Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - WWII Historian: The 3 Women Who Changed The Course of WWII - Catherine Grace Katz

Episode Date: October 30, 2025

Catherine Grace Katz is a Chicago-born writer and historian. She earned a BA in History from Harvard (2013) and an MPhil in Modern European History from Cambridge (2014), focusing on counterintelligence origins. After working in finance in New York, a bookstore visit inspired her return to history and writing. She is currently pursuing her JD at Harvard Law School. Get her brilliant book The Daughters Of Yalta: The Churchills, Roosevelts, and Harrimans: A Story of Love and War here: https://amzn.to/3WtWW20 Anthony Scaramucci is the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge, a global alternative investment firm, and founder and chairman of SALT, a global thought leadership forum and venture studio. He is the host of the podcast Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci. A graduate of Tufts University and Harvard Law School, he lives in Manhasset, Long Island. 📚 Get a copy of my books: Solana Rising: Investing in the Fast Lane of Crypto https://amzn.to/43F5NldFrom Wall Street to the White House and Back https://amzn.to/47fJDbvThe Little Book of Bitcoin https://amzn.to/47pWRmhThe Little Book of Hedge Funds https://amzn.to/43LbM83Hopping over the Rabbit Hole https://amzn.to/3LaykJbGoodbye Gordon Gekko https://amzn.to/47xrLYs 🎥 𝗕𝗼𝗼𝗸 𝗮 𝗖𝗮𝗺𝗲𝗼 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗔𝗻𝘁𝗵𝗼𝗻𝘆! https://www.cameo.com/themooch 🎙️ Check out my other podcasts: The Rest is Politics US - https://www.youtube.com/@RestPoliticsUS Lost Boys - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYFf6KS9ro1p18Z0ajmXz5qNPGy9qmE8j&feature=shared SALT - https://www.youtube.com/c/SALTTube/featured 📱 Follow Anthony on Social Media Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/scaramucci/ X - https://x.com/Scaramucci LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/anscaramucci/ TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@ascaramucci?lang=en YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@therealanthonyscaramucci Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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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. He is the father himself.

He has a daughter about their age, but also he recognizes that it will play well with the father is 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, tribulations, 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.

And 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. And 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 a 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 Churchill's, Roosevelt's, and Harriman's, a story of love and war. I mean, what an incredible story. And this is such great back because 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. and 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. And 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's purebucci.

Was it well received? It was. It was so well 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. Thank you for that. And those cameos go to the Brain Tumor Foundation, which I've been a,

a board member of. So it's a fun little thing to do for the charity. And I've said, happy birthday and congratulations, 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. But 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, and 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 Excel 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 both scholars and academics, members of the Churchill family, and others of various walks of like who want to encourage people to study the example of Winston Churchill as really a preeminent example of public leadership. And so I was very fortunate to have the opportunity

to then go and hear Madeline 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 think you'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 and 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 going to be writing an article that only a handful of people will read, but thanks.

And sure enough, mom's always no 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 the 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. But 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. You 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 and 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 carrying favor.

So tell us about reality, political reality, and these allies who didn't trust each other. And again, and 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. So 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 you do about Germany, future Poland, 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 and basically a solo invasion of the Japanese home islands. And so Stalin says, okay, 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 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. It's now the American century, and they're looking to, you know, the other kind of terror balance 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 it's human beings and it's, I mean, it's just so much here. Stalin needs our help. He needs Len Lees. He's, he's a little scared. He's, 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, right? Because, you know, when Churchill first meets Roosevelt, he, like, 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 conjure him for help in the war. So this is a lot of improbable things happening. Tell us about how these women help to lubricate this situation, help 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, perspectives, strengths. And just a note, so the three daughters are Sarah Church. Churchill, Winston's daughter, Anna Roosevelt, FDR's daughter, and Kathleen Harriman, who is the daughter of April Harriman, the U.S. Ambassador 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 Westerners, 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. But 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 the, for D-Day. She is an actress, which means that she's, by trade, that's her profession, before she's. 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 to double speak, the performing in front of the partners that you need to court. She is a number 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 the, 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. And she'd be out there in the garden with him, handing and 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, there's just 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. Kathy 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 book,

Blitz while her father was the Lenise 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 Avril. 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 the Zique discussing these intense meetings with Molotov, the foreign minister, and she becomes the American woman who has more access to an

experience with Stalin in his inner circle than any other American woman in history. Anna 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 still drinking. He's He's, I mean, these are fascinating people, right? He's got high blood pressure. He's like, they ask me the cigarette FDR, right?

And he can't exercise because he's crippled and he's in the wheelchair. You like to swim? He likes to swim. Yes. He does, you know, of course, you know, I stood over. I did one press conference on the White House in my failed time in the Trump administration, and I stood over the swimming pool. That's where the Brady Press room is.

