The Last Lion

  To his staff’s amusement and chagrin, Churchill, a cigar gripped between his index and middle fingers, often proffered the “V” with his palm facing inward—the British equivalent of the American raised middle finger—instead of giving the proper, palm-outward salute. Whether the nasty or the patriotic “V,” crowds howled with delight, for surely the P.M. was telling Hitler—one way or the other—to bugger off. So powerful was the connection, that had Churchill lost his voice, his two upraised fingers could have done his speaking, without diminution of his message. For the introduction of its nightly overseas programming, the BBC borrowed the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which corresponded to the Morse code designation for “V”—dot, dot, dot, dash. Colonel Britton encouraged the people of occupied Europe to tap the signal on wineglasses and coffee cups whenever Germans entered a room. The Germans were powerless to respond; they claimed to have invented the campaign, after all.76

  When touring America in 1940, Duff Cooper found that most of the Americans he met held erroneous opinions about Britain. Americans believed the larger Dominions were still colonies of Britain, something like the thirteen American colonies had been. Virtually every American Cooper met had no idea of the bloodshed that HMG believed would likely result in India between Hindu and Muslim were London to abandon that nation, but Americans were steadfast in their opinion that the British were wrong to be there and should get out. Cooper grew to believe that Britain was losing not only the war in Europe but also the propaganda war in America. Churchill believed he knew Americans. He had written, and Americans had read, numerous magazine pieces, collections of essays, and three great works—his biography of Marlborough, his history of World War One, and his eminently readable account of his youth, My Early Life. In 1939 he published a collection of essays, Step by Step, that explained how during the 1930s Europe marched toward war. But most Americans did not read books by foreign politicians in order to formulate their political opinions or take a man’s measure. On his earlier journeys to America in the late twenties, Churchill attained a minor celebrity status, drawing audiences of three to five thousand to his big city lectures, a sizable number, particularly at a time when most Americans cared little about faraway events. (Granted, his speeches then were not designed to unmask the risks to humanity of totalitarianism but to sell his books and articles.)77

  Churchill’s style, wit, and literary abilities had been well documented in the U.S. press for two decades: Time magazine in early 1923 put him on the cover of its seventh issue. By the late 1930s Churchill, an exile within his own party, had been much heard in America, and his words were often prescient. In a 1938 Saturday Evening Post article he called for a united states of Europe and the jettisoning of European tariffs. And, of course, he predicted the catastrophic violence that had since overtaken Europe. Yet up until December 1941 most Americans, according to Gallup polls, cared neither about the unsavory events in distant lands nor about whether Winston Churchill was correct in his predictions of a new Dark Age. In 1941, Charles Lindbergh filled sports stadiums with tens of thousands who flocked to his isolationist speeches and hissed whenever Lindy mentioned Churchill’s name. Americans grasped a simple truth: If America went to war, their sons would fight, and tens of thousands of them would die.

  Churchill might have been half American, but he was all English, and an aristocratic Englishman at that. He put on his pants one leg at a time, but his valet held the pants. He wore a large Breguet pocket watch—the “turnip,” he called it—on a heavy gold chain pulled across his waistcoat, which imparted to him a Daddy Warbucks look, this during a decade when most Americans could afford neither a waistcoat, a gold watch, nor a gold chain to hang it on.* Churchill’s political genius did not extend to the mind-set of working-class Americans, yet it was their support he needed. His greatest weakness as he sought American help was his history. Until 1940, Americans knew of only Churchill the loose cannon, impetuous, often witty, sometimes spot-on in his predictions, but in the end unreliable. “He was all snakes and ladders during much of his earlier career,” recalled A. J. P. Taylor, “but on the occasions when he climbed the ladder, he’d seem to find a way to snake right back down.” Since becoming prime minister, he had inspired Britain, but Britain teetered still on the edge of the abyss. Given his irregular history, he might prove just the man to administer the final push.78

