In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  One of Harriman’s cables was handed to Roosevelt on his last day in Washington§ before leaving for Warm Springs for a rest. He read it, and banged his fist on the arms of his wheelchair. “Averell is right; we can’t do business with Stalin,” he said. “He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta.”

  Yet he continued to believe that problems should not be confronted. On April 11, 1945, the last full day of his life, he sent a short cable to Churchill in which he said: “I would minimize the general Soviet problem as much as possible because these problems, in one form or another, seem to arise every day and most of them straighten out.…” But he added: “We must be firm, however.…”

  FDR BELIEVED that if he smiled on the goddess who presided over his destiny, she would smile upon him. He also believed that if he ignored disagreeable facts and situations, eventually they would go away. Given time, he could reconcile the apparently irreconcilable. The main thing was never to lose faith.

  He would never accept the end of his youthful love affair with Lucy Mercer. The secret leaked out: she had been with him on the day of his death. It later transpired that she had been with him often; that after the death of her husband, she had come back to him.

  In Warm Springs, Georgia, in the early afternoon of April 12, the President was sitting for a portrait. He said something amusing. Lucy smiled. He was looking at her. Then he tried to put his hands to his head; he whispered, “I have a terrible headache,” and a bit more than two hours later was dead of a massive stroke. An elderly house servant who was in the room when Roosevelt was stricken said: “The last I remember he was looking into the smiling face of a beautiful woman.”

  LESS THAN FOUR HOURS after FDR’s death, following a hasty search of the White House bookcases for a Bible on which to take an oath, Harry S Truman was sworn in as President by Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone. Secretary of State Stettinius, whom Truman soon replaced with Byrnes, asked whether the next San Francisco conference, scheduled to convene in less than two weeks, should be postponed. The conference, following on the earlier San Francisco meeting, was to be devoted to drafting the final charter of the United Nations. Truman replied that the conference “should be held as directed by the President”—still meaning, by that, Franklin Roosevelt.

  A memorial appearing in Yank, the soldiers’ magazine, said that FDR “was the Commander in Chief, not only of our armed forces, but of our generation.”

  After the funeral service for FDR, Harry Hopkins told Robert Sherwood that “he was going to turn in his resignation at once and he thought the whole Cabinet should do likewise and get out.… [H]e said, ‘Truman has got to have his own people around him, not Roosevelt’s. If we were around, we’d always be looking at him and he’d know we were thinking, “The President wouldn’t do it that way.” ’ ”

  * Forrest C. Pogue, author of the classic biography of Marshall, dissents from the common view that Marshall brought pressure to bear on Roosevelt to obtain such a commitment.

  † See this page.

  ‡ Getting Russia to go to war with Japan was.

  § March 24, 1945.

  55

  ONE WORLD—OR TWO?

  AMERICA HAD BEEN HERE BEFORE. It was uncanny how the experience of the First World War seemed to be repeating itself. Once again American troops had arrived in France at least a year too late; the ally with the most powerful army was chiefly responsible for winning the war on the ground, and was imposing its own peace terms, of which the United States disapproved; in the hour of victory over Germany, the menace of Russian communism suddenly loomed up, threatening all Europe; and the President of the United States was stricken while attempting to patch up a lasting peace.

  All that was missing was the final scene: the withdrawal of the United States from international politics. Political leaders of both parties were keenly aware of this, and Republican foreign policy strategists led by Vandenberg and Dulles were as determined as the Democrats not to let it happen again. The foreign policy thinking of the Truman years has to be understood against the background of the overriding fear of America’s leaders that U.S. voters might once again want to turn their backs on the world.

  A quarter of a century earlier, the American political establishment had not followed Woodrow Wilson. Regretting it, they did so now.

