From reports of communist governments in exile in Moscow it was evident Stalin intended, if possible, to install communist puppet regimes beyond Russia’s borders: in Germany, Austria, and probably other bordering states. This would make it unnecessary for the Soviets to keep their forces there, beyond establishing bases. Roosevelt “agreed this is to be expected. Asked further, whether the Allies would not do something from their side which might offset this move in giving encouragement to the better elements, just as Russia encourages the Communists, he declared that no such move was contemplated [by the United States]. It is therefore probable that Communist Regimes would expand, but what could we do about it?”12
Archbishop Spellman was disappointed—but could see the problem: namely the American electorate. Although, in the wake of the President’s State of the Union speech and his Casablanca summit, there had been a growing acceptance in Republican circles of the idea of American involvement in international decision-making once the war was won, there was still a deep core of the American public wedded to isolationism.
To push through American membership in a United Nations organization, given President Wilson’s failure in 1920 with respect to the League of Nations, would already be a tremendous challenge. To achieve this, Roosevelt was ready to stand for a fourth term in 1944. But offering a platform of American intercession in European politics, with the possibility of yet another war to be fought there—this time with the Soviet Union, which not even Hitler’s two hundred divisions had been able to defeat—was unlikely to fly.
The President sounded, for once, almost defeatist. “France might possibly escape” such a puppet fate, if its people elected a sufficiently socialist government, so that “eventually the Communists might eventually accept it. On the direct question whether the odds were that Austria, Hungary or Croatia would fall under some sort of Russian protectorate, the answer was clearly yes.” Hopefully, with the Soviets industrializing their economy, the outlook would not necessarily be so terrible in terms of European people’s standard of living. “It is natural that the European countries will have to undergo tremendous changes in order to adapt to Russia, but he hopes that in ten or twenty years the European influences would bring the Russians to become less barbarian.”13
The President’s hopes on this score would, in the end, take more than forty years to be met—not ten or twenty. Spellman, however, did not contest the President’s crystal ball after his own foreign trip, for it seemed too grounded. The archbishop was only disappointed that Mr. Roosevelt, normally such a figure of moral as well as physical courage, should be so laissez-faire. As the President put it: “The European people will have to endure the Russian domination, in the hope that in ten or twenty years they will be able to live well with the Russians”—the Russians gradually becoming more civilized, while the Europeans became more egalitarian. “Finally he hopes, the Russians will get 40% of the Capitalist regime, the capitalists will retain only 60% of their system, and so an understanding will be possible. This is the opinion of Litvinoff,” too, the recent Soviet ambassador to Washington, the President averred.14
Litvinov had been recalled to Moscow, however, not simply for talks, but to be replaced in October by a “barbarian” apparatchik: Andrei Gromyko.
Spellman, who had spent so many years at the Vatican earlier in his career, wondered at the almost dispirited view of the President regarding the future of Europe: the very cradle of civilization, and the home of so many Christians. Roosevelt had always been against “spheres of influence” in the world, but was now talking of “an agreement among the Big Four. Accordingly the world will be divided into spheres of influence: China get the Far East; the U.S. the Pacific; Britain and Russia, Europe and Africa. But as Britain has predominantly colonial interests it might be assumed that Russia will predominate.”15
It was an unenviable scenario for Europe. “Although Chiang Kai-shek will be called in on the great decisions concerning Europe, it is understood that he will have no influence on them,” the President explained. “The same thing might become true—although to a lesser degree—for the U.S.,” in terms of meager American “influence on decisions concerning Europe.” The President “hoped, ‘although it might be wishful thinking,’ that the Russian intervention in Europe might not be too harsh.”16
Stalin “not too harsh”?
Was the President serious? American knowledge about the Soviet regime, thanks to Russian secrecy, was admittedly minimal, but from the head of U.S. foreign intelligence, General Donovan, the President had received an all-too-real picture of Stalin’s system of mass deportation, arrests, executions, and rule of fear. The President’s realism concerning Russia, in fact, went way back to his instructions when sending Ambassador Bullitt to Moscow to establish the first U.S. embassy in Soviet Russia: “You will be more or less in the position of Commander Byrd—cut off from civilization.”17
The President’s view of communist Russians as “barbarians” had not changed since then. Tragic though it might be, Stalin the Barbarian had survived as dictator of the USSR. As had communist Russia itself, despite facing the greatest war-assault ever mounted in military history.
Was Russian nationalist barbarianism reason enough, though, for the United States to hold back and watch while the struggle for Europe was—as in the 1930s—left to others? Could a near-bankrupt Britain be expected to master events in western Europe any better than it had in 1940, let alone in central or eastern Europe? Its military forces had been evacuated from the continent in Norway and at Dunkirk in 1940, been trounced in North Africa and rebuffed with ease at Dieppe in 1942, and even in 1943 its prime minister was really only backing a 1944 cross-Channel attack in deference to the President’s will—Churchill concerned, still, that it could be a disaster if indeed it took place . . .
Britain, in short, could not be depended upon as a military power in Europe in its own right.
