sir Ian Jacob, military a.s.sistant secretary to the war cabinet. "The American power was building up. Up to that point there were just as many British forces involved in all these things as there were American, but not so in the future. And it was becoming clear also to Roosevelt that at the end of the war there would be only two great powers in existence-Russia and America. . . . So from that moment on, we were nothing like so close as we had been."

Churchill was ill with a cold and sore throat as he began his trip on November 12, 1943-his health would soon get worse-and Roosevelt added an affectionate note to an official cable: ". . . it will be grand to see you again. I hope your cold is better."

Before Teheran the two were to get together at Cairo for sessions with Chiang Kai-shek. There were, however, worries about security: Roosevelt cabled Churchill that their "meeting place is known to enemy" and suggested moving to Khartoum. Perhaps a bit too glibly, Churchill, who thought Cairo well protected by British forces, dismissed the anxieties: "See St. John, chapter 14, verses 1 to 4," he cabled back. The pa.s.sage from the King James Version reads in part: "Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in G.o.d, believe also in me. . . . I go to prepare a place for you."

The message was on its way when Churchill began to second-guess himself. Had he been too grandiose in comparing himself to Jesus? Had he been too quick, he worried, in "taking too much upon myself and thus giving offence"? What would Roosevelt think of him? To Churchill's relief, the news from that quarter was good. The president, he recalled, "brushed all objections aside and our plans continued unchanged."

Clementine gently warned Churchill to handle himself with care around the president in the coming days. Knowing Churchill was upset that the Americans would not support a British operation involving the island of Leros in the eastern Mediterranean, she wrote Winston: "I'm afraid that so far your journey has not been pleasant or refreshing-Your cold must have made you miserable & uncomfortable & then I know Leros must cause you deep unhappiness-But never forget that when History looks back upon your vision & your piercing energy coupled with your patience & magnanimity will all be part of your greatness. So don't allow yourself to be made angry-I often think of your saying, that the only worse thing than Allies is not having Allies! . . ."

Sarah Churchill, the actress, now an officer in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, joined her father on this journey. She had never met Roosevelt and was soon charmed. "One knew, of course, of his physical handicap, but after two minutes one never thought of it again"-a tribute to Roosevelt's mastery of her professional craft. One day in Cairo, Churchill said to Sarah: "Arrange a car. I want to go and have a look at the Sphinx and the Pyramids. I want to see how close you can get in a car, because if it is possible I want to take the President, but I don't want to raise his hopes if we can't get close enough." After a brief survey, they discovered it could be done. The prime minister hurried back to the compound, found Roosevelt, and said, "Mr. President, you simply must come and see the Sphinx and Pyramids. I've arranged it all." Churchill's enthusiasm was so infectious that, Sarah recalled, Roosevelt "leaned forward on the arms of his chair and seemed about to rise, when he remembered that he could not and sank back again. It was a painful moment." Turning from Roosevelt, Churchill said, "We'll wait for you in the car." Sarah went with her father. "Outside in the shining sun," she remembered, "I saw that his eyes were bright with tears." Churchill's affections were engaged. "I love that man," he said.

THANKSGIVING FELL DURING the stay at Cairo, and Roosevelt had brought along a supply of turkeys. "Let us make it a family affair," Roosevelt said to Churchill, and the two men dined with Sarah, Elliott Roosevelt, John Boettiger, and Harry and Robert Hopkins. "Harry had arranged an army band to play in the balcony of the drawing room," Boettiger wrote Anna Roosevelt. "We had several c.o.c.ktails before dinner, then went in and there was champagne." Churchill threw himself into the party with his usual vigor. "We had a pleasant and peaceful feast," he recalled. "Two enormous turkeys were brought in with all ceremony. The President, propped up high in his chair, carved for all with masterly, indefatigable skill. As we were above twenty, this took a long time, and those who were helped first had finished before the President had cut anything for himself."

