1941–42
Sallow-faced and graying, Harry Hopkins was an incorrigible workaholic even though cancer had left him with only half a stomach and thus permanently malnourished. Kept alive by virtue of a large “personal pharmacy” of pills, he looked as worn out and frayed as his sagging suits. Divorced from his first wife, left bereft by the death of his second and now at the mercy of the damp chill of an English winter, he was in evident need of a comforting female presence. The decidedly unmaternal Clementine instantly took him under her wing.
She had been puzzled by the news that President Roosevelt was sending as his envoy a diplomatic unknown. The son of a harness maker and a prime architect of the New Deal, Hopkins bridled at the very thought of the aristocratic monarchist who had concentrated so much power in his own hands. He made clear from the start that he planned to resist the prime minister’s legendary persuasive powers. “I suppose Churchill is convinced he’s the greatest man in the world,”1 he grumbled to a friend before leaving Washington. Instinctively an isolationist, he seriously doubted whether Britain was even worth saving.
Brendan Bracken, who had met him on the croquet power circuit on Long Island, now informed the Churchills that Hopkins’s fact-finding visit was of incalculable importance. Hopkins might have been anti-British, but he was closer to Roosevelt than anyone in the president’s inner circle and was regarded on Capitol Hill as the second-most powerful man in Washington. He lived just down the landing from the president’s bedroom in the White House and so endured with Franklin the notoriously unappetizing food served by Eleanor Roosevelt’s kitchen.
Hopkins’s skepticism was in any case far from uncommon in the US. American opinion—shared by most of Congress and the military—was still largely against involvement in the war. Many feared that supplying armaments to Britain would either leave America undefended or ensure that the weaponry would fall into Nazi hands once Britain was defeated. Others believed, wrongly, that the riches of the British Empire were virtually limitless, and they saw no reason to help what they still imagined to be an imperialist nation of murderous redcoats. It was clear that the US would only wade in if Roosevelt were personally persuaded to intervene. What Hopkins (and later other key Americans) would report back to the president was, therefore, vital to Britain’s survival.
Fortunately, Bracken had observed that Hopkins combined a Democrat’s concern for the many with a taste for hobnobbing with the rich and powerful few. He reveled in the attentions of beautiful highborn women and appreciated fine dining in fancy surroundings. Bombed, blasted but so far unbeaten, the Churchills thus set out to win him over with their particular brand of upper-class elegance, charm and “ambrosial” food. Britain was virtually bankrupt, but no expense was to be spared in making their American guest welcome; everything was to be choreographed for maximum effect. The “half-blind,” as Winston later referred to the Americans at this time, were to be made to see. It was Britain’s only hope.
Rather than the usual Foreign Office flunky, Bracken himself (at that time the prime minister’s parliamentary private secretary) went to meet Hopkins when his flying boat landed at Poole one cold Thursday afternoon in early January 1941. He found the American so exhausted by his lengthy transatlantic journey (a four-lap trip involving up to thirty hours in the air) that he was too weak to unfasten his seat belt. After allowing Hopkins a brief rest, Bracken escorted him to London via a specially scheduled train, which, under Winston’s direct orders, was made up of the most luxurious Pullman carriages staffed by conductors in white gloves.
Back at Downing Street, Clementine was already hard at work with Mrs. Landemare planning for a private lunch with Winston the following day. She ensured that the wartime dining room in the basement—one of the few parts of the building still regularly used—looked as appealing as possible, despite the presence of steel shutters at the windows and metal pit props to strengthen the ceiling. The overall effect, enhanced by flowers, chintz curtains and paintings by the French masters Ingres and David, was of a ship’s wardroom.
She cannily resorted to another well-tested means of lifting male spirits. Knowing the power Pamela wielded over older men, Clementine prominently placed a particularly flattering photograph of her daughter-in-law with her baby on a fine old antique table. It was one of the first things Hopkins noticed when Bracken escorted him into the room at midday and fixed him a sherry. In a promising start, Hopkins complimented Winston on his daughter-in-law’s “delicious” beauty, but it soon became clear he would not be so easy a catch. Deprived of sleep thanks to the Luftwaffe bombing overnight, he challenged his host by suggesting that Winston did “not like America, Americans or Roosevelt.” Winston responded with the utmost charm, describing in florid terms his admiration for the president and the nation of which he was leader, and informing his guest that he himself was half American. But even his genial best was not quite enough to win Hopkins around, and they settled down to lunch still at odds.
Hopkins’s ill health often made eating a struggle but he relished the menu of tasty clear soup, followed by the tenderest cold beef with green salad, all washed down with one of the finest wines in the government’s depleted stocks. Winston insisted he have seconds, including more of what Hopkins called “jelly” with his beef, and the American was only too happy to oblige. The two men discovered they liked each other’s wit, pugnacity and irreverence. This was dinner-table diplomacy at its best. By the time a smiling Mrs. Landemare came in with the cheese and the port, followed by coffee, Hopkins was succumbing to Winston’s charisma—and Clementine’s cuisine. When he eventually emerged onto London’s bomb-scarred streets at four o’clock, feeling unusually invigorated, he declared, “I never had such an enjoyable time.”2
The following day (a Saturday) he was invited for further “enjoyable times” in the historic splendors of Ditchley. There he met Winston and his other guests before and after dinner in the fifty-foot-long library, with its two marble fireplaces, red leather sofas and towering bookcases, and ate in the opulent dining room beneath a huge chandelier and twinkling sconces. He was being treated to the ultimate English country-house weekend—a dramatic contrast to the Roosevelt White House, which was notoriously cluttered and even a little grubby and where the servants ate better than the guests. Here in war-torn England, Clementine ensured Hopkins was waited on hand and foot and that his every need was catered for.
Hopkins pretended his ill health was due to a bug caught on the trip over, but she was not fooled and observed him so attentively that she came to know when he was cold or in pain just “by looking at him.” She made sure the fires were banked up and around eleven she urged him to go to bed, saying, “You have a long day tomorrow and you can have a nice talk with Winston in the morning. I’ve fixed your bed and put a hot water bottle in it.” Normally known for “a tongue like a skinning knife and a temper like a Tartar,”3 Hopkins felt so at ease he even played with Nelson, the scratchy Churchill cat.
The trip was in all respects confounding his expectations. It was, of course, not all pleasure, but it was always purposeful. Both Churchills took their guest on tours of bombing sites during the week, and along with millions of Britons he endured the German air raids by night. Then, on the weekends, he was treated to aristocratic finery. It was a potent mix for a poor boy from Iowa.
Clementine planned virtually every moment of his day with the aim of furthering the British cause, and made a “great fuss” if the staff allowed Hopkins to stray from her carefully chosen itinerary. The message was at all times to be clear and consistent—even if not entirely truthful. The Churchills secretly knew from recent decryption successes at Bletchley Park that the imminent danger of invasion had receded. But Hopkins was to be given the unequivocal impression that it could happen at any time. Although they became genuinely fond of their American guest, with his sardonic humor and personal courage, the national imperative of emphasizing to Roosevelt the scale and immediacy of the Nazi threat trumped everything else.
As the Churchills had hoped, the hard-bitten Hopkins was astonished by the good-humored determination of a people who lived with the constant reality of death and destruction. He was also moved by the enthusiastic welcome he had received as the representative of a nation that had, in truth, been miserly in its support for the last democracy in Europe to hold out against fascism. He reported back to Roosevelt: “The people here are amazing from Churchill down and if courage alone can win—the result will be inevitable.”4 Moreover, he was quickly convinced of Winston’s greatness as a leader, exclaiming after one late evening spent with the prime minister: “Jesus Christ! What a man.” But for all this, Hopkins had no doubt that “the most charming and entertaining of all the people that he met” on his extended six-week trip “was Mrs Churchill.”5
“I suppose you wish to know what I am going to say to President Roosevelt on my return,” Hopkins remarked to Winston and Clementine at an intimate dinner at the end of January, not long before he left for home on February 10. They sat in agonized suspense, while a blizzard roared outside, until finally he resumed. “Well, I’m going to quote you one verse from that Book of Books. ‘Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.’” He added very quietly: “Even to the end.” Tears poured down Winston’s face; Clementine too was quietly sobbing. “The words,” recalled Winston’s doctor Lord Moran, who was present at Clementine’s insistence, “seemed like a rope to a drowning man.” Their mission had surely succeeded.
