Charles “Chip” Bohlen

August 30, 1904 – January 1, 1974

While Chip Bohlen would go on to become known as one of the “Wise Men” of the Cold War, he was already on the front lines of history during World War II. Bohlen joined the State Department in 1929 and held posts in Prague, Paris, Moscow, and Tokyo, where he was interned by the Japanese for six months after Pearl Harbor. Bohlen returned to Washington as a Soviet specialist in 1942. One of the few Soviet experts and fluent Russian speakers in the State Department in the 1940s, Averell Harriman tried to hire him for his team at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, but Bohlen decided to stay on in Washington with his wife and young children. George Kennan went to Moscow instead. But it was Bohlen who was chosen to serve as President Roosevelt’s interpreter at both Tehran and Yalta. Russian translation only scratched the surface of Bohlen’s knowledge about Russia and the Soviet Union. Had Roosevelt and the State Department utilized the full extent of Bohlen’s knowledge and capabilities earlier, or had they developed a larger team of Soviet specialists like Bohlen and Kennan, might history have been different?

Photograph: Wikimedia commons, public domain