Roosevelt, eager to ensure public consent for this controversial plan, explained to the public and the press that his plan was comparable to one neighbor's lending another a garden hose to put out a fire in his home. "What do I do in such a crisis?" the president asked at a press conference. "I don't say... 'Neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15; you have to pay me $15 for it' …I don't want $15 — I want my garden hose back after the fire is over."[20] To which Robert Alphonso Taft, Republican Senator from Ohio, responded: "Lending war equipment is a good deal like lending chewing gum. You don't want it back." In practice, very little was returned except for a few ships.
Joseph Stalin, during the Tehran Conference in 1943, acknowledged publicly the importance of American efforts during a dinner at the conference: "Without American production the United Nations [the Allies] could never have won the war.