Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [95]
The British were exasperated by American visitors who told them how to run their war, while themselves remaining unwilling to fight. A British officer wrote of Roosevelt’s friend the flamboyant Col. William “Wild Bill” Donovan: “Donovan … is extremely friendly to us338 & a shrewd and pleasant fellow and good talker. But I could not but feel that this fat & prosperous lawyer, a citizen of a country not in the war, & which has failed to come up to scratch even in its accepted programme of assistance, possessed very great assurance to be able to lay down the law so glibly about what we and other threatened nations should & sh[ou]ld not do.”
It is against this background of British resentment and indeed hostility towards the United States that Churchill’s courtship of Roosevelt must be perceived. The challenge he faced was to identify what D. C. Watt has called “a possible America,”339 able and willing to deliver. This could only be sought through the good offices of its president. Churchill, least patient of men, displayed almost unfailing public forbearance towards the United States, flattering its president and people, addressing with supreme skill both American principles and self-interest. He was much more understanding than most of his countrymen of American utopianism. On the way to Chequers one Friday night late in 1940, he told Colville that “he quite understood the exasperation340 which so many English people feel with the American attitude of criticism combined with ineffective assistance; but we must be patient and we must conceal our irritation. (All this was punctuated with bursts of ‘Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree’.)”
Churchill himself knew the United States much better than most of his compatriots, having spent a total of five months there on visits in 1895, 1900, 1929 and 1931. “This is a very great country, my dear Jack,” he wrote enthusiastically to his brother back in 1895, when he stopped by en route to the Spanish war in Cuba. “What an extraordinary people the Americans are!” He was shocked by the spartan environment of the West Point Military Academy, but much flattered by his own reception there: “I was … only a Second Lieutenant341, but I was … treated as if I had been a General.” During his December 1900 lecture tour, he was introduced in New York by Mark Twain, and told an audience in Boston: “There is no one in this room who has a greater respect for that flag than the humble individual to whom you, of the city which gave birth to the idea of a ‘tea party,’ have so kindly listened. I am proud that I am the natural product of an Anglo-American alliance; not political, but stronger and more sacred, an alliance of heart to heart.”
He had met Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Hoover, along with Vanderbilts and Rockefellers, Hollywood stars, Henry Morgenthau, William Randolph Hearst and Bernard Baruch. He had lectured to American audiences in 1931–32 about the perceived shared destiny of the English-speaking peoples. Many of his British contemporaries saw in Churchill American behavioural traits, above all a taste for showmanship, that his own class disliked, but which were now of incomparable value. Humble London spinster Vere Hodgson perceived this, writing in her diary: “Had he been pure English aristocracy342 he would not have been able to lead in the way he has. The American side gives him a superiority complex—in a way that Lord Halifax would not think in good taste—but we need more than good taste to save Britain at this particular moment.”
In 1940–41, Churchill