On July 7, after an overnight train ride from Hyde Park, where he had spent the holiday weekend, Roosevelt returned to the White House, which, after ten years of living there, he called his “back yard.” That afternoon, he met with Admiral Leahy, General Marshall, and General Giraud, who the president hoped could eclipse de Gaulle. Giraud impressed Daisy, who joined them for afternoon tea, as “charming” and “a real gentleman of the old school.” Roosevelt spoke with him in French, even telling a joke. But Giraud proved to be no match for de Gaulle, who was dominating the emergence of a French authority in North Africa. In mid-June Roosevelt had told Churchill that he was “fed up with De Gaulle. . . . The last few days indicate that there is no possibility of our working with De Gaulle.” Roosevelt thought he was “a very dangerous threat” to the war effort but confessed that he did “not know how to deal with” a man who was “out for himself, & wants to be the next ruler of France—in whatever capacity may be expedient when the time comes.”
As Milton Viorst noted, de Gaulle’s behavior was especially offensive to Roosevelt’s sense of propriety. De Gaulle knew that his arrogance and independence irritated Roosevelt no end and reciprocated his contempt in response to the president’s reluctance to remember that France was a great nation. But it was France’s failure to have fought, the way Britain did, that especially irked Roosevelt and angered him about de Gaulle’s insistence that he be treated as the leader of a great power.
Leahy and Daisy, who had spent the weekend with the president at Hyde Park, worried that the burdens of office, including the difficulties with de Gaulle, were wearing him down. They confided to each other that the president still looked tired from his trip to Casablanca, and they agreed that plane travel especially exhausted him. But they saw no way to deter him from making overseas air trips. In contrast with Wilson, who had limited freedom to influence his counterparts at Versailles in 1919, Roosevelt saw himself in an advantageous position in any meeting he might have with Churchill and/or Stalin. The emergence of U.S. productive might and his own talent for personal persuasion, which had carried him through three elections and continued to be reflected in high public approval, convinced him that his successful interactions with his allies were essential in fighting the war and assuring a stable postwar peace.
But his weariness wasn’t simply the result of arduous travels abroad. It was also the product of the constant demands on his social skills. Louise Hopkins, Harry’s new wife, for example, who lived in the White House, impressed Roosevelt as “not very bright” and full of tiring conversation that wore on him. He had developed the habit of forcing “himself to keep up the outward appearance of energy and force—It must be very exhausting,” Daisy thought. He enjoyed a bit of solitude or those occasional moments he spent alone with Daisy, confiding in her that “it was the greatest possible rest to be able to just be as he felt & not have to talk & be the host.”
The constant turmoil in domestic affairs continued to test his resilience. Isaiah Berlin, the head of an operation called the Special Survey Section in the British embassy, reported that labor and race strife, in conjunction with the lull in military advances, had temporarily generated “universal dissatisfaction” by the public with the administration and moved “the troubled home front into the centre of attention. . . . Anti-Roosevelt columnists are playing it for all they are worth, and [columnist Walter] Lippmann . . . has addressed severe words to the President on his lack of clear guidance to the nation and failure to bring facts home to the public.” In response, Churchill wrote Roosevelt: “I have been so much distressed and angered to see the way you are being harried. Knowing what war burdens are, I greatly admire the splendid calm and buoyancy with which you bear them amidst so much clatter.”
Although Anglo-American forces successfully invaded Sicily on July 10, despite gale winds that blew paratroopers off their target, and Italy’s king Victor Emmanuel III forced Mussolini’s resignation, the gratifying war news was not enough to quiet divisions at home. The greater the prospects for victory, the more critics felt free to complain about the administration’s shortcomings. Roosevelt wrote to Churchill describing the “unfortunate feeling in this country that victory is in sight.” At a press conference on July 27, when he announced that the following night he would hold a Fireside Chat regarding the war, a reporter asked: “Abroad or at home?” Roosevelt dismissed the suggestion that the two could be separated. There is only one front, he said: Everything we do at home influences what happens abroad; the two are indelibly linked.
In his radio address, Roosevelt celebrated Allied victories on the Russian front, in the Pacific, and in Europe. “The first crack in the Axis has come,” he declared. “The criminal, corrupt Fascist regime in Italy is going to pieces.” He predicted that Mussolini and “his fascist gang will be brought to book, and punished for their crimes against humanity. No criminal will be allowed to escape by the expedient of ‘resignation.’” Mindful of Soviet disappointment in the absence of a second front, Roosevelt stressed his continuing determination to compel unconditional surrender. Also eager to remind Hitler and the Nazis of the price they would pay for their atrocities, and if possible, to deter them from committing additional crimes, he declared, “We will have no truck with Fascism in any way, in any shape or manner. We will permit no vestige of Fascism to remain.” No one will forget that “in every country conquered by the Nazis and the Fascists or the Japanese militarists, the people have been reduced to the status of slaves or chattels. It is our determination to restore these conquered peoples to the dignity of human beings.”
Roosevelt also sought to refute assertions he was “playing party politics at home,” and that his administration was “failing miserably on the home front.” He dismissed this as “a false slogan easy to state but untrue in essential facts.” He insisted that America was performing brilliantly, producing the sinews of war that promised the ultimate victory. In addition, he concluded, “while concentrating on military victory, we are not neglecting the planning of the things to come,” including “the return to civilian life of our gallant men and women in the armed services. They must not be demobilized into an environment of inflation and unemployment, to a place on the bread line or a corner selling apples. We must, this time, have plans ready—instead of waiting to do a hasty, inefficient, and ill-considered job at the last moment.” He called on “Congress to do its duty in this regard.”
While Roosevelt used a Fireside Chat to quiet and control the home front, he laid plans for future overseas offensives. He saw face-to-face discussions with Churchill and Stalin as essential to wise war plans. Although travel to distant places seemed more than likely to strain his physical stamina, which was growing less robust, he was uncomfortable with plans devised through written communications. Now, more than ever, with the war moving toward ultimate victory, he had supreme confidence in his judgment and ability to dominate his allies. And so he was eager to meet with Stalin as well as Churchill. He did not think he could entirely disarm Stalin’s suspicions of his former western adversaries, but he thought he could make meaningful progress in persuading him that he and Churchill shared his determination to destroy Hitler’s regime and genuinely wanted a cooperative postwar relationship.
