Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - Was Stalin Misunderstood? With Giles Milton

Episode Date: January 22, 2025

In this conversation, Anthony talks with Giles Milton about his new book, 'The Stalin Affair: The Impossible Alliance That Won the War.' They explore the complex relationships between key figures during World War II, including Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, and Franklin Roosevelt, as well as the significant role played by Kathy Harriman and her father, W. Averell Harriman. The conversation delves into the unlikely alliances forged during the war, the compelling personalities behind them, and the complex dynamics that ultimately shaped how the conflict unfolded.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe, wherever you get your podcast, and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know. Anyways, let's get to it. My guest today, Giles Milton, wrote an incredible book called The Stalin Affair. It takes us behind the scenes of World War II's Improbable Alliance, uncovering the personalities, power struggles, and political maneuvers that help shape

the outcome of the war. We dive into the letters of Kathy Harriman, Churchill's surprising relationship with Stalin and Roosevelt's knack for swaying the American public. Let's get into it. So joining us now on Open Book is Giles Milton. And this is one of those books where I'm in the bookstore. I find the book. I read the book. I send it to my producer, Giles. And it's a phenomenal book. You're an international bestselling author and historian. And the book's title is called The Stalin affair, the impossible alliance that won the war. And it is unbelievable what happened. Because younger people don't really understand the context, but I'm going to set the scene for

them. And I'd like to talk a little bit about yourself. But for younger people listening in, we had a rise of fascism after a global economic depression. Lots of that fascism ended up in Asia and some of it ended up in Europe. But the two great fascist leaders, one was a communist leader, one was a national socialist leader. They teamed up and they formed a peace treaty with each other. And that's the most bizarre part about it because Stalin was an antagonist of the West. But now he becomes the part of the alliance that actually helps us win the war. And so in Russia, we both know, you and I, that they call that war the great patriotic war because they see themselves at the real victors in that war. And you wrote this amazing book about so many

things that happened that if I didn't read your book, I wouldn't know, happened. this improbability. So let's step back for a moment. Tell us a little about yourself why you decided to write this book and then we'll talk about the premise of the book. Oh, I mean, ever since I was tiny, I've been completely obsessed by the past. You know, as a little boy I used to spend my time in antique shops and junk shops. I loved old coins. I loved old books. And I particularly loved old records and letters are delving into people's private lives and the story behind the scenes. You know, there's people with metal detectors. They go to beaches and they spend hours looking for coins and stuff. And every now and then, they come up with a

silver coin or a gold coin. And I started going into the archives and, you know, you could spend hours in the archives combing through files and finding nothing. And then one day you come across this fantastic document that sheds light, a whole new light on what you think is a familiar subject. And I suppose that was really the starting point for this book, the Stalin affair, was that I learned of a collection of letters written by a young, a glamorous young American socialite. Kathy Harriman, 23 years of age, who wrote hundreds of letters to her sister, and those letters revealed an extraordinary story of what happened to her during the Second World War. Okay, so let's set the scene, because Kathy Harriman is the daughter of Avril Harriman,

and Avril Harriman is a dilettat. He's a playboy. His father is the founder, the descendants of a railroad family. They form an investment bank called Brown Brothers Harriman, but he's an old-school wasp in the United States. He's gone to the right boarding schools, and he is somebody that has the respect of Franklin Roosevelt and the white-angle Saxon establishment. He goes to Europe, first to Great Britain. He ends up having an affair with Pamela Digby, also a.k.a. Pamela Churchill, she marries Winston Churchill's son.

She becomes Averill-Hammerman's last wife at the end of his life, which is a very fascinating book, by the way. We're going to have Sonia Purcell on. I know if you know Sonia. She's a good friend of mine, in fact, yes. Okay, so please, hopefully you'll have a good experience on this podcast and you'll let Sonia know. But I read her book with great enthusiasm as well. And now she's a young girl and she's talking about secrets. She's talking about things that if this got disclosed at the time could have been very damaging. So tell her story, tell her relationship with her dad. She also ends up at Yalta. There's a great book about that, by the way. Another British historian has written a great book about Yalta and these three women, these three young women, that are interacting on behalf of their dads at Yalta. But go ahead. Yeah, so Kathy, as I said, she's 23 years old in 1941. She's she's super bright. She's vivacious. She looks the part, you know. She kind of looks a million dollars. And she's very close to her father. And as you say, President Roosevelt has sent Averillover to really form a very close and special relationship with Winston.

