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victories in Libya.” At a birthday banquet in the Kremlin Eden reported as Churchill was reaching United States waters, “We drank [to] your health and some others. Stalin spoke very warmly of you.” On returning, Eden would tell Brooke that state dinners in Moscow began at ten and lasted until five. “[General] Timoshenko arrived drunk and by continuous drinking restored himself to sobriety by 5 A.M. On the other hand, [Marshal] Voroshilov after at least arriving sober, had to be carried out before the evening was over.” Before the Marshal slumped down, Stalin—who prudently watered his vodka—asked Eden, “Do your Generals also hold their drink so badly?”
    Diplomatically, Eden answered, like Stalin through an interpreter standing by, “They may have a better capacity for drink, but they have not the same ability for winning battles!”
    Much was on Churchill’s figurative plate as he prepared for a late dinner at the White House. Despite her outburst at breakfast, Eleanor Roosevelt had greeted him and her husband warmly as they emerged from the elevator on the second floor. Weary from attending pre-Christmas activities all over Washington through the day, she had returned to oversee room arrangements for Churchill and his small airborne party. She showed Lord Beaverbrook to a bedroom, the PM’s deputy Tommy Thompson to another, the Yellow Bedroom, and John Martin, the PM’s private secretary, to the Small Blue Bedroom. The two Scotland Yard shadows were given a joint room and Churchill’s valet a dressing room adjoining Churchill’s quarters. The Monroe Room, Eleanor explained to Churchill, had been emptied of furniture to serve as his map room, to parallel his planning domain in the Cabinet War Rooms, underground below buildings at the corner of Great George Street and Storey’s Gate. (He would shortly have the Monroe Room covered with maps and colored pins, showing the movements of British troops and ships.)
    A tale more likely apocryphal is that she showed him to the fabled Lincoln Bedroom, which he proceeded, without informing her, to dislike. Once she left, he allegedly tried out beds in other rooms and selected for himself the Rose Bedroom, next to Thompson’s room on the east end of the floor. It was decorated with Victorian scenes and, whether or not he knew its history, had been used by Queen Elizabeth on her visit in 1939. According to Harry Hopkins’s close friend and FDR speechwriter Robert Sherwood, however, Churchill was “installed in the big [Rose] bedroom across from Hopkins’ room, and as the two of them walked back and forth to visit one another they had to pick their way through great piles of Christmas parcels.” Hopkins, a widower and FDR’s trusted intimate—almost his second self—lived in the White House with his daughter, Diana, then nine. Son of a harness-maker in Sioux City, Iowa, he had been described to Churchill warily, in traditional Tory fashion, before he met and bonded decisively with Hopkins, as “the old nonconformist conscience of Victorian liberalism.... He does not believe that a world in which some live in the sun and others in the shadows makes sense.”
    Mrs. Roosevelt had invited the advance party to “tea” at 8:15 in the ground floor Red Room while dinner was being prepared, but recognizing Churchill’s lack of eagerness for the signature British beverage, FDR was already seated at a small table prepared to mix more potent drinks. The PM emerged in one of his characteristic guises—the blue cap and (over a ruffled shirt) the double-breasted coat of an Elder Brother of Trinity House, the venerable guild chartered by Henry VIII and headquartered at Tower Hill, still supporting lighthouses and navigational aids. To be one of the thirty-one elite Elder Brothers was a valued royal, naval, or political distinction.
    The President prized his special martini recipe, although its mild relative proportions were often considered by guests to be unfortunate,