A young American in London gets acquainted with President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill
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On February 27, the Kids' Page talked to Curtis Roosevelt, the grandson of President Franklin Roosevelt.
Mr. Roosevelt (Curtis Roosevelt, that is) is now in his 70s, and was visiting London to give a speech at the Churchill Museum about his grandfather's friendship with Winston Churchill.
We asked him what it was like to have a famous grandfather, and whether he ever met Winston Churchill. He said that because he lived in the White House with his grandparents as a boy, he didn't think of his grandfather as a famous political figure, but as his grandfather. And although Curtis Roosevelt was not present when Churchill first visited the White House in December 1941 (and stayed for three weeks), he does remember his grandmother (Eleanor Roosevelt) describing the late-night conversations and stories FDR and Churchill shared.
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Curtis Roosevelt finally did meet Winston Churchill in 1948, when Curtis was a teenager; but he said the great Churchill was not very interested in talking to an 18-year old, having more serious things to do and more serious people to talk to!
Eleanor Roosevelt, Curtis Roosevelt's grandmother, was also an important person in her own right, and after the death of President Roosevelt, Mrs. Roosevelt chaired the drafting committee preparing the proposed Universal Declaration on Human Rights. After it was passed by the General Committee she also chaired the U.N.'s Commission on Human Rights, as well as being one of the senior U.S. representatives to the U.N. General Assembly.
To Curtis Roosevelt, though, FDR and Eleanor were "Papa" and "Grandmere" - not famous public figures, but grandparents.
We also asked Curtis Roosevelt about the special friendship between President Roosevelt ("FDR") and Winston Churchill. Churchill's first visit to the White House in 1941 came at a very difficult time for both the United States and Great Britain. The United States had just suffered the attack on Pearl Harbor, which wiped out the Americans' Pacific fleet, and Great Britain had spent many grueling months facing the Nazi menace in Europe. When Churchill and Roosevelt got together, they were full of talks of politics and plans, but they also had time to get to know each other better, and loved to share stories. They wrote hundreds of letters to each other, and shared a similar sense of humor. They both knew what failure in the war would mean, and they were determined to defend their countries. They didn't always agree on everything, but they did listen to each other as friends. Their friendship became the bedrock of the close cooperation between the United States and Great Britain in World War II, and after.
If you'd like to sit next to President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill today, you can go to Old Bond Street, in London: there, a life-sized sculpture of the "Allies," FDR and Churchill sitting on a bench, leaves just enough room for you to sit between them.
Kids
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