Churchill. And Averill thinks that if he could have Cathy with him, she'd add a touch of glamour to his life there. And so he manages to get her over in the form of a journalist, but also she's going to work as his aid. And for the next really sort of year and a half, two years, Kathy and Averill spend their life with Winston Churchill. They are at the very heart of the war. They are there for every big moment. And so, for instance, Kathy is living at the Prime Minister's country residents of checker when the news of Pearl Harbor breaks. And this is one of the letters she writes to her sister, where she describes in vivid detail what it's like to be with Winston Churchill when this momentous news comes through, news of course, which is going to change the course of the war.

And so what really fascinated me was that, if you like, this is watching the Second World War from behind the curtains. I felt that because you're dealing with these people in the room with Churchill, and of course, later with Stalin, because they're both, father and daughter are going to be sent to Moscow, that you have a unique perspective on the unfolding events of the war. So, I mean, it's unbelievable, right? What you know as a historian, which is what's weird about life is we read it, and it's almost like a Hollywood script for us, so this was the obvious thing that happened. But what you know as a historian, there's so many improbable things that happen to make certain outcomes, right? One is, you know, Lord Halifax

has to say he doesn't want to be prime minister, right? He's the first choice after Neville Chamberlain leaves. Churchill was a controversial figure prior to the war, you know, flamboyant, credible writer, gifted orator, but he's a, you know, he's a drinker. He's got people upset. He likes telling people the truth, right, Giles? He tells people the truth about the Nazis. People don't like, you know that people don't like hearing the truth, right, Giles? And here's one of the big problems that Churchill is going to find himself in a, a personal relationship with Joseph Stalin, who is a man he's detested for his entire political career. He called Stalin's Soviet regime. He described them as a league of failures, the criminals,

the morbid and the deranged. You know, Winston Churchill, when he was Minister of War in Minister of Munitions in 1919, he sent the British army, British troops into Soviet Russia to try and crush this regime in its very earliest days. So now, bizarrely, Churchill, himself in a wartime relationship with Joseph Stalin, and he needs someone who's able to manage this relationship, because, you know, it's a very, very uncomfortable, uncomfortable bedfellows that these two men make. And of course, they're going to be joined by Roosevelt as well as to form the big three relationship that will last throughout the course of the Second World War. So let's go to Mr. Stalin for saying. He's a very complex guy. He's a ruthless murderer. He's a thug.

He rises to take power after Lenin. He takes out Trotsky. He eliminates people. He's literally cutting him out of pictures and shooting people. But he's also a little bit nervous guy. You know, he's got a plane. Every time the Germans are heading towards Moscow, he flies himself to his DACA on the Black Sea.

When his army is repelling the Germans, he flies back and kills all the people that knew that he flew there. He's a nervous power. paranoid guy, right? Different guy, different guy from Churchill. Why don't you set the personalities up for us? You know, Churchill's a little bit more revealing, a little bit more open of a soul, right? Churchill, I'm sure many of your listeners will be familiar. He's from an aristocratic background, an old-style British aristocrat with a fantastic education, classical background. Stalin could not be more different. Stalin is the son of a wife-beating father and drunkard. A Stalin very early on was a

gangster, he robbed banks down in Georgia, where he comes from. But he's also an almost unknown figure, even in the Soviet Union. He never gives radio addresses. He's never seen in public. So very few people know anything about him. And certainly Churchill and the ministers in Britain knew nothing about Stalin other than the fact that he is a brutal monster who's liquidated millions of his own subjects. And so, you know, when Churchill decides he's going to go form a political partnership, a wartime partnership with Stalin against Hitler. This is a pretty hard thing to sell not only to his own ministers, but to the British public. And so what Churchill does on the day, the very day that Hitler invades the Soviet Union, Churchill makes this, I think, politically

brave broadcast to the British nation explaining that, you know, no one has been a more steadfast opponent of Stalin and the Soviets for its entire political career. But, you know, when it comes down to political monsters, Hitler is worse than Stalin, and therefore, we're going to side with Stalin against Hitler. So he gives this groundbreaking broadcast, and this is the beginnings of this famous wartime relationship, which will just about last the course of the war, but there are going to be many, many mountains to climb, there's going to be many disasters, many things are going to go wrong, and the relationship is going to break up almost on a number of occasions, and it's going to be saved by the trio of individuals who sort of form the heart of the narrative in my book.

