FDR’s untimely death meant postwar peace “As He Saw It” was aborted

If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my papers, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread… We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.

— John Swinton, former Chief of the Editorial Staff of the New York Times.[1]

It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.

— Henry Kissinger, U.S. Secretary of State in the Nixon-Ford administration.[2]

_________________________________________________________________

i]

As I write after watching the official commemoration in Moscow of the eightieth anniversary of the Second World War in Europe ending at 23.01 hour on 8th May 1945 – 9th May in Russia due to time difference between Central Europe and Moscow – former allies against Nazi Germany are engaged in an on-going proxy-war in Ukraine driven by the United States and its European partners in NATO against the Russian Federation as the successor state of the former Soviet Union. The war against the Axis powers (Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and Imperial Japan) brought together Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union (the Big Three) that General John R. Deane, chief of the American Military Mission in Moscow towards the end of the war, described as The Strange Alliance.[3] It might have been a “strange alliance” but together the Big Three crushed the Axis powers and the contribution of the Soviet Union in defeating Hitler’s armed forces was indispensable. Churchill acknowledged in 1944 that Russians “tore the guts out of the German Army.”[4] The English military historian John Erickson in his authoritative and classic two-volumes of the war in the Eastern Front, The Road To Stalingrad and The Road To Berlin, stated, “The ‘Great Patriotic War’, which lasted from 22 June 1941 to 9 May 1945 and spanned 1,418 days…was the saga of the Soviet people and a fiery vindication of the resilience of the Soviet state, a record of sacrifice and achievement (coupled with the exertions of the Communist Party) whereby the burden of this, the most gruelling of all wars, was carried to a triumphant end. The record speaks for itself. In the course of 1,320 days of active military operations (93 per cent of the entire wartime period) the Red Army destroyed or disabled 506.5 German divisions in the east, while Germany’s sullen satellites lost a further 100 divisions as the price of participating in the war against the Soviet Union. Out of the grand total of Germany’s losses of 13,600,000 killed, wounded, missing and made prisoner, Soviet military statisticians reckon that no less than 10,000,000 men met a grim fate on the Eastern Front.”[5] The Soviet casualties both military and civilian amounted to an estimated 27 million deaths, and of this figure the military deaths amounted to some 8.7 million;[6] the comparative figures for the U.S. was 407,300 military deaths of which 250,000 died in Europe, and for Britain 383,700 military deaths that included soldiers from the Commonwealth countries (such as Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, South Africa).[7]

The war was a clash of titans, Hitler’s Germany against the Soviet Union under Stalin. The decisive theatre of war in Europe was in the east. As Erickson wrote, “the horrendous carnage was also accompanied by a mighty clash of war machines, the Red Army claiming the battlefield destruction of 48,000 enemy tanks, 167,000 guns and almost 77,000 aircraft, while Soviet war industry, having carried through the greatest enforced industrial migration in history, furnished the battlefronts with no less than 78,000 tanks and 16,000 self-propelled guns, 108,028 combat aircraft, 12 million rifles and carbines, 6 million sub-machine guns, almost 98,000 field guns and 110,000 lorries. By these demonstrations, whatever the scale of measurement, the decisive role in defeating the ‘Fascist bloc’ was played by the Soviet Union.”[8] While under the wartime leadership of Franklin Roosevelt the United States at the head of the Big Three was turned into, in the words of the president, “the great arsenal of democracy.”[9]

In the intervening decades since this “most gruelling of all wars” ended, its memory and what it entailed faded among the people in the collective West, while in public it went deliberately unspoken by members of the ruling class. The end of the war was also the end of the Big Three amity. A fork in the path of the “strange alliance” emerged soon after the victorious Red Army took Berlin and, consequently, the parting of the Big Three in taking divergent paths came about at the fork viewed as imminent and unavoidable. But was it?

