This easy, almost casual sparring between Roosevelt and Stalin at once reflected and concealed felt national interests and long-run volcanic forces. The President and his military chiefs had long agreed that the invasion of Japan would be immensely costly and that Soviet intervention on the Asiatic mainland was imperative. Even with Russian participation, the military planners estimated, the war in the Pacific would last eighteen months after Germany surrendered; without Russian aid the war might last indefinitely, with unbearable losses. It was also understood that the Red Army would take part once it had the chance to deploy troops to the east; Stalin had made this clear—even volunteered it—over and over again. The Russians’ eagerness to fight Japan in order to protect their postwar interests was so clear, and their promises so definite, that some, including Eden, argued that Roosevelt need make no concessions to Stalin; Moscow would make war anyway.
But Stalin—and probably Roosevelt, too—knew that the fact of Soviet participation was not the vital point. It was the timing and strength of the intervention that were crucial. And here both leaders acted against a background of the harshest kind of Realpolitik. Doubtless Stalin knew his lesson better than Roosevelt did because he had learned it under the most excrutiating circumstances. In 1939, after years of fearing a coalition of capitalistic and fascist nations against Russia, he had cut the Gordian knot—and fractured his own ideological credibility—by the pact with Hitler on Poland. But hardly had the deal been concluded when the Kremlin strategists went through agonies of suspense. What if Hitler inveigled Russia into claiming its half of Poland prematurely and they got involved in fighting Poles before the Poles were ready to be beaten? Even worse, what if Hitler made peace with Warsaw and left the Russians to fight all the Poles and even France and Britain? Then when the Wehrmacht came crashing through the Polish defenses, Stalin’s fears were transmuted into a nightmare. What if the advancing Nazis did not stop at the agreed-on line or—unthinkably—at the Polish-Soviet border?
Things had turned out all right—Hitler was a man of honor, at least among thieves—and the Kremlin felt it had won its gamble when the Germans ended the Polish campaign locked in combat with Britain and France. But fears rose again in Moscow when the Nazis overcame France. Would the West now make a separate peace with Hitler at the expense of Russia? Britain did not—but worse was to come. The German attack on Russia robbed Stalin of his scales-tipping power. After all his frantic efforts he was at the mercy of the West, which could time its re-entry onto the Continent for its own advantage, not Russia’s. This the Anglo-Americans did.
Now—at Yalta—the tables were turned. The Marshal had his allies just where they had had him for three long years. He could intervene whenever he wished—and his timing would turn on political as well as military factors.
So the man who faced Roosevelt across the table in Livadia Palace was schooled in the art of offering and delaying assistance. The President, too, was quite aware of the application of this art to the Pacific, if only because his military chiefs were. They stressed the need for Russia to attack in Manchuria at least three months before the planned invasion of Kyushu; they also saw the Soviet advantage in waiting to attack the Japanese until American troops invaded Kyushu and forced Tokyo to pull troops off the Asiatic mainland. It was the strategy of the European front stood on its head. It was the second second front.
Casting its shadow across these calculations was the two-headed giant China. Despite his deepening disappointment over Chiang’s efforts, the President clung to his long-term hopes for a free, democratic, and friendly China. He wanted to win Moscow’s support for Chungking and to discourage Russian intervention in China’s affairs. To reach his twin goals of Japan’s defeat and China’s survival, Roosevelt had to induce Stalin to do things that the Marshal had no overpowering desire to do—to join in the war against Japan at a time that would be more advantageous for his allies than for himself, and to support a “bourgeois” regime that was at odds with his ideological comrades in Yenan.
Clearly Stalin held by far the stronger hand. Roosevelt’s best cards were that he could legitimize the Marshal’s demand for Pacific real estate and Manchurian railways and ports and that he was the most likely of the Big Three to induce Chiang to go along. But to do the latter he had to gain Soviet backing for Chiang.
Roosevelt was disturbed by Stalin’s ambitions in Manchuria. Toward the end of the conference he had Harriman ask Stalin and Molotov to agree that Port Arthur and Dairen be free ports and that the Manchurian railroad be operated by a joint Chinese-Soviet commission. Stalin did so, except that he insisted Port Arthur must be a naval base and had to be leased. He granted that Chiang’s concurrence was necessary—he preferred that Roosevelt ask Chiang for it—but demanded in return that the Generalissimo agree to the status quo in Manchuria. To all this Roosevelt agreed—and also to the need for secrecy. The matter of informing Chiang was postponed on the ground that no secret was safe in Chungking—and Stalin did not want Tokyo to get wind of his plan and then strike the first blow. Above all, he did not want his careful timing to be spoiled.
The Russians did not ask for as much at Yalta as their power in Asia would have enabled them to gain on their own. Churchill made no objection to the deal when Stalin talked to him near the end of the conference. Eden objected to it because of the secrecy of the whole thing, but the Prime Minister overrode his Foreign Secretary for the reason that British authority in the Far East would suffer if they were not signatories to the agreement.
