by Cita Stelzer
Churchill was looking forward to meeting Truman. They had exchanged many important cables and spoken on the phone since Truman had become President but had not met in person. After their first working meeting in Potsdam, Truman noted in his private diary that Churchill “is a most charming and clever person”. Perhaps unaware of Churchill’s deep admiration for the United States, he added that Churchill “gave me a lot of hooey about how great my country is. I am sure we can get along if he doesn’t try to give me too much soft soap”.19 In his memoirs, Truman, knowing that he was writing for publication, recorded, less controversially,: “I had an instant liking for this man who had done so much for his own country and for the Allied cause.”20
Truman and Stalin reflected their perceptions of the declining importance of Britain and its Prime Minister by meeting without him on the day before the formal meeting opened. On the morning of 17 July, Stalin showed up unexpectedly at Truman’s villa, with Molotov in tow. It was the first encounter of the American and Soviet leaders. Protocol was abandoned as they sat down to get acquainted. As time passed, a Truman aide slipped into the room and asked if the President wanted to ask his new friends to stay for lunch. The President asked what was on the menu. “Liver and bacon” was the reply. The President told the aide: “If liver and bacon is good enough for us, it’s good enough for them.”21 Stalin at first said he could not stay but was persuaded to do so. After Stalin admired the wines served, Truman sent him “twelve bottles of Niersteiner (1937 vintage) wine, twelve bottles of Port wine and six bottles of Moselle wine as a gift”.22 After lunch, when Stalin and Molotov had left, the President took a nap.
That afternoon Churchill, too, had a busy lunch. This one with Truman’s Secretary for War, Henry Stimson, who told him that the Americans had successfully detonated an atomic bomb.
The following day, 18 July, Churchill invited Truman to lunch in his villa, before the next plenary session, due to start late in the afternoon. Churchill proudly noted the President called this lunch “the most enjoyable luncheon he had [had]for many years.”23 From the Prime Minister’s point of view, it was also among the more useful: he had an opportunity to discuss with the President the implications of the successful detonation of the atomic bomb.
Attesting to the difficult nature of the issues confronting the leaders is the fact that many of the agenda items were the same as those with which they had wrestled at the Teheran and Yalta conferences: reparations; the borders and divisions of Germany; the future governance of Poland; the continuing war in the Far East; and the structure of a long-anticipated institution to preserve world peace.
There were official banquets at which each of the Big Three were hosts, as well as smaller working staff dinners every night (also breakfasts, lunches and teas). It was in these settings that Churchill hoped that not only he, but also his military and political staffs, would establish the tripartite personal relations that would carry through to broad agreements on the agenda items, and to post-war cooperation. At Truman’s official dinner on 20 July, the President again served those wines that Stalin had praised, along with a well-known claret, Mouton d’Armailhacq, and a Pommery champagne 1934.
The celery, lettuce, tomatoes and ice cream were flown into Babelsberg from the USS Augusta berthed at Antwerp. Other courses, presumably provided locally were pate de foie gras, caviar on toast, vodka, cream of tomato soup, perch sauté meuniere, filet mignon with mushroom gravy, shoestring potatoes, lettuce and tomato salad, French dressing, Roca cheese, vanilla ice-cream, chocolate sauce, demi-tasse …24
Truman, who loved classical music and played the piano very competently, and as often as possible, asked Stalin to name his favourite composer. Stalin replied, “Chopin” – a Polish freedom-loving émigré who spent most of his adult life in France, and a composer who probably would have been Gulag-bound, or worse, if he had lived in Stalin’s time. The President therefore arranged that a classically-trained piano-playing US Army sergeant, Eugene List, would begin the musical entertainment with one of his personal favourites, the Chopin Waltz in A Minor (Opus 42).25
Sixteen years later, during the festivities for President Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961, President Truman was a guest at the White House and Eugene List played Truman’s favourite Chopin waltz again.26
Stalin so enjoyed the performance that he shook the sergeant’s hand warmly afterwards. Cadogan joked with Molotov that they should hire Sergeant List to play while they discussed the Polish Question.27 Churchill was less impressed: his taste ran more to the gaiety of Gilbert and Sullivan, and music hall ditties, hummable tunes and martial airs. It would be interesting to know the reaction of Molotov, who it is said, played the violin well enough to busk in the early days before he rose to power with Stalin.28
Not to be outdone, Stalin, for his own banquet the following evening, 21 July, rushed in four musicians from Moscow, including two female violinists whom Truman describes as “rather fat,”29 and, in a letter home to his wife Bess, “a dirty-faced quartet”.30 Churchill undoubtedly would have preferred conversation, but it was not to be. President Truman told the Prime Minister he would be leaving the dinner as soon as “our host indicates the entertainment is over”.31 As did Churchill who once quipped: “I stay until the pub closes.”