Well, I will say this about your writing. Your writing is very crisp. It's very eloquent in terms of describing the personalities. But for an American, your voice is even better because I listened to you on the audible version of the book. And I found your voice to be very compelling. And so this is my little broadcast to my viewers and listeners and followers that this book is great, both in its written form.

but it's also great in audio, where I have a tendency sometimes due to my travel schedule to go back and forth between. But there are two guys here that are instrumental in this story, in addition to Churchill and Stalin and Roosevelt. One is Avril Haramon and one is Archibald Clark Kerr. So tell us about those men. And in particular, there's some intrigue around Archibald that I'd like you to share with us. Archibald Clark Kerr was a true eccentric British. Maverick. You've got to really picture diplomats of the period in Great Britain. We're talking about men who wore pinstripe soups, they wore bowler hats, they carried rolled umbrellas, black briefcases,

and they went to Eaton and Oxford, the best schools and universities in the country, and they were always referred to as Your Excellency. Well, Archie would have none of this. He insisted on everyone should call him Archie. He held his meetings in the embassy in Moscow, where he was ambassador in summer months he held it in his deck chair in shorts, bare-chested. He wrote all his memos to the foreign office in London with a quill pen. And this necessitated him having a flock of geese in the British embassy. And every time he needed a quill, a new quill, he'd pluck a feather from this protesting goose, sharpen it off and write these fabulously colourful memos to his colleagues in the foreign office. But the importance of Archie was, A, he was a very old friend of Winston Churchill, who

particularly admired his personal skills, and these came to the fore when Archie was sent to Moscow, finds himself in the Kremlin in a private meeting with Joseph Stalin. And bizarrely, these two men hit it off from the minute they first meet. They both are avaricious pipe smokers, and they bond over tobacco. And from that moment on, Archie Clark Kerr becomes a close confident of Joseph Stalin. And this is going to be an incredibly important. partnership because Archie is the only person that can keep this allied relationship between Churchill and Stalin, always a rocky one, keep it on track. It's fascinating, right?

If he doesn't exist, who knows what could have happened in that relationship? Because remember, Stalin is calling for more troops. He wants more troops on the Western front, right? Yeah. And the Americans are not ready. The Brits are not ready. Roosevelt's not ready. And he keeps him going.

You know, he keeps this, he keeps this relationship going. What about Molotov? Talk about him for a second. You also, he's another intriguing character in your narrative. Yeah, Molotiv is really the only person. But also set to scene, Giles, if you know, my Molotov is the foreign minister. I'm sorry, I should have said that. We've got young people, you know, what I love about my podcast, because I actually

know my demo. We got a lot of young people. They listen because they're like, all right, at least the mooch is going to give me some shit about history, right? That's great. We need young people. We need young people, we're desperate for them. You and I need young people.

So set this scene on Maltov. Tell me who Maltaf is first. So Stalin had a very small circle of advisors, this inner circle of which the most important with Molotov, his foreign commissar. He's like a foreign minister, essentially. And so he's dealing with the outside world. He's the one that's dealing with Winston Churchill, with Roosevelt.

He's the sort of the public face, if you like, of the Soviet system. But frankly, the Soviet system is so Stalin-centric that everything, revolves around Joseph Stalin. And everyone realizes this, and particularly Winston Churchill, realizes that nothing will ever get done unless Joseph Stalin has agreed to it. And so you get this very momentous event

in the summer of 1942, where Winston Churchill takes a decision to fly to Moscow to go and meet Stalin himself. His arch enemy, he's going to see him, and try and forge a personal relationship with him. And it's worth sort of picturing the scenes of that first meeting. You have a British aristocrat

who's detested Stalin, the gangster, all his political life, flying into the Kremlin to meet him. And they meet, and that first meeting is an unmitigated disaster. Stalin throws insults at Winston Churchill. He personally abuses him, and the whole thing ends in absolute disaster.

Churchill storms out of the Kremlin, and he says, I'm having nothing more to do with this man, I'm tearing up the allied relationship. I'm pulling out of this partnership. Stalin could go in alone. The Soviet Union can go in alone. This is the point where Archie Clark Kerr steps into the fore because he realizes Churchill's making a catastrophic mistake. And the rather brilliant thing about Archie is that he knows Churchill's strengths, but he also knows his weaknesses. And he takes him to one side. And everyone else has tried to persuade Churchill to stay in Moscow. Churchill refuses.

