TWENTY-TWO

ARSENAL OF DEMOCRACY

The decision as to how much shall be sent abroad and how much shall remain at home must be made on the basis of our over-all military necessities.… We must be the great arsenal of democracy.

—FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, DECEMBER 29, 1940

THE THURSDAY AFTER the election, Roosevelt boarded the presidential train in Hyde Park for the long, slow journey back to Washington. At Union Station Vice President–elect Henry Wallace welcomed him along with a swarm of jubilant Democrats. Two hundred thousand cheering spectators lined Pennsylvania Avenue. FDR repeatedly doffed his battered campaign fedora as the open limousine made its way to the White House. Thousands of well-wishers followed the car through the open gates of the Executive Mansion chanting “We Want Roosevelt” until the president and Eleanor appeared on the north portico.¹

Waiting for Roosevelt was a congratulatory message from Churchill. “I did not think it right for me as a Foreigner to express my opinion upon American politics while the Election was on,” said the prime minister, “but now I feel you will not mind my saying that I prayed for your success.”² Bismarck had said that the most important geopolitical fact of the modern era was that the Americans spoke English, and Churchill exploited that fact shamelessly.³ “Things are afoot which will be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe,” he told Roosevelt. “In expressing the comfort I feel that the people of the United States have once again cast these great burdens upon you, I must avow my faith that the lights by which we steer will bring us all safely to anchor.”⁴

As Churchill wrote out that message, the Battle of Britain approached a climax. The Luftwaffe had failed to gain air superiority over the Channel; Operation Sea Lion—the German invasion plan for the British Isles—had been shelved, yet air attacks against civilian targets accelerated. For fifty-seven consecutive nights the Nazis bombed London: ten thousand were dead, more than fifty thousand injured.⁵ On November 14 three hundred German bombers hit Coventry, kindling a firestorm that claimed 568 civilian casualties and destroyed the city’s center.^* Five nights later, 1,353 people were killed in a massive raid on Birmingham.⁶ At sea, the battle hung in the balance. More than five hundred British merchant ships had been sunk by German U-boats and surface raiders—a total of more than 2 million tons of lost shipping that was difficult to replace. Most serious of all, Britain was on the verge of bankruptcy. The “cash-and-carry” provision of the Neutrality Act had drained the British Treasury of its dollar reserves.

Roosevelt appeared in little hurry to offer assistance. No one was better at laying a smoke screen to cloak his intentions than FDR, and he masked his plans for aid to Britain in postelection euphoria. In late November, Lord Lothian, who had just returned from London, called on the president to explain Britain’s plight. At his press conference on November 26 Roosevelt was asked:

Q: Mr. President, did the British Ambassador present any specific requests for additional help?

FDR: Nothing was mentioned in that regard at all, not one single thing—ships or sealing wax or anything else.⁷

Roosevelt’s cavalier denial concealed the intense planning that was under way in Washington. On Tuesday, December 3, Hull, Stimson, Knox, Commerce secretary Jesse Jones, and General Marshall met with Morgenthau at the Treasury to review Britain’s financial situation. As Treasury officials scrawled figures across a blackboard, the inescapable conclusion was that the British would exhaust their gold and dollar reserves within the month just to pay for the orders already placed with American industry. The money to pay for future orders was nowhere in sight. “What are we going to do?” asked Morgenthau. “Are we going to let them place more orders?”

“Got to,” said Knox. “No choice about it.”⁸

Roosevelt took the problem with him when he departed Washington the next day for a Caribbean cruise on the USS Tuscaloosa accompanied only by Hopkins and his immediate staff—Pa Watson, Dr. McIntire, and Navy captain Daniel Callaghan. The White House proclaimed the purpose of the cruise was to inspect base sites in the West Indies, but FDR wanted time at sea to refresh and regroup.^* Aside from meeting local dignitaries, including the Duke of Windsor, Roosevelt spent his days fishing, basking in the sun, and spoofing with cronies. Evenings were devoted to poker and movies. When Ernest Hemingway sent word that many big fish had been caught on a stretch of the Mona Passage between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, FDR trawled there for several hours using a feathered hook baited with a piece of pork rind as Hemingway suggested but failed to get a strike.⁹

Roosevelt seemed carefree and relaxed, almost indifferent to the calamity facing Britain. “I didn’t know for quite a while what he was thinking about, if anything,” said Hopkins. “But then—I began to get the idea he was refueling, the way he so often does when he seems to be resting and carefree.” There were no substantive discussions on board, Roosevelt did not consult or ask advice, he did not study briefing documents or background papers, but it soon became clear he was pondering Britain’s problem and plotting his response.¹⁰

On December 9 Roosevelt’s thoughts were stimulated when a Navy seaplane set down alongside Tuscaloosa, lying at anchor off Antigua. In the mail pouch was a historic letter from Churchill, a four-thousand-word cable that the prime minister considered “one of the most important of my life” and that historians describe as “the most carefully drafted and re-drafted message in the entire Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence.”¹¹

The letter was Churchill at his best: articulate, comprehensive, well argued, dignified yet deferential. The prime minister began with a masterly restatement of the military situation. He traced the war in minute detail from the North Sea to Gibraltar to Suez to Singapore. “The danger of Great Britain being destroyed by a swift, overwhelming blow has for the time being very greatly receded. In its place there is a long, gradually maturing danger, less sudden and less spectacular, but equally deadly.” Churchill reviewed the problems of war production and sea tonnage, both imperiled by persistent attacks by German bombers and U-boats. But the most serious problem Britain faced was financial:

The moment approaches when we shall no longer be able to pay cash for shipping and other supplies. While we will do our utmost, and shrink from no proper sacrifice to make payments across the Exchange, I believe you will agree that it would be wrong in principle and mutually disadvantageous in effect if at the height of this struggle Great Britain were to be divested of all saleable assets, so that after the victory was won with our blood, civilization saved, and the time gained for the United States to be fully armed against all eventualities, we should stand stripped to the bone.¹²

Hopkins recalled that Roosevelt read and reread Churchill’s letter as he sat alone in his deck chair, and for two days he did not seem to reach any conclusion. “He was plunged in intense thought, and brooded silently.”¹³ Then one evening it all came out: the program the world would know as Lend-Lease. “He didn’t seem to have any clear idea how it could be done legally. But there wasn’t a doubt in his mind that he’d find a way to do it.”¹⁴ Essentially, the president’s plan was that the United States would lend Britain whatever it needed, at no cost, and the British would repay the United States by giving back what it had borrowed, or in some other tangible manner, when it could.¹⁵ Like a creative artist, FDR had devoted his time on the cruise to evolving his conceptual idea. Once he saw it clearly, he moved decisively.¹⁶

Back in Washington a week later, tanned and rested from his cruise, Roosevelt unveiled his masterpiece—“one of the greatest efforts of all his years in office,” said Morgenthau.¹⁷ Meeting the press the afternoon of December 17, he broke the news. There had been no staff studies, no diplomatic discussions, no touching of political bases. It was pure Roosevelt. The president took the initiative himself.¹⁸ The working press, especially the White House press corps, was always FDR’s greatest ally, and he initiated the debate with a homey analogy:

Suppose my neighbor’s home catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him to put out his fire. Now what do I do? I don’t say to him, “Neighbor, my garden hose cost me fifteen dollars; you have to pay me fifteen dollars for it.” No! I don’t want fifteen dollars. I want my garden hose back after the fire is over.

