Commander in Chief Read online

  Travel agencies? As the President had quickly assured McCrea, “in the planning and preparatory stages” of Operation Torch, he hadn’t wanted to draw attention to “that area.” “But now that the troops are there,” he’d added, “that restraint is removed.”

  Innocent of any ulterior motive, McCrea had assembled a raft of informative material. “The President was pleased with it and confided: ‘Just the sort of information I want.’”

  Some weeks later, though, “late one afternoon, early in December the President sent for me, sat me down at the corner of his desk and this is about the way it went.

  “The Pres: ‘John, I want to talk to you in great confidence and the matter about which I am talking is to be known to no one except those who need to know.’ Since this was the first time the Pres. had ever spoken to me thus, naturally I was greatly curious,” McCrea later narrated in his somewhat stilted literary style. The President had then confided, “‘Since the landing of our troops in No[rth] Africa, I have been in touch with Winston by letter. I feel we should meet soon and resolve some things and that that meeting should take place in Africa. Winston has suggested Khartoum—I’m not keen on that suggestion. Marrakech and Rabat have been suggested. I’m inclined to rule out those areas, and settle for Casablanca.’ And then to my amazement the President said: ‘What do you think of the whole idea?’”

  McCrea had been stunned.

  “As quickly as I could,” McCrea recalled, “I gathered my wits and proceeded about as follows. ‘Right off the top of my head Mr. Pres. I do not think well of the idea. I think there is too much risk involved for you.’”

  The President had been unmoved. “Our men in that area are taking risks, why shouldn’t their Commander in Chief share that risk?”

  McCrea was a seasoned sailor—an aspect he thought might be a more effective counter. “‘The Atlantic can be greatly boisterous in the winter months,’” he had pointed out, “‘and a most uncomfortable passage is a good possibility—’

  “‘Oh—we wouldn’t go by ship. We would fly,’ said he.”

  Fly?

  McCrea was shocked. No U.S. president had flown while in office—ever. “This was a great surprise to me because I knew he did not regard flying with any degree of enthusiasm,” McCrea recounted. Mr. Roosevelt had not flown in a decade, in fact, since traveling to Chicago from New York before the 1932 election. In terms of the President’s safety, waging a world war, it seemed a grave and unnecessary risk—especially in terms of distance, and flight into an active war zone. But the President was the president.

  McCrea had therefore softened his objection. “I quickly saw that I was being stymied and I tried to withdraw a bit.

  “‘Mr. Pres.,’ said I, ‘you have taken me quite by surprise with this proposal. I would like to give it further thought. Right off the top of my head I wouldn’t recommend it.’”

  When, the next morning, Captain McCrea went upstairs to the President’s Oval Study, carrying with him some of the latest reports, secret signals, decoded enemy signals, and top-secret cables from the Map Room—of which he was the director—he’d recognized the futility of opposing the idea. It was a colossal risk, he still thought, but he knew the President well enough to know that, if Mr. Roosevelt had raised the matter, it was because his mind was probably already made up, and he was simply looking for the sort of reaction he would be likely to meet from others.

  “He laughed lightly,” McCrea recalled—informing him that Prime Minister Churchill had already responded positively to the suggestion, in fact was gung ho for such a meeting—“‘Winston is all for it.’”

  McCrea had remained concerned, though. Security would present a problem not only during the broad Atlantic crossing, he warned, but in North Africa itself. “I still think the risk is great and if you are determined to go I will do all possible to manage that risk,” he’d assured the President. But the risks were real. “From what I have read in the despatches and the press,” he’d said, for example, “affairs in No[rth] Africa are in a state of much confusion.” Casablanca itself was a notorious gathering place for spies and expatriates. And worse. “I would suppose that No[rth] Africa is full of people who would take you on for $10—”

  Assassination?

  “Why I said that I’ll never know,” McCrea later reflected. It was almost rude, “—but I did and at the moment, of course, I felt it. He laughed heartily.”

