It was hard to say. Better wait until after the election to get really involved, Willkie decided; meanwhile he could put pressure on both candidates and their parties. But on October 8 Wendell Willkie died.
A GRAND DESIGN?
The war would wait for no election, the President had said. Nor would peace. It was Roosevelt’s lot that explosive questions of war and peace dominated both his wartime campaigns. In 1940 the problem had been rearming America and aiding Britain but at the same time promising to keep America out of war. In 1944 the problem was America’s role in maintaining peace and security after the war was won. The President’s management of this problem in 1944—his success in winning a presidential campaign even while the foundations of a controversial postwar organization were being hammered out—was the climactic political feat of his career.
He was still pursuing his idea that nations would learn to work together only by actually working together. Oil, food, education, science, refugees, health—these and many other problems created bridges—and sometimes barriers—between the Allies. UNRRA continued its relief activities under the quiet, devoted leadership of Herbert Lehman; the President’s main role was to help win funds from Congress and to define the jurisdictional line between UNRRA and other relief activities, such as those of the Army and the Red Cross. He took a particular interest in the future of international civil aviation, holding that the air was free but that actual ownership or control of domestic airlines, especially in Latin America, should be in the hands of the governments or the nationals, not of American capital.
Roosevelt generally left the technical aspects of these matters to the corps of presidential advisers and of Civil Service professionals that had risen to peak numbers and talent during the war. But in this election year he kept a careful watch on political implications. No technical problem bristled with more complexities and political dynamite than did international monetary and financial policy.
Planning to prevent postwar monetary chaos had been going on at the Treasury since Pearl Harbor. The chief planner, Harry Dexter White, had long conceived of a United Nations stabilization fund that would enjoin its members both from restrictive exchange controls and from bilateral currency arrangements and would promote liberal tariff and trade policies in order to stabilize foreign-exchange rates; and of a Bank for Reconstruction and Development with enough funds and powers to provide capital for economic reconstruction and relief for stricken people. The British were thinking along somewhat the same lines, though John Maynard Keynes had a far bolder plan, for a Clearing Union that would have no assets of gold or securities but would establish an extensive system of debts and credits making for expansionist pressures on world trade. After endless preliminary discussions a distinguished group of Americans and British, including White and Keynes, in company with Russians, Frenchmen, and others, met amid the meadows and mountains of Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July to hammer out agreements.
“Commerce is the lifeblood of a free society,” the President wrote in a greeting to the conference. “We must see to it that the arteries which carry that blood stream are not clogged again.”
The toughest problems were not economic but political. The members of Congress in the American delegation had to be propitiated. The English feared the postwar supremacy of the American dollar even while having to come to terms with it. The Americans could not go along with the unorthodoxy of Keynes’s scheme even though they acknowledged the brilliance, subtlety, economic genius—and occasional insufferability—of the master. The Russians argued stubbornly about their quota of the fund, but Molotov agreed to ease the matter at the eleventh hour. The conference ended with the fund and the bank agreed on, though still needing congressional approval.
Molotov’s flexibility raised hopes about future Soviet collaboration with the West. “There are two kinds of people,” Morgenthau remarked to Roosevelt later, “one like Eden who believe we must cooperate with the Russians and that we must trust Russia for the peace of the world, and there is the school which is illustrated by the remark of Mr. Churchill who said, ‘What are we going to have between the white snows of Russia and the white cliffs of Dover?’ ”
“That’s very well put,” Roosevelt said. “I belong to the same school as Eden.”
The real test was collaboration in keeping the peace after the war was won. By late August, American, British, and Soviet delegates were hard at work, in the stately Harvard-owned Georgetown residence “Dumbarton Oaks,” on the structure of postwar security organization.
The concern of Americans about a new League of Nations had risen to a pitch of both enthusiasm and controversy in the summer of 1944. A host of organizations founded to support a new world order were conducting major publicity campaigns. Wilson, an evocative, highly favorable, and somewhat fictional film about the man who had fought for the League, was packing them in at select movie houses across the nation. Over two-thirds of the voters, according to polls, favored the creation of a new international organization and American membership in it. A cross-section of college students took this position by a ratio of almost fifty to one. Heavy majorities favored giving a world organization military power to preserve peace.
A spate of books on world organization appeared in bookshop windows. Sumner Welles, freed of his State Department responsibilities, argued in The Time for Decision against reliance on military alliances—none in all human history, he said, had lasted for more than a few short years—and for a United Nations that could enforce peace through an Executive Council of eleven members, including Britain, China, the Soviet Union, and the United States as permanent members. The Council, he said, could act only by unanimous agreement of the Big Four and only by a two-thirds vote of the whole Council. Welles’s volume, a Book-of-the-Month Club selection for August 1944, sold almost a half-million copies. Historians and political scientists, including James T. Shotwell, Dexter Perkins, and D. F. Fleming, helped revive the old Wilsonian issues and argued for a new and stronger League. Generally the pundits saw close Big Four unity—especially Soviet-American friendship—as the cornerstone of peace, but they did not always explore the complexity and Realpolitik of big-power relations.
