THE PRESIDENCY: Home from the Sea

In the damp, disused, musty wharf shed the 50 men stood and sat, impatient, griped, chilled: newsmen, cameramen, radiomen, technicians, bottleholders. They had been waiting a long time—two weeks at Swampscott, Mass., two days at Rockland, Me. They were angry as a bunch of bears with sore haunches. They were the reception committee for Franklin Roosevelt, returning from the greatest fishing trip that any President of the U.S. had ever undertaken.

The fog, heavy all day over the far reaches of Penobscot Bay, had gradually lifted and faded; about 3 o’clock the watchers saw the top-heavy, bulging, comfortable Presidential yacht coming around the breakwater, could see beyond it the escorting Coast Guard cutter Calypso, sleek, dangerous, moving like a loafing shark.

By now the broadcasters were babbling into microphones with their perpetual synthetic excitement; police stiffened into nervous alertness; the blue-grey Potomac slowly nosed alongside the wharf, safely home from the mysteries of the Atlantic.

Strange Fruit. President Roosevelt was back from the most momentous journey of all his 200,000-odd miles of White House travel. He had been gone from Washington 13 days. For most of that time his whereabouts had been unknown to his country. He brought back his half of the unknown fruits of a conference that had no parallel. The U.S., though not at war, had conferred through the head of its Government with Great Britain, a nation at war, on how Nazi Germany was to be defeated, had further agreed on “certain common principles” as a basis for a future peace, a better world. And fundamental to the “common principles” was one dominating new world idea: control of the post-war world by the U.S. and Great Britain.

Undoubtedly the President and the Prime Minister had discussed in the frankest terms—they are that kind of men—all the probable next moves in the world conflict.

From this great venture on hostile seas into strange diplomatic waters—this extraordinary Roosevelt coup, more dramatic than his cross-country flight in 1932 to address the Chicago Convention which first named him for the Presidency—Franklin Roosevelt returned. He returned not to wave his hat to a cheering crowd, but to face his White House press corps —including the men who usually defend him from all critics and laugh at his humor—this time hopping mad.

His great journey had all but ended in a bad press, for the newspapers of the U.S. were angry. They had been left out. Prime Minister Winston Churchill had carried along British reporters—”literary men” from the Ministry of Information—but Mr. Roosevelt had not. The first flash confirming the meeting had come from Ottawa a few minutes before the White House pressmen had been allowed to release it. Then London had blanketed the U.S. report by providing all the interesting details. The British were told more under censorship than the U.S. without it.

Even the newsreels had been taken by British cameramen; the first films to appear were unusually amateurish. The appearance in the news pictures of Ensign Franklin Jr. and Captain Elliott Roosevelt, fully uniformed, wearing the shoulder aiguillettes of Presidential aides, seemed to exasperate many a U.S. citizen who likes everything about the President but his family. When Lord Beaverbrook, British Minister of Supply, turned up suddenly in Washington, all these cumulative exasperations were expressed by a local wit who snarled: “Beaverbrook came over to see if the British had left anything.”

No News Today. As the Potomac eased to the dock, the big, rosy-jowled face of Major General Edwin M. (“Pa”) Watson bloomed suddenly over the rail. Stentoriously Pa whispered to White House Secretary Bill Hassett: press conference immediately. The wharf slip was cranked up to deck level; the horde of sweating, shoving newsmen belched through a bottleneck of broad-shouldered Secret Service men and Maine State troopers, poured through a hatch, clattered down the companionway’s 20 steps, found themselves, a little embarrassed, suddenly before the President.

Franklin Roosevelt—who had been tipped off by radio to the reception that awaited him—sat still, calm, relaxed, happy; his hair slicked back, black doughnut circles gone from his eyes. He wore loose grey tweeds, a light blue shirt, striped blue-on-blue tie, gold collar pin. Sallow Harry Hopkins sat near by against the wardroom’s green-grey bulkhead, eyes narrowed watchfully except when he twitched a smile at a face he knew. From the table’s green felt top the President picked a Camel, lit it, stuffed it with his thick awkward fingers into his ivory holder. He hadn’t any news, he said—an old friendly opening gambit with the newsmen.

Then he talked, smoothly, soothingly. The newsmen’s hackles sank. He explained away one irritation after another. But with it in his power to spill the news that the country was eager for, he told nothing. Names of ships and dates were out, he said. He would not even say how long or how often he had conferred with Churchill. All he could and would say was that he had been aboard the cruiser Augusta and Churchill aboard H.M.S. Prince of Wales. The only scene on which he was willing to dwell was the Sunday morning church service held on the fantail of the Prince of Wales, the fraternizing of the British tars and U.S. bluejackets, the mingling of American and British uniforms—the scene that photographs had already pictured to the world. Instead he offered two opinions: 1) that the Russians can last throughout the winter to fight again next spring with materials sent by the U.S.; 2) that the U.S. was no nearer war than before he conferred with Churchill.

Pleased with himself as a canary-full cat, the President after the conference held up the train for half an hour while reporters filed their first wires—an unusual gesture of appeasement. But the U.S. was not to get the story of the meeting of President and Prime Minister, not at least from Franklin Roosevelt.

The Meeting. The story of the meeting came to the U.S. press bit by bit, mostly from British sources. The 9,050-ton Augusta with its large escort of cruisers and destroyers, the 35,000-ton Prince of Wales with its own numerous escorts—together a fleet large enough to fight a major sea battle if an enemy appeared—rendezvoused on the North Atlantic coast.

