Obit­u­ar­ies for Churchill’s wartime sec­re­tary Patrick Kinna report that he saw a naked Churchill greet Franklin Roo­sevelt at the White House, say­ing he had “noth­ing to hide from the Pres­i­dent.” Con­rad Black in Franklin Delano Roo­sevelt: Cham­pion of Free­dom has Churchill deny­ing he ever appeared to the Pres­i­dent com­pletely undressed. My guess is that the obit­u­ary writ­ers are read­ing more into Kinna’s story about “noth­ing to hide” than was actu­ally there. Do you know the full story? —M.T.

Roo­sevelt and Churchill, Casablanca, 1943

A story like this is very sus­cep­ti­ble to being embell­ished or obfus­cated through count­less recitals by inti­mates (and friends of inti­mates) over the years. The most likely inter­pre­ta­tion is that Churchill made some off­hand remark, but was not stark naked when the Pres­i­dent arrived in his room. (Remem­ber, FDR entered his bed­room; Churchill’s ever-present valet would have handed him a towel as he climbed out of the tub in the adjoin­ing bath­room.)

I use this tale to demon­strate the vararies of quote attri­bu­tion in the pref­ace to Churchill by Himself:

To rely on [the Inter­net] for proof of a Churchill quo­ta­tion is per­ilous. It is full of sup­posed quo­ta­tions he either never said, or repeated from some prior speaker. The test of any quo­ta­tion, on the Inter­net or else­where, is whether it is accom­pa­nied by attri­bu­tion. If not, it may be pure invention—or words put in Churchill’s mouth to make it more interesting.

Take for exam­ple WSC’s cel­e­brated line to Roo­sevelt, emerg­ing naked from his bath: “The Prime Min­is­ter of Great Britain has noth­ing to hide from the Pres­i­dent of the United States.” Can it be believed? As noth­ing very momen­tous hinges on the issue, and given the impru­dence of imput­ing untruth to WSC’s body­guard Wal­ter Thomp­son (who first quoted it), and with con­sid­er­able attri­bu­tion, I con­cluded that it can.

Harry Hop­kins, FDR’s adviser, repeated his ver­sion of this remark (using “con­ceal” instead of “hide”) often enough to raise at least a pre­sump­tion in favour of its verac­ity. As against such con­sid­er­a­tions is the tes­ti­mony of Churchill him­self. Hop­kins’ biog­ra­pher  Robert Sher­wood once screwed up the courage to ask Churchill point blank whether the story was true or false. WSC said it was “nonsense,” that he “never received the Pres­i­dent with­out at least a bath towel wrapped around him.”

As to the dec­la­ra­tion itself, Churchill added: “I could not pos­si­bly have made such a state­ment as that. The Pres­i­dent him­self would have been well aware that it was not strictly true.” Yet Churchill later told King George VI that he was “the only man in the world to have received the head of a nation naked.” (Chap­ter 33, Ripostes…Naked encounter.)

Truth, how­ever, is elu­sive, and what is most impor­tant in this unpor­ten­tous inci­dent is that what­ever the actual facts, the reported words are con­sis­tent with Win­ston Churchill’s per­son­al­ity. More sig­nif­i­cantly, they are con­sis­tent with the extra­or­di­nary lack of cer­e­mony that char­ac­terised the rela­tion­ship of Churchill and Roo­sevelt: the col­le­gial way they worked together, despite many disagreements.

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Tagged as: Conrad Black, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins, King George VI, Patrick Kinna, Robert Sherwood, Walter Thompson