Dinner at the White House E-Book

Louis Adamic

• Herausgeber: Classica Libris
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

“This imaginative piece is a beautiful example of a mouse giving birth to a mountain. On January 13, 1942, the author and his wife were guests at a brief dinner in the White House, at which by chance Winston Churchill was also present. On the basis of the casual conversation of this evening, Mr. Adamic engages in all sorts of ‘afterthoughts’—sentimental, prejudiced, irrelevant and now and again perceptive.”
—Robert Gale Woolbert, Foreign Affairs

Leseprobe

Copyright

First published in 1946

Copyright © 2022 Classica Libris

Dedication

TO

GEORGE P. SKOURAS

PART I

A SINGULAR EVENING WITH PLURAL MEANINGS

Chapter 1

The Invitation

“Should like a chance to talk to you,” read Mrs. Roosevelt’s telegram dated January 9, 1942, “and wonder if you would care to dine with me Tuesday the thirteenth at the White House and go to Philadelphia Orchestra concert at Constitution Hall, Toscanini conducting. Of course if Mrs. Adamic cares to come too I shall be delighted.”

“If I care to come too!” remarked Stella.

The next day, a wire from Mrs. James M. Helm, permanent White House social secretary: “Mrs. Roosevelt delighted you and Mrs. Adamic can come to dinner on Tuesday, January thirteenth. Black tie. Seven-thirty.”

I was fairly sure I knew what Mrs. Roosevelt wanted to talk about. In October 1941 I had published a book called Two-Way Passage which interested her. About a week after Pearl Harbor, while traveling in California as assistant director of the Office of Civilian Defense, she had mentioned in My Day that she was reading it in matches. Then on December 29 she wrote that the book seemed to her worthwhile for the explanations it gave “of the various pulls which our mixed population has to undergo.” But she thought my proposal at the end contained more difficulties than I appeared to realize.

The proposal—put in the form of a phantasy—was that while Europe was occupied the United States develop economic and political reconstruction programs for the various countries and teams of carefully selected and trained people, many of them first- and second-generation Americans with backgrounds in European lands or regions, possibly including such men as Wendell Willkie, whose father had immigrated from Germany. Plans would be formulated and personnel held in readiness to enter the countries the moment they were liberated, fill in the vacuum left by the defeated Axis forces and help the peoples work themselves out of devastation and confusion toward rehabilitation. I thought we must begin way beforehand to plan for the postwar period, as we hadn’t done during World War I.

America today was the result of a lot of immigrants in the past three hundred years making the Passage Here; now, to keep the Old World from blowing up again in everybody’s face with another war after this one was over, I suggested that we make the Passage Back in person and, while administering relief and reconstruction, convey as much as we could of our American experience in democracy—including the practice of federalism, the trend toward general welfare, the spread of ethnic “unity within diversity,” and the principle of the importance of the individual.

Mrs. Roosevelt did not specify the difficulties she saw. On December 31 she returned to the subject, expressing doubt that my “plan could be carried out in exactly the way” I had outlined it. But she made it clear that the book was a pre-Pearl Harbor publication and she wondered how I might revise my “plan” now that we were actually in the war.

Between mid-October and the early days of December 1941 the book evoked considerable public comment, some favorable, some unfavorable, some mixed. It brought me over a thousand letters. But Pearl Harbor reduced the mail inflow to a trickle until Mrs. Roosevelt’s published comments stirred up new interest.

I could not doubt that Mrs. Roosevelt wished to discuss Two-Way Passage. I had been considering how my idea would adjust to the new situation—our entry into total war.[1]

Expecting that my opportunity to talk with her would be very limited, I typed out some points I wanted to be sure to emphasize—among others, that the proposal was not a “plan,” as she had characterized it, but an idea, a suggestion, deliberately presented in the form of a wishful phantasy in order to leave it wide open to the pressure of events and to continual revision in practical procedure.

Mrs. Roosevelt’s invitation sent me on a spree of conjecture. Did the President know about it? Had they discussed Two-Way Passage? Had she summarized it for him?