  McCrea was not being timorous. Several weeks later his concern was validated—Admiral François Darlan, the new French high commissioner under the Allied commander in chief in the Mediterranean, General Eisenhower, was murdered in broad daylight in Algiers.

  By then, however, the trip had been prepared in great detail, and the President would hear no more attempts to dissuade him.

  Maintaining secrecy for the trip had not been easy, however. There was, for instance, the problem of idle gossip. The British had been making their own travel arrangements for Prime Minister Churchill. By secret cable from his “bunker” beneath Westminster, in London, Mr. Churchill’s office had duly informed the British ambassador in Washington, D.C., Viscount Halifax. Halifax had told his wife.

  It had been McCrea who had then taken the telephone call from a distraught, elderly Colonel Edmund Starling, who—going back to the days of President Wilson—was chief of the Secret Service detail responsible for the President’s safety at the White House. “The Colonel said it was urgent he see me at once,” McCrea recalled. “He came to the Map Room and we went out into the corridor, out of earshot of the Map Room personnel. This is about the way it [went]:

  “Col—Is anything going on here about the movements of the President of which I should be apprised?”

  McCrea had been noncommittal. “I don’t understand what you are driving at, Colonel. Could you be more specific?” he’d responded.

  “Col—Well, it is this. A taxi cab driver here in Washington called the W.[hite] H.[ouse] today and told the telephone operator that he wanted to talk to someone in authority who had to do with the movements of the President.” On being put through to Colonel Starling, he was asked to come straight to the White House. He’d left “just a few minutes ago. His story was that he had answered a call to the British Embassy this forenoon and there he had picked up a couple of ladies and had driven them in town to a Woodward & Lothrop Dept. store. On the way in they had talked at some length and that one lady had said to the other that the President was going soon to North Africa where he would meet with Mr. Churchill. He, the driver, had no way of knowing whether or not it was so, but nevertheless if it was, he thought it was something that shouldn’t be talked about.”

  This was a serious understatement.

  Oh, the British. Often so pompous about rank and privilege—and so casual with regard to high-level gossip shared in the presence of the “servant class.”

  It hadn’t boded well, but there was little McCrea had been able to do; an important summit of wartime leaders could hardly be canceled or reconvened because of an ambassador’s wife’s shopping trip.

  The President was more amused by the incident than concerned. What he worried about was his longtime White House military aide, Major General Edwin “Pa” Watson. The general wouldn’t be going, the President had told McCrea. “Pa has suffered a heart attack last spring,” the President had explained, “and while he is now back on active duty Ron [McIntire, the President’s doctor] thinks he is in no condition to stand the stress and strain of a long air trip across the Atlantic and on to Casablanca. I dread telling Pa that I have decided he should not go with us.”

  McCrea could only marvel at a president more concerned not to upset his loyal military aide than for his own safety. The President had reason to be concerned, however. “I intentionally put off telling Pa as long as possible and when he brought the appointment list to me this morning,” Roosevelt told McCrea on January 7, 1943, “I broke the news to him and told him that on Ron’s advice because of the considerable flying involve
d and his recent heart attack that I was not taking him on this trip. Pa was shocked—slumped in his chair and broke into tears—and remarked perhaps his usefulness around the W.H. was about at an end. I comforted him as best I could but to little avail. After a bit he recovered his composure and withdrew. Now John, I told you last evening I would enter the House Chamber [of Congress, for the upcoming State of the Union address] this noon on your arm. If I do that I think it would be a further shock to Pa. Will you please run Pa down at once and tell him that I neglected to tell him this a.m. that as usual I would enter the House Chamber this noon on his arm. That might soften the blow a bit of his not going to No. Africa with us.”3

  Once again Captain McCrea had been amazed at the President’s concern for the feelings of others, while directing the administration of his country in a global war. Also the President’s innocence, too: for it would be the President’s naval aide who would suffer the full force of General Watson’s disappointment at being excluded from the North Africa trip, however much the President wished to sugar the pill.