Yes. And if you 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 to sign on a Sharpie, your name, on the tile. So you see a lot of the former press secretary. I signed it on the first day after my press conference. And that's the very famous pool that both Roosevelt and John Kennedy swam in before Richard Nixon covered it.

But back to your book. You have a huge fan and a woman by the name of Sonia. now, do you know who that is? Yes. So I was, I think 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, I think it was Kathy, Do I have it right? Yes. I think it was Kathy Harriman had insight into Stalin. But Pam Churchill, because of a 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? 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. You've got Sarah Churchill who's having an affair with the American ambassador to Britain, Gil Wynent. Churchill's daughter-in-law, Pamela, is having an affair with April Housie. 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 to the center. Not to interrupt you, Catherine, but is there something about war which makes people want to have a lot of sex? Or what do you 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. Could be it, but I interrupt you.

Go back to your dead tail. 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, um, 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 backchanneled through these unofficial kind of quasi-official, unofficial means, often through these personal, special relationships that are going on. my 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? There 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. And the Americans are very much looking at this and saying, okay, 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 I 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, not preventing war eternally, but at least peace in Europe for 50 years. And by large margin, he's succeeded. 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 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, you know, it's not entirely rosy. Poland quickly falls behind the Iron Curtain, despite Stalin guarantee. guaranteeing that, oh, we're going to have free elections here, not to worry. This is something that Churchill feels that Roosevelt doesn't understand of how imperative it is for Stalin to have Poland very much under his control. But for Roosevelt, this is just so secondary to the superseding issue of, you have 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. This is a huge issue that leads to, you know, 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, it really the ultimate

politician, especially in the domestic sphere, he has, 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. And there's a great letter from George Kennan that I found while I was researching this where the Secretary of State Edwards Detainees writes to the American Embassy in Moscow and George Kennan responds about, 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. Even 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 saying. This is very much, you know, he doesn't understand that his brain holster. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. He was in the personal charm business, so he totally got the room. He's calling him Uncle Joe, the guy who doesn't like to be called Uncle Joe. You 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, Joe.

He likes the chuminess. He was an informal guy. He liked that sort of chumny. dumbiness, you know, just an incredible leader, FDR. But, okay, so we're, we're, 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. And she's trying to figure out who's important for her father to see who isn't. 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 of this children's, flooding, riding horses, sailing, what have you. And 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. Eleanor can't really bring herself to see this. And FDR 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 In box, 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.

And so she is, even though she's the oldest, she's the least experience in kind of the hands-on political realm. But at this point, she's really supplanted someone like Harry Hopkins, who's been one of his closest advisors for years as the person closest to him deciding who gets to meet with him and who has to meet with somebody else. And this includes at Yalta, Winston Churchill, who feels that it's vitally important that they are aligned before they go into the conference room, because Stalin will exploit any distance between them. Churchill, for all of his good intentions, is exhausting. And so she knows that she can't just allow this open access. But it kind of works to her father's objectives as well to use her somewhat unwittingly for his own objectives of

not being too cozy with Churchill while at the conference. But she's really, she knows this is the last time she gets to be with her father. He's likely going to die soon. And so it's just this really tragic, very bittersweet triumph for her to be the person who's important to him, but also recognition that this is it. Stahl, let's talk about him. He raises a glass to get towards the end of this conference. He raises a glass and he toasts the daughters.

It's almost this like ceremonial thing that he's done. doing. And what does this gesture, you know, and their experience more broadly. Tell us about how these young women were recognized. Here's the leader of the Soviet Union. He's going to control a big part of Eastern Europe. He's going to create a Soviet USSR empire. But he's astute, right? He knows that these women have been impactful here. What does he say? And what's the historical significance of it? He does. So the 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 Alexandron. Yep. And so there's a lot of symbolism, a lot of heavy atmosphere here, his, you know, top spot. It's a run-down home, though. Let's just tell you, right? It's a rundown home. There's rats. There's electrical lights flickering.

and they're whitewashing the walls. But it's really, it's unseemly. None of the Americans who are quite hygienic are in love with this all. No, riddle with bedbugs. They try to spray everything with DDT. We now don't realize that probably wasn't a great idea. But, you know, they soldier on. There are no bathrooms available.

They're all queuing for, you know, the one or two. So anyway, so Stalin does during the, you know, 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. He 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 these daughters, you know, it's not like, you know, if we'd only listen to the daughters more, there would have been no Cold War. That's not what the role is. But I think 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. And so Stalin is in a way kind of recognizing this role, which I think is very important. And, you know, 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 on the very human side. It's an awesome book for those reasons because, you know, we both know through history there's a little bit of a butterfly effect.