Alexander Werth (1901-69) was one of the very few westerners in the Soviet Union through the entire war reporting for the BBC. He was Russian-born and naturalized British writer and war correspondent. And since Werth was fluent in Russian language, this provided him unique access into the wartime Soviet society that informed both his work as a journalist and later his book Russia At War 1941-45. Towards the end of his book Werth wrote,

American writers have made much of Stalin’s “betrayal” of Yalta so soon after the conference. Some have attributed it—not at all plausibly—to the criticisms and opposition with which Stalin met from the “revolutionary doctrinaires” in the Politburo. Much more credible are some of the other explanations offered for the “change” in Soviet policy after Yalta. It is probable that Stalin took note of Roosevelt’s remark that the United States were unlikely to keep any troops in Europe for more than two years. Secondly, he seems to have been impressed, soon after Yalta, by the great hostility that the Russians met in Poland, which led to his determination not to take any serious chances, either there or in any of the other east-European countries.

The growing American opposition in March and April, to the big post-war loan to Russia was also of some importance, in increasing East-West tension. Roosevelt’s death caused genuine alarm in Russia—an alarm which soon proved justified, especially when President Truman made his début in his Russian policy by stopping Lend-Lease for Russia immediately after VE-Day—while Russia was still committed to entering the war against Japan, on America’s side. As we know from Harry Hopkin’s account of his visit to Moscow soon afterwards, Stalin was deeply annoyed and offended by what Stettinius called this “untimely and incredible” step.

Indeed, Yalta, this great manifestation of three-power unity of purpose with victory over Nazi Germany in sight, proved, perhaps inevitably, a watershed in inter-allied relations. Conflicting interests and contrasting ideas that in normal circumstances would have been almost incompatible, had been shelved, while the gigantic struggle was in progress. But now when it came to preparing for peace the working compromises that had been reached proved only too fragile.[10]

The differences within the “strange alliance” had required deft handling and the sort of statesmanship displayed by Franklin Roosevelt, as leader of the Big Three, that went missing by his untimely death on April 12, 1945, less than a month before the war’s end. Roosevelt had been a bulwark against the deep-seated Russophobia among Anglo-Europeans since he recognized the Soviet Union in 1933 establishing diplomatic relations with Moscow, and he had given much thought to the postwar order for a peaceful world in which entente with the Soviet Union was essential. It was not only the “strange alliance” that faded from the collective memory of the people in the West after the war, but it was also how Roosevelt’s role in forging his personal relationship with Stalin came to be viewed dimly with the onset of the Cold War. Following his fourth inauguration on January 20, 1945, Roosevelt spoke briefly to the assembled people after taking his oath of office. He said, “We have learned that we cannot live alone at peace, that our own well-being is dependent on the well-being of other Nations far away. We have learned to be citizens of the world. We have learned, as Emerson said, ‘The only way to have a friend is to be one.’”[11] It could be said that those words described well Roosevelt’s approach in engaging with Stalin at the two Big Three meetings, Tehran (November 28-December 1, 1943) and Yalta (February 4-11, 1945), when they came together.

At the Potsdam Conference outside of Berlin held July 17-August 2, 1945, Truman met Stalin for the first time as the Big Three leaders assembled once more after Germany’s unconditional surrender. It was for the last time they were together as differences widened between the Anglo-American powers and the Soviet Union. During the conference on July 24 Truman informed Stalin of the successful test of an atomic weapon a week earlier but made no mention of using A-bomb against Japan he would authorize despite the views of his military commanders against such use when Japan was on the brink of negotiating surrender. Stalin, however, had been kept informed of the Manhattan Project by his intelligence people and the “atomic spies”, such as Klaus Fuch, who passed inside information on the atomic project to Moscow. Stalin understood the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan was a brusque and intimidating message from Truman for the Soviet Union signalling closure to the “strange alliance.” And Stalin’s response was to demand for a redoubled exertion by war-exhausted Soviet people to build their own atomic weapons, which they did with the consequence of the wartime alliance divided militarily, ideologically, and held apart in a divided Europe by nuclear weapons.

