257. Churchill, FDR, & Mind Games at Yalta (Ep 2)

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0:29Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Durrumpur. Can I just ask you a question? You can ask any questions as long as it's not inappropriate. No, we're saving that one for later. I want to know why it is that in the middle of Britain's greatest heat wave, you're wrapped up like a baton truck driver in layers. What is wrong with you? It's hot. I've been up since six o 'clock this morning preparing for this epic broadcast. Oh, yes. And reading with huge pleasure Serhi Plohi's Yalta book, which is sitting beside me. and it's actually quite cold in the Garden of the Six.

1:08I got a bit of a chill. So although it's a heatwave, I've got my Northwest Frontier Khyber Pakdun shawl on. There's a wonderful thing that they do. We are going to get on with this. And actually, you've mentioned the plocky book. Also, can I commend to you, The Daughters of Yalta, Catherine Grace Katz, and also huge plaudits to Diana Preston, who's written Eight Days at Yalta. They're all fantastic, fantastic books. I should remind you, in the last episode, We were doing the kind of Marvel origin stories of Stalin, Koba, bank robber, poet. Difficult to imagine anyone having a more unpredictable background.

1:44I know, right? To be both orthodox seminarian and bank robber. It seems to be two Venn diagrams that have probably never, ever met again or before in history. I was trying to think who else I could think of. And it's only sort of fryer tuck. That's very good. That's very well done. Literally, that's it. But we're going to talk about the other two because this is the meeting. Frank, Stark and Stalin are the same. All top history insights on Empire. Let me tell you, you would not get this on other history podcasts. Kind of laser-like, laser-like discernment. But we're going to talk about the other two of the big three, and that is Roosevelt and Churchill.

2:24So can I start telling you a little bit about Roosevelt, who was otherwise known as the Sphinx because he was so difficult to read. But he was also called, I mean, at school when he was younger, the feather duster, because he was flimsy, let's say. That's what his robust boy school... A bit of a sissy. That's what they called him. And we'll go into that in a bit more detail. But my favourite nickname, because it's just so rude, was Mussolini, who used to call him Of the Anus. Can I explain why? It doesn't work if you just know him as Franklin Roosevelt, but if you add the middle name, it becomes...

2:57Delano. So Delano means, in Italian, Of the Anus. and Mussolini delighted in his middle name and insisted on referring to him as the anus or out of the anus, any possibility. The genitive of anus, of the anus. Of the anus, our genitive. Public school education, everybody, gives himself away every single time. We know our genitives, us puss boys. FDR was born into a wealthy family. So his parents, James and Sarah, were very well off. You know, James was a landowner, he was a businessman. They were like New York old money is what he was brought up in. And this place that he lived in, Hyde Park, because nobody has original names at this time in history.

3:40Everything's named after somewhere in England. He lived on a huge estate, even though it was sort of on the outskirts of New York. And he had, I mean, like literally hundreds of workers worked for land. So this is a man of means. As so many American presidents were and are. But FDR grew up pretty much in the lap of luxury. And he had parents who sort of doted on him. They loved him. He was largely schooled at home and he sort of had this very closeted environment for most of his young life. But then when he's 14, he has to go to school and they send him, it's sort of like a bit like the Prince Charles story.

4:11They send him to a school called Rotten School, which is a little bit like, you know, it's going to make a man of you. And this is a private school where the boys are praised for being rambunctious, for being naughty, for being sporty. I mean, sporty is a really big thing. What school doesn't have boys praised for being sporty and naughty? But for him, you know, he's a bookish boy. He's kind of like narrow-faced, blonde, pale, rather have his head in a book than, you know, in a scrum. He looks a bit like F. Scott Fitzgerald in the pictures. He does. Actually, he does. Yeah, I didn't think that.

4:46And he's got the same sort of suit and the same centre-parting and that slightly sort of Gatsby-ish sort of style to him. Yeah. And he also grows up in the shadow of a family member. So, I mean, you know, the name Roosevelt, often when people just say Roosevelt, they don't mean FDR. They don't mean the man behind the New Deal. They mean Theodore Roosevelt, who we've talked about before in our Philippines episode. And he is related. So, you know, a distant cousin of FDR. They are in the same sort of food group and family. And he grows up in that kind of shadow, you know, the lesser Roosevelt, if you like.

