Now came the battle for public and political support for the “unsordid act.” Roosevelt did need congressional approval for Lend-Lease. Although public opinion was moving toward aid to Britain, he still had a fight on his hands. A coalition to oppose further involvement had come together. It included noninterventionists, isolationists, anti-Semites, anti-imperialists, powerful Western senators often under the leadership of the formidable Montana Republican, Burton K. Wheeler, and what historian Robert Kagan describes as voters “from regions with heavily Irish American, Italian American, and German American populations.”1 Perhaps the most potent group was the America First Committee (AFC), founded on September 4, 1940, by a group of Yale students.
To win this battle Roosevelt needed assurance that the billions he was proposing to spend to help Britain at a time when America would be scrambling for resources would not be wasted. Which meant he needed assurance that Britain was in the fight to stay, and would make use of the tools he was providing to Churchill, who had publicly promised, in a radio broadcast on February 9, 1941, “We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle, nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.”2
First, Roosevelt needed assurance about Churchill. After all, his always finely tuned antennae had most likely picked up rumors about Churchill’s drinking, and Joseph P. Kennedy, the president’s ambassador to the UK until very recently, had denounced Churchill and extolled the strength of German arms. Roosevelt undoubtedly checked informally with Harriman, Baruch, and other members of Churchill’s network. He might even have sought advice from America’s hero of the First World War, General Jack Pershing, an old friend with whom Churchill had long discussions of the state of the world after a dinner at the home of Alice Roosevelt Longworth when his second lecture tour took him to Washington.
Roosevelt therefore sent Harry Hopkins, his most trusted aide, who had moved into the White House at Roosevelt’s request, to Britain on a fact-finding mission. Hopkins arrived in London on January 9, 1941, about three months before the Senate would vote on the Lend-Lease bill. After a month of meetings with Churchill and just about everyone who was anyone in Britain’s struggle for survival, touring bombed cities with Churchill, sitting in on many meetings, and staying at a very cold Chequers, a very ill Hopkins wrote to Roosevelt: “Churchill is the gov’t [sic] in every sense of the word—he controls the grand strategy and often the details—labor trusts him—the army, navy, air force are behind him to a man… this island needs our help now, Mr. President, with everything we can give them.”5 As one historian put it, “Hopkins had gone to London to see if the British were tough enough to keep on fighting. Churchill had passed this test with flying colors…”6
In short, Churchill would never surrender. A year later, after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt, no matter how satisfied he was with Churchill, remained under pressure to preserve scarce military resources for America’s use. Roosevelt needed reassurance that military material sent to Britain would not be wasted in a vain effort to save it from Hitler. Shortly after midnight, early in the morning after what Roosevelt would later that day refer to as an attack by “the Empire of Japan”7 on Pearl Harbor, the issue of British staying power so troubled the weary president that he asked the London-based journalist Edward R. Murrow, who was in America for a visit, into the Oval Office for beer and sandwiches.8 Murrow’s CBS reporting from London on the Blitz had made him world famous, “the best known American in London,”9 with access to every source of information about the war, and extraordinarily influential in determining how Americans at home and abroad viewed the war and Britain’s reaction to it. The “stirring broadcasts” of Murrow and his colleagues “helped to convince Americans to see the British not as a doomed nation but as a pugnacious ally in desperate need of American help.”10 Most notable was Murrow’s September 1940 broadcast “The London Blitz: Can They Take It?” which starts with the opening words Murrow made famous: “This is… London.”11
The president could rely on Murrow’s access to information about anything that was happening in London and so was eager to have Murrow’s view of the state of Britain’s morale. Fortunately, with the foresight exhibited while he built his American network during his tours and his Wilderness Years, Churchill had come to know Murrow. Crucially, that was before Murrow became a star reporter with easy access to everyone who mattered. Churchill understood the importance of American journalists working in London, and was aware from his own experience as a journalist of their voracious need for useable “copy.”17 Which is one reason he made himself available to Murrow for interviews early in Murrow’s career when the American journalist arrived in London in 1937 as CBS’s “representative in Europe.”18 To his secretaries’ horror, Churchill took calls directly from Murrow without requiring the reporter to jump through the usual protocol hoops required by most political figures.19 Churchill also had accommodated Murrow in September 1940 by overruling the BBC’s refusal to grant Murrow permission “to send live broadcasts on the German raids to America from London’s rooftops…. Murrow reached the Prime Minister. A former war correspondent himself, Churchill approved the broadcasts. He hoped that Murrow’s radio reports would affect American public opinion…”20 They certainly did.