“What I am trying to do is eliminate the dollar sign,” he continued. “Get rid of the silly, foolish, old dollar sign.” Weapons and war materiel would be of greater service if they were used in Great Britain rather than kept in storage. After the war the United States would be repaid in kind, thereby “leaving out the dollar mark and substituting for it a gentleman’s obligation in kind. I think you all get it.”¹⁹ Churchill, who had no prior knowledge of the president’s plan, was stunned. When he digested the proposal he told Parliament that Lend-Lease was “the most unsordid act in the history of any nation.”²⁰

With Congress adjourned until the new year, Roosevelt carried his idea directly to the country. On Sunday, December 29, 1940, he delivered one of his most famous fireside chats, the “arsenal of democracy” speech. He called it a talk on national security, coining an expression that would permeate American debate for generations.²¹ Movie theaters, restaurants, and other public places emptied as nine o’clock Eastern Standard time approached. CBS, NBC, and the Mutual network carried the address live, and a record 75 percent of Americans would either listen to or read the president’s remarks.²² In the White House, Clark Gable and his wife, Carole Lombard, joined Eleanor, Sara, and members of the cabinet to watch FDR declare that there was no hope of a negotiated peace with Hitler. “No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it. There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness. There can be no reasoning with an incendiary bomb.”

Roosevelt told his listeners, “If Britain goes down, the Axis powers will control the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australasia, and the high seas—and they will be in a position to bring enormous military and naval resources against this hemisphere.” The United States must prepare for the danger ahead. “But we well know that we cannot escape danger, or the fear of danger, by crawling into bed and pulling the covers over our heads.”

The answer for Roosevelt was unstinting support for Britain’s resistance:

The people of Europe who are defending themselves do not ask us to do their fighting. They ask us for the implements of war, the planes, the tanks, the guns which will enable them to fight for their liberty and for our security. Emphatically we must get these weapons to them in sufficient volume and quickly enough, so that we and our children will be saved the agony and suffering of war.

We must be the great arsenal of democracy. For this is an emergency as serious as war itself. We must apply ourselves to our task with the same resolution, the same sense of urgency, the same spirit of patriotism and sacrifice as we would show were we at war.^23*

At one point in the fireside chat Roosevelt spoke of German fifth columnists operating in the Western Hemisphere. Then followed the sentence “There are also American citizens, many of them in high places, who, unwittingly in most cases, are aiding and abetting the work of these agents.”

When the speech had been submitted to the State Department, the draft came back with the words “many of them in high places” crossed out in red pencil. FDR, who had little affection for the nation’s career diplomats, was appalled. “Leave it in,” he instructed Rosenman. “In fact, I’m very much tempted to say, ‘many of them in high places, especially in the State Department.’ ”²⁴

In much the way that Churchill galvanized British resistance, Roosevelt’s speeches and press conferences in December 1940 and January 1941 deepened America’s understanding of what was at stake.²⁵ Buoyed by his unprecedented third-term mandate, FDR assumed command of public opinion as he had done during the hundred days in 1933. Letters and telegrams to the White House after his fireside chat ran 100 to 1 in the president’s favor. A Gallup Poll in early January showed 68 percent of Americans in favor of Lend-Lease and only 26 percent opposed.²⁶ In Britain and throughout the Commonwealth the public was thrilled by Roosevelt’s stirring affirmation of American purpose. Churchill wrote that it was his duty “on behalf of the British Government and indeed the whole British Empire to tell you, Mr. President, how lively is our sense of gratitude and admiration for the memorable declaration which you made to the American people and to the lovers of Freedom in all continents on last Sunday.”²⁷

On January 6 Roosevelt went to Capitol Hill to deliver his ninth State of the Union message. The bulk of the president’s speech was devoted to preparedness, defense production, and the necessity for Lend-Lease. “Let us say to the democracies: ‘We Americans are vitally concerned in your defense of freedom. We are putting forth our energies, our resources and our organizing powers to give you the strength to regain and maintain a free world. We shall send you, in ever increasing numbers, ships, planes, tanks, guns. This is our purpose and our pledge.’ ”

But the address is remembered for Roosevelt’s peroration:

In future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression.…

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way.…

The third is freedom from want.…

The fourth is freedom from fear.… ²⁸

Like Lend-Lease, the Four Freedoms were Roosevelt’s idea. “Nobody ghost-wrote those words,” said Robert Sherwood.²⁹ Sitting in his upstairs study two nights before the speech was to be delivered, going over the third draft with Rosenman, Sherwood, and Hopkins, FDR said he had an idea for the peroration. “We waited as he leaned far back in his swivel chair with his gaze on the ceiling,” Rosenman remembered. “It was a long pause—so long that it began to be uncomfortable.” Then he began dictating. “The words seemed to roll off his tongue as though he had rehearsed them many times to himself.^* A comparison with the final speech will show that his dictation was changed by only a word here and there, so perfect had been the formulation in his own mind.”³⁰

Shortly after the State of the Union, Wendell Willkie paid a courtesy call at the White House preparatory to a goodwill visit to England.^† When he was announced, FDR was closeted in the Cabinet Room with Rosenman and Sherwood working on his January 20 inaugural address. The president shifted himself onto his wheelchair and moved into the Oval Office to greet Willkie, only to discover that his desk was clear of papers. He turned back to the Cabinet Room and told Rosenman and Sherwood to give him some papers.

“Which particular papers do you want, Mr. President?” asked Rosenman.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” said FDR. “Just give me a handful to strew around on my desk so I will look very busy when Willkie comes in.”³¹

Roosevelt and Willkie spent more than an hour together. “At regular intervals great bursts of laughter could be heard coming through the closed doors,” James Roosevelt reported.³² At one point Willkie asked Roosevelt why he retained Harry Hopkins as an intimate adviser in view of Hopkins’s general unpopularity. “Someday you may well be sitting here where I am now,” FDR replied. “And when you are, you’ll realize what a lonely job it is, and you’ll discover the need for somebody like Harry Hopkins who asks for nothing except to serve you.”³³

As Willkie prepared to leave, Roosevelt took a sheet of his personal stationery and commenced writing:

Dear Churchill,

Wendell Willkie will give you this. He is truly helping to keep politics out over here.

