THE DAUGHTERS OF YALTA
The Churchills, Roosevelts and Harrimans: A Story of Love and War
Catherine Grace Katz

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William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright © Catherine Grace Katz 2020

Catherine Grace Katz asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Map by Mapping Specialists, Ltd

Excerpts from The Second World War, Volume VI: Triumph and Tragedy by Winston S. Churchill reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown, London on behalf of The Estate of Winston S. Churchill. © The Estate of Winston S. Churchill

Excerpts from A Love in Shadow by John R. Boettiger. Copyright © 1978 by John R. Boettiger. Used by permission of John R. Boettiger. All rights reserved

The author is grateful to reprint material from The Churchill Archives Centre and The Kathleen Harriman Mortimer Papers by kind permission of Allen Packwood and David Mortimer, respectively

Cover design by Jo Thomson

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008299712

Ebook Edition © September 2020 ISBN: 9780008299736

Version: 2020-09-02

Dedication

For my family

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

A List of Key Delegates at Yalta

PART I

‘SHE CAN HANDLE THEM, AND THAT’S WHY THEY’RE GOING TO TAKE HER.’

1. February 1, 1945

2. February 2, 1945

3. February 2, 1945

4. February 2, 1945

5. February 2–3, 1945

6. February 3, 1945

7. February 3, 1945

PART II

‘AS IF … THE CONFERENCE ISN’T SO MUCH MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANYTHING ELSE.’

8. February 4, 1945

9. February 4, 1945

10. February 5, 1945

11. February 5, 1945

12. February 6, 1945

13. February 6–7, 1945

14. February 8, 1945

15. February 8, 1945

16. February 9–10, 1945

17. February 10–11, 1945

PART III

‘ALL THIS, AND MORE I HAVE WITH ME FOREVER.’

18. April 12–July 27, 1945

After Yalta

PICTURE SECTION

ABBREVIATIONS

NOTES

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

Map

A List of Key Delegates at Yalta

This list serves to identify some of the individuals who feature prominently in this book. It contains only a small number of the hundreds present at the Yalta Conference. Note that some of these individuals had multiple titles. I have listed only those titles relevant to or easily recognisable based on their role in this story.

The American Delegates

 Franklin D. Roosevelt – President of the United States

 Anna Roosevelt – Franklin Roosevelt’s daughter and aide-de-camp; also known as Anna Roosevelt Boettiger

 W. Averell Harriman – American ambassador to the Soviet Union

 Kathleen (Kathy) Harriman – Averell Harriman’s daughter

 Major General Frederick Anderson – Deputy commanding general, U.S. Strategic Air Forces, Europe

 Charles Bohlen – Assistant to the secretary of state, interpreter to Franklin Roosevelt

 Lieutenant Commander Howard Bruenn – Physician to Franklin Roosevelt, cardiologist

 James Byrnes – Director, Office of War Mobilization

 Steve Early – Press secretary

 Edward Flynn – Former chairman of the Democratic National Committee; Franklin Roosevelt’s friend

 Wilder Foote – Assistant to the secretary of state

 Alger Hiss – Deputy director, Office of Special Political Affairs, Department of State

 Harry Hopkins – Special adviser to the president

 Sergeant Robert Hopkins – Harry Hopkins’s son, a U.S. Army Signal Corps photographer

 Admiral Ernest King – Commander in chief, U.S. Fleet; chief of naval operations

 Major General Laurence Kuter – Assistant chief of staff for plans, U.S. Army Air Force, representing Henry ‘Hap’ Arnold, general of the army

 Fleet Admiral William Leahy – Chief of staff to the commander in chief (Franklin Roosevelt) of the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy

 General George Marshall – Chief of staff of the U.S. Army, general of the army

 H. Freeman Matthews – Director, Office of European Affairs, Department of State

 Vice Admiral Ross T. McIntire – Surgeon General, U.S. Navy; physician to Franklin Roosevelt

 Eddie Page – Second secretary and consul, American embassy, Moscow

 Edward R. Stettinius – Secretary of state

 Major General Erwin ‘Pa’ Watson – Military aide and secretary to Franklin Roosevelt; U.S. Army (Ret.)

The British Delegates

 Winston Churchill – Prime minister

 Sarah Churchill – Winston Churchill’s daughter and aide-de-camp, section officer in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force; also known as Sarah Oliver

 Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander – Supreme allied commander, Mediterranean theatre of operations

 Major Arthur Birse – Interpreter to Winston Churchill

 Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke – Chief of the Imperial General Staff

 Sir Alexander Cadogan – Permanent undersecretary of state for foreign affairs

 Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr – British ambassador to the Soviet Union

 Admiral of the Fleet Sir Andrew Cunningham – First Sea Lord and chief of naval staff

 Anthony Eden – Foreign secretary

 General Sir Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay – Chief of staff to Winston Churchill, deputy secretary to the War Cabinet

 Lord Moran – Physician to Winston Churchill

 Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Charles ‘Peter’ Portal – Chief of air staff

 Commander Charles ‘Tommy’ Thompson – Winston Churchill’s aide-de-camp, Royal Navy

The Soviet Delegates

 Joseph Stalin – Marshal of the Soviet Union, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

 General Aleksei Antonov – First deputy chief of staff, Soviet army

 Lavrentiy Beria – People’s commissar for international affairs (NKVD)

 Sergo Beria – Lavrentiy Beria’s son

 Andrei Gromyko – Soviet ambassador to the United States

 Fedor Gusev – Soviet ambassador to the United Kingdom

 Marshal Sergei Khudyakov – Deputy chief of the Soviet air staff

 Fleet Admiral Nikolai Kuznetsov – People’s commissar of the Soviet navy

 Ivan Maisky – Deputy people’s commissar for foreign affairs of the Soviet Union; former Soviet ambassador to the Court of St. James’s (UK)

 Vyacheslav Molotov – People’s commissar for foreign affairs

 Vladimir Pavlov – Interpreter to Joseph Stalin

 Andrey Vyshinsky – First deputy people’s commissar for foreign affairs

PART I

‘She can handle them, and that’s why they’re going to take her.’

ONE

February 1, 1945

In the winter of 1945, Livadia Palace, its once snow-white façade now covered in grime, stood empty on its perch above the Black Sea. The furniture and priceless art were long gone. Sinks, toilets and lamps had been ripped from their fittings and pulled from the walls. The Nazis had stolen everything, even the brass doorknobs.

Situated less than three miles down the coast from the resort town of Yalta, on the southern tip of the Crimean Peninsula, this palace had once been the summer home of the tsar and tsarina, Nicholas II and Alexandra. They had torn down the old Livadia Palace where Alexander III had died and replaced it with a new 116-room imperial retreat better suited to family life. The Mediterranean climate and black pebble beaches offered the tsar, tsarina, and their five children a respite from the humidity and opulence of Saint Petersburg. Palms and cypress trees filled the lush gardens surrounding the neo-Renaissance Italianate palace constructed from white Crimean stone. The tsar and his children bathed in the sea, played tennis, and rode horses over rocky trails while the tsarina sold her needlework at the bazaar, to raise funds for the local hospital. But amid the relative simplicity, there remained splendour. In the white ballroom, where French doors opened onto a courtyard, the tsar’s eldest daughter, Grand Duchess Olga, celebrated her sixteenth birthday with a grand soiree. She swirled through the night in her pink gown, her hair swept high on her head for the first time, while her first jewels – a necklace made of thirty-two diamonds and pearls – sparkled in the chandeliers’ light.

The tsar and his family visited Livadia only four times before they were murdered, in 1918, in a basement outside the city of Yekaterinburg. This brutality marked the end of the Romanov dynasty and imperial Russia. The Bolsheviks soon transformed the palace into a sanatorium for favoured Soviet workers needing rest, quiet, and treatment for tuberculosis. The comrades sterilised the gleaming white palace and removed or covered all signs of the Romanov family, just as they tore down monuments to royalty across Russia, replacing them with monuments to themselves. Then came the war, the second in a quarter century. In 1942, the Nazis overran the Crimea after a months-long onslaught of the nearby port city of Sevastopol, part of the grisly and ultimately ill-fated Operation Barbarossa, when the Nazis broke their non-aggression pact with the Soviets and charged east across the steppe. Only the tsar’s summer palace would do for the Nazis’ Crimean headquarters, so the invaders commandeered Livadia. In the spring of 1944, the Soviets finally reclaimed the Crimea and pushed the Nazis out, but not before the retreating enemy plundered Livadia Palace, taking everything they could carry.

It was here, in this despoiled palace in February 1945, that Kathleen Harriman, the glamorous, twenty-seven-year-old daughter of the fourth-richest man in America, now stood. Thousands of workers crowded the palace and the gardens, sawing, hammering, painting, fumigating, polishing and planting, not to mention installing much-needed plumbing. Cots had been set up for the conscripted labourers and the Romanian POWs the Soviets had brought in to clear the area of the wreckage the war had left behind, but there were still hardly enough places to sleep for everyone toiling away across the once imperial grounds.

Kathy and her father, W. Averell Harriman, the United States ambassador to the Soviet Union, had arrived several days earlier from Moscow, where they had lived for the past fifteen months. They had intended to fly, as they had little more than ten days to oversee final preparations for one of the most crucial conferences of the war, but bad weather had kept them grounded. In the end, their eight-hundred-mile journey by train had taken nearly three days as they crawled past the bombed-out villages and trampled countryside to which Kathy had grown accustomed over these past months. Every train station she saw was in ruins. ‘The needless destruction is something appalling,’ Kathy wrote to her childhood governess and friend, Elsie Marshall, nicknamed ‘Mouche’, back in New York. (Whether or not this observation would make it to Mouche was up to the censor.) To her older sister, Mary, she wrote, ‘My God but this country has a job on its hands – just cleaning up.’

Though the war was by no means won, by late 1944, British and American forces had liberated Rome, Paris, Brussels and Athens from German and Italian occupation, while the Red Army marched westward across Poland and Romania. Notwithstanding the surprising and remarkably forceful counteroffensive of the Wehrmacht, Germany’s combined fighting forces, in Belgium, France, and Luxembourg that December, which threatened to break through the western line in the bitterly cold Ardennes Forest, it was evident that the Allies had gained the upper hand. The war in the Pacific was far from over – American generals estimated it might last another eighteen months unless a secret, untested weapon could be finished in time, which might change everything. But the British prime minister, Winston Churchill; the President of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt; and the Soviet general secretary, Joseph Stalin, realised they had reached a critical juncture in Europe. As their armies raced to Berlin, the three leaders were facing complicated questions about the end of the war on the continent, questions they could resolve only face to face.

It was not the first time they had called such a meeting. In late November 1943, the ‘Big Three’, as they were known, had conferred in Tehran to lay the foundations for the long-awaited second front, which they launched just seven months later, on the beaches of Normandy. At the time, in an effort to appeal to Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill had generously made the arduous journey to Tehran, a location significantly closer to Moscow than to London or Washington. Now it was only fair that Stalin should come to them. The western leaders proposed holding the conference in the Mediterranean, but Stalin claimed his health was too fragile to leave the Soviet Union. On the advice of his doctors, he refused to consider any location beyond his own country’s borders. Churchill and especially Roosevelt believed they needed Soviet cooperation to guarantee victory in the Pacific and the success of Roosevelt’s newly imagined organisation to secure world peace, as well as Stalin’s long-term commitment to ensure political self-determination for recently liberated nations such as Poland. The two had more to lose in their vision of a democratic postwar world than did Stalin, whose Red Army unambiguously controlled Eastern Europe. Roosevelt quietly directed Averell Harriman to acquiesce to Stalin’s request without much haggling – to confirm that he and Churchill would come to the Soviet Union before Churchill could raise any further objections.

The Black Sea coast was as far west as Stalin was willing to travel, and the string of resort towns along the southern coast of the Crimea, a stretch nicknamed the ‘Romanov Route’ for the number of residences that once belonged to the imperial family and their aristocratic friends, still held a certain allure among high-ranking comrades. Though the Soviets decried the corruption of the imperialist age, they apparently had no moral qualms about using these luxurious palaces themselves. After assessing various locations around the Black Sea, from Odessa to Batum, the Soviets and the Americans deemed Yalta and Livadia Palace the best of several options; the other choices were too damaged by war to accommodate large delegations or were less accessible by ship or plane. Harriman and the American embassy in Moscow begrudgingly agreed, even though, as Churchill underscored, the Black Sea was still littered with mines, making it impossible for the leaders to risk travelling to Yalta by ship – though some of their support staff would have to do so. By the New Year of 1945, it was decided: Roosevelt and Churchill would rendezvous on the island of Malta, sixty miles off the southern tip of Italy, and fly the remaining distance to the Crimea to meet Stalin at the former tsar’s summer palace.

Though Livadia was an imperial residence, it was smaller than the 100,000-square-foot mansion in the Hudson River Valley where Kathy Harriman had grown up. It was also too small to house all three of the delegations, which seemed to swell exponentially with every passing day. Playing the genial, accommodating host, Stalin had graciously offered Livadia to President Roosevelt. As the largest palace of the several nearby, its ballroom was perfectly suited to hosting the formal meetings of the Big Three and their advisers, and, given that Roosevelt was paralysed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair, Stalin thought the president would be most comfortable if he did not have to travel to the conference sessions each day. Meanwhile, Churchill and his party were to be accommodated at Vorontsov Palace, another Russian aristocrat’s home the Soviets had nationalised, which was a thirty-minute drive down the road. Stalin opted for a slightly smaller estate nearby referred to as both the Koreiz Villa and Yusupov Palace, which was conveniently situated between the American and British residences. Vorontsov Palace and the Koreiz Villa were in a much better state of repair than was Livadia, though a certain uncomfortable aura surrounded Stalin’s chosen abode. It had once belonged to the man who, according to rumor, had murdered Rasputin, the mystic (or charlatan, depending on one’s perspective) and adviser to Tsarina Alexandra, whose unsavoury influence over the Romanovs had hastened their decline. Whether the inscrutable Stalin intended to send a message of some sort – of either intimidation or dark humour – in his selection of this particular villa, or if he simply found it to be the most comfortable, remained a mystery.

Once it was decided that the three leaders would gather at Yalta, the Soviets had just three weeks to turn the ransacked villas into a site fit for one of the largest and most important international summits in history. Lavrentiy Beria, the forbidding head of the Narodny komissariat vnutrennikh del – the dreaded NKVD, the Soviet Union’s secret police – and the man Stalin could always rely on to execute his most unpleasant tasks, took charge of the preparations. This encompassed overseeing everything from structural repairs to the transport of provisions to the removal of any ‘undesirable elements’ from the surrounding area – including 835 supposed anti-Soviet individuals discovered over the course of the 74,000 security checks the NKVD had conducted within twenty kilometers of Yalta. Ambassador Harriman was to arrive approximately ten days before the conference to see that the improvements were up to American standards and to ensure that the logistical and protocol-related matters were in order, so that no problem, no matter how small, could hamper the progress of diplomacy.

In theory, Averell Harriman was responsible for the conference’s final arrangements, but in reality, that was not exactly the case. Averell never passed up the chance to be at the centre of the day’s action. In early 1941, isolationism still ran rampant in the United States and the nation remained neutral. Roosevelt had been eager to support the fight against the Nazis but could do so only while maintaining a position of neutrality. Thinking creatively, he discovered a loophole that accomplished his objectives, and the Lend-Lease programme was born: the United States would provide Britain and its allies with food, fuel, ships, aircraft, ammunition, and other war materiel that Britain would theoretically return after the war. When Roosevelt named Averell the Lend-Lease envoy in February 1941, he moved to London without a moment’s hesitation to take up the post, despite the fact that the Blitz raged on. But after the United States entered the war, the action shifted east, and Averell was eager to follow it. Roosevelt offered him the position of ambassador to the Kremlin in the autumn of 1943, and he left London for Moscow without delay.

This time was no different. Three days after Averell and Kathy arrived in the Crimea, he flew off to Malta to meet Churchill and Roosevelt, eager to take part in any important pre-conference developments. Meanwhile, Averell left his daughter in Yalta to carry out the rest of the preparations at Livadia over the week that remained before the delegates arrived.

