Not mentioned in either of FDR’s letters or in Anna’s correspondence with her husband was that few of the travelers on board the Quincy were “really all right.” Hopkins was still suffering from his many ailments, and on the very evening FDR wrote the brief assurances to Daisy and Eleanor, his longtime friend and personal secretary Edwin “Pa” Watson suffered a heart attack. This necessitated Watson’s immediate transfer to the Quincy’s sickbay upon the presidential party’s arrival at the Great Bitter Lake, where he remained in an oxygen tent under the watchful eye of Dr. Bruenn.⁵

Now that they were finally under way again on this Valentine’s Day, 1945, Anna found that she was too excited to sleep. So as the sun dipped below the horizon, she clambered up to the flag bridge in time to get a good view of Port Said, the historic city and gateway to Suez. At approximately 10:40 p.m., the ship passed through the port’s submarine gate and out into the open Mediterranean for the overnight journey to their next port of call.⁶

AS ANNA UNDERSTOOD IT, THE OSTENSIBLE REASON FOR THEIR LAYOVER in Alexandria, aside from the need to refuel, was to give Churchill the chance “to get a report” from FDR on his conferences with “the three kings” in advance of his own meetings with them. Like FDR, Churchill had left the Crimea shortly after the final luncheon meeting, in a hasty and unplanned departure that his daughter Sarah described as the very antithesis of the orderly and well-organized exit of the Americans.

Apparently seized by a sudden fit of loneliness, with the president gone and Stalin having vanished “like some genie,” the impetuous Churchill, who originally had planned to leave Yalta the next morning, suddenly demanded that his party be ready to depart in fifty minutes. Much to Sarah’s amazement, and to Churchill’s valet’s grief, this task was accomplished in just over an hour—inspired in part by the genial and sprightly behavior of the prime minister, “who like a boy out of school, his homework done, walked from room to room saying: ‘Come on, come on!’”⁷

From Yalta, Sarah and her father spent two nights on the Franconia, which was anchored in Sevastopol. While waiting for his flight out, Churchill took the opportunity to visit the famous battlefield at Balaclava. On February 14 they flew on to Athens, where Churchill was relieved to see order restored and was deeply moved by the enormous crowd—estimated at forty thousand people—who had turned out to hear him speak in the city’s Constitution Square. The mayor honored Churchill’s presence in Athens by lighting up the Acropolis, the first time the ancient citadel had been illuminated since the arrival of the German forces in April 1941. As was often his wont, Churchill held court that evening at the British Embassy, where he regaled his guests deep into the night. At 7:35 a.m. the next morning, Churchill’s Sky Master, escorted by three RAF long-range fighters, bolted down the runway bound for Egypt and the last face-to-face encounter he would ever have with Franklin D. Roosevelt.⁸

It was fitting that, as with their much-celebrated first wartime rendezvous in 1941, off the coast of Newfoundland—where they drafted the Atlantic Charter—the final meeting between these two iconic leaders took place on a warship. The historic port of Alexandria made for an apt setting in itself, and not only because it was named after one of history’s great conquerors; the city is also a mere seventy miles east of El Alamein, another site of great significance. It was at El Alamein that the British achieved their first great land victory over the Axis in November 1942, a victory that would not have been possible without the sudden and decisive intervention of FDR six months earlier. In a scene that came to symbolize the bond forged between the two men during the war, Churchill was in the White House when FDR made this fateful move. The president had just handed the prime minister a telegram informing him that the besieged British garrison at Tobruk had fallen. Tobruk possessed the only major port in the Western desert, and holding it was viewed as vital to the British defense of Egypt. As such, the news of its capture by the Germans left Churchill stunned and speechless. FDR finally broke the silence by asking “What can we do to help?” and, in consultation with General George Marshall and Field Marshal Alan Brooke, who were also in the room, made the controversial decision to divert a squadron of A-20 light bombers destined for Russia to the retreating British forces in Egypt, along with three hundred Sherman tanks and one hundred self-propelled guns that proved decisive to the subsequent victory. Years later, Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke wrote that “the Tobruk episode in the President’s study” helped lay “the foundations of friendship and understanding that built up during the war between the President and Marshall on the one hand and Churchill and myself on the other.”⁹

