Abstract
President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) appointed John ‘Gil’ Winant as Ambassador to Great Britain in early 1941.1 From then to the end of the Second World War, he helped to steady the Anglo-US relationship and repaired damages inflicted by Joseph Kennedy. Winant drew the sting from many of those irritations that plague even the sturdiest of alliances. To countless Britons, high and low, he also symbolised American commitment to their safety. Labour party’s Ernest Bevin, a wartime minister in Churchill’s coalition cabinet, explained in 1946: ‘It’s a vivid recollection to us to see [Winant] walking round the streets during an air raid witnessing how London took it … he shared our sorrows … he gave one a feeling of optimism.’2
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Notes
Bernard Bellush, He Walked Alone: A Biography of John Gilbert Winant (The Hague: Mouton, 1968), p. 118.
Lynne Olson, Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in its Darkest, Finest Hour (New York: Random House, 2010), pp. 13–14. Constance Winant raised show dogs. She enjoyed horse races, shopping expeditions, and luxury spas. Her husband was censorious on the subject of her gambling.
Entry of 15 February 1941, Fred Israel (ed.), The War Diary of Breckinridge Long: Selections from the Years 1939–1944 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), p. 181; Mr R. Butler, Minute, 23 January 1941, F0371/26224 (File 409), Foreign Office Records, National Archives, London (NAL);
W. Averell Harriman and Elie Abel, Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin 1941–1946 (New York: Random House, 1975), p. 5;
David Reynolds, From World War to Cold War: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the International History of the 1940s, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 150–62.
John Winant, Our Greatest Harvest: Selected Speeches (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1950), p. 58.
Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948), pp. 839–40; Farewell dinner to Mr J. G. Winant at Lancaster House, p. 4, 23 April 1946, Box 196, John Winant Papers, FDRL.
Nigel Nicolson (ed.), Harold Nicolson: Diaries and Letters 1939–1945 (London: Collins, 1967), pp. 186, 263.
John Colville, The Fringes of Power: 10 Downing Street Diaries 1939–1955 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1985), pp. 372, 773; Bellush, He Walked Alone, pp. 168, 180;
John Winant, Letter from Grosvenor Square: An Account of a Stewardship (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947), pp. 61–62; Ethel Johnson, ‘The Mr. Winant I Knew’, South Atlantic Quarterly, January 1949, p. 37; Farewell dinner to Mr J. G. Winant at Lancaster House, p. 2, 23 April 1946, Box 196, John Winant Papers, FDRL.
Interview of Winston Churchill, p. 2, 4 July 1951, Box 1, interview of Virginia Crawley, p. 4, 3 July 1951, interview of Anthony Eden, pp. 15–17, 7 and 8 July 1951, Box 2, Bernard Bellush Papers, FDRL; Johnson, ‘The Mr. Winant I Knew’, p. 38; Winant, Letter from Grosvenor Square, pp. 92, 96–7; Bellush, He Walked Alone, p. 178; David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (New York: Random House, 2005), pp. 263–4. Winant’s son John survived German prison and the war. A younger son, Rivington, survived tours with the Marine Corps in Pacific combat.
Edward R. Murrow to Winant, 10 November 1941, Box 209, John Winant Papers, FDRL; A. M. Sperber, Murrow: His Life and Times (New York: Freudlich Books, 1986), p. 189; entries of 14 April and 3 August 1941,
James Leutze (ed.), The London Journal of General Raymond E. Lee 1940–1941 (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1971), pp. 241, 361; Bellush, He Walked Alone, p. 166.
Lend-Lease, enacted by Congress in March 1941, did ultimately provide tangible aid, valued between $21 and $25 billion, to the British Empire. See Reynolds, From World War to Cold War, p. 109; I. C. B. Dear and M. R. D. Foots (eds.), The Oxford Companion to World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 680.
Ibid., pp. 26–7, 102–3; Ivan Maisky, Memoirs of a Soviet Ambassador (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968), p. 214; Reynolds, From World War to Cold War, pp. 187–8.
Olson, Citizens of London, pp. 169–70; Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, pp. 269, 311, 919; Rudy Abramson, Spanning the Century: The Life of W. Averell Harriman, 1891–1986 (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1992), pp. 302–4; Harriman and Abel, Special Envoy, p. 26; Entries of 14 and 27 April, 15 and 25 and 30 July, 29 August 1941 in Leutze, The London Journal of General Raymond E. Lee, pp. 241, 259, 340, 353, 359, 382; Bellush, He Walked Alone, p. 175; interview of Virginia Crawley, 3 July 1951, pp. 7–8, Box 2, Bernard Bellush Papers, FDRL.
Churchill to FDR, 1 April 1942, Warren Kimball, Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), Vol. I, p. 439.
Martin Gilbert, Churchill and America (New York: Free Press, 2005), p. 345;
Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember (New York: Harper, 1949), p. 266.
Winant, Letter from Grosvenor Square, pp. 207–9; Maisky, Memoirs of a Soviet Ambassador, pp. 180–1, 268; Bellush, He Walked Alone, pp. 189–90; Warren Kimball, Forged in War: Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Second World War (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1997), p. 223.
Robert Murphy, Diplomat among Warriors (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964), pp. 230–3.
Lord William Strang, Home and Abroad (London: Andre Deutsch, 1956), pp. 205, 225.
Alonzo Hamby, Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 280; interview of Anthony Eden, 7 and 8 July 1951, p. 19, Box 2, Bernard Bellush Papers, FDRL;
John Allison, Ambassador from the Prairie or Allison Wonderland (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), p. 102;
Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (New York: Viking Press, 1946), p. 392.
John Winant, ‘Fundamental Freedoms’, Conference: The Magazine of Human Relations, Winter 1947, p. 5.
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© 2012 David Mayers
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Mayers, D. (2012). John Gilbert Winant, 1941–46. In: The Embassy in Grosvenor Square. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137295576_3
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