Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [124]
The president’s respect for the British prime minister’s abilities was not in doubt, any more than was his commitment to the alliance to defeat Germany and Japan. But he was a much cooler man than Churchill. “Even those closest to Roosevelt,”442 wrote Joseph Lash, who knew him well, “were always asking, ‘What does he really think? What does he really feel?’” At no time did Roosevelt perceive himself engaged with the prime minister in a matched partnership. He was no mere leader of a government but a head of state, who wrote to monarchs as equals. Churchill felt no deep sense of obligation to America for its provision of supplies. In his eyes, Britain for more than two years had played the nobler part, pouring forth blood and enduring bombardment in a lone struggle for freedom. Roosevelt had scant patience with such pretensions. He paid only lip service to Britain’s claims upon the collective gratitude of the democracies. Churchill’s nation was now mortgaged to the hilt to the United States. Sooner or later, the president had every intention of exercising his power as holder of his ally’s title deeds.
Roosevelt had visited Britain several times as a young man, but never revealed much liking for the country. As president, he repeatedly rejected invitations to go there. He perceived hypocrisy in its pretensions as a bastion of democracy and freedom, while it sustained a huge empire of subject peoples denied democratic representation. Cooperation with Churchill’s nation was essential to the defeat of Hitler. Thereafter, in the words of Michael Howard, Roosevelt “proposed to reshape the world443 in accordance with American concepts of morality, not British concepts of realpolitik.” Roosevelt’s acquaintance with foreign parts had been confined to gilded European holidays with his millionaire father and a 1918 battlefield tour. He nonetheless had a boundless appetite to alter the world. Eden was appalled when he later heard the president expound a vision of Europe’s future: “The academic yet sweeping opinions444 which he built … were alarming in their cheerful fecklessness. He seemed to see himself disposing of the fate of many lands, allied no less than enemy.” The president mentioned, inter alia, a liking for the notion that the French colonial port of Dakar should become a U.S. naval base. His hubris shocked not only the British, but also such wise Americans as Harriman.
Eden claimed that Churchill regarded Roosevelt with almost religious awe. Yet the foreign secretary almost certainly misread as credulity Churchill’s supremely prudent recognition of necessity. In no aspect of his war leadership did the prime minister exercise a more steely self-discipline than in this relationship. “My whole system is founded on friendship445 with Roosevelt,” he told Eden later. He knew that, without the president’s goodwill, Britain was almost impotent. He could not afford not to revere, love and cherish the president of the United States, the living embodiment of American might. He dismissed doubts and reservations to the farthest recesses of his mind. For the rest of the war, he sought to bind himself to Roosevelt in an intimacy from which the president often flinched. Churchill was determined upon marriage. Roosevelt acknowledged the necessity for a ring; but was determined to maintain separate beds, friends and bank accounts. The prospect of ultimate divorce, once the war was won, held no terrors for him.
The second strand in that first alliance conference was the attitude of the U.S. Chiefs of Staff. They were appalled by the spectacle of Britain’s prime