By the time Churchill’s plane touched down in Egypt in February 1945, however, the relationship between the two leaders had entered a new phase. They still enjoyed each other’s company, but the warmth that characterized the early stretches of the war—when Churchill referred to himself in their correspondence first as “naval person” and then as “former naval person”—had given way to more formal, and at times distant, interactions. Much of the shift can be attributed to FDR’s objections to what he deemed Churchill’s Victorian sensibilities—above all, his inability to imagine a world without the Empire. Then there was FDR’s determination to maintain an independent relationship with Stalin and the Soviet Union. FDR never gave up the notion that he “could handle Stalin better” than Churchill or his British colleagues. “Stalin hates the guts of all your top people,” he once remarked to Churchill, adding “he thinks he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do so.” Most distressing to Churchill, however, was the diminution of the British role in the war—and the loss of influence that it undoubtedly represented as the conflict drew to a close.¹⁰

One issue that drove a wedge between the two leaders, and that made manifest Great Britain’s waning power, was the question of the joint development of the atomic bomb. The genesis of this all-important scientific endeavor dates to a letter President Roosevelt received in the fall of 1939 from Albert Einstein largely at the instigation of the physicist Leo Szílard. The letter noted the recent discovery of nuclear fission, and warned the president of the possibility that this breakthrough might lead to the creation of extremely powerful weapons. It also alluded to the likelihood that German scientists were already working to develop such weapons.¹¹

FDR wasted no time in responding to these developments. He immediately established an Advisory Committee on Uranium under the leadership of Dr. Vannevar Bush, president of the Carnegie Institution in Washington. In the meantime, Great Britain launched a similar effort, which, over the next two years, made enormous scientific strides. In the fall of 1941, the British sent a copy of their findings—under the euphemism “the Maud Report,” after the committee that carried out the work—to Washington. Its revelations spurred FDR to throw the entire weight of the American government into a massive effort to develop the atomic bomb. By January 1942 the program was fully under way; its code name—the Manhattan Project—was a reference to the Manhattan offices of the US Army Corps of Engineers, which had been assigned to oversee the construction of the initial facilities.¹²

At the time the Maud Report came out, FDR suggested to Churchill that the two powers might want to coordinate their scientific efforts.¹³ But owing to a split of opinion in London over the degree to which Great Britain should collaborate with the Americans, it would take some time—and a good deal of rancor—before the two governments would be able to hammer out a formal understanding.¹⁴ This document, known as the “Quebec Agreement,” was signed in Quebec City in August 1943, and its terms called for “full and effective collaboration” between the two governments and their scientists. It further stipulated that any decision to use an atomic bomb or to share information about the project with a third party would require “mutual consent.”¹⁵

The Quebec Agreement also addressed the non-military uses of atomic energy that might result from the Manhattan Project. In a clear expression of American suspicions of the British, and of the competitive nature of the transatlantic relationship, the agreement demanded that the latter “recognize that any post-war advantages of an industrial or commercial character shall be dealt with as between the United States and Great Britain on terms to be specified by the President of the United States.” In addition, it stated that the prime minister “expressly disclaims any interest in these industrial and commercial aspects beyond what may be considered by the President of the United States to be fair and just and in harmony with the economic welfare of the world.”¹⁶

Many officials and scientists in Britain were appalled by America’s demands. Yet as Churchill wrote to Lord Cherwell, his scientific adviser, sometime later, he was “absolutely sure” that the British could not have achieved “any better terms… than are set forth in my secret agreement with the President.” He remained confident that the British association with the United States was permanent and had “no fear that they will maltreat us or cheat us.”¹⁷ Cherwell was not so sanguine. At the end of 1944 and the beginning of 1945, as the bomb—and the atomic age—came to the fore, he pressed Churchill to go back to FDR to secure American acquiescence to any effort by the British to conduct independent atomic research after the war.¹⁸ Thus there was another reason, beyond a discussion about the “three kings,” for which Churchill made the decision to travel to Alexandria to see FDR a mere four days after he had left the president’s side at Yalta.