“The intellectuals are nearly all with us,” Roosevelt wrote to a friend, just as they had been in 1920; he pleaded for a grass-roots effort. Actually the intellectuals were as divided as usual, especially between internationalists and “realists.” Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr warned the former against encasing their optimistic view of human nature in leagues and federations; progress could come only after decades of anarchy. Carl Becker wondered How New Will the Better World Be?, since national loyalties and power always had been, and always would be, the essence of international politics. William T. R. Fox, of Yale, contended that agreement among the great powers, especially between Russia and the West, was crucial, and that Soviet co-operation was neither to be assumed nor rejected, but achieved. In The Republic, Charles A. Beard left his fictional internationalist guests speechless after he derided the League of Nations as an effective body and love and morality as ways of running the world. Walter Lippmann’s U.S. War Aims argued that Wilsonian strictures against nationalism were useless, that “we are not gods,” that a world community must evolve slowly from existing nations and communities, that in the middle run the world would be not one but three, with Atlantic, Russian, and Chinese orbits, and that in the short run Washington must boldly co-operate with Moscow, or at least coexist with it.
The books and articles and editorials helped establish the context within which the peace planners worked; so did the presidential campaign. In mid-August Dewey declared that he was deeply disturbed by reports that the Dumbarton Oaks Conference would “subject the nations of the world, great and small, permanently to the coercive power” of the Big Four. A four-power alliance, he said, would be immoral and imperialistic. With Roosevelt’s approval, Hull put out a statement denying that any “superstate with its own police forces and other paraphernalia of
coercive power” was being thought of; he denied that the Big Four could coerce other nations. Dewey designated his foreign-policy adviser, John Foster Dulles, to meet with Hull, and after three days of long discussion the two men worked out a statement designed to remove the more controversial aspects of postwar organization from the presidential campaign.
The issue that was cleaving the men at Dumbarton Oaks, however, was not the Big Four against the other nations of the world, but the Big Four against themselves. Early in the proceedings Ambassador Gromyko, head of the Soviet delegation, advanced the principle of Big Four unanimity, and he stuck to it all the days following with might and main. The innocuous word cloaked the momentous proposition that assuming the rule of unanimity an aggressive Big Four power could veto Council action intended to protect a smaller nation or—and this aspect was played down—another Big Four power. The Americans had shifted back and forth on the veto question—they could never forget the specter of Senate isolationism—but at Dumbarton Oaks they took the position that a party involved in a dispute, whether a great power or small, should not be allowed to vote on the question. Gromyko flatly opposed any limitation on the veto, as expected, but then he threw a bombshell into the sedate mansion by demanding that all sixteen of the Soviet republics be seated in the new organization.
February 4, 1944, C. K. Berryman, courtesy of the Washington (D.C.) Star
“My God!” exclaimed Roosevelt when Stettinius told him of the request. He asked the Undersecretary to inform Gromyko that such a proposal—labeled “X matter” to keep it from becoming known—would end the chances of the new United Nations being accepted by the Senate or the American people. Actually, the sixteen-vote proposition seemed so preposterous to Roosevelt that he expected to talk Stalin out of it. The veto was another matter. The more the Anglo-Americans opposed it, the more Gromyko insisted on it. Stettinius, convinced that solving the veto question was crucial to the whole enterprise, decided to bring out his “biggest and last remaining gun.” Would the President talk with Gromyko? Would Gromyko, the President asked the Undersecretary, be offended if he received him in his bedroom? Stettinius thought he would be impressed.
It was an odd encounter the next morning between the President in his old bathrobe and the dark, personable young Ambassador. After chatting breezily, Roosevelt turned to the main issue, noting that traditionally in his country husbands and wives in trouble could state their case but not vote on it. He dwelt at length on old American concepts of fair play. Gromyko was pleasant but unyielding. Roosevelt then proposed a cable to Stalin reiterating his argument. That was up to him, Gromyko said. The President sent a friendly but strongly worded cable to the Marshal. Almost a week later the reply came back. The basic understanding was the unanimity of the Big Four. That presupposed no room for suspicion among the major powers. He could not ignore, said Stalin, certain absurd prejudices hindering an objective attitude toward the Soviet Union.
So deadlock had been reached on preserving the peace even as Soviet and Anglo-American troops were winning it. The Russians were still insisting on their sixteen votes. The Dumbarton Oaks meeting adjourned with the shining structure of a new international organization agreed on, but with a dark cloud over the capacity of the great powers to order their own relationships.
In mid-September 1944 Roosevelt and Churchill and the Combined Chiefs met again in Quebec for another conference, this one essentially military. The scene was the same as before, with Roosevelt and Churchill quartered in the Citadel and their staffs in the Chateau Frontenac, perched high on the north bank of the St. Lawrence, but the situation was radically different. Churchill and Roosevelt met as victors. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt greeting the Churchills at the station seemed more like the reunion of a happy family than a gathering of world leaders.
