Books: Eavesdropping on History

CHURCHILL & ROOSEVELT: THE COMPLETE CORRESPONDENCE

It is fun to be in the same decade with I you," Franklin Roosevelt cabled his friend Winston Churchill. Fun hardly seemed the right word at the time: the two leaders were sharing some of the darkest moments in history. It was January of 1942. The Japanese, after their attack on Pearl Harbor, were invading the Philippines and advancing southward through British Malaya; the Germans ruled most of Europe. But Jan. 30 was also Roosevelt's 60th birthday, and Churchill remembered to wish him many happy returns, "and may your next birthday see us a long lap forward on our road." That was what prompted Roosevelt's expression of delight to be sharing such a road with such a man.

When Churchill came to write his six-volume history of that epoch, The Second World War (1948-1953), he portrayed this intensely personal alliance as an unmatched and unmarred friendship, for he wanted very much to see the two nations continue their political partnership. Now, with the publication of the monumental Churchill & Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence, expertly edited by Rutgers History Professor Warren F. Kimball, the relationship between the two leaders emerges as more tempestuous, and correspondingly more interesting, than was generally believed. There are no shattering revelations, to be sure: the two Allies' archives were declassified in 1972, and many historians have tilled these fields. But to read the voluminous wartime messages between Roosevelt and Churchill is to eavesdrop on history.

It is Roosevelt who initiates the exchange, less than two weeks after the guns of September 1939, by reminding Churchill that they were both naval ministers during World War I. "Keep me in touch personally with anything you want me to know about," Roosevelt urges. Churchill does, first with a telephone call about a German threat to sink a U.S. merchant ship, and subsequently with an outpouring of 1,161 letters, telegrams, congratulations and miscellaneous messages (Roosevelt's answers: a slightly more laconic 788).

Their correspondence is elaborately courtly, full of solicitude. Churchill gallantly pretends to be deferential on matters of strategy: "We wholeheartedly agree with your conception . . . We cordially accept your plan ..." Roosevelt urges relaxation: "Once a month I go to Hyde Park for four days, crawl into a hole and pull the hole in after me ... I wish you would try it ... Lay a few bricks or paint another picture."

Both Roosevelt and Churchill have to deal with millions of troops deployed around the world, but both subscribe implicitly to Mies van der Rohe's dictum that God is in the details. Churchill loves to think up code names and refers to himself as Former Naval Person. But when he prepares to meet Roosevelt at the Casablanca conference in 1943, he cables a temporary change: "I am 'Air Commodore "Frankland."' Suggest you also choose an alias and one for Harry [White House Aide Harry Hopkins]."