U.S. At War: Grandpa’s Christmas

The eleventh Christmas since Franklin Roosevelt was first elected President was also the first he had spent at Hyde Park since 1932. Then he had four grandchildren. By last week, five marriages and three divorces later, he had 14 grandchildren, and the seven who were on hand to spend Christmas with him made the 20 bric-a-brac-filled rooms of the Hyde Park mansion seem precariously crowded. The mother of John Roosevelt Boettiger, 4, found his overcoat pocket crammed with keys he had filched from White House doors. Grandpa Roosevelt—his hair considerably whiter than in 1932 and, as he remarked to a photographer, thinning just short of baldness—presided at gift-unwrapping in the library, carved, the turkey at-dinner and read aloud, as always, Dickens’ Christmas Carol. Of the reading, Grandma Roosevelt reported in her column that “he cuts the whole story, of course, but he is so expert at reading it now, he can hold even the small children’s attention for a little while.”

At 3 p.m. on Christmas Eve the adults at the family gathering clustered in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial Library while the President, broadcasting to U.S. armed services around the world on what was announced as history’s greatest hookup, prosily summarized and confirmed the headline news and dope stories of the past several weeks. General Eisenhower was to command the U.S.-British invasion of Europe, heavy casualties are to be expected, Mr. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin had “got along fine” at Teheran, they had agreed that in the future international peace would be kept, if necessary, by international force. This was perhaps the poorest of all the President’s thousands of speeches in the past decade. Where the people wanted facts and news, he gave them rounded generalities.*

If the President planned to report any fresh details of Cairo and Teheran to the American people, or to offer any concrete proposals, he was perhaps saving them for his State of the Union speech to Congress.

*First reports from abroad indicated that not many soldiers actually heard the speech. Britain got it only by shortwave, which few British sets was canceled because it competed with the King’s braodcast.