The sense of betrayal by Stalin of the Yalta agreements that American authors, as Werth noted, spread soon after the war ended was matched by an equal sense of dismay among the populace and the leadership of the Soviet Union with their Anglo-American allies. According to Werth, “On the one hand, Russia was a devastated, almost a ruined, country, with a formidable task of economic reconstruction ahead of her. But on the other hand, she was sitting on the top of the world, having won the greatest war in history. The future seemed bright as never before… A revolutionary Europe to a few—a happy, prosperous Russia to most. Among many of those who now dreamed of such a happy Russia there also existed the idea that the survival of the Big-Three alliance after the war would, somehow, tend to liberalise the Soviet regime (as, in some respects, it had already done during the war). Many illusions (in either direction) were to be destroyed only a few months later, with the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima…”[12]

The war literature is too vast for any individual interested to read even selectively any one aspect of the war from any one perspective of those who were in leadership positions on either side in governments and in the armed forces during the war and wrote their memoirs, of those who prepared the official records in war departments and ministries of foreign affairs and branches of the armed forces, of those journalists who reported from various theatres of the war, and of those academic historians who wrote histories of the war and biographies of wartime leaders and military commanders. My own fascination has been in reading biographies of the wartime leaders and military commanders, and here too the literature being vast one may, I suppose, through selected critical readings might reach a somewhat balanced understanding of, for instance, of Eisenhower or De Gaulle, while both having written their wartime memoirs as military commanders have also been subjects of biographers from different backgrounds and perspectives. In the ‘what if’ of history Roosevelt’s untimely death raises the question, had he lived long enough to see the war’s end and his vision of post-war peace secured by American-Soviet entente would it have meant a much different great power politics from the one that was seeded with the droppings of the atomic bombs on Japan followed by the Berlin blockade of 1948-49, the Korean war, the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam war, and so on and so forth through the Cold War years and after to America’s NATO-led proxy war in Ukraine against Russia? Of course, we will never know. But reading Roosevelt’s son Elliott Roosevelt’s intimate account of his father’s wartime thinking for postwar peace in As He Saw It published in 1946, we get an intriguing glimpse into what might have been instead of what became the Cold War and after its end turned hot in Ukraine, and with it was a return to full-blown Russophobia.

ii]

Elliott Roosevelt (1910-1990) was one of four surviving sons and a daughter of the president and the first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Elliott enlisted in the United States Army Air Force as an aviator ahead of the war, served with distinction, and promoted to the rank of brigadier general. His father being wheelchair bound due to paralytic illness, Elliott was one of the sons who accompanied the president during wartime conferences beginning with the Atlantic Conference in Argentia, Newfoundland, in August 1941 when Churchill joined the president and together signed the Atlantic Charter. Elliott also accompanied his father as a military attaché to the Casablanca meeting in January 1943, then in November 22-26, 1943, at the Cairo conference attended by Churchill and the Chinese leader General Chiang Kai-shek; this was followed by the Tehran conference November 28-December 1, 1943, when Stalin came to his first meeting with Franklin Roosevelt. Elliott Roosevelt met Stalin in Tehran, but did not accompany his father to Yalta where his sister Anna went instead.

Elliott Roosevelt’s account of the Big Three conferences he attended as his father’s son and aide was personal. As he explained, “After any great upheaval like this last war, there is bound to be a great spate of books. Generals, ministers, war correspondents, all fly to the typewriter or the not-so-very-sharp pencil. Nevertheless, for my book I can stake out a small but quite still definite space which is wholly individual.”[13] Apart from being a son of the president, the qualification for writing his account, he explained, was “that it was given to me to be present at and a witness of some of the most important meetings of the war, indeed of our lifetime. Father wanted and needed someone whom he knew well and trusted, a member of his family, if possible, to be with him whenever he was overseas for a wartime conference. This is not to suggest that he didn’t know his official advisers well, or that he didn’t trust them; but with one of his sons he could wholly relax. He could talk as though he were talking out loud to himself—and he did. Of his sons, I was most often in a position to be drafted as his aide. Thus, when he first met Churchill off Newfoundland, I was attached to a reconnaissance squadron at Gander Lake, Newfoundland; when he came to Casablanca, my outfit was operating out of Algeria; one of our headquarters bases was still in Tunisia when he came to the Near East for the Cairo and Teheran conferences. Only when he went to Yalta was I unable to be at his side.”[14] But why did he write and publish his account of the conferences he attended, the discussions among the Big Three he heard, and what his father confided to him in private, within a year of his father’s death? He wrote,

