VIII. Fish and Churchhill

ChapterVIII FISH AND CHURCHILL ON SUNDAY, the third day of August, 1941,a sleek 16S-footyacht slipped from its berth at the submarine base at New London, Connecticut, and headed, in the sunset afterglow, for Long Is land Sound. It steamed down the Thames River, over the course of the annual Yale-Harvard rowing race, and out beyond the Race Rock lighthouse. Then it vanished into the Atlantic. Aboard was the President of the United States, ostensibly off on a fishing trip. It was to be probably the most bizarre fishing trip any angler ever took. President Roosevelt had left Washington that afternoon in jaunty mood and with what was described as "the same old optimistic cast in his eye." Always alert to advertise himself as a lover of peace, he had taken the occasion of his departure to remark that he still hoped the United States "would not have to get in a shooting war." (Mr. Roosevelt made a habit of lapsing into a colloquial jargon, which even the twelve-year~old mental ities among the electorate could grasp, whenever he wished to strike a popular attitude upon a big issue.) A week or ten days on the Potomac,out on salt water, would be fine, and, as far as he could see, it was a good time to take a vacation.!

The country had been prepared for this·the day before when FISH AND CHURCHILL' 97 StephenEarly,the WhiteHousepresssecretary,had announced that the President was going to take a week's vacation in New England waters. Mr. Early's chief purpose, it seemed, was to indicate that Mr. Roosevelt desired a rest and did not wish, to be bothered by publicity or routine government business. "From the time the President boards the Potomac until the time he returns to shore," Mr. Early said, "the movements of the ship will be a confidential naval i operation and it is particularly re quested that the press, radio and other media of dissemination of information so consider the movements of the Potomac." No newspapermen were to be permitted to accompany the party, although in the past the press had customarily covered Presiden tial voyages from an escort ship. Mr. Early said the President had no plans to land, even at his mother's summer home at Campobello, New Brunswick. Accompanying him would be his military aide, General ("Pa") Watson, his naval aide, Captain Beatdall, and the White House physician, Admiral McIntire.

Captain Beardall had been requested to send the Navy a daily dispatch, which would be released to the press. All ofthis, of course, was just enough to.give the whole expedition a tinge of mystery. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox was a straight-faced accom plice. "1 can assure you that it is a purely rest or vacation trip," he told reporters at his press conference, "and I ask the news papers not to display any enterprise in attempting to follow him or speculate on his whereabouts." As though a President could not have a rest on his own yacht in New England coastal waters without enshrouding his voyage in semisecrecy, Mr. Knox added: "The man has been carrying a tremendous burden and we should let him have a week or ten days of complete rest. I am asking the press to treat the President as it would any officer of any ship." This appeal did not quite ring true, if, indeed, it was intended to. Why this uncustomary coyness? It could not THE ATLANTIC CHARTER be a question of safety, for surely there was no imaginable need for the President to expose himself to personal danger. There were plenty of perfectly safe places to go, in or out of the coun try, whether he wanted to rest, to work, or to hold a conference.

Mr. Rooseveltboarded the Potomaca few minutes before she sailed on Sunday. He was piped aboard as the Presidential flag was run up the mast. Sailors in summer whites stood at salute at the gangway. The President made no statement. Not even the crew knew where they were going. The correspondent of the New York Times wrote: "It was no more than the start of a vacationfor a man who has ... longed for some sea air." Naturally, the buzzing started soon. On Monday, the British Press Association announced that Harry Hopkins had returned to London "yesterday" from Moscow after his dramatic flight to talk to Stalin. On Tuesday, Clement Attlee, Lord Privy Seal, told the House of Commons that Prime Minister Churchill "would not find it convenient" to attend an important debate on the progress of the war. Hints were allowed to pass through British censorship that Rooseveltand Churchill had met or were to meet somewhere. In Washington, the Navy Department re leased a dispatch from the Potomac: "After a night of restful sleep the .President is continuing his cruise in northern waters to an undisclosed destination. He is attired in a sport shirt and slacks and is enjoying the sea air from the fantail. . . . The President spent some time discussing affairs with the Comman der-in-Chief of the Atlantic Fleet.... All on board well." This was a teaser. Apparentl" Admiral Ernest J. King, the Atlantic fleet's commander, "had popped up from no~here," as the magazine Newsweek described this development.

Meanwhile, in England, Harry Hopkins, the President's alter ego, had disappeared. London sleuths looking for him were told: "You'll find Hopkins where Churchill is." By Wednesday it was known in London that the rotund Prime Minister and FISH AND CHURCHILL 99 the American roving wraith had left "together"for a secret destination. White House Press SecretaryStephen Early refused to squelch the rumors ofa Roosevelt-Churchill meeting. He merely said he knew nothing about it. Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State, also avoideda categoricaldenial,but he did say that the Presi dent had made no mention of such a meeting when he talked with him on the telephone the previous Saturday night (the night before Mr. Roosevelt'sdeparture). On Wednesday, the Navy released a laconic message from the Potomac which said that the sailors were "responding to New England air after·Washington summer." It did not men tion the President. Some observersviewed this omission as indi cating that Mr. Roosevelt might have transferred to another ship which would speed him to a secret rendezvous. The Cana dian Prime Minister was questioned, but he provided no solu tion to the mystery.

Washington reporters were making bets on whether Roose velt and Churchill had met, were meeting, or would meet. The feverish inquiries of· Domei's correspondent, Masua Kato, re vealed Japan's curiosity, while the German D.N.B.'s reporter, Kurt Sell, offered even money that if such a meeting were held, it would be on shore rather than at sea. (He would have come within a few hundred yards of untroubled waters in a sheltered bay·of winning his bet.) On Thursday, the Navy divulged another chatty radio report from the Potomac. "All members of party showing effects·0£ sunning. Fishing luck good.... President being kept in close touch international situation by Navy radio." The report did not say that Mr. Rooseveltwas on board or that he was not on board. Meanwhile, the New York Herald Tribune's Washington bureau had been playing Sherlock Holmes. The information it 100 THE ATLANTIC CHARTER ferreted out showed that "something was cooking." General George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff, was missing, ostensibly on a routine inspection trip to an undisclosed destination which even Chairman Robert R. Reynolds of the Senate Military Af fairs Committee could not learn. Admiral Harold R. Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, was presumably on leave, but where he was, nobody seemed to know. Major General H. H. ("Hap") Arnold, Chief of the Army Air Forces, had gone "somewhere"

on officialbusiness and even his wife was wondering where. On top of all this, Under Secretary of State Sumner WeUes sud denly disappeared for "a short rest," and Major General James H. Burns,··Hopkins' assistant in the Lend-Lease Administration, vanished without leaving a word about his whereabouts. Secre tary of the Navy Frank Knox made his exodus from the capital during the week, but by Friday he had been located at York I-Iarhar, Maine. It was now taken for granted that a momentous conference between two chiefs of state, Roosevelt and Churchill, was in progress. Washington now calmed down to await the results. The President had, in fact, transshipped to the cruiser Au gusta on Monday night. Elliott Roosevelt tells us in As He Saw It that his father "enjoyed himself thoroughly, giving the press the slip, much as a twelve-year-old boy playing cops-and-robbers will enjoy shaking a playmate who is trying to shadow him."

