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How FDR and Winston Churchill Celebrated Christmas After Pearl Harbor

Posted on
December 22, 2016
by Agree Staff
It was December 22nd, 1941. President Franklin Roosevelt already had a difficult task in summoning Christmas spirit a few weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. And now he had made his wife mad.

Great Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill was coming to the White House for a 10-day visit during the holidays, dinner was scheduled for that night, and FDR hadn't told Eleanor.

FDR Angered Eleanor Before Churchill's Visit

The White House butler overheard the First Lady complain to the President, "You should have told me. Why didn't you tell me? I can't find [the housekeeper] Mrs. Nesbitt anywhere. If only I had known."

As historian Doris Kearns Goodwin later explained, "Once foreign policy became his main concern, it did separate the two from one another. She wasn't sharing with him the way she did during the early days of the New Deal. I'm sure that her angry response was also about that separation."

The visit was kept secret not to just to Eleanor, but to everybody. However, once Churchill arrived, the two leaders addressed the nation on Christmas Eve. A crowd of 20,000 was assembled outside the White House for the lighting of the national tree, and two spoke to them and to millions over the radio waves.

FDR and Churchill Addressed The Nation on Christmas Eve

Both sought to resolve the tension between celebrating the holiday and preparing for war. FDR said, "How can we light our trees? How can we give our gifts?  ... How can we pause, even for a day, even for Christmas Day, in our urgent labor of arming a decent humanity against the enemies which beset it?  ... even as we ask these questions, we know the answer. There is another preparation demanded of this Nation beyond and beside the preparation of weapons and materials of war. There is demanded also of us the preparation of our hearts; the arming of our hearts. And when we make ready our hearts for the labor and the suffering and the ultimate victory which lie ahead, then we observe Christmas Day—with all of its memories and all of its meanings—as we should."

Churchill followed with a bit of understatement, "This is a strange Christmas Eve." But he quickly shifted to the magnitude of the dangers, with an eye toward keeping America's attention not just on the Japanese who attacked Pearl Harbor, but on the Germans as well: "Almost the whole world is locked in deadly struggle, and, with the most terrible weapons which science can devise, the nations advance upon each other."

Yet he managed to end on a hopeful note: "Let the children have their night of fun and laughter.  Let the gifts of Father Christmas delight their play. Let us grown-ups share to the full in their unstinted pleasures before we turn again to the stern task and the formidable years that lie before us, resolved that, by our sacrifice and daring, these same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world."

And they weren't.
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