Troubled Journey

1
The Crucible of World War II
More than half the world is ruled by men who despise the American idea and have sworn to destroy it ... . It is not hysterical to think that democracy and liberty are threatened.
--WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE, in support of America's entry into World War II


Foreign Politics demands scarcely any of those qualities which are peculiar to democracy; they require, on the contrary, the perfect use of almost all those in which it is deficient ... a democracy can only with great difficulty regulate the details of an important undertaking, persevere in a fixed design, and work out its execution in spite of serious obstacles. It cannot combine its measures with secrecy or await their consequence with patience.
--ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE




PUT ASIDE YOUR MOVIE MEMORIES of World War II--pictures of GIs (usually an Italian, an Irishman, and a Jew, with an occasional black)--united in a camaraderie born of a determination to stamp out fascism. Wartime surveys taken by the Army revealed that troop morale was dangerously low. Most soldiers had little idea of why they were fighting and few cared about the political meaning of the war. They were there because they had to be, and they fought for their own lives and those of their buddies, not for some higher principles.
Morale at home wasn't much better. The public was uncertain about the war's objectives and it was hesitant about supporting a total war against Germany. Americans felt a great distaste for Hitler, but, according to an Office of War Information survey, nearly half the public had positive feelings toward Germany. Of those who had an opinion, about one in five thought Hitler's policies toward the Jews were probably justified and more than half thought that Jews had too much power in America. While New Deal writers, labor leaders, and intellectuals saw the war asa fight for democracy, the American people as a whole shared few convictions regarding Germany. Their strongest feelings were reserved for Japan and a desire to "pay back" the "dirty Japs" for their December 1941 sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. It was only after the fact that our blood sacrifice and subsequent knowledge of the Holocaust broadly sanctified the war.
Among the public at large, feelings about the war ran strongest among those who had fervently opposed American involvement. The isolationist critics of President Roosevelt's policies who called themselves "America Firsters" were convinced that war was more likely to bring fascism to America than democracy to the rest of the world. Their opposition ran so deep that the "Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought war but not unity to the American people."
Stunned by the Japanese attack, Roosevelt's Republican critics temporarily abandoned their public posture of isolationism. With the nation at war Republicans turned to criticism of how the President was directing the fight. Republican isolationists like Ohio's Senator Robert Taft called for an investigation of American unpreparedness at Pearl; privately many were convinced that the attack had been part of a plot by FDR to push the country into war.
The 1942 congressional elections were a sharp setback for the President. Supporters of Roosevelt's policies had targeted 115 isolationists for defeat in the general election; 110 were reelected. The voting returns gave the Republicans 44 more seats in the House and 9 in the Senate. Surveying the election results, a writer for the party organ The Republican crowed, "It would be absurd to say that 'isolationism' was not a factor in the election." The Administration was left with a razor-thin margin of 7 votes in the House. Like Woodrow Wilson before him, FDR was threatened with an isolationist revolt.
Isolationism was a deep and abiding tendency in American life. Temporarily forced below the surface by Pearl Harbor, it continued as a powerful current. Typically, America Firsters, or members of the "peace bloc" as some styled themselves, were fiercely hostile to Roosevelt's foreign as well as domestic policies. Fiercely anti-Communist, they were convinced that a devilishly clever Roosevelt had maneuvered the country into an unnecessarywar against the wrong foe just as he had used his wiles at home to foist the alien measures of the New Deal's "creeping socialism" on an unsuspecting nation. They were more likely than their fellow citizens to believe that we could "do business with Hitler" and they saw Japan and particularly Russia as America's real enemies. The isolationists were able to withstand the pressure to support the war wholeheartedly because they based their dissent on a time-honored American tradition of noninvolvement in European affairs. They felt themselves the "true" Americans; it was the rest of the country that had strayed.