I doubted that FDR had found time to read a three-hundred-page book since Pearl Harbor and it seemed unlikely that he had seen it before then—and before his wife had read it. The military situation was grave beyond possibility of exaggeration; and one assumed, one hoped, that he was busy with it every minute of his waking hours.

Chapter 2

Seven-Thirty

To my telegraphed requests for a reservation, five Washington hotels replied one after another: no rooms. So when Stella and I arrived about six in the evening on Tuesday the thirteenth, we changed to evening clothes in the Union Depot’s washrooms where several other people were doing the same thing. Then we checked our suitcase and sat in the crowded waiting room, glancing alternately at the afternoon papers and at the clock on the wall until it was time to go to the White House.

The war news was nearly all bad. The Japanese were approaching Singapore, winning in Burma; Tarakan, the Dutch Indies oil island off Borneo, had fallen; Malaya was falling. Our position in the Philippines was desperate… The only glimmer seemed to be on the Eastern Front. The Russians and winter had stopped the Germans; here and there the Red Army was actually pushing them back.

We happened to get a cab to ourselves.

“Which gate?” asked the driver as we approached our destination.

We hadn’t been instructed on that detail. “I guess the main one,” I said.

“Pennsylvania Avenue?”

“Yes.”

The driver pulled up at the curb across from the North Gate; taxis were not allowed to enter the grounds any more, or even to stop on the White House side of the street.

It was a cold, crisp evening. Helmeted soldiers, bayonet fixed on rifle, walked post about every hundred yards along the fence surrounding the mansion.

In front of a small wooden guardhouse just inside the entrance stood a young navy officer, a tommy-gun over his arm. A second officer popped out of the guardhouse. We exchanged greetings and I gave them our name. They looked at us a long moment, then one of them bade us go up the curving driveway.

As we reached the portico steps, dimly lit by a large lamp high overhead, two men of the White House Detail of the Secret Service—tightly buttoned in heavy overcoats, hat brims low over their eyes; short, shapeless, tough-looking—emerged from behind the great Ionic columns and closed in on the line of our ascent. They stood above us—an intent barrier.

For an instant as we went up the steps we felt uncertain, uncomfortable, suspect—until the men with separated a little and the menace of their fierce interest relaxed. Stella said, “Good evening” and one of them replied; the other, after squinting at me from beneath his bent hat brim, stepped aside and motioned us to enter.

We hadn’t told them our name. Presumably, while we had walked up the rather long driveway, the gate had informed the portico by telephone who we said we were. I could not see how they could be absolutely certain that we were we.

With this uneasy thought I followed Stella through the large door opened by a uniformed Negro. He bowed slightly and said “Good evening” in a low, liquid bass voice.

We walked into a spacious, brilliantly lighted lobby. There were several doors, a staircase, lamps on bronze standards, many pictures on the walls. Inlaid in the marble floor was the Presidential Seal, also in bronze, under an ellipse of stars representing the forty-eight states of the Union.

Another uniformed Negro servant took Stella’s wrap and my coat and hat.

Presently a slender man in formal attire stood before us and, greeting us in an impersonally courteous manner, inquired, “Mr. and Mrs. Adamic?” Then: “I’m Mr. Clark.” I gathered he was the new Chief Usher, successor to the renowned Ike Hoover who had retired some time before.

He took a piece of cardboard from under his arm and glanced at what appeared to be a seating plan. “Mrs. Adamic,” he said, “you will sit at the President’s right.”

Stella batted her eyes, swallowed, and looked at me with an expression in which were mingled surprise, pleasure, amusement and alarm.

I laughed, perhaps a trifle nervously.

Mr. Clark smiled. “You needn’t worry, Mrs. Adamic. You’ll be more at ease than anyone else in the room.”

“Will I?” said Stella.

“Oh yes,” said Mr. Clark lightly. “The person sitting next to the President always has the best time; he puts everyone at ease. And you, Mr. Adamic, will be on Mrs. Roosevelt’s left.”

Why discriminate? I thought to myself, amused.

Mr. Clark waved us to follow him.

We were ushered into the Red Room, brightly elegant with white wainscoting and marble mantel offsetting the red curtains, upholstery and rug.

