Guests and fish.

Ben Franklin famously said that both stink after three days, which could be correct. You love having visitors. You also love when they go home, and who could blame you? Your space is your space and, well, that’s it. Still, there are times when, for many reasons, you buck up and launder the guest room sheets again. As in the new book, “Mr. Churchill in the White House” by Robert Schmuhl, doing so might divert all-out war.

The year 1941 was an eventful one for Franklin Roosevelt. In January that year, he was inaugurated for a third term in office. In March, he helped out with the British war effort; in June, his personal secretary and “close companion” Missy LeHand suffered a stroke and his presidential library broke ground. Roosevelt’s mother died in September and Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japan in December. Then, at the end of the year, Winston Churchill arrived in Washington and stayed more than two weeks longer than planned.

It wasn’t the last time Churchill visited the Roosevelts, but that first stay set the tone and rankled Mrs. Roosevelt mightily. Churchill dared to choose his own room in the White House, and he proceeded to treat the residence as his own home. Servants and the President both learned that the British statesman wasn’t afraid to walk around in the nude; the White House butler also learned not to bother Churchill before mid-morning, and that total quiet was mandatory in the hallways.

And yet, though the visits sometimes took on a bit of a vacationy tone, serious work was done while Churchill took up residence in America’s home. Schmuhl writes at length about how the White House became, in a way, like a second office for Churchill, with the consent (implied or otherwise) of FDR (but probably not Eleanor Roosevelt), and how the efforts and “chummy” friendship of both men on this side of the pond led to “cooperation, and… common cause” and affected what happened overseas and in the world.

So you say you’ve read every book on World War II that you could get your hands on and you want more. “Mr. Churchill in the White House” will satisfy you and it offers a nice bonus: you can eagerly share this WWII book with those who aren’t war buffs.

Indeed, author Robert Schmuhl tells this hidden-in-plain-sight story with the kind of charm and humor you don’t expect in a book on the War. There are anecdotes in here that ardent war historians will vacuum up and information that will make biography lovers happy, but readers who like a bit of dirty linen with their books will be gleeful at what Schmuhl shares, too. Trust this and speaking of politics: you’ll absolutely want to know about the exchange between Nixon and Churchill, and how it portended the future…

This is a story to enjoy on a rainy day or if it’s too hot to go outside. Indeed, “Mr. Churchill in the White House” is a book worth fishing for.

“Mr. Churchill in the White House: The Untold Story of a Prime Minister and Two Presidents” by Robert Schmuhl
c.2024, Liveright
$32.00
382 pages