The Untold History of the United States

by Oliver Stone

  It was exactly the kind of deal that Roosevelt had set out to prevent. Hull protested the establishment of “spheres of interest.” Churchill decried U.S. hypocrisy: “Is having a Navy twice as strong as any other power ‘power politics’? . . . Is having all the gold in the world buried in a cavern ‘power politics’? If not, what is ‘power politics’?”83

  Stalin quickly delivered on his part of the bargain. He stood aside in December 1944 as British troops brutally repressed a left-wing uprising in Greece, where the Communists, who had led the underground resistance to the Nazis, were battling for power with reactionary forces who wanted to restore the monarchy. Great Britain supported the monarchists. Stalin refused to support the leftists, despite the fact that they had the backing of much of the Greek population. The U.S. public was shocked by Great Britain’s behavior.

  Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill met for a second time at Yalta on the Black Sea in early February 1945. Though the Battle of the Bulge was still raging in Belgium and fighting had intensified in the Pacific, the war had clearly turned in the Allies’ favor. The time had come to finalize postwar plans. The Soviet Union was in a commanding position. The Red Army occupied Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia and was approaching Berlin. Deep rifts had appeared among the Allies, reflecting fundamentally different geopolitical and strategic views. The Soviet Union was preoccupied with security. Great Britain sought to preserve its empire. The United States wanted Soviet assistance in ending the Pacific war, fashioning a world economy that would be open to U.S. trade and investment, and establishing a United Nations to preserve the peace.

  The USSR had paid an enormous price in repulsing the German invasion. Many millions of its soldiers and citizens lay dead, and much of the nation was in ruins. The United States and Great Britain had helped the Soviets defeat Germany, but their efforts and resulting losses paled beside those of their Soviet ally. The United States had, in fact, come out of the war economically and militarily stronger than ever. But its diplomatic leverage was compromised by its failure to deliver the relief and assistance it had promised Stalin during the darkest hours of the war. The United States still had one major card to play: the promise of postwar economic assistance to help the Soviets rebuild their shattered nation. The once powerful British were in the weakest position, no longer able to press their claims independently. Great Britain now depended on U.S. goodwill and largesse to retain its status as a major power in the postwar world. The conflicts that surfaced at Yalta would eventually tear the alliance apart. But those tensions would not be apparent in the public display of unity or in the exuberant response by citizens around the world desperate for good news after many long years of war.

  During a secret meeting in Moscow in October 1944, Churchill and Stalin outlined an agreement for British and Soviet spheres of influence in postwar Europe on this scrap of paper.

  These differences played out in the debate over Poland, which was the focus of seven of Yalta’s eight plenary sessions. Stalin declared, “the question of Poland is not only a question of honor but also a question of security. Throughout history, Poland has been the corridor through which the enemy has passed into Russia.” It was a matter “of life and death for the Soviet Union.”84

  Stalin demanded recognition of the Communist-led government operating out of the eastern city of Lublin that was provisionally ruling Poland. Its crackdown on internal opposition had sparked the beginning of a civil war. Roosevelt and Churchill backed the London-based government in exile, most of whose members were virulent anti-Communists. Stalin accused them of being terrorists. It was to weaken the London Poles that Stalin committed the dual atrocities of killing thousands of Polish army officers in the Katyn Forest in 1940 and having the Red Army stop on the banks of the Vistula in 1944 while the Germans put down the Warsaw Rising.

  The three leaders compromised on setting up a Polish Provisional Government of National Unity. The agreement stated, “The Provisional Government which is now functioning in Poland should therefore be reorganized on a broader democratic basis with the inclusion of democratic leaders from Poland itself and from Poles abroad.” Then the British, U.S., and Soviet ambassadors were to consult with the Polish leaders, and free elections, open to all “democratic and anti-Nazi parties,” were to be held.85 The three leaders agreed on the Curzon Line as the eastern border, despite the objections of the London Poles, but disagreed on Poland’s western boundary, which was left for future resolution. The agreements were admittedly vague. Admiral Leahy, a veteran of the Spanish-American and First World Wars, who had spent time in the Philippines, China, Panama, and Nicaragua before returning from retirement to serve as Roosevelt’s chief of staff, warned Roosevelt, “this is so elastic that the Russians can stretch it all the way from Yalta to Washington without technically breaking it.” Roosevelt agreed, “I know, Bill—I know it. But it’s the best I can do for Poland at this time.”86

  At Tehran, Roosevelt had written Stalin a personal note promising that “the United States will never lend its support in any way to any provisional government in Poland that would be inimical to your interests.”87 Yet the London Poles, being hard-line anti-Communists, were clearly inimical to Stalin’s perception of Soviet interests.

  Roosevelt understood that he had little leverage at Yalta. He was more excited about getting Stalin to agree to the “Declaration on Liberated Europe,” which promised to establish broadly representative governments through free elections.

  Though they didn’t see eye to eye on Germany, the Big Three agreed to divide the soon-to-be-conquered nation into four military zones, with one to be controlled by France. Unable to reach an accord on postwar German reparations, they decided to establish a reparations commission, which could base discussions on a figure of $20 billion, with half going to the Soviet Union. Stalin agreed to come into the war against Japan three months after the end of the war in Europe. In return, the United States promised territorial and economic concessions in East Asia that largely restored what Russia had lost to Japan in the 1904–05 Russo-Japanese War.