Churchill was sweet to worry but soon saw that Roosevelt "had calculated to a nicety, and I was relieved, when at last the two skeletons were removed, to see him set about his own share." In a toast to Churchill, Roosevelt explained the history of the day and "how our American soldiers are now spreading that custom all over the world" and that he "was delighted to share this one with the Prime Minister." Churchill answered in the spirit "of warm and intimate friendship," saying he wished to give thanks that "in these crucial times, you, Sir, are President of the United States, and a great defender of the right." Churchill had spoken, Boettiger recalled, with "deep feeling."

It felt like old times. "Upon this happy note, we all retired to the drawing room for more music: 'Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,' 'Marching Through Georgia' and similar tunes," said Boettiger. Sarah had a full card, so Churchill-much to Roosevelt's amus.e.m.e.nt-asked Pa Watson, the president's beloved appointments secretary, to dance with him. "It is an enormous satisfaction to have my mess crew from the Potomac & Shangri-La, Music by an army band, & later W.S.C. cake-walked with Pa Watson," Roosevelt wrote in a diary of the trip. "For a couple of hours we cast care aside," Churchill recalled.

TEHERAN WAS NEXT. Roosevelt flew into the Iranian capital about forty-five minutes ahead of the British and was swept away. Sarah Churchill said the trip into the city was "spine-chilling" for her and her father. Their car moved slowly-too slowly-through cavalry-lined streets crowded with people. "Anyone could have shot my father at point blank range or just dropped a nice little grenade in our laps," Sarah recalled. "The crowd pressed around the car. I put my hand on his knee lightly and as lightly he covered my hand with his." Churchill engaged the enemy. "I grinned at the crowd, and on the whole they grinned at me," he recalled. When they finally arrived at the British legation, Churchill ordered Inspector Thompson to ratchet up security.

It was not to be Churchill's last uncomfortable moment in the capital. A young Russian-speaking American diplomat, Chip Bohlen, was along to translate for Roosevelt. Bohlen remembered November 28 as "a beautiful Iranian Sunday afternoon, gold and blue, mild and sunny." Churchill, however, was still feeling bad. "By an unfortunate coincidence my voice has left me through a d.a.m.n cold on this somewhat unusual occasion," he cabled Clementine. Churchill had wanted Roosevelt to stay with him at the British legation. Roosevelt wanted his own headquarters at the American emba.s.sy. Amid rumors of a.s.sa.s.sination plots, though, Roosevelt wound up under Stalin's roof.

Churchill requested time with Roosevelt before the first three-way meeting, Harriman recalled, to "settle beforehand on the military matters they would discuss with Stalin." Roosevelt said no. "He wanted to see Stalin first and to see him alone," Harriman wrote. "Roosevelt believed that he would get along better with Stalin in Churchill's absence." Roosevelt, Harriman said, "did not want to be pinned down" by Churchill, did not want to sit and listen to speeches about this operation or that campaign. "The President had reason to suspect that Churchill would press him to support a British plan to capture Rhodes and open the Dardanelles," Harriman recalled, "even if this meant a delay of one or two months in the cross-Channel invasion." Word reached Harriman that "storm signals were flying" in the British camp because of Churchill's exclusion from the Roosevelt-Stalin get-together.

And so Harriman-who always seemed to get stuck with Churchill at tough moments-went over. "PM has bad throat and has practically lost his voice," General Brooke told his diary. "He is not fit and consequently not in the best of moods." "Grumbling but whimsical," Churchill gave Harriman a short speech. "He said that he was glad to obey orders; that he had a right to be chairman of the meeting, because of his age, because his name began with C and because of the historic importance of the British Empire which he represented," Harriman recalled. "He waived all these claims but he would insist on one thing, which was that he should be allowed to give a dinner party on the 30th, which was his 69th birthday." He would, he said, "get thoroughly drunk and be prepared to leave the following day." Nursing his cold and his hurt feelings, Churchill recalled: "I continued to be far from well, and my cold and sore throat were so vicious that for a time I could hardly speak. However, Lord Moran with sprays and ceaseless care enabled me to say what I had to say-which was a lot." But he would have to wait until four o'clock.

