Pearl Harbor Christmas Read Online Free PDF Page B

“Now, Eleanor, all that little woman would do even if she were here is to tell Fields what we can tell him ourselves right now. Fields, at eight tonight we have to have dinner ready for twenty. Mr. Churchill and his party are coming to stay with us for a few days.”
    Both Roosevelts expected the Prime Minister and his party, but because of their delays at sea and the understanding that he would cruise up the Potomac from his anchorage, Churchill was scheduled to arrive the next day. Yet his impulsive request for a plane had altered matters. For security reasons, the President had not wanted to alert the White House staff too soon, and Mrs. Roosevelt fussed that she had not yet allocated rooms nor arranged for a dinner with the additional high-level guests her husband wanted. The PM’s arrival was also cutting into her scheduled press conference at 9:30. She was extraordinarily busy, writing a syndicated newspaper column (“My Day”), giving speeches as First Lady, making inspection tours, representing a wheelchair-bound president, and working as unpaid assistant director (under the feisty and controversial Fiorello LaGuardia) of the Office of Civil Defense.
    The inauspicious beginning of the day may have made the President unusually sharp with his first official visitor. At 10:50 he expected the new Soviet ambassador, Maxim Litvinov, who was accompanied by former US envoy to Russia, William Bullitt. The stocky, sixtyish Litvinov, Lenin’s first ambassador to Britain after the revolution and dismissed by Stalin as foreign minister because of his Jewish origins during the cynical rapprochement with Hitler, had been rehabilitated. (The veteran Bolshevik V. M. Molotov proved more acceptable to Berlin.) When Averell Harriman, with Lord Beaverbrook, had been on a supply mission to Moscow, Harriman had been “shocked” by Litvinov’s appearance. (He had been summoned hastily to interpret for Stalin.) “His clothes and shoes were shoddy and, I remember, his waistcoat and trousers did not meet to cover the expanse of his shirt front.” On arrival in New York, Litvinov, now back in precarious favor, had purchased more suitable clothing for his new role. When he presented himself to Roosevelt in three-piece Madison Avenue garb, FDR, extending his hand, asked, “You get that suit in Moscow?”
    Realizing the envoy’s background and hoping that he would be more than a toady for the Kremlin, Roosevelt reached out for some idealism, hoping that Litvinov would want to be remembered for something positive. To Litvinov’s discomfort, the President remarked, rather rudely, “Some day you will die and you will probably know beforehand that you are to die and you will remember your parents and all that they meant to you, and what then?” Litvinov confessed to Bullitt as they left that it was a poor beginning. He didn’t like the President’s hectoring yet had to put up with it. His job was to extract as much Lend-Lease war materiel for Russia as was possible and to minimize long-simmering anti-Soviet feeling in America. Thanks to Hitler and Hirohito, Litvinov’s country had become an ally.
    Roosevelt had other ceremonial duties after Litvinov withdrew. The President received the Chinese ambassador, Hu Shih, a noted philosopher but largely a figurehead for the family of Chiang Kaishek and his wife; and Netherlands envoy Alexander Loudon. Then, after lunch with Harry Hopkins, who, however frail and chronically ailing, had long been FDR’s primary link to Britain and managed Lend-Lease; then Roosevelt telephoned the Canadian Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, to confirm that “a certain person” was “on his way.” Aware it was happening, King had invited Churchill to make a quick trip to Ottawa to address the Canadian parliament and planned to come to Washington to escort him. “There will have to be a Supreme Council,” Roosevelt told King, “and I am determined that it shall have its headquarters in