Then from memory FDR wrote out a passage from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Building of the Ship,” which he had learned as a schoolboy at Groton:

Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!

Sail on, O Union, strong and great!

Humanity with all its fears,

With all the hope of future years

Is hanging breathless on thy fate.³⁴

On January 10, 1941, the Lend-Lease bill (H.R. 1776) was introduced by Majority Leader John W. McCormack of Massachusetts in the House and Alben Barkley in the Senate. Isolationist opponents had a brief field day. The Chicago Tribune called H.R. 1776 “a dictator bill” designed to destroy the Republic. New York’s Thomas E. Dewey said it meant “an end to free government in the United States.” Senator Burton K. Wheeler claimed it “will plough under every fourth American boy.” Senator Vandenberg asserted that the bill gave FDR the authority “to make war on any country he pleases any time he pleases.” The best line was delivered by Senator Robert Taft of Ohio: “Lending war equipment is a good deal like lending chewing gum. You don’t want it back.”³⁵

The isolationists had the headlines, but Roosevelt had the votes. Polls consistently showed three quarters of Americans supported the president and Lend-Lease.³⁶ On February 8 the bill cleared the House 260–165, largely along party lines. The following day Wendell Willkie, back from Britain, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Nearly 1,200 people crammed into the splendorous Caucus Room (more than twice its rated capacity) to hear the former GOP nominee. They were not disappointed. Breaking with his party’s congressional leadership, Willkie endorsed Lend-Lease down the line. The most dramatic segment of Willkie’s testimony came when he was questioned about his remarks during the campaign that Roosevelt would lead the nation into war. Willkie said he saw no constructive purpose in discussing old campaign speeches. “I struggled as hard as I could to beat Franklin Roosevelt and I tried to keep from pulling my punches. He was elected president. He is my president now.”

Thunderous applause shook the Caucus Room. Nevertheless, Senator Gerald Nye persisted. He quoted Willkie’s Baltimore statement that the United States would be at war by April 1941 if Roosevelt was reelected.

“You ask me if I said that.” Willkie grinned. The Caucus Room erupted.

When the laughter died down, Nye continued: “Do you still agree that might be the case?”

“It might be. It was a bit of campaign oratory.” More laughter. “I’m very glad you read my speeches because the president said he did not.”³⁷ Howls of laughter and sustained, foot-stomping applause.

For practical purposes the debate was over. Willkie’s good nature and obvious sincerity carried the day. Just as with selective service, his support for Lend-Lease broke the back of the opposition.

The following day Senator George of Georgia, the new chairman of Foreign Relations, pushed the bill through committee 15–8. On March 8 the full Senate added its approval 60–31, and three days later the House accepted the Senate version by a lopsided 317–71. Roosevelt’s preparedness coalition was in full control. Unrepentant Southern Democrats—men like Carter Glass, Pat Harrison, “Cotton Ed” Smith, and Walter George—joined big-city liberals and Republican internationalists to put the president’s program across. FDR signed the bill into law thirty minutes after its final passage. The next day Congress appropriated $7 billion to fund the first shipments to Great Britain, the largest single appropriation in American history.^* “This decision is the end of any attempts at appeasement,” said FDR. “The end of urging us to get along with dictators; the end of compromise with tyranny and the forces of oppression.”³⁸

Passage of Lend-Lease repealed the “cash” provision of the Neutrality Act. The “carry” requirement remained in effect. Whatever aid America supplied had to be carried in British bottoms. That posed a serious problem. There was little point providing $7 billion for military aid if it ended up on the ocean floor. In the three months leading up to Lend-Lease, 142 vessels, roughly 800,000 tons of shipping, had been sunk. German U-boats were sinking British ships three times faster than shipyards could replace them. In Churchill’s words, the Battle of Britain had become the Battle of the Atlantic.³⁹

Roosevelt responded on April 10 by announcing that the United States had concluded an agreement with the Danish government in exile permitting U.S. forces to occupy Greenland and establish bases there.⁴⁰ The following day he advised Churchill he was extending the American security zone in the Atlantic to 25 degrees west longitude, roughly midway between the westernmost bulge of Africa and the easternmost bulge of Brazil. The Navy would patrol that zone and inform the British of all enemy vessels sighted. “It is important for domestic political reasons … that this action be taken by us unilaterally,” Roosevelt told Churchill. “When this new policy is adopted here no statement [should] be issued on your end.”^41*

At his press conference on April 25 the president was asked to distinguish between a patrol and a convoy. Was the United States planning to convoy British merchant vessels? “No,” said Roosevelt. The difference between a patrol and a convoy was similar to the difference between a horse and a cow. “You can’t turn a cow into a horse by calling it something else. It is still a cow. This is a patrol.”

Q: Could you define its functions?

FDR: Protection of the American hemisphere.

Q: By belligerent means?

FDR: Protection of the American hemisphere.

Q: Mr. President, if this patrol should discover some apparently aggressive ships headed toward the Western Hemisphere, what would it do about it?

FDR: Let me know. (Loud laughter.)⁴²

Roosevelt’s elliptical response reflected his determination not to get too far in front of public opinion. Gallup Polls in April showed overwhelming support for all-out aid to Britain, and FDR’s approval rating stood at 73 percent. But the country was evenly divided on whether the Navy should be placed on convoy duty, and a whopping 81 percent opposed America’s entry into war.⁴³ Roosevelt’s caution rankled the hawks in the administration. “The President is loath to get into this war,” noted Morgenthau. “He would rather follow public opinion than lead it.”⁴⁴ Stimson, Knox, and Ickes concurred. Even the military chimed in. “How much a part of our Democratic way of life will be handled by Mr. Gallup is a pure guess,” Admiral Stark complained to the commander of the Pacific Fleet.⁴⁵ A more understanding assessment was offered by King George VI, who watched Roosevelt’s helmsmanship with undisguised admiration. “I have been so struck” he wrote the president, “by the way you have led public opinion by allowing it to get ahead of you.”⁴⁶ Roosevelt’s stance involved more than public relations. Like Lincoln before Fort Sumter or Wilson prior to World War I, FDR told his cabinet he was “not willing to fire the first shot.” If the United States went to war, it would be because it was attacked.⁴⁷