AT THREE A short distance away, Stalin arrived to call on Roosevelt. In a khaki tunic with the star of the Order of Lenin on his chest, Stalin smiled as he walked toward Roosevelt, who was in his wheelchair. Mike Reilly, who was trying to stare down the NKVD guards who accompanied Stalin, thought the Soviet dictator "was a very small man, indeed, but there was something about him that made him look awfully big."

"I am glad to see you," Roosevelt said to Stalin. "I have tried for a long time to bring this about." Stalin said he was pleased to meet Roosevelt and, Bohlen recalled, noted that the long delay "had been entirely due to his preoccupation with military matters"-a not very subtle allusion to the Soviet battle against the Germans, a phase of the war in its thirtieth month.

Roosevelt and Stalin knew to keep their points short in order to maintain a comprehensible flow of conversation-something the voluble Churchill sometimes forgot to do with the Russians. "Churchill was his charming best when he started talking, but that does not work quite as well when you're dealing through an interpreter," recalled Kathleen Harriman. "Long speeches like the ones the Prime Minister gave, even in close company, took too long to translate, and he would lose his audience."

Roosevelt was not going to let that happen to him as he and Stalin surveyed the world situation in bursts. "This being primarily a get-to-know-you meeting, the conversation jumped quickly from subject to subject," Bohlen recalled. The first was the most important. According to Bohlen's minutes, Roosevelt asked how things stood on the Soviet lines, and Stalin replied that they were "not too good"; Roosevelt said "he wished that it were within his power to bring about the removal of 30 or 40 German divisions from the Eastern Front and that the question, of course, was one of the things he desired to discuss here in Teheran."

When France came up, Roosevelt wasted no time in signaling that he and Churchill did not always agree. Roosevelt and Stalin were critical of de Gaulle, and Bohlen noted that Stalin's antide Gaulle att.i.tude was partly "the reaction of one who felt that any country that collapsed as quickly as France did was not deserving of respect or consideration." Bohlen sensed something else, too: "I could not help feeling suspicious, as I listened to Stalin, that he was also thinking a little bit along other lines. He foresaw in the revival of a strong and healthy France an obstacle to Soviet ambitions in Europe."

Roosevelt mentioned India, warning Stalin against bringing up independence for the subcontinent with Churchill. Yes, Stalin said, that was a "sore spot" for Churchill.

As they parted, Roosevelt told Stalin he was happy to be staying in the Soviet compound since it would give him "the opportunity of meeting" his host "more frequently in completely informal . . . circ.u.mstances."

In the British camp, Churchill was stewing, his circle as worried as he was about the Roosevelt-Stalin session. Eager for intelligence as the talk ended, the British got wind of the colonial part of the conversation, including Roosevelt's advice that it was not worth discussing India with Churchill. As Harry Hopkins described all this to Moran, Moran noted, "Stalin's slits of eyes do not miss much; he must have taken it all in. As I listened to Harry, I felt that the President's att.i.tude will encourage Stalin to take a stiff line in the conference."

ROOSEVELT, CHURCHILL, AND Stalin soon took their places for the initial plenary session in the Soviet emba.s.sy. "The setting was rather heavy for the warm climate," Bohlen recalled. "The room, which was fairly big, was furnished with large chairs and a round table with a green baize cover. There were curtains on the windows and tapestries on the walls." Roosevelt was the presiding officer, and this was to be the kind of proceeding he liked-free-flowing, even chatty.

In their opening words, the Big Three were each in character. Roosevelt tried charm. "As the youngest of the three," Bohlen recalled, "he welcomed his elders." Alluding to Stalin, Roosevelt said he was delighted to have the Russians as "new members of the family circle." Churchill struck historical notes: "This meeting, I said, probably represented the greatest concentration of worldly power that had ever been seen in the history of mankind." Stalin was to the point. "Now let us get down to business."