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On this day in 1943, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt joins British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin at a conference in Iran to discuss strategies for winning World War II and potential terms for a peace settlement.
Tehran, Iran, was chosen as the site for the talks largely due to its strategic importance to the Allies. When first lady Eleanor and the couple’s daughter Anna expressed a desire to accompany Roosevelt to Iran, he flatly refused, saying there would be no women allowed at the preliminary conference between himself and Churchill in Cairo or at the Tehran meeting. Eleanor and Anna were incensed to find out later that Churchill’s wife and Madame Chiang Kai Shek from China had made the trip.
Roosevelt was in his third term as president in 1943. The “Big Three,” as the leaders were known, discussed ways to defeat Nazi Germany and agreed upon an invasion of Normandy, codenamed Operation Overlord, which was launched in June 1944. Churchill would have preferred an indirect assault on Germany to Overlord, and mistrusted the Soviet leader. For his part, Stalin wanted a territorial buffer between the Soviet Union and Germany, made up of the former Baltic nations, Poland and part of Germany, to be part of any post-war peace settlement.
In a joint declaration issued December 1, Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt recognized “the supreme responsibility resting upon us and all the United Nations to make a peace which will command the goodwill of the overwhelming mass of the peoples of the world and banish the scourge and terror of war for many generations.” After the Tehran meeting, Roosevelt and Churchill traveled back to Cairo, where they discussed who would lead Operation Overlord. After some discussion, they agreed upon General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who in 1953 would become the 34th president of the United States.