Isolationism reflected Protestant America's view that the United States was God's chosen nation, a land which had been divinely set apart from the wickedness of the Old World to serve as a beacon of righteousness unto all the nations. Seeded intellectually by Puritanism, the isolationist impulse took political form with George Washington's Farewell Address warning America to steer clear of decadent Europe. Bordered by militarily weak neighbors to the north and south, and shielded by vast oceans to the east and west, Americans enjoyed free security and a sense of invulnerability. This knowledge led young Abe Lincoln to boast that "all the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa, combined with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Buonaparte for commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make track on the Blue Ridge, in the trial of a thousand years." But Lincoln warned, in lines often quoted by isolationists, that "danger" could "spring up amongst us." If America were imperiled, the threat would come from within.
American involvement in World War I inspired broad opposition and served to heighten isolationism. Wilson pushed for war because he feared the consequences of one power, in this case Imperial Germany, dominating the continent of Europe. It was in America's interest to see that a balance of power was maintained. But Wilson, moralist that he was, never discussed such considerations; instead he explained American participation almost exclusively in terms of German wickedness and American morality. It was to be a war to end all wars, a war for democracy. Wilson sincerely believed that if democracy and capitalism were brought to the world the different nations would be too busy creating wealth to bother fighting one another. When World War I ended, not in a triumphfor democracy, but in an orgy of squabbling over the remains of the German Empire, it seemed clear that a great deal of American blood had been shed for naught.
In the 1930s the rise of Hitler and Mussolini forced Americans once again to look across the ocean. Isolationists, replaying America's entry into World War I, responded with a devil theory of war. Munitions makers and bankers, greedy cosmopolitan capitalists aided by the masterminds of British finance, they argued, had placed self-interest above patriotism and insidiously drawn the innocent American lamb into the European slaughter. By the late 1930s the collective devil of the cosmopolitan bankers and munitions makers were replaced by a single figure, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, at once the most loved and the most hated man in America. "The 1930s produced an enormous number of people with a special mission--a mission to warn America that the President had treason in his soul." FDR, they would insist, was a Communist who would betray America, a Judas who would ruin America with a kiss.
The wellborn Roosevelt was hated both in the corporate boardrooms, where he was considered a traitor to his class, and in the heart of the country, in small-town Protestant America, where his support of labor unions, social welfare programs, and government regulation was seen as an expression of the social forces threatening to destroy the nineteenth-century world of a self-reliant people and a self-regulating economy. A popular nativist ditty of the period read:
God Bless America The Jews Own It The Catholics Run It The Negroes Enjoy It The Protestants Founded It But The Communists Will Destroy It.
For New Deal loyalists such doggerel was yet another example of the fascist forces that threatened America from within and without. If Republican diehards insisted that Roosevelt was "that Bolshevik in the White House," ideological New Dealers returnedthe favor by denouncing conservative Republicans as fascists. Henry Wallace, the point man for the New Dealers, fought the 1940 election with the slogan "Keep Hitler out of the White House." Wallace conceded that "every Republican is not an appeaser. But you can be sure that every Nazi, every Hitlerite, and every appeaser is a Republican." Wallace glossed over the isolationism of leading Democrats like Burton Wheeler who were left-leaning at home yet impassioned appeasers. Reflecting public sentiment, the Democratic Party's 1940 platform contained a tougher anti-war pledge than the Republicans'. At their harshest, fervent New Dealers dropped the qualifiers and pronounced Wendell Willkie, Roosevelt's middle-of-the-road Republican opponent, "the man Hitler wants elected President." Willkie, a devout internationalist, or "One Worlder" as they were then called, became a strong supporter of New Deal foreign policy after his defeat.
The New Dealers' rhetoric was exaggerated; their fear of fascism was not. The twentieth century had brought democracy under unprecedented attack. In the wake of the senseless slaughter in World War I, many writers and social scientists emphasized the irrational nature of politics. The free choice necessary for democracy was, they said, a pleasant myth, out of place in a world where mass sentiment and public opinion could be manufactured like bicycles. The "masses," it was concluded, were incapable of managing their own affairs. The distinguished isolationist Harry Elmer Barnes announced that "differential psychology has proven the inferiority of the masses," by which he meant the new immigrants, thus confirming, he claimed, "the old Aristotelian dogma that some men are made to rule and others to serve."
