Americans in Paris: Life and Death under Nazi Occupation 1940–44. Charles Glass
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Frenchmen must somehow adapt themselves to this fact.’ He recalled his first meeting with Pétain in July 1940:
The Marshal was then eighty-four years old and in his eyes I was only a young diplomat substituting for an ambassador, so he smiled at me indulgently. Then, in his cool, clear, rather formal French, he said that continuance of the war would have been insanity, and that France would have been completely destroyed, since neither France nor Britain should have gone into a war for which they were wholly unprepared. With some emotion he declared that France could not afford again to have a million of its sons killed … Each time I talked with Pétain he expressed in some way his friendly feeling for the
United States, implying that it was only his affection for our country that made him tolerate my rather unwelcome arguments.
Count René de Chambrun arrived in Vichy on 19 August. Clara had not seen her only son for more than two months. A frontline soldier during the Battle of France, René had served as a lieutenant on the Maginot Line. The high command promoted him to captain and assigned him as liaison officer to the British forces at the front. His brief mission to England convinced him that Britain would hold if America provided aid. At Ambassador Bullitt’s suggestion, Prime Minister Paul Reynaud posted René to Washington as a temporary military attaché to persuade President Franklin Roosevelt to send weapons to Britain. René spent two months in America, seeing Roosevelt, his cabinet, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the press and Republican isolationists like his Aunt Alice Roosevelt Longworth and Ohio Senator Robert Taft. On returning to France via Spain, René went first to Châteldon to see his wife, Josée. The next day, at Vichy’s Hôtel du Parc, he told Clara and Aldebert what he had accomplished in the land of their births.
It was an impressive story. On 12 June, two days before Paris fell, René’s Yankee Clipper touched down in the water off Long Island’s La Guardia Field. A Pan Am employee handed René an urgent message from Marguerite Lehand, FDR’s longtime private secretary and, unknown to René, sometime mistress of Ambassador Bullitt. It asked him to call President Roosevelt as soon as he reached his hotel, the old Ritz, in Manhattan. When he called, ‘Missy’ Lehand told him, ‘The president wants to see you as soon as possible.’ René turned up at the White House the next day to be greeted by the president, ‘Happy to receive you, cousin!’ Roosevelt asked, ‘Are you going to win this war?’ René answered, ‘That depends very much on you.’ Later, FDR welcomed him to the presidential yacht, the converted 165-foot Coast Guard cutter Potomac. Also on board were financier Averell Harriman, who was advising Roosevelt on foreign affairs despite his business interests in Germany, and Commerce Secretary Harry Hopkins. René wrote later to a friend about the cruise: ‘Radiograms reporting the advance of the German army through France kept coming in and when it was about 7 p.m. the President was informed that the German army had crossed the Loire. He turned towards me and said, with deep feeling in his voice: “René, the show is over” and then, after a silence of a few seconds, he added, “I really think Britain will be unable to hold out.”’
René repeated what he had told Bullitt at the embassy in Paris: ‘I maintain that Britain, entrenched in her island, is invincible, thanks to her fleet, her fighter force, which is becoming the best in the world, a good antiaircraft defense, which must be reinforced immediately, and ground forces, which have been miraculously rescued.’ Roosevelt, a sagacious politician whose private views already accorded with René’s, needed less persuading than René imagined. He had already arranged for 3,100 planes purchased by France but embargoed under the Neutrality Act to be sent via Canada to Britain.