Stalin remained reluctant to meet before the end of the year at earliest. But a “man to man” talk with Stalin, Roosevelt told Daisy, might enable him “to establish a constructive relationship,” though it might also “result in a complete stalemate.” Daisy came away from the conversation thinking: “How much F.D.R. has on his shoulders! It is always more & more, with the passing months, instead of less & less, as he deserves as he gets older.” On August 8, Stalin advised Roosevelt that he could not “go on a long journey” to meet him at any time that summer or fall. He offered congratulations on “the outstanding successes in Sicily,” which had brought the “collapse of Mussolini and his gang.” But he was still not convinced that the Allies would commit themselves to a cross-Channel attack, and the failure of a British-Canadian assault on the French port of Dieppe in April 1942 only increased his uncertainty about Anglo-American resolve to cross the Channel.
With Soviet victories at Kursk and soon after, the city of Orel, 225 miles southwest of Moscow, Stalin had more leverage than ever to implicitly threaten to make a negotiated settlement with Hitler. He gave no hint of doing so, but as long as the Allies delayed an invasion of western Europe, the possibility remained all too worrisome. But because he did not wish to rule out entirely a meeting with Roosevelt, he finally suggested a conference at some indefinite time in Astrakan in southern Russia on the banks of the Volga or in the port of Archangel in the northwest. If these sites were too inconvenient for the president, Stalin proposed a meeting of representatives instead. Roosevelt admitted to Daisy that he wasn’t eager for a long, arduous trip to see Stalin, as she recalled: “He doesn’t want to go, but he has to put every possible effort into going because he thinks it will help in planning the future of the world.”
In the meantime, he worked to coordinate plans with Churchill, feeling compelled to blandish him a bit. When Roosevelt issued a public statement on the eve of the Sicily invasion lauding American forces and urging the Italian people to abandon Mussolini and the Fascists as Hitler’s tools, he failed to mention the British contribution to the effort. An irritated Churchill, unhappy about having become the junior partner in the Anglo-American alliance, warned Roosevelt that while he had no objection to the president’s appealing to the Italians for prompt capitulation, “in all the frankness of our friendship, untoward reactions might grow among the British people and their forces that their contribution had not received equal or sufficient recognition.”
With Stalin still noncommittal about a date for a conference, Roosevelt suggested to Churchill that they confer in Quebec. Churchill was most eager for another meeting and suggested coming over to the States in mid-August before proceeding to Canada. He was especially eager to “settle the larger issues” about the invasion and ultimate governance of an occupied Italy. Churchill feared that the U.S. chiefs would convince the president to forgo an Italian campaign in order not to delay the cross-Channel attack. “I trust we can keep all important options in this theatre open until we meet,” Churchill cabled him. The collapse of Mussolini’s government before the end of July provoked an Anglo-American debate about recognizing a new authority in Italy. Roosevelt wanted assurances that any new government would be recognized by Americans as a genuine representative of the people. He believed that U.S. involvement in postwar international affairs depended on the conviction that democratic values or self-determination would inform discussions and actions everywhere. Churchill was more concerned with Italian stability, which he believed would best be served by a monarchial regime.
During the first week of August, Roosevelt went freshwater fishing on the north shore of Lake Huron in Canada. After arriving in Canada, the prime minister came to Hyde Park for two nights on August 13, and had a picnic lunch the following day with Harry Hopkins, who was under almost constant attack in the conservative press and “looked sick—white, blue around the eyes, with red spots on his cheek bones.” The assault on his character was so ugly that he considered a libel suit, which the president talked him out of. Eleanor Roosevelt, her friends Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, Sam Rosenman, Daisy, Churchill’s daughter Mary, and other Roosevelt kin were also in attendance. They ate traditional American fare—hot dogs, hamburgers, corn pudding, and watermelon. Neither Cook nor Dickerman knew who Daisy was. It was evidence, Geoffrey Ward writes, “of how secretive FDR could be and of how wide was the gulf between the intimate worlds of the two Roosevelts.”
Daisy recorded her impressions of the guests, but particularly Churchill. She noted the “special little ice-pail for his scotch.” She described him as “a strange looking little man. Fat & round, his clothes bunched up on him. Practically no hair on his head, he wore a 10-gallon hat. He talks as though he had terrible adenoids—sometimes says very little, then talks quite a lot—His humorous twinkle is infectious. . . . In a pair of shorts, he looked exactly like a kewpie [doll]. He made a good dive in [the swimming pool], soon came out, wrapped a large wool blanket around himself & sat down to talk to F.D.R. . . .” She found that Churchill was “difficult in conversation when he doesn’t want to talk, perfectly delightful and witty when he wants to be. He makes no effort just to ‘talk’ with the person next to him, but is very responsive if interested.” She was keenly aware of the nature of the relationship between the two larger-than-life leaders. She had “the impression that Churchill adores the P., loves him as a man, looks up to him, defers to him, leans on him.” His regard for the president convinced her that the prime minister had “real greatness” in him. In the bosom of so many friends deferring to him, “the P. was relaxed and seemingly cheerful in the midst of the deepest problems.”
In Daisy’s presence, “the P. & the P.M. talked rather casually,” but they also focused on some of the grave difficulties besetting them. As a prelude to their more formal meetings in Quebec beginning on August 17, they discussed the Katyn massacres in Poland and the “hopes and horrors” of the Nazi occupation and rivalries in the Balkans. The details of atrocities, Churchill said, were enough to make “one’s blood boil.” Although it would not serve the war effort to publish their suspicions of Soviet responsibility for the Polish killings, Churchill’s report to the president raised doubts about their ability to remain close allies with Stalin’s brutal, imperious regime. For the time being, however, they saw no choice but to cooperate with the Russians. As Churchill rode a train back to Canada for their meeting in Quebec, he wrote Roosevelt that he was “pretty sure that we ought to make a renewed final offer to U.J. [Uncle Joe] to go to meet him at Fairbanks [Alaska] . . . as soon as this Military Conference is over. If he accepts it will be a very great advantage; if not, we shall be on very strong ground,” as to their eagerness for cooperation. On August 18, they sent Stalin a joint cable from Quebec, emphasizing the importance of a tripartite meeting. But if he still could not commit himself to a time and place, they suggested the alternative of a prompt conference of foreign office chiefs.