According to Elliott, this jocular conversation occurred when he and Franklin, Jr., joined their father on the Augusta: "You look wonderful, Pop. But how come all this?You on a fish ing trip?" F~ther roared with laughter. "That's what the newspapers think. They think I'm fishing somewhere off the Bay of Fundy." He was as delighted as a kid, boasting of how he had thrown the newspaper men off the scent by going as far as Augusta, MaiJ!e,on the presiden tial yacht Potomac.Then he told us what it was an about.

FISH AND CHURCHILL 101 "I'm meeting Churchill here. He's due in tomorrow. on the -Prince of Wales. Harry Hopkins is with him." And he leaned back to watch the -effectof his announcement on us. I guess-it was -big. I wasn't near any mirrors, but he enjoyed it. Elliott takes for granted "Father's" preoccupation at the mo ment with "the effectof his announcement on us." To the senior Roosevelt,the "effect" of a statement or of an event, in the sense of its emotional impact, was always one of the most important things about it. As for fishing, "Father" did fish once. It was on Thursday, in Placentia Bay, from the deck of a battle cruiser. "He caught a What-is-it, unidentifiable by anyone on board," writes Elliott. " 'Have it sent to the Smithsonian,' Father suggested, and tried no more fishing during the whole trip." On the other side of the Atlantic, Winston Churchill left Scapa Flow on Monday, August 3, -on the battleship Prince of Wales. His most valuable fellow-passenger was Harry Hopkins, who had heenassigned the Admiral's cabin.-It·is generally con ceded that Harry Hopkins played a large part in the genesis of the Atlantic Conference, and he was certainly the intermediary between Roosevelt and Churchill in making the preparatory arrangements. Churchill's chronicler, H. V. Morton, writes that Hopkins pressed the idea on the Prime ~'£inister one afternoon "towards the end of July" while the two were walking in a little garden behind No. 10 Downing Street. "When Mr. Churchill reentered No. 10 he had decided to cross the Atlantic."2 Early the following morning, President -Roosevelt was called to the telephone in the White House to receive a trans-Atlantic call.

It was Winston Churchill, proposing the meeting, and the President "agreed." Of course such a meeting was in Mr. Roosevelt'splans before Hopkins had left Washington for England, as RobertE. Sher102 THE ATLANTIC CHARTER wood's account makes clear}~ Hull states that Roosevelt had cherished the idea for some time/ but Sherwood does not divulge what Hopkins told the Prime Minister in order to sell the idea to him, particularly on the point of why a theatrical spectacle involving the Atlantic fleets and air forces of both nations was to be chosen as the setting for what could be more soberly ac complished at a simple meeting in Washington or Ottawa. Sher wood writes: "Most of Hopkins' conversations with Churchill on the forthcoming Atlantic Conference ... were conducted in private and Hopkins kept no record of them.,,5 But Hopkins left notes of innumerable conversations which were "conducted in private." Many of these were far less important than these talks with Churchill, which fashioned the conference at which the aims of the war were to be laid down. Yet, says·Sherwood, Hopkins kept no record of them. He did, however, record in his notes that he played backgammon with the Prime Minister aboard the Prince of Wales and he took the trouble to describe Churchill's type of game, all of which Sherwood quotes for pos terity. Sherwood states,ex cathedra, that these two backgammon players also "discussed the phraseology of the Atlantic Charter,"

but he goes into no details and disclosesno entries in Hopkins' notes on the subject-if he made any. Here is one of those strange gaps that abound in the erratic Hopkins' "notes" as ,"'e are per mitted to glimpse them piecemeal at the sufferance of his friendly biographer. The latter's historical task, it should be said in .fairness, was probably not made easier by Harry Hopkins' neurotic harping upon .his own intimacy with the great person ages into whose company a whimsical fate had thrown him, but it is sometimes difficult to decide where Hopkins' erraticism ends and Sherwood's deft editing begins. In his memoirs, Winston Churchill sidesteps any responsi.. bility for the staginessof his nautical rendezvous with Roosevelt. With exquisite casualness, he writes that Harry Hopkins told FISH AND CHURCHILL 103 him the President wished very much to have a meeting with him "in some lonely bay or other" and that he accepted.6 On Saturday, August 9, the Princeof Wales and its escort, all camouflaged, joined the American armada assembled in Placen tia Bay as planes circled overhead. The battleship Arkansas,the cruisers Augusta and Tuscaloosa, and a flotilla of destroyers, still in peacetime gray, with gleaming brass and pine-white woodwork, rode at anchor, placed somewhat like chessmen not yet brought forward into play. Franklin D. Roosevelt, wearing a Palm Beach suit, stood under an awning that had been erected upon the forward gun turret of the Augusta.That day, the At lantic Conference began.

When Secretary of State Cordell Hull, wearing his most lamb like expression, had put off inquisitive reporters by telling them that the President had not mentioned any meeting with Prime Minister Churchill when he, Hull, talked with Mr. Roosevelt on the telephone the night before Roosevelt's departure,.he had perhaps spoken with literal veracity but certainly without can dor. He knew about·the meeting. However, Mr. Hull had not been invited along. Under Sec retary Sumner WeIles, a man more consistently pliable under the Roosevelt touch,·had been. In his memoirs, Hull reveals that Welles had written to him on July 28 at White Sulphur Springs, where Hull was resting (he was to be back at his desk in Wash .. ington on Monday, August 4), telling him that the conference with Churchill had been arranged for August 8, 9, and 10. In this letter Welles reported that "he intended to urge the Presi dent, if he expected to discuss more than purely military prob lems, to take someone with him who could keep a precise record of the conversations and of the agreements that might be reached. "7 This was indeed a strange communication, and it accentuates 104 THE ATLANTIC CHARTER the strained relationship that existed between these two officials.

