Historian: The Untold Story of WWII's Most Fascinating Person - Geoffrey Roberts

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1:23That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. The nature of Stalin's power, which wasn't just about he was a dictator, he was brutal, he had all his coercive power at his disposal, he had people shot and stuff like that. His power rested on his personality and on his charm and the social capital, which he parlayed into politics. You see the charming Stalin in action and you can see the power he exerts. It's very revealing about the nature of the Stalinist system and Stalinist power in that system and where that power lies in it.

1:58And the roots of that power, the source of power, which is tremendous, are actually much more interesting and complex than people might think. Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. And joining us today is Jeffrey Roberts. Jeffrey Roberts is a renowned historian, a brilliant author. He's also a commentator. But a book that is absolutely fascinating to me, which is called Wartime Letters, Kathleen Harriman, who I think is one of the understudied, by the way, historical figures from the Second World War. And you've obviously spent decades studying the Second World War and the Soviet Union, sir.

2:37And we loved your book, Stalin Wars, et cetera. And I didn't really understand Soviet strategy until I met your writing. But what drew you to Kathleen Harriman? As I was saying to you before we started the podcast so i met i met young kathleen harriman through the work of sonia pernell who wrote the book on pamela harriman who was pamela digby churchill uh and their intersection of their lives but this young woman is absolutely fascinating to me and so why don't we why don't we start there why'd you write about her well i i i met um i met kathy for her letters yeah and i'll tell the story in the book because my first trip to the united states september 2001 i was in washington dc working in the library of congress on her father avril harriman's papers in the library of congress and in those papers dispersed throughout those papers in hundreds of different files copies of uh some of some of uh kathy's letters yeah so so that's what that's where i i came came across i can't remember whether or not i discovered her letters before the terror attacks or after the terror attacks but what i do remember is that is that throughout that month i was scurrying around the library of congress the avril harriman papers collecting all of kathy's letters together right making copies of them because i had this idea i decided these letters were so interesting so um so captivating fascinating um that they had to be published they had to be read by by by other people so that was my idea i was going to publish a book of these letters so that's september 2001 okay so i returned to up to ireland um and then it occurred to me with something which hadn't occurred to me in the previous few weeks maybe kathy was still alive because she was born in 1917 which made her early 80s and she was alive so what happens was a few months later in march 2002 i actually traveled to new york and met kathy we had lunch we had a long afternoon uh conversation in which you know i talked to her about the letters and also about her wartime experiences so so i met kathy through her letters then i met her um yeah much much surprisingly way in person now the reason i i traveled to do it was i've talked to her my my kind of goal here i wanted to get get her permission to publish the letters in a book right problem was she refused to give that permission because she didn't want to take any undue credit she was very critical of um people who after the war wrote various memoirs claiming that they've been president of great events with great people the person she had in mind in particular was kay sammersby kay sammersby who was eisenhower's um assistant driver during the war and kay wrote a memoir just after the war in which there were like hints she had an affair with eisenhower well well, Eisenhower was Kathleen Aramond's hero, for sure.

5:50So she said to me, she said, she wrote to me, she swore that she would never do the same thing. So basically, she vetoed publication of her letters by me, right? And that veto held until she died in 2011, right? 2011, she died, okay, which means that it's now possible for me to publish letters. also at the same time i get access to kathleen's private papers and why i discover is that there's many many more letters in her private papers than the ones that were in i'd found in the um the library congress there's a the whole as a kind of rich tapestry of a story which emerges from kathleen's um private papers as well as from the letters themselves so i mean she's a fascinating woman let's go over her a little bit okay she's a championship skier she's a wartime correspondent uh she is a uh i would say an advisor to her dad and also what's fascinating about her because she's young and we're in this very masculine male-dominated world at that time she's not taking that seriously uh which she takes advantage of in terms of her insights and being able to get real information from people.