The following day, before Stalin could respond to their latest invitation, they sent him a detailed cable about a possible Italian surrender and occupation. When a garbled version of the cable left Stalin confused about the terms of surrender, he responded angrily that he was being treated as “a passive third observer. I have to tell you that it is impossible to tolerate such a situation any longer.” He demanded the creation of a tripartite commission based in Sicily to enforce unconditional surrender on all their enemies. When Churchill read Stalin’s reply, he exclaimed, “Stalin is an unnatural man. There will be grave troubles.” Roosevelt later told Daisy that Stalin’s message was “rude—stupidly rude” and that Stalin’s reluctance to meet signaled a possible intention to make a separate peace with Hitler, acknowledging, “It is what I have feared right along.” The recall of Russia’s ambassadors in London and Washington added to fears that Stalin might be planning a negotiated exit from the war. In the following week, however, after he received the full details of the Italian surrender talks, Stalin sent a more conciliatory cable, endorsing the Allies’ action as “entirely” in line with “the aim of unconditional surrender of Italy.” To avoid future confusion, however, he agreed that, “the time has fully come for the establishment of a military-political commission of representatives of the three countries.”
Stalin’s threatening tone could not help but foster a conviction during the Quebec talks that a firm commitment to a cross-Channel assault was now more essential than ever. Churchill, who had been the most skeptical, conceded that they should commit themselves to a May 1, 1944, date or as close to then as possible. He took comfort from the understanding that they would mount the greatest assault in terms of men and equipment ever undertaken. Because Churchill now seemed so solidly in favor of the invasion of France, Roosevelt accepted his recommendation that they follow the conquest of Sicily with an attack on Italy at the beginning of September. As he had before the Sicilian campaign, Churchill argued that it would be a grave error to wait eight months before launching anther major offensive, especially since it seemed realistic to believe that they could take advantage of Mussolini’s collapse and Italian reluctance to continue fighting. That supposition, however, underestimated the intensity of German determination to oppose an Allied conquest of Hitler’s fascist partner.
Churchill and Roosevelt also made a secret pact regarding “tube alloys,” or the creation of an atomic bomb. On August 19, two days into their weeklong meeting, they committed to sharing their results of current research on atomic power, but not to include the Soviet Union in their efforts toward such a powerful weapon. The five-part agreement included commitments not to use the potential weapon against each other or against a third party without mutual consent. It also pledged nondisclosure of information about the weapon without shared agreement. Finally, because of U.S. production burdens in manufacturing the atomic bomb, they agreed to American postwar industrial or commercial advantages with respect to it. They ended by providing for the establishment of a policy committee to oversee future work on the weapon.
Although Churchill and Roosevelt were aware that Soviet informants had told Moscow about Anglo-American research on an atomic bomb, they knew that if they relayed to Stalin the current state of its development, he would insist on equal access to any bomb-building capability. Russia’s likely responsibility for the Katyn Forest massacres, concern about postwar Soviet expansionist ambitions in Europe, and the suspicions aroused about Stalin’s possible interest in a separate peace with Hitler left Churchill and Roosevelt unwilling to treat Russia as a reliable future ally.
The Roosevelt administration’s doubts about the Soviets were by now an open secret. In August, the columnist Drew Pearson had railed against the State Department, led by Cordell Hull and supported by subordinates Adolf Berle, James Dunn, and Breckinridge Long, for its anti-Russian sentiments. Hull denounced the assertions as “monstrous and diabolic falsehoods.” In a press conference on August 31, Roosevelt himself condemned Pearson’s undermining of Allied unity, stating, “The whole statement from beginning to end was a lie” and calling Pearson “a chronic liar in his columns.” But Pearson’s claims stung not just because they threatened to destabilize relations with Moscow but also because they were true.
More disturbing was the fact that the Quebec meeting had failed to advance any responses to the growing evidence that the Nazis were systematically murdering Europe’s Jews in concentration camps. In April, a Bermuda conference, principally including British and U.S. representatives, had deadlocked over ways to rescue Europe’s Jews from Hitler’s extermination program. In July, Roosevelt had proposed to Churchill that they share the cost and responsibility for relocating an estimated five or six thousand Jewish refugees in Spain to temporary camps in North Africa. “At the earliest possible moment,” he hoped they could find a more permanent place for their settlement. Concerned about a hostile Arab reaction to the presence of Jewish refugees in North Africa and specifically “a limited number” in Palestine, while Roosevelt wanted a quick and uncontroversial solution to the problem, that seemed out of reach, for every proposal was wrought with innumerable controversies; the only answer to the dilemma was the quickest possible defeat of the Nazis. In August 1943, Eleanor described Jewish suffering in Europe as unparalleled and called upon the world to protest Nazi crimes, but added “I do not know what we can do to save the Jews in Europe and to find them homes.” She echoed Franklin’s conviction that the best solution was “rescue through military victory.” That summer, when Jan Karski, a member of the Polish underground, told Roosevelt that “without Allied intervention, Polish Jewry would cease to exist,” the president replied: “Tell your people we shall win the war.”
Roosevelt returned to Hyde Park on August 26, and although Daisy thought he looked “well, but tired,” he was in fact suffering a variety of life-threatening ailments. He described his general condition to Daisy as feeling “so sleepy his brain wouldn’t work.” He fell asleep twice when trying to write a message to Congress, he told her, and she suspected a serious decline in his health, confiding to a diary: “He just is too tired too often. I can’t help worrying about him.” She thought that the constant barrage of domestic criticism of the president’s leadership was “more wearing on F.D.R. than the real big problems of the war & the future peace—the ‘little foxes’ that gnaw at the roots of the vine.” In fact, at almost sixty-two, Roosevelt was beset by severe hypertension, an enlarged heart, and “acute bronchitis, which was responsible for a persistent cough,” and showed evidence of “chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.” Dr. Jerrold M. Post, who studied Roosevelt’s heath records, believes that his complaint about the imperfect functioning of his thinking was “‘sub-acute chronic diffuse hypoxia of the brain’—chronic insufficient oxygenation of the brain. This is a very reasonable explanation for the drowsiness, problems in concentrating, and episodes of semi-stupor that affected Roosevelt during his last two years of life.”