  Time, in its first issue of January 1941, named the previously unreliable Churchill 1940 Man of the Year. Churchill, the editors declared, shared with Lenin and Hitler a genius for the spoken word. Through their words, these three giants had changed history, two for ill and one, Churchill, for good, but only should he prevail in the current struggle: “He [Churchill] gave his countrymen exactly what he promised them: blood, toil, sweat, tears, and one more thing—untold courage.” Some readers wrote the magazine to express surprise. Churchill as Man of the Year? Why not Hitler? Hitler could lay claim to the prize, not because of the enormity of his misdeeds since 1939 but because Hitler, in the opinion of many Americans, had rebuilt Germany. When the first electric lights in Appalachia were just sputtering into incandescence, the Reichsführer was building his autobahns, a system of futuristic roadways Americans would not see for another generation. Now he was busting up the old order pretty smartly. A New Jersey letter writer said: “If England wins… the world will have lost the opportunity to be governed by the smartest master since the days of Moses.” Though pairing Hitler with the biblical hero who delivered the Jews from tyranny resounds now with terrible irony, many Americans did not consider Hitler—and certainly not the whole of Germany—an enemy. And, Americans wondered, were Britain and Churchill worthy of American aid, or were they imperialists on the brink of defeat, for whom any help would come too late.79

  To answer those questions Roosevelt had sent Harry Hopkins to London. He arrived in London on January 9, escorted by Brendan Bracken, who had met him at Poole, on the south coast. Hopkins stopped for the latest news at his embassy on Grosvenor Square and then checked into Claridge’s. Churchill had sent Bracken to greet Hopkins for good reason. He had been Churchill’s friend and fixer for almost two decades. He, like Churchill, was an optimist, but without the pouts and sulks. When the Old Man went into a funk, Bracken could be depended upon to yank him out. He was also a one-man Ministry of Information, full of knowledge across a broad spectrum. Discussions that took place in Bracken’s presence, Colville wrote, “required no books of reference.” Within hours of Hopkins’s arrival, Bracken pronounced Hopkins the “most important visitor to ever arrive on this island.” Given his natural enthusiasm, Bracken’s hyperbolic assessment of Hopkins’s importance seems predictable, yet when Bracken offered an opinion, people listened, Churchill foremost among them.80

  To Pamela Churchill, Hopkins appeared a “little shriveled creature with a dead cigarette out of the corner of his mouth,” huddled against the winter chill wrapped in his great overcoat. His wardrobe looked as if it had never met a flatiron. His dour, crumpled features were usually topped by an equally crumpled fedora, pulled low. “His was a soul,” Churchill wrote, “that flamed out of a frail and failing body.” He was a welfare expert, four years a widower, and prone to cynicism. He had served as Roosevelt’s commerce secretary from December of 1938 until the previous September when, afflicted with intestinal ailments, he resigned. When Roosevelt learned Hopkins was alone and adrift in Washington, he invited him and his young daughter Diana to live in the White House. Diana took a small room on the third floor, Hopkins, the Lincoln study, just down the hall from the Boss.81

  On the morning of the tenth, Bracken escorted Hopkins to a basement room at No. 10 Downing St. There, while nursing a glass of sherry and waiting for the prime minister, Hopkins took note of the smashed windows, the scrambling repairmen, and the overall decrepitude of the place. Soon, “a rotund-smiling-red-faced gentleman appeared—extended a fat but none the less convincing hand and wished me welcome to England.” They adjourned to a small dining room
where over lunch they spent more than three hours in private talks. Churchill made plain his desire to meet the president, the sooner the better, a request Hopkins passed along to Roosevelt. Hopkins probed for any ill will toward Americans on Churchill’s part by allowing that in some quarters rumor had it that Churchill disliked Roosevelt. Churchill responded with a “bitter though fairly constrained attack” on Joe Kennedy, who Churchill knew (via a tap on Ambassador Kennedy’s phone) was virtually an enemy of Great Britain. To prove his warm feelings for Roosevelt, Churchill sent a secretary to fetch a copy of the telegram he had sent on the occasion of Roosevelt’s reelection (which Roosevelt had not responded to).82