FDR SPENT THE MORNING OF FEBRUARY 15, 1945, ON THE FLAG DECK of the Quincy. Almost immediately after the ship reached its moorings, however, he launched into a series of meetings. The first was with Secretary Stettinius, who came aboard just after 11:00 a.m. in the company of Charles Bohlen and John Winant, the American ambassador to Great Britain. Stettinius had stopped in Alexandria on his way from Moscow to Mexico City to give the president a preliminary report on the discussions in the Russian capital among the three foreign ministers, as well as to bring the president up to date on a number of State Department matters. This included a brief review of Stettinius’s coming trip to Mexico City to take part in the Inter-American Conference on the Problems of War and Peace, a conference that FDR insisted Stettinius attend in an effort to solidify Latin American support for the United Nations.¹⁹

The two men also touched upon a secret and sensitive mission Stettinius was to carry out on his way to Mexico City that was closely linked to the discussions FDR was about to have with Churchill. Stettinius would visit Brazil to meet with President Getúlio Dornelles Vargas, with whom he would arrange an agreement for the US to purchase all of Brazil’s production of monazite sands—a mineral rich in thorium, one of the key elements needed for the construction of an atomic bomb. In fact, the secretary of state completed his mission with aplomb, securing access to Brazil’s monazite deposits without divulging the reason for the purchase—an outcome that thoroughly pleased FDR.²⁰

At approximately 12:35 the shrill sound of the bosun’s pipe announced the arrival of Prime Minister Churchill, his daughter Sarah, and the ubiquitous Commander Charles Thompson, Churchill’s naval aide-de-camp. While Sarah and Anna enjoyed a few moments on deck, Churchill retired to FDR’s quarters where the two men, in the company of Harry Hopkins, discussed what the prime minister referred to as the “Tube Alloys” project.

Churchill began the meeting by reading aloud the memo that Lord Cherwell had prepared for him explaining the British desire to carry out independent research into the potential commercial and industrial uses of atomic energy after the war. FDR reportedly made “no objection of any kind” to Cherwell’s arguments. He did say, however, that recent reports indicated new uncertainty about the possibility of atomic power being used for commercial purposes. And, in perhaps an intentional misrepresentation of the timeline reported to him by Stimson at the end of the year, FDR specified September 1945—rather than August—as the likely date for “the first important [military] trials.” Churchill was pleased that Roosevelt was not opposed to the British engaging in atomic research after the war. But like many of the other understandings that passed between them, this implied agreement would prove short-lived: just over a year after FDR’s death, President Truman would sign the McMahon Act, which brought the wartime atomic collaboration and sharing of information between the two nations to an abrupt halt, eventually leading the British to develop their own atomic arsenal.²¹

At 2:00 p.m. it was time for lunch, where the two leaders and Hopkins were joined by Anna, Sarah, Churchill’s son Randolph (who had arrived roughly an hour before), Admiral Leahy, and Ambassador Winant. Given how often Sarah Churchill saw Ambassador Winant, with whom she was having a secret affair, she could not help but be bemused and delighted by his presence. “Yesterday lunch we went on board the President’s ship in Alexandria,” she carelessly wrote to her mother, “and who do you suppose was there? The Ambassador!! But alas our paths separated right after coffee!”²² The luncheon was a purely social affair, and a most pleasant one at that. But as Churchill later reflected, FDR seemed placid and frail; it was as if the president possessed “a slender contact with life.”²³

At the close of this convivial gathering, shorn of all of the tensions that had burdened the two leaders at Yalta, something of the old warmth seemed to return. It had been three and a half years since their first fateful wartime meeting, where in far darker circumstances they had created their vision for a better world. Now, they parted affectionately, never to see one another again.