While surprising at first glance, it actually made perfect sense for Kathy to supervise this work. She spoke Russian; Averell did not. Realising that her father would never have time to master the language while also performing his ambassadorial duties in Moscow, Kathy had decided to learn Russian for both of them. As soon as they arrived in Moscow, where she was to serve as the official hostess of Spaso House, the residence of the American ambassador, Kathy hired a tutor. The small number of English-speaking Russian tutors in Moscow were already engaged, so she had to employ a French-speaking tutor and translate from Russian to French to English. Kathy practised her Russian at every opportunity, listening intently during productions at the renowned Bolshoi and Maly theatres and mumbling Russian phrases to herself as she walked down the street. Sometimes the locals gawked at her, but, as she told her sister, Mary, they tended to stare at her anyway because of her fur coat and silk stockings, scarce luxuries few in Moscow could afford. Her Russian was hardly perfect, but she spoke well enough to act as her father’s interpreter at social gatherings. Now she took on the task of communicating with the Russian sentries, bureaucrats, and labourers in the melee at Livadia. Even if she struggled occasionally, she hoped the Russians would forgive her, just as she forgave them as they struggled to properly pronounce her name. The formal word for ‘mister’ in Russian was Gospodin, so the Russians addressed her as ‘Gospodina Harriman’. Many, however, found it impossible to pronounce the ‘H’ in Harriman, so ‘Miss Harriman’ came out sounding something like ‘Gaspadeena Garriman’, which reminded Kathy of the sound made by ‘an old man clearing his throat early in the morning’.

It was not the first time Averell – always Averell or Ave, never Father or Daddy – had left Kathy to fend for herself in a remote place. During her four years at Bennington College in Vermont, Kathy spent her winter vacations at Sun Valley, Averell’s ski resort in Idaho. It was the first of its kind in the United States. When Americans caught the ski craze following the 1932 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, Averell realised that an enormous opportunity lay before him. As chairman of Union Pacific Railroad, he was looking to increase business on western railway lines. People needed a reason to go west, and a glamorous ski destination rivalling the Alpine resorts of Europe would be just the thing. A ‘seaside ranch in the mountains’, as it was billed, Sun Valley was an instant success – especially after Averell directed his engineers to invent and install the world’s first chairlift. Sun Valley quickly became as much a home to Kathy as the Harrimans’ city residence in Manhattan or their country estate, Arden House, in the Hudson River Valley. Kathy’s parents had divorced when she was ten, and her mother, Kitty, had died of cancer when Kathy was just seventeen. Averell had remarried in 1930, to Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney’s ex-wife, Marie Norton, and Marie naturally assumed the role of mistress of Arden. Though Kathy and her stepmother were on good terms and Arden House was surrounded by glorious grounds for riding and shooting, two of Kathy’s most serious pursuits, Sun Valley was the place that truly connected Kathy with her father.

While Averell chased across the world, attending to his various endeavours, first in business, then increasingly in government, he left Kathy as his deputy for weeks at a time to assist with the day-to-day operations of the resort: assessing slope conditions, seeing to publicity, and looking after celebrity guests such as Ernest Hemingway, who soon called Sun Valley home. She even performed the occasional bit of reconnaissance on rival resorts, which had begun to spring up in the West. Though the family was remarkably wealthy, the Harrimans were not ostentatious and held something of a Spartan attitude. Kathy had attended the Foxcroft School, a boarding school in Virginia known for its fox hunts, its multi-day horseback expeditions to the Luray Caverns, and its requirement that its girls sleep on unheated outdoor porches every night, regardless of the weather. Embracing a life among the elements, at Sun Valley, Kathy quickly developed a passion for skiing. Before her father had chairlifts installed, she often made the five-hour trek up a mountainside – fashionably clad in a monogrammed jacket and cashmere sweater, her skis encased in sealskins – all for one run down the untouched Idaho powder. Her friends and family started calling her ‘Puff’ for the sound of her ragged breaths at high altitude, as, unyielding, she trudged higher and higher. But the precious weeks Kathy spent at Sun Valley meant so much more than athletic thrills. They served as a proving ground for a daughter determined to show herself worthy of standing at her father’s side as an equal.

In many ways, helping to manage Sun Valley was the ideal preparation for the work Kathy now faced. But nothing could truly ready a person for the overwhelming amount of labour that had to be done before Roosevelt and his party arrived at Livadia Palace. Under Lavrentiy Beria’s direction, the Soviets were frantically restocking the villas with whatever could be spared from Moscow’s luxury hotels. More than fifteen hundred railcars, laden with building supplies, tools, furnishings, rugs, light bulbs, art, dishes, cookware and food, had heaved along on the thousand-mile journey to the Crimea. It seemed as if every moveable object within Moscow’s renowned Hotel Metropol had been packed up and transported. Even the maids’ uniforms for the conference were embroidered with the Metropol’s distinctive ‘M.’ In addition to the obvious beds, tables and chairs, the more mundane items of daily life, such as coat hangers, shaving mirrors and ashtrays, had to be supplied. Kathy presumed some of these things were ‘just being “requisitioned” out of homes’ from the war-battered towns nearby.

There was also the problem of evicting the current residents, who had moved in when the Nazis moved out: bugs. The palace was infested with lice and bedbugs. As the motley team of Beria’s NKVD forces, Red Army soldiers, local peasant labourers and the Romanian POWs scrambled to put everything in order, the U.S. Navy Medical Corps arrived to delouse the palace. They sprayed the furniture with a 10 per cent solution of DDT in kerosene and dusted all the linens with DDT powder, but even that draconian dose did not get rid of the bugs entirely. Kathy herself was all too well acquainted with Russian insects. On the train from Moscow to Yalta, something had bitten her near her eye. Her skin had swollen so badly that for a day or two she could barely see. International wartime diplomacy could be distinctly unglamorous, but Kathy remained unfazed.

It was because of her stalwart and unflappable nature that Kathy had become a fixture in her father’s world. Thanks to her fifteen months in Moscow and the two prior years in London, where she had worked as a war reporter, Averell Harriman’s attractive, opinionated daughter was well known to the military and civilian leadership of all three Allied nations gathering at Yalta. Her presence at Livadia Palace would come as no surprise to any of them, not even to Roosevelt. ‘As this is her department, have arranged to take Kathleen along,’ Averell had informed FDR by wire on January 17. ‘I will leave her at Yalta to assist in the details of the arrangements there.’ Roosevelt did not object.

It was ironic that this advance work in living arrangements and hospitality had become Kathy’s domain. She had moved to London at the beginning of the war to work as a journalist – not, as she insisted multiple times, to be her father’s housekeeper. In fact, one of the last things she had written to her sister, Mary, before moving to Moscow was ‘I only hope there’ll be no entertaining.’ Kathy was woefully disappointed. Life in Moscow seemed to be one lavish caviar- and vodka-fuelled banquet after another. By now she knew to expect that supervising an enormous household staff and entertaining guests would be part of her work at Yalta, but over time she had come to realise that her role as her father’s hostess and deputy was much more complex than simply organising parties and managing the house. Though never officially given a title, she was essentially serving as the Americans’ protocol officer, a role often overlooked and underappreciated yet vital to international diplomacy. Overseeing protocol encompassed everything from observing and respecting the rituals and customs of foreign nations to making sure that the seating arrangements at a state dinner did not exacerbate petty grievances. Now it was up to Kathy to anticipate and eliminate all potential sources of cultural confusion, irritation, or distraction before the delegates arrived. Even something as seemingly innocuous as accidentally mistyping a deputy secretary’s name on a place card could annoy that delegate, who would then take his irritation with him into the conference room. The follow-on effects could be damaging.

Important as the rituals of protocol were, Kathy was sometimes charmingly oblivious to them. Once, during a night out in London with her best friend, Pamela Churchill, the prime minister’s daughter-in-law, she happened upon the king of Greece. Kathy greeted him with a simple American ‘How do do!’ Pam, by contrast, dropped to a deep curtsy. Kathy also was not inclined to defer to those who considered themselves her superiors. She had once caused a kerfuffle with Adele Astaire, the sister and former dance partner of the American movie star Fred Astaire, who had married Lord Charles Cavendish, after writing a rather sarcastic Newsweek article about Adele’s contributions to the war effort. As a war reporter, Kathy had met and covered countless women who worked in factories, served as transport pilots, or nursed soldiers just behind the front lines. Adele’s efforts as an ‘amanuensis’ – making improvements to the love letters soldiers sent home – could not compare (though Adele did make for good copy). In the article, Kathy observed that Adele ‘still [wore] silly bows atop her graying hair’. Newsweek had also printed Adele’s age – a generous forty-four – but Kathy could blame that on her editor. Unsurprisingly, Adele, a friend of Kathy’s stepmother, had not taken kindly to this portrayal. When the former starlet next saw the younger woman at a restaurant in SoHo, she shrieked at her, calling Kathy a ‘bitch to end all bitches’ and threatened to ‘break’ her in London. Kathy was visibly amused, which made Adele all the more furious.

Now, much as Kathy might have liked to laugh at the Russian maître d’hôtel as he worked out the optimal arrangements of china and crystal place settings, she refrained from sharing her frank opinions. A war was raging; a diplomatic approach was essential. Among people who cared deeply about protocol, it was imperative that everything was done just right. It was a thankless job. If she executed everything correctly, no one would notice her work; if, however, she made a mistake, her father would take the blame for failing to make every provision for cross-cultural harmony. Helping the myriad challenging personalities in Roosevelt’s entourage adapt to Russian customs would be difficult, even without the added complication of the trying physical environment. The Soviets had done their best to ensure the comfort of their guests, but nonetheless, the navy medical team had to warn the American contingent to lower expectations and encouraged ‘a little good naturedness’ from all parties.

As Kathy went from room to room at Livadia, inspecting the living arrangements, the ever-present NKVD officers in tow, she put her Russian-language skills to use. FDR’s suite, once the tsar’s private chambers, including his office and private dining room, was one of Kathy’s chief concerns. The room now serving as the president’s bedroom had an ambience of overbearing darkness. It was like a Pullman car carved from a heavy block of wood. The walls were panelled in mahogany; paintings in enormous gold-leaf frames lined the walls; orange-fringed silk lampshades abounded; plush green harem cushions were scattered across the floor. And in the middle was a massive wooden bed frame, an imposing style of furnishing the Soviets imagined that a visiting dignitary would desire. In pursuit of perfection, they had several times changed their minds about which Bokhara rug would best suit the room. Each change in opinion surfaced only after workers had moved the behemoth of a bed back into place.

But Kathy could be every bit as demanding and attentive to detail. When she found that painters in FDR’s bathroom could not understand her Russian, she was undeterred. Catching their attention, Kathy pointed to the window and the sea beyond and then back at the walls. Back and forth, back and forth. The wall colour, she tried to explain yet again, had to match the colour of the water. Nearby, a plumber, who was supervising the repairs to the bathroom fixtures the Nazis had ripped from the wall, watched her. He did not seem amused. Perhaps this was because she had ordered the painters to change the colour at least six times already.

Kathy had more important issues to worry about than the slighted feelings of the plumbers and painters. A battalion-sized contingent of Cabinet members, State Department officials, and top-ranking military officers – not to mention the president of the United States – was about to arrive on the palace’s doorstep. Bathrooms, or the lack thereof, were proving a particular nightmare, and Kathy did what she could to forestall ablution chaos. A mere nine toilets and four bathtubs were available to accommodate several hundred people, and only Roosevelt’s suite had a private bath. Everyone else would either have to wait in line or use the latrines that had been hastily constructed in the garden. Even with the added nineteenth-century-style privies, thirty-five officers would be shaving in buckets beside their beds.

Rooming assignments also required strategic thinking. There were not enough private bedrooms in the palace to accommodate everyone whose credentials would have warranted the finest suites in New York’s or London’s most exclusive hotels. As it was, sixteen colonels would have to share one room as if in a barrack; junior officers would be stuffed in the eaves. The bedrooms on the first floor, nearest the president, Kathy reserved for his closest government advisers: his special adviser Harry Hopkins, Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, the Soviet expert and Russian interpreter Charles ‘Chip’ Bohlen, the director of the Office of War Mobilization and elder statesman James Byrnes, and Averell. Top-ranking military leaders she assigned to the second floor. As army chief of staff, General George Marshall outranked everyone. Kathy awarded him the tsar’s imperial bedroom. Admiral Ernest King, the second most senior officer in the U.S. Navy, would have to be satisfied with the tsarina’s boudoir.

When Kathy could spare time, she fled to the outdoors. After a long Moscow winter, capped by the three days she and her father had spent inside a pest-ridden train en route to the Crimea, it was a relief to walk the sloping paths of the palace gardens, the cypress trees piercing the horizon, the snowcapped, craggy mountains looming in the background. The scenery reminded Kathy of Italy. Exploring the gardens was not the strenuous exercise she was used to, though the walkways naturally graded uphill. Still, the warm sun was welcome. During the previous, seemingly endless Russian winter, she had come down with a terrible bout of scurvy, which made her gums swell and bleed so dramatically, she thought her teeth would fall out.

These outdoor explorations provided insights and inspiration for an additional assignment Kathy had to complete before the guests arrived. Together with Eddie Page, one of the young Foreign Service officers at the embassy in Moscow, she was writing a pamphlet to assist the Americans with their brief immersion in local culture. As most of the American delegation had never set foot in the Crimea, nor in fact any other part of the Soviet Union, this pamphlet was meant to be a useful diplomatic instrument, full of information about the geography, history and significance of this unfamiliar part of the world. The task lacked the journalistic challenge of the hard-hitting reporting about developments on the fighting fronts that Kathy had begun to write for Newsweek just before Averell was called to Moscow, but at least it was something.

When Kathy first moved to London, she had no journalistic training beyond a general education in international affairs at Bennington College and experience assisting with public relations for Sun Valley. But journalism had been her ticket to London – and to Averell’s world. It was only after her mother died that Kathy had truly come to know her father. Shortly after Kitty’s death, Averell had written to his two daughters. In this letter, he told them that he had somewhat radical notions about parenting. He would never be able to replace their mother, as he simply was not the warm, affectionate type who showered his children with outward signs of love. He could, however, offer them something different.

After Averell’s father, the self-made railway tycoon E. H. Harriman, died when Averell was seventeen, Averell’s mother inherited the entirety of her husband’s vast fortune. ‘The Richest Woman in the World’, as magazines dubbed her, became a formidable force in American philanthropy. Independence ran deep in the Harriman women. Averell’s sister Mary Harriman Rumsey was a force in her own right. As a student, she became known for driving herself to Barnard College in a coach-and-four and for founding the Junior League, a national organisation inspired by the work of the settlement movement and the social reform leader Jane Addams. Mary Rumsey went on to become a key appointee in Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration, a New Deal organisation meant to stabilise business and employment opportunities after the tumult of the Great Depression. With such women as examples, Averell wanted his own daughters to be as independent as they desired – a rare sentiment among fathers of their class. In time, he hoped they would join him in his business affairs to whatever degree it suited them. If they could be patient with him and maintain an open mind, he was sure that, soon enough, they would become ‘the finest & best of friends’. While Mary ultimately sought a more traditional life of marriage and family, Kathy eagerly took up Averell’s offer.

When Averell wrote this letter, he could not have foreseen that in addition to working alongside him in Sun Valley, Kathy would spend four years at his side, navigating diplomacy in two European capitals embroiled in war. Averell’s second wife, Marie, should have been the one to accompany him, but because of trouble with her eyesight she had elected to remain in New York. Averell encouraged Kathy to go in her place. To Averell, the idea of bringing his daughter to London was not some revolutionary concept. It was more like continuing a family tradition. When Averell was a boy, his father had insisted on taking the entire family – wife, sons and daughters – on his travels around the world. In 1899, when Averell was seven years old, the family embarked on the Harriman Expedition, a major exploration of the Alaskan coast that Averell’s father organised and sponsored, alongside America’s pre-eminent scientists, artists, writers and photographers. Other summers, they drove across Europe in brand-new automobiles. Later, in 1905, in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War, Averell’s father took the family to Japan, where he was looking to develop an around-the-world railway network.

Kathy was thrilled by Averell’s invitation. Her childhood governess, Mouche, was English, and nearly every summer the Harriman girls had travelled to Britain or France. The experience had instilled in Kathy a natural kinship with Europeans and a sense of adventure. But at first, the American government refused to permit Kathy to join her father in London as she was not considered essential personnel. Averell contacted his friend Harry Hopkins, FDR’s longtime colleague, adviser, and the person closest to the president. Hopkins secured a visa for Kathy to work in London as a war reporter, despite her lack of experience. Undaunted, Kathy wrote to Hopkins, ‘Someone opens the door or passes the butter at the table – “thank you” is the polite result … But teaming that same “thank you” with the opportunity you’ve made possible for me just doesn’t make sense … I’m extremely grateful & will continue being so for a hellova long time.’ She flew from New York to Bermuda to Lisbon on a luxury ‘flying boat’, the Dixie Clipper, and arrived in London on May 16, 1941, less than a week after the worst air raid of the Blitz. More than five hundred Luftwaffe planes had bombarded London for nearly seven hours, leaving the historic chamber in the House of Commons a smouldering pile of char.