If anyone doubted that dictatorship was the wave of the future they had only to look around. In the years after World War I, first Portugal, then Spain, Italy, Greece, Japan, Turkey, Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, followed by Austria, Germany, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and a host of Latin American countries, had turned to dictatorship. Americans, with their traditional faith in progress, had believed that they were the future, that democracy would spread around the globe. Now it seemed probable to many that democratic institutions had outlived their usefulness. With the onset of the Great Depression an optimist was a man who thought the future was uncertain.
In a nation ravaged by depression and doubt, Roosevelt, through word and deed, made democracy a fighting faith again. By his vocal opposition to what he called the "economic royalists" and his insistence that Nazi Germany was more than just another great power, Roosevelt created a climate in which a broad range of immigrant, labor, liberal, and left-wing groups began to reconstitute a sense of national purpose. Some evoked Jefferson and the Founding Fathers to proclaim that Communism was twentieth-century Americanism, while a far larger group of liberals saw in the social engineering of the New Deal a middle way between Soviet authoritarianism and the tyranny of the market.
The New Dealers saw foreign policy as a chance to extend the democratic revival worldwide. "There was a sense that once justice was achieved in America it would be necessary to spread it abroad" so that the tide of dictatorship might be pushed back forever. When the war came, Henry Wallace, who believed America was "the Chosen of the Lord," applauded as the young James Reston insisted that we could not win the war with Germany "until it ... became a national crusade for America and the American dream." Reston thought the war would be a failure if a single totalitarian state remained. Wallace's America, said a Wallaceite, had "accepted a divine mission to save the world, Roosevelt [was] to be its prophet," World War II was to be "a people's war for worldwide democracy."
Roosevelt, the pragmatist, encouraged these views with his own grandiloquent statements of America's purpose in fighting. Like Wilson before him, he never publicly discussed his overwhelming concern with the balance of power, for fear that it would be divisive. Instead he cloaked his foreign policy in the rhetoric of the Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter. To match Hitler's "New Order" Roosevelt proposed a new "moral order." He declined territorial ambitions and projected a reeducation of the world along the lines of Christian morality. This Sermon on the Mount world of self-determination and democracy for all nations was so inspiring that one Catholic cleric was moved to describe democracy as "the nearest thing to God on earth."
Roosevelt was neither a tribune of the new moral order nor a "Red dupe." Critics and admirers alike would have been better served if they had watched what he did rather than listened towhat he said. From December 1941 on, the President subordinated all his efforts at home and abroad to the goal of winning the war. He allowed New Deal programs to atrophy as businessmen brought to Washington to build up the arms industries elbowed aside the social reformers who had dominated Washington for a decade. Roosevelt stood back and watched as special interests lobbied ferociously for pork barrel bills to aid farmers or car dealers or some particularly deserving capitalist. In return Roosevelt expected support for the fragile consensus he had built for both winning the war and creating a permanent American international involvement to maintain peace.
Roosevelt was willing to sacrifice some of what he had built at home because he was firmly convinced of the danger abroad. While the isolationists were replaying World War I, Roosevelt was trying to detail a forceful diplomatic response to Nazi imperialism. He understood that international affairs was a game of power subject to its own rules. His task was to play that game within the constraints of American power and domestic politics. To defeat Hitler he was willing to make a deal with the French fascist Admiral Jean Darlan. When he was castigated by liberals and leftists for negotiating with Darlan, he replied with more than a touch of disdain: "My children, you are permitted in time of great danger to walk with the devil until you have crossed the bridge." Later, unleashing his temper, he shouted: "Of course I'm dealing with Darlan, since Darlan is giving me Algiers!" The deal with Darlan was a reflection of the limitations of American power. But when it came to alliance with first Britain and then the Soviet Union, a good many thought that Roosevelt had indeed made a deal with the devil; Britain and Russia were cordially hated by many of his countrymen.
