American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Roosevelt, reminding Stalin of the “six or seven million” Polish-Americans who opposed recognizing the Lublin group because it represented only a small portion of the Polish people, urged a government of national unity. Churchill backed the President. But Stalin was adamant. “During the last thirty years our German enemy” had passed through Poland twice, he said. And he admonished Churchill for proposing that a Polish government be established at Yalta, when no Poles were present. “I am called a dictator and not a democrat,” he said, “but I have enough democratic feeling to refuse to create a Polish government without the Poles being consulted.” During the next three days Roosevelt and Churchill, step by step, drew formal concessions from the Russians for a more inclusive government, free and unfettered elections, and participation by the London Poles. But it was probable that Washington and London would have little actual influence over the holding and policing of elections.

  The President was nearing the end of his leverage with Stalin. And a cardinal reason for that was Roosevelt’s supreme military goal at Yalta— the participation of Russia in the war against Japan. The President and his military chiefs had long agreed that Soviet action on the Asiatic mainland was imperative to avoid unacceptable American losses. Nor was there any question that Russia would intervene; this had long been agreed upon, and it was to Moscow’s interest anyway. The question was when and how and with what power the Red Army would intervene. Would it hold back while the Allied forces assaulted the bulk of the Japanese troops in the home islands and on the mainland—and then move in for the spoils? Or would the Russians take their share of the burden from the start?

  Was history playing a grotesque trick? For three long years Stalin had urged—demanded—pleaded for a second front in France and the Anglo-Americans had taken their time about it, or so it seemed to the Kremlin, finally crossing the Channel when it suited their own interests. Now it was Roosevelt who was asking for a second front and Stalin who could take his time. Stalin made the most of his bargaining position by gaining confirmation of a host of political concessions: return of southern Sakhalin to Russia; cession of the Kurile Islands to the Soviet Union; preservation of the Moscow-controlled regime in Outer Mongolia; internationalization of the port of Dairen; recognition of Moscow’s “pre-eminent interests” in Manchuria. On some issues the President asked for postponement so he could consult the absent Chiang. In return Stalin promised in writing that he would enter the war against Japan two or three months after the surrender of Germany.

  For any misgivings Roosevelt had about certain compromises at Yalta he had a great consolation—but one that also served to narrow his leverage. This was agreement on the shape of the United Nations, his third supreme goal at Yalta. Here the President was acting not only out of his own hopes and convictions but for a large body of liberal and internationalist feeling in the United States expressed by such diverse notables as Henry Wallace and Wendell Willkie (before the latter’s death in the fall of 1944). There was no question that a UN would be established; the question was its power and structure. Roosevelt found Churchill cooperative though skeptical, Stalin grudgingly responsive but insistent on the principle of great-power unanimity. Stalin and Molotov were still pushing their outlandish idea that the Soviet Union should have sixteen votes in the proposed assembly, one for each of its sixteen component republics. When Molotov suddenly cut down the request to two extra votes, and the British—doubtless with an eye on their own dominions—appeared to go along with this compromise, Roosevelt felt he had to agree.

  Some in Roosevelt’s delegation thought he had compromised too much, but the President believed that an effective United Nations organization could rectify the failings of Yalta and earlier conferences. He was so eager for its establishment that he risked being a hostage to its success. “Mr. President,” Leahy said at one point, “this is so elastic that the Russians can stretch it all the way from Yalta to Washington without even technically breaking it.”

  “I know, Bill—I know it. But it’s the best I can do.” The two men were discussing the Polish settlement, but the exchange could have related to any of the major Yalta compromises. Holding only weak hands in the great poker game of Yalta, Roosevelt believed he had won the foundations of future peace. It was with hope and even exultation that he and his party left Yalta for the long journey home.

  Above all, he left with confidence that, whatever the problems ahead, he could resolve them through his personal intervention—whether it was dealing with Stalin over Poland, or with Chiang over Far Eastern settlements, or even with Churchill or de Gaulle over imperialism in India or colonialism in Indochina. But Roosevelt did not know, for neither his doctor nor anyone else had ever told him, that his heart had been failing for several years. On his return from Yalta people in the White House— especially the correspondents—noted more than ever before how gray and scrawny he appeared, even vacant of face with his jaw drooping and mouth falling open—but then how he would suddenly come to life, tell a joke, his laughter booming out above theirs. He appeared to compartmentalize his health and malaise as he did the rest of his life, alternating intervals of intense activity like Yalta with long periods of rest away from Washington.

  He looked forward to his trip to San Francisco for the founding meeting of the United Nations in April, and to a voyage to England later in the spring with the First Lady. What a grand reception he would receive from the British! But first he would report to Congress, and then he would journey to Warm Springs at the end of March for an old soldier’s R&R— rest and recreation.

  CHAPTER 5

  Cold War: The Fearful Giants

  AFTER BUFFETING HEAVY SEAS off the Chesapeake capes, the cruiser Quincy glided into Newport News on February 27, 1945, bringing the Commander-in-Chief back from Yalta. Two days later Roosevelt was wheeled into the well of the House of Representatives and seated in a red plush chair in front of a small table. Apologizing for speaking while sitting—“it makes it a lot easier for me not to have to carry about ten pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs”—he reported optimistically on Yalta but warned that whether it was entirely fruitful or not lay in the hands of “you here in the halls of the American Congress.”