Despite the expanded American patrol zone in the Atlantic, British losses continued to mount. In the first three weeks of May, twenty merchant vessels were lost to German submarines in the area Roosevelt had staked out.⁴⁸ The war was going badly elsewhere as well. In the Balkans, German troops swept through Yugoslavia and expelled the British army from Greece. In North Africa, the Wehrmacht had superseded the Italian Army in Libya and pushed eastward to the Egyptian border. Crete was about to fall, Syria and Iraq were in danger, and the neutral nations—Spain, Portugal, and Turkey—were threatening to jump on the German bandwagon. On May 3 a despondent Churchill asked Roosevelt to intervene. “Mr. President, I am sure you will not misunderstand me if I speak to you exactly what is on my mind. The one decisive counterweight I can see … would be if the United States were immediately to range herself with us as a belligerent power. If this were possible I have little doubt that we could hold the situation in the Mediterranean until the weight of your munitions gained the day.”⁴⁹

Roosevelt responded on May 10. He ignored Churchill’s plea for the United States to enter the war and reassured him that aid was on the way. “Thirty ships are now being loaded to go to the Middle East. I know your determination to win on that front and we shall do everything that we possibly can to help you do it.” The president reminded Churchill, “this struggle is going to be decided in the Atlantic. Unless Hitler can win there he cannot win anywhere in the world.”⁵⁰

On May 27 Roosevelt notched public awareness a step higher with his first fireside chat of the year. The speech, as Assistant Secretary of State Adolf A. Berle observed, was “calculated to scare the daylights out of everyone.”⁵¹ The president spoke from the East Room of the White House to a worldwide audience of some 85 million. After laying out the threat posed by Nazi Germany, he announced his intention to ensure the delivery of needed supplies to Britain by whatever means were necessary. “I say that this can be done; it must be done; and it will be done.” That was followed by a “proclamation of unlimited national emergency.”⁵² Roosevelt did not ask for repeal of the Neutrality Act, he did not request new statutory authority, nor did he suggest the Navy undertake convoy responsibility. Nevertheless, by declaring an unlimited national emergency he prepared public opinion for the prospect that hostilities might follow. “I hope you will like the speech,” FDR cabled Churchill. “It goes further than I thought it was possible to go even two weeks ago.”⁵³

Public response was overwhelmingly favorable. Ninety-five percent of the telegrams to the White House supported the president.⁵⁴ A Gallup Poll in early June showed a clear majority of Americans now favored armed convoys to protect vessels carrying goods to Britain. In the South, 75 percent were in favor.⁵⁵ “I hope that we will protect every dollar’s worth of stuff that we send to Great Britain,” said Senator Carter Glass of Virginia, “and that we will shoot the hell out of anybody who interferes.”⁵⁶

As May melded into June, Roosevelt confronted one of the most serious racial issues of his presidency. The nation’s black leaders were concerned that qualified Negro workers were being passed over by defense contractors and not receiving their share of jobs. Led by A. Philip Randolph, the beloved and powerful head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, they organized a protest march on Washington and scheduled it for July 1. FDR sought to head them off. A black march in segregated Washington could easily provoke violence and at the very least would antagonize the southern leadership of his preparedness coalition. He asked Eleanor and New York mayor La Guardia to meet with Randolph and his colleagues and dissuade them. When that failed, Roosevelt invited the black leaders to the White House.

The meeting took place Wednesday afternoon, June 18. In addition to Randolph and NAACP head Walter White, the president invited Stimson, Knox, and La Guardia. When Randolph asked FDR if he would issue an executive order making it mandatory for the defense industry to hire black workers, Roosevelt declined. “If I issue an executive order for you,” he told Randolph, “there will be no end of other groups coming in here and asking me to issue orders for them. In any event, I can’t do anything unless you call off this march of yours.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. President, the march cannot be called off.”

“How many people do you plan to bring?”

“One hundred thousand, Mr. President.”

Thinking that Randolph was bluffing, FDR turned to White. “Walter, how many people will really march?”

“One hundred thousand, Mr. President.”

Roosevelt recalled the 1919 Washington race riots, when he had been assistant secretary of the Navy. “You can’t bring 100,000 Negroes to Washington. Someone might get killed.” Randolph held firm, and Roosevelt continued to resist. Finally, La Guardia broke the impasse: “Gentlemen, it is clear that Mr. Randolph is not going to call off the march. I suggest we all begin to seek a formula.”⁵⁷ FDR at length agreed and asked the group to adjourn to the Cabinet Room to hammer out an appropriate executive order. Negotiations over the precise wording required another week, and on June 25 the president signed Executive Order 8802, banning discrimination in the defense industry and the federal government because of “race, creed, color, or national origin.”

Randolph canceled the march, and Roosevelt’s action was an important civil rights breakthrough. For the first time since Reconstruction the U.S. government acted to guarantee equal opportunity for blacks. Roosevelt was not the prime mover; it was Randolph who had called the shots. But FDR was wise enough to recognize a just cause and flexible enough to acquiesce when it became necessary. If Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed blacks from physical slavery, wrote the Amsterdam News, Roosevelt’s executive order liberated them from economic captivity.⁵⁸

It was about this time in the spring of 1941 that Missy’s health began to fail. She was forty-three. For twenty years she had been at FDR’s side—his secretary, companion, and confidante—but the strain of long hours with little respite had taken its toll. “The president would work night after night, and she was always there working with him,” her friend Barbara Curtis remembered. “He could take it, but I think her strength just didn’t hold out.”⁵⁹

After dinner with the president, Hopkins, Grace Tully, and Pa Watson on June 4, Missy collapsed and fell to the floor unconscious. White House physicians initially diagnosed it as a slight heart attack brought on by overwork. In fact, it was a small stroke, a precursor of a massive stroke two weeks later that paralyzed her right side and rendered her unable to speak coherently. Missy was transferred from the White House to Doctors Hospital in Georgetown, where Franklin and Eleanor visited her frequently. As Doris Kearns Goodwin reports, the visits were unbearable for FDR. “All his life, he had steeled himself to ignore illness and unpleasantness of any kind.” For Eleanor the visits were easier to handle. More accustomed to vulnerability and loss, she kept up a steady flow of flowers, fruit, presents, and letters.⁶⁰

Grace Tully assumed Missy’s secretarial duties, but she was not a companion for FDR. That void was never filled. And in his own way, quietly and with no outward emotion, Roosevelt grieved for Missy. While she was in the hospital he ordered round-the-clock nursing care, paid every expense, and wrote each of her doctors personal notes expressing his gratitude. Aware that Missy might never recover, FDR worried what would happen if he should die and there was no one to pay for her care. Five months after her stroke he changed his will, directing that half of the income from his estate (which was eventually probated at more than $3 million) be left to Eleanor and the remaining half “for the account of my friend Marguerite LeHand” to cover all expenses for “medical care and treatment during her lifetime.” Upon Missy’s death, the income would go to Eleanor, with the principal eventually divided equally among his five children.⁶¹ “I owed her that much,” Franklin told his son James. “She served me so well for so long and asked for so little in return.”^62*

