Episode 320: The Devils Will Get No Rest

Historically Thinking

As the President of the United States prepared to travel to Morocco for a wartime conference, his closest aide and advisor wrote down just why he was going to make the arduous trip. Franklin Roosevelt, wrote Harry Hopkins, “was going to Casablanca ‘because he wanted to make a trip. He was tired of having other people, particularly myself, speak for him around the world. He wanted to see our troops, he was sick of people telling him that it was dangerous to ride in airplanes. He liked the drama of it. But above all, he wanted to make a trip.” What Churchill called the most important Allied conference took place over ten days in January 1943. In a strange combination of resort accommodations, surrounded by barbed wire, anti-aircraft guns, and sandbags, a no-holds barred exchange laid out plans for the next year, and the years to come. James Conroy describes the antecedents to the conference, the lengthy trip to get there, and what happened in his new book The Devils Will Get No Rest: FDR, Churchill, and the Plan That Won the War. A practicing lawyer until 2020, James Conroy’s first book Our One Common Country, was a finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize; his second, Lincoln’s White House, shared the Lincoln Prize.