“I’ll write the response.”
“Good.”
Hopkins takes a cigarette pack from his coat pocket. He shakes one straight into his mouth. Matches are already in his hand.
“He doesn’t get it, Harry.” Roosevelt feels the urge to push himself back from the desk, stand and pace, it never goes away, wanting that freedom. Instead he claps a hand on the desk, settles for this. “It’s not the seventeenth century anymore. England is done with that. Europe is done with that.Two world wars have been fought, in consecutive generations. Everything’s changed. The whole world.”
Hopkins says, “Winston’s just an old-style imperialist. He’s even said so. What was it? ‘I have not become the King’s Prime Minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.’”
Roosevelt slaps the table again. “Tell me one thing, Harry. Name one thing British imperialism has done in four hundred years for their colonial peoples.”
“Not damned much.”
“I won’t have it, Harry. We fought World War I to make the world safe for democracy and all we did was make it safe for imperialism. That is not going to be the new world order after this war. That’s not what the United Nations is all about. You know, if England wants us to help them stay a first-class power, they’re going to have to stop this oppressive imperialism. England’s going to have to reckon with us, Harry. That’s not something they’re used to yet. But they will be, soon as we finish this war for them.”
Hopkins scribbles notes on a pad. Without looking up he elevates his free hand, lifts the thumb. That’s right.
Roosevelt says into the room, “Don’t get me wrong, I love Winston. He’s one of the greatest men of this century, no doubt about it. But he wants to continue old-fashioned balance-of-power politics. I’ve got news for him, balance-of-power is why we’re in this war in the first place. All it does is hang on to the same tensions and alliances that made peace impossible after World War I. And we get sucked into two foreign wars this century. Those politics are ancient. What can you do?”
Harry’s cigarette goes to his mouth. Still writing, the cigarette dangling on the dampness of his lips, he says, “England’s ancient, Mr. President. What can you do?”
Roosevelt nods. “The United Nations. America. Britain. China and Russia. Got to have Russia in or it won’t work.”
Hopkins finishes and raises his head. He looks like a starved, neglected pooch.
“Your boy Stalin. That’s a bastard.”
“Oh, Joe’s all right, Harry. He’s get-at-able.”
“He’s a totalitarian.”
“And he’s killed eight out of ten Germans in this war. Damn it, when this is over they’ve got a right to be at the head table more than we do, certainly more than England or France.”
“He’s tricky, Mr. President.”
“He knows what he wants, that’s all. He’s political to a fault. Ever since Stalingrad he’s gotten the idea he can kick the Germans’ ass without us if he has to. The key to Joe is to let him know you like him, you like Russia, and you want to work with them. They’ll go turtle in a minute if you let them, but we’re going to keep them in this alliance after the war, Harry. I don’t care if Winston screams bloody murder all the way to Moscow and back, we’re keeping the United Nations alive and the Reds are in it. That’s my dream, Harry. That’s my legacy. A lasting peace in the world after two world wars. No power politics. No bullies.”
Roosevelt nods at his own words. He wants Harry to leave now, he’s tuckered. Hopkins spots this and rises.
“I’ll have the cable for you in half an hour.”
“Great. Happy hour?”
“Grace has already cleared my schedule.”
Hopkins departs. The Oval Office alone with Roosevelt now reverberates with the notions and actions of presidents before him who made the weightiest decisions here. Stalin, a bastard. A totalitarian. Roosevelt knows this. Ambassador Harriman and others never let him forget it. But what all the official naysayers don’t reckon on is America’s influence. With a powerful America as a partner and counterbalance, we can show the Red leadership how to make their country prosperous and modern without brutalizing their own people along the way. Russia can be tamed. Roosevelt’s mentor Wilson, who was President during the Russian Revolution, knew this. Like Wilson, Roosevelt admires the will of the Russian people, their ability to sacrifice, suffer, and survive. They boggle the imagination.
Roosevelt regrets that Stalin is a tyrant. But communism is essentially an egalitarian form of government, isn’t it? Communism wants to share resources, empower all its classes from the bottom up, build a classless society. Not too different, Roosevelt thinks, from his own New Deal. History will see the similarities if some of the currently living don’t. Without the repressive tactics, you could view Stalin as another progressive liberal. A socialist. America’s full of socialists. Push the analogy a little further and you get Churchill the Republican, pledged to status quo, business as usual.
So what if Uncle Joe wants to expand his reach into eastern Europe? Russia’s got a right to protect its borders, how many times have invaders waltzed in through Poland? It’s unfortunate but eastern Europe may be the meal the rest of us serve the Russian bear after the war. Small price, Roosevelt thinks, for a world at peace. The United Nations will just have to work hard to contain Russian expansionism the same way we’ll unravel British imperialism.
There’s going to be a power vacuum in western Europe after the war. Germany and France are shot to hell. England’s on the ropes. If Russia fills the gap, it won’t be such a bad thing. If we can make Soviet-American cooperation a reality, we might together do a far better job running European and world affairs than the old Great Powers have done.