Hopkins arrived back in the US “more of a partisan than perhaps might have been expected by anyone who had not been exposed to the Churchillian force.”6 Some even thought he had been bewitched. He told Roosevelt that America must do all it could to help Britain with guns, ships and planes, and as Britain no longer had the funds to buy the “cash and carry” armaments it desperately needed, the president’s ideas on financial aid would have to be introduced with great urgency. Hopkins, already Roosevelt’s fixer in chief, now became Churchill’s de facto representative in Washington as well. He even persuaded the once skeptical Roosevelt to describe Winston as a “brilliant and great leader” in his speech on March 15 at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
Hopkins would return to England just a few months later, but in the meantime he did not forget his hostess. He sent Clementine parcels of cheese, lipstick, ham, chocolate, bacon, a satin nightdress and nail polish, knowing how rare all of these were in Britain. “Oh boy,” she wrote in her thank-you letter, using a signature Americanism in tribute. “You are a good fairy.” She and Mary, she said, had wept with joy when they opened the parcel and she asked him when he would be coming back, reminding him to bring plenty of warm clothes when he did so.7 Clementine now entered into regular and very friendly correspondence with Hopkins, telling him just a month later, for instance, that she was “missing” him.
Enlisting Hopkins’s support—even devotion—in Washington was a decisive coup, but he was not the first influential American to be won over by the Churchills’ joint efforts. On his first night in London Hopkins had dined with Ed Murrow, the resident CBS correspondent, who was then beaming the horror of the Blitz directly into American homes every night under the radio call sign “This is London.” Winston had long since identified the debonair Murrow as the conduit to the hearts and minds of US popular opinion, and through Clementine’s initiative, he had set about drawing the Americans into the fold. As a result, Murrow was not only well informed—as Hopkins discovered—but also a fervent advocate of Britain’s cause.
Although usually reticent in forming new friendships, Clementine had spotted in Murrow’s wife, Janet, the opportunity to cultivate the journalist. A quiet Connecticut Yankee with a dislike of the English class system, Janet was a great influence on her husband but was largely ignored by the men who dominated the powerful circles in which he moved. She was known to feel lonely in London, and Clementine had gone to work alongside her distributing American “Bundles for Britain” aid parcels to bombed-out families, during which time she had openly sympathized with many of Janet’s radical views. Janet had been surprised and flattered by the attention, writing to her parents in December 1940 that Clementine was “charming, vivacious and attractive.”8
Clementine rarely issued invitations to Downing Street on her own account, but she made a notable exception for Janet Murrow. And when Ed arrived to collect his wife following one of her earliest lunches with Clementine, Winston seized his moment. Scuttling out from his study right on cue, he waved the American inside with the words “Good to see you. Have you time for several whiskies?”9 It was an invitation he could hardly refuse. Thereafter the Murrows had joined the select and trusted small band regularly summoned for Downing Street dinners—an intimate circle that excluded many people the Churchills had known for years, and most of the cabinet.
British journalists could only look on with envy at the access granted to the couple, knowing full well that the Americans were “treated as tin gods because they were so useful.”10 Although he greatly admired Roosevelt, Murrow’s new understanding of Britain’s position had made him, by the time Hopkins arrived, increasingly impatient with America’s vacillation in coming to her aid. As Winston admitted, Britain was struggling with an acute shortage of virtually every kind of military hardware, and was “naked before its foes”; only US firepower could save her. “I hope that life goes well for you in America,” Murrow wrote in a private letter home at one point, “and that your nostrils are not assailed by the odor of death . . . that permeates the atmosphere over here.”11 His message on air was more tactful but was nevertheless pointed as he hammered in Britain’s refusal to surrender. “I saw many flags flying from staffs,” he reported after one night of heavy bombing. “No flag up there was white.”
Murrow was fortunately close friends with the new American ambassador, Gil Winant, an ex–Republican governor of New Hampshire born to a prosperous New York City family who had worked for FDR on the US Social Security Board in the midthirties before going on to head the International Labour Office in Geneva in 1939. An Abraham Lincoln look-alike with the “rapt gaze of a monk,”12 Winant had a sense of urgency (no doubt fostered by Murrow even before his arrival in London) and a passionate belief in freedom that were a welcome reversal of the hostile defeatism of his predecessor, Joseph Kennedy. Winant arrived at Bristol on a blustery afternoon in March 1941 to discover a Britain enduring massive casualties from relentless air raids, devastating losses in the fighting overseas and the imminent threat of starvation as Germany’s U-boats strangled its naval supply lines. After nine months standing alone, it was evident that the United Kingdom was physically, emotionally and financially bankrupt. “We were hanging on by our eyelids,” recalled Alan Brooke, who was shortly to head the British Army.13 Winant himself would write later, “[Y]ou could not live in London in those early years and not realise how narrow was the margin of survival.”14
The possibility of defeat was, of course, not to be admitted, but even Clementine allowed herself at one point to wonder aloud to Winston’s private secretary, “Jock, do you think we are going to win?” Colville had been well trained and replied “truthfully and unhesitatingly ‘Yes.’”15 All depended, however, on persuading America to intervene.
As they had for Hopkins, the Churchills ensured that Winant’s welcome was spectacular. In an unprecedented honor, George VI himself was waiting outside Winant’s carriage door when his train stopped at Windsor, and the king even invited the ambassador to stay the night at the castle. The royal offer was refused. Having already witnessed so much suffering, Winant was impatient to get on to London to start work. He told a BBC reporter: “There is no place I’d rather be at this time than in England.” Two days later he was treated to an intimate dinner with Winston, and thus was made another recruit to the greater Churchill “family.”
Winant soon became a familiar and reassuring figure on the Churchills’ visits to bomb-damaged cities. He was struck not only by people’s courage but by Clementine’s unsung contribution. “The most marked determination and enthusiasm were among middle-aged women,” he noted to Roosevelt, observing that such women all showed “great appreciation of Mrs Churchill’s coming.”16 Like Hopkins, Winant was a solitary figure, partly estranged from his society wife, Constance, who stayed behind in America. His growing closeness to the Churchills—nurtured by a now-familiar round of dinners, weekends and bomb-site tours—gave him a welcome sense of belonging in a foreign land. He became a fixture of their world, joyfully discovering that even in war it was never dull or drab, but, as one American historian has put it, forever “shot through with color.”17
Clementine especially loved it when Winant came to visit. Although admired and respected by Winston, he was too much of an idealist for the prime minister’s buccaneering taste. By contrast, he and Clementine were kindred spirits. Both were shy and reserved; each was quietly radical, believing in a duty to help the less fortunate. According to Mary, Winant “understood intuitively” her mother’s complex nature and her demanding life, and as a result, she confided in him—something she rarely did with anyone else.18 Clementine also comforted Winant when his pilot son John went missing for five weeks in October 1943.
Going on walks together alone at Chequers or Ditchley, they became instinctive allies. She esteemed his selflessness; he recognized her quiet achievements. He wrote on one occasion to ask her to congratulate Winston on “one of the greatest [speeches] of its kind ever made.” He knew that she had played a part in its success: “I especially liked the references to de Gaulle and France and felt that, perhaps you had had something to do with it.”19 Winant held Clementine’s courage, resourcefulness, determination and devotion to the British people in the highest regard. Indeed, he could not have admired her more. But it was another Churchill who was to capture his heart.
Glamorous, entertaining and alluring in her WAAF uniform, Sarah was enjoying her contribution to the war effort now that her relationship with Vic Oliver was effectively over. Although strong-willed like her father, at twenty-seven she was feeling emotionally vulnerable and worried about losing her looks. Some elusive quality about her mesmerized the fifty-two-year-old Winant, who relished her rebellious side. His intimate status with her parents—allied to the fact that her London flat in Park Lane was just a five-minute walk from the American embassy in Grosvenor Square—meant that he was frequently thrown into her company, and toward the end of the year they began an affair. As both were still married they kept up appearances, but the relationship was an open secret in Churchill circles.