While in London, Kathy worked first for the International News Service and later for Newsweek, one of a number of businesses in which Averell had an ownership stake. But moving to the USSR with Averell meant resigning from Newsweek just as she was angling for a posting to cover the war in North Africa. ‘I am thrilled at what you have done – and very proud. Don’t worry about your future plans,’ Ave assured her in a note. Once in Moscow, however, her journalistic endeavours had been largely limited to clipping and mimeographing articles to include in the daily embassy news bulletin, a task she compared to ‘paper doll cutting’. Now, compiling this pamphlet on the Crimea, Kathy found that information about local history, both ancient and from the nineteenth century, was abundant. But she was having much more difficulty learning about the Crimea’s more recent past. One afternoon, she decided to pay a call on an elderly local woman, Maria Chekhova, sister of the famed Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. Seeking relief from tuberculosis, Chekhov had moved to Yalta with his mother and sister in 1898, and it was there that he composed two of his most famous works, The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. The writer had died in 1904, but his eighty-three-year-old sister still lived up the road from Livadia Palace, in his elegant white dacha, with views of the sea; somehow she had managed to save it from Nazi wrath. Kathy’s visit to Miss Chekhova seemed to hold potential: who could have a better view of the past half-century of Russian history and culture? But though Miss Chekhova was ‘charming, full of life and thrilled to be meeting some Americans’, as Kathy wrote to Mouche, Kathy was ‘having a hellova a time finding out about the pre-revolutionary history of this part of the coast, as the Soviets seem very reticent on the subject’. Chekhova also refused to tell Kathy anything ‘about what happened during the year and a half of occupation’. As Kathy soon discovered, Maria Chekhova was hardly unique. At the palace, she found the same restraint. ‘The natives who work around the place here at Livadia don’t seem to know anything either,’ she told her former governess.

When Kathy moved to Moscow in October 1943, people had warned her that daily life in Russia would be unlike anything she had ever known, even compared to London in the immediate aftermath of the Blitz. ‘I thought coming over here – starting to work for the Press and all that, would be the last time in my life that I’d be scared,’ Kathy wrote to Mary just before leaving London. ‘Now crashing London seems like chicken feed.’ She had expected to find Moscow a city of ramshackle buildings made of wood and occupied by coarse, unsmiling people, but that was not the case. In some ways, Moscow looked much like any modern western city. American Lend-Lease trucks rumbled down wide boulevards, and streetcars were so completely crammed with people rushing around the city that they reminded Kathy of the trains returning to New York from New Haven after the Harvard-Yale game. But for all their hustling, Muscovites seemed to be in a perpetual rush to nowhere. All but the oldest citizens outpaced the young and athletic Kathy on the streets in their great hurry to join queues for food or drink, only to stand and wait in line for hours. Kathy might have asked them about these paradoxes, but she was not allowed to socialise with them. She was permitted to mingle only with the diplomatic community or the men in the American press corps, many of whom had Russian girlfriends who were ‘out and out prostitutes’. Often, the only friend she had was her father. In a bustling city of millions, life was remarkably insular.

By 1945, the American people still knew very little about their eastern ally. There had been no diplomatic relations between Russia and the United States between 1917, when the Bolsheviks seized power, and 1933, when President Roosevelt finally recognised the Soviet Union. During that time, limited business or academic exchange occurred between the two countries; but even before the 1917 revolution, Russia held little interest for Americans. Few learned Russian as a foreign language. It was not until a professor at the University of Chicago adapted a French-Russian grammar book in the early twentieth century that a Russian-language textbook became available in America. By the time Kathy went to Moscow, there was still only one reliable English-Russian phrasebook for beginners: Bondar’s Simplified Russian Method. Kathy had no idea such a thing existed, so she had to borrow a Bondar from a fellow American diplomat when she arrived.

Learning the language was only the first barrier to overcome when attempting to understand the Soviet Union. Kathy found the Soviet citizens with whom she had incidental contact in Moscow or on the ski slopes of the Lenin Hills ‘friendly and frank’, but on an official level, it was nearly impossible to get to know anyone other than the most senior leaders in government, and not in any personal way. Kathy was far from the only person who encountered this difficulty. In the weeks before the Yalta Conference, the State Department had submitted a request to the American embassy, asking for biographical profiles of the Soviet bureaucrats with whom they would be working. George Kennan, Averell’s chargé d’affaires at the embassy and one of the few Russian experts in the Foreign Service, responded that the request was impossible to fulfil. The Soviets never shared any kind of personal information about their bureaucrats with outsiders, except in obituaries, when ‘they can no longer be of use to the foreign world’. Friendship, expressions of mutual interest, or acts of kindness counted for nothing. As Kennan explained, if a Soviet bureaucrat ‘does a kind or obliging act, it is because he finds it in the interests of his government to do so’, as ‘the personal views of a Soviet official have little or no influence on his behavior … The views of a Soviet official are manufactured for him.’ When it came to shaping policy, ‘individual relations could therefore not possibly have – except possibly in the case of Stalin himself – much effect on such decisions.’ As much as Kathy and even Kennan knew about the Soviet Union, there remained expanses of ambiguity and oblivion, as vast as the Soviet Union itself, which lay beyond the grasp of even the most informed outsider.

When Kathy was in her teens, her mother, Kitty, used to worry that if the governess did not handle her carefully, Kathy would turn out to be nothing more than a ‘sporting woman’. (The comment did not lack irony, as Kitty had herself been an expert equestrian and crack shot.) In London and Moscow, Kathy’s life had certainly evolved beyond riding, shooting and skiing. Her stepmother now had a tendency to worry about Kathy’s ‘state of spinsterhood’, despite the fact that in London, Kathy had no shortage of ardent suitors and often found her calendar booked two weeks in advance – though appropriate dates in Moscow were a bit more difficult to come by. Most of the women in Kathy’s social set, including her sister, Mary, who was only eleven months older, were married and settling down with husbands and children. But for Kathy, there would be plenty of time for that later.

Averell may have once predicted he and Kathy would become the closest of friends, but in many ways, the necessities of wartime made their relationship less like that of a father and daughter and more like one between business partners or colleagues. Even though much about life in Russia was unpleasant, Kathy had no intention of leaving her father’s side before the war was over. As one of her most persistent admirers, General Ira Eaker, the American commander in chief of the Allied Air Forces in the Mediterranean, had prophesied in a letter to her, ‘You are going to be in the USSR for a long time, if you continue to be your Dad’s ablest Lieutenant.’

The ablest lieutenant now had just seventy-two hours left before the American delegation arrived at Livadia, and everything around her was still in an alarming state of extremes. There was more than enough caviar to feed a small city, but scarcely enough lavatories for a large family; the bed linens that had been acquired from one of the finest hotels in the world now covered hard, thin mattresses riddled with bedbugs.

But that was Russia, a land of extremes and contradictions, a place where perception often had no relation to reality. Where Moscow shops beckoned passers-by with tempting displays, yet inside there was nothing to purchase. There were luxuries that no American would ever expect in wartime at the embassy residence, such as champagne for breakfast and bouquets of irises and dahlias for Kathy’s bedside table, yet no glass in the south- and east-facing windows for more than two years after nearby bombings of the Battle of Moscow had shattered them to pieces. And here, in this vestige of empire on the Black Sea, the three most powerful men in the world would gather in a tsar’s palace that, save for some furniture and a coat of paint, otherwise would have been condemned.

TWO

February 2, 1945

Sarah Churchill stood on the deck of the HMS Orion, looking out over the cruisers anchored in the fingerlike inlet that formed Malta’s Valletta Harbour as the walls of the ancient city bore down from above. Malta was a rocky fortress of an island off the southern tip of Italy, the city of Valletta seemingly carved directly from the local limestone. The city walls spiralled upward, and within each spiral the buildings fitted together like pieces of a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. The first time Sarah had come to Malta with her father, a year and a half earlier, she was struck by the colour. As an aerial reconnaissance intelligence analyst in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, or WAAFs, as the women’s branch of the Royal Air Force was known, she had spent two years scrutinising photographs of Malta and the Mediterranean so closely, she knew them as well as London. But those pictures were black and white. In reality, these homes, churches and buildings of state glowed with blushing warmth in the morning sunlight; everything was pink.

It was not yet 9.30 a.m., but excited crowds had gathered on both sides of the narrow harbour wherever they could get a view of the ships moored below, even piling onto the rooftops of buildings that had miraculously survived more than three thousand air raids during the enemy’s relentless two-and-a-half-year bombardment. By the middle of 1942, Malta was the lone speck of an Allied stronghold between Italy and North Africa. This island, just one-fifth the size of London, had become the most bombed spot on earth. In honour of the Maltese people’s fortitude, Britain’s King George had awarded them the George Cross, and President Roosevelt had presented them with a hand-drawn scroll of honour. Now another prize lay in wait – the chance to catch a glimpse of the meeting of the two great leaders for whom they had fought and endured. The moment was imminent. The ship for which they were all waiting would soon steam into port.

Usually, crowds made Sarah anxious – which was ironic, considering that before the war she had been a stage actor. But today the onlookers were the least of her worries. Her father was pacing the deck beside her. As he puffed on his long cigar, little white clouds of smoke followed in his wake. The British delegation had been waiting nearly half an hour for the American ship to appear on the horizon. Half an hour’s delay was nothing in the context of transatlantic sea travel, but given her father’s multi-month ordeal in securing this meeting, patience had long since worn thin. Across the harbour, the rest of the delegation was gathered along the rail of the Orion’s sister ship, the HMS Sirius. The British and American military chiefs of staff were there, as well as Averell Harriman; Harry Hopkins; the American secretary of state, Edward Stettinius; and the British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden (who had experienced a rather rude awakening that morning, when the military band assembled on board had kicked off the day’s festivities a trifle early, jolting Eden from his bed with a rousing rehearsal of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’).

There were arguably better ways to spend one’s morning than waiting for a ship to appear, but at least the day was warm. Back in England, seven inches of snow had fallen, but here the Mediterranean climate was so pleasant and mild that Sarah could leave her greatcoat behind in her cabin. In her neatly tailored WAAF uniform, she cut a striking figure beside her father, who was smartly attired as an officer of the Royal Yacht Squadron.

Though her ensemble, a blue wool skirt and jacket, was just one of many uniforms on display along the harbour that morning, it was nearly impossible for Sarah to melt into the sea of navy and olive, not least because of her red hair, which was tucked in tidy waves under her uniform cap. Once, she had a mane of red hair the very same shade as her father’s – though he was now practically bald. When Sarah had arrived at the WAAF recruiting office in the autumn of 1941, the greatest concern of the woman conducting her interview was not Sarah’s fitness to serve. Rather, she was broken-hearted to inform Sarah that her hair, the most beautiful red hair she had ever seen, would have to be cut. But Sarah hadn’t cared. All she wanted was to get into the war as quickly as possible. Still, the recruiter had made Sarah promise she would visit a fashionable London hairdresser before departing for training, rather than place herself at the mercy of the camp barber.

Even if her hair colour had not prevented her from hiding in plain sight, her name made her instantly recognisable. Sarah was listed on personnel rosters as Section Officer Oliver, but by the time she joined the WAAFs, her ill-fated marriage to Vic Oliver was over, save for the technicality of obtaining a divorce. Regardless of what the personnel papers said, everyone knew Section Officer Oliver by her maiden name. Sarah Oliver was one Sarah Millicent Hermione Churchill, the prime minister’s thirty-year-old daughter. As they stood side by side on the deck, any observer would have noticed her close resemblance to her father. She was slender and tall like her mother, with a delicate nose and chin, but she had her father’s eyes and upturned smile. Father and daughter stood together along the rail of the Orion in the February sunshine, waiting for the president of the United States to arrive.

President Roosevelt was nearing the end of his 4,883-mile journey from Washington. The plan was for the British and American delegations to rendezvous in Malta and confer on military and political strategy throughout the afternoon and evening. Then, in the early hours of the next morning, they and their contingents would all leave Malta together and fly 1,375 miles over the Greek islands, the Aegean Sea and Turkey, to the Crimean Peninsula on the Black Sea. There, at the end of an eighty-mile drive, their host for the conference, Joseph Stalin, would be waiting.

Sarah had been granted special leave from her Royal Air Force base – RAF Medmenham – west of London, to join her father for this trip. It was the second time Winston had asked Sarah to accompany him to a major international conference. In early November 1943, Sarah’s commanding officer had summoned her to his office and informed her that he was granting her leave, as the prime minister had requested her presence on an important but unspecified voyage. It was thrillingly hush-hush, every bit as dramatic as the start of a novel by G. A. Henty or H. Rider Haggard, and Sarah had ‘walked on air’. Soon she was on a plane bound for Tehran, for the very first meeting of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. The Tehran Conference, a triumph in Allied cooperation, solidified the leaders’ commitment to the D-Day landings at Normandy, which finally relieved the Soviets of the concentrated brunt of Nazi aggression on the Eastern Front. Tehran had left Sarah optimistic. Goodwill seemed to flow among the three leaders, and Sarah felt inspired. ‘Whatever follows,’ she had written to her mother, ‘one couldn’t help but feel that a genuine desire for friendship was sown.’

Since then, the Allied forces had routed the Nazis at Normandy and slowly begun to push them east towards Germany. In the wake of Allied victories across Europe that summer, the three leaders called for another meeting to coordinate plans for what they hoped would be the end of the war. The code name for this conference would be ARGONAUT, as Churchill suggested, after the Greek mythological heroes who had accompanied Jason in his search for the Golden Fleece on the shores of the Black Sea. In early January, Sarah learned that she too would be an Argonaut. Once again her commanding officer had summoned her and told her to pack her bags. Her father required her for another ‘Top Secret’ journey. Asking a trusted friend at Medmenham to cover for her, she put out a rumour that she was ill, so no one would suspect the real reason for her absence. On the night of January 29, she met her father at RAF Northolt. Soon they were underway.

Despite the sense of optimism as victory in Europe became more tangible with every passing day, Sarah felt disquiet about this conference. It had started with the weather. They flew from RAF Northolt with a blizzard chasing their tail. They had raced to take flight before the gale truly set in, but new problems emerged once they were airborne. The pilots had trouble controlling the temperature inside the plane. The unpressurised cabin was so hot and uncomfortable that Sarah and her fellow passengers felt like ‘tomatoes screaming for air’, while her father looked just like a ‘poor hot pink baby about to cry’. Not only did he have to suffer in the boiling cabin, but he also had developed a 102-degree fever. Despite Winston’s stalwart constitution, it seemed as if every time he left for an overseas conference, he managed to fall ill. Every time he had willed himself to recover, even from a serious bout of pneumonia on the way home from Tehran, which had left him grounded in Carthage for two weeks; but cracks in his resolute nature were beginning to show. This time, the prime minister told his daughter, as they flew through the night towards Malta, he was absolutely certain he was ‘in for something’.

Between the blizzard that had chased them east and her father’s premonition, Sarah could not help but feel superstitious, experiencing something like an actor’s qualms before opening night, as the start of the conference approached. She had begun to ponder the idea of fate. During a conversation with her father’s doctor, Lord Moran, who had travelled with them to Malta, Sarah posed an unusual question. Was it possible, she asked, for the lines in one’s hand to be used to predict one’s future? Sarah’s comment threw the man of science off balance. Surely not, he assured her. The distinct patterns in each person’s palm were entirely the result of anatomy and genetics. ‘You think there is nothing in it?’ she asked, with a hint of disappointment. But Lord Moran could not give her the answer she sought and quickly changed the subject.

Fortunately, after several nights’ sleep Winston had fully recovered his health, as well as much of his usual buoyant demeanour. He even had made up a rhyming couplet on the way to dinner the previous evening to reassure Sarah that all was well: ‘My temperature is down, my tummy ache gone, my functions have resumed their norm: in fact I’m in the best of form!’

But by the time the British contingent gathered on deck to wait for Roosevelt, the cheerful atmosphere was gone. At eight that morning, they had received dreadful news. During the night, a plane transporting several Foreign Office experts to the conference had crashed into the sea near Lampedusa, a small Italian island. According to early reports, of the nineteen passengers and crew, seven had survived, but no one knew who those survivors were, nor if seven was an accurate number. The British delegation was stunned.

Winston was filled with trepidation as he paced the deck. Ever since he and his allies had begun planning the conference, he had harboured grave concerns about holding the meeting on the Black Sea. As the date drew near, he became even more convinced that his concerns were justified. Averell Harriman had reported that the Soviets had relayed inaccurate information about the runway at the airfield where the British and Americans were scheduled to land the next morning. It had not been lengthened, as promised, to accommodate the delegations’ C-54s and Yorks. Instead, the planes were to land at a different airfield altogether, where the runway was two thousand feet shorter than normally required. The drive from the airfield to Yalta looked similarly troubling. An RAF officer who had arrived at Yalta with the advance team described a six-hour journey through a blizzard over nearly impassable mountain roads. Not only was the airfield six hours away from their lodgings, but the HMS Franconia, which contained the secure communications centre for the British and had dodged the floating mines on its way into port, was anchored in Sevastopol Harbour, a three-hour drive east from Yalta. As a British Army major in the advance contingent told a colleague, it was like ‘running a conference with three focal points, one at each corner of Wales, linked by bad mountain roads covered with snow, ice and slush’.

