A Wartime White House Christmas With Churchill : Thomas Maier
http://www.wsj.com/articles/thomas-maier-a-wartime-white-house-christmas-with-churchill-1419205851
After a fiery speech to Congress, Britain’s leader suffered a heart attack his doctor kept secret.
n Washington, D.C., for Christmas 1941, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill felt a bit lonely and not very well. This yuletide far away from home would be very different from the last, spent contentedly with his whole family in London. Yet looking out at the tree-lighting ceremony on the White House lawn, he knew he’d been given the best gift of all.
With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, the U.S. had declared war against the Axis powers, a decision Churchill had been waiting for since 1939. Finally, Great Britain would be joined in a grand alliance with the U.S. and all its might. To plan the war, both Churchill and his old friend Lord Beaverbrook, who he’d appointed as his minister of supply, rushed across the ocean for strategy meetings with Franklin Roosevelt and his military advisers.
“This is a strange Christmas Eve,” Churchill said from the White House in a speech broadcast internationally. “Almost the whole world is locked in deadly struggle, and, with the most terrible weapons which science can devise, the nations advance upon each other.”
Churchill had been dining at his Chequers country retreat with Averell Harriman, the president’s special envoy in London, when news of Pearl Harbor arrived. The prime minister immediately called the White House to voice his support. “We are all in the same boat now,” Roosevelt told him.
Churchill’s study of American history, especially the Civil War, had taught him that the U.S. was traditionally slow to go to war, but once engaged in conflict “fought to the last desperate inch.” “I went to bed,” he wrote of the night of the attack on Pearl Harbor, “and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.”
Throughout the Christmas meetings at the White House, Churchill helped convince Roosevelt to focus first on beating Hitler in Europe, rather than immediately launching a second front against the Japanese in the Pacific.
Both Roosevelt and Churchill enjoyed their wide-ranging strategy sessions and witty conversation over drinks. As relayed in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book “No Ordinary Time,” Eleanor Roosevelt later said, “They looked like two little boys playing soldier.” She knew her husband’s focus had shifted from a domestic New Deal to an international war creating a new world. “They seemed to be having a wonderful time—too wonderful, in fact. It made me a little sad somehow.”
On the day after Christmas, Churchill addressed a joint session of Congress. “I cannot help reflecting that if my father had been American and my mother British, instead of the other way around, I might have got here on my own,” he said. “In that case this would not have been the first time you would have heard my voice.”
Congress cheered him on. He then reminded its members that Germany could have been stopped earlier, perhaps without bloodshed, if an Anglo-American alliance had been forged. With a vow they’d win the war together, Churchill ended his fiery message. “Now we are the masters of our fate,” he implored. As he turned to leave, his right hand rose in the air, with two fingers forming a confident V for victory. The speech drew hosannas from both sides of the Atlantic.
That night, Churchill felt a sharp pain in his chest. In his White House bedroom, he opened a window for some air and soon became short of breath. His physician, Charles Wilson, was called. He listened to Churchill’s chest with a stethoscope and realized that the 67-year-old prime minister had suffered a heart attack. Yet he said nothing, later confessing in his memoir that he decided it was better to run the risk of further endangering Churchill’s health rather than order a “disastrous” treatment of six weeks’ rest.
Churchill refused to be thrown off his pace. Shortly after Christmas, he traveled to Florida for a few days’ rest before returning again for a last round of negotiations with Roosevelt in Washington. On Jan. 14, 1942, Churchill flew with Lord Beaverbrook in a Boeing flying boat from Virginia to Bermuda, and then again in the same massive plane on their way home to England.
During the flight, Churchill and Lord Beaverbrook moved up to the control deck. They looked out at the starlit sky and the tops of clouds. Both men told the pilot how they envied his job. They had ignored the king’s warning that the empire’s top leaders not travel together in the same aircraft. Lord Beaverbrook didn’t lose sight of the gamble. After all the other passengers, including the prime minister, fell asleep on the long flight home, he told the pilot, “If we lose Churchill, we lose the war.”
Mr. Maier is the author of the new book “When Lions Roar: The Churchills and the Kennedys” (Crown, 2014), from which this op-ed is adapted.
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