By the time of Murrow’s post-beer-and-sandwiches chat with the president, Murrow believed England would last as long as Churchill led her. To Murrow, Churchill was his “hero.”21
Problem solved, with perhaps one open question. If, despite Churchill’s leadership, British grit, and American aid, Britain could not resist a German invasion, would Churchill allow the Germans to gain control of the British fleet, which would be a major problem for America? Roosevelt knew that Robert R. McCormick, noninterventionist editor of the Chicago Tribune, opposed both his New Deal and his foreign policies. He was probably less aware that when it came to McCormick, Churchill’s long-standing practice of not allowing a policy opponent to become a personal enemy had enabled the men to strike up a real friendship. They visited each other’s homes in London and Chicago, and served as attentive hosts on such visits. That paid dividends for the president and Churchill when Senator Tom Connally, an isolationist,22 questioned McCormick about Churchill’s promise never to turn the Royal Navy over to the Nazis.
It is worth repeating McCormick’s response: “Senator, I have known Winston Churchill for twenty-five years. A more thoroughly honorable man never lived. He would not have made that promise [not to surrender the British fleet] if he had not intended to keep it.”23
McCormick’s opposition to aid to Britain gave that testimony added weight. Lend-Lease passed on March 11, 1941, providing Britain the help it needed. Churchill had the ability to pass Roosevelt’s scrutiny, with a bit of help from his network friends and others. No discussion of the impact of Churchill’s support for Roosevelt’s efforts to stretch the permissible limits of his power to aid Britain would be complete without a mention of Henry Luce—“a mass media power unlike anyone before or since.”24
Roosevelt knew and respected Luce’s ability to sway public opinion, and he knew too that any effort by the publisher to bolster Churchill’s reputation and image would reach millions of Americans, adding to Churchill’s value for Roosevelt in the battle against isolationist sentiment. This was especially true since readers of Luce’s magazines knew of his unconcealed opposition to Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Only Luce could bestow the equivalent of the Good Housekeeping seal on a public figure by naming him “Man of the Year.” Lance Morrow, who during his forty-year career at Time wrote several Man of the Year cover stories, recently recalled, “In the old culture, appearing on Time’s cover was a secular version of being beatified by the Catholic Church. To be Man of the Year was equivalent to being canonized a saint—or perhaps winning a Nobel Prize. Maybe better.”25 He further described Luce as “…the most important journalist of the 20th century.”26
As a biographer of Henry Luce’s wife, Clare Boothe Luce, later noted, “The editorial opinions expressed in his [Luce’s] magazines were largely his own and resonated around the globe. Many policy experts considered them more influential than those of the president of the United States.”27
Luce also threw his Life magazine into the battle to boost Churchill’s image and solidify support for aid to Britain. The combined circulation of the two influential magazines at that time exceeded four million per week.30 The January 27, 1941, issue of Life featured on its cover a Cecil Beaton photograph of Pamela Churchill,31 Randolph’s wife, holding a five-week-old Winston Churchill II.32 The magazine then devoted ten pages of pictures and text to Churchill, his family, and aspects of his life. We have Churchill the prime minister at the Downing Street cabinet table, cigar in hand, flanked by telephones. The text describes the photo: “…Cecil Beaton’s camera has caught the great bulldog jaw and penetrating stare which today inspire the most stubborn and successful resistance that freemen have yet made to Nazism.”33 Churchill was on the Life magazine cover of April 29, 1940, some twelve days before he became prime minister. The cover photo title is Britain’s Warlord. He is described as “…the disillusioned cherub’s face on the cover is that of the driving brain behind the British fighting effort.”
Other Life magazine covers: “The Second Volume of Winston Churchill’s Memoirs: Their Finest Hour” (February 7, 1949), “Actress Sarah Churchill” (May 23, 1949), and “Churchill’s Granddaughter Arabella” (March 8, 1954).