THE QUINCY LEFT ITS MOORINGS IN THE ANCIENT HARBOR LESS THAN ten minutes after the prime minister and his party had departed, and arrived in Algiers just before 9:00 a.m. on the morning of Sunday, February 18. The ship’s arrival provided Anna a last opportunity to write home. Knowing that her mother would be concerned about her father’s health, she wrote first to Eleanor, noting that “father is really fine… [and] has been resting for the past two days.” Today will be busy, she continued, making reference to the many appointments FDR had scheduled in the hours ahead, “but then we’re thru.”²⁴

Anna offered much the same assessment about FDR’s condition in a note she sent to her husband. “OM seems fine, thank goodness,” she wrote. But this view was not shared by those who came to see the president on board the Quincy that day.

Samuel Rosenman, who had flown from London so that he could assist FDR in drafting the address on Yalta, was deeply disheartened by FDR’s appearance. He had never seen the president looking “so tired.” FDR appeared to have lost a great deal of weight, and “seemed listless and uninterested in conversation,” as he “slowly and silently went through the process of signing some bills and correspondence to be dispatched home by air.”²⁵

An even less optimistic assessment came from Carmel Ophie, a career diplomat who had traveled to Algiers with the US ambassadors to France and Italy, Jeffrey Caffery and Alexander Kirk, to join the president for lunch.²⁶ “He looked ghastly, sort of dead and dug up,” Ophie observed as he greeted the president and Anna. He was also shocked to see Hopkins “carried off the S.S. Quincy on a stretcher,” while Pa Watson was “under an oxygen tent” and another aide was “in the sick bay with a bad case of influenza.” Nor was Ophie alone in this observation; as Ambassador Kirk said to him, “This is really a ship of death and everyone responsible in encouraging that man [FDR] to go to Yalta has done a disservice to the United States and ought to be shot.”²⁷

Hopkins, not willing to contemplate a long sea voyage confined to his cabin, had indeed finally made the decision that he had no choice but to leave the Quincy and make arrangements to fly back to the United States.²⁸ FDR had been counting on Hopkins to help him draft his Yalta message to Congress, and the latter’s decision to abandon him at this key moment seemed to wound the president. Perhaps out of exhaustion, or hubris, or perhaps overwhelmed by the knowledge that Watson’s health had taken a further turn for the worse, FDR appeared unable or unwilling to recognize the seriousness of Hopkins’s condition. He suspected that the real reason Hopkins wanted to leave was to escape the tediousness of the journey. As a result, their parting that afternoon was not a pleasant one. Anna, too, was “furious” over Hopkins’s decision to leave. But Hopkins was in fact gravely ill. Within two days of his arrival in Washington, he was flown immediately to the Mayo Clinic, from which he would not emerge until he had to rush back to Washington to attend the president’s funeral.²⁹

Since Bohlen planned to accompany Hopkins on his return journey, and since Stephen Early was scheduled to depart that day to take up a planned visit to Eisenhower’s headquarters in France, Rosenman suddenly found himself tasked with helping the president draft this major address without the assistance of three of the key people who had been at Yalta. Admiral Leahy suggested that Rosenman hold a “hurried conference” with Hopkins, Bohlen, and Early in the hectic hours before their departure. Armed with this “fill-in” information, which was supplemented by a six-page memorandum Bohlen hastily dictated before he left, Rosenman went right to work. He hoped that it might be possible for him and the president to complete a final draft in advance of their arrival at Gibraltar in roughly twenty-four hours, which might allow him to return to London. But it soon became apparent that “the hard voyage to Yalta and the shattering responsibilities of the conference” had sapped the president’s strength, and no matter how hard Rosenman tried, he could not get his chief to work on the speech.

THE EXPANSE OF OCEAN BETWEEN ALGIERS ON THE NORTH AFRICAN coast and Newport News, Virginia, runs roughly 4,200 miles. Thus far, Captain Elliott Senn and the other officers of his task force could look back on the president’s journey with a high degree of satisfaction. They had run into some fairly high seas and stiff winds in their first traverse of the Atlantic, but they had brought the president to his first destination, Malta, safely, and had not run into any difficulties since their departure from the Great Bitter Lake a few days before.