  Those looking down from the packed galleries—Eleanor Roosevelt, visiting royalty and dignitaries—watched the President with concern. It was uncharacteristic of him to refer to his disability. Slightly stooped over the table, he spoke in a flat tone, slurring his words and stumbling a bit over his text. The resonant voice of old had lost its timbre; it was the voice of an invalid. Friend and foe noted his gaunt face and trembling hand. Yet his flagging voice rose to a note of desperate urgency at the climax of his address.

  “Twenty-five years ago, American fighting men looked to the statesmen of the world to finish the work of peace for which they fought and suffered. We failed—we failed them then. We cannot fail them again, and expect the world to survive, again.” Yalta “ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries—and have always failed.” He called once again for a universal organization of peace-loving nations.

  Almost the whole of his fourth term apparently lay before the President—plenty of time to organize the new United Nations, finish off Hitler, throw the full weight of Allied power against Japan, and strengthen his working partnership with Stalin. In fact only eight short weeks remained to Roosevelt, and in half that time relations with Moscow turned sour.

  Again Poland was the main engine of conflict, just as it had been in 1939 and before. Within the loose framework of the Yalta agreement, Stalin was absolutely determined to install reliable communists as rulers of Poland. He was already operating on a bald sphere-of-interest basis: the Anglo-Americans were to have a free hand in Greece and points west, and the Russians in Poland and the Balkans. Churchill cabled Roosevelt: “Poland has lost her frontier. Is she now to lose
her freedom?” He might have to reveal in Parliament, Churchill added, a British-American “divergence” unless the Allies confronted the “utter breakdown of what was settled at Yalta.”

  The crisis in the “Rainbow Coalition” became even more acute when Stalin suspected that Anglo-American talks with the defeated Germans in Italy were the first step toward a negotiated separate peace—a violation of the Big Three pledge to require an unconditional surrender to all three Allies jointly. Angry messages flew back and forth between Moscow and the Western capitals. Stalin, once again facing the old bogey of German troops being released in the West to fight in the East, accused the West of not merely a “misunderstanding but something worse.” Roosevelt cabled Stalin that he bitterly resented Stalin’s “informers” for their “vile misrepresentations of my actions or those of my trusted subordinates.” The President perhaps was even more upset when he learned that not Molotov but only Ambassador Gromyko would head the Soviet delegation to the San Francisco UN organizing conference. If this reflected Stalin’s downgrading of the UN, it was a serious blow to Roosevelt’s high hopes for postwar unity.

  Still, Roosevelt’s spirits seemed to brighten by April, when events reached one of the great climacterics of history. The whole German defense structure was crumbling west of the Rhine. The Red Army was across the Oder and grinding its way westward against last-ditch resistance. After a bloody struggle, a huge amphibious task force that in February had launched a massive invasion of Iwo Jima was mopping up the tiny island. On April 1 Nimitz’s men invaded Okinawa and made rapid progress during the first days ashore, while the invasion fleet stood guard offshore and beat off hundreds of suicide attacks by Japanese aircraft.

  Relations with Stalin seemed to ease a bit in early April. On the afternoon of April 11 the President dictated the draft of a speech for Jefferson Day: “… Today we are faced with the preeminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships—the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together and work together, in the same world at peace.…

  “The work, my friends, is peace. More than an end of this war—an end to the beginnings of all wars. Yes, an end, forever, to this impractical, unrealistic settlement of the differences between governments by the mass killing of peoples.…

  “The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.”

  The Death and Life of Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Franklin Roosevelt died April 12, 1945, at his second home in Warm Springs, Georgia, among greening trees and flowering dogwood and wild violets. He died in the company of women he held dear—his secretary Grace Tully, his cousins Margaret Suckley and Laura Delano, and his friend Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd. Eleanor Roosevelt, notified at the White House, arrived in time to accompany her husband’s body on the funeral train that next day rolled slowly north through Georgia and the Carolinas into Virginia. Glimpsing the weeping faces and solemn crowds at the little depots and crossroads, she remembered:

  A lonesome train on a lonesome track,

  Seven coaches painted black.…

  A slow train, a quiet train,

  Carrying Lincoln home again.…

  Following the obsequies in Washington, the funeral train once again headed north, now pulling seventeen cars filled with officials and politicians. The train passed through New Jersey and Manhattan and up the east bank of the Hudson. At Garrison, across from West Point, men removed their hats just as men had done when Lincoln’s funeral car passed eighty years ago that spring. At the little siding at Hyde Park cannon sounded twenty-one times as the coffin was moved from the train to a horse-drawn caisson. Behind the bier another horse, hooded and with stirrups reversed, led the little procession as it toiled up the steep slope to the rose garden on the bluff above. There stood Eleanor Roosevelt, Anna, and one son who could be freed from war duty, along with President Harry Truman and his cabinet, and a phalanx of six hundred West Point cadets.

