Dinner With Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table Read Online Free PDF Page B

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Jan Christiaan Smuts
    Despite having led a guerrilla campaign against British forces in the second Boer War, Jan Christiaan Smuts (1870–1950) was not only a political champion of South African involvement on the British side in both world wars, but served in the British Army in the First World War and was raised to the rank of British Field Marshal in the Second World War. He was a member of theImperial War Cabinet. A scholar as well as a soldier and friend of Churchill, he was a driving influence in the creation of the League of Nations after the first conflict and the United Nations after the second conflict. He was Prime Minister of South Africa from 1919 to 1924 and from 1939 until 1948, when he lost power to the National Party which campaigned against Smuts’ increasingly liberal attitude to racial segregation, which it replaced with apartheid.
Edward S. Stettinius
    US Secretary of State, 1944–45. One of the architects of the UN, he stepped down as President Truman’s Secretary of State in order to become the first US Ambassador to the UN, but resigned in 1946, unhappy at Truman’s attitude towards the assembly. Died in 1949, aged only 49.
Henry L. Stimson
    US Secretary of State, 1929–33, and Secretary for War, 1911–13 and 1940–45. Already aged 73 when in 1940 Roosevelt asked him to return to the post of Secretary for War which he had last held before the First World War, Stimson was a noted “hawk” in Washington against both the German and Japanese regimes.
Walter Thompson
    Churchill’s bodyguard. He had been Lloyd George’s bodyguard from 1917 to 1920, when he took over Churchill’s security. He retired in 1936 to become a grocer, but returned to be Churchill’s bodyguard throughout the Second World War.
Commander C. R. (Tommy) Thompson
    A Flag Lieutenant at the Admiralty, he was responsible for organising Churchill’s wartime travels both in Britain and overseas,accompanying him throughout and journeying over 40,000 miles in doing so.
Harry S Truman
    US President, 1945–53. A Missouri haberdasher by trade who assumed the highest office on Roosevelt’s death, although widely discounted as greatly inferior in stature and ability to Roosevelt, whom he had served as Vice-President. Despite winning re-election in 1948, he suffered low popularity during his presidency, although subsequent analysis of his handling of foreign affairs, in particular his decision to use nuclear weapons on Japan, contain communism, sanction the Marshall Plan programme to rebuild Western Europe and engage in the Korean War has led to his being adjudged one of the most underrated presidents in American history.
Sumner Welles
    US Under-Secretary of State, 1937–43. Roosevelt described him as “the only man in the State Department who really knew what was going on”. Born into a wealthy and influential New York family, Welles had been a page boy at the wedding of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. The two men had a strong rapport and Welles wielded more personal influence on foreign policy matters with the President than the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull. Hull was among Welles’s political enemies who forced his retirement by threatening to reveal his homosexual importuning. Thereafter, he attempted suicide and retreated into alcoholism and the manipulative care of his manservant, Gustave.
Wendell Willkie
    Unsuccessful Republican contender in the 1940 presidential election. Initially a Democrat, Willkie had come to prominencecampaigning against aspects of Roosevelt’s New Deal and was the surprise “outsider” choice on the Republicans’ 1940 ticket. Despite some tactical backflips during the election campaign, he was mostly a vocal supporter of sending aid to Britain, in contrast to some isolationists in his party. After his defeat, he divided his party by backing Roosevelt’s lend lease policy and was sent by the President as a personal wartime emissary to Britain, the Soviet Union and China. Having failed to be