The prime minister also had deeper concerns, particularly regarding his relationship with Franklin Roosevelt. Churchill and Roosevelt had developed a genuine friendship over the course of the past four years. The visit to Malta itself was a heartening reminder of that partnership. In the early days of the war, Italy and Germany controlled the Mediterranean and North Africa, save for this one tiny island outpost. From Malta, the British could attack the Italian navy and target enemy supply lines, thus keeping General Erwin Rommel and the Wehrmacht from unchecked domination in North Africa. But by May 1942, Malta was nearly on its knees. The enemy sank convoy after convoy of supplies from Britain, driving the population to the brink of starvation. Meanwhile, with no materials available to fix the planes engaged in a near-constant series of dogfights, the Allied fighting force was crippled. At one point, the RAF was down to a mere five functioning fighters to defend Malta. The British aircraft carrier ferrying Spitfire replacements to the island was so badly damaged, it was not seaworthy, and without more fighters to ward off enemy bombers, the island would surely fall, and soon. Desperate for help, Churchill had cabled Roosevelt. The president responded immediately, sending an American aircraft carrier loaded with new British Spitfires to the Mediterranean not once but twice, thus saving Malta from annihilation and the British forces from a fully supplied German army in North Africa.

In recent months, however, Roosevelt seemed increasingly ambivalent towards Churchill’s opinions, convictions and concerns as they tried to arrange a tripartite conference. This stung Churchill acutely. Throughout January he repeatedly pushed Roosevelt to meet with him in Malta ahead of their conference with Stalin in order to outline a united Anglo-American position on the issues up for debate at Yalta. Churchill was particularly concerned about Polish independence. He thought the Americans failed to fully appreciate the matter’s delicate complexities, while the Soviets understood them implicitly. Stalin was a merciless and wily autocrat, but Churchill was willing to believe he would be a man of his word. ‘If only I could dine with Stalin once a week, there would be no trouble at all,’ he once declared. In October 1944, Churchill and Stalin met in Moscow. During that meeting, the two men had reached a secret bargain whereby the Soviets agreed they would not interfere in liberated Greece, where the British had long held influence, and the British would largely stay out of Romania and Bulgaria. So far, Stalin had kept his promise. However, Churchill remained wary of the people surrounding Stalin and the historical forces that had shaped Russia for hundreds of years. Like the tsars in the imperial era, the Kremlin sought to control Eastern Europe. The entrenched national paranoia about security on Russia’s western border, where open plains left the vast nation exposed to enemy invasion, retained a strong grip on the minds of Soviet leaders. Hitler’s 1941 assault on the Soviet Union – Operation Barbarossa – was only the most recent example of such an invasion, and it might have been successful, had not an especially cruel winter taken the Nazis by surprise and halted their progress just outside the gates of Moscow. In pursuit of their national interest, the Soviets would be looking to exploit even the smallest points of disagreement between the two western partners. Poland had long been the object of Russian desire. But it was the guarantee of Polish sovereignty that had led Britain to declare war on Germany in the first place. On that issue, perhaps more than any other, it was imperative that the British and the Americans iron out their differences well in advance.

Roosevelt, by contrast, was far more concerned that meeting with Churchill in Malta would make Stalin feel as if the western powers were plotting behind his back. In response to Churchill’s many requests for such a meeting, Roosevelt consistently demurred on the grounds that neither he nor his secretary of state would be able to arrive in sufficient time to hold any meaningful discussions. Pressing matters in Washington prevented them from leaving for Malta until the last possible moment. Besides, Roosevelt preferred to keep discussions with his counterparts ‘informal’ and saw no need to prepare an agenda.

Roosevelt wanted to commit to meeting at Yalta for a mere five to six days. But the end of the war presented deep ideological questions about the future of Europe, and Churchill adamantly believed that the answers would be too complex to resolve in five or six days. After all, he scoffed, ‘Even the Almighty took seven.’ Churchill was haunted by what he called the ‘follies of the victors’ after the Great War. The triumphant nations believed they had secured peace for generations, but they had failed to craft institutions strong enough to guarantee it. Old wounds continued to fester, and victory proved an illusion that led to further disasters: a global financial crisis, the failure of the League of Nations, German national humiliation, and ultimately another, bloodier war. This time, the Allies would have to proceed carefully; otherwise, Churchill wrote to Roosevelt, ‘The end of this war may well prove to be more disappointing than was the last.’ Cooperation between the Allies was crucial. As Churchill told Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden several days before leaving for the conference, ‘The only hope for the world is the agreement of the Great Powers … If they quarrel, our children are undone.’

Because the prime minister was seen by so many, including the throngs of Maltese who had turned out to catch a glimpse of him, as a giant among men, it was easy to forget that just like so many of his countrymen, he was also a father, one with children in uniform – a father standing with his daughter on a sunny February morning.

To the woman standing beside him, Winston Churchill was simply ‘Papa’. But Sarah had always known, long before her father became prime minister, that something special set her father apart from other men. He had an aura of greatness that sent dinner guests scurrying out of the room in search of pen and paper to take down his every word. But for all his lofty, imposing rhetoric and force of personality, he was also a doting father who let his children climb on his back and used his mastery of the English language to compose an ode, for ‘Poor Puggy-Wug’, his daughters’ beloved dog that had fallen ill. When Sarah was home from school, she loved nothing more than to spend hours in the garden below the family’s country home, Chartwell, engaged in one of her father’s favourite, if unusual, pastimes: bricklaying. This work was the furthest thing from politics, and Winston found the manual labour relaxing. He built hundreds of yards of brick walls around Chartwell’s gardens. While he did have a professional bricklayer on call, Sarah was his chosen ‘second mate’. They established a perfect system. Sarah handed him bricks and maintained a ready supply of mortar, and while Winston laid the bricks on the wall, he entrusted her with the crucial responsibility of making sure the plumb line running along the top kept the bricks straight and even. Together, the mason and his assistant passed many pleasant hours anticipating the other’s every move in quiet, contemplative harmony.

Twenty years later, she was at his side once again. There had been long periods of separation in the years when Sarah was touring with theatrical productions. For a man of his age and class, it was surprising that Winston did not wholeheartedly object to her decision to pursue a career on the stage, but his own mother, the wealthy American debutante Jennie Jerome, had been something of an unconventional woman for her day. She wrote plays for London’s West End, was rumoured to have scores of lovers, and had a snake tattooed on her wrist. By comparison, Sarah’s way of bucking convention was quite tame. There had been tension between father and daughter when she ran away to New York to marry the much older actor Vic Oliver, a decision Winston did not condone and from which he had persistently tried to dissuade her.

But the war had brought Sarah and Winston back together. Early in the conflict, Winston and his wife, Clementine, had decided that someone from the family should accompany him as aide-de-camp and all-round protector, supporter and confidant on his travels. The various Churchills were not equally suited to the task. Clementine was terrified of flying. Diana, the oldest, was married, with three young children, and she detested politics. Randolph, the second child, the only son, and a major in the British Army, was brilliant like Winston, and while he sometimes joined his father, his drinking made him brash and arrogant, a liability in the delicate role of supporting Winston during stressful, high-stakes negotiations. Mary, the youngest, had travelled with Winston and Clementine to Quebec for Winston’s meeting with Roosevelt in 1942, but though bright and capable, and an officer in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, Mary was eight years younger than Sarah and still a bit too inexperienced. Sarah was the ideal choice. She was the right age, had a sharp intellect, and was keenly aware of the military and political issues at stake, thanks to her work at RAF Medmenham.

But more than that, the deep connection between father and daughter confirmed the rightness of the decision. Since childhood, Sarah had felt like something of a ‘loner’. Nervous and shy, she formed few friendships with the other girls in her social circle. As a teenager she spent much of her debutante season hiding in the bathroom, playing cards with her cousin Unity Mitford, to avoid making small talk with her peers. Even at home, from the time she was a little girl, she had felt timid and awkward in her father’s presence. Whenever she worked up the nerve to speak to him, she had been sure to ‘tidy’ her mind before she opened her mouth. If her message was important, she would instead write her thoughts in a note. Though she always felt her father was much more eloquent and quick-witted than she was, she did believe that she understood him and, even in her silence, that he understood her. Others in the family would tease her for her reticence, but he would stay their tongues in an instant, saying, ‘Sarah is an oyster, she will not tell us her secrets.’

During the quiet hours spent laying bricks at her father’s side, Sarah studied him as a naturalist studies a species. She observed that when he was ‘with a trusted audience he would let them see his mind leaping and ranging around a problem in a breathlessly spectacular way.’ Sarah desperately wanted to be part of this trusted audience, to be ‘in the league of people, who if they could not help, understood where he was trying to go with an idea’. So she decided to ‘train [her]self to think; not the things he thought, but the way he thought, and would apply it to certain problems as a practice’. Even if she did not speak, she wanted him to know that she was ‘in silent step with him’. Now perhaps no one, aside from her mother, knew Winston Churchill’s mind better than Sarah.

It was for this reason that Sarah now found herself in Malta, watching her father as he impatiently paced the deck. Other than his protégé, Anthony Eden, there was no one else within the British delegation to whom he could confess his deep concerns about the upcoming conference, particularly his frustration with his American ally. But even Eden had his own agenda and political future to look after. Winston needed someone at his side who could share his inner burden while asking only to be allowed to help. Someone who could temper the linguistic torrent he unleashed behind closed doors, but one who could also interpret his feelings in the words left unsaid. At home, this task fell to Clementine, who had carefully honed her ability to channel her husband’s energy and prod his impassioned speech and deepest convictions in a positive direction. Sarah did not have her mother’s forty years of experience managing Winston Churchill, but she had experience enough. Just as she had maintained the plumb line on the brick walls at Chartwell, she could maintain the plumb line here, and help him adjust course when emotion tempted him off the narrow path he had to walk between his partners in the tripartite alliance.

At 9.35 a.m. the president’s ship, the USS Quincy, finally appeared on the horizon. Ever so slowly, it eased its way into the harbour, carefully avoiding the submarine nets at the entrance. A squadron of six Spitfires raced across the sky, and the bands amassed on shore sprang to life, greeting the cruiser with a soaring rendition of the U.S. national anthem, followed by a rousing round of ‘God Save the King’. With the aid of a tugboat, the thirteen-thousand-ton warship inched towards its berth. The two ships were so close together in the narrow inlet that Sarah could see the face of every person on the Quincy as it passed. The ship’s crew was splendidly turned out at attention on deck. Sarah had to admit, the American sailors, soldiers and airmen looked to be ‘very superior creatures’. The prime minister had stopped pacing and positioned himself on the landing, at the top of one of his ship’s ladders facing the water. He had promised Roosevelt he would be ‘waiting on the quay’ when the president arrived. This would do just as well.

As the Quincy drew even with the Orion, a hush suddenly fell over the crowd. There, on the ship’s bridge, was the president of the United States, sitting with a dignified posture in his wheelchair, along the rail. The president and the prime minister regarded each other. Churchill, standing firmly at attention, slowly raised his hand to his cap. Each man gave the other a firm salute. Just for an instant, the past few months’ tension and pent-up frustration melted away as the two old friends were reunited. Even to Sarah, who had spent a lifetime surrounded by dignitaries and statesmen, it was a ‘thrilling sight’. Across the harbour, on the Sirius, the British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, was standing with the American delegates Harriman, Hopkins and Stettinius, observing the encounter. It was a moment, Eden later professed, when the world ‘seem[ed] to stand still’, making one ‘conscious of a mark in history’.

Finally, the Quincy docked in its berth and lowered its gangplank. Harriman, Stettinius, Hopkins and General Marshall boarded first to greet their boss. Shortly thereafter, a formal announcement was made and the prime minister was ‘piped aboard’. Sarah soon followed. Arriving on deck, she was ushered to a group of four wicker chairs arranged in the sunlight, where her father and the president sat side by side. They made an incongruous pair. With his Royal Yacht Squadron uniform, Churchill appeared dressed for a military parade, while Roosevelt was attired simply in a dark, striped suit and a tweed flat cap, as if he could not decide whether he was ready for a business meeting in the city or a country picnic at his beloved Hill-Top Cottage in Hyde Park, New York.

Like Churchill, Roosevelt had not come to Malta alone. Given his physical limitations, he often travelled with one or more of his sons, who helped him to stand and move between his chair, his car and his bed. At Tehran, both his son Elliott and his son-in-law John Boettiger had accompanied him, but this time he had left them at home. In early January, Roosevelt had cabled Churchill with an unexpected message: ‘If you are taking any of your personal family to ARGONAUT, I am thinking of including my daughter Anna in my party.’ FDR had never brought Anna, the oldest of his five children and his only daughter, on an official trip abroad before. It was a surprising, albeit welcome change to his retinue. ‘How splendid,’ Churchill replied. ‘Sarah is coming with me.’

Winston and Clementine had met the ‘first daughter’ during their visit to Washington in 1943, and Sarah had spent time with Anna’s husband, John Boettiger, at Tehran, but simply by reading the newspapers Sarah would have learned about Anna. The president’s daughter was thirty-eight and had three children: a teenage daughter and son from her first marriage, to a stockbroker named Curtis Dall, and a five-year-old son with John. Before John had joined the army in 1943 as a captain in the Civilian Affairs Division, Anna and John had lived in Seattle, where they edited a newspaper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. With her husband deployed to North Africa and the Mediterranean, Anna had moved from Seattle to the White House in early 1944. After years of relative obscurity out west, she had become an increasingly visible figure in Washington; she frequently stood in for her mother as surrogate First Lady during Eleanor Roosevelt’s numerous trips.

Now, here Anna was, sitting across from FDR. The two daughters were introduced. Anna was tall and blonde; her fine, straight hair, set in a permanent wave, had become frizzy in the sea air. Like her father, she wore a simple civilian suit and hat. Immediately Sarah was struck by just how much Anna looked like Eleanor. ‘Although,’ Sarah noted conspiratorially in a letter to her own mother, Anna was ‘so much better looking’. Then another amusing thought occurred to her. She supposed strangers thought she and her older sister, Diana, looked much like Clementine, except in that case, ‘not so good looking!’ Appearances aside, Anna seemed an easygoing, pleasant person. Sarah decided she liked her very much. However, she observed that in spite of Anna’s casual manner, she seemed to be ‘quite nervous about being on the trip’.

Settling in, Sarah turned her attention to the president, who was seated to her left. Winston’s frustration with Roosevelt aside, Sarah was glad to see him again. At Tehran, she had found him a warm and charming man. He was so full of life that at times he seemed ready to leap out of his chair, as if he had forgotten he could not walk. Looking at him now, Sarah was taken aback. This vitality so evident at Tehran was gone, the life sapped from his slackened face. It seemed he had aged a ‘million years’ over the fourteen months since she had last seen him, and his conversation, once sparkling and witty, wandered and meandered.

Something had definitely changed. Even the president’s ever-present group of friends and advisers had notably altered. From what Sarah observed on board the ship that morning and learned during conversations with the Americans who had arrived the day before, Harry Hopkins, once inseparable from Roosevelt, no longer held the position of influence he had long enjoyed. Poor Hopkins had been seriously ill for some time. He had been treated at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota for the side effects of stomach cancer, which he had been battling for the past six years. Hopkins had willed himself to make it to this conference, but an unfamiliar distance had arisen between him and the president. In place of Hopkins, Edward Stettinius, who had been secretary of state for only two months, had become Roosevelt’s primary ‘buddy’. Perhaps Sarah was wrong, but based on her first interactions with him, Stettinius had seemed rather ‘wooden headed’. Worst of all, John Gilbert Winant, the American ambassador to Britain, was thousands of miles away. Although all the other American, British and Soviet ambassadors had been included (with the exception of Lord Halifax, Churchill’s envoy to the United States, who had remained in Washington and had not attended previous international wartime conferences), Roosevelt had left Winant in London. Sarah desperately wished Winant, or Gil, as she knew him, was there. This was not just a selfish wish. When Winant was present, Sarah knew her father had a strong, true friend among the Americans. But with Winant in London and Hopkins in a diminished role, the president’s inner circle at Yalta would be distinctly less pro-British.

The joy Sarah had felt as she watched her father and Roosevelt salute each other passed quickly as Winston’s anxiety about the state of the relationship between Britain and the United States crept into her mind. What had happened to Roosevelt since she had seen him in Tehran? ‘Is it health,’ she wondered, ‘or has he moved away a little from us?’

