Dinner With Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table (10 page)

The originally scheduled roast leg of lamb had been replaced at the last minute with broiled chicken. We can only suppose that the President's last-minute announcement that he would be joined by distinguished guests caused chaos in Mrs. Nesbitt's kitchen. Or perhaps the roast leg of lamb was
deleted in favour of broiled chicken because there just wasn't enough lamb to feed seventeen people.

Neither this menu nor the other menus during the Churchill visit catered specifically to English tastes or to the preferences of the Prime Minister. Indeed, on the day
following
the first White House dinner, the lunch led off with a cream soup, much disliked by Churchill as we shall see in Chapter 10, in this instance cream of celery soup. The
following
courses – kedgeree and grilled tomatoes and raspberry Mary Anne – may have made Churchill long for some home cooking and for his favourite cook in Britain, Mrs. Landemare.

No matter. Churchill had come to do business, not to eat. His principal goal was to persuade the President that
the Germany First strategy he had enshrined in the series of memoranda written on the sea voyage to America – an “immense feat of intellectual effort and foresight”,
according
to historian Andrew Roberts
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– was in America's interests. So for him the Christmas festivities, no matter how welcome in themselves, were an interruption in the
private
time he felt he needed with Roosevelt. In the event, as later discussions revealed, Roosevelt had already decided that “Germany first” was the policy that would hasten victory in what had become a world war.
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It was left to the Prime Minister to sell his plan for implementing that strategy – which proved no small chore given the competing claims on resources.

Meanwhile, with Christmas only two days away, the White House was decorated with evergreens, Christmas balls and wreaths. As in all houses full of children waiting for Christmas Day, the mood was excited and expectant, in part because of the Roosevelts' desire to convey calm and cheer only a few weeks after the Pearl Harbor disaster. It must have been doubly busy with messengers delivering gifts, journalists prying and the British military and political staffs with their red boxes needing the Prime Minister's
attention
: a “hugger-mugger”
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atmosphere in which two
powerful
heads of state lived side by side, an unusual situation under almost any circumstances, and especially unusual when the two leaders were planning what would
undoubtedly
be a long war against two determined and mutual enemies.

As if that were not enough chaos, Churchill and Roosevelt held a press conference, American style, the Prime Minister wearing a polka-dot bow tie, striped trousers and a short black jacket, and responding to complaints from the press
“boys” in the rear that he could not be seen by standing on a chair.

To add to the managerial problems, the reaction to Churchill's visit was electric: gifts, cards and letters to the Prime Minister poured in. Gifts were turned over to the British embassy, which catalogued them, showed them off to the press and sent out the requisite thank-you notes. One, a signed photo of the prizefighter and world champion Jack Dempsey, was perhaps sent because Dempsey had battered the much bigger Luis Angel Firpo into submission, and the sender was hoping Britain would similarly batter larger Germany. Among the oddest were a bag of lima beans with instructions for cooking; a copy of George Washington's will; a painting of the great seal of the State of Ohio;
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and a six-foot tall V sign made of lilies.
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More knowledgeable donors sent bottles of brandy and boxes and boxes of
cigars
that continued to be the gift of choice to Churchill from admirers throughout the war. More important than any gifts as tokens of the American public's growing affection for the Prime Minister was an invitation from Congress to address a Joint Session of Congress on the day after Christmas.

On the evening of 23 December, cocktails were followed by dinner at eight p.m., once again featuring typical 1940s American fare. That evening the menu was:

We can only assume that at some point Churchill
managed
to obtain a glass or two of champagne: although no champagnes or wines are listed on these detailed menus, they undoubtedly were available. (Today the White House menus list the wines served with each course.) In the days that followed, the President and Prime Minister typically stayed up talking, drinking brandy and smoking until two or three a.m. For the better part of three weeks, despite Eleanor Roosevelt's efforts, the late-night sessions
continued
. She was no more successful than Clementine Churchill in bringing such evenings to a close. “Mother would just fume,” the President's son, Elliott, recorded, “and go in and out of the room making hints about bed, and still Churchill would sit there.”
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On Christmas Eve, meetings between principals and their military and political staffs went on as usual amid the bustle typical of any large house the day before Christmas – in this case a house with two political giants living side by side.

