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Yalta: Stalin, FDR, and a Lemon Tree.

The meeting was cordial and consisted primarily of Stalin’s welcoming the President to Yalta and making sure that he was comfortably settled. Since it was about cocktail hour, the President repeated a ritual he regularly performed at the White House: He made a pitcher of dry martinis. As he passed a glass to Stalin, he said apologetically that a good martini really should have a twist of lemon.

At six o’clock the following morning, when I came down to the main entrance hall, I was astonished to find, just outside the door to the anteroom, a huge lemon tree—I counted some 200 pieces of fruit on it—which Stalin had ordered flown in from his native Georgia so the President could serve his martinis with a twist.

Source:

“How would you like to be attached to the Red Army?” (American Heritage, June/July). [via Arts and Letters Daily].

Fascinating stuff. Stalin played the ailing Roosevelt like a fiddle at Yalta. President Bush was absolutely correct when he asserted earlier this year that the agreement reached by the Big Three at Yalta was one of the great wrongs of history, a flawed and unjust agreement which led to the captivity of millions.

Posted by Will Franklin · 19 June 2005 12:13 AM

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