Roosevelt saw Britain as America's first line of defense. But for many Irish- and German-Americans, the nation's two largest white ethnic groups, and particularly the Irish, a hatred for England came with their mother's milk. Both steadfastly denied that any moral distinction could be drawn between British and German imperialism. For the Irish, German sins in Czechoslovakia were not nearly so odious as Britain's in Ireland. For some German-Americans the suffering they experienced during World War I blinded them to Nazism. They simply didn't want to see Americago to war against Germany again. Others, like the nation's most prominent isolationist, aviator-hero Charles Lindbergh, and Joseph Kennedy, the American Ambassador to Britain, had a soft spot for the New Germany. They saw England as old and effeminate, while Germany, like America, was young and virile. "Civilization," Lindbergh intoned, "depends on [Hitler's] wisdom far more than on the action of the democracies."
Almost all isolationists hostile to Britain were deeply suspicious of the U.S.S.R. as well, but the strongest opposition to American aid for the Soviet Union came from American Catholics. Catholics and particularly Catholic intellectuals applauded when one of Roosevelt's most effective critics, Robert Taft, warned that "the victory of Communism in the world would be far more dangerous to the U.S. than the victory of fascism." For Catholics isolationism was a matter of anti-Communism. Catholics and Communists had been at war for nearly a quarter of a century, battling over Soviet persecution of religion and the future of Spain, when FDR tried to convince American Catholics that an alliance with Russia was in America's best interest. Roosevelt feared that without millions of Russian soldiers to absorb the brunt of the fighting, the U.S. casualties required to defeat Hitler would far exceed what the American public would tolerate. Catholic leaders were unmoved. They described an alliance with the Soviets as a "covenant with hell." Pointing to the Soviet conquest of part of Poland and the Baltic states, they warned that cooperation with Stalin could only destroy the moral position of the United States. Anti-Soviet feeling was so intense that one bishop declared: " ... rather than serve as an ally of a communistic government, young Catholic men should refuse to join the armed services of this country."
Catholics found powerful allies within the Administration. The professional diplomats at the State Department shared their anti-Communist sentiments; State experts on Europe were cultured, conservative aristocrats with warm feelings for the highly cultivated pre-Nazi Germans they had known. Russia, by contrast, evoked disgust. They saw it as a land of barbarism and bad manners, a threat to the traditional order of Western civilization. George F. Kennan, in the late forties a prime mover in the postwar hard line toward the Soviets, wrote: "Never ... did I consider the Soviet Union a fit ally or associate, actual or potential, of the UnitedStates." Sharing the Germans' anti-Semitism, many diplomats saw Bolshevism as a Jewish disease, and like the Catholics they feared above all that war against Hitler would leave Russia in control of Eastern Europe. Aware of these fears and the pro-German feelings of some of his diplomatic advisers, Roosevelt is said to have joked shortly after Pearl Harbor that his "State Department was neutral in this war and he hoped it would remain that way." The President, I. F. Stone has argued, was "torn between the rival claims of Stalin and the Vatican. To hold his party together, he had to appease Pius XII; to keep his casualties down, he had to appease Stalin." There was no way in principle to resolve the conflict.
To overcome the opposition of his critics, Roosevelt made promises about the Russo-American alliance on which he could not deliver, promises that were to haunt postwar America. Roosevelt allayed the fears of Catholics and isolationists with talk of how the alliance would democratize the Soviet Union, which would forgo its position as the center of world Communism to become a nation-state like any other. Ironically, it was because Roosevelt and his advisers saw important similarities between Germany and the Soviet Union, similarities confirmed by the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, that they were willing to take a chance on such a transformation.