But Archie takes him to one side and explains that, you know, Stalin is just a good-for-nothing gangster. He speaks in insulting language. Churchill has to go beyond this. He tells Churchill to go back into the Kremlin for one more time to try and forge a relationship with Joseph Stalin. And Churchill finally agrees to this, goes back into the Kremlin, gets completely drunk with Joseph Stalin. they bond over bottles of whiskey and vodka and God knows what. And Churchill comes back that night to the dacha where he's staying and says to Archie that he's become great friends with Joseph Stalin. And this vital wartime partnership, this is the thing that's going to win the Second

World War for the Allies, this partnership, this partnership in that night is back on track. And so Archie has really saved the vital allied relationship at that point in the war. Okay. sell my business. I want the best tax and investment advice. I want to help my kids and I want to give back to the community. Ooh, then it's the vacation of a lifetime.

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The Germans are well, way more prepared in terms of their military arsenal and their troops and their training than we are. We're frankly caught off guard. We have a couple of miracles happen. We have the miracle at Dunkirk. We have the miracle of Franklin Roosevelt putting down, frankly, the first America first movement, which was a Nazi movement in the United States. There's a couple of big miracles that happened. Some would think, certainly Churchill thought that the Pearl Harbor sneak attack. was a miracle because it brought it brought Roosevelt into the war he was trying to coax him into the war

and you know the the interesting thing about it is uh germany declares war on the united states before we even decided to declare war on germany so we have all this interesting improbable things are happening what makes your book so interesting is the realness of it you know you can hear the conversations you can hear the you can hear the aftermath of decision making both failed decision making and successful decision making. But I want to go to Kathy Harriman before I flip over to something else. She has a charm about her. She seems to have played an important role in navigating these relationships.

Tell us who she is as a person and tell us the value that she provides being part of the story. So Kathy is initially brought over to London by her father to work as a journalist because he thinks she'll be able to get across to the American person. public, the hardships that the British are facing, the appalling bomb marbents of the blitz that are taking place. You know, Churchill is desperate for American aid, not just munitions, weaponry, but food supplies everything. And so that's her first role. But also, she's very good at managing the Churchill, at working alongside Winston Churchill, at getting him on side. And as you said earlier,

you know, within 10 days of her father arriving in England, he's in bed with Pamela Churchill, you which is taking the special relationship to pretty new extremes. But Cathy then Averill, her father, wants her to come with him to Moscow, because I think he's hoping not only can she work as his aid, but some of her charm will work wonders on Stalin and his commissars. And, you know, she's not just a sort of attractive woman adorning the American embassy in Moscow. She's got a real role to play. She learns Russian very quickly and speaks it very well.

She works for the Office of War Information in Moscow. She hosts the American Embassy parties which were never innocent events. These were parties at which she attempts to get Stalin's commissars as drunk as possible and try and get information out of them because what her and her father want to know is what is Stalin's plans for the post-war world. Particularly as the war goes on and moves into its final year, it's clear that the Allies are going to win. They want to know what Stalin.

is planning to do at the end of the Second World War. And so she plays an incredibly important role in information gathering, but also supporting her father in this incredibly important work. It's amazing. It's an amazing story. She's a 23-year-old young woman. You know, she's educated, but she's just 23, and she's in there. Yeah, it's amazing. She's making toasts to Joseph Stalin,

these formal dinners that they have all the time in Russian as well. She goes to the Bolshoi ballet with Stalin. She has to do this within one time. She's watching her vodka glass, you know, and he's not intimidated by her at all. He's trying to charm her. It's classic stuff where we read about these people and we two-dimensionalize them as great protagonist and antagonists in a novel, but they're actually human beings. Okay.