Among scores of other photographs, we have Churchill the cavalry major in military uniform astride his horse; Churchill the painter, at a canvas; Churchill visiting the troops and the ruins in bomb-struck Britain; and more, plus attractive family photos. The finishing touch is the text of a speech delivered by Dorothy Thompson, “the most celebrated female correspondent of her generation… legendary.”34
Luce was not a mere observer and reporter of events. On July 25, 1940, he reportedly invented the idea of trading obsolete mothballed destroyers for strategic bases, converting the arrangement from a politically less defensible handout to a more acceptable trade for bases that was in America’s strategic interests. That deal was signed into law by the president on September 2.43 Key to public acceptance was an appeal from General Pershing pointing out, among other things, that America had a large inventory of destroyers left over from the First World War.44
Churchill cannot reasonably claim to have recruited Henry Luce to his network. But he can reasonably claim to have attracted Luce to his side with courage, literary and oratorical skills, and a willingness to fight Nazi Germany while, in the words of John F. Kennedy, America slept. Luce needed Churchill to make the case for intervention, Churchill needed Luce to make his arguments available to millions, Roosevelt needed both as weapons with which to take on noninterventionists, and both needed a president that knew how to use them in his fight to aid Britain. An interdependent and effective troika. The national debate about involvement ended on December 7, when Japan, or “the Japanese empire,” as Roosevelt called it, attacked American bases in Hawaii and then the Philippines. The attack ended the opposition of Senator Wheeler and his isolationist colleagues to their involvement. Wheeler rallied around the flag, saying, “the only thing now is to do our best to lick hell out of them.”52
Churchill appreciated that belated support. When he was in the United States after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he spoke to a joint session of Congress on December 26, 1941. At a luncheon after that speech, he made no special comment to most senators as he shook hands. “But when [Senator Burton] Wheeler was presented, Churchill stopped him, shook his hand warmly and said, ‘This is a genuine pleasure to me, sir, I’ve long wanted to meet you. This is one of the pleasantest moments of this very happy occasion.’… [commenting on Senator Wheeler later at a luncheon], Churchill said, ‘I liked him. He is a fighting man…. I respect and admire fighting men even if they are against me.’ ”53
All of this despite the fact that before Pearl Harbor Senator Wheeler, on the Senate floor, had called Churchill “a European imperialist” among other unflattering references. The now-famous Churchill magnanimity extended further. Churchill pointed out: “After the war broke out some of my friends wanted to go after Chamberlain and his groups, who tried to appease the Nazis… but I was against any reprisals. I told my friends that the Chamberlain group had tried to do their duty in the best light they saw it and that now there was job to be done fighting the Nazis, not one another.”54
For Churchill there could have been no news better than the Japanese attack despite its horrific toll on America. “I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all… I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful,”55 recorded Churchill in his history of the Second World War.
Such a peaceful sleep would have provided a much-needed rest for the embattled prime minister, but he realized on awakening that America, having been attacked by Japan, might adopt the policy of many isolationists and concentrate what Churchill saw as its awesome fire power on the Pacific theater and revenge for that sneak attack. Recall that Germany had yet to declare war on America, and would not do so for five days, while Hitler weighed his options. Churchill tried to tie Germany to the Japanese attack with the announcement, “…we can only feel that Hitler’s madness has infected the Japanese mind and that the root of the evil and its branch must be extirpated.”56
Anticipating a two-theater war, Roosevelt and his military advisers, including General George Marshall,57 had determined that America’s efforts would indeed be aimed at Germany first. Churchill, probably unaware of that decision, decided to head for Washington immediately. U.S. ambassador John Winant, who had been at the Chequers dinner during which Japan’s attack had been announced on a small radio, advised him that FDR was reluctant to agree to his visit. The British cabinet opposed it. No matter. Churchill, with his military and other advisers, sailed for America on December 12. While in Washington, Churchill and his staff participated actively in military planning. He had, after all, fought in several wars, was fully briefed by his sources on the state of German preparedness, and was quite proud of his military expertise, unusual for most civilians. Murrow describes a dispute between American General Mark Clark,58 an exemplar of “obtuse arrogance in military men,” and said Churchill: “General Mark Clark opened a conversation with, ‘of course you civilians….’ Churchill cut him short with, ‘Young man, I was killing people when you were puling and puking in your blanket.’ ”59
Churchill had observed a shooting war in Cuba while attached to Spanish troops a year before Clark was born and was serving in the trenches in Europe a year before Clark graduated from West Point, and, like Lincoln, was a longtime student of military strategy.60
The rest, as they say, is history, well told from many points of view by the scores of scholars who studied the war and its aftermath. What is less well covered is the continuation and blossoming of the Churchill-Luce connection. Churchill’s association with Luce, combined with his pen, would enable him to maintain his and his family’s standard of living in years to come, beginning with the payment to Churchill in 1945 of $20,000 to reproduce sixteen of his paintings in Life, “pictures that were more pleasant curiosities than significant art.” Luce’s editors “were not enthusiastic about the idea… but Luce saw an opportunity to draw Churchill into a deeper association with the magazine.”61
Churchill, in turn, saw an opportunity for payments that would be treated as capital gains rather than taxable income. Luce’s representative, Walter Graebner, describes the way Churchill structured the transaction: “Here was showmanship at its best. Churchill had carefully set up a private exhibition [of his paintings in his suite at Claridge’s], and I was his audience.”62 And on May 21, 1945, Life magazine put the now-famous portrait of Churchill by Yosuf Karsh on its cover.
Luce went on to finance Winston’s trips to the South of France, showering “favors and money on Churchill,” including $750,000 from Life to add to the $400,000 Churchill was receiving from the New York Times for his Second World War memoirs, written largely while in one of Churchill’s favorite spots in the world, the South of France.63