  IN AN OFTEN QUOTED OBSERVATION, F. Scott Fitzgerald remarked that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” By that he meant, he explained, “for example, [to] be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

  Much of that quality was on display in the United States in the months immediately following FDR’s death. Leaders of both parties, joining together, went about creating the sort of new institutions to deal with world problems that Wilson had advocated—international institutions that could function only on the basis of voluntary cooperation between countries—even though they were on notice that the element essential to making such institutions work would be missing. Soviet Russia, with the world’s strongest army, would not cooperate in building a unitary new world order.

  It was curious timing. For the first time, the United States was prepared to participate in an international alliance. Only Taft and Herbert Hoover remained isolationist; even Vandenberg, in a famous Senate speech in January 1945, admitted that he had been wrong and now was a convert to internationalism. The willingness of right-wing middle western Republican leaders to ally with a Russia that was communist had been a long time in coming, but when it came, it turned out that the leaders in the Kremlin would not enter into a permanent alliance with open societies.

  PEPPERY HARRY TRUMAN, a short, combative, folksy blend of simplicity and shrewdness, had barely known FDR. In his three months as Vice President he had not been briefed on what the country’s military and civilian leaders were doing. He had little time in which to learn a lot.

  Two days after becoming President, he had lunch at his desk with Harry Hopkins, the single person best qualified to tell him the inside story of everything. In his diary Truman recorded: “Discussed the whole history of the Roosevelt administration 1933 to date—particular emphasis on the foreign visits.… We discussed Stalin, Churchill, de Gaulle, Cairo, Casablanca, Tehran, and Yalta.” To that meeting, his diary indicates with a humor that may have been conscious, Truman devoted a half hour.

  He quickly formed opinions about the other major world leaders. He explained to Mrs. Roosevelt that “the difficulties with Churchill are very nearly as exasperating as they are with the Russians.” He claimed that “Russians distribute lies about us.… Our papers lie about … the Russians—and the British out lie … us both.”

  Truman received a variety of advice from his senior advisers as to what to do about the Soviet Union. Harriman warned that unless America were to adopt a firm attitude, the Russians might continue to turn neighboring states into communist vassals; and he told Forrestal that the United States “might well have to face”—from Soviet communism—“an ideological warfare just as vigorous and dangerous as Fascism or Nazism.”

  At a White House meeting April 23, Stettinius, who knew no better, said that the Kremlin had broken its Yalta pledge to allow Poland a freely elected democratic government. Notes of the meeting show that Admiral Leahy replied “that he had left Yalta with the impression that the Soviet government had no intention of permitting free government to operate in Poland, and that he would have been surprised had the Soviet government behaved any differently than it did.” Stimson, pointing out that the Russians had kept their word in military matters, urged going slowly in breaking with them, and said that they might interpret their political pledges differently: according to their own lights, they might be fulfilling their promises.

  Marshall cautioned against acting in such a way that Russia would delay entering the Far East war, as her help was greatly needed.

  According to one set
of notes of the meeting, “The President said … that he felt our agreements with the Soviet Union so far had been a one-way street and that he could not continue; it was now or never. He intended to go on with the plans for San Francisco”—the conference to create the postwar United Nations peacekeeping organization—“and if the Russians did not wish to join us they could go to hell.…” Shortly afterward Truman met with Molotov and gave the Soviet minister a tough and pointed lecture, telling him that if Russian leaders did not want to be talked to like that in future, all they had to do was keep their promises.

  Harriman, on the suggestion of his aide Chip Bohlen, proposed that Truman send the ailing Harry Hopkins on a mission to Moscow to meet with Stalin and resolve matters. The President did so, but feeling that he had serious problems with Great Britain, too, he sent another envoy to London. He asked another invalid veteran of the Roosevelt years, former ambassador to Russia Joseph Davies, to undertake the trip. Truman held Davies in high regard, though it is not easy to understand why. In London Davies told the prime minister that his (Churchill’s) warnings about the Soviet threat were like those the world had heard from Hitler and Goebbels. He counseled the British leader to give more credence to the Kremlin’s professions of good faith. Davies reported to Truman that Churchill “was basically more concerned over preserving England’s position in Europe than in preserving peace.” FDR’s chief of staff, Leahy, endorsing Davies’s report, commented to the new President that “this is consistent with our staff estimate of Churchill’s attitude throughout the war.”

