For the rest of 1944 and the first half of 1945 Buchman seems to have left most things to his lieutenants - and to have been well-pleased to do so. 'The work is in competent hands,' he remarked on 3 April. And later that month: 'An absolutely perfect evening and I didn't have to do a darned thing about it.' His health was steadily improving, though occasions when he could manage a full day without a rest are mentioned as noteworthy in his secretary's diary, and sometimes he spent the whole day in bed. 'The Lord has given me a wonderful peace,' he said in January, and by June he wrote to a friend, 'You will be interested to know I am my old self again. At a reception yesterday, a reporter, who interviewed me fifteen years ago in Seattle, came over and said, "You don't look a day older." So I have recaptured the blush of youth and am storing up masses of energy for some visits I hope to pay very soon.'7

That letter was written from San Francisco where the United Nations Conference on International Organization was in progress. On 12 March, at the Yalta Conference, Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill had decided to hold the San Francisco Conference in April, precisely when Buchman had a theatre booked there. 'It looks as if you had been guided to the right part of the world three or four months before Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin knew anything about it,' wrote a member of the British delegation.8

Buchman had already given thought to the quality needed in any new international organisation. At Mackinac the previous summer, when the first delegates came from Europe, he told them, 'I had a vision early this morning of your cities - Stockholm, Copenhagen, Berne and London - their rulers learning to be guided by God. Then there would be less confused thinking. Any new League of Nations must have that atmosphere. But then the task will still lie ahead - to build men who so live in the councils of nations that "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" is a practical purpose, not a pious hope.'

The Yalta Conference had been officially hailed in America as a triumph of co-operation between wartime allies now uniting for the purposes of peace, which this new international organisation would safeguard. Russia's aims had not been clear to an ageing Roosevelt, who felt that he could easily handle Stalin. The dividing up of great areas of Europe, which followed Yalta, was not foreseen. One of Roosevelt's chief aides. Admiral Leahy, later wrote in his memoirs, 'The ink was hardly dry on the Yalta Protocol before serious difficulties of interpretation arose.'9

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