Not until 8:00 p.m. did Harriman emerge from the conference room to tell Anna whom the president, in consultation with the British and Soviet delegations, had decided to invite. With the dinner scheduled to begin in thirty minutes, Anna and the ambassador immediately set to work on the seating arrangements, while Commander William Rigdon, assistant naval aide to the president, hastily drew up the place cards, taking care not to misspell the various names of the Russian and British guests.
Amid this frenzy, Dr. Bruenn—Anna’s partner in trying to keep any unnecessary “crises” away from FDR—burst into the dining room to inform Anna that she needed to drop everything at once and go see Justice James Byrnes, who was so upset at the way he had been treated that first day that he had not only decided to refuse the president’s invitation to dinner but was also threatening to “order a plane to take him home.” The “Assistant President” was furious because he had not been invited to the first plenary session. As the meeting was devoted to military matters, and as FDR was convinced that Stalin would speak more freely about these questions if the number of civilians in the room was kept to a minimum, FDR had asked Byrnes not to attend, but to come along at 6:00 p.m., by which point FDR assumed they would have moved on to nonmilitary matters and Byrnes would be summoned into the conference room.24
Byrnes arrived on schedule, only to “cool his heels” outside the closed doors for the next forty-five minutes without anyone saying “boo to him” as the military discussions went on much longer than FDR expected. Now even more enraged, Byrnes retired to his room to vent his anger on anyone within reach, including Drs. Bruenn and McIntire. Now it was Anna’s turn. “I have never been so insulted in my life,” he fumed. “I should have been included in these first discussions, even though they were military in character.” “At home,” he stormed, “I could and did consult with the military, but here I am not considered important enough. I told the President,” he went on, “that I had come along [to this conference] to work and not for the ride. Harry Hopkins had been at the conference,” he erroneously insisted. “Why not me?”
Anna argued with and cajoled Byrnes for the next fifteen minutes, insisting that she did not want to go to FDR and Uncle Joe with “this little problem.” But Byrnes refused to be consoled, even after Ambassador Harriman arrived “to join the fray.” It was only after Anna had told him that having thirteen at dinner “would give the superstitious FDR ten fits” that the sulking Byrnes finally agreed to attend, with the promise—broken almost immediately—that he was not going to say “one word.” Having won her argument “on this stupid basis,” Anna went off to dine with Sarah Churchill, Kathy Harriman, and some generals Kathy “had corralled.”25
Sarah Churchill, Anna Roosevelt, and Kathleen Harriman at the Livadia Palace, February 8, 1945. (Courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library)
While Anna coped with Byrnes and Churchill headed to Stettinius’s room to take a few minutes to freshen up, FDR and Stalin retired to the president’s study for a few moments of private conversation. There is no record of what the two leaders discussed, but given that Stalin raised the issue of the “rights of small powers” in the proposed world organization a number of times that evening, it seems likely that the two men may have broached this question. Indeed, in numerous “toasts”—which in Russian tradition often involve a fairly lengthy oration—Stalin returned again and again to this theme during the meal, insisting that the three Great Powers who had borne the brunt of the war had earned “the unanimous right to maintain the peace of the world” and thus should not be expected to stand by while the many smaller states they had liberated during the war sat in judgment.26
Not wanting to open a breach on this critical question before the three leaders had had the chance to address it formally, FDR responded somewhat diplomatically by concurring with the view that the Great Powers bore a greater degree of responsibility for what happened both during and after the war and that the peace should be written by them. Churchill, though more poetic, was less diplomatic when he challenged Stalin’s assertion with a paraphrase of Shakespeare’s line from Titus Andronicus: “The eagle should permit the small birds to sing and care not wherefore they sang.”
Overall, the dinner that FDR hosted that evening was largely a social affair marked by good humor and the consumption of much champagne and vodka. By the end of the evening, FDR felt relaxed enough to confide to Stalin that he and Churchill affectionately referred to him as “Uncle Joe” in their correspondence—a remark that required some hasty further translation as the word for uncle does not connote the same affectionate meaning in Russian. Meanwhile, the staunchly anti-communist Churchill went so far as to raise a glass “to the proletarian masses of the world!”27
As usual, before retiring for the night Anna dropped in to check on FDR, who seemed quite happy at the way both the dinner and the first day’s sessions had gone. Anna, too, was pleased, though in her case it was because the dinner had broken up early and all seemed well. “Jimmy made a fine toast,” her father enthused. But Anna, as amused and tempted as she was, decided to say nothing about the Byrnes incident. Better to wait and recast the episode as a “light story” for FDR to enjoy in the morning. He had had enough excitement for one day.28
Chapter 6
Coming to Grips with “The German Problem”
AS IN WASHINGTON, FDR BEGAN THE SECOND FULL DAY OF THE YALTA conference with a visit from Dr. Bruenn, who checked his heart—by administering the first of the electrocardiograms he performed twice daily—as well as his lungs, blood pressure, and overall condition. The president’s lungs were clear and there had been no change in the function of his heart or in his blood pressure since the evening before, but his usual sinus troubles had returned and he had developed a nocturnal paroxysmal cough that would awaken him at night. This was not a welcome development in view of the long days and late evenings that the conference required, although the president said he had been able to get back to sleep after being roused by the coughing spells.