Welles knew perfectly well that Roosevelt expected to discuss "more than purely military problems," for he had himself been alerted to prepare for that; there was no "if" about it. In fact, he went to the conference with a working draftof the Charter in his brief case.8 As for his intending "to urge" the President "to take someone with him who could keep a precise record of the con versations and of the agreeme,l1tsthat might be reached," it is difficultto credit the sincerity of this ostensiblenaivete on Welles' part. One would suppose that but for WeIles' solicitude, Mr. Roosevelt was going to swim out into the Atlantic Ocean to talk to Winston Churchill alone.on a raft. A competent short hand reporter would have sufficedto "keep a precise record," if that were anything to worry about. Actually, both men were to be accompanied by large entourages, and the Under Secretary must have known of these arrangements, for, as he later dis closed,he had rather detailed preparatory conversationswith the President in Washington. 9 His letter to Mr. Hull appears to have been phrased to play down the importance of the impend ing meeting, to assuage the man who, as Secretary of State, would certainly have been a logical functionary to participate in drawing up the aims of the war but who was being left behind.

Franklin D. Roosevelt hardly needed Sumner Welles to urge him to take "someone" with him. He had a natural proclivity for showmanship. Nor did he need to be told bya Louis B. Mayer or a Cecil B. De Mille that there are three essential ele ments of any successful theatrical production: a good dramatic story, a colorful setting, and an impressive cast. With a war rag ing in the world and with all the facilities of the Arlny and the Navy at his disposal for use as props, his fecund imagination had had no difficulty contriving the story and the setting. As for an all-star cast, that was his at the snap of his fingers. Gener als, admirals, and lords, striped-trousered diplomats and slouchFISH AND CHuaCHILL 105 hatted back-room favorites-all big. names, exuding glamour and mystery-were only too happy to participate in the epic drama of the hour and could be summoned from either side of the Atlantic by a telephone call.

With the Prime Minister came his inscrutable chum and con fidant, Lord Cherwell, who had until recently been plain Pro fessor Lindemannand who is terselydescribedby Morton·(who was also on board) as "a tall, unsmiling man"; General Sir John Dill, Chief of the British Army's Imperial General Staff; Ad miralof the Fleet Sir Alfred Pound, the First Sea Lord; Sir Wil frid Freeman, Vice Chief of the Air Staff; Sir Alexander Cado gan, Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs; and their assistants, secretaries, and flunkies. England' s much cartoonednewspaperpublisher,Lord Beaverbrook,Ministerof Supply in Churchill's cabinet, followed by air. Even more ostentatious was the company President Roosevelt chose to surround him at the conference. Included were Gen eral GeorgeC. Marshall, Chief of Staff of the Army; Admiral Harold R. Stark, Chief of Naval Operations; Admiral Ernest J.

King, commander of the Atlantic fleet; General H. H. ("Hap") Arnold,Chiefof the Army Air Forces;AdmiralRichmondK. Turner of the Navy'sWar Plans Divisionand Colonel Charles W.Bundyof the Army's War Plans Section; Harry Hopkins, officiallythe Lend-Lease Administrator, actually the President's right-hand man in.all things, just back from a cabalin the Krem lin; Hopkins' Lend-Lease assistant, Major General James H. Burns; Lend-Lease "Co-ordinator" W. Averell Harriman, gen erally considereda traveling handy man of the President and Hopkins; Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles; General Edwin M. ("Pa") Watson, the President's military aide, arid Captain John R. Beardall, his naval aide. In addition, two of the President' ssons were brought into this momentous gathering~ Mr. Roosevelt had four sons. Two had put on uniforms.·The 106 THE ATLANTIC CHARTEll youngest, Franklin, Jr., in his early twenties, had become an en sign in the Navy. Elliott, a few years older, had been commis sioned a captain in the Army. John and James were civilians.

The President chose Franklin, Jr., and Elliott and had them de tached from their service assignments and brought to his side at the Atlantic Conference, where they figured prominently in the photographs and movie reels taken for public display. This widely advertised the fact that two of the Roosevelt sons were in uniform. When the battleship Prince of Wales hove to in Placentia Bay on Saturday morning, Harry Hopkins was at once transferred to the Augusta. At eleven o'clock, Prime Minister Churchill, wearing a dark blue Trinity House uniform with a visored cap, followed in an Admiralty launch. With naval ceremony and to the strains of God Save the King and The Star-Spangled Ban ner, he was received aboard the President's cruiser. He handed a letter to Mr. Roosevelt and said, "I have the honor, Mr. Presi dent, to hand you a letter from His Majesty the King," as the cameras clicked. The scenewas pictorially impeccable.The President, his shoul ders thrown hack, his head slightly cocked on one side, was handsome, impressive, and photogenic-as usual. Franklin, Jr., and Elliott had been placed in the immediate foreground. Even the veriest dolt would now see that if the world was going to be saved in its great crisis,it was the Rooseveltfamily that was roll ing up its sleevesto save it.

Mr. Churchill stayed on the Augusta to have lunch privately with Mr. Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins. Elliott Roosevelt tells us that when he joined them at the end of the meal, he found the Prime Minister "draining his glass" and talking about the United States' declaring war on Germany "straightaway." We gather from Elliott's report that his father did not say to Mr. Churchill that he still hoped the United States "would not have FISH AND CHURCHILL 107 to get into a shooting war," which was the cheerful tidings he had left with the press when he boarded the Potomacthe pre vious Sunday. On the contrary, he was ruefully explaining to his guest that the temper of the American people was not yet ready. The President was thinking, blurts out Elliott, of "American politics."10 It would appear that this luncheon meeting on the first day of the conference provided a revelation of the basic motivations of the principals. Yet Robert E. Sherwood's account does.not even mention it. Sherwood skips to the formal dinner (dinner jackets and black ties) given by the President that evening. The Ameri cans present, he states, were Roosevelt,WelIes, Stark, Marshall, King, Arnold, Hopkins, and Harriman; on the British. side were Churchill, Cadogan, Pound, Dill, Freeman,and Cherwell.

Perhaps it was a distaste for the inappropriate that forced Sher... wood to omit two names from this.list: Franklin, Jr., and Elliott. They were present, too, but the deletion is understandable, par ticularly since he was going on to state that "during dinner, Roosevelt, Churchill, Hopkins, WeUes and Cadogan got down to business,"ll which business,·it then appears, was nothing more modest than a charter to project the future of most of the world. Elliott, however, is not similarly deterred in his hook. He gloats over his presence at the historic banquet. But from his rib ald, eyewitnessaccount, we gather that the "business" consisted chiefly of Churchillian eloquence on the subject of what the United States must give and do in the war. "Winston Church ill held everyone of· us, that night-and was conscious every second of the time that he was holding us." There was a reserva tion in "Father's" mind, however, when the Prime Minister pleaded, .as Elliott puts it, "that the lion's share of Lend...Lease should go to the British lion." "Father" was thinking of Russia.12 The next morning was Sunday. The President, the entire 108 THE ATLANTIC CHARTER American delegation, and several hundred sailors and marines attended Divine Service on the quarterdeck of the Prince of Wales. They sang and prayed in unison with the British ship's company. 1:he pulpit was draped with the American and Brit ish flags. Fifteen hundred British seamen craned their necks to see the bounteous Mr. Roosevelt, who had, the previous after noon, sent each of them a cardboard carton containing an orange, two apples, two hundred cigarettes, and a half-pound of cheese. (Mr. Roosevelthad chosen to take personal credit for this gift, supplied by the American Navy, by having inserted in each box a card with the words: "The President of the United States sends his compliments and best wishes.")13 So poignant was the ceremony that Churchill's writer, Mor ton, recorded that it was almost intolerable in its emotionalism.