On June 22, 1941, the war took a decisive turn. Without warning Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, an invasion of his recent ally, the Soviet Union. At 0330 hours German forces poured across the Russian frontier from the Baltic to the Black Sea. One hundred and eighty divisions, 3.8 million men, supported by thousands of planes, tanks, and artillery pieces surged forward in three parallel thrusts. In the north, Field Marshal Ritter von Leeb pressed toward Leningrad; in the center, Marshal von Bock drove on Smolensk and Moscow; in the south, von Rundstedt barreled through the Ukraine toward Kiev. Russian resistance crumbled. In four days German panzers were 200 miles deep in Soviet territory. Two Russian armies had been destroyed and three badly mauled, and 600,000 prisoners were in German captivity. In the air, the Russians lost 1,800 aircraft on the first day of fighting, 800 on the second, 557 on the third, and 351 on the fourth.⁶³

Churchill responded with immediate support for the Soviet Union. “No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years,” he told a British radio audience the evening of June 22. “I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding.… Any man or state who fights on against Nazidom will have our aid. It follows, therefore, that we shall give whatever help we can to Russia and the Russian people.”^64*

Roosevelt followed Churchill’s lead, gingerly at first, then with increasing vigor. On June 23, at the president’s direction, the State Department issued a cautiously drafted statement affirming Hitler as the nation’s number one enemy and proclaiming America’s sympathy for any who opposed him “from whatever source.” The Soviet Union was not mentioned.⁶⁵ Roosevelt may have been testing the waters, or the State Department may have resisted going further. In any event, at his press conference the following day the president came flat out: “Of course we are going to give all the aid that we possibly can to Russia.” Roosevelt said he had no idea what the Russians needed and had not yet received any request from Moscow.

Q: Will any priorities on airplanes be assigned to Russia?

FDR: I don’t know.

Q: Does any aid we could give come under Lend-Lease?

FDR: I don’t know.… We will not cross that bridge until we come to it.⁶⁶

For Roosevelt there was no question that the Soviets should receive what they needed. He was no more fond of communism than Churchill was. But much of his political life was premised on the doctrine that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and he saw no reason not to measure Stalin by that standard. The Soviet Union was scarcely engaged in fomenting world revolution and had not been since the mid-1920s. Even if it were, the universalist appeal of communism was far less reprehensible than the genocidal racism of Nazism. And although Russia had attacked Finland and absorbed the Baltic states, it displayed none of the aggressive imperialism of Germany and Italy.⁶⁷ But the American administration was divided. Career foreign service officers remained hostile to the Soviet Union; the military advised the White House that the Germans would sweep across Russia in one month, three at the most; and Stimson and Knox worried that supplies sent to the Soviets might fall into Hitler’s hands. Together with Ickes, they urged that the breathing space provided by Hitler’s invasion be utilized to win the war in the Atlantic.

There was also a political minefield to navigate. “The victory of Communism would be far more dangerous to the United States than a victory of Fascism,” said Senator Robert Taft. “It’s a case of dog eat dog,” allowed Missouri’s Bennett Champ Clark. “I don’t think we should help either one.” The isolationist press, led by the Chicago Tribune and the New York Journal-American, was predictably opposed to aid to Russia. More serious was the potential opposition of the Catholic Church. Many Catholics felt bound by the 1937 Encyclical of Pius XI, Divini redemptoris, which stated categorically, “Communism is intrinsically wrong and no one who would save Christian civilization may give it assistance in any undertaking whatsoever.”^68*

To short-circuit the hostility of the foreign service, Roosevelt sent Hopkins to meet Stalin and observe the situation firsthand. As in 1933, relations with Russia would be handled in the Oval Office. The diplomats would be relegated to the sidelines as interpreters and note takers. Hopkins was impressed by the Soviet resolve. When he returned to Washington, Roosevelt brushed aside the War Department’s military estimate; rejected the advice of Knox, Stimson, and Ickes to concentrate on the Battle of the Atlantic; and invited the Soviet ambassador in Washington, Constantine Ourmansky, to present a list of items the United States might supply to the Red Army. Within a week the Soviets submitted a detailed request totaling $1.8 billion.

As Russian resistance stiffened, Roosevelt pressed the military to step up deliveries. He fumed at the cabinet for its foot-dragging: “I am sick and tired of hearing [the Russians] are going to get this and they are going to get that.” He wanted a hundred or more fighters delivered to the Soviet Union immediately. “Get the planes right off with a bang,” he told Stimson, even if they had to be taken from the U.S. Army.⁶⁹ Public opinion rallied to the president’s side. A July Gallup Poll indicated that 72 percent of Americans favored a Russian victory. Only 4 percent were opposed.⁷⁰In the fall FDR instructed General Marshall to give precedence to delivery of supplies to Russia. Shortly thereafter he formally declared the defense of the Soviet Union “vital to the defense of the United States,” making Russia eligible for aid under the Lend-Lease Act.⁷¹

Three weeks after Hitler’s invasion of Russia, Roosevelt dispatched 4,400 marines to relieve the British garrison in Iceland. The move had been planned for several months, but the White House kept its fingers crossed. Admiral Stark wrote Hopkins that what the Navy was being asked to do was “practically an act of war” and wanted the president’s explicit approval. “O.K., FDR,” Roosevelt scribbled on the bottom of Stark’s request.⁷² Marines were deployed initially because it was unclear whether Iceland was in the Western Hemisphere, and the Selective Service Act prohibited the use of draftees if it were not. After the marines were in place the State Department redefined the hemisphere to include Iceland, and FDR pressed the American patrol zone one degree of longitude eastward.

It was at FDR’s instigation that he and Churchill met off Newfoundland in early August. “I’ve just got to see Churchill myself in order to explain things to him,” the president told Morgenthau.⁷³ The arrangements were entrusted to Hopkins. Confidentiality was essential. Churchill would have to cross the U-boat-infested Atlantic coming and going, and Roosevelt for his part wanted to avoid provoking his isolationist critics until after the conference took place. Initially FDR envisaged a private one-on-one meeting, but Churchill pressed to have the senior military staffs included, and Roosevelt agreed.