In September, however, after he had returned from Canada and Churchill came to Washington for more conversations and several public appearances, including the receipt of an honorary degree from Harvard, those closest to Roosevelt “remarked on how well the P. looked—we all agreed that it was extraordinary,” Daisy noted. “It seems as though the trials & difficulties of the office of President . . . acts as a stimulant to the P. They may take the place of the exercise which he can’t have like other people.” It was, however, wishful thinking, for while the challenges of being president in wartime may well have energized him, the increasing deterioration of his health was a reality that no external conditions could contain.
By contrast with the president, whose growing health problems were not yet fully evident in September 1943, Harry Hopkins was transparently exhausted and ill. Since 1935, after Hopkins had much of his stomach removed because of a cancer, “blood transfusions, intravenous feedings, and injections of vitamins and iron” had saved his life, but he continued to suffer from bouts of diarrhea, insufficient stomach acids to assure digestion, “vitamin B-12 deficiency, pernicious anemia, and liver disease.” He took so many medicines he thought of himself as a walking drugstore.
When he returned from Quebec, he was in terrible shape and had to be hospitalized again—this time for three weeks. Although his doctors prescribed three months of total rest, he refused to stay sidelined. “All those boys at the front are fighting & getting hurt & dying,” he said. “I have a job to do here & I’m going to do it.” His plan to move from the White House to Georgetown also troubled Roosevelt, who anticipated that it would mean that he would be less able to rely on Hopkins for daily support. The president regarded it as “a form of abandonment, which left him more alone than ever.” It was Harry’s talent to cut through a disagreement to capture the essential point that especially appealed to Roosevelt. “When a group of men are arguing and haggling over the details of some problem and perhaps talking at cross purposes,” Roosevelt said, Harry, “in one sentence, will put his finger on the point of the argument and clarify the whole thing.” Churchill called him “Lord Root of the matter.” However much distance opened between Roosevelt and Hopkins, they shared a determination not to let their physical maladies deter them from the work of winning the war and preserving the New Deal. Given the length and general success of their service, neither of them could accept that healthier successors could do their jobs as well as they could.
There was no question in Roosevelt’s mind about the obligations of a leader in wartime. Like soldiers on a battlefield, they were obliged to risk their lives for a larger good. In conversation with royal visitors from Austria, Greece, and Yugoslavia, he urged them to join their respective armies. “Go into the Army;” he said, “go to the front with the soldiers; if you get killed, it’s just too bad, but you will have done the right thing.”
One of those conflicts was a long-simmering battle between Cordell Hull and Sumner Welles, whose loathing was so mutual that, as Roosevelt told Daisy, they wanted “to kill each other.” His own preference for Welles over Hull irked the secretary no end. He constantly complained in private about Welles’s frequent visits to the White House and denigrated him as “my fairy” and “the polecat in the next room.” Hull had his eye on Welles’s job, and with the help of William Bullitt, spread stories about Welles’s homosexual proclivities and warned Roosevelt that Welles’s presence in the administration was a ticking time bomb. Roosevelt had limited regard for Hull: Privately he complained that Hull was too thin-skinned about criticism, which he should have taken in stride, as the president himself did. But ever mindful of Hull’s Senate connections, which could prove invaluable for future treaty approvals, Roosevelt gave him priority over Welles. He urged Hull to accommodate himself to Welles’s presence, but Hull could not tolerate so strong a competitor as a colleague. In fact, because Hull was in poor health and often absent from Washington recuperating from physical maladies, he needed Welles to run the department. Still, he could not reconcile himself to the president’s greater reliance on Welles for advice and the execution of foreign policy.
The conflict between Hull and Welles came to a head during the summer of 1943. When Ralph Brewster, Maine’s Republican senator and a staunch foe of the New Deal, learned of Welles’s sexual activities from Bullitt and Hull, he threatened to expose the administration’s coddling of a national security threat unless Welles resigned. Warned that Welles’s continued presence in the government could jeopardize the Democrats’ hold on the White House in 1944, Roosevelt, who was considering running for a fourth term, accepted Welles’s decision to resign. He was having a hard time “keeping the old boy sweet,” Roosevelt told Vice President Henry Wallace, and he needed to keep Hull as secretary “for the general welfare of the country.”
The loss of Welles had resulted in what Roosevelt described as a “dreadful day” and left him “very tired & ‘keyed up.” He was not only pained at having to let Welles go, but his departure left a yawning gap in the State Department’s utility as an instrument of Roosevelt’s foreign policy. Soon after, when Bullitt asked Roosevelt to support his election as mayor of Philadelphia, he vented his anger over the Welles incident, telling him: “If I were the angel Gabriel and you and Sumner Welles came before me seeking admission into the gates of Heaven, do you know what I would say? ‘Bill Bullitt, you have defamed the name of a man who toiled for his fellow man, and you can go to hell.’ And that’s what I tell you to do now!” After Bullitt left his office, Roosevelt’s secretary Dorothy Brady said, the president “was raving, raving!” The president ordered Philadelphia’s Democratic bosses, “Cut his throat!” and Bullitt lost the election by a wide margin.
At the beginning of October, Roosevelt complained to Churchill that “the newspapers here, beginning with the Hearst, McCormick crowd, had a field day over General Marshall’s duties. . . . It seems to me that if we are to be forced into making public statements about our military commands we will find ourselves with the newspapers running the war.” Because he was reluctant to let Marshall leave Washington, as he relied on him heavily for military counsel, Roosevelt wanted to give command of the cross-Channel attack to Eisenhower. But he was determined not to let conservative press publishers undermine his leadership by forcing him into a premature or unwanted appointment. In addition, he complained to Churchill about a press leak reporting differences with Stalin over the venue for an October foreign ministers conference. The story was the product of “a dangerous leak somewhere. . . . Don’t you think perhaps it would be beneficial to us both if this leak could be run down and so avoid another one in the future when there is more at stake?” he asked Churchill.