There was a prayer for the President, a prayer for the King and his ministers and generals and admirals, and, lest the supplica tion be too personalized, a prayer for the victory of Right and Truth. Onward Christian Soldiers was one of the hymns chosen for the occasion.As its martial beats rolled out over the water, even the huge fourteen-inch guns of the battleship seemed beati fied, and one could easily forget that some of the Allies in the great impending crusade were renegade Christian soldiers at best, with little godliness to commend them. The propagandistic potentialities of this mise en scene were, of course, a politician's delight. From the standpoint of anyone bent upon wooing the American people toward greater belliger ency, they were reason enough for the whole expedition. In preparation, Elliott Roosevelt had sent a Grumman plane to Lake Gander and back, a trip of almost three hundred miles, to bring Air Force photographers with both still and motion-pic ture film and equipment. The Navy, with its battleships, cruis ers, and destroyers on the spot and its submarine base nearby, naturally had·its own amplitude of such facilities,.but economy Harry Hopkins clasps the hand of Maxim Litvinov, Soviet Ambassador to the United States, after telling a Russian War Relief Rally in Madison Square Garden, New York, on June 22, 1941, that President Roosevelt sent word that the United States would aid the Soviet forces on the battlefield and that the Russian front would not fail. (At this time the United States was officially not at war.) At the left is Mayor Fiorello La Guardia of New York City. World Wide Photos President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill seated for church services on the for ward deck of H.M.S. Prince of Wales at the Atlantic Conference in August, 1941.

Standing behind them at the right are Admiral E. J. King, Commander of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, and General George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army. At the extreme left are two sons of the President, Franklin D., Jr., and Elliott. In the back ground (center) is Sumner Welles, U.S. Under Secretary of State. United Press International On his way both to and from his First meeting with Stalin at Teheran, Roosevelt stopped at Cairo to confer with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek of China. At Cairo Roosevelt put pressure on Chiang to take the Chinese Communists into his government and reneged on the long-promised ANA KIM operation to strengthen Chiang's Nationalist forces in China. World Wide Photos This picture shows President Roosevelt in a moment of ebullience as he poses with Joseph Stalin,the Russian dictator, and Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, on the portico of the Russian Embassy in Teheran, while attending the Teheran Conference in November, 1943.

Standing (left) directly behind Stalin is V. M. Molotov, Russian Foreign Minister. Anthony Eden, British Foreign Minister, is seen standing between Roosevelt and Churchill. United Press International Stalin at Teheran. World Wide Photos Just back from the Teheran Conference, where, by agreements as yet undisclosed, a partition of Poland giving the Soviet Union 48% of the land of prewar Poland had been sanctioned a.nd the balance of power in postwar Europe adjusted in favor of the Soviet Union, President Roosevelt is welcomed in the White House on December 17, 1943, by Rep. Joseph W. Martin of Massachusetts, Minority Leader of the House. Between them in the background is Rep. Sol Bloom of New York. World Wide Photos At the conference table at Yalta, in February, 1945. Alger Hiss is seen in the back ground, between President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Stettinius. He is showing something to Harry Hopkins (bending down), who is seated directly behind the President. United Press International At the end of the road to Russia,a pensive Roosevelt sits Ranked by Stalin and Churchill.

The occasion is the Final dinner of the Yalta Conference. (It was given by Churchill at Vorontsov Villa. Also present were Secretary of State Stettinius (left), Foreign Min isters Eden and Molotov (right), and three interpreters. At this dinner, Roosevelt made an important concession to Stalin on the reparations issue, over Churchill's dissent.) World Wide Photos FISH AND CHURCHILL 109 could hardly be expected in exploitingthis opportunity.As a promotional medium, pictures could be almost as effectual as the lofty words soon to be unloosed to the world from the unique backdrop of this trumped-up naval concentration in a bay on the coast of Newfoundland. So there was more business· on hand than just praying. This, Franklin D. Roosevelt's moment of piety before going forth, like St. George to slay the dragon, had to be seen in movie theaters throughout the land, from Maine to California.

After these rapturous rites of Sunday morning on the deck of a battleship, of which a vast number of pictures were taken, Mr. Roosevelt was treated to a delectation of a more worldly kind a gastronomic one-o£ which no pictures were taken. The grouse-shooting season had opened in England on August I, and Mr. Churchill had arranged for sufficient birds to be put on the Prince of Wales for a luncheon party, with an extra brace for the President. This was the delight served in the wardroom to the two leaders and their staff chiefs after the Divine Service.14 The spirit at once yielded to the flesh. General "Hap" Arnold pronounces that "it was a .good lunch."15 The General had evidently been disporting with the British long enough to catch their habit of understatement. Yet he was sufficiently impressed to record that it started with caviar and vodka, followed by turtle soup, then grouse and champagne, tapering off faultlessly with port, coffee, and brandy. As the smoke of Churchill's long, savory cigars, passed round the table, pervaded the wardroom, it was a genial company of well-fed, well-oiledmen, mostof themdecoratedand beribboned,who iat sipping well into the afternoon, talking about the wars to be fought .