Dr. Bruenn treated the cough, which continued for the next three nights, with terpin hydrate and codeine, and the sinus troubles with nose drops that were administered each evening before FDR retired. He also urged the president to limit his activities in the mornings and reiterated his request that he take a rest in the afternoons. But these pleas were no more successful than they had been over the course of the past few months in Washington. On most days, FDR entertained a steady stream of advisers and officials. He found it difficult to catch any sort of rest in the afternoon, although on a few occasions, when time permitted, he set aside a few minutes to receive a rubdown from Lieutenant Commander George Fox just before dinner.1
FDR’s first meeting that day was Secretary of State Stettinius, who made it a point during the Yalta conference to drop by for a talk in the mornings, when the president’s “mind was fresh and he was unhurried by outside pressure.” Over forty-five minutes or so, the two men discussed a host of topics, including FDR’s continued opposition to the Soviet request for sixteen seats in the General Assembly, the list of possible locations for “the world organization conference,” and the president’s and Ambassador Harriman’s plan to discuss with Stalin the Soviets’ entrance into the Japanese War—a topic the president insisted there was no need for Stettinius to take part in given the “heavy burden” he was carrying.2
Satisfied that he had obtained his chief’s “innermost feelings” about some of the critical issues in front of them, Stettinius left the president to take a short stroll on the palace grounds, before he would attend the first of the daily lunchtime meetings with his two counterparts, Foreign Ministers Anthony Eden and Vyacheslav Molotov. In the meantime, FDR had lunch in his private dining room with Anna followed by a 2:30 discussion with Harry Hopkins, H. Freeman Matthews, and Charles Bohlen. Each man in turn did his best to convince FDR to support granting France both a zone of occupation and a seat on the Allied Control Commission that would govern Germany
in the immediate aftermath of the war. FDR agreed with their position on the zone, but still refused to commit to the idea of France being granted a role in the governance of Germany—the subject slated to be discussed in that day’s plenary session.3
BECAUSE YALTA LATER BECAME KNOWN AS THE PLACE WHERE THE BIG Three decided the future of Eastern Europe, it is easy to forget one of the primary reasons they reassembled in 1945 was to discuss not Poland but Germany. Perhaps the most striking indication that this was the case can be derived from the original name the Allies used in referring to the proposed second summit—namely, Eureka II. This term points to the unequivocal link between the first Big Three conference at Tehran, code-named Eureka, and the second one at Yalta.4
It was at this first all-important—and often overlooked—meeting between Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin in late 1943 where the three leaders sketched out much of the framework of the Yalta conference. Indeed, virtually all of the major military and political issues that were discussed in the Crimea in the spring of 1945 were first broached at Tehran, including Soviet participation in the war against Japan and recognition in principle that the eastern border of Poland would follow the so-called Curzon Line first proposed by the British foreign minister in 1920 as part of the reconstitution of the Polish state called for by the Treaty of Versailles.5 It was also during the Tehran gathering that the Allies engaged in their first serious discussions of what their generation referred to as the “German problem,” the idea that the existence of a powerful and united Germany was incompatible with world peace. One solution to the German problem that received a good deal of attention at Tehran was the possible breakup of Germany into several smaller states after the war. Another solution, first articulated by Henry Morgenthau at the Second Quebec Conference in September 1944, was to “pastoralize” Germany—that is, to demolish the German state’s war-making capacity, which Morgenthau insisted was the only way to root out and destroy the twin evils of German Nazism and Prussian militarism. Like many of his generation, Morgenthau viewed a resurgent Germany—not the Soviet Union—as the greatest threat to international security. He titled his plan “Program to Prevent Germany from Starting World War III” and remained vehemently opposed to any suggestion—such as that first put forward by the State and War Departments in the summer of 1944—that the Allies would have no choice but to rehabilitate the German economy after the war.6
To a certain extent, FDR shared these sentiments. Having spent his summer holidays in Germany during his boyhood, and as assistant secretary of the Navy during World War I, when the Germans introduced the world to unrestricted submarine warfare, FDR had already developed an antipathy for the German people. His youthful exposure to Germany—which included attending school there and studying the German language—led him to believe that the cult of militarism had poisoned the German mind.7 FDR dismissed any notion that the Germans were not responsible for what had taken place during the war—that “only a few Nazi leaders are responsible.” As he once wrote to Secretary of War Henry Stimson, this idea “is not based on fact. The German people as a whole must have it driven home to them that the whole nation has been involved in a lawless conspiracy against the decencies of modern civilization.”8
FDR initially concurred with Morgenthau’s view that any plan that called for the immediate rehabilitation of the German economy after the war, including the summer 1944 plans of the War and State Departments, must be rejected. It was of “the utmost importance,” he wrote, “that every person in Germany should realize that this time Germany is a defeated nation. I do not want them to starve to death but… if they need food to keep body and soul together beyond what they have, they should be fed three times a day from [US] Army soup kitchens. That will keep them perfectly healthy and they will remember the experience all their lives.”9