Years later Sarah, never one to reveal much of herself, would write coyly about a “love affair which my father suspected but about which we did not speak.”20 In truth, this belies her parents’ acquiescence: the fraught situation of 1941 meant that almost any consolidation of Britain’s “special relationship” with America could be considered an act of patriotism. Though the Churchills may not have talked about it openly, they not only tolerated the affair but gave it plenty of opportunities to flourish. Sarah was, after all, not alone in conducting a “patriotic” relationship. Emotions were heightened by the dangers of war and, as one writer put it, “sex” in those early war years “hung in the air like fog.”
Averell Harriman, a rich American lothario with film-star looks, was about to make London even “foggier.” He arrived in March, around the same time as Winant, to help set up Roosevelt’s new Lend-Lease military aid program. The US would “rent” Britain vital equipment in return for assets rather than hard cash. Although the move stopped short of a declaration of war on Germany, Lend-Lease represented the de facto end to American neutrality and went some way to solving Britain’s chronic shortage of currency.
FDR had first conceived of the plan after a desperate plea for help from Churchill back in December 1940, but he always knew it would take a big political push to get it through a skeptical Congress. Hopkins, whose trip to Britain had converted him to the British cause, had worked tirelessly to persuade FDR to proceed with the plan and helped him win the debate in Washington and drive the bill through. Once Lend-Lease was eventually passed by Congress in March 1941, Hopkins became the devoted chief administrator of what was to amount to a $50 billion program. Now Harriman was tasked with actually delivering the essential planes, ships, weapons and equipment that Britain needed to defend herself.
The son of a ruthless railroad tycoon—the man who set private detectives on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—Harriman was widely considered a power groupie, intent on broadening his own influence at least as much as that of his country. His reputation had suffered when he had chosen not to fight in the First World War only to profit from it through his shipping interests. As a result he was desperate to play a role in this conflict. Many in Washington thought—or rather hoped—that such a hard-nosed businessman would be tougher with the Churchills than Hopkins had been.
Winston and Clementine opted for a swashbuckling reception for his arrival. Harriman was deliberately kept in the dark about where he was going to land until he disembarked at Bristol on the afternoon of March 15. Thereafter Roosevelt’s special representative was treated to a meticulously planned “special welcome.”21 “Whoever the President had sent,” recalled Mary, however difficult or abrasive his personality, “everybody here was going to bust themselves to get on” with him. “It was immensely important to us how it all went.”22 In a carefully stage-managed maneuver, Winston’s naval aide, Commander Thompson, bundled a startled Harriman swiftly past a guard of honor onto a waiting biplane to take him straight to Chequers for dinner. “Dear Mrs Churchill,” Harriman wrote ten days later from his suite at the Dorchester hotel. “To be kidnapped on arrival at Bristol, whisked off by plane to Chequers and there find such a warm and friendly welcome from you and Mr Churchill was indeed both a dramatic and delightful beginning of my mission.”23
The Hollywood-style spectacle had appealed to the adventure-seeking Harriman. So too did his arrival at Chequers, redolent as it was of wood smoke, antiquarian books and the thrill of centuries of history. “I was very excited, feeling like a country boy plopped right into the center of the war,” Harriman admitted.24 He was particularly charmed by what he called Clementine’s “unfeigned delight” when he gave her a bag of tangerines he had bought in Lisbon.25
Since it was within Harriman’s remit to supply the military hardware Britain so desperately needed, Winston focused his attention on him, leaving Clementine to take care of Winant. Within days of his arrival, Harriman was ostentatiously flattered with an office at the Admiralty, access to secret cables and invitations to high-level meetings. “I’m practically a member of the Cabinet,” he crowed to a friend back home, W. M. Jeffers, president of the Union Pacific Railroad.26 Winston told him: “We accept you as a friend. Nothing will be kept from you.” He meant, as it turned out, literally nothing.
Harriman’s wealth, looks and, most of all, power made him London’s latest social catch; he was showered with invitations, often for several engagements a night. One he was advised not to miss was a glamorous dinner at the Dorchester in April, where, seated next to him in a shoulderless gold dress, was twenty-one-year-old Pamela Churchill. Her puppy fat had gone but her curves had not. Her jaw was sculpted and she glowed with the indefinable Churchill allure. Hopkins had already informed Harriman that she was more plugged-in “than anyone in England.”27
For Pamela, Harriman was the most beautiful man she had ever seen: tanned, dark-haired, six foot one and, unlike the overweight and spotty Randolph, delightfully receptive to her feminine charms. She had been briefed that, as Roosevelt’s special emissary, Harriman would be instrumental in deciding whether Britain won the war. So over a lavish dinner of salmon and strawberries—the Dorchester was largely unaffected by rationing—she launched into what friends came to call her “mating dance.” She asked him questions, listened raptly to his answers, stroked his arm with her fingertips, and laughed when he attempted a joke.
After dinner, Harriman invited Pamela back to his palatial suite at the Dorchester, where she helped him peel off her dress. They lingered under the sheets throughout the night’s heavy bombing, as his ground-floor rooms were deemed capable—thanks to the hotel’s modern steel frame and thick concrete floors—of withstanding anything except a direct hit. Randolph was conveniently away overseas with his regiment, and although she continued to spend weekends with the Churchills, Pamela was now spending weekday nights alone in one of the cheap “bilious-coloured” rooms on the exposed top floor of the Dorchester, where the wind whistled in the fireplaces during raids. Her neighbor, Winston’s niece Clarissa, remembers being surprised that night not to find Pamela traipsing down to the basement shelters when the bombing started. The building shook and the guns roared, but Pamela was ensconced in bed with the man who might just be able to help bring it all to an end. She no longer felt morally tied to Randolph and was looking for a purpose as well as excitement. It was the first act of her career as the twentieth century’s most influential courtesan.
Harriman was entranced. Not only was he entwined with one of the most desirable women in town but as the nerve center of Nazi resistance, London itself was intoxicating. “Blacked out, bombed out, expensive and hard to get around in, it was still magnificent—the Paris of World War II,” observed one contemporary.28 Wealthy, well-connected American civilians, from New York bankers to Hollywood directors, vied to be assigned to the British capital on temporary government duty. Life on the edge was exciting: normal inhibitions were suspended; no one wanted to be alone. Thousands of bombs rained down on London, and thousands sought comfort in one another’s arms. But Pamela’s seduction of Harriman went beyond consolation; it was a strategic alliance of the highest order. She knew all too well how important the affair could prove to her parents-in-law and to her country.
Word of the relationship spread quickly. Beaverbrook was particularly delighted when he found out. After all, Harriman had only just landed at Bristol and “already he was compromised.”29 Beaverbrook went out of his way to encourage the affair by keeping Pamela’s baby, his six-month-old godchild, at his country house in Surrey and by giving her money to spruce up her wardrobe. To do her “job” she needed to be unencumbered and gorgeous. Thus liberated, Pamela quickly set to work, passing on to Beaverbrook, or directly to her father-in-law, anything she gleaned from Harriman about what the Americans were thinking. She also became adept at sifting information in the other direction, to boost Britain’s case for more aid. In this way she fast became one of the most important intelligence brokers in the war.
Winston and Clementine could hardly have hoped for more from their campaign to bring Roosevelt’s special representative, the very man charged with keeping Britain free, into the “family.” America would remain officially uncommitted to the conflict until after Japan’s attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor eight months later—but now that the man in charge of supplying ships, guns and planes to Britain was sleeping with their daughter-in-law, the Churchills were surely nearer than ever to “dragging” in more American support. Harriman became adroit at translating their most urgent needs into action, persuading Roosevelt, for example, to authorize US ports to repair British warships.