Stalin's policies throughout the 1930s--his pledge to build "socialism in one country," his expulsion of Trotsky, the prophet of permanent revolution, his brutal liquidation of the old Bolsheviks, and his deemphasis of Marxist ideology--seemed to indicate to FDR that Russia was becoming an ordinary nation-state, which could be dealt with in conventional terms. Stalin's national Bolshevism looked very much like Hitler's national socialism--the standard quip being that the principal difference between the two was that Moscow was colder than Berlin--with two very important differences. First and most significant was the belief that the Soviet Union lacked the diabolism and dynamism which made Germany so dangerous. Hitler was a genuinely popular leader who galvanized the masses with a pornography of violence alien to the bloody but bureaucratic Stalin. So that while Soviet Marxism promised salvation in a long-deferred future, Hitler was promising an Aryan heaven now by way of immediate conquest and racial "purification." Secondly, the Soviets, despite their reign of terror, andunlike the Nazis, still spoke the language of Western humanism. They killed in the name of freedom and a better future, so it was possible to argue, as many did, that "the methods were deficient but the basic idea was good." Or as Harold Ickes, FDR's close adviser, put it, "I hate Communism, but it is founded on a belief in the control of government, including the economic system, by the people themselves." It was the very antithesis, he thought, of Nazism.
Roosevelt gambled that, in the course of an alliance, American influence would begin subtly to shape the Soviet Union into a civilized nation by Western standards. He hoped, in effect, that the forced alliance of war would spawn the true friendship of peace, which over the long run might further modify the regime. During the war, there was some reason to believe that just such a modification was taking place. Stalin, aware of the need to rally popular support, eased up on government control of religious and personal life. And as a gesture of his newfound nationalism, Stalin officially dissolved the Communist International, the supposed general staff of the world revolution. Encouraged by these developments, Roosevelt privately told New York's Cardinal Spellman that the Anglo-Americans would not be willing to fight the Soviets for control of Eastern Europe once Hitler was defeated, that the European countries would have to undergo a great change to adapt to the military power of the backward Russians, and that in ten or twenty years European influence would civilize the Russian barbarians. The Europeans, FDR explained, could not expect America to rescue them from Russia as well as Germany. Thus the great need to exert a moderating influence on Russia by paying sympathetic attention to Stalin's claims to Eastern Europe.
Here lay the great, and perhaps unavoidable, contradiction in Roosevelt's policies. If he were to keep the Soviets happy and draw them into a postwar alliance to keep the peace, he would have to acknowledge Soviet control over Eastern Europe. But a Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe would be a clear violation of the promises of self-determination embodied in the Atlantic Charter for which Americans were supposedly fighting and dying. Roosevelt's announced foreign policy and his actual foreign policy were on a collision course.
The tension between these two policies reverberated within theUnited States. Roosevelt, trying to make his wish, a new Russia, father to the fact, joined left, liberal, and labor groups in sometimes effusive praise of Stalin and the Soviet Union. Movies like Mission to Moscow, based on a book by the American Ambassador to the U.S.S.R., Joseph E. Davies, celebrated not only the truly heroic struggle against the Nazi invaders but Stalin's personal virtues as well. It was all laid on so thick that James Agee, writing in the pro-Soviet Nation, called the movie "a great, glad two-million-dollar bowl of canned borscht, eminently approvable by the Institute of Good Housekeeping." Davies was effusive in praise of Stalin but he wasn't alone in hyperbole; the middle-of-the-road Life magazine proclaimed Lenin "perhaps the greatest man of modern times" and the Russians "one hell of a people ... [who] to a remarkable degree ... look like Americans, dress like Americans and think like Americans."