After a successful landing in Italy at the beginning of September, Allied forces had come up against stiff German resistance. Churchill was eager to expand the fighting to the Eastern Mediterranean, but American military chiefs, supported by Roosevelt, regarded this as a potential “suction pump” that would divert forces from an increasingly difficult Italian campaign and disrupt arrangements for the attack on France. As it became clear that the Germans intended to maintain “a full-scale defense of Italy,” discussions about the Eastern Mediterranean were soon abandoned.
But Churchill’s doubts about crossing the Channel remained, as he believed that “present plans for 1944 seem open to very grave defects.” He worried that the division of American and British forces between Italy and France would leave one of the fronts vulnerable to a massed German counterattack. “It is arguable,” he advised Roosevelt, “that neither the forces building up in Italy nor those available for a May OVERLORD [code name for the French invasion] are strong enough for the tasks set them.” He also feared “a startling comeback for Hitler” if they became too rigid about their decision to cross the Channel. “My dear friend,” Churchill added, “this is much the greatest thing we have ever attempted, and I am not satisfied that we have yet taken the measures necessary to give it the best chance of success.” He judged the ongoing Italian campaign to be a great aid to the Russians by forcing Hitler to divert “powerful forces to this theatre.” The Allies had “to win the battle in Italy, no matter what effect is produced on subsequent operations.” He also requested an early conference with Roosevelt before they met Stalin in Tehran, which is where the Russian leader finally agreed to meet in December.
In late October Roosevelt became ill and joked with Churchill that “It is a nuisenza to have the influenza.” But it was no joking matter: He ached all over and had a fever of over 104. Ten days later, on October 30, he was still feeling “miserable and very tired, but he can’t give in to it.” He had begun drinking coffee in the morning to pep him up, but it left him shaky and with trembling hands. He dreaded the thought of flying over the Atlas Mountains to Tehran and worried that Hopkins, who was determined to go with him, would also suffer the ill effects of so arduous a journey. But Roosevelt considered the meeting as of “paramount importance” and believed he had to go, “regardless of the cost to him” or Harry.
Roosevelt agreed that they should meet in November but asked Stalin to consider coming to Egypt, which would be an easier, more convenient journey for him. Since he had agreed to send Hull to a foreign ministers conference in Moscow, he hoped that Stalin would be more flexible about where he and Churchill convened with him. At the Moscow conference, however, when Stalin went along with an Anglo-American pronouncement on the need for a postwar international peacekeeping organization, sent word of his readiness to join the war against Japan after Germany’s defeat, but refused to meet anywhere but in Iran, Roosevelt conceded to his insistence on the Big Three gathering in Tehran.
Dr. McIntire recommended that the president travel by sea as a restorative health measure. But McIntire surely knew that at best a sea voyage would be a small palliative. He could not have been unaware of the fact that Roosevelt’s health was in serious decline, but he consistently hid the truth from the press and public about the president’s medical condition. To McIntire and millions of Americans Roosevelt had become indispensable, though the physician was clearly doing the president’s bidding in revealing nothing about the true state of his health. As Roosevelt understood, as soon as the war ended, Americans would be more than ready to see him retire. He told Daisy, “If the war is over next year, it will be impossible to elect a liberal president.” He had every hope that the war would end in 1944 and that he could devote himself in retirement to international peace.
In the meantime, he saw a meeting with Stalin, however far he had to travel and whatever the risks to his health and person, as essential if they were to bring the wars in Europe and Asia to the swiftest possible conclusion and begin arranging a more stable, peaceful postwar world. “I still think it vital that we see him [Stalin],” Roosevelt cabled Churchill on October 29. “I too am most anxious that you and I get away from this dispatch method of talking.”
When Hull saw Roosevelt just before he left for his Middle East meetings, he observed that the president “was looking forward to his meeting with Stalin with the enthusiasm of a boy.” On November 13, Roosevelt was carried aboard the Iowa, a new battleship, for a seven-day crossing to Oran in Algeria, from where they were scheduled to fly to Tunis and then on to Cairo for the beginning of a conference with Chiang Kai-shek on November 22. A near disaster had marked the sea crossing: An accompanying U.S. destroyer had inadvertently fired a torpedo that barely missed the Iowa while it was in the midst of an antiaircraft drill. “All is in the hands of God,” Roosevelt wrote Daisy from on board the battleship.
Aside from the torpedo incident, which gave Roosevelt the excitement of facing combat, the sea crossing was a very pleasant one. “Everything is very comfortable and I have with me lots of work and detective stories and we brought a dozen good movies. . . . It is a relief to have no newspapers! I am going to start a one page paper,” he wrote Eleanor. “It will pay and print only news that really has some relative importance!” His son Elliott met him at the pier in Oran when the ship docked. “The sea voyage had done Father good,” Elliott noted. “He looked fit; and he was filled with excited anticipation of the days ahead.”
A night flight to Cairo brought Roosevelt to the banks of the Nile at dawn, where he could glimpse the pyramids and the Sphinx. “Man’s desire to be remembered is colossal,” he said to Mike Reilly, his Secret Service agent, speaking as much about himself as surely as about the ancient Egyptians. After getting settled in a villa “way out of town, I’ve visited the pyramids and been fortified by the Sphinx,” he also told Eleanor. “I’ll give free transportation to any Senator or Congressman who will go over and look at her for a long, long time,” he wryly declared. On November 20, the party, including Churchill and his daughter Sarah, celebrated Thanksgiving with dinner at Roosevelt’s residence, where he presided over the gathering while he carved two huge turkeys. “For a couple of hours we cast care aside,” Churchill recalled. To Roosevelt’s great amusement, the guests danced to music played on a gramophone. With Sara the only woman present and in much demand, Churchill danced with presidential aide Pa Watson. Roosevelt “roared with laughter.” “I had never seen the President more gay,” Churchill recalled.
Eleanor and their daughter Anna had been annoyed with him for his refusal to let them join the trip. Women are not permitted on naval warships; nor would they be welcome at the conference, he informed them. But when both Sarah Churchill and Madame Chiang Kai-shek showed up in Cairo, Eleanor and Anna were furious. “I’ve been amused that Madame Chiang and Sarah Churchill were in the party,” Eleanor wrote Franklin. “I wish you had let me fly out. I’m sure I would have enjoyed Madame Chiang more than you did,” she added. She felt she could have handled Chiang better than Franklin, “I think the men (including FDR) are afraid of her,” Eleanor told Anna, as Madame Chiang had the ability to make the most powerful of men “squirm.”