Churchill boarded the battleship HMS Prince of Wales at Scapa Flow on August 4 and sailed with the tide. During his absence, Labour party leader Clement Attlee, who was deputy prime minister in the war cabinet, stood in for Churchill in the House of Commons. Attlee was under firm instructions to answer no questions concerning the prime minister’s whereabouts. On the second day out the sea was so rough the Prince of Wales’ destroyer escort could not maintain the pace. Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, the first sea lord, who was traveling with Churchill, gave the order for the destroyers to drop away. The big battleship plunged on at high speed alone, zigzagging to avoid possible U-boats and maintaining radio silence to avoid detection.⁷⁴ It seems mind-boggling in retrospect that Great Britain’s prime minister, the chief of the imperial general staff, the first sea lord, and the air vice chief of staff—that nation’s highest political and military leadership—should be traveling together on a single warship in the North Atlantic, fully aware of the U-boat menace they faced.^* Two days later, when Prince of Wales crossed the twenty-fifth meridian, a squadron of Canadian destroyers took up screening positions and escorted the mighty vessel to the American fleet lying at anchor in the deep waters of Placentia Bay, off Argentia Harbor—one of the locations acquired by the United States in the Destroyers for Bases deal.

For his own route to Argentia, Roosevelt organized an elaborate charade. On Sunday evening, August 3, he boarded the presidential yacht Potomac at New London, Connecticut, for what was announced as a ten-day fishing vacation off the New England coast. The following day he hosted members of the Danish and Norwegian royal families on board, and that evening, under cover of darkness, rendezvoused with vessels of the Atlantic Fleet off Martha’s Vineyard. The Potomac returned to Massachusetts waters still flying the presidential pennant and for the next week cruised leisurely around Cape Cod, giving every evidence that FDR was still present.^†

Roosevelt, however, had boarded the heavy cruiser Augusta, flagship of the Atlantic Fleet, and set sail for Newfoundland. Waiting for the president on ship were General Marshall, Admiral Stark, and General Hap Arnold, each of whom had taken his own circuitous route to the rendezvous. Accompanying the Augusta was her sister ship, the 9,000-ton Tuscaloosa, and five destroyers. The little flotilla sped along at a steady twenty-one knots and arrived off Argentia the morning of August 7. There they were joined by the venerable Arkansas, the 1912 dowager empress of the battleship fleet, and a dozen more destroyers from the Atlantic patrol.⁷⁵ Prince of Wales, with her Canadian escort, steamed slowly into the magnificent harbor precisely at 9 A.M. on August 9. As the huge battleship made its way through the line of American ships, crews in dress whites stood mustered at the rails—a dazzling panorama on a bright, sunny day.

At eleven o’clock Churchill, dressed in the Navy-like uniform of Warden of the Cinque Ports, crossed the bay to the Augusta. On deck, just below the bridge, Roosevelt waited. He stood erect, holding his son Elliott’s arm. “The Boss insisted on standing,” said presidential bodyguard Mike Reilly. “He hated and mistrusted those braces, but it was a historic occasion and he meant to play his part as much as his limbs would permit. Even the slight pitch of the Augusta meant pain and possibly a humiliating fall.”⁷⁶

“At last we have gotten together,” said Roosevelt.

“We have,” Churchill replied as they shook hands.⁷⁷

BY THE TIME lunch was finished, they were “Franklin” and “Winston.”^78* “I like him,” FDR wrote his cousin Daisy Suckley, “and lunching alone broke the ice both ways. He is a tremendously vital person and in many ways is an English Mayor La Guardia.”⁷⁹ Churchill said, “I formed a very strong affection, which grew with our years of comradeship. We talked of nothing but business, and reached a great measure of agreement on many points, both large and small.”⁸⁰ For Hopkins, who played interlocutor at lunch, the friendship was preordained. “They were two men in the same line of business—politico-military leadership on a global scale—and theirs was a very limited field and the few who achieve it seldom have opportunities for getting together with fellow craftsmen in the same trade to compare notes and talk shop. They established an easy intimacy, a joking informality and a moratorium on pomposity and cant—and also a degree of frankness which, if not quite complete, was remarkably close to it.”⁸¹

In their working habits Churchill and Roosevelt could not have been more different. Roosevelt always worked in a setting of tranquillity, where outside pressures rarely penetrated. Churchill, on the other hand, “always seemed to be at his command post on a precarious beachhead, the conversational guns continually blazing.” Roosevelt retired early; Churchill did not work up a full head of steam until about ten in the evening and often stayed up until three or four. He slept late and always took a nap after lunch. Roosevelt worked straight through from morning to evening and usually took lunch at his desk. Churchill had an unquenchable thirst for champagne, cognac, and Scotch whiskey and fortified himself at regular intervals through most of his working hours. FDR enjoyed a martini, two at the most, during the “children’s hour” at seven but otherwise abstained.⁸²

The emotional high point of the Argentia meeting was the Sunday religious service on the deck of the Prince of Wales. Roosevelt and Churchill sat side by side under a turret of fourteen-inch guns with their military chiefs standing behind them. American and British sailors mingled in the foreground, the flags of the two countries draped the altar, and British and American chaplains shared the prayers and readings. Churchill, who was not an observant Christian, relished the pageantry of the Church. (He sometimes said he was a “buttress” of the Church of England rather than a “pillar” because he supported it from outside.⁸³) As host for the ceremony, the prime minister chose the hymns: “O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” and the Navy hymn “For Those in Peril on the Sea.” “Every word seemed to stir the heart,” Churchill wrote later, “and none who took part in it will forget the spectacle presented. It was a great hour to live.”⁸⁴ Roosevelt, who had insisted on walking the length of the ship to his seat on the fantail, called the service the “keynote” of the conference. “If nothing else had happened while we were here,” he told his son Elliott, “that would have cemented us. ‘Onward Christian Soldiers.’ We are, and we will go on, with God’s help.”^85*

Several times during the conference Churchill pressed Roosevelt for a declaration of war. “I would rather have a declaration of war now and no supplies for six months than double the supplies and no declaration,” he was quoted as saying.⁸⁶ Roosevelt replied that he was skating on thin ice with Congress and they would debate a declaration of war for three months. As Churchill later explained to the war cabinet, “The President said he would become more and more provocative. If the Germans did not like it, they could attack the American forces.”⁸⁷ Roosevelt agreed to provide armed escorts for British convoys as far as Iceland; expedite the shipment of planes and tanks; and request another $5 billion for Lend-Lease. Together they sent a joint message to Stalin pledging further assistance, and, in the event of war in the Pacific, agreed to a “Hitler first” strategy.⁸⁸

The most enduring result of the conference was the Atlantic Charter: a stirring declaration of principles for world peace adopted by Churchill and Roosevelt on August 12. The Charter renounced territorial aggrandizement, supported self-determination, favored a loosening of trade restrictions, reaffirmed the desire to seek a world free from fear and want, and proclaimed the freedom of the seas. In cautious words it advocated a permanent system of international security, a reduction of armaments, and abandonment of the use of force.⁸⁹ “The profound and far-reaching importance of this Joint Declaration was apparent,” wrote Churchill. “The fact alone of the United States, still technically neutral, joining with a belligerent Power in making such a declaration was astonishing.”⁹⁰

