A corporate executive turned architect of the postwar international order
The Yalta Protocol preserves the signature of the American representative, “E. R. Stettinius Jr.”
Edward Stettinius was a statesman who moved from corporate management and national mobilization into the center of American diplomacy at the end of the Second World War. As administrator of Lend-Lease, he helped sustain the Allied war effort, and at Yalta he accompanied Franklin Roosevelt in negotiating the framework of postwar Europe and international organization. He signed the Yalta Protocol as the American representative and then led the United States delegation at the conference that founded the United Nations, but his effort to address growing tensions with the Soviet Union through the UN brought him into conflict with the Truman administration. His career shows how wartime coordination between corporations and the state fed into postwar multilateralism while being constrained on the threshold of the Cold War.
Career Timeline
- 1926Joined General Motors as assistant to John Lee Pratt
- 1931General Motors vice president for public and industrial relations
- 1934–1938Executive at U.S. Steel, becoming board chairman in 1938
- 1939–1941Led wartime resource and production-priority bodies
- 1941–1943Administrator of Lend-Lease aid
- 1943–1944United States Under Secretary of State
- 1944–1945United States Secretary of State and American representative at Yalta
- 1945–1946First United States Ambassador to the United Nations