5:21And I don't know whether it is initially out of political conviction, But, you know, he joins the Democrats rather than the Republicans to forge his own way. And he sort of rises through the ranks. As you quite rightly said, there's a certain class of American politico who sort of is carried on the slipstream of Wall Street wealth. Big houses, big dinners, all of that kind of thing. I've just come back from an American book tour where I was giving talks in Dallas in that sort of family. and they had this extraordinary shrine to the Bushes who they had given their money to and supported in the election campaign.

5:58And you have these dynasties of politicians who are supported by these enormous big money folk. So look, FDR is kind of one of those people who's sort of born into one of those born-to-rule families and he becomes a lawyer and he's quite successful and he then gets involved in politics with the Democrats and he's quite a good campaigner. He sort of gets a following in the Democratic Party. but then something terrible happens in August 1921 at the age of 39 and this is you know I know we've sort of gone through his childhood it's pretty dull apart from you know you had a hard time at school but it's at 39 that the real life-changing if you want origin story thing happens he's stricken with an illness while he's on vacation and it ends up with him being paralyzed from the waist down.

6:45He won't be able to use his legs again. People said immediately it was polio is what they thought it was. Well, there was a big polio epidemic in the 1920s. I lost an aunt. My father's sister died of polio in 1947. It was a fact of life, as was typhoid, even these things that thankfully most of us don't ever have to see. I think what's really interesting about his illness is that people called it polio. He was diagnosed with it. But now there are doctors who've had a look at what actually happened to him and they think it might have been something else. And weirdly, the same condition that we said Alexander the Great might have had, you know, when he was sort of a statue, the living statue, this rising paralysis.

7:28And it's called Ghislaine Barry syndrome. So what happened to Roosevelt is, you know, he had a fever. Then he had this ascending paralysis that sort of started in his legs and then went all the way through. had numbness everywhere and it sort of rose, ascended, paralysed him and then subsided but he never got use of his legs back. And people have said, actually, you know what? That diagnosis sounds a lot like Guillain-Barre syndrome, actually. In all the books I've read, people just say polio. Polio, I know, I know. But I've said, and it's not widely, it's sort of, I've seen, you know me in medical documents, Dr.

8:00Quack is in the house. I remember this other, this unexpected side of you. Those that haven't followed previous episodes, Anita's father was a doctor. He was a doctor. And she used to entertain herself as a child by reading medical encyclopedias. I did. So, if ever you have some strange symptoms, just phone Anita and you'll be... Got an interesting rash. I'm your girl. Do you know, actually, I have to say that if my dear departed father was still around, I can actually feel him taking off a flip-flop to throw at me. stop diagnosing people you have no qualifications i should try that anyway so look that's interesting about him it also leads to something which is going to define him and lead to this sphinx-like character he doesn't want people to pity him and he doesn't want people to know and he hates all of the accoutrement that go with you know his paralysis and he will always kind of compensate keep his medical history an enormous secret and more on that later because there's some really strange stuff on that.

9:06I have to say, until I started researching this series, I had no idea because we have all those pictures of him and he's always seated. Because he can't. Yalta, Tehran, all these images. There are also photos, which he did not like, of him in a wheelchair with a blanket over his legs because that is not the image of a man who is president. Anita, what I'd love you to tell me, though, is this complicated marriage of his, which is interesting. Because Eleanor Roosevelt is an extraordinary figure in her own right, isn't she? But by the stage we're talking now, things are not good at the ranch. So she had married FDR 15 years before his paralysis.

9:39So she knew the man before and she was with the man afterwards. And she was a fifth cousin once removed of the Roosevelts. And she is an extraordinary creature. If you look her up now, people know Eleanor Roosevelt really well because she fought the good fight. You know, she fought for women's rights. She fought for civil rights. Your kind of girl? Completely. She joined the Women's Trade Union at a young age and then becomes actively involved in putting it on the table in front of her husband and saying, you know what, workers need rights, women need protection, and this civil rights thing, no more lip service, you're going to have to do something.

10:18And she spoke in public. She was a very, very strong character. But the really interesting thing is their marriage. There's a social secretary that gets in the way, Lucy Mercer. That's it, Lucy Mercer. So there's a lot of revision about this. And you know, who knows what goes on behind a closed door. But there's a biography by a woman called Hazel Rowley. And she says that they have something of, well, she doesn't use the phrase open marriage, but she says they gave each other space to cultivate romantic friendships outside the marriage. I think there was definitely an affair with the social secretary, Lucy Mercer, because correspondence was found by Eleanor.

