This is only one of many ticklish questions on which there will be one mind in the Soviet Union and opinion will be divided in the democracies. It illustrates the difficulties that will have to be faced and surmounted in these conversations. For agreement must be reached on some terms if the coming victory, purchased at a price that is still far from paid, will lead to the peace and order the three powers and their representatives are working for. The quest for peace is the reality overshadowing all lesser considerations, and if the three statesmen convince one another that this is the paramount aim of all, they will proceed in an atmosphere of confidence in which all problems are arguable—and soluble.
Can men coming together from points so far apart, shaped by personal experiences and systems of life so different, driven together only by the attack of a common enemy and carrying with them so many old suspicions and reservations, create the atmosphere of agreement?
The answer is threefold. In the first place they have sought this rendezvous. Slowly, even reluctantly, it has grown out of a decision that must be a tripartite decision or the meeting would not take place. The decision is that the safety of Russia, Great Britain and the United States requires that they shall work together to win the peace as well as the war. Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill are above all representatives of the supreme national interests of their respective countries. They are convinced that the cooperation they seek from one another constitutes the minimum guarantee of “peace in our time.”
The second part of the answer is to be found in the aspirations of the statesmen themselves. It is a fact of prime importance that all are inclined to view themselves in the light of history. Churchill is a historian. He has studied with minute care the career and character of his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough, and he can hardly help thinking of himself as the second of his line to take his place among the immortals in the story of England. Certainly his speeches are addressed as much to the reader of tomorrow as to the listener of today.
In the first year of the war, while waiting to see Churchill in the library of Admiralty House, I picked up from the table the book in which he describes his early life. When my turn came I told him I found the story so interesting that I was almost sorry to be interrupted. Immediately he offered to give me a copy of the book. “But no,” he said on second thought, “if I give you a book it won’t be that one. I’ll give you a volume of my speeches because they are historic documents. It is by my speeches that I shall be remembered in history.”
To listen to Stalin talking of Lenin, and of himself as the successor of the founder of the Soviet State, is to understand that he, too, considers himself a chosen instrument of history. The true Communist sacrifices himself to posterity as eagerly as the true Christian bears the sufferings of this life in anticipation of rewards in heaven. If Stalin is no longer the single-minded Communist, it is because he has become the heir of Peter the Great. He has banished the Old Bolsheviks in favor of the heroes of imperial history beause he beholds Russia today as a great, perhaps the greatest, power in the world and himself as a towering figure in the pageant of that greatness.
The President’s sense of history is very strong. Long before the war, from the beginning of his administration, in fact, he thought of himself as one of the small company of American Chief Executives destined to loom large in the record because they preside over periods of convulsive change. Perhaps this premonition of immortality came from his triumph over physical disability; perhaps from the crisis in which he was inducted into office. As time passed, at any rate, it grew stronger. The part he felt elected to play became not simply an American but a world role.
Neither Stalin, the triumphant revolutionary who revitalizes the power of Russia, nor Churchill, the triumphant Conservative who restores the prestige of the British Empire, has a greater sense of mission and of destiny than Franklin Roosevelt. Perhaps he thinks in even larger terms than they do. Certainly he is more attracted by large ideas and global plans. His field for the Four Freedoms is “everywhere in the world.” So he is likely to be more stirred than the others by this meeting not merely because he responds to drama but because he is playing there the role he most covets. Roosevelt would like to go down in history as the great peacemaker. For a long time he was lukewarm to the Wilsonian dream, and he is much readier than Wilson to compromise with the ideal. Yet in a strange way—strange because it shows that in spite of our defection it is indigenous to America—it is still the same dream. Roosevelt also yearns to be the founder of a world peace system.
On two counts, therefore, because the three men aspire to a large niche in history, and because they believe cooperation is a safer national policy than isolation, there is reason to hope that they will strive hard to agree on the concrete decisions left suspended at the Moscow conference.
The unanswered part of the question depends on more imponderable factors. It depends in no small part on what might be called the intra-relations within the Big Three, the personal impressions they make, the impact of the mind and manner of each upon the others. The Prime Minister and the President are already friends. Churchill did not get on too well with Stalin when he went to Moscow at the height of the Russian dissatisfaction at the failure to open the second front. The picture is different now. But what effect will the Roosevelt charm have on Stalin?
Winston Churchill has frequently mused aloud on the fate that has pushed the President, Stalin and himself into a relationship none of them could have foreseen when the war began. It strikes him as extraordinary that this oddly assorted trio should be brought into conjunction and given a joint control of a great crisis in the destiny of mankind.
It is extraordinary that a few men should exercise so much power that the interplay of their ideas and their personalities should be so important as it is. It is extraordinary that so much should depend on how they get on together at this historic parley. But that is so only because they are all alike instruments of great forces and symbols of the desperate hopes of peoples that these forces can be controlled and used henceforth for construction instead of destruction. Whether they can work together depends, finally, not on three men, however powerful they are, but on the will of the great nations they represent.