Yet still the questions kept coming back from Washington: Could Britain really hold out? Was America wasting its money on a hopeless cause? Winston’s assurances to Roosevelt went only so far, but now Harriman was arguing emphatically that American aid was being put to good use. He became so committed to the struggle that when he returned home he found even close friends regarded him as “unduly pro-British.”30
No matter that Pamela was still married to Randolph; the national interest took precedence. Far from trying to stop the affair, it appears that Clementine facilitated it, ensuring that Pamela and Harriman were thrust together as often as possible and inviting both to Chequers or Ditchley on weekends. (One small concession to propriety was that Pamela often omitted to sign the Chequers visitors’ book if Harriman was present, although most if not all of those invited to these weekends seem to have known about the affair and appreciated its strategic value.) Questions are sometimes posed as to the extent of Clementine’s knowledge of the relationship. But few if any in London society were unaware of it (indeed there was some muttering in less well-briefed circles about Pamela’s lack of discretion). Even Roosevelt had been informed and would joke about the affair with Hopkins. So while Pamela did not openly discuss the subject with her mother-in-law, she was always convinced that both Churchills “knew perfectly well.” “It was fine and nobody really blamed me,” Pamela recalled, “because they understood . . . how difficult Randolph was.”31
Both Churchills made a point of referring to Pamela’s lover as “our dear Averell” but in truth Clementine was never fond of him. He lacked humor, particularly about himself, and treated his staff badly. He also flaunted his wealth and connections, oiling his way from one grand cocktail party to another, and, far from sharing Britain’s suffering, maintained a supply of luxuries throughout his stay in London. She thought him yet another coldly ambitious businessman. But whereas in peacetime she had had no qualms about letting self-important people know her opinion of them, now she had to bite her tongue. Harriman was too vital to the war; his ego had to be flattered.
It was for this reason perhaps that Clementine, who generally balked at asking strangers for personal favors, made an exception in May 1941. Eighteen-year-old Mary had recently announced her engagement to the son and heir of her mother’s onetime suitor, the Earl of Bessborough, despite having only just met him. Clementine told Harriman that she was convinced Mary was not in love and had simply been swept off her feet with excitement. Mary had refused her mother’s pleas to reconsider and ignored her sister Sarah’s “frank ridicule.”32 Harriman had daughters, Clementine reminded him, and so must surely understand what young women were like. With Winston so busy running the war, could he perhaps speak to Mary instead?
Harriman was evidently unqualified for the task. He barely knew Mary (and her suitor not at all) and his two daughters had been raised by their mother, who had divorced him while they were young. Most of his recent experiences with young women had been as bedfellows. Nevertheless, he succumbed to Clementine’s flattery and agreed. The fact that Clementine had singled him out to play father confessor to Mary was “a source of tremendous gratification . . . He was now at the centre of the action, just as he had always longed to be.”33 Wrapped up against the damp spring weather he took Mary for a walk around the French garden at Ditchley, where he held forth on the need to avoid making hasty decisions. Mary—probably unwittingly—played her part for the war effort. She dutifully wrote to thank Harriman for his worldly “kindness” and credited him for helping her see sense.
Clementine seemed unconcerned that Harriman was cuckolding her son. Pamela had in any case already decided that she would have to make her own way in life. Traveling by sea to a staff job at the British North African command base in Cairo earlier in the year, Randolph had taken to high-stakes gambling with a louche, moneyed crowd that included Evelyn Waugh. Thanks to his previous extravagances, money was already extremely tight, but now Randolph cabled Pamela for hundreds of pounds she simply did not have to cover his losses. She begged Beaverbrook for help and (hoping Clementine would not find out) sold the diamond earrings she had been given as wedding gifts, but the debts would even so take years to pay off.
She now carried the Churchill name and had done her bit by providing an heir and no longer had need of the drunken, abusive Randolph and his so-called bachelor rampages. As Clementine had feared, Pamela found him “impossible to be married to” and “his own worst enemy.”34
When Randolph came home on leave in the spring of 1942 and discovered the affair, he exploded with rage. His anger stemmed not from sexual jealousy, friends said, but a sense of betrayal. He had befriended Harriman on his recent visit to Cairo, made at Winston’s request, and had liked and respected him. Even worse was his bitterness toward his parents, whom he accused of condoning adultery “beneath their own roof” and sacrificing his marriage and happiness in order to woo the Americans. “He used terrible language and created a rift that never healed,” recalled Alastair Forbes, a friend of Randolph’s and Mary’s.35
To lower the temperature, Pamela agreed “not to see too much of his parents,” as Randolph rightly suspected they preferred her company to his own. When he left London at the end of his leave, Pamela was more discreet. But otherwise her relationships with both Harriman and the Churchills resumed largely unchanged.
• • •
Clementine was now expert at preparing official receptions with the military precision necessary to make every one as productive—and as agreeable—as possible. It was a gigantic operation. A typical weekend at Chequers, for instance, would be arranged on a grid system and could easily involve twenty constantly changing guests coming and going, staying variously for lunch, dinner, overnight or all three. Considering the circumstances, her hospitality was legendary. Winston expected no less. The American Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau (another key target of the Churchillian charm) remembered Winston being in “good form” every time they met during the war—except once: “The night his wife gave him a supper he did not like and so he did not talk all through supper. She said, ‘I am sorry, dear, I could not buy any fish. You’ll have to eat macaroni.’”36
Clementine was not only intent on keeping Winston happily fed within the severe limits of wartime supplies. She also studied their countless visitors’ backgrounds, families, interests and tastes in food, and took great care over her seating plans to ensure everyone’s compatibility and comfort. Her ministrations were flattering and highly effective. Meals at Downing Street, Chequers and Ditchley were a much-needed, spirit-lifting spectacle, as well as a stage on which Winston could work his magic on his carefully selected guests. He managed to “have his way” over various aspects of the North African campaign in part through his weekly “luncheon conversations in London with General Eisenhower,” the American commander of Operation Torch.37 Having discovered Eisenhower’s love of stew, Clementine ensured he was served the finest—with plenty of onions.
The Churchills also made an impression through their eccentric attire. Winston liked to wear a siren suit at dinner—a bizarre onesie-style garment that Clementine had made up for him in a variety of colors and fabrics, including velvet. She, by contrast, presided over more intimate dinners in beautiful flowery silk housecoats with her nightdress underneath.
Despite her hard work few visitors paused to register, let alone admire, her efforts. One rare exception was the Canadian prime minister Mackenzie King, who told Clementine that he “marvelled” at how “you are able to think of the many things you do, to say nothing of how you manage to perform them.”38 Very few, apart from Hopkins and Winant, would take the trouble to get to know Clementine herself, in part because Winston disliked sharing her. On one trip to Plymouth, which had been badly bombed, Harriman witnessed a “contest of wills” between the prime minister and the local MP Nancy Astor, who was trying to “carry off Mrs Churchill to a women’s political meeting.” “In war it is the Prime Minister who must make the vital decisions,” Winston declared of his most precious asset. “Clemmie comes with me.”39
Harriman’s daughter Kathleen, who joined her father in London and was also taken under Clementine’s wing, noticed how gracious she was in “taking a back seat” to her husband. “But don’t get the idea she’s mousy, not at all. She’s got a mind of her own, only she’s a big enough person not to use it unless he wants her to,” she wrote to her sister, Mary, after spending a weekend at Chequers in the summer of 1941. She went on to observe that “everyone in the family looks upon him as God and she’s rather left out, and when anyone pays any attention to her she’s overjoyed.”40 The entire family held the great man in a reverence not far short of worship, hanging on his every word and never missing his speeches. On the occasion of one of his “bolstering” broadcasts to France, they all assembled around the radio, and the knobs were prepared for the right frequency. But then an aunt pressed the wrong one, “the feathers flew” and in desperation Clementine grabbed the radio so hard she broke it. “After an hysterically chaotic scene, everyone rushed upstairs to listen to the remainder of the speech on a servant’s set.”41
The Churchills’ outward charm and energy belied the strain of two long years of war. Their frantic dinner-table diplomacy had yet to yield the ultimate prize: despite the collective pressure from the successfully annexed Harriman, Winant and Hopkins, Roosevelt was still refusing to send American troops into combat. Again and again, the president had pulled himself up to the edge of confrontation, only to retreat at the last minute. Even a number of skirmishes between German and American warships in the Atlantic—such as the torpedoing of the destroyer USS Kearny in October 1941 and the sinking of another destroyer, the USS Reuben James, two weeks later—failed to provoke a declaration of war. What would it take, Winston and Clementine wondered, to propel Roosevelt to lead his country into battle at their side? There was no question that saving Britain was a moral imperative, but while America stepped up its aid under Harriman, it would not fight. One critical historian has concluded: “If Munich had been Great Britain’s least glorious hour, mid-1941 was surely America’s.”42
A strategic error by Hitler was, however, about to present Britain with another, rather different ally, one that also proved decisive to its survival. In June 1941, Hitler had launched a bloody invasion of the Soviet Union, catching Stalin by surprise despite repeated warnings from the British, who had been alerted to the imminent Operation Barbarossa through Bletchley Park decrypts, and marking the beginning of four years of war on the Eastern Front. Until the Panzers swept across the Soviet border, Stalin had been providing Hitler with huge material assistance under the terms of the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939. Yet those same Russians, who had previously stood by during Britain’s darkest hours and even negotiated with Hitler for a share of the spoils of British defeat, now demanded urgent aid and assistance. The Soviet ambassador, Ivan Maisky, dashed down to Chequers to deliver a note to Churchill from Stalin requesting the immediate deployment of British troops in northern France to take the pressure off the Russian front, where casualties were horrendous. Although he certainly welcomed the Soviet Union into the war against Hitler (which military chiefs thought likely further to delay a German invasion of home shores), Winston believed the plan to be unworkable; Britain had been fighting alone for so long it could spare neither men nor matériel. When Maisky protested at his refusal, Churchill quickly moved away, so the Russian was left alone by the fireplace with Hopkins. When the two began discussing the Soviet idea of a new front in Winston’s absence, the ever-vigilant Clementine sensed the potential danger to the British position. She quickly approached the pair with a broad smile and the offer of tea. Maisky realized that with Clementine on the prowl the occasion was “unsuitable” for lobbying the Americans and left; no damage was done.43
• • •
Exhausted by her relentless workload and family worries, and plagued by bouts of bronchitis, Clementine had not taken a break, apart from the occasional weekend, since the summer of 1939. Nor was she alone in this. The Prof was showing “signs of breaking up under the strain,” Beaverbrook’s asthma was becoming more severe, Commander Thompson had lost over thirty pounds, and more than a smattering of military commanders and civil servants kept themselves going with an arsenal of pills and booze, while others had found themselves simply incapable of carrying on. Even the notoriously tough Alan Brooke later admitted that as the war dragged on he came perilously close to a nervous breakdown. So when Winston finally received an invitation from FDR to discuss the war at a secret summit in Placentia Bay, in Newfoundland, in August 1941, Clementine was jubilant and threw herself into the preparations. By contrast, Roosevelt kept his wife, Eleanor, in the dark, telling her, along with the rest of the nation, that he was going fishing.
