The President, King had found on arrival, was “sitting up in his bed” on the second floor of the White House mansion, “wearing a gray sweater,” smoking. He’d been “reading newspapers. Gave me a very hearty welcome. Began at once by saying he was having a [hard] time with the new Congress,” given the loss of so many Democratic seats in the November midterm elections, “but hoped that would go by.”12
Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, the leading isolationist opponent of the New Deal in Congress and eldest son of Republican president William Howard Taft, was a particular sore, the President had remarked—quoting to King an account in that day’s paper. Taft was reported to be opposing the President’s attempt to make a new deal with the Panamanian government over the Panama Canal area.
The President had smiled mischievously. “Asked me,” King recorded, “if I knew the U.S. owned the largest red-light district anywhere.”13
Mackenzie King—a staunch, Bible-obsessed Presbyterian who had forsworn alcohol for the duration of the war—was well aware how much Roosevelt enjoyed teasing him. When King confessed his ignorance, the President had “described how one of his ancestors,” William H. Aspinwall, had given up hope of building a transcontinental railway across “the isthmus of Panama, having mortgaged [his] homes in the States.” Then suddenly he’d heard gold had been “discovered in California. He knew at once that his railway would be a success and half a dozen offers were immediately made by wealthy men to complete his road. Later, when De Lesseps came to develop the canal, the red-light district developed in that area. The U.S. are now wishing to get control of certain parts and had to purchase this area . . .”14
It was typical of Roosevelt to use the irony of a vexing situation to render it less frustrating—U.S. senators “querulous about different things” such as this while the President struggled to win a global war and create the basis for subsequent peace.
Beneath African palms, in complete privacy and in secret, the President would soon, he told Mackenzie King, be able to discuss his vision for the world that would follow war: especially his idea of a United Nations Security Council led by the four powers.
First, however, the war had to be won by the United Nations. Roosevelt had already explained his current strategy to the supreme commander of the Soviet Armies, Joseph Stalin, in a cable he’d dispatched from the White House on November 19, 1942. “American and British Staffs are now studying further moves in the event that we secure the whole south shore of the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to Syria,” the President had informed Stalin. “Before any further step is taken, both Churchill and I want to consult with you and your Staff because whatever we do next in the Mediterranean will have a definite bearing on your magnificent campaign and your proposed moves this coming Winter.” U.S. and British armies were not only forcing Hitler to keep substantial numbers of troops, artillery, tanks, and planes in Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and northern France to defend against the threat of Allied invasion in the West, but were forcing Hitler to do so in the Mediterranean now, in order to keep Italy fighting as a primary Axis partner; this would make it difficult, if not impossible, for Hitler to achieve unilateral military victory against the Russians.15
Stalin had not immediately responded to the request, however, as the President confided to King—the Russian dictator’s focus having been on the Russian counteroffensive that began that day at Stalingrad. A week later, on November 25, Roosevelt cabled again. The President had congratulated Stalin on the Russian breakthrough west of Stalingrad, which threatened to cut off the German salient stretching as far east as the Volga. In order to remind his Russian counterpart that the United States was fighting a global, not simply regional, war, however, he’d informed Stalin of a similar U.S. game changer in the Pacific, where the U.S. Navy had decimated the Japanese fleet attempting to reinforce the Japanese army on Guadalcanal. The Japanese had been compelled to evacuate the island, and U.S. forces were now “sinking far more Jap ships and destroying more planes than they can build.”16
This time Stalin had responded. “As regards operations in the Mediterranean, which are developing so favorably, and may influence the whole military situation in Europe, I share your view that appropriate consultations between the Staffs of the United States, Great Britain and the USSR have become desirable,” the Russian premier wired back to the White House on November 27, 1942. But beyond this—and his congratulations on the U.S. Navy’s success in the Pacific as well as American-British operations in North Africa—he declined to be specific. In particular he had ignored the idea of a meeting of national leaders, not even according it a mention.17
Finally, on December 2, the President had decided to get to the point. In yet another cable sent from the Map Room at the White House, he’d urged Stalin to address “the necessity for reaching early strategic decisions” through “an early meeting.” This was not simply because military staffs, conferring on their own, would be unable to reach decisions “without our approval,” but because Roosevelt felt “we should come to some tentative understanding about the procedures which should be adopted in the event of a German collapse”—i.e., the postwar.