Not long after Churchill returned to his villa that night, a directive went out for entertainers for the dinner party he planned to give: “He ordered up the whole of the Royal Air Force Band – the String Orchestra”.32 Organising an emergency flight from London was no easy matter for those in charge of logistics, but the Prime Minister was determined to have his dinner party go well. Besides, he had, for some reason, decided to add a ham course to the proposed menu so that, too, had to come by air from London.
The seating plan and programme for Churchill’s banquet on 23 July were important enough to him to be pasted into the Churchill family albums – now called the Broadwater Collections – with the following note, in bold capitals, to his then-secretary Elizabeth Layton:
THIS IS THE CARD OF THE “BIG THREE” DINNER
AT POTSDAM 23-7-45 AND MUST BE
CAREFULLY PRESERVED IN MR. CHURCHILL’S
SCRAP BOOK PLEASE
Churchill first had to decide how many guests he could invite. So important did he consider the physical comfort of a dinner to be that he ran a test: he had some of his staff sit around the table and pretend to be Stalin or Truman – to make certain the elbow room was adequate.33 He calculated that he could fit only 28 at a table that had been hastily constructed by the sappers, so he was required to recall several invitations, including one to the Solicitor General, Sir Walter Monckton. Comfort and space, Churchill felt, would ease the flow of conversation. Churchill himself arranged the seating.
On the morning of 23 July, the Prime Minister began to fret about the dinner plans. Moran tells us that Churchill felt “that he has discharged his duty as host if he provides good plain fare and gives his guests plenty of elbow room to get at it”.34 But for whatever reason, the Prime Minister that morning upset the pineapple juice on the table by his bed. He gruffly ordered his valet, Sawyers, out of the room even though the clean-up was not finished. Some of his tension might have come from his anticipation of the upcoming dinner, which he regarded as the most important of the conference. His tension might also have been caused by three additional facts. First, he worried about how and when to tell Stalin of the successful testing of the new atomic weapon. Second, by this stage in the conference, Churchill was aware of the earlier attempts by Stalin and Roosevelt – continued at this conference by Truman – to marginalise him. His dinner was, in a sense, an attempt to regain standing and control of events. Third, the dinners that preceded his had gone reasonably well, setting a standard Churchill felt he had to match or, better still, exceed.
The assembling diners, sipping either the 1937 Krug or the alternative offering of amontillado, must have been surprised to hear the string orchestra of the Royal Air Force strike up Freire’s Mexi
can Serenade, “Ay-ay-ay”. Truman later recalled: “I liked to listen to him [Churchill] talk. But he wasn’t very fond of music – at least my kind of music”,35 which was the classical music the President had played a few nights earlier at his own dinner.
Churchill’s dinner, Potsdam Menu, music, wines, seating chart
Churchill’s decision to match his conference partners’ musical offerings was more out of necessity and not to be seen as a spoilsport, than from any love for dinner-time musical entertainment, which Churchill believed interfered with the main purpose of the dinner – conversation. The leaders were there to cement relationships, not to listen in silence to after-dinner music, at least in Churchill’s view.