The events which I propose to describe in this book, the conversations which I remember, the impressions and the incidents which have formed my present convictions, took place—roughly—from the war’s outbreak until shortly after the meeting of the Big Three at Yalta in the Crimea. At the time they took place, let me assure you, I had no intention of writing a book about them. The decision to write this book was taken more recently, and impelled by urgent events. Winston Churchill’s speech at Fulton, Missouri, had a hand in this decision; the meetings of the Security Council at Hunter College in New York City and the ideas expressed at those meetings were influential; the growing stockpile of American atom bombs is a compelling factor; all the signs of growing disunity among the leading nations of the world, all the broken promises, all the renascent power politics of greatly and desperate imperialism were my spurs in this undertaking.[15]

At the August 1941 meeting of Churchill and Roosevelt the main agenda item was what came to be known as the Lend-Lease agreement to provide American military assistance to Britain and the Soviet Union. Hitler’s war against the Soviet Union was launched on 22nd June, some six weeks earlier and the German Wehrmacht’s advance towards Moscow as the two Anglo-American leaders met in Argentia, Newfoundland, seemed at the time to be unstoppable. Ahead of the meeting with Churchill before he arrived, the president spoke privately in his cabin on board the presidential flagship USS Augusta with Elliott. The president mentioned, “The P.M. is coming here tomorrow because—although I doubt that he’ll show it—he knows that without America, England can’t stay in the war.” He went on to state, “The British Empire is at stake here. It’s something that’s not generally known, but British bankers and German bankers have had world trade pretty well sewn up in their pockets for a long time. Well, now, that’s not so good for American trade, is it? If in the past German and British economic interests have operated to exclude us from world trade, kept our merchant shipping down, closed us out of this or that market, and now Germany and Britain are at war, what should we do?” The president continued, “Leaving to one side for the moment the fact that Nazism is hateful, and that our natural interests, our hearts, are with the British. But there’s another angle. We’ve got to make clear to the British from the very outset that we don’t intent to be simply a good-time Charlie who can be used to help the British Empire out of a tight spot, and then be forgotten forever.” Elliott asked what his father meant, and the president said, “Churchill told me that he was not his Majesty’s Prime Minister for the purpose of presiding over the dissolution of the British Empire. [Churchill later repeated this in his radio address.] I think I speak as America’s President when I say that America won’t help England in this war simply so that she will be able to continue to ride roughshod over colonial peoples.”[16]

Even before the first face-to-face meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt since the war in Europe started in September 1939, the president confided to his son the main sticking point in his thinking about Britain, France and other European colonial powers after the war would be about their empires and how they would address the demands of the colonial peoples. For Roosevelt, it seemed he had been thinking, the war then raging and however long it went before its end, was an interlude between the past age of colonialism, of “white man” rule over “coloured peoples”, and the future of independent nations in what today is the Global South. It also seemed that Roosevelt saw his role of steering the world safely from the past of the colonial order that was unsustainable in his view to a future of independent nations in which the Atlantic Charter would become one of the planks of the new order he hoped to put together.

In the next several days the president and the prime minister with their military and diplomatic staffs during business hours discussed the needs of the war, its progress and its conduct, and after dinner over drinks their conversations turned to politics and history. In the earlier sessions Churchill dominated, as he was wont to do and as he was the leader engaged in war, while Roosevelt listened with occasional questions and comments. As Elliott Roosevelt wrote, “It must be remembered that at this time Churchill was the war leader, Father only the president of a state which had indicated its sympathies in a tangible fashion. Thus, Churchill still arrogated the conversational lead, still dominated the after-dinner hours.”[17]

In one of those after dinner conversations the following exchange occurred between Roosevelt and Churchill described by Elliott Roosevelt, as follows:

Father started it.

“Of course,” he remarked with a sly sort of assurance, “of course, after the war, one of the preconditions of any lasting peace will have to be the greatest possible freedom of trade.”

He paused. The P.M.’s head was lowered; he was watching Father steadily, from under one eyebrow.