  It had not taken long. In General Watson’s room next to the Oval Office, where Pa Watson acted as the President’s appointments secretary, guarding all access to the Chief Executive, McCrea had endured a tirade from the general. If he himself was forbidden to travel, Watson said, why should the President—who’d had his own heart problems—go? Watson “thought the Pres. was badly advised about making the trip—the risk was too great for him to take. Why hadn’t I informed him about the trip? ‘I’ve always taken you in my confidence,’ said he, ‘and in this important instance you have not taken me into your confidence.’

  “I calmed Pa down as best I could,” McCrea related. “I told him of the charge given me by the President that no one, absolutely no one, should know about this trip except those who needed to know—and he [the President] laid great emphasis on that point. That he would tell you himself in due course that you could not make the trip and that he would tell me when he had done so.”

  This did little to solace the Army general—who was, after all, still the President’s military aide. The Navy had trumped him. “There was just no comforting Pa,” McCrea recalled. “He was deeply disturbed and repeated over and over again that the Pres. was badly advised in the decision to make this hazardous trip. ‘I hope you didn’t encourage him in that,’” he’d demanded accusingly. “I told Pa that I had done everything I possibly could to dissuade the President—but to no avail. That insofar as I knew the deal had been made with Mr. Churchill and that was it. And then Pa exclaimed with much emphasis: ‘There is only one so and so around here who is crazy enough to promote such a thing, and his name is Hopkins’”—the President’s White House counselor.4

  2

  Aboard the Magic Carpet

  GENERAL WATSON WAS wrong about Harry Hopkins. Recently married, Hopkins had no great wish to go to Casablanca. His wife said goodbye to him “at the rear door” of the Ferdinand Magellan, Hopkins jotted in his diary that night. Eleanor had shown no emotion, but Louise had been a bag of nerves—as was Hopkins, who worried about the weeks he’d be away from Washington. A survivor of stomach cancer and major intestinal surgery before the war began, Hopkins required constant medication. Above all, though, he had no wish to leave his new bride. Over Thanksgiving, at a cast party for S. N. Behrman’s new play on Broadway, The Pirate, he’d been heard to say to a friend, as he introduced his young consort: “Look, Dyke,—I ought to be dead—and here I am married!”1

  A charming and pretty gadabout, Louise was a socialite who, to her discomfort, had swiftly found herself accused of impropriety after the wedding, thanks to people envious of Hopkins’s proximity to the President—people such as the financier Bernard Baruch, who’d failed to obtain a job in the Roosevelt war administration. “I must say that I didn’t like the idea of leaving a little bit,” Hopkins confided to his diary before going to sleep, for “Louise had been very unhappy all evening because of the political attacks on us.”2

  For his part, Admiral Bill Leahy—the President’s chief of staff at the White House, but also now the chairman of the Combined Chiefs of Staff—was equally reluctant to go. The sailor had suffered a bad bout of flu in recent days, and did not relish the long journey by train and then air. Nor did he savor what was awaiting him at the secret destination: a continuing international political imbroglio that in his view had been pretty much screwed up by people who didn’t understand the military difficulties of the situation.

  There were others, too, who were anxious. Daisy Suckley, the President’s cousin and longtime confidante, had already said her goodbye the day before, and wasn’t therefore at the Bureau of Engraving platform. She’d argued strenuously against such “a long trip,” she noted in her own diary, one “with definite risks” that included enemy interception, accidents, even assassination. “But one can’t and mustn’t think of that.”3 On the plus side there were, she acknowledged, exotic places the President would get to see. And people, too. “W. Churchill first and foremost, of course,” she’d added. Others, however, he would not. He’d asked to meet Stalin, “but Stalin answered that he could not possibly leave Russia now—One can understand that,” she allowed, given the great winter battle still being fought to the death at Stalingrad.4

  Fala, the President’s beloved Scottish terrier, was not going, either, Daisy noted. The President had asked his wife if she would look after him. Like Stalin, the First Lady had said she was too busy. The President had therefore asked Daisy, who’d originally given him the terrier, as a gift, and she’d agreed to do so.