DECEMBER 2, 1943
SCENE OF PARLEY LIKE ARMED CAMP
Each Delegate’s Villa and Hotel Where Sessions Were Held Under Heavy Guard
By Cable to The New York Times.
CAIRO, Egypt, Dec. 1—Not since the days of the Ptolemys has Egypt been such a cynosure of attention from the civilized world.
The fact that something big was about to happen was a wide-open secret in the rumor-ridden cities of the African periphery for weeks. Finally, after a flood of rumors, it was blandly announced on the morning of Nov. 22 that Prime Minister Churchill, President Roosevelt and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, accompanied by their principal military advisers, had arrived here.
CHIANG FLIES IN AMERICAN PLANE
Dr. Hollington Tong, the Chinese Vice Minister of Information, then told about the Generalissimo’s first visit thus far west except for his trip to Moscow several years ago. The Chinese party came in two four-engined American planes with American crews. General Chiang’s plane arrived at 7 P.M. on Nov. 21. Mme. Chiang was not in good health but felt that her presence was needed. Only two long stops were made on the four-day journey, General Chiang’s first from China since his trip to India in 1942.
Major George Durno, a former White House correspondent who is handling Mr. Roosevelt’s press relations, then spoke of the President’s trip. There was a sudden hush when he quietly stated that not only the President but the Army and Navy staffs were here. “The President requests you fellows to have lots fun for three or four days, then get your answer at a press conference,” he said.
Mr. Roosevelt arrived on the morning of Nov. 22 by plane. Rear Admiral Wilson Brown, his naval aide; Rear Admiral Ross Mclntyre, his physician: Harry Hopkins, Rear Admiral William Leahy and service men came with him. The
plane was protected by fighters.
PLANE BROUGHT SPECIAL JEEP
It taxied up to an enormous concentration of jeeps, armored cars and guard patrols blocking all points as Mr. Roosevelt’s special jeep was unloaded from the huge plane. The President then drove off past lines of soldiers guarding the road with their faces sternly pointed to the desert. Not a single eye peeked at the road for a glimpse of the visitor as the armored cars swirled protectively through the desert.
Mr. Churchill, who had arrived the previous evening by warship at Alexandria, having called at Gibraltar, Algiers and Malta, was accompanied by a party that included his daughter, Sarah Oliver, and Ambassador John G. Winant. The ship had a special cipher staff and map room, permitting the Prime Minister to carry on his regular work. The three Allied leaders took time from their talks to visit the Pyramids and the Sphinx.
The President stood the journey well. He had never been so far east, Major Durno said.
The President saw Mr. Churchill first on the afternoon of Nov. 22 in his villa. All the leaders met in their villas, compared to the general conferences.
34 VILLAS, ALL GUARDED
At 10 A.M. on Nov. 23 the chief of the Office of War Information in Asia took up the story with a description of the physical set-up of the conference. “There are thirty-four villas in the hotel’s general vicinity,” he said, “with its own guards around each one in which the ‘big shots’ live. Each villa can be considered a separate defensive area protected by British and American guards. The whole region is a general defense area protected by its own guns and searchlights.
“Right alongside the peasants laboring in the cabbage and corn fields, there are ack-ack batteries. Near the road turn-off British and American M.P.’s are on sentry duty. One needs two passes to penetrate beyond there—a special delegate’s pass and your own identity paper. After that, accredited visitors are again stopped twice before they are admitted to the hotel.”
Within the hotel were the service agencies: billeting, transportation and information desks. Observers’ desks, for those officials reporting the occasion to the world, were in the corner. On the left was the bar.
The main conference room was back near the dining room, in a former salon. Other conference chambers were on the left. An American Army post exchange was set up in a corner. Conference Room No. 1 was a big private dining room with twenty-eight seats grouped around a green-baize-covered table.
Both the dining room and the bar were much in use by the delegates, who did not pay cash but merely signed chits.
CONFERENCES BEGUN NOV. 22
At 11 A.M. on Nov. 22, the conference began. Gen. George C. Marshall entered the central lobby. Shortly thereafter, papers and pencils were rushed into Conference Room No. 1 and soon the military chiefs entered the chamber. A little later Lieut. Gen. Joseph Stilwell came up and asked where Conference Room No. 4 was. At 3 P.M. a general conference began, after the staff talks, the OWI official said.
At this point the correspondents rushed in with a series of questions regarding the details and color surrounding the meeting. The following unrelated facts emerged:
On Sunday night, Nov. 21, General Chiang called on Mr. Churchill and at 11 A.M. the next day the Prime Minister called on Mr. Roosevelt.
The entire ground floor of the hotel was devoted to conference rooms, of which there were five. There were offices on the first, second and third floors. About eighty offices were prepared in advance.
Maps posted in the main corridors listed the offices. Special telephone directories and exchanges were prepared, each national delegation having its own differently colored directory.
The British Government acted as host for the conference, footing all the bills. The preliminary arrangements for this meeting began some time ago, with about twenty specially sworn officers and more than 200 soldiers making preparations.
