FDR - Jean Edward Smith [316]
* The Defense Aid Supplemental Appropriations Act passed the House 336–55 and the Senate 67–9. Among the items included in the first consignment to Great Britain were 900,000 feet of fire hose. Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 272 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952).
* At cabinet Roosevelt said the patrols were a step forward. “Keep on walking, Mr. President,” replied Stimson. “Keep on walking.” Stimson diary (MS), April 25, 1941.
* Missy died in July 1944 without knowing the president had provided for her in his will. After her death, Roosevelt’s son James, whom FDR had appointed his executor, suggested to his father that he might wish to change his will. Roosevelt refused. “If it embarrasses mother, I’m sorry. It shouldn’t, but it may. But the clause is written so that in the event of Missy’s death, that half reverts to mother, too, so she gets it all. Missy didn’t make it, her half already has reverted to mother, and so the clause is inoperative. I don’t have to change it, so I won’t.” James Roosevelt, My Parents: A Differing View 108 (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1976).
* Shortly before the speech was delivered, Churchill’s private secretary, J. R. Colville, noted the irony in WSC’s warm support of the Soviet Union given his strong anti-Communist stance. “If Hitler invaded Hell,” Churchill retorted, “I would at least make a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” Winston S. Churchill, The Grand Alliance 370 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951).
* From the Vatican, Harold H. Tittman, the president’s acting representative to the Holy See, advised Washington that in the Curia “the militant atheism of Communist Russia is still regarded as more obnoxious than the modern paganism of Nazi Germany.” Tittman to State Department, June 30, 1941. Quoted in William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Undeclared War 547 (New York: Harper & Row, 1953).
* The journalist H. V. Morton, traveling with Churchill, grimly recalled the fate of Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, chief of the imperial general staff, who was lost at sea when the vessel he was traveling in to Russia was torpedoed off the coast of Hoy in 1916. Morton, Atlantic Meeting 33 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1943).
† A crewman dressed as FDR, complete with pince-nez and cigarette holder, sat prominently on deck fishing while the ship sent regular bulletins ashore that all was well and the president was enjoying himself. Neither Grace Tully nor Eleanor was aware of Roosevelt’s deception; the cabinet was not informed; and the press was kept at a distance. Even the Secret Service was bamboozled, the White House detail avidly attending the Potomac from the shore. Jon Meacham, Franklin and Winston 105–106 (New York: Random House, 2003); Grace Tully, F.D.R.: My Boss 246–248 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949).
* Roosevelt and Churchill dined alone with Harry Hopkins. The British commanders—Pound; Field Marshal Sir John Dill, CIGS; Air Vice Marshal Sir Wilfred Freeman; and Sir Alexander Cadogan of the Foreign Office—dined with their American counterparts at a “very good fork lunch” provided by Admiral Ernest J. King, Commander of the Atlantic Fleet. To their dismay the lunch was “entirely dry,” save for tea and a “cup of Joe”—Navy lingo for coffee—a derisive reference to Josephus Daniels, who removed alcohol from Navy wardrooms in 1914. (FDR and WSC were not bound by that regulation.) Theodore A. Wilson, The First Summit: Roosevelt and Churchill at Placentia Bay, 1941 85 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969).
* “We live by symbols and we can’t too often recall them,” Felix Frankfurter wrote Roosevelt when photographs of the service were published. “And you two in that ocean, in the setting of that Sunday