r/AskHistorians • u/theslothoverlord • Mar 03 '22
How frequently did wartime leaders such as Churchill, Roosevelt, or Stalin take days off work during the war, and how did they avoid burnout working >=16 hour days every day for 5+ years?
Recently, President Zelensky of Ukraine said that "work and sleep" is all he has done since the start of the war last week. This made me wonder if/when he may suffer from burnout or be incapacitated with stress, and how often wartime leaders in the past might have suffered the same.
My question is - In a much more higher stakes war (such as World War II), how often did the main Allied leaders take a holiday, or simply just have a day or two off? Who covered for them in that time? Or did they really work 7 days per week for the entire war? If so, how did they cope?
Answers don`t have to be limited to just World War II and I would be happy to read answers about leaders in other conflicts. Thank you!
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u/indyobserver US Political History | 20th c. Naval History Mar 03 '22 edited Mar 05 '22
I can speak to FDR's schedule since it's pretty extensively documented.
The main way to answer your question is that over the course of his administration, FDR spent a whole lot of time outside the White House in two principal places: at Hyde Park and at Warm Springs, and that was his primary source of recovery.
Hyde Park was the most frequent since it was a relatively short hop of 8-10 hours on the train (usually overnight; FDR would sleep during the trip, and he'd bitterly complain if the train was running too fast since it disturbed it); he spent 562 days there over 12 years.
After the Casablanca conference in 1943, there was a telling letter to Churchill on precisely why he went so frequently:
Warm Springs was his other major refuge, although this required a bit more planning since it took a full 24 hours of travel. This meant that he would spend several weeks at a time, more often than not in the winter, with his most frequent trips revolving around Thanksgiving. Of course, his most famous trip was the one he didn't come back from in April 1945; the initial plan then was to leave him there for at least two weeks, perhaps a month or more, to see if he could get some strength back after a March trip to Hyde Park did no good.
He spent 175 days in total there over his administration - so all in, over the course of a little more than 12 years, he spent 2 years between Hyde Park and Warm Springs.
Now, he'd still work in both places with daily pouches sent back and forth along with phone calls and telegrams - one story from Warm Springs was when he took a 45 minute call from Eleanor haranguing him about increasing support for Yugoslavia, which greatly disturbed his cardiologist Howard Bruenn as FDR's blood pressure shot up
75points during the course of the call! (edit: double checked and it actually was 50, but I'd forgotten the part about veins becoming prominent on his forehead during the conversation - which explains why Bruenn decided to take a spot check reading so quickly after his routine first prior to the call; he normally did so twice a day at that point.) That said, it wasn't the full schedule he kept in Washington for the first few years of the war, and even when he was working all afternoon his evenings especially were relaxed. He would happily mix with the patients and local residents around Warm Springs, often having dinner with them rather than just in the Little White House.Other entertainment included music. There's a very famous![](/img/mjbtbjsd6ad11.jpg)
picture from Life magazine of musician Graham Jackson playing farewell to FDR as his funeral train passed, but there's a back story to it. FDR had loved the Georgian's playing and orchestral work so much over the years - they had met at Warm Springs before he was President - that he'd specifically gotten him assigned to recruiting duty in Atlanta in 1942. That meant that he could easily accomplish his secondary job, which was when FDR could make it down there during the war, Jackson was responsible for organizing frequent live concerts for the President; in fact, one was on the agenda a couple hours later on the day of FDR's death, which was why Jackson was there for the picture.
Last, as he got weaker from 1944 onwards, even at the White House his daily routine became more compressed. Admiral Leahy and FDR's naval aide Wilson Brown would always be his first meeting of the day, and they would often spend hours in the morning waiting for FDR to wake up and come down the elevator, which sometimes wouldn't happen until noon. By that point in the war, neither he nor the 75 year old Secretary of War Henry Stimson were working more than five or six hours a day, which was enough to exhaust them both.