And she provides this softening agent for the relationship, right? He's, he likes her. Yeah, and I think what's so appealing about Kathy's letters and why I I found them so wonderful, is they're so vivid. You've got a very different, a very personal side to the Second World War. You know, we're all used to the familiar stories of the big battles and everything. But to get the picture of what it's like in Churchill's living room, I mentioned Pearl Harbor. She describes a scene of Churchill's been hung over all day because they drank too much on the previous night. He's been sitting there with his head in his hands. They turn on the nine o'clock news on the

BBC and they miss the headlines, so they miss the big story. The news goes on. It comes back to the headlines. And then they're only half listening. And she describes how Churchill says, what was this about? Was it Pearl Harbor? Was it Pearl River? What are they talking about? And he finally realizes that the Americans have been attacked at Pearl Harbor. And having sat all day with his head in his hands, he leaps up from his armchairs and shouts out, we shall declare war on Japan. This great moment for Winston Churchill, America's now in the war. And to have this vivid portrayal of it is something you very rarely read, I think, in history books. Yeah, I look like that. I mean, you put it together, Giles. I mean, it's an awesome book. I want to go to the Roosevelt Churchill, Stalin dynamic. And I want to also relate to our listeners that Roosevelt is in his third presidential term, and he's not well. He has high blood pressure. He's been afflicted, obviously, with either polio or Gillian Barre syndrome, where he's significantly paralyzed. And it's affected. And it's affected.

his physicality, and he's not well, but he's also a big thinker. He's trying to set up the United Nations. He sees himself as this grand figure, and he dishes his good friend Winston Churchill a little bit to endear himself to, quote unquote, Uncle Joe, although when he calls him Uncle Joe, it doesn't go over super well. He guess Stalin doesn't understand the familiarity of it or the translation doesn't go over well. But talk to us a little bit about the threesome. if you will, the dynamic among these three men and the balancing of the relationships there. I mean, it's worth pointing out that these are the three most powerful men in the world, and two of them, Churchill and Roosevelt want to be best buddies with Joseph Stalin,

and to secure that, they will do anything they can to put each other down. And actually, I hadn't realized until I started researching this book, to what extent Roosevelt was prepared to sort of dish the dirt on Churchill and trying to deals behind Churchill's back. He's forever, it's almost like he's ganging up on Churchill as he tries to curry favour with Joseph Stalin. And even Roosevelt's own American aides are quite shocked at how he's prepared

to sort of stab Churchill in the back. You know, one notable aside, he says to Joseph Stalin, he says this question of British India, he's talking about the British Empire in India, he said, I think it would be best if the two of us sorted it out without Winston being present. So it gives some idea of how Roosevelt's trying to do deals behind Churchill's back. But likewise, Churchill, when he gets to meet Stalin, he's trying to put Roosevelt down as well. So we have this idea, I think, that Churchill and Stalin were sort

of best buddies going in to meet with Stalin. But this wasn't the case at all. Now, the big three, that is, Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt only meet twice. They meet. They meet in person at Tehran at the end of 1942, and they will meet at the beginning of 1945 in Yalta. And these are fascinating sort of set-piece occasions. Great pieces of theatre, if you like. All the great, the diplomats are there, the foreign ministers are there, and the aides are there, Averill Harriman's there, Cathy Harriman is there, Archie is there, and all of them are watching the political dynamics of what's taking place, and they're putting these into their private letters and memos. And that's what makes it you realize that this Big Three relationship was

actually completely dysfunctional. It was there because they had one common goal and that was to defeat Adolf Hitler. But I think they all knew that as soon as Hitler had been defeated, there was every likelihood that this relationship was going to fall apart. Even though Roosevelt himself, as you mentioned, wanted to set up the United Nations in the hope that the UN would then be a global policemen and sort of managed the post-war world. Did they, did they underestimate Stalin? You know, he was not educated, but a very well-read guy. He had this amazing library. He was a cunning human being. He was a great negotiator. You know, you write about that as much in the book. Tell us a little bit about that, or am I wrong in suggesting that?

No, you're absolutely right that both in Whitehall and in D.C., I think that Stalin was viewed as some sort of ignorant peasant. And it took Archie and Averill to go to Moscow and meet with Joseph Stalin and realise that they were dealing with an extremely shrewd political operator. Stalin may have had no formally education, but he was unbelievably well read. He was superbly well advised and he knew exactly what was taking place on the battlefront. He knew details of, you know, weaponry of planes of tanks that astonished both Averill and Archley. And it's very interesting. to read their memos back, you know, to their respective political leaders in Washington and Whitehall saying, do not underestimate Joseph Stalin. And if you do, he's going to get the better of you.