Running for his third term as president, Roosevelt had pledged not to send American boys to die in Europe. Yet he was trying to help the British to stop the Germans and their threat to American interests in the western hemisphere. FDR saw in his young Franco-American cousin an ally who could lobby for the additional arms that Britain needed without seeming too close to the administration. FDR wrote a list of twenty-two influential Americans that René needed to persuade. They included Secretary of State Cordell Hull, House Speaker Sam Rayburn, Treasury Secretary Hans Morgenthau and New York Daily News publisher Joe Patterson. When Missy Lehand suggested René meet important women, FDR added a twenty-third name, his wife Eleanor’s. René saw Mrs Roosevelt, who was also his cousin, the next day. He toured the United States, using family members, like his Aunt Alice, who was as powerful within the conservative wing of the Republican Party as his cousin Eleanor was among New Deal Democrats. Alice, Teddy Roosevelt’s only daughter and René’s ‘favorite aunt on both sides of the Atlantic’, arranged an important dinner with Senate Republican leader Robert Taft and Joe Patterson. René undoubtedly knew that his mother disliked Aunt Alice. Clara had sided with her brother, Congressman Nicholas Longworth, in his many marital disputes with his wife, who was notoriously temperamental. Alice had once caught her husband in flagrante with her closest friend, Cissy Patterson. Although the flamboyant and red-headed Cissy was Joe’s sister, she went to work for his national newspaper rival, William Randolph Hearst, as editor of the Washington Herald. Whenever she could, Cissy published malicious gossip about Alice. René may have been aware of the tortuous background, but the dinner was business. He convinced both Taft and Joe Patterson not to oppose FDR’s proposed increase in military spending. Producing more American weapons would make some available to Britain.
At public meetings, René was usually introduced as Lafayette’s descendant and the nephew of the late House Speaker, Nicholas Longworth – links that emphasized his American origins. That René’s campaign worked was borne out by Roosevelt’s release to Britain of tanks, anti-aircraft guns and machine guns that had been ordered by France and embargoed since the beginning of the war. Lord Lothian, Britain’s ambassador to Washington with whom René had breakfasted regularly there, wrote to the young captain on 9 August, ‘You have been able, almost alone, to change official public opinion in favour of my country … For all of this, I want to assure you that Great Britain will never forget anything that you have done for her during her days of misfortune and distress.’
René maintained what contact he could from the United States, via telegram and occasional telephone calls, with his parents and his wife, Josée, in France. Aware of food shortages and the millions of refugees in the Vichy zone, he asked Roosevelt to send humanitarian aid to southern France. On 14 July, the president said he might do it, ‘if Bullitt agrees’. When William Bullitt arrived from Lisbon on 20 July, René was waiting for him at La Guardia Field. Bullitt endorsed his scheme to send food to France. On 1 August in Washington, René repeated his request to Roosevelt. The president wanted assurances that Germany would not seize the American food. René pointed out that the German army would not cross the line of demarcation to seize powdered milk, when its forces were concentrated in the north to invade Britain. FDR agreed to provide assistance on two conditions: Maréchal Philippe Pétain must cease his government’s anti-British propaganda and declare publicly to the American reporters in Vichy that he supported America’s increased defence expenditure and its democratic ideals.
Back in New York, Henry Luce, founder and owner of Time and Life magazines, invited René to lunch and an editorial staff meeting. René was already a friend of Luce and his glamorous wife, the playwright Clare Boothe, whom he had guided around the Maginot Line the previous May. Time had given favourable publicity to René, noting on 24 June that Roosevelt had returned from his cruise with de Chambrun on the Potomac ‘refreshed and ready to act within the limits of his great powers. Some of them he used forthwith – to wave U.S. planes across the Canadian border’. Luce asked René a favour: would he meet Time’s 33-year-old editor, Frank Norris, and photographer Ed Riley ‘by chance’ on the Pan Am Dixie Clipper to Lisbon and ease their way across Portugal and Spain to Vichy? Luce told René he wanted Time to be first with a story out of the Free Zone, perhaps choosing to forget that a dozen American newspaper correspondents were already there.
When René arrived in Vichy with the two Time men, Clara was proud of her son and his achievements in the United States. She did not have to tell him what everyone in France knew: that his father-in-law, Pierre Laval, believed that Britain would lose the war and France must find a place, albeit secondary, in the new German Europe. If René de Chambrun and Pierre Laval argued about their differing conceptions of the outcome of the war, neither René nor