He had very carefully placed the Generalissimo to his left and the President to his right because Stalin, at the opening session, had proposed, with a shrewd eye for flattery, that the American President serve as presiding officer at the conference.
Whereas the principal foreign advisers sat beside their leaders at the plenary sessions at the Cecilienhof, at the dinner Churchill placed Eden, Molotov and Byrnes opposite their chiefs so that they could be brought into the conversation whenever the Big Three chose, or excluded from it when they thought best. In order to have Stalin on one side and Truman on the other, Churchill had to deviate from his usual practice of keeping his interpreter next to him: Major Birse was placed one seat away, on Stalin’s left, with Pavlov across from Birse.
The printed menu – like many of his contemporaries, Churchill referred to menus as “bills of fare” – offered the diners, to start, a choice between a cold clear soup and hot turtle soup (a comforting reminder to Churchill of earlier days), neither being the detested cream soup. The soup course was accompanied by a 1937 Hallgartener Riesling. The Riesling carried on through the next course – fried sole.
On the front of the dinner card and on the menu itself is a repeat of the form used at Yalta, with both Downing Street and Potsdam addresses. This address was used because the villa was considered to be the Prime Minister’s official residence while in Potsdam, and the Prime Ministerial cypher meant that the dinner was official government business. Memories differ as to where Churchill’s dinner actually was held: at his private villa, at the Cecilienhof, or elsewhere. To add to the confusion, there is another menu for this dinner that is headed Schloss Cecilienhof. Perhaps the staff ate in the Cecilienhof dining room, which was larger, sharing the same menu. Admiral Cunningham recalled later that the official dinner was at the Prime Minister’s house at Babelsberg,36 as does the German-language guidebook to the Cecilienhof.
Whatever the location, what is certain is that Churchill served “the good plain fare” that Moran tells us the Prime Minister felt it a host’s responsibility to provide, including roast chicken, boiled new potatoes and peas (new peas were one of his favourites). But the quality of the claret was not up to the usual Churchillian standards. The 1940 Saint-Julien vines “suffered wartime neglect”, earning the wine only two stars of a possible five, according to wine expert Michael Broadbent.37
Churchill’s selection of the final course before the dessert – cold ham and lettuce salad – was an afterthought that had been flown in from England at the last moment, perhaps to liven up the dull menu.38 The dessert consisted of fruit salad and ice-cream (another Churchill favourite). By the time this was served, the orchestra was playing the tuneful Holberg Suite by Edvard Grieg, a move up the quality scale from Mexican music, and undoubtedly more pleasing to the presidential ear.
The dinner ended with the sappers, drafted as waiters, bringing in Scotch woodcock, a Victorian/Edwardian savoury served hot at the end of the meal. It consists of scrambled eggs, cayenne pepper, and Gentleman’s Relish on buttered toast, with anchovies crossed over the top. A traditional British food of the sort upon which Churchill had been raised. The reactions of the Prime Minister’s foreign guests to this offering are not recorded. It was accompanied by Stokes port, Prunier Brandy (an elegant brandy produced since the 1700s), Cointreau and Benedictine – and the inevitable cigars.
This straightforward, uncomplicated meal was a useful bridge over the tensions, stresses and ever-widening differences that had appeared at the meetings throughout the day. The sound of clinking glasses, toasts (brief speeches, really) in both languages, their interpretations and a seating arrangement – the Big Three side by side – that facilitated easy conversation, including frequent changing of places with the President at one point briefly sitting opposite Churchill, all combined to create an atmosphere very different from the formal plenary sessions. Churchill became increasingly jovial, and attentive to Stalin, whom, as at Teheran, he called “Stalin the Great”, in recognition of the fact that the Generalissimo’s power was far greater than that of the Russian Tsar, Peter the Great. Stalin, no stranger to flattery but too shrewd and wary to be affected by it, was all business. The wines and food notwithstanding, he turned the conversation to the coming showdown with Japan, and the Soviet Union’s possible role.