For this, it would be vital to meet in person, the President had emphasized. “My most compelling reason is that I am very anxious to have a talk with you,” he’d written. “My suggestion would be that we meet secretly in some secure place in Africa that is convenient to all three of us. The time, about January fifteenth to twentieth [1943]. We would each of us bring a very small staff of our top Army, Air and Naval commanders.” He thought a rendezvous in “southern Algeria or at or near Khartoum,” in Egypt, would fit the bill.18
Mackenzie King had been awed and delighted by the President’s initiative—touched that Roosevelt would share with him both the background and his confidential intentions: his game plan.
Still waiting for Stalin’s response, the President had the next day discussed with King the problem of Churchill and Great Britain—to which Canada, as a Dominion of the British Empire, was constitutionally tethered. The President still deplored Churchill’s stand over India and unwillingness to abide by the terms of the Atlantic Charter he’d signed up to; also Churchill’s dislike of the Beveridge Plan for postwar social security in Britain. Churchill’s obstinacy in pursuing the postwar revival of the “British Empire,” rather than inspiring and leading a new, postcolonial “British Commonwealth of Nations,” came under the President’s caustic fire—as well as Churchill’s aversion to the notion of postwar United Nations trusteeships. “When I asked him about Churchill’s attitude, he said the reply which he [Churchill] had made in discussing these things was a rather sad one,” King recorded that night. “It was to the effect that he [Churchill] would not have anything to do with any of these questions. That when the war was over he [Churchill] would be through with public life,” and would turn to “writing.”19
That evening, December 5, 1942, there had been cocktails at 7:30 p.m., mixed by the President himself. (“The President said: we will not ask Mackenzie to take any cocktails tonight. I appreciated,” the wartime teetotaler noted, “his anticipating my refusal.”)20 There was then dinner with Harry Hopkins and his wife, Louise. And several short documentary and newsreel films, in black and white and in color.
Looking at the documentary footage that had been spliced together—some of it “going back to the days of his governorship in the N.Y. state,” as well as events like Roosevelt’s “flight to Chicago at the time of the [1932] Convention”—“reviews of troops, etcetera”—King had found himself amazed. “It made me marvel how a man had ever stood what he did in dealing with crowds over so many years,” the quiet Canadian had noted, given the President’s physical disability and the demands of America’s almost continuous electoral process, compared to the Canadian parliamentary system. “What was the most interesting was the way in which he, from the outset, had stood for the new deal and the rights of the common man in all his addresses,” King dictated. “It was a real recre
ation and most pleasant,” he’d added. “As it was getting on toward 10, I asked the President if he did not think he should retire and let him rest. He said no, we want to have a talk about another matter. He had said earlier in the day: ‘I want to speak particularly about Stalin tonight.’”21
In the President’s Oval Study (or “chart room,” as King called it in the nightly diary he dictated), “the President sat on the sofa and told me to come and sit beside him there, to get his good ear, the right ear.
“He then ordered a horse’s neck for each of us: ginger ale and the rind of an orange. Harry Hopkins came in and sat down for a few minutes and then retired. The President then started in at once on what he has in mind as a post-war programme. I looked up at the clock at that moment. The hands were exactly at 10 to 10.”22
A fervent believer in spiritualism as well as Christianity, King was forever watching the hands of the clock for signs of significance. Given the magnitude of the President’s global problems—war in the Pacific, war in China and Asia, war in the Soviet Union, war in the Mediterranean, war in the Atlantic, war in the Aleutians, preparations for eventual cross-Channel landings—it had seemed extraordinary to Mackenzie King that the President of the United States could set these concerns aside, in his mind, and share his thinking on the world that would come after the war was won.