So by the time of their final dinner meeting at Yalta, on February 10, 1945, the Big Three seemed in broad agreement. Churchill happily presided over the affair at his villa, the reception hall of which had been closely searched and locked by Red Army soldiers before Stalin arrived. The Prime Minister offered a toast to the King, the President, and the President of the Supreme Soviet. In his reply Roosevelt spoke of the time in 1933 when his wife had gone to a country town to open a school. On a classroom wall there had been a map with a great blank space for the Soviet Union—and the teacher had told the First Lady that it was forbidden to speak of this place. He had then decided to open negotiations to establish diplomatic relations with Moscow, the President said. After more toasts he told another story that illustrated how hard it was to have any prejudices, racial, religious, or other, if you really knew people. Stalin said this was very true. Churchill and Stalin discussed British politics; the Marshal thought his friend would win the next election because Labour could not form a government and Churchill was more to the left than the socialists anyway. Churchill remarked that Stalin had a much easier political task, since he had only one party to deal with; the Marshal agreed with this. Switching subjects, Stalin said that the Jewish problem was a difficult one; he had tried to establish a national home for the Jews in an agricultural area but they had stayed there only two or three years and then scattered to the cities.
The President said that he was a Zionist and asked if Stalin was one. Stalin said he was one in principle but there were difficulties.
At this point Zion seemed to be on Roosevelt’s mind. When Stalin walked over to him at the dinner to ask if he could stay longer at the conference, Roosevelt said that he had three kings waiting for him. The President was willing to stay longer but he was eager to get through the tedium of official drafting of communiqués and agreements and to try his hand at personal diplomacy with the three monarchs, Farouk, of Egypt, Ibn Saud, of Saudi Arabia, and Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia. While the three foreign ministers wrestled with the final conference protocol, Roosevelt motored to Sevastopol, touring the battlefield of Balaklava on the way, stayed overnight on the conference communications ship, and then flew to an Egyptian airfield near Ismailia and boarded the Quincy, anchored in Bitter Lake.
To Hopkins what followed seemed a lot of horseplay, and much of it was. The Commander in Chief donned a huge black cape and seated himself on the forward gun deck to receive his royal visitors. Young Farouk came aboard in h
is admiral’s uniform; Roosevelt urged him to raise more long-staple cotton and presented him with a twin-motored transport. Selassie, a dignified small man in a huge army coat and cap, discussed the disposition of Italian possessions in North Africa with the President; he received four command and reconnaissance cars. The whole affair seemed to reach a peak of peacockery when Ibn Saud hove to in full regalia on the deck of an American destroyer, which had picked him up at Jidda along with his rugs, sheep, awnings, charcoal-cooking buckets, holy water, and a retinue of royal relatives, guards, valets, food tasters, and servers of ceremonial coffee.
Anna Boettiger was nowhere in sight when the monarch came aboard the Quincy. The President had told his daughter, Mike Reilly said later, with perhaps a trace of blarney, that the King of Arabia would not allow women in his presence on such occasions and had added, “By the way, those women he does see, he confiscates….”
After the two chiefs of state agreeably discussed oil and reforestation, Roosevelt moved the discussion toward Palestine. At once the balmy atmosphere turned frigid. The President asked the King to admit some more Jews into Palestine, indicating it was such a small percentage of the total population of the Arabian world; he was shocked when Ibn Saud said no. The King went into a monologue about how the Jews had made the countryside bloom only because of millions from American and British capitalists, how the Palestine army of Jews was not fighting Germans but Arabs, how the Arabs would take up arms before yielding further. The President, Hopkins wrote shortly after, seemed not to comprehend fully what Ibn Saud was saying and brought up the question two or three times more, and each time the King was more emphatic. Still, the King got his present, an airplane.
The Quincy proceeded through the Suez Canal to Alexandria, where Churchill, who had made a quick trip to Athens to assay the stormy Greek situation, came aboard with his daughter Sarah and son, Randolph, for a family lunch with Roosevelt, Anna, Hopkins, and Winant. To Churchill, the President seemed placid and frail, with a slender contact with life. Roosevelt had admitted in a note to his wife earlier that he was exhausted “but really all right.” And now, en route to Algiers, he wrote to “Dearest Babs”:
“Headed in the right direction—homeward!
“All well, but still need a little sleep.
“A fantastic week. King of Egypt, ditto of Arabia and the Emperor of Ethiopia! Anna is fine and at the moment is ashore in Algiers. Give John and Johnnie my love. I hope to come to Washington when you say you are going to be there—one of those 8 days.
“Devotedly
“F.D.R.”
Roosevelt and Hopkins had left Yalta in a mood of satisfaction and optimism, and the heady alliance with the potentates did not dim the euphoria. But as the Quincy steamed westward through the Mediterranean the mood changed. Pa Watson had been hospitalized by the ship’s surgeon on leaving the Crimea, and inexplicably did not improve. Roosevelt had invited de Gaulle to meet him in Algiers, and the General huffily declined. Hopkins was ailing on arrival in Algiers and decided to fly home to avoid the long sea trip. Roosevelt was annoyed because he had wanted Hopkins to help him with his report on Yalta during the return voyage. Luckily he had already summoned Rosenman to meet him at Algiers for the trip.
