The Second Meeting

Churchill, FDR, and the Atlantic Charter

“We’ve met before.”

That was the thought on the American’s mind as the Englishman climbed the gangway of his ship. It was a warm August day and all around them, densely wooded valleys were echoing the sounds of gulls in the salty air and seals on the rocky shore. A southwesterly wind blew and a gray mist filled the air. Their first meeting had been twenty-three years prior, at a dinner in London. For both, it had been a professional obligation and anyway, it had been a Monday night. For the American though, it was a highlight: meeting the famous Englishman, a man eight years his senior, on his home turf, at the famous Gray’s Inn. As the Englishman shook the American’s hand, the American reminded him of their first rendezvous, remarking on his “treasured recollections.” The Englishman stared into the American’s pale, gray-blue eyes. He didn’t remember.

“Frankly, it has slipped my memory,” the Englishman told him.

It was just after 11 AM on August 9, 1941 and President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill were meeting aboard the USS Augusta off the coast of Newfoundland in Placentia Bay to plan an alliance that would be known as the Atlantic Charter, setting the course for the Western World’s next 84 years.

Back then when they first met in July 1918, Churchill was an M.P. and served as the Minister of Munitions under Prime Minister David Lloyd George after serving as First Lord of the Admiralty at the beginning of World War I. Roosevelt, on the other hand, had served as a member of the New York State Senate and by then, had become the Assistant Secretary of the Navy under President Woodrow Wilson. Beyond their status as sons of their respective nations’ aristocracies, both men were steadily climbing the ranks of power.

Still, the meeting was unremarkable. Roosevelt was visiting Great Britain to tour the nation’s naval bases, amid the United States’ late entry into WWI. He secured meetings with Prime Minister David Lloyd George and even had an audience with King George VI for forty-five minutes. Even so, Roosevelt’s memories of that evening at dinner hadn’t been as rosy as he recalled to Churchill. In fact, he had written that Churchill—then, in 1918 already famous—had “acted like a stinker.”

Now they were together again, shaking hands—Roosevelt, standing and stiffened by metal leg braces and the support of his son, and Churchill, stooped and aging, with much of his nation in rubble. Power, which seemed nearly within grasp for both men in 1918, had not come easy for either. Churchill had lost his seat in Parliament in 1923, only to regain it in the following election. But he couldn’t regain a position in the Cabinet, limiting his influence. In a political wilderness that lasted the entire 1930s, Churchill wrote a four-part biography of his ancestor, the First Duke of Marlborough, John Churchill. But none of the four volumes sold particularly well and his debts, always rising, began to pile up. Even his wife, the ever-faithful Clementine, slipped into a depression.

By 1939, Churchill was 64 years old. He hadn’t held a ministerial office since 1929. As he wrote, “In the twinkling of an eye, I found myself without an office, without a seat, without a party and,” in reference to his 1922 bout with acute appendicitis, “without an appendix.” Perhaps worst of all, the warnings he had issued about Germany throughout the decade had gone unheeded by British leaders inclined toward appeasement. While in Munich in 1932, Churchill even told a German businessman named Ernst Hanfstaengel that he would be willing to meet with the Nazi Party’s leader, Adolf Hitler, who would gain power the next year. Hitler declined, telling Hanfstaengel, “What on earth would I talk to him about?” Churchill, who had been famous in his twenties, was now old and out of the game.

Roosevelt had an even worse turn of luck than Churchill in the years after their first meeting. In August 1921, he had gone for a swim in the Bay of Fundy, near his family’s summer home on Campobello Island, a Canadian island near the Maine border. The following afternoon, the 39-year-old skipped dinner with his family after complaining of chills and lower back pain. The following day, his legs had grown weak. Bed-ridden, he would never gain use of them again.

Now, pulling into Placentia Bay twenty years later, Roosevelt was wheelchair bound and separated by just a few hundred miles of north Atlantic Ocean from Campobello. He was about to secure his third term as President, but now the Second World War had broken out and both Europe and Asia faced existential threats. Churchill, for his part, had turned personal losses into political gain too. On May 10, 1940—at the age of 65—he finally became Prime Minister. Soon, it became clear that he was quite possibly England’s last occupant of the office. That September, the Blitz began. For eight months, Nazi bombs rained down on England, killing over 40,000 civilians in the process. By then, France had fallen too. Hitler’s army was just across the English Channel.

Since Churchill had become Prime Minister, he had tried to gain the United States’ official entry into World War II. And despite Hitler’s aggression, Roosevelt demurred, ever aware of the isolationist feelings in the United States that only grew after World War I. In fact, Roosevelt had signed four separate Neutrality Acts in 1935, 1936, 1937 and 1939. A Gallup poll conducted in May 1940 indicated that just 7% of Americans believed the country should declare war on Germany and send troops abroad. In was an American tradition: since Washington’s farewell address in 1796, Americans had held true to the tenets of isolationism. But slowly, the veil began to lift. In March 1941—as the Blitz raged on in Britain and as Hitler continued to tear through Europe and Imperial Japan through Asia—Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Act into law, to provide materiel to Britain, the Soviet Union, France, Republic of China and other Allied nations.

