From 'Associated Powers' to 'United Nations.' ('Declaration by Associated Powers' that became the 'Declaration by United Nations' created by President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1942 to fortify the Allied alliance)

Eight years after the event, Britain's Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill described a memorable meeting with United States President Franklin Roosevelt in a bedroom at the White House on New Year's Day 1942. "The President was wheeled in to me on the morning of I January. I got out of my bath, and agreed to the draft", he wrote in his six-volume history of the Second World War.

Mr. Churchill had arrived in Washington the night of 22 December 1941. it was just two weeks after Pearl Harbor, when most of the United States Pacific fleet was destroyed. For the Allies, the news from the fronts was grim. The President, the Prime Minister and their staffs were meeting to develop a joint war strategy. Mr. Churchill would be a guest of the President and Mrs. Roosevelt in the White House for three weeks.

Both men worked in bed-the Prime Minister out of habit and the President, paralyzed below the waist by poliomyelitis 20 years earlier, out of need. During Mr. Churchill's stay at the White House, they conferred daily, often in each other and over lunch. So the Prime Minister, roused from his bath, was not surprised to find the President waiting for him in one of the wheelchairs he used to get around the White House.

Among the items on the President's agenda that morning was approval of a draft of what was originally to be the "Declaration by Associated Powers". Quickly written in the United States Department of State and the White House, the objective of the brief Declaration was to achieve agreement in purpose and action by the Allied nations. Soon after the Prime Minister's arrival at the White House, the President gave him the draft. Agreeing to the same procedure they had used in August 1941 to finalize the Prime Minister's text of what became the Atlantic Charter, the two men would blend their revisions.

Although the Atlantic Charter did not call for the founding of an international organization at the end of the war, but only suggested "the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security" (see UN Chronicle, December 1993, page 71), it did state rights and goals that were to be important in the UN. These included: the right of peoples to choose their own form of government; equal access by all countries to trade and raw materials; international cooperation to improve labour standards, economic conditions and social welfare; freedom from fear and want; peace and world security; freedom of the seas; and disarmament.

With the five-paragraph Declaration, Governments subscribe to the principles embodied in the Atlantic Charter and underscore their conviction that "complete victory ... is essential to defend life, liberty, independence, and religious freedom, and to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands". Moreover, they commit themselves to using their full military or economic resources against the enemy, to cooperate with the other signatories and not to make a separate armistice or peace.

The final version of the document that Prime Minister Churchill emerged from his bath to receive and approve bore a new name. President Roosevelt had changed "Declaration by Associated Powers" to "Declaration by United Nations". "I thought this a great improvement", the Prime Minister wrote. He then showed the President these lines from Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage:

Here, where the sword united nations drew

Our countrymen were warring on that day!

And this is much, and all which will not pass away.

In the President's White House study later that New Year's Day, the two men met with the Foreign Minister of China and the Soviet Union's Ambassador to sign, in Winston Churchill's words, "this majestic document". Eventually, 47 nations became signatories. The Declaration by United Nations gave to the "Grand Alliance" of the Prime Minister the name that would serve it through more than three-and-a-half years of world war and the decades beyond.