Three people were already there: two pretty girls and a tall, sunburned man of about fifty. Mr. Clark made the introductions, but neither Stella nor I caught the girls’ names. They were about the same age, in their early twenties, and from their speech obviously English. The man was Mr. Robinson—Monroe Douglas Robinson, a cousin of Mrs. Roosevelt’s, as we learned from My Day two days later. He wore a dinner jacket; the girls had on short black dinner frocks.

They looked at Stella’s long dress and one of them asked, “When did you get your invitation?”

“Three or four days ago,” answered Stella.

“We were called most unexpectedly only about an hour ago,” said the girl, “and were told to come as we were.”

Stella and I looked at each other, wondering.

Mr. Robinson had said good evening in a quiet voice but now he turned to me with sudden vehemence: “Look, I’ve just come from Peru—this morning—after a long absence from home. What’s happened? What’s going on?”

I wasn’t sure what he was driving at, what to say, how to meet his mood.

“What’s the matter with the Japs?” he went on. “Are they crazy? If they’re not they should have known they couldn’t get away with a sneak stunt like Pearl Harbor.”

“Well,” I said, “they made a pretty good stab at getting away with it.”

Mr. Robinson did not seem to hear. “They’re crazy, that’s all. Else, how could they imagine they had a chance? We’ll beat them to a pulp—blow them off the map.”

Mr. Clark reappeared and invited us all to follow him. He led us across the lobby to a corridor and motioned us into a small elevator. As we rose to the second floor Mr. Robinson said, “What I can’t understand is how—why—we were caught napping like that. Asleep at the switch! I can’t understand, can you?” He glared at me.

The elevator opened just as Mrs. Roosevelt came out of a door in the wide hallway and walked quickly toward us. Her full-skirted black taffeta gown swished about her, enhancing the sweep of her movement. Her face was lighted with a smile, her hands were outstretched.

I had met her twice before in New York but tonight, here, she looked specially attractive, impressive. The upswept hairdress and the long gown made her appear even taller than she was. She looked well, strong, handsome; also sad, worried, almost harassed beneath her self-control. In her left hand she held a small, silver-embroidered evening bag, and pressed against it was a folded piece of paper.

The English girls, first out of the elevator, were friends of the family; one, we gathered later, was the President’s goddaughter. Mrs. Roosevelt received them with intimate cordiality, then sent them into the President’s Study.

Mrs. Roosevelt evidently had not seen her cousin since his arrival from Peru; she greeted him affectionately and admired his sunburn. He followed the English girls into the Study and a moment later I heard the President’s familiar, carrying voice: “Hello, Monroe.”

Mrs. Roosevelt shook hands with Stella, then with me. “I’m so glad you two could come,” she said warmly, earnestly. Her voice was much more naturally volatile and less carefully modulated than when heard on the radio or from the platform. “This is a very special evening.” She smiled suddenly and put an arm around Stella, who seemed to disappear in a fold of her black gown. “We haven’t had cocktails before dinner since Pearl Harbor but we’re having them this evening—the President is mixing them for us.”

She strode with Stella into the Study. I followed. Through a half-open door on the way I caught a glimpse of a large, well-lit room dominated by a great four-poster bed—FDR’s, no doubt.

Chapter 3

In the President’s Study

The atmosphere of the oval room known as the President’s Study—sometimes as the Lincoln Study—did not derive so much from the mixture of fine old period pieces and chintz-covered armchairs, the too-numerous paintings and prints occupying much of the wall space, and the cheerful, light-reflecting green-and-yellow curtains, as from its proportions and historic associations. I had heard the rumor (since printed in a slightly different version by Mrs. Roosevelt) that sometimes late at night when everything is quiet some of the White House residents imagine hearing in it steps like those of a very tall man thoughtfully pacing the carpeted floor…

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his ninth year as President, seemed to be wonderfully at home in the room. About halfway down the long, curved wall on the right-hand side as we entered, he sat at a large desk. On it were a small ship’s clock and numerous little donkeys, a cigarette box, ashtrays, a book or two, and a tray of cocktail makings.