  He told Hopkins that Greece was likely lost, and that Britain would gas Germany if Hitler used gas first. Thus began one of Churchill’s bloodthirsty performances: “We, too,” he told Hopkins, “have the deadliest gasses in the world,” and said that they would use them if up against the wall. On the humanitarian aid front, Churchill declared that he was opposed to feeding the peoples conquered by Hitler, for that would only make Hitler’s job of controlling enslaved populations easier. Finally, he told Hopkins that no secrets would be kept from America. That wasn’t true, and Churchill knew it; British interagency telegrams marked “Guard” were not to be shared with the Americans. By the time lunch was cleared, the two had connected; Churchill insisted Hopkins join him for a weekend at Ditchley.83

  They had Ditchley to themselves, Ronnie Tree having gone off to check conditions in his constituency while his wife took her squadron of mobile canteens to Portsmouth, which had caught the full force of the Blitz the previous night. As Ditchley’s midday meal was being readied, Colville recalled that “Mr. Hopkins arrived and his quiet charm and dignity held the table,” where small talk and champagne put the diners at ease. Hopkins brought news of the Duke of Windsor, who recently had visited Roosevelt on board his yacht off the Bahamas, where Windsor now served as governor general. Apparently the duke “spoke very charmingly of the King” (a fact that touched Winston), but Hopkins allowed “the Duke’s recent entourage was very bad.” Windsor—forgotten but, alas, not gone—had been keeping company with a stridently pro-Nazi Swede, a fact that would not play well in America were the press to run with it.84

  The talk turned to Britain’s needs. Colville recorded that Hopkins offered that the proposed Lend-Lease program “would arouse loud controversy, but he felt sure it would succeed.” Then the discussion turned—or rather, Churchill turned the discussion—to politics. He told Hopkins, forcibly, that socialism was bad, that jingoism was worse, and that the two combined formed “a kind of debased Italian fascism,” the worst creed ever designed by man. Churchill may not have been aware that Hopkins’s politics ran beyond the liberal to the fringes of socialism. Roosevelt’s conservative enemies hated Hopkins even more than they hated the president. In any event, Hopkins was not there to talk political creeds.85

  Later in the afternoon, dinner guests began to motor up to the front door. The Marquesa de Casa Maury came at teatime, and also Oliver Lyttelton and the Prof. Bracken, who had chatted with Hopkins, reported to Churchill that Hopkins had told him his mission was to see what Britain needed so that the United States might deliver it—even if it meant transferring to Britain armaments the U.S. Army did not want transferred. Roosevelt, Hopkins had told Bracken, was determined to give Britain everything needed for victory. Hopkins did not inform Bracken that Roosevelt’s intentions were conditional on his reporting to the president that Britain was worth the investment. Nor did Hopkins relate that Roosevelt, to placate his generals, would see to it that military equipment shipped in the earliest stages of Lend-Lease was likely obsolete or close to it.86

  For that night’s dinner at Ditchley, the large dining room was lit only by candles aloft in a spreading chandelier and in sconces on the walls. The table was set simply with white linen and four gilt candlesticks with tall yellow tapers in the center. The food, Colville noted, “is in keeping with the surroundings, though I notice some attempt to be less lavish since [Minister of Food] Lord Woolton’s recent strictures on over-feeding.” Woolton’s strictures did not extend to Churchill’s champagne.87

  Later, when the ladies departed after dinner, the men got down to business. Hopkins paid a graceful tribute to Churchill’s speeches, which had, he said, “produced the most stirring and revolutionary effect on all classes and districts in America. At an American Cabinet meeting the President had had a wireless-set brought in so that all might listen to Churchill.” Upon hearing this, Churchill “was touched and gratified.” He said that he hardly knew what he said in his speeches last summer, he had just been imbued with the feeling that “it would be better for us to be destroyed than to see the triumph of such an imposter.” When, at the time of Dunkirk, he told Hopkins, he had addressed the cabinet, he had realized that there was only one thing the ministers wanted to hear him say: that whatever happened to their army, they should still go on. He had said it.88

