WWII Historian: The 3 Women Who Changed The Course of WWII - Catherine Grace Katz

0:00The conference concludes with this banquet that Stalin has thrown in the palace that he's using for the conference, which was once the home of the man who engineered the murder of Rasputin during the time of the Tsar Nicholas. And so there's a lot of symbolism, a lot of heavy atmosphere here. So Stalin does, during the rounds and rounds of toasting that the Soviets like to do, he raises a glass to the three daughters, recognizing their contributions and their place, a very important place with their fathers. And you kind of see this moment where Stalin, he reveals in a way a little bit of humanity.

0:29He is the father himself. He has a daughter about their age. But also he recognizes that it will play well with the fathers to recognize the daughters and their contributions. But I don't think it's entirely a wholly political decision. I do think that for each of us, we all have someone in our lives who's vitally important to us and that we can't get along without in moments of self-doubt, trial, tribulation. And rarely does this person leave a paper trail. But we know it when we see it and we know we can't get along without them. I'm sure you can think of someone for you. I can think of someone for me.

0:59And so Stalin is in a way kind of recognizing this role, which I think is very important. and in diplomacy, someone like this, if they do their job well, you never hear from them. It's only when things go wrong that their names come up. So it really is this very fitting tribute at the end of the conference. But they really are this unique role of kind of daughter and diplomat where they're able to go places and have conversations that someone in a more official capacity from the State Department or the Foreign Office might not be able to have, but they speak with the weight of their fathers behind them.

1:27And they're also able to be honest and frank with these figures who very few people can be honest and frank with. And I think that that's a really unique role. And just kind of understanding family remains, even for some of these giants of history, in the most important geopolitical moments, that's still there. That's still part of them, just like it would be for us. Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining us today is Catherine Grace Katz. She's a historian and an award-winning author. The title of the book is Daughters of Yalta, the Churchills, Roosevelt's, and Harriman's, a story of love and war.

2:05I mean, what an incredible story. And this is such great backers. I've read so much about Yalta, but I have never seen Yalta from this perspective. Some people do write about it on the periphery a little bit. I think Michael Dobbs did in his book, but you really talk about how important these women were to their dads and to the process of peace and diplomacy. You do a brilliant job doing that. So just an incredible book. But before we get there, tell us a little bit about yourself. And I believe we did meet at the Harvard Law School, you and I, a few years back, right? We did, yes. We met during my third year at Harvard Law, which was so much fun to hear you speak there.

2:47And it was actually, I was very excited to hear you speak because a couple of years earlier during COVID, you had been doing some of those cameos for fundraising during COVID. And my sister had actually ordered a cameo for our mom from you. Oh, is that right? Yes. And so Anthony Spirabuti. Was it a well-received bathroom? Was it okay? It was a little received that my family said I had to go and hear you speak when you were at Harvard Law, and you were nice enough to make another little video with me there, which was great fun, and we've all greatly enjoyed it and listened to your podcast. So thank you very much.

3:21Thank you for that. And those cameos go to the Brain Tumor Foundation, which I've been a board member of. So it's a fun little thing to do for the charity. Absolutely. I've said happy birthday and congratulations to a lot of different people. I offer career advice. I mean, you have no way I'm offering relationship advice. I mean, it's sort of fun. All right, but let's talk about relationships. It's a good segue because the daughters of Yalta, I want to know why you wrote the book, first of all. What was it about this point of history, why you wrote the book? And then I want to talk to you about the insights from the book.

3:58But why? Why write about this? What triggered you? Absolutely. So it was kind of a series of fortuitous coincidences that led to writing this book. I had been a history major at Harvard as an undergrad. Winston Churchill had been a part of my thesis in some way. He was then, again, a small part of my dissertation when I did my master's at Cambridge after that. And then like so many other recent graduates, I found myself working as a financial analyst in New York City. Quickly discovered I didn't love it as much as I had hoped I would. But by fortuitous coincidence, there was a bookstore in the lobby of my office called Chartwell Booksellers, which is named after Winston Churchill's country home.

4:37And the store specializes in books by and about Winston Churchill. and when I just, you know, couldn't, you know, just needed a break from the XL modeling, I'd go down to the lobby, say I was getting a coffee, really I'd be sneaking into the bookstore to have a chat with the owner and through the owner I was introduced to a group called the International Churchill Society, which is a group of folks, both scholars and academics, members of the Churchill family and others of various walks of life who want to encourage people to study the example of Winston Churchill as really a preeminent example of public leadership.