  In the same vein, before leaving for Moscow, Hopkins told Forrestal, Harriman, and Bohlen “that he was skeptical about Churchill, at least in the … Anglo-American-Russian relationship; that he thought it was of vital importance that we not be maneuvered into a position where Great Britain had us lined up with them as a bloc against Russia to implement England’s European policy.”

  Sending Hopkins off on his mission, Truman noted in his diary that he had told his special envoy to “make it clear to Uncle Joe Stalin that I knew what I wanted—and that I intended to get it—peace for the world for at least 90 years. That Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria, Czeckoslovakia [sic], Austria, Yugo-Slavia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia et al. made no difference to U.S. interests.… That Poland should have ‘free elections,’ at least as free as Hague, Tom Pendergast …” or any other crooked machine politician would allow. “Uncle Joe should make some sort of gesture—whether he means or not to keep it.… Any smart political boss will do that.”

  Truman indicated that “to have a reasonably lasting peace the three great powers must be able to trust one another and they must themselves honestly want it. They must also have the confidence of the smaller nations. Russia hasn’t the confidence of the small nations, nor has Britain. We have. I want peace and I’m willing to fight for it. It is my opinion we’ll get it.”

  Truman’s envoy Hopkins received a warm reception when he arrived in Russia, obtained agreement from Stalin on the issues necessary to let the San Francisco conference go forward to create the United Nations Charter, and received reassurances as well on the date of Russian entry into the war against Japan.

  THE TRANSITIONAL YEARS following Roosevelt’s death were marked in the administration by the coexistence of inconsistent points of view, by rapid and often complete changes of opinion, and by frequent misunderstandings of foreign politics—while the mercurial President seemed impulsive in his judgments and erratic in his behavior.

  Truman told his diary (June 7, 1945): “I’m not afraid of Russia. They’ve always been our friends and I can’t see any reason why they shouldn’t always be.” Naively, he compared the average Soviet citizen, who had no voice in his government, to “a stock holder in the Standard Oil of New Jersey”—presumably someone who owned only one share.

  He continued to misunderstand both Stalin and his one-man dictatorship. Truman wrote (July 17, 1945): “I can deal with Stalin. He is honest—but smart as hell.” As late as 1948 Truman said in public that “I like Old Joe,” describing the Soviet leader as “a decent fellow [who] is a prisoner of the Politburo …,” adding that Stalin “can’t do what he wants to do. He makes agreements, and if he could, he would keep them; but the people who run the government are very specific in saying that he can’t keep them.”

  Truman shocked both Britain and the USSR by terminating the lend-lease program on which the two of them had come to depend. For England, the cutoff was a disaster. But a Gallup Poll showed 60 percent of Americans opposed to any aid to Britain at all.

  Then, at Potsdam, the last of the Big Three conferences—and the one during which Churchill learned that he had been voted out of office—Truman shifted the U.S. position on Germany. Though at the time that country was divided “temporarily” into zones of military occupation by the Allied forces, she would not, it was decided, eventually be dismembered. This created a dangerous new source of tensions between Russia and the West: a prize so dangerous in enemy hands that each would have to try to win it.

  The goal of the United Nations alliance had been to destroy Nazi Germany. It was an ambiguous objective because it used two words to describe the enemy instead of one. Nazis were the enemy to Stimson, Hull, Churchill, and Truman; Germans were, to Roosevelt and Stalin. From Stalin’s perspective, Truman’s walking away from FDR’s commitment to dismember Germany might well have looked like America’s unilateral renunciation of her alliance with Russia. Truman did not see it that way, and evidently had no inkling, either, that Stalin might see it that way.