A year and a half before—in July 1940, a few weeks after the collapse of France—I had been in the President’s office with other consultants to his hastily improvised Defense Commission and, talking to us off-the-record for close upon an hour about the United States’ ghastly predicament in the global arena, he had not looked well. His hands, gesturing for emphasis, lighting one cigarette after another, and flicking the ashes off his wrinkled seersucker coat, shook rather badly. The rings under his eyes were very dark and deep. The sharpest feeling he projected on that hot afternoon (at least to me) was one of tense concern crossed with resentment against men like Senators Borah and Nye who had obstructed his efforts to prepare the country psychologically and militarily. Several times, as he spoke impromptu with never any hesitancy and with what seemed to be entire frankness, his famous voice rasped with impatience at those in leading positions who did not perceive the nature of the crisis even after all the information at his disposal had been laid before them…

Now, five weeks after Pearl Harbor, there was no trace of ill-health, weariness or doubt. FDR looked extraordinarily fit, self-possessed, relaxed—on top of the world.

He was giving the last few flips to the silver cocktail shaker. His face was ruddy and his close-set gray eyes flashed with an infectious zest. He had his head cocked at an angle of expectancy, alert not to miss a thing, ready to make mischief at the drop of a hat. He had just said something to one of the English girls that made her blush, then laugh.

That he was physically handicapped came as a surprised afterthought touched by an instant’s disbelief. The long, broad-shouldered torso and the large head, set off by the well-fitted dinner jacket, the soft white shirt and the natty black bow tie, were powerful, magnificent, focusing one’s attention. The movements of his arms and the rest of his upper body were amazingly vivid and agile.

Mrs. Roosevelt introduced Stella and me to the President.

“Awfully glad you could come,” said FDR. The pressure of his hand was firm.

Half a dozen people stood close to the desk directly behind me where Mrs. Roosevelt was introducing newcomers to those who had arrived earlier, and for a minute or two I was unable to back away. FDR deftly poured the cocktails to about one-sixteenth of an inch from the brim. Then he suddenly looked up at me as though expecting me to say something.

“It’s great to see you looking so well, Mr. President.”

He smiled quickly. “Will you have a cocktail?” he said, handing me one. “It’s an Orange Blossom.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The President glanced down. Fala had come from somewhere. I thought: Now the picture is complete. The Scottie sniffed at my shoes and the cuffs of my trousers, then sat back on his haunches. “You pass,” FDR said to me, laughing, “you pass. Have you a dog?”

“Two,” I said.

“What kind?”

“Just mutts. But we think they’re rather wonderful.”

“Oh, I’m sure they are,” the President said.

Mrs. Roosevelt turned. “Here’s a letter from your boy Franklin,” she said, giving her husband the sheet of paper I had noticed earlier in her hand. Franklin, Jr. was then serving on a destroyer somewhere in the Atlantic. The President put on his glasses and read the letter quickly, laid it on the desk, and blinked his eyes and smiled with a nod to his wife.

Meantime, slipping her evening bag under her arm, Mrs. Roosevelt took two cocktails from the tray and passed them to her cousin and Stella, urging the others to come up and get theirs.

When we all had one, the President lifted his glass with a brief gesture of salutation to his guests and took a sip. He seemed to savor it.

My pitch of interest was such that I scarcely tasted what I was drinking.

“Fala is getting to be very famous,” I said.

“Yes indeed,” said the President.

“Last week,” said one of the English girls, “I saw a picture of him on a magazine cover.”

“I thought it was rather good, didn’t you?” said the President, his look sweeping all of us.

We agreed that it was.

“Fala’s been getting a better press than I,” laughed FDR, reaching down to pat the dog’s head. “But everybody misspells his name. There’s only one l.”

“It’s an unusual name,” remarked Stella.

“Yes,” said FDR, leaning back. “One of my Scots ancestors way, way back was Murray the Outlaw of Fala Hill.” He laughed again and put his cigarette holder into his mouth, tilted up at a sharp angle.

Maybe an evening like this, I thought, is his way of keeping sane while in the dead center of an overwhelming insanity. Or maybe it means that, since he is in on the inside of everything that’s in the works, the day’s bad news which I saw in the headlines half an hour ago doesn’t worry him. Perhaps too his buoyancy comes in part from the great relief that our trance of indecisiveness is pierced and we are facing the showdown at last…

Mrs. Roosevelt, going about with a tray of hors d’oeuvres, stopped to introduce me to her private secretary, Malvina Thompson, a woman with an easy, natural manner and a simple directness of speech. The President called her “Tommy.”

