No Ordinary Time

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  It was Hopkins who persuaded Roosevelt to side with Churchill instead of Stalin on the issue of giving France a significant role in the occupation of Germany. Though France was a country without an army (Stalin’s argument), Churchill was thinking of the future, when the American troops had gone home and Britain was left to contain the might of Russia. At that moment, a strong France would be critical to the overall stability of Europe. Giving France a zone of occupation was thus an important first step. Once Roosevelt was brought to agree with Churchill on this, Stalin was forced to go along.

  • • •

  Each of the Big Three leaders had different priorities at Yalta. Roosevelt was primarily concerned with reaching an accord on the new international organization and bringing Russia into the war against Japan as quickly as possible. The Joint Chiefs had told Roosevelt it was worth almost any price to secure the Red Army’s military assistance in the Far East, where the invasion of Japan was expected to cost a million American casualties. Churchill wanted above all to maintain the British Empire and to keep Europe from being dominated by one power (thus his stance on France). Stalin had little interest in such abstractions; his mind was sharply focused on the borders of Poland, on reparations from Germany, and on various pieces of real estate in the Far East.

  At meetings held the previous September with Britain and Russia at the Dumbarton Oaks estate in Washington, D.C., to discuss the framework of a postwar security organization, the United States had outlined a world organization of two houses: a large Assembly and a small Security Council consisting of seven members, four of them permanent—the U.S., Russia, Great Britain, and China. In cases that involved the sending of United Nations forces to trouble spots or mediating international disputes, any one of the Big Four could exercise a veto. However, if one of the Big Four were involved, that country could discuss the problem but could not vote on it. When the Dumbarton Oaks Conference ended, two key issues remained unresolved: the Soviet Union was refusing to go along with the voting procedures in the Security Council, and was insisting on sixteen seats in the Assembly for the sixteen Soviet republics.

  At Yalta, Stalin dramatically shifted. He accepted Roosevelt’s voting proposals for the Security Council and said he would now be satisfied with two or three extra seats in the Assembly for the republics that had suffered the most during the war—the Ukraine, White Russia, and Lithuania. Churchill was pleased. As long as each member of the Commonwealth had a separate vote, he had no trouble granting Stalin’s request for a few extra votes for the Soviet republics.

  The issue was not so easy for Roosevelt; firmly committed to the principle of one vote for each member of the Assembly, he found the idea of any extra votes at all abhorrent. Yet, if he refused to compromise with Stalin after the Russian leader had come so far, then the whole structure of the United Nations would be in jeopardy. After struggling for several days, Roosevelt endorsed Stalin’s proposal on the condition that, if the United States needed to add two extra votes of its own to satisfy Congress, it could do so.

  The Polish problem was to take up more time and generate more heat than any other issue at Yalta, though in many ways, as Averell Harriman observed, “events were in the saddle,” and the fate of Poland had already been decided before the subject was even taken up. With Stalin’s troops occupying the entire country and a communist regime firmly in place in Warsaw, “it would have taken,” Harriman argued, “a great deal more leverage than Roosevelt and Churchill in fact possessed, or could reasonably be expected to apply, in order to alter the situation fundamentally.”

  Roosevelt was willing to be flexible about Poland’s borders—the Soviet plan basically called for the westward movement of the entire country, compensating Russia at Germany’s expense—as long as the government itself was free, independent, and strong. “The most important matter,” Roosevelt argued in his opening presentation, “is that of a permanent government for Poland . . . a government which would represent all five major parties.” Churchill agreed: “I am more interested in the question of Poland’s sovereign independence and freedom than in particular frontier lines. I want the Poles to have a home in Europe and to be free to live their own lives there. This is what we went to war against Germany for—that Poland should be free and sovereign.”

