Dinner With Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table by Cita Stelzer Page B

Soviet power and was instrumental in establishing NATOTO. He strongly encouraged Truman to intervene in the Korean War and to support French efforts in Indochina. He died aged 78 in 1971.
A.V. Alexander
    Labour politician who succeeded Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty. Born in 1885, the son of a blacksmith, he left school at 13 and served in the Artists’ Rifles in the First World War. In the post-war Labour government he served as Minister of Defence and Labour leader in the House of Lords. He died in 1965.
Clement Attlee
    Leader of the Labour Party, 1935–55 and Prime Minister, 1945–51. Attlee served as Churchill’s Deputy Prime Minister in the War Cabinet, putting aside political differences in a successfulpartnership. He enjoyed Churchill’s respect and also endured his occasional jibes. He was a former public schoolboy who fought in the First World War and whose social conscience was shaped by witnessing poverty in the East End of London where he was a local mayor and MP. His wife was a closet Tory. He died in 1967, two years after Churchill.
Bernard Baruch
    Amassed a fortune on Wall Street. Baruch (1870–1965) was a financial adviser to various US presidents, including Roosevelt during the war. He was also a long-standing friend of Churchill, offering personal financial advice and generous hospitality.
Lord Beaverbrook
    Press magnate and Minister of Aircraft production, 1941, Minister of Supply 1941 and Lord Privy Seal, 1943–5. Born Max Aitken in Canada in 1879, he was the son of a Scottish minister. He bought the Daily Express in 1916, turning it by the 1930s into Britain’s best-selling newspaper. Beaverbrook supported appeasement but was also considered a crony of Churchill. During the war he built a popular reputation because of his perceived energy in improving armament production. He contrived to combine a firm belief in the British Empire with repeated calls for more help for the Soviet Union and the early opening of a Second Front in Europe.
Valentin Berezhkov
    Stalin’s interpreter at the Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam conferences. In retirement he remained loyal to Stalin’s memory though when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991 he moved to California, where he died in 1998. One of his sons wrote to Ronald Reagan asking if he could defect; another became interpreter to Boris Yeltsin.

Arthur H. Birse
    Born in Russia and trained as an international banker, Birse was fluent in Russian and an expert in Russian affairs. During the war, he served in the Intelligence Corps in Cairo, achieving the rank of major in the British Army. He was later appointed to the British embassy in Moscow. He was asked to translate for Churchill at Teheran, Moscow in 1944 and at Yalta. In 1945, he acted at Churchill’s interpreter. He also interpreted for Eden, Attlee and Bevin
Charles E. Bohlen
    The diplomat “Chip” Bohlen (1904–74) was working at the US embassy in Tokyo when Pearl Harbor was attacked and thereafter endured six months in a Japanese internment camp. After his repatriation to Washington he advised Harry Hopkins and President Roosevelt on Soviet affairs. He travelled with Roosevelt to the Teheran and Yalta Conferences, where he served as an interpreter, a role he revived at Potsdam for Truman. Alongside his friend George Kennan, Bohlen helped shape the policy of Soviet containment, and he succeeded Kennan as Ambassador in Moscow in 1953. Rethinking some of his earlier conciliatory overtures, Bohlen concluded that “anyone who started with too many illusions about the Soviets came out disillusioned”.
Violet Bonham Carter
    Daughter of the Liberal Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith and stepdaughter of Margot Asquith, Violet Bonham Carter lived in Downing Street between the ages of 21 and 27 and knew many of her father’s contemporaries, marrying his Principal Private Secretary. She was a close friend of both Winston and Clementine Churchill. Created Baroness Asquith of Yarnbury, she remainedactive in Liberal