5:09And so I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to then go and hear Madeleine Albright speak at one of the events that they were hosting. And while I was there, I met a few of the Churchill family members, and they were about to open Sarah Churchill's papers to outside researchers for the first time, and they asked if I would be interested in writing a small article about them. And I said, yes, just thinking it'd be a fun way to stay engaged with history and do a little bit of writing. And I just remember shortly after that, walking home from the office one Saturday and talking to my mom about this opportunity.

5:42And she said, you never know, this could take you in a totally different direction than you ever expected. And I said, I'm pretty sure I'm just gonna be writing an article that only a handful of people will read, but thanks. And sure enough, moms always know best. So here we are today. And the rest is history. But I think the reason that the story of Sarah Churchill and her father, and then Kathleen Harriman, Anna Roosevelt, and their fathers really stood out to me is because it is very easy to forget that someone like Churchill or Roosevelt is a real person. We put them on a pedestal. They become more than human.

6:17But at the end of the day, they're also part of someone's family. And bringing out that human side of history, especially the grand narratives of geopolitics, we don't know what it's like to negotiate across the table from Stalin in our own lives. But we all know what it's like to be someone's child. Many people know what it's like to be someone's parent. And so seeing a fundamental moment on the precipice between World War and Cold War from this different perspective, I think, can help people understand the lessons that history has to offer if it is presented in a way that is really more about the character and the person and the narrative.

6:50You know, I'm shaking my head because you mentioned the human component and people also forget, Catherine, that Churchill, yes, he was human, but so was Adolf Hitler. And believe it or not, so was Joseph Stalin, right? Now, they are different, perhaps different types of humans than we would like to associate with, but there they are. They have to associate with Joseph Stalin. Churchill excoriates Stalin before the war when the non-aggression pact is broken, Hitler and Stalin. Churchill is flying back and forth to Moscow, currying favor. So tell us about reality, political reality, and these allies who didn't trust each other.

7:33And again, we're going to talk about Roosevelt a little bit and how he made fun of Churchill at Yalta to try to get Uncle Joe on his side, et cetera. I mean, you just write so beautifully about this, but give us the dynamic and give us the personalities of those three men. And then we'll talk about the women, Anna, Sarah, and Kathy. Well, we've reached a really interesting inflection point in the war at this point, where it's the spring of 1945. The Battle of the Bulge has just ended. That really looks like the last stand for the Nazis. Now the race is on to see which of the allied armies are going to be the first to liberate Berlin.

8:06So allies are now suddenly in competition. And with the end of the war brings some really pressing questions that the three leaders will have to hammer out in person together, such as what to do about Germany, future Poland, will the Soviet Union join the fight against Japan, things like that. And so at this point, though, Stalin recognizes that he holds more cards than do his allies. They need more concessions from him than he needs from them. They want to ensure that Poland has free elections. This is very important to Churchill. FDR wants to save American lives by not having 200 ,000 American soldiers die in basically a solo invasion of the Japanese home islands.

8:45And so Stalin says, OK, I'll meet with you, but you have to come to me. And so Churchill and FDR agree. They make a harrowing journey out to Yalta, the kind of dangerous trip that no one would have a principal, the president or prime minister to make today. And at this point, the balance amongst them has really changed. while Stalin is holding more of the cards. FDR also recognizes that the British Empire has basically mortgaged the empire to be able to stave off the Nazis while they waited for the rest of the world to join them. And so in the post-war world, you're going to have a situation where Britain is not the power that it used to be.

9:21It's now the American century, and they're looking to, you know, the other kind of counterbalance to them is not going to be Britain, but it's going to be the Soviet Union. And FDR is consciously deciding that he needs to prioritize his relationship with Stalin over Churchill, which is incredibly hurtful to Churchill, especially when we think of the legacy of the special relationship that was so much of the personal bond between the two of them throughout the majority of the war. It's phenomenal history because, again, it's human beings and it's, I mean, there's just so much here. Stalin needs our help.