With Winston out of the country from August 4, Clementine seized her chance for a respite. She checked into a “Nature Cure” clinic known colloquially among England’s upper classes as the “mad-house.” Today, Champneys in Tring, Hertfordshire, is more of a beauty clinic and spa offering some conventional medical services, but in the 1940s, Dr. Lief’s establishment had a reputation for strange “electrical” appliances and putting its patients into padded cells where they were “starved and hosed and worse.”44 Fortunately, Clementine’s treatment appears to have been of a milder sort: “The ‘mad-house’ is comfortable and well run,” she related on her fourth day. “I have massage, osteopathy, hot and cold showers etc etc, but nothing to eat so far but tomatoe [sic] juice and pineapple juice.” She was looking forward to being allowed some milk the following day, and then to “work up” to solid food. “The idea is to give the digestion a complete rest.”45
Dr. Lief was undoubtedly concerned about his VIP patient, who even now never stopped monitoring events. Upon her return home, he advised her to take a day off from her duties every week, but though “rest days” were duly marked in her diary for the next couple of months it became obvious the idea was unsustainable. Neither the Nazis nor her husband observed a six-day week. Even so, when she went to greet Winston at King’s Cross station on the morning of August 19, she felt much revived, and the news from his summit gave cause for optimism. He and Roosevelt had signed the Atlantic Charter—outlining their joint hopes for the postwar world and affirming the principles of self-determination and free trade—and had developed what appeared to be a genuine and warm relationship. The president had resisted making any promise that the US would enter the war, but surely it could not now be long in coming?
Four long months later, on the night of Sunday, December 7, the closest of the Churchills’ circle gathered for dinner at Chequers—“Pug” Ismay, Winant, Harriman and his daughter Kathleen, Pamela, Winston’s private secretary John Martin and naval aide Commander Thompson. The mood was glum: news from the front was relentlessly bad and yet America was still stalling. Under Lend-Lease, it was stepping up supplies, but still it would not join the actual fighting. Clementine, too exhausted to join them, had taken to her bed. Winston was so down he silently held his head in his hands. Around nine, his butler Sawyers carried in a little flip-top radio and switched it on for the BBC news, just in time to catch a momentous announcement: “Japanese aircraft have raided Pearl Harbor, the American naval base in Hawaii.”
What happened next is a little unclear. Some reports suggest Winston danced a celebratory jig with Winant, others that in the confusion of the moment the prime minister simply asked the ambassador what he should do first. It is known that the two men soon put in an urgent call to Roosevelt, who talked of being “in the same boat now.” The new certainty that America would soon be at war (Roosevelt declared war on Japan the following day and three days later Japan’s allies Germany and Italy declared war on the US) was obviously an untrammeled relief for the British. But the Americans present joined in the palpable excitement. “The inevitable had finally arrived,” Harriman recalled. “We all knew the grim future that it held, but at least there was a future now.”46
Once he had discussed the news and its repercussions with Clementine, Winston retired to bed and in his own words “slept the sleep of the saved and the thankful.” He had long compared America to a woman who had to be wooed; now she was, as he put it, finally “in the harem.” Across the Atlantic, no one thought to inform the president’s wife. Eleanor had been her husband’s political partner during the New Deal social reforms of the thirties, but as Franklin’s attentions had shifted from welfare to weapons she had found herself increasingly excluded. Now she was left to deduce that America had joined the fighting from the frantic traffic in and out of her husband’s office.
The next day Churchill began making plans to visit Roosevelt in Washington. Clementine wished him luck with his momentous mission—“May God keep you and inspire you to make good plans with the President”—while excoriating, in an uncommonly bellicose tone, those “Nazi hogs” and “yellow Japanese lice.”47 After crossing the Atlantic through a series of terrific gales, Winston stayed at the White House over Christmas, leaving Clementine behind with her cousin Maryott Whyte (who was still serving the Churchills), as Mary was on active duty with her guns at Enfield, North London.
Lacking Clementine’s loving patience, the White House staff found Winston a trying guest and misinterpreted the glass constantly to be found by his side as an indication that he “drank like a fish.” (In fact, he disliked the president’s American martinis so much he would excuse himself and pour them down the lavatory, refilling the glass with water.)48 During his visit, he was given the Rose Suite within the family quarters on the second floor, only a few doors down from the president. Taking advantage of this proximity, the two leaders often talked long into the night.
It was not just the staff who were disturbed by his nocturnal habits and supposed drinking habits. Eleanor Roosevelt, a near-teetotaler whose family was riddled with alcoholism, loathed Winston’s night-owl lifestyle and railed at the effect of his visit on the health of her husband, who had been partially paralyzed by polio since 1921 and needed regular sleep. She also disliked the way Churchill, in her view, romanticized war. Unwilling to play the part of adoring listener to the great man, she was forthright in her own opinions; they were never likely to get on.
Eleanor’s discovery in 1918 of Franklin’s adulterous relationship with her beautiful social secretary, Lucy Mercer, had made her fiercely independent. Roosevelt’s illness—and his desire to avoid a career-wrecking divorce—may have brought them back together, but the resulting partnership was professional rather than intimate. When Franklin could not attend speeches or rallies in the 1920s because of his condition, Eleanor stood in for him, becoming as a result one of the first great female voices of the Democratic Party. She had also acted as the president’s eyes and ears during his administration’s battle to implement the New Deal welfare plan in response to the depression of the thirties. But their marriage, according to one of their five surviving children, remained in a state of “armed truce” throughout.
Unlike Winston, Franklin was not a one-woman man. He chose to surround himself with adoring and undemanding admirers, referred to by Eleanor as his “handmaidens.” During the war these included the exiled Princess Märtha of Norway—who was striking, flirtatious and at his request called him “dear godfather”—his private secretary Missy LeHand and also, unbeknown to his wife, a woman with a voice like seductive “dark velvet,” the very one whom he had promised to forsake to save his marriage: Lucy Mercer (now married to a society figure twenty years her senior).