While Roosevelt and Churchill met off Newfoundland, Congress grappled with an extension of the draft. The Selective Service Act of 1940 required inductees to serve for twelve months. For many their service commitment was about to expire. If they returned home, the battle-worthiness of almost every Army unit would be severely weakened. It was a crisis not unlike that faced by Union commanders during the Civil War when their soldiers’ term of enlistment expired. Roosevelt put the problem to Congress on July 21. Rather than submit a specific request, he left it to Congress to find a solution. “Time counts. The responsibility rests solely with the Congress.”⁹¹

Marshall and Stimson carried the fight. At their urging the military affairs committees of the House and Senate drafted legislation to extend the term of service by up to eighteen months at the discretion of the president. That would provide the Army with a sufficient manpower cushion to rotate men in and out without damaging combat efficiency. The measure carried the Senate easily, 45–30. But in the House opposition was fierce. With all members facing reelection in 1942 there was little enthusiasm for taking action that would be unpopular with a vast swath of the electorate. An August 6 Gallup Poll indicated that 45 percent of Americans opposed an extension. Between the Appalachians and the Rockies, 54 percent were opposed.⁹²

Speaker Rayburn and Majority Leader McCormack worked the corridors and cloakrooms assiduously but were unable to determine the outcome with any degree of certainty. More than sixty Democrats indicated they would vote against the bill. That meant the administration needed at least twenty Republicans to offset their defection. As the House reading clerk called the roll, tension on the floor mounted. The final tally showed 203 in favor, 202 against. Twenty-one Republicans had joined 182 Democrats to put the measure across. Rayburn banged his gavel and announced the results. A recapitulation was requested. Rayburn yielded, and the review showed the tally to be correct. “There is no correction of the vote,” he announced. “The vote stands, and the bill is passed. Without objection, a motion to reconsider is laid on the table.” His gavel came down and that was it. Despite vehement Republican objections Rayburn had gaveled the measure through. There would be no vote on a motion to reconsider. Passage of the draft extension act prevented the dismantlement of the Army on the threshold of war. Rayburn had pushed the Speaker’s power to the limit and had prevailed.^93*

After Argentia, Roosevelt moved quickly to protect British shipping. When a German submarine fired torpedoes at the American destroyer USS Greer in early September, he seized on the incident to invoke a “shoot-on-sight” policy. “When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck before you crush him.” The president said, “from now on, if German or Italian vessels of war enter the waters, the protection of which is necessary for American defense, they do so at their own peril.”^94* Later in the month, off Newfoundland, the Canadian Navy turned over a fifty-ship convoy out of Halifax to five American destroyers, which safely shepherded the vessels across the North Atlantic into the hands of the Royal Navy just south of Iceland.⁹⁵

FDR always took the political stance of the Catholic Church seriously, and he worried about possible criticism of Lend-Lease aid to Russia. On September 3, at the suggestion of two American prelates who supported the administration, the president appealed directly to Pope Pius XII.⁹⁶ “I believe that the survival of Russia is less dangerous to religion, to the church as such, and to humanity in general than would be the survival of the German form of dictatorship,” he wrote.

Furthermore, it is my belief that the leaders of all churches in the United States [including the Catholic Church] should recognize these facts clearly and should not close their eyes to these basic questions and by their present attitude on this question directly assist Germany in her present objectives.⁹⁷

Considering the president was writing to the Pope, his tone was as sharp as diplomatic practice permitted. Whether Pius XII was convinced is doubtful. His response on September 20 skirted the issue.⁹⁸ But the Pope, who as Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli had lunched with Roosevelt at Hyde Park immediately after the 1936 election, chose not to take issue with the president. At the end of September he wrote the apostolic delegate in Washington calling his attention to an often-overlooked paragraph in the encyclical Divini redemptoris that distinguished between the Communist government of the Soviet Union and the Russian people, “For whom We cherish the warmest paternal affection.”⁹⁹ By implication, aid to the Russian people was permissible—a position that was made explicit in a pastoral letter by Archbishop John Timothy McNicholas of Cincinnati in October.¹⁰⁰

Roosevelt was hammered by personal tragedy in 1941. First Missy, then, on September 7, two weeks before her eighty-seventh birthday, Sara died. During the summer at Campobello her health began to fail. Eleanor assisted her return to Hyde Park and on Friday, September 5, called Franklin at the White House and suggested that the end was near. Roosevelt immediately left by train and arrived at Hyde Park the morning of the sixth. He spent the day sitting with Sara, describing his shipboard meetings with Churchill, filling her in on Washington gossip, talking of old times. That evening at dinner she seemed better. But at 9:30 she lost consciousness. A blood clot had lodged in her lung, and her circulatory system collapsed. Roosevelt sat with her through the night and most of the next morning. Just before noon her breathing stopped. Her son was at her bedside.¹⁰¹

Sara was buried next to her husband in the small cemetery behind Hyde Park’s St. James’ Episcopal Church. The eight men who had worked longest for the estate—including her chauffeur and butler—carried her coffin to the grave. The Secret Service watched from a distance. “I don’t think we belong in there,” said Mike Reilly, “even if Congress says we do.”¹⁰²

Roosevelt remained at Hyde Park several days, sorting Sara’s things. He wore a black armband on the left sleeve of his jacket and would continue to do so for well over a year. Late one afternoon Grace Tully brought him a box he had never seen. She untied the twine that held it closed, and together, she and the president looked inside. They found a number of bundles wrapped in tissue, each carefully labeled in Sara’s firm hand. One held the gloves she had worn at her wedding. Another contained Franklin’s first pair of shoes. Others held his baby toys, his christening dress, a lock of his baby hair. Beneath the bundles were his boyhood letters written from Groton and Harvard. Roosevelt’s eyes filled with tears. He told Tully he would like to be alone. She hurried from the room. No one on the White House staff had ever seen the president weep.¹⁰³

^* Over the years allegations have been made that Churchill declined to order preparatory air defense measures for Coventry so as not to reveal that the British were able to decrypt (code name Ultra) German radio signals. To the contrary, the Air Ministry took prompt defensive action. Fighters were scrambled, bombers dispatched to hit the fields from which the German planes departed, and the antiaircraft barrage that night over Coventry was greater than any yet put up and succeeded in keeping the attacking aircraft at very high levels. Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life 683–684 (New York: Henry Holt, 1991).

^* “I try to get away a couple of times a year on these short trips on salt water,” said Roosevelt in his 1941 Jackson Day message to the Democratic faithful. “In Washington the working day of the President averages about fifteen hours. But at sea the radio messages and the occasional pouch of mail reduce official work to not more than two or three hours a day.