Something big will come out of this war. A new heaven, a new earth.
But Churchill just aggravates Stalin. In March of’42, just three months after the U.S. entered the war, Roosevelt had to write Churchill:
i know you will not mind my being brutally frank when i tell you that i think i can personally handle stalin better than either your foreign office or my state department. stalin hates the guts of all your top people. he thinks he likes me better, and i hope he will continue to.
Roosevelt met Stalin for the first time in November of ’43 at Teheran. That was the farthest from Moscow Stalin was willing to travel. It was the only airplane trip the Marshal had ever taken, and he assured Roosevelt it was his last. Roosevelt ignored Churchill’s plea to stay with the Prime Minister at the British Embassy. Instead, the President accepted Uncle Joe’s invitation to take quarters at the Russian compound in Teheran.
At the Teheran meeting, Roosevelt did everything he could to establish warm relations with Stalin on this, their first face-to-face encounter. Initially, the little Marshal in his unadorned mustard-colored uniform with great shoulder boards like shelves was detached and stiff, exposing little humanity where Roosevelt could attach his charm. Three times the President met with Stalin, all the while refusing Churchill’s requests for just one private lunch. The full plenary sessions were argumentative but little more than rubber stamps for what the President and Stalin had discussed in Churchill’s absence. The nightly state dinners were tense affairs, with Stalin and Churchill exchanging barbed blandishments. Stalin was not going to forget how twenty-four years earlier Churchill railed in Parliament against the Red Revolution, supporting the intervention of British troops and money on the side of the czar against Lenin’s forces. Roosevelt enjoyed the bald enmity between the two, hoping it would reinforce Stalin’s preference for America. But he could not chip the grimace from Stalin’s face until he turned on Churchill himself.
Roosevelt planned the ploy in advance. Assembling for one of the official meetings, he leaned over to Stalin to indicate the Prime Minister, who’d developed a head cold. In a stage whisper audible to all, Roosevelt said, “Winston’s cranky this morning, he got up on the wrong side of the bed.”When the translation was complete, the
President noted a vague smile crease Stalin’s mouth. He pressed on, teasing Churchill for his Britishness and his John Bull resemblance. Churchill was offended and scowled, turning ever redder, until Stalin broke into a belly laugh. For the first time in three days of meetings, Roosevelt felt an intimacy open between him and Stalin. At that moment, for the first time, he called the Marshal “Uncle Joe.” It was a miscalculation. Stalin’s mirth dissolved. He made to leave the table. Only when Roosevelt made the reference into a compliment, comparing him to the cherished American “Uncle Sam,” was the Marshal mollified.
At another session regarding the postwar fate of Germany, on Churchill’s sixty-ninth birthday, Stalin joked that at the end of the war fifty thousand German officers should be selected for execution. Churchill found this in bad taste. For comedy Roosevelt played the role of peacemaker, chiming in that Stalin’s figure was too high, a compromise should be reached. They should only shoot forty-nine thousand. Churchill left the room in disgust, and was brought back by a cajoling Stalin. Then Roosevelt’s eldest son, Elliott, a captain in the Army Air Corps, turned antic, exclaiming, “Hell, why not shoot a hundred thousand!” Stalin went over and wrapped his arm around the young man’s shoulders.
Major decisions were made at Teheran. Uncle Joe was satisfied. Churchill was corralled. Roosevelt viewed the conference as a great success.
Now that the war’s end is in sight, he sees no reason to change that formula. Let no one alter. Or falter.
Harry Hopkins returns with the proposed cable to Churchill. The President scans it. He changes the date of his arrival in Malta from February first to the second, the same day the presidential party is expected in Yalta. This way there’ll be no time for an official meeting with Winston. Maybe dinner.
He tells Harry, “Send this to Uncle Joe too. That’ll lock down the schedule and we shouldn’t hear any more about it.”
“Done.”
Harry turns to go. The man’s shoulder blades protrude beneath his suit coat.
Roosevelt takes up a cigarette. He thinks of Winston and his cigars. Big ostentatious ones, which the Prime Minister has trouble closing his lips over. He talks without taking them out, making his scratchy, constant voice even more strident. Roosevelt likes Winston Churchill, admires his flights of Victorian rhetoric. He’s sorry he has to make one of the most extraordinary men of history, leader of one of the world’s great and courageous nations, look so small.
The President spreads both hands over his legs, squeezes powerful fingers over the deadened thighs. He looks at Harry’s wraith wrists swinging while the man walks away, the flesh pasty on the back of his friend’s neck. Harry, who’s been trying to die for years now.
Roosevelt thinks about the spell that came over him an hour ago in front of Maloney. Exhaustion. Confusion. Goddammit.
Roosevelt swallows a bilious tang, a fear. He lights his cigarette to chase the taste. After one puff he snuffs the cigarette.
Harry and me, Winston and Joe. America. England. This whole planet of men and nations. Our peace will be costly. But it’s coming. We’ll all birth it together.