And it's when we see the big three leaders together that we get some idea of the naivety, particularly of President Roosevelt. So, for example, you know, the AIDS, Archie and Avril, are extremely worried about what's going to happen to the Baltic states in the aftermath of the war, assuming the Allies win it. And Stalin says, well, the Red Army will probably be in charge of these Baltic states, but what we'll do? We'll hold a plebiscite. We'll ask the people who they want to rule them. And Roosevelt turns to Stalin and says, well, that's a very good idea and supports it. And it takes Archie and Averill to say, you know, that any plebiscite run by Joseph Stalin is quite likely to go the way that Joseph Stalin wants it to go. And so they're constantly urging both Churchill and Roosevelt to be extremely cautious when dealing with Joseph Stalin.

But the reality of the situation, when we look back on it now 80 years later, is that that was an area of the world that was close to his perimeter, close to Russia. And the United States and Great Britain really did not want to have another war after the Second World War. And so they're forced to make a lot of concessions to Joseph Stalin. and he knows this, which is why he presses those cards so hard at Yalta. Yeah, particularly the question of Poland is an interesting one, because remember, Britain had gone to war over Poland when Poland had been invaded by Hitler, and then Stalin comes in and swallows the eastern half of Poland. Britain comes into, this is a beginning of the Second World War for Great Britain.

And Churchill is absolutely determined to have a democratic Poland at the end of the war. And Stalin is absolutely determined to take control of Poland. And here's an example of the mastery of sort of how Stalin was able to put down Churchill, who delivers these wonderfully eloquent monologues and everything. And he delivers his speech at the Yalta Conference and says, you know, for me and for Great Britain, Poland is a question of honour. And Stalin turns to Winston Churchill in front of everyone and says, well, if Poland is a question of honour for Great Britain, it's a question of life and death for the Soviet Union.

This gives a flavour of just how clever. Stalin was at turning people's phrases around and using them to his own advantage. He does it repeatedly. He modifies his language when he's dealing with the Western Allies. He speaks to them in very sort of emoliant terms, which he never uses with his own side. So you get some grasp of the shrewdness of the man, and that he was a supremely confident and able political operative. Listen, I mean, the book is awesome. Okay, so we're at the point in the conversation where my producer and I have picked

out five words from the book. I'm going to say the word, Giles, and then you give me one or two sentences. Okay, you react to what I'm going to say, okay? Okay. You're ready? And it's really just five names, actually, from your book. Usually there's other things, but I'm going to say Winston Churchill. You say what? Winston Churchill forged the Big Three relationship. He did the biggest political U-turn of his life, having hated Stalin and the Soviet system, all his political career, takes a very brave decision to go into partnership with his oldest political enemy. Yeah, no, you'll get the quote better than me, but doesn't he say something to the effect that he would praise the devil himself if he said something in Parliament,

he would praise the devil himself if he said something nasty or against him? That's exactly right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, he's a master of the great quote. I always like the one he says, there's only one. something worse than fighting with allies, and that's fighting without them, which sort of sums up his relationship with throwing. Exactly.

What he says about democracy, right? It's a terrible form of government that you consider the other thing. So he is obviously our most stunning figure from the war, our most interesting. And, of course, he lives to write his memoirs, which obviously you and I have both read and have been fascinated by. Let's go to Roosevelt. Roosevelt, so his big problem, I think, at the beginning of the war, was the strength of the America. First movement. The fact that, well, a Gallup poll says it all, a Gallup poll taken just after

Hitler invaded the Soviet Union showed that two-thirds of all Americans did not want America to support the Soviet Union in its hour of desperate need. So Roosevelt's great skill, I think, was to persuade the American public that this was going to be in their best interests. And the other thing I think I should say about Roosevelt, because we haven't touched upon it, and it's incredibly important, is that Lendlis, the Lendlis aid that poured into the Soviet Union. Millions and millions of tons of raw materials, of tanks, of planes, of metal, of food, of supplies that America supplied to the Soviet Union, which helped Stalin win the war on the Eastern Front.

Yeah. Of course, Stalin says it was your material, but it was our blood, right? It was another great turn of a phrase that he uses. But the interesting thing, and one of your contemporary historians, a gentleman by the name H.W. Brands writes in one of his books about Roosevelt that Roosevelt is on the radio. He's making one last pitch to get elected. He's going to break the tradition of George Washington and run for a third term. And he gets on the radio and he tells his fellow Americans that they're not going to be going to war. He's not going to get involved with the war in Europe. He clicks off the radio. He wheels himself into the study.

