Before Harry Truman
considered running for reelection, the formulation of what is now considered
gospel with what we now consider the neoconservatives was that FDR, largely
because he was suffering from the illness that would kill him within a few
months, essentially ‘sold out’ both America and Eastern Europe by allowing
Joseph Stalin to walk all over him at the Yalta Conference.
The truth, as both I
and other historians have since realized, is that there was no ‘Great Betrayal’
at Yalta by FDR, just another in way-station on the course he had long since
chartered. A more accurate comparison might be that of Woodrow Wilson and trip
to Paris after World War I ended.
Like the man in whose
cabinet he served FDR traveled to Yalta to meet with two powerful world leader
convinced that the force of his personality would be enough to bring about the
post-war utopia he imagined. Like Wilson FDR attended this conference with a
delegation that was ill-equipped to question the head of the delegation. FDR
went with his new Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, who was not only
inexperienced and ineffectual but had been chosen almost entirely because he
was pliable to FDR himself. Harry Hopkins, his trusted aide was also present
but he was in ill-health himself. Jimmy Byrnes, who FDR had considered for the
Vice-Presidency but passed over for Truman, had been persuaded to join the
conference. But Byrnes was there almost solely to observe and pass along
messages to Congress.
It is telling that FDR
truly considered even then that the biggest threat to the international peace
he foresee was not Stalin but the domestic forces at home in Congress. Stalin
by this point had begun his expansion into Eastern Europe and had no intention
of behaving like the restrained manner FDR was hoping. FDR misread Stalin as
another European imperialist much like Churchill when it fact he demanded
ultimate and undiluted control over the territories and population that lived
under them. But FDR didn’t see a tyrant the way other members of his diplomatic
corps then but a crucial if difficult wartime ally. At Yalta he eagerly sought
Stalin’s help and Stalin was willing to
give far less than he got.
By now FDR was focused
on gaining full Soviet participation in the United Nations, which at this point
was what he considered the League Of Nations could have been but with
improvements. Arrangements were made for the first meeting in San Francisco on
April 25th to settle on the charter as well as the question of
voting procedure in the Security Council and the number of votes for the USSR
in the proposed General Assembly. For that reason FR and Hopkins left in a mood
of supreme exultation because for them that was the crucial issue. They got a
huge jolt in that regard on March 24 when Stalin refused to dispatch Molotov to
the meeting, despite Roosevelt’s plea. Only FDR’s death would cause him to
reverse his original decision.
FDR was also pleased
that he had received a pledge from Stalin that the Soviet Union would enter the
war against Japan two to three months after the surrender of Germany. Stalin
made it clear what his conditions were. They included the outright gain of the
Kurile Islands and the South of Sakhalin, regain the lease on their naval base
at Port Arthur and received endorsement for a proposal of a Sino-Soviet
Railroad, essentially giving the Soviets a sphere of influence in China. Because
FDR believed that an invasion of the home islands of Japan would be necessary
to unconditionally defeat the country, he saw the benefits of a Soviet attack
on the Japanese Army in Manchuria. That Roosevelt was essentially handed over
China to the Soviet Union – something that took place with Mao’s revolution in
1949 – was a legacy of Roosevelt to Truman that he would never shake.
FDR was still focused
on maintaining domestic support for his foreign policy and therefore accepted
the counsel of his State Department to push Stalin and Churchill to sign a
Declaration on Liberated Europe which would reaffirm the Atlantic Charter and call
for the formation of interim governments in Europe ‘broadly representative of
all democratic elements in the population.” It is hard to discern why FDR
wanted this noble declaration signed, perhaps it was an instrument to convey to
Stalin the need for moderation in Europe. But he refused to accept the State
Department’s proposal to establish a High Commission to enforce the declaration
which meant he had little committed to what it stood for. Stalin was more than
willing to sign it but for him it was a ‘mere scrap of paper’. Less than two
weeks after Yalta his deputy commissar would bludgeon Rumania’s King Michael
into installing a government fully compliant to Soviet wishes. When Churchill
asked FDR to join him in writing Stalin, hoping to prevent a purge of
on-Communists in Europe, the President sidestepped it by declaring: ”Romania is
not a good place for a test case.” By that point FDR seemed more than willing
to concede Eastern Europe was under Soviet control.