THREE

February 2, 1945

Perhaps it was because Sarah had an actor’s ability to summon a wide range of emotions or simply because she had a natural ability to read people. Within moments of sitting down across from the Roosevelts on the Quincy, Sarah sensed what Anna was desperately trying to hide. Anna was indeed nervous about the trip, but not because she was new to the world of tripartite conferences, nor because she was, for the first time, seeing firsthand the furious destruction left by war. Anna was anxious not for herself but for her father. Sarah’s perception had been acute: Franklin Roosevelt was seriously ill. He was dying of congestive heart failure. Other than the doctors, Anna was the only person who knew just how grave the situation had become.

In the winter of 1944, after her husband joined the army, Anna had moved back to the White House, with her four-year-old son. Shortly after her arrival, she began to notice small changes in her father. He had a persistent cough, his skin looked ashen, and he appeared far more exhausted than a man of sixty-two years should be. Granted, twelve years in the White House, including two at war, would have taken a toll on the fittest man in his prime, but this condition hinted at something more than fatigue. The signs were perceptible to only the most attentive observers. His hands shook when he lit a cigarette. Once, while writing his name at the end of a letter, he seemed to draw a blank, dragging the pen across the page in an unintelligible black squiggle. Sometimes in the dark of the White House movie theatre, as the family watched an after-dinner film, the light coming from the screen would be just bright enough for Anna to glimpse her father’s mouth hanging open for long stretches of time, as if he could not muster the energy to keep it closed.

Anna’s mother, Eleanor, attributed much of FDR’s increased fatigue to concerns about their troublesome middle son, Elliott. He had recently announced that he was divorcing his second wife, Ruth, in order to marry a film starlet. But Anna’s observations, taken together with a remark by FDR’s secretary, Grace Tully, that he had either fallen asleep or briefly lost consciousness while signing papers some months earlier, compelled Anna to take action. She summoned her father’s doctor, Vice Admiral Ross McIntire, an ear, nose and throat specialist. He tried to tell her that The president was simply suffering the prolonged effects of earlier bouts of influenza, sinus infection and fever, but Anna was unconvinced. She insisted that FDR have a comprehensive medical evaluation.

A thorough examination by the young cardiologist Howard Bruenn, at Bethesda Naval Hospital in late March 1944, revealed that Anna’s suspicions had been correct. The president was breathless after moderate exertion, there was fluid in his lungs, and his blood pressure was 186/108 mmHg – a systolic number indicating a hypertensive crisis. Cardiology was a relatively new field – a professional organisation of American cardiologists had convened for the first time in 1934 – but to Bruenn, the results were clear: the president was suffering from acute congestive heart failure, a disease for which there was no cure. Bruenn could try to prolong his patient’s life by using digitalis to temporarily clear the fluid in his lungs and by advising him to shorten his work hours, sleep more, maintain a strict diet, and lose weight to reduce the strain on the heart. But it was just a waiting game. Treating heart failure was beyond McIntire’s capabilities, so he begrudgingly agreed to have the thirty-eight-year-old Bruenn take over the president’s primary care on one important condition: Bruenn was not to tell anyone about FDR’s diagnosis – no one in the Roosevelt family, and especially not the president himself. Surprisingly, Bruenn faced no resistance from the patient. FDR never asked what was wrong with him.

But Anna was no fool. There had to be a reason why her father was taking new medications, why his diet now closely resembled that of her toddler, and why the new doctor insisted FDR work no more than four hours a day. Before long, Bruenn broke McIntire’s rule and took Anna into his confidence, revealing FDR’s diagnosis in enough detail to ensure that his recommendations were given serious attention. Anna read whatever she could about heart disease and followed Bruenn’s instructions to the letter. Aside from her husband, she told no one, not even her mother.

Though Roosevelt asked Bruenn no details about his health, he must have sensed that something was seriously wrong and that Anna was protecting him. Her presence at Yalta represented an abrupt change from the situation at Tehran. Then, Anna had begged to accompany her father, but he had flatly refused, for no logical reason. Instead he chose her brother Elliott and her husband, John. This rejection had stung Anna. Yes, her brother and husband could help support Roosevelt physically in a way she could not, but his Secret Service officer, Mike Reilly, could have done that. Not only had Elliott accompanied FDR to Tehran, but both Elliott and Anna’s younger brother Franklin Jr had joined their father at the Atlantic Charter Conference with Churchill in August 1941, at which they had outlined the common principles that united the free world, as well as the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, which solidified the Allies’ commitment to a German unconditional surrender. It was only fair that she should at last have a turn. At the time, Anna had also been desperate to see her husband, whose letters from his posting in Italy had taken on an anxious, depressed tone. She needed to see him to give him some reassurance. As she told FDR, if it was a problem that she was not in uniform, she could join the Red Cross. Still, her father refused to budge: in keeping with the age-old maritime superstition that women on board ships brought bad luck, no women were permitted to sail on navy vessels. (Never mind that, as the commander in chief, Roosevelt easily could have granted her an exception. Or she could have flown.) That old superstition did not seem to bother Winston Churchill, who was bringing Sarah to Tehran. No matter what argument Anna made, FDR would not acquiesce. In a rare fit of frustration with her father, Anna fumed to her mother that FDR was a ‘stinker in his treatment of the female members of his family’. She blazed with anger at the injustice: ‘Pa seems to take for granted that all females should be quite content to “keep the home fires burning,” and that their efforts outside of this are merely amusing and to be aided by a patronising male world only as a last resort to keep some individually troublesome female momentarily appeased.’

But when she approached her father about joining him at Yalta, he simply responded, ‘Well, we’ll just see about that.’ She expected to be disappointed once again. Then, in early January, he surprised her. Winston was bringing Sarah again, and Ambassador Harriman was bringing his daughter, Kathleen. Anna could come along if she wished.

When FDR told Eleanor he had decided to bring Anna, it was her turn to feel hurt. She had commiserated with Anna about being left behind for Tehran, and Anna knew how much Eleanor was hoping Franklin would ask her to join him for this conference. Instead, he put Eleanor off, saying it would be ‘simpler’ if he took Anna, as Churchill and Harriman were bringing their daughters rather than their wives. If Eleanor went, people would feel they had to go out of their way to make a ‘fuss’. Eleanor pretended to understand.

While bringing Anna as his aide-de-camp did indeed simplify logistics, it did not fully explain the larger reason why FDR wanted to bring his daughter, rather than his wife, to this conference. Eleanor either could not see or could not accept that her husband of forty years was truly sick. Meanwhile, for all her good intentions, she did not help alleviate Franklin’s exhaustion – she added to it. Anna admired her mother’s relentless energy – she poured her heart and soul into causes such as advocating for the rights of women and providing opportunities for the poor. Yet she had never been a naturally warm and nurturing person. Anna had clear childhood memories of entering her mother’s room while she was working. Without lifting her head from her papers, Eleanor would say, in a deep, chilling voice, ‘What do you want, dear.’ She did not phrase it as a question. Eleanor lacked a sense of timing as to the propitious time or place to voice her opinions on Franklin’s policy decisions. And her opinions tended to be strong. Though he valued her perspective – in fact, he considered it one of his great assets – she often failed to appreciate the many competing demands on the president’s time, particularly during a time of war. His moments of rest were few and far between. During those precious intervals, he was not especially receptive to being subjected to a family member’s interrogation. At one particular dinner party, Eleanor began quizzing him about some decision or other that he had made. After a trying day, he had been looking forward to a relaxed, sociable evening and did not appreciate Eleanor’s probing questions. Noticing that he was about to reach boiling point, Anna jumped in as mediator, lightheartedly heading Eleanor off by saying, ‘Mother, can’t you see you are giving Father indigestion?’ In his public and private life, FDR was constantly surrounded by a crush of people clamouring for his favour and attention. Anna thought he liked to keep people around him all the time because as a boy, he had grown up with no neighbourhood children to play with and only a much older half brother for occasional company; thus, he always wanted to be ‘one of the gang’. But even if he did not like to admit it, FDR’s energy was not what it once was. It would have been a kind gesture to bring Eleanor to Yalta, but could he be blamed for trying to ensure that a gruelling trip would be as peaceful as possible?

Anna knew how much her father’s decision had wounded Eleanor. In part Anna felt guilty, as if she were betraying her mother – and not for the first time. But Anna also knew that if Eleanor went, she would have to stay at home. So Anna kept her mouth shut, convinced herself that her presence really would keep things ‘simpler’, and blocked the guilt from her mind.

There was another, more nuanced reason why FDR wanted Anna to come with him. She might not have appreciated this rationale, had she allowed herself to consider it for a moment; instead, she breezed past it, another difficulty swept from her thoughts. FDR was able to thoroughly relax in Anna’s presence because he felt that, as a woman, she had ‘no ax to grind’. Unlike her brothers, who could and did use their time with FDR as an opportunity to meet people who might advance their careers, FDR assumed Anna would not be ‘with him because she was inclined … to meet a lot of people to help her get into something else later on’. She existed to serve her family, especially the men, and to keep them tranquil and content.

No matter how hard Anna and Dr Bruenn worked to extend FDR’s life, he would soon die. Going to Yalta was almost certainly Anna’s first and last chance to experience being needed by her father, to become part of his world, which had long been closed to her. So she accepted his reasons for wanting her at his side and chose to interpret them as an affirmation that finally she was a person of value in his life.

Anna had long wished to be the person her father most wanted by his side. Some of her fondest childhood memories recalled the afternoons when she and Franklin had mounted their horses for long rides through the woods and glens surrounding their home in Hyde Park. As they rode, he would point out trees and birds to teach her about different species; he explained how to farm the land in a way most in keeping with the natural environment. Anna imagined that someday they would manage the Hyde Park estate side by side.

FDR indeed loved the natural world, but he loved politics just as much, if not more. He spent countless hours cloistered behind a heavy wooden door, strategising with his political colleagues, the cigar smoke spilling out from the crack under the closed door into the hall. Desperate for his attention, Anna would write him notes, asking him to please come and say good night. She tried to make the prospect more appealing with the promise of pulling a prank on her brother. To the ‘Hon. F.D. Roosevelt,’ she wrote. ‘Will you please come and say goodnight … I am going up now to put something in James’ bed and you may hear some shreiks [sic] when you come in.’ One evening when FDR was shut in his office with his associates, Anna decided to sneak in and hide. Moments later she began to choke on the cigar smoke that filled the room from floor to ceiling, and her eyes started to burn. She had no choice but to give herself up and retreat, coughing and spluttering in utter humiliation. That air was clearly not intended for little girls.

Once, her father had invited her into his library to help him with some books. Anna trembled with nervous excitement at finally joining him in his sacred enclave. She must have trembled too hard, for the instant he handed her a stack of books, they slipped from her arms and crashed to the floor. Anna felt so completely ashamed, she wished she could melt into the ground. Terrified that her father would be furious, she burst into tears and ran away.

When FDR contracted polio, Anna thought her dream was lost for good. It was 1921, Anna was fifteen, and the Roosevelts were at their home on Campobello Island, in New Brunswick, Canada, for the summer. The day had started carefree and beautiful, the kind of day made for sailing and swimming. That afternoon, Franklin had begun to feel chills and a growing discomfort in his lower back. Two days later, he was paralysed from the waist down. He was only thirty-nine, but he would never walk unaided again. Gone were the horseback rides through the woods, and with it the dream that someday Anna would join her father as the custodian of Hyde Park. Anna was soon sent away to the Chapin School in Manhattan, and for the rest of her childhood she rarely saw her father without other people in the way – her omnipresent grandmother, the doctors and nurses, and FDR’s political colleagues, who now had to come to him. All she could do was watch as he struggled with his new crutches and steel braces. He swore each day that today he was going to walk the one thousand feet of the driveway. He would strain on the crutches, swinging his legs as the sweat ran down his face, but each day he would fail as Anna stood helpless and broken-hearted at the top of the drive, watching the man who had so often carried her on his shoulders, who had for so long stood as the infallible hero at the centre of her universe, as he struggled and failed, over and over again.

In a way, FDR’s heart failure, a terrible condition that no one wished upon him, was also a gift – a gift that Anna could not refuse. She quickly realised that she needed to take on a larger role in her father’s life if he was to live to see the end of the war. She and her father never discussed her role at the White House; she just naturally stepped into ever-expanding responsibilities. People across myriad military, government and civic institutions were constantly clamouring for an audience with the president. Given Dr Bruenn’s stipulation that FDR was to work no more than four hours per day, he could not possibly take all of the requested appointments; face-to-face interactions were exhausting. So Anna became his gatekeeper, determining who really needed time with the president and who could be fobbed off on somebody else. Sometimes she took the meetings herself and later gave FDR a summary of the discussion. She also tried to ease his burden in ways he was not aware of. After he went to bed, for example, she would sneak to the night pouch and remove whatever papers and requests she felt others could handle, so that he need not be bothered with them.

Had the public known what Anna was doing, there surely would have been an outcry. As it was, some people criticised her simply for living in the White House. One woman wrote Anna a scathing letter, scolding her for ‘grafting on the taxpayers’. It was bad enough that Anna was living in the White House at the taxpayers’ expense, the woman sniped – she had better not have the nerve to be taking a salary, too. The writer also implied that Anna was running the risk of turning out like her mother, whose excessive involvement in her husband’s administration was unseemly. This woman was clearly no admirer of FDR, but ‘at least he was elected’, she spat. No one had elected Eleanor; she was ‘only a meddlesome private person’ who had no place interfering in political affairs.

This woman’s vitriolic assault on the Roosevelt women aside, she did raise a valid concern. Surely Anna knew that taking papers out of her father’s pouch was inappropriate, but still she did not stop. She was desperate to do anything to help him. If she could have kept him from going to Yalta, she might have. The entire journey would take weeks; the conference itself would be gruelling. It might very well kill him.

The long voyage to Yalta had begun in darkness. At 10 p.m. on January 22, Roosevelt and his delegation made a furtive escape from Washington. Newspapers across the country were predicting that the Big Three would soon have another conference, but for the sake of security, no one in the United States, Britain or the Soviet Union would confirm where or when it would take place. The president had a secret train depot in the basement of the Bureau of Printing and Engraving annexe, an innocuous-looking concrete-and-limestone building on 14th Street SW, one block south of the National Mall; there, he boarded his armoured train car, the Ferdinand Magellan. In this way he avoided the prying eyes at Union Station, along with its steps, which impeded his progress by wheelchair. From Washington, FDR, his aides and his daughter travelled to Newport News, where the USS Quincy was waiting. For weeks the ship had undergone secret renovations to make it fit for the president, though it was almost impossible to conceal the work completely. In November Roosevelt had received a letter from a retired U.S. Army soldier, warning FDR that he had overheard two men in a restaurant in Middleburg, Connecticut, talking about a toilet bowl on the Quincy being raised nine inches to accommodate a certain person on an upcoming trip. The saying ‘Loose lips sink ships’ never seemed so appropriate. It became even more difficult to suppress the rumours that something was afoot when Roosevelt held his birthday party on January 21, nine days before his actual birthday, January 30. Having successfully evaded any local Nazi spies and paparazzi en route to Newport News, the entourage set off on the eleven-day, 4,883-mile voyage to the rendezvous with Churchill at Malta.

Among the few in Washington who knew Roosevelt was bound for another tripartite conference, the choice of Anna as his aide was a bit of a surprise. Labor Secretary Frances Perkins had assumed he would take one or more of his sons to assist him physically. General Edwin ‘Pa’ Watson, FDR’s longtime adviser, appointments secretary and close friend, who was often included in Roosevelt’s coterie, was among those the president had included in the Yalta delegation. Watson often had the task of helping the president stand in his heavy leg braces. While he could provide FDR with physical support, Anna provided something less tangible. As Watson explained to Perkins before departing, ‘Anna can do things with her father and with other people that the boys can’t … They can’t manage him … She can tell him, “You mustn’t see people. You mustn’t do that. You mustn’t talk with them. It tires you out. You’ll be no good tomorrow.” And she can also handle the other people. Without alarming them, she can handle them, and that’s why they’re going to take her.’

Shortly after they left Washington, John Boettiger wrote to his wife. ‘I HATE your being away,’ he told Anna, ‘but I am so thrilled that you are getting a chance to really be on the inside of a most historic meeting.’ He knew how valuable she was to her father and how much this trip meant to both of them, personally and for the future benefit of the world. The sense of being part of history was by no means lost on Anna. When she had moved back into the White House, she had promised not to keep a diary, so that all she heard and saw would remain confidential. But for this conference, she decided to make an exception, so she could later share her experience with John.

But before the next pages in history could be written, FDR would have to survive the trip. Much could go wrong even before they reached Yalta. For eleven days, FDR would be under the close observation of those travelling on the Quincy. These included not only personal friends like Watson, who were devoted to Roosevelt, but also some with their own distinctly political aspirations. The president’s party had hardly been at sea more than a few days before someone started asking about Roosevelt’s health. Jimmy Byrnes, a former South Carolina senator and Supreme Court associate justice, now serving as the head of the Office of War Mobilization and attending the Yalta Conference in this official capacity, quietly mentioned to Anna that FDR did not look too well. In his opinion, the president’s haggard appearance and open-mouth stares seemed to indicate that something more than FDR’s frequent sinus trouble was amiss. Anna had brushed him off, saying of course it was just his tricky sinuses. Sitting with his mouth open was merely a way to breathe more easily. Byrnes remained sceptical.

