ANNA RETURNED TO REJOIN HER FATHER ONLY A FEW MINUTES AFTER the Saudi king had safely departed the Quincy. The warship soon set off—bound first for Alexandria, to take on fuel and other supplies—before embarking for Algiers, and then the long voyage home to Virginia. As the ship made its way toward northern stretches of the Suez Canal, Anna took a few moments to type out another letter to her husband. She was not sure when there would be another “pouch drop,” and there was much exciting news to report, about her trip, incognito, to Cairo and the “pageant” she had missed that day.1 She was also happy to convey that the “OM” was “standing up under it all extremely well” since “the last scare” she had written about. Still, she was worried about the long journey that awaited them. Anna had just learned that one of her father’s principal speechwriters, Samuel Rosenman, who was in London on a special mission, would be flying down to join them in Algiers, to help FDR draft a message to Congress about the Yalta conference as they traversed the Atlantic. Anna would have preferred that her father “spend the entire crossing resting up.” Her worst fear was that he might experience a terrific “letdown” once he got home, and “crack under it as he did last year,” after Tehran. All they could do at this point, she lamented, was keep their fingers crossed that this would not happen again.2
A few days before, FDR, too, had found some time to send a couple of quick notes home, both written on February 12, 1945, while he was on board the Catoctin. First, he penned a few lines to Daisy, whom he informed that though the evening meetings of the summit conference were “long and tiring” he was “really all right” as he had confined himself to “either work or sleep.”3 The second was a brief note to Eleanor—the first and only letter that he sent to her during the trip that conveyed a similar message, expressing his view that he thought the conference had wound up successfully and intimating that he was “a bit exhausted” but, using the same phrase, “really all right.”4