In a few years Life would be fervently anti-Soviet, but even at the height of the war such views elicited a hostile reaction. Max Eastman, Trotsky's former confidant in America, attacked the "mushheads and muddleheads" who "are doing us in" by carpeting the country with admiring accounts of "Uncle Joe." America's Russophiles, concluded Eastman, who had turned conservative, were a danger "to the survival of free institutions within America." Catholic leaders echoed Eastman. Prelates sympathetic to FDR urged him to prove his good faith by purging and prosecuting American Communists to atone for the Soviet-American alliance. A failure to root out Communists at home, warned Edmund Walsh, later a key figure in launching Joe McCarthy's anti-Communist crusade, would constitute proof that FDR's support of Russia in the war against Hitler was based as much on ideological sympathy as practical necessity.
Victories in North Africa and Italy in 1943 and the invasion of Normandy temporarily quieted isolationist and anti-Communist sentiment. Gearing up for the 1944 presidential election, FDR secured his right flank by throwing his outspokenly reformist and pro-Soviet Vice-President Henry Wallace to the political wolves. He replaced Wallace with Senator Harry Truman, a Missouri Democrat acceptable to both New Dealers and the growing number of conservative Democrats. Their Republican opponents, Thomas E. Dewey, a crusading New York district attorney withclose ties to Wall Street internationalists, and his running mate, Governor John Bricker, an Ohio isolationist, gave the Democratic ticket a close race. Sensing that for the first time in a dozen years a Republican victory was within grasp, Dewey and Bricker tried to capitalize on a mixture of growing anti-labor and anti-Communist sentiment. They taunted the Democrats with cries of "Clear it with Sidney," referring to the hold the "pink" CIO chieftain was supposed to have over FDR. For all his alleged power, however, Sidney Hillman had failed to keep his choice for Vice-President, Henry Wallace, on the Democratic ticket. The Republican mudslinging was undercut by the well-publicized Soviet role in the Allied victories. And the Democrats replied to Republican charges with a gleeful chorus of "The Old Red Scare Ain't What She Used to Be."
FDR the campaigner went out of his way to reassure the solidly Democratic Polish and Catholic voters about the future of Poland. He posed with a map of the old Poland prominently displayed, proclaiming that "Poland must be reconstituted as a great nation." He assured the voters that once Hitler was defeated he would know how to deal with Stalin on Poland's behalf. The ploy worked. Despite grumbling, Poles and Catholics stayed with the New Deal coalition that had brought them into the mainstream of American life. Roosevelt was buoyed by the defeat of numerous isolationists in the House and Senate, but the joy was short-lived.
With the successful Anglo-American landings on the beaches of France on D-Day, June 6, 1944, it became clear that the Allies would win the war. The question became when, and with which victor getting what part of the spoils. Britain and the Soviets were clear about their ambitions. As far back as 1939 British-Soviet negotiations for an alliance against Germany broke down, in part because of the Russian desire to reconstitute the boundaries of the old Czarist empire by taking Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, the Baltic republics which had broken away from the old Russian empire during World War I. When the two negotiated in 1941, Stalin, with Hitler at his throat, insisted that at war's end Russia would retain the territories acquired in the Nazi-Soviet pact plus Rumania. Churchill recognized that Russian success would have to be rewarded at the expense of Eastern Europeans. He was willing to leave Eastern Europe in Soviet hands if in return he couldpreserve the British Empire and its influence in Western Europe. Churchill knew that at war's end the Americans would withdraw their troops from the Continent. He feared above all that unless the Soviets were locked into a clearly defined set of borders and spheres of influence, the massive Russian armies would dominate Europe. Stalin, for his part, was more than willing to acknowledge a free hand for the Anglo-Americans in Western Europe if he was given similar freedom in the East.
On October 9, 1944, Stalin and Churchill sat down in a businesslike manner to divide up Europe. "Churchill, stating that London and Moscow must not go at cross purposes in the Balkans, pushed across the table to Stalin a simple stark list giving Russia 90% predominance in Rumania, and 75% in Bulgaria, Britain 90% in Greece and dividing Yugoslavia and Hungary 50/50 between Russia and the West. Stalin paused only a moment, then with his blue pencil made a large tick on the paper and passed it back to Churchill."
