Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [58]
When René arrived in Vichy with the two Time men, Clara was proud of her son and his achievements in the United States. She did not have to tell him what everyone in France knew: that his father-in-law, Pierre Laval, believed that Britain would lose the war and France must find a place, albeit secondary, in the new German Europe. If René de Chambrun and Pierre Laval argued about their differing conceptions of the outcome of the war, neither René nor Clara spoke of it. Nonetheless, Clara persisted in her belief that René, rather than Charles de Gaulle, who had been condemned to death in August for desertion by a Vichy court martial, was the man to save France.
After seeing his parents at the Hôtel du Parc, René met his father’s old commander, Maréchal Pétain, to deliver Roosevelt’s message. Pétain agreed to the president’s conditions for supplying powdered milk and other necessities to France. His foreign minister, Paul Baudoin, was immediately instructed to suspend his verbal attacks on Great Britain. At five o’clock that evening, Pétain gave the press conference Roosevelt had asked for. Correspondents from the United Press, New York Herald Tribune, New York Times, Baltimore Sun and Chicago Daily News recorded Pétain’s words: ‘France will remain firmly attached to the ideal that she shares with the great American democracy, an ideal based on respect for individual rights, devotion to family and the fatherland, love of justice and humanity.’ Satisfied that Pétain had done all Roosevelt asked, René returned to the United States on 31 August with his wife, Josée, bearing a letter from Pétain to the president.
René’s plans unravelled as soon as he reached New York, where Missy Lehand told him over the telephone not to come to Washington. Harry Hopkins, one of Roosevelt’s closest advisers in the cabinet, was on his way to New York to meet him for dinner that night. Hopkins was candid: ‘The president has had to give up the plan of shipping condensed milk. Churchill telephoned him insisting that we maintain the blockade [of France].’
René de Chambrun, whom the president declined to meet again, felt betrayed. Arrayed against him were, in addition to the British, many French émigrés in the United States like Eve Curie who believed that aid to any part of German-occupied Europe would only help the Nazis. Yet René persevered, campaigning across the country and seeking private assistance from Anne Morgan and the Quakers. Henry Luce’s Time magazine wrote, ‘René de Chambrun, a captain of French infantry, is a wiry little man of 33, with the late Nick Longworth for an uncle, a profitable knowledge of the law, both French and American, a host of important connections, a taste for driving too fast in an automobile and an inborn capacity for landing out of any catastrophe on his feet.’ The praise was for the book he had just published, I Saw France Fall: Will She Rise Again?, whose royalties he donated to a charity for French prisoners of war.
When Clara learned of Roosevelt’s change of mind, she took her son’s side:
Like his mother, the fact that a President of the United States, after all that passed between them, is false to his promise, does not turn him from his purpose when once it is settled. Consequently, after the terrible shock of such a disappointment he said little, but set about getting relief for France from other than government sources. He obtained all that was possible from the Red Cross and ex-President [Herbert] Hoover. The two ships which were sent over to Marseilles (where they arrived safely) did as much as two ships can to attenuate suffering.
René’s circumvention of Britain’s blockade of France attracted the attention of the British Embassy in Washington. Forgotten was Lord Lothian’s praise for Ren