  Now it was Stalin’s turn. “The Prime Minister has said that for Great Britain the question of Poland is a question of honor. For Russia it is not only a question of honor but of security.” For more than a century, Poland had been the traditional invasion route to Russia; Napoleon had come that way, Hitler had come that way, and the Soviet Union was determined that this would never happen again. Indeed, Stalin threatened, he would continue the war as long as necessary in order to ensure a friendly government in Poland. This was, he concluded, “a matter of life and death for the Soviet State.”

  Realizing that without a settlement on Poland the Big Three would break up, Roosevelt did what he could in the days that followed to extract concessions from Stalin. He got Stalin to agree that the communist government in Warsaw should be “reorganized on a broader democratic basis” to include the leaders of the exile government in London, and that “free and unfettered elections” would be held soon, perhaps within a month. On paper it looked good, but the critical matter of supervising the elections to ensure that they were truly free remained obscure.

  As it was written, the formula was “so elastic,” Admiral Leahy complained to Roosevelt, “that the Russians can stretch it all the way from Yalta to Washington without even technically breaking it.”

  “I know, Bill,” Roosevelt wearily replied, “I know it. But it’s the best I can do for Poland at this time.”

  In the end, Roosevelt biographer James MacGregor Burns concludes, Roosevelt’s position on Poland resulted not, as many have since charged, from “naïvete, ignorance, illness or perfidy, but from his acceptance of the facts: Russia occupied Poland. Russia distrusted its Western allies. Russia had a million men who could fight Japan. Russia could sabotage the new peace organization. And Russia was absolutely determined about Poland and always had been.”

  The Polish issue settled, Roosevelt turned back to his original goal: securing Russian help in the war against Japan. The costly invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa were about to begin. The American military chiefs believed that the war against Japan would continue at least eighteen months after Germany’s surrender. The first test of the atomic bomb was not to take place for another five months. The United States needed Russia’s help. It could mean the savings of tens of thousands of American lives.

  With all this in mind, Roosevelt negotiated a secret agreement with Stalin in which Stalin pledged to enter the war against Japan within two to three months of Germany’s surrender. In return, Roosevelt agreed to legitimize Russian claims in the Far East, including the recovery of southern Sakhalin from Japan, the annexation of Japan’s Kurile Islands, the lease of Port Arthur as a naval base, the right to use the international port at Dairen, and a joint share with the Chinese in control over the Manchurian railroads.

  High spirits were evident on the part of all three leaders on February 8, when it was Stalin’s turn to host the formal dinner. Held at Yusupov Palace, Stalin’s sumptuous dinner lasted until 2 a.m., with forty-five standing toasts. Stalin toasted Churchill as “the bravest governmental figure in the world,” the courageous leader of a great nation that had stood alone “when the rest of Europe was falling flat on its face before Hitler.” In reply, Churchill toasted Stalin as “the mighty leader of a mighty country that had taken the full shock of the German war machine” and broken its back. Stalin then saluted Roosevelt as “the man with the broadest conception of national interest; even though his country was not directly endangered, he had forged the instruments which led to the mobilization of the world against Hitler.”

  • • •

  “We have wound up the Conference, successfully, I think,” Roosevelt happily reported to Eleanor as the presidential party left Yalta. �
��I am a bit exhausted but really all right. It has been grand hearing from you.”

  Roosevelt’s long absence had been hard on Eleanor. Though she had passed the first week pleasantly enough at her apartment in New York, she seemed at loose ends in Washington, feeling far removed from the center of action, waiting every day for mail from her husband and daughter. “LL was really so happy to get a letter from you,” John reported to Anna. “She has had so little word . . . . That is somewhat tragic.” Anna and John wrote faithfully to one another almost every day—“What a lonesome barn this is,” John told Anna the day after she left; “only one night and I am dying”—but Eleanor heard from Franklin only twice.

  Matters were not improved when Roosevelt asked Lieutenant A. L. Conrad, a White House courier who had returned early from Yalta, to bring Eleanor a bouquet of flowers. “Lt. Conrad came to lunch,” Eleanor reported to Franklin, “and brought the orchids which he said you told him to get me. Many thanks dear but I rather doubt his truth since you wouldn’t order orchids [orchids were tremendously expensive at that time of year] and so I suggest you don’t forget to pay him!”

