No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Author:Doris Kearns Goodwin [Goodwin, Doris Kearns]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 20th Century, Biography & Autobiography, Historical, Nonfiction, Presidents & Heads of State, Retail, United States, World War II
ISBN: 9781476750576
Google: Hfv-AwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1476750572
Barnesnoble: 1476750572
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2008-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16

“THE GREATEST MAN I HAVE EVER KNOWN”

The President was in high spirits in the early days of 1943. At midnight, January 9, he was set to begin the first leg of a seventeen-thousand-mile top-secret journey to Casablanca for a ten-day meeting with Winston Churchill. The trip promised the drama and adventure upon which his health of spirit depended. He would be the first president in history to fly overseas, the first since Abraham Lincoln to visit his troops in an active theater of war.

The security concerns were agonizing. Casablanca was filled with Vichyites and Axis agents; if the Germans discovered the site of the conference, protection could not be guaranteed. Indeed, it was later determined that the Germans did find out, through a coded message in Berlin, that a summit meeting was taking place at Casablanca, but fortunately, because the word “Casablanca” was translated literally as “white house” instead of the Moroccan city, Hitler assumed the meeting was in Washington.

The more the president’s aides fretted over the risk he was taking, the more excited Roosevelt became, his enthusiasm like that of a young child escaping the control of his parents. To preserve absolute secrecy, elaborate deceptions were planned at every point. From Washington, the presidential train headed north as if it were taking Roosevelt and Hopkins on a routine trip to Hyde Park. But once it reached Baltimore, it turned around and came back on a different line, heading south to Miami, where a Boeing Clipper stood ready to carry the travelers across the Atlantic to North Africa. From his window, Roosevelt glimpsed the jungle of Dutch Guiana, the vast Amazon River, and the western rim of the Sahara Desert.

Equally merry, Churchill was heading toward Casablanca in a Liberator bomber. Observing the prime minister’s high spirits, Lord Moran noted that, whenever he got away from his red dispatch boxes, he put his cares behind him. “It’s not only that he loves adventure; he feels, too, at times that he must ‘let up’ . . . shed for a little the feeling that there are more things to do in the 24 hours than can possibly be squeezed in.” Perhaps, Moran suggested, the president also had that feeling. “It’s the instinct to escape, to take a long breath. Besides, neither of them, in a way, have ever grown up.”

Not even the crude accommodations on the flight managed to dampen Churchill’s mood. In the stern of the unheated bomber, two mattresses were stretched side by side, one for the prime minister, the other for Lord Moran. In the middle of the night, Moran awoke with a start to find Churchill crawling down into the well below. He had burned his toe on the red-hot metal connections of an improvised heating arrangement placed at the foot of his mattress. Hours later, Moran awoke again to discover a shivering prime minister on his knees, trying to keep out the draft by putting a blanket against the side of the plane. “The P.M. is

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