Before addressing the matter of Stalin, the President had given his own views on the objectives or principles that should guide the victorious nations. “We talked of the 4 freedoms. Two of which,” the President remarked, “we cannot do much about.” Freedom of religion, Roosevelt had explained, was “something that the people have to work out for themselves. The State cannot impose anything. The freedom of speech: that too is something that will take care of itself”—though the President wished something could be done “to prevent exaggerated and untrue statements” from being broadcast or printed, especially the near-treasonable articles constantly being published by “sensational papers,” such as Colonel McCormick’s right-wing, isolationist Chicago Tribune.
This left “the other two” freedoms, which were perhaps more crucial, at least in planning a postwar universe: “freedom from fear and freedom from want.”23
Of the two, the President told King, “the first is necessarily the most important, as the second depends on it. As respects freedom from fear,” the President had continued, “that can only be brought about when we put an end to arming nations against each other.” In the case of Germany and Japan, the arms treaties signed after World War I had proven useless. The German and Japanese capacity for making war must therefore be completely and irrevocably destroyed, once and for all time, he felt. This was something that could not be secured by negotiation, à la Versailles Treaty, but only achieved by a policy of “unconditional surrender” to the Allies, the President explained.
It was the first time King had heard President Roosevelt use the term, and he listened most carefully as the President explained.24
“My great hero in all of this today,” Roosevelt remarked, “is General Grant. In bringing the civil war to an end, Grant demanded to Lee unconditional surrender. He would make no agreements, no negotiated peace.”25 Repeating the point, the President said: “I think there should be no negotiated peace” at all with the Germans and Japanese. “It should be an unconditional surrender. After Grant had gathered in all the guns, ammunition, etc., there were quantities of horses remaining. Grant turned to Lee and said to let the horses go back to the field. For the people to use them in the cultivation of the soil, get back to the art of peace. That I think at present is what we should do with Germany. Deprive her of all right to make planes, tanks, guns, etc., but not take away any of her territories nor prevent her development in any way.”26
King had asked if the President was confident of dictating unconditional surrender to the forces of the Third Reich on that basis. “He replied: ‘yes’”—with Japan to follow: “that he thought what should be done was to defeat Germany first; demand unconditional surrender and then for the 3 powers: Britain, U.S. and Russia to turn to Japan and say: now we demand the same of you. If you want to save human life, you must surrender unconditionally at once. If not, the 3 of us will bring all our forces to bear, and will fight till we destroy you. Russia would then be persuaded to attack Japan. It would not take a year to bring about her defeat. He was not sure the Japanese would accept any unconditional surrender, and would probably seek to fight on. However that plan of campaign would bring its results”—the world finally and definitively spared the possibility of a renascence of German or Japanese militarism—ever. “If the Japanese did not accept unconditional surrender,” he added in a remark that would have immense significance later, “then they should be bombed till they were brought to their knees.”
Thinking of the ever-burgeoning size of America’s air forces as well as the terrifying new bomb—using vital Canadian minerals such as radium and uranium27—that he’d ordered to be developed, the President confided to King how the United States would have to push its forces to within bombing distance of Japan, while the war in Europe went on. “At present, Russia is too busy to attack Japan, and Japan is too busy to attack Russia.”28
Unconditional surrender it was, then, as the President’s war aim—not to placate or encourage the Russians, as some subsequently assumed, nor in punitive revenge against the Germans or the Japanese, as others did. And especially not to mollify liberals in America, who were complaining that the United States was installing former fascists, like Admiral Darlan, to administer liberated territories, instead of getting rid of them, as still others later speculated. Rather, the President saw unconditional surrender quite clearly at that moment as the basis for lasting postwar security—leading to a postwar peace to be overseen by the United Nations, using the four most powerful antifascist nations: the United States, Russia, and Britain, together with China (which the United States was supporting as the most populous and potentially important nation in the Pacific)—acting as the world’s “international police” on the UN’s behalf: the basis of the UN Security Council.
