Hopkins’ assignment to meet with Churchill bypassed normal diplomatic channels. He held no official position, and when reporters asked the president if Hopkins was to be the next ambassador to Great Britain, Roosevelt answered, ‘You know Harry isn’t strong enough for that job.’ Recent events, however, had left a serious void in communication between the two nations. Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., had resigned, and the British ambassador to the United States, Lord Lothian, had died just days after Roosevelt received Churchill’s pivotal letter. Unable to meet with his British counterpart himself, Roosevelt told the press he was sending Hopkins to London’so that he can talk to Churchill like an Iowa farmer.’

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in American History magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

The mission was indicative of the special trust that Roosevelt put in Hopkins. Unassuming and plainspoken, Hopkins enjoyed a unique relationship with the chief executive. Roosevelt had other advisers, but he found Hopkins perfect company and liked to discuss important matters with him informally. Hopkins was unswervingly loyal to the president, who in turn often heeded his friend’s advice on significant policy issues. The president’s decisions, however, were clearly his own. For example, Roosevelt appointed General Dwight D. Eisenhower chief of Operation Overlord (the 1944 Normandy invasion plan) instead of General George C. Marshall, despite the opposition of Hopkins and many others, including Churchill. Meanwhile, the public regarded Hopkins as something of a ‘mystery man,’ as Time magazine described him in 1944, consumed by a strange illness and privy to the war’s many secrets.

Noticeably ill during a visit with the president in May 1940, Hopkins spent the night in a White House suite. At one time President Abraham Lincoln’s study, the suite was just down the hall from Roosevelt’s room. Hopkins lived there for the next three and a half years. When he married for the third time in July 1942, his wife, Louise, joined him and his daughter Diana in the White House. The family remained there until December 1943, when Harry rented a house in nearby Georgetown. Other members of Roosevelt’s circle, such as Rexford Tugwell and Henry Morgenthau, came to accept Hopkins’ closeness to the president as a fact of Washington life. Not everyone, however, was happy with the arrangement. Harold Ickes resented Hopkins’ insider role, and the two remained at odds for years. ‘I do not like him,’ Ickes once noted in his diary, ‘and I do not like the influence that he has with the president.’ Wendell Willkie, Roosevelt’s opponent in the 1940 presidential campaign, asked Roosevelt why he placed such faith in Hopkins when he knew that others resented it. The president told Willkie that if he ever became president, ‘You’ll learn what a lonely job this is, and you’ll discover the need for someone like Harry Hopkins who asks for nothing except to serve you.’

Winston Churchill’s initial reaction upon receiving word of Hopkins’ impending visit was, ‘Who?’ When the tall, lean American arrived in London, however, he quickly impressed Churchill with his forthrightness. British officials who were initially taken aback by Hopkins’ rumpled appearance soon accepted him as he was. He seemed to the British to be the stereotypical American: confident, secure, and oblivious to formality. Sherwood wrote that ‘Hopkins naturally and easily conformed to the essential Benjamin Franklin tradition of American diplomacy, acting on the conviction that when an American representative approaches his opposite numbers in friendly countries with the standard striped-pants frigidity, the strict observance of protocol and amenities, and a studied air of lip-curling, he is not really representing America–not, at any rate, the America of which FDR was President.’

Hopkins’ visit heartened British citizens, who saw his presence as a sign of forthcoming U.S. help. Churchill confidante Brendan Bracken told the prime minister’s secretary, John Colville, that Hopkins ‘was the most important American visitor to this country we had ever had . . . . He could influence the president more than any living man.’

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to