He's there with his son James. He lights up a cigarette. He says, I just told a big lie to the American people. He said they're 100% going to war. They're just not ready to hear that. And it's my job as a leader to pull them and to get them educated to understand it's their fight too. That the fright for freedom were all interconnected. And he's smoking the cigarette, explaining that to James. Of course, that ends up in James's diary, which is how Brands finds it. Here's a fantastically cynical quote from Truman, which he said at the beginning of the war.

He said, if we find the Americans are winning, we should. supply Germany with weaponry. If we find the Germans are winning, we should supply the Russians with weaponry. And that way, they can kill as many of each other as possible. Well, you know, listen, Ronald Reagan got that, right? I mean, he did that with the Iranians and the Iraqis in the 1980s. So we understand that. Okay, let's keep going here. We've got Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler. The most extraordinary thing Hitler perhaps did was in 1939, where he signed the Nazi Soviet pact. This, as you alluded to, to at the beginning. These were the two great dictators of Europe. They were sworn enemies,

absolutely hated each other, couldn't have stood more politically poles apart. And yet, in a moment of extraordinary, sort of diabolical pragmatism, Hitler and Stalin do a pact, which enables them to invade Poland, carve it up. And this is going to be the beginning of the Second World War. An extraordinary event, which took everyone by complete surprise. No one was expecting this to happen, cause great shockwaves in 1939. But everyone wondered how long this pact could last. And sure enough, by 1941, two years after it was signed, the pact falls apart. And Hitler turns on his erstwhile ally and invades the Soviet Union. I think Stalin was surprised by that, though, right? A little bit, right? He thought the pack was going to last a little longer,

or am I wrong? No, you're absolutely right. Stalin was absolutely astonished when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, despite having very good intelligence not just from the frontier where, you know, two million German troops were amassing on the frontier of the Soviet Union, but even Britain, which had very good intelligence, warned Joseph Stalin, he was about to invade, he was about to be invaded. He dismissed this as deliberate warmongering, scaremongering. And so on the evening of the 22nd of June, 1941, when Hitler's tanks roll over the frontier, Stalin almost has a mini breakdown. He's so utterly stunned that this erstwhile Alley has turned against him. I think one of the things that we do, which is a mistake as historians or people that study

history, is we also two-dimensionalize Hitler into this non-human where he was very much human. And so we have to understand like the insanity of him and how he was able to rise to where he was. And, you know, and there's a lot of, obviously a lot of things there that we always have to unpack. Let's go to Harriman and Avril Harriman, not the daughter. Yeah, so Avril Harriman really plays a crucial role in the war. Now, it should be said that Roosevelt liked to have personal envoys. He didn't really like to deal with diplomats and ambassadors. He, of course, he had an ambassador to London at the time, but he liked somebody who could be his sort of personal conduit to, first of all, to Winston Churchill and then to Joseph Stalin.

He wanted the, as he put it, the undiluted words of Winston Churchill, and then after that, the undiluted words of Joseph Stalin. This is how he dealt with. It was highly effective. There was no bureaucracy. There was no red tape. He had one man directly between him and his wartime partners. Okay, the last, I've saved the best for last, and I don't mean the best in terms of the

best person, but the title of your book. Let's go to Joseph Stalin. Joseph Stalin, I think, was underestimated by pretty much everyone in the West. As I mentioned, a very unknown figure. and it really took some time before the Western diplomats, both in London and in Washington, came to realize that they were dealing with an extremely shrewd and dangerous operator. They realized by the end of the war also

that the Red Army would be in control of much of the land that Stalin coveted. That's much of Eastern Europe, much of Central Europe. And so I think there was a fear, but on the part of Averill and Archie in particular, who had got to know Stalin extremely well, that Stalin was very likely, despite all the fine words and the smiles and the champagne at the Yalta conference, that Stalin at the end of the war was going to get exactly what he wanted. It's great. It's great stuff, Giles. I really appreciate you joining me today.

The title of your book is The Stalin Affair, The Impossible Alliance that Won the War. Thank you, Jiles Milton. I got to tell you, I enjoyed the book, but I think I enjoyed our conversation more than the book, frankly. So thank you for joining us on Open Book. Well, thank you very much for having me on. It's been a great pleasure. Well, when you think about history, we read it and we sort of think of it as an affair complete. Well, that was supposed to happen exactly the way it happened.

