American eagle

The eagle should permit the small birds to sing and care not wherefore they sang.

1945, 4 February, Yalta. (OB VII, 1176.)

Why not put the eagle’s neck on a swivel so that it could turn to the right or left as the occasion presented itself?

1946, 4 March. en route Fulton, Missouri.

(Halle, America and Britain, 17.)

Presidential aide Clark Clifford recollection. Truman explained that he had revised the President’s Seal so that the eagle, instead of facing the quiver of arrows, faced the olive branch of peace.

There are no people in the world who are so slow to develop hostile feelings against a foreign country as the Americans, and there are no people who, once estranged, are more difficult to win back. The American eagle sits on his perch, a large, strong bird with formidable beak and claws. There he sits motionless, and M. Gromyko is sent day after day to prod him with a sharp pointed stick— now his neck, now under his wings, now his tail feathers. All the time the eagle keeps quite still. But it would be a great mistake to suppose that nothing is going on inside the breast of the eagle.

1946, 5 June.

Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko (1909-89), Soviet politician and diplomat. Entering the Soviet foreign department after Stalin’s purges in 1939, he became Ambassador to the US in 1943, and to the United Nations in 1946. He was the Ambassador in London (1952-53), Foreign Minister (1957-85) and Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (1985-88). WSC was referring to Gromyko’s tactics at the UN organising conference in San Francisco, April-June 1945.