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By Root 2478 0

only a young diplomat substituting for an ambassador, so he smiled at me indulgently. Then, in his cool, clear, rather formal French, he said that continuance of the war would have been insanity, and that France would have been completely destroyed, since neither France nor Britain should have gone into a war for which they were wholly unprepared. With some emotion he declared that France could not afford again to have a million of its sons killed … Each time I talked with Pétain he expressed in some way his friendly feeling for the United States, implying that it was only his affection for our country that made him tolerate my rather unwelcome arguments.

Count René de Chambrun arrived in Vichy on 19 August. Clara had not seen her only son for more than two months. A frontline soldier during the Battle of France, René had served as a lieutenant on the Maginot Line. The high command promoted him to captain and assigned him as liaison officer to the British forces at the front. His brief mission to England convinced him that Britain would hold if America provided aid. At Ambassador Bullitt’s suggestion, Prime Minister Paul Reynaud posted René to Washington as a temporary military attaché to persuade President Franklin Roosevelt to send weapons to Britain. René spent two months in America, seeing Roosevelt, his cabinet, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the press and Republican isolationists like his Aunt Alice Roosevelt Longworth and Ohio Senator Robert Taft. On returning to France via Spain, René went first to Châteldon to see his wife, Josée. The next day, at Vichy’s Hôtel du Parc, he told Clara and Aldebert what he had accomplished in the land of their births.

It was an impressive story. On 12 June, two days before Paris fell, René’s Yankee Clipper touched down in the water off Long Island’s La Guardia Field. A Pan Am employee handed René an urgent message from Marguerite Lehand, FDR’s longtime private secretary and, unknown to René, sometime mistress of Ambassador Bullitt. It asked him to call President Roosevelt as soon as he reached his hotel, the old Ritz, in Manhattan. When he called, ‘Missy’ Lehand told him, ‘The president wants to see you as soon as possible.’ René turned up at the White House the next day to be greeted by the president, ‘Happy to receive you, cousin!’ Roosevelt asked, ‘Are you going to win this war?’ René answered, ‘That depends very much on you.’ Later, FDR welcomed him to the presidential yacht, the converted 165-foot Coast Guard cutter Potomac. Also on board were financier Averell Harriman, who was advising Roosevelt on foreign affairs despite his business interests in Germany, and Commerce Secretary Harry Hopkins. René wrote later to a friend about the cruise: ‘Radiograms reporting the advance of the German army through France kept coming in and when it was about 7 p.m. the President was informed that the German army had crossed the Loire. He turned towards me and said, with deep feeling in his voice: “René, the show is over” and then, after a silence of a few seconds, he added, “I really think Britain will be unable to hold out.”’

René repeated what he had told Bullitt at the embassy in Paris: ‘I maintain that Britain, entrenched in her island, is invincible, thanks to her fleet, her fighter force, which is becoming the best in the world, a good antiaircraft defense, which must be reinforced immediately, and ground forces, which have been miraculously rescued.’ Roosevelt, a sagacious politician whose private views already accorded with René’s, needed less persuading than René imagined. He had already arranged for 3,100 planes purchased by France but embargoed under the Neutrality Act to be sent via Canada to Britain.

Running for his third term as president, Roosevelt had pledged not to send American boys to die in Europe. Yet he was trying to help the British to stop the Germans and their threat to American interests in the western hemisphere. FDR saw in his young Franco-American cousin an ally who could lobby for the additional arms that Britain needed without seeming too close to