FDR - Jean Edward Smith [377]
* Harvard professor Samuel Cross, who served as interpreter when Roosevelt met Molotov, did an excellent job, but he blotted his copybook by entertaining dinner parties in Cambridge with stories of what Molotov had said to the president and what the president had said in reply. When he heard of it, Roosevelt was furious and instructed Hopkins to find someone in government service who could keep his mouth shut. After an extensive search Hopkins chose Bohlen. Charles E. Bohlen, Witness to History 132–133 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973).
* Admiral Leahy, who was sitting next to FDR at the meeting, said the president leaned over and whispered, “That old Bolshevik is trying to force me to give him the name of our Supreme Commander. I just can’t tell him because I haven’t made up my mind.” Admiral William D. Leahy, I Was There 208 (New York: Whittlesey House, 1950).
* “Nobody thanked me for my services,” wrote Beria. “I was rewarded solely with a Swiss watch. According to my father, Stalin was satisfied with the results of the conference and considered he had won the game. I am sure my summaries must survive somewhere in the archives. Perhaps the recordings too have been preserved.” Sergo Beria, Beria, My Father 94 (London: Duckworth, 2001).
* The message was handwritten by Marshall and signed by Roosevelt. Afterward Marshall passed it along to Eisenhower with the message: “Dear Eisenhower: I thought you would like to have this memento. It was written very hurriedly by me … the President signing it immediately. G.C.M.” Reproduced in Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe 229 (New York: Doubleday, 1948).
TWENTY-SIX
LAST POST
I can’t talk about my opponent the way I would like to sometimes, because I try to think that I am a Christian.
—FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, NOVEMBER 4, 1944
ROOSEVELT APPEARED TO BE in excellent health at Teheran. Bohlen said he was “clearly the dominating figure at the conference, never showing any signs of fatigue and holding his magnificent leonine head high.”1 Lord Ismay thought he “looked the picture of health and was at his best … wise, conciliatory, and paternal.”2 Stimson, greeting the president on his return to Washington on December 17, 1943, noted that he looked very well. “He was at his best [and] greeted all of us with very great cheeriness and good humor and kindness.”3
Franklin and Eleanor spent Christmas at Hyde Park—the first time since 1932 that the family gathered at Springwood. Anna was there from Seattle, and the two younger boys, FDR, Jr., and John, had secured leave from their units. For Anna, whose husband was with the Army’s press contingent in North Africa, it was a special reunion. The president was lonely. Missy, his companion for twenty years, languished stroke-ridden at her sister’s home in Massachusetts; Louis Howe had been gone for a decade; Marvin McIntyre, FDR’s longtime appointments secretary, had died while the president was in Teheran; and Hopkins had moved out of the White House on December 21.* Anna filled the void. She gossiped with her father as Missy had done, shared breakfast with him in the morning, sat beside him in his study as he worked, and joined him for cocktails before dinner. “It was the beginning of a new intimacy in their relationship,” wrote Doris Kearns Goodwin.4
Anna had intended to return to her job at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer after Christmas, but Roosevelt asked her to stay on. Would she consider coming to work for him? he asked. “Father could relax more easily with Anna than with Mother,” Elliott observed. “He could enjoy his drink without feeling guilty.”5 Anna agreed to the change immediately. “With no preliminary talks or discussions,” she recalled, “I found myself trying to take over little chores that I felt would relieve Father of some of the pressure under which he was constantly working.”6 Anna was never given