Two days out of Algiers Pa Watson died of acute congestive heart failure and a cerebral hemorrhage. The President seemed unusually depressed, and exhausted. For days Rosenman could not get him to work on his report to Congress and the people. He would stay in bed most of the morning reading books he had brought with him and looking over documents. After lunch in his cabin he sat with Anna on the top deck in the sun, reading or just smoking and staring off into space. He seemed to show some of his old-time gaiety and animation only at cocktail time and at dinner.
After gliding through semitropical seas the Quincy ran into rough weather between Bermuda and the Chesapeake capes. It put into Newport News on February 27, 1945, and the President went directly to the White House. Adolf Berle, who had taken a rather hard line toward the Russians, went around to see him. Roosevelt threw his hands up and said:
“I didn’t say it was good, Adolf, I said it was the best I could do.”
TWENTY With Strong and Active Faith
TWO DAYS LATER THE doorkeeper of the House of Representatives bawled out word of the President’s arrival, Congressmen and packed galleries stood and applauded, and then quieted to a hush as the President of the United States was rolled to the well of the chamber in an armless wheel chair and seated in a red plush chair in front of a small table. Eleanor and Anna Roosevelt looked down from the gallery; Princess Martha, Baruch, Halifax were there; Vice President Truman and Majority Leader McCormack presided at the dais behind; arrayed in a row of chairs immediately in front of the President were members of his Cabinet. In the rows just beyond were members of the United States Senate, one-third of whom could thwart Roosevelt’s carefully laid plans for postwar organization and peace.
“I hope that you will pardon me for an unusual posture of sitting down during the presentation of what I want to say,” the President began, “but I know that you will realize that it makes it a lot easier for me in not having to carry about ten pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs; and also because I have just completed a fourteen-thousand-mile trip.” Then he added lightly and quickly: “First of all, I want to say, it is good to be home.”
“It has been a long journey. I hope you will also agree that it has been, so far, a fruitful one.”
Slightly stooped over the table, the President was talking in a flat tone, sometimes slurring his words and stumbling a bit over his text, which he followed with his forefinger. Occasionally he raised his voice for emphasis, but the ringing rhetoric of old was gone. His voice had lost its timbre, Acheson felt; it was an invalid’s voice. Friend and foe noted his lean, set face, his trembling hand as he reached for a glass of water.
“Speaking in all frankness, the question of whether it is entirely fruitful or not lies to a great extent in your hands. For unless you here in the halls of the American Congress—with the support of the American people—concur in the general conclusions reached at a place called Yalta, and give them your active support, the meeting will not have produced lasting results.”
It was a long rambling speech, with little that was new to his listeners. He had not been ill for a second, he said, until he arrived back in Washington and heard all the rumors that had spread in his absence. He talked at length about plans for Germany, reiterating that unconditional surrender would not mean the destruction or enslavement of the German people, describing the four occupation zones, and promising the destruction of the Nazi party, militarism, and the German General Staff, “which has so often shattered the peace of the world.”
The President ad libbed over and over again, to Rosenman’s despair; his voice almost gave way at one point; and throughout there was a repeated tiny faltering in his emphasis, as though his mind could not sustain its grip on the speech. But toward the end his flagging voice took on an edge of desperate conviction.
“The Conference in the Crimea was a turning point—I hope in our history and therefore in the history of the world. There will soon be presented to the Senate of the United States and to the American people a great decision that will determine the fate of the United States—and of the world—for generations to come….
“No plan is perfect. Whatever is adopted at San Francisco will doubtless have to be amended time and time again over the years, just as our own Constitution has been….
“Twenty-five years ago, American fighting men looked to the statesmen of the world to finish the work of peace for which they fought and suffered. We failed—we failed them then. We cannot fail them again, and expect the world to survive again.
“The Crimea Conference…ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries—and have always failed.
/> “We propose to substitute for all these, a universal organization in which all peace-loving Nations will finally have a chance to join….”
EUROPE: THE PRICE OF INNOCENCE
Victory—and an end to power politics. It was a time for hope. Allied forces were converging on the Rhine; Cologne was under direct attack; to the south American troops pushed into Trier. The whole German defense structure west of the Rhine was crumbling. On the Eastern Front the Red Army was streaming across the Oder hardly fifty miles from Berlin; other troops had turned north toward the Baltic to cut off Danzig.
Peace would break out soon; could it be secured? A conference had been called to meet at San Francisco on April 25 to frame the charter for the United Nations Organization. The President had chosen a bipartisan delegation, including Vandenberg and Stassen, to represent the United States. He looked forward to going there as host, he told reporters, just to say “howdy do.” The general response to the Yalta Conference seemed favorable, though Senator Wheeler called it a “great victory for Stalin and Russian imperialism” and the old isolationist press charged a sellout of the Atlantic Charter. Cantril reported that the conference had raised hopes for a long-time peace and that Americans were impressed both by Big Three co-operation and by the way the administration was handling American interests abroad. Even the Polish arrangements were accepted. Cantril did report colossal public ignorance about the actual decisions at Yalta, but the more informed seemed the more satisfied.
Then, in just one month, while Roosevelt looked on dismayed and almost helpless, everything seemed to come unhinged.
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