Churchill had wanted British and American leaders to meet without a Soviet general present, as all he would do, Churchill complained, is lobby for a second front. But Roosevelt was convinced that Stalin would protest about being excluded. “It would be a terrible mistake if U.J. thought we had ganged up on him on military action,” Roosevelt told Churchill. Also, Roosevelt and Marshall, who had accompanied him to Cairo, did not wish to give the British an opportunity to argue for any postponement of OVERLORD while they battled the Germans in Italy. The president and his chiefs saw the coming meeting in Tehran as the occasion to form a united front with the Russians against any diversion from the French campaign. During the Cairo conversations, Churchill affirmed his commitment to a cross-Channel attack but also confirmed American suspicions of his eagerness for a Balkans campaign by declaring that OVERLORD “should not be such a tyrant as to rule out every other activity in the Mediterranean.”
With the Chiangs present in Cairo, however, Stalin declined to send a Soviet representative there lest it give the Japanese a pretext for declaring war on Russia. Roosevelt had conceived of a meeting with China more as a boost to their prestige and stature than as a forum at which to consider possible military agreements. To be sure, the discussions with Chiang Kai-shek, which included General Stilwell, involved hypothetical plans for reopening the Burma Road as a prelude to a large-scale assault on Japan’s million-man army in China. But these talks were more symbolic than substantive, as China was a source of unremitting conflicts and insoluble problems. Stilwell was contemptuous of both Chiang and U.S. policy in China, as he had concluded America was locked into a no-win policy of backing a “rotten regime . . . a one-party government supported by a Gestapo and headed by an unbalanced man with little education.” Stilwell was also angry with Roosevelt, as the general believed that he had “been ignored, slighted, blocked, delayed, double-crossed, lied to.” While he was eager for a campaign to retake Burma, Stilwell felt that it was “absolutely impossible to do anything.”
Churchill did not care very much if China collapsed. He was convinced that an island-hopping campaign across the Pacific would eventually bring Japan to defeat. While willing to give lip service to CBI military campaigns, Roosevelt shared his belief in combating Japan outside China. He accepted Stilwell’s view of Chiang as “highly temperamental” and his regime as shot through with “corruption and inefficiency.” This is not to say that Roosevelt discounted China’s importance. On the contrary, he viewed China as a potentially powerful influence in postwar affairs. As a country with over 400 million people, it would eventually become a great power. Because he believed that Chiang was the only one who could hold China together, he wished to grant the Generalissimo the appearance of being a political equal. Consequently, in conversations with him in Cairo he encouraged illusions about military action that to Stilwell and Churchill seemed unrealizable. Churchill complained that the talks with Chiang were “lengthy, complicated and minor . . . [and] occupied first instead of last place at Cairo.” Roosevelt was not sure Chiang could last. Maybe “we should look for some other man or group of men to carry on,” he told Stilwell in Cairo. But regardless of whom he dealt with in China, his objective remained the same: to keep Japan’s million troops in the country occupied in fighting there so that they would be unable to join the Pacific battles, and to foster the image of China as a great power in order to use it as a surrogate for U.S. designs in postwar Asia.
Stalin’s reluctance to come to Cairo was partly a matter of his fear of flying, which he had never done before he traveled to Tehran. Fearful that domestic opponents might sabotage his plane, he switched aircraft at the last minute. For all his talk about visiting the front lines, he rarely left the Kremlin, where he was well guarded and safe from potential assassins.
From the moment he first met Roosevelt and Churchill on November 28 to the end of the talks on December 1, Stalin’s competitiveness and reach for power were on full display. He convinced Roosevelt to stay at the Soviet embassy, where he asserted that the president would be safer from attack than he would be by driving the five miles from the American legation to the site of the meeting each day. Roosevelt’s presence in the Soviet compound enabled the Russians to plant listening devices in his rooms, but mindful of Soviet spying, Roosevelt took care to reveal nothing damning and to indicate only genuine regard for Stalin. For his part, his decision to stay at the Soviet embassy was calculated to promote trust between them.
To Churchill’s distress, he was too ill to join an initial dinner with Roosevelt and Stalin on November 27. Exhausted and with “his voice almost completely gone, . . . he had dinner in bed like a sulky little boy.” At that first Roosevelt-Stalin meeting, Roosevelt “made it clear that he was eager to relieve the pressure on the Russian front by invading France.” When Hopkins, who was a guest at the dinner and eager to restrain Churchill from arguing against a second front, informed Lord Moran, the prime minister’s physician, of what Roosevelt had told Stalin, Moran concluded “that the President’s attitude will encourage Stalin to take a stiff line in the conference.” Churchill still believed that Stalin’s fixation on the French assault rested to some degree on his desire to keep his Allies out of the Balkans, which he planned to make into an exclusive Soviet sphere of control.
When the three leaders assembled on the following day, they began with an exchange of conviviality. As diplomat George Kennan related the occasion, Churchill passed around a silver cigar case inscribed with “To Winston from his fellow Conservatives, 1925.” Roosevelt responded by sharing his own silver cigarette case with the inscription: “To Franklin from his Harvard Classmates, 1904.” Stalin, not to be outdone by his capitalist colleagues, offered them his silver cigarette case, which had found its way from Budapest with the inscription: “To Count Karoli: From his Friends at the Jockey Club, 1910.” In Kennan’s telling, Stalin was happy to demonstrate his appropriation of a valuable taken from a European nobleman.
Mindful of their history-making power, Churchill and Stalin began the first tripartite discussion with grandiose pronouncements. “In our hands,” Churchill announced, “we have the future of mankind.” Their meeting represented “the greatest concentration of world power that has ever been seen in the history of mankind.” Stalin was equally majestic: “History has spoiled us,” he said. “She’s given us very great power and very great opportunities . . . Let us begin our work.” Roosevelt, who as the only head of state presided over the conference, went directly to the tasks at hand: Although he described the U.S. strategy against Japan, he acknowledged that the most important topic of their discussions was how to strike most effectively at Hitler by drawing the greatest weight off the Soviet forces.