Eleanor retaliated by building her own fiefdom at Hyde Park, two miles from the main house, a collection of stone buildings known as Val-Kill. Here, in her loneliness, she established a rival court, and attempted to build several intense relationships with both women and men. But nothing could quite assuage her feeling of disappointment and betrayal. By the time America entered the war, she was fifty-seven and age had not been kind to her. Her wavy brown hair was flecked with gray and her buckteeth and receding chin detracted from her dazzling blue eyes. Nearly six foot tall, she dominated a room but did not conform to Winston’s ideas of an “attractive” woman. Uninterested as she was in fripperies such as good food, decor or even her own dress, he felt there was something unusually masculine about her. Churchill may not have been convinced, but the American people appreciated the energy she expended on their behalf, and her unfailingly sharp-minded and wholesome public image; she often enjoyed higher approval ratings than her husband. Her “My Day” syndicated column, highly paid lecture tours, press conferences, speeches to party conventions and solo visits to slums, mines and factories had in time made her one of the most visible figures in American life, and a potent political force in her own right.
Winston appears to have been unfamiliar with the role Eleanor had pursued during her nine years as First Lady. Or, more likely, he willfully failed to appreciate her work for the poor in order to make a point. Such activism smacked of a form of female emancipation that was more characteristic of American women, a phenomenon he was not eager to see spread to British shores (and especially to his own home). When Eleanor asked him over lunch what Clementine was doing for the war effort he mischievously expressed his delight that his wife did not engage in any public activities, saying that she stayed at home. A strained silence fell on the table as all eyes turned toward Mrs. Roosevelt, but she never “batted an eyelash.”49 It was fortunate for Winston that Clementine had remained in England.
No doubt he compared Eleanor unfavorably to Clementine—as had Harry Hopkins—when it came to the food served at her table. Ernest Hemingway once claimed the cooking at the Roosevelt White House to be “the worst [he had] ever eaten” and the president himself remarked that it “would do justice to the automat.” Eleanor’s cook, Henrietta Nesbitt, was not yet restricted by wartime rationing as Mrs. Landemare was in Britain but the US First Lady’s puritan streak blinded her to the sensory—and diplomatic—shortfalls of her dreary and repetitive cuisine. Mrs. Nesbitt’s signature salads, for instance, were composed of “a mountain of mayonnaise, slice of canned pineapple [and] carved radishes.”50 Roosevelt never touched them, murmuring sadly, “No thank you,” when offered one, although guests felt obliged to peck at one out of politeness. Winston was horrified to be presented with the sort of creamy soup he particularly detested not once but several times during his stay, including on Christmas Day. Evidently, Eleanor had failed to research her guest’s particular likes and dislikes, as her British counterpart would have done.
Occasionally the president would rebel, refusing to eat any more liver, string beans or broccoli, all of which he particularly loathed, and once turning away salt fish after it had been served for lunch four days in a row. By contrast, the undercooked quail and pheasant he loved were kept off the menu. Eleanor herself took an “almost grim satisfaction in the austerity”51 but Roosevelt half-jokingly warned her that his unappetizing diet did not “help” his “relations with foreign powers,” saying, “I bit two of them today.”52 Some observers said her stubborn attitude was a form of drawn-out culinary revenge for Franklin’s affair.
Whatever the case, Eleanor was clearly a determined woman who did not see it as her duty to pamper and indulge her husband, or to run a house with Clementine’s attention to detail. Visitors to the White House came away astonished to find their white gloves blackened by the dust, filthy threadbare carpets and curtains in the process of rotting away.
Winston seems to have been too busy discussing strategy with Roosevelt to write home much during his trip, apart from one lengthy letter sent from the ship on his way over. He added a quick postscript on arrival, noting, “All is very good indeed . . . The Americans are magnificent in their breadth of view.”53 He did, however, telephone from the White House to establish Clementine’s foot size so that he could buy her some much-desired new stockings. She in turn mostly reported on domestic news, except for a gentle reminder that the American declaration of war was only the beginning: “I have been thinking constantly of you & trying to picture & realise the drama in which you are playing the principal—or rather it seems—the only part—I pray that when you leave, that the fervour you have aroused may not die down but will consolidate into practical & far-reaching action.”54
It was during Churchill’s time with the Roosevelts—twenty-eight months into the war, beyond Clementine’s watchful gaze—that the pressures of his position finally caught up with him. During a ceremony in front of a large crowd on Christmas Eve at which he helped Roosevelt light the Christmas tree on the White House’s South Lawn and delivered a moving speech, he began to feel palpitations. Then, on Boxing Day night, after addressing Congress for the first time, as he leaned out to close a stubborn bedroom window he was gripped by an acute pain in his chest and found himself struggling to breathe.
His doctor, Lord Moran, suspected he had suffered a minor heart attack but decided not to tell anyone, especially not his sixty-seven-year-old patient. America had only just entered the war and there was “no one but Winston to hold her by the hand.”55 Nothing could be allowed to impede the success of the so-called Arcadia summit in drawing up a joint strategy—although the episode was an ominous harbinger of things to come.
When Winston finally left Washington on January 14, Hopkins handed him an affectionate note for Clementine. “You would have been quite proud of your husband on this trip because he was ever so good natured . . .” She had been given a welcome respite from the grueling task of looking after her husband. In her absence, Hopkins had discovered the immensity of managing two men he referred to as the “prima donnas.”56 No wonder he was admitted to the Navy Hospital shortly after the prime minister’s departure, where he collapsed from exhaustion. The war was exacting a heavy price on everyone.
• • •
America’s entry into the war, however heartening, did nothing immediately to stem mounting discontent at home. In January 1942 criticism of the government’s prosecution of the war—not least the recent loss of two great battleships, reverses in the African desert and almost unchecked Japanese advances through British territories in Southeast Asia—led to a vote of confidence in the Commons. Winston won by 464 to 1, but that success failed to silence the critics and the doubters. Even his once infallible rhetoric was losing its potency, and his ministers—some of whom were jealous at Winston’s trips away from the drabness of wartime London to the bright lights of Washington—began to grumble about drift and detachment at the top. It is significant that Winston now appointed the Labour leader Clement Attlee as his deputy prime minister, the first person in Britain to hold such a role, to take the reins in his absence. Winston, convinced that the “bulk of the Tories” hated him, began to wonder whether his time in power had run its course. Victory in battle still seemed determined to elude him. And worse was yet to come.
On February 15, 1942, the Japanese took Singapore after the surrender of sixty thousand British troops—a defeat Winston himself described as the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history. Clementine fretted about the effect this latest ignominy would have on his already battered morale. “Oh how glad I am that you are back once more to encourage, to cheer, to charm us,” she wrote to Hopkins when he visited again in April 1942. “You can’t think what a difference it makes to Winston. He is carrying a very heavy load and I can’t bear his dear round face not to look cheerful and cherubic in the mornings . . . What with Singapore . . . we are indeed walking through the Valley of Humiliation.”57
Winston’s woes were exacerbated, in Clementine’s view, by Beaverbrook, who was destabilizing the government with periodic threats to resign as minister of supply or by demanding vastly greater powers to carry on. In her desire to protect Winston, she sometimes overreacted. Her view of her longtime enemy had recently softened, in part because of his pride in his gallant pilot son Max, and also because of his generosity to her numerous causes. But now she believed his impetuous behavior was harming her husband; she even suspected he might have his sights set on toppling him. During a heated row with Winston in mid-February 1942 she unleashed an angry tirade against Beaverbrook, whom she feared would turn out to be another Fisher—then rapidly regretted it. “My Own Darling, I am ashamed that by my violent attitude I should just now have added to your agonising anxieties—Please forgive me,” she wrote in a little note. But she refused to suppress her suspicions of Beaverbrook completely: “Try ridding yourself of this microbe which some people fear is in your blood. Exorcise this bottle Imp & see if the air is not clearer & purer.”58
In the event, Beaverbrook was persuaded to become minister of production, only to resign a fortnight later, blaming his asthma. Pamela, despite being both Beaverbrook’s protégée and his intimate, backed Clementine’s judgment. Clementine knew “probably quite rightly . . . that Max would use Winston to the maximum but also throw him to the wolves if he felt inclined.”59 Ironically, Beaverbrook professed to be a great fan of Clementine, and of the “home life” she created. Winston’s “relationship with Mrs Churchill,” he told a friend, “might be told in story form as a life-time of domestic content.”60
The military situation took a further dire turn in June 1942, while Winston was again staying at the White House. Devastating news came through of the fall of the strategically important port of Tobruk in North Africa and the surrender of thirty thousand British and Empire troops to a German force half the size. Hopkins knew from experience how Clementine, intimately involved in the war as ever, would be deeply concerned at this latest bitter setback and wrote to her immediately to stress that Winston was trying to put on a brave face. “No one knows better than you that Tobruk was a great shock to him.” He nevertheless conceded, “There was nothing any of us could do or say that could temper the blow.”61 The jibe from the Labour MP Aneurin Bevan, a long-term critic of the coalition government, that Winston “won debate after debate, but lost battle after battle” wounded him deeply.62 But all those months of wooing the Americans had paid off, as Roosevelt offered support in place of criticism, diverting vital Sherman tanks and guns from the US military to help the beleaguered British recapture lost ground.