But as FDR and his party settled down to dinner on the evening of February 18, 1945, Captain Senn was unnerved by a report indicating possible U-boat activity in the region and even more so by the news that two Allied merchant ships had been sunk in the vicinity of Gibraltar the night before. Thus the security screen around the Quincy was enhanced considerably. A third destroyer was added to the task force as the president’s vessel left the harbor, and within hours of breaking out into the Mediterranean, the group was joined by three more destroyers, so that by 11:00 p.m. that night the Quincy was protected by no fewer than seven warships.

At noon the next day, there was much excitement as the now-famous USS Murphy approached the Quincy to deliver both the president’s mail and Commander Bernard A. Smith’s report on the ship’s “Mission to Mecca.” About an hour later, the Quincy and its now eight escort vessels entered the Strait of Gibraltar, steaming ahead at 27 knots. As on the way into the Mediterranean, above them flew two Ventura bombers, a squadron of P-38 fighters, and a K-Class Navy Blimp.³⁰

With the famous rock clearly visible seven miles off the starboard bow, the task force increased its speed to 29 knots, passing the Cape Spartel Light shortly after 2:00 p.m. and then, at last, reaching the Atlantic. Roughly three hours later, this most dangerous portion of the return voyage having been completed, four of the eight escorts broke away from the task force, leaving the Quincy with the light cruiser USS Savannah and the usual complement of three destroyers for the rest of the crossing.

FDR did little over the twenty-four-hour period between the Quincy’s departure from Algiers and the ship’s safe passage into the Atlantic. Nevertheless, he seemed extremely worn, and as a result, Anna and Drs. Bruenn and McIntire agreed that he should spend the next two days in bed. But on the very morning that Anna intended to put this regime into place, Pa Watson died. Anna had just finished her breakfast when Dr. Bruenn brought her the news, and for a time the two of them talked about what effect this might have on her father. Watson was much more than the president’s appointments secretary and aide. He was also a dear friend, and there was no question that his passing would come as a severe blow.³¹

Anna and Dr. Bruenn waited anxiously outside FDR’s quarters as Ross McIntire went in to inform the president. Dr. McIntire soon emerged to say that FDR “had taken it in his stride,” which, Anna reflected, was “typical of him,” although he was prone “to hide much in the way of inside turmoil.” Anna then went in to see her father, accompanied by Admiral Brown, and together the three of them discussed the message to send to Frances Watson, the noted concert pianist and the general’s spouse of twenty-five years. After determining that it would be best to keep FDR’s mind occupied so he would not “be thinking too much about Pa,” Anna abandoned the notion that he should spend two days in bed. It would be far better to keep him engaged in his usual routine, and after about fifteen minutes, she suggested he go up on deck to take in the sun.³²

ANYONE WHO KNEW FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT WOULD AGREE THAT he had an ebullient personality. The similarly affable Churchill once compared seeing him to opening a bottle of champagne. Thus his behavior in the days that followed Watson’s death suggests that the passing of his old friend and aide threw FDR into a sort of depression.

As Dr. McIntire observed, up to this point the thought of death rarely seemed to enter into FDR’s mind. Aside from his “natural buoyancy and sanguine temperament” there was “the immediacy of the tasks that lay before him,” which seemed to render him incapable—even after the deaths of many dear associates—of losing faith in his own invulnerability.³³

But Watson’s death was different. Following lunches in his cabin, FDR spent time on the deck “quietly reading, or just smoking and staring off into the horizon.” Sometimes Anna, Admiral Leahy, or Judge Rosenman joined him, but more often than not they left him “alone with his book—and his thoughts.” When the sun began to sink, the president retired to his cabin for a nap before dinner. Although evening meals were preceded by a “cocktail hour,” during which FDR seemed comparatively more animated, he showed no interest in doing any work after dinner in the evenings, which was highly unusual when he was preparing a major address. Instead, he would retire to Admiral Leahy’s quarters with the rest of his party to watch a film, followed immediately by bed.³⁴