A servant placed a bowl of popcorn before FDR, who said, “Ah—thank you,” and took a handful and began to toss it dexterously into his mouth. His eyes caught mine watching him; and, staying his hand for a moment, he asked:

“How many copies has your book sold?”

“About twenty-five thousand.”

“Really!” he exclaimed. “Random House has brought out my speeches and state papers in four volumes, but they haven’t done nearly as well,” he grinned, “though I haven’t heard lately what the figure is.”

Just another author, I thought… Good Lord! Has he read my book?

“Let’s sit down,” said Mrs. Roosevelt to the roomful at large.

Following her lead and Miss Thompson’s, we all drew chairs into a semicircle in front of the President. I saw Mrs. Roosevelt reach for a rather heavy armchair and started toward her but was too late.

“We’ll save this one for the Prime Minister,” she said.

“Is he still here?” I blurted.

“Yes, he’s still here,” she smiled, apparently delighting in my surprise which bordered on incredulity.

Well, I said to myself.

Like most people outside Washington inner circles, I had assumed that following his Ottawa speech some two weeks before, Winston Churchill had returned to England. There hadn’t been anything in the papers about him for well over a week. (Very few people had any inkling of his vacation in Florida.)

If this isn’t something, I thought, to see these two fellows together… But if Churchill is still here, conferring with FDR, why…

I began to wonder. Mrs. Roosevelt had invited us. She had wanted to talk with me. What had happened? Why were the English girls called in at the last minute? Had Churchill just returned from somewhere? And had the plans for the evening been changed only that afternoon, and Mrs. Roosevelt hadn’t felt free to cancel our invitation? For an instant I felt like an intruder, or rather like one who has been invited to this house but not to this room. I thought of the story about the woman in Carnegie Hall who went out during the performance for a drink of water, then got lost in the labyrinth of corridors and finally walked onto the stage while Heifetz and Rachmaninoff, or their equivalent, were playing a violin-piano concerto before a rapt capacity audience… Or had Churchill been here right along, and was this dinner FDR’s idea, an idea he had finally decided on only a few hours ago? If so, we were not intruding but on the contrary…

Through a kind of half daze I saw Mrs. Roosevelt sit down directly in front of the President and invite me with a friendly motion of her hand into the seat beside her.

“It will interest you, Mr. Adamic,” she said, “that the President gave his copy of your book to the Prime Minister and specially requested him to read it. And I did too.” Her earnest voice quavered in sudden mirth. “We’re most anxious to know what he’ll say.”

When I resumed breathing I said, “Is he reading it—has he finished it?”

“That—we don’t know,” said Mrs. Roosevelt. “He’s had it four or five days now—in his room.”

“I’d give anything to know his reaction,” I said, “especially to the last part.”

“So would I. And I think the President would too. He told Mr. Churchill he might not like the last part.”

“Then my guess is that Mr. Churchill read that part first.”

Mrs. Roosevelt was on the point of nodding in agreement, but she lifted her hands instead in a gesture which said: Who knows? We’ll just have to wait and see…

Chapter 4

John Bull in Person

In the last part of Two-Way Passage I was a bit hard on the British. I pointed out what seemed to me imperial Britain’s innate inability to play a constructive role in postwar Europe, which was bound to be very different from prewar Europe. And I maintained that the United States had a singular opportunity to help European nations move toward a democratic future. Our varied population drawn from many lands made us kin to much of the Old World. Our experience in political and personal democracy, our good will and material resources, our comparative lack of a record in European affairs resented by Europeans, and our distaste for the exploitation of other peoples were qualities which could contribute a lot to world stability and peace—if (a tremendous, little word)…

If we could only realize wherein our strength lay. If we could distill a purpose within ourselves and recognize the nature of the opportunity before us. If we could during the war convince Britain and the Soviet Union that it would be wise to let us seize the opportunity. And, once it was grasped, if we could do a sincere, honest job of encouraging political, economic and social democracy no matter how far Left it might want to go.