“So there is a chance for a bit of sunshine or a wetted line, or a biography or detective story or a nap after lunch. Above all there is the opportunity for thinking things through—for differentiating between principles and methods, between the really big things of life and those other things of the moment which may seem all-important today and are forgotten in a month.” 10 Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt 82–83, Samuel I. Rosenman, ed. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950).

^* The phrase “arsenal of democracy” was first used by Jean Monnet, a representative of the French government in Washington, in a conversation with Justice Felix Frankfurter in late 1940. Frankfurter was struck by the phrase and suggested to Monnet that he desist using it until Roosevelt could make it his own. Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy also came upon the phrase (Monnet and McCloy were very close friends), and it was contained in a speech draft submitted to the White House by the War Department. When he saw it, Roosevelt said, “I love it,” and included it. Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 260–261 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952); Kai Bird, The Chairman: John J. McCloy and the Making of the American Establishment 121 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).

^* At his press conference on July 5, 1940, Roosevelt gave an offhand answer to a question about his long-range peace objectives in which he casually alluded to five freedoms, two of them falling under the heading “freedom of speech.” The fifth freedom, freedom from want, was suggested by Richard L. Harkness, then with The Philadelphia Inquirer,later with NBC News. “I had that in mind but forgot it,” said FDR. “That is the fifth, very definitely.” Press Conference 658, July 5, 1940. 16 Complete Presidential Press Conferences of Franklin D. Roosevelt 21–22 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972).

^† Willkie’s visit to England was the product of a December 1940 meeting between the chief British intelligence agent in the United States, William Stephenson, and Roosevelt. When FDR asked how he could make a gesture to hearten the British, Stephenson suggested sending Willkie. Roosevelt liked the idea, and at a New Year’s Eve party Justice Frankfurter, evidently speaking on the president’s behalf, broached the idea to Irita Van Doren. Van Doren passed it on to Willkie, who was receptive. Final arrangements were made at a January 15, 1941, dinner at Van Doren’s Upper West Side apartment attended by Willkie, Frankfurter, the publisher Harold Guinzburg, and the writer Dorothy Thompson. Steve Neal, Dark Horse: A Biography of Wendell Willkie 188–190 (New York: Doubleday, 1984).

^* The Defense Aid Supplemental Appropriations Act passed the House 336–55 and the Senate 67–9. Among the items included in the first consignment to Great Britain were 900,000 feet of fire hose. Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 272 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952).

^* At cabinet Roosevelt said the patrols were a step forward. “Keep on walking, Mr. President,” replied Stimson. “Keep on walking.” Stimson diary (MS), April 25, 1941.

^* Missy died in July 1944 without knowing the president had provided for her in his will. After her death, Roosevelt’s son James, whom FDR had appointed his executor, suggested to his father that he might wish to change his will. Roosevelt refused. “If it embarrasses mother, I’m sorry. It shouldn’t, but it may. But the clause is written so that in the event of Missy’s death, that half reverts to mother, too, so she gets it all. Missy didn’t make it, her half already has reverted to mother, and so the clause is inoperative. I don’t have to change it, so I won’t.” James Roosevelt, My Parents: A Differing View 108 (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1976).

^* Shortly before the speech was delivered, Churchill’s private secretary, J. R. Colville, noted the irony in WSC’s warm support of the Soviet Union given his strong anti-Communist stance. “If Hitler invaded Hell,” Churchill retorted, “I would at least make a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” Winston S. Churchill, The Grand Alliance 370 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951).

^* From the Vatican, Harold H. Tittman, the president’s acting representative to the Holy See, advised Washington that in the Curia “the militant atheism of Communist Russia is still regarded as more obnoxious than the modern paganism of Nazi Germany.” Tittman to State Department, June 30, 1941. Quoted in William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Undeclared War 547 (New York: Harper & Row, 1953).

^* The journalist H. V. Morton, traveling with Churchill, grimly recalled the fate of Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, chief of the imperial general staff, who was lost at sea when the vessel he was traveling in to Russia was torpedoed off the coast of Hoy in 1916. Morton, Atlantic Meeting 33 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1943).

^† A crewman dressed as FDR, complete with pince-nez and cigarette holder, sat prominently on deck fishing while the ship sent regular bulletins ashore that all was well and the president was enjoying himself. Neither Grace Tully nor Eleanor was aware of Roosevelt’s deception; the cabinet was not informed; and the press was kept at a distance. Even the Secret Service was bamboozled, the White House detail avidly attending the Potomac from the shore. Jon Meacham, Franklin and Winston 105–106 (New York: Random House, 2003); Grace Tully, F.D.R.: My Boss 246–248 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949).

^* Roosevelt and Churchill dined alone with Harry Hopkins. The British commanders—Pound; Field Marshal Sir John Dill, CIGS; Air Vice Marshal Sir Wilfred Freeman; and Sir Alexander Cadogan of the Foreign Office—dined with their American counterparts at a “very good fork lunch” provided by Admiral Ernest J. King, Commander of the Atlantic Fleet. To their dismay the lunch was “entirely dry,” save for tea and a “cup of Joe”—Navy lingo for coffee—a derisive reference to Josephus Daniels, who removed alcohol from Navy wardrooms in 1914. (FDR and WSC were not bound by that regulation.) Theodore A. Wilson, The First Summit: Roosevelt and Churchill at Placentia Bay, 1941 85 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969).

^* “We live by symbols and we can’t too often recall them,” Felix Frankfurter wrote Roosevelt when photographs of the service were published. “And you two in that ocean, in the setting of that Sunday service, gave meaning to the conflict between civilization and arrogant, brute challenge; and gave promise more powerful and binding than any formal treaty could, that civilization has brains and resources that tyranny will not be able to overcome.” Roosevelt and Frankfurter Correspondence, 1928–1945 612–613, Max Freedman, ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967).

^* A twelve-month extension would have passed with less difficulty, but Rayburn and McCormack chose to go for the full eighteen months Marshall and Stimson requested. The bill passed by the Senate differed slightly from the House version, and rather than go to conference and face another vote in the House, the Senate simply adopted the House version (37–19) on August 14, 1941 (50 Stat. 886).

^* The Greer “incident” was ambiguous. While on a mail run to Iceland, Greer was notified by a British patrol plane of a U-boat in the area. Greer shadowed the submarine using sonar but did not fire. She reported the sub’s location to the British plane, which dropped four depth charges but missed. The German U-boat commander could easily have assumed it was the Greer that had fired. He might also have assumed from Greer’s profile that it was one of the destroyers transferred to the British Navy by the United States. In any event, the U-boat fired two torpedoes at the Greer, both of which missed. Greer returned fire and loosed nineteen depth charges, which also missed. There was “no positive evidence that submarine knew nationality of ship at which it was firing,” the Navy told FDR. Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 287 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).