FDR and his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, denounced the "percentages deal." Roosevelt was willing to concede Eastern Europe to the Soviet sphere of influence. Roosevelt, American Ambassador to Moscow Averell Harriman recorded, "consistently show[ed] very little interest in Eastern European matters except as they affect[ed] sentiment in America." But that was the rub; discussing Poland, presidential pollster Hadley Cantril made it clear that public support for FDR's policies was "unusually sensitive to events." Roosevelt could never acknowledge that American blood had been shed to exchange German imperialism for a Russian variety. Even internationalist papers like the influential New York Herald Tribune were already warning against "selling out" Poland and the Baltic states to Soviet imperialism.
Roosevelt rejected the percentages agreement but refused to spell out what he wanted the future map of Europe to look like. As one reporter correctly put it, the President seemed to be "long on ideals, short on plans." If he wasn't sure of what he wanted, though, Roosevelt knew what he didn't want. When he was urged to demand Russia's agreement to an independent Poland, he responded testily, "Do you want me to go to war with Russia?" Filled with a self-confidence that exuded the optimism his countrymen had learned to love during the dark years of the Depression,Roosevelt's style was to play up the positive and ignore the darker possibilities. Explaining his interpretation of Russia to the Advertising War Council Conference in 1944, Roosevelt exclaimed, "They didn't know us, that's the really fundamental difference." And he went on: "They are friendly people. They haven't got any crazy ideas of conquest and so forth; and now they have gotten to know us, they are much more willing to accept us." "His technique of government was always to leave questions open and hope that events would play into his hands [as they did at Pearl Harbor], but as they conspicuously failed to do after 1944."
Roosevelt had an enormous faith in his powers of personal persuasion. It was a style that served him extremely well in American domestic politics and he tried to extend this personal touch, what Isaiah Berlin has called "royal cousin diplomacy," to foreign affairs. In 1936, for instance, he thought Hitler might be curbed if he could ask the Führer "personally and secretly ... to outline the limits of German objectives"--something he failed to do with Stalin. He made a great effort to win Stalin's confidence, even to the point of making jokes at Churchill's expense to win the Marshal's confidence. After they got chummy, he told aides that "I can personally handle Stalin better" than anyone else. Through man-to-man, personal diplomacy he expected to ease some of the tensions between his public and his private foreign policies. He hoped that by drawing Stalin into a web of mutually interlocking relationships, culminating in a big power consortium (the Four Policemen) at the UN, he could moderate Stalin's aims. Roosevelt the realist saw that despite America's vast military muscle, the war's end would produce irresistible pressures to demobilize quickly; so if he was to secure the peace, he would have to do it while the military alliance still bought Russian goodwill.
The Yalta Conference of the Big Three--Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin--took place in February 1945, two months before FDR's death and three months before the German surrender. It was the Indian summer of Allied cooperation. The President accepted the reality of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe. His problem was how to tell a public that thought it had been fighting the war for an Atlantic Charter promising freedom to oppressed peoples that Polish independence was to be at Stalin's sufferance. When FDR explained to Stalin his difficulties in getting thesepolicies across at home, Stalin replied that "some propaganda work should be done." But Roosevelt would have to return home to face the likes of Congressman John Dingell of Michigan, representative of a large Polish-American constituency, who had warned that "we Americans are not sacrificing, fighting and dying to ... make Joseph Stalin a dictator over the liberated countries of Europe."
Since Stalin, his troops in place in Eastern Europe, had the power to act while Roosevelt could only argue, what he needed and got was a face-saving formula. Roosevelt proposed and Stalin acceded to a Polish government whose core would be attached to Moscow but which would also include Polish nationalists. The agreement gave FDR some breathing space at home, cleared the way for sorely needed Russian aid in the war against Japan (this was before the bomb), and secured Russian support for creating the UN. The American delegation left Yalta elated. The exception was Admiral William Leahy, later a key Truman adviser; he grumbled that the accords were so elastic that the "Russians can stretch it all the way from Yalta to Washington without breaking it."
