Home
Search transcripts:    Advanced Search
Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Part:         Session:         Page of 912

meeting the British somewhere. That was very encouraging to the British. Of course, it wasn't safe to let anyone know where Churchill was.

On August 21st Roosevelt was back and we had our first meeting at the new Cabinet table. Roosevelt described his meeting with Churchill, which we had all read about in the papers by that time. He had much more to say about Churchill as a human being, as a person. Before the Argentia meeting, he was already communicating with Churchill by cable and code, but Churchill and Roosevelt had never met face to face, I think, unless there had been a very brief meeting many years before when Roosevelt was Assistant Secretary of the Navy. It was under circumstances in which there was no competent meeting at all.

I had known Churchill a little as a young man before the First World War, socially purely. Some of my English friends were friends of his - as a matter of fact, most of them were. Some of them were killed at Gallipoli out of having been friends of Churchill's and gone out there with him. Churchill was a very interesting, alert and vigorous individual who was an intellectual clearly. The people that he knew in England, cultivated and saw a lot of out of sheer personal taste and selection were groups of young intellectuals, artists and poets. For instance, Rupert Brooke was a great personal friend of his. He was a personal friend of mine. It was through that group of Tom Nesbit, Rupert Brooke and that





© 2006 Columbia University Libraries | Oral History Research Office | Rights and Permissions | Help