  But personal hurts seemed secondary, Eleanor conceded, against the momentous events at Yalta. When the official communiqué from the conference came over the wires, Eleanor was pleased to hear that full agreement had been reached on the structure of the new United Nations. This to her was the most important issue at Yalta. “All the world looks smiling!” she told Franklin. “You must be very well satisfied and your diplomatic abilities must have been colossal. I think having the first United Nations meeting in San Francisco is a stroke of genius.”

  The mood of the American delegation as they boarded the Quincy on Great Bitter Lake was one of “supreme exultation” as telegrams of praise flooded in from around the world. Though parts of the protocol remained secret, the published communiqué met the enthusiastic response of opinion leaders everywhere. The fact that agreement was reached on so many subjects, ranging from the United Nations to German reparations to the role of France and the frontiers of Poland, seemed extraordinary. William Shirer labeled the agreements “a landmark in human history”; the New York Times editorialized that they seemed “to justify or surpass most of the high hopes placed on this fateful meeting.”

  “We really believed in our hearts,” Hopkins later recalled, “that this was the dawn of the new day we had all been praying for and talking about for so many years.”

  But as the Quincy proceeded westward to Algiers, clouds seemed to settle over the ship. Hopkins was by now so desperately ill that he was unable to leave his cabin. The thought of the nine-day voyage across the Atlantic in rough seas filled him with dread, and he decided to leave the ship at Algiers, rest at Marrakesh for a few days, and then fly back to Washington.

  Roosevelt was angered by Hopkins’ decision to leave. “Why did Harry have to get sick on me,” he muttered, his voice trailing off. He was counting on Hopkins to help with the report on the Yalta Conference, which he had promised to deliver to Congress as soon as he returned. Though Sam Rosenman was scheduled to come aboard and help with the speech, no one but Hopkins knew the full story of what had gone on and what could be revealed.

  “The president was good and mad,” Harry’s son Robert recalled, “so much so that he didn’t actually say goodbye when he left. Dad had always rallied before, the president reasoned. Why couldn’t he rally now? Besides, the best road to recovery was to keep your spirits up, and the best way to do that was to stay together.”

  Weary himself, the president was unable to see that Hopkins, who had always been there beside him, loving him and fighting for him, had simply reached the limit of his endurance. All that Roosevelt could see was that Hopkins was leaving him, as Missy had left him before, and Louis Howe before that. Perhaps, if Roosevelt had been able to explain any of those feelings to Hopkins, Hopkins might have stayed on the ship. But the sad truth is that nothing was said, and the two old friends parted with a frosty farewell that proved to be their last.

  Two days later, Roosevelt’s military aide, the bluff and genial Pa Watson, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage aboard the Quincy and died. “One moment he was breathing and the next his pulse had stopped,” Anna recorded in her diary. Mclntire and Bruenn broke the news to Roosevelt in his cabin while Anna waited and worried outside. “He was very, very upset,” Bruenn recalled. “I shall miss him almost more than I can express,” Roosevelt said.

  “Many in Washington considered Watson merely a jovial companion to the President,” Sam Rosenman observed. “He was much more. Like Missy, he had an uncanny instinct for distinguishing between the fake and the genuine in human beings and human conduct . . . . The President had seen many of his friends die; but in his weakened and tired condition, the death of Watson seemed to have a more depressing effect on him than the death of any of the others.”

  For days, the president remained in his cabin, withdrawn, quiet, and preoccupied, refusing to work with Rosenman. “It was a sorry ship,” Rosenman recalled. It was not until February 26, the day before the Quincy was scheduled to land at Newport News, that Roosevelt finally agreed to go over the minutes of the meetings and begin working on the speech. It was “none too soon,” Rosenman remarked.