On his return to Britain Churchill defiantly won another confidence vote in early July 1942 (this time by 477 votes to 25), but in his speech to the Commons he offered a rare glimpse of his own suffering—an admission that bore all the signs of Clementine’s gift for reading the public mood: “Some people assume too readily that, because a Government keeps cool and has steady nerves under reverses, its members do not feel the public misfortunes as keenly as its independent critics,” he said. “On the contrary, I doubt whether anyone feels greater sorrow or pain than those who are responsible for the general conduct of our affairs.”
Family grievances also weighed heavily on the Churchills at this time—not least Randolph’s bitterness toward them. One night in spring 1942, father and son rowed so violently about “condoning” Pamela’s affair with Harriman that Clementine feared Winston might have a seizure; she banned Randolph from Downing Street for the rest of the war. “I think the greatest misfortune in R’s life is that he is Papa’s son,” Mary recorded in her diary of the time. “Papa has spoilt and indulged him & is very responsible.”63 Nevertheless, Mary and her sisters were outraged at Pamela’s adultery and never really forgave her.
Not long after this distressing confrontation, a humiliated Randolph volunteered to leave a safe staff job in Cairo to join the Special Air Service (SAS) and operate behind enemy lines. It seemed as if he could do no right; Clementine was furious with him for what she perceived as gross selfishness at a time when Winston was “bearing not only the burden of his own country but, for the moment, of an un-prepared America.” She raged at Randolph’s decision, saying he should simply have “quietly and sensibly” rejoined his old regiment rather than choosing a highly risky operation that would cause his father “agony of mind.” Pondering whether she should send Randolph an “affectionate” cable begging him, for his father’s sake, to rejoin his old regiment, she concluded plaintively: “He might listen to me, as though he does not care for me, I know he respects me.”64 Wisely, she did not cable him and Randolph went on to sign up with the SAS as he had desired. It was an occasion when her concern for her husband perhaps blinded her, as her daughter Mary reflected, to the interests of her son.
Not that she was unwilling to confront Winston when she had to. One instance was his order, in early November 1942, for the church bells to be rung to celebrate the British Army’s first major victory, at El Alamein in Egypt, where Lieutenant-General Montgomery’s troops had irreversibly broken the German line and secured the Suez Canal. She shared his joy at for once receiving good news—made possible in large part by those Sherman tanks Roosevelt had delivered after the fall of Tobruk—but the bells had remained silent since the outbreak of war in case they were needed to signal an invasion and Clementine feared that ringing them now, to mark a single triumph, would be both premature and hubristic. Mary, who was at home on leave, remembered her mother being “violent” in her argument and in her view “quite rightly.”65 In the face of such formidable opposition, Winston backed down—at least until British forces had triumphantly reentered Tobruk (scene of their previous humiliation) a few days later.
It was natural for him to be ebullient, even overbearing, in victory. Perhaps Clementine also reminded him to treat his staff well. One of his secretaries in those weeks, when the war finally seemed to be turning in Britain’s favor, recalled how “once he began to bark he quickly stopped himself.”66
Clementine took particular pains to ensure Winston was on his best behavior when they welcomed Eleanor Roosevelt to Britain at the end of October 1942 for a three-week trip to find out more about women’s experience of the war and to visit American troops. Once again, they pulled out all the stops: after spending her first few days at Buckingham Palace with the king and queen, Eleanor was to join Winston and Clementine for a weekend at Chequers. “I confide my Missus to the care of you and Mrs Churchill,” wrote Roosevelt, who had encouraged the trip as a way of soothing Eleanor’s obvious discontent at her reduced political role. (She now felt so distanced from him that she had just rejected a rare request to come back and live with him again as his wife.) “I know our better halves will get on beautifully,” he had written to Winston in parting. He sent as a gift a Virginia ham, prompting the diplomatic response from Clementine (who was now accustomed to receiving one from almost every visiting American): “I so love Virginia hams.”
It was the first time these redoubtable women had met, and both were curious. They certainly looked different: Clementine beautiful and immaculately presented, Eleanor a little horsey and often rather windswept. More significantly, their public personas stood in marked contrast: Clementine avoided voicing her views publicly and remained at her husband’s side almost throughout the war, whereas Eleanor maximized her own status, traveled widely without the president (to the point that the Washington Star once ran the ironic headline MRS. ROOSEVELT SPENDS NIGHT AT WHITE HOUSE) and confidently aired her own opinions in newspaper columns, even when they were at odds with her husband’s policies. Eleanor had learned to use her position as America’s First Lady to further causes she believed in and was frequently credited with having become the “most influential woman of her age.”67 She was even sometimes referred to, half-jokingly, as “Madam President.” Clementine was merely (if incorrectly) viewed as just Winston’s wife.
These apparent differences masked an astonishing number of parallels in their lives. They were of a similar age and upper-class background; they shared a concern for the poor and a dislike of gambling and extravagance that led some to consider them “crashing bores.” (Roosevelt in particular felt the constraints of “living with a saint.”) Both had also been schooled in England—in Eleanor’s case after the early deaths of her parents—and each had been taken in hand by an inspirational headmistress. They had endured difficult and fearful childhoods, and as girls had been considered plain (Eleanor’s mother had called her “granny”). Their lives had been touched by family tragedy and left them plagued by self-doubt, sometimes even depression. Neither was conventionally “feminine” (one of Clementine’s former employees thought she “would have made a very good man”). Like Clementine, Eleanor thought herself an inadequate mother and had lost an infant child, and like Winston, Franklin was unwilling to impose discipline on his children. Their respective broods were often unhappy and sometimes unpleasant: the four Roosevelt sons who reached adulthood were to rack up eighteen marriages between them; Clementine’s offspring would blunder through eight (although Mary was successfully happy in hers).
They also shared the chronic loneliness and isolation that often afflicts the wives of ambitious men. Their husbands had dealt with huge personal crises—the humiliation of the Dardanelles had brought Winston to his lowest ebb; polio had crippled Roosevelt—and bounced back stronger. Winston and Franklin were implacable optimists who, in some ways, had never entirely grown up. Now fate had chosen them to carry the immense burden of saving the world, and neither man’s spouse found her supporting role easy, although in divergent ways each “shattered the ceremonial mould”68 and went far beyond what political wives had achieved before. Eleanor had never wanted to be First Lady; there was much in Clementine that did want to be married to the prime minister, but this desire was tempered by her insecurity. The two women were keepers of their husbands’ consciences, safeguarding the “ordinary” citizen’s interests; both were brave and stoical. On occasion, they shored up the Anglo-American alliance when Roosevelt and Winston fell out. Ultimately, however, one was to prove considerably more influential during the war than the other, although not the one observers at the time might have guessed.