The place was almost certainly Newfoundland, perhaps Placentia Bay, not many miles away from the huge new U.S. naval base now building. There the coast line is rugged and barren, as it was in the few glimpses appearing in the pictures released, and the weather mostly foggy as it was described in the accounts of the meeting.

At the first meeting Mr. Churchill boarded the Augusta, moving jauntily in his cocky walk, a long, specially made cigar crunched in his teeth. He wore his Trinity House uniform of dark blue, the effect of its eight brass buttons slightly marred by the grey marks where he had hastily brushed away the little mound of silver grey cigar ash that collects on his stomach as he sits slouched down.* His zippered ankle-high shoes were half unzipped. He handed a letter to Franklin Roosevelt, said: “I have the honor, Mr. President, to hand you a letter from His Majesty the King.”

Franklin Roosevelt smiled and thanked him. The little rotund, stooped, pink-faced, bulldog-jawed Britisher, his visored cap askew over the remnants of sandy yellow hair that once was red, stood beaming, like a deceptively diffident cherub. The tall, easy-mannered American, with a jaw just as stubborn, stood with his huge shoulders thrown back, his head cocked on one side, as it always is when he meets something new and important.

That was only their first meeting. Before they parted they knew each other a great deal better. Except on Sunday, when the Augusta pulled alongside the Prince of Wales and the President crossed a short gangplank to attend services, all the meetings took place on the U.S. cruiser.

For at least three and possibly as many as five days Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill conferred together in the President’s cabin, alone.

The Gathering. In the President’s party, besides his sons, were Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles; General George Catlett Marshall, Army Chief of Staff; Admiral Harold Raynsford Stark, Chief of Naval Operations; Lend-Lease Administrator Harry Hopkins; Admiral King of the Atlantic Fleet; Lend-Lease Coordinator W. Averell Harriman, not to mention his Military Aide Pa Watson, his Naval Aide Captain Beardall, his physician Admiral Mclntire.

With Churchill were the Hon. Sir Alexander George Montagu Cadogan, Permanent Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, a man whose refrigerated attitude somewhat resembles Mr. Welles’s; Lord Cherwell, the Prime Minister’s science adviser, recently knighted (June 12), a pioneer advocate of the balloon barrage, a vegetarian chum who constantly beats Churchill at Monopoly; Lord Beaverbrook, Britain’s Minister of Supply; General Sir John Greer Dill, chief of the British Army’s Imperial Staff; Sir Wilfrid Rhodes Freeman, Vice Chief of the Air Staff; Admiral of the Fleet Sir Alfred Dudley Pickman Rogers Pound, First Sea Lord.

Not once, however, did this entire staff, or even parts of it, meet together with the two masterminds.

Such conferences as took place between the staffs were informal, and all was not work. The U.S. naval officers entertained the British; and were entertained in return. After the church services on Sunday Churchill treated Roosevelt to the first grouse of the British season, with champagne served liberally, in a luncheon in the Wales officers’ wardroom. The President then talked to the British about the war. On the next day the procedure was exactly reversed, the President gave a dinner (black ties) aboard the Augusta.

One person present at the church services on the Wales deck later told a friend that Churchill was much moved as the chaplains carried on the service, as the two crews sang 0 God, Our Help in Ages Past. Churchill, said this account, finally said loudly, gruffly: “I’m not a religious man. But I thank God that such a man as you is the head of your Government at a time like this.”

The chaplains led another song: Onward, Christian Soldiers. The President and the Prime Minister sang lustily. But their voices were drowned in the drone of the patrol planes overhead.

Friends Part. What passed in the long sessions when Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill sat together dredging, squeezing, milking each other’s minds, only they know in full. But of some of the things which passed no one who knew the two men was in any doubt:

Not all their hours were spent in intensive business. Churchill, in spite of his lisp (which he suppresses when he makes a speech), is a superb story teller, with an irony that eats like slow acid. The President, utterly fluent, is an engaging conversationalist. Two such men do not get quickly to the subject of their business.

But in the course of their repeated conferences, Churchill smoking a succession of his huge black cigars and Roosevelt chain-smoking cigarets, they inevitably returned again & again to the things they have in common, a love of planning on a grand scale.

And although neither has a taste for details, they did hatch and execute on the spot two plans—a draft of war aims to put before the world and an invitation to Stalin to confer on Russia’s war needs. What else they planned in the course of the leisurely conferences may pale into insignificance beside another thing that they accomplished: a meeting of minds.

When the time for parting finally arrived, the President formally said good-by to the British Staff. Last, the Prime Minister waddled briskly up, casually saluting in a sweeping sidearm gesture. They shook hands a long time, Roosevelt talking rapidly, gaily, Churchill grunting genially, his eyes glinting. This might be the first of many meetings, or the last time each would see the other. But Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill had taken each other’s measure—and they parted intimates.

* Trinity House is a Mariner’s organization chartered by King Henry VIII in 1514 as a “Guild, Fraternity or Brotherhood of the Most Glorious and Undividable Trinity of St. Clement.” Duties: to erect and manage coast lighthouses and buoys, operate the pilot service in harbors. In 1604 members were divided into Elder and Younger Brethren. There are 13 Elder Brethren, two from the Navy, eleven from the Merchant Marine; and 200 Younger Brethren, elected by the Elders. Trinity House is now a corporation. Churchill is an Elder Brother.