“No artificial barriers,” Father pursued. “As few favored economic agreements as possible. Opportunities for expansion. Markets open for healthy competition.” His eyes wandered innocently around the room.

Churchill shifted in his armchair. “The British Empire trade agreements,” he began heavily, “are—”

Father broke in. “Yes. Those Empire trade agreements are a case in point. It’s because of them that the people of India and Africa, of all the colonial Near East and Far East, are still as backward as they are.”

Churchill’s neck reddened and he crouched forward. “Mr. President, England does not propose for a moment to lose its favoured position among the British Dominions. The trade that has made England great shall continue, and under conditions prescribed by England’s ministers.”

“You see,” said Father slowly, “it is along in here somewhere that there is likely to be some disagreement between you, Winston, and me.

“I am firmly of the belief that if we are to arrive at a stable peace it must involve the development of backward countries. Backward peoples. How can this be done? It can’t be done, obviously by eighteenth-century methods. Now—”

“Who’s talking eighteenth-century methods?”

“Whichever of your ministers recommends a policy which takes wealth in raw materials out of a colonial country, but which returns nothing to the people of that country in consideration. Twentieth-century methods involve bringing industry to these colonies. Twentieth-century methods include increasing the wealth of a people by increasing their standard of living, by educating them, by bringing them sanitation—by making sure that they get a return for the raw wealth of their community.”

Around the room, all of us were leaning forward attentively. Hopkins was grinning. Commander Thompson, Churchill’s aide, was looking glum and alarmed. The P.M. himself was beginning to look apoplectic.

“You mentioned India.” He growled.

“Yes. I can’t believe that we can fight a war against fascist slavery, and at the same time not work to free people all over the world from a backward colonial policy.”

“What about the Philippines?”

“I’m glad you mentioned them. They get their independence, you know, in 1946. And they’ve gotten modern sanitation, modern education; their rate of illiteracy has gone steadily down…”

“There can be no tampering with the Empire’s economic agreements.”

“They’re artificial…”

“They’re the foundation of our greatness.”

“The peace,” said Father firmly, “cannot include any continued despotism. The structure of the peace demands and will get equality of peoples. Equality of peoples involves the utmost freedom of competitive trade. Will anyone suggest that Germany’s attempt to dominate trade in central Europe was not a major contributing factor to war?”

It was an argument that could have no resolution between these two men…

It was after two in the morning when finally the British party said their good nights. I helped my Father into his cabin, and sat down to smoke a last cigarette with him.

Father grunted. “A real old Tory, isn’t he? A real old Tory, of the old school.”

“I thought for a minute he was going to bust, Pop.”

“Oh,” he smiled, “I’ll be able to work with him. Don’t worry about that. We’ll get along famously.”

“So long as you keep off the subject of India.”

“Mmm, I don’t know. I think we’ll even talk some more about India, before we’re through. And Burma. And Java. And Indo-China. And Indonesia. And all the African colonies. And Egypt and Palestine. We’ll talk about ’em all. Don’t forget one thing. Winnie has one supreme mission in life, but only one. He’s a perfect wartime prime minister. His one big job is to see Britain survives this war.”

“I must say he sure gives the impression he’s going to do just that.”

“Yes. But you notice the way he changes the subject away from anything postwar?”

“It’s embarrassing, the things you were talking about. Embarrassing to him.”

“There’s another reason. It’s because his mind is perfect for that of a war leader. But Winston Churchill lead England after the war? It’d never work.”

As it turned out, the British people agreed with Pop on that one.[18]

The following evening Churchill returned from the battleship HMS Prince of Wales that brought him to Argentia to Augusta for an informal dinner and more conversation with Roosevelt in the company of only Harry Hopkins, Elliott Roosevelt, and his younger brother Franklin, Jr. On this occasion, noted Elliott Roosevelt, was the beginning of the mantle of leadership slipping away from British shoulders to American. He wrote,

We saw it when, late in the evening, there came one flash of the argument that had held us hushed the night before. In a sense, it was to be the valedictory of Churchill’s outspoken Toryism, as far as Father was concerned. Churchill had got up to walk about the room. Talking, gesticulating, at length he paused in front of Father, was silent for a moment, looking at him, and then brandished a stubby forefinger under Father’s nose.