If Soviet domination of Europe was to be the ultimate price of defeating the Nazis, then, should American sons be sent to Europe at all? Here the President sounded more positive, for he was by no means defeatist about the larger, global picture. The League of Nations had been “no success, because the small states were allowed to intervene,” he said—leading to a state of anarchy that Hitler had exploited, allowing him to conquer most of Europe by force. The lesson was therefore simple. Once Hitler was defeated, it had to be assumed postwar peace could only be guaranteed by “the four big powers (U.S., Britain, Russia, China).” The United States would be supreme in its own hemisphere, and across the Pacific. But did that mean that the security of the heartland of modern civilization—a civilization built on the foundations laid by the Greeks and the Romans—should be handed over to the British, who were weak, and the Russians, “because they are big, strong and simply impose themselves”? the vicar military asked.18
The President shrugged—unsure how the future would play out, and whether American voters would support a permanent American presence in Europe. All that could be said with certainty at this juncture was that, after waging two vast and destructive wars in Europe in the space of thirty years, Germany was clearly too powerful a nation to be allowed to threaten world peace again. It should, he thought, be divided up into numerous states—“Bavaria, Rhineland, Saxony, Hesse, Prussia,” and “disarmed for forty years,” he asserted. “No air force, no civilian aviation, no German would be authorized to learn flying.” Austria, though Catholic, could not be saved from a “Russian dominated Communist Regime.” Hungary, by contrast, might be saved—“He likes the Hungarians. He wants them to come over,” Spellman quoted the President’s view. “He would be ready to accept them on the Allied side as they are, if they come over.” The only states where self-determination would actually be guaranteed—presumably by Britain—would be in western Europe: “Plebiscites would be held in the following countries: France, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Greece”—but not even Czechoslovakia, which he doubted could be saved in time.19
Western Poland, on September 3, 1943, went unmentioned.
The Allied “side.”
Hungary coming “over” . . .
It was clear the President foresaw a division of Europe into an Allied West and a Russian-dominated East in the not-too-distant future, now that British Eighth Army troops, having crossed onto mainland Italy, were beginning to fight their way north.
Spellman, who had supported Roosevelt against the bitter denunciations of Father Charles Coughlin in 1936, as well as in confronting the Axis powers after Pearl Harbor, was made acutely aware by the President of the domestic political challenge: how to get the American public to endorse, after the fall of the Third Reich, even the remotest possibility of another war to “save” specific nations in central Europe, and push back the Soviets, once they established themselves there.
Leaving the conundrum up to the President, the Archbishop focused, for his part, on pressing for Rome—as well as its environs in a twenty-mile safe zone—to be considered an “open city” in order to protect the Vatican and Rome’s historic churches: “what to do for Holy See,” as he put it.20
Nevertheless, the President’s somewhat dispirited “realism” worried him. Was the President ailing?
50
The Empires of the Future
THOUGH NOT PRIVY to the President’s discussions with the British prime minister, young Mary Churchill was aware that, though almost a decade younger than her father, Mr. Roosevelt was not one hundred percent well.
Decades older than Mary, Daisy Suckley was noticing the same—and was concerned. The President had returned from Canada in apparent good health, yet sported “dark rings under his eyes”—and was finding it more difficult to exhibit the abiding confidence and humor that were his trademark as a leader.
For his part Harry Hopkins seemed ill—but that, at least, showed in public. In Roosevelt’s case, the President refused to show weakness, let alone signs of illness. “This is one noticeable way in which the P. is so outstanding,” Daisy noted. Others seemed positively “shell-shocked” by the pace and demands of government and command in war, whereas the President “is completely normal mentally & spiritually, although he has in a way, more responsibility than anyone,” she described.1 Roosevelt would not even permit Ross McIntire, his doctor, to accompany him to Hyde Park—nor would he allow McIntire to bring in a medical consultant to assess his cardiac and circulatory health, lest word leak out he might not be up to the trials of a fourth presidential election, were he to stand.
Daisy thus worried that Churchill’s extended stay at the White House, with his wife, daughter, and immediate staff—military, clerical, private—to boot, was simply too demanding at a time when the First Lady was still away: leaving the President to have to take care of even the most basic aspects of hospitality.
What she did not quite understand was that Churchill was now the only man in the world who could help the President not only shoulder his great burdens, but stop the “barbarians” from occupying too much of eastern, central, and western Europe as the war progressed.
The responsibilities of being a national leader, and on top of that commander in chief in a world war, were almost literally crushing—and Daisy was certainly right to be anxious.
Hitler, for his part, was unwell, living in isolation, intimate only with his mistress, Eva Braun, and his dog, Blondi; Stalin associated only with those in literal terror of him—even instructing the NKVD to “investigate” his son and daughter by his second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, who had allegedly committed suicide in 1932.2 (Of his first wife, Ekatarina, who had died of tuberculosis in 1907, a year after their marriage, Stalin had reportedly said: “With her died my last warm feelings for humanity.”3)
Given that the Quebec Conference was over and that its military decisions would henceforth be carried out by the Combined Chiefs of Staff, twelve days of entertaining the Churchills did seem rather long, however, to Daisy. It appeared so even more to the press, who wondered why Churchill needed to spend so much time in Washington with the President. What was Churchill busy plotting now, if the big decisions had supposedly been made at Quebec? skeptics wondered.
