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Archibald Clark Kerr, Averell Harriman, and the fate of the wartime alliance

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Abstract

This essay examines how the divergent personalities, emotional thinking, and cultural assumptions of British ambassador to Moscow Archibald Clark Kerr and US ambassador W. Averell Harriman coloured their respective perceptions of political problems and recommendations for dealing with the growing tensions in the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union.

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Notes

  1. Alexander Werth, Russia at War 1941–1945 (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1984), 753.

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  2. Werth, Russia at War, 751–2.

  3. Clark Kerr, ‘Stalin, an Obituary Appreciation’, 26 September 1949, Clark Kerr papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford, UK. Clark Kerr wrote a number of such ‘obituaries’ for the BBC. Ironically he would die two years before Stalin.

  4. Kathleen Harriman to Mary, 9 November 1943, box 170, W. Averell Harriman papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC [henceforth Harriman papers].

  5. Kathleen Harriman to Mary, 9 November 1943, box 170, Harriman papers. Molotov had reason to ask. Also at the party was Charles E. ‘Chip’ Bohlen, who found the uniforms ‘ridiculous’ and the Soviets ‘inordinately proud’ of them. The matter of the uniforms suggests how the Soviet quest for respect could backfire in ridicule. (Charles E. Bohlen, Witness to History 1929–1969 (New York: W W Norton & Co., 1973), 130.

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  6. Kathleen Harriman to Mary, 9 November 1943, box 170, Harriman papers.

  7. Clark Kerr to Eden, 16 July 1944, Foreign Office (FO) 800/302/111, National Archives, Kew.

  8. This and the preceding quotation are from Geoffrey C. Ward, ed., Closest Companion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 253 (emphasis in original).

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  9. Quoted in Lord Moran, Churchill at War 1940–45 (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2002), 162.

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  10. Robert P. Meiklejohn diary, 4 October 1945, box 211, Harriman papers.

  11. This and the preceding quotation are from Minute by Geoffrey Wilson, 4 August 1944, FO 371/43305.

  12. Clark Kerr to Eden, 18 November 1943, FO 800/301/250, PRO.

  13. Kathleen Harriman to Mary, 9 November 1943, box 170, Harriman papers.

  14. This and the preceding quotation are from Clark Kerr to Eden, 18 November 1943, FO 800/301/250, PRO.

  15. This and the preceding quotation are from Clark Kerr to Eden, 18 November 1943, FO 800/301/250, PRO.

  16. Werth, Russia at War, 753–4.

  17. Kathleen Harriman to Mary, 9 November 1943, box 170, Harriman papers. British naval officers at the party loyally recorded that Molotov had made ‘a concerted effort … to make our Ambassador drunk. Molotov himself did not come off best’. ‘War Diary of the British Naval Mission, Moscow’, 7 November 1943, enclosed in Richard D. Wyant to Warner, 29 December 1943, FO 371/43288.

  18. My thinking on homosociality has been influenced by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) and

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  19. Hazel V. Carby, Race Men (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998).

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  20. Thomas Brimelow to Donald Gillies, 23 November 1989, Donald Gillies collection, Bodleian library, Oxford University, England.

  21. For an excellent biography, see Donald Gillies, Radical Diplomat: The Life and Times of Archibald Clark Kerr Lord Inverchapel, 1882–1951 (London: LB. Tauris, 1999).

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  22. The Second World War Diary of Hugh Dalton 1940–45, ed. Ben Pimlott (London: Jonathan Cape, 1986), 567–8.

  23. This and the preceding quotation are from Ibid.

  24. Clark Kerr to Anthony Eden, 31 August 1944, N5598/183/38, FO 371/43336.

  25. Clark Kerr to Anthony Eden, 27 March 1945, N3934/545/38, FO 371/47941. For approving minutes, see ibid., 18, 19 April 1945.

  26. See William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feelings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

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  27. Walter Bell to Gillies, 25 July 1991, Gillies collection, Bodleian, Oxford (henceforth Gillies collection).

  28. John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 188–94.

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  29. John Hersey to Patch Hersey, 19 November 1944, box 7, John Hersey papers, Beinecke Library, Yale.

  30. Quoted in James Bertram, The Shadow of a War (London: Victor Gollancz, 1947), 87.

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  31. Meiklejohn diary, 19 February 1944, box 211, Harriman papers.

  32. John Hersey to Donald Gillies, 11 November 1991, Gillies collection.

  33. Clark Kerr to Warner, 30 July 1943, F.O. 800/301/92, PRO; Gillies, Radical Diplomat, 125.

  34. This and the preceding quotes are from Clark Kerr to Christopher F.A. Warner, 11 June 1942, FO 800/300/24.

  35. Clark Kerr to Eden, 27 April 1942, FO 800/300/-.

  36. Gillies, Radical Diplomat, 156.

  37. Frank Giles, ‘From Russia with Love’, London Sunday Times, 6 March 1980, 33.

  38. Clark Kerr to Christopher Warner, 11 June 1942, file 800/300/24; Clark Kerr to Eden, 27 April 1942, 800/300/-.

  39. Clark Kerr to Eden, 27 April 1942, F.O. 800/300/-.

  40. Clark Kerr to Eden, 27 April 1942, F.O. 800/300/-.

  41. This and the preceding quotes are from Clark Kerr to Christopher Warner, 3 October 1942, FO 800/300/198.

  42. This and the preceding quotes are from Harriman diary, 21 October 1943, box 170, Harriman papers.

  43. [Foreign Ministry of the USSR], Sovetsko-Amerikanskie otnosheniia vo vremia velikoi otechestvennoi voiny 1941–1945 (Moscow, 1984), 386. My thanks to Olga Baeva for translating this document.