  From the Moscow embassy, Harriman continued to urge getting tough with the Russians. Truman wavered uneasily between doing so and not. The Russian dictator kept his promise to declare war on Japan, but after the dropping of the two atom bombs, Emperor Hirohito surrendered, rendering Soviet help unnecessary. At that point American leaders would have preferred Stalin to break his word. Japan surrendered two days after Russia entered the war. Harriman, without even consulting Washington, refused the Soviet request to participate in the ceremony of accepting Japan’s capitulation; and Byrnes repeated to Molotov that there would be no Russian forces in the army of occupation.

  Still, there were the promises made to Stalin at Yalta—matters such as the Kuril Islands—and now Americans began to be aware of these. It proved a great embarrassment to Truman, and even more so to Byrnes. In FDR’s last years, Byrnes had handled domestic affairs while the President did foreign affairs; when Truman took office, he intended to do just the reverse, letting Byrnes manage foreign policy while he concentrated on matters at home. Byrnes was a senior statesman, but his only claim to expertise in foreign policy was that he had been at Yalta. Before Truman had been President for two weeks, Byrnes presented him with a red leather-bound copy of the shorthand notes he had taken at the conference, which, given his skill as a professional court reporter, could be argued were the authentic record of the proceedings. He was staking out a claim to be the specialist in the Yalta accords.

  But month after month new details surfaced of secret agreements, made when Byrnes was not present, that contradicted the assertions made by the administration about U.S.-Soviet commitments. By the summer of 1945, the President knew that he had been wrong about the Polish accord between Stalin and FDR—and he still could not find the only American copy of the Far East pact between the two men. Yalta, supposedly his strength, was blowing up in Byrnes’s face—and in Truman’s. Truman was not to blame, Byrnes told him, for the “duplicity and hypocrisy which had been practiced by the President”—i.e., Roosevelt—but the American public might not agree.

  Byrnes made a game effort to deal with the situation in such a way as to protect Truman, himself, FDR’s reputation, and the Democratic administration. He used stick and carrot. Backed by the implicit threat of the U.S. atom bomb, but offering the prospect of an opportunity for Russia to share in the atomic energy monopoly, he threw himself into making the best deal he could with the Soviet Union.

  At the London
meeting of foreign ministers in September 1945, Byrnes tried to work things out. The American public position was that at Yalta, Stalin had promised democracy in eastern Europe. Byrnes now knew that was not so, but could not admit it because he was the one who had been maneuvered into telling everyone that in the first place. He therefore tried to obtain concessions from Russia, however small or cosmetic, so that he could go back to Washington saying that the Soviet Union was now keeping its word.

  He tried to wrap it all up: “We have pushed these babies as far as they will go,” he told John Foster Dulles, a Republican member of his team, “and I think we better start thinking about compromise.” But Dulles would not go along with that. He threatened to break with the administration and attack publicly if Byrnes did not stand firm on making the Russians live up to their alleged commitments.

  So Byrnes moved away from compromise and no longer could reach an agreement with the other side. A Soviet staff member complained to Charles Bohlen that although he had been told the secretary was “practical,” he was not showing himself so. “When is he going to start trading?” asked the Russian.

  Byrnes found himself out on a limb. He knew the Soviet Union would not introduce democracy into eastern Europe; could not be forced to do so, short of going to war; and did not believe it had pledged to do so. But he also realized that the people of the United States could not be told any of those things without courting disaster for his administration and his party in the next elections. American public opinion was moving in an anti-Soviet direction. Byrnes had been left behind by the mainstream. Leahy accused him of appeasement. Truman started to distance himself from the secretary.

  The idea of sharing atomic energy secrets with the USSR—and doing so without first consulting the Senate—aroused the wrath of Vandenberg and other leading members of the Foreign Relations Committee. They blamed Byrnes; Truman, they felt, simply did not understand.