53
WILSON’S WAY
NINETEEN FORTY-THREE proved to be the pivotal year in the European war. The Allies completed their conquest of North Africa, which, in turn, opened the Mediterranean to their shipping. They took Sicily. They obtained Italy’s surrender; and, against stubborn German resistance, they invaded the southern tip of the Italian peninsula.
The most important military event of the year was the Soviet Union’s defeat of Germany in mammoth clashes of arms on the eastern front. After the Red Army won the largest tank battle in history—the battle of Kursk—what began to emerge was that a fundamental shift in the balance of power was taking place: the Soviet Union, which had been considered a negligible military factor as late as 1941, was on its way to becoming the greatest land power in the world.
Roosevelt and Churchill held a half dozen conferences during the course of 1943, reaching strategic decisions and then modifying or abandoning them as circumstances quickly changed. The main question they had to resolve (but which they postponed repeatedly) was when American and British forces would launch their long-mooted invasion of France. By the autumn it became clear that the Allies had destroyed the German submarine menace, winning the battle of the Atlantic and making it possible for the United States to ship a mass army across the ocean to England to mount such an invasion.
The invasion date finally was set at the Teheran conference. This was the last of the 1943 meetings, though the first that was attended by Stalin. It took place in the capital of Iran, a country partially occupied by British-led and Russian-led forces in the Second World War as in the First.
Teheran was the most important of the 1943 conferences because at it the leaders of the Big Three—the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union—reached agreement at last on their grand strategy in the war. Although the British still were inclined to postpone the cross-Channel invasion until 1945 or even 1946, FDR imposed the date of late spring 1944. Stalin and Churchill accepted that date; and the three leaders agreed that the United States and Great Britain also would launch an assault on France’s Mediterranean coast at about the same time. In turn Stalin promised to order a major Soviet offensive on the eastern front timed to coincide with the two invasions of France. This was their perfected war plan, and they kept to it on schedule.
The three leaders also reached some broad agreements about the postwar world. It was common ground, especially as between Roosevelt and Stalin, that Germany should be dismembered and her power to make war destroyed. It was agreed, too, both that there should be an international organization and that the peace should be kept by a concert of the several great powers.
FDR sketched out on a sheet of paper how this might look. There would be an Assembly, consisting of the governments of the forty or so United Nations, to make nonbinding recommendations; and an Executive to deal, also in a nonbinding way, with all non-military questions. Then there would be the “Four Policemen,” the Big Three plus China, to enforce the peace. FDR had been expressing ideas along these lines at least since 1942. He claimed to be too realistic to expect his proposed international organization to keep the peace forever, but hoped that it might do so for a few decades.
Stalin was somewhat skeptical. He argued that the Germans were so powerful that even if dismembered, they would manage to reunite eventually. Against such a threat, FDR’s international organization, he claimed, would prove inadequate. Instead the Allies should retain strategic points around the world with which to keep potential aggressors subdued. His posture was similar to that of Clemenceau at the Paris conference a quarter of a century before. Like Clemenceau, he doubted that Germans could be reformed.
Stalin was skeptical, too, about elevating China to the level of the Big Three and about deputizing her to play a role in European affairs. China, like Germany, historically posed a danger that Russians dreaded; and while Stalin did not point that out, he made clear that he felt she should be confined to her own sphere in Asia.
FDR did not disagree. His scheme, as he explained it, did not call for a Chinese presence in Europe or indeed anywhere outside of Asia. The United States would not be involved in policing postwar Europe either; Roosevelt made it clear that the American public would insist on withdrawing from the Continent. Control of Europe would be shared in the postwar world by Great Britain and the Soviet Union. That was a key element in FDR’s plan; and Stalin gave the impression of being at least open to persuasion.
Churchill and Stalin seemed disposed to listen sympathetically to Roosevelt’s plan for restructuring world politics, but FDR was unable to explain clearly what he had in mind. On the one hand, he did not intend for the three or four great powers to act jointly in peacekeeping operations all around the globe. In his plan each would act only within its own region: Europe was to be policed by Britain and Russia; the Western Hemisphere, by the United States. On the other hand, he opposed establishing spheres of influence. But he could not explain why his scheme would not do just that.*
The Woodrow Wilson part of FDR seemed to be genuinely opposed to exclusive spheres of influence on moral principle. Yet the Theodore Roosevelt part of him recognized that the establishment of spheres might be the only way to do political business in an imperfect world—while the FDR in him cautioned not to reveal that to the public.
Others in American public life, many of them with minds less complicated, were also considering how to remake the world. Their schemes, like Roosevelt’s, failed to explain how goals were to be achieved with the specified means.
Looking ahead to the 1944 presidential elections, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Harrison E. Spangler, convened a party conference at Mackinac Island, Michigan, in September 1943 to adopt an agreed plan for postwar policy. All factions in the party were represented at Mackinac except for Willkie’s followers, regarded by the others as extreme internationalists. Vandenberg was principally responsible for the resulting Mackinac Declaration, which endorsed American membership in an international organization but stressed that the United States would not be bound by its decisions. This program was open to the objection that if its members were not bound by its decisions, the organization could not be effective.