10:55And after that, there's a period where Lucy is sacked and disappears from life. But again, just in the run up to Yalta, the period we're talking about, by this time, Lucy is married and she is one of the people that sees FDR off to Yalta. So that's FDR's love interest. But Eleanor's love interest is said to be a woman. It's a journalist called Lorena Hickok. Eleanor and her are so sort of friendly. She calls her Hick. She was a lesbian, openly. And Eleanor and her do seem to be sort of, you know, very, very close. And who knows whether it's sexual or not. But Eleanor writes to Hick about their open secret.

11:32And this is just a few months after FDR's inauguration. You think they gossip about us? I'm always so much more optimistic than you are, I suppose, because I care so little about what they say. And Laura Hickok preserved almost all of the three and a half thousand letters that she and Eleanor wrote to each other. So that is love. I don't know if it's sex, but it is certainly love. This impacts on our story about Yalta because it means that Eleanor Roosevelt does not come to Yalta. And instead, FDR brings his daughter, Anna, who he has a very good relationship with. And it's Anna Roosevelt who's going to be appearing in this episode.

12:13And we'll talk about her because another extraordinary, extraordinary woman. OK, why don't you take us away with Churchill? Because we've done Roosevelt. I live between India and Britain, and I can't think of any other character who has left a more varying impression, depending on which side of those two countries you're in. In India, of course, Churchill is looked upon as the worst of all the British imperialists, as the man responsible for the Bengal famine. And there's a widespread belief in India that Churchill was a racist who was responsible for the death of six million Bengalis. In Britain, he is our most revered historical character.

12:50And in polls of great British figures from history, Churchill quite often comes top. And in a sense, both sides of Churchill are true. He is the figure whose speeches during the First World War rallied the nation and led to the British pulling together to help defeat Nazism. But equally, his writings on Indians and India, and incidentally, Palestinians, are so racialist by our standards today that they are completely beyond the pale. So both these characters are contained in this man. He comes from money as well, old money. More than money, he comes from one of the kind of grandest families in Britain.

13:29And he's born in Blenheim Palace, outside Oxford. If you go there today, there's a whole sort of Churchill wing of Churchill memorabilia and a whole exhibition about his life. His distant ancestor was the Duke of Marlborough, who won the Battle of Blenheim. And Blenheim Palace is built as a thank you from the nation for him. And so Churchill is born into one of the grandest palaces in the country. And he has beauty and glamour too. I mean, his mother is an American heiress, Jenny Jerome, daughter of a New York stockbroker. So she comes from her own wealth and class, basically sort of New York royalty.

14:07And at some point, there is actually a common ancestor between FDR and Churchill. There's a Spencer ancestor who they both share in distant mists of time. So he's actually a distant cousin of FDR, which is extraordinary that these two figures negotiating the future of the world are disordered. Everything's connected. Not that it brings them any particular closeness. They're also very, very different at school. So, you know, Churchill, like FDR, is sent to a school that's meant to sort of toughen him up, and he actually ends up being tougher than the school. So he's a right Haraway at school, boarding schools in Ascot and Brighton before going to Harrow.

14:43And the reports about him just describe a willful, rebellious, pain in the arse of a child. who does not look kindly on discipline at all. There's one report that has him, it's sort of like that scene in Dead Poets Society where they jump up on the desks and things. And in that sort of very sort of understated way, this is not the way we expect our young men to behave. But he's a character right from the start, right from the get-go. He goes to Sandhurst, which is the officer training corps here in Britain. Where my father went. Your father went. And he gains his commission. He goes and joins the fourth Hussars in February 1895.

15:24And this is the thing that will make him because his adventures, I mean, he's a man with an appetite, a young man with an appetite for adventure. He goes off first to Cuba, where he gets into all sorts of adventures, and then to the northwest frontier. And I have wandered around the hills of Swat, looking at some of the forts that he attacked in my 20s. 20s. When you drive up from Peshawar into the Swat Valley, there are a whole chain of forts today called Churchill's Picket. And I remember climbing up a hill 20 years ago, looking at this place where famously Churchill ostentatiously rode a gray pony along the top of the hill in full view of the Pashtun enemy.