If Byrnes was already suspicious, others likely soon would be. The sinus explanation was unlikely to pass muster if FDR’s condition deteriorated further, so it was vital that Anna shield her father as much as possible. No one could know just how sick he was: not Byrnes, nor anyone else in the American delegation, but least of all Churchill and Stalin. The continued success of the alliance of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin was precariously balanced on the strong personal relationship among the three men. With victory so close at hand, it was imperative that nothing upset that balance.

Fortunately, the voyage to Malta allowed FDR time for plenty of rest. As the ship was travelling under radio silence, he was not obligated to respond to anything but the most urgent messages, to which he would reply via a complex system of couriers. Except for spending some time reading the briefing materials the State Department had prepared for the conference, he was free to relax in the sunshine on deck, nap in his cabin and organise his beloved stamp collection. Once they arrived at Yalta, Bruenn’s four-hour rule would have to be suspended for the duration of the conference. It would be impossible for Roosevelt to miss any of the multi-hour plenary sessions or the formal dinners, filled with toasting and speeches, which inevitably would last long into the night. Anna could try to make her father rest as much as possible during the mornings and early afternoons, but with the Americans all under one roof, it would be difficult to stop Secretary of State Stettinius, Harry Hopkins, or other Americans from wandering in to chat. Churchill posed another problem altogether. During their journey on the Quincy, he continued to bombard Roosevelt with cable after cable. Some dealt with important military and policy concerns, but mostly they consisted of complaints about the journey to Yalta and the accommodation there.

If the prime minister could wear a person down by cable, he was positively enervating in person. Churchill continued to insist on scheduling private audiences with FDR, but Anna could not allow them. It would not be an exaggeration to say that if Churchill pushed Roosevelt too hard, the president could very well die of exhaustion or stroke. Despite their alliance, Roosevelt had concerns greater than Churchill’s wounded feelings. With whatever energy he had left, he had to prioritise American interests as his principal object at Yalta. He could succeed only with cooperation, not just from the British, whose global power had waned considerably over the course of the war, but also from the Soviets.

First, Roosevelt was determined to save American lives, particularly in the Pacific. His generals projected that though their island-hopping strategy – the attacks on small, poorly defended Pacific islands that were well-positioned to serve as air bases midway across the ocean and support an eventual attack on the Japanese home islands – had thus far proved a success, even with recent victories in the Mariana Islands and the Philippines, they could not confidently envision launching a full-scale invasion of Japan itself for at least a year. Furthermore, fighting on the Japanese home islands would likely become a war of attrition. They believed the Allies would eventually win, but if the as-yet-untested wonder weapon failed, the cost of victory could possibly be as many as a million American lives over at least eighteen months of war. If FDR could draw the Soviets into the fight against Japan and thus hasten its conclusion, he could potentially save hundreds of thousands of American soldiers.

Roosevelt’s second objective was strategic, and somewhat personal. The Soviet Union had exponentially increased in power under Stalin’s leadership; it could no longer be perceived as a distant, mysterious hinterland on the fringe of Europe. Now it was imperative that the Soviets become part of the world order. In Roosevelt’s mind, the way to do this was by securing their participation in a global fraternity united by a commitment to peace. FDR’s hero Woodrow Wilson had tried to form such a fraternity: the League of Nations. As Wilson’s assistant secretary of the navy, Roosevelt had attended the 1919 peace conference in Paris and had seen first-hand the political jockeying and deal-making that ultimately doomed the league. Where Wilson had failed, Roosevelt was determined to succeed. In his vision of a world peace organization that would unite all nations, Soviet participation was crucial. As much as Roosevelt viewed Churchill as a longtime friend and partner, Stalin was the person Roosevelt believed he needed to woo at Yalta. He was confident that Stalin could be swayed by Roosevelt’s personal powers of persuasion.

Anna liked Winston Churchill well enough. She had met him when he had come to Washington in May 1943; she had been in Washington then to see her husband off to war. She found him a witty conversationalist, undoubtedly bright, yet also something of a rotund, comical eccentric whose liberal use of snuff produced enormous sneezes that ‘practically rock the foundations of the house’. It was, however, one thing to enjoy his company personally and appreciate the value he brought to the wartime partnership, but quite another to embrace his old-fashioned, imperialistic worldview. As Eleanor said in a letter to Anna only a month after the Americans had entered the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor, ‘I like Mr. Churchill, he’s loveable & emotional & very human but I don’t want him to write the peace or carry it out.’

FOUR

February 2, 1945

Averell Harriman had travelled two thousand miles from Moscow to Malta and was prepared to brief Roosevelt on all matters related to Soviet-Polish relations, Soviet demands for reparations, and the cost of Stalin’s intervention in the war with Japan. After serving nearly a year and a half as ambassador to the Soviet Union, he had a better understanding of the internal workings of the Soviet regime than perhaps any other American. And yet, when lunch was announced and the president and prime minister headed to FDR’s suite on the Quincy, with Anna, Sarah, Ed Stettinius, Anthony Eden, Jimmy Byrnes and FDR’s chief of staff, Fleet Admiral William Leahy, Averell Harriman was not invited. Clearly it was not intended to be a working lunch.

For days, Harriman had been taking the blame for agreeing to hold the upcoming conference in such a remote, inhospitable location – to make matters all the more irritating, he had twisted his ankle badly on the rocky terrain of Malta. In truth, once Roosevelt had indicated he would agree to a meeting on the Black Sea, there was little Harriman could do to intervene. As he told Sarah Churchill, after nearly running her over with his car while racing to meet Stettinius’s plane at RAF Luqa two days earlier, ‘Well, it was there, or two worse places.’ For the man who had led a charmed life since birth, the conference was off to an inauspicious start.

Handsomer than many of the movie stars who frequented his resort and heir to one of the largest self-made fortunes in America, Harriman had never encountered an obstacle – in business, in sports or in the form of an actual mountain range – that he could not surmount through tenacity, ingenuity, a talented staff and sound investment. He had grown up in a mansion atop a mountain overlooking the Hudson River Valley. In the vast parkland below the house, the three brown bears that his father had captured on the scientific expedition to Alaska lived as pets in spacious cages, and there was a barn filled with several scores of polo ponies next to the base of a funicular. This mechanism transported everything from food to cars to ponies from the bottom of the mountain to the house. From the Union Pacific Railroad, to international shipping lines, to mining companies, to Newsweek magazine, to Brown Brothers Harriman, his banking firm, he had found success in nearly every business endeavour he attempted. He approached leisure with the same focus and drive. Rejecting time-consuming rounds of golf in favour of the speed and aggression of polo, he had become one of the top-ranked players in the nation; his team defeated the world-class Argentinians in the 1928 Cup of the Americas. It was only natural that he would eventually turn his attention to government. As Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease expediter, he took his relentless energy and business savvy to London, where he oversaw the distribution of more than $30 billion in aid to the British Empire.

Unfortunately, as the past few months had shown, working with the Soviet government was nothing like his previous business dealings, not even the investments he had made in the Soviet Union after World War I, when most businessmen had preferred to leave money on the table than do business in a country suddenly led by the Bolsheviks. There was a saying that Harriman and his staff used at the American embassy in Moscow: when ‘trading with the Russians you had to buy the same horse twice’. Over the past six months, Harriman had tried desperately to convince Roosevelt to change his approach to negotiations with the Soviets, but Roosevelt had resisted. If the luncheon snub in Malta was any indication, the president was not about to reconsider.

The lunch ended, but still Roosevelt did not summon Harriman. Instead of sitting down with his advisers or with the British delegation, as Churchill had intended when he suggested the rendezvous in Malta, Roosevelt and his daughter set off on a tour of Malta, scheduled to last an hour and a half, with the island’s governor general and his family. Anna invited Sarah Churchill to come along. Making the rounds of the island was a kind gesture to the local people, but time was running short. The American and British contingents were leaving for Yalta that night, and still the two delegations had had no substantive discussion about the conference. As Roosevelt drove away for his afternoon tour, Churchill returned to his ship to take a nap. For all the influence Harriman was able to exert, he might have remained at Yalta with Kathy.

It was not the first time during the war that Harriman felt that FDR had failed to address a problem head-on. Early in the conflict, Harriman thought that Roosevelt did not truly recognise the scope of the Nazi menace, namely, in the form of the German navy, the Kriegsmarine, which Harriman believed was capable of knocking Britain out of the war. Lend-Lease was a brilliant plan, but it was not enough. The Americans could send food and materiel across the Atlantic, but if German U-boats sank the convoys, the British would be left with next to nothing. If its people were starving, the government would have to surrender to Hitler. In the spring of 1941, Roosevelt knew American public opinion did not support a declaration of war on Germany, but Harriman was frustrated that the president was ‘unwilling to lead public opinion or force the issue’. The ambassador feared that the president was once again choosing to downplay a grave danger to American and Allied interests, thus revealing a naive understanding of the Soviet leadership’s true power and ambition.

It was convenient to forget that the Soviet Union had been in league with the Nazis for a year and a half at the beginning of the war. Averell Harriman had only recently begun his tenure as Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease envoy in London when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, in June 1941. By breaking the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact of 1939, the Nazis drove the Soviets into alliance with Britain. Although the American public held a similarly hostile view towards both the Communists and the Nazis, there were undeniable benefits to this new alliance. With the Red Army fighting alongside the British, the Americans might not need to enter the war at all. Roosevelt extended $1 billion in Lend-Lease aid to the USSR. Averell supported Roosevelt’s decision wholeheartedly and looked at the alliance with the Soviets as a positive development for both the British and the still neutral Americans. He took a practical stance towards the situation, unconcerned with the Soviets’ beliefs about the structure of society, industry and the economy. All that mattered was that they opposed Hitler. ‘To put it bluntly, whatever it costs to keep this war away from our shores, that will be a small price to pay,’ he explained. (Self-interest may have bolstered his opinion: in July 1941, he still owned $560,000 in Soviet government notes from manganese contracts liquidated in 1928.)

Almost from the outset, however, Kathleen, then just twenty-three, was less convinced than her father that an alliance with Stalin would ultimately be worth the price. As a reporter in London, Kathy had quickly gained a perspective different from her father’s. Though most of the time the International News Service assigned her stories with titles like ‘Girl’s Cheery Song Helped Londoners Forget Their Woes’ or ‘Girl Reporter Finds Women Hang out Laundry as Usual’, her boss slowly began to give her war-oriented beats, at least those that senior reporters had neither the time nor interest to cover. Among them were press conferences with leaders from exiled European governments, from countries such as Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Poland; their prime ministers and kings had fled to London when the Nazis invaded. Just three years earlier, Kathy had been a student at Bennington College, writing her junior thesis on Nazi Germany’s increasingly hostile behaviour towards Czechoslovakia. Suddenly she found herself reporting on the tragic results of what she had pondered in theory. At these press conferences, the issue that raised the most immediate concern was not Nazi aggression, but rather Britain’s new alliance with the Soviet Union. The exiles were not pleased with the sudden rush of support for Stalin in Britain and the United States.

Neither Kathy nor her father particularly valued rest. In their suite at the Dorchester Hotel, father and daughter would stay up talking about the state of the world long into the night. Sometimes these conversations turned into healthy debate. ‘Since I’ve been [g]oing around in the free-gov’t circles,’ Kathy wrote to her sister, ‘I’ve found a very different Stalin feeling. (Different from Averell.) They distrust him and fear him and figure he’s doing a good job of out-smarting the Americans and the British.’ The exiled Polish leaders were particularly vocal. They argued that Stalin would look for any opportunity to seize Poland and install a de facto Soviet regime. Kathy believed them. Not until the late summer of 1944 would Averell realise that Kathy had been right to listen.

In October 1943, Roosevelt appointed Harriman ambassador to the Soviet Union. Despite the Poles’ continued warnings that Stalin could not be trusted, Harriman remained convinced that the Soviets’ objectives aligned with those of the West. Logically, the Soviets’ historical desire to have friendly neighbours made sense, especially on their vulnerable western border, where they had sparred with Poland since the reign of Catherine the Great and been attacked by invading forces, from Napoleon in 1812 to the Wehrmacht in 1941. But Harriman did not think Stalin would go so far as to impose Communist puppet governments in countries such as Poland, or take over completely. He believed the United States should be prepared to take a firm stance if the Soviets stepped out of line, lest the Americans risk ‘storing up trouble for the future’. However, like many westerners, including Churchill and Roosevelt, he believed in the power of strong personal relationships with Soviet leaders. Harriman was a businessman, and people liked to do business with people they liked. Did that not apply to Soviet politicians as much as to American industrialists or financiers?

For nearly a year, Harriman persisted in this assumption, until a much crueller reality became apparent. What Kathy had heard in London from the exiled Polish leaders was borne out in August 1944.

Throughout the war, the Poles had maintained an active resistance network, especially in occupied Warsaw, where they waged a guerrilla battle against the Nazis against heavy odds. For a brief moment in the summer of 1944, conditions tilted in the Poles’ favour. The Nazi troops in Warsaw were weaker, and the Red Army was quickly approaching. The Poles knew they could not expel the Nazis from Poland entirely without Soviet assistance, but they also realised that the Soviet Union would eagerly absorb Poland if given the chance to put boots on the ground, especially with the Americans and the British distracted with their own battles raging across Western Europe and the Mediterranean. If the Polish resistance could secure Warsaw before the Red Army arrived, they could make a compelling case to the western Allies that the Poles were a formidable force worthy of an independent place in the world, not a dispensable people to be cast off to the Soviets the moment they were free of the Nazi yoke. The Warsaw Uprising began on August 1. At first, the plan looked promising. The Polish resistance secured central Warsaw, but food and ammunition quickly dwindled. The fighters expected the Red Army to arrive any day, bringing supplies and reinforcements. However, the Soviets, now just miles from Warsaw across the Vistula River, suddenly stopped. With no ammunition, the Poles became sitting ducks for the Nazis. Their courageous uprising became a mass slaughter. Over 200,000 Poles, mostly civilians, were killed, and the city was almost completely destroyed.

When Harriman discovered that the Red Army was simply sitting and watching from the banks of the Vistula as the Nazis destroyed the Polish resistance, he was shocked. Unable to comprehend why the Soviets would allow the Nazis to retake the upper hand in Warsaw, he lobbied the Soviet government to allow American and British planes to use Soviet airfields to resupply the Polish resistance. Stalin refused. No amount of personal persuasion could move him. Harriman began to realise the West had sorely miscalculated. They had misunderstood the man they had jocularly referred to as ‘Uncle Joe’. Churchill defied Stalin and ordered the RAF to airdrop whatever supplies it could. Meanwhile, Harriman anxiously tried to convince Roosevelt, who at the time was campaigning for re-election, that it was imperative for the Americans to take a hard line with Stalin before the Soviets ran unchecked across Eastern Europe. But Roosevelt and the State Department had other priorities. They were more concerned that such intervention would jeopardise future American-Soviet cooperation, both in military terms and in the Soviets’ commitment to an international peace organisation. Representatives from the three Allied nations would be convening to discuss this organisation at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., on August 21. Roosevelt would allow nothing to derail those plans. While tragic, the resistance in Warsaw was simply another wartime casualty.

As Kathy told her sister in a letter, it was a ‘very bloody time’ for their father. By the middle of August, anxiety over Poland had taken a heavy toll on him. A tall, athletic man, Averell lost an alarming amount of weight, his frame dropping to a mere 160 pounds, and he developed stomach ulcers. Kathy became gravely concerned for his health. But, casting Kathy’s worries aside, he continued to press his case, arguing through the night with Stalin’s deputies, sometimes until 6.30 in the morning. As Averell waited for the inevitable call from the Kremlin every evening, he needed something to calm his racing mind. The only thing that helped was games of bezique. Kathy would sit with him and play trick after trick. Averell usually beat her handily. Over the first seven months of 1944, Kathy accumulated a 100,000-point deficit. Suddenly, in the late summer of 1944, she began winning. She triumphed so often that she nearly drew even, but she knew her victories had little to do with her ability. Averell’s mind was elsewhere.

The ambassador was desperate for help. He could not fight the Soviets on Poland by himself. Finally, Harriman appealed to Harry Hopkins, urging him to make the president understand the severity of the situation, not just for Poland, but also for the United States: ‘The policy appears to be crystallizing to force us and the British to accept all Soviet policies, backed by the strength and prestige of the Red Army … The general attitude seems to be that it is our obligation to help Russia and accept her policies because she has won the war for us. I am convinced that we can divert this trend but only if we materially change our policy toward the Soviet Government … They have misinterpreted our generous attitude toward them as a sign of weakness … Unless we take issue with the present policy there is every indication the Soviet Union will become a world bully.’