Out of ever-increasing solidarity and friendship, Roosevelt said at the start of the conference, had come prospering fortune. Though no one could yet forecast when the war with Germany would end, it was clear that the Germans were withdrawing from the Balkans, and it seemed likely in Italy that they would retire to the Alps. The Russians were at the point of invading Hungary. In the West the Germans probably would retire to the Rhine, which would be a formidable rampart. In Asia, the President went on, the American plan was to regain the Philippines and to control the mainland from there or Formosa, and from bridgeheads that would be seized in China. If forces could be established on the mainland of China, China could be saved.
“Everything we have touched has turned to gold,” Churchill summed it up in his own equally favorable review of the situation.
These heady successes helped the conferees debate some of the old issues in relaxed fashion. No longer was the Mediterranean a source of contention; the Americans were willing to leave their troops in Italy until the Germans were defeated or pushed out. Churchill now spoke more freely of Vienna as a key objective, after giving the Germans a “stab in the Adriatic armpit,” and the American Joint Chiefs were now less hostile to an amphibious landing on the Istrian Peninsula and even willing to bequeath landing craft to General Wilson for that possibility.
The sharpest turnabout was on Pacific strategy. Gone were the days of trying to limit the diversion of troops and ships to the amphibious attack against Japan; now the British wanted to play their full part. Japan, Churchill told the plenary session, was as much the bitter enemy of the British Empire as of the United States. He proceeded to offer the British main fleet to take part in the major operations in the central Pacific under American command. A detachment could operate under MacArthur if desired, and he also proffered RAF bombers. The Prime Minister knew that King and other admirals were cool to the idea, so he pressed for a showdown while Roosevelt was present. Could he have a definite undertaking about using the British fleet in the main operations against Japan?
“I should like,” Roosevelt said vaguely, “to see the British fleet wherever and whenever possible.” King said that the matter was being studied.
“The offer of the British fleet has been made,” Churchill persisted. “Is it accepted?”
“Yes,” the President said.
“Will you also let the British Air Force take part in the main operations?” Marshall answered that not so long ago “we were crying out for planes—now we have a glut.”
Evidently the British could not break into the American preserve in the Pacific without a bit of hazing. But Pacific planning still turned largely on the progress of the war in Europe. At the time of the Quebec meeting the Combined Chiefs had high hopes, based on Intelligence estimates, that the Germans would surrender within twelve weeks. Though the President was not so optimistic, it seemed high time to reach final agreement on occupation zones. Roosevelt had long opposed the earlier plan that the British occupy northwest Germany and the Low Countries and the Americans southern Germany, Austria, and France; “I am absolutely unwilling to police France,” he had exclaimed. But now at Quebec he changed his mind and approved the original plan, partly because the British agreed that the Americans could control Bremen and its port of Bremerhaven in order to supply their forces.
Long-run policy for Germany was a harsher problem. For weeks Morgenthau, Hull, and Stimson had been debating the treatment of Germany after its surrender. Stimson was willing to punish the Nazi leaders, destroy the German Army, and perhaps partition Germany into north and south sections and internationalize the Ruhr, but he did not want to destroy raw materials and industrial plant crucial to European recovery. Morgenthau was burning to diminish and fragmentize Germany, dismantle and move out all plants and equipment, close the mines in the industrial heartland, and take control of education and publishing. Hull at times seemed to favor a punitive policy, at other times a softer one, but always a State Department role. Roosevelt talked tough at times—he wrote to Stimson that the Germans should be fed from army soup kitchens for a while—but on policy he wavered among his contending advisers. His central guideline seemed to be that the German people as a w
hole were responsible for a lawless conspiracy and must be taught a lesson.
Summoning Morgenthau to Quebec, Roosevelt asked him to present his proposals on Germany. As the Secretary spoke, he could hear and see “low mutters and baleful looks” from the Prime Minister. Churchill had never been more irascible and vitriolic, Morgenthau remembered later, as, slumped in his chair, he let loose the full flood of his biting, sarcastic rhetoric. He looked on the Treasury plan, he said, as he would on chaining himself to a dead German. The President sat by saying little. The next day, in a less negative mood—because he wanted Morgenthau’s help on Lend-Lease matters, perhaps, or, even more, because he had been persuaded that Britain would gain economically from a deindustrialized Germany—Churchill dictated a statement which he and Roosevelt initialed. It went far in Morgenthau’s direction.
“The ease with which the metallurgical, chemical and electrical industries in Germany can be converted from peace to war has already been impressed upon us by bitter experience. It must also be remembered that the Germans have devastated a large portion of the industries of Russia and of other neighboring Allies, and it is only in accordance with justice that these injured countries should be entitled to remove the machinery they require in order to repair the losses they have suffered. The industries referred to in the Ruhr and in the Saar would therefore be necessarily put out of action and closed down….
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