16:11Foolish, perhaps, he told his mother, but I play for high stakes and given an audience, there is no act too daring and too noble. So that sort of sense of playing to the audience is something that is very much with him. And he writes this book called The Story of the Malachan Field Force that becomes, I think, his first publication. And then he goes to the Boer War, where he is captured and escapes from the camp where he's being captured. And again, to talk about my American hosts, in that Shrine to Churchill in Dallas, where I was last week, they have the gun that he was given when he had to get across, is it 1 ,000 miles or 200 miles of occupied enemy territory from his prison camp to get to British lines.

16:56And at some point, he comes across a man who's not sure whether he's a friend or a foe. And the character sees this lone boy. And although I think he's a boar, he takes pity on this lone escape prisoner and gives him his revolver. Wow. And that's the revolver you've seen. And that revolver I saw last week in Dallas, of all places. I mean, it has to be said, not many of us were sympathetic to him because they put a bounty on his head. There's a 25 pound bounty on his head, wanted dead or alive, just like in a Western. And he is becoming a creature of daring do. He also starts writing for newspapers.

17:28He becomes a war correspondent. And he writes very well. I mean, he's a compelling writer, even then. So the journey from that to being a politician, once you've got that name recognition, is not so hard. But he does find it hard to get elected. He first gets elected in 1900, shortly before the death of Queen Victoria. He takes his seat in the House of Commons as a Conservative for Oldham in the north of England. And in 1901, he makes his maiden speech. But, but, but he then crosses the floor. Which makes him deeply unpopular for a long period of time. Hated, absolutely hated. But he goes and he does this very ostentatious, I'm crossing the floor, I'm going to sit with David Lloyd George.

18:12Who was regarded as a sort of class enemy by the Conservative because he'd introduced death duties. It was a very ingenious way of Lloyd George to undermine the aristocracy because because it meant that every time one of them died, that the estates would be divided, 50 % would have to go to the government. And so in a generation, many of the greater estates get wiped out. And for Churchill, born in Blenheim Palace, to sit beside Lloyd George was the equivalent of, I don't know, Boris Johnson sitting beside Jeremy Corbyn. Yeah, it was a big deal. Do you know, talking about Lloyd George, it's just suddenly, I remember there was a poem or kind of one of these dog roll verses that they used to scream at Lloyd George.

18:46They hated him, the Conservatives. Lloyd George, no doubt when his life runs out, will ride on a golden chariot, seated in state on a red-hot plate. To it's Satan and Judas Iscariot. Iscariot. Judas Iscariot. That's it. Yeah, yeah. It's funny the things that lodge in your head. I think that's from school. He's a liberal, but he's also, when he's sitting with the liberals, an enemy of the suffragettes. Because the suffragettes hate him with a passion because he's not very sympathetic towards the cause of women's votes. He comes into your Sophia Bible. He's very prominent in Sophia because he's Home Secretary at the time of the bloody march that takes place, Black Friday march on Parliament.

19:25As Orban would call himself a very liberal liberal. Indeed. And so what happens is there is one suffragette who attacks him at a train station and he's only saved by his Homburg hat. She brings a riding cop crashing down on his head and it's his hat that saves him. But he does have rather a nasty welt on his head. Teresa Garnett was her name. So Temple Mead Station as well in Bristol, in case you're interested. But then he married... Is there a plaque to Churchill getting horse whipped? Anyone who knows anything about suffragette history knows that is a big chapter. But his marriage to Clemmie, tell us about Clemmie, because Clemmie is such a central, big part of his life.

20:05And then we'll take a break and actually get you to Yalta. Now, I think you've been acquainted with, but let's talk a little bit about Clemmie and him. Perhaps improbably for a man that was quite a difficult man, Churchill has a fantastically good marriage to Clementine. They meet in 1904, love at first sight. The marriage lasts 56 years, five children together. And she's a blue blood. She's an aristocrat to her bone marrow as well. But also importantly, comes from money. Doesn't necessarily at this period go with being an aristocrat. They're a fantastic double act. Churchill, despite being this sort of bulldog with the cigar, has, like all of us, his weaknesses and his insecurities.