Actions in Poland
confirmed that. At Yalta the Western powers formally agreed to the cession of a
significant part of prewar Poland to the Soviet Union but deferred the issues
of Polish boundaries in the West until a future conference. Roosevelt worked with
Churchill to secure a more independent and democratic Poland and had some
success. Nevertheless Stettinius later claimed the agreement was “what the two
countries could persuade the Soviet Union to accept.” Upon seeing the accord
Admiral Leahy FDR’s close friend exclaimed: “Mr. President, this is so elastic
that the Russians can stretch it all the way from Yalta to Washington without
technically breaking it.” FDR seemed to know that with his resigned reply. “I
know Bill – I know. But it’s the best I can do for Poland at this time.” And
after Yalta FDR seemed far less interested than Churchill about restraining the
Soviet capacity to exploit that elasticity.
When negotiations for a
new provisional government bogged down, Churchill requested a forceful joint
message be sent to Stalin. Again Roosevelt declined to join Churchill but this
time he refused to be placated. He sent a more passionate reply to FDR stating:
“Poland has lost her frontier. Is she now to lose her freedom?”
Roosevelt actually
chose to tell his cabinet we are having difficulty with British relations and
that the ‘British were more than willing for the United States to have a war
with Russia at any time. He was still focused on emphasizing the progress on
meetings for the UN and still believed Europe had to be less important in world
affairs. By the end of March Churchill again cabled his discontent to
Roosevelt, pointing out the increasing puppet government of Poland.
Finally FDR seemed
willing to admit some ‘anxiety’ regarding the Soviet attitude since the
conference in Yalta and declared awareness of ‘the dangers inherent in the
present course of events not only for the immediate issues involved…but also
for the San Francisco Conference and future world cooperation. But even then he
was still hoping for a peaceful resolution.
On April 1 he wrote
Stalin and admitted his concern about the ‘discouraging lack of progress’ in
implementing the Yalta agreements. For once being pointed FDR made it plain
that any Polish solution ‘which would result in a thinly disguised continuance
of the present Warsaw regime would be unacceptable and cause the people of the
United States to regard the Yalta agreement of having failed.” This had no
effect on Stalin, who in a reply FDR received on April 7th blamed
the British and American ambassadors for the breakdown in talks and accused
them of departing of the terms of the conference. Three days later the
President cabled Churchill that they would need ‘to consider most carefully the
implication of Stalin’s attitude and what is to be our next step.” Two days
later FDR was dead. Whatever that next step might have been would be left to
the discussion of his many advisers and since he had not briefed any of them,
we will never know what it is. Perhaps even FDR himself had not figured it out.
To give Roosevelt the
benefit of the doubt – and he very much deserves it – it is conceivable that if
he had lived longer that he might have pursued actions that imposed a new
definition of how Yalta might be enforced. Perhaps Yalta would be viewed as the
occasion FDR made his last effort to
assay Stalin’s willingness to cooperate would be a test case for how to go
forward. FDR deserves all the credit in the world for as speechwriter Sam
Rosenmann would put it: “the patient effort in leaving no stone unturned in the
search for world peace.” The fact remains, however, that even by that point
Stalin had made it very clear that he had no interest in any version of it that
didn’t involve his own dictatorial designs.
At the time FDR
remained more concerned about bringing about strong domestic support for his
postwar plans but he did so by being less than open with almost anyone around
him. Because he thought the stakes were too high and feared obstruction from
the Senate, he believed any admission of the likely limitations of the
settlement would be grift for man like Robert Taft to resume the isolationist
settlements that had followed after World War I. As a result, however, the
public was unable to see through the thin tissue that papered over the
divisions between the Big Three and believed that continued unity and joint
purpose would continue in a post-war world.
