FDR - Jean Edward Smith [368]
Steaming at twenty-five knots and Condition of Readiness Three, which required one third of her crew at battle stations at all times, the Iowa arrived at the port city of Oran in French Algeria the morning of November 20, eight days after leaving Chesapeake Bay. Waiting for Roosevelt when he came ashore were General Eisenhower and the president’s sons Elliott and Franklin, Jr., who were stationed nearby. “The sea voyage had done father good,” Elliott recalled. “He looked fit and he was filled with excited anticipation of the days ahead.”58 The president inspected the ruins at Carthage and that evening dined with Ike, Kay Summersby, Admiral Leahy, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, Elliott, and Franklin, Jr., at Eisenhower’s villa overlooking the Gulf of Tunis.59
From Tunis Roosevelt flew to Cairo, where he met with Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek. Churchill insisted on meeting the president before they saw Stalin, but FDR was reluctant to appear to be caucusing. He agreed to the meeting only if China were invited and spent much of his time in Cairo with Chiang and his wife. Roosevelt was concerned about China’s postwar role in the Pacific. “I really feel that it is a triumph to have got the four hundred and twenty-five million Chinese in on the Allied side,” he wrote. “This will be very useful 25 or 50 years hence, even though China cannot contribute much military or naval support for the moment.”60 Churchill took a more jaundiced view. “Our talks,” he said, “were sadly distracted by the Chinese story, which was lengthy, complicated, and minor.”61
The high point of the four days in Cairo was Thanksgiving dinner at the residence of the American minister on November 25. “Let’s make it a family affair,” said FDR as he carved two enormous turkeys for the nineteen British and American guests. “This took a long time,” Churchill remembered, “and those of us who were helped first had finished before the President had cut anything for himself. As I watched the huge platefuls he distributed I feared that he might be left with nothing at all. But he had calculated to a nicety, and I was relieved when at last the two skeletons were removed to see him set about his own share.”62
After dinner Hopkins unearthed an ancient gramophone and began to play dance music. Churchill’s actress daughter Sarah was the only woman present and was in great demand. Never one to be outdone, the prime minister asked Pa Watson, the president’s big, jovial military aide to dance, much to the amusement of FDR, who roared with laughter as the two fox-trotted to the tunes of Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, and Harry James. “For a couple of hours we cast care aside,” wrote Churchill. “I had never seen the President more gay.”63
Roosevelt landed in Teheran Saturday afternoon, November 27, 1943, following a six-and-a-half-hour, 1,300-mile flight from Cairo. Initially the president planned to stay at the American legation, but the distance between the legation and the British and Soviet embassies was such that after one night he accepted Marshal Stalin’s invitation to stay at the guest house in the Russian compound. Driving through the narrow, crowded streets of Teheran posed a security risk for each of the Big Three, and by staying close to one another the need to do so was eliminated.
Roosevelt was eager to meet Stalin. The president had come to Teheran determined to strike up a working relationship with the Soviet leader, and as Hopkins told Lord Moran, “he is not going to allow anything to interfere with that purpose. After all,” said Hopkins, “he has spent his life managing men, and Stalin at bottom could not be so very different from other people.” To FDR, Stalin was “Uncle Joe” (“U.J.” in his cables to Churchill), and he was confident that