Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [104]
No one knows exactly what was said at the encounters aboard Augusta between Churchill and Roosevelt. But Hopkins, who was present, described the mood. The president adopted his almost unfailing geniality, matched by the opacity which characterised his conversation on every issue of delicacy. As for his companion, no intending suitor for marriage could have matched the charm and enthusiasm with which the prime minister of Great Britain addressed the president of the United States.
Churchill and Roosevelt were the most fluent conversationalists of their age. Even when substance was lacking in their exchanges, there was no danger of silences. They had in common social background, intense literacy, love of all things naval, addiction to power and supreme gifts as communicators. Both were stars on the world stage. In the twenty-first century, when physical fitness is a preoccupation of many national leaders, it may also be remarked that neither of the two greatest statesmen on earth seemed much reduced by the fact that one was a fifty-nine-year-old cripple and the other a man of sixty-six famous for his overindulgence in alcohol and cigars.
One of Roosevelt’s intimates, Marguerite “Missy” LeHand, declared him “really incapable of a personal friendship with anyone.”378 Yet for all his essential solitariness, the president had a gift for treating every new acquaintance as if the two had known each other all their lives, a capacity for forging a semblance of intimacy which he exploited ruthlessly. Churchill, by contrast, had scant social interest in others. After the untimely death of his close friend F. E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead, in 1930, he was unwilling to interest himself in any other human being save possibly Beaverbrook and Jan Smuts for long enough to establish a social, as distinct from political, communion. Indeed, at Placentia he pricked the president’s vanity by forgetting that the two had met earlier—in London in 1918.
Churchill loved only himself and Clementine, while to Roosevelt’s mistresses it was rumoured—almost certainly mistakenly—that he had recently added the exiled Crown Princess Marthe of Norway. While Roosevelt sometimes uttered great truths, he was a natural dissembler. Henry Morgenthau claimed to be baffled by the president’s contradictions: “weary as well as buoyant, frivolous as well as grave, evasive as well as frank … a man of bewildering complexity of moods and motives.” Roosevelt was much more politically imaginative than Churchill. He told Wendell Willkie in the spring of 1941 that he thought Britain would experience a social revolution when the war was over, and he was right. Churchill, meanwhile, gave scarcely a moment’s thought to anything that might follow Britain’s desperate struggle for survival against the Axis, and was implacably hostile to socialism. Roosevelt, like his people, regarded the future without fear. Optimism lay at the heart of his genius as U.S. national leader through the Depression. Churchill, by contrast, was full of apprehension about the threats a new world posed to Britain’s greatness.
At Placentia Bay the prime minister strove to please the president, and Roosevelt, fascinated by the prime minister’s personality, was perfectly willing to be pleased. However, the shipboard meetings between British and U.S. service chiefs were tense and stilted. The Americans—generals George Marshall and Henry “Hap” Arnold, Admirals Harold Stark and Ernest King—were wary. On security grounds, Roosevelt had given them no warning of the intended meeting until they boarded Augusta. They had thus prepared nothing, and were determined to say nothing, which committed their nation an inch further than existing policy avowed. The British—CIGS