“Mr. President,” he cried, “I believe you are trying to do away with the British Empire. Every idea you entertain about the structure of the postwar world demonstrates it. But in spite of that”—and his forefinger waved—“in spite of that, we know that you constitute our only hope. And”—his voice sank dramatically—“you know that we know it. You know that we know that without America, the Empire won’t stand.”

Churchill admitted, in that moment, that he knew the peace could only be won according to precepts which the United States of America would lay down. And in saying what he did, he was acknowledging that British colonial policy would be a dead duck, and British attempts to dominate world trade would be a dead duck, and British ambitions to play off the U.S.S.R. against the U.S.A. would be a dead duck.

Or would have been, if Father had lived [bold added].[19]

iii]

The Atlantic Charter of 14 August 1941 laid out President Franklin Roosevelt’s post-war vision, or scheme, as precepts for peace: decolonization, equality and respect of sovereignty of all nations, economic advancement and security for all peoples, free trade and freedom of commerce without hindrance on high seas and oceans for all countries, making the use of force unlawful, disarmament, and the rule of law enacted and enforced by the centrepiece of the new global order, the United Nations, that would be launched at the San Francisco Conference between April 25-June 26, 1945, before the war ended.[20] The subtext of Roosevelt’s public and private engagements through the several wartime conferences with his co-belligerents Churchill and Stalin that Elliott Roosevelt witnessed and wrote about, was the precepts in the Atlantic Charter spelled out and broadcast to the world before America entered the war after Pearl Harbor in December 1941. But as Elliott Roosevelt noted and described the private conversations he observed between his father and the prime minister onboard the Augusta in Argentia, Newfoundland, ahead of the signing of the Charter brought into the open glaring unresolvable differences over the postwar architecture for world peace between the two men.

At the Tehran conference in November-December 1943 after the Red Army’s decisive victories over Hitler’s Wehrmacht in the battle of Stalingrad followed by the battle of Kursk, which together tore the guts of the German armed forces and set the Soviet army to roll westward, the main discussion among the Big Three leaders was setting the date for opening the second front in Europe on the Atlantic seaboard. It was at the Yalta conference in February 1945 as victory was in sight that the main agenda became the postwar setting for peace within the framework of the United Nations organizations. Elliott Roosevelt was unable to go to Yalta due to his military deployment, but his sister Anna Roosevelt in the company of Harry Hopkins, the president’s trusted advisor, were present at the conference. They briefed him of the proceedings in Yalta, while the president took to writing some letters for his son about the conference and his meetings with Churchill and Stalin.

Elliott Roosevelt met his father for the last time during the week of Christmas 1944 he spent at the White House with the family. The president spoke with him while preparing for his fourth inauguration and travelling to Yalta. He did not hide his anger with Churchill taking sides among the different factions of the Greek resistance and sending British troops in support of the favoured group in the fight that had broken out within the resistance movement. The president said, “British troops. Fighting against the guerrillas who fought the Nazis for the last four years. How the British can dare such a thing! The lengths they will go to hang on to the past! I wouldn’t be surprised,” he went on, “if Winston had simply made it clear he was backing the Greek Royalists. That would be only in character. But killing Greek guerrillas! Using British soldiers for such a job!” And when Elliott reminded his father that it was probably done with American Lend-Lease equipment, the president replied, “I’ll find out about that… Though I don’t suppose there’s too much I can do about it.”[21] And then the president abruptly changed the subject recalling his conversations with the Queen of the Netherlands during her visit with the president.

“You know, it was just about a year ago that Queen Wilhelmina was here. In the White House. For a visit. And we got to talking”—he grinned—“I should say, I got her to talking, about the Dutch colonies, and what was going to happen to them after the war. Java, Borneo—all the Netherlands East Indies. Talked back and forth for more than six hours, over two or three evenings. I made the point that it was American arms that would be liberating those colonies from the Japanese. American soldiers and sailors and marines. I mentioned the Philippines.” He grinned in recollection. “And, Elliott, she agreed that the policy we have in the Philippines would be the pattern she would follow in the Dutch East Indies, after the war. She promised me that her government would announce, immediately after victory in Japan, that they were going to grant the peoples of the Dutch East Indies first dominion status, with the right of self-rule and equality.

