Books: Ambassador’s Report

LETTER FROM GROSVENOR SQUARE (279 pp.)—John Gilbert Winant—Houghton Mifflin ($3).

The death three weeks ago, by his own hand, of onetime Ambassador John Gilbert Winant gave a tragic urgency to the message of this book. Winant took his life in despair; yet he left behind this reaffirmation of a faith—the faith that had sustained the people of Great Britain (and the U.S. citizens who tried to aid them) in the months before Pearl Harbor.

Written in the form of a letter to an old friend, Letter from Grosvenor Square tells a little of what was not said at that time. It is a simple, forthright account of Winant’s work in London, from February 1941 to Pearl Harbor. It is a very good book, honest, unassuming, completely sincere.

In the course of it, Winant does more to re-establish the reputation of Franklin Roosevelt than all the fevered praise of the writers of their recollections of him, and to recall him as he seemed then—not the toast-drinker of Yalta, or the self-righteous social reformer, but the determined advocate of aid to a Great Britain that was fighting for its life.

Experience. Letter from Grosvenor Square also throws a good deal of light on the obscurities of Winant’s character and life. When he left college (Princeton 1913), he studied with General Arthur L. Conger, afterwards head of G-2 under Pershing. General Conger was one of the greatest U.S. authorities on Prussian militarism, and a man General Marshall considered to have been among the best brains in the Army.

Conger taught Winant the requirements of modern warfare—manpower, factory output, raw materials, foodstuffs, and the then almost unknown science of psychological warfare. Winant spent two summers in the Shenandoah Valley, going over Stonewall Jackson’s campaigns. Later he paid his own way to Paris and enlisted as a private in the A.E.F. (He came home a squadron commander in the Air Service.)

As director of the International Labor Organization, Winant visited the front during the Battle of France in World War II, left Paris the day before the Germans entered, saw the British soldiers arriving from Dunkirk, saw something of the early bombings of England. (He saw much more as Ambassador.)

In January 1941, Roosevelt summoned him to Washington, spent the day questioning him about conditions in Europe. Winant, three times Republican Governor of New Hampshire, had urged Roosevelt to run for a third term: “My appeal to him was that we were facing war, that he had a greater hold on the people of the democratic world than any other statesman of his time, and that it was too late to find a substitute; that I understood his wanting to retire to Hyde Park to enjoy the freedom of private citizenship, but that I did not think that was good enough in the dangerous days that lay ahead. He looked wan and tired, and it hurt me to say what I had to say. …” Roosevelt never told him he was going to appoint him Ambassador. A few days later Winant read the news in the papers.

Work. Winant believed that the British people would stand up under the bombing, and his task became one of selling his thesis to his superiors. (He pays a tribute to General Tooey Spaatz, who was sent to London by Roosevelt to measure Britain’s chance of survival: “No man in the United States had a more accurate evaluation of the strength of the German air force.”)

The other side of Ambassador Winant’s task was to interpret to the British the complications of U.S. policy and procedure. This seems (although he does not say so) one of the most miserable jobs on earth. The British thought that each anti-Nazi speech by the President or a member of the Cabinet would be followed by a declaration of war. It also seems to have become increasingly difficult for Winant to speak of U.S. aid when he knew how small was the rate of U.S. production. Between the lines of Letter from Grosvenor Square one can see the misery of an honest and kind-hearted man hailed as a savior by a suffering people and acutely conscious of his limited ability to help them.

Winant was at Chequers on Dec. 7, 1941, having already learned through Intelligence sources that two Japanese convoys, 63 transports and warships, had been sighted off Cambodia. He found Prime Minister Churchill at lunch time, walking up & down outside the entrance door. The British feared a Japanese attack on Siam or British territory, in which case they would be forced into an Asiatic war without the U.S.

Churchill: “If they declare war on you, we shall declare war on them within the hour. … If they declare war on us, will you declare war on them?”

Winant: “I can’t answer that. . . . Only the Congress has the right to declare war. . . .”

Churchill: “We’re late, you know. You get washed and we will go in to lunch together.”

Most of the guests left early. Churchill, who had worked as usual the night before, rested in the afternoon. At dinner Churchill was grim and silent. At 9 p.m. he asked Sawyers, the butler, to bring the radio to the table. It was a $15 portable that Harry Hopkins had given him. There was a burst of music as he tuned it; then the announcement of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Churchill jumped up and started out of the room.

Churchill: “We shall declare war on Japan.”

Winant: “Good God, you can’t declare war on a radio announcement.”

Churchill (quizzically): “What shall I do?”

Winant: “I will call up the President by telephone and ask him what the facts are.”

Churchill: “And I shall talk with him, too.”

Purpose. Winant wrote Letter from Grosvenor Square to counteract “the growing disillusionment of today; which not only dims and obscures the present, but is trying to cloud the past.” The past which he has called to mind, dwarfed in part by the mighty events which followed it, nevertheless seems in retrospect one of the great periods of human history: the 50 destroyers; the 90 consecutive days of the bombing of London; the time of Churchill’s inspired speeches, which seem to grow more significant and moving as more light is shed on their origins; the time when it seemed that there really was a new spirit abroad in the world, when free people were cooperating to win a free world, and no tyranny could frustrate their hopes.

What sustained men in those days was a faith, in the words of John Winant, that those who suffered and died did so for the common good of the free people of the earth who should come after them. There were moments in that period when there was no other resource but that faith, when the sands in the hourglass seemed to have run out and all would soon be over. Had there been disillusionment then, it would have been fatal.

Winant’s own final and fatal disillusionment is nowhere hinted at in his book; it is a call to faith, by a man who had crucially asserted his own.