Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [120]
In the knowledge that Americans, and especially their legislators, were deeply wary of Britain as a suppliant, he said nothing of dependency, real though this was. Instead, he talked of partnership, shared burdens. He flourished his own American parentage: “I shall always remember how each Fourth of July my mother would wave an American flag before my eyes.” He reached his peroration: “Lastly, if you will forgive me for saying it, to me the best tidings of all is that the United States, united as never before, has drawn the sword for freedom, and cast aside the scabbard.” He unsheathed an imaginary blade, and brandished it aloft.
Then he sat down, sweating freely. As one man, the chamber rose. The applause echoed on and on, until at last with a little wave Churchill left the rostrum. Hope Ridings Miller reported: “I never saw Congress in a more enthusiastic mood, and some diplomats, who habitually sit on their hands at a joint Congressional meeting, lest one gesture of applause might be diplomatically misinterpreted, clapped louder and longer than anybody.” Interior Secretary Harold Ickes called him “the greatest orator in the world423 … I doubt if any other Britisher could have stood in that spot and made the profound impression that Churchill made.” It was just after one o’clock. The prime minister, pouring himself a whiskey in the Senate secretary’s office, said to Charles Wilson, his doctor, “It is a great weight off my chest.”424 At an informal lunch after his speech, he told congressmen: “The American people will never know how grateful we are for the million rifles sent us after Dunkirk. It meant our life and our salvation.” If this was a flourish of flattery, it promoted a legend that Americans cherished. That night Wilson was alarmed to discover that Churchill had suffered an attack of angina pectoris. But there was nothing to be done, no change in the schedule to be considered. It would have been a political catastrophe, if the world saw Britain’s elderly war leader flag.
Churchill used Roosevelt’s personal train to travel to Ottawa to address the Canadian Parliament, where he achieved another wonderful success. Back at the White House, he wrote happily to Attlee, “We live here a big family, in the greatest intimacy and informality.” Peerless phrases dropped from his lips in even the most banal circumstances. At the White House lunch on New Year’s Day, as he transferred hash and poached egg to his plate, the egg slipped off. The prime minister restored it to the hash, and, with a glance at his hostess, said, “to put it on its throne.”425 It was fortunate that conversation sparkled, for the food at the Roosevelt White House was notoriously awful. After the meal, in her sitting room Eleanor Roosevelt and her secretary Malvina “Tommy” Thompson compared notes on the two leaders with the First Lady’s friend and confidant Joseph Lash. Lash said the prime minister had the richer temperament, but the president was a more dependable, steadier man in a crisis. “‘Tommy’ clapped her hands426 and said she and Mrs. Roosevelt felt the same. The president was more hardheaded, they felt. He was less brilliant, but more likely to do the right thing. The president also gave the impression of being more under control, of never letting himself go.”
It is striking how many of those who worked with Roosevelt deferred to his greatness, but disliked his personality. Diplomat Charles Bohlen, for instance, observed that despite the president’s pose of informality, “the aura of the office was always around him.”427 If Churchill’s outbursts of ill temper sometimes irked colleagues, Roosevelt’s associates were made