Churchill could feel a change coming. Later that summer, in 1941, Harry Hopkins, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce and Roosevelt’s most trusted advisor, visited Churchill in England after a trip to Moscow to meet with Stalin. Hopkins brought a stash of Stalin’s caviar as a gift, which Churchill said “was very good to have even though it meant fighting with the Russians to get it.” More than gifts, Hopkins had good news for Churchill too: Roosevelt wanted to meet him…Again.

Both men had been exchanging telegrams about the war for months, but now the goals were clear: Churchill wanted more support for his flagging nation, and Roosevelt wanted a clear outline for the world to follow after the war ended. Although the United States was still three months from entering the fray, Roosevelt knew he wanted the postwar global order to be led by Americans.

So, the two men agreed: they would meet in secret off the coast of Newfoundland in early August.

As Churchill boarded the Prince of Wales at Scapa Flow on August 4, he cabled Roosevelt: “It is twenty-seven years ago today that the Huns began their last war. We must make a good job of it this time. Twice ought to be enough.” Each night, as Churchill and his men ferried across the North Atlantic, practice “arguments” took place between Churchill and Alexander Cadogan, the Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, playing Roosevelt. Almost every night they watched That Hamilton Woman, a film from that same year starring Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, and each time it made Churchill cry. Across the six-day journey, Churchill watched other films, including Swiss Miss by Laurel and Hardy, listened to records on his gramophone, and read C.S. Forester’s novel, Captain Hornblower. Once after lunch, Harry Hopkins refused a second brandy. Churchill reprimanded him, “I hope that as we approach the United States you are not going to get more temperate.”

By the morning of August 9, the Prince of Wales docked alongside the USS Augusta, the presidential cruiser. After the awkward recollection of their first meeting—or lack thereof for Churchill—the two men spent the first of 113 days together across the ensuing four years.

By August 11, an agreement began to form. It included provisions that neither the U.S. nor the U.K. would seek territorial gains “after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny,” and affirming “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live,” including the “sovereign rights and self-government to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.” Crucially, at Roosevelt’s request, it called for world peace following the war, although it did not include a provision for how to best keep such a promise. Churchill had an idea: a pact of mutual security. Although Roosevelt initially balked—fearful of isolationists in America who still denigrated the League of Nations—he ultimately agreed. Churchill was pleased. It was, he wrote, “a plain and bold intimation that after the war the United States would join with us in policing the world.”

By August 14, the agreement was announced. Both leaders returned home.

The United States would formally enter the war in December, after Japanese pilots bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7, 1941. Over the course of the next four years, millions would die across the world as the forces of freedom and tyranny battled head-to-head. Churchill and Roosevelt would continue to meet repeatedly as the postwar international order first laid out in the Atlantic Charter began to crystallize. The Charter, and the meeting off the coast of Newfoundland that started it all, would go on to form the basis for NATO, which was founded in 1949. With NATO, the bond between the United States and the democracies of Europe would be forever fused and its most essential tenet, Article 5, would guarantee that an attack on any one nation would be treated as an attack on all. Churchill’s idea for mutual security, it seemed, would last. In a dangerous world, NATO would be both a prayer for peace and a promise that an event as destructive and disordering as WWII could never happen again.

In 2025, that prayer has been cast aside and America has abdicated its role of global leadership.

A few weeks ago, the Trump administration released its “National Security Strategy” document which stated bluntly, “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.” It continued that “nations must assume primary responsibility” for their defense. Yet the document reserved its harshest judgements for Europe, which since the days of the Atlantic Charter has been the United States’ most important continental ally. In a section titled “Promoting European Greatness,” the administration laid out that Europe’s economic issues are only eclipsed by threats of “civilizational erasure” that include the undermining of “political liberty and sovereignty” and the “loss of national identities and self-confidence.” To solve this crisis, the administration suggested aligning with “patriotic European parties,” an apparent reference to movements like AfD in Germany, a far-right party that is now the largest oppositional force in the Bundestag.

The document—which serves as the official foreign policy stance of the entire term—also fails to criticize Russia or China as threats to the United States, instead choosing to strike a conciliatory tone toward nations that the first Trump administration had described as “acute threat[s]” that used “subversion and aggression.” Now, it seems the United States’ National Security Strategy is designed with a deference toward China and with Russian desires in mind. This all comes at a moment when the administration is poised to allow Russia to dictate the terms for the end of its war with Ukraine, and as NATO Chief, Mark Rutte, has warned just this week that “Russia is already escalating its covert campaign against our societies. We must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured.”

Except this time the United States will not be there to help.

It’s as though the idea of a global order for peace has…slipped our memory.

Sources:

Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking With Destiny.

William Manchester and Paul Reid, The Last Lion.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/06/world/europe/trump-europe-strategy-document.html