Juliet Nicolson

Diplomatic daughters go behind the scenes at Yalta

Sarah Churchill, Kathy Harriman and Anna Roosevelt were horrified by what they saw on their trip to the Crimea, says Catherine Grace Katz

Sarah Churchill with the Big Three at the Tehran Conference in 1943. She would be Winston’s all-round protector, supporter and confidante at Yalta two years later. Credit: Alamy

From Downing Street to Pennsylvania Avenue, history’s powerful inter-family influencers, whether spouses or children, have long operated behind weighty political front doors. With an unerring eye for the revealing detail, Catherine Grace Katz has uncovered a fascinating generational back-story to the Yalta summit of February 1945.

The three varyingly spirited daughters of Churchill, Roosevelt and Averell Harriman who accompanied their world-leading fathers to the freezing bleakness of the Crimea to thrash out terms for ending the second world war all played their crucial role. As Churchill and his second daughter Sarah crossed the Crimean steppe to the sulphurous muddy peninsula in the Black Sea they drove through countryside where ‘nearly all the buildings lay in scorched ruins’. Stalin’s devastating regime was unmissable.

Roosevelt had travelled the 6,000 miles with his only daughter Anna, still disguising from onlookers his dependency, as a long-term polio victim, on a wheelchair. Harriman, America’s glamorous, wealthy ambassador to Russia, arrived from Moscow with his youngest daughter Kathy to join the Russian leader Joseph Stalin, a man whom they had once ‘jocularly referred to as Uncle Joe’.

Beria fixes Anna Roosevelt with his ‘thick lips and bulging eyes’, making his intentions unequivocal

Each head of state came with his own tactical priority. Stalin had his eye on Soviet expansion into Poland; Roosevelt was troubled by Japan and wanted Russia’s support in the Pacific, while the protection of Europe from Russian dominance was top of Churchill’s agenda. With their fly-on-the-wall observations of the tensions and behaviour of other delegates, the daughters provided practical and emotional support to the fathers which became personally and politically indispensable.

Sarah Churchill a former actress and Waaf officer was Winston’s ‘all-round protector, supporter and confidante’. Kathy Harriman was a first-class ski champion, former journalist, fluent Russian speaker and the apple of her father’s eye.

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