But the fact remains
even in the days before he died it had to be clear to FDR that the center
wasn’t going to hold. Stettinius informed his colleagues in the cabinet on
April 2nd that a serious deterioration in relations with the Soviet
Union had taken place. The following day in regard to Russian non-participation
in the military surrender of German forces in north Italy led to Stalin making
unfounded charges about complicity between Britain and America and the Germans.
Even this didn’t cause FDR to do more than turn the other cheek. In what was
his last message to Stalin, he assured the Russian leader that ‘mutual mistrust
and minor misunderstandings’ should not be allowed to happen in the future.
When Averill Harriman questioned the use of the word minor, FDR left it in. In
what was his final cable to Churchill, which he drafted at Warm Springs, he
advised the PM to “minimize the general Soviet problem as much as possible
because these problems in one form or another seem to arise every day…We must
be firm, however, and our course thus far is correct.” Even to his dying day he
seem convinced that he could cooperate with Stalin.
It is far from easy to
criticize FDR which may be the very reason that so many of his greatest
defenders – including men like Oliver Stone – will not take up cudgels against
him. As Max Lerner cogently argued:
“if anyone else
happened to be President – Wendell Willkie, Thomas Dewey, Henry Wallace – the
historians and the political culture would have called it the idiocy it was.
But it was Roosevelt, and it is a measure of the spell he casts over us that
few even now dare condemn his actions and inactions outright.”
(I would just add that
there are many who if Wallace had done the same thing would have viewed him as
a similar genius.)
FDR, from the start of
his ‘negotiations’ with Stalin seemed more than willing to give the Soviet
leader anything he wanted from the start of their relationship right until the
end of it. FDR never even began to exercise the full octave of escalation that
he had, seeing it only as giving Stalin everything on one side and a complete
break on the other.
And it is worth noting
that years later Truman made a telling point when he said: “heroes know when to
die.” He was talking of Lincoln, but it could clearly have referred to FDR.
When the President died on April 12th, he left Truman a complex,
ambiguous and challenging nature of a post-war world with little more than a
grand vision whose limitations were becoming apparent even by the time of his
death. He seemed to believe Europe could be supervised by Britain and Russia,
even though the two nations emerged from the war profoundly disproportionate in
stature, a reality FDR largely avoided. He resisted British efforts to deepen
the American commitment to Europe, never answer if it would be left alone to
face a new dominant continental power that was already revealing to the rest of
the world is true vile intentions and no contingency plan should his
accommodation with the Soviets fall apart. He never even made clear to the rest
of his administration what those assumptions were and by the time of his death they
were beginning to debate the next step.
Harriman wrote down a
memo to FDR which the President never read, asking to be given some concrete
means of showing Russian officials that their outrageous actions were affecting
their vital interests. He requested authority to inform Stalin that it was time
for a quid pro quo and that his beloved UN conference might fall apart unless
it was dealt with. This opinion was becoming preeminent in the thinking of the
cabinet. It doesn’t seem to have entered the President’s.
And the biggest sin he
did was that he never told his Vice President – a man who had been selected
with the full knowledge that FDR wouldn’t survive his term – anything about his
way of thinking. Nor did he tell his own feeling with his secretary of state or
any single member of his cabinet or advisors. FDR more or less was skillfully
juggling balls of dynamite whose nature he was fully unable to understand and Truman had to pick
them up in mid-air the moment he passed away – with none of the ability to perform
the juggling talents of his predecessor. And the fact that he believed that
Soviet cooperation would happen more based on anything but illusions was
something that Truman and those around him kept believing far longer than they
should have.
In the next article I
will deal with Truman’s early days in office and how he came to deal with the
members of FDR’s cabinet and adviser his illustrious predecessor had left
behind.
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