That was not the only serious business transacted at the dinner. Truman, by pre-agreement with Churchill, wisely mentioned, almost casually, to Stalin that the West had a new and more powerful weapon. Stalin did not let on that he had known all along about the existence of the bomb from German-born, British-educated Klaus Fuchs, who operated in Britain, and worked on the Manhattan Project.
After dinner, to Churchill’s surprise, Stalin “got up from his seat with the bill-of-fare card in his hand and went around the table collecting the signatures of many of those who were present. “I never thought to see him as an autograph-hunter!”, Churchill later wrote.39 Churchill complained that, if everyone did as Stalin had done, he would have to sign 28 menus, and sent Sawyers (ever-present in rooms when Churchill might need him) around with Churchill’s own menu card. Lord Moran wrote of how “all these hardened, sophisticated, wandering men” joined in the milling about, borrowing pens, exchanging information and signing each other’s menu cards, adding to the general relaxed conviviality.40 So successful had Churchill been at cracking the formal ice of the daytime sessions that the usually dour Stalin became, in Moran’s words, “smiling and almost amiable”.41
After formal toasts had been offered, Churchill filled what he describes as one “small-sized claret glass with brandy” for himself and another for Stalin. “We both drained our glasses at a stroke” and, as Churchill recalled, “gazed approvingly at one another”.42 Unfortunately for Churchill, neither the brandy nor the mutual approving gazes kept Stalin from pursuing his post-war agenda. Having shown himself a collector of autographs, Stalin became, in the words of one historian, “a collector of territories” as well.43
Churchill’s warning not to treat his post-election return to Potsdam as a certainty proved prescient. So that he could be in London for the election results, delayed for three weeks after polling day by the need to receive and count the votes of overseas troops, he left Potsdam on 25 July, only two days after playing host to the American President and the Soviet Premier at his grand dinner. The confident forecasts he had received of a renewed mandate to govern proved to be wishful thinking. The Labour Party received an overwhelming majority; its leader, Clement Attlee, was the new Prime Minister; and Churchill, who did retain his parliamentary seat, was reduced to a new role as Leader of the Opposition. It was Attlee, initially attending the conference as Leader of the Opposition, who returned to Potsdam as Prime Minister to continue the meetings with Truman and Stalin.
July 1945 was thus an important turning point in Churchill’s career. Despite regaining the premiership in 1951, Churchill would never again lead with the vigour and effectiveness that characterised his wartime leadership. By the time he returned to Downing Street in 1951, just short of 77 years old, age and ill health had had their inevitable effects, Britain’s role and influence in world affairs was diminished, and President Eisenhower and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, proved less susceptible to the Prime Minister’s charm and persuasive
powers.
Would the course of events have been different at Potsdam had the purposefully convivial Churchill not been replaced, mid-meeting, by the more monosyllabic Clement Attlee? That is unlikely. Churchill’s charm, his eloquence, his farsighted view of the future shape of world events – foreseeing the totalitarian horrors a tyrant like Stalin would impose on those lands his armies had overrun, and the Cold War Churchill would describe only six months later in his “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri – were in the end no match for what today we call “facts on the ground”. In 1945 those facts overwhelmingly favoured the Soviet dictator.
Notes
1. Churchill, The Second World War, Triumph and Tragedy, Volume VI, p. 578
2. Beschloss, The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1941-1945, p. 239
3. Truman, Harry, Memoirs: Year of Decisions, Volume 1, p. 337
4. Truman, p. 381
5. Bohlen, Charles, p. 226. Bohlen was quartered with President Truman in the President’s villa.
6. Churchill, Volume VI, p. 545
7. Truman, Memoirs, Vol.1, p. 342