  The aged rector prayed as servicemen lowered the body into the grave. Cadets fired three volleys. A bugler played taps. The soldier was home.

  The death of any President leaves Americans in shock and grief. The passing of Roosevelt left them also empty and disoriented. Millions of Americans in their teens and twenties had never really known another President. For them Roosevelt was the presidency. And for many he would continue to be. More than any President since Jefferson, FDR dominated his times; more than any President since Lincoln, his ideals and policies would influence the presidencies to come.

  The man people most vividly remembered in their mourning was the FDR who had electrified the nation on entering the White House hardly more than a dozen years before. That Roosevelt had touched their hearts and minds and bodies with a reassuring immediacy; the enduring effects of FDR’s leadership in peace and war remained to be tested. The New Deal laws and programs had virtually transformed major aspects of American life—economic security, agriculture, labor relations, banking, welfare, conservation, and much else. FDR had bequeathed the powers and structure of the modern presidency, its penetrating impact on people’s lives, an expanded and rejuvenated federal government. He had mobilized millions of new voters and partially realigned the balance of parties. And as William Leuchtenburg later made clear, he would cast his shadow over future presidencies by setting the agenda of policy, establishing the standards for measuring presidential leadership, leaving a federal government filled with his people and his ideas.

  Roosevelt’s greatest service to mankind, Isaiah Berlin wrote from a British perspective, was proving it possible “to be politically effective and yet benevolent and human”; that “the promotion of social justice and individual liberty” did not necessarily mean the end of effective government; that “individual liberty—a loose texture of society”—could be reconciled with “the indispensable minimum of organizing and authority.”

  It was harder to assess the man than the presidency. “Great men have two lives,” Adolf Berle said in a tribute to his old boss, “one which occurs while they work on this earth; a second which begins at the day of their death and continues as long as their ideas and conceptions remain powerful.” But the more Roosevelt’s “second life”—his heritage of ideas and decisions, examples and innovations—was examined, the more fragmented it appeared to be. For not only did Roosevelt conduct multiple and sometimes clashing policies at any one time, he shifted from plan to plan, from program to program, with such nonchalance as to leave his friends perplexed and his adversaries aiming at a moving target.

  He started off as a crisis manager who simultaneously economized in order to balance the budget, pushed through a socialistic venture in the Tennessee Valley, tightened and expanded the regulation of banking and agriculture, and sought to concert the interests of workers and industrialists under the NRA. Soon he gave up on economizing, began to spend lavishly on emergency relief projects and later on the WPA, built and restored bridges, dams, roads, and other public services while diverting funds to construct aircraft carriers, went in for major relief expenditures as he approached the 1936 election, reverted to economizing after it, then turned back to heavier spending in the recession years of 1938 and 1939. Meantime FDR experimented with such imaginative ventures as the Civilian Conservation Corps, the National Youth Administration, rural electrification, soil conservation, housing subsidies.

  He held mixed views about private and public centralization. The New Deal monopoly policies, economist Ellis Hawley concluded, were a study in “economic confusion,” as Washington shifted from government-sponsored cartelization under the NRA, marketing agreements, and coal policy to trustbusting rhetoric and antimonopoly measures such as the Wheeler-Rayburn utility holding company act. New Deal economic planning, according to Hawley, came in a “disjointed, almost haphazard manner, in response to specific pressures, problems, and needs, and without benefit of any preconceived plan or integrating theory.” Herbert Ste
in summarized the first four years as “fiscal drift.” That term and the next left an ambiguous heritage to later administrations.

  Juggling economic policies from day to day amid his own Tocquevillian void, Roosevelt did not always exhibit grace under pressure. During the economic crisis in spring 1938 he had angry meetings with Morgenthau, whom the President evidently felt he could safely rebuke as an old friend and neighbor. The Treasury Secretary for his part grumbled in his extensive diary about Roosevelt’s “helterskelter” planning and his lost sense of proportion. A year later, with unemployment still ranging up toward 10 million, the President and the Secretary were still wrangling, Morgenthau was still talking about resignation, Eleanor Roosevelt was still talking him out of it. When Morgenthau asked for an appointment to present a statement on taxation—two hours, he thought, would be needed—his boss asked him instead to leave it so that he could “read it a little bit at a time at my bedside.”

  Seeking some intellectual order in the disarray of Roosevelt’s economic programs, historians identified a first and second New Deal, but there were in fact several New Deals as the President groped for the key to full recovery. Historians discerned a third New Deal late in Roosevelt’s second term that emanated from his effort to find institutional solutions to faltering economic strategies. Thwarted in his efforts to build an executive-legislative-judicial team, he sought to improve presidential planning by creating the National Resources Planning Board under a Delano uncle, establishing more presidential control over “independent” regulatory commissions, enlarging the White House policy staff, proposing the “Seven TVA’s bill” that would establish regional planning authorities in the Missouri and other great riverbeds. Most of these efforts failed in the face of bureaucratic inertia and congressional fears of “fascist type” concentration of power that would destroy state and local authority.