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Winston Churchill was on a roll. In his quarters at the White House over Christmas 1941, the visiting British Prime Minister was in the tub, dictating to an assistant. Coming out of the bathroom, Churchill dropped his towel, and there was the PM, in all his naked glory, pacing and talking. Suddenly there was a knock at the door. "Come in," Churchill said as he turned to face Franklin D. Roosevelt, who apologized and began to retreat. The Prime Minister stopped him. "You see, Mr. President," he quipped, "I have nothing to hide from you." FDR loved it, and later told his secretary Grace Tully with a chuckle, "You know, Grace, he's pink and white all over." After Churchill returned home from this trip, Roosevelt told him, "It is fun to be in the same decade with you."The Roosevelt-Churchill connection set the tone for a series of relationships between ensuing American Presidents and British Prime Ministers -- Reagan and Thatcher, Bush and Blair -- who were brought together by common interests and shared values. As the wars of the 21st century take shape, George W. Bush and Tony Blair are working in the shadow and style of the Great Men of World War II.
Were Roosevelt and Churchill really friends, or just allies in a marriage of convenience? And what about Bush and Blair? "A man in high office is neither husband nor father nor friend in the commonly accepted sense," Eleanor Roosevelt once said, rather chillingly. While there is undeniably a central political element in friendships between public figures, there can be a personal bond there, too, one formed by sharing a common cause and carrying the same burdens. Like their predecessors, Bush and Blair, I believe, are genuinely fond of each other.
Meeting Roosevelt, Churchill once said, was like "opening a bottle of champagne." Born eight years and an ocean apart, sons of rich American mothers, they loved tobacco, strong drink, history, the sea, battleships, hymns, pageantry, patriotic poetry, high office, and hearing themselves talk. But it was hardly love at first sight. Roosevelt and Churchill met briefly at a dinner in London on Monday, July 29, 1918. FDR was 36 and assistant secretary of the Navy; Churchill, 43 and minister of munitions; America and Britain were allies against Germany in the First World War. "I always disliked him since the time I went to England in 1917 or 1918," Roosevelt would tell Joseph Kennedy in 1939. "At a dinner I attended he acted like a stinker." (Churchill did not recall the meeting at all.) They would not be in contact again for 21 years.
When Roosevelt and Churchill next crossed paths, Britain was fighting Nazi Germany alone; America, tied down by an isolationist public that wanted no part in yet another European war, hung back. FDR was exquisitely sensitive to public opinion and did not know if Churchill was worth betting on. On the day Churchill became Prime Minister -- at the age of 65, after a long and erratic political career -- Roosevelt told his cabinet, "Well, I suppose Churchill is the best man England has, even if he is drunk half [the] time." Staring across the English Channel at Hitler, Churchill knew he needed the American President, but Roosevelt did not make it easy. Elusive, complex, and sometimes deftly duplicitous, FDR proved a difficult man to win over.
"No lover," Churchill remarked after the war, "ever studied every whim of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt."
The two met at sea, off the coast of Newfoundland, in August 1941. At a church service aboard the HMS Prince of Wales, the Americans and British sang "Onward, Christian Soldiers," heard a lesson from the Book of Joshua, and prayed together. Churchill wept. "It was a great hour to live," he would say. Even the chilly FDR was warmed by the ceremony.
"We are Christian soldiers," he said afterward, "and we will go on, with God's help." On the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Churchill and Roosevelt spoke by telephone. "We're all in the same boat now," Roosevelt told the Prime Minister.
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