9:54He needs Len lease. He's a little scared. He's leaving Moscow to his DACA because he thinks the Nazis have broken through the defense line into Moscow, kills everybody that finds out that he's done this. He's a murderous thug, but he's incredibly smart and incredibly well read. And he does not trust either of those guys at all. And they have an interesting relationship, Because when Churchill first meets Roosevelt, he waves him off. He meets him in 1921 when he's the assistant Navy secretary. He just waves him off. And now Churchill's got to be quite obsequious with FDR to try to conjole him for help in the war.

10:40So this is a lot of improbable things happening. Tell us about how these women helped to lubricate the situation, helped to add diplomacy and grace and the subtlety. as you describe as being feminine, frankly, and being human. How do they help this process? They have a very unique role as daughter diplomats. However, though they each have this shared role, they are coming at it from slightly different backgrounds, perspectives, strengths. And just a note, so the three daughters are Sarah Churchill, Winston's daughter, Anna Roosevelt, FDR's daughter, and Kathleen Harriman, who is the daughter of April Harriman, the U.S.

11:20ambassador to the Soviet Union. Stalin does not bring his daughter Svetlana. She is, he and she are having a difficult moment in the relationship as she's recently married. He doesn't like her new husband, but he wouldn't have allowed her to interact with Westerhers regardless. Sarah Churchill is really the first one who makes kind of the breakthrough into this role of daughter diplomat. Early in the war, the Churchill family had decided that when Winston traveled abroad, they'd want someone from the family to go with him as the protector and confidant. Typically, he turned to his wife, Clementine, who was really, you know, his partner throughout his entire political career.

11:56But she's afraid of flying, doesn't want to travel. And so Sarah gets the nod initially to attend the Tehran conference where they're setting the plans for D-Day. She is an actress, which means that she's by trade. That's her profession before she joined the women's branch of the Royal Air Force. And so this kind of actress mentality and training really suits her very well for diplomacy, where there's a lot that's left unsaid, kind of the doublespeak, the performing in front of the partners that you need to court. she is a member of the British Armed Services so she understands implicitly the military imperatives she's a beautiful writer and so Winston knows he will want to write his wartime memoirs later and he will look to Sarah and her letters from the time to recreate those moments that he knows will be historically vital but then more than anything she just really understands her father in a way that few people do really aside from her mother and a lot of this is fostered through hours that she'd spend with him in the garden outside their home where he would be engaged in one of his favorite pastimes, which was bricklaying.

13:00And she'd be out there in the garden with him, handing in bricks, mixing the cement. And she came to understand him and the way that his mind worked. She would say that she could walk in silent step with him, where even if he wasn't speaking, she understood what he was thinking. And so this level of having someone that you can trust implicitly, even amongst your allies, this is a deeper level of being able to say exactly what you need to say to coordinate your thoughts to put your best presentation forward and get all the frustration out that you have with your allies. And so Sarah really plays this role for him.

13:33Kathy Harriman has been at her father's side in a different way, starting first while she was a 24-year-old war reporter during the Blitz, while her father was the Lend-Lease envoy in London. They became very close with the Churchill family, especially Pamela Churchill, the prime minister's daughter-in-law, who becomes Kathy's best friend, but she's also having an affair with Averill. Kathy stays with him as he goes out to become the ambassador of the Soviet Union. She learns to speak Russian, and she really becomes his assistant ambassador in many ways. She's up late with him over games of Buzik, discussing these intense meetings with Molotov, the foreign minister, and she becomes the American woman who has more access to and experience with Stalin in his inner circle than any other American woman in history.

14:18Anna Roosevelt has a complicated but also very straightforward role, and that is she's literally there to keep her father alive. He is dying of congestive heart failure. She is the only one who knows other than the doctor, and so she is doing whatever she can to protect him and make sure he survives Delta. And, you know, he's still smoking. He's still drinking. He's, I mean, these are fascinating people, right? He's got a high blood pressure. He's like, pass me the cigarette FDR, right? And he can't exercise because he's crippled and he's in the wheelchair. He likes to swim. Likes to swim. Of course, I stood over.