  The news of Yalta ignited a kind of optimism that hadn’t been seen for decades. Former President Herbert Hoover called the conference a “great hope to the world.” CBS war correspondent William Shirer, who later authored the renowned best seller The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, declared it a “landmark in human history.”88 Roosevelt addressed the Congress upon his return, concluding:

  The conference in the Crimea was a turning point, I hope, in our history, and therefore in the history of the world. . . . We shall have to take the responsibility for world collaboration, or we shall have to bear the responsibility for another world conflict. . . . And I am confident that the Congress and the American people will accept the results of this conference as the beginning of a permanent structure of peace upon which we can begin to build, under God, that better world in which our children and grandchildren, yours and mine, the children and grandchildren of the whole world, must live and can live. And that, my friends, is the only message I can give you, for I feel very deeply, and I know that all of you are feeling it today and are going to feel it in the future.89

  Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s advisor and confidant, shared the post-Yalta enthusiasm:

  We really believed in our hearts that this was the dawn of the new day we had all been praying for and talking about for so many years. We were absolutely certain that we had won the first great victory of the peace—and by “we,” I mean all of us, the whole civilized human race. [The Soviets had proved] reasonable and farseeing and there wasn’t any doubt in the minds of the President or any of us that we could live with them and get along with them peacefully for as far into the future as any of us could imagine. But I have to make one amendment to that—I think we all had in our minds the reservation that we could not foretell what the results would be if anything should happen to Stalin. We felt sure that we could count on him to be reasonable and sensible and understanding�
�but we never could be sure who or what might be in back of him there in the Kremlin.90

  The Soviets shared in the post-Yalta ebullience but could not be sure about the man next in line behind Roosevelt. Observers of Roosevelt’s speech to Congress noticed how rapidly the president’s health was failing. Exhausted from his trip, for the first time in his presidency he addressed the Congress sitting, not standing. Over the next weeks, disagreements with the Soviets surfaced over Poland and other issues, raising vexing questions for the president about the future of the relationship. But he never lost hope that the three nations would continue to work together in peace and friendship. In his last cable to Churchill, Roosevelt wrote, “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.”91

  On April 12, 1945, Harry Truman, who had succeeded Wallace as vice president after the 1944 elections, went to House Speaker Sam Rayburn’s office in the Capitol to play poker and make a dent in his latest shipment of whisky. Upon arrival, he was instructed to call Steve Early at the White House immediately. Early told him to rush right over. At the White House, Eleanor Roosevelt informed Truman that the president had died. After regaining his bearings, Truman expressed his regrets and asked if there was anything he could do. Mrs. Roosevelt replied, “Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now.”92

  The Big Three at Yalta, February 1945, where they overcame serious differences over the future of Poland and the rest of Europe to reach a series of agreements, igniting optimism in both the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

  Truman was shockingly unprepared for that moment. He had met with Roosevelt only twice during his eighty-two days as vice president, and they had not spoken about any of the substantive issues facing the nation. In fact, most astoundingly, neither Roosevelt nor any of the other top officials had even informed Truman that the nation was building an atomic bomb. On his first day in office, the new president ran into a group of reporters outside the Capitol. One asked how his first day on the job was going, to which Truman replied, “Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now. I don’t know whether you fellows ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the moon, the stars and all the planets had fallen on me. I’ve got the most terribly responsible job a man ever had.” When a reporter yelled out, “Good luck, Mr. President,” Truman responded, “I wish you didn’t have to call me that.”93 It was not false humility on Truman’s part. He sincerely felt he was in way over his head and told everyone he met with that it was all a mistake and he was not qualified to be president.

  Harry S. Truman taking the oath of office at the White House following Roosevelt’s death. The new president was shockingly unprepared for the moment.

  Stimson, Wallace, and others were afraid that Truman, given his own inclinations and lack of preparation, would be putty in the hands of some of the hard-liners. Stimson anticipated that the greatest pressure would come from Churchill and warned Marshall that they “ought to be alert now that a new man was at the helm in the Presidency to see that he was advised as to the background of the past differences between Britain and America on these matters.”94

  Roosevelt had spelled out perhaps the most crucial difference at his March 16 cabinet meeting. Forrestal missed the meeting but had Assistant Secretary H. Struve Hensel attend and take notes, which Forrestal included in his diary: “The President indicated considerable difficulty with British relations. In a semi-jocular manner of speaking, he stated that the British were perfectly willing for the United States to have a war with Russia at any time and that, in his opinion, to follow the British program would be to proceed toward that end.”95