."Hap" Arnold's epicureanism, a capacity not normally cul tivated by the army fare of the professional soldier, had been considerably refined during his recent peregrinations in the 110 THE ATLANTIC CHARTER higher echelons of brass and might. On his visit to England that spring, the red carpet had been rolled out for him. From the many gracious references in his memoirs-such as "we had a delightful lunch at the Savoy" and "we had an interesting din ner at 'The Beaver's' [Lord Beaverbrook's] house in the coun try"-we gather that his "Global Mission" was not always a harrowing experience. The gates of Buckingham Palace had been opened to him. ("Then I entered a room, and there was the King.") He had also been invited for a week end with the Churchills at Dytchley Castle, where life in wartime was so far from grim that a dinner coat was stillderigueur. Here a guard of honor saluted his departure, in the limousine of Air Marshal Sir Charles Portal, after a luxurious visit devoted at least partly to.the elaboration of Mr. Churchill's ideas of "proper propa ganda" to change the thinking of the American people and bring the United States into the war.16 So the caviar-and-grouse feast in the wardroom of the Prince of Wales was not "Hap's" first experience as a gourmet, and there is no reason to believe that the vodka, the champagne, the port, and the brandy rendered him any less able to enjoy the dinner Sir John·Dill gave that night "for some of us" in the Admiral's cabin. By this time he seems to have recovered from the shock of the British requests made the previous day. ("There was one item that stunned me: the British were asking for 6,000 more heavy bombers than we were then producing.") Between the luncheon and the dinner, there was, on the Augusta, a round table discussion, which included. Marshall, Arnold, Dill, and Freeman, on the favorite subject of expanding and accelerating the American war effort.17 Dill and Freeman could hardly have chosen a more propitious moment to find their American mili· tary opposites ina mellow and obliging mood. By Monday, Sir Wilfrid was so pleased with "Hap" that he confided to him: "When Portal comes over, I am going to insist that he see just ·FISH AND CHURCHILL III two people;one is the.President of the United States, and the other is you."18 (The British knew, of course, that it was Harry Hopkins who really held the key to the treasure, but as far as air-force materiel was concerned, it was important to them that General Arnold be an eager expediter, an efficientconduit.) Elliott Roosevelt was also invited to the Prime Minister's vo luptuous Sunday grouse-and-champagne luncheon. Only one incident does he record: "And there was the moment when someone rapped for quiet and cried out: 'Gentlemen, the King!' and there was a great scraping back of chairs and shuffiing of feet and a moment of silencewhile the glasseswere lifted up and then the wine sipped."

That night, and the next, too, the Prime Minister dined with the President on the Augusta. To these intimate meetings the brass and the braid were not invited. But Harry Hopkins was included. So were the two RooseveltboYS.19 On Monday morning, Churchill came over from his battle ship at eleven o'clock for a two-hour conference with the Presi dent. The purpose of this meeting was twofold: to beat into shape the final draft of the joint declaration (the Atlantic Char ter) and to prepare a stiff note to Japan. The State Department and the Foreign Office were represented, appropriately enough, by, respectively, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles and Sir Alexander Cadogan, Britain's Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.20 One might have thought that this quartet-Roosevelt, Church ill, WeUes, and Cadogan-eould proceed to chart the future policy of the world (if indeed they judged themselves qualified to tackle such a project at all) as well, if not better, without the assistance of Harry Hopkins. Surely there was nothing in the background of this man that would prepare him for this role, which would seem at the least to require a developed juridical sense and a profound knowledge of history. Hopkins' recent 112 THE ATLANTIC CHARTER tete-a.-tetewith the Russian tyrant in the Kremlin was hardly a substitute for these prerequisites. Indeed, the mantle of a sage could only look ludicrous on his shoulders. Yet President Roose velt .had him at this meeting, as he had him at·most important meetings.

Harry Hopkins understood the kinetics of politics. Let such as Sumner WeUes fret about punctilio; let h~m excite himself over the absence of a qualifying phrase in a document. If the exigenciesof the moment demanded a charter, with Harry Hop kins present no nice concern over precision of meaning could long delay it. Words for the purpose would be put together and agreed upon without much ado and with little exertion required from Mr. Roosevelt. A wag in Washington had once remarked that Sumner WeUes glanced in a mirror every three hours "to be sure the halo was still there." But virtue was never likely to get out of hand with Harry Hopkins in the room, which is prob ably one reason why he was so constantly at his master's elbow. By the time the British sailedfor home on Tuesday, "Winston" and "Franklin" had achieved a well-buttered camaraderie. This was to be expected, since both came to the conference with the same objective in mind, i.e., to hasten the entry of the United States into outright war. The Atlantic Charter was to glorify the warin the eyesof the American people. Roosevelt'seagerness to do this overrode all other considerations.

One would have supposed that in any game with the Prilue Minister, the President held all the trump cards at that time, but to a surprising extent, the reverse was true. Thus on Monday, Mr. Churchill reported in a telegram to his cabinet, addressed to the ·Lord Privy Seal: "For the sake of speedy agreement I have little doubt he [the President] will accept our amendments." Referring to one of these amendments, he said: "He will not like this very much, but he attaches so much importance to the Joint Declaration, which he believeswill affect the whole moveFISH AND CHURCHILL 113 ment of United States opinion,that I think he will agree." He did agree. Churchill, it appears, was rightly confident that he had the President in his pocket, but. there was the haunting doubt of whether the President yet had the American people in his pocket. So'when. the Briton asked in his telegram that the War, Cabinet be summoned that night to approve what he was doing, he cautioned. that "it would be most imprudent on our part to raise unnecessary. difficulties" and added 'that' he feared the President would be "very much upset" if no joint statement could be issued, and "grave and vital interests might be affected."

Inlplicit in this message is a recommendation that his 'col leagues not take too seriously all of the content of the strange declaration which he was asking them to approve. We know that they did not. As Sherwood puts it, the officialsof the British government never regarded the Atlantic Charter as much more than "a publicity handout.,,21 Certain objections which Sumner WeUes had raised, at the Monday~morning session, to the flabby wording favored by Mr. Churchill (on the crucial subject of the availability of the re sources of the world to all peoples) died a quick death in the aft ernoon. Harry Hopkins had contributed the opinion that it was inconceivable that the"issuance of the joint declaration could be held up "by a matter of this kind." WeUeshad thought President Roosevelt stood with him on the principle involved, but the President capitulated, as Mr. Churchill had known he would.

Welles later wrote: "I can only surmise that afterwards Harry Hopkins persuaded him that the questions at issue would not be of sufficient importance to \varrant any delay." Time was of the essence, Roosevelt told Welles. Why quibble now about the dis criminatory trade practices of Great Britain and her dominions? Churchill and Cadogan had, on Saturday evening, presented the first draft, some parts of which, according to WeUes, "meant precisely nothing." Welles prepared an alternative draft which 114 THE ATLANTIC CHARTER Roosevelt edited early Monday morning. By eleven o'clock, WeUes had the third draft ready for the four-man meeting in the President's quarters. The next day, the conference ended and the Prime Minister went home. Thus was born what Churchill's accompanying chronicler, Morton, called "a new charter for Humanity." Harry Hopkins acted as a sort of midwife. The period of gestation, be it noted, was not long. However, as Morton professed to see it, it was "a splendid charter, but one that, after all, was drawn up long ago upon a mountain side in Galilee." Such plagiarism, if it be that, might perhaps explain the briskness of the literary composition that took place on the cruiser Augusta, although the image Mor ton contrives, of two master politicians dashing· out to sea on warships to rephrase the Sermon on the Mount, is a bit discon certing. The haste with which "a new charter for Humanity"

was brought forth comes to mind when one reads what was said of it by the English magazine T wientieth Century in its ·next is sue: "Even as a piece of rhetoric, the Anglo-American Declara tion will simply not do." (As events proved, it was as a piece of rhetoric, and as that only, that the Charter did do.) This was the final text: Joint Declaration by the President and the Prime Minister August 12, 1941 The President of the United States of America and the Prime Min ister, Mr. Churchill, representing His Majesty's. Government in the United Kingdom, being met together, deem it right to make known certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries on which they base their hopes for a better future for the world. First, their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other. Second, they desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned.