Each of the policing powers would have its “own air force” to enforce the disarmament of Germany and Japan, the President explained to King—able thereby to cauterize any attempt by such nations to step out of line and make war on others. Colonialist imperialism would, over time, become a thing of the past, with nations reverting to their original boundaries after Hitler’s war. “Keep everything as it was” was how the President explained his vision—territorial changes agreed only by democratic plebiscite, not war. “Russia to develop Russia but to make an agreement not to take any territory. Not to try to change system of government of other countries by propaganda.”29
Was all this a pipe dream?
“The President then said: ‘to effect all this, of course, [we] would have to get Stalin to agree,’” King recorded, careful to note Roosevelt’s actual words.
Stalin was a dictator—but a dictator more concerned with absolute rule over his own vast territory, stretching from Archangel to Vladivostok, than elsewhere: especially in a world revolution that he would find less easy to control. “He said that he believed he [Stalin] would. That he thought Molotov was an Imperialist but he believed Stalin was less and less on those lines.”
However abhorrent Russian communism was, one had to be realistic. Since “it was clear that the U.S., Britain, China could not defeat Russia” by force of arms—something even Hitler was failing to do, with more than two hundred Wehrmacht divisions and his Luftwaffe—it would be futile to try. Better, he thought, to see if the Soviets could be drawn into an international system that guaranteed Russia would never be attacked by the Germans or another Hitler. Quoting a former Republican Senate leader, Jim Watson, the President said to King: “If you cannot beat him, join him. The thing to do was to get them all working on the same lines,” under the aegis of a supranational United Nations.
Communist or not, the President had continued,
Russia was going to be, after the war, “very powerful. The thing to do now was to get plans definitely made for disarmament” of Germany and Japan, with Russia onboard30—hence his attempt to set up a secret summit with Stalin and Churchill.
The Canadian prime minister, in his diary, had acknowledged being thrilled. It was clear that, in sharing his notion of unconditional surrender both of the Third Reich and the Empire of Japan, the President was speaking without vengeance or rancor, but almost as a surgeon might, prior to taking out a tumor.
Postoperatively, in the case of the Third Reich after the war’s end, “there should be put into Germany immediately a committee or commission of inspectors,” Roosevelt said to him, “say 3—one to be chosen from Canada; one from South America, and one from China,” on behalf of the United Nations. “They should have their staffs, and their business would be to inspect day after day, year in and year out, all the factories of Germany to see that no war material should be manufactured. If any such were discovered, the Germans were to be told that unless that stopped within a week’s time, that certain of their cities would be bombed. The cities would be named: Frankfurt, Cologne, and probably the cities where the manufacturing is taking place. If they went ahead, despite this threat, they might then be told that from now on, all imports and exports in and out of Germany would be stopped. That no trains passed out of their countries. Persons would be stopped at the borders.”31 Blockaded, in other words, or “ostracized,” as King had reflected.
Yet if Mackenzie King had been impressed by the President’s visionary thinking early in December, 1942—less than twelve months after Pearl Harbor—he’d been equally moved by the depth of Roosevelt’s moral and social purpose. In Britain, Winston Churchill had dismissed the Beveridge Report, which outlined possible future British social and health policies—as pie in the sky:32 a dismissive view that was echoed by the British ambassador on Mackenzie King’s visit to Washington, when King met with him. Americans were “all much excited about the Beveridge Report,” Lord Halifax had confided in his own diary. “I told them all that, just as with the Malvern Conference Report, so with this, they [Americans] always know much more about it than I do!”33
Commander in Chief Page 4
