David on Ernest Bevin

“He is a powerful fellow, with a bull neck and a huge voice – a born leader...if there is trouble, mark my words! You will hear more of Bevin!”

“Putting all this together during March 1945, British and American leaders detected a fundamental and sinister shift of Soviet policy. Why it had happened, however, seemed less clear. Most attempts at explanation took as their premise the continued good faith of Stalin himself: that seemed to be one of the lessons of Yalta, indeed of wartime summitry as a whole. Therefore the change of heart was presumed to lie with his advisors—those sinister forces supposedly swirling around in the shadowy recesses of the Kremlin. British Cabinet Minister Ernest Bevin (soon to become foreign secretary) suggested that blame for the turnaround should be ascribed to Molotov. Alternatives postulated by the Foreign Office were the “Party bosses behind the scenes” or “Army marshals at the front” who were throwing their weight about amid the chaos of Eastern Europe. Churchill was similarly unwilling to blame Stalin. On 5 April he wrote darkly to FDR about “the Soviet leaders, whoever they may be.””