With the Red Army now on the Oder and the Anglo-American armies within reach of the Rhine, that final defeat, so necessary to the reform of the German character, seemed tantalizingly close. But aside from an agreement reached at Tehran to grant each of the three powers a zone of occupation once the Reich had been defeated, the Allies had still not come to a final decision about the status of the German state after the war. One reason FDR found it so difficult to arrive at a settled policy for postwar Germany stemmed from the intense debate that the president’s initial approval of the Morgenthau plan had unleashed in Washington following the Quebec conference. Both Cordell Hull and Secretary Stimson were adamantly opposed to the plan. A second reason came as a consequence of the growing opposition to the notion of a Carthaginian peace that emerged in the press in the fall of 1944, where “fanatical, bitter-end resistance among German front line troops” attributed to the announcement of the Morgenthau plan were being reported. By this point the Soviets had also made clear their desire for postwar German reparations—a notion that militated against the deindustrialization of Germany after the war. The difficulties FDR encountered over postwar German policy in the fall of 1944 pushed him to postpone the matter. But the imminence of Germany’s final collapse meant that it would be impossible to avoid coming to a decision over three issues of immediate concern at Yalta: how to coordinate the final assault on the German state, what the exact borders of the proposed zones of occupation were, and whether France should participate in the occupation.10
In his capacity as chair of the proceedings, it had been FDR’s intention to begin the political negotiations on Germany with a focus on the proposed zones of occupation and what role France should play in the Reich after the war. But Stalin was clearly not pleased with this agenda. He insisted that there were a number of other vital questions he wished to examine, including the resumption of discussion of the dismemberment of the German state that the three powers had begun at Tehran. Equally important was the question of the payment of reparations. Indeed, given the extent to which the three powers had discussed the possible breakup of Germany at their last summit, FDR’s decision not to raise the dismemberment issue as the first order of business came as a surprise to the Soviet dictator.11
It may not have been Stalin’s intention, but by bringing up these matters at the outset of the discussions on the future of Germany, the Soviet premier put FDR and Churchill on the defensive. Churchill faced a special quandary. His concern over Germany was linked to the larger question of the security of Western Europe. Like Roosevelt, Churchill had supported the idea of dismemberment earlier in the war, but by the time he had reached the Crimea, he and his government were of two minds. On the one hand, Churchill, and much of Whitehall, had always favored the separation of East Prussia from the rest of Germany—a region that, since the days of the 1907 Crowe Memorandum describing the potential threat that Germany posed to Great Britain, was widely viewed in British circles as “the cauldron of wars.”12
On the other hand, the forced breakup of the German state might inflame the German public and rekindle the same nationalism that had proved so destructive in the past, necessitating a substantial and prolonged period of occupation—a responsibility that Great Britain could ill afford. The British also worried that a weak and dismembered series of small German states could easily fall prey to Soviet domination, particularly in the east.13
Churchill was thus unprepared to commit to a decision on dismemberment. In a frank and often tense exchange with Stalin, he insisted that the matter was “too complicated… to be settled in five or six days.” At the very least a decision on dismemberment would require a “searching examination of the historic, ethnographic, [and] economic facts” involved. He also pointed out that under the terms of unconditional surrender, “we reserve all our rights over their lands, their liberties, and even their lives,” which meant that there was no need to rush the matter as the question could be decided at any time in the wake of the defeat.14
FDR was certainly not opposed to dismemberment; in fact, he frankly acknowledged that his personal preference was to see the breakup of Germany into as many as five or even seven states. But
he, too, had been strongly cautioned by both Stimson and Hull in the wake of the Morgenthau plan that a forced dismemberment might entail a prolonged occupation—necessitated, as the Foreign Office argued, by a resurgence of German nationalism.15
Given the war against Japan, and the latent domestic hostility toward US involvement in European affairs, the idea of stationing a large number of American troops in Europe after the war was widely viewed as unacceptable. This public opposition strengthened the argument among US military planners to maintain Soviet-American cooperation after the war. As with many of the issues that arose in the early days of the Yalta conference, FDR’s preferred stance when a debate arose between Churchill and Stalin was not to take a position that might be regarded as hostile to one side or the other but, rather, to play the role of “honest broker”—a position that drove Churchill to distraction but that Stalin found reassuring. This moderation was no accident, but part of FDR’s overall plan to use the Yalta meeting as a means to enhance the degree of trust between himself and the Soviet dictator. Hence, his initial and somewhat rambling response to the dispute that had emerged over this question—during which he reflected on the largely decentralized Germany he had visited in his youth—was actually an effort to diffuse the tension in the room. Bohlen found FDR’s foray into the past somewhat alarming; in his memoirs he speculated that this was the one time during the Yalta conference when the president’s ill health might have affected his thinking. But as Anthony Eden observed to the contrary, “Roosevelt was, above all else, a consummate politician. Few men could see more clearly their immediate objective, or show greater artistry in obtaining it.”16
The Last 100 Days Page 11