As Rosenman recounted, this somnolent routine continued day after day as the Quincy made its way westward. Exasperated at the president’s unwillingness to help him draft the Yalta address, Rosenman turned to Anna for help. By the time FDR finally turned his attention to the speech—on February 26, one day before their expected landfall—Anna had more or less churned out two complete drafts of her own.³⁵

Once FDR got involved in the drafting of the address, he and Rosenman spent a good deal of time discussing the larger meaning of the Yalta conference. FDR intimated that many challenges lay ahead, not least the task of adhering to the “tough principles contained in the Atlantic Charter,” which, he was convinced, would bring to the surface his differences of opinion with Churchill. But like Churchill, FDR believed that Stalin was a man of his word, and that the Soviet leader was interested in maintaining the peace of the world—in part, because peace would allow the Soviets to focus on their recovery from the war. Overall, he remained optimistic that the Yalta conference “had paved the way for the kind of world he had been dreaming, planning and talking about.”³⁶

As the USS Quincy began its final approach to Newport News, FDR drafted another statement, one conveying the sense of loss he felt in the wake of General Watson’s death.³⁷ Taking note of “a great personal sorrow to me,” and acutely aware that he would be returning to a White House devoid of the warm presence, good humor, and discerning hand of General Watson, FDR admitted that he “would miss him almost more than I can express.” He observed that Watson had been his military aide and, later, his appointments secretary for twelve years, and yet had become such a close friend that “there was never a cloud between us.” Then, in an implied reference to the fact that Watson—like FDR—had been advised by his doctors not to undertake this arduous journey, FDR noted how Watson, out of his loyalty to the president and to the country, had insisted on seeing the war through and “on taking this trip with me.” This statement, which reflected FDR’s emphasis on loyalty and duty, would be repeated almost word for word upon his own death a mere six weeks later.³⁸

THE QUINCY HAD BEEN BLESSED WITH WHAT ADMIRAL LEAHY described as semi-tropical weather since it left the Mediterranean. But during the final hours of their voyage, the president and his party encountered a stiff headwind and some “very rough seas.” In the past, such conditions would not have deterred FDR from going out on deck to take in the sights as the ship made its way through the Chesapeake Channel, past Hampton Roads, and into the harbor. But on this occasion, he remained in his cabin.

At 6:25 p.m., the Quincy finally arrived, docking at the same pier from which it had departed more than five weeks before. FDR did not disembark immediately but, rather, stayed on board to have dinner with Captain Senn and a number of other officers. Just over two hours later, the president was wheeled to his waiting railway car, where he would observe the solemn transfer of General Watson’s body from the ship to the train, under full military honors; his coffin carried by six officers from the Quincy as pallbearers, accompanied by Captain Senn, the ship’s chaplain, and the shrill, plaintive piping of the Quincy’s boatswain.³⁹ After the general’s flag-draped casket was placed on board a special car reserved for that purpose, FDR spent the next thirty minutes on the telephone with various officials in Washington, making sure that all of the necessary arrangements for the burial of his old friend at Arlington the next day were in order. He also spoke to Eleanor and put in a call to Daisy, who was relieved that he was “safely back” but saddened, too, to hear the news about “Pa,” the one person “FDR could lean on both figuratively and physically.” Unbeknownst to either Eleanor or Daisy, however, FDR also spent five minutes speaking to Lucy Rutherfurd, who expressed similar relief that he had returned safe and sound.⁴⁰

Finally, at 10:15 p.m., the president’s train began its slow trek across Virginia, northwest to Richmond and on to Gordonsville, just east of Watson’s beloved seventy-five-acre estate at Kenwood, nestled in the rolling hills not far from Monticello. FDR spent many a happy occasion there, first in a cottage that Watson had constructed for the president’s use, but more often in the main house, which FDR preferred. It was at Kenwood, in fact, over the course of four anxious days in June 1944, that FDR awaited the long-anticipated invasion of Normandy—an invasion that did so much to seal the fate of the hateful regime that had made his long journey to Yalta a necessity.