  44. Harriman, unaddressed letter, 1 November 1943, box 170, Harriman papers.

  45. ‘W.A. Harriman — Notes regarding meeting with Mr. Molotov at the Kremlin October 21, 1943’, box 170, Harriman papers.

  46. John R. Deane, The Strange Alliance (New York, 1947), 25.

  47. John Balfour to Christopher Warner, 1 November 1943, F.O. 800/300/235, PRO.

  48. Harriman to the President and Acting Secretary of State, 30 October 1943, box 170, Harriman papers.

  49. Deane, The Strange Alliance, 3.

  50. Kemp Tolley, Caviar and Commissars: The Experiences of a US Naval Officer in Stalin’s Russia (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1983), 180.

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  51. British Documents on Foreign Affairs (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1988), part III, series A, vol. 6, p. 305.

  52. WA. Harriman to the Secretary, 1 November 1943, box 170, Harriman papers.

  53. David Mayers, The Ambassadors (New York: Oxford University Press), 149.

  54. George F Kennan, Memoirs 1925-1950 (Boston: Little Brown, 1967), 211.

  55. Mark J. Conversino, Fighting with the Soviets (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 67.

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  56. This and the preceding quotation are from Frank Costigliola, ‘“I Had Come as a Friend”: Emotion, Culture, and Ambiguity in the Formation of the Cold War, 1943–45’, Cold War History 1 (August 2000): 116–7.

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  57. SOE memorandum, Answers to Questions’, [no date but 1945], HS4/211, National Archives, Kew.

  58. Lt. Col. James D. Wilmeth, ‘Report on a Visit to Lublin, Poland February 27–March 28 1945’, box 22, entry 319, RG 334, National Archives, Washington.

  59. Harriman to the President, 8 March 1945, box 34, Map Room files (hereafter MR), Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library (hereafter FDRL).

  60. This and the preceding quotation are from Harriman to Secretary of State [unsent], 10 April 1945, box 178, Harriman papers. Pentagon generals, however, examined a list of similar complaints from Deane and judged them ‘irritating’ but ‘of relatively minor moment’. Diane Shaver Clemens, ‘Averell Harriman, John Deane, the Joint Chief of Staff, and the “Reversal of Cooperation” with the Soviet Union in 1945’, International History Review, 14 (May 1992), 280.

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  61. Clark Kerr to Warner, 21 June 1945, FO 371/47862, National Archives, Kew.

  62. For Truman’s concerns about assuming the presidency and about the connection between height and presidential greatness, see Robert H. Ferrell, ed., Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 16

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  63. Margaret Truman, ed., Where the Buck Stops (New York: Warner Books, 1989), 77–79. On the activities of Harriman and Deane in Washington, see Clemens, ‘Reversal of Co-operation’, 293–303.

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  64. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States 1945, (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1969), 5:232.

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  65. This and the preceding quotation are from Clark Kerr to Warner, 21 June 1945, FO 371/ 47862, National Archives, Kew.

  66. Lippmann to Hans Kohn, 30 May 1945, box 82, Walter Lippmann papers, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.

  67. Frank K. Roberts to Christopher FA. Warner, 14 March 1945, FO 371/47934.

  68. Joseph E. Davies diary, 6 June 1945, box 17, Joseph E. Davies papers, Library of Congress. Though Davies was of course a sympathiser with the Soviets, historians have not questioned the veracity of his diary. Moreover the entry cited here is original, not one of the reworked passages that Davies did in the early 1950s.

  69. This and the preceding quotation are from Clark Kerr, Discussion between the Prime Minister and the Soviet Ambassador at No. 10 Downing Street, 18 May 1945, PREM3/ 396.

  70. This and the preceding quotation are from Giles, ‘From Russia with Love’, 35; Inverchapel to Foreign Office, 11 March 1950, Clark Kerr papers, Bodleian, Oxford.

  71. Roberts to Warner, 25 April 1945, FO 371/47882, National Archives, Kew.

  72. John Hersey to Patch Hersey, 19 November 1944, box 7, Hersey papers.

  73. Clark Kerr speech to the American Society of International Law, 24 April 1948, box 71, Felix Frankfurter papers, Library of Congress.

  74. Lamar Trotti and Dudley Nicholas, ‘One World’, 28 January 1944, Darryl Zanuck to Trotti, 4 January 1944, box 24, Irita van Doren papers, Library of Congress.

  75. Andrew Schlesinger and Stephen Schlesinger, eds., Journals 1952–2000 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (New York: Penguin, 2007), 335–6.

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  1. University of Connecticut, USA

    Frank Costigliola

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  1. Frank Costigliola
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Correspondence to Frank Costigliola.

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Frank Costigliola is professor of history at the University of Connecticut and a former president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the NEH. His forthcoming book is entitled Roosevelt’s Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Win the War and Lose the Peace (Princeton University Press).

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Costigliola, F. Archibald Clark Kerr, Averell Harriman, and the fate of the wartime alliance. J Transatl Stud 9, 83–97 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1080/14794012.2011.568161

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