14:55I did one press conference in the White House in my failed time in the Trump administration. And I stood over the swimming pool. That's where Brady Press Room is. And actually, if you go down under the clapper boards, you can go into the swimming pool the tile is still there and they ask people that work in the press room uh to sign on a sharpie your name on the tile so you see a lot of the uh former press secretaries i i signed it on the first day after my press conference and that's the uh very famous pool that both roosevelt and john kennedy swam in uh before richard nixon covered it but but back to your book you have a huge fan and a woman by the name of sonia pernell do you know who that is yes so yeah okay so i was i think i i received your letter to me at the chalk history festival and i was there with sonia who wrote a great book about pamela churchill harriman or whatever we want to call her at this point and we were talking about your book and we were talking about that relationship because you said that the uh i think it was kathy do i have it right?

16:09Yes, I think it was Kathy Harriman had insight into Stalin, but Pam Churchill, because of her relationship with Harriman, had insight into the State Department and the FDR. She said to me about you that she wrote a book about Churchill's wife. She wrote a book about Pamela Clementine Churchill. And she said to me about you, you really understood the dynamics, the diplomatic dynamics but those women were passing information back and forth to their principles were they not absolutely and you have this really so how did that impact everything well you have this really interesting mix where it's kind of the personal and the political are all intertwined in some very cozy bedfellows where it kind of seems like everyone except winston churchill himself is having an affair amongst all these people who are at yalta um you've got sarah churchill who's having an affair with the american ambassador to britain Gil Weinant.

17:04Churchill's daughter-in-law, Pamela, is having an affair with Averill Harriman, who is the ambassador of the Soviet Union. She also has some pretty cozy relations with Peter Portal, who's the head of the Royal Air Force. He writes her a 30-page handwritten letter during Yalta to tell her all about what's going on, and then hand delivers it to her for a chance to see her. And that letter, fortunately, never read through the censor. Not to interrupt you, Catherine, but is there something about war which makes people want to have a lot of sex? Or what do think it is? You know, I, having not lived through a war myself, I can only speculate that there's a, you know, that sense of living for the moment before not knowing there's a tomorrow.

17:38Could be it, but I interrupt you, go back to your tale. So they're all, all this information is converging, right? Absolutely. And so you have, you know, a lot of kind of looking the other way, pretending you don't know what's going on, but also understanding that these relationships that some of these women have with some very senior individuals kind of in the allied camps are going to be huge insights into the mindset of the allies. So for Churchill, he doesn't explicitly ever address his daughter or daughter-in-law's relationships, but it's very important to him that he has his back channel into kind of what can't be said officially diplomatically, but can very much be back channeled through these unofficial kind of quasi-official unofficial means, often through these personal special relationships that are going on.

18:29My takeaway from this is the subtlety of history, meaning you and I read it. It looks like a Hollywood script now. The good guys won, the bad guys lost. But then you and I both know that the bad guys actually won the East, right? Because Stalin took over parts of the East. We allowed for the Iron Curtain to descend on those people because we were fatigued with war. But on at least the side of the West, we look victorious. We come out of it prosperous. But it didn't necessarily have to happen that way, right? So what happened at Yalta that were certain pivots that allowed for these outcomes to go in the direction that they ultimately did?

19:12There are certainly moments at Yalta, but I think a lot of the framework for what comes after Yalta is set before they arrive at the conference. And a lot of this is just by the sheer fact that the Soviets have boots on the ground across Eastern Europe, across Poland. They are determined to have friendly neighbors on their borders. Poland and Ukraine have been the pathways of invasion across the flatlands since the days of the Napoleonic War. So there's a centuries old Russian and Soviet mindset of needing to have protection on that exposed flank. So Stalin is going to do whatever it takes to make sure that he has security on his border.

19:48And the Americans are very much looking at this and saying, OK, you know, realistically, there's no appetite to push them out. But where are we going to look to areas of collaboration going forward? And Roosevelt's really thinking about his own legacy. And he wants to succeed where Woodrow Wilson failed at the end of World War One and create this blasting organization of the United Nations, an organization dedicated to peace. And he wants Stalin's buy-in to make sure that this is going to be a success, you know, not preventing war eternally, but at least peace in Europe for 50 years. And by large margin, he succeeded.

20:19You know, we can have discussions now about whether the UN needs some adjustments, whether it's kind of outlived its original purpose, you know. But we have this really optimistic moment that we're going to now avoid these regional squabbles. We're going to have this commitment around the United Nations and we're going to resolve these these issues that once led to war diplomatically in a friendly manner altogether. And so I think that's really one of the bright spots that comes out of Yalta. However, there is not it's not entirely rosy. Poland quickly falls behind the Iron Curtain, despite Stalin guaranteeing that, oh, we're going to have free elections here.