Third, they respect the right of all peoples· to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see soverFISH AND CHURCHILL lIS eign rights and self-government restored to those who ha.ve been forcibly deprivedof them. Fourth, they will endeavor, with due respect for their existing obli gations, to further the enjoyment by all States, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity. Fifth, they desire to bring about the fullest collaboration between all nations in the economic field, with the object of securing, for all, improved labor standards, economic advancement, and social security. Sixth, after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny, they hope to see established a.. peace. which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and· want.

Seventh, such a peace should enable all men to traverse the high seas and oceans without hindrance. Eighth, they believe that all the nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons, must come to the abandonment of the use of force. Since no future peace can be maintained if land, sea, or air armaments continue to be employed by nations which threaten, or may threaten, aggression outside of their frontiers, they believe, pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of gen eral security, that the disarmament of such nations is essential. They will likewise aid and encourage all other practicable measures which will lighten for peace-loving peoples the crushing burden of arma ments. The "new charter for Humanity" did bear one resemblance to Divine Writ. There were no mortal signatures affixed,no sealing wax. Mr. Churchill also took advantage of the occasion to see to·it that Roosevelt shook his fist at the Japanese again. It.was now known that the imposition of economic sanctions on July 26 had put Japan in an intolerable predicament. As we have seen, this was no surprise to Roosevelt, who had been warned by the Navy that the embargo meant war.22 Nor could Sumner Welles,with the accumulated information of the State Department at his dis posal, have harbored any illusion. He could not have been un familiar, for example, with the Hornbeck Memorandum of Jan116 THE ATLANTIC CHARTER uary 3, 1935, in which the Chief of the Division of Far Eastern Affairs stated what must have been almost axiomatic in diplo matic circles: "It is obvious that Japan either must have accessto enlarged markets for her goods and must further develop an in dustrialized economy or must starve. The inherent virility and vitality of the Japanese people preclude any expectation that they will passivelyaccept the latter alternative." As for Mr. Churchill, surely no one needed to expostulate with an Englishman10n the problems of Japan's insularity, and he was geographer enough to know that there was in Japan, which has meager natural re sources, a population of eighty million occupying an area one twentieth the size of Australia, which had a population of only sevenmillion. So it is somewhat surprising to read in the Church ill memoirs: "It had not perhaps been realized by any of us how powerful they [the sanctions] were."23Be that as it may, it was agreed that a truculent American note would be dispatched to the Japanese. Their dilemma was to be pressed upon them.

Churchill telegraphed his cabinet: "He [Roosevelt] has agreed to end his communication with a severe warning, which I drafted."24(It is no wonder, then, that when the attack on·Pearl Harbor came, the exultant Mr. Churchill blurted out to the House of Commons: "This is the object that I have dreamed of, aimed atand worked for; and now ithas come to pass!")25 The Princeof Walesweighed anchor at 5:00 P.M. on Tuesday. In a pleasing little farewell ceremony, the President and the Prime Minister exchanged "autographed photographs," Morton tellsus. A cordial message had been sent to the Russian dictator just before the final parting. Back on the Princeof Wales, Churchill again telegraphed his government. "They"-the pronoun hangs in the air-"are send ing us immediately 150,000 more rifles,and I look for improved allocations of heavy bombers and tanks. I hope they will take over the whole ferry service and deliver both in England and in I \ FISH AND CHURCHILL 117 West Africa by American pilots, many of whom may stay for war..training purposeswith US."26 He hoped that his colleagues would feel that his missionhad been "fruitful." From the King came a message of congratulation.Nine days before, Franklin D. Roosevelthad startedout on what he had calleda fishingtrip, but it was WinstonChurchillwho made the big catch.

Lord Beaverbrook,the Minister of Supply, who, had flown over at the Prime Minister'sinvitation,was now sent on by air, in the companyof W. AverellHarriman, to Washington,where a localwit was quotedin Time as saying,perhapswith more per spicacitythan graciousness,"Beaverbrookcameover to see if the Britishhad left anything."27 There was one point on which Roosevelt took full charge. That was the form of the Charter and the.timing and manner of its release to the world. He insistedthat it not be inscribedon parchment and signed and sealed as a treaty. That would have required him to submit it to the Senatefor ratification,and, as Sherwoodfrankly states,"he was taking no chanceson that."28 It was merelyto be mimeographedand released. "Nevertheless,"writes Sherwood,"its effect was cosmic and historic." Sumner WeIles has written that "it was preciselyas valid in its binding effectas if it had been signed and sealed,"29 therebyintroducinga new conceptinto the law of international compactswhichmight be designated,for want of any other pass port, as the Welles Doctrine and which has, at least, the merit of clothingwith legality,evenif by sheerfiat,an ostensibleagree ment which the massesof the world were allowedto think was solemnlyconsecrated.A"Joint Declaration"presupposesa meet ing of minds, i.e.,an agreementor compact.As for Franklin D.

Roosevelt,whether or not he consideredhis agreementwith the Prime Minister"valid in its binding effect"in a technical,legal sense,there is no doubt that he intended the efIeetof its release lIB THE ATLANTIC CHA'RTER to the world to be "cosmic and historic." It was to strike the American scene like a bolt of lightning. He had arranged that it be released in London and Washing .. ton On Thursday, August 14,while he would still be at sea.When the conference ended, Welles was sent on to Washington with the President's instructions. Just as WeUes was leaving the har.. hqr, he received this message, which Roosevelt, with his usual finessein such matters, had ordered Admiral Stark to send him: U.S.S. Augusta Ship Harbor, Newfoundland August 12, 1941 The President said he would like no release of' the names of those who accompanied the President until Saturday on which day you may release it. His reasons are that he wants the. press release to stand out "like a sore thumb," with nothing to detract from it or to cause any other dis cussion; then when it has had time to be.thoroughly digested, just of itself, to go ahead and give out the names of the rest of the party-on Saturday.