7:11And also, you know, listen, I also read the book, you may remember this book, The Daughters of Yalta by Catherine Grace Katz, which weaves all of them together. All these young women, Anna Roosevelt, Sarah Churchill, they're all together at Yalta. The number one thing for me is the relationship with her and her dad. a smart woman she know where she knew her dad was having an affair with pamela churchill uh tell us about that whole relationship set the scene for us if you will what kind of world was she living in before i do that i mean you mentioned earlier um pernell's book yes uh about pamela and also you just mentioned katherine gas and i know that you did an interview with jose milton not so long ago right yes all of whom like make use of kathy and her letters as part of their a part of their narratives in those books the thing that's different about my book is that what i want to do i've done in the book i think is to present kathy story in her own words yeah a direct giving you direct access to what kathy was saying in her letters right so you can actually make your make make your own interpretation so so i'm trying i'm trying i'm trying to write out the book as an did that not to impose too much of an interpretive framework on the book yeah yeah interpret it yourself right okay so so kathy kathy has a very interesting wartime journey of course you know at the age of 23 she joins her father avril in london may 1941 obviously this is before the united states enters the war britain is still being bombed um her father's in in london to facilitate the lend-lease program a program to britain so she comes over to be a father's aid basically uh but she's also walking as a journalist as well so she's she's a war reporter while she's in london between 1941 and 1943 and then and then avril is appointed american ambassador to the united states and she goes to the united states and of course in the end russia she has all kinds of interesting encounters inventors including as you mentioned she was a champion ski she actually skied in the moscow ski championships in in 1941 in fact came third in in in the women's event and and uh and she did all kinds of other things while while she was in russia you know she's generally at the most uh the best known american woman in russia apart perhaps from eleanor russell so okay so she has a very fluent russian though right she speaks fluent russian right well i'm not sure she speaks very fluent russian but she certainly learned russian She learned Russian sufficiently to give toast and to have conversations with people, which is more than most people that went to Moscow during the war did.

9:52Now, you asked the question about her father. Yes, that's an interesting question. I'm not sure that I would describe Caffey as Avril's advisor, but he's certainly someone that he talks to all the time. Yeah, they're constantly talking. And what they're talking about is the war and is about politics. So this is the other thing to remember about Catherine, I think you'll appreciate this, Antelique. She's a very political person. She's interested in politics, interested in what's going on, trying to understand the way events are actually developing. So I think Catherine's a very important sounding board as far as everyone's concerned.

10:32But also, what's also true is that a lot of her own views and perceptions are shaped by the conversations that she has with her father, because her father is obviously a very powerful, but actually very powerful influence on that, but not actually overly dominating. You read the letters, yeah, I mean, he's a central figure in the whole correspondence, but he's not completely dominating by any means. She retains her independent self and separation from her father. Thank you for tuning in to Open Book. And if you haven't already, please hit the subscribe button below so that you're the first to know when our new episodes drop each week.

11:10We've got a lot more coming. And now back to the show. One of the things that I got out of it, and maybe this is correct, and if it isn't, please correct me, but I feel like he had this unorthodox style, Avril Harriman, that he drove the State Department crazy. You know, like how much of what we think of as diplomacy in World War II was actually personal relationships and back channel trust the way Avril Harriman was? Yeah. Professor. Yeah, because Avril wasn't a diplomat, or actually he wasn't a politician. He was a businessman. He was also, you know, quite close to Roosevelt. He was one of Roosevelt's special envoys, personal envoys, right?

11:52First in London, then in Moscow. That's the way Roosevelt liked to work, through personal representatives, because he found it to be much more effective in getting what he wanted to be done. So he's often bypassing the State Department. Yeah. So there are some tensions in London between Avril in his role as Rizzo's representative and the American ambassador and the State Department in that context. And then, of course, when he goes to Moscow, okay, now he's the ambassador. He's part of the State Department set up, but he doesn't behave the way of any kind of normal ambassador. He really kind of like shakes up the whole American diplomatic operation in Moscow.

12:32And he does it very effectively. harriman is very very effective representative for the united states in moscow during the war gets hung very well with the soviet leadership um with stalin you know he is enormously effective in practical ways in cementing the soviet american relationship um during the war and kaffee's part of that as well because of course it's not just a question of politics and bureaucracy it's also social psychological personal right yeah there's a whole set of interpersonal dynamics going on within the grand alliance of them at the very top levels right in moscow everywhere in fact during the war and the kind of the cafe avril partnership is very very central to to to the success of those dynamics and the contribution that they make to keeping the grand alliance to together during the world because it wasn't the most like natural alliance in the world was it you know, capitalist America, communist Russia, dictatorship, liberal democracy, and so on.