Though he knew of the historic hostility between the Poles and the Russians, FDR thought he had squared the circle of the Polish question. But in July 1944 Polish partisans in Warsaw rose up against the Nazi occupation. For eight weeks they fought valiantly even as Soviet troops perched on the edge of the city refused to come to their aid. The official Russian position was that the uprising was unleashed by "a group of criminals to seize power." Upset, FDR wrote plaintively to Stalin: "We must think of the reaction of world opinion, if the anti-fascists in Warsaw are left to their own devices." When the Nazis had crushed the rebellion, the Soviets marched into Warsaw. Roosevelt averted his gaze; he continued to hope, on the basis of some significant gestures of goodwill from the Russians and extensive conversations with Stalin, that Soviet recognition of the need for good relations with the United States--who else had the money to help rebuild the war-ravaged Soviet economy?--would lead to the measure of Polish freedom needed to satisfy American sentiments. In effect, his wish was for an open rather than closed sphere of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe.
A few weeks before his death, FDR, on March 1, 1945, made an extraordinary effort to forestall the growth of isolationist sentimentin Congress. Forgoing the dignity and reserve afforded a speaker at the podium, he had himself wheeled into the well of the Senate chamber. "There," as The New Republic's columnist TRB described it, "for the first time in living history a President sat literally on the same level with Congress ... and for the first time [FDR] referred publicly to his paralyzed legs," as he tried to calm and cajole the Congress with his anecdotal account of how Yalta would turn out all right.
Roosevelt put the best possible face on things for Congress, but he too was worried about Russian unwillingness to make even the cosmetic changes agreed on at Yalta. He feared that the fragile domestic consensus he had worked so hard to build was in peril. In late March 1945, less than two weeks before his death, he cabled Stalin explaining that the Polish question had "aroused the greatest popular interest so that it was urgently necessary for the Russians to provide for something more than a 'thinly disguised continuation of the [Soviet-backed] Warsaw regime' or America would come to regard the Yalta agreement as having failed ..." A few days later, FDR explained with some exaggeration that "the American people make up their own mind and no exertions of the government can change their judgment ..." He concluded ominously: "I have been forced to wonder whether you fully realize this fact." It's unlikely that Stalin did understand. He responded by accusing Roosevelt of trying to rewrite the Yalta accords while steadfastly refusing to put an acceptable face on the Polish government. Comments at the Yalta meetings suggest that he viewed the question of American public opinion as little more than a dodge. "When for the nth time at Yalta Harry Hopkins [Roosevelt's aide] brought up the question of American public opinion," Stalin responded testily, "I will not hide behind Soviet public opinion." Yet another mention of public sentiment led Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinsky to carp that the American people should obey their rulers.
Roosevelt was disappointed with Stalin's response but unwilling to risk an open break. Faced, as Walter Lippmann explained it, with the problem of "how to make good our principles in territories Stalin held," Roosevelt realized there was no alternative to persuasion. On the last day of his life he wrote to Churchill, who had been pushing for a tougher stand: "I would minimize the generalRussian problem as much as possible ... our course thus far is correct."
Roosevelt's death was to spare him the hard choices that lay ahead. As FDR told Stalin, "Genuine popular support in the United States is required to carry out a government policy foreign or domestic." But in the wake of the intense Catholic and isolationist response to Yalta it was no longer possible to maintain both a consensus at home and an understanding with Russia. FDR was like a fantastically skilled juggler who thrilled the crowd by juggling dynamite only to toss up one stick too many. When the sticks of dynamite began to fall, FDR was gone and Harry S. Truman was sitting in the White House.
"What an enviable death was his," mourned Winston Churchill, who lived to see what followed.
Copyright © 1984 by Frederick F. Siegel