20:55Not to worry. This is something that Churchill feels that Roosevelt doesn't understand of how imperative it is for Stalin. Stalin to have Poland very much under his control. But for Roosevelt, this is just so secondary to the superseding issue of saving American lives in the Pacific and creating this United Nations organization. There are some that believe that due to the illness of Roosevelt, that he caved into Stalin's demands at Yalta. Is that the correct view of this history or how would you look at this history? I think Roosevelt's illness at Yalta made him less able to navigate and strenuously advocate for certain issues that are a little bit more on the margins, such as things like, you know, standing up for individuals who don't want to be repatriated back to the Soviet Union.

21:44This is a huge issue that leads to tragedy. Many people die who eventually got repatriated. However, on kind of the core issues of kind of where lines are going to be drawn, who's going to be in power over what territory, Roosevelt has a mindset that is formed pretty far in advance of Yalta. And to his credit, his kind of touchy feely style of personal politicking, really the ultimate politician, especially in the domestic sphere, he believes in the powers of personal persuasion. This has suited him incredibly well domestically in his relationship with Churchill, but it really doesn't work when it comes to the relationship with Stalin.

22:25And there is a great letter from George Kennan that I found while I was researching this, where the Secretary of State, Edwards de Teneus, writes to the American embassy in Moscow. And George Kennan responds about kind of, can we find some information about the backgrounds of these Soviets that we're meeting with? And he says, unfortunately, I can't give you the information you require. Anything that I have is not accurate. The accurate information only comes out in their obituaries once these guys are no longer of use to anyone. And don't be persuaded that invitations to dinner or rounds of golf mean that you're making a breakthrough.

23:00Even if they like you and they respect you, which I do think Stalin did with FDR, it's not going to change their pursuit of what they believe is their national interest. The Soviets bureaucrats' views are entirely manufactured for him. Personal opinions don't matter at all. And I think FDR gets this completely wrong. And that's not just because he was sick. This is very much, you know, he doesn't understand that his brain is culture. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. He was in the personal charm business, so he totally got that wrong. He's calling him Uncle Joe, the guy who doesn't like to be called Uncle Joe.

23:32You know, I mean, you know, Marshall made a mistake with FDR. He wanted to be called General Marshall. And Admiral Leahy always said, man, that was a really bad decision with somebody like FDR, you know. Exactly. So he wanted to call him. He likes the chumminess. He was an informal guy. He liked that sort of chumminess. You know, he's just an incredible leader, FDR. But okay, so we're at the point where I want to talk about Anna, if you don't mind, because I feel like she is under a lot of pressure. He's sick. You mentioned the doctor knows he's sick. She's acting, as you write about, as like a gatekeeper.

24:12And she's trying to figure out who's important for her father to see and who isn't. And she recognizes that there is moments of intellectual laxity on Roosevelt's behalf that he's losing some of his mental acuity. And so she's trying to figure out what times in the day to set up these meetings. Tell us a little bit about her and tell us about the love that she had for her dad. Anna really idolizes her father and thinks back to the rosy days of her childhood and her relationship with him, where he really was the hands-on loving parent much more than Eleanor was, where he'd be out playing in the yard with his children, sledding, riding horses, sailing, what have you.

24:51And all of this changes dramatically when he's diagnosed with polio. Suddenly, this warm relationship she remembers is pulled away. He's surrounded by all these political colleagues. The door is constantly shut in her face. And so she's just been desperate from the time she was a little girl to be important to him again and to feel valued by him and just to be recognized. And during the war, her husband went to fight in the Mediterranean in the army. She decides to move home, home, of course, being the White House. And having not seen her father in a while, she recognizes that he's not well and insists that he had medical examinations, which reveal he's dying of congestive heart failure.

25:29Eleanor can't really bring herself to see this. And FTR himself never once asks what's wrong with him. You can understand he's trying to win the war. He doesn't want to stop and think about his own mortality. So it falls to Anna to become this gatekeeper, make sure he eats right, doesn't work too hard, takes papers out of his inbox she thinks that other people can handle. But she doesn't have this lifetime of experience being around him in kind of the political world as an adult in the way that some of the Churchill children did and Kathy Harriman had had with her father since the beginning of the war.