Eavesdropping on History

By Otto Friedrich

CHURCHILL & ROOSEVELT: THE COMPLETE CORRESPONDENCE

It is fun to be in the same decade with I you," Franklin Roosevelt cabled his friend Winston Churchill. Fun hardly seemed the right word at the time: the two leaders were sharing some of the darkest moments in history. It was January of 1942. The Japanese, after their attack on Pearl Harbor, were invading the Philippines and advancing southward through British Malaya; the Germans ruled most of Europe. But Jan. 30 was also Roosevelt's 60th birthday, and Churchill remembered to wish him many happy returns, "and may your next birthday see us a long lap forward on our road." That was what prompted Roosevelt's expression of delight to be sharing such a road with such a man.

When Churchill came to write his six-volume history of that epoch, The Second World War (1948-1953), he portrayed this intensely personal alliance as an unmatched and unmarred friendship, for he wanted very much to see the two nations continue their political partnership. Now, with the publication of the monumental Churchill & Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence, expertly edited by Rutgers History Professor Warren F. Kimball, the relationship between the two leaders emerges as more tempestuous, and correspondingly more interesting, than was generally believed. There are no shattering revelations, to be sure: the two Allies' archives were declassified in 1972, and many historians have tilled these fields. But to read the voluminous wartime messages between Roosevelt and Churchill is to eavesdrop on history.

It is Roosevelt who initiates the exchange, less than two weeks after the guns of September 1939, by reminding Churchill that they were both naval ministers during World War I. "Keep me in touch personally with anything you want me to know about," Roosevelt urges. Churchill does, first with a telephone call about a German threat to sink a U.S. merchant ship, and subsequently with an outpouring of 1,161 letters, telegrams, congratulations and miscellaneous messages (Roosevelt's answers: a slightly more laconic 788).

Their correspondence is elaborately courtly, full of solicitude. Churchill gallantly pretends to be deferential on matters of strategy: "We wholeheartedly agree with your conception . . . We cordially accept your plan ..." Roosevelt urges relaxation: "Once a month I go to Hyde Park for four days, crawl into a hole and pull the hole in after me ... I wish you would try it ... Lay a few bricks or paint another picture."

Both Roosevelt and Churchill have to deal with millions of troops deployed around the world, but both subscribe implicitly to Mies van der Rohe's dictum that God is in the details. Churchill loves to think up code names and refers to himself as Former Naval Person. But when he prepares to meet Roosevelt at the Casablanca conference in 1943, he cables a temporary change: "I am 'Air Commodore "Frankland."' Suggest you also choose an alias and one for Harry [White House Aide Harry Hopkins]."

"The aliases from this end," Roosevelt replies with his sardonic humor, "will be (a) Don Quixote and (b) Sancho Panza." Churchill feels slightly piqued: "However did you think of such an impenetrable disguise? In order to make it even harder for the enemy and to discourage irreverent guesswork propose Admiral Q. and Mr. P. ... We must mind our P's and Q's."

From such exchanges, two very different characters emerge. Churchill, already 64 when the war began, seems considerably more emotional, more stubborn, more immersed in his nation's struggle ("The worth of every destroyer that you can spare to us is measured in rubies"). And sometimes, as when the British stand virtually alone after the fall of France, he can sound frankly desperate ("Mr. President, I cannot cut the food consumption here below its present level"). Roosevelt, seven years younger, is more ebullient, conscious of his greater economic and military power, yet surprisingly wary about domestic opponents in Congress markably aloof, fending off Churchill with a ghostwritten evasion or with a quick joke. One of the great virtues of Kimball's editing is that he includes many undiplomatic first drafts that were toned down by advisers before being sent.

What binds these strongly independent men is a warm personal admiration-and, of course, a powerful common interest in resisting Hitler. The letters graphically show how that interest leads them into their thorny alliance with Joseph Stalin. In what must be one of the harshest summit conferences ever endured, Churchill goes to Moscow in 1942 to inform Stalin that the Western Allies cannot possibly open a second front in France that year. "We argued for about two hours," Churchill reports to Roosevelt, "during which he said many disagreeable things, especially about our being too much afraid of fighting the Germans, and if we tried it like the Russians we should find it not so bad ... I repulsed all his contentions squarely ... In his heart, so far as he has one, Stalin knows we are right."