Churchill did not dispute Roosevelt’s assertion and declared that “North or North-West France [was] the place for Anglo-American forces to attack, though it was of course true that the Germans there would resist desperately.” He followed this cautionary note with the admonition that while they prepared for the invasion over the course of the next six months, they needed to find a use for the forces available to them in the Mediterranean. He asked: Should they move northeast toward the Danube, or should they invade the south of France? Stalin, who remained intent on dominating the Balkans, offered that no doubt, striking at southern France was the wisest strategy. He also promised to join the fighting against Japan once Germany was defeated. Unwilling to raise overtly a divisive political issue, Churchill nonetheless remarked on potential tensions confronting them: “Although we were all great friends,” he said, “it would be idle for us to delude ourselves that we saw eye to eye on all matters. Time and patience were necessary” if they were going to follow the war with a stable peace. Privately, Stalin had anticipated Churchill’s hint at their differences, saying, “I dislike and distrust the English. They are skillful and stubborn opponents. . . . If England is still ruling the world it is due to the stupidity of other countries, which let themselves be bluffed.”
As all three of them understood, were it not for Hitler, they would be more openly suspicious of one another’s intentions. Their opposing points of view, however, could not be entirely suppressed. After dinner on the evening of November 28, as they sat in a circle drinking coffee and smoking cigars, Churchill remarked: “I believe that God is on our side. At least I have done my best to make Him a faithful ally.” Stalin could not resist a rejoinder: “And the devil is on my side,” he said with a taunting grin. “Because, of course, everyone knows that the devil is a Communist—and God, no doubt, is a good Conservative.”
That evening, Roosevelt was showing the effects of his declining health. He said little and looked as if he was going to faint. “Great drops of sweat began to bead on his face.” We can only speculate that he was suffering another angina attack. After coffee, he excused himself and went to bed, and Churchill and Stalin continued their discussion. When Stalin expressed his fears of a postwar German resurgence that could lead to yet another conflict, Churchill suggested that they might be able to ensure a fifty-year peace by controlling German aviation and rearmament. Friendship between their two countries and the United States would be essential to keeping Germany in check. They then turned to Poland, and Stalin asked if Churchill and Eden, who was also present, thought that Russia intended “to swallow Poland up.” They answered the question by agreeing that what Poland might lose in the east could be balanced by gains to the west.
On the second day Churchill invited Roosevelt to meet with him privately, but the president declined, saying that it would irritate Stalin. That afternoon, the three discussed coming military operations. Churchill emphasized the need to keep pressure on Germany by fresh assaults in Italy and the Mediterranean, while Stalin, backed by Roosevelt, pressed the case for OVERLORD. He argued that anything other than the attack on France would be a pointless “diversion,” and Roosevelt predicted that limited actions in the Mediterranean could grow into larger operations and delay the French campaign. Stalin pressed Churchill to state whether he genuinely believed in OVERLORD, and asked Roosevelt who the invasion commander would be, insisting that the attack not occur without one man’s taking charge. When nothing seemed to be resolved at the close of this discussion, Stalin offered an olive branch by inviting everyone to dine at the Soviet embassy.
Tensions between Churchill and Stalin erupted that evening when Stalin proposed that after the war, fifty thousand of Hitler’s principal officers be shot. Churchill declared it an act of barbarism that his Parliament and people would never accept. When Elliott Roosevelt, who had accompanied his father to the conference, stated his conviction that the U.S. Army would back Stalin’s proposal, an enraged Churchill left the room. Stalin and Molotov followed him to assure him that they were only joking. Although Churchill returned to the dinner, he believed that given half a chance, Stalin would follow through on his idea. Afterward, at the British embassy, he vented his anger and frustration, seeing nothing but disaster ahead—another bloody war and “impending catastrophe” with an end to civilization and a “desolate” Europe.
The next morning, November 30, anxious to put aside residual tensions, Churchill arranged to see Stalin alone. He again made the case for further action in the Mediterranean, but Stalin remained adamant about a May 1944 deadline for OVERLORD. He warned that if the operation were to be further delayed, it would encourage sentiments in Russia of ending the war. His countrymen “were war-weary” and expected the Allies to honor their commitments. At their afternoon meeting, Roosevelt promised to name a commander within the next three or four days, and they agreed to issue a communiqué announcing “complete agreement as to the scope and timing of the operations which will be undertaken from the east, west and south.” They also agreed to conceal the timing and point of attack of the French campaign with what Churchill called “a bodyguard of lies.” That evening, at a sixty-ninth-birthday dinner for the prime minister, the conviviality was palpable, with endless toasts from the three leaders. “I drink to the proletarian masses,” Churchill exclaimed. “I drink to the Conservative Party,” Stalin responded. When Churchill added, “England is getting pinker,” meaning more like red Russia, Stalin noted, “It is a sign of good health.”
During the last day of the conference, December 1, the discussions focused on postwar affairs. Roosevelt had already convinced Stalin to accept a postwar peacekeeping organization that was a worldwide body rather than a group of regional organizations directly concerned with local areas. U.S. opinion, the president said, would oppose regional arrangements as being too much like great power politics with spheres of control. They agreed to leave the details of how such a body be organized until later in the war. Roosevelt also urged consideration of a system of trusteeships to govern former colonies: One of the victors would take responsibility for a former colony for twenty or twenty-five years. It was Roosevelt’s way of putting an idealistic face on U.S. postwar diplomacy by turning Asian and African colonies into U.S. naval and air bases while those peoples moved toward self-government. He also agreed to Soviet control over the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, but on the condition that they enjoy a right to self-determination. He then joked with Stalin that he had no intention of going to war with the Soviet Union over the fate of these countries. Roosevelt was effectively informing Stalin that while American public opinion would object to arbitrary Russian control of other nations, he personally accepted spheres of control as a great-power reality that the United States would have to live with.
