In the beginning

I feel a short explanation of the genesis of this column, which will appear regularly in this space on ww2daily.com, is in order before I discuss its focus and launch into my first treatise on the subject (or should I say subjects?) it will explore. A genealogy must begin with an ambition I have had for several years to write and produce a play based on the 113 days President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill spent in one another’s company during World War II. Arguably the most significant relationship of the war—if not the 20th century, with ramifications for the world of today and beyond—I e-mailed the purveyor of this site, TV-film-multimedia producer Steve Rubin, a pitch to obtain his backing for a theatrical production dramatizing the nature and events of this epic friendship. With two of the most monumental figures of all time as protagonists; a supporting cast featuring names so noteworthy one word is all that is needed to identify them: Stalin, de Gaulle, Molotov, Mountbatten, Ike; and exotic stage settings ranging from Casablanca to Marrakech to Cairo to Teheran to Yalta, I was sure I had all the ingredients for great theater. Heck, the recipe might even be winning enough to make it to Broadway.

Alas, the experienced and ever-pragmatic Rubin responded with a kindly stated e-mail that said, in effect, forget it. The reason for his dissuasion was the lack of money to be made in theater unless a show did make it to Broadway, which was near impossible to do. Thus disabused of my longtime dream by the economics of theater as seen by a pro, I forlornly clicked the reply button to thank Rubin for his time. Only then did I read the remainder of his message.

“However, here's a thought. Why not develop your idea as a series for podcast on my Web site? In addition to the diary I want to develop other WWII original programming and your proposal is just the kind of thing I’d like to present. Granted, it won’t be theater. But you’ll have the chance to reach a much wider audience and develop the relationship in much greater detail. Why don’t you start doing that by plotting out 13 half-hour episodes about Roosevelt and Churchill’s times together? A lot of exciting things are going on in the digital universe and this could fly. It's something to consider.”

And so I did for perhaps a nanosecond before replying with an enthusiastic “I have and I’m in!” As it turned out, 10 was an ideal figure for the number of shows to produce: a series introduction and one episode for each of the nine conferences the two leaders held from their initial rendezvous off the coast of Newfoundland in August 1941 to their final meeting at the Big Three summit at Yalta in February 1945. The structure set, I then began to write the back story for the first episode, featuring an encounter the men had in England in 1918, from which to develop the script. As I did, it occurred that with the addition of a verb here and correction of a little syntax there, I could flesh my notes for this and future episodes into regular articles as a series supplement. I broached the possibility to Rubin, who said it would make a welcome addition to his burgeoning and hungry-for-content Web site. Hence, the birth of this column.

While a multitude of chronicles, minutes, diaries, letters and other historical documentation exists that provides a precise, matter-of-fact, official and “complete” accounting of the orchestrated public events and proclamations of the two titans’ time together, my desire from the get-go has been to strip away the veneer and, based on the facts, imagine the private conversations, inner thoughts and emotions, and hidden moments that led to the give-and-take decisions they made in unison and shaped the prosecution of the war. It is this sub rosa tableau of shared intimacies, views, affections, fears and jealousies I hope to present over the course of these columns and proposed companion series, with the aims of showing how the smallest of comments can influence the largest of destinies, how the fate of modern civilization can turn on a perception and, ultimately, how grounded fiction can strike closer at the truth than manipulated fact.

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A good place to introduce the stars, themes and series is the first meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill. The date: July 29, 1918. The location: London’s illustrious barristers’ enclave, Gray’s Inn. There, amid a magnificent chestnut screen taken from a shipwrecked galleon of the doomed Spanish Armada and original portraits of Elizabeth I and Bacon, an already lionized and haughty 43-year-old Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, His Majesty’s minister of munitions, did not give the time of day to an obscure junior Navy secretary in attendance, 36-year-old Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The occasion was a banquet given to allow for toastmaking and hobnobbing by “allied ministers prosecuting the war.” As the U.S. representative to the assemblage of statesmen, dignitaries and high-level functionaries, a nervous, unsure Roosevelt was called upon to deliver a short speech conveying American sentiment toward the Great War. “We are with you,” Roosevelt managed to blurt to the distinguished audience, “in the declaration that we are going to see this thing through with you.”

