FDR - Jean Edward Smith [312]
At eleven o’clock Churchill, dressed in the Navy-like uniform of Warden of the Cinque Ports, crossed the bay to the Augusta. On deck, just below the bridge, Roosevelt waited. He stood erect, holding his son Elliott’s arm. “The Boss insisted on standing,” said presidential bodyguard Mike Reilly. “He hated and mistrusted those braces, but it was a historic occasion and he meant to play his part as much as his limbs would permit. Even the slight pitch of the Augusta meant pain and possibly a humiliating fall.”76
“At last we have gotten together,” said Roosevelt.
“We have,” Churchill replied as they shook hands.77
BY THE TIME lunch was finished, they were “Franklin” and “Winston.”78* “I like him,” FDR wrote his cousin Daisy Suckley, “and lunching alone broke the ice both ways. He is a tremendously vital person and in many ways is an English Mayor La Guardia.”79 Churchill said, “I formed a very strong affection, which grew with our years of comradeship. We talked of nothing but business, and reached a great measure of agreement on many points, both large and small.”80 For Hopkins, who played interlocutor at lunch, the friendship was preordained. “They were two men in the same line of business—politico-military leadership on a global scale—and theirs was a very limited field and the few who achieve it seldom have opportunities for getting together with fellow craftsmen in the same trade to compare notes and talk shop. They established an easy intimacy, a joking informality and a moratorium on pomposity and cant—and also a degree of frankness which, if not quite complete, was remarkably close to it.”81
In their working habits Churchill and Roosevelt could not have been more different. Roosevelt always worked in a setting of tranquillity, where outside pressures rarely penetrated. Churchill, on the other hand, “always seemed to be at his command post on a precarious beachhead, the conversational guns continually blazing.” Roosevelt retired early; Churchill did not work up a full head of steam until about ten in the evening and often stayed up until three or four. He slept late and always took a nap after lunch. Roosevelt worked straight through from morning to evening and usually took lunch at his desk. Churchill had an unquenchable thirst for champagne, cognac, and Scotch whiskey and fortified himself at regular intervals through most of his working hours. FDR enjoyed a martini, two at the most, during the “children’s hour” at seven but otherwise abstained.82
The emotional high point of the Argentia meeting was the Sunday religious service on the deck of the Prince of Wales. Roosevelt and Churchill sat side by side under a turret of fourteen-inch guns with their military chiefs standing behind them. American and British sailors mingled in the foreground, the flags of the two countries draped the altar, and British and American chaplains shared the prayers and readings. Churchill, who was not an observant Christian, relished the pageantry of the Church. (He sometimes said he was a “buttress” of the Church of England rather than a “pillar” because he supported it from outside.83) As host for the ceremony, the prime minister chose the hymns: “O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” and the Navy hymn “For Those in Peril on the Sea.” “Every word seemed to stir the heart,” Churchill wrote later, “and none who took part in it will forget the spectacle presented. It was a great hour to live.”84 Roosevelt, who had insisted on walking the length of the ship to his seat