ROOSEVELT AND A GUEST SETTLED in for lunch at the president’s desk in the Oval Office of the White House. Roosevelt was recovering from a cold and seemed woozy.
“An extraordinary meal,” his guest wrote later. By “extraordinary,” he meant extraordinarily awful.
“Spinach soup—” he began.
The guest was William Averell Harriman, known variously as Averell, or Ave, or Bill, depending on who was speaking. Wealthy beyond measure, he was the scion of the Union Pacific rail empire, built by his father. He joined its board of directors while a senior at Yale, and now, at the age of forty-nine, was its chairman. In the mid-1930s, to encourage rail travel to the West, he directed the construction of a vast ski resort in Idaho, called Sun Valley. He was handsome by any standard, but the two things that made him especially so were his smile, which was large and white, and the easy, athletic grace with which he moved. He was an expert skier and polo player.
Harriman was to leave for London several days later, on Monday, March 10, there to coordinate the delivery of American aid once the Lend-Lease Bill finally passed. Like Hopkins before him, Harriman was to serve as Roosevelt’s looking glass into how Britain was faring, but he also had the more formal responsibility of making sure that Churchill got the aid he most needed and, once he got it, made the best use of it. In announcing the appointment, Roosevelt gave him the title “defense expediter.”
Harriman dipped his spoon into a watery green liquid.
“—didn’t taste bad but looked like hot water poured over chopped up spinach,” he wrote in a note for his own files. “White toast and hot rolls. Main dish—cheese soufflé with spinach!! Dessert—three large fat pancakes, plenty of butter and maple syrup. Tea for the president and coffee for myself.”
Harriman took particular note of this lunch because of Roosevelt’s cold. He wrote, “It struck me as the most unhealthy diet under the circumstances, particularly as we discussed the British food situation and their increasing needs for vitamins, proteins and calcium!!”
Roosevelt wanted Harriman to make England’s food supply a priority, and spent a long while—too long, from Harriman’s perspective—talking about the specific foods the British would need to survive. Harriman found this ironic. “As the President was obviously tired and mentally stale, in the British interest it struck me that fortification of the President’s diet should be first priority.”
Harriman came away from the meeting concerned that Roosevelt did not yet truly grasp the gravity of Britain’s position and what it meant for the rest of the world. Harriman himself was publicly on record as favoring American intervention in the war. “All in all I left feeling that the President had not faced what I considered to be the realities of the situation—namely that there was a good chance Germany, without our help, could so cripple British shipping as to affect her ability to hold out.”
Later that day, at about five-thirty P.M., Harriman met with Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who was also suffering from a cold and looked tired. The two discussed the broader naval situation, in particular the threat to Singapore posed by the rising power and aggression of Japan. The U.S. Navy had no plans to interfere, Hull told him, but he personally believed that the navy should deploy some of its most powerful ships to the waters of the Dutch East Indies in a display of force, in the hopes—as Harriman paraphrased his remarks—“that by bluff the Japs could be kept within bounds.”
By sitting back, Hull said, America risked the “ignominious result” of having Japan seize key strategic points in the Far East, while America kept its ships safely moored at their big Pacific base. Obviously tired and befogged by his cold, Hull could not for the moment remember its exact location.
“What is the name of that harbor?” Hull asked.
“Pearl Harbor,” Harriman said.
“Yes,” Hull said.
AT FIRST, HARRIMAN HAD only a vague sense of exactly what his mission was supposed to accomplish. “No one has given me any instructions or directions as to what my activities should be,” he wrote in another memo for his files.
In exploratory conversations with U.S. naval and army officials, Harriman found a deep reluctance to send weapons and matériel to the British without a clearer understanding as to what they planned to do with them. Harriman faulted Hopkins for this. Hopkins had seemed to have only an impressionistic sense of what the British needed and how those needs fit into Churchill’s war strategy. The military leaders Harriman spoke to expressed skepticism and seemed unsure of Churchill’s competence. “Such remarks are made as, ‘We can’t take seriously requests that come late in the evening over a bottle of port,’ which, without mentioning names, obviously refers to evening conversations between Hopkins and Churchill.”
The skepticism Harriman encountered in Washington now made his task clear, he wrote. “I must attempt to convince the Prime Minister that I or someone must convey to our people his war strategy or else he cannot expect to get maximum aid.”
HARRIMAN BOOKED A SEAT on Pan American Airways’ Atlantic Clipper, scheduled to depart at nine-fifteen A.M., Monday, March 10, from the Marine Air Terminal at New York Municipal Airport, known informally as LaGuardia Field. (Only later, in 1953, would the name LaGuardia Airport become official and permanent.) Under the best conditions, the journey would take three days, with multiple stops, first in Bermuda, a six-hour flight away, then a fifteen-hour leg to Horta, in the Azores. From there the Clipper would fly to Lisbon, where Harriman was to catch a KLM flight to the Portuguese city of Porto, lay over for an hour, then proceed by plane to Bristol, England, and catch a British passenger flight to London.
Harriman initially reserved a room for himself at Claridge’s hotel, then canceled and booked the Dorchester. Notoriously frugal (he rarely carried cash and never picked up a dinner check; his wife, Marie, called him a “cheap old bastard”), he telegraphed Claridge’s on Saturday, March 8: “Cancel my reservation but reserve cheapest room my Secretary.”
Just two days earlier, the Dorchester had come up during Churchill’s lunch with Harvard president Conant, who was staying at Claridge’s. Clementine suggested that for the sake of safety, Conant should move to the Dorchester—at which point Clementine and her friend Winnifreda burst out in earthy knowing laughter and, as another guest recalled, “explained to Dr. Conant that although his life may be in greater danger at Claridge’s, his reputation may be in greater danger at the Dorchester.”
Conant replied that as president of Harvard, “he would rather risk his life than his reputation.”