Outside the hotel, in the garden, British medical and dental posts were erected in special tents with tiled floors. Serious medical cases would have been sent off immediately by ambulance to the Fifteenth General Hospital.
The Cairo Conference, in 1943. From left, Chiang Kaishek, Roosevelt, Churchill and Mme. Chiang Kai-shek.
The first call on the medical officers was made by Mme. Chiang shortly after her arrival on Sunday. She had her own doctor with her, but was bothered by serious eye trouble and her face was swollen. After a consultation between a conference medical officer and the Chinese doctor, specialists were called and Mme. Chiang was treated for a painful, but not serious, illness.
A special deep air-raid shelter and many slit-trenches were built around the hotel and the villas.
The make-up of the British delegation was announced after these details had been given. Mr. Churchill brought, as his aide-de-camp in his capacity of Minister of Defense, his daughter, Section Officer Sarah Oliver of the Waaf, the wife of the well-known comedian.
His party included Lord Moran, president of the Royal College of Physicians, as his doctor; Comdr. C.V.R. Thompson, his personal assistant, and two private secretaries.
On Monday, after his call on Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Churchill repaid a call by General Chiang at noon in the latter’s villa.
At 3 P.M. on Monday the first big meeting in Conference Room No. 1 commenced. British marine guards were posted at each door.
The room looks out on a path leading to the hotel’s drained swimming pool, which was also blocked off and guarded.
British, American and Chinese delegates attended the session. They included the service chiefs of all three nations. The sitting lasted one hour.
The British delegation’s offices were on the first floor, the Americans’ on the second.
On Monday afternoon the hotel was like a railway station. World-important figures were milling about, shouting “Hello, how are you? I haven’t seen you for a long time.” Numerous beribboned generals were moving around in clusters.
As one American observer put it, the interior of the conference room was very depressing and filled with gaudy furniture. The lobby was like a college-town hotel during a class reunion.
On Nov. 23, two conferences took place in the hotel. A British staff meeting occurred between 9:45 A.M. and 12:30 P.M. and an American counterpart lasted from 11 A. M. to 12:30 P.M. This, it was explained, was the normal procedure for staff talks.
On Sunday evening, according to later disclosures, Mr. Churchill had all the British staff chiefs to dinner in his villa, and informal talks followed. On Monday morning he conferred with Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr, Ambassador to Russia, then called on Mr. Roosevelt and General Chiang. Gen. Carton de Wiart was present at the latter call. Mr. Churchill lunched privately with Mr. Roosevelt at the latter’s villa, rested during the afternoon and then dined with him. After dinner the two statesmen held a discussion with their military staffs. No Chinese were present. The Prime Minister returned to his villa with the British chiefs and worked until 2 A.M.
On Tuesday morning a plenary conference was held among the political chiefs at President Roosevelt’s villa. Chinese representatives attended. Mr. Churchill and Mr. Roosevelt again lunched together.
During the conference Mr. Churchill and Mr. Roosevelt visited the Pyramids. Mr. Roosevelt sat in a large brown car while Mr. Churchill, his daughter and staff walked about at the base of the Sphinx.
The statesmen remained a half hour. As the sun began to set in the western desert they moved on to a point from which the Pyramids could best be viewed with security. Officers rattled behind on jeeps and a few British anti-aircraft gunners manning the nearby defenses gazed on in awe.
IMPORTANT TALK ON ASIA
On the afternoon of Nov. 23 an important conference concerning Allied strategy in Asia was held. At 3:20 P.M. word ran through the hotel that General Chiang was coming. Large colored maps of Asia were placed on the walls of the conference rooms and place-cards were affixed to the green table.
General Chiang was placed at the north end and Admiral the Lord Louis Mountbatten at
the south, with various generals and admirals between. The Chinese were all handsomely uniformed and included China’s only admiral, C. S. Yang.
This key talk began at 3:30 P.M. and ended a half hour later when the delegates, preceded by Admiral Leahy, emerged with earnest, grim expressions. Admiral Leahy led a group of high officials upstairs with Maj. Gen. Claire L. Chennault to the American secretariat, while five Chinese officers waited in the lobby.
The arrival of Ambassador Laurence A. Steinhardt indicated that Turkey’s position would be reviewed.
On the morning of Nov. 24 three important meetings took place:
The British staff chiefs met in Room 1 for an hour, other British experts met for a short time in Room 5, and all morning long the American chiefs of staff as well as some Chinese conferred in Room 4.
The delegates were working excessively hard by midweek. There was much shuttling about, with sixty-four jeeps making more than 150 trips daily. By Wednesday evening it was established that Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Churchill, General Chiang and their staff chiefs were in constant daily contact. General and Mme. Chiang saw Mr. Roosevelt on Nov. 22 and dined at his villa the next evening. General Marshall had dinner alone with Mr. Churchill on Nov. 23.
At 11 A.M. on Wednesday a plenary conference was held in Mr. Roosevelt’s villa among the Government chiefs and their staffs. The President lunched with Mr. Churchill afterward.
The New York Times Book of World War II, 1939-1945 Page 106