20:43Clemmie is there by his side when he has wobbly moments, as he does surprisingly often. The black dog moments. And he has depression, of course. She's there right to the end. So we have now gone through the backstories of these three extraordinary and utterly different characters. The two very rich men from extremely privileged backgrounds who are distant cousins lined up against a man who was the son of a cobbler who had been an orthodox seminarian. Yeah, gone to God, left God. So it's not an obvious party, this one. They're not obviously going to get on. And the way you'd imagine it to be is that Roosevelt and Churchill will be on the same side with everything and And Stalin will be on a different side.

21:32That's what you'd imagine. That's what you'd imagine. But it doesn't actually turn out to be quite as simple as that. Join us after the break and find out how they get on. The Insolvenz-Altrag is set up. And suddenly everything is in a tempo. For our protagonist, the hardest phase begins. In episode 4 of our series Endstation Insolvenz we show why openness is the most important thing. Why a insurance is not a opponent. And how a company is stabilized or organized. In the podcast channel, good stories from credit reform. Everywhere, where there are podcasts.

22:29there. Roosevelt hates the idea. It's a long way away from America. And Churchill has the best line ever, he calls it. He says, it's the Riviera of Hades. If we had spent 10 years in research, we couldn't have found a worse place. That's it. Isn't that great? So, none too enthusiastic. They wanted to meet in Cyprus or somewhere sunny with good Mediterranean fare. Mediterranean, Ops. Somewhere, anywhere like that. But Stalin is adamant it's got to be Yalta. And there is a reason for that because Yalta, as we kind of touched on in the first episode, has been brutalized by the war. It's in his backyard.

23:09He wants them to see. He wants them to also know this is a place that they took back from the Nazis. So there's a lot of symbolism in choosing Yalta for Stalin. What though is not immediately apparent, as we'll see when Roosevelt and Churchill land, They come to this devastated Riviera that looks like, you know, can accept can if a bomb had gone off in the middle of everything. And when Roosevelt and Churchill see this, they are appalled at the level of devastation. But what they don't know is that the Nazis are only responsible for about three quarters of it, that a quarter of the devastation is Stalin's own secret police and under Beria, who we'll meet at the conference, who's astonishingly ruthless and violent.

23:53And Ray P, awful beast of a man. And Ray P, head of the NKVD. But they, prior to the conference, have gone around, A, weeding out any potential enemies of the state because they don't want anyone who's even remotely hostile to Stalin to be in the same region as him when he comes to the conference. But we've also had this sort of mass deportation. So the indigenous people of the Crimea, who are the Crimean Tatars, 200 ,000 of them have been deported by the Soviets in the run-up to this conference. It's one of the great deportations and war crimes of history. And so a lot of the stuff, the devastation and the empty villages and the destroyed houses that Churchill and Roosevelt see and imagine must be the Nazis.

24:38I mean, many of the devastations are Nazi devastations, but some of them are due to Burry and the NKVD just getting rid of the local people who had been accused of supporting the Nazis during the occupation. And being complicit in the occupation. I'm just going to very quickly though recap before we get to Yarta because although we're concentrating on Yarta, it's not the first time that the big three have met and sometimes the big two meet behind the third's back. So, you know, in Casablanca, Roosevelt and Churchill met without Stalin. In Moscow in 1940, this is all in 1943, in 1943 in Moscow, there is a meeting of foreign ministers.

25:15They're talking, But Tehran is a really big one, which is in December 1943, that the big three come face to face for the very first time. In the British embassy. Now, I have a little story. Not for me. I don't normally go on rabbit holes away from the main summit. No, especially when we've been told by the producer to stay on target. In the words of Star Wars, stay on target. But go on, tell us. But if you look at pictures of the big three in the Tehran conference, if you look at their feet, there is a tortoise. and the tortoise was present in the photograph because he was a kind of mascot of the British Embassy in Tehran.

25:50And I met the same tortoise in my visit to the British Embassy in Tehran in 1986. You met the same tortoise? The tortoise is there forever. How do you know it's the same tortoise? Because it was introduced to me very formally as the tortoise. How do you do? How do you do? I'm the tortoise from Tehran in the photograph. Nice to meet you. I've read all your books. And he was still going strong. Not very fast, but he was going strong in 1986 when I was there. That is an extraordinary. Was he a Dalrymple? I mean, I just want to round off this story with the usual. Was he just a relative? He was very friendly to Dalrymples.