But there are so many things going on in history, frankly, that were improbable. One of them was the relationship and alliance between Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, and FDR. Remember now if Adolf Hitler had just made the decision to leave Stalin alone, he probably could have controlled most of Western Europe before the United States entered the war, and it would have been more difficult to beat Adolf Hitler if he was only fighting on one side of Europe, only fighting on the Western Front. So here we are, very complex personalities, very different political ideologies. And of course, there's always a fly in the ointment. There's Kathy Harriman, the 23-year-old daughter of Avril Harriman, who makes so much of a difference in terms of lubricating

and softening the relationship that Joseph Stalin has with these Western leaders. Just a phenomenal book, great storytelling. And of course, as I mentioned in this audio version of Open Book, there is an audio version of the Stalin affair. It's on Audible. And it's none other than Giles himself that is reading the book and what great intonation he has. He draws you in.

He forces you to stay reading. A couple of late nights for me, Giles Milton can create insomnia if you listen to his books on Audible. Great to have him on our show. Oh. Ma, my next guest is a guy named Giles Milton. He's a British historian who wrote a great book about Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, and Franklin Roosevelt.

So you were born before the Second World War, right, ma? Yeah. I mean, I know you're going to go on the Golden Bachelorette at this point, though. I know you're getting hit on. Ma, you get hit on by a lot of men? Or no, you can tell me. I'm home, but he had a breakdown, and I didn't go, thank God. But that's the truth.

Okay, so you're born before the war, you're 88. Do you remember the Second World War at all? Ma, you were probably... No, I was too young, really. I know that when my brothers came home, they picked as their little sister, and I was very, very close for me. But they both fought in the Second World War, right? One was in the Battle of the Bulge, Sal, and one was in Dede, in the Normandy invasion.

He was the first one off the boat. Yes, I know the story. You know, we've talked about it. So, Mom, do you remember Franklin Roosevelt? You were a little school. He was great. You're going to be a very special child. But Pop liked Franklin Roosevelt, right?

He loved him. Yes, he did. And he thought his wife was good, too. He didn't think his wife nice looking because he was quotatious, I guess, in his own way. But he thought that Franklin Roosevelt was great. Yeah, he did. What about Harry Truman? You liked Harry Truman?

Yeah, I thought he was very, very good. He wasn't like the limelight. He helped more, you know, he was good. He was very good. Yeah, he was simpler. He was less focused on his own publicity and more focused on doing the right thing. That's the right way of putting it 100%. Yeah, he was very, very good.

Okay. And his biography is earth-shattering if you really read it. Yeah, you wrote you, the one that you read was the one that his daughter wrote about him in the 1970s. I remember you reading. Yeah, right. Yes. Uh-huh. Maxie, I have a good memory, right, Ma?

Yeah, and I think Franklin, I mean, not frankly, Churchill was very, very good kill. He wasn't afraid of anybody. He wasn't afraid of anybody, right? You liked that about him, right? I like that about him. Yeah, well, that's how we got, Ray. We got raised like that.

We got raised not to give his shit about anybody, right? Stephen brought that on. And he taught you the insinence. How about when Billy Whiteley, when I was seven years old, Billy Whiteley was trying to beat me up in the front yard, and I ran inside. What did Nana tell me to do? Your grandmother was the rock of him in the door.

She was an immigrant. Yeah, he was bigger than me. I punched him right in the face. Bravo, Anthony. Remember when I punched him right in the face? He was bigger than me. He started crying. Yeah.

He was crying like a little turd. You people would be putting, you people would be put in jail now in 2024. You had me swinging at this kid in 1971, ma. It was something to say. That's what she had, really. You know, I was more mellow, but my mother didn't take too much stuff, Ranchoan are her kids. She was fiery.

All right, love it. All right, love you, ma. Love you very much. I see you. All right. I am Anthony Scaramucci, and that was Open Book. Thank you for listening. If you like what you hear, tell your friends,

and make sure you hit follow or subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast. While you're there, please leave us a rating or review. If you want to connect with me or chat more about, the discussions, it's at Skaramucci on Twitter or Instagram. I'd love to hear from you. I'll see you back here next week.