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By Root 747 0

sometimes displayed private impatience towards perceived American pusillanimity. “Here’s a telegram for those bloody Yankees,”343 he said to Jock Colville as he handed the private secretary a cable in the desperate days of May 1940. In dispatches to Washington, the malignant U.S. ambassador Joseph Kennedy made the worst of every such remark which he intercepted. He translated Churchill’s well-merited dislike of himself into allegations that the prime minister was anti-American. Kennedy’s dispatches inflicted some injury upon Britain’s cause in Washington, cauterised only when Roosevelt changed ambassadors in 1941, replacing Kennedy with John “Gil” Winant, and Churchill embarked upon personal relationships with the president, Harry Hopkins and Averell Harriman. Churchill’s broadcasts, however, already commanded large American audiences, and imposed his personality upon Roosevelt’s nation in 1940–41 almost as effectively as upon his own people. By late 1941, Churchill ran second344 only to the president in a national poll of U.S. radio shows’ “favourite personality.” “Did you hear Mr. Churchill Sunday?” Roscoe Conkling Simmons asked his readers in the Chicago Defender on May 3, 1941. “You may be against England, but hardly against England as Mr. Churchill paints her … Did you note how he laid on the friendship of Uncle Sam?” Churchill’s great phrases were repeated again and again in the U.S. press, “blood, toil, tears and sweat” notable among them.

If Churchill had not occupied Britain’s premiership, who among his peers could have courted the United States with a hundredth part of his warmth and conviction? There was little deference in his makeup—none, indeed, towards any of his own fellow countrymen save the king and the head of his own family, the Duke of Marlborough. Yet in 1940–41, he displayed this quality in all his dealings with Americans, and, above all, with their president. When the stakes were so high he was without self-consciousness, far less embarrassment. To a degree that few of his fellow countrymen proved able to match between 1939 and 1945, he subordinated pride to need, endured slights without visible resentment, and greeted every American visitor as if his presence did Britain honour.

By far the most important of these was, of course, Harry Hopkins, who arrived on January 8, 1941, as the president’s personal emissary, bearing a letter to King George VI from his fellow head of state, saying that “Mr. Hopkins is a very good friend of mine, in whom I repose the utmost confidence.” Hopkins was a fifty-year-old Iowan, a harness maker’s son who had been a lifelong crusader for social reform. He met Roosevelt in 1928, and the two men formed an intimacy. Hopkins, the archetypal New Dealer, in 1932 federal relief administrator, and one of the strongest influences on the administration. Roosevelt liked him in part because he never asked for anything. It was the heady scent of power that Hopkins savoured, not position or wealth, though he had a gauche enthusiasm for nightclubs and racetracks, and was oddly flattered by press denunciations of himself as a playboy. He cherished contrasting passions for fungi and the poetry of Keats. The high spot of his only prewar visit to London, in 1927, was a glimpse of Keats’s house. A lonely figure after the death of his second wife from cancer in 1937, he was invited by FDR to live at the White House. Hopkins had pitched camp there ever since, with the title of secretary of commerce and the undeclared role of chief of staff to the president, until he was given responsibility for making Lend-Lease work.

Hopkins’s influence with the president was resented by many Americans, not all of them Republicans. He was widely unpopular, being described by critics as “FDR’s Rasputin,” and an “extreme New Dealer.” At the outset of World War II, he had been an instinctive isolationist, writing to his brother: “I believe that we really can keep out345 … Fortunately there is no great sentiment in this country for getting into it, although I think almost everyone wants to see England and