Certain people are around at certain times and they can change the course of history. Okay, so if you've listened to any of these podcasts, we take five words from your book or people. I'm going to say the word. you think about what comes to your mind when I say it. Okay, you ready? If I say Kathy or Kathleen Harriman, you say what? I say the woman who was closer to and knew more about Stalin and all of his inner circle, fearsome men that they were than any American woman who ever lived. And was fluent in Russian, yes? Not quite fluent, but very conversant. But very conversant. She was translating. Yes. She was translating a lot. Okay. She was. Let's go to Sarah. Let's go to

Sarah Churchill. More like Winston than any of the other children, had she been born 10 years later, which would have made her a contemporary of Thatcher, perhaps she would have carried on his political legacy. Yeah, so she was the toughest of his children, right? I mean, she was the strongest, I think, in terms of her mental constitution. Is that fair to say? He was strong. She was brilliant. She was creative. She really had this kind of combination of the brains and the creativity, kind of the Churchill and the Spencer family is funneling into one person. And like her father, She was a stubborn redhead back when he had any hair. But she really does understand the nuances of what's at stake in kind of a very human way

and the impacts that decisions around the conference table will have on the lives of individuals whose lives are being reordered at that very moment. Okay. My personal favorite, if I could just be honest, is Anna Roosevelt. And she's my personal favorite because of the way she thought about her dad. You know, she was, the other two were super smart, but they were also opportunistic about themselves. She, at least to me, came across more selfless in your book. That's my opinion.

You may have a different opinion. Let's talk about Anna Roosevelt. I say Anna Roosevelt. You say what? I say a tragic figure, someone yearning for recognition, for love, for closeness, only to be disappointed to really never hear it from the person who she wanted to hear it from and who she admired more than anyone. It's only after he passes away.

and his one-time mistress, you know, to what extent their affair was a romantic one later in life, you know, seems more emotional. But she only receives a letter from Lucy Mercer telling her what her, what she meant to her father and never heard it from FDR himself. Yeah. Of course, and of course, Lucy Mercer was with FDR the day that he died in April of 1945. Yes. All right, let's, I got to say the word daughters. You say what? daughters. I'd say that they are often the unsung heroes of many a story, as an oldest daughter myself. But, you know, 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. And they're also, you know, 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. And in the most important geopolitical moments, that's still there. That's still part of them, just like it would be for us. Last word. And I'm going to give you the last word, Catherine. I say the word Yalta. In the immediate aftermath of Yalta, the word would be the apex of allied cooperation.

By the beginning of the Cold War, it would be sellout. Today, I think of it as a slow burning tragedy, an inevitability by that point in time where we fall down this frustrating counterfactual spiral, if this hadn't been, maybe this could have been instead, if Roosevelt hadn't been sick, if the Soviets hadn't had so much control. But really, to be able to satisfy those questions,

we have to look back to opening the second front earlier, which would require rearmament earlier, which gets to decisions made back in the 1930s. And so by the time we get to 1945, a lot of history is already written before it even unfolds. And I think that's one of the things that draws me to a story like this

where you can see the kind of the melodrama in the lives of individuals playing out on a global stage. Well, I love the book because there's great complexity to the book. I had James Holland on a little earlier on Open Book, and James and I were just talking about how so many things have to happen sequentially to get this scripted history. But we both know,

and you know, history is unscripted. Things are just like today is unscripted. And so we have to remind ourselves of that. And I think you captured all of that in your great book. And so the title of the book is the daughters of Yalta, the Churchill's, Roosevelt's and Harriman, a story of love and war. It's a fascinating book, and I'm really delighted that you came on Open Book, and I hope you'll come back. I know you have another book out. So before we let you go, could you just tell us what that book is? I believe you're writing about the Hindenburg, if I have that correctly. I am. And about that disaster and the prelude to war. So tell us, just give us a sentence of that if you don't mind. Yes. So my next book coming out about a year from now.

So I'd love to come back if you'll have me is about the Hindenburg disaster, the rise of the Nazis, the prelude to war, and the making of modern breaking news media. featuring someone who I know is one of your personal heroes, William L. Shire, author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, goes on to become one of the great voices of World War II. First radio broadcast he ever made was about the Hindenberg disaster. So I hope that through the lens of individual... I'm looking forward to reading that.

You know, I've read more than one biography of his, also Edward R. Murrow. And, of course, I've read Shire's writings. And, you know, there's a lot of similarities to the 1930s, Catherine, Grace Katz, a lot of similarity. So you got to be careful out there. But I really appreciate you coming on. And I'll certainly get you back.

And please give your mom my cameo fan. Please give your mom my best. I absolutely will. You'll have to promise that we can make another one sometime soon. Okay, that's the deal. We'll get that done. Holly and I'll make sure that that happens.