  Knowing of Watson’s death and Hopkins’ illness, Eleanor was nervous as she waited for her husband to come home, fearing that he would be in worse shape than when he left. Yet, to her surprise, when he landed in Washington, he seemed unaccountably well and, in spite of the sorrow, retained some of the exhilaration of the trip, “leading you to forget” for a moment, she said, how tired he was.

  “Look at the communiqué from the Crimea,” he told Eleanor, “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.”

  • • •

  In the years to come, the rosy assessments that surrounded the initial publication of the Yalta protocol would give way to severe criticism as the Yalta Conference came to be seen by many as a symbol of failure in foreign policy, a series of surrenders to Russia that led inexorably to the Cold War and the loss of Eastern Europe to the communists. Critics, profiting by their knowledge of later events not known to the participants at the time, have focused most of the blame on Roosevelt, a “sick man at Yalta,” unfit for the job of negotiating with Stalin.

  What is the truth of these claims? It must be agreed at the outset that Roosevelt was a sick man at Yalta. It was obvious to anyone who saw him that his strength was waning. “To a doctor’s eye,” Lord Moran wrote, stunned at the change in the president since Quebec, “he has all the symptoms of hardening of the arteries of the brain in an advanced stage so that I give him only a few months to live.” Averell Harriman, who had not seen the president since November, was equally taken aback. “The signs of deterioration seemed to me unmistakable,” Harriman later admitted.

  Still, the question remains: did Roosevelt’s physical condition impair his judgment? There is no simple answer. The Americans who worked with him most closely at the conference—Stettinius, Leahy, Harriman, and Byrnes—are unanimous in their belief that Roosevelt was in full possession of his faculties at all times. Admittedly, Harriman observed, the long conference tired him. “Nevertheless he had blocked out definite objectives which he had clearly in his mind and he carried on the negotiations to this end with his usual skill and perception.” Admiral Leahy agreed. “It was my feeling,” Leahy later concluded, “that Roosevelt conducted the Crimean Conference with great skill and that his personality had dominated the discussions.”

  Even Anthony Eden, who was disheartened when he first saw Roosevelt at Malta, later acknowledged that Roosevelt’s ill-health did not seem to alter his judgment. To Eden’s surprise, Roosevelt not only kept up with Churchill in the round of conferences, but also found time to conduct a whole separate enterprise—negotiations with Stalin over the Far Eas
t.

  Certainly, if Roosevelt had been in better health, he might have held out longer on a number of detailed points—he might have insisted on stronger safeguards with regard to Poland, he might have kept more ambiguous his commitments to Russia in the Far East, he might have fought harder against the two extra Assembly seats—but in the end, there is no evidence that fine points of language would have made a great deal of difference in the course of events. “If Stalin was determined to have his way,” Averell Harriman concluded years later, “he was bound to bend or break the agreements even if they’d been sewn up more tightly.” Unless, of course, the people of the United States were willing to go to war with Russia over Poland or Latvia or Lithuania, which Harriman seriously doubted they were.

  • • •

  At noon on March 1, 1945, Roosevelt went up to the Capitol to address a joint session of Congress. The chamber was filled to overflowing with everyone anxiously awaiting the president’s report on the Yalta Conference. In time-honored fashion, the doorkeeper announced the members of the Supreme Court, the members of the Cabinet, and finally the president of the United States. A hush went over the great chamber as the door opened to reveal the president seated in his wheelchair. In all the times the president had addressed the Congress, this was the first time he had ever allowed himself to come down the aisle in his wheelchair. Always before, either supported by the arm of a colleague or leaning on crutches, he had “walked” to the well.

  And now, also for the first time, instead of standing behind the lectern in a position above the well, he seated himself in a soft chair in front of a small table on the floor below the dais. “I hope you will pardon me for the unusual posture of sitting down during the presentation of what I want to say,” he began, “but I know that you will realize that it makes it a lot easier for me in not having to carry about ten pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs; and also because I have just completed a fourteen thousand mile trip.’