KATZ HAD A nice book idea here. The Yalta conference, as you probably know, was a summit meeting among the Allies in February 1945, an attempt to agree on certain questions about the final phases of the Second World War and plan for the post-war world. Stalin was present--on his home turf, as Yalta in on the Crimean peninsula (apparently he would not have agreed to any site that involved his leaving the USSR). FDR was there, even though he was in poor health (he died a couple of months later). Churchill was there. And a few other key players as well, e.g., Averell Harriman, US ambassador to the Soviet Union. And Alger Hiss--but that's another story.
Turns out the daughters of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Harriman were there, too, with non-negligible roles, as they were in close attendance on their fathers and serving as confidantes, sounding boards, assistants--not necessarily in official roles, but still close to the center of things.
The Yalta conference was historically important in a number of ways, but using the perspective of the daughters, who were outside and inside at the same time, so to speak, gives the book the grain of a novel, full of personal detail and the stuff of lived experience, at the same time that it tells the story of weighty and consequential high-level negotiations.
The Yalta conference was not a great diplomatic success for the West. FDR was so keen on getting Stalin's promise of cooperation in the about-to-be-created United Nations that he gave Stalin much more leeway with Poland and eastern Europe than was wise, much to Churchill's dismay. Judging from the epilogue, the post-Yalta lives of the daughters were not so happy, either.
The book is certainly a success, though--highly focused on a period about two weeks long, but deeply revealing of the era and of its epochal war.
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