  The first to see him, on April 13, was Secretary of State Edward Stettinius. The former lend-lease administrator jumped at Truman’s request to be educated about what was going on in the world. Stettinius had had little influence with Roosevelt. In fact, many considered him a complete lightweight. A friend of Roosevelt complained, “A Secretary of State should be able to read and write and talk. He may not be able to do all of these, but Stettinius can’t do any of them.”96 Stettinius painted a picture for Truman of Soviet deception and perfidy. Since Yalta, he explained in a memo later that day, the Soviets have “taken a firm and uncompromising position on nearly every major question.” He charged them with acting unilaterally in the liberated areas and said that Churchill felt even more strongly than he did on these matters.97 Churchill wasted little time confirming that view both in cables and in a hurried visit to Washington by Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. The British ambassador to the United States, Lord Halifax, sized Truman up and decided that the new president was “an honest and diligent mediocrity . . . a bungling if well meaning amateur” surrounded by “Missouri County court-house calibre” friends.98

  That afternoon Truman met with his old Senate mentor James F. “Jimmy” Byrnes. Admitting his abject ignorance, Truman implored Byrnes to tell him about everything “from Tehran to Yalta” and “everything under the sun.”99 Because Byrnes had been part of the U.S. delegation at Yalta, Truman assumed he had accurate knowledge about what transpired. It would be many months before Truman discovered that that was not the case. In this and subsequent meetings, Byrnes reinforced Stettinius’s message that the Soviets were breaking the Yalta Agreement and that Truman needed to be resolute and uncompromising with them. He also gave Truman his first real briefing about the atomic bomb, which, he conjectured, “might well put us in a position to dictate our own terms at the end of the war.”100 He did not specify exactly to whom the United States would be dictating terms. Truman so trusted Byrnes that he made clear his intention to appoint him secretary of state as soon as Stettinius had gotten the United Nations off the ground. Truman’s close friend and appointments secretary Matthew Connelly later wrote, “Mr. Byrnes came from South Carolina and talked to Mr. Truman and immediately decided that he would take over. Mr. Truman to Mr. Byrnes, I’m afraid, was a nonentity, as Mr. Byrnes thought he had superior intelligence.”101 Superior intelligence, perhaps, but, between this unlikely pair, who would do so much to shape the postwar world, Truman had more formal education, having at least graduated from high school, whereas Byrnes had dropped out at age fourteen.

  Ambassador Harriman paid a call on Stalin at the Kremlin and found the Soviet leader profoundly saddened by Roosevelt’s death. Stalin held Harriman’s hand as he bemoaned humanity’s loss in Roosevelt’s passing and asked Harriman to convey his deepest condolences to Mrs. Roosevelt and the Roosevelt children. Harriman tried to assure Stalin that he would develop an equally strong relationship with President Truman, whom Harriman described as “a man of action and not of words.” Stalin responded, “Roosevelt has died but his cause must live on. We will support President Truman with all our forces and all our will.”102 The usually skeptical Harriman was moved by the depth of Stalin’s emotion.

  Truman with James Byrnes (left) and Henry Wallace at Roosevelt’s funeral. Having been Truman’s mentor as a senator, Byrnes became the new president’s closest advisor on foreign policy. He would later help convince Truman to fire Wallace from his cabinet.

  Molotov stopped off in Washington before heading to San Francisco for the opening of the United Nations. He was eager to speak directly with the new president. Harriman rushed to Washington too, intent upon reaching Truman prior to his meeting with the Soviet foreign minister. Arriving in time, he warned Truman that the United States was facing a “barbarian invasion of Europe” and urged him to stand firm and tell Molotov that “we would not stand for any pushing around on the Polish question.”103 Harriman reinforced the advice that Truman had been receiving from Churchill and Eden. As soon as the Soviet Union extended control over a country and imposed its system, he declared, the secret police moved in and wiped out free speech. He felt certain that the Soviets wouldn’t risk a break with the United States because they desperately sought the
postwar reconstruction aid that Roosevelt had dangled before them. Stettinius and Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal generally concurred with that assessment. All three encouraged a tough stand over Poland.

  On April 23, Truman gathered his foreign policy advisors for a final meeting before sitting down with Molotov. Stimson, Marshall, and Leahy offered a different point of view. Leahy again noted the opaque elasticity of the Yalta Agreement and the difficulty of alleging bad faith on that basis. In fact, he said, after the understanding at Yalta, he would have been surprised had the Soviets behaved differently than they had. The esteemed Marshall, whom Time magazine had named Man of the Year for 1943, contended that a break with the Soviet Union would be disastrous, given U.S. dependence on it to help defeat the Japanese. Stimson showed the clearest understanding of the Soviet predicament and urged greater circumspection on the part of the inexperienced president. He explained that the Soviet Union had been a trustworthy ally, often delivering even more than had been promised, especially in important military matters. He reminded the president of Poland’s importance to the Soviets and said that “the Russians perhaps were being more realistic than we were in regard to their own security.” He added that outside the United States and Great Britain, including countries under U.S. influence, very few countries shared the United States’ understanding of free elections.104 Truman, true to form, tried to mask his limited understanding of the issues with bluster and bravado. He promised to stand up to Molotov and demand that the Soviets stop breaking the Yalta Agreement. As far as the United Nations was concerned, the United States would “go on with plans for the San Francisco conference and if the Russians did not wish to join us they could go to hell.”105 He acknowledged to Harriman that he didn’t expect to get 100 percent of what he wanted from the Soviets, but he did expect to get 85 percent.106