13:34So she banquets with Stalin. She's playing bridge with Eisenhower. She dines with Churchill at Chequers. Do the letters reveal anything about those men that the official histories miss? She humanizes them. She presents a picture of both Stalin and Churchill, which I don't think he'll find anywhere else. At least I can't find it, yeah? uh yeah so it's very much a human personal and sometimes quite quirky portrait of two so so there's a lot of insight there i mean okay so you said earlier i'm a soviet history specialist okay so so what drew me to what interested me about her letters when i first encountered them in 2001 was the letters that she wrote for moscow yeah and the picture she drew of life in Russia during the war, what's going on in diplomacy in Moscow, right?

14:30And in terms of the interactions at the top of Moscow. That's what interested me. And I learned so much from reading her letters about what was going on in those relationships. It's mainly the humanisation of personal portrait, but there's also lots of kind of like political kind of hints and astute observations that she made which we can inform your view of the total history of this period okay so let's go to let's go to stalin for a second then because you spent your career trying to get this story right about stalin and i think you've done an amazing job of separating the wartime leader from some of the atrocities some of the monstrous nature of him uh and then she comes in with this very personal perspective.

15:20So tell us how that influenced you, because she's really just talking to her family, which is the thing I find most fascinating. You're giving us a window into a young woman talking to her family about people she's meeting. And of course, these are progenous historical figures. So what was something you got from her that changed your view of Stalin or fortified your view of Stalin or did something to you about Stalin absolutely which is she's okay she's writing to her family yeah um also she's writing to Pamela Harriman yeah Pamela Churchill at her time yeah when she goes to Moscow um you know she she write as a separate correspondence with Pamela and Pamela herself writes many many letters to her in Avril while they're in Moscow yeah that's a very good question I said because you actually get a really important and interesting insight about starling from from these letters right which is the nature of to do with the nature of starling's power right which wasn't just about he was a dictator he was brutal he had all his coercive power at his disposal you know he had people shot and stuff like that his power rested on his personality and on his charm right and and on and the social capital which he he parlayed in into politics right so that that's what you've you see that you see the charming style in in action and you can see the power it exists over cafe by the way as well of course and also over avro of all the foreigners who actually come coming to to contact so it's actually to me it's very revealing about the nature of the star in this system and starting to power in that system and where that where that where that power lies and the roots of that power that the source of power which is tremendous are actually much more interesting complex than people might think i think it's fascinating i want to go to you for a second because like me you're from a working class family you grew up in deptford your dad was a laborer at a power station you know my dad was a crane operator and a union guy right and i think it's i think it's shaped and influenced the way i see things so i want you to take us to your background and did it shape how you read the letters of a woman born into one of the wealthiest families in america if not the world right yeah my father was a union man as well uh by the way um a lot of my members of the family were crane drivers i worked in the docks order kind of like classic blue collar um occupations i mean listen i i that was one of my best jobs jeffrey it helped me pay for harvard law school i was a doctor very well paid jobs of course very well there were high hourly wages and i was a doc worker in the summers of 1984 and 1985 which got me through uh got me through school well i had the privilege of having various grants public grants i didn't have to work well i did work well at college obviously but i didn't have to work my way through college yeah that that's that's an interesting question you asked me um i i never felt there was any like class or cultural distance between myself and kathy when i'm engaging with her letters and also when i met her in person in new york in 2002 what struck me about it was the way she and i say this in the book the way she was able to transcend class and cultural barriers right they weren't a kind of an impediment to her engaging with people during the war okay at the very top level also what she called this is her worst top mind the little people as well for all from engaging as as well right so so i never felt like look after she died um marie brenner wrote an article about cafe in vanity fair right which kind of like focused on her kind of like American upper class kind of background and roots and influences and stuff like that which kind of made me think that maybe I'd missed a sort of dimension of my reading of Kathy and her so that kind of like broadened my perspective but I never felt there was any like gap in my understanding of her arising from the fact that we had very radically a different class origin but how did you feel did you did you feel there was any Did you have any problem?

