On December 16, Roosevelt returned to Washington from his trip looking energized. At a press conference the next day, he began by saying there was no special news, then introduced a major new idea: the United States should stop treating aid to Britain as a simple cash transaction.

Roosevelt argued that America’s best immediate defense was Britain’s success in defending itself. To explain his thinking, he used a household analogy about lending a neighbor a garden hose to fight a fire. The point of the example was that the lender should help first and worry about replacement later, rather than demand payment before giving assistance.

This concept became the core of a bill soon introduced in Congress as H.R. 1776, later known as the Lend-Lease Act. Its central principle was that the United States should supply Britain, or any ally, with whatever aid was necessary because doing so served American self-defense, whether or not the recipient could pay immediately.

The proposal quickly met fierce opposition in Congress from critics who believed it would draw the United States into the war. One opponent warned that it would mean “ploughing under every fourth American boy,” a claim that enraged Roosevelt because he saw it as deliberately false and dangerously unpatriotic. By Christmas 1940, the idea’s success was still far from assured.

At the same time, Churchill’s powerful letter to Roosevelt stirred Harry Hopkins’s curiosity about the British prime minister. Hopkins wanted to discover whether Churchill’s forceful language was merely grand rhetoric or solid substance. That interest set up Hopkins’s coming trip to bomb-scarred London, where he would help influence the future course of the war.