Harriman asked permission to come to Washington to brief Roosevelt in person. His request was denied. Meanwhile, the Nazis continued to ravage Warsaw. In September, Stalin finally agreed to aid the Poles, but by then it was too late. One-quarter of the city’s population was dead.

While the Warsaw Uprising fundamentally altered Harriman’s view of the Soviets, it also drove a wedge between the ambassador and the president who had appointed him. Though Harriman and Roosevelt were the patriarchs of two of New York’s elite families, they did not always see eye to eye. In fact, the Harrimans and Roosevelts had clashed long before either FDR or Averell Harriman rose to prominence. In the early 1900s, Averell’s father and FDR’s cousin Teddy Roosevelt developed a fierce political rivalry in New York State, prompting Teddy Roosevelt to launch an antitrust investigation into E. H. Harriman’s way holdings. And though Averell Harriman had joined FDR’s New Deal administration partly out of the sense of civic duty inherited from his liberal-minded father, he was not initially a true believer in its progressive agenda. Formerly a Republican, he had shifted his allegiance to the Democrats in part out of pragmatism. But it required a nudge from his sister, Mary Harriman Rumsey, the founder of the Junior League and Roosevelt’s appointed chairman of the Consumer Advisory Board, for Harriman to join the New Deal. At the time, the newspapers mocked him, dubbing him one of the administration’s ‘tame millionaires’, but he formed an unlikely and genuine friendship with Harry Hopkins, who had risen from his early days as a poor Midwestern social worker to become Roosevelt’s closest adviser. It was Hopkins who had convinced FDR to appoint Harriman as his Lend-Lease envoy in London at the end of 1940.

But the deeper problem between Harriman and Roosevelt had to do with control. Averell Harriman’s fortune outstripped FDR’s by orders of magnitude. With such wealth came both purchasing power and a certain degree of political independence. Unlike the rest of FDR’s inner circle, who depended on the president for position and prestige, Harriman did not need proximity to FDR to gain influence, nor did he rely on government funds. He took no salary as Lend-Lease envoy and paid for much of the Moscow embassy entertainment for the Soviets out of his own pocket. Roosevelt therefore lacked the necessary tools to rein in Harriman, save for one. FDR could control him by granting, or refusing to grant, access. Before the Atlantic Charter meeting with Churchill in 1941, Harriman had to seek the president’s permission to attend multiple times before FDR finally agreed to bring him. FDR similarly refused to dispatch Harriman to represent American interests at the Moscow Conference in 1942, forcing Harriman to appeal to Churchill to send Roosevelt a message requesting Harriman’s presence at the meeting. Churchill did so happily. Eventually, FDR relented.

Though the two were never overtly at odds, relations between Roosevelt and Harriman reached a low point in October 1944 – with Warsaw already reduced to rubble – when Harriman was finally allowed to return to Washington to brief Roosevelt on Eastern Europe. During their first meeting, Harriman quickly found his efforts frustrated. It was nearly impossible to speak with the president alone. Harriman had much experience with FDR’s ever-present coterie, but a new individual now seemed to be his mainstay: Anna was never far from his side. Harriman had no personal grievance with Anna, but her presence did cause complications. Harriman had travelled five thousand miles to brief the president on the desperate situation in Warsaw and to update him on developments in the Pacific. But at their first meeting, he could not fully disclose all information, as he did not know if Anna had clearance to hear classified reports. Then, during another meeting, Anna’s son Johnny wandered in with his Labrador retriever. The president stopped to chat with the boy, so Harriman’s briefing had to wait until Johnny ambled off to the garden.

When Harriman was finally able to describe the alarming developments to Roosevelt in detail, he was sorely disappointed by FDR’s response. ‘The President consistently shows very little interest in Eastern European matters except as they affect sentiment in America,’ Harriman wrote in his minutes, noting that FDR had ‘no conception of the determination of the Russians to settle matters in which they consider that they have a vital interest … on their own terms,’ particularly in Poland. Ten months earlier, when the subject had turned to the beleaguered country at the Tehran Conference, he had callously joked, ‘I don’t care two hoots about Poland … Wake me up when we talk about Germany,’ before pretending to fall asleep. Frankly, he told Harriman in May 1944, he ‘didn’t care whether the countries bordering Russia became communized’, as it had little impact on U.S. public opinion.

But perhaps even more concerning was the fact that FDR remained convinced that Stalin would bend to American will through personal persuasion, just as Harriman had once naively believed. Roosevelt had previously told Churchill, ‘Being brutally frank … I think I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do so.’ After so many failed negotiations during the Warsaw Uprising, Harriman had painfully learned that such confidence in candour and apparent friendship was futile. Harriman would not go so far as to forcefully express his opinions; that would risk alienating Roosevelt. He had seen Gil Winant, the United States ambassador to the United Kingdom, do this as he strenuously advocated for the exiled Polish government living in London. The result, of course, was that Winant found himself iced out of the upcoming conference. Harriman enjoyed his position at the heart of geopolitics and had political aspirations that reached beyond serving as an ambassador in the Roosevelt administration. Still, he returned to Moscow in late November 1944 thoroughly disheartened and dejected. ‘I do not believe that I have convinced the President of the importance of a vigilant firm policy in dealing with the political aspects in various Eastern European countries when the problems arise,’ he concluded in his memorandum.

By the time Averell left Kathy in Yalta as he departed for Malta, his dire outlook had not changed. Though Poland’s postwar borders and governance were to be a major topic of discussion at Yalta, like Churchill, Harriman feared it was already too late. The Americans had failed to truly challenge the Soviets on Poland throughout the latter half of 1944, and now the Red Army controlled Polish territory up to the Oder River, just miles from the German border. Regardless of what the western Allies argued at the conference, it seemed that Soviet designs on Poland were, as Harriman warned the new secretary of state, Edward Stettinius, ‘virtually a fait accompli’. Not even the famous Roosevelt charm could change that.

When Roosevelt returned from his tour of the island at 4.30, Harriman finally learned that his services were required – only it was not the president who required them. As soon as FDR had arrived back at the Quincy, he went straight to a military briefing with his Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Roosevelt who needed Harriman’s help was Anna. FDR had given her seventeen dollars to shop for gifts to bring home to the White House staff, as there would be no souvenirs to buy at Yalta. There were two problems with that. First, seventeen dollars was not nearly enough. Second, the shops would close in less than half an hour. The normally stoical ambassador took pity on Anna. FDR did not want his advice. He had nothing better to do. He might as well help her.

Averell Harriman was one of the wealthiest, most powerful people in the world, an expert across many areas of business and government. But he did happen to know a particular detail about shopping in Malta: the world-renowned Maltese lace was just the gift required. As Averell never carried a wallet, he had already asked a local administrator’s wife to collect some for him. He generously told Anna she could take her pick from his own selection. They could go to the woman’s house and look at it right away. Anna readily agreed, so the ambassador and the president’s daughter went off together to examine piles of lace.

FIVE

February 2–3, 1945

Shortly after 11 p.m., Sarah, Anna, and their fathers arrived at Malta’s RAF Luqa. Official cars were descending on the airport in droves, and the British and American delegates now spilled out of the vehicles onto the tarmac and made their way to their assigned Yorks and C-54 Skymasters, their path illuminated by one lone spotlight in the blackout. ‘The Russians had been told that we were bringing 35 people a piece,’ Sarah had remarked to her mother the day before. ‘The total complement of souls is now 535!’ Some were already based in Russia or had travelled there by ship, but the majority now stood on the airfield. Thousands of pieces of luggage and supplies were being loaded onto the planes: personal bags marked with white labels, hand luggage with buff labels, and cases containing secret documents bearing distinctive yellow labels with black bands. Roosevelt and his party looked on at the bustling activity as their bags were ferried away to their aircraft. Standing near the president was the forty-four-year-old secretary of state, Edward Stettinius, his customary Homburg covering his prematurely white hair, which contrasted starkly with his heavy, dark eyebrows. The president joked to Stettinius that the combined western delegation was so large that it might appear to the Russians to be ‘a minor invasion’.

Sarah Churchill knew what an invasion looked like. She had spent the autumn of 1942 at RAF Medmenham preparing for Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa. As a section officer in the aerial reconnaissance division, Sarah and her fellow intelligence analysts worked around the clock scrutinising pilots’ aerial photographs of German and Italian shipyards, railways, troop movements and factories – vital information that informed Allied naval invasions, ground assaults and bombing strategies. The training was intensely difficult for men and women alike. They had to look at photographs taken from ten thousand feet above ground and discern whether an area of grass had been disturbed by troop movements or grazing animals. They learned to differentiate between types of ships solely by the shadows they cast, and how to layer images to create three dimensions, use complicated slide rules, and compute logarithms.

For Sarah, Operation Torch represented one of the triumphs of her war experience – but not because of the invasion itself. During a weekend leave that November, Sarah had driven to Chequers, the country estate of British prime ministers north of London, on an army motorcycle. When she arrived, she immediately went up to see her father, who was dressing for dinner. While meticulously brushing the two or three hairs that remained on his otherwise bald head, he conspiratorially turned to Sarah and said, ‘At this very moment, sliding stealthily through the Straits of Gibraltar under cover of darkness, go five hundred and forty-two ships, for the landings in North Africa.’

It was rare that Sarah knew any military subject better than Winston, but on this occasion, she did. ‘Two hundred and forty-three,’ she corrected him, unable to help herself.

‘How do you know?’ he shot back.

Sarah had spent the past three months poring over images of the region. She had analysed the locations where the ships would drop anchor and knew exactly how large a fleet would land along the French Moroccan and Algerian coasts.

Impressed, her father demanded to know why she had not told him what she had been working on. Sarah retorted, ‘I believe there is such a thing as security.’ Instead of erupting in a ‘blaze of anger’ at this apparent impertinence, Winston chuckled. Later that night, he proceeded to regale his guests with the story. He also repeated it to Eleanor Roosevelt, who was in England, visiting British women engaged in war work. Amused, she in turn told the tale to the American press.

Several days later, Sarah found herself summoned to the Air Ministry. Officials there accused her of breaching security by divulging the details of a major Allied invasion. ‘Who told Mrs Roosevelt this story?’ they insisted.

Sarah could only reply, ‘My father.’

Her superiors were simultaneously frustrated and amused. There was nothing the Air Ministry could do about it.

This evening, however, there was little room for humour. As Winston and Sarah bid their delegates from the Foreign Office a temporary goodbye as they were shown to their respective aircraft, neither the prime minister nor the foreign secretary yet had any concrete information about the fate of their colleagues and friends whose York had crashed into the Mediterranean Sea. Surely the tragedy cast an air of unease over the flight ahead – one that was, objectively speaking, far more dangerous than the trip from Britain to Malta. The transport planes were unpressurised, so the two delegations would fly to the Crimea at a low altitude – no more than six thousand feet – leaving them exposed to the smattering of Nazi anti-aircraft units that remained on the Aegean Islands. There was also a real risk of Turkish anti-aircraft fire. Still technically neutral, the Turks did not intend to fire at Allied planes, but they had mistakenly shot at a British plane carrying part of the advance team from Malta to the Crimea ahead of the conference; the attack left the tail riddled with shell holes. Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s planes would each travel surrounded by six P-38s for protection, but for the dozen remaining transports, the only safeguard was to fly under the cover of darkness. It was imperative that each aircraft take off at a precisely scheduled moment. Once the planes reached the Crimea, further complications could arise. It was reported that heavy fog was expected to hover over the Saki airfield for most of the day, leaving a narrow window of time for the VIP-laden planes to make a safe landing. Soviet airfields lacked the technological support a pilot needed to land a plane using instruments alone in conditions of poor visibility.

Danger aside, Anna Roosevelt was relieved to be getting underway as she boarded their C-54 – nicknamed the Sacred Cow – the first plane ever custom-made for the president of the United States. She enjoyed being her father’s girl Friday, but he did not make the job easy. She had spent the past eight hours in a frenzy. Her father seemed to assume that Anna could read his mind. After the tour of Malta and the potential souvenir debacle, which Harriman had sorted out for her, FDR had instructed Anna to make arrangements for dinner. He did not tell her whom he wished to invite, nor even how many people would attend, and as he had already left for the military briefing, all she could do was make an educated guess. Then she ‘frantically’ raced around, distributing invitations. Meanwhile, she was fretting about her father’s condition after the strain of the long, exhausting day – with dinner still ahead. After the briefing with the chiefs of staff, she thought FDR would finally be able to take a short break, but Stettinius and Eden slipped into his room for a pre-dinner chin wag when she was not looking. Then an unannounced visitor appeared out of the blue: Randolph Churchill, the prime minister’s son. Churchill decidedly had not asked him along for the conference. Randolph, who was stationed in Yugoslavia, had come to Malta en route to Italy to have some dental work done, which just so happened to coincide with his father’s visit. Having heard that Randolph ‘annoy[ed] his father’, Anna tried to keep him out of the way. She invited Randolph and Sarah for drinks in her cabin while she plotted the most diplomatic way to get rid of him before dinner. After all, Sarah had explicitly been invited, but Randolph had not. (‘We had a visit from Randolph,’ Sarah cryptically reported to Clementine, knowing just how much her brother could frustrate Winston. ‘I will tell you about that in another letter.’) Randolph quickly realised he was getting the brushoff; fortunately he excused himself, without making a scene, for a ‘pressing engagement’ back on the Sirius.

Dinner finally came and went, and just when Anna thought she had a few minutes to quickly throw her things into the appropriate cases and bags before leaving for the airfield, a peeved Harry Hopkins – who had just had a run-in with Anthony Eden – turned up at her room, looking for a drink. Anna begrudgingly opened the case she had finally finished packing and offered him a dram of the scotch she had brought along. But when her back was turned, Hopkins walked off with the bottle. She was not terribly upset to lose the scotch itself. However, the bottle was packed in a special box her husband had carried with him while serving in the Mediterranean; keeping it with her made Anna feel as if some small piece of him was nearby. Hopkins had taken it without a thought.

At 11.30 p.m. the engines of the planes scheduled to leave first roared to life. The noise was thunderous. They took off at ten-minute intervals and soared eastward into the night, blue flames trailing behind them. One by one over the next four hours, the planes disappeared into the dark sky until just two transports and their fighter escorts remained. At 3.30 a.m., the Sacred Cow took flight, followed minutes later by the prime minister’s Skymaster.

Much to the chagrin of Dr Bruenn and the chief of the president’s Secret Service detail, Mike Reilly, Roosevelt refused to use a safety belt while he slept in his bed during the flight. Concerned that the president might roll out and injure himself if the plane braked suddenly on takeoff, Dr Bruenn had crept over to FDR’s berth and lain down along the side. The young doctor thought he had managed to sneak in without Roosevelt’s realising he had an uninvited bunkmate. The doctor was wrong. FDR later told him, with a wink and a smile, ‘It’s lucky I recognized you as you came in.’

At 8.30 a.m. local time, the planes began to break through a low ceiling of clouds, landing at Saki with perfect choreography. Everything around the airfield was carefully staged for their arrival. The Soviets had erected tents brimming with refreshments beside the runway, a resplendent Red Army band stood ready to burst into triumphant martial music, and a long line of black armoured Lend-Lease Packards and Russian-made hearselike ZiS limousines were poised to take the delegates off to Yalta, once they had been feted properly.

Between the planes’ cinematic entrance and the lavish cornucopia the Soviets seemed to conjure out of thin air on the barren steppe, it seemed the delegates had landed on a film set. But as they emerged from their planes, they stepped not into the Technicolor world of Oz, but into Dorothy’s sepia-toned Kansas. Gone were the sun-drenched, rosy limestone buildings and the cerulean waters of Malta. From the concrete tarmac to the snow-covered fields stretching towards the distant, overcast horizon, the land was flat, featureless and colourless. Robert Hopkins, Harry Hopkins’s twenty-two-year-old son and a photographer with the U.S. Army Signal Corps, was travelling with the American delegation as the principal American photographer. He had brought a few precious rolls of colour film, but to use more than one at Saki would have been a waste. The crimson on the three Allied flags, flying from masts along the airfield, presented the only contrast to various tones of grey, which dominated the landscape.