It was in this respect that Dr. Goebbels was more insightful than Allied journalists. The fact that Churchill was spending so much time with the President in America spoke volumes to him. The Reichsminister and Führer might still hope for signs of a split in the Allied coalition, one that might help preserve the Third Reich and its armies. The President, however, seemed still master of world opinion. Hitler had spent only a few hours with Mussolini at Feltre, before the Duce’s arrest. By contrast, hosting Churchill for almost two weeks, the President was demonstrating to the world the solidarity of the Western Allies—an even more symbolic demonstration, in fact, than the Quebec Conference.
Taking his cue, Churchill had settled in and talked to the President at length about the Russian menace, in front of Cardinal Spellman and others. As a result of those conversations, in fact, a new idea of Western unity began to emerge in the Prime Minister’s fertile brain.
At 10:00 p.m. on September 5, Winston Churchill left the President and with his wife, Clemmie, and his daughter Mary, departed the White House and took the train to Boston.
The Prime Minister had cabled Field Marshal Smuts, the South African prime minister, writing: “I think it inevitable that Russia will be the greatest land power in the world after this war which will have rid her of the two military powers, Japan and Germany, who in our lifetime have inflicted upon her such heavy defeats. I hope, however, that the ‘fraternal association’ of the British Commonwealth and the United States together with sea and air power, may put us on good terms and in a friendly balance with Russia at least for the period of re-building. Further than that I cannot see with mortal eye, and I am not as yet fully informed about celestial telescopes.”4
Unrecognized by most historians, however, this was in fact a new turning point in the war, as Churchill now sought not only to wed Britain to the United States in terms of defeating Hitler, but beyond that in dealing with the Soviet Union.
The truth was, without the help of the United States there was little hope Britain could, on its own, do much of anything to halt the advance of Soviet forces in Europe, or even combat Soviet communist “influence” there. In partnership with the United States, however, it could—possibly. It would require girding up the people of the United States to the challenge, but it was perhaps for this reason, rather than to perpetuate British colonialism, that he had been put on this earth. Churchill had earned huge respect for his moral courage in confronting Hitler, when Britain stood alone; as Prime Minister he now felt he must, as far as possible, use that continuing respect and public support to buck up the President; to help Americans, not simply Britons, embrace a new, quasi-imperial global role as the guarantors, as far as possible, of democracy and the four freedoms.
It was a tragedy the present war could not end as the triumph of democracy over fascism and tyranny, but as the President said, it could take a generation or more before the Russians cast off communist dictatorship and embraced anything like the four freedoms.
Distinct from Western norms of civilization, the Soviet Union remained a tyranny based on fear, paranoid secrecy, incarceration, deportation, mock justice, xenophobia, and ruthlessly Russian—as opposed to international—self-interest. How much better would history have been served had Stalin never been born! Stalin had, however—and his tough, dictatorial leadership had at least ensured the Soviet armies succeeded in halting Hitler’s mad invasion, just as Napoleon’s invasion army had been destroyed in the heart of Russia. Somehow, Churchill mused, it would be for the United States not only to create a United Nations authority that would help preserve the peace after the defeat of Hitler and the Japanese but—in partnership with the British—face up to the Russians . . .
Fortunately the Prime Minister liked to work long and late. No sooner had the train pulled out than “he started to compose his speech,”
his secretary, Elizabeth Layton, wrote home,5 and together with Churchill’s shorthand stenographer, Patrick Kinna, she took down his words over four hours of nighttime railroad dictation: his speech to be given at Harvard University on September 6, on the acceptance there of an honorary degree.
Churchill had already given some of the most memorable, indeed historic, speeches in the annals of rhetoric—rich in metaphor and in the sheer magnitude of his historical perspective. His Harvard University address, however, was to be special in that, three years before his famous “Iron Curtain” speech, Churchill now made an open appeal to the youth of America to assume responsibility not only to help win the war against current tyranny but to continue to do so thereafter: safeguarding democracy on behalf of those who could not, by virtue of their weakness, do so on their own.
To the “youth of America, as to the youth of Britain, I say ‘You cannot stop,’” Churchill declared the next day in Harvard’s famous Yard. “There is no halting-place at this point. We have now reached a stage in the journey where there can be no pause. We must go on. It must be world anarchy or world order.” As he put it, “We do not war primarily with race as such. Tyranny is our foe, whatever trappings or disguise it wears, whatever language it speaks, be it external or internal, we must forever be on our guard, ever mobilized, ever vigilant, always ready to spring at its throat. In all this,” he emphasized as a British prime minister speaking in America, “we march together. Not only do we march and strive shoulder to shoulder at this moment under the fire of the enemy on the fields of war or in the air, but also in those realms of thought which are consecrated to the rights and dignity of man.” The British Commonwealth and the United States were now joined at the hip—not only in their common language, but in their willingness to fight alongside, even subordinate to, one another.
Commander in Chief Page 42
