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By Root 887 0

He was met at Bristol by Commander “Tommy” Thompson, Churchill’s administrative aide, who led him aboard a plane which took them straight to Chequers. Harriman’s guest gift to Clementine Churchill was a box of tangerines, which she received with unfeigned gratitude. The envoy was enfolded in a warm prime ministerial embrace. Kathleen Harriman, who accompanied her father’s mission, wrote to her sister: “The PM is much smaller than I expected365 and a lot less fat … and looks rather like a kindly teddy bear … I’d expected an overpowering, rather terrifying man. He’s quite the opposite: very gracious, has a wonderful smile and isn’t at all hard to talk to. He’s got the kind of eyes that look right through you. Mother [Clementine] is a very sweet lady. She’s given up her whole life to her husband and takes a back seat graciously. Everyone in the family looks upon him as God and she’s rather left out.”

In London, Harriman established himself on the second floor of a Grosvenor Square building adjoining the U.S. Embassy, and was also given his own office at the Admiralty. Churchill invited him to attend the weekly meetings of the Cabinet’s Atlantic Committee. Of Harriman’s first eight weekends in Britain, he spent seven at Chequers, though like most American guests he found his sense of privilege tempered by dismay at the coldness of the house. Churchill convoyed him, like Hopkins, as a prize exhibit on his own travels around the country. Here, he told the British people, was a living earnest of America’s commitment—the president’s personal representative.

In private to Harriman, “the PM bluntly stated366 that he could see no prospect of victory until the United States came into the war.” If Japan attacked, said Churchill, the British naval base of Singapore would be at risk. At every turn, the prime minister sought to balance his desire to convince Roosevelt that Britain was a prospective winner against the need to exert pressure by emphasising the threat of disaster if America held back. Harriman urged Churchill to bolster Britain’s case by publishing details of its appalling shipping losses. Between February and April 1941, 142 ships totalling 818,000 tons had gone to the bottom, more than double the rate of sinkings in the early months of the war. At a Defence Committee meeting in May, Eden and Beaverbrook suggested that at least meat-ship losses might be disclosed, to emphasise the gravity of the food situation. Churchill, with the support of several other ministers, opposed this, “believing that we shall get the Americans367 in by showing courage and boldness and prospects of success and not by running ourselves down.” Moreover, figures which privately frightened the British government would deal a shocking blow to domestic morale if they were revealed, and would have provided a propaganda gift to Hitler.

Some Americans displayed a condescension which irked the recipients of their aid. Kathleen Harriman described British reluctance to enthuse about American Spam and cheese: “The great difficulty is re-educating368 the people,” she wrote to her sister. “They prefer to go hungry rather than change their feeding habits.” A Tory MP wrote: “The idea of being our armoury369 and supply furnishers seems to appeal to the Yanks as their share in the war for democracy … They are a quaint lot—they are told that if we lose the war they will be next on Hitler’s list … and yet they seem quite content to leave the actual fighting to us; they will do anything except fight.” Duff Cooper, as minister of information, told newspaper editors on March 21, 1941: “The great thing is not to antagonise the United States370 … When we offered the bases against the [fifty loaned] destroyers we imagined, in Winston’s words, that we were exchanging ‘a bunch of flowers for a sugar cake.’ But not at all. The Americans have done a hard business deal.” After Lend-Lease was passed, Franks, the British driver for U.S. military attaché Raymond Lee, told his master that he noticed more goodwill towards Americans. “Well, yes,”371 agreed Lee sardonically. “Perhaps