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uneasy by his bland geniality, his reluctance to display anger, or indeed to reveal any frank sentiment at all. Where Churchill sought clarity of decision by working on paper, Roosevelt preferred to do business verbally. No minutes were taken of his Cabinet meetings. This approach led to many confusions, on issues of war and domestic policy alike. The president prided himself on his powers of persuasion, and had raised to an art form the ability to send every visitor out of his presence confident that he had got what he wanted. Both Churchill and Roosevelt were often accused of betraying their own social class, but the president was a much more skilled politician. De Gaulle described him as “a patrician democrat whose every simple gesture428 is carefully studied.”

Halifax wrote with condescension but some justice about Churchill’s late-night sessions with the Chiefs of Staff at the White House: “Winston’s methods, as I have long known, are exhausting for anybody who doesn’t happen to work that way; discursive discussions, jumping like a water bird from stone to stone where the current takes you. I am sure the faults that people find with him arise entirely from overwhelming self-centredness, which with all his gifts of imagination make him quite impervious to other people’s feelings.” Some of Roosevelt’s intimates were struck by Churchill’s single-minded obsession with the war. The occupant of the White House, by contrast, was obliged to devote far more of his energies to domestic matters, and to managing Congress. “The difference between the President429 and the prime minister,” wrote his secretary William Hassett, “is the prime minister has nothing on his mind but the war: the President must also control the government of the United States.”

Churchill felt able to take more for granted with his own nation’s legislature than did Roosevelt with his. Yet, while the Americans perceived Britain’s government as entirely dominated by Churchill, the British took a legitimate pride in the effectiveness of their bureaucratic machine. Churchill’s team were bemused by the whimsical fashion in which the U.S. government seemed to be conducted. Ian Jacob thought the Oval Office “one of the most untidy rooms430 I have ever seen. It is full of junk. Half-opened parcels, souvenirs, books, papers, knick-knacks and all kinds of miscellaneous articles lie about everywhere, on tables, on chairs, and on the floor. His desk is piled with papers; and alongside his chair he has a sort of bookcase also filled with books, papers, and junk of all sorts piled just anyhow. It would drive an orderly-minded man, or woman, mad.” FDR’s famous dog, Fala, had to be evicted from a meeting in the Cabinet Room for barking furiously during a Churchillian harangue.

Cadogan asked Halifax with mandarin disdain: “How do these people carry on?”431 They were unimpressed by Roosevelt as a warlord. Jacob wrote: “By the side of the Prime Minister he is a child432 in military affairs, and evidently has little realisation of what can and what cannot be done … To our eyes the American machine of Government seems hopelessly disorganised … They will have first to close the gap433 between their Army and Navy before they can work as a real team with us.” Had any American senior officer read these words, he would have answered that it was pretty rich for a British soldier thus to patronise the United States and its armed forces when Britain’s record since 1939 was of almost unbroken battlefield failure and since her economic survival rested upon American largesse. Criticisms of Roosevelt’s working methods had substance, but ignored America’s untold wealth and achievements.

The British, in the years ahead, would persistently underestimate U.S. capabilities, and feed American resentment by revealing their sentiments. They failed, for instance, to recognise the potency of Roosevelt’s personal commitment to supplying Russia. Just as Churchill and Beaverbrook faced opposition on this issue in Britain, so the president was obliged to overcome critics at the top of the armed forces,