  “I wished him all the best luck on this secret trip,” Daisy recorded the next night, after saying goodbye—more devoted to him than ever. “He is leaving as if to go north to Hyde Park,” which was near her own baronial home, Wilderstein. “At a certain siding,” though, “the train will be picked up by the regular engine & start south for Miami—He goes with all one’s prayers.”5

  At Baltimore the locomotive was, indeed, decoupled. Instead of continuing north, a new locomotive bore it south, toward its destination a thousand miles away: through Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, to the former Pan American Clipper terminus.

  For his own part, President Roosevelt was glad to get away. Despite the winter cold, the capital was a cauldron of rumor, gossip, political rivalry, and competitive ambitions. Looked after by his valet, Petty Officer Prettyman, and his Filipino crew from the presidential yacht, the USS Potomac, he ate and slept well. Rising late on Sunday, January 10, 1943, he lifted the shades of his compartment. The passengers had been instructed that, in order to maintain absolute secrecy, they were to “keep the shades down all day,” as he wrote Daisy that night—confiding that he “found myself waving to an engineer & fear he recognized me.”6

  Minor mishaps always amused FDR.

  All day, as the heavy, shaded train bore on, the President went through his White House papers, dictating final letters and memoranda to Grace Tully, his secretary, who would be leaving the train in Florida before they reached Miami. He then said goodnight and retired early, knowing they would all have to rise before first light the following morning.

  Woken early on January 11, Hopkins donned a robe and made his way to the President’s stateroom, where he “found the President alone.” Together they “laughed over the fact that this unbelievable trip was about to begin. I shall always feel that the reason the President wanted to meet Churchill,” Hopkins surmised, “was because he wanted to make a trip.”7

  Roosevelt had become “tired of having other people, particularly myself, speak for him around the world. For political reasons he could not go to England,” Hopkins noted—despite Eleanor having found her husband a nice potential apartment in London, complete with elevator, where he could stay if he chose to meet Churchill there. But the President had balked at the political ramifications. The new, potentially more hostile, isolationist Congress, elected the previous November, would have a field day,
he feared. Certain members of Congress and rich, right-wing newspaper owners would accuse the President either of kowtowing to the British or colluding with foreign allies without first telling members of his visit, let alone getting their consent.

  London, then, had been out—and the North African battlefield in. Roosevelt would travel as U.S. commander in chief, not as president—thus permitting him to insist upon absolute secrecy, with no press correspondents following him. He “wanted to go to see our troops,” Hopkins noted, and “he was sick of people telling him that it was dangerous to ride in airplanes. He liked the drama of it. But above all, he wanted to make a trip.”8

  Whether Hopkins was right was debatable, but the sheer drama of the President’s secret getaway from Washington was—like his “escape” from the press to Newfoundland for the Atlantic Charter meeting in 1941—undeniable.

  Grace Tully duly disembarked to stay with relatives. Then, at Miami, the party detrained and was driven by car to the former Pan American Airways terminal by the harbor. Two huge flying boats were waiting, bobbing on the water.

  “My God! Why, that’s the Pres[ident]. Why didn’t they let me know he was to be one of my passengers?” the captain of the first boat, the Dixie Clipper, exclaimed. “It’s somewhat of a shock to know you are flying the Pres. of the U.S.”9

  With its giant 152-feet cantilevered wingspan, four fifteen-hundred-horsepower Wright Twin Cyclone engines, plus sponsons attached to both sides of its hull to provide extra lift and ease of embarkation, the Clipper—leased by the U.S. Navy, and its crew given Navy rank—duly took off from the predawn waters of the harbor and made first for Trinidad, in the Caribbean, fourteen hundred miles away. “The sun came up at about 7:30,” Roosevelt wrote to Daisy, “& I have never seen a more lovely sunrise—just your kind. We were up about a mile—above a level of small pure white clouds so we couldn’t even see the Bahamas on our left—but soon we saw Cuba on the right & then Haiti.”10