Unmemorable words, except for the record, spoken at what historians brush off as a meaningless social gathering. Yet in truth, a rebuff at the affair factored into President Franklin Roosevelt’s decision-making process to give or deny assistance critical to the survival of Britain during the early dark days of the Second World War. Upon ascending from the rank of first lord of the Admiralty to the office of prime minister on May 10, 1940, Churchill desperately petitioned the president for any and all spare aircraft, old destroyers, guns and other war matériel he could muster to send his imperiled nation. Yet Roosevelt still bridled at Churchill’s snub from more than a generation earlier, and was not sure the now 65-year-old PM was not a blathering and besotted old English sod, despite brilliant oratory that had stirred his people and the world. “I always disliked him since the time I went to England in … 1918, [when] he acted like a stinker,” Roosevelt told Joseph Kennedy Sr., American ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, in 1939. “But I suppose he is the best man England has, even if he is drunk half of the time,” he remarked to White House confidant (and Interior secretary) Harold Ickes in a appraisal of the newly installed PM in the spring of 1940.

Although his assessment would change dramatically in July, when a Royal Air Force merciless drubbing of the collaborationist French fleet at the Algerian port of Oran impressed Roosevelt that Churchill was a man of action and not bluster, the president’s decades-long grudge almost won the day as he struggled with whether or not to come to the rescue of the beleaguered British isle. Notwithstanding blood oaths that his people would “fight on the beaches …,” Roosevelt had grave doubts about the suspect Churchill’s capacity to rally the Brits to repel an expected Nazi onslaught, which might result in the expenditure of precious American capital and resources for naught. There was a domestic political component on the table as well. National hero Charles Lindbergh and other prominent members of the isolationist America First Committee had fanned overwhelming public opposition to taking sides in the war: If Roosevelt placed his chips on Churchill and Britain lost the hand, it was almost a certainty he would lose a bid for re-election. All told, a strong case could be made for the president to pass.

On the other hand, personal feelings aside, Churchill was an old warrior, who just might be the man to go toe-to-toe with Hitler and deal him his first defeat, making a massive investment at a time America was still recovering from the Depression well worth the risk. Then too, Roosevelt was an interventionist at heart, at least to the extent of providing vital aid imperative to propping up Europe’s last remaining democratic power after the Fall of France in June. If England fell, the tyrant Hitler’s mastery of the continent would be complete, and that was an outcome the passionately freedom-loving Roosevelt could never stomach. Finally, there was the verdict of history to be contemplated: How would the arbiters of tomorrow judge him if he selfishly left England on its own and it toppled; that is if there were men and women in future ages with the latitude to form independent interpretations? After all, who could say after such a scenario whether Hitler might turn his eyes on the New World and complete his dream of world hegemony, leaving Roosevelt irrelevant and but one story to be told?

In the end, of course, the second set of considerations prevailed, and Churchill’s snub did not cause the British ship of state to sink. Yet it illustrates the staggering power Roosevelt wielded that his opinion of Churchill, formed during a fraternity cocktail party, could be a decisive factor in whether to champion Great Britain as it fought for its life. That it did not is to Roosevelt’s credit. Still, the president’s unflattering estimation of Churchill reveals an all-too-human side. Imbued with a deep sense of destiny, Roosevelt took umbrage when Churchill didn’t accord him the respect he believed his due, and his anger at the slight festered into contempt that could have proved disastrous. Churchill as well had a commanding sense of being among the anointed (famously commenting as a young man “We are all worms, but I do believe that I am a glowworm.”), although he felt himself so far above the ordinary that others’ opinions of him, except for those of Roosevelt whom he venerated, held no meaning.

Fortunately, FDR was an astute and big enough man to rethink his opinion of Churchill’s character and resolve, and he eventually forgave (but not forgot?) the ancient miscue. But on other matters for both men, either on a personal or policy level, there were communiqués and perceptions (and sometimes affronts) of too great a weight to cast aside. Over the course of the nine following columns I’ll explore how the fate of the free world hinged on how various stimuli played out on the idiosyncratic mindsets biology and life had forged in these two men, whom individual will and circumstances had invested with God-like power, and provide an inside glimpse of intimate moments of soul-baring discussion, childish frivolity and gut-wrenching gravity between them. I hope you will come along for the ride.