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Articles
Dudgeon or Duty? Churchill’s Absence from the Roosevelt Funeral
- By RICHARD M. LANGWORTH
- | October 30, 2022
- Category: Churchill in WWII Q & A
The funeral quandary
On 15 February 1945, after the Yalta Conference, Winston Churchill flew to Alexandria, Egypt. There in the harbor he boarded USS Quincy to bid farewell to President Roosevelt. “The President seemed placid and frail,” he wrote later. “I felt that he had a slender contact with life. I was not to see him again.”1 Two months later to the day, after funeral ceremonies, Franklin Roosevelt was buried at Hyde Park. The Prime Minister was not among the mourners.
FDR died on 12 April and his funeral began two days later. A reader asks why Churchill was absent: “A number of sources, some reputable historians, say he purposely skipped the President’s funeral out of strategy or personal feelings. Is there any truth to these assertions?”
There is some conjecture that Churchill missed the funeral for political reasons, or even envy at FDR’s position as de facto leader of the Western allies. There is also considerable evidence to the contrary. Defenders argue that his absence was owed to circumstances during a critical time. There may be a broader lesson here, for difficult choices that face leaders in times of stress.
Reasons of strategy?
Warren Kimball, editor of the Churchill-Roosevelt Correspondence and erudite works on their wartime relationship, suggests that Churchill’s absence was a political strategy:
The United States and Britain may have been, as Churchill told George VI in 1942, “married” after many months of “walking out,” but the marriage was characterized by more than occasional unfaithfulness. It held together largely because Britain, and particularly Churchill, saw no reasonable alternative. A “special relationship,” of sorts, exists so long as the subordinate partner plays the proper role. And at almost every critical juncture, Roosevelt—and the United States—had their way.
Churchill’s decision not to attend Roosevelt’s funeral was an attempt to bring the mountain to Mohammed—subtly to shift the focus of the Anglo-American relationship from Washington to London. “I was tempted during the day to go over for the funeral and begin relations with the new man,” he wrote to the King, but “I should be failing in my duty if I left the House of Commons without my close personal attention….
Moreover I think that it would be a good thing that President Truman should come over here at about the same time as was proposed by his predecessor.” It is difficult to imagine Churchill letting political fence-mending at home interfere with his world-wide machinations, while the psychological advantage of having Truman trek to London was obvious.2
This is plausible, considering how Churchill’s presence might have actually drawn attention away from the solemnities. Consider also how little Churchill might have accomplished with Truman during the preoccupying events of the funeral. The new President was facing sudden, enormous challenges. Could they prepare for substantive talks in a day? Churchill’s two 1941 meetings with FDR had been preceded by long sea voyages, full of lengthy planning sessions with his staff.
A mix of artifice and affection?
Jon Meacham, author of the dual study Franklin and Winston (2003) had the impression
that the decision was partly political and partly emotional, the product of a prideful moment in which Churchill, after playing the suitor to Roosevelt, wanted to himself be courted. If raw politics had been the sole force in their friendship, there would have been no question about Churchill’s going. He needed to get on good terms with Truman. This was the optimum time for Churchill to shape a new president’s worldview. He could unleash his eloquence about the dangers of Stalin on a new audience, one not yet tired of being lectured….
Still, Churchill stayed home. Was Churchill, tired of dancing to another man’s tune, relieved Roosevelt was dead? Had it all been an act? No—like so many human relationships, Roosevelt and Churchill’s was a mix of the selfish and the unselfish, of artifice and affection. Churchill could be put out with Roosevelt. Who, having spent five years in such an exhausting and exhilarating dance, would not have been-much earlier and much more so than Churchill was? From Churchill’s perspective, Roosevelt withheld some essential part of himself to the end. What Churchill may not have realized is that Franklin Roosevelt did that with everyone in his life—it was how he lived.3
One might expect close colleagues, such as Jock Colville or Lord Moran, to mention this possibility in memoirs. But if there was evidence of Churchill being “tired of the dance,” no intimates suggested it. All we have on record are Churchill’s deep sense of loss, also recorded by Meacham, to Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins and Parliament.
A fit of pique?