“Then, after their government has been established, if the people, by free vote, decide that they want complete independence, they shall be granted it. Just as we are granting it in the Philippines.

“That’s a commitment. And it means a sharp break away from the leadership of the British. Think what that will mean to Stalin! How it will show him what the western nations can and will accomplish, in the postwar!”

I gathered that he had been reminded of these conversations with Queen Wilhelmina by British arrogance in Greece.

“That’s right,” he said. “That’s right. That’s why, for one thing, I don’t think any public statement condemning the British actions in Greece is necessary, quite apart from what it would mean to the Axis, in terms of propaganda.

“The point is that we are going to be able to bring pressure on the British to fall in line with our thinking, in relation to the whole colonial question. It’s all tied up in the one package: the Dutch East Indies, French Indo-China, India, British extraterritorial rights in China… We’re going to be able to make this the twentieth century after all, watch and see!”

His sharp irritation of a few minutes before had disappeared completely, as he contemplated with gusto his plans for the kind of foreign policy which would not only be independent of the British Foreign Office but would force that citadel of Empire to a recognition of progress.

And it was clear that he was looking forward to the rehashing of global policy at the proposed next meeting with his associates in the Big Three.[22]

President Roosevelt lived for less than four months after Christmas 1944. He was the youngest of the Big Three wartime chiefs, but his health was in decline with the burden of the war upon him, demands of the last presidential campaigning, and the toll of the journey involved to and back from Yalta. But on arrival home from Crimea, as his son recorded his Mother telling him, the president was in an exultant mood. He told the First Lady,

Look at the communiqué from the Crimea: the path it charts! From Yalta to Moscow, to San Francisco and Mexico City, to London and Washington and Paris! Not to forget it mentions Berlin!

It’s been a global war, and we’ve already started making it a global peace![23]

At Yalta the proudest achievement of the president was resolving differences on the voting procedure in the Security Council. Elliott Roosevelt explained what this meant, “Both Father and Stalin approved the concept of the veto power for the Big Three, basing their arguments on the simple, crystal-clear fact that if the peace is to be maintained it can be maintained only if all the world’s greatest powers concur. If two of them fall out with the third, if one falls out with the other two, the peace is in danger. Only unity and integrity of purpose can save the peace. The solution of the dilemma posed by this procedural question was Father’s. The Big Three, plus China and France, must agree unanimously, so said the solution, before the world organization can take economic or military action against an aggressor. But any seven of the Security Council’s eleven members can cite an aggressor nation and call it to account before the tribunal of world opinion.” He summed it up, “Father was categorically insistent on the need for maintaining the utmost integrity among the nations, and especially among the Big Three. And this approach to the veto principle preserved that integrity.”[24]

According to Harry Hopkins’ recollection provided to Elliott Roosevelt, “the unity of Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt was a firmer and more tangible thing at Yalta than at Teheran. And it was evident that Father’s rôle, even more than at earlier conferences, was that of leader. It is not by chance that he sat in the middle, when the pictures were taken. He dominated Winston Churchill more completely than before; Joseph Stalin was likewise prepared to heed Father’s counsel, to accept Father’s solutions.”[25]

It did not take long after the war’s end in Europe and in the absence of President Roosevelt for the unravelling to begin of the Big Three unity, which the president had envisaged as indispensable for postwar peace and global order. Stalin had assured the president at Yalta that three months following the surrender of Germany the Soviet Union would be at war with Japan given the time needed to move the Red Army from the western front to the east. Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bombs over Japan without prior consultation or notice to Stalin at the Potsdam conference was a message delivered that Roosevelt’s requirement of the Big Three integrity and unity on most important issues was being set aside by his successor in the White House. Less than a year later came Churchill’s “iron curtain” speech of March 1946 given at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, in which he renounced the wartime alliance of the Big Three and declared the Soviet Union and communism posed the threat to postwar peace and stability.