H. R. Stark 30 The 4'sorethumb" technique was spectacularly successful.On Saturday, when the yacht Potomac, with the President again on board, came around the breakwater and dropped anchor at Rockland, Maine, the country was still agog, and fifty newsmen, radiomen, cameramen, and technicians were waiting for the great performer. Broadcasters babbled into microphones. He was home from the mysteries of the Atlantic, from hostile seas, from a conference that had no parallel. The mellifluous phrases of ~~ Charter had already cast their spell. It was an extraordi nary Rooseveltian coup, more dramatic than the cross-country flight in 1932to address the Chicago convention which first nom inated him for the Presidency.

FISH AND CHURCHILL 119 In the wardroom of the Potomac,the President received the White House press corps. He sat calm and relaxed, with Harry Hopkins nearby. To the newsmen, who had been through thir teen days of irritating suspense, he talked informally, smoothly, and -soothinglybut was sufficientlyevasiveto allow an intriguing air of grandiose mystery to hover. He said that Anglo-American understanding was now complete as regarded developments on every continent of the world and that he and the Prime Minister had outlined a course of action for any eventuality that might develop anywhere. Some newsmen nodded knowingly at this. Manifestly, anyone who wanted war could easily read into this equivocacy a portent of imminent participation. But to the ques tion "Do you think we are any closer to entry into the war?" the President replied cryptically that he would not say so. Whereupon Mr. Roosevelt went to Washington by train. His first moves were to confer with Secretary of State Cordell Hull and to summon Congressional. leaders to the White House for a first-hand report of the conference. But there was nothing to deliberate about. The whole affair, including the Charter of the Atlantic, was a fait accompli.

In Great Britain, the London Daily Sketch refused to believe that the Prime Minister and the President had conferred··only to produce "a piece of oratory." To Britons in general, the Church in-Roosevelt conference was worth the'effort and expense·only if it brought the United States deeper into the war. They were disappointed that Roosevelt had not openly committed his coun~ try to declare war, but they hoped that his understanding with Churchill was like an iceberg, the largest part of which remains invisible. As for the Charter, that was thought to be mainly for Ameri can consumption. Its eight points were met with widespread in difference in England, and Canada, where the more outspoken newspapers and magazines brushed it off with such phrases as 120 THE ATLANTIC CHARTER "stale magniloquence," "a rhetorical manifesto," and "unreal istic." One London newspaper (the DailyExpress)growled that the English people were more interested in war aims than peace aims (a fact which, unfortunately for the future, was only too true). ··Purthermore, English statesmen had been attending in ternational conferences for a long time, much longer than the Americans. There was much less inclination to whoop things up over mere words. The London Times did manage, dutifully, to rejoice that "the world now knows beyond doubt what we are fighting for," but the Canadian Forum, in its next issue, ridi culed "the gushing efforts" of editors and columnists who took that tack. "None of them," it said, "professes to discuss the actual content of the eight points-and for the obvious reason that there is nothing much in them to discuss.... About the only con..

elusion wecan reach is that Mr. Churchill must be a better sailor than President Roosevelt. He has notoriously been opposed throughout to committing his government to any war aims ex cept the defeat of Hitler. He now concedes to the president a few pious generalities, including two of the president's 'four freedoms,' and in return he no doubt goes home with some very specific promises of American assistance." A piece of oratory or not, the Atlantic Charter no doubt de servesa place among the memorabilia of British history. It may be trotted out by historians of the future to illustrate the fatuity, or the perfidy, of Anglo-American statesmanship in the Second World War, which is perhaps an ignoble destiny, considering its flamboyant origin. In 1941, however, its consequences were real, if devious. Viscount Samuel did bother·to discuss the eight points in the Contemporary Review and to argue that some were meaningless and others were silly, yet·he said that the Charter would always be "outstanding in the history of these times."

Winston Churchill gives us the key to this paradox. He writes in his memoirsthat "the profoundand far-reachingimportanceof FISH AND CHURCHILL 121 this Joint Declaration was apparent." But it is also apparent from his treatment of the subject in his memoirs that in his mind, the importance did not lie in any probability that the eight points would be honored at the end of the war. These had been cast off long before Mr. Churchill wrote his memoirs. It lay first, of course, in the efficacy of the proclaimed principles as soothing sirup fora gullible American public and, secondly, in the fact that President Roosevelt's very words, pronounced in the Charter, were a casusbelli.The German government could take them in no other way. Churchill writes: The fact alone of the United States, still technically neutral, joining with a belligerent Power in making such a declaration was astonish ing.a1 Mr. Churchill knew the restraints put upon neutrals by inter national law, and he had read the American Constitution, which gives to the Congress alone the power to declare war. So it was natural that he should consider Roosevelt's conduct "astonish ing," pleasing though it was to the British and the Russians. He prided himself on having induced Roosevelt· practically to· de clare war. "The inclusion in it," he goes on to say, "0£ a refer ence to 'the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny' (this was based on a phrase appearing in my original draft) amounted to a chal lenge which in ordinary times would have implied warlike ac tion." A challenge to whom? To the existing government of Germany. A challenge to the death. (It "implied warlike action"

this time, too. In September, Roosevelt announced orders to the Navy in the Atlantic to "shooton sight,"and in O,ctober,in his Navy Day speech,he said,"The shootinghas started.") The message was also plain to the heads of the Soviet govern ment. The tyranny which President Roosevelt was going to see destroyed was the Nazi one, not their own. It was important to them to know this.

122 THE ATLANTIC ,CHARTER Whatever Churchill's private feelings may have been, he played the game to the end. On the Sunday evening after his return to England, at the hour when the greatest number of the American people were sitting quietly at home, he made a broad cast. It was beamed to the United States and had been widely advertised in advance. Never was his voicemore sonorous, his ca dences more exquisite!y executed, his judging of American sus ceptibilities more astute. The meeting with President Roosevelt, he said, was "symbolic." It symbolized "the deep underlying uni ties of the English-speaking people throughout the world." This was fraternal, as befitted the occasion, but it was not grand enough for Mr. Churchill. Sure of his mastery, he rose to a higher plane. It symbolized, he intoned, "something even more majestic, namely the marshalling of the good forces of the world againstthe evil forces."32 Coming from another man, such sanctimony might have evoked either disgust or laughter, but Mr. Churchill brought tears to many eyes. In the spell of his oratory, the element of self exaltation was overlooked, and forgotten were the British Em pire's long record of conquests and subjugations, her invention of the concentration camp during the Boer War, the scrapping of the Fourteen Points after Germany surrendered in World War I, the grabbing of vast territories in Africa in 1919, and other skeletons which were moldering in His Majesty's royal closet and which had contributed to the international reputation of "perfidious Albion." Also forgotten was the moral record of Britain's new ally to the east, the semi-Asiatic despotism which had only the year before been expelled from the League of Na tions for aggression, at which time Mr.. Churchill himself had made the historic remark that "Communism rots.the soul of a nation." Not in the least abashed by any of this, Mr. Churchill put the present war up to his American listeners as a simple clash between the "good forces of the world" and the "evil forces."