Thomas E. Dewey was the leading candidate for the Republican nomination. His foreign policy adviser, John Foster Dulles, had become a lay religious leader with a special interest in plans for postwar world institutions. Dulles sponsored a plan for an international organization whose decisions could be imposed only through moral force. As moral force had not deterred Hitler or Mussolini, it was not clear why it would deter Stalin or others. Privately Dulles held more realistic views.
Walter Lippmann scored a popular success in 1943 with his book U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic, in which he argued that world peace could best be secured by a continuing alliance of the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain. The following year, as the differences between the three countries became more evident, he published U.S. War Aims, advocating the establishment of spheres of influence and the adoption of a policy of live and let live. The book proved to be a failure, eclipsed by Sumner Welles’s The Time for Decision, a Wilsonian work calling for a new League of Nations. Of course, the old one had not worked.
In the spring of 1944 Cordell Hull, loyal Wilsonian that he was, assembled a bipartisan group of eight senators, including Vandenberg, to work with the State Department on its draft of a proposed United Nations Charter. Vandenberg approved of it, but felt the United States should not join the UN unless Britain and the Soviet Union agreed to peace terms America would deem just. There was no realistic possibility that this condition would be met; Russia was going to keep the neighboring lands that she occupied.
In late June 1944 the Republican National Convention assembled in Chicago and nominated Dewey for President on the first ballot. Taft was running for reelection to the Senate that year, and in his place Ohio governor John W. Bricker headed the forces of isolationism at the convention. Dewey
chose Bricker to run with him for Vice President. The foreign policy platform, reflecting the views and language of Dulles and Vandenberg, cautiously favored U.S. participation in a postwar international peacekeeping organization.
The Democrats, too, met in Chicago, in July. Sensing a conservative swing in the electorate, FDR, in poor health but running for a fourth term as President, seemingly allowed party officials to designate the vice-presidential nominee. Under the surface of events, he moved deviously to select a candidate himself—someone who would not hurt the ticket in an election that he feared might be close.
The incumbent, Henry Wallace, was a liability who had to be disposed of because his fringe spiritualist beliefs and leftist politics threatened to disquiet the mainstream of the electorate. But dropping the Vice President would risk forfeiting the enthusiasm of FDR’s core of supporters to whom Wallace’s idealism, vision, and eloquence were of especial importance. If their hero were to be sacrificed, the rival clan would have to suffer a sacrifice in return.
Once again pushing forward and then pulling the rug out from under his oldest political associate, FDR launched a boom for James Byrnes as his candidate—and then allowed political boss Ed Flynn of the Bronx to veto the “assistant President” as a liability in courting Catholic and black voters, and organized labor to veto him as too conservative.
Having appeared to let the Right veto the candidate of the Left, and the Left veto the candidate of the Right, FDR allowed the real contest to go forward between the two names acceptable to everyone, and therefore to him: William O. Douglas and Harry S Truman. FDR somewhat preferred Douglas, but let the leaders of the party organization—many of whom seem to have secretly believed that Roosevelt might die in office—choose Truman instead, putting the middle-of-the-road Missouri senator in line for the White House.
The Democratic foreign policy platform strongly endorsed creation of an international organization “endowed with power to employ armed forces when necessary to prevent aggression and preserve peace,” but did not provide details of how this would be done.
The Republicans were placing their emphasis on retaining full freedom of action for the United States, while the Democrats were putting theirs on giving up enough national decision-making power to the United Nations so that it could be effective. But both pledged themselves to institutionalized international cooperation—which probably was as much as the electorate cared to know.
With foreign policy effectively excluded from the campaign, FDR won the November election. But as Roosevelt had foreseen, though his aides had not, his margin of victory over his Republican challenger was smaller than in 1940: 7.5 percent instead of 9.88 percent.
As the 1944 presidential campaign was taking place, representatives of the various United Nations were meeting at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire (July 1–22), and in the Dumbarton Oaks mansion in Georgetown, a section of Washington (August 21–October 7), to draw partial blueprints for, respectively, international financial institutions and a postwar international organization to preserve the peace.
Both conferences were held in an attempt to realize the new and largely American vision of a unitary world whose affairs would be dealt with by international institutions. At Bretton Woods, the United States sat down with 44 wartime allies to devise a postwar monetary order. Holding to her traditional goal, America hoped to break down blocs and barriers and to establish a stable global financial order within which her citizens could trade, invest, and do business anywhere in the world. The United States and Great Britain were the only two real financial powers at Bretton Woods, and the story of the conference is that of the dialogue and negotiations between the two. They were the most ambitious economic talks in history, aimed, as they were, at designing a new system for the entire world.