France and Poland were other subjects of potential discord that they hoped to avoid. Stalin declared “the entire French ruling class . . . rotten to the core and . . . now actively helping our enemies.” Roosevelt enthusiastically agreed to stripping the French of their empire and turning their former colonies, like Indochina and Senegal, into trusteeships. As for Poland, he resisted any public expression of whatever resolution they reached, explaining that he needed the Polish vote in the 1944 election, thus privately acknowledging his plans to run for a fourth term. He did, however, endorse proposals to cede Polish territory in the east to the Soviets in return for Polish acquisition of German territory in the west. They also agreed on the need for permanent restraints on Germany and Japan, including the dismemberment of the German state so that it could not pose a renewed threat to Russia.
Roosevelt left Tehran confident that he had improved relations with Stalin and increased the prospects for postwar stability, but in meetings in Cairo afterward with Churchill and British military leaders, he expressed doubts about Stalin’s keeping his promise to join the fighting against Japan once Germany surrendered. When Churchill argued that Soviet engagement in the Far East conflict would make an invasion of Burma superfluous, Roosevelt responded: “Suppose Marshal Stalin was unable to be as good as his word; we might find that we had forfeited Chinese support without obtaining commensurate help from the Russians.” He described keeping “the Russians cozy with us” as a “ticklish” business. After his return to the United States on December 16, he informed the cabinet that it was a “nip and tuck” issue whether the Russians would come into the war against Japan. He was likewise not certain that Stalin would take his side in support of a world peacekeeping body, as opposed to the regional organizations that Churchill favored. “I’ll have to work on both of them,” he told a Democratic senator.
Roosevelt’s concerns were, in fact, fully justified, for Stalin considered his allies as untrustworthy and all too ready to serve their own interests at Russia’s expense. In 1944, in a famous conversation with Milovan Djilas, the Yugoslav Communist leader, Stalin, his paranoia on full display, castigated Churchill and Roosevelt as treacherous. He did not misread them in assuming that their primary consideration was their own goals, but he could not imagine that anyone could be, like him, less than ruthless in pursuit of them. “Churchill is the kind of man who will pick your pocket for a kopeck if you don’t watch him,” he said. “Yes, pick your pocket for a kopeck! By God, pick your pocket of a kopeck. Roosevelt is not like that. He dips in his hand only for bigger coins. But Churchill? Churchill—will do it for a kopeck.”
At a press conference on December 17, Roosevelt lauded the Tehran talks as establishing a basis for international understanding that could spare future generations the horrors of another world war. When asked to describe his personal impressions of Stalin, he said that the meeting confirmed his highest expectations. The same was true of his assessment of Chiang Kai-shek, and their mutual rapport bode well for future relations, as did the congressional repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1884. When questioned whether he found Stalin to be “dour,” Roosevelt replied that he thought Stalin was like him—“a realist.” Anyone who knew anything about Stalin’s and Chiang’s merciless suppression of domestic opponents and their indifference to democracy was aware that Roosevelt’s characterization of the two leaders overstated their virtues. Roosevelt’s description of himself as a realist reflected his conviction that he had no power to reform the regimes in Russia and China, both of which were nonetheless essential to winning the war with the least possible loss of men and material well-being. In addition, he believed that any truthful account of these Allies would not only undermine cooperation in conducting the war but also weaken public resolve in the United States to participate actively in postwar international affairs.
On Christmas Eve, Roosevelt spoke to Americans about his meetings in the Middle East, and his image making was on full display. “At Cairo and Tehran,” he reported, “we devoted ourselves not only to military matters, we devoted ourselves also to consideration of the future—to plans for the kind of world which alone can justify all the sacrifices of this war.” He described his meetings with the “unconquerable” Stalin and Chiang as deepening his regard for them and convincing him that they shared the same objectives in the war and for the postwar world. Singling out Chiang as “a man of great vision and great courage,” he stated that he had every confidence that together they would not only defeat Japan but also put in place a peacekeeping system that would ensure tranquility for “many generations to come.” Likewise, he and Stalin reached agreement on future policies to defeat Germany and establish a “durable peace.” He saw no “insoluble differences” with Russia. “I got along fine with Marshal Stalin,” he asserted. “. . . He is truly representative of the heart and soul of Russia; and I believe that we are going to get along very well with him and the Russian people—very well indeed.” He ended with the announcement that General Dwight Eisenhower would head a future combined attack in Europe and warned Americans against assuming a quick end to the fighting that would allow them to revert to isolationism.
On December 28, when he held a follow-up press conference, a reporter asked what he meant when he told another journalist that he no longer liked the term “New Deal.” Did his focus on postwar world politics signal an end to domestic reform? Roosevelt explained that the collapse of the economy in 1932 required “Dr. New Deal,” an internist, to attend to the nation’s ills. After Pearl Harbor, the new affliction facing the country required a different specialist, “Dr. Win the War. This certainly did not mean that the remedies of Dr. New Deal should now be cast aside. “It seems pretty clear,” he said, “that we must plan for . . . an expanded economy, which will result in more security, more employment, more recreation, in education, in more health, in better housing for all our citizens, so that the conditions of 1932 and the beginning of 1933 won’t come back again.” But all this would take place only after Dr. Win the War had used his skills to lead the country successfully through the fighting. So did this pronouncement “add up to a fourth-term declaration?” a reporter asked. “Oh, we are not talking about things like that now,” Roosevelt evasively replied. But it was clear that he was not ruling out the possibility.
As he welcomed in the New Year at the White House with Eleanor, their daughter Anna, several grandchildren, and Daisy, he struggled with yet another cold or flu. Did he have the physical stamina to seek another term? As long as the war continued, he could not imagine retiring to Hyde Park. It would be too much like a ship’s captain abandoning his crew to make their way through a perilous storm. Besides, as he told Daisy, when it came to the question of a fourth term, Churchill had said, “I simply can’t go on without you.” And then there was so much unfinished other business: When he returned from Tehran, he told Felix Frankfurter, “I realized on the trip what a dreadful lack of civilization is shown in the countries I visited—but on returning” his encountering striking coal miners and railroad workers and complaints about secret postwar agreements with Churchill and Stalin made him “not wholly certain of the degree of civilization in terra Americana.” The key issue, he told Edward Stettinius, Jr., his new undersecretary of state, was not whether the United States could make the world safe for democracy, as Woodrow Wilson hoped, but whether democracy could make the world safe from another war.