Roosevelt wants to reinforce the shaky new alliance by holding his own meeting with Stalin--or UJ. for Uncle Joe, as he and Churchill now call the dictator-because, as Roosevelt very bluntly puts it, "Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks he likes me better." Roosevelt artfully tries to avoid a preliminary meeting with the truculent Churchill: "I do not want to give Stalin the impression that we are settling everything between ourselves before we meet him." But that is exactly what Churchill insists on: "It is grand of you to come and I will meet you anywhere."

Thus occurs the Casablanca conference, the fourth of their eleven wartime meetings. Here Churchill gets his way, persuading Roosevelt to pursue a "Mediterranean strategy" of invading Italy rather than France, to Stalin's fury. But Churchill also begins to see how U.S. power is overtaking that of Britain. At one point he hopes that "our numbers justify increased representation for us in the high command." At another, he describes himself to Roosevelt, a little ruefully, as "your lieutenant."

As the Allies begin to recapture territory, local politics keeps dividing them. Churchill supports Charles de Gaulle as the leader of Free France; Roosevelt dislikes and distrusts the general. "The day he arrived [in Casablanca]," F.D.R. comments bitterly, "he thought he was Joan of Arc." And when De Gaulle keeps pressing his claim to govern North Africa, Roosevelt explodes, "Why doesn't De Gaulle go to war? Why doesn't he start [marching]? It would take him a long time to get to the Oasis of Somewhere."

Sometimes the exchanges between Allied governments become rancorous. Churchill believes that Britain's military intervention in favor of the Greek monarchy in 1944 is the only way to stop a takeover by Communist guerrillas. Washington is skeptical. "We have been set upon, and we intend to defend ourselves," Churchill writes angrily to Hopkins. "I consider we have a right to the President's support... It grieves me very much to see signs of our drifting apart at the time when unity becomes even more important, as danger recedes and faction arises." Roosevelt suavely answers that he is "a loyal friend and ally," then cites "the mounting adverse reaction of public opinion," and urges that Churchill let "the people.. . express themselves."

On no issue do the two leaders disagree more strenuously than on the future of Europe's colonial empires, particularly the independence of India. With the Japanese threatening the subcontinent's borders, Churchill refuses to make any commitment on India. Roosevelt warns him that Americans believe "almost universally" that Britain is to blame for "unwillingness ... to concede to the Indians the right of self-government." Churchill passionately answers that "anything like a serious difference between you and me would break my heart," but he declares just as passionately that Britain will do what it must "to defend this vast mass of helpless Indians."

As the British empire fades, the chief empire builder becomes Uncle Joe, and the focal point of controversy becomes Poland. Churchill has backed one Polish exile "government" and Stalin another. Now, with the Red Army sweeping across Eastern Europe, Stalin demands and then seizes total power for his puppets. Churchill's protests go for nothing. Roosevelt, weary unto death ever since the Yalta conference early in 1945, remains all too characteristically hopeful. "I would minimize the general Soviet problem as much as possible," he says in one of his last messages to Churchill, on April 11, 1945, "because these problems, in one form or another, seem to arise every day and most of them straighten out."

The next day, Roosevelt complained of "a terrific headache," pressed his hand to his forehead and then fell unconscious in his chair. Churchill cabled the President's widow his grief at the loss of "a dear and cherished friendship which was forged in the fire of war." Perhaps he also remembered not just the great battles won but the small exchanges: the time Roosevelt sent him a postage stamp postmarked on the cruiser Augusta the day Churchill had climbed aboard; the time Roosevelt jokingly sent him a newspaper clipping suggesting that Churchill's wife was descended from Mormons. Or maybe he remembered their first major argument, shortly before the North African invasion. When they had worked out a compromise, as they generally did in those early days, Roosevelt had greeted it with only the briefest of messages: "Hurrah!"

EXCERPT Roosevelt to Churchill, March 3,1944: 'I am having the oil question studied by the Department of State and my oil experts, but please do accept my assurances that we are not making sheep's eyes at your oilfields in Iraq or Iran...'

Churchill to Roosevelt, March 4, 1944: 'Thank you very much for your assurances about no sheep's eyes at our oilfields at Iran and Iraq. Let me reciprocate by giving you the fullest assurance that we have no thought of trying to horn in upon your interests or property in Saudi Arabia. My position on this, as in all matters, is that Great Britain seeks no advantage, territorial or otherwise, as the result of the war. On the other hand she will not be deprived of anything which rightly belongs to her after having given her best services to the good cause-at least not so long as your humble servant is entrusted with the conduct -- --of her affairs.'

-By Otto Friedrich