  Churchill then proceeded on to one of his two favorite topics, the future (the past being the other). He claimed that after the war, he could never lead a party government against the opposition leaders who had co-operated so loyally. He hoped a national government would continue for two or three years so that the country might be undivided in its efforts to put into effect certain measures of reconstruction. He offered that the text of the Lend-Lease bill, which he had read that morning, had made him feel that a new world had come into being. Then he described that future, as he visualized it. He began by predicting that were the socialists of the world to unite, the new world would be one of communism and squalor (he later told the House in 1945: “The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries”). But if the Germans built the new world, tyranny and brute force would reign. He pledged that Britain sought no territorial gains, but only the restoration of liberty to those robbed of it by the Nazis. He sought only peace for his English yeomanry, who deserved to feel safe each night within their humble cottages. He had made this speech over numerous dinners for the benefit of numerous guests, some of whom, such as Colville, had heard the talk numerous times. Hopkins wasn’t any more interested in the future than in political creeds; still, he listened politely.89

  Churchill asked Hopkins what he thought. Colville recalled the American’s reply as “slow, deliberate, halting… a remarkable contrast to the ceaseless flow of eloquence” to which Churchill had treated the room. In Colville’s recollection, Hopkins said that there were two kinds of men: those who talked and those who acted. The president, like the prime minister, was one of the latter. Hopkins claimed Roosevelt was intent only upon one end: the destruction of Hitler. Where Colville paraphrased Hopkins’s reply to Churchill, another guest, Oliver Lyttelton, recalled Hopkins’s exact words: “Harry Hopkins did not reply for the better part of a minute—and how long that seems—and then, exaggerating his [Midwest] American drawl, he said, ‘Well Mr. Prime Minister I don’t think the president will give a damn for your cottagers.’ ” Lyttelton thought: “Heavens alive, it’s gone wrong.”90

  Hopkins paused again, and then continued: “You see, we’re only interested in seeing that goddamn sonofabitch Hitler gets licked.”91

  Colville: Churchill, taken aback, “hastily explained that he had been speaking very freely and was simply anxious to let Hopkins realize that we were not all devoid of thoughts of the future. He would be the first to agree that the destruction of ‘those foul swine’ was the primary and overriding objective.”

  As for the future, Hopkins recounted that he had heard Roosevelt sketch out an idea very similar to Churchill’s, but that Roosevelt refused to listen to those who talked too much of postwar aims. That was a curious aside, for in his State of the Union address the previous week, Roosevelt—a witness to, but not a participant in, the current ordeal—had linked ongoing aid to Britain to a vision (his vision) for the postwar world. Roosevelt had, in essence, declared his intention to win both the war and the peace, a bit of hu
bris given that Churchill and England were doing the fighting, alone. Churchill had earned the right to speculate on the future (although he did not say anything of the sort to Hopkins). Following the speechifying, Churchill, Hopkins, and the other guests—brandy and cigars in hand—adjourned to the projection room to watch some German news films, one of which included a scene of the March 1940 Brenner Pass meeting between Hitler and Mussolini, “which with its salutes and its absurdity,” Colville noted, “was funnier than anything Charlie Chaplin produced in The Great Dictator.” Churchill, always the last to retire, went off to bed sometime after 2:00 A.M. Despite Churchill’s relentless monologues, Colville concluded that the boss had sold Hopkins on the idea that some members of the British ruling class were indeed men of action, not words.92

  The salesmanship continued the following day. Night Train to Munich was the night’s celluloid feature, followed by more drinks and more robust conversation, less formal and more relaxed than the previous evening. Churchill’s mood was upbeat; Enigma decrypts that day revealed that the German invasion forces were moving to southern France to take their target practice, a good sign that the invasion was off at least until spring. This secret he chose not to share with Hopkins. With the fate of his South African gold still in doubt, he asked Hopkins what Americans planned to do with all the gold in the world once they accumulated it? Fill teeth? Hopkins replied they’d put their unemployed to work guarding it. Late in the evening, flush with the news of the German pullback, to say nothing of a brandy or two, and knowing full well the Germans were not coming to England anytime soon, Churchill proclaimed to Hopkins that even though it was wrong to say Britain would welcome invasion, that’s just how he and the British people felt. Colville thought the evening a success, telling his diary, “I think Hopkins must have been impressed.”93