Hastings Ismay, 1st Baron Ismay

Lord Ismay was Churchill's chief staff officer for the whole of the Second World War and the first Secretary General of NATO, and he is remembered chiefly for a sentence he probably did say. He was an Indian Army cavalry officer who spent the interwar years in the Committee of Imperial Defence, and in 1940 became the link between Churchill as Minister of Defence and the Chiefs of Staff - a post with no command authority whose entire function was to make an impossible relationship work. Pug, as everyone called him, attended almost every wartime conference, translated the Prime Minister's enthusiasms into something the service chiefs could act on, and translated their refusals into something he would accept. Brooke and Churchill both recorded that the machine would not have run without him. He went to India with Mountbatten in 1947 as chief of staff during partition, was briefly Commonwealth Relations Secretary, and became NATO's first Secretary General in 1952, building the civilian side of an alliance that until then was mostly a treaty. The remark attributed to him - that the alliance existed to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down - is not in any contemporary document and is quoted constantly, which is its own comment on how institutions acquire founding stories. He kept a diary he never published and burned much of his correspondence. His memoirs are notably discreet about Churchill, which annoyed historians and was entirely characteristic. The NATO headquarters building in Brussels has a room named after him. He is one of the very few men to have been trusted simultaneously by Churchill, Brooke, Marshall and Eisenhower, which was the job.

• Lived: 1887 CE – 1965 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: military_leader, politician