The recent HBO Winston Churchill biopic, Into the Storm,
shows the British premier bathing in a White House tub while
amiably chatting with a nearby President Franklin Roosevelt.
Rising from his bath, Churchill is at first covered by a towel,
which he accidentally drops, appearing naked before the
President. “As you can see, Mr. President, I have nothing to
conceal from you,” he wittily tells his wartime partner, sparking
mirth and laughter between the two.
It’s an amusing vignette, but did this nude encounter between
Churchill and FDR really happen? The British ambassador recently
hosted a screening of Into the Storm, followed by a
panel discussion, where Newsweek editor and
Churchill/FDR biographer Jon Meacham was asked this question.
“Yes!” Meacham replied, according to the Washington
Post, “I actually interviewed the man who took the
dictation!” He added: “For me, in a dork way, it was very
glamorous.”
That man was Patrick Kinna, Churchill’s wartime dictationist, who
died at age 95 in March, and was the last surviving witness to
the naked incident, which some of his obituaries dutifully noted.
As Meacham described in his Franklin and Winston, during
Churchill’s Christmastime 1941 visit to Washington, following
Pearl Harbor, the Prime Minister was fresh from his twice a day
bath and pacing about “completely starkers” in his White House
bedroom, according to Kinna. The loyal stenographer, who
previously had served the Duke of Windsor, was taking dictation
from his restless nude chieftain. Churchill replied “come in,”
after a knock at the door, and FDR rolled forward, surprised to
see the Englishman disrobed. The President tried to leave, but
the Prime Minister stopped him, declaring, “You see, Mr.
President, I have nothing to hide from you.”
According to Meacham’s book, FDR supposedly enjoyed the repartee.
His own secretary, Grace Tully, later recounted, “Chuckling like
a small boy, he told me about it later,” pronouncing that the
naked Churchill was “pink and white all over.”
An obituary for Kinna elaborated a little more. “Churchill was in
the bath and began dictating,” according to Kinna. “He would
submerge himself under the water every now and again and come up
and carry on with the dictation.” The war-time secretary
recalled: “He was very absorbed in his work that morning and
would not keep still for the valet to help dress him; he kept
walking around the room speaking aloud. There was a rat-a-tat-tat
on the door, and Churchill swung the door open to President
Roosevelt!” Kinna concluded: “Churchill simply said that he had
nothing to hide from Mr. President!”
The story of Churchill naked with FDR may have first originated
with Churchill’s long-time bodyguard, Walter Thompson, who
remembered the Prime Minister saying: “You see, Mr President, I
have nothing whatever to hide from you.” But FDR’s close aide and
confidante, Harry Hopkins, also eagerly and bemusedly popularized
the story among friends shortly after the incident, more
majestically recounting Churchill’s riposte as: “The Prime
Minister of Great Britain has nothing to hide from the President
of the United States.”
Churchill Centre founder Richard Langworth, author of
Churchill by Himself: The Definitive Collection of
Quotations, thinks the episode very likely true though
maybe exaggerated. Churchill himself later denied it to Hopkins’
biographer, insisting it was “nonsense,” and that he “never
received the President without at least a bath towel wrapped
around him.” He also cleverly noted, “I could not possibly have
made such a statement” about nothing to hide, because the
“President himself would have been well aware that it was not
strictly true.” But Langworth observed that Churchill also
told King
George VI that he was “the only man in the world to
have received the head of a nation naked.”
Langworth calls the incident “consistent with Winston
Churchill’s personality” if also “very susceptible to being
embellished or obfuscated through countless recitals by intimates
(and friends of intimates) over the years.” He thinks Churchill
likely was not stark naked (or “starkers”) in front of FDR, and
was probably still toweled up, but almost certainly “made some
offhand remark” that impressed his audience. More importantly,
the encounter, whatever its details, illustrated the
“extraordinary lack of ceremony” and close collegiality between
FDR and Churchill.
FDR himself was known to conduct business from and receive
visitors in his bedroom, if not from his bath. According to
Conrad Black’s FDR biography, at least one member of Roosevelt’s
inner circle thought this ritual discomfitingly reminiscent of
the court of Louis XIV. Victorian patricians like Roosevelt and
Churchill perhaps, accustomed to servants and valets, could
stylishly hold forth from almost any location or state of dress,
their spectators still in awe of their majesty. Presumably more
recent American presidents and British prime ministers have not
similarly entertained. Nor have they likely shared with each
other what FDR famously told Churchill shortly after the bath
incident and days of strategic planning about the world’s future:
“It’s fun to be in the same century with you.”
