John Gilbert Winant

February 23, 1889 — November 3, 1947

John Gilbert Winant was a two-time Republican Governor of New Hampshire who became one of Democrat Franklin Roosevelt’s most effective leaders of the New Deal era. Winant, a former schoolteacher, willingly embraced the outreach from across the aisle to become the head of the Social Security Board and later the head of the International Labor Office in Geneva. It was Winant whom Roosevelt tapped to succeed Joseph Kennedy as Ambassador to the United Kingdom in 1941 after Kennedy’s outspoken advocacy of appeasement and concerning ties to Nazi sympathizers began to jeopardize the relationship between the United States and Blitz-torn Britain prior to American entry into World War II. The soft-spoken Winant quickly became beloved by Londoners, who felt they had found in him someone who understood the pain and suffering felt by the common man after months of nightly raids by the Luftwaffe. Like Averell Harriman, he was embraced by the Churchill family and was with them the night the news broke that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. And while Averell Harriman was growing closer to Winston Churchill’s daughter-in-law, Winant, too, found himself drawn into the Churchill fold by one family member in particular.

Photograph: Wikimedia commons, public domain