FISH AND CHU~CHILL 123 Then came the shining promise. He announced that the Eng lish-speaking nations were going to lead "the broad toiling masses in all the continents" out of "their miseries" and to "the broad high-road of freedom and justice." If the Americans needed a cause to fight for, what more could they want than this? For good measure, he added this sweetener: "This is the highest honor and the most glorious opportunity which could ever have come to any branch of the human race!" Surely Hitler had nothing to do with the miseries of most of the "broad toiling masses" on the continents of the world. And did these unfortunates include the beaten-down subjects of Stalin, Molotov, et ai, which notorious gentlemen now presum ably came within Mr. Churchill's category of "the good forces"? Had Mr. Churchill asked these new allies of his what their post war plans for Europe and Asia were? On none of this was he specific, or even articulate.

The flaws were fairly safe from detection. The Prime Minis ter's appeal was emotional rather than analytical, and his art was irresistible to most Americans. Months of incessant propaganda had predisposed them to acceptance of this type of approach. Actually, the speech was an eclipse of fact, a sheer tour de force of distortion, as events were inexorably to prove. But Mr. Churchill had the sagacity to turn to religion on this Sunday eve and, at the same time, to shroud with silence the doctrinaire atheism of his Communist allies. He described the hymns sung on the deck of the battleship Prince of Wales, good old Chris-. tian hymns familiar to his audience. We sang "Onward Christian Soldiers," and indeed, I felt that this was no vain presumption but that we had a right to feel that we were serving a cause for the sake of which a trumpet has sounded on high. The war had indeed been made holy.

By coincidence, Mr. Churchill's archenemy, Adolf Hitler, also 124 THE ATLANTIC CHARTER had a habit of using the word "masses" with the redundant ad jective "broad" preceding it. "If you want the sympathy of the broad masses," he had written in Mein Kampf, "then you must tell them the crudest and most stupid things." One of the few virtues found alongside the roster of Hitler's viceswas the frank ... ness to lay bare his methods for all to see and to copy if they wished. In this instance, Machiavelli had given the same counsel some four hundred years before. It had been put into practice by many illustrious figures in modern European history, who, how ever, unlike Machiavelli and Hitler, possesseda reticence, or del icacy, which would never have permitted such self-revelation. If in August of 1941 one had set out consciously to compose a crude and stupid thing to say about the war then raging in Eu rope, one could not have done better than to say that the triumph of the .Soviet military hordes, which was one of the objectives and the inevitableefIect of the Allied coalition, would spread freedom and justice to the peoples who would lie in their path.

It could only be more preposterous to suggest···that Onward Christian Soldiers be the theme song. The cynicism of Adolf. Hitler should not have shocked too greatly the inhabitants of Mr. Churchill's island homeland. The Scotch novelist Henry Mackenzie had long ago given them this thought to ponder: Mankind, in the gross,is a gaping monster,that loves to be deceived, and has seldom been disappointed. The American people had recently heard Hitler's warmed-up version of this old aphorism quoted up and down the land to prove that Hitler was a scoundrel. Most of them were blissfully unaware that the potion he prescribed was an old recipe and that presidents and prime ministers could mix it as well as a Fuhrer and often had.

FISH AND CHURCHILL 125 Incredible as it may seem, even the House of Commons, which one would assume to have some sophistication, was to hear from the lips of Winston Churchill on February 27, 1945, and to ac cept docilely, this amazing statement: I know of no Government which stands to its obligations even in its own despite more solidly than the Russian Soviet Government. ss Of this, the noted English naval historian Captain Russell Gren fell has said: "This must surely rank as one of the most serious political misjudgments in history."34 Perhaps Grenfell underrated the Prime Minister's judgment by overrating his candor. Chl:lrchillcould not possibly have been speaking from conviction; for a quarter of a century he had been saying the contrary. Peremptorily, he silenced debate: "1 decline absolutely to embark here on a discussion about Russian good faith." By then, Stalin had long since repudiated the Atlantic Charter pledge to seek no territorial aggrandizement, had gob bled up with the ruthlessness of a Ghengis Khan the three Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, was in the process of seizing parts of Poland, Rumania, Czechoslovakia, and Germany as permanent annexations to Russia, and had conspired, for a secret price, to violate his neutrality treaty with Japan, as Mr.

Churchill, just back from Yalta, knew. The record of the Soviet government from the early days of Bolshevism had been one of chicanery, perfidy, and default because these were openly pre scribed tactics of Leninism and Stalinism in the grand strategy for the Communist world revolution. The more recent moves of the Red dictatorship had demonstrated beyond cavil that it would not be deterred in its imperialistic ambitions by any moral com mitments. We can only believe that Churchill made his statement to 126 THE ATLANTIC CHARTER Commons as a gesture to which he felt committed, a sort of dip lomatic obeisance which Yalta compelled. We do know that at this stage of his life he moved about, as he later wrote, "with an aching heart and a mind oppressed by forebodings."35 Nine years later, Sir Winston, still at his euphonies as his eightieth birthday approached, was found at Blackpool, England, telling a political meeting that if the United States were to withdraw its troops and armaments from Europe, that "would condemn all Europe to Russian communist subjugation and our famous and beloved island to death and ruin."36 Actuatly, from the moment of Hitler's flaming death and the triumph everywhere of "the good forces" over the "evil forces,"

Europe had never been out of that mortal peril. Churchill had made his own volte-facepublicly as far back as March 5, 1946, when in his famous Fulton speech he dolefully intoned: From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain had descended across the continent ..•. Police governments are pre vailing in nearly every case.... Communist parties or fifth columns constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization.* Winston Churchill's tongue-in-cheek blurb to the House of Commons in 1945 after Yalta ("Their word is their bond," he even brought himself to say of the Kremlin masters) is one of those assertions, sometimes resorted to in desperate polemics, which in many minds defy contradiction by their very enormity. They stun the intellect by sheer audacity, and opposition freezes. It has been said that politics is the science of exigencies.In fair... ness to Churchill, it should be recalled that in those days he had always, in his public utterances, to take into account the wishes of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who, says Captain Grenfell, was "in =II: Speech at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri. Roosevelt was dead; Truman· was now President.

FISH AND CHURCHILL 127 a stateof infatuatedhallucinationregardingthe virginpurityof Marshal Stalin's motives." The role Churchill deigned to play was often an unenviable one. More pleasant to perform, perhaps, though no less grotesque, was his task on that Sunday evening back in August, 1941,when, by radio, he assumed command of the forces of God on earth against Satan and graciously offered to share his generalship with the President of the United States.