The talk of war, Elliott Rosevelt wrote, filled the air in Washington and whether the war against the Soviet Union might come before 1948, “which is to say, preferably before the Soviets can perfect their version of an atomic weapon.”[26] Russophobia reappeared in the ruling circles of the western powers. “Undoubtedly, from V-E Day forward, Stalin and his advisers determined that if the overall picture of Allied disunity was going to be so marked,” Elliott wrote knowing intimately his father’s thinking, “they would promptly start thinking of mending their wall, against any eventuality. Iron curtains do not simply grow. There are reasons for their existence. If a Churchill could talk about an iron curtain in Europe, a Stalin could point to the reasons for its necessity… In my effort to get back to first and underlying causes for our critical present, I note only that it was the United States and Great Britain who first shook the mailed fist, who first abrogated the collective decisions… [W]e vacated the vitally important role of operating as mediator between Great Britain and the Soviet Union, the only two nations whose security interests clash today. Rather than arbitrating those differences, as Father had always been careful to do, we chose sides; worse than that, we did not simply line up beside Britain, we lined up in back of her.”[27]

Truman goaded by Churchill steered America away from the path Roosevelt had set with the Atlantic Charter as the guidepost for postwar peace built on the integrity and unity of the Big Three. Roosevelt wished and schemed to see the end of empires; Truman set course that would turn America into an empire as the postwar superpower. In concluding the account of his father’s effort in “forging a global peace”, Elliott Roosevelt wrote,

Somewhere, at some point in the months since Franklin Roosevelt’s death, his brave beginning has been prejudiced. It may be that “prejudiced” is too mild a word. It may be that it should read: The peace is fast being lost.[28]

And so it was, and so it came to be said of America is “agreement incapable” as was said of Britain being “perfidious Albion.”

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Notes:

[1] See https://spartacus-educational.com/USAswintonJ.htm

[2] The origin of this quote of Kissinger comes from a phone conversation he had with William F. Buckley, Jr that Buckley took note of and disclosed it in his book United Nations Journal: A Delegate’s Odyssey (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1977), p. 40. Here is the full quote of Kissinger’s remarks to Buckley made in the spring of 1968 ahead of the Republican National Convention that nominated Richard Nixon as the Republican presidential candidate for the November 1968 election: “Nixon should be told that it is probably an objective of Clifford [Secretary of Defense in the Lyndon Johnson administration] to depose Thieu [President of the Republic of (South) Vietnam] before Nixon is inaugurated. Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem [former president of South Vietnam], the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”

[3] John R. Deane, The Strange Alliance (London: Viking Press, 1947); also see Alexander Werth, Russia At War 1941-45 (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1964), p. xiii.

[4] Cited by A. Werth, op. cit., p. xiv.

[5] John Erickson, The Road To Berlin (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1983), p. ix.

[6] See “World War II Casualties of the Soviet Union”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the_Soviet_Union

[7] See “World War II Casualties,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

[8] Erickson, op. cit.

[9] Jean Edward Smith, FDR (New York: Random House, 2008), p. 481.

[10] Werth, op. cit., p. 980-981.

[11] Cited by Smith, FDR, pp. 628-629.

[12] Werth, op. cit., p. 982.

[13] Elliott Roosevelt, As He Saw It (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1946), pp. xiv-xv.

[14] Ibid., pp. xv-xvi.

[15] Ibid., pp. xiii-xiv.

[16] Ibid., p. 22, and pp 24-25.

[17] Ibid., p. 35.

[18] Ibid., pp. 35-39.

[19] Ibid., pp. 41-42.

[20] Ibid., pp. 42-44; for the Atlantic Charter, see https://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/atlantic.asp

[21] Elliott Roosevelt, op. cit., pp. 222-223.

[22] Ibid., pp. 223-225.

[23] Ibid., p. 246; also see the Yalta communiqué and the mention in it of the Atlantic Charter, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945Berlinv02/d1417

[24] Ibid., p. 239.

[25] Ibid., p. 241.

[26] Ibid., p. 248.

[27] Ibid., p. 254-255.

[28] Ibid., p. 247.