Less charitable than Kimball or Meacham was the late Christopher Hitchens, who summarized Churchill as “Incompetent, Boorish, Drunk, and Mostly Wrong.” Hitchens was certain Churchill skipped the funeral out of “pique at Roosevelt’s repeated refusal to visit Britain during the war.”4 Three years later, Richard Holmes adopted a similar line in Footsteps of Churchill (2005):
It is not unreasonable to wonder whether FDR’s death…did not strike Winston as robbing him of the timely finale to which he himself aspired. Nothing he said to those closest to him at the time or wrote later offers a clue to why he chose not to pay his last respects to the man with whom his fate had been so closely bound, and to spurn an invitation to confer with Harry Truman…who was anxious to meet him. Such a flagrant departure from Winston’s normal standards of behaviour, and such a lapse in his duty as prime minister of a nation that needed U.S. good will more than ever, argues that some irrational factor was at work.5
First, in April 1945 Churchill was not anticipating a finale. Second, what he said to those closest to him offers clues to his decision, and these do not seem irrational. Let us now consider the case most likely, beginning with the official biographer, Sir Martin Gilbert.
First impulse
Washington ceremonies were set for 14 April, interment at Hyde Park the next day, Sir Martin wrote. “No sooner did he hear the news than Churchill made immediate plans to fly to Hyde Park….
He would leave on 8.30 on the evening of April 13. Everything was made ready for his departure, but by 7.45 he had still not decided whether to go. “PM said he would decide at aerodrome,” noted [Alexander] Cadogan in his diary. At the last moment Churchill decided not to go, explaining to the King that with so many Cabinet Ministers already overseas, with Eden on his way to Washington, and with the need for a Parliamentary tribute to Roosevelt, “which clearly it is my business to deliver.” he ought to remain in Britain.6
Churchill’s reasoning was confirmed by Anthony Eden, then his Foreign Minister, in his own memoirs. Eden was due in America for the United Nations conference—another factor influencing Churchill’s decision. As Eden recalled:
The Prime Minister at first proposed to attend President Roosevelt’s funeral himself, but at the Cabinet on April 13th he asked me to go in his place. The next day I was at the White House, taking part in a simple but moving ceremony. Afterwards Mrs. Roosevelt asked me to go to see her. She said how touched she was that our country had sent a special representative and added that as the immediate responsibilities we had all to share were so heavy, she thought that I should meet her husband’s successor at once.7
What we know
There is more evidence backing Gilbert’s and Eden’s scenario, as Paul Courtenay summarized in reviewing Holmes’s book:
Churchill told his wife: “I decided not to fly to Roosevelt’s funeral on account of much that was going on here” (per Mary Soames). He wrote to Harry Hopkins: “…everyone here thought my duty next week lay at home, at a time when so many Ministers are out of the country” (per Martin Gilbert). And: “P.M. of course wanted to go. A[nthony Eden] thought they oughtn’t both to be away together…. P.M. says he’ll go and A. can stay. I told A. that, if P.M. goes, he must…. Churchill deeply regretted in after years that he allowed himself to be persuaded not to go at once to Washington” (per Alexander Cadogan).8
Churchill is not here to recall in his thoughts. There is no doubt he was faced with one of the statesman’s painful decisions. There was, after all, a World War going on, but the Allies were closing on Berlin. The end might come any day. Yet there is no doubt about his bereavement.
“I feel a very painful personal loss, quite apart from the ties of public action which bound us so closely together,” he telegraphed to Harry Hopkins. “I had a true affection for Franklin.”9
The reader may decide if there was more to it than that. Was there a subtle, underlying vein of strategy or regret? Even then, Churchill’s decision was not irrational. It is not hard to believe that, with victory approaching after so many terrible years, he would wish to be close at hand.
Endnotes
1 Winston S. Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy (London: Cassell, 1954), 348.
2 Warren F. Kimball, “Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Special Relationship,” in Robert Blake & Wm. Roger Lewis, Churchill: A Major New Assessment of His Life in Peace and War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 304.
3 Jon Meacham, Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship (New York: Random House, 2002), 350.
4 Christopher Hitchens, “Churchill Takes A Fall: The Revisionist Verdict,” in The Atlantic, April 2002. My rebuttal to this article is online.
5 Richard Holmes, In the Footsteps of Churchill (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 274.
6 Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life (London: Heinemann, 1991), 835.
7 Anthony Eden, The Eden Memoirs: The Reckoning (London: Cassell, 1965), 528.
8 Paul H. Courtenay, “Greatness Flawed,” in Finest Hour 128, Autumn 2005, 37, citing Mary Soames, Speaking for Themselves: The Personal Letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 526; Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 7, Road to Victory 1942-1945 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2013), 1294; and David Dilks, ed. The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan O.M. 1938-1945 (London: Cassell, 1971), 727.
9 Gilbert, Churchill: A Life, 835.