He sits back and lowers his eyelids. One thing about the White House, it does not disappear when you close your eyes. He feels the Oval Office nudge him, history like Iago in his ear whispers, “Open your eyes, Franklin.”
He complies. The old dead presidents of the room tell him.
They speak with dozens of voices.
Don’t ever be sorry. For anything you do as President.
We know what we’re talking about, son.
History is not made by men who are sorry.
~ * ~
* * *
January 11, 1945, 1330 hours
SHAEF headquarters
Reims, France
if you take the face of every man, woman, and child of kansas and you blend them all together, you will get the face of General Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Bandy has snapped a hundred photos of the General for Life. In every one, Bandy captures the chin of a stolid farm lad, the eyes of a veteran plainsman, the soft cheeks and skin of the dairymaid, the crinkles of a girl, the doll hair of a tyke. Somehow, when Bandy releases the shutter, Ike never has his eyes closed, his mouth askew, or his hat cockeyed. He is composed when he’s angry, balanced when hurried, firm when sweet. He is the erect American everyman from Abilene.
Bandy stands near the door and waits. He’s in a large octagonal room that used to be a banquet hall in this former technical school for boys. The crystal chandelier dangling overhead must weigh a ton. War maps festoon every inch of wall and table. Wax pencil arrows in black, red, blue, and green crosshatch them all, a crazy quilt of troops and machines on the move, eyeing each other across Europe, antagonistic colors.
Female staffers operate banks of telephone connections, plugging and unplugging. Young men in crisp olive drab uniforms stride left and right shuttling sheaves of paper to someplace or another, where Bandy supposes they drop one and pick up a replacement. Other bright young men lean over the maps, drawing, erasing, measuring life and death in crayon. Every sound in the big room and the other rooms down the hall makes the same amount of noise, no one endeavor in here stands out. SHAEF, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, hums. Bandy watches Eisenhower in the center of it all, chain-smoking Camels. The General points, pats young men on backs, talks into phones, ponders over spread-out charts, all the while emitting smoke.
Bandy left home three days after New Year’s. Life magazine sent a car up from Memphis to ferry him to an air base for a flight to Norfolk, where he boarded a Navy supply ship to London, then a quick flight to Paris, a car to Reims. The trip took six days. He wrote no letters to Victoria on the voyage, they didn’t part the best of friends. She’ll be all right, Bandy thinks. She always has been. This time is no different.
She doesn’t understand, is the problem. Bandy taps his foot on the worn oriental carpet. Twenty feet away Ike taps his foot on the same carpet, impatient with some progress report he takes over the phone. Bandy’s camera bag loops over his shoulder. Inside it are a new 35mm Leica and his old battle-ax Speed Graphic. They weigh much more than merely their poundage. They’re not just Bandy’s tools, they’re his purpose. Take the cameras away and he’s only a tobacco farmer, a man, flesh and blood, not exceptional at all. But with them he can stand so close to the flames of history he can toast a marshmallow. What he sees, the whole United States sees. But him first.
Eisenhower hasn’t noticed Bandy yet, the General’s focus is tightened to where it doesn’t extend past his corona of tobacco fumes. Others walk in and out of his clouds. Eisenhower embraces what importance they bear for whatever time it takes, then moves like a little bit of Kansas weather over someone or something else to do with the war. Bandy wonders if Eisenhower isn’t breathing some good old Tennessee leaf in those Camels.
Eisenhower jabs a cigarette out in an ashtray on the huge map table. He digs into his shirt pocket for the pack, finds it empty. Scowling, he crumples it into a ball. Bandy tosses a fresh pack through the air, spinning it to land and skid across the map right in front of Ike. The General looks up. His head tilts for a moment at who would toss things at the Supreme Allied Commander.
“Charley?”
“General.”
Eisenhower unwraps the pack, considering Bandy.
“You went home, I heard.”
“I came back, sir.”
“I take that as a failure on my part, son. I apologize. Your wife ticked?”
“Plenty, sir.”
“You’ll give her my apologies. Come over here.”
Bandy advances to the table, opposite Ike, who lights up, then runs a palm over his hair, thin and pale as Midwestern corn silk.
Eisenhower has long appreciated the value of good relations with the press. He knows America cannot wage a prolonged, costly war without popular support back home, and only the press can create that. Ike has always treated those men and women armed only with cameras or notep
ads as valuable members of the Allied team. He has promised them to be honest and open, and Bandy considers that for the most part the General has kept his word. Ike knows many of the journalists by name. Back in Washington, before taking command of the Allied European Force, Ike became an admirer of Bandy’s battle photography in Life. While others are ducking, Charles Bandy is standing. When others are holding their ground, Charles Bandy is creeping forward, to get shots of the soldiers from the front when they advance too. Eisenhower values courage. He rewards Bandy for his gumption as well as his contribution to the war effort with access to the Supreme Commander that other photogs and reporters are denied. The General and Bandy first met three weeks before D-Day. Bandy saw a man who spoke in plain terms, who knew his job and was loyal in how he went about doing it. A man who appreciated a good tobacco farmer.
The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] Page 6