At twilight, in weather warmer than usual for December, the President and the Prime Minister went onto the White House's South Portico balcony for the traditional ceremony of the lighting of the national Christmas tree. Somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 people stood outside the White House singing carols and listening to Churchill say: “I cannot truthfully say that I feel far from home”,
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adding another building block to the special relationship he was constructing. Both the President's and Churchill's words were broadcast across the United States and overseas.

At dinner that night, an American guest, Percy Chubb, noted that the President was “buoyant” but Churchill “subdued”. Always working, even at a Christmas Eve dinner, Churchill fretted about Britain's food supply and
commented that the Americans were shipping too many powdered eggs to Britain, “the only thing you can make with them is Spotted Dick”
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, steamed suet pudding, served with custard, widely disliked, to boys at English boarding schools such as the one attended by a young Winston Churchill. FDR, needling, said: “Nonsense. You can do as much with a powdered egg as with a real egg.” Chubb responded by asking “How could you fry a powdered egg?”
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On Christmas morning, the Prime Minister and the President, along with invited guests and their families, attended a special Divine Service, “surrounded by
bevies
of G-Men, armed with Tommy-guns and revolvers”,
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at the Foundry Methodist Church on 16th and P Streets in Washington. It was during that service that Churchill first heard the carol, “O Little Town of Bethlehem”.

After the service, on to lunch. Once again, it began with the cream soup.

Fortunately, the Prime Minister was focused more on selling his war strategy than on what was put on his plate.

That Christmas night at the White House, at eight p.m., the President and Prime Minister sat down together for a traditional American Christmas dinner, 1941 style, in the State Dining Room, surrounded by some forty to fifty
family
members and friends, but oddly, no children, who
apparently
dined somewhere else. Churchill's physician noted that guests stood around in a circle while Mrs. Roosevelt went around shaking hands. Once again, dinner was American fare, with the soup mercifully clear:

One of Mrs. Roosevelt's guests, Betty Hight, starry-eyed at the sumptuousness of that Christmas dinner and the
richness
of the setting, wrote to her family:

Betty Hight mentions that a “sauterne wine” was served as well as champagne.
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Churchill surely would have been sufficiently sensitive to the suffering of his countrymen to have compared the lush dinner with the thin fare available in Britain under the rationing programme in which he was
so heavily involved, and under which the availability of vegetables often depended on the ability of each household to grow its own.

No charades, no Christmas crackers as in an English house, but an after-dinner showing of the film
Oliver Twist
. Churchill, with his mind on the importance of his speech to a Joint Session of Congress the next morning,
uncharacteristically
excused himself early to do his homework, a
process
that lasted until two in the morning. He knew that his first speech to America's elected representatives (there would be two more) was of critical importance for explaining the British position, and persuading the legislators who
controlled
the military's purse strings and could oppose any presidential strategy if they chose to do so. In the event, it was another triumph for the Prime Minister.

Sir Charles Wilson was with Churchill when he returned to the White House after the speech. Churchill thought it had gone well but was worried about something else: the
reaction
of some congressmen led him to fret that he was not in touch with Americans, other than the President. He knew that he would one day need the goodwill of top government officials. So he told Sir Charles he was planning a dinner at the British embassy for members of the Roosevelt
administration
, including Cordell Hull, then Secretary of State, and key congressmen.

That evening he confided an even greater worry to his physician. He told Sir Charles Wilson that he had been
experiencing
shortness of breath, dull pain down his left arm and pains in his chest, which he wanted to attribute to his excitement at the opportunity for intimate meetings with the President, saying: “It has all been very moving.”
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Sir Charles diagnosed “coronary insufficiency”, for which the
prescription would then have been complete bed rest for six weeks, but knowing Churchill would never have accepted, he made the decision not to tell him the truth.

Needing a few days' rest to recover from his heart attack, and according to Andrew Roberts, “keen not to overstay his welcome in Washington”,
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Churchill flew to Pompano Beach, Florida, to stay at the seaside villa owned by Edward Stettinius, then a presidential aide. Commander Thompson describes the meals:

Fortifying sunshine, some dips in the warm ocean, a return by train to the White House for a few final dinners, and back to Britain on a transatlantic flight, then
considered
very risky except by the American pilots. So successful had Churchill's table-top diplomacy been that General George Marshall later complained that Roosevelt “would
communicate” only with Churchill on matters affecting the conduct of the war, leaving Marshall and others scrambling to find out what the two leaders had in mind.
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