Harriman, Stettinius, Hopkins, Eden and General George Marshall were among the earlier arrivals at ALBATROSS, the code name the Americans irreverently assigned to Saki and its dangerously short runway. The landing strip was just a path of concrete slabs pitted with shell holes, which the Soviets had smoothed as well as they could. The whole thing was covered by a layer of ice. Stettinius remarked that it was like landing on a slippery ‘tile floor’. Miraculously, there had been no mishaps. General Aleksei Antonov of the Red Army had arrived promptly to greet General Marshall. As Marshall stepped off the plane, Antonov invited him to sample the lavish breakfast beneath the tents. Entering the feast-laden pavilion, the humble Pennsylvanian was pleased to find a tumbler full of what looked like fruit juice. Upon closer inspection, Marshall, a teetotaller, discovered that he was wrong. The tumbler was brimming with Crimean brandy. Unflappable as ever, Marshall stepped away from the noxiously sweet digestif. Without a backward glance, he turned to his men and muttered, ‘Let’s get going.’ They departed promptly for Yalta, along with Hopkins, who had become seriously ill during the flight. Stettinius, Eden and Harriman were left to wait in the damp cold for the president and the prime minister. Among them, only Harriman, dressed in a custom-made calf-length leather flight jacket, with fur lining, looked both rakish and at least somewhat prepared for the change in weather. The others had to be content with steaming glasses of sweet Russian tea to stave off the chill seeping through their woollen overcoats.

At ten past noon, the Sacred Cow touched down at Saki and came to a rest on the side of the runway. While FDR readied himself to disembark, Anna hurried off the plane in time to see Churchill’s Skymaster emerge from the clouds. The crowd gathered as the prime minister’s plane taxied to a halt. Soon the door of the fuselage opened and Churchill emerged, dressed in a military greatcoat and an officer’s cap, with a mischievous smile on his face and an eight-inch cigar clenched between his teeth. He gave the assembled crowd a little salute before carefully waddling down the stairs. Sarah followed moments later and joined Anna off to the side. Sarah was once again in uniform and no worse for wear after the overnight flight, while Anna seemed to be getting into the Russian spirit, having changed out of her simple tweed coat into a fur. The Soviet minister of foreign affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, had been waiting for the distinguished visitors and now greeted the prime minister. The puglike Molotov was dressed all in black, from his double-breasted overcoat to his ushanka, a traditional Russian fur cap with the earflaps tied on top, which accentuated what Churchill described as Molotov’s ‘cannon-ball head’. Surely Molotov, who as a young Bolshevik had chosen that moniker, which meant ‘hammer’, would not have appreciated the teasing. Churchill knew that despite the amusing headwear, the Soviet foreign minister was ruthless and calculating, with his penetrating eyes and a ‘smile of Siberian winter’. Shaking hands with Churchill, Molotov explained through his interpreter, the sallow, shrewish Vladimir Pavlov, that Stalin had not yet arrived in the Crimea. In the meantime, Molotov would be representing the general secretary.

Together, Churchill and Molotov stood waiting for Roosevelt to emerge from the Sacred Cow. Normally, FDR was carried down the steps of an aircraft, but the Sacred Cow’s engineers had installed an elevator that lowered him and his wheelchair from the belly of the fuselage to the ground. There, an open Jeep, one of the thousands of American vehicles that Harriman had negotiated to send to the USSR under Lend-Lease, was waiting. The Soviets had thoughtfully retrofitted it, so that the seat put Roosevelt at the same height as those walking alongside him. Everyone, from Churchill and Molotov to the Red Army soldiers, looked on as Mike Reilly hoisted FDR out of his chair and into the Jeep. It was one of those rare moments when Roosevelt, always so protective of his public image, had no choice but to display his physical vulnerability. In that instant, Churchill could not help but pity the man. The illusion of strength faded ever so briefly, revealing Roosevelt, in Churchill’s sentimental mind, as a ‘tragic figure’. The Soviets had covered the seat of Roosevelt’s Jeep with a Kazak carpet, which lent him the appearance of an elderly maharajah as he moved forward, with Churchill and Molotov walking alongside, to review the troops. (Churchill’s doctor, Lord Moran, described the scene less charitably, comparing the president to an elderly Queen Victoria in a phaeton, with the prime minister in the role of a lowly attendant trailing behind.)

As Roosevelt, Churchill and Molotov watched the white-gloved Soviet soldiers in knee-high boots stomping resolutely through the oily puddles, their rifles with fixed bayonets held over their shoulders in precise position, Sarah and Anna took in the scene together. The Red Army band began to play the Soviet national anthem. As she listened to the tune, Anna thought it strangely melancholy. And yet its sad air seemed appropriate in this place. As Sarah observed, they were standing in the midst of ‘a great wide open blank space of nothing covered with snow’. Any buildings that had once stood within view had been destroyed in the war.

While Sarah took in the barren horizon, Anna pulled out her camera. She had brought it to take some keepsake snapshots to share with her husband when she returned. She noticed a group of official Soviet photographers and a film crew standing nearby. Through the viewfinder of her camera, she caught a glimpse of her father, which introduced yet another worry. At home, FDR and the American press had formed a gentleman’s agreement. Newspapers refrained from printing pictures that revealed his wheelchair. Many Americans did not even realise Roosevelt did not have the use of his legs. It was unlikely that the Soviet photographers would be quite so accommodating.

It was not just Roosevelt’s disability that concerned her. Churchill seemed amused by the revlew, while Molotov looked on with a scowl, as if secretly irritated to be standing out in the foul weather for yet another parade. By contrast, Anna’s father appeared only half present, as if pasted into the tableau from a different scene altogether. Anna knew that the long day at Malta, followed by a short night of sleep on the plane, had left him more haggard than usual, but the difference between the prime minister and her father was striking. Though more than seven years younger than Churchill, FDR looked older: his cheekbones were sunken, and the lines around his mouth and jowls appeared weatherworn. He was dressed in his customary Brooks Brothers naval boatcloak, but instead of lending him the air of a dapper yachtsman, the garment seemed to swallow him, making him look more gaunt than he was. Just as Byrnes had noticed on the ship to Malta, he sat with his mouth hanging open for long stretches, sometimes staring off into the distance, his skin waxen. To a sick man, the camera lens could be incredibly unforgiving. But there was nothing Anna could do. The Soviet photographers continued to snap away.

The procession of Packards and ZiS limousines snaking across the Crimean steppe towards Yalta had only begun their journey, but Sarah could already sense they were off to a ‘sticky start’. The rough, slushy roads, pockmarked by winter and war, rattled the passengers’ bones as the convoy crawled along at a mere twenty miles per hour. At this rate, the final eighty miles to Yalta would take almost as long as the fourteen-hundred-mile flight from Malta.

The Crimea had long been a crossroads of conflict and imperialism. Since antiquity, Taurians, Greeks, Persians, Venetians, Genoese and the Tatar Khanate, a Muslim state of the Ottoman Empire, had lorded over the Crimea until, in 1783, the Russians annexed the khanate in the name of Catherine the Great. Each coloniser had left the Crimea with vestiges of its heritage; the local culture presented a mix of Mediterranean, Moorish and Russian influences. Cities such as Sevastopol derived their names from the Greek language, while the Uchan-Su waterfall, on the southern coast, took its name from the Tatar words for ‘flying water’. The natural environment was every bit as diverse. The south, known for its rich greenery, beachfront resorts and subtropical temperatures, resembled southern France, but the Crimea’s likeness to the Mediterranean quickly disappeared as one travelled inland. Behind the beaches, the Crimean mountains rose suddenly like waves thrust skywards from the depths of the Black Sea. North of the mountains, the dramatic peaks gradually gave way to the flatlands of the steppe. In summer, the steppe was like a prairie, filled with flowers and lush grasses, but in winter, a cycle of frosts and thaws left the bleak expanse shrouded in thick fog. The steppe swept less than a hundred miles north to the Kherson Oblast, where a natural border between the Crimea and the Ukrainian heartland was formed by the Sivash, a series of salt-rich lagoons nicknamed the ‘Rotten Sea’, for the putrid odour emanating from their shallow waters. Microalgae turned the Sivash a startling deep red, as if the blood spilled by thousands of soldiers over two centuries of wars fought across the peninsula had collected and pooled in the lagoons. The Crimea was one of Russia’s, and later the Soviet Union’s, most prized lands, but it always stood slightly apart from Mother Russia. The Isthmus of Perekop, a four-mile strip of land between the crimson Sivash and the Black Sea, was all that connected the Crimea to the mainland.

After what felt like ‘an eternity’, Winston grumpily turned to Sarah and asked how long she thought they had been driving.

‘About an hour,’ she replied.

‘Christ,’ he muttered sharply under his breath, ‘five more hours of this.’

Sarah knew it was hardly Averell Harriman’s fault that Yalta had been selected as the conference location, but as they drove along through the barren steppe, she could not help but join the chorus of criticism. ‘Really!’ she thought. ‘Averil [sic] must be mad’ to force Roosevelt to suffer through such a drive. As their car crawled along, Lord Moran, who was driving with Winston and Sarah, noted that the miles and miles of frozen, foggy steppe reminded him of northern England’s haunting moors covered in snow. It was an appropriate comparison. Perhaps recalling Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Sarah scribbled in a letter to her mother that the expanse of countryside looked ‘as bleak as the soul in despair!’

Once, this desolate land had been dotted with cooperative farms. Though neither Sarah nor Anna knew it as they drove south, the destruction the Nazis had wrought in the Crimea masked the brutality the Soviets had already inflicted on their own people there. The charred cooperative farms, which Stalin had organised in response to a grain shortfall in 1928, were vestiges not of agrarian prosperity destroyed by war, but of state-sponsored famine. Between 1928 and 1940, Soviet collectivisation led to the deaths of millions of peasants. Nowhere was the death toll worse than in Ukraine, where the famine disguised another objective – the Holodomor – the Soviets’ genocide of ethnic Ukrainians. And in the depopulated city of Simferopol, the Nazis had given the Soviets the conditions they needed to eliminate another ethnic minority supposedly hostile to the state. The Soviets wanted unobstructed access to the Dardanelles and Turkey, but in their way stood the Crimean Muslim Tatars, with whom the Turks shared religious and ethnic ties. Stalin tasked his ruthless NKVD chief, Lavrentiy Beria, the same man in charge of preparations at Yalta, with their removal. Beria accused the Tatars of collaborating with the Nazis, and over the course of three days in May 1944, he loaded nearly 200,000 Tatars on cattle trains and forcibly deported them to Uzbekistan, where many died in exile.

Now their farms stood abandoned. Nearly all the buildings lay in scorched ruins alongside charred remains of trains, tanks and other instruments of war, as if General Sherman had risen from the dead for an encore march to the sea halfway across the world. The only people the travellers saw as they rolled slowly southwards were Soviet soldiers, many of them women and teenage girls, who stood at attention along the road every several hundred feet. It appeared that an entire infantry division had been pulled off the line to guard the route, though the presence of these careworn soldiers could hardly have been more than ceremonial. Few carried rifles. More striking than their gender or their lack of arms were their faces. The soldiers had been drawn from the many ethnic groups that made up the Soviet Union – Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Chechens and more. Each soldier, bundled in a long, padded coat, was intended to be a nameless copy of the preceding soldier, an identical cog in the wheel of the state. But their faces betrayed individuality.

Not until the convoy reached Simferopol did any signs of daily human life appear, albeit scenes more reminiscent of black-and-white newsreels than humanity in the flesh. Simferopol was once a thriving city under Catherine the Great, but by 1945, describing it as a city was generous. The few buildings that remained standing had no heat or electricity, and the inhabitants barely seemed to belong to the modern world. Their clothes were colourless. ‘Neither gray nor brown – just plain drab,’ Anna observed from the window of the Packard she shared with her father and his Secret Service agent, Mike Reilly. The women’s skirts were voluminous, shapeless sacks, and it had clearly been years since the children had any new clothes. Over that time, they had grown. Their trousers and skirts were all too short, exposing their ankles and shins to the cold. At first, Anna thought they looked surprisingly healthy, considering the circumstances, but upon closer inspection, she saw their faces. She realised that the children, and especially the mothers, looked remarkably old. The women’s skin was deeply wrinkled, and their lower backs were permanently curved from carrying heavy burdens.

After the convoy left Simferopol and began its ascent into the mountains, the Americans briefly pulled to the side of the road to eat the sandwiches they had brought from the Quincy. But the British pressed on. Harriman had assured them that a rest house stood only forty-five minutes away, and they were eager to find it – especially Sarah, who was experiencing one of the uncomfortable realities of being one of only two women present. ‘The rest house,’ Sarah wrote with amusement to her mother, was ‘most necessary for more reasons than resting’. But the forty-five minutes passed, and it did not appear. Stale ham sandwiches and sips of brandy mollified her appetite, but they had been driving for nearly four hours, and the call of nature was growing more urgent with every passing minute. At one point, she desperately considered finding a clump of trees along the side of the road: ‘I scanned the horizon – Cars in front – press photographers behind!! Obviously no future in that!’ she told Clementine. Finally, when Sarah’s ‘hope had nearly died’, they stopped. Mercifully, they had found the house.

Sarah and Winston expected to stop only a few minutes to use the facilities, but their Soviet hosts apparently had other plans. When they finished washing, they were led into a small room. Molotov had beaten them to the rest house and now stood, grinning, beside a table ‘groaning with food and wine’. Like the overwhelmingly indulgent display of food beneath the tents at Saki, here was bounty strikingly incongruous with the dismal montages of subsistence living that the western travellers had observed over the past four hours. Ever the gracious hosts, Molotov, his deputy Andrey Vyshinsky, and the Soviet ambassador to Britain, Fedor Gusev, beckoned for them to sit. The table clearly had been laid for the three Soviet politicians, the prime minister, the president and the daughters to enjoy a sumptuous private luncheon. The Soviets had anticipated their every need. They had even constructed a ramp, covered in rugs, at the front door so Roosevelt could enter in ease and comfort.

But when he arrived a few minutes later, Roosevelt was fixated solely on the fact that several hours of driving still stretched on before them, mostly over dangerous mountain roads. As it was, they would barely reach Yalta before dark. He was exhausted and eager to press on. Observing the appalling destruction from the windows of the Packard had left him in a dark frame of mind. As they drove, he had turned to Anna and said that he wanted ‘to exact an eye for eye from the Germans, even more than ever’.

Anna, however, was desperate to get out of the car, even just for a moment. Facing the same problem as Sarah, she ‘begged’ her father ‘to be allowed to stop’ just for a moment for purposes other than dining. He could hardly deny her. But as she was the one getting out of the car, she would be the one to ‘pave the way with Mr. Molotov with a refusal’ from FDR.

When Anna entered the rest house, she discovered with ‘horror’ the spread of delicacies assembled on the table: ‘vodka, wines, caviar, fish, bread, butter – and heaven what was to follow’. FDR had never cared for lavish Russian delicacies; he had brought his own chefs to the Tehran Conference so he could eat the food he preferred. Harriman had once again arranged with Molotov for FDR to bring his own food, along with his longtime Filipino mess crew, to Yalta, but now it was not simply a matter of culinary preference. Dr Bruenn had placed FDR on a severely restricted diet to reduce his dangerously high blood pressure. Heavy, salty foods like those piled high on the table and copious amounts of alcohol were expressly prohibited. Anna knew that her father’s blood pressure had been extremely high the night before. Even small deviations from his strict diet could put him in grave danger. Even if FDR had wanted to stop for lunch to be polite, he simply could not eat the caviar, cured fish and meats that lay before her.

Anna spent the next few minutes running back and forth between her father in the car and Molotov in the house, trying to decline the invitation to lunch as graciously as possible. She had no Russian vocabulary, so she had to enlist Pavlov, the Soviet interpreter, to help her. Finally, after several awkward minutes, Anna managed to put Molotov off without sparking an international incident. She hopped back into the car, and the Americans continued on to Yalta, leaving Churchill and Sarah to feast with the Soviet foreign minister. ‘That tough old bird,’ as Anna somewhat rudely dubbed Churchill in her diary, ‘accepted with alacrety [sic] – and I left them all to go at it!’

As the Roosevelts drove away into the mountains, Anna saw neither the chagrin nor the dissatisfaction stamped across the Soviets’ faces – nor did she witness how their departure had thrust the British into an awkward position. Like FDR, Churchill had already eaten lunch in his car and wanted to travel over the mountainous roads in daylight, but for both the western leaders to depart without acknowledging the Soviets’ hospitality would have been rude, and deeply embarrassing to Molotov and his party. Trying hard to conceal their lack of appetite, Sarah and Winston dug into the feast. Only then did the look of disappointment fade from the faces of Molotov, Vyshinsky and Gusev.

The lunch was delicious, and the Churchills soon wished they had forgone their ham sandwiches. But they would not quickly forget the Americans’ hasty departure, their tail-lights growing fainter as Roosevelt drove southwest into the setting sun like the hero of an American western. Nor, for that matter, would the Soviets forget. Once, the British and the Americans had moved as a synchronised unit; each party’s words and actions perfectly complemented the other’s. But lately it seemed that a rupture had formed in this show of unity, for which the lunchtime encounter offered further evidence. The Soviets would be only too happy to exploit that rupture in the days ahead.

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