The Trip

With Franklin Roosevelt's return to Washington, many personal details of his epochmaking, 25,000-mile trip came out. Some of them:

> The President left Washington immediately after his appearance at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on Armistice Day. His method of travel to and from Africa is a military secret. For the rest of the trip he used a Douglas C-54, flying in it to Cairo and Teheran and back from Teheran to Cairo, Carthage, Malta, Sicily and finally to Dakar. His mode of travel from Dakar home was not disclosed.

>In the C-54, the President slept on a rubber mattress stretched across two seats from which the backs had been removed. A green curtain hung about the improvised bed. The plane's remaining 26 bucket seats were for Harry Hopkins and Admiral Leahy, for the President's naval and military aides, his physician, a masseur, and his valet, Prettyman. Also taken along were a corps of six Filipino cooks from the Presidential yacht Potomac.

> The night after arrival of the President's party in Teheran, Russian Foreign Minister Viacheslav Molotov telephoned Averell Harriman, told him the Ogpu had discovered a German plot on the lives of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin. He suggested that Franklin Roosevelt move from the American to the Russian Embassy. The President did so, the next day. Churchill remained at the British Embassy, just across the street. The Russians then threw a screen around the Russian and British Embassies, turning them, in effect, into one armed camp. Probable reason for the scare: week before, 38 German paratroopers had been dropped in the vicinity, and only 32 rounded up. Even the janitors in the Russian Embassy were armed.

> Chatting with Molotov one day in his room in the new yellow brick Russian Embassy, President Roosevelt picked up the inkwell on his desk, turned it over in his hand. Then he noticed the trademark: "Made in Germany." Molotov blushed, but finally laughed, too.

> The President did all his Christmas shopping in U.S. Army post exchanges in Cairo and Teheran. The Army had previously picked out choice wares from native street bazaars, and held the price-hagglers down by an unofficial international OPA ceiling of their own.

> Starting with his flight to the Democratic National Convention in 1932, President Roosevelt has now traveled farther than the distance to the moon (238,860 miles). Next most traveled President: William Howard Taft, 114,000 miles.

*For Winston Churchill's mileage, see p. 34.

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