19:47I'm going to answer it very honestly. I would say that as a student, I was probably insecure and self-conscious, and it probably would have influenced me. Today, 40 years after I left college and law school, I would probably be less influenced, and I think I would be similar to the answer that you just gave. You know, the thing that you said that I want to go back to is that she didn't want the letters published. She waited her whole life to make sure that the letters didn't come out, at least until she was gone. how do you think she would think about it today that here we are in 2026 we're still wrestling with the questions she was writing about in 1943 i think she would be intrigued and amused amused by it yeah look if kathy didn't want her letters to be published at all and she indicates to me in our response that she did she did she did after by me after after she died then she could destroyed the letters yeah she could have made it physically impossible to do the fact that she kept all these letters all the different branches of correspondence all the all kinds of huge that's that that that that's a sign that she might feel a bit ambivalent about it but basically she's open to publication right yeah exactly she just didn't want to be a self-agrandizing person but there's a there's a question that i would like you to channel a little bit of her and your knowledge of the soviet union the former soviet union and a little bit of yourself of can great powers with fundamentally different systems ever grow to trust each other long enough to solve a common problem like they did in the second world war of course that's the question that's on everyone's mind at the moment isn't it because of current offense that's that's why that's why i'm asking it jeffrey robert it's certainly it's certainly on my mind well it's on mind it's on mine too sir which is why i'm asking yeah in fact i've actually been writing and thinking about this quite a lot uh recently but but but connected to the book of course what happened during the second wild war was an example of where great powers did collaborate together for a common purpose and very and very very successfully indeed right so so and and that that success that experience what it was all about what it meant at the time in a very personal and human one that's what you find reflected in the letters yeah so it's very interesting from that point of view now of course the whole thing like fell apart quite quickly after that after the second world war and we had the cold war and all this kind of things stuff like that as this story i've been one of those people who's argued actually that wasn't inevitable right that the failure of the grand lives after second one wasn't it wasn't an inevitable ability that that some form of Roosevelt's policy of collaboration and cooperation with the Soviet Union could have continued after the Second World War.

22:45But the political legate, for whatever reason, for their own reasons, decided that they didn't want to do that. So, yeah, so actually, you know, in a way, in publishing the book, maybe I'm going to reveal too much here. There was a kind of ulterior motive here, because I was harking back to the Second World War, that experience. obviously from the for the moment of time i'm thinking and i'll say directly but you can draw your own conclusion about that's what was happening in the past look what's going on now i got that so that's why i asked the question because i got i got that from you and i have an enormous amount of respect for what you've done here okay so we're at the point of the podcast where we're at the point where my producer and i came up with five words from your book i'm gonna read the word I need a one sentence or so reaction to it.

23:32Okay, you ready? Right. If I say the word war to you, what do you say? Violence. Diplomacy. Peace. Friendship. Understanding. How about Churchill?

23:50Churchill. Fascinating. Yeah. Different character. Equally fascinating. But what would you say is Stalin? Fascinating in other words. Well, as you said earlier, I spent decades writing, thinking about Stalin. In all kinds of acts, impressive. It's impressive. And, you know, the book about his library and how he self-trained himself for his life, you know, and the mendacity and the paranoia, my God. yeah yeah but the thing about style is like he's he's an intellectual so that's the crucial point to understand but he's a practical uh intellectual right which is why he got on so well with avril harriman general avril harriman's as the most interesting things to say about starting as a as a war leader about how effective he he he was a warrior these men were incredibly well read and so when they were passing time with each other they they had uh these very deep intellectual discussions you know and yeah yeah he was obviously a monster but you know as we know these are also human beings you know what i mean yeah yeah i've had not starting that avril haram had more to do with stalin than any other foreigner or unless they were communist during the war so very very close very into that relationship a very effective relationship i think from the point of view of grandolites and also from the point of view of furthering the american interests i mean avril's position was not on the ambassador i i'm i'm furthering american interests that's that's what i'm here to do it means we're getting getting my hands dirty um you know making some compromises dealing with difficult issues then that is what i'm going to do that's that's what i do and kathy was there and kathy was there by his side all the way through and she shared those attitudes of her father yeah i'm going to give you the last word and i have two words for you kathleen harriman i mean to me she's she's kathy harriman yeah because that's how i came to know personally she's certainly the most fascinating female figure of the second world world i've ever studied or had any connection with from the get-go i was convinced that my kind of like fascination with her work i'm crossing wasn't just a thing personal to me that that anyone who reads these letters will will will have the same experience yeah as i did which basically you'll be you'll be you'll be you'll be blown away blown away by and i'm kind of glad that you you personally have confirmed that listen i you know i wanted to bring you on for that reason and i think that these women are uh underreported upon in terms of the significance that they've had and i think you've been brilliant in terms of describing her and also laying out the case for her and her insight so i really appreciate you coming on sir the title of the book is wartime letters.

26:48Kathleen Harriman, or as our astute and esteemed author says, Kathy Harriman. Jeffrey Roberts, thank you so much for joining us today on Open Book. Thanks.