Alexander Cadogan

Sir Alexander Montagu George Cadogan was a British diplomat and civil servant. He was Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs from 1938 to 1946. His long tenure of the Permanent Secretary's office makes him one of the central figures of British policy before and during the Second World War. His diaries are a source of great value and give a sharp sense of the man and his life. Like most senior officials at the Foreign Office, he was bitterly critical of the appeasement policies of the 1930s but admitted that until British rearmament was better advanced, there were few other options. In particular, he stressed that without an American commitment to joint defence against Japan, Britain would be torn between the eastern and western spheres. He was part of the delegation that accompanied Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Winston Churchill at the Atlantic Conference with President of the United States Franklin Roosevelt, where parties agreed to the Atlantic Charter.