FDR would have preferred Dumbarton Oaks, too, to be essentially a negotiation between the great powers, but American internationalist opinion in both the Democratic and Republican parties was too much under the influence of Woodrow Wilson for that to be practical politics. The plans for an international organization to keep the peace, carried forward by the Dumbarton Oaks meeting, necessarily represented a compromise between FDR’s concepts, embodied in the Security Council, and Wilson’s, embodied in the General Assembly.
The productive functioning of international institutions depended on continuing cooperation between the various governments, and especially those of the three allied great powers. But in 1944 there was even more reason than there had been in 1943 to question whether that cooperation could in fact be relied upon. Buoyed with success, the Russians might well harden their position on postwar boundaries and on the future of eastern Europe.
Roosevelt was hopeful but also realistic. During the presidential campaign, he told Hull: “In regard to the Soviet government, it is true that we have no idea as yet what they have in mind, but we have to remember that in their occupied territory they will do more or less as they wish. We cannot afford to get into a position of merely recording protests on our part unless there is some chance of some of the protests being heeded.”
WESTERN LEADERS blinded themselves to the obvious: it was not just the United States that wanted to remake the world in its own image; so did the Soviet Union. Unlike a Woodrow Wilson—or a Leon Trotsky—Stalin was no believer in trying to change the whole world at once. He moved a step at a time. Victory in the Second World War would bring him control of neighboring countries. He would give priority in the years afterward to consolidating that control. In twenty years there might be another major war, in the chaotic aftermath of which he could annex an additional large portion of the globe. In the end his regime was destined to have it all; his version of Marxism told him that. So he could wait.
As communist leaders explained long afterward, the plan to buy Stalin’s cooperation with postwar credits was a nonstarter. No amount of credits from the United States would induce him to abandon his goals.
Indeed U.S. aid was in some ways dangerous to him: subversive of his regime. Harriman was not the first American ambassador to notice that the Soviet government denied to its people that the streams of supplies from the United States came from abroad. To accept help meant to open up Soviet society to foreign influence, and Stalin’s purposes were better served by keeping the lands he served closed off from the rest of the world.
To imagine that the men in the Kremlin would abjure their political religion in return for economic benefits was to underestimate the depth of their commitment to their faith. “Roosevelt believed in dollars,” Foreign Minister Molotov recalled decades later. “Not that he didn’t believe in anything else, but he considered his people to be so rich, and we so poor and so worn out, that we would come begging.… That’s where they miscalculated. That’s where they weren’t Marxists and we were. They woke up only when half of Europe was taken from them.”
Stalin’s theories left him impervious to demonstrations of Western friendliness. Marxism, which pictures events as being driven by objective social forces, is one of those philosophies that leave no room for individual humans to make a difference. If Churchill and Roosevelt promised sincerely that Britain and America would live forever in peace and harmony with a communist Russia, it would only mean that Churchill and Roosevelt were mistaken.
The Soviet dictator seems to have assumed his allies would understand that he would take control of the countries the Red Army conquered. Stalin told a group of Yugoslav communists: “Whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system” as far “as his army can reach.” Churchill therefore spoke a language the Kremlin understood, in offering, for example, to recognize Russia’s hold on Romania if Stalin would recognize Britain’s control of Greece. That was Moscow’s way of doing business.
When FDR spoke of the Big Three working together, however, he spoke in terms whose meaning the Russians must have found elusive. If there were to be two halves to the world, the Soviets could have one for their closed communist system and the Anglo-Americans
could have the other; and the two could coexist. But if the President, in suggesting a three-power world directorate, meant that there was to be only one world order, the issue would have to be joined as to whose kind of world it would be. To the extent that FDR was Rooseveltian—a realist willing to divide the world into spheres of exclusive control or influence—he could have a deal with Stalin. But to the extent that he was Wilsonian—an idealist determined to set the entire world free—he could only in the end have a war with Russia, whether hot or cold.
* Perhaps he was reaching for some sort of concept in which each great power would exercise merely a limited peacekeeping responsibility in its sphere while not interfering in other respects with the independence of the countries in its sphere, and without closing them off from outside influences or from relationships with other great powers.
54
HANDING OVER COMMAND
IN LATER YEARS Bullitt would allow it to be understood that he broke with FDR on the question of Soviet Russia. In fact, it was FDR who broke with him. Hull tried to obtain some sort of diplomatic appointment for Bullitt, but could not; the President never would forgive what he had done to Welles. Sardonically, FDR joked about sending him as minister to Saudi Arabia—having in mind, no doubt, a very large desert and a very small canteen of water.
As a boy, Bullitt must have read adventure stories in which the hero, ruined, runs away to join the foreign legion and wins glory. He did much the same thing. His career at an end, he asked Stimson to let him go on active duty with the army; Stimson refused. He then applied to join the forces of Free France. De Gaulle replied by hand: “There are some consolations. Your letter, for me, is one. It will be for all the French. Come now! Good and dear American friend. Our ranks are open to you. You will return with us into wounded Paris.…”
In the Time of the Americans Page 62