Eleanor arrived in London at Paddington station on the evening of October 23, 1942. A large crowd had gathered to greet her. People were grateful to the Americans for entering the war and impressed by stories of Eleanor Roosevelt’s commitment to the poor. The king and queen were there too, to “welcome [her] with all [their] hearts.” At Buckingham Palace she was put in an enormous suite, specially restored after a bombing raid. She was also given her own ration card and assigned a bed in the converted cellar that served as a royal air-raid shelter. A five-inch mark had been drawn in the bath to show the maximum depth of water permitted and she was told there would be no heating, whatever the weather, until November 1. Though First Lady of the most powerful country on Earth, Eleanor felt intimidated by the grandeur of her surroundings, and on her first night she stumbled around in the dark because she could not find the light switches.69 Uncharacteristically, she even fretted about her wardrobe and her hair.
British women struggling with severe clothing rations warmed to Eleanor’s lack of ostentatious glamour; some were taken with the idea that her hat and coat looked as if they had been made over. She came across as more homely than Clementine—more believably of the people—and she was refreshingly informal. She instantly called Clementine’s secretary Grace Hamblin by her first name—an unimaginable familiarity in the Churchill household until that point—and thereafter Clementine (but not Winston) followed suit. She drowned her insecurities in a punishing work schedule that included touring the capital with the queen, dozens of trips up and down the country, and—like a surrogate mother—a promise to sort out the unsuitable thin cotton socks issued to American soldiers stationed in Britain (the first had arrived back in January 1942). She made sure American commanders ordered 2.5 million woolen replacements.
Like her compatriots, Clementine was bowled over by Eleanor’s boundless energy, as well as her flattering curiosity about every detail of life on the home front. Her enthusiasm never seemed to flag, and she soon outpaced not only the posse of “saggy-kneed” reporters who trailed her every move but also Clementine. On one visit Clementine was left to sit and rest on a marble staircase while Eleanor ran up four flights to chat with more workers. The American First Lady went out of her way through mud and rain to meet the former hairdressers, typists and housewives who were now digging ditches, servicing planes and driving tractors. She was also impressed by the legions of female volunteers who had stepped up to staff hostels, mobile libraries and canteens, or to spruce up shelters and distribute the thousands of tons of clothing and other supplies collected from America and the Commonwealth. The huge and unconventional role of British women in wartime had become the norm through necessity, but Eleanor’s praise lent it dignity, even glamour. She talked enthusiastically about transplanting many of the ideas she saw in action in Britain back to the US. (On her return home, she hired a dancer to develop a program for entertaining children in case bombing raids started in America, explaining that she had seen “similar activities” in the shelters Clementine had shown her in Britain.)70 It was all enormously gratifying for her British counterpart, who had done so much to bring women into the war both by organization and by her own example; almost the entire female population was now taking part in the struggle in some way.
Their contribution, in a country whose attitudes had previously seemed so conservative, appears to have struck many Americans—and helped to convince them that Britain really might prevail. “It was not just the occasional woman who was operating a machine or scrubbing a floor,” Winant noted. “It was all the women. And it wasn’t just the women who were used to hard work, but frequently those who lived lives of comparative leisure.”71 Harriman wrote to a friend: “It is the spirit of the women that is carrying this country through the frightful experience of the bombing.”72 He told his wife, “[T]he women are the mainstay of England.”
Harriman’s assistant Robert Meiklejohn was similarly “astonished by the absence of fear or panic” during even the most ferocious bombing raids. When, as a result of one attack, the department store Selfridges caught fire, his female neighbors “acted as if the bombing were like a thunder storm . . . A couple of women came up on the roof about three-thirty AM in their bathrobes and weren’t at all frightened.”73 The US Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau noted in his diary: “What the women in England were doing was just unbelievable . . . If it were not for the women, England would cave in today.”74
Apart from that early call to arms in Manchester, however, Winston rarely acknowledged the part being played by women. His doctor later recalled that in all the years he had spent by Winston’s side he had only heard him mention women in conversation once, concluding: “He is not interested in them.”75
Winston was thus blind to Eleanor’s popular appeal, whereas Clementine observed how Madam President was a celebrity in her own right, prompting spontaneous outbursts of cheering wherever she went. In Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, Belfast and Edinburgh, she received standing ovations. In London, people loitered around the American embassy just to catch a glimpse of her. She was no silent shadow to her husband but a fully fledged public figure; someone who used her fame and popularity to aid others or to raise morale. In what was probably her first direct letter to the president, Clementine described in gushing terms the effect his wife’s presence was having “on [Britain’s] women and girls,” saying, “When she appears their faces light up with gladness and welcome.”76 She paid tribute to Eleanor’s handling of the press: “I was struck by the ease, friendliness and dignity with which she talked with the reporters, and by the esteem and affection with which they evidently regard her.” Even the enemy took note of the sensational coverage she received: the Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels issued an order to German journalists to play it all down.
Eleanor meanwhile found Clementine attractive, youthful and charming but constrained by her husband’s notion that women should stay in the background. “She has had to assume a role because of being in public life,” Eleanor noted in her diary; “the role is now part of her, but one wonders what she is like underneath.”77 She saw that Clementine worked diligently to support relief efforts for Russia and China, but also observed that she was “very careful not to voice any opinions publicly or to associate with any political organizations.”78 They enjoyed each other’s company and talked together a great deal, but Clementine was so guarded that Eleanor found it a challenge to discern what she really believed.
By contrast, the First Lady’s vocalism sometimes risked undermining her husband. In July 1940 she had appeared to argue in her newspaper column against the military draft—which Roosevelt had just unequivocally endorsed. The very next day, after a forthright memorandum from Franklin, she had been forced to write that her comments had been misunderstood and that she was not, in fact, an opponent of the draft after all.79
Yet there is no doubt that a bond formed between the two women over the course of the visit, especially after a poignant trip via Canterbury to the port at Dover, where they could see the German-occupied French coastline across the channel. As ever, crowds of excited women and children surged forward to see Eleanor, who beamed warmly back at them and talked to as many as she could. The next day, Canterbury was heavily bombed by daylight. As Clementine wrote to Roosevelt, it was more than likely that some of those who had so happily greeted them were among the casualties. A clearly shaken Eleanor wrote to her husband that “the spirit of the English people is something to bow down to.”80
Though it is possible she was simply displaying good manners in front of such an important guest, there were occasional flashes of tension between Winston and Clementine during the visit that might suggest she welcomed Eleanor’s willingness to challenge him. At a small dinner party held in Eleanor’s honor, attended by Brendan Bracken and Henry Morgenthau, the prime minister brought up the subject of Spain. Eleanor asked why it had not been possible to help the antifascists. Winston replied that those around the table would have been “the first to lose [their] heads” if the Spanish republicans had won. Eleanor, who recalled his being “quite annoyed”81 by her intervention, countered that she did not care if she lost her head. Incensed by the public confrontation, Winston fired back: “I don’t want you to lose your head and neither do I want to lose mine!” At this point, Clementine leaned across the table and said pointedly, “I think perhaps Mrs Roosevelt is right.” An astonished Winston rose abruptly from the table, signaling that dinner was over.
“I do not think Mrs Roosevelt ever really got my father,” Mary said in an interview much later. “She was very suspicious of him. He loved jokes and stories and was never earnest—not her sort at all.”82 Sensing the antipathy between Eleanor and her husband, Clementine took pains to be her most charming and emollient with the president himself, writing: “On each occasion that Winston has been to America he has told me of your great goodness and hospitality to him & I only wish that I could do something adequate to show you how I feel about this. I hope one day to meet you in person & tell you.” It was perhaps the first time she felt the need to paper over cracks in the Churchill-Roosevelt alliance. It would not be the last.
Shortly after Eleanor returned to America, a Gallup poll revealed that she was probably “the target of more adverse criticism and the object of more praise than any other woman in American history.”83 Nearly half of the country thought it brilliant she did not stay at home and spoke her mind, but two in five thought it terrible, wanting her to remain indoors, “where a wife belongs.” It proved that attitudes were still conservative, but in the US at least, things were changing fast. FDR was intensely proud of what she had achieved in cementing relations between the two powers at this crucial moment in the war and she herself was on a high. The trip had been met with unalloyed enthusiasm in the British and American press—one Newsweek reporter gushed that she had received “the greatest ovation ever paid any American touring Britain.” Meanwhile, Clementine had watched and learned. For the rest of the war she was to push herself forward in a way that would have been unthinkable before.
The influence was not